The Afghanistan Mission and the Liberal Party

 It's been quite a week for the Liberal Party.  It's also been quite a week for anyone who, like me, grows increasingly sick of Ignatief's weak, half-arsed "third way" leadership.

Now, like most Canadians I've never been particularly fond of Dion as the party leader, but Iggy's making me look back at Dion's brief days with nostalgia.  Thanks to Ignatief, the Liberals have come to be some of the Conservative Party's staunchest allies.

Oh, I know it doesn't look that way on paper.  At least, not with a cursory glance.  Pay attention, though, and you'll notice a pattern of Liberals being conspicuously absent from strategic votes - witness the way the vote for Bill C-300 went down (and that was their own bloody bill!) - making their efforts to battle Conservative policies highly disingenuous.  They're letting the CPC basically get their way with everything, from privatizing Crown corporations, to weakening environmental laws (even those related to offshore drilling, of all things), to killing important progressive legislation, and now their efforts even include extending the Afghanistan mission by a good three years.

Last week, I blogged about this last issue briefly, but I feel the need to return to the topic for a variety of reasons - one of which is the fact that even Warren Kinsella has come out against the Liberal handling of the Afghanistan issue:

You know, I was busy with last night’s gig (and a big shout out to my buddy BCL, who came by to take in the show) and feeling sorry for myself for my Man Cold©, so I didn’t get a chance to fully reflect on the following:
1.  The Prime Minister said last Fall that our combat mission in Afghanistan would end, and would be “a civilian humanitarian development mission after 2011.”
2.  The Liberal Party’s leader said this Spring that his party also favoured “a different role focusing on a humanitarian commitment” after 2011.
3. “Humanitarian.” They both used that word.
4.  After the Liberal leader abruptly changed his mind about all this “humanitarian” stuff, so did the Prime Minister.  Both of them now favour extending the war, and yet more combat roles for at least 1,000 troops.
5.  There’ll be no debate about any of this in Parliament, which is, you know, the Supreme Legislature of the People.  No one seems to give a shit about that.
6.  To drive in the final nail in democracy’s proverbial coffin, the Prime Minister emasculates his Minister of Defence, and sends out his press secretary to tell the rest of us that we’ll be at war for a few more years.  On political info-tainment shows.
7.  Got all that?  Whiplash-inducing reversals on all sides, open contempt for the legislature, cabinet ministers neutered in public, unelected hacks wielding the power of the executive.  Oh, and, more war.
8. More war.  Just like that, in the week where we are all supposed to be remembering why war is a bad thing.
9.  And political people actually wonder why both the Liberals and the Conservatives are dropping below 30 per cent in the polls, and why the NDP is moving up.  And they wonder why people are growing more and more cynical about democracy, and democratic institutions, and are angrily lashing out at politicians.
10.  Wonder no more.

For context, this is the same Warren Kinsella who's long been a Liberal party hack and even a high-ranking campaign coordinator.  Him coming out so strongly against a party's stated position is very rare.  So rare that I don't think it's ever actually happened before.

So, why would the Liberals stake out such a terrible position?

Basically, because Iggy, much like his "third way" liberalism, is stupid.  I strongly suspect Iggy was trying to stake out a position that would attract Red Tories of the CPC (the old guard who are supposedly non-crazy) away from Harper's neoconservativism and toward the Liberals.  Basically, they wanted to out-conservative - or at least pre-empt - Harper.  "Extend the mission with 400 troops?" they asked, scoffing, "Why, stop being such a girly man, Prime Minister!  You should have a full thousand!"

The problem with this plan is that it can't possibly work.  Harper's the one who made the announcement of the extension - trying to impress the less-than-30% of voters who actually like the idea by throwing a larger number out isn't good enough to attract them away from the CPC, because pro-War has long been the CPC's territory.  Harper basically has two choices at this point - he can say, "Nah, 400 will manage," at which point the pro-War crowd will continue licking Harper's feet and praising him for his wisdom, or else he can say "Sure, a thousand's even better," at which point he'll have conquered the idea as his own and the Liberals don't get any credit for it.  (Turns out, Harper actually said both, in the order I listed above.) 

 But by even making the suggestion in the first place, the Liberals can't speak out against the idea of the extension without coming across as a bunch of waffling wimps.

Which, of course, they are.

Which is why, of course, this is exactly what they did

“How many trainers? Where are they going to be? Are they going to be out of combat? How much is it going to cost? Why is it impossible for this government to give simple answers to clear questions that Canadians need to have answers to before they can approve any mission by this government,” Michael Ignatieff demanded.

