The Sixth Estate

For those of you who don’t know, retired Harper Cabinet minister Stockwell Day now has two jobs: political “counseling” and journalism. Mr. Day has taken a position as occasional contributing columnist to CBC. This is presumably yet more evidence of the far-left agenda in our national media.

Today, Mr. Day has published a half-baked column filled with some extraordinary untruths. By untruths, I don’t just mean ideological statements that I don’t agree with. I just mean some incredibly obvious, basic, errors that someone with a course or two in economics really I don’t think would make. Which is where it gets kind of disturbing. We don’t have many retired Cabinet ministers kicking around, so it’s tough to generalize, but if this is the intellectual calibre of the people running our country, I don’t mind telling you, it’s a little bit worrying.

The main complaint from Day — and this is the hypocrite part — is that Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau both support fiscal policies which would keep their countries mired in budget deficits. Uh, hello? You know what party you were in, right? You remember the budgets you voted for? Or maybe you just slept through all those votes. The hypocrisy is extraordinary here. Our right-wing budget deficits are necessary responsible investments. Their left-wing budget deficits are unsustainable giveaways. I agree with Day that budget deficits are a problem. I’m just not sure he agrees with himself.

But, as I say, my concern is not with political grandstanding or ideology. It’s with things like this:

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The government attempted to do an end-run around the current contempt scandal in several ways, one of which was manipulating the Commons agenda to make sure the budget vote comes up first. (That failed) One of the sillier methods was the announcement of a supposedly new Open Government Initiative by Treasury Board president Stockwell Day. By “Open Government,” though, he doesn’t actually mean “open.” Or “government.”

But the best feature of the site has to be its “Government of Canada Open Data License Agreement for Unrestricted Use of Canada’s Data.” I know that Web click-wrap agreements are things you never read. I almost never do. But with a name like that, I just couldn’t help it. Why would you need a long license in order to have “unrestricted” access to data? Would you be surprised to know that there are actually all kinds of restrictions?

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The alternative, sadly, is that only those people living in Conservative ridings are most eligible for protection from hate crimes.

Stockwell Day, in (related) news, has a blog of sorts. Recently he advanced the bizarre claim that a Christian cabinet minister in Pakistan was assassinated by terrorists because being Christian is a capital crime in that country is a capital crime. It isn’t, it would be rather strange for a Christian to become a government minister if it was, and although the man’s death is very sad, BigCityLib rightly castigated Day for his slipperiness with the truth. But then I noticed something else. In Canada, Day wrote, the Ministry of Public Safety gives out security funding to community centres and churches that fear “hate-motivated crimes or vandalism.” (Quite a range of crime, then.)

After five years of Conservative government, you probably won’t be surprised by the contents of this table:

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