One Dead Duck:

The Canadian Media Covers the Environmental  File

So far, "one dead waterfowl has been found there" said the story in the Edmonton Journal while the Globe and Mail chose to refer to the outcome of this recent oil spill as resulting in "one dead duck."  The  purpose of this "one dead  duck" story was clearly intended not to commemorate the death of a duck in Alberta but rather to reassure Canadians that this was the only environmental impact resulting from  the spillage of 22,000 barrels of oil into the muskeg of North Western Alberta on May 29 of this year.  Just who determined the extent of the waterfowl body count or the precise number of barrels of oil that were spilled was not specified but the confident and concerned tone of the article would lead one to believe that the same individual or individuals had surely notified the family of the waterfowl cum duck of its untimely and crude demise.

Despite the "one dead duck" theme, it appears unlikely that we have heard the last of this story. Reliable sources have suggested that Evan Solomon has already devoted an entire segment of CBC's Power and Politics to examining the political repercussions behind the duck's demise.  According to informed inside sources at CBC'S Politics and Power, Thomas Mulcair, the leader of the NDP, has speculated that the duck's untimely death was hastened by its already weakened condition due to a severe case of "Dutch Disease," which, it is thought, to have been contracted earlier somewhere over Eastern Canada.

Joe Oliver, the Minister of Natural Resources, and Peter Kent, the Minister of the Environment, respectively, in the Harper Government both denied this and insisted that there was irrefutable evidence that the duck had actually committed suicide as a result of unremitting harassment by foreign funded environmental lobbyists. Oliver even agreed to eat the dead duck on a future Power and Politics show to demonstrate that the toxic effects of the "Dutch Disease" had been rendered entirely harmless in Canada due to the proactive measures of the Harper Government. To reaffirm his comments on an earlier show, Oliver promised to wash down his duck dinner with a glass of pristine water from an oil sands taillings pond.

An unidentified spokesperson for the Canadian corporate media monopoly was quoted as saying that, if there were a positive moral to be drawn from this unfortunate incident, it was that it demonstrated the vigilance and commitment of the Canadian media to report on environmental degradation wherever it occurred in Canada.  In an accompanying editorial, The Globe and Mail affirmed that Canada's national newspaper would never duck its responsibilities when it came to reporting on the fowling of our environment and that a eulogy for the late duck would appear in the Lives Lived section of the paper sometime soon.

The Conservatives Members of Parliament From Ontario: They Didn't Go to Ottawa for You

It was not so long ago when you couldn't turn on your TV without seeing a Tory attack ad with a picture of Michael Ignatieff and a sombre voice over stating "He didn't come back for you".
Now that Mr. Ignatieff has disappeared from the political forum perhaps it is time for the people of Ontario to ask their Conservative representatives in Ottawa "Why did you go to Ottawa?" and to confront what the only truthful response to that question can possibly be "not for you."

The fact is while many of these individuals particularly those who were at the forefront of Mike Harris's "Common Sense Revolution" have done very well to further their own political careers in the Harper government they have done almost nothing for Ontario or Ontarians.
Indeed as part of a government obsessed with building firewall around Alberta or promoting the resource based economies there and in Saskatchewan and British Columbia , Ontario Tories have as a group looked on as impassively as Nero while Ontario's industrial economic base burned down in the new petro dollar Canadian economy.

The three individuals pictured above who have benefitted most from their hasty and inglorious departures from the disgraced Harris regime were Jim Flaherty, John Baird and Tony Clement. All of these individuals share some traits in common; they are self promoting opportunists and career politicians and in the case of Baird and Clement, they do not appear to have done anything else in their lives but politics. Their "success" in Ottawa itself is rather perplexing moreover because they surely did not leave for Ottawa with the accolades of most Ontarians ringing in their ears. No it was more of a case of lets get out of town and get a new gig somewhere else until the lingering odours from the discredited Harris government begin to dissipate. Flaherty even managed to deny he had left an 8 billion dollar Provincial deficit behind as he fled the scene with the recriminations of many Ontarians still echoing in his ears.

