All posts tagged Brent Rathgeber

There is a God: Merit Contractors, advocates of Bill C-377, would be caught in its web

by David Climenhaga on October 29, 2012 in Canadian Politics, Labour with 9 Comments

Tory MP wonders about Bill C-377: “Is anybody really interested in breaching Sally the Receptionist’s privacy because she earns 40k answering the phones at the Union Hiring Hall?” Below: Stephen Kushner.

Surely it is one of life’s little ironies that among the groups certain to be caught in the web of Bill C-377, the federal private member’s “transparency” bill mischievously designed to cripple unions with onerous reporting requirements, would be the anti-union Edmonton-based Merit Contractors Association.

Earlier this year, the Merit Contractors and their counterparts in other provinces set up a website and launched a national campaign complete with news releases and canned newspaper op-ed pieces to support Bill C-377.

But apparently they failed to notice, in the words of a report to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance prepared by the Alberta Federation of Labour, that the funds Merit established for the benefit of its own member companies’ employees would be captured under the provisions of C-377.

This isn’t how campaigns to harass unions are supposed to end up, is it? If nothing else, this suggests there is a wise and provident God concerned with cosmic justice.

This realization may be why expressions of consternation are now being heard within Conservative Party of Canada circles about this amateurish and unconstitutional piece of legislation.

As has been argued here before, about the only things that are truly transparent about this proposed Cotton-Belt-style law brought forward by social-conservative British Columbia MP Russ Hiebert are its goal of burdening unions with reporting provisions so onerous and expensive they can no longer do their jobs, and the opportunity for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to make bogus suggestions the NDP Opposition is too close to “Big Labour.”

The Canadian Bar Association’s Privacy and Access Law Section has compiled a long list of problems with Bill C-377, including violations of provincial privacy laws, huge administrative expenses for taxpayers and clear examples of violations of Canadians’ constitutional rights. The authors of the CBA’s letter note that since the financial activities Canadian unions are already required by law to be transparent to their members, “as a threshold statement, it is unclear what issue or perceived problem the bill is intended to address.”

Reporting requirements under Bill C-377 would be so intensive (notwithstanding Mr. Hiebert’s ludicrous claim to the contrary) that unions would be required to spend essentially all their time reporting every expense over $5,000, which would then have to be vetted and published on the Canada Revenue Agency’s website at significant public expense.

However, for some reason – perhaps because he failed to understand the full implications of his own bill despite his training as a lawyer – Mr. Hiebert has omitted to mention in the House of Commons or in public that his bill would require far more groups than just “trade unions” to disclose their finances, activities and the political views of their employees and officials.

This, in turn, has recently led some Conservative stalwarts to holler just hold it a minute. In a recent blog, Edmonton-St. Albert MP Brent Rathgeber sensibly asks of the $5,000 reporting limit, “Is anybody really interested in breaching Sally the Receptionist’s privacy because she earns 40k answering the phones at the Union Hiring Hall?”

“Many other types of privacy are invariably going to be breached if this legislation proceeds unabated,” Mr. Rathgeber went on. “If one of the building trades spends $10,000 rehabilitating a carpenter who fell off scaffolding, suddenly the injured worker’s name, rehabilitation hospital and costs become a matter of public record. If a union member and his spouse divorce and if the member’s pension credits are to be divided as part of a matrimonial property settlement, the fact that the union pension administrator writes a check to the non-member over $5,000 would suddenly become disclosed, with the beneficiary’s name, on a public website. Where is the public interest in any of this disclosure?”

Despite being painted in the media as a maverick, it is said here Mr. Rathgeber’s blog commentary tends to provide useful insights into what Conservative top dogs are thinking. So we may be getting to the heart of the matter when he worries Bill C-377’s faulty premise that the tax-deductability of union dues creates a public interest in knowing what is done with them “would have to be more consistently applied.”

“As a lawyer, my law society fees are tax deductible,” he explains. “Does that mean that the public has a right to know what the Law Society pays its staff?” Under the logic of C-377, it is said here, the answer to Mr. Rathgeber’s question is bound to be yes.

Mr. Rathgeber therefore sensibly indicates he will not be voting for Bill C-377 – which as a private member’s bill, he cannot be compelled by his party’s whips to do. One suspects a lot of other Conservative MPs will be doing the same.

Nevertheless, Bill C-377 could still pass. Which brings us back to the Merit Contractors.

In case they missed it, their organization would be captured by C-377 because of the involvement of some Merit companies with the Christian Labour Association of Canada and other employee groups entitled to bargain collectively, as well as some of its employee group benefit programs that contain money from those groups.

As the AFL pointed out in its brief, this includes a benefit plan run by Mercon Benefit Services, the Merit Contractors’ “comprehensive and affordable medical, dental and insurance program,” whose sole director is Merit President Stephen Kushner.

This in turn means that under C-377, if it were passed by Parliament, Merit would be obligated to report on the Canada Revenue Agency’s new and improved (and extremely expensive) website the details of Mr. Kushner’s “gross salary, stipends, periodic payments, benefits (including pension obligations), vehicles, bonuses, gifts, service credits, lump sum payments, other forms of remuneration and, without limiting the generality of the foregoing, any other consideration provided, and a record of the percentage of time dedicated to political activities and lobbying activities.”

Like any sensible person I oppose the passage of Bill C-377. But if it does become the law, I look forward to reading this private information about Mr. Kushner, that enthusiastic supporter of the bill, posted alongside the much shorter and more modest, though equally unconstitutional, section about me!

And if he objects, someone is sure to wonder: “Why are the Merit Contractors afraid of the light?”

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Motion 312 and reproductive rights: pay attention to what Tories do, not to what they say

by David Climenhaga on September 26, 2012 in Canadian Politics, Reproductive Rights with 12 Comments

What? What? I’m pro-choice and pro-life, Edmonton St. Albert MP Brent Rathgeber seems to say in this shot grabbed from his website. Below: Kitchener Centre MP Stephen Woodworth.

In this era of routine political deceit, wise voters are advised to pay attention to what their elected representatives actually do, not what they say.

So when Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party of Canada tries to have it both ways on abortion in the debate surrounding Kitchener Centre MP Stephen Woodworth’s Motion 312, which would have Parliament “study” the point at which a baby becomes a human being, this strategy should be seen for what it is: an effort to chip away at women’s reproductive rights through the Parliamentary back door.

