Life in Canada

Only months ago, the recently retired CSEC commissioner, Justice Robert Decary, stated in his final report that he had uncovered records suggesting some of CSEC's spying activities "may have been directed at Canadians, contrary to law."

The retired justice said the CSEC records were so unclear or incomplete that he was unable to determine whether the agency had been operating legally.

Decary's predecessor, Justice Charles Gonthier, filed the same complaint about incomplete or missing records in his day, which forced him to report in a similar fashion that he could not determine if CSEC had been breaking the law.Gonthier also alluded to a CSEC operation in 2006 that he suggested may have been illegal.

The head of CSEC at the time, John Adams, recently told CBC News that, as a result of that discovery, "I shut the place down for a while."However, intelligence experts have told CBC News that the oversight problems at CSEC are much deeper than poor record-keeping.

They say successive commissioners have simply lacked both the resources and the legal mandate to conduct meaningful oversight.

The current commissioner, Judge Jean-Pierre Plouffe, operates with a staff of 11, about half of whom actually work on investigations, largely to ensure CSEC isn't abusing its powers by spying on Canadians.
hugh-segal-250-rtris7f

Conservative Senator Hugh Segal: "The notion that a group of 11 might be able to provide proper oversight is more like a prayer than any kind of constructive statement of fact." (Reuters)

But CSEC employs over 2,000 people who covertly collect masses of information recently described as more data per day than all the country's banking transactions combined.

As Segal says, the result is obvious: "When there are thousands of people at CSEC processing millions of messages every day of all kinds, the notion that a group of 11 might be able to provide proper oversight is more like a prayer than any kind of constructive statement of fact."

Not exactly as written

Of course, even if a commissioner did discover something seriously amiss at the electronic eavesdropping agency, there is a chance Canadians would never know.

Here's how the system works: a typical Canadian veneer
Suppose the commissioner's oversight sleuths discover that CSEC is illegally intercepting phone calls and hacking into the computers of certain Canadians.

The oversight commissioner is required to report his discovery in a top secret report to the defence minister.

That happens to be the same minister responsible for CSEC, and from whom the agency gets its government direction.It is also the minister who would be at the centre of any CSEC scandal if news of this breach leaked out.If the minister refuses to expose his own agency's wrongdoing, the oversight commissioner can try to use his annual report to Parliament to do that.

But a funny thing happens on the way to Parliament.

First, CSEC gets to censor the entire report. Then it goes back to the same defence minister.

The minister is required to present the sanitized version of the report to Parliament, but has no obligation to mention it is not exactly as originally written.

Former CSEC chief Adams admits the agency is "very, very biased towards the less the public knows the better."

He points out that in the spying business, opening an agency's operations to full public scrutiny "would be kind of like unilateral disarmament, because if Canadians know everything CSEC can and can't do, then everyone else will too."

But as the leaked Snowden documents continue to force back the curtains at CSEC, Adams says it is time to find a better way to reassure Canadians about what they are doing.

"I think a knowledgeable Canadian is going to be much easier to deal with," he says.

If the public reaction to the Snowden revelations is any indication, Canadians are all ears.

The cowardly government having left town, as it were, in a hail of bullets — one day before the post office announced it is ending home delivery — we are left to marvel at the prospect of a government, and a prime minister, who are quite literally hiding out from the public.

Not only was the House of Commons conveniently shuttered, but neither the minister responsible, Lisa Raitt, nor any Canada Post executives were on hand to answer questions regarding this drastic reduction in public services. But then, in this they were only following the example set by the prime minister, who has for months avoided answering questions about the scandal that is slowly destroying his government.

He does not answer the questions put to him in Parliament — simple questions of fact, on matters he would be in a position to know about, that one would think could be dispatched with a quick yes or no — when he chooses even to pretend to. He does not hold news conferences, in any but the most perfunctory sense. He does not consent to interviews, except under the tightest of conditions, and with the friendliest of interviewers.

