Peace, order and good government, eh?

A moment of parochialism

2012-05-15T22:11:57Z

For decades now the right wing in Alberta, which has been in control of the province for that whole time, has made no bones about not giving a damn about the rest of the country. They've been very forthright about it--firewalls, letting the Eastern bastards (and incidentally any stray non-Albertan Western bastards) freeze in the dark, all that.

So now we have Mulcair talking about Albertan oil causing Dutch disease for the rest of Canada, which it clearly does, and suggesting that we need to take measures to defend the country and its non-oil industries from this. And we have British Columbians not wild about a pipeline which will benefit Albertans but impose mainly costs on BC, costs the Albertans won't have to bear or, most likely, even help with in the event of a major spill.

What strikes me as bizarre is the Albertan right's response: Utter shock that other parts of the country would fail to prioritize Albertan interests. They seem amazed at the mean-spiritedness of other parts of the country in failing to cheerfully support Albertan money-making at their expense. Suddenly now because it's for them, the country must pull together; a benefit to Alberta must be seen as a benefit to all. Uh, guys, if you wanted anyone to give a shit about your welfare you might have thought about giving a shit about anyone else's welfare any time in the last thirty years. Really, why should I give a flying fuck whether their oil makes it to market?

Friday night

2012-05-12T00:00:00Z

Are you ready to party on a Friday night? 'Cos I'm going to begin the set with a song about dying. That said, it's a rather more upbeat version than most — this is Goin' Down Slow by Kenny Neal and Billy Branch (with a tip of the hat to Moose).

If you're curious about the history of the song Catfish Blues there's an essay on it here. This is Popa Chubby (which is the stage name of Ted Horowitz).

Remember the selections from the 2010 Crossroads Festival that I posted last week? I had one left over. This is Gary Clark Jr. (again) with Don't Owe You a Thing. Have a good weekend.

Friday Robocon rant

2012-05-11T15:57:00Z

This post will be a little short on details but it will provide the links so you can follow them and fill in the blanks if you don't get the references. The main point is that I'm joining with bloggers at The Sixth Estate, Saskboy's Abandoned Stuff (any number of posts) and others who have expressed increasing frustration with the pace of Elections Canada's investigation into Robocon.

The first post linked to above mentions a couple of specific areas where the trail has gone cold. You might forgive the loss of the proxy server logs since the owner generally only keeps them for a week. But there's also the loss of the video evidence that might have identified Pierre Poutine which is the alias of the person who purchased the credit cards used to pay the bills at RackNine.

The story that broke last Friday afternoon connected Poutine to the CPC campaign in Guelph and specifically to Andrew Prescott, the deputy campaign manager. That alone doesn't prove both used the same computer but the heavy lifting done by Zorpheus at The Wingnuterer makes that claim much harder to argue with. Yesterday afternoon we learned that the IP isn't associated with the campaign office but it does trace back to Guelph. Andrew Prescott, it turns out, doesn't live in Guelph. But the parents of Michael Sona, the campaign's comms director, do. Do they have a Rogers account? Has anyone asked them? Did Prescott ever visit? Does Prescott do all his business from a laptop that he could have used there or anywhere else? Has anyone asked him?

Probably not. Prescott has lawyered up and has been refusing to speak to EC investigators since March. Has anyone thought to get a subpoena and properly depose him so questions can be answered? Because there are more questions than that for him. And I'd refine Alison's question about the proxy server: why did Prescott suddenly begin using the proxy server only two days before the election?

I understand that if charges are ever going to be laid, then the investigation needs to be done carefully and according to procedure so the charges will stick. But Al Matthews has been investigating the fraudulent phone calls in Guelph for a year. And we're only now finding out that crucial transaction records in the CIMS database have been blanked out? And that one of Andrew Prescott's "Daemon Dialer" downloads — the type of download that would supply the data for RackNine to place the calls — can't be duplicated? As Saskboy has asked repeatedly: would this information be missing if Elections Canada had used its legal authority to access CIMS much sooner than it did?

When Marc Mayrand testified at committee recently that incidents like this shake the public's confidence in our electoral system, he got it absolutely right. And watching the trail get cold before our eyes shakes our confidence in Elections Canada itself. The cynic in me — the one I've been keeping in check so far — is getting restless. He's tempted to suggest that what we're getting is for the benefit of the media and is designed to make us think that something is happening when it really isn't. Please make a liar out of him.

Friday night Crossroads blogging

2012-05-05T00:00:00Z

Eric Clapton started the Crossroads Guitar Festival series both to showcase guitar players and to benefit a drug treatment center called the Crossroads Centre. All three of tonight's clips are from the most recent festival in 2010.