These are meaningless and weak questions, and Ignatieff doesn't actually expect any answers - at this point it's just flailing.  Even NPD turncoat and third-way liberalism champion Rae admits that the Liberals can't do anything to really fight the CPC on this issue:

But, for now, they are hostages to Conservative policy, as Mr. Rae admitted. "We have done an unusual job for an official opposition and we are not -we are not in a position to negotiate a plan, we are not in a position to do anything...," he said after Question Period.

I've seen it speculated that the real issue here is the Liberal war chest.  Namely, that it's empty - if they were to go to election too soon, the party would implode from lack of funding.  So, they move politically rightward at every chance, hoping to eat away at CPC support, while biding for time to refill the war chests.  This hasn't been working, of course, because war chests get filled through strong leadership and brave ideological stances - something good leaders like Layton and Harper* have understood for some time.

Honestly, the state of the Liberal party, the poor leadership Iggy's giving them...  It really makes me miss Cretien.  Pepper-spray and all.

*Here I use the term "good" to mean "effective," not "kind" or "righteous" or the like.  Which should be obvious, since Harper's one of the few politicians in North America I'd unironically describe as evil.

The Afganistan Withdrawal Hornswoggle

For years now, we the public have been told that 2011 will be our last year of involvement in Afganistan.  As most are likely aware, this is no longer the case - Harper has announced that we'll be keeping 400 Canadian soldiers there to operate in a training capacity, and the Liberals countered his announcement with the suggestion that we should increase that number to an even thousand because...  well, because they're Liberals and the Liberal party is pretty shit right now.

Of course, this move surprises no one who's been paying attention.  Pogge pointed out, way back at the beginning of October, that the official line from both U.S. and Canadian governments weren't really meshing well with their own message:  namely that our planned withdrawal was putting the mission at jeopardy, that "it will be impossible to replace Canada's more than 1,000 combat troops without diminishing forces elsewhere in the country."  The reason this objection didn't make much sense is that our withdrawal was meant to occur at the same time as the planned drawdown of American troops in Afghanistan - which suggests that, in truth, the U.S. Government has little intention of actually reducing their forces.

The number of troops we're going to be keeping there during this farce of nation-building is yet to be determined - don't think for a second that the four hundred number Harper gave is in any way accurate, not with the Liberals giving him ample opportunity and excuse to boost that upwards considerably, nor with the concerted campaign to convince us that we really actually don't want to pull out anyway.  Our withdrawal may not even end up as a drawdown, at this rate.

Omar Khadr set to Plead

Omar Khadr, a young man who was taken prisoner in Afghanistan while fighting NATO forces alongside the Taliban in 2002. He was 15 at the time; he captured while wounded, probably tortured, interrogated at length, intimidated and threatened with many things including rape and murder, and held for years without access to a lawyer. He was eventually given not a trial, but a tribunal, and is currently in the midst of his second military tribunal to determine his guilt or innocence.

He's also a Canadian citizen, albeit one whose plight has been largely ignored by Canada's reigning governments.

Indeed, successive Canadian governments have refused to seek extradition or repatriation despite the fact that groups like Amnesty International urged doing so. In fact, not only did Canada fail him - as established by the Canadian Cabinet, the Federal Court of Canada, and then the Supreme Court of Canada, resptively - we've spent $1.3 million making sure that he stays in Guantanamo... Rather than fighting for his Charter Rights.

According to the buzz in the media, he's about to plead to a lesser charge. As a result, he'll serve eight years, and will likely be made to withhold any formal accusations of torture - much like what happened with John Walker Lindh's own plea bargain.

I'm not going to talk about this, though, because I'm sure there are plenty of news sites, and plenty of other blogs, where you can hear all about this stuff. Instead, I'm going to focus on a narrative I fear is about to grow through certain media sources - one which I find incredibly ugly, particularly given everything this young man has already been forced to endure.

There are certain groups who are doing their level best to make sure Khadr's repatriation won't happen. This includes one purported "expert on evil" by the name of Dr. Michael Welner:

In an exclusive interview, Dr. Michael Welner says Khadr is known to have expressed peace-loving intentions only to "those advancing his public image" from behind the razor wire at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Welner also discounts much-cited comments by some U.S. guards at Guantanamo that the Toronto native is a "good kid" and "salvageable" - calling them "shallow in their prognostic significance."

