Category Archives: Politics

Jul 22 2014
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Politics

The curious case of Mike Duffy and the 31 counts

 

The gorilla in the Senate is biding his time

The gorilla in the Senate is biding his time

And then there was one.

Like pins on a bowling alley, they’re toppling: Retired Liberal Senator Mac Harb, Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau, and now that most tele-charismatic of them all, Tory Senator Mike Duffy who, last week, learned that the RCMP had charged him with 31 counts of fraud, breach of trust and bribery.

Only Conservative Senator Pamela Wallin (suspended like her colleagues, Messrs. Brazeau and Duffy) remains under police investigation for alleged fiduciary misdeeds.

But it is on Mr. Duffy that all eyes are focussed. That’s because it is thanks to Mr. Duffy that a government could fall and the edifice of the Conservative Party of Canada could crumble. 

If either of those scenarios play out over the next several months, it would make history; marking the first time a journalist (former or active) in this country played a role anything more substantial than gadfly to established power. And you can just bet he’s itching to scratch that substantial epidermis.

“The court process will allow Canadians to hear all of the facts,” he told reporters outside his home in Kensington, P.E.I., on the weekend. “They will then understand that I have not violated the Criminal Code.”

Looking almost relaxed for a man who has had two heart surgeries since his fat hit the flames several moons ago – when news erupted that he may have run afoul of Senate residency rules, expense protocols and the acceptable limit and circumstances for receiving. . .um. . .“donations” from “friends” to settle his debts to the Upper Chamber – Mr. Duffy promised to say nothing more to the media whilst his case is before the judicial system. 

Still, he intimated, his day in court promises to be a day of reckoning for everyone who ever thought of crossing him. His message to The Centre: “I’m coming for you.”

It’s not an idle threat. 

Legal experts wonder whether federal prosecutors can prove that the $90,000 “gift” to Mr. Duffy, from former Prime Ministerial Chief of Staff Nigel Wright to settle his account for improper senatorial spending, does, in fact, amount to receiving a bribe. After all, how can the recipient be charged if the ‘gifter’ gets off Scot free? To date, the RCMP has refused to charge Mr. Wright with any wrongdoing.

In a Canadian Press story, Queen’s University law professor Don Stuart put it this way:

“It seems unclear what the courts have made of the word corruption (in the relevant statute). Normally speaking you don’t have to prove a motive, but in (the Duffy) case you might have to, because of the use of the word corruption. . .They (the prosecution) will have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that his (Mr. Duffy’s) intention was a corrupt intention.”

But, then, that would amount to blackmail. And, by all accounts so far, that word does not appear in any of the indictments against the suspended senator. 

At this point, a multitude of questions become salient. 

If Mr. Wright, with all the best intentions (though possibly career-ending poor judgement), merely wanted to settle the matter of Mr. Duffy’s expenses privately without further burdening taxpayers, is it possible that certain government operatives, unbeknownst to Mr. Wright, appended a coercive codicil to the deal that required Mr. Duffy to extend, in return for the booty, certain favours to his political masters or, alternatively, instruct him to keep his mouth shut about certain, past wrongdoings of which all were intimately familiar?

Again, would that amount to bribery or blackmail?

Naturally, it’s all speculation. Still. . .

“If the matter goes to full trial and potentially involves the sitting prime minister of the country in connection with matters of the Senate, we will see a mix of politics and law that will be one of the outstanding trials in our history,” Rob Walsh, former law clerk to Parliament, told the Toronto Star’s Tim Harper. “If it comes to that.” 

Anyway you cut it, that’s bad news for the current government. It hardly matters when Mr. Duffy’s trial embarks. The scandal has already tainted the Tory regime and the Senate, where further investigations of other standing members are, we are told, underway.

And then there were none.

 

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Jul 21 2014
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Business, Politics

Rothesay mayor finds crow perfectly digestible

 

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Everyone deserves a second chance or, at least, a second helping of one’s own words, refried, re-seasoned and finally made palatable, if only just.

So it was last week when Rothesay, New Brunswick, Mayor Bill Bishop all but retracted his comments about the dreaded Funky Monkey Sandwich Shop, a food truck from nearby Quispamsis. 

Lest we forget, the Bishop of Rothesay characterized his community thusly: “You have to know Rothesay, it is not your regular community. We people here have been here for decades and they (I, perchance?) have very firm beliefs, and needs and wants and the word change in Rothesay is not a welcome word.”

As the CBC reported, “Bishop said he has nothing against Dan Landry, the Funky Monkey’s owner, but a mobile restaurant is ‘not the type of enterprise that we welcome in Rothesay.’”