The first tune may stir some memories for you if you're around my age. Comin' Home was released as a single by Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett in 1969. This is Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks and Warren Haynes.

This is the first performance by Gary Clark Jr. I've posted here. It may not be the last. He's all of 28 and may be around for a while yet. This is Bright Lights. The familiar face giving him some help on guitar is Doyle Bramhall II.

This seems like an appropriate way to close: Eric Clapton performing Robert Johnson's Crossroads. That's Steve Gadd on drums and Chris Stainton on piano. Have a good weekend.

Bumped and updated: A little Friday morning Robocon blogging

2012-05-04T19:23:00Z

Update:

I guess I should have waited to do Friday afternoon Robocon blogging. Courtesy of The Sixth Estate, here are new reports from Postmedia (via the Ottawa Citizen) and the Globe and Mail. Short version: In not entirely surprising news, the connection between Pierre Poutine and the Conservative campaign in Guelph has been confirmed. The original post follows...

According to someone who knows a bit about using telephones to suppress the vote, what happened in last year's federal election campaign was "a fairly sophisticated operation" that was likely based on lessons learned in American political campaigns. That's from a former Republican political operative named Allen Raymond who served three months in jail for his own involvement in vote suppression.

So I guess we can add Raymond to the list of people who would surmise that what a lot of us have been calling Robocon wasn't the work of a single rogue operator but the result of a coordinated effort on a national scale. That was from the only new article I've seen in the last week that relates directly to this story — there have been no new developments reported in either the Elections Canada investigation or the Council of Canadians lawsuit. While we wait impatiently for more, contemplate this quote from Raymond:

"Voters are just a commodity when you're in this business," he said. "You're just trying to get enough to win. Are they people? Sure they are, but at the end of the day they're just part of the transaction. You detach yourself because you've got a job to do."

Seeing voters as a commodity and elections as a business is part of the same culture that views citizens as consumers.

Democracy is in deep, deep trouble.

Y'all keep using that term "free trade"

2012-05-04T18:48:00Z

Kate Heartfield has an interesting column on trade negotiations between Canada and the EU and specifically on the possible consequences for the cost of pharmaceuticals. The EU is insisting on changes to Canada's intellectual property laws and there's some dispute about what that will mean for Canadian consumers. You can follow the link for more but I wanted to draw attention to this, from Heartfield's closing paragraph.

...the whole point of free trade is to allow consumers access to the best goods at the best price.

I'm afraid that's only true in some imaginary land where so-called "free markets" work as advertised. In this world, there are actually no such things as free markets and their biggest boosters mostly wouldn't have it any other way. The point of the agreements that are sold to us as being all about free trade is actually to guarantee profits to investors and corporations while limiting the ability of governments to govern for the benefit of their own citizens.

The trade agreement under discussion here is a case in point. The negotiations have occurred out of the public eye and without public consultation. If proponents of this agreement have their way, then changes to our intellectual property laws will effectively be written by European pharmaceutical companies. Don't try and tell me their highest priority is the welfare of Canadian consumers or the democratic rights of Canadian citizens.

When I hear the term "free trade" these days I assume I'm being addressed by someone who hasn't been paying attention or who is about to try and put something over on me.

Disclosure for thee but not for me?

2012-04-30T13:12:00Z

This op-ed in the Globe and Mail depends in large part on the uncritical acceptance of the conclusions of a Fraser Institute report. So it might have been nice if the Globe had disclosed that the column's author, Gwyn Morgan, is both a serious financial donor to the Fraser Institute and a member of its board of directors. Perhaps if we spread a rumour that Morgan is secretly a political blogger, the paper's editors would take more interest in these things.

Let's take a quick look at one small part of Morgan's column:

Germany has given away $130-billion, mostly to solar-power companies. Yet solar power makes up a minuscule 0.3 per cent of German power supply, while doing almost nothing toward the original objective of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In February, Germany's Minister of Economics and Technology, Philipp Roesler, announced a pullback from green-power subsidies saying the cost was "a threat to the economy."

It's true that Germany is making serious reductions to their feed-in tariff rates but Morgan makes it sound as though it's because the original policy was a failure. There seems to be another side to the story.

The government has explained its decision as a way of slowing the rapid growth in the sector, saying it was one of Germany's success stories, but had been allowed to grow too fast and had been too heavily subsidised.

Where Morgan claims that solar supplies only 0.3% of electricity in Germany, there may be another side to that story too.

The sun provides from 3.2% to - on sunny days at midday- up to 25% of Germany's energy.

