Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Jim Stanford points out that any "bitumen bubble" will only get worse if the Cons and their provincial cousins get their way in shifting the Canadian economy even further toward immediate tar sands extraction:

(I)f the problem exists because we’re pumping out raw bitumen faster than markets can absorb it, will it really help to pump it out even faster? Few analysts believe the Keystone pipeline to the United States would solve the problem, even if it does get built; at best, it would displace downward price pressure from Oklahoma southward to Louisiana. Pipelines through British Columbia are unlikely to be built, for environmental reasons. And even if Canadian oil could reach Asia, remember that there are similar price risks there – including alternative supplies, conservation and environmental constraints. In sum, the inherent limitations of an economic strategy rooted in the extraction and export of raw resources cannot be overcome by simply finding another foreigner to sell to.

The sheer waste and irrationality of the Canadian discount should be addressed with alternative measures. Instead of extracting and exporting raw commodities, we should strive to add more value to our resources right here in Canada. Upstream, we could use far more Canadian-made equipment in resource projects. Downstream, we could upgrade and refine the resource instead of saturating export markets with raw output. Even better would be to use Canadian petroleum refined at home to displace the expensive crude currently imported from Britain and Algeria.

Yes, this would mean slowing the pace of bitumen expansion, since there’s not enough demand in Canada, to absorb all the new bitumen the industry wants to pump. But we would extract much more value from each barrel. And we’d stop cheapening the value of our own non-renewable resources with this mad rush to export.

- Meanwhile, Stephen Leahy takes note of the Cons' effort to brand environmentalists as terrorists in order to silence dissent from the oil-at-all-costs extraction policy. Saskboy reacts with due outrage here at home.

- And Heather Scoffield reports that the Cons' supposed commitment to monitoring the environmental impacts of the tar sands has led to precisely zero public reporting so far - while any future reporting will be based less on the neutral and accurate presentation of actual results than a concerted effort to fit any result into the party line:

The hope is to start releasing data through a publicly accessible portal soon — perhaps by the end of the month, although no date has been made final.

Some types of data would be streamed continuously as scientists produce it. Other data would be released at periodic intervals of three or six months. And other categories would be released more holistically, presented in a way that would prevent analysts from coming to spurious conclusions based on a partial picture, Dodds said.

- Finally, speaking of complete failures, Amy Minsky and Mike Le Couteur took the time to check on the Cons' spin about reviewing ministerial expenses - and found that eight out of nine departments who responded (including Bev Oda's) featured absolutely no effort to determine whether expenses claimed were actually legitimate.

Convenient

In case we needed any more confirmation that the Cons won't even pretend to be honest about what they've done until after they're done having to answer for it, this nicely fits the pattern. So who thinks we can afford to let any of the rest of the Cons keep hiding out any longer than can be avoided?

Parliament in Review - April 25, 2012

Wednesday, April 25 saw one of the more noteworthy economic debates we've seen in the current session of Parliament, as a former-PC-turned-Liberal raised the issue of income inequality to a noteworthy response from the Harper Cons.

The Big Issue

Scott Brison presented what should have been a relatively non-controversial motion - calling not even for immediate action to address income inequality, but merely for study of the issue with a focus on "welfare walls" rather than substantive redistribution. But Dany Morin recognized that the Cons are doing everything in their power to reduce public knowledge of the issue - and sure enough, Brison's motion was met with admonitions from Shelly Glover and Cathy McLeod that their party doesn't believe the issue deserves any discussion.

Meanwhile, Peggy Nash nicely summed up what we already know about the corrosive effects of inequality. And Hoang Mai lamented the Cons' refusal to recognize reality. But the Cons made it abundantly clear that they don't see inequality as a problem worth addressing - meaning that we can expect at least three more years of matters getting worse.

First Principles

Another day of debate on the citizen's arrest bill led to plenty of discussion about the parties' general philosophies about criminal justice. Mike Sullivan noted that the Cons' anti-refugee bill treats newly-arrived individuals as offenders, then made the point that few if any potential offenders will look into the possible sentences before deciding to engage in criminal activity.  Raymond Cote questioned how the Cons can favour judicial discretion when it comes to the reasonableness of a citizen's arrest but not when it comes to sentencing, and suggested that we take an epidemiological point of view in evaluating our criminal justice policy. Charlie Angus commented that dealing with crime has to be a community effort rather than relying unduly on individual action. And Craig Scott pointed out that the committee process had been highly effective in addressing C-26 - again raising questions as to why the Cons are so eager to shut it down most of the time.

