They didn't have their papers so they weren't allowed to travel from their Bantustan

A Manitoba MP is crying discrimination after two aboriginal women were not allowed to board a plane with her, even though they had tickets.

Niki Ashton, who represents the Churchill riding for the NDP, said Gail and Joyce Nepinak were scheduled to fly to Ottawa from Winnipeg with her on Sunday evening.

The Nepinaks had been invited by the House of Commons to speak at the special committee on missing and murdered indigenous women on Monday.
It is the first time the committee will hear from families.

Gail and Joyce don't have driver's licences or any other government-issued ID, which is required by airlines for passengers to board.

 Air Canada would not accept the Nepinaks' health cards, bank cards, their electronic boarding passes, a House of Commons invitation, or even Ashton vouching for them.

I have flown with less ID than the Nepinaks carry.  I don't drive so I don't have a driver's license, but I have flown multiple times since 9/11 with no problem whatsoever.  The rules seem to be different depending on some unknown  *cough* racism *cough* factor.

This is what our country is now, this is what Canada has become, and we are letting it happen.

Judicial Kabuki

As anyone and everyone could have predicted, the Alberta Tories attempt to legislate George Orwell's most feverish nightmares into existence will be challenged in the courts.

And the Government knows that when the laws have finally wended their way through the court's system they will be struck down.  Not maybe.  Not probably.

Inevitably.

They know this and are transparently counting on the years-long time line of public workers and all Albertans having their freedom of speech expunged getting to a judicial remedy to allow them to distract from covering up foster-care deaths in the short term and shaft public workers in the medium term.

It is a blatantly, disgustingly cynical and irrefutably deliberate abuse of the system.

It's also directly out of the the long sordid history of past right wing legal Kabuki, laws to allow licensed marriage commissioners and pharmacists engage in religious discrimination in their government licensed roles.  Who cares if they will eventually be overturned and how much the legal costs will be if they give the radical base a tingle up the pant leg when you need to throw them some meat?

You don't get to call yourself fiscally responsible or morally upright if you willingly waste millions of taxpayer dollars undermining human rights for as long as you can get away with it to promote your own party's partisan gain.

You don't even get to call yourself a 'human rights lawyer' anymore.

When a crazy stalker goes after someone who see's her coming

Poor Rachel.  I almost feel sorry for her only not really.

"Rachel Marsden – Come on down.

So a couple weeks back I get followed by one @RachelMarsden - I briefly glanced at her profile and saw she appeared to be a National Security and Political commentator so I followed back. She almost instantaneously began to make aggressive sexual advances to me in Twitter Direct Messages while also insisting she knew my true identity."

Anon-blogger/Hacktivist Jester goes on to exhaustively detail clumsy manipulation, narcissistic, genuinely creepy courtship rituals and an extended grand mal one-sided conversational melt down as Marsden slowly begins to realize she has been exposed, her oh so clever attempts at blackmail and sexual conquest have failed and she's being ignored.



But she is For hundreds of increasingly deranged and threatening messages. 

If this wasn't someone with a long, unambiguous, documented history of glomming onto and then destroying men this would seem meaner than it does.  With Rachel Marsden, who followed through on her threat to attack him in print and reveal what she thought was his identity (Jester denies she found and exposed the real thing, judge for yourself, I'm agnostic.) it seems like a public, preemptive act of self defence.   Jester is no saint, basically this is the story of Rachel Marsden coming up against someone smarter than she is and even meaner.

How will she sustain her act now that anyone she sets her mind on getting and/or destroying can find all her moves with 30 seconds of googling?

Losing their religion

When even The Calgary Herald agrees that legislation has gone too far in attacking unions and free speech it means we are halfway to Orwell's 1984.

"The passing of Bills 45 and 46 on Wednesday night mark a dark chapter in Alberta history.

...

The contract the government wants to impose is zero per cent for the first two years and then one per cent in each of the next two years. The union and province reached an impasse and the union decided to wait for binding arbitration, where it believed its chances would be better. That right and historic arrangement has been shredded.
Even more disturbing however, is Bill 45. Under this bill, public sector workers, union leaders and even members of the general public can be fined thousands of dollars for just musing about or encouraging a strike. If this sounds Orwellian, it’s because it is.
The fundamental right to freedom of expression is being violated here and should concern all citizens who value our rights and freedoms.
This legislation will also impose $250,000 fines per day for any illegal strike and a $1-million fine per day that would go into a liability fund. Fines for illegal strikes are not unusual, though these ones are onerous.
Needless to say, making it illegal to just talk about striking is the kind of law one might expect in some banana republic or other oppressive totalitarian state.

...

