The Sixth Estate

After the election, I speculated that the Harper regime would introduce either no Senate elections or rigged Senate elections. I’m sad to say I was right, and that it appears it will be the latter: the provinces will be allowed to hold elections as they please, and the Prime Minister will then have the option — not the obligation — to appoint people who win the provincial elections.

Unfortunately, this pathetic attempt to sidestep necessary Constitutional reform is going to simply move us one more step along what the late Jim Travers called our road toward an Arctic banana republic. I realize Constitutional reform is difficult to the point of impossible — the usual explanation for why it’s impossible. But the idea that we can move ahead with these elections anyways is fundamentally wrongheaded and will turn our democracy into a joke. Here are four questions that have to be answered before Senate reform should be allowed to proceed. The Harper regime has failed to provide an answer to even one of these questions.

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On May 26, 2011, Quebec Conservative MP Christian Paradis began to assert himself in his new role as the federal Industry Minister in the most decisive way possible: he announced $4 million in funding for economic development in his own riding. It’s a relatively small announcement, and Community Futures grants are actually quite standard fare, not just in Québec. But still, the fact that Paradis’s first announcements as minister were money for his own riding is prompting me to announce a new project here at Sixth Estate: the Pork Barrel project, which can now be accessed on the top bar of this website.

I subscribe to the government’s RSS newsfeed, and I’m going to track new funding announcements over the next year to see where they go. I am, of course, prepared to be happily surprised if and when it turns out that funding is spread equitably around the country. But here’s what I expect to find: (more…)

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On May 11, I announced a new study of political and economic bias in the major papers of Canada — the Globe & Mail, National Post, Toronto Star, Montreal Gazette, and Vancouver Sun. Today I am presenting the first update on results. This provides an important perspective on which perspectives are given the most access to the least neutral section of the newspaper: its opinion page. The Media Bias Page can be found on the top bar of this website.

Some trends are holding more or less solid. For instance, conservative parties are getting more op-ed space than the Liberals and the NDP combined, and Her Majesty’s Official Opposition is getting about half the opinion space that the Liberals are. More significantly, the data clearly show that business voices — think tanks, trade associations, lobbyists, and corporate executives — predominate. This isn’t just about progressive voices being squeezed out — although that’s certainly true. The media really isn’t hearing from social conservatives, either. This is interesting because

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I’ve heard a lot of BS over the years from the right-wing think tanks which are springing up in the wake of the Fraser Institute, spinning gibberish to advance privatization and deregulation. But I have to say, I really never imagined it would come to this:

We are nowhere near to running out of natural resources. Human creativity and financial resources together will ensure a continued supply of all the resources we need. The exact form those resources will take cannot be known today, however. It relies on future innovations, which are, by their nature, unpredictable because they will be the fruit of our imagination and curiosity. That is why the human mind is the greatest natural resource of all.

That’s Brian Lee Crowley, of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, the think tank movement’s new branch plant in Ottawa. In this article he argues not only that we haven’t reached peak oil, which is an understandable sentiment, but that there is no need to have a resource conservation policy ever, because we will never run out of a valuable resource. If this isn’t a religious faith, I don’t know what is. Such irrational garbage has no place in the thinking of what claims to be an independent, non-partisan, evidence-based analysis. History is full of examples of cultures that did exactly that. And promptly perished.

Updated: Even worse, the MLI’s website discusses the “mistaken premise that fossil fuels are finite.” That’s right, folks. They’re infinite! Good Lord…

First of all, if you’re not aware of the current WikiLeaks revelations about Alberta’s electricity schemes, you can catch up by reading blogger David Climenhaga and alternative media The Tyee. I won’t go back over old ground, except to summarize: the Albertan government offered to build massive infrastructure to transfer excess electricity from the tarsands south to America on the cheap, to bypass the usual public consultations process so that the people would not realize they were being ripped off, and have the new lines run by a subsidiary of SNC Lavalin, Mohamed Gadhafi’s prison-building friends in Montreal.

Now, Climenhaga and The Tyee have already hit on the main theme of a government yet again irresponsibly betraying the democratic public interest for the benefit of their rich corporate friends, but there’s an angle here they’re missing. I’ve been thinking about writing on this for a while, as a warning, and unfortunately it seems that my assessment has been — as folks in the intelligence industry say — “OBE”: Overtaken by Events. Here’s the real lesson, just in case we hadn’t already learned it: there is no such thing as an energy superpower. You’ve probably heard this term before; it’s a major centrepiece of Canadian international and environmental policy these days. Forget it, folks. It doesn’t exist. Because here’s the thing:

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Canada’s two and a half national intelligence services — the RCMP, Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and Communications Security Establishment (CSE) — have a remarkable ability to float under the political radar in this country. Recently, however, a couple of stories have brought them temporarily back to the surface. First, it’s been suggested that CSIS and the RCMP may be recklessly sharing Canadians’ information with the Americans, despite the fact that this led to the abduction and torture of numerous Canadians several years ago. Second, some progressives are concerned about Harper’s creation of a new Cabinet committee that will handle national security and intelligence issues.

Now, the first doesn’t surprise me, and the second doesn’t concern me — that sort of political oversight happens anyways, folks. What does concern me is the creeping growth in the surveillance state which has happened since 2001, and has gone mostly unremarked in the media. The new stories suggest the process is continuing — and perhaps accelerating. That’s not surprising, either. Intelligence budgets have basically doubled over the past decade, the only government programs to get that sort of boost, and CSE is now powerful enough to get $800 million buildings complete with an ice rink and a Zamboni. But I’m going to talk about something else, two programs you may not have heard of: Section 16, and the Security Intelligence Review Committee.

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More WikiLeaks cables are now up, and I’ve nearly completed listing the Canadian cables now. The new selections feature reflections on English-speaking Conservative politicians resenting the promotion of their less numerous and supposedly less qualified Quebec colleagues, the embassy’s thoughts on free trade and deep integration, Canada’s plans to replace its “combat” force in Afghanistan with an exceptionally large “training” force (which apparently was being considered as early as 2009, when the government publicly was still saying the mission would be over by 2011), the Conservative government’s decision to abandon climate change reforms, and the documents which suggest that Canadian intelligence agencies are still routinely sharing data on Canadian citizens with their American counterparts, the sort of thing which should have stopped after the abduction and torture of Maher Arar and other citizens in 2002.

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