In Praise of Bob Rae. A Goodbye to a Good Man

On the day that he announces his political retirement, I come not to bury Bob Rae, but to praise him.

Not only did I vote against Rae twice when he was leader of the Ontario NDP, I actually enjoyed doing it. But I don't vote for someone as much as I vote against everybody else. Indeed, the proudest ballot I ever cast was for a transvestite to be mayor or Toronto, so convinced was I that he/she would be less embarrassing than Mel Lastman.

Having said that, there's much to respect and even admire about Rae.

He's easily one of the smartest people in Canadian elective office in my lifetime. Even those that disagree with him, as I repeatedly did, acknowledge that he's a heavyweight. And that's something that's profoundly lacking in public life today, where stupidity is too often considered a virtue.

Rae also engaged in the single greatest act of political bravery in my lifetime. For all intents and purposes, he pulled the plug on his time at Queens Park because he thought it was necessary.

Shithead conservative bloggers and dishonest Sun Media hacks, like Brian Lilley, enjoy pummelling Rae for Rae Days, all the while heaping praise on Republicans like Scott Walker for doing essentially the same thing.

Rae Days requires absolutely no courage for conservatives, since that's what their base vocally wants, anyway. However, the public sector unions were Rae's political base, and he knew it. And he still immolated himself doing what was right. If that's not bravery, I have no idea what is. Moreover, it speaks to the bald hypocrisy of his critics.

Speaking of hacks like Lilley,  (who, full disclosure, is apparently a friend of my ex-girlfriend) He joyously posted this retarded and fundamentally dishonest chart from Sun News on his Facebook page this evening.

Did Premier Rae spend a literal shit-ton of money in the face of what was then considered a brutal recession? He sure did. And that's the primary reason I voted against his government in 1995.

What is nicely left out is the fact that there was a worldwide recession during Rae's tenure at Queens Park. What those lying fucks at the Sun neglect to point out are the federal and U.S employment and deficit figures at the time.

Why is that? I suspect that it's because the prime minister of Canada during the worst of it was Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney and the president of the United States was Republican George H.W Bush, who to varying degrees, did pretty much exactly what Rae did as premier of Ontario. All three raised taxes, all three had high unemployment, and all three had massive deficits.

But Rae is studied not only in isolation from the context of the time, the figures also leave out what his conservative peers were doing at the time.

By the way, why does Sun poster boy Stephen Harper get a pass? Unlike Rae, Harper started out with a $13 billion surplus, which he immediately pissed away on electioneering hucksterism. Then, in the guise of his Keynesian "Action Plan," he created tens of billions of dollars in new deficits, which he spends millions more advertising on television, five years after the fact. And none of that happened twenty years ago, when Keynesian economics were the the accepted wisdom, Harper's doing it now.

I point that out not to defend Rae, but to highlight the intellectual dishonesty and gullibility of what passes for the Right these days. Not only can we not win on our merits when we engage in nonsense like this, we don't deserve to.

I made no secret of my opinion that Bob Rae was the Liberal party's last, best chance of surviving, if not actually winning power. He was uniquely qualified to call the Harper government on its own bullshit. Rae was not only smarter than the rest than the rest of the federal leaders, he was more politically experienced and intimately familiar with the pitfalls of having headed a party and a government before.

If Rae compared his record in Toronto to Harper's in Ottawa, I believe it would have been devastating ... for Harper. And I think the Tories knew that, too.

But the Liberals insisted on being the Liberals. They continue to hate one another more than they hate Harper, and they refuse to renounce their addiction to stunt leaders, like Michael Ignatieff and Justin Trudeau. And that's precisely why "Canada's Natural Governing Party" is going to cease to exist by the end of the decade. By forcing Rae out of the permanent leadership race last year, I think they signed their own death warrant.

Although I opposed almost everything that he did in public life, I never doubted Rae's sincerity. I believe him to be someone who actually got into politics to serve what he thought was the greater good, rather than personal enrichment or self-aggrandizement.

Unlike most of the ward-heelers out there, I'm of the opinion that Bob Rae will better off without politics. Sadly, politics will be worse without Bob Rae.

I never voted for him and I never would, but I wish the man well in private life.

Scott Reid States the Obvious, Is Still Wrong

Here I go again, saying something utterly uncontroversial to anyone that isn't three years old, a partisan fuck, or an abject idiot.

People in politics, as a general rule, don't enter the life to serve you. And they really haven't for about thirty years.

Politics has become a laboratory for mediocrities to see how rich they can make themselves off of the public teat.

There's no greater example of that than the revolving door between politics and lobbying. This is nothing more than a legal version of influence peddling and trading in on public service. I actually have more respect for those that actually have the balls to steal taxpayer money without the pretence of serving anyone other than themselves. Were it up to me, politicians, their appointees, and the senior civil service would be banned from lobbying for life.

Actually, that's not true. The only reason I wouldn't advocate stuffing the lot of them in a bag and drowning them like cats is that it would be impossible to find a big enough bag. So a lobbying ban will have to do.

The more mediocre a staffer you are, the more likely you are to moonlight in opinion journalism, especially in Canada. You almost never see the real kingmakers on TV or writing columns that even third-graders know are horseshit. Instead, you get the worst sycophants imaginable pretending to know "how it really works."

Which brings me to Scott Reid, the former Paul Martin consigliere. In 2005, Reid said the single most balls-out stupid thing I've heard in thirty years of studying politics.

You see, then-Opposition leader Stephen Harper was hoping to steal the Liberal issue of a national daycare credit from out from the Grits. So he offered a $1,200 a year tax credit to families as a way of ward-heeling himself into office.

Now, if you opposed the Tories, there were any number of ways to attack the proposal. For example, you do what I did: call it an unaffordable welfare program for the middle class and an example of hucksterism at its worst. The left is always going to oppose Harper's programs. If you want to beat him, you need to turn fiscal conservatives around from voting for him. I thought everybody knew that.

Apparently, Scotty didn't. That's why he said this ...




The "beer and popcorn" debacle reinforced the long held and richly deserved Liberal reputation for unbridled arrogance. Even when its true, you never tell the public that the government can spend their money better than they can. And, unsurprisingly, Harper made the Liberal Party wear that remark for years.

That's why I'm amazed that anyone listens to anything Reid has to say about politics. On the other hand, a lot of people are very fucking stupid.

On Friday, he published this in the Ottawa Citizen, and it stands as an example of how you can be right, while still being completely ignorant of a history that you yourself lived through. It really is a remarkable read.

Stephen Harper is gradually turning into Jean Chrétien.

From Teflon to tinpot, from insuperable to insurrection, the two leaders appear to be travelling remarkably similar paths in the second half of their time as prime minister.

That's demonstrably not true. Harper was Chretien from as far back as 2005, well before he moved into 24 Sussex drive.

This is because Harper heads a party populated mostly with lunatics and fetus fetishists. Hyper-religious "Big Government Conservatives" are not only fewer in number in Canada than in the United States, they also tend to be more geographically isolated and don't carry as many seats as they do in the U.S Congress. Majority governments do not rely on these people's support.

But they can fuck up the chance of winning one, as we saw in 2004. The Conservatives were enjoying a 10 point lead over the majority Liberals, when their candidates started spouting off about abortion, gay marriage, and other shit that sane people don't give a shit about. The Tory hopes of a majority evaporated and Liberals were only reduced to a minority, instead of being physically destroyed.

When the Martin minority government was defeated in the fall of '05, Harper knew that he had to muzzle those psychopaths, lest he be humiliated again. Not only did he vow not to legislate on those issues, he imposed brutal message discipline on his candidates. Since nothing succeeds like success, it shouldn't surprise anyone that he carried that discipline into government.

Chretien's experience was different. As a minister in the Trudeau government, he was routinely humiliated by the Prime Minister's Office. The Sun King once went so far as to rewrite one Chretien's budgets and release it to the public without consulting him first.

