Judge who berated rape victim is a Conservative Party hack

In September of 2014 Judge Robin Camp of the Alberta provincial court acquitted Alexander Scott Wagar a six foot one 240 pound man of the rape of a 100 pound 19 year old girl.  Throughout the trial the Judge repeatedly referred to the alleged victim as 'the accused', asked her why she just didn't just keep her knees together and pronounced from the bench that "sex and pain sometimes go together, that — that's not necessarily a bad thing."

The case was successfully appealed and will be retried.  Three months after the appeal was filed Justice Minister Peter Mackay appointed Camp to the federal Bench.The fact that Camp had TWO appeals against his rulings for basic mistakes of law and grotesque breach of impartiality would have been completely available to Mackay at the time he appointed Camp.  Camp is now barred from hearing cases as the case against him heats up.

Alberta Attorney General Kathleen Ganley has forced an inquiry into the conduct of Federal Court Justice Robin Camp after his controversial remarks during a sexual assault trial surfaced late last year.

By asking the Canadian Judicial Council to move the complaint to a formal inquiry, the council will skip the review panel phase of its investigation.

Camp got his law degree in South Africa in the 1970s when apartheid was still the law of the land.  He is an Alberta Tory Party insider, Managing Partner in the same law firm as Alison Redford's husband in commercial law (The same law firm at the center of a roiling scandal over improper tendering of Alberta's tobacco company litigation.) before being appointed to the provincial bench by the government of the day.  Because he was already a provincial court judge he could then be appointed to the Federal bench without the same kind of vigorous review other candidates have to go through.

He was also on the board of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, a far right legal group founded by Reform Party and Wildrose party member John Carpay who once berated Ralph Klein for failing to use the Notwithstanding clause to block gay rights.   With connections to the Fraser Institute and other far right groups and secretive about their funding despite the explicitly political nature of their activism they are known for their opposition to human rights legislation and hate speech laws, their defense of Trinity Western University over its discrimination against gays and their attempts to override democracy and undermine public healthcare through legal assault. 

He's a prominent, high profile member of the Canadian right wing establishment.

The Conservatives, both provincial and federal were so eager to get a true believer  Conservative insider on the court they appointed a monster.

The Fraser Institute's Incredible Shrinking Credibility

The American media notices just how much a joke the Fraser Institute is.

Soon it will just be the Calgary Herald left, breathlessly repeating the Fraser Institute's nonsense as if it had any credibility or usefulness.

Well the Calgary Herald is the staggering drooling joke of Canadian print journalism, which considering the embarrassing fish-wrapper competition is very strong in this country is  really saying something. 

It only makes sense that they would be joined at the hip to the most embarrassingly stupid right wing propaganda operation with pretenses to serious political and economic criticism in Canada. Again, a title with a lot of competition but one the Fraser Institute stoops to conquer.

In Character

Honestly anyone surprised by Danielle Smith's craven rat paddle away from the sinking Wildrose ship just hasn't been paying attention. When she couldn't control the Calgary school board with the the sheer self evident perfection of her Fraser institute indoctrinated ideology she blew it up in a display of juvenile mean girl behaviour that has typified her career. 

When it became clear that her deeply held passionate conviction that global warming was just a nasty fraud perpetrated by the 99% of scientists who belive in it meant a permanent exile in the electoral wasteland she abandoned it - publicly at least - with barely a moments delay. When it became obvious that good, moral gay hate clutched close to the withered hearts of her bigoted supporters had inexplicably become a barrier to her ambition she suddenly began pretending to be a lifelong defender of diversity and proud friend of Dorothy.

She's one of Canadian politic's most calculating, chameleon like, weather vanes to ever leave principle lying in a pool of its own roadkill blood as she tools down the highway to the bright future of power in devoted service to the elite.

Don't these mewling whiners understand her needs are what really matter?