As for Germany's GHG emissions, something has certainly reduced them.

Germany's emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) were 2.1 percent down year-on-year in 2011 at 916.7 million tonnes, as the impact of more renewable energy kicked in and mild weather cut heating fuels use, data from government agency Umweltbundesamt (UBA) showed on Thursday.

The emissions of six gases - widely blamed for global warming - were down by 26.5 percent from the reference year 1990, exceeding a target for Germany to lower emissions by 21 percent under the Kyoto climate protocol in that period.

I can't be sure whether I should be taking the facts and figures from the Guardian and Reuters at face value. More research would be in order before reaching a definitive conclusion. But I'm pretty sure I can't take Gwyn Morgan and the Globe and Mail at face value since Morgan's quoting a report he helped pay for without ever disclosing that fact.

Friday night

2012-04-28T00:00:00Z

Good evening. Have some blues. As Chris Smither mentions in his intro, Statesboro Blues was originally written and recorded by Blind Willie McTell.

The opening bars of this tune put me in mind of Canned Heat. Since it's a road song, maybe that was the idea. This is Moreland and Arbuckle with Tall Boogie.

The event this next performance is taken from was sponsored by a musical instrument retailer called Guitar Center. That might explain why there are so guitar players about. Warren Haynes is joined by Joe Bonamassa and Brad Whitford, the latter being the rhythm guitarist from Aerosmith. The tune is Born Under a Bad Sign. Have a good weekend.

Friday morning Robocon blogging

2012-04-27T15:11:00Z

I don't often write about polls but I'll make time for this one. In support of their lawsuit contesting the results of last May's federal election in seven ridings, the Council of Canadians commissioned EKOS Research Associates to do a study. EKOS investigated the occurrence of fraudulent phone calls in those ridings and the political leanings of those who received them. To establish a baseline, the company also looked at 106 other ridings where there have been no reports of fraudulent calls.

Here's a summary of the results from the Globe and Mail:

Ekos president Frank Graves said the survey found voters in the seven ridings were 50 per cent more likely to have received illegitimate calls than those in 106 surveyed "comparison" ridings... And about three times as many Liberal, New Democrat and Green supporters as Conservative supporters claimed they were given false or incorrect information about polling station locations.

In a report on the same story in the Ottawa Citizen, Graves described the possibility that those results could be merely coincidental as "completely statistically improbable." The reaction from the Conservatives was entirely predictable: they ignored the evidence and attacked the messenger. Frank Graves must be a Liberal. There is no other possible explanation.

Hopefully a judge is less likely to see things the same way because the results support a closer investigation considering the close margins of victory in these ridings. You can argue that this survey relies on people's recollections of events that happened nearly a year ago. You can also argue that those recollections may have been influenced by recent media reports. That might account for discrepancies in details but the important point here is whether or not the poll respondents received the phone calls they report. That's not a minor detail and it seems unlikely to me that very many people would manage to manufacture a memory of a phone call misinforming them about the location of a polling station.

And if the Conservatives want to claim that those manufactured memories are intentional on the part of people who don't support the CPC, EKOS has that covered:

Ekos pointed out that if the responses alleging incorrect information being received were the constructions of disgruntled non-Conservative voters, it would leave unexplained why the same targeting effects were not present in the comparison group.

If you'd like to review the actual report EKOS submitted, it's here in pdf format. There's also a post at Creekside that puts the EKOS findings up alongside the margins of victory for the Conservatives in those seven ridings. Not exactly scientific but still interesting.

A few days before this study was reported, the Council of Canadians also announced an "expert witness."

[Bob] Penner has more than 20 years as a political consultant, and has developed and implemented sophisticated voter contact programs and other tools for a variety of clients. Stratcom was one of the first Canadian firms to specialize in this area.

Penner reviewed all the evidence, including the counterclaims made by the Conservatives, and prepared an affidavit (also pdf) which the Council summarizes thusly:

Penner alleges several reasons why the claim that "misdirecting calls were simply mistakes and artifacts of inaccuracies of the voter lists provided by Elections Canada... is not plausible... There would be absolutely no legitimate reason for a political party to knowingly call the supporters of another party to encourage them to vote, or to alert them to a polling location change. Any such call must have another purpose, such as suppression of the opponent's turnout."

It sounds like common sense but if an "expert witness" gives it more weight in the eyes of a judge, so be it. Hopefully this, along with the EKOS study and the affidavit from the former call centre employee reported in last week's post, will encourage him to let the lawsuit go forward.

