Posts from our progressive community

Oh no. Poor Stephen Harper. He just can't get a break from that horrible senate scandal. 

As if having the hand of Pamela Wallin coming at him in his dreams, making it look like a sex scandal, wasn't bad enough eh? 


Today he had to admit that when he personally examined Pammy's expenses and declared them "satisfactory."

He might have spoken too soon. 
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In a piece titled "An Inconvenient Truth" (stolen from this documentary), anti-choice and anti-feminist Lakritz regurgitates the dog-eared lies that fetus fetishists habitually spew about abortion.

Lakritz uses these fabrications to spin her attack on Dr Henry Morgentaler.
When the University of Western Ontario in London awarded him an honorary doctorate eight years ago, he said: “Well-loved children grow into adults who do not build concentration camps, do not rape and do not murder.”

Interesting, how he only acknowledged the humanity of these unborn babies when he predicted their future criminality; otherwise, they were just non-human blobs to be obliterated. Lakritz claims to locate "gaping holes" in Morgentaler's observation; instead she digs herself deeper and deeper into an irrational and illogical bear-pit of MASSIVE zygote zealotry.

This approach is interestingly enough, echoed in her shrieeeky defense of Israel's apartheid policies and practices where Lakritz denounces Hamas for its decision to segregate a marathon event on the basis of gender.  

This is a deplorable consequence of patriarchal religious ideology — which occurs in many Islamist countries, as well as in Israel, and Central/South America where Catholicism rules many governments.

"An inconvenient truth" about Israel that I've never heard Lakritz denounce is this one. 
Figures show that 57 per cent of Depo Provera users in Israel are Ethiopian, even though the community accounts for less than two per cent of the total population. About 90,000 Ethiopians have been brought to Israel under the Law of Return since the 1980s, but their Jewishness has subsequently been questioned by some rabbis and is doubted by many ordinary Israelis.   Racism and misogyny.

We've dealt with her many fabulations before, at DJ!

But then, Lakritz is only about truthiness and competing against Kay Mère, to be the most bad-ass anti-feminist pro-Israel violence R.E.A.L.WOMAN columnist in Canada.  It's been quite a lucrative pursuit for Babs; Lakritz may well be auditioning to replace her.

It is young people like Rachel Parent who give me some reason to hope for the future:



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Thanks to alternative media, Canada's recent denigration of all things U.N. begins to make sense. Just another instance of how we have become a renegade nation under the Harper cabal.

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This is seriously upsetting. I’d expect this kind of thing from a Conservative government—kind of goes with the territory. But from my party? NDP Premier Greg Selinger has a lot to answer for. First Nations communities continue to be homeless... Dr.Dawg http://drdawgsblawg.ca/

We are too busy with our lives that we hardly notice the wonders of the nature.

CounterPunch recently carried a lament for The Silent Death of the American Left.  It offers useful insights for the gristled remnant of Canada's once proud political Left that has now fallen happy victim to the black hole of political compression, the flaccid centrism that afflicts us today.   The question stands for us as well - is there really a Left movement in Canada any longer?


There is, of course, a Left ideology, a Left of the mind, a Left of theory and critique. But is there a Left movement?

Does the Left exist as an oppositional political, cultural or economic force? Is anyone intimidated or restrained by the Left? Is there a counterforce to the grinding machinery neoliberal capitalism and its political managers?


Instead the Left seems powerless to coalesce, to translate critique into practice, to mobilize against wars, to resist incursions against basic civil liberties, powerless to confront rule by the bondholders and hedgefunders, unable to meaningfully obstruct the cutting edge of a parasitical economic system that glorifies greed while preying on the weakest and most destitute, and incapable of confronting the true legacy of the man they put their trust in.

This is the politics of exhaustion. We have become a generation of leftovers. We have reached a moment of historical failure that would make even Nietzsche shudder.

We stand on the margins, political exiles in our own country, in a kind of mute darkness, a political occlusion, increasingly obsessed, as the radical art historian Tim Clark put it a few years ago in a disturbing essay in New Left Review, with the tragedy of our own defeat.

Consider this. Two-thirds of the American electorate oppose the ongoing war in Afghanistan. An equal amount objected to intervention in Libya. Even more recoil at the grim prospect of entering the Syrian theater.
Yet there is no antiwar movement to translate that seething disillusionment into action. There are no mass demonstrations. No systematic efforts to obstruct military recruiting. No nationwide strikes. No campus walkouts. No serious divestment campaigns against companies involved in drone technology.

