Council of Canadians calls Conservative robocalls motion defamatory and abusive

Council of Canadians calls Conservative robocalls motion defamatory and abusive



A "wanton and officious intermeddler." Add this to "professional agitator" and "virulent critic." Sounds like t-shirts, bumper stickers, and badges to me.

"Champerty and maintenance" - invoking such an obscure law surely suggests desperation. If you're going to go medieval, why not a duel by swords in costume at dawn on Parliament Hill? Choose your champions.

The deeper story here may be in the extreme remarks in the on-line  "Comments" section: there are some pretty scary Canadians out there.

PIPSC, Fat Cats, and Disturbing Dreams

I had the pleasure of attending the PIPSC Fat Cats game on Sunday - an exciting affair that the FCs won in the ninth with a sensational walk off steal at home plate by LaDale Hayes, who also made an extraordinary diving catch earlier in the game. Though American, he also represented the team in the before game ceremonies - which turned out to be fortuitous since he was clearly the player of the game. Still one wonders why one of the Canadian players was not a representative. Maybe Harper sent out a chill message or perhaps the Canadians thought they were being "neutral."

At any rate, I suspect the FCs gained a few more fans from the friends and family of those in attendance, which was substantial. And who knew Gary Corbett was such a rocker?

The mood at the PIPSC-Fat Cats game was festive, but beneath it was a depressive mumbling. This is my reading of that underlying mood, what I personally extrapolated from chit chats with several people, who may or may not have been members of PIPSC - I never asked. And so my comments in no way reflect PIPSC’s or any one member of PIPSC's position on these issues.

1) Managers have not suffered. Indeed, many have received or will receive bonuses for finding “efficiencies” - an extraordinarily perverse neoliberal incentive practice driven by greed.

2)Tony Clement in fact dreams of "efficiencies" at night when he's not counting gazebos - or electric sheep.

3) The PS has been increasingly politicized to the point where it is almost no longer even a nominal neutral non-partisan space but a mere extension of the ruling Regime, though the PS out of necessity has always had to bend to some degree to the party in power - never to this extent.

4) Harper has governed as a “dictator” in spirit if not in fact; and such an authoritarian rule has profoundly undermined the services and programs run by the PS, parliamentary democracy, and fundamental democracy. The current gutting of the PS coupled with the effects of the omnibus bill will only exacerbate this excruciating situation.

5) The Regime is looking for new young hires - at a reduced wage scale of course - the main requirement being a willingness to be moulded by the Regime’s ideology and thus a contributor to the neoliberal agenda.

6) Several PSs are resigning before getting axed simply because they can no longer tolerate working under the oppressive yoke of the Regime.

7) Unless progressive forces across Canada find a way to fuse their political strengths Canada will be lost. By the time the next election rolls around it will be too late since so many policies and laws will be so firmly established they may be impossible to remove - a scenario I’ve argued myself many times. Progressives have to step outside their respective bubbles and reach out to each other and, most of all, to the mainstream, as vague and challenging as that might be. They must abandon their comfortable, secure cocoons and enter the messy space of public discourse somehow.

Over 120 Lawyers Ask for Proposed Environmental Changes to be Removed from Bill C-38

You would think that such a significant resistance from the law community might have an effect on the Regime's thinking, but don't count on it. The goal is the full implementation of a neoliberal agenda in the belief that it will be next to impossible to reverse - even were there to be a regime change - because so firmly entrenched.

Banksters will be on a Desperate Prowl for the Rest of 2012

As I've suggested many times, the current global economic conditions were to be expected. We are in a static, no growth economy forever, the maximum growth hovering around 2%. for the foreseeable future.  I could live with that, but market-driven neoliberals couldn't, and they are the ones who, alas, control economic policy in the world. Europe, the U.S., and China in particular are all suffering serious economic woes, and the Canadian economy  grew by only 1.9% in the first quarter - much less than all the neoliberal, market-driven Canadian economists predicted -  including the Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Finance Minister. That meagre growth was driven by business development, not by consumers, who have pulled back on consumption while sinking into debt by another $454. per capita - just about the limit of debt load, reasonable or otherwise, for the average Canadian relative to income. The banksters will thus be on a desperate prowl for profit. Be prepared.

Repressive Tactics Smack of History

Of course the so-called budget bill, stuffed to the gills with non-budgetary items as such, has multiple political purposes, but one of them is clearly to limit dissenting voices within parliament itself and to usurp parliamentary power and transfer it to cabinet - as can be seen, for example, in the new environmental regulation proposals. This is a significant undermining of parliamentary democratic legislative procedure, but equally disturbing are two other recent repressive tactics that smack of other repressive regimes witnessed in history.

Can there be any doubt that both the proposed further criminalization of wearing a mask at a lawful assembly and the aggressive CRA assaults on legitimate charities are unequivocally designed in essence to stifle dissent?  This is obvious even to the mainstream media for a change. But perhaps what is most perplexing  is what seems to be the utter complicity of a significant number of ordinary Canadians who have indicated in recent polls that they support such a repressive, undemocratic regime. Maybe, just maybe,  I shouldn't remain baffled for too long,  however, for that implicit consent, that complicity, also smacks of history where both the indifferent and the complcit get swept up in illusionary power.

