Month: February 2010

Political aide's excuse for ATI interference? Trying to save reporters $30

Deen Beeby is the Access to Information ace at The Canadian Press' Ottawa bureau (Bronskill over there is pretty sharp, too). He's got a great knack for asking for just the right kind of documents that often contain interesting nuggets about what your federal government is doing. This morning, he reported that something was so interesting in documents about to be released to him by the Department of Public Works and Government Services that a political aide to the then-minister of the deparment, Christian Paradis, had a bureaucrat literally run to the mailroom to intercept the documents that were about to be sent to Beeby. The bureaucrat's excuse: They were frantic to save CP $27.40 in photocopying charges. Yes. My eyebrow is raised as well at that one.

That revelation prompted the prime minister's chief spokesman to acknowledge that interference in the ATI process should not have happened.

That's not good enough for the federal Liberals who say this kind of situation is precisely why Parliament has an information commissioner:

Acting Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault should immediately launch an investigation into political interference by the Harper government under the Access to Information Act, Liberal MPs said today.

“This is a clear-cut case of the Harper government’s direction to deny or limit Access to Information requests that reveal their mismanagement,” said Liberal Treasury Board Critic Siobhan Coady. “Direction to not disclose information comes from the Prime Minister’s office. The Harper government has routinely pressured non-partisan ministry officials, from Deputy Ministers on down, to prevent disclosure of politically damaging information.

Tough call for Legault. She's the “acting” commissioner. If she were the regular commissioner, she'd have the closest thing you get in politicis to tenure, i.e. a seven-year appointment that only Parliament can interrupt and then, only if youve been a very, very naughty commissioner. I assume (and hope) Legault wants to have the 'interim' descriptive removed from her title. Does launching an investigation help or hurt her chances of the government putting forward her name to be confirmed as commissioner? (I hope it doesn't hurt her chances that, based on our one and only meeting, I think she's got a good grasp of the issues those of us in the requester community have.)

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Sarah Palin and "virtuous ignorance"

Some paragraphs that stood out in Jonathan Raban review of books by and about Sarah Palin:

Alaska, the particular reality from which Palin hails, is so little known by most Americans that she was able to freely mythicize her state as the utopian last refuge of the “hard work ethic,” “unpretentious living,” and proud self-sufficiency. Her anti-tax rhetoric (private citizens spend their money more wisely than government does) and disdain for “federal dollars” were unembarrassed by the fact that Alaska tops the tables of both per capita federal expenditure, on which one in three jobs in the state depends, and congressional earmarks, or “pork.” So, too, she mythicized the straggling eyesore of Wasilla (described by a current councilwoman there as “like a big ugly strip mall from one end to the other”) as the bucolic small town of sentimental American memory. Listening to Palin talk about it, one was invited to inspect not the string of oceanic parking lots attached to Fred Meyer, Lowe's, Target, Wal-Mart, and Home Depot, or the town's reputation among state troopers as the crystal meth capital of Alaska, but, rather, the imaginary barber shop, drugstore soda fountain, antique church, and raised boardwalks, seen in the rosy light of an Indian summer evening.

…

Commonsense Conservatism hinges on the not-so-tacit assumption that the average, hardworking churchgoer, like the ladies at the booth, equipped with the fundamental, God-given ability to distinguish right from wrong, is in a better position to judge, on “principle,” the merits of an economic policy or the deployment of American troops abroad than “the 'experts'”—a term here unfailingly placed between derisive quotation marks. Desiccated expertise, of the kind possessed by economists, environmental scientists, and overinformed reporters from the lamestream media, clouds good judgment; Palin's life, by contrast, is presented as one of passion, sincerity, and principle. Going Rogue, in other words, is a four-hundred-page paean to virtuous ignorance.

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Canada, Newfoundland create largest national park in eastern Canada

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The Seattle-based Pew Environment Group is praising the governments of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams today after the announcement the the creation of the Mealy Mountains National Park in Labrador. While Harper's government has been roundly and often harshly criticized domestically and internationally for being a laggard when it comes to climate change policy, but his government has won praise from many of those same detractors (sometimes a bit grudgingly) for setting aside millions of square kilometres of land, mostly in Canada's north, for new parks and wildlife reserves.

“Congratulations to Prime Minister Harper and Premier Danny Williams. This is a great leap forward in efforts to complete the Canadian National Park system. Prime Minister Harper’s leadership has been critical to the protection of Canada’s boreal forest—considered by scientists to be a top global conservation priority,” Steve Killick, director of the Pew's International Boreal Conservation Campaign, said in a statement. Killick's colleagues passed along the picture, left, of hikers in the Mealy Mountains.