Tory heavy Jason Kenney says he’s voting for it. Prime Minster Harper says he’ll vote against it. But by allowing the vote to proceed later today they are tossing a hunk of red meat to their hard-right social conservative base, which would ban abortion outright in a moment if it ever got the chance.

So even though the motion will likely be defeated – for the time being – they are keeping the issue on the front burner and providing the foes of reproductive choice with opportunities to organize, raise money and generate publicity for their cause. Count on it that they also see a continuing fund-raising opportunity for themselves in this tactic.

But no matter how calculatedly they split their votes, the Harperites really can’t be everybody’s good buddy on this one, as the party’s official caucus blogger, Edmonton-St. Albert MP Brent Rathgeber, seemed to be trying to do in a jaw-dropping post on his Parliamentary website yesterday.

“I have come to the conclusion after years of deliberation and inner debate that I am both Pro-Choice and Pro-Life,” Mr. Rathgeber wrote. (Emphasis added.) “That does not make me bi-polar; it means that this matter extremely complicated, with multiple methods of examination, resulting in potentially polarizing conclusions.”

While it is indeed true this statement does not provide any evidence Mr. Rathgeber is bi-polar, what it does mean is that he’d really like to keep everyone voting for him and his party despite taking action on one side of an issue that is as polarizing in his riding as it is across Canada.

So it’s what Mr. Rathgeber does, and not what he says, that really matters.

And what he’s going to do today, as he stated elsewhere in the blog, is to vote for Mr. Woodworth’s motion, the intention of which is obviously to tighten the screws on women’s right to reproductive choice.

Mr. Rathgeber can try to justify his vote as he wishes, but he’s taking a stand against reproductive choice. Period. No excuses. No opportunity for appeal.

Yet try he does, at length: “A void exists in Canadian law regarding this issue; Canadians are perhaps unique among western democracies in that we have neither sanctions nor regulations approving abortion or the rights of fetuses,” Mr. Rathgeber bloviates. “The void in Canadian law means there are currently NO LEGAL restrictions regulating the process.  Theoretically, a very late term procedure, if performed, would not attract criminal sanction. …”

“Accordingly, given how divisive this issue is, I concede that if the matter were settled, it ought to remain so.  ….  So Parliament must do what the Supreme Court invited it to do in 1988: fill a vacuity in Canadian law, no matter how divisive and polarizing that debate will be.” Yadda-yadda.

In this way, Mr. Rathgeber – and by extension, the entire Conservative Party for which he so frequently speaks, even those parts of it that allow the vote and then say Nay – tries to pass off his action to suppress the rights of all women as just a matter of procedural consistency.

Sorry, but that dog won’t hunt!

A nice analytical hint about the Tories’ real motives is contained in Mr. Rathgeber’s previous blog post, about the death of former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed, in which the MP laments the decline in the quality of Parliamentary debate from a (largely imagined) golden age of substantial ideas to a contemporary one of fleeting and insubstantial sound-bites.

“Today, we live in the era of the seven-second sound-bite and reaction to the story becomes the next story. … Fulsome debate does not lend itself to the seven-second sound-bite,” Mr. Rathgeber moans, as if it was the other guys responsible for this. “It was policy, not spin, that interested Premier Lougheed.”

Unfortunately – for all of us – it’s nothing but blatant spin that interests Mr. Rathgeber, Mr. Kenney, Mr. Harper and all the rest of the Parliamentary Conservative caucus on this particular issue.

But it really boils down to something as simple as this: no matter what they tell you, if you’re concerned about women’s rights, you’re foolish to vote for the Conservative Party of Canada.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

If Alberta’s Tories loved Peter Lougheed so much, why do they have so little to say about him?

by David Climenhaga on September 24, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Canadian Politics with 6 Comments

Linda Duncan at the Alberta NDP’s 50th annual convention over the weekend. Below: Ralph Goodale, Peter Lougheed.

We have 28 federal electoral districts in Alberta of which 27 elected members of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Of those 27 Conservative MPs, one has since been kicked out of caucus for refusing to blow into a Breathalyzer and now sits as an independent Conservative. One has quit and not yet been replaced. The 28th is a New Democrat.

So how many Alberta Members of Parliament, do you think, paid tribute to former Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed in the House of Commons when Parliament resumed sitting four days after Mr. Lougheed’s death in Calgary at 84?

The answer would be “only one.”

And who was that sole Alberta Member of Parliament who did make a tribute to Mr. Lougheed in the House of Commons? Why, that would be Linda Duncan, Alberta’s sole New Democrat MP, the representative for Edmonton-Strathcona.

Indeed, only two MPs had anything nice to say about Mr. Lougheed in Parliament when it resumed sitting after his passing, and the other was a Liberal from Saskatchewan – former cabinet minister and deputy leader Ralph Goodale.

I raise this only because of the instinctively critical reaction of a few people in Alberta Tory circles to recent suggestions by some New Democrats that today’s Alberta NDP has more in common with the program of Mr. Lougheed when he was premier from 1971 to 1985 than does the party whose long spell in power began under his leadership.

Actually, even on this point the Tory response has been pretty muted – except for a few Twitterers who obviously haven’t been paying adequate attention to the Tory Trollfeed. After all, the governments of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Premier Alison Redford, who claim to wear the mantle of the former premier, would have trouble claiming in a serious debate that their market fundamentalism looks much like any policy Mr. Lougheed would have adopted, or that current NDP policies wouldn’t have mostly made sense to Alberta Conservatives circa 1971.

It’s said here the Conservative braintrust must recognize that it could get a little embarrassing for today’s Conservatives to try to make a serious case they ought to be called the party of Peter Lougheed – and not the party of Ralph Klein!

Mr. Lougheed, Ms. Duncan told the House of Commons during the 15 minutes before Question Period during which MPs may comment on whatever they wish, was “a formidable advocate for establishing provincial control of natural resources and for establishing a stronger place for Alberta in the federation.”

“Yet he contributed so much more on other fronts,” she went on. “He created the Heritage Savings Trust Fund, investing resource royalties towards health care and medical research. He established the first Alberta Ministry of Culture and set aside protected areas, notably Kananaskis Country. He enacted the Alberta Bill of Rights and contributed to the entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights. Recently, he raised concerns with the fast pace of development of the oilsands and called for greater attention to the environment. In his own words, Peter Lougheed was a Canadian first, an Albertan second and a political partisan third. He left a lasting legacy benefiting not only Albertans but all Canadians. We would do well to build on his legacy and his recent sage advice. …”

Since Monday was the first day after Mr. Lougheed’s death that our MPs got together, it seems unlikely Ms. Duncan’s remarks were meant as a cynical or overtly political gesture. As Opposition environment critic, however, she could hardly be blamed for mentioning Mr. Lougheed’s recent words of caution about the pace of oil sands development. That reference, along with the one about the Charter of Rights, must have made Mr. Harper and his spear-carriers grind their teeth – although possibly not nearly as much as when Mr. Lougheed said it.