"When one leaps to the conclusion about Omar Khadr's future because he is friendly, one might recall that Osama bin Laden has always been described as gentle, likable and charming," New York-based Welner told Postmedia News.

"There is no record of (Khadr's) publicly repudiating al-Qaida, as civilized Muslims should, not even a letter composed for him by Dennis Edney," he added in a reference to one of Khadr's two Canadian lawyers. There is "no call . . . to radical Islamists to mature beyond their elemental intolerance."

Welner, 46, spoke as the Canadian government faces the prospect of soon receiving a call for Khadr to be transferred to a Canadian jail in the event he is convicted of war crimes charges he faces in a Guantanamo military commission.

This Doctor, and I use the term loosely, has created what he calls "the Depravity Scale," purportedly a "achieve a scientific-legal standardization of evil." I expect this Doctor, again a term I'm using loosely, will get a lot of face-time from certain news sources.

Let's be clear, though: The man's a quack. There's no such thing as a scientific measure of evil. The whole idea doesn't even make any sense.

Looking through the sources Welner used to build his scale reveals all of a single reference to an actual, academic journal (Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law). His scale never went through any sort of peer-review process, either - it was an editorial. This is exactly as scientific as measuring someone's skull to determine whether they're likely to commit murder. Or, to use a more modern example, diluting medicine to make it more effective.

And yet Dr. Welner is trying to use this system he invented whole-cloth from his imagination to make Khadr's situation even more miserable.

This poor man has spent a third of his life in prison, terribly mistreated, denied a fair and open trial, and now is likely to spend yet another eight years behind bars. But this still isn't enough Dr. Welner.

For shame, Dr. Welner. For shame.

Alward and Voting Reform

Yesterday, our new Premier David Alward unveiled his cabinet accompanied by some very strong words on the New Brunswick economy. Or perhaps they just seemed strong to me; it's pretty standard for a new government to remark in a slightly-optimistic way on the great challenges that lay ahead and how it will require solidarity with the voting public to meet them and blah blah blah. Still, when you use the word "despair" in your speech? I dunno, that doesn't strike me as a terribly good sign, even if it's as part of a sentence not asking people to fall into it.

Still, reading about his cabinet team and the overwhelming majority government they'll be heading up brings to mind the sad state of affairs found with our electoral process, which has been getting a lot of attention in the press lately.

In 2006, Bernard Lord claimed he was going to initiate a referendum on voter reform as a result of the 2005 report by the Commission on Legislative Democracy. He promised to do this once he was elected, Scout's honour. I have my doubts as to whether he would have gone through with it or if it would have become part of the PC government's traditionally high number of broken promises,* but it's all academic because the fact remains he wasn't elected. Instead, we received a Liberal majority with a minority of votes.

This last election was even worse, with 76% of the seats going to the PC party, while only receiving 49% of the votes. Of course, nothing will ever quite match the hilarity of 1987's election, where the Liberals managed to turn 60% of the popular vote into 100% of the seats in the Legislature. That was really something.

And yet, it still wasn't enough to get New Brunswickers to agitate for a change to the system.

Credit where it's due - I had no idea that Lord had promised any such referendum until it was pointed out to me recently. It still surprises me... And even if it was an empty promise, that's more than I would have expected from either of our big two.

I wish that Alward would follow in Lord's footsteps and call for a Referendum on the Commission's recommendations.** I'm not going to be holding my breath, though. While the system as it stands is pretty fundamentally broken, it's broken in a way that works for both the Grits and the Tories. They've both been bitten by the system, but it's also benefited them greatly in turn. Fundamentally, neither party likes having to compromise - governing from common ground, making deals with other parties to form and enact legislation, these things are much harder than just holding out until you get the majority (which you'll do eventually, you just have to be patient). Then you can get all the stuff you want pushed through without much problem.

What's the answer? Well, amazingly, the papers I've been seeing lately have been helping - a number of editorials have been calling for Proportional Representation. But that's not enough. I tend to think that, absent a sudden NDP/Green welling of support in New Brunswick (two parties that support PR and the Commission's recommendations), Elsie Hambrook is correct in that it really needs a champion.

I'd be ecstatic if it turned out to be the current Tory government, or even elements within it, that became that champion. It would prove most of my thoughts about them wrong. Like I said, though... I'm not holding my breath.

If you feel like I do, you might want to consider joining the Facebook group New Brunswickers for Proportional Representation.  Not that Facebook groups count for much, but at least it's somewhere to start.