“These new parks will draw tourists from around the world, conserve lands important to aboriginal Canadians and safeguard the habitat of the Mealy Mountains woodland caribou herd. Bigger than the United States’ Yellowstone and Yosemite parks combined, the scale of this new protected area is remarkable. It will rival the largest protected areas in eastern North America, equal in size to New York’s Adirondack State Park, twice the size of Everglades National Park and six times the size of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.”

The Ottawa-based Canadian Boreal Initiative is also pretty chuffed: “We are very pleased to recognize the achievement of the governments, the Aboriginal peoples and local organizations who came together to advance a common vision for the protection of this important region.”

Environment Minister Jim Prentice, the minister responsible for Parks Canada, was in Happy Valley/Goose Bay, Labrador today to make the announcement about the park.

The park reserve will protect roughly 10,700 sq km, which will make it the largest national park in eastern Canada. The provincial government also announced its intent to establish a waterway provincial park to protect the Eagle River, adjacent to the proposed national park reserve. Together these areas will protect over 13,000 sq km.

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Attention philatelists! Behold the new Romeo Leblanc stamp!

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I used to be a stamp collector and remain fond of the hobby and its practioners. So for those philatelists who drop by here now and again, I draw your attention to the unveiling this morning of a new stamp, honouring New Brunswicker and former Canadian Governor General Romeo Leblanc.

Current Governor General Michaelle Jean unveiled the stamp today at Rideau Hall.

Canada Post, the issuer, says:

The commemorative stamp features Mr. LeBlanc's official portrait. The Canadian, New Brunswick and Acadian flags are positioned below the portrait. The stamp pane has been used to tell of Mr. LeBlanc's service to Canada and features his personal Coat of Arms, the Order of Canada insignia, the Governor General's Caring Canadian Award, and the Governor General's Academic Medal.

Each stamp measures 32 mm x 32 mm (square) and have 13+ perforations. Lowe-Martin printed the stamps, which are available in panes of 16 stamps. The stamps are P.V.A and printed on Tullis Russell paper using lithography in eight colours. They are general tagged on four sides. The official first day cover will be cancelled in Memramcook, New Brunswick – the site of Mr. LeBlanc's birth place.

Be sure to check out Canada Post's collectors Web site.

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TD Bank proclaims "the end of a rising unemployment rate"

For the last two days, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's inner cabinet has been huddled at Meech Lake, Que. fine-tuning the policy directions the government will take in next month's federal budget and throne speech. And on each of those last two days, Industry Minister Tony Clement was released from those meetings for an hour or so to update reporters on those meetings. There was not a lot of news in those updates but Clement did say, on both days, that job creation is now the government's number one priority.

The Canadian economy, we learned this morning, is not waiting for the government. Entrepreneurs across the land have been busy creating jobs on their own.

Statistics Canada reports that in January, the Canadian economy added 43,000 jobs, a sign of strength that surprised many professional forecasters, who were expecting a rather tepid employment report. Most those new jobs were part-time but, still economists say the results were a positive sign. And Statscan itself notes that the number of people in Canada is far off the peak employment numbers of October, 2008 (the month of our last general election, coincidentally). In fact, there are 280,000 Canadians who had a job the last time they voted for a federal government that do not have one right now.

That said: the unemployment rate, which peaked at 8.7 per cent last August dropped in January to 8.3 per cent. TD Bank's Diana Petramala crunches the data and concludes that it's only going to get better for Canadians looking for work and, by extension, for a government trying to show that its policies are putting Canadians to work:

The job gains this month were largely consistent with the current stage in the economic recovery. We estimate that Canadian real GDP grew by 4% annualized in the fourth quarter and are expecting growth of 3.6% in the first quarter of 2010. Typically, during early stages of recovery, these types of quarterly growth rates are consistent with average monthly employment increases in the range of 20,000-25,000. The 3-month moving average for job gains is roughly consistent with this estimate at 29,000. As the Canadian economic recovery gains steam in the near-term, we expect continued improvements in the labour market, with average monthly job gains holding in the current range. In addition, we have likely seen the end of a rising unemployment rate.

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Harper on hockey: "an important part of our character"

Whether you're a fan of the prime minister or not, I think most Canadians would agree with his thoughtful analysis of our national game, which he sketches out some detail in an interview with Michael Farber of Sports Illustrated:

Although there are important sports in Canada — our own football, lacrosse — nothing does compete with hockey. It's on a different plane, to the extent where, rightly or wrongly, people see these sports as deeply reflective of the character of the nation [and] certainly deeply reflective of the sports culture of the nation. And sports culture is an important part of any nation. You can say soccer in many countries [is] just as important but … nobody has a national claim to soccer the way Canada has a national claim to hockey or the United States has a national claim to baseball. They define the country in a unique way.