So one might ask how did they manage such a successful move from a discredited Harris regime to the minority Harper government. Well the short answer might be like all those who experience failure at one level it is best to move on rather than remain in the place where that failure occurred and where the consequences of it still rankle with those who experienced it. For example none of the three individuals above left any record of lasting accomplishment in the Harris government which itself was roundly rejected by voters partly because of it's in your face and uncompromising political style. This, believe or not, was the kind of politics that they took with them to Ottawa and which has now become the modus operandi of the Harper government.
If it is difficult to understand the success of the remnants of the Harris regime in Ottawa, it is equally difficult to explain how the Harper Conservatives were able to elect 73 members from Ontario in the 2011 election. Part of this of course can be explained by inequities of the first- past- the post electoral system which saw the NDP and the Liberals get 50.9% of the votes and 33 seats while the Conservatives got 44.4 % of the vote and 73 seats. But even this obvious distortion of the results doesn't explain why 44.5% of Ontario voters actually cast there ballots for the Harper Conservatives.

Whether it was the law and order initiatives or a desire for "majority" government or the appeal of their social conservatism agenda it is difficult to say but to attribute it to the Harper government's capacity to manage the economy seems almost impossible to reconcile with what had happened in Ontario and what had occurred there during the recession and afterward.
The reality is that if the Harper government throughout their tenure could be said to have any kind of economic strategy at all it was focused entirely on promoting natural resource extraction and export largely to the benefit of their core constituency mainly in the three most westerly provinces. Apart from some ill advised bailouts of American based auto companies Ontario was ignored while the petro dollar currency devastated its suddenly uncompetitive industrial base.

While space does not allow me to document that process here, it is relevant to note that none of the Harper conservatives in Ottawa did anything to mitigate the economic decline in Ontario. Unlike with Saskatchewan potash the Harper conservatives including those in Ontario looked on while Inco, Falconbridge and the steel industry was taken over by foreign multinationals. While there were still subsidies and environmental deregulation to promote the tar sands there were no such subsidies to promote alternate energy sources in Ontario. Furthermore while the Harper government threw all its support behind the Keystone pipeline and the Western gateway there was nothing to address any of the economic woes in Ontario.

The question that needs to be asked of every member and especially every minister in the Harper government from Ontario is how they could so aggressively support a Conservative economic agenda that had no Ontario component to it. That is why the next time when Ontarians have the opportunity to cast their votes the first question that they must ask their Conservative members of Parliament is Who did you go to Ottawa to represent?.
Even in Canada's sorry democracy, 73 members from Ontario represent the most sizable element in the Harper majority government yet they have been invisible where Ontario's short term and long term economic interests are concerned. In fact they have eagerly promoted an economic, environmental and social agenda that has often been detrimental to Ontario's needs and interests

The time has come for all Ontarians to ask our Conservative MPs in Ottawa just whose interest did you go to Ottawa to represent? Do it now because If you wait until the next election to do so you may find yourself living in an Ontario and a Canada that is unrecognizable from what most of us would like it to be.

Scourge of the Geezers

Margaret Wente: Visionary Prophet of the Coming Generational War in Canada

Thomas Hobbes, who Margaret Wente probably thinks was some minor Republican Tea Party politician inspired by the writings of Ayn Rand, once predicted that, without fear to control us, human society would be destroyed in a total "war of the all against the all." Ms. Wente, it seems, is more modest in her predictions as she only posits a coming war between geezers and the young if Canada does not extend the age whereby Canadians qualify to receive their OAS payments.

As geezer is usually a term applied to old or older men I assume Ms. Wente expects this coming war will pit old males against young males and females but as subtlety or nuance is not a prominent features of her prose it is not entirely clear just how the sexes will line up in the coming conflict. Ms Wente does not elaborate on where the "geezers'" mates will throw their support in the war over the old age pension

Being to quote Ms. Wente one of the "tsunami of geezers" who holds the future survival of Canada in his greedy grasping hands I would like to inform her that if and when this war breaks out this geezer will not fight.