What a difference a day and social media makes. No sooner had hizzoner expressed his inner thoughts with his outer voice, the chocolate mousse hit the fan. Facebook and Twitter (themselves, vectors of dreaded “change”) erupted with heaping doses of ridicule, topped with thick dollops of derision. 

Apparently, this inspired the following mea culpa from Rothesay’s first citizen (again, on Facebook and Twitter):

“I have received many calls and emails regarding my comments on the Funky Monkey Food Truck and I have also seen the considerable debate this has generated in social media. Clearly, I chose my words poorly and I apologize to those I offended, and in particular to the owners of the Funky Monkey. . .My concern was ensuring that mobile food establishments fit appropriately within municipal regulations and operate fairly with other restaurants. We welcome entrepreneurs to our community and we are grateful to any business, such as the Funky Monkey, that enhances the quality of life in Rothesay.”

Still, I can’t help wonder if Mr. Bishop would have been as effusive in his praise for an establishment that, only 24 hours before, he effectively derided had instant electronic communications never been invented. 

Indeed, the phrase, “It’s too late, now, pal,” comes to mind. 

Four years ago, Darren Cahr, a partner in the Chicago law firm of Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP observed on his blog, Legally Social, “We are entering a new age of transparency – for you. Everyone will know more about you, and your secrets, and every detail of your private existence.”

In fact, he wrote, “Nearly every technological development over the past several years has been devoted to capturing data. Document management systems and data mining, e-mail archives and browser cookies – all of these things and so many more are devoted to finding and maintaining data. But if the growth of electronic media has resulted in the dawn of an age where nothing is ever forgotten, it is suddenly becoming apparent that a lot of folks miss that option. People want to have their mistakes erased, they want to be able to step away from that drunk moment on Twitter. But they can’t.  Individuals are becoming like flies caught in amber, a series of embarrassing moments frozen in time forever.”

 All of which is just one way of saying that the social media – the realm where nothing is ever forgotten – is also a place where nothing is ever forgiven.  

According to a CBC report, various Facebookers were having none of what the mayor offered to serve. 

“I should like to hear the mayor comment on what he actually said, instead of eating crow and commenting on something he did not say,” posted one Thomas Littlewood. “His Worship’s original statement suggests that Rothesay is too elitist to support something like a food truck; now he just wants to make sure that it fits with municipal by-laws? Which is it?”

Added Marlyn Isaac in her post: “The horse is already out of the barn.”

As for Funky Monkey’s tireless proprietor Dan Landry, he’s holding up. Reports from the front lines of the food truck skirmish suggest that he’s having to turn thronging admirers away.  

“At this time, we’re not as worried as we were a couple of days ago,” he told the CBC. “But, yes, there is still a concern that there’s a negative force working against us.” 

Oh, puh-leeze! With enemies like Mayor Bishop, who needs friends?

 

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Jul 18 2014
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Business, Politics

Narrow-mindedness: A dish best served to go

 

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I have no personal beef with Rothesay, New Brunswick, Mayor Bill Bishop. I don’t know the man. But I am exquisitely acquainted with his particular brand of parochialism.

It is the sort of mean-minded, distrustful fear-mongering that undermines diversity, shuts down business opportunities before they have a chance to bloom and gives small, semi-urban communities a bad name from coast to coast to shining coast.

Food trucks. Really, Mr. Mayor? That’s the current and urgent threat to the good people of your Saint John bedroom neighbourhood?

To be clear, hizzoner’s britches are bunched over the Funky Monkey Sandwich Shop – a Traveling Willbury of grilled paninis, which has been operating for several months in the vicinity of Mr. Bishop’s municipal back door.

As this enterprise comes from the foreign country of Quispamsis, about 11 minutes distance from noble Rothesay by car ride, you might (or might not) understand the good fellow’s objection:

“You have to know Rothesay, it is not your regular community,” he rather lamely told the CBC this week. “We people here have been here for decades and they have very firm beliefs, and needs and wants and the word change in Rothesay is not a welcome word.”

Indeed, according to the CBC report, “Bishop said he has nothing against Dan Landry, the Funky Monkey’s owner, but a mobile restaurant is ‘not the type of enterprise that we welcome in Rothesay.’”

Meanwhile, Mr. Landry can’t figure out what the mayor is talking about.

“We’ve had a great summer so far and the community is, very much so, coming out and supporting us. So we don’t have any fears of about whether the community wants us here,” he told the CBC. “I think the people are looking for new food trends, I think the people are looking for new food options and they are looking for real food instead of processed food. I think that these small businesses give people the opportunity to get out there in the market and sell that product without having the costs involved with the brick and mortar investments.”

