A Culture With No Memory

Is that who we are? No memory and very little brains? It appears that the harpercons have increased their popularity in the polls. (Note to Ignatieff and dead-ender Liberals: If you're going to decide to come out fighting after years of capitulation, it might be a good idea to have a set of policies to present to the people you're trying to get onside. It's the height of arrogance to imagine that voters will flock to you just because you're the Liberal Party of Canada and you're tired of being pushed around.) Is there any greater indication of the shallow, forever-in-the-present mindset of Canadian political culture than that?

Of course, it's not just Canada. It's human civilization anywhere I guess. No matter how many death-squads the USA organized in Vietnam, Central America, or Iraq, it was never allowed to interfere with their reputation as the champion of human rights and democracy. Regardless of the lies about the Gulf of Tonkin or Saddam Hussein's WMDs, here we are with our news media regurgitating new nonsensical deceptions about Iran's nuclear ambitions.

What is it about us humans that as a group, and in our own little groups, we remain impervious to some of the most basic elements of mature, critical thinking? For example (and getting back to Canada), during the Mike Harris reign of error in Ontario, people died in ambulances trying to find emergency rooms that weren't full to capacity. People in Walkerton died from drinking tap water. That hadn't happened before (at least in living memory or since modern standards were established many decades earlier) and, more importantly, it hasn't happened since. On top of all his other failures, Harris and the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario were responsible for those deaths. But here we have the Ontario PCs remaining in second place in Ontario politics.

Which brings us to the rising popularity of the stephen harpercon party of Canada. Why are they at 40% in the polls rather than say 4%? Okay, that would be a bit of stretch. Given the apparent distribution of stupidity across any given human collective over a certain size, the harpercons vote should sanely begin to taper-off after 20%. stephen harper himself should be treated as a serial liar who loathes his own country's political traditions (calling a parliamentary coalition a "coup" is nothing less than spitting upon the way Canadians govern themselves). He ought to be treated like poison.

Here's three examples from Alison at Creekside's "101 Reasons to Have an Election."

dirty tricks manual:

Banned, shit-head commentor "Wayne" responded to this travesty by lamely insisting that every political party has worked to fuck-up the work of the legislature. Even more stupidly, he insisted on this assertion because his local harpercon MP told him this was so. Bullshit. No other party has ever been found to have a 200-some page guidebook on how the chairs of parliamentary committees can obstruct proceedings, manipulate witnesses and essentially destroy one of the most important aspects of a democracy; legislative oversight.

As an example of how this worked out in practice, Alison points to the resignation of environment committe chair Bob Mills when it turned out that a witness previously believed to be friendly to the government's lies and delusions on the environment was unreliable. Mills tried to change the order that the witnesses would appear and when overruled by the rest of the committee, resigned. When no other harpercon would replace him as the majority chair, the committee was effectively stymied.

Even more nauseating, harpercon parliamentary whip Jay Hill is supposedly responsible for brow-beating any harpercon MPs who don't happily play along with sabotaging democracy.

Accountability Act

As a result of the Liberal's AdScam atrocity, and the harpercons' loud and proud railing against corruption and lobbyists, it was inescapable that they'd have to produce some actual genuine legislation on the subject. They did. A less than useless propaganda exercise that simultaneously makes low-level bureaucrats worried about breaking the law while allowing the harpercons to appoint as many cronies to high-level positions and award as many public contracts to loyal financial backers as they please. Regarding low-level bureaucrats:

The rules-laden Federal Accountability Act is backfiring and creating a bureaucracy of risk-averse "Dilberts" who keep their heads down, don't trust anyone and put process ahead of getting things done, warns a report by Ottawa think-tank Public Policy Forum.

Regarding appointments and lobbyists:

When the federal government was patting itself on the back last month on the anniversary of the passage of the Federal Accountability Act, it failed to mention that two key components – the appointments commission and the lobbying provisions – have not been implemented...The Accountability act, drafted by the Tories in response to the Liberal sponsorship scandal, passed the Commons and Senate and received royal assent in December 2006, but a separate cabinet order is required for many provisions to come into force. There is nothing forcing cabinet to establish the appointments commission.

How else to interpret this but as cynical contempt for the electorate?

listeriosis

As with drinking tap water, Canadians take it for granted that biting into a deli-sandwich isn't going to kill them. As with drinking tap water, Canadians had best think twice when carrying out normally everyday activities under a "conservative" government. Blinded by dogma (and hopes for showers of money from corporate special interests) "conservatives" like the harpercons stupidly insist that it is better to have profit-driven corporations inspect themselves and pull any potentially dangerous products off the market, rather than have government inspectors with a vested interest in protecting the public do so.

To the surprise of nobody with half a brain or a modicum of honesty, meat processing gian "Maple Leaf" failed to adequately clean their equipment, failed to note potential contamination and failed to prevent this contaminated meat from entering the market. People began to die in June and the problem was only traced to the source in August, whereupon the harpercons sat for THREE DAYS wondering how to spin things in order to make it look like it was anyone else's fault but their own.

When they did grudgingly own up to any responsibilty, harpercon agricultural minister Gerry Ritz showed all the qualities of a cockroach, joking about the deaths and hoping some of them might be from among his political enemies. Shockingly, but in retrospect not surprisingly, Ritz wasn't the only one who saw fit to make light of people dying due to harpercon delusions and incompetence. Health minister Tony ("two-tier") Clement made a tongue-in-cheek endorsement of the safety of the food being served at a function at the Canadian consulate in Denver. Ha-ha.

Ah! But did not the harpercons have the integrity to appoint an inquiry into the tragedy? Yes, they did. It took a while. Like over four months to appoint someone to head the inquiry. But then they got down to business, right? Wrong. The harper's Privy Council Office tried to withold documents recording their non-response to the crisis by insisting that they were hand-written notes and therefore not "transcripts" which MUST be released under the Access to Information Act.

The Privy Council Office (PCO) has refused to release handwritten notes on key government conference calls held in August and September.

The Canadian Press requested all transcripts and minutes of calls held to deal with the listeriosis outbreak linked to the deaths of 20 Canadians – but the government says those handwritten notes don't qualify as a transcript.

It took four months for Privy Council officials to reach that conclusion.

This, despite the fact that the word transcribe is in part defined in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary as "make a copy of, esp. in writing . . . write out (shorthand, notes, etc.) . . . ."

A report was eventually issued over a year after people started dying and harper had survived his failed attempt for a majority government before the great recession hit. It basically said that maybe the idiotic self-regulation policies of the harpercons had something to do with it after all.

There is no other way for a sane person to respond to these and other abominations but to heartily reject, now and forever, continuing to take these gangs of liars, thieves and killers as genuine proponents of anything remotely related to democracy.