All posts tagged Stockwell Day

Is Premier Alison Redford’s bitter fight with the docs about money, or control?

by David Climenhaga on February 1, 2013 in Alberta Economy, Alberta Health Services, Alberta Politics, Health Care, Health Insurance with 6 Comments

Who’s in change here? Progressive Conservative MLAs get ready to supervise the work of an Alberta Health Services medical team while Alberta voters look on. Health officials, physicians and electors may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: AMA President Dr. Michael Giuffre; a space invader

Is the increasingly bitter fight between Alberta’s government and the province’s physicians just about money? It’s said here it’s more about who gets to control the health care system.

If you need evidence for this assertion, look no further than the fact just two and a half months ago Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne said he was going to impose a pay deal on the docs that would have seen their salaries keep on rising.

Premier Alison Redford is now traipsing around the province explaining that these same doctors are being paid too much – why, they get 20 to 29 per cent more than their counterparts anywhere else in Canada!

“Quite frankly, before I start asking Albertans to pay health care premiums, I want to make sure that we’re getting the best deal possible with our doctors,” Ms. Redford told supporters during a recent telephone town hall. “At the end of the day, I think that’s really where we start to save some money with respect to things like health care.”

This is the leader of the same government that just days ago was about to force the same supposedly overpaid physicians to accept an imposed agreement that included a 2.5-per-cent lump sum payment and cost-of-living increases in each of the next three years.

Naturally, the doctors didn’t think that was enough and screamed bloody murder when Mr. Horne moved to unilaterally impose the contract on them. But it still raises the question: If they were not paid enough in November, why is the same pay too much now?

For his part, Mr. Horne has since withdrawn that deal, denied he imposed anything, and returned to the bargaining table with the AMA, setting the stage for the current slanging match.

AMA President Dr. Michael Giuffre conceded on CBC radio yesterday that Ms. Redford’s percentages are essentially correct, but argued that the costs of hiring nurses, renting space and otherwise operating a medical business in boom-bust Alberta are also higher by roughly the same amount.

He couldn’t resist the highlighting the irony of the fact that back in November the Redford Government spent $130,000 of taxpayer money on radio ads to promote an imposed settlement that now seems to have become far too expensive.

Accusing the government of “slamming” and “vilifying” physicians, Dr. Giuffre assailed the premier’s “often-confusing and frequently misleading” comments about physician pay as alarming and not particularly helpful to the on-again negotiations with the docs. He suggested the government is unfairly demonizing physicians because it desperately wants to hold the line on a budget deficit burgeoning in the face of lower prices fetched by Alberta petroleum resources.

Of course, the bitterness between the government and the AMA may go back a little farther than that. Alert readers will recall that the AMA backed the wrong horse in the final days of last spring’s election campaign, when the association bought advertisements that assailed the government and all but called on voters to elect a Wildrose government. Rest assured Alberta’s PC elephant has not forgotten!

Still, if you consider for a moment that the government’s real cost-control fight with doctors may be about who is going to be the boss of the health care system, the emphasis on Alberta physician pay premiums over other provinces suddenly makes sense.

Look at this from the government’s perspective. If you cede control of the system to physicians, who obviously have a dog in the hunt, the chances you’ll ever get health care costs under control are, shall we say, diminished.

Not only are Alberta physicians generously paid, but the billing structure is highly advantageous to their financial health. So it should come as no surprise that in the background of this public fight over wages, Mr. Horne has been chatting with his counterpart in Ontario about ways to change the formula by which physicians are compensated.

But if the government proposes any change to the billing process, it is likely to be attacked by the AMA as dangerous to patients – and chances are good many Albertans will listen. Both the government and the AMA also know that if you asked the typical Albertan in the street whom he or she would rather have in control of the health care system – doctors or politicians – the answer is likely to overwhelmingly favour the docs.

Yet if the government can’t slow down the rate at which health system costs are rising, the PCs and Premier Redford are bound to come under increasing pressure from the Wildrose Party – which can promise without a shred of evidence or accountability that its privatization schemes will deliver fairer, cheaper, more efficient health care.

