Opinion on Canadian federal election result

Saw a few posts from people on my TL that today was a great day for Canada because of the new PM's swearing-in ceremony etc.
 
Really? The only reason I vote is that when I criticize a government, no one can say that since, you didn't vote, you lost your right to criticize. Although, I'm not a fan of Conservatives, deep in my heart, I already know NOTHING will change for the small guy.
 
Let me emphasize that point again (for slow people), NOTHING will change for the general public.

 
If Stephen Harper was such a bad guy that the whole country took a sigh of relief with the Liberals win, then why did people elect him back in 2011? And he had been the PM of Canada 5 years before that, too. So, the public already had a little taste of what Harper was all about. Did Harper hypnotized the public somehow in 2011? Heck, he isn't even a "hottie" like JT.
 
I remember seeing this same enthusiasm which I see for Justin Trudeau now, back in 2008, with the election win of Barack Obama. Heck, people all over the world were mesmerized with his win & there were so many hopes attached to his win. Well, we can see how much he actually achieved in his past 7 years of presidency. Except, the Affordable Healthcare Act, he has failed to achieve everything, from closing Guantanamo to controlling emissions to improving checks & balances on Wall Street.
 
Only reason Liberals won in Canada because the general public around the world only wants to keep changing political parties. Let's take a quick look at the tennis match of politics played in some countries around the world:

US: 8 years of Democratic rule (Clinton) is followed by 8 years of Republican (Bush Jr.) & then back to Democrats (Obama) & then back to Republicans (Bush Jr. II in 2016) & so on so forth.

Canada: Conservatives (Mulroney) followed by Liberals (Chretien / Paul) & then back to Conservatives (Harper) & now back with Liberals (Trudeau).

UK: They are little bit unpredictable. 18 years of Conservatives were followed by 13 years of Labour & then back to Conservatives (coming up to 6 years now).
 
Pakistan: PML-N & PPP play the match.

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.
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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.

Genetic testing at home is risky business

Like the world didn't have enough ways to discriminate against our fellow human beings, that now we have "genoism" ... discriminate based on one's genetics. Besides discrimination, companies now can exploit your DNA info for their own nefarious purposes, like they didn't have enough of our personal info, already.

“This is being marketed as a fun thing to do,” says Bev Heim-Myers, chair of the Canadian Coalition For Genetic Fairness, an organization advocating for legislation banning discrimination based on genetic test results. “But it can go from fun to devastating. This information can then be shared & used against the person. Until we have laws protecting genetic information, this is a dangerous thing.”
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http://www.macleans.ca/society/health/d-i-y-dna-genetic-testing-at-home/

On a midweek morning last month, Tim Cottee clicked shut his office door, woke his computer & girded himself for a piece of life-changing news. Weeks earlier, the 42-year-old executive at a Winnipeg financial services company had signed up with 23andMe, a California-based company that provides DNA testing & health information to Canadians over the web. His results were now in ... & he was feeling a mix of excitement & dread: 6 years ago, his mother had died at 69 of Alzheimer’s disease, & these results would reveal whether Cottee was carrying a mutation of the APOE gene known as the e4 variant, the strongest hereditary risk factor for Alzheimer’s.
 
Cottee is not the first person to suspect a Trojan horse is lurking in his DNA. The atavistic fear of flaws in our biological coding is an inescapable feature of the genetic era, going back to the mapping of the human genome in 2003. What’s changed is the ease with which we can put those misgivings to the test. Cottee is one of about 20,000 in this country who have swallowed hard & clicked on their 23andMe health results since the firm took advantage of a gap in Canadian laws 5 months ago & began offering its health profiles to members living north of the border. For $199, the company couriers its members a “collection kit”—essentially, a test tube into which you spit—which goes back to the company’s laboratories in the US for genotyping. Within weeks, members can log on to the company’s website to view a raft of information ranging from the amusing (are you predisposed to hate cilantro?) to the soul-crushing (are you predisposed to Parkinson’s disease?).
 
