Prime Minister Stephen Harper today launched his latest attack on the Senate, following up on threats he made during his appearance before the senate earlier this year.
Senator Munson: Prime Minister, welcome. I cannot help myself; once a reporter, always a reporter. You suggested in French that there would be political consequences if the Senate said no to an eight-year term.
As you know, we are studying the proposed accountability act and Senate reform in a serious way and there may be amendments. It may take some time and it is serious work. There are critics who believe you would like nothing better than to fight an election on the backs of the Senate.
Mr. Harper: Well, do not give me the opportunity.
Senator Munson: There will be political consequences then.Thursday September 7, 2006 – Senate Committee on Senate Reform
Harper claims that he’s interested in improving Canada’s democracy.
Nothing could be farther from the truth, demonstrated by Harper’s own actions.
Stephen Harper thumbed his nose at our democracy by secretly negotiating a cabinet seat for former Liberal David Emerson, mere hours after the votes were counted on January 23rd, without requiring that Emerson get a real mandate from his constituents.
Harper isn’t interested in democracy but does want to change Canada, fundamentally, using the United States model as the mirror image he’d like to see reflected in Canada. Canadians ought not to sleep walk into supporting Harper’s vision. Properly informed, I am certain they will reject such a vision.
Harper doesn’t want democracy, he wants a presidency.
Brian Mulroney steps in it, commenting on the ineffectual “Clean Air Act” being promoted by Rona Ambrose and Stephen Harper:
“And I think there is more work to be done on that, both substantively and ‘presentationally’, and my guess [is] that is where the government is heading,” he said. CBC – Environment key to courting middle-class vote: Mulroney
When voters go next to the polls they’ll have to decide whether they believe that the current crop of Conservatives actually believe, and care, about climate change – beyond how the issue effects their electoral results.
The track record on the issue of those who control the party – largely ex Canadian Alliance and Reformers like Stephen Harper – underscores clearly that it was those same folks who have fought any attempt to a) recognize that there is an issue and b) create policies and legislation and a cultural / political climate where change could be made possible. But climate-change denial is not strictly a western conservative trait, and here we have Mulroney exhorting the current crop of Conservatives to change the optics of the situation, rather than make substantive change.
Entrusting Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, Canada’s new government, on the climate change file is truly like putting the foxes in charge of the hen house.
It should also be noted that Harper is hell-bent on weakening the federal government in every way imaginable (taxation, private property legislation, the so-called triple E senate) in order to make Canada’s federal government impotent on such issues of national importance.
In the next election there will be four federal parties (Green, Liberal, New Democratic, and Progressive Canadian (‘PC Party’) parties), plus the Bloc Quebecois, who truly support policies aimed at turning around Canada’s sorry record on environmental and climate change issues. The Conservative Party, my party, won’t be one of them, but they certainly will try to spin the situation and fool voters into believing they are.
I am a Conservative who hailed from the Progressive Conservative Party and have always championed environmental issues as my colleagues will attest to. But there are too few voices like mine within the party to make a difference. The only reason the Conservative leadership is talking about these issues at all today is because public opinion is forcing them to – they would much prefer to ignore the climate change file completely.
The leadership of the Conservative Party – kowtowing to Alberta oil interests and manufacturers in Central Canada – is not likely to change the anti-environmental course they’ve been on since Preston Manning and Stephen Harper started the Reform Party. Change will be skin deep, not transformational. That’s simply not good enough.
Congressional hearings can be dry, dull, affairs, but the Kucinich-Paul Congressional Hearing on Civilian Casualties in Iraq is riveting:
So, in the 2004 study, I went and I led the study, and I paid a guy $200 to smuggle me into Iraq. So I flew to Jordan, and gave him 200 bucks, and he smuggled me in. He had really dark tinted windows. And so he smuggled me across the border—even though they searched the car, somehow we made it—and we went through a checkpoint in Fallujah as we were coming in.
This guy who smuggled me in—he’s a professional smuggler. He’s a tough guy. He’d been in the military 21 years, the U.S. had come, and now he was suddenly unemployed and driving a car. As we drove past Abu Ghraib prison—I’m lying on the floor in the back, and he goes, “Abu Ghraib! Abu Ghraib!” And I sort of looked up, and my driver was up front, and I said, “Do you mean the prison?” And he looked back over his shoulder, and he was weeping.
You know, there are consequences to every American family that’s lost a loved one that dwarf the economic concerns. And the notion that there might be hundreds of thousands of Iraqi families with scars that deep should scare us profoundly, I think. Les Roberts, Associate Professor, Clinical Public Health, Columbia University
The hearing looks into the recent Lancet study which pegs the number of Iraqi deaths at over 650,000 since the start of George W. Bush’s foolhardy, illegal, and pointless war in that country. When the study was released in October it was greeted by howls of protests by both the U.S. and U.K. governments, however as time has past the conclusions reached in the report have only gained additional credibility and currency among the press and many policy makers.
P.S.: Lets not forget: the Iraq war is a war Stephen Harper wanted Canada to support.