The 49th Parallel

The other shoe drops!

2007-05-05T13:37:00.000-05:00

Well, I have just heard the death knell of computer people being a profession, or a "white collar" class in western society. Yesterday, IBM announced that it may be laying off up to 150,000 people from it's Global Services division. Add to that the spin-off effects, and you may see up to half a million computer professionals looking for a job by the end of the year.

This will have the same effect on the US computer field that Nortel's crash had on Canada's...a flood of highly qualified computer professionals looking for whatever computer job they can get. This means that companies who need computer people will be able to cherry pick what they need, and get over-qualified people to fill even the "joe jobs".

What does that mean? Well, if you are not highly specialized or have degrees up the wahzoo, you are no longer going to be able to make a wage that is significantly better than a McJob. If you are lucky, you will be able to make $30K. You might even get benefits, but don't count on them. And if you don't kiss-ass all the time, you will find yourself on the street PDQ, because there were 5,000+ resumes submitted for the job when you got it, and when they advertise to replace you, they will get 20,000. I base these numbers on the numbers I have heard for what happens today in Canada, where Canada population is 10% of the US's.

If there was a time for Computer People to unionize, the time is here...but it may already be too late. Good Unions didn't help the manufacturing sector of either Canada or the US, although it has managed to keep trades people gainfully employed. In fact that may be the model that computer people should look at...being tradespeople.

Computer tradespeople will no longer wear dress pants and shirt...but maybe work pants, and polo shirt with their first name, or their company's embroidered on them. That will not appeal to those who got into the field because it was high paying, or that it wasn't a trade, but to those who love computers, it won't matter, as long as they are working on computers, and they can make enough to survive on.

There is a bright side to this..sorta. Again, based upon what has happened in Canada, the vast numbers of people looking for jobs with computer skills will make it cheap enough again to start to operate tech-support call centers in the US again. That's something... I guess.

More thoughts surrounding Remembrance Day

2006-11-13T02:26:00.000-05:00

I saw "The Longest Day" again on TV, and I was amazed at the number of stars in it. It included Jeffery Hunter, who portrayed Christopher Pike in Star Trek, the captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise before Kirk. This led my train of thought about D-Day to the fact that one of the brave heros who stormed Juno Beach that day was Captain James Montgomery Doohan, who would later be known to most of the world as Scotty, the best engineer of the best ship in Starfleet. So, I did a bit of research...

From Wikipedia:

"His first combat assignment was the invasion of Normandy at Juno Beach on D-Day. Shooting two snipers along the way, Doohan led his unit to higher ground through a field of anti-tank mines and took defensive positions for the night. Crossing between command posts at 11:30 that night, Doohan took six hits from a Bren gun fired by a nervous sentry: four in his leg, one in the chest, and one through his right middle finger. The chest bullet was stopped by his silver cigarette case, and the shot finger was amputated (during his later screen acting career he would generally conceal this).

Despite his wounds, Doohan remained in the military, trained as a pilot and flew an artillery observation plane. He flew Taylorcraft Auster Mark V aircraft for 666 (AOP) Squadron, RCAF, as a Royal Canadian Artillery officer in a flying role in support of #1 Canadian AGRA (Army Groups Royal Artillery). All three Canadian (AOP) RCAF Squadrons were manned by Artillery Officer-pilots and 'aircrewed' by Artillery personnel serving as observers. Though never actually a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force, he was once labeled the "craziest pilot in the Canadian Air Forces"."

At one point I was looking how to recommend Mr. Doohan for the Order of Canada, but it turns out that you cannot be made a member after you have died, although if you have been named to the Order, but not invested in it, it can be done so posthumously. There should be a way to honour him, as he was a great Canadian, and most people in Canada don't know him as a Canadian.

Another thing that I found interesting is that so many people were inspired by his character, Scotty, and went into Engineering. In fact, one year, more than half of the people in engineering at the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) said that they had gone into that program because they wanted to be like Scotty. In 1993, the school gave him an honorary engineering degree!

"In fact, science fiction - especially Star Trek - generated so much interest in engineering amongst young people in the United States, that in 1993 MSOE presented an honorary degree to James Doohan, who portrayed "Scotty" in the original Star Trek series." - MSOE NEWS SERVICES

In fact, a lot could be made out of Mr. Doohan's life for both it's inspiration of people to go into engineering, and for the fact that like a lot of young people today who have served in both the Canadian and American armed forces, that they can then go on after their service and become an inspiration to millions of people, even after being wounded, and disfigured.

William Shatner can't same the same.

A Remembrance Day remembrance for those who have given their lives, and one who also gave me a name.

2006-11-11T00:10:00.001-05:00

In the US, kids may learn the Pledge of Allegiance in grade school...in Canada, we tend to learn "In Flanders's Fields".

When I was in Air Cadets, every year we would be down at the Cenotaph, Ottawa's War Memorial near Parliament Hill, and stand at attention for what seemed like hours on end (was really only minutes, of course), but to see people that would have been my grandfather's age crying, and smiling at the same time was a strange sight that will always stick with me.

Some years, I attend a Remembrance Day Ceremony at St. Patrick's HS, which inherited the tradition from St Pats Collage before it was swallowed by one of the bigger local Universities. My namesake died in WWII, and it's really something to hear your name, the name of a man I never knew, and to see hundreds of people pause momentarily after his name to honour him. It's a very powerful moment for me.

If things had been slightly different, I would have gone into the Canadian Air Force, studied geophysics with the aim of becoming a Canadian Astronaut...but that reality never was...I probably would have participated in the first Iraq War, and put my life on the line there.

So I honour my namesake, Farrell James McGovern, who died on his way over to Europe like many brave souls, knowing that every lost ship in the Atlantic, like the one my grandfather went down on, The SS Nerissa, enabled another to complete her journey and bring men and materials to fight the Nazis.

And every year, I tend to go through two or three poppies, as they do tend to fall off after a while. I'm actually on my fourth this year, and I have started using a Canadian Flag pin to replace the bent straight pin that is usually used to hold them on.

Unfortunately, I am too sick this year to attend any of the ceremonies, but I will probably be watching the one at the Cenotaph, like millions of other Canadians do each year.

ttyl

Those stupid yellow ribbon magnets

2006-10-22T22:59:00.000-05:00

Across America, many people have been putting these yellow magnetic ribbons on the back of their cars, supposedly to support the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan...but in reality they are making a very different comment than the one they intended. You see, the whole "Yellow Ribbon" thing comes from a song from the 1970's that has the chorus:

"Tie a yellow ribbon 'round the old oak tree
It's been three long years. Do you still want me?
If I don't see a ribbon round the old oak tree
I'll stay on the bus, forget about us, put the blame on me.
If I don't see a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree"
- "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" by Tony Orlando,
performed by Tony Orlando and Dawn

Which is fine as it goes, but it is patently obvious that the people have not listened to the whole song. It is actually about criminal who has just been released after serving 3 years in jail!

Here are the complete lyrics (emphasis mine):

"I'm comin' home, I've done my time. Now I've got to know what is and isn't mine.
If you received my letter tellin' you I'd soon be free
Then you'll know just what to do if you still want me. If you still want me

CHORUS
Tie a yellow ribbon 'round the old oak tree
It's been three long years. Do you still want me?
If I don't see a ribbon round the old oak tree
I'll stay on the bus, forget about us, put the blame on me.
If I don't see a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree

Bus driver, please look for me, 'cause I couldn't bear to see what I might see
I'm really still in prison, and my love she holds the key
A simple yellow ribbon's what I need to set me free I wrote and told her please

CHORUS

Now the whole damn bus is cheering and I can't believe I see
A hundred yellow ribbons 'round the old oak tree I'm comin' home"

(c) Copyright 1972 by Tridem Music. (c) Copyright assigned 1973 Five Arts Music.
(c) Copyright assigned 1973 Levine & Brown Music, Inc.