* = Not that the Liberals are much better. About the only major party in New Brunswick that's never broken its promises is the NDP, by virtue of never having won more than a single seat at a time. Ugh.


** = For those interested, Elsie Hambrook wrote what those recommendations were:

In the mixed-member proportional representation that was recommended for New Brunswick by the Commission on Legislative Democracy in 2005, about 35 MLAs would be elected as per usual, from ridings, and 20 regional seats would be filled from a list of candidates presented by parties, according to each party's share of the vote. Voters would cast two ballots, to elect a local MLA and to choose a party.

Tea Party rumblings in Canada

According to a recent poll, Canada may be seeing the first glimpse of a home-grown tea party.  Nothing official, of course, but the sentiment is there.  (Perhaps we'd call it the Red Rose Tea Party?  Pity.)

Of course, the above article is flawed in that it just lumps up distaste with government on all sides of the political divide and calls it "Tea Party-like," which is a poor descriptor.  The Tea Party in the United States is about a particular kind of distaste with government.  It's the sort of distaste that advocates for government getting out of health care (except for Medicare, of course, because that doesn't count for some reason.)  They're the sort of people whose distaste in government leads them to call for ever-lower taxes, and the dismantling of public transportation programs paid in part by tax dollars, but then yell, whine, and kvetch when there aren't enough buses to get them all to one of their rallies.  The sort that wants to privatize everything because government can't do anything right, except maybe kill brown-skinned people overseas and keep those gays from getting married.

However, by the data presented in the article, a significant portion of those in Canada fed up with "government and elites" are of the conservative bent, which suggests that crazy ol' Stevie isn't crazy or reactionary enough for them.  I do not consider this a good thing for reasons that should be obvious.

Just in case it isn't, though, let me present a case study of the sort of mentality the typical Tea Partier has.

Here's an example where an essential service is neglected out of greed.  Really, it's hard to get more essential than firefighting, but the people in Obion County didn't feel like setting something up for themselves - likely because of the costs involved in doing so.  The nearby city of South Fulton, in what I can only imagine was a fit of charity, offered to provide fire department coverage for Obion County.  As this was out of city limits, this was not something they could force on them; furthermore, it was not something they could simply do for free, because this sort of thing costs money.

The simplest solution is the socialized one - roll the fee into property taxes and ensure everyone's taken care of.  Obion County decided to make it an opt-in system - if a homeowner wanted the Fire Department to service his or her property, then that homeowner would pay the nominal fee of $75 a year.

You may have heard of this story already, as it's made a lot of distance over the blogging parts of the internet.  Anyway, the end result is that a guy named Cranick decided not to pay, his house caught fire, and when he called the Fire Department to come save it, they refused.  They eventually did come out, but only to save his neighbour's house when the fire spread.  Even when they were there, though, they still didn't help the guy out because he hadn't paid and by the time they got there it was too late for him to change his mind.

It's easy, for someone like me who lives in a country with universal access to health care, to get all morally indignant at the firefighters.  The U.S. doesn't have our health care system, though (because SOCIALISM!), and firefighters' work insurance coverage south of the border tends to be laser-precise.  There's a good chance that if they'd tried to help the guy, and one of them got injured, they'd be footing the bill themselves because their insurance simply doesn't cover them fighting fires outside of their jurisdiction.  That's outside of potentially losing there jobs due to disobeying orders from their superiors who are worried about the free rider problem inherent in the situation.

And it's not like Cranick couldn't have paid.  This wasn't some poor subsistence farmer scraping to get buy.  The home that burnt down is a 34-acre farm with three houses on it.  It's a beef cattle farm, and he likely still owns a second farm in Kentucky.  If he'd just applied a third of his USDA subsidy from last year to pay for this service fee, he'd still have his house.

He didn't, because

[quote]"I thought they'd come out and put it out, even if you hadn't paid your $75, but I was wrong," said Gene Cranick.[/quote]

The guy tried to game the system (a system he probably had a hand in setting up, by voting not to have a county fire department) and he lost.  And that's the Tea Party mentality for you, in a nutshell.

A mentality that's simply unsustainable for a culture such as ours - one that decries the taxes needed to ensure the health of our most cherished institutions, yet refuses to give up those institutions.  One that looks for loopholes that benefits oneself at the expense of one's neighbours, all the while bragging about bootstraps and free markets, and screaming about vague, barely-concealed racist fears of "the other."