Not everyone is psychologically prepared—especially those who had been tested so they could trace their genealogy, the other arm of 23andMe’s thriving online enterprise. “I had a bit of a cry,” said Candace, a 47-year-old mother of two from Brantford, Ont., who learned she has one copy of the e4 variant (she asked that her identity be withheld). “It’s like, whoa, I didn’t know this was in me. Oh my god, what if I pass it on? It’s very jarring, at first.” So weighty are the findings, & so challenging to place in proper perspective, that in November 2013, the US Food & Drug Administration sent a letter to 23andMe asking it to stop providing health results to its American members. The service amounts to a medical diagnostic device that the FDA had not yet approved for marketing, the letter said. 23andMe quickly complied.
 
The company has faced no such roadblock in Canada. Here, direct-to-consumer DNA testing has fallen through the yawning chasm known as the constitutional division of powers. Health Canada says the service falls under the jurisdiction of the provinces, while the provinces show little interest in regulating testing that is done outside their borders (a spokesman for the Ontario ministry of health said they don’t consider it their jurisdiction). No surprise, then, that 23andMe has ramped up efforts to market its genetic health service north of the border since the FDA clipped its wings. Canada, in the meantime, remains the only G8 country without some sort of law governing how genetic test results can be used by insurers & employers, despite warnings that people who receive bad news could face discrimination when they try to obtain coverage or get jobs.
 
All of which suggests the country is no more ready for the new era of genetic health testing than the thousands of Canadians on whom 23andMe has been dropping eye-opening &, in some cases, heartbreaking information. “This is being marketed as a fun thing to do,” says Bev Heim-Myers, chair of the Canadian Coalition For Genetic Fairness, an organization advocating for legislation banning discrimination based on genetic test results. “But it can go from fun to devastating. This information can then be shared & used against the person. Until we have laws protecting genetic information, this is a dangerous thing.”

We can’t say we weren’t warned. Long before the Human Genome Project charted almost all of the three billion base pairs of human DNA, ethicists & futurists sounded alarms about the potential misuse of genetic information, as testing became cheaper & more widely available. The term “genoism”—unethical discrimination based on genetics—was coined by Andrew Niccol, director of Gattaca, a 1997 movie that portrayed a society driven by eugenics rather than merit. The film’s foresight, alas, proved greater than its cultural impact. Canada, for one, has been drifting for years toward the world it depicted.
 
The plunging price & ready availability of genetic testing is a key part of that new reality. The price to fully sequence all three billion base pairs has been driven down to about $2,000, from the billions spent on the Human Genome Project. But the real game-changer has been Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google billionaire Sergey Brin (the two are now separated), who realized the true value of genetic testing lay in aggregated data that could, in turn, be sold for medical research & development. In 2006, she founded 23andMe with her partner, Susan Avery, naming the company after the 23 pairs of chromosomes in a human cell. The following year, they began offering $999 genotyping—a process that identifies about 750,000 of the genome’s DNA base pairs. By late 2012, the firm was offering $99 tests to its American members, while asking them for consent to share their genetic data, stripped of identifying personal information & lumped in with hundreds of thousands of others’, for the purposes of medical & pharmaceutical research.
 
The company has since shared that information with partners ranging from pharmaceutical giant Pfizer & the US National Institutes of Health, to advance research into everything from obesity to Parkinson’s disease. Last week, the firm announced it is launching its own research division to develop drug therapies.
 
The company’s growth is part of a gold rush occurring at the nexus of big data & Big Pharma, with Silicon Valley players such as Apple developing apps that encourage customers to self-report personal health information in the name of advancing medical research. And it’s not as though 23andMe, which is financially backed by Google, keeps its real line of business a secret. The firm notifies its members about every new collaboration, while encouraging them to participate in online surveys about their traits, tastes & histories. The customers, meanwhile, receive a downloadable file containing their raw DNA data, which they are free to share with doctors or genetic counsellors, along with a report of 110 traits, inherited conditions, drug responses & genetic health risk factors.
 
Reading the report can be a strangely out-of-body experience—like learning secrets about a friend you thought you knew well.
 
