-       and make Canada an international laughingstock

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/article/854197–russian-bombers-a-make-believe-threat

and: http://tinyurl.com/3xrqffw  ( Toronto Star Editorial cartoons – See August 26 cartoon by Corrigan)

The facts? No tuberculosis. Women, some pregnant, and children on board as well as the men. So far, no terrorists.

Maybe Vic might have tried to escape with his family from a repressive regime if he was a Tamil?   Would that make him a terrorist?

We need responsible government Ministers who check the facts before they speak.

As a consequence of delays by the federal government, projects are running behind schedule and the rigid artificial deadline of March 31, 2010 will likely not be met by many.

The report identifies the risk of half a billion dollars of uncompleted work being dumped onto local property taxpayers. Anywhere from 24% to 46% of participating communities could be short-changed by the “dine and dash” attitude of the federal government towards Canada’s cities and towns, who offered to shoulder a big portion of the task of getting unemployed Canadians back to work.

The report does not pick up those projects which have had to overpay a premium in order to have projects completed by the artificial deadline.

Deadlines made sense as targets so projects would get underway, but total inflexibility will cost Canadians millions of dollars, said Mr. Kennedy. The Conservatives believe they can reclaim hundreds of millions at the end of the fiscal year to pose as better fiscal managers.

“A key question now is, will the new Infrastructure Minister Chuck Strahl be more practical and helpful than his predecessor?” Mr. Kennedy adds.”Canadians realize their interests have suffered from John Baird’s conflict between his other role of defending and promoting the Harper Conservatives at all costs and sensible serious management of these projects.”

The report also contains a further caution about the Harper government’s unhealthy wilful ignorance of facts. Like the Opposition, the PBO has had to resort to doing his own surveys to make up for the poor quality of what is being collected by the Harper government.

Even after a year into the program, the government still had not collected any reports for more than 25% of projects worth a total of $2.5 billion.

Also noteworthy are revised figures that show only 8% of funding had actually been spent at a time last fall when the government was claiming it had spent 90%.

When you have finished laughing at Stockwell Day — for building jails for criminals he cannot find — think of the failed American regime of crime and punishment.

To his estimated $9 billion expenditure, add the $1 billion bill for security at the G20 summit and the $16 billion purchase of F-35s in an untendered contract.

Stack such expenses against Stephen Harper’s commitment to halve the $54 billion debt in five years, and wonder what he plans to slash and burn to get there.

Think also of his decisions to weaken the national census and kill Statistics Canada surveys that measured the impact of government policies on Canadians, especially the poor and the vulnerable.

Throw in his silencing of independent watchdogs, from the parliamentary budget officer to the RCMP ombud, and axing funds to advocacy groups monitoring the government.

We can see where the Prime Minister is going. How he’s getting there we can glean from his ideological, authoritarian, secretive, even demagogic, methodology. He and his ministers do not want to be burdened with facts and logic in order to do what they want.

George W. Bush, bent on invading Iraq, did not want to know that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, did not have anything to do with 9/11 and did not have any connections to Al Qaeda.

Tony Clement, bent on cancelling the compulsory long form of the census, advances arguments that defy common sense. He says people should not be jailed for not filling out the long form but they can be jailed for failing to fill the short form. He’ll spend an extra $30 million to get more voluntary data that would be just about useless. He accuses individuals and groups opposing his decision of being freeloaders when, in fact, they pay StatsCan for using its services (GTA municipalities alone pay $500,000 a year for census data).

Day, bent on building more prisons, does not want to know that the crime rate has been declining for 20 years. That even public fear of crime is down. Even an internal federal poll shows that only 1 per cent of Canadians list crime as a big issue.

But Day says that unreported crimes are up, the numbers of which he does not know, cannot know. Yet he’s certain that “those (nonexisting) numbers are alarming.”

He is in the la-la land of Republicans, who for decades whipped up (white) fear of (black) crime and kept building prisons across America until there was no more money to build.

They turned to private enterprise to build some more. Then some states didn’t have the money to pay even the per diem rates, so they let some inmates out. Declared too dangerous to be kept out of jail, the inmates are too expensive to be kept in.

Still, the U.S. easily retains its record of the highest incarceration rate in the world — 2.3 million vs. 1.6 million in China (despite five times the population). That’s 751 per 100,000 population vs. 627 in Russia and 107 in Canada.

A fifth of American inmates are sexually abused, 16 per cent suffer mental illnesses and another 16 per cent are kids under 18. About 500,000 are there on drug offences alone. Of the 700,000 released every year, more than half return within three years.

