The Canada thread

[norton ash]

Happy Canada Day!

Things have never been worse, and fuck Harper and our criminal government. Let's take it back.

[Jeff]

http://www.ipolitics.ca/2012/07/01/harp ... onal-poll/

That's a remarkably consistent trajectory since Harper won his majority.

Rex Murphy, wrong again, the day after the election, poo-pooing talk of Harper's "dark agenda."

When Stephen Harper was a member of the ultra-right-wing Northern Foundation in 1989, Mr. Harrison documents that this was a group that had numerous Neo-Nazi skinheads as organizers, as well as a leadership that included a well-known white supremacist and anti-feminist crusader as a prominent leader that sought to take over the mass-media to enable the... fulfillment of a right wing agenda. The Northern Foundation, with the support of corporate allies was able to get Mr. Harper elected in the first place by indeed, taking over the mass-media in Canada. This was done to shelter Mr. Harper from the kinds of critical journalism which had kept him out of power, in the first place. Corporate mass-media owners would seek to remake Mr. Harper and the Conservative Party from being ultra right, into a fabricated image of a non-threatening "moderately conservative" party.

Stephen Harper linked to Nazi intellectuals and Christian fundamentalists suggests Trevor Harrison’s book

Oh, and here's a helluva timeline of Neo-Nazis, the Heritage Front, the Reform/Conservative Party, and the repeal of Canada's Hate Crime Legislation.

"Summer 1998: Ezra Levant appears on the cover of the Heritage Front Report.... More than a decade later, Levant fails to push Lemire, who operates Freedom-Site to this day, on his connection to the Heritage Front."

June 8 headline: "Hate Speech Clause's Repeal Gives White Supremacists Rare Moment Of Glee." (“Way to go, Harper. I know we can’t get everything we want, but I stand a little taller today as a Canuck.”)

HAPPY CANADA DAY!!!!

[Feilan]

OMG - don't get me started on the size LARGE TURN-COAT NEO-FASCIST NEWF and all of the amazing shite that dribbles forth from his lazy arse rhodes-scholarly GOB.

I'm in Beijing and I just don't have time right now. In a week or so I may yet fully indulge the otherwise necessarily squelched impulse to hold forth.

FUCK that profoundly evasive and simultaneously utterly base mother-effer. The noble island he sprang from surely does, with the exception of sparse numbers calling in on Sundays to Cross Country Fuck-Up, waxing poetic about the weather in the bay and just how much they loves 'im.

At heart I'm alllll down-home for the record, by which I mean way east of Bathurst, and that mouthpiece can go stuff itself with all the cod that can't be caught.



Peace out.

[JackRiddler]

And to think, if not for those ambitious men of 1776, I'd live in Canada, too!

[Jeff]

I haven't even been able to get with the Hate the government, love the country crowd this year. Even with a stolen election and a broken electoral system, it's still our fault.

There are a few things to still be thankful for, though. Like Quebec. Thanks for still being there, for now. I know how hard it must be. Please hang in there a little longer. We need you. Especially the students of Montreal.

And Cheri DiNovo. She's a radical cleric and a Toronto NDP Member of the Provincial Parliament. Because Ontario currently has a minority government and the Liberals sometimes need to do the right thing, or less of the wrong thing, to retain power, a few good things have happened. Like DiNovo's "Toby's Bill," which became law and added gender identity and gender expression to the province's human rights laws. So DiNovo helps give me hope for both politics and religion.

[Feilan]

... on my Canada Day, by which I mean the blooming of July 1st about two hours before it actually first reached the eastern edge of Canuckistan, I was in a car in Shanxi province with family heading for the Shinao mountains...

Hardly 5 minutes out into traffic of the small city where the uncle and aunty live I saw a small, easy to miss thing of such curious significance I am still thinking about it three days later: on the hind window of a little hatchback thingy - parked, a Canadian flag in the top left corner... Beneath it in bold black letters the word 'Montreal'.

[Jeff]

Oh Canada: the government's broad assault on the environment

Ed Struzik
Monday 2 July 2012

But Canada's pristine image — and more importantly its environment — is not likely to recover from what critics across the political spectrum say is an unprecedented assault by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper on environmental regulation, oversight, and scientific research. Harper, who came to power in 2006 unapologetic for once describing the Kyoto climate accords as "essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations," has steadily been weakening environmental enforcement, monitoring, and research, while at the same time boosting controversial tar sands development, backing major pipeline construction, and increasing energy industry subsidies.

