rabble.ca Canadian federal election blog

Polling CanWest: Vote Harper!

by Ben Powless

Now we all know the mainstream media has their little biases. Anyone who’s read Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, anything by Bob McChesney, has heard of Judy Rebick, or has read a newspaper would be reasonably able to rhyme off a dozen reasons why our media is inherently conservative (little c).

Yet it’s not so often that we get such a stark reminder about just how much the major papers belonging to CanWest pander so much to the Conservative party.

Yesterday, as I sat by the lake at my mom’s farm, reading about the world economy disintegrating around us, I came upon the editorial in the Ottawa Citizen, fully endorsing the Harperites. And I began to wonder what other Asper-family voiceboxes had done the same.

The Ottawa Citizen followed Harper’s paradigm, and claimed it to be about leadership, and little else (quoting principle and resolve, and not what you do with it – didn’t we learn this lesson in the 1940’s?).

The Vancouver Province couches it is as strong economic resolve in these troubling times (Naomi Klein, anyone?) – we can’t change the captain in rough seas, even if he’s heading for an iceberg, and thinks of us as cargo, not crew. The Vancouver Sun rains sunshine on Harper’s days in office. That animosity to the news media? All forgiven!

The Calgary Herald boasts of his incredible human rights record (have they followed the news?) especially around the Israel-Lebanon conflict. They are touted as scandal-free (have they heard of Chuck Cadman? Aboriginal issues?) and end with “The Calgary Herald endorses Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives.” Though to be fair, they are probably all good buddies, and there’s no harm in that, right?

In much-contested Quebec, the Montreal Gazette pulls no bars in declaring its full support of Harper, but acknowledges they won’t win around Montreal, and calls on readers to vote against the Bloc however they can, after brushing off Quebecois concerns over stiff sentencing and arts cuts.

At least readers in Windsor were treated to a more balanced assessment of party vs. person, acknowledging that the Tories may not be the best representatives in the region.  The National Post held back too, only publishing a disgruntled diatribe against Dion’s language skills, perhaps reserving itself for voting day.

What ever happened to even the pretence of media independence? At least we can be thankful the voice of CanWest has chosen to bare itself for all to see.

So it’s all the more fitting to see such a stirring reminder of why we need independent media and analyses like those found at www.rabble.ca – among others.

Without further comment …

by Sharon Fraser

I have just sent this letter to Avaaz.ca who have written — once again — urging the use of the site VoteForEnvironment.ca as a voting aid.

___________________________________________________

I am very impatient with you people — and I’m not the only one — with your continuing campaign for Elizabeth May in Central Nova.   

Elizabeth May never had a chance to beat Peter MacKay — and she’s still not going to.  The NDP, however, did have a chance but has had to fight, not just the usual opponents who were running but know-it-alls from all over the country who, somehow, seem to think that they have inside knowledge that the people in Central Nova don’t have. 

I guess it’s pretty late for me to be saying this but to Avaaz, VoteForEnvironment and all the other voting busybodies around the country — lay off.  Let the people of Central Nova spend these last hours before the election doing their own thinking — as they’ve always done. 

Peter MacKay is — without much doubt — going back to Ottawa.  If he exercises restraint on Tuesday evening, he may avoid saying thank you to Elizabeth May and her wrong-headed supporters far beyond the borders of Central Nova. 

Yours most sincerely etc. etc. 

Hey, Steve! Thanks for this!

by Bernadette L. Wagner

It’s weird.  Harper doesn’t make these kinds of boo-boos. He makes strategic mistakes but he is not the kind of guy who gets the dates of elections wrong by four months, especially when he’s reading right off the hard copy.  So I figure that either he’s drunk in that clip or this is a dog whistle.

The date, February 14th rung a bell for me, not because of Valentine’s day, but  because February 14, 2008 saw Canada very quietly sign a Bilateral Civil Assistance Plan with the USA.

The plan recognizes the role of each nation’s lead federal agency for emergency preparedness, which in the US is the Department of Homeland Security and in Canada is Public Safety Canada. The plan facilitates the military-to-military support of civil authorities once government authorities have agreed on an appropriate response.

In other words, Dubya can call Steve or Steve can call Dubya and ask for military help.  Really, it’s that easy!  Harper need only give the word and the USA’s Northern Command is here, on Canadian soil, ready, willing and able.  And they’re all raring to go, having just ended a joint conference with Canadian Forces personnel at CFB Halifax where they shared loads of good stuff!

