Wednesday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your afternoon reading.

- Ladies and gentlemen, your fully accountable Treasury Board president:

Clement, the MP for Parry Sound-Muskoka and a former Ontario cabinet minister in the Mike Harris years, emerged from Conservative caucus Wednesday to make the announcement in a brief statement to the media.

“We have arranged for myself and others including (Foreign Affairs Minister John) Baird, who had his responsibilities in the program, (Infrastructure) Minister (Denis) LeBel and others to appear before the public accounts committee in the weeks ahead,” he said.

As a result, “parliamentarians will have a full right to ask any additional questions they may have,” Clement added.

Clement then turned and left, refusing to answer reporters’ shouted questions about why he has never stood in the Commons chamber to explain his role in the disbursal of nearly $50 million in G8 Legacy Fund spending in his riding last year.

Incidentally, it's worth raising some question as to the Cons' strategy in the committee hearing. Keep in mind that for the past few weeks, the NDP has been able to reveal more and more of its own research on Clement, keeping the story in the news despite his refusal to answer questions: so might the goal of the committee hearing be to allow the Cons to force everything out into the open now with a single opportunity for MPs to ask any questions at all of Clement before the Cons again declare the subject closed?

- I ask of course only because of the Cons' habits of engaging in Parliamentary warfare and taking unaccountability to new depths.

- Meanwhile, the Star-Phoenix editorial board chimes in on how the Cons' ideology is damaging Canada and the world:

It is not without irony that, as parliamentarians were carrying on their fruitless last hours of debating the crime bill, Prime Minister Stephen Harper was conducting an unprecedented face-to-face meeting with both Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, presumably to discuss the dire global economic situation.

The meeting comes as a group of economists are questioning the efficacy of the type of fiscal austerity Mr. Harper has been preaching in the face of growing evidence that the world is in danger of slipping into a 1930s-like, double-dip recession. The economists note the Depression was a result of such government action.
...
Although Saskatchewan is experiencing a remarkable boom, among the first victims of a serious global recession is likely to be commodity prices - just as was the case in the 1930s.

It's also the case with this omnibus crime bill, which will disproportionately hit the pocketbooks of those jurisdictions with serious social problems or large aboriginal populations, because of the restrictions placed on judges' ability to take into account special circumstances. The federal government blindly sticking to ideology rather than weighing economic evidence could be a disaster for Saskatchewan.

Canada requires better than a government that ignores facts and limits debates.

- Finally, Cliff nicely highlights the corporatist push to grant rights to capital while denying them to people:

Neil Reynolds today demonstrates the traditional fondness of right wing libertarians for dictatorial authoritarian regimes with a column expressing almost unalloyed admiration for Singapore, a country even (Reynolds) is forced to admit is severely authoritarian.

Some may be surprised at how a self professed libertarian could seem so enthusiastic about a borderline totalitarian state with pervasive, constant surveillance, barbaric criminal law and a rigidly authoritarian state apparatus. Silly rabbit, right wing libertarians don't want liberty for people, people sometimes use liberty to band together against the depredations of capital, and capital is the only thing (Reynolds) and his ilk want liberty for. Capital and those who have it.
...
So-called 'Free Markets' are the only freedom Reynolds gets passionate about, free people can become obstructive to that freedom through quaint concerns about the environment or workers rights or a decent social safety net and that's a freedom he seems to believe should be discouraged.