The WAR on Science: Thursday, November 21, 2013, 7:00 pm Room 1900, SFU Harbour Ctr

agentaqua · Jan 6, 2015

agentaqua · Jan 6, 2015

6/ Harper creates climate of fear for charities — In some quarters, some Canadians have become scared rabbits under Harper’s stewardship. Some very famous people who agreed to an interview with me for the book, some independently wealthy people who had nothing to fear – such as losing a job. One very important artist who had a lot of important things to say, called after the interview and asked that the interview be withdrawn because he had represented several charities for years. He was worried that if he criticized the government, these charities would lose their charitable status. If he backed down, others would also start caving in.

7/ Harper tries to intimidate Canadian diplomat — Tried to intimidate diplomat Richard Colvin into not revealing detailed information about the Afghan detainee situation. When Harris interviewed Colvin, he worried that I might be a CSIS agent and asked me to remove the battery from my cellphone. He believed that he was being followed by a CSIS agent (Canadian Security Intelligence Service). This kind of fear is new.

8/ Tory MP Michael Chong resigns after being subjected to Harper intimidation – Harris went to Fergus Ontario to speak to Michael Chong who quit Harper’s cabinet. Clearly a man of integrity, he was Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs. One day on his way to a caucus meeting, his deputy stopped him in the hall to say that something big was coming down the pike. The PM was going to make a major announcement about Chong’s department. Harper had decided to confer nation status on Quebec. Chong was not involved in this decision nor was cabinet. It was an unconstitutional edict by Harper who sees himself as a presidential figure. Harper advised Chong to go along with the decision. Chong told Harper his decision was unconstitutional and resigned. Chong was too afraid to release details of his meeting with Harper for fear of future ramifications in his life.

9/ Harper curses MP Bill Casey for speaking the truth, Casey resigns – Harris spoke with Bill Casey, the most popular Tory MP in the Maritimes. He has decided to seek the Liberal nomination in the next federal election. Casey was the first person to come face to face with Harper’s dark side. The Atlantic Accord was negotiated, and gave Atlantic Canada two options: stay with the old deal if the numbers worked better on offshore development or get the new deal if the numbers worked better that way. The deal and was negotiated in good faith. Harper brought it back to Ottawa and changed it unilaterally. Casey looked at the legislation, which was part of a budget, and asked Harper about the change in the Atlantic agreement. Casey even took the agreement to the Justice Department to get their opinion. They confirmed that Harper had tampered with a negotiated agreement. Casey was advised to toe the line and vote for the budget. Casey took the Justice Department opinion to Harper, and put it on Harper’s desk. Harper swept it off his desk and said, “Bill, the ******* words mean what I say they mean….You know your ******* problem, you’ve never been with the program.” Casey phoned his wife, told her what had happened and she told him not to vote for it. The next day he was kicked out of caucus. Casey decided to run as an Independent. Harper parachuted a person from the Justice Department into Casey’s riding, who accused Casey of stealing money from the electoral district association. And brought in the RCMP. And had him investigated while the election is going on. Bill Casey won the election.

10/ Harper ruthlessly cuts funds to Nova Scotia to get back at Casey — Shortly into his term, Casey got a call from the mayor of Truro asking Casey to come to his office ASAP. The infrastructure payments which Truro needed had been cut. When they called the PM’s Office (PMO) to find out what had happened, the mayors were told to ask their MP Casey why the funds were cut — “You didn’t vote for the right party.” That’s the sort of ruthlessness that we’re dealing with.

11/ Harper’s anti-union Bill 377 – Bill 377 should have you very, very alarmed. It was fraudulently brought in as a private member’s bill. It was really a backdoor government anti-union bill fully supported by Harper. One union leader called it the “worst pile of ********” he had ever seen in his life. Bill 377 is not about union accountability, as its name would imply. It’s about punishing unions, making it harder to run a union and giving the impression that unions do not already have financial accountability. Harper wants to make war on the unions just as he has made war on other groups of people.

12/ Senate returns emended Bill 377 to House, Harper reintroduces 377 unchanged — When Bill 377 went to the Senate, Liberal Senator Hugh Segal said it was unconstitutional. He emended the bill and sent it back to the House. When Segal retired and subsequently died, Harper reintroduced the unemended Bill 377.

13/ Harper cuts CBC funding — This is what Harper said about the CBC: “First we bring them to their knees. Then we restructure them.”

14/ Harper cuts funding to Canada’s veterans — The Harper government has behaved in a horrible fashion towards Canada’s veterans. Minister Julian Fantino has been a no-show to scheduled meetings. He blamed the veterans for the tone of the meetings with him. He disrespected veterans when he was asked to reconsider closing the VA centres. The government cut $226,000,000 from the VA budget. They took $3.8 million and closed 9 VA centres across the country. A veteran in Thunder Bay was told to go to the closest VA centre to him, which happened to be in Winnipeg, an 8-hour drive away. Wounded veterans were entitled to a $31,000 per year pension. The average payout now is $26,000. They don’t even recognize PTSD as a war-related condition.

By his actions, Harper is building the coalition that’s going to defeat him.

15/ Head of StatsCan resigns over Minister Tony Clement’s lies — Munir Sheikh, head of Statists Canada, read in the newspaper that he was advising Minister Tony Clement to get rid of the long form census and replace it with a shorter form. Sheikh went to the Clerk of the Privy Council to request that Clement stop telling lies about him publicly. Stats Canada employees wrongly believed that Sheikh was a Harper plant put in there to destroy Stats Canada. So he was faced with an inter-departmental revolution. He went to Clement himself who apologized and said it would never happen again. The very next day the same story appeared in the Vancouver Sun. Sheikh went to the PMO to complain. The PMO said “So you want to go out and call the Minister a liar do you? Don’t you realize that getting rid of the long form is our ticket to a majority government?” Sheikh resigned.

16/ The F35 scandal – a $10 billion dollar lie. — Harper stood up in the House and said “We have a contract for 65 of these planes. They’ll cost $15.7 billion.” He had the real number in his possession when he said this – a number which Kevin Page challenged the Tories on. Instead of admitting Page was right and they were wrong, the Tories drove Page out of office.

17/ The Linda Keen scandal — Keen, the Nuclear Commissioner, was fired for standing up for her scientific advice. She tried to sue Harper and found out you can’t do that in Canada. She wasted $100,000 of her own money to be told that Harper has absolute privilege.

When I took up this project and started bumping heads with the most vindictive politician I’ve ever met, someone who I think is ruthless to the bottom, and I think a rogue Prime Minister as well, I remember saying to myself, “You know, you might have bitten off more than you can chew here.”

agentaqua · Jan 6, 2015

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/01/05/fatino-stephen-harper-cabinet_n_6418960.html

Stephen Harper's Cabinet Is Now Tied For Largest In Canadian History
The Huffington Post Canada | By Michael Bolen
Email
Posted: 01/05/2015 5:18 pm EST Updated: 01/05/2015 5:59 pm EST

When Stephen Harper became prime minister in 2006 he touted a "smaller" cabinet "designed for work—not for show". On Monday, he became the first among equals in a cabinet tied for the title of largest in Canadian history.

The demotion of embattled Julian Fantino to associate minister of National Defence and the appointment of Erin O’Toole to minister of Veterans Affairs brings the size of the Harper ministry to 40 strong, matching the size of Brian Mulroney's 1984 cabinet.

MP Brent Rathgeber, who quit the Tory caucus to sit as an independent in 2013, was quick to point out the milestone.

And while Rathgeber's criticism of the expansion was implied, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair was more explicit.

"For someone who has always preached cuts for government expenditures, Harper is now proving once more he’s not able to deliver the goods," Mulcair told reporters in French on Monday.

"He’s beaten all the records of all the governments in Canada."

When Harper first became prime minister in 2006 he appointed just 26 people to his first cabinet, a move meant to contrast his fiscal conservatism with the policies of former Liberal PM Paul Martin, whose own cabinet had ballooned in size to as large as 39 members.

"My smaller cabinet and more streamlined cabinet structure are designed for work—not for show," Harper said at the time. "The structure is designed to promote accountable, efficient and effective government—more focus and purpose; less process and cost."