By placing one of those yellow ribbon magnets on your car, you are saying that the soldiers who are putting their lives on the line are criminals. Whether you agree with the reason they are there or not, we owe it to them to READ THE FRIGGING LYRICS of a song before we try to associate it with something to show our support for them! Further...what do you want to bet that those magnetic ribbons have a label that says "Make in China"?

If you really want to spend additional money, other than the taxes you, your children and grandchildren will be paying for just the interest on the trillion dollar debt Bush Jr. has rung up, then go and donate at Operation Helmet, which is using private funds to help upgrade the padding in troops helmets to help prevent serious brain injuries...equipment that *should* have been supplied by the government! That will support the troops in a way that makes their lives over there a little bit safer.

http://www.operation-helmet.org/

ttyl
Farrell

US entertainment industry buys Canadian MP

2006-09-19T05:14:00.000-05:00

Greetings:

I'm sure all of you have heard about the horror stories from down in the States where grandmothers and dead people are being sued by the music companies for supposedly downloading music on the internet. Or the various incidents where someone finds a flaw in a software package, and gets threatened with going to jail if they disclose that vulnerability so that you can avoid it? There are just some of the things that people have suffered due to the Digital Millenium Copyright Acts (DMCA) in the US. It is a nasty piece of legislation that was passed in the United States after over a millions and millions (Some have estimated over a billion) dollars in lobbying and "perks" the US entertainment industry lavished upon those in the US Federal Government.

Well, guess what....they are doing the same here in Canada.

Sam Bulte, the former Liberal Party MP for Parkdale/High Park, and here is a quick summary from WIkipedia:

"2006 federal election, Bulte was criticized by University of Ottawa Law professor Michael Geist, historian Jack Granatstein and blogger Cory Doctorow among others. The criticism centred around an apparent conflict of interest relating to her position as "one of the leading people on copyright policy, possibly even the future Canadian heritage minister" [3] and her stance in favour of stricter copyright laws in the face of substantial campaign contributions from Canadian and American entertainment industries. Geist's colleague David Fewer noted that Bulte did not originally have much interest in copyright law, but has become increasingly vocal on the topic since she started to receive money from the copyright lobbies."

Since they were not able to get Ms. Bulte into office, due to the general malaise of the Liberal Party, and the number of people like Dr. Geist blowing her cover, they have done the same thing with the Conservative Party.

Today, Bev Oda is the Minister of Culture, the post Ms. Bulte was hoping to occupy. A funny thing happened on the way to the election...when it became apparent that Conservative Party was going to win, and that Oda was the heir elective to the Culture Ministry, the floodgates of money poured into her coffers from the entertainment industry. Here is what Dr. Geist says:

"Presumably much of this support came from a May 2005 Oda fundraiser when corporate donations were lawful and Oda was the Heritage critic rather than the Heritage Minister. Even so, the significant financial support does little to instill confidence in the fairness of the copyright reform process. Given that many of the donors did not provide financial support to any other riding association in Canada (with the possible exception of Sam Bulte, whose riding association has yet to file its report), there is little doubt about the motivations behind the decision to back Bev at a time when it looked like the Liberals' fall was imminent." Quoteed from here

So, one way, or another, the entertainment industry has bought an MP, who is willing to do their bidding. The fact that until it looked like Ms. Bulte wasn't going to win that they started pouring money into Ms. Oda's campaign shows that any changes in the copyright laws was bought.

Now, I don't know about you, but I don't like it when big companies influence the way that our country works. And what is worse, most of the companies are AMERICAN. They are seeking to import American culture into Canada by buying Members of Parliament to implement American style laws. And if they are successful in changing Canadian culture by buying Members of Parliament, what will be next?

So, what can I do, some of you are hopefully saying....here are a few that are quoted on BoingBoing.net:

Write to your local Member of Parliament. Letters (which are better than email) from just a handful of constituents is enough to get the attention of your local MP. Contact information for all MPs is available here. Online Rights Canada also provides an easy way to write to your local MP.

Write to the Prime Minister of Canada. Contact information here.

Write to Bev Oda, the Minister of Canadian Heritage. Minister Oda is one of the two ministers responsible for copyright policy in Canada. Prior Canadian Heritage Ministers have been perceived to be close to U.S. copyright lobby groups and copyright collectives. Ministry contact information here. Minister Oda's contact information here.

Write to Maxime Bernier, the Minister of Industry. Minister Bernier is responsible for the Copyright Act in Canada. Despite the fact that Minister Bernier is viewed as a strong advocate of reduced government intervention, the rumour mill suggests that he supports DMCA-style reforms. Minister Bernier's contact information here.

Ask each political party where it stands on copyright. Copyright policy could prove to be a divisive issue in the months ahead - ask each political party for their views on the issue.

Write to Canadian Heritage's Copyright Policy Branch. The Copyright Policy Branch is home to a large contingent of bureaucrats focused on copyright matters. Contact information here.

Write to Industry Canada's Intellectual Property Policy Directorate. The IPPD is Industry Canada's counterpart on copyright policy, though it addresses a broader range of IP issues. Contact information here (scroll to the bottom).

For more info, go here

Terrorism in Quebec

2006-08-08T16:16:00.000-05:00

When most people think about Terrorism in Quebec, their minds turn to the FLQ, the October Crisis, and Pierre Trudeau. A few might think about the Biker Gang wars...but there is a new terrorist threat in Quebec that may have world wide reverberations.

According to a story by CBC News, a Carol Montreuil's vehicle exploded last Thursday, but was attributed to an electrical malfunction. But the following day, a number of news media outlets started recieving emails from a group called Initiative de résistance internationaliste (IRI), claiming it had firebombed the car.

It turns out that Carol Montreuil is Vice-President of the Canadian Petroleum Products Institute, in charge of Eastern Canada. According to the CBC story:

"...the IRI e-mails blame oil companies for holding consumers hostage while making enormous profits, damaging the environment and financing "an imperialist army which is committing barbarous acts" in places such as Iraq."

This is not the first time that the group has acted. Sometime in November of 2004, they bombed a Hydro Quebec transmission tower on the eve of George W. Bush's visit to Canada.

In an email sent to both the Quebec French Media, and to al-Jazeera, the IRI stated:

"We refuse to allow all the weight of resistance to fall on the noble Iraqi people, who are being massacred because they were an obstacle to the American energy hegemony, or to the Bolivian peasants courageously mobilizing against the pillage of their gas resources, even risking their lives," the note said.

"We also refuse to let the Colombian and Palestinian people confront the imperial army alone, whether or not it is hidden behind a national banner." (translation by CTV news)

The IRI seems to be against what they percieve is the US's attempt at energy imperialism through armed conflict.

Who they are, how big, and how long they have been around is currently unknown.

Long Live the New Flesh...NOT!

2006-07-27T22:29:00.000-05:00

I frequent a wonderful website called Digg.com, and it's another place like Slashdot.org where interesting stories get pointed at, and people can comment on them. I was commenting on a story about how Peter Doran, a scientist whose work has been misrepresented by many Global Warming Denier to prove that scientists have not reached a consensus on the subject. Well, Mr Doran has published a note in both the Amerst Times and the New York Times stating that he is does feel that the data supports Global Warming.

But that is not what prompted me to write about this. It was a comment by one of the other users who claimed to be a Canadian on Digg.com that bothered me.

"Yeah. Wow. Half a degree. Awesome. Man the lifeboats."

As a fellow Canadian, comments like yours make me wince.