A mentality that, sadly, we may be seeing the first glimpses of in our own Great White North. 

The irony here is that, despite the contempt in which I hold the Tea Party and likeminded individuals...  I still think they should be able to get make their voice heard democratically through proportionate representation.  I'll just do my best to shame them at every opportunity if a Canadian Tea Party ever does form.

In Which I Lament the State of New Brunswick Politics

The results of the NB election were not too surprising for most, but I'll admit they weren't what I expected.  I really thought the People's Alliance would act as a bigger spoiler for the PCs than they turned out to be - really, they were pretty much a non-factor in almost every riding.  In the end, the Tories took 76% of the seats with only 48% of the vote...

Hooray for the FPTP system! [/sarcasm.]

Really, we badly need voting reform in this province, and this country.  That the NDP should get ten percent of the vote and end up with no seats - a clear indication that a good portion of the populace want them as representatives in the Legislature - is shameful.  Unfortunately, it's only the third parties who ever talk about any sort of voting reform...  With good reason, since voting reform (i.e., greater democracy) only ever harms the power base of entrenched political interests.

If we had a more proportional representation system, "coalition" wouldn't be a naughty, scary word - it would simply be the way things are done.  Indeed, parliamentary systems evolved specifically to accommodate them.  Government should be a matter of finding compromise and common ground, instead of a contest between two parties winner-takes-all.  Governance shouldn't be a game that people are trying to win, it should be a matter of finding the best way to represent a the will and best interests of the populace.

Instead, our FPTP system encourages a game of musical chairs.  The Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives have very, very similar policies in many regards.  The Libs got spanked this election in large part because of their attempted sale of NB Power...  Putting the Tories in charge.  But the Tories tried to sell off NB Power themselves back in the 90's, so it's not like they make a sterling alternative on that issue.

It's very easy to get discouraged.  Speaking out in favour of reform for a system that's been designed to make it tremendously difficult to reform sometimes feels like tilting at windmills...  It requires people to vote against the two traditional parties in favour of an alternative - and since the bar of entry for third parties is so high, it requires them to do so in great numbers.

Still, one cannot give up.  Mere voting is not the end-all, be-all of democratic participation.  The responsible citizen must educate, agitate, and participate whenever the opportunity presents itself.  Change is a messy, unwieldy thing, which makes it that much more important.

Killing Civilians for Sport

I had a hard time deciding the topic for today's post... Part of me really wanted to talk about the Conservatives' muzzling of federal scientists, since that's a Canadian thing and fairly recent. But I'm still pretty damn angry about the news out of Afghanistan, even if it's almost a week since the story broke, and I think it's important enough to override more local stuff. Not the least of which is because a certain perspective becomes apparent as you read the various reports on the events and the order in which they happened, one that I haven't seen much comment on.

From the Guardian article on the event:

Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret "kill team" that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.

Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians.

So, more war crimes in Afghanistan, this time of as blatant a nature as you can get. I mean, this is the sort of thing you'd expect to find in a bad movie - one that would get a public outcry in the U.S. for unfairly depicting U.S. Soldiers. But here it is, and it happened in the really real world.

Of course, if you've even glanced at the story, you probably know all this. What you might not realize is something that reveals itself only by really thinking about the implications of some of the reported events:

The killings came to light in May after the army began investigating a brutal assault on a soldier who told superiors that members of his unit were smoking hashish. The Army Times reported that members of the unit regularly smoked the drug on duty and sometimes stole it from civilians.

The soldier, who was straight out of basic training and has not been named, said he witnessed the smoking of hashish and drinking of smuggled alcohol but initially did not report it out of loyalty to his comrades. But when he returned from an assignment at an army headquarters and discovered soldiers using the shipping container in which he was billeted to smoke hashish he reported it.

Basically, what happened was the self-described "kill squad" decided to smoke hashish in the wrong place - a recruit who was otherwise willing to look the other way if they smoked anywhere else wasn't willing to put his own ass on the line because they were using the container he was responsible for as their smoke house. So, he told on them, they found out, and then they beat him up.

Then, as revenge, he told his superiors about their war crimes.

This suggests two things: 1. He knew about the war crimes already, much like he knew about the drug use before they got him involved in it. 2. He considered their drug use in his container worse than murdering civilians, since otherwise he would have reported them in a different order, and much sooner than he did.