Asked Monday about the utility of today's much larger cabinet, now greater in size than Martin's largest ministry, Harper's press secretary Carl Vallée told HuffPost in an email that "We are confident that we have the team to deliver on the priorities of Canadians: jobs, the economy, safe communities, and standing up for Canadian values at home and abroad."

Fantino was shuffled out of Veterans Affairs on Monday after 18 controversial months on the job. Throughout his tenure, the former commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police faced criticism for closing offices, cutting jobs and for failing to spend his department's full budget. Fantino suffered through several public gaffes, including showing up late to a meeting with angry vets and ignoring questions from the wife of a former soldier with PTSD while TV cameras rolled.

Fantino becomes associate minister of National Defence, a job which had been vacant since July of 2013. According to the Prime Minister's Office, Fantino will assist the minister of National Defence on issues of "arctic sovereignty, information technology security and foreign intelligence."

agentaqua · Jan 6, 2015

http://www.vancouverobserver.com/opinion/harper-legacy-one-we-want-leave-future-generations

Is the Harper legacy one we want to leave for future generations?
Sheila Harrington Jan 5th, 2015

Photo via Creative Commons by Bram Cymet
The year 2014 was a busy time for the Harper Conservatives, who were quietly dismantling Canada's environmental protections to serve international oil, gas, mining and aquaculture interests.

Weakened laws include granting broad power to the Ministers of Fisheries and Oceans and Environment to authorize destruction of Canada’s native fish in favour of foreign industrial development, along with lifting restrictions on large scale dumping of aquatic drugs, pesticides and farm-fish waste into the ocean.

At the end of the year, the Harper Conservatives handed federal ports the license to operate without environmental reviews and the power to destroy terrestrial species at risk of extinction. And if you want to peacefully protest the projects these actions will allow, they have just proposed new provisions to the criminal code that could result in 10 years in jail and big fines.

Once its gone, it’s gone. Instead of Canada’s iconic natural areas, we will have poor air quality and industrial landscapes with coal, oil barges and pipelines replacing our fisheries, tourism and hospitality jobs.

After 2015, do we really want to continue this authorized, corporate control to destroy Canada’s natural areas, climate, and democracy?

Let’s leave a different legacy, and choose to conserve habitat, stop the fossil fuel expansion, and further the solar, wind and water energy businesses with viable, clean jobs.

agentaqua · Jan 6, 2015

http://www.vancouverobserver.com/op...path-transforming-canada-international-pariah

Stephen Harper continues to make Canada into an international environmental pariah
"Pariah: a person who is hated and rejected by other people." Miriam-Webster On-Line Dictionary
Warren Bell Jan 4th, 2015

Polar Bear - powerful, but endangered
Once again, showing contempt for international standards and principles, Stephen Harper has turned his back on a shared global norm.

In a stunning display of contrarian behaviour, the Canadian government refused, at the September, 2013 meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), to enhance protection for 76 plants and animal species under threat. Documents revealing this action have only just come to light.

Canada, in one single meeting, displayed more indifference to species protection than any other country has since CITES came into effect 39 years ago – ironically enough, on Canada Day, 1975.

The next largest number of refusals to enhance protection has come from Iceland, with a far more modest 22, and Iceland took years to achieve that total. The US has never refused to enhance protection of a single species.

As usual, the Canadian government handled inquiries about this matter through a “communications officer”, Danny Kingsberry. No minister was available to answer questions.

Kingsberry said opaquely that Canada’s inaction was “temporary” and that its reservations were simply “technical in nature”.

Bland bafflegab, coming from this particular government – famous for saying one thing (nice) while doing another (very not nice) – is not in the slightest reassuring.

Kingsberry has already been part of that sort of duplicity. Bilingual and engaging, he was parachuted into Environment Canada from a similar role with Transport Canada in February, 2013.

He was then tasked with fending off concerns about the closure of most of Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s libraries. At that same time, library staff were taking pictures of hundreds of documents tossed into the back of a dumpster, ready for the landfill.

The Minister responsible stated with feigned outrage: “It is absolutely false to insinuate that any books were burnt.”

Kingsberry repeated similarly that all that was taking place was consolidation of materials.

The difference between “burning” and “garbaging” is only relevant to a politician intent on “plausible deniability”.

So why is Stephen Harper so oddly obstructionist with regard to protecting endangered species?

The answer undoubtedly lies in Canada’s Arctic. There, Harper has pinned his hopes on obtaining a treasure of untold wealth for the nation through opening up the region for fossil fuel, mining and other extractive industries.

But situated right in the middle of that treasure is the iconic, endangered polar bear population.

In May, 2014, CITES, under international pressure, initiated a “significant trade review” of the global trade in polar bear parts.

Canada is the only country in the world that permits trophy polar bear hunting (as opposed to local indigenous hunting).

So the CITES trade review was a symbolic slap in the face for Canada.

Environment Minister Leona Agglukaq, opined defensively: “We are confident that Canada's [support of hunting] will be reaffirmed through this review process."

But polar bear hunting, which has been sharply limited by all nations since 1973, is really just the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

The actual two-pronged threat to polar bear survival – likely to reduce numbers by 60% by mid-century – is the combined assault of global warming and pollution.

Stephen Harper pays lip-service to climate change, while doing next to nothing to address it. And he is also fully aware that resource exploitation in the Arctic will increase already significant pollution levels even more.

The real problem with CITES reviewing trade in polar bear parts is that it will lead to an exploration of the underlying vulnerability of the bear population that lives at ground zero of Stephen Harper’s policy agenda – ignoring global climate change and impacts to the environment while proceeding with rampant resource extraction.

CITES joins the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and major medical authorities in resolutely challenging Stephen Harper’s perspective and intentions.

Punishing CITES, then, is just another step in a trajectory that Canada’s leader has mapped out for the country – out of sync with other countries, in conflict with international bodies, and even at odds with most of his own citizens’ view of the future.

Let’s hope that Canadians stop Stephen Harper and vote out his Conservative majority in the 2015 federal election, before he goes too far with his dangerous and unsustainable plans.

agentaqua · Jan 7, 2015

http://thetyee.ca/News/2015/01/07/C...ce=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=070115

Government Censorship of Websites On the Rise: Unions
Civil servants left to their own devices to access internet.
By Jeremy J. Nuttall, Today, TheTyee.ca

Screen-capture from Blacklock's Reporter
The website of Ottawa-based Blacklock's Reporter was blocked to federal staff last year. Credit: Screen-capture from Blacklock's Reporter.

Government rules that dictate the type of websites that civil servants can view for work have become so strict that many employees in Ottawa use personal electronics -- such as smart phones and tablets -- to access information needed to do their jobs, say public sector unions.

In some cases, they say employees must make special requests to the government department they work at to get websites unblocked in order to view the material they require.

The government has argued that it blocks certain sites to protect its system from viruses and to prevent workers from viewing illicit material.

But unions say that the degree to which the government blocks websites goes beyond those with illicit material. The government department that manages what sites can be viewed has refused to reveal what sites or how many sites it has blocked.

Revelations about the extent of the censorship came to light Monday when a news service, Blacklock's Reporter, reported that Shared Services Canada, a government department that oversees information and IT, prevented civil servants from viewing its news site.

Blacklock's Reporter is a journalist-owned subscription news service focusing on policy and laws. Civil servants were unable to read the site for 19 days in August and September.

News site tracks regulations, tax courts

Its managing editor said blocking the site to civil servants was overkill.

"We do stories about fertilizer regulations. We cover tax court," managing editor Tom Korski said. "How anyone could possibly conceive of this coverage as so subversive a government employee can't see it at work is ridiculous -- but that's what they did."

Ted Francis, a spokesperson for Shared Services Canada, said in an email the site was blocked because of a security threat to government computers, but Korski said viruses have never been a problem.

Blacklock's discovered its site was blocked after civil servants with subscriptions complained. They filed an access to information request to find out why.

The request came back heavily censored, but Blacklock's did determine the site was unblocked the day they filed their information request.

Korski said the government is misusing the shared services system, which he said was initially meant to streamline government information.

"They took that model and instead come out with this crazy Orwellian scheme where they will block news sites in a functioning G-8 democracy for federal employees," Korski said. "It's crazy. You have to call that crazy."

The story is no surprise to unions representing civil servants. They said control over what type of information government workers are permitted to view has become so tight that many departments only allow access to government websites or those that are preauthorized.