I Love Canada

The Canada Stephen Harper has openly revelled in his hatred for and unambiguously promised to destroy.   #DenounceHarper

Sourced from Unseat Harper

"You have to remember that west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada; people who live in ghettos and are not integrated into Western Canadian society."
Report Magazine, 2001

"Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society. It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff."
Interview with Terry O’Neill of BC Report newsmagazine, 1999

"[Y]our country [the USA], and particularly your conservative movement, is a light and an inspiration to people in this country and across the world."
Speech to a Montreal meeting of the Council for National Policy, June 1997

"Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it"
Speech to a Montreal meeting of the Council for National Policy, June 1997

"In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half, don't feel particularly bad for many of these people. They don't feel bad about it themselves, as long as they're receiving generous social assistance and unemployment insurance."
Speech to a Montreal meeting of the Council for National Policy, June 1997

"Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status ..."
Op-ed article in the National Post, December 12, 2000

"Now 'pay equity' has everything to do with pay and nothing to do with equity. It’s based on the vague notion of 'equal pay for work of equal value,' which is not the same as equal pay for the same job."
National Citizens Coalition Overview, Fall 1998

"For taxpayers, however, it’s [pay equity] a rip-off. And it has nothing to do with gender. Both men and women taxpayers will pay additional money to both men and women in the civil service. That’s why the federal government should scrap its ridiculous pay equity law."
National Citizens Coalition Overview, Fall 1998

There's no hidden agenda, he's been quite open about it.

Danielle Smith: Wrong for Alberta

What happens if a rigid, far right ideologue who's only experience in a public service role is a tale of obstruction, fundamental lack of understanding of the facts, radical disdain for the role of the public sector, childish spats and a seeming inability to compromise or work with anyone who disagrees with her becomes Premier?

December 6, 1998: Smith proposed the closure of up to 30 schools due to excess space in older, inner-city classrooms. Smith suggested that the money earned from selling or leasing older schools could be used to build new schools and stem the exodus of public school students to Catholic, private, charter and home schooling. Contradicting Smith, LoVecchio told the Herald that she didn't "know where she's getting her numbers," explaining that when a CBE facility is leased to a non-profit group or private school, the Department of Education excludes those students from the board's utilization rate.

December 7, 1998: Calgary Herald editorial:

'Trustee Danielle Smith's contention that the CBE will close schools and then lease the buildings is also fatally flawed. Even if such buildings are rented to day cares, private schools or other users, Alberta Education still applies the space against the CBE balance sheet, but not the students. Previous decisions to lease old schools instead of sell them has simply exacerbated the CBE's poor utilization rate.

My Mommies help me with my homework

Arbitrary school rankings designed by the Fraser Institute to promote an anti public school privatization agenda?  Absolutely worthless.

Having a school for cultist polygamist kids get a perfect score?  Absolutely priceless.

A school for children in the polygamous commune of Bountiful, B.C. is among the highest ranking on the 2011 Fraser Institute Report Card. 

Bountiful Elementary-Secondary scored a perfect 10 mark. 

It tied with 12 other schools, mostly private schools in the Vancouver area, that also achieved perfect 10s. 

The Fraser Institute rates 875 public and private elementary schools throughout B.C. based on 10 key indicators using data from province-wide testing, known as the Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) test. FSA tests are mandated by the B.C. Ministry of Education.
Fraser Institute spokesperson, Peter Cowley, said not much is known about what made Bountiful so successful on FSAs. 

“With regard to what techniques they may have used or how they taught in math, for instance, between kindergarten and grade 4, all those things may be interesting but we don’t have any long term record of success yet,” Cowley said. 

Jane Friesen, the director of Simon Fraser University's Centre for Education Research and Policy, said people should look at these rankings carefully. 

“It’s simply telling you how is a particular cohort of students in a school doing in a particular year. I think we have to be careful to not interpret those results as a measure of the effectiveness of the school and I think that’s where the real issue comes in,” she said

Preston Manning writes bad Science Fiction

It's 2018 and Canada has answered the call of the professional right wing's fondest wet dreams on healthcare:

It is December, 2018, and at long last Canadian health care has been reformed. Long waiting lines are a thing of the past. Universal coverage has been maintained and expanded. The numbers of doctors and treatment facilities available to serve Canadians has been significantly increased. Health care for the vast majority of Canadians has dramatically improved and at lower cost per capita.

