Just as I was starting to panic and think that I would have nothing to write about for my next blog, Mr. Harper came through for me in his most recent decision to attend the Copenhagen climate change meeting. Not that I think he shouldn’t attend it, I do – but the fact that he wasn’t going to attend until Obama decided to reminds me of high school, or maybe even junior high. Now I understand that rubbing elbows with Obama is probably a big thrill, one I would enjoy too, but seeing as Alberta alone emits more pollution than some small countries, I think Mr. Harper should have been attending regardless of what his US counterpart was doing that day – because it is the right thing to do, not the popular thing.

Like many of us years ago, I watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. However, unlike many of you, I made the mistake of watching The Day After Tomorrow right after it. The combination of the two scared the hell out of me. If you’ve seen the two films you understand what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, basically The Day After Tomorrow is like if An Inconvenient Truth was a movie and not a documentary: the world goes into another ice age because the North Atlantic current shuts down from melting ice caps and Canada gets wiped out by snow and ice; only the Southern hemisphere is unaffected. Now I know it’s just a movie and everything, but the science is basically true, and to me, that’s freakin’ scary. We’re talking doomsday stuff here, and need I remind anyone that 2012 is right around the corner. I’m not suggesting we base federal policy on the Mayan calendar, nor am I preaching a doomsday is imminent, but if we continue on this path, we will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sure it sells big bucks in the theatres, but I’d like theatres to be around in the next few decades and maybe more after that, I mean, I do have nieces and nephews.
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Shawn Graham and Jean Charest announce the proposed sale of New Brunswick Power

In the past few weeks New Brunswick has been lucky enough to enjoy a break from the regularly scheduled swine flu hysteria. Thanks to Premier Shawn Graham we have been jolted from our H1N1-induced torpor. While everyone’s attention was focused on fighting over vaccines, Premier Graham and Quebec Premier Jean Charest were working out a deal that would see New Brunswick give up total control of its power assets by selling NB Power to Hydro Quebec. In spite of Premier Graham’s mantra of “self-sufficiency” for our little have-not province, he is selling out our energy future and doing it for a fraction of what the assets are actually worth. The vast majority of rate cuts will benefit only large industrial users, cutting small businesses and residential users off from the spoils, all by government design.
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The Canadian government's bureaucracy is hiding the ineffectiveness of our current political system.

My esteemed colleagues here at InformedVote.ca have done an amazing job over the last week bringing to light non-publicized, yet incredibly important facts and figures normally lost in the massive bureaucratic vacuum that is organizing and leading this country of ours down the road to…where? I no longer know what to think. What are we achieving as a country? Delinquent on our promises to reduce emissions, maintain economic integrity, fight terrorism and protect social services, it’s becoming obvious to me that Canadians as a whole have lost their idealism. We can blame our politicians all we want, but the sad fact is that these public figures we’re so quick to criticize are elected by us, the Canadian public.

Once every few years, a steadily declining number of us don our thinking caps, pay attention to a few of the insults thrown back and forth between political parties, and decide to grant stewardship of this great nation to the group that appears to be the least ignorant, arrogant and threatening.
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Journalist Amanda Lindhout and photographer Nigel Brennan

Yesterday, Canadian journalist Amanda Lindhout and Australian photographer Nigel Brennan were released from captivity. They were held by Somali criminals (or freedom fighters) for fifteen months. Their release was secured by a ransom finally paid by the efforts of their families, friends and neighbours. The money was raised through fundraisers, the selling of family belongings like Brennan’s parent’s car and home and help from professional negotiators. The question was raised many times over the last fifteen months and constantly in the hours since their release: should the Canadian and Australian governments have done more to help?

Of course our governments don’t pay ransoms, nor do they negotiate with terrorists and nobody (or at least I’m not) is suggesting that they should have done those things. However, there are a great many other things the government could have been doing. They didn’t seem to have any interest at all in Lindhout’s case. There was not even an appeal to the Canadian people to come together to help out a fellow national. Most people didn’t know about Amanda’s case until the one year anniversary of her captivity, and many people still don’t know.
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The last several weeks have seen the development of the Afghan detainee story unfold in multifaceted directions.  First we had the testimony of senior level bureaucrat Richard Colvin, whom after serving a stint in Afghanistan and numerous other positions as an overseas diplomat and being “promoted” to the top intelligence position representing Canada in the United States, comes before the Special Committee on the Afghanistan Mission and describes what some of us had already known: torture is going on in Afghanistan. Several international organizations have already reported that the NDS (National Directorate of Security) was torturing or allowing the torture of detainees handed over by Canadian soldiers. Colvin places this on a backdrop of poor documentation and negligent attention to warnings from him to the Canadian government and senior military officials.

