Graeme Hamilton: Quebec seeks special status for select journalists Quebec’s Culture Minister, Christine St-Pierre, announced this week that she is pushing forward with a plan to create "a new model of regulation of Quebec media." Public consultations on the project will be held across Quebec this fall. Key to the plan would be legislation establishing the "status of professional journalist" in order to distinguish those committed to "serving the public interest" from "amateur bloggers." It is proposed that state-recognized professional journalists would enjoy unspecified "advantages or privileges" not available to the great unwashed. La Presse reported that one of the privileges Ms. St-Pierre has in mind is "better access to government sources." If St-Pierre would like to examine ways in which government might help to improve the practice of journalism, I would suggest she consider ways to avoid the kind of concentration of media ownership we have in Canada. Mitigating the negative effects of monopoly or oligopoly is definitely a legitimate concern of government. But there’s no way politicians should be anywhere near the responsibility for determining what does or doesn’t constitute journalism, how the craft should be practiced or who its elite practitioners are. If we’re to have any…
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Peace, order and good government, eh?: Jack Layton dead at 61
Jack Layton dead at 61 Jack Layton, the New Democratic Party leader who led his party to Official Opposition status in this year’s federal election, has died after a battle with cancer. He was 61. That’s the lede of a fairly long piece at the Toronto Star. This came up on Twitter a few minutes ago, attributed to a statement from Olivia Chow, Sarah and Michael Layton: He passed away peacefully at his home surrounded by family and loved ones. Details of Layton’s funeral arrangements will be forthcoming….
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: Everything old is new again
Apparently Stephen Harper is bringing us "a new brand of patriotism" — according to a movement conservative political operative who’s currently working for a "high stakes public strategy firm" in Chicago. But never mind that. We’re re-embracing Canada’s traditions and renewing our connection to the past. I do remain a bit confused about the way a hockey team that has adopted a fighter jet as its logo figures into that but apparently it does. But never mind that. I, for one, would welcome a return to the halcyon days of old. Aristocracy. A rigid class society. Debtors’ prisons. I can hardly wait. H/t to Let Freedom Rain….
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: Friday night
Apparently in all the time I’ve been posting music, I’ve never posted Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks. This is Milk Shakin’ Mama….
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: Inside the wire
You may recall that last fall when the Conservative government, with the help of what was then the official opposition, reversed course and agreed to continue the involvement of Canadian Forces in Afghanistan, we were assured that our troops would be out of harm’s way. This would be a training mission with the trainers based in relatively safe locations, such as the capital city of Kabul. In comparison to the combat mission in Kandahar, the troops would be much safer because they’d be inside the wire. KABUL, Afghanistan — Suicide attackers stormed a British compound in the Afghan capital Friday, killing at least eight people in a series of explosions and more than eight-hour gunfight on the anniversary of the country’s independence from Britain. Three Westerners – a South African and two Britons – were inside the compound when a suicide bomber detonated explosives packed in a car outside the British Council. Another suicide bomber rushed inside the compound and blew himself up. The twin explosions shattered windows a third of a mile (half a kilometer) from the site. Two months ago, as this article reminds us, there was an armed assault on a hotel in Kabul that involved a…
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: This is where I stopped reading
Since the title of Lawrence Martin’s column of yesterday is Pushing the limits of state surveillance, I would imagine he was going to go on to discuss the continuing assaults on civil liberties and privacy that have been part of the so-called War on Terror™. But I got disgusted at the end of the second paragraph and stopped reading. Ten years on, we are still presented with the insanity that sees a ragtag collection of terrorist twirps, pissants or whatever you want to call them holding hostage the world’s greatest military power. Washington got sucked right into their trap, colossally overspending on defence and driving the treasury into dire debt; starting a war with a non-guilty party on the basis of bogus information at an appalling cost of almost 5,000 American lives; building a surveillance state that erodes if not ravages once-cherished American freedoms. In the war on terror, is there any doubt who the loser has been? I’d say the losers are the Iraqis, who just got written out of the story completely. As a result of that "war with a non-guilty party", hundreds of thousands of them are dead and millions more were wounded, injured or displaced. If…
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: Has anyone spoken to John Baird lately?
In the immediate aftermath of the Auditor General’s report on G8 spending, we were assured that while the attention to administrative detail was lacking, there was certainly no intention to mislead parliament. We were also assured that while Tony Clement was heavily involved in considering all the projects in his riding, it was John Baird who made the final decisions. The auditor general’s other major concern is that there is no paper trail to show how or why the 32 projects were chosen out of 242 that were proposed by the municipalities. Wiersema said they were selected by the infrastructure minister at the time, Baird, based on the advice of Clement, who was then industry minister and is now president of the Treasury Board. No public servants were involved in the decision-making process, the audit found. Of course we’ve since learned that public servants were involved — the documents obtained and released by the NDP make it clear that bureaucrats from Industry Canada, Infrastructure Canada and DFAIT were all involved at one point or another. What’s now unclear is just how much John Baird was actually involved, despite the fact that Clement himself assured us his colleague made the final…
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: Leave Sun TV aloooooooone!
