The Sixth Estate

Around the same time that Sun News claims Jack Layton was getting a nude massage in Toronto, Stephen Harper was campaigning for the privatization of healthcare and for Albertan sovereignty. Which one do you think is more important to today’s election campaign, according to Sun? Go on, guess.

That hissing sound you hear is the air coming out of the NDP bandwagon’s tires. Which is a shame. For one glorious week it looked as if a party might be able to deny Conservatives a majority. At this point the NDP’s rise has almost certainly stopped. Whether it plummets and results in vote-splitting (guaranteeing a majority) or whether this flops like the Chretien Face Ad is anyone’s guess, though I suspect the former. Whether or not it should have been revealed is beside the point: awarding a majority government to a party that is currently in contempt of Parliament and in court on charges of election fraud is infinitely worse than shunning an Opposition leader, even if every seedy detail about the Layton massage story really is absolutely true.

(more…)

Progressive Economics has compiled all federal and provincial budget data from 1980. This is what the Post and Mail ought to have done before they endorsed Harper on the grounds of his fiscal discipline and leadership qualities. Interestingly, when it comes to fiscal discipline, the political party that delivers the most balanced budgets is the NDP – at 50% of budgets for NDP governments.

The Conservatives come a respectable second place at just shy of 40%, and the Liberals finish last among surviving parties at around 27%.

As you’ve probably heard by now, the Globe & Mail has endorsed Stephen Harper as our next Prime Minister. Realistically, newspaper endorsements have pretty much nil effect on election campaigns nowadays — the only people who actually read the old papers anymore are probably more than politically aware enough to have made up their minds weeks ago. So the best response for people who find this endorsement pathetic is to get out and make a difference where it really counts. Not here, where, I suspect, a combination of selection bias and confirmation bias means that virtually no regular readers are contemplating voting Conservative anyways.

I won’t regale you with a long list of sins and misdeeds by the government. Not for partisan reasons — I have such a list, and if another party wins the election, I expect I will have another such list in a few years’ time. Instead I’m more interested in what the endorsement says about the media. This editorial is a sad indication of how fragile Canadian democracy has become. Not only does the Old & Male call for the creation of two-tier private healthcare, but it says that the next leader needs to be authoritarian (they call it “bullheaded”) in order to pull us out of the recession. So not only have they decided to oppose universal healthcare, but they’ve also decided that what we really need is a Benito Mussolini, someone who will make the trains run on time and never mind how many heads they crack open in the process. Well done, Globe & Mail. You have completed your transition from democratic institution to anti-democratic fifth columnist. Now kindly go off and die in a corner.

(more…)

Yesterday Postmedia sent an interesting article across the country, purporting to show that “Unions, Environmental Groups Have Layton’s Ear.” The gist of the article is that Jack Layton has been lobbied mostly by labour and green groups, while Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff have a higher percentage of contacts with industry. The actual article is a much more balanced piece than its title and its first two paragraphs suggest, which makes me wonder whether this was initially intended as a politically motivated anti-NDP hit piece. After all, the “lobbying records” which are breathlessly revealed here are a matter of public record. You can perform the same “analysis” yourself over at the Lobbying Commissioner’s website.

And so I did. But before I get to that, I want to point out something else first. There are, as Mark Twain memorably put it, “three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” I don’t rightly know the difference between a lie and a damned lie, but I know a statistic when I see one. And the presentation of even basic stats here in Postmedia’s analysis of NDP lobbying records is poor. I’ll take them apart first, and then I’ll rewrite the story the way it should have been written, pointing out some significant facts that Postmedia inexplicably overlooks, like the fact that Layton met with business reps as often as environmental reps and that Harper wasn’t interested in meeting healthcare groups, either.

(more…)

First of all, let me say that this is absolutely, unforgiveably, completely beyond the pale in a democracy. Sun News is to be heartily congratulated for coming forward with it. On the other hand, even in being honest they manage to be far, far too charitable to the Harper Conservatives.

The news, in case you haven’t seen it yet, is that Harper’s campaign team attempted to plant a story in the papers about how Michael Ignatieff was covertly working on the front lines in the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The centrepiece of the story was a picture supposedly of Ignatieff, in military kit, posing with some soldiers in front of a helicopter. But the picture isn’t real. Or rather, it is real, but it’s not Ignatieff. It’s someone who looked vaguely like Ignatieff, so they decided to pass it off to the press as part of this fabricated story. It didn’t work. Sun News went public with the fraud. But there are at least four huge problems so far, and frankly any one of them is frightening.