Ergo, the government’s simplistic but easy-to-sell attack on the AMA from its flank makes political sense while Ms. Redford’s brain trust tries to figure out how to wrest control of the system from physicians and put it in the hands of more easily controlled officials.

Come to think of it, this is what former premier Ed Stelmach was up to when his government created Alberta Health Services back in 2008, not that that worked out the way anyone expected.

Saying doctors are paid 20 to 29 per cent more is just easier to explain than making a complex case for restructuring the way routine health services are delivered to most Albertans, many of whom are focused on the complaint they can’t find a family doctor.

Even Albertans who understand that health care financing is a complex policy question may not connect the dots that this argument represents a strange flip-flop by the government from what it was saying just a few weeks ago.

With the AMA, whose members are not used to losing, darkly hinting that it may resort to legal action if the government won’t bow to its will, look for this fight to continue for some time yet.

But don’t be surprised if this doesn’t particularly displease Ms. Redford, Mr. Horne and Finance Minister Doug Horner.

After all, given its vocal position on the need for austerity, the Wildrose Party can hardly rush to the doctors’ defence and call for a big salary increase, and fighting with the docs at least makes it look as if the government is doing something to respond to the Opposition’s screams about the deficit.

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BudgetChoice.ca – a coercive push poll or the greatest thing since Space Invaders?

Scoffers may try to dismiss www.budgetchoice.ca, the government’s $57,000 online do-it-yourself deficit-elimination tool “as a particularly coercive push poll” intended to soften up voters for another round of cuts to the public service or maybe a tax increase, wrote commenter Tom Fuller after yesterday’s post.

“But I think it’s a stroke of genius turning the budgeting process into an on-line multi-player role-playing game,” Mr. Fuller went on. “Assuming my avatar (Chlorox, the Elf Warrior) I vote to cut services to children and seniors, and lay off everyone at Environment. For reducing expenditures by 23 per cent, I get 5,000 special bonus points, and can claim the magic axe of Steve West, lost for lo these many years. I haven’t had this much fun since I spilled the beer on my Atari and shorted out Space Invaders.”

My blogging colleague Dave Cournoyer apparently agrees, observing: “It simplifies the process, but it also works to demonstrate that with modest tax increases and minor cuts to the Legislative Assembly budget, and cuts to wasteful programs like Carbon Capture, the government could easily balance the budget without burning down the house. And I did all that as a Level 4 Dwarf with a Stockwell Day amulet. It earned me 430,000 Gold Katzs.”

Personally, I’m not a gamer, so I have no idea.

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.

Stark choice may face compiler of PM’s Dossier of Dodgy Disclosures: Orange Wave or orange jumpsuit!

by David Climenhaga on April 27, 2011 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment
Somewhere in Alberta, the Prophet Jeremiah contemplates Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 500 pages of dodgy disclosures, said to have been recorded by the hand of Tom Flanagan. Below: Dr. Flanagan and Julian Assange.

Here’s a question for you: Is Tom Flanagan thinking about joining the Orange Wave and voting NDP? D’ya think?

It would make sense. After all, Jack Layton as prime minister is probably the best hope the poor guy has of not having to dress in orange and share a cell at Guantánamo Bay with Julian Assange.

I’m joking of course. … At least, given Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s reputation for vindictiveness, I think I’m joking.

It was Dr. Flanagan, neo-con University of Calgary professor and American-born avatar of the Canadian loony right, who in his former role as prime ministerial advisor and best buddy compiled a secret Dossier of Dodgy Disclosures. Five hundred pages of dodgy prime ministerial disclosures, or so the press tells us!

The reason for this effort, we are told by the Canadian Press, was because the Conservatives sensibly worried that the prime minister’s penchant for undiplomatically flapping his gums about what he really thought could end up causing a catastrophic melt-down on some future campaign trail, and they’d better have their talking points in order.

Later, as is well known, Dr. Flanagan and the prime minister had a falling out when the former had the temerity to write a cheerleading biography of the latter, who nevertheless, being a notorious control freak, flipped out when his permission wasn’t sought. Legend has it Mr. Harper tried hard to get the book deep-sixed, and banished the errant professor from his inner circle forever when it was published anyway.