How did they get to this heaven on Earth in Canada's green and pleasant land?  Let Preston guide you along through a future where Wikileaks exposes all the Canadian politicians and opinion makers who condemn private medicine but fly out of the country to use it when its their own health on the line.  On balance, trying to enlist Wikileaks in the cause of Canadian right wing politics is probably better than calling for the murder of it's founder like Manning's fellow Calgary school right wing insider Tom Flanagan - but also far less likely than some right wing western government actually following through on such threats and murdering Julian Assange the way Flanagan wants.

Then there's the finishing blow, after Manning conflates real and imagined courtroom victories against the public system and creates this condescending  final flight of fancy:

 Meanwhile, back in Ottawa, the Standing Committee on Health had invited Dr. Lars Aalborg, Nobel Prize-winner and a world-renowned expert on queuing theory, to propose means of reducing Canada’s health-care waiting lines. Dr. Aalborg said he would do so only on the condition that members of the House of Commons agreed to participate in a scientific experiment. Being near Christmas, the members were in a charitable mood and consented to this unusual request. When Dr. Aalborg arrived he closed all the doors to the House of Commons except one and then asked all 308 members to form a line outside that door. He then asked the members to enter the chamber through that door, one by one, while he timed the process. Approximately one hour and 15 minutes later, all the members had entered the chamber. Dr. Aalborg then opened two more doors to the chamber and divided the members into three uneven lines, one outside each door. Once again the members were instructed to enter while Dr. Aalborg timed the process. This time it took less than 45 minutes for all members to enter the chamber.

Leading members of the Liberal and NDP caucuses – those who could count, tell time, or both –  (This presumably is an example of the classy, gracious civility in politics that Preston Manning claims to support - Cliff ) immediately explained the meaning of the experiment to their bewildered brethren. By establishing three open doors to its health-care system – a public care door, a private not-for-profit door, and a private for-profit door – and with government responsible to ensure that the care available through each met acceptable standards, Quebec ensured that the average waiting time for getting into the health-care system and receiving quality care would be significantly lower than if everyone was forced to wait in a long line behind a single door.

Is it rude to point out the fairly glaring logical fallacy inherent in his snotty little fairytale, that whether entering the room through three doors or one there's still only one pool of doctors, nurses and hospital beds in the room serving all three doors?

In Australia and Sweden, the concrete evidence was that the two tier system created a 'perverse incentive' for doctors to cherry pick the easiest most lucrative patients into the profit door's line, while the more expensive and less lucrative public door's line got longer and longer because those who could afford to pay their way in front of them funneled through the profit door.

Of course to market ideologues like Manning, an inequity like this result isn't a bug in his preferred system it's a feature.

Adapted and expanded from a comment I made on Buckdog's quick out of the gate response to Preston's dribbling.

How they got suckered. Us too.

Myriam Miedzian has an excellent piece at Huffington Post for all those who are continually baffled by working class people who vote against their own interests to protect the tax breaks of multi-millionaires.

In his recent book, After Shock, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich argues that the economic downward mobility of American workers, has "to do with power...income and wealth in fewer hands." Apparently, many working class Americans want to keep it that way. A recent SEIU poll reveals that, 38 percent of American voters are opposed to rescinding Bush's tax cuts for the 2 percent who earn $250,000 or more annually. 2 or 3 percent of taxpayers probably earn close enough to $250,000, to think they might be affected someday. This leaves about 33 percent voting against their self-interest -- higher taxes on the wealthiest would reduce the national debt, facilitate spending on levies, bridges, schools, healthc are, and create jobs. Similarly, an AP-GfK poll found that in the upcoming election, 58 percent of white working class Americans favor Republicans who opposed rescinding the Bush tax cut, and fought every Democratic bill benefiting low income earners including extending unemployment benefits.
On the other hand, a 2005 study by Dan Ariely of Duke and Michael Norton of Harvard, reveals that when presented with unlabeled pie charts representing wealth distribution in the U.S where the richest 20 percent control about 84 percent of wealth and Sweden where the top 20 percent control 36 percent, 92 percent of respondents -- who reflected U.S. ideological, economic, and gender demographics -- stated they would rather live in a country with Sweden's wealth distribution.
"Why don't more Americans -- especially those with low incomes advocate for greater redistribution of wealth?" the authors ask. Their answer: Americans drastically underestimate the disparity between the very rich and the rest of the population, are overly optimistic about social mobility, and there exists a disconnect between their attitudes toward inequality, their self-interest and public policy preferences.

