Tag: Canada’s tories

NEW MEDIA AND POLITICS CANADA: More Hash April 11, 2012

So the real costs of the F-35 program continues to make news, while from the opposition we hear calls for the resignation and/or firing of the Defense Minister who is described by Liberal House leader Marc Garneau as being, “…either incompetent or not too bright!” I don’t see why it’s an either/or situation. It could be both. I’ll admit it also could be neither. Perhaps the Minister simply lied. Those numbers are pretty much the same as the ones the PBO announced them back in March of 2012.

So where are the media at currently on the issue of the over-priced F-35 First Strike Fighter Jets replacing the soon to be mothballed CF-18’s? Well, over at Canada’s National Newspaper, J.L. Granastein makes a really poor argument that these jets aren’t just shiny new toys for the military by… talking about all the neat gadgets we get if we buy the F-35: 

We might be involved in coalition air operations, and the F-35 could fill that role, both as a strike aircraft and as an interceptor. Its stealth technology – and a host of additional high-tech wonders – make it potentially the best fighter available anywhere for the next quarter-century, and that explains why so many countries want to purchase it. 

There’s a lot wrong with his argument for procurement of these first strike weapons, number one of which is (aside from spending exorbitant amounts of Canadian taxpayers money) the idea of always being at the ready to join the Americans in bringing war and destruction to the Middle-East instead of doing something useful like say, peace-keeping. Also the Canadian press is doing its standard crappy job of informing Canadians about the Tory wish list of other toys for the military over the next 6 years. That’s gonna’ cost upwards of $115 Billion. Health care anyone?

                                                 Vroooom Baby, Vroooom!

So yesterday I’m having sport at the Tories expense about their lack of a jobs for youths strategy, which they’ve gone and made worse during the current economic downturn by cutting funding for Katimavik. So I open the morning’s local fish-wrap and behold the Conservatives are announcing $27 million dollars worth of spending on… yeah, a youth jobs program. Well good, I think to myself. It’s something anyhow. Right? Wrong!

The $26.7-million, a mix of previously committed and new money, is earmarked for eight projects. The biggest beneficiary is the YMCA of Greater Toronto, awarded 90 per cent of the money. Nearly $9-million of this will be used over the next three fiscal years to bankroll and administer the Y’s youth exchanges program.

So most of this money (90 %) is going to be spent in Toronto. Students looking for a leg up in finding a job in other parts of Canada are on their own.Canada’s Tories are nothing if not short-sighted.

Speaking of which, guess what government department is getting hit hardest by Harper’s budget cuts: …the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Agriculture Canada will be among the hardest-hit departments as Ottawa rolls out where it will cut 19,200 jobs across the country. What could go wrong with that?

David Suzuki writes about the Gulf of St. Lawrence, its importance to our Canadian identity and the legislative changes made by the governing Tories that will have serious repercussions for the health of marine environments in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. (i.e. ‘…gutting the Fisheries Act by stripping down habitat protection provisions, and it plans to amend the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act in a way that would make it easier for mining and oil companies, for example, to jump through regulatory hoops and get projects up and running faster than the time required to evaluate all their impacts on nature.’)

And wrapping this up this wee post, here in Quebec, students are holding rolling protests today in their latest salvo against planned tuition hikes. They hope to finish the day having held 12 different demonstrations in various parts of Montreal. I wonder who blinks first, the premier or the students?

Cheers!

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NEW MEDIA AND POLITICS CANADA: Tuesday At The Radio Show

I wish I could get it all together: the radio show, the podcast and the blog. Truth is I do it alone and simply run out of steam and so I keep my primary focus on the radio show and offering up an alternative to the bilge that the media spews forth daily. It’s simple, if you want to remain informed all you need is the desire coupled with the digital media. I’m going to start offering up my heavily linked posts once again as a tool for you and for myself so I can bring some sort of order to my radio show.

The U.S. State Department has announced that their chief investigator will review the Obama administration’s handling of a Canadian company’s request to pipe oil from western Canada to Texas, following complaints from 14 U.S. lawmakers. The review will look at the Keystone XL pipeline approval process, the controversial $7 billion project, a 2,735 kilometer pipeline proposed by Calgary-based TransCanada, and whether the State Department “and all other parties involved” in the project followed federal laws and regulations. This comes on the heels of  a protest on Sunday that saw more than 12,000 people show up to form a human chain around the White House in protest of the pipeline.

It’s also worthy of note that one of the world’s leading climatologists, James Hansen of NASA, says that so far as what little chance we have of stabilizing climate and avoiding the most disastrous global climate impacts if the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over. Our Prime Minister, by the by, believes this all to be a “no-brainer.” Awesome choice of words dude!

Our PM, Harper stated that we would not recognize the country after he was through and clearly on his agenda is the dismantling of Canada’s social safety net. In Harper’s Canada the right to strike has been taken away from ordinary Canadians.

Here in Quebec we’re convinced that the Progressive Conservatives are completely uninterested in ever winning Quebec seats in parliament in the near future.

Internationally there is no more important story than the current ramping up of tensions between western powers and Iran. There has been a long stated desire by the neo-cons to wage war on Iran ever since they blundered their way into Iraq and created a power vacuum benefiting the Iranians. Just as it was before the Iraq war we are reading stories about statements being leaked anonymously that are surefire evidence of a nuclear weapons program under way that is the “greatest threat” to democracies everywhere!

The notion Iran would work to attain nuclear weapons in order to deploy them against Israel, the United States, or anyone else is a “virtual impossibility.” It would be suicide as they would find themselves incinerated in a retaliatory nuclear attack. It is the same use of fear and lies that we witnessed before the Iraq war and as Seymour Hersh wrote in the New Yorker that “despite years of covert operations inside Iran, extensive satellite imagery, and the recruitment of Iranian intelligence assets, the United States and its allies, including Israel, have been unable to find irrefutable evidence of an ongoing hidden nuclear-weapons program in Iran.”

 Those are the lead stories for Tuesday’s show — tune in here at 8 AM for lots more.

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