The Sixth Estate

I’m happy to report some good news in my latest update to the Sixth Estate Pork Barrel, which tracks government spending by riding across the country using the quarterly Proactive Disclosure reports theoretically issued by every Department (some departments haven’t bothered to meet the schedule this fall).

Since the last update, I’ve removed Aboriginal Affairs spending. I’ve also removed the Ottawa ridings. The reason is because there are such a large number of Aboriginal reserves in Western rural areas, and such a large number of government-funded NGOs and quasi-NGOs in the Ottawa region. These funding areas are important, accounting for billions of dollars a year, but they both bias the results in misleading ways: every government has a massive Indian Affairs budget and most of that goes to Conservative ridings because that’s where a lot of Aboriginal people are, so a Conservative government would look more unfair on my Pork Barrel ranking, and a (hypothetical) NDP government would look much fairer, in both cases purely because of a single funding envelope. It also saves me a lot of time, since there are thousands of entries on the Aboriginal Affairs disclosure list and nobody’s paying me to process them.

The result is that, among non-Aboriginal spending, actually the trend is surprising and interesting. It seems that in every region of Canada, funding was relatively equally distributed during the second quarter after the election. In fact, in no region (Western Canada, Ontario, Quebec, Maritimes) did Conservative ridings receive more funding than Opposition ridings, on average. The Liberals do well in the following charts because they tend to control the downtown cores, and the downtown cores are full of NGOs soaking up grant money:

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I’ve finally discovered why National Post “columnist” Lawrence Solomon is such an avid climate change denialist: he’s also and more important, a morally stunted bigot. That’s the only conclusion that can reasonably be drawn from his inspiring Christams column, “Godless Societies are Unfit for Survival.”

It’s not what you might think at first. According to Solomon, any society that believes in a God — any god or gods, it doesn’t particularly matter — is a superior society. Any society that doesn’t, is an inferior one: either an evil murderous one like North Korea (incidentally, not an atheist country), or a “non-progressing” one (his concept), like the African Pygmies.

I can’t decide whether Solomon doesn’t actually believe in any gods, and just thinks it’s a useful lie that elites like himself should perpetrate in order to maintain social order, on whether he really  is so incredibly, unbelievably, criminally stupid that he thinks religious beliefs have value just because they’re religious.

As a matter of fact, most of the world’s major religions have at some point engaged in vicious and bloody struggles to eradicate the other ones. There are still Christians, Jews, and Muslims who cling to the belief that their God will help them exterminate their rivals and cleanse their holy lands, who will shortly thereafter subject those enemies to an eternal punishment in hell. I need hardly point out that there is something seriously morally questionable about believing that one of these faiths has it right, let alone (as Solomon claims to believe) that all of them do.

One of the most surreal medical institutions in our country is surely the College of Homeopaths of Ontario. This agency was set up by the provincial government in 2007 to accomplish a task roughly as useful to the future of humanity as the new Ether Studies Institute which Dalton McGuinty no doubt hopes to set up next, probably at York University. The College of Homeopaths has as its absurd goal the formalization and professionalization of a form of medicine which most sensible people realize isn’t real to begin with: homeopathy.

Homeopathy is a branch of medicine which advances the following claims. First, diseases are a result of distortions in the body’s invisible energy field, not viruses, or bacteria, or genetic mutations. Second, you can cure a disease by drinking a poison that causes the same symptoms as the disease — for instance, ground-up duck liver cures the flu. Third and finally, when you dilute these poisons in water, they get stronger — and the thinner they get, the stronger they get. As I’ve said before, this is like deciding that because your tea is too weak, you’re going to pour in a gallon of water.

Not just a gallon, though. To make a homeopathic preparation, you take one part toxin (duck liver, arsenic, caffeine, etc.), mix it with ten parts water, shake it up and down ten times, and repeat. This process is done anywhere from several dozen times to several thousand times (and each gets designated by a “X,” for instance, a 200X medicine). They needn’t bother. Once you dilute one part in 10 more than twenty-four times, there’s statistically very little chance there’s a single atom of a presence left. That’s not just basic chemistry; it’s basic math. Not a problem, homeopaths reply: water has quantum memory. What this means, and why it makes the thinned-down “medicine” ever stronger, even they cannot say.

Homeopathy doesn’t work. If it did work, it would be a Nobel Prize-worthy overturning of most of what we know about chemistry and physics, in addition to plain old common sense. So naturally, in Ontario, they’re creating a government-sponsored professional council to oversee it.

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One of the most pervasive myths of the modern age is that democracy is something that requires very little effort. Our democracy and our freedoms will survive whether we are politically active or not, the sages of the economic order assure us — in fact, if we don’t really feel like it, we need not even bother with the minimal level of participation implied by voting. Human beings naturally want freedom and democracy. We will always overcome the worst among us, though we will rarely have to break a sweat doing so. Indeed, the most important thing is personal fulfillment. Society will go on, as it always has.

