On abdications of duty

Shorter Gerry Ritz:

If unscrupulous businesses want to fleece Canadian suckers consumers, far be it from we Conservatives to stand in their way.

On continued control

I'd certainly be interested to see some evidence that Conservative MPs are doing anything more than dispensing party talking points. But while there may be some better examples available, the contents of Jason Warick's report this morning look to me to fall far short.

Let's go point by point...

- At last notice, Con MPs weren't allowed to present private members' bills which hadn't been vetted by Harper's staffers. And from the fact the Cons are publicly lining up behind Rob Clarke's bill to trash the Indian Act with nothing to replace it (as well as the fact that it fits with the Cons' explicit government legislation), it's a stretch to claim C-428 as a sign of rebellion.

- It's absolutely true that the Cons are trying to distance themselves from Kelly Block since her anti-refugee mailout started giving rise to protests. But if you can find an inch of daylight between the talking points that have been rightly protested by Block's constituents and the ones dispensed by Jason Kenney and others as the Cons' party-approved excuse for slashing refugee health care, you're a more creative thinker than I.

- And Warick's final example - that of Gerry Ritz - looks to me like a signal of business as usual rather than any noteworthy development. The XL Foods beef fiasco is nothing new for a minister who's presided over this type of health and safety disaster before. Yet Ritz continues to be a member of Harper's cabinet charged with overseeing Canada's food production - meaning that his actions and words are plainly those of Harper's government, not an example of an individual MP at odds with his boss.

(Though I'll grant that if Ritz wanted to make the case against his party's belief in industry self-regulation by secretly sabotaging the industry for which he's responsible, he could hardly have done better.)

Which means that Warick's list is quickly pared down to a brief outburst by anti-abortion MPs. But Harper has always allowed socons to have their occasional day in the spotlight as long as they keep up the trained-seal routine on other issues.

So no, we don't have much reason to think the Cons' Saskatchewan MPs are exercising any real independence. And we should be careful not to be too generous with the label - lest Harper manage to claim he isn't being unduly controlling based on an erroneous interpretation of what Con MPs are actually doing.

[Edit: fixed typo, added link.]

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- No, the aftershocks of an e. coli outbreak which has unfortunately given both Canadians and export markets reason for concern about the safety of some of our major food sources aren't about to end simply because the Cons are again pretending everything's fine. And the president of the union local representing XL Foods workers points out one of the major steps needed to ensure problems aren't allowed to fester due to managerial neglect:

Under the UFCW’s collective agreement, O’Halloran said, line workers can inform a supervisor only if they spot a safety issue, but the decision about whether to slow the line remains with management.

He said he wants the company to allow workers to go public with their food safety concerns if they are ignored by XL. It’s a demand he will reiterate at a press conference Wednesday alongside other labour leaders and Alberta New Democrat leader Brian Mason.

- Meanwhile, pogge and Pat Atkinson rightly call for accountability from the Cons - however certain it is that they'll offer nothing of the sort. Thomas Walkom connects the health issues caused by unsafe food to those arising from fast-tracked drugs. David Climenhaga worries about the destruction of the brand of Alberta beef. And Duncan Cameron fits the Cons' false claims about new inspectors into a broader theme as to the need for more facts in politics.

- But then, Lawrence Martin points out why our more cynical politicians seem to think that lying is a cost-free strategy:

Truth shaving of a serious kind has become so commonplace in politics today that it is expected. In the news business anything that is expected, that happens often, is of declining news value. And so the media over time has lost its sense of outrage when politicians wilfully distort or lie. The media don’t hold politicians to as a high as a standard as they used to. You’ll rarely, for example, see a front page headline saying “Cabinet Minister Caught Up In Baldfaced Lie.” Criticisms will usually come in the body of the story or on the inside pages. Political strategists realize the story will be one-day wonder, forgotten the next. No big deal.

In the case of the Harper government, numerous cases of willfull deceit have been documented by the press. Rarely a week goes by without some damning report, this week’s example being the government’s decision to close down water-monitoring stations in the north. Prior to this, we saw Conservative attacks slamming the New Democrats for favouring a carbon tax. They don’t. They favour a cap and trade system. Costs for cap and trade – a policy initially favoured by the Conservatives themselves – can get passed on to the consumer just as costs from the Conservatives’ regulatory measures to combat greenhouses gasses can be.

But as election results have shown, the Harper Conservatives, at least to date, haven’t paid much of a price for in-your-face duplicity. So why should they change their approach?