But Dr. Flanagan did just fine on his own, thanks very much, apparently supplementing his presumably inadequate salary as a civil servant by appearing as a TV commentator, and while doing so famously calling for U.S. President Barack Obama to have Mr. Assange, the well-known Wikileaker, assassinated for publishing information embarrassing to the U.S. government.

But that was then. That is, before someone – although not Dr. Flanagan, presumably – leaked the compendium of embarrassing Stephen Harper one-liners to the Liberals.

And this is now. The Liberals passed them on the media, and the rest is history – or, actually, as we used to say back in the days before there were J-Schools, “history on the fly.”

Why should we care about this, as the Conservatives now insist that we shouldn’t?

Well, as the Good Book asks and answers: “Can a leopard take away its spots? Neither can you start doing good, for you have always done evil.”

What the Prophet Jeremiah had in mind, folks, was this: “No, the leopard can’t change his spots. And Mr. Harper hasn’t really changed either. Either will bite you, given the opportunity.”

Modern history, in fact, is rife with leaders who had plenty to say early in their careers that no one could quite believe because it seemed so outrageous. Arguably, in a number of such cases, the world would have been a better place if voters had paid attention while they still had the option.

Which is why we should pay attention now to what Mr. Harper had to say.

Here are a few gems the Conservatives thought that they should worry about, as reported by the Canadian Press, the CBC and me. Readers, presumably, are capable of reaching their own conclusions about what Mr. Harper had in mind.

On public health care: “The best (health care) system means having a system where you have as many tiers as possible…”

More on public health care: “The solution is to have a health care system where people pay some of the costs themselves.”

On Stephen Harper’s ambitions: “It has never been my intention to seek a second term or to become a career politician.”

On public post-secondary education: “I think we’re vastly over-invested in universities. … The vast majority of young people should be going through non-university, post-secondary training.”

On minorities: “You’ve got to remember that west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada: people who live in ghettoes and who are not integrated into western Canadian society.”

On abortion: “I’m not ashamed to say that, in caucus, I have more pro-life MPs supporting me than supporting Stockwell Day.”

On the future of Western Canada: “If the partners are not willing to live up to the requirements of a partnership, fairness requires that they pursue an equitable dissolution of the partnership.”

On the poor: “Providing for the poor is a provincial, not a federal responsibility.”

Well, it was promised here that readers could draw their own conclusions about what Mr. Harper has in mind. But let me help with one, OK? What Mr. Harper meant was this: “Providing for the rich is federal responsibility.”

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

The future of the New Democratic Party and Canada: the real West wants in

by David Climenhaga on March 24, 2011 in Uncategorized with 4 Comments
Your blogger with the dynamic Dave Barrett, who is enjoying his retirement and therefore unlikely to be available to lead the NDP … pity! Below: Audrey McLaughlin, Dave Barrett in his prime, Preston Manning in his.

If the New Democratic Party had chosen Dave Barrett as federal leader in 1989, they’d be the Official Opposition in Ottawa today.

More important, it is said here that if the NDP had selected Mr. Barrett over Audrey McLaughlin, Stephen Harper would have never been prime minister and the Reconstituted Reform Party of Canada or whatever it’s called would not be on the verge of forming a majority government.

Indeed, given the history of the Liberal Party of Canada during the period after 1989, we could well have had a national NDP government by now, or at least have been looking forward to the strong possibility of that happening soon, instead of the current potentially catastrophic situation.

Indeed, Mr. Barrett as Opposition leader could have heralded a reverse takeover of the Liberals by the NDP, just as in fact was engineered by the far-right Reform Party of Canada to subsume the much more inclusive Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. This could have led to a long period of progressive and positive government in our country instead of the neocon nightmare we now face.

Alas, these are all what-ifs, bordering on Technicolor pipedreams.

But the harsh reality is that, no matter what, the dynamic Mr. Barrett would have been a far more effective leader than the well-meaning Ms. McLaughlin had the political talent to be.

More important, Mr. Barrett had the right instincts about what would appeal to Western Canadian voters and would be good for Canada. That is why he opposed the Meech Lake Accord and could give only half-hearted support, which he later concluded had been an error, to the Charlottetown Accord.

