Laurie Scott calls for Ontario task force to protect sex slavery victims

These kinds of news stories don't usually make the front news. The general public in the Western world is oblivious to these kinds of stories & thinks that these kinds of things, i.e. sexual violence against vulnerable women & sex slavery only happens in law less countries like Iraq, Syria, Libya, Cambodia, & other African & Latin American countries. And these girls & women who unfortunately fall victims to these are not adults or illegal migrants but born-&-bred Canadians & even as young as 11 years old.

Furthermore, this is happening right here in the largest Canadian city; Toronto. But this is not happening only in Toronto or Canada, but happening all over the Western world; US, UK, & other Western European countries.

People who are involved in the rehabilitation of these victims are saying that this problem is not dying down, but actually exploding in major urban areas of North America & Europe. What the heck is going on?

Well, the problem is borne out of multiple factors:

1. Decreasing role of parents: Western philosophy on family, rightly or wrongly, changed in the last few decades that everyone is responsible for their own lives. Parents can, but actively discouraged, to meddle into their daughters' affairs. Heck, the society even gave that kind of parenting a derogatory name, "helicopter parenting."

Girls were taught from schools to general society that you are your own person & should make your own decision. That's all ok when that young lady is old enough (at least in university) to understand her world around her & see what's going on, but telling that to a teen girl is simply wrong. Mix that "independence" teaching with the love-hate relationship a teen has for his/her parents, & you are only going to get a problem.

2. Broken homes: In the latter half of 20th century, more & more homes start to break up. Every one on their own. Parents, when living separately, got more expenses, & hence, working more & more to bring that extra cash. When single parents are working more & more, & looking less & less after their kids, the kids got the free leash on whatever they can do. Well, from dabbling into drugs to coming into contact with the wrong crowd through those drugs to selling their bodies to get those drugs (when out of money) leads these girls to a life of prostitution & sex slavery.

3. Media's objectification of women: Media is an expert in manipulating social values & thinking. People in 21st century have being programmed for the past few decades that women are sexual objects. Of course, internet & easy accessibility to porn only escalated that problem, but media didn't stop there, too. Men & boys are bombarded day & night that women should be used for sexual purposes & then discarded like used tissues.

Movies & TV shows all show women whimpering after men to take them & use them as they please. Young men are being heavily influenced by latest rap & hip hop music videos & these videos don't exactly show men respecting women. Then, on top of that, we got the Kardashian clan, which, ironically, is the young female generation's idol. That idol is effectively teaching young females to rise to the top of social hierarchy through sex.

4. Female dresses: Yes, inevitably, this topic will be breached. Female dresses is pretty much becoming non-existent in the Western world. Men are wearing more & more clothes, while girls & women are encouraged to take it all off ... in the name of latest fashion. Latest fashion trends from the Kardashians is pretty much showing as much as flesh in the public as a female can. Miley Cyrus is showing young females in the West, & effectively, the whole world, that wearing a few strips of clothes, literally, is enough. Heck, we got stories coming out of Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, & New York, US, that women are publicly strolling around in the nude (after all, what's the point of those strips, too?)

So, what we can then expect from young impressionable girls, when they are being taught from a young age that do whatever you what to do & it's your body, & nobody in the home is teaching them any proper morals & values, & their celebrity idols are prancing around on the worldwide stages in the nude, & they are seeing that their celebrity idols got their fame & fortunes by baring it all?

They definitely are not going to learn to study hard, don't do drugs, wear proper clothes to school, make good friends, & of course, have good role models in their lives. They are learning, & hence, then actively practicing, with not very good end results, to get what they want by using their bodies as a collateral.

Of course, these factors is not the comprehensive list of all that is causing this problem of prostitution. There are lot more factors. These are just the tip of iceberg. But what I'm trying to say is that this "exploding" problem of prostitution is not so easily resolved by a special vice squad or the close collaboration of a few law enforcement agencies. It may just take the problem underground, which is even more dangerous for the victims. This problem is just a symptom of several other social problems & unless, & until, those problems are handled effectively, this problem of prostitution will not go away.
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http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/05/18/laurie-scott-urges-ontario-task-force-to-protecting-sex-slavery-victims.html

Ontario is in the grips of homegrown human trafficking, says a veteran Tory MPP, who is calling for the creation of a provincial task force on sex slavery.

Laurie Scott, the member for Haliburton–Kawartha Lakes–Brock, says women & girls as young as 11 years old are being forced into prostitution here & they are not newcomers from the former Eastern Bloc looking for a better life — they are Canadian-born.

“I’ve heard stories of girls being targeted at the mall food court, the parking lot at their high school or a house party they attended with friends,” she told the legislature last week.

“This province is home to the largest number of domestic human trafficking cases, where victims are born & raised right here in Ontario,” said Scott, who presented a non-binding motion calling on the government to form a special team dedicated to rooting out human trafficking.

It would be similar to the existing guns & gangs unit, in which police officers, Crown prosecutors & social workers work together as a team from beginning to end of an investigation.

“Through this combination of expertise, the task force achieves the dual purpose of apprehending criminals & assisting victims,” Scott said in the introduction to her motion, which passed with all-party support.

Asked whether the passage of the non-binding motion meant a task force would be established, a spokeswoman for Community Safety Minister Yasir Naqvi said the government would continue to work with its partners “to combat this very serious issue.”

Scott said it’s also important to co-ordinate support for women & girls escaping exploitation.

“One aspect where a provincial task force would be immeasurable would be its ability to help facilitate the creation of safe houses solely for the purpose of sheltering human trafficking victims,” she said.

MPPs were told how pimps frequently move prostitutes up & down the Highway 401 corridor both to meet demand & to make police detection much more difficult.

“Young women are lured through personal relationships, systemically isolated from the family & friends, psychologically & physically abused by those who they trusted & in some cases loved,” said Scott.

Human trafficking was recently front & centre at a legislative select committee on sexual violence & harassment against women. Scott is a member of that committee.

Among those that appeared before the committee was Katarina MacLeod, a former prostitute whose agency, Rising Angels, deals with women trying to escape that life. She said modern-day slavery is out of control.

“From what I see working on the front lines it is getting worse … it is really exploding,” MacLeod told the Star, adding many of the women she sees are under 18.

She said she is hearing of more & more women moving from hotel to hotel, in many cases not even knowing what city they are in.

MacLeod agreed a specialized team in the justice system “fighting for these girls” is needed.

Several police services across the province have vice squads that deal with human trafficking & informally share information.

York Regional Police is recognized for its progressive work on human smuggling, especially in dealing with sex trade workers. Det. Sgt. Peter Casey said the force has not arrested a woman on solicitation charges in the past 7 years — but it does throw pimps in jail.

The people behind the smuggling range from organized crime to teenage boys pimping out girls in their schools because there is “huge” money to be made, said Casey.

“Let’s put it this way, if you are a drug dealer … you can only sell that kilo of cocaine once, but if you are a pimp & have a number of young vulnerable women you are exploiting, you can exploit them over & over & over again, day after day.”

Experts said a woman working in the sex trade can generate revenues of $280,000 a year. And that often goes straight into a pimp’s pocket.
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The Ministry of Community Safety & Correctional Services says it has provided about $1.4 million in funding since 2003 to 11 projects under the Proceeds of Crime–Front Line Policing Grant, to help police combat human trafficking in Ontario.

