2015 ELECTION #3: OUR VALUES

Vancouver, BC

24 March 2015

2015 Election #3

We are hearing now about ‘Our Values,’ as dictated by Mr Harper, the relationship of his version a distant place from any we are familiar with in the context of ‘Our’ or ‘Canadian.’

The prime minister is expounding in heroic terms about his care for our safety and the imminent need for his Bill C-51 which is now under fire across the country by the legal and academic communities as it clearly threatens our rights and freedoms. We are wary of a police state and suspicious of Harper's interpretation of ‘Our Values’ who governs with non-transparency and non-accountability by policy. The Security Certificate is one clear indication of this as 5 men are now incarcerated without charges, something completely alien to this country.

The direct effect of this is a spillover; we have lost confidence in all politicians and their ability to govern.

Canadian values are typically based on equality across the board, a system that provides the needs and one that governs for the good of all. This is the antithesis of Harper policies and the result is that two-thirds of the country feel there is no efficacy in voting and a good many of those who do vote use it to manipulate the election by nominating those most likely to win over Harper rather than perhaps voting for the party they would like to support.

So, we desperately need election reform from first-past-the-post to proportional representation so that all Canadians can be assured that their vote really went where it was meant to go.

Inequality is exacerbated as the general public is marginalized and a small group gets the lion’s share of our resources while the rest contribute mightily to their wealth and struggle to get by themselves. It harkens back to the middle ages and the English class system where the average worker was never be able to own a piece of land, never mind their own home. As real estate has soared out of sight in Canada, and is still unregulated, that is certainly the state of affairs here and now. Harper withholds massive funds from social services and opens the door to private enterprise to take over health, education, housing, the infrastructure all of which we will be paying for directly. Meanwhile, our taxes are going to big business in the billions, in the form of subsidies. So, what are we paying taxes for?

Canadian values have not changed despite the coercion of the prime minister and the wealthy. The country has never been so divided. The vast majority of us are democrats and do not support Harper’s fundamental modification of our relationship between state and society. Poverty and the deprivation to youth of a place in the country is giving them reason to go elsewhere to put down roots. And his defiance of science like a know-better teenager is just obnoxiously irritating. Our history of fairness, integrity, peace, wisdom and vision are nowhere to be found now and the rest of the world is well aware of the change keeping us out of the UN and indeed, marginalizing Harper on the world stage where he strives to be recognized.

Today, we are informed by Harper of his utterly absurd plan to expand his ISIS ‘mission’ for another year into Syria, and to expect Canadians to accept this bid to buy votes in 6 or 7 months. There is no evidence that ISIS is on our borders threatening to invade Canada and he has no license to enter Syria. A religious war in the Middle East in a culture so far removed from Harper's personal crusade of the religious-right that he has no understanding of it. Thrusting our soldiers into this quicksand at great expense to us and them is a ridiculous act of madness but, his desperation to win this election is driving him to use his massive power way over the top and it's clear the man has lost his grip on reality if, indeed, he ever had any. 

The prime minister will sometime leave politics having made sufficient changes to the point where we will not recognize the country, as he promised, and collect his rewards for his service to big business to handsomely support him and his estate. Entirely unrelated to our values, this is an old economic exercise traditionally practiced by pimps.

2015 ELECTION #2: SECURITY

VANCOUVER, BC

15 March 2015

2015 ELECTION #2

The sound of the campaign drum began when two demented souls shot two soldiers last fall and we heard about Harper’s keen interest in our safety for the first time. Security is overtaking the economy in his platform.

Like George Bush Jr and 11 September 2001, ‘a situation’ fell into Harper’s lap. The October 2014 murders of Canadian soldier in Ottawa and Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu by mentally ill young men trying to find a place in an unfortunate make-believe despotic bootcamp, was his pretext to taking an unwilling country to war. The heretofore vanilla Prime Minister talked excitedly of providing security with the statement: “The biggest job of government is to ensure the safety of its people.” He was planning retaliation and he was ensuring a return volley by ISIS or ISIL. Harper immediately put us in new and much more imminent danger from these young misfits.

Then he introduced the Expanded Surveillance Bill C-51. A juvenile response by a grown man who has a responsibility to make the right decisions on behalf of his people, not an open invitation to an extreme foreign culture with violent insurrection on its mind to anyone who crosses its sword. And Harper has done just that. We are now wide open to any other misguided groupie taking dictation from a religious fanatic utterly mad with power.

