Fakers and Cons

Still adding to the list of Con fakery below, if you have more suggestions.
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Fakers

Fake F-35 mock up cockpit from Lockheed Martin for DefMin Peter Airshow MacKay to hold $47,000 presser in to announce purchase of 65 Lockheed Martin stealth fighters in 2010.
Tony Gazebo and Rona Ambrose attending.



Fake citizenship ceremony in which half of the participants were actually Citizenship and Immigration Canada staff passed off as new Canadians on Sun News Network





Fake lake, the $57,000 part of a $1.9 million display for the 2010 G8/20 summit, concerning which I asked some more questions earlier today.

Fake G8 border infrastructure slush fund that splashed $50M around Tony Gazebo's riding for gazebos and flower pots miles away from the border, and incidentally increased his vote margin win from 26 votes in 2006 to almost 11,000 in 2010.

Fake protesters made up of Conservative party interns and staff sent out by the PMO to heckle Justin Trudeau on the lawn of the House of Commons as he gave a presser announcing "new measures to increase transparency in the HoC." 

Fake apology to First Nations

Fake election phone calls, live and automated, presumably originating from the Cons' CIMS data base, either being obnoxious while pretending to be from an opposing party or advising voters their polling station had moved or closed.

Fake Jobs Grant from the same people who thought it was a super idea to grant businesses a 15% wage reduction pass NOT to hire Canadians. This new idea, which doesn't exist yet despite a recent Hockey Night in Canada ad blitz at $95,000 a pop, would again subsidize business while rolling back $300M from the provinces should they agree to hell freezing over.

Fake Commander-in-Chief shtick while surveying Alberta flood damage, and good lord, he's wearing fucking wings.
Unsurprisingly reminiscent of Bush photo op surveying Katrina.  Mr. Dress Up's spox explained it was "in tribute to the military".  
See Boris : last paragraph.

Fake CIDA "not", crayoled in at Bev Oda's request above the signatures of CIDA dept heads, making it look as if they, not she, had gutted KAIROS' funding from CIDA. After initially fudging about it, eventually she fessed up.
Meanwhile over in Israel, Jason Kenney told the Israelis he'd done it for them, then retracted it when he got back to Canada.

Fake security at the G20. $1-billion and 19,000 police unable to prevent a few black bloc from rioting but as protests wind down on the last day, kettling without first giving the crowd a chance to disperse nets many shoppers, media, and people returning home from work in the largest police bust in Canadian history. Public Safety Min refuses to divulge origin of command for police state crowd control exercise.

Fake 'red menace' scare. 
Steve, Airshow, MacKay, and PMO staffers make ridiculous remarks about bravely staring down Russian bombers in the Arctic. Meanwhile Canadian Forces are participating with those same Russian bombers in a Canada/US/Russia exercise in joint air traffic coordination in the Arctic. 
aka Fake justification for purchase of 65 F-35s.

 Fake "Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act", which made no mention at all of child pornography because up to an hour earlier this bid to require internet service providers to give police your name, unlisted phone #, and IP address without a warrant was called the Lawful Access Act.

Steve's fake outrage at Lib/NDP/Bloc coalition proposal - with separatists! and socialists! - following the 2011 election.
Following the 2004 election, Harper himself proposed a Con/NDP/Bloc 'cooperation' with those same separatists and socialists to unseat the minority Libs.
In 2000, a proposed coalition of the Bloc, Alliance, and PC parties sought to make Stockwell Day Prime Minister of Canada.

Fake 'grassroots' website Ethical Oil
Alykhan Velshi left a six figure job with Steve's gov to relaunch Ezra Levant's Ethical Oil  -"mooching off free Wi-Fi at coffeehouses and wearing flip-flops” - after which he returned to the PMO fold. Con Resource Bureau-connected webserver Go New Clear hosts Ethical Oil, Jason Kenney, Joe Oliver, Kathryn Marshall, etc.

Faked support for abolishing StatsCan long census. 
MP Maxime Bernier claimed "thousands" of complaint emails per day during 2006 census, all unfortunately deleted, vs. the 22 recorded "expressions of concern" sent to StatsCan. 
When Tony Gazebo falsely claimed StatsCan support for abolishing long census, StatsCan chief Munir Sheikh at left resigned in protest.