Of greater concern to genetic experts, though, are the heavyweight indicators such as those for Alzheimer’s, breast cancer & Parkinson’s. Before disclosing them, the 23andMe site requires members to open a printed primer explaining the results & their limitations. In the case of the Alzheimer’s APOE variants, they can also watch a video presentation by a Harvard Medical School doctor, Robert Green, who assures members he’s not being paid for his appearance. “Finding you are at somewhat higher risk might cause distress,” Green acknowledges in the clip. “So give it some thought. If you think this information might distress you, you can simply decide not to view it. Or feel free to discuss it with a doctor or a genetic counsellor before you unlock & view your results.”

Such notes of caution litter the site. But critics complain they aren’t enough, because the thought of revelatory news a couple of clicks away is too tempting for most people to pass up. Adverse findings can trigger panic, while an absence of indicators provides false reassurance, warns Allie Janson Hazell, president-elect of the Canadian Association of Genetic Counsellors. Furthermore, putting the information in perspective requires expert understanding of the limitations of a genetic test, as well as a person’s family history, she says. Janson Hazell points to 23andMe’s tests for 3 mutations associated with breast cancer, which are most prevalent in people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. “If I, a person of non-Ashkenazi ancestry, get a normal result back, I might feel reassured, even if there’s lots of breast cancer in my family,” she says. “This is where the potential for harm comes in.”

As you might expect, what is framed in Canada as “potential for harm” takes the form of direct accusation in the US. Less than a month after the FDA fired off its warning letter to 23andMe, the company was fending off a class-action lawsuit alleging that its health reports were scientifically meaningless marketing tools allowing it to build up its inventory of saleable gene data. One commentator on Forbes.com warned that quality control is an issue at 23andMe, accusing the company of extrapolating from “a few reports about specific populations.”

Emily Drabant Conley, 23andMe’s director of business development, brushes aside the knocks, saying the company strives to strike a balance, presenting scientifically accurate information in a way that non-experts can understand. “We’re seeing with our customers that they do understand the information, & they do find it relevant,” she says from 23andMe’s offices in Mountain View, Calif. At the root of the model, she adds, is an individual’s right to obtain information about himself so he can make healthy adjustments to his lifestyle. “There are many cases where this information really changes the trajectory of someone’s health,” says Drabant Conley, who has a doctorate in neuroscience. “He or she can find out a piece of information he or she didn’t know, that you could really only ascertain through genetics.”

Company officials are also quick to note that the FDA recently eased its stance on 23andMe’s marketing, allowing it to advise customers whether they have markers for Bloom’s syndrome, a rare condition associated with short stature, sun sensitivity & increased cancer risk.
 
Whatever the criticisms, direct-to-consumer DNA test results appear to be good enough for the insurance industry. 5 years ago, knowing that many Canadians would soon be able to afford the tests, the association representing the country’s life & health insurers issued a statement claiming the right to ask applicants if they’d had genetic testing done. If so, they’d ask for the information before agreeing to a policy, they said, just as they would demand disclosure of other medical records.
 
The point, says Frank Zinatelli, vice-president of the Canadian Life & Health Insurance Association, was to ensure equal footing between insurer & client: Insurers don’t demand genetic testing from anybody who hasn’t already had it done, he stresses; nor can they reopen existing policies based on newly discovered adverse results. But people who knew they had genetic indicators for degenerative diseases like Huntington’s could conceivably rush out to buy policies, Zinatelli argues, upsetting actuarial calculations & ultimately costing everyone. “Let’s remember the definition of insurance,” he says. “It is financial protection against unanticipated loss”. [emphasis his]

Maybe. But that hasn’t stopped critics from citing the insurers’ position as proof that Canada is hurtling toward a Gattaca-like society, where the genetically flawed live diminished lives, cut off from important opportunities or benefits. In 2009, researchers at the University of British Columbia published a survey in which 40% of 233 people with family histories of Huntington’s disease reported they’d experienced some sort of discrimination based on their risk of developing the devastating hereditary brain disorder—especially when it came to getting insurance. Fully 29% said insurers had rejected them, increased premiums or asked them to take genetic tests. (The highly predictive Huntington’s mutation, it should be noted, is not part of 23andMe’s health results package.)
 