And while we're waiting to find out, Elections Canada has been having fun with phone records.

Elections Canada investigators are seeking phone records to trace calls seemingly designed to send Northern Ontario voters to the wrong polling stations.

Investigators recently contacted voters with specific questions about their home telephone providers, in an apparent attempt to electronically trace incoming calls they received leading up to the May 2 vote.

The takeaway from this report is that EC's investigation really has widened. Their investigators are now looking closely at Nipissing-Timiskaming, described as "the most closely contested federal riding in the last election", and they're now looking at live calls as well as robocalls. In fact, wasn't Nipissing-Timiskaming mentioned in that affidavit from the former call centre employee?

The voter suppression story isn't dominating the news the way it did for a while, but it isn't going away either. Evidence suggesting an organized criminal conspiracy to influence the outcome of the election continues to mount. The Conservative reaction, denying everything and dismissing their critics as sore losers rather than encouraging a thorough investigation, doesn't exactly make them look like defenders of democracy. That may be taking its toll.

Friday night: RIP Levon Helm

2012-04-21T00:00:00Z

Levon Helm, best known as the drummer for The Band, passed away yesterday from "complications of cancer." He had already come back from throat cancer once to resume recording and performing until very recently.

I would imagine you'll find lots of retrospective looks at his career (like this one at the New Yorker) so I thought I'd just put up some of those recent performances. This is an appearance on the David Letterman show in 2009 where he performed a song called Tennessee Jed from a newly released album. If you want to skip the introduction the song actually gets under way just after the 1:00 mark.

If I have the details correct, the concert at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee was in 2008. There was a PBS special that used material from it in 2009 and then a CD/DVD release as a live album in 2011. This is Anna Lee.

And this is Ophelia from the same show. Have a good weekend.

Friday morning Robocon blogging

2012-04-20T15:36:00Z

The story of vote suppression in last year's federal election has moved ahead this week on two different tracks.

Glen McGregor and Stephen Maher, the journalists who originally broke the story of the Elections Canada investigation, delivered another installment this week. They're reporting that EC investigators have now shifted their attention to Conservative Party headquarters because they're satisfied that the party's CIMS database was the source for the information used to drive the robocalls that misled voters about polling station locations. And in the course of examining the logs to see who was behind the calls...

... the agency is trying to determine why database records provided by the party appear to be missing entries that could help identify who downloaded the phone numbers used to make fraudulent robocalls...

Aside from the comparisons to the infamous Nixon White House Tapes and the missing 18 minutes, that bit of news also prompted this:

The Conservatives say it's impossible to delete logs that keep track of access to CIMS.

Really? Tell me more.

Specifically I'd be curious to know which database engine CIMS uses that wouldn't allow even someone with administrative rights to delete a record. Normally a database administrator has full rights to do anything he or she wants to the data and controls access by limiting the permissions of the other users. Would an administrator of CIMS be restricted in other ways? If the log table became corrupt in a way that involved picking up garbage data, would there be no way to repair it? And if that happened, wouldn't it render the access logging pretty much useless?

I can't say for sure that the Conservative claim is simply wrong but it doesn't gibe with my own experience in working with databases.

The McGregor-Maher story also reported that EC investigators are looking at phone records in the Conservative war room and asking questions about phone calls to RackNine, the company whose servers hosted the robocalls. Whoever set the calls up with that company contacted their CEO directly on a private line and seemed to have inside information about the company's dealings with the CPC. And that revelation led to this:

The fact that Elections Canada is making inquiries about activities in the Conservative war room appears to conflict with the conclusion of an internal probe, led by Conservative party lawyer Arthur Hamilton, who was asked by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to get to the bottom of the matter.

Hamilton, a veteran who handled the party's legal business in the In and Out elections-spending affair and the Helena Guergis scandal, is said to have concluded that no party workers outside of Guelph are implicated, a point that party representatives repeatedly emphasize.

But according to the CBC the next day:

The party's lawyer also contradicted media reports that said he was leading an internal party investigation. Arthur Hamilton told CBC News that he is not conducting an investigation and has not conducted an investigation into the calls.

Let me play back the first report on Hamilton's investigation again, with a little added emphasis:

Hamilton ... is said to have concluded that no party workers outside of Guelph are implicated, a point that party representatives repeatedly emphasize.

Is said to have concluded? Said by whom? The unnamed party representatives who want very much to get their party off the hook? Where did the report of Hamilton's investigation come from in the first place? It now seems obvious it didn't come from Hamilton himself or he'd be facing some direct questions about the contradiction.

