Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Stephanie Larocque highlights the Cons' gall in hanging onto federal reimbursements from their own ad scam even after having admitted their guilt:

You don't have to prove guilt when the charged plead guilty. And that is exactly what happened last week when the Conservative Party entered into an agreement in Ottawa where they would plead guilty to overspending and pay the maximum fine allowable under the Canada Elections Act if the charges were dropped against their senior members.

One might think that pleading guilty to attempting to circumvent the rules that manage our democracy would be done with an air of regret or remorse. When it comes to the Conservatives, however, you would be wrong. Instead, Conservative spokesman Fred DeLorey issued a statement claiming the plea bargain was "a big victory'' for the party in its five-year "administrative dispute'' with Elections Canada over the legality of the in-and-out scheme. "Every single Conservative accused of wrongdoing has been cleared today,'' DeLorey said.

I don't think anyone has ever looked a an agreement that admits guilt as ever clearing anyone of wrongdoing. The notion is ludicrous. The coordinated overspending done by funneling funds through 67 ridings just happened spontaneously? No, the Conservatives accused of wrongdoing were only spared the embarrassment of having their involvement in the scheme dissected in open court rather than being cleared of anything.
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Conservative Party spokesman Fred DeLorey responded that "The question of reimbursements will be dealt with in the ongoing civil proceedings." referring to the civil case the Tories brought against Elections Canada in which they dispute Elections Canada's ability to refuse to reimburse expense claims.

In other words, guilt not just without remorse, without apology, and without even having the decency to immediately repay funds improperly received from the taxpayers that they have already admitted were the result of a scheme to overspend their limits. Indeed, should they win the civil case they would compel Elections Canada to reimburse the outstanding expense claims which they have already agreed were illegal. The nerve of this position is staggering. They admit wrongdoing yet continue to seek a means of profiting from that wrongdoing, trying to have excessive refunds that were requested with fraudulent receipts taken from your tax dollars.

- pogge blasts Ontario's McGuinty Libs for decreeing that any deficit reduction will be accomplished solely through service cuts rather than even the most obviously needed tax increases.

- Mike DeSouza reports on Greenpeace's expose of multi-billion-dollar corporate lobbying against action on climate change.

- Tim Naumetz points out that even as the Cons claim to be retaining a meaningful gun licensing regime, their bill to torch the long gun registry also includes provisions to make it impossible to enforced the individual licensing rules.

- Finally, the Calgary Herald editorial board lists its home city as one of the areas which has been poorly served by utterly useless Con MPs over the past decade. And it's well worth using the attention of the NDP's national leadership campaign to change the part of the story which laments the lack of a viable alternative.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- The NDP follows up on the Tony Clement G8 scandal by pointing out the connection between his pork-barrelling and the 2008 federal election (which, let's not forget, was called at the Cons' behest):

The NDP is accusing federal Conservative cabinet minister Tony Clement of using a controversial, $50-million G8 legacy fund to buy re-election, prompting a heated denial from the government.

Municipal documents obtained by the New Democrats show Clement met with local mayors and councillors in the midst of the 2008 election campaign. They discussed how to identify projects that could be eligible for the legacy funding.

Twelve days after that meeting, a local news outlet reported that Clement had posted video endorsements from "local townspeople, mayors and council members" on his campaign website.

"It gave him a major advantage over the other candidates," New Democrat MP Charlie Angus said in an interview Thursday.

"I think the question has to be asked: Was this a $50 million price of an election?"

- But then, the Cons have obviously lost touch with any sense that public money should be used for anything other than to fulfill their political whims - as Kate Heartfield points out when it comes to their dumb-on-crime policy.

- Meanwhile, the Calgary Herald slams the Cons for eliminating any actual judgment and discretion from the criminal justice system:

The Canadian Bar Association passed a number of worthy recommendations at its recent annual conference that Justice Minister Rob Nicholson should take time to consider.

They include a measure asking that a "safety valve" be brought in with mandatory sentences, which would give judges an ability to deviate from the legislation in rare circumstances where they feel the sentence would cause an injustice.
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(O)ne size fits all does not work in sentencing. We just have to look to the U.S. for numerous examples of what can happen in the extreme. Under California's three-strikes law, a man with a record of two felony convictions for burglary, was sentenced to prison for 25 years to life, after getting caught at a pro shop trying to steal three golf clubs. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that ruling. In another case a man whose third offence was stealing Batman and Cinderella videos from a department store, was sentenced to a minimum of 50 years in prison.

These are not hardcore criminals and it is not in society's best interest to treat them as such.