Similar popular disgust is evident regarding the imposition of stern austerity measures during a prolonged and enervating recession. But once again this smoldering outrage has no political outlet in the current political climate, where both parties have fully embraced the savage bottom line math of neoliberalism.

Homelessness, rampant across America, is a verboten topic, unmentioned in the press, absent from political discourse. Hunger, a deepening crisis in rural and urban America, is a taboo subject, something left to religious pray-to-eat charities or the fickle whims of corporate write-offs.


The environment is unraveling, thread by thread, right before our eyes. Each day brings more dire news. Amphibians are in stark decline across North America. Storms of unimaginable ferocity are strafing the Great Plains week after week. The Arctic will soon be ice-free. The water table is plummeting in the world’s greatest aquifer. The air is carcinogenic in dozens of California cities. The spotted owl is still going extinct. Wolves are beginning gunned down by the hundreds across the Rocky Mountains. Bees, the great pollinators, are disappearing coast-to-coast, wiped out by chemical agriculture. Hurricane season now lasts from May to December. 
And about all the environmental movement can offer in resistance are a few designer protests against a pipeline which is already a fait accompli.

Our politics has gone sociopathic and liberals in America have been pliant to every abuse, marinated in the toxic silt of Obama’s mordant rhetoric. They eagerly swallow every placebo policy Obama serves them, dutifully defending every incursion against fundamental rights. And each betrayal only serves to make his adoring retinue crave his smile; his occasional glance and nod all the more urgently. Still others on the dogmatic Left circle endlessly, like characters consigned to their eternal roles by Dante, in the ideological cul-de-sac of identity politics.

How much will we stomach before rising up? A fabricated war, a looted economy, a scalded atmosphere, a despoiled gulf, the loss of habeas corpus, the assassination of American citizens…

One looks in vain across this vast landscape of despair for even the dimmest flickers of real rebellion and popular mutiny, as if surveying a nation of somnambulists.

We remain strangely impassive in the face of our own extinction.

I see that Shelley Glover, the Conservative M.P. for St. Boniface riding, is in a spot of trouble. It seems that the lady who practically levitates out of her House of Commons seat to lead a standing ovation each time her dear leader deigns to speak could be suspended from that seat should Elections Canada have its way.

Somewhat reminiscent of the campaign irregularities that forced the resignation of Peter Penashue and later led to his defeat in a byelection, Glover, along with fellow traveller James Bezan, the Conservative MP for Selkirk-Interlake, failed to file campaign documents from the 2011 election. Letters sent to the Speaker of the House advised "that an elected candidate shall not continue to sit or vote as members of the House of Commons pending the filing of complete and accurate returns”.

Glover has filed an appeal, explaining the problem this way:

“This is an accounting dispute between the campaign and Elections Canada.”

Predictably, party-loyalist-masquerading-as-impartial-Member-of-Parliament Andrew Scheer, the Speaker of the House, said he is awaiting the court decisions before taking any action.

Meanwhile, I thought readers might enjoy a 'greatest hits' compilation video of the 'honourable' member from St. Boniface:


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…is nothing short of bizarre! And Pit bill Baird’s contention that the Grit and Dipper support for the treaty is somehow related to reintroducing the Gun Registry is stuff from a freaking alternate universe! Seriously? Has the moral compass of the CPC gone that wacky??? (2) Trashy, Ottawa, Ontario

The standard narrative on Nigel Wright seems to be that he is a straight arrow who took one for the boss. But Linda McQuaig suggests that narrative is what the Harperites would like you to believe. The truth is more complicated:

Less attention has been paid to Wright’s role as one of the Harper Conservatives’ top bagmen.
In addition to being a key player in Stephen Harper’s rise to power and the push to “unite the right” a decade ago, Wright, a Bay Street insider who served as managing director of the powerful private equity firm Onex, has been deeply involved in the money side of conservative politics.
Wright was one of three founding directors of Conservative Fund Canada, which was set up in 2003 to finance the new conservative movement in its bid to bring about a conservative revolution in Canada —an aspiration Wright strongly shares.
Until becoming Harper’s chief of staff in 2010, Wright spent seven years on the board of the fund, along with corporate high-flier Senator Irving Gerstein.Wright and Gerstein developed the fund into an effective fundraising machine that underwrote Conservative election campaigns and developed the party’s sophisticated computer systems. They also battled Elections Canada over the “in and out” scandal — Wright is named in court documents — in which the Conservative party eventually pled guilty to election law violations and paid hefty fines for using a complex scheme that resulted in campaign overspending. 
Money is the mother's milk of politics. And that is particularly true of the Conservative political apparatus. Senators Duffy and Wallin brought in money, and -- as recent emails have revealed -- Duffy expected to be compensated for his services.