Then there's the nature of the Liberal Party itself, which is based almost entirely on regicide. Since about 1975, every Grit leader has had a powerful leader plotting behind the scenes to relieve him of his job. And Chretien knew that Paul Martin (who Scott Reid worked for, remember?) would do to him exactly what he did to John Turner, as he in fact later did.

Similarities in the personal styles of the two leaders have long been noted — and many of the qualities they share are admirable. They are both good at winning elections. They each lack any shred of indecision. And they both hold their ground stoutly. Perhaps most important of all, they understand who they are, what they stand for, and the importance of communicating consistency.

Each of those points are demonstrably false.

Both Chretien and Harper won their elections as a result of hopelessly divided governments. The Progressive Conservative coalition built by Brian Mulroney was destroyed by 1993, and Harper beat (albeit, only barely) a Liberal Party in a state of open civil war. Neither was a fantastic political accomplishment.

Furthermore, neither stands for anything at all. Chretien ran on the tired platform of "free shit for everyone," opposing the GST and NAFTA, only to head the most fiscally conservative, globalist government in Canadian history. Chretien successfully carried out Mulroney's legacy.

Harper, on the other hand, ran as a manager and a fiscal conservative. Once in office, however, he blew up the deficit faster and bigger than anyone since Trudeau himself, mostly on ward-heeling nonsense that the Liberals invented.

Neither communicated consistency, and only a moron would suggest they did. Both transparently lied to the public and dared them to vote for someone else, knowing that realistic alternatives didn't exist.

Increasingly, it is not just character but circumstance that begs the comparison of Harper with Chrétien.

The most top-of-mind parallel is caucus unrest. Brent Rathgeber, until his recent resignation, was as unknown to Canadians as the whereabouts of Mike Duffy’s dignity. Suddenly, we are to believe his departure heralds the evaporation of Harper’s control over his own backbench. That would be a gross overstatement.

But it is plain that a number of government MPs are no longer content to suffer in silence. Their personal ambitions are stagnating. Their ideological itch is going unscratched.

And they’re sick of taking orders from the hired help while getting the high hand from the prime minister.

Christ, Reid can't really believe that nonsense, can he? The facts are very different, and they go to the fundamental differences between the Liberal and Conservative parties.

The Tories are generally more disciplined when it comes to caucus and messaging generally. They are also much better team players until things become intolerable, as they did in the latter Mulroney years.

The Conservatives also never have a very deep bench. There's rarely a clear successor to power that everyone knows can win an election, which is why they've never enjoyed party dynasties, like the Liberals used to.

The Grits, on the other hand, tend to have very deep benches of talent. The problem is that they all think that they should be prime minister right away. Since Lester Pearson died, they've devoted themselves to stabbing one another in the back more than they have to actually governing. Whenever the the Tories have shown even a modicum of discipline, they've kicked the shit out of the Grits.

And if Reid is right, there's a Paul Martin in the Tory benches ready to take over when Harper is done in by his own hubris. If there is, I don't see one. Harper's most likely successor is Jason Kenney, and I can't think of anyone who wouldn't be able to beat the snot out of that greasy prick.

I will say one thing about Scott Reid's column. It has the worst people in the world publicly furious, and demonstrates as clearly as anything can that the Liberal civil war is far from over. Those crazed bastards are going to continue to going into elections devoting more time and energy hobbling each other than they do the Conservatives. And they're going to keep doing it until they cease to exist at all.

If there's anything at all the Conservative government can take comfort in during these dark days, it's that.

Wynne Win? The Establishment and Media Got It Wrong

Last October, Ontario's Liberal premier, Dalton McGuinty finally saw the writing on the wall. The gas plant and ORNGE scandals could no longer be swept under the rug. It was clear that McGuinty's minority government was going to be defeated on a confidence motion and and election was going to be forced. And that was an election that ol' Dalton almost certainly was going to lose.

My Liberal friends like to tell me what a gifted politician McGuinty is, but that's always been nonsense. Like Stephen Harper and Barack Obama, McGuinty has been gifted with the opponents he had. He's never actually beaten anybody that impressive. Ernie Eves was discredited after a decade of Conservative rule. John Tory is a great man, but an impressively bad politician. And Tim Hudak, as I've long said, is the Dumbest Motherfucker on Earth. It seemed that as long as the Ontario Progressive Conservatives insisted on being the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, Dalton McGuinty would keep winning.

But something changed in the last 18 months. The NDP under Andrea Horwath began an improbable rise in public opinion. In my opinion, there was a very real chance that Horwath could have replaced McGuinty's minority with one of her own.

So the premier exercised the only option left to him. He quit. But he went further than that. He also prorogued the legislature until a replacement as Liberal leader could be elected. And the very same people who were outraged by Harper's prorogations couldn't stop congratulating McGuinty for his, mostly because they're shameless hypocrites and assholes. I condemned both, and rightly so.

Anyhow, the second McGuinty's resignation was announced, Liberal Party insiders started lining up to get former MPP Sandra Pupatello in the race. Then the media got on board. That everybody could be so spectacularly wrong was striking to me. That so many "experts" could misread the atmosphere out there was nothing less than amazing.

First, Pupatello is from the more conservative wing of the party, and that just isn't where the next election is going to be fought. The only way that Tim Hudak is ever going to elected premier of this province is by accident. He polls incredibly well when there's no chance of anyone voting for him, but as soon as he opens his stupid fucking mouth, he drops fifteen points.

My feeling is that the Ontario Tories are barely going to be a factor in the next election. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they dropped to third place at Queen's Park, although that's not an official prediction. The battle over who forms the next government is going to be between the Liberals and the NDP, and the Grits weren't going to pull that off with someone like Pupatello staking out positions to McGuinty's right.

Second, as the media and the party machinery began lining up behind her, Pupatello grew arrogant. She said that she wouldn't bring the legislature back into session until she won a seat, which could have taken months. As it is, Queen's Park has been shuttered for four months now and the public is only getting angrier.

The Liberal brand has been so badly damaged over the last couple of years that it would have probably been better for the party to have a leader outside of Queen's Park. They're going to need a ton of money and a superior effort to convince people that they're no longer the McGuinty Liberals. The chances of pulling either off while taking shots in Question Period over the remaining McGuinty scandals are not good. And that assumes that the legislature sits for any length of time. My guess is that the Grits get taken out in a confidence vote on their Throne Speech.

I thought that Gerard Kennedy was probably the best leader the Liberals had. He's personally very popular and he could do battle with the NDP and probably win. He also has the added benefit of not having been associated with McGuinty for years. The last thing the Grits need is ads morphing their new leader into McGuinty and, having been in federal politics since 2006,  Kennedy makes those hard to produce.

For reasons that I still don't understand, Kennedy never gained any traction and the left wing candidate became Kathleen Wynne. And that's where everybody got a bad case of the stupids.

Wynne's opponents, mostly from the Pupatello camp, couldn't really go after her for the most obvious reason: her long tenure in the McGuinty cabinet. So they hit her on being from Toronto, which was a bad idea. If the Grits want to stay in power, they can't afford to lose any Toronto area seats. I don't see how they do it without picking up Peter Shurman's Thornhill riding.

And then there were dark mutterings about Wynne's lesbianism. I had no idea that she was gay until a Pupatello spinner went on the Internet to condemn a whisper campaign that no one else had heard of. Here's how cynical politics is, folks. If you want to draw attention to someone's homosexuality, you pre-emptively highlight non-existent efforts to make it an issue by saying how ugly they are.

It worked, too. When the Toronto Star endorsed Pupatello last week, they made Wynne's sexuality part of the column in a way that managed to insult pretty much everybody.

The convention delegates weren't buying it and Wynne won on the third ballot tonight. Sandra Pupatello managed to piss away what was increasingly looking like a sure thing. As the other candidates dropped out after the first two ballots, the majority of them went to Wynne and took their delegates with them. When Pupatello didn't win on the first ballot, she fell apart rapidly, which is pretty much what I expected to happen.

