How the Canadian Left Waged Inception Against the Public

In Inception, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an extractor. With the use of specialized equipment, he can slip into the mind of another individual and steal their secrets.

With a little more work, he can even plant ideas within the minds of his subjects.

The Canadian left has managed just such a feat within the minds of Canadians. But unlike Cobb, who uses a sleep-induction/mind-link machine, the "specialized equipment" of the Canadian left is the state itself.

The Canadian left long ago stumbled upon a subtle means on inception -- quietly installing their agenda as public policy, then allowing the Canadian public to justify it to themselves after the fact.

They accomplished this through a combination of expansion in the size of government and the subversion of civil society in order to meet specific ideological ends.

Barry Cooper refers to this as the "embedded state" - state organs dedicated to increasing the reach and influence of government throughout Canadian life.

Through a variety of QUANGOs -- quasi-autonomous non governmental organizations -- the Canadian left has embedded their own ideology within this embedded state.

They've used Canada's Secretary of State -- a rarely-scrutinized office empowered to disperse funding to civil society organizations -- to accomplish this end.

This began during the Prime Ministerial tenure of Pierre Elliot Trudeau. As Prime Minister, Trudeau directed the Secretary of State to fund and, if necessary, create NGOs.

This had two consequences. It eliminated the need for sivil society organizations to appeal to private citizens for financial support, and allowed the government to make choices that would ideologically benefit the governing party.

A key example is the public funding of pro-abortion organizations while denying funding to their anti-abortion opponents.

The result has been a status quo on abortion where Canada has no abortion law whatsoever. Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada national director Joyce Arthur suggests that groups that plan to change this should not only be denied public funding, but should also be denied the ability to raise funds as charitable organizations, while pro-abortion organizations should be allowed these privileges because their goals are "not political" because they reflect the view of "mainstream Canadians".

But according to a recent poll on the topic of abortion, that mainstream may be much smaller than Arthur believes.

A recent poll concluded that only 21% of Canadians are even aware that Canada has no abortion law.

According to that poll, sampled Canadians believed:

-41% of Canadians believed that abortions are only available within the first trimester.

-15% of Canadians believed that abortions are only available within the first trimester if a woman's life is at risk, if she was raped, or if her unborn child will be born with serious complications.

-10% of Canadians believed that abortions are only permissable if a woman's life is at risk, if she was raped, or if her unborn child will be born with serious complications.

Only 27% of those polled favoured the status quo.

Conversely, Arthur believes that abortion should be formally legalized within Canadian law, but that no restrictions should be placed upon it. She declares that restrictions on abortion would be "unnecessary, cruel, and discriminatory".

Clearly, 73% of Canadians disagree with her -- which would mean that, according to Arthur's bizarre definition of "mainstream" Canada, only 27% of Canadians are within that mainstream.

When polled, Canadians do voice their support for the status quo. The problem is that they don't know what that status quo is.

Arthur further insists that anti-abortion groups cannot justify charitable status based on their educational efforts. She declares them to be deceptive; propaganda. Yet, it seems that the "educational" efforts of groups like the ARCC are a good deal more deceptive.

The National Action Committee on the Status of Women funded many pro-abortion groups who have helped foster this particular rhetorical environment.

It's no wonder that so many Canadians seem to think they share what are actually the ARCC's extremist views on abortion: groups nestled close to the core of Canada's embedded state have spent a long time convincing them that they do.

That the Canadian government has been providing funding to such organizations created an artificial sense of respectability for them -- and considering the iron-fistedly censorious nature of Arthur and the ARCC (they've been involved in efforts to ban anti-abortion groups from University campuses), any respectability afforded is purely artificial.

The Canadian left resorted to these tactics because they must not have known that they couldn't achieve their agenda without monopolizing support from the state.

After 40 years of this kind of subtle manipulation, it's no wonder that the left has managed to convince Canadians that they share their agenda -- even when they apparently aren't fully aware of what that agenda really is.

As Stephen Harper continues to tighten the screws on this kind of ideological self-indulgence, Canada's left will have to begin to find its own resources, and start forging its own reputation as opposed to piggy-backing their message on the back of the government.

Huh. So Now Social Engineering Is Bad

Dobbin: Social engineering only illegitimate if it's from the right

Writing in an essay published on the ideologically-parochial Rabble.ca, Murray Dobbin articulates a few more of his "Stephen Harper the anti-democrat" arguments.

Among some of the points raised in the essay, Dobbin decries what he calls "right wing social engineering":

"One of the most popular concepts on the political right over the years has been the notion of 'social engineering.' The phrase is intended to describe a process by which liberals and the left 'engineer' society - that is, set out to remake it -- by implementing government programs, intervening in the economy, and redistributing wealth so that there is a measure of economic equality (in a system defined by inequality). The implication is that these changes were undemocratic -- imposed by politicians, intellectuals and bureaucrats."

The problem for Dobbin is that in many cases such programs were indeed imposed by politicians. A prime case-in-point is that of Pierre Elliott Trudeau's wage and prize freeze. Trudeau had mocked that policy when it was proposed by then-Conservative leader Robert Stanfield. He then promptly implemented a policy he had essentially promised not to -- after being elected on the back of a rejection of it.

A more recent example is that of Stephane Dion's ill-fated coalition -- an idea that Dobbin had floated well in advance of Dion's attempt. Dion had explicitly rejected the notion of a coalition government when it was floated by NDP leader Jack Layton, only to be thoroughly rebuffed by the Canadian public.

Dobbin's made it clear that he in no way disapproves with left-wing bait-and-switch politics. But when conservatives get elected on the platforms they run on, it suddenly becomes underhanded social engineering:

"Yet rightwing social engineering is exactly what Stephen Harper intends to do, and has already done in many ways. We are now a far more militarized culture than when he came to office four years ago -- with an aggressive 'war-fighting' military. Our foreign policy is now in lock-step with the US This has never been debated in Parliament nor has the Conservative Party actually run on such policies. In spite of the fact of widespread support for new social programs like universal child care and Pharmacare, such programs are ruled out by the Harper government. While his minority government status has so far prevented an assault on Medicare and the Canada Health Act, Harper is on record as supporting increased privatization and two-tier Medicare."

Of course, Dobbin may have been disappointed to learn that Canadians supported increases in military spending not only well in advance of Harper becoming Prime Minister, but also well in advance of Harper becoming the Leader of the Opposition.

Foreign policy typically isn't debated in Parliament, unless it requires the ratification of a treaty, a declaration of war, or supply legislation. Canadian foreign policy is decided by the Prime Minister of cabinet, and has been this way since Canada won the right to decide its own foreign policy.

If this represents an assault on democracy, it was launched well before Harper became Prime Minister. As with other things, details that were once simply accepted details of Canadian politics have suddenly become intolerable to Dobbin under Harper's governance.

"This is true social engineering if by that term we mean the illegitimate remaking of Canadian society and governance. When all the social programs and activist government programs that the prime minister objects to were implemented there was widespread public support for them. Governments were responding to social movements demanding these things: unemployment insurance, Medicare, subsidized university education, Family Allowances, public pensions, old age security. These programs were not imposed by a cabal of liberal and socialist intellectuals and bureaucrats -- they were rooted in the expressed values of Canadians."

This, frankly, is an assertion that will be quickly accepted by Dobbin's far-left base, but it doesn't actually pass the laugh test.

There's a broad gulf of difference between widespread public support and the demands by a limited number of groups for certain privileges in the eyes of the Canadian state.

This argument runs particularly thin when one considers the sheer number of "civil society organizations" created by the Trudeau government through funding doled out by Canada's Secretary of State.

Canadians have very rarely been given the opportunity to render judgement on institutions such as the Status of Women Canada, which tended to focus its efforts on funding a great deal of activism. Naturally, many groups were favoured to their ideological nature, while others were excluded for theirs.

The Court Challenges program became typically troublesome when activist groups began using it to legislate through Canada's courts of law -- all too often the Supreme Court.

This broad collection of activities represented the embedding of a chosen ideology within what Barry Cooper aptly termed the embedded state.

After Harper changed the mandate of the Status of Women to provide real services for women in the community, and dismantled the court challenges progam (though he has yet to replace it with a more suitable program), Canadians had the opportunity to reflect on that during a General Election.