Yet the Tories are headed that way, with Day’s Orwellian fear-mongering and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson announcing higher jail terms for a raft of drug-, gambling- and prostitution-related crimes. Creating a clientele for the jails they are building.

Spending lavishly on skewed priorities, from tax breaks for the rich to ordering big-ticket defence toys, has been a Republican/Conservative specialty. That’s how Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan turned huge surpluses into record deficits. So did Mike Harris and George W. Bush.

Harper is following in their footsteps. He also shares Harris’s mean streak and some of the former premier’s bullying cabinet colleagues (Jim Flaherty, Tony Clement and John Baird), as well as chief of staff (Guy Giorno). Like Harris, Harper is cutting social programs and targeting employment equity, which would no doubt entail demonizing the poor as well as minorities.

If you thought Harris wreaked devastation on Ontario, Harper may have bigger plans — and on a national scale.

NOTE: You’ve got to see the video to believe it.

The Prime Minister’s Office was busily emailing its message of the day to supporters and MPs as Treasury Board President Stockwell Day was unsuccessfully trying to share it with reporters in Ottawa Tuesday.

“Continuing the Focus on Jobs and Growth – Message of the Day” was the headline on the PMO missive. That was not Mr. Day’s message, try though he did. The minister was sent out as the Tory representative in the morning in advance of a series of cabinet meetings this week that ends with the national Conservative caucus meeting Thursday.

Mr. Day was to talk about jobs and growth; he tried to talk about jobs and growth and stimulus. However, reporters had other ideas – the controversy over the census dominated and there was a question about prisons to which he gave a very curious answer – and so his news conference went slightly off the rails.

Here’s what he was supposed to be discussing:

“Today, the Honourable Stockwell Day, President of the Treasury Board, Minister for the Pacific Gateway and Minister Responsible for British Columbia … discussed the Government’s continued focus on creating jobs and economic growth across Canada,” the PMO email says.

And it listed some of the points that Mr. Day would make:

“Today, Canadians can be encouraged by the positive signs of recovery we are seeing across the country,” according to the talking points. “However, the recovery is still fragile and Canada is not immune to the economic instability of other countries.”

To be fair he did make the points in his introductory remarks before he took any questions, he just wasn’t able to build on them. That’s because reporters had other ideas _ nowhere, for example, in the talking points is any mention of the controversy over the scrapping of the compulsory long-form census or Canadians not reporting crime.

Mr. Day, in answering a question about the government’s thinking in building more prisons during a recession, defended the billions of dollars of expense with his assertion that the crime rate is not going down because other offences are going unreported at an “alarming” rate.

“It shows we can’t take a Liberal view to crime which is, some would suggest, that it is barely happening at all,” Mr. Day said. “Still, there are too many situations of criminal activity that are alarming to our citizens and we intend to deal with that.”

Not surprisingly, Mr. Day’s comments about unreported crime have provoked a lot of commentary, including a YouTube video annotating his statements during the news conference.

The Liberals, too, were quick to pounce. “Stockwell Day seems like he is making things up,” a senior Ignatieff official told The Globe. “Not to say that there are no such things as ‘unreported crimes,’ but to use that to justify their ‘lock’em all up and throw away the key’ agenda is pushing the envelope.

“If Mr. Day is so keen to look back to the early 60s crime stats, he should know that some crimes reported today were not necessarily reported back then: domestic violence, rape and child abuse, to name a few.”

If only the Treasury Board President had just stuck to the talking points. What he really meant to say was that his government is continuing its work to “return to balanced budgets by winding down stimulus spending when the time is right.”

“It is with a heavy heart that I have decided to step down as the candidate for the federal Liberal Party in Parry Sound—Muskoka.  A number of years ago, I was treated for cancer.  It seems to be making a re-appearance.  But the prognosis is good, and I am not going anywhere.  I do, however, have to take this issue seriously and make health my priority.”

“I discussed the matter last evening at a meeting of the Parry Sound—Muskoka Federal Liberal Association.  I want to thank all of our local riding association members and the community at large for their support over the past year.  I will continue to be involved with our community, the riding association and the Liberal Party of Canada, especially as the association prepares to select a new candidate.”

Tim Dunn, the President of the Parry Sound—Muskoka Federal Liberal Association, added:

“I want to offer Shawn and his family our best wishes at this difficult time.  He grew up in this community, and believes in a compassionate, progressive Liberal government in Ottawa.  While we are sad to lose his strong voice, the Association is now shifting its efforts towards nominating our next candidate.”