No doubt Ms. Duncan expected to hear similar remarks from the some of her 25 Conservative fellow Parliamentarians. If so, she was disappointed.

Instead, from them, there was little but silence on the topic. From all the Conservative MPS in the House, according to Postmedia News, one said she was changing her name, one lauded an Olympic athlete, one said the government wants to restore the planet’s ozone layer and three told the same pathetic lie about the NDP’s tax policies.

Of course, you may say, Conservative politicians had their chance to make their remarks at Mr. Lougheed’s public memorial service in Calgary or in the media.

This is true enough. Mind you, Prime Minister Harper spent almost as much time on that occasion attacking the legacy of Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau, even if he didn’t name the man, as he did praising Mr. Lougheed.

Those few in the ranks who mentioned him at all, like the redoubtable Parliamentary blogger Brent Rathgeber, passed pretty lightly over Mr. Lougheed’s real accomplishments – for the obvious reason, I am sure, that they don’t show the current crop of Conservative legislators at either level of government in a very good light.

Still, Mr. Rathgeber’s blog – posted eight days after Ms. Duncan’s tribute in the House – made one good point: “As a lasting legacy, modern politicians should study his style and replicate his methods. It would improve our democracy.”

Agreed. Although it wouldn’t hurt to adopt some of his policies too!

Twenty-five Conservative MPs from this province, and not one of them had anything to say in Parliament about Peter Lougheed! Their silence speaks for itself!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Pure milk or pure ideology? Alberta MP attacks supply management

by David Climenhaga on August 8, 2012 in Agriculture, Alberta Economy, Alberta Politics, Canadian Economy, Canadian Politics, Supply Management with 25 Comments

Milking it for all that it’s worth – not how it’s done any more. Below: Edmonton-St. Albert MP Brent Rathgeber.

ST. ALBERT, Alberta

Brent Rathgeber, Member of Parliament for Edmonton St. Albert, has launched a third “attack” on the policies of the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

But it’s safe to say the local bi-weekly newspaper here in St. Albert got it completely bass-ackwards when it reported Mr. Rathgeber had “put himself squarely at odds with his own party this week with an attack on Canada’s supply management system.”

Au contraire! It’s clear that Mr. Rathgeber’s role in Mr. Harper’s government is as the guy that runs stuff up the flagpole to see who salutes.

Since he never gets disciplined by his disciplinarian prime minister, it’s pretty obvious this was what Mr. Rathgeber was up to when he suggested the CBC should be run as a charity like the cowed and marginalized Public Broadcasting Service in the United States. Apparently this one didn’t fly, as Mr. Rathgeber eventually dropped it.

Not long ago, Mr. Rathgeber launched a sharp attack against former minister of international co-operation and orange juice, Bev Oda, just days before she “decided” to resign from both her cabinet portfolio and her seat in the House of Commons.

This time, in what starts off as a defence of the Harper government’s decision to effectively shut down the Canadian Wheat Board, a post on Mr. Rathgeber’s blog soon turns into a broadside against supply management – the system whereby milk, eggs and poultry have been marketed in Canada since the 1970s and which is half-heartedly supported by the Harper Conservatives for reasons of political necessity.

Mr. Rathgeber proceeds to trot out all the textbook criticisms of supply management associated with market fundamentalists like Mr. Harper. The principal argument against supply management, of course, is that since it raises the prices farmers can charge for their produce, it results in higher prices for consumers. As Mr. Rathgeber puts it, “the supply management system therefore results in a legal transfer of income from millions of Canadian consumers, who pay higher prices for regulated food products, to less than 20,000 domestic farmers.”

Naturally, as we would expect from a loyal member of a highly ideological party, this simplistic formula ignores the price-setting power of corporate food processors and retailers, both sectors that are dominated by a tiny elite of massive corporations. Many factors influence food prices in Canada, as is suggested by the big variations in milk prices across the country – an average $4.45 for four litres in Regina in 2011, compared with $6.95 for the same amount in Charlottetown, according to the Government of Canada’s own figures.

Do you really imagine food prices will come down now that we’ve demonstrated to corporate food producers what we’re willing to pay? It’s said here that no matter how little the farmers get, our prices will remain high because the Canadian retailing and processing oligopoly has the market power to enforce the prices it wants us to pay.

Still, your blogger has to confess here that he is not an unmitigated enthusiast for supply management – the command and control system that sets prices by giving legal “marketing boards” the power to set production rates and wholesale prices for milk, “industrial milk” (used in processed food), eggs, chickens and turkeys by awarding quotas to individual farmers. Farmers must have quota – which can cost tens of thousands of dollars per cow – in order to legally sell the produce. This also means imports of these products are not permitted, except for industrial milk and cheese used in processed products, which are subject to tariffs.

This leads to another of Mr. Rathgeber’s arguments, that supply management serves as an impediment to Canadian participation in trade agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership, negotiations for which the Canadian government has recently been “invited” to join. Can it really be true that the TPP countries would exclude Canada over supply management when they have their own agricultural subsidies and controls? Unlikely.

Indeed, I very much doubt the countries involved in the TPP care much at all about our subsidies or agricultural practices. They just want unfettered access to our market to dump their surplus produce.

Still, it’s always struck me as a little self-serving for supply managed farmers to say, as they frequently do, that supply management gives us consumers stable and predictable prices – which is true enough, even if those prices have been predictably high compared to those in the country next door.

But it’s absurd to argue, as Mr. Rathgeber seems to be doing, that ending supply management would usher in an era of grocery-shelf nirvana for Canadian consumers, or that there would be no other consequences for Canadians.

Given the economies of the corporate dairy sector, for example, most milk in the United States is produced using Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone. Because they could, thanks to supply management, Canadian farmers listened to the views of their consumers and considered the welfare of their livestock and rejected RBG.

So, count on it, if supply management is eliminated, not only will Canada’s small and mid-sized dairy and poultry operations be wiped out almost overnight by multinational bulk suppliers, but the economics of the system Conservatives like Mr. Rathgeber are championing will require the use of RBG and like substances. So whether or not the price will go down, which is no certainty, the quality of the product we buy will decline.