Does it make any difference in the coming election? I don't think so. Wynne has the right politics to fight the NDP, but she lacks Kennedy's charisma and popularity. Worse, for all intents and purposes, she is Dalton McGuinty, or she may as well be when the NDP and Tories get through with her. As someone who was so senior in cabinet for so long, she can't just walk away from the McGuinty scandals.

Because she has a seat, Wynne has no credible way of avoiding calling Queen's Park back. I expect that we'll start hearing calls for that by Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest. If she doesn't have a throne speech ready to go by the second or third week of February, she isn't going to have a honeymoon as premier and the public could very well start agitating for an election, which the NDP will be more than happy to give them.

While she won't get crushed as badly as Sandra Pupatello would have, I still think that she'll lose. Not having given this a great deal of thought, we'll start talking about the next Liberal leadership race by the first of April.

The only way that can be avoided is through a Liberal coalition with the NDP. Not an accord, which the Dippers have been burned by before - an actual coalition complete with seats at the cabinet table. The problem with that scenario is that most Liberals are too arrogant to share power with anybody and it could very well start a civil war.

The ultimate responsibility for the coming decline and fall of the Ontario Liberal Party rests with Dalton McGuinty. He could have lost an election and resigned, giving the party time to rebuild under a new leader. Instead, he's ending two careers at once: his and that of his successor.

It's hard to see how Wynne survives as leader after losing to the NDP. What's likely to happen is that there'll be an endless stream of Liberal leaders, not unlike what we're seeing with the federal party. And you just can't win government under those circumstances.

The next couple of months are going to be fun to watch.

Sun News Network & the Marketplace of Ideas

I don't support public subsidies of most things, particularly in the cultural arena. As a practical sort of fellow, I recognize that when you pay for something, you get a vote in how it's done. For obvious reasons, government should be kept well away from culture, which I would include news as a part of.

I also don't believe that running a television network is an essential function of government, and it's almost impossible to argue that otherwise. You may have been able to make a case for the existence of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the early years of radio and television, when it simply wasn't profitable for private industry to service large parts of a huge and sparsely populated country. But that hasn't be true for decades now. The federal government's sponsorship of the network has long outlived its usefulness and the CBC should be either sold or abolished.

I also oppose the government regulating the cable industry, especially as it pertains to programming. Cable does not utilize "the public airwaves," at least not as traditionally understood. The market, rather than the CRTC, can and should determine the fate of individual broadcasters.The CRTC retains jurisdiction over cable simply because it can.

As things currently stand, the government mandates the carriage of certain channels by the cable companies, who are then forced to pay the broadcasters for the privilege. Worse, individual households are forced to pay for the channels, whether they want them or not. I could probably list off dozens of channels that being artificially kept alive by CRTC policies in an age where it's getting harder and harder to justify the CRTC's very existence.

And that's where the Sun News Network comes in. The Sun started off as a newspaper chain for people who can't read. In 2011, it started a television news network for people who don't enjoy thinking very much.That network is losing money hand over fist and it's owner, Quebecor, appears to be gutting the newspaper business to keep it alive.

To say that Sun News is bad television is unfair. It's actually spectacularly bad television. It took all the worst aspects of Fox News and MSNBC and made them look like they were produced by a high school AV club. The on-air personalities, such as they are, are exclusively people who are genetically incapable of getting a job outside of Canada. The chances of a Peter Jennings or John Roberts emerging from the mess of Sun News are somewhere between slim and none.

One of the mantras of cable news is that all perspectives should be treated equally, which is nonsense and they know it. There are any number of opinions that are just stupid. But cable news thrives on what they call they call "diversity of opinion" because it allows them to put freaks on the air, and freaks are good for ratings.

Cable news - both liberal and conservative - isn't news. It's political propaganda, which is fine, but it shouldn't be treated as anything other than that, and certainly not by government regulators. But Sun News has spent the last few weeks agitating for mandatory carriage from the CRTC. These champions of the free market are demanding the same government cheese that everybody else gets.

SNN is unique, at least in Canada. The other broadcast networks at least pretend to maintain the pretense of professional neutrality. Sun News doesn't bother presenting itself as anything other than the house organ of the Conservative, Republican and Likud parties.

Like MSNBC and Fox, there's almost no wall between their "news" and "opinion" programming at Sun News. And like Fox, Sun devotes an incredible amount of time bitching about its competition and how unfairly it's treated by the world. In that, it is a perfect representation of what the conservative movement has become. Like modern conservatives everywhere, Sun News has embraced the cult of it's own victimhood and hilariously does so under the banner of "personal responsibility." .

Initially, I opposed granting Sun News mandatory carriage because I'm against the involuntary subsidization of political activity. Not only do I think that political parties shouldn't receive public money, I would eliminate the tax deduction for contributions to them, which is an indirect subsidy to both the parties and their contributors. If I don't believe in the involuntary subsidization of the parties, it stands to reason that I would oppose it for their broadcast mouthpieces.

That shouldn't suggest that I agree with Sun's liberal critics. They've been wildly dishonest in this debate. They oppose carriage for Sun simply because they're conservative. I can guarantee you that if there were a network blatantly supportive of the NDP or Liberals, they'd reverse their position in a heartbeat. They also don't seem to mind mandatory carriage for CTV or CBC, which I do. Were there a Canadian version of MSNBC, they'd be making exactly the same noises Sun's supporters are.

Denying SNN carriage does little more than play into their pathetic sense of victimhood and reinforces their argument that they're being unfairly treated because of their politics.

Look, Sun News is going to fail, and probably within two years. Not only are its ratings pathetic, its core demographic - old people - is one that advertisers don't care about. Mainstream advertisers are also awfully reluctant to support a network that goes out of its way to piss off so many of their potential customers. Advertising on SNN makes businesses boycott bait, and it's hard to see how that fits into any sane business plan.

Carriage is going to keep Sun News on life support, but not for as long as people tend to think it will.

I'm not signing any petitions for those hypocritical monsters, and I'm not asking any of you to, but I've very reluctantly come to the conclusion that Sun News should be granted mandatory carriage.

However, that should be accompanied by rescinding the CRTC's jurisdiction and a wholesale deregulation of the cable industry in this country. If a cable provider decides for whatever reason that it doesn't want to carry Sun News (or any other channel) or pay them what they want, they can drop them without the federal government getting involved. Cable companies would also be required to compete, and I would drop the ban on foreign ownership. If Rupert Murdoch wants to buy Sun News and make it profitable, like he has with his anti-Semitic and anti-American Rotana network in Saudi Arabia, he should be free to.

Will anyone at Sun News support my ideas for deregulation? Of course they won't. Once they get mandatory carriage, they'll take the money and find new ways to pretend that the world is out to get them.

But they won't be able to pretend that they've been forced off of the air for any reason other than they produce an unwatchable and hackish product.

On Senator Joyce Fairbairn

Anyone who has seen Alzheimer’s up close (and, at this point, I would imagine that almost everybody has) knows just what a cruel disease it is. It effectively kills a person years before they physically die and causes the patient's family untold anguish. Alzheimer’s is among the very ugliest things that can befall a human being and anyone who suffers from it, and especially their families, has my deepest and most sincere sympathy.

The date of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis is almost wholly irrelevant. A diagnosis merely creates an opportunity for treatment that might slow the destructive progress of the disease. But the decline of patient's facilities is apparent for months, and often years, before that dreaded diagnosis comes. As Monica Crowley recounted in her book Nixon Off the Record: His Candid Commentary on People and Politics, Richard Nixon commented on Ronald Reagan's apparent befuddlement more than a year before Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. As a matter of fact, President Nixon died almost six months before President Reagan's final letter to the American people was written.