In the event, the NDP opted to pursue the improbable if not impossible dream of forming a pan-Canadian social democratic alliance centred in Ontario and Quebec instead of the region where it had its start and enjoyed its greatest potential support. Alas, support in Ontario was half-hearted. In Quebec it was virtually non-existent, since other, nationalist parties occupied the social democratic territory.

Inevitably, this meant support for constitutional policies that were not in the interests of Western Canadians, and which alienated the West from the party to which it had given birth.

What happened next is well known, and tragic. It was Preston Manning and the Reform Party that took advantage of the legitimate constitutional concerns of Westerners. Many voters who personally supported far more progressive economic and social policies than the divisive hard-right Reform Party stood for, held their noses and voted Reform as if it were a course of chemotherapy to cure the country’s potentially fatal constitutional ills.

Why do you think so many Western Canadian New Democrats voted “counter-intuitively” for the Reform Party?

This is what gave Mr. Harper his beachhead, after which came the millions in corporate dollars that aim to make it a permanent occupation despite the well-known progressive proclivities of voters across this land. This is true even here in Alberta where, mainly as a result of their recent voting history, electors are often portrayed as restive hillbillies.

Today, on the cusp of generational change in Ottawa and our fourth federal election in less than seven years, we can read the right-wing media celebrating the careers of Reform politicians like Stockwell Day, the embarrassing religious fundamentalist and social conservative who unlike the vast majority of his fellow Westerners believes men and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time.

Mr. Day, for a time himself the Reform leader under one of the party’s many guises, has decided to retire from politics. In the face of his departure and those of other Western Reform MPs who rode on Mr. Manning’s constitutional coattails, “the Conservative Party, which was born out of the Western-dominated Reform and Canadian Alliance, becomes increasingly Ontario-centric,” the Globe and Mail accurately concluded recently.

At the same time, the NDP’s Ontario-based leader, Jack Layton, now 60 and being treated for cancer and other ailments as well as facing a difficult electoral prognosis, may be nearing the end of his political career.

So it is time for the New Democratic Party too to be thinking about generational change, and for Canadians from the region that still offers the party its greatest hope to assert themselves.

As is well-known, Single-Member Plurality systems favour the strongest national party, now the so-called Conservatives, and strong regional parties – as proved by both the Bloc Quebecois and the pre-Conservative Reformers.

With the Reconstituted Reform Party – that is, Mr. Harper’s Conservatives – turning into an Ontario party, this presents a significant second chance for the NDP.

To be blunt, the NDP needs to give up its pan-Canadian pipedream, which will never amount to a hill of beans at least until the NDP can become the Opposition, and to recognize the harsh truth about the first-past-the-post system that was so effectively exploited by Mr. Manning.

The NDP needs a strong leader from Western Canada, and a social democratic platform written with Western Canada’s needs and dreams in mind.

If the NDP cannot or will not recognize that the West is its only hope, Western progressives and social democrats can be forgiven if they look elsewhere for political answers. It is profoundly hoped that this time it will be somewhere more in tune with their fundamental progressive beliefs than the reactionary Conservative-Reform Party under the likes of Mr. Manning and Mr. Harper.

This time, the real West wants in!

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

God Hates Winks? Really! You need to know this!

by David Climenhaga on November 15, 2010 in Uncategorized with 3 Comments
Some of the protesters Saturday in Edmonton. Below: He that winketh with the eye, like this guy, causeth sorrow. And don’t you forget it! Below David Niven, Sarah Palin. (Tyler Heustis photo used with permission.)

Did you know that God Hates Winks?

Really, I’m not making this up. God’s been extremely clear about it.

I’m referencing the same source as the “fringe U.S. anti-gay protest group” that failed to put in an appearance Saturday in Edmonton’s Whyte Avenue theatre district where a performance of the Laramie Project was scheduled.

Apparently the members of the famously intolerant Westboro Baptist Church don’t approve of performances of this play, seeing as it tells the story of the murder of a gay youth in a small U.S. town and that community’s reaction to it. What’s more, they obviously don’t approve of such performances wherever they take place.

