Tag Archives: Civic Literacy

Roundup: Dispute or drawing board?

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A government-sponsored review of the Auditor General’s findings on the F-35 procurement failure could be indicating that they’re trying to dispute his findings, rather than taking the procurement process back to the drawing board like they (sort of) promised to.

A Dalhousie professor believes that our current approach to immigration is simply snobbery that won’t help with the coming demographic crunch, but rather that we need more unskilled labourers who will be industrious and start businesses.

Documents show that Jack Layton’s state funeral cost some $368,000 – more than the state funerals of the previous two governors general, who are actually entitled to such events.

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Roundup: Paying back union sponsorships

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It appears that Elections Canada has forced the NDP to pay back $344,468 in union sponsorships for their conventions since 2003. This is the figure that Thomas Mulcair has been refusing to disclose to date, and which the Conservatives will use as more ammunition in the days and weeks to come.

Liberal MP Frank Valeriote stands by his campaign decisions with the robo-calls in his riding – but would simply have followed the CRTC rules of having the proper tags on the end had he known.

The Canadian Forces’ Arctic exercises last week offered us a glimpse of the secretive and mysterious JTF2 unit.

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Roundup: Fined for telecomm violations

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The CRTC has fined the Liberal riding association in Guelph for an improper robo-call during the last election, and Frank Valeriote, the MP, accepted the finding. Now, just to remind you – this was about a violation of the Telecommunications Act with an unidentified robo-call warning that the Conservative candidate might be pro-life. It was not a violation of the Elections Act. It has nothing to do with misleading voter to wrong polling stations, or anything like that. No matter how many equivalencies the Conservative partisans try to this to the other Guelph robo-calls and the mysterious “Pierre Poutine,” they would all be wrong.

Helena Guergis’ lawsuit against Stephen Harper and company has been tossed out – as well it should be. The Judge correctly asserted that the matter of her being in cabinet are a Crown Prerogative – because it is. And Crown Prerogatives are generally non-justiciable for a reason. Otherwise, people start doing silly things, like taking to the courts when they lose at politics, just like they start writing to the GG or the Queen. Oh, wait – they already do! But yeah, it’s not the court’s jurisdiction. If you have a problem with the way a government exercises its prerogative, then you vote them out in the next election. If people had a modicum of civic literacy, this kind of thing might be avoided. Guergis says she’s stating law school next week – hopefully she’ll learn this lesson, as well as what “frivolous lawsuit” means. She also says she wants to appeal, but good luck with that.

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Roundup: Detaining refugees versus the Charter

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Apparently an internal report at Citizenship and Immigration says that the government should consider detaining Roma refugees if the new changes to the Act don’t stem the tide of claimants. It’s a bit hard to see how that would be squared with the Charter, considering it would be arbitrary detention and racial profiling, no?

The National Energy Board is now demanding that report from the Enbridge spill in Michigan two years ago as part of the Northern Gateway review panel. Thomas Mulcair, meanwhile, considers the project dead, while still calling the oil sands an “important resource.” Okay then.

Despite Conservative promises that the whole F-35 purchase was going to be frozen and rethought, Lockheed Martin says there’s no change on their end and we appear to be going full steam ahead.

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YCYC and our crisis in civic literacy

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Those of you who follow me over on the Twitter Machine know that I’ve been highly critical of the new “educational charity” Your Canada/Your Constitution pretty much since its inception. Last week they put out yet another press release that demonstrates their civic illiteracy, and more than that, the fact that they are deliberately misleading the public when they say that their goals are about education around our system of governance.

On the mandate page of their website, YCYC purports to do “research and education about the history, and ongoing development, of Canada’s Constitution and governments.” And in order to solicit donations from the public, they promise to use the money to develop education materials, host workshops and public forums for discussion, and hold contests to get people engaged. According to the site:

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The Online Party demonstrates the height of civic illiteracy

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News went out yesterday that a the Online Party of Canada has obtained “registered party status” and will be fielding candidates in the upcoming federal by-elections. Never having heard of them, I quickly found an interview that party leader Michael Nicula, the director of a Toronto-based IT services company, did with the National Post. The results were pretty appalling.

Nicula quickly demonstrates that he has close to zero civic literacy. He has no understanding of responsible government, the Westminster system, or even the basics of just what is democracy. All wrapped in this shock-and-awe package of the Internet as the panacea to all of our political woes.

It was this quote in the interview that immediately caught my eye: “Why do we have to spend billions of dollars on elections?” Nicula asked. “The American Idol contest is done on the Internet, and it works pretty well. Why not do the same? With more security of course.”

And then my head exploded.