...

In trying to hold the government to account, it is usually the media that bears the burden. The media can either go along with the fall in standards or they can take a much stronger stance. Journalists have to find a way to respond that embarrasses offending politicians to a degree that makes them fear for their reputations. As of now the politicians pay no such price and, as can be seen in the presidential campaign, the downward spiral picks up speed.

- And indeed the Cons seem to be trying to outdo one another in how blatantly they mislead the Canadian public.

- Finally, Alex Himelfarb comments on the state of our democracy:

(G)rowing inequality makes it almost impossible to imagine ever formulating a shared sense of the good life. The very idea becomes a stretch given the profoundly different ways in which the super rich, the poor and the majority experience life. They breathe different air. Their kids go to different schools. They live in different neighbourhoods. Money always matters, but in an increasingly privatized world, it has never mattered more.

At the top, the extraordinary gains of a small global elite have given them an outsized capacity to shape the agenda and at the same time to secede from much of society. And even as extreme inequality undermines equality of opportunity, the myth of meritocracy emboldens many to believe that they are entitled to all they have. Down the economic scale, just as the very rich want to see taxes cut to hold on to what they have, so too do the majority want to withhold their money from a state they no longer trust. Even if recent events have shaken confidence in the promise of markets, they have not restored confidence in governments — and why should they? Look at the lost manufacturing jobs, tainted meat, deteriorating institutions and hollow politics. And, in a perfect self-fulfilling prophecy, taxes are cut, the state shrinks and becomes less trustworthy, the services it provides less relevant and increasingly shoddy, and the distrust grows and curdles into cynicism.

The result: a marketized politics of propaganda and pandering. It’s understandable then that, increasingly, those who want something better are looking outside of conventional politics: to their communities or global causes or to the streets. It was striking how many of the participants in the Quebec student protests found a new solidarity — and expressed a new sense of the common good — in their activism. Clearly some do care about our democracy, but many, especially young Canadians, have given up on the impoverished version offered up by our politics. That is both understandable and dangerous. The new activism and rebuilding of an independent civil society are essential but not enough.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Alex Himelfarb nicely summarizes the price of austerity:

Let me be clear that I share in the broad consensus that we must be fiscally prudent. But let’s pause on what fiscal prudence really means: It means spending wisely, reducing waste, collecting sufficient taxes to pay for the public goods and services we want, and keeping debt coming down, at least during reasonably good times.
...
Today’s austerity, however, is not primarily about fiscal prudence. If it were it wouldn’t be proceeding in tandem with large, unaffordable and unnecessary tax cuts for the most affluent among us. These tax cuts make deeper program cuts inevitable.

The persistent emphasis on low taxes and cuts to services and public goods looks more like ideology masquerading as fiscal common sense. In this light, austerity seems rather to be about cutting back the state and rolling out the free market agenda. Less public, more private; less collective, more individual. It is, in other words, the fulfillment of the neoliberal counter-revolution rather than an economic plan for the future.
...
I, for one, would propose that inequality, not austerity, be the defining issue for us now. Income inequality is growing fast in Canada and even the traditional deniers are coming on board. The gap is simply too big, the risks too high to ignore. Indeed, extreme inequality will continue to grow in an agenda dominated by austerity and tax cuts, an agenda that reduces our capacity for mutual aid and for collective solutions to our major challenges – our low productivity, climate change and environmental deterioration, and declining political participation.

Of course we ought to be fiscally prudent and that means asking of each cut and each expenditure, including every tax cut: will this help reduce inequality or will it make things worse?

Let’s make inequality in all of its manifestations – child poverty, the reemergence of elderly poverty, the squeeze on working Canadians and students, and the excessive incomes at the top – a national priority.

- Paul Waldie documents the results of the Cons' insistence on demolishing the single-desk Wheat Board with no consideration of the resulting consequences. And predictably, the outcome looks to be plenty of damage and confusion rather than any of the supposed benefits the Cons have been claiming.

- Meanwhile, the Cons are also working on making Canada's food supply less safe. And don't take my word for it: here's what their own spinners said in adding the jobs the Cons are now cutting:

The new investments being announced today will improve the Government's ability to prevent, detect and respond to future foodborne illness outbreaks. Among other improvements, the Government will:
-hire 166 new food safety staff with 70 focusing on ready-to-eat-meat facilities...

So if the hirings were an improvement to the "ability to prevent, detect and respond to future foodborne illness outbreaks", then surely the firings have to be the opposite. Right?

