All posts tagged Jack Layton

Wicked Witch war of words: ‘Has Thatcher bashing crossed a line?’ Well, er… no!

by David Climenhaga on April 13, 2013 in Canadian Politics, Ezra Levant, Freedom of Expression, Margaret Thatcher, Neoconservatism, Ralph Klein with 13 Comments

The Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz. Below, Ezra Levant in an orange wig with a can of Orange Crush mocks Jack Layton’s funeral. RIP or give it a rest?

Oh my – quelle horreur! – naughty Britons still appalled by the depredations visited upon their country by Margaret Thatcher’s government have shocked and appalled the world by pushing “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead!” to the top of the charts.

In case you missed it, the former British prime minister, who was in office from 1979 to 1990, died on Monday at 87. But it took until yesterday for the song from the Wizard of Oz – an apt metaphor itself for the operational side of neocon governments everywhere – to mischievously reach No. 1 on the British Broadcasting Corp.’s weekly music chart.

The right-wing media in Britain and, quite naturally, here at home in the colonies were full of opprobrium for the posthumous protest that cheekily pushed Ding Dong! to the top.

But really, given the misery the neoliberal project championed by Mrs. Thatcher and the likes of Ronald Reagan and Canada’s own Brian Mulroney has created throughout the world – consigning half the population of the planet to the status “surplus humanity” for the convenience of the 1 per cent – I’m surprised it took this long, and that the commentary has been this humourous and mild. (I mean, other than what Respect MP George Galloway had to say.)

We have a tradition – or maybe it’s a taboo – here in the West that one ought not to speak ill of the dead. But this needs to be treated with the proverbial grain of salt when it comes to politicians, even freshly dead ones, when the hagiography begins before they’re even planted in the ground.

Of course, the people penning hagiographies are bound to try to use this cultural squeamishness about speaking frankly with the goal of suppressing all criticism of the policies of the people they are deifying – as is most certainly happening now with Mrs. Thatcher and as happened last month here in Alberta upon the death of Ralph Klein.

This is especially true in the case of people like Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Klein whose noxious neoliberal policies continue to be enthusiastically proselytized by politicians of the right despite their unremitting record of economic and social failure.

This, in turn, is important because, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out in the Guardian, “those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized.”

So they need to be countered, and quickly – and it does no harm if this is done with a touch of humour.

Here at home, naturally, universally right-wing media coverage of this brouhaha has mostly taken on the tone of “more in sadness than in anger,” with a heaping side dish of “we just don’t do that sort of thing in Canada.”

Yet, in fact, we do. It’s just that we rarely do it when the likes of Mrs. Thatcher, Mr. Reagan or Mr. Klein pass on to whatever reward awaits them.

On the other hand, never forget, if the recently dead political figure is someone on the left, one can say pretty much whatever one feels like and not invoke the supposed taboo.

And I’m not just speaking of press coverage of the death of Hugo Chavez here – although he’s a perfectly good example of this phenomenon in the Canadian media.

Who can forget Sun News Network TV commentator Ezra Levant marking the death of NDP leader Jack Layton in 2011 by donning an orange wig and sipping Orange Crush while exchanging mocking repartee with that great public intellectual Michael Coren?

The typical tastelessness of Mr. Levant’s display notwithstanding, what he had to say about Mr. Layton is directly applicable to those on the right who today purport to be horrified by even the mildest criticism of Mrs. Thatcher’s dark history.

“At what point,” asked Mr. Levant, “does somebody say, you’re putting that body on a bloody campaign tour? At what point does someone say, how many spin doctors … are allowed to set up a funeral before we say, ‘You’re getting creepy, guy?’”

“At what point do we say … this is a macabre attempt to, I dunno, bring back some political spirit from the dead,” he went on, noting that, “if I am not sufficiently deferential … if I am not being obedient and super polite, oh, they just open the sewer pipe.”

On this, for once, I think Mr. Levant basically got the principle right.

There can be very little doubt those who support the continued neoliberal project are using the death of Mrs. Thatcher to bring back a political spirit from the dead, and using our traditions of respect for the dead to open the sewer pipes if we dare to mention the obvious.

So in response to the Edmonton Journal’s timorous headline writer, who asked, “Has Thatcher-bashing crossed a line?” the answer is, “I’m afraid not.”

Cue the music!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Anonymous comments? Dean Del Mastro’s right: there oughtta be a law!

by David Climenhaga on November 2, 2012 in Freedom of Expression, Social Media, Tory Online Rage Machine with 9 Comments

A young member of the Tory Online Rage Machine (TORM) composes a mean Tweet using talking points from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office. TORM operatives may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: The unfortunate Dean Del Mastro.

It’s hard not to feel a pang of sympathy for Dean Del Mastro, the Conservative MP for the Ontario riding of Peterborough, who informed us the other day that there oughtta be a law about anonymous comments on the Internet.

Who among us hasn’t felt the sting of the Anonymous Brigade on Twitter, Facebook and in the comments sections of myriad blogs and online newspapers? Just try to “censor” some Sun News Network bloviator’s on-air ejaculations and watch what happens to your blog’s comments section!

“One of the best ways to end on-line and electronic bullying, libel and slander would be to force people posting hurtful comments to properly identify themselves,” Mr. Del Mastro (or some anonymous political sluggo toiling away in his constituency office) wrote last week on his Facebook account.

“This morning I read comments on a news story posted on an electronic news publication, many of them could only be described as hateful rants. The common denominator is that none of them identified the person that wrote them; this strikes me as something that Parliament should address,” said Mr. Del Mastro, who according to his official webpage “will be fully exonerated.” (What that’s all about, Mr. Del Mastro explained on his MP page, is that Elections Canada is just following up “on false complaints from a disgruntled former supplier who sued me unsuccessfully.” So, enough said about that, anonymously or otherwise.)

Well, I for one kind of agree with Mr. Del Mastro’s views on Internet anonymity, although it prompted a storm of snotty 140 character protests, many of them sorta, semi, somewhat anonymous. At least, I agree that it would be a better world in most ways if we would all just identify ourselves with our actual names when we wanted to say something rude about a powerful politician, businessman or corporation.

