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The transparency games
Posted June 18, 2013 by Aaron Wherry
The NDP makes a move
Conservatives
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Saskboy’s Abandoned Stuff: New Conservative Party? Yes Please
Posted June 18, 2013 by John Klein
I’ve felt badly for a while now that conservative voters have no ethical right wing party to vote for in Canada (or the USA, for that matter). The Conservative Party of Canada is the only Canadian political party with the word “coalition” in its Constitution. The CPC coalition of the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservatives, removed right wing voters’ choice, so Harper’s new CPC could more easily cheat their way to victory.
Rathgeber: “There is speculative talk about starting a new political party and even reviving old ones.” brentrathgeber.ca/brents-blog/— Paul Wells (@InklessPW) June 17, 2013
With the (Read more…)
General
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Reinventing progressive politics
Posted June 17, 2013 by rabble staff
June 17, 2013
Please support our coverage of democratic movements and become a supporting member of rabble.ca.
We are so accustomed to the connection between political parties and democracy that to question the relationship between the two might seem absurd. But for those who recognize the multiple crises faced by humanity — the destruction of our environment, climate change, the ravages of unfettered finance capital, the undeniable limits to growth — the failure of our liberal, multi-party democracies seems increasingly obvious. To many people — the millions who can’t even be bothered to vote — they are simply irrelevant.
The “game” has been designed not to represent the needs of people or communities but to manage capitalism in the interests of the elites.
Canada
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The Scott Ross: The Day John A. Macdonald Died
Posted June 6, 2013 by thescottross.blogspot.com
If there was no John A. Macdonald, there would be no Canada.
Our most important founding father and first Prime Minister died 122 years ago today. Canadians of all political persuasions should take a moment and remember John A. Macdonald because they share so much in common with the man who made this country.
For Conservatives they owe much to Macdonald. Their majority government was elected because of moderation and stability, two values Macdonald owed his 19 years as Prime Minister to.
Jack Layton undeniably shared perhaps the most valuable trait with Macdonald, and that is being a man of (Read more…)
General
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Dream no little dream
Posted June 4, 2013 by Aaron Wherry
The New Democrats want to defund the Senate
Activism
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What Do We Do About Those Pesky, Apathetic Non-Voters?
Posted June 4, 2013 by Stephen Elliott-Buckley
I have heard lots of people blaming the following people for why we didn’t get a positive change in government in BC three weeks ago: apathetic, nihilistic young people apathetic people who don’t follow politics apathetic people who simply don’t vote bad people who generally don’t care about a better world. But what really happened [...]
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Conservatives
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ConCalls: “The Liberals Did It First”(TM) #RoboCon #cdnpoli
Posted May 29, 2013 by John Klein
The Conservative trolls will have to get new talking points so they don’t look hopelessly dated. Multiple Conservative parties, the NDP, and another Liberal MP were all fined thousands of dollars for broadcasting robocalls in a deceptive manner where the true identity of the caller was not revealed. Just the other day I had to […]
Climate Change
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Coal Hard Truth #skpoli
Posted May 29, 2013 by John Klein
“We depend too much on coal” — @MayorMandel #p2syyc; glad someone said that too— Chris Turner (@theturner) May 29, 2013 .@MMandryk IEA says we have ~3 years left (worldwide) to stop building coal power to avoid 450ppm. SaskParty renewables investment is poor.— Saskboy K. (@saskboy) May 29, 2013 The Leader-Post may be giving kudos to […]
Energy
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Nuke billions dwarf gas-plant millions
Posted May 22, 2013 by Erich Jacoby-Hawkins
Ontario politics is presenting us with lots of storm and fury over money wasted on energy boondoggles, without much accountability, consistency, or perspective.
The lead story remains the money lost when the Liberal government cancelled two gas-fired electric plants during the last election season, to garner votes and save seats. Obviously the local residents didn’t want those gas plants, and democracy is supposed to mean doing what voters want, but here the Liberals ignored local objections until the last minute, running up a huge bill. That’s the second strike, that they did this without any idea of the cost. Actually, the attack narrative swings between the Liberals lying about how much it would cost and the Liberals doing this without knowing what it might cost. Sure, these are contradictory accusations, but in politics what seems to matter is the mud, not the clarity.
