Poilievre replies and I laugh

For those of you who asked me to keep you posted on whether Pierre Poilievre replied to my letter which appears in this blog on April 28th, he did. But quite expectedly, the reply was less than useless. Instead of addressing my concerns Mr. Poilievre simply quotes himself at length from House of Commons records. And the pieces he quotes didn't even address the events that I had specifically talked about. So it goes. I here post my reply to his reply. 

Dear Mr. Poilievre 

In reply to my letter of April 28^th you failed utterly to address my concerns. Instead of making a serious reply to my various charges against you, you simply chose to give me a recitation of some of your words from the House of Commons. Now besides the sad and obvious fact that only an extreme egotist would compose a letter consisting almost entirely of self-quotation, you even failed to address the actual events that I had raised. 

Your reply demonstrated that you failed entirely to understand that what I was pointing to was an overall pattern of petty, abusive, childish, and ultra-partisan behavior on your part. Politics should always be about ‘building people up’ not tearing them down, and your behavior in and out of the House has consistently done the later. You quote yourself as saying that “it is very important that people in this chamber conduct themselves in a way that make their constituents proud.” Now, overlooking the obvious grammatical error in this statement, I must point out that you certainly do not appear to live by this adage in your professional conduct.  

The most astute thing you stated in your letter was the observation that you are “not right all of the time.” Indeed you are correct in this claim. And let me point out the most obvious mistake in your letter. Again quoting yourself, you write, “What is key in our democracy is that the people are sovereign.” Again, overlooking the rather awkward grammar, this statement demonstrates that you don’t even understand the very political system under which you serve. We live in a ‘constitutional monarchy,’ and in such a system sovereignty flows downward from the Queen (or King) through the Governor General and to the House of Commons. Sovereignty is a Middle-English word which means ‘pre-eminence’ or absolute authority. And in a constitutional monarchy this pre-eminence is in the hands of the Monarch. Thus, people often use the word monarch and sovereign interchangeably. In our political system the people are not, as you claim, sovereign. You are simply wrong and the fact that your Prime Minister had to go to the Queen’s representative and ask her to prorogue parliament demonstrates that you are wrong. If you were speaking, instead, about your desire that the people be considered sovereign then I recommend that you declare your opposition to our system of constitutional monarchy and tell your constituents that you are, in fact, a republican. Saving this, please learn how the system works. 

As one of your constituents I ask you once again to improve your behavior in and out of the House of Commons. Instead of taking the opportunities that you have of speaking in public to make petty criticisms of others, please use them to build up the spirits and confidence of the Canadian people in these troubled times. 

Kirby Evans

Democracy's Failures

Well the people of British Columbia, in their (lack of) wisdom, reelected the most right-wing, self-interested, hypocritical premier in the country. But as anyone who has read my blog knows, I believe that democracy is a system severely compromised by market forces that distort results in favor of a corporate agenda and centralizing power. Democracy as it presently exists can be said to be significantly failing the very principles it was instituted to uphold. With this in mind, on this rather depressing day, I bring you some other failures of democracy.

-1933 Hitler’s Nazi Party elected with 44% of the vote.

-1967 Lestor Madox elected Governor of Georgia.

-1963-87 George Wallace elected Governor of Alabama (Four Times!)

-1968 & 72 Richard Nixon elected twice (the 2^nd time with 49 of 50 states)

-1991 Boris Yetlsin elected President of Russia by 57%

-1993 Derek Beackon elected Councilor for Milwall under the BNP banner

-2000 Vladimir Putin elected President of Russia twice!

-2009 the Fascist UBP wins the Cyprus Elections

 

The story continues . . . 

What has become of radicalism?

“The poor are set to labour – for what? Not the food for which they famish; not the blankets for want of which their babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels; not those comforts of civilization without which civilized man is far more miserable than the meanest savage – no: for the pride of power, for the miserable isolation of pride, for the false pleasures of one hundredth part of society.  -Shelley

 

It is remarkable that radicals like Shelley who wrote nearly two hundred years ago, still sound radical today. The vulnerable are still everywhere the victims of the powerful, the majority continue to labor under atrocious conditions for little money while the rich and powerful work less under better conditions for a great deal more money. Political debates rage but the primary political parties differ little in their basic paradigm and few are ready to make any genuine changes that will raise average people up to a tolerable level. The great radicals of the late 18^th and early 19^th century, like Paine, Godwin, Thelwall, Holcroft, William Blake, etc., are even radical by today’s standards. How little progress we have made.