Think about that for a second. Of course, this should come as no surprise; according to a survey of U.S. troops in Iraq, almost half of all army soldiers (and more than half of Marines) have said they would cover up war crimes for their fellow soldiers. Moreover, if the statistics in that survey hold up for Afghanistan (and I see no reason they wouldn't), then going by the numbers there are almost ten thousand war criminals stationed there, as one in ten have admitted to committing abuses against civilians.

I'd be very interested to see how coalition forces rate against these statistics. I suspect it would be very revealing, but I've yet to see a proper survey performed.

Ultimately, all this adds up to the mission in Afghanistan being a failure - and it's likely the door for success has long passed. No "surge" strategy will work here (for that matter, the surge strategy didn't really work in Iraq, but that's a whole 'nother topic). If the coalition is even still trying to win hearts and minds, they're failing miserably - and it's because of events like this. There's even a good chance that the Army was warned after the first murder and chose to ignore the warning, though I don't know if we'll ever know for sure whether that's true.

Can anyone state the official goal of the war in Afghanistan, quoted from an official in a position of responsibility, stated for public consumption? The last thing I remember hearing is about how it's for the well-being of Afghans - particularly Afghan women - because if the coalition in general departs, and the U.S. in specific, then blood will run in the streets.

That these claims can be made when the Afghans don't want us there, when actual Afghan women's organizations want us all out because we're making things worse, not better... That these claims can be made while our side sends out murder squads both official (Task Force 373) and unofficial (this Stryker brigade)... Well. Hypocrisy ain't just for the Greeks, you know. Sooner or later, we're going to have to face the possibility that, as much as any conflict can have good guys and bad guys, we may just be on the side of the bad.

Ironically, once upon a time, I was a supporter of the war in Afghanistan. I'm not sure exactly when I changed my mind on the subject, but I'm sure it was related to something like this.

Signs, Signs, Everywhere There's Signs

Stevie's Tories have strewn Canada (or at least certain parts of it) with "Economic Action Plan 2010" signs, and are sparing no expense to ensure that each and every one of the 8,500 signs are carefully tracked... On a weekly basis, no less.

You may have seen one of these signs. They look exactly like the image to the right.

Every single week, eighteen government departments have to submit paperwork (by noon each Monday) on the sign status throughout Canada:

The signage database, at the request of the PCO, includes the total number of projects that require an “Economic Action Plan” sign, the number of signs already installed, the number of signs remaining to be installed and the number of signs ordered.

They're not tracking how many jobs their plan has created - but the signs? Oh, those they track. Why, if I weren't so sure Stevie were such an upstanding guy, I'd suspect that he probably were more interested in looking like he were doing something than actually doing it.

Wait, sorry. Did I say upstanding guy? I meant asshat. Stevie's a tremendous asshat.

Now, here's the thing. In a recession, makework programs are not an inherently bad thing - there's better things to spend the money on than a PR campaign (infrastructure is a no-brainer, and these days investing in green technology would be a pretty good idea), but figuring out ways to get money into the citizens' wallets in order to boost confidence and help people ride out the economic downturn is the general idea. However, you still want to make sure the money's being well-spent... And one would imagine, given how much Stevie's PMO crows about "fiscal responsibility," this would go double for the Tories.

We have no idea how much the 3000 pages of documentation the tracking program has cost taxpayers, because the Tories are staying quiet on that note. We do have an idea how much the signs themselves cost:

For the smallest one-foot by three-foot sign, the cost was $86. Larger 2x6 signs cost $204, while 4x12 signs cost $663.

Wanna know the absolute kicker? The part that makes this all so incredibly shameful? The signs aren't even made in Canada. The $86 (plus delivery and installation) goes to a company based out of Tacoma, Washington. Stevie's spending all this money to line an American company's pockets. Which, I shouldn't have to tell you, completely defeats the purpose of a recession-based makework program.

I think I've finally realized something that I kind of always knew, but never really fully digested: Stevie hates Canada. I mean, really, what other explanation is there?

Narrative Control

It's looking more and more likely that an election is on the horizon for us residents of Soviet Canuckistan. Iggy's trying to use the long-gun registry to create an election issue to campaign on (hoping to eradicate NDP support in doing so), while Layton's desperately trying to avoid stepping on any of the landmines being laid before him - and irritating his base in doing so. Meanwhile, Harper's been starting to create a coalition boogieman to campaign against. "You losers better gimme a majority this time or else you'll be sorry!" is his basic refrain.

And of course, the census scandal continues to broil in the background, as more and more groups keep adding their voices to the chorus of protest over the Convervatives' move against a long-standing Canadian institution.