As much as some people would like to pretend differently, the story of Senator Joyce Fairbairn isn't about Alzheimer’s. It isn't even so much about Senator Fairbairn herself, despite the wishes of certain partisans to make it so. More precisely, it is about how politics is often crueller than even Alzheimer’s.

Canadians were told last week that Senator Fairbairn was declared legally incompetent in April, and a declaration to that effect was signed by her party's leader in the Senate, James Cowan. Such a declaration would prevent Joyce Fairbairn from buying or selling a home or stock, or testifying in a trial. I can't imagine that she would be legally allowed to drive a car. It did not, however, prevent her from voting in the Senate.

By the point that someone is declared legally incompetent from dementia - something that doctors and judges decidedly do not do frivolously - they often don't know where they are or why they're there. People that they've known their entire lifetimes are strangers to them. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, my grandmother spent several years thinking that I was my grandfather, who died about six months before I was born.

Being taken to the Senate chamber every day and sitting there must be a terrifying ritual for the Ms. Fairbairn. God only knows what air travel to and from Alberta must out her through, Remember, this is a woman that requires 24-hour-a-day constant care. And in her moments of clarity, she is very likely tortured by what's happening to her by being reminded of the honourable office that she holds to this day and her inability to carry out its duties. I cannot possibily imagine what this must be doing to her, despite having seen it in close proximity myself.

When I first heard the story, I wondered to myself why the Senator was still in office. If her disease progressed so rapidly that the declaration of legal incompetence was a shock to her and the Liberal Party, that would be one thing. It would also be highly unusual, since Alzheimer's - a slowly degenerative disease - almost never works that way. I suspected that something deeper, and more darkly political was afoot.

In this morning's National Post, Jonathan Kay confirms my suspicions.

“Jim Cowan [is] a serious guy who was appointed to the Senate Liberal leadership by Paul Martin,” he told me. “He has no control over the Senate Liberals, because the most active are Chrétien appointees who have nothing but contempt for the Martin gang. So even if Jim wanted to do the right thing, my bet is the Chrétienites … insisted that [Joyce Fairbairn] be kept in the Chamber despite her illness. They are [allegedly unprincipled individuals] who sent a member of Joyce’s staff to her house every day; to bring her to work when they knew she was ill. All this not to help her, but to delay [Stephen Harper] from appointing another elected Alberta senator to replace her. Watch what happens next. They will try to claim she is on ‘sick leave’ for the next two years. Just another way to [delay] the pick, and use her office budget to hire staff to work on party politics.”

“Their game now,” he added, will be to “attack the nasty Tories” for making an issue of Fairbairn. “These guys have no shame.”

He also added that “the PMO is urging us to keep quiet, because they fear the Liberals will find some way to blame us.” Thus his refusal to let me use his name.

According to this veteran Conservative Senator, Fairbairn’s saga has been going on at least since 2009. Since then, he says, “we [Senators] have been quietly asked not to challenge Joyce in Committee or the Chamber, because she wasn’t well. This game of being ‘nice’ has been going on for too long.”

Kay's source, it should be noted, is "a veteran Conservative Senator," so his motives might be less than pure. But it certainly conforms to how politics works. And I include in this the allusion to "being 'nice.'"

This isn't, according to the Conservative Senator, a matter of party politics, at least not entirely. It's a continuation, in the most inhumane way imaginable, of the Chrétien-Martin civil war within the Liberal Party of Canada itself. That makes this story even more repugnant than it otherwise would be. And it would otherwise be plenty repugnant.

It seems logical to conclude that Senator Fairbairn is being kept in office for no other reason than that the Liberals want to hold her seat for as long as possible. My foreign readers should know that the Canadian Senate is an body appointed by the Prime Minister, in this case the Conservative Stephen Harper.

Of course, that only delays the inevitable. Under Canadian law, Senators are required to retire at 75, which Senator Fairbairn does in the fall of 2014, well before the next federal election. Harper will name her replacement, sooner or later. Until then, her staff is literally dragging her across Ottawa and sometimes across the country. And at any given time she might not know who those people are, where she's being taken, or why.

But there's money involved. Even if Joyce Fairbairn is on medical leave, the Grits will continue to be allowed to exploit her office budget to the party's political ends. And that's truly despicable. A political party that can't get along with one another is using a desperately ill woman for money and politics. This might be one of the more personally awful things that I've heard about in politics. And if Jonathan Kay and his Conservative source are correct, this has been ongoing since sometime in  2009, not this past April.

But it gets worse. Because Liberals are Liberals, they're hiding their own conduct behind the shield of Senator Fairbairn's savage suffering. Their more rabid partisans are threatening to exploit the frailties of Conservative MPs and Senators should anyone treat l'affaire Fairbairn with anything other than complete silence.

To that I say, "Good."

I haven't voted for the Conservatives in well over a decade, and everything about Harper's governance has affirmed the correctness of that decision. I carry no water for them whatsoever. If anything, the Tory insistence on becoming the Liberals causes me to hold them in even greater contempt than I hold the Grits. And I wasn't sure that I was capable of that.

More importantly, the people need to know if their constitutional representatives, whether elected or appointed, are in any way impaired from carrying out their duties, either physically, ethically or morally. An uninformed democracy isn't a democracy at all, and we're plenty uninformed without some insider code of silence that prevents us from knowing everything we should.

You might recall that I didn't share the conservative (large or small "C") outrage when Public Safety Minister Vic Towes' divorce pleadings were leaked by a Liberal staffer. That's exactly the kind of thing the people should know about those at the very top of the legal establishment of the nation, especially when they consciously compare their political opponents to child pornographers.

As a Manitoba Cabinet minister, Towes was responsible for naming judges to the bench and he presumes to become a Court of Appeal judge himself. And the Conservatives who were outraged by the Towes story are themselves hypocrites, given the fun they had with the story of Jack Layton's massage parlour arrest in the 90's, which was almost certainly leaked by the Liberals.

I'm of the opinion that Adam Carroll (aka Vikileaks) and Anonymous performed a valuable public service. If the Liberals want to seek "vengeance" by exposing lawmakers in situations similar to Senator Fairbairn's, I'm actually okay with that.

But I know they won't. They'll report seeing a Member drunk in a bar or doing something that in no way impairs their legislative duties. The Liberals (and in fairness, the Conservatives increasingly) are masters of false equivilience.

I have yet to see anyone, anyone at all, treat Senator Joyce Fairbairn unfairly except the Liberal Party of Canada. To keep her in Ottawa when she's been legally declared unable to fulfill her constitutional duties is nothing short of a national disgrace. And to do it for reasons of political advantage and money should tell you everything you need to know about the people doing it. This has nothing to do with Senator Fairbairn and everything to do with the political apparatus that surrounds her.

At this point, I would normally go on a 300-plus word, wildly entertaining rant about why the Liberals no longer deserve to exist. Today, I don't have to. Their actions make my argument far better than I ever could.


Update - 4:19 PM: Ah, I see it's already begun. I do hope that this column names names, gives dates and cites specifics, allowing those involved to defend their reputations in a court of law against its author and the media conglomerate that publishes him. If the column doesn't do that, then you again know everything you need to about the author and publisher.

It's very probably yet another chickenshit attempt to defend the indefensible without having the courage to do it honestly, instead relying on blackmail.

Of course, the coulmn could cite dead politicians, cleverly protecting himself and his publisher from libel action. I wouldn't expect anything less.

Guns, gangs and the stupidity of everybody

When bad things happen, people get scared and you'd be surprised how quickly scared people transform themselves into stupid people. It's almost like magic!

As my Canadian readers probably already know, there was another shooting incident in Toronto last night. It was a particularly bad one, leaving two dead, nineteen wounded and two injured. It comes just six weeks after the dramatic June 2 shooting at the Eaton Centre that killed two, wounded six and injured one.

Since everybody is currently freaking out and losing all sense of perspective, one thing jumped out at me from the CBC report of the Scarborough shooting last night. "Prior to the shooting on Monday evening, 16 people had been killed in gun-related homicides on the streets of Toronto since January 1, compared to 14 people at the same time last year."