Prosecuting freedom of speech If pricking an elitist balloon is all it takes to face the punishment of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, then the Sun News Network is in trouble. But then so is our constitutionally-guaranteed right to freedom of speech, the right to vigourous debate, divergent opinion as well as the right to choose channels. This is in anticipation of a decision by the CBSC on the matter of complaints — lots and lots of complaints — about an interview of a dancer named Margie Gillis by Sun TV’s Krista Erickson. You may have already heard something about it but if not, and you’re that curious, you can see Part 1 and Part 2 at YouTube. The good people at the Sun network are obviously shaking in their boots at the severe punishment they expect to receive….
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: "in the hope of sparking a greater discussion"
Quebec NDP MPs stay silent on their political past The Star emailed every Quebec MP in the NDP caucus — excluding Interim Leader Nycole Turmel — a short questionnaire last week soliciting their opinions on the political future of the province and whether they had changed over time. They were also asked if they had ever held a membership in another political party at the provincial or federal level, how they voted in the Quebec referendums, whether they ever cast a ballot for the Bloc Québécois and whether they considered themselves federalists, sovereigntists or believed another term would best describe their beliefs. … One week later, not a single NDP MP from Quebec had agreed to participate. If this exercise was all about "sparking a greater discussion" as the article claims, why not prepare a questionnaire that could be sent to all 308 MPs? If the focus was to be on the opinions of those from Quebec, why not send it to Quebec MPs from all the parties? Why limit it to the NDP caucus unless the hoped for discussion was about the failure of Dippers to respond or to pass a purity test?…
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: Friday night
I had two of these links stashed away for a while — kinda laid back, not really blues, but good enough to work with. When I came across a third I decided to put them all together and call it a change of pace. The first performance was recorded on Roy Rogers’ couch. I never fail to be amazed at the sound Norton Buffalo could get out of a harmonica….
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: QOTD: On national security
Glenn Greenwald Murtaza Hussain, posting at Glenn Greenwald’s blog, reflects on the riots of the last few days in England and then looks closer to home. When considering the actual premise of "national security," one would have to look at a country which has descended into widespread internal chaos as being "insecure." For all the money spent on aggressive wars against ill-defined enemies in obscure parts of the world, the most dangerous threat to the actual physical safety of individuals within a country remains from their fellow citizens given a breakdown of social cohesion. It is a sign of dangerously confused priorities that defense spending is considered to be a budgetary holy grail which must be left untouched when discussing cuts to overall spending; but deep cuts to social services which directly affect the lives of millions of Americans are considered fair game. Nothing is more of a threat to the safety of Americans than a social system which will produce a generation of angry, disaffected young people and give rise to the types of scenes Britons are witnessing today….
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: Let the record show
It was a bit less than two years ago that government lawyers, on behalf of CSIS, spiked their own evidence in the matter of the Security Certificate on Adil Charkaoui rather than comply with court-ordered disclosure. To quote Colin Freeze at the Globe and Mail on the federal officials involved: … they now hold Mr. Charkaoui to be less of a threat to national security than further court-ordered revelations of the secret information that was used to build the case against him. This was after a series of rulings in this and the Harkat case in which the integrity of government evidence and witnesses had been called into question and the intelligence community was letting their frustration with the "judicialization of intelligence" be known. Due process can be so darned inconvenient at times. A few days after that it was reported that the certificate on Charkaoui would be revoked. I have to wonder if the leak of a CSIS document reported last Friday was someone’s way of circumventing the judiciary completely and injecting that same evidence — unsourced, of course — directly into the public record….
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: Canada’s back!
Apparently we have a prime minister who will literally lock himself in the nearest bathroom when he doesn’t get his way. I suppose that’s marginally better than holding his breath ’til he turns blue. And it might help explain why he went missing for that G20 photo op a couple of years back. And to think some of us were worried about what John Baird would do to our international reputation. Later that same day: Canadian officials are, of course, denying the story but this report takes note of "obvious tension" between Brazilians and Canadians so obviously something happened. The added wrinkle here is Dimitri Soudas claiming a consistent record on the part of our government in fighting to provide access for journalists. I’m surprised the reporter who filed this could even manage to type it out for laughing so hard….
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: "I haven’t seen that statistic"
Howard Sapers is Canada’s Correctional Investigator. If you want to know what’s happening in Canada’s prisons, he’d probably be a good place to start. Unless you’re Public Safety Minister Vic Toews. Sapers is concerned about the increasingly crowded conditions in our prisons and says its leading to more violence and more deaths. He’s particularly concerned since the current government’s policies are pretty much guaranteed to increase the prison population even more. "The indicators that we look at in terms of getting a measure of institutional violence are all going in the same direction," Mr. Sapers said. "And they’re all going up." Vic Toews disagrees. "I haven’t seen that statistic," he said. "There isn’t as much prisoner-on-prisoner violence that used to exist eight or nine years ago, before we put in policies that restricted some of the movement of prisoners." If you’re inclined to read the rest of the article to learn what evidence Toews is relying on when he disputes Sapers’ comments, you’ll search in vain. He doesn’t offer any. His position is that his government implemented a policy that should have improved the situation, therefore the situation must have improved. Evidence to the contrary is waved away by saying…
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: Mostly competent government
Government cost-cutting agency has no business plan OTTAWA — The Conservative government has no business plan for its newest agency despite promising it will save taxpayers between $100 million and $200 million annually through streamlining the federal information technology strategy. And as of Monday, Public Works, which assumed responsibility for the new agency, couldn’t explain how those savings were calculated. That’s because there were no calculations involved. Somebody pulled some numbers out of the air, somebody else said "Sure, that sounds good" and then they went on to the next item on the agenda. There is no plan. They have no idea what they’re doing. Recall the census long form debacle — Clement had no idea what he was talking about and no clue as to the ramifications of the decision when he first made the announcement that the mandatory census long form was being eliminated. He continued to play it by ear long after it became obvious that he was lying through his teeth and making things up. Same deal here….
