Posts tagged canada
Canada watches its democracy erode | The Australian
Excellent read, with some good perspective from outside the country:
“A minister told parliament she did not know who had altered a document that cut funding to a foreign aid group. Later, she admitted to ordering the changes, but did not know who had carried out the order. Lying to parliament, a cardinal sin of Westminster-style democracy, has become a political tactic.
Following rulings by Speaker Peter Milliken, for the first time in Canadian history, the government and a minister have been found to be in contempt of parliament for withholding information and misleading the house.
The Integrity Commissioner was so inept that she failed to uphold a single one of more than 200 whistle-blowing complaints.
Forced out of office by the ensuing public outcry, she was awarded a $C500,000 severance package on condition that neither she nor the government talk about it.
That is, a public servant paid by the taxpayer was financially gagged by yet more taxpayer money to stop taxpayers finding out what was going on.
When a foreign service officer blew the whistle on the Canadian military handing over detainees to Afghan security forces, in likely violation of international humanitarian law, the government tried to destroy him and refused to give documents to a parliamentary inquiry. The Speaker reminded the government parliament controlled cabinet, not the other way round.
After the last elections, when the opposition parties were close to agreement on a coalition majority government, rather than face the house in a vote of confidence, Harper talked the governor-general into shuttering parliament for a month until he shored up his own support.
When the time came to choose a new governor-general, Harper opted for someone who had carefully drawn up terms of an inquiry commission to exclude the potentially most damaging aspects of a scandal involving a former conservative prime minister.
Four conservatives have been charged with exceeding campaign spending limits in the 2006 election that put Harper into power. A minister used public office and material to pursue party-political goals of courting ethnic vote banks for the conservatives.
Having come into office on campaign promises of greater transparency and accountability, Harper has silenced civil servants and diplomats, cynically published guidelines on how to disrupt hostile parliamentary committees, and suppressed research that contradicts ideologically-driven policy, for example data that show crime rates to be falling.
Judges who rule against the pet causes of the government’s ideological base are not immune to attacks from cabinet ministers.
Civil society groups that criticise any government policy or ideology risk loss of funding and hostile takeovers by boards stacked with pro-government ciphers.
Little wonder Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin describes the government’s “arc of duplicity” as “remarkable to behold”. What remains unclear is whether this adds up to an indictment of Canadians’ indifference to democratic rights being curtailed or of the opposition parties, which have failed to harness the silent majority’s outrage.”
AAARGH. The opposition should have been able to beat the Harper administration like red-headed stepchildren with this the whole way along, but they’ve been rolling over since day one. Election time, Y U NO TAKE OFF KID GLOVES, IGNATIEFF? Layton has only begun to sort of hint that Harper’s been abusing power. What do you have to do to get people angry in this country?
via towerofsleep and standardgrey
Pierre Elliott Trudeau
Not a lot of non-Canadians will immediately recognize his name, but Canada’s perhaps greatest prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was and still continues to be a political hero of many Canadians, including yours truly. My family and I emigrated to Canada well after Trudeau’s astonishing 15 years of premiership, but I remember how old CBC video footage of him delivering his famous off-the-cuff speeches enlivened my imagination and got me seriously interested in politics for the first time. He was perhaps the last intellectual to head a Western government, but much more than that, he was the last true liberal to lead a left-of-center political party in North America. His sense of idealism, however, was not merely ideological, in search of some elusive utopia; it was rather born out of a heartfelt impulse to make life better for the least advantaged in society, to build a more equal Canada.
He could be tough and brash sometimes, to be sure. He would curse at the media on live television and even physically take on some reporters from time to time, and he certainly wasn’t afraid to do a pirouette behind the Queen (or anyone else for that matter) either. But he was also charming and always dashing with the trademark fresh red rose in his lapel every time he appeared in public. Rarely do style and substance reach such a point of equilibrium in a politician as they did with Pierre Trudeau. In arecent article in The Walrus (Canada’s answer to the New Yorker), a former colleague (his senior economic advisor) and friend of Trudeau’s, Denise Chong, relays a memory that speaks rather nicely to his qualities as a principled progressive:
In 1996, back in Ottawa and at work on another book, I saw Trudeau for what would be the last time. The occasion was to celebrate the Glorious 13th, the fateful day in December 1979 when Liberal strategists summoned enough of their MPs to the House of Commons, including one brought by ambulance from an Ottawa hospital, to pass a motion of non-confidence against Joe Clark’s government.
For this gathering, held at a restaurant at the National Arts Centre, Trudeau insisted on inviting two or three guests of his own choosing, and so I attended for the first time. I had no idea I would be asked to speak to the crowd, some thirty former aides and long-time party activists. I began by telling of my grandfather’s hopeful beginning in this country, then I conjured the image, indelible in my mind, of my former boss challenging high school students, by now middle aged: “You’ll have to decide — is this country too big for you?” He was talking about separatism, but I also heard what it would take to keep alive the dreams of my grandfather: a boundless imagination about Canada. Others took the podium. Their witty, sarcastic, and at times ribald references to the politicking that had brought Trudeau back for one more term struck a far different tone than I had. It made me feel like the outsider I was.