But then again, the Neo-Cons have taken over the Canadian Parliament. Most Neo-Cons, both in Canada and the US, are members of a Fundamentalist Christian Church. They are best described as The Religious Reich, and they have a hard-on for anything that can help bring about "The End Times". That is why most of them are Climate Change Deniers. Global warming means that the Earth is becoming more like the Christian's Hell. It's also why they support war in the Middle East. If they can get "The Rapture" going, they all get beamed off Earth by an old guy in a beard, and get to live in a place with limitless amounts of Philly Cream Cheese.

As Prime Minister Harper is a Neo-Con, a Fundamentalist, and Climate Change Denier, could be why the Canadian Government website that covers Climate Change and Canada's response has be removed by the government:

Go to http://www.climatechange.gc.ca and you will see a missing website...luckily, the Internet Archive's Way Back Machine has a copy of it...here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20050325095138/www.climatechange.gc.ca/english/

It contains a great number of "inconvenient truths" that the Canadian flavour of Neo-Cons dislike, especially as it would affect their "Preciouss", the Oil Patch. What is it with Neo-Cons and oil? Maybe it's like the Black Oil in The X-Files...or worse, like the video tapes in that Canadian classic, Videodrome by David Cronenberg Oil gets into their bodies and creates "The New Flesh"...I have this scary image of PM Harper standing up in Parliament yelling "Long Live The New Flesh!" Then the Black Oil starts shooting out of his mouth...and covers the entire House of Commons in that Black Oil.

That's an image that kepts me awake at night....

Perception, And America

2006-07-04T03:32:00.000-05:00

As someone who holds both Canadian and American Citizenship by birth, and the fact that I have lived and worked in both countries...I can say that there is a major skew between Americans and how they perceive themselves, and how others do.

I lived in the US during both Reagan's time in office, and Bush Jr., and The times are very different. Back during the Reagan years, Democrats and Republicans both saw themselves as part of the American culture, and that they differed on many things, but at the end of the day, they were all Americans. Today, the Republican party has taken an "Us vs Them" attitude, and has had great electorial success by vilifying the Democrats. The Democrats don't know how to answer this, since the best response would be to vilify the Republicans...but it's against the Democratic nature. So the USA has drifted to the Right.

From the Canadian point of view, we see an America that has gone kinda nuts. They attack each other, when they have much bigger fish to fry. Canadians see the Left in the US as being very Right Wing, and as much as we hate it, the US always has a big influence on Canadian Culture. And we see this with the rise of Harper, and his use of the same type of tactics that the Republican party has used so successfully. Harper and company have managed to take an accounting scandal and turn it into a tool bludgeon the Liberal Party. Unfortunately, for Harper, eventually, simply being an alternative to the Liberal Party will wear off, and the ultimate benefactors of this will be the New Democratic party.

Ultimately, many Canadians no long feel comfortable with the US government...and many Americans feel the same way. The Bush Jr. has managed to damage the perception of the US around the world. He has taken a situation where he, either through deception or incompetence, has put the US and a number of it's allies into the situation where they are attempting to prosecute an undeclared war in a country that didn't have the nuclear weapons that Bush Jr.'s government claimed they had. And for *that* they should be criticized. For using a base outside of the US to try to get around their Constitution, they should be criticized. And both Americans, and the other citizens of the world should be holding the US, and Bush Jr to blame for these, because ultimately it was the people of the US who elected Bush Jr. and a majority in the both Houses. But don't blame me...I didn't vote for Bush Jr. Not that Kerry was significantly better, but at least he has combat experience, and thus would have had a clue about how to clear up the problem in Iraq.

The Blind following the Blind

2006-06-02T22:42:00.000-05:00

Most Canadians who watch or read the news know about Prime Minister Harper's attempt to muzzle the press. What many may not know is that he is exactly aping what President Bush did in the US...in fact, almost issue for issue, Harper is becoming a clone of Bush...with all that implies. And the US media has started picking up on this too. Check out this paragraph from the Huffington Post:

The parallels to the relationship between President Bush and the Washington press corps are almost too obvious to point out: a conservative leader who thinks the national press is out to ruin him; a communications strategy designed to manage all information out of the administration (including a prohibition on photographing coffins carrying deceased soldiers); a preference for local news outlets, which are perceived to be more sympathetic to the government, for disseminating information; and, indeed, an apparently larger strategy aimed at starving the media beast and thereby rendering the press irrelevant to the process of governing.
Ankush Khardori - Eat The Press (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ankush-khardori/a-lesson-from-canada-for-_b_22062.html)

What we see now is a cross boarder attempt to muzzle the press at worse, or the Canadian Prime Minister following the lead of the US President at best. Both are troubling to Canadians.

As most people know, the Press is vitally important to the running of an open, democratic country. The first step in turning a democratic country into a totalitarian state is overt management of the media. In fact, the closer a country is to a dictatorship, or small "Politburo" who hold absolute power, the more control the government exerts over over the media. Without the media, Canadians would never have known of the "Sponsorship Scandal", Americans would never have heard about Watergate. And those are just two of the biggest, best known incidents where the media has helped keep the government honest. Without the media, there is no way to hold up the ugly truth to the electorate, and the only good electorate is an informed electorate.

Sports Caster and my cousin, Pat Marsden died today.

2006-04-27T13:34:00.000-05:00

My cousin Pat Marsden died today around 6 am in Toronto. He was moderately famous, having been a popular sportscaster in Canada on the CTV network, and after many years, he retired to Florida. Among his many accomplishments was being the TV host of the Canada/Russia hockey series back in 1972. I met him a number of times, but in reality, I probably knew his mother better than I knew him. Virtually every news outlet in Canada has something about his death this morning. He had been a smoker since age 4, and he died from lung cancer. The Picture above is from when he used to do the play-by-play of CFL football games. He obviously loved sports, and it must have been a great life to work at something that you love.

I do know a few stories about him...and he was quite the character. Interviewed by Earl McRae while in the hospital and he was philosophical about his fatal diganosis in February.

"There's nothing I can do about it, Earl. When your time comes, it comes. We're all going sometime, I just didn't expect it to come this soon for me. Three weeks ago I told my wife, 'You know what? I can't get over how great I feel.' But I have no regrets. I'm 69 and I've had a good life with lots of laughs and lots of friends. Lots of great memories."

Visitation will take place at the Rosar-Morrison Funeral Home, on 467 Sherbourne. The hours are Sunday from 7-9 p.m., Monday 2-4 p.m. and again from 7-9 p.m.

His funeral will be held at St. Michael's Cathedral on Bond Street at 10 a.m. on Tuesday morning.

Although he was living in Toronto, he grew up here in Ottawa. His mother is buried here I believe...His mother was a wonderful person, who was very kind to my family. I guess they will have alot to discuss.

Somewhere in the Summer Lands, another person walks up to the football field, and starts telling jokes about the guys playing. He knows them all, and they stop the game when they notice him. They give him a warm welcome, then go back to the game. For that was their lives, and so too, it was Pat's.

2006-03-31T07:51:00.000-05:00

Much has been written about downloading music in Canada, and a great deal of confusion has resulted. This is just a quick little bit about it...

The Copyright Act includes a private copying exception that grants Canadians the right to make personal, non–commercial copies of music without requiring permission from the copyright holder. Both the Copyright Board of Canada and the Federal Court of Canada have ruled that private copying may include peer–to–peer music downloads. This interpretation is consistent with both the technologically neutral language found in the legislation as well as with many similar private copying systems in Europe.
- Dr. Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. http://michaelgeist.ca

So, please, go ahead and download music...but remember, the artists do need your money to keep on making great music, so if you download something, and like it, buy the CD, or via a service like iTunes...or better yet, when they come to town, go and see their show. Most artists make far more money from playing shows, and selling things like t-shirts than they do from retail record sales. To get a good idea of how badly most artists are screwed by having a record contract, check out Courtney Loves excellent Salon Magazine article on how the major music labels stick it to their artists.