But then, we might want to amend some provincial Defamation Acts, like the ones in 10 of our provinces, so that Canadians actually enjoyed their Charter guarantee of free expression without the risk of SLAPP suits by powerful individuals and corporations with extremely well-financed chips on their metaphorical shoulders.

And even so, would be pretty hard to enforce given the ease with which false identities, fake identities, satirical identities and multiple online personalities can be ginned up on the Internet nowadays – a capability for which, as fans of the market like Mr. Del Mastro would have to admit, there’s a market.

But what really got me wondering about Mr. Del Mastro’s commentary was whether he cleared it through the Prime Minister’s Office. I mean, isn’t Stephen Harper’s PMO the sinister agency pulling the strings attached to what has come to be known (here, anyway) as the Tory Online Rage Machine?

And doesn’t the TORM, more to the point, depend on the anonymity of its legion of identities to be effective – if only because on most nights the vast majority of its thousands of defamatory, offensive and often profane observations are composed by the same five or six pimply faced adolescent Conservative Party operatives sitting in their underwear at their computers in their basement bedrooms in their moms’ houses?

You know, the kind of anonymous heroes who labelled the late Jack Layton “Taliban Jack” for having the temerity to suggest that the so-called NATO coalition should open lines of communication with the Taliban, something that the Conservative government of the day rejected as unconscionable although the same Conservative government is prepared to consider it.

Mr. Layton has passed on, but those of us who admired him are still waiting for the apology.

Who can forget the famous Craigslist advertisement a few weeks before the last federal election from “a social media organization working for a political organization” looking for “a team of writers who will post to newspaper comments, media forums, FB pages, etc. We are NOT officially affiliated with the Harper campaign.” (The italics are mine.)

“Your writing must be right-wing, strong and use supplied talking points,” the ad said. “You are creating an on-line persona with a consistent tone. Ideally, you can make up facts and statistics to stir controversy. Where suited, humour, sarcasm and personal insults are welcome.”

“To apply,” continued the ad, which did not mention who would supply the talking points, “submit a 100 word post based on the headline ‘Ignatieff promises no coalition after election.’” That would be a reference to Michael Ignatieff, a now-forgotten pre-Justin-Trudeau leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.

Whatever, I think all reasonable Canadians could get behind Mr. Del Mastro’s effort to ensure these opinionated multiple personalities – who, we must remember, are NOT associated with any Harper campaigns, post or future – are required by law to identify themselves.

But will Mr. Del Mastro’s former pals and patrons in the Harper Election Machine? That remains to be seen. Don’t hold your breath.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Welcome to Alberta’s Wild West, where the market sets the value of your vote

by David Climenhaga on October 26, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Election Financing with 3 Comments

Drug store billionaire Daryl Katz, right, discusses his plans for a new Edmonton hockey arena with a representative of the Alberta government. Since Wild West hockey barons may not appear exactly as illustrated, a photo of the real Mr. Katz is shown below. (CBC Photo, circa 2008.)

Look, people, this here is the Wild West. If a billionaire wants to buy an election, why the heck shouldn’t he? Isn’t that what the Alberta Advantage is supposed to be all about?

Seriously, folks, that’s just the way we do things out here in Wild Rose Country, and if you don’t like it you should just go back to Ontario and freeze in the dark in your nuclear-powered basement!

If you’re one of those naïve ninnies who thinks your input ought to be considered come election time, well, fuggedaboudit! This is Alberta! You should have been a billionaire too, and it’s nobody’s fault but your own if you’re not.

Now, mind you, there is such a thing as too much democracy, even here in Alberta, and from time to time things do go wrong with our election financing rules. For example, what happens when even our billionaires can’t agree on which right-wing horse to back?

That seems to be exactly what happened in the April 2012 provincial election, the financing of which now has the entire province, not to mention the rest of the country, in a swivet in the wake of the release of our political parties’ fund-raising totals by Elections Alberta earlier this week.

The facts of the case are pretty simple, by the sound of it. In the last days of the 2012 election campaign, Edmonton drug store billionaire Daryl Katz somehow got all of his friends and relations to each agree to donate up to the maximum allowable $30,000 to Premier Alison Redford’s Progressive Conservative party, which at that point looked like it was about to lose the vote to the far-right Wildrose Party led by former Fraser Institute apparatchik Danielle Smith.

This all added up to $430,000. Strictly for convenience sake, I am sure, plus of course to save on bank charges for separate cheques, the dough was shipped over to PC HQ on a single cheque and later divided up for record-keeping purposes among the actual donors. Really.

By mere coincidence, Mr. Katz was hoping at about the same time to have Alberta taxpayers build him a swoopy new half-a-billion-dollar hockey arena in a nice part of Edmonton for his currently locked-out unionized professional hockey club, the Edmonton Oilers. Those negotiations with the City of Edmonton have hit a momentary roadblock, but will doubtless resume soon.

Anyway, if this sounds to you a lot like the political donations now being investigated so vigorously by the authorities in Montreal, you must be the kind of miserable crybaby who goes to protest marches, wears an orange hat, has a lifetime membership in the Friends of Medicare and uses a picture of Jack Layton for a screensaver on your computer.

Naturally, this being Alberta, things are completely different here – and not just because we don’t speak French. The biggest difference, of course, is that huge political donations are completely legal and standard operating procedure here in Alberta, so there’s absolutely no point having an inquiry like the one in Quebec.

Instead, Elections Alberta will quietly investigate the donation by Mr. Katz and all of his friends and relations. Since the donations are entirely legal except for some incorrect paperwork, the probe will find that absolutely nothing has been done wrong. The results of the investigation, unfortunately, will have to remain a secret, because that’s the way we do things here in Alberta and the law says we can.

Remember, there’s only one kind of election spending that we tightly control in this province and that’s third-party advertising, even if all it does is criticize a government policy during an election campaign without actually suggesting you vote for anyone else in particular.

