Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Sarah-Taïssir Bencharif discusses her experience facing prejudice against Muslims in Canada. But Ashifa Kassam reports on the growing public response to violence, as communities across the country formed "rings of peace" around mosques during their prayers on Friday.

- Meanwhile, Maher Arar points out how Canada's security state has been built around Islamophobia. And Manisha Krishnan argues that any real security threat comes from the radical right.

- But then, Kyle Curlew makes the point that we should be more skeptical of the basis for an unaccountable and intrusive security state to begin with. And CSIS' wanton intrusions into personal privacy (which it can't even be bothered to document) look to reinforce the position that the only reasonable direction to pursue is that of dismantling baseless surveillance.

- Finally, the Star's editorial board writes that it's long past time for the federal government to stop breaking its promises and obligations to Canada's First Nations.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Winslow Wheeler compares the NDP's F-35 hearings to politics on the opposite side of the U.S. border:

The differences between Canadian politicians and members of Congress are utterly stunning. Unlike here, oversight in the Canadian Parliament is alive and well. In Canada, I found two political behaviors unheard of in the United States: Opposition politicians actually try to understand the issue they are talking about, and they take offense at being lied to.

My re-orientation started when, lo and behold, without giving long, windy, and poorly informed opening statements, the parliamentarians asked questions directly relevant to my testimony about the cost to buy and operate the Canadian version of the F-35. They were not reading off or cribbing from memos but were reacting to what I had said; we had an actual discussion, one member at a time. They probed my estimate of the potential $200 million-per-aircraft cost -- not the $75 million Canada's Department of National Defense (DND) had been advertising. They also poked at my prediction that the cost to operate the F-35, after purchase, would be at least three times DND's original estimate.

The members' questions were constructed by themselves on the spot and reflected that several of them had done their homework. For example, Matthew Kellway of Ontario had clearly read and understood an article in Proceedings, the U.S. Naval Institute's journal, written by the U.S. chief of naval operations, Admiral Jonathan Greenert, questioning whether radar-evading "stealth" technology was viable against current and future countermeasures -- a key question in Canada, where "stealth" dominates the debate about the F-35 almost as much as cost.

Most remarkable was their predisposition to listen, integrate the new information they heard, synthesize it to formulate a new understanding, and then ask more questions. 

 - But it's worth noting that Wheeler may have overgeneralized in linking his positive impression to Canadian politicians generally - as Allan Gregg points out that the Cons are doing their utmost to drain Canadian politics of evidence and critical thought:

I have spent my entire professional life as a researcher, dedicated to understanding the relationship between cause and effect. And I have to tell you, I’ve begun to see some troubling trends. It seems as though our government’s use of evidence and facts as the bases of policy is declining, and in their place, dogma, whim and political expediency are on the rise. And even more troubling …. Canadians seem to be buying it.
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The thing that is disconcerting and unsettling about all this is not just the substance of these Bills, but why a government would want to disguise that substance. Maybe dismantling the Wheat Board; or pre-emptively squashing collective bargaining; or sending more potheads to jail is a good thing. But before we make those decisions, let’s look at all the facts; have a fulsome and rational debate; and make a reasoned decision of what is in the best interests of all the parties involved. For voters to determine whether these are measures they support or oppose requires that they know what is at stake and what the government is actually doing. Moreover, for the rule of law to work, the public must have respect for the law. By obfuscating the true purpose of laws under the gobbledy-gook of double speak, governments are admitting that their intentions probably lack both support and respect. Again, the lesson here is Orwellian … in the same way that reason requires consciousness, tyranny demands ignorance.

 Raising this is not a question of right versus left. It is rather- in the words of Al Gore – a question of right versus wrong. And also make no mistake that this is not simply an attack on, or a claim that the sole practitioner of masking intent is The Harper Government. Jean Charest, introduced Bill 78 as “An Act to Enable Students to Receive Instruction from the Post Secondary Education They Attend”. Under some fairly benign circumstances, it basically bans the freedom of assembly. And under the pretext of another perpetual war – the so-called War on Terrorism – the President of the United States not only routinely orders the execution of foreign nationals, on foreign soil, without any semblance of due process whatsoever, but boasts that this as one of the greatest accomplishments of his Presidency. And the American media routinely applauds him for it. Now I know it’s not comfortable to offer suspected terrorists due process, but isn’t this exactly the kind of behaviour Orwell was warning us about?
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While the circumstance in Canada 2012 is obviously nowhere near as dystopian as what Orwell depicts in 1984, I really do think that there are some unsettling parallels going on here that we ignore at our peril. I also think it’s time to gather the facts….and fight back.

- Fortunately, Paul Wells for one is meeting the Cons' latest line of echo-chamber talking points with due mockery.