Realistically, major record companies are mainly into it to make money, not promote music. They are scared shitless by the idea that a band can directly connect to their fans via the internet and sell their music directly. This is short circuiting their business model, and is part of why they attack *any* music distribution via the internet.

And this brings me to why I am writing this short article...I just read in the most recent MONITOR magazine a bit of bullshit. James Careless writes in the March issue:

"Until recently, the phrase 'legal music downloads' was an oxymoron, like 'honest politician' or 'military intelligence'. But no longer: Today, you can download the songs you want legally from the Web, for storage and playback either on a portable MP3 player or your PC.

The only catch is that, when it comes to mainstream pop songs, you have to pay for legal music downloads. But, at $0.99 or less for your favourite tune, the cost is minimal. In addition, sites such as Yahoo! Music Unlimited Canada and Napster will 'rent' you unlimited access to millions of songs, as long as you pay a monthly subscription fee."

Now, who would you trust, a Professor of Law, or some writer in a small, local magazine?

But the article does have one high point, it has a pointer to the Jane Siberry web site, and the fact that she is experimenting with an honour system for downloading music from her site...basically, you can pay what you want, or not pay at all. Here is what she says in on her website:

"I wanted you to hear about this from me first. The Sheeba store has a new pricing policy.

Like many, I'm restless and impatient with living in a world where people are made to feel like shoplifters rather than intelligent peoples with a good sense of balance. I want to treat people the way I'd like to be treated. 'Dumbing UP' (as opposed to 'dumbing down')"

She goes on to note her new pricing policy:

"FOUR choices on the pop-down 'buy' button
1. free (gift from Jane)
2. self-determined (pay now)
3. self-determined (pay later so you are truly educated in your decision)
4. standard (today's going rate is about .99)"

Her final message is this:

"The most important thing is that the music flow out to where it could bring enjoyment. And THAT is the best thing you could give me."

That is what music is about.

Gee, I guess this isn't that short...sorry! :-)

2006-02-21T04:05:00.000-05:00

Recently, we have been hearing about how President Bush claims that he has the constitutional power to authorize wiretaps that bypass the FISA Courts. We hear how Cheney has claimed that he has the right to de-classify secrets at his discretion.

Admittedly, the offices of President and Vice President are the embodiment of a great deal of power. The people who hold those offices for spans of 4 years have a mandate to do the best for America they can using the powers of those offices. That is what we expect, anyways.

But today, millions of Americans are suffering due to the bureaucratic fowl up that has been the response to the Hurricane Katrina Disaster. A sad example of this problem is seen with the thousands of trailer homes that are sitting in a field, some slowly sinking in the mud for months, while people whose homes have been destroyed are shuffling from one temporary home to another.

Why are those trailer homes sitting vacant?

Because FEMA regulations say they cannot be deployed on a flood plain, and most of the Mississippi Delta is a flood plain.

Now we have seen the President and Vice President exercise the executive powers of their offices any number of times recently...why not ask one of them to exercise that power to relax, even temporarily, the FEMA regulations to allow the deployment of those trailer homes so that the wandering people of New Orleans can have a place to rest their heads at home for the first time in over six months.

ttyl
Farrell

Why Canada should not join the US missile defense program

2006-02-18T10:50:00.000-05:00

Bush's Missile Defense is not a viable system.

The big problem with the concept of the Missile Defense system of today is the same problem that Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" program had. The system depends on computer software to drive the hardware, and as anyone who has had their Windows computer crash for seemingly no reason, software is not reliable.

Now think about this: If Microsoft, which admittedly hires some of the best and brightest programmers available, and deploys some of the best software development methodologies out there can't write software that can run one computer reliably, do you really think that the US Government could write software that would not only have to run hundreds, maybe thousands of computers reliably...but would have to work THE FIRST TIME the entire system is tested!

Back in the 1980s, when Reagan was the US President, I spent a lot of time in the US, and talked to a number of scientists and technology people about the "Star Wars" program. All of them told me it would never work, but would not tell the government that, as they were receiving huge amounts of money to do basic research into the science and technology. Much of that money has paid for itself today in technologies that have made our life better...but not given us the ability to build a continental missile shield.

So although the money put into the research was well worth it, let us understand that it best put to basic research, which we need to fund, not pull the wool over people's eyes saying it will protect us from incoming missile attacks from foreign powers.

From a policy point of view, it is also a bad program. Time and again, the mistake that the US has been making is relying on glitzy high tech solutions to international problems, rather than utilizing the tried and true solutions that are unglamorous and low tech. This was the basic finding of the 9/11 Commission. Too much reliance was placed upon "signals intelligence", essentially tapping of communications, rather than having people on the ground infiltrating Bin Laden's organization, and the radical Islamist movements.

Similarly, if we rely upon a glitzy high tech "Missile Shield" rather than upon tried and true methodologies like diplomacy, we will suffer possibly the destruction of our civilization. Are you willing to risk the human race on the possibility of literally a "Blue screen of Death"?

ttyl
Farrell

Nettwerk Records vs RIAA

2006-01-28T16:27:00.000-05:00

As many of you know, the Music Megacorps in the US (represented by the RIAA) and around the world is suing their customers from the simple act of downloading music off the internet. An act that pretty much doesn't affect about 98% of the artists, and only affects the mega-corps that are the ones who make real money off of music. Now there are some socially responsible labels, and Canada's Nettwerk Records is one of them. It's home to artists like Avril Lavigne, Barenaked Ladies, Chantal Kreviazuk, Conjure One, Delerium, Dieselboy, Erin McKeown, Jars of Clay, Kirsty Hawkshaw, Kristian Leontiou, MC Lars, Mediaeval Baebes, Neil Finn, Oh Susanna, Old Crow Medicine Show, Paul van Dyk, Po' Girl, Robert Post, Ron Sexsmith, Sarah McLachlan, Shelley Campbell, Sixpence None The Richer, Stereophonics, Swollen Members, Tara MacLean, The Devlins, The Finn Brothers, Tiesto, and Treble Charger, to name a few.

I am sure that you probably have at least a few of the artists in your music collection. I know I have a lot of them in mine.

Now Nettwerk doesn't agree with the Megacorps suing the fans of their artist...and have taken a stand. One victim of the Megacorps' agression, David Greubel of Arlington, Texas is being sued for downloading Avril Lavigne's "Sk8er Boi". It seems that RIAA never asked Nettwerk's permission to sue on behalf of Avril, who they manage. So, they have said they will cover Mr.'s Greubel's legal costs in fighting the lawsuit! Needless to say, this has caused some controversy on both sides of the boarder in the music industry! As well it should!

When you sue your customers, chances are, they will no longer buy your product.
This is technically known as "Shooting yourself in the foot". Nettwerk, as a record label and management firm know that the sharing of music is *the prime* way that new artists are exposed to fans these days. With Much Music and MTV playing virtually no music videos, and no popular shows on regular stations playing them either, the music video is quickly becoming a dead medium. Add to that, FM radio sucks. They have anemic playlists, and seem to play everything they have in "heavy rotation", that is once every 4 hours, or more. Without Radio or TV, how will you become exposed to a new artist? Word of Mouth, mixed CDs that friends give you, and off the Internet. In fact, the Internet is the next pop medium for exposing new artists. These days where many albums are two or three good songs, and the rest is filler, who is going to risk $15-$30 on a CD before you hear the whole thing? The music buying public is *not that stupid*.