And they didn't get to the point where they drastically underestimated that disparity by accident:

Instead, as Reich points out "rich and powerful think tanks, books, media, ads" were designed to convince Americans that free markets "know best" and operate in the interest of working people. They also convinced them that their enemies are not the heads of large corporations and the Republicans who represent them, but rather the Ivy League quiche eating, Eastern elite -- people like Senators John Kerry and Ted Kennedy, outspoken supporters of policies beneficial to working class Americans. This has fed into a "Real Men Vote Republican" reaction among many white male blue collar workers.

Lest you conclude we are immune  to such mythology here in Canada, remember that organizations like the Fraser Institute have the unambiguous goal of making us just as ignorant about where our best interests truly lie.  If they weren't having great success at that project would we have the government we have now?

The Exploitation Capital

The Fraser Institute waxes rhapsodic about doing business in Alberta

'Its great, they don't care about the environment, you don't have to lay out money for death squads like the other places Canadian mining companies have to do business. They just roll over the opposition, inconvenient First Nations communities, labour - the public are so anesthetized you can get away with anything!'

Alberta has been named the most attractive jurisdiction for mineral exploration and development in the world, according to a new report from the Fraser Institute, released Wednesday.

This ends a three-year run for Quebec as the top choice, according to the Survey of Mining Companies: 2010 Mid-Year Update.

The survey of international mining executives was conducted between June 1 and June 30. It is based on the opinions of mining executives representing 429 mineral exploration and development companies on the investment climate of 51 jurisdictions around the world.

Alberta, which had been ranked fourth in the previous survey moves to the top spot and Finland, which was third, moves into second.

Overall, the top 10 jurisdictions are Alberta, Finland, Quebec, Yukon, Saskatchewan, Chile, Newfoundland and Labrador, Botswana, Alaska, and Nevada.

The bottom 10 scores went to Ecuador, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Bolivia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Russia, Colorado, Indonesia, and Tasmania.

"After ranking Quebec as the best place in the world for mining investment for three years in a row, it appears that miners' confidence in the province has been shaken by increases in mining taxes which were announced without consultation in Quebec's spring budget," said Fred McMahon, co-ordinator of the survey and the institute's vice-president of international policy research.

'You don't need to worry about the local government trying to get some benefit for its citizens from the resources you're extracting - they're ideologically opposed to the very concept of the public good!'

There's a really simple rule: If the Fraser Institute thinks you are doing something right, it is literally the worst possible thing you could do.

The Future as the Fraser Institute sees it

PAY & SIT: the private bench (HD) from Fabian Brunsing on Vimeo.

Grown in Pods

Rabble excerpts Not a Conspiracy Theory: How Business Propaganda Hijacks Democracy by Donald Gutstein. He explores how the Fraser Institute squats out far right ideologues like a factory farming operation.

The Fraser Institute launched a program in 1988 that would have far-reaching impact on advancing the corporate agenda. This program, aimed at students, is actually a half-dozen initiatives through which the institute "is cultivating a network of thousands of young people who are informed and passionate about free-market ideas and who are actively engaging in the country's policy debate," as the organization's publication Frontline puts it. The initiatives are separately funded but work together as a comprehensive package of recruitment and intellectual grooming. These programs outgun in magnitude, scope and longevity anything that the progressive left has mounted through unions and social justice organizations.