- Frances Woolley posts about the effect of moral hazards in allocating health care resources. But while the principle is worth discussing, I have to seriously question how much of a problem is demonstrated when the sole example of actual gratuitous consumption of health care comes from Homer Simpson.

- Finally, Linda McQuaig criticizes the Cons' preference for foreign capital over Canadian workers:

Ironically, the Harper government has complained forcefully about “foreign” interference from outside environmentalists protesting a proposed pipeline across the Rockies. But when it comes to foreign companies stripping Canadian workers of half their wages and then moving operations out of the country, the government hasn’t a negative word to say.

Harper is of course staunchly pro-capitalist, and has aggressively lowered corporate tax rates, while refusing to link lower taxes to investment or job creation.

But his anti-union stance, evident in disputes at Air Canada and the post office last summer, has been particularly provocative. He seems determined to turn Canada into an anti-union paradise — prompting the Ontario Federation of Labour to call for a mass rally at the Caterpillar plant in London this Saturday.

As the PM gears up for his coming battle against federal public sector unions, he will no doubt draw inspiration from Mitt Romney’s stirring words: “I like to be able to fire people who provide services.”

Too close to home

Yes, the threat of a slander suit probably had something to do with Gerry Ritz' desperate retreat after attacking the Canadian Wheat Board. But more important is the significance of Ritz' allegation based on what his own party has done: if one considers it theft to use quasi-public money for unapproved purposes and to promote political ends, then surely the Cons would qualify as a full-on criminal enterprise.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Erin compares the numbers behind the NDP and Sask Party platforms, with the one major difference being the windfall potash profits the Wall government wants to keep out of public hands.

- Bruce Johnstone highlights a few more of the harmful effects that figure to follow from the Cons' choice to scrap the Canadian Wheat Board:

But the legislation will do much more than destroy the world's last remaining "state trading enterprise" with single desk powers. It will do irreparable harm to Canada's reputation as the marketer of quality wheat and barley.

By dint of its marketing clout and the single desk, the Canadian Wheat Board can guarantee delivery of specific quantities and qualities of grain to customers in 70 countries where it does business. No private grain company, no matter how large, can do that.

It will damage, perhaps fatally, the network of branchlines that provides loading sites for producer cars and the shortline railways that operate on them. Those producer cars saved Prairie farmers an average of $1,200 per railcar, money that will now be flowing to the grain companies.

By removing the CWB's regulated access to grainhandling facilities, the Harper government has left farmers to the tender mercies of the grain companies and railways.

In the short-term, the elimination of the single desk will also cost Canadian taxpayers million of dollars a year. The legislation calls for the Port of Churchill to be subsidized to the tune of $5 million a year to support grain shipment for five years and another $4 million over three years for maintenance.

In fact, the cost of winding up the CWB could cost taxpayers many more millions - in severance to employees, legal costs, etc. All this to get rid of a profitable enterprise that wasn't costing taxpayers a nickel.

- Paul Dewar's proposal to bring municipalities to the table with the federal and provincial governments looks like an idea well worth discussing in its own right. But it makes for a particularly noteworthy contrast against a Con government which doesn't even want to engage with the provinces in the first place.

- Finally, Jordan Press discusses the need for citizenship education to encourage students to actually participate in political discussions rather than merely memorizing names and dates.

Saturday Afternoon Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- For those looking to paint foreign investment as a panacea for economic development, Paul Krugman offers up (via Kash Mansori) what should be a chilling correlation between capital imbalances and economic disaster in Europe. But of course, we know the actual response will merely be a declaration that the countries now suffering for buying into the corporatist mantra really just needed to go even further in that direction.

- The NDP is rightly focusing attention on the latest developments in Tony Clement's G8 scandal, as Clement looks to have influenced one of the mayors in the thick of the patronage into hiring a Clement acquaintance on request.

- Meanwhile, the Cons' claims not to have paid a ransom to kidnappers to free two diplomats in West Africa looks to have been entirely false. But have no fear: as far as Canadians are concerned, nothing happened which the Cons are prepared to discuss:

A spokesman for Mr. Harper’s office said on Friday that the government does not comment on leaked documents.

- Finally, Bruce Johnstone questions why the Cons are in such a hurry to demolish the Canadian Wheat Board:

Another huge issue is the fate of producer car loading sites - railroad sidings where farmers can load their own grain into railcars, bypassing the grain companies. From 700 sites 10 years ago, there are only 300 today, but they handle 12,000 railcars a year - four times as many as a decade ago. For farmers, those producer cars mean savings of about $1,200 per railcar.