With this majority, there is little the opposition can do with a prime minister with the obstinacy and blind fervour of a bull in heat, and until a case reaches the Supreme Court—our effective opposition—the Bill will go swiftly through the warped process extant.

If mad with power is the threat from ISIS, then mad with power is also the threat from Harper as the megalomania that drives him now comes directly from the ease with which he has pushed omnibus bills through the House and into law, and that extends to Bill C-51. With it, the country is now not safe from itself. Completely uncontrolled, any constabulary collecting megadata can force their way into your personal affairs probably causing life changing events such as losing your job, your family, your home, purely by way of implication.

Think about it: one of the few liberal democracies left in the world literally having its constitutional rights and freedoms hanging in the balance. We have allowed a radically different politico to wrench us out of our entire history of stable, balanced governance for the good of all to the antithesis: for the good of a few and fear for the vast majority. We are now being governed by fear!

Like Bush et al, Harper can’t seem to learn, even from in-your-face experience, that violence begets violence.

For a government claiming the most and the best of everything in our history, the country is less secure than ever before in its history.

2015 ELECTION #1

VANCOUVER BC

1 MARCH 2015

RE: 2015 FEDERAL ELECTION

During the run-up to the coming federal election I will post blogs regularly to point up the consequences to Canada and Canadians of legislation passed into law by the Harper government since he took office in 2006. The list is long, the effect has changed and continues to alter and contradict our long established values of democratic and fair governance for the good all, the likes of which we haven’t seen for a generation, the worst of it in the last four years since Mr Harper has had complete control of the House of Commons and the Senate. I feel we have an urgent need for many blogs, to reach those who have a misunderstanding of Harper’s intention, and to encourage everyone to vote; it’s critically important that we get out the vote.

The economy is the Conservative platform intended to win the 2015 election and it is probably the most destructive instrument Harper has used to manipulate Canada to serve big business, to destroy our democracy and all that word stands for.

Harper has paid out $billions of taxpayers money to companies that need it the least while starving those that need it the most thus creating extreme inequality such that we haven’t experienced since colonization. At the same time he has encumbered the country with debt, deficit and the cost of its service alone of $ 29.3 billion 2013/14 or 11% of revenue.[1]

Misspent funds cover the gamut of unnecessary and phantom services for party promotion and opposition attacks in the form of million-dollar ads; frequent and uncalled for travel, and security for party members and family; the extravagance and waste of the G8/20 Summit; Corporate Social Responsibility Counsellor office $180,000. but no counsellor, no work; $376K to bring a prisoner back to Canada for trial; and the infamous $1.3 billion every year in subsidies to the Canadian oil industry while the country is told with regular monotony that we must tighten our belts for the good of the federal debt.

The galling loss of revenue to tax evaders, those who bear citizenship and are wealthy and surreptitious enough to seek closets to hide their wealth, to escape their obligation for their share of assessments leaving the least able to take up the slack for them, lies uncontested by Harper. The same citizens are the bearers of dead capital.

And the loss of jobs sent offshore with trade deals, little left but the top-heavy part-time, minimum wage, temporary employment that so many most resort to, has left over a million unemployed, 376,00 of those our young people,[2] 60% unable to collect employment insurance and their protection by unions threatened, students and all youth must leave to find a career and a future. They can see that the country is not better off now and will be so much worse in their lifetime with the Harper government.

All of this is not just allowed but encouraged, indeed advanced by the Harper ideology, which has created a country with rotting infrastructure, extreme inequality, ignorance of the severity of climate change, and the removal of funding for social services leaving it to the unregulated private sector to make obscene profits on education, health and housing, the basic needs and rights of Canadians.

I can’t leave this without adding the clear and frightening Bill, C-51, that Harper is tabling in security under the guise of terrorist threats based on murders by lost, mentally ill young men who needed help, the kind of help that he sees no need to provide but has harnessed the constabulary with the responsibility, the social work and counselling for which police are neither trained nor funded.

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[1] Fraser Research Bulletin, Fraser Institute, August 2014, Vancouver, p.6.

[2] Towards a Youth Job Guarantee, Broadbent Institute, p.3