It’s just as well for Tony Clement that he helped save a woman from drowning last weekend — it’s likely to be the last good news story he features in for quite some time.

The Industry Minister’s testimony at a specially convened committee meeting on Parliament Hill on Tuesday will have won few converts to the government’s argument that scrapping the mandatory long-form census is a smart and necessary move.

The world’s most boring political scandal rumbled on, as MPs were recalled to hear from a long list of witnesses, who almost unanimously condemned the government’s plan.

Walking past the tourists and the marching bands on the lawn of Parliament Hill to cover the committee felt like a descent into the ninth circle of Hell. Inside a stifling, packed committee room, Mr. Clement made the case that the government should not threaten people who fail to fill in the census with jail time.

On this, he has a point. It is also conceivable that some people may find census questions about home repairs and spousal support to be “coercive and invasive,” as the Industry Minister suggested.

But the government’s solution — to make the mandatory form voluntary — has received such blanket condemnation — even from those who are normally staunch Conservative allies, such as seniors organization CARP — that the government is looking not so much out of touch, as out to lunch.

Mr. Clement claimed that a $30-million advertising campaign and a much larger sample size will eliminate concerns about the quality of the data gathered in the 2011 census.

But a number of other witnesses disagreed. Former chief statistician Ivan Fellegi, said the next census could be “unusable” because the information will not be comparable to data from previous years. He urged the government to follow the recommendation suggested by the National Statistics Council (NSC), the government’s advisory group, which has called for the threat of jail sentences to be removed and some questions on household activities to be dropped for the next census in 2016.

This seems to be a common sense compromise but common sense and a willingness to compromise seem to have deserted this government of late. The NSC wasn’t even consulted on the changes that former TD Bank chief economist Don Drummond said would produce “misleading” data. (He argued that voluntary responses would not be representative of the population, since there would likely be too many white, middle-class Canadians and too few immigrants, aboriginals and poor people.)

In the absence of any other explanation, it must be assumed the Conservatives made this strange move to appeal to those libertarians in their voting base. Let’s hope it’s made someone happy.

Liberal MP Marc Garneau complained to Mr. Clement that he had “manufactured this crisis.” But the problem for the Conservatives is they didn’t manufacture it well enough.

A good communications strategy requires the tale to be told in two halves — the disaster story one day and the triumph story the next. The government provided a solution for which there was no problem that anyone has been able to discern. As NDP MP Charlie Angus noted, no one has been ever been jailed for not filling in the census form, while the Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, said there have been just 50 census-related complaints to her office in the past 20 years.

It’s summer and most Canadians are more focused on having fun than following a scandal that has no sex and no one getting rich. Yet, a new Harris Decima poll does suggests Conservative support has slipped as the census story has continued to dominate the headlines. As one depressed senior Conservative put it: “We do pick small hills to die on sometimes.”

Two things stand out about the great Canadian census controversy.

The first is that there is a controversy. Who could have predicted that the federal government’s decision to eliminate something as profoundly prosaic as the mandatory long-form census questionnaire would generate such fierce opposition?

The second is the shameless hypocrisy shown by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government.

Industry Minister Tony Clement says he’s axing the mandatory questionnaire because the state has no right to demand intrusive information, such as the number of bedrooms in a home.

Yet his is the same government that requires airlines to collect and hand over detailed personal information on everyone who flies – and then give much of it to a foreign state.

It’s also the government that last month transformed downtown Toronto into an armed camp, where police arbitrarily stopped and searched people going about their lawful business and then—equally arbitrarily—arrested and jailed scores more.

Until forced by the courts last year, Harper’s “non-intrusive” government used all of its power to keep Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik from returning to Canada.

Once Abdelrazik (who has been charged with no crime in any country) did return, this government intruded into his life to deny him the most basic rights: to work, to earn an income, to open a bank account.

So no. The Harper government is not libertarian. It has used the full muscle of the state to walk over the civil and constitutional rights of those it purports to represent.

Yet it insists that requiring a sample of Canadians to anonymously provide information on their living arrangements is an affront to freedom—this despite the fact that Ottawa’s privacy commissioner has received only three census complaints in 10 years.

What’s more unusual about this issue is that so many seem to care.

The scrapping of the census long form has been attacked by every organized group imaginable and decried editorially by newspapers of all political stripes.

Opposition to the government’s move appears to have resonance not only with those who make use of census data in their work (academics, urban planners, bankers, marketers) but with the public at large.

