Democracy gone Astray: Thursday, February 16, 2012

Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Rob Ford’s subway fairy tale

What will Rob Ford do now that he’s run out of election promises to break? Build casinos, of course. And so continues the gangsta fairy tale of Robert Bruce Ford. We’ll get to that slippery casino business a little further down.

But first, to revisit that watershed moment in a mayoralty that’s careening dizzyingly out of control, the vote last week at a special meeting of council to effectively kill Ford’s privately funded Sheppard subway scheme and replace it with parts of the Transit City plan he declared dead his first day in office.

A dazed mayor – still reeling from that turn when his point man on the transit file, Gordon Chong, reported that he couldn’t find the billions to fund his subway plan – responded by calling council’s vote “irrelevant.” Ford then inexplicably hopped on the Bloor line in the wee hours, taking the subway from his Etobicoke home to Scarborough in a clumsy bit of PR.

Ford doesn’t seem prepared to let his Sheppard fantasy go. His executive voted this week “on a process to move forward with the development of a plan to complete the Sheppard subway.” But that train has left the station.

Try as he may to sell the fallacy that his plan is still in play, the reality is that – as far as the province is concerned, and it controls the purse strings on the transit file – council’s vote to revive LRTs on Finch and bring the Eglinton-Crosstown above ground in stretches is the final word.

Eight Nobel laureates including Archbishop Desmond Tutu have written to the prime minister to argue that oil derived from Canadian tar sands "threatens the health of the planet" and that the UK should support European moves to classify the controversial energy source as highly polluting.

A similar letter has been sent this week to the transport minister, Norman Baker, by the shadow transport secretary, Maria Eagle, asking him "to vote in favour of labelling oil from tar sands as highly polluting immediately and in line with the European commission's proposals".

Last November, the Guardian revealed that the UK government has been actively supporting Canada's attempts to stop the tar sands oil being designated by Europe as emitting 22% more greenhouse gas emissions than that from conventional fuels. The proposal, the Fuel Quality Directive, could effectively ban tar sands oil from Europe and would set a precedent of officially labelling tar sands oil as dirtier than conventional oil.

Baker has defended the UK's stance on the grounds that all different types of crude oil – not just tar sands oil – should be assessed as low, medium and high emissions. "To be clear, we are not delaying action in any way, but are seeking an effective solution to address the carbon emissions from all highly polluting crudes, not simply those from one particular country," he has said. The foreign office has admitted such a system "may take some time" and would effectively kick the proposal into the long grass.

The head of the union representing senior civil servants has said that pay deals for officials that could reduce their tax liability need to stop and are widespread across Whitehall, especially in commercially orientated wings of government departments.

He was speaking in the wake of a Guardian story revealing that 25 senior members of staff at the Department of Health have had their salaries paid to limited companies. The practice is also understood to occur in primary care trusts.

The department has apologised after documents sent to the Guardian showed that contrary to assurances given to parliament, more than 25 senior staff employed by the department are paid salaries direct to limited companies, with the likely effect of reducing their tax bills. In some cases, the documents show the named individuals are being paid more than £250,000 a year, as well as additional expenses. The payments amount to almost £4.2m in one year.

Jonathan Baume, general secretary of the First Division Association, said: "We now need to be very transparent, very clear that this cannot continue, but at the same time grasp the very difficult political nettle which is to address pay at the senior levels of the civil service. Frankly, it's a shambles. Ministers are going to have to raise the salaries."

Some long-term sick and disabled people face being forced to work unpaid for an unlimited amount of time or have their benefits cut under plans being drawn up by the Department for Work and Pensions.

Mental health professionals and charities have said they fear those deemed fit to undertake limited amounts of work under a controversial assessment process could suffer further harm to their health if the plans go ahead.

The new policy, outlined by DWP officials in meetings with disabilities groups, is due to be announced after legal changes contained in clause 54 of the welfare reform bill have made their way through parliament.

The policy could mean that those on employment and support allowance who have been placed in the work-related activity group (Wrag) could be compelled to undertake work experience for charities, public bodies and high-street retailers. The Wrag group includes those who have been diagnosed with terminal cancer but have more than six months to live; accident and stroke victims; and some of those with mental health issues.

An audit by San Francisco county officials of about 400 recent foreclosures there determined that almost all involved either legal violations or suspicious documentation, according to a report released Wednesday.

Anecdotal evidence indicating foreclosure abuse has been plentiful since the mortgage boom turned to bust in 2008. But the detailed and comprehensive nature of the San Francisco findings suggest how pervasive foreclosure irregularities may be across the nation.

The improprieties range from the basic — a failure to warn borrowers that they were in default on their loans as required by law — to the arcane. For example, transfers of many loans in the foreclosure files were made by entities that had no right to assign them and institutions took back properties in auctions even though they had not proved ownership.

Commissioned by Phil Ting, the San Francisco assessor-recorder, the report examined files of properties subject to foreclosure sales in the county from January 2009 to November 2011. About 84 percent of the files contained what appear to be clear violations of law, it said, and fully two-thirds had at least four violations or irregularities.