Simply put, we're at about the same place we were last year so far as gun deaths go. It's also noteworthy just how few people are killed by guns in a city of this size. Toronto still has a remarkably low homicide rate. The events are undeniably becoming more spectacular and brazen, but they're also comparatively rare.

Let's compare and contrast for a moment. Toronto, a city of 2,615,060 people, has seen 28 meet a violent end so far this year.  Chicago, home of 2,695,598 souls, has had 228 murdered as of June 16. 27 people in Chicago have been stabbed to death this year, equal to Toronto's entire homicide rate. The North American city closest to Toronto in size has a murder rate nearly ten times ours.

Here's an even better perspective.

For comparisons to various cities in North America, in 2007 for example, the homicide rate for the city of Toronto was 3.3 per 100,000 people, yet for Detroit (33.8), Atlanta (19.7), Chicago (15.5), San Francisco (13.6), Boston (10.3) and New York City (6.3) it was higher, while it was only marginally lower in Vancouver (3.1), San Jose (2.9) and Montreal (2.6).

Aside from a spike in 2005, Toronto's murder rate has been falling since 1991, when it was still only 89 deaths. I'm not sure that Toronto could possibly be safer than it already is.

I addressed this all after the Boxing Day, 2005 murder of poor Jane Creba, but it does bear repeating. God knows that you won't hear it anywhere else.

You would think that those statistics would chill everybody the fuck out. However, we have a media that makes money out of fear, a political class that exploits that fear, and a population that just likes being scared.

I can't really blame journalism - and especially the local news - for it's sleazy "If it bleeds, it leads" ethos. They wouldn't do it if we didn't buy it. That's how capitalism works. People want their own stupidity reinforced as often and as powerfully as possible. It's self-defeating and sad, but what are you going to do?

The political class, however, is something else entirely. They're supposed to know better than the rest of us, and they do. But they consciously exploit our own scared stupidity to further their own retarded agendas. And the agendas on both the Left and the Right are nothing short of monumentally retarded.

Let's start with the Left. We have this guy on City Council named Adam Vaughan. After the Eaton Centre shooting, young Adam got it into his head that banning guns and ammunition would solve all of our social ills, despite a complete and utter lack of evidence to sustain his assertion.

First, the city doesn't have jurisdiction. Gun laws fall under the Criminal Code of Canada. Even if Vaughan's silly "ban" were to pass, who would police it? Who would prosecute infractions? Where would you jail offenders? And who in the fuck would pay for all of the above?

Second, the "hunters" that everybody on both sides of the argument refer to aren't the issue either way. Nobody who knows what they're doing goes hunting with a handgun. And the use of rifles and shotguns in Toronto crimes is incredibly rare. It happens, but not a lot.

Handguns are already tightly regulated in Canada. The most anti-gun jurisdictions in the United States look like they're giving guns away, compared to Canada.

Third, even if you were able to institute a Western European-style ban on handguns, our proximity to the United States would make it meaningless. The Second Amendment to the U.S Constitution, combined with the open border, guarantees that those guns will wind up in our cities. Period.

Mexico has even stronger gun control laws than Canada does. Ask how it's working out for them. Partisan Republican shitheads like to harp about the 600-odd Fast and Furious guns that killed two U.S agents and about 300 Mexicans. But they don't like talking about where the guns that killed the other 47,000 Mexicans since 2006 came from.

As long as the United States - which has as many guns as it does people - continues to exist, gun control laws in Canada and Mexico will be effectively meaningless. The U.S itself has all kinds of laws barring felons from being armed. Notice how well they've worked?

Finally, liberals simply aren't serious. As much as they scream about banning guns, they don't seem all that excited about punishing those who use them in crimes. Most Canadian liberals couldn't be more opposed to the Harper government's recent crime bill that imposed mandatory minimum sentences for gun crimes.

I'm of the mind that the Conservative gun sentences aren't tough enough. Were it up to me, if you use a gun in the commission of a crime, you go away for life with no possibility of parole for twenty years, regardless of whether anyone gets hurt or if the gun isn't even fired. If you pull a piece on somebody, I can only conclude that you intend to kill them and figure that you should be treated accordingly. The fact that you're either a bad shot or a pussy shouldn't work in your favour. I would also amend the Criminal Code to prosecute attempted murder under the same sentencing guidelines as murder itself.

The conservative side of the debate is every bit as ridiculous and stoically unserious as the liberals are.

In one of the few things that he's ever been even half-right about, my dipshit of a mayor said “It’s not the hunters, these are gangs. I wish we could get the guns out of the city with respect to these gangs. It is going to be very difficult, but you don’t take it out on hunters and the sportsman show.” Federal Public Safety Minister and celebrated babysitter fetishist Vic Toews backed Ford up, remarking that “The issue isn’t the legality or illegality of bullets or guns. The issue is these guns in the hands of criminals. That needs to be stopped. Our focus has been on focusing on those individuals who in fact are breaking the law.”

They're right. Guns aren't the problem, gangs are. What they ignore is that, short of implementing the police state that Toronto Councillor (and world-class fuckhead) Giorgio Mammolitti has wet dreams about creating, you aren't going to break gangs by law enforcement means.

Law enforcement and academics alike often refer to gangs as "criminal enterprises," which makes sense since they aren't the singing social clubs that West Side Story would have you believe. Anyone who knows anything will tell you that the point of an enterprise, criminal or otherwise, is to make money.

The single economic biggest driver of street gangs (and other criminal enterprises that aren't the fucking banks) is drugs.

This is something that I addressed a couple of years ago. The more the government presses on drug criminalization, the greater the risk to those involved in it. The greater the risk is, the higher the profits are when demand doesn't shrink, which it isn't often known to do. When you combine high profits with illegal demand, insane levels of violence are unavoidable. That's especially true when economic downturns actually do create a shrinking market. In a shrinking market, a gang (like any other enterprise) will fight to maintain its share of the market, or increase it at the expense of competitors.

For people that pride themselves on being champions of the capitalism, right-wingers these days don't know very much about it.

The other side of the Harper Tories' crime bill created mandatory minimums for drug offenses. Coupled with the firearms side of the law, that makes drug trafficking more risky, thereby increasing price and profits. Assuming that the Great Recession drove down consumer demand for drugs (which is fair, since it drove down demand for everything else), that redoubles the determination with which gangs will fight for the remaining profits.

Again, the experience of the banks leading up to the financial crisis is instructive. When a market, like the housing bubble, creates irresistible profit opportunities, people will create opportunities to exploit them to maximum effect even when they defy common sense. The Mafia famously stayed away from drugs because they feared the response from law enforcement, but only until the potential profit from the drug trade became too great for them to ignore.

Gun violence in the drug trade creates a government response that punishes both guns and drugs, but naturally drives the profitability of both and thereby increases the incentive to engage in them. This increases the potential for violence as the stupidity spirals upwards. If you expect gangs to act more responsibly than banks to the lure of guaranteed profit, you might just be too fucking dumb to debate..

Gang gun violence is driven almost exclusively by the profitability of the drug market. Deny the gangs that profit, and I can almost assure you that the gun violence will gradually diminish. There is now forty years of Drug War experience that shows that law enforcement can't solve the problem. Simple logic instructs us that the free market can.

Of course, mere decriminalization can't accomplish that, since it would leave the market in the hands of the criminals. Selective legalization won't do it, either. Marijuana legalization will just increase the efforts of criminals to expand the market of drugs that we already know are the most dangerous because of criminalization. You need to go all the way, including cocaine and heroin.

On the other hand, if you legalize cocaine and heroin, the meth epidemic pretty much evaporates. I'm willing to wager that folks won't be willing snort battery acid when given a safer, afforable alternative. But the methamphetamine experience should also teach us all something. When people can figure out how to get high from a wildly combustible combination of Sudafed and battery acid in response to existing drug laws, those drug laws will never work.