In fact, the very requirement to defend himself in the court of public opinion, against a fossilized notion of community values, is not the shame of Funky Monkey’s main man; it’s ours. We let this garbage happen all the time, everywhere in this benighted region of ours. We have for years, for decades.

Halifax doesn’t pit itself against Moncton for concerts and sporting events. It fights cage matches for such opportunities against Dartmouth, Bedford and Sackville. 

Sydney would rather witness Cape Breton become a theme park for Chinese technocrats fascinated by the possibilities of a coal-fired, mag-lev monorail than see Glace Bay obtain one, new, pathetic store opening.

We are, in this sea-bound region, our own worst enemies; forever imagining that the town just down the pot-holed road is waiting to pounce, preparing to storm the gates  of our own, oh so very special, burg. After all, don’t you know, Anytown, Atlantic Canada, is “not your regular community.” 

Indeed, “We people here have been here for decades” and we “have very firm beliefs, and needs and wants and the word change”. . .well, friend, it’s just not a welcome word at all.

Parochialism, thy name is Atlantic Canada. 

From our inter-provincial trade barriers to ancient regulations governing skills qualifications and labour mobility – from restrictions on provincial exports of wine to sign posts about honey bee imports – we are a lonely, miserly, short-sighted lot fated, it seems, to suffer all the consequences of our provincialism, insularity and localism.

I have known far too many men and women in this region who have closed their fists, when they might have opened their hands. I have seen them shut their eyes from seeing and block their ears from hearing.

I have also seen and heard these same patriarchs and matriarchs make appalling, disingenuous speeches about the inestimable value of the East Coast way of life, about the incomparable standard this region provides to those lucky enough to have a way to make a living. 

Unless, of course, they happen to run a food truck into a burgermeister’s territory, just down the road from economic perdition.

 

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Jul 16 2014
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Democracy, Politics

How Ottawa minds our own business

 

What are these posts for? Shut up, government says, sit on 'em

What are these posts for? Shut up, government says, sit on ’em

What do 33 dejected foreign workers, denied positions in New Brunswick, and low blood sugar have in common?

If you said it’s the bevy of busybodies beavering away to make a general nuisance of itself in Ottawa – otherwise known as the Government of Canada – give yourself a pat on the back. But stay away from the sweets.

Apparently inspired by a Globe and Mail investigation earlier this year, Harpertown is all set to poke its proboscis into the pantries of the nation.

“In recent months, the Globe and Mail documented the links between sugar and harmful health concerns, and called on the federal government to set a recommended daily sugar limit,” the newspaper reported, in one of the most pompous displays of self-serving grandiosity it has been this ex-staffer’s pleasure to witness, earlier this week. 

“Our reporting revealed the extent to which the food industry adds sugar to many products in various forms, the extent to which labelling requirements don’t sufficiently inform consumers about this practice and the broad range of health problems that stem from the amount of sugar in the daily diet.”

Now, galvanized by this magnificent example of public service journalism, we are asked to believe that Ottawa is about to require food producers to finally play it straight with Canadians and tell the truth about the degree to which they are poisoning the general populace. 

Accurate labelling, it seems, is the answer. So is a federally-sanctioned “recommendation” for the amount of sugar Canadians should consume in any given 24-hour period.

Bully for the federalistas, but methinks the chances that this famously recalcitrant crew of onetime reformers and oftentimes media mashers takes its marching orders from Canada’s self-appointed, self-important, “national newspaper” are perishingly small. 

The more likely explanation (which may be weirder still) is that despite its right-wing, small-government, anti-Liberal, nanny-state-hating political pedigree this particular crew of Tory MPs and their fellow-travelling bureaucrats just can’t resist telling people – any people – what to do.

And that extends far beyond the sugar bowl.

As the Moncton Times & Transcript reported recently, Canadian consular officers in Vietnam rejected 33 applicants from that country for jobs at Captain Dan’s Seafood and Pecheries GEM Ltee despite the fact that the two employers had “valid labour market opinions at the time of the application and had paid all due fees while the Vietnamese applicants took additional measures to improve their candidacy.”

Those measures included “weeks of intensive English-language courses and specific seafood processing training.”

The Moncton lawyer representing the two local firms is flabbergasted. “The employers have been let down without an adequate workforce,” Martin Aubin told T&T reporter Kayla Byrne. “They have paid good money, done everything by the rules and received permits to hire people. We had openings for 33 people, we found 33 people, but all of them have been denied. . .To fail completely is a new experience for me.”

Get used to it. 

