The Transformation Is Complete

 With Pierre Poilievre the newly anointed leader of the CPC, Canadians can take a step back and breathe a sight of relief - the masquerade is over. 

Ever since its formation in 2003, the CPC has been a hardline right wing ideologue party that cloaked itself in the moderate nature of the old PCs.  They called themselves Tories, and under Harper’s leadership, they were more or less able to maintain the appearance of not being quite as radical as many said they were behind the scenes. 

Then they won a majority in 2011.  No longer fearing losing power by way of a confidence motion in parliament, Harper allowed the party to begin implementing its more aggressive policies - although there was some restraint because Harper still believed he could be re-elected.  

Major project impact assessment processes were gutted, agencies stripped of their power to make rulings on substantive matters, laws related to citizenship were modified, making many Canadians’ citizenship conditional, and they tried enacting what amounts to a voter suppression law (guess who wrote that little stinker?  - Oh right - they party just picked him as their leader).  

Then there was the 2015 election.  Some very high priced advisors came in and the CPC introduced a series of policies that to be kind, most Canadians found appallingly racist at their core.  

That was just the party dropping the veil.  Way back in 2013, I wrote a piece on here comparing Harper’s governing style to the traits associated with modern day fascism (not Hitler’s fascism, but rather that fascists have become since the end of WWII).  I was surprised then by the number of boxes on that list that Harper ticked off.  It wasn’t just a few.  No, it was a lot.

Having watched the Reform party emerge from Alberta politics, I had always been suspicious of how easily that movement could slide into authoritarianism, if not into overt fascism.  There was an ugly underside to Reform that few outside of the “Alberta Bubble” seemed to recognize.  “Oh, they aren’t really that bad”, or “Once in power, the normal constraints on power will moderate their behaviour” were common refrains.  Then there was the reality of it - the radicalism, and fervent belief that they had the “Right of the Matter” in all things to do with government meant that they chafed at those restraints.  The 2015 election was merely where the party dropped any pretence of being “nice”.  

In selecting Poilievre, the CPC has signalled that the takeover is complete.  What remained of the old PCs is dead, done and buried. It was notable that on Poilievre’s “coronation night”, Peter MacKay declined to speak.  Even the last leader of the PCs couldn’t bring himself to say anything. 

The CPC may attempt to cloak itself in “reasonableness”, but that seems unlikely with a man like Poilievre being the public face of the party. He isn’t a man known for being reasonable to begin with.

Since the departure of Stephen Harper in 2015, the party has changed - the factions that Harper was able to hold in check through sheer force of will are no longer so easily tamed - they’ve seen how they can take a bigger slice of the pie - the MAGA movement in the US, and the Kenney-led UCP have shown them what they can do by being more overt.  

Poilievre has shown us through his run at this leadership that in fact he is perfectly willing to let the extremes off leash, and they have heard that message loud and clear. Expect the next policy convention to be a sharp turn even further right.  Topics that had been off the table under Harper will be on the table now - and it’s going to be ugly. 

Doubling Down on Racism - The Chris Champion Edition

 Over at the Dorchester Review, we find one Chris Champion doubling down on his position that the "Indian Residential Schools (IRS) really weren't all that bad".  

The dust-up on Twitter starts a few days ago, but culminates in a series of posts like this one, depicting students "having an absolute blast on that play structure", for which the poster got well blasted in the responses.  

First of all, I will point out that WWII Nazi propaganda showed us pictures of smiling children in concentration camps, and prisoners playing football - that doesn't change the brutality of the conditions they were kept in - it was still propaganda. 

For context, the Dorchester Review is a quasi-intellectual publication operated by the same Chris Champion that led the writing of the much criticized Social Studies components in the Kenney Government's proposed curriculum revisions - we'll come back to that.  For now, I want to focus on what the Dorchester Review's Twitter account has posted, and an article that was published on their website this morning.  Given the tone and tenor of what is written in the article, and what I have seen on Twitter, I assume that whoever is running the Dorchester Review Twitter account is either Chris Champion himself, or someone very close to Mr. Champion. (does it really matter?)  

This morning, in reply to this tweet, and several others, we find the following tweet: 

Which just happens to link to an article on the subject written by Mr. Champion.  Let's take a closer look at Mr. Champion's ideas here, shall we? 

Twisting the Night Away ...

 I won’t waste much time directly addressing the attempted coup that took place in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday this past week. Others have already covered it in considerable depth, and the fallout will no doubt take months or more to sort out.  