Ontario employers get slap on wrist for mistreating employees

Another one of those articles highlighting how employers are exploiting workers, & the government is dragging its feet in actually doing anything to stop this open exploitation. Employers are not stopping at merely forcing workers to work more hours or work while they are injured or sick but they are also stealing workers' wages by either not paying them outright or delaying their wages.

As I always mention that keep in mind that this is happening in Canada & not in a developing country (where it would be most expected). People all over the world are same; after all, we all have red blood. Corruption & taking from others what's not rightfully ours (out in the open) is considered bad everywhere but it happens everywhere the same.
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http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/05/24/ontario-employers-get-slap-on-wrist-for-mistreating-employees.html

Scarborough resident Sylvia Buchanan was owed thousands by her former employer, who fired her the day after she asked to be officially put on the books as an employee.

Instead, what she got was a nine-month runaround from the Ministry of Labour, the department supposedly meant to protect her against workplace violations.

9 months of waiting for money she was legally owed. 9 months of stress & anguish as the bills piled up. All to get the wages she was entitled to by law.

Buchanan’s assessment of trying to navigate the system?

“It was horrible.

“If I had not pressured the ministers, if I had not constantly called my MPPs, I honestly don’t think this would be resolved,” she says. “I think it would still be in the system somewhere.”

When it comes to enforcing Ontario’s Employment Standards Act, critics say it is workers — not the government — doing the heavy lifting.

Complicating matters is the fact that, by law, workers are supposed to confront their employer about possible mistreatment before filing a complaint with the Ministry of Labour.

When a complaint is lodged, employers are immediately notified & are given the employee’s name, often leading to immediate dismissal.

The employment act offers no protection against unjust dismissal.

“The strongest condemnation of the model is the fact that virtually no employees file complaints, only former employees do,” says David Doorey, an employment law expert & professor at York University.

“People have to make a choice about paying the rent or making a complaint. So people will choose to pay the rent,” adds Deena Ladd of Toronto-based labour rights group the Workers’ Action Centre.

“I think that’s a real indication that the system is not working at all.”

Sylvia Buchanan, who has 3 degrees & more than a decade of teaching experience, began working with private college Oxford Education Group in April 2013, hired to create an English curriculum for the school.

But for more than a year, her boss refused to recognize her as an employee, she says, treating her instead as an independent contractor. Independent contractors have no rights under the Employment Standards Act.

Buchanan says she had no idea that she was hired as a contractor until she was first paid, receiving a mysterious cheque that bore little information instead of the official pay stub she was expecting.

She also says she was treated like any other employee: she worked predominantly from the college’s premises, used its equipment, had her hours set by her boss, & represented the college at conferences.

She says she was fired the day after she told her employer she was considering filing a formal complaint.

But because she was classified as a contractor, she did not receive termination or holiday pay.

In June 2014, Buchanan lodged a complaint with the Ministry of Labour, asking for those wages & claiming that she was the victim of reprisal for standing up for her workplace rights.

The process, she says, was riddled with frustrations.

By August 2014, Canada Revenue Agency had already ruled that Buchanan had rightfully been an employee of the college.

It took until October 23 for the Ministry of Labour to agree that she was owed holiday & termination pay.

It wasn’t until March 2015 that Buchanan finally received the $2,500 she was entitled to.

Mohammed Azharuddin, vice-president of Oxford College of Arts, Business & Technology, says his organization began Oxford Education Group as a “startup” & says he told Buchanan upfront that she would be hired as an independent contractor.

He told the Star that Buchanan’s termination had nothing to do with her complaint to the ministry, & that she was let go because “there was no progress happening” with her work.

He also says his organization paid the money owed to Buchanan on time, via the Ministry of Labour, & that the ministry was responsible for the delay.

“We definitely paid within the 30 days (required by law). There was a discrepancy at the Ministry of Labour end of it.”

The ministry refused to say whether Buchanan’s employer paid on time. In an email to the Star, it confirmed that it did receive the college’s cheque, but said the “the regional program office was not aware of this.”

That “clerical error,” as the ministry called it, added 4 months to Buchanan’s already agonizing wait time.

At 54, she is still living with her aunt & uncle in Scarborough because she can’t afford rent.

“I don’t feel like I have any protections,” says Buchanan. “They make it so difficult to get through these claims that I suspect that a lot of people just give up.”

The system designed to enforce the Employment Standards Act is increasingly under fire for being inaccessible, inefficient & — for workers such as Buchanan — infuriating.

Under the current model, employers have almost no incentive to obey the law in the first place.

The Ministry of Labour has a team of just 180 enforcement officers to look into employment standards violations across the entire province — less than half the number devoted to Occupational Health & Safety inspections.

Figures requested by the Star show that the 15,485 complaints made last year prompted 2,768 proactive workplace inspections. Only 8 resulted in prosecutions with serious financial penalties.

A further 321 tickets of less than $360 were issued for violations from failure to give regular pay, to denying overtime pay & not paying minimum wage.

York University’s Doorey says those penalties do little to deter lawbreakers, who are unlikely to be caught unless workers risk their job to speak out.

“The model depends on vulnerable employees learning the law, & then starting a legal fight with their employer, & that model will never be effective,” he says. “Violations of the ESA are treated as minor monetary infractions not deserving of a heavy hand of justice.”

“If you just slap (employers) on the hand & give them a fine of $200 or something, how is that going to stop them from exploiting people again?” asks Buchanan, whose former employer faced no penalties for firing her without pay.

In 2009, the government did commit $10 million to employment standards enforcement, allowing the Ministry of Labour to significantly reduce its backlog of more than 17,000 claims.

The ministry also operates an employment standards call centre in 24 languages, which last year received more than 265,000 calls about possible violations. But the hotline doesn’t offer any assistance in filing complaints, which must be done online. ...

The action centre’s Ladd says the process can be challenging for vulnerable workers who may struggle to understand the Act’s confusing exemptions, and may not have ready access to a computer or speak English as a first language.

And while employers can afford lawyers, the majority of workers cannot.
...

The province’s Open for Business Act, passed in 2010, includes a provision that can force complainants to first approach their employer about possible employment standards violations.

While the legislation says exceptions can be made in the case of vulnerable workers, experts say the measure still discourages employees from speaking out.

“I would say 99.9% would not file a claim until they decided to leave employment or they have been fired or laid off,” says Avvy Go, director of the Metro Chinese & Southeast Asian Legal Clinic. “The employer will know who filed the claim & that person will lose their job.”

Figures requested by the Star show that in the year before that Act was passed, workers submitted 20,365 formal complaints. But since the Act’s implementation, the number of claims has fallen to an average of 15,500 a year.
...

Recognizing that relying on vulnerable workers to enforce their own rights makes little sense, many jurisdictions have moved to a more proactive model of enforcement.

In California, the state can slap embargoes on goods made by companies who violate labour laws. In Wisconsin, the government can place a temporary hold on employers’ property until they pay workers what they’re owed. And under New York State’s wage theft law, guilty employers can be forced to pay up to triple the amount of wages owed.

In a move welcomed by campaigners, the Ministry of Labour has started conducting so-called proactive inspection blitzes aimed at high-risk sectors, where inspections are done even if no complaint has been made. Its current blitz focuses on vulnerable & precarious workers.