In case you’re Rip van Winkle (hmmmmm….), the Westboro congregants, all 71 of ’em, all of ’em cousins by the sound of it, really don’t approve of gay people at all, or Reform Jews, or Catholics, or even Methodists, for heaven’s sake! And they spend a couple of hundred thousand rapidly devaluing U.S. smackeroos every year travelling around the North American continent telling folks who aren’t really all that interested about their passionately held beliefs.

Still and all, one would have thought they wouldn’t have bothered trying to drive all the way from Topeka, Kansas, to northwestern Canada, for heaven’s sake, seeing how far gone to hell those Canadians are, what with their very popular North-Korean-style state supported health insurance, inclusive marriage policies, a nasty tendency to spell color with a U and a dollar called a Loonie that’s worth more than the Greenback on some days. (Although, I suppose, the latter could be taken as more evidence of God’s displeasure with Uncle Sam.)

Plus, of course, we’ve got more petroleum resources up here than such famous oil towns as Sodom, Gomorrah and Wichita, the third one being right down the road from Topeka in a more-than-strictly-metaphorical sense. (Actually, you could probably make a scriptural case from what happened to the first two of these places, and maybe the other one too, that God Hates Oil, but let’s leave that one for another day, seeing as we started out with winks.)

Maybe they thought we should amend our hitherto ineffective provincial branding slogan from “freedom to create” to “freedom to procreate.”

What the hell (as it were), maybe they figured they were already in the neighbourhood, stirring up hate in Great Falls, Mont., or something, and decided an excursion to Alberta before the snow flies might be nice.

More likely, though, they thought there they might still be some hope for redemption for us here in Alabamberta, seeing as we have the pro-profit Prophet Danielle Smith and her Wild-Eyed Alliance Party to warn us about the similarities to North Korea in the way we do health care. You know, kinda give us a chance to nip things in the bud with a little privatization before we all climb into that hand-basket bound for Hell.

Or, come to think of it, maybe they’re just … never mind.

Well, whatever. In the event, the Westboro congregants apparently didn’t make it across the border, which is sort of too bad, since we were deprived of the opportunity to give them a good old Canadian welcome like the one we gave Stephen Van Rensselaer in 1812.

This wasn’t the first time the Westboro Boys had trouble with Canadian border, either. Back in 2008 federal Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day sent an alert to Canadian border guards to hold the invisible line against the Kansans. (Now there’s irony!) Maybe Stock’s order is still in effect.

Regardless, lots of tolerant Edmontonians, the kind of folks who still approve of human rights for everyone, showed up waving funny signs that said things like “God loves everyone, even if you’re straight,” and “God Hates Fangs.”

Now, I’m not sure of theological foundation of that last one, although the Bible is pretty darn chilly on the topic of dogs now that they mention it, but I am sure than God Hates Winks, and prating fools too, and it’s time people on both sides of the border took note of it.

Consider Proverbs 6:12-13: “A naughty person, a wicked man, walketh with a froward mouth. He winketh with his eyes.”

And where does this lead, you may ask? To Proverbs 10:10: “He that winketh with the eye causeth sorrow; But a prating fool shall fall.” (And what does this say about Sarah Palin, I wonder? Take that one any way you like…)

That isn’t the only reference, either, but let’s quit while we’re ahead and move on to God’s attitudes about male pattern baldness. He doesn’t want you to make fun of it – got that? And if you doubt me, look it up: 2 Kings 2:23-24.

Now, I’m not going to waste your time trotting out the stuff about how God hates it when you plant petunias and tomatoes in the same window box (Leviticus 19:19), or how you’re supposed to kill your children if they convert to Buddhism (Deuteronomy 13:6-9) or if they get a job working Sundays at the Dairy Queen (Exodus 31:15). Everybody who’s read my previous sermons should be clear on that by now.

I just want you to know that you should stop winking. As for what we should do about soft drinks called Wink, or convenience stores of the same name, I don’t really know, but it would probably be prudent to steer well clear of both of them.