Fake smaller government

The Cons' 2012 budget proposed slashing 19,000 positions from the federal public service over five years, but added more than 34,000 between 2006 and 2012 - a 14% increase.                                                                                            Additionally, a 2011 CCPA study discovered a shadow public service: "Over the past five years, federal personnel outsourcing costs have risen 79% ... and remain above $1 billion a year."

Fake emergency preparedness
"It's really just posing," Alberta Fire Chiefs Assoc. Pres. said, singling out fed politicians like SafetyMin Vic Toews showing up to "help out" Alberta flood victims after Cons' 2012 budget slashed federal funding for the Joint Emergency Preparedness Program. "They can just stay in Ottawa. They got in the way."

Fake "cooperation" with Elections Canada, including stonewalling on EC reports of election fraud 3 days before election,  'reviewing' Poutine logs at Responsive Marketing Group before EC, cutting their budget, taking 3 months to not provide EC with witnesses, delaying promised election reforms, and in the words of Judge Richard Mosley : generally engaging in "trench warfare". 


Dr. Dawg sees much of this as Conservative theatre.

I think they're just fakers always hoping not to get caught.

Feel free to add your own "faker" suggestions and links in comments - updating as they come in.

Video version on Youtube 
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Vaudevilliany

Dimitri Dogfight Soudas, Aug 25, 2010 : "...as the new, highly capable and technologically-advanced F-35 comes into service. It is the best plane our Government could provide our Forces, and when you are a pilot staring down Russian long range bombers, that's an important fact to remember."

Airshow MacKay : "On the eve of Barack Obama's visit to Ottawa, a Russian jet approached Canada's Arctic air space and had to be turned away by Canadian warplanes... fighter planes and world-class pilots that know their business and send a strong signal that they should back off and stay out of our airspace."

Steve 'Spaceman Spiff', Feb 28, 2009 : “ increasingly aggressive Russian actions around the globe and Russian intrusions into our airspace. This government has responded every time the Russians have done that. We will continue to respond; we will defend our airspace.”

Sheer vaudevilliany, of course, all of it.

Two weeks prior to Soudas showboating about "staring down Russian bombers", Russia and NORAD were wrapping up a 3-day joint exercise that had been three years in the planning.
Pictured are Canadian Forces Col. Todd Balfe, deputy commander Alaska NORAD Region, and Russian Air Force Col. Alexander Vasilyev on board Fencing 1220 for VIGILANT EAGLE :

"a joint 3-day exercise designed to establish clear communication processes that would allow the two forces to work together during a real crisis.

In the scenario presented by the exercise, a B-757 jetliner, simulated by a Gulfstream 4 jet, signaled to authorities on the ground that it has been hijacked. NORAD F-22s and an E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control aircraft scrambled in response and followed the track of interest across the Pacific and handing it off to Russian Federation fighters as it approached Russian territory. On the second day of the exercise, it was done in reverse, with SU-27 fighters making the hand-off to F-22s as the “hijacked” aircraft approached Alaska."

CP, yesterday : "A new Wikileaks cable suggests the U.S. government views Stephen Harper's talk about Canadian Arctic sovereignty as little more than empty chest-thumping designed to win votes.

A January 2010 cable says Harper cautioned NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen that the alliance has no role in the Arctic because "Canada has a good working relationship with Russia with respect to the Arctic" and a NATO presence "could backfire by exacerbating tensions."  
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The Canada-US border : thicker but fuzzier

For all the wringing of hands in the national press about how US security concerns are resulting in a "thicker Canada-US border", scant attention is paid to how that border is also getting blurrier, unless to repeat government assurances that it is not.

Case in point is yesterday's announcement of the Shiprider program, signed Monday by Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano - an agreement "designed to increase border security by allowing the RCMP and the U.S. Coast Guard to team up and ride in each others' vessels during border patrols."