"Directives in many departments allow employees to request certain sites to be unblocked if they are deemed necessary for their work," said a representative for the Canadian Association of Professional Employees, who asked not to be named.

"We don't know how often those requests are being accepted or denied."

The union said many workers now use their personal cell phones or tablets for work because they can't get full access to the internet.

The representative said he doesn't know if the restrictions are impeding employees' work.

The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, which represents government scientists, said its members have also encountered blocked websites. A communications person for the union was unable to provide more details by deadline.

Shared Services Canada would not grant an interview to The Tyee but said in the email that Blacklock's was blocked because a potential threat to government infrastructure was detected and rectified.

Journalists' Association responds

The government department would not answer questions about what websites it has blocked or how many. It did not give a reason or acknowledge the questions posed. Instead, it provided a link to the access to information act.

On Tuesday, the Canadian Association of Journalists issued a statement criticizing Shared Services Canada for blocking Blacklock's Reporter.

The association's president, Hugo Rodrigues, said the organization considers access to media an important part of freedom of expression and questioned how government employees who need to monitor media for work can do their jobs if they can't access it.

"That the department would restrict the access those employees have seems a bit heavy-handed," Rodrigues said.

Like Korski, Rodrigues said he doesn't believe the government's excuse that the site was restricted over concerns about viruses but said he couldn't speculate on why it, or other sites, may have been blocked.

agentaqua · Jan 7, 2015

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/glob...s-threaten-democratic-voices/article21789300/

SHELDRICK AND GANDESHA
B.C. pipeline-protest case shows how lawsuits threaten democratic voices
BYRON SHELDRICK AND SAMIR GANDESHA
Contributed to The Globe and Mail
Published Wednesday, Nov. 26 2014, 11:15 AM EST
Last updated Monday, Dec. 01 2014, 12:03 PM EST

Byron Sheldrick is chairman of the political science department at the University of Guelph. Samir Gandesha is director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University.

At 4:00 on November 17, the RCMP read an injunction that had been granted the previous Friday prohibiting members of the public from traversing areas of a Burnaby Mountain Conservation Area. The initial injunction had initially been directed at members of the Burnaby Mountain Caretakers and Burnaby Residents Against Kinder Morgan Expansion, and two Simon Fraser University professors who are members of those groups. They were also served with a $5.6-million civil suit. These are the roots of the current standoff between the RCMP and the protestors.

The lawsuit brought by Kinder Morgan against demonstrators peacefully protesting survey work on Burnaby Mountain represents a classic strategy of political and legal intimidation. Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation -- or SLAPPs -- are lawsuits brought against group of citizens, usually alleging that the group has committed defamation, trespass, or some other civil wrong, which have the effect of curtailing political engagement over a public issue.

These lawsuits generally involve damage claims and requests for injunctive relief, and place a chill on public engagement. The impact of a such lawsuit, when brought by a major corporation and claiming millions of dollars in damages, cannot be overestimated. The prospect of losing one’s house would test the political mettle of anyone.

SLAPPs are extremely effective political weapons. They remove political issues from their context, transforming them into narrow issues of civil liability. In the Burnaby Mountain case, issues of environmental integrity, the impact of pipelines on conservation lands and the autonomy of municipal governments are at stake. The National Energy Board ruling granting Kinder Morgan the right to conduct survey work on Burnaby Mountain effectively overruled local municipal decision-making. The Mayor of Burnaby, Derek Corrigan, was re-elected in the recent elections on an anti-Kinder Morgan platform. He and Burnaby Council are currently appealing the ruling, which arguably represents a significant departure from current understandings of both the authority of administrative tribunals and current jurisprudence on federalism.

Yet, it is the authority of this NEB decision that stands at the heart of Kinder Morgan’s claim that demonstrators are “trespassing” on what is otherwise considered public land. The legal issues in the case are far from settled, yet the narrow issue of trespass has been employed to support a major damage claim and an injunction that, now that it is being enforced, permits the company to complete its work before the courts have even considered the validity of the original NEB ruling. Moreover, not only is the board’s initial ruling under appeal, the NEB’s very impartiality has been called into question by the former head of BC Hydro, Marc Eliesen, who resigned from it last week, describing the board as “industry captured.”

The case reflects the urgent need for legislation regulating SLAPPs. Courts have proven ineffective at doing so. In Canada, only Quebec has legislation in place. Ironically, British Columbia was the first province to enact anti-SLAPP legislation in 2001, although it was reversed shortly after the election of the Liberal government. Critics of anti-SLAPP regulations argue that such legislation erodes the rule of law. However, in Ontario, a blue-ribbon panel recommended the introduction of anti-SLAPP legislation. Legislation based on the report was introduced, but subsequently died on the order paper when the last Ontario election was called. The Ontario government has committed itself to reintroducing the bill, which is carefully designed to balance rights of citizens to public and political expression, while ensuring that “real” grievances continue to be dealt with by the courts.

Such legislation would help here. There’s no better evidence of the frivolous nature of Kinder Morgan’s suit than its claims that the protestors made “threatening” faces. This launched a satirical “Kinder Morgan face” trend on social media.

The proposed Ontario legislation requires the court to hold an expedited hearing to determine whether the litigation involves a matter of public interest and negatively impacts political expression. If the answer is “yes,” then the burden shifts to the plaintiff to demonstrate that they have suffered actual harm and that the lawsuit would likely be successful. It is important to keep in mind that over 80 per cent of SLAPP cases are unsuccessful. Winning the case is rarely the objective behind these lawsuits. An expedited hearing process ensures that plaintiffs cannot use the courts to tie citizens up in expensive court proceedings as a strategy for curtailing public expression. The Ontario legislation also would put on hold all related proceedings, thereby preventing the very scenario unfolding on Burnaby Mountain.

As a result of the SLAPP suit filed by Kinder Morgan, we now have the RCMP acting at the behest of a foreign oil company to arrest young people, SFU faculty and Coast Salish elders, who are profoundly concerned not just about what more than doubling of the capacity of these pipelines might mean to the region but also about the effects of tar sands bitumen on global climate change more generally. When challenged about what he thought about what this meant for the ability of Canadians and First Nations peoples to democratically determine their own fate, one RCMP officer simply said he doesn’t think about such issues; he was simply “doing his job.” Where have we heard that before? And with what consequences?

At a time when the lack of citizen engagement, growing political apathy as reflected by low voter turn-out, and general cynicism about our political system are universally lamented, it is important that our institutions of justice not be co-opted into processes that further erode and undermine the quality of our democracy.

agentaqua · Jan 7, 2015

http://www.watershedsentinel.ca/content/harper-evangelical-capitalism

Harper & Evangelical Capitalism
By: Joyce Nelson
Society
Jan-Feb-2015-Vol25-No1

We think of right-wing evangelical religion as an influence in American politics, but, unrecognized by the public and mostly unreported, it is a powerful influence on the Conservative caucus. That would explain the destruction of environmental policies and those omnibus bills.

When it comes to religion, most 21st century Canadians are a tolerant lot, with a “live and let live” mentality. We tend to not particularly care about other Canadians’ religious beliefs, or lack of religious beliefs, and we expect a similar tolerance in return.

But when the supposed separation of Church and State starts to erode, we take notice. As Stephen Harper gears up for the next election, some of us wonder if the massive changes to Canada that have already been perpetrated by the Harper government are connected to his religious beliefs.

In her 2010 book, The Armageddon Factor, Marci McDonald warned about the “theo-cons” (Stephen Harper’s word), who view “science and environmentalism as hostile to the Bible.”

Regarding the church that Harper has belonged to for nearly three decades – the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church – McDonald noted that its “adherents believe that the Bible is ‘inerrant’ and the Second Coming is ‘imminent’.”

That would place Harper’s church squarely in the Evangelical tradition called dominionism, those who believe in the so-called “dominion mandate” spelled out in Genesis 1:28: “And God blessed them [Adam and Eve], and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth.”

Many (although not all) dominionists take that passage as a divine trump card against any thoughts about environmental protection or regulation.