That Premier Redford actually has the gall to claim that among unionized workers “there’s an appreciation for what we’re trying to do,” is laughable.
Nobody believes that and no one can believe that a so-called human rights lawyer would allow such an abomination to the most fundamental right of any free and democratic society — the right to speak and say things that the state might not agree with."

 And we must never forget that the other motive besides sticking it to public workers, is to distract Albertans from the scandal over covering up the deaths of scores of vulnerable, mostly aboriginal children in provincial foster care.  This government is so cartoonishly evil they should be twirling their moustaches as they tie children and workers to train rails!

Laws of Nature.

The sun will rise in the east. Winter will follow Autumn. Falling objects will obey the law of gravity. And Rob Anders will be a blithering, drooling, verbally incontinent half-wit.

It's comforting to know the world contains some certainties.

“I have previously provided my thoughts on Nelson Mandela.“I will let history be the judge.

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!"

Shhhh, don't actually talk about what he stood for!

I can certainly see why the political right wants to brand any comment about what Mandela really stood for and what he would have thought of the right wing politicians with kind but neutering words for his legacy now as 'inappropriate'. How convenient a blockade to any public commentary about what Mandela stood for in the context of today's policies. 

How helpful a taboo to block discussion of the long sordid history of the Canadian right wing and politicians alive and active today who defended Apartheid, demonized Mandela and the South African opposition and promote the kind of policies today that Mandela was imprisoned for opposing. To hell with your sensitivity to 'appropriateness'. Its just another con.

Alberta's Premier Alison Redford, in a breathtaking display of cynicism, opportunism and hypocrisy seeks now to wrap herself in Mandela's legacy, this just after she has savagely curtailed labour and free speech rights for Albertans with the despicable bills 45 and 46.  

Mandela was a proud and steadfast supporter of organized labour, free speech and the rights of workers.  Here's a speech in support of a General strike that today would get him arrested in the Orwellian new Alberta created by Alison Redford.

Stephen Harper joins nervous right wing politicians across the world offering anodyne and neutering compliments to Mandela the Statesman.  He certainly doesn't want to talk about Mandela the revolutionary, Mandela the freedom fighter - that would open the rancid can of worms that is the toxic history of Apartheid apologists in the Canadian right wing in general and Stephen Harper specifically.

They want to lull us into forgetting who and what they are.

Don't let them.

Double standards

New Conservative Party policy:

"Federal public service unions and those in federally-regulated industries should tell their members how much of their dues go to political donations, media organizations and other political activism. Union members should be allowed to “opt out” of the portion of their dues that go to such activities." 

Does that mean that corporations should also be required to reveal how much of their profits go to 'political donations, media organizations and other political activism' and their customers should be allowed to opt out of the percentage of the costs of their products that go to such activities?

In Celebration of Labour Day: Market Failure's Biggest Hits

What so many managerial class fiscal conservatives never seem to get, is that the health of the Labour Market affects the health of the Market in general - and even the health and well being of the people in it. 

EG: The people least likely to get paid sick days or be able to afford unpaid ones are the people who handle your food.  The impact in lost productivity is many times what paying service workers enough to be above the poverty line and provide sick days would cost.

EG: With the winding down of train service and the increasing price of gas for a huge chunk of the Canadian population a single company, Greyhound, is their sole and only way of traveling.  A Corporate Monopoly controls the travel of millions of Canadians visiting family, following work or fleeing disaster.  They have used this monopoly to let service quality slide to virtually Dickensian levels and threaten to withdraw service without extortionate payoffs from provincial governments. 

EG: A neighborhood acquires a reputation and a customer base because of its character, its unique and independent businesses providing goods and services people cant find elsewhere.  That success causes commercial rents to rise.  And to continue to rise until all the independent, character filled small businesses are forced out of the area and replaced with the soulless  big-box chains that can afford the rents.  The thing that added value to the neighborhood is killed in the process of squeezing every last penny out of that value..

Anybody else have any examples?

Kelly McParland resurrects a classic racist smear divorced from history and reality

"If the U.S. does go ahead with plans to intervene, it will be doing so despite overwhelming public weariness across the western world with problems in the Middle East and Arab countries, with limited support from other western governments, and with no real appetite from Americans themselves. The experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan, the ongoing crisis in Egypt, the apparent lack of any progress in a region addicted to violence, have all been effective in diluting the West’s innate sympathy for the people of the region.  How often can you try to help people who don’t seem to want it and respond largely with anger and even more violence?"

Ahistorical, racist nonsense that deliberately ignores how often the West has intentionally stamped out any stirrings of real democracy in the region.

The end of Inevitability?

We all know that helpless frustrating feeling.

We are allowed to debate all we want, the majority can express their view clearly and unambiguously objecting in the streets and the ballot box.