What we can take from this, I think, is that if there has been an internal CPC investigation, we actually know nothing about it. What "party representatives" have been reporting about an investigation is just spin. And I do wish that reporters would make these people go on the record when they have an obvious vested interest in steering the story in a particular direction.

So to summarize, EC is now investigating the possibility of involvement in voter fraud at the national party level. Party spokespeople insist the evidence for that involvement is not only not proof of anything but couldn't possibly exist. I'm looking forward to the next installment.

Meanwhile...

When it was announced that the Council of Canadians was supporting a lawsuit to challenge the election results in seven specific ridings, I had hopes that would force more evidence of voter suppression into the public eye. The initial reaction from the Conservatives was about what you'd expect: it's a frivolous lawsuit brought by sore losers and should be dismissed before there's even any evidence presented. The Council of Canadians decided to present some anyway.

To counter the claim that the calls about incorrect polling stations were the result of errors, the Council produced evidence that in six of the seven ridings there were no changes to polling station locations and therefore, no reason for the calls to have been made in the first place. They then released an affidavit signed by a former employee of Responsive Marketing Group (RMG), a call centre the Conservatives employed during the election. The affidavit sworn by Annette Desgagne is here (pdf) and here's a followup at the Ottawa Citizen, again by McGregor and Maher. A key section:

About three days before the election, Desgagne says, the scripts she was reading off a computer screen were changed to change-of-address calls.

"I started to become concerned about the Change of Address Calls, because several of the listeners with whom I spoke questioned me about the new polling location I was providing," Desgagne said.

One woman from Winnipeg told Desgagne the new poll location she provided was over an hour away from her home, Desgagne said. In another call, she says, she gave a new poll location to a woman who had already voted in the lobby of her seniors residence.

There's one important point that's more clearly expressed in the Council's media release (my emphasis):

...she was instructed to make calls about polling location changes and was given a new script that did not indicate that she was calling on behalf of the Conservatives.

There's more at the Citizen, including Desgagne's claim that when she and other employees reported their concerns to management, they were told to stick to the script. The Conservatives and representatives of RMG are denying it all and telling a different story. But they have yet to explain why Desgagne would even come forward with such specific recollections about the calls if she has it all wrong. Desgagne's story was originally reported by the Toronto Star weeks ago so she's had lots of time to reconsider. Obviously she hasn't.

And as an aside, Alison at Creekside became curious about RMG. I like it when Alison becomes curious. In this case she produced an interesting read about aggressive sales pitches, shady charities and mergers that leave you wondering just who owns whom. It's notable because RMG was heavily involved in supplying data to the CIMS database.

That's quite a bit more activity to report than last week's meager offering and significantly, claims that problems were limited to Guelph and to local campaign operatives look ever more difficult to sustain . And the adventure will continue, I'm sure.

Is this really the story you want go with?

2012-04-19T14:47:00Z

Burke campaign paperwork could have aided Guelph robodialling

A mysterious operative known only as Pierre Poutine could have obtained the ammunition he needed to launch his election-day attack on the electorate simply by walking into the campaign office of Guelph Conservative candidate Marty Burke.

...

...sources close to the Burke campaign have told the Mercury hard-copy versions of the CIMS data suspected to have been used in this case were routinely printed off and used for legitimate campaign purposes, such as canvassing or arranging rides to polls.

Someone who passed through the Burke campaign office on York Road could have picked up a copy of these printed lists, sources say.

On Twitter, Kady O'Malley already pointed out one problem with this theory: the information would have to be supplied to RackNine, the service that hosted the calls, in digital form.

So our mysterious infothief, having wandered through the office at just the right time to get hold of the data, would have had to sit down at a computer with his stolen documents and rekey everything to get it ready for submission. Or scan it all, put it through the optical character recognition process and then separate the Conservative supporters, who didn't get calls, from those who had indicated an intention to support a different party, who did get calls. It all seems unlikely.

But put that objection aside for a moment and consider what "sources close to the Burke campaign" have just suggested about the way the campaign managed information.

We've been given to believe that CIMS is a highly secure system with access controlled by password. Are we now to understand that all that security was actually a waste because users in the riding offices were casually printing off supposedly secure data and leaving it laying around where any casual visitor could scoop it up and walk out the door with it?

The defence on offer now appears to be: we're not guilty, just completely irresponsible.

And gee, are there any privacy concerns here?

Your move, Vic.

2012-04-18T15:05:00Z

Omar Khadr formally requests transfer home from Guantanamo

Ottawa has received an application from convicted war criminal Omar Khadr to transfer from Guantanamo Bay to Canada.