17 European Countries Force Transgender Sterilization

People rightly flipped out across the internet last month over news that the Swedish parliament would not be repealing a barbaric law that forces sterilization on trans people seeking to change their gender on legal documents. While it's despicable that Swedish politicians are opposing the law change, much of the outrage, no doubt, occurred because people previously didn't realize that a forced sterilization law existed in Sweden.

Considering how shocking people find Sweden’s law, it's worth pointing out the country is 1 of 17 in Europe (shown in red below) that require trans people to have a surgical procedure that results in sterilization before legal gender change is made to their identification ID. The law is currently under review in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Portugal, and in Ireland a name change (which acknowledged gender change) was granted for one woman after a legal challenge that went to the high courts, but no laws exist on the matter.

Data source: European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights

OTTAWA - The federal government is poised to issue a firm policy direction on Old Age Security in the upcoming budget centred around raising the age when retirees can start to collect.

Several government sources now say the budget will lay out a path forward, rather than launch a national conversation or policy paper on proposed changes despite considerable discomfort within the Conservative caucus on OAS changes.

"We have to take action right now to make sure that there are OAS funds there for seniors, not just for today's seniors, but for the seniors of the future," Human Resources Minister Diane Finley said Wednesday during Question Period.

"If we don't take action now, there may not even be an OAS system for the future."

The leading option is to increase the age of eligibility from 67 from 65 — an option Prime Minister Stephen Harper has publicly confirmed is under consideration.

The plan is to phase in the changes slowly and begin the process in a few years. One leading possibility — as uttered vaguely by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty last week and then retracted — is to start phasing in the increase in age in 2020, and make the change over five years.

Under that scenario, anyone now aged 57 or older would not be affected.

It’s been billed as a blueprint for refashioning Ontario’s public services. But in the cold light of day, the long-awaited report from economist Don Drummond’s advisory panel is curiously vague.

True, the former federal bureaucrat is crystal clear about the spending cutbacks he wants to see. He argues that if the province is to eliminate its deficit by 2018, it will have to introduce a level of spending restraint that, as he told reporters Wednesday, would be “unprecedented in the post-war period in Canada.”

To achieve that, Drummond and the three others on his panel want the government to cut back everything — from health care to education to welfare to justice.

Their report says that over eight years this would amount to a 16.2 per cent cut in real per capita spending on the government-provided services Ontarians receive.

Nothing would be spared. Under the Drummond formula, even health spending, which the panel treats more leniently, would not be allowed to keep up with inflation and population growth.

So how exactly are these cutbacks arrived at?

Canada’s copyright legislation is taking a very different path from controversial U.S. legislation that drew widespread protests, Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore said Wednesday.

In an interview with CBC News the week a special committee set up its schedule for examining the bill, Moore said the government has rejected the aggressive approach the American government tried to take with the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Observers have said they’re not opposed to much of bill C-11, the act to amend the copyright act, but they fear lobbying could convince the Canadian government to take a more aggressive approach.

"This is a very different path," Moore said, pointing out each country has different consumer and cultural pressures affecting its legislation. "We’ve rejected the American style approaches on massive parts of our legislation."

"SOPA was about an international pursuit of piracy with pretty aggressive means that our government is not considering in our copyright bill."

One example, he said, is that the Canadian legislation would bring in "notice and notice," where an internet provider would notify rights infringers on behalf of the content creator. The U.S. bill has "notice and takedown," where a creator complains and the service automatically removes the content.

Enbridge pipeline bad for the economy

The Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline will deliver an inflationary oil price "shock" to Canadians of US$2 to $3 per barrel "every year for 30 years," a B.C. economist predicts.

Robyn Allan, former president of the Insurance Corp. of B.C. and senior economist for B.C. Central Credit Union, cites studies by Alberta Energy and the University of Calgary that predict Enbridge will trigger even higher domestic oil prices -- ranging between $8 to $10 per barrel respectively. She has taught money, public finance and economics at the university level.

Higher oil prices without any change in real economic activity -- the Enbridge case -- create inflation, she continues. Inflation from higher oil prices will be especially painful for Canadians since Canada must import almost half of its crude oil from offshore. It still has no pipeline to ship western crude to eastern markets.

As oil prices rise, income is transferred from consumers to producers, causing greater unemployment, higher interest rates and a decline in business investment.

Northern Gateway, Allan says, "will serve to permanently reduce GDP, increase unemployment, cause labour income to fall and decrease government revenues."

You don’t have to scratch very hard under the veneer of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty to discover they are fiscal conservatives. Or at least they say they are.

I like fiscal conservatives because I am one, too. I don’t believe in carrying too much debt and I’m sure Harper and Flaherty would agree. But then Harper goes out and forces $5 billion in extra spending from his government and the provinces to support his woefully unnecessary crime legislation in the face of declining crime stats. That’s a triumph of conservative ideology over fiscal common sense. It’s also just plain wrong.

A worse offence to fiscal conservatism is not trying to preserve the revenue you have. And if Harper and Flaherty have done their homework properly, they would notice that the biggest province in Canada is seeing much of its manufacturing shuttered. That’s not just tough on owners and workers, but lost tax revenue to fight the federal deficit.