And doctors warn that fears of discrimination are discouraging people from obtaining genetic tests that could head off life-threatening diseases. At a Senate committee hearing last fall, Dr. Ronald Cohn, chief of clinical & metabolic genetics at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, told the story of a 12-year-old girl whose parents delayed getting her tested for a hereditary connective-tissue disorder because of concerns about the entire family’s insurability if the results became known. The girl could have one of two conditions, Cohn said, for which the treatments are vastly different. Without the test, “I can’t manage the child’s care,” he added. “I have her come back frequently for echocardiograms to make sure everything is in place, until the family moves forward and I know which disease I’m going to deal with.”

Disturbing as their anecdotes are, advocates such as Cohn & Bev Heim-Myers have had a hard time getting attention on Parliament Hill. In 2013, James Cowan, a Liberal senator from Nova Scotia, tabled a private member’s bill in the upper chamber prohibiting anyone from demanding a genetic test, or the results of a genetic test, as a condition of providing goods or services. Bill S-201 would have amended the Canadian Labour Code to stop employers from requiring workers to take or disclose the results of genetic tests, while adding genetic characteristics to the Canadian Human Rights Act as a prohibited ground of discrimination. It carried the power of criminal law, with fines as high as $1 million & prison terms as long as 5 years.
 
23andMe counted among the bill’s most enthusiastic supporters. But the law’s key provisions were voted down in February by the Conservative majority in the Senate—in part because the Harper government promised in its 2013 Throne Speech its own legislation against genetic discrimination. A spokeswoman for Justice Minister Peter MacKay said in an email last week that the government still intends to act on the file, but she did not specify when. And the fear factor is running high. When Cohn & the staff at Sick Kids recently offered free full-genome sequencing to 330 children in care at the hospital as part of a study, more than 100 of the families refused, citing concern about genetic discrimination.
 
Curiously, few of 23andMe’s Canadian members seem to share those qualms. Several contacted over the past few weeks told Maclean’s they welcomed the health results, & some bristled at the idea of government interference in the service. “I’m fine with the Canadian lack of regulation here,” said Davis Simpson, a 45-year-old Calgarian who signed up to do genealogical searches & regards the health findings provided later as a bonus. “I strongly oppose any action to deny me access to my own health information.”

Most, including Simpson, saw the need for some control of genetic discrimination, but they tended to view the issue mostly as a matter of personal choice. “No one has a right to my body, with or without my explicit consent,” said Nancy, a member from Minden, Ont., who asked that her identity be withheld. “Logically, that includes my personal genome.”

Still, even savvy users like Cottee admit that opening the results unleashes a flood of unforeseen implications, raising as many questions as it answers. After drawing a breath & clicking through to his APOE findings, Cottee was stunned to find that he carried neither copy of the e4 variant. He then took his raw data & loaded it onto a website that screens it for 15 other, less reliable genetic mutations connected to Alzheimer’s. Again, nothing.

“It was a weird thing, because I didn’t actually feel the sense of relief I thought I was going to,” Cottee recalls. “I’d had this feeling of inevitability all along. So why wasn’t I feeling more positive?” It was then that the limitations—or was it the value?—of his tests hit home. Alzheimer’s is a multi-factoral disease, he knew, linked to everything from genetic mutations to obesity. If, for example, his mother never had the APOE gene, then something else had made her vulnerable to Alzheimer’s. She was overweight, & her unhealthy lifestyle had led to diabetes, he notes. But Cottee has already taken steps to avoid those risk factors, which leaves him in the same boat as the rest of us at the onset of the genetic era: awash in information, yet woefully short on certainty—& a little afraid of what he might learn next.