Upon confrontation in the house the government has switched their stance on this issue numerous times. They began by saying that there were no allegations of torture and, at least at first, lambasted Colvin as a rogue bureaucrat who could not be trusted. This wouldn’t have sat well with the always micromanaging Stephen Harper, whom I’m sure doesn’t want the opposition to get a foothold on anything, and the frame quickly changed from criticizing Colvin, to criticizing the credibility of the reports and not the person. This shifted again when Harper came back to referring to Colvin’s reports for a period of eighteen months as mere “evaluations.” In my honest opinion, this constant reframing of the governments narrative calls into question the complicity of senior PMO officials, ministers and even the Prime Minister. There are simply too many questions left unanswered here. We know that the Liberal Government signed a transfer agreement some weeks before losing the election in 2006/2007, but what about before then? What kind of agreement was in place before the Conservatives took power? I think a full scale inquiry dating back to the beginning of the war and our operations in Afghanistan is necessary so we can have a proper examination of the level of accountability that existed in regards to the transfer of detainees.
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According to Campaign 2000, child poverty in Canada remains a major issue.

On Tuesday, Campaign 2000 released its annual report on child poverty in Canada, and propounded an alarming statistic. According to the organization’s estimates, ten per cent of Canadian kids currently live in poverty. Among First Nations children, this figure is even more disturbing: one in four.

The statistics represent a lack of progress over the last 20 years, according to Campaign 2000, in terms of combating child poverty in Canada.

The report also mentions that the disparity between rich and poor appears to be widening in our country, as since 1989, the average income of families with children in the wealthiest tenth of the population increased by 33 per cent compared to an increase of just 16 per cent for those in the poorest tenth of the population.

Campaign 2000 places particular emphasis within the report on the plight of Canada’s Aboriginal people, stating that the Canadian Aboriginal population has increased by 45 per cent since 1996, compared to eight per cent in the non-Aboriginal population. Meanwhile, Aboriginal people face higher rates of unemployment and sub-standard living conditions than their non-Aboriginal counterparts.
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That’s Wilfrid Laurier from Quebec. He has no future. He does nothing nowadays, but sit in the library, day after day, reading books.
- A journalist commenting in 1884. Wilfrid Laurier became Prime Minister in 1896.

There are great life lessons to be gleaned by watching politicians in action or by reading political history. This should not be surprising, since politicians are recruited from our own society, and they have the same life issues as everyone else. In fact, many issues they grapple with are universal in nature and people around the world also grapple with these same issues in some form.

The foregoing quote underscores a great universal lesson. Success often flows to those with grit and determination who do not let setbacks hold them down. Laurier is just one of many politicians who languished in opposition for years, but through diligence and patience was able to eventually achieve power. Sir John A. Macdonald, Mackenzie King, Abraham Lincoln, and Winston Churchill all experienced major setbacks during their careers, although they are remembered more for their victories and successes. Dalton McGuinty is a recent example: few expected him to be successful, but through discipline, hard work and openness to advice, he was able to bounce back and achieve two back-to-back majorities.
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During the 2008 US elections I was living in the United States. I saw countless ad campaigns that disparaged the speaker’s opponents with allegations of every kind, on both federal and state levels. Some of these allegations were true, though exaggerated, and others were wildly fallacious. One could hardly help but notice how infrequently the candidates actually spoke about themselves or where they stood on issues.

I rapidly realized that in a country where few voters would take the time to seek out the truth about how their chosen candidate had voted or the changes he or she had made in the positions they currently held, these short television ads were going to be the basis of the decisions they made. These campaigns were no longer about who had the best ideas, the best track record or the most promising history. It was about who had the nicest suit, the fullest head of hair and the most entrancing manner of speaking. It was all a show.
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Listening to the retailers association, the RCMP and Imperial Tobacco crying the blues over black-market tobacco is like listening to the cheating husband, his mistress and the wife lamenting over getting too much sex, not enough sex, and not wanting sex.

The first is crying wolf as they benefit from the problem, the second is crying about not getting enough when they aren’t doing anything to advance their cause, and the third is crying foul when they are possibly the source of the problem.

In every province except Quebec, there is an electronic program available to the government to not only monitor tobacco purchases on reserves, but to police off-reserve individuals and make sure they don’t get access to exemptions on tobacco that they are not legally entitled to.

You see, black-market tobacco is not the only problem.  There is also the issue of tax exempt tobacco, legally obtained for the purpose of resale on reserve, and then being sold illegally to off-reserve purchasers. This adds another $1.5 billion in fraud to the $2 billion already mentioned.
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Canadian soldiers and a captured Afghan insurgent

Disturbing allegations regarding the treatment of Taliban prisoners captured by Canadian forces in Afghanistan have resurfaced this week, after Parliamentary testimony by Richard Colvin, the second highest ranked member of Canada’s diplomatic service in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2007.

Colvin appeared before a special Commons committee on Wednesday November 18, 2009 and steadfastly reaffirmed previous statements he has made that senior Conservative government officials and Canadian military personnel had been aware of serious allegations that Taliban prisoners had been subjected to systematic abuse since at least 2006, that such treatment was part of sanctioned government policy, and that those he attempted to raise the issue with made it clear to him that these charges were not to be brought to light at a time when Prime Minister Stephen Harper was attempting to persuade an increasingly skeptical public that Canada’s Afghan mission was being conducted in strict accordance with international law, particularly when dealing with captured Taliban fighters.
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