Democracy gone Astray: Monday, June 17, 2013

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.]

Monday, June 17, 2013

MP Dean Del Mastro interfering in elections investigation, witness says

OTTAWA – A witness in an Elections Canada investigation has written to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and House of Commons Speaker Andrew Scheer complaining that Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro’s attacks on him appear to be designed to interfere with the investigation.

Last Thursday, Del Mastro, the parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, rose in the House on what’s called a “question of privilege” to complain that an investigation into his 2008 campaign financing was violating his rights as an MP.

We are so accustomed to the connection between political parties and democracy that to question the relationship between the two might seem absurd. But for those who recognize the multiple crises faced by humanity -- the destruction of our environment, climate change, the ravages of unfettered finance capital, the undeniable limits to growth -- the failure of our liberal, multi-party democracies seems increasingly obvious. To many people -- the millions who can't even be bothered to vote -- they are simply irrelevant.

First Nations groups resolute in their opposition to Keystone XL

First Nations groups are resolute in their opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline, and are willing to go to great lengths over the coming months in order to stop the project, activists say.

Maryam Adrangi, of the progressive think-tank the Council of Canadians, told The Hill Times that activist groups are “training people for non-violent direct action such as blockading heavy equipment” in order to derail construction of the XL Pipeline.

Long Before Helping Expose NSA Spying, Journalist Laura Poitras Faced Harassment from U.S. Agents

Journalist Laura Poitras is being described as the connection between the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and the reporters for The Guardian and The Washington Post who published his leaked documents about government surveillance. Poitras shared a byline on two of the key articles about the ongoing NSA revelations, and filmed the Guardian interview in Hong Kong in which Snowden went public with his identity. But well before she took on Snowden’s case, Poitras has come face to face with issues of privacy and state surveillance over her work as a documentary filmmaker. In an excerpt of an April 2012 interview on Democracy Now!, Poitras discusses her repeated detention and interrogation by federal agents whenever she enters the United States. The interrogations began after Poitras began working on her documentary, "My Country, My Country," about post-invasion Iraq, and continued with most recent film, "The Oath," about ex-Guantánamo prisoners returning to Yemen. She estimates she has been detained approximately 40 times and has had her laptop, cellphone and personal belongings repeatedly searched.

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Source: democracynow.org
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Great Gatsby Economics

WASHINGTON—You don’t need me to tell you, but it’s a whole lot tougher leading a garage band than being a superstar. What you might not have known is just how much harder.

If you want an example of growing inequality, try the rock ‘n’ roll industry. Between 1982 and 2003, the share of concert income taken home by the top 1 percent of performers more than doubled, rising from 26 percent to 56 percent. The top 5 percent collected almost 90 percent of all concert revenues.

Shawn Lyons was dead to rights—and he knew it. More than a month had passed since People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had released a video of savage mistreatment at the MowMar Farms hog confinement facility where he worked as an entry-level herdsman in the breeding room. The three enormous sow barns in rural Greene County, Iowa, were less than five years old and, until recently, had raised few concerns. They seemed well ventilated and well supplied with water from giant holding tanks. Their tightly tacked steel siding always gleamed white in the sun. But the PETA hidden-camera footage shot by two undercover activists over a period of months in the summer of 2008, following up on a tip from a former employee, showed a harsh reality concealed inside.

You know the world is in trouble when Barack Obama starts sounding like Stephen Harper.

The Spymaster-in-Chief.

James Clapper, Obama’s director of National Intelligence, is a desperate liar caught with pants down, shoes off, and socks and undies tossed in a ball in the corner.

A Houston-based pipeline company responsible for three major oil spills in Alberta in three consecutive years has a questionable safety record in both the United States and Canada, according to regulatory documents.

On June 15 Plains Midstream, a subsidiary of Plains All American Pipelines reported a 1,000 barrel condensate spill near Manning, Alberta.

More than 40 workers are involved in cleaning up the highly toxic condensate which is used to dilute thick bitumen so it can move through pipelines.

Quebec's construction sites will be idle on Monday because of a general strike called by unions.