No one – but, no one – gets around these dogs once they’ve got several bones clenched between their incisors. Consider, if you will, one more choice example of latent control freakishness: Bill C-24, which passed quietly in June.

Also called the Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act, this legislation moves its patron, Minister of of Citizenship and Immigration Chris Alexander, practically to tears. 

It will, he said recently, “protect and strengthen the great value of Canadian citizenship, and remind individuals that citizenship is not a right, it’s a privilege. . .It is in honour of those who protected this city, in honour of those who have served and serve today, in honour of all who have made the sacrifice of war, and those who have contributed in their own way to building this great country, that we are further strengthening the value of Canadian citizenship.”

It will also do a couple of other things, according to one news report – notably provide the federal government with sweeping new license to share information about Canadian immigrants with foreign powers almost indiscriminately.

Of course, that’s all in a day’s work for a government whose main business is fast becoming minding other people’s.

 

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Jul 15 2014
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Climate, Environment, Politics

How to make poor-weather friends in eastern Canada

 

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The temptation to assign blame for Mother Nature’s tempests is, at times, overwhelming – especially when you’ve been without power for a week. 

According to New Brunswick’s electrical utility, on Friday as many as 18,000 people in this province were still in the dark, both literally and figuratively, after post-tropical storm Arthur slammed into the Maritimes on July 5. 

A rising chorus of those affected are asking tough questions. 

Why is it taking so long to restore service to everyone? Why are some homes reconnected while their neighbours across the street remain blacked out? Have our famously verdant urban streets become states of emergency just waiting to happen?

Naturally, a matching deluge of politics falls steadily on the capitol these days. 

The provincial Liberals have criticized the Tory government’s weather preparedness, suggesting that NB Power was, once again, caught with its pants down around it ankles. “It’s a total embarrassment,” charged Rick Doucet, Grit MLA from Charlotte-The Isles, last week. “How many events do we have to go through before we’re going to learn? . .This is the third major weather event to hit New Brunswick in the past seven months. We should be getting better at this, but it appears that’s not the case, unfortunately.”

The critique prompted an immediate and sharp rebuke from provincial Energy Minister Craig Leonard, who barked: “For them (Liberal opposition members) to come out and criticize the preparation work done by this utility, in the middle of the restoration work, is just the lowest of the low. . .It just highlights their ignorance.”

But, in at least one respect, we are all ignorant. To what extent should we, on the East Coast, expect increasing and increasingly severe weather? And how should those calculations inform the decisions we make about preparedness?

Clearly, what we currently have in place in this province and in Nova Scotia (where hundreds also remain without power) are insufficient to withstand the new normals climate change metes out. 

For, make no mistake, this is what we are beginning to experience. 

Last winter’s brutally long winter on this continent was, most experts think, the ironic result of a steadily warming planet. Higher temperatures in the polar region played havoc with the traditional gradients in air pressure which, in turn, sent the jet stream literally all over the map.

This produced wild swings between iron cold and almost balmy conditions sometimes within a matter of mere hours. The result: Ice, rain and snow storms within single 24-hour periods with the predictable effects of downed power lines, blankets and games of Old Maid by candlelight.

That was last December in New Brunswick. It’s harder to blame climate change for this month’s storm. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States predicts a near-normal Hurricane season for the Atlantic coast.

Even so, it takes only one of these violent tumults to exacerbate, through storm surges, another demonstrable effect of global warming: rising sea levels. According to NOAA: “There is strong evidence that global sea level is now rising at an increased rate and will continue to rise during this century. While studies show that sea levels changed little from AD 0 until 1900, sea levels began to climb in the 20th century. The two major causes of global sea-level rise are thermal expansion caused by the warming of the oceans (since water expands as it warms) and the loss of land-based ice (such as glaciers and polar ice caps) due to increased melting.

“Records and research show that sea level has been steadily rising at a rate of 0.04 to 0.1 inches per year since 1900. This rate may be increasing. Since 1992, new methods of satellite altimetry (the measurement of elevation or altitude) indicate a rate of rise of 0.12 inches per year. This is a significantly larger rate than the sea-level rise averaged over the last several thousand years.”

For New Brunswick and every coastal area of Canada, these are real nuts and bolts, dollar and cents, issues. Every time a tempest storms into our environs, we can measure the economic costs in the millions and tens-of-millions of dollars – costs that will, in time, only escalate.

It’s now time, if it wasn’t before, for closer regional cooperation on protecting and managing our respective power grids.

After all, Mother Nature doesn’t observe provincial borders. Why should we?

