The Sixth Estate

Some new life was breathed into the investigation of election fraud in 2011 today when Elections Canada investigators filed court documents requesting that various phone companies reveal call records of complainants in more than 50 ridings across the country, which may be used to identify the source of a number of harassment and misdirection calls made during the election — some sending voters to the wrong polling location, others just pestering them, allegedly on behalf of the Liberal Party, which denies the calls.

This is getting more than a little ridiculous. The investigation lurches on, zombie-like, never really active but never really dying. One day, we’re told, there will be a final report. Maybe. Only it might not be public. It might or might not lead to prosecutions, or compliance agreements. If it does lead to a compliance agreement, Elections Canada may or may not decide to withhold that agreement from the public until after the next election, in order to shield the government from the consequences of its misdeeds — something it did last election, for instance, to protect the illegal overspending habits of the campaign of Government House Leader Peter Van Loan.

Here’s the part that’s truly silly, though: it’s November 2012. They’re filing for the call records now? They got some of these complaints almost 18 months ago now. The rest of the complaints filtered in during the spring. What the hell took so long? One of the things that emerged from the “Pierre Poutine” investigation in Guelph is that Elections Canada took so long to investigate that many critical records had already been deleted. And that investigation starting filing warrants a year ago now. It’s safe to say any investigation of a May 2011 election that starts searching for documents in November 2012 is going to have a bit of a rough time. Once again this country is stung by Elections Canada’s incompetence.

I’m putting up something I should have put up months ago, which for the moment I’ll call Project Poutine: a record of misdeeds by both the government and the opposition parties. Real misdeeds, I mean, not just a word spoken out of turn. It’s quite a length list, as you can see. Most of the items on the list aren’t actual links yet, because it’s going to take me some time to put everything together. And it will only grow. But somewhere there ought to be a record, I think, of the various shenanigans our political parties are allowed to get up to in what appears to be a basically lawless political sphere.

Unlike the Globe & Mail, which claims that science is legitimate but that it has no really significant implications (regarding climate change, for instance), the National Post claims that science isn’t really legitimate at all. They even have an annual Junk Science Week devoted to the promotion of fringe scientific hypotheses, like radiation hormesis and anti-global warming nonsense.

This week, though, they deepened their commitment to superstitious nonsense. They’ve given space to someone from a group called Real Clear Science, which from the looks of the article is anything but clear. Atheists are in the wrong, the article asserts, because you can’t really prove that God doesn’t exist. And therefore it’s very likely he does, and scientists should take that into account. It’s unreasonable for atheists to expect science to cast doubt on the existence of God.

Kind of beside the point, really, and the argument, as usual, is nonsense. It’s true that God’s existence can’t be disproven scientifically. There are lots of things that can’t be conclusively disproven scientifically. That doesn’t mean we should pay them much attention. Science can’t disprove the existence of fairies or unicorns, either. But I think you’d agree with me that we would look somewhat suspiciously at any scientist whose work was predicated on the assumption that such things probably existed, or even that there was a good chance they might exist.

Next thing I know, the Post will be telling me not to be so quick to rule out the existence of Bigfoot, or the Yeti.

Actually, I kid. That’s not the next thing the Post will tell me. That’s the last thing they told me, earlier this week, when they gave a rather undue amount of space to a geneticist who not only claims to have found conclusive genetic proof of Bigfoot’s existence but also says that it’s time to pass a law affirming that Bigfoot be given the full protection of human rights law and the full privileges of Native Americans.

Occasionally anonymous bloggers get criticized by Real Journalists™ who say that a story doesn’t have credibility unless there’s a recognizable name on the byline. I can’t help but notice that the Bigfoot Story was published anonymously, too, by “National Post Staff.” Whoever that is.

Last year, as you may recall, the Conservative Party was caught bombarding residents of a Montreal riding with a misleading “poll” implying that their Liberal MP, Irwin Cotler, was resigning and that there would shortly be a by-election. The Conservatives soon admitted their guilt, but preposterously claimed that any criticism of this campaign would constitute an attack on Constitutionally protected freedom of speech. Their surveyor, Campaign Research, publicly stated that they were a market research organization, a member of the Marketing Research Intelligence Association, and would certainly never be involved in anything untoward.

That’s where the two parallel tracks of “justice” got going. As it turns out, apparently there is no law against a phone campaign that makes false allegations about a sitting MP. It’s only illegal if you do it during an election, when false proclamations about candidacy are outlawed by the Canada Elections Act. Cotler submitted a complaint to the Speaker of the House of Commons, a hallowed institution now filled by a 33-year-old insurance salesman from the Prairies. Predictably, Harper’s tame Speaker was trotted out to issue a vague ruling that the phone campaign was “reprehensible” but fell outside of his mandate as Speaker. This is not surprising. After a year of majority government, so far the Speaker has yet to issue a ruling confirming that anything doesn’t fall outside his mandate as Speaker.