They returned him with a stronger mandate to govern, although the Liberal Party, NDP and Bloc Quebecois attempted to usurp it at Dobbin's urging.

But a Dobbin essay just wouldn't be a Dobbin essay without a foray into complete fiction:

"Harper's determination to remake Canada in the image of unregulated capitalism is illegitimate because it aims at dismantling what decades of democratic engagement has created. It is even more outrageous given the fact this fundamental shift is being undertaken by a government which received support from less 23 per cent of the eligible voters in Canada. Canadians have not changed their minds about these programs and values - if anything support has been reinforced by the perceived threats to these gains. These things are the fruits of democracy -- its ultimate litmus test. Harper's plan to rid the country of this legitimate evolution of social and economic change is true social engineering, and profoundly anti-democratic."

If Stephen Harper had any "determination to remake Canada in the image of unregulated capitalism", one would expect that, at some point, Harper would be moving to do away with the regulation, as opposed to exporting the Canadian model to the rest of the world. Harper has already announced his plans to promote Canada's financial regulation system to the rest of the world when Canada hosts the G8 Summit later in 2010.

But then one remembers that this is a Murray Dobbin essay -- one in which the desire to spread ideological panic takes the driver's seat, logic rides as a passenger, and the corpse of fact is stuffed away in the trunk.

It's a world in which Canadians supported a broad variety of ideological programs because Dobbin said so, Stephen Harper plans to deregulate Canada's economy despite never taking any steps to do so, and in which social engineering is bad -- but only now that he wants to accuse the other guys of doing it.

Institutional Censorship of the Pro-Abortion Movement

Banning anti-abortion groups violates civil liberties

Across Canada, anti-abortion groups on various University campuses have been under fire.

Where pro-abortion groups fail and students' unions decline to run pro-abortion groups off campus, they settle for simply disrupting any events they disagree with.

In the latter case, it's censorship by deeply-institutionalized means.

Fortunately, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association is prepared to take a stand on the matter, they're preparing to intervene in a case involving the University of Victoria Student Society and an anti-abortion group by the name of Youth Protecting Youth.

The argument is that anti-abortion activism "inherently discriminates" against women.

It shouldn't be thought that the BCCLA necessarily agrees with Youth Protecting Youth -- they merely believe that their freedom of expression should be protected.

"We're pro-choice nuts over at the civil liberties association," explained BCCLA spokesman John Dixon. "We would like to persuade the university students society to relent -- that's the course we're pursuing for now."

"This is a public institution and an organ of the government of British Columbia. Students are forced to pay fees to fund the Students Society."

It's on that note that the members of Youth Protecting Youth pay funds to an organization that has acted to deny them the freedom to express themselves because pro-abortion busybodies like Joyce Arthur -- who is representing pro-abortion group Students for Choice in this matter -- believe that expression "inherently" oppresses them.

Dixon insists that the U Vic Students' Society is wrong to attempt to censor the group. He quite rightly notes that silencing Youth Protecting Youth doesn't in any way settle the abortion issue.

"They can't punish, denounce, discipline a group who, in a very civil way ... try to persuade people not to have abortions. It isn't as though the entire Western world has settled all these bioethical questions about the beginning of life and end of life -- they're live issues."

Barry Cooper has often theorized about what he calls the "embedded state". He describes the embedded state as politicized institutions that operate for the preservation of its own powers, often in support of partisan or ideological interests.

The behaviour of the students unions that rush to run anti-abortion groups off their campuses demonstrate that the embedded state is alive and well on university campuses across Canada.

These organizations have given themselves the power to censor student groups on their campus in direct contravention of civil liberties. It's entirely understandable that zealots like Joyce Arthur either do not understand this or simply don't care.

Fortunately, the BCCLA seems to be prepared to stand up to these organizations -- at least within the province of BC. The time is long overdue that civil liberties groups in other provinces take a similar stand.

Canada Can Stand to Change a Little

New thinking on foreign policy was badly needed

Since Prime Minister Stephen Harper took office in 2006, there have predictably been some people he hasn't been able to please.

Unsurprisingly, Frances Russell has been one of them. For good reason, Harper -- and many other Canadians -- don't seem particularly distressed by this.

Many Canadians have recognized this for a positive development -- particularly as it pertains to foreign policy.

As Roy Rempel would note, Canada has long lacked any kind of coherent foreign policy, and has instead relied on a network of finely-crafted platitudes wrapped around obselete Pearsonian peacekeeping missions that have often proven ill-suited to the current state of the world -- as in Rwanda and Somalia.

Russell, for one, longs for the dreamland of yesteryear.

"The federal Conservatives are proving every day they don't need a majority to transform Canada," Russell laments.

"Aside from their swift and generous response to the Haitian earthquake -- what better way to douse the rogue prorogue furor? -- the Conservatives are backing away from internationalism, expunging most if not all of Canada's powerful human rights and humanitarian language from the lexicon of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade," she continues.

(Sure. The response to the Haiti catastrophe had nothing at all to do with humanitarianism, and everything to do with the proroguement. Sheesh, it seems like Harper just can't win.)

The flipside of this claim is that it simply isn't true. The Conservative government has shown a robust -- although not unlimited -- commitment to Canada's mission in Afghanistan, a UN-mandated mission of combination state building and fighting extremism.

Moreover, Canada also signed onto the treaty banning cluster munitions -- although after securing assurances that Canadian commanders wouldn't be held responsible if allied forces used the (quite rightly) controversial weapons.

That is internationalism, even if it isn't the kind of internationalism that Russell prefers -- one built more on the platitudes of soft power without backing it with the capabilities of hard power. Even Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff recognized the danger of this a long time ago.

"According to Embassy, Canada's Foreign Affairs Newspaper, Conservative staffers directed DFAIT bureaucrats to stop using policy language created by the former Liberal government immediately upon taking office in 2006," Russell complains.

"Chief among the forbidden phrases are 'human security,' 'public diplomacy,' 'good governance,' 'gender equality,' 'child soldiers,' and 'international humanitarian law,'" she continues. "Instead, the Conservatives' lexicon features 'human rights,' 'the rule of law,' 'democracy,' 'democratic development,' 'equality of men and women,' 'children in armed conflict' and 'international law.'"

What Russell objects to is many of the same foreign policy concepts, albeit stripped of left-wing ideological qualifiers.

"Children in armed conflict" clearly denotes the sense that all children in the midst of an armed conflict pose a dilemma to the global community -- armed and unarmed children alike. "Equality of men and women" recognizes that equality means equality, as opposed to some of the thinly-veiled ideological causes sponsored under the guise of "gender equality" (a phrase that says nothing about men or women, but somehow has always been tailored toward women).

"International law" strips the ideological impetus from "international humanitarian law", and instead recognizes something that doesn't necessarily define international law, but rather must operate within its confines.

"Democratic development" clearly indicates that good governance tends to happen within democratic states, where citizens are empowered to decide the direction of their country. It's something that tends not to happen under communist states or dictatorships.

Even the Human Security narrative has returned with the Will to Intervene doctrine, a recent upgrade on the Responsibility to Protect Russell alludes to.

The same rejection Canada's former embedded state ideology applies to domestic developments that Russell predictably decries.

"Since 2006, the Conservatives have either axed or slashed funding for the Canadian Council on Learning, the Status of Women, the Canadian Council of Social Development, the Court Challenges Program, the Canadian Policy Research Networks, the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation, Volunteer Canada, the Canadian Health Network, the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada, Family Service Canada and Centres of Excellence, among many others," Russell writes.

But it doesn't take Barry Cooper to recognize that the organizations and bodies that Russell alludes to represented the embedding of a left-wing ideology within the embedded state.

These are things that many Canadians would agree could have stood to change a little -- although many more Canadians (like Cooper) would insist that Canada could stand to change a lot.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has surely learned that you can't please everyone. Clearly, he isn't about to start with the defenders of a tired and discredited old leftism.

CUPE Ads a Good Deal (Of Goods)

Few Canadians watching any amount of TV right now can escape the Canadian Union of Public Employee's "Good Deal For Canadians" ads, in which an interviewer (read: actor) asks an assortment of people-on-the-street (read: worse actors) whether or not they think Canada's public services are a "good deal for Canadians".

Unsurprisingly, all of the actors in the ad agree that Canada's public services are a good deal for Canadians.