Either way, it cost a bundle. Critics tout the figure of a billion dollars, although the real costs seems to have settled at just over half that. Yet there are two aspects to this whole kerfuffle that I find disturbing, beyond, of course, the wasted money.
The first is that although the other parties are doing their best to excoriate the Liberals for cancelling the gas plants without knowing the cost, they themselves had the exact same policy, and if they don’t know the cost now, they certainly didn’t know it then. They listened to the voters, too, so they also promised to shelve the gas plants, the only real difference being the Liberals were actually in a position to do it. It’s a weak platform from which to hurl attacks.
But the other, more sinister problem, is what’s happening now without a spotlight. Ontario is steadily moving ahead with plans to refurbish our expensive, aging, underperforming nuclear reactors, and may yet build new ones. Although the decision to refurbish the Darlington reactors hasn’t been finalized, the government has already signed contracts totaling almost a billion dollars(there’s that figure again) to start the estimates and design. The lion’s share is going to SNC-Lavalin, exposed this week for years of illegal bribery and kickbacks. The actual job could cost as much as 10 billion dollars, from the government’s own estimates. And recall that this plant was supposed to cost less than $4 billion to build, yet the final bill came in at over $14 billion. So how much will refurbishment really cost? No one can say, but the best guess is in the double-digit billions. Vastly more than was lost in the gas plant cancellations. Yet I bet you haven’t heard anything about this, until now.
Our elected officials need to cut the attacks, and start looking at a better energy plan for all of Ontario, one that puts conservation first, shifts supply to renewables, and takes us away from the pig-in-a-poke cost overruns of nuclear power.
Published as my Root Issues column in the Barrie Examiner under the title “Forget attacks and focus on better energy plan“.
Erich Jacoby-Hawkins is a director of Living Green and the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.
Energy
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Nuke billions dwarf gas-plant millions
Posted May 22, 2013 by Erich Jacoby-Hawkins
Ontario politics is presenting us with lots of storm and fury over money wasted on energy boondoggles, without much accountability, consistency, or perspective.
The lead story remains the money lost when the Liberal government cancelled two gas-fired electric plants during the last election season, to garner votes and save seats. Obviously the local residents didn’t want those gas plants, and democracy is supposed to mean doing what voters want, but here the Liberals ignored local objections until the last minute, running up a huge bill. That’s the second strike, that they did this without any idea of the cost. Actually, the attack narrative swings between the Liberals lying about how much it would cost and the Liberals doing this without knowing what it might cost. Sure, these are contradictory accusations, but in politics what seems to matter is the mud, not the clarity.
Either way, it cost a bundle. Critics tout the figure of a billion dollars, although the real costs seems to have settled at just over half that. Yet there are two aspects to this whole kerfuffle that I find disturbing, beyond, of course, the wasted money.
The first is that although the other parties are doing their best to excoriate the Liberals for cancelling the gas plants without knowing the cost, they themselves had the exact same policy, and if they don’t know the cost now, they certainly didn’t know it then. They listened to the voters, too, so they also promised to shelve the gas plants, the only real difference being the Liberals were actually in a position to do it. It’s a weak platform from which to hurl attacks.
But the other, more sinister problem, is what’s happening now without a spotlight. Ontario is steadily moving ahead with plans to refurbish our expensive, aging, underperforming nuclear reactors, and may yet build new ones. Although the decision to refurbish the Darlington reactors hasn’t been finalized, the government has already signed contracts totaling almost a billion dollars(there’s that figure again) to start the estimates and design. The lion’s share is going to SNC-Lavalin, exposed this week for years of illegal bribery and kickbacks. The actual job could cost as much as 10 billion dollars, from the government’s own estimates. And recall that this plant was supposed to cost less than $4 billion to build, yet the final bill came in at over $14 billion. So how much will refurbishment really cost? No one can say, but the best guess is in the double-digit billions. Vastly more than was lost in the gas plant cancellations. Yet I bet you haven’t heard anything about this, until now.
Our elected officials need to cut the attacks, and start looking at a better energy plan for all of Ontario, one that puts conservation first, shifts supply to renewables, and takes us away from the pig-in-a-poke cost overruns of nuclear power.