Indeed, I have already contacted my daughter and we have already signed a non-aggression pact whereby she promised not to engage in this war against "old geezers," i.e., me, nor I in a "war against the young," i.e., her.

As part of our truce, I did promise that I will, as planned, pass on all my material resources upon my death to her, my "young" daughter, and I will not demand any repayment of the considerable sums that I, the old "geezer," had expended on her upbringing and extensive education.

This old "geezer" did insist however on one concession from my "young "daughter which was that she refrain from reading any more Globe and Mail columns by Ms. Wente lest they might subsequently inflame her to take up arms against any or all of the liberal, leftists, reformers and other treasonable sorts that are the usual suspects of Ms.Wente's daily rants in the Globe and Mail . To this, she agreed with amazing alacrity stating that she had already discovered along with most of her "young" cohorts that she got about as much mental stimulation from reading the list of ingredients on the back of dishwasher detergent bottles than she got from any of Ms. Wente musings in print. Furthermore, she added that, like the latter, if you had ever read one of Ms. Wente's columns, there was certainly no need to make this a habit as they all were of a similar ilk as only the names were changed daily to reveal the identity of the latest offenders against the rightist code.

Canada Dreaming:

Why renewing democracy in Canada must begin first with democratic reform

Much has been written recently by many with respect to identifying what is wrong with democracy or government in Canada and how they might be "renewed." Yet, the elephant in the room which has largely been ignored in this discussion of how to renew democracy in Canada is the unavoidable conclusion that Canada is a 21st century country with a 19th century constitution and a 19th century electoral system. Furthermore, unless we acknowledge this reality, any hope of renewing democracy in Canada is simply a pipe dream. Indeed, to even speak of a "renewal" of democracy in Canada is itself misleading because the system of governance under which we have operated since Confederation was never intended to and has never functioned in practice as any kind of acceptable option for a modern democratic state.

Strange as it might seem, the one group committed to radical change in Canada who has recognized this undeniable fact and acted aggressively on it to remake our country is the present Conservative Party of Canada. The kind of radical change which constitutes the rightist agenda of the Harper Conservatives may not be the kind of change which the overwhelming majority of Canadians want, but it has proceeded apace nonetheless under both the Conservative minority and "majority" regimes.

If one were to describe the modus operandi of the Harper Government during its tenure in office, it might be summed up as follows. They know full well the depth of the democratic deficit in the Canadian constitutional framework and they know exactly how they can ultimately use this to remake this country in their own image. How, you might ask, can they achieve this objective in an allegedly democratic country where 60%+ Canadians citizens did not vote for them in the last federal election. Isn't the irrevocable political reality that Canada was and still is a predominantly small "L" liberal country and that it is likely to remain so for some time to come?

The answer easily enough is because the Harper Conservatives know that this country has a 19 century constitution, a 19th century electoral system and a largely uniformed or apathetic citizenry and that a determined minority political party in power can exploit this knowledge to secure their rightist agenda. Not much different in many respects than how a radical right wing party in Germany in the 1930's accomplished this by utilizing the same constitutional shortcomings and the same electoral system which we still have in Canada. That party never achieved an absolute majority of votes either but it too managed a "majority" that never exceeded more than 37% of the German electorate and we all know where that lead.

The Harper Conservatives, recognizing the flawed constitutional structures and electoral system which pass for democracy Canada, have made this the key element of their political strategy and they have implemented it so effectively that they are well on their way to constructing a new concept of Canada which may well be radically different than that held by the majority of Canadians today. This "new" Canadian democracy, which the Harper Conservatives is constructing however, has very little which is actually new about it; firmly rooted as it is in an outdated constitutional system which has changed minimally since !867

What is new, however, is the ideological rigour and determination with which the Harper Conservatives have acted to achieve their agenda by exploiting every one of the multiplicity of democratic flaws which have always existed in our old and outmoded constitutional system. Earlier, Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments did exploit these same democratic shortcomings to their occasional advantage, but, being less ideological and more consensual in their approach to governance, they did not attempt to use them to alter or remake the political status in any radical way.

