Pie Palace

I just got a pushy call from a telemarketer telling me that I was getting a “second notice” of my car’s warranty expiring, and that I should re-register it through them. I’ve never owned a car. They refused to tell me where they got my phone number, anything about the car in question, or the company they are working for. It sounds like a scam (and the RCMP thinks so too).

The call was from 1.916.219.8163¹. It comes about five days after I moved the number to Rogers’ wireless service. I hadn’t received any phone spam in my 2.5 years with Virgin Wireless.

Anyone else gotten these calls?

1. Heh. There’s an online service for tracking “complaints” about phone numbers. check it. (back)

I’m about a week late in saying this, but better late than never: Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza is immoral at best, and a war crime at worst.¹

The thing I find depressing about Israel’s assault on Gaza is that it has no apparent exit strategy. If Israel gets its way and wipes out the entire Hamas leadership, what will happen? Another crop of angry youth will rise up to replace them; Israel will respond to their posturing violently; and the cycle will begin again.

It’s sad to say, but about the only good thing that I can realistically expect to come out of this is an improvement in the level of agitprop software being published. Playing Raid Gaza! gives me the same feeling of discomfort as reading news reports of the casualties.

Let’s hope that when this foray into mass murder ends, Palestinians and Israelis will find a way to forge some sort of peace.²

1. We can say the same thing of Hamas firing rockets into Israel. Israel gets headline billing because it has killed and injured so many more civilians in the past few days. (back)
2. I apologize for the lower than usual signal-to-platitude ratio, but (a) I’ve got the flu, and (b) I’m trying to word this in a way that doesn’t have me branded as a C list bigot. (back)

I’ve always voted for hope. Every time I’ve walked into a polling both, I’ve said to myself: “what do I want the future to look like?” I have a soft spot for sustainability and social justice, so I’ve usually given my vote to the Green Party. But thanks to yesterday’s fiasco at Governor General’s, I don’t want to play nice anymore. I want to punish Stephen Harper.

I feel like voting strategically for the first time in my life. I just want to see Stephen Harper fail.

Democracy can only thrive under the rule of law. In the case of a parliamentary democracy, such as Canada’s, the “rule of law” is a set of polite conventions that every parliamentarian is expected to follow. A party cannot govern without the tacit support of 50%+1 of the sitting MPs. If a party loses that support, the Governor General may either choose to trigger an election, or allow a coalition of other parties to take the reigns of power. This week we’ve seen Harper running scared. Instead of losing his minority government he first delayed a non-confidence vote that would have toppled him, then prorogued the House of Commons.

This is not how our Parliament is intended to work. When a politician knows their time is at an end, they should gracefully step aside, regroup, and attempt a come-back. Not take their ball and go home.

From my perspective, it looks like Harper values power more than anything else. He’s hoping that a two month break will be long enough for him to gather enough popular support (by demonizing Quebec) that he will get a majority in a mid-winter election.

In the background, our economy is slowly grinding to a halt as the Canadian dollar falls, tens of thousands of jobs are lost, and the government hemorrhages money due to fiscal mismanagement.

Photo credit: harperdictatorship.ca.

So far I’ve heard John Baird and Pierre Poilievre parroting the same lines about the upcoming non-confidence vote: non-confidence votes are back-room deals; nobody voted for a coalition; the opposition parties just care about the subsidies. And now, thanks to a leaked set of talking points (scroll down to the bottom of the story), we can the original source. Just for once I’d like to hear a politician speak and hear something that they had thought of. I’d like to hear them make a coherent and reasoned argument that wasn’t spin.

CBC’s Canadian doctors should face regular testing: medical school head is a great example of poor journalism. The gist of the article is simple: a doctor has recommended that Canadian doctors should be periodically recertified. The journalist has found another doctor else who says “No! doctors shouldn’t be retested.” Without talking to the journalist, we can’t tell if that was to create a sense of conflict, or to make the story more “balanced.”