However before we get too carried away with the federal deficit, let’s look at some facts. In eliminating the deficit, the federal government is expected to be between $4 billion and $5 billion ahead of Flaherty’s debt reduction schedule this year. So capping federal tranfers to the provinces for health care and reforming Old Age Security are questionable efforts.

Hitman Jason Kenney strikes again

Before we get on with this column, here is its context.

We are familiar with the Stephen Harper government’s penchant for blackballing its critics — for example, calling Jack Layton “Taliban Jack” for suggesting talks with the Taliban, precisely what NATO is doing.

The government fired or muzzled civil servants, even independent monitors who did not follow orders. It cut off funding to groups that deviated from government orthodoxy on Israel — for example, Kairos, the ecumenical group, and the Canadian Arab Federation, two organizations sympathetic to Palestinians, something that’s heresy to the Harperites.

The government’s appointees to the board of Montreal-based Rights and Democracy (established by Brian Mulroney to advance human rights abroad) ruined the organization because it had given three small grants to two Palestinian and one Israeli human rights group critical of Israeli policies.

Now, here’s the government’s latest scandal.

It is cutting nearly $1 million in funding to the Mississauga-based Palestine House, an educational and cultural centre established in 1994. The federal money is not for the centre per se. Rather it is for English language training and immigrant settlement services, including skills development and daycare, for about 1,100 newcomers a year.

Generational conflict: Neo-liberalism's new bait-and-switch ploy

The world seemed to change dramatically in 2011. On the global stage the democracy movement that started in Tunisia spread throughout the Middle East and beyond, eventually settling into tiny Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, just blocks from Wall Street. From there, Occupy Wall Street rippled out to become a global protest movement.

The Occupy movement introduced two powerful frames into public discourse, says Joe Brewer, director of Seattle-based Cognitive Policy Works. The "99 Percent" frame "evokes a maximal inequality that resonates deeply with the lived experiences of working-class people in the U.S. and around the world," he writes in a January 2012 memo, while the "Occupy" frame is action oriented and can be activated anywhere: Oakland, Congress, Democracy itself.

Together they present a robust agenda for progressive change. They also represent a serious challenge to the established order, and the elites are fighting back.

Brewer warns us to not let "the real culprits--the reckless bankers and their enablers who have infiltrated our government--shift blame."

But that's exactly what they and their neoliberal foot-soldiers are trying to do.

Neoliberalism remains the dominant global ideology because of its ability to adapt to changed circumstances. Even when neoliberal policies result in unmitigated disasters like the 2008 meltdown, neoliberals seem able to pick up the pieces and move on, turning failure into success. Neoliberalism is now engaged in manufacturing a new reality, using an ambitious blame-the-victim bait-and-switch strategy.

PARLIAMENT HILL—Diehard gun owners who despise the federal long-gun registry won’t stop until all elements of the 1995 law are dismantled, including the national licensing system and stiff ownership screening, opposition MPs say.

“The gun lobby is not going to stop,” NDP MP Charlie Angus (Timmins-James Bay, Ont.) told The Hill Times as Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) majority government was poised to vote on House of Commons passage Wednesday on Bill C-19, Eliminating the Long-Gun Registry Bill, legislation that would dismantle the registry and destroy all its records.

“I’ve dealt with them, these guys are fanatics on guns, so I think the message to the backbenchers is ‘yeah, we are going to go for stripping the licensing, as far as possible,’ that’s coming,” Mr. Angus said.

Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia (Lac Saint Louis, Que.) agreed the battle is not over, despite the final stage in what has been inevitable since Mr. Harper won his majority in the federal election last May after making elimination of the registry one of the Conservative Party of Canada’s central campaign planks.

Mr. Scarpaleggia, a member of the Commons Public Safety and National Security that held a string of hearings into the effects of Bill C-19 last fall, said witnesses opposing the registry made it clear they will not be satisfied until all elements of the program’s founding legislation, the 1995 Bill C-68 introduced by then Liberal Justice Minister Allan Rock, are gone.

New, tougher reforms to refugee legislation that hasn't yet come into force are already drawing fire from critics who say they give Canada's immigration minister too much power and risk the lives of claimants.

Bill C-31, introduced Thursday by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, toughens the measures taken in the Balanced Refugee Reform Act, a compromise bill passed under a Conservative minority government. That earlier bill has yet to be implemented. It was due to be up and running by June 29.

Kenney says he wants the new bill passed by that date and implemented sometime next fall.

The bill will implement long-planned biometric identification — including fingerprints and photos — for people who apply for visas to visit Canada, and allow the minister to select which countries are "safe," known as a designated country of origin.

Speaking to Evan Solomon, host of CBC's Power & Politics, Kenney said the information would eventually be purged but didn't know after how long. He said his department is working with Canada's privacy commissioner to develop the system.

The Conservative minister in charge of federal spending restraint is distancing himself from his own department’s edict that details of what gets cut be kept secret for months after the 2012 budget is released.

Treasury Board President Tony Clement said that, after reading about the memo on The Globe and Mail’s website Thursday, he was investigating why it had been issued to all federal departments. The memo states that in contrast to a previous order, departments should not include details of how they will implement the spending cuts when they report on future plans and priorities in May.

“What I can assure you is, first of all, that memo didn’t come from me,” said Mr. Clement. “Secondly, my position is that we have an obligation to provide Parliament with timely and accurate information.”