In taking the Bible literally and as “inerrant” (rather than as metaphorical or symbolic truth), most dominionists also believe that the Earth is a mere 6,000 years old, and that the “end times” are not only “imminent” but welcome, because the Faithful will be “raptured” to Heaven before the Battle of Armageddon takes place in the Middle East. The handy Rapture Index at raptureready.com helps them determine just how “imminent” those end times are.

Now some Canadians are wondering: Does the Prime Minister’s Office check the Rapture Index regularly? Does Harper?

In other words, just how much has the separation of Church and State been blurred in Canada?

Church and State
McDonald first raised such questions in an October 2006 feature article for The Walrus, “Stephen Harper & the Theo-Cons,” surprising readers by stating that there were “an estimated seventy Evangelicals in [Harper’s] Conservative caucus.” McDonald identified as Evangelicals Cabinet stalwarts such as Deborah Grey, Vic Toews (“one of the most conservative Evangelicals in his cabinet”), and Jason Kenney (a Catholic, but nonetheless “a regular on the evangelical circuit”).

McDonald’s article also mentioned one of the very few times that Harper has talked about his religious views. In February 2005, he told Evangelical talk-show host Drew Marshall, “I won’t say I always keep my faith and my politics separate, but I don’t mix my advocacy of a political position with my advocacy of faith.” The statement begs the question whether his political positions come from his Evangelical faith.
In a 2003 essay posted on the Christian Coalition International (Canada) site, Harper accused the Left of “moral nihilism – the rejection of any tradition or convention of morality” and he targeted a “social agenda” that causes “damage” to “our most important institutions, particularly the family.”

A 2007 article in the Vancouver Sun (August 18, 2007) noted that Harper’s cancellation of a proposed national daycare program coincided with the beliefs of Evangelical Christians, who “don’t want the state meddling in the sacred duty of raising children.” The piece also informed readers that Harper’s (and Preston Manning’s) Christian and Missionary Alliance Church “has about 2.5 million members and 14,000 congregations worldwide. One fifth of its members live in North America, with Alberta a Canadian hotbed.”

The article noted: “Aware that many Canadians are suspicious of Evangelicals, [Preston] Manning last year [2006] organized a series of conferences to urge conservative Christian leaders to tone down their Biblical ‘peel-the-paint-off-the-walls’ rhetoric.”

Soon after the 2006 election, Harper cancelled the position of National Science Advisor, dismissing Arthur Carty, whose mandate was to provide the PM with “sound, unbiased and non-partisan advice on science and technology.” Environment Canada also removed all references on its website to the scientific findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN-sanctioned group of scientists.
In 2009, Gary Goodyear, Harper’s Minister of State for Science & Technology (2008 – July 2013), oversaw $147.9 million in funding cuts for science programs, leading the Globe & Mail’s science reporter to note (March 17, 2009) that some scientists wonder if Goodyear “is suspicious of science, perhaps because he is a creationist.” When asked his views on evolution, Goodyear told the reporter, “I’m not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don’t think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate.”

The incident caused a brief media flurry, with the National Post calling it a “pseudo-scandal” targeting “white, male, English Christians.” By that point, the Harper government’s muzzling of scientists was underway.

“Domestic Extremism”
After McDonald’s book was reviewed in the press, little was mentioned in Canada about the issue of Church and State separation, even while Harper doled out $26 million to 14 private Christian colleges. The silence continued in March 2011 when dominionist Evangelical Stockwell Day, acting as Treasury Board president, announced $1.6 billion in cuts to environmental services across several departments, including a 20% cut to Environment Canada.

The silence continued in February 2012, when Public Safety Minister Vic Toews announced that environmentalism had been listed among “issue-based domestic extremism” targeted for increased security surveillance. (Fellow Evangelical Deb Grey is now interim chair of Security Intelligence Review Committee, the watchdog that oversees the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.)

Then, in an article for The Tyee (March 26, 2012) Andrew Nikiforuk broke the silence, writing of Harper’s church that it “believes that the free market is divinely inspired and that non-believers are ‘lost’.”

Nikiforuk further noted: “Given his government’s pointed attacks on environmentalists and science of any kind, Harper would seem to take his advice from the Cornwall Alliance, a coalition of rightwing scholars, economists and Evangelicals. The Alliance questions mainstream science, doubts climate change, views environmentalists as a “native evil,” champions fossil fuels, and supports libertarian economics.” The Cornwall Alliance also “describes environmental regulation as an impediment to God’s will: ‘We aspire to a world in which liberty as a condition of moral action is preferred over government-initiated management of the environment as a means to common goals’.”
...continued below...

agentaqua · Jan 7, 2015

Just weeks after Nikiforuk’s article, in June 2012 the Harper government passed omnibus budget Bill C-38, eliminating at least 70 pieces of federal environmental legislation, and then in October passed bill C-45, gutting the federal Fisheries Act and the Navigable Waters Protection Act, while undermining First Nations’ land and treaty rights. Then came the deluge of Harper’s War On Science, with hundreds of millions in funding and thousands of positions cut from DFO, Environment Canada, and other scientific departments.

At the same time, the then Public Safety Minister Vic Toews cancelled the part-time contracts for all non-Christian prison chaplains, meaning that the federal prison system is now mostly served by Christian chaplains.

The Cornwall Alliance
The Cornwall Alliance is an American Evangelical lobby group founded in 2006 by Calvin Beisner, recently described by religiondispatches.org (August 15, 2014) as “the most influential evangelical anti-environmentalist in the United States.” Beisner is a dominionist vehemently against any government regulation of the environment. He is also dismissive of climate science.

That’s because Beisner and the Cornwall Alliance believe that “Earth and its ecosystems – created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence – are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception.”

In 2010, at a special function hosted by the (oil industry-backed) Heritage Foundation, the Cornwall Alliance launched a book and accompanying video called “Resisting the Green Dragon,” which labelled the environmental movement “one of the greatest threats to society and the church today.”

Fully in the free-market, neo–liberal economic camp, the Cornwall Alliance is apparently opposed to collective ownership of parks and wilderness areas, collective ownership of natural resources and utilities, and the collective ownership by First Nations of reserve land and traditional territories. (The Harper government has long been attempting to impose “private property rights” onto First Nations’ reserves and governing structures.)

The website thinkprogress.org investigated the Cornwall Alliance in 2010 and found “deep ties to the oil industry,” especially ExxonMobil and Chevron, as well as direct connections to “longtime right-wing operatives orchestrating the climate science denial machine.”

When asked about such ties by the UK’s The Guardian (May 5, 2011), Beisner said, “There have been no corporate donations and certainly no oil money,” although he did not deny connections to the “climate science denial machine.”

Beisner’s rhetoric has been heating up lately. In 2013, he called the environmental movement “the greatest threat to Western civilization” because it combines “the utopian vision of Marxism, the scientific facade of secular humanism, and the religious fanaticism of jihad.”

Beisner is now also roundly attacking other Evangelical Christian churches which don’t take the same hardline stance against environmentalism that he does.

A Well-Oiled Machine
The Cornwall Alliance is a key member of the Council for National Policy (CNP) – a secretive organization that is considered one of the pillars of the New Right in the US, which recently gained control of Congress in midterm elections through Tea Party Republican wins. Many of the winning politicians (including state governors) are climate skeptics whose campaigns were heavily funded by fossil-fuel interests. They are looking to stop the creation of new wilderness areas, rollback environmental regulation, force through the Keystone XL pipeline, and open the Pacific Coast to energy exploration.

According to author/activist Chris Hedges, the CNP brought together dominionist Evangelicals and the “right-wing industrialists willing to fund them.” The CNP meets in utmost secrecy three times per year and gives billions of dollars to right-wing Christian organizations. Its membership and donor lists are not disclosed, and its events are closed to the public and the press. The Council for National Policy is known, however, to have given an award to the billionaire Koch Brothers, who are heavily involved in the tar sands and in funding the Fraser Institute.

Over the years, a variety of rightwing speakers have addressed the CNP, including Ronald Reagan, free market economist Milton Friedman, Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, and, in June 1997, Stephen Harper, then head of the National Citizens Coalition (NCC).