But of Ontario’s 442,000 workplaces, just 2,694 were inspected in such investigations last year. There are only 35 enforcement officers dedicated to this proactive enforcement, & employers are given notice that their workplace will be inspected.

“It kind of defeats the whole purpose of the audit,” argues Go.

“I understand you will never have enough resources to investigate every single complaint,” she adds. “That’s why you need to look at how to change the system to ensure there is enough incentive for the employers to obey the law.”

In the meantime, Buchanan says, it is workers who are suffering.

“You’re putting people’s lives on the line. If I didn’t have family support, I’d be living on the streets.”

“I think it takes a very strong-willed person to go through this process,” she adds. “I expected the government to work on my behalf.”


Proposed solutions

A recent report by the Workers’ Action Centre makes a number of recommendations to improve enforcement of the Employment Standards Act. The proposed reforms include:

• Develop an expanded, proactive system of enforcement to improve compliance

• Increase enforcement team staffing

• Enact a “hot cargo” provision that would enable inspectors to impose embargos on goods manufactured in violation of the Act

• Revoke the requirement that forces workers to approach employers before filing an ESA claim

• Authorize the Ministry of Labour to place holds on employers’ property when a complaint is filed for unpaid wages

• Increase fines to double or triple the amount of wages owed

• Establish set fines for all offences, even when employers voluntarily agree to pay worker wages owed

"21st Century Beggars" by Gatis Sluka

"21st Century Beggars" - Gatis Sluka, Latvijas Avize, Latvia

The dark side of on-demand work

Another one of those opinion pieces highlighting the latest work trend, which everyone is so getting fond of ... flexible work.

Only problem with on-demand, freelance work is the low pay & the exploitation of the worker. Yes, it frees an individual from a strict 9-5 schedule & perhaps, even long commutes, but then that individual is tied to a computer for long times, because each work is paying low enough that individual has to string together a series of enough jobs to make it worth his/her time.

Companies are of course loving this on-demand work trend because they can offload all the "menial" / insignificant / time-consuming work on to the freelancer, while reducing their number of employees. Those reductions in manpower means a huge reduction in labour costs. Those freelancers, on the other hand, are responsible for their own health insurance, saving up on pension, & of course, any vacations mean no earning power during those times (so, in effect, unpaid vacations).

Although, the author ends the piece with a great advice that devaluing the work what people do makes the whole society lose its humanity & values, & make the humans nothing more than being treated like mere machines, the end result will still be exploitation of the average human. Because, after all, nobody gets rich by paying more money, & everyone dreams to be rich. So, a few will indeed get rich, at the expense of turning millions into poor souls.
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/career-advice/life-at-work/the-dark-side-of-on-demand-work/article24822808/

Work how you want, when you want & for whom you want.

Sounds like employment paradise – & the rise of the on-demand work force, seems to suggest that this vision can be turned into reality.
...

While Uber is a prime example of an on-demand work force – where workers are matched with employers for the duration of a project – it’s just the tip of the iceberg when discussing the benefits & perils of such a labour market. We are entering an era in which will see the Uberfication of everything, & while the sharing economy brings tremendous value to cost-conscious companies & can provide employees flexibility & extra cash, it comes with inherent risks that ethical companies will need to manage.

A few months ago, a New York Magazine piece detailed how several house cleaners provided by San Francisco startup Homejoy were homeless themselves, despite the fact that the company raised $40-million in venture capital.

These stories will surface closer to home, too. In Ontario, 41% of work is now conducted outside of the traditional scenario, where an employee works full time for a single employer, according to a recent survey. Those involved in such precarious employment – where workers patch together several part-time positions – are typically paid lower wages & have few opportunities for growth, according to a recent OECD report that observed that non-standard work is rarely a stepping stone to a better job.

So, who are these new on-demand workers who source roles from mobile technology platforms, & why do they do it? According to a recent US survey, they are predominantly white, male & between the ages of 18 & 34. They are educated, with almost 30% possessing a college degree. Their motives primarily are making money & controlling their schedule but their inability to make enough remains their most pressing issue, according to a Rutgers study.

The concept of flexibility in these roles is also misguided, according to Kristy Milland, who spent more than 9 years as a Toronto-based on-demand worker for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a platform that crowdsources human labour for tasks that computers can’t do as well.

Ms. Milland, who wrote articles & product descriptions, transcribed audio & video files, handled translations, graphic design, Web design, market research, database creation, programming, & other projects, said that work opportunities are posted sporadically & pay below an acceptable rate. Full-time “Turkers,” explained Ms. Milland, are chained to their computers at all times of the day just to be able to make enough to get by, & often accept lower compensation to pay their bills.

Ms. Milland made “Turking” her primary job in 2010 when her husband lost his full-time role at a Fortune 500 company. She earned about $50,000 a year, sometimes working 17 hours at a stretch, seven days a week, & taking full weeks off when she generated enough income. She never worked for less than $20 an hour & often took weekends off but usually spent the rest of the day at her computer in case work appeared.

While she lauds the benefits of working when you want, the risk for exploitation quickly surfaces. The company assigning the project can reject your work, forcing you to go without pay – & with no recourse. Amazon can also suspend you without reason & there is no way to appeal, she said. You cannot move up the platform or create lasting relationships with those requesting the work, to open the door to better opportunities.

“Generally, it’s a stagnant job where your income ebbs & flows based on what work happens to have been posted,” Ms. Milland said.

“We are sold as ‘artificial’ artificial intelligence, not live humans with skills & intelligence, & that hurts our chance of ever being respected as a talented, high-quality work force deserving of respect,” she added.

Until now, new & disruptive companies have fuelled the sharing economy but traditional companies will start to join, said Alexander Shashou, president & co-founder of Alice, a New York-based technology platform that enables services-on-demand for the hospitality industry.
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While there may be no way to put this on-demand work force genie back in its bottle, as the practice becomes more popular & ingrained, the workers’ experience needs to be taken into account. As an entrepreneur, I’ve benefited from working with contractors I’ve found on Upwork, paying industry standard wages & often speaking on the phone or even in person.

Increasingly devaluing work done by humans helps some companies in the short term, but none of us in the long term, & without taking precautions, we run the risk of racing to the bottom.


Leah Eichler is founder & CEO of r/ally, a machine-learning, human capital search engine for enterprises. Twitter: @LeahEichler

The flip side of free choice? Responsibility.

Great article. We all want maximum freedoms to make any choice we want to make but when those choices, unfortunately, blow back in our faces, we all blame others for the consequences. Now, in some cases, it's indeed the society's fault, but in many cases, it's our own fault.

For instance, we love popping pills. Something small happens to our bodies, & we are crying the world to the doctor. We are happy at getting a prescription. But when those pills start causing harmful side effects, the whole medical profession gets the blame. Question should be asked to those people that who told you to run to your doctor for every small ailment & why not try taking better care of your body & health by yourself.

Another case is people immigrating to foreign countries. Before immigration, those people have a nice picture of their future home. After moving to that place, when they are having difficulties in securing a certain level & kind of job, reaching a certain social status (preferably, the same one they had back home), & overall, securing the same kind of life they had back home, those immigrants don't blame themselves for moving themselves & their whole families to another country, all based on a little ideal picture they had in their mind, but they blame the host country. Perhaps, those immigrants should've verified their rosy mental picture of their future home against the reality.

