From the same group of thugs who brought you the Temporary Foreign Workers fiasco ....

The Trojan Horse! (Or horses, if you like). Ever heard of the International Mobility Program? How about Inter-Company Transfers, whereby foreign companies are permitted to bring their own foreign workers in to do work on Canadian soil?

No?

Off to Creekside where Alison had done an amazing amount of heavy lifting. It may be the most important post you've read this year.

John Baird is either a liar or stupid ...

And, no, you are not limited to one or the other when trying to decide.

I've said before that Harper and his incompetent thugs are nothing more than hillbillies playing at governing with no coherent plan and no clear concept of the world around them. No one epitomizes the intellectual laziness of the Harper regime than his so-called Minister of Foreign Affairs, John Baird. This is the guy who's supposed be in touch with the world and understand the nuances of other countries and cultures. The truth is, he is utterly unqualified for the job.

After calling the former Canadian ambassador to Egypt, Ferry de Kerckhove, something close to anti-Semitic, Baird furthered the exposure of his own ignorance by stating an outright falsehood, proclaiming that de Kerckhove was on the payroll of the government of Qatar.

Ferry de Kerckhove squared this away quickly while making it clear what he thinks of John Baird and his penchant for making things up. Read it all.

[I] was never on the payroll of the Government of Qatar. Mr. Baird could have checked the fact rather than try to defame me!

...

Yet I would hope that he might understand the danger my grandmother faced during the German occupation of Belgium as she harbored a Jewish couple in her basement for the better part of 1944. She was visited by the head of the Komandantur of Liege who told her there were rumors she was sheltering Jews. She stared him down and challenged him to check if he did not believe her word that she did not. He backed off. The couple survived. That is real life Mr. Baird and I am deeply proud of my grandmother.

My mother, although born a catholic hailed from a well-known Jewish family of printers for the Vatican. Of course, Mr. Baird, you might not know that Catholics could not become printers for the Vatican a few centuries ago as it was not “kosher” (pardon the pun!) for Catholics to make money from the Vatican.

The people of Ottawa West - Nepean should be ashamed of themselves for sending this national embarrassment and total waste of skin to parliament.

Dear Canada ... Kiss your navy goodbye

The Royal Canadian Navy, your navy, is now in worse condition than it ever was under any other government since before the 2nd World War.

Today the RCN announced that HMCS Iroquois is so badly rusted out and so dangerous to sail that it may never return to service.

That leaves the RCN with one, that's right, one serviceable destroyer. The RCN has one, that's right, one replenishment ship.

What that means is that the RCN is able to put ONE under-strength task group to sea in the event of a crisis, whether military or humanitarian. In a country bordered by three oceans, we have to choose ONE and hope it's a correct guess.

The RCN is conducting patrols with clapped-out, continually useless Maritime Coastal Defence Vessels, the likes of which don't even have a useable gunnery system and present a useless sick-bay.

So much for the myth perpetuated by the Harper government that the Conservatives are all about defending Canada. You'd have to go back to 1936 to find Canada's navy in such a deplorable state.

Harper lied to you and he lied to the armed services.

The thickness of Peter Mackay

Let's face it, Peter Mackay is not among the sharpest implements in a drawer full of dull blades. His latest attack on women demonstrates a thought process that is not only overly-simplistic but flawed to the point of being dangerous. Tabatha Southey does a low-level strafing run on Mackay demonstrating his consistency in being wrong on, well, everything.

At this point, I’m impressed with the sheer breadth and scope of Justice Minister Peter MacKay’s ineptitude. These days he’s wrong about so many things and manages to communicate this wrongness in so many mediums, I’m in awe.

The man is wrong everywhere! He just keeps popping up wrong! Peter MacKay is like the Zelig of wrong! He’s wrong in the House of Commons – and throws papers on the floor. He’s as wrong in four-year-old as he is in adult.

It gets better and is a great Sunday morning read.

Of course, nothing about Mackay would be complete without pointing out his failure to keep it professional in the House of Commons when his steady squeeze gave Harper the finger. It also showed what he thought of women.

Liberal MP David McGuinty asked Mr. MacKay how the Conservatives' newly unveiled green plan would help his dog in Nova Scotia. Mr. MacKay is said to have looked up, pointed to Ms. Stronach's empty chair and said "You already have her."

...

Added Mr. McGuinty: "I mean, this is the kind of conduct that you expect from a schoolyard bully, not a Minister of Foreign Affairs ... It is not the conduct that is becoming of a minister of Foreign Affairs.

Mackay ran away from further questions on the matter.

But one has to wonder: What's motivating this mono-synaptic twit?

He sold out a "big tent" party (which admittedly had been shredded by Mulroney) to a bunch of intolerant, racist, small-minded, knuckle-dragging, low-life fascists just to get a seat at a particular table. This is not someone motivated by a sense of public service.

Could it be that Peter Mackay is so dumb that he believes he can outlast Harper and, because he sold out his once centrist party to the Calgary republicans, that he is the anointed monarch?

Please ... he can't be THAT stupid. 

Swamp Blaney with information

So, Harper has ordered Public Safety Minister, Steven Blaney, to learn about and monitor every protest, everywhere by anybody in Canada.

The federal government is expanding its surveillance of public activities to include all known demonstrations across the country, a move that collects information even on the most mundane of protests by Canadians.
The email requesting such information was sent out Tuesday by the Government Operations Centre in Ottawa to all federal departments.

The Government Operations Centre is not allowed to issue such instructions. It's own terms of reference make it a body designed to respond to emergencies; not gather information on legitimate assemblies. In short the GOC is now spying on you. Welcome to Harper's Canada. (And the stinking turd has the unmitigated gall to call Putin a threat to stability).

Others have written extensively and eloquently on this. Dr. Dawg and Simon have pointed out very clearly what this means and if you don't get the "police state is here, now" flavour from their very clear messages, I would re-read them until you do.

So, what are you going to do about it?

Try this: Every community and local event, right down to a friggin' church bake sale should be reported to Blaney's office. Make every event a demonstration or protest.