Negotiations broke down Saturday and the strike began at midnight.

The unions represent more than 175,000 residential, industrial and commercial construction workers.

Six years after Canada's three most secretive agencies were supposed to set up a way to protect whistleblowers reporting wrongdoing within their ranks, they have finally all complied.

The national security and intelligence departments — the Canadian Forces, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) — were exempted from a whistleblower protection law that came into force for federal government employees in early 2007.

Aspiring journalists and bloggers who secretly crave mainstream credibility are bound to soon be trolling the client lists of the Atlantic Speakers Bureau and other businesses of its ilk looking for charities they have done business with that have fallen on hard times.

I mention this in light of the bizarre campaign by the Harper Conservatives and their allies out here on the Great Plains to prove Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is Not Fit to Govern, or at least likely to be just as bad at it as they are, because he hasn't given his speaker's fee back to a charity that hired him and then ran into financial difficulties.

OTTAWA - Proposed new rules would forbid a number of federal officials from forever discussing sensitive aspects of their work.

The officials would include the prime minister's national security adviser, federal lawyers who work on terrorism cases and intelligence analysts in the Privy Council Office.

UPDATE—Iran’s interior ministry confirmed on Saturday that Hassan Rouhani, the standard-bearer of the reformist movement and a decided moderate in Iran’s political spectrum, will be the next president, succeeding Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in August. His election means big changes, and a new attitude that will eventually carry over into foreign policy.

Celebrations, including dancing in the street, greeted the announcement that Rouhani had won.

Since the first week of June, when the Washington Post and London’s Guardian, doing the work that journalism is supposed to do, published detailed news of the National Security Agency’s gigantic programs of cell-phone and Internet information-gathering, the world has been riveted. These were scoops of a high order. Yet they were more in the nature of confirmations than of revelations. The existence and the ambitiousness of what was referred to in this space, two weeks before the Post and Guardian stories, as the N.S.A.’s “data collection and analysis on a global scale” have been known in broad outline for a long time.

An extraordinary fuss about eavesdropping started in the spring of 1844, when Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian exile in London, became convinced that the British government was opening his mail. Mazzini, a revolutionary who’d been thrown in jail in Genoa, imprisoned in Savona, sentenced to death in absentia, and arrested in Paris, was plotting the unification of the kingdoms of Italy and the founding of an Italian republic. He suspected that, in London, he’d been the victim of what he called “post-office espionage”: he believed that the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, had ordered his mail to be opened, at the request of the Austrian Ambassador, who, like many people, feared what Mazzini hoped—that an insurrection in Italy would spark a series of revolutions across Europe. Mazzini knew how to find out: he put poppy seeds, strands of hair, and grains of sand into envelopes, sealed the envelopes with wax, and sent them, by post, to himself. When the letters arrived—still sealed—they contained no poppy seeds, no hair, and no grains of sand. Mazzini then had his friend Thomas Duncombe, a Member of Parliament, submit a petition to the House of Commons. Duncombe wanted to know if Graham really had ordered the opening of Mazzini’s mail. Was the British government in the business of prying into people’s private correspondence? Graham said the answer to that question was a secret.

Canadian stocks are down about 3 per cent since the opening of trading on Jan. 2, and in the past 12 months the S&P/TSX index — the broadest measure of market activity — is up 6 per cent.

It’s been a different story in New York. As the U.S. economy has emerged from hibernation, the Dow Jones Industrials are on a tear. The main average is up 12 per cent since Jan. 2 and 20 per cent in the past year.

OTTAWA — The Conservative government is proposing to claw back four per cent of the public service payroll from its employees as part of its sweeping plan to modernize its pay system and bring it in line with the private sector.

Public Works and Government Services Canada, the federal paymaster and receiver-general, wants to recover two weeks pay from every public servant’s pay cheque for the next year beginning Jan. 1. All new hires will start on the new system when they begin work and would have the first two weeks of their pay withheld.