The the elites will do what they want anyway.  'Austerity economics are inevitable and unavoidable', throwing ourselves into the latest military quagmire is the only real option, the drug war will continue no matter how much the majority object. Lie back and enjoy it or shake your adorable little fists either way the 'grown ups' will make the real decisions.

But suddenly that aura of inevitability is wavering.  The UK parliament stuns observers by actually reflecting the will of the British people and deciding NOT to blindly sign on to raining death down on the Syrian people to object to the Syrian government possibly having rained death down on the Syrian people.  Harper and Mckay go back to the old filthy propaganda well to try to smear Trudeau as promoting drug use to children (won't SOMEONE think of the children?) but despite their smears the Liberal's popularity actually jumps as Canadians go, 'Yeah? So he's admitting publicly to what a huge percentage of Canadians do or have done privately? Good for him.'  In the US the drug war shows every sign of beginning to officially wind down as Obama's Justice Department signals it will not sabotage the will of individual states to stop treating Marijuana like Satan's leafy friend.

The discredited orthodoxy of austerity still dominates the discourse of mainstream politics worldwide, despite the will of the public but even there cracks are beginning to appear.

Could we finally be getting past the stale argument that there is no choice but what the elites tell us so we should just be grown ups and accept it?

Starvation Experiments

The story appeared yesterday and seems to have sunk beneath the surface with nary a ripple.

Beginning in 1942, and ending nobody seems to know when, Canadian government bureaucrats deliberately withheld food and nutritional supplements from native communities and native children to chart the progress of various kinds of malnutrition.

Some communities would get vitamins, others as the control groups would not.  Residency schools would get half their milk ration cut to observe the effect on the tiny bodies imprisoned within. Dental services would be deliberately withdrawn from groups of children to better see the progress of malnutrition related gum disease and tooth decay.  Adulterated food that could not be legally sold to white people would be provided to see its effects.

These horrific, Mengele reminiscent experiments with the hungry bodies of children weren't performed in Nazi death camps they were conducted in Canada only a few short decades ago.

Where is our outrage?

Underwater

Been a wet day here.

This is three blocks away from me.

I live in the downtown core of Calgary.  A relatively dry spot two blocks outside the evacuation zone.  I'm high and dry on the 26th floor of an apartment building but I'm not going anywhere.  We are completely surrounded by evac zones and all of the bridges in and out of downtown are closed.

On the plus side still have power and clean water and the river water appears to have crested.

 

New occupants of the courthouse jail-cells, evac'd from the zoo.

There's an eerie ghost town quality to the streets below.  I've lived in Calgary almost 25 years this is dramatically different in scope and severity to any flooding the city has experienced in the past (1994, 2005 - neither were anywhere close to as severe.)  the irony is inescapable: the major power center of the global warming industries of Canada is experiencing what is very likely the consequence of severe climate change.

And next week a political party more concerned with attacking trade unions than even acknowledging the existence of climate change is meeting here.

Class War at its most blatant

To the Tories this is win-win.  

Get a Judge venal enough to jump at a dangled Senate appointment and they get legislation designed to crush Canada's Labour movement past the courts.

 Get a Judge who actually respects Canada's constitution they get to rant about activist judges to their base when its over-turned.

Either way the Canadian people pay for the Conservative Party's ideological war with the concept of workers banding together to protect and promote their interests.

Critics of a controversial bill requiring unions to disclose in-depth financial details are calling on its supporters to produce a constitutional expert to testify the bill can pass legal muster — because they don’t believe that one exists. 

As Bill C-377 enters its second week of Senate committee hearings, several constitutional scholars are speaking out against the Conservative private member’s bill that would force labour organizations to disclose to the Canada Revenue Agency how they spend the dues they collect. 

Such experts — including the Canadian Bar Association and law professors who testified at last week’s Senate hearings — say it violates Charter guarantees to privacy and freedom of association, and encroaches on provincial jurisdiction.

Perspective

So Torontonians, the next time you are tempted to stereotype Calgarians as a bunch of redneck rubes, our Mayor is an urbane Muslim college teacher.

Your Mayor is Chris Farley with a crew-cut.

$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.

Don't insult us

The most rigid control freak running the most hierarchical top down PMO, controlling the most micro-managed government in Canadian history and we're supposed to believe Harper's chief of staff short-circuited Puffy's embarrassing audit with a thick wad of cash WITHOUT Harper's knowledge? Pull the other one.

The BC voter:

Wait, what?

Am I the only one weirded out by the reaction of Americans to the shooting of 19 people at the New Orleans Mother's Day Parade? 

"OhGodOhGodOhGod!!!....wait it's just drug and gang related? Whew! We were worried for a second..."

What?

"Public Sector unions are a blight on society"

 ...says convicted felon and well known douchebag.