However, Maclean’s decided to publish something today that I think deserves to be smacked around for continuing exactly the patterns that I have become increasingly critical of conservatism in Canada for following. 

The column, entitled “Let’s Not Waste This Crisis in American Democracy”, and is written by former Harper-era communications guy Andrew MacDougall.  Please, go and read it.  When you are done reading it, I’ll explain just how twisted it really is. 

Institutional Racism In Conservative Ideology

This post has been evolving for quite a long time.  However, in the last few days, a series of pieces have been published which bring together several threads of thought that I have been exploring for the last several years.  

There has long been a degree of bigotry and racism underlying modern day conservative ideologies.  At a glance, it appears to have its roots in the politics of religious literalism and the desire for simple, black-and-white explanations of the world in which we live.  My thinking on this matter has clarified enormously in the last few days.

The first part of this was a very thoughtful analysis published in the Toronto Star:  "The Ideological Roots of Stephen Harper's Vendetta Against Sociology".

Harper’s two disparaging comments about sociology, however, also need to be understood alongside his gutting of the long-form census in 2010. It is widely accepted that this action fundamentally undermined Canada’s ability to understand its own demographics, long-term social trends, and inequalities — in short, its sociology.

So what does Harper have against sociology? First, Harper is clearly trumpeting a standard component of neo-liberal ideology: that there are no social phenomena, only individual incidents. (This ideology traces back to Margaret Thatcher’s famous claim that “there is no such thing as society.”) Neo-liberalism paints all social problems as individual problems. The benefit of this for those who share Harper’s agenda, of course, is that if there are no social problems or solutions, then there is little need for government. Individuals are solely responsible for the problems they face.

If this isn't chilling to you, it certainly should be, because it is a concise explanation of the apparent blindness of the Harper government to the consequences of decisions such as cancelling the long form census and other tools which can be used to inform government policy.

The second and third pieces of this story were published in the Calgary Sun today.  The first being Lorne Gunter's column:  Aboriginal Leaders: Canada's Shame in its Relations With First Nations.

Aboriginal leaders claim the Harper government's decision highlights Canada's "shame" in its relations with First Peoples. They believe it is proof of widespread racism and sexism in the government and in the broader Canadian society as a whole. 

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau says the Harper government is "out of touch" and "on the wrong side of history." 

The United Nations - that paragon of sanctimony, hypocrisy and inaction on real human rights abuses around the world - has chimed in. 

And even the country's police chiefs have insisted something must be done. 

So does all this support mean an inquiry really would be a good idea? 

No, it is simply another example of how much our nation's elites (police chiefs included) are seized by political correctness.

It's true that aboriginal women and girls are killed or disappear with greater frequency than non-aboriginal women - nearly three times as much. But the "why" is not as much of a mystery as our chattering classes would have us believe.

Most murdered or disappeared aboriginal women are not the victims of some vast conservative conspiracy or of white racism. They are the victims of the men in their lives.

Most killed or abused aboriginal women are killed or abused by aboriginal men - not callous white cops or violent white johns.

Wait a minute.  Nobody in their right mind is going to believe that a public inquiry is going to identify the guilty culprits.  That isn't the purpose of an inquiry.  The purpose of such an inquiry is to ask much bigger questions.  Questions such as whether the conditions on reservations contribute to domestic violence, and how a man like Picton managed to operate for multiple years, or why aboriginal people are grossly over-represented in Canada's prisons.

Of course, if you take a simplistic, black-and-white view of the world, any murder boils down to "catch the offender and punish them".  Simple, easy and horrendously misguided.   If you don't ask the big picture questions about these situations, you will never fully understand what is going on.  In fact, one is left very much in the dark, with the rather ridiculous assumption that bad people do bad things and that's all there is to it.

Anyone with even a little bit of grounding in reality and common sense will have long ago realized that people respond individual to their circumstances, and collectively to their environment.  Sociology is the study of societies and their behaviours.  The systems within a societal context will influence the individuals living in it.

In Canada, we have over two centuries of relations with the First Nations.  There are enormous problems with these relations, and much of it goes to the differences in what the First Nations understand the treaties to mean and how the Indian Act enacts those same treaties.  I know there are a plethora of other issues to be considered as well, but at its core, the Indian Act is a profoundly flawed piece of legislation which assumes the "superiority" of Colonial-era British society relative to the First Nations and very much embodies a series of structures that to modern eyes arguably impose a degree of structural and system racism which acts against our First Nations.

The overly simplistic rubric of the Harper Government blinds it to these issues.