In order to figure out if we are striking the right balance between freedom and security, it helps to know what's on both sides of the scale. But when it comes to the National Security Agency's domestic and Internet surveillance program, even after all of Edward Snowden's leaks, we don't actually know very much at all. "Yes, I worry about potential government abuse of privacy from a program designed to prevent another 9/11 — abuse that, so far, does not appear to have happened.," The New York Times' Thomas Friedman writes. "But I worry even more about another 9/11." What would cause the balance to shift for Friedman? Surely cameras in every home would provide valuable counter-terrorism information, but no one thinks it's worth the cost. Likewise, we need to evaluate whether the NSA's programs are worth the cost. To do that, we need to know what they are. Here are some of the many thing we don't know yet.

Texas Governor Rick Perry has some bad news for Texas women. On Friday afternoon, the one-time presidential hopeful notified legislators that Texas would not join the federal government and 42 other states that have addressed gender-based wage discrimination. Their bill, which installs state-level legal protections similar to those enacted by the federal Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, had a lot of momentum before reaching Perry's desk. Last month the legislation, along with two separate amendements, cleared both of the state's chambers, and it would have made Texas the 43rd state in the Union to have passed such legislation.

An odd thing is happening in the world's self-declared pinnacle of democracy. No one -- except a handful of elected officials and an army of contractors -- is allowed to know how America's surveillance leviathan works.

For the last two years, Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) have tried to describe to the American public the sweeping surveillance the National Security Agency conducts inside and outside the United States. But secrecy rules block them from airing the simplest details.

Britain's top-flight universities should be prepared to make lower exam offers to some state school pupils, after research published on Monday shows that elite institutions have become more socially exclusive over the past decade.

The report by the government's social mobility commission warns that the proportion of state-educated pupils attending Russell Group universities has declined since 2002. It suggests that the nation's most academically selective universities are becoming less socially representative, and have "a long way to go" to ensure that all potential students have a chance of gaining a place.

A diplomatic breakthrough on the Syrian civil war at the G8 summit in Northern Ireland appeared unlikely when the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, chastised the west for considering arming Syrian rebels, saying they ate human organs. He said Russia by contrast was arming the legitimate government of Syria.

Speaking after a difficult meeting with Putin in Downing Street, David Cameron claimed both men were in agreement on the need to end the human catastrophe of the civil war. But there was little to suggest the two men made progress on how to convene a fresh Syrian peace conference in Geneva, let alone who should attend, or its agenda.

Istanbul came to a standstill on Sunday as an army of riot police and gendarmerie cordoned off streets and use teargas on protesters in the centre of the city while the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, staged a rally before hundreds of thousands of supporters at the waterfront.

Some 24 hours after using brute force to clear the focal point of the demonstrations against the government and bulldozing Gezi Park in Taksim Square, where a varied crew of protest groups had been camped out since the beginning of the month, Erdogan ditched all efforts at conciliation at a rally of his Justice and Development party (AKP).

Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.

CHICAGO — Six people were killed and at least 13 others wounded in shootings between Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, police said. Other weekend shootings killed one and wounded 16, bringing the bloody weekend total to seven dead, 29 wounded.

When eight of the world's wealthiest countries gather on Monday for their annual forum, this time in Northern Ireland, the meeting will focus on, among other things, offshore tax havens.

The G8 summit on Monday and Tuesday comes nearly two months after what is believed to be the largest ever leak of data from offshore tax havens, most of it from the Caribbean and South Pacific. CBC News was part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists group that was given access to the data from 10 locales, involving 130,000 people.

Canadian history has a reputation for being dull, but our nation's past is arousing passions in Ottawa of late.

The federal government has spent $28 million commemorating the bicentennial of the War of 1812, a program that some critics say was an extravagant exercise in drumming up patriotism.

The Conservative government's latest foray into the history books has also divided opinion. Last month, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage started a "thorough and comprehensive review of significant aspects of Canadian history."

OTTAWA - Summer students hired as tourist guides for Parliament Hill and area have been trained to praise the Senate and disdain democracies with three or more political parties.

A training manual for the 2013 summer season features an eyebrow-raising section about the value of the Senate, now embroiled in expense scandals and ethical breaches.