The minister has recently delivered several speeches on the importance of “open government” and financial transparency. He acknowledged that message would be at odds with a clampdown on information about spending cuts.

Iran uses terror to target civilians, and so does Israel

A great miracle happened in Tbilisi, New Delhi and Bangkok, and alongside that miracle there was ineptitude that flies in the face of Iranian pretentions and ambitions. But the intentions were clear and grave: to take Israeli lives, especially diplomats and other official representatives of the state. That is terror.

The assassinations of the Iranian scientists were no less terrorist, let's admit it. Terror is terror, against diplomats exactly like against scientists, even if the latter are developing nuclear weapons. There is no great difference between an attempt to kill a representative of Israel's Defense Ministry and a strike on an Iranian nuclear physicist. There are nuclear physicists in Israel too and if, God forbid, someone tried to assassinate them, that would rightly be considered cruel terror.

And so anyone who uses these deplorable assassination methods cannot be critical when someone else tries to emulate them. And why should the world denounce Iran's terrorist acts - as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday - and not denounce others? Are there special countries that are allowed to assassinate at will, and others who are not?

Both kinds of countries should be denounced. The methods this time were even amazingly similar. Magnetized explosive devices were stuck on cars, like in underworld hits; not blind mass attacks, but the kind that are directed against the occupants of one car, whose fate is sealed unless miracles and operational incompetence prevail.

People who were impressed with the assassination of the Iranian scientists - and there are many such people in Israel - those who say with a typical Israeli wink that "they shouldn't be mourned" ignore the fact that another harsh, unnecessary bloody cycle has been launched. What possible use can there be in killing one scientist, who is then replaced by three others?

What good was it at the time to kill a key Palestinian terrorist when his place was taken by 10 others? The killer of Dr. Thabet Thabet in cold blood in 2001, a Tul Karm dentist and peace activist who did not deserve to die, also laid the groundwork for the assassination attempt in New Delhi.

The killer of Hezbollah's Imad Mughniyeh, an avowed terrorist who deserved to die, may have saved the lives of many Israelis, but put the lives of many others at risk.

That's the way it is in the cruel cycle of assassination wars. But in Israel people who dwell in glass houses are keen to throw stones. Here people are impressed by and cheer Israeli assassinations and no one has questions or doubts, either about their morality or their efficacy. We are allowed.

Here people are shocked by attempted assassinations by Arabs or Iranians, but divorce them completely from the context of Israeli assassinations. How did a columnist in Israel Hayom put it this week? "Attacking Israel is in their DNA." Theirs? And what about us? The writer forgot, and made us forget, our DNA. It, too, supports assassinations, including sometimes of the innocent.

Assassinations of Palestinians have scaled down in recent years and have been carried out mainly in Gaza, and so the hit lists of the Shin Bet security service and the Israel Defense Forces are now shorter. That's a good thing.

But according to the data of the human rights group B'Tselem, Israel targeted and killed no less than 232 Palestinians in the territories between the beginning of the second intifada and Operation Cast Lead, a period of about eight years. During those attacks,approximately 150 innocent bystanders were killed, including women and children.

These assassinations, most of which did not target "ticking bombs," were acts of terror. They are not much different from the criminal Iranian attempts in far-off Asia. The representative of the Defense Ministry in New Dehli does not deserve to die, but neither did Dr. Thabet Thabet. The Iranian scientists probably did not deserve to die either.

In February 1990, then-Commerce and Industry Minister Ariel Sharon asked the delegates to the Likud Central Committee convention: "Who's for stopping terror?" A sea of hands flew up. Today the question should be: Who is against terror? We will all devotedly raise our hands. But people who are truly against terror must also say: against all terror, against any terror, be it Iranian, Palestinian or Israeli.

Original Article
Source: ha'aretz
Author: Gideon Levy

Can you spot the difference on “lawful access” bill?

So the Conservative government sends off a contentious bill for printing and provides copies to House of Commons staff to distribute and table in Parliament — then withdraws it an hour later and replaces it with a new version?

That’s what happened Tuesday when Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, through the Speaker of the House, tabled the Investigating and Preventing Criminal Electronic Communications Act just after 10:00 am. The short title is listed as “Lawful Access Act.” An hour later, House of Commons staff withdraw it and replace it with the identical bill, save a new short title. It’s now the “Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act.”

Check out the last-minute name change to the government’s contentious “lawful access” bill

I think it’s safe to say bureaucrats in the departments of Public Safety and Justice didn’t dream up this last-minute change. In fact, the Tory partisans who did aren’t the first ones to come up with such an ominous-sounding (but noble!) name. A U.S. Congressman (in 1997) can lay claim to this.

Federal security services have identified Greenpeace and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals as the kind of “multi-issue extremist” groups that pose a threat to Canadians, documents obtained under Access to Information show.

In a series of documents from 2005 to 2009, the RCMP and CSIS assess “threats from terrorism and extremism” and report growing concerns about environmental and animal-rights groups, as well as militants from first nations.