The second item was a column by Michael Coren:  In The Wake of Tragedy a Sobering Reality

As a Catholic I can tell you with absolute certainty that if countless horrors had been committed by Catholics in the name of Catholicism, I and legions of my co-religionists would protest. I know the same would be true of most other religions and cultures.

Coren's claim that he would protest if countless horrors had been committed in the name of Catholicism is of course completely undermined by his own past utterances on a wide range of matters, not to mention his relative silence with regards to the sex abuse scandal that has plagued his Church for decades now.

But, we are told, these repeated beheadings and murders have nothing to do with most law-abiding, civilized Muslims. Perhaps so, but then it could be argued that neither does a book by Salman Rushdie or a drawing by a Danish cartoonist but that hasn’t stopped endless demonstrations and threats. 

Then there is the reality of the Islamic response. While I am sure that most Muslims are appalled by what happened to James Foley, even a cursory glance at social media reveals thousands of comments defending and justifying what happened, by Muslims on every continent. It might be comforting to believe that Islamist violence and bloodlust is a fringe psychosis, but every survey and all of the anecdotal evidence indicates that a sizeable minority of Muslims support it, an even greater number feel it is in some obscure way justified, and more still refuse to condemn it.

Funny how Coren can see this so clearly in the Muslim faith, and is so quick to call it out while turning a blind eye to the centuries of misdeeds done in the name of Catholicism.

While Coren may well be his own special brand of crazy, his blindness to the systemic racism and bigotry of his position is no different than that of Harper.  The simple, harsh reality is that the ideology they all subscribe to blinds them to the systemic problems they are creating and the very problems which aggravate already awful situations.

The minute you take a position that there "is no such thing as society", it becomes easy to wash one's hands of collective responsibility.  Perhaps the even greater irony of that is that same flight from collective responsibility makes it easier to label entire groups as "other" and criticize them for not meeting whatever arbitrary standard you may set.

I am quite certain that if you were to confront Harper, Gunter or Coren with the implicit bigotry of their positions, they would deny it.  Their very ideological constructs are so limited in their understanding of large, complex systems like societies that they cannot comprehend the idea that their positions foster othering and judgments on incomplete information.

A stage is not only set upon which racism and ethnic bigotry can flourish.  In Harper's Canada, it is not only growing and flourishing, but the flames of ire are being fanned by it.  I can only hope that we are able to replace our current government with one whose perspective encompasses a much broader view of what Canada is, and what it can become.

The Politics Of Othering

I don't like Pauline Marois.  I never have.  Frankly, she reminds me of a teacher I had in grade 6 who ruled the classroom through fear and intimidation ... and she keeps on using political tactics that reek of the same stupidity.

Today's entry into the race for the bottom that is the Quebec Election comes from Marois in the form of "voter fraud" claims.

The PQ called a news conference Sunday morning to express concern about media reports of English-speakers and other non-francophones from outside the province trying to vote in the April 7 election. 

PQ candidate Bertrand St-Arnaud wants the province's chief electoral officer to closely examine attempts to register to vote. 

"We don't want this election stolen by people from Ontario and the rest of Canada," St-Arnaud said.

Really?  ... and just who might this sudden influx of anglophone voters be?

The comments come after the head of an electoral office for a downtown Montreal riding, Sainte-Marie-Saint-Jacques, resigned on Friday over concerns about the registration process. 

Mathieu Vandal told Montreal's Le Devoir newspaper there had been an increase in the number of non-francophones trying to register and he wasn't confident voters were being properly screened.There have been numerous reports recently of English-speaking university students trying to register to vote in the election. 

Some students have complained they were turned away even though they believed they had the necessary documentation. 

Oh ... students.  Well yes, there's so many of them in Quebec that if all of them voted, they might be able to sway a seat or two.

Of course, this is actually the PQ playing two wedges at once.  The first wedge being to riff on Poilievre's claims of "widespread voter fraud" (which we know are BS), along with playing a blatantly racist card - namely whipping up fear of "anglophone voters" trying to steal the election among rural, french speaking Quebecois voters.  (The so-called "pure laine Quebecois" who have been the backbone of separatist movements in Quebec for years)

Quebec has a population in the 8,000,000 range (give or take a bit), with a fairly large number of post-secondary educational institutions - somewhere around 70 colleges, and 17 universities.  Even if all of them are the size of the University of Calgary - some 20,000 students, that's still a relative handful of voters - even if they were all anglophones from outside Quebec in the first place.

Of course, Marois has been playing divisive politics since she rolled out the bogus "Charter of Quebec Values" legislation, and it's only going to get worse as her polling numbers slide.  Like Harper (whose playbook she seems to be liberally borrowing from), she can't seem to see anything other than hostile solutions to the problems she faces.  

