Harp Of Darkness

When it comes to secrecy and one-man rule, Canada may never have had a prime minister who more closely resembled “Uncle Joe” Stalin himself than Stephen Harper.

Appointing political commisars in the PMO to block public access to information from Canadian scientists or our Defence Department so that the only “truth” we will hear is precisely the message Uncle Joe wants us to hear is despicably un-Canadian. It’s not just shaping the message, petty spinning, it’s outright information control through information denial.

Now let me get this straight. Our soldiers are giving life and limb in a noble quest to bring democracy to Afghanistan while this _________ (fill in the blank) throws a hood over its head at home?

These Gag Orders effectively set up our armed and our civil services against the people in order to serve not the country but, rather, the will of a decidedly undemocratic leader. It is an abuse of power, an act of political corruption, a subversion of democracy.

Now Uncle Joe’s latest despotic gambit has been revealed. It came in the form of a Friday motion to the Federal Court of Canada seeking to suppress scheduled hearings into whether Canada turned prisoners over to Afghan authorities knowing they would probably be tortured.

In March the head of the Military Police Complaints Commission announced public hearings would be held because the government had stonewalled MPCC investigators despite their top-secret security clearances.

Now that the MPCC has been forced to go public, and only now, the government has seen fit to challenge its jurisdiction. That seems more than a little self-serving and duplicitous coming from the same government and the same ministers who pledged to co-operate fully with the commission back when the inquiry was launched.

The latest stunt demonstrates that it’s not Stephen Harper’s secret agenda that we need fear the most but his secret government. If this is the way Harper treats Canadians while he’s leads a minority government, imagine what he would do to us should we be foolish enough to hand him a majority?

 

Mission Creep, Harpo Style

Prime Minister “Mission Creep” Harper is already speculating on keeping Canadian troops in Kandahar beyond the 2011 extension – if we’re misfortunate enough to keep Lardo in office that long. From CanWest:

“We’ll cross some of those bridges if and when we come to them. We’ve not suggested we abandon Afghanistan at a point in time.” Harper said Canada’s diplomatic and development efforts would continue in Afghanistan for many years to come.

“I will assume from their failure to actually ask me that question directly that what they understand is that Canada is saying that we will be out of Afghanistan in 2011 militarily,” Harper said.

But he did not rule out being asked “for some kind of extension or some kind of other re-engagement” later on.

“I think they understand that we’re serious. We’re serious about not just staying, but also leaving,” he explained.

“When I say leaving, I mean accomplishing our objective, which is training the Afghan forces so they can take principal responsibility for their own security in Kandahar.”

C’mon Steve. 2011 makes a full decade in Afghanistan. If the US and ISAF can’t train enough soldiers to defend the rot that passes for a government in Kabul by then, we never will. That’s the problem with having no clearly defined targets. Ideologues like Cheney and Harper use the uncertainty to just keep moving the goal posts until all sense of mission is blurred to the point of irrelevance. These clowns just don’t understand that war isn’t supposed to be turned into a pastime.

 

Rick Mercer on Harper/Cadman

Here it is, Kids. This one is definitely worth the price of admission.

 

And He Was Expecting – What?

Retired Justice John Gomery showed up before a Commons committee today to whine that Harpo has completely ignored his report on restoring government accountability issued in the wake of his enquiry into the sponsorship scandal.

At the time, when Gomery was doing everything possible to help Harpo into power, our Furious Leader rubbed his back, patted his judicial bum and assured Gomery that he, Harpo, would clean house once he got the reins of power.

SURPRISE! Just kidding. C’mon you really didn’t believe that nonsense, did you? Did you? Accountability? Ha, in a pig’s eye!

From the Toronto Star:

“I am disappointed. I find it hard to swallow,” he told the Commons government operations committee, which is reviewing the Conservative’s handling of his report.

“I gave them two years, I thought it would give them the time to do something.”

Well, best you learn how to swallow harder, Johnny. You were had. The Canadian people were had.

Gomery told his undoubtedly rapt audience that the growing, centralized power in Harpo’s PMO is a “danger to Canadian democracy” and paves the way to political interference in public administration.

But what’s wrong with Rule by Political Commissars? You know, those faceless insiders who keep the gags firmly on outfits like the Department of National Defence and Environment Canada, Harpo’s aides who keep the curtains so tightly drawn lest the Canadian people get a glimpse of what the inside really looks like.

