Canada now has no legitimate government

Byoliveridley

Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean has granted a request from Stephen Harper to suspend Parliament until late next month, the prime minister announced on Thursday, a move that avoids a confidence vote set for Monday that could have toppled his minority government.

Following my advice, the Governor General has agreed to prorogue Parliament," Harper said outside Rideau Hall after a two-hour meeting with Jean. When Parliament resumes Jan. 26, the first order of business will be the presentation of a federal budget.

via GG agrees to suspend Parliament: Harper

Funny, when a PM loses the confidence of parliament, it seems patently undemocratic to let him shut down parliament (the only mechanism of governance) for two months so he can pretend to still be a legitimate PM. Holy cow, I can’t imagine something like that happening in India, our president would laugh the PM out of the building if he/she wanted him to suspend parliament for 2 months, then ask him to hold a confidence vote.

Sad, whatever country I move to eventually becomes a banana republic.

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    India Debates Fitness of Woman Set to Be President

    Byoliveridley

    I remember her vaguely from being immersed in Indian politics a lot more in the past than I am now. She’s just another politician, member of the Congress Party, the corruption, nepotism, etc., well, par for the course. Just because she’s a woman does not make her immune. There’s a long history of corrupt politicians becoming president of India (See Singh, Zail!). Indira Gandhi started the rather convenient process of hiring pliant presidents, it was in general a good power consolidation move. It just so happened that the outgoing president, Dr. Abdul Kalam was a nuclear scientist and technocrat, not a career politician.

    It looks like the Congress party’s just returning to its politician president ways!

    India Debates Fitness of Woman Set to Be President – New York Times

    India’s first female president is likely to be voted into office on Thursday, but this milestone event has been overshadowed in recent weeks by an unusually savage debate over whether she is fit to become head of state.

    When the leader of the governing Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, announced in June that Pratibha Patil, 72, was her party’s official choice for the post, she added that to have a woman president would be a matter of “great pride” and a “historic moment in the 60th year of our republic.”

    But Gandhi’s attempt to promote this as a triumph for gender equality has won Ms. Patil little support.

    Instead, the pre-election campaigning has been dominated by a series of vitriolic attacks on Ms. Patil’s credentials.

    The opposition has alleged, among other things, that she shielded her brother in a murder investigation, protected her husband in a suicide scandal, and was herself involved in numerous financial irregularities.

    And then there are Ms. Patil’s own peculiar statements — most notably, her revelation that she had heard the voice of a dead guru predicting she would rise to power.

  • Harper = Bush Lite?

    Byoliveridley

    Harper's economic strategy, if it can be called that, is looking more and more like George Bush's: tax cuts and military spending. While gutting our revenue by $60 billion over five years, Harper laid out a plan to spend $490 billion in addition to the annual defence budget over 20 years to build up the Canadian military. This economic policy is well on its way to bankrupting the U.S. and could do the same to Canada.

    We could instead bring together unions, capital, universities and provincial governments and make Canada a leader in green technologies, potentially providing hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs and literally thousands of profitable companies. But under Stephen Harper, Canada's economic ship of state just drifts.

    Our economy is completely on its own, pulled this way and that, and ultimately down, by faltering corporate globalization and the catastrophic collapse of American casino capitalism.

    Six Ways Harper Is Wrecking the Economy :: Views :: thetyee.ca.

    The Tyee makes a compelling argument, not in the sense that Harper is a bumbling incompetent know nothing like Bush, but that the ideology of continuous tax cuts + deficit spending + cutting government programs will eventually lead us to where the U.S is at this point in time, and I don’t think too many Canadians want to be Americans at any time, especially the present.

    That and his impotent and irresponsible approach to climate change make him a dangerous choice. Canada is where the US was in 2004, at the cusp of choosing a leader whose optics are better than his performance.

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    Chemical Warfare

    Byoliveridley

    This story from a local Chicago TV station does an excellent job of documenting the chemical weapons dropped on Vietnam by the United States in the 1960s, the effects they still have on Vietnam, and the Americans who handled these so called “defoliants”.

    cbs2chicago.com – Agent Orange: A View From Vietnam

    During the eight years of the Vietnam War that the U.S. Military dusted the Vietnamese landscape with Agent Orange, it was only intended to kill vegetation. It was a combination of two herbicides 2,4D and 2,4,5T mixed together into the most potent plant killer ever made. It was spread over 3 1/2 million acres of forests and crops to kill the trees and vegetation so the United States troops could see the enemy. The Armed Forces were told it was harmless. But in March 1978, Bill Kurtis broke the story on CBS 2 that American veterans of Vietnam who had been exposed to Agent Orange were complaining of illnesses, birth defects among their children, skin rashes, cancer, nervous problems and respiratory problems.

    orange3_small.jpgPeople tend to blame dioxins for all the health effects. But 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, constituents of Agent Orange, are no spring chickens. Exposure during spraying, especially of the grossly excessive amounts that rained down upon Vietnam, can cause various health effects as well, not to mention long-term devastation of entire ecosystems.

    Side note: New Zealand, in 2004, apologized to New Zealand’s “veterans” for their exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam war. Not a word to the Vietnamese, of course.

    Side note 2: A US Federal court, in 2005, dismissed the first claims brought by Vietnamese plaintiffs against Dow Chemicals and Monsanto, here was the government’s  reasoning:

    In a brief filed in January, it said opening the courts to cases brought by former enemies would be a dangerous threat to presidential powers to wage war.