Having a pancake breakfast? Make it a pancake breakfast to protest the consumption of toast.
Holding a bake sale to raise funds for the poor overseas? Make it a bake sale protesting the lack of foreign aid being provided by Canada.

Swamp the sonofabitch. They don't have the people or the resources to sort through it. And keep doing it. Don't let up and they'll eventually give up. You turn their own weapon against them.

You can send a letter, or thousands of letters, without postage, to:
Steven Blaney, MP
House of Commons,
Ottawa, ON, K1A 0A6

Email: steven.blaney@parl.gc.ca

Fax: 613-995-6856

Phone: 613-992-7434

And feel free to tell your community newspaper what you're doing. They'll eat it up.
 

It's time BC teachers realized that the woman in the pink shirt is a bloody bully

Christy Clark takes credit for creating Pink Shirt Day, an initiative intended to combat the bullying that occurs in BC schoolyards. It was a useful illusion to help her fulfill her political ambitions. There's only one problem: Christy Clark is one of the most notorious bullies in British Columbia.

Christy Clark is the one who tore up collective agreements, repeatedly violated the constitutional rights of teachers and has brutally starved the provincial public education system at all levels. It makes one wonder what it is this daughter of a BC teacher has against education in general and public-school teachers specifically.

She has enlisted her populist water-carriers in the media to refer to the BC Teachers Federation as "militant", an unwarranted term used without a shred of substantiation. As The Gazetteer points out, it was Clark who tried to provoke a strike, violated the constitution, ignored the rule of law and tore up contracts. Yet none of those media pundits have taken to calling Clark what she is: an extremist and a bully.

Jim Nelson does a great job of laying out the history of the BCTF and the fact that they're anything but militant. Forced by then-premier Bill Vanderzalm into becoming a union, teachers, by their very nature go out of their way to avoid conflict and confrontation and they do it at their own peril. Further, they have caused less classroom disruption due to labour concerns than the Campbell/Clark regime has done with a fiscal hatchet.

Jim Nelson used an interesting analogy when he put Christy Clark's behaviour with teachers against the backdrop of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Interesting that he should use that particular group because the ILWU marine component has just experienced a single outrageous act on the part of the employer and they didn't hold back. A strike vote was swift and unanimous.

Seaspan, the largest tug, towing and vessel escort company in BC, unilaterally imposed a new contract on both officers and ratings, stripping them of established working conditions and placing a higher demand on call-out crews. The ILWU and the Canadian Merchant Service Guild (representing officers) were understandably outraged at the move. When Seaspan appeared intransigent the ILWU received unanimous approval from its members to go to a strike. The CMSG also announced a strike vote prompting the federal labour minister, Kellie Leitch, to get involved. The officers have agreed to an arbitrator and not to strike providing Seaspan does NOT implement the new contract. The ratings aren't being quite as nice about it. They expect negotiations to resume immediately, failure of which will lead to 72 hours strike notice and a virtual shut-down of shipping all over BC by Sunday.

Now, if I were betting on what's happening now, (and having had a couple of conversations with some tug captains), I'd bet that Seaspan expected a strike and then expected the anti-labour Harper government to legislate crews back to work with an imposed agreement ... favouring Seaspan's owners.

Tug crews are a tough lot. They have difficult, dangerous jobs requiring exceptional skill and a high level of knowledge. When they, without hesitation, threatened to get tough and get tough fast, they brought down their bully. There is no doubt the officers and ratings made it clear to Leitch that they wouldn't and did not need to back down. You see, the crews, particularly the officers, hold the hammer, something I'll describe if and when it appears they may close to swinging it.

The teachers haven't been getting the same kind of action. They've been bullied since 2002, yet they've only pulled themselves out to the picket line for 14 days since 1995. They've watched their working conditions deteriorate, at the hands of Christy Clark and have appeared powerless. The courts find in their favour and Christy Clark ignores it.

Time to get tough. Find the hammer handle and threaten to swing it. When Clark and Fassbender (who should be described by the media as an extreme fundamentalist) attempt to ignore the threat, follow through. Are there going to be hard feelings? Of course. You don't pull down a bully by being nice.

And the next time Christy Clark puts on a pink t-shirt everyone needs to mark her for the bully she is. 

Stephen Harper would not approve

THIS is what Canadians do.

When someone needs help, real Canadians go out of their way to provide it.

Then we have the Harper party approach to helping others:
First up, James Moore. Your neighbour's kid can starve for all he cares.
Next, the man who prostituted the Progressive Conservative party, Peter "Airshow" MacKay. If you have nothing, he'll take that away from you too.

Can you imagine any one of these self-absorbed, evil, swine considering Anton Gafarov anything but a mortal enemy?

Justin Wadsworth, however, renews your faith in the spirit of Canadian fair play and the belief that a hand up always brings more than the back of the hand.

Well done, Mr. Wadsworth. You do Canadians proud.

Veterans are outraged. Now they need to do what they once did best. Lead. Part 3.

Unification, led by Paul Helleyer in 1968 and permitted by Lester Pearson, was a wound most veterans still bear. Initially intended as a modernization to bring three separate services under one joint operational roof, it steam-rolled well beyond the original plan to create a single service which was purportecly able to share resources and personnel across the the three combat elements. It was to become a dumb idea championed by a self-aggrandizing fool who today sees aliens in his cereal bowl. But the damage to morale, traditions and the ethos of the services was extensive. So extensive, in fact, that when veterans look back at the past several decades they are unable to connect the last major re-equipping of the armed forces with the prime minister that actually did it: Pierre Trudeau. And they are just as blinded to the fact that Brian Mulroney, despite all the typical conservative rhetoric, sold off critical combat capability during his tenure.

Let's end the history lesson there and get to the point of this whole discussion. Veterans are now the recipients of some of the shabbiest treatment ever at the hands of the federal government and the fault lays, not just with Julian Fantino, but with Harper himself.

