I’m back again – for now.

Over the past year or so this blog had been dying a slow, quiet death as I focused my blogging attention on other areas (www.ontwowheels-eh.blogspot.com). However, now that we are in the heat of another election campaign, it seems appropriate to resurrect it as a means to vent about the election in general and the parties/leaders in particular. So here goes.

A friend just posted this comment on Facebook:

“Getting pretty tired of all these election ads and promises...not sure where all this money is going to come from to pay for these promises but it makes me nervous.”

And she’s absolutely right. Election campaigns have become little more than an endless stream of promises, each party trying to one-up the opposition and appeal to a smaller and smaller demographic as the electorate gets further and further sub-divided into special interests/races/religions/geographies/whathaveyou.

I know why they do it – an announcement a day keeps the parties in the news cycle.  However, this mindless quest to top the charts can be counter-productive. Voters get tired of steady announcements and the predictable attacks they generate. The fiscally responsible become concerned about the ability to pay for it all. And the cynics’ positions become more entrenched as they realise how few of those promises will ever see the light of day once the election is over.

So I have a modest proposal.

In my utopia, an election campaign would go as follows. Treat it like a request for proposal. First the writ is dropped. That is followed by a period of several weeks during which no campaigning can occur, but during which the parties develop and publish detailed platforms outlining government direction, major policies, new spending initiatives they would support, etc. (The proposal.) Once the platforms are published the parties and candidates can begin campaigning, explaining why their their platforms are better and responding to voter and media questions about the details through a combination of public meetings and door-knocking. Then we vote.

Now wouldn’t that be more civilised?

 

The nanny state gone wild

Well I for one am certainly glad that the Ontario Provincial Police are unstinting in their pursuit of crooks, villains, evil doers, criminals of the highest order, and assorted other ne’er do wells. Why just last week they stopped a trucker on the 401 and charged him with … not speeding, or improper passing, or dangerous driving, or having an unsafe load, or road rage. No, they stopped him for smoking!

According to this article in The Toronto Star, the driver was pulled over and given a $305 ticket for smoking in the cab of his rig.

The man, who hails from London, Ont., was headed for Windsor when he was pulled over Wednesday along Highway 401 and given a ticket under the Smoke-Free Ontario Act.

The law, considered a Canadian standard-setter when it was passed in 2006, forbids smoking in all workplaces and enclosed public spaces, including buildings, structures or vehicles worked in or frequented by employees, according to the government's website.

What makes this so egregious is that it is his own rig. He’s an owner-operator and it’s his property, his home away from home. Yet the long arm of the state still thinks it has the right to reach in and legislate what he can or cannot do in his own property.

What’s next for Ontario’s finest? Will they be raiding my home office to see if there’s an ash tray on the desk? How about busting the farmer flouting the law by having a quick puff in the cab of his tractor? Oh and don’t forget those dastardly real estate agents who might want a quick nicotine fix in their car with the agent’s name and logo on the side – clearly a workplace in need of protection.

And while they’re doing that perhaps they could, if they get a chance, keep an eye out for the guys who have broken into several homes in this area over the past couple of months, or find the hit and run driver who put a friend’s son in hospital, or maybe even try to find some of those many missing native women. That is if they’re not too busy with important stuff like this.

And they wonder why respect for the law is decreasing.

It’s mine! All mine!

In yesterday’s Ottawa Citizen, Amir Attaran, Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development Policy called out the Harper Government on it’s mean and churlish attitude towards helping poorer nations fight the coming swine flu pandemic.

Here are a few excerpts from that piece. You can find the complete article here.

Last week, as Stephen Harper was tooling around Washington and talking up Canada's virtues, across town a more substantially moral leader, Barack Obama, announced a global plan to donate life-saving influenza vaccines to poor countries in Africa, Asia and elsewhere.

…

Those donations are likely to be, for many countries, the only vaccine that they get. Heeding the World Health Organization's call, Australia, Britain, Brazil, France, Italy, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland also went along with the donation plan.

Canada, however, declined.

…

With 50.4 million doses of vaccine in Canada's entitlement, and 32 million Canadians, perhaps only half of whom want to be vaccinated, PHAC officials are certainly correct that we have "more than enough for any Canadian that wants to receive it."

…

The Harper government must do better than continue its mean streak. In this, and much else to do with international aid, poorer foreigners notice Canada's new beggar-thy-neighbour attitude, and wonder how a country once known for its generosity has fallen so far. The usual preening about Canadian internationalism is nonsense, where WHO has justly called on Canada to share a life-saving resource, and we refuse.