Without the CWB handling producer car logistics for farmers, who will? The grain companies? The railways? Not on your life.

There are a host of issues that hinge on the single desk: the fate of the Port of Churchill and the Canadian International Grains Institute, to name two. One farm group said "the elimination of the single desk may well be the biggest change to agriculture on the Prairies in over 100 years."

So why is the federal government rushing into such a momentous change with its ideological blinkers on?

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Gerald Caplan laments the difficulty in trying to comment reasonably on the actions of a government whose attitude toward reason ranges from overt hostility to wilful blindness:

Stephen Harper has just declared that the greatest security threat to Canada is something he called “Islamicism.” I’ve seen no sensible dissection of this remarkable comment because no one can make sense of it. It goes without saying that vigilance against any potential terrorist attack is vital. Has some new peril now been discovered that no one else knows about? Are Canadians in imminent danger? Might we not be fretful about a nice homegrown Christian version of Norway’s notorious Anders Breivik as well as extremist Muslims? Why does our leader choose to feed into the bigotry of those who are determined to smear all Muslims as terrorists?

In terms of what really menaces Canadians, is “Islamicism” really scarier than global warming? What is it about these conservatives that make them care so little about their kids’ future? What about water scarcity, a looming crisis? Or the fragility of the global economic system? Youth unemployment? What about the bottomless need everywhere in Canada for new or repaired or upgraded infrastructure? Who’s going to protect us from exploding road rage on our gridlocked roads? What about glaring, growing inequality and our declining quality of life?

- Meanwhile, Don Martin points out the latest absurdity in the form of Stephen Harper's utter unwillingness to concede that Bob Dechert's close relationship with a Xinhua reporter can even be questioned:

It’s been a full week since news broke about affectionate emails from a Conservative MP to a Chinese state agency reporter.

Shrugged off by the Harper government as a “ridiculous” non-story, the ongoing revelations prove this is a legitimate story given the long legs by this government’s ridiculous non-reaction.
...
A probe would actually do Mr. Dechert a big favour. Until he gets the all-clear from a proper investigation, the mild-mannered Mr. Dechert will stand accused of having taken his oath of loyalty too casually and his foreign affairs job too literally.

- Lest there be any doubt: yes, inequality is bad for business. Austerity is bad for the economy. And still the Cons and their counterparts around the globe continue to fight for both.

- Finally, Bruce Johnstone contrasts the Cons' reluctant acceptance of the results of the Canadian Wheat Board's director elections with their new insistence that the votes and views of CWB members don't matter.

Conservative democracy at work

Shorter Gerry Ritz:

The only fair vote is one where I get to revise the results after the fact to reflect my preferred outcome.

The last stand

Glen McGregor breaks a bigger story than he seems to realize, as the Harper Cons are now quite explicitly declaring their intention to take a wrecking ball to the Canadian Wheat Board:

Anyone doubting the government’s commitment to shutting down the Canadian Wheat Board is instructed to take a look at this notice posted on the procurement site, MERX.

It announces the government intends to seek an auditor to check the books and “provide reasonable assurance of the total financial impact of the repeal of the Canadian Wheat Board Act and the dissolution or winding up of the CWB after the final pooling periods (expected to be July 31, 2012).”

The contract value is projected at $500,000 to $1 million and only pre-approved accountants are eligible to bid on the work.

After a contested plebiscite and the firing of the board’s president, Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz announced in May the government’s intention to shutter the single-desk marketing agency by August of next year.

Now, to correct where McGregor seems to have missed the significance of the Cons' new action: it isn't true that Ritz has ever been honest enough to declare that the Cons would "shutter" the Wheat Board.

Instead, the Cons have pretended that removal of single-desk authority wouldn't have any impact whatsoever on the Wheat Board's operations - or at least not one which would substantially affect its ability to market grain. And it's the Board's defenders who have pointed out that there's no realistic prospect of survival without either single-desk status, or regulated access to storage and handling facilities.

Now, without coming clean about their intentions, the Cons have let it slip that they're planning for the Wheat Board to be rubble by this time next year. And that leaves no room for doubt that anybody wanting the CWB to survive will need to take every opportunity this fall to force the Cons to change their mind.

[Edit: fixed wording.]