“Multi-issue extremists and aboriginal extremists may pursue common causes, and both groups have demonstrated the intent and the capability to carry out attacks against critical infrastructure in Canada,” says a November, 2008, assessment prepared by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Critics say the Harper government is blurring the lines of counterterrorism to target legitimate opponents of resource developments such as the Northern Gateway project, which will bring bitumen pipelines and massive oil tankers to British Columbia’s rugged coast. And they worry that new legislation designed to give police access to individual Canadians’ personal Internet information will increase surveillance of environmental groups that support acts of civil disobedience.

A new bill that would require telecommunications providers to give police subscriber information without a warrant will likely be challenged in the courts if crucial changes aren't made, critics say.

"A court challenge, I think will be inevitable, if this law passes as is," said University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, who holds a Canada Research Chair in internet and e-commerce law.

"I think the more immediate question is whether or not the government is prepared to consider amendments to this legislation."

The "protecting children from internet predators act," introduced in the House of Commons Tuesday, is similar to previous bills designed to give police and intelligence officials new powers to access digital communications. All the previous bills died when the minority governments that proposed them fell and elections were called.

Compared to similar, previous bills, the new one contains more provisions for oversight and reduces the types of information available without a warrant from 11 to six. Critics say those are positive steps.

OTTAWA - The Harper government signalled Wednesday it's open to softening a controversial bill that would give authorities easier access to information about Internet users.

The shift came after a torrent of criticism about the legislation — including concerns from some of its own MPs.

In the House of Commons, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said the bill would skip the second-reading stage and be sent directly to committee — a move that would make it easier to alter the content.

Generally bills only go to committee after receiving second reading, considered approval in principle from the Commons.

Following question period, Government House leader Peter Van Loan said dispatching the bill to committee now is a sign "that the government is open to a broad range of amendments in order to get the right balance."

OTTAWA — Enbridge, the company behind a controversial pipeline proposal to link the Alberta oilsands with the British Columbia coast, has complained federal departments were asking it for too much information and pushing the approval process at an "unrealistically fast" pace, says newly released briefing material from Environment Canada.

The internal records contrast recent statements made by federal cabinet ministers and the Alberta-based energy company about delays in the review process for the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline. If built, it would link the oilsands to the port of Kitimat so bitumen could be exported to Asia by tanker.

Paul Stanway, a spokesman for Enbridge, stressed in an interview Wednesday that the company raised these concerns early in the process, but that it was never proposing to slow down timelines for the project's approval.

While the company said that its discussions with the federal government were about its preference to delay detailed reports about its plans until after the project has received the green light from regulators, Environment Canada said Enbridge felt federal departments were "asking for more technical information and project design details" than the company was ready to provide at the time.

“I am going to leave the marijuana debate to the federal government. It's in their sole sphere of responsibility,” B.C. Premier Christy Clark told reporters after former attorneys-general call for legalization of marijuana.

The chorus of voices calling for a change in the marijuana laws is growing louder in B.C. as the federal government moves in the opposite direction, advocating mandatory minimum sentences.

Four former attorneys-general added their names this week to a growing list of people asking the provincial government to urge Ottawa to regulate and tax marijuana use and to abandon the mandatory minimum sentences for minor and non-violent marijuana-related offences. Others on the list include four former Vancouver mayors, the current Vancouver mayor, medical health officers across the province, several police officers and health-related academics.

Premier Christy Clark declined to comment. On previous occasions, however, she has not shied away from entering the debate over matters solely within federal jurisdiction. She has even spoken out about the tough-on-crime bill that includes the new marijuana penalties.

Tories restore controversial provisions to refugee bill

The federal Conservatives will table a new bill Thursday removing the right of appeal for failed refugee claimants from so-called “safe countries,” the Star has learned.

Asylum seekers whose claims are rejected, withdrawn or abandoned will also be banned from applying for permanent residency on humanitarian grounds within a year of the refugee board’s decision, a government source confirmed with the Star.

These changes will essentially return the Balanced Refugee Reform Act, passed by the House of Commons in 2010, to its original form — restoring the most contentious clauses removed by the then Conservative minority government under opposition pressure.

Canada does not currently have a list of safe countries of origin, countries considered capable of providing state protection to its citizens. However, democratic countries such as Mexico and Hungary — currently key source countries of Canada’s refugee claimants — are likely to be designated as such by the immigration minister once the new act takes effect, other sources say.

The refugee reform act was to take effect last December but was delayed until June, fuelling fears among critics that Immigration Minister Jason Kenney was buying time to backpedal on those concessions, now that the government has a majority mandate.

Mayor Rob Ford refused Wednesday to discuss the TTC report that argues there is a poor case for the Sheppard subway extension he desires.

Ford received the report a year ago, Royson James reported in Wednesday’s Star, but did not release it or publicly disclose its existence.

Ford held a news conference Wednesday to tout the city’s labour deal with its outdoor workers’ union. When a reporter asked him why he had not released the report, his press secretary, George Christopoulos, interjected to say: “Stay on topic. This is about the labour.” Ford remained silent.

The report lends professional credence to the arguments of councillors who prefer light rail on Sheppard over Ford’s proposal to extend the subway line to Scarborough Town Centre.

A Toronto lawyer is suing police for unlawfully arresting him during the G20 summit, a claim substantiated by Ontario’s police complaints watchdog.