According to Michael Harris’ new book, Party of One: Stephen Harper and Canada’s Radical Makeover, the membership of the CNP is “essentially a secret society of wealthy, hard-right Republicans … Their agenda was cleaving to Christian heritage, unqualified support of Israel, a strong military, gun rights, traditional values, and small government – things Canada’s NCC [and Harper] would not find objectionable.”
Harris considers Harper’s CNP speech to the mostly American audience remarkable in that “Harper was essentially describing the Canadian system of government as a dictatorship run by the Prime Minister of Canada.”

Since 2011, the Harper government has cut funding to at least 31 women’s organizations and 10 Aboriginal groups across Canada. Since 2012, the Canada Revenue Agency has targeted at least 52 environmental and progressive NGOs for “political activity audits,” and recently told Oxfam Canada that “relieving poverty is charitable but preventing it is not.”

Reportedly, several of the CRA audits were prompted by complaints from Ethical Oil, which was founded by a former Jason Kenney-staffer and has had as its spokesperson Kenney's former executive assistant.

Foreign Policy
In January 2014, a Vancouver Sun staff blog noted that on Harper’s recent trip to Israel, “ten influential evangelical Protestant pastors and leaders” (including the president of Christian & Missionary Alliance Canada) flew with him, along with 21 rabbis, but “no mainline Protestant leaders” and only one Catholic clergyman (a columnist for the National Post) were invited. The piece explained that “more than 60 per cent of the Canadian population is either mainline Protestant or Catholic,” while “evangelicals make up about 10 per cent of all Canadian voters.” The piece connected the trip to the Evangelical belief that current conflicts involving Israel fulfill Biblical prophecy.

In February 2014, the Vancouver Observer’s Warren Bell similarly questioned Harper’s Israel trip. Regarding the Christian & Missionary Alliance Church, Bell stated that such Evangelical authorities “pinpoint global warming and extreme weather events as an indication that the ’end times’ are imminent (and attempting to mitigate climate change as even against God’s will.)”

Could the Cornwall Alliance’s clever mix of free-market capitalism and dominionist thinking be the impetus behind the Harper government’s policy decisions? Bell thinks so: “This intimate intermixing of religion and politics is entirely new in Canada. The shaping of domestic and international policy by the federal government on the basis of a doctrinaire Christian ideology has really never been seen before.”

As a further example, we might consider Harper’s sudden about-face regarding Communist China. According to Marci McDonald, “for years, Harper and the Conservative Party had refused to consort with China,” but in 2009 Harper sent seven ministerial trade missions to that country. “As it turns out, the religious right has played a role in justifying that about-face,” McDonald wrote in The Armageddon Factor.
During a trip to China in 2008, Stockwell Day (a dominionist Evangelical and Harper’s Minister of International Trade at the time) met Dr. Zhao Xiao, “a prominent economist and one of the country’s rare influential Christians, who is best known for a research paper arguing that the secret to America’s financial success is its churches,” according to McDonald.

Dr. Zhao subsequently partnered with the Masters of Arts Leadership program at Trinity Western University (a private Christian college in Langley, BC) to train a new generation of Communist Party officials in ethics. The program was “set up by Don Page, the former external affairs mandarin who … specializes in teaching management techniques modeled on the example of Jesus Christ.”

Trinity Western (currently in the news because its law school discriminates against LGBTQ applicants) now oversees “the education of thousands of Chinese officials, even offering them degrees,” McDonald wrote in 2010.

Harper allowed the controversial 2012 sale of tar sands company Nexen to Chinese company CNOOC, and he recently signed the FIPA investment deal, which locks Canada into a 31-year agreement by which Chinese companies can sue municipal, provincial and federal governments if they don’t like our regulations.

That’s especially worrying if those upcoming Trinity Western-educated Chinese officials have been taught that God doesn’t like wilderness areas, environmental regulations, and restrictions on divinely-inspired free-market capitalism.

Good Lord, what would Jesus do?

Joyce Nelson is an award-winning freelance writer/researcher and the author of five books.

- See more at: http://www.watershedsentinel.ca/content/harper-evangelical-capitalism#sthash.skiAZks8.dpuf

agentaqua · Jan 8, 2015

http://www.ipolitics.ca/2015/01/06/memo-to-the-pm-try-being-human/

Memo to the PM: This year, try being human
By L. Ian MacDonald | Jan 6, 2015 8:57 pm | 19 comments | Tweet about this on Twitter61Share on Facebook429Share on LinkedIn3Google+0Email to someone
Watson, Harper

Here are some thoughts, in the first days of an election year, on how the federal party leaders might raise their games going into Campaign 2015.

First, for Stephen Harper: Time to take the high road. Incumbency has some big advantages — you’re calling the shots, defining the Canadian agenda in both domestic policy and international affairs.

Going into the new year, the PM had two obvious items on his to-do list: firing Julian Fantino as minister of Veterans’ Affairs and announcing a meeting with Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne. Fantino did the unimaginable by alienating veterans, a core Conservative constituency, while Wynne was generating far too much political capital from Harper’s odd refusal to sit down with her.

Done and done. Bonus: By making known his plans to meet with Wynne on the day of the meeting itself, Harper denied the Queen’s Park press gallery a free week-long pass on setting an agenda for it. Not that the agenda itself mattered much; the only important thing is that the prime minister of Canada finally gave the premier of Ontario a meeting. It’s called managing the Canadian federation — something the prime minister is expected to do, notwithstanding any personal animus.

He should do more of that sort of thing. After so many years in public life, Stephen Harper remains a polarizing and puzzling personality.

He can demonstrate a sense of occasion when it’s required of him. When he invited all the living former prime ministers to travel with him to Nelson Mandela’s funeral in December 2013, he was doing the right thing. When he offered a state funeral for former Finance minister Jim Flaherty, as he had for Jack Layton, he gave us an all-Canadian moment. When he spoke in his eulogy of how Flaherty had the gift of friendship — “I can’t even get my friends to like me … ” — he showed both humility and humour. When he spoke in the House after the attack on the Hill last October, and then hugged the opposition leaders, he showed empathy.

There’s the Harper who understands a prime minister’s unifying role. Then there’s the other Harper — the one who picks stupid fights with the chief justice of the Supreme Court — and he isn’t going to win hearts and minds in an election year.

That’s the Harper who understands a prime minister’s unifying role. Then there’s the other Harper — the one who picks stupid fights with the chief justice of the Supreme Court — and he isn’t going to win hearts and minds in an election year. Let’s see which Harper shows up to campaign.

For Tom Mulcair, the question in 2015 remains what he can do to make the NDP competitive again.

It’s a bit of a quandary. Mulcair is master of the House, a dominant figure as Opposition leader in question period. But out in the world — where nobody stops to watch QP every day at 2.15 — the NDP is languishing in third place behind the Liberals and Conservatives.

New Democrats know that it’s not enough for Mulcair to be Angry Tom. In his daily show in the Commons during the fall sitting, he was showing a mordant sense of humour. It’s still a work in progress, but it’s an improvement. In fairness, it was Layton who got the NDP to Official Opposition, and the question is whether Mulcair can keep them there. Mulcair isn’t Layton.

And Justin Trudeau isn’t Michael Ignatieff, who led the Liberals to their worst showing ever — 18.9 per cent of the vote and third party status in the House. As Trudeau has already demonstrated, the Liberal brand is not dying, but is quite resilient. Trudeau enjoys the positive effects of name recognition. He’s personable and authentic, and that shows in his strong retail game. The Liberals are drawing big crowds — not just for Trudeau’s events, but for nomination meetings as well.

He’s attracting enough good candidates to allow the Liberals to run as a team. He has surrounded himself with good people. But he’s also impulsive and impetuous — tendencies which may not serve him well in a campaign.

Then there’s the question of where Trudeau stands on the issues. What we’re seeing now is a blank page, which voters can fill in as they like. A blank page is one thing — an empty vessel is quite another.

Finally, there’s Elizabeth May and the Green Party. The Greens are very close to double-digits in the polls, and are quite competitive in British Columbia, especially on Vancouver Island. Also, please note that May raised nearly $3 million in 2014.

It’s time to start taking her seriously, especially as a potential player in a minority House. She’s earned it.