One conference briefing concerned the Civil Assistance Plan, the bilateral Canada-United States plan that facilitates military-to-military cooperation in support of a civil emergency in either country, once agreement for assistance is reached between the two governments. The CAP was signed in February 2008 and, in early September 2008, Canada sent several aircraft to assist with the response to Hurricane Gustav.

“It was the first time we had done this with the CAP,” Christensen said, “and it was important for our senior non-commissioned officer leadership and the Americans to understand what the CAP is all about.”

Of course, we peons don’t get the details.  We’re talking top security stuff, the kind that will take care of terrorism and all those things that our Strong LeaderTM will handle on our behalf.

“[I]n a time of global economic instability,” Harper said with a smirk as he carried on after giving the incorrect E-Day date in his speech.  Yep.  It’s economic instability for the rich right now, that’s for sure.  Destitution and despair for others.  Some have called this economic terrorism.  Others say it’s economic warfare.

But hey, we’ve got PM Steve.  And I think that this Thanksgiving we must be ever so grateful that our Steve the Sweater Guy has taken care of every little thing!

And, y’know, maybe we should each email him and suggest he lay off the booze.  I mean, rilly!  What if there’s a crisis?

Oh! Wait a hold it! I just figured it all out.  PM Steve is just trying to demonstrate that he is not heartless!

Silly me.

—-

Crossposted at the regina mom

The Rich are the New Poor

By Dionne Brand

In recent days I am struck by how many pictures of distraught stockbrokers, stock analysts, bankers, traders, buyers, sellers, I’ve seen in the news. They’ve occupied the focus of web pages, and newspaper front-pages with their dramatic poses. We are alerted to their plight at the start of every newscast, and in extended treatments on cable networks and magasines. Their problem, we are exhorted, is our problem. And no doubt it is – since they’ve been gambling with our labour, our natural resources and our human rights for decades, with abandon, daring and license.  The conservative revolution triumphed in the Reagan era, was embraced by Clintonesque triangulation (doing to the US social safety net what Reagan left undone) and exploded socially and economically in the Bush redux era, culminating in that industry of industries, war. Now it’s all imploding and we are summoned to have sympathy with these men pulling their hair out on television and in newspapers. We are never exhorted so by the powerful to swift and decisive bailouts for working people, or, the poor, the homeless, the sick, the starving - the photographs of these groups that appear do not solicit anything but pity or contempt. Tough, the powerful say to them – it’s the way of the free market. Now here the rich are ‘begging for a handout’ – those words they made so popular when referring to the rest of us. The rich are the new poor. Bankers, from all over the world, fear in their eyes, their hands to their temple, their finger on their bloodshot eyes, their $300 dollar haircuts askew. This is the true image of despair.

I am amused and not a little terrified. What? Nobody left to bilk? No small countries to choke to death on structural adjustment programs? No new wars to gin up the arms industry?

Why don’t we instead overwhelm poverty with $700 billion dollars you ask. Of course not – who would the powerful prey on?

Word up (as the young people say)

A few weeks ago a blogger (no name- apologies- can’t seem to find the blog again) on DailyKos  reminded me of the following from Capital Vol. III Part III (1894) - The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall.

“The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-expansion appear as the starting and the closing point, the motive and the purpose of production; that production is only production for capital and not vice versa…

At a certain high point this increasing concentration in its turn causes a new fall in the rate of profit. The mass of small dispersed capitals is thereby driven along the adventurous road of speculation, credit frauds, stock swindles, and crises…

But as soon as it no longer is a question of sharing profits, but of sharing losses, everyone tries to reduce his own share to a minimum and to shove it off upon another. The class, as such, must inevitably lose. How much the individual capitalist must bear of the loss, i.e., to what extent he must share in it at all, is decided by strength and cunning, and competition then becomes a fight among hostile brothers. The antagonism between each individual capitalist’s interests and those of the capitalist class as a whole, then comes to the surface, just as previously the identity of these interests operated in practice through competition. How is this conflict settled and the conditions restored which correspond to the “sound” operation of capitalist production? The mode of settlement is already indicated in the very emergence of the conflict whose settlement is under discussion. It implies the withdrawal and even the partial destruction of capital…”

Pretty good for 1894. 