I'm really not sure how things are going to go. I don't think anyone has much of an idea; an election this fall (not likely) or spring (much more likely) is a real gamble for everyone involved.

What I do know is that the Harper government has been pretty impressive at destroying a number of illusions about Canada. We Canadians used to like to think of ourselves as progressive, compassionate and practical. Even good, though we'd make the claim in quiet tones, blushing from embarrassment. This is clearly not the case; Harper's managed to frame the public narrative to the point that "immigrant" has become a dirty word in much of our public discourse. Where once we lauded our institutions of higher learning, an anti-intellectual sentiment has been growing louder. The CBC has always been tragically underfunded, but there was a time when the idea of getting rid of it would have provoked angry snarling even from Tories.

Go to the CBC website and look at any politics-related news article, and look at the user comments. You'll find some of the vilest stuff this side of Stormfront. Those are fellow Canadians' voices.

I'm not going to pretend that Harper created any of this. These ugly sentiments have always been there, but he's been able to frame enough of the debate that suddenly they've become that much more acceptable to espouse. Sure, rural Quebec (to use an example) has always had some pretty ignorant, offensive attitudes toward minorities, but it wasn't until recently that a group like the ADQ could actively campaign on "screw the minorities (especially the browns)." Me, I remember how loudly the NB Greens were decried when their leadership was revealed as being a bunch of bigots - it's something it took them years to live down.

Meanwhile, we've got a government that's doing its level best to prevent us from learning about the way prisoners have been treated by our "allies" in Afganistan, and the public largely doesn't care - notice how there haven't really been any developments there in over a month. The new head of Amnesty International is strongly criticizing our government for eroding our human rights (e.g., Omar Khadr, the de-funding of rights groups, the mass arrests at the G20 protests, etc.), and the story basically went by without a blip. You know, I'm no fan of Mulroney, but I really can't see him silencing a Veterans' advocate for saying politically inconvenient things. Certainly, I couldn't imagine Mulroney getting away with it... But Harper's managed.

It's depressing. Harper said at the outset that he was going to change the nature of Canadian politics forever; I don't know about how enduring it will prove to be, but it's certainly true that by legitimizing certain often-repugnant perspectives and controlling the public narrative to such a degree, Harper's definitely changed Canadian politics for the time being. (This actually is part of the reason I find the Census thing so baffling - given how tightly Stevie tries to control his message, how careful he tends to be, how could he make such an obvious blunder?)

Yet, for all he's "accomplished," Harper must be terribly frustrated. Twice now Canadians have refused him a majority, and it doesn't seem likely that they'll change their minds on that issue anytime soon - no matter what kind of coalition boogieman he invokes. He's basically already made all the gains he feasibly can; there aren't really any more voters he can court without promising things that will lose him some of his current base. Not that he needs a whole lot of help in that regard, as the Wild Rose party in Alberta can attest to.

So, what am I saying in my own rambling way? To be entirely frank, I'm not sure, but I think I can sum it up as follows: I'm aghast at the state of things in my country, and in a bit of horrified awe at the damage that a single government has accomplished in two short terms. I'm also hopeful that we've seen it at its worst, and in a way I'm looking forward to the next election since, at the very least, it will mean we'll be able to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

The Importance of Wikileaks

There's a book titled "Claim of Privilege" by Barry Siegel. Not too hard to find. Here's the Publishers Weekly write-up, as quoted on the Amazon dot com:

In 1948, three civilian engineers died in the crash of an air force B-29 bomber that was testing a missile guidance system; in their widows' lawsuit, the Supreme Court upheld the air force's refusal to divulge accident reports that it claimed held military secrets. But when the declassified reports surfaced decades later, the only sensitive information in them involved the chronic tendency of B-29 engines to catch fire, egregious lapses in maintenance and safety procedures, and gross pilot error. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Siegel (Shades of Gray) ably recounts the case, a scandal and cover-up with grave constitutional implications. The 1953 Supreme Court decision gave the executive branch sweeping authority to conceal information under national security claims without judicial review, a precedent confirmed when the Court refused to reopen the case in 2003. (The author notes the influence of Cold War anxieties and the 9/11 attacks in these rulings.) Siegel insists on decorating the story with often extraneous human-interest profiles of everyone involved. But his is an engrossing exposition of the facts and legal issues in the case, which produced a disturbing legacy of government secrecy and misconduct still very much alive. (June)

This is just one example of gross mismanagement of justice in the name of "national security." There are many others, both before and since, and it wouldn't take very long to drudge up a few. Governments want the people over which they rule to trust and support them; whether they're a democracy or a totalitarian regime, this remains true. This is why it's so important for societies to do exactly the opposite - question at every turn, demand transparency and accountability, and make sure the things they do in your name are things with which you agree.