Published as my Root Issues column in the Barrie Examiner under the title “Forget attacks and focus on better energy plan“.
Erich Jacoby-Hawkins is a director of Living Green and the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.
General
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The most plausible reason for the NDP loss in BC
Posted May 15, 2013 by CuriosityCat
 |
| Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion in BC |
I think Gordon Gibson’s take in the Globe & Mail on the vote-shifting caused by the position-shifting of Dix in the last week of the campaign is the most plausible explanation of why the polls were so different from the actual results:
The NDP looked way ahead before voters went to the polls in British Columbia. Then it all changed. Why? One word: “Pipelines.” Or more precisely, two: “Kinder Morgan.”Until two weeks ago it was the election of the NDP’s Adrian Dix to lose.
Then he got greedy. Worried about an emerging Green threat, Mr. Dix sought to pre-empt the party by going greenier-than-thou, specifically by promising to ban significantly greater tanker traffic out of the port of Vancouver, which would doom the export of Alberta oil to the Pacific.
This was a stunning turnabout on a clear promise to withhold judgement until the pipeline application had been filed with details made available…
The Kinder Morgan flip-flop sent a message that the NDP would prefer the enviro-left to the development-right. The voters got the message, judged that the economy would suffer and made their choice.
Of course the enviro-left will reject that thought. An NDP representative commenting on the results actually said that people who fail to achieve their ends via elections will gain them in other ways and referenced the “War in the Woods,” a famous BC environmental confrontation. We shall see.
This framing of the BC NDP as preferring the “enviro-left to the development-right” is a good summary of the probable result of Dix’s desperate attempt to rob votes from the Green Party.
It is also the framing that both the Harper new Conservatives and the federal Liberal Party will use against Thomas Mulcair’s NDP come 2015.
The risk for the Liberal Part of Canada is that it also goes too far in supporting those who oppose pipelines through BC as a proxy for fighting global warming, rather than supporting responsible pipeline development and tanker shipment of the Alberta oil sands bitumen.
The Liberal Party is already dangerously close to sliding down the slippery slope that Dix’s BC NDP rushed down, with the same consequences possible.
The 2015 battle will be about the economy, because the world recovery is still weak, given the unwise austerity programs in the EU and the budget-slashing Republican Party’s control of the House in the USA.
General
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The most plausible reason for the NDP loss in BC
Posted May 15, 2013 by CuriosityCat
|
| Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion in BC |
I think Gordon Gibson’s take in the Globe & Mail on the vote-shifting caused by the position-shifting of Dix in the last week of the campaign is the most plausible explanation of why the polls were so different from the actual results:
The NDP looked way ahead before voters went to the polls in British Columbia. Then it all changed. Why? One word: “Pipelines.” Or more precisely, two: “Kinder Morgan.”Until two weeks ago it was the election of the NDP’s Adrian Dix to lose.
Then he got greedy. Worried about an emerging Green threat, Mr. Dix sought to pre-empt the party by going greenier-than-thou, specifically by promising to ban significantly greater tanker traffic out of the port of Vancouver, which would doom the export of Alberta oil to the Pacific.
This was a stunning turnabout on a clear promise to withhold judgement until the pipeline application had been filed with details made available…
The Kinder Morgan flip-flop sent a message that the NDP would prefer the enviro-left to the development-right. The voters got the message, judged that the economy would suffer and made their choice.
Of course the enviro-left will reject that thought. An NDP representative commenting on the results actually said that people who fail to achieve their ends via elections will gain them in other ways and referenced the “War in the Woods,” a famous BC environmental confrontation. We shall see.
This framing of the BC NDP as preferring the “enviro-left to the development-right” is a good summary of the probable result of Dix’s desperate attempt to rob votes from the Green Party.
It is also the framing that both the Harper new Conservatives and the federal Liberal Party will use against Thomas Mulcair’s NDP come 2015.
The risk for the Liberal Part of Canada is that it also goes too far in supporting those who oppose pipelines through BC as a proxy for fighting global warming, rather than supporting responsible pipeline development and tanker shipment of the Alberta oil sands bitumen.
The Liberal Party is already dangerously close to sliding down the slippery slope that Dix’s BC NDP rushed down, with the same consequences possible.
