Holy crap!

From the twitter stream of the White House Underground:

Blood on her hands

The day before a massacre at a Quebec Mosque Kellie Leitch attacked a motion opposing Islamophobia as 'special privileges'.

Presumably that includes the special privilege to sit at prayer without being shot...

Re-writing History only weeks later

Tom Mulcair says he's staying on as NDP leader but it may not be up to him.

There's a concerted attempt to peg the beginning of the NDPs decline in fortunes to the eruption of the Niqab controversy because that's an honorable and incontestable reason for losing, but our numbers started dropping before it erupted and the Liberals held the same position and manifestly did not suffer because of it.

The real turning point began with the absurd 'No deficits' promise when it became clear the NDP was running to the economic right of the Liberals and allowing them to become the real change alternative. I absolutely REFUSE to let that history be elided as the attempt to do so is clearly intended to short-circuit the necessary debate about the NDPs baffling, economically and politically suicidal lurch to the right.

We arrived at the moment where Canadians finally came to us - and didn't find us where they were looking for us.

Learning from Failed Strategies

Newscaster: And we'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere. And to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys. - The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Conservatives engaged in a despicable, pandering campaign of dog-whistle xenophobia specifically against Muslims.  This despite the PQ campaign that tried to do the same thing last year resulting in electoral annihilation.

The NDP decided to run a safe, nonthreatening, centrist campaign where the party completely accepted the neoliberal consensus of austerity and deficit hysteria - this despite the fact Canadian voters were aching for change and that a similar campaign to the right of the liberals by the NDP in Ontario last year was a disaster costing the party multiple seats.

The NDP campaign of 2015 was brilliant... when Tony Blair ran it in 1997.

The NDP ran a campaign on the assumption that voters have completely internalized the conservative framing on spending, austerity, deficits and the whole downward trajectory in public spending of the last several decades and will punish anyone who deviates from it.

But the NDP promised balance budgets and lost more than half their seats, the Liberals promised multiple deficits to finance reinvestment in Canada's infrastructure and won a landslide.

Times have changed.

But political strategists like generals are always fighting the last war.

The Politics of Hate are the Politics of Losers

Canada has now seen two major political campaigns that made pandering to xenophobia and racism cornerstones of their strategy.

The shameful PQ campaign last year that saw them utterly annihilated and now the Conservative campaign of 2015 a hateful, despicable campaign of incitement and willful shredding of the social fabric - which as I type this is seeing them swept from power.

By now even the most cynical of political psychopath must now calculate that pandering to Canadians worst instincts is a failing political strategy.

Also shameful, disgraceful and unforgivable.

If you vote Conservative you are condoning and supporting THIS

Insiders say PMO actively discouraged the department from accepting applications from Shia and Sunni Muslims.

This is from CTV News, hardly known for a traditional hostility to conservatism or this government.

Sources tell CTV News that a temporary halt to the processing of some Syrian refugees was ordered earlier this year to make sure the types favoured by the Prime Minister’s Office were being prioritized.

Department of Citizenship and Immigration insiders told CTV’s Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife that PMO staff went through the files to ensure that persecuted religious minorities with established communities already in Canada -- ones that Conservative Leader Stephen Harper could court for votes -- were being accepted. Insiders say PMO actively discouraged the department from accepting applications from Shia and Sunni Muslims.

 Roll that around in your mind a little.  Really let that sink in that the Prime Minister of Canada in 2015 actively, deliberately sabotaged the rescue of desperate people of a different faith in order to favour his own coreligionists and to benefit politically.

This is monstrous. And if you can still vote for the government responsible for this and for unforgivable pandering incitement against Muslims that has resulted in multiple vicious assaults across Canada as the hateful take their cue from official bigotry you are a monster too.

Astonishing, Infuriating and ultimately terrifying.

The Tyee's comprehensive document of indictment against the Conservative government is something every Canadian should read to be reminded in the aggregate of the many crimes and misdemenors of this corrupt and dangerous government.

Stephen Harper and his Conservatives have racked up dozens of serious abuses of power since forming government in 2006. From scams to smears, monkey-wrenching opponents to intimidating public servants like an Orwellian gorilla, some offences are criminal, others just offend human decency.

This is more Nixonian than Nixon, more Dick Cheney style malevolence than even the savage former Vice President would have ever dared to indulge himself in.  Stephen Harper makes Vladimer Putin look like a cuddly devotee to the rule of law.

Stephen Harper's government is an ongoing, organized criminal enterprise.

The Quintessential Conservative MP

Acting with principle makes the difference

Desperate, poll driven policy designed to triangulate with ruthless electoral precision and avoid giving the government something to attack them with has driven the Liberal Party down to third party status.