By resigning in protest this week over the government decision, former Statistics Canada head Munir Sheikh is on his way to becoming a national hero.

Indeed, a casual observer might think that Canadians are fixated on statistical methodology.

My guess is that most are not. Rather, it is the arbitrary and secretive nature of the government’s decision that strikes a chord. It reminds those who are suspicious of Harper why they still don’t trust him.

Most Canadians may not care whether future historians will be able to use the census to accurately track the growth over time of, say, three-car garages. But a good many instinctively disapprove of the high-handed manner in which Harper has made this calculation impossible

His handling of the census is a reminder of other equally arbitrary moves, such as proroguing Parliament to avoid defeat in the Commons.

Worse still, the otherwise inexplicable census decision leaves Harper open again to charges of being ideological—of pandering to a shadowy grouping usually referred to as his hard-line base.

Whether such a proto-Republican base even exists to any meaningful extent within the Conservative Party is an open question. But as long as enough Canadians think it does, as long as they suspect that Harper and his cronies are closet Tea Partiers, they will mistrust this prime minister.

The census controversy is not about statistics. Not in the least. It is about Stephen Harper.

Tony Clement is rapidly alienating large swaths of the population.

Folks in his goody-strewn riding of Parry Sound Muskoka think he’s a fine politician. But across the country, a large — and growing — segment of the electorate blames the industry minister for throttling Statistics Canada, allowing foreign acquisitors to pick off Canadian companies, chopping federal funding for dozens of tourist attractions and using last month’s world leaders’ meetings to funnel $50 million into his constituency.

In less than two years, Clement has chalked up a surprisingly long — and disparate — list of detractors. It extends from corporate boardrooms to church basements.

At the moment, Clement is

battling an escalating backlash over his directive to scrap the 35-year-old questionnaire which 20 per cent of Canadians are

required to complete, every five years, as part of the census. Beginning in 2011, it will be replaced by a voluntary survey.

To the governing Conservatives, the long-form census, which tracks housing conditions, income levels, ethnicity and employment, is a needless intrusion into people’s lives.

To the economists, urban planners, social policy analysts, corporate strategists, health-care providers, academic researchers and community workers who rely on the information it provides, it is a vital resource.

For three weeks, the outcry has grown. Clement has dismissed every objection.

Before that, he was at the centre of the summit fiasco. It was Clement’s insistence that the Huntsville area could handle both the G8 gathering and the larger G20 meeting that set the stage for last month’s debacle on the streets of Toronto.

Logistics experts tried every possible way to accommodate 20 world leaders and their entourages in Muskoka. Finally, the mayor of Huntsville, backed by the commissioner of the RCMP, said it couldn’t be done. The government switched the G20 summit site to Toronto. By then, planning time was limited, so Ottawa moved in, disregarding the will of the city and the needs of its residents.

What resulted was an emptied-out downtown, ripe for clashes between police and protesters.

These are just the national flare-ups. He’s also left a trail of local upheaval:

• In Sudbury, Clement is persona non grata. He approved the sale of Inco to Brazilian mining giant Vale and raised no objection when the new owner chopped 261 jobs, saying it was part of a worldwide pattern.

For the next year, he watched impassively as the multinational ground down its Canadian workforce. Finally, a new contract was signed, with rollbacks in workers’ benefits. They realized they had no choice; they couldn’t buck the will of a deep-pocketed global corporation.

• In Hamilton, Clement is trying to cast himself as the saviour of the steel industry, but the community is not buying it.

In 2007, with Ottawa’s blessing, U.S. Steel bought Stelco. A month later, it shut down the company’s Hamilton blast furnace, laying off 700 workers. Last year, it closed its Canadian operations until markets improve, putting another 1,500 people out of work.

Clement belatedly sued U.S. Steel for failing to live up to its commitments under the Investment Canada Act. A federal court judge agreed the lawsuit had

merit, but the Pittsburgh steelmaker appealed. Years of court battles lie ahead, offering no relief to jobless workers.

• In Toronto, Clement is the hatchet man who chopped federal funding for Gay Pride weekend and the Caribana festival.

• In Ottawa, he is the minister who discarded Canadian content rules for the wireless industry, setting a precedent for the entire broadcasting spectrum.

The instigator of most of these policies — except the pork-barrelling — is Prime Minister Stephen Harper. But it is Clement’s face Canadians see, his reputation that is on the line.

Whether he is a yes-man or a dogmatic partisan, he is turning people against his government.