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The Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt lights up her blog and the blogosophere is richer for it. Welcome, Susan!

Her first posts are from the frontlines of today’s federal budget reaction.

The king of Canadian automotive industry analysts, Dennis Desrosiers, takes a look at some recent data published by Statistics Canada on 2007 car sales and, after crunching his own numbers, observes:

.. the average weeks of before-tax family income needed to purchase  a new vehicle in Canada dropped to 18.9 weeks … the lowest level since 1991. So relative to before-tax income Canadians paid almost the same for a new vehicle in 2007 as they did in 1991. Not a bad deal, especially since vehicles are vastly superior today from virtually all perspectives (design, performance, content, build quality etc) than in 1991.

The OEMs [original equipment manufacturers, like General Motors and Toyota] are providing spectacular value to the consumer  … pure and simple. And these stats dispel the notion that somehow the OEMs have taken advantage of the consumer relative to changes in exchange rates. Yes, many vehicles on a pure exchange rate basis have become a little higher priced in Canada than in the US but the OEMs have responded and lowered prices and with all the lower MSRP prices announced this year already and the heavy discounting in the market that has been in place for a number of years .. the consumer is winning and winning big.
 

As we approach Budget Week — the first key confidence motion checkpoint — it’s interesting and not a bit confusing to see some well-respected polling firms getting different responses from voters. In all cases, the Conservatives are leading or tied for the lead but in no case are they at majority territory. The Libs are doing very poorly according to one poll but doing as well as the Conservatives in two others.

Here’s a summary:

• CONS-LIBS TIED The latest to be released is from Nanos Research.  This poll of 878 people was taken Feb. 16–20 by telephone which the pollster says is accurate to within 3.3 per cent, 19 times out of 20 (Pct change since last Nanos poll on Feb 4 2008):
• Liberal Party 34% (+1)
• Conservative Party 34% (+3)
• NDP 14% (-5)
• BQ 10% (NC)
• Green Party 8% (NC)
• CONS SURGE The most recent result from The Strategic Counsel (PDF), the polling firm used by CTV News and The Globe and Mail. This poll of 1,000 was taken Feb. 14^th and 17^th by telephone and the pollster says the results are accurate to within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20 (Pct change since last SC poll on Jan 13 2008):
• Conservative Party 39% (+3)
• Liberal Party 27% (-3)
• NDP 12% (-2)
• BQ 10% (-1)
• Green Party 12% (-2)
• CONS-LIBS TIED A Harris-Decima poll prepared for The Canadian Press. This poll of 1,000 Canadians was conducted by phone Feb. 14–17 and the pollster says its results are accurate to within 3.1 per cent, 19 times out of 20.
• Conservative Party 35%
• Liberal Party 33% 
• NDP 13%
• Green Party 9%
• BQ 8%

“I'm interested in silver bullets. I think they exist,” says Bob Metcalfe (right), one of the most engaging and wise enterpreneur/inventors I've ever met. Metcalfe got filthy rich inventing Ethernet, the now ubiquitous technology that lets computers on a local area network talk to each other. He's now, mostly, a venture capitalist. But in a recent interview in which he talks about the future of optical networks — he believes terabit Ethernet is a decade or two away (!) — he says the lessons of the Internet's construction hold some promise for the great challenge at the beginning of the beginning of this century: clean and cheap energy.

Metcalfe — who joked that he may start up a blog called The Ener-net — has been hanging around the green-tech community and often hears the “gray hairs”, as he calls them, repeat the conventional wisdom that the path to sustainable cheap, clean energy will be slow, “requiring scalable solutions” and there “there will be no silver bullets.”

So Metcalfe thought about that.

“So I reflected on the history of the Internet, which I judge to be a great success, and there were silver bullets! One of them, probably the biggest silver bullets in the Internet story was the invention of dense-wave division multiplexing, or the earlier invention of optical communications in general. That's a silver bullet! That converted telecommunications from scarce to plentiful, just like that. That's a silver bullet. I'm interested in silver bullets. I think they exists. So I'm hoping to find some in the energy space.”

The Montreal Gazette has a dramatic front page today, pointing to an inside feature by freelancer David Sachs. Sachs takes a look at the demographic makeup of the Canadian Forces and finds that the CF — mostly white and male — doesn't look like much like contemporary Canada and, given various projections, certainly won't look like Canada in the next decade or so. Right now, about 15 per cent of the Canadian population are visible minorities and, yet, just three per cent of CF members are visible minorities. That ratio's even worse when it comes to CF leadership. Not a single one of the 75 most senior generals and admirals in the CF, as of March 1, 2006, was a visible minority. And of the 14,235 men and women who were officers in the CF at that time, just 352 or 2.5 per cent were visible minorities. It gets worse looking at non-commissioned officers: There are 47,784 of them in the CF and just 863 or 1.8 per cent are visible minorites. (More on the officer class below). Sachs writes:

Beyond the implications for the maintenance and expansion of our armed forces, there are implications for public support of our military missions, and for the social cohesion of our nation. How far can a military diverge from the population it serves before it is seen as a mercenary force, or at least, a distinct military caste? How does the widespread lack of connection with our soldiers affect public opinion on military matters?

