Silence implies consent

Susan Delacourt discusses Munir Sheikh's testimony today that his enforced silence on the long-form census issue was being spun as approval of the Harper Conservative's census debacle.

Dutiful silence is an honoured tradition in Canadian public service, but if it becomes a weapon in someone else's hands, that should make us all worried. And it might make public servants reconsider whether discretion is always the better part of valour.. . . we in the media, yes that means me too, should be careful about allowing mischievous spin to fill a duty-bound silence.

So this is what it has come to -- Canadian civil servants have to resign if they want to tell us the truth?

Yawn

There must be something wrong with me.
I could care less about Conrad Black.

"They hate us for our freedom"

Phil Nugent describes the situation of racists in the US today:

...most of the people who look at Obama and start thinking such deep thoughts as, "We need to take our country back!" probably have kids who grew up in the post-King era--hell, in post-Yo! MTV Raps-era--and they have no idea why Mom and Pop are so het up ...
I know that living in a world that the Fonz and Richie Cunningham never made is rough on them, but in a way, they brought their seething misery on themselves. They look at all the people who disgust and bewilder them because they're not howling in protest about the black president and the immigrants and the welfare bums whose existence they register like a fish bone in the throat, and they can find no peace, a condition made all the more unbearable by the fact that so many people who ought to be on their side find peace with it just fine. They suffer from an apparently unbeatable psychological condition, one that I think George W. Bush described best: they look at all the sane people in the world, and they hate us for our freedom.

Going all in

We seem to be in a Texas Hold-Em culture these days, where everybody is going all in, all the time.
Chet discusses how the flying monkeys of the right wing have swung into knee-jerk formation behind dismantling the mandatory long-form census:

. . . in literally days, following Clement's out-of-the-blue announcement, a whole set of new convictions has been created about the perfidy of the census, and there are passionate tweeters and commenters pushing those convictions as if they'd had them for their whole lives.
This is one reason, really, why following politics is so surreal these days.

Of course our side has its own orthodoxies -- as I found out when I posted heretical opinions this winter about the gun registry and the Olympics. But the right wing construct is more elaborate, comprehensive and predictable

a loud unending chorus of census evil! socialism! social engineering! liberal statist fascism! . . . [as well as] the usual guff about government-worshipping Stalinist prairie-hating hippies

And this tide of hyperbole engulfs everything, whether it makes sense or not -- for instance, why did climate science ever become a left-right issue, to the point that the ruminations of a bunch of nerdy climatologists are so threatening to the right wing that the mere mention of Al Gore drives them absolutely nuts? It's WEATHER, for heavens sake, its where we all live. And then there is stem cell research, and abortion, and who people can marry, and what children should be taught in school, and who we should let into the country, and what paperwork people need to fill out when they buy a gun.
It all seems to get wrapped up in the same big tangled ball of string. Not only is there no nuance anymore, but anyone who thinks nuance should still be possible is actually being naive.
After I expressed my own doubts about the gun registry, I kept bumping into right wing opinions about how dismantling the registry would be just the first step in a long list of other culture war battles up to and including how people should be able to carry handguns into church, and I thought, whoa! all I wanted is that we should cut the paperwork for a few hunters so where did THAT come from?
If dismantling the gun registry is the first step down the road to dismantling the wheat board, outlawing gay marriage and teaching creationism, then count me all out.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

Arrogant twit

"I think people are just, you know, wishful thinking. There is an absolutely really good reason why we have to be firm about the March deadline because as soon as the deadlines start to drag on, people begin to substitute other things and there begins to be other excuses. If we allow for one, believe me, every municipality from one end to the other will have a reason why their deadline should be extended," [Con MP Brad Trost] said in an interview.
"I understand where they're coming from, but the moment we extend the deadline they're going to be like kids with homework, all of a sudden they're out playing in the park rather than getting the homework done"