Consensus and compromise were the operative Canadian political values for most of this period and whatever role ideology played in this process was left to marginal parties on the political right or left. There were, to be sure, heated debates, but, even here, the Progressive Conservatives could go from confirmed opponents of free trade to exponents of it and the Liberals vice versa indicating that ideological rigour was not the defining element in their political response to issues.

When the Reform Party and the right wing rump of the former Progressive Conservative party morphed into the Conservative Party, the populism and democratic inclinations of the Reform Party quickly gave way to the ideological thrust of the right wing conservative faction led by Stephen Harper. This is precisely the point at which the old political Canada and the new political Canada converged with the emergence of new right-wing ideologically driven party within an old and badly flawed Canadian constitutional structure devoid of any strong democratic principles or protections to confront this new political development. The results were predictable, although it took some time before the new Conservative Party agenda, often referred to initially by their opponents as their "hidden agenda," could be put in place. Even with the election of Conservative minorities in 2006 and 2008 and, despite the weakness of the opposition, the Harperites kept their ideological tendencies in check and adopted a kind of populist and relatively mainstream governing style. In fact, they spent liberally and, in general, with a few concessions to their populist and ideological base, they stayed largely within the traditional mainstream of Canadian politics. This undoubtedly was a strategic longer term consideration as well as a practical necessity as any aggressive or radical political initiatives might have insured a hasty Parliamentary defeat on an issue that might not have the support of the necessary 37% of the Canadian electorate they needed.

Suffice it to say, Conservative patience was rewarded in 2011 when they received their 39% majority and were finally in the position whereby they could fully exploit the democratic deficits in our flawed constitution and begin to drive their ideological right wing agenda straight through it. In fact, their election victory itself in 2011 relied a great deal on a staple component of good old Canadian political values, i.e., the preference for majority governments over minority ones and our seeming dislike of or unfamiliarity with coalition governments. The persistence of the latter values may also explain why constitutional change and even the demand for such changes in Canada have lagged far behind other democracies including several with the same British antecedents as ours. The Canadian electorate has traditionally and continues to prefer authority and certainty in government over democracy and the uncertainty that sometimes goes with it. Until this belief changes, we are likely to continue to have "majority" governments of the sort we currently have for some time to come. This, combined with the democratic shortcomings implicit in our outdated constitution, means that any government, but particularly and dangerously so when it comes to ideological driven ones like the present regime, will be able to remake the country in whatever image they like in the course of the five year "mandate" they are able to achieve with the votes of a minority of the Canadian electorate

We can already see this pattern emerging in the "majority" Harper Conservative government which was elected in 2011. This is a government which has much less patience for processes of Parliamentary debate and sees the committee system, which they now control, as a bothersome kind of inconvenience to getting things done. The case of the dismantling of the Wheat Board is instructive in this respect where parliamentary process was largely ignored as were all attempts at consultation, compromise or consensus. No referenda, no legal opinions, just do it in the shortest time and rid the country of a detested remnant of Canadian socialism. The same approach is evident in the discussions over the fiscal transfers to the provinces for health care, again just a unilateral government decision, no discussion, debate, or any effort to achieve consensus or compromise

.More importantly, perhaps, was the obvious agenda of removing the federal government from our health care system completely with respect to policy, standards, or any other form of involvement. Let the provinces take care of their individual health care systems and, if they do not have enough funding, they then will get as much health care as they can afford. The likely result is ten health care systems in Canada without any guarantee with respect to equality or level of care from one jurisdiction to another or even that the system remains essentially public in character. The ideological objective is to get the federal government out of public health care and perhaps to kill or privatize it altogether over time

The recent appointments of vetted Conservative partisans to the Senate, the appointment of a unilingual Auditor General with partisan party ties as well as two right leaning Supreme Court justices indicate that the Harper Conservatives are fully exploiting the almost unlimited powers the Prime Minister has under our constitution to make the key constitutional appointments that insure their agenda is "constitutionally" entrenched.