The reason? Well, advertising like that might be purchased by people like the coalition of unions that paid for those notorious “No Plan” advertisements back in 2007 that got Ed Stelmach off to such a shaky start as premier the next year. Who knows, without a law like this, environmentalists, pipeline haters, world peace advocates and Esperanto speakers might do the same thing? None of them are the kind of people who are likely to urge you to support the kind of right-wing parties we like here in Alberta and therefore none of them are the kinds of people who ought to be able to speak their minds here in the New West.

Now, it is interesting and slightly ironic that the people screaming the loudest about the donation by Mr. Katz and all his friends and relations are in the Wildrose Party, which itself has not exactly suffered because of Alberta’s current election financing rules, loosy-goosey though they may be.

Indeed, Ms. Smith’s Wildrosers raised considerably more from their billionaires (as well as quite a few non-billionaires, of course) than did Ms. Redford’s Tories from theirs – a total of $3.1 million during the campaign period, compared with the PCs’ $1.6 million, according to Elections Alberta.

Now, one can feel a certain sympathy with the Wildrose Party, which the polls said was leading strongly until the final 72 hours or so of the campaign, a fact that must leave them feeling “we was robbed,” even if their own erupting bozos contributed significantly to their loss in the polling booths.

But their leader’s protests are pretty rich, as it were, given whom they represent, and who pays their freight. It seems pretty likely that they’re no more inclined to legislate the kind of election financing controls that Alberta really needs than are Ms. Redford’s PCs.

If they say they are, and even if they sincerely mean it just now, readers should remember that opposition parties don’t always deliver on such pledges once they observe the advantages of the status quo from the vantage of power. Example: the independent Parliamentary budget officer promised in 2006 by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Neo-Liberal Party of Canada, then still in opposition.

It is said here that if all the billionaires’ donations in Alberta had gone to one right-wing party or the other (either Ms. Redford’s Tories or Ms. Smith’s Wildrose) and if the NDP were the only party protesting, this story wouldn’t even rate five column inches of news coverage in this province.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Victor Toews demonstrates in Omar Khadr case how wedge politics biteth like a serpent

by David Climenhaga on October 2, 2012 in Canadian Politics, National Security, Omar Khadr Case with 2 Comments

Mennonites in Paraguay. Below: Victor Toews and Omar Khadr as they appear nowadays. Way below: Rob Anders in one of his waking moments.

You’d think Victor Toews would have felt a little empathy for Omar Khadr.

Mr. Toews is the Paraguayan-born public security minister in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government.

Mr. Khadr is the Canadian-born child soldier who came to adulthood during a decade in U.S. custody after being captured in a firefight with U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002, and who last weekend was repatriated to a Canadian prison over Mr. Toews’s noisy objections.

Mr. Toews (pronounced Taves) was raised by a Canadian family with strong, some might say extreme, religious views who, it is fair to conclude, had sufficient concerns about the bright lights and big cities of Western Canada to head for the safer rural confines of Filadelfia, Paraguay, where Mr. Toews was born in 1952. Filadelfia was populated by German-speaking Mennonites who left Russia for Germany in the early 1930s but sensibly moved on to the Southern Hemisphere before things went completely south in Europe. Mr. Toews’s parents came to Canada from Russia as children in 1924 and 1926 in the same Mennonite migration.

Mr. Khadr, as is well known, was also raised by a father with strong religious views, extreme enough in the elder Mr. Khadr’s case to go and fight for the theocratic government then in power in another country, taking his young son with him. Mr. Khadr was only 15 when that country was invaded by the United States, which one could argue was where and when his troubles really started. Before that, he had been taken by his Egyptian-born father to Peshawar, Pakistan, apparently so that he could be raised and educated away from the Western influences his family viewed as pernicious.

Now, this analogy only goes so far. Mr. Toews’s Anabaptist forebears, like mine, were pacifists, while Mr. Khadr’s Muslim father most emphatically was not. And, as Mr. Toews’s official biography points out, he was safely back in Canada by 1956.

Still, one wonders what Mr. Toews would have done if at 15, he had been instructed by his parent to do something illegal or immoral. Remember, according to Mr. Toews’s family’s belief system, his father had the authority to issue commands, and he had the obligation to obey them. Scripture outlines appropriate punishments for children who disobey: “Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.” – Proverbs 23:14.

I imagine that like most young people in a similar situation – perhaps like young Mr. Khadr, perhaps like me – Mr. Toews would have done as he was told.

Regardless, as an adult, Mr. Toews seems to have had little difficulty putting behind him the core religious beliefs of his upbringing – which as I recall places high value on such things as forgiveness, understanding, marital fidelity and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, which surely means not just paying your taxes, but obeying the courts when they tell you you’re breaching a fellow citizen’s constitutional rights.

Yet Mr. Toews had no problem ignoring Canadian courts or agreements made with our American allies about the return of Mr. Khadr to this country.

Nor has he hesitated to demonize Mr. Khadr as a terrorist, or make much of his “conviction” by a U.S. military tribunal the existence of which, it is fair to say, has become a profound embarrassment to our American cousins, who were very anxious to see this still-young reminder of their unsavoury quasi-legal activities in an occupied corner of Cuba out of sight and out of mind.

Now, Mr. Toews is pretty clearly a highly intelligent man, and as is well known, he has been trained in the law to a degree sufficient to be considered a candidate for the bench of a superior court. So there can be little doubt Mr. Toews well understood the problems presented by the manner of Mr. Khadr’s conviction, his rights as a Canadian citizen (even one with his dark family history) and the likely true nature of the threat that he presents to Canada and Canadians (not much, although possibly some).

Moreover, surely Mr. Toews had some empathy based on his own upbringing for the fate Mr. Khadr faced abroad, in the care of a militant fundamentalist father in a strange land.

Nevertheless, Mr. Toews chose to ignore these things as is the custom of his party to eke out a temporary political advantage by trying to play the attitudes of voters distrustful of the Islamic religion against politicians still courageous to speak out for due process and the limited justice possible in this imperfect world.