It says, first and foremost, we're a northern country. It's an important part of our character. I was recently chatting about hockey with [Russia] President Medvedev. And, you know, we're the two coldest countries on earth, and not by coincidence, the two best hockey countries. Fairly consistently. It does say that. I think it also says something about the character. Hockey is a fast, aggressive, tough sport and that's an important part of the Canadian psychology and history. It's sometimes forgotten because Canadians are thought of as peace-loving and fair-minded and pleasant — which I think we are — but that's not inconsistent with tough and aggressive and ambitious, which is also part of the national character.

The other thing I should mention about hockey is this: From the fairly early days, [it was] culturally cross-cutting as well. It's English and French. It's pretty well all regions of the country. Ethnic communities. One of the first things you see [is] immigrants start to belong to Canadian society when their kids start to come to the hockey rink. Then the parents start to integrate with the other parents. It crosses social class lines. So it's a great common denominator. It really is.

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Laurie Hawn is not amused, accuses opposition of undermining troops

Today, all three opposition meetings called and convened an “unofficial” meeting of the House of Commons Special Committee on the Mission in Afghanistan. Of course, that committee technically no longer exists. Its work, like all committees, ended with the prorogation of Parliament and it must be reconstituted, if the House so wishes, at the beginning of the next Parliamentary session.

The Opposition, of course, believes that one important reason why Prime Minister Stephen Harper prorogued Parliament was to avoid some of the potentially embarrassing and uncomfortable questions the Afghanistan committee was asking about the treatment by Afghan authorities of bad guys caught by Canadian soldiers.

So if that was the reason Harper tried to shut down the committee, the committee met on their own — Liberals, Bloquistes and New Democrats but no Conservatives. They called some witnesses. They took their testimony.

At the end of the day, Edmonton Conservative MP Laurie Hawn, who is the parliamentary secretary to the defence minister Peter MacKay and who was also a member of the Afghanistan committee, fired off the following to those in the press gallery.

Today, Opposition members held a transparently partisan event. It is clear that they are only interested in politicizing an issue on the backs of our brave men and women in uniform. Instead of undermining our troops, this Government chose action—and improved an inherited Liberal Taliban prisoner transfer agreement that remains the Gold standard amongst our allies.

Both Mr. Mendes and Mr. Drapeau’s views are well known on this matter and nothing new was revealed in their testimony today.

Today’s opposition theatrics confirmed a strategy of smears and insinuations. I and this Government firmly reject any suggestion that Canadian troops are guilty of war crimes.

We have heard credible and first-hand testimony from upstanding Canadians such as Generals Rick Hillier and Michel Gauthier who have firmly rejected such allegations. Parliamentarians should turn their future focus to important policy questions, like Canada’s future humanitarian role in Afghanistan and the end of the military mission in 2011. Unfortunately, the Opposition is more interested in a political circus, purely for partisan gain.

As we have continuously stated, the Government has and will continue to provide all legally available documents both to the MPCC and to Parliament. However, we will not release highly sensitive information that could endanger the lives of Canadian troops in the field. As the Minister of Justice has previously stated, this is not a political process – it is a process carried out by independent experts whose only interest is the application of the law.

Meeting at Meech: Cabinet talks about jobs

The federal cabinet's Priority and Planning Committee — the inner cabinet, if you will, and which is the only one of five cabinet committees that Prime Minister Harper chairs — met today at Wilson House at Meech Lake, Que., just north of Ottawa. Your correspondent was there to snap some pics and cover the event. Here's the pics (Click on any one pic to see a bigger version) NOTE: If you can't see the thumbnails, scroll down! I've got a formatting problem here that I'm trying to solve…:

Cannon
Cannon		 Moore
Moore		 LeBreton
LeBreton		 Wouters
Wouters
Harper
Harper		 Paradis
Paradis		 Finley
Finley		 Van Loan
Van Loan
Nicholson
Nicholson		 Strahl
Strahl		 Prentice
Prentice		 Toews
Toews
Verner
Verner		 Baird
Baird		 Akin
Akin		 Flaherty
Flaherty
Reporters
Reporters		 Meech View
Meech View		 Wilson House
Wilson House

These and other ministers gathered at Meech Lake for a two-day retreat to talk about next month's budget and Speech from the Throne. Industry Minister Tony Clement would later emerge from this meeting to travel to Ottawa for an update with reporters in the National Press Theatre. Clement laid out what had been going on back at Meech:

  • Finance Minister Jim Flaherty “provided us with an overview of his pre-budget consultations, an update on planning for the budget and the latest projections for economic growth,” Clement said.
  • Human Resources Minister Diane Finley, Trade Minister Peter Van Loan, and Clement “will discuss policies and proposals to lead Canada into the economy of tomorrow to ensure that we excel against foreign competitors, assure our place on the world stage and capture the jobs that come with that.”
  • Natural Resources Minister Christian Paradis and Environment Minister Jim Prentice “will build on that discussion by presenting an assessment of how we can continue to create jobs by adapting new clean technologies to green energy opportunities.”
  • Then it was back to Finley who was to “present fiscally responsible proposals to tackle unemployment and prepare Canadians for the jobs of tomorrow.”

