Steve and Sandra - Getting Things Undone

All this, and they were only elected with 36% of the popular vote.

Nuclear greenwashing and spinning

Dear Canadian media :
Please stop printing crap like this about Patrick Moore and nuclear power:

"A popular Canadian environmentalist said Tuesday it's silly for Saskatchewan to benefit from uranium exports but not from nuclear energy.
Speaking in Saskatoon at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon, Patrick Moore, former president of Greenpeace Canada and founder of Greenspirit, an environmental consultancy firm, said ..."How ridiculous is it for a province that supplies uranium to 441 nuclear plants around the world to have an anti-nuclear policy at home?"
Moore admits he was opposed to nuclear energy during his Greenpeace years, but changed his mind after researching the power source. The environmentalist hopes more people take a closer look at nuclear energy, saying general uncertainties about the fuel comes from concerns over nuclear waste, meltdowns and proliferation, all of which are not likely to happen or cause damage."

unless you are going to also follow the money and mention that Moore's speaking engagement at that Chamber of Commerce luncheon was hosted by two Canadian uranium mining companies, that Moore's current cross-Canada tour is sponsored by TEAM CANDU, and that Moore is being paid to support nuclear power by the US Nuclear Energy Institute.

Thank you.

The delicate art of sock puppetry

Reuters : "A speech that Afghan President Hamid Karzai delivered to Canada's Parliament a year ago, urging the country's continued military support, was nothing more than a "political stunt," written by Canadian defense ministry staff, an opposition party charged on Tuesday."

The President of Afghanistan selling the war to Parliament on behalf of the Canadian military.

Nice.

Hey Bush, your lips are moving.

"Death to Canada", outraged Afghans chant.

Yes, we are rather worried about that too.

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SPP : Naomi Klein vs Tom Flanagan

Tom Flanagan, US poli-sci prof at the University of Calgary; Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute; and all-round 'eminence grease' to Stephen Harper, this Tom Flanagan, writes in Saturday's G&M : "In times of perceived crisis, a conservative party can win by positioning itself further to the right, as shown by the victories of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Ralph Klein, Mike Harris, and Goerdon Campbell."

G&M, Saturday Sept 8 :

 "In Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, she argues that an idea that began with Chicago School economist Milton Friedman has determined much of the course of recent history – that a time of crisis, whether a war or a hurricane, offers a strategic opportunity to overwrite the resulting “blank slate” with market privatization and corporatism."

She also argues that such a crisis can be a man-made destabilization of public infrastructure.

Flanagan also has a book out : Harper's Team : Behind the Scenes in the Conservative Rise to Power.
I'm guessing it isn't going to be "behind the scenes" enough for us though, so I thought we'd have a look at a 2003 policy paper from the Fraser Institute, the think tank where Flanagan is a Senior Fellow.


Mandate for Leadership for the New Prime Minister

• Bank of Canada : Create a new currency—the amero—and a North American Central Bank for Canada,Mexico and the United States.
• Convert existing dollars into ameros. 
• Retain Canadian national symbols on notes and coins.
• Exchange Rates : Remove the Bank of Canada’s power to set interest rates and leave as its main responsibility the convertibility of Canadian into US dollars at par.
• Environment : Withdraw from Kyoto protocol
• Allow export of water for use in non-irrigation projects.
• Labour : Increase flexibility in labour market by, for example, introducing worker choice legislation for those covered by federal labour laws.
• Int Trade & Foreign Aid : Remove Canadian regulations that restrict free trade (unilaterally if necessary), such as the Wheat Board.
• Remove Canadian restrictions on foreign ownership of banks and other financial institutions; airlines and railroads; newspapers and electronic media.
• Allow individuals and firms to sue provinces for damages if trade barriers remain in place.
• Health : Repeal or change the Canada Health Act to remove limits on provincial autonomy over health care, as recognized by the constitution.
• Allow competition in health-care delivery, including, private insurance, for-profit and non-profit hospitals, and private surgery and other treatment facilities.
• Defence : Work for inter-operability with NATO and US for air, naval and ground forces.
• Introduce biometric screening of travelers.  Share air passenger information with the United States.
• Judiciary : Abolish the Court Challenges Program to discourage special interest groups from bypassing the political process to obtain special privileges.
• Aboriginal Policies : Restructure aboriginal policy to empower the individual, not band elites.
• Create a new overseas intelligence service to coordinate counter-terrorism efforts.
• Abolish all policies related to “industrial strategy,” particularly regional economic development agencies.  In Atlantic Canada, the money saved could be used to virtually eliminate corporate taxes.

