Fish advisory council disbanded, MP says

A New Democratic MP said Monday that the federal government has shut down an advisory body that collected the views of fishermen to help make better science decisions.

"This is just a shameful decision," said Ryan Cleary, the MP for St. John's South-Mount Pearl. The Fisheries Resource Conservation Council (FRCC) was shut down on Thursday, he said.

Cleary said he was unsure whether the closure is part of a series of cuts at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans that are expected to save the department $56.8 million in the coming year.

The FRCC was founded in the early 1990s, in the wake of closures that rocked the Newfoundland and Labrador fishery starting with a moratorium on northern cod in 1992.

"This is basically a voice for fishermen.… The fishermen on the water are essentially scientists in a way," said Cleary, who intends to raise the issue in the House of Commons.

"When you axe this, you take away a critical, a crucial voice for fishermen."

Our houses no longer homes for Democracy

The speaker was explaining that she didn't think much of the work conducted in the provincial legislative assembly.

"Most of my issues are around the quality of debate and the research and the fact that you can pretty well get up in the house of assembly and say whatever it is you like," she said. "You don't have to be concerned with truth."

Put more bluntly, she was saying that the province's elected members were often full of what might be charitably called hooey. Bunkum and horsefeathers.

It's not an uncommon sentiment among members of the public, and if the statement was from one of those ubiquitous morning-radio bits where they stick a microphone in front of someone who is filling their gas tank to measure "the public's" opinion, it would have been unremarkable.

But this was the Premier speaking. Kathy Dunderdale, the newly elected Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador. She was defending a decision to keep the legislative assembly closed for what could be months - it might not sit again until spring. Spring! Her explanation, she told the CBC, is that important work can be done outside the legislature.

"I don't find it a place for a very healthy, open, constructive debate to start with," she said.

Klaszus: CBC elbowed out as state broadcaster

As journalists in many countries fight for the right to expression, some Canadians are making a show of grumbling about our socalled "state broadcaster," the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. This language is intentional, suggesting a dangerous deference to power, collusion between government and newsroom.

It makes one think of the Soviet Union, of Iran and Libya, of regimes that forcefully use media outlets to act as megaphones for propaganda. State broadcasters typically ignore legitimate news stories (such as antigovernment protests) while promoting others (progovernment rallies). They dutifully broadcast leaders' rants, no matter how nonsensical. We are led to believe that CBC is this kind of organization, corrupt and untrustworthy. But if CBC is indeed a state broadcaster, it's a shoddy one, critical of the ruling party and strangely supportive of populist movements (take a cbc.ca headline from last week as an example: "Occupy Canada rallies spread in economic 'awakening'").

Apparently, nobody at CBC got the memo on how a state broadcaster is supposed to conduct itself.

Canada firm on budget cuts despite global risks

OTTAWA – Canada will press ahead with billions of dollars in cuts to wipe out its budget deficit, despite an uncertain world economic outlook, and may even reduce spending more deeply than already promised, the federal minister in charge of the program said on Monday.

Dismissing opposition concerns that both the domestic and the global recoveries are too fragile to withstand cuts right now, Treasury Board Minister Tony Clement said eliminating the deficit was the best way to keep the Canadian economy strong.
“This is a very different kind of economic situation than that which was facing the world three years ago,” he told Reuters in an interview.

“Here what we’re facing is uncertainties in the marketplace caused by sovereign debt… The best way to deal with that as a government is to offer the fiscal virtue of lowering the deficit in stages to get back to balance with a plan that will get you there, that is a real plan, and is a legitimate plan.”
Canada weathered the economic crisis of 2008 better than most of its trading partners, as its raw material exports stayed in demand and the government cut taxes and boosted government spending to bring the country out of recession.

Colleagues of Slain Kansas Abortion Doctor George Tiller Continue His Fight for Reproductive Rights

A federal judge has blocked the impact of one of the laws aimed at defunding Planned Parenthood, ordering Kansas to restore federal family planning funds to a clinic that claims it suffered "collateral damage" from the law because it would be forced to close, leaving 650 mostly low-income patients without access to reproductive healthcare services. Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, and the unaffiliated Dodge City clinic, are challenging a law requiring the state to first allocate Title X funds to public health departments and hospitals, which leaves no funds for specialty family planning clinics. This is just the latest development in Kansas, which saw the murder of one of its staunchest supporters of women’s access to abortion: Dr. George Tiller. For more, we are joined by Julie Burkhart, who worked for eight years with Tiller before he was killed in 2009. She is the founder and director of the Trust Women Foundation and PAC, which focuses on protecting women’s access to reproductive healthcare, as well as the rights of the physicians who provide these services.

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Source: Democracy Now! 