Critics say that assault reached a crescendo in recent weeks with the passage in Parliament of an omnibus budget bill known as C-38, which guts or significantly weakens rules relating to fisheries protection, environmental assessment, endangered species, and national parks. Under this bill, the criteria that currently trigger environmental assessments, for example, have been eliminated, leaving such reviews more to the discretion of the Minister of the Environment and other political appointees. The Fisheries Act will no longer be focused on habitat protection; instead, it will restrict itself largely to the commercial aspects of resource harvesting. Ocean dumping rules will also be changed to allow the Minister of the Environment to make decisions on permitting. And Parks Canada will no longer have to conduct environmental audits or review management plans every ten years. In addition, budgets cuts will eliminate the jobs of hundreds of scientists working for various government departments that focus on the environment and wildlife.

...

Melissa Gorrie, a staff lawyer for the environmental law group Ecojustice, marvels at the persistence with which the Harper government is pressing ahead with its assault on the environment. She knows because she and her colleagues have successfully gone to the Federal Court of Canada several times to get the government to use emergency measures under the Species at Risk Act to protect declining caribou and sage grouse populations.

With each victory, the government has found a way not to act on the court order. Much of the stalling comes from procedural wrangling and disagreements about what constitutes an "imminent threat." In the case of caribou, when all else failed the government came up with a draft recovery plan that satisfies none of the complainants nor any of the scientists who have been studying caribou for the past quarter-century.

"My colleagues and I have been talking about this quite a lot lately," said Gorrie. "It's either a vendetta and a total assault on the anything environmental or a total disinterest in the issue. Whatever it is, I don't think we've seen anything quite like this in Canada."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... sfeed=true

[Jeff]

Desmarais and Power Corp. have been enduring fixtures behind every Liberal and Conservative government I can recall.

Sarkozy holes up in Canadian cottage country as l'affaire Bettencourt rages

TU THANH HA AND LES PERREAUX

MORIN HEIGHTS, QUE. — The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, Jul. 03 2012

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, enjoyed a taste of Canadian cottage life in the Laurentians last week, a respite from public attention that has been renewed by a French police raid on Mr. Sarkozy’s offices and Ms. Bruni-Sarkozy’s mansion as part of a probe into alleged secret campaign financing.

...

Since losing office, Mr. Sarkozy has been reported to have vacationed in Morocco, then to have received an invitation to stay at a cottage owned by the Desmarais family in Morin-Heights, north of Montreal.

Mr. Sarkozy is known to be close to Power Corp. founder Paul Desmarais Sr. He has often been a guest at the Desmarais family’s Sagard estate in Quebec’s Charlevoix region and he awarded Mr. Desmarais the Grand-Croix de la Légion d’honneur, the highest honour ever bestowed on a Canadian by the French government, at a private ceremony in early 2008.

Around Lake Echo, with its stately log mansions and multi-level stone cottages and old-growth trees, Mr. Sarkozy and Ms. Bruni seem to have whistled through relatively unnoticed. (They are rumoured to have come and gone in the space of a few days last week.) Helicopters were seen loading and unloading passengers at what locals say is the compound where the Demarais family has two homes.

...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/wor ... le4386007/

And again with our unelected Liberal/Conservative Senate:

Canadian senators warn United Church over Israel boycott

CAMPBELL CLARK
OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail
Published Wednesday, Jul. 04 2012

A group of nine senators has warned the United Church of Canada that it could spark a rift with the Jewish community if it approves the boycott of goods from Israeli settlements in occupied lands.

The senators, all United Church members and from both the Conservative and Liberal parties, have waded publicly into a controversial issue before it comes to a vote in mid-August.

It’s a debate in which the lines between church and state have already been crossed several times as the United Church considers a new foray into the electrified world of Mideast politics.

A working group established by the church has issued a report that proposes a boycott of all products from Jewish settlements in occupied lands, arguing the settlements are illegally eating away Palestinian lands and the hope for a two-state solution. But it also rejects a wholesale boycott of all Israeli goods.

The nine senators have warned in a letter to United Church moderator Mardi Tindal that the distinction drawn with the narrower boycott will “be lost upon” Israelis and Canada’s Jewish community.

...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/pol ... le4387825/

[Jeff]

Science community to protest research cuts with funeral march

By Natalie Stechyson, Postmedia News July 8, 2012

OTTAWA — A funeral procession — complete with a coffin, black-clad mourners and a scythe-wielding grim reaper — will make its way to Parliament Hill Tuesday as hundreds of scientists from across Canada rally in protest of federal science cuts.

Members of Canada's scientific community are staging the rally to mourn the "death of evidence" in what the rally's organizers say is the federal government's war on science.

Whatever values Canadians cleave to, they should be presented with evidence on the impacts of federal government policies and programs and be able to make informed decisions based on that information, said co-organizer Scott Findlay, associate professor of biology and former director the University of Ottawa's Institute of the Environment.

"The prevention of this evidence getting into the public domain, the consequence of that is that the public continues to be uninformed. And an informed public is the basis on which democracy depends," Findlay said.