In other words, as Harper Conservatives always do, Mr. Toews chose to seek the wedge, the opportunity to separate his opponents from their supporters, no matter how shortsighted or harmful to the country or any of its citizens the tactic might prove to be.

Now, having created a constituency for keeping Mr. Khadr out of Canada at all costs, Mr. Toews and his government have been forced by our powerful American allies to repatriate this young man regardless of what they have told the public.

It should surprise no one, then, that this wedge so injudiciously applied is now beginning to separate the Harperites from some of their own supporters.

To stick with Proverbs 23 just a little longer, it turns out that it is not just wine that at the last stingeth like a viper, but wedge politics too. This time at least it has come back to bite our Conservative government on its hindmost parts!

Thus endeth the lesson.

Canada’s Most Embarrassing MP reinserts foot into mouth

Speaking of allegations of terrorism, the Canadian Parliamentarian and professional heckler who once labelled South African President Nelson Mandela a “terrorist” and a “Communist” was back in the news yesterday making sure he is unlikely to be challenged any time soon for the title of Canada’s Most Embarrassing MP.

Calgary West Member of Parliament Rob Anders was being quoted all over the place yesterday halfheartedly apologizing for suggesting NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair contributed to the death last year of Mr. Mulcair’s predecessor, Jack Layton, who succumbed to cancer in August 2011.

“I actually think one of the great stories that was missed by journalists was that Mr. Mulcair, with his arm twisted behind the scenes, helped to hasten Jack Layton’s death,” Mr. Anders told the iPolitics online newsletter, apparently based on his deep insider knowledge of NDP affairs.

While the Globe and Mail provided a lead that explained the story straight up, our local media here in Alberta took pains to try to mitigate the own-goal scored against the Harper Government by Mr. Anders, diminishing the importance of this great young friend of prime minister with frequent references to his lowly backbench status.

Mr. Anders, who most recently fell asleep in the House of Commons while the TV cameras rolled, is well known for a list of outrageous statements and activities far too long to reproduce here. Still, it’s hard to fault the founder of “Canadians Against Forced Unionism” and supporter of Bloc Quebecois separatist motions in the House for his chronic and apparently uncontrollably childish behaviour. He is, after all, a dope.

One does wonder, however, about the voters of Calgary West, who habitually re-elect him.

Politically minded Albertans look forward with anticipation to the next round in the grudge match between Mr. Anders and Premier Alison Redford.

Back in 2004, in Round 1, Ms. Redford tried to knock Mr. Anders off his perch in Calgary West by seeking the Conservative nomination there. She was handily defeated by Mr. Anders who, whatever else can be said of him, knows how to campaign.

This year, in Round 2, Mr. Anders and several other federal Conservatives sided with the Wildrose Party in hopes of removing Ms. Redford’s Progressive Conservatives in the April 23 provincial election. That effort was spectacularly unsuccessful.

Albertans concerned about their province’s reputation at home and abroad wish Ms. Redford well in Round 3, which is surely inevitable.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Politics ain’t beanbag: Stephen Harper is attacking the most vulnerable Canadians

by David Climenhaga on July 10, 2012 in Canadian Politics, Media with 2 Comments

Politics ain’t beanbag, people, and it’s not NERF ball either.

But Liberal leaders Michael Ignatieff and Stephane Dion both played it that way, so it was easy for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Reform Party bullyboys to walk all over them. As for Paul Martin, that guy’s own Liberal team worked him over in the corners before he even got to face off with the Conservatives.

Who knows what Jack Layton would have done, or how he would have played it? But when New Democrats chose Tom Mulcair as Canada’s Opposition Leader after Mr. Layton’s death, they chose someone who could judiciously hit back in the corners.

Elbow shots and rabbit punches like Mr. Harper’s recent “Risky Theories” attack ad will get a good solid body check in return, like today’s effective riposte from the NDP.

It’s said here this is exactly what’s needed. Watch for the Tiny Tory Rage Machine to be in full throat by tonight about the injustice of it all. Well, cry me a river. What’s good for the goose and all that.

Who’s your daddy?

The National Post on union kids’ camps: Threat or menace?

by David Climenhaga on July 1, 2012 in Canadian Politics, Christianity, Labour, Media with 8 Comments

Kids from Friedrich Engels Cabin at Camp Solidarity think about ways to seize control of the means of production at the National Post and establish the Information Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well, they’ll never get the chance, because they never worked for Ted Byfield! The National Post says union kids camps are not just bad, they’re weird! Below: The Post’s illustration of kids at union camp; Prof. Frank Furedi, who confirms the diagnosis union camps are weird; Prof. Troy Glover, apparently in his camping clothes.

Confession time: Years ago I sat on the board of a church camp.

I sent my kids there. One year one of my daughters was a counsellor at the camp.

And at that camp, they taught those kids … and here comes the confession part … Christian doctrine!

Real Christian doctrine, too, stuff right out of the Bible about helping the poor, kindness to the imprisoned and letting he who is without sin cast the first stone.

This is not the sort of thing the raw-meat fundies who support the Wildrose Party and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s so-called Conservatives think of as being Christian at all. The Bronze Age rigours of the Old Testament are more to their taste.

Anyway, there wasn’t all that much doctrine at that camp, in fact. I think the kids there spent most of their time canoeing, getting sunburns, eating marshmallows until they threw up and making lame crafts they took home and left lying around their houses until their moms quietly tossed them out. Plus, they all got a T-shirt, on which I got a deal for the camp from a unionized shirt supplier.

I have to say, I never saw much difference, good or bad, in my kids’ behaviour when they got home. Just the same, and there’s just no way to get around this, you’d have to call the Christian doctrine that camp taught those children … ideology!

Well, what’s the big deal about that, you wonder? As kids, lots of us had to suffer through summer camps our parents thought would improve us. And lots of us snuck out of evening prayers and necked with some other kid from the church in Burnaby or Aldergrove behind one of the cabins, which for many of us was first time we really gave any serious thought to the doctrine of turning the other cheek.

