Monday, December 24, 2007

I’ve Been Waiting for Four Months for Documents in Response to My Access to Information Requests Relating to Canada’s Mission in Afghanistan

On August 29, 2007, I filled out the necessary forms and sent cheques for five dollars each to the Privy Council Office, the Department of National Defence, Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and the Canadian International Development Agency to request copies of documents under the terms of the Access to Information Act.

The documents I was seeking concerned communications planning related to the Canadian mission in Afghanistan. Last winter, I published online a thirty thousand word study of Canada’s mission in Afghanistan titled: Mission of Folly: Why Canada should bring its Troops home from Afghanistan. In the spring of 2008, Between-the-Lines, a Toronto publisher, is to publish a revised and updated book version of the study under the same title.

In the new version of Mission of Folly, I have paid particular attention to the role of the federal government and its departments and agencies in communicating the mission to the Canadian people and the world at large. In short, I have focused on the politics of the mission and the ways the government has been involved in promoting the case for the military mission to the public.

For that reason, I sought documents that would bring to light the communications strategy of the government. Let me be clear, in my requests, I sought no documents on Canada’s military strategy, troop deployments or equipment deployment in Afghanistan. Nothing I sought could be interpreted as having anything to do with national security.

Here is the first letter I sent to the Privy Council Office on August 29:



Privy Council Office August 29, 2007
General Enquiries
Room 1000
85 Sparks Street
Ottawa
Canada
K1A 0A3
Dear Sir or Madam:

I am writing to you to request, under the terms of the Access to Information Act, the receipt of all communications planning documents related to the Canadian mission in Afghanistan. With respect to the mission, I am requesting copies of all strategic public affairs plans and evaluations, all media relations plans and plans for promotional activities related to military recruitment, and/or the promotion among the public of awareness about and support for Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan. I am requesting documents on community outreach initiatives, all relevant public opinion studies and other evaluations of programs, all minutes of meeting related to the subject, all relevant E Mail correspondence, and all plans and reports related to ministerial visits to Afghanistan and to communications prior to, during and following such ministerial visits.

I am requesting copies of all contracts and/or contributions agreements awarded by
the department(s) to firms, organizations or individuals related to
the planning, delivery or assessment of the communications and
community outreach products, programs and activities listed above, as
well as copies of all electronic or written documents and
correspondence pertaining to these contracts and to the subsequent
work undertaken by these parties, including copies of all reports,
presentations, assessments and other documents prepared and submitted
by these firms, organizations or individuals under the terms of their
agreements with the department, and the invoices submitted by these
firms for their related work.

I am addressing these requests as well to: DND, DFAIT, CIDA. Naturally, I am anticipating that you will assist me with the portions that come under your purview.

Thanking you in advance.

Yours sincerely,


James Laxer,



I sent the same letter, appropriately addressed to DND, DFAIT, and CIDA. Under the terms of the Access to Information Act, I was entitled to expect receipt of the documents within thirty days.

In mid October, I received a letter from the Privy Council Office, dated October 10, 2007, which included the following passage:

“The Privy Council Office received the request on September 4, 2007.

In processing your request we have found it necessary to consult other government institutions. As a result, an extension of up to 120 days beyond the 30-day statutory deadline is required to complete your request.

Please be advised that you are entitled to bring a complaint regarding the processing of this request to the Information Commissioner (22nd Floor, 112 Kent Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 1H3). The Access to Information Act allows a complaint to be made within sixty days of the receipt of this notice.”

I decided not to bring a complaint in response to the letter, and made the same decision when I received similar letters from the other departments and from CIDA.

In the cases of DND and DFAIT, I received advice that my requests were so broadly conceived that it would take a long time to meet them. In these cases, with the assistance of the relevant officers in the departments, I revised my requests to narrow the scope and cut back the time period for the documents I was seeking. (I also made it clear that if the documents I sought were so extensive that an additional payment would be needed, I would make that payment.)

Here is the letter I sent to DND on October 5 with the revised request:




October 5, 2007

General Inquiries,
Department of National Defence,
National Defence Headquarters,
Major-General George R. Pearkes Building,
101 Colonel By Drive.

Dear (name deleted):

This is a follow up to my earlier request, which as we discussed, is to be divided into two.

This new request, therefore, covers the second paragraph in the original request.

I am requesting copies of all contracts and/or contributions agreements awarded by
DND to firms, organizations or individuals related to
the planning, delivery or assessment of the communications and
community outreach products related to the Canadian mission in Afghanistan. In addition I am requesting copies of all electronic or written documents and
correspondence pertaining to these contracts and to the subsequent
work undertaken by these parties, including copies of all reports,
presentations, assessments and other documents prepared and submitted
by these firms, organizations or individuals under the terms of their
agreements with the department, and the invoices submitted by these
firms for their related work. The time period covered in this request is May 1, 2007 through August 31, 2007.

If, as with the previous request, this request proves to be unworkably broad, I would appreciate it if you would E Mail me with suggested revisions to it.

Thanking you in advance.

Yours sincerely,


James Laxer,


Nearly four months have passed since my initial requests. To date I have received no copies of any of the documents sought.

Mission of Folly will be published, as scheduled in the spring of 2008, but without the benefit of the documents relating to the communications strategy of the government and its departments and agencies.

The officers I have dealt with in each of the departments and at CIDA have been unfailingly responsive, polite and helpful. I do not attribute the unacceptably slow pace of the meeting of my requests to any of them.

The debate about Canada’s mission in Afghanistan is a matter of the greatest importance. Citizens attempting to participate in that debate should not be sidelined with interminable delays when they seek pertinent documents from the federal government.

Saturday, December 08, 2007

How the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair Really Matters to Canada

There are many Canadians whose interest in the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair does not extend beyond the delicious anticipation of watching the 18th prime minister of Canada explain to a Parliamentary Committee why he accepted bags of cash which he took some time to declare as income.

The affair does have a much deeper importance, though, which is rooted in the way key decisions were made in Canada during the crucial decade of the 1980s. It was the decade when Canada signed on to the Free Trade Agreement with the United States. The FTA, and is successor NAFTA, drove a stake into the heart of Canadian democracy. Under the terms of these treaties, Canada was required to accord “national treatment” to U.S. firms, meaning that Canada could no longer discriminate in favour of domestic firms in its taxation and subsidy policies. Nor could Canada create new publicly owned firms to compete with U.S. corporations without paying out crippling financial compensation to them.

Moreover, the FTA took much of the control of the Canadian petroleum industry out of Canadian jurisdiction. It stipulated that Canada could not have a two-price system for its petroleum in which Americans would pay the world price for Canadian oil imports while Canadians would pay a lower price. And it committed Canada, at any given time, to sell at least as much petroleum to the U.S. as it had sold on average over the preceding three years, even if this were to mean petroleum shortages for eastern Canadians who were reliant on imported oil.

The Mulroney government made all these concessions to the Americans without gaining unfettered access to the U.S. market in return. American trade law remained in place alongside the FTA, allowing the U.S. to mount countervailing duties against Canadian exporters to protect U.S. producers---as the United States has repeatedly done in the case of softwood lumber.

What has all this to do with Karlheinz Schreiber?

We know that, acting on the instructions of his Bavarian masters, whose leader was Franz Joseph Strauss, Minister President of Bavaria and the dominant voice in the Christian Social Union, the fervently right-wing partner in German politics of the more moderate Christian Democratic Union, Schreiber helped finance the overthrow of Joe Clark as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party.

In 1983, the PCs held a federal convention in Winnipeg and a review of Clark’s leadership was on the agenda. Strauss and his CSU henchmen saw it as their role to support the rise to leadership of conservatives of their ilk in the right-wing parties of the West. In their eyes, Joe Clark was an old-fashioned conservative, a red-tory who was too firmly Canadian for the new era of globalization. As was revealed in 2001, on the CBC program, the Fifth Estate, Mr. Schreiber helped fund the effort to fly delegates to Winnipeg who would vote against the leadership of Joe Clark.

Schreiber explained that he gave money to Walter Wolf, a member of the group that was determined to dump Clark. Schreiber put it pithily: “It’s expensive to travel, right? For this is what Walter Wolf collected the money, and then get the people in which worked for you, and you paid their fare, and perhaps he said to you, they need some money for their wives, they want to go shopping, or whatever, for the hotels.”

When Clark received the support of 66.9 per cent of the delegates, short of the 70 per cent he felt he needed, he called on the party to convene a leadership convention, the convention at which Mulroney succeeded him as leader.

Schreiber and the Bavarians had played a role, quite likely decisive, in nudging the support to dump Clark above the thirty per cent level at Winnipeg. With Mulroney as PC leader and later as prime minister, Schreiber and his associates felt they had a man with whom they could come to understandings.

Franz Joseph Strauss, in addition to being the leader of the most right-wing brand of mainstream German politics in the post-war decades, was involved in the 1970s in the founding of Airbus, the European civilian aircraft manufacturer that challenged American Boeing for the multibillion dollar business involved in selling aircraft to the airlines of the whole world. Strauss became chairman of Airbus in the late 1980s and held that position until his death in 1988.

For the past several decades, the Europeans and the Americans have been fighting a no-holds-barred struggle to sell their respective aircraft to the world. The Europeans have subsidized and bribed their way to success, while the Americans have used Department of Defense contracts to buttress their national champion.

Both sides wanted to sell their planes to Air Canada. In 1988, government owned Air Canada signed a contract to purchase 34 Airbus A330s and A340s. Not only Boeing, but the U.S. government, was heartily annoyed by this victory for the European competitor. And the details of how this came about remain highly controversial.

What matters more than how the deal was or was not lubricated, is that during the 1980s, Canada was being put out of the business of fostering national industrial champions so that it could play in the big leagues. And this benefited both the Europeans and the Americans.

If the Europeans got the Airbus contract, the Americans got the FTA, with all its arrangements that made it impossible for Canada to support its own industries. While neo-con Canadian politicians from Mulroney to Harper sold the line to Canadians that governments should stay out of the marketplace, the Europeans and the Americans spent billions ensuring the success of their industrial champions, with all the employment, technological, strategic and sleazy benefits that went with that.

