Pie Palace

Remember the prorogation kurfuffle? No, not the one in 2009 one. The first one.

It looks like history is about to repeat itself.

Mr. Harper has announced that he wants to eliminate government subsidies for political parties. So far he’s only said that he wants to use that as a Conservative plank in the next election, but I’m betting that it will appear in bill form sometime before early March – just before a budget would have to be brought down.

Why? The first time the government tried to eliminate subsidies, the opposition parties freaked out and botched forming a coalition. This time around, instead of proroguing, Harper is going to force the vote and allow the government to fall on this handy dandy wedge issue. In the subsequent election, he can paint the other parties as pigs at a trough, and say “there are already generous credits and incentives in the tax system to encourage people to give to political parties today.” Oh wait. He just did.

I can pretend the move is antidemocratic: the subsidy means that everyone’s vote has value. In a donation-only system, only people who have spare cash can donate, so they’ll donate to parties that pander to their wants meet their needs. Poor folks (who can’t wait until tax time for their tax credits to be returned) won’t be represented as well.

But, in my heart of hearts, my main reason for supporting the subsidy is that it benefits the Green Party. The subsidy forms a substantial part of the our budget, so any reduction of the subsidy would cripple the federal party. I tend to think of that as a bad thing, but others would probably disagree.

Even though Canada lost the race to join the UN Security Council, the government was able to break one notable record. They succeeded in making a statement so bizarre and self-serving, it actually parodied itself. According to Harper’s communications director:

A big deciding factor was the fact that Canada’s bid did not have unity because we had Mr. Ignatieff questioning and opposing Canada’s bid.

And according to our Foreign Minister, Lawrence Cannon:

Not being able to speak with one voice as a country had a negative impact on Canada’s bid.

The Conservatives are actually saying that Canada lost its bid to sit on the Security Council because of the Liberals. They apparently think Canadians are stupid enough to believe that a guy less popular than Stephen Harper was able to convince fifty-some governments to vote for Portugal.

It’s too bad that our new Governor General’s coat of arms features an apparently meaningless string of binary. Considering that every other device in coat of arms has some degree of symbolism, I’m surprised none of the folks at the Canadian Heraldic Authority bothered to find something nifty to encode in there.

In entirely unrelated news, Bobby Scrawls, Assistant to the Deputy Herald Chancellor of the Canadian Heraldic Authority, recently got his first tattoo! He wanted to get “out of the box” of his day job, so he got some really awesome Chinese Japanese Korean Asian characters inked on his back. Because of his incredible artistic ability, he got “Writes like a ninja” tattooed over his spine:

Of course, opinions on the meaning of those characters differ.

(Images from Hanzi Smatter used without permission, see Mental Floss for more tattoo fun)

If you had $27.44 burning a hole in your pocket, what would you buy?

An awesome pair of scuba fins? A smoking hot picture of Pamela Hannam (National Bodybuilder) with a sword? A bitchen’ pair of pliers?

Sadly, you can’t get any of those. Your $27.44 has already been spent on a riot:

The federal government spent $933 million on security for the G8/G20 talks in Toronto, which works out to a little over $27 per Canadian. The amount is seems excessive, especially given the amount spent on security for previous G8 meetings:

(Note that the graph above is a dramatic low-ball, as it assumes that half of the $933 million was spent on the G20 summit)

It’s too bad that vandals that showed up with the legitimate protesters. They’ve provided a post hoc justification for a mind-numbing waste of money.

Next time perhaps they could consider renting a cruise ship and buggering off to the middle of the Atlantic. Or maybe head to Kannanaskis again?

I was skimming through OpenParliament.ca, when I ran across a discussion of bill C-4, (aka “An Act to amend the Youth Criminal Justice Act and to make consequential and related amendments to other Acts” or “Sébastien’s Law”). For the uninitiated: it’s the Conservative push to reform the young offender act.

The thing that got me about it was Bloc MP Serge Ménard‘s comments. That dude has something to say. He starts by pointing out that Quebec has had a youth crime rate half that of the rest of Canada, and then he goes on to describe how QC applies “the right measure at the right time.” As far as I can tell, it involves parents, psychologists, and specially trained judges. After saying his bit, he goes on to outline exactly the parts of bill C-4 that suck. With quotes. The only way this guy could be more excellent is if he spoke with footnotes and had X-ray vision.

The exchange between Ménard and Conservative Ed Fast is interesting. Ménard makes an argument based on experience, describing what has worked well in Quebec for the last 25 years. Ed Fast makes an argument based on aspirations – saying how their changes are intended to behave, but without any apparent evidence. Even the Liberals and NDPers (between verbally high-fiving each other) make arguments based on what has been shown to work.

I could draw conclusions about the relative merit of the arguments, but I’ll leave that up to you, dear reader.