The 2015 battle will be about the economy, because the world recovery is still weak, given the unwise austerity programs in the EU and the budget-slashing Republican Party’s control of the House in the USA.
Activism
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Live-Blogging the Next BC Government
Posted May 14, 2013 by Stephen Elliott-Buckley
Here we are: only hours to go until the polls close. What will be the next BC government? What are your hopes, fears, dreams, goals? This page will refresh every 15 seconds, or you can manually reload it. Please add in your comments below What are your seat predictions? What do you think will be [...]
Election
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Assessing the NDP’s environmental platform
Posted May 7, 2013 by redeye
The Wilderness Committee has taken a close look at the NDP’s platform. Joe Foy gives us an assessment of what the party says it will do if it wins the provincial election on May 14. Joe Foy is National Campaign Organizer for the Wilderness Committee. He speaks with Redeye host Jane Williams.
Climate Change
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Need for retiring carbon as simple as 1 2 3
Posted May 2, 2013 by Erich Jacoby-Hawkins
I saw two films recently that unexpectedly fit together: “Jurassic Park 3D” and “Do the Math”.
Do the Math, by 350.org, boils the climate crisis down to three simple numbers: 2 degrees, the amount of warming that we must not exceed, and so far the only global consensus position that even the Harper government has supported. 565 gigatons, how much more fossil carbon that lets us burn; more and we heat the planet beyond supporting human prosperity. 2,795 gigatons, the total fossil fuel reserves currently identified and tagged for extraction. This means 80% of known reserves of coal, oil and gas must remain in the ground, unburned, if we are to continue to flourish.
As author Bill McKibben says: when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging! That means not building any new infrastructure for extracting, distributing, or refining fossil fuels. Even the very conservative International Energy Agency agrees.
Yet instead we see editorialists, lobbyists, and most politicians pushing new pipelines and tar sands expansion, fracking, and other enhanced extraction. Ignoring the contradiction, they defend new high-cost fossil infrastructure because the alternative would require new high-cost renewable infrastructure. Wouldn’t it make more fiscal sense to spend our money on infrastructure with a permanent, renewable supply than on energy we know will run out? And how crazy is it to expand an industry whose own success in extracting resources must eventually put itself out of business?
Some wrongly think being Green means I’m left-wing, and note that I sometimes criticize political parties with Conservative in their name, ignoring that I also call out Liberals and New Democrats. I’m actually deeply conservative: I believe we should be able to live on the same planet our grandparents did, and our grandchildren deserve the same, too. As fast as they can, fossil fuel companies are transforming the basic chemistry of our atmosphere, changing temperature, precipitation, sea levels, weather and climate such that our children will literally live on a different planet than the one we were born to. What could be more radical than the uncontrolled world-changing actions of Big Oil/Coal/Gas?
Another deeply conservative belief of mine: responsibility for our own waste. Generally individuals and businesses must pay to dispose of their garbage. Only fossil fuels are allowed to break the rules by dumping carbon pollution into our air, our very life-support system, for free (and profit).
Jurassic Park had a simple message: just because we can do something (for a profit), doesn’t mean we should. Re-introducing extinct dinosaurs from 65 million years ago to the modern world was clearly a bad idea. Releasing carbon sequestered millions of years ago into today’s biosphere is a similarly bad idea, no matter how much money some pocket.
So what to do, how can we be energy wise and not fossil fools? Read next week for a couple of powerful solutions to get us off fossil fuels quickly while maintaining our prosperity.
Published as my Root Issues column in the Barrie Examiner under the title “Films offer clear environmental message“.
Erich Jacoby-Hawkins is a director of Living Green and the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.
Climate Change
Full Story »
Need for retiring carbon as simple as 1 2 3
Posted May 2, 2013 by Erich Jacoby-Hawkins
I saw two films recently that unexpectedly fit together: “Jurassic Park 3D” and “Do the Math”.
Do the Math, by 350.org, boils the climate crisis down to three simple numbers: 2 degrees, the amount of warming that we must not exceed, and so far the only global consensus position that even the Harper government has supported. 565 gigatons, how much more fossil carbon that lets us burn; more and we heat the planet beyond supporting human prosperity. 2,795 gigatons, the total fossil fuel reserves currently identified and tagged for extraction. This means 80% of known reserves of coal, oil and gas must remain in the ground, unburned, if we are to continue to flourish.