What mattered when Karlheinz, everyone’s favourite Christmas uncle, helped replace Joe Clark with Brian Mulroney, is that the door was opened to the globalization deals in Canada in the 1980s that helped shove this country down the global ladder to the position we occupy today as suppliers of oil sands oil to the Americans and greenhouse gas emissions to the planet.

What I can’t fathom are the media pundits whose line of analysis is that what went on in the 1980s was the bad old days of influence peddling and that all this has happily been put behind us. Are they kidding?

When Brian Mulroney came to power and made his deals, Canadian democracy was fundamentally weakened. We live today in the nether world of plutocracy, in which those with big money ensure that they get the arrangements that favour them. They twist arms, fight wars, educate economists to peddle their line, and yes, they bribe whenever and wherever it is necessary.

Saturday, December 01, 2007

The Harperites on Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Do These People Have No Shame?

The position of the Harper government on climate change, unveiled before the world at the recent Commonwealth Conference in Kampala, and ready for use in Bali at the upcoming global summit on climate change is as follows: the advanced countries should not commit themselves to hard targets for greenhouse gas emissions until the major developing countries adopt hard targets.

In other words, Canada should wait for India and China to get on board with hard targets before we do.

Here’s what this means in practice. While the energy consumption of the average person in the world produces a little more than one metric ton of carbon annually (measured in carbon dioxide emissions), this average disguises enormous differences. Annual per capital carbon emissions in the United States total 20 metric tons, in Canada, 18.4 metric tons, Japan, 9.8 metric tons, France, 6.8 metric tons, Sweden, 6.1 metric tons, China, 3.0 metric tons, and India 1.1 metric tons. The average person in all developing countries is responsible for the emission of 0.5 metric tons.

The average Canadian accounts for the emission of 16.5 times as much carbon dioxide as the average Indian, 6.1 times as much as the average Chinese, 3 times as much as the average Swede, 1.9 times as much as the average Japanese, and 2.7 times as much as the average inhabitant of France.

Harper’s stance: why should we do anything serious about our own emissions until the people at the bottom end of this list get serious about theirs? Until they do, Canadians should be content with “aspirational” targets only.

Do these people have no shame?

Saturday, November 24, 2007

Stephen Harper’s Environmental Bridge to Nowhere

It is not often that an emperor’s clothes are torn from him in full public view, but that is precisely what happened to Stephen Harper at the Commonwealth summit in Kampala.

On the crucial issue of climate change, Harper had one ally when he arrived in Uganda, the right-wing government of Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Alone among the fifty-three countries at the conclave, Canada and Australia opposed the inclusion of binding greenhouse gas reduction targets in a Commonwealth statement.

The problem for Harper is that midway through the meeting, the Australian people threw John Howard’s government out of office and resoundingly chose the Labour Party, which plans to sign on to the Kyoto Accord, to govern the country.

That left Harper all by himself in Kampala. After long negotiations between the Harper contingent and the rest of the Commonwealth, a “compromise” statement on climate change was agreed to, a statement which drops mandatory targets in favour of “aspirational” goals.

Aspirational targets are the Alberta’s oil patch’s synonym for hot air. Having had his robes stripped off in Kampala, Harper still is outfitted with his fig leaf. We can expect that leaf to be front and centre on his persona when he returns to parliament. Harper will insist that while the Commonwealth’s eventual statement dispensed with hard emission targets for developed countries, it declared that developing as well as developed nations should “aspire” to greenhouse gas emission reductions. Or, as a Calgary oilman might say, hot air for everyone, hard targets for no one.

Last week, Environment Minister John Baird claimed on CBC television that Canada was on the same page as Europe on climate change, but that Canada has set out to construct a bridge to nations such as the U.S. on the issue at the global climate change conference in Indonesia next month. He insisted that Canada has a special talent for bringing people together.

His bridge building metaphor implies an effort to find common ground on which two groups of countries with different approaches can stand. But at Kampala, it was all the other countries that had to build a bridge to Canada. The result was a statement on climate change that had been modified due to Canada’s efforts from serious to frivolous.

The Harperites will no doubt point to the Commonwealth statement as evidence of Canada’s growing influence in the world. But now that Australia has gone over to the European side on climate change, to whose shores can Harper and Baird construct their bridge.

The obvious answer is the United States. The trouble, though, is that even the Americans are not standing still on the issue of climate change. Most Americans now revile George W. Bush who is Harper’s only remaining foreign ally on the issue. Next fall the United States will elect a new president who will be almost certain to take a tougher line on global warming than the Harper Conservatives.

The Harper Bridge is a bridge to nowhere. The sad fact is that as long as Canadians have this government at the helm, we will be bringing up the rear on the greatest global question of our time. Or to keep up the metaphor, we will be sitting on a shoal, connected to the rest of the world by the Harper government’s pontoon.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Ontario is Harper’s Whipping Boy

The evidence mounts that the Harper government’s political strategy is to turn Ontario into the whipping boy of Confederation.

On a host of issues, the government is steering a course that blatantly negates the interests of Ontario. The most obvious case in point is the government’s bill to add twenty-two additional seats to the House of Commons after the 2011 census. The Harperites would give Alberta five extra seats, B.C. would get seven more and Ontario would have an additional ten. The change, to reflect population growth, sounds fine except that if the goal is rep by pop Ontario should get twenty additional seats, not ten.

Once the change is made, the Western Provinces, Quebec and the Atlantic Provinces will not be under-represented in the Commons, but Ontario will be. Why not give Ontario the twenty extra seats the province is due according to population? Government House Leader Peter Van Loan explained on CBC television that there would be a problem squeezing that many more seats onto the floor of the House. (Even my three-year-old granddaughter could come up with a better one that that.) His solution: just give Ontario ten fewer seats. His rationale: ten seats are a lot. Thanks Peter, but for people whose early education included arithmetic, it’s transparently unfair.

With the government’s bill, Canada is back to old-time election rigging. Alberta and B.C. are more likely to vote Conservative than Ontario, so give them the seats they are due while short changing Ontario.

The government’s anti-Ontario stance does not stop there.

It extends with a vengeance to manufacturing and the cities.

Without serious attention behind paid to this crucial matter, because of our strong commodity exports, Canada’s industrial sector is being ripped to shreds. Disproportionately, that affects Ontario where the majority of industrial jobs are located. Tens of thousands of jobs are being lost in manufacturing. The crisis, which is of historic proportions, could lead to the permanent destruction of the country’s industrial base. At risk are operations in the auto, steel, chemical, rubber, and other industrial categories.

The long-term consequence of NAFTA, high petroleum prices and the mad dash to develop the oil sands in Alberta (green house gases be damned) has been to return Canada’s economic strategy to the export of resources, resources and more resources. In recent times, economists and political scientists have regarded the staples theory of Harold Innis---the idea that Canada’s economy turns on the exploitation of resources for export---as outmoded.

Look again. The staples economy is back with a vengeance, with all its attendant risks of boom and bust.

The hyper-exploitation of the oil sands is chiefly responsible for the soaring Canadian dollar. When the American economy slows appreciably over the next year, the Canadian dollar will fall, but by then the damage to the battered manufacturing sector may be irreversible. Expecting the sector to rebound in a recessionary environment nourished by a lower dollar alone is too much to ask.

Closely linked to the manufacturing crisis is the nation’s urban malaise. That too, while not limited to Ontario, is centred in the Greater Toronto Area with its six million inhabitants.

Perhaps it should not be surprising that with their 19th century classical liberal (aka neo-conservative) ideology, the Harperites don’t think it matters that our cities are shackled to a 19th century constitutional order. More cynically, since the nation’s major cities, with the exception of Calgary and Edmonton, don’t figure in the Conservatives’ target ridings, their plight is of no consequence.

The GTA and other major Canadian metropolises are being allowed to lapse into shabbiness and inefficiency as infrastructure is not renewed. Public transit---essential in larger cities and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions---is surviving on crumbs.

Canada desperately needs a constitutional order in which municipalities are brought out from under the shadow of provincial jurisdiction and are outfitted with the fiscal means to thrive. In the absence of constitutional change, the federal government, with its surpluses, needs to transfer GST and other tax revenues to the cities, from which those taxes were generated in the first place.

With his forty per cent strategy---aimed at winning enough votes in the right places to win a majority of seats in the next election---Stephen Harper couldn’t care less about the fact that vibrant cities are the key to the nation’s development in the 21st century.

The Conservative government’s guiding principle is that what’s good for the oil patch is good for Canada. That view of things alone is enough to foster an outlook that is systematically anti-Ontario.

Long used to being the cream-fed pet of Confederation, and resented for it, it’s difficult for Ontarians to wake up to the urgent fact that with Stephen Harper at the helm, they’re getting their asses kicked.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Oh Canada: Scandal and Farce

If hockey is our national sport, political scandal is Canada’s national art form.

The Mulroney-Schreiber affair---the coming judicial inquiry and the afternoon delights of foam-flecked exchanges during Question Period---promises much titillation. Like the Sponsorship Scandal, ample rhetoric will be invested in making it seem that this was one of the darkest affairs in the sordid history of humankind.

The beauty of a full-blown Canadian scandal is that almost no effort is ever made to put it into perspective. How much did the scandal cost taxpayers? To what extent did it change the course of public policy?

The answer to both questions is almost always: not much.

Don’t get me wrong. I am no fan of kickbacks and brown envelopes stuffed with cash. Wrong-doers should be forced to pay for their evil deeds.

It is the art form I enjoy. Jabobean drama, the running of the bulls at Pamplona, and Sumo wrestling cannot compare to the stately procession of a Canadian scandal.

Picture it. What did you know and when did you know it?

The sight of Jack Layton surrounded by the eager faces of NDP caucus members, his face flushed with sweat forming on his ample forehead telling the house that this is no laughing matter. Canadians have had too much scandal, on this side of the house and on that. This must not be treated lightly. Jack has a way of banning the right to laugh or smile that brings on fits of the giggles, in the manner of an overwrought funeral.

Then come the Liberals, their lips pinched and their eyes narrowed to slits. It’s payback time. You besmirched us and now it’s our turn to get you. When did the cover up and the stonewalling begin, they want to know? Does this affair stretch back to Preston Manning’s childhood or the first time John A. Macdonald drank scotch? What was the colour of the envelopes used to deliver the cash? Was it the same colour as the envelopes Liberals favour?

