The Sixth Estate

Or so I’m forced to conclude from this press release, in which new foreign affairs minister John Baird appears to express surprise and dismay at the “appointment” of North Korea to the presidency of the United Nations Conference on Disarmament. Baird says Canada will “immediately review” whether to withdraw in protest from the Conference. Now, the appointment of North Korea to the head of an anti-arms committee certainly is cartoonish. But there are several problems with the government’s openly deceitful “reaction” to this “news.”

The first, and most important, is that the chairmanship of the Conference rotates alphabetically. You don’t get appointed for any reason, other then that it’s your turn. Canada’s turn came a few cycles back of North Korea. The fact that Canada’s official protest was announced without mentioning the alphabetical selection process that caused it is a strong indication that Mr. Baird doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about. (more…)

I apologize for dropping off the face of the planet over the past week. I’ve been swamped with work on a research contract and, even for crazy left-wing loonies like myself, sometimes there really is work to do. However, I’m back now. To show you I haven’t been doing just nothing, I’m updating the Pork Barrel Index — the continuing tracking of government funding announcements by riding.

Unfortunately, on this score the Conservatives continue to disappoint. The percentage of government announcements going to Conservative ridings, according to News.gc.ca‘s RSS feeds, is now up to 73% since May 2, 2011. It gets even more fun, too. An impressive 99.5% of total dollars went to those Conservative ridings. The outlandish ratio respects the fact that several big funding announcements have gone to Conservative ridings, including the near-billion dollar subsidy given to Shell for its Quest carbon-capture facility in Alberta.

So far, for reasons which are a complete mystery to me, Kamloops MP Cathy McLeod is the big winner. Almost 9% of all government funding announcements have gone to her riding, though none of them were big-ticket items.

Here’s a strategy question for would-be journalists: given that the Mulroney government was pro-asbestos, should you attempt to cover the current asbestos controversy by pointing out that Conservatives have a history of supporting this cancer-causing industry, or by pointing out that one of the Mulroney ministers responsible was Jack Layton’s father, Robert?

If you’re Postmedia, you choose Option B, as can be seen in this rather silly attempt at a hatchet job. They even claim they summoned Layton for an interview to answer for “his father’s role a quarter-century ago as a Conservative minister promoting asbestos” and — horror! — he refused to speak to them about it.

Incidentally, Option A is also wrong. The correct answer is Option C: neither Harper nor Layton, nor Rae for that matter, should be held responsible for what Mulroney did or didn’t do in the 1980s. That’s because Layton is not his father, and Harper is not a Progressive Conservative.

While we’re on the subject, the Postmedia author of this waste of bandwidth is Randy Boswell. You’ll never guess what his father supported. (I don’t know either, by the way, nor do I care.)

Sometimes the right-wing columnists which populate our supposedly left-wing mainstream media get truly bizarre. Witness, for instance, today’s asinine free-marketeering in the Ottawa Citizen by William Watson, who offer the absurd and even pathetic market that even though EI programs successfully helped laid-off workers during the recession, we should get rid of them anyways to prevent lazy ne’er-do-wells from soaking up aid “during good times.”

Incidentally, it’s worth pointing out that Watson, who calls himself a “small government type,” sees absolutely no inconsistency from his casually contemptuous dismissal of the poor on the one hand, and his job on the other. He’s a professor at McGill University, where his salary is presumably paid for by the big government he claims to detest. I guess that’s just different.

The declaration by former Harper regime Cabinet minister Chuck Strahl that he agrees the government should list asbestos as a carcinogen is a welcome one, but it’s also a highly suspicious one. It’s public knowledge (if not widely disseminated public knowledge) that Strahl has been through the ringer on this. He was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in the run-up to the 2006 election. The doctors were wrong on only one of those three words, and he beat incredible odds to be with us today. The cancer, known as mesothelioma, was caused by years of asbestos exposure from when Strahl worked in the lumber industry.

So as happy as I am to see someone beat cancer, and as happy as I am to see someone support taking steps to restrict asbestos use, I’m troubled by Strahl’s announcement. This man was a Cabinet minister in the Harper regime for years — something, incidentally, that this article bizarrely makes absolutely no mention of. The Harper government has supported the criminally dangerous asbestos industry that whole time, ranging from barricading previous versions of the international hazardous chemicals agreement now being debated all the way to attempting to suppress a Health Canada report establishing that asbestos did, in fact, cause cancer. Where was Strahl back then? Sleeping?