The media (or at least those portions of the media which are stuck suckling at the U.S. Government's tit, which is most of them) would have you believe that the latest batch of documents released by Wikileaks - which, I'd agree, was released in a careless manner - did nothing but put people in danger. "There is nothing new to be found in these documents," goes the refrain, "anyone who's been paying attention already knew all this stuff."

There's some truth to this statement, though it makes one wonder why most of this was classified in the first place.

It's certainly true that it's been a poorly-kept secret at best that Coalition forces have been utilizing teams of assassins to target high-profile insurgent leaders; this is something that's been reported on before, though usually with a certain level of deniability on the part of Government spokespersons. But there are certain details that have emerged as a result of the leak that are rather eye-opening. As Prattap Chatterjee reports:

"Find, fix, finish, and follow-up" is the way the Pentagon describes the mission of secret military teams in Afghanistan which have been given a mandate to pursue alleged members of the Taliban or al-Qaeda wherever they may be found. Some call these “manhunting” operations and the units assigned to them “capture/kill” teams.

Whatever terminology you choose, the details of dozens of their specific operations -- and how they regularly went badly wrong -- have been revealed for the first time in the mass of secret U.S. military and intelligence documents published by the website Wikileaksin July to a storm of news coverage and official protest. Representing a form of U.S. covert warfare now on the rise, these teams regularly make more enemies than friends and undermine any goodwill created by U.S. reconstruction projects.

...

In more than 100 incident reports in the Wikileaks files, Task Force 373 is described as leading numerous “capture/kill” efforts, notably in Khost, Paktika, and Nangarhar provinces, all bordering the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of northern Pakistan. Some reportedly resulted in successful captures, while others led to the death of local police officers or even small children, causing angry villagers to protest and attack U.S.-led military forces.

The core information used here is from the diarydig website that catalogues and analyzes the Wikileaks documents. Very interesting/disturbing is the way that local leaders of reconstruction projects are forced to apologize to communities for the actions of these sorts of teams - the aid workers we put there are distrusted by the populace because they're seen as part of the same group. And really, why wouldn't they be? If my country was being occupied and my countrymen being killed on such a regular basis, I split hairs like that, either.

In fact, it gets worse than this. If you look through the data, there's only a single case where Task Force 373 successfully assassinated their target; every other incident involves friendly fire, killing afgan police, or a civilian massacre. That's one successful mission out of a hundred for a task force that's illegal by international law in the first place.

This isn't helping.

"We have an important job to do there," various Coalition governments assure us - my own government included. We do? What is it? We're not saving any lives, our very presence in Afganistan is causing far more harm than we could possible prevent... We're not fighting for equal rights for women, despite our claims to the contrary and terrible articles found in Time magazine; our presence there is actively making things worse because we tend to prop up and protect the very people who do these terrible things (despite our claims to the contrary). Initially, the coalition went in to dismantle the Taliban and get bin Laden. Well, okay. The first part's done, the second part can't be done anymore, at least not in Afganistan.

Now, what?

Supposedly, we're still there in an effort to rebuild Afganistan after the tremendous damage we've inflicted there.

So, what is it? Revenge? How many lives must end, how much blood must be spilt, before the West in general, and the U.S. in specific, has had its revenge on that part of the world for 9/11? It was nine years and over a million deaths ago.

Just how many Afgan and Iraq lives is a single U.S. life worth? Or, to put it more selfishly, how many Coalition soldiers' lives have to be wasted before we can admit that we're not helping, there's little point to staying, and we should just leave? Any chance we likely had to complete the mission (assuming the mission statements ever given in Afganistan actually had anything to do with truth) is probably gone.

So, why are we still there?

It's a damn good question, in my mind. And it's the sort of question that makes Wikileaks so important in this day and age, because as the media becomes more profit-driven, as cutbacks limit the media's ability to get at the unvarnished truth (if they were ever able to do so), the importance of finding an alternative for the public grows.

How'd They Vote?

Since it's Wednesday but I don't really feel like writing up a full-blown rant, I'll just share this website I've found useful.  It lists each MP in parliament and how they voted on various issues, plus other useful stuff.