L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy, the bi-monthly magazine of Canadian politics and public policy. He is the author of five books. He served as chief speechwriter to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from 1985-88, and later as head of the public affairs division of the Canadian Embassy in Washington from 1992-94. The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

agentaqua · Jan 8, 2015

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/capt-trevor-greene/science-cuts-canada_b_4534729.html
Capt. Trevor Greene
Author, There Is No Planet B; Promise And Peril On Our Warming World
How the Harper Government Committed a Knowledge Massacre
Posted: 01/03/2014 12:07 pm EST Updated: 03/05/2014 5:59 am EST

Scientists are calling it "libricide." Seven of the nine world-famous Department of Fisheries and Oceans [DFO] libraries were closed by autumn 2013, ostensibly to digitize the materials and reduce costs. But sources told the independent Tyee in December that a fraction of the 600,000-volume collection had been digitized. And, a secret federal document notes that a paltry $443,000 a year will be saved. The massacre was done quickly, with no record keeping and no attempt to preserve the material in universities. Scientists said precious collections were consigned to dumpsters, were burned or went to landfills.

Probably the most famous facility to get the axe is the library of the venerable St. Andrews Biological Station in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, which environmental scientist Rachel Carson used extensively to research her seminal book on toxins, Silent Spring. The government just spent millions modernizing the facility.

Also closed were the Freshwater Institute library in Winnipeg and the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre in St. John's, Newfoundland, both world-class collections. Hundreds of years of carefully compiled research into aquatic systems, fish stocks and fisheries from the 1800s and early 1900s went into the bin or up in smoke.

Irreplaceable documents like the 50 volumes produced by the H.M.S. Challenger expedition of the late 1800s that discovered thousands of new sea creatures, are now moldering in landfills.

Renowned Dalhousie University biologist Jeff Hutchings calls the closures "an assault on civil society."

"It is always unnerving from a research and scientist perspective to watch a government undermine basic research. Losing libraries is not a neutral act," Hutchings says. He blames political convictions for the knowledge massacre.

"It must be about ideology. Nothing else fits," said Hutchings. "What that ideology is, is not clear. Does it reflect that part of the Harper government that doesn't think government should be involved in the very things that affect our lives? Or is it that the role of government is not to collect books or fund science?" Hutchings said the closures fit into a larger pattern of "fear and insecurity" within the Harper government, "about how to deal with science and knowledge."

Many scientists have compared the war on environmental science to the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe. Hutchings muses, "you look at the rise of certain political parties in the 1930s and have to ask how could that happen and how did they adopt such extreme ideologies so quickly, and how could that happen in a democracy today?"

agentaqua · Jan 9, 2015

http://www.cbc.ca/informationmornin...-ponders-acquaculture-reform-recommendations/
Province ponders acquaculture reform recommendations
Keith Colwell is Nova Scotia's Minister of Fisheries and Aquaculture

agentaqua · Jan 9, 2015

New Treaty Allows China to Sue Canada to Change its Laws
BY LAUREN WALKER 9/15/14 AT 5:22 PM
http://www.newsweek.com/new-treaty-allows-china-sue-canada-change-its-laws-270751?piano_t=1

agentaqua · Jan 9, 2015

agentaqua · Jan 9, 2015

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-...acks-off-activities-after-cra-audit-1.2893307
Ecology Action Centre 'backs off' activities after CRA audit
Harper government's special team investigated charity's political activities
By Paul Withers, CBC News Posted: Jan 07, 2015 8:21 PM AT Last Updated: Jan 07, 2015 9:15 PM AT

Mark Butler said the Ecology Action Centre has changed how it tracks its work. (CBC)

Photo of Paul Withers
Paul Withers
Reporter

Paul Withers is an award-winning journalist whose career started in the 1970s as a cartoonist. He has been covering Nova Scotia politics for more than 20 years.

A Halifax environmental group that survived a special "political activities" audit says it has become more cautious — even suggesting it backs off issues — since being targeted by the Canada Revenue Agency.

"We take a little more care. We converse more and we call our charity lawyer more often before we speak out on issues and maybe we back off stuff we wouldn't otherwise have backed off of," says Mark Butler, policy director of the Ecology Action Centre.

The EAC was one of a number of environmental groups with charitable status audited by the Canada Revenue Agency in 2012 after the Harper government poured millions of dollars into a special team to audit the political activities of charities.

'I don't think that's a fair and neutral application of the laws.'
- Mark Butler, Ecology Action Centre
The CRA declined to discuss this case, citing privacy rules. It denies it is being used as an instrument of revenge on critics of the Conservative government.

In February 2014 the CRA notified the Ecology Action Centre it would not revoke the group's charitable status. CRA said it was satisfied with measures taken to track its political activities.

"We passed the audit. They found we had good financial management. We hadn't violated any of the laws. They have asked us to to do a better job of tracking political activity," says Butler.

Obeying the 10% rule

By law, charities may not devote more than 10 per cent of their resources to political action.

To satisfy the CRA, the Ecology Action Centre has developed a spread sheet. Every month, each of its 40 staffers record how much time is spent on political activities, administration and fund raising.

In July 2014 the Ecology Action Centre detailed the steps it's taken to meet the terms of its February 2014 compliance agreement with the CRA.

Butler says the organization remains committed to its mandate to protect the environment. Its seven core issues — coastal, energy, marine, wilderness, transportation, food and built environment — remain unchanged.

Butler declined to identify examples of the EAC pulling back because of the audit.

"I think it's perhaps we take more care, rather than backing off, might be a more accurate way to phrase it."

Butler says political activity is a grey area, which he defines as exhorting the public to change laws or write to politicians.

He agrees charities should not be partisan and has no objection to being audited, calling the ability to issue a tax receipt a "privilege" that needs to be justified.

Still, he questions the fairness of these audits.

"It does look like environmental organizations, particularly environmental organizations that are at times critical of the government, are receiving more attention than any other part of the charitable sector," he says.

"I don't think that's a fair and neutral application of the laws as they stand."

CRA says it is not being unfair to any one group.

agentaqua · Jan 9, 2015

RICK MERCER HITS THE NAIL ON THE HEAD! FIPA China-Canada Trade agreement signed IN SECRET without parliamentary or public debate more like a story line with DR.EVIL. http://bit.ly/1oBlJIP

Stephen Harper sells Canada: China can secretly sue to repeal Canadian laws http://ow.ly/BzMxT

Harper signing FIPA treaty to Undermine the Constitution (Canada's Charter Rights and Freedoms >http://bit.ly/1BCBFAn

Harper's Secretive Treaty with China Further Diminishes First Nations constitutional treaty Rights -Vice Magazine >http://bit.ly/1ubh2bH

Harper's FIPA: Sneaky, Unconstitutional, Undemocratic, Terrible Deal with China http://ow.ly/BzMsQ, http://ow.ly/BzMji

The Scary Canada-China Trade Deal That Will Haunt Us For 31-Years http://ow.ly/BzPSO

Harper sneaks through secretive Canada-China FIPA, locks Canada in for 31 years (despite constitutional court challenge) >> http://bit.ly/1oF67DF - The Council of Canadians

Read the press release: Harper government sneaks through Canada-China FIPA despite ongoing court challenge http://bit.ly/XaOGn

Harper Government Ratifies Controversial Canada-China Foreign Investment Deal > http://bit.ly/1qLEspf - Desmog Canada

Harper OKs potentially unconstitutional China-Canada FIPA deal, coming into force October 1st > http://bit.ly/1rVsBRU - The Vancouver Observer

agentaqua · Jan 12, 2015

http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2015/01/1...eadlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=120115
Austerity or Prosperity? Canada's $626 Billion Question
That's what corporations hoard while Tories refuse to stimulate jobs.
By Murray Dobbin, Today, TheTyee.ca

For economy to hum, workers need money to spend. Why does Harper continue to cut government jobs while Scandinavian countries prove opposite policies succeed? Photo of Ontario labour protest: Shutterstock.

Imagine for a moment two societies living side by side. One has discovered the wheel and uses it. The wheel makes life easier for workers and boosts the economy for everyone. Prosperity reigns. The society next door is well aware of the wheel and watches as its neighbours move inexorably ahead, becoming wealthier, more efficient and healthier while creating more leisure time for cultural activities.

But the ones who reject the wheel aren't those who do the work in this society. Those who refuse it are the governing elite, the priests, the official advisors and scribes who have incorporated a moral objection to the wheel into the state religion.

Use of the wheel is thus proscribed by faith, not reason. All practical arguments in its favour are rendered useless.