Moreover, the inevitable structural changes will hit small towns throughout the Prairies and destroy many businesses in the agricultural supply chain – and the employees they support. The impacts on our health and that of our children are harder to predict, but they are unlikely to be beneficial.

Canadian dairy and poultry farmers that try to soldier on for a spell will essentially become employees of predatory multinational agricultural corporations – which, it is said here, would suit Mr. Harper and Mr. Rathgeber just fine. (One wonders if, under these circumstances, the government of Alberta Premier Alison Redford would look more kindly at the idea of allowing farm workers to join unions, a Charter-protected right that is nevertheless currently illegal in Alberta.)

And, mark my words, urban consumers will pay for whatever lower prices we see on the grocery shelves in service cuts caused by lower corporate taxes, hidden subsidies to agricultural multinationals and environmentally destructive corporate farming practices. More growth hormones in your kids’ milk? Less tax money for urban services? Count on both!

As for those trade deals, ask yourself, how well have all those other trade deals we’ve signed on to worked out for ordinary Canadian consumers and working people? To say the least, that’s a topic for debate.

Finally, on the matter of real politics, supply managed dairy farmers are particularly influential in the politics of Quebec, which are about to take on a separatist hue once again, as always seems to happen when we have the misfortune to have Conservatives on the government benches in Ottawa. Guess for whom this will be a great issue!

So which do you value more, the survival of Canada, or ideological market-fundamentalist perfection? I fear I know the answer when it comes to Mr. Harper.

Mr. Rathgeber concludes his post by stating, with reference to the government’s destruction of the Wheat Board, that Western Canadian grain farmers have proved “they can successfully compete without a government-sanctioned cartel.” Of course, the Wheat Board wasn’t a cartel, it was a collective bargaining agent for Western wheat and barley growers, and we know how the Harper Government feels about collective bargaining when it’s the little guy that benefits.

It’s a little rich to suggest as Mr. Rathgeber does that anything has been proved, since the Wheat Board’s single-desk system was shut down only seven days ago. I wouldn’t be surprised the impacts of this policy decision turn out to be considerably more severe for Western grain farmers than this market fundamentalist government is pretending just now. And for the rest of us, since our American neighbours are already demanding that we lower our wheat quality standards so they can send inferior product up here.

Regardless, one thing is a virtual certainty: If Mr. Rathgeber is attacking supply management, the prime minister and his other minions are not far behind.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The coda to Oda was writ bright with orange juice

by David Climenhaga on July 4, 2012 in Canadian Politics with 3 Comments

Bev Oda, foreground, enjoys a celebratory dinner at the Savoy, her orange juice just visible under her right arm. Departing Canadian politicians may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Ms. Oda in happier times; Ms. Oda has a last cigarette before barking out the order to the firing squad.

Bev Oda had to know she was a dead woman walking – politically speaking, that is. So give the Member of Parliament for Durham, Ont., some credit for recognizing the obvious, and shouting out the order to the firing squad herself!

She’ll be gone by the end of the month, just after celebrating her 68th birthday, with time on her hands to enjoy her comfortable Parliamentary pension. Not just gone from cabinet, but also from the House of Commons, her own decision, she said.

There is no sin greater in the Harper Government than politically embarrassing our sourpuss prime minister, and Ms. Oda, the international aid minister, delivered embarrassment in spades with her famously symbolic $16 glass of orange juice.

Never mind someone in her office scratching a “not” onto an already-signed contract in 2009 to give money to a Christian aid organization that tuned out to be insufficiently sympathetic to Israel for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s taste, an act that could be described as akin to forgery. And forget about her “reign of terror” against her staff, or being caught smoking too close to the back doors. These and greater sins could be forgiven, and regularly were.

But it was pretty hard for anyone with a pulse, even a habitual Conservative voter in the backwoods of Alberta, not to understand the powerful symbolism of that overpriced glass of O.J. Once the price of that jar of juice registered on the nation’s political seismograph, Ms. Oda was a coda faster than you could say “Helena Guergis.”

Ms. Guergis, alert readers will recall, was also once a rising star in Mr. Harper’s cabinet. But she married a guy who proceeded to lose a safe Conservative seat in Alberta to a New Democrat in 2008, followed that up with some dubious and embarrassing claims about his relationship with the PM, and in 2009 drove his SUV right into a police roadblock near the couple’s Ontario home with the wrong stuff in both his glove compartment and his bloodstream.

When Ms. Guergis made the fatal decision to stand by her man, Mr. Harper’s political Praetorian Guard delivered the double-tap within hours. Skidded her from both cabinet and the Conservative caucus, it wasn’t long before the loyal Tory voters of her Simcoe-Grey riding finished the job in the May 2011 federal election, where she foolishly tried to run as an independent.

Ms. Guergis has complained publicly about the injustice of it all, seeing as she did nothing wrong but for some difficulties with an airport security staffer. Apparently she found the situation painful enough to launch a lawsuit against the PM. But those are the breaks for those who run afoul of the neo-Con capo of Parliament.

Or consider the sad fate of former Alberta Reform-Alliance-Conservative MP Peter Goldring, the Independent Member who’s no longer even allowed to hand out maple leaf pins and bookmarks on Canada Day on the grounds of the Alberta Legislature.

The five-term MP for Edmonton East was either pushed or jumped from the federal Tory caucus in December 2011 after he was charged with failing to provide a breath sample to a police officer who pulled him over on his way home from a fund-raising event.

He has pleaded not guilty to the official charge, but no trial was required to determine his punishment for embarrassing Mr. Harper. He is persona non grata, even in the city he still represents as an MP, even among provincial Conservatives who are no particular friends of the prime minister.

So, about the time Edmonton-St. Albert MP Brent Rathgeber made his bones and the national news on June 26 by taking a public shot at certain overly indulgent ministers with the apparent approval of his boss, Ms. Oda had obviously recognized an offer she couldn’t refuse and decided to take it with more dignity than either Ms. Guergis or Mr. Goldring.

Which brings us to the question of whether a similar fate awaits Peterborough MP Dean del Mastro, Mr. Harper’s Parliamentary assistant, for the scheme tied to his office to pay citizen money-launderers a $50 bonus for passing $1,000 “donations” through to his campaign to disguise the source of the campaign cash.