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: Has the leak investigation been announced?
I’ve seen a number of media stories since yesterday about the CSIS documents that were leaked to La Presse and supposedly reveal that Abousfian Abdelrazik and Adil Charkaoui once plotted to blow up a plane. Oddly, none of those stories seem to report any concern from any government official at the unauthorized release of this so-called intelligence. Obviously these documents weren’t intended to be public information. You would think that when our national intelligence agency loses track of confidential documents — and not for the first time — that in itself would be a story. But the only official government reaction I’ve seen came from Jason Kenney who appears to be pleased about the leak because it gives him the opportunity to lecture us on the need to trust governments and intelligence agencies rather than question their conclusions. Of course Kenney has it exactly wrong, particularly as it concerns the issue of guilt or innocence. The onus is never on the citizenry to just trust government. The onus is on government to present the facts and make its case. But then Jason Kenney and democratic principle aren’t all that well acquainted. And his case isn’t exactly strengthened by the fact…
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: Friday night
You go to Banglin’ tell my boys You go to Banglin’ tell my boys What times I’m havin’ up in Illinois Illinois Blues was written by Skip James, who referred to a lumber camp in Mississippi where he worked in the early twenties as Banglin’. The Wikipedia article on James describes his fingerpicking style as "intricate" and his sound as "dark." This is Alvin Youngblood Hart….
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: Did they really think we wouldn’t find out?
Japan’s Fukushima catastrophe brings big radiation spikes to B.C. After Japan’s Fukushima catastrophe, Canadian government officials reassured jittery Canadians that the radioactive plume billowing from the destroyed nuclear reactors posed zero health risks in this country. In fact, there was reason to worry. Health Canada detected massive amounts of radioactive material from Fukushima in Canadian air in March and April at monitoring stations across the country. … …government officials claimed there was nothing to worry about. "The quantities of radioactive materials reaching Canada as a result of the Japanese nuclear incident are very small and do not pose any health risk to Canadians," Health Canada says on its website. "The very slight increases in radiation across the country have been smaller than the normal day-to-day fluctuations from background radiation." In fact, Health Canada’s own data shows this isn’t true. It’s a fairly long piece and gets into other issues but the one I wanted to focus on is the complete failure at risk communication. Are the "government officials" who take the easy way out and lie to us in situations like this really incapable of understanding the damage they do in the long run? The message that people get from…
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: I guess some dances never go out of style
Every year or two I find a reason to point to Declan’s post on the Media Failure Two-Step. (And actually I could find a reason much more often than that.) To review, the Two-Step looks like this: Step 1) Cause something (bad) to happen through your reporting. Step 2) Report on this (bad) thing from the perspective of an innocent bystander. And then you just repeat indefinitely. Our latest example? With the Globe and Mail leading the charge, since yesterday many in the media have been having a great old time implying that a Quebec politician who has previously been involved with the BQ is somehow unfit for her position as an interim leader for the NDP. That in turn would imply that about half the voters of Quebec are illegitimate participants in the democratic process until they somehow redeem themselves to the satisfaction of the Globe’s editorial board. And in case it isn’t obvious, deserting the BQ in droves to vote for the NDP isn’t sufficient for the purpose. And today, right on cue, we have John Ibbitson lamenting the fact that Quebec has become politically isolated from the rest of Canada. He cites a number of reasons for…
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: Mostly competent government
The Harper Government™ has been doing such an awesome job of protecting the endangered woodland caribou in northeastern Alberta that a Federal Court has decided to step in and order the Environment Minister to actually do his job. [Justice Peter Crampton] said Jim Prentice, the former federal environment minister, never explained why he decided against an emergency order that would protect caribou habitat, although all available science pointed to the need for one. "Notwithstanding the substantial scientific and other evidence that was discussed … the minister concluded that there are no imminent threats to the national recovery of boreal caribou," Crampton wrote. "This conclusion essentially came ‘out of the ‘blue.’ … Accordingly, the decision cannot stand." The court has instructed the current minister, Peter Kent, to "revisit" that decision not to issue an emergency order. Kent has also been told to produce a recovery plan for the declining caribou herds by Sept. 1. It seems our mostly competent Conservatives have already missed a legal deadline for said plan — by four years. And it’s not as if no one knew there was a problem. Some scientists have predicted caribou will be gone within 30 years. Biologists have been documenting the…
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