Gilles Duceppe is rejuvenated. His blue eyes are more piercingly hawk-like than they have been since the loss of a seat in a by-election to the Conservatives a couple of months ago. There’s life in the old Bloc yet. A party with no rationale for existing has received the gift of life from yet another scandal.

Stephen Harper stands in his place trying to look as though he was only nine years old when Martin Brian Mulroney, the eighteenth prime minister of Canada, was in office. Inside, he seethes at the thought that he has been side swiped by something that has nothing to do with him. He’s a collateral victim just as Paul Martin was when he was roasted by Adscam, and Ralph Goodale was when he was barbequed by Judy Wasylycia-Leis and the Mounties. Later Goodale was cleared when the election was over and lost, but that’s how the game is played.

Does it occur to Harper, who ran a smear-soaked campaign in 2006, that there’s poetic justice in this swing of the pendulum?

The main event is to be savoured most of all. Brian Mulroney, with his Elvis style white mane, rippling in the wind, as he is conveyed to the inquiry on a tumbrel has vowed to “to fight and win again.” There’s an air of grace about the old prize fighter who belatedly declared the cash payments as income.


Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Jean Chretien brought golf balls with monographs on them when he went to see Justice John Gomery. Martin Brian has more at stake. This will be his judgment day, the last chance to salvage the name his father gave him. Last chance to close some of the yawning gap between himself and Pierre Trudeau, the prime minister Canadians chose to love.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

In Bishop’s Robes, Jim Flaherty Meets the Retailers

At a highly publicized meeting on Parliament Hill today, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty will exhort the nation’s retailers to bring prices into line with the stronger value of the Canadian dollar. The gathering bears a strong resemblance to a conclave of medieval warlords with the local bishop. From time to time the bishop would meet with knights, lords, knaves and other grandees to urge a little Christian charity on them.

Keep the pillaging, looting, mayhem, and theft from the local peasants to a minimum he would urge. Not only would this win points for them with the Almighty, it would do much to prevent the peasants from revolting. And the peasants are always revolting, he might add.

Naturally those present at the gathering understood that the bishop would take no earthly action to ensure compliance with his stated wishes. Moral suasion was the name of the game.

When Jim Flaherty meets with the Retail Council, Walmart and all the other marts, he is there to urge them to do the right thing. They should give Canadian consumers true value for their puissant loonies.

Like the medieval bishop, Flaherty is a man a principle, of fixed principles. He believes in the celestial workings of the unregulated market. Let the forces of supply and demand, of wages and profits operate like a finely tuned timepiece and all will be well. There will be no legislation to require retailers to treat Canadians fairly when they purchase automobiles, books, household appliances and clothing, the finance minister has already said.

Why bother to hold the meeting at all if Flaherty plans to take no action to ensure that Canadians get fairness?

As a man of his creed, the finance minister believes that words from the pulpit can have an effect. For their part, the retailers are grumbling. They don’t want to be seen at a confessional where they are cast in the role of the sinners. The price gap between Canada and the U.S. is someone else’s fault, they insist. Blame the manufacturers, the distributors, labour and the geography of Canada, just don’t blame them.

At the conclave, Flaherty will be sure to explain to the retailers that spending an hour or two wearing a hair shirt in a his presence and perhaps conceding a few alms to consumers is better than the alternative: a meeting at a future date with a political leader who might actually do something.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

A Modest Proposal Addressed to the Harper Government on How to Snare Stephane Dion

With more than a little interest, I've watched your recent efforts to snare Stephane Dion in a trap that will not allow him any choice but to bring down the government and get the election campaign going.

Allowing the cameras into the caucus meeting was a deft touch. The lusty bellowing, while down the hall the Liberals were attired in sack cloth and ashes, drove the point home that you’re ready and they’re not. (I will admit that seeing the Conservative caucus members on their feet did have the feel of a convention of used car salesmen about it, but don’t be deterred. The energy came through. I’m sure that a lot of Canadians are anticipating the day when you elect even more members of this sort, and won’t have to listen to the opposition at all. Hell, your caucus will be the House.)

The Speech from the Throne was a beauty. On climate change, you made it clear that you’re not going to be dictated to by so-called experts who are exaggerating the whole warming thing. (That was a great editorial in the Globe and Mail last week, showing how Nobel Prize winner Al Gore was blowing the issue out of proportion. If Rona Ambrose hadn’t been shifted out of the environment portfolio, I’m sure she would have been up for some kind of award herself. Not that I have anything against John Baird, who oozes sincerity on matters ecological.)

The real crisis is not the environment, as you subtly showed in the speech. It’s crime. You told it like I’m sure you think it is on the unprecedented crime wave that is sweeping the country. (Where did Stats Canada get those numbers about the falling murder rate last year? That’s not the stuff I see on the nightly news.)

Good idea to put all the crime bills into one big omnibus and to warn the Liberals that if they try to shift a comma, we’re into an election. Don’t let yourselves be distracted by the opposition idea that dealing with the bills one at a time could speed up the process and get them into law more quickly. They actually have the nerve to say they support most of this stuff. The point is that where crime is concerned, you need the omnibus to scare the criminal classes. Criminals don’t read the back pages of the paper to find out if this or that bill has passed. But the omnibus is different. They’ll see that on the front page of the Sun, and they’ll take notice.

The vexing trouble is that the Liberals are going to slither and slide and wriggle to do everything they can to avoid their appointment with the voters. This is not the time to grow faint-hearted and to worry too much about the fact that two-thirds of the voters supported other parties in the last election, and that they might think you should pay some attention to the opinions of the members they elected. That’s backwards thinking. This is the moment to get those voters who weren’t on board last time, and to snuff out the Grits for good.

With all the money in the bank, that big communications centre in Ottawa ready, the candidates salivating, the buses idling, and the pack media cheering you on, there is not a moment to be lost.

I’m worried that Stephane Dion is not man enough to take the bait and vote out the government. Maybe the attacks on him have not been personal enough, although the television ads did help. (Dion probably doesn’t watch television.)

Have you considered adding to the omnibus bill a provision that would make it a criminal offence for the Leader of the Opposition to wear those wire glasses Dion affects and to name his dog Kyoto?

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Dion Needs to Play Fabius Maximus to Harper’s Hannibal

Later today when the Governor General reads the Speech from the Throne, Stephane Dion and the Liberals should take their cues from a wily Roman general who was in a desperate war with the Carthaginians in 217 B.C. Stephane Dion needs to play Fabius Maximus to Stephen Harper’s Hannibal (the Carthaginian general who led his troops into Italy.)

Hannibal wanted to fight a war of annihilation against the Romans. He planned to lure them out onto the field of battle where he could finish off their armies and occupy Rome itself. And when he got the chance, he decimated Roman armies at Lake Trasimene and Cannae.

But the wily Fabius Maximus decided to fight a war of attrition against the invaders. He shadowed Hannibal’s army, but refused to engage him in a pitched battle. He deployed what have been called “Fabian Tactics” ever since.

Naturally the impatient critics of Fabius (Layton and Duceppe) heaped scorn upon him and dubbed him “Hannibal’s lackey.” The poet Ennius was closer to the truth when he immortalized Fabius as “the man who singly saved the state by patience.”

Hannibal wandered around Italy, thumping his chest, but eventually he ran out of supplies and had to take his armies home, where he was defeated by the Romans.

It’s not easy to be a Fabian. In the Canadian Parliament, you’ll be howled down by what passes for manliness in that chamber of horrors. But Stephane Dion needs to remember two things. A war of attrition may not seem heroic but it works exceptionally well against an opponent who needs to fight right now, but whose staying power is not as great as yours. The Liberals, when fully mobilized and fighting on ground of their own choosing can defeat the Conservatives whose appeal is limited to a distinct minority of Canadians. Second, the public (as opposed to the Ottawa media) is much more interested in what the government does than in the trials and tribulations of the opposition. The story will quickly shift from Liberal humiliation for not voting out the government to the real problems the government is getting itself into---in Afghanistan, in the failure to fight greenhouse gas emissions, and in the emerging crisis in Canada’s manufacturing sector.

In the next few days, during all the sound and fury, Stephane Dion should adhere to the wise approach of a Roman general whose name became a watchword for the tactics of patience.

Monday, October 15, 2007

Harper’s Afghanistan Panel: Let’s Save Them the Bother of Visiting the Tim Hortons in Kandahar and Ghost Write their Report Now

It’s an old con in Canadian politics. The prime minister names a royal commission, inquiry or panel to write a report on a controversial public question. Then he picks a chair for the panel who agrees with him on the subject, along with panel members who are also on side.

That’s what Stephen Harper did last week when he announced the formation of a five-member panel to recommend a future role for Canada in Afghanistan at the expiration of the current military commitment which is due to expire in February 2009. Chosen to head the panel was Liberal John Manley, a former deputy prime minister. The naming of Manley gave the appearance of non-partisanship. But Manley’s stoutly hawkish views and his active promotion of the deep integration of Canada into an all encompassing North American Union made him a ludicrous choice to head any panel whose views could not be predicted in advance. Manley was co-chair of the Independent Task Force on the Future of North America, a big business lobby effort to bind Canada to the U.S. economically, militarily, and in a joint security agenda. If Manley was any more pro-American he’d be an out and out annexationist. The other members named by Harper to the panel were: Derek Burney, former Canadian ambassador in Washington; broadcaster Pamela Wallin, who served as consul-general in New York; Paul Tellier, former clerk of the Privy Council; and Jake Epp, a former cabinet minister in the government of Brian Mulroney. (Wallin is the one member of this panel who is an independent thinker and may not go along with the others.) None of the members of the panel is an expert on Afghanistan, although Manley has visited the country twice.

We know what’s in store for the panel members. They’ll travel to Kabul, where they’ll stay in the Afghan capital’s more informal version of Baghdad’s Green Zone. They’ll be surrounded by soldiers and private security guards, and they’ll meet with members of the Karzai government. (Who knows the Karzai government members may even get briefing notes in advance from Ottawa!) If they want to, the panelists could actually chat with the Taliban’s unofficial representative in Kabul who has the run of the town, and who could let them in on how negotiations are going between the Karzai government and the insurgents. But they’re not likely to do that. They could also speak with university students in the capital who don’t share the misogynist and theocratic views of the Taliban, but who don’t want the West in their country either. I doubt if that will be on their agenda.