Over 17,000 students have come in contact with at least one of the student programs, the institute claims. "Developing talented students sympathetic to competitive markets and limited government" through these programs "is one important way that the Fraser Institute is working towards changing the climate of opinion in Canada." Graduates have spread into politics, academia, other think-tanks and the media.

They're especially proud of Ezra Levant, who was a student of the Calgary School's Tom Flanagan and attended his first student seminar in 1992. He was asked to join the student leaders' colloquium in Vancouver and became an intern, where he wrote the book Youthquake, which was distributed and publicized by the institute. Levant tapped into the American conservative movement as a Koch Foundation Summer Fellow in Washington, D.C., and attended various Institute for Humane Studies and Liberty Fund events. After graduating from law school and articling, he worked for several years as a parliamentary assistant to Preston Manning and Stockwell Day. From there he did a two-year stint on the editorial board of Conrad Black's National Post, which was dominated by conservative ideologues. Next, he entered electoral politics and was nominated for the Canadian Alliance in the riding of Calgary Southwest. He attracted national attention when he initially refused to resign his nomination so that party leader Stephen Harper could run. After some high-profile deliberation, Levant resigned. He practiced law briefly at a libertarian law firm in Calgary and wrote a weekly column for the Calgary Sun and Winnipeg Sun. In January 2004, along with other Fraser Institute alumni, he started the socially and economically conservative magazine Western Standard, which took over the mantle from the defunct Alberta Report.

Another star graduate of the Fraser's student program is Danielle Smith, who started her career at a Calgary student seminar. She went on to a year-long internship at the institute, publishing some of her attacks on environmentalism in the institute's Canadian Student Review. She then worked for the short-lived Canadian Property Rights Research Institute and was hired as an editorial writer for Conrad Black's Calgary Herald, arriving in the editorial office just as the workers went on strike for a collective agreement. She later became host of CanWest Global's Sunday talk show for several years. Smith was subsequently appointed the Alberta director of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. (The Fraser Institute's former environmental director is the B.C. director.)

Gone to Kentucky to badmouth Canada

Nadeem Esmail, the Fraser Institute's healthcare hack in residence is taking his dog and pony show on the road to the deep south. He knows his insurance industry paid for polemics against Canada's public health system will be alternately picked apart and hooted out of the room here in Canada, but the American tea partiers will eat them up with a spoon.

National health care reform will be the focus of a daylong conference in Lexington on Friday.

The third annual Conference for Healthcare Transparency and Patient Advocacy will be held at Lexington's Four Points Sheraton, 1938 Stanton Way, starting at 8:45 a.m.

...

Nadeem Esmail, an analyst with the Fraser Institute in Alberta, Canada, will talk about his work, which he says shows that Canada's system delivers care inefficiently.

He says, for example, that the average Canadian waits 34 weeks for joint-replacement surgery. Esmail says that's because Canada's government program lacks private competition, and that the free care it offers causes demand to outstrip supply.

"Canada's system doesn't guarantee access to care; it guarantees access to a waiting list," Esmail said. Other universal-access programs, such as those in France, Germany and Switzerland do a better job, he said.

Dr. Garrett Adams of Louisville, representing Physicians for a National Healthcare Program, said he'll paint a more positive picture of Canada's system.

So fortunately someone will be there to counter the spin and Esmail won't have his preferred unchallenged venue to spread the half truths and outright lies that are the Fraser Institute's bread and butter.

The Fraser Institute has all but given up selling Canadians on their long campaign to kill public healthcare. Now their primary role on behalf of their various big money backers is to represent the right wing anti-public good message on any public endeavor to Americans unfamiliar with their noxious history and unambiguous bias.

Esmail won't be telling his Kentucky audience how limited the credibility of Der Institute is in Canada or that the overwhelming majority of Canadians - even in Alberta the most right wing province in Canada - staunchly support the Canadian public system and fiercely resist any attempts to move it towards the American model. He certainly won't be promoting the fact that it costs less per capita and as a percentage of GDP than the American model, and don't expect even a paragraph on superior results like lower infant mortality, longer lifespans, a healthier public overall and a more competitive economy.

