On February 5th, I commented on Obama’s plan to impose a $500,000 salary cap on U.S. executives who were holding onto taxpayer dollars for dear life.

Seven months later Obama has made bold moves in the right direction. Today the Treasury department ordered seven corporations, which have yet to repay their bailout money, to cut executive salaries and bonuses in half. The top 25 highest paid executives will have a $500,000 salary cap imposed on them and will see their perks capped at $25,000. The seven companies affected are: Bank of America Corp., American International Group Inc., Citigroup Inc., General Motors, GMAC, Chrysler and Chrysler Financial.

The Federal Reserve also weighed in, suggesting the monitoring of pay packages at thousands of banks to ensure salaries do not continue spiraling out of control.
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It’s been a fascinating month of revelations for Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to say the least.

On October 3, Harper drew a standing ovation for his performance with famed cellist YoYo Ma at the black tie event for the National Arts Centre gala.

This yearly event is a showcase for the rich and powerful elite in Ottawa society, with all the pomp and ceremony that such a prestigious, invitation only soiree commands.

One would think that should the Prime Minister wish to entertain the assembled dignitaries, his preference might run to light classical music, or perhaps nothing more radical than Michael Buble.

Which only made his choice of The Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends” all the more unexpected.
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We may have escaped a general election this fall, but four ridings are going to the polls November 9 for by-elections. The two Quebec ridings will likely remain BQ, but the other two ridings, one each in British Columbia and Nova Scotia, are in play, largely between the Conservatives and the NDP. The outcomes won’t shift the balance of power in Ottawa, but they could test Harper’s ability to win a majority. And for child, youth, and family advocates, they isolate and juxtapose these two parties’ family policies in a way that’s usually not possible.

In the BC riding of New Westminster-Coquitlam, there are four candidates, but it’s really a two-horse race between NDP Finn Donnelly and Conservative Diana Dilworth. This riding has swung between NDP and Conservative for years, both candidates have been municipal politicians for years, and both work for environmental non-profits. Donnelly, born and raised in the area, is a local hero for twice swimming the length of the Fraser River to bring attention to sustainability issues. Dilworth’s bio notes that, as a single parent of two adult children, she understands the stresses of raising a family. But she also understands business, having worked in the public, private, and non-profit sectors, and having run her own business.
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Prince of Pot Marc Emery, in a familiar pose

We Canadians can all sleep a little bit easier at night.

That’s because Marc Emery, Vancouver’s Prince of Pot and officially one of the DEA’s most wanted kingpins, is off the streets and in prison, awaiting extradition to the United States on drug and money-laundering charges. His capture represents a major victory in the War on Drugs.

For ten years now, Emery has corrupted the very fabric of our society by selling marijuana seeds and donating virtually all of the after-tax proceeds to cannabis-friendly organizations with a mind to “overgrow the government.” A pot activist and retailer since 1994, Emery has had many run-ins with the law. 10 arrests, in addition to police raids in 1996, 1998 and 2005 of his Hemp BC headquarters would have crippled a lesser evildoer, but Emery (and I ask that my readers forgive the analogy) is as resilient as a weed, unerring in his insubordination.
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It’s official, in 2016 the Olympics will shed it’s gracious light on the Brazilian state of Rio De Janeiro in the city of the same name, with it’s stunning beaches, famous statues and vibrant culture. As the world turns it’s attention to the famous city it cannot possible ignore the violence in the slums and favelas.

Favelas are shantytowns that look like mountains of small boxes with windows and doors made of tin and red brick. The residents of Brazil’s favelas will not likely be attending the Olympics, many of them will not likely be making it to 2016. It was recently reported on the LEAP blog (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) that 2,757 homicides were registered in the city of Rio De Janeiro in 2008. It is estimated that the police are responsible for 1 in 5 of these killings.

The low-income areas have erupted into a battlefield where drug wars are being fought between the police and gangs like the Terceiro Comando. These battles are conducted over the heads of families who may or may not be involved in the illegal drug market. Men, women and children are dieing in the hundreds. Children especially, often these gangs prefer to use children to do their dirty work as they receive shorter prison sentences.
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My political action, or my theory (insomuch as I can be said to have one) can be expressed very simply: create counterweights.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Tens of thousands of airplanes successfully land and take off without incident at major Canadian airports every year. There were significantly fewer traffic accidents in North America during the past five years. The Prime Minister shoved a protester today. A celebrity actor was arrested at the airport for illicit drug possession.