In Brief

Nycole Turmel criticized the Cons for slashing support to co-operatives in the budget. Charlie Angus pointed out that Bev Oda was a repeat offender when it came to frivolous spending of public money which went unaccounted for until opposition parties raised the issues. Romeo Saganash compared the cost of Oda's limo rides and five-star hotel rooms to the much smaller price of saving children through programs which the Cons are cutting, while Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet noted that the Cons had sunk to a new low in refusing to fund programs covered by a homelessness partnering strategy. Fin Donnelly contrasted the Cons' rhetoric about merely wanting to change fisheries regulation to avoid regulating ditches against their admission that part of the goal was to grease the skids for massive pipeline projects. Maria Mourani presented a private member's bill to review the extraterritorial activities of Canadian businesses. And in adjournment proceedings, Linda Duncan questioned the Cons about their choice to limit consultation with First Nations on resource projects which affect their land and livelihood.

Full circle

That's right: Tom Lukiwski has the gall to rerun "the civil service made us do it" in response to breaches of privilege including one based on his party's fabricating and lying about advice from the civil service.

Somewhere, a hastily altered memo stating that the Cons' contempt of Parliament is ^NOT a problem awaits its turn in the spotlight.

[Edit: fixed wording.]

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted material for your weekend reading.

- Yes, Tabatha Southey's latest is on the hilarious side. But sadly, it's worth noting that even giving the Cons credit for being willing to tell the truth only in response to the correct question (which requires specific knowledge of the answer) is too generous: is there really any evidence that their response even to the right question is anything but to repeat their pre-fabricated talking points?

- The Mound of Sound posts on state capture by corporate interests:

Corporatism is now insinuating itself between legislators and the voting public whenever and wherever that suits its interests. None of this could happen without a willingly and thoroughly corrupt political class which is pretty much an apt description for America's "bought and paid for" Congress. As we transition into a full-fledged petro-state we too will have to be constantly aware of the susceptibility of our own political classes to Corporatist corruption. But being aware is not enough. This has to be fought back because it won't go away on its own.

- Meanwhile, there doesn't seem to me much doubt which needs and values are being utterly ignored as the Cons look to cater to the corporate sector:

With so many recommendations and so much time and thought put into developing them, how can the Harper government justify tossing it aside with barely a glance?

They’ve had practice, for one. In 2009, a Senate subcommittee released an anti-poverty plan, which, if anything, covered too much ground with 74 recommendations. The government took no action on that report despite its chilling conclusion that, far from lifting people out of poverty, many of our existing programs are so badly designed that they hold people down.
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No one is disputing that Ottawa already puts substantial funding into programs that help the poor but the fact remains that more than 3 million Canadians are still living in poverty.

That makes it astonishing that the Conservative government is so ready to dismiss any thoughtful advice on what it can and should do to help those suffering Canadians achieve more productive, happier lives.

- And at the end of an otherwise gloomy column, Gerald Caplan suggests that now may just be the time for the NDP to run a successful campaign by highlighting the issues that the Cons have been working so hard to ignore:

There’s a powerful, exciting and unanswerable campaign to run against Mr. Harpergovernment, especially by the NDP. The target is broad as a battleship, the issues irresistible – a government that can neither be trusted nor afforded. The examples are legion; there are almost too many to keep track of. But me, I’d begin with inequality and the multiple ways it’s increasing, thanks to corporate tax cuts, tax havens, tax loopholes, tax evasions, tax subsidiaries and government subsidies to corporations. There’s a very explicit class war being waged out there, with the government as enthusiastic enabler of the filthy rich getting even filthier at the direct expense of the rest of us. This is the perfect NDP issue since the Chrétien-Martin governments were active collaborators in this unrelenting war against the middle and lower classes.

What a campaign Mr. Layton could run on these issues. He could easily produce a new case every day throughout the entire campaign that would shock and outrage most Canadians. Jaded New Democrats would be revitalized. The many progressives disgusted with the present political system would be re-inspired.

This is why the NDP was founded. This is what the NPD exists for.

An election? Bring it on!

Sunday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading (and participating).