When federal control over pseudoephedrine at your local pharmacy has to be established under an anti-terrorism law, all hope of rationally defeating recreational drug use is forever lost. And even those draconian measures haven't stopped gang violence, or even significantly decreased it. They've just created a failed prison industry and forever ruined millions of lives. The law is now more dangerous to the individual than even drugs are.

Finally, the last three presidents of the United States have either admitted to using marijuana or cocaine, or specifically refused to deny it. That being the case, what's a parent supposed to tell his or her fucking kid - "Don't do that or you might wind up being president someday?" The question is even more complicated by the fact that the majority of parents have used recreational drugs, and many continue to do so.

When three admitted or suspected drug users in a row are elected Leader of the Free World, I think that you can rather safely argue that we've crossed the Rubicon of the social acceptability of drug use.

We couldn't build a more perfectly retarded construct around the drug issue if we tried. The situation is such that now the only people who benefit from it are politicians, cops and gangbangers. You sure as fuck don't, and neither did the people on Danzig Street last night. Or the thousands of people in the Eaton Centre last month. Or anyone in Chicago at any given time.

People (and especially conservatives) are going to have to sit down and start thinking about what they prefer: statist, puritanical government regulation of what free people do to their own bodies, or finally doing something to stop innocent people from being shot at neighborhood barbecues.

Stephen's Harper's risky ploy

Up until fairly recently, I thought that, if nothing else, Stephen Harper was at least a competent politician. Sure, he's a jabbering dupe of a prime minister, and his party has come to embody all of the worst excesses of his Liberal blood enemies, but at least he was a better than average campaign strategist.

That's changed over the last year. He won his long-awaited majority after running what was easily the worst of his four national campaigns. He won because the Liberals under Michael Ignatieff self-destructed. Towards the end of the campaign, he wound up running against the idea of an NDP majority, which no one would have thought possible even a month earlier. As the Dippers rose, they split the Grit vote in enough ridings to allow the Conservatives to come up the middle. Winning because the other side falls apart is hardly an accomplishment to be very proud of.

As it happens, the Tories may have still had to cheat to win, even as Canada's Natural Governing Party was busy committing collective suicide. In recent weeks, there have been credible reports of robocalls being made in dozens of ridings. Those calls, which were fraudulently identified as coming from Elections Canada, told Liberal-leaning voters that there polling place had changed. And that, as you might imagine, is a fucking crime.

Those calls almost certainly originated with the Conservative Party, and Stephen Harper almost certainly knew about them. To suggest otherwise is to entirely ignore the last six years.

Harper has famously micromanaged both his party and the government to such an extent that Tories everywhere are afraid to say or do anything at all without first clearing it with the Prime Minister's Office. Entire books have been written about his top-down management style, for Christ's sake.

If the robocall scandal is even half as widespread as is currently alleged - and I'd be awfully surprised if it doesn't get a lot bigger - there is no credible way that Harper didn't know about it. Nothing happens that the upper echelons of the Tory campaign or the PMO doesn't know about, and if the upper echelons of the Tory campaign or the PMO knew about the robocalls, you can bet your ass that Harper knew about it. The suggestion that the spending required to launch calls as widespread as what we're hearing would escape Harper's notice, or that of his top campaign people, is ludicrous. And if his top campaign people knew, he knew.

If I were the Prime Minister, I'd be looking for a very good criminal lawyer right about now. I just can't see a scenario where the Tories can avoid a public inquiry on this one. If they refuse to initiate one, they look guilty. But if they do, the chances are pretty good that they'll be found guilty. And once the small-fries start looking at the prospect of going to jail, they'll start trading up with prosecutors. Once that starts, it isn't likely to stop. One of the drawbacks of Stephen Harper's management style - as opposed to, say, Brian Mulroney's - is that it doesn't inspire much loyalty.

The In and Out scandal dragged on for years, but no one really cared about that because to even understand it was to get so far into the weeds of Canadian campaign finance law that no one could be bothered. By the time the Tories admitted their guilt, no one noticed.

This is different. If true, this is voter fraud carried out across the second largest country on Earth. As things currently stand, it stretched across multiple time zones and could have affected tens of thousands of voters. That's really easy to understand. This is far more like the Sponsorship Scandal - or even Watergate - than it is In and Out.

I will credit Harper for one thing. He's smart enough not to play defense. He knows that once you go on the defensive, as Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff learned to their sorrow, you're dead.

So he's going on the offense, as he usually does. What's newsworthy is his target: Interim-Liberal leader, Bob Rae.

 

Rae is a strikingly odd choice of a target. After all, he's the temporary leader of the third party in Parliament. The Grits are so wholly discredited that it's hard to see them winning a national election ever again. Rae is also the only halfway credible or smart figure in the party, but he agreed when he accepted the interim leadership that he wouldn't run for the permanent leadership. Should he renege on that, he'll re-ignite the decades old civil war in the party that destroyed them in the first fucking place.

The hyper-smart, "small c" conservative, Gerry Nicholls, has a theory about why Harper's doing this, but I disagree with him.

While the Prime Minister is the living embodiment of everything that's truly wrong with the Human Spirit, he's not actually retarded. And while he's more than willing to piss away a grand fortune in public money in hucksterish, electioneering nonsense, he doesn't have a history of doing so with party money.

Historically, Harper has only gone jihadi on those that he perceives as a threat. You'll notice, for example, that he hasn't dumped a ton of money shit-talking the NDP, even though they happen to be Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.

And you know what? Harper isn't wrong. If Bob Rae can overcome the mortal handicap of leading the fratricidal and cannibalistic Liberal Party of Canada, he is the clearest threat that Stephen Harper has ever faced. Assuming that the NDP doesn't swallow the Liberals whole before the next election - which almost certainly won't happen - Rae is the only saviour the Grits have.

Firstly, Rae's alone among prominent federal politicians in being not only smarter than Harper is, he is also the only guy who has more experience, both in politics and governing. No other Dipper or Grit has Bob Rae's resume, or anything close to it.

Secondly, he's managed to get through life pretty much free of scandal. Say what you will as his time as Premier of Ontario (and I've said the most horrible things imaginable, and voted against him on two seperate occasions. I'll always regret that I was only born in 1970 and haven't lived in the ridings of Toronto Centre, York South or Broadview, so I could I have voted against him more often.), but his government was shockingly clean.

I'm not going to pretend that he's not a credible threat to Harper, and perhaps the only one out there. If anyone can take out Harper, it's Bob Rae. The Tories aren't just right to try to take out Rae, they're smart to do it when he doesn't the money or the media spotlight to respond.

Having said that, the line of attack is confounding, unless you really appreciate lying.

If I had Harper's record, spending and deficits would be the absolute last thing I'd hit Rae on. This is because Harper himself has surpassed even Pierre Trudeau as being the spendingest prime minister in the peacetime history of Canada. His per-capita deficits certainly reflect that.

Stephen Harper is maybe the last person on earth that isn't George W. Bush that should be hitting Bob Rae on being a shopoholic communist. After all, what in the fuck do you suppose that Harper himself has been doing for the last three years, if not trying to spend his way out of a recession? If Harper can magically get himself around that argument, Rae can then ask him what he was doing in pissing away a $13 billion surplus by turning the tax code into a middle-class giveaway before the world started ending.

Like him or not, Rae displayed an almost heroic level of political courage in attacking his deficits by confronting his own strongest constituency, the civil service unions. And that cost him his job, which he must have known it would. And few things are as dazzling hypocritical than nu-conservatives shithammering Bob for Rae Days while celebrating weapons-grade fuckheads like Scott Walker and John Kasich for essentially doing the same thing.