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Doug Saunders nicely describes how centrist brokerage parties across the developed world have undermined their own relevance by putting their efforts into a failed corporatist experiment:

(T)he parties of the centre-left, like the Liberals in Canada and Labour in Britain, attempted an experiment in the 1990s and 2000s that they hoped would bring both rising equality and rising prosperity: A largely free and unfettered market economy, combined with low government debt and big investments in social services. The idea was that the booming economy would finance a state-supported rise in equality. The experiment mostly failed: While life did improve for the poor in the West, it didn't change at all for the middle class, and often got worse, as they watched the wealthy become ultra-wealthy. The increasingly angry “squeezed middle” are the people who tend to vote in elections, and many were driven to distrust the big parties whose experiment failed them.
...
The new, more open and borderless world of the past 20 years has meant that the big centrist parties continue to work well for the winners, for the in-groups that benefit from their specific programs. But for those who become disconnected or distanced from the state, who have no daily need for government (as the very poor do) but also do not feel its benefits (as the wealthy do not), the big party no longer means anything.

“Since the opening up of the world after the end of the Cold War, we've see that mainstream parties find it increasingly difficult to present political programs that address winners and losers at the same time,” says Mr. Cramme. “You basically have both left and right-wing mainstream parties essentially speaking to winners – and all those who are left behind due to globalization, technological change, cultural disaffection, are not adequately represented by mainstream political parties, so we see a surge of extremist parties on both the right and the left.”

- Boris catches Stephen Harper playing dress-up once again, this time with a uniform normally reserved for trained military air crew members. But I suppose after a campaign where he successfully convinced the media to portray him as a "steady hand" despite his track record of getting his party and country into trouble for no particular reason, Harper can't see much limit to the false labels he can wear.

- Bruce Johnstone criticizes Gerry Ritz for his anti-democratic plan to undermine the Canadian Wheat Board:

Ritz's comment about respecting democracy is a bit rich, considering that he has done everything in his power to undermine the CWB since taking over as minister responsible for the board in 2007. This includes issuing "gag orders" on the CWB from promoting the benefits of the single desk in director elections, to arbitrarily changing voters' lists on the eve of director elections, to allowing Tory MPs to disseminate anti-single desk propaganda during election campaigns.
...
The act says if the minister responsible for the CWB wants to change the single desk or the types of grains the board markets, he must first consult with the CWB's board of directors and hold a vote among producers. In Goodale's view, that means asking producers two simple, straightforward questions: "Do you want the CWB's single-desk marketing system for wheat: yes or no?" and "Do you want the CWB's single-desk marketing system for barley: yes or no?"

No trick questions, like the barley plebiscite in 2007 that asked three questions, including whether farmers would support a strong, voluntary CWB - a red herring designed to muddy the waters around the single-desk issue.
...
So why would the Tories risk breaking the CWB Act by not holding a plebiscite, or killing the single-desk by ramming legislation through Parliament with their majority? Because they know they wouldn't win a plebiscite, a fair plebiscite that asks farmers to vote for or against the single desk, nothing more, nothing less.

- Finally, Orphaned Voter provides a nifty cartogram of Canada's 2011 election results in noting that a stunning 71% of votes failed to contribute to the election of any MP.

Egged on

Gerry Ritz describes the Cons' standard as to what kind of resistance it'll take to get their attention:

Ritz's Conservative Party won a majority government on Monday, giving it for the first time the legislative clout to strip the board's monopoly as it has long intended.

"I was not shy about raising this at every whistle stop that I made in Saskatchewan in eight different (electoral districts), plus my own," Ritz said. "No one threw eggs at me. There's some concern we're going to throw out the baby with the bathwater (but) I told everyone not a chance."

Needless to say, now might be the time to invest in egg futures.

Thursday Morning Links

Assorted content for your perusal...

- Dr. Dawg picks up on a stunningly evasive answer from Gérard Latulippe of Rights and Democracy about the "forensic audit" which was supposed to have been made public six months ago. But I'm not sure that I agree with his description of the answer as "bafflegab": isn't it more of a flat-out declaration that he refuses to talk about the main issue facing his organization?

- Donald Savoie continues to be thoroughly unimpressed with the empty promises coming from Cons and Libs alike in New Brunswick's ongoing election. But while I can understand his not wanting to be seen taking any party's side, wouldn't it be worthwhile to mention the alternative which is actually talking honestly about the province's fiscal mess?