Firmly and conscientiously opposing the Government's hop, skip and a jump from a police state overplay with C-51 was viewed as a catastrophic mistake by the NDP.  Commentators confidently predicted that Thomas Mulcair had misread the public mood after the attack on parliament and this would be where the Liberals, more in tune with the electorate would pull away into firm second place and Harper, most in tune of all, into the lead.

Instead, despite the great effort of the media to create that narrative, the Canadian public recoiled in disgust from the savage, ideological Conservatives and also the blatant, amoral schemers the Liberals openly pronounced themselves to be.

"“I do not want this government making political hay out of an issue … or trying to, out of an issue as important as security for Canadians,This conversation might be different if we weren’t months from an election campaign, but we are,” - Justin Trudeau

And so the rights and freedoms of Canadians are knowingly and openly sacrificed to protect the Liberal Party of Canada's standing in the polls.  This has always been the Liberal Party's MO, Trudeau's just the first leader stupid enough to admit it openly. 

Meanwhile the NDP stood on principle and staked out a position that was deeply unpopular in the polls, and benefit now from being there waiting when the Canadian public reached the same conclusion.

That's called leadership, its something voters remember in the polling booth.

“

The Shock Doctrine doesn't work if you wait until the shock has worn off

The 33% who say terrorism is the most important issue facing Canada are the bottom floor hardcore Conservative base plus a handful of weird neo-con Liberals.

C51 preaches exclusively to the choir.  As the details become more widely known even soft Tory swing voters are coming to hate it.  The Conservatives made the classic error that always trips up right wingers, of assuming everyone else will see and respond to events the way they do through what they assume is universal but is in fact an exclusively conservative lens. 

They thought they had one of Naomi Klein's shock treatment moments after a mentally ill man attacked parliament.  He was a drug addled paranoid who just as easily could have been commiting mayhem in the name of fighting alien invaders as jihad.

The Conservatives assumed their visceral response to the event would be shared by all Canadians and maybe it was... For a month or so.  The frustratingly long time line of pushing legislation through parliament even for a majority came up against the rebounding natural skepticism of Canadians who watched aghast as George Bush engaged in similar legislative fuckery after 9/11.

We may be watching what political historians will someday call one of the greatest political miscalculations in Canadian history.

The magic number is 40%

#NDP #ABNDP
 Any single party that can get 40% of the electorate behind them wins. Federally or provincially. And the test isn't just that they can, its that no other party can. 

This is why, sad and horrifying as the prospect is, that the Conservatives have an excellent chance of winning the next federal election.  It's also why the Alberta NDP have an excellent chance of being reelected in four years and starting a new Alberta dynasty.

A three way tie means the Conservatives probably win federally.  Of the two progressive parties the NDP have a better chance of solidifying the progressive vote than the Liberals but very probably neither has the time to do it before October, The progressive split will probably continue and if it does, Harper wins.  I will be delighted to be proven wrong but I'm afraid I'm probably right.

In Alberta, frustrated right wingers like to harp on the fact that 60% of Albertans didn't vote for the NDP.  But of course the point is that no other single party could come close to that 40% the NDP won.  

'Ah ha!' They say, but its only because the right wing is divided between the Wild Rose and the PCs.'  Of course this is based on the highly questionable conclusion that Wild Rose and PC voters are generic right wingers who could end up following one party and this is of course nonsense.  The real vitriol and bile in the recent Alberta election was that between PCs and Wild Rose.  They are NOT interchangeable voters.  The many reluctant progressives who supported the PCs to keep out the Wild Rose will throw their support to the NDP or the Liberals or the Alberta Party.  That's assuming the PCs don't keep staggering on, and if they do they certainly won't win back the Wild Rose voters.

The electoral math favours the NDP, and so does the cyclical nature of petroleum prices.  The NDP will probably be going into the next election on the heels of a boom, and voters reward governments lucky enough to match the boom bust cycle to the electoral cycle. That's at least part of why Prentice called the early election that was his downfall.

The Alberta right wing split and renewed boom should be enough to get the ANDP another 40% at least next time, and that's all any government needs barring bringing in proportional representation.

In Character

Honestly anyone surprised by Danielle Smith's craven rat paddle away from the sinking Wildrose ship just hasn't been paying attention. When she couldn't control the Calgary school board with the the sheer self evident perfection of her Fraser institute indoctrinated ideology she blew it up in a display of juvenile mean girl behaviour that has typified her career. 