Nicholas Wright, 29, was riding his bicycle along Bloor St. on June 27, 2010, the summit’s final day, when he was allegedly stopped by police and handcuffed, searched and detained for about 20 minutes.

Wright claims he was told he was being arrested for wearing a disguise — he had a bandana and goggles around his neck — and an officer later provided a fake name when Wright demanded he identify himself.

“It was very upsetting,” Wright said. “The experience has made me more concerned and fearful about my liberty and civil liberties in general, and it’s made me view police in a different light.”

Wright alleges police violated his Charter rights, conducted a false arrest, and carried out a negligent investigation. He is seeking $25,000 in damages and will be filing his lawsuit Thursday.

The Florida Senate narrowly defeated a bill this week that would have handed over management of more than two dozen state prisons to private corporations -- the largest-ever attempt at prison privatization in the nation.

The contentious measure was defeated despite getting the endorsement of powerful state Republican lawmakers, including Gov. Rick Scott and a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party. The Wall Street corporations that own and operate for-profit prisons were closely attuned to the vote in Florida, hoping for a major expansion of management contracts in the nation's third-largest prison system.

The policy implications were massive: the bill would have privatized every state prison south of Orlando, which represents about 20 percent of the entire correctional system. The GEO Group, one of the nation's largest private-prison corporations, has its corporate headquarters in the heart of South Florida and had expressed great interest in what its chief executive called "the largest single contract procurement in the history of our industry."

Both GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America, the nation's largest operator of for-profit prisons, have lobbied heavily and spent liberally on Florida campaigns in recent years. Over the last decade, the Florida Republican party has been the single largest recipient of campaign donations nationwide from both companies, according to a Huffington Post analysis of campaign finance data, and employees at both companies or their proxies have donated a combined total of more than $1.8 million to Florida candidates and committees over the last three election cycles.

The fate of Montana's century-old ban on corporate political spending is now in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court, setting up a possible sequel to the hotly contested Citizens United decision handed down two years ago.

In 2010, a five-member majority of the U.S. Supreme Court declared that corporations' independent spending in elections does not corrupt -- or even appear to corrupt -- the political process. On Wednesday, Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock submitted a brief to the Court with facts that suggest otherwise as he urged the justices to uphold his state's ban on corporate political spending.

The case, Western Tradition Partnership v. Bullock, comes up from the Montana Supreme Court, which in December adopted the attorney general's arguments to hold that the state's history of corporate-driven corruption dating back to the Gilded Age justified that Montana's Corrupt Practices Act is still valid. The law, passed by voter referendum in 1912, says that a "corporation may not make ... an expenditure in connection with a candidate or a political party that supports or opposes a candidate or a political party."

WASHINGTON -- Making his first run for Congress in the early 1990s, this candidate promised not to be a Reagan Republican, fashioned himself a progressive conservative, said he was impartial on unions and stayed vague on abortion rights.

It's a description that fits Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor whose past political pursuits in that state have weighed down his current presidential ambitions. But in this case, it applies to former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, whose own political origins have been explored in far less depth.

In his circuitous path to the top of the primary polls, Santorum has presented himself as the pure conservative alternative to Romney. But an extensive review of newspaper archives and interviews with officials involved in his successful 1990 congressional race against Rep. Doug Walgren (D-Pa.) suggests that Santorum was cut from a similar GOP cloth as his current adversary.

When the city of Pontiac, Michigan, shut down its fire department last Christmas Eve, city councilman Kermit Williams learned about it in the morning paper. "Nobody reports to me anymore," Williams says. "It just gets reported in the press." This was just the latest in a series of radical changes in the city, where elected officials such as Williams have been replaced by a single person with unprecedented control over the city's operation and budget.

Gov. Rick Snyder put Louis Schimmel in charge of Pontiac last September, invoking Public Act 4, a recent law that lets the governor name appointees to take over financially troubled cities and enact drastic austerity measures. Under the law, passed last March, these emergency managers can nullify labor contracts, privatize public services, sell off city property, and even dismiss elected officials.

Schimmel got to work quickly, firing the city clerk, city attorney, and director of public works and outsourcing several city departments. City fire fighters were told that they would be fired if their department was not absorbed by Waterford Township's. Schimmel has proposed putting nearly every city property up for sale, including city hall, the police station, fire stations, water-pumping stations, the library, the golf course, and two cemeteries.

Over in France, a farmer has successfully sued Monsanto for pesticide poisoning. The farmer claims he suffered a raft of neurological troubles after inhaling the agrochemical giant's Lasso herbicide while cleaning his sprayer in 2004. The court's ruling against Monsanto "could lend weight to other health claims against pesticides," according to Reuters.

All very interesting, but what caught my eye was this background bit toward the end of the story:

France, the EU's largest agricultural producer, is now targeting a 50 percent reduction in pesticide use between 2008 and 2018, with initial results showing a 4 percent cut in farm and non-farm use in 2008-2010.

Wait, France has a national policy in place to slash pesticide use within less than a decade? That's news to me. So I did a little digging and found that back in 2008, the French government rolled out a plan called Ecophyto 2018 in response to the European Union's 2006 Sustainable Use Directive, which called for all EU countries to concoct national policies on cutting pesticide use. Ecophyto sets an ambitious agenda for French agriculture: to meet the pesticide-reduction target while maintaining production levels.

