Life in Canada

OTTAWA - Canada's trade deficit with the world expanded to $1.6 billion in June, in a sign of just how slow the economy grew in the second quarter.

The trade deficit for the month, hit by a drop in energy and automotive exports, compared with a $1-billion deficit in May, Statistics Canada reported Thursday.

"Problems facing Canadian exporters have clearly been too much: a persistently strong Canadian dollar, weak U.S. demand, and Japanese supply disruptions, to name a few," "The export sector is clearly in no position to take on the responsibility of being the major driver of growth going forward and it appears that economic growth in the coming quarters could be weaker than originally anticipated.

Statistics Canada said merchandise exports fell 1.7 per cent in June, while imports were off 0.2 per cent.

"Given the recent financial turmoil hammering global markets in recent weeks, the Bank of Canada is likely to view today's news as additional support to keep monetary policy accommodative for an extended period of time,"

The trade surplus with the United States slipped to $3.6 billion in June from $3.7 billion in May and the trade deficit with countries other than the United States grew to a record $5.2 billion in June from $4.8 billion in May.

Exports fell to $36.5 billion, while merchandise imports fell to $38 billion.

Exports to the United States declined 2.4 per cent to $26.5 billion, while imports fell 2.3 per cent to $22.8 billion.

Have I got this right, 'so we export energy and import merchandise. It sounds like we've managed to export one more thing as well: the value-added jobs that make the economy run.' Way to go, free-traders! At this rate, we'll be a Third World country in no time.

Peter Hall, chief economist for Export and Development Canada, noted there were a number of disruptions in the first half of the year for Canadian exports, including those caused by the Japanese earthquake and tsunami's effect on the automotive sector.

"So some of the slowdown in momentum that we're seeing at the moment is not a demand problem, it is a supply problem," However Hall said he will be watching carefully to see if the economy does indeed rebound from the factors that constrained growth in the first half of the year or if the financial chaos forces consumers and businesses to stop spending in the back end of 2011.

"We're really at a point of decision at the moment. It is a point of consumer and business decision, what are they actually going to do,"
"Will they lose more confidence or will they see through this."

Imports from countries other than the United States for the month increased 3.1 per cent to a record high of $15.2 billion. Exports to countries other than the United States edged up 0.3 per cent to $10 billion.

Exports of energy products fell 5.1 per cent to $8.7 billion, as both volume and prices dropped. Automotive exports fell 5.3 per cent to $4.5 billion.

Shipments of agricultural and fishing products declined 2.3 per cent to $3.2 billion.

Industrial goods and materials exports increased 0.9 per cent to $9.5 billion on the strength of metals, alloys and chemicals, plastics and fertilizers. The increases were partly offset by reduced exports of metal ores, mainly nickel ores, concentrates and scrap.

Energy imports declined 11.7 per cent to $4.2 billion, with both volumes and prices down. Imports of industrial goods and materials declined 0.5 per cent to $8.2 billion.

Machinery and equipment imports rose for a fourth consecutive month, rising 2.5 per cent to $10.6 billion.

Imports of other consumer goods increased 2.1 per cent to $5.0 billion driven mainly by clothing and shows.

For the past decade, Canada’s GHG emission targets were framed by the Kyoto Protocol, in which Canada committed to a 6% reduction in emissions by 2012 relative to 1990 levels (590 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or Mt CO2e). In spite of signing this treaty and its ratification through Parliament in 2002, Canada has continued to increase emissions. A legacy for our Grandchildren for sure..

In 2009, Canada’s 690 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Mt CO2e) emissions were 17% higher than 1990 levels. But using 2009 makes us look better than we are due to the impact of the recession. In 2008 emissions (734 Mt) were 24% higher; in 2007 (748 Mt), 27% higher.

Having abandoned responsibility for adhering to the Kyoto Protocol, Canada signed on to a Kyoto replacement, scandalously cobbled together in Copenhagen in 2009. Under this new deal, our commitment is the same as the US, to reduce GHG emissions to 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 (a new target of 607 Mt).

Currently, there is a wide gap between this commitment and emissions reduction planning from federal and provincial governments. A new report from Environment Canada, Canada’s Emission Trends, estimates that existing government actions are expected to reduce GHG emissions by about one-quarter of the reductions in GHG emissions needed to meet the 2020 target. Under business-as-usual conditions, emissions will soar to 850 Mt in 2020; with existing government actions, only to 785 Mt.

Alas, even this commitment is cast under doubt by a new report from the National Roundtable on the Environment and Economy, one of those distinguished panels the feds love to appoint. They look backward and evaluate programs implemented for their effectiveness and find that Canada’s actions achieved only about half of what had been predicted (good synopsis here).

One wonders why the feds even bother issuing reports like Canada’s Emission Trends when they show off a government that is failing to move on its own inadequate targets. It is like a thumbing of the nose to the rest of the world: “sure, we’ll sign yer dang treaty but don’t expect us to actually implement anything.”

But I’m glad the report is out because one useful thing it does is break down emissions by industrial category, rather than the more opaque “sources of emissions” in the Kyoto accounting system. We learn that (surprise, surprise) the oil and gas industry will account for 46 Mt (86%) of Canada’s anticipated increase in emissions between 2005 and 2020. It also shows the rise of the oil sands as a source of GHG emissions. Emissions from the oil sands are anticipated to triple to 92 Mt in 2020 relative to 30 Mt in 2005 (this is somewhat offset by a drop conventional oil production).

Will the newer Chinese oil-sands owners be able to reverse the Canadian Governments upward trends of GHG..What do you think?

And these are only the emissions from getting the gunk out of the ground and any processing in Canada; emissions from burning those fossil fuels in the US are several times larger, but those count in the US inventory.

Bottom line: Canada cannot achieve its Copenhagen commitment until it takes on the oil and gas industry and compels emission reductions by putting a moratorium on new development, and phasing out the existing industry. As long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister, such action is unthinkable (though please surprise me, Steve). So Canada’s reputation for not living up to its international commitments will continue to worsen, and any announcements to the contrary should be captured and sequestered underground where they hopefully will not leak back to the surface.

The weakening global economy is bad news for Canadian trade, and when the latest statistics are released Thursday 11th August they are likely to show the country’s trade deficit getting worse.

Canada started the year with a promising trade surplus, buoyed by rising oil prices. But the months of April, May and June have seen a persistent, and growing, deficit, with imports outstripping exports.

Economists estimate the trade deficit will cut three or four percentage points off overall economic growth in the second quarter. While the Bank of Canada predicts overall gross domestic product growth of 1.5 per cent in April-June period, other forecasts see less than 1 per cent.

With oil prices declining and last week’s harrowing stock market swoon highlighting the uncertain economic picture, the outlook for commodity-driven Canadian trade is darkening.

“The global economy is losing momentum,” said David Madani of Capital Economics in Toronto. “What we’re seeing in the financial markets is a reflection of that reality.”

Capital Economics, like some other firms, forecasts lower commodity prices, which will cut into the value of Canadian exports such as oil and coal. Though it doesn’t believe the United States will suffer a double-dip recession, the trade picture is likely to remain difficult for some time because of persistent weakness in the U.S. economy as consumers and governments battle with debt.

“In a world that’s deleveraging, economic growth is hard to come by,” Mr. Madani said. “Markets are coming to that cold hard reality.”

U.S. trade stats are also due Thursday. A deficit of $48-billion (U.S.) is predicted by economists for June, an improvement from May as the lower U.S. dollar helps lower prices for American goods abroad. (China, on Wednesday, is expected to report a $27-billion trade surplus for June.)

The negative outlook for Canadian trade is exacerbated by several factors. A strong Canadian dollar is helping the import picture but hurts the situation for exporters. But falling oil prices are the single biggest negative. After climbing from last September through April to about $115 a barrel, oil steadily slid before spiking lower in the past week, alongside equity markets.

Oil exports in 2010 were $52-billion (Canadian), the country’s biggest single product, accounting for one-eighth of all of Canada’s merchandise trade exports. The commodity exceeds the value of all of Canada’s exports to the United Kingdom, China, Japan, Mexico and Germany, the country’s five largest trading partners after the U.S.

Even as oil slips, Canadian trade fits into the theme of a split between the economy in Western Canada compared with the East.

At Port Metro Vancouver, Canada’s busiest trading hub, new statistics highlight that strong export picture, bolstered by gains in commodities such as lumber from British Columbia and Saskatchewan potash to Asia.

At facilities on the Burrard Inlet in Vancouver and elsewhere in the Lower Mainland, activity is as busy as ever. Container traffic is set to reach another record this year, led by a 12-per-cent gain in full boxes carrying Canadian exports (compared with a 1-per-cent gain in imported containers).

Cargo stats, measured by tonnage, show exports up 2 per cent and imports down 4 per cent.

“We’re seeing the East-West difference of the economy in Canada,” said Robin Silvester, chief executive officer of Port Metro Vancouver, which is seeking to expand and sees strong long-term positive trends.

“We’re much more bullish than you would infer from the stock market.”

The B.C. premier promised that rioters will be brought to justice. But that won’t happen.