When it became clear that her deeply held passionate conviction that global warming was just a nasty fraud perpetrated by the 99% of scientists who belive in it meant a permanent exile in the electoral wasteland she abandoned it - publicly at least - with barely a moments delay. When it became obvious that good, moral gay hate clutched close to the withered hearts of her bigoted supporters had inexplicably become a barrier to her ambition she suddenly began pretending to be a lifelong defender of diversity and proud friend of Dorothy.

She's one of Canadian politic's most calculating, chameleon like, weather vanes to ever leave principle lying in a pool of its own roadkill blood as she tools down the highway to the bright future of power in devoted service to the elite.

Don't these mewling whiners understand her needs are what really matter?

Living well is the best revenge.

Lets respond to this attack on Canada by being as Canadian as we can just as hard as we can.

By being decent, and courteous, and concerned about each other and committed to peace and justice and shared struggle.

Lets respond by reaffirming our beliefs in free expression and free assembly, in inclusiveness and welcome. Lets respond to a provocation that HAS THE EXPLICIT GOAL of making us over-react, to behave the way our enemies want us to and expect us to, by not falling for such a blatant scheme and playing into the hands of our enemy.

Lets remember our enemy isn't Muslim, or Arabic, or the newcomer or the dispossessed. Our enemy is injustice and want and abandonment, the sources and breeding grounds for the fanaticism and hate that can be found speaking any language, believing any creed and in any colour

Fear is the only real enemy.

The last time someone as paranoid and vindictive as Stephen Harper was thwarted...

The one entity, one independent power that has stymied Stephen Harper again and again, contradicted his agenda, limited his options and overturned his decisions MULTIPLE TIMES in just the last few months has been the Supreme Court of Canada.

Does Stephen Harper strike anyone as someone who responds well to independent oversight or any restrictions on the exercise of his power?  Can we really count on Harper placidly accepting such an infuriating limitation on his exercise of power - clearly his number one constant priority?

There is a precedent, for a similar powerful, suspicious, paranoid and dictatorial leader being challenged by the judicial branch and lashing out violently in defiance of constitutional norms.  Should Canadians be watchful for our own high court equivalent of the Saturday Night Massacre?

Anti-TFW But Pro-Immigration

It's important I think, in the mounting fervor against the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to remember that the workers in it are not the enemy.  These are people who are following the rules they were given in an effort to improve their families lives.  They have travelled thousands of miles to work hard and live frugally so they can send money home or save it up to someday bring their own families here.

It's all part of the same immigrant tradition as the family histories of most Canadians. 

I don't object in the slightest to competing for jobs against fellow citizens; workers who aren't afraid to stand up for themselves or change jobs or organize.  But migrant workers too afraid of being deported to do any of those things?  Workers who will put up with any abuse, tolerate any working conditions, be unwilling to even take sick days all because they are afraid of failing their families by being sent home?

Creating a class of workers that vulnerable and desperate and exploitable is bad for everybody.

Canada needs more people.  All the boomers will retire in waves and to afford the social safety net we want Canada will need more taxpayers than we will create with births alone.  We should increase immigration and make it faster and easier.

What we shouldn't do is create a permanently exploitable underclass.

They are incapable of Governing

At what point does the fact that the Conservative government is just not competent enough at the process of government to produce laws that don't violate our guaranteed Charter rights and are therefore stuck down by the courts constitute political malpractice?

Are they just deliberately batting foul balls to have something to shout about judicial activism to their mouth breathing base over?

The Conservative government’s tough-on-crime agenda has suffered another major blow at the Supreme Court of Canada. The court blocked the government’s attempt to stop judges from routinely giving extra credit to offenders for time served in jail before sentencing.
The 7-0 ruling continues the losing streak of the Harper government in major cases at the Supreme Court over the past month.

The unanimous ruling is even written by one of Harper's own appointees! They were repeatedly warned this would happen and deliberately pissed away MILLIONS of taxpayer dollars to pass a law that anyone with even a child's understanding of the charter and existing sentencing law could and did tell them would be overturned by the courts. This is incompetence and wastefulness on a truly breathtaking scale.

Frankly it disqualifies them for governance.

The next time the Sun or one of their odious commentators attacks someone else's patriotism...

Lets just stop and enjoy the irony for the moment, of the owner of the rabidly right wing, aggressively 'patriotic' Sun newspaper chain and the even nuttier far right Sun TV network being a Separatist candidate in Quebec with the avowed goal of breaking up Canada.

Nice Day for it

When Conservatives get in trouble due to their scummy worst instincts, whether it be covering up the deaths of scores of foster children in Alberta or being caught being pigs in the trough in the Senate they look for an enemy to burn at the stake or hang from the tallest tree to distract their nutter base.