"Mad Man" by Steve Nease

"Mad Man" - Steve Nease, Oakville, ON, Canada

Harper's niqab ban plays dangerous politics

A great opinion piece. Democracy & elections in the West seem to be always based on some kind of fear that "you better vote for me, otherwise apocalypse will come." Sort of an election campaign from the "uncivilized" & "barbaric" developing world.
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/harpers-niqab-ban-plays-dangerous-politics/article23340295/

Zunera Ishaq hails from Pakistan where she was a high school teacher, lives in Mississauga, Ont., is 29 & has 3 kids. She came to Canada in 2008, passed her citizenship test 5 years later with flying colours, & is now ready to take the oath of citizenship. She’s been “imagining [this moment] for so long” because she’s anxious to be a full & active member of Canadian society. She & her husband chose Canada over other countries, she says, because “It is especially important to me to live in a country of religious freedoms since I am a devout Muslim.”

She’s already a volunteer at her eldest child’s school – a public school – & at a local women’s shelter, & once she becomes a citizen she is determined to have an active say in her country’s future. Her lawyers, Lorne Waldman and Naseem Mithoowani, have been impressed by her feistiness, independence & determination. Zunera Ishaq would be, from all accounts, a model Canadian.

Yet if it were up to the Prime Minister of Canada, Ms. Ishaq would have to settle for “imagining” her citizenship until hell freezes over. Why? Because she wears a niqab, which covers her entire face except her eyes. Ms. Ishaq says in a court affidavit that “I first started wearing the niqab when I was approximately 15 years old….After I had done research….I came to the conclusion that the niqab is mandatory to my faith.” While many Muslims disagree, each is free to make these decisions for herself.

It’s perfectly legal, harms no one, but is providing ammunition for Stephen Harper’s election campaign.

The story begins in 2011, when then-immigration minister Jason Kenney arbitrarily decreed that faces couldn’t be covered at citizenship oath-taking ceremonies. This was a direct blow to Ms. Ishaq. She is prepared to unveil herself in private to an official before taking the oath, but will not appear unveiled at the public ceremony. She approached the University of Toronto’s legal aid clinic who put her in touch with Lorne Waldman, one of Canada’s top-notch immigration lawyers. Mr. Waldman went to court to challenge the government & won. In his words, “The Court found that the policy of requiring a woman to remove her facial covering, where there is no question of identity or security, was illegal. The government is required to follow the law.”

Well, not so fast. Never mind the law. We’re talking about politics here. The government has decided to appeal the ruling against them, as just one of their battery of pre-election attacks against Muslims here & abroad. For what I believe are crassly political motives, they are deliberately inflaming Canadians against each others. Now we know what Conservatives mean by “Canadian values.”

Ms. Ishaq has been personally singled out for the national spotlight by no less than Stephen Harper himself. In fact the entire government of Canada seems obsessed by this one woman ... .

Quite simply, the Conservatives have decided that she is a useful weapon in their re-election campaign. By scapegoating her while introducing their much-criticized new anti-terrorism bill, they hope to convince frightened voters that the Conservatives are their best hope against dangers of all kinds. But in doing so, they are instead actually jeopardizing the country’s security. Stephen Harper & his minions are actually subverting the work of our security forces by alienating much of the Muslim community.

CSIS & the Mounties badly need the co-operation of the Muslim community to provide information about security risks among them. Yet even moderate Muslims – the large majority – are outraged by the way the government has, among other things, been picking on this one harmless Muslim woman, & in the process mocking the right of all Muslims to follow their religion in the way they want. Out of sheer political opportunism, Stephen Harper is undermining that community’s trust in official Canada while very likely estranging & radicalizing some Muslims, perhaps dangerously. How can he possibly not understand this?

Other Canadians are also guilty of this reckless behaviour, further angering all Muslims & in particular alienating younger ones. Far too many of these provocateurs are from Quebec, people with responsible positions as political, community & judicial leaders. They are not merely bigoted & intolerant. They are also divisive & destructive. They are playing into the hands of ISIS. As they surely must understand, they are sending an unmistakable message to every Muslim in the land: You are not one of us & we don’t trust any of you. And that message is being heard loud & clear by Muslims everywhere, with predictable repercussions.

Is it really too much to expect the Prime Minister of Canada to act responsibly at a time like this? It seems it is. Politics trumps all, even if it means turning other Canadians against Muslims & turning Muslims against official Canada. The consequences of both remain to be seen.