He does not, because he dares not: because the story he has been telling — of a conspiracy among virtually everyone around him to dispose of a matter in which he had previously taken a great interest, in a way that he now insists he would have prevented had they not, all of them, lied and kept him in the dark — is not credible. It is indeed an open question whether he will consent to the sort of in-depth year-end interviews that prime ministers traditionally conduct. How can he?

If the Senate scandal has had such legs, then, it is because so much of the behaviour it describes, the secrecy and deception and control from the top, has been everywhere replicated in the government’s handling of the fallout. What began as a secret deal to buy a senator’s silence has progressed through several additional layers of deception: the bogus story about Senator Mike Duffy repaying his own bogus expenses, papered over with a bogus money trail; the tampering with the Deloitte audit; the whitewashing of the Senate committee report; the series of ever more preposterous stories, after the story broke, about what Senator Duffy and Nigel Wright were up to, and whether they were fine, upstanding public servants or misguided patriots or deceitful criminals; the denials of involvement or knowledge, including to the police, by several of the principals, in direct conflict with the known facts; the mysterious mass deletion of emails by Benjamin Perrin, who may or may not have been the prime minister’s lawyer, followed by their even more mysterious discovery; the stonewalling and evasions throughout. I may have missed a stage, but I believe we are now at the coverup of the coverup of the coverup.

But in the days before Parliament rose, as the government frantically attempted to close off every line of inquiry raised by the publication of an RCMP affidavit, what was previously denial and obfuscation reached the level of outright obstruction. Only, whether out of desperation or contempt or sheer cluelessness, they are no longer bothering even to conceal what they are up to.

I refer to the decision by the Tory-controlled Senate internal economy committee to refuse to call as witnesses any of those alleged to have taken part in the audit tampering. The committee — which, after all, had commissioned the audit in the first place — had earlier made a show of investigating the matter, hearing testimony from those responsible for conducting the audit that confirmed, at a minimum, there had indeed been highly improper inquiries made by a senior partner at the firm, Michael Runia.

According to the RCMP affidavit, it was Runia, the auditor of record for the Conservative party’s fundraising arm, whom Senator Irving Gerstein, its chairman, had approached to see if he could discover what the audit would report — one of several avenues that seem to have been pursued to block, influence or even shut down the audit. Yet when the motion was put to call Runia as a witness, the Tory majority voted it down — as, later, did the Tory majority in the Senate at large.

This astonishing performance was followed, in the days after, by the Senate Speaker’s rejection of a Liberal motion of privilege with regard to the documented interference by the Prime Minister’s Office in Senate business; by Senator Gerstein’s ruling, as chair of the Senate Finance committee, that a motion calling upon him to step down while the RCMP investigation continues was out of order; and by the apparent blocking of an opposition motion in the Commons Ethics committee to take up the matter of the disappearing emails.

As ever, we are confronted with the utter inability of our democratic institutions to hold those in power to account. Nor is this confined to the Senate mess. Debates in Parliament are now routinely cut short by “time allocation.” Committees now routinely meet in camera. The Parliamentary Budget Office is reduced to filing access to information requests for the departmental data to which it is statutorily entitled. The list goes on.

Ottawa is increasingly a town in lockdown — as often as not with all-party support. MPs of all parties have resisted having their expenses either audited or disclosed. All parties agreed to a plan to compel Hill staffers to sign lifetime gag orders (though the bad publicity may force a rethink), just as all parties colluded this spring to prevent Mark Warawa and other MPs from speaking their mind in Parliament. The culture of secrecy and control runs deep, and there seems no way to break out of it.

Here’s a ba humbug statistic heading into the holiday season: Employment growth in Canada is at its slowest pace (excluding the recession) in more than a decade.

BMO Capital Markets crunched the numbers this week and came up with what it says “isn’t exactly encouraging” results for job creation in this country.

While 6.9 per cent unemployment is better than earlier this year, only 148,000 jobs have been created between January and November, “the weakest in a non-recession years since 2001,” according to BMO economist Benjamin Reitzes.
He notes employment is up only 1 per cent in November compared to the same time last year, and called the creation of 21,600 jobs last month “unspectacular.”