So rather than give the audience what it wants...good music, at a decent price, in formats that are useful with today's music playing technology, the Music Megacorps do the opposite. They are trying to make the customer buy shitty music, for too much, in formats that give them monopolistic control over the music.

The Music Megacorps are not alone in this...the Movie Industry is on the same road...and speaking of roads...

Have you noticed how GM, Ford and to a lesser extent, Chrysler are all having problems selling their cars? Guess what they are doing? They are trying to dictate what the customer should buy rather than finding out what the customer wants, and building that. The Japanese car companies *are* listening to their customers and building cars that the customer's want. That's why they are expanding, building new auto plants and generally eating US car company's lunch.

In the music business, iTunes is much like the Japanese Car Companies...they are giving customers what they want...and they are doing gangbuster business. The only annoyances with the service is the digital rights management (DRM) that Apple was forced to implement, because the Music Megacorps wouldn't work with Apple otherwise. If they didn't have to kiss the ass of the Music Megacorps, iTunes would be an almost perfect service. It's also that same monopolistic Music Megacorps that also cause the stupidity that causes the non-US versions of iTunes to have significantly less music than the US version. I remember hearing one person saying that an artist they like has only one album available on the Canadian iTunes store, but their whole catalog on the US. Sure, it's nice to be able to sell the same thing three or four times, but today we live in a global market...and one can buy stuff as easily from Hong Kong as you can from the next city over via the internet.

Nettwerk recognises this, and is out to protect their market by supporting their customers. A record company that cares about both it's customers and it's artists is a rare thing these days, and I highly recommend that you consider the music that they put out, and if you like it, buy it. Personally, I have about 20+ albums by Nettwerk artists, mainly Sarah McLachlan (Compete Catalog), Bare Naked Ladies (most), Delerium (just their newer stuff), and Mediaeval Baebes (one, which I can't find at the moment). Buy music by their artists off of services like iTunes. And let them know that you support them in their fight.

ttyl
Farrell J. McGovern

The speech they don't want you to see...

2005-12-15T15:07:00.000-05:00

Hi!

I spend some time, and recovered from the Google Cache the speech that the Policy Council is trying to hide on their site...thank you Google!

Steven Harper - vice president, National Citizens' Coalition (Canada);former Member of Parliament, 1993-1997; former chief party officer/senior policy advisor, Reform Party of Canada; his articles have appeared in the Calgary Herald and Toronto's Globe and Mail.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me begin by giving you a big welcome to Canada. Let's start up with a compliment. You're here from the second greatest nation on earth. But seriously, your country, and particularly your conservative movement, is alight and an inspiration to people in this country and across the world.

Now, having given you a compliment, let me also give you an insult. I was asked to speak about Canadian politics. It may not be true, but it's legendary that if you're like all Americans, you know almost nothing except for your own country. Which makes you probably knowledgeable about one more country than most Canadians.

But in any case, my speech will make that assumption. I'll talk fairly basic stuff. If it seems pedestrian to some of you who do know a lot about Canada, I apologize.

I'm going to look at three things. First of all, just some basic facts about Canada that are relevant to my talk, facts about the country and its political system, its civics.Second, I want to take a look at the party system that's developed in Canada from a conventional left/right, or liberal/conservative perspective. The third thing I'm going to do is look at the political system again, because it can't be looked at in this country simply from the conventional perspective.

First, facts about Canada. Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it.Canadians make no connection between the fact that they are a Northern European welfare state and the fact that we have very low economic growth, a standard of living substantially lower than yours, a massive brain drain of young professionals to your country, and double the unemployment rate of the United States.

In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half, don't feel particularly bad for many of these people.They don't feel bad about it themselves, as long as they're receiving generous social assistance and unemployment insurance.

That is beginning to change. There have been some significant changes in our fiscal policies and our social welfare policies in the last three or four years. But nevertheless, they're still very generous compared to your country.

Let me just make a comment on language, which is so important in this country. I want to disabuse you of misimpressions you may have. If you've read any of the official propaganda, you've come over the border and entered a bilingual country. In this particular city, Montreal, you may well get that impression. But this city is extremely atypical of this country.

While it is a French-speaking city -- largely -- it has an enormous English-speaking minority and a large number of what are called ethnics: they who are largely immigrant communities, but who politically and culturally tend to identify with the English community.

This is unusual, because the rest of the province of Quebec is, by and large, almost entirely French-speaking. The English minority present here in Montreal is quite exceptional.

Furthermore,the fact that this province is largely French-speaking, except for Montreal,is quite exceptional with regard to the rest of the country. Outside of Quebec, the total population of Francophones, depending on how you measure it, is only three to five percent of the population. The rest of Canada is English speaking.

Even more important, the French-speaking people outside of Quebec live almost exclusively in the adjacent areas, in northern New Brunswick and in Eastern Ontario.

The rest of Canada is almost entirely English speaking. Where I come from, Western Canada, the population of Francophones ranges around one to two percent in some cases. So it's basically an English-speaking country, just as English-speaking as, I would guess, the northern part of the United States.

But the important point is that Canada is not a bilingual country. It is a country with two languages.And there is a big difference.

As you may know, historically, and especially presently, there's been a lot of political tension between these two major language groups, and between Quebec and the rest of Canada.

Let me take a moment for a humorous story. Now, I tell this with some trepidation, knowing that this is a largely Christian organization.

The National Citizens Coalition, by the way, is not. We're on the sort of libertarian side of the conservative spectrum. So I tell this joke with a little bit of trepidation.But nevertheless, this joke works with Canadian audiences of any kind,anywhere in Canada, both official languages, any kind of audience.

It's about a constitutional lawyer who dies and goes to Heaven. There, he meets God and gets his questions answered about life. One of his questions is,"God, will this problem between Quebec and the rest of Canada ever be resolved?" And God thinks very deeply about this, as God is wont to do. God replies, "Yes, but not in my lifetime."

I'm glad to see you weren't offended by that. I've had the odd religious person who's been offended. I always tell them, "Don't be offended. The joke can't be taken seriously theologically. It is, after all, about a lawyer who goes to Heaven."

In any case. My apologies to Eugene Meyer of the Federalist Society.

Second, the civics, Canada's civics.

On the surface, you can make a comparison between our political system and yours. We have an executive, we have two legislative houses, and we have a Supreme Court.

However, our executive is the Queen, who doesn't live here. Her representative is the Governor General, who is an appointed buddy of the Prime Minister.

Of our two legislative houses, the Senate, our upper house, is appointed, also by the Prime Minister, where he puts buddies, fundraisers and the like. So the Senate also is not very important in our political system.

And we have a Supreme Court, like yours, which, since we put a charter of rights in our constitution in 1982, is becoming increasingly arbitrary and important. It is also appointed by the Prime Minister. Unlike your Supreme Court, we have no ratification process.

So if you sort of remove three of the four elements, what you see is a system of checks and balances which quickly becomes a system that's described as unpaid checks and political imbalances.

What we have is the House of Commons. The House of Commons, the bastion of the Prime Minister's power, the body that selects the Prime Minister, is an elected body. I really emphasize this to you as an American group: It's not like your House of Representatives. Don't make that comparison.

What the House of Commons is really like is the United States Electoral College. Imagine if the Electoral College which selects your President once every four years were to continue sitting in Washington forte next four years. And imagine its having the same vote on every issue.That is how our political system operates.

In our election last Monday, the Liberal party won a majority of seats. The four opposition parties divided up the rest, with some very, very rough parity.

But the important thing to know is that this is how it will be until the Prime Minister calls the next election. The same majority vote on every issue. So if you ask me, "What's the vote going to be on gun control?" or on the budget, we know already.