Harper, always prepared to pump Canadian military history for the lazy patriotic vote it garners, is a tribalist, self-centered, sociopath. Fantino was his perfect hatchet-man. But make no mistake about it, what is being done to veterans now is very much calculated by Harper and the elitists who surround him.

Of the roughly 1.1 million Canadians and Newfoundlanders who served in the 2nd World War, less than 90,000 are alive today. At an average age of 90, those veterans are dying in the hundreds per month. Korea veterans, a much smaller group, have all but vanished. No veteran of the 1914 - 1918 Great War survives. In short, the corps of veterans from the declared wars and Korea is shrinking rapidly.Veterans from the Cold War era, Gulf War 1, peacekeeping and Afghanistan do not constitute the same numbers as the large group that returned from the world wars and, (get ready for this), the Harperites don't really consider them veterans in the same light anyway. Those veterans do not meet the Conservative fetish of military glory associated with the big total wars. If you don't believe me, replay some of Fatino's interviews where he tries to minimize the standing of today's veterans by elevating the risk and contribution of municipal police, himself included. He's trying, along with Harper, to make national service, with a full combat liability, no more than police work.

And we all know, for a multitude of reasons, it is not, and never will be, the same thing. Julian Fantino never once deployed for the better part of a year to any one of the world's shit-holes. Ever. We did it with all too familiar regularity.

So, here's the thing, (and you need to absorb this one fully). What Harper is doing to veterans is NOT singularly unique. What he is doing to you, he is doing to everyone. He has shattered the Canadian public service. He is destroying labour law in this country. His myopic focus on creating a petro-state (in Alberta) has promoted accelerated rust-out in the Canadian manufacturing sector. Essential middle-income jobs are being destroyed in the most populated areas of the country in favour of corporate wealth generation from wanton resource extraction. You are just another domino to fall in a long line of tiles. Complaining loudly will do one thing: he'll do what he can to silence you faster.

It's not that Harper doesn't care about you. Harper doesn't care about anybody. He consults nobody outside his elitist circle; he accepts no advice; he answers no questions. When cornered, he runs for cover and hides.

Veterans are in a decidedly exceptional position, should they (we) choose to exploit it. We have always been there for Canadians and we have nothing to hide. And Canadians in general appreciate that we have honestly done our duty on behalf of this country in the best interest of our country.

Do what you have always done best. Lead, and accept nothing short of a fully completed mission.

A majority of Canadians sympathize with veterans. They do not accept the mistreatment and the abuse at the hands of a sociopath. They are watching you. They want to see what you are going to do.

There is a strong belief that if your loud protestations garner some kind of pay off, that you'll take it and resume your seat at the camp table. That would leave the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who have had their lives and dreams crushed by Harper's policies sorely disappointed. And you will have lost them forever.

Do the right thing. Get out front. If you never want another Fantino, you have to gather your forces, muster your strength, fight off the fear and get rid of the whole force from which the Fatinos originate.

You need to suck it up and realize that you are only one segment of the population which has been kicked in the genitals. You need to organize and slam Harper hard. So hard that he is totally and completely de-stooled.

If you do not do this, Harper will be back, even if he pays you off this time, and he will do untold amounts of damage. Your meager pension will not withstand the financial assault he will carry out on you if he is returned to government. Do you like your health care plan? He'll kill it. Do you expect to get Old Age Security? It will be gone. Don't believe me? Ask a 55 year old when they get to access their Canada Pension Plan? No one figured on that one but Harper ripped it away from them.

It is time that you considered all of those Canadians you never saw when you were in Bosnia, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, the Golan Heights, Cyprus, Haiti, Cambodia, Viet Nam and any number of places where bullets flew until we took the lead and realized that they want you to get out front, look them in the eyes and say, follow me.

You don't have a lot of time. If you think Harper is going to wait until the fall of 2015 to go to the electorate, you're not paying attention. He is under so much pressure that he could trigger an election at any moment. Never mind the "fixed election date". He's already broken that law once before. All the signs are there and if you're not ready, he'll trample you.

You need to look at the door to your front and realize that it could open at any moment and expose you to a hail of hostile fire. So, get organized and lead. Make your issue big and make it a part of the bigger issue. Harper is not and never will be your friend. He lives in a world where hatred and ignorance are political weapons. You can defeat him and deny him his weapons. Quit worrying about who replaces him. We've all been in situations in far flung places where victory meant we got rid of the nasty prick in the chair without knowing what came afterwards.

You've done it before.

Do it now. Lead.

Veterans are outraged. Now they need to do what they once did best. Lead. Part 2.

There is a commonly held misconception that all members of Canada's armed services and, by extension, discharged veterans are Conservative supporters. That, of course, is simply not true on more than one plane.

What is true, is that many voted for Harper and his uber-right-wing thugs based on a load of false propaganda, seriously limited information, and for purely selfish reasons, (which is why we all vote in a specific direction). It would not be a stretch to say that most members of the armed services had little use for Chretien and his Liberals long before the general electorate swung away from them. Chretien was viewed, (with good reason), as being anti-armed forces and if you're in the service you're going to fight back with the only tool allowed armed service personnel in a democracy: your big X against the name of someone who isn't going to return a Liberal government. That meant Paul Martin, despite making some immediate and needed course corrections when it came to the Canadian Forces, didn't stand a chance amongst CF voters. But that's more history than an explanation.

The truth is most members of the armed services are pretty apolitical, especially in their early years of service. When a kid joins the service he/she is not politically engaged and definitely doesn't possess a political ideology. Young (put any political party name here) ideologues don't, as a rule, join the armed services, particularly during peacetime. It would interfere with their ability to get inside the political machine. And, although this is likely to create a poo-flinging session, my long association with armed services has taught me that among those few young service members who do have a political view, none of them are conservative of the Harper ilk. That kind of young person avoids military service like a plague, although there is an exception I'll identify later.