Well said sir, well said.

We’re back all right – at the back of the pack.

Remember this from two short years ago?

"The news is spreading throughout the world: Canada's back," Harper told the crowd of about 35,000 on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Sunday.

"Canada's back as a vital player on the global stage ... Canadians are citizens of the world and we're making a positive contribution in every field of human endeavour."

Well we’re back all right – at the back of the pack. Here’s what the United Nations thinks about our relative position in the world when it comes to ‘green’ stimulus spending.

The Global Green New Deal update for the upcoming G20 summit in Pittsburgh revealed the Harper government was spending the equivalent of about $77 U.S. per person in green stimulus, putting it in ninth place out of 13 countries evaluated.

Yup, we’re right there at the bottom with Spain, South Africa and Mexico. Disgraceful.

Why do I want an election?

Because it will give the media something to talk about other than H1N1!

Just once I would like to open a newspaper, turn on the radio, or catch the TV news without being faced with yet another fear-mongering story about swine flu.

The media have taken what was, and is, a serious health issue and in full Chicken Little fashion have managed, through a constant barrage of inflammatory and sensationalist stories, to instil fear and near-panic in large segments of the population and raise everyone’s stress levels to the extent that we have so-called health “experts” shipping body bags off to First Nations reserves and regular folks with a head cold making funeral arrangements.

Can we not get a little perspective please?

Stephen Harper made me what I am today – a Liberal.

There’s no need to document Stephen Harper’s lies, divisive leadership style, political abuses, and general incompetence – that’s been more than adequately covered over the past 3 1/2 years by bloggers of all political stripes and the MSM – but what we don’t hear as much about is the damage that he has done to the Conservative brand.

In better times I would have described my political views as agnostic, not bound to any particular party’s ideology and willing to support whichever candidate and/or party offered what I considered to be the best vision for the future of my Canada at that point in time. If pressed, I might reluctantly have described myself as a red tory with a large dollop of libertarian thrown in – fiscally conservative, socially liberal, and of the view that people should be allowed to live their lives as unencumbered as possible by the nanny state in all its myriad shapes and forms. And except for the most rabid of tinfoil-party-hat-wearing partisans, I expect a very large number of Canadians, perhaps even a majority, would self-identify in a similar way.

But since Stephen Harper and his gang of Alberta and ex-Ontario Mike Harris Conservative sycophants came to power, I have had to get off the fence as it were and take a stand against their malevolent attacks on Canadian institutions, their laissez-faire attitude towards the meaning of Canadian citizenship, their fast and loose interpretation of transparency and accountability, their relentless destruction of Canada’s international image (everywhere except in the US administration that is), and their general disdain for the non-Conservative majority in this country.

That’s why I now financially support the party that I think is best able to get them all (or at least most of them) the hell out of Ottawa – and the sooner the better.

Stephen Harper has effectively destroyed the Conservative brand for many, many Canadians, and it will be a long, long time post-Harper before those non-aligned voters start trickling back to the Conservative Party, or what’s left of it when he’s done.

Lesson for Neo-Cons

As George Santayana so famously said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

According to The Guardian, a recent scientific journal suggests that Neanderthals met their demise not as a result of climate change, but at the hands of humans. As lunch. And to add insult to injury, the teeth of recently ingested Neanderthals were possibly used to make costume jewellery.

Nasty.

But the history lesson here should not be lost on the modern Neanderthal – the Harper-worshipping neo-con.

The article states, “modern humans probably contributed to Neanderthal extinction”, and “modern humans” will do so again. But this time I’d vote for letting them keep their teeth.

A tale of two immigrants

Mikhail Lennikov (stories here, here, and here) is, by most accounts, a model citizen. He came to Canada in 1997 on a student visa. In 1999 he applied for permanent residency. He was honest in his application, never hid his KGB background, and even shared information with CSIS. Since then, while waiting for the wheels of Canada’s immigration system to grind on, he has lived and worked in BC, raising his family and fully integrating into his adopted community.

The Canadian government has now finally decided that despite Lennikov’s exemplary record as an immigrant over the past 12 years, his time with the KGB more than 20 years ago make him “detrimental to the national interest”, and therefore he must be deported. But in a grand show of compassion, they have agreed to let his wife and son stay in Canada. 