Similarly, people choosing to eat sugary, fatty junk foods & then not taking responsibility for its consequences. People choose to smoke but blame the cigarette companies after getting cancer. Americans want to have their "rights to guns" but when people are killed for no reason, whatsoever, guns get the blame. Nobody is forcing anyone to smoke, drink alcohol, eat sugary & fatty junk foods, or buy & use guns in the public, become an immigrant, or become an addict of popping pharma pills, but when the outcome is unpleasant from those choices, don't blame the society for your ills.
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http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/we-must-remember-the-flip-side-of-free-choice-is-responsibility/

We live in an era of unprecedented choice & personal autonomy.

Beyond the massive range of options in food, merchandise & entertainment that are made possible by a global marketplace, of even greater significance is the freedom we now possess to make independent decisions about our own personal identities & lifestyles.

It has become an indispensable component of modern Canadian life that neither law nor society should have anything to say about an individual’s choice when it comes to such once-controversial topics as sex, abortion, gender, marriage, parenthood, divorce or any other manifestation of life as it is lived. ...

Our range of choices is continually expanding, pushing far past the limits of old taboos. The Supreme Court of Canada recently ruled, for example, that we now have the right to choose the manner & timing of our own deaths, in cases of terminal illness & with the assistance of a physician. Given events in the US, as well as recent policy discussions in Canada, our laws on marijuana may soon be shifting toward greater choice, as well.

This sanctification of personal choice above all else has become so deeply ingrained that, when a high school student in Toronto was told by her principal that she couldn’t wear a sports bra to school, she organized “Crop Top Day” to give voice to scantily clad teenaged girls demanding the right to wear whatever they want, whenever they feel like it, school dress codes be damned.

By & large, all this choice is a good thing. While there may still be sound reasons to require appropriate attire in certain circumstances, the notion that adult Canadians ought to be given wide latitude to live their lives however they wish is to be applauded. Indeed, with many of these issues, such as sexual orientation & gender identity, the matter is not a choice at all; rather, society is simply recognizing & respecting personal destiny. As it should.

Yet there’s another important, but little discussed, aspect to this veneration of choice that requires recognition. At some point, we need to acknowledge that behind all these choices we’re making lie heightened expectations for personal responsibility & liability. It is clearly inappropriate to demand maximum choice, then blame others when the outcome proves unpleasant or unexpected.

That’s not what happened last week, when the Quebec Superior Court awarded smokers $15.5 billion as compensation for the consequences of their own decisions.

At issue in the class-action lawsuit was the degree to which smokers themselves should be held responsible for choosing to smoke in the face of ample evidence, some of it dating back to the 1950s & 1960s, that smoking was a dangerous & addictive habit. The individual decision to start smoking, according to Justice Brian Riordan, is “essentially stupidity, too often fuelled by the delusion of invincibility that marks our teenage years.” Yet, remarkably, the judge held that “we do not attribute any fault to dependent smokers who did not quit for whatever reason” later in life. The court ruling thus absolves individual smokers from culpability for their own continuing situation. Instead, the burden of guilt falls squarely upon cigarette companies for knowingly selling a deadly product. That said, as nasty as tobacco may be, it still requires willing buyers & a permissive government to complete the market. In defending his massive award, Justice Riordan asked: “If the companies are allowed to walk away unscathed now, what would be the message to other industries that, today or tomorrow, find themselves in a similar moral conflict?”

This is not a rhetorical question. In fact, there are numerous other products—some of which are marketed & sold by government — that today pose identical moral conflicts. Alcohol is an obvious comparison. Fatty, salty or sugary foods are other examples of legal products with potentially unwelcome consequences. Yet, in the face of a constant barrage of public health announcements, media campaigns, & political statements on obesity & healthy living, people continue to consume these products. And while we properly celebrate the right to be able to make such choices, what happens when some of these folks later come to regret the exercise of their personal autonomy? Based on the cigarette ruling, decisions of these kinds will be sloughed off as mere “stupidity,” & given official forgiveness. But why should the ultimate responsibility for bad outcomes always lie with someone else, preferably, a corporation that can afford multi-billion-dollar payouts & that’s made to play the scapegoat?

In an age of unlimited choice, we must learn to accept greater responsibility for the consequences of the many choices we make, even if the courts are eager to let us off the hook.

Paranoia (movie line 1)

IMDB          RottenTomatoes          Wikipedia

Especially true for our "modern" age of smartphones & social media.

Number of sexual assaults reported on children rises to 85 a day

Although, it is despicable wherever children are sexually abused in the world, but these kinds of stories don't make the headlines in the West. When something like these surfaces in the developing world, people are up in arms that children are not being protected by the law enforcement authorities & government.

Usually, the numbers of sexual assaults on children in those countries is quite small, compared to thousands upon thousands being abused in England or North America.
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http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jun/17/police-record-85-sexual-assaults-children-day-nspcc

Police are recording 85 sexual assaults on children each day after an increase of more than a third in reports of abuse & exploitation, new figures have revealed.

A total of 31,238 allegations of sexual offences against children, including rape, assault & grooming offences, were made to forces in England & Wales in 2013/14, research by the NSPCC has found. The figures show an increase of 38% – more than a third – on the previous year.

The majority of the victims were aged between 12 & 16 but more than one in four – 8,282 – were younger than 11, the charity said. Of those, 2,895 are estimated to be aged 5 or under, including 94 babies.

More than three-quarters of the reported abuse cases were against girls (24,457). Britain’s largest force, the Metropolitan police, recorded the highest number of sex crimes against children, with 3,523.

The data, obtained through freedom of information requests, reveals a significant year-on-year increase in the number of sex offences against children. In 2012-13, the same research showed that a total of 22,654 sexual crimes against children were recorded by 41 police forces. All 43 forces in England & Wales responded in the latest study.

The NSPCC said that until now the total had largely remained steady & the 38% rise was the biggest increase in 6 years of requesting the figures. Since 2008/09, the number has increased by almost 50%.

Last year the charity helped 2,400 young victims through its therapeutic recovery programme, but it says there are not enough services to support every child who has experienced abuse.

Jon Brown, senior policy officer for the NSPCC, said: “Our estimate is that there are 50,000 children in the country who need help & support for abuse who are not getting it.

“We need the government to step up & breach this gap. It cannot be right that so many children are going without support. We should be treating this as a public health problem given the damage done into adulthood to individuals who have been abused as children.”
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Police experts say the effect of the case has been to encourage more victims, both those reporting abuse in the past & ongoing abuse, to come forward because they are now more confident they will be believed.

But improved recording methods by police have also been cited as a possible reason for the increase.

Brown said it was not clear whether the increase in reports of abuse was due to an actual rise or increased confidence of victims coming forward.

He agreed with comments made last month by Simon Bailey, chief constable of Norfolk & the national police lead on child abuse, that there was a real increase in abuse taking place, much of it facilitated by the internet.

Responding to the new figures, Bailey said they still represented the tip of the iceberg.

“Many, many, more victims have found the confidence to report abuse, knowing they will be treated with sensitivity & respect, that we will listen to them & that we will take their allegations seriously,” he said.

“Increased reporting means we are dealing with unprecedented number of investigations but it is my belief that more abuse is being perpetrated. The internet has given people the ability to sit in their room & indulge fantasies in a way that simply was not available to them two decades ago.”

Last month Bailey revealed that the police are investigating more than 1,400 prominent men, including politicians, celebrities & those linked to institutions, over allegations that they have sexually abused children in the past. The investigations are being carried out by forces across the country & coordinated by a team running Operation Hydrant.
...