This myth is powerful. Some of the country’s most high-profile political commentators have openly argued over the past year that politics is unimportant, that Canadians shouldn’t vote, and even, in one extreme case, that they probably shouldn’t be allowed to vote. These are serious arguments in the papers today. I am being selective, but I am not being deceptive. There are columnists arguing that we should not have democracy in this country, and there are editors agreeing that this is a perspective worth sharing with their readership.

To say that the Harper regime is spearheading this democratic crisis is to miss the point. They are simply the opportunistic filth which have lied, defrauded, and cheated their way to the top of the heap. Barring major political and social change, if it hadn’t been Harper’s Conservatives, it would probably have been some other political force.

They say you get the government you deserve, not necessarily the one you vote for. This is very true. In Canada, as in many other Western countries, political power is now held by generations who have been raised in peace and prosperity, and who have come to believe that democracy is something that comes easily and cheaply, something that is simply the natural state of affairs, something which will go on without us while we concern ourselves with styles and gadgets and entertainment. Hence we need not worry about a right ignored here, a law broken there, an illegal secret police unit here, an election fraud scheme there.

This is actually precisely the opposite of the truth. Democracies are rare, fleeting miracles which require constant attention from all their members. Among other animals with complex societies, there is nothing which could be plausibly described as an analogue to democracy. Instead, almost without exception, they form societies in which a few large dominant individuals lord it over the rest. Your own body works this way, too: with the exception of the elite neurons, you consist of trillions of cells who are expected to live only for the good of the collective, and die for the good of the collective — immediately, obediently, and on demand, through a process called apoptosis — when they grow too old, too damaged, or too dangerous. Cells are independent life forms, the descendants of bacteria, turned selfless collectivists in a manner the Stalins and Kim Jong Ils of the world could only dream of.

This is how the vast majority of human societies operate, too, once they get beyond the level of small mobile bands where people are  free to come and go and so there is little sense of permanent hierarchy. Almost all states, in almost all of political history, have been rigidly totalitarian states in which leaders control the life and death of their subjects and defend that power in the most preposterous terms, usually by proclaiming themselves either the direct descendants of the gods, or in fact gods themselves.

Through great effort and sacrifice, some societies have developed in which these natural traditions are no longer followed. But the idea that this situation can persist as some sort of natural phenomenon is horribly misguided. Evolution doesn’t work that way. At least in the short term, it is much easier and more efficient to organize society as a rigidly authoritarian collective. Those are the sorts of societies which will tend to emerge if enough people decide that politics is something not worth worrying about. At that point, whether the dictatorship which emerges is a “communist” one or a “fascist” one or a “Conservative” one or a “Liberal” one really only depends on which particular group of cynical opportunists has the easiest route to power and, if there’s potential competition, which moves to seize it the soonest and most ruthlessly.

And if that’s what’s easier in the short term, than that’s what will happen, barring some constant effort by those of us capable of thinking about greater things. Evolution doesn’t care about the long term. The dodo bird is extinct because losing the power of flight seemed like a good idea when there were no predators around. Had dodos been intelligent, their Fraser Institutes and free-market politicians would have been confidently assuring their followers that there was no scientific basis for the idea that predators would ever reappear or that wings would ever be needed again, and eagerly promoting the benefits of their new wing-free, low-tax paradise.

This is, I will admit, not a hopeful message. The United States stands on the edge of a precipice. So does most of Europe, where Greek democracy was ended this fall and the fates of more countries may follow. Canadians have so far remained absurdly content about their position in an increasingly unstable world, so supremely overconfident that our export-based nation will thrive in a world where all the importers are going bankrupt that we have failed to notice the fifth column cheerfully tearing apart our social democracy from within, and now from above.

Do you think I’m exaggerating? In the past year or so, the Government of Canada has declared it will not enforce the Canada Health Act (the new health “deal”), that it is happy to let the provinces decide whether federal politicians should be democratically elected or simply appointed, Soviet Union-style (the Senate reform “debate”), that it does not have to follow the law (the election fraud case), that it is exempt from the Constitution (the Abdelrazik case), and that it is not answerable to the courts (the Wheat Board case). This government has outlawed strikes, blown the national budget buying the better part of $100 billion in shiny new toys for the military, and expanded spy agency and police powers to the point that they can now freely monitor what emails we send and what Internet sites we visit without even so much as a warrant.

And so far, they have only held a majority in Parliament for one year. We are at their mercy, and they have only just got started with us.

The Fraser Institute has published a new report denouncing a set of new financial disclosures which mutual funds may eventually be required to make to investors. From a consumer protection standpoint, that sounds like a good thing to me. As usual, the Fraser Institute hacks feel otherwise, and they share these feelings without bothering to mention who (if anyone) paid for this study.