- Finally, talk about this fall's Saskatchewan election is starting to heat up, if only in highly general terms so far. Both Three Hundred Eight and the Numbers Guy have posted overviews of what to expect - albeit with little discussion of the factors that figure to influence the race. And a new Saskatchewan General Election blog has also launched which should hopefully serve a useful aggregator for election news (as well as a reminder of the unreliability of non-random online polls).

Any day now...

...this whole census thing is bound to go away on its own, figure the Cons. That is, if one ignores the Calgary Herald:

The federal Conservatives should reverse their stance on killing the mandatory long form of the Canadian census. From academics to genealogists to corporations, everyone except Stephen Harper's Tories seems opposed to the introduction of voluntary completion forms, replacing the long form. Economists, think-tanks, professional associations, non-profits, labour unions, religious groups, municipalities and corporations oppose the move, which will cost taxpayers millions more but lead to inferior results.

Harper officials have tried to spin this change as proof that they are the party that supports smaller and less intrusive government. And yet, the Tories plan on spending another $30 million to send the detailed long forms to 30 per cent of households instead of 20 per cent, in hopes that at least 20 per cent of those will voluntarily agree to answer the questions.

How does spending more money equal smaller government? It's ironic to be sure.
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This calls for a graceful about-face by the prime minister, as the count is overwhelmingly in favour of keeping the census intact, mandatory forms and all.

And the National Post:

We are on record opposing the government's slapdash approach to cancelling the mandatory long-form census. Nothing has occurred in the two weeks since to change that opinion or to alter the impression that this was a hasty decision, and that the dubious explanations now being offered for it were concocted after the fact.
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(I)t's making the government look foolish, and it doesn't appear that anything more salacious will come down the pipe to distract the chattering classes' attention before autumn. For this self-interested reason--and also, for the more important and substantial reason that good census data is a valuable resource -- the government should accept a compromise solution offered by the National Statistics Council: Remove certain long-form questions that are deemed particularly invasive and eliminate the threat of imprisonment from the relevant legislation.

Enough already. It's past time to turn the page.

And the Royal City Record:

The plan to replace the long form mandatory census with a voluntary one has been almost universally panned. In fact, the longtime bureaucrat in charge of the department actually resigned over the decision.

It is still puzzling why Harper has not done some back-pedalling.
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Now, for the average taxpayer, it may seem like an arcane battle, and many would probably be delighted to not have to fill in the long form. But those same folks may not be so delighted when government makes decisions on flimsy data and they end up with less services - or worse, services placed in areas for political purposes and not based on facts.

Making the census long form voluntary will ensure that some individuals will simply not be represented in the data.

And to make decisions without that information is just plain dumb, as SFU statistics professor Carl Schwarz says, "Making decisions with poor data is worse than making decisions with no data. If you've got poor data, you make decisions with this aura of respectability that just isn't there."

And William Christian:

Pity poor Tony Clement, the federal industry minister. A bright and decent guy, though without the backbone to resign, he has to take the fall for the prime minister’s decision to cancel the long-form census. Without the details provided by the long-form census, future governments, both provincial and federal, will not have the information effectively to introduce social welfare programs.

No money, no information. Bye-bye, social planning. And a faith-based foreign policy.

Maybe Harper’s agenda is becoming less hidden.

Many reviews are in

Michael Behiels:

It is becoming patently obvious Harper now presides over a minority government that can all-too-readily be characterized as a not-so-benign dictatorship. Harper successfully exploits the first-past-the-post electoral system -- which he and Flanagan denounced as immature -- and the ideological and political divisions within the opposition parties, to impose his unflinching will on his cabinet, caucus, and what he characterizes as an utterly dysfunctional House of Commons, one made so by the government itself. With his appointment of yet more Conservatives to the Senate, Harper will exercise full and unfettered power over Parliament, a power which he will readily use to cow the judicial branch of government with his so-called tough-on-crime legislation.
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Harper's continued use of such bold, provocative and intimidating tactics proves that he is morally convinced that the end -- unfettered power for his Conservative party and government and the wholesale destruction of the centrist Liberal party -- justifies the means.

Susan Riley:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decision to shut down Parliament for his own partisan convenience -- no more nasty questions about Afghan detainees, no more challenges from a "Liberal-dominated Senate" -- is shocking, but hardly surprising.

It is an expression of this prime minister's contempt not just for Parliament, but for government.

So much for those urgent Tory crime measures that will die on the order paper; so much for an adult debate on the deficit, or pension reform, or Afghanistan after 2011. The assumption is that we will be so wrapped up in the Olympics we won't notice the long silence from Ottawa. We will, in fact, welcome it.