The piece is not necessarily a criticism of the CF; rather it explores some of the factors that have made the CF look the way it does today — Esprit de Corps publisher Scott Taylor figures 30 per cent of those serving now are from military families and are following dad's footsteps — and explores some of the ways the CF is trying attract more visible minorities, aboriginals, and women.

Notably, the piece quotes “Capt. Ken Charles, a national diversity officer and himself an immigrant from St. Lucia” to support this statement: “No soldiers or representatives of minority communities interviewed claimed that racism was in any way apparent in the Canadian military. Capt. Charles says the only incidence of racial bias he’s encountered in the military was on a visit to the United States, when someone there assumed he was a driver.”

Last year, I received a briefing note through an access-to-information request that had been prepared for then Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor by Vice-Admiral Greg Jarvis. Jarvis would retire a few months after filing this report but was, at the time, Chief of Military Personnel.

Jarvis found that, after general officers, the whitest group of officers in the CF are Air Force pilots. There are 1,952 pilot officers in the CF but just 24 or 1.2 per cent are visible minorities. Just 11 or 0.6 per cent of pilot officers are aboriginals, and 70 or 3.6 per cent are women.

It's not much better in the rest of the Air Force, so far as officers go. Of the 1,365 officers in Air Operations, just 23 or 1.7 per cent were visible minorities; 12 or 0.9 per cent were aboriginals; and 174 or 12.7 per cent were women.

Visible minorities are best represented among the officer class in “Engineering”, where, of the 833 officers, 40 or 4.8 per cent are visible minorities.

Among the non-comm officer class, the Military Police is the least diverse, with just 16 or 1.3 per cent visible minorities among the 1,245 non-commissioned officers. Non-commissioned officer musicians are the most diverse, with 9 or 3.9 per cent visible minorities among this group of 233.

The Prime Minister’s Director of Communications Sandra Buckler passed along the following this afternoon:

The Prime Minister spoke yesterday to Prime Minister Tusk of Poland to express Canada’s appreciation for the contribution Poland is making to the international effort in Afghanistan. With 1300 troops on the ground, as well as helicopters, Poland is a robust contributor as a new and committed member of NATO. The Prime Minister reviewed with Prime Minister Tusk the establishment of the Manley Panel and its recommendations, broadly accepted by the government, including that Canada remain in Kandahar beyond 2009, on condition that NATO allies contribute an additional battle group and that additional equipment is secured for the Canadian Forces. Prime Minister Tusk confirmed Poland’s desire to make as significant a contribution as their capacity will allow and to assist Canada wherever possible. The Prime Minister indicated he was looking forward to working with President Kaczynski, who will represent Poland at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, and other allies, to ensure the greatest possible chances of success for the international effort in Afghanistan.

The Prime Minister and Prime Minister Tusk also spoke about the commitment flowing from the last Canada-EU Summit in Berlin, to undertake a comprehensive study into a closer economic partnership between Canada and the EU. The study is due to be completed in the spring which will allow the preparation of concrete deliverables for the forthcoming Canada-EU Summit under the French Presidency in the fall of 2009, an initiative which Poland supports.

The Prime Minister’s director of communications Sandra Buckler provided us with the following information this afternoon:

Prime Minister Harper spoke today to Prime Minister Janez Janša of Slovenia. The Prime Minister congratulated Prime Minister Janša on being the first new European Union (EU) member state to hold the rotating Presidency of the European Union. Leaders discussed the commitment undertaken at the Canada-EU Summit in Berlin in 2007 to complete a study on a closer economic partnership between Canada and the EU, which is due to be completed in the spring. The results of this study will be reviewed at the 2008 Canada-EU Summit under the French Presidency in order to pursue a balanced and closer economic integration, something which the business communities in both Europe and Canada support and for which Prime Minister Janša confirmed Slovenia’s support. The Prime Minister then raised Afghanistan and Canada’s appreciation for the Slovenian troop contribution. The Prime Minister underscored Canada’s continued interest in and support for the EUPOL mission, an EU initiative to build capacity and in train the Afghan National Police. Canada has contributed 22 police personnel to the EUPOL Mission, an undertaking which leaders agreed was crucial to the success of the overall international effort in Afghanistan. Finally, leaders noted that Canada and Slovenia will face off in the opening round of the Hockey World Championships in Halifax on May 2 and said they looked forward to meeting at the NATO Summit in Bucharest in April.

The Conservatives appointed new directors to the board that oversees the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, one of whom is Brian Mitchell, a Montreal-based lawyer who once ran against Joe Clark for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative party. Mitchell also ran unsuccessfully in 2005 against Manitoban Don Plett for the leadership of the Conservative Party but has served since then as a Quebec director on the Conservative Party’s national council.