Then the panelists will fly to Kandahar, where they’ll watch a little ball hockey, and head over to Tim Hortons for a double-double. If they visit the bazaar in Kandahar, they will find a lot of people who insist that Hamid Karzai’s brother is a kingpin in the opium trade. They could, but are not likely to, chat with him about the problems of one of the world’s leading narco-states.

Then the panelists, in flack jackets, will likely travel to the countryside to see, first hand, evidence of Canadian aid to a local school or some other project. If they could get away from their handlers, they might talk to people in rural Afghanistan about how their quality of life has not been helped much by western aid, a lot of which flows into private pockets, in a country where the corruption involves Afghan authorities, and private western companies. Don’t count on that being in the itinerary.

After the tour, the panelists will come back home and will write their report.

We could save them the bother and ghost-write it for them now. It’s not much of a stretch to figure out what it’s going to say.

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Stephane Dion: Champion of Corporate Tax Cuts

Since the recent by-elections in Quebec, Liberal leader Stephane Dion has been looking alarmingly unsteady. In an effort to reconnect with terra firma on Friday, Dion told a business audience at the Economic Club of Toronto that he wanted to push the corporate tax rate well below that in the United States.

He charged that the Harper government hasn’t done enough to reduce the corporate tax rate. He said that the former Liberal government had been on track to lower the rate from 28 per cent to 19 per cent. (The current corporate tax rate is 21 per cent.) The Tories, he charged, plan to reduce the rate to 18.5 per cent by 2011.

Dion told the applauding corporate crowd that he could do better. Why wouldn’t they applaud? Nothing makes the heart of corporate Canada beat faster that the sight of the two largest political parties vying to see which one can cut corporate tax rates more deeply.

“A low corporate tax rate is not a right-wing policy or a left-wing policy. It is a sound policy,” Dion told his delighted listeners.

That’s wrong, Mr. Dion. It is a right wing policy, culled straight from the playbook of trickle down economics. And Dion is also wrong to claim that reducing the corporate tax rate will induce corporations to spend more on capital equipment. What induces increased capital spending is increased economic demand, not supply-side tax cuts for the rich. The notorious and failed experiments in various kinds of tax cuts for the wealthy in Ronald Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s administrations, and in Mike Harris’ Ontario, demonstrate irrefutably that all you get from such tax cuts is more money in the pockets of the rich and less revenue for governments to spend on infrastructure, job training, and social programs----and the latter, by the way, do increase demand and prompt businesses to invest more. Tax cuts for the rich plunged the U.S. and Ontario into increased government deficits, creating a golden opportunity for wealthy bond holders to make money on the public debt. Tax cuts for the rich reduce economic demand and slow economic growth.

Dion also claimed that corporate tax cuts would strengthen Canadian companies against foreign takeovers. What the cuts actually do is to make them more attractive takeover targets.

In the next few weeks, Stephane Dion may find himself fighting a federal election. During the campaign, his only hope of winning will be to position himself as the leader of a broad coalition of progressive Canadians who are determined to stop Stephen Harper.

At a time when the gap between the rich and the rest is yawning ever wider, progressive Canadians will be appalled by Dion’s emergence as a tax-cutting pal of big business. Quite apart from the merits of corporate tax issue, where does Dion think he’ll find the votes he needs to win?

They’re not on the right, Mr. Dion. You’re not going to pry any votes away from Stephen Harper’s hammer lock on the one third of electors who form his base. The votes you need are in the centre and on the left. In addition to those who want to vote Liberal are many NDP, Green and Bloc voters who might be recruited by a progressive crusade against the Harper government.

One the eve of the Speech from the Throne, Stephane Dion has inflicted a new wound on himself.

Sunday, October 07, 2007

Uh….what is the Logic behind Canada’s Military Mission in Afghanistan? Please, Run that Past Me Again

The members of the Harper government have argued that Canada needs to fight in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban and to sustain the government of Hamid Karzai. While the Karzai government upholds the rule of law, is committed to democracy and the rights of women, the Taliban is the implacable enemy of civilization, on these and a host of other matters, according to the Harper government.

Recently, the Karzai government has been negotiating with elements of the Taliban, and Hamid Karzai has said he wants to bring Taliban leaders into his administration.

What the hell is going on?

The head of the government we are fighting for, the man who is supposed to symbolize all that is decent in Afghanistan, wants members of the terrorist insurgency to join with him in ruling the country. Representatives of the Harper government have made it clear that Canada does not approve of negotiations with the Taliban, but that it’s up to the Karzai government to decide on its own policies. (Having dispatched troops to help Afghans uphold the government they really want, we could hardly try to dictate to the government in Kabul, could we?)

So, what are we doing in Afghanistan? Hamid Karzai does not seem to regard the members of the Taliban as beyond the pale of civilization the way Stephen Harper does.

Are our troops fighting and dying to improve the bargaining power of Hamid Karzai in restructuring his government with members of the Taliban in it? How is this conflict worth the life of even one more Canadian soldier?

Saturday, October 06, 2007

Why Howard Hampton and the NDP Deserve Your Support on Wednesday

Now that the irksome issue of public funding for faith based schools is off the table and Conservative leader John Tory is suffering from a self-inflicted wound on that score, it is time for progressive voters to decide whom to support. The big, bad wolf of a return to Mike Harris’ party, even in the form of John Tory’s Little Red Riding Hood, is not at the door. No one needs to vote Liberal to keep the beast at bay.

Does Dalton McGuinty deserve the votes of progressive Ontarians?

I think not. Under Liberal rule, Ontario has continued to veer in the direction of a society that is ever more divided between the rich and the rest. While McGuinty can claim to have slowed the Common Sense Revolution launched by Mike Harris, he has not halted and reversed it. The Liberals have talked a good line about education, health care, the environment and the cities and have delivered little. Class sizes are too large, the erosion of public health care continues in the form of new private hospitals, no serious environmental plan has been implemented, and our cities are falling into disrepair and are in desperate new of a reformed tax system. It is all well and good for Dalton McGuinty to point toward major public transit schemes for the future. But he has wasted the past four years.

While the Liberals slowed the march toward higher tuition fees, the reprieve is over, and fees are going up again. Many of my students cannot afford to attend university full-time. We are tilting back toward the days when universities were preserves of the well-to-do.

Ontario needs a truly progressive government.

Howard Hampton is the leader to deliver it. He combines sanity with dogged determination and the NDP has its programmatic priorities right. When Hampton says that no one in Ontario should be expected to work for less than $10 an hour, who can disagree? It is a disgrace that McGuinty is prepared to wait three more years to raise the minimum wage to that level. How can anyone take seriously the wailing business interests, their pockets bulging with profits, who claim they will be grievously wounded by an immediate rise in the minimum wage? Only the most supine of governments would buy into this theory that Ontario’s problem is that the poor have too much money and the rich don’t have enough.

On the environment, Hampton has unveiled a plan that emphasizes conservation and renewable energy. The alternative to it is huge new investments in nuclear power, the route both the Liberals and the Conservatives would be bound to take.

On education, Hampton alone is committed to saving the public school system which is presently suffering a slow death because of inadequate funding. And he alone understands that the next few years will determine whether post-secondary education is to be open to everyone or simply the privileged.

Hampton has also looked into the future, beyond the economic sheen of the moment and understands the grave threat to Ontario’s manufacturing sector. The province is losing tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs. The centre of heavy manufacturing is being dangerously hollowed out. To those, such as McGuinty and Tory, who believe that the market is always right, there is no real concern about this. A job lost in one sector will be replaced in another they think. When the debt-ridden US economy is forced to go through a period of purging---and that time is not far off---Ontario is going to be hit with an economic sledge hammer. We need political leaders who know that only foolish people let their basic industries collapse. A stronger NDP after election day will give our industrial cities and workers a much needed voice.

The NDP leader was right the other day to challenge the jaded media of the province for failing to think about the problems of the people who are not having it so good. Seniors in shabby retirement homes and children living below the poverty line in immigrant families don’t get a lot of attention from newspapers and broadcasters who have moved so far to the right that they have little in common with the concerns and thinking of most Ontarians.

Howard Hampton brings the debate back to the realities of the lives of the majority of the population. He deserves to be premier after October 10. Failing that, we need him in place heading up a powerful caucus that could force a minority Liberal government to match its rhetoric with deeds.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Harper’s Forty Per Cent Wager

The unveiling of the Conservative get-tough-on-drugs initiative is the first salvo in the Harper government’s fall offensive whose strategic goal is to secure an electoral majority by Christmas.

The law and order approach mostly directed at soft-drug users is red meat being heaped on a platter for Harper’s core constituency---older white men in suburbs and small towns who resent just about everybody else.

The reason the former head of the National Citizens’ Coalition is dancing a jig these days is that he thinks that in a quick election he can win the 40 per cent of votes he needs to cobble together a thin majority government. He doesn’t have the 40 per cent yet, but with his party’s coffers bursting and his opponents in disarray, he believes he can do it.

Meanwhile, each of Harper’s foes lives in his or her delusional nether-world:

• Worst off is Stephane Dion who party has fallen prey to struggles over who is to succeed the leader of the moment when he expires on the field of battle. Dion, a fundamentally decent man, who would be a moderately progressive prime minister, has been a dud as leader, a flop in English Canada and even worse in Quebec.
• Gilles Duceppe, who feels support for the Bloc ebbing away, wants an election as soon as possible so he can hang onto enough seats to retire with dignity.
• Jack Layton, fresh from the NDP’s stunning by-election victory in Outremont, and now with an impressive Francophone lieutenant in Thomas Mulcair at his side, thinks this is his chance to challenge the Liberals for the lion’s share of the centre-left vote.
• Elizabeth May is riding the Green Machine. The Greens are more a sentiment than a party.

Particularly in English Canada, Harper’s opponents are bent on slaying one another, leaving him free---he anticipates---to win the big prize. At the moment, well over 60 per cent of Canadian voters don’t want Stephen Harper. But that won’t stop the opposition leaders from acting out the last scene of Hamlet and inflicting grievous wounds on one another.