Trudeau spoke last. He began by saying this ought to be the final such meeting. The mood turned sombre. He asked what was served by sitting around patting oneself on the back over political manoeuvring that had been conducted in secret. There was more. Think, he said, of how men still dominated political life, of how few women were in their midst — all the more reason not to be so proud of that time. Because of his impatience for ill-reasoned arguments, many may imagine Trudeau possessed little humility, but to me this was one of his most affecting qualities. Without humility, we contrive boundaries in our minds, smug about what we know and who we are, turning our world into “us” and “them.”
Just think of how someone like Trudeau would be perceived in the political arena today: elitist, condescending, arrogant, renegade? In the era of entrenched identity warfare, revisionist racism and benign hate-mongering, someone like Trudeau would not stand a chance to speak candidly, publicly about our common social predicaments, let alone run for office. Forget Obama, just take a look at the curious and quite painful metamorphosis of one-time public intellectual and Trudeau-wannabe, Michael Ignatieff, who now leads the same Liberal Party in Canada. Where is the courage to counter fear, greed, calumny, hate, and indifference? Where is the humility in the face of paltry and fleeting victories? Where is the strength of character befitting an enlightened leader out to redress injustice? The age of celebrity and unwarranted prestige, I’m afraid, leaves little room for any of that. Even our most seasoned public intellectuals seem inured to the trappings of mass exposure.
I hope this reflection isn’t misconstrued as a call to action or for enlightened leadership (or some such misbegotten cliche), however. What I wish to point out is the not-so-subtle fact that just as Trudeau stood as a reflection of a public that recognized and willed to existence an era of truly principled liberalism, so do our so-called representatives reflect the fragmented selves we have become today. It took an informed, reflective citizen to recognize and endorse a liberal agenda. It took a humble and compassionate citizen to deliberate on and inform a Trudeau. Politics was a dialogic process, interpretive, and, yes, exclusive (all-boys clubs all around). It wasn’t perfect (far from it), but at least it aspired to perfection.
Perhaps I’m being too uncharitable (‘pessimism of the intellect’ is, after all, part of the mission around here!), perhaps; but at this difficult hour, with so much in the world in a bad fix, I’m afraid the burden of proof is on those with more charitable takes on our common problems.
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An earlier version of this post was badly edited, so I’m reposting this.
Canada Readings
Alla Myzelev (Guelph): Canadian Architecture and Nationalism: From Vernacular to Deco. The Canadian School: A new generation of designers marries the local with the avant-garde. A look at how theCommunist Party changed Canadian elections forever. No one can hear you scream: At Mars on Earth, on Canada’s Devon Island, researchers prepare for space travel’s worst dangers. A review of The Canadian Century: Moving Out of America’s Shadow by Brian Lee Crowley, Jason Clemens, and Niels Veldhuis (and more). Let’s begin with a premise that presumably we can all agree upon: literary criticism in Canada is struggling. Here, Now:Canadian writers, living on the edge of the world, have the best view. Canada’s Funnyman:Stephen Leacock was the most successful humorist writing in the English language, but his ideas about society were not so amusing. The secret script for “Fox News North”: Deride hippies, assail Starbucks, introduce guest with alternative view, cue head-shaking. Location, location, location: Does where you live determine who you are? (and a graphic on the 66 faces of Canada) Here is an eccentric, non-textbook sense of contemporary Canadian literature. Follow the Leader: A friend and colleague remembers Pierre Trudeau. With her “un-Albertan” magazineAlberta Views, founding editor Jackie Flanagan is trying to show her province isn’t all rednecks, cowboys and oil tycoons.
Mark Ralston/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
No Canadian has ever won an Olympic gold medal on home soil, not even at the Winter Games, where one would think Canadians might have a bit of an advantage. But all that may be about to change if the organizers of the Vancouver Games, which begin Friday, have their way. More…
“”After the Super Bowl, the next sports spectacular to take over television screens will be the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Super Bowl Sunday is imperial Rome, all armor and battle formations, while the Olympics are still classical Greece: all torches, wreaths and moral uplift. The Super Bowl is a unique display of American exuberance. The Olympics have a more solemn function: to channel the lethal energies of modern nationalism into a peaceful competition for gold medals.
The Olympics have done their part in replacing war with sport as the way nations earn respect. Modern nations compete by branding their identities, and hosting the Olympic Games is the biggest branding opportunity a nation ever gets. The Beijing Games unveiled China as a global power. The Rio Games in 2016 will do the same for Brazil. The Sochi Winter Games in 2014 will showcase the raw power of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