Gee, John, does this mean no more congratulatory photo ops with Stephen Harper? I’ll bet you feel like a real tool now, don’t ya? That’s because you were a tool and a very handy one at the time.

 

Enough Is Enough, Except When It’s Not

Harpo EnviroMin John Baird is a huckster, a dabbler in the Dark Arts, a master of sleight-of-hand. Well, maybe not exactly a master because he and SHarper have tried to con us twice and it hasn’t worked but you have to give him full points for trying.

That’s why Bairdo is now talking tough on the Athabasca Tar Sands, or at least future projects which, he promises, will have to achieve unattainable targets using nonexistant technologies that we’ve been told for a decade are just around the corner. Our Furious Leader’s 800-pound gorilla (and he really does look like one) beats his chest, bares his fangs in anguished roars and flings dung about his cage proclaiming loudly that they’ll do better next time or, if not, then the time after that, or the one after that, or sooner or later or eventually, maybe.

It’s all show. Really, it’s all for worrywart voters. “Look mom”, he proclaims, reaching deep into his diapers, “look what I’ve made for you!” Sorry for all the scatalogical references but it’s a preposterously scatalogical plan.

It’s designed to showcase initiatives; bright, shiny, sparkling distractions; not to achieve a meaningful reduction in our nation’s GHG emissions. If he wanted to do what really matters, Baird would be showcasing something other than fanciful ideas – he’d be defining limits, hard caps on greenhouse gas emissions.

Why are the Tories so afraid of greenhouse gas emission caps? It’s obvious when you think about it. It’s because it would mean carbon rationing, allocation of a national, total maximum permissible carbon emission quota, and how else can you carve up something you’ve rationed except on a per capita basis? Why should a guy from Ontario be limited to X-tonnes of GHG emissions when a guy from Alberta gets 4X? If we’re all going to have to sacrifice, shouldn’t we all bear the same sacrifice? Of course we should, it’s the quintessential Canadian way, rien?

You see, once you set hard caps, emissions = money and potentially big money. Alberta doesn’t want to share its good fortune, it’s petro-wealth, but it sure wants you to share it’s petro-dirt. Whatever limits are set, it wants your province not it’s own to bear the disproportionate burden, to carry the environmental cost of its wildly lucrative Tar Sands.

Worse yet, is what the idea of carbon rationing on an equitable, per capita rationale would or could lead to. Why, if we entertained such revolutionary thinking at home, how would we begin to refute the Chinese and the Indian claims for similar, per capita quotas? What might begin in Athabasca could wind up undoing the entire New World Order.

That’s why Bairdo is cavorting about promising to “do better” because what’s he really trying to do is to keep the same shell game going for just as long as he and our Furious Leader can get away with it.

I hope I’ve given you something to think about, a fresh way of looking at exactly what lies behind the Tories environmental scheming. Harpo, Bairdo and the rest of them are cheap shills for Big Oil and the sooner we see that plain reality, the sooner we’ll find a way of dealing with this problem.

 

Your Morning Laugh

The best line of the day has to be this one from Chantal Hebert in the Toronto Star writing about Harper’s blundering PMO:

One can only run a federal government on the

wits of apprentice sorcerers for so long.

As Hebert writes, first it was Sandra Buckler getting caught out claiming DND had kept Harper in the dark when it stopped transferring detainees in Afghanistan.

Next up was press secretary Dimitri Soudas getting mixed up in a dispute between DPW and a certain “politically active” Montreal landlord.

Now it’s chief of staff Ian Brodie and the leak of embarrassing revelations about Obama’s and Clinton’s real positions on NAFTA.

Yes, yes, yes. Top that off with a slathering of Brian Mulroney and a heaping helping of the Chuck Cadman affair and SHarper seems to be getting in deeper every day.

Maybe, though, we ought to be grateful for all these scandals. With an opposition in disarray these embarrassments are probably going a long way to keep Harper out of majority territory.

Still, “apprentice sorcerers.” that is a good one.

 

Clemency Sought for Kohail

Canada is going to bat for Mohamed Kohail, the young Canadian kid who faces beheading in Saudi Arabia.

Apparently Harpo has decided that his new policy on clemency interventions applies in this case. What that means is that Canada goes to Riyadh having concluded that their justice system stinks because, if it was a fair trial, we wouldn’t intervene.