Only if the wider public takes ownership of the upcoming election, the most consequential since the free trade election of 1988, is there any hope of forcing the opposition parties to focus on stopping Harper. The need to stop Harper becomes glaringly apparent when we contemplate a few of the consequences of handing him complete power for five years:

• On Afghanistan, Harper has backed away from his previous pledge to base any post February 2009 role for Canada on a “consensus” among the federal parties. At his press conference in Ottawa this week, Harper said he will rely on the support of a parliamentary majority. After he wins his election, the “consensus” will be reduced to his party alone, and in this top-down government, that means Harper alone.
• Five years with Harper in control means that during the crucial struggle to grapple with greenhouse gas emissions, Canada will be on the side of the US in promoting so-called voluntary emission standards. Production in the oil sands will expand, and northern Alberta will spew ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The oil patch will make a ton of money and Calgary’s favourite son will preside over a nation with its dollar above par, and a shrinking manufacturing base in central Canada.
• With a majority under his belt, Harper can afford to pander to his growing Christian fundamentalist base. Unlike Mike Harris in Ontario who limited himself to helping the rich at the expense of the poor, Harper will not hesitate to saddle social policy with faith-based initiatives borrowed from south of the border.
• Half a decade of Harper in complete control will propel this country down the road to much deeper integration with the US. The plans are in place, the corporate sector is on board. Two decades ago, “free trade” robbed Canada of control of its petroleum industry, and ended the idea of a Canadian industrial strategy. The next step will reduce this country to a series of weakly linked resource producing regions on the northern edge of Manifest Destiny.
• The central goal of Harper’s social policy will be to cut taxes so as to limit Ottawa’s capacity to spend effectively on health care, childcare, higher education and the quest to raise the quality of life of aboriginal communities. The Canada that is spoken of as one of the last bastions of a civilization in which the rich have not run away with everything will be no more.
• And just for a chaser, Harper will privatize CBC television.

The majority of Canadians don’t want this agenda, and will not want it while it’s being inflicted on them. And the opposition politicians in Ottawa can be expected to rise in Question Period and denounce it all as it unfolds. They’ll have their seats. But what the Hell will the rest of us have?

Friday, September 28, 2007

Bush, Harper and Friends: An Environmental Production in Five Acts

At a White House-sponsored climate change conference in Washington DC this week, President George W. Bush told participants that he favoured a global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as long as each nation decides “for itself the right mix of tools and technology to achieve results that are measurable and environmentally effective.”

Bush steadfastly refuses to commit the United States to any scheme of mandatory emission reduction obligations. The US-led process---Stephen Harper is an enthusiastic participant---is transparently aimed at sidelining the UN-organized talks that are to begin in December in Indonesia. The UN talks will attempt to draw up a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol which would take effect in 2012.

The UN agreement would involve tough, mandatory commitments of the kind the Bush administration rejected when it refused to sign on to Kyoto. Even though Canada ratified Kyoto, the Harper government has dropped any attempt to reach its targets and supports the Bush administration’s view of the way ahead.

The Bush approach has been evolving for years. To avoid inconvenience to big corporate polluters and the free enterprise system, the Bush approach has been an unfolding drama in five acts: deny; deceive; delay; defang; and deep-six.

1. Deny. Act One was the outright denial that if global warming was occurring at all, it was being driven by the emission of greenhouse gases as a consequence of human activities. Following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan who believed that trees were a source of pollution, George W. Bush and Stephen Harper thought the global warming theory was a sneak attack on free enterprise cloaked in the garb of science. Beneath that garb were anti-capitalist demagogues.
2. Deceive. When outright denial became an embarrassment in the presence of people who could read and write, the corporate allies of Bush and Harper turned to deception, in the form of cooked “science”. Petroleum and coal companies sponsored their own studies, designed to cast doubt on the validity of the global warming hypothesis. Corporate funded “experts” emerged to claim that no evidence existed to suggest that human activity was responsible for climate change. The “experts” were much like the tobacco company-financed “scientists” who used to pour cold water on the connection between smoking and lung cancer.
3. Delay. As the case made by genuine scientists became more definitive, and almost universally accepted, Bush, Harper and friends turned to delay. Instead of signing on to the Kyoto targets and the process which will design more rigorous targets for the future, they changed the subject to that of finding ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions “while keeping our economies growing” as Bush said this week. For Bush and Harper, economic growth was the lodestar that was never to be compromised. If reducing greenhouse emissions could be achieved without slowing growth that would be fine.
4. Defang. Not happy with the Europeans and others who were determined to reduce emissions even if this proved costly, Bush, Harper and friends have launched a process with a cheerier outlook. They are joining the battle against greenhouse gas emissions as long as this does not discommode big industry and big energy. It will all be voluntary, putting the future of humanity in the hands of technology and the corporations. If the free market can’t save us, then what can?
5. Deep-Six. This week George W. Bush, with the support of the Harper government, launched a flank attack on the international campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Kyoto process has been a unique initiative in the history of our species to counter a unique threat. Bush wants to share in the rhetoric of that struggle because he has no political choice. But his loyalty remains where it has always been, with the great corporate legions, and their drive for profits. That loyalty, the product of ideology and material greed, is rooted in the faith that the corporations will come up with an answer and catastrophe will be averted. And if not, at least this generation of corporate leaders will still reap their rewards.

Friday, September 21, 2007

John Tory: Where’s the Beef?

John Tory looked every inch the premier in last night’s televised leaders debate. Or, at least, he looked like the old time Conservative premiers of Ontario in the days before Mike Harris. I can remember an evening at Queen’s University decades ago when John Robarts was premier and Bill Davis was an up and coming star. They both wore scrumptious navy blue suits, just like John Tory did.

Meanwhile Dalton McGuinty seemed to be a very thin hare caught between Tory and Howard Hampton.

With John Tory as their leader, the Conservatives have found a man who gushes compassion. They have dispensed with the “axe-murderer” look achieved by Mike Harris and by the man with the slick-back hair, Ernie Eves. Tory painted McGuinty as a premier who has allowed people to suffer for the past four years. Tory appeared to care about students, seniors, wage and salary earners and he even took a shot at the super rich for the low taxes they pay in comparison to low income single mothers. Fortunately, I had a box of tissues on hand so I could weep along with him.

Who’s kidding who!

John Tory plans to drop Ontario’s health tax at the same time as he claims to care about health care. He bleeds for students but will do nothing to hold down their tuition. He is a dedicated crime fighter, but failed to commit himself to supporting a call for the banning of hand guns in the province. He complains about the province’s job creation record, but is a member of the party that at the federal level is sandbagging Ontario with its full steam ahead approach to the Alberta oil sands---which are spewing out greenhouse gases, driving up the dollar too quickly, causing massive job losses in Ontario, and bringing in insufficient royalties for Albertans. He claims to support public education, but he would deliver hundreds of millions of dollars a year to faith based schools.

Where’s the beef, John Tory?

That’s the question that needs to be posed over and over again in the closing weeks of the campaign. John Tory’s compassion is not backed up by commitments to make life a little less comfortable for his friends on Bay Street and the Post Road, so that much more can be done to help those who need help.

On the other side of the bruised premier stood NDP leader Howard Hampton, who does have some very intelligent ideas. His proposals for saving energy instead of building nuclear plants, and for holding down electricity rates to help keep Ontario competitive are excellent. So is his commitment to roll back tuition fees for students. Many of my students now go to school part time because they can’t afford the tuition. Hampton’s pledge to raise the minimum wage to ten dollars an hour immediately is crucial. In a province, where the rich have never had it so good, it’s time for those at the other end of the spectrum to get a little closer to a living wage. Hampton’s platform is well thought out. Alone of the leaders, he actually has ideas for strengthening Ontario’s economy during a time of difficult transition.

Monday, September 17, 2007

CNN’s Lou Dobbs: America’s Jean-Marie Le Pen

In France, the former paratrooper, leader of the Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has been the tribune of prejudice against immigrants, blaming them for unemployment among the French, campaigning to shut off future immigration, and even demanding the expulsion of millions of immigrants from the country.

In the United States, the man who beats the drums to warn Americans about the dangers of immigration is not a political leader. He is a broadcaster, CNN’s Lou Dobbs, whose weekday show Lou Dobbs Tonight (6.00 p.m. ET), is devoted to haranguing his fellow countrymen about the myriad ways illegal Latino immigrants are harming America.

Dobbs’ show is a soapbox for his cause. Night after night, he rants about what he calls the “War on the Middle Class.” He has written a book with that title and shamelessly uses his program to flog it.

Many of the problems of the middle class, by which he means wage and salary earners, can be laid at the door of the illegals, according to Dobbs. They hold incomes down and they flood into neighbourhoods and transform their cultural character.

In his broadcasts, Dobbs has charged that Mexican immigrants conceive of themselves as an “army of invaders” who are determined to occupy the southwestern United States in order to reverse the outcome of the Mexican-American war of 1846 and return a giant swath of the USA to Mexico. He once declared that “the invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans” as a consequence of “deadly imports” of leprosy, malaria and other diseases.

America’s borders are not secure, they are "broken", Dobbs warns in nightly jeremiads. He is mostly talking about the frontier with Mexico but he throws in the Canadian border from time to time. Dobbs became alarmed last month when Presidents George Bush and Felipe Calderon held a North American summit with Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the Chateau Montebello on the Ottawa River. He imagines that far from the US dominating its neighbours the US government is shedding sovereignty on behalf of pesky Mexicans and Canadians.

Dobbs sometimes broadcasts from sites next to the Mexican frontier, where he hosts open forums with guests who specialize in bashing Mexicans. The odd Latino gets on the show to complain about bias, but nothing is ever done to introduce even a modicum of balance into these exercises.

Other favourite Dobbs takes on the story include:

• Chastising Congress for not locking down the borders.
• Railing against municipalities that are sympathetic to Latinos and refuse to crack down on illegal immigrants.

Never appropriately acknowledged on the Dobbs show, as is the case with the narratives of Le Pen in France, is the extent to which the United States and American employers have come to depend on Latino labour.

Even more noteworthy than Lou Dobbs, with his obsessive negativity about immigrants, is the willingness of CNN to broadcast this torrent of abuse, month after month. CNN and Lou Dobbs cry out for action by the derelict Federal Communications Commission whose job it is to decide which broadcasters deserve a licence.