The Auto-da-fé target du jour both provincially and federally is working Canadians who commit the horrific sin of banding together to defend and promote their interests, those evil thugs who believe employers owe their employees the opportunity to have a decent middle class lifestyle. The barking mad Conservative base is never happier than when someone half-baked libertarianism and sheer seething hatred for anyone who thinks differently than they do is getting it in the neck and the politician's corporate honchos are happy with the ongoing plan to turn Canada into a low wage economy in a mad race to the bottom with the slave labour economies of the developing world.

Middle Class Canadians watch their middle class lifestyles recede in the rear view mirror but maybe enough will say 'fuck you Jack, at least I've got MINE' to give the Conservatives another one of those razor thin margins of 30% or 35% of the population they laughingly refer to as a mandate.

"Oh well its a nice day for it, bring the kiddies - Oooh look at his feet kick!"

$90,000

It appears to be the magic right wing scandal number right now.  It's the amount Stepen Harper's chief of staff surreptitiously paid to a sitting Senator in order to stonewall an embarrassing audit.

And now its the amount the Alberta Wildrose Party has been charged by the CRTC for unsolicited and deceptive robo-calls during the the last provincial election.  Good luck finding out about it from Alberta's right wing cheer-leaders pretending to be unbiased media. Only Global Media tersely reports the story but declines to report the nature of the calls.

I received one of the calls personally and immediately recognized it as a Wildrose push-poll.

There were lots of questions like "If you knew that PC leader Allison Redford supported the Liberal daycare plan of Paul Martin and opposed Stephen Harper's parental credit alternative and hired a campaign manager who didn't pay his debts would you be more or less likely to support her?"

The call didn't identify itself as being from the Wildrose Party, didn't identify itself as campaign material, in fact deliberately presented itself as a poll with the implication of impartial information gathering and was a deliberate, sleazy attempt to damage Allison Redford by implying, horrors, that she was a squishy liberal.

Global's story twists itself into knots to avoid mentioning any of this.

$90,000.  A number that now represents the venality, arrogance and media granted impunity of Canada's political right.

The leeches at the top bleeding us dry

So private interests take over gigantic communications infrastructures built by the sweat and millions of the Canadian public for pennies on the dollar.  They then reduce quality of service to the bare minimum they can get away with, eliminate thousands of well paying jobs reducing the anemic Canadian middle class even further while exporting those jobs out of Canada to third world sweat shops and taking away all the rights and job security of those few employees left that they can. 

For this their soulless, piggy eyed CEO is feted as a corporate genius and paid 11 million a year.

Welcome to Canada.

Not just Un-Canadian. Inhumanly vicious and depraved

The pathologically sadistic and demented Harper government has now gone so far they managed to shock the conscience of Saskatchwan's right wing Premier Brad Wall.  Or maybe he just realized it would appall his constituents.

Premier Wall called Ottawa’s decision to deny chemotherapy to a refugee in Saskatoon "un-Canadian.” Now, the Province of Saskatchewan is stepping up to the plate.
The province will pick up the tab for chemotherapy for a man seeking asylum in Saskatoon. The man says he fled Pakistan when he was persecuted for his Christian faith.
Shortly after arriving however, he was diagnosed with cancer, and the federal government refused to pay for treatment.

Ottawa quietly introduced changes in the spring to the Federal Health Program, which cut drug, dental and vision care for refugee claimants.  These cuts were highlighted in a recent mail out by Saskatoon area MP Kelly Block. The mail outs triggered protests, saying the language was inappropriate and offensive.

The  display of small minded, xenophobic demagoguery by MP Kelly referred to was this:

Block lets her constituents know that she is working hard for them and "ending unfair benefits for refugee claimants." The mail-out goes on to say, "new arrivals to Canada have received dental and vision care paid for by your tax dollars. Not anymore."

The pamphlet then asks constituents to answer a questionnaire that provides two options. A respondent can agree either with the statement, "I agree with Kelly Block. Newcomers don't deserve more benefits than Canadians," or, "I disagree. Refugee claimants should get dental, vision and phar-macare even if I don't."

To say that the MP's mail-out to constituents is misleading is an understatement.

Actually, if you are a government-sponsored refugee, health benefits such as vision and dental care continue. But if you are a refugee sponsored by a church group, those benefits ended as of June 1. We now have two different classes of refugees in Canada as a result of the federal government's rule changes.

Block's reference to "newcomers" leaves the impression she is talking about all immigrants. For the record, most immigrants who land in Canada - particularly if they come under the immigrant nominee program - never have had dental, vision care or pharma-care benefits. In the past, all refugees did.

Unseating Stephen Harper and his merry band of repugnant toadies is now a moral necessity in order to save the soul of this country.