"Senate investigations are usually of a higher standard than those by committees of the House of Commons," says a 39-page manual on Canada's political system.

OTTAWA - The prime minister's national security adviser, federal lawyers who work on terrorism cases and intelligence analysts in the Privy Council Office would be forever forbidden from discussing sensitive aspects of their work under proposed new rules.

The Harper government wants to pull the cloak of eternal secrecy over past and present employees of nine federal agencies and those who used to toil at two now-defunct branches.

MANNING, Alta. - A pipeline company is dealing with a new spill in Alberta.

Plains Midstream Canada says it is responding to a leak on its Kemp natural gas pipeline system approximately 90 kilometres northwest of Manning, Alberta.

James Bamford on NSA Secrets, Keith Alexander’s Influence & Massive Growth of Surveillance, Cyberwar

As the U.S. vows to take "all necessary steps" to pursue whistleblower Edward Snowden, James Bamford joins us to discuss the National Security Agency’s secret expansion of government surveillance and cyberwarfare. In his latest reporting for Wired magazine, Bamford profiles NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander and connects the dots on PRISM, phone surveillance and the NSA’s massive spy center in Bluffdale, Utah. Says Bamford of Alexander: "Never before has anyone in America’s intelligence sphere come close to his degree of power, the number of people under his command, the expanse of his rule, the length of his reign or the depth of his secrecy." The author of "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America," Bamford has covered the National Security Agency for the last three decades, after helping expose its existence in the 1980s.

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Source: democracynow.org
Author: -

U.S. surveillance architecture includes collection of revealing Internet, phone metadata

On March 12, 2004, acting attorney general James B. Comey and the Justice Department’s top leadership reached the brink of resignation over electronic surveillance orders that they believed to be illegal.

President George W. Bush backed down, halting secret foreign-intelligence-gathering operations that had crossed into domestic terrain. That morning marked the beginning of the end of STELLARWIND, the cover name for a set of four surveillance programs that brought Americans and American territory within the domain of the National Security Agency for the first time in decades. It was also a prelude to new legal structures that allowed Bush and then President Obama to reproduce each of those programs and expand their reach.

MONTREAL - Space-industry representatives are generally welcoming the appointment of retired general Walt Natynczyk as the new president of the Canadian Space Agency.

But there's some concern the appointment of a former Canadian Forces boss might signal an impending militarization of the country's space program.

Natynczyk will officially take over as CSA president on Aug. 6, replacing ex-astronaut Steve MacLean who left unexpectedly last February.

Renowned economist Paul Krugman is worried about Canada’s economy.

The Nobel Prize winner and New York Times columnist wrote in a blog post Saturday that Canada “ought to be quite vulnerable to a big deleveraging shock despite its boring banks.”

By “ought,” he means he’s not quite sure. But he sees warning signs in the fact that a very large spread has developed between U.S. and Canadian house prices, and Canadian household debt levels are reaching levels seen in the U.S. just before that country’s own “deleveraging shock.”

WASHINGTON — In the months and early years after 9/11, FBI agents began showing up at Microsoft Corp. more frequently than before, armed with court orders demanding information on customers.

Around the world, government spies and eavesdroppers were tracking the email and Internet addresses used by suspected terrorists. Often, those trails led to the world's largest software company and, at the time, largest email provider.

EDMONTON - Some Albertans have turned to a vocal U.S. environmental group for information on pipeline safety they say they can't get from their own government.

Four conservation and landowners organizations have asked an expert from the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council to talk to them about what Albertans should be concerned about regarding the province's aging pipeline network.

Dix remakes shadow cabinet to create opposition stronghold

Former New Democrat leadership candidate Mike Farnworth is leading the charge when it comes to dissecting the Liberal government's budget in a revamped shadow cabinet announced Friday by NDP Leader Adrian Dix.

Dix appointed Farnworth, known as one of the NDP's most able debaters and agitators, as the new Opposition finance critic. Farnworth takes over from Surrey New Democrat Bruce Ralston, who takes on international trade, immigration, multiculturalism and public accounts.