- Tom Levenson points out one of the greatest ironies of the current Wisconsin showdown in particular and the attack on public employees in general, as they result in workers giving up exactly the type of intelligent retirement planning that we're supposed to be pursuing:

Wisconsin’s public service employees are not overpaid relative to their private sector counterparts. Rutgers University professor Jeffrey Keefe has done the analysis. (See his complete study on our Employment Policy Research Network website: www.employmentpolicy.org.) Controlling for education and other standard human capital variables he found that Wisconsin’s public sector workers earn 8.2 percent less than their private sector counterparts in wages and salaries. Taking fringe benefits into account shrinks the difference to 4.2 percent. Thus, public sector workers have lower wages and higher fringe benefits (yes, pensions and health care benefits are the two standouts). But overall, they are not overpaid compared to the private sector. No easy scapegoat here.

That is: Wisconsin state workers are living exactly the way their fellow citizens should want them to: they are deferring present consumption for income security in retirement. This is what every financial counselor begs their clients to do. It is what as a society we want to happen—better by far that our citizens anticipate and prepare for life after work than to hit the bricks with a grin and a sawbuck in their pockets.

- Scott Reid nicely sums up what the Cons' advertising scandal (among other cover-ups) ultimately means:

What can — and what must — still be explored is whether the only principle that remains standing in Stephen Harper's Ottawa is that the ends justify the means. Whether the Conservatives will be held to account for their actions — if indeed it is shown they deliberately and willfully broke election law. And how can the wrong be righted since we cannot of course, turn back time and conduct again an election held a half-decade ago on different terms.

Stephen Harper will say he doesn't care. That it's a minor disagreement as to how a rule might be interpreted. But that is plainly disingenuous. Harper is the Roger Clemens of federal politics. A man who fights against any and all evidence he did wrong. Who accuses his accusers of ulterior motives. Who bullies those he can and demeans those he cannot. And who, in the final analysis, if — and we should say if — is confirmed as a cheat, will employ his supporters to argue that it does nothing to undermine his achievements. But it does. It undermines everything. Because it undermines his personal integrity.

In that respect, the historic issue at stake is not the result of the 2006 election. It is the legacy of the man who still leads Canada in 2011. Once the outcome of these charges has been fully adjudicated let's hope the finding takes a central, not marginal place in our permanent assessment of Stephen Harper. And let's hope that others refuse to follow his lead — whether it works or not.

- Meanwhile, Malcolm offers his take on the cause of Bev Oda's impending demise:

Despite Stephen Harper's bluster and misdirection, no one has disputed Bev Oda's right to suspend the funding - or, more accurately, to reject the proposal to continue funding.

If Bev Oda had the competence God gave a particularly stupid goldfish, she would have sent the documents back to the officials unsigned. She would have informed them that she was not going to approve the funding, and that would have been that. Alternatively, she could have instructed them to prepare another version of the document with an "I do / do not approve" option.
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(F)or me, it isn't the dishonesty that's shocking. I've known politicians to be dishonest before. Heck, in the great scheme of political dishonesty, this isn't even a big one.

No. For me it's the stupidity.

Lying when you're caught out at something is, if not admirable, at least understandable.

Lying for no reason at all is simply inexcuseable.

In fact, it's just plain dumb.

Bev Oda may not be thrown under the bus immediately - but you can rest assured that her political advancement in the Harper heirarchy is done like dinner. She's an embarrassment - and Harper doesn't like to be embarrassed.

When her political obituary is written within the next year or so, people will blame her demise on the fact that she lied to Parliament and to the people of Canada.

The reality, though, is that she torpedoed her own political career because she is mind-numbingly stupid. The lie is merely a symbol of her incredible incompetence.

- Finally, time is running out to participate in the Mapping the Canadian Political Blogosphere survey - so for those with a few minutes, now is the time to help give as accurate a picture as possible of Canada's blogging community.

Deep thought

Never before has a federal cabinet minister's utter failure to accomplish anything to earn public acknowledgment been trumpeted with such pride.

Monday Morning Links

Assorted reading to pass a chilly Family Day.

- Your non sequitur of the day comes from Con MP Ed Holder responding to the concerns of Kevin Page and the opposition parties about the use of "cabinet confidences" to hide the actual costs of Harper policies:

Conservative MP Ed Holder (London West, Ont.) said it wasn't so much about resources, but rather a lack of time, and MPs focusing on "salacious" issues rather than what they're in Parliament to do. He said the Library of Parliament is an excellent resource for MPs who need help understanding the budget or estimates or any piece of legislation.

How that's supposed to help in the absence of estimates related to a particular bill is left as an exercise for the reader - at least, assuming there isn't a "cabinet confidences" section of the library where full information can be found.