If I was Bob Rae, I'd be using this Harper ad in my leadership campaign because it highlights his strengths. Rae can run those 30 seconds and respond with "Yes, for the first half of my term, I was a socialist. What's Stephen Harper's excuse? When I saw the error of my ways, I tried to rectify the situation on the backs of those who had supported me. Will Stephen Harper do that?"

This ad is a big bad mistake because it allows Bob Rae to hit Harper from his own right. Rae spent a shitload of money because he was ideologically inclined to do so. And when he saw that he was wrong, he blew himself up trying to right the situation. Harper, on the other hand, spent a shitload of money to try to buy elections, and then cling to power. And absolutely no one thinks that he's going to try to balance his budgets on the backs of the people who brought him to power.

It should be fairly easy to merge the second half of Rae's Ontario term with the Chretien-Martin austerity budgets that eventually balanced the books. And then compare them to Harper's record of being proudly allergic to money, sucking off everyone who might potentially vote for him like a three dollar crack whore, and voter fraud.

If the Liberals can stop being Liberals for fifteen fucking seconds, Stephen Harper just handed them a platform that they almost can't help but winning with.

But I know the Liberals far better than I'd like to. And I know that they'll see this ad, get scared stupid and suffocate Rae in his sleep tonight. That's why they're useless and better off fucking dead.

Fuck Andrew Scheer

Just for the record, I might be putting myself in serious legal jeopardy in writing this. There's a chance that I could be charged with Contempt of Parliament. But the fact is that I don't know, and I don't care. Let the little prick turn the RCMP on me if he can. If they have their way, they'll know where to find me soon enough.

For a few weeks now, I thought that the biggest threat to Canadian democracy was Public Safety Minister Vic Towes and his physchotic plan to undermine the privacy of everyone in this good Dominion.

As it happens, I was wrong. The real threat is Stephen Harper's fourteen-year-old lapdog of a Speaker of the House, Andrew Scheer. Today, he presented himself for what he is, an enemy of free speech.

Some background might be necesseray for my foreign readers. A few weeks ago, Towes introduced a massiveley inttrusive bill that would compromise the privacy of all Canadians. During his time of the floor, he compared those who would oppose this totalitarian measure to child molesters.

Some kid in the Liberal Party of Canada (and I believe it was far bigger than one kid) decided that if morality was at play, it was well beyond time to explore the Minister's own morality. And what a tale his divorce pleadings told! I'm not ging to recount them here, but they're easy enough to find.

First, Harper's half-wits blamed the NDP, which was annoyingly wrong for anyone who understands the way the Liberal Party operates. Then they went to the Speaker, the aforementioned Mr. Scheer to step in.

Some more background might be in order here. A few months ago, it was revealed that the Conservatives were sending robocalls to the riding of Montreal Liberal M.P Irwin Cotler, reporting rumours that he might resign. Those rumours were false, and in fact, started by the Conservatives, but they were perfectly legal. Indeed, Speaker Scheer so ruled, and I was inclined to agree with him. Political dirty tricks that are not, in and of themselves illegal, are not a matter for Parliament, or the criminal justice system.

Of course, this drove the Left nuts, but the Left can hardly get through the day without be driven nuts by something.

However, we learned today that dirty tricks against Liberals and dirty tricks against Conservatives are two entirely different things, which was the logical basis for this most extraordinary of rulings;

I am now prepared to rule on the question of privilege raised on February 27, 2012, by the Minister of Public Safety (Mr. Toews) regarding cyber campaigns following the introduction in the House by him of Bill C-30, An Act to enact the Investigating and Preventing Criminal Electronic Communications Act and to amend the Criminal Code and other Acts.

I would like to thank the Minister for having raised these matters, as well as the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons (Mr. Van Loan), the Minister of Foreign Affairs (Mr. Baird), the Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons (Mr. Lukiwski), the House Leader of the Official Opposition (Mr. Comartin), the Member for Toronto Centre (Mr. Rae), the Member for Bas-Richelieu—Nicolet—Bécancour (Mr. Plamondon), the Member for Saanich—Gulf Islands (Ms. May) and the Member for Westmount—Ville-Marie (Mr. Garneau) for their interventions.

In raising his question of privilege, the Minister raised three issues, each of which he believed to be a contempt of the House. The first concerned the use of House resources for the so-called vikileaks30 account on Twitter, which he claimed was used to attack him personally, thereby degrading his reputation and obstructing him from carrying out his duties as a Member of Parliament.

The Interim Leader of the Liberal Party then rose to inform the House that he himself had intended to rise on a question of privilege, having been informed February 26 that it was an employee of the Liberal Research Bureau who had been responsible for the vikileaks30 site. The Interim Leader offered his unequivocal apology and that of the Liberal Party to the Minister. In view of this unconditional apology made personally by the Member and on behalf of his party as a whole, and in keeping with what has been done in similar circumstances in the past, I am prepared to consider this particular aspect of the question of privilege closed. I also wish to inform the House that the House of Commons Policy on Acceptable Use of Information Technology Resources was applied in this case, given that an unacceptable use of House IT resources occurred.

The Minister also raised the matter of an apparent campaign to inundate his office with calls, emails and faxes. This, he contended, hindered him and his staff from serving his constituents, and prevented constituents with legitimate needs from contacting their Member of Parliament in a timely fashion.

As the Member for Windsor—Tecumseh reminded the House, my predecessor Speaker Milliken was faced with a similar situation in 2005, in a matter raised by the former Member for Glengarry–Prescott–Russell. In his ruling on June 8, 2005, Speaker Milliken concluded that, while the Member had a legitimate grievance that the normal functioning of parliamentary offices had been affected, the Members involved and their constituents had still maintained the ability to communicate through several means. Thus, he could not find that it was a prima facie case of privilege as the Members were not impeded in their ability to perform their parliamentary duties.
Having reviewed the facts in the current case, I must draw the same conclusion on this second aspect of the question of privilege.

This brings us to the third, and what I consider to be the most troubling, issue raised in the question of privilege, that of the videos posted on the Web site, YouTube, by the so-called Anonymous on February 18, 22 and 25, 2012. These videos contained various allegations about the Minister`s private life, and made specific and disturbing threats. The Minister has stated that he accepts that coping with vigorous debate and sometimes overheated rhetoric are part of the job of a politician, but argued that these online attacks directed to both him and his family had crossed the line into threatening behaviour that was unacceptable. He contended that the threatened actions contained in these videos constituted a deliberate attempt to intimidate him with respect to proceedings in Parliament.

In House of Commons Procedure and Practice, Second Edition, it states:

(quote)“It is impossible to codify all incidents which might be interpreted as matters of obstruction, interference, molestation or intimidation and as such constitute prima facie cases of privilege. However, some matters found to be prima facie include the damaging of a Member’s reputation, the usurpation of the title of Member of Parliament, the intimidation of Members and their staff and of witnesses before committees, and the provision of misleading information.” (unquote)
In spite of the able arguments advanced by the Member for Westmount – Ville-Marie, the Chair is in no doubt that the House has full jurisdiction to decide the matter. As is noted at page 108 of O’Brien and Bosc:

(quote) “Speakers have consistently upheld the right of the House to the services of its Members free from intimidation, obstruction and interference. Speaker Lamoureux stated in a 1973 ruling that he had “no hesitation in reaffirming the principle that parliamentary privilege includes the right of a member to discharge his responsibilities as a member of the House free from threats or attempts at intimidation.” (unquote)

Those who enter political life fully expect to be held accountable for their actions — to their constituents, and to those who are concerned with the issues and initiatives they may advocate. In a healthy democracy, vigorous debate on issues is encouraged. In fact, the rules and procedures of this House are drafted to allow for proponents and opponents to discuss in a respectful manner even the most difficult and sensitive of matters. However, when duly-elected Members are personally threatened for their work in parliament – whether introducing a bill, making a statement, or casting a vote, this House must take the matter very seriously.

As noted by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House, threats or attempts to influence a Member’s actions are considered to be breaches of privilege.

