Paul Davis 'cannot trust' Stephen Harper, says rules for fisheries fund changed

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Paul Davis emerged from a meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper Friday evening saying the province will not be able to access a fisheries fund linked to the EU trade deal.

However, a statement from the Prime Minister's Office said the agreement was "never intended to be a blank cheque" something the federal government said earlier in the week.

The two have been meeting to discuss a disagreement between the provincial and federal governments on funds associated with the free trade deal with the European Union.

SCOTUS Rules Workers Don’t Need To Be Paid for All Their Time Working

Stories of the horrid conditions for workers in Amazon warehouses have been trickling out for years: The temperatures at the warehouses vary wildly, with some workers having to work in sub-zero conditions, others passing out from days where the temperature soared above 100 degrees, workers crying from not being able to keep up the brutal pace demanded, and then being threatened with termination for crying. And we can now add another indignity to the list, coming yesterday at the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in a 9-0 decision that it is legal for Amazon warehouse workers not to be paid for a portion of their workday.

John Tory's Toronto and the false promise of political unity

It has been a month and half since the election of John Tory as Mayor of Toronto, and a scant 12 days since Tory actually took over the office officially, and we have already witnessed a return to the nauseating displays of false recrimination and psudeo-differentiation that have marked Toronto's civic politics for a very long time and that are reflected by the seemingly unalterable sameness that grips the faces and forces that govern it.

Toronto's election, overall, resulted in nothing new. There were no ideological shifts of any interest and just one incumbent lost, only to be replaced by a very similar ideological "opponent." Where there were vacancies on City Council they were filled by birds-of-an-ideological feather, including the replacement of the feisty Adam Vaughan by the likely to be functionary Joe Cressy, who, despite having battled each other during the federal by-election, in which Vaughan defeated Cressy rather easily, are really not different ideologically in any meaningful sense at all.

Obama's New Triangulation Strategy Has Democrats On Edge

WASHINGTON -- Thursday night's close House vote to pass a government funding bill split both political parties into factions. But it's the division among Democrats that got the most attention Friday morning.

That's because, like few other times during President Barack Obama's tenure in office, disagreements over economic policy and legislative strategy have erupted not just between the White House and Congress but within Congress itself.

The disputes were prompted by a couple of policy riders added to the $1.1 trillion spending bill, the first of which guts a key part of financial regulatory reform, providing government insurance for the type of risky Wall Street trades at the heart of the 2008 meltdown. The second dramatically increases the amount of money individuals can give to national political parties for the purpose of retiring debt, hosting a convention and replenishing recount funds.

Untrained CIA Agents Were Just Making Up Torture Methods As They Went Along

On Tuesday morning, the Senate intelligence committee released an executive summary of its five-year investigation into the CIA's interrogation and detention program. (Read the executive summary here.)

Among the report's most striking revelations is that CIA interrogators were often untrained and in some instances made up torturous techniques as they went along.

The CIA was "unprepared" to begin the enhanced interrogation program, the Senate report concluded. The agency sent untrained, inexperienced people into the field to interrogate Abu Zubaydah, the first important Al Qaeda suspect the US captured.

F-35 saga soars to ineptitude, piled upon bungling

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is nothing if not cautious. But sometimes his catastrophe-avoidance reflex can backfire rather badly. Case in point? The F-35.

Does the Royal Canadian Air Force need serviceable fighter jets? Most Canadians would say so. The Conservative government shared that view once: A sole-sourced purchase of 65 new Lightning II stealth fighters, from U.S.-based Lockheed-Martin, formed a part of the Tory election platform in 2011. At the time, Conservatives argued that the “brave men and women in uniform,” deserved nothing but the best, that the F-35 fighter was indeed the best, and that the opposition were ninnies for questioning this.

The media, the message and the money

With Stephen Harper, it’s always about the marketing.

Those who prefer facts to his relentless manipulations of reality are, in the PM’s mind, members of the ‘reality community’. Like the “plankton people” — to borrow a phrase Russians sometimes use to describe the flotsam and jetsam of Russian society. The nobodies.

But why is the media — including some of the biggest players in the mainstream — enabling him? It’s particularly baffling when you remember that the Harper government wanted to steal material from news outlets in order to schlepp it out as political advertisements. Thankfully, CTV’s Don Martin zapped the Cons with the right word: What they were suggesting bordered on fascism.

PM has time for John Tory but not premier

TORONTO - Toronto's newly elected mayor says he had a private meeting with Stephen Harper on Thursday, the same day the premier of Ontario publicly complained she hasn't had a chance to meet with the prime minister in over a year.

John Tory — a former Ontario Conservative leader — said Friday he sat down with Harper for a brief meeting at Toronto's Pearson International Airport.

Hiding torture from us

In my October rabble column, I spoke about the horrible treatment of Abu Wa'el Dhiab, one of the Guantanamo detainees who was abusively force-fed by his American guards to dissuade him from continuing his two-year-long hunger strike. In that article, I wrote that Abu Wa'el Dhiab was another example of the collateral damage of the War on Terror, and indeed he was, as U.S. officials proved recently.

A few days ago, we learned in the news that Abu Wa'el Dhiab was released from Guantanamo after being detained there for over 12 years. He was never charged with any crime. Abu Wa'el was sent to Uruguay, a country that accepted him as a refugee, along with five other detainees. Apparently, the transfer deal was sitting for a year on the desk of Chuck Hegel, the embattled U.S. Defense Secretary, before it was finally approved.

It's Time to Nationalize the Tar Sands

It would be hard to invent a more destructive ritual of national self-punishment. Year after year, we hand oil companies gigantic tracts of pristine land. They skin them of entire ecosystems. They vacuum billions of dollars out of the country. Their oversized power, sunk into lobbying and litigation, upends government lawmaking.

And Canada's return? The exploitation of the tar sands provides just two per cent of our GDP. It has gutted manufacturing jobs and made a mockery of our emissions targets. And now that oil prices are crashing -- as resource commodities predictably do -- it is putting a vicious squeeze on government spending.