Emphasis mine.
This is 36-year-old Saskatoon Humboldt Con MP Brad Trost's insulting, dismissive response to requests from Saskatchewan municipalities that the federal government extend the deadline for infrastructure projects --without an extension, the municipalities will be on the hook for millions if the projects cannot be finished during the wettest summer we've ever had.
Being younger than just about every other politician in Saskatchewan, I guess Trost figures he should be able to lecture everyone else about kids and playgrounds!
Trost's condescending remarks are being condemned across the province -- even John Gormley is pissed, and if the Cons have lost Gormley on an issue, you know its bad.
But our lone Liberal MP Ralph Goodale says it best:

"What an insulting, condescending little twit. I mean, that is outrageous for a person of his position to lay that kind of abuse . . . on the cities and towns and villages and rural municipalities of Saskatchewan. That is just appalling," said Goodale.

Trost is making some kind of announcement in Humboldt later this morning, and I expect we'll be hearing later today about how he was "mis-quoted" and "taken out of context" -- stay tuned.
(And if the name Brad Trost seems eeriely familiar to non-Sask readers, this is the same guy who shot off his mouth last year about the Toronto Pride Parade funding.)
NOTE: I updated and sourced the original quote.

Musical interlude

Dumb and dumber

Now that the census decision has gobsmacked the Harper Conservatives just as badly as their prorogation decision six months ago, the discussion is increasingly turning to why in the world they did it.
Scott thinks the goal of the census change was to short-circuit any expansion of social programs:

they are not doing away with the mandatory longform as a way of defending privacy, but as a backdoor way of attacking the programs they hate.

while Chet says the Conservatives want to prevent criticism that their economic policies aren't working:

what Harper really doesn't want is for the census data to show what the effects of his own policies have been in the here and now. Harper appears to like control more than anything else, and there's just no way he can control what a thorough and complete census will tell.

POGGE suggests the basic goal is to make government ineffective:

Harper and his crew take their inspiration from American movement conservatives and Harper himself made that clear long before he became prime minister. . . This is a movement that crosses borders. Its members have been organizing and building out their infrastructure for forty years.

The Georgia Straight also picks up on the American wingnut influence in the census decision:

“You see this attack on the census very much in the American right,” [NDP MP Charlie] Angus said. “It has had no traction here in Canada as far as I can see. I’ve never had a complaint and never heard of this as an issue.". . ."I’ve never gone into a Tim Hortons in Canada and had someone rail at me about big bad government spying on them with the census, but I am hearing this from Conservative cabinet ministers. I think the public is shaking its head.”

The census decision certainly does undermine a internationally respected Canadian agency which may well have been resented by the Harper Conservatives.
But however comforting it is to believe that the Cons had a reason for doing this, I am afraid that maybe they didn't. Like medical isotopes and prorogation and maternal health and party funding and so on and so on, the census decision may well have been just another knee-jerk pander to the base that they didn't really think about very much before they did it.
Basically, I think the Harper Conservatives are increasingly being revealed to Canadians as the gang that couldn't shoot straight. And I think official Ottawa has finally realized how untrustworthy these guys are -- even the Bank of Canada has fired a very public shot across Harper's bow.

Finally

Every time I think the G20 police abuse issue is dying away, it springs to life again.
There are a number of investigations going on into various aspects of the G20 protests, but no one was tasked with looking at police behaviour -- until now.:

The “systemic issues” under investigation [by the Office of the Independent Police Review Director] include allegations of unlawful searches, unlawful arrests, improper detention and issues related to the Eastern Avenue film studio used as a detention centre during the G20 weekend.

And the Toronto Community Mobilization Network is doing its own People's Investigation too -- great idea!
A commenter on a news story has raised an issue I noticed as well -- that the usual media phrasing which describes the G20 protests as "clashes between protesters and police" is wrong. It implies that the protesters were fighting against the police.
But they weren't.
First the police where nowhere to be seen when the Black Bloc was breaking windows and setting fire to police cars:


Then the police were clubbing and arresting peaceful protesters in what were supposed to be safe protest zones:








And more here.

The missing link

Over at The Vanity Press, Chet identifies the crucial connection between getting rid of the mandatory long-form census, and the refusal to hold an inquiry into police abuses during the G20 protests:

. . . both express a preference for ideology over fact, and for authority over responsibility. In both cases, the politicians want to shove away the possibility of finding out a truth that disagrees with their preferred view of things -- you know, the one in which they never did anything wrong and in which they still deserve the power they have?. . .