Unlikely. Election financing schemes are complicated, normally easy to deny and, as history shows, pretty much business as usual for the well-financed conservative parties faced with inconvenient election spending rules.

Like that of Mr. Rathgeber, Mr. del Mastro’s loyalty to his boss is unquestioned, so as long as he sticks to Tim Hortons and steers clear of the Savoy, he should be just fine for the long haul.

This isn’t France, after all.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Tory Brent Rathgeber knocks cabinet perks: Maverick move or just maverick shtick?

by David Climenhaga on June 26, 2012 in Canadian Politics with 4 Comments

Your favourite blogger, with Brent Rathgeber, the original blogging Tory.

What’s up with Brent Rathgeber? Specifically, is he a maverick, or is he just doing the maverick shtick?

Mr. Rathgeber, as is well known to readers of this blog, is the Member of Parliament for Edmonton-St. Albert, and he is surely Parliament’s best-read blogger. As such, this makes him the country’s senior “Blogging Tory,” or, at least the only one with seat in the House of Commons. Of course, it also makes him my representative in the government of Canada, whether I like it or not.

Earlier today, Mr. Rathgeber posted an item on his blog that does something, well, something Conservative MPs just don’t do.

He criticized one of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet members. But that’s not such a big deal, because the minister in question was the unfortunate Bev Oda, she of the $16 glass of orange juice and the notorious hotel upgrade. As everyone in Canada seems to be quite confident, Ms. Oda is going to get the old skideroo as soon as the prime minister next reshuffles his cabinet, an event widely believed to be soon.

More interestingly, Mr. Rathgeber (very mildly) criticized the rest of Mr. Harper’s cabinet, of which Mr. Rathgeber is likely never to be a member owing to the surfeit of Conservative MPs from this corner of Canada, for their collective $600,000 limo drivers’ overtime bill. (Well, they’ve got to wait for you, for heaven’s sake!)

The mainstream media made a bigger thing out of this than the mild criticism in the blog would seem to warrant. “A Western Canadian Conservative MP went public Tuesday to blast the ‘egregious’ waste of tax dollars by Harper government cabinet ministers, saying ministers were showing an attraction to ‘opulence’ and ‘extravagance’ that is alien to the values of ordinary Canadians,” panted a drivellist for the Vancouver Sun.

Still, Prime Minister Harper is notoriously thin-skinned about this kind of thing, and that presumably would be especially so if, as in this case, his MP appeared to have found inspiration in an old NDP press release.

Which leave the fundamental question about this story unanswered: Is Mr. Rathgeber, hitherto best known for his opinion the CBC should be run as a charity, really out there in maverick territory, is he safely within the corral helping one of the prime minister’s public relations schemes to unfold?

He did write, it cannot be denied: “Surely, as government preaches fiscal discipline such extravagance must be eliminated.”

The auguries are mixed. The fact the post there at all suggests it has the OK from on high. Plus, after all, someone has to make the case for sending Ms. Oda back to the back of the backbenches.

On the other hand, the fact Mr. Rathgeber unexpectedly failed to put in an appearance at an Edmonton studio for a segment on his blog post on journalist Don Martin’s CTV show Power Play suggests someone told him to zip his lips, and quickly.

Personally, I lean toward the idea Mr. Rathgeber’s slip was no slip at all, and had the approval from the highest levels. Maybe we’ll know tomorrow – if the post is still there and Mr. Rathgeber is still in the Conservative caucus.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Explaining the F-35 fiasco: the ‘Yes Minister Defence’

by David Climenhaga on April 11, 2012 in Uncategorized with 7 Comments
Yes Minister! Senior civil servants advise Defence Minister Peter MacKay, holding the Globe and Mail at right, on the F-35 purchase: “Confidentially Minister MacKay, everything you tell me about the F-35 is in complete confidence, so equally, and I am sure you appreciate this, and by appreciate I don’t actually mean appreciate, I mean understand, that everything I tell you is also in complete confidence.” (…may not be exactly as illustrated, etc.) Below: The real Mr. MacKay and Brent Rathgeber in flack-proof vests, as befits members of the Harper government.

A Conservative Member of Parliament from Alberta has helpfully offered what we might term the “Yes Minister Defence” for his government’s spectacular mishandling of the F-35 fiasco.

The Conservatives were just too dumb to understand the F-35 file, Brent Rathgeber, the MP Edmonton-St. Albert, who is best known for his belief that the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. should be run as a charity, seems to be suggesting in a recent edition of his blog.

Lest Mr. Rathgeber assert that this characterization of his April 5 post is one of those periodic defamations he is forced to endure as our public-spirited Parliamentarian, let us quote from Brent’s Blog directly:

“As I watched Bob Rae’s admittedly thoughtful question of Privilege tabled earlier today in the House of Commons alleging Ministerial impropriety regarding the F-35 Fighter Jet (non) procurement, I was reminded of the British sitcom/mocumentary ‘Yes Minister’,” Mr. Rathgeber wrote. “In it, a rather hapless politician is routinely ‘managed’ by his more intelligent Deputy Minister. Although a clever British satirical sitcom, ‘Yes Minister’ parodies the reality that the bureaucracy has the expertise and experience that few politicians will ever achieve in any given subject matter.”

Now, while I have no doubt Defence Minister Peter MacKay will not be pleased to learn he has been depicted by one of his caucus mates as “rather hapless” and by implication less intelligent than his departmental staff, a charitable interpretation of the F-35 procurement mess would suggest this is a fair comment on Mr. Rathgeber’s part.

That is, at least, to those of us who are not persuaded that Mr. MacKay merely intentionally misled us, the hapless members of the public, because he thought we were too stupid to figure out the multi-billion-dollar costs of the single-engine stealth fighter that needs a million-dollar paint job every time you have to change a spark plug and add a quart of oil, and also doesn’t carry enough fuel to intercept a Russian bomber until it’s practically within sight of the Peace Tower.

For his part, according to the Toronto Star, Mr. MacKay says he knew the so-called fighters would cost $10-billion or so more than Ottawa told taxpayers, and he didn’t mean to mislead us when he didn’t tell us about it. He just didn’t feel he needed to say anything because it was only an accounting difference, he explained to CTV’s Question Period.

Getting back to Mr. Rathgeber’s novel Yes Minister Defence, the Edmonton-area MP concedes that “something as significant as a $10-billion underestimate in Canada’s then largest military procurement would theoretically call for a Minister’s resignation.” (Emphasis added.)