Clement also said: “While there have been a number of positive economic indicators such as recent GDP growth, there is one statistic that is still too high: unemployment. The number of Canadians looking for work is still unacceptable. The economy, specifically creating jobs remains the top priority of the federal government.”

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Arar's U.S. lawyer: "never a clearer and more egregious case of abuse"

David Cole is law professor at Georgetown University and one of Canadian Maher Arar's lawyers in Arar's attempt to sue the United States for its role in his torture in Syria.

Cole writes about that case in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books:

Arar's claims were simple: to forcibly send him to Syria to be tortured violates the [U.S.] Constitution's due process clause, which the [U.S.] Supreme Court has interpreted as forbidding conduct that "shocks the conscience," as well as the Torture Victim Protection Act, which allows torture victims to sue those who subject them to torture "under color of foreign law." Courts have long held that torture is the paradigmatic example of conduct that "shocks the conscience" and violates due process. And Arar alleged that the US defendants sent him to Syria for the purpose of subjecting him to torture under Syrian law. These allegations were largely confirmed not only by the Canadian investigation, but also by the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general. In twenty-five years as a lawyer, I have never had a clearer and more egregious case of abuse.

Yet thus far the US courts have shut the door entirely on Arar, not even allowing him to offer proof
of his claims…

Cole critiques the decision made on Nov. 2, 2009 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to bar Arar's claim by highlighting some of the views of the four dissenting judges on the 11-member appeals court:

Judge Barrington Parker, appointed to the Second Circuit by President George W. Bush, wrote that "if the Constitution ever implied a damages remedy, this is such a case—where executive officials allegedly blocked access to the remedies chosen by Congress in order to deliver a man to known torturers." Had Arar been able to get to a court to challenge his removal before federal officials put him on a plane, the court would plainly have had authority to review the case and forbid the removal; courts routinely enjoin removal when a foreign national faces a substantial risk of torture. The fact that the defendants lied to Arar's lawyer to keep her from filing an action when the torture could have been averted, in Parker's
view, only strengthened the case for a damages remedy after the fact; otherwise, the courts are essentially rewarding the obstruction of justice.
Judge Robert Sack reasoned that if Arar had been tortured by federal officials at JFK, he would indisputably have a right to sue, and that the defendants' choice to outsource his torture abroad should  not insulate them from liability.

For Arar, the judgement by the Court of Appeals is bitterly ironic, given that particular court's history of crusading against torture wherever it happens …

In 1980, the same court that dismissed Arar's case ruled, in a landmark decision, Filartiga v. Pena-Irala, that federal courts could adjudicate claims by foreign citizens against foreign defendants for human rights violations committed abroad.
Filartiga involved a young man who had been abducted, tortured, and killed by a Paraguyan police chief. When the family learned that the officer had fled to the United States, they sued him in US court.
The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit declared that the torturer is the "enemy of all mankind," and therefore may be sued for his wrongdoing wherever he is found.
The usual reluctance to have a US court pass judgment on overseas conduct not involving any American citizens was overcome by the fact that the prohibition on torture is universal. Since that decision, US courts have adjudicated human rights claims involving brutality in Burma, South Africa, Yugoslavia, Nigeria, Mexico, the Philippines, Argentina, and many other nations. The Supreme Court upheld the practice in 2004. Yet according to the Second Circuit, the same sorts of claims are too sensitive to permit adjudication when brought against US officials.

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Monster U.S. deficits; national daycare; and a light for hard rock miners; Tuesday's A1 headlines and Parliamntary daybook

Obama's monster deficits; Liberals float a national daycare plan while Windsor shuts its plan down; and some light at the end of the labour tunnel for Sudbury's hard rock miners. Listen to my four-minute audio roundup of what's on the front pages of the country's newspapers plus highlights from Tuesday's Parliamentary daybook by clicking on the link below.

You can also get these audio summaries automatically every day via podcast from iTunes or via an RSS feed by subscribing to my AudioBoo stream. Both the iTunes link and the RSS link are at my profile at AudioBoo.fm. Look under my picture on the left hand side of the page.

Listen!

[Audio hiccups at beginning of file are Audioboo.fm's fault, not mine. Apologies nonetheless.]

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