Fish, politics and that awful, sinking feeling

The more I observe the machinations of today's fishery, the more I have this sinking feeling about its future.

It's best summed up by quoting one pithy remark from former fisheries minister John Crosbie: the problem with the fishery, he said, is that it is completely surrounded and governed by politics.

Not all politics is bad, mind you. Some people benefit greatly from political decisions.

Take, for example, the City of Mount Pearl. Some people feel that Mount Pearl is no more a city than the City of Mundy Pond or the City of Marystown.

Mount Pearl was simply the beneficiary of a very astute politician, Tory Neil Windsor. He also happened to be Mount Pearl's former "Town" Engineer, and happened to become the province's minister of finance.

He delivered a big, fat political gift that people in Mount Pearl must still be grateful for; that it became a city! A town with city status that has no industry, no hospital, no bus service, no fire department of its own, no airport, no waste disposal system, no water supply, few buildings over five stories, and until recently, the best restaurant in town was at the local Irving service station in Donovans.

Wildrose makes hay as PCs lose their way

With just two weeks to go, time is running out for Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives. As of today, several polls show the upstart Wildrose Party poised to form government. I think I know why.

The PCs have ruled Alberta for 41 years, and for the last many years at least they ruled with an ironic fist.

In other words, for many of the senior leaders in the PC party, the “Conservative” in Progressive Conservative is a noun, not an adjective.

They call themselves Conservatives but have rejected the conservative approach to governing.

If it pleases the court of public opinion, I offer as an example a single piece of startling evidence.

In January, Calgary’s School of Public Policy released a report showing wage increases for Alberta’s public sector employees ate up 95% of the total increase in government revenues between 2000 and 2010, far outstripping public sector wage growth in other provinces.

Yes, that’s right, 95%, which happens to rhyme with “all our future spent.”

So much for pro-choice

Do you think doctors who are opposed to abortion on religious grounds should be forced by the government to perform them anyway?

It’s not a real issue in Canada, where abortions are available on demand, for any reason or no reason, from the moment of conception until the moment of birth, paid for by taxpayers.

Doctors who believe in it do it. Doctors who don’t, don’t.

Canada has no legal limits on abortion whatsoever. It’s a pro-choice utopia.

But on the campaign trail last week, Alberta Premier Alison Redford said she no longer believes abortion is a matter of personal conscience.

True, for years, she was the justice minister of Alberta where that was the rule. But Redford is losing the Alberta election badly — a new poll put her 17 points behind the upstart Wildrose party, with just two weeks to the election —so she hit the panic button.

So, off the cuff, she told reporters that doctors should now be compelled to provide abortions on demand, even if they don’t believe in it. She styled it as an attack on the Wildrose party, whose platform supports freedom of conscience— like Redford herself did, until about fifteen minutes ago.

Prime Minister Harper muzzles diplomats and foreign agencies

The Stephen Harper government was ready to splurge $25 billion or more for fighter jets. It’s spending $9 billion for jails we don’t need. But it has no money for programs and agencies it does not like. It has been axing or starving them — for example, the CBC, the Canadian International Development Agency, the foreign affairs department and the Montreal-based human rights group, Rights & Democracy, in this latest round of cuts alone.

Harper came to office in 2006 harbouring a deep distrust of the federal bureaucracy, which he considered a catacomb of Liberal sympathizers. He held a particular animus for foreign affairs, whose officials he thought of as elitist, having never travelled abroad. More crucially, he feared their resistance to his blind support of Israel.

His compulsive need to control all government communications hit our diplomats particularly hard. It hobbled their ability to publicly speak for Canada, something they have long been very good at. He muzzled them so much that, in 2008, the John Manley commission on Afghanistan publicly criticized him for preventing our embassies and ambassadors from representing our interests abroad.

Harper’s latest cut of $523.5 million over four years at foreign affairs comes on top of two earlier ones. He may be driven partly by the populist notion of stripping the pinstriped brigade of their martini lunches. But in reality, Canadian diplomats are among the hardest working civil servants, besides being among the brightest yet quintessentially modest Canadians.

Canada 2013: a world of fun

With Danielle Smith stomping across Alberta in the boots of history (OK, lousy metaphor), Pauline Marois richly earning the most awkward political nickname in memory (she’s la dame du béton, the woman of concrete, but whatever: she seems on track to win 85 of 125 seats at the next election) and the British Columbia centre-right hopelessly divided, it’s time to ponder the mess Canada might be in in a year.

Or not. You know, polls are for dogs, these are tidings of Christmases which may be, not Christmases which must be, etc. etc. blah de frickin blah. But let’s pretend.

Smith is likely to be premier of Alberta in two weeks. This is in some ways the least problematic outcome for Stephen Harper, not just because Smith and Harper agree on most things but because Smith has shown no tendency to want to run against Ottawa. She was in Ottawa several weeks ago and delivered a perfect snoozer of a lunchtime speech. Which may even have been the goal.