It's unfortunate, but not entirely shocking.    In some ways, Harper and Marois are political allies.  

Harper doesn't care what happens in Quebec - it just creates opposition seats as far as he is concerned, so if Quebec chose to separate it's to his political advantage.  Marois, of course, doesn't want to see anything working in Quebec's favour federally so that she can claim that "Federalism Doesn't Work" (which really makes the SCoC decision WRT Marc Nadon a double whammy - it shoots both Harper and Marois' positions full of holes).

Frankly, I don't believe that the majority of Quebec wants to even consider a referendum on separation at this time.  Marois got elected the same way Harper did - it wasn't a vote _for_ the PQ, it was a vote against the incumbent government that had been in power too long.  Now that the referendum discussion is back on the table, she's back-pedalling fast trying to change the channel.

Calgary Sun Plays The Racist Card ...

It's never been a big secret that lurking just underneath the surface of Canada's right wing politics is a religiously-inspired vein of racism.  It reared its head back in the late 1980s when the debate over turbans in the RCMP was at full volume, and the Reform Party voted to ban turbans as part of the RCMP uniform, and frankly has never really gone away.

In the Calgary Sun today, we find a column decrying the alleged silence over various attacks on Christians in the Muslim world.

More or less, the reasoning in the column seems to be that the world community is being "silent" about these attacks, and is somehow being hypocritical about it.

A church is bombed in Pakistan and 85 people are killed while more than 140 more are maimed. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility. 

Violence and civil unrest rocks Damascus and Aleppo, forcing Syrian churches to close their doors, possibly forever. 

Thousands of elite Philippine troops battle Muslim guerrillas of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) who raze churches before they occupy the key port of Zamboanga. 

Christians in the southern Egyptian town of Dalga are forced to watch as a Muslim mob set fire to an ancient monastery and steal its contents. 

All played out against the backdrop of a shopping mall terror attack in Kenya where Muslims are asked to leave before hostages are taken.

The implicit message underlying all of this is that Islam is a "violent religion" bent on erasing Christianity from the face of the earth ... and why, oh why, isn't the world's political leadership speaking out on this?

According to the column's writer, it's because they are afraid of the Muslims:

As long as our ruling elites remain terrified of offending Islam, the self-proclaimed religion of peace that claims sole ownership of the term ‘persecuted minority,’ the fundamentalists will do as they please.

But, it is not so simple as that in reality.  Yes, as the article points out Canada has spoken out on such matters.  What the article fails to recognize is that such statements will have no effect whatsoever.  The radicals which carry out these acts are not themselves governments, and do not care one whit what governments have to say about it.

The only "threat" that we can make to them is a full scale invasion to eradicate the extremists.  Except that anyone with their head out of the sand will have long ago recognized that such approaches don't work.  Western powers have spent the last decade and a bit cleaning up the mess made in Afghanistan and Iraq, and as many had predicted prior to the invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, the radicals had simply gone to ground at the height of the hostilities, and are now quietly re-emerging from the shadows to assert their claims to power again.

But, underlying the column is the usual line of xenophobia about a religion and culture that frankly most people in the western countries simply do not understand.  We're supposed to be afraid of these people because of their religion, instead of the fact that they have organized themselves into what amount to paramilitary gangs like al-Shabab.

Canada is a uniquely peaceable country.  I'm not sure what it would take to provoke the kind of rioting that we have witnessed in Egypt, nor do I particularly want to find out.   That makes it all the more puzzling when we see the kinds of rioting on TV news that has resulted in churches being burned down.  We have space here - lots of it.  What provokes a mob to attack a monastery?  Who knows - perhaps when this land has been occupied by competing powers for a few millennia we will have a more direct understanding.  Many of those religious sites in the Middle East have belonged to different faith communities multiple times, and there are competing claims for the same location.

So ... why is the Sun publishing columns which simply repeat tired, old arguments about the "evils" of a particular faith?  Largely because they can.  It's easy, and it plays to the fears that the Reform/Alliance/Conservative parties have used to build up their base.  There's no secret that the Sun has become the unofficial mouthpiece of the CPC in Canada, saying the things which the base wants to hear, but that Harper doesn't dare allow to be uttered by his politicians.  There is a good reason for this. Fear is a powerful weapon in politics.  Bush II demonstrated that in spades.  The poorly understood, like cultures in far off lands, are prime targets for "othering" - painting in a particular light that seems reasonable until you start asking prickly questions about things.