- Susan Delacourt gives her take on why Bev Oda's forgery and cover-up - and the Cons' continued defiance - are well worth some continuing coverage:

You want to know why this government spends so much time controlling its "message" and its portrayal in public? Because it's trying to enforce power over who writes its history -- criticism is tantamount to taking the enemies' side. We reporters in Ottawa are used to this by now.

The Bev Oda controversy is not staying in the headlines because we journalists are trying to bring down the government (much as many Conservatives love to believe). Most of us actually aren't in that good-versus-evil frame of mind. It's being reported because it was an open, ham-handed effort to distort the record. And it's part of a pattern. (See cases above -- there are more.) So is it a big deal? Yes. Precisely because it's so ordinary, and it's being portrayed that way by Oda's supporters.

- And Brian Topp theorizes that there's somewhat more to the Oda ado than the Cons are letting on:

Given Ms. Oda's impressive background and real qualities, her first round of testimony on this matter was more credible than her second. Notwithstanding her belated fess-up, I doubt she doctored that memo. In changing her story and claiming that she did, I speculate, she is taking the fall for someone else.

Someone dumb. Someone who is cavalier about the integrity of public servants. Someone who has a notably loose relationship with the truth. Someone in a position to give orders to ministers – orders in contempt of Parliament – even at the price of their credibility and (possibly) their careers.

Who could that be?

- Though in fairness, it's worth noting that no mistake, offence or outrage is actually a career-ender for a right-wing ideologue. Just ask Tim Powers, who's taken up Russell Ullyatt's defence after Ulyatt merely torpedoed an entire budget consultation process for his own personal gain.

- Finally, Scott Feschuk notes that the Cons are also taking embarrassing steps to try to revise the language used to rewrite their history:

The Conservatives imported the expression “job creators” from Republicans in the United States, who are masters at putting a positive spin on negative concepts like cuts to social programs (“budget relief”) and extending tax breaks for the super rich (“Gimme!”). Since some in the media here have obligingly begun to use the term, we can expect to see more of the same from Conservatives. Farewell words with negative connotations!

Old term: Deficit.
New term: Aspiring surplus.
Used in a sentence: “Mr. Speaker, I am proud to say it was this Conservative government that presided over the largest aspiring surplus in our history.”

Old term: Tar sands.
New term: Money juice.
Used in a sentence: “Hey, how did these 3,000 dead ducks wind up in our money juice?”
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Those expressions and more await us. For now, it’s just “job creators” and what we can do for them so that maybe they can possibly do something for us perhaps. And if they later slash jobs by the thousands to protect the bottom line, the government can praise them as “leisure creators.”

Canada's Pointy-Haired Government Strikes Again

Looks like somebody forgot to insert the United Way update again:

*The Minister has been clear: this was her decision.

*The Minister has apologized for a lack of clarity in her testimony before Committee, and has rectified that lack of clarity.

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted material for your weekend reading.

- Great (and true!) news from the CRTC:

CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein says the commission tried to stall the amendment to its prohibition on false and misleading news for 10 years, but eventually gave into pressure from the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations when it proposed its amendments in January.

But now that the regulations committee has agreed to no longer pursue the issue, the chair says the CRTC will drop it.

“We never wanted to touch this thing. We put it forward because we were ordered to do it. We did what we thought would be a workable compromise,” von Finckenstein said in brief interview Friday at the Prime Time conference in Ottawa, organized by the Canadian Media Production Association.

“I was perfectly happy with what it was before, and I’m sure at the next commission meeting, we will withdraw this attempt at rewriting.”

- The Globe and Mail takes up the idea of birth bonds in contrast to the Cons' desire to spend billions on prisons. And it's hard to imagine that many Canadians would choose the Cons' side given the choice:

Assuming Canada had extra billions in a time of large deficits, consider the birth bond – a government investment to be made each time a child is born. The investment would be held until the child turns, say, 18, and then made available for postsecondary education or an apprenticeship program. Canada has 370,000 births a year. How much could it afford to put into an ambitious investment for each newborn, instead of into jail expansion?
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If Mr. Page is right, Canada could seed an education account for each newborn with $13,783. Outlandish? Maybe, but it makes more sense than prison expansion, if the government is intent on spending an extra $5-billion. Canada wouldn’t need a birth bond, anyway; net tuition paid by all students is $3.5-billion a year. Instead of Truth in Sentencing, the country could afford Free in University, with change left over.