Service in the navy, army or air-force is very insular. Long deployments, active service and isolated bases mean limited interaction with the civilian community. A very different lifestyle leads many service personnel to further isolate themselves (and their families) from too much civilian contact. Politics becomes dirty, invasive and unwanted. Politicians are viewed as dirty, invasive and unwanted. A majority of service personnel therefore distrust all politicians. Political interest only arises when it directly affects serving individuals or the organization to which they belong. Thus, political motivation depends on how they view the treatment offered by the gang in place at the time. Disband an airborne regiment, lose the votes of the entire army and likely chase them into the arms of the first party who says we'd never have done that. Cut the defence budget so deeply that there are not enough crews to man ships, lose the votes of the entire navy with the same end result.

Veterans are odd creatures. They have a tendency to take those particular political views and emotions with them on the final walk out the main gate and there is a good chance they'll hang on to them for decades. They maintain an emotional affinity with their former service that most civilians do not fully comprehend. It is born out of the fact that while serving they were a part of more than just an organization. The people they served with were and are a part of a very close-knit family with intentional barriers preventing those who did not serve from ever entering the deep centre of the military psyche. You didn't serve? You don't ever get to be a part of the ethos and no one is ever going to explain it to you.

So, it will likely come as something of a shock when I tell you that in the 1960s prior to Paul Helleyer committing the heinous crime that was Unification, most service personnel found themselves voting Liberal.

You see, Diefenbaker was a tough pill to swallow. He had done little to foster the armed services. Pay was poor and conditions were not improving. Cancellation of the AVRO Arrow iced Dief in the eyes of many service personnel. That and a long held belief that the Liberals were a better option for significant pay raises and an improvement in conditions put them ahead in the minds of people who had endured enough of Diefenbaker's draconian austerity measures, most of which had to do with keeping service personnel impoverished.

There was something else. The Liberals under Louis St. Laurent had engaged in a purpose-bent re-equipment program. Diefenbaker inherited a modernized or modernizing armed forces as a result of the government which preceded his. That fact was not lost on the long service veterans who were starting to leave the service in the 1960s and taking their political affinity for the Liberals with them.

Here, I'll end part 2. Part 3 will be a little longer in coming. 

Veterans are outraged. Now they need to do what they once did best. Lead. Part 1.

There is no doubt Canadian veterans have been treated in the most vile way possible by one of the most ignorant people in the Harper government. Julian Fantino has demonstrated, quite clearly, that he feels a greater duty to his benefactor, Harper, than he does to the armed services veterans his department is mandated to assist. In fact, his recent behaviour demonstrates a total disdain for veterans. He believed he could appear at a time of his choosing and start issuing orders. This to a group who, now no longer in uniform, would loudly tell a serving general where to go if they didn't like what was being said. Fantino forgot, (or perhaps has never understood) who it is he actually works for. Not surprising, actually. Fantino has a long and documented history of being a dangerously stupid person with too much power which he felt was his to abuse and then to attack anyone who shone a light on his activities.

Some people are giving Fantino credit for "sincerely apologizing" to veterans for the spectacle he created. Except that it wasn't a sincere apology and accepting any part of it would be a huge mistake. Professor Stephen Kimber explains why.

Sincerely? In the next breath, Fantino was bitching to his stenographers at the Toronto Sun that the multi-medalled, wheel-chaired vets had been “duped… jacked up” by the union representing public servants who will lose their jobs and who had paid the veterans’ airfare to Ottawa.
When those mindless-dupe vets failed to show Fantino the due deference he required, he told the Sun, “I wasn’t just going to play dead.”

Keeping in mind, of course, that on one of Fantino's previous yap-sessions with those same stenographers he tried to paint himself into the same frame as a combat veteran. That should have told the veterans who attempted to meet with him that such endeavours were likely to fail. Fantino, who does not know how to control his authoritarian impulses, views himself as a hero. A self-styled hero who brooks no protest without his explicit permission.

Fantino clearly does not understand veterans. Worse though, is that he expects veterans to kneel before him and then be grateful for his very existence. His style is to issue orders; not to listen. And he further insults veterans by telling them they have been "duped" by the public service union, PSAC.

Really? Duped by the very union veterans watched like hawks when they were serving? The same union whose collective wage and benefit package formed the basis for the Canadian Forces compensation and benefit negotiations with the Treasury Board? Ya think?!!

If there's been any "duping" going on it's been by Harper and company, Fantino included. They have made a point of positioning themselves as "friends of the forces" and the "protectors of veterans", all without having done much except make loud noises about it. While the Harperites have been diligent in making certain they applied a nice shiny surface paint job, they have been hacking away at personnel, cutting pay and benefits, cancelling equipment acquisition and fighting against veterans attempting to hang on to disability benefits.

Not to mention the biggest duping of all. Harper, on Sunday, 1 March 2009, on CNN in the U.S., (he never says this kind of thing where a Canadian can get at him), told Fareed Zakaria that the war in Afghanistan was futile. And rather than call the Chief of Defence Staff and require that all Canadian troops be withdrawn to a safe area, he continued to knowingly send Canadian kids to their death. That made them cannon fodder and it highlighted Harper as a dangerous sociopath. Fantino too, is a sociopath but with perhaps a more lingering aroma of corruption.

And here ends part 1. 

Rotten to the core

BC premier Christy Clark is not known for honest dealing. She and Harper work out of the same playbook and regularly employ the same people to work the sewers of a political system rife with cronyism and putrefied by secret back-room deals and political corruption.

This time, a judge has just handed Clark her ass. She violated the constitution when she was education minister and then did it again, on the same education issue, as premier. The stench emanating from her overly-expensive waterfront Vancouver office is palpable. Clark is as dishonest as the liar she replaced. Families first? Not yours. (Bold mine)

... a tale of a government secretly wanting to provoke a strike that year for political reasons. There are always cynics who read political motives into big public labour disputes. But it’s startling to see a judge blame months of disruption in schools firmly on the crass political motivations of a government.
Justice Susan Griffin, who has been dealing with the differences between the government and the BCTF for a number of years, concluded “the government did not negotiate in good faith .... Government representatives were preoccupied by another strategy. Their strategy was to put such pressure on the union that it would provoke a strike .... The government representatives thought this would give government the opportunity to gain political support for imposing legislation on the union.”