Well, I only mention this because the National Post has made the discovery that – oh my gosh!!! – some unions have kids’ camps too!

Unions! And you know what that means! Ideology!

“At these summer camps, ideology doesn’t take a holiday,” barked the headline over the story by the appropriately named Kathryn Blaze Carlson.

Holy cow! Ms. Carlson informs us that not only are union members sending their kids to camps where they might watch a movie with Jack Layton in it instead of Jack Nicholson, but there are summer kids’ camps run by environmentalists (which as we should all know by now is tantamount to treason in Mr. Harper’s Canada), and even camps operated by … wait for it … vegans! (Editor’s Note: You’ve used up your quota of exclamation points. Just stop it!)

Now, the mainstream media always strives for balance, so Ms. Carlson was also scrupulous to mention in passing that there are Tea Party camps south of the Medicine Line too. But really, you can sense from the tone of the article that’s basically OK with the Great Friends of Free Speech who run the National Post, because at least there the children would learn something useful – you know, like firing a MAC-10.)

Getting back to the horror, the horror, of union kids’ camps – for gosh sake, the Alberta Federation of Labour has one, and now the Canadian Union of Public Employees has started one too – Ms. Carlson trots out an expert named Troy Glover from something called the Canadian Summer Camp Research Project who explained, “this is how you indoctrinate youth — you get them involved in fun activities and you teach them a message on the side.”

Goodness, the next thing you know, these children might be influenced into becoming the kind of grownups who stand up for their rights in the workplace, make lousy consumers of poorly made foreign-sourced electronic trinkets or, worse, turn into vegans so serious they won’t eat anything that casts a shadow. (Sorry, stolen joke. Cultural artifact.)

Ms. Carlson intones: “Parents who enjoy hockey or the ballet take their children to NHL games or the Nutcracker.* Catholic mothers and fathers take their children to church, Jews to synagogue, Muslims to the mosque. Is sending a child to an ideological camp simply an extension of that sort of natural parental influence, or is it inappropriate?” (Emphasis added.)

Union kids’ camps? Threat or menace? Well, of course it’s inappropriate, and Ms. Carlson has an expert to explain that too. She had to go a long way to find him – which proves the Post is serious about getting to the bottom of this dreadful stuff.

“‘Parents want their children to hang out with kids whose parents think like them — it’s a natural gravitation,’ said Frank Furedi, a sociologist at the University of Kent in Britain. ‘If you take your values seriously, you’ll want to influence your child. This is just an extreme version of that.’” (Emphasis added again.)

Just as we thought … extremists. (Editor’s Note: Oh, go ahead, you can use more exclamation points. This is harder to stop than I thought.)

Thanks! Extremists! Now, where was I? Oh yeah… “Mr. Furedi said not only is there ‘something weird’ about these camps, but they could deepen the societal divisions that already exist. And Mr. Glover said he is simply ‘uncomfortable’ at the idea of camps where children could be ostracized for going against the ideological grain,” Ms. Carlson explains.

Speaking of deepening societal divisions, it must have taken great restraint for Ms. Carlson not to use the term “class war.” So have you got that? It’s not just weird to teach children that working together can be effective, it’s divisive. It leads to class war! Just like that Tom Mulcair guy and his dangerous discourse on Dutch Disease.

And that’s why union camps are bad. Ditto vegan camps. And especially environmental camps, which are not only dangerous but drain the precious resources of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, because we’ll all have to pay for the CSIS agents’ mosquito repellent, marshmallows and overtime though our taxes, which are already way too high of course.

So just stop it people! Don’t send your kids to union camps! Just say no!

Send them to a church camp, where they’ll never be ostracized for going against the ideological grain.

Well, maybe a bit. And they might get lucky, which would also be bad. But at least they’ll never get leaflets!

*Actually, lots of parents who enjoy hockey and dancing can’t afford NHL games or the ballet. But they don’t teach that at Camp National Post, apparently.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

How far will Prime Minister Stephen Harper go with separatists to hang onto power?

by David Climenhaga on June 26, 2012 in Canadian Constitution, Canadian Politics, Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair, Wedge Politics with 4 Comments

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, left, with Parti Quebecois Leader Pauline Marois … or something very much like that. The politicians pictured above may not be exactly as illustrated in real life. Below: Thomas Mulcair, Jack Layton.

Now that our sullen neo-conservative prime minister is on speaking terms once again with former PM Brian Mulroney – in desperate hopes of staving off an eventual electoral disaster in Quebec at the hands of the federalist NDP leader, Thomas Mulcair – one wonders how long it will be before the Harper Government sits down to sup with separatists.

Sure enough, it was only a few hours after Mr. Harper’s meeting with Mr. Mulroney that Industry Minister Christian Paradis, the PM’s “Quebec lieutenant,” had proclaimed a rapprochement between the Harper Conservatives and the separatist Parti Quebecois. Details, it is reported, will follow.

What a catastrophe from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s perspective that he must eventually face an opponent who is both immensely popular in Quebec and a demonstrably a committed federalist!

Indeed, it can be persuasively argued that Mr. Mulcair is a much better federalist than Mr. Harper. Mr. Mulcair, after all, took a chance on the federal NDP at time when being anything but a sovereignist in Quebec looked like a recipe for electoral suicide. Mr. Harper is well known as a signatory to a sovereignist screed in Alberta that refuses to go peaceably down the Memory Hole, despite the best efforts of the Conservative media establishment here and elsewhere.

So now Mr. Harper, after long rejecting Mr. Mulroney as a political embarrassment over the Airbus Affair, has come hat in hand to his elder for some tips on how to make Quebec behave itself.

And one of the key secrets to Mr. Mulroney’s electoral success, as is well known, was his willingness to welcome Quebec nationalists into the federal Conservative fold.

This is not to suggest that Mr. Mulroney was making common cause with the separatist movement in Quebec for cynical reasons. On the contrary, the Conservative apologist Robert Fulford likely had it right when he stated that Mr. Mulroney “set out to bring permanent internal peace to Canada by dissolving the arguments for separatism.”