Remember when Stephen Harper told Canadians to allay their fears about a possible hidden agenda on the part of his party to radically change the country, that we would be protected by Parliament, the bureaucracy and the courts; not likely it seems under the present Canadian constitutional structures where the sitting PM has ultimate control over all these constitutional levers as well. Faced with the obvious democratic deficit in Canada, my advice for all well meaning advocates of 'democratic renewal" in Canada is to start a new campaign which is focused on constitutional reform without which any real democracy is impossible.

Everybody Knows: The Lesson from Egypt For all Canadians on our "Mission" in Afghanistan

The next time a Canadian soldier dies in Afghanistan and his body travels down the "Highway of Heroes," reflect on the tragic events playing out in Egypt and ask yourself for what did he or she die. The only honest answer to that question, however unsettling it might be to some Canadians, would be to keep a corrupt dictatorship in Afghanistan in power. That this is the case was tragically evident over the past several days as we watched the USA and its compliant allies, including Canada, stand by and watch the corrupt and dictatorial regime in Egypt crush a mass movement for democracy and political reform in that country. When the time came to encourage and support a "regime change" in the Moslem World initiated by the actual citizens themselves and to test their alleged commitment to democracy and individual rights, the collective response in the West led by the USA was to beg off.

Perhaps those of us forewarned by "the back channel" conversations of Western powers revealed by Wikileaks recently were expecting this kind of cynical response, but it was no less distressing when we saw it unfold. In the words of Leonard Cohen's haunting song "Everybody Knows", we, too should have known that, in the end, we would discover that "the captain lied . . . the fight was fixed . . . the good guys lost [and] the poor stay poor, the rich get rich, that's how it goes."

Nonetheless, for one exquisite moment as we watched the Egyptian people confront their corrupt US sponsored regime, many of us were there with them in the streets and shared their hopes and aspirations. Not so our political leaders however and soon we were confronted by the image of that one-time prophet of change, Barak Obama, preaching the politics of moderation and non-violence to the Egyptian people. What was good for us in the West was not necessarily good for the Egyptian people or America's strategic interests in the Middle East which might be summed up as oil and Israel. So, as Mubarak, in black suit and black tie, unleashed the made-in-America tanks, armoured vehicles and canisters of gas on the people, our hopes that a regime change, inspired and courageously attempted by the Egyptian people, was doomed by the alleged champions of democracy and individual rights. Confirming, as they did so, that the American establishment which has built a grand national mythology around the concepts universal human rights and democracy could easily abandon it when it got in the way of America's interests.

Picture, if you will, the image of the Egyptian people escaping from a harsh political prison built by their leaders with the full support of their American allies and being told they should not tear it down but return to it while the American President assured them that the warden would insure that their guards would be changed.

So Canadians, remember what our Ambassador in Kabul had to say about the corrupt dictatorial regime in Afghanistan as disclosed by the Wikileaks papers. Then ask yourself just why our soldiers are dying there to protect a government which is essentially the same as the despised Mubarak dictatorship which the people in Egypt are trying to overthrow without so much as a word of encouragement and support from our government.

Speaking Truth to Power: Wikileaks and what they reveal about the contemporary mainstream political news media in Canada.

One of the more interesting questions which might be posed with respect to the recent Wikileaks disclosures is, if, by chance, a large quantity of secret documents pertaining to our government secret activities were leaked here in Canada, how likely is it that any of them would ever be released to the public? If, as in the USA, these secret documents were made assessable to Canadian newspapers, the answer would probably be "no" and, if it were to the TV and Radio media, it would be even less likely they would ever see the light of day.

