Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Tim Harper wonders what's next for the Occupy movement, but rightly notes that state crackdowns are completely unwarranted. And Jacqueline Kennelly highlights the value of the Occupy movement as part of the work in progress that is democracy:

From the Occupy movement is already emerging new energy, new commitments, and new conversations. The Occupiers themselves are figuring out how to run their small communities, and more: they're reaching out to others to ex-pand the conversations begun within their tent cities. The Occupy Ottawa movement is engaging with academics at Carleton and the University of Ottawa to develop panel discussions, in order to educate the public and themselves about the complexities of the capitalist system that they know is not working. The original movement in New York, Occupy Wall Street, has had regular visits from scholars and writers. The blogosphere, Facebook, and Twitter are alive with conversations about what this movement means and what it is trying to achieve.

But beyond these conversations lies the more important legacy of a movement such as this one: the embodied experience of lived democracy. It is a recognition that at the root of democracy lie human relationships, in all of their messiness, complexity, and beauty. And it is the realization that the process of building a better world is just that: a process. That is the point.

- Ann Cavoukian speaks out against the Cons' Internet surveillance legislation.

- Michel Drapeau weighs in on the Cons' desire to torch the data from Canada's gun registry:

Mr. Drapeau, who is a historian who recently co-wrote a tome on military law with Federal Court Justice Gilles Letourneau, said he’s “shocked.” The records are “part of our history. It’s part of our makeup, it’s part of our culture, it’s part of making us the way we come,” he said.

“This is what they used to do in the former Soviet Union—wipe out portions of history, or in East Germany and so on, and in China. I find that from a democratic standpoint, let alone an archival standpoint, this is without precedent, and a very, very serious event in the life of a nation...”

- Finally, Donald K. Johnson takes the problem with John Ibbitson's analysis of charitable giving rules a step further. But let's make it clear just how far off base Johnson is by pointing to his example of a system he wants Canada to follow:

It’s now vital for our government to capitalize on this enormous success by expanding the capital gains tax exemption to include charitable gifts in the form of private company shares and real estate. I should note that charitable gifts of both of these asset classes are exempt from capital gains taxes in the United States. By introducing these measures in the next budget, the government would be levelling the fundraising playing field for our not-for-profit sector with their American counterparts.

So who wants to make the case that the U.S.' greater tax dodges for charitable giving (coupled with the rabid anti-tax doctrine taken as a given by Johnson) have produced better social outcomes?

Tuesday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Geoffrey Stevens notes that much of the Cons' justification for utterly senseless choices is to point to an imaginary majority:

We don’t have a “silent majority” in Canada. It appears we have instead an “invisible majority.” This mass of unseen Canadians is like Harvey, the invisible rabbit from the 1950 film starring James Stewart. It can only be seen by those who truly believe in its existence — that is to say, by Stephen Harper and his apostles.

This invisible majority persuades the government to embrace policies that make absolutely no sense, decisions that cannot be justified in a rational way, initiatives that can be understood only by those who are able to commune with Harper’s Harvey.

Who knew the long-form census was as an intolerable intrusion resented by millions of Canadians? Who knew a falling crime rate would make a massive prison-building binge essential? Who knew that resurrecting the trappings of our colonial past would be smart politics in the Canada of the 21st century?

The invisible majority knew. The pollsters didn’t hear them, but Harper did, and he acted.
...
What secret intelligence prompted Defence Minister Peter MacKay to talk last week about how Canadian servicemen will be able to stand taller and prouder when the royal designations are restored?

“This is, of course, claptrap, utter nonsense,” commented military historian Jack Granatstein. “The British connection and the monarchy are even grander abstractions with little or no meaning for today’s servicemen and women. … The reality is that Canadians in and outside the Canadian Forces have turned their backs on the monarchy.”

Granatstein is right. He’s a smart man — smarter, I venture, than those members of Harper’s inner circle who follow the dictates of an invisible (if imaginary) majority.

- Alison catches the Globe and Mail editing the NDP out of Canada's political scene.

- Laura Ryckewaert points out how last week's Federal Court ruling on records documenting the RCMP's surveillance of Tommy Douglas fits into the general attitude of the federal government toward access to information:

The Federal Court's decision that the government should release the information it has on former NDP leader Tommy Douglas is an important ruling that shows federal institutions have a lack of respect for access laws, say experts.

"If we treated many of the laws the way we treat access we'd have some significant problems, and in this case it's not ordinary citizens that are not respecting the letter of the law of access, it's government institutions," said Michel Drapeau, a lawyer who specializes in access to information.
...
Mr. Bronskill said he thinks one thing that could be built into the act is with regard to the lack of penalties for the handling of ATI requests.

"Departments miss deadlines all the time, they don't give you records by the deadline that they set for themselves, even when it's a lengthy extension sometimes," he said. "When you don't pay your bank on time, or your cable bill on time it gets cut off. Well when a federal agency misses an access to information deadline what's the penalty? Absolutely nothing."

However, not everyone thinks changes need to be made to the act.

"The only thing that is wrong with the act is the inability or unwillingness of many government institutions to basically apply it as it is," Mr. Drapeau said.

- Finally, for more on Jack Layton, see the latest from Brian Topp on how Layton made decisions, while Peter Kelly has a suggestion as to what comes next.

Softening support

Another day, another prominent former Con (of one stripe or another) turning on a party for whom he apparently had high hopes. Today it's former Progressive Conservative candidate and access-to-information guru Michel Drapeau lamenting how the Cons have managed to make information even less available than it was under the Libs:

Michel Drapeau, an access-to-information specialist, said there is a move toward more secrecy at the Defence Department and in government in general when it comes to responding to requests made under the access law.

"The culture at DND is changing towards more secrecy where you have to fight for every bit of information," said Mr. Drapeau, a lawyer and author of a 2,800-page legal textbook on the Access to Information law.

The access legislation allows Canadians to request government records by paying a $5 fee per request.

Mr. Drapeau, a retired colonel, said the bureaucracy is making it more difficult for people to make requests for information by charging hefty search fees for material that just two years ago was readily produced, or withholding records for long periods of time.

"I never thought I'd say this, but the situation has gotten worse under the Conservatives," said Mr. Drapeau, who ran unsuccessfully in the 1997 federal election as a Progressive Conservative candidate.

What is ironic, he noted, is that Mr. Harper ran his last election campaign on openness and accountability in government.

So far the Cons have managed to avoid much public attention to their steady stream of defections and disgruntled members. And it may be time for the opposition parties to start correcting that state of affairs - particularly the Libs, given that the Cons can't hear a Lib member sneeze without attributing it to Stephane Dion's lack of leadership.

But even if the Cons are winning the PR war to a limited extent, the more important story has yet to play out...and it figures to do plenty of damage to the Cons. Any real loss of support - both among those who actively backed the Cons last time out, and among prominent figures like Duff Conacher and Drapeau who have apparently had enough of the Cons' broken promises - looks to entirely outweigh any additional backers the Cons may have won while in power. And that should help ensure that the Cons have nowhere to go but down.