Americans are treated to a multi-channel media universe from which they can draw a minimum of useful information, and a very limited range of viewpoints. In the land of the free, people are free to imbibe the ravings of the loud and the call of the ignorant.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

In America: Bitter Recriminations About the War in Iraq

From the heights of the political and business classes to the ranks of the people, Americans are finding the lessons of Iraq unendurably unpalatable.

Consider the illusions that most Americans had at the time of the invasion in 2003:

• Saddam Hussein’s regime, which was implicated in the attacks of September 11, 2001, was developing weapons of mass destruction that could be used in a sneak attack on the United States.

• Victory in Desert Storm in 1991had been easy. It was time to finish the job in a march to Baghdad to topple the tyrant.

• The American military, the most formidable, well-lubricated instrument of naked power in human history, would have no trouble carrying out the mission.

The first three acts in the drama exceeded expectations: the pyrotechnics of “shock and awe” in the sky above Baghdad on the first night of the attack; the toppling of Saddam’s statue; and George W. Bush’s landing on the aircraft carrier to declare “mission accomplished.”

That should have been the happy ending.

Then came the militias, the suicide bombers, the rising toll of American soldiers killed, the collapse of the Iraqi infrastructure and economy, the flight of four million Iraqis from their homes, the rise to power of an Iraqi government dominated by the Shiite majority from which Sunnis and Kurds recoiled, and the dispiriting revelations that there had been no weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam hated Osama bin Laden and had had nothing to do with 9/11.

Wind this film back to the beginning though and what stands out is that almost all Americans stood behind George W. Bush from the early days after the terror attacks until things started to unravel in Iraq. And that included most of the leading members of the Democratic Party. The idea that their country had the right to invade another country which had not attacked them was OK with most Americans. The problem was that it didn’t work.

Whose fault was that?

The majority of Americans blamed two sets of culprits for the debacle: Iraqis themselves and their political leaders; and President George W. Bush and his closest advisors.

The charge against the Iraqis was that, having been liberated by the Americans and their allies, they failed to establish a viable government that could foster unity and security. One of the most common narratives in the US today is that unless the Iraqis get their own act together, the Americans should leave. If the situation were not so tragic, this would qualify as macabre humour.

Americans, including those running for the presidency in both parties, are chastising the nation the United States invaded for its failures.

The other culprit was the once supremely popular president, George W. Bush. His approval rating plummeted, not because he launched the invasion, but because it came to grief. Americans, who had praised him for being an uncomplicated leader, who knew where he was going, turned on him for having planned the invasion and its aftermath poorly and even for having led them into the wrong war.

The idea took hold in the United States that the occupying army had been too small and that Saddam’s army should not have been dismantled.

What did not gain traction in the US, except in isolated circles, was the notion that most Iraqis never saw the Americans as liberators, but as foreign invaders who did not belong there. In that respect, Iraqis were not much different from most peoples in the world. They did not want US soldiers on their soil and regarded the US as an imperial power that was bent on controlling their oil and the Middle East.

For George W. Bush, the journey from lionized commander-in-chief to hapless incompetent, did not take long. To a man, incurious about history, it must have seemed that many of his own people had betrayed him, just as many Americans came to feel betrayed by their president.

For Americans who live in the bubble of their nation and its identity, who have been raised to believe they are the freest, richest, most fortunate people in the world, it was not surprising that the war was perceived in terms of Iraqis who couldn’t get their act together and a president who had let them down.

If you don’t know much about the rest of the world and are sure that your country is at the centre of it, it is natural to think in personal terms about failure and betrayal.

What still has not penetrated the consciousness of the American people and its political leaders is that their country presides over a global empire. The question that looms over their future is whether their empire is desirable and even sustainable. Until they face up to that, Americans will be trapped with a spectrum that extends from the highs of national ecstasy to the lows of bitter recriminations.

Monday, September 10, 2007

On the 6th Anniversary of September 11: Utopianism and Reality in Afghanistan and Iraq


The US-led invasions that followed the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, in Afghanistan and Iraq were nothing less than vainglorious attempts to remake countries in ways they could not be remade. These have been latter-day crusades, just as much the product of apocalyptic religious fervour as those undertaken in the Middle Ages. They will end just as badly.
The September 11 attacks provoked a wave of messianic thinking of the sort that previous crises have generated at other times in American history. The Bush administration responded with the idea that to counter an act of such evil, a war must be declared whose purpose was to banish evil itself. A year after the attacks, George W. Bush declared: “Our responsibility to history is clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” In his Second Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, Bush focused on the positive side of the determination to rid the world of evil: “America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world and to all the inhabitants thereof.”
It is not that the US did not have material objectives in Afghanistan and Iraq. Oil, the transportation routes to oil and natural gas and the quest for strategic military advantage in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia mattered. But the language of the President was apocalyptic and absolute.
To understand the invasions, Bush’s words need to be taken seriously. The most important motive for the military missions was to transform Afghanistan and Iraq in America’s image. Without the messianism, the idea that it was America’s God given task to remake the world, these invasions would have been unthinkable. Following the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush told Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas that “God told me to strike Al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.”
Certainly the president was reaching out to the religious right with these statements. But it is a mistake to think that Bush and his advisers are not subject to the messianism they express.
Hard as it is four years after the assault on Iraq to remember this, the invasion was undertaken in the last flush of the triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was the brief era of the End of History and the Borderless World when the notion reigned supreme that liberal capitalism was the way ahead for all of humanity. The architects of Operation Iraqi Freedom actually believed that American forces would be met by cheering crowds and feted with bouquets of flowers.
Those who launched the invasions did almost no serious thinking about long-term consequences. In Iraq, the invasion unleashed chaos and suffering---four million people have become refugees. It gave Al Qaeda a foothold in Iraq which it had never had before and it handed enormous power to Shiite theocrats with strong links to Iran. The report by General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, that there has been modest military progress in the country as a consequence of the surge in American troop strength there, has been treated by observers as little more than a political message to improve the position of the US for its endgame in a failed war. In war, it is a rule of thumb that statements by a commanding general are aimed at winning the propaganda struggle, and are not exercises in truth telling.
In Afghanistan, the invaders have wandered into a thicket of long-existing struggles between the Pashtun in the south---from whom most of the Taliban emerged---and other tribal groups in the north and other parts of the country. Without being sufficiently aware of what they were doing, the western invaders became embroiled in tribal and factional struggles that extend from Afghanistan into neighbouring regions of Pakistan.
The Harper government and other proponents of Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan like to portray their approach as one of hard-headed realism. They are sailing under false colours. From the start, the idea that the West could successfully conquer Afghanistan and impose a western style government on that country has been a utopian fantasy.
The Taliban has had the tactical wit to align itself with the poppy growers and drug warlords they formerly opposed when they ran the country. That has drawn the US, Canada and other western powers into an opium war so that many Afghans now believe the West threatens their livelihood and that the Taliban is their protector.
The government of Hamid Karzai has begun quiet negotiations with elements of the Taliban. A deal in the not distant future is entirely possible. The result of such a deal would not be democracy, the rule of law and equal rights for women. It would mean an altered configuration of power in Afghanistan, with new Pashtun and Taliban elements in the government and some former Northern Alliance factions out of it. It would not bring peace, but rather a continued armed struggle, with a different list of players on the opposing sides.
The US and NATO could well seize on a deal with parts of the Taliban to declare victory and pull most of their troops out.
In the meantime, Canadian soldiers are fighting and too many are dying in campaigns to retake terrain they have previously taken only to have the Taliban reoccupy it later. Small gains are made building and opening schools, but these are often nullified by an insurgency that remains potent.
The Harper government and other backers of the war have resorted to hiding behind the soldiers to escape their own responsibility for the mess we are in. The exhortation that we must all “Support Our Troops”---something, which if meant literally virtually all Canadians do---is being used to silence critics of the mission.
The preposterous result is that a Canadian government that calls itself “conservative” is floundering in a failing crusade. Meanwhile those who want our troops brought home are the ones who adhere to the traditional conservative idea that wars should only be fought when they are unavoidable and that they should never be fought in aid of messianic missions to reconstruct the world.
Our politics has been turned inside out in ways that are deeply puzzling to almost everyone. Conservatives have become utopians, even if at times they are embarrassed by the rhetoric of George W. Bush. Meanwhile those in other parts of the political spectrum have become the skeptics, those who warn that the world cannot and should not be subjected to violent campaigns to transform it in the name of liberation, campaigns whose tangible results are death and dislocation on an enormous scale.

Saturday, September 08, 2007

On Education: John Tory Starts a Culture War

John Tory, Ontario’s Conservative leader, has enjoyed a reputation for moderation and judgment. In light of this, it has come as an unwelcome surprise that Tory has embarked on a radical strategy, no less disruptive than Mike Harris' Common Sense Revolution, in his bid to lead his party to power in the upcoming provincial election. The traditional approach for a moderate opposition politician, as Tory was presumed to be, is to campaign on the defects of the sitting government, showing how it has failed to keep its promises, and capitalizing on scandals and administrative lapses.

Tory and his handlers have obviously decided that this timeworn method will not succeed in toppling Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals. Instead Tory has started a culture war. He hopes to win by injecting highly divisive hot-button issues into the campaign. The tactics are borrowed from the playbook of the American hard right.

At first glance, Tory’s proposal to provide public funding to faith based schools can be seen as nothing more than an attempt to extend to other religious denominations what Roman Catholics already enjoy.

In fact, his goal is not to engage in a debate about the rights and wrongs of public support for Catholic schools, a policy that is rooted in the Constitution of 1867. His goal is to launch a 21st campaign to stress the fault lines in Ontario society and to win power in the process.

If the Ontario government were to fund faith based primary and secondary schools, two consequences would be highly likely. First, public funding for Jewish, Muslim, Orthodox Christian and other faith-based schools would inevitably open the door to legal challenges from still other faiths and sects for the funding of their schools as well.

Analogies with the Catholic case for funding are misleading because the existence of Catholic schools, whatever one thinks of this, is constitutionally based. This means that the presence of publicly funded Catholic schools cannot be used as the basis for court challenges on behalf of other faiths. Once some other faith’s schools are funded, though, this situation would be completely altered. Tory’s proposal, if implemented, would throw the courts open to plaintiffs arguing for the support of all manner of sectarian schools.