“This is hardly the stuff of a firm underlying economy,” says Reitzes.

United Steelworkers economist Erin Weir points out that most of the jobs created last month were part time or self-employed Canadians.

“The longer-term trend is still that Canadian employers are creating barely enough jobs to keep pace with population growth,” says Weir.

The Bank of Canada recently pared back its economic growth forecast for this year and next and has stopped talking about hiking the benchmark interest rate, which has been stuck at the same level since September 2010. Instead, it’s taking a wait-and-see approach and some economist say rates could fall further.

That pessimistic view comes despite the latest gross domestic product figures showing Canada’s economy grew at the fastest pace in two years in the third quarter.

While the numbers were seen as encouraging, economists caution the pickup was expected after weak summer, which included the Alberta floods and a construction strike in Quebec.

Still, there are two ways of looking at Canada’s economic growth these days. On one hand, economists see steady improvements, driven in part by a recovering U.S. economy. Others point to lower consumer and business confidence that could curb spending.

TD Bank recently described corporate Canada as being “in a slump,” posting less profit over the past year and a half, which is weighing on economic growth and job creation across the country.

A recent report from Ernst & Young says corporate Canada is also more cautious about doing mergers and acquisitions in today’s economy than its counterparts in the U.S. It says Canadian companies “seem to be waiting for more favourable economic conditions, for the right deal or, in some cases, for someone else to make the first move.” Now where have I seen that before?

However, economists at the Conference Board of Canada are more optimistic about the country’s economic growth, with forecasts above the Bank of Canada. In a recent report, the Conference Board forecast 2.4 per cent economic growth in 2014 and 2.6 per cent in 2014, up from 1.8 per cent in 2013. That compares to the Bank of Canada’s predictions of 1.6 per cent this year and 2.3 per cent in 2014, which were lowered this summer from previous forecasts of 1.8 per cent and 2.7 per cent.

“Better times are in store over the next two years,” the Conference Board said, citing improved outlooks in the U.S. and the global economy. This kind of mixed view won’t do much for job creation. People looking for a new job will likely latch on to the more positive take on Canada’s economy, while those holding jobs they don’t like could use the pessimistic view as an excuse to stay put, for now. The rest is up to Canada’s employers.

The key to understanding Canada Post's latest strategic masterstroke - henceforth, the post office will charge you nearly twice as much to deliver a letter half the way - is to understand the logic of monopoly. Only in a world entirely insulated from competitive reality would the appropriate response to declining demand be ... higher prices and worse service. Or more commonly known as 'shooting oneself in the foot'

But then, this has been the post office's strategy all along. My research tells me for the last 40-odd years Canada Post's business plan has amounted to charging more and more for less and less. Long before email or electronic funds transfer or any of the other things the corporation blames for its woes, the post office was using the brief intervals between strikes to cut service.

First Saturday deliveries were discontinued. Then next-day service became day-after-next, redefining at a stroke a half-billion late letters every year as "on time."

At length home delivery was discontinued altogether on rural routes in favour of community mailboxes - an innovation to which urban customers are now to be introduced. The price of a stamp, meanwhile, is to jump to a dollar - two and a half times, after inflation, what it cost in 1981, when it still made house calls. The day is not far off when, for $5, the post office will refuse to deliver your letter at all. Such is the logic of monopoly.

And yet all the while it was withdrawing service from wider and wider swaths of the country the corporation was insisting on maintaining its "exclusive privilege" in first-class mail - under the Canada Post Corporation Act, it is illegal for anyone but the post office to deliver a letter for less than three times the price of a stamp - on the grounds that it would otherwise be unable to provide universal service.

As loopy as that sounds, it still has its adherents. That, too, is the logic of monopoly: The less the service, the more attached people become to what remains. Alreadyrural customers are lecturing their urban cousins on the delights of community mailboxes. ("You get to meet your neighbours!") For without anything to compare it to, people cannot imagine how it could be better - though they are easily persuaded it could be worse.