There are three problems here:

1. The No doctor’s statement:
   

   What we do every day is not really a book learning thing, [...] To say, in fact, that because you pass an exam makes you a good physician every 10 years is absolutely wrong.

   is exactly refuted by the CMAJ editorial:
   

   In Quebec, investigators found that family physicians’ scores on their certification examination and Medical Council of Canada Qualifying Examination were related to provision of quality care after 4–7 years in practice. More recently, Holmboe and colleagues found that physicians’ scores on the American Board of Internal Medicine’s Maintenance of Certification examination was associated with higher rates of performance in care for Medicare patients.

   which goes on to cite the studies in question.
2. The Yes doctor, Wendy Levinson has qualifications as a medical instructor, and appears to study how patients interact with their doctors and is a chair at department of medicine.
3. Meanwhile, the No doctor, Howard Conter does not appear to have any any relevant publications or appointments.

News stories like this are important. They get people to think about how healthcare is delivered in Canada, and how that can be reformed. It’s a pity that the story took the form of “she said, he said” instead of dipping into the empirical studies behind the editorial.

All throughout the US election, Canadian news outlets kept running stories that featured Americans saying things like “I just can’t bring myself to vote for someone with a name like Obama, it sounds too Muslim,” or “I don’t think Obama was raised with Christian values,” or “Should we really elect someone with the middle name Hussein?”

Don Miller has written a brief blessay that may explain this mind-numbing xenophobia. It gybes nicely with Jesus Camp and The Assault on Reason: essentially stating that the unicorn chasersreligious right is born out of a horribly segmented and alienating society.

The same election that made Obama president also denied marriage to millions of Americans. California, Arizona and Florida voted to ban gay marriage. Arkansas banned same sex couples from adopting children. I can’t fathom how the same people who would elect a black man as president would deny consenting adults from making long term commitments to each other. I guess that shows what kind of community I grew up in.

Link to Don Miller via Matthew Helmke.

Let’s get this over with: W is a terrible movie. It’s like a really long “This is Your Life,” showing select scenes from George W Bush’s life: his frat hazing, him losing his first bid for congress, him meeting his wife; while kinda, sorta, almost showing the lead up to his invasion of Iraq.

The documentary portions are boring. It skips over the more tawdry (hence interesting) parts of his life, in favour of showing W’s conflict with is dad. Who cares? The interesting bits are glossed over: why did Laura, a Democrat librarian, decide that W was worth her time? How did W act during his father’s presidency? What did he do as governor of Texas?

There is the occasional jab: Bush and his posse of advisors get lost on his ranch while discussing their plans for the war; the scene where W’s advisors try to convince Colin Powell that the Iraq invasion is diabolical. The movie would have been much better if it had given up on trying to be serious and presented itself as an over-the-top comedy: when W says that god has told him to run for president, it should have been a musical number; Carl Rove should have had devil horns and a tail; W should have had nightmares about choking on an Iraq-shaped pretzel.

If you’d like to see an interesting commentary on the current president, rent Homecoming. It’s weaker on current events, but it’s no less insightful.

The election is over. The NDP and Conservatives gained a few seats. The Liberals lost a few. The Greens doubled their percentage of the popular vote (6%, up from 3%). The only way I can describe the the last 35 days is as a waste of time. The next time Steve-o decides to call an election, Governor General should look to the other parties to form a government.

I really shouldn’t be surprised:

The Green Party isn’t being included in the debates because three of the four establishment parties don’t want the Greens there. I’m surprised that they cared enough to threaten to pull out.
(Update: Edited for style)

The election has begun. And we’re already being let down by our media and our current Prime Minister. Let’s consider a line of questioning on CTV Newsnet coverage (around the 7:30 mark).

Let’s consider the exchange from two angles:

First, there’s the consistency angle. As much as Harper dislikes the Senate, he happily appointed Conservative insider Michael Fortier to the Senate in 2006, and then appointed the unelected Fortier to his cabinet. If Harper feels so strongly about the Senate, why is he appointing unelected people to the senate?

Second, let’s consider Tom Clark’s response. Instead of calling the Prime Minister to task on his inconsistency, he happily skates over the statement and instead asks Harper about hypotheticals (and later asks Harper to promise that he won’t get personal).

It’s easy to see why voters become cynical. The Prime Minister has ignored the spirit of his 2006 election platform, and isn’t being held to task for it. In a rare interview, a journalist has the opportunity to take him to task, but opts instead to drop the name of his media outlet, and ask an essentially meaningless question. Reporters have a responsibility to their viewers – they shouldn’t let a politician get away with this kind of dishonesty.

This is going to be a long election.
(Update: Fixed spelling mistake in title)