And skipping down a bit :

"When Canada did not agree to take part in the US ballistic missile defence (BMD) program, the US worked around it, locating the necessary radars in Alaska and Greenland. Space-based assets have made Canada’s geographic position less important than that of Poland or Rumania. 

All of these issues (and there are many others) must be addressed in the very near future. They all point in the same direction: Canada can preserve its sovereignty and its prosperity only by a closer relationship, particularly in military and security policy, with the United States."

Gosh, those all seem so familiar to us now, don't they?
From Flanagan and the Fraser Institute' lips to Harper's ear.
And he who has the ear of the king is more important than the king, yadda, yadda.

Actually the above disaster capitalism wish list is so complete a description of Harper's SPP policies, I'm somewhat disappointed to find no mention in it anywhere of his infamous jelly beans.

Link fixed : Mandate for Leadership for the New Prime Minister
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NAWL goes down

This is the Victoria BC office of the Status of Women Action Group. As you can see, it is a 7x7 foot storage locker. While they do have the use of a donated voice mail, they no longer have any federal funding. No swag for SWAG.

H/T to F-email Fightback who blogged about this back in July.

One year ago the federal Conservative government announced it would no longer fund women's groups that do polling, advocacy, lobbying or general research. Perhaps the most drastic change to the mandate and operation of Status of Women Canada was also dropping the word "equality'' from the agency's goals.

So it wasn't much of a surprise this week to learn that NAWL, the National Association for Women and the Law, an advocacy group promoting equal rights, pay equity, legal access and education, is closing its doors due to those very changes to the criteria for funding. Like the two women in the storage locker in Victoria, they will continue their work, but as volunteers.

At the time of the budget cuts, Gwen Landolt of REAL Women, the traditional-values group which has spent the last 25 years fighting against equal rights for women, explained that groups (like SWAG) are no longer needed because "women are equal now". I somehow doubt this line of reasoning would much impress the woman in the wheelchair working at the storage locker, given that a woman working full-time makes 73 cents as compared to the dollar made by a man in the same job. I also suspect this leaves little free time for advocacy but Gwen is unfazed : "If a group can't support itself and its lobbying activities across the country, then it just isn't a grassroots organization and shouldn't be funded by the taxpayer."

She is inordinately proud of the fact that REAL Women does not receive a single penny in federal funding and professes not to see why anyone else should, neglecting to mention that REAL Women has in fact applied for federal funding, but was delisted in 1999 for not having any actual programs that furthered the main objective of Status of Women Canada, which, as you will recall, used to consist of programs and advocacy for women. Gay bashing and anti-abortion propaganda evidently did not count as credits.

Gwen was interviewed on CBC's The Current yesterday.

Anna Maria Tremonti asked her if she didn't think that pay equity, paid maternity leave, and a national daycare plan were things that Canadian women wanted. Landolt explained that women were different from men and that if women had wanted a national daycare plan, they wouldn't have voted for Harper.

I do hope, women of Canada, that you are taking notes. You will recall that in an effort to appear to have outgrown his a nutty Reform roots, Harper campaigned on a promise not to attack funding for women. Nonetheless, Landolt, along with Charles McVety, met with Harper his very first day in office.

Landolt was also very exercised about Canada having been censured by the UN group CIDA for not having done enough to promote women's rights. CIDA attacked Harper, she explained, because of what the feminists told CIDA about him.
Do you really think that was what turned them off, Gwen? Or do you think it might have been that the office of your associate at REAL Women, Sharon Hayes, a Reform MP and also a board member of Focus on the Family, circulated a press release claiming that the Chinese perform ritual abortions in order to eat the fetuses? Just a guess here.

Josee Verner was also on The Current but mercifully the sound of her going round and round in circles blended so well with the sound of the washing machine that I only caught a couple of her cycles.
Roughly paraphrased :
JV : NAWL didn't get funding because they didn't apply for it.
AMT : What, given the new mandate, could they have applied for?
JV : Well they didn't apply. That's why they didn't get funding.
AMT, brightening up : So if they do apply now, could their funding be restored?
JV : Murmer, murmer. At just that point, Josee's spin cycle clicked in so I didn't hear a satisfactory answer.