For the most part, they're right. But the CUPE ads themselves are selling Canadians a deal of goods. (This is a painfully mixed metaphor, but there's a point to be made.)



Many of the services the ads allude to: water treatment, sanitation, libraries and health care, are indeed necessary and valuable services for Canadians.

But not all of Canada's Public Employees provide valuable services for Canadians.

Many of the "services" offered by Canada's Public Employees are little more than the appendages of the embedded state, and that state's embedded ideology. "Services" like the funding of advocacy (read: activism) by groups funded by the Status of Women, for example, provided very little in terms of service to Canadians -- unless they shared the state's embedded ideology.

Predictably, CUPE itself opposed changing the Status of Women's mandate from "advocating equality" to providing actual services of value for Canadians.

"Services" like the Status of Women's advocacy certainly had very little value for Canadians who are indifferent to, or opposed to, what had become the state's embedded ideology. It was difficult to support services like that on a logical basis.

But where CUPE can't appeal to logic, it chooses to appeal to emotion and vanity. The first CUPE ad closes with a subtle bit of branding, when the "interviewee" declares Canadians who support Canada's public services to be "awesome".

If this had come up with a legitimate person-on-the-street interview, that would be one thing. But in an ad that is scripted -- and scripted badly -- it's simply contrived.



In the second ad, CUPE touts the economic value of Canada's public services. Indeed, some of them have a tremendous economic value. The economic value of health care, for example, is obvious. Employers in Canada are compelled to spend far less on health insurance for their employees than employers in the United States.

Libraries help our youth advance their education, and encourage literacy later in life -- both of which are of inestimable economic value.

But then, there is what Brian Lee Crowley deems to be "pseudo-work". In his book Fearful Symmetry, Crowley recounts how the baby boom compelled the government to set up entire social programs in order to absorb baby boomers entering the job market -- worried that the free market would be unable to accomodate them -- and how needs that would otherwise be satisfied by part-time work were expanded into full-time jobs, or how needs that required full-time work were expanded to require an extra multitude of full-time workers.

These public services -- found in crown corporations like CN, Via Rail and HydroQuebec -- aren't merely of limited economic value. They're actually of negative economic value. Not only do they suck the funds necessary to pay these employees out of the economy, but they also suck the skills of these employees out of the free market, where they could be applied much more efficiently.



In the third ad, the interviewer talks to a woman who simply has to be the worst actor in all of these ads, who gushes about Canada's health care.

Canadian public health care is indeed a good deal for Canadians. But not nearly as good as this woman insists as it is.

The woman recounts a (fictional) story about her daughter breaking her ankle at a local arena. The arena staff call 911 (unlikely for a broken ankle) who then sends an ambulance (also unlikely for a broken ankle).

But a visit to a Canadian emergency room would quickly dissuade anyone from believing this woman's story. Seven hour waits don't tend to inspire Canadians with absolute confidence in health care.

Of course, this is not the fault of the employees working in the emergency room. They make do with the resources they are given.

However, a great deal of the resources pumped into Canadian health care are sucked up by a surplus of middle management. Whenever a provincial government in Canada makes a move to divert more resources to front-line services by laying off middle managers, CUPE or one of its provincial equivalents fires up a panicked campaign accusing that government of "attacking health care".

Moreover, some of the limits the unions themselves place upon their employees prevent them from working extra hours in order to serve Canadians. The impact of this on Canadian health care becomes most pronounced when one looks at diagnostic medicine.

Ironically, diagnostic health care in Canada would be of better quality without the unions. But CUPE won't tell you that.



In the final ad, the interviewer talks to an unemployed worker, who appreciates the support unemployment insurance offers to struggling Canadians -- particularly at a time of global recession.

No argument is necessary to this particular ad. Unemployment insurance has a tremendous value to the Canadian economy, particularly local economies. It prevents workers -- who often possess extremely valuable skills -- from leaving local communities, provinces, or even the country to seek work elsewhere, by providing them with aid to get them through tough times.

But aside from this, the CUPE ads go to great lengths to conceal the fact that many of the "services" -- appendages of the embedded state's embedded ideology and pseudo-work -- the ad is intended to defend either provide little value to Canadians, or are actually encumbered by the union itself.

To envoke a far less tortured metaphor, the CUPE ads are trying to sell Canadians a bill of goods. Canadians should continue to buy the ones that offer value, and reject the ones that do not.

Oh, But So Much Has Changed Already!

Lawrence Martin misses the forest of change for the trees

Writing in an op/ed column in Metro News, Lawrence Martin decries the current state of Canadian politics, and blames it all on the leaders.

Canada's political leaders, it seems, just aren't young, vibrant, hip, or inspiring enough. And the only way that Canadians will ever see any kind of meaningful change in Canadian politics is for Canada's youngest politicos -- individuals like Justin Trudeau and, uh... Justin Trudeau... -- to take over the reins of leadership.

But Martin seems to be overlooking the myriad of ways that things have changed already. And it didn't take the young, vibrant, hip and inspiring Trudeau to change things.

In fact, many of the most significant -- and constructive -- changes in Canadian politics have been effected by a fifty-year-old man "about as cool as a Toyota Corolla". Stephen Harper.

Of course, if one were to listen to individuals like Murray Dobbin, Judy Rebick, Michael Byers, Heather Mallick, Antonia Zerbisias or any number of other commentators, one would hear them insisting precisely the opposite. They would insist that Harper has been nothing but poison, not only for Canadian politics, but for Canada itself.

Each of them, in turn, would have their own complaints -- complaining Harper dismantled the court challenges program, hamstrung the Status of Women, is dismantling gun control, and has declined to fight climate change in any meaningful way. This isn't the full extent of their complaints, but it does effectively scratch the surface.

This is their view of reality, but many Canadians don't share it. Many Canadians see some of these actions as taking the government out of the business of taking sides in matters related to social activism, setting the Status of Women on a better course, dismantling cosmetic legislation disguised as gun control, and reevaluating a "crisis" for which the scientific evidence is erroding, and increasingly looks as if it were trumped-up in the first place.

And while many Canadian conservatives would argue that Harper hasn't gone nearly far enough -- and many Canadian progressives are insisting that Harper would go further if he won his dreaded majority -- it's difficult to overlook the specific character of this change, notably that Canadian government has finally gotten back into the business of good governance.

In doing so, the Canadian government is slowly moving away from an era in which its chief order of business was not good governance, but its own particular method of social engineering.

The government is moving away from an old era in which the politics of public virtue dictated that the government use its power to mold society according to the designs of a select group of architects, and back to an era in which the politics of public good simply entails managing the country's affairs.

Whether one credits Jean Lesage for this old concept of the politics of public virtue (as Brian Lee Crowley does), or John Diefenbaker (as Barry Cooper does) is actually largely immaterial.

What is important is that many Canadians are waking up to the notion that it isn't the government's job to promote any one particular ideological view of Canadian society. Rather, it's the role of government to stay out of the affairs of others as much as it can, and simply focus on providing people with the opportunities to build the kind of society they wish to see, without government picking sides.

Many left-wing ideologues look at the Harper government and they decry what they call the "death of Canada". In its own small way, perhaps it really is -- at least for them.

Grown accustomed to the state favouring their particular conception of the politics of public virtue, these ideologues have come to think of Canada as an ideological construct. So long as that ideology was theirs, they were entirely comfortable with it.

In many of his actions, Stephen Harper has begun -- not yet finished -- to rebuild Canada as a non-ideological construct. As a country in which the citizens will decide the character of its society.

That, in itself, has been a wonderful change over the previous state of affairs.

It didn't take Justin Trudeau to change Canada after all. And if Trudeau ever does get his opportunity to change Canada, many more Canadians may, in time, come to wonder if it actually would be for the better.

L'Ecole Polytechnique: Martyrs To An Embedded Ideology?

Opposition MPs boycott remembrance ceremony

One would expect that any of Canada's MPs would be eager to take any opportunity to respect the memory of the 14 women killed by Marc Lepine during the 1989 L'Ecole Polytechnique shootings.

But apparently, not so much. Numerous female MPs from the NDP, Liberal Party and Bloc Quebecois opted to skip a recent non-partisan memorial for the victims of the shooting over their outrage at the Conservative Party eliminating various ideological elements of Canadian policy.