If any member of these political parties votes differently from his party on a particular issue, well, that will be national headline news. It's really hard to believe. If any one member votes differently, it will be national headline news. I voted differently at least once from my party, and it was national headline news. It's a very different system.

Our party system consists today of five parties. There was a remark made yesterday at your youth conference about the fact that parties come and go in Canada every year. This is rather deceptive. I've written considerably on this subject.

We had a two-party system from the founding of our country, in1867. That two-party system began to break up in the period from 1911 to1935. Ever since then, five political elements have come and gone. We've always had at least three parties. But even when parties come back, they're not really new. They're just an older party reappearing under a different name and different circumstances.

Let me take a conventional look at these five parties. I'll describe them in terms that fit your own party system,the left/right kind of terms.

Let's take the New Democratic Party, the NDP,which won twenty-one seats. The NDP could be described as basically a party of liberal Democrats, but it's actually worse than that, I have to say. And forgive me jesting again, but the NDP is kind of proof that the Devil lives and interferes in the affairs of men.

This party believes not just in large government and in massive redistributive programs, it's explicitly socialist. On social value issues, it believes the opposite on just about everything that anybody in this room believes. I think that's a pretty safe bet on all social-value kinds of questions.

Some people point out that there is a small element of clergy in the NDP. Yes, this is true. But these are clergy who, while very committed to the church, believe that it made ahistoric error in adopting Christian theology.

The NDP is also explicitly a branch of the Canadian Labor Congress, which is by far our largest labor group, and explicitly radical.

There are some moderate and conservative labor organizations. They don't belong to that particular organization.

The second party, the Liberal Party, is by far the largest party. It won the election. It's also the only party that's competitive in all parts of the country. The Liberal Party is our dominant party today, and has been for 100years. It's governed almost all of the last hundred years, probably about 75percent of the time.

It's not what you would call conservative Democrat; I think that's a disappearing kind of breed. But it's certainly moderate Democrat, a type of Clinton-pragmatic Democrat. It's moved in the last few years very much to the right on fiscal and economic concerns, but still believes in government intrusion in the economy where possible, and does, in its majority, believe in fairly liberal social values.

In the last Parliament, it enacted comprehensive gun control, well beyond, I think,anything you have. Now we'll have a national firearms registration system,including all shotguns and rifles. Many other kinds of weapons have been banned. It believes in gay rights, although it's fairly cautious. It's put sexual orientation in the Human Rights Act and will let the courts do the rest.

There is an important caveat to its liberal social values. For historic reasons that I won't get into, the Liberal Party gets the votes of most Catholics in the country, including many practicing Catholics. It does have a significant Catholic, social-conservative element which occasionally disagrees with these kinds of policy directions. Although I caution you that even this Catholic social conservative element in the Liberal Party is often quite liberal on economic issues.

Then there is the Progressive Conservative Party, the PC Party, which won only twenty seats. Now, the term Progressive Conservative will immediately raise suspicions in all of your minds. It should. It's obviously kind of an oxymoron. But actually, its origin is not progressive in the modern sense. The origin of the term "progressive" in the name stems from the Progressive Movement in the 1920s, which was similar to that in your own country.

But the Progressive Conservative is very definitely liberal Republican. These are people who are moderately conservative on economic matters, and in the past have been moderately liberal, even sometimes quite liberal on social policy matters.

In fact,before the Reform Party really became a force in the late '80s, early '90s,the leadership of the Conservative Party was running the largest deficits in Canadian history. They were in favor of gay rights officially, officially for abortion on demand. Officially -- what else can I say about them?Officially for the entrenchment of our universal, collectivized, health-care system and multi cultural policies in the constitution of the country.

At the leadership level anyway, this was a pretty liberal group. This explains one of the reasons why the Reform Party has become such a power.

The Reform Party is much closer to what you would call conservative Republican, which I'll get to in a minute.

The Bloc Québécois, which I won't spend much time on, is a strictly Quebec party, strictly among the French-speaking people of Quebec. It is an ethnic separatist party that seeks to make Quebec an independent, sovereign nation.

By and large, the Bloc Québécois is center-left in its approach. However, it is primarily an ethnic coalition.It's always had diverse elements. It does have an element that is more on the right of the political spectrum, but that's definitely a minority element.

Let me say a little bit about the Reform Party because I want you to be very clear on what the Reform Party is and is not.

The Reform Party,although described by many of its members, and most of the media, as conservative, and conservative in the American sense, actually describes itself as populist. And that's the term its leader, Preston Manning,uses.

This term is not without significance. The Reform Party does stand for direct democracy, which of course many American conservatives do, but also it sees itself as coming from a long tradition of populist parties of Western Canada, not all of which have been conservative.

It also is populist in the very real sense, if I can make American analogies to it -- populist in the sense that the term is sometimes used with Ross Pert.

The Reform Party is very much a leader-driven party. It's much more a real party than Mr. Perot's party -- by the way, it existed before Mr. Perot's party. But it's very much leader-driven, very much organized as a personal political vehicle. Although it has much more of a real organization than Mr. Perot does.

But the Reform Party only exists federally. It doesn't exist at the provincial level here in Canada. It really exists only because Mr. Manning is pursuing the position of Prime Minister. It doesn't have a broader political mandate than that yet. Most of its members feel it should, and, in their minds, actually it does.

It also has some Buchananist tendencies. I know there are probably many admirers of Mr. Buchanan here, but I mean that in the sense that there are some anti-market elements in the Reform Party.So far, they haven't been that important, because Mr. Manning is, himself, a fairly orthodox economic conservative.

The predecessor of the Reform Party,the Social Credit Party, was very much like this. Believing in funny money and control of banking, and a whole bunch of fairly non-conservative economic things.

So there are some nonconservative tendencies in the Reform Party, but, that said, the party is clearly the most economically conservative party in the country. It's the closest thing we have to a neo-conservative party in that sense.

It's also the most conservative socially, but it's not a theocon party, to use the term. The Reform Party does favor the use of referendums and free votes in Parliament on moral issues and social issues.

The party is led by Preston Manning, who is a committed, evangelical Christian. And the party in recent years has made some reference to family values and to family priorities. It has some policies that are definitely social-conservative, but it's not explicitly so.

Many members are not , the party officially is not, and, frankly, the party has had a great deal of trouble when it's tried to tackle those issues.

Last year, when we had the Liberal government putting the protection of sexual orientation in our Human Rights Act, the Reform Party was opposed to that, but made a terrible mess of the debate. In fact, discredited itself on that issue, not just with the conventional liberal media, but even with many social conservatives by the manner in which it mishandled that.

So the social conservative element exists. Mr. Manning is a Christian, as are most of the party's senior people. But it's not officially part of the party. The party hasn't quite come to terms with how that fits into it.

That's the conventional analysis of the party system.

Let me turn to the non conventional analysis, because frankly, it's impossible, with just left/right terminology to explain why we would have five parties, or why we would have four parties on the conventional spectrum. Why not just two?

The reason is regional division, which you'll see if you carefully look at a map. Let me draw the United States comparison, a comparison with your history.

The party system that is developing here in Canada is a party system that replicates the antebellum period, the pre-Civil War period of the United States.

That's not to say -- and I would never be quoted assaying -- we're headed to a civil war. But we do have a major secession crisis, obviously of a very different nature than the secession crisis you had in the 1860s. But the dynamics, the political and partisan dynamics of this, are remarkably similar.

The Bloc Québécois is equivalent to your Southern secessionists, Southern Democrats, states rights activists. The Bloc Québécois, its forty-four seats, come entirely from the province of Quebec. But even more strikingly, they come from ridings, or election districts, almost entirely populated by the descendants of the original European French settlers.