In the wake of Vancouver’s riots, B.C.’s populist Premier Christy Clark was quick to read the public pulse. “We will hold you responsible,” she said the morning after the mayhem. “You will not be able to hide behind your hoodie or your bandana.” A special team of experienced prosecutors, she said, would work with police to ensure swift, severe punishments for rioters—jail time, she made clear, sounding more like an Old West sheriff. The public roared its approval. The riots touched a raw nerve in Vancouver, where 19 of every 20 residents want the troublemakers prosecuted to the full extent of the law, according to a new poll by Angus Reid.

The reality of prosecuting the mess, however, will soon sink in. The premier is “out of touch with how our courts are operating,” Vancouver criminal defense lawyer Jason Tarnów tells Maclean’s. There is “no way” riot cases will get preferential treatment just because politicians are asking for it; that would be unconstitutional. Rioters will be processed by a justice system hobbled by judge, sheriff and prosecutorial shortages and a legal-aid system that no longer meets even basic needs, according to a recent report. “Justice will not be swift,” adds criminologist Robert Gordon, of Simon Fraser University. “This will be a long, drawn-out process.”

A week before the riot in fact, five Vancouver trials were ordered shut down after judges deemed courtrooms unsafe to proceed due to a shortage of sheriffs. More than 2,000 criminal cases, meanwhile, are at risk of being quashed over delays. In the past year, a range of cases, from drunk driving to drug dealing have been tossed because it took up to two years to get to trial. “It takes 12 to 18 months to get a single-day trial in Vancouver right now,” says criminal lawyer Michael Shapray. “What will happen if police suddenly lay 300 criminal charges? How are you going to find the judges, sheriffs and prosecutors for this?” In an eye-opening report released last fall, the provincial court warned that 17 new judges must be hired just to bring B.C. back to 2005 levels and slow the backlog. Instead, B.C.’s spring budget approved cuts totalling $14.5 million to the judiciary, court services and prosecution services. (In the wake of the riots, funding for sheriffs was quietly restored.)

But the issue isn’t solely administrative. Although this will surely go down as the world’s best documented riot, some of the hundreds of thousands of photos submitted anonymously to police may be inadmissable as evidence. “In court, you have to be able to call a witness who took the video or picture,” says Shapray. The photo of the so-called “kissing couple” offers a perfect example of how deceptive a picture can be without video evidence or witness testimony. Was it staged? What were they doing? News sites buzzed until the couple was identified.

Further, we may be putting too much faith in facial-recognition software: it was designed to sift through well-lit, frontal, ID-quality images, not dark, grainy cellphone photos. Brock Anton, who became an Internet meme after bragging about his alleged exploits on Facebook—apparently admitting to burning a police car and assaulting an officer—may next become an example of someone who gets off scot free, unless credible witnesses come forward to testify, says Shapray.

Precedent offers little comfort to outraged citizens. Of the more than 1,100 people held over the Toronto G20 weekend last summer, only 317 were ever charged. And of those, 58 per cent had their charges withdrawn, stayed or dismissed. The rioters who took part in Vancouver’s violent anti-Olympic protest last year have all, meanwhile, escaped criminal punishment.

Still, some rioters are receiving punishment far worse than anything the courts might dole out for their crimes. Robert Snelgrove, 24, was captured on film walking out of Sears with a handful of face creams. The next day, the Coquitlam, B.C., native—then fully sober and utterly mortified—turned himself in, and returned the stolen items. No charges were laid. Police took a statement and sent him home. But the Internet mob, who’d pasted his image to shaming sites, was just getting going. By evening, he’d been identified and his cell number and work address were posted online. Then came the messages: “Die scumbag,” plus a rash of homophobic insults. (Snelgrove is gay.)

The mob was relentless. “It was message after message”—voice, text and Facebook messages, says Snelgrove. For the first three days he didn’t eat anything. “I felt sick. I felt too ashamed to go outside.” Customers called his manager to complain, and he was suspended without pay, and expects to be fired.

In a world where a reference check begins with a Google search, the mob has given many students and young adults a life sentence. There is a reason, however slow and unwieldy, that the administration of justice has been delegated to the state. Internet justice, unlike the real kind, is swift and severe—and not necessarily right or fair.

Canada Post lockout drives thousands to switch to online billing

How to improve the bottom line..force a strike then get Harper to make it illegal

Canada Post employees can expect a lighter load once they’ve dealt with the backlog of mail they’re facing this week.
Thousands of frustrated consumers across the country have made the switch to receiving their banking and cable and utility bills online, in response to the labour dispute between the Crown corporation and its 48,000 unionized employees.

Thanks to the Senate for their sober thoughts on Canada Post
Mail delivery to resume Tuesday, Canada Post says E-services are a good substitute for the mailman By making it inconvenient for people to pay their bills, the battle has accelerated the shift away from paper statements – a change that is posing a major challenge to Canada Post as it finds its place in an increasingly digital world.

Mail is expected to be on the move again on Tuesday, nearly a month after members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers began a series of rolling strikes in large part to protest wage rates. This week, both union and management, which locked out workers on June 14, have said they will comply with the federal government’s back-to-work legislation after a weeks of divisive – and at times bitter – debate on Parliament Hill.

Post offices were scheduled to start delivery Tuesday morning after employees were ordered back to work on Sunday. But Canada Post has already suffered a great deal of damage – as the dispute dragged on, the corporation said the labour action was costing tens of millions of dollars in lost business. But will be regained with lower labour and running costs.

ING Direct, a bank that conducts its business by Internet or phone, had 350,000 customers switch to online banking in the past two weeks. Almost half of its 1.8 million Canadian customers now receive their banking statements exclusively online.

“The postal strike created a small catalyst at a time when it’s already easy to make a change to online,” said Peter Aceto, chief executive officer of ING Direct Canada. “Canada Post has gone from the thing we relied on most to communicate a few decades ago to becoming a smaller part of our lives.”

Canada Post will lose at least $2,352,000 a year in revenue from ING Direct on stamps alone, assuming the company sends each of those 350,000 people one letter a month at the commercial price of $0.56 a stamp.

It isn’t just banks that will save from the switch to online bills and statements.

At Shaw Communications Inc., a telecommunications company, about 70,000 people signed up for online billing in June.

“That’s probably 10 times more than we would normally see,” said Peter Bissonnette, Shaw’s president.

“Clearly the labour disruption has driven that behaviour,” he said. “We’re very pleased that customers are finding other ways to do their billing.”

Enmax Corporation, a Calgary-based utility, had 5,000 customers enroll in its online billing system – a “very dramatic increase,” spokesman Ian Todd wrote in an e-mail.

Rogers Communications and TD Canada Trust also saw increases in customers choosing online bills and banking, but did not have exact numbers.

Jon Hamilton, a spokesman for Canada Post, says the corporation tried to convince the union that even the threat of a strike could have an impact.

“We went out talking to our employees as much as a year and a half ago, saying, ‘We need to understand that there are options available to our customers these days,’ ” he said. “The exclusive privilege we enjoy on letter mail is over – we have a huge competitor and it’s called the Internet.”

Canada Post has much to figure out to remain relevant, but charities, seniors, people in rural areas and small-business owners still rely on its extensive network, Mr. Hamilton said.

“The strike may have hastened the process for some people to switch, but the long-run trend was there anyway,” said Richard Chaykowski, a professor of industrial relations at Queen’s University.

Published on M

Canada is now a mid-level player in the global innovation race, passed by rising powers China and South Korea in some categories and falling further behind long-time rivals such as the United States, Germany, Norway and Sweden.

In a report being released Tuesday in Ottawa, the Science, Technology and Innovation Council says Canada’s innovation performance has slumped on most key measures in the two years since its last report card.

Why doesn't Canada have more top companies?
Factors that hinder Canada’s tech, digital sectors have nothing to do with UBB
Where Canada shines: water tech

The conclusions are familiar to those who have closely followed the innovation debate. A flood of studies has shown that Canada has talent and resources in spades, but isn’t leveraging them effectively to consistently produce the kind of innovation necessary to make the country prosper over the long haul.

What’s particularly frustrating to experts is that Canada isn’t making any progress, in spite of knowing for some time where the country falls short.

Indeed, Canada ranked worse or stagnated in 18 of 24 benchmarks tracked by the council since its 2008 report, according to the 76-page document, a copy of which was obtained by The Globe and Mail.

“Current best efforts are not getting us to where we want to be,” concludes the council, which is chaired by University of Ottawa chemist Howard Alper.

Among other things, the country is spending less per capita on research and development, business R&D is down, venture capital relative to GDP is down, government spending on R&D has fallen and the ranking of Canadians in high-school test scores is lower.

And while Canada spends a lot of money on R&D through tax credits, it spends less than its peers in direct contributions to innovative companies, according to the report.

A recentinvestigation found that a significant chunk of the nearly $5-billion that Ottawa and the provinces give to companies in refundable R&D tax credits goes to dubious research and unscrupulous consultants. The result is that Canadian taxpayers are spending billions of dollars on a program that too often delivers little or no new R&D.

The STIC report also found that from 2000 to 2007, Canadian companies spent 75 per cent of what their U.S. counterparts did on machinery and equipment, per worker. And they invested in information and communications technology at half the pace of U.S. companies.

The report pointed out that the strong dollar provides a window of opportunity to invest in imported technology at lower cost.

Another major area of concern is labour productivity, which has been growing at less than 1 per cent for the past decade. Among advanced economies, that puts Canada 23rd out of 33 countries in productivity, according to the Swiss-based International Institute For Management Development.