The Conservative Party eliminated the Court Challenges Program, shifted the mandate of the Status Of Women away from research and advocacy (and toward providing actual services for women), and recently passed legislation -- with the help of numerous Liberal and NDP MPs -- to abolish the long gun registry.

The missing MPs excused their absence by citing their outrage at these moves.

"We consider this a hypocritical gesture because her government has shown itself from the beginning to be hostile to all women's demands," complained Bloc MP Nicole Demers.

"I find it difficult to stand beside a minister who chooses not to advocate for women, who chooses to follow the party line, who chooses to endorse the elimination of the long-gun registry." added Liberal MP Anita Neville.

Of course, what Demers declines to consider is that the demands of the groups funded by the Status of Women hardly represent the desires of all women, and what Neville declines to consider is that the long-gun registry has failed to keep guns out of the hands of unstable individuals like Kimveer Gill, who perpetrated the Dawson College shooting.

It couldn't have kept the hunting rifle out of the hands of Marc Lepine. Because it isn't gun control.

The Harper government's moves outrage individuals like Demers and Neville because it was a refutation of the ideology that lies at the core of what Barry Cooper describes as the embedded state, and with the character of the politics of public virtue that it entails.

Individuals like Demers and Neville seem to feel entitled to government organs designed to advance their particular ideology. But the role of government is not to advance any particular ideology.

In refusing to attend a remembrance ceremony based on these things, Demers, Neville and their fellow absentee MPs have expressed their intent to use the victims of the L'Ecole Polytechnique shootings as martyrs for what they believe should be the embedded ideology of the Canadian state.

That's an excessively poor use for the memory of a national tragedy.

Less = More

Less activist government expects more of citizens, not less

If Canadians were beginning to wonder precisely how Justin Trudeau intended to follow in his father's footsteps, few would blame them.

While Trudeau has enjoyed a middling profile in the Liberal party, he has yet to truly establish himself as a heavyweight in Canadian politics. To date, he hasn't offered much more than the typical partisanship Canadians have come to expect.

During a recent speech in Brantford, Ontario, Trudeau didn't divert much from this trend.

Speaking to a partisan audience, Trudeau insisted that Stephen Harper's Conservative Party won its minority government by utilizing wedge politics and divisive attack ads.

(What he chooses to omit is that it was his own Liberal Party that lost two consecutive elections with ill-conceived wedge politics, and that their 05/06 campaign featured the most divisive attack ads in Canadian political history.)

Trudeau accused Harper's government of disempowering Canadians.

"For the past four years, a government has been convincing us to expect less," Trudeau told his audience, "and worst of all, to expect less of ourselves."

But what Trudeau doesn't seem to understand is that a government that is less active in attempting to mould the country's social order to its own ideology isn't a government that is teaching Canadians to expect less of themselves.

It's a government that is teaching Canadians to expect more of themselves.

One of the great achievements of the Harper government has been to significantly pare back the programs the Liberal party has traditionally used to advance its own ideological agenda.

By cancelling the court challenges program (although the Conservative government has yet to propose a badly-needed alternative) and shifting the mandate of the National Committee on the Status of Women, Stephen Harper eliminated programs that weren't only being used as tools of what Barry Cooper describes as the embedded state, he also eliminated programs that were being used as tools to embed the ideology at the core of the embedded state.

In doing so, Harper replaced a notion of public virtue wherein the basis of public virtue was the government's funding of often-narrow ideological advocacy with a politics of public virtue wherein the basis of public virtue is the government's ability to actually help its citizens when and where needed.

This isn't to say that there isn't a place in Canadian policy for portions of Justin Trudeau's vision of public virtue. In particular, his youth initiative would be of incredible benefit to Canada.

But Trudeau even seems to misunderstand his bill's place within a political order in which citizens have begun to expect less of their government.

"They want to make a difference in the world," Trudeau continued. "But they're not entirely sure that politics will make a difference. Young people have gotten a lot more empowered with information. The problems they want addressed are very big but the capacity of the politicians has not been there."

Trudeau seems to misunderstand that this reflects a growing trend -- one encouraged by Trudeau's colleague Romeo Dallaire -- in which youths are beginning to expect less of their government, and more from themselves.

It isn't a trend exclusive to Canada, either. As Adam Curtis notes in The Power of Nightmares, people in numerous countries have lost faith in ideologies and grand visions such as the ones that the Liberal party has continually sought to offer Canadians (and just as often declined to deliver on).

This has led to the rapid proliferation of Non-Governmental Organizations, wherein citizens take direct and personal responsibility regarding the state of the world, and their ability to effect it.

That isn't Canadians expecting less of themselves. It's Canadians expecting less of their government, and more from themselves.

In any healthy, strong (in the Barberian sense) democracy, that is what citizens do.

The Hard Decision on Human Rights Commissions

Contentious choice between abolition and reform

The hot debate over Canada's Human Rights Commissions hasn't been particularly firey recently.

That being said, if anyone can be expected to have a particularly strong opinion on the CHRC and its provincial counterparts, it's University of Calgary political scientist Barry Cooper.

Cooper, whose published work -- both with and without his frequent collaborator, David Bercuson -- focuses on the politics of public virtue, seems to see the HRCs as the most utterly blatant embodiment of the embedded state. Consequently, he seems to find a great deal of affinity for the opponents of the HRCs:

"For those who have never taken the time to read dry legal documents, consider that Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act declares that hate speech is constituted by words that are likely to expose somebody to hatred or contempt - and what that has meant for Canadians.

In early October, Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant gave testimony before the House of Commons justice committee, currently considering whether section 13 should be repealed. Their remarks, available on You Tube, provide a short but thorough examination of the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) and its works.

They argue that the censorship implications of section 13 are an abomination in a constitutional democracy, that section 13 is the reason for so many complaints, and is why the entire administrative structure of this taxpayer-supported, government-backed human rights industry is broken past the point where it can be fixed. Any country, at least where freedom of expression and speech is truly valued, would have dissolved this outfit years ago."

Whether or not the censorship facilitated by section 13 is warranted or justified is a matter for some debate.

Most Canadians would likely agree that protecting minorities in Canada -- whether they be defined as such by their ethnicity, sexuality or religion -- is worth reasonably curtailing free speech in cases where the intent is evidently to incite hatred or contempt against them.

The trouble is there's no objective test for the intent to incite hatred or contempt. More Canadians still would likely agree that a more worthy course of action would be to censor cases where speech clearly intends to incite violence is likely another matter altogether.

Even Levant and Steyn would likely be more than happy to support that.

Of course, it's important to note that Steyn and Levant can hardly be considered impartial judges of the Commission, considering their run-ins with it:

"Both Steyn and Levant have encountered Canada’s human rights bureaucrats first hand and written about their hair-raising experiences. The larger story, of an out-of-control bureaucracy that transformed itself from an organization charged with conciliation of differences among citizens into a politically motivated attack organ, should also trouble Canadians."

Levant's and Steyn's troubling experience with the HRCs -- finding themselves having to defend themselves against complaints that should have been summarily dismissed -- have revealled that the CHRC has taken on the most eggregious features of the embedded state.

Human Rights Commissioner Dean Steacy once famously remarked that "freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value."

Yer if Steacy had consulted the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms -- the law that the CHRC is charged with upholding -- he would see that the right to freedom of speech and expression are enshrined within that document. In his eager embrace of the role of speech/thought police, Steacy had disregarded the purpose for the Commission's existence.

In its place, Steacy and his fellow Commissioners seem to have replaced the continued existence of the commission itself and the preservation of its censorship powers as the raison d'etre of the CHRC.

Out of genuine reverence for the concept of human rights and true detestation of discrimination, Canadians have approved of the existence of these commissions, but have often been shocked at the HRCs' excesses:

"Because most of us are in favour of human rights, Canadians have accorded the benefit of the doubt to anything calling itself a human rights commission. That favourable impression has depended on maintaining a veil of ignorance over how these bodies actually operate. After Steyn and Levant (among others) made their operations public, it is clear to all but the willfully blind that their reason is entirely undeserved.

Instead of dealing with genuine civil liberties, Canada’s human rights commissions have taken upon themselves such tasks as censoring cartoons and jokes, preventing RCMP instructors at Depot in Regina from raising their voices at recruits, or compelling a fast-food restaurant to keep an employee whose medical condition makes it impossible for her to comply with the company’s hand-washing policy.