There's been "no real change" in the federal government's approach to First Nations issues, says the national chief for the Assembly of First Nations, five years after the residential schools apology.

In an interview airing Saturday on CBC Radio's The House, Shawn Atleo described the Harper government's approach to decision-making as "top-down, unilateral, government-knows-best," saying that "in my personal reflection, since the apology, there has really been no real change in the approach."

So, just to catch you up with all the latest on Toronto’s mayor: The police were reportedly aware of the infamous video of the mayor allegedly smoking crack weeks before it was shown to the Toronto Star; the mayor’s name is also reported to have been mentioned in discussions picked up on police wiretaps, part of a year-long investigation culminating in this week’s massive raid on an apartment complex in the city’s western suburbs — the same one where the mayor is reported to have told staff the video could be found.

Canada has fallen behind other countries in collecting statistics on the use of different contraceptives, and this has important public policy implications, according to some experts.

The situation is "in sharp contrast" to the U.S., Australia and many European countries, which collect national data on birth control, UBC professor and family physician Wendy Norman told CBC News.

The worst fears of Chicago Public School teachers and staffers were confirmed Friday when district officials announced it was laying off some 850 employees.

“Given the historic financial crisis facing our District, next year’s budget will not come without painful decisions, which is why we are making tough choices at central office in order to minimize impacts to our classrooms,” said CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett in a statement Friday. “We will continue this work over the next several weeks to further identify reductions to central office spending to help close the District’s $1 billion deficit and make sure that every dollar helps protect precious classroom funding.”

Over the past three decades, the inflation-adjusted income of the median American family has basically remained stagnant. The same can’t be said of college costs, which have simultaneously surged to almost unrecognizable heights, according to a new report by the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

Costs at private nonprofit four-year colleges have increased by more than 150 percent since 1982, but the real trouble is at four-year public schools, where inflation-adjusted costs have experienced a startling 250 percent jump.

The Syrian opposition—in all its varied forms—has long asked that Barack Obama contribute more to its fight against President Bashar al-Assad than reprimands and non-lethal aid. (That category has included ready-to-eat meals of Western but not Syrian favorites like tortellini with cream sauce.) The rebels got some of what they wanted Thursday, when the White House let it be known that it is now considering sending them small arms. The change in policy was prompted by intelligence reports claiming that Assad had used small quantities of sarin gas on several occasions, killing between a hundred and a hundred and fifty people, and occurred on the same day that the United Nations announced that at least ninety-three thousand people have died in the war. The former, though, were the decisive hundred.

At the heart of Edward Snowden's decision to expose the NSA's massive phone and Internet spying programs was a fundamental belief in the people's right-to-know. "My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them," he said in an interview with the Guardian.

From the State's point of view, he's committed a crime. From his point of view, and the view of many others, he has sacrificed for the greater good because he knows people have the right to know what the government is doing in their name. And legal, or not, he saw what the government was doing as a crime against the people and our rights.

Al Gore: NSA Surveillance Violates The Constitution

Former Vice President Al Gore broke with many of his fellow Democrats Friday and said that the NSA surveillance programs violate the constitution.

"This in my view violates the constitution. The fourth amendment and the first amendment – and the fourth amendment language is crystal clear," he told The Guardian, which revealed the agency's phone surveillance and reported on its Internet data-mining. "It is not acceptable to have a secret interpretation of a law that goes far beyond any reasonable reading of either the law or the constitution and then classify as top secret what the actual law is."

Bank of America Lied To Home Owners, Former Workers Allege

June 14 (Reuters) - Six former Bank of America Corp employees have alleged that the bank deliberately denied eligible home owners loan modifications and lied to them about the status of their mortgage payments and documents.

The bank allegedly used these tactics to shepherd homeowners into foreclosure, as well as in-house loan modifications. Both yielded the bank more profits than the government-sponsored Home Affordable Modification Program, according to documents recently filed as part of a lawsuit in Massachusetts federal court.

Women Are at the Table, So Now What?