On the positive side, Canada’s performance is improving in areas such as R&D spending by the provinces, funding of research through the tax credits and the percentage of the population with postgraduate education.

“Data show that some Canadian industries are global leaders,” according to the report, titled State of the Nation 2010. “We are also fortunate to have a strong talent pool that could deliver on high ambitions. The challenge is to deploy talent well, invest in advanced technology, integrate innovation into corporate and country strategies and leverage our efforts to deliver prosperity for all Canadians.”

Among the key observations in the report is that the country needs to do a better job of fostering clusters around its leading companies. These tend to be few and far between in Canada, and the recent struggles of Research In Motion Ltd. demonstrate that the country’s depth of innovation leaders is pretty thin.

“Support for clusters is one way to build critical mass in both short-term and long-term research areas of joint interest to companies and research organizations,” according to the report. “Such collaborations also improve companies’ ability to recruit Canada’s highly qualified graduates.”

Another federal advisory panel, headed by Open Text chairman Thomas Jenkins, is currently reviewing what Canada spends on R&D, with a focus on the controversial Scientific Research and Experimental Development tax credit. His report is due out before the end of the year.

All the rhetoric of late regarding rewarding good teachers and penalizing poor ones, of shipping good teachers to underachieving schools and less able educators to schools with higher standards simplistically works to remediate symptoms and in my view does nothing to address the problem.

In my wife's three decades in the classroom, she has dealt with apathy, truancy, hunger, lack of sleep, behavioural issues, language and cultural barriers, limitations of ability, as well as emotional, physical and sexual abuse. These were often present in the same classroom in the same school year.

Whether she was 10 times more competent or only 1/10th as able, little she did or could have done to change things over which she had no control. Reducing the human equation in education to standardized numbers holds no weight of logic.

Washing a car will not fix a faulty motor any more than blowing one's nose will cure a cold. The problem lies in the hands of society in general parents in particular and efforts to download apathy onto the shoulders of educators, whether by reward or punishment, are ludicrous and irresponsible.

Letter from defeated Liberal MP targets Muskoka projects funding

The RCMP is in the midst of deciding whether to launch an investigation into the government's controversial spending for the G8 summit last year.

The move comes in the wake of a complaint by former Liberal MP Marlene Jennings, who wrote the Mounties a letter dated April 15 that raised questions about a "possible misappropriation of funds."

Opposition parties immediately pounced on the news Tuesday, pointing to it as evidence that their long-standing claims of government misspending at the summit are well-founded. However, the government brushed off the accusations, saying they were merely a political public relations stunt and that the Tories have done nothing wrong.

Jennings represented Notre-Dame-De-Grace-Lachine in Quebec before losing her seat.

The RCMP acknowledged Tuesday that it has received a "referral."
"The matter is currently with A Division," said Const. Suzanne Lefort, referring to the Commercial Crime Section of the RCMP. "Based on the evaluation of the information provided, the RCMP may or may not initiate an investigation, but we cannot talk about the investigation right now."

In her letter, Jennings wrote that Parliament approved the use of funds for the Border Infrastructure Fund, but that "recent revelations" suggested the money approved by Parliament for that fund were instead used to subsidize infrastructure projects in Muskoka.

Jennings told Postmedia News she thinks the RCMP is dealing with her complaint as a "serious matter" and that although they are only at the beginning stages, she is satisfied they are taking her concerns seriously.

A recent auditor general's report slammed the approval of 32 infrastructure projects that were budgeted to receive $50 million in Tory cabinet minister Tony Clement's riding prior to last summer's G8 summit in Huntsville, Ont.

Interim Auditor General John Wiersema suggested the whole process "lacked transparency" and was submitted to Parliament without "clear and accurate information" about what MPs voted to approve.

The audit also found millions of dollars worth of projects - including construction of public washrooms and gazebos - were authorized without approval from department officials, and ended up having little to do with their original purpose, presented to Parliament as funding for "border infrastructure."

As news of Jennings' letter surfaced Tuesday, Opposition MPs went after Clement, peppering the government with questions about the investigation. During question period Tuesday, the NDP repeatedly asked Clement to explain how funds were doled out to the various projects in his riding.

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird answered opposition questions about G8 spending. He said the auditor general's report showed the government had no intent to mislead Parliament about how the funds were spent.

Baird called Jennings' complaint a "stunt" by a defeated Liberal candidate who was not focusing on "the issues that really matter to Canadians."

The Canadian middle class is in crisis. Each year, its share of our national income shrinks, relative to that of the richest few. Recent reports show Canada’s wealthiest one per cent accounted for 32 per cent of all income growth between 1997 and 2007 – the most in recorded history. Thanks to skyrocketing executive compensation levels and an aggressive attack on well-paid, family-supporting jobs, the gap between the rich and the rest of us grows ever wider.

Nothing epitomizes this situation more than the recent history of Air Canada. In the last decade, Canada's national carrier has suffered unprecedented financial turbulence, including run-ins with bankruptcy protection. According to the Canadian Auto Workers’ internal research, over the same period Air Canada's CEO at the time, Robert Milton, pocketed $86 million – while thousands of front-line employees were forced to take cuts, to the tune of about $10,000 per year, including an erosion of real wages, lost vacation, paid lunch breaks and other benefits.

Air Canada workers made major sacrifices. The company plowed ahead with plans to do more with less. Work intensified and productivity skyrocketed. Measured in seat miles delivered per employee, labour productivity at Air Canada jumped 75 per cent. Yet many who had earned a good (albeit modest) salary saw their quality of life and working conditions decline.

This storyline has played out in too many workplaces across Canada. “Good” jobs are on the wane, in all sectors – whether in factories, service shops, office buildings, or among the professional classes. Many have come to accept the logic that jobs in the “new economy” are inherently insecure. Pension plans exist only in fairy tales, and personal sacrifice has become the new norm. We accept the mantra that the next generation of workers will be worse off, and assume they simply aren’t in a position to demand better.

This attitude must change – for everyone’s benefit. The squeezing out of Canada’s middle class has major implications for our collective prosperity. Middle-class incomes drive economic growth, pay for public services, support healthy families, and build communities. Society cannot subsist on crumbs left over by the rich. Workers cannot accept the logic that relentless cuts and constant sacrifice will bring better days ahead.

Air Canada employees have already drawn a line in the sand during their current contract talks. They’ve resolved to make up ground on lost wages. They’ve rejected a program of two-tiering, which would make second-class workers of future generations. And in a recent show of solidarity, the CAW, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (three unions representing the lion’s share of Air Canada employees) rejected a company proposal to undercut and eventually eliminate the current defined benefit pension plan. By saying “no” to these demands, Air Canada employees are facing down the corporate-led riptide that’s pushing Canada’s middle class to the brink.

With the company’s return to profitability in 2010 and a brighter future on the horizon, Air Canada’s demands for more cuts, fewer full-time jobs, and outsourcing appear baseless. It’s made worse by CEO Calin Rovinescu’s hefty 76 per cent pay hike that landed him $4.55 million in compensation last year, a defined benefit pension that would pay him $351,000 per year at age 65, and a $5 million retention bonus he would be paid just for staying on the job until March 2012. His insistence that workers accept less reeks of hypocrisy.

Not surprisingly, the frustration and anger among Air Canada employees is reaching a breaking point. Demonstrations have been taking place in communities across Canada, with impressive turnouts. CAW members recently voted 98 per cent in favour of strike action, as a last resort. They know that what’s at stake in these negotiations goes far beyond their own self-interest.

Air Canada is recognized as a world-class carrier and has received dozens of awards for quality service, largely because of its hard-working employees. It’s time they receive their fair share.

The Air Canada battle is a principled fight about fairness and justice. It’s about reclaiming workers’ rights to good jobs, as well as our collective ability to demand better from employers and government. It’s about closing that ever-widening wealth gap and strengthening the middle class, for all Canadians.

Are the public interested? ..does Canadian apathy still reign..watch this space?

Are rising consumer debt loads the Achilles' heel of the Canadian economy?

"Low interest rates today do not necessarily mean low rates tomorrow," warned Carney. "Risk reversals, when they happen, can be fierce; the greater the complacency, the more brutal the reckoning."

What's happened to consumer debt levels since he scolded Canada's profligate spenders? Well, apparently nobody was paying much attention, and over the first three months of this year a new study suggests consumer debt has continued to climb.

According to the credit rating agency, TransUnion, Canadians now owe an average of almost $26,000 on their credit cards, lines of credit and auto loans.

That's an increase of 4.5 per cent, or another $1,000, over the same period last year.

The picture becomes even bleaker when you factor mortgage debt into the TransUnion report. Currently, Canadians owe just over $1 trillion in mortgage debt, and that pushes the $26,000 figure to just over $100,000 per Canadian family.

Now let's bring that debt picture into line with earned income.

According to the Ottawa-based Vanier Institute, the average Canadian family is now carrying a household debt that amounts to 150 per cent of their personal disposable income. That's the highest level in history. And stated in a starker way, for every $1,000 a Canadian family earns, they have to make about $1,500 in debt payments.

Sadly, according to TransUnion, Canadians persist in carrying large credit card balances at onerous rates. And the amount being carried on plastic only fell $25 to an average of $3,539 over the last year.

At the same time, the national credit card delinquency rate rose 11 per cent.