Nuclear trucking routes in the US Jeff Berlin

"Is that it?" My wife leans forward in the passenger seat of our sensible hatchback and points ahead to an 18-wheeler that's hauling ass toward us on a low-country stretch of South Carolina's Highway 125. We've been heading west from I-95 toward the Savannah River Site nuclear facility on the Georgia-South Carolina border, in search of nuke truckers. At first the mysterious big rig resembles a commercial gas tanker, but the cab is pristine-looking and there's a simple blue-on-white license plate: US GOVERNMENT. It blows by too quickly to determine whether it's part of the little-known US fleet tasked with transporting some of the most sensitive cargo in existence.

As you weave through interstate traffic, you're unlikely to notice another plain-looking Peterbilt tractor-trailer rolling along in the right-hand lane. The government plates and array of antennas jutting from the cab's roof would hardly register. You'd have no idea that inside the cab an armed federal agent operates a host of electronic countermeasures to keep outsiders from accessing his heavily armored cargo: a nuclear warhead with enough destructive power to level downtown San Francisco.

That's the way the Office of Secure Transportation (OST) wants it. At a cost of $250 million a year, nearly 600 couriers employed by this secretive agency within the US Department of Energy use some of the nation's busiest roads to move America's radioactive material wherever it needs to go—from a variety of labs, reactors and military bases, to the nation's Pantex bomb-assembly plant in Amarillo, Texas, to the Savannah River facility. Most of the shipments are bombs or weapon components; some are radioactive metals for research or fuel for Navy ships and submarines. The shipments are on the move about once a week.

Still No End to 'Too Big to Fail'

When Congress passed the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in the summer of 2010, the Obama administration made happy talk about putting an end to “too big to fail” banks. Hold the champagne. The Federal Reserve Board has just created the fifth-largest bank in the country, despite a flood of warnings from community advocates and smaller banks.

Skeptics in financial markets are entitled to their skepticism. Capital One has been rapidly assembling this new behemoth, acquiring local deposits and credit card operations in a series of mergers. Federal Reserve governors reviewed the complaints and rejected them. In banking regulation, the “new normal” so far looks a lot like the “old normal.”

Of course, it is impossible to say this marks an end to reform. But it’s a real downer for the reform advocates. They have pleaded for a different perspective from the Fed regulators—weighing the “public benefits” of bank consolidations against the “adverse effects,” as Dodd-Frank requires. But the Fed made this calculation on very narrow grounds.The governors concluded that one more very large bank will not by itself bring down the system. True enough. But each decision the Fed makes now on applying the new rules sets a precedent for its future decisions. How big is too big? The Capital One decision seems to say size is not an issue.

Reform groups like the National Community Reinvestment Coalition argued that the new, enlarged Capital One is a bad bet on its own terms because its business model is grounded in credit card debt, with a heavy portion of so-called “subprime” credit card holders—borrowers much like the “subprime” mortgage holders now lined up for foreclosure and bankruptcy. When the credit card bubble bursts, these critics say, the government will stick with the same bad choice—bailing out the creditors when the debtors fail.

Financial market cynics have assumed all along that Dodd-Frank did not end “too big to fail” but instead created a charmed circle of protected banks labeled “systemically important” that will not be allowed to fail, no matter how badly they behave.

The Fed and other regulators were given the impossible job of changing the behavior of these megabanks without messing with their awesome size and financial power.

Good luck to the Fed. The new regulatory rules are still being written, and the banking industry has flooded Washington with comments, questions and fine-print objections. Some say the bank lobbyists are in a purposeful stall, hoping to delay the final regulations until they get a more banker-friendly president. I suspect the stalling tactics are designed to outwait the public anger.

Original Article
Source: the nation
Author: William Greider

Drummond Report: Ontario Will Need Severe Cutbacks To Avoid Greece's Fate, Report Warns

TORONTO - Bigger class sizes, higher electricity and water bills and new parking fees at public transit stations are among the bitter pills deficit-ridden Ontario must swallow to avoid the same fate as debt-plagued Greece, economist Don Drummond warned Wednesday.

Unless all 362 of his recommendations are implemented, Canada's most populous province will wind up doubling its deficit by 2017-18 and increasing its debt to a staggering $411.4 billion — a little more than half its gross domestic product, he predicted in his long-awaited austerity blueprint for Ontario.

"Ontario's finances do not yet constitute a crisis, and with early strong action a crisis can be averted," the report states.

"The lessons of history and of what is happening elsewhere today are clear: the government must take daring fiscal action early, before today's challenges are transformed into tomorrow's crisis."

Even if the governing Liberals stick to their current plan to slay the deficit by 2017-18, the province will still end up with a $30 billion shortfall, according to Drummond's calculations.

OTTAWA - Senior defence officials concede there is currently no Plan B — or back-up proposal — to deal with delays in the F-35 jetfighter program, and insist one is not necessary because of recent upgrades to the CF-18 fleet.

But there were suggestions Wednesday the Harper government might be casting around for an alternative as Julian Fantino, the associate minister of defence, told opposition parties to "stay tuned" for a response to the Pentagon's statement that the cost of the radar-evading plane would rise.