Peter Wanless, the charity’s chief executive, said: “These figures are disturbing & clearly illustrate child sexual abuse is a continuing & widespread problem that needs urgent action. But we know this is still only a fraction of the true number of victims because some endure an agonising wait of many years before telling anyone – & others never reveal what has happened to them.”

How the 'poshness test' is denying working-class people top jobs

A few months ago, I blogged about how universities in US are laying out the red carpet for children of rich parents. That is skewing the education paradigm in favour of the rich. Well, this news from the UK is highlighting how the social favouritism for the rich doesn't stop at the school but continues on to working lives.

Now, this news may surprise that lot in the world, who think that there is merit & fairness in the Western world. In the Western world, most jobs, & definitely the good ones, are only available through the "power of Networking." Of course, employees of certain socio-economic background keep similar friends, & hence, when the boss says that a vacancy is coming up in a department (marketing, finance, human resources etc.), employees tell their friends (who are like them) about that vacancy.

Eventually, people of a certain socio-economic background end up in the same company. Promotions take place from that employee pool. And then, those people hire the same; other people in their own image. After all, it's just human psychology that we like other people who seem similar to us; in values, in finances, in habits, in education etc.

So, of course, the good jobs in the top firms will go to the people who are of a certain "posh" class. It doesn't matter what education or how good a person was in school, anymore; it all comes down to who you are friends with, nowadays. This is the case everywhere around the world.

At the end of the day, the so-called "modern" society is going back to the days of dark ages, when the few select elites of the society used to have everything in the society working for them; from politics to finances to education and work for their kids.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/poshness-test-is-the-new-glass-ceiling-lack-of-wealthy-background-denies-working-class-people-top-10319541.html

Thousands of working-class people are being denied jobs at top firms, as they effectively need to pass a “poshness test” to join elite employers, according to the official body set up by the Government to promote social mobility.

Executives are more likely to judge potential recruits by how they speak than by how well they might do the job, research by Alan Milburn’s Social Mobility & Child Poverty Commission found.

Its review shows that more than two-thirds of the job vacancies in elite legal & City firms are filled by university graduates who have been through private or grammar schools. By comparison, nearly 90% of schoolchildren have a comprehensive education, compared to just 7% attending fee-paying schools & 4% going to selective grammar schools.

Discrimination comes about because the managers who conduct job interviews do not like working-class accents, the commission reported, but are impressed by young people who have travelled widely, which naturally favours those from well-off families.

One employer frankly admitted his firm’s recruitment practices were loaded against young working-class applicants. But, he asked: “How much mud do I have to sift through in that population to find that diamond?”

Even when a working-class youth is on first rung of the ladder, he or she is likely to be passed over for promotion because of “the tendency of more senior professionals to promote in their own image & thus ‘misrecognise’ merit,” the commission said.

“This research shows that young people with working-class backgrounds are being systematically locked out of top jobs,” said Mr. Milburn, the former Labour Cabinet minister who chairs the commission. “Elite firms seem to require applicants to pass a ‘poshness test’ to gain entry. Inevitably that ends up excluding youngsters who have the right sort of grades & abilities but whose parents do not have the right sort of bank balances.

“Thankfully, some of our country’s leading firms are making a big commitment to recruit the brightest & best, regardless of background. They should be applauded. But for the rest this is a ‘wake up & smell the coffee’ moment. “In some top law firms, trainees are more than 5 times likely to have attended a fee-paying school than the population as a whole. They are denying themselves talent, stymieing young people’s social mobility & fuelling the social divide that bedevils Britain. ”

The “poshness test” is one way in which Britain’s social divide is widening, despite the rise in the number of professional jobs, which is expected to increase by 2 million in the next 5 years.

Research has previously shown that graduates whose parents can support them while they do unpaid work have a marked advantage, because almost a third of graduates recruited for full-time jobs in the top firms have already worked for them, usually as unpaid interns. It has also been found that most major firms tend to recruit graduates from just 19 universities.

The commission, which advises the government on social mobility, has examined the recruiting history of 13 elite firms employing 45,000 of Britain’s highest paid professionals.

They concluded that the recruiting practices are now so skewed in favour of “poshness” that many of the firms’ own senior executives would have not been hired under the criteria now used.

Between 60% & 70% of job offers made by the leading accountancy firms are to graduates of the 24 leading universities that make up the Russell Group.
...

But on a positive note, some firms have acknowledged that A-level results are not always a good indicator of performance, & have stopped taking them into account. In one firm that was studied, more than 10% of recruits would have failed if they had been judged on their school results.

Dr. Louise Ashley, of Royal Holloway, University of London, who led the research, urged firms to recruit from a wider range of applicants, & make sure that those from “diverse” backgrounds were not at a disadvantage. “Selection processes which advantage students from more privileged backgrounds remain firmly in place,” she said.

Criminal Minds, S1E14 (quote 1)

Pretty clear what it is saying; essentially, an eye for an eye.

Stephen Harper: Master Manipulator

A very long read but definitely a very interesting one. If it doesn't mention "Stephen Harper" or "Canada," then one might easily confuse the article with an article about a dictator from an African country or one from the Middle East or even a country from Asia (China) or South Asia (Pakistan). And this guy has been the face of Canada for almost 10 years, & he may yet win again on October 19th, 2015, for another 4 years.

I liked the article even more so because it showed how much "democracy" there really is in Canada. As I always say in my blog posts that there is no such thing as democracy anywhere in this world (maybe, in Iceland, but then it's a very small homogenic society). The only difference between Western "democracy" & Eastern "democracy" (in other words, democracy of the developing world) is that one democracy is all smoke-&-mirrors & the other one actually shows outright that there is no such thing as democracy.

On top of that, this article specifically mentions that a large section of the Canadian public is clueless about the government & ministers (20% of Quebecers don't even know which political party is the ruling party of Canada). Funny thing is that this statement reaffirms what I already say in my blog posts that Canadian public is far more busy with sports, food, beer & where my next paycheque is coming from. It doesn't have time to analyze & think how the government is screwing it around.

Since, the article is quite long in itself, I'll leave you to read it. But before I do that I'll copy & paste one paragraph which, very nicely, summarizes the whole article, & in essence, the actions of the ruling political party of Canada for the past decade:

"In the 11 years since he became leader of the country’s Conservatives, the party has been fined for breaking electoral rules, & various members of Team Harper have been caught misleading parliament, gagging civil servants, subverting parliamentary committees, gagging scientists, harassing the supreme court, gagging diplomats, lying to the public, concealing evidence of potential crime, spying on opponents, bullying & smearing. Harper personally has earned himself the rare rebuke of being found to be in contempt of his parliament."
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/15/stephen-harper-master-manipulator

...
As Harper tries for a fourth term in office at the Canadian federal election ..., he is trailed by an extraordinarily long list of allegations. ... In Canada, some of the prime minister’s men & women have been accused not simply of cheating to win elections but of conspiring to jam the machinery of democratic government.

Some of these allegations have been proved. In the 11 years since he became leader of the country’s Conservatives, the party has been fined for breaking electoral rules, & various members of Team Harper have been caught misleading parliament, gagging civil servants, subverting parliamentary committees, gagging scientists, harassing the supreme court, gagging diplomats, lying to the public, concealing evidence of potential crime, spying on opponents, bullying & smearing. Harper personally has earned himself the rare rebuke of being found to be in contempt of his parliament.