Van Loan said the pact shouldn't be viewed as Americans encroaching on the jurisdiction of Canada because it's a joint effort between both countries.
And he stressed that security and trade between the two countries can be mutually beneficial.
"Because of the integration of our North American economies ... effective management of the border is essential to the health of both of our countries' economies," said Van Loan.

According to former diplomat Paul Frazer, Canadians shouldn't be alarmed by the prospect of foreign officers policing Canada's waters.
"It's not a one way kind of operation," he told CTV's Power Play from Washington on
Tuesday.
Frazer stressed that the new plan is a quid-pro-quo deal for Canada.
"You will have Canadian authorities aboard American boats, going into American waters, and the reverse coming into Canadian waters."

Right. That sounds fair : the flea will ride on the elephant and then the elephant will ride on the flea.
A couple of points not covered by our enthusiastic media but clearly stated in the agreement :

COMMITTED to the prevention, detection, suppression, investigation, and prosecution of any criminal offence or violation of law related to border enforcement including, but not limited to, the illicit drug trade, migrant smuggling, trafficking of firearms, the smuggling of counterfeit goods and money, and terrorism

based on joint Canada-United States threat and risk assessment and coordinated with existing cooperative cross-border policing programs and activities.

That seems rather ... broad, considering that any "integrated cross-border maritime law enforcement operation" may also continue "on land" and include "aerial support".

But where it gets weird is the section called Information Sharing.
Info is not to be "further shared" with "a non-participating government agency or a foreign country" without "the consent of the participating agency sharing the information" ... "unless the use or further sharing is required by its domestic laws" or there are "exigent circumstances".

Exigent circumstances.

All of which is merely fleshing out the details of last year's Canada-US pact allowing cross-border military activity , following the disclosure two years earlier that 30% of FBI agents operating in Canada do so without the knowledge or approval of the Canadian government.

Well now we have yet another agreement to legalize the decline of Canadian sovereignty.
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North America Next

A year ago the U.S. Department of Homeland Security gave Arizona State University $15 million to establish a Center of Excellence for Border Security and Immigration. The border security research centre is led by Rick Van Schoik, director of ASU’s North American Center for Transborder Studies.
Arizona State U presser, Feb. 2008 :

"The establishment of the center by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security follows more than two years of work assembling a team of U.S. universities, Mexican and Canadian institutions, government agencies, technology companies and national laboratories.

Research at the center will focus on new technologies such as surveillance, screening, data fusion and situational awareness using sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles and other technologies. The center will also provide research on population dynamics, immigration administration and enforcement, operational analysis, control and communications, immigration policy, civic integration and citizenship, border risk management and international governance."

Canadian advisors to NACTS include Former Deputy Prime Minister of Canada Anne McLellan and Christine Frechette, Director of the North American Forum on Integration, and York University and the University of Alberta, along with notable US deep integrationists Stephen Blank and Robert Pastor.

In their Feb 2009 policy paper "North America Next: A Report to President Obama on Building Sustainable Security and Competitiveness", they make eight recommendations calling for deeper integration, including :

• the inclusion of private sector and public-private P3 partnerships in meet-ups prior to the North American Trilateral Leaders’ Summits
• a National Security Council deputy to expand their "focus on traditional security to include law enforcement, commerce, transportation, environment, water, and regional development in the three countries"
• enhanced overall joint defense of North America which would allow Canada to continue responsibility for the Artic
• a joint revolving fund for infrastructure investments in North America
• a North American Greenhouse Gas Exchange Strategy to "ensure the United States continues to have priority access to Canada’s wealth of hydro-electricity, natural gas, light petroleum and uranium in exchange for offsets for the greenhouse gases created by their development"
• "moving the U.S.-Mexican and U.S.-Canadian borders (and their processing costs) away from the (actual) borders to the factories and farms from which trade goods originate", and
• "building and improving trade corridors like CANAMEX that go from northern Canada to southern Mexico".

The paper recommends less emphasis on "integration" and more on "plug and play interoperability".

Just keeping you up on the new North American language here.