The sinister legacy of Trudeau

by Pierre Beaudet

The specter returns, especially in Ontario and BC it seems, where Dion, Jean Chrétien (he dared to) and the other luminaries of the Liberal Party have ‘celebrated’ the legacy. It is amazing how many Canadians can still be fooled by an image. Here in Quebec, Trudeau is less popular than Stephen Harper, which is not to say much. Not because people love the Conservatives. But they still remember the snake who isolated René Lévesque in the constitutional debate by backroom deals with other provincial leaders including, what a shame, NDP Premiers. It’s actually much worse than that.

Trudeau did NOT participate, contrary to the image, in the battle that came to be known as the ‘quiet revolution’. His obsession against nationalism prevented him from joining Lévesque, Gérin-Lajoie and many others, not to forget social movements (especially trade unions) that really overthrew Duplessis and projected Quebec into modernity. Trudeau was also mooding because he could not be the chief, since they were ample quality people around.

He was enough intelligent to see the vacuum in Ottawa, so he got himself in as the guy who would humiliate Quebec. That was his principal mandate and because there was no alternative in Quebec at that time, he was accepted, although with lots of reluctance, basically since he was playing the image of the ‘young lion’. All of this came down in flames rapidly however. In 1970, he put hundreds of people in jail (including this writer) for a pseudo insurrection while in fact, he used the stupidity of our Mickey Mouse guerillas to hit at the social movements and the PQ. Later in 1975, Trudeau was the ‘tough guy’ who crushed trade union resistance through freezing salary increases, supposedly to fight inflation.

In English Canada, Trudeau is sometimes remembered as the person who ‘stood up’ to the US. I don’t know where people get that. During the Vietnam War, Canada was a reliable allied of Washington by providing political support as a US surrogate in the International Commission of Control, whose real mandate was to stop the insurrection in the south. The Canadian military industry in the meantime made huge profits selling guns to the Pentagon, despite many calls from civil society and the NPD. In the 1970s under Trudeau, the dictatorships of Marcos (Philippines) and Suharto (Indonesia) became our ‘best friends’ with Trudeau touring there like a third rate singer. During the military coup of Pinochet in Chile, Canada was not only acquiescent, but provided economic support to the dictatorship by approving international loans. In southern Africa, Trudeau was consistently opposed to impose any sanctions against the apartheid regime and was also hateful of liberation movements.

All of that led to his very prolonged defeat and decline, starting with the election of the PQ in 1976. Instead of recognizing the political fact, he put all his energy in destabilizing Quebec, starting with fraudulent maneuvers in the 1980 referendum. He had the guts to promise Québécois that he would change the constitution, but he really meant that he would centralize Canada further and avoid any serious discussions on the national aspirations of the Québécois. It went down and down like this until his last ‘political movement’ when he succeeded in derailing the deal that Brian Mulroney had cooked up (Meech Lake agreement) in 1991.

This man by himself has played a hugely negative role in aggravating the fractures between Quebec and Canada and not providing any serious leadership to build some defenses against the US domination. Why do people like him in Vancouver or Toronto?  This is another mystery that escapes my small mind.

One could say, it’s gone and away. But it is not. The old guard of the Liberal party is trying to resurface using the son (a pale and mediocre copy of the father). The ‘new’ guard is very hesitant, again thinking that Quebec nationalism is the ‘worse menace». Progressive Canadians, including prominent activists who write in Rabble, still think that the Canadian federal state has to be ‘strong’ and submit the ‘lower levels’ to some sorts of ‘social protection’.

Until this is really confronted, forget about any possibility of building progressive politics in this land.

Politics during a meltdown

By Marc Lee

What irks me about the Harperites’ non-response to the economic crisis is their claim that they have responded by bringing in tax cuts, announced in the Economic and Fiscal Update almost a year ago, and perfectly timed to the occasion. There is an argument to be made for tax cuts as a fiscal stimulus, although I think they will do little in the current situation where consumers are reining in spending. I’m leaning more towards souping up our existing transfer programs so that they are more effective automatic stabilizers, and starting to roll out some major infrastructure projects to retrofit our economy for low carbon world. In any event, fiscal stimulus means deficit, and the real economic discussion we should be having now is around how large the planning defict should be in 2009/10.

But the notion that Harper and Flaherty saw all of this coming and acted proactively is just plain nonsense. A year ago, tax cuts were brought in for precisely the opposite reason: surpluses as far as the eye could see due to robust economic growth projections. I challenge anyone to find a Conservative quote from a year ago that attributed their tax cuts to the looming recession. But given that tax cuts are their answer to every economic and social policy question, their claim seems to come off as credible.