Farid Noedost (stories here, here, and here) arrived in Canada as a refuge from Iran and gained permanent residency in 2001. Since then he has been convicted of drug crimes, fraud, mischief and sexual assault. In 2007 he was sentenced to 3 years in federal penitentiary for trafficking in cocaine. In 2008 he received a 3-year suspended sentence on a sexual assault conviction involving under-aged females. Other sexual assault charges were stayed.

The Immigration and Refugee Board told Noedost “The way you have conducted yourself in Canada is despicable. You are a danger to girls under 18.” And then rolled out the welcome mat. Yup, this convicted criminal and sex offender, who authorities believe presents a continued danger to Canadians, is welcome to stay.

Mikhail Lennikov – DEPORTED!

Farid Noedost – WELCOME!

Is this a great country or what?

What the hell is going on?

Let’s just summarize the last few weeks:

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and Dalton McGuinty’s provincial Liberals tag-team a $10+ billion bailout of GM and Chrysler. A significant portion of those dollars will be taken from the majority of Canadian taxpayers to top up the pensions of the few – the GM retirees. This in spite of vociferous denials by both levels of government that that would not be the case. Predictably all the other auto manufactures are now crying foul because they are now at a competitive cost disadvantage (a legitimate complaint).

A testy John Baird responds in Question Period to opposition claims that infrastructure funding is slow to get out by saying “It is moving 10 times faster than under any other Liberal government". This is undoubtedly the Freudian slip of the month and confirms what many neo-Cons have suspected for months now.

Lisa Raitt (Jasmine MacDonnell) leave commercially and politically sensitive ministerial briefing papers at CTV and apparently don’t notice them missing for weeks. Good thing they’re both on top of the portfolio.

John Baird tells Toronto to “fuck off”, gaining another 500,000 Conservative votes in Western Canada. Oh wait, he’s from Ottawa, isn’t he? 100,000 votes then.

Lisa Raitt (Jasmine MacDonnell) makes what could charitably be called injudicious remarks on tape, which then gets left in a washroom, delivered to the media, and subsequently published after a failed attempt by MacDonnell (really??) to get an injunction against their release. Deep Trough is on it and we’ll soon know who really paid the legal costs. The tinfoil-hat-wearing Tory bloggers are crying Liberal conspiracy. Ho-hum.

Michael Ignatieff and the Liberals decide to support the Cons tough on crime Bill C-15. This in spite of significant push-back from the Liberal grass roots and ample evidence that mandatory minimums never have, and never will work to reduce crime. But I guess when the alternative is more Cons “Liberals soft on crime” attack ads, policy adjustments must be made.

Alberta’s Stelmach Tories are musing publically that Ignatieff is more sensitive to many Alberta issues than Harper is. Jim prentice is not amused.

And then to top it all off, Molson retirees will no longer get their entitlement of 864 bottles of free beer a year and current employees will be limited to 624 free bottles a year (12 per week – that’s two a day except Sundays when they’re allowed to drink real beer).

It’s been like a month of full moons.

The water is getting a bit warm….

Like the proverbial frog in the pot of water that supposedly doesn’t realize how hot the water is getting until it is too late and it boils to death, our respective federal and provincial governments (Conservative and Liberal – this is a non-partisan rant) are sitting in a hot tub of epic proportions with the auto bailouts.

A mere 4 or 5 months ago, the total bailout amounts being discussed for Chrysler and GM were in the range of $3 to $4 billion dollars. And those amounts were greeted with howls of outrage from taxpayers and others.

Flaherty’s latest trip to the deficit cupboard was necessitated in part by a ballooning estimate of $10 billion required by GM and Chrysler from the Federal  and Provincial treasuries (i.e. taxpayers). And while McGuinty predicts that the current Ontario deficit should be able to handle the increased bailout funds needed, he also couches his confidence with this: “We're going to keep an eye on it.” In other words, expect to see us back for more later.

And none of this comes with any guarantees whatsoever. There’s nothing to say that $10 billion will be the end of it. GM will still likely go into bankruptcy, and will probably be broken up. Chrysler may yet end up consolidating operations in the US, leaving Canada with nothing but future loft condo properties where factories used to employ thousands.

Actually I misspoke. There is one guarantee, and that is that the taxpayer will never be repaid those billions in ‘loans’ to the auto industry. That you can bet on.