And despite Carney's hectoring and the rule changes surrounding lines of credit, they are still the most popular lending vehicle. Excluding mortgages, they accounted for more than 41 per cent of outstanding debt at the end of the first quarter at $33,981, up 5.9 per cent from the first quarter of 2010.

It's interesting to note that Canadian indebtedness rose as interest rates came down steadily over the last ten years. And that begs the question: what will happen when interest rates start to rise again as many analysts believe they must?

In fact, speaking earlier in June, Carney warned that while he was holding the core bank rate at one per cent, it would rise from crisis lows at near zero to what many economists believe to be a more normal rate in the six-per-cent range.

That's where broader economic conditions come to bear on debt levels.

If interest rates jump, the impact will be immediate on floating-rate vehicles like lines of credit and variable-rate mortgages. For example, someone with a 3.5 per cent variable-rate mortgage can carry a $400,000 mortgage at around $2000 a month.

If interest rates climb, and the variable rate reaches six per cent, that same mortgage would jump to almost $2,600 a month.

The debt picture also gets complicated when you compare the growth in mortgages to annual wage gains. In its annual report, the Canadian Association of Accredited Mortgage Professionals said that over the last 15 years, the annual growth rate in mortgage debt has been around 7.5 per cent. And yet wages have been increasing at around 2.3 per cent a year.

Why is that important? Simply because if consumers are already stretched to keep up because of flat-lined wage increases that have barely matched the inflation rate, they have very little room in their budgets to accommodate rising costs triggered by a surge in interest rates.

Obviously loan delinquency and home foreclosures would increase. And if you add a job-killing recession to the mix, you have the onset of a perfect storm that could see an increasing number of Canadians fall into personal bankruptcy.

Perhaps that's why Finance Minister Jim Flaherty joined Carney in warning Canadians to cut back on debt. He certainly fears that the world could be faced with another recession, given the sluggishness of the global economy and the inability of the U.S. to get its fiscal house and economy in order. "I am quite worried," said Flaherty in an interview. "We have lived three-and-a-half years now since the credit crisis started in late August, 2007. We are seeing in Europe, in particular, some very difficult situations."

Fortunately, so far the Canadian economy shows little sign of weakness with the Bank of Canada predicting growth in the three-per-cent range for this year.

But with economic stimulus programs being withdrawn in the U.S. and Flaherty vowing to turn off the spending taps in Ottawa, growth could slow sharply as the country enters 2012. If it does, Canada's debt binge could make things even worse as consumers cut back on their spending to reduce their loan balances.

Only time will tell. But for now, Canadians seem determined to ignore the warnings and keep on borrowing

OTTAWA - Tightening a belt is tricky when you have to wrap it around 39 people.

Stephen Harper's biggest cabinet ever will have to do some sucking in of its collective gut if the Conservatives are serious about trimming the fat.

The annual salary bill for all the ministers and junior ministers appointed last week is about $9 million — the largest on record.

That's at a time when the Conservatives are looking to slash $4 billion from the bureaucracy and billions more in the coming years to balance the books.

The prime minister's team rivals the largest cabinets of Brian Mulroney and Paul Martin.

According to 2011 figures on Parliament's website, an ordinary MP draws a base salary of $157,731 per year. As prime minister, Harper gets double that plus a car allowance.

Still, Harper's $317,574 salary to run the country is modest compared with what bank presidents and top executives in the private sector make.

Ministers get $75,516 atop their MP base salary, plus a car allowance. Ministers of state get an extra $56,637, but no car allowance.

Marjory LeBreton gets $132,300 for being a senator and another $75,500 for her role as leader of the government in the Senate.

So with one prime minister, 25 ministers, 11 ministers of state, and government senate and house leaders, it all works out to roughly $9 million in salaries and perks and that is without the staff

The Conservatives quietly approved increases in the maximum salaries political staff are entitled to receive.

The changes went into effect April 1, even though Harper has announced budget cuts to eliminate the federal deficit one year ahead of schedule, in 2014-15.

The prime minister said that feat would be achieved "by controlling spending and cutting waste."

Whether a staffer actually receives the maximum allowable salary is left up to the discretion of each minister, who must still keep within an overall office budget.

But ministers will have a little more money to play with since the government has decreed that their offices should no longer have to foot the bill for international travel by ministers, their staff and parliamentary secretaries. Those costs will now be absorbed by government departments instead.

The Prime Minister's Office says cabinet salaries are largely covered by MPs' regular wages.

"Almost two thirds of your cost is actually their salaries as MPs, which would have to be paid whether or not they're in cabinet," spokesman Andrew MacDougall said in an email.

Harper has also defended his beefed-up bench.

"I think it's important to know when you're talking about austerity, that this government has reduced ministerial budgets significantly," he said after his cabinet was sworn in at Rideau Hall.

"So the question here is not cost. The question is making sure that we have a ministry that is broad, representative of the country and tries to use people's talents to the maximum. ...

"I think it would be a mistake to try and have a smaller cabinet that would make less use of people."

Harper's cabinet ranks in size with Mulroney and Martin's 39-member teams.

Derek Fildebrandt of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation says his issue isn't so much with what cabinet ministers make, but with the pensions they go on to collect at age 55.

"We're fine that they're decently compensated," Fildebrandt said.

"They're not outrageously compensated. They're well compensated, but they're not outrageously compensated. But pension-wise, they are outrageously compensated."

The group says that for every $1 an MP puts into their pension plan, taxpayers contribute another $4.

Fildebrandt also questioned defeated MPs' severance packages.

Defeated Conservative cabinet minister Josee Verner wasn't in the House of Commons long enough to get a pension. But like all MPs who have served fewer than six years, she qualifies for a severance equal to half her salary.

Verner's nearly $117,000 golden parachute may ease her jump to the Red Chamber — where she will earn $132,300 a year as one of Harper's three new senators.

Compare that to what a typical Canadian family makes. The median after-tax income of a family of two is $63,900, according to Statistics Canada.

I guess we got what we deserve.. again?

Fifteen per cent of Canadian homeowners took money out of their homes last year, at an average amount of $30,000, new data showed Wednesday. It took years to build up this equity and now..well..time will tell

New 'massaged data' from the Canadian Association of Accredited Mortgage Professionals Wednesday showed that Canadians took out $26 billion worth of equity from their homes in 2010, an increase on the $20 billion taken out in 2009.

The most popular use for those funds was home renovations, with 36 per cent of the 2,000 Canadians the group surveyed for the report saying that was their plans for the money they withdrew.

But investments (28 per cent) replaced debt consolidation (19 per cent) as the number two use of home equity takeout.

Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty are two high profile names who have repeatedly voiced concerns over Canadians' debt loads in recent months.

On average, Canadian homeowners have $222,000 in home equity, equal to 66 per cent of the value of their homes.

Approximately three million Canadians have no debt on their homes. And the report estimates that 79 per cent of mortgage holders have at least 25 per cent worth of equity in their homes, and roughly three per cent have "negative equity" — meaning they owe more on their home than it would be worth if they sold it.

The average down payment for a home purchased in the last 12 months was 30 per cent, up from 26 per cent for homes purchased two years ago.

Criminal networks that use the Internet to facilitate their scams are finding a virtual haven in Canada, according to a new study. In my view, the Canadian public need to be educated in these matters.

“Canada is moving up in what may be called Top Ten Badness list,” said Patrik Runald, a security specialist with Websense, a multinational corporation based in California.

The content-filtering company now ranks Canada as the sixth most likely country to host servers running malicious programs, up from 13th the year before.

Websites engaged in “phishing” – a scam in which a hacker uses email to trick people into disclosing passwords or other personal information, usually to get more information – are said to have tripled in Canada within the past year. Command-and-control networks used by one machine to enslave others – known as “Botnets” – are said to have increased 50 per cent.

This sort of invisible activity amounts to big business. Phishing, botnets, and other such “malware” lay the groundwork for large-scale theft of money and identity. Popular consumer programs such as Air Miles and Sony PlayStation’s online gaming service have lately made headlines after being pillaged by hackers in search of patrons’ personal information.

While the world’s biggest hacking gangs remain largely based in Eastern Europe and China, they frequently disguise their aims and identities by setting up operations in the West, usually by sneaking their programs onto legitimate servers.

The latest threat survey by Websense, a NASDAQ-traded company that sells software that filters Web content, is to be released on Tuesday. The company says it gets its data by scouring a couple of billion Web pages daily.

The United States remains the No. 1 country on WebSense’s threat list, followed by France, Russia, Germany and China.

Washington has lately hired hundreds of police and prosecutors to deal with U.S. cyber crime. This stepped-up enforcement may now be prompting criminals to set up shop on servers north of the border.

“If they have big-profile takedowns in the U.S., the hackers are shying away a little bit,” said Mr. Runald. But “they don't want to move to a country with a shadier reputation.”

Canadian-based sites, he said, invite less scrutiny from anti-virus programs than sites based in, say, Romania and the Ukraine.

While the scope of crime operations are international, Canadian consumers will be more likely to fall victim to phishing if crime gangs take root in Canada. “These are servers Canadians are going to on a daily, monthly, weekly basis,” Mr. Runald said. “Most of the traffic to Canadian servers are from Canadians.”

Experts say the survey findings stand to reason, although they caution cyber criminals migrate from one jurisdiction to another for a host of reasons. “These things shift around based on a vulnerability that may exist,” said Rafel Rohozinsky, a senior fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. “Cyber criminals tend to move in tribes.”