McQuaig wonders if Wright's bank account would have been replenished by party funds:

Even if Harper didn’t “know” about the payment — just as Bill Clinton didn’t “know” Monica Lewinsky — there’s still the question of where the $90,000 came from. While Wright may have written the cheque on his own account, might he have expectations of reimbursement from party funds or wealthy Conservative donors?
It's always been hard to believe that Wright's motives were purely altruistic:

The Conservative narrative about Wright recklessly freelancing a private solution to the Duffy problem seems out of sync with what is known about Wright — that he’s a team-playing party loyalist who is highly disciplined (getting up at 4 a.m. to run 20 kilometres), with a strong connection to the money-raising side of the party.
The Conservatives are all about money. And money is the source of political corruption.

In honour of Canadian Environment Week — currently underway amidst accelerating tar sands development, hot on the heels of withdrawals from the Kyoto Protocol and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification — let us reflect upon what the federal government, if it were so inclined, could be doing differently. In other words, broadly speaking, how might Canada move beyond the symbolic in pursuit of true environmental sustainability?

1. Get serious about climate change.

By and large, there are three basic policy tools available to the government here: standards, carbon taxes, and cap-and-trade. To the extent that they have acted at all, the Harper Conservatives, in line with the Americans, have primarily gone the route of standards (such as fuel efficiency requirements and sector-by-sector regulations). This is a somewhat surprising move since standards are known for being “command and control,” while carbon taxes and cap-and-trade, regularly decried by the Conservatives (although they did briefly favour the latter), are considered more market-oriented.

Unfortunately, the standards that have been implemented so far by the Canadian government do not go far enough. The three major types of policy tools may have different implications with respect to simplicity, predictability, cost-effectiveness, and comprehensiveness, but in the end, the most important question is how stringent they are. We are getting rather late in the game of dealing with climate change, and it is high time we exploit every mechanism we have at our disposal.

2. Take advantage of our federal system of government.

In a federation like Canada, where responsibility for protecting nature is shared between the federal and provincial governments, environmental policy can get messy. But if this overlapping jurisdiction is accepted and handled wisely, then sometimes environmental progress can emerge out of competition between the two levels. Political scientist Kathryn Harrison dubs this kind of arrangement “unilateralism,” in which the feds and the provinces pursue their environmental goals independently. That way, they effectively check one another’s work. If one level of government abandons its responsibilities, there is still the second to fall back upon.

Sadly, this approach is not one that is embraced by the current federal government. The Harper Conservatives have pursued equivalency agreements with their provincial counterparts, in which provinces forfeit their rights to implement independent environmental assessments on certain key projects, allowing the feds alone to call the shots. This may avoid duplication of efforts, but the savings come at the expense of the natural world. The environment would be far better off if we embraced all the advantages Canadian federalism has to offer.

3. Enshrine environmental rights in the Constitution.

Environmental lawyer David R. Boyd came out with two books on environmental rights last year. He finds that 147 countries from virtually every region of the world have explicitly inserted environmental rights or responsibilities into their national constitutions. His work shows that the impact of these measures extends far beyond mere symbolism, with countries that boast green-tinged constitutions demonstrating stronger environmental performance. In many cases, governments rewrite legislation to comply with the environmental provisions of their constitutions and courts even force their governments to change course.

Anyone who recalls the last few decades of Canadian history knows that amending the Constitution is no easy task, but the fact that we are part of a dwindling minority of nation states that do not prioritize environmental protection in this manner should serve as a wake-up call. The natural environment is not some trivial matter to be tossed back and forth by the government of the day. It is the life support system we all depend upon, and it deserves at least as much pride of place in the supreme law of the land as freedom of speech and the right to vote.

This post appears on rabble.ca.

Filed under: Canadian Politics, Environment Tagged: Canadian Environment Week, climate change, Conservative Party, environmental rights, federalism, global warming, Stephen Harper

There couldn't have been a greater contrast between the two political leaders. There couldn't have been a clearer sign that the Con regime is rotting, like a fish, from the head down.

On one side there was Tom Mulcair, controlled, dignified, asking short direct questions about the sordid senate scandal.

On the other there was Stephen Harper, squirming like an eel, dodging most questions, and lashing out like a political thug.
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