    Translation: We reserve the right to drop chemical weapons on our “enemies”, and doing anything to abrogate this right is “dangerous”.

    Image courtesy of Reuters shows a Vietnamese child, one of many with birth defects associated with Agent Orange exposure.

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    Power to Build Border Fence Is Above U.S. Law

    Byoliveridley

    Banana Republic Alert…

    Securing the nation’s borders is so important, Congress says, that Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, must have the power to ignore any laws that stand in the way of building a border fence. Any laws at all.

    Last week, Mr. Chertoff issued waivers suspending more than 30 laws he said could interfere with “the expeditious construction of barriers” in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. The list included laws protecting the environment, endangered species, migratory birds, the bald eagle, antiquities, farms, deserts, forests, Native American graves and religious freedom.

    Power to Build Border Fence Is Above U.S. Law – New York Times

    I don’t know what to say, rule of law, so quaint, so pre 9/11…

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    Pakistan's Self Interest

    Byoliveridley

    Excellent article on the dynamics of Pakistan and the Taliban (H/T to 3QD)

    Scapegoating Pakistan (Harpers.org)

    Other countries, as former senior CIA official Michael Scheuer reminded me, do not look at the world from the same point of view as the United States. “The first duty of any intelligence agency,” he said, “is to protect the national interest. Pakistan is not going to destroy the Taliban because at some point they would like to see the Taliban back in power. They cannot tolerate a pro-Indian, pro-American, pro-Russian, pro-Iranian government in Afghanistan. They already have an unstable Western border and have to worry about a country of one million Hindus that has nuclear bombs.”

    That’s 1 billion Hindus, kind sir, not 1 million, there are one million Hindus in South Chennai alone, I would guess, your point is well taken, though. Self-interest ought to be the driving force of any country’s foreign policy. But this article oversimplifies the situation. Not all self-interest needs to be couched in, and carried out in purely adversarial terms. It has been in the self-interest of the military ruling class of Pakistan to carry out this hyper militarized foreign policy. It aids and abets the survival of this ruling class. But is it really in the long term self interest of the rest of Pakistan? Being Indian, I might tend to underestimate and undersell the threat that India is to Pakistan, but I don’t see the threat. Yes, India is a large country with hegemonical ambitions of being the local bully, but its threat to Pakistan is overrated. India has huge problems of its own anyway, and is probably not interested in territorial expansion at this point in time! I am guessing that a Pakistan that is a little more accommodating to its neighbors would find its neighbors a little more cooperative, no?

    How does this play out in the real world? Very simply, Pakistan cooperates with the United States when it serves its interests and doesn’t cooperate when it feels that its interests aren’t served.

    Well, I am completely and utterly on board with that. Pakistan should pay much more attention to its neighbors than to the “leader of the free world” thousands of miles away.

    The Pakistan-Afghan border, aka the Durand line, was drawn by some Brit administrator and in a region with thousands of years of history, artificial borders drawn by foreigners means little to the people who live there. Most identities are tribal, and these stupid colonial lines don’t mean that one person living one mile east of the border will think “Pakistani” and the other, one mile west of the border, “Afghani”.

    We’re unfortunately still suffering the consequences of colonial manipulations and divisions, and will continue to do so until regional borders reflect ethic identity more accurately, and are not a function of some ignorant British moron governor’s cartographic skills.

    Rant over, nothing like an ethnic conflict in my neck of the woods to bring out the stream of consciousness rambling. Back to more science based blogging later!

  • Canadian Elections October 14th?

    Byoliveridley

    Prime Minister Stephen Harper will later this week ask Governor General Michaëlle Jean to set Oct. 14 as the date for the next federal election, senior government officials said Monday.Harper will visit Jean at Rideau Hall, her official residence in Ottawa, to establish the election date, the officials told the Canadian Press, speaking on condition of anonymity.The prime minister will declare that, after having met with all three opposition leaders over the last few days, he no longer has the confidence of Parliament, the sources said. As per tradition, it will then be up to Jean to decide whether to dissolve Parliament and set the election date.

    Harper to ask GG to set Oct. 14 as election date: sources

    Just like most things Canadian, our elections will also be about 2 weeks before the American one, it’s Harper vs. Dion, also starring the NDP, the Bloc Quebecois and the Green Party. Climate Change will be front and centre, thanks to Dion and the Liberals’ Green Shift campaign:

    Our plan is as powerful as it is simple. We will cut taxes on those things we all want more of such as income, investment and innovation, and we will shift those taxes to what we all want less of: pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and waste.

    Energy costs are soaring all over the world. While energy prices continue to rise, we need to encourage energy efficiency. We need to change wasteful habits. We need to discourage polluting activities.

    In other words, a kind of Carbon Tax similar to the one the BC provincial government instituted this July. Of course, Harper called this a tax increase and has forecast gloom and doom for all Canadians if something like this happens. As such, his attacks have been successful and support seems to be dropping.

    It’s going to be very interesting and very tight, with the Tories and Liberals both polling in the Mid 30s. Expect yet another coalition government. The Greens could affect results in certain ridings, always good to follow. I hope to learn a lot about Canadian politics from watching this election. The system is quite like India’s and as such, is easily understandable.

    Also expect no soap operas, this is Canada, folks, if you were expecting the Jerry Springer feel to this weekend’s goings on South of the border!!