Conservative budget levies frontal assault on environment, First Nations

Only a week after record-breaking temperatures in the National Capital Region, a chill blew through Ottawa streets as Finance Minister Jim Flaherty prepared to deliver the federal budget. After five years of a minority Conservative government, all signs pointed to a strict austerity budget on March 29.

Social justice activists and concerned citizens have been organizing around the anticipated announcement of pension reform, job losses and social spending cuts. During the speech, about 17 concerned Canadians stood up in the House of Commons gallery and chanted, "This is not our budget! Where are we in your budget?" The group was detained by Hill security but later released without charges.

"We chanted for a solid 60 seconds before they moved to kick us out," said Taylor Eby, one of the participants in the demonstration. "The reason I took part in this action is because, like many Canadians, I'm frustrated with this government's lack of accountability and their unwillingness to listen to the majority who did not elect them."

Canadians opposed to the Harper government's austerity measures are rallying around the slogan Not Our Budget, and issued a press release coinciding with the action on Parliament Hill. The group expressed concern with the "gutting of environmental legislation" and cutting "services for First Nations education and health."

A New Way Forward

The NDP will not lose its principles with Thomas Mulcair. Rather, one hopes that with him they have the chance to win power and finally apply them.

Some things just happen. No one sees them coming. When they do, we can’t guess their consequences.

Case in point: First, the NDP’s sweep of Quebec in last year’s federal election and becoming the Official Opposition and thus government-in-waiting. (Even now when I write this I wonder, “Did this really happen?”) Second, Jack Layton, the NDP leader who had done the unexpected, dies at the very peak of his career, and a new leader must be found to take the party to power.

There were people in the party who said from the outset of the leadership race that who that new leader should be was a no-brainer. He or she must be the one likely to hold the most Quebec seats, most credible as a prime minister, and most able to put an end to the odious rule of Stephen Harper.
That person was, of course, Thomas Mulcair and he was, indeed, chosen at last week’s NDP leadership convention.

Why Tom Mulcair is Stephen Harper’s first real Opposition threat in years

Tom Mulcair is the most experienced opposition leader Stephen Harper has faced. Between Quebec’s national assembly and the federal Parliament, he’s been in elected politics for 18 years. Unlike Paul Martin, who had been in Parliament for nearly as long, Mulcair has been in an opposition party, Jean Charest’s Quebec Liberals, that fought its way to government. He is an effective interrogator of witnesses in parliamentary committees, a skill he should keep using. He’s smart and hungry.

For now, he’s more a danger to Bob Rae than to Stephen Harper.

Some of my colleagues have been tut-tutting Mulcair for reading from notes in his victory speech at the NDP convention and in his first performances in the House of Commons. Here in the Parliamentary press gallery, we like our political leaders spontaneous. It’s why so many of us thought Michael Ignatieff’s town-hall free-association sessions were the highlight of the 2011 election. It helps explain why apparently nobody in 30 years has ever taken Bob Rae aside and said, “Bob? Edit.”

Canada, home to the suicide capital of the world

Randy Keeper is sick of building coffins. A wiry fellow who looks younger than his 49 years, Keeper is proud of his job as a carpenter and crew leader, saying he’s built 25 houses from scratch over 17 years in Pikangikum, the reserve in northwestern Ontario where he has lived his whole life. But when it comes to the wooden boxes he builds for Pikangikum’s dead, he draws a blank. “I don’t count them,” he says from his daughter’s dining room table. He remembers the last ones, though. They were in December. “I had to make two in one day, one for an elder and one for a younger person.”

The dreams started a couple of weeks after that. In one, he’s lying face up in a freshly dug grave, watching as a coffin is slowly lowered toward him. He doesn’t know if there’s anyone inside, but he recognizes his handiwork: 100 lb. of plywood, treated pine and nails, a simple enough thing that takes him no more than 90 minutes to build. In the dream he’s alive but can’t move as it comes down on his chest, smothering him. Then he wakes up. “The elders told me to stop making them,” he says, “but I have no choice because I work for the band. I get nervous, shaky. Once the dreams happened I’d say yes out of respect for chief and council, but sometimes I don’t show up.”

MP pension reform bill to be introduced in fall

Legislation will be introduced this fall to turn the vague hints of MP pension reform made in this week's budget into concrete plans, government sources say.

Changes will be made to the age of entitlement and benefit levels, though they won't take effect until after the next election in 2015.

In the meantime, MPs will start contributing more to their own pensions next year and by 2016, will pay half.

In advance of Thursday's budget, the Conservatives hinted they would take a hard line on MP pensions, after they raised the eligibility age for Old Age Security benefits to 67 from 65.

But the budget Thursday was thin on details, sparking criticism that politicians weren't ready to take a hit while asking Canadians to take one on the chin.

"The fact that they put their own bank accounts ahead of the country at the same time as they are asking others to sacrifice, it's really disappointing," said Gregory Thomas, the federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Earth Hour: environmentalists say there’s renewed activism

Where do you stand on Earth Hour?