Canadians not misled on F-35 costs, Tory MP says

A top Conservative MP responsible for military procurement insists the Conservative government did not mislead Canadians over the costs of F-35s slated to replace Canada's fleet of F-18 military jets.

The comments come after the auditor general said this week that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's cabinet would have known the pricetag for the military aircraft was higher than what the public was told.

In an interview airing Saturday on CBC Radio's The House, Conservative MP Chris Alexander tells host Evan Solomon he "honestly" doesn't think Canadians were misled on the costs.

When Solomon asked Alexander why the full costs were not disclosed in Parliament, Alexander appeared to point the finger at officials at the Department of National Defence (DND), saying the answer was in the auditor general's report.

"Not all the information that was in the department flowed where it needed to go, upwards and to other departments," said Alexander who serves as parliamentary secretary to National Defence Minister Peter Mackay.

But when pressed on the question of who was responsible for the lack of due diligence, Alexander answered: "We are."

Fight between ‘blue’ and ‘red’ conservatives may turn air purple, political experts say

The Wildrose juggernaut that now threatens to bring down the Tory dynasty was painstakingly constructed over the past five years by disaffected blue Tories, with help from key strategists allied with Stephen Harper’s federal Conservatives.

While the party’s surge in the polls might seem to have come out of nowhere, its backers have been carefully setting the stage for the Wildrose ascendance for more than five years.

The movement began in earnest in 2007, when former premier Ed Stelmach announced an independent review of oil and gas royalties.

Mount Royal University political science professor Duane Bratt said the big-tent Tory party had always contained a small, very conservative right wing, which alternately tried to gain control or break away from time to time, to no avail. The royalty review made the split possible.

“The royalty review was critical to the rise of the Wildrose,” Bratt said. “That’s when money started to flow to the Wildrose. … It gave them a base. It gave them some anger to work with. They mobilized.”

That anger was primarily in the oilpatch, and the money was flowing in from the towers in Calgary. But from the outset the party cultivated a strong populist stance, and a review of contribution records shows money coming from individual Albertans as well.

Canadians not misled on F-35 costs: MacKay

The federal government didn't mislead Parliament or the public over the cost of buying F-35 fighter jets, it simply didn't include items such as paying pilots, fuel and maintenance over the life of the aircraft, the defence minister says.

"The additional $10 billion was money that you could describe as sunk costs," Peter MacKay told CTV's Question Period Sunday.

Auditor General Michael Ferguson's report last week stated the jets would cost $25 billion and not the $15 billion price tag the federal government has put on the F-35s.

Ferguson also said Prime Minister Stephen Harper's cabinet would have known the cost was higher than what the public was told.

But the $10 billion discrepancy includes money the government already pays to keep the country's F-18 jets flying, MacKay said from his riding in New Glasgow, N.S.

"So there's a different interpretation," he said.

"But the way acquisitions have always been done is to key in on the actual costs of new equipment and that is the way that this number was arrived at.

Arrests made in shootings that terrorized Tulsa's black community

Police backed by a helicopter arrested two men early Sunday and said they would face murder charges in the recent shootings that terrorized Tulsa's black community and left three people dead and two others critically wounded.

Police spokesman Officer Jason Willingham said the two men were arrested at a home just north of Tulsa about 2 a.m. Sunday and were expected to be charged with three counts of first-degree murder and two counts of shooting with intent to kill in the spate of shootings early Friday. He said police made the arrests after receiving an anonymous tip.

While police identified the men as white and all the victims are black, authorities have not described the shootings as racially motivated and declined to discuss that issue Sunday.

Community leaders, however, expressed concern about the motivation for the shootings on Tulsa's predominantly black north side, as well as the possibility that they would provoke a vigilante response. Rev. Warren Blakney Sr., president of the Tulsa NAACP, said Sunday that word of the arrests had provided a great sense of relief.

“The community once again can go about its business without fear of there being a shooter on the streets on today, on Easter morning,” he said.

Ban on Gideon Bible handout at public schools sparks torrent of hate mail

A rural Ontario public school board’s decision to ban distribution of Gideon Bibles to its young students has unleashed a torrent of threatening calls and hateful emails directed at trustees.

Some messages to the Bluewater District School Board express racist sentiment and question trustees’ patriotism.

“When are you ‘politically correct’ idiots, with your heads buried in the sand, going to realize that every action you take to destroy Canadian heritage ...?” one email began.

“Allowing newcomers to Canada the ability to walk all over our heritage has got to stop before they carry us into the realm of a warring nation like the one they often left behind,” another writer said.

The invective has unnerved some trustees as they prepare to formalize the ban on distribution of all noninstructional religious materials prompted by a parent’s complaint about the decades-old tradition of offering free Gideon Bibles to Grade 5 students.

Trustee Fran Morgan called the “onslaught” of messages “really disturbing,” and said it has made her uneasy about driving the 30 kilometres to board meetings at night by herself.

“I really do feel threatened by it,” Morgan said from Griersville, Ont. “It’s been very unpleasant.”