Gosh, she's so nice though, isn't she? Really, it would be churlish to ask anything more from her.

Go listen to both of them, along with two NAWL advocates, here.
Heather Mallick on the value of SWC & LEAF, the perfidy of REAL Women
F-email Fightback : Amnesty International on NAWL closure
Also : Impolitical, and JJ, and Hope and Onions

MacKay, flypaper, and...The Battle of the Bulge?

Peter MacKay was in Washington yesterday to observe the annual Canadian Defence Minister's homage to Bush's flypaper strategy :
"If the job is not done in Afghanistan, if countries like Canada leave, the Taliban can follow them,'' MacKay told Canadian reporters here.

The tradition began in October 2004 when President Bush, aka Crusader Bunnypants, addressed reporters in Greeley, Colorado:
"We have defeated the Taleban..."
Wait, that's not it...just a sec...scrolling down...ah, here we go :

"We are fighting these terrorists with our military in Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond so we do not have to face them in the streets of our own cities." (Applause.)

Canada failed to observe the flypaper strategy ceremony in 2005 for some reason, but here's Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor in April 2006 :

"Fighting terrorists in Afghanistan is better than waiting until they show up in Vancouver, Montreal or Ottawa, Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor told the Commons on Monday."

MacKay slipped in a small coda of his own yesterday when he added a reference to the US Battle of the Bulge, saying he wanted to "look into the whites of the eyes'' of other NATO countries to determine whether those nations truly appreciate the need to step up in Afghanistan and the impact on their countries if they don't :

"North America is not immune. Continental Europe is not immune. Nobody is immune.''

Canadian reporters were puzzled but they wrote it all down anyway.

And did I call this one back in July? Why yes, yes I did.

SPP and "The Shock Doctrine"

Chet Scoville of Vanity Press, blogging at Shakesville :
"...the SPP is an especially dangerous example of the privatization of government that neoconservatism has been demanding and putting into place for a quarter of a century: the sort of thing Naomi Klein outlines in The Shock Doctrine. It's especially dangerous because, being multinational and happening as it is below the radar, it will be extremely difficult to undo once it's done."

Stephen Lendman in an excellent review of Klein's book at Mostly Water :
"The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" explodes the myth of "free market" democracy.

On Milton Friedman's Chicago School revolution of rapid-fire economic transformation he called "shock treatment" : " It's central tenets are structurally adjusted mass-privatizations, government deregulation, unrestricted free market access for foreign corporations, and deep cuts in social spending with repressive laws."

On "the whirling revolving door between government and business taken to a new level" :
"That's the whole idea in a get rich quick environment - get an impressive government title, stay in office long enough in a department handing out big contracts, collect insider information with market value, then quit and cash in. Klein calls public service now "little more than a reconnaissance mission for future work in the disaster capitalism complex."

"Fighting "terrorism" is big business. September 11 unlocked the potential, a huge new growth market was created, and protection from terror became more important than big brother watching.

Klein calls it "an unprecedented convergence of unchecked police powers and unchecked capitalism, a merger of the shopping mall and the secret prison."

The Security and Prosperity Partnership : a North American merger of the shopping mall and the secret prison.

"Zero Degree Turn", the Iranian Shindler's List

Remember this cartoon?

It was the winner of the International Holocaust Cartoon Competition, sponsored by the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri to answer the publication of 12 cartoons mocking/denigrating Mohammed in a Danish newspaper in Sept 2005.

Statement of the artist, Abdellah Derkaoui : "I want to express my total heartfelt sympathy with the millions of Jewish victims of the Holocaust who suffered the greatest crime against humanity under the Nazis. Nobody can deny that more than six million people were massacred during the second world war by the devil Hitler and his Nazi henchmen." Continued here.

At the time, many westerners were surprised that the winning entry was so sympathetic both to Jews and to the Holocaust. They are about to be surprised again.

"Zero Degree Turn" is an Iranian Shindler's List, a government-made miniseries airing on the Iranian state-run television. Based on a true story of diplomats in the Iranian Embassy in Paris in the 1940s who gave out about 500 Iranian passports to Jews to help them to escape, it is a fictionalized account of one of those Iranian diplomats who decides to forge Iranian passports for French Jews.