... Yet this deeply unpopular politician has won 3 elections in the last 9 years. Although the Liberals are showing a late lead in the polls, Harper’s emphasis on his record on security & the economy may yet put a fourth in his trophy cabinet next week. That is what makes Harper’s politics interesting, that he has perfected the tactics of taking & holding power – in spite of the demands of democracy.

His people have been caught out more often than most. That may be because they are more brazen than most ... . But, at heart, Harper’s team are not that different from politicians across the developed world who have discovered that democracy is a pretty sweet theory but that, in reality, if you want to get hold of power & use it, there are all kinds of devious moves available that have very little to do with that antique idea.
* * *

Start with the business of winning an election. During Harper’s first successful run, back in January 2006, his party bumped up against the limit that it was allowed to spend in its national campaign – $18.3 million Canadian dollars ($9.15m). But it still had money in the bank, & the race was very tight. So it channelled more than $1 million down to 67 local candidates who had their own budgets & who then paid for a blitz of TV advertising during the final fortnight of the campaign. Harper squeaked home with 21 more seats than the liberals, & managed to form a minority government with 36% of the vote. Some of the local Conservatives were worried that this was illegal, but Harper’s national director dismissed them with contempt. “What a bunch of turds,” he emailed.

The national officials evidently had persuaded themselves that they had the law on their side. Elections Canada, the official body that enforces polling law, disagreed. As one of its investigators put it: “You could argue that they stole the election.” Team Harper duly suffered the indignity of police raiding their headquarters in Ottawa, seizing their computers & paperwork, & the further embarrassment of having 4 senior officials charged with criminal offences. The Conservatives fought Elections Canada to the last ditch, repeatedly challenging it in the courts. Finally, the prosecution accepted a plea bargain. The charges against the 4 officials were dropped, while the party as an organisation pleaded guilty to illegal campaign spending & paid $282,000 in fines & restitution. That was in March 2012, more than 6 years after the offence, by which time this particular scandal had cobwebs on it, & Harper had won 2 more elections, in November 2008 & May 2011.

If the path to electoral crime is rarely trodden, there is a close alternative, what Nixon’s people called “ratfucking” – acts of sabotage to damage an opponent. Not exactly criminal. Not always. So, for example, when the current Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau (son of the former prime minister, Pierre) held an open-air press conference in Ottawa, he found himself being heckled by a group of young protesters waving placards. They were later revealed by the Huffington Post to be interns working for the Prime Minister’s Office.

In the fortnight before polling day in 2011, Liberal supporters started receiving nuisance calls from people who claimed to be Liberal party workers – calling Jewish voters on the sabbath, waking up others in the middle of the night. Liberals said this was Conservatives trying to alienate their support. Then, in the final 3 days before the vote, Elections Canada received a series of complaints about “robocalls” – recorded messages sent by automatic dialling – that told voters quite falsely that their polling station had been moved. By election day, anxiety was rising among officials, as internal emails recorded: “It seems that Conservative candidates are pretending that Elections Canada or returning officers have changed the polling stations … They have actually disrupted the voting process … It’s right across the country except Saskatchewan … It appears it is getting worse.” This looked like a national campaign to suppress the Liberal vote by scattering it away from the polling booths.

Some of those voters told the Guardian that they had first received a call from the Conservatives asking how they planned to vote. Sandra McEwing, a stage manager from Winnipeg, said: “My answer was unequivocal, like, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ I hung up after that.” Others say they gave similar replies. All then say they received robocalls or live calls, sending them to a polling station that did not exist or to a distant one where they had no right to vote. Some of these voters were in ridings, or electoral districts, where the eventual margin of victory was tiny. Bill Hagborn, president of the Liberal association in a riding in Ontario, told of a bus full of aboriginal voters, who were very unlikely to vote Conservative, & who were misdirected by calls & ended up not voting at all. That riding – Nipissing-Timiskaming – went to the Conservatives with a majority of only 18.

With Team Harper back in power, a group of voters from 6 ridings went to federal court to challenge the results of the election. After a seven-day hearing, the trial judge, Mr. Justice Mosley, issued a devastating verdict: “I am satisfied that it has been established that misleading calls about the locations of polling stations were made to electors in ridings across the country & that the purpose of those calls was to suppress the votes of electors who had indicated their preference in response to earlier voter-identification calls.”

The judge declined to order new elections – the evidence did not reveal whether the calls had actually swung the result – but the declaration of national fraud was powerful stuff. And perhaps even more serious, he found that “the most likely source” of the phone numbers that had been used was the Conservative party’s central database, the Constituent Information Management System (Cims), which is believed to hold the names & addresses of every voter in Canada, together with profiling information that has been gathered by party workers or bought from commercial data-gatherers.

The judge specifically avoided identifying the Conservative party as a whole, or its candidates, as having organised the fraud. However, he went on to complain that it had “engaged in trench warfare in an effort to prevent this case from coming to a hearing on the merits”, which had included “transparent attempts to derail this case”.

Meanwhile, Elections Canada had been investigating. Spurred on by news coverage, voters from 261 of the 308 ridings filed complaints about calls that either caused nuisance or misled them about their polling station. The investigators struggled. When they tried to get records of phone numbers that had called the complainants, they failed in 92.5% of cases. With the 7.5% where they succeeded, they then failed to find the owners of 40% of the phone numbers they had identified, including many that were registered across the border in the US. “We were running into brick walls all over the place,” as one investigator put it. With one startling exception.

In relation to the riding of Guelph in Ontario, the Conservatives who had engaged in “trench warfare” to impede the civil court, handed Elections Canada a group of witnesses who identified an ambitious young party worker, Michael Sona, as a culprit, adding crucially that he had acted without authority, as a “rogue activist”. Sona’s name was rapidly leaked to newspapers. Investigators were able to follow a trail of electronic footprints from the local Conservative office, where Sona worked, to a telemarketing company that had sent out a robocall to more than 7,000 Liberal households, diverting them from their polling stations. Sona was arrested, prosecuted & jailed for 9 months for interfering with an election. He says that he is innocent, a decoy thrown out to protect the real culprits. Others say he is a maverick who set up his own relatively clumsy scheme without the blessing of his party.

But what about all the other ridings? Elections Canada in April 2014 published a report in which it acknowledged the difficulties it had encountered, & reported that – with the exception of Guelph – that it had been unable to find any concrete evidence of dubious activity. This left open the possibility that voters in these ridings had been victims of something far more sophisticated than the clumsy operation for which Michael Sona had been blamed. In Ottawa today, political insiders claim to have heard Conservative workers boasting of using call centres in the US, India or the Philippines.

However, they can prove nothing, & Elections Canada not only found no such clues but enraged Harper’s opponents by concluding that its inability to find evidence of activity outside Guelph amounted to positive evidence that there had been no such activity. This contradicted the finding of Mr. Justice Mosley & implied that all of the complainants from outside Guelph had been tainted by confusion, delusion or dishonesty. No culprit other than Michael Sona has been brought to book.