 

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Jul 15 2014
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Politics, Privacy

New shenanigans for spy versus spy

 

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Leave it to a once and likely future candidate for leader of the free world to admit what was previously inadmissible in polite company. Yes, Virginia, the world is full of creeps, spooks and spies, and we here in the West employ a goodly number of them.

This, from former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an interview with the German newsweekly Der Spiegel last week: “I don’t want to give a general answer (about the morality of international spying). There’s so much that goes on in intelligence circles. If we were to say no, under no circumstances, that you shouldn’t do that to us, we shouldn’t do that to you, what if a circumstance arises where it is conceivable that it would be in your interest and ours?” 

Furthermore, she said: “The United States could never enter into a No-Spy agreement with any country – not you, not Britain, not Canada.”

Mrs. Clinton made her remarks just as German officials ousted the CIA’s super-secretive station chief from his (or her) digs in Berlin. According to a BBC report last week, “The German government has ordered the expulsion of (the) official. . .in response to two cases of alleged spying by the US. The official is said to have acted as a CIA contact at the US embassy, reports say, in a scandal that has infuriated German politicians. A German intelligence official was arrested last week on suspicion of spying.

An inquiry has also begun into a German defence ministry worker, reports said.”

 In fact, nowadays, it is inconceivable that even friendly nations will resist the temptation to snoop in each other’s sock drawers and medicine cabinets. According to some research – and thanks to the timely revelations of former National Security Administration (NSA) operative Edward Snowden – since the end of the Cold War, spying hasn’t been declining, as one might reasonably expect. It’s been on the rise.   

“Hacking for espionage purposes is sharply increasing, with groups or national governments from Eastern Europe playing a growing role, according to one of the most comprehensive annual studies of computer intrusions,” Reuters reported from San Francisco last month. “Spying intrusions traced back to any country in 2013 were blamed on residents of China and other East Asian nations 49 per cent of the time, but Eastern European countries, especially Russian-speaking nations, were the suspected launching site for 21 per cent of breaches, Verizon Communications Inc. said in its annual Data Breach Investigations Report.”

How worried should we be about our own, personal information? Surveillance experts routinely dismiss public concerns about the electronic sieves through which choice tidbits of individual identities pour. There’s now so much information floating around in cyberspace, they argue, that the odds of any one hapless schlub falling prey to Internet evil-doers are far greater than ever before.

That’s cold comfort, however, when we are also confronted with headlines like this one in Friday’s Globe and Mail: “Ethical concerns raised by workers at spy agency.”

Apparently, workers at Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) – this country’s version of the NSA – are more than a little disturbed by the conduct of some of their colleagues and supervisors. Indeed, reports the Globe, “some have also tried to blow the whistle about ‘improper contractor security screening’, questionable contractor invoicing’, ‘unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information’, and ‘con-compliance with CSEC’s values’.” 

Meanwhile, the institutional hunt for better and greater sources of personal information continues unabated. Now, Statistics Canada wants people to fork over their Social Insurance Numbers as it tries to improve the accuracy and relevance of the data it collects. “The agency is trying to find out if people will reveal a key identifier they’ve been so often warned to protect,” a Canadian Press story observes.

Of course, back in 2011, the federal government’s privacy hawks abolished the mandatory long-form census, claiming it poked its nose in where it didn’t belong. Evidently immune to irony, Ian Macredie, a former StatsCan paper-pusher, told the CP, “We may have a population that, because of the (U.S.) National Security Administration, has a heightened awareness of Big Brother collecting data about us.”

Sure we do. These days, all of our creeps, spooks and spies hide in plain sight.

 

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Jul 09 2014
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Politics

Shaking off these pre-election blues

 

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For the second time in the space of six months, thousands of luckless New Brunswickers will sojourn a week or more without power. This is, without a quibble, the story of mid-summer, knocking almost everything else off the front pages of The Fourth Estate.

Sooner than we care to admit, however, the days will shorten, the shadows will lengthen and the sun-kissed air will begin to present a familiar chill. 

Suddenly, the lights are back on, the kids are toddling back to school and the rest of us are heading straight for that temporary purgatory known as a provincial election campaign.

The race for the ballot box will undoubtedly dominate the headlines day after breathless day. But, in the absence of any new, bold ideas, any workable solutions for the province, I wonder if it should. 

In fact, despite my well-worn sandwich board broadcasting my disdain for anyone who actually chooses not to vote, I’m wondering if I should sit this one out. In this respect, at least, a recent Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development survey puts me in ignoble company.