The Liberal Party has twenty-six seats in Quebec.Most of these come from areas where there are heavy concentrations of English, aboriginal or ethnic votes. So the Bloc Québécois is very much an ethnic party, but it's also a secession party.

In the referendum two year sago, the secessionists won 49 percent of the vote, 49.5 percent. So this is a very real crisis. We're looking at another referendum before the turn of the century.

The Progressive Conservative Party is very much comparable to the Whigs of the 1850s and 1860s. What is happening to them is very similar to the Whigs. A moderate conservative party, increasingly under stress because of the secession movement, on the one hand, and the reaction to that movement from harder line English Canadians on the other hand.

You may recall that the Whigs, in their dying days, went through a series of metamorphoses. They ended up as what was called the Unionist movement that won some of the border states in your 1860 election.

If you look at the surviving PC support, it's very much concentrated in Atlantic Canada, in the provinces to the east of Quebec. These are very much equivalent to the United States border states. They're weak economically. They have very grim prospects if Quebec separates. These people want a solution at almost any cost. And some of the solutions they propose would be exactly that.

They also have a small percentage of seats in Quebec. These are French-speaking areas that are also more moderate and very concerned about what would happen in a secession crisis.

The Liberal Party is very much your northern Democrat, or mainstream Democratic party, a party that is less concessionary to the secessionists than the PCs, but still somewhat concessionary. And they still occupy the mainstream of public opinion in Ontario, which is the big and powerful province, politically and economically, alongside Quebec.

The Reform Party is very much a modern manifestation of the Republican movement in Western Canada; the U.S. Republicans started in the Western United States. The Reform Party is very resistant to the agenda and the demands of the secessionists, and on a very deep philosophical level.

The goal of the secessionists is to transform our country into two nations, either into two explicitly sovereign countries, or in the case of weaker separatists, into some kind of federation of two equal partners.

The Reform Party opposes this on all kinds of grounds, but most important,Reformers are highly resistant philosophically to the idea that we will have an open, modern, multi ethnic society on one side of the line, and the other society will run on some set of ethnic-special-status principles. This is completely unacceptable, particularly to philosophical conservatives in the Reform Party.

The Reform Party's strength comes almost entirely from the West. It's become the dominant political force in Western Canada. And it is getting a substantial vote in Ontario. Twenty percent of the vote in the last two elections. But it has not yet broken through in terms of the number of seats won in Ontario.

This is a very real political spectrum, lining up from the Bloc to reform. You may notice I didn't mention the New Democratic Party. The NDP obviously can't be compared to anything pre-Civil War. But the NDP is not an important player on this issue. Its views are somewhere between the liberals and conservatives. Its main concern, of course, is simply the left wing agenda to basically disintegrate our society in all kinds of spectrums. So it really doesn't fit in.

But I don't use this comparison of the pre-Civil War lightly. Preston Manning, the leader of the Reform Party has spent a lot of time reading about pre-Civil War politics.He compares the Reform Party himself to the Republican Party of that period.He is very well-read on Abraham Lincoln and a keen follower and admirer of Lincoln.

I know Mr. Manning very well. I would say that next to his own father, who is a prominent Western Canadian politician, Abraham Lincoln has probably had more effect on Mr. Manning's political philosophy than any individual politician.

Obviously, the issue here is not slavery, but the appeasement of ethnic nationalism. For years, we've had this Quebec separatist movement. For years, we elected Quebec Prime Ministers to deal with that, Quebec Prime Ministers who were committed federalists who would lead us out of the wilderness. For years, we have given concessions of various kinds of the province of Quebec, political and economic, to make them happier.

This has not worked. The sovereignty movement has continued to rise in prominence. And its demands have continued to increase. It began to hit the wall when what are called the soft separatists and the conventional political establishment got together to put in the constitution something called "a distinct society clause." Nobody really knows what it would mean,but it would give the Supreme Court, where Quebec would have a tremendous role in appointment, the power to interpret Quebec's special needs and powers, undefined elsewhere.

This has led to a firewall of resistance across the country. It fueled the growth of the Reform Party. I should even say that the early concessionary people, like Pierre Trudeau, have come out against this. So there's even now an element of the Quebec federalists themselves who will no longer accept this.

So you see the syndrome we're in.The separatists continue to make demands. They're a powerful force. They continue to have the bulk of the Canadian political establishment on their side. The two traditional parties, the Liberals and PCs, are both led by Quebecers who favor concessionary strategies. The Reform Party is a bastion of resistance to this tendency.

To give you an idea of how divided the country is, not just in Quebec but how divided the country is outside Quebec on this, we had a phenomenon five years ago. This is a real phenomenon; I don't know how much you heard about it.

The establishment came down with a constitutional package which they put to a national referendum. The package included distinct society status for Quebec and some other changes,including some that would just horrify you, putting universal Medicare in our constitution, and feminist rights, and a whole bunch of other things.

What was significant about this was that this constitutional proposal was supported by the entire Canadian political establishment. By all of the major media. By the three largest traditional parties, the PC,Liberal Party and NDP. At the time, the Bloc and Reform were very small.

It was supported by big business, very vocally by all of the major CEOs of the country. The leading labor unions all supported it. Complete consensus. And most academics.

And it was defeated. It literally lost the national referendum against a rag-tag opposition consisting of a few dissident conservatives and a few dissident socialists.

This gives you some idea of the split that's taking place in the country.

Canada is, however, a troubled country politically, not socially. This is a country that we like to say works in practice but not in theory.

You can walk around this country without running across very many of these political controversies.

I'll end there and take any of your questions. But let me conclude by saying, good luck in your own battles. Let me just remind you of something that's been talked about here. As long as there are exams, there will always be prayer in schools.

QUESTION: I have Canadian roots. That's why I have my maple leaf on. Please tell me about the distinct society law. Have there been court attempts to interpret that language? That's in the federal constitution now?Excuse my ignorance.

MR. HARPER: No, there have been no formal attempts by the courts to interpret it. There has been no referral of this to the court by the government. The reasons is obvious. The establishment wants to sell distinct society in Quebec as meaning everything the sovereign ties want it to mean, and then tell people in the rest of the country it means absolutely nothing at all.

The concerns about it are threefold.

The concerns are that it would impact the division of powers asymmetrically between the provinces and the federal government. The concerns are also that it would affect minority rights, particularly in the province of Quebec. They have been under some attack. Some of you may know that there are restrictions on these of English in some aspects of Quebec public policy.

But I think the third is the one which has had the least discussion and should be the biggest concern. In putting such a phrase in the constitution, whether it has any overt legal significance sends a very clear message to the international community that Canada recognizes Quebec as a nation. Down the road this would further the claims of Quebec sovereignties to separate unilaterally if they got a mandate to do so. And I think that's the mostdangerous thing about it.

QUESTION: Can you tell us something about the supply side criteria in Canada? It looks so depressed here. But what abou tmarginal tax rates, entrepreneurship, or the ability or nonability to start new companies, unemployment, welfare -- the basic supply-side criteria for analyzing a country?

MR. HARPER: I can try to do that quickly. We do have high marginal tax rates. High tax rates of all kinds. We have some of the highest capital gains taxes in the OECD. We still have very generous welfare rates. And our extremely generous unemployment insurance is really,basically, a subsidy to seasonal work.

So we have inflexible labor markets in large parts of the country and considerable disincentives on higher income individuals.

To just give you a little of the real dark side of that,there was a survey in the Chamber of Commerce just recently. It got almost no publicity, one of those selected news items. One out of ten Canadian businesses says it will relocate its operations to the United States within the next two years unless these things change.

The bright side is that, in the recent election campaign, there were several proposals for significant change in the platforms of two of the opposition parties.

The Reform Party promised to reduce high marginal rates and to cut the capital gains rate in half.