 

Massacre in Sri Lanka and traffic concerns

Another bloodbath. Another mass-killing. Once again certain forces in the United Nations warned against a coming nightmare, and once again too many ignored the warnings. The New York Times reports UN spokesman, Gordon Weiss, saying that over the weekend the civilian death toll had gone substantially up and included more than 100 children. Thousands have been wounded over the past month and the pain and suffering is incalculable. But once again Western Governments have barely raised an eyebrow to another massacre. Here in Canada Tamils have been engaging in various peaceful protests, ostensibly aimed at just getting a meeting with a representative of Prime Minister Harper’s government. At first the Government said that they would not meet with anyone who was displaying the flag of the Tamil Tigers, because the Tigers are considered a ‘terrorist’ organization and the flag is banned in Canada. (The whole idea of banning a symbol is another sticky issue we can leave for another time.) But even when the Tamil protesters removed the flag, the government refused to meet with them and hear their concerns. And average Canadians seem to be horrified not by the massacres in Sri Lanka but by the gall of protestors ‘holding up traffic’ during their protestors. People forget the long and  significant tradition of peaceful resistance from Thoreau to Gandhi  and the roll that such protest can play in waking people up to important issues. But the real tragedy here is the degree to which Western Governments, particularly right-wing ones, are willing to ignore the brutal militarism of governments with which they are allied, all the while painting practically any resistance movement with the brush of terrorism. The Tamils have legitimate and serious concerns regarding their treatment by the Sri Lankan government, concerns that have been largely ignored by governments in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. Now average people are paying the price for the failure of those in power to act on behalf of the weak and vulnerable. It seems to me that people turn to armed resistance only as a last resort and over time these resistance forces often lose touch with their roots and become little more than criminal enterprises. But the regression into crime and violence is the failure of people and governments to address injustices from the earliest possible moment. The Tamil Tigers may in fact be a terrorist organization. But we need to get past such issues and talk to whoever is willing to talk and speak up for those with no voice. Instead of worrying about whether a protest group is holding up traffic let us open up a discourse with them and try to address their concerns. And most of all let’s remember that governments can be just as criminal and brutal as ‘terrorists’ in the pursuit of their interests and the most vulnerable are always the ones who pay. 

Bullies by Proxy

In the darker moments of the soul, and I know many like me have felt the same, I am overcome with pessimism motivated by the apparent tolerance, advocacy even, of the worst form of oppressive power. People seem drawn to power hungry leaders who, if one is at all observant, clearly have no interest in the people over whom they rule, but are simply anxious, grasping, selfish souls who strive to overcome their own desperate feelings of inadequacy by controlling others and everything in their possible purview. Our own Prime Minister, for example. One need not be particularly astute in political terms to understand that he would do anything to gain and hold on to power for the sole purpose of aggrandizing his warped and childlike ego which is profoundly weak because the man has no soul and no humanity. And thus he surrounds himself with spiritually small and intellectually miniscule men who, like himself, have not the empathy to reach out to others. They cannot fight for the vulnerable or console the down-trodden because they are themselves so desperately weak and wounded that they rail against the defenseless or those at risk as though they might raise themselves up to the level of powerful ‘MEN,’ when it really just demonstrates their pathetic limitations. Real human, and humane, strength is demonstrated not by our ability for bluster and bullying, but by our ability to put our own egos aside and take ourselves down to the level of the weak and vulnerable and raise them up.  

And yet angry and aggressive people, who feel that they are superior to others, or secretly suspect that they aren’t even equal to the rest, seem to like to have bullies for their representatives because they are ersatz images of themselves. Thus average conservative voters can be bullies by proxy. This political fact troubles and depresses me more than any other.

Oh, that the free would stamp the impious name

Of KING into the dust! or write it there,

So that this blot upon the page of fame

Were as a serpent’s path, which the light air

Erases, and the flat sands close behind!

