Terahertz

Well this is a change from last year’s embarrassment of a caucus retreat for the Liberals (when Ignatieff said he would defeat Harper ASAP then got whipped by his party and retreated back to the vote or abstain with Harper at every opportunity bit).

Today we have Ignatieff blasting Harper for reckless spending (exactly what needs to be said), and also adding a little bit about “playing nice with others.” This is a great contrast to Harper’s scaremongering with coalition talk again.

In the red and orange corner we have talk of cooperation and nation-building. Defence of health care and the environment are priorities, along with sound economic management.

In the blue corner we have talk of boogeymen and the continued denigration of our welfare state.

My new theory is that Libertarians like Harper just never learned to share as children.

This is the latest YouTube video that’s making news in Canada:

A few thoughts cross my mind:

• Does this shaky spy-cam action and rock music show anything other than the film-makers bias?
• Why does this paranoid bigot feel the need to film a check-in gate?
• And does this not worry airport security more than a family of travellers who have already passed the main security gates?
• On a related note, what’s the real, scientific explanation of why we feel this need to see faces? We know people are very easily deceived, so what does seeing someone’s face actually accomplish?
• If they are not who they say they are, won’t getting through customs in England be quite a bit more difficult?
• Why question the gender of one of the passengers other than to suspect that most Muslims are terrorists?
• If this “error” was so egregious, then I guess we must just be lucky that these veiled “women” didn’t use this opportunity to strike with plastic knives and bring down the plane. Or of course, there is no real need to be any more secure at the gate other than to ensure that people paid for their seats.

And while I deplore Islam and its brutal subjugation of women, ignorant accusations like this do nothing to help bring peace and freedom to the victims.

I’ve finally written an article for The Peak again. This time I address the long-form census controversy and ask if Harper’s really a great strategist or just a lucky ideologue.

Harper’s success: strategy or luck?

By Ian Bushfield

Many pundits and voters view Stephen Harper as a strategic political mastermind. Since winning the Conservative party leadership he has impressively managed to take a right-wing fringe party to consecutive minority governments. However, after repeatedly failing to win that elusive majority, the evidence is growing that blind ideology often impedes his better judgment.

His latest blunder comes with the growing and near unanimous backlash in his attempt to kill the long form portion of the census. Every five years the federal government conducts a survey of the country in two parts — a short form that is sent to everyone and a longer form that is only sent to one-in-five people. The long form probes deeper than the short form and provides a wealth of information for social welfare groups and policy-makers. Until Harper’s recent decision, both forms were mandatory, but now the long form has been made voluntary.

The rumours out of Ottawa suggest that this decision came directly from Harper himself, likely assuming that a change like this would go widely unnoticed as the political season winds down into the summer. However, statisticians, local governments, social groups, and even religious groups like the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada have denounced the action.

In a stunning display of statistical ignorance, to compensate for this break in continuous data, Harper decided that they would send out more voluntary long-form surveys at an estimated cost of $30 million. Perhaps a first-year stats student here can explain to Harper how collecting more shit won’t make it smell any better.

The government’s post-hoc reasoning for such an unpopular course of action is that the mandatory long form is overly intrusive and violates the fundamentals of the freedom to privacy. Neglecting that the freedom to privacy is neither stated nor implied by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it is worth remembering that actions such as filling out the census are important of civic responsibilities, just like jury duty, voting, and paying taxes are. Similarly, Harper has no intention of making the long-form farm census voluntary which provides invaluable information about agricultural techniques. Apparently suburban libertarians are more important than rural ones.

Scrapping the long-form census is more about weakening the information available to progressive social justice agencies across the country than appealing to a very fringe libertarian base. By weakening the continuity of census data, organizations and local governments will be less able to target their services to where they are needed the most. If only those who can afford the time respond, it will be much more difficult for Stats Canada to ensure the robustness of its data from low income and remote communities; the groups most served by such aid organizations.

The census wasn’t Harper’s first mistake as leader. In his blood-lust to kill the weakened Liberal party after the 2008 election, he assumed it would be easy to remove the per-vote party subsidy system, only to find that the opposition parties could agree on enough to form a coalition and threaten to topple his government.

Then, last year he assumed Canadians were too apathetic to care if he prorogued Parliament to avoid answering questions about the torture of Afghan detainees. It must have been quite the surprise when hundreds of thousands of protesters turned up to criticize his three-month Christmas vacation.

So, it seems that perhaps Harper’s only real strategy thus far has been to appear less incompetent than the various Liberal leaders. But with lame ducks like Paul Martin, Stephane Dion, and Michael Ignatieff, should we really be calling Stephen Harper an expert strategist?