The Progressive Conservative Party promised to severely reduce the payroll tax burden. That's another serious disincentive we have. And also to look at reducing some of the high marginal rates as well. So these things are beginning to be questioned.

QUESTION: From my own rather parochial perspective, because I'm interested in United Nations affairs. Canada's government has always seemed to be a big booster of the United Nations. And Mr. Chretien was down in Washington not too long ago, saying that if the United States wanted to kick the UN out of New York, he'd bring it up here.

My question involves Maurice Strong, the Canadian who's now one of the top UN officials in charge of reforming that organization. He seems to be a rather mysterious character, worth a lot of money, sort of a global citizen.What do you know about Mr. Strong, and what is his agenda?

MR. HARPER: Well,let me handle the second question first. It is a small country, but don't assume I know every other Canadian. I probably don't know much more about Mr. Strong than you do, although we have some mutual friends. But he is known privately for his far-left views on many economic issues, in particular. He was once president, I believe, of Ontario Hydro. He was considered a disaster in that function.

Everything I hear about him would suggest to me, the same as you, that he is a very, very dangerous individual, and one to be watched very carefully.

The first part of the question was on the United Nations. Canada has always been, at critical junctures, a supporter of NATO, NORAD, and the United States. However, a lot of public sentiment has been fairly neutralist in its philosophy. Many Canadians -- obviously not myself -- fancy themselves as some kind of a third force that's neither pro-American nor pro-Soviet or pro-Third World --something in between.

So that's where you get the strong support for the United Nations. Canada contributes a great deal to the UN relatively, and takes a great deal of pride over always being praised by UN bodies.

This distresses conservatives like myself quite profoundly, but I will warn you,it's a widespread view, and I will always say, one that could only be maintained as long as you basically provide us with military protection.

QUESTION: First, I want to thank you for a very interesting and highly informative presentation. It was just excellent.

MR. HARPER: Thank you.

QUESTION: I'd like for you to look forward a bit. I know it is difficult, and maybe in the current context even dangerous. But if you would, give us your thoughts about what might happen politically down the road in Canada.

MR. HARPER: It's so difficult to do that. And that's the reason I emphasized the crisis nature. Because the very existence of the country is really uncertain in the next four to five years.

Quebec will have a referendum. We don't know which way it will go. But it certainly could go either way. And we don't know what forces that will set in motion.

It isn't just Quebec. The Reform Party itself represents a constitutional agenda that challenges the way our entire political system operates. And there's widespread dissatisfaction with that system.

The forces that held this country together traditionally, a series of East-West economic policies,have been undermined in the last decade by free trade. Don't get me wrong. I think that's a positive thing. But they were so central to the concept of the country and how it was governed. It's just very uncertain.

However, let me just make two predictions. One is that Canada will be profoundly changed in the next five to ten years. I just don't believe the confederation we have today will look the same. Whether Quebec separates or not, there are going to be very major changes.

The second thing is that Canada, in spite of its ongoing social democratic, welfare-state mentality, will continue to move to the right on fiscal, economic and social policy, with minor deviations, because that's the way the world is going.

When Canadians face the choice of either preserving their welfare state or adapting themselves to the world economy, they always, at times of crisis, choose to adapt themselves to the world economy.

And I think that the basic decision on the free trade agreement will continue to be a dominant force for the good. We can see how these conservative values are winning in some spheres.

But whether they will change the underlying drift to liberal social values, and to governments that, through new means, want to control people's lives, I severely doubt. But that's the battle we'll be fighting everywhere.

QUESTION: I understood you to say that the Reform Party only operates at the federal or national level. How are the local provincial governments and the local governments organized politically in the Western provinces?

MR.HARPER: That's a very good question. In the four Western provinces, the party system is very similar to what it was before the Reform Party burst onto the scene. There continue to be, in each province, three political parties -- the NDPs, the Liberals, the PCs -- with the exception of British Columbia, where there is a provincial Reform Party and there is no provincial PC Party. There are historical reasons for that.

But this provincial Reform Party, while it attracts many Reformers, has no formal political affiliation with the federal party. It was created locally, and for local reasons.

But I think it's fair to say that increasingly,particularly in the three Western provinces, the remnant PC party is PC only in name. It's increasingly becoming dominated by people who are Reformers federally.

At the highest level, there still tend to be federal Tories. But the big thing that happened in this election, and few analysts have caught it, is essentially the federal PC party was eliminated as a significant political factor in Western Canada. In this election it didn't just simply fail to win seats; it got almost no votes west of Manitoba. It's basically gone.

Increasingly, provincial PC politicians, whatever their instincts, are finding themselves having to align themselves with Reform and with its constitutional agenda.

QUESTION: Two quick questions. There was recently a proposal I read about from Preston Manning that would allow the different provinces to have control over the languages and the culture of that particular province. While I guess it was met with a lot of opposition, it seems to me that that actually would go against the Reform Party's message of having the one nation of Canada, because it would further fragment Quebec from the rest of Canada.

That's one question.

The second is a little bit more pragmatic. In looking at where the votes, the bodies, are, it's the Ontario Province. Obviously, there's animosity between the PC and the Reform Party as far as an alliance. But obviously the hundred seats that the Liberals gained there have to be winnowed down somehow in order for the Reform Party ever to have control over Canada. What is the Reform Party doing about that?

MR. HARPER: First the language question. There are some fairly obvious problems with the idea of decentralizing language,particularly in the human rights area. However, I'm a very strong believer that this, in some form, is essential.

The country Canada should be modeling itself after in all kinds of ways is Switzerland. When you have a multilingual state, particularly one where, thankfully, the language groups are geographically divided, you cannot run language policy at the national level.

This was Pierre Trudeau's great error. His idea was to social engineer a bilingual country from coast to coast. This has been a disaster economically. It's created all kinds of linguistic antagonisms in the country.

So in some form or another, that's the route you have to go. A country like Canada will never have as strong a national identity as you do in the United States. You just have to accept that and get questions of ethnicity out of the national government. It's just a recipe for disaster otherwise.

On the second question, I've written a long, long article with Dr. Flannigan at the University of Calgary on the evolution of the political right in Canada.

Everybody knows that to have a stable national conservative force, you're going to have to have one political party. The split of the vote between the PCs and Reformers in Ontario is a severe problem. However,it's fundamental because it isn't just over the details of economic and social policy. This fundamental divide on the constitutional agenda isn't going to go away, as long as the Quebec question is just sitting there on the horizon, like a huge rain cloud.

It's the division between the Whigs and the Republicans. It cannot be reconciled. One party is going to win out.

My sense is that time is on the Reformers' side. The provincial government in Ontario is a Progressive Conservative government led by Premier Mike Harris,who's very conservative economically. And he has increasingly been distancing himself from the federal PC Party. He hasn't overtly supported Reform, but he is definitely not supporting the PC Party. In fact, there was just a news item today that apparently the federal PC leader has formally cut off communications with Mr. Harris.

Ultimately if the crisis continues,Canadians are going to be asked which side they're on. And you're either on the side of these ethnic secessionists or you're against them. The Reform Party is against them. The other parties are somewhere in the middle. And Reform is not going to lose that contest in the long term, if that continues to be the battle.

Is David Wilkins Dick Cheney's padawan?

2005-12-13T17:18:00.000-05:00

"I find your lack of faith disturbing."
- Ambassador Wilkins

US Ambassador David Wilkins manifests his true side, he is a Dark Lord of Sith. He is shown here conjuring fire in his hands to throw at current Canadian Prime Minister, Paul Martin. He was reportedly angry at Martin's lack of faith in the actions of the US.*

* Note for the humour impaired...IT'S A JOKE!