Harper minister ducks questions on plan to “authorize” water pollution

OTTAWA – Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s minister in charge of protecting Canada’s fisheries does not appear to have an explanation for suggesting that the country needs new rules to “authorize” more water pollution.

Several days after Postmedia News reported he had made this argument in support of new environmental legislation, that was expected to be adopted on Friday, Fisheries and Oceans Minister Keith Ashfield has not offered to explain his own remarks.

China blocks Bloomberg website after report on wealth of next president’s family

BEIJING, CHINA — China blocked access to Bloomberg’s website on the mainland after the business and financial news agency published a report Friday detailing the multimillion-dollar assets of relatives of the man set to become the country’s next president.

The report says that the extended family of Vice-President Xi Jinping holds interests that include investments in companies with total assets of $376 million, an 18 per cent indirect stake in a rare-earths company with $1.73 billion in assets and a $20 million holding in a tech company. The report cites public documents Bloomberg reporters compiled.

Mayor Rob Ford didn’t stop for open streetcar door, TTC union says

A confrontation between Rob Ford and a TTC driver occurred Wednesday because the mayor drove his vehicle past the open doors of a streetcar, the head of the transit workers’ union said Friday.

“My understanding is that Mayor Ford bypassed an open door and the operator then got off the streetcar – left his seat anyways – to advise the motorist, not knowing it was Mayor Ford, of the seriousness of the violation, as well was the concern for our passengers,” Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113 president Bob Kinnear told the Star.

Public servants defend right to wear ‘Stephen Harper hates me’ buttons

OTTAWA—They believe the prime minister hates their guts and they are fighting for the right to say something about it.

Blue buttons emblazoned with the words “Stephen Harper hates me” have landed some employees at the Canada Revenue Agency in hot water for wearing them to work.

The buttons were created by some grassroots members of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) — the largest of the unions representing federal employees — from the Atlantic region earlier this year as a way for workers to express their displeasure with looming cuts to public jobs and services.

Canada's Hard Turn Right

A new petro state has emerged in global affairs and its extreme political behavior has unsettled both Americans and Europeans alike.

For starters, the year-old regime has muzzled government scientists who are now accompanied by Soviet-like “minders” at public events.

It has branded environmentalists as “foreign radicals.”

Government whistleblower watchdog fails to deliver after five years

OTTAWA - Following the release of the fifth annual report by the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner, civil society groups are calling the federal Conservatives' 5-year-old whistleblower regime a failure and calling for major reforms to ensure protection of Canadian whistleblowers.

"After five years of bureaucratic charades, taxpayers have essentially nothing to show for more than 30 million dollars spent on the Integrity Commissioner's office and the associated Tribunal," said David Hutton, executive director of FAIR, the whistleblower charity. "Not a single wrongdoer has been sanctioned and not a single whistleblower has been protected. It is time for a root and branch reform of this law."

With Alberta's budget all but balanced, where's Ted Morton now that we don't need him?

Can it be less than two years since Ted Morton, then Alberta's steely-eyed finance minister and hard-right fiscal hawk, was poised to become premier himself?

Readers with long memories will recall how Morton had in January 2011 just stuck the knife into then-premier Ed Stelmach. Morton wanted a painfully instant balanced budget that Stelmach was too smart or too humane to accept. When he didn't get his way, he quit -- precipitating the crisis that led to Stelmach's resignation.

Oh how the winds of change were blowing then! Morton was The Man, the cock of the walk, the tight-fisted front-runner in the then-nascent Progressive Conservative leadership race. He was the self-described leftists' nightmare, an American-born “right-winger with a PhD” -- his thesis dissertation in "political economy" assailing the U.S. Supreme Court for its "confused understanding of the relationship between sexual equality and the family." He was the guy who as soon as he was in the top job would reunite the PCs and the Wildrose Party into a neo-Con monolith that would turn the screws on Alberta till the pips squeaked!

Canada's Mean Test: Myths behind neo-con madness

It's difficult to overstate the significance of the Quebec student strike (the longest in North American history) and resultant public backlash against the provincial government's Orwellian response.

Not that you'd know it. According to mainstream (predominantly) English media, Montreal is being held hostage by a handful of scruffy, possibly naked, hooky-playing slack-tivists who got distracted on the way to a door-crasher sale at the Apple store and decided to stop traffic while demanding their constitutional right to free lattes. Or something.

The negative stereotyping of those who resist (or are an inconvenience to) the current neo-conservative model doesn't begin and end with students, of course -- public servants are also a favourite target, what with their middle-class wages and secure-ish retirement. And let's not forget sick days!

It’s hard to be an energy superpower

The first thing we should all be honest enough to admit about Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s plans to transform Canada into an “energy superpower” is that Plan A, which is really all about Alberta bitumen, is perhaps just a bit more reckless and sinister than we might have imagined.

It’s true that Ottawa has been “getting the fundamentals right,” if you can forgive the cliché. If you can forget that he has to stand on the shoulders of his Liberal predecessors to do so, our Conservative prime minister can crow that the World Economic Forum has given Canada a blue ribbon for bank regulation. In any case, Prime Minister Harper can rightly boast that Canada’s tax rate on new business investment is the lowest of the G7 countries, as is Canada’s ratio of debt to gross domestic product.

Federal cutbacks threat to future generation

The word from the federal government is austerity, but in reality it is a case of creating a crisis and solving it by cutting public programs and services. It is an excellent opportunity for the libertarian Harper government to ditch previous public initiatives and scale back the size of government.

Stephen Harper's Conservative government is delivering budget changes by stealth. Little by little the funding is being cut - a program here, a program there. On the eve of Aboriginal Day the government silently cut the funding for the Cultural Connections for Aboriginal Youth program.