Nope, he'll just focus on wait times - without ever once mentioning that they are overblown, dropping rapidly in recent years and to the extent they exist, the wholly predictable result of cutbacks promoted by the Fraser Institute themselves.

The Fraser Institute is an industry funded PR firm disguised as an independent think tank and Esmail is just there to earn his paycheck badmouthing Canadian healthcare for his clients.

Canada's Sarah Palin

The resemblance is really quite astonishing.A telegenic far right political figure with a slim resume tainted with a history of extremism and obstruction with rapturous middle aged white men in Canada's right wing getting serious tingles down their pant leg over her while the public response is likely to be far less impressive.

Danielle Smith has won a race to lead the Wildrose Alliance Party, a right-wing rival to Alberta’s long-serving Progressive Conservative government.

The Wildrose Alliance has been attracting a lot of attention in Alberta recently after polls showed the upstart fringe party is bleeding support away from the Tories and emerging as the province's second-place choice to form a government.

Her biggest public role hitherto was as an elected trustee of a Calgary school board that was so dysfunctional and riven by party politics that it had to be dissolved by the provincial government. The childish exploits that led to the entire board being shut down included loud standoffs degenerating into shoving matches at one point. This bodes well for a spirit of compromise and constructive reasoned governance in any hypothetical Smith administration.

Of course serving as a representative on a public school board is probably problematic if you are ideologically opposed to the very concept of the public good.

Her entree into politics came in 1998 as a trustee with the Calgary Public School Board, a period marred by infighting between right- and left-leaning members. In 1999, Alberta's Learning Minister declared the board “completely dysfunctional” and fired all of them.

Jennifer Pollock, a Liberal and a third-term trustee at the time, recalls Ms. Smith's determination and, not flatteringly, single-mindedness. “I don't think people should vote for her,” Ms. Pollock says, comparing her former colleague to Stephen Harper – a parallel Ms. Smith's supporters make in a much more positive way.

Smith is careful to downplay divisive subjects like abortion and gay rights but the Alberta Wildrose Alliance (a name that ironically reflects the winnowing Darwinian reductionism of Alberta right wing politics.) is a deeply reactionary, extremely right wing party both in terms of economics and social issues.

A party led by a professional political operative who went from a year of interning at the free market fetishist Fraser Institute to a (deliberately?) divisive, short and failed term as a public school trustee and from there to the Progressive Group for Independent Business* - whose leader once said if you weren't willing to vote right wing, you weren't welcome in Alberta. The infrastructure of right wing pressure groups, corporate PR agencies masquerading as think tanks and party operatives grow these people in pods.

But gosh, she seems so down home and comfy, you betcha!

*Correction, Oct 28: Smith was in fact the Alberta Director of another right wing 'pro-business' pressure group The Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB)

Returning to the scene of the crime, to sell insurance.

Hi, Fraser Institute here. Our ideology and fetish for spending cuts has pushed healthcare to the brink, but pointing that out is just rude and old fashioned. What you should really do is listen to us some more about how to fix it.

CALGARY, ALBERTA, Nov 10, 2008 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) -- Canadian patients are enduring greater risks because the country's health care system regularly employs aging and outdated medical technology, concludes a new report from independent research organization the Fraser Institute.
...
"It's time to consider alternatives to the status quo if we want to achieve a world-class, universal access health care system. Unless we allow more competition into the both the financing and delivery of health care services, Canadians will continue to be burdened with lengthy waiting lists and outdated medical equipment.

It's a great scam really: Help create massive destruction through constantly advocating for funding cuts to social services like healthcare - then argue its the nature of universal healthcare that's the problem and like any good PR firm masquerading as a think tank, promote the services of your clients as the solution.

Wait times and The Fraser Institute

Wait times for healthcare have dropped dramatically, so dramatically that even the Fraser Institute has to admit it, albeit with sulky bad grace.