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Meeting George Takach

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On my travels last weekend, I wound up at an event that was attended by a number of Nova Scotia Liberals, and along the way, had my first encounter with bottom-tier would-be Liberal leadership candidate George Takach (who at last check has not officially declared). Takach, a Toronto-based lawyer who hasn’t run for public office before but has apparently worked on Parliament Hill, was out trying to meet some prospective supporters at the event (as the current rules now allow anyone who totally swears they’re not a member of any other party – really! – to vote for the next Liberal leader). I should note that Takach doesn’t appear to have a website in place for his putative leadership bid either – just a Twitter account and a Facebook page, neither of which actually has a biography. That, I had to find through a Google search and came up with the page from his law firm. So, yeah, points for having a place to drive prospective supporters with a coherent platform or policy ideas in place. Or not.

Just as an observation, let me say that Takach wasn’t exactly working the crowd. Even among a smaller group of fairly prominent local Liberal organisers – you know, the kinds of grassroots organisers who have networks and who can mobilise people to support a leadership campaign – he didn’t pro-actively engage them and waited for people to come to him. And when people asked for his leadership “elevator pitch,” he got bogged down along the way numerous times, not to mention made his foundational platforms – like school meal programmes to help kids get a good start in life – things aren’t actually areas of federal responsibility. Oops.

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Roundup: The politics of gun violence

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I believe Colin Horgan said it best, so I’ll start off by quoting him: “Yes, never miss a chance for partisan shots. With senseless human tragedy comes political opportunity! Well done, everybody.” He is, of course, referring to the release put out by the government in the wake of the shootings in Scarborough, to which the government gave two lines of condolences and twelve lines of partisan salesmanship about how the opposition needs to support their tough-on-crime agenda. Because we all know that if the mandatory minimums that already exist on the books didn’t prevent this, well, then we need even tougher penalties for deterrence! It also didn’t help that Vic Toews took shots at those judges who struck down the mandatory minimums as arbitrary and inappropriate in some cases – and it was both in the cases in which they were struck down. And then Julian Fantino is the one to sound reasonable? How did that happen? (And just to note that Liberal MP John McKay, whose riding the shooting happened in, was also eminently reasonable, while NDP MP Rathika Sitsabaiesan, from the neighbouring riding, took to Power and Politics to suggest they talk to the critic another day. Oops).

The Federal Court shot down a challenge to the government’s decision to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol because, well, it’s actually the government’s right to do so. That’s the way executive powers work, even if you don’t agree with them – not that it seems to stop the civically illiterate from taking to the courts to try and change the foundations of parliamentary democracy on a whim because they lost a political battle.

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Roundup: No prorogation until the “mid-term”

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In case you were wondering, Stephen Harper has ruled out a prorogation anytime in the near future, but hints that there would be a more extensive cabinet shuffle and new Speech From the Throne in the “mid-term” as they re-jig their longer-term agenda. (Full interview here). All of this media speculation he’s quashing – all that’s left to speculate on is who will fill those six vacant and soon-to-be-vacant Senate seats. Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt wonders if Bev Oda was tricked into resigning if she supposedly got tipped off that she was being shuffled out, and yet Harper said he’s not planning any major shuffles. It does make you think.

Speaking of Oda, it seems that all of her old limousine invoices mysteriously turned up the day after she resigned – even though days ago media outlets were told that those documents didn’t exist. I’m sure the Information Commissioner will be very interested in how that happened.

Failed refugee claimants are being offered $2000 worth of assistance and a one-way plane ticket if they voluntarily return to their country of origin. Some refugee lawyers say it’s humane and voluntary, while others worry it’s a bribe for them to walk away from their legal rights. Apparently this saves taxpayers money because it means CBSA doesn’t have to chase them down for deportation, so everyone (except genuine refugee whose claims have been unfairly denied and who are in danger if they return to their country of origin) wins, right?

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Roundup: Secret meeting with Mulroney

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With a need to bolster his public image in Quebec, and the real sense of how much trouble he could be in should the PQ get elected in the province, Harper apparently had a secret meeting with Brian Mulroney last week for advice. (I’m still trying to figure out when that might have happened, given that Harper’s been a pretty busy PM of late, between international travel and vote-a-thons in the Commons). Nevertheless, necessity can make for strange bedfellows. Paul Wells dissects what it all means here.

The Rio+20 summit has ended with little in the way of agreed upon targets or timelines. Peter Kent says it’s a good thing, and that big conferences like that end up being counter-productive, and that binding targets are “inappropriate” and “unrealistic.”

Despite the requests to waive solicitor-client privilege in the investigation of a soldier’s suicide, Peter MacKay says no.

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