A spokeswoman for Public Safety Minister Vic Toews says the federal government is now making a decision "in accordance with Canadian law."

I'd be willing to bet that the formal request for transfer was made some time ago. What's new here is the acknowledgement from our government. Let's see how long it takes Toews to either grant the request or figure out how to say no when the Americans want this to happen.

One source maintains the United States is asking Canada for a diplomatic favour in taking the Toronto-born citizen back.

The source says Washington wants to "get rid" of Mr. Khadr for their own reasons.

I'm not sure why the Globe is leaving it at "for their own reasons" when other articles have already spelled it out.

The other prisoners being held in the Guatanamo prison are well aware of Khadr's plea deal. As long as Khadr remains on Cuban soil, they'll be reluctant to negotiate when it looks as though the other side isn't honoring their commitments and the White House will have that much more trouble dealing with a serious political liability. In an election year.

Almost immediate update:

And that's what I get for not waiting the obligatory hour — or two, or twenty-four — to see if the Globe and Mail was going to substantially rewrite its story.

Sources have said the delay has complicated commission proceedings against other Guantanamo inmates because it has made them reluctant to strike their own plea deals.

That's what I just said. Except I added the part about it being an election year. Does anyone doubt that's an issue?

Guest post: New progressive narrative

2012-04-17T23:49:00Z

This is a guest post contributed by frequent commenter Jared Milne.

In the last couple of years, various Canadian commentators have remarked on the new conservative narrative of Canada that Stephen Harper and the federal Conservatives have been creating. Much of this narrative centres around a new form of patriotism that emphasizes support for the military, the Canadian North, hockey and Tim Horton's coffee. Now, with the Harper Conservatives having formed a majority government in the 2011 federal election, progressive Canadians like Murray Dobbin, Jim Stanford and Andrew Jackson are calling for a new progressive narrative that provides an alternative to the narrative offered by the Harper Conservatives and the more general political right. Carol Goar has written about an anti-poverty movement that she says is "out of step" with the people it tries to help, and Reilly Yeo talks about the need for innovative thinking in how government can work in a networked and global society.

Unfortunately, there are voices on the left that make this much easier said than done. Prominent American professor and public intellectual Ward Churchill called many of the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks "little Eichmanns", claiming that their deaths were a "befitting penalty" for the corporate oppression they supposedly engaged in. Canadian political writer and poet Robin Mathews called Stephen Harper a "psychopath" and compared him to Adolf Hitler. Noted progressive blogger Canadian Cynic, commonly directs personal attacks and insults against those he disagrees with. In one post, he has referred to the federal Conservatives as the "Stephen Harper Brownshirt Party" and called retired judge Frank Iacobucci a "cheap hooker". In other posts, Canadian Cynic has referred to various female conservative bloggers and politicians as "cunts". Members of the Occupy Movement have bragged about the "fun" they can have protesting on private property rather than working to earn a living, made up demonstrably false claims about major historical figures, and caused more general violence and hooliganism.

The problem with what these people have been saying and doing is that they make all progressives look bad by association. Their words and actions are used by critics on the right who try to discredit what progressives are advocating and tar all progressives as being hateful towards anyone who disagrees with them, advocating extreme policies and supporting violence when in many cases progressives do not. Progressives like Dobbin and Stanford are exactly right when they talk about the need for a new narrative that can better meet the realities of today's politics, but any attempt to construct that narrative is only hindered by the likes of Churchill, Mathews, Canadian Cynic and the more radical members of the Occupy movement.

What could a new progressive narrative look like, if it were to have a broader appeal to Canadians than the words and actions of people like Mathews or Canadian Cynic? Much of the conservative narrative today centres around individual freedom, and its opposition to the government "control" that progressives supposedly want to exercise on individuals through government taxes and programs. In many respects, however, government intervention and social programs have actually increased the freedom enjoyed by the vast majority of Canadians.

It's one thing to for someone to lose his or her job through incompetence, but quite another to lose it because of shifts in the economy or the company needing to downsize through the ineptitude of its management. In the latter case, Employment Insurance can help those unemployed people to pay their bills and participate in the economy while they are looking for work. Socialized medicine has freed many Canadian families from having to pay the incredibly high sums of money that their American counterparts pay to that country's private system.

Public education has allowed a greater number of people to better exercise their full talents and increased their career choices. Minimum wage laws have increased the purchasing power of the poorest people in society and allowed them to better participate in the economy. Workplace safety laws have decreased the injuries workers have suffered, allowing them to be more productive for their employers and earn more money for their own use. Environmental regulations can support tourist and fisheries industries and the people who work in them. A judicious combination of publicly available daycare spaces and tax credits for those parents who prefer alternate means of childcare can provide support to more parents than either initiative could alone, thereby allowing a greater number of parents overall to enter the workforce while their children are cared for.