While Canada is not exactly a next door neighbour to Norway and other Scandinavian countries, there is no excuse for not knowing and emulating the proven success of those nations. What's their open secret? Replace the wheel in this story with robust government engagement in the economy and you have pretty much all you need to understand about why Norway, Sweden and Denmark are doing so well economically and socially. And why Canada is destined for inexorable decline.

Indeed, Canada's government is so dedicated to the religion of austerity that it could easily appear to some future anthropologist that our civilization declined in relentless pursuit of downsizing itself. Unlike the Maya, who apparently outgrew their social and economic structures, we seem determined to deliberately dismantle ours.

Cure for 'chronic demand deficiency syndrome'

Canada and Eurozone countries are suffering from what Martin Wolfe, writing in the Financial Times, calls "chronic demand deficiency syndrome." It is not that governments are unaware of the problem of deficient demand. John Plender, another Financial Times economist, focuses on the Eurozone, which, he writes "is being driven towards deflation by a moralistic drive for austerity which does nothing to arrest rising debt as a percentage of gross domestic product... " He could just as easily be talking about Canada where collapsed oil prices are poised to accelerate a deflationary situation already threatening because of weak demand.

A recent study on Norway, Sweden and Denmark, titled "How Can Scandinavians Tax So Much?," demonstrates how national governments can actually address underlying structural demand weaknesses -- or rather, in their cases, how to prevent such weaknesses from developing in the first place. The key is not just high government spending but a dedication to revenue collection that comes as close as possible to eliminating leakage in the tax system.

The top marginal income tax rate in the three countries is between 60 per cent and 70 per cent compared to 43 per cent in the U.S. and about 50 per cent in Canada. Add in other taxes like consumption and payroll levies and the average Scandinavian worker gets to keep just 20 per cent of her paycheck. In the U.S. that same employee keeps 63 per cent.

How can such high tax rates (which would be denounced as 'punitive' here) result in some of the best economic outcomes on the planet?

How can the Scandinavian countries studied produce such high standards of living, high labour participation rates, highly profitable corporations and high placements (all higher than Canada) in the world competitiveness sweepstakes?

Here is how. Unlike in Canada, where Prime Minister Harper openly demonizes taxes ("I don't believe any taxes are good taxes"), Scandinavian governments have totally committed themselves to collecting all the revenue due to them.

According to the study's author Henrik Jacobsen Kleven: "First, the Scandinavian tax systems have very wide coverage of third-party information reporting and more generally, well-developed information trails that ensure a low level of tax evasion. Second, broad tax bases in these countries further encourages low levels of tax avoidance.... Third, the subsidization or public provision of goods that are complementary to working -- including child care, elderly care, transportation and education-- encourages a high level of labour supply."

With the governments pumping billions of dollars into the Scandinavian economies there is no "chronic demand deficiency syndrome." They do not rely on debt-financed consumer demand and the reduction of private consumer spending makes for more rational economic decision-making overall.

The U.S. has accomplished what appears to be a stable recovery by also rejecting the austerity obsession and engaging in repeated rounds of quantitative easing -- artificially pumping money out into the economy though bond purchases. Canada meanwhile is actually sucking billions out of the economy through tax cuts to sectors (corporations and the One Per Cent) who aren't spending it.

...continued below...

agentaqua · Jan 12, 2015

The power of government stimulus

The dominant view of taxing and spending in this country has been carefully constructed over a period of 30 years. It is that taxes take money out of the economy and undermine investment. This claim is now revealed as nothing less than an outright lie.

But it should surprise no one. A 1985 book, Government Limited by John Calvert, revealed just how much government spending stimulates the economy and bolsters the private sector. Calvert pointed out that most government spending ends up in the coffers of private businesses: police departments buying cars, hospitals buying pharmaceuticals, governments buying paper, building ships, constructing highways, bridges and ports. Fully 12 per cent of private sector employment in 1984 was directly attributable to government spending on goods and services.

But that doesn't even count the direct spending of government employees whose salaries represented 22 per cent of non-investment income. That translated into 12 per cent of total spending on private goods and services. Transfer payments -- welfare, family allowance and pensions -- accounted for 13 per cent of spending on goods and services. The tax revenue for these expenditures came largely from individuals rather than corporations so that rather than a drain on corporate investment, government spending is in fact a subsidy to business. Withdraw it and thousands of businesses would simply go bankrupt.

Corporations sit on $626 billion

Of course we have withdrawn billions since 1985 -- over $60 billion a year in abandoned revenue at the federal level if you go back and count Paul Martin's huge tax cuts in 2000-2005. If we had that money back to spend, the vast majority of it would ultimately end up being spent in the private sector. And that might actually convince Canadian corporations to invest some of the $626 billion in idle cash it is now sitting on. (An IMF report recently chastised Canadians corporations for accumulating idle capital at a faster rate than any other country in the G7.)

Around the world the religious orthodoxy of unfettered capitalism is being questioned on many fronts. But not in Canada. The 2008 financial crisis had the effect of throwing into question the neoliberal orthodoxy of the gradual disappearance of the nation-state as a key player. Conflicts between states now abound and citizens in EU countries are demanding actions that conflict fundamentally with the EU collective wisdom. As the Financial Time's mark Mazower states, "... by discrediting the more mythical idealisations of the market, [the crisis] has encouraged the restoration of state power as a goal in itself."

It is a trend vigorously resisted by the Harper government at every turn.

Use the wheel, Canada

Some in the financial world have even begun talking about taking an old tool out of the state tool box that would allow deficit spending without going into hock to the banks and international lenders. That tool is monetizing government debt. In other words, ending the absurd "independence" of central banks and using them to create the money supply, allowing governments to borrow effectively from themselves at near zero interest rates (as they once did). This would have the added benefit in Canada of ending the irresponsible practices of the Canadian private banks and their reckless creation of a housing bubble.

But that's a radical solution that is beyond the pale in Harper's world.

Another global trend that Harper has been trying to avoid is the ending of tax evasion by corporations and wealthy individuals through the global harmonization of corporate taxes. This objective, being pursued most seriously by EU nations, also has its roots in the revival of nation-state power: countries are desperate for revenue to fund national democratic governance.

None of these trends is universal but the spectre of another crisis, much worse than the last, is challenging free market orthodoxy everywhere. Those countries that take up the challenge first and most effectively are the ones that will survive the next disaster.

In other words, the "wheel" is now a known to be powerful invention and the only question remaining is who will embrace its use first or last.

So far, Canadians must continue to watch their Scandinavian neighbours use the wheel and prosper while we remain captives of the free market priesthood.

Norway's lessons

Norway is the logical choice of neighbour to compare ourselves to, if you can stomach it.

In Canada we have virtually given away our energy heritage through criminally low royalty rates over a period of some 70 years. Norway bargained hard with oil companies to develop its relatively new-found resource -- and kept ownership of it. The result, as reported in The Tyee, is a heritage fund of (as of a year ago) CAD$909.36 billion. That puts tiny Norway $1.5 trillion ahead of us and while each Canadian has a $17,000 share of our $600 billion debt national debt, each Norwegian has a $178,000 stake in their surplus. Norway puts aside a billion dollars a week from its oil resource.

But all that oil money aside (literally), Norway actually funds its government services through taxes which its citizens gladly pay. And why not? As The Tyee's Mitch Andersen reported: "Norwegians enjoy universal day care, free university tuition, per capita spending on health care 30 per cent higher than Canada and 25 days of paid vacation every year."

We on the other hand live in a country where a third of citizens believe in Harper's fiscal self-flagellation, in an extremist religion that calls upon us all to deliberately impoverish ourselves. Hallelujah

agentaqua · Jan 12, 2015

http://www.ipolitics.ca/2012/12/07/...nadians-ignorance-of-parliamentary-democracy/

How Harper exploits Canadians’ ignorance of parliamentary democracy
By Frances Russell | Dec 7, 2012 9:01 pm

Frances Russell is a Winnipeg-based freelance journalist and author. She is a regular contributor to the Winnipeg Free Press and is the author of two award-winning books. Her career has spanned nearly 50 years and includes time as a reporter and political columnist with the Winnipeg Free Press, the Vancouver Sun, the Globe and Mail and United Press International, in Ottawa. She also provided occasional columns and commentary for CBC-TV, CBC Radio, CBC Newsworld, the Ottawa Journal, the Edmonton Journal, the Toronto Star, Canadian Forum Magazine and Time Canada.