As author Bill McKibben says: when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging! That means not building any new infrastructure for extracting, distributing, or refining fossil fuels. Even the very conservative International Energy Agency agrees.
Yet instead we see editorialists, lobbyists, and most politicians pushing new pipelines and tar sands expansion, fracking, and other enhanced extraction. Ignoring the contradiction, they defend new high-cost fossil infrastructure because the alternative would require new high-cost renewable infrastructure. Wouldn’t it make more fiscal sense to spend our money on infrastructure with a permanent, renewable supply than on energy we know will run out? And how crazy is it to expand an industry whose own success in extracting resources must eventually put itself out of business?
Some wrongly think being Green means I’m left-wing, and note that I sometimes criticize political parties with Conservative in their name, ignoring that I also call out Liberals and New Democrats. I’m actually deeply conservative: I believe we should be able to live on the same planet our grandparents did, and our grandchildren deserve the same, too. As fast as they can, fossil fuel companies are transforming the basic chemistry of our atmosphere, changing temperature, precipitation, sea levels, weather and climate such that our children will literally live on a different planet than the one we were born to. What could be more radical than the uncontrolled world-changing actions of Big Oil/Coal/Gas?
Another deeply conservative belief of mine: responsibility for our own waste. Generally individuals and businesses must pay to dispose of their garbage. Only fossil fuels are allowed to break the rules by dumping carbon pollution into our air, our very life-support system, for free (and profit).
Jurassic Park had a simple message: just because we can do something (for a profit), doesn’t mean we should. Re-introducing extinct dinosaurs from 65 million years ago to the modern world was clearly a bad idea. Releasing carbon sequestered millions of years ago into today’s biosphere is a similarly bad idea, no matter how much money some pocket.
So what to do, how can we be energy wise and not fossil fools? Read next week for a couple of powerful solutions to get us off fossil fuels quickly while maintaining our prosperity.
Published as my Root Issues column in the Barrie Examiner under the title “Films offer clear environmental message“.
Erich Jacoby-Hawkins is a director of Living Green and the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.
General
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All lawbreakers will be punished … unless they happen to be Alberta Conservatives
Posted May 2, 2013 by djclimenhaga
In Alberta, lawbreakers must be punished, and they will be punished — unless, of course, they happen to be supporters of the ruling Progressive Conservative Party.
So, the government announced yesterday, it will be going after the Alberta Union…
General
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Alberta Diary: All lawbreakers will be punished … unless they happen to be Alberta Conservatives
Posted May 2, 2013 by David Climenhaga
“’Ave you got a leesence for your minkey?” An investigator for Elections Alberta pauses momentarily in his probe of political donations made to the Progressive Conservative Party by seeing-eye monkeys. If you don’t get it, I can’t help you. Actual Elections Alberta investigators by now have likely been transferred back to plain clothes. Below: Justice Minister Jonathan Denis, retired Chief Elections Officer O. Brian Fjeldheim and drugstore billionaire Daryl Katz.
In Alberta, lawbreakers must be punished, and they will be punished – unless, of course, they happen to be supporters of the ruling Progressive Conservative Party.
So, the government (Read more…)
General
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Normalizing secrecy
Posted May 1, 2013 by Greg Fingas
I haven’t commented yet on the story surrounding Tom Mulcair’s request for basic investigation into back-channel information between the Trudeau government and the Supreme Court of Canada – which seems best classified as a minor but reasonable request …
General
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Accidental Deliberations: Normalizing secrecy
Posted May 1, 2013 by Greg Fingas
I haven’t commented yet on the story surrounding Tom Mulcair’s request for basic investigation into back-channel information between the Trudeau government and the Supreme Court of Canada – which seems best classified as a minor but reasonable request which has been blown out of proportion.
But I’ll take a moment to point out the jaw-dropping response from the Libs, who are apparently demanding government secrecy far beyond that ever publicly defended by even the Harper Cons: This motion calls for the federal government to release archived documents related to the constitutional negotiations which led to the patriation of the Constitution (Read more…)
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