Summary:

... she was the premier of a government that, according to the B.C. Supreme Court, ran a lengthy con on parents and children to engineer some dim political advantage...

Grifter.

JobScam. An idea without a plan ...

... is nothing more than a dream.

That's what the weasel in a prime minister's suit is now trying to peddle to you. Having spent $2.5 million in advertising on a program that did not exist, this is how he explained it away. (From Aaron Wherry and you really need to read the whole piece).

“Mr. Speaker, I noted that the Canada Job Grant was in fact very well received by those in the marketplace,” Mr. Harper enthused, “by people who want to upgrade their skills, want to receive more training, want to gain jobs and, by pluralism, want to create jobs.”

Well, that just makes you all squishy thinking about all those happy people dreaming about the imaginary jobs they're going to get when the Harper government finally gets off their collective asses and actually negotiates a deal with the people who will be providing the access to training. Someday. Maybe. Would you like a sparkle pony with that elephant turd pie?

We may well have known a lot less about this fiasco if we'd relied solely on the information provided by Advertising Standards Canada. It took a leak for us to find out that ASC had forwarded fraud complaints on the expensive advertising and that the Harper government quickly removed them. The ASC, because the Harperites hauled their ads immediately after the complaints started piling in, won't identify the public abuser because they "withdrew" before the council could adjudicate. The only identity you'll see on the ASC website is Service Provider, buried amongst the restaurant, used-car and cheap air fare scams. 

The council publicly posts complaint reports, but there are two different ways of handling the disclosure, she said. Some transgressors are identified, others are not.
If an advertiser pulls or changes an ad after people complain to the council, they don't get publicly identified.
"If the ad was not withdrawn or amended until after the council decision, that's when the advertiser is identified," said Feasby.
And so it is that a posting on Advertising Standards Canada's website shows that a "service provider" with a national television campaign advertising "a new program of services" attracted 22 complaints last year.
"To the council, the commercial conveyed the general impression that the services were universally accessible," says the posting. "In fact, they would not be accessible for some time."

That's Janet Feasby. She won't tell anybody who the identity of the Service Provider is because the explicit rules say so. However ... back in August she wrote this about the Harper scam:

"In reality, the implementation of this program is not imminent, and the process of obtaining such agreement may well take a considerable length of time if, in fact, an accord with the provinces and territories (on the grant proposal) is even possible," said the letter leaked to Global.

And that one did identify the Harper government and it did make the point that the whole program, top to bottom, was blatantly fraudulent.

But yesterday, Harper told the country that everybody just loved it. He tells you all kinds of things. Most, if not all of them, are untrue. Yesterday's attempt to put lipstick on a pig shows a level of desperation in that he, and his cohort of thugs, have no amount of hesitation when it comes to insulting the intelligence of Canadians ... and spending your money to make themselves look good.

And when he tells you that they are the most fiscally competent herd in the field, keep in mind that they have yet to demonstrate anything resembling competence at anything. Clearly management and organization are absent with this crowd and without at least those two things, you don't have a government.

Harper couldn't organize a one man rush to a three hole outhouse ... but he can dream about it.

Two things ...

There are two things Harper isn't: an economist nor a statesman.


Be clear on one thing. Everything Harper is doing now, on any file to which he actually pays attention, is for a single purpose - to retain power at all costs. And he will pursue any cynical course to make that happen, including the destruction of the Canadian middle-income sector.

Harper has mismanaged the economy to the point of ruination. With Canadians reeling at rising unemployment levels and shrinking wages, Harper touts himself as the only true financial manager on offer. Worse, there are media types who actually swallow that and regurgitate as though it is somehow true ... because Harper's spin machine said so.

Yet, by any metric, Harper's performance on the economy has been a dismal failure. With paltry job growth and a December 2013 loss of 60,000 jobs, Harper's claims become evidence of self-delusion.

The Canadian dollar is being intentionally weakened, not because it benefits the country as a whole, but again, it serves Harper's purposes. And, yes, they're lying about it.

Harper will stomp the economy to the ground if it means he can produce a 2015 budget that appears "balanced" or better yet, has an imaginary surplus. To achieve this goal he will ignore the economic wisdom of the better-educated and wildly more experienced and follow a course which has crushed much more robust economies than Canada's.

For years, the government’s strategy has been to cut the deficit it created and hope that exports and investment would fill in the gap. This hasn’t worked.

Despite this, Mr. Flaherty’s still believes the answer to insufficient aggregate demand is to eliminate the deficit by 2015-16. Even the International Monetary Fund thinks he’s wrong. It has recommended that, in the absence of a strong recovery in growth and job creation, the date of deficit elimination could be delayed.

Which economies have succumbed to amateur processes followed by the Harper/Flaherty lot? Owen has the answer to that.

As for Harper's statesmanship, aside from the groin rub he shared with Benjamin Netanyahu, there will be no awards arriving on his desk. Harper gushed all over Netanyahu in an embarrassingly unprofessional and unstatesmanlike manner. It became clear to everyone watching, in Canada and around the world, that Harper had stepped into something personal and was not speaking for Canadians. He was speaking purely for himself and the entourage of select right-wing religious freaks that you paid to go with him.

Why would he do that? Again, an attempt to retain power. Whether Harper is a true believer or not, his performance was intended for his right-wing religious base. It's right out of the Karl Rove playbook.

The Harper entourage was the largest such travelling road show that anyone can remember. The group nicely reflects core elements of the coalition that Harper has built with the intention of placing him in power and keeping him there. Key to the religious wing of that coalition is a collection of socially conservative evangelicals, Jews and conservative Catholics. Mainline Protestants and progressive Catholics need not apply and they were not represented on the junket.

Harper will blather on about this trip for months, as he blathers on about the economy. In the end he hopes that, on election day, you stay home, (or go to a non-existent voting place), while his energized Christian Zionist, Rapture seeking base swamps the polls.