- Meanwhile, the federal NDP's push to make the Cons look completely out of touch with rural Canada seems to be proceeding nicely thanks to a concerted focus on issues that matter more than the long gun registry. Though as I noted yesterday, the especially fun part will come when the Cons get to stand up to try to defend keeping the registry as it stands as the NDP works to improve it.

- Finally, the Cons' distrust of evidence-based government has taken its most extreme form yet: apparently it's too intrusive to bother keeping track of how many health inspectors are actually monitoring livestock transportation.

On priorities

Just so we're clear: the Harper government's contribution in response to the worst flooding in Canadian history, washing out a third of Saskatchewan's farmland, is less than what they were willing to spend on half a day's worth of G20 rent-a-cops.

Suffice it to say that this doesn't exactly improve the perception that the Cons continue to take Saskatchewan for granted.

We'll tell you how you can oppose us

Gerry Ritz is understandably backtracking from his party's concerted effort to block any Parliamentary investigation into last year's listeria outbreak and other food safety issues. But Ritz' apparent theory about the committee looks to be even more disturbing than that of the Cons who disrupted it from within:

The meeting adjourned before members could vote on the competing proposals because a Conservative member of the committee "filibustered for over an hour" and "ran out the clock," Allen told the House of Commons.

Ritz shot back: "If we did not want the committee working, we could have just vetoed the whole darn thing up front. We actually are looking forward to a non-partisan report from the opposition, working in conjunction with our government members."

Which raises a couple of questions: when exactly does Ritz think the Cons were granted a "veto" over the proceedings of a committee where they're in the minority? And how likely is it that a party so obsessed with immediate perception will actually provide meaningful cooperation to a potentially embarrassing investigation if their starting point is a belief that they're entitled to shut it down by fiat?

Not yet silenced

Shorter (or at least more accurate) Gerry Ritz on the most recent set of Canadian Wheat Board directors' elections:

The farmers have spoken - despite our best illegal efforts to drown out their voices.

(H/t to Buckdog and 900 ft Jesus.)

On crisis management

While there have been plenty of comments about Gerry Ritz' mockery of listeriosis deaths under his watch (see Scott's list so far), the comments I've seen so far miss another part of the story which may say more than anything about the Cons' unfitness for office. Here's Ritz' excuse after the fact:

Ritz emailed an apology that he intended to deliver publicly in suburban Ottawa later Wednesday.

"It was a highly stressful time," he said in prepared remarks. "Many people were working countless hours and attending countless meetings to keep on top of the situation. In that context, I made a couple of spur of moment offhand comments. In particular, one about my official opposition critic, whom I have already called to apologize.

"My comments were tasteless and completely inappropriate. I apologize unreservedly."

So what's wrong with that response? Remember that Ritz was one of the MPs who Harper singled out for inclusion in his cabinet - giving him authority to make emergency orders in some circumstances precisely on the assumption that he would be capable of making responsible decisions in the face of a crisis.

Instead, even if one takes at face value that the incident was out of character for Ritz, it shows that he was completely lacking in judgment in the face of exactly the type of situation which can be expected to come with his role in cabinet.

And it only gets worse when one considers Ritz' comment about Wayne Easter. Keep in mind that the other participants in the call included representatives from the Prime Minister's office as well as assistants to Tony Clement - and there's no indication that any action at all was taken until other people on the call went public.

Which can only be taken as a tacit statement that Harper and his party don't think it's a problem for a cabinet minister to respond to a crisis by musing about the death of political opponents. And from my standpoint, that makes it downright frightening to consider what kind of action or reaction we might see from the Cons in the event of a more urgent national emergency.

All of which is to say that while Ritz' comments were indeed tasteless and inappropriate, they're also far more than that in what they say about both his reaction to the listeriosis outbreak, and his party's standard of acceptable behaviour for a cabinet minister. And whether or not Harper does anything now that the matter has gone public, the only appropriate response is to ensure that none of Ritz, Clement, Harper or their party kin is in a position of responsibility next time a crisis surfaces.

A little-known fact

The Conservative word for "crisis" is the same as their word for "opportunity to play Last Comic Standing".

Definitely in issue

Shorter Gerry Ritz:
Sure, an incumbent government has to run on its record. But wouldn't it be far more sporting if we whited out the part where unsuspecting members of the public died from tainted food?

Dismissive

Shorter Gerry Ritz:
As far as I'm concerned, the real heroes are those who ensure that anybody who dares to tell the truth faces the full wrath of a vengeful government.