The second track was with respect to the surveyor, Campaign Research. The MRIA opened an investigation of its member’s misconduct, the final report of which is now published. It concludes:

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From the Venerable Kady:

A Conservative-backed campaign to haul Liberal leadership contender Justin Trudeau and now former natural resources critic David McGuinty before the natural resources committee to explain their headline-making comments on Albertan politicians…

Sixth Estate analysis once Hansard becomes available.

Update: Shame, shame, Postmedia. Unless more evidence is forthcoming, I consider the matter settled and the “innocent explanation” I referred to to have been provided. I’ll keep the story up anyways because it was a good-faith summary of a Postmedia report. I am deeply sorry to my readers and to the Conservative Party.

When the Harper government elected not to discipline ranking MPs Dean Del Mastro or Peter Penashue or Peter Van Loan when serious allegations about financial improprieties were raised with respect to their campaigns, critics yet again asked the question: “What does it take for a male Cabinet minister to be fired by Harper?” This was the wrong question. The real question was: “How common does electoral malfeasance have to be in the Conservative ranks, such that it isn’t seen as a termination-worthy offence?”

We’re getting closer to an answer to that question. This week Postmedia reported (h/t Dammit Janet) that a rather suspicious group of donations were gathered over a multi-year period in the Laurier-Sainte-Marie riding, in Montreal. That was Gilles Duceppe’s riding until last year; now it’s represented by the NDP.

Straight from the source:

The unexplained donations… fall mostly into three groups: a group of donations of $666.66, totalling $99,999; a group of donations of $733.33, dottalling $32,999.85; and a group of donations of $333.33, totalling $14,333.19.

Postmedia tried to contact all the donors… Some sayd they couldn’t recall making donations, and others declined to discuss thee issue. But 11 said they definitely did not make donations, and would like to know how their names ended up on the list.

I’d kind of like to know, too. I’m sure there’s an innocent explanation.

The more cynical readers of this blog will doubtless be unsurprised, but I think that the recent shambles of a “public consultation” embarked upon by Elections Canada is strong evidence that the organizations is conceding its investigation into the 2011 election robocalls,  does not intend ever to charge someone with vote suppression (least of all the individual behind “Pierre Poutine”), and instead plans to engage in a grand exercise in theatrical arm-waving in the hopes that public opinion in the agency’s demonstrably negligible capacity to regulate Canadian elections will be restored.

Elections Canada is working towards what will supposedly be a Grand Report on the issue of electrion fraud tabled in the spring. To that end, it’s engaging in public consultations with respect to a draft report proposing some tweaking to the electoral accountability laws. We’ll get to those tweaks momentarily.

The fact that Elections Canada seems to think we’ve progressed from the “investigation” phase of the robocalls file to the “lessons learned” stage, as symbolized in this new policy paper, tells us all we need to know about the agency’s investigation of the robocalls. There was an investigation — we know there was — but it was under-resourced and consequently slow and ineffectual. If Elections Canada expected this to end in formal charges being laid, we’d have to have another round of “lessons learned” reports, and policy proposals, to close off whatever schemes would have been identified over the course of the investigation. It’s unlikely Elections Canada plans to engage in two such rounds of consultations. This is it. Consequently, whoever did commit electoral fraud in 2011 has definitively gotten away with it. Unless they decide to come forward themselves, for some reason, which seems unlikely.

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I’ve been thinking through how to write this post for a while. I hope I don’t regret it. But recently a commenter forced the issue, and I had to censor her (his?) comment, and since I don’t like doing that without explanation, I suppose that’s what I’ll do today. Today is a three-part story about the Harper regime’s excessive attempts to punish responsible and harmless actions by normally law-abiding Canadians.

On that note, the first part of our story are the new reforms to the copyright law, contained in Bill C-11, also known as the Copyright Modernization Act. (For those who don’t want to pore over dry legalese, Lawyers’ Weekly has an accessible summary.) Among other things, Bill C-11 outlaws any attempt to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or circumvent a “technological protection measure” — itself defined as “any effective technology… [that] controls access to a work.” This means, for instance, that it is now illegal to make a copy of a DVD, even if it is a DVD you already own and you’re not planning on giving the copy to anyone else.

The bill is schizophrenic in its approach to copyright protection. On the one hand, it lays out a variety of new fair dealing rights, clarifying that Canadians usually can, for instance, make backup copies of copyrighted works that they already own. (But you can’t distribute them.) But the bill also sets out this new category of technological protection measures. If a work has a “technological protection measure” on it — if it’s encrypted, or has a digital lock, like an e-book, for instance — then you can be taken to court for copying it. Even, presumably, for personal purposes. For the record, all commercial DVDs are (very weakly) encrypted.

