On double standards

Simon Enoch, Paul Dechene and Stephen Whitworth have already weighed in on the City of Regina's choice to blow its nose on a petition that reflects citizen engagement in action. But I'm surprised nobody's yet pointed out the vastly different treatment between two different aspects of the petition.

As Dechene notes, the City took two steps to arbitrarily cut down on the number of names treated as valid. First, it simply threw out over 2,800 names based on the fact that the listed date didn't include the year. And second, it conducted a "sampling" of the names on the remaining list, presuming that any signatures were invalid unless a signatory provided a positive response to a phone-out campaign - then applied the response rate for that sample to the balance of the signatures.

And there's a particularly jarring disconnect between those two steps.

Simply put, if the City was going to be calling out to confirm the validity of information on the petitions in any event, there's no excuse for their pitching petitions based on the date without conducting comparable sampling to assess that issue. After all, it would have taken little added work to conduct a similar sampling of the signatures which didn't list the year, and determine whether the intended year was in fact 2013.

But apparently sampling techniques were seen as utterly unacceptable if they served to validate rather than exclude signatures.

And based on the City's earlier attempt to change the rules in the middle of the petition campaign in order to prevent any referendum, we have to presume they had some even more restrictive form of "verification" ready in the wings if the phone campaign didn't figure to meet its goal of avoiding the referendum threshold: perhaps setting up an in-person roll call with 15 minutes notice, and disqualifying the signature of anybody not present to respond to his or her name being called.

It remains to be seen how Council will answer the Clerk's report - though anybody counting on most of the current crop to value public input when a chance for a private operator to bleed the city dry is at stake figures to be in for a long wait. But there's reason to hope that the Clerk's double standard will give the petitioners a fighting chance if we see the expected response.

Update: Paul Dechene has more. 

Friday Evening Links

This and that to end your week.

- Tavia Grant writes that at least one region of the globe - Latin America - is seeing some real progress in combating inequality. And the World Bank has some ideas to keep up the momentum:

The bank still sees room for improvement. It recommends governments incorporate the goal of equal opportunity into public policy and make further reforms to strengthen the social protection system.

It also urges governments to break the “vicious cycle” of low taxation and low quality of public services, by using some of the region’s commodity windfall to improve public services.

- Back in Canada, it's another week, another finding of pollution caused by the tar sands and covered up by the Harper Cons. Not to mention a concerted effort to exploit foreign labour to ensure Canadians can't find good jobs. Nothing to see here. Enjoy your publicly-funded propaganda campaign.

- Though Jeffrey Simpson does maintain enough residual faith in the prospect of making improvements to suggest that a national drug plan for seniors is in order. And Lawrence Martin is downright Pollyannaish in suggesting the Harper Cons might recognize that a judicial finding of electoral fraud might cast their legitimacy into enough doubt to require a federal election.

- Finally, Stephen Whitworth doesn't see much more reason for optimism at the provincial level:

(O)ne gets the distinct sense that Saskatchewan’s current leadership class have no vision, no imagination, no appreciation for the arts and no respect for the great things about this province’s history.

I submit that everything cool is getting kicked because in general, the business class and its toady politicians are ashamed of Saskatchewan’s historic achievements, which really, all come from the political left: health care, crown corps, arts boards and the co-operative sector. All that stuff really did make this place better but our conservative-types didn’t build it (actually, they fought it every step of the way) so they have to dismantle it. Because if they can’t have a legacy, NO ONE gets a legacy.

I mean, we’re in a boom and we’re starving our universities for funding? What a joke. I thought Saskatchewan was a have-province.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Yes, it's noteworthy enough that Jack Layton is surging ahead as Canada's first choice for Prime Minister. But perhaps the most stunning news is that the first of those polls comes from Ipsos-Reid - the pollster which regularly places Conservative support (and one would think by association Stephen Harper's) higher than any other. And if even the most Con-friendly of polls is showing Layton ahead, there doesn't seem to be much prospect of the Cons getting any good news as the campaign winds down.

- Meanwhile, the party polling is looking no less promising for the NDP.

- John Duffy notes why the NDP's gains don't figure to be ending anytime soon:

There is no reason to believe...that this has to come to a halt. Fact: various polls are now showing the NDP eating not only into the Liberal vote (as in Ontario) but also into the Conservative vote pretty much everywhere outside the prairies. Analysis is catching up. Fact: the NDP surge is showing no sign of abating. Fact: The NDP has a great, upbeat "closer"-style spot on television right now, while the other parties have ads that are not resonating. Fact: The Conservative response, which would probably be impressive, is nowhere to be seen, plus they just lost one of their best strategy guys at the worst possible moment. Meanwhile, the Liberals are starting to fall off the coverage radar. Fact: earned media campaign coverage is about to go dark for the Royal Wedding and the final weekend.
...
I am seriously starting to wonder whether some sort of massive genie hasn't been let out of the bottle here. Mr. Harper has framed the campaign and its run-up as an anti-politics exercise. Putting words in the PM's mouth, I described his core pitch as being, "The heck with these elections we've all come to hate. Vote for a Harper majority and all this political crap gets out of your hair for four years." What appears to be happening here is that the anti-politics appeal has found its audience, and it's expression is "the heck with Harper and Ignatieff." The response seems not to have taken the form of Liberal voters sourly staying home and throwing the election to the Conservatives. Rather, it appears the anti-politician mood that the Prime Minister stoked has created an immense opening for Mr. Layton's positive, uplifting, take-a-chance-on-me offering.