They have invented new categories of crime and imposed lifetime bans on uttering opinions that hurt the feelings of someone or other. Senior counsel for the CHRC has advanced the opinion that their job is to end hate, a very human, though not particularly, edifying emotion.

They aspire to become more than a thought or speech police; they seek to be an emotion police.

In order to achieve these ambitions, members of the CHRC have joined neo-Nazi websites and posted messages on them in the hopes of provoking some dim-witted hatemonger to post something equally vile. Then one of their friends or even colleagues would be able to lodge a complaint.

In a real court (and to common sense) this is entrapment by an agent provocateur. In the kangaroo courts of Canada’s human rights commissions, it’s standard operating procedure.

Moreover, the CHRC employees are perfectly aware that what they are doing cannot stand the light of day. On at least one occasion they hacked their way into a wi-fi account of an Ottawa woman and posted their musings from her account. Incidentally, all this malfeasance by your tax-supported servants has been documented in sworn testimony by CHRC staff."

The methods employed by the CHRC have proven to be very successful.

"With such procedures at their disposal, it is no wonder that, until last month, the CHRC had a 100 per cent conviction rate -- the envy in this respect of North Korea and Cuba, which occasionally stumble in the administration of justice. Naturally the CHRC announced it would appeal this stain on its perfect record."

Of course, what Cooper might have meant to say was that the CHRC has a near-perfect conviction rate in cases it has chosen to pursue. As many should recall, the complaint against Mark Steyn was dismissed, as was the complaint against Levant.

As it turns out, however, one of the most striking issues surrounding the HRCs is the manner in which they often exceed their mandate. The task of conciliating two conflicting parties has often been cast out the window in the preference for punishing them.

As Patrick Nugent, the counsel for Dr Darren Lund in Alberta's Boissoin v Lund case notes, HRCs are not supposed to make punitive judgements. They are, however, allowed to require defendents to pay damages for their actions, but Nugent himself notes that HRCs often cross this particular line, as he suggests they did in Alberta.

"At the centre of the power of the human rights bureaucracy is a justification of the censorship provisions of the Canadian Human Rights Act, namely section 13. It is based on a massive yet legally untested expansion of a nearly 20-year-old decision by the Supreme Court of Canada, in the 'Taylor case.' In that decision the Court decided that hate speech by a neo-Nazi meant 'extreme feelings of opprobrium and enmity' against a group, and not 'subjective opinion of offensiveness.' Today human rights officials have completely reversed the ruling."

With the many, many valid questions that have been raised about the CHRC by its growing stable of critics, one would expect that the Commissions would be prepared to meet some of that criticism by opening their organization to the light of day.

Instead, the CHRC has indulged itself in Nixonian politics, replete with an "enemies list" drafted by its Chief Commissioner:

"Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the controversy over the human rights commissions is the response of the Chief Commissioner of the CHRC. She has complained long and loud of unfair criticism and announced: 'I have a file' on her critics. 'I’m a public servant ... and I’m not going to sit by.' As Terry O’Neill, who is on the list, wrote in the National Post early in October: 'Big Sister’s been watching me.'"

This represents just another embedded state tendency by the CHRC. Instead of coming clean about the Commission's excesses and promising to do better, Jennifer Lynch is instead investigating her critics.

With all of these troublesome facts about the HRCs afoot, it's unsurprising that Cooper comes down firmly on the side of abolishing them altogether:

"The duty of Parliament is clear. Remove not just the offensive section 13. Dismantle the entire Orwellian structure."

But Canadians recognize the key role that the CHRC and its provincial counterparts play. Abolishing the commissions would be throwing this baby out with the bathwater.

Reforming the commissions, toughening the standard of evidence required in panel hearings, and placing stronger constraints on the censorship powers of the commissions is a course of action that would be preferable to all Canadians.

Regardless of what Canadian Human Rights Commissioners may want Canadians to believe, the status quo is simply not tolerable.

Derailing (and Re-Railing) The Train of Public Virtue

Time for the Conservative Party to offer its own model of public virtue

Writing in an op/ed in the Ottawa Citizen, David Warren offers his take on Barry Cooper's recent opus It's the Regime, Stupid!.

Cooper is one of the better-kept secrets of Canadian political science: a paleo-conservative with one eye on Canada's past, another on its future, and his finger on the pulse of Canada's present.

Cooper's book offers a scathing critique of Laurenti-o-centric politics and where it has led the country:

"Looked at from another angle, we are the curious aggregate of 'two founding cultures' -- the combination of French Canadian nationalist whining and extortion, with the old English Canadian Loyalist junction and anti-American malice, in a kleptomanic welfare state -- fuelled by revenue appropriated from Western Canadian resources.

This is not exactly my way of looking at post-war Canada, and perhaps an over-simplification of Cooper's, but there's a lot of truth in it all the same. A 'regime,' which we may fairly associate with the Liberal party (though spread through other parties by such mechanisms as the 'sacred trust' of our dysfunctional medicare system), has embedded itself in Canadian life, in the form of a self-interested and self-serving federal bureaucracy of extraordinary size.

The notion that Canada consists centrally of ourselves -- the Laurentianistas -- plus imperial extensions east, north, and west, would come very close to being the irritant that has inspired Cooper to produce his string of pearls on Canadian politics, the most memorable of which before the book now published was entitled, Deconfederation (1991), co-written with David Bercuson. It was a book that proposed to call Quebec's separatist bluff, by sketching out the benefits to the Rest of Canada over and above the transaction costs, if Quebec would only leave."

Cooper's and Bercuson's argument circulated around the notion of the politics of public virtue. Although they argued that the politics of public virtue -- leaing Canada inexorably into the era of the welfare state -- actually originated with John Diefenbaker, who they identify as the first Prime Minister to govern with social justice as a central preoccupation (although the traces of this notion can be identified earlier at the provincial level, in the Saskatchewan government of Tommy Douglas and Alberta government of -- believe it or not -- William Aberhart), it was the fight against Quebec separatism that truly entrenched those ideals as central to Canadian governance.

The Liberals struggles to find ways to fund their efforts to use democratic socialism to soften the demand for Quebec sovereignty often led to ham-fisted attempts to suck revenue out of the Western provinces, and often became as big a threat to national unity as anything imagined by Rene Levesque or Luicen Bouchard.

The growing public bureaucracy became a symbol to the west of the country financing Liberal attempts to pander to Quebec separatism at Western Canada's expense.

The election of (briefly) Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney as Prime Minister did little to stem this slide itno a bureaucratic and self-interested state. By the time Paul Martin -- who at times seemed to possess the will to turn the tide -- his party's own excesses in twisting Canadian governance to their own benefit finally bit him.

The election of Stephen Harper resulted not only from the nadir of the sense of entitlement born out of the Liberal party's vision of the politics of public virtue, but also of a slowly-emerging distaste for that particular status quo, and a desire for real change.

But, just as the Liberal vision of the politics of public virtue was fraught with peril, so is Warren's view of how Stephen Harper should proceed:

"My own view, that Harper's political strategy is simply to remain in power for as long as possible, governing with as much common sense as circumstances will allow, until the hegemony of the Liberal party recedes into memory, would probably answer to Cooper's requirements. Harper is a transitional figure; not the new regime but the man who allows one to emerge over time. He is astute in his grasp of his own limitations.

In particular, he must stay in power until the threat has passed of the Liberals replacing their old divide-and-conquer 'national unity' fraud, with a new divide-and-conquer environmentalist fraud. The global warming hysteria -- seized upon by bureaucrats all over the world as the means to advance and consolidate the Nanny State -- is itself receding. We must wait it out."

Warren's view seems to be that the Conservative party should simply outwait the allegedly waning surge of environmentalism. But this may is an ultimately short-sighted view.

The enthusiasm for the apocalyptic view of environmentalism may indeed be waning -- it's usually difficult to tell for certain.

But to pretend that the Liberal party couldn't profit politically from a new environmental focus is naive. Even if Canadians stop fearing an environmental apocalypse, the environment is still central to the issue of quality of life.

This is the conservative angle on the environmental issue. Even if apocalyptic zealots are outraged at the very idea that an environmental catastrophe may not be as imminent as activist scientists have insisted it is.

The other issue with Warren's thesis is the notion of Stephen Harper needing to remain in power for as long as possible.