Which brings us to part 2 of my story: newspaper paywalls. Newspaper paywalls are becoming disturbingly commonplace, and will likely be universal among major papers a few years from now. We’ll take just a hypothetical example of how these newspaper paywalls work. We’ll call it by a hypothetical name: the Map and Parcel.

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As I pointed out in my last post, the fact that the Conservatives have admitted they will miss their budget projections next year isn’t news. There hasn’t been a single annual budget yet that actually reached the projected balance it was supposed to, and, as a result, the date at which the Conservatives promise we’ll be back into surplus territory has crept farther and farther back in time. Now it’s past the 2015 election. This is kind of surprising, since it was widely expected that the spin-happy Conservatives would make a great flourish out of balancing the budget before the next election. Maybe that’s still the plan, despite the published figures.

Anyhow, I thought it would be useful to look at this from a broader perspective, which is what I’ll do in the next couple of posts. Today we’ll talk about debt, as opposed to deficit. Debt is the overall amount the Canadian government owes from previous years; the deficit is just the difference between revenue and expenses in the current year. As you’ll see in a moment, Canada’s responsible majority government has been hard at work serving our best interest.

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Last week, the media delivered its resounding judgement on the Conservatives’ fall budget update. Jim Flaherty, they say, has unfortunately allowed the projections to slip. The deficit has grown. Canada may not balance its budget on time. Curiously, this fact does nothing to change the obvious cognitive dissonance now in play in the right-wing media. Conservative deficits are bad. But Liberal deficits would be even worse, because the Conservatives are going reluctantly into deficit, whereas the Liberals do so enthustiastically. CBC, also known as Conservative Biased Commentary, gave an online column to former Harber Cabinet minister Stockwell Day to deliver this message, along with some trumped-up nonsense about how “quantitative easing” means going into debt (no, it doesn’t).

Anyhow, it’s time for Sixth Estate’s budget commentary series. The theme as the same as the last time, and the time before that. The fact that Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has announced we’ll “miss” our budget balance projections yet again isn’t news, despite what you may have read in the news media. In fact, that’s what’s happened, every year, since the Conservatives came to power. When it comes to accurately predicting the state of the nation’s finances in future years, you can see from the following chart that Flaherty is almost unbelievably consistent in never quite delivering a performance as good as he’d promised:

What this chart shows are the Conservative surplus and deficit projections announced every year as part of the budget, with the last line, the light blue one, indicating this fall’s budget update. As you can see, the government invariably comes in slightly below where it claimed it would be. That’s precisely what happened this fall, so it’s pretty much par for the course.

That doesn’t mean the overall deficit or surplus hasn’t changed. It has. The Conservatives started out with a small surplus of several billion dollars per year. They changed that into a record-winning deficit of $50 billion per year. Canada has been clawing itself back out of the budget deficit hole ever since. Good thing we didn’t have a left-wing government in power. Imagine how big their deficit would be! Thank God for responsible Conservative money management.

What this has meant is that, ever since the Conservatives first got us back into deficit, the day at which they claim they’ll balance the budget has slipped progressively farther and farther into the future. In the 2009 budget, they promised we’d be back into the black in 2013. Last year, they said it would be more like 2014. This spring, they promised to balance the budget in 2015. This fall, they said it would be more like 2016.

I wonder what they’ll say next year.

Here’s a thought for would-be editors of a national paper of record: any time your headline editorial starts with the phrase “in spite of the evidence,” it’s probably a good time to reconsider what you’re writing. On what basis are you going to argue, then, if not evidence? Gut feelings? Dreams? Divine revelation?

Ever since the Margaret Wente scandal broke (if not before that), the Globe & Mail has certainly made an art form out of making an ass of itself. Friday’s editorial, however, took the cake. I almost hesitated to be that harsh on them. Unlike most of their rivals in the newspaper sphere, the Globe & Mail at least claims to be pro-science. But it isn’t. It isn’t even science literate. And that, I have to suspect, is why it published an editorial more becoming a third-rate free community weekly than a national “paper of record.”

Last week, a Stanford biologist named Gerald Crabtree published the first part of a series of papers which will argue that human intelligence peaked thousands of years ago and is now gradually declining. It’s the result, Crabtree says, of the accumulation of genetic defects on the X chromosome. Once communities began growing large and well-organized, especially but not solely because of the invention of agriculture, individual baseline intelligence started to become less important than other factors for survival in groups, combined with the fact that once we invented language we could pass on knowledge through education, rather than each of us needing to carry with us a genetically determined toolkit making each individual capable of, in essence, re-inventing the wheel.

It’s heady stuff, the sort of “reality TV is making humans dumber” stuff that’s guaranteed to get a lot of headlines (even though, you’ll note from the above, Crabtree is talking about genetic evolution resulting from group dynamics over thousands of years, not reality TV or any other modern-day ills). So naturally he got a lot of headlines. Even the Globe & Mail couldn’t pass the story up. And that’s where the trouble started.

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