And today in the news, James Moore's outspoken appeal to the public to decry the Ottawa Educational Sex Exhibit is nothing more than another instance of an attempt to repress that which the Harper Regime finds ideologically objectionable, this time the target being a form of free speech and educational art by way of censorious intimidation. And yet we'll all roll over if not bend down.  It seems we continue to lack the collective moral outrage to do anything substantive about our oppressive condition. I hear the sound of much weeping across the nation from those defeatist positions.

See, too, my earlier post: Are Canadians resigned to the current repressive methods of the Harper Regime? 

a tiny glimpse into the ways our government serves the corporate and financial world, not the people of Canada

Some Key Areas Where Neoliberal Policy Undermines both the Industrial Economy and Canadian Democracy

Under the Harper Regime, the investor class is constantly being protected at the expense of the real industrial economy, for just about all policy decisions privilege both the financial sector, with its market-driven initiatives and debt-driven growth strategies, and of course corporations - in particular resource corporations in oil, gas, and mining, all of which combined have a heavily weighted presence on the TSX and, in fact, together with financials drive the TSX index. The obsession with deficit reduction and austerity are part of this process in order to maintain socalled  “market confidence,” played off ironically, as they always are around the world, against sustainable growth. And do I need to mention successive corporate tax cuts presumably designed to attract investment, but the success of which no economist has ever measured accurately? Much if not all of the financial sector is, of course, composed of corporations.

Foreign worker policy is designed both to drive wages down with differential pay scales, and targeted immigrant recruitment is designed to enhance a neoliberal policy of economic growth in the sectors the Regime favours as being in “Canada’s national interest.”

Anti-labour, anti-union, policies and back-to-work legislation are obviously designed to suppress wages and erode workers’  benefits. Throw the newly proposed changes in EI into the mix here too, and it’s a war on  the majority of Canada’s very own citizenry.

Reducing in effect government financial participation, pension reforms clearly favour the financial class because of the profit possibilities of the  Pooled Registered Pension Plan proposal, as do the OAS changes that will force many to seek private pension arrangements if they can afford it or otherwise to stay in the workforce for longer than planned.  Add the corporate management shift to defined contribution plans, which also obviously aid corporate bottom lines and, in turn,  shareholders and the investor class, and we see another neoliberal triumph.

Gutting of a myriad of regulations and other laws and policies wherever and whenever possible to allow corporations to exploit both people and the planet at will for profit is now commonplace for the Regime. The legislative assault on long-standing environmental regulations is only the latest, but countless not-so-subtle manoeuvres in foreign policy, whereby Foreign Affair diplomats become sales people, so-called shifts in foreign aid such as the new CEDA relationship with mining companies, and the assault on charities  through the CRA also come readily to mind.

All the free trade agreements negotiated by the Regime serve a neo-liberal agenda, as they did, to be fair, under Liberal rule as well.  Even as we can’t change NAFTA through parliamentary process, we will not be able to change any of these other, more recent international trade agreements, including CETA, simply because they’re international. We lack the power nationally in law to do so, though there are costly international mechanisms we could avail ourselves of but, it would seem,  never do.

 Gutting expenditures and a host of smaller programs  for Social Services, including limited Health transfers to the provinces, wherever possible is de rigueur in such neoliberal driven government such as ours.

This is a mere but, alas, sad glimpse into some of the ways our government serves the corporate and financial world, not the people of Canada.

Are Canadians resigned to the current repressive methods of the Harper Regime?

“Fascism creeps; and one of its hallmarks is that by the time you realize you're in it, it's too late to do anything about it.” We see where things are going, but it’s like watching a train wreck -- “that slow-motion horror in your head, the disbelief, the sense that nobody can hear you screaming, and the sickening knowledge that there's nothing you can do to stop what you know is coming.” (Sara Robinson )

There’s a considerable degree of credibility in this scenario since, given the utter failure of our representative political system, the now absolute division between power and politics in that system, we have become completely powerless to change things in time. Our government  clearly serves corporate Canada, in particular the financial sector and big oil, not the people of Canada. (This abject condition  is merely a watered down, subtler version of the U.S. government’s relation to corporate America.*)  Despite all our protests, letters to the editor, petitions, teach-ins, marches, tweets, blog posts, sit-ins, and occupy efforts, we remain powerless since our only  real leverage in such a tyranny is the ballot box.  But by the time the next election rolls around, even if we mange to engage the mainstream in a recognition of the danger, the utter destruction of both democracy and the environment  in Canada may be irreversible.

* I would argue that we are significantly more powerless than the Americans because parliamentary procedure has allowed the Regime to exercise pathological, serial abusive power on bill after bill - most obviously with omnibus bills and closure. Congress, as dysfunctional as it is, gives more power in its discursive formats to individual representatives than our whipped MPs, and dissenting voices are frequently heard on both the left and the right.