softwood lumber: sellout?

Hmm. I don't know much about the issues and am therefore not sure what I think about this situation yet. Nonetheless, I wanted to see how foreign news agencies reported the breakthrough. I found the following snippets particularly interesting:

From the Seattle Times:

If the agreement holds, analysts said Americans buying new homes probably should not expect a price break from the deal.
"This is all organized to keep competition down and prices high for U.S. producers," said Gary Hufbauer, an economist at the Institute for International Economics, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
Said Jerry Howard, executive vice president of the National Association of Home Builders: "For an administration that espouses free trade, there is no logical reason to ... engage in one-sided negotiations that would provide a massive subsidy to the U.S. timber industry at the expense of millions of American consumers."

From the Washington Post:

Shares of Canadian lumber companies dropped Thursday, as analysts derided the deal.
Jack Layton, leader of the opposition New Democratic Party, strongly criticized the Conservatives for letting the United States keep $1 billion in penalty duties despite numerous rulings by the World Trade Organization and other panels against the U.S. levies.
Roy Nagel of British Columbia's Central Interior Logging Association, said it seemed aimed more at creating peace with Washington than helping the Canadian industry.

From Canoe:

It remains to be seen whether Canada's willingness to compromise on softwood lumber could set a precedent for other industries. He said other sectors might be tempted to challenge parts of the free-trade agreement.

Which also included this one little ray of sunshine:

"To be very blunt about it, the U.S. forest industry owns Capitol Hill, owns the White House, and calls the shots," he said. "As a result you have had successive presidents and successive administrations acting in the most outrageous manner on the orders of the U.S. industry. . . "The president (George W. Bush) appears to be a little more reluctant to play the kind of thuggish game that the U.S. industry has been demanding."

Despite all the bitterness and accusations of "selling canadians short" on this deal, I believe that securing stability and predictability of market access for the years to come is certainly more important that collecting all the (illegally charged) import duties.

hiding the human cost of war

The new Conservative government has taken "two important steps to restore tradition, which in nearly all cases, is the proper thing to do things" (that attitude is, to me, inherently short-sighted but not the object of this particular rant).
The Liberals started ordering the flag atop the Peace Tower at half-staff for fallen soldiers in 2002 after a friendly-fire incident in Afghanistan. I welcomed this as our country reaching a new level of social maturity, when all Canadians could grieve and reflect on the ultimate sacrifice which we demanded of them by putting them in that situation. This continued for the next three rounds of military casualties, but they chose not to extend the honour to a soldier who died in a vehicle roll-over accident. Critics immediately decried the "picking-and-choosing" attitude of the Liberal gov't, meanwhile, veterans and other military associations stated they preferred that ALL fallen comrades be honoured on Nov.11 (which makes a lot of sense to me). The CBC's backgrounder has all the details.

Aside: there is such a thing as flag etiquette, but that's not the object of thois rant either.

Resistance to change is a normal human reaction, and typically, once the dust settles, life goes on just as happily as before. So why would the new Conservative government revert to the original tradition? Personally, I suspect they are trying to lull Canadians into a blissfully ignorant state, avoiding drawing any negative attention to the expanded and dangerous mission in Afghanistan. This suspicion is reinforced by today's announcement banning reporters from events marking the return of bodies of soldiers killed in the line of duty.
I agree with Kevin Newman's perspective indicating that public participation in the grieving process provides the mourning families more effective sympathy and support, helping them cope with their losses, than if they are left to deal with it alone and forgotten by the very country that caused their loss.
It just doesn't make sense to me that former politicians (PMs, cabinet ministers, governors general, etc), having served in the plushest of offices, should be honoured such after dying of natural causes, when young eager Canadians who die in the harshest of conditions protecting our social interests aren't allowed to share their final chapter.

misguided efforts

It's really, really too bad that high-profile celebrities choose to focus their efforts on ending the control of the overabundant seal population, rather than saving polar bears from impending extinction due to global warming!

accountability?

"Today we tabled in Parliament the new Federal Accountability Act, a bill which contains a number of measures aimed at cleaning up the federal government," said Prime Minister Stephen Harper. "Once implemented, this Act will: Put an end to the influence of big money in federal political parties; [etc]"
http://pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?category=1&id=1097

I just can't see how this is going to be good for our society for a number of reasons:
-Who donates most to federal political parties? Rich people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and/or advancing a certain agenda. These people won't go away just because of the act, they'll just go underground where they cannot be traced.
-Interested people join social organizations like the labour unions and church groups because they believe that collectively they have better bargaining power with the government (through donations to political parties). If these orgs don't reflect the values of their constituents, then their funds dry up and they fall apart due to the laws of the free market. Preventing these social organizations from representing their members' values will also cause them to fall apart as they will have lost their raison-d'etre. Who then will bargain with the government to tackle specific issues and implement changes that people really want?
-What does it really mean to "be held accountable to the people of Canada" anyway? What methods do we have as citizens? Really, our only (and most important and fundamental) power is our vote. But the recent election and its aftermath has shown us how the government really cares about our votes - just ask the thousands of constituents of Burnaby BC - and how they twist protest votes against the liberals into votes "for" their five key priorities - and how the minister of the biggest spending federal department is appointed to the senate, bypassing "public" scrutiny in the House of Commons and flying in the face of having democratically elected cabinet ministers leading the country, and who says he intends to run not as soon as possible in a by-election, but only at the next general election...
-Further empowering Officers