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

Media Ice Age: Conservatives devolve from Orwellian to the Kafkaesque!

by David Climenhaga on September 13, 2010 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment
No. 6 speaks his mind? Not if he’s a scientist in “the Village” on the Rideau, where things are by turn Orwellian and Kafkaesque, he doesn’t! Below: George Orwell. Below George: Franz Kafka. What’s with their hair?

It would be easy to make fun of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s control-freak Conservatives for yesterday’s revelation in the mainstream media that they have tried to put a deep chill on reporting about the Ice Age.

Leastways, it was a story about the Ice Age that tipped the media to the fact the Harper government has muzzled scientists employed by Natural Resources Canada, instructing them to say nothing about anything without the approval of political commissars in the office of Natural Resources Minister Christian Paradis.

The media was gobsmacked to learn that not only are these taxpayer-paid scientists told to shut the heck up about the tarsands, climate change and similar “controversial” topics, but that they also need to zip their lips “about floods at the end of the last Ice Age.”

These “Orwellian” new rules went into effect last March, and the media only noticed just now. Possibly they would have noticed sooner had the rules been “Kafkaesque,” one supposes.

(Readers may wonder about the difference between these two common journalistic terms, both of which are usually used to mean, “I haven’t heard of this before.” The first is named after the author and former journalist, George Orwell, and normally implies the use of language that means the opposite of what it says. The second is named for the author and former civil servant Franz Kafka, and means “really flippin’ weird,” a sentiment anyone who has worked in government will understand. A few Canadian journalists have read Orwell, but none are thought to have read anything by Kafka. Arguably, Kafkaesque would have been more appropriate adjective in this case. However, je digresse.)

This intelligence tidbit about the new reporting rules for NRC scientists came from the delightfully named Postmedia News (post-media? I’ll say! news? occasionally…), which seems only to have come across the story about the new information controls because these selfsame federal scientists failed to return calls in a timely fashion when a Postmedia reporter sat down at her post-work station to write a story on the Ice Age floods.

Reading between the lines, readers will conclude without surprise that the reporter wanted to do the story in the first place because of a publicity handout issued by a British university “to alert the media … about a colossal flood that swept across northern Canada 13,000 years ago, when massive ice dams gave way at the end of the last ice age.”

These details, wrote the astonished journalist, were “deemed so sensitive” that the scientist “was told he had to wait for clearance from the minister’s office.” Later, one of the people interviewed for this yarn refers to the research as “a nice, feel-good science story about flooding at the end of last glaciation.”

Do these college-educated journalists not understand that talking about anything that happened 13,000 years ago is controversial among the voters who make up a significant portion of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s political base? Just ask Stockwell Day, who will inform you that the world is only 6,000 years old.

On the other hand, if the dates can only be finessed a little, scientific news of a big flood could be considered a good thing in Mr. Harper’s circles….

OK, that’s the making-fun-of-the-government part. Thus endeth the lesson. The same speaker goes on to get to the real point, concluding: “…Can you imagine trying to get access to scientists with information about cadmium and mercury in the Athabasca River? Absolutely impossible.”

Well, there you have it, actually. This is a government that disputes mainstream scientific opinions on such issues as pollution from tarsands mining and climate change for political and ideological reasons.

This is also a government that harnesses voodoo economics to serve the interests of its powerful corporate backers, so it should hardly surprise us that it is uncomfortable both with the idea of independent government scientists who see themselves as serving the people, not corporate political interests, and with research results that are based on honest research and not ideology.

This kind of reliance on voodoo science is the motivating factor behind the long-form census brouhaha, and it is the motivation behind the new rules about dealing with the media that face NRC’s scientists.

Above all, this is a government that wants to control all information at all times. Indeed, those of us who are inclined to assail the United States for its many faults should be thankful that our neighbour has such a profound commitment to free speech. One suspects that without that example next door (and without the inconvenience of a minority Parliament, of course), the Harper government would do more than just issue directives to public employees about talking to the media.

If NRC is prepared to let its scientists talk to bloggers and the community press, as the story suggests, and just control their access to national and international media, that is only evidence of the incompetence of their media handlers, not their benevolence.

That the Harper Conservatives campaigned on a platform of openness and honesty can quite properly be termed Orwellian, even if its policies devolve into the merely Kafkaesque when they involve matters that took place before the last glacial era.