Oh, I am so glad that Chet is back!

Great line of the day

So they're having this debate in the States about whether some Bush-era "temporary" tax cuts for wealthy people should be allowed to expire and the so-called "fiscal conservatives" are all "we need to keep the cuts for job creation" in spite of the fact that undertaking the cuts in the first place didn't create any jobs -- when, oh lord, will Reagan's inane "trickle-down economics" theory finally be laughed out of court? -- and in spite of the fact that letting the cuts expire will increase government revenue and reduce the US deficit that all the fiscal conservatives claim to be so concerned about.
Anyhoo, John Cole points out the stupidity of all this and concludes:

. . . the best way to get our finances back in order is to systematically ignore anyone who calls himself a fiscal conservative. If I could find a bank run by dirty hippies I would put my money there, because I just don’t trust these people in pinstripes anymore.

G20 Art

At FFIB NAMOL, artist Ffib has posted his interpretation of the "police riot" during the G20

We witnessed on TV and now through more private video and personal testimony the extent of the harassment, brutality, and abuse, including sexual abuse, that was wrought upon law abiding Canadian citizens by a large number of Toronto police officers throughout Saturday & Sunday.
A Police Riot best describes what happened at the Toronto G20.
In any case here is ffibs interpretation of that weekend.

Sigh

I don't understand how anybody ever got the impression that Stephen Harper is such a great manager, as we watch his ministers wreck the agencies they are supposed to be directing.
Now Tony Clement has destroyed the reputation of internationally-respected Statistics Canada and he continues to wiggle around the truth -- after saying for the last week that Stats Canada had endorsed the voluntary long-form census, Clement now sort of admits he was lying and it was the government's decision. In his statement following Shiekh's resignation, Clement says

As I have noted previously [yeah? where?] Statistics Canada's preferred approach would have been to maintain the mandatory long form census.
However, after the Government's decision to replace the mandatory long form census Statistics Canada was asked to provide options for conducting a voluntary survey of households. One of the options provided - the voluntary National Household Survey - was chosen.

Emphasis mine.

Don't panic

Maybe the Obama White House will learn from the Sherrod debacle exactly what all leaders have to learn -- don't panic.
It was panic that made the Obama administration react too quickly, without investigation or due process. So they tried to kill the racism story quick by firing a person who didn't deserve to be fired, and made themselves into a bigger story about poor decision-making.
The moral is, you will be criticized no matter what you do, so do the right thing.

I love the internets

I haven't posted anything about the census long form brouhaha yet but everyone is posting this song tonight.
Andrew Davidson says:

some people can unleash their pent-up creative energy on literally anything.

Skdadl says

So what do Canadians do when the presumptions of the popinjays in Ottawa provoke them to proving once again that we can be a pretty uppity bunch? Well, we write songs, of course. As Tom Lehrer once sort of sang, "They may be winning the battles, but we've got all the good songs."

Considering what a hit the video is, one of the singers notes:

“We should have discussed royalties earlier. Now that it’s taken off this will be a much harder discussion. Statistics say that nine time out of ten, plus or minus one, 80 percent of the time in any group of ten there will be at least one Yoko Ono.”

Getting back to the main issue, this comment on Warren Kinsella's site sums it all up:

Things we all have to do as Canadians:
- pay our taxes
- fill out the census
- register deaths, births, marriages
- be registered in school until you’re 16
No mandatory service, no volunteering, no national population register, no identity card… Christ, we don’t even have to work if we don’t have to, and we’ll get some kind of income support. What is the matter with Canadians? Fewer than half of us seem to be able to pry ourselves away from reality TV even to vote, depending on which type of election we’re talking about.
Lookit- the census isn’t about YOU. It’s about US. Nobody cares about YOUR information. They care about averages, aggregates, trends.

Yes, like the news that that there are 21,000 self-declared Jedi Knights in Canada -- and they're pissed off too!