I have carefully reviewed the online videos in which the language used does indeed constitute a direct threat to the Minister in particular, as well as all other Members. These threats demonstrate a flagrant disregard of our traditions and a subversive attack on the most fundamental privileges of this House. As your Speaker and the guardian of those privileges, I have concluded that this aspect – the videos posted on the Internet by Anonymous – therefore constitutes a prima facie question of privilege and I invite the Minister to move his motion.

Now, who in the fuck knows what that even means?

If Anonymous gained private information outside of the public realm by illegal means, that would already be in violation of the Criminal Code of Canada. Accordingly, there would be no basis for the Speaker's ruling.

If, on the other hand, the Speaker is ruling that private individuals cannot release pubicly available material, not under seal, that's somethig else entirely. Furthermore, it's a concept completely absent in the Criminial Code itself.

There's also no reason for the ruling unless the government intends to do something to punish the release of said material. Finding parties in Contempt of Parliament for doing do, using parliamentary resources (as the Liberal Party of Canada did) is one thing. Such a finding against a private citizen - or a foreign national, not resident in Canada - is quite another, particularly absent a Criminal Code violation.

It then appears that Andrew Scheer, Stephen Harper's fourteen-year-old Boy Speaker of the House, is creating criminal laws all by himself.

More importantly still, Scheer makes a fundental mistake when he says that "These threats demonstrate a flagrant disregard of our traditions and a subversive attack on the most fundamental privileges of this House." That self-entitled little cunt forgets that the House serves at the pleasure of the people, and not the other way around. They get the privlieges that we give them at any given time. At least that's the way that it's supposed to be.

Now, I've been fairly upfront about my support of free speech. I think that the only reasonale restrictions on it should regard national security. And I've been very upfront in saying that much too much has been made of national security restrictions.

I abhor speech restictions of any kind, as I'm sure you've all figured out.  I've long opposed Section 13 of the Canadian Human Code, spoken out against it, and devoted years worth of links to people who spoke out against it even more strongly than I did.  I've been known to be lumped in with the "Speechies" by the Left that opposes any repeal of Section 13.

Well, the same Conservative government that is supposed to repeal those laws is now having its Boy Speaker hand down this ruling, whatever it's supposed to mean in practical terms.

And this is where I expect my fellow conservatives and libertarians to stand the fuck up.

You can't expect anyone to take us seriously when we defend the right to spread rumours about Irwin Cotler, or even the right of bigots to say the most horrible shit about practically everyone, while supporting the right of anyone to disseminate even our enimies from telling the publicly available  truth about one guy that Stephen Harper happened to give a cool job to.

You either stand for free speech, or you stand for people like Vic Towes and Andrew Scheer.

 But you don't get to stand for both. It's time to put up, or shut the fuck up.

More People Shouldn't Vote

I don't think that I've ever equated low voter turnout, particularly among young people, with public cynicism. Public cynicism in politics is, more often than not, misplaced because voters aren't especially good at paying attention. You see, the real scandal isn't the promises that politicians break, it's the ones that they keep.

For example, if you thought that Stephen Harper was going to govern as a conservative, you just didn't pay attention to his campaign or thought that he was consciously lying. There's just no two ways about that.

Let's look the issues that got him the most attention five years ago. He promised that he was going to cut the national value added tax - the most ineffective tax cut imaginable if you plan on it accomplishing anything other than getting yourself elected - by two percent and giving money away for babysitters and sports equipment. Not only is that not conservative, it was Harper's way of telegraphing that he was going to put us back into deficit spending. It's important to remember that the Tories blew through the $13 billion surplus that he inherited from the Liberals by the time the financial meltdown hit us.

The only thing that he did lie about was his promise not to tax income trusts. That lie cost people a shitload of money, but the Conservatives paid no political price whatsoever for it. I guess his unconstitutional fixed elections date law could qualify as a lie, but I consider it more of a clever trick that fooled dumb people. Parliament, you see, cannot restrict the constitutional prerogative of the Governor General without amending the Constitution, and the Governor General is the person empowered to dissolve Parliament and call elections. But when Prime Minister Harper violated his own law, he won increased seats. That's not an indication of public cynicism as it is public stupidity.

That's what makes studies like this one a titanic waste of money that we really don't have.

Elections Canada is commissioning a major new national survey as it searches for new ways to encourage disengaged young Canadians to vote.

With an estimated cost between $100,000 and $250,000, the project will survey 2,500 people between the ages of 18 and 34 who are disabled, unemployed or aboriginal, live in rural areas, or speak neither English nor French as a first language.

It’s all part of a “youth research action plan” Elections Canada hopes will help it reach out to a segment of the population that’s increasingly tuning out electoral politics.

Only 37.4 per cent of voters ages 18 to 24 cast ballots in the 2008 federal election. Turnout by young voters has been dropping steadily since the 1960s, when about seven in 10 of those eligible to vote for the first time went to the polls.

The drop-off in youth participation is largely responsible for the overall decline in Canadian voter turnout over the past two decades. Just 58.8 per cent of eligible voters cast ballots in 2008 — a record low.

I think I've said this before, but I don't think that not enough people voting is a problem as much as that too many people are. Let me rephrase that. Too many people that don't have any idea what they're voting for or against are lining up at the polls.

One of the most annoying platitudes that's never going to go away is that folks have a "responsibility" to vote, which isn't true. People have the right to vote, but the responsibility to know what they're actually doing. Too many people exercise the right but ignore the responsibility.

I've talked to a few people in my life who refused to vote because, as they put it, they weren't interested and knew absolutely nothing about the issues. I have endless respect for those people. They couldn't be more responsible than people who vote because they think that should or cast ballots for parties just because their families or ethnic communities always voted that way.

Another truism that drives me up a fucking wall is "the people are always right." No, the people are often selfish, stupid and bigoted assholes. The worst shit in human history - like slavery, the Nuremberg laws and supply-side economics - usually had broad popular support. Until they didn't. But voters never take responsibility for the ugly nonsense that they previously were for. No, they turn their backs on something, at which point it becomes the government's fault.

Elections Canada identified youth engagement as a key priority in its 2008-13 strategic plan. It commissioned other youth surveys after the 2008 election that are nearing completion and will be published in the next month or two.

“It’s an ongoing process to try to understand what is making that group tick and how we can reach them better with our communications,” Enright says.

Among other things, the new survey will try to identify barriers to participation and determine the values, attitudes and behavioural factors linked to voting or non-voting.

It also hopes to identify what Elections Canada calls “possible interveners” —musicians, activists, social media sites — that young Canadians are listening to, then use those channels to deliver its message.

“If they’re telling us that they’re not hearing us,” Enright says, “who are they hearing? Is it best to reach them through some sort of social media? Or is it best to continue to put our efforts and our moneys into traditional advertising campaigns?”

You've gotta be shitting me! If I've ever heard a clearly and cleverly articulated reason for getting the government out of politics, that's it. Elections Canada actually believes that if kids aren't listening to them, they might listen to Panic! At The Disco or fucking Twitter. The scary thing is that they probably aren't wrong.

Yeah, they might get some more no-nothing hipster jerk-offs to the polls, but what does that actually accomplish? You've created a new audience for twisted spin doctors to write sleazy political ads for. In the end, you create less accountability for a government by, for and of the fucking lobbyist swine, not more. It's famously difficult to hold government accountable if you weren't paying attention to it in the first place.

Look, I get that useless beauracrats like those at Elections Canada have an interest in justifying their existence. I just wish that they'd do so in less damaging ways. More importantly, they should stick with with they're good at. For example, they've had a few really hot girls at my polling place in the last few elections. They should get more of them instead of caring why, how or if they vote.

If they're determined to continue the destruction of our democracy with wildly unchecked ignorance, they at least owe me the courtesy of giving me some masturbation material while they do it. Few people need the distraction more than I do.


Link lovingly stolen from Gerry Nicholls.