The strength of Cooper's thesis is that it reflects a change in the purpose of Canadian government. Retaining power for power's own sake -- or even out-waiting political changes that may favour his party -- doesn't reflect these changes away from aelf-serving politics of public virtue and toward more responsible and accountable government.

Harper achieved this by doing what Tom Flanagan described as "tightening the screws" on government -- not only through a program of tax cuts, but also by trimming old Liberal party-era social engineering projects, as embodied by the court challenges program and by the ideological direction of the Status of Women.

Some would have expected that Harper's re-adjustment of the Royal Commission for the Status of Women -- as well as suggestions that Harper has treated women as a "left-wing fringe group" -- it seems that female voters are continually softening toward Harper.

The termination of the Liberal agenda of social engineering via various pet projects doesn't seem nearly as threatening to many Canadians as left-wing Canadians would have the rest of us believe.

Last but not least, dismissing national unity and environmentalism as fraudulent is intellectually perilous. Canada came within less than a percentage point of breaking up during the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum because the Liberal government of Jean Chretien was inattentive to, and bungled, the national unity file. Not because concerns regarding national unity are fraudulent.

Brian Lee Crowley has recently noted (and Denis Stairs noted before him), demographic shifts within Quebec will soon take the teeth out of Quebec separatism. This will change the form the national unity debate takes in Canada, but it will not lay the issue to rest.

Likewise environmentalism is not fraudulent. Whether the action taken on preserving the environment is taken to head off an apocalypse or is taken simply to improve the quality of life of Canadians, the issue of the environment is crucial.

The Conservative party needs to stop short of abolishing the politics of public virtue, and instead offer Canadians an alternative to the tired version of it to which they had once resigned themselves.

A conservative version of the politics of public virtue will very likely share the most compelling elements of the Liberal version. The difference, of course, should be that the conservative model shouldn't rely on state action to achieve that vision, but rather make it possible for citizens to accomplish those goals on their own -- even if the state provides some help along the way.

An Idea Crazy Enough to (Never, Ever) Work

Liberal leadership -- or Tory membership -- should be farthest thing from Ruby Dhalla's mind

Writing in a blog post on the National Post's Full Comment blog, Dan Arnold drops an interesting thought regarding rumours that Ruby Dhalla is among the Liberal MPs that may cross the floor.

Arnold provides what he must imagine to be a very persuasive reason for Dhalla to stay put with the Liberal party: defecting will hurt her chances to be leader of the Liberal party.

It's hard to decide which prospect is more unlikely -- Dhalla being admitted into the Conservative party, or winning the leadership of the Liberal party. Not only is either incredibly unlikely, but both are terrible ideas.

The reasons for both come back to one central issue: Dhalla's recent private member's bill that would extend pension -- admittedly, not a full pension to immigrants after only three years of residence.

The bill has drawn near-universal condemnation, and for obvious reasons: not only is it an extremely cynical piece of legislation, but it's incredibly irresponsible to boot.

Even Judy Sgro, normally a close ally of Dhalla's, has announced she will vote against the bill. Usually private member's bills stand a snowball's chance in hell of passing. Dhalla's bill is likely better compared to a single snowflake in the eighth ring of hell.

The Conservative party would have to publicly renounce virtually all of its principles in order to accept Dhalla within their ranks.

The Liberal party, meanwhile, would not only risk alienating its fiscally-conservative wing, but also risk alienating communities of immigrants who came to Canada and earned their position in this country -- not having a government cheque mailed out to them before they had so much as earned their citizenship, as the recipients of Dhalla's bill would recieve.

It's hard to believe that Dhalla wasn't imagining a windfall of votes from immigrants whose parents are receiving an extra government cheque every month. Her bill is so incredibly cynical that it could only be born of sheer opportunism.

Of course, there are deeper problems with Dhalla's bill than simply paying these people a pension. There's something deeply wrong with the idea of admitting immigrants to Canada who are past retirement age unless they are capable of supporting themselves financially.

Cases where an individual is in immediate peril of being persecuted or killed by their state is another matter entirely. Admitting these people to Canada (regardless of age) and extending them financial aid if need be is the right thing to do. (Canada has no business to accept refugees only to live in poverty.)

But cases where an elderly individual is coming to Canada under no such state of peril is another matter altogether. If they are coming to Canada on their own, they'd better be able to support themselves. If they're being admitted under a family reunification program, their family had better be able to support them.

It's in the sense that Dhalla's bill spits on these basic principles that it truly represents Barry Cooper's politics of self-service. The Liberal party has already been bitten hard by the consequences of embracing these politics too closely. The Conservatives would do themselves -- and the country -- a disservice by following suit.

Fortunately, the Conservatives won't be embracing the politics of self-service, at least in the form of Ruby Dhalla. She's already announced that she won't be crossing the floor.

"The rumour mill is in overdrive again," Dhalla wrote in an email. "These people need to find a topic of discussion that doesn't include the name Ruby Dhalla."

The Liberals may not be so fortunate. If Michael Ignatieff can't right the Liberal ship, the party may be in search of a new leader soon. If Dhalla hasn't jumped to the NDP by that time, one can only wonder if she'll make every Liberal's worst nightmare come true.

Olympic Ceasefire a Nice, But Unfeasible, Idea

Taliban would stand to gain from spoiling Canada's Olympic party

As much as they are said to be a symbol of peace, the Olympics have actually had an uneasy relationship with war for much of the past century.

In 1936, the Summer Olympics were held in Berlin. At the time it was widely known that Nazi Germany was preparing for war. In 1980, the Soviet Union hosted the Summer Games while attempting to stamp out an Islamic uprising in Afghanistan. In 2002, Salt Lake City hosted the Winter Olympics while the United States was already fighting in Afghanistan, and preparing to invade Iraq.

In 1972, terrorists murdered Israeli athletes at the Summer Olympics in Munich. In 1996, the Atlanta games were marred by a bomb explosion that killed two people in Centennial Olympic Park.

Yet despite this uncomfortable relationship with various forms of armed conflict, the Olympic Ceasefire has become something of an Olympic tradition.

The organizers of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics seem to have embraced this particular notion, as an Olympic ceasfire resolution is set to be presented before the United Nations.

Certainly, nobody expects Canadian soldiers to lay down their arms so Taliban insurgents can have their way with them. But this is one time when Canada actually may be better off following the example of former US President George W Bush, who refused to seriously entertain the notion of an Olympic ceasefire in 2002.

In fact, Canadians can expect the Taliban to redouble their efforts to harm NATO soldiers (and Canadians in particular) during the 2010 Olympics, just as they did during the recent Afghan elections.

To cast a dark cloud over the Olympics would be nothing short of a propaganda triumph for the Taliban.

Some may recall the story of Mehboba Ahdyar, the Afghan sprinter who was scheduled to participate in the Beijing games. Despite the numerous social obstacles she had to overcome in order to compete in the Olympics -- obstacles not limited to the Taliban alone -- Ahdyar promised to be a powerful symbol of the progress being made in Afghanistan on issues such as women's rights.

Even though the Afghan Parliament frequently kowtows to the regressive attitudes of many Afghans -- various outrageous pieces of legislation have threatened to legalize rape within marriage, among other atrocities -- Ahdyar was already a symbol of how far Afghan women had come since the removal of the Taliban from power, as she had participated in and won several competitions in Afghanistan. Such competitions were entirely unheard of under the Taliban, who forbade women from participating in athletic competition.

Ahdyar's story, however, took a disappointing turn when she fled to Norway to seek asylum.

Ahdyar's story failed to turn out to be the feel-good tale about the advancement of women's rights in Afghanistan that it could have been. However, it continues to teach lessons about precisely how regressive the Taliban truly is, and why it cannot be allowed to re-assume power in Afghanistan.

Having already marred one Olympic story with death threats and intimidation, the Taliban will certainly be eager to seize the opportunity to further marr an event that stands for everything they stand against.

But as powerful as the symbolism of killing a mass of Canadian soldiers during the Vancouver Olympics could be for the Taliban, continuing to fight the Taliban in the name of democratic freedom and human rights would be a much, much stronger symbol for Canadians.

That alone makes the idea of an Olympic ceasefire a little absurd. As nice as the idea is, one simply doesn't extent courtesies to an enemy that they know the enemy will not return.