Let’s assume, for the moment, Mr. Page is wildly out of touch, as Ottawa claims. The federal government’s published budget estimates for federal corrections show an annual hike of $861-million – 36 per cent – by 2012-13 (compared with 2009-10). Now assume, conservatively, that the provincial costs rise by the same amount as a result of the federal crime bills. For that $1.722-billion extra a year, what could Canada do that is forward-looking, and has a long-term economic payoff?

It could pour resources into research. Currently, the government spends about $3-billion on the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Canada could take the $1.08-billion given to the CIHR each year and double it, and still have $700-million to spend on an enormous expansion of subsidies for master’s and PhD students.

- I'm sure we can all agree the general public is too jaded about politics to think that forgery or deception matter. Right? RIGHT?

- But at least some people do still admire Bev Oda. Take for example Tabatha Southey:

Sure, some of us were, and I imagine still are, capable of changing a C to a C+, but very few of us are “courageous” enough to change a C into a “NOT a C.” This is essentially what Ms. Oda did when she (or so she now claims) arranged for a recommendation prepared and signed by the Canadian International Development Agency to be altered to state that CIDA did “NOT” recommend that funding for the church-based foreign-aid organization Kairos be continued, when in fact continuing funding is exactly what CIDA did recommend.

This wasn't a matter of changing $7-million to $3.7-million in funding. Any of us could've done that. This was no such small feat. Fraudsters, we've found our saint.

Not only did Ms. Oda give a false impression regarding what CIDA had recommended, she oversaw the alteration of a document already signed by two signatories and possibly herself so that it would support her claim, if and when the document were ever to be examined by complete and utter morons.

Friday Afternoon Links

Content goes here.

- I'll second Greg's agreement with Chantal Hebert's latest:

As it did over the census, the Liberal opposition has turned to the social media to put pressure on the Conservatives. Given the alleged seriousness of the offence, one would think the party would turn its mind to putting its money where its mouth is in Parliament rather than on Facebook and Twitter.

If Harper was the leader of the official opposition, he would already be taking steps to withdraw the confidence of the House from the government.
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The testimony that triggered the 2005 opposition siege of Martin’s minority government did not involve the Liberal leader or his ministers directly. It surfaced as the result of an inquiry set in motion by the prime minister himself and only a few months before its definitive conclusions were scheduled to be delivered to the public.

Still Harper made a strong case that the issue of the character of the government was one of such importance that it deserved to be put to voters at the earliest opportunity.

What was true then is as true now. The Prime Minister — by virtue of his role and his authority — defines the culture of his government and Canadians deserve to decide whether a culture of ministerial deceit is what they expect from a party that came to power promising to restore the integrity of an abused system.

- And unfortunately, the fact that the Libs are treating Oda's forgery as just another momentary scandal rather than linking it in any meaningful way to the broader question of whether or not the Cons can be left in office - including by publicly stating a willingness to work with other parties to achieve change - only figures to give force to criticisms like John Ibbitson's that the issue is one of "nit-picking" rather than the fitness for office of the Harper Cons.

- Rick Salutin is right to note that there's a serious lack of activist organization to serve as a counterweight to political leaders in reaching the broader public. But it's worth also adding the caveat that there's also a need for some kind of identifiable longer-term goal in organizing to ensure that one-time outpourings of public outrage such as that which toppled Hosni Mubarak don't simply give rise to more of the same under another figurehead leader.

- Finally, Dan Gardner's latest features a reminder as to just how much the Cons have done to eliminate inconvenient (though accurate) data from Canada's public debate:

While the world moves ever deeper into an Information Age, Canadian public policy is headed in the other direction. “As a nation, we have very little capacity to conduct social policy research, evaluate social programs or monitor progress towards achieving social aims,” concluded a federal report in 1998. That statement is even more true today.

“There is genuine concern that Parliament is losing control of its fiduciary responsibilities,” Kevin Page, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, told a House of Commons committee this week. Page raised his red flag for many reasons. The latest is the refusal of the Conservative government to provide MPs with the estimated costs of implementing its crime bill. The government says the estimates are “cabinet confidences.”

So Cabinet gets to see them, no one else. Vote, but vote blindly. Having come to power promising “open and transparent” government, the Conservatives have made government more closed and opaque than ever.

The Law Commission, which studied complex legal issues: closed. The Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO), which reports on critical financial issues: under-funded and stonewalled. The long-form census, which was the source of essential data used by private and public sectors across the country: replaced with a useless survey.