Mr. Rohozinsky, who also heads a private corporation known as the SecDev group, pointed out that Ottawa has been dragging its feet on cyber security.

The federal government announced its strategy only last year, long after other G8 countries began investing heavily in tackling the problem, partly because successive minority governments had made the esoteric subject of cyber security a non-starter of an issue in Canada. The new Conservative majority government now has the clout to tackle the issue, if it chooses to do so, Mr. Rohozinsky said.

Canada's Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, last week spoke out about an “alarming trend towards ever-bigger data breaches,” and called for new laws that would impose fines on companies that don’t do enough to safeguard personal information from hackers.

Apathy reigns once more and would the people of Canada ever be told by this TRANSPARENT government...smile

Canadian firms' poor record of investment stretches back 40 years: report

OTTAWA - The Conference Board has issued a stinging indictment on how little Canadian firms invest in making themselves more productive. I wonder how current Harper will react if at all.... recall 'no-one can tell him anything'

Under-investment in new equipment and machinery has been a problem stretching back at least 40 years, and Canadians have paid a heavy price, the think-tank says.

The Conference Board is not the first to point out that Canada lags behind many advanced economies in terms of productivity improvements.

But the new analysis released early Friday shows how long the practice has been going on and finds an almost perfect correlation between low investment and low productivity.

On average, Canada's investment in machinery and equipment as a share of gross domestic product was the second lowest among peer countries in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Only France was worse.

While, investment picked up in the 2000s in response to the loonie's burgeoning purchasing power, it still leaves Canada 11th among a group of 16 peer countries that include the U.S., Japan, Australia and about a dozen European nations.

Canada ranks 12th among its peer group in productivity.

More specifically, the report argues that the paucity of investment in information and communications, including computers, has been Canada's principal downfall. It says investment in communications technology is critical to a business' operations in today's market, given the profusion of Internet and broadband networks and the growing use of smartphones.

"On the surface, Canada seems to be doing well (economically)," says chief economist Glen Hodgson.

"But let's not get too hung up about what's happened over the last four quarters or even a few years. Look at the 25 year pattern and that clearly has shown up in terms of real income ... where Canada has fallen behind (the U.S.)."

Low productivity was also a reason the loonie was low throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s, Hodgson says.

One reason Canada has done relatively well in recent years, he says, is because it has lucked into an extended period of hyper-demand and prices for commodities that Canada has in abundance. Even so, the economy should be performing better, a point that has also been made by Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney.

The central banker has pin-pointed low productivity as the main culprit for why it expects the economy to grow at a relatively tame two per cent or so once it completes its backfill from the recession.

The Conference Board report comes at a time when the issue of corporate taxes is a key demarcation point among the parties in the election campaign, with the Conservatives favouring lower taxes to boost investment and the opposition parties calling for the rate to be hiked.

Labour economists such as Jim Stanford and Erin Weir, as well as the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, have published charts showing investments did not increase as combined federal-provincial corporate tax rates slid from about 42 per cent at the turn of the century to the current 28 per cent.

As well, governments eliminated the capital tax, and introduced investment-inducing benefits, such as tax write-offs and the elimination of import duties on machinery and equipment.

The perceived lack of payoff for the many carrots thrown at firms has frustrated policy makers. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has on several occasions urged firms to play their part.

"We need the private sector to continue to step up, start to invest ... to help create more jobs than we've seen in Canada, more investment in machinery and equipment," he said in response to a poor exports data last fall.

Hodgson says the issue of why Canadian firms have lagged behind for such a long time is complex, but he believes most business decisions are rational.

"It's not a question of blame. We had a whole combination of things from a weak dollar to some barriers like capital taxes, so under the circumstances it was rational not to go out and invest, when you could still compete with the dollar at 70 or 75 cents (US)," he explained.

Those circumstances have come full circle, he adds, and he believes businesses will alter their behaviour as well.

"We've seen some evidence of a change, but it's early days. You change a tax policy and it's going to take a while before you see any consequence in terms of investment behaviour."

The case for painting Harper as an anti-democrat stems from dozens of actions, catalogued below. They can be roughly divided into three categories: Treatment of the parliamentary process; degree of information control; intimidation of opponents.

TREATMENT OF PARLIAMENTARY PROCESS

* Prorogations of Parliament:

Other governments have prorogued Parliament many times. But Harper’s prorogations were seen as more crassly motivated for political gain than others. His second prorogation, 16 months ago, brought thousands of demonstrators to the streets to decry his disregard for the democratic way.

* Contempt of Parliament:

The demonstrations did not serve to elevate the prime minister’s respect for Parliament. He refused a House of Commons request to turn over documents on the Afghan detainees’ affair until forced to do so by the Speaker, who ruled he was in breach of parliamentary privilege. More recently, he refused to submit to a parliamentary request, this time on the costing of his programs. The unprecedented contempt of Parliament rulings followed.

* Scorn for parliamentary committees:

Parliamentary committees play a central role in the system as a check on executive power. The Conservatives issued their committee heads a 200-page handbook on how to disrupt these committees, going so far as to say they should flee the premises if the going got tough. The prime minister also reneged on a promise to allow committees to select their own chairs. In another decision decried as anti-democratic, he issued an order dictating that staffers to cabinet ministers do not have to testify before committees.

* Challenging constitutional precepts:

During the coalition crisis of 2008, Harper rejected the principle that says a government continues in office so long as it enjoys the confidence of the House of Commons. To the disbelief of those with a basic grasp of how the system works, he announced that opposition leader Stéphane Dion “does not have the right to take power without an election.”

* Lapdogs as watchdogs:

Jean Chrétien drew much criticism, but also much help for his cause, as a result of his installing a toothless ethics commissioner. The Harper Conservatives have upped the anti-democratic ante, putting in place watchdogs — an ethics commissioner, lobbying commissioner, and others — who are more like lapdogs.

The foremost example was integrity commissioner Christiane Ouimet, who was pilloried in an inquiry by the auditor general. During her term of office, 227 whistleblowing allegations were brought before Ouimet. None was found to be of enough merit to require redress.

The Prime Minister’s Office saw to it that she left her post quietly last fall with a $500,000 exit payment replete with a gag order.

* The Patronage Machine:

To reduce checks on power it helps to have partisans in the right places. Harper initially surprised everyone with a good proposal to reduce the age-old practice of patronage. It was the creation of an independent public appointments commission. But after his first choice of chairman for the body was turned down by opposition parties, he abandoned, in an apparent fit of pique, the whole commission idea.

Since that time he has become, like other PMs before, a patronage dispenser of no hesitation.

One of the latest examples was the appointment of Tom Pentefountas as deputy chair of the CRTC. His only apparent qualification was his friendship with the PM’s director of communications. Mr. Harper also had good intentions on Senate reform but it, too, has remained a patronage pit. One of his first moves as PM, having long lashed out at the unelected body, was to elevate a senator, Michael Fortier, to his cabinet.

* Abuse of Process
Another less noticed infringement of the democratic way came with the 2010 behemoth budget bill — 894 pages and 2,208 clauses. It contained many important measures, such as major changes to environmental assessment regulations, that had no business being in a budget bill. Previous governments hadn’t gone in for this type of budget-making, which is common in the United States. The opposition had reason to allege abuse of process.

INFORMATION CONTROL

* The vetting system:

In an extraordinary move, judged by critics to be more befitting a one-party state, Harper ordered all government communications to be vetted by his office or the neighbouring Privy Council Office. Even the most harmless announcements (Parks Canada’s release on the mating season of the black bear, for example) required approval from the top.

In most instances, forms known as Message Event Proposals had to make their way through a bureaucratic labyrinth of checks for approval.

Never had Ottawa seen anything approaching this degree of control. In one of many examples a bureaucrat, Mark Tushingham from Environment Canada, was barred from giving a talk about his book on climate change — even though it was a work of fiction. The muzzling policy of the government extended to the military brass. It led to a split between the prime minister and Chief of the Defence Staff Rick Hillier.

* Public service brought to heel:

In asserting his individual will in the nation’s capital, it is of central importance for the chief executive to have a compliant bureaucracy. Under Harper, who suspected the bureaucracy had a built-in Liberal bias, the public service was stripped of much of its policy development functions and reduced to the role of implementers.

The giant bureaucracy and diplomatic corps chafed under the new system. Their expertise had been valued by previous governments. In the Harper democracy, it was shut up, don’t put up.

As for independent agencies, the level of distrust was much the same. As part of her distant past, Nuclear Safety Commission head Linda Keen was seen to have Liberal affiliations. It was among the reasons she was unceremoniously dismissed.

* Access to information:
The government impeded the access to information system, one of the more important tools of democracy, to such an extent that the government’s information commissioner wondered whether the system would survive. Prohibitive measures included the elimination of giant data base called CAIRS, delaying responses to access requests, imposing prohibitive fees on requests, and putting pressure on bureaucrats to keep sensitive information hidden. In addition, the redacting or blacking out of documents that were released reached outlandish proportions. In one instance, the government blacked out portions of an already published biography of Barack Obama.

* Supression of research:

Research, empirical evidence, erudition might normally be considered as central to the healthy functioning of democracies. The Conservatives challenged, sometimes openly, the notion.

At the Justice Department they freely admitted they weren’t interested in what empirical research told them about some of their anti-crime measures. At Environment Canada, public input on climate change policy was dramatically reduced.