Effectively cleared of responsibility, the Conservatives pushed back hard. When Elections Canada asked for more powers to help it investigate future fraud claims, the House of Commons backed them. The Harper government, however, denied the body the powers it wanted & removed its entire investigations branch, transferring it to the office of the public prosecutor, where it is no longer answerable to parliament. Meanwhile, the Conservative MP who had acted as Harper’s spokesman on the robocalls affair – his parliamentary secretary, Dean Del Mastro – was jailed for breaking spending limits in his own riding & submitting false records. The sentencing judge told him that he had indulged in “the antithesis of democracy”.
* * *

...
Harper is a master tactician. Knowing that there is a block of rightwing voters who have nowhere else to go, he has been willing to defy them in search of wider support: adopting liberal positions on abortion & gay marriage; veering leftwards to pump public money into the economy to avoid recession in 2008; reaching out to the migrants who now fill the suburbs of traditionally Liberal cities such as Toronto. He studies the stats. He makes the numbers add up. Harper has his roots in the same ideological soil as Thatcher & Reagan: cutting tax & rolling back the state; tough on crime & even tougher on the unions; boosting families & national pride; a solid economy that rewards those who work hard.

And then there were the tactics that were to attract such notoriety. They reflected the man’s character – clever and harsh – moves that turned a democratic election into a mere sequence of manoeuvres. ...
...

It meant money – millions in private donations to fund the campaign, & millions more in state giveaways in order to encourage the voters. ... Harper gave his electorate a high-profile gift when he first took power in 2006, by cutting the Canadian sales tax, GST. It cost the exchequer some $12 billion, but it purchased popularity. At times, it meant descending into old-fashioned, US-style pork-barrel politics, pouring public money into ridings that were politically important. An investigation by the Globe and Mail this year found that 83% of the Harper government’s new infrastructure projects had gone to the 52% of ridings that were in Conservative hands.

And it meant investing heavily in the politically profitable new science of microtargeting. This was the original reason for the Conservatives creating the Cims database, in which was stored every conceivable item of intelligence about voters. Other parties have since caught up, but at that time it allowed the Conservative party to target the “market segments” it needed for victory – not just with policy, but with favours. A $500 tax break for children to do ballet or hockey in the 2006 budget was good for a middle-class segment (this was doubled in 2014). A break for tradespeople’s tools could buy another. The Canadian writer Susan Delacourt, who tracked this in her book, Shopping For Votes, told of the finding in the Cims database that people who owned snowmobiles were potential Conservative voters. The Harper government has pledged $35 million to create new trails for snowmobiles.

These tactics have proved particularly effective in a world in which people are becoming alienated from politics itself. In Canada, nearly 40% of the electorate did not bother to vote at the 2011 election. Among voters under 24, more than 60% stayed away (compared with 35.3% in 2006). A poll in Quebec province two months ago found that as the federal election campaign was launched, 20% of respondents could not name the political party that was running the country. Delacourt cites one of Harper’s political marketers, Patrick Muttart, saying that much of Conservative activity was aimed at voters who paid no attention to politics & who needed messages that were “brutally simple”.

In power as in elections, Harper’s rule has been to keep winning, whatever it takes. Even parliament – the embodiment of the popular will – is merely an obstacle to be dealt with. Soon after the November 2008 election, as he began his second minority government, Harper launched an “omnibus bill”, which contained so many provocative proposals that he united the previously divided opposition parties, which decided not just to vote against the bill but to form a coalition that could replace his government. Harper didn’t want that. So he prorogued parliament. He needed the consent of the Queen’s representative, the governor general, to do so. He got it. And so the parliament that threatened him was simply suspended until the political storm passed.

A year later, Harper was in deep trouble again, over press reports that Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan had handed over Taliban prisoners to local security forces, who had then tortured them. Harper’s government had denied the claims, which amounted to allegations of war crime, but it was caught out badly in November 2009 when a Canadian diplomat & a general separately went public with evidence that parts of the government had known about this for more than 3 years. When the opposition united once more to demand the release of paperwork on the subject, Harper refused … & then persuaded the governor general to prorogue parliament again. There was a chorus of protest, led by professors of law & politics, but Harper scorned them. The elected representatives of the people were simply locked out for 3 months.

The following year, Harper clashed again with the rights of parliament. In July 2010, he announced that his government would buy 65 F-35 fighter jets, costing a total of $15 billion – the most expensive military purchase in Canadian history. The new Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, reckoned the real price would be even higher & accused Harper of deliberately understating it. Harper refused to hand over the paperwork that would disclose the truth about the F-35s & about the cost of a clutch of other policies. In March 2011, the speaker of the House of Commons ruled that this was a contempt of parliament, & the House then passed a vote of no confidence in Harper’s government. There was an election (involving the robocalls), which Harper won. Ignatieff quit. And 11 months later, it emerged that the true cost of the F-35s was nearly twice what Harper had claimed. In 2007, his second year in office, the National Post disclosed that Team Harper had drawn up a guidebook for the Conservative chairs of parliamentary committees, advising them how to use delays, obstruction & confusion to block difficult inquiries. In opposition, Harper said he would reform the Senate, so that its members would be elected. In office, he changed his mind, kept the power to select them himself & appointed 59 new senators so that he had a built-in majority in the upper house. The House of Commons found itself being swamped with omnibus bills, which included dozens of contentious proposals that could not be properly debated in the time available. At the daily Question Period, when ministers traditionally provide information, Harper’s parliamentary secretary, Paul Calandra, gave answers so obstructive that, after a volley of complaint, he ended up apologising to the house, in tears.

Harper clamped down hard on senior officials whose job was to monitor the behaviour of the state. A report by the auditor general found that defence officials had misled ministers & parliament, & whitewashed cost overruns & delays in a determined effort to ensure Canada purchased the F-35 jet. Kevin Page, parliamentary budget officer, reported experiencing “significant amounts of intimidation” & that his office budget was cut by 30%. Linda Keen, head of Canada’s Nuclear Safety Commission, challenged Harper over the safety of the Chalk River nuclear site: she was denounced & sacked. Peter Tinsley, chair of the Military Police Complaints Commission, attempted to investigate the torture of Taliban prisoners who had been detained by Canadian forces: he lost his job. Beverley McLachlin, chief justice of the supreme court, blocked Harper’s choice for a new high court judge: she was denounced in terms which caused a wave of complaint that Harper was interfering in the independence of the judiciary.
* * *

As Harper launched his election campaign 10 weeks ago, he faced the tricky coincidence that one of his closest allies, Senator Mike Duffy, was sitting in court in Ottawa, charged with fraud. The trial is not yet finished, & Duffy has pleaded not guilty, but, whatever the outcome, the case has exposed in embarrassing detail the behaviour of the core of Team Harper – the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), which has been described eloquently by the Globe and Mail as “a 90-person juggernaut of political strategists, ‘issues managers’ & party enforcers who exercise strict control over cabinet, the houses of parliament & the bureaucracy.”

Duffy has been an Ottawa character for years, famous as a TV journalist & notorious for his Conservative bent, which paid off in January 2009 when Harper appointed him as a senator for the small eastern province of Prince Edward Island.

It was nearly 4 years later, in December 2012, when a diligent journalist, Glen McGregor of the Ottawa Citizen, reported that Duffy had told Senate authorities that his cottage in Prince Edward Island was his real home & had been claiming public money for the expense of living in Ottawa. The Senate’s internal economy committee hired a firm of auditors, Deloitte, to check the housing claims of all senators, including Duffy. When the PMO realised that Duffy might be tempted to talk to his old friends in the press, it aimed – as an internal email put it – “to prevent him from going squirrely in a bunch of weekend panel shows.”