Perhaps worst of all, civil servants are increasingly forbidden from organizing conferences or otherwise connecting with external researchers whose findings my be uncongenial to the government. Where contact is permitted, there are still restrictions. I know of one conference where a survey of the attendee’s views was quashed by frightened civil servants because it was likely to produce numbers the Conservatives don’t want to exist. Mission accomplished.

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.

No longer sacrosanct

Perhaps the most remarkable part of the Cons' desperate evasion on Bev Oda's behalf has been the degree to which it violates the credo that's served as this blog's tagline for the past few weeks. There may once have been some opportunity to cut Oda loose in hopes of minimizing the damage to Stephen Harper personally - but after two consecutive days of the Prime Minister using his role as the face of the government to poke a thumb in the eye of anybody who thinks honesty or even a willingness to concede some connection to reality has the slightest relevance to a party's fitness to hold office, there doesn't seem to be any turning back now.

That may make Oda's job relatively secure in the short term. But if we are headed for a spring election, it surely figures to make the kingpin weaker than he would have been otherwise. And if the current level of observer outrage over a government that's willing to ignore crimes within its midst holds up through an election campaign, we may well see the entire edifice come toppling down.

Wednesday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your midweek reading.

- Dan Gardner nicely sums up the Cons' destructive governing style with a handy analogy:

Lots of people accuse him of being ruthless, or an ideologue, but he’s usually credited with being a basically competent manager.

He doesn’t deserve that credit. His government is badly run and incoherent. Promising fiscal conservatism, Stephen Harper spent money like crazy, expanded the federal government, cut taxes, and turned a surplus into a structural deficit (yes, it’s structural, as even the International Monetary Fund agrees). He has no real plan for getting the budget back into balance.
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To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with questioning the census or any other status quo. Indeed, it’s always good practice to consider the relative merits of alternatives.

But as any reasonably competent manager knows, you do that before, not after, you pick up the sledgehammer and smash stuff.

- But let's give the Cons credit for at least being efficient when it comes to what really counts: maximizing the amount of public money going to their cronies.

- Frances Russell points out what the Cons' use of public offices for political advertising says about their disrespect for Canada's political system and voters alike:

With his unprecedented commandeering of the Prime Minister's Office, Harper has out-Americanized the Americans -- and struck another blow against our constitutional tradition.

No U.S. politician, not senators, not congressmen, not even the president, can conduct fundraising, campaign ads or any overt political activity from Capitol Hill, the White House or federal buildings or facilities. The House of Representatives Ethics Manual prohibits the use of House recordings for "any political purpose."

Harper's attack on Canadian traditions doesn't stop there. The prime minister has his minions looking for ways he can appropriate the role of the Governor General as Canada's head of state to hand out honours and awards to Canadians.

He's already created the Prime Minister's Volunteer Awards. And he has been fighting his defence minister for two years to get one of the military's troop and cargo Airbuses repainted white.

Pollster Frank Graves told The Hill Times he believes Harper is trying to assume "symbolic office, similar to the president of the U.S., which is one of the things they have been shooting for."

- Finally, who plans to spend the afternoon refreshing this page waiting for Bev Oda's name to be added?

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday...

- Yes, the story behind the Cons' KAIROS funding forgery is far from over. And while the media and opposition will undoubtedly want to get to the bottom of the matter, Paul Dewar rightly notes that somebody else should be very interested to figure out who doctored an official document to mean the opposite of its original text:

NDP MP Paul Dewar wants Oda to appear again before the foreign affairs committee to face questions. He raised the prospect of a police probe if opposition MPs can't find out who “doctored” the document.

- Meanwhile, Murray Dobbin notes how the KAIROS forgery fits into the Cons' general style of governance:

Shocked hardly describes it. This is political thuggery worthy of a dictatorship. It clearly originated in the PMO, but Bev Oda, the hapless minister of International Cooperation, was assigned the role of Official Stonewaller. Oda's answers to questions put to her by a parliamentary committee reveal an arrogance of power that is identical in its mentality to the dozens of autocracies around the world. Oda stated she didn't know who doctored the documents she signed, but said: "I know that the decision ultimately reflects the decision I would support."

That is almost impossible to believe. Almost surely, the only reason the not was inserted into the document was that it had already been signed by Oda -- indicating she accepted the recommendation by CIDA officials. Had Oda not signed, authorizing payment of the grant, there would have been no need to doctor the document to reverse its intent. She could simply have declined to sign it and announced that KAIROS would not be getting a grant. The vulgar method used to circumvent the law demonstrates just how little this government cares about the rule of law. They couldn't even be bothered to make it credible.