The party says Mitchell has now resigned so that he can become a member of the board of directors of CBC.

In addition to Mitchell, the Conservatives also appointed Linda Black who, the press release says, is “a member of the Alberta Secretariat for Action on Homelessness, a member of the Law Enforcement Review Board of Alberta, and governor for the Board of Governors of Mount Royal College”, and Mary McNeil, “the president and chief executive officer of the BC Cancer Foundation.”

In the meantime, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage is about to publish its report on “The Role of a Public Broadcaster in the 21st Century.” The Conservatives make up the minority on that Committee and it is believed that there will be dissenting views in the report that will soon be published.

The Heritage Committee meets on Tuesday next week to finalize the wording of their report.

 

 

Interesting piece in the current edition of The Weekly Standard by Stephen Schwartz who casts a critical eye at the call earlier this week by Rowan Williams, who, because he is the Archbishop of Canterbury is the global leader of the Anglican Communion, for official recognition in Britain of sharia or Islamic religious law:

What the archbishop ignored is that British Muslim radicals raise the demand for sharia as an ideological banner. They hope to separate Muslims from their non-Muslim neighbors, the easier to recruit and indoctrinate believers for jihadism . . .

sharia fanatics … want the public enforcement of religious decrees. Obligatory sharia for Muslims, enforced by the British state, is the ultimate threat implicit in Archbishop Williams's call for accommodation.

Schwartz, it ought to be noted, was once on the political left, but now describes himself as a political conservative. He not only underwent a political conversion; he is a religious convert as well. Born of Jewish and Protestant parents in Ohio, he is now a practising Muslim and earns a living mostly as the executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism. He has a book on Sufism coming out this fall. He has more to say in the Standard article about the introduction of sharia in the West:

Counterintuitive as it may seem, the Islamists' call for introduction of Islamic religious law in the West is an innovation, not heard in Europe or the United States before the radicalization of Muslims at the end of the 1970s. This is because it is actually a violation of traditional sharia, which commands that Muslims living in non-Muslim lands obey the law and respect the customs of the host countries. This requirement is spelled out, for instance, in the sharia volume A Code of Practice for Muslims in the West (1999), which quotes the moderate Iraqi Shia ayatollah Ali Sistani pronouncing that Muslims living in non-Muslim nations must commit themselves “to abide by the laws of that country,” as they implicitly promise to do when they sign an immigration form. If they cannot do this, they should return to Muslim territory . .

Technorati Tags: religion

David Pugliese, the Ottawa Citizen's well-connected defence reporter, says Sandra Buckler and her communications shop within the Prime Minister's Office will exert even more control over the public affairs function at the Department of National Defence in advance of a federal election.

“This new process explains why the public is seeing a lot of sentences such as “Defence officials were not available to comment” or “Military officials could not comment” in media reports these days as the PMO/PCO approval process for the emailed statements for reporters can take anywhere between two days and three weeks. Those types of timelines are just not good enough to deal with the rapid pace of the 24-hour news cycle……..and critics of the Canadian Forces have been able to take advantage of the lack of response from DND/CF since they are able to get their points across unchallenged in news stories and broadcasts.

Josee Touchette, DND’s assistant deputy minister for public affairs, is on the record stating there has been no change whatsoever regarding the policy in dealing with media inquiries. But even her own public affairs officers roll their eyeballs on that laughable claim.”

Pugliese also has a pointer to an article by Sharon Hobson, who has impeccable credentials as a journalist covering the Canadian defence establishment. Hobson writes in the current newsletter of the “pro-military” (to use Pugliese's adjective) Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute.

The 1998 openness policy may still be on the books, but its implementation has been unrecognizably corrupted. The chances of getting an answer to a direct question are slim, and the chances of getting an actual interview with someone are slimmer. In fact, on many questions, the DND's method of dealing with the media is not to deal with them at all.

… You may have noticed more and more media stories contain some version of the line “the Department of National Defence did not return calls”.

Find someone who will talk about the shutout, and they will point the finger at the Privy Council Office (PCO) and the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). The civilians at the top are asserting their control and the word has come down that no one in the military is to speak to the media without specific clearance.

And that “word” is verbal. There is no written guidance on how to ignore the media. Rather, everyone is being told that if media inquiries concern “a regional or national issue” (it's not clear what would not be covered by this description) then any DND communication must be cleared by the “the centre” (PCO/PMO). How this works in practice is for the DND contact to write up a reporter's request for information with a proposed Media Response Line (MRL).

That is then sent to the PCO/PMO for approval. But instead of being approved and sent back, it sits in a pile somewhere. When the reporter gets fed up waiting and calls again, the DND is not able to offer a response because the official process is now underway for dealing with a written inquiry and the response has not yet been approved. Requests for interviews are routinely denied in lieu of PCO/PMO approved written “bullets”. So instead of being able to have a broad discussion with a DND project manager, the reporter receives one or two carefully crafted sentences which allow for no interpretation or selective quoting … [Read the whole sad story]