This is what drove the genuinely patriotic Mr. Mulroney’s efforts to recognize the reality that Quebec constitutes a “distinct society” within Canada, which culminated in the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords that had failed so irrevocably by 1992.

It was English Canada’s deep discomfort with recognizing that reality – with Mr. Mulroney’s vision of Canada as two nations in one country – that provided the wedge for the Reform Party under Preston Manning not only to defeat Mr. Mulroney’s constitutional proposals in a national referendum, but to set up the takeover by the Reform Party of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada in 2003.

There is no little irony in the reality these were the circumstances that allowed the rise of the American-influenced and ideologically fundamentalist wing of Canada’s conservative movement – eventually led by the steely eyed Mr. Harper after Mr. Manning and Stockwell Day proved insufficiently hard edged – to form the government.

And now the grip on the country by Mr. Harper and his fellow ideologues is weakening, in no small part because their neoconservative nostrums are so unconvincing to the people of Quebec.

But if Mr. Mulroney only welcomed Quebec nationalists to get them to become Canadian nationalists, can we trust Mr. Harper to be motivated by the same thing?

This seems unlikely. Mr. Harper’s (neo) Conservative Party, after all, is the one that has been willing to slap Quebec at every turn and on every issue – whether it’s support for the arts, the long-gun registry or military adventures abroad – the better to drive effective electoral wedges within English Canada.

This was the party that was prepared, for example, to scream that former Liberal leader Stephane Dion and the late NDP leader Jack Layton were “selling out to separatists” when they dared in 2008 to talk of a democratic coalition that would depend on votes from the sovereignist Bloc Quebecois, a story that has now been mostly purged from the Internet.

And this was the party whose MPs shouted down Quebec MP Gilles Duceppe, then the leader of the BQ, by singing O Canada when he tried to speak about the coalition in Parliament – a crude riposte that, quite literally, must have been music to the ears of Quebec’s die-hard separatists.

“This deal that the leader of the Liberal Party has made with the separatists is a betrayal of the voters of this country, a betrayal of the best interests of our economy, a betrayal of the best interests of our country, and we will fight it with every means that we have,” said Mr. Harper at the time. …But that was then.

Do you seriously think that facing a popular national NDP leader from Quebec with impeccable federalist credentials, Mr. Harper won’t take greater risks, drive deeper wedges, make more dangerous promises, make deals with anyone, in his efforts to keep his increasingly unpopular government afloat?

Yesterday’s grainy attack ad on Mr. Mulcair – almost a parody of itself – was one part of Mr. Harper’s strategy. Seeking out strange bedfellows is obviously another.

So will Mr. Harper sup with the separatists? It is said here he is bound to. And don’t count on him using a long spoon!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

An Open Letter about Rob Ford to the City of Toronto, from the Rest of Canada

by David Climenhaga on May 6, 2012 in Uncategorized with 5 Comments
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, a political figure so big he has his own gravitational field! Toronto politicians may not appear exactly as illustrated.

Dear Toronto:

It’s time we had a frank talk about that Chief Magistrate of yours.

We are speaking of course about Rob Ford, the big guy who keeps showing up in that lime-green team jacket.

We’re sorry we can’t think of a gentle way to put this, but surely we’re all in agreement that your Mr. Ford is a jackass? First there was that thing with closing public libraries and trying to insult Peggy Atwood. (It must have been embarrassing to a great big man like that to have his butt kicked by a little slip of a thing like Ms. Atwood. Or was that his brother? Well, whatever.)

Then there was that Toronto’s Biggest Loser project, or whatever it was called, with weekly weigh-ins and all that embarrassing stuff. Very unseemly, even before he was caught on phone-cam sneaking out of Col. Sanders’ place with a bucket of eviscerated chicken bits.

Now there’s this business about chasing reporters around and demanding that they hand over up their BlackBerries! BlackBerries, for God’s sake! Why would anybody do that? We mean, other than to check up on who the reporter’s sources are? This was all because Mr. Ford wants to buy some city trees, or out in a fence or something? And why didn’t the reporter just kick his big fat butt? Lord knows, it would have been hard to miss! Well, maybe the Toronto Star has a rule about letting reporters do that sort of thing. Like we said, whatever.

It’s not that we’ve got anything against politicians who aren’t allergic to a little argy-bargy now and then. You know that we loved Jean Chrétien, even after he tried to throttle that protester and especially after he chased that burglar around 24 Sussex with an Eskimo sculpture while his RCMP guards snoozed.

And it’s not that we don’t have any embarrassing politicians out here in the ROC. Or politicians that wear dumb green team jackets, for that matter – just look at Hamilton and Saskatoon, not to mention Edmonton! Just consider Alberta’s recent provincial election and those Wildrose guys, the ones who were all aflutter about the White Man’s Electoral Burden and how gay people are certain to burn in an eternal Lake of Fire if they don’t repent and stop keeping their apartments so tidy. It must have been excruciating to witness that happening if you happened to live in Alberta, but, well, what could we say?

And it’s not as if there haven’t been other embarrassing politicians from Toronto, either, I suppose. Does anybody remember that Mel Lastman fellow? He was officially a Bad Boy too, if we remember correctly. Although, we have to admit, he’s been eclipsed – in every sense of the word – by Mr. Ford.

Nope, it’s none of those things, although we have to admit that from our point of view out here in the ROC, the thing about Toronto is that most of its politicians must have been pretty sensible because you were just so darned successful. Names like Jack Layton spring to mind.

We don’t know if the penny ever dropped for you, but that’s why we always hated you so much, Toronto! You might not have quite been the World Class City you always worried you weren’t, but, by God, you were the closest thing to one north of the 49th. We knew you for your cultural institutions, for your great restaurants, for your efficient public transit system and for your confident multiculturalism – and we deeply resented it.