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This week in neocon nonsense

Just this week :

In a pre-emptive election strike, Bill C-484, Con MP Ken Epps' trial balloon bill for recriminalizing abortion, is shot down by Justice Minister Bob Nicholson, who voted for it. Twice.
Nicholson says the Cons will instead table a bill to "punish criminals who commit violence against pregnant women, but do so in a way that leaves no room for the introduction of fetal rights." Which is exactly the same thing they said about C-484.


The whistle blower who was fired for revealing that the Cons' deregulation of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency allows "industry to implement food safety control programs" is threatened with legal action by Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz.
Meanwhile the president of the CFIA inspectors union states : "the agency is so short-staffed that food inspections and follow-up audits simply aren't taking place".
With 12 dead of listeriosis so far, Maple Leaf Foods waits four days to inform the public their sliced meat is contaminated. So much for self-regulation.



Canada First? Not so much.
The Cons have "quietly scuttled the navy's $2.9-billion project to replace its aging supply ships" and "cancelled a tender call for the purchase of 12 mid-shore patrol ships for the Coast Guard".
So why is Harper going up to the Arctic again this week to talk about Arctic sovereignty and Operation Nanook, a military-led Arctic sovereignty exercise?
"As part of the Harper government's plans to expand Canada's presence in the North, MacKay is expected to announce on Thursday several million in funding over five years for the Junior Canadian Rangers, the youth wing of the part-time reserve force that patrols the Arctic."


Sports! -it's the new arts and culture , featuring branding without the swears!
Besides, with sports you can "invest $20-million toward the opening ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games in order to ensure that the event adequately reflects the priorities of the Government and helps to achieve its domestic and international branding goals."


Pierre Poilievre, parliamentary secretary, on the refusal of 26 Cons to obey summons to appear before the Ethics committee to answer questions about the in and out scheme in which the Cons exceeded their 2006 election spending limit by $1.1 mil­lion by transferring money into the campaign bank ac­counts of 67 selected local candidates and then immediately transferring the money back out again : "No one takes Ethics Committee summons seriously"
Without ever once actually using the phrase "executive privilege", Harper keeps threatening an election, presumably at least in part to bring about an end to the questions. Oh, the "dysfunction"!


Harper's statement on civilian deaths in Afghanistan : see below.


Just. this. week.

Polls vs pols, deep integration edition

An update on yesterday's Globe&Mail poll :

80% of 11,590 G&M respondants - at one vote only per IP - are not too keen on the whole deep integration "mutually beneficial public policy agenda" thing. Yeah, us! The poll was still open for voting , last time I looked.

And in a fortuitous coincidence, right across from the poll and linked on the same G&M page is an opinion piece from ubiquitous deep integration media darling Michael Hart and William Dymond, who proudly inform us they are "former officials involved in the negotiation first of the Canada-U.S. free-trade Agreement (FTA) and then of NAFTA".

You'll recall Michael Hart of Carleton U., a former official at Foreign Affairs and Int. Trade and sometime deep integration teacher at the North American University, from his February piece in the Natty Post : Canada blew it! :

"The crisis of Sept. 11, 2001, provided a perfect opportunity to seize the moment to re-imagine the border, but Canada blew it."

in which he bewailed the loss of this unique opportunity to implement "the structural and institutional changes of deep integration" because of "nationalist phobias". Silly us.

Perhaps you also recall his statement to the Int. Trade Committee on SPP in May last year :

"We have made a political choice that we wanted a more deeply integrated North American economy," Hart said. "That means a willingness on our part to, for example, strengthen the perimeter around North America in order to deal with security issues that are uppermost in American minds."

In their new G&M piece, "The sabre-rattling on NAFTA is worrying, but take it as an opportunity", Hart and Dymond warn that "If our neighbours elect a Democratic president, Senate and House on Nov. 4, things could get ugly", but then take some comfort that unlike Paul Martin, whose relationship with the US was marked by "petulance and prickly self-righteousness", at least "the Harper government brought maturity and perspective".

Well ok then.

They then pose a number of questions to us, most notable for the facility with which they replace the word "Canada" with their preferred term, "North America" :

"What can we do together to promote our common interests in the security of the Arctic, the sustainable exploitation of Arctic energy supplies, and environmentally responsible navigation through Arctic waters?"

"What kind of legislative and other programs can we pursue in order to ensure long-term North American energy security?"