In other instances, the government chose to camouflage evidence that ran counter to its intentions. A report of the Commissioner of Firearms saying police made good use of the gun registry was deliberately hidden beyond its statutory deadline, until after a vote on a private member’s bill on the gun registry.

The most controversial measure involving suppression of research was the Harper move against the long-form census. In his democracy, critics alleged, knowledge was being devalued. The less the people knew, the easier it was to deceive them.
* Document tampering:

It was the Bev Oda controversy involving the changing of a document on the question of aid to the church group Kairos that captured attention. But in Harperland, document tampering was by no means an isolated occurrence.

During the election campaign it has been revealed that Conservative operatives twisted the words of Auditor General Sheila Fraser in order to try to deceive the public. They made it sound like she was crediting them with prudent spending when, in fact, what she actually wrote applauded the Liberals.

As part of their vetting system, the Conservatives tried to institute a policy, until Fraser rebelled, whereby even her releases would be monitored by central command. The re-ordering of documents extended to the Harper economic-recovery program. The Conservatives got caught putting their own party logos on stimulus funding cheques, which were paid out of public purse. They were forced to cease the practice.
* Media curbs:

Though having stated that information is the lifeblood of democracy, the prime minister went to unusual lengths to deter media access. He never held open season press conferences, wouldn’t inform the media of the timing of cabinet meetings, as was traditionally done, limited their access to the bureaucracy, and had his war room operatives, using false names, write online posts attacking journalists. In one uncelebrated incident in Charlottetown in 2007, the Conservatives sent in the police to remove reporters from a hotel lobby where they were trying to cover a party caucus meeting.

INTIMIDATION OF OPPONENTS .. he will pay for this one....

* Afghan detainees:

As a reflection of the governing morality, the detainees’ file is one the Conservatives would hardly wish to showcase.

They attempted to tar the reputation of diplomat Richard Colvin, who contradicted their position. On the same file, they tried to deny Parliament its historic right to documents. On the same file, Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor got caught misleading the House, had to apologize, and later resigned. On the same file, the Conservatives terminated the work of Peter Tinsley, the Military Police Complaints Commissioner, whose inquiry was getting close to the bone. Tinsley’s commission was denied documents for reasons of national security — even though all his commission members had national security clearance. Lastly, it was this same file which played a large role in the prime minister’s decision to again prorogue Parliament.
* My way or the highway:

The prime minister had once criticized Paul Martin’s Liberals, saying that when a government starts eliminating dissent, it loses its moral right to govern. In a variety of punitive ways, Harper moved against NGOs, independent agencies, watchdog groups, and tribunals who showed signs of differing with his intent.

In some cases he fired their directors or stacked their boards with partisans. In others, he sued them or cut their funding. The targets of such tactics included the Rights and Democracy group, Elections Canada, Veterans’ Ombudsman Pat Stogran, Budget Officer Kevin Page and many more. His party’s smear tactics — sometimes resembling those of right-wing Republicans — included labelling the Liberal party anti-Israel, calling Dalton McGuinty the small man of Confederation, trying to link Liberal MP Navdeep Bains to terrorism, and calling for reprisals against academics such as the University Ottawa’s Michael Behiels for questioning their policies.

* Personal attack ads:

Beginning when Stéphane Dion was elected Liberal leader, the Harper Conservatives became the most frequent deployer of personal attack ads — many of them blatantly dishonest — of any government. Before the Conservatives’ arrival, such ads were seldom, if ever, used in pre-writ periods. They made them a common practice.
* A democratic party?

Though he came from the Reform Party, Harper, as his mentor Preston Manning once said, never showed much interest in power sharing. His Conservative Party has become a reflection of his command and control style. Tom Flanagan, Harper’s former strategic guru, helped the leader evolve the Tories into what Flanagan calls a garrison party. It basically exists, he said, to go to war against opponents, raise money, and bow at the leader’s feet.

Helena Guergis, the excommunicated MP, is one of the latest to find out what one’s rights within the party amount to. Under Mr. Harper, the rank and file have had little say in policy formation. At the riding level, no dissonance with central command is tolerated. Last year, when constituents in Rob Anders’ Calgary riding tried to organize to contest his renomination, party operatives descended like a commando unit, seized control of the riding executive, and crushed the bid.
* Legal Threats:

The Conservatives ran from accountability by running to the courts. No government has resorted to legal threats and challenges to intimidate opponents as much as this one.

In the so called Cadman-gate affair, wherein the Conservatives were accused of trying to bribe independent MP Chuck Cadman for his vote, the party resorted to suing the Liberals. They went after Tom Zytaruk, who wrote a book on the affair, alleging Mr. Zytaruk’s tape of an interview with Harper was altered.

The party sued Elections Canada in connection with the in-and-out affair and it is using legal channels to try to block information gathered by the Military Police Complaints Commission on the Afghan detainees’ affair.

In other cases, the Conservatives chose to circumvent their own laws. In the interest of making democracy fairer, Harper brought in a welcome measure — a fixed-date election law. PMs no longer had the advantage of setting election dates at their own choosing. But in 2008 Harper ignored his own law and went to the Governor General to call an election.

The government’s perspective in democratic/legal rights area was illustrated when Harper went so far as to appeal a Canadian Federal Court decision asking the United States to repatriate the Canadian Omar Khadr from Guantanamo. Harper was reluctant to speak out against the judicial travesties at Gitmo. The Conservatives shut down the Court Challenges Program, which provided funding for Canadians to defend their Charter rights. They fought hard to deport Iraqi war resisters and they went to extremes to crush protests at the G-20 summit.

Lorraine Weinrib, a professor of law and political science, says Harper is intent to construct his own constitutional framework. His actions, she said, align with “an all-powerful executive that makes its own rules on a play-by-play basis.” Those actions “reveal an understanding of democratic engagement that barely tolerates the dispersal of power.”

If a healthy democracy requires some degree of balance of power between the executive branch, the legislative branch and other power sources, there is little such balance today. The Harper effect has been to enfeeble the other constituent parts. The state of democracy now is such that the civil service is subjugated, the committee system weakened, watchdogs anemic, independent agencies intimidated, information less available, the prime minister’s own party in servitude, political parties soon — if Harper gets his way — to be stripped of public funding.

Consultant Keith Beardsley who worked in the Harper PMO, said the initial plan in 2006, when the party was new to power and insecure, was to put the hammer down — exert maximum control — for about the first six months. The six months came and went, he said, but the hammer was never lifted.

Critics fear it never will be, that we may just be seeing the beginning, that Harper will see an election victory as vindication for authoritarian methods and that more will follow.

The remarkable thing, as professor Russell notes, in looking at the way this prime minister has overpowered the system, is that he has done it all with only a minority government. Even prime ministers with big majorities have never been able — if indeed it was ever their intent — to bring the system to heel to the extent of the minority man.


I fee for you Canada..do the right thing..THINK

Itemized

Stephen Harper’s one-man show The Attack On Democracy.

For anyone rich reading this article and without a conscience, who cheats will cut corners (taxes etc) and is selfish this text may hurt you. It’s a must-read on the record thus far, particularly by colleagues, friends and family members who might not much like Harper, but like the other options far less.

One can only imagine where he might it next with sufficient popular support.

Can we still call this a parliamentary democracy? Or is it something more akin to a democracy of one?

More and more, Stephen Harper’s critics are asking the question. There is a widespread view among political scientists and constitutional scholars that the prime minister, with his l’etat c’est moi methods, has brought Canadian democracy to new lows.

Canadians themselves may be starting to feel that way. Pollster Angus Reid found this week that 62 per cent of Canadians surveyed described our democracy as being in a state of crisis. For the first time in many elections, democracy is a foremost issue.

When Harper was not even two years into his stewardship, a study published in the International Political Science Review measured the degree of centralization of power in all parliamentary countries. Canada, the study concluded, was the worst.

Much of our undemocratic condition was a result of the power hoarding of prime ministers who came before Harper, says Peter Russell, the University of Toronto professor emeritus who has studied prime ministerial power since the 1950s. But if our democratic health was bad then, Russell says, it’s now worse — much worse — after Harper’s five years in power.

“Harper is on a course towards a very authoritarian populist government appealing over the heads of Parliament to the people with an enormous public-relations machine. The appeal is to the less educated and less sophisticated parts of society.” What is being fashioned, says Russell, is a presidential prime ministership without a powerful legislative branch to keep it in check.

Lori Turnbull, who teaches political science at Dalhousie University, says the system with its loosely defined separation of powers relies on a prime minister acting in good faith. Mr. Harper can hardly be said to have done so, she said. In reference to abuses of power by the Conservative government, she said that “if you put together a list of what he’s done, it’s scary.” (See list below.)

Conservatives say the portrayal of Harper as an autocrat are politically motivated — this though many of the same professors and journalists (this writer included) charting the plight of democracy today were highly critical of ethical corruption during the Chrétien years.

During his time in office, Harper has been charged with denying Parliament its historic right to documents, shutting down the House, intimidating independent agencies, muzzling the bureaucracy, suppressing research, curbing the access to information system, and other transgressions.

In the election campaign, people have been barred from Conservative rallies, strict limits have been placed on questions form journalists, Tory candidates have been instructed to stay away from all-candidates debates in their ridings. Liberals and New Democrats say the controversy over the coalition issue is another example of Harper not being able to tolerate the rules of democracy.