"Basically, I think it's ridiculous - if there were any sense of self-respect or realism, [Defence Minister Peter MacKay] would say, 'Don't be absurd,'" says University of Calgary Political Scientist Barry Cooper. "It's the sort of thing that only a bureaucrat would think was meaningful."

It's a nice enough idea in practice. But Canada stands to gain too much by continuing to fight the Taliban during the Olympics, and stands to lose too much by relenting.

Maybe That's What the Problem Is

Ontarians may just not object to McGuinty's culture of entitlement

Reporting on the aftermath of the Ontario Liberal party's recent by-election victory in St Paul's, Toronto Star columnist Royson James has phrased the matter rather succinctly.

"Either the St Paul's riding is incurably Liberal, as defeated Conservative Sue-Ann Levy says, or voters are content with life in Ontari-ari-ari-o," he muses.

And therein could lay the problem -- that Ontario voters have simply become accustomed to scandal to the point where they don't even blink when a seemingly unending flood of it bursts forth.

And indeed these scandals do seem unending.

Yet another contract tendering scandal has emerged, this time in London hospitals. According to accounts, up to $3 million in contracts were awarded untendered, at a cost to taxpayers of $1500 per day. According to these accounts, these contracts were issued to a single consultant.

To make matters worse, the contract was signed by a hospital administrator who lacked the authority to make the deal. The consultant in question was a former employee of the hospital.

"Giving an un-tendered contract to a former colleague — at first glance, it doesn't look very good," said Progressive Conservative party deputy leader Christine Elliott. "We need a full investigation."

"“We have had this culture fostered over six years by the [Dalton] McGuinty liberals. It’s ok not to tender a contract. It’s ok — nod, nod, wink, wink — to give contracts to your insider friends,” said provincial NDP leader Andrea Horwath.

Horwath echoed the words of Tory leader Tim Hudak in predicting yet more scandals to come.

“It’s really the tip of the iceberg,” she insisted. “There are all sorts of insider sweetheart deals. We haven’t even scratched the surface.”

"It’s outrageous. It’s just another example of the lack of oversight ... and insiders getting sweetheart deals," Horwath added.

Observers of Ontarian politics know by now that this episode isn't an isolated incident. It follows scandals at eHealth, the Ontario Lottery Gaming Corporation, and the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation, as well as complaints that Dalton McGuinty misled Queen's Park when he announced that he had paid a retainer to an investigating firm when no such retainer had been paid.

To date, Hudak and Horwath's prediction has unfolded as foretold. There's little reason to think it's going to stop any time soon.

So, if Royson James' assessment rings true, and Ontarian voters remain perfectly comfortable with Dalton McGuinty's government, it's pretty clear that there are very deep problems in Ontario.

As some Canadians may recall, the Liberal party vote in the 2004 federal election remained strong in Ontario despite widespread knowledge of the sponsorship scandal. While the specific scope of the scandal was not yet known to voters -- but would be in 2006 -- the nuts and bolts of the scandal itself were widely known.

Yet Ontario returned 75 Liberals to Ottawa. In 2006, even in the wake of full public knowledge of the scandal -- knowledge that was obtained over the objections of the Liberal party -- Ontario elected 54 Liberals, a majority of the seats in that province.

It may not be unfair to theorize that Ontarian voters are unusually tolerant of scandal. It seems that the politics of self-service -- the ugly handmaiden of what Barry Cooper would describe as the politics of public virtue -- may have taken root deeply in Ontario.

To make matters more disturbing yet, the politics of public virtue may have become deeply distorted in Ontario. One would expect that the politics of public virtue would have room within its enclave for honest, accountable, and responsible government -- government that doesn't allow its various agencies to run wild spending public monies, and doesn't mislead the legislature and cancel independent investigations.

Yet even amidst all of these shenanigans in Ontario, the Liberals were able to walk away with what many considered to be a key by-election in Toronto. If voters in St Paul's had taken a thoughtful appraisal of their government, one would have at least expected a closer race.

It's possible that this assessment may not be entirely fair. Dr Eric Hoskins may well have won the riding based on the strength of his own candidacy. But based on evaluations of the matter by Chris Selley, that doesn't seem entirely likely.

Perhaps voters in "Ontari-ari-ari-o" are simply very comfortable with millions of taxpayers dollars being handed out by people with no authority to do so without so much as a contract tendering.

Perhaps this is more exclusive to voters in St Paul's.

One way or the other, the matter bodes very poorly for Ontarian politics. Then again, perhaps Ontarians will surprise their fellow Canadians by throwing the derelict McGuinty government out in 2011.

The Great MisLeader?

McGuinty accused of misleading Queen's park, impeding access to information

Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak and NDP leader Andrea Horwath have gone after the throat of Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty by filing a complaint with the Office of the Speaker of the House accusing McGuinty of misleading both the public and Queen's Park.

At the heart of the matter is the Premier's claim that PriceWaterhouseCoopers had been hired to conduct an independent investigation of the spending scandals at eHealth. Instead, McGuinty cancelled the probe.

“Not only did Dalton McGuinty do nothing to stop the spending abuses at eHealth, he misled Ontarians when he said he had any interest in getting to the bottom of the scandal. It is clear that Ontarians cannot trust him to fix the culture of entitlement that he himself created,” said Hudak.

“He misled Ontarians,” he added. “It is clear that Ontarians cannot trust him to fix the culture of entitlement that he himself created.”

If this weren't bad enough, today the NDP claimed that McGuinty's office was impeding Access to Information requests.

According to the NDP, McGuinty's office staff delayed the release of thousands of pages of Ontario Lottery Gaming Corporation financial records dealing with expense claims.

"This appears to be political interference of the highest order, with direct connection right back to the premier's office," Horwath said. "Clearly, [McGuinty] and his office were desperately, desperately trying to manage their way out of yet another expense scandal."

The source of the most recent accusation practically comes out of the mouth of Kelly McDougald, the fired CEO of the OLGC, who is claiming she was scapegoated and has launched a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the government of Ontario.

"The Minister [Finance Minister Dwight Duncan] advised ...that the government could not delay the release of the records any further," McDougald alleged in her statement of claim.

"It certainly paints a very disturbing picture about the role of the finance minister and the deputy chief of staff to the premier in intervening in the FOI process," said Hudak.

The problem, according to Horwath, is that this is very much becoming the modus operandi of McGuinty's government. "It's quite clear from the documents from Ms McDougald ... that the premiers' office and the minister's office made every effort possible to hold back the information," she announced. "It's really obvious that although the premier talks about transparency and accountability, what comes out of his actions is exactly the opposite."

Horwath couldn't have said it any better -- if the events themselves hadn't already spoken loud and clear.

McGuinty promises an independent investigation into the eHealth scandal, and even claims his government has paid a retainer to a high-profile investigating agency -- then cancels the investigation. McGuinty's staff, knowing full well that the opposition is examining government documents for signs of further scandal, impede access to information.

If the "summer of scandal" (as Hudak has cleverly dubbed it) is making McGuinty's government look more and more like Paul Martin's disgraced government, that isn't coincidental.

Those who have followed recent writings by Barry Cooper may recognize a similarity between McGuinty's obstruction of Access to Iformation and a senior government bureaucrat's attempts to prevent the release of the minutes from a Liberal cabinet meeting in which "strengthening the Liberal party in Quebec" should be a priority of the federal government.

This is characteristic of the kind of scandal that emerges in a government where the culture of self-service and its close friend, the culture of entitlement, have begun to run rampant.

Dalton McGuinty has some serious questions to answer. He needs to start by firing his Health Minister, David Caplan, and his Finance Minister. Then he needs to seriously consider resigning as Premier.


From the archives:

September 1, 2009 - "It's the Regime, Dalton"

Elizabeth May and the Politics of Self-Service

Lizzie May helps herself to party funding in nomination contest

More trouble seems to lie ahead for Elizabeth May in her quest to become the Green Party candidate in Saanich-Gulf Islands.

Yesterday May's challenger, Stuart Hertzog, asked Elections Canada to investigate a transfer of up to $62,000 to that riding's Green Party riding association. According to Hertzog, the transfer was made contingent on the riding choosing Elizabeth May as its candidate, and giving control of the money to John Fryer, May's campaign manager.