This instinctive desire by the Harper Conservatives to suppress facts that do not buttress its ideology and the economic interests of its supporters is not going to be stopped by a shocked story in the mainstream media.

Only by sweeping these so-called Conservatives out of power can real honesty and integrity be restored to our federal government.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

On that plummeting poll: thank god Harper’s so disagreeable!

by David Climenhaga on August 6, 2010 in Uncategorized with No comments
The human touch: Prime Minister Stephen Harper addresses the media after a Conservative caucus meeting in Ottawa yesterday. Canadian politicians may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: Ralph Klein.

Canadian voters of all progressive stripes should thank the gods of politics that our prime minister is such an uncongenial, unbending and self-righteous person. Just imagine the damage a dogmatic neo-liberal radical like Stephen Harper could do if he didn’t frighten voters so badly, or if he had the capability of treating his nominal friends in the mainstream media with anything but arrogance and contempt.

Instead, this man is simply disagreeable. He utterly lacks a common touch. Most attempts to humanize him, short of covering old Beatles tunes, instantly fall flat.

One could not help thinking of this yesterday when the prime minister, reminiscent of Wiarton Willie on Groundhog Day, popped out of his slit trench just long enough to address his loyal caucus with the usual anodyne platitudes and then insultingly dismiss the gathered media. That done, he ducked back underground without addressing any of the pressing questions of the day.

Compulsory census questions? Leave that issue to Tony Clement and Stockwell Day. Maybe old Stock can come up with an imaginary unreported statistic or two to make the government’s case!

With performances like this, it’s no wonder the latest EKOS public opinion poll shows the prime minister and his misnamed Conservative Party plunging for the prairie like a CF-18 over Lethbridge. OK, that was hyperbolic. The poll indicates that the Conservatives’ nationwide popularity dropped 3.5 per cent in a week. But sticking with flight analogies for a moment, if an Air Canada Airbus fell that far that fast, there’d be ambulances waiting on the tarmac!

Yeah, Mr. Harper got to be prime minister. But a sensible analysis of how this came about suggests it had more to do with former prime minister Paul Martin’s mismanagement than the charmless Mr. Harper’s particular political skill set.

Knowing how to deal with the media, and understanding that doing so is part of a politician’s basic job description, is not a partisan quality, of course. Rare politicians of all parties have the magic touch, just as many more from all over the ideological spectrum do not.

Think of Mr. Martin’s predecessor, Jean Chrétien, who was not exactly a failure as prime minister no matter what you may think of his policies. On a personal note, I will always remember fondly how Mr. Chrétien gently shooed away the big-shot reporters from Toronto so that he could do an interview “with my friend, Dave,” the unknown reporter from a second-rate provincial newspaper. “I can talk to you guys any time,” he explained to them. “I only get to speak with Dave today.”

Yeah, it was all baloney, but it still makes me feel like I was 10-feet tall! I can’t imagine Mr. Harper saying anything to the likes of me but “Get the hell out of my sight.”

But the incumbent prime minister need not look outside his own party for examples of how to do the essential job of managing the media. Consider Ralph Klein, premier of Alberta for 14 years to the day.

Mr. Klein had many faults. Some of his policy ideas were catastrophic – Albertans are still paying for his irresponsible decisions on the health care file, including destroying desperately needed medical facilities. Others were plain weird – who can forget the $400 “prosperity bonus” cheque we Albertans all received in September 2005?

But Mr. Klein rarely met a voter he didn’t like – when he was sober, anyway. And above all, he knew how to deal with the media. Rain or shine, when the Alberta Legislature was sitting, Mr. Klein met the members of the press gallery in the Legislative rotunda every afternoon at 3 o’clock and answered whatever questions they threw at him.

Mr. Klein didn’t always like it, but he always did it, usually with a smile on his face. Like Mr. Chrétien – and unlike Mr. Harper – Mr. Klein enjoyed successive majority governments.

What’s more, as the polls of the day illustrated, Alberta’s voters never tired of him. It was bored members of his own Conservative party who grew weary of Mr. Klein and effectively turfed him in March 2006 – a decision they no doubt have come to rue.