 

               - Shelley

Harper, Accountability, and the Future

In the Ottawa Sun this week appeared this commentary on the Harper record on the issue of accountability and open government. http://tinyurl.com/accountablegoernment The fact that his appeared in a paper like the Sun demonstrates just how bad thing really are given the Sun's continual endorsement of the Harper government and their ability to ignore so many vital issues. It is a scathing indictment of Harper and his cronies and proves the point that it is not just the policies of Harper that are a problem; it is the threat he poses to democracy that is the real danger. 

But there is something I really don't understand about the Conservative attack on open government and accountability. THey have to know that the time will eventually come when they are are not in government anymore. That is how the system works, the opposition eventually forms government in Western 'democracies.' The Conservatives will then fall victim to the very system that they have created. They will have created a system that so hamstrings the opposition that they will be unable to hold the Liberals to account and will have little cause to complain because they will have been the mechanism that destroyed government accountability in the first place. Watch it happen. Sometime in the near future (either one year of a few) you will be watching Conservatives sitting on opposition benches complaining about the very set of circumstances that they so willfully created. And they will be full of bluster and indignation at the secrecy and lack of accountability of the Liberal Government. 

I just don't understand stuff like that.

What do our Politicians stand for.

In the lead up to the Liberal convention conservative pundits are ratcheting up their rhetoric against Ignatieff in an effort, one supposes, to stem the growing tide of his perceived popularity. Thus far, however, with few obvious targets on which to centre their negative rhetoric, the reoccurring theme of Conservative talking points has been the simple claim that Mr. Ignatieff doesn’t seem to stand for anything. “Sure, he’s smart,” they concede, “but what does he actually stand for?” They ask. And then comes the inevitable reply that he doesn’t stand for anything and that he is all show. Now here is a monumental irony in action. In the lead up to the  2006 election the cornerstone of the Conservatives campaign added up to little more that “We aren’t the Liberals!” On the heels of the Sponsorship scandal the Conservatives estimated that this is all they had to do to get elected. In the next election they stood for so little that they even tried to avoid publishing a platform and only did so a few days before the actual voting day under the pressure of media scrutiny. The platform, by the way said little of any substance. In the end the Conservative Party under Harper’s tutelage has centered almost all of their electoral efforts on attacking the Liberals rather than defining themselves. This  has led to the continual display of irony in which whenever they are embroiled in a problem or scandal their only defense seems to be the refrain that “The Liberals used to do that, and usually worse than we.” The only issues that the Conservative have consistently pursued have been ‘Crime’ and ‘Taxes.’ In the case of crime, this is a typical right-wing scare tactic. The system of law enforcement in Canada, the one that is so woefully lax according to the rhetoric of the Conservatives, has ushered in a gradual decline in Crime over the last thirty years. In this case the media helps to inadvertently promote the Conservative rhetoric that  the country is about to fall into chaos of gang-violence and murderous rampages. However, given the decline in crime, we must conclude that overall the system is working more or less the way it is supposed to. (One could, of course, make a more profound critique of the system’s emphasis on incarceration and lack of preventative social policies. But the point here is simply that the Conservative critique is based on an entirely false premise that crime is rampant and on the increase. ) Somewhat ironically, one of their only actual legislative efforts on crime is to eliminate the long-gun registry, a move that is strongly opposed by police forces across the country. The other issue that the Conservatives have tried to make theirs is taxes. They have tried to represent themselves as the party that has and will decrease your taxes, trying to benefit from the widespread perception that Canadians pay an exceptionally high rate of tax. The main part of their tax policy has been to lower the GST by two points. This is a move that most economists disregard as, at best, totally irrelevant to most people, and at worst, entirely wrongheaded. Even a number of Conservative Party insiders have admitted that the decision to lower the GST was not based on sound economic policy but on a public relations effort. The Conservative also attempted to portray themselves as tax fighters in other sectors like personal and income taxes. Anyone who has filed taxes over the past couple of years knows that in most income brackets taxes have stayed the same or even increased.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that while the Conservatives are trying to portray Mr. Ignatieff as little more than a tweed blazer with no genuine political ideas, the Conservative are even worse than bereft of ideas and that their only idea is to misrepresent themselves, their opponents, and the state of the country. Harper himself cannot even rise to the level of being a tweed blazer; he is only a sweater-vest with a disturbing grin. Next time someone asks what their political opponent stands for, whether Liberal, Conservative, or otherwise, ask them what they really stand for.