- Meanwhile, Stephen Maher reports that the Cons' illegal election tactics in Guelph may now be under investigation by the CRTC along with Elections Canada. And Glen McGregor notes that the Con staffer initially thrown under the bus seems to have had little to do with Robocon (even as his documented track record of party-sanctioned attempted vote suppression makes him a less-than-sympathetic scapegoat).

- Finally, John Dunbar offers his own broadly representational visualization of Enbridge's plans for Douglas Channel - featuring a supertanker in the middle of an island 500 metres above sea level.

Sunday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your weekend.

- David Olive highlights the complete lack of need for the Cons' planned attacks on Old Age Security:

Say what you will of Stephen Harper’s success in scaring Canadian seniors with his recent musings about cutting seniors’ benefits. It does not warrant the public debate that the most charitable of the PM’s critics on this issue have tepidly welcomed.

The affordability of a higher-quality health care system does merit debate. Also affordable housing, the cornerstone of poverty reduction. Also education reform that better matches students with a workplace that, as a business think tank complained last week, is suffering a “desperate shortage” of skilled workers despite 1.42 million Canadians out of work.

The PM is wrong about the sustainability of Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement, paid to the poorest Canadians. And Canadians have let him know it.
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On his return from swanning with the swells in Davos, the improbable venue where Harper first floated his soak-the-seniors idea, the PM was given an earful from his own caucus. They have been inundated with complaints from constituents fearful and angry about the prospect of either themselves or someone they love being deprived of some portion of their average modest $500 a month in OAS payments. (That’s $6,000 a year, considerably below the poverty line. Hence the Guaranteed Income Supplement paid to the poorest seniors.)

Neither Harper or his more excitable ministers have explained why OAS and GIS suddenly are a “crisis.”

Nor have they offered a scintilla of convincing evidence for their case. Which is not surprising, perhaps, given the weight of contrary evidence in the many reports on this topic. But you’d think the PM would at least have read those reports before needlessly frightening a large part of the population.

- Meanwhile, Selena Ross reports from an NDP meeting to consult with citizens about the rumoured cuts to OAS.

- Thomas Walkom points out the futility of trying to justify torture as a matter of evidence-gathering as the Cons are determined to do:

(T)icking-time-bomb cases are so rare as to be almost non-existent. Countries like Morocco that use torture employ it not just for exceptional threats but as a standard investigative technique.

Thus Syrian jailers tortured Canadian Maher Arar in 2002 — not because they believed he was about to blow up downtown Damascus, but because that’s what Syrian jailers do.

Naturally, Arar told his torturers whatever they wanted to hear. His “confession” was then passed on to Canada.

But, as Justice Dennis O’Connor’s inquiry into the affair later discovered (and CSIS, to its credit, confirmed), the confession was useless — because it just wasn’t true.

And that is the practical problem with torture. It is unreliable.

- Tria Donaldson and Max Fineday write that Romeo Saganash's leadership campaign offered important inspiration to young First Nations activists.

- And finally, Alice offers a look at whether the Toront-Danforth by-election campaign stands in its early stages, while Linda Diebel presents Olivia Chow's take.

Wednesday Morning Links

Assorted content for your midweek reading.

- It's tough to disagree with Jamey Heath's view that a united Canadian left is a long way off. But perhaps more important than his recognition that it will take awhile to reach that end goal is his rightful identification of the process most likely to get there:

Many left-leaning Liberals are Liberals for no reason other than it used to be a viable alternative to Conservatives. They would find a happy home in the NDP if they accepted its invitation.

But they are leery. They fret the party's success may prove shortlived and worry it has not taken on board enough lessons from successful Prairie cousins, or the not-sosuccessful Bob Rae experience in Ontario.

Convincing them the NDP can form the base of something new -able to work with Quebecers -will take more than a welcome mat. It also depends on more introspection from Liberals who mistake being in the middle with avoiding the polarized politics their party long fed.

- Alice's latest chart comparing the riding-level two-party races in 2008 and 2011 is definitely worth a look. But it's particularly worth noting that the two largest blocks of ridings involve races where the NDP seems well positioned to take over Con territory - including the 50 where the NDP came second to the Cons in both 2008 and 2011, and the 43 where the NDP eclipsed the Libs as the second-place party. And indeed, an even split of the 148 ridings where the NDP and the Cons were the top two contenders would result in the NDP ranking at the top of the federal party standings.

- Thomas Walkom points out what the Conference Board of Canada's report on health care really says - contrary to the media spin about it somehow serving to justify further privatization:

(The report) makes the obvious point that health involves more than doctors, hospitals and drugs. It suggests that Japan’s high life expectancy is related more to diet than anything else (the Japanese are far less obese than Americans).