The Conservatives have been hammered for months in the House of Commons over delays and cost overruns in the multinational project. Other allies, such as Australia, have placed orders for Super Hornets — the newer, beefed up version of the CF-18 — to hedge against F-35 delays.

It's not necessary for Canada to go down that road, said a high-level defence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"We have no back-up plan. We have a reserve and flexibility in the life extensions we've done structurally to our F-18s and in weapons systems," said the source, referring to the $1.8-billion modernization that's took place over the last decade.

Recession, deficits and austerity in Ontario

Ontario public service advocates and providers are becoming increasingly and rightfully alarmed about the direction of provincial finances, in the run-up to the public release of the Drummond Commission report, and a subsequent provincial budget that looks to be painfully austere.

The budget-cutting set are ramping up the rhetoric pretty dramatically: warning that Ontario is fast becoming the "Greece of Canada," that we are about to hit the "debt wall," that interest rates will skyrocket when the debt raters wake up, and similar nonsense. This is pure shock-doctrine stuff (reminiscent of like propaganda that set the stage for Paul Martin's austerity in the mid-1990s), and must be called out for what it is.

Ontario is not remotely Greece. A good way to make us MORE like Greece would be to throw tens of thousands of broader public sector workers out of their jobs, in a misguided effort to dig our way out of a hole. Investors love our bonds (and those of every other Canadian province) -- that's why they finance 10-year loans for interest rates barely above the rate of inflation. The key task in strengthening the fiscal balance is to put people back to work: paying taxes (instead of collecting EI), and buying stuff (instead of hoarding cash). While the provincial government's toolkit in that regard is not infinite (the feds have far more ability to influence job-creation, through macro, monetary, exchange rate, and other policies), we can't consider the provincial fiscal challenge without placing it in its appropriate macroeconomic context.

Could “the protester,” 2011′s “person of the year” according to Time magazine, be heading for a second title reign in 2012? If the first month and a half of this year is any indication, it sure looks like it.

This time around, it’s a little different. In 2011, the numerous uprisings in several parts of the Middle East combined with wide-scale Occupy protests into a year of democratic unrest. People around the world were angry with their respective governments for one reason or another and they were no longer shy about showing it.

This year, so far, protesters have been similarly angry, but it has been about something considerably more prosaic than fundamental democracy: copyright.

There was, of course, the mid-January protest in the U.S. against the Stop Online Piracy Act and related Protect Intellectual Property Act. On Jan. 18, millions of people signed online petitions against the bills, which would have given the government and entertainment companies sweeping powers to censor the Internet. The protests ultimately got the legislation killed, at least for now.

No sooner did the SOPA furor die down than anger over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement sprung up. Poland recently saw thousands of protestors take to the streets to express dismay over their country’s signing of the international copyright treaty, which they said has been negotiated for years in secrecy. The country has since reversed plans to ratify ACTA, with several other countries–Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia–following suit.

The Scene. Charlie Angus, the honourable member for garish colour combinations, rose this day wearing a purple shirt, silver suit and silver tie. Whatever the attitude thus conveyed, he first struck a sorrowful tone.

“Mr. Speaker,” he lamented, “what is clear is Canadians cannot trust the government with protecting their privacy rights.”

To justify this contention, Mr. Angus called his first witness. “Let us try out this quote, ‘What we’re seeing is only the tip of the iceberg. The real threat to Canadian privacy is coming from within, from our own federal government.’ Does anyone know who said that?” the New Democrat asked. “It was Ann Cavoukian, the privacy commissioner of Ontario.”

And with that much established, Mr. Angus rounded on the Public Safety Minister, his sad tone replaced with adamant indignation. “According to the minister, she is on the side of child pornographers,” he charged. “He is wrong. She is on the side of average, law-abiding Canadians who play by the rules. So why is he on the side of intrusion, snooping and treating Canadians like criminals?”

Vic Toews, perhaps tired from the last 48 hours of dancing around and away from that thing he said, seemed unwilling to engage this provocation.

Drummond Report taxes credulity

As wildly different as they may be, Premier Dalton McGuinty and Mayor Rob Ford do have one thing in common: Both insist we can do more on less.

They’re not the only politicians who feel that way. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find an elected leader willing to speak the truth about paying for the services we receive.

To Ford’s credit, he did see his way clear to raising property taxes 2.5 percent, a rare — no, unique — display of realism on his part. But that won’t make up for the $65 million he threw away with the cancellation of the vehicle registration tax last year.

For McGuinty, the problems are, if anything, more dire. Ontario, historically Canada’s economic engine, is sputtering. That’s why he hired economist Don Drummond to take a hard look at the situation. Doing what adherents of the dismal science always do, Drummond’s response outlines the finer points of self-mutilation.

His report puts one in mind of the KPMG document much quoted in the city’s last round of budget cutting. Both followed a sort of bottom-line reductio ad absurdum logic that leads nowhere, except to more of the same.

Still, Drummond isn’t entirely to blame for the lack of imagination; he was instructed not to examine tax increases.

Yet the idea that governments can slash and burn their way to prosperity doesn’t hold. That doesn’t stop us from clinging to it as if our very lives were at stake.