On the economy he'll continue to paint a false picture of astute economic wisdom by presenting a "balanced" budget in 2015. (Whether it actually balanced or Flaherty had to diddle with the finance projections the way he did in Ontario). With that, the mysterious "risk" the Canada Revenue Agency says exists awaiting the decision of the prime minister in summer 2015 will become obvious: Harper will attempt to buy your vote with the offer of "income splitting".
 

“It’s the re-election! This is the million-dollar shot.”

If there was ever a question as to the purpose of Harper's lavish pilgrimage to the lap of Bibi Netanyahu, this should put it to rest.



Harper is blatantly misusing your tax dollars for a re-election photo op. I wonder which senator he learned that from? Oh, right. I forgot. The Conservative Party bag-man, and Harper-appointed senator, is along on the junket.

Added: Alison provides some entertainment value. Make sure you read her comment.

Harper Enemies Up

As one of the nastiest people a minority of Canadians have ever delivered to the office of prime minister, Harper continues his royal progress through Israel in an effort to secure his seat on the Rapture Bus. Harper's speech to the Knesset should leave critical-thinking Canadians reeling. While Harper's over-the-top rhetoric may play well with a large segment of the Israeli population, it's rotting fish to a majority of Canadians and it demonstrates an unbelievable level of ignorance on the part of Harper and his mindless sycophants.

The embarrassing love-fest between Harper and Netanyahu might seem a little strange, but one should keep in mind that these two have something very much in common. They are both under deep suspicion of being incredible liars on a national and international scale. Although Netanyahu may be winning the international competition in that area and simply sees Harper as an amateur and a useful idiot.

Harper's assertion that any and all criticism of Israel is antisemitism is, of course, based on the fact that about the only thing he knows of Israel is the highly sanitized Netanyahu version of everything. The other stuff he neither knows nor is he possessed of the requisite curiosity expected of a critical-thinking junior statesman. Harper's pronouncement has been fed to him: by his own rapture-seeking religious head; by his various accompanying rabbinical plants; by his political predecessor and reality-challenged, Stockwell Day; and quite clearly, Netanyahu himself. And let's not mince words here. The danger in Harper's pronouncement should in no way be minimized because what he's actually saying is that any criticism of Netanyahu's unacceptable behaviour is transmuted to mean criticism of the nation-state of Israel and then corrupted to mean criticism of the all Israelis onward to become Hitlerite antisemitism. It's how Harper thinks and he's demonstrated it at home when he loudly labels his own detractors as "un-Canadian".

So, if you were to call Netanyahu an asshole, (which he is), Harper simplifies the argument by making you "officially" the hater of all things Jewish ... thus, one of Harper's enemies.

Now, let's take a look at a situation of Netanyahu's own making. It's called Firing Zone 918. When Gerald Caplan referred to the treatment of the residents of Hebron by the Israeli Defence Force executing Netanyahu's orders he wrote this:

... the small Palestinian city of Hebron, just south of Jerusalem, where fewer than a thousand Israeli extremists, protected by the might of the Israeli army, have been allowed to make life a misery for the city’s 170,000 Palestinians. Hebron is a shameful development that needs to be seen to be believed, and even then it’s barely believable.

That isn't the half of it. The residents of the South Hebron Hills, in the Israeli-occupied west bank is now a hell hole. People who have lived as nomadic tent-dwellers and in the caves of the hills for generations going back two centuries are being expelled. The IDF declared 30,000 acres of private farmland a military training area and has been in a legal fight with the Israeli Supreme Court since 1999 - the High Court agreeing with Palestinian residents that the IDF has no right to expel them.

So what Netanyahu approved methods are used to get them to move? How about flashbangs tossed into the family dwellings of farmers. Israeli settlement, which Netanyahu accelerated, has brought evictions and increased harassment. If the long-time Arab residents complain to the civil authorities of illegal settlements and trespass, the IDF raids them - the Arabs; not the Israeli settlers. Whole olive groves have been ripped out by the roots. 

It is, by any descriptor, an ethnic expulsion. This despite the fact that the UN recognized Israeli occupation means that the residents are defined as "protected persons" under the Fourth Geneva Convention and their removal is illegal.

So, Harper can bluster on all he likes. Benjamin Netanyahu is an asshole who Nicolas Sarkozy correctly labelled a liar and whose illegal actions on the west bank earned him this.

Harper might remember, having labelled a wide swath of people who simply expect the Israeli government to behave like a responsible member of the global community as antisemitic, that he doesn't really need any more enemies. The one's he's already made are patiently awaiting his return. And we still want to know what he knew and when he knew it.

Added: Bene Diction has looked at the list of religious "leaders" accompanying Harper and makes an interesting observation.

I don’t see Catholic, Methodist, United, Anglican, Lutheran, Mennonite, Presbyterian, and moderate Baptist delegates.

Nope. 

The List

Thanks to David Akin we finally have a list of the entourage Harper hauled along, on your tax dollars, on his pilgrimage official visit to Israel. Read it closely and discover the delightful people who will dine on your dime, while Harper closes research libraries, labs and facilities. Rejoice that Stockwell Day, supposedly retired, is still sucking up your money because, after all, there is no more self-entitled an individual than a right-wing religious freak jamming austerity down your throat.

And there's more. Dr. Dawg has some of the more poignant details and a must-read. 

If this trip had happened when Harper was in opposition he would have been standing on his commons desk screaming.

At the time of writing, Harper is addressing the Knesset. (Live broadcast). Not surprisingly, over half the members of the Knesset are absent, but the public gallery is standing-room-only. Of course, when you have 223 boot-lickers traipsing behind you, not to mention all the administrative and security staff, plus the media train, you can pretty much bet that virtually every public seat was taken up by members of Harper's royal progress.

And as Harper and Bibi spend the day rubbing each others' groin and making embarrassing public statements about their love for each other, there is at least one media outlet in the world making it clear that Harper is full of shit.

Ineffably Stupid

That is how an analyst once described the writing of Rex Murphy. Murphy, in his latest pronouncement on Neil Young's position on the tar sands, proves nothing has changed.