- But if there's any good news to be found in the Cons' constant cover-ups, it's that they may be setting up their own government's demise. Here's John Ibbitson:

(N)ot only do the Conservatives give tax cuts to fat cats and waste billions on toys for the military and prisons that turn scared kids into hardened criminals, but they also erode democratic freedoms by keeping Parliament and the rest of us in the dark about their plans.

Only you don’t have to camp out at Liberation Square to bring this government down. You only need to cast a ballot.

None of this may matter. The Conservatives think they can win the next election on the ballot question of competence and leadership, and the polls suggest they’re right.

But don’t be surprised if you see a Liberal attack ad that shows Parliament with the doors chained shut. And the Conservatives will have only themselves to blame.

- Finally, the Star points out the dishonesty in the Cons' attempt to play to prejudice by attacking veiled voters:

No fewer than 253,069 voters cast mail-in ballots in 2008. Elections officials had no way of checking their faces. Other voters turned up at the polls with two pieces of acceptable non-photo ID, such as a hydro bill, a government cheque or an insurance policy. Still others with no valid ID at all just swore an oath and had a neighbour or roommate (with valid ID) vouch for them.

In a crunch, a veiled Muslim woman can either show her face in private to an official, or swear an oath that she is qualified to vote, and present two pieces of ID.

Given all these factors, it is absurd, as the Star has argued before, to think of veiled Muslim women as posing a threat to the integrity of our electoral system. Laws that in effect single out Muslim women send an ugly message that if minorities want to exercise their rights as Canadian citizens, they should behave and look more like the “mainstream,” whatever that might be.

Wednesday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous midweek material...

- Thomas Walkom rightly notes that at least some of the progressive disappointment with Barack Obama's administration can be traced to the gap between his words even while campaigning and his supporters' expectations.

But the broader lesson (which Walkom hints at) looks to be a need to put greater emphasis on the fact that winning power is a means rather than an end: rather than tying our hopes and goals to a single individual, we should evaluate political leaders based on what they can actually accomplish for the greater good. And no progressive on either side of the border should be satisfied with "winning" an election if it doesn't result in meaningful positive change.

- Which includes you, Duncan Cameron. That isn't to say we shouldn't be looking at ways to bring about a coalition government - but a panicked electoral scheme which gives the Libs more credit than they deserve as an alternative (and thus disempoers the parties fighting for real change) could easily be expected to lead to our own set of disappointments in short order.

- The Globe and Mail's editorial on skyrocketing consumer spending that the real problem is that not enough money is being borrowed in the corporate sector:

One of the weirdnesses of the recent recession was that Canadian consumer credit kept expanding from the low point, rising by 7 per cent. In this period, home equity has had a strange inverse relationship to personal net worth in Canada, the former being quite high during the slump while investment portfolios crashed. This pattern continues: Statistics Canada figures on Monday showed household net worth up 2.7 per cent in the third quarter, while home resales lessened, and residential mortgages decelerated.

The dependence of the major banks on consumers is shown in a chart in the central bank’s report. For half a dozen years, household credit’s share of their loan portfolios have ranged from 55 to 60 per cent – a departure from most of their history.

The world has moved far away from words that Shakespeare attributed to the sententious Polonius: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” But Canadian householders should work on borrowing less, and banks should seriously consider shifting more of their lending from households back to business.

But it's worth asking the question: is that necessarily because the banks have preferred to target consumers, or might it have something to do with businesses just not having a reason to borrow?

- Finally, it's well and good to Bev Oda's latest spin on KAIROS as an affront to ministerial responsibility. But I'd prefer to see it as a golden opportunity: doesn't it mean we can reverse all of the Cons' flawed decisions simply by planting somebody to add "not" to the relevant documentation after it's been rubber-stamped?

Surprise, surprise

Let's see how the first test of the Cons' New Era of Ministerial Accountability is working out:

Ms. Oda’s spokeswoman, Jessica Fletcher, said in a e-mail that the minister wouldn't comment on the contents of the briefing notes.

Requests for an interview with CIDA representatives went unanswered.

But don't worry: the Cons will surely find their commitment to ministerial responsibility again just in time for the next photo op.

Burning question

Stephen Harper considers the fact that one of his cabinet ministers is pro-choice to be a problem (on par with her being a poor communicator) when it comes to defending his party's principles on maternal health. So what does that say about what litmus tests Harper might plan to apply for cabinet assignments in the future?