And it points out that the countries with some of the worst health outcomes are often those with the most poverty.

That Canada has the second-highest level of infant mortality among advanced nations may have little to do with our health care system and much to do with the fact that our poverty rate is almost as high as America’s.

The second question the Conference Board looks at is why U.S. medical costs are so high.

Its findings here won’t give much solace to the National Post.

The study attributes much of this extra spending to America’s reliance on private medical insurance. Administration costs in the United States are twice those of its nearest competitor, France.

Incidentally, Canada already has the third-highest rate of private health spending among the countries surveyed, a fact that should give pause to those who claim that privatization leads to lower costs.

The study also fingers another panacea of the right: market incentives. It notes that outpatient surgery and diagnostic testing in the U.S. are skyrocketing — in part because pricey tests (such as MRI scans) are needlessly duplicated and in part because fee-for-service billing encourages specialists to schedule more operations.

- Shorter Charles Moore: Better to redefine "democracy" as meaning something other than government supported by voters than to acknowledge that a distorted first-past-the-post system doesn't live up to the standard.

- Finally, pogge notes that at least some of the lessons from Maher Arar's abduction seem to have been wilfully ignored by CSIS in identifying Canadians as "suspected of terrorist-related activity" based on nothing more than distant association.

On safeguards

A spokesflack for Vic Toews tries to explain why we shouldn't be the least bit worried about the Harper government handing passenger information to the U.S. even for flights which don't land there:

The United States has agreed to erase after seven days, passenger information "that is confirmed to not be linked with terrorism."

Which should be highly reassuring on a couple of fronts. After all, who wouldn't be completely pleased with the U.S. seeking whatever additional information it wants about all Canadian passengers and everybody they're linked to in order to "confirm" a negative before erasing any information?

And more importantly, who would doubt for a second that anybody saddled with a false positive will get a fair shake in trying to clear their name, both from the U.S. and Canada?

Lessons to be learned

The Globe and Mail comments on the Cons' cabinet-level attempt to cover up information from the final Arar inquiry report which had nothing at all to do with genuine security issues:

The next time the Canadian government tells you it has secrets it needs to keep to protect national security, feel free to laugh out loud.

Canada fought long and hard to keep 1,500 supposedly dangerous words out of the 1,400 pages of a judicial report into the disappearance of Maher Arar, a Muslim father of two from Ottawa who fell victim to the West's fight against terrorism. We now know what most of those dangerous words were. Here is one example. It's from the judicial report's Table of Contents: "Application for Telephone Warrant." (Cue the crack of lightning.) Also falling on the censor's cutting stone was the apparently unspeakable phrase "the CIA." As in, "The RCMP had periodic contact with the CIA at this time." Surprise, surprise. When an innocent Canadian Muslim was dispatched to Syria, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was involved...

We also learned yesterday that information gleaned under severe abuse or torture from a Canadian, Ahmad El Maati, in Syria was used by the RCMP to persuade a judge back in Canada to let it tap someone's telephone. A gross deprivation of civil liberties in a part of the world where the rule of law does not prevail thus provided the basis for an intrusion into civil liberties here in a constitutional democracy. And no one questioned very hard whether the information obtained under such duress in Syria was solid...

(W)hen Judge O'Connor tried to get the truth out, the Canadian government fought him in court for a year to keep the lid on 1,500 words.

We now know that the public had a right to see those words. They remind us of how fragile our civil liberties can be in a dangerous time.

It remains to be seen whether mainstream media sources like the Globe will keep the heat on the Cons for their other attempts to suppress information as well. But now that it's clear just how flimsy the excuses have been even when it comes to an inquiry intended to reveal the truth to Canadians, there's less reason than ever to take the Cons' word as to any need for secrecy.

Still listed

CTV reports that the U.S. is refusing to remove Maher Arar from its no-fly list based on "information obtained by U.S. authorities, independent of anything supplied by Canada" contained in the U.S.' "secret file". But while that claim eliminates from the equation the RCMP's information which proved to be so dubious based on the O'Connor report, there's no apparent indication that it also excludes the "confessions" which Arar was tortured into during his rendition.

Now, it could be that the U.S. does in fact have other information which would offer a relatively reasonable justification for keeping Arar on the list. But even if so, the Bush culture of secrecy and deceit can only lead people to be rightfully suspicious when the public face continues to be "trust us, but we won't tell you why". And in the absence of some credible statement as to why Arar and others are still being treated with suspicion (free of both any reliance on confessions obtained through torture, and any link to lawsuits related to rendition), it looks like there's still an awfully long way to go in the effort to secure justice for Arar and others.