(more…)

There is a new think tank in Canada, and this one is specifically devoted to the privatization of healthcare. I can’t emphasize that enough: we have a new National Citizens Coalition. Unsurprisingly, this one is funded by big business and backed by the Conference Board of Canada, also known as Plagiarizers R Us. It will be called the Canadian Alliance for Sustainable Healthcare — a contrived name with the acronym CASH. The new group is billed as a vital new deep thinker at a time when healthcare costs are spiralling out of control. This is a nefarious myth. Yes, healthcare costs are rising faster than inflation. But they’re rising at the same rate in America, and the Americans already spend about twice as much on healthcare per person as we do. So sooner or later we will need to worry about it, but it’s not urgent yet. What is urgent is the shortage of doctors and the rising costs of drugs. Those we need leadership on.

Not from our government, though. During this election campaign, finance minister Jim Flaherty was booked making the following appalling statement about healthcare: “realistically there will be no serious discussion this year anyway… I’m not sure if any of the provincial politicians are going to raise this… At some point, somebody will take the lead on this.” Way to seize the initiative, Jimmy.

I don’t know yet what CASH will put forward as a solution to the healthcare problem, but from the acronym and from its wealthy backers, I can guess. In the meantime, the Conference Board is soliciting job applicants for the new think tank. New CASH economists will apparently be doing quantitative analysis of healthcare sustainability. Hmm. Sounds like the Fraser Institute. Maybe that Institute’s credibility is finally so tainted that the masters of Canada are going to try and trick us with a new brand name.

Following up on my renewed interest in the Canada Tory School of Energy and Environment, until recently the home of disgraced Conservative convict Bruce Carson and now the home of an oil sector consultant, I thought I’d take a look at its partner organization in Calgary, known as Carbon Management Canada.

Like the Tory School, Carbon Management was until recently chaired by Bruce Carson. Like the Tory School, its new management is even more dubious than its old management: Gordon Lambert, the sustainable development vice-president at Suncor, one of the dominant players in the tarsands. Given CMC’s mandate, this is obviously less offensive than the corporatist takeover of say, the sciences and humanities granting councils, which I’ve covered previously. Still, it does raise questions about the independence of what is theoretically a university-focused research and granting agency.

(more…)

It has been officially announced that the Tory-run farce of a climate change institute, the Canada School of Energy and Environment, has officially replaced the disgraced Tory insider and convicted fraudster Bruce Carson with someone even closer to the energy industry, Rick Hyndman. Around the same time, Carson’s chair at the head of another related government think tank, Carbon Management Canada, was filled by a Suncor executive named Gordon Lambert. It appears that those in charge of the institutes are taking advantage of our distraction with the election campaign to complete the oil industry’s takeover of the government clean energy program.

The Edmonton Journal, which reported the new announcement (CSEE’s website doesn’t show it yet), mentions only that Hyndman is a former deputy minister at Alberta Energy. That’s probably true. However, he just came off of 12 years as a policy analyst for the oil industry lobby group, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP). That’s six times as long, and a decade more recently, than his stint as a deputy minister. And his time at Alberta Energy, according to his bio, was focused on deregulation. So it’s definitely worth asking how exactly the University of Calgary decided that this guy was qualified to lead a school supposedly doing scientific research into clean energy, which Carson explicitly turned into a school doing government-industry policy coordination.

(more…)

Sun News (which I will not be launching, but which I will occasionally be reading), better known as The Network That Plagiarizes Wikipedia, has renewed its attack on CBC’s Vote Compass. Both Ezra Levant and Peter Worthington, who together probably form a single wit, claim to have found new evidence that the Compass is biased towards Liberal. As usual, the attacks betray a startlingly complete ignorance of how graph-based assessments like this actually work, which is typical of the contemporary media.

In this case, I have to wonder whether there’s more to it, of course. Sun TV News competes with CBC TV News. The Vote Compass mini-scandal was over weeks ago. For Sun to revive it now smacks of a cheap attack on a rival. But, just in case it’s not, here’s the real reason why the compass seems “biased” Liberal. And believe me, it’s not because it’s pro-Liberal. Oh, and by the way, Worthington also appears to be lying to bolster his case here. He claims that when you run through the form saying “Don’t Know” for everything, it comes up Green. I know, because that’s one of the first things I tried too. It doesn’t come up Green. It comes up blank, just as it should. Nice try, Peter.

(more…)

Presumably by coincidence, the National Post and the Globe & Mail have just published a pair of extraordinarily vapid columns on the same theme: in short, better a lying populist than an articulate but somewhat long-winded intellectual. In the Irrational Post, the article is by Kelly McParland. In the Grope & Flail, it’s by Adam Radwanski. In both cases, the message is the same response to Michael Ignatieff’s recent and entirely accurate description of how Parliamentary democracy operates in a minority situation: (a) Ignatieff was correct to point out that a minority government must operate with the support of one or more opposition parties, either in a formal coalition or an informal one; but (b) Ignatieff should not have said this because Canadians are too stupid to understand the subtlety of this point.

This is not journalism, this is sewage. Radwanski’s appalling pretzel logic illustrates my point for me:

(more…)