If yesterday’s EKOS poll is accurate – and with a decline that steep and swift you’ve got to wonder a little – Prime Minister Harper won’t be long for his job, short of a perpetual Parliamentary prorogation, anyway.

And if our scowling prime minister leaves office any time soon, we can all heave a sigh of relief – including, one suspects, many members of his own Parliamentary caucus. After all, as the late prime minister John Diefenbaker tried to persuade Canadians, now and then Progressive may even fit with Conservative!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

MP’s blog post suggests Harper government sees West Bank and Gaza as integral parts of Israel

by David Climenhaga on August 5, 2010 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment
Brent Rathgeber: Is his blog evidence of a dangerously evolving Harperite position on Israel-Palestine? Below: Stockwell Day.

Has the Conservative government of Stephen Harper privately reached the conclusion that the West Bank and Gaza are now integral parts of Israel? A passing remark in a blog post by an Alberta Conservative Member of Parliament suggests this may be so.

In his July 28 post, Brent Rathgeber, MP for the riding of Edmonton-St. Albert, wrote: “Canada, the United States and the United Nations all support a ‘Two-State Solution,’ in which the existing Israel would be partitioned to allow displaced Palestinians a sovereign nation of their own.” (Emphasis added.) Mr. Rathgeber then goes on to set out his arguments for why this approach “remains impractical.”

It is certainly true that the United States and Canada support the idea of some kind of two-state solution for the region, and under the circumstances this is probably the best the world can hope for in terms of securing a peaceful future for both Israelis and Palestinians.

But since no one in the U.S. or Canadian governments seems to be suggesting officially that Israel within its 1949 borders should be partitioned to accommodate a new Palestinian state, one wonders what else Mr. Rathgeber could have in mind.

Now, this may be reading too much into a passing comment in an unedited blog post by a backbench MP from Alberta. It may simply mean that Mr. Rathgeber misunderstands his own government’s position. Or he may be speaking of the pre-1948 borders that were proposed for Israel. Who knows?

But it seems at least possible that Mr. Rathgeber’s chance remark reflects an interpretation of Israel’s borders that prevails behind closed doors in Prime Minister Harper’s Conservative caucus – that the West Bank and Gaza, the territories that would have to comprise any future Palestinian state, are not occupied territories but part of “the existing Israel.” It would not be out of character for the Harper Conservatives to develop policies, in the words of Jesus Loves Me, simply because “the Bible tells me so.”

This is not the United States, after all, which following the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 returned to provisional membership in the “reality-based community.” No, this is Mr. Harper’s Canada, where our government remains powerfully attracted to the idea of basing policies on fantasies, both secular and religious. In Canada nowadays, in the words of that still-anonymous Bush White House aide, “when we act, we create our own reality.”

And so our government wishes to eliminate the mandatory long-form census, along with any danger it might uncover scientifically measurable facts at variance with the conclusions of the prevailing Harperite ideology.

And in the face of hard evidence that crime rates are falling, the Harper government bases it’s law ‘n’ order wedge policies on “the increase in the amount of unreported crime.” And how do they know, you wonder, if the crimes in question went unreported? Well, just trust them! After all, as Stockwell Day, a man who is said to believe that dinosaurs and men strolled on earth together 6,000 years ago, says, “There’s no question.”

There are other points in Mr. Rathgeber’s dissertation with which reasonable people can strongly disagree. He seems not to be aware, for example, that three to six per cent of the Palestinians are Christians, his justification of the naval blockade of Gaza by Israel is misinformed, as is his suggestion that the sole goal of the elected Hamas leadership in Gaza is “annihilating the Jewish State.”

But on the whole, the tone of Mr. Rathgeber’s post is neither irrational nor particularly mean-spirited. This suggests he is not personally driven by the loony apocalyptic dispensationalism of others in the Conservative caucus such as Mr. Day.

But this in turn suggests that the troubling key proposition that underpins his argument is so widely held in government circles as to amount to an assumption of fact. If that it so, while hardly surprising, it means Canada under the Harper government can make no positive contribution to resolving the tragic situation in the Middle East.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.