The reality is that Canada has one of the most concentrated print media ownership regimes in the world and TV and Radio media ownership is even more restrictive. Furthermore, the cross-ownership of print, TV and Radio media outlets and their integrated news operations means that there is no real independent print or broadcast outlets in Canada with any significant public audience. In fact, with the exception of Toronto where the "liberal" Toronto Star shares a print media market with three right-leaning or right wing orientated papers, the Globe & Mail, the Post and the Sun, the rest of the print media industry in Canada is pretty much a corporate rightist monopoly. In fact, if one includes Macleans, the only "national" newsmagazine in Canada, this further reinforces that view.

The result of concentration of media ownership is, as a visiting friend from Europe remarked to me last summer, that the mainstream media in Canada appeared to be much more to the political right than most of the Canadians he encountered across the country. He was even more surprised, moreover, when I told him that the political right in Canada, as represented by the Conservative Party, had only the support of approximately 38% of the electorate. Considering the ideological orientation of the electorate, therefore, it would be reasonable to conclude that the media in Canada is far more conservative or rightist in outlook than the majority of the voting public in Canada.

At one time, the dominant position of the corporate right media in Canada was somewhat offset by the presence of the CBC which tended to adopt a more centrist or liberal position within the broadcast media. This changed with the election of the Conservative Party in 2005 which has seen the CBC adopt a far more favourable and much less critical attitude toward the right wing political minority and the government which speaks on its behalf. That CBC stance may have been influenced by the fact that, on the day following the Conservative "victory" in 2005, Norman Spector, a then Conservative party insider in an op-ed article in the Globe & Mail, advocated the abolition of the CBC as one of the first priorities for the new Prime Minister Steven Harper. (See my blog on this at "http://gmcsheffrey.blogspot.com/2008/02/full-of-sound-and-fury-signifying_3819.html")

Clearly, Spector recognized from the beginning that, if the Conservatives were ever to achieve an electoral majority in Canada, they needed a supportive mass media which would help make their right wing political agenda more palatable to a Canadian public at large which was much more moderate and centrist in their political views. That supportive right wing mass media, with a few rare exceptions, was already in place. The CBC was more problematic, both based on its past performance and its liberal inclinations but also because of the possibility that it might adopt the stance that its primary approach to political coverage might be shaped by taking into account the minority status of the new Conservative government. The crux of the issue, for the CBC as a national public network, was (and remains) how should the fact that 62% of the Canadian electorate had voted against the Conservative Party and its political agenda influence the primary focus and allocation of the CBC's political coverage. It appears that the CBC may have concluded, either for reasons of its own financial self-survival or its adoption of the Conservative Party rationale, that the Conservative Party's minority governing status notwithstanding, the Conservative Party were the government of all Canadians and, as such, they should be treated as if they were de-facto a majority government.

Whatever the reasons for the CBC's adoption of a more government focused and more conservative friendly network were, the result of this became especially evident after the election of the Conservatives to their second "majority-minority" in 2008. With the retirement of Don Newman as the senior parliamentary editor and political commentator at the CBC and the host of the daily show "Politics" in 2009, the position of the CBC as the most reliable and non-partisan source of political news and opinion in Canada had been utterly diminished. The current show, hosted by Evan Solomon and renamed "Power and Politics," covers politics as entertainment and the 'barking dogs" segment, which was introduced to sample public response to political issues of the day, might well be used to describe the show as a whole. Lots of barking political dogs who seemingly skipped or failed obedience school, reciting message tracts and a host without the knowledge, background or inclination to either control them or ask them to answer any serious or probing questions. The result is equivalent to a modified version of Parliament's Question Period where no serious questions are asked or answered and the prevailing atmosphere seems to be, does anybody really take any of this seriously anyway. With a few slight changes, this show could easily be transformed into a first rate parody of what passes for political discussion on the National TV network of some Banana Republic and that would surely be an improvement over what it is in its present format.