Optimistically, with environmental groups buoyed by renewed support from a re-energized citizenry? “These rituals are important for creating a sense of identity and community,” says Keith Stewart of Greenpeace Canada. “They look down the street and see they are with their neighbours who want to do something about climate change.”

Or, more soberly, with Harry McCaughey, a Queen’s University professor who will turn off his lights tonight and use the darkened hour for sad reflection on climate change? “My mind cannot get away from this overwhelming problem we are facing,” he says.

Donations to and membership in environmental groups are up since January, when public hearings into the Northern Gateway pipeline launched and Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver accused environmentalists of a having “radical ideological agenda” funded by foreigners and abetted by “jet-setting celebrities.”

There is likely to be a more activism in the wake of the federal budget’s new rollbacks on environmental protection, says Stewart.

Federal Budget 2012: Finance Minister Jim Flaherty scrambles to limit fallout on MP pensions

OTTAWA—Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government is scrambling to limit the political fallout from a budget that targets the pensions of government workers and seniors while not reducing the gold-plated pensions of members of Parliament.

The Conservatives’ budget document notes only that adjustments to MPs’ retirement arrangements will take effect in the next Parliament (likely in 2015 or 2016).

But in a single line in his budget speech in the Commons, Flaherty said the government would begin adjusting the cost-sharing burden to make MPs contribute more to their pension plans beginning in 2013.

The Conservatives have been sharply criticized for being vague about possible changes to MPs’ pensions while asking future seniors to work another two years before accessing Old Age Security payments and requiring federal public servants to pay a larger share of their pension plans.

“MPs missed an opportunity today to put Canada first and lead by example,” said Gregory Thomas, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. “MPs can still retire at age 55 after just six years of service. This budget contains no specific changes to the retirement age for MPs, the number of years they need to work, or the massive pensions they can collect.”

Occupy protesters sent to hospital after clash with police

Protesters clashed with police Friday night as members of the Occupy Toronto movement marched to express outrage at the arrest of four others earlier in the day.

At least one protester was arrested during the march.

Marchers gathered in front of 52 Div. headquarters on Dundas St. W. near University Ave. The group then left the station and headed to Queen St. and University Ave. around 9 p.m.

A protester on a bicycle and a police officer got into a physical confrontation, resulting in the arrest of the protester. Police waved their batons in an attempt to moved back the crowd of protesters.

The march dissipated around 10 p.m.

Earlier Friday, four people were arrested at Osgoode Hall on University Ave., after they refused to leave the grounds. Two of the people arrested were sent to the hospital to be treated for minor injuries, according to Staff Sgt. Deb Abbott.

All four protesters face charges in connection with the incident, police said. The charges include causing a disturbance, obstructing police, assault with intent to resist arrest and possession of marijuana.

Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Tim Alamenciak

Budget’s new rules unfairly target environmental groups

The Conservatives are continuing their dishonourable attack meant to intimidate environmental groups, in a budget item that stands out for adding a needless new cost.

Non-profit groups will be required to “provide more information on their political activities, including the extent to which these are funded by foreign sources,” budget documents say. And somehow the government has found $8-million, at a time of restraint, for the Canada Revenue Agency to spend on “education and compliance,” $3-million of which is for extra audits to ensure the existing 10-per-cent rule is maintained (no more than 10 per cent of funds can be spent on advocacy). Witch-hunts don’t come cheap.

Foreign sources? It’s not illegal for Canadian charities to take money from outside the country. And why should it be? If a Canadian cancer researcher, or a program to keep inner-city youth in school, receives money from a foreign foundation, is anything wrong with that? Why, then, is it wrong for an environmental group?

We live in a globalized world – the phrase is nearly as ubiquitous as what it represents. The Canadian government is only too happy to solicit foreign capital, foreign students (it has special scholarships for them), foreign culture, foreign labour. But foreign charitable donations for advocacy? Why, they’re a threat to the Canadian way of life!

Recycling neo-liberalism in austerity budgets

At what point does something that was once new, turn into old, and make way for something newer? Twenty years? 30? 40? I ask in light of the CBC's Terry Milewski's question to NDP Leader Tom Mulcair at his first news conference. How do you expect to appeal to voters, he prodded, with a program so "antiquated"?

But hold on. If you're 30 years old, 35, even 40 (born in 1972), the only economic wisdom you've ever known is the nostrums of neo-liberalism, which began in the Reagan-Thatcher 1980s and continues into the current round of austerity budgets everywhere. You've lived entirely in a pro-business context of deregulation and "reining in" public spending. It's ancient, as old as you are. (And includes the era of those zealous neo-Liberals, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin.)

Or take a Globe and Mail editorial, which asked, "Is a 'labour-friendly government' really what is needed at a time when public-sector unions have lost touch with the reality of the economy?"

Now, labour-hostile governments are all anyone under 40 has seen, starting with Thatcher and Reagan smashing the miners and air traffic controllers. The decimation of unions over that time is seriously related to the rise of social inequality (We are the 99 per cent) that marks and mars our era. Union bargaining had largely created the middle-income sector. Some labour-friendliness might restore balance and avoid the strife that inequality has led to. It would be innovative. Milewski and the Globe editorialist are basically showing their age, and a lazy refusal to think fresh.