Harper’s then chief of staff, Nigel Wright, persuaded the Conservative Party Fund, which is partly funded by the taxpayer, to stump up $32,000 to pay off Duffy’s debt for him, although the troubled senator would be allowed to pretend that he was repaying the money himself. Since, as his own emails disclosed, Wright thought it was “morally wrong” that the senator had taken the money, this looked rather like an attempt to use taxpayers’ money to repay money that had been taken from the taxpayer. In the event, it turned out that Duffy owed much more. With Duffy pleading poverty, Wright quietly paid the $90,100 himself. (He had made millions in the world of finance before joining Team Harper.)

Duffy managed to keep his seat until a second diligent journalist, Robert Fife of CTV, disclosed that it was Wright who had paid Duffy’s debt & that the Senate’s report had been “sanitised”. In an avalanche of embarrassment, Mike Duffy was dumped by the Conservatives & charged by the police; Wright resigned, & Stephen Harper denied knowing anything about the cover-up. At the end of May, an Ipsos-Reid poll suggested that only 13% of Canadians believed him.

Harper’s leadership style is all about control – of information & of people. In 2010, Harper provoked fury by cancelling the national census & then scrapping a series of long-term surveys, thus effectively concealing the facts about significant trends in Canadian society, including poverty, inequality, housing need & health. In a report in March, the information commissioner, Suzanne Legault, complained that Canada’s Access to Information law “is applied to encourage a culture of delay … to deny disclosure. It acts as a shield against disclosure. The interests of the government trump the interests of the public.”
* * *

The Harper government’s obsession with control may look simply like a means to maintain power. But it can achieve something more important, to reverse the flow of influence: instead of government responding to people, the electorate become passive recipients of state decisions. Consider the case of climate change.

Harper has never made any secret of his support for the oil industry. Emerging from his formative years in Alberta, he was a founder member of the neoconservative Reform party, which was baptised with a $100,000 cheque from the head of Gold Standard Oils. Soon after taking power in 2006, Harper started to clamp down on research into global warming. He got rid of his own science adviser & killed the climate-change section of the Department of Foreign Affairs. He shut down the official website on climate change & tried to cut funding for the Polar Environment Atmosphere Research Laboratory, which had been at the forefront of monitoring deterioration in the ozone layer as well as climate change.

But he opened his door to the other side of the argument. The Polaris Institute thinktank reported in December 2012 that 45 oil lobbyists had been allowed to work inside Harper’s government & that during the previous four & a half years, officials & ministers had held some 2,700 meetings with the oil lobby. By contrast, the Climate Action Network had managed just six.

Having changed the flow of information into government, he then dramatically changed the direction outwards to his electorate. A new protocol required all government scientists to ask for clearance from the PMO before speaking publicly. As a result, important research has been buried, stalled or misrepresented, including an analysis of changes in snowfall, an inquiry into the loss of ozone over the Arctic, & research on the impact of a 2C rise in global temperature. Meanwhile, the government department that oversees the oil & gas industries increased its advertising budget from less than $250,000 in 2010 to a massive $40 million only two years later.

Activists, too, felt the rough hand of government. Harper set aside $8 million to check the activity of charities, including environmental groups, to stop them campaigning politically. David Suzuki, the Gandalf-like founding father of the Canadian green movement, stepped down from his own charitable foundation so that he could speak freely without the organisation being attacked. In British Columbia, a green group called Dogwood Initiative, reported that material that it had obtained under the Access to Information law revealed that it had been under “illegal surveillance” by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

Having distorted the flow of information, Harper then moulded the policy to fit. Ever since he first took power in February 2006, he has been promising action on climate change, particularly in relation to the carbon that is released from Canada’s huge reserve of tar sands, now the third-biggest reservoir of oil on the planet.

After a false start in 2006 with a bill that was killed by parliament for being too weak, he launched a sleek new vehicle – “Turning the Corner” – in March 2007, with new emissions targets for each sector of the economy, crucially including oil and gas. It could all come in to force as early as 2010, he said. But the sleek new vehicle was soon diverted into the oil lobby’s bog, where it stalled & stuck in endless negotiation. At one point, in February 2013, Harper’s environment secretary, Peter Kent, said the rules were “very close” to being finalised. Four months later, Kent was out of the job, later reflecting ruefully that perhaps he had been “pushing too hard”. To this day, Canada still has no emissions rules for its oil & gas sector.

In the background, Harper’s government announced a “cap & trade” system to cut emissions in 2008, then dropped the plan in 2011. It failed to hit the targets that it had agreed at the Copenhagen summit in 2009, scrapped a raft of environmental rules, &, in 2011, became the first government to back out of the Kyoto protocol, which the Liberals had ratified in 2002. When the Centre for Global Development, in 2013, ranked 27 developed nations according to their handling of the environment, it placed Canada at number 27.
* * *

Canada’s current election campaign has followed a path that is now familiar. The Conservatives have more money. Harper has stopped public funding for political parties, which yields a financial advantage to his own party, with its Cims database full of potential private donors. In a neat symbol of its purchasing power, the Conservative party has been accused of buying likes on Facebook (it declined to comment, saying it was an “internal party matter”). His team have restricted the flow of information to voters: the prime minister makes speeches & holds photocalls but avoids questions from the press. With few exceptions, Conservative candidates have been told not to take part in public debates. Big issues are raised, but it is the small issues that dominate. Canada’s most idolised hockey player, Wayne Gretzky, may not be a political thinker, but his endorsement of Harper made big headlines. The collapse in the price of oil may have driven the Canadian economy into recession, but Harper is microtargeting market segments by offering a new tax break for home renovations & for those who belong to organisations such as the Rotary Club.

At a point when the party was slipping backwards in the polls, Harper’s team came up with a brilliantly successful wedge issue, insisting that no Muslim woman should be allowed to take the oath of Canadian citizenship while wearing a niqab. In the past 4 years, the number of women who wanted to wear the niqab while taking the oath has reached a grand total of two. But this became a big issue as it split off two sections of voters in Harper’s favour: the “old stock” Canadians, who fear Muslim migrants as intruders, & liberal feminists, to whom one of Harper’s ministers appealed by describing the niqab as “a medieval tribal custom that treats women as property rather than people”. For speaking up in favour of a Muslim woman’s right to choose what she wears, the leader of the centre-left New Democratic party, Tom Mulcair, was punished with a disastrous collapse in his poll ratings, while Harper surged upwards.

Harper has the natural advantage of an opposition which is divided between Mulcair’s NDP & Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. He also has the advantage of what looks like a form of voter suppression which, unlike robocalls, is legal – a requirement that voters produce an official document in addition to their voter card to prove that they have a home in the riding. Harry Neufeld, who has been running elections in Canada since 1982, said he estimated that at least 250,000 qualified electors would be denied a vote. These are likely to be people who would not vote Conservative – students, the poor, aboriginal people. “I believe the legal changes amount to systematic manipulation,” he said. “It saddens me to see this happening in Canada. It reduces the perceived integrity of our national elections. And it damages our reputation as a country with deep democratic values.”


Nick Davies is the bestselling author of Flat Earth News, on falsehood & distortion in the media, & a former Journalist of the Year. His latest book, Hack Attack, is out now in paperback.