On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the best, New Brunswick scores 5.2 relative to other regions in the country in its residents’ intention to vote. P.E.I. ranks 6.6; Quebec, 4.5; Nova Scotia, 4.3; Ontario, 4.2; British Columbia, 4.0; Manitoba, 3.8; Alberta, 3.0; Northwest Territories, 2.6; Newfoundland and Labrador, 2.3; and Nunavut, 0.9.

It’s depressing. But no more so than the stunning lack of imagination available to our various political classes – a circumstance, I hasten to add, that is not unique to New Brunswick.

Unquestionably, in this province the big issues of the past two years and foreseeable future are economic malaise and dissolution, and the commercial development of natural resources, including shale gas and pipeline construction.

Premier David Alward’s Progressive Conservative platform does address these rather concrete matters but, given the stakes, somewhat flabbily. 

“We choose to take advantage of the opportunities before us – to develop our natural resources, to promote innovation and to put in place the economic strategies that will allow business to grow and provide jobs,” his party’s website declares. “We’re saying yes to bringing our people home and building a stronger future for our province.”

Well, of course, they are. Who isn’t “saying yes” to in-migration for a change? The question is: how?     

 “Our goal is to increase the tax base in New Brunswick, so we can better fund needed public services,” the site continues. “With additional investments in healthcare, social programs and infrastructure, we’ll strengthen the quality of life for all New Brunswickers, but particularly for families, seniors, and the most vulnerable.”

That’s laudable, but, again: how? 

The provincial Tories “believe New Brunswick has an incredibly exciting and prosperous future. By putting all our resources to work here at home we can build the kind of province where we want to live, and the kind of province we want to leave our children and grandchildren. This is our time. This is New Brunswick’s time.”

In largely faux contrast Liberal Leader Brian Gallant’s messages include becoming the “smart province. . .We will revitalize our economy, create jobs and ensure that everyone has the opportunity to succeed. We Liberals believe that, properly governed, the province can offer good jobs and a good standard of living, so we can keep our people right here in New Brunswick.”

Good and proper government, it seems, means becoming “the smartest province in the country. We need to invest in education, training, and literacy. By making strategic investments in education, training and literacy. . .We can fill the skills gap. . .We can grow New Brunswick’s traditional industries. . .We can grow emerging industries. . .We can create a healthier, more socially-just province.”

In every election cycle, there is a time for grand generalizations and lofty pronouncements. In New Brunswick, that time is just about up. 

Specificity must, at some point, enter the political arena. Innovation, ingenuity and worthwhile risks must, one day, play central roles in the affairs of government. 

Call it a hurricane of decidedly welcome change this time, but it, too, would be a headline worth reading.

 

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Jul 03 2014
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Municipal Affairs, Politics

Mayor Rob Ford’s unerring instinct for survival

 

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Like the proverbial cat of lore, though a conspicuously rotund one, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is possessed of nine lives – one for nearly every fatal blunder possible in the brutal cosmos of elected office.

About the only outrage this recovering substance abuser hasn’t committed in his relatively short career in front of the footlights is an old-fashioned sex scandal involving a mistress whom the media’s hound dogs reveal to be a foreign spy.

Everything else – from public drunkenness to smoking crack cocaine with “persons of interest” to Hog Town’s sturdy constabulary – he has covered with enviable bravado and originality. It now remains to be seen whether he manages his public reconstruction with equal dollops of brio. 

He’s off to a truly Fordian start.

“When I look back on some of the things I have said and some of the things I did when I was using, I am ashamed, embarrassed, and humiliated,” Mr. Ford practically wailed before a crowd of Toronto reporters who had gathered at City Hall on Monday, exactly 24 hours after his release from 60 days of self-imposed rehabilitation at a facility far from prying eyes.

He said he was “wrong” and had no one to blame, “but no one”, but himself. He talked about enduring “some of the darkest moments” of his life as he relented to treatment that, nonetheless, “saved” his life. He blathered on about spending a good deal of his time in charge of Canada’s largest city – a metropolis of between two and six million souls, depending on how one parses census data – “in complete denial” about his “personal demons.”

Then he launched into a vigorous defence of his political record and vowed to represent the people of his city with matchless determination and characteristic devotion. 

The meta message, therefore, was along certain lines thusly: “Sorry for all the bother folks. but I’m all better now. Let’s move on; nothing to see here anymore. . .Anybody got a candy bar I can scarf? Getting off booze and drugs is hungry business. . .Gotta tell you. . .Ooo, is that a donut I see?” 

The degree to which one believes Hizzoner’s declarations of personal cleanliness and sobriety depends entirely on one’s perspectives about public office and what it may or may not do to those who serve at the democratic will of the electorate. 