Europe threatened by its own 'Clash of Civilizations'

A great opinion piece. Assimilation of immigrants is a 2-way street. When the indigenous population is not willing to help assimilate immigrants with jobs, education, & social & ethnic segregation, then immigrants with criminal intentions will do something regrettable to the indigenous population. Then, who is to blame here?
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The challenge, rising from below during these difficult years, comes from a different vision: One that sees the world & its peoples as divided into “civilizations,” fundamentally incompatible with one another. The most extreme holders of this vision, such as the Kouachi brothers in Paris or Anders Breivik in Norway, believe that this incompatibility is a material threat deserving a violent response. Others simply want to turn it into a political reality.

The first group comes from a criminal subgroup on the fringes of Europe’s Muslim populations.

France faces this problem most dramatically. It has the largest Muslim population in Europe, accounting for 8% of its people; they are also by most measures the most culturally & politically integrated religious-minority population in Europe: fluent, very secular, prone to intermarriage, very loyal to France, politically moderate. They’re not a new population, & have very small families, so are not growing much.

But they, like most European Muslims, are generally very poor, & excluded rather dramatically from France’s very closed employment & education systems. Among the young males who drop out of high school, there is a group – generally the least religious in origin – who are attracted to crime & political extremism.

This male, alienated sub-population is manipulated from abroad: The extremist armies of Syria, Iraq & Afghanistan have drawn some in, inculcated them with a “clash-of-civilizations” vision, radicalized them, & sent them back on deadly missions.

7 years ago, after an earlier moment of violence, I sat down with the ambitious mayor of a south Paris suburb with a large Muslim-immigrant population. He warned that the high-school dropout sons of poor but ambitious immigrants were at risk of extremism: “The root causes of the violence of course are still present, & it’s still a powder keg,” he said. “The poverty still exists – the ethnic segregation, the social segregation, the unemployment, people suffering from violent crime & also suffering from a sense of not being part of the national community.” He urged a politics of inclusion.

His name was Manuel Valls, and today he is the Prime Minister of France – launched to that position in good part by his response to this religious-minority alienation, a response that sadly was not as inclusive as his earlier words suggested.

That population is generally of Christian descent, more elderly, & politically conservative. While less frequently prone to violent acts of terrorism, they are an order of magnitude larger in population & pose an even bigger threat to Europe’s integrity.

In France, almost a fifth of the population has been willing to vote for an extremist party, the National Front, which is founded on the same clash-of-civilizations ideology that motivates the jihadis. As with the Islamic-extremist underclass, it targets Jews & pro-European liberals, & opposes European unity.

She, like her political cousins in Britain (Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party) & the Netherlands (Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party) is an explicit supporter of, & is backed by, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has turned the clash-of-civilizations ideology into his guiding mission (with the addition of an equally fictional third, “Eurasian,” civilization).

But Islamic-extremist attacks ... are intended not just to punish, but to polarize: Jihadis explicitly want a war of “civilizations” in Europe. If that other, larger group of divisive believers prevails at the ballot, then their mission will have succeeded.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/europe-threatened-by-its-own-clash-of-civilizations/article22383222/

Canads's secret arms deal with Saudi Arabia

Just in case, if you were thinking after reading (assuming you read & not closed your eyes & jammed fingers in your ears) that article about how an activist crashed a glitzy arms industry dinner, that it's all other countries & got nothing to do with Canada, & Canada is the beacon of peace. Well, here's an article on arms deal between Canada & Saudi Arabia, & ironically, government isn't revealing much info on the deal ... wow, what a great democracy ... people cannot know what the gov't is doing ... the same people who voted for the govt.

My tax $$$ are going to support human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. I don't think I voted for that in last election (I voted NDP). Isn't this a great feeling that Canadians are supporting human rights abuses in foreign countries? Then, when people in those countries don't feel that great about us, we are like, "they don't like our way of life." Frankly, why would or should they? We are complicit in them being abused through our tax $$$.

 

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/canadas-arms-deal-with-saudi-arabia-shrouded-in-secrecy/article22547765/