On Global News tonight they featured a few people living in downtown Toronto who were asking why these talks are being held in their neighbourhood rather than in a remote location.

Perhaps this map has something to do with it:

I know if I was a conniving prime minister with delusions of a majority and was expecting violent protests, that I wouldn’t want such a conference anywhere near a riding that my party had won or had a chance to win…

Hot on the heels of Marci McDonald’s bestselling The Armageddon Factor, comes another expose on the religious right in Canada. I just finished Losing Control: Canada’s Social Conservatives in the Age of Rights, which was written by gay activist Tom Warner and published by Between the Lines.

Full disclosure: My review copy was provided at no charge by BTL publishing. Nevertheless, take my review as my honest opinion on this book.

Losing Control provides a good supplemental reading to the narratives provided by McDonald. While McDonald provides the detailed look into some of the cast of characters involved in the religious right, Warner adds an academic history in the events that date back to the formation of the modern rights movements in the 1960s.

Warner documents a shift in Canadian thinking from it’s Christian roots to a secular society that prizes individual and minority rights. This shift has obviously come hard for the social conservatives in the country, who have since rallied around various conservative parties, from the Progressive Conservatives to the Reform, Canadian Alliance and modern Conservative Party.

Warner breaks his treatment thematically, treating the abortion debate, repressive sexuality laws, gay rights and gay marriage in successive chapters. He finishes with some discussion about the social conservative inroads in politics.

Unfortunately, he only has passing references to the debates over evolution vs. creationism and school prayer, both of which have been hot topics for social conservatives.

In The Armageddon Factor, McDonald used mostly original research to compose her book, however the vast majority of Losing Control is based on 29 pages of third-party sources. This extensive bibliography provides a valuable resource for anyone wanting to get the dirt straight from the source.

I partially criticized McDonald for minor editorializing at points in The Armageddon Factor, and while Warner uses the mostly neutral term social conservative to refer to Canada’s vast network of religious right figures (which includes evangelical protestants, Catholics, conservative Jews, Sikhs and Muslims), he does end many of his chapters in a more of a warning style.

As an example, at the end of the chapter on regulating sexuality he states:

Sadly, there is no realistic reason to believe that members of Parliament will take the next logical step and actually decriminalize prostitution and repeal the repressive bawdy house sections of the Criminal Code. As has so often been the case in the past, the best hope for progress on those issues rests with the justices of the Supreme Court and their interpretations of the rights guaranteed by the Charter.

This is of course not to say that I disagree with anything Warner has to say, I’m with him almost the entire way through this book. He does come down firmly with the BC Civil Liberties Union and criticizes other gay activists who have used the Human Rights Tribunals to censor hate speech, to which I’m still undecided upon, but otherwise I’m in total agreement.

I think the greatest value in Losing Control is in its framing the battles with the religious right in terms of conflicting societal values. It’s secular rights (which include religious freedoms) versus theocratic ambitions to regulate morality.

One final chapter I was hoping for was for Warner to connect the dots (something McDonald attempted to do) and discuss the main organizations that have been active in the fights against progressive minority rights. Such organizations as REAL Women Canada, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, the Catholic Civil Rights League and Focus on the Family Canada. At the very least, a brief perusal through the comprehensive index will identify the organizations that routinely come up in church-state separation debates.

Overall, Losing Control is a well-researched book that covers the history of social conservatives in Canada and the battles that have been fought and progress that has been made since the introduction of various Bills of Rights and the Charter. While not an outright replacement for The Armageddon Factor, it does make a good supplement for anyone who wants to dig a bit deeper into these issues.

I think I have the wrong idea about the point of the modern judicial system.

I was under the impression that sentencing a convict was at least in part to help rehabilitate them and make them see the “error of their ways.” A part was always retributive punishment, but there was supposed to be some focus on actually returning that prisoner to society as a contributing member.

Prisoners are still human beings, and they have rights.

Well, it turns out that even the most progressive parties out there want to take some steps to take any hope for forgiveness out of our system and ensure that it remains focussed on good old “eye-for-an-eye” scriptural punishments (while forgetting the contradictory turn the other cheek passages).

Perhaps it’s just all politics though. No party really wants to be known as supporting murderers and child molesters. Who really wants to be “soft” on crime?

Nevertheless, my support goes to the John Howard Society in Manitoba on this case. Their arguments are rational and rights-based.

“Someone has to point out that it does not serve public safety to make it harder for people to reintegrate after a prison sentence,” said [John Howard Society executive director] John Hutton.