In that way, the social safety net has in fact provided support to Canadians in many ways, providing them with more resources to exercise their talents and individual efforts. However, a new progressive narrative would also need to recognize that government action is not the only solution to a problem, and can in fact make things worse if it's not well implemented. Mel Hurtig and John Ralston Saul have both sharply criticized the conventional wisdom of free trade agreements, tax cuts and privatization. However, Hurtig has also derided the National Energy Program launched by the Trudeau government in the late 1970s as having been "poorly conceived, poorly explained and poorly defended." Saul has also criticized the slowness, bureaucracy and lack of clarity of the Foreign Investment Review Agency, implemented in the 1970s to review the foreign purchases of Canadian companies.

Rather, it could be said that society functions best through a combination of individual initiative and collective action, through the participation of both governments and markets, each complementing one another's strengths and compensating for one another's weaknesses. Private charitable donations and government programs can, at the best of times, combine to support a greater number of those in need than either one could on their own. Private citizens with their own sources of power and wealth, independent of any government, can act against the type of government encroachment seen in Communist Russia or China, while government programs and laws, when they're properly implemented, can support the liberty of the less powerful.

A progressive narrative can offer a strong criticism of the current market-based consensus that has led to marked increases in poverty among Canadians and that by and large has not had the "trickle down" effect that its advocates have promised.

However, a new progressive narrative can also acknowledge also the good that comes of individual effort, independent of government action.

A new progressive narrative can also offer a number of strong rebuttals to the Conservative claim that their party is best suited to managing the economy. It is worth remembering, for instance, that it was the Opposition parties who forced the Harper government to implement the stimulus package that would become Canada's Economic Action Plan that helped stimulate the economy and create jobs. Many of the sound regulations that have kept Canadian banks from suffering the fate of their American counterparts were not put in place by Harper, but by previous governments.

On the other hand, Stephen Harper claimed during the 2008 election campaign that, if there was going to be a recession, it would have happened by now. The Harper government has broken its promise not to tax income trusts and drastically increased the national debt and made the tax system more complicated to the point where even Finance Minister Jim Flaherty admits that the tax system is more complicated than it used to be. Many of the tax credits introduced by the Conservatives are harshly criticized by conservative pundits and think tanks, who do not believe that these credits are achieving their goals. Various conservative pundits and bloggers are also becoming increasingly frustrated with Harper's fiscal mismanagement.

A new progressive narrative would also need to address some of the criticisms directed towards it by the political right. Condemning all capitalists and businesspeople as cruel and uncaring of others is just as unfair and untrue as condemning all progressives and leftists as destructive Black Bloc types. After all, people who own organic grocery stores, occult or bong shops and vegan restaurants may not be known for holding conservative views, but they are risking their own money and capital in setting up businesses that they own and from which they make their living and provide jobs to others. Many Liberal and NDP candidates over the years have been business owners themselves. Vive Le Canada founder Susan Thompson, for example, previously founded and owned Hell N' Back Welding and later ran for the federal NDP in Alberta. Rather than adhering to the stereotype of the latte-sipping elitist that's commonly associated with the NDP, Thompson was an entrepreneur who founded her own blue collar company.

These people are, in a sense, capitalists just as much as any business executive who works in a Calgary or Toronto office tower, albeit on a smaller scale. In turn, many of those business executives also donate both their time and their money to any number of worthy causes, their own private initiatives complementing the government's efforts. Think of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or the work of someone like Melcor president and CEO Ralph Young. Lumping such people in with less ethical and less compassionate businesspeople doesn't help anyone. Even the likes of Jonathan Kay, managing editor of the conservative National Post newspaper, talked about how reasonable he found many of the solutions advocated by Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks in their book The Trouble With Billionaires. His problem was not so much with what McQuaig and Brooks were advocating, but rather the general disdain they seemed to hold for rich people as a whole.

Similarly, blanket condemnations of industries like the Alberta oilpatch will not win support for a progressive cause. Most people in the oil industry are no different than anyone else in that their main goal is simply to earn a living. When it comes to changing the way energy is developed in Canada, many people working in the oil industry would want to know how any changes proposed by progressives would avoid damaging or costing them their livelihoods. This perception among many people in Western Canada that progressive parties do not support their regional interests is one of the major reasons they have tended to support conservative parties at the federal level, such as with the rise of the Reform Party under Preston Manning.