"I think it's important for the public to understand that scientists are getting increasingly concerned about this. I'm hugely concerned."

...

There is growing concern in many quarters about what is being viewed as the government's excessive information control. Several organizations say they are concerned with what they call the silencing of Canada's federal scientists.

In April, government media minders were dispatched to an international polar conference in Montreal to monitor and record what Environment Canada scientists said to reporters.

Earlier that month, the Ottawa Citizen reported how a reporter's simple question about a Canada-U.S. study on snow generated a blizzard of paper at the National Research Council.

In 2010, Postmedia News first reported that the Harper government had tightened the muzzle on federal scientists. Natural Resources Canada scientists were told that spring they need "pre-approval'" from Minister Christian Paradis' office to speak with national and international journalists. Their "media lines" also need ministerial approval, said documents obtained through access-to-information legislation.

...

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology ... story.html

[DrVolin]

The end of the long-form census was the tip of this considerable iceberg.

[Jeff]

The end of the long-form census was the tip of this considerable iceberg.

Yes.

I recall the pundits were baffled. It seemed like an odd, soft target. Harper knew the Liberals wouldn't trigger an election over it. Joe Voter's going to be outraged over shorter forms to fill out?

From today's Death of Evidence rally:









The NDP released this answer today to the Conservative's attack ad:



I like it for throwing the economy back in Harper's face, and I fancy Megan Leslie's voice.

And after the disclosure today of Enbridge's calamitous response to its Michigan disaster, I was reminded of this rather clever NDP initiative against the Northern Gateway Pipeline, "Radicals for our coast."

[jfshade]

link

Nova Scotia — open for what kind of business?

June 21, 2012 - 4:14am By JOAN BAXTER


Nova Scotia Natural Resources Minister Charlie Parker addresses the media in Halifax in April. (INGRID BULMER / Staff

In 1993, the Progressive Conservative government of Donald Cameron introduced new commercial licence plates to the province that state, in red letters, “Nova Scotia. Open For Business.” It may be time for the NDP government to revisit that message.

Last week, Natural Resources Minister Charlie Parker made a clear choice about the kind of business Nova Scotia really supports. Rather than defend the rights and interests of a Nova Scotian family business, he sided instead with DDV Gold, a subsidiary of Australian company Atlantic Gold, granting the mining company vesting orders and thus ownership of 14 parcels of land in Moose River Gold Mines.

Some of that belongs — or rather belonged — to the Higgins family that had refused to sell any land, pointing out that they run a successful and sustainable business (providing five full-time jobs and 25 seasonal ones) producing Christmas trees on land that has been in the family for generations.

So perhaps the government of Darrell Dexter might consider a more accurate message for the commercial licence plates. Maybe something like “Nova Scotia. Open for Foreign Destructive Extractive Business.” While they’re at it, perhaps they could update our provincial slogan. Instead of “Come to Life,” how about “Come to Help Yourselves to Our Land and Resources”?

The decision to expropriate the Higgins land, Minister Parker said, was “difficult” but he was “confident it best serves the public interest.” He said the Touquoy gold mine in Moose River will create about 150 jobs during operations, 300 during construction. Yet DDV Gold’s own Focus Report speaks of just 200 jobs during construction.

The minister also said Nova Scotians will see benefits through taxes and royalties. But the company will enjoy a tax holiday on profits until it recovers 110 per cent of its initial investment. And the company’s Focus Report says the total royalties the province will receive on the estimated $700 million of gold output over the mine’s life will amount to perhaps $6 million — which, to put things in perspective, is a paltry sum that could barely pave eight kilometres of road in Nova Scotia.

But Nova Scotians are used to big promises about the proposed benefits of this or that big industrial project, which are almost never legally binding and can be forgotten the minute a company faces financial problems. As we’ve learned the hard way, big promises are rarely worth the hot air used to make them. Nova Scotian taxpayers have a long record of paying the bills for companies in the so-called “private” sector and cleaning up the toxic messes they leave behind them.

None of the project’s cheerleaders — not the government, not the company and not the Mining Association — is being up front with the people of this province about the immense risks of open pit gold mines like the one planned for Moose River.

A few years ago, I spent a day touring an open pit gold mine in Mali in West Africa and came away with a horror of such hell holes. They are immense craters, created by blasting vast quantities of rock out of the earth with explosives. The waste rock is piled in small mountains; and in Nova Scotia, it is likely to be laced with and leaking arsenic. Open pit mines use vast quantities of fresh water, and toxic waste has to be stored and treated in massive tailings ponds.

And to extract the gold — 1.6 grams from one ton of rock — the company will use large quantities of cyanide. Once a week, about 12 tons of this poison will be transported by truck from the train station in Truro, over highways 102 and 224, and then down the Moose River Road.