Which news story is likely to be reported heavily in the newspapers and blogs? Which ones will attract the most attention from readers? It is a good time to be alive, but one unfortunate aspect of today’s times is that we live in an age of instant entertainment and political correctness, in which bad news is reported more frequently than good news and in which people are quick to judge and criticize others. We give our political leaders a hard time, demanding instant solutions to difficult and complex problems, criticizing them often and rarely praising them. If you were to examine snapshots taken of a senior career politician from his/her first election to the present, you would probably see an individual who has aged significantly more than most people in their demographic cohort, not unlike the photo timelines of petty criminals that the police sometimes show at anti-drug workshops.
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I can’t bring myself to sing the national anthem in public. On the rare occasion (probably the last time I was at a hockey game) where I am required to stand as it plays, I fight the following battle within myself: Sing; No. You’re supposed to; I don’t want to. You’re standing anyway, sing; No, I’ll feel stupid. Isn’t that sad? I’m too cool to sing the Canadian national anthem in a roomful of other Canadians; I haven’t opened my mouth and joined in since elementary school, when it didn’t faze me at all and I belted it out every morning. And I’m not alone – look around your local sporting event – most people are like me, standing silently, waiting for it to be over, or at the very most, mumbling the words quietly under their breath. To be fair, there will always be one or two shameless diehards, bellowing along energetically, bless their hearts.
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Isn’t it great to know that the people running this country can’t even be bothered to read a memo regarding allegations of torture? Apparently memos addressed to Senior Military Officers and Foreign Affairs between 2006 and 2007 (16 in total) were never seen by Stephen Harper or then-Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay. Wow, I mean sure they have a lot of things to read and probably have somebody reading every piece of paper they get sent to deem whether it is worth their time, but anybody with half a brain should know that torture is really not okay, and after the 15th memo might decide to pass on the 16th one.

This leads to one simple conclusion – they read them and didn’t care. Scary!

At least the American’s have acknowledged that these things have happened in their recent history, Guantanamo is even being shut down. There are not many things in US Military Practice that I would want the Canadian government to copy, but this is one of them. Have the decency to admit when you have made a serious judgment error and do what you can to fix it. Don’t give a speech about how you never saw the memo, when there is record of 16 being written.
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I have been following with much interest the downward spiral and final fizzles of Bishop Raymond Lahey’s ignoble and sadly typical priestly career. The media it would seem, on the surface has done everything in its power to flog this story to death and drag the once unjustly good name of Bishop Lahey through the mud. What has shocked me though, is that while interviews of the victims of this once powerful man abound, the public has been left completely ignorant of the sheer influence Lahey once had in Antigonish County. It is staggering, given the number of boys who have now come forward attesting to the Bishop’s pedophilic tendencies, that the focus has been entirely upon Lahey’s ecclesiastic rank and the awful, yet ironic fact that Lahey was in charge of the settlement soon to be paid to survivors of the same cruel form of Catholic charity he also imbibed in. I have been meditating on the appalling morbidity of this and the fact that it did not compel this new round of victims to come forward earlier. This article, rather than merely reporting and commenting on events, tenders a hypothesis (sadly one that has not been raised thus far): that Bishop Lahey was not confronted because of his tremendous influence in the affairs and daily operations of the community of Antigonish.
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I woke an hour earlier than usual this morning to head off to the west-end of Edmonton to locate what now looks to be the last bastion of free parking in the city of Edmonton – Beulah Alliance Church. At eight blocks north of the West Edmonton Mall it was an easy find but a long drive as Edmontonians were caught, not just with their pants down, but with their all-season-radials in all-winter weather. I sought out this particular church amongst the plethora of other Albertan evangelical options not, however, for salvation or bake sales, but for a free bus that would take me to meet none other than Prime Minister Stephen Harper at, what was at the time, an ominous undisclosed location, where he would be speaking about an unnamed topic. Tantalized, I braved almost an hour in slushy gunk to get to the upper-middle class and mostly white riding of Conservative party member Rona Ambrose.
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