If Harper is right, we deserve the government we aren't getting. This is a richly-blessed country with a well-educated, relatively prosperous population and a degraded political culture. And until its citizens move from apathy and cynicism to outrage and involvement, nothing will change.

Instead, we have seen a decline in political discourse from the theatrical jousting of the Mulroney era, to the crankiness of the Chrétien years to the imbecilic insults and bald-faced lies that dominate politics in the age of Harper.

The Halifax Chronicle-Herald:

Traditionally, majority governments prorogue Parliament when they legitimately run out of items on their agenda. But Mr. Harper is now perversely, repeatedly and cynically using such mechanisms to suit his own partisan agenda.

Prime ministers have much overt and covert power at their disposal. But to use the Constitution as a convenience store — and as a means to buck the system or to duck accountability — is to debase it, something that doesn’t faze Mr. Harper.

Andrew Coyne:

The government’s professed rationale, that this is all about economic planning, is obvious bilge: nothing prevents a government from planning and meeting Parliament at the same time, or certainly shouldn’t. The informal justification its supporters are putting about is scarcely better: it may be inconvenient to the government that its appointees do not yet control all Senate committees, but that is no reason to shutter Parliament. It is a motive, not a defense.
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Each time Parliament allows one of these abuses to pass, its power is reduced a little more. Indeed, so diminished has it become that it is hard for some observers to muster much indignation at this latest assault: it’s only Parliament, after all. It’s exactly this sort of whittling away by degrees that has allowed closure, for example, to be invoked more or less routinely to cut of Parliamentary debates, where once it was to be used only in the most extreme circumstances. It was the improper use of closure, recall, that set off the wild, four-week brawl known as the Pipeline Debate. Now, nobody can be bothered.

The time has long since passed for Parliament to take a stand against its own evisceration. The really substantive issue is whether the government will yield to the Commons demand that it produce the Colvin documents, and perhaps that fight can be resumed in March. But proroguing to delay that day of reckoning, possibly in hopes of sneaking through another snap election in the interval, is worthy of some sort of Parliamentary rebuke, which is why the symbolic measure (and it could only be that) of MPs meeting in another place came to mind.

The Ottawa Citizen:

Like many an absolute ruler before him, he might find it convenient to dismiss the people's representatives when they get in the way. Despite appearances, though, he's not an absolute ruler. Eventually, he'll have to face an election.

Harper's Conservatives once promised a more open and transparent government. Instead, they take every opportunity to be cynical, secretive and radically partisan -- even when they don't need to be. It's become an ugly habit. The Afghan detainee controversy only became a problem for this government because of its defensive response. The Harper cabinet created a public-relations nightmare for itself, and is now trying to wriggle out by creating another.
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We don't pay our members of Parliament not to show up for work. If Conservative MPs don't want to go to the trouble of attending committee meetings, or even going through the motions in question period every day, there are plenty of would-be MPs from other parties who would gladly take their place.

James Travers:

Apart from those partisan advantages, the timing could hardly be worse for a dark Parliament.

While Canadians struggle with recession's aftershocks, Harper risks being seen as more interested in maximizing a sporting spectacle Conservatives are doing everything possible to make their own.

Less likely to be noticed but no less important, the Prime Minister is piling on fresh evidence that accountability is a fiction, an election promise easily made and forgotten.

Whatever else it achieves, suspending Parliament first and foremost blinkers oversight. Having tried and failed to blame abuse reports on a bureaucrat just doing his job, Harper is now trying to push it under the carpet for two critical months and perhaps much longer.

The Calgary Herald:

Prorogation is a gap between sessions of a legislative body, during which time the body's activities are suspended and the usual slate of political business (the proposal, debate and passage of bills and motions) is largely wiped clean, to be started from scratch in the next session.

This is a measure which ought to be used only in times of crisis, before elections or in instances when a government believes it has completed its legislative agenda. None of these conditions apply at present. Harper's misuse of prorogation will only heighten cynicism about the political process. Many Canadians already cynically believe that their elected officials accomplish next to nothing. Now, that belief will be borne out for two months.

Stephen Maher:

Why should we labour while the television will be filled with athletes from around the world straining Lycra and breaking records in the ice rinks and snowy mountains of British Columbia? So on Wednesday, a spokesman for Mr. Harper announced that there is no need for anyone in Canada to work during the Olympics.

Workplaces will be shut down — except for emergency services — for a two-week national holiday.

Hurray!

Oops. Sorry. I’ve just received a clarification.

Actually, you do have to keep working. It’s just members of Parliament who don’t have to work.

My mistake.

You will be pleased to know that your parliamentary representatives can put their feet up and give the luge the attention it deserves.