In the immortal words of Homer Simpson: Rock stars, is there anything they don't know?

That's just the start of Murphy's diatribe and you could probably quit reading right there. Murphy, who regularly expounds on topics on which he is bereft of education and without a scintilla of fact, just used the words of an imaginary cartoon character to call out Neil Young for having no knowledge.

However, Murphy is well-known for being welcome at the campfire of Big Oil. He shills for them with great regularity and even performed for them at the University of Calgary where he presented an uninformed, uneducated, deceitfully headlined speech called Climate Change 101. (A subject in which Murphy has no expertise and presented without a single actual credible scientist in the room).

So, let's compare Murphy's criticisms of Neil Young with Murphy himself.

Homer's truth rang out again when I heard Neil Young — expatriate, now California-based rock immortal — staggeringly claim that the Fort McMurray oil site reminded him of atomic-bomb-blasted Hiroshima.

OK, we get that Murphy is a Homer Simpson fan, but the fact that a Canadian lives in California is relevant, how? Murphy is trying to make a point that if you don't live north of the US border that, even if you visit the tar sands, you can't actually see them. And what is just so staggering about a vast manufactured wasteland which is visible from the International Space Station being compared with a similar, but much smaller, level of devastation?

Now, we can forgive minor sins in any propaganda war — and there is a propaganda war circling the oil sands. But to offer an equivalence, and repeat it, with the horror, mass obliteration and deaths of Hiroshima, goes so far outside all boundaries of good taste, truth, judgment and proportion as to be unfathomably irresponsible.

Unfathomably? Remember when Murphy wrote this? He tore into Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins for being "angry". He even invented words to describe their very thoughts. The only problem was, Murphy had never interviewed them. And it was a subject with which he was utterly uninformed because it dealt with the counselling of soldiers in combat. It wasn't even a Canadian issue; it dealt solely with the U.S. military. All told there were at least three subjects on which Murphy had no knowledge, either directly or via competent research, yet he opined at length on the pages of a Canadian daily. Irresponsible? Many American commentators suggested that and much more. And as for "propaganda", Murphy should remain silent on such pointed utterances of the word when referring to anyone but himself.

... one-sided and over-toxic condemnations amplified by the voice of a rock star are not that discussion. Mr. Young has failed to be fair, and thereby he fails also to be persuasive.

The master of uninformed, one-sided, over-toxic condemnation so says. And once again Murphy highlights Neil Young's legacy of fame as having no value. So, how does Murphy stack up? Not well.

Murphy is a three-times failed political candidate and an apparent opportunist. He has run for both Progressive Conservative and Liberal parties in Newfoundland and was rejected by voters. He speaks and writes at length on the evils of climate-change science vociferously claiming he is not a denier, but a skeptic, without the benefit of having ever actually having read the science or having demonstrated any ability whatsoever to do any of the basic math associated with climate science. Still, university chancellors have tripped over their own gowns conferring honourary degrees on him for whatever reason and Murphy gains access to university audiences to speak on topics completely beyond his realm of education.

That would make him that much more special than Neil Young if it weren't for one small fact: Neil Young has honourary degrees too.

More than one reviewer of Murphy's downward spiral has suggested that he attempts to cover his irrelevance with polysyllabic gobbledygook. One of them, Robert Miller, struck home when he inferred that Murphy's so-called eloquence is actually little more than a poor attempt at imitating Mark Twain ... and Mark Twain would not be pleased. (Read Twain's 19 rules, but read 13 and 14 particularly closely).

I can sum this up with a quote directed at Murphy, once again from G. Robert M. Miller:  ...you’re too juvenile and too poorly read to write on this subject, and so you shouldn’t. At the very least, Murphy is in no position to pass critical judgement on a host of subjects in which he proclaims, but cannot substantiate, superior knowledge. That includes tackling Neil Young.

Harper salutes coastal British Columbia ...

With a sneer and a raised middle finger.

The Harper government spent $26 million of your tax dollars investigating the reasons for the collapse of the 2009 Fraser River sockeye run. The Cohen Commission Final Report (PDF) was delivered to the Governor in Council on 31 October 2012 after 18 months of hearings and investigation. During that 18 months, scientists conducting studies into the collapse of Pacific salmon stocks made it clear that the Prime Minister's Office had interfered with and effectively gagged those scientists making any kind of public statement as to their findings and their published research. In short, the PMO was not going to let any government scientist say anything which could even be slightly construed as bad about ... fish farms on the BC coast.

The Cohen Report contained 75 sweeping recommendations to Government with deadlines and benchmarks if the Fraser River sockeye stock was to be given any chance of continued survival. And that's just about where things ended. Almost all of the recommendations have been ignored with deadlines having expired on many and other actions simply put on "hold".

Now, this. (bold mine)

The Harper government has quietly opened the door to a major expansion of B.C.’s controversial fish farm sector despite warnings by the 2012 Cohen Commission about the effects of net-based farms on wild salmon.
The decision, revealed to fish farmers by Fisheries Minister Gail Shea in October, was laid out in letters to several B.C. First Nations last week.
An official in Shea’s department said Wednesday that Ottawa has already received 11 applications for expansions or new farms.

Take clear note of how that was done. Shea told the fish farming industry back in October, 2013, that expansion of Atlantic salmon open-pen feedlots in Pacific coast waters would be approved. She informed the affected BC First Nations last week.

So much for the "duty to consult" and so much for the coast of British Columbia.

As for the Cohen Commission Report and the outstanding items. Well, the Honourable Bruce Cohen has never been invited to sit down with anyone from government to discuss his report.  The outstanding deadlines, (almost all have which have expired), will never be met. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans will continue to be in a blatant conflict of interest with a mandate to regulate and preserve wild fish stocks while at the same time promoting domestic open-pen feedlots, virtually all of which are owned by European companies.

Harper just showed British Columbians what he thinks of them. And all Canadians actually. It's your $26 million he wasted on an inquiry, the recommendations of which he had no intention of reading.

Can you hear me now?