Another issue a new progressive narrative would have to address would be specific issues that the political right has managed to claim as its own and which still matter very much to Canadians. Carol Goar has pointed out that the Conservative justice reforms have a lot of appeal to lower-income Canadians who feel threatened by drug dealers and violent young offenders. While it is true that overall crime rates are falling, it is still a sickening state of affairs when sexual offenders are sentenced to house arrest and probation for sexual assault or time served for possession of child pornography. Many Canadians remain unconvinced of progressive approaches to justice, and a new progressive narrative would need to provide more details on how it would deal with violent and sexual offenders.

Perhaps most of all, however, a new progressive narrative would have to avoid, as much as possible, the type of insulting language used by the likes of Churchill, Mathews and Canadian Cynic cited earlier in this essay. This is in fact an area where open-minded progressives and conservatives could come together in establishing a more constructive dialogue between all parts of the political spectrum. This new dialogue would also work against the more radical elements on both sides whose interest is in demonizing or destroying one another, rather than providing sound governance that benefits all Canadians. It is one thing to have a legitimate political disagreement with someone, but quite another entirely to want to demonize them for having different views, or hating them simply because of their general political allegiance

Sadly, this tendency remains as strong as it has ever been, indulged in by people on both sides of the spectrum. The latest manifestation comes in the debate over the foreign funding of Canadian environmental charities, when Senator Mike Duffy accused many of these groups of somehow being "un-Canadian", impugning their patriotism for having dissenting opinions.

There is, however, a more positive dialogue that many of us who have a strong interest in politics frequently overlook. It's the dialogue between many everyday Canadians who live, work and volunteer together, even when their beliefs cross partisan lines. They support the same hockey teams, they volunteer for the same organizations, and attend the same churches, all in spite of whatever political differences they may have.

In talking to many of my fellow Canadians, I've noticed how many of them defy the stereotypes one would expect. Self-made entrepreneurs and rural farmers have voted for or even run for the New Democratic and Liberal parties. Conservative supporters have voiced their support of the handgun registry even as they decry the long gun registry, and have voiced support for banning smoking in bars and a fully public health system. University professors and civil servants can support the Conservatives just as readily as the Liberals or the NDP. Political advocacy organizations have had executives made up of Liberals, NDPers, Red Tories and Blue Tories who work together for a common goal. Municipal candidates who are card-carrying members of the federal Conservative party have been supported by lifelong Liberals and NDPers who admire the candidate's competency. In all these cases, they respect one another's beliefs and don't hold the other person's political beliefs against them.

A new progressive narrative, one that speaks up strongly for itself but that avoids the stereotyping and demonization so common in Canadian politics these days, can make an invaluable contribution to building the new dialogue that is needed and in trying to build common ground among Canadians. It's important to remember that many people vote for their chosen parties simply because they feel these parties are best suited to managing the country. People who vote Conservative can and frequently do show compassion for the poor and care for the environment, while people who vote Liberal, NDP or Green can and frequently do put in long hours of hard work and show entrepreneurial spirit.

Stereotyping people based on the parties they support doesn't contribute at all to establishing any kind of a positive dialogue, and in many respects these stereotypes aren't even true to begin with. From everything I've seen, those ordinary, hardworking Canadians who stop at Tim Horton's for a coffee on their way to work or get up early on Saturday morning to take their children to hockey practice are just as inclined to vote Liberal, Conservative, NDP or Green depending on their individual beliefs. Indeed, a 2010 study by the Globe and Mail specifically found that drinking Tim Horton's coffee doesn't necessarily make you a Liberal, an NDPer or a Conservative-it simply makes you a Canadian.

Helping us to remember this is the greatest service a new progressive narrative could do for Canada and for all Canadians, whatever their political views.

Sources Cited:

Mel Hurtig, The Vanishing Country: Is It Too Late To Save Canada? Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2002. Page 112.

John Ralston Saul, A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada. Toronto, Ontario: Viking Canada, 2008. Page 215.

Friday night

2012-04-14T00:00:00Z

Vietnam Vet with a cardboard sign
Sitting there by the left turn line
Flag on the wheelchair flapping in the breeze
One leg missing, both hands free
No one's paying much mind to him
The V.A. budget's stretched so thin
And there's more comin' home from the Mideast war
We can't make it here anymore

This is James McMurtry with We Can't Make It Here.

I had never heard of John Fullbright until yesterday when I happened across this and was intrigued by the title: Satan and St. Paul.

This is River Take Me by Darrell Scott and I think it's really quite extraordinary. Have a good weekend.