So one has to wonder what the current situation would be if the discussions back in the fall were about a $10 billion dollar (or more) bailout. Would our political ‘frogs’ have jumped right back out of the pot? Or would they have settled in for a nice, long soak?

“Mr. Harper left his balls out West….”

The Globe and Mail reports that the GM/CAW agreement will, in fact, result in provincial and federal taxpayers forking over billions to protect the pensions of GM retirees. This in spite of Harper’s and Clement’s repeated assurances to the contrary.

In decrying the blatant about-face, Kevin Gaudet, federal director for the Canadian  Taxpayers Federation, provides one of the best quotes I’ve seen in a while, stating, “Mr. Harper left his balls out West when it comes to taking a principle stand…”. Truer words were never spoken.

I presented my thoughts on bailing out any pension plans in the following letter to the editor, published by the Ottawa Citizen April 27. It now appears more relevant than ever.

“While I certainly sympathise with retirees from Nortel, Chrysler, GM and others who are concerned that their retirement incomes will be impacted by the current state of their companies and the recession, I must protest in the strongest possible terms any government action to guarantee 100% payouts from those defined pension plans.

I am one of the vast majority of Canadians who never had a pension plan, who never had an employer making matching contributions (or better) to my retirement funds. Now retired, what I have to live on I saved from my own earnings. And over the past 2 ½ years, thanks to Jim Flaherty’s income trust fiasco and now the global recession, my retirement fund has slipped to slightly better than 50% of where it was projected to be today. To put it in even plainer terms, my income is now half of what I had expected. As a consequence many plans have been cancelled or deferred indefinitely, and total retirement remains elusive as part-time work supplements my modest retirement income.

There are many, many of us in similar situations, and to ask us to now use our tax dollars to augment the pension incomes of others is neither fair nor appropriate.

By all means provide support to those workers who might lose their entire company pension, but under no circumstances should we be topping up pensions that have unfortunately suffered a similar degradation in value as the rest of us have experienced.”

Where “no” means “yes”

As I blogged yesterday, the Conservative Party’s riding nomination process seems to have something of a democratic deficit, to the advantage of sitting MPs. Well it gets even stranger.

Under the headline “Tories c all nomination rules democratic” The Calgary Herald reports today that Conservative party president Don Plett finds it “very, very strange that somebody would even suggest that this is not democratic.”

His comment follows an explanation that ballots were mailed out to 94,000 party members, and that ballots not returned were counted as no votes.

In what kind of a democracy does a non-vote get counted? Is this what the Harper Conservatives are planning to do to save their skin in the next federal election? If you don’t show up on polling day your vote will automatically be tallied as a vote for the Con candidate?

Mr. Plett, that is not how a democracy works.

“The party of the grassroots just dug up the lawn.”

This just has to be the quote of the day, offered in a comment to this article in the Globe and Mail about the Conservative Party’s latest affront to democracy whereby sitting MP’s are shielded from nomination challenges unless a minimum of 2/3 of the members of a riding association call for a nomination race in their riding.

According to the article, Tories claim the change is “necessary to ease stress on their MPs and allow them to stay focused on the onerous demands of a minority government.”  Yes, that would be the onerous demands of jeering and clapping in the House like a bunch of trained seals (By the way, where is the seal hunt when we could really use it?), memorizing and parroting back PMO-provided talking points, and staying well out of sight (and sound) unless trotted out by his Harpiness to answer legitimate but potentially embarrassing questions directed at any sitting Cabinet Minister. I can see why they need all their energy for that.

Of course the big winner in all of this is Rob Anders of Calgary-West. When Don Martin, writing in his home town paper, The Calgary Herald, says this about Anders, “Raise his name with Conservative MPs and they wrinkle their noses like they've just taken a big whiff of the stuff spring uncovers in an off-leash dog park.”  you’d think the Cons would be desperate to dump him. But no, this ruling assures him of yet another run at representing the fine folks of Calgary-West who clearly would elect a stump if they painted it blue and stuck a Suncor sign on it.

However there is a small glimmer of light in all of this as apparently the change has pissed off at least one well known grassroots nutbar. Chuck McVety is not happy, claiming “The democratic deficit in this country is already large enough. We don't need the governing party to be sinking deeper into ... a culture of entitlement.”  Uh, yeah.

Conservatives help you pay less tax.

It’s true. And to prove it, I got this handy-dandy 14-page guide to tax savings in the mail today, complements of Cheryl Gallant, one of the more useless Con backbenchers on the Hill.