Finally! Someone’s implemented a Canadian TheyWorkForYou. You can find it at OpenParliament.ca. Frigging awesome, if you ask me. (H/T to Darrell for pointing this out)

Quebec is doing what it can to prevent women from wearing niqabs (face covering garments that leave only the eyes exposed). The Quebec Immigration Department has booted two recent immigrants out of French-language classes for covering their faces. At the same time the government has introduced Bill 94, which would prevent provincial employees from wearing niqabs and limit how much effort public employees would need to put into accommodating veil-wearers.

Why has Quebec suddenly decided that niqabs are bad? To “protect equality between women and men”¹ and to “stress the values that unite [Quebecers]“²

In other words:

• Quebec has decided to bar women from language training to protect their equality with men.
• Quebec is targeting immigrants and minorities to promote inclusiveness.

I agree with the premise that niqabs are ambulatory prisons that can be used to drive a wedge between women and society.

But saying “you musn’t wear a niqab” is pretty close to saying “you must wear a niqab.” It removes a woman’s right to self determination. In both cases she’s not quite as equal as the man who gets to choose his own duds.

If I were to draft my own Bill 94, it would look something like:

1. The only time someone’s face needs to be shown is when they are being authenticated. Women will have to show their faces to bankers, police, doctors, and pharmacists. If a woman can complete her studies with her face covered, then the only time she need show her face at a school is when she’s taking a test or examination.
2. Make school uniforms mandatory. Adults have already formed habits and ingrained behaviours that many Quebecers find distasteful. Let them be and concentrate on the next generation. If niqabs are as onerous as their critics suggest, children should jump at the freedom afforded by their uniforms.

“Reasonable accommodation” is a two way street: immigrants will have to adjust to showing their face when necessary and Quebecers will have to adjust to seeing people with different customs. It’s reasonable to expect immigrants to respect our laws and other codified norms, but we can’t expect them to entirely discard their native culture. Similarly, recent immigrants should be able to expect that they will be treated in the same manner as other citizens, as a society we realize that their history is part of who they are and we accept that. Even if have decided we don’t like its origins.

Image by leeno.

1. That’s according to Chrstiane Pelchat, president of the Quebec Council on the Status of Women. (back)
2. So says Jean Charest. (back)

“Sitting in the dark,” is associated with poverty, losers, and psychopaths. Which is why I don’t get Earth Hour. In case you haven’t heard of it, the idea is that people should turn off their lights for one hour at 8:30 on March 27 to show that they support action on climate change. The “support action on climate change” part makes sense. I get that. I support that.

But I don’t get the “turn off their lights” part.

If we’re trying to convince Canada’s population that we should do something about climate change, we aren’t going to win any converts by telling them they have to reduce their quality of life. People associate lighting with being modern. In our society, you only sit in the dark if there’s something wrong with you. If we want to actually do something, we should try to show how easy it is to live green. We should point out that we waste a crap-load of energy on inefficiency. We should point out that our energy consumption has risen by 10% between 1990 and 2003¹, but our standard of living hasn’t changed (while our real incomes have fallen).

If I got to design a replacement for Earth Hour, it would go something like this: A bunch of my fellow hippies would gather on Parliament Hill on Saturday morning with batteries and generators. We’d build a stage, and invite a bunch of acts to come out an play. Come 8:30 we’d start the show. It would be powered by generators running on non-food sourced biomass (such as agricultural waste) and batteries charged from renewable sources. Everyone who could produce a valid bus transfer, or a piece of ID with an address within two kilometers of the event would get a free drink. Everyone who brought their own drink container would get $1 off booze ($2 if the container still had the skanky remains of their morning coffee). Anyone who drove would have to stare into Fat Cat’s unblinking eye for ten minutes.

And now for a numbers rant: the bizarre part about Earth Hour is that lighting really is the least of our problems. In 2003, Canada produced 10,477,207 terajoules (TJ) of energy from green house gas emitting sources. 15.3% of that was converted to electricity.² In 2003, we used 63,000 TJ of electricity for lighting. That’s 3.9% of our total green-house-gas emitting electricity use, or .6% of our total energy use.

1. According to public data, we consumed 7,539 kilograms of oil-equivalent fuel in 1990 and 8,278 in 2003. (back)
2. Calculated by adding together the GHG emitting sources and dividing by total: (134019+337441+1138645)/10477207. This clearly doesn’t cover non-GHG emitting energy sources such as hydro, nuclear, and renewable energy. Those sources do, indirectly, emit GHGs, of course, but that makes the calculation harder. (back)

I recently had an interesting exchange with Jonathan Soroko of Popular Logistics about the Afghan detainee issue, prorogation, and what they mean for Canada. Here’s an excerpt of my explanation for a friendly American:

1. At some point in the early 2000s, Canada joined the US invasion of Afghanistan. Part of our exit strategy was to say that we wanted the Afghan policy/army to become professional enough that they could handle their own detainees.
   
2. In January of 2006, a Conservative government came into power in Canada after 12 years of Liberal rule. Our Conservatives/Liberals are like a really left wing version of your Republicans/Democrats.
   