We resented it – and you – because we knew, in the hearts of our hearts, that we looked like a bunch of chumps by comparison. You know, the sorts of places that if somebody complained out loud that you ought to elect the “Caucasian Candidate” because he’d represent everyone equally badly, lots of our neighbours would say, “What? Whaaaat?!” Well, they’d never get away with that in Toronto, we’d think.

Nowadays, though, thanks to this Ford fellow, we’re starting to feel a little sorry for you. Turns out you’re just another chump like us, only way bigger.

In fact, you may be an even bigger chump! At any rate, some of us out here in the hinterlands have mayors that are pretty reasonable!

And, you know what? From that little seed of sympathy, a great big oak tree of empathy is going to start to grow! Pretty soon we’re all going to love you, Toronto, and that will be just … pathetic!

We’re going to love you because you’re going to be part of the club, just like us, another second-rate Melonville in the frozen north with an embarrassing civic government that’s signed the surrender papers and ended the War on the Car. And this in the place that welcomed Jane Jacobs and stopped the Spadina Expressway!

Where will our bright young people, our authors, our actors, the kids we brutally teased in school when we were growing up, dream of leaving for now? San Francisco? New York? Paris?

I don’t know how this makes you feel, Toronto, but it makes the rest of us feel like we’re missing a limb. Sometimes we can feel our old envy or Toronto twitching, but then we look down and … it’s just gone.

Look, we can’t tell you what to do. But this is starting to have an effect on your Canadian family – all your jealous brothers and sisters spread out across the great land, the part of it within 30 kilometres of the U.S. border anyway. If you can’t bring yourself to skid that guy for your sake, maybe you need to do it for ours! That’s right! Do it for us – your Canadian family! If you don’t get him out of there soon, we’ll never get back to hating Toronto like God and Conservative Party of Canada intended!

We hated you because you grew up to be something better than the rest of us. We hated you because we couldn’t count on you to automatically vote for Stephen Harper and his ilk every time there was a federal election like so many of us did. We hated you because you had better taste than us, because you owned a subway that worked and because you have the only major league baseball team in the country. (And this last point is true even if the only beer you sell at Blue Jays games is Coors and it costs $10 a can!)

Can we make this any clearer? We hated you because you were so big in every way it felt as if you had your own gravitational field. Now the only thing about you with that kind of pull is … your mayor!

If this keeps up, Toronto, we’re all going to have to start hating … Vancouver!

For your sake…. for our sake … for Canada’s sake… do something!

With Heartfelt Sincerity,

The Rest of Canada

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Thomas Mulcair? We can’t spare that man. He fights!

by David Climenhaga on March 30, 2012 in Uncategorized with 10 Comments
Ulysses S. Grant, exactly as he appeared. Below: Thomas Mulcair (from a Toronto Star photo), for comparative purposes; President Lincoln.

I like Thomas Mulcair for the same reason Abraham Lincoln liked Ulysses S. Grant.

As President Lincoln famously said of Gen. Grant, the Commanding General of the Union Army in America’s great Civil War: “I can’t spare that man. He fights!”

Legend has it that the president was responding to a silly delegation of people who wanted Gen. Grant cashiered because he was reported to be too fond of whisky. The President, who was personally an abstemious man, but one with a sense of humour, inquired of them what it was Gen. Grant drank … so that he could send a case of the stuff to the rest of his generals!

Last weekend, Canadian New Democrats came to a similar conclusion about Mr. Mulcair – who, oddly, physically rather resembles Gen. Grant, despite the century and a quarter that has passed since the American soldier and politician’s death. They voted for Mr. Mulcair because they believe they can count on him to fight.

Maybe he really does have a temper, they thought. So what?

Maybe he can be sharp with supporters who don’t agree with him – indeed, I personally have seen Mr. Mulcair do this. Maybe the flame of ideological purity burns a little less brightly in his breast than in some. But, by God, he fights! And what we New Democrats need now is a fighter!

So it should hardly surprise us that, despite the great strengths of the other candidates, in the end a majority of New Democrats rolled the dice for the candidate who is obviously prepared to stand up and fight this terrible neo-Con government of Stephen Harper and his failed Conservative retreads from Ontario and Alberta.

You could hear it in Mr. Mulcair’s voice yesterday as he stiffened his sinews, summoned up the blood, and assailed Mr. Harper’s contemptible budget – which attacks seniors, public servants and the CBC while waving a shiny penny at the media to distract their wandering attention.

What a pleasure it was to hear him state the obvious: “The Conservatives ran an entire election campaign without saying a word to Canadians about their plans to cut OAS or health transfers. Clearly Mr. Harper is not a man of his word.”

The mainstream media, not surprisingly, along with its allies and boon companions in the prime minister’s so-called Conservative Party, were quick to start calling Mr. Mulcair an angry man. The implication was his is the kind of irrational anger that requires a time out, or even a trip to an anger-management course. One bloviator for a national newspaper held forth on how this was not what the NDP, previously successfully led by the seemingly mild-mannered Jack Layton, needed to succeed.

Well, we’ll see about that. But it seems to me that Mr. Mulcair is not so much angry as he is determined. But if it takes a little righteous anger – and I use that term advisedly – to battle the vote-suppressing, robo-calling, Parliament proroguing, anti-democratic urges of Mr. Harper and his neo-Con goons, then I say bring it on, and about time too!

Jack Layton was a fine man and a extraordinary leader. But he was really untested when it came to dealing with the legendary viciousness of these unprincipled Conservative market-fundamentalists who believe any deception is fair ball if it advances their ideological agenda.

Earlier on in the last Parliament, the Harper Tories identified Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff as the Main Enemy, and through a long intellectually dishonest but highly effective campaign demolished that essentially decent man brick by brick. They ignored Mr. Layton, at least until it was too late – when we got a glimpse of the tactics they were prepared to stoop to with the ugly massage parlour allegations leaked in the dying days of the election campaign to the Conservative Party’s house newspaper, the Toronto Sun.

It may be a heresy in some circles to say this aloud, but I have wondered privately how Mr. Layton – a profoundly decent and kindly man – would have stood the full onslaught of the Eye of Sauron that occupies 24 Sussex when it was finished with the professorial Dr. Ignatieff.