Canada has the most dysfunctional and undemocratic parliament in the British Commonwealth. Canadians have been reduced to electoral democracy, not parliamentary democracy.

Democratizing the Constitution — Reforming Responsible Government, a new book by political scientists Peter Aucoin, Mark D. Jarvis and Lori Turnbull, defines electoral democracy as “a system in which the electorate decides who forms the government and the prime minister then governs as a virtual autocrat until the next election … The concentration of powers … cannot be permitted to remain in the hands of a single individual who is able to undermine democratic governance at his or her will.”

Turnbull, associate professor of political science at Dalhousie University, attributes much of the problem to our close proximity to the U.S.

“We don’t have a really clear understanding of what parliamentary democracy means,” she said. “We generally confuse what should be going on with what is going on in the U.S. And we’re manipulated when politicians confuse those terms because we get a lot more information about congressional democracy than we do about Canadian democracy.”

The book proposes a solution. Canada should follow the lead of its sister Commonwealth countries Britain, Australia and New Zealand and codify the principles of parliamentary democracy to ensure the players — voters and politicians — understand the playbook and stay within the rules.

“The other systems have rules about prorogation and dissolution, especially dissolution,” said Turnbull. “And a lot of other systems don’t use prorogation at all. They just have a parliamentary calendar.” Unlike prorogation and dissolution, a parliamentary calendar levels the playing field, binding government and opposition equally.

The current occupant of 24 Sussex has unleashed a torrent of deliberate misinformation about the tenets of parliamentary democracy in his amazingly successful drive to further confuse Canadians about the manner and traditions of their form of government.

Canadians don’t elect a government or a prime minister. They elect a Parliament. But Prime Minister Stephen Harper has described the parties who form Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition as “losers”.

Under the British parliamentary system, however, opposition parties are not only not losers, they can — and often do — form governments by coalescing (another dirty word in Harper’s lexicon) to defeat and replace a governing party which is short of a majority of seats.

Harper’s Blitzkreig on parliamentary democracy began in 2008. “Harper, in less than two years, made three unilateral decisions showing clearly how a Canadian prime minister not only can exercise unconstrained power at whim to prorogue and dissolve Parliament but also to declare on what he would accept or not accept as a vote of confidence,” the authors write.

Harper’s first unilateral decision was to call the 2008 federal election despite his own new fixed-date election law, framed precisely to prevent a prime minister from doing what he was about to do — dissolve Parliament to exploit good polling numbers.

His second was to prorogue parliament in December, 2008 to escape parliamentary defeat by a coalition of opposition parties, a defeat he deliberately provoked by slashing their parliamentary funding.

His third was to prorogue Parliament once more in December, 2009 — this time to escape parliamentary accountability regarding allegations that Afghan detainees had been tortured.

Unlike in the U.S., which steeps its children in American history throughout their educational careers, in Canada the teaching of history and government is a hit-and-miss proposition in provincial school systems. Not only is there no common historical perspective, but some provinces don’t teach history at all except as part of “social studies.”

Generations of Canadians have grown up with only the sketchiest ideas of the fundamental differences between Canadian parliamentary democracy and American presidential-congressional democracy.

The mix of constitutional uncertainty, disagreement, confusion, and outright illiteracy in the electorate — and even among many pundits and politicians — about the conventions of responsible government facilitated the government’s survival throughout Harper’s assaults on Parliament’s foundations, the authors say.

“As with the election call in 2008, there is no evidence that the prime minister was much concerned about public opinion over his abuse of prorogation. If anything, it appears that having successfully employed the first prorogation as an effective partisan tool to avoid defeat in the House, Conservative strategists seized on it as a handy tool for further use.”

The authors say the only remedy is to write things down. That’s what the Americans did in their 1788 constitution. “And that’s the thing that Australia and New Zealand and Britain have done that we haven’t done,” said Turnbull.

They propose three areas of reform involving the Constitution, Parliament and political parties.

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agentaqua · Jan 12, 2015

Constitution — Require that the House of Commons be summoned within 30 days of a federal election. Establish fixed election dates every four years binding both the prime minister and the governor general, unless a two-thirds majority of MPs approves a motion to dissolve Parliament. Require the consent of a two-thirds majority of the House of Commons to prorogue Parliament. And adopt a constructive rule on non-confidence — one that establishes confidence in the government can only be withdrawn through an explicit non-confidence motion that must state which opposition leader is capable of forming a government.

Parliament — Limit cabinet to 25 ministers and parliamentary secretaries to eight. Use secret preferential ballots by committee members to select committee chairs. Adopt a schedule of opposition days that cannot be changed unilaterally by the government. And cut partisan political staff by 50 per cent.

Party — Restore the power of party caucuses to dismiss the party leader, including a sitting prime minister, and appoint a new interim leader. Remove the party leader’s power to approve or reject candidates for election in each riding.

Paul Thomas, professor emeritus of politics at the University of Manitoba, calls the debasement of Canada’s Parliament under the Harper Conservatives “stark.” He cites such recent developments as: the government forcing committees to meet in secret and muzzling opposition MPs from revealing anything that occurred to protect the government; drafting 400-page omnibus budget bills and ramming them through Parliament in marathon sittings allowing little or no debate; compelling opposition MPs to appear before committee to be interrogated because they offended the government; and controlling and managing the parliamentary press gallery.

Our system is based on the assumption that prime ministers and cabinets will respect constitutional traditions and unwritten conventions — not to mention democratic norms — and agree to be bound by them, Thomas said.

“So there’s always a presumption of a certain amount of restraint on the part of the prime minister. He has, not all the power, but most of the power, and he can make a lot of things happen and prevent other things from happening and if he’s bound and determined like Harper is, then you get someone who is more systematic, sweeping and more consistently controlling.”

Thomas said the government is determined to dominate the agenda, to engage in news management and to prevent unforeseen events from arising through Parliament. “It’s more systematic and across the board. They don’t see Parliament as a useful part of the governing process. They see it as a nuisance.”

In terms of its power and effectiveness, he said, Canada’s Parliament is now “at the bottom of the heap … it has lost tremendous ground in terms of public support and confidence.

“(Y)ou have one rogue prime minister who is bound and determined to wield power ruthlessly, intimidate his enemies, beat up on them, attack public servants, manipulate the access to information law, develop communications strategies, use opponent research, all of these techniques. And there’s a whole school of this being taught in U.S. universities. It’s called Political Management.”

Lori Turnbull wonders why the opposition parties even bother to show up, particularly at committee. “I wouldn’t,” she said. “Harper would initially say they were pulling a stunt. But after a few weeks, it would send a clear message, particularly if the opposition (was) united about it.”

University of Toronto professor emeritus of politics Peter Russell describes Canadian democracy as “very weak.” Canada now has what he calls “presidential prime ministerial parliamentary government,” he said, adding that unless Canadians do something soon to save their parliamentary democracy, “they will have presidential government, period.”

The leader now controls caucus and cabinet and runs the show, he said. It’s reached a point where the prime minister’s political staff has more power than the cabinet.

“We have a 35-year-old ‘communicator’ telling a veteran 55-year-old cabinet minister when to stand up and when to sit down,” Russell said.

He has just returned from Australia, where things could hardly be more different. He attended the parliamentary session in which Australia’s position on admitting Palestine to the United Nations General Assembly was debated. Unlike in Canada, the Australian prime minister and the leader of the opposition both sit on an angle so they can see their caucuses.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, like Harper, opposed Palestinian membership. “But as the issue rolled on during the week, she was ‘rolled’ in the cabinet,” Russell said. “It’s a crude word but it means she didn’t carry the cabinet. They were split and when that happens in Australia they go to caucus.

“And the entire caucus voted on the Palestinian recognition issue. They too were split. And that was why Australia abstained.”

That is the core of parliamentary democracy, otherwise known as parliamentary supremacy.

And it’s simply unthinkable in Harper’s Canada.

Click here to view other columns by Frances Russell.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

The WAR on Science: Thursday, November 21, 2013, 7:00 pm Room 1900, SFU Harbour Ctr

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