(Edit: fixed wording.)

Weaker in the world

Embassy's Michelle Collins reports on yet another area where the Cons' neglect is putting roadblocks in the way of actors who would have little trouble getting plenty done under a remotely competent government. This time, it's in the operations of international NGOs, who when they haven't been ignored completely have been told to base their funding proposals on standards which the Cons haven't bothered to announce:

While a change of government naturally results in a shifting focus and tweaking of priorities, actors within Canada's NGO community say that across the board, all are facing a much graver situation than in past years, and one from which it will take a long time to recover.

The culprits are strategic reviews of program funding at Foreign Affairs and CIDA, as well as an overhauling of their mandates and dramatic shifts in personnel, which has left organizations outside the government increasingly unsure of the government's changing priorities...

"There is a certain level of concern and a certain level of frustration at the lack of clarity," said Robert Fox, executive director of Oxfam Canada. "There's also a concern around the fact that given that lack of clarity, rumors abound and signals are not clear."

While Oxfam is blessed with strong public support, Mr. Fox said the current uncertainty has made a number of organizations "jittery."

Of its own international projects, Mr. Fox said he has been told by CIDA officials that when making proposals to be mindful of CIDA's "priority countries." However, CIDA Minister Bev Oda has yet to identify these countries of focus, as well as its long awaited new aid policy...

Mrs. Armit said the Parliamentary Centre has been waiting a year to hear back from CIDA about renewing its nearly decade-old and highly-regarded parliamentary project in Cambodia, but that they are now losing hope.

Compounding the impact from the top-down, many are also pointing to an overwhelming sense among federal civil servants that ideas contrary to the political direction of the day could cause unwanted headaches. Others say the process of project approval has also become more politicized than in the past, noting that intervention by a politician has increasingly become the solution...

Ms. White said the situation risks bringing about a decimation of the whole sector.

"And this is a sector that gives an incredible return of investment to its country," she said.

In a global context, NGO leaders say that forcing them to the sidelines will have long-lasting consequences for the country's influence — especially at a time when Canada is facing increasing competition from developing nations such as China, India and Brazil.

Now, it wouldn't come as much surprise if the Harper regime is perfectly happy to weaken organizations which would tend to present independent Canadian voices abroad rather than being bound by the Cons' messaging rules.

But any harm done to NGOs today figures not only to limit Canada's ability to project its voice on the international stage in the short term, but also to make it far more difficult to recruit strong Canadian representatives in the future. And if the Cons aren't the least bit concerned about that outcome, then it's long past time for a change in government before the damage becomes irreparable.

On cabinetry

Since Adam Radwanski didn't quite cover all the notes worth mentioning from the Cons' cabinet shuffle, here are a few more observations...

- The big news of the day was MacKay to Defence. But am I the only one who finds it the least bit surprising that Deceivin' Stephen's choice to try to clean up his party's political mess on Afghanistan is someone who's already contributed to the problem?

It seems beyond doubt that MacKay will find some way to run his mouth and make the Cons' public image on Afghanistan even worse. Which leaves only the question of which group will benefit more from MacKay's appointment: his House sparring partners (Dawn Black and Denis Coderre), or his riding challengers (Louise Lorefice and Elizabeth May).

- One of today's changes may help to signal just how much control is being exercised by the PMO rather than individual ministers. Industry goes from being run by one of the most rabid anti-government ideologues in Maxime Bernier, to a former Progressive Conservative in Jim Prentice - which would seemingly make for a strong chance of a far more moderate direction if the ministers have held any sway. But will anything actually change?

- Gordon O'Connor may have found himself shuffled into what seems to be the safest Cabinet position possible. But it's worth wondering whether the opposition parties find ways to keep holding his feet to the fire - if for no other purpose than to test what aside from a lack of political use (farewell to thee, Carol Skelton) is considered a removal-worthy offence for Harper.

- Speaking of Skelton, while I neglected to note it when she retired, her Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar seat figures to be another juicy target for the NDP in the next federal election - that is, if anybody notices she's gone.

- Finally, the Oda/Verner position swap may have been largely a matter of change for the sake of change. But I have to wonder if the switch is aimed in part at putting Heritage in the hands of a minister who's less susceptible to the (predominatly English-based) citizen media who managed to run Sarmite Bulte out of Parliament for her coziness with the entertainment industry, and figured to cause problems for Oda as well.