In the past, we know, the Fraser Institute has taken money from tobacco companies to argue against tobacco regulations, money from mining companies to promote deregulation in that sector, and money from companies who do business with China to promote the benefits of Canadian trade with China. This is, in short, their modus operandi, only difficult to prove because it is usually carried out in secret. So, the first question might be: which organization might oppose consumer protection laws, and have the money to commission a study of those laws?

I think you can guess the answer as well as I, and so we are left to wonder whether they got their money’s worth from the report. I rather doubt it, because as you can infer from the Fraser Institute’s chief objection to the new regulations, it would seem there’s actually not much there to criticize:

For people who prefer to digest information on a portable communications device, Fund Facts could be delivered through that device. However, if information is formatted for letter-sized paper, it could be difficult to review on smaller devices.

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe this is the Fraser Institute’s first formulation of the Blackberry defence: financial disclosure doesn’t count if it can’t be read on a smartphone. Interestingly enough, the Fraser Institute doesn’t habitually disclose its financial sources in a format that can be read on any device. They don’t seem to find this linkage as ironic as I do.

The Fraser Institute, as usual, proposes as its solution to throw out with the bathwater not just the baby, but most of the household furniture as well: there should be, they say, no need to have any format requirements at all. The chief argument for formatting requirements is that it would require companies to present their information in a similar layout which could be easily read and compared by potential customers. This is unnecessary, says the Institute’s Neil Mohindra, because that sort of sophisticated market research would require consumers to “read several documents” — a task he feels most Canadians are simply not up to.

The range of off-the-cuff commentary on the new health “deal” from the professional media is predictably pathetic. There’s the usual variety of pro-government shills nodding sagely and agreeing that Canadian healthcare is expensive and unsustainable, even though as far as First World countries go we’re solidly middle-of-the-road, and spend only a fraction of what the Americans do on a per capita basis.

One extreme I really didn’t expect, though I can’t say it surprises me, is the position that Jim Flaherty did us a favour by dictating his terms rather than negotiating an actual agreement with the provinces. That link goes to Don Martin, who apparently feels that a dictatorship is far superior to a federal democracy because it involves much less boring diplomacy. As I say, this hardly surprises me: since at least the end of April, when they endorsed this government en masse, the majority of the corporate media has been alternating between calling for authoritarianism and weakly fretting about how many eggs will have to be broken to make the new Canadian omelette.

Update: In the “maybe they’re just stupid” department, the Globe & Mail throws its hat into the ring by suggesting that we could develop an “efficient” system and drop our wait times down to German or Dutch levels if only we made physicians work overtime and handle “minor” questions over the phone. This statement cannot possibly have been made by anybody who actually personally knows a practicing physician. In any case, the reason Germany and the Netherlands have less problems getting access to doctors is because they have 1.5 times as many doctors per capita as we do. As I have repeatedly stated, and will keep on stating, you can’t make resources more efficient if they don’t exist in the first place.

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The only reason the preposterous announcement that Santa’s sleigh will be receiving an armed escort by CF-18 fighters doesn’t win the Flack Award this week is because the same announcement has been made for several years now. Why does Santa need a military escort through Canadian airspace? Is the government worried he’ll veer off course and deliver the best presents to a Liberal child? Are they perhaps concerned about Muslim terrorists lurking in the barren lands with a surface-to-air missile launcher?

And of course, there’s the $30 billion question: are the CF-18s really enough to keep Santa safe, or will he only truly be safe once we get our new F-35s?

But that is not new. No, the most unnecessarily excited shill this week was surely Greg Rogers of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, whose boss is minister Bernard Valcourt. On Monday, Rogers announced breathlessly that

Boats are not normally made to be sunk, but manufacturing a vessel to do just that has propelled 70-year-old A.F. Theriault & Son Ltd. from traditional boat building into cutting edge innovation, and helping to train navies around the world in the process.

For those who don’t speak Propagandese or Newspeak, I’ll parse that into English for you: ACOA is subsidizing the Theriault shipyard to manufacture target ships which will be shot at by the navy for training purposes. I’ll bet no one has thought of that before! In an alternative version of the press release, Rogers also makes the following painfully unsuccessful attempt at sounding clever and cutesy:

All in all, it’s just another reason to believe this is one longstanding company that will continue to sail the waters of success for years to come.

Unlike the company’s boats, which will be sunk in short order.

You may or may not have heard of the Communications Security Establishment, Canada’s most secretive and (for most of its history) non-legal spy agency. You also may or may not have missed the following rather Orwellian regulation:

His Excellency… hereby transfers to the Communications Security Establishment, effective at 00:00:02 on November 16, 2011, the control and supervision of those portions of the federal public administration in the Department of National Defence known as the Communications Security Establishment and the Communications Security Establishment Internal Services Unit.