Mr. Mulcair, it seems to me and obviously to many other New Democrats, is tough enough to stand up to these people, and to honourably and articulately dish it back to them in a way that will make sense to Canadians.

The hypocritical cavils of national press notwithstanding, how can this be a bad thing with an opponent like Mr. Harper and with a cause as important as saving our country from the depredations of neo-Con ideology?

The chief knock against Mr. Mulcair in the media is that he’s cranky?

Please! I’m cranky too. What reasonable Canadian wouldn’t be at the thought of the way these so-called Conservatives, who are in fact dangerous Straussian radicals, conduct themselves, and the un-Canadian program they intend to implement?

It was a legitimate issue for New Democrats – deciding how to order their own house after the remarkable Mr. Layton’s death – to consider Mr. Mulcair’s past role in a Liberal provincial government (though it was, as he pointed out, a government led by the only federalist party in the province in question) and whether that mattered in our leader’s resume.

Obviously, a majority decided it didn’t, indeed, that Mr. Mulcair took a considerable political risk becoming a New Democrat in a place and time where the conventional political wisdom had it that there was no future for supporters of the NDP.

But it takes some cheek for the Conservatives, of all people, to send out an email calling Mr. Mulcair a blindly ambitious and divisive opportunist, apparently all on the strength of the facts he saw the light and joined the New Democrats and has been guilty of the occasional sharp retort!

Now here we have a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, a standard Conservative rhetorical technique to be sure, but in the matter of the party of Stephen Harper, Rob Anders, Dean Del Mastro and 1,001 anonymous robo-callers more a matter of hilarity than outrage.

Conservative media commentators (which is pretty well all of them) who see horror in this need to remember that an unwillingness to suffer fools and Conservatives gladly is no barrier to success in Canadian politics – consider the sterling example of Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

But these people appeal oleaginously to the better angels of our nature, as Mr. Lincoln might have said, and preach at us that we ought to have chosen a leader with a more patient and less acerbic personality, the better to be ground to dust by Mr. Harper.

Well, no thank you. I can only speak for myself, but I am sick of linking hands and singing Kumbayah. I’m sick of “moral victories” when in effect they are political defeats.

The Canada we have built is a great nation and the values of tolerance and social co-operation that characterize it are worth fighting to preserve – and to enhance.

I’m proud of my New Democrats for electing a leader who will be tough, and who will fight, for Canada.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Thomas Mulcair: an NDP leader who passes the Ralph Klein beer test and Tory fear test

by David Climenhaga on March 25, 2012 in Uncategorized with 4 Comments
One hopes profoundly readers of this blog will indulge its author in running this photograph one more time, given the occasion. NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair, chosen by the party as its leader this evening, is like Ralph Klein a politician who seems to be someone an ordinary person could have a beer with. Below: Mr. Klein.

Apparently it took the Conservative Party slime machine less than five minutes this evening to start going after just-elected New Democratic Party Leader Thomas Mulcair in an ugly email blast.

The first Conservative email attacking Mr. Mulcair started going out while he was still on the stage in Toronto celebrating his victorious ascent to the leadership of Canada’s Official Opposition.

Even the Conservative Globe and Mail characterized the attack as “vicious,” quoting Conservative Party spokesman Fred DeLorey telling credulous Tory supporters that the new NDP leader is “an opportunist whose high tax agenda, blind ambition, and divisive personality would put Canadian families and their jobs at risk.”

Given the former Reform Party’s propensity for fear-mongering and reactive negativity, it’s mildly surprising that it took them that long – assuming, of course, that it was just happenstance or mischievous children and not one of the Conservatives’ army of robo-callers and monkey-wrenchers who mucked up the NDP’s voting system earlier in the day.

Whatever. Get used to it. The misnamed Conservatives are the Tea Party of Canada whose shady and vicious scorched earth campaign techniques are inspired and taught by their Republican cronies south of the Medicine Line.

The speed and nasty tone of tonight’s Conservative email is proof that, whatever his pluses and minuses seemed as a potential leader, the NDP chose a replacement for Jack Layton who has already earned our unlikable prime minister’s fear. Well, Stephen Harper should be afraid. By the time this is over, I predict, we’ll all be calling the Conservatives the Robo-call Party of Canada!

We can also expect the Conservative media (which nowadays is pretty well all of it) to be quick off the mark in assailing Mr. Mulcair, although its tone is likely to be marginally more polite (except at Sun Media, of course). It will try to sow discord within NDP ranks now that the party’s members have made a choice after a long and exhausting campaign.

Indeed, the same Globe story tried to dismiss Mr. Mulcair as ill-humoured, hard to warm to and having (horrors!) a difficult relationship with the media.

Really? The Toronto Star came a little closer to the reality of the new NDP leader’s personality when its reporter observed in a feature on how the Mulcair team won the leadership that Mr. Mulcair “is, organizers knew, a guy people could have a beer with, despite all those headlines of a difficult personality to the contrary.”

I can vouch for the truth of this statement, as a matter of fact, having had a beer with him.

Indeed, and this is meant as a compliment, Mr. Mulcair’s relationship with voters in many ways reminds me of that of former Alberta premier Ralph Klein – who as readers of this blog will know, could be ill-humoured and whose relationship with the press at times was fraught. Nevertheless, large numbers of voters seemed to think he would be a great guy with whom to have a beer – a conclusion that did him no harm, as observers of the Alberta political scene will recall.

As an Alberta politician himself, a bloodless ideologue like the unappealing Mr. Harper presumably understands very well the kind of danger a living, breathing, human politician like Mr. Mulcair presents to him.

With a provincial election expected to be called as early as the day after tomorrow, Albertans may have an opportunity to see a little more of Mr. Mulcair and experience the positive things he shares in common with the most popular Alberta politician of a generation.

Certainly we hope Mr. Mulcair will include some stopovers in Alberta in his busy schedule of the weeks ahead to lend his undeniable star power to the campaigns of some of our provincial New Democrats.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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