However, he asks, is it really reasonable to expect the minister to resign “given the highly technical and unique market regarding military procurement.” Apparently he thinks not, as he goes on: “is it realistic to expect politicians to have the requisite technical expertise regarding said purchase?”

After all, he explained, there are only a few makers of multi-billion-dollar stealth fighters with radios that don’t work when it’s cold, or too close to the North Pole, or something, and only a few governments rich enough and dumb enough to contemplate buying them. So “this is not a normal operating market and therefore the suggestion of a truly competitive process is largely irrelevant.”

Moreover, Mr. Rathgeber suggests, this whole matter was really all the fault of a bunch of nameless Department of Defence bureaucrats. He asks, complete with double question marks: “Is Parliament entitled to accurate information to hold the Government to account and assure the public purse is spent wisely? Or can a bureaucracy with superior technical expertise ‘manage’ Ministers and in turn Parliament with impunity??”

Most of us would agree that the answer to the first question is yes and the answer to the second ought to be no. Regardless, from Mr. MacKay’s response to the second question we can infer that he did understand the difference and that Mr. Rathgeber’s attempt to pass the buck (hundreds of millions of ’em, actually) to the civil service doesn’t really fly, as it were.

However, Mr. Rathgeber’s blog does contain a couple of other tidbits worth repeating. First is his admission that the allegedly perfect workings of the market, which Prime Minister Stephen Harper believes in with such near-religious faith, are not so perfect when the requirements are too technical for mere ministers of the Crown to understand.

Actually, a lot of us who do not share the PM’s market-fundamentalist convictions have been saying this for a long time, and it is nice to hear it said by a member of the Reform Party caucus in Ottawa.

Second, Mr. Rathgeber notes that given the economic relevance of military procurement contracts so huge the sums are barely comprehensible even to those of us who are not members of Cabinet, they are also used “for non-military purposes such as industrial benefits, regional development and job creation.”

This is a point we can heartily agree is a reasonable role of government, although in the knowledge that it is a worthwhile activity of the sort usually dismissed by Mr. Rathgeber’s caucus colleagues as “picking winners and losers.”

It is good to know that at least one member of Mr. Harper’s caucus understands that such matters as industrial benefits, regional development and job creation are too important to be left to the vagaries of “the market.”

Of course, none of this answers why the Conservatives were so set on purchasing an aircraft that so manifestly does not meet Canada’s defence needs.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Conservative MP Brent Rathgeber on the long-gun registry: welfare state social engineering, or what?

by David Climenhaga on February 14, 2012 in Uncategorized with 9 Comments
Edmonton-St. Albert MP Brent Rathgeber, in naval costume, gets off some potshots with a Glock, or something. Below: Another shot Brent in a military getup. Note the flag, I swear I dragged this photo straight off his website without even passing it through Photoshop! Remember guys, when you’re looking down at the Velcro patch on your sleeve, the flag needs to look like it’s upside down! Below that: Yet another.

It takes a special kind of politician to use the shooting of two police officers as evidence for the need to eliminate the long-gun registry.

You see … er … the registry was an example of the welfare-state mentality! That’s it, I think.

I’m not making this up. My community’s Member of Parliament, Brent Rathgeber, publishes a blog on his website and, in his Feb. 8 post, used the shooting of two RCMP officers near the not-too-distant town of Killam the day before as a platform to defend the ongoing plan by his Conservative Party to shut down the long-gun registry and destroy the data it contains.

The MP for Edmonton-St. Albert sits on Parliament’s Public Safety Committee, whence he has been a braying voice for dismantling the registry. When he’s not doing that, he advocates turning the CBC into a charity. In addition … actually, that’s about it.

Now, it had been my intention for several reasons to draw no connections between the shooting of the RCMP officers at Killam and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s plans to continue using the registry as a Conservative Party fund-raising machine.

After all, I thought, the case appeared to involve a handgun, and so the weapon used to shoot the officers wouldn’t have shown up in the long-gun registry. What’s more, from the news coverage of the shootings, the police obviously knew there was a gun in the residence they were approaching. Plus, in this case, right from the get-go the shooter obviously wasn’t a “law-abiding gun owner” of the type Mr. Rathgeber purports to defend. So, from my perspective, there wasn’t really much of a connection with the long-gun registry.

Moreover, I didn’t particularly feel like trying to score political points off gun nuts or their Tory enablers out of respect for the officers, who thankfully by the sound of news reports will recover from their injuries.

Finally because, as much fun as it is to rile up the gun set and get them to say outrageous things by daring to mention a fight that they in fact have won, I’m growing weary of their hysteria.

Still, it’s hard not to say something when my own community’s MP takes the opportunity to exploit a painful event like this, which could easily have turned out to be a terrible tragedy, to score a few cheap political points.

He was reigniting the debate over the long-gun registry at this time, Mr. Rathgeber explained, because events like the shooting at Killam and the March 2005 tragedy at Mayerthorpe in which four Mounties were shot to death “reignite the debate over the merits of the LGR.”

“However,” he stated, “the fact that incidents like Mayerthorpe and Killam occur demonstrate the sad reality that there is no connection between preventing such tragedies and the LGR.”

Alas, Mr. Rathgeber provides no evidence for or explanation of this strongly stated proposition. Instead, he expresses his opinion that the rifle and shotgun registry won’t work because it “represents the worst of the modern welfare state mentality.” Say what?

What this latter comment may in fact be evidence of, to paraphrase Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman’s recent observation about the state of the conservative movement south of the Medicine Line, is that for conservatives on either side of the border tinfoil hats are becoming an increasingly de rigueur as a fashion accessory.

Mr. Rathgeber explained his belief there is a connection between the welfare state and the gun registry by arguing that the latter “is based on the premise that people who are likely to flaunt the law generally will somehow respect a law that requires them to register their firearms. The simple and overstated reality is that this premise is simply fallacious.”

Of course, while that statement may be fallacious, it’s not actually the premise on which the registry was based. The premise of the long-gun registry was that it would help to keep firearms out of the hands of people deemed to be a danger to themselves or others, and help return stolen firearms to their legitimate owners.

Now, it’s quite legitimate for Mr. Rathgeber and other opponents of the registry to argue that it didn’t work, couldn’t work, or cost too much money – all of which they have asserted, and indeed some of them also say about gun licenses and restrictions on the ownership of handguns. On these points, I suppose, we can all exchange statistics and angry Tweets until we are blue in the face.