Why now?   That's a bit more of a puzzle.  It's not like there's anything going on in Canada that justifies this kind of ignorance based attack ... or is there?  In Calgary right now, we are in the throes of a municipal election, and the incumbent mayor is a Muslim.  Make no mistake about it, the Sun and their far right power masters, have been supremely angry ever since Naheed Nenshi was elected in 2010.  They have made no secret of their desire to get rid of him.  If they can chisel away at his support a little bit by calling into question him by way of their characterization of his faith, they will.

Could They Be Any More Blatant?

This business about Terrorism arrests (cue doomsday music) reeks of politics.

In the last little while, we've had the HarperCon$ prattling on about the "Russian threat", now terrorism has reared its ugly head? Hmmm...smells rotten to me.

It starts to really stink when we get the oh-so-wise Vic Toews urging people to spy on their neighbors.

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’s pitch Thursday comes shortly after Mounties charged three Canadian citizens of South Asian heritage in connection with an alleged domestic terror plot.

He urged “all freedom-loving Canadians” to “be vigilant” against terrorist threats.

But the minister later singled out assistance from ethnic communities as key.

Asked to define what he meant by vigilant, Mr. Toews cited the example of Canadian Somalis, disclosing that this community – which is overwhelmingly Muslim – had recently brought suspicions regarding extremists to authorities.

“I think it’s that kind of vigilance that is absolutely necessary in order to deal with these kinds of problems,” Mr. Toews said.

Uh huh. I don't know about you, but this smells to me. Not only is it designed to stir up fear among Canadians in general, it deliberately makes "Others" out of visible minorities. If this doesn't scare you, it should. The last time we saw government propaganda of this nature, it was in WW II era - and it was used to justify some amazingly horrific acts on the part of both citizens and governments in North America; and it's well documented just how the Nazis used that same technique.

Racism, Xenophobia and Intolerance Are Alive And Well

I'm appalled. Riding home this afternoon, I turned down the main road that leads into my community to find a group of demonstrators with placards protesting the arrival of a Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka.

They were waving a British Empire-era ensign flag and a handful of placards with slogans like "Canada is Closed", "Tamils = Trouble" and so on. There weren't many of them - ten at most.

While I have reservations about the arrival of these people, the fact is that they're here and each of them has a story. Given that Sri Lanka is just emerging from a civil war, and the Tamils are on the losing side of that war, it seems entirely conceivable to me that many may well rightly fear for their safety.

It's a sad statement that the knuckle-dragging crowd out there sees fit to wave their ignorance and xenophobia in public in response to a group of people arriving who they apparently fear.

Insecurity Response

In the wake of the Christmas Day attempt at man-bombing a plane, there has been a renewed level of agitation from the right-wingnuts for racial and religious profiling to be used for screening people at the airport.

The problems with this are myriad. How do you identify someone's religion? For that matter, how do you identify if someone is of a particular ancestry - especially in North America where there are a lot of people born and raised here who might appear to be of Arab ancestry? Or for that matter, just what makes someone "visible" as a member of a particular ethnic population?

The practical answer is that you can't - and it won't work - ever.

Such approaches to threat management are just as ineffective as the ridiculous restrictions that have been placed on people flying into the US in the last week.

They do, however, have some insidious side effects that we should be thinking about. Let us presume, for a moment, that there was such a profiling scheme implemented. In effect, what you have just created is two queues at the airport - one for whatever group(s) you designate as deserving additionally scrutiny, and one for the rest of the population.

How is this any different from the racial segregation policies that were a part of South Africa's Apartheid era?

They aren't. Period.

In fact, such policies plant the seeds for the same kind of insane limitations on freedoms and liberties that were in place for decades in South Africa. (Not to mention segregation era USA, come to that) What they do is confirm the assumed notion that so many people have that being different is somehow a threat. This is precisely the kind of policy that makes neo-Nazi and other racist organizations ecstatically happy - because it gives them the "moral authority" (in their view) to beat the tar out of whomever raises their ire.

In fact, what it lays down is the foundation for exactly the kind of racism and bigotry that our very laws have been designed to eradicate.

As an aside, just how do you "know" somebody's religion? You can ask them, but the determined will quite happily lie to you about it; and people change religious affiliation all the time. How many of us in this society are "lapsed Catholics", or perhaps are Catholics that switched to one of the Charismatic churches?

The real answer is to investigate and root out threats one at a time - as they turn up. Not with heavy military action, but with counter-intelligence and espionage. Focus on undermining the very organizations that facilitate these actions the same way they operate - in the shadows.