Democracy became an election issue after the prime minister was defeated on a confidence motion over contempt of Parliament. Though the Speaker of the Commons ruled there were legitimate grounds for the charges, Harper dismissed them as parliamentary squabbling.

“Who does he think he is? The king, here?” asked Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff. During the televised debates he told Harper, “You are a man who will shut down anything you cannot control. I suspect some readers I am (ALlright Jack people)of this article will wholeheartedly agree.”

When Harper campaigned during the 2006 election, he made promises of a new era of openness and transparency to contrast a Liberal Party plagued by the sponsorship scandal. He brought in accountability legislation, which was applauded by such oversight groups as Democracy Watch for containing many impressive reforms. But a great number of the reforms, the watchdog group found, never saw the light of day.

At the same time the Conservatives were making their accountability promises in the 2006 campaign, they were running a surreptitious money-shuffling operation that became known as the in-and-out affair. It allowed the party to spend more on its campaign advertising than Elections Canada permitted. Earlier this year, party operatives involved in the scheme, including former campaign manager Doug Finley, were charged with offences under election finance laws.

The case for painting Harper as an anti-democrat stems from dozens of actions, catalogued below. They can be roughly divided into three categories: Treatment of the parliamentary process; degree of information control; intimidation of opponents.

TREATMENT OF PARLIAMENTARY PROCESS

* Prorogations of Parliament:

Other governments have prorogued Parliament many times. But Harper’s prorogations were seen as more crassly motivated for political gain than others. His second prorogation, 16 months ago, brought thousands of demonstrators to the streets to decry his disregard for the democratic way.

* Contempt of Parliament:

The demonstrations did not serve to elevate the prime minister’s respect for Parliament. He refused a House of Commons request to turn over documents on the Afghan detainees’ affair until forced to do so by the Speaker, who ruled he was in breach of parliamentary privilege. More recently, he refused to submit to a parliamentary request, this time on the costing of his programs. The unprecedented contempt of Parliament rulings followed.

* Scorn for parliamentary committees:

Parliamentary committees play a central role in the system as a check on executive power. The Conservatives issued their committee heads a 200-page handbook on how to disrupt these committees, going so far as to say they should flee the premises if the going got tough. The prime minister also reneged on a promise to allow committees to select their own chairs. In another decision decried as anti-democratic, he issued an order dictating that staffers to cabinet ministers do not have to testify before committees.

* Challenging constitutional precepts:

During the coalition crisis of 2008, Harper rejected the principle that says a government continues in office so long as it enjoys the confidence of the House of Commons. To the disbelief of those with a basic grasp of how the system works, he announced that opposition leader Stéphane Dion “does not have the right to take power without an election.”

* Lapdogs as watchdogs:

Jean Chrétien drew much criticism, but also much help for his cause, as a result of his installing a toothless ethics commissioner. The Harper Conservatives have upped the anti-democratic ante, putting in place watchdogs — an ethics commissioner, lobbying commissioner, and others — who are more like lapdogs.

The foremost example was integrity commissioner Christiane Ouimet, who was pilloried in an inquiry by the auditor general. During her term of office, 227 whistleblowing allegations were brought before Ouimet. None was found to be of enough merit to require redress.

The Prime Minister’s Office saw to it that she left her post quietly last fall with a $500,000 exit payment replete with a gag order.

* The Patronage Machine:

To reduce checks on power it helps to have partisans in the right places. Harper initially surprised everyone with a good proposal to reduce the age-old practice of patronage. It was the creation of an independent public appointments commission. But after his first choice of chairman for the body was turned down by opposition parties, he abandoned, in an apparent fit of pique, the whole commission idea.

Since that time he has become, like other PMs before, a patronage dispenser of no hesitation.

One of the latest examples was the appointment of Tom Pentefountas as deputy chair of the CRTC. His only apparent qualification was his friendship with the PM’s director of communications. Mr. Harper also had good intentions on Senate reform but it, too, has remained a patronage pit. One of his first moves as PM, having long lashed out at the unelected body, was to elevate a senator, Michael Fortier, to his cabinet.

* Abuse of Process
Another less noticed infringement of the democratic way came with the 2010 behemoth budget bill — 894 pages and 2,208 clauses. It contained many important measures, such as major changes to environmental assessment regulations, that had no business being in a budget bill. Previous governments hadn’t gone in for this type of budget-making, which is common in the United States. The opposition had reason to allege abuse of process.

INFORMATION CONTROL

* The vetting system:

In an extraordinary move, judged by critics to be more befitting a one-party state, Harper ordered all government communications to be vetted by his office or the neighbouring Privy Council Office. Even the most harmless announcements (Parks Canada’s release on the mating season of the black bear, for example) required approval from the top.

In most instances, forms known as Message Event Proposals had to make their way through a bureaucratic labyrinth of checks for approval.

Never had Ottawa seen anything approaching this degree of control. In one of many examples a bureaucrat, Mark Tushingham from Environment Canada, was barred from giving a talk about his book on climate change — even though it was a work of fiction. The muzzling policy of the government extended to the military brass. It led to a split between the prime minister and Chief of the Defence Staff Rick Hillier.
* Public service brought to heel:

In asserting his individual will in the nation’s capital, it is of central importance for the chief executive to have a compliant bureaucracy. Under Harper, who suspected the bureaucracy had a built-in Liberal bias, the public service was stripped of much of its policy development functions and reduced to the role of implementers.

The giant bureaucracy and diplomatic corps chafed under the new system. Their expertise had been valued by previous governments. In the Harper democracy, it was shut up, don’t put up.

As for independent agencies, the level of distrust was much the same. As part of her distant past, Nuclear Safety Commission head Linda Keen was seen to have Liberal affiliations. It was among the reasons she was unceremoniously dismissed.

* Access to information:
The government impeded the access to information system, one of the more important tools of democracy, to such an extent that the government’s information commissioner wondered whether the system would survive. Prohibitive measures included the elimination of giant data base called CAIRS, delaying responses to access requests, imposing prohibitive fees on requests, and putting pressure on bureaucrats to keep sensitive information hidden. In addition, the redacting or blacking out of documents that were released reached outlandish proportions. In one instance, the government blacked out portions of an already published biography of Barack Obama.

* Supression of research:

Research, empirical evidence, erudition might normally be considered as central to the healthy functioning of democracies. The Conservatives challenged, sometimes openly, the notion.

At the Justice Department they freely admitted they weren’t interested in what empirical research told them about some of their anti-crime measures. At Environment Canada, public input on climate change policy was dramatically reduced.

In other instances, the government chose to camouflage evidence that ran counter to its intentions. A report of the Commissioner of Firearms saying police made good use of the gun registry was deliberately hidden beyond its statutory deadline, until after a vote on a private member’s bill on the gun registry.

The most controversial measure involving suppression of research was the Harper move against the long-form census. In his democracy, critics alleged, knowledge was being devalued. The less the people knew, the easier it was to deceive them.

* Document tampering:

It was the Bev Oda controversy involving the changing of a document on the question of aid to the church group Kairos that captured attention. But in Harperland, document tampering was by no means an isolated occurrence.

During the election campaign it has been revealed that Conservative operatives twisted the words of Auditor General Sheila Fraser in order to try to deceive the public. They made it sound like she was crediting them with prudent spending when, in fact, what she actually wrote applauded the Liberals.

As part of their vetting system, the Conservatives tried to institute a policy, until Fraser rebelled, whereby even her releases would be monitored by central command. The re-ordering of documents extended to the Harper economic-recovery program. The Conservatives got caught putting their own party logos on stimulus funding cheques, which were paid out of public purse. They were forced to cease the practice.

* Media curbs:

Though having stated that information is the lifeblood of democracy, the prime minister went to unusual lengths to deter media access. He never held open season press conferences, wouldn’t inform the media of the timing of cabinet meetings, as was traditionally done, limited their access to the bureaucracy, and had his war room operatives, using false names, write online posts attacking journalists. In one uncelebrated incident in Charlottetown in 2007, the Conservatives sent in the police to remove reporters from a hotel lobby where they were trying to cover a party caucus meeting.

INTIMIDATION OF OPPONENTS

* Afghan detainees:

As a reflection of the governing morality, the detainees’ file is one the Conservatives would hardly wish to showcase.

They attempted to tar the reputation of diplomat Richard Colvin, who contradicted their position. On the same file, they tried to deny Parliament its historic right to documents. On the same file, Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor got caught misleading the House, had to apologize, and later resigned. On the same file, the Conservatives terminated the work of Peter Tinsley, the Military Police Complaints Commissioner, whose inquiry was getting close to the bone. Tinsley’s commission was denied documents for reasons of national security — even though all his commission members had national security clearance. Lastly, it was this same file which played a large role in the prime minister’s decision to again prorogue Parliament.
* My way or the highway:

The prime minister had once criticized Paul Martin’s Liberals, saying that when a government starts eliminating dissent, it loses its moral right to govern. In a variety of punitive ways, Harper moved against NGOs, independent agencies, watchdog groups, and tribunals who showed signs of differing with his intent.