But Mr. Rathgeber is just making it up when he suggests, without any supporting evidence whatsoever, that the premise of the long-gun registry was for it to be a social engineering project to turn the criminally minded into square-john citizens disinclined to flout the law. It is also worth noting, I suppose, that just because a legal measure is not 100-per-cent effective doesn’t mean it’s not effective at all.

Now, I have to pause here to say that in all the years I have read stylebooks warning aspiring writers not to confuse “flaunt” and “flout,” I have never come across an actual example in practice. I recognize that is tempting fate to draw this to anyone’s attention, as we all make errors of this sort from time to time. But still, forgive me Brent, there it is, a ripe plum just waiting to be plucked! Also, I liked the way you slipped in the Franklin Roosevelt quote.

Mr. Rathgeber begins to draw his post to a close with an observation that one could fairly summarize as saying that if you’re a police officer who relies on the long-gun registry for information, it’s your own darn fault anyway if someone takes a potshot at you.

He concludes with the thought that since “psychologists, psychiatrists and counsellors have been unable to significantly alter human behavior when it comes to homicidal tendencies, it is unrealistic that legislated registries will perform any better.”

I wonder if these same psychologists, psychiatrists and counsellors might have better luck keeping blogging Tories of the Parliamentary variety from drawing illogical and unsupported conclusions that, to borrow a delightful phrase from Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick, writing on the same topic, tends to make one “an MP who will lower the tone of any municipal wiener roast you invite him to.”

Well, to Mr. Rathgeber’s credit, at least he didn’t equate the registry with any European political movements from the 1930s.

Still, as political blog posts go, the timing of this one made it pretty tacky!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Are there really 287,000 law-abiding farmers, trappers, hunters and fishers in Toronto?

by David Climenhaga on January 30, 2012 in Uncategorized with 11 Comments
A strong market in central Canada for raccoon coats like the one worn by this man accounts for the large number of urban trappers who live in Metropolitan Toronto, law-abiding gun owners who account for some of the 287,000 long guns in that city. Or something like that, anyway. Below: Edmonton-St. Albert MP Brent Rathgeber, some of his fashionable Conservative fellow MPs.

The Conservative Member of Parliament for Edmonton-St. Albert, the riding in which I reside, has made a name for himself by being a noisy defender of the Harper Government’s effort to shut down the national rifle and shotgun registry and destroy all its records.

Brent Rathgeber likes to describe his party’s nearly completed plan to eliminate the registry and permanently trash all its information, despite the pleas of the police whom he also purports to support, as a way to preserve “the liberty of law-abiding farmers, hunters, fishermen, trappers and others.”

Liberty is good, as I think we can all agree, especially for someone who like Mr. Rathgeber also describes himself as a “libertarian.”

I was thinking about this yesterday as I read the Toronto Star’s scoop, based on a geographical breakdown of the federal long-gun registry’s collected data that had fallen into the newspaper’s hands, that there are approximately 287,000 “long guns” registered in Toronto!

Most of these, about 263,000 firearms according to the Star, are held by individuals, presumably in their homes.

I immediately wondered how many of these highly urbanized Ontarians, to use Mr. Rathgeber’s descriptive phrase, require these weapons because they are “farmers, hunters, fishermen and trappers”?

Probably a portion of them are hunters and fishers, although how many farmers and trappers live in Metropolitan Toronto is open to question. That said, heaven knows, if there were still a market for raccoon coats, Toronto might just be the place to set up a trap-line!

Moreover, what an Ontario fisherperson would need a rifle or shotgun for, I’m not sure either, since he or she would be unlikely to encounter a bear, one not driving a BMW to the TSE anyway, on the way down to the Humber River. But I guess a really big bass could be frightening if it started flopping around and snapping its jaws at you. You might want to think twice about shooting it in the bottom of your boat, however.

In Mr. Rathgeber’s defence, it’s true that there is probably a slightly higher per-capita number of farmers, fishers and hunters living in his urban central Alberta riding. Edmonton-St. Albert is, after all, adjacent to a large faming area that is rich in wildlife – quite a large percentage of which will bellow “moo” if you approach it with a shotgun.

In this regard, northern Edmonton and St. Albert may be quite different from Metro Toronto where, we are informed by the Star, police make more use of the long-gun database than in any other Canadian centre.

It’s also quite possible that there’s both stronger police support and more voter support in the ridings of Metro Toronto than on the northern edge of Edmonton, making opposition to the registry more of a consideration for politicians like Mr. Rathgeber. Then again, since Edmonton-St. Albert is an urban riding, perhaps not – but, in that case, citizens are going to need to give Mr. Rathgeber a dingle and let him know how they feel about his position on the registry.

Getting back to Mr. Rathgeber’s “Others” category, I have no idea what my MP had in mind. Perhaps he was thinking of those law-abiding gun owners who, for one reason or another, are about to slip over into the non-law-abiding column whence they are deemed suitable grist for the vast gulag of multi-billion-dollar prisons that the libertarian Mr. Rathgeber also enthusiastically supports.

You know, like the law-abiding Saskatoon gun owner who somehow slipped up and let his 11-year-old boy take a loaded Colt .45 to school, where it went off in the lad’s knapsack. (When I Tweeted this, other law abiding gun owners were swift to inform me that the fellow in question obviously wasn’t law abiding – which, since he was until the gun left the premises, is part of the problem with the whole concept.)

The legions of Mr. Rathgeber’s fans and allies in the law-abiding gun owner community who now so enthusiastically follow this blog will be quick to point out that a Colt .45 is a handgun, not covered by the long-gun registry, and therefore I am a “fascist libtard” or worse who wants to seize their guns – and, by gosh, I should just come over and give it a try!

All I can say to them is that it would have been awfully hard for the young fellow to hide a rifle or a shot gun in his knapsack, and anyway, judging by their correspondence, a goodly number of them are looking for Mr. Rathgeber to champion their efforts to eliminate the handgun registry too. This is a topic I’m sure he’ll be happy to get back to us about with his position in the fullness of time and public opinion polling.

Like most “conservative libertarians,” Mr. Rathgeber is quite selective about what he chooses to be libertarian about. In this regard, I suppose, libertarians are rather like their frequent political allies the Biblical literalists, who inevitably pick and choose what parts of the Bible to be literal about. Well, one can’t be too libertarian, what with all those taxpayer-built prisons to fill!

Anyway, just in case the gun-registry controversy dies with the registry, Mr. Rathgeber also has another big cause – forcing the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. to rely on charitable donations to survive, sort of like the “charitable” Fraser Institute, only without billionaires lining up to bankroll its efforts to lobby on their behalf. But that’s a topic for another day.