Basically it’s more Conservative Party propaganda touting their “Tax Cuts for Everyone” and “Tax Cuts for Hard Working People”. Every page assures us that “Families save with Conservatives” and lists as tax cuts such items as: medical expenses, child care expenses, GST tax credit, capital cost allowance for farmers, education tax credit, and other tax policies that were in place years before the Cons took power. Well it’s not the first, and won’t be the last, time they take credit for the work of others.

Calls in to Gallant’s constituency office asking if this was funded by the Party or by the Government have not been returned.

Prorogue, Coalition, Harper, Dion, Leadership, Iggy, Duffy, G-G, Baird - I can't take it any more!

Every six months or thereabouts I get so entirely fed up with politics (a sham), politicians (liars), political pundits (the blind leading the deaf), and rabid partisans (rabid partisans) that I say a pox on all their houses and take a time out. I prorogue myself, you might say.

Well I've reached that point again where I’m just so sick of the madness that I’ve decided to ignore (at least as best I can) politics for a while. It might be for a week or it might be for a month, but one thing is for certain - when I start paying attention again the Conservatives will still be lying swindlers, the MSM will still be biased and only marginally competent, the Liberals will still be trying to figure out what the hell happened, and the rabid partisans will still be abusing each other with cheap shots and ad hominem personal attacks.

Actually, in a way it's kind of comforting because, just like missing an episode or two of Desperate Housewives, it really doesn’t matter. Within a couple of minutes you’re all caught up and know exactly what’s going on because it’s just more of the same outrageous behaviour by a dysfunctional group of self-absorbed idiots trying their damnedest to self destruct in prime time.

Now I just need something else to write about....

None of the above ....

In my voting lifetime (40 years and counting ...) I don’t recall ever being put in a situation similar to that in which I now find myself. As I have never been particularly faithful to any party, I have always had the option to vote for the candidate and/or party that I felt was the best option for Canada at that point in time. But I always had a choice. I don’t now – at least not any palatable choice. For the first time in my experience, I would be voting for the least objectionable option.

The Conservatives under Stephen Harper will never get my vote. I tried to keep an open mind when they won a minority last time, but after 2 years of their antics on the Hill, I now not only despise the man personally, but his band of incompetent sycophants make my skin crawl. This is a party whose only purpose has become to embarrass and belittle their opponents in the hope that the electorate will end up hating the Opposition more than they hate the Conservatives. Now that’s something to vote for!

Then there’s the Liberal Party, a party which allowed itself to be self-consumed and marginalized by the sponsorship scandal (relatively minor by most political scandal measures), but probably more accurately, as a result of the Chretien-Martin feud among senior party ranks. Then the Liberals blew the one opportunity they had to resurrect themselves as a political force by electing Stéphane Dion as leader. When the best any of the political pundits could offer at the time he was elected was to comment on his honesty and integrity, you just knew he wouldn’t do well in Stephen Harper’s gutter. And now, with their continuing abstentions and gamesmanship making a mockery of the concept of opposition, I am beginning to question their ability to govern even if they were elected in a minority situation. Perhaps if they actually had the balls to stand on their principles and put up a fight I might change my mind, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

The NDP have made an art out of being in opposition. Their entire shtick has, for some years now, been to sit on the sidelines and take potshots at whoever forms the government of the day. They have always had the luxury of never having to be in charge, so they know not what it means to compromise, to take a chance, and to accept responsibility for their decisions, whether good or bad. They simply wait in the wings, and then, like auditors, come in after the battle and bayonet the wounded. They have made themselves largely irrelevant, and will have to do a total refresh of their party before they’ll attract any serious attention from me. That’s not to say they couldn’t, as they have some strong members, but Jack would have to go for sure, along with many of his colleagues who seem to be stuck in some sort of socialist time warp.

I might consider the Greens if I knew what they stood for, but Elizabeth May distancing herself from Paul Watson and The Sea Shepherd (which any rational, thinking person did many years ago) does not constitute a platform in my humble opinion. I’ll accept that it’s at least partly my responsibility to find this stuff out, but until the Greens start making some noise and getting some traction on the other big issues of the day besides the environment, then I can’t see them getting my vote.

So I’m stuck with three choices, none of which is acceptable: don’t vote; spoil the ballot; or vote for the party I dislike least. What a hell of a way to run a railroad.