In some cases he fired their directors or stacked their boards with partisans. In others, he sued them or cut their funding. The targets of such tactics included the Rights and Democracy group, Elections Canada, Veterans’ Ombudsman Pat Stogran, Budget Officer Kevin Page and many more. His party’s smear tactics — sometimes resembling those of right-wing Republicans — included labelling the Liberal party anti-Israel, calling Dalton McGuinty the small man of Confederation, trying to link Liberal MP Navdeep Bains to terrorism, and calling for reprisals against academics such as the University Ottawa’s Michael Behiels for questioning their policies.


* Personal attack ads:

Beginning when Stéphane Dion was elected Liberal leader, the Harper Conservatives became the most frequent deployer of personal attack ads — many of them blatantly dishonest — of any government. Before the Conservatives’ arrival, such ads were seldom, if ever, used in pre-writ periods. They made them a common practice.
* A democratic party?

Though he came from the Reform Party, Harper, as his mentor Preston Manning once said, never showed much interest in power sharing. His Conservative Party has become a reflection of his command and control style. Tom Flanagan, Harper’s former strategic guru, helped the leader evolve the Tories into what Flanagan calls a garrison party. It basically exists, he said, to go to war against opponents, raise money, and bow at the leader’s feet.

Helena Guergis, the excommunicated MP, is one of the latest to find out what one’s rights within the party amount to. Under Mr. Harper, the rank and file have had little say in policy formation. At the riding level, no dissonance with central command is tolerated. Last year, when constituents in Rob Anders’ Calgary riding tried to organize to contest his renomination, party operatives descended like a commando unit, seized control of the riding executive, and crushed the bid.

* Legal Threats:

The Conservatives ran from accountability by running to the courts. No government has resorted to legal threats and challenges to intimidate opponents as much as this one.

In the so called Cadman-gate affair, wherein the Conservatives were accused of trying to bribe independent MP Chuck Cadman for his vote, the party resorted to suing the Liberals. They went after Tom Zytaruk, who wrote a book on the affair, alleging Mr. Zytaruk’s tape of an interview with Harper was altered.

The party sued Elections Canada in connection with the in-and-out affair and it is using legal channels to try to block information gathered by the Military Police Complaints Commission on the Afghan detainees’ affair.

In other cases, the Conservatives chose to circumvent their own laws. In the interest of making democracy fairer, Harper brought in a welcome measure — a fixed-date election law. PMs no longer had the advantage of setting election dates at their own choosing. But in 2008 Harper ignored his own law and went to the Governor General to call an election.

The government’s perspective in democratic/legal rights area was illustrated when Harper went so far as to appeal a Canadian Federal Court decision asking the United States to repatriate the Canadian Omar Khadr from Guantanamo. Harper was reluctant to speak out against the judicial travesties at Gitmo. The Conservatives shut down the Court Challenges Program, which provided funding for Canadians to defend their Charter rights. They fought hard to deport Iraqi war resisters and they went to extremes to crush protests at the G-20 summit.

The story of increased concentration of power in the prime minister’s office is one, as charted by Donald Savoie and other specialists, that has been ongoing for decades. But the experts are hard pressed to find another prime minister as obsessed with control as the current one.

Chrétien was driven, at times, to authoritarian measures because of his longstanding bitter feud with Quebec separatists. Even notorious Chrétien never personally tried to control Ottawa like Harper.

Lorraine Weinrib, a professor of law and political science, says Harper is intent to construct his own constitutional framework. His actions, she said, align with “an all-powerful executive that makes its own rules on a play-by-play basis.” Those actions “reveal an understanding of democratic engagement that barely tolerates the dispersal of power.”

If a healthy democracy requires some degree of balance of power between the executive branch, the legislative branch and other power sources, there is little such balance today. The Harper effect has been to enfeeble the other constituent parts. The state of democracy now is such that the civil service is subjugated, the committee system weakened, watchdogs anemic, independent agencies intimidated, information less available, the prime minister’s own party in servitude, political parties soon — if Harper gets his way — to be stripped of public funding.

Consultant Keith Beardsley who worked in the Harper PMO, said the initial plan in 2006, when the party was new to power and insecure, was to put the hammer down — exert maximum control — for about the first six months. The six months came and went, he said, but the hammer was never lifted.

Critics fear it never will be, that we may just be seeing the beginning, that Harper will see an election victory as vindication for authoritarian methods and that more will follow. Lambs to the slaughter.

The remarkable thing, as professor Russell notes, in looking at the way this prime minister has overpowered the system, is that he has done it all with only a minority government. Even prime ministers with big majorities have never been able — if indeed it was ever their intent — to bring the system to heel to the extent of the minority man.

I wish this fine land of Canada all the luck in the word for they will surely need it in a few days.

OTTAWA—The government’s plan to extend the Canadian Forces mission in Afghanistan deserves a public debate.

Any new training mission, first proposed by the Liberals then adopted by the Conservatives, poses many dangers to Canadian soldiers:

* All military operations carry inherent risks of accidents and “friendly-fire”;
* Recruitment and training centres have repeatedly been targeted for attacks by insurgents;
* Canadian soldiers may be expected to provide security perimeters around their bases, exposing them to attack;
* Training will likely require operations in the field, “outside the wire,” where a training mission could quickly turn into actual combat with insurgents;
* And most alarmingly, insurgents have already infiltrated the ranks of recruits for the Afghan National Army, and have turned their guns on foreign military trainers inside training facilities.

Despite Prime Minister Harper’s stated intention of ensuring a “safer” mission for the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan, numerous Canadian soldiers will likely be killed or permanently injured, and the mission will ultimately not be successful.

“Although they won’t admit it, most Western governments have already given up on the country,”. “The training mission is clearly an exit strategy that will cost more Canadians their lives.”
Now sadly the election has pre-empted a proper public discussion of the mission. “Canadians need to be made aware of the risks of this mission,”

Harper is so lucky?

Welcome back, George Abbott.

It’s not the role he wanted when he quit his post as education minister to run for the B.C. Liberal leadership, but Mr. Abbott is back at his old job in the unruly world of contract negotiations with the B.C. Teachers’ Federation.

Mr. Abbott’s task is to avert a teachers’ strike this fall, right around the time Premier Christy Clark might want to call a general election.

Or maybe not. A battle with teachers, as a wedge issue in an election campaign, isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the BC Liberals.

“We’re talking British Columbia here.… You can make the argument either way,” observed Mr. Abbott, who, between his careers as a blueberry farmer and a politician, has been a political science instructor. “There have been some instances where governments may have benefited from that, but probably an equal number where it’s been challenging for governments.”

Nonetheless, there is no clearer signal that the Clark government would rather achieve a rare settlement with teachers at the bargaining table than Mr. Abbott’s reappointment to education. After all, there has been only one negotiated settlement since the teachers were forced into provincewide bargaining 17 years ago, and that was when the government offered several thousand dollars in signing bonuses to all civil servants. Even then, the teachers agreed only 90 minutes prior to the deadline.

Ms. Clark defined the combative relationship between government and the teachers’ union during her own tenure as education minister. She refused to meet with the union president for months and imposed a collective agreement on teachers. She also stripped the union of significant powers, including the ability to negotiate class size, school hours and the school year. It triggered a one-day illegal walkout.

By contrast, the first time Mr. Abbott met with B.C. Teachers’ Federation president Susan Lambert, he handed out his cellphone number – an unprecedented gesture of open communication. She was floored.

So when Premier Christy Clark reappointed Mr. Abbott to education this week, there was a sigh of relief at the BCTF headquarters.

The negotiations are just getting under way. The teachers’ contract expires in June, and there would be no point taking job action before school resumes in the fall – who would notice? So there is time enough for the “respectful and professional” negotiations Mr. Abbott has promised.

But judging from each side’s opening positions, it will take more than goodwill to settle this round of bargaining.

The teachers’ union wants parity with their Alberta counterparts, which would mean wage hikes of nearly 20 per cent. It wants the right to negotiate class size again – a reversal of a policy imposed by Ms. Clark. And it wants to tear down the provincewide bargaining model.

The government, meanwhile, has set a two-year, “net zero” mandate for the entire public service. (Net zero means the teachers could negotiate pay raises if they are willing to give up something else, but there is no additional money.)

“We are polls apart,” Ms. Lambert acknowledged. “I think [the union demands are] realistic and it’s very different from the government mandate. There is going to have to be a shift somewhere along the line.”

It is possible that Ms. Clark, who won the Liberal leadership as a champion of families, might find more cash for education. But the signals so far are not good. She has reduced the size of cabinet by 25 per cent to send a message that her government will be frugal. The net zero mandate has been reinforced. And Mr. Abbott this week was unsympathetic to the wage parity pitch.

“I don’t think labour market adjustments would be warranted with respect to the teachers. I’m not understanding them to be an occupational group that is in short supply,” he said.

If all that wasn’t challenging enough, the B.C. Supreme Court is set to rule, as early as April, on the teachers’ Charter challenge to the initiatives introduced by Ms. Clark back in 2002. If the teachers regain the right to bargain on class size, staff levels and school hours, Mr. Abbott’s rowdy class will score the upper hand.

Arithmetic in B.C. classrooms:

$79,633: top rate a ‘category five’ Vancouver teacher can earn

$91,213: maximum rate for a teacher in Edmonton in the same category

$85,322: equivalent rate for a Toronto elementary teacher

Two weeks: last strike by B.C. teachers, in October, 2005

202: schools closed between 2001 and 2010

$1.7-billion: capital spending on 83 new schools and other improvements

59,300: decline in student enrollment since 2000