They don't want to talk about how wait times have been reduced through innovations within the public system or the underfunding and medical school enrollment suppression that created the wait times in the first place, and they still push for greater private sector involvement despite the extensive evidence showing it would increase wait times rather than reducing them (PDF).

The biggest laughs in their rather pissy press release come from the last paragraph:

The Fraser Institute is an independent research and educational organization with locations across North America and partnerships in more than 70 countries. Its mission is to measure, study, and communicate the impact of competitive markets and government intervention on the welfare of individuals. To protect the Institute's independence, it does not accept grants from governments or contracts for research.

So no government funding, but massive corporate funding now, that's a whole other kettle of fish. They solicited and took massive wads of cash from big tobacco, and then fought tooth and nail against anti-smoking legislation. Massive donations from Exxon help pay for a long history of global warming denial. They get huge contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries and surprise surprise they oppose publicly run healthcare. Oh and a lot of money from this charmer.

This isn't the resume of a think tank, but that of a well paid PR firm acting on behalf of their paying clients.

UPDATE: Hey look, the more healthcare privatization in your area the longer you have to wait for care:

The health coalition also noticed that wait times appear higher in areas with the most privatization as health-care workers stretch their time between hospital and private clinic. For instance, Montreal is one of the hardest spots to get a family doctor, yet has quite a few private "boutique" clinics selling two-tier care for wealthy executives and companies, the report notes. The vast majority of people can't afford to pay the private clinics' prices so they wait longer to see a doctor.
"For-profit clinics siphon out scarce specialists' time and (schedule) medically unnecessary procedures," Mehra said.
Queue-jumpers who can afford to pay at private clinics do so, and that means people in the public system wait longer, she added. In Ontario and Manitoba, Mehra said, they found local hospitals have reduced MRI hours because technologists have gone to for-profit clinics.

Skepticism for sale

In the marketplace of ideas, how come enviro-skepticism needs to be so heavily subsidized?

90% of Enviro Skeptic Books Have Think Tank Roots

A new study by a team of political scientists and sociologists at the journal Environmental Politics concludes that 9 out of 10 books published since 1972 that have disputed the seriousness of environmental problems and mainstream science can be linked to a conservative think tank (CTT). Following on earlier work by co-author Riley Dunlap and colleagues, the study examines the ability of conservative think tanks to use the media and other communication strategies to successfully challenge mainstream expert agreement on environmental problems.

A made up movement using made up pseudo-science financed by big polluters just to give politicians the political cover to be able to say 'There is scientific disagreement about man made global warming.' and continue to do nothing.

Follow the money. Always follow the money.

Well they are Social Darwinists...

Maybe Richard Dawkins will explain to the Fraser Institute that Social Darwinism is a rather moronic misapplication of Darwin's theories and that Survival of the Fittest is as much about the most effective cooperators as the most fierce competitors.

My own view, frequently expressed (for example in the The Selfish Gene and especially in the title chapter of A Devil's Chaplain) is that there are two reasons why we need to take Darwinian natural selection seriously. Firstly, it is the most important element in the explanation for our own existence and that of all life. Secondly, natural selection is a good object lesson in how NOT to organize a society. As I have often said before, as a scientist I am a passionate Darwinian. But as a citizen and a human being, I want to construct a society which is about as un-Darwinian as we can make it. I approve of looking after the poor (very un-Darwinian). I approve of universal medical care (very un-Darwinian).

Milestones

I started this blog two years ago this month. Sometime in the next few weeks I will post my thousandth post and register my 40,000th hit.

Not bad for something I began as a lark because my beautiful girlfriend had started one for her crochet projects and suggested I might enjoy playing with blogger too.

Drop by and say hi folks, this is an open thread and if I can be forgiven the arrogance, if anyone has some favorite posts from the last few years of my ranting, feel free to post a link.

Here's a few of mine:

• The same weight to a lie
  My obligatory blog rant about the flaws of the MSM
  
  
• Masters of Mendacity
  One of my more representative runs at the Fraser Institute
  
  
• Montebello protesters stop blatant police provocateurs before they can engineer a riot
  The post that got more hits - by the hundreds! - than any other I've done.
  