Over the past few decades, Toronto has become a true melting pot of people from divergent world cultures. Some have zero tolerance for the sort of shenanigans that has typified Mr. Ford’s regime. Others are decidedly sanguine about their mayor’s peccadilloes and proclivities, if only because he has deliberately made a populist of  himself – a posture they appreciate. 

He’s no elite, they say. He’s a man of the people. And like any man of the people, he has his faults. We should forgive him for these, shouldn’t we? At least he’s not a nail-biting, politically correct elitist. 

Better yet, he doesn’t go around shooting people in the dark, as burgermeisters of many less enlightened cities in disadvantaged nations often do when their critics cross the line and commit the unpardonable offence of questioning authority.

But if this is, indeed, our litmus test for municipal leadership in this country, then we have reached a truly sorry state of affairs. 

Mr. Ford’s crimes against common decency demonstrate his colossally poor judgement. His tirades – drunken or otherwise – against his colleagues reveal dimensions of immaturity and paranoia that would otherwise fill a therapist’s calendar for years to come. 

He has yet to apologize personally to his rival for mayor, Karen Stintz, for outrageously inappropriate remarks he made about her while sucking back a few brewskis in a bar in April. 

And he has never acknowledged the shellacking his behaviour has visited upon Toronto in the court of world opinion. According to a CBC item posted to its website recently, “A new media-monitoring analysis suggests the Rob Ford saga received more intensive media coverage in the United States than any other Canadian news story since the turn of the century.”

Toronto mayoralty candidate Olivia Chow is right when she declares, as she did to the Globe and Mail this week, “The question is not whether Rob Ford is clean and sober. The issue is that he is a failed mayor.”

Still, will that matter four months from now when municipal election day rolls around?

This cat’s come back from the brink before.

 

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Jun 25 2014
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Business, Economy, Employment, Politics

Bring us your tired, yearning to work

 

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Through no fault of their own, 50 million people around the world are rootless and stateless. The victims of wars and warlords, dictators and economic dissolution, they wander the Earth as refugees, as unwilling nomads, and in numbers not recorded since the end of the second, great, European conflagration of the 20th Century.

Meanwhile, the Canadian government – once a beacon of light in the United Nation’s Human Development Index – plays a crass round of poker in which it chooses those immigrants it wants, those it will merely tolerate and those it would rather wash its hands of entirely. 

The latest incarnation of this game of drones is the new regime governing the nation’s Temporary Foreign Workers Program.

Employment Minister Jason Kenney says he’s doing Canadians a favour by restricting the number of international grunts businesses in this country can hire and installing punitive fines on  those who flout the fresh regulations. 

As CTV reports: “Under the new rules, employers in places with high unemployment rates won’t be allowed to hire temporary foreign workers in the lowest wage and skills groups in the accommodation, food service and retail sectors. Companies will also be required to re-apply each year to have low-wage TFW’s, instead of every two years. The cost of that will rise to $1,000 per employee, up from $275.”

Mr. Kenney justifies his decision in typically bellicose terms: “As opposed to being a last resort, in too many cases it’s (the TWF) become a first or only resort. . .That is unacceptable. I don’t care how tight the local labour market is, you shouldn’t be setting up a business and spending money on capital for a business if you don’t have the human capital to staff it.”

Don’t you just love the way these guys talk? 

Human beings become “human capital”, commodities that governments can and do rate and rank according to their own political exigencies and circumstances. 

At the same time, the minister in charge of labour markets doesn’t give a fig about the condition of labour markets if giving a fig means annoying a partisan base of low-end citizen workers/voters who, once their pogey runs down, can’t find sufficient numbers of mc-jobs to qualify them for another, ritualistic term of government-sanctioned, fully funded couch potatodom. How exquisitely NDP of him.

All this from a government who thinks it perfectly reasonable to lecture Atlantic Canadian provinces on their habitual use of Employment Insurance to actually sustain a labour market that backstops at least four, bone-fide seasonal industries (fishing, forestry, tourism, and agriculture).

In fact, on this subject in this country, almost no one looks good. Abuses of the system are systemic and rampant. And no government – Tory or Grit – has ever figured out a compelling, convincing, comprehensive, rational fix. 

But why should they bother? After all, no one in this country gets elected by insisting that low-wage foreign workers are only here because native-born and naturalized citizens don’t possess the skills that commercial enterprises actually need.

Have you ever worked a naan oven at 5 am in the morning? I didn’t think so. 

On the other hand, too many employers in this country work these people like virtual slaves; gaming the system at every opportunity to feather their marginal nests. As there are no federal oversights, no provincial or municipal protections that practically apply, what else would we as fine, upstanding Canucks expect?