Second, assurances from advocates for the public funding of faith based schools that this would not lead to a massive exodus of students from public schools provide cold comfort. In a rapidly evolving multi-cultural society such as Ontario’s, against the backdrop of rising assaults on secular norms in many countries, it is foolhardy to suggest that the availability of publicly funded sectarian schools would not lead to a flight from public schools.

At present, public schools are a meeting ground for people from diverse backgrounds, a key to Ontario’s success as a society that has done better than most others in realizing the benefits of diversity, and avoiding the pitfalls. Public funding of sectarian schools is bound to generate campaigns to win parents over to the idea that to be true to their faith they should send their children to a school whose students are members of their faith alone.

That Tory has his sights set on a radical debate about public education can be grasped from his flirtation with the idea of introducing creationism into the school curriculum. The Conservative leader threw this stink-bomb into the debate and then appeared to back off a little.

His mention of creationism sent a coded message to those whose religious convictions motivate them to launch a wide-ranging attack on what they see as today’s Godless, secular society.

Creationism, the idea that the earth was created by a divine-being a few thousand years ago and that humans once walked with dinosaurs, is bogus science. It has no more place in a school curriculum than the notion that the earth is flat or that the sun revolves around the earth---ideas that were once held by powerful religions whose leaders were prepared to execute those with different views on the nature of the universe.

What Tory was doing was letting religious fundamentalists know that he is not unsympathetic to their aspirations.

Beyond the fundamentalists, there are other interests at play. Look at the coalition Tory has supporting him on the funding issue. In addition to those who support public funding for faith based schools there are the advocates of public funding for private schools. It is not accidental that private schools that draw their students largely from upper middle class families see the current election campaign as a golden opportunity for their own cause.

And they are not the only ones. A campaign is in full swing in the United States to establish a new multi-billion dollar market for the private sector through the privatization of much of the public school system. Education is seen as a lucrative field in which private companies can move into the designing, managing and supplying of schools. The neo-cons and business interests who support the establishment of charter schools (some public, some private) and other privatization initiatives make the case that the public school system is an unproductive monopoly dominated by teachers and teachers’ unions. They look forward to the day when this public monopoly will be dismantled and parents will be free to “choose” the types of schools their children attend.

In the process, the public school system will be reduced to a last resort option for the poorest and least powerful segments of society. Out of this will come billions of dollars in profits for those who have had the foresight to spot a golden opportunity.

The Ontario Conservatives are not telling the electorate where the path they have chosen will lead. But we were not born yesterday, Mr. Tory. We have seen this motion picture before.

Sunday, September 02, 2007

Jim Flaherty: The Auto Workers’ free-market friend in Ottawa

G M’s announcement last week that it will cut 1200 jobs at an Oshawa, Ontario truck plant is the latest signal that the nation’s manufacturing sector is in deep trouble.

CAW economist Jim Stanford told the Toronto Star that “economic research over the years has shown that the spinoff effects in total add up to about 7.5 jobs” for every automobile job that is eliminated. The effect, therefore, of the GM job cuts will be the loss of about eight thousand jobs in a host of companies that supply the Oshawa truck plant as well as in local restaurants, building businesses and a variety of service industries. Many of the lost jobs in the auto parts sector will be south of the border in American plants that supply the truck plant.

Manufacturing layoffs are becoming an ever more common occurrence in Ontario, as core industrial employment is cut back, and the nation’s heavy industries are hollowed out.

Because the overall economic health of the country appears relatively robust, the growing crisis in the auto sector and in manufacturing as a whole has been masked.

Since the late 1990s, about 10,000 auto assembly jobs have been lost in Canada and over the past six years, 13,000 jobs have been cut in the auto parts sector. This year in addition to the General Motors jobs cuts, Chrysler has decided to eliminate 2000 jobs in Ontario.

One might expect that Jim Flaherty, Canada’s Finance Minister, who represents the riding of Whitby-Oshawa, where many of the workers who are about to lose their livelihoods reside, would be working overtime to save auto jobs.

On the contrary, he seems philosophical, content with the stance his government is taking. He told a reporter that he was “concerned” about the GM announcement and mentioned his recent budget’s faster write-offs for capital investments in machinery and equipment for manufacturers as evidence that the government is doing a lot for the auto industry.

At a time when the effects of the rapid surge in the value of the Canadian dollar and the slowdown in US auto sales are combining to threaten thousands more auto jobs, Flaherty’s faster write offs will be about as effective as a finger in a dike during a storm surge. Everybody knows that in a slowing market faster write offs don’t generate additional capital investment.

Flaherty is, and always has been, a staunch right-wing conservative, proud of never having interfered with the celestial functioning of free markets. That’s why he can be philosophical about the loss of good jobs in his riding. “People who have been losing jobs have been getting other jobs,” he noted.

He makes it seem so easy. What alternative jobs will those who are laid off be getting and for what kind of pay? What about workers in Oshawa and Whitby who are trying to pay down their mortgages?

While Flaherty fiddles, we stand to lose a big chunk of our manufacturing sector. And we’re not likely to get it back.

It’s hard to know whether Flaherty is intelligent enough to understand that his ideological outlook favours capital at the expense of labour, or is a bone-headed true-believer who thinks free markets are socially neutral. For the auto workers in his riding, it doesn’t much matter.

Their powerful MP won’t do a damn thing for them. Flaherty and the other members of the Harper government don’t believe in the concept of an industrial strategy to nurture and protect high paying jobs in key industrial sectors.

The trouble is that although the ways they do it may have changed, the French, Germans, Italians, Swedes, Japanese and South Koreans carefully protect their vital industrial sectors. And the Americans do exactly the same thing through the backdoor route of defence spending to procure equipment from key industries, including the auto industry.

Maybe it’s time for auto workers to find an MP who isn’t a neo-con boy scout who is dumb enough to think our competitors play by the free market rules they profess and don’t follow.

Friday, August 31, 2007

The Elephant in the Room: The Guns at Virginia Tech

The thoughtful, well-written report on the massacre at Virginia Tech was released in Richmond, Virginia yesterday. The review panel was convened by Virginia Governor Tim Kaine to investigate the killing of thirty-two students and faculty and the wounding of 17 others on April 16 by Seung Hui Cho, a student who died by his own hand on that day.

The review panel, with experts from an array of fields, did a fine job examining the warning signs from the shooter that were observed by so many over a period of years. Despite the warnings, no decisive action was taken to intervene to stop Cho from setting out on his day of hatred and vengeance. The panel found grave fault with the failure of campus authorities to warn the university community following the first shootings which killed two people before the second and much more deadly wave of shootings that came two hours later.

There is one great lacuna in the centre of the review. It concerns the elephant in the room: the easy availability of lethal weapons in Virginia and across the United States.

The authors of the report were not unaware of the problem. When it investigated the role of firearms in the tragedy, the panel reported that it “encountered strong feelings and heated debate from the public. The panel’s investigation focused on two areas: Cho’s purchase of firearms and ammunition, and campus policies toward firearms. The panel recognizes the deep divisions in American society regarding the ready availability of rapid fire weapons and high capacity magazines, but this issue was beyond the scope of this review.”

The statement is realistic. It is also poignant and defeatist.

The review spells out the facts about Cho’s purchase of two weapons with which he carried out the massacre. Cho placed an order online for a Walther P22 pistol with TGSCOM Inc., a company that sells guns via the Internet. He picked up the firearm on February 9, 2007 at a pawnbroker’s shop in Blacksburg, located adjacent to the Virginia Tech campus. On March 13, a month later, in accordance with a Virginia law which allows people to purchase only one handgun every thirty days, he bought a Glock 19 9mm pistol from Roanoke Firearms in Roanoke.

It appears that Cho’s purchase of weapons was in violation of Federal law which does not permit the purchase of firearms by a person who “has been adjudicated as a mental defective or who has been committed to a mental institution.” A special justice of the General District Court in Montgomery County, Virginia found him to be a danger to himself in 2005.

Under federal law, therefore, Cho was not permitted to buy firearms. While the Virginia statute on gun purchases is less clear in the case of persons suffering from psychiatric problems, the point becomes moot when we consider how easy it is to buy guns in Virginia. When Cho purchased the two guns, he filled out the Federal and Virginia forms. The dealers carried out the background check, and since his name did not come up in the databases, the sales were completed. Even if this cursory system had blocked Cho, he could easily have purchased firearms in any case. Under Virginia law, no background checks are required for firearms transfers in the form of gifts. More important, sales by private collectors of guns and sales by private collectors at gun shows require no background checks. Anyone can go to a gun show, pay in cash, and walk out with a weapon. With a weapon in hand, the purchaser can then go anywhere in the US, and the more stringent laws in Massachusetts or other states are bypassed.

In the case of the Virginia Tech shooter, as the review reported: “Minutes after both checks, Cho left the stores in possession of semi-automatic pistols.” Unlike an automatic weapon, with which the trigger is pulled once to unleash a stream of bullets, a semi-automatic pistol requires the trigger to be pulled to fire each shot.

The weapons Cho purchased could be loaded with 10 or 15 round magazines. This would allow a shooter to rapidly fire these shots and then to quickly eject the spent magazine and reload the gun with a fresh one. In October 2004, with the expiry of the federal Assault Weapons Act of 1994, which had banned clips or magazines with over 10 rounds, it became possible to purchase 15 round magazines.

In the weeks and months prior to the massacre, Cho purchased five 10 round magazines for use in the Walther on the Internet from eBay. He bought several 15 round magazines and ammunition from Wal-Mart and Dick’s Sporting Goods stores. By the day of the killings, the shooter had two highly lethal weapons and almost 400 bullets in magazines and loose ammunition.

Ludicrous as it may seem, during its public hearings, the review panel heard from gun advocates that Virginia Tech and other campuses would be safer if those legally armed with concealed weapons were on site to respond to a shooter such as Cho. The review reported that it could not find evidence of a single case, anywhere in the United States, where an armed citizen had ever intervened to challenge a campus shooter.

Virginia Tech, prior to the massacre, had mounted a ban on the carrying of weapons on campus. The review reported that it was not altogether clear whether this ban could be enforced to prevent a person with a Virginia permit to carry a concealed weapon from doing so.