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Last week, the National Post said that the journal Climatic Change was an important and valid source for information on the climate change “scare.” They said this because of literally 10% of the articles in that journal — specifically, an article suggesting Venice would suffer less from sea level rise than first thought.

It’s worth pointing out that the July issue of Climatic Change is now out and it is a special issue on climate change and sea level rise, the theme of which is that Florida is in for a rough ride.

You won’t read about this in the Post, though. As soon as they realized Climatic Change wasn’t saying what they wanted it to say, they moved on to find something that would, like the deceitful, cowardly, anti-scientific s@@ts that they really are.

Appallingly, all but CTV appears to have missed this week’s tabling of the annual report of the Information Commissioner, which makes for disturbing if characteristically dry reading. I’ll admit, I would have missed it myself but for the appearance of a fluff piece on the government newswire, claiming that the report highlighted “efforts to reverse declining trends in timeliness and disclosure across the access to information regime.” It sounded too light to be true, so I read the report myself.

It’s worth noting that when this news report speaks of “timely access” and “full disclosure,” what it actually means is illegal delays and withholding of information by the Government of Canada. Naturally there are no penalties for such interference in Access to Information requests, with the rare exception of cases where individuals’ behaviour is particularly outlandish and egregious, as was the case with a ministerial aide named Sebastien Togneri at Public Works last year. Here are some of the highlights of the report:

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“God give our land a Conservative majority…”

Every time I read the press’s lamentable suggestions that left-wing anarchists caused the Vancouver Riot this week (a talking point they loyally picked up from the Vancouver police), I’m reminded of the decidedly right-wing idiot behind me belting out his modified lyrics to O Canada at the last game I personally attended. None of the almost exclusively young, intoxicated, expensive jersey-wearing and sometimes soft drink-sipping white dudes in the photos look especially like anarchists to me, despite what the police say. Nor is it, as the loudmouthed brat at Five Feet of Fury seems to think, a pent-up reaction to Human Rights Commissions and hate crime laws.

Here’s why I know this. In 1994, Vancouver rioted after losing the Stanley Cup. Much like in 2011, store windows were smashed, crowds clashed with police, etc, etc. More cars were burned this time, mind you. But that event happened before anarchist Black Blocs were organized, before HRCs and hate crime laws became social conservatives’ favourite punching bags, before any of that. Maybe Vancouver hockey fans, when they get riled into a frenzy by government advertising, heavily intoxicated, and then corralled into massive, uncontrolled mobs by official design (the better to watch on officially provided big-screens), just don’t take much to get pushed over the edge.

Oh, and speaking of history, you know when there was also an expensive riot, which did burn cars? Montreal in 1993. You know, the year they won. Which just proves my point. Pile 100,000 drunk hockey fans into the downtown core of a major city and see what happens.

Unlike the political columnists now yammering on about an event they plainly don’t understand, the sports columnists probably remember that there was a lost Cup in 1994, too. Maybe the two groups should have a sit-down and fill in their mutual blind spots.

Apparently what the Conservatives meant by “small government” during this spring’s election was “government so small it can dictate terms of employment to people even when they are not government employees.”

It’s worth asking exactly what is conservative about this.

Normally, I’m all for Junk Science critiques. I even do them myself from time to time — when the Government of Canada sees fit to promote homeopathy, for instance. But the National Post‘s Junk Science week, sadly, is precisely the opposite. What they’re doing is promoting Junk Science this week, not criticizing it. Sadly, I was wrong when I thought my feud with that paper was limited to the odious work of Larry Solomon.

One of this week’s offenders — one among many — is Terence Corcoran’s pickup of a piece soon to be published in the journal Climatic Change suggesting that the city of Venice may be spared serious flooding as a result of climate change-induced increases in Adriatic Sea levels. This, he claims, is part of “a pattern of science backtracking over IPCC alarmism,” all part of the unraveling of the “global climate scare.” Now, I have a few questions for Terry about this rather silly position:

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