Is the House really supreme or not??

I must admit that I am somewhat amazed by what is going on in the House of Commons these days. The opposition parties stand up every day now and demand public inquiry knowing full-well that the Government will simply ignore the request. How long can this go on? A week? Two maybe? Eventually the opposition parties will have to piss or get off the pot, as they say. Not one of the opposition leaders has the courage to do anything! Quite frankly I am most surprised by Mr. Duceppe's recalcitrance. The Bloc really has nothing to lose here they could even force an election and probably still win a couple seats. 

My message to the opposition leaders is, if you do this for much longer you will look foolish and strengthen the Conservative supporters claim that you are just playing 'gotcha' politics. You must bring forward a motion to hold the Government in contempt, or something substantial to back up your claims that the Government is doing something wrong by not complying with the demands of the House. Otherwise your claim that the House is supreme is hollow and empty because your own actions will have proved that you don't believe this to be true. Only powerful actions on the part of the opposition will properly iterate the claim that the House is supreme. 

Misdirection and Politics. . .. .

Misdirection is a form of deception in which the attention of an audience is focused on one thing in order to distract its attention from another.

 Misdirection takes advantage of the limits of the human mind in order to give the wrong picture and memory. The mind can concentrate on only one thing at a time. The magician uses this to manipulate the "victim's" idea of how the world is supposed to be.

For the word 'magician' read politician. The technique of misdirection has proved frightfully easy for politicians to adapt from the art of magic to the game of politics. I guess Harper doesn't need to be bright, the rest of the people just have to be gullible. 

The Wikipedia page on Misdirection has a section on Magic, Warfare, literature, and TV and Film. Someone really needs to add a section on Misdirection in politics. 

Wake up Canada!

If this country allows the Harper government to prorogue parliament again and sits by and does nothing, then as a nation we probably deserve to fall into fascism. When a nation is unwilling to stand up for democracy and justice it deserves what it gets. The very fact that people on the news channels blithely discuss the failure of the Government to abide by orders of parliament and the idea that the Prime Minister can just dissolve the nation's legislative body in order to avoid bad press and potential retribution from the majority of the House shows just how bad things have gotten. Shame on Michael Ignatieff for his disappearing act in the past week. 

This is what should be happening; the three opposition parties should be on the television every day making it clear that Canada has slipped into dictatorship. They should be filing cases and the World Court, they should be calling on the Canada to be immediately ejected from the Commonwealth of Nations. We have an serious crisis in this country, and just as Germany and Italy slipped into fascism in the 1930s, if we do nothing now we are in real trouble. But the Official Opposition is not even on the radar screen, it is like they have just given up. The NDP is making some noise but it amounts to very little unless we can get unified action on the part of the opposition. 

Wake up Canada, you are losing the fundamental structure of our democracy.

The NDP shows its Hypocritical side . . .

As promised I will be among the first to call the NDP hypocritical when circumstances demand it. The NDP has, of course, not supported the government, nor will they, I believe, when the time comes to actually vote in the House of Commons. But Brad Lavigne is being deeply hypocritical recently by suggesting that the NDP will take events on a “case by case” basis and could support Harper if he is willing to do something about EI, credit card fees, etc. Well I presume that parties always take it on a case by case basis, however only last spring the NDP said they would not vote for Harper’s budget even before they read it because it didn’t really matter what was in the budget because Harper could not be trusted, period. I happen to agree with that position. However, what has changed Mr. Lavigne? Has Mr. Harper suddenly become more trustworthy? Why suddenly is it possible for you work with the government now? Hypocrisy, pure and simple. 

Shame on Canada . . .

In Canada we have a government that attempts to use the courts to avoid living up to its basic human rights obligations. What a terrible shame. Stephen Harper is distroying Canada's international reputation and showing that it has no respect for Canadian or international law in the Omar Khadr case. 

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/08/24/conservatives-khadr.html

Partisanship past and future . . . Continued

Here is a good example of the outrageous, deeply ignorant, ad homonym, and for the most part completely wrong, criticism of the NDP coming out of Liberal blogs. 

The New Democrat Party are sanctimonious, arrogant, pious, inflexible, uncooperative, self-serving, beholden to union interests, trapped in the 1960s, white, cowardly, anti-business, and anti-fiscal responsibility.

Now this stuff could just as easily have been written by a Conservative blogger and when it comes to this kind of ignorant and abusive behavior I really think it is below comment or contempt. (I won't even point out the glaring grammatical error but I will let you find it for yourself). I think the 'trapped in the 1960s' comment is quite amusing, particularly given the slow death that Capitalism is suffering as we speak. 