The review recommended that Virginia extend background checks, the kind that Cho passed, to the purchase of firearms sales at guns shows. (Don’t hold your breath for even this mild change in a state the prizes guns as much as Virginia.) It also called on the state to clarify whether universities have the right to ban guns on campus at all.

There was not a word in the review calling on the state or the nation to curtail the sale of semi-automatic weapons that can be used to carry out massacres on campuses, in office buildings or on the streets.

What is striking is the painstaking reconstruction in the review of every development in Cho’s life en route to the massacre. Americans always do this with remarkable precision, in the investigations of the four presidential assassinations in their history, and in the recapitulation of massacres and other high-profile murders. This review has opened a debate about privacy laws and the right of institutions to share information about potentially dangerous individuals. But the review has done nothing to reopen the debate about gun control in the United States.

Guns and the gun culture constitute the elephant in the room. For the foreseeable future, the elephant is staying put. Guessing which weird person could become a killer is the American alternative to gun control.

As long as our neighbours believe that it is OK for people to purchase weapons to hunt other people, Canada needs more customs officers at the border, and those officers need to be much more vigilant in checking for weapons entering our country.

Monday, August 27, 2007

U.S. Steel Takes Over Stelco: Requiem for what was once a Canadian Owned Industry

US Steel, historically the mighty American rival of Stelco, the Steel Company of Canada, has reached a deal to take over its Canadian rival for $1.16 billion. With Stelco in foreign hands, the once domestically owned industry will be wholly under the control of companies based outside of Canada.

Last year, Dofasco was sold to foreign interests and earlier this year, Algoma Steel and Regina-based Ipsco were purchased by foreign companies.

The take over of Stelco marks the end of the century long saga of Canadian owned steel companies. The steel story was a remarkable one because unlike automobiles and petroleum, where foreign owners predominated from near the beginning, Canadian companies ran the industry.

And it didn’t happen by accident. What made the Steel Company of Canada especially noteworthy when it was established in 1910 was that the company reversed the usual pattern of Canadian economic relations with the outside world. Instead of exporting a raw product for manufacture elsewhere, Stelco imported American iron ore and coal to produce steel in Hamilton, Ontario. It was Canada’s rejoinder to Pittsburgh.

Stelco was created as a deliberate act of national policy, involving both British and Canadian entrepreneurship. The notion was that an industrialized country required its own steel industry, owned and controlled domestically.

Recently the C.D. Howe Institute---that ever faithful lobbyist on behalf of foreign ownership and deeper integration of Canada with the US---released a report arguing that this country needs far more foreign investment.

The C.D. Howe Institute and its scribes are wedded to the theory that all mergers and acquisitions are beneficial because they promote greater productivity and higher returns on invested capital. The only thing this theory ignores is the real world. Repeated studies have shown that in manufacturing industries, Research and Development facilities and parts, components, and capital equipment manufacturers grow up around a central producer such as Stelco. These networks are crucial sources of cutting edge innovation and of employment, much of it highly skilled. Shift the ownership of the key company outside Canada and the R and D and other network functions will also shift outside the country. The net result, as will be the case with Stelco, will be lost innovative activity and employment.

The timing of this boggles the mind. The middle to long term outlook for producers of steel and other commodities is extremely bright in today’s global economy. Only a dull and unimaginative business community was choose this as the moment to lose its control of the steel industry, and only a witless government would stand by and allow it to happen.

How much of Canada would the C.D. Howe Institute put up for sale? Based on their track record---all of it. Perhaps their final act, when everything else has been sold, will be to put themselves up for sale and turn out the lights.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Why John Tory is Wrong on Public Funding for Faith Based Schools

Ontario Conservative leader John Tory has introduced a classic, indeed hoary, issue into the upcoming provincial election campaign: whether we ought to publicly fund faith based schools.

Tory has pledged that if his Conservatives win office, they will extend full public funding to faith based schools in addition to the funding which already exists for the Ontario Catholic Separate School System. According to his estimate this would cost taxpayers about $400 million annually. His argument is simple, not to say simple-minded: if it is fair for Catholic schools to receive public funding then it is fair for funding to be extended to schools of other faiths, including Jewish and Muslim schools.

History and equity don’t always result in neat solutions, as anyone familiar with the history of Canada and of Ontario, in particular, ought to know.

The case for a separate school system in Ontario was a part of a broader political compact that made Confederation possible. Without that compact, there would be no Canada. In the colonies that made up the future Canadian federation in the 1860s, there was a fundamental demographic divide. Looking back on that era from our day, we are inclined to see the divide as linguistic, English and French. At least as important in that day, however, was the divide between Protestants and Roman Catholics.

The Canadian Constitution, originally the BNA Act of 1867 (Constitution Act of 1867), lays bare the political compact of the 1860s. Under the constitution, Roman Catholic minorities outside Quebec, and Catholics and Protestants in Quebec, were given the authority to maintain the school systems they had established by the time of the union. Section 93 of the BNA Act stipulated that:

“In and for each Province the Legislature may exclusively make Laws in relation to Education, subject and according to the following Provisions:

1. Nothing in any such Law shall prejudicially affect any Right or Privilege with respect to Denominational Schools which any Class of Persons have by Law at the Union:
2. All the Powers, Privileges and Duties at the Union by Law conferred and imposed in Upper Canada on the Separate Schools and School Trustees of the Queen’s Roman Catholic Subjects shall be and the same are hereby extended to the Dissentient Schools of the Queen’s Protestant and Roman Catholic Subjects in Quebec:
3. Where in any Province a System of Separate or Dissentient Schools exists by Law at the Union or is thereafter established by the Legislature of the Province, an Appeal shall lie to the Governor General in Council from any Act or Decision of any Provincial Authority affecting any Right or Privilege of the Protestant or Roman Catholic Minority of the Queen’s Subjects in relation to education:
4. In case any such Provincial Law as from Time to Time seems to the Governor General in Council requisite for the Executive of the Provisions of this Section is not made, or in case any Decision of the Governor General in Council on any Appeal under this Section is not duly executed by the proper Provincial Authority in that Behalf, then and in every such Case, and as far as the Circumstances of each Case require, the Parliament of Canada may make remedial Laws for the due Execution of the Provisions of this Section and of any Decision of the Governor General in Council under this Section.”

Because there was not much public funding of education in 1867, the level of funding for these systems was left open for provincial governments to determine. This meant that the Catholic minority in Ontario had a constitutional right to its school system, but that the level of funding of the system was a matter for politicians at Queen’s Park to debate.

Over the past several decades there has been significant evolution of the constitution on this set of issues in a number of provinces, resulting in several types of systems. For instance, in 1997, section 93 of the Constitution Act of 1867 was amended to remove the application of paragraphs 1 through 4 (cited above) to Quebec. Instead of the previous arrangement which arose out of the compact of 1867, the amendment allowed for the reorganization of school boards in Quebec along linguistic lines. Instead of Catholic and Protestant school systems, there were to be French and English language systems. The amendment of 1997 was the culmination of a debate in Quebec on the issue that began in the early 1960s.

Ontario evolved in a different way. The province had no intention of becoming officially bilingual as New Brunswick had and showed no desire to reconstruct its schools systems in the way Quebec had. It’s not hard to see why this was the case. In Ontario, the Roman Catholic population is not predominantly French speaking. In the 2001 Census, 34 per cent of Ontarians declared themselves to be Roman Catholic, while only 4.4 per cent of the population is made up of people whose first language is French. There are 3.86 million Catholics in Ontario, compared with 3.9 million Protestants. Sixteen per cent of Ontarians described themselves as having no religion. Eighty-five per cent of Ontarians have designated themselves as Protestant, Catholic or as having no religion. Other religious groups in the province include members of various Christian Orthodox faiths, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs.

As a consequence of historical evolution, Ontario now has two very large publicly funded school systems, the Public School System and the Catholic Separate School System. In the mid 1980s, at a time when all three major political parties in the province supported the idea, full funding was extended to the Catholic Separate School System.
About 95 per cent of Ontario’s children attend one of these two systems. The systems operate in all parts of the provinces and ratepayers devote a portion of their property taxes to whichever of the systems they support. In municipal elections, voters choose trustees for the system they support (they can also support the French public system, which is much smaller).

No abstract thinker starting from scratch would establish a system such as the one we now have in Ontario. But our system was not created from scratch. It evolved over a span of more than a century and a half. For much of that time, the province was deeply divided between a dominant Protestant community, in which the Orange Order held great power, and a minority Catholic community. The public school system, as recently as my own days in it five decades ago, was really a Protestant system, with Protestant prayers and religious observances. Today, the public system is a genuinely secular system, to which people of all faiths or non-faiths can send their children. Alongside it is an enormous Catholic system that delivers a high quality of education to the children who attend it. The latter system is replete with teachers with a very wide range of views on all subjects. It is a system---I have had the pleasure of speaking to students in separate schools on a number of occasions---that opens the minds of students to the world around them.

No one in his or her right mind would seriously suggest that the separate school system ought to be shut down or merged with the public system. Such a drastic and unwarranted course would do a grave disservice to the young people of the province and would visit religious divisions and strife on us that we have successfully put behind us.

It is natural that some men and women of other faiths now make the case that public funds ought to be used to pay for the education of their children in their own faith based schools. It is, however, not in the best interest of Ontario for us to accede to that demand. Our society has an immense and overriding interest in keeping public education strong. This is a time when there are growing pressures among the wealthy and the privileged to strengthen private schools, to have us take the path of inequality that has been taken with lamentable results in Britain and the United States. Adding to the pressures from private schools, the public funding of a potentially long list of faith based schools, would condemn our public system to an uncertain future.

Estimates have been made that about fifty thousand students would have their faith based educations funded by John Tory’s proposition. It might start there, but it certainly wouldn’t end there. Over time, full funding would encourage tens of thousands of parents now sending their children to public schools to enroll them in parochial schools of one variety or another. That pressure on the public system would likely motivate still more wealthy parents to abandon public education.

To be fit to serve as premier of Ontario, a complex society with its own unique history, a leader ought to demonstrate a large measure of judgment, understanding and wisdom. In floating this campaign promise, John Tory has come up short.