Hence the political debate now shaping up, between the Conservatives, who support the cuts based on the need to "protect the taxpayer" - Canada Post has parlayed its statutory monopoly into projected losses of near $1 billion - while the opposition demands that they be reversed, in the name of protecting consumers. The possibility that the interests of both might be served does not seem to occur to either, because neither can conceive of a world outside the monopoly: a world in which anyone other than Canada Post is allowed to carry the mail.

But that alternative must surely now be inescapable. The question before us is not whether to "save home delivery" or "save Canada Post." That is a false choice, which only the logic of monopoly forces upon us. Step outside its confines, and the question is "who can offer the best service to postal users at the lowest cost?" To which the answer is: Open it up to competition and let's see.

Indeed, step outside Canada, if you dare to compare and you find that is increasingly the norm. Across Europe, under the aegis of the single-market directive, the old state postal monopolies are being cracked open, and have been transformed into dynamic international competitors.

Yet in Canada, we remain inert, seemingly helpless to do anything but watch as Canada Post grinds slowly and expensively to a halt. And as ever, the obstacle remains the "universal" service mandate. Private competitors, it is asserted with utter conviction, would refuse to serve the countryside. They'd undercut Canada Post on urban routes, leaving the post office with the costlier rural routes.

That would certainly be true - if the private carriers were obliged, as Canada Post is now, to charge the same price for a letter anywhere in the country, no matter where it goes or how much it costs to get it there. But this is an absurd restriction, required of no other good or service, public or private. We do not pay the same for a phone call, regardless of duration, distance or time of day. Neither is it expected that the price of a house should be the same in the country as it is in the city. Why should it be so for a letter? Why has it been so?

Because it was useful. Politicians liked it, because it allowed them to subsidize rural constituents out of the prices paid by those in the cities. And the post office liked it, because it helped sustain the case for monopoly. But what was previously merely inefficient and unjust is now intolerable. The "exclusive privilege" has got to go, which means so must the uniform postage rate, and the rest of the logic of monopoly.

The issue, in short, that ought to concern us is not what becomes of Canada Post, but what is the best alternative for the people it serves; not whether Canada Post pulls out of the mail delivery business, but whether others are allowed to get in.

Or will we continue to protect it from competition on a service it refuses to provide?

The Vatican has refused to provide information requested by the United Nations on the alleged sexual abuse of children by priests, nuns or monks.

The Vatican said the cases were the responsibility of the judicial systems of countries where abuse took place.

The UK National Secular Society accused the Vatican of hiding behind legal technicalities.

On his appointment in March, Pope Francis said dealing with sex abuse was vital for the Church's credibility.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child put a wide-ranging questionnaire to the Holy See - the city state's diplomatic entity - last July, asking for detailed information about the particulars of all sexual abuse cases notified to the Vatican since 1995.

The questions included whether priests, nuns and monks guilty of sexual crime were allowed to remain in contact with children, what legal action had been taken against them, whether the Church required clergy to report abuse to secular authorities and whether complainants were silenced.

In its response, the Holy See insisted that it was "separate and distinct" from the Roman Catholic Church, and that it was not its practice to disclose information about the religious discipline of clergy unless specifically requested to by the authorities in the country where they were serving.

It stressed that it had changed the criteria for choosing priests and revised Church law to ensure clergy were properly disciplined.
'Filth'

The National Secular Society criticized the Holy See's response, insisting that it operated a "firm command and control structure over the worldwide Church".

Vatican officials are due to be questioned about child abuse, among other issues, by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in January.

After taking office, Pope Francis said the Vatican needed "to act decisively as far as cases of sexual abuse are concerned, promoting, above all, measures to protect minors, help for those who have suffered such violence in the past (and) the necessary procedures against those who are guilty".

His predecessor, Benedict XVI, had promised to rid his Church of the "filth" of clerical sex abuse.

Observers said he went further than ever before in tackling the legacy of abuse, though critics said that was not far enough, accusing him of failing to protect children from pedophile priests.