  
• For Profit Healthcare claims another victim
  My mom is a former nurse and hospital administrator and I've grown up my whole life around the health care system. I consider those advocating a return to the bad old days of private for profit care to be little more than vandals and nothing enrages me more than the outright falsehoods they use to advance their goals. This post is one of very many, but is representative in how no subject I blog on gets more push back - even from supposed progressives! - then defending public single-payer care. Bottom line, if the proponents of more health care privatization have to make up or massage their facts to make their case, and they do, they probably don't have a great case, do they?
  
  
• Liberal MPs show their true colours
  A year ago the Liberals gave us a taste of what to expect from their non-existent opposition to Stephen Harper and demonstrated once and for all whose side they were on. This isn't a minority government we're in right now, it's a coalition government of two center right parties. This post also covers one of my main themes here, organized labour.
  
  
• Canada's Railways a disaster waiting to happen
  My family has had a cabin on the shores of Wabamun Lake since the 30's. No matter how often we moved or where we moved to the one concrete piece of stability was summers spent there. CN Rail's emphasis of speed and profitability over safety, with the help of government oversight reduced to almost nothing, destroyed that piece of my childhood, perhaps permanently. I might be a little bitter.
  
  
• Homelessness and mean spirited Calgary
  This piece got re-printed in Alberta Views an excellent magazine that puts the lie to the idea of a politically conservative Alberta monoculture.
  

All the subjects covered on this blog are also linked by labels - feel free to browse by subject.

Irony isn't dead

I haven't bothered to respond to any of the Fraser Institutes PR efforts on behalf of the Insurance and Pharmaceutical industries of late because there seems little point. Few aside from an ideological hard core even seem to pay attention to them any more and most of their wacky pronouncements on Canadian health care for example seem intended mostly to provide fodder for American right wingers fighting the increasingly desperate and hopeless battle against an increasingly inevitable universal system there.

Canadians, The National Post's dwindling subscriber base aside, simply aren't buying.

But the spat between Nadeem Esmail, who's in charge of the Fraser Institute's health care distortions and Health Minister Tony Clement calls for comment, if only because I really don't trust a Conservative Minister to defend public care, and because the National Pest appears to have made only Esmail's side of the fight available.

The right has jumped on wait times as their new health care bugaboo in their long war against the public system. Of course many of the wait time problems facing Canada stem from policy decisions by right wing politicians in the first place. Remember fifteen years ago when the big scare was that we would have too many doctors leading to policy steps being taken to reduce medical school class sizes? Seems like a lifetime ago, but we're still paying for these kind of panicky reactionary steps.

But trusting right wing numbers on wait times requires a certain amount of breathless naiveté. Esmail angrily defends the paltry 26% of ideologically self selecting responses from doctors to the Fraser Institutes's wait times study as 'not a small or unreliable sample'.

It is of course virtually the platonic ideal of a small and unreliable sample. Denying that fact in a loud clear voice doesn't change it. He also decries 'rhetoric and misleading information'. I know, hard to believe the ballsiness; rhetoric and misleading information are the Fraser Institutes bread and butter. Hence the title of this post.

Wait time lists are neither as large nor as wide spread as the right tries to paint them, were largely the result of right wing funding decisions to begin with and have been dropping over the last few years.

And it's public sector solutions that are making them drop while across the border, the US utopia of private care faces wait times just as high or higher, with the added 'benefit' of double the cost per capita for their health care non-system that leaves millions with no coverage at all. Wait times are as bad or worse in the US, so moving towards American style private care would make matters worse.

Once the wait times bugaboo loses it's power, wait for the free market ideologues at the Fraser Institute to find some other avenue to battle public health care. Just don't make the mistake of thinking they actually care.

Be more like the boy

Shorter Fraser Institute: Imagine what BC could accomplish if they just completely screwed their workers, you know, the way Alberta does.

Hat tip: Vive Le Canada

Update: Erin at The Progressive Economics Forum completes the spin unpacking process.