But most significantly this little snippet reminds me of the similarity of many Liberals to the Conservatives not only in content but in style. And that, my friends, is the real rub. It reminds me of someone I know who hates her mother and has slowly become exactly like her. The Liberals are growing ever closer to the Conservative party and it almost seems as they strike out against the NDP as a kind of veiled self-loathing as a result of their own failures both in terms of their image and in terms of substantive political discourse. For years now the Liberals have been telling us that the Conservatives don't play well with others and yet this blog abuse of the NDP has become endemic. The Liberal Party was once an important and vital political institution in Canada but alas, no longer. 

As I have said many times, I belong to no party, and will criticize any political policy, strategy, or style with which I disagree. But in the age in which people have been slowly blinded by a huge lie of (so-called) market ideology, there are many cases in which the NDP has been the only party that has stood up and talked about the various failures of this market. And many Liberals have shown incredible hypocrisy by defending universal healthcare in light of the debate in the US while at the same time excoriating the NDP which is the party of universality in this country. So it goes . . . 

Iran and our own Democracies.

The events is Iran are tragic and profoundly unjust. However, we in the Western ‘democracies’ love to point to democratic failures elsewhere and have little inclination to turn a critical eye on our democratic processes. We imagine that we have more or less perfect democracies and that we could never be subject to the kind of oppression that the people in Iran are experiencing. But we shouldn’t be so smug and events in Iran should give us pause to consider our own situation.

In the last General Election in Canada a little less than 60% of registered voters turned out to vote. The Conservatives won about 40% of those votes. This means that about twenty-five percent of registered voters voted for the ruling party. Now given that a certain percentage of adults are registered or cannot register to vote, this means that we can conservatively estimate that perhaps 20% of adults in Canada voted for the ruling party. Now if the Conservatives had won few more seats they would be a majority government and rule as a de facto dictatorship with less that quarter of the people supporting them. (Keep in mind now that given Harper’s complete disregard for the courts in cases when they decide against his agenda when I say a de facto dictatorship I don’t think it is hyperbole) Now such a circumstance must be treated with suspicion and to say that this is democratic is surely questionable. This is particularly disturbing when one considers that all of these candidates were chosen by unaccountable local constituency offices and many of them were parachuted in by the upper management of the party.

Now, as undemocratic as our system is at a practical level, we should keep in mind that if millions of people had massed in Ottawa at Parliament Hill suggesting that the will of the majority is being ignored in the organization of government, our Prime Minister would be even quicker to call out the army to disperse such crowds that the Iranian clerics have been. Anyone who doesn’t believe it is irretrievably naive.

So while you are watching the terrible events unfold in Iran, don’t be so quick to feel comfortable and superior in the nature of our democracy. We have plenty to work on here in our ‘democracies’ and we should get to work. 

Convention of Cintra

The Convention of Cintra was an agreement signed in August of 1808 which allowed the defeated French Troops to evacuate from Portugal, thus allowing Napoleon’s forces to escape from the British, ensuring nearly six more years of French occupation for Spain. The Convention of Cintra deeply disturbed many in England including radicals who, though they supported the early days of the French Revolution and similar political reforms at home, were disgusted by French aggression on the continent and the wilful slaughter of Spanish citizens. Several of the English Romantics spoke out against the Convention. Leigh Hunt, close friend of Byron and Shelley, used his periodical the Examiner to attack the Duke of York, the King’s brother who had been the head of the army and was seen as the main perpetrator of the Convention. Hunt’s attack nearly landed him in jail but he managed to escape with the help of a very good defence attorney. Wordsworth wrote a pamphlet condemning the Convention which was edited by his friend Thomas De Quincey. In a poem written at the same time as the pamphlet Wordsworth wrote:

I weigh the hopes and fears of suffering Spain;
For her consult the auguries of time,
And through the human heart explore my way;
And look and listen – gathering, whence I may,
Triumph, and thoughts no bondage can restrain.

Lord Byron also lamented the Convention in lines fro his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

And ever since that martial synod met,
Britannia sickens, Cintra! at thy name.

What will the poets write about our own political troubles? The tribulations of Canadian politics are, perhaps, only a storm in a teacup compared to the Peninsular War. But our parliament has been prorogued and the precedent has been set for all future Prime Ministers to simply squelch the sovereignty of the House on a partisan whim. And now, just to reiterate his rule by decree, Harper will appoint a bunch of senators after he had lost the confidence of the House. The implications of this are monumental for our political system. Our soulless and sinister Prime Minister would be glad to rip the very heart out of our system for his own petty and partisan interests. Consider in what interest he is really acting.