Today, according to the Canadian Council for Refugees, “the number of migrant workers in Canada has increased by 70 per cent in the last five years. Canada has been shifting towards a reliance on migrant labour. In 2008, for the first time, the number of temporary foreign workers in Canada exceeded the total number of permanent residents admitted in the same year. At the end of 2012, the gap had grown: There were 338,189 temporary foreign workers in Canada on December 1, 2012, compared to 257,515 new permanent residents.”

Rather than revile these people publicly, we should embrace them as essential contributors to our society. Or, have we become too hardened to the plight of the world’s rootless that we have forgotten our own history?

 

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Jun 17 2014
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Politics

In Canada, once a citizen always a citizen

 

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Chris Alexander is a young man on a mission. And as all young men do on missions he makes mistakes, for which the rest of us must surely pay.

Canada’s 45-year-old citizenship and immigration minister apparently believes his beloved country is under siege. Droves of dual citizens (Canadian and pick-a-nation) are queuing up to undermine the foundations of this perfect democracy that perches between the Niagara escarpment and the Arctic Circle.

Says he: Off with their imperfect, great-white-northern heads. 

“This. . .is historic because it addresses an asset that Canadians consider absolutely fundamental to their identity,” he opined in Ottawa as his Bill C-24 was set to pass its third reading in the House of Commons last week. 

In fact, he insisted, Canadians think his proposed legislation is “absolutely essential” to counter treachery against the state in this country – activities that are, apparently, rampant among young, downwardly mobile scions of upwardly mobile immigrants to whom this government has, until now, opened up its hearts and pocket books.

Specifically, Bill C-24 would, as the Canadian Press reports, “strip dual nationals of their Canadian citizenship if they commit acts of treason, terrorism or espionage. . .the federal bill would increase the scope to those born in Canada but eligible to claim citizenship in another country – for instance, through their parents – and expand the grounds for revocation to include several criminal offences.”

As for that, says CP, Mr. Alexander elaborated: “The Conservatives (are) fixing flaws introduced by the Liberals in 1977 – legislation that ‘actually cheapened Canadian citizenship, opened it to abuse and put to one side the whole question of allegiance and loyalty to this country’.” 

Clearly, from this perspective, rot must fester at the root of our system.

The important question, though, is whether a duly elected government has the right to determine whom among those who may or may not cleave to “allegiance and loyalty” and “country” is worthy of citizenship.

Unfortunately, there are no legal precedents available to answer that question, a circumstance which tends to arise when politicos are entitled to freelance their ideologies over and above their responsibilities to protect the rights and freedoms of all  their fellow countrymen and women. 

Still, no evidence, whatsoever, exists to suggest that rougher, more punitive citizenship laws will preserve law and order in Canada. Generally, perpetrators of crimes against the public well-being are local fools and maniacs who were born and raised in communities that are both ostracized and forgotten by ‘polite’ society. Generally, these disenfranchised individuals are not immigrants. Rarely, are they dual citizens.

And yet, facing stiff opposition from federal Liberals and NDP, Mr. Alexander now drapes himself in the finest Harperite raiment: denial. 

According to the Canadian Press, Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett asked last week, “How can the minister justify this abuse of power which trample on the rights of Canadians, even those who were born here in Canada?”

NDP multiculturalism critic Andrew Cash added: “This is nonsensical and it’s most likely unconstitutional. Why did the government turn down every single suggestion put forward to try to fix this bill?”

In turn, Mr. Alexander accused Mr. Cash of being “lost in the thickets of his own ideology,” which is, if ever there was one, a perfect pot-kettle-black moment in recent Canadian politics.

In 1977, Mr. Alexander was exactly eight years old, just wise enough to recognize that a two-wheeler was marginally better than a trike. I was a hopeful political science aspirant at Dalhousie University. Even then, though, I knew the difference between callow indifference to the gravity of truth and a flat tire.

No Canadian asks his brethren to declare fealty to the state; rather he demands that the state produces democracy as a condition of his participation. If the state fails to comply, then it is the right of every citizen to object. 

Mr. Alexander’s measures would, by extension, turn this objection into sedition. And that, in his own words, is no “asset that Canadians consider absolutely fundamental to their identity,”

Lawyers and scholars are already having a field day with this proposed legislation, as others have had with the Harper government’s similar forays into constitutional engineering. 

What remains to be seen, however, is the degree to which citizens embrace the nobility of their enfranchisement as among the luckiest people on Earth, before their luck runs out thanks to a young man “lost in the thickets if his own ideology.”

 

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