What that little piece of bureaucrat-speak means is that CSE, whose primary function is to monitor telephone, Internet, and other communications traffic and pull out intelligence-worthy morsels for its masters, no longer answers to civil servants inside the Department of National Defence. Instead, it is now an indepedent agency working directly for the Defence Minister, the Dishon. Peter MacKay. So the man who thinks search-and-rescue helicopters are actually his personal taxi service now has the opportunity to use our country’s most technologically advanced spy agency as his own personal surveillance service.

Here’s the Orwellian part. You may have noticed, as I did and as Lux Ex Umbra has, the odd fact that MacKay seized control of the CSE at precisely two seconds past midnight. That’s because MacKay wants to run CSE without having to follow the relevant employment law, the Public Service Employment Act. To get around the rule of law, the government also passed the following second regulation:

1. Subsection 132(1) of the Public Service Employment Act applies to the Communications Security Establishment.

2. These Regulations come into force at 00:00:01 on November 16, 2011.

3. These Regulations cease to have effect at 00:00:03 on November 16, 2011.

Interestingly, these regulations were signed into force on November 15, but not published in the Canada Gazette until December. So by the time you read about them taking effect, the inclusion regulation had expired and the transfer regulation was already illegal again.

I offer this parody of a post, which is no way intended to be taken seriously (kids, arson is illegal) in the spirit of the inane juvenile babbling now being offered up by overpaid buffoons like Lorne Gunter, among many, many others, who are no doubt absolutely 100% correct that signing into a climate change agreement that costs rich countries more than poor countries is simply too great a sacrifice to make, even if the alternative is extinction. They’re right. Dying is better than redistribution of wealth!

I am getting increasingly fed up with my neighbour. Both of us eat the same sort of food — I can see them cooking it at the barbecue. Both of us get it at the same place — the local grocery store. It’s the only one in town. If it wasn’t there, we’d both starve pretty quickly.

But you see, there’s a problem. I drive to the store once a week. My neighbour just had their car written off in a terrible accident. Now they say either I have to drive them, or they’re going to take the bus. The bus which I pay for out of my tax money. They don’t pay taxes, because they’re low-income and usually spend half the year completely unemployed, lazing about. So now not only am I paying for my groceries, but I’m paying for them to get theirs, too. This is obviously a moral travesty of the highest order.

So this afternoon, I hit upon a solution. I’m going to burn down the grocery store. That way, they won’t need to waste my tax money gallivanting about town on the bus.

Right? I mean, that is the standard he’s claiming to set, isn’t it? The reason burkhas and niqabs have to be banned from Canada isn’t because they make women too hot in the summer sun, or because they turn women evil, but because they represent a misogynist religious faith that preaches that God made men superior to women. That‘s what we think has no place in Canada, and not just some pieces of cloth. Oddly enough, it seems perfectly acceptable for a man who thinks God wants women to wear burkhas, and does everything in his power to make his wife or daughter wear one, can become a citizen. There’s no rule banning that.

So what exactly does our esteemed Minister of Immigration have to say in his own defence? You see, it occurs to me that Jason Kenney is a staunchly faithful Roman Catholic. According to his church, God didn’t make women and men equal, either. That’s why only men can be Popes. And bishops. And priests:

The masculine character of the hierarchical order which has structured the church since its beginning…seems attested to by scripture in an undeniable way… As a matter of fact, we see in the Acts of the Apostles and the epistles that the first [Christian] communities were always directed by men exercising the apostolic power.

I realize many Catholics don’t feel this way. But Kenney is a longtime conservative Catholic activist, and at least to my knowledge, he has never publicly denounced his church. He got his political start in San Francisco trying to ban pro-choice student groups from a university campus.

Now, lest I be accused of an anti-Popery polemic here, let me say that this has nothing to do with Catholicism specifically. There are plenty of Conservative MPs with backgrounds in conservative Protestant faiths in which women are not seen as fully equal, too, and every last one of them insists that the reason men get the positions of authority and women can’t is because God set up the church that way.

So here’s my demand. Jason Kenney, if you’re going to ban burkhas and niqabs, fine, go ahead. But before you do that, have the good sense to stand up and say, in public, that anyone who claims we should have any modicum of respect or loyalty or reverence for a God who teaches that men are superior to women is a disgraceful, backwards, misogynist s**t and that these primitive sexist beliefs have no place in the Dominion of Canada. And I want him to say that the Pope is counted in that number, because last time I checked, Benedict XVI was saying that ordaining women as priests was a “most serious crime,” ranking right up there with pedophilia.

Otherwise, Mr. Kenney, climb down off your moral high horse and stop pretending that you care one whit about liberating women from the oppression of religion. Because if the only difference between you and them is a disagreement over choices of headgear, frankly, that doesn’t impress me very much.