Reading about it, I was reminded that Iran was the only Middle East country on this list to hold spontaneous candlelight vigils for victims of the WTC 9/11 attacks this year, and I can't help wondering how many of them listen to their leaders on TV and think, just as we do, "I sure hope the rest of the world isn't basing its opinion of Iranians on what this idiot says."

From Cliff at Rusty Idols earlier today : "the biggest objection of the 'bomb Iran' crowd may be that the show doesn't fit the narrative of genocidal Nazi Iran."

Is Canada still "No Nukes"?

UBC Professor Michael Byers noticed a change in Canada's stated position on nuclear weapons at the government website, dfait.

Embassy Mag : Canada's Disturbing Change of Position :
"In January 2002, Canada's policy called for "the complete elimination of nuclear weapons...through steadily advocating national, bilateral and multilateral steps "

But recently, the same foreign affairs website has been amended to say that Canada's nuclear weapons policy is now "consistent with our membership in NATO and NORAD, and in a manner sensitive to the broader international security context." As Mr. Byers rightly points out, this clause strips Canada's policy of any real meaning."

Given NATO and the USA, yeah, it does.
In a search of dfait just now, I found the phrase "the complete elimination of " still in use up to Oct 2005.
After that, it only appears in archives. I guess the sixties really are over.

Rather touchingly, I see the moon is still off-limits though :
"The 1979 Moon Agreement – formally the Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies – reiterates the Outer Space Treaty's obligation that the Moon be used only for peaceful purposes."

Lucky moon. Maybe one day we can get something like that for Earth too.

"The Outer Space Treaty only explicitly forbids orbiting nuclear weapons or other WMD about the Earth, installing them on celestial bodies, or stationing in outer space in any other manner."

We're still good on that last one though, dfait, right? Right?

SPP : Back to school edition

Hey teachers! Having trouble finding course materials that rebrand Canada as part of the North American Union?

Arizona State University is your one-stop go-to place to find everything you need to - what was that happy phrase the Independent Task Force on the Future of North America used again? oh yeah : "to launch an educational project to teach the idea of a shared NA identity in schools".

Just look at these handy course materials :

Teaching Modules: Backgrounders and Cases
Building North America Into Your Course
North American Economic Integration: General Overview
Analyzing North American Integration
Managing North America
North American Structures and ¨Sites¨of Integration
Continental Strategies of Selected North American Companies

Now I know what you're thinking. That it will all be written from a US point-of-view. Not so at all. They've got lots of Canadians on their link roster : Fraser Institute, C.D.Howe Institute, I Asper School of Management. Plus there's papers on many now familiar integration projects : Atlantica, the Pacific North West Economic Region, North America's Super Corridor Coalition (NASCO).

Here's a sample from a "teaching module" written by George Haynal, "Senior Fellow at the Norman Patterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University, Ottawa-based vice president of public policy at Bombardier, Inc., and former Canadian consulgeneral in New York" :

"The Next Plateau in North America- What's the Big Idea? Mapping the North American Reality" :

"The obligation to defend the North American landmass has become far more complicated now but defending ourselves and defending space that we share in North America still constitutes one inseparable set of obligations for both our countries. So we had better face up to the need not only to defend our territory but also to do it in a way that also constitutes a satisfactory contribution to the defence of the United States."

"We must ensure that the critical infrastructure that serves us and which we share with the United States is protected against threats from terrorism or criminality. North American security is a joint need; it should be supplied as a common enterprise."

and in a section on Canadian companies (Bold - mine) :

"Ownership rules intended to ensure that owners were obliged to be "patriots" seem almost quaintly archaic at a time when multiple citizenship is so available, including to global investors."

You'll recognize some other familiar faces at the Arizona State U site as well. Stephen Blank guided the Montreal-based North American Forum on Integration for Canadian students up here in April, while Robert Pastor, author of Toward a North American Community, was Vice Chair of The Task Force on the Future of North America and, yes, author of that phrase : "to launch an educational project to teach the idea of a shared NA identity in schools".

Get 'em while they're young, I always say.

H/T to ToeDancer at Bread and Roses for the Arizona State U. link