3. In early 2006, Richard Colvin (a no-name Canadian diplomat), see was sent to Afghanistan as a diplomat. He was apparently the #2ish Canadian civilian official in the country.
   
4. In a roughly 18 month period between early 2006 and late 2007, Richard Colvin saw evidence that the Afghan authorities regularly tortured prisoners. Under the Geneva conventions, a country cannot knowingly hand enemy combatants over to authorities that will torture them. That’s a war crime. Colvin sent a number of memos back to Ottawa informing them of the situation. At some point in 2007, he was told to stop writing his complaints down, and told to voice them over the phone.
   
5. In late 2006, early 2007, a Globe and Mail reporter broke the story that Afghan authorities were torturing prisoners given to them by Canadian troops. The Canadian government initially dissembled, then eventually decided to improve their procedures to ensure that detainees were being treated fairly.
   
6. At some point in 2009, Richard Colvin was subpoenaed to testify before a Parliamentry committee (like your congressional committees, with equivalent powers) to say that his superiors must have known about the torture going on in 2006-2007, but did nothing to stop it. If his allegations can be shown to be true, then members of the Canadian government may be liable to stand trial for war crimes. Note that Canadian soldiers themselves would not be guilty of war crimes – only the (civilian) policy-setting oversight bodies, since those bodies controlled what happened to detainees.
   
7. This is where things get murky. The Conservative government circled the wagons after Colvin’s testimony. They implied that anyone who cares about Afghan detainees is either woolly headed or a Taliban supporter. They didn’t supply a number of documents requested by the Parliamentry committee (which, if it’s intentional, is illegal). The conservative MPs sitting on the Parliamentry committee didn’t show up to the last meeting in December, which prevented quorum, which prevented the committee from planning its next move. Then our Prime Minister essentially dissolved Parliament on New Years’ eve.

This is where things get partisan. Folks who are generally opposed to the Conservative government are squealing that there’s a cover-up going on. Those who support the Conservatives are saying… well… they’re saying that it’s perfectly legal for a Prime Minister to dissolve Parliament at any time. Which is true.

In the wake of the prorogation (a fancy term for the dissolution of Parliament), a bunch of uppity folks which include a number of Conservative-supporters, turned out for fairly massive protests in late January. Many of the protesters feel that the prorogation served no discernible purpose other than to hit the pause button on the detainee issue until March, when the federal budget may distract the media from embarrassing questions.

Of course, there’s some context here:

• Regarding the military: In the mid 1990s, some Canadian troops were dispatched to Somalia on a peace keeping mission. Sadly, the troops in question had discipline issues and (alleged) white supremacist tendencies. Time passed, and a couple of Somali kids turned up dead in the Canadian camp, and a bunch of photos surfaced showing Canadian soldiers torturing at least one of the boys. More time passed, the government of the day (Liberal, this time) was finally coerced into calling an inquiry. Over the course of the inquiry, it appeared as if the government (or Defence Department) was executing some kind of coverup. Despite that a number of low-ranking soldiers were found guilty guilty, and the unit was disbanded. Canadians view themselves as a nation of peace keepers, so that was like an itty bitty kick to the national gonads.
  
• Regarding our Parliament: Effectively, Canada has a two-party state. Usually, one of those parties (overwhelmingly the Liberal Party) has a majority of seats in Parliament. At the moment, the Conservatives have a minority government. If all of the MPs in the House decide to pass a non-confidence vote against the government, a federal election will be forced. Which means that the Conservative government is walking a knife-edge of governing the way they want to, versus appeasing the rest of the political leaders to prevent a non-confidence vote. If any one of the parties senses political advantage (ie, pulling ahead in the polls), then they will force an election.

“Innocent until proven guilty.” Remember that phrase? As of Monday afternoon, it seems to have gone out of style.

I’m referring, of course, to the allegations that Col. Russell Williams killed Jessica Lloyd and Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, and sexually assaulted two others. The Citizen has trumpeted the story on their front page for three days this week. The CBC radio news has found reasons to mention it in most of their news casts, going to far as to refer to it as the colonel case. Coverage has been heavy enough that General Walter “there-are-no-allegations-of-torture-whoops-yes-there-are” Natynczyk gave a press conference yesterday about an anti-military backlash.

Amid this rash of coverage, it’s easy to forget that the accused hasn’t been convicted. We don’t know what the evidence is. We haven’t heard anything more than allegations. We must consider Williams innocent until he is proven otherwise.

For that to happen, our news outlets have to learn some self control. The case has everything an editor could ask for to boost ratings: beautiful women, sex, violence, a fall from grace, and a small-town celebrity. But that doesn’t excuse the feeding frenzy going on right now. Williams may turn out to be innocent: the police may have made a mistake, new evidence may come to light, or the evidence provided may be insufficient.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I assume that the police are doing their job, and that they have strong evidence, and are likely to win a conviction when this comes to court. If Williams is guilty of these horrific crimes, then I hope he is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and his life is ruined. But until he has his day in court, we must give him the benefit of the doubt.