It was not just the government that was deluded. The Bank of Canada and pretty much all of the major forecasters (whom a PM Dion would consult within 30 days of election) completely missed this coming recession. A lot of them are still in denial: having now accepted a downturn they see but a blip before Canada resumes growth in the second half of 2009.

The Tories just two weeks ago were proudly stating that Canada’s economic fundamentals were sound. That mantra is now dead. Harper may have known otherwise, suspected that the shit was about to hit the fan, and thought he could pull off a quick election, and majority government, before it did. Having spent the past couple of years ridiculing and bullying Stephane Dion, and spending the surplus the Liberals left them, it almost worked. But there is a new narrative now: fears of a Harper majority fueled a huge ABC campaign and online strategic voting sites; and the juxtaposition of Harper’s early claims about the Canadian economy dashed on the shoals of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Speaking of which, huge asset price collapses such as the one we are witnessing have historically been followed by depressions. Now we hope that policy makers can put together a package that merely keeps is in a recession. But those policy makers are still too obsessed with monetary policy, and we are getting to the point where monetary policy is pushing on a string. Keynesian economic policies have been pushed a side in recent decades in favour of strong central bankers with a steady hand guiding the ship of state through rough economic waters. The economy heats up too much, raise interest rates; starts to cool, cut interest rates.

At the onset of the election campaign, Harper adopted the steady hand metaphor to describe his government. In fact, his fiscal policies are actually the opposite: to avert the deficit caused by their tax cuts and a recession, they would have to cut spending, thus worsening the situation. Far from gentle adjustments of course, this approach turns the wheel toward the rocks.

But there is hope: on October 15 we may wake up to celebrate one of the biggest political miscalculations ever from one of the shrewdest political operators to make it to Ottawa.

Thinking big or acting small

By Erika Shaker, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

For me, one of the most telling moments of the 2004 election came during the leader’s debates when Stephen Harper asked Gilles Duceppe why he continued to run as leader of the Bloc.

“You’ll never have power,” he explained. Duceppe was incredulous. Is that what you think democracy is all about: power? he asked. It’s about representing the people who vote for you, regardless of the outcome, he responded. Are you saying your years in Opposition mean nothing?

I’m paraphrasing. But this exchange illustrates fundamentally different views of democracy. A healthy democracy contains mechanisms that necessarily limit absolute power, thereby helping to create and ensure a more democratic society.

Free elections are not the sole determinant of a democratic society. It also has to do with the ability of citizens, regardless of location, or socio-economic status, or myriad of other factors, to participate in all aspects of that society.

Do they have equal access to high quality, publicly accountable public services like education and health care? The justice system? Elected representatives? Government institutions? If their rights have been trampled, are there mechanisms in place that allow for redress?

So let’s take stock of what the Harper Conservatives have done since being elected—as a minority government.

They questioned the credibility (Linda Keen, Marc Raynard) and then fired (Adrian Measner, Linda Keen) civil servants who prioritized their legal mandate and public responsibility over demands from the PMO.

They eliminated a program that helped guarantee marginalized organizations and individuals equal access to the justice system (Court Challenges Program).

They sued Elections Canada when it questioned whether their party violated campaign spending laws (“In-and-Out” scheme). They provided their MPs with a step-by-step guide to ensure parliamentary dysfunction.

And they severely restricted the media’s and the public’s access to information (eliminating the national Co-ordination of Access to Information Requests System).

And that’s just for starters.

Mr. Harper has maintained that he has set “a tone.” He’s right. Ryan Sparrow only revealed it. This is a government of political strategy and character assassination. A government for whom robust democracy is an inconvenience because it gets in the way of exercising power without having to worry about legislative checks and balances, healthy media analysis, or even public scrutiny.

So is this the government we deserve? I certainly hope not. I think we deserve more than this small-minded approach that sees every different point of view not as a position to be considered but rather as an affront that must be eradicated.

I think we can and should expect more, particularly when there’s so much at stake. We need a comprehensive plan to address the major issues of our time: inequality, a hugely unpopular and costly war, environmental degradation, crumbling infrastructure, growing personal debt, Canada-U.S. relations and resource dependence in an era of globalization.

At such a pivotal time in our political history, I think we can demand that our elected representatives think big, rather than act small.