…

Hutton offered statistics from the National Parole Board showing out of 400,000 pardons granted in the last 40 years, only 4,000 have been revoked after an offender committed another crime.

So there’s talk about a “Fox News North” coming to Canada to spew lies and propaganda for the Conservative Party.

Besides the obvious issues with such a network, it’s worth wondering how much Harper’s cabinet would use such a network as its sole voice in the media, as journalists are increasingly getting stonewalled by the PMO. Rather than muzzling everyone in the government, Harper could get away with letting everyone talk to the media – so long as its only through the Con-Ad machine.

It’s a bit scary to me that ultra-nationalist, anti-immigration parties are soaring in popularity. The fact that a party that believes the Netherlands needs its own Guantanamo Bay or that wants to ban the Koran has placed third and will potentially grab a seat in a coalition is very worrisome.

While Muslim extremism is a threat, racist fascists are still not the answer.

Of course, similar wing-nuts are easily found much closer to home.

Apparently it’s Chevron, not BP, that has been seeping oil from a Burnaby refinery into the Burrard Inlet for the past month without really telling anyone.

And I guess its not really clear what the Conservatives really think about offshore drilling. I think Prentice wants to sound like moratoriums exist (at least in the Arctic) but doesn’t really want to rule out any drilling once the fuss over a little spilt oil subsides.

Sorry for the delay in posting this review, I was hoping to have this piece published in The Peak’s Arts section but they choose to go with a 2,000 word piece about a museum’s shoe exhibit instead, but that’s a whole different rant.

The Christians are coming!

In The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada, Marci McDonald attempts to raise the awareness of our own growing Christian Right. She purports to show how they have quickly and subtly gained an alarming amount of influence in the government.

In the first chapter, McDonald outlines Stephen Harper’s personally religious history, a topic that is not spoken of very much by Harper of the media. Harper became a born-again after moving to Calgary and joining Preston Manning’s Reform Party movement. However, Harper, unlike Manning and much of the Reform Party, was more comfortable keeping his faith and politics mostly separate. McDonald notes that it was only later when, as leader of the new Conservative Party, Harper attempted to reach out to the evangelical communities.

But it was still hard for McDonald to measure the level of influence the Christian Right has had under Harper’s consecutive minority governments. There have been few socially conservative policy changes, and of those most have disappointed the very factions McDonald seeks to expose. Harper has repeatedly turned away from the abortion debate and upon winning his first minority government in 2006 he quickly allowed for his promised free vote on same-sex marriage – a vote that was actually earlier than many evangelicals had wanted, since it provided them less time to mount a defence. Similarly, by breaking his fixed-election date law in 2008, Harper killed several of his caucus’ private members bills, including an unborn victims bill that was called the “first winnable abortion bill” in years.

However, McDonald does point out that perhaps Harper’s greatest success has been in his “incremental” changes, evidenced by his countless appointments of partisans and born-agains to all levels of courts, the senate and the civil service. Within the Prime Minister’s Office, Harper counts many evangelical leaders, including the former leader of Focus on the Family Canada, Darrell Reid.

Similarly, Harper has been able to make many changes by the mere stroke of a pen. In recent months Harper has cut funds to Status of Women Canada and KAIROS, a social justice charity that apparently represented the wrong-type of Christians for this government (like McDonald has been told she is). He has sent tens of millions of stimulus dollars to Bible Colleges and after he cut funding to abortions for overseas aid, a crowd of 15,000 pro-lifers rallied on the steps of the House of Commons.

McDonald also briefly discusses the so-called “Christian Left,” which included Tommy Douglas, the father of Canadian medicare. She points out how both Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and NDP leader Jack Layton have reached out to various faith communities through acts like the revival of the NDP Faith and Social Justice committee. Contrary to some interpretations, it does not seem to me that McDonald is against these, or even Harper’s, attempts to dialogue with people of faith in principle, but merely that she hopes that such activity is acknowledged publicly.

The Armageddon Factor is an enlightening read, regardless of your personal views, but unfortunately the book strays from neutrality enough that it reads as a bit more than just a who’s who of the Christian Right. My initial hope was that it could have been more like the documentary film Jesus Camp, which, for the most part, just lets the subjects speak for themselves.

Either way, the book does shed light on much of what has been going on in the dark. No democracy is served by secrecy and backroom lobbying. At the very least, this book will hopefully force Canadians to decide what kind of country we want this to be, because if we do not, there are those who have a scripturally-inspired version of what they think it should be.