NEW YORK — The focus of feminism has long been on inclusion and equality: giving women access where they had been shut out, ensuring the same opportunities and rewards as for men. This focus can distract from a harder, pertinent question: How would everything in the world be different if the female half of humanity had not been more or less locked out of its design?

It is a tricky subject. Many arguments for equality flow from the premise that gender differences have historically been overstated. To suggest that women have a distinct way of thinking is, in this view, to flirt with the kind of logic that held them down.

It’s a rare moment when I’m in the position to soothe white people’s anxiety around an issue concerning race. My usual preference is to start riots. So please allow me this one opportunity I have to assuage any fear white people may be experiencing around the recent news that more white people died in the United States last year than were born. Ready? OK.

Relax. White America isn’t going anywhere.

OTTAWA - Sen. Pamela Wallin's timeline of when she identified problems with her expenses predates the Conservative government's defence of their former senator in the House of Commons and the media.

And Wallin's assertion that Senate bookkeepers failed to detect mistakes in her travel claims that she later spotted appears to be at odds with the upper chamber's version of events.

Behind the throne in Langevin Block

Complaints about power being centralized in the Prime Minister’s Office have been going around Ottawa since the time of Pierre Trudeau. In that regard, Stephen Harper’s PMO is no different, though it is more controlling than most if not all of its predecessors.

The system actually likes to know who’s in charge, and historically that begins with the PM’s chief of staff, principal secretary or senior policy adviser.

OTTAWA — Military brass warned Defence Minister Peter MacKay in September that being able to refuel Canadian fighter jets in mid-air is “critical to the defence of Canada,” and should be “closely linked” to the purchase of any new warplane.

That may have significant bearing on whether the government chooses the F-35 as Canada’s next fighter because the stealth jet is incompatible with the Royal Canadian Air Force’s current air-to-air refuelling fleet.

Former B.C. Conservative senator Pat Carney has gone after Pamela Wallin, one of four members of the upper chamber accused of abusing the taxpayers' trust, for blaming her failings on an excessive paperwork burden.

Carney made her comment on Facebook Friday after communicating with one of her former office employees who was "steamed" after hearing Wallin's first full interview since the scandal broke.

The World Indigenous Network Conference held in Darwin, Australia at the end of May brought together 1,400 indigenous leaders to explore common purpose in the face of juggernaut industrial developments around the globe.

Among them were a number of Canadians, three of whom -- perhaps unknown to many in their own country -- offered one of the most most moving and important lessons of the entire gathering.

Imagine the modern responses to some historic revelations about the nature of reality:

Nicolaus Copernicus: Polish guy without even a BA says earth revolves around the sun.

Isaac Newton: Government bureaucrat and alchemy crank offers three "laws" about action and reaction.

An increasing number of landed immigrants are struggling to complete the final stage before becoming citizens: passing the citizenship exam.

The failure rates have increased significantly since Citizenship and Immigration Canada introduced new and harder tests last year on March 28 and July 23.

A glimpse at an enormous trove of leaked records about secret companies and accounts is being opened to the public in hope it will shed light on the murky world of offshore finance.

The information, contained in a new online database released Friday night, has the names of more than 100,000 offshore entities — mainly companies and trusts set up in locales such as the British Virgin Islands and Cook Islands — and the people associated with them.

The upcoming G8 Summit is an unprecedented opportunity to go after tax cheats who use tax havens. But Canada threatens to be a spoiler. Again.

British Prime Minister Cameron wants G8 leaders to endorse a strong action plan to tackle tax havens when they meet in Northern Ireland next week.

But Stephen Harper could block agreement, unless we mobilize strong public pressure to get him to change his mind.

OTTAWA - A new poll suggests Canadians overwhelmingly believe MPs and senators are cheating on their taxpayer-funded expense claims.

And an overwhelming number of Canadians questioned want to be able to check up on them by requiring all parliamentarians to publicly post all their expenses online.

OTTAWA - Statistics Canada says manufacturing sales fell 2.4 per cent in April to $48.2 billion, the fourth decline in five months and the largest monthly percentage drop since August 2009.

The agency says lower sales in the petroleum and coal product and primary metal industries were largely responsible for the decline.