Moroun should stop meddling in a new Canada-U.S. crossing

The busiest crossing between Canada and the United States is in private hands. That’s worked well enough for decades, but the owner is now getting in the way of a much-needed expansion of capacity at the border. He should end his campaign of obstruction and alarmism.

Matty Moroun of Grosse Pointe, Mich., has a good reason to protect his 81-year-old Ambassador Bridge – the sole above-ground span linking Windsor, Ont., and Detroit. More than two million trucks have crossed the bridge this year; that’s 7,200 a day, and this is a bad year. The trucks carry cargo equal to about one-quarter of all trade between Canada and the U.S., worth around $150-billion. Together with millions of passenger vehicles, the trucks rumble to or from the bridge through an overwhelmed customs plaza and onto the streets of downtown Windsor. Delays can stretch into hours, costing businesses in the two countries’ manufacturing heartland millions of dollars.

The bridge and its related infrastructure are too old and too small to meet the current or future needs of North American businesses and local residents.

Protesters block rush hour traffic with roaming protest

At the height of Toronto's rush hour commute, a group of about 100 to 125 people staged a roaming protest starting with the occupation of Bay and King Sts.

The demonstrators sat in the intersection for several minutes before marching north to occupy the intersection of Yonge and Dundas Sts. around 6 p.m.

“Whose streets? Our streets!” the protesters chanted at Bay and King Sts.

After several minutes, the group marched north in the middle of Bay St., to Queen St., where they marched east.

The group stopped in front of the Eaton Centre, blocking traffic.

They marched to the intersection of Yonge and Dundas Sts. where protestors sat on the ground, forming a “99%” symbol to viewers in nearby buildings.

When asked how long the protesters would be allowed to occupy the streets, Staff Sergeant Andy Norrie said, “It’s one of those things that evolves as the event carries on.”

The mandatory minimum mess

The standard argument in favour of mandatory minimum sentences is that they deliver certainty. "If you do X, the minimum punishment you will receive is Y." It's simple, clear, and predictable. And that makes mandatory minimum sentences a powerful deterrent against crime.

The standard response to that argument is: "Look at the research. There's stacks of it. It proves that mandatory minimum sentences don't deter crime."

The standard response to that standard response is, well, nothing. Supporters of mandatory minimums simply ignore the research on deterrence. So let's save a little time today and skip it.

Go back to the initial claim that mandatory minimums produce clarity, simplicity, and predictability. "Do the crime, do the time." Is that true?

No. And I can demonstrate with two provisions in the Conservatives' omnibus crime bill.

The bill includes a mandatory minimum sentence of six months for growing more than five and fewer than 201 marijuana plants with the intent of trafficking. There's also a mandatory minimum sentence of nine months for anyone who grows between one and 201 marijuana plants for the purposes of trafficking when certain factors are present - among them, that "the person used real property that belongs to a third party in committing the offence."

Don't waste billions on 'tough-on-crime'

On the heels of their majority victory, the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper pledged to pass an omnibus crime bill. Said bill is just the beginning of an ambitious war on crime that will radically change significant aspects of the country's Criminal Code and justice system. While some aspects of the bill may have merit, on balance, it's the wrong approach, at the wrong time, pursued for the wrong reasons.

Dubbed the "Safe Streets and Communities Act," Bill C-10 will no doubt appeal to those who view the justice system as "soft on crime," even though the facts suggest most of the changes are unnecessary or unwarranted. The bill bundles a number of crime-related initiatives including the imposition of mandatory minimum sentences for weapon and drug-related convictions, and expanding the list of offences where conditional sentences (such as house arrest) would not apply.

Meanwhile, crime rates in Canada are at the lowest since 1973, and longer prison sentences, increasing the number and capacity of prisons, and mandatory minimum sentences have shown to be ineffective in numerous jurisdictions around the world. However, according to Justice Minister Rob Nicholson's spokesperson, the "Tories don't use these statistics as an excuse not to get tough on criminals."

Non-partisanship non-existent at Commons ethics committee ‘witch hunt’

OTTAWA — To Conservatives, ethics committee hearings scheduled for this week will give an important look into alleged abuses of Canada’s open-records laws at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

But to Opposition New Democrats, the committee’s study of the CBC is “a farce ... a witch hunt” intent on a partisan pursuit of the Tories’ perceived enemies.

Either way, any illusions that the spirit of non-partisanship would prevail under a Conservative majority government are quickly dashed whenever the House of Commons Access to Information and Ethics committee sits.

“ETHI,” as it is known in Parliament Hill shorthand, has quickly become the most entertaining — if not the least productive — show in Parliament, with often rancorous sniping between ranking Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro and senior NDP MP Charlie Angus.

This week, the committee continues its study of the CBC’s handling of access to information requests at a time when the corporation’s annual parliamentary appropriation of $1.1 billion is in the crosshairs of across-the-board government cuts.