Considering what currently passes for non-partisan political discourse in the Canadian media, it should not be a surprise that some of the best and relevant political commentary in the country has recently come from John Doyle, the television critic at the Globe & Mail. The advent of the "new" format Globe & Mail last year was marked by the demise of Rick Salutin's sage and provocative column which often offered insightful and original political commentary which managed to rise above the partisan "spin" so characteristic of the rest of this genre of journalism in Canada. What Doyle pointed out, with respect to the impact of the Wikileaks documents that seemed so obvious but was ignored by the political media in Canada, was that they demonstrated how much of what passed for "respectable" mainline political journalism in this country amounted to little more than "spin" which originated from government or other "reliable" insider sources. Serious investigative political journalism barely exists at all in this country and this can be traced directly to the editorial constraints imposed by the dominant right wing control of the media and the absence of any truly independent media forums in Canada.

One need only turn to Canadian press coverage of the war in Afghanistan to see just how true Doyle's observation is in this respect. Although the Globe & Mail did initially spearhead the investigation in the Afghan detainees issue, it soon dropped it once it became too much of a potential negative political problem for the Conservative Government that it supports, both editorially and in its political commentary and reportage. Similarly, the Globe & Mail and the rest of the rightist Canadian media regurgitated unreservedly the Conservative Government spin on extending the Canadian military mission in Afghanistan. It was only when Wikileaks released the comments of the Canadian ambassador in Afghanistan that the Canadian public at large had any real idea of just how negatively the Afghan regime was viewed by our senior Canadian representative there. Clearly, it explains why the ambassador's views were not revealed earlier by a government which was bent on continuing our participation in this ill fated and hopeless adventure in Afghanistan regardless of the real situation on the ground there.

Whatever else Wikileaks may or may not have accomplished, it has revealed to those Canadians who are capable of understanding the intrinsic limitation of our compliant mass media just how very little of what we see, hear or read there can be taken at face value. In this respect Wikileaks might be viewed as a kind of very effective "spin dispersant" which serves to reveal the real story behind the official versions of it which are daily parroted in our national media.

Send in the Clowns: Don't Bother They Are Everywhere

Three wise men of the right in Canada

A friend recently asked me why I no longer continued to update my "Send in the Clowns "segment of my blog. I responded by saying that I had come to the conclusion that political satire no longer had much critical value in Canada. The reason for this was that in the present political context in Canada, the clowns appeared to be in charge of the circus and hardly anyone seemed to perceive this or even care that this was actually the case. I suppose this was inevitable considering the kind of Banana Republic that Canada appears to have been transformed into over the past five years. Satire simply doesn't work in a context where the political actors no matter how clownish or outrageous their behaviour might be, are no longer seen as being outside what is considered to be the acceptable norms within the body politic of Canada.

Take for example the case of Don Cherry presiding over the installation of Robert Ford the newly elected major of "Toronna". Cherry is not only a clown who dresses like one but someone whose political IQ would make Sara Palin appear a political genius in comparison. He has made himself into a media star in Canada by denigrating foreign born and Quebec hockey players in the NHL, defending fighting in the game and "bullying" the "effete" or "weak kneed" Ron Maclean for his more moderate or reasoned views on these or other issues. Cherry whom John Doyle of the Globe and Mail has styled the star of "loony -right night in Canada" has now achieved the status of a neo-con celeb to whom Conservative Party candidates eagerly line up for political endorsements.
In the case of the recent bye-election in Vaughan this amounted to one political clown in a funny suit endorsing another would be political clown in a police suit and nobody seemed to think that electorate would find this a little disturbing based on the past track records and extreme views of both of these men. Seemingly the political fixers were right and 15.9% of the electors who bothered to vote elected the clown in the police suit because he had been proclaimed the "star" candidate by the media and endorsed by Cherry, the other "star" clown in a suit.

Should we have been surprised or shocked when immediately after the 68 year old former man in the police suit initiated his political career by questioning the value of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and followed this up by labelling critics of his extreme views on the Charter as "Nazis".
What is so disturbing to me however is that the over the top and bullying behaviour so typical of both Cherry and Fantino fits in exactly with the in your face, my way or the highway attitudes that are so characteristic of the Harper Conservative Party while in power. What is perhaps even more disturbing is that these tactics seem to be approved of by the 37% of the Canadian electorate who vote for the Conservative Party.