"What kind of institutional capacity do we need to have in place to facilitate and promote the governance of North American economic and security concerns and to ensure appropriate co-operation at the state/provincial and legislative levels?"

Gosh, Mike, Bill, I'm guessing your answer to the questions is whatever you quislings decide to call the next incarnation of the SPP, but our answer is right up there at the top in those G&M poll results.

The Last Giant Oil Frontier

Anyone else receiving this email investment offer from the "owners" of "unclaimed arctic treasures"?

The Last Giant Oil Frontier : Access to a Trillion Dollars in oil and natural gas!
"Who owns the Arctic Commons vast oil and gas resources?
The US Company, United Oil and Gas Consortium Management Corp., does.
The US Government and oil companies currently have access to a strong prior claim to the Arctic Commons hydrocarbons through the US Nevada private company United Oil and Gas Consortium Management Corp., which made a solid international Arctic Commons hydrocarbons claim on May 9th 2006."

Rigzone, Feb 7, 2008 : "This claim [with the United Nations and the five Arctic countries] is for the exclusive exploitation, development, marketing and extraction rights to the oil and gas resources of the seafloor and subsurface contained within the "Arctic Claims"; an area of the Arctic Ocean that has no country's claims to it; or simply, the open area in between all of the Arctic-bordering countries.


A preliminary assessment by the US Geological Survey suggests the Arctic seabed may hold as much as 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and natural gas reserves. By one estimate, 400 billion barrels of oil might lie beneath the Arctic seabed.
Provided the Company's claim tenure, legal issues and government negotiations are managed properly, the Arctic Commons Deeps basin area could become the world's largest independently owned offshore oilfields; safely beyond the reach of self-serving governments.


Peter Sterling, CEO of the Company, commented, "For the major independent oil companies, (IOCs) operating in the world's great sedimentary oil basins, the above-ground risks via onerous taxation and outright expropriation are becoming extreme. IOCs are not getting access to enough new sources of oil and gas. State owned oil companies are increasingly taking over their national oil reserves and squeezing out the IOCs. IOCs urgently need to find a new vision for energy growth to remain relevant and the Arctic Commons Deeps sedimentary basin complex represents such an opportunity. And we intend to manage that vision by acting as the 'Lead Manager' of the Arctic Commons Consortium."


They have a website explaining the whole thing.
They also have, um, issues :

"The North Pole is ours, not Russia's!
The last giant oil frontier on Earth is in the arctic. The ocean floor is believed to hold vast reserves of untapped oil and natural gas, which is expected to become accessible as climate change melts the ice.
Russia's bogus claim to the deep ocean floor beneath the Arctic ice cap has been dismissed by other countries with territories bordering the region.
It is the sort of gangsterism practiced by Russia’s government - and from the arbitrary and cruel behavior of President Putin towards those who disagree with him and criticize him, an alarming number of whom meet early deaths, that threatens the free world and makes governments and companies loath to deal with Russia for energy projects.
The free world should have its share of the vast energy reserves that lie beneath the Arctic without having to deal with Russia’s blackmailing regime."

So seldom does one come across the word "bogus" even once in a missive soliciting investment funding, but United Oil and Gas Corp manage to squeeze it in there three or four times.

The U.N is also on their shitlist for having established the "International Criminal Court (which can try individuals for violations of international law) and the U.N. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency". As yet unbeknownst to the rest of us, the U.N. also has secret designs on the moon.

But wait! Apparently we're still not done with Russia yet! :


"From Kamchatka to the Gulf of Finland, Russia is still a land of acid rain, heavy metals and plutonium. Stick a pin in a map of Russia and you are likely to alight upon a poisoned river or the rusting hulk of a nuclear submarine, an irradiated steppe, some chemically defoliated birch trees or a person with a life expectancy of 34 years."


Point being : Neither the U.N. nor Russia are suitable stewards of the 1.3 million miles of "unclaimed Arctic treasures", a job obviously better left to private enterprise and the United Oil and Gas Consortium Management Corp., foe of arms control, the International Court, the UN, "onerous taxation", and "self-serving governments".