For her own part, May doesn't think it's a terribly big deal.

"It's a minor matter," May said. "Once he understands that he's got the wrong end of the stick on this, he'll be quite satisfied."

The funds are connected to a Green party scheme to enact it's "#1 priority" of getting Elizabeth May elected.

"That's a reasonable priority for a party that wants to move beyond being a movement," May explained, and suggested that Hertzog just isn't getting with the program.

"I think he actually doesn't think Greens should aspire to be politically relevant," she suggested. "I don't think we have any place in the political arena if we're not serious about being in the House of Commons."

According to Hertzog, however, his objection isn't stemmed from any belief that the party should remain irrelevant, but that party nominations should be decided fairly -- in the absense of interference from the party executive.

"Elizabeth May has a funded campaign she can use to win the nomination," Hertzog said. "The funding has come from the party specifically for her to win the nomination and then the candidacy."

Apparently, funds have been released to the riding association -- $50,000 promised by the Green Party federal council and $12,000 donated by other ridings (at the federal council's request), but Fryer hasn't been granted signing authority for the money.

Yet.

Interestingly enough, May hasn't yet won the nomination for Saanich-Gulf Islands. So if those paying attention to this particular episode suspected that the $62,000 could be something of a bribe for the riding association. One may even wonder what the federal council would do should the riding association decide not to select May as their candidate.

This particular episode could be viewed as what takes place when a political party institutes what Barry Cooper describes as the politics of public virtue within its own organization, and then allows it to be poluted by the politics of self-service.

As the leader of the Green party, Elizabeth May has decided that she's entitled to help herself to party funds in order to conduct her relentless quest to get herself elected to the House of Commons.

In May's mind, getting herself elected is the most important thing for her party -- perhaps even the only thing that truly matters. And in order to do that, she's willing to divert tens of thousands of dollars in party funds to the riding association she's chosen to run for even before she's been selected as the candidate.

Whether Elizabeth May wants to admit it or not, that is much more than a "minor matter". Based on the optics of it alone -- let alone questions about the party's priorities -- this particular matter should be setting off alarm bells in the minds of many Green party members.


Other bloggers writing about this topic:

Mark Kersten - "The Cost of Shifting Priorities"

A View From Science - "Can May Win?"

It's the Regime, Dalton

Regime change overdue in Ontario

If Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty were beginning to look an awful lot like former Prime Minister Paul Martin, it isn't simply because each is at the head of a seemingly well-entrenched Liberal government.

When it comes to the undeniable ability of each man's government to rack up considerable political standard, one could easily be forgiven for having trouble telling the two apart.

The emerging story of the Dalton McGuinty government appears to be rather similar to the story of the fall of the Paul Martin government. Like the latter, the former is unlikely to have an entirely happy ending.

Meanwhile, if Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak is beginning to look an awful lot like former Opposition Leader Stephen Harper (who, it becomes more and more apparent month by month, was actually a very different entity than Prime Minister Stephen Harper), it isn't simply because each has been offered a delectable meal of political scandal by the governments they oppose. It isn't only because each man clearly intends to feast.

Hudak, as some may recall, has been described by some as a potential conservative saviour. Harper came to the leadership of the Conservative party amidst similar sentiments.

Each man, however, seems to be encountering a government entrenched within a political regime that has become prone to scandal. Accordingly, the challenge each man faces -- one that Harper has begun to meet, and that Hudak must yet face -- is nothing less than changing the institutional political culture of their respective (in Harper's case) and prospective (in Hudak's case) state.

In It's the Regime, Stupid! Barry Cooper theorizes that the political regime of any country -- which he defines as the common notions of who is entitled to govern, to what ends, and by what means -- tends to centre around the economic centre of any particular state.

Cooper's argument, as it pertains to the federal government, is that the economic power of the west has drawn Canada's political regime into the influence of western values.

In the book, he surmises that the ultimate significance of Stephen Harper's tenure of Prime Minister is his slow diversion of Canadian governance from the politics of public virtue and toward more pragmatic ends and means.

In Cooper's account, this was as much out of necessity as out of any yearning by Canadians for a different style of governance. He notes that the sponsorship scandal represented the nadir of the politics of public virtue -- as he argues was actually ironically introduced to Canadian government by John Diefenbaker.

Cooper muses that the sponsorship scandal represented in utmost clarity the extent to which the politics of self service had dribbled into the politics of public virtue. Among the other sponsorship scandal-related episodes he focuses on is a particularly telling episode in which a high-ranking public servant -- an employee of the state -- attempted to withhold the minutes of a cabinet meeting from the Gomery Commission in which those present had suggested that strengthening the Liberal party in Quebec should be a primary goal of the federal government in its fight against Quebec separatism.

The infection of the politics of public virtue by the politics of self service had allowed the government of the day to dress up their petty partisan interests as the interests of the state itself.

Cooper further surmises that this infection -- which he suggests is nearly inevitable -- allows partisan-minded civil servants to come to view themselves as entitled to raid the state for their own benefit. They begin to view themselves as entitled to their entitlements.

This "culture of entitlement", Cooper argues, is very much the political culture of the politics of self service.

Those who paid attention to the events of 2004-2006 in Canadian politics are well aware of what transpired during that period of time. Rumblings about the corrupt nature of the sponsorship program first began in 2000, when it was first discovered that Alfonso Gagliano had been awarding sponsorship contracts to companies that subcontracted printing to his son's company. It was a tiny -- and seemingly trivial -- taste of things to come.

In 2002, the ugly truth slowly began to emerge. By 2004, Canadians had a disturbing picture of what was transpiring within that program. An election fought in that year returned Paul Martin's Liberal government not with the overwhelming majority Martin had expected to win, but a minority government.

By 2005, Justice John Gomery finally decided that Canadians were entitled to the full picture, and lifted the media blackout on his Commission's proceedings. Canadians finally got the full picture, and it was decidedly not a pretty one.

The sponsorship scandal should have been destructive enough to Martin's Liberal government. But it took an RCMP investigation into leaks regarding Income Trust taxation policy to turn the tide.

Many particularly partisan Liberals continue to complain that the RCMP was blatantly interfering in the election taking place at that time. But they forget that Martin's Finance Minister, Ralph Goodale, declined to investigate the leaks in question, and thus made the RCMP's involvement necessary.

If one thing can be said about Dalton McGuinty, he is doing a much better job of addressing the political sins of his government.

McGuinty's Finance Minister Dwight Duncan recently fired Ontario Lottery Gaming Corporation CEO Kelly McDougald amidst the resignations of its entire board of directors. At issue were findings that OLGC board members had used OLG expense accounts for their own personal benefit, including for golf club fees and bar tabs.

This is only the most recent scandal involving the OLGC. In past concerns have been voiced about how the OLGC investigates fraudulent winnings, and the reported use of subliminal messaging in slot machines in Provincially-operated Casinos.

The Ontario government had previously fired Duncan Brown for the clearly inept discharge of his duties.

However, it now seems that the problems at the OLGC have certainly gone deeper than its CEO, and possibly even deeper than its Board of Directors.

Like Martin, McGuinty's latest troubles come hot on the heels of the eHealth scandal, one that involved some of McGuinty's aides. At the centre of the scandal was hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts issued untendered and without sufficient documentation.

Although McGuinty promptly issued new directives for the management of public contracts, his government shut down an independent investigation of the matter.

When one looks into the past troubles with the OLGC, however, one finds the same individual as at the heart of the eHealth Scandal: then-Minister responsible for the OLGC and current Health Minister David Caplan.

The political regime in Ontario has become so bereft of accountability that a Minister who has proven to be utterly inept at overseeing the OLGC not only did not face any consequences for that failure, but actually received a considerable promotion.

This is the challenge that Tim Hudak must face. If scandals continue to emerge, and continue to be addressed as the eHealth scandal has, defeating Dalton McGunity in the next provincial election will not be Hudak's greatest challenge.

Hudak's greatest challenge will be in turning Ontario away from the evidently polluted politics of public virtue that has led to these scandals, and back toward Cooper's described politics of pragmatic ends and means.

Tim Hudak's challenge will be to change the Ontarian regime. With no newly emerging centre of the Ontarian economy, Hudak's work will be cut out for him. Then again, Dalton McGuinty may have enough bullets left in his gun to shoot himself in the foot until his government bleeds to death.