Most of you have seen this:



This is just a part of the latest $9 million advertising campaign embarked upon by the Harper government to convince you that they are wrapping their loving arms around you and are going to give you everything you ever wanted on your smartphone for a whole lot less money than you pay now.

But, as with all things Harper, it is an ad campaign about nothing. You will not have more choices, you will not get lower prices and you will not have better service.

The strategy, (if you can call something so poorly conceived and managed a "strategy"), set forth by the Wii-generation occupants of the PMO, was to lure in new telecommunications companies by auctioning off the 700 mHz frequency spectrum. The idea was that this would allow a fourth major player into the game of "long term evolution" (LTE) and the market pressure of competition would give you more choice, lower prices and, along with sparkle ponies and rainbows, service even in the deep woods.

The problem from the outset is that the pack of wise-asses in Ottawa who dreamed up the idea have the attention span of a two year-old and the research acumen of a kindergarten class. In the last sell-off of spectrum they watched small companies buy in and then within a year attempt to sell themselves to the big three telecoms. That should have taught them something. It didn't.

In order for a fourth player to enter the wireless market it first needed a banker. Wind Mobile had one, but things went kind of badly. The Dutch company which was to be funding Wind Mobile's expansion wanted something in return for their investment. Something like ... financial and corporate control. That spawned an investment review by the federal government and then the serious people from down the street dropped their bombshell. The Dutch company was controlled by Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman who is busy fighting off Russian courts over some shady deals with the Russian government. If the brats advising cabinet had done more than 30 seconds worth of research they would have known this from the beginning and would have been fully aware that their so-called plan was doomed. Not to mention that Wind uses equipment provided by a Chinese "private" company which has raised security concerns in the U.S. (Huawei has been labelled a "Security Threat" by more than one country). That too, should have been readily apparent to the short-pantsers.

So, as the 700 mHz spectrum is put up for bids today the Harper government will allow the same old companies to swallow up your property and charge it back to you for the same old rates with the same level of gouging. Wind Mobile pulled out.

As Michael Geist points out, this whole effort having resulted in total failure, the only option left is to impose regulation on the wireless industry in Canada. Good luck with that. It's not going to happen.

This is just the latest in a stream of propaganda. Lots of advertising, costing lots of money and resulting in absolutely nothing. More vacant activity from the phoney who pretends to be a leader.

An absolute phoney

Harper is at it again. In a trick stolen from the Christy Clark manual of "quick wins", The Great Pretender is now holding secret press conferences.

Last week, while members of the English media were blocked from questioning Prime Minister Stephen Harper during a Lower Mainland visit, he held an event to field queries from a select few members of the ethnic media.
Some of the chosen few who attended the Jan. 6 event told 24 hours that Conservative MPs Wai Young, Nina Grewal and Alice Wong were also in attendance.
One reporter said journalists were allowed to ask Harper one question each and were given a chance to have their photo taken with the prime minister.

It was not on his announced agenda and no one knew there was any kind of public session. Oh! Wait. It wasn't public. It was exclusive. Let's end it right there. End of story. Sure there's more but who ... fucking ... cares?!

Every one of those reporters was subject to a PMO clamp before they ever walked into the room. They had to submit their questions in advance and they had to stay on the PMO topic. Ask your question, get your pic with the turd and get the fuck out.

Would the PMO choose to challenge me on any of that? Feel free to grace the comments section ... at your own peril.

So what else is this phoney sonofabitch up to? Well, how about denying the facts about unemployment; how about failing to address corruption in a senate scandal HE created; how about failing to address the needs of veterans HE sent into combat; how about overseeing the destruction of this country's accumulated knowledge?

How about it, Harper? Where are you on the things that are starting to bore into the guts of all Canadians?

Here's where.

Nowhere. Instead he feeds you propaganda and, oh, sister, Joseph Goebbels would have had a hard time pulling this one off. He fed you one that didn't even exist. It's some weird daydream and a dream without a plan is never a goal.

“The Canada Job Grant will result in one important thing – a new or better job,” said the reassuring voice-over in the TV ads.
The problem: The program was never launched and is still on hold. The job grants were announced in the 2013 federal budget, but it called for an agreement with the provinces, which have so far refused to buy in.
Employment and Social Development Canada spent between $2.5 million and $2.6 million on the ad campaign. That figure excludes radio ads funded by the Finance Department.

 Don't believe me? Go to any community college or vocational school and ask them. There's nothing. 

[The] cash came from an $11-million fund set aside last year for Employment and Social Development Canada to promote the government as a job creator.
Before the Canada Job Grant TV ad went to air, the government paid Environics Research Group almost $70,000 to conduct market research. Focus groups saw a near-final version of the commercial.
Environics concluded: "The main message was consistently seen as positive and one that inspired hope…. In light of seeing the new ad for the Canada Job Grant, most now believe the Government of Canada is on the right track regarding skills training and the job market in Canada.”

 Shall I translate that for you? Sure. It's called bullshit. They had nothing, they fed you a line and in the end you get absolutely nothing. Stephen Harper set aside $11 million to feed you a line of bullshit. There is no job training program and there are no jobs.

He's lying to you ... in your face. And he's doing it to you with your money.

Why?

Power. Harper, never known for being able to think on his feet, likes all the perks of power and he is quite willing to lie to hang onto it.

The economy of this country is tanking ... fast. The central bank has so much as said so. While the Bank of Canada would like to raise interest rates to keep the currency stable, Harper and his cabinet idiot, Flaherty, are pursuing a course which will drive the Canadian dollar to 68 cents on the US dollar and full-time unemployment to record levels. In the end there will be a dazed population wondering what the hell hit them.

I can hardly wait for his memoirs.

Harper is a phoney. He can't deal with open questions from the media; he leaves questions asked of him in parliament to the daily-appointed crippled moron with a government title; he lies to you over and over and over and then he has it paid for with your tax dollars.

Get this guy in the open, without the screen of protection he has built around himself, and he can be devastated in 30 seconds. Without a script he is reduced to a mail-room clerk.

Stephen Harper is a phoney, a liar and he's costing us our country.