Now I’ve come to you asking for a favour for a condemned criminal because your justice system sucks. That’s the double bind to Harpo’s policy. When you ask for consideration you effectively tell the only guy who can give it that you think he’s a shit. That might not always sit well, don’t you think?

 

Jodi’s Right

Dona Cadman looks a bit spinny at the moment, vouchsafing for the prospective boss on the strength of having looked into his eyes, but no matter.

There’s endless debate over what happened and whether it was illegal and whether some Libs defamed Harpo by claiming he was in on it, but no matter.

What does matter is this. Jodi Cadman said it herself, it was an “indecent proposal.” It was a truly indecent, utterly sleazy act to try to take advantage of a man just weeks away from death, a man about to leave a wife and child to an uncertain future.

It was indecent and, by his own admission, Harper knew of this indecency and did nothing to stop it when he could have. Harper was content to sit back and let his henchmen try to take advantage of a man’s vulnerabilities and weaknesses in a moment of enormous peril.

Stephen Harper might not be a criminal but he’s shown, beyond the slightest doubt, that he is a vile, loathesome creature utterly devoid of any shred of integrity or even decency. He’s a moral reprobate, a huckster. He’s a power-grabber, sneak thief and a theoconservative mandrake. Canada can do well without him and his kind.

(p.s. the “mandrake” reference – Mandrake is a powerful herb of the Nightshade family used for its anaesthetic and supposedly magical qualities. Closely related to the deadly Belladonna, Mandrake (like Harper) can cause hallucinations and delerium if ingested. According to folklore, the humanoid Mandrake root screams when it is pulled from the earth, and the human who hears it will go deaf, become insane, or in more extreme versions of the legend, drop dead)

 

What is Flaherty Playing At?

Sitting out here on Vancouver Island, I view Ottawa/Ontario politics with a degree of puzzlement. It’s more than a degree, I just don’t get it.

Now, as I understand it, Harpo’s FinMin, Flaherty, is a recycled dud from the former Ontario government of Mike Harris, the outfit that surprised the good people of that province with a parting gift in the form of a $5-billion deficit.

There are certain things we all know. Globalization hasn’t been good for North American manufacturing sector, this we know. Stephen Harper really gets off on playing Rovian wedge politics, this we know. Harpo can’t stand Liberals, federally or provincially or even those who just show up at voting stations, this we know. SHarper’s minions, that is to say his cabinet ministers, don’t wipe their backsides without Steve’s say so, this we know. Furious Leader has two eyes; one he uses to scan the country in search of carrion, the other he keeps focused on his home province and future energy superpower, Alberta, this we know.

So why is Harper using his trained chimp, Flaherty, to pick a fight with Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty? Is it because Harpo has been too busy defunding the federal government just as McGuinty has come, Oliver Twist style, asking for another bowl of gruel? Is that what this is all about? Does Harpo want to make Ontario voters believe their province’s economic woes are their Liberal government’s fault? What is it?

Now you know that a guy with a name like McGuinty who resembles nothing so much as a reincarnation of Ichabod Crane, doesn’t come to power unless the outgoing bunch really screwed the pooch somewhere. The voters have to be some peed off to do that. Flaherty was, of course, a player in that reviled government so why, of all people, is Harpo using him to wage war on Ontario?

Sorry, I don’t have any answers. Please enlighten me.

 

Cadman Day II – It Only Gets Worse

It was one thing for the Harpies to maintain, even without having the guts to come out and say it, that Chuck Cadman’s widow, Dona, was wrong about her claim that her husband was offered a million-dollar insurance policy bribe to vote against the Martin government. Now Chuck’s daughter has confirmed her mother’s account.

From the Toronto Star:

“Independent MP Chuck Cadman confided on his deathbed to his daughter days after the 2005 budget vote that he had been offered an insurance policy for a million dollars by the Conservatives.
Jodi Cadman said this morning she burst into tears when her father revealed that news to her.

“My first reaction was I was hurt, very hurt and I started crying,” she said in an interview. “If there was an Achilles heel for him, it was complete selflessness. It would have benefited myself and my mom.”

That despicable, greasy, lying pr__k of a prime minister isn’t going to talk his way out of this one. The author of the Cadman bio has a tape of Harper making it clear he knew the offer was going to be made and did nothing to stop it. He claims he told them not to bother because Cadman wouldn’t accept but he didn’t order them not to do it.

You can listen to the tape itself, Harper’s own admissions, here:

http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/308224