Meanwhile, it’s pretty clear the Conservative rush to wreck the gun registry had nothing to do with the rights of law-abiding gun owners and everything to do with wedge politics and fund-raising, at which it presumably it has been a fantastic success for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives.

In Mr. Rathgeber’s defence, his lush rhetoric about our liberty is typical of Canadians are hearing Conservative MPs in ridings throughout the country, good foot soldiers who have received their marching orders.

No doubt we’ll be hearing from him soon on how our freedom of investment choice must be defended by whittling down our retirement benefits.

Indeed, it’s never a bad time to start worrying when a Conservative politician commences talking about defending your liberty!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

If we’d heeded Tom Kent in 1981, our democracy would be healthier today

by David Climenhaga on November 18, 2011 in Uncategorized with 6 Comments
Tom Kent, chair of the Royal Commission on Newspapers, 1981. (Canadian Press photo). Below: The cover of the 1981 Royal Commission report; Edmonton-St. Albert MP Brent Rathgeber.

Today we mark the passage of Tom Kent, the man who got it right about the state of Canada’s news media and was ignored to the country’s great disservice.

Mr. Kent – who had a distinguished career as a journalist, code-breaker, senior civil servant, Liberal Party activist, adviser to prime ministers, businessman and academic – was asked in 1980 by the government of prime minister Pierre Trudeau to lead an inquiry into what was then so clearly going wrong with the Canadian newspaper industry, and by extension the rest of the media.

The Royal Commission on Newspapers, which began its work in 1981 under Mr. Kent’s chairmanship, was created in response to the moves by powerful corporate special interests to dominate and control the flow of news essential to our democracy through the concentration of media ownership.

It seems faintly quaint today that the event the sparked the inquiry was the sudden closing of two venerable daily newspapers – the Ottawa Journal and the Winnipeg Tribune – in a sleazy deal worked out between their two corporate owners to allow each company to totally dominate the then highly profitable print advertising business in one of the two cities. No one would blink an eye if something similar happened today.

But where things were then was much different – and much healthier – than they are today, with our mass media in an advanced state of decay and corporate domination and only the chaotic threads of the Internet offering any succour to the democratic necessity for freedom of information and expression.

“Where we are is, in the Commission’s opinion, entirely unacceptable for a democratic society,” the final report of the Royal Commission stated in July 1981. “Too much power is in too few hands; and it is power without accountability. Whether the power is in practice well used or ill used or not used at all is beside the point. The point is that how it is used is subject to the indifference or to the whim of a few individuals, whether hidden or not in a faceless corporation.”

Since those words were written we have seen how that power has been used, and has been abused for malign purposes, for 30 years. Today, as we know and are powerless to change except for our pinprick efforts on the Internet, the situation is infinitely worse and more sinister than it was then.

Indeed, as this lament is written, despite claims to the contrary, our Conservative government in Ottawa is preparing to destroy the CBC – pretty much the last remaining major news media organization in operation in Canada not entirely devoted to the corporatist line. That said, plenty of fault can be found in the CBC’s coverage in this regard as it seeks to ingratiate itself with the government to save itself from the depredations of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s neo-Con ideology.

We can say this about the government’s intentions toward the CBC with reasonable certainty because, as has been noted in this space before, we are able to observe and understand the behaviour of the prime minister’s well-disciplined spear-carriers in the ranks of his Alberta caucus. So when you hear the likes of Brent Rathgeber, the MP for Edmonton-St. Albert, assailing the CBC as he did during the May 2011 election campaign or advocating its significant de-funding as he did on his taxpayer-financed MP’s blog earlier this month, you can be confident that something is in the wind.

This time Mr. Rathgeber, who claims he actually likes the CBC, proposes restructuring the network along the lines of the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States. “I favour continuation of the CBC, but on a charitable model rather than on a perpetual subsidized basis,” Mr. Rathgeber wrote. “Rather than compelling every taxpayer to pay $69 towards the CBC, viewers could contribute whatever amount they like voluntarily and get a tax receipt for so doing. This certainly works well south of the border for its Public Broadcaster (PBS), which continues to produce great documentaries, while promoting American culture.” (Emphasis added.)

“There was a time when, given Canada’s large geography and sparse population, it was not commercially viable for private broadcasters to reach the remote north or even much of the rural west,” Mr. Rathgeber went on, echoing the points he made during the election campaign. “The advent of satellite dishes has certainly remedied that. So in 2011, seventy-five years after its inception, the role and efficacy of the CBC must be critically addressed.”

It would be a fair observation that Mr. Rathgeber is not a politician who steps out of the Conservative message box very far or very often. And it would be reasonable to assume on that basis that his remarks provide a reasonable indicator of where the Harper Government intends to go to emasculate and if possible destroy the CBC.

Alas, no $69-dollar-a-year calculation will ever be done to account for the cost of tax breaks and special favours for Mr. Harper’s CBC-hating rooting section and echo chamber at Sun Media, which is rapidly becoming the Conservative Party’s semi-official version of Pravda.

That said, perhaps there is some merit to the idea of assigning all of our taxes on a charitable basis, as Mr. Rathgeber proposes for the CBC. He might be surprised what Canadians, given the choice, would opt to fund, and not to fund.

Regardless, if we had listened to Mr. Kent’s suggestions three decades ago, we would not be in the fix we find ourselves in today. Indeed, from this troubled vantage point, he looks like a prophet.

The Royal Commission’s recommendations included prohibitions on further concentration of media ownership, which was far less severe then than now, tax incentives for wider media ownership and tax breaks to newspapers that devoted more space to local news coverage. Under the legislation proposed by the commission, no budding Conrad Black would have been allowed to own more than five newspapers, and each of those would have had to be more than 500 kilometres from any other.

Alas, these principles were only half-heartedly endorsed by the Trudeau Government, and they were quickly discarded by prime minister Brian Mulroney. Like that of the United States after President Ronald Reagan, when limits on media ownership concentration were eliminated, Canadian media ownership was soon almost entirely controlled by a handful of corporate owners with little interest in the needs or prevailing views of the communities in which their papers were published. Our democracy has suffered accordingly.

Needless to say, in their reports on his death, media (including the CBC) passed very lightly over the Royal Commission and its recommendations, if they mentioned them at all.

Mr. Kent was 89 when he died on Tuesday. He will be missed.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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