A local group opposed to the mine, Eastern Shore Forest Watch, worries that any accident that caused the mine to close — and accidents and spills are not uncommon in open pit gold mines — would “vapourize the company’s line of credit.” Nova Scotians would once again find themselves stuck paying for a catastrophic clean-up.

DDV Gold is already looking at another gold mining project on Cochrane Hill, about 80 kilometres from its newly acquired land holdings in Moose River; and the CEO of the parent company, Atlantic Gold, says his company is exploring the length and breadth of the province for more gold deposits that he is sure are there for the taking.

And that, of course, will mean seeking the title to the land to get at them. Woodlot owners, farmers and other landowners in Nova Scotia, brace yourselves. Nova Scotia, it seems, is open for gold digging.

Joan Baxter is a Nova Scotian journalist, development researcher and writer, and award-winning author.

[Iamwhomiam]

May god bless Canada because it sure seems Satan and its minions has taken over.

On edit: : Reviewing the article above posted by Jeff, this paragraph stuck with me:

So perhaps the government of Darrell Dexter might consider a more accurate message for the commercial licence plates. Maybe something like “Nova Scotia. Open for Foreign Destructive Extractive Business.” While they’re at it, perhaps they could update our provincial slogan. Instead of “Come to Life,” how about “Come to Help Yourselves to Our Land and Resources”?

Poor Nova Scotia!

I had a 4.5 hour meeting yesterday with representatives of Lafarge, the world's largest cement company. It featured a reprimand from one of their Paris-based Board of Directors Stakeholders Sustainability Panel members representing the Centre for Human Ecology, Allister McIntosh, after viewing our local plant's presentation on operations by their Environmental Manager and director of Community Relations, calling it "Greenwashing." Shocked they were! Perhaps even more shocked than I was to here those words from such a corporate representative.

I straightened him out about his misconception that Lafarge is a responsible international corporation.

In 2008, North America's second largest producer of cement of all of their plants released 400 pounds of mercury into our atmosphere. This plan is directly across the street from our local High and Middle Schools. A single drop of mercury will contaminate a 20 acre lake and make its fish unsafe for human consumption.

Their Easter NA Region's Environmental Director at the time said that wasn't much of a problem locally because the elemental mercury released enter "the World Mercury Cycle" and didn't fall locally, which in part is true, but not all of the time. Still air and rain or a low cloud cover would cause much but not all of the mercury in their emissions to precipitate more locally.

Today they're visiting Nova Scotia.

Lafarge is the company principally responsible for our EPA's 20 year delay in establishing limits on mercury, and other emissions, as called for by our Clean Air Act, regulations enacted long ago by other modern 1st world nations like Bangladesh.

The point being, Lafarge is very good in extracting cooperation from local and national regulators as well as they extract their irreplaceable natural resources.

Oh, Canada!

Poor Canada!

2nd edit to add hyperlink

[Jeff]

The decision to expropriate the Higgins land, Minister Parker said, was “difficult” but he was “confident it best serves the public interest.”

The first NDP government in Nova Scotia and it's a Third Way abomination. It's made worse choices than even Selinger's in Manitoba and Calvert's in Saskatchewan. And now it's deservedly the least popular in the country.

From the text of a letter, reproduced in this thread on Rabble, that went to NDP-NS caucus members last month:

We are writing this letter - as supporters who have worked for, and donated to, the NDP through many past elections - because we would like to support the NDP in the next Nova Scotia provincial election, but we are now trying to see the point.

We supported the NDP, through many years, because we think Nova Scotia needs changes. Although in many ways this is a wonderful place to live, Nova Scotia could do better. For many years, while in opposition, the NDP spoke to the values of social justice, equality of opportunity and environmental sustainability that we think to be important. One can only imagine what the NDP, when in opposition, would have said about the priorities of a provincial budget which:

• Gave (via forgivable loan) $304 Million to the Irvings
• Cut the tax rate for large corporations;
• Forced spending cuts on health care, and primary, secondary and post-secondary
education.

And as a Nova Scotian comments:

We weren't looking for socialism in one province. We weren't looking for socialism period. It wasnt promised by anyone. We were just looking for the shared aspiration of everyone who gets involved with the NDP: a progressive government.

Anyone involved with the NDP for a long time is used to making do with minimum expectations. And sometimes barely that. Not only did we get far short of minimum expectations, we got something even the biggest pessimists among us would never have dreamed of: the fullout neo-liberal agenda that neither of the old line parties had the 'guts' or political fortitude to pull off.

The federal party hasn't gone there. But eternal vigilance and all that.

[Iamwhomiam]

^^^^

But eternal vigilance and all that.

AMEN!