- Douglas Bell rightly points out that the NDP's surge is based at least as much on the party's appeal to Canadian values as to any protest vote.

- And Bell also passes along Liam McHugh-Russell's end-of-campaign prediction:

I told you two weeks ago that the NDP would need just a glimmer of hope to finally take off, and now they've gotten it. They're finally heading toward their ceiling and that ceiling is high indeed: 130 per cent the height of the Conservatives or the Liberals. You want a seat count? NDP 115, Conservatives 110; Liberals 65; Bloc 18. In the end, politics is possible and suddenly, so are these results. Me, I am still rooting for the NDP because I believe they're serious about us having the Canada we already have, except better. But it's also very exciting that the result we do get five days from now will be determined by the question I said mattered when this whole thing started: whether Canadians believe it's possible for them to have the government they want. And it seems increasingly like they can – and that they will.

- Armine Yalnizyan offers a reminder of the Cons' choice to gut the long-form census - and points out the wide range of Canadians affected by their inexplicable disregard for thorough and accurate census data.

- Stephen Whitworth expresses some restrained displeasure with the Globe and Mail's train wreck of a Con endorsement.

- And finally, Les Perreaux debunks the efforts of political opponents and media alike to make an issue of the NDP's potential wave of new MPs.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- We can say this much for Bev Oda's KAIROS forgery: it ranks up there with the census debacle and the 2008 fiscal update crisis as one of the moments which has launched the best commentary on Stephen Harper's government. For sheer outrage, it's hard to top Stephen Whitworth:

It’s past time to say it: it is no longer possible for any informed, intelligent person of sound mind to vote for a Conservative candidate as the party is currently constructed. Voting Conservative automatically indicates the voter is either uninformed (which this paper’s staff and writers will work harder to help correct), or a demented ideologue and possible sociopath.

- Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne is somewhat more restrained, but makes up for it in style points:

In times past — not under the last government, but in any previous — a minister who lied to Parliament, even once, would be gone, immediately: if not out of any genuine sense of shame or remorse on the part of the government, then certainly out of a sense that it could not afford to be publicly associated with such deceitful behaviour. But this government, and this Prime Minister, seem instead to be bent on riding this out. They do not deny that she lied. But neither do they acknowledge that she did. They simply do not address the issue at all. Instead they make another point altogether: that the minister was within her rights to overrule her bureaucrats.

Yes, of course she was. She may even have been right to do so, though that is something that can be debated. What cannot be debated, what she had absolutely no right to do, was to misrepresent her bureaucrats’ views, alter documents, and lie to Parliament.

WHICH IS to say: it is the government’s defense of her, more even than the minister’s misconduct, that is now the issue. Ministers in any government will screw up from time to time. Some will even lie. That is fallible humanity. But when they are caught, when the jig is up, when there are no longer any lies to be told, it is to be expected — it has always been expected — that consequences should follow. At the least, one could expect the government to acknowledge that what she did was wrong — or at the very least, to acknowledge that she did it.

If it then tried to keep her on, arguing that the sin was not so great as to warrant a resignation, that would be objectionable enough, and a denial of all previous precedent. But it would at least be a tacit concession that ministers should not lie to Parliament. If it had tried to pretend there were some doubt about what she had done, that would be graver still, since it would be to deny facts that were not capable of dispute, and thus to cast into doubt the very possibility of fact and evidence as guides to public debate. But just to ignore the charge altogether, to carry on as if nothing had happened, takes us into the kingdom of dada.

- Alex Himelfarb's post on the shifting of the Overton Window is well worth a read. But I have to wonder whether his conclusion matches his analysis: if it's true that the most substantial impact of the right's well-funded push over the past few decades has been to shift the terms of political debate, isn't it more important to develop and amplify a competing narrative than to spend time and energy denouncing the current one?

- Finally, Stuart Thomson makes a good point about the Cons' targeted political stimulus which looks to be worth some follow-up on the national level:

A year after the Citizen published its stimulus story, it occurred to me that maybe 30 smaller, $1 million projects were more effective than a single $30 million project. Maybe even 30 times more effective.

The government would seem to agree. Re-sorting my stimulus spreadsheet by the number of projects, rather than the amount of money spent, produced some startling results.

Vaughan, the so-called battleground riding that recently switched from Liberal red to Tory blue, received funding for a whopping 136 projects. That’s 136 billboards for the government. It’s at the top of the list for all of Canada, but that doesn’t even begin to tell the story. It has 60 more stimulus projects than the second-place riding. It has more than six times the average for Ontario. If you look at the results on a bar graph, Vaughan shoots into the sky, towering above every other riding. It looks not unlike the Toronto skyline, with the bar representing Vaughan mimicking the CN Tower.

Perhaps it’s a coincidence, but the second riding on the list also tells a story: Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing, home of NDP MP Carol Hughes, who found herself high on a Conservative hit-list after she voted to scrap the gun registry. She changed her vote, but not before attracting a series of attack ads.

How do you tell if a riding like Hughes’ is coveted by the Conservatives? Look around at the 76 stimulus signs dotting the landscape. It’ll tell you all you need to know.

The appropriate response

For all that's been said about Brad Trost's attempt to eliminate federal funding to Planned Parenthood's international operations, the definitive word so far goes to Stephen Whitworth:

Reasonable, tolerant people do not launch petitions against Planned Parenthood because it provides legal abortions. I'm officially calling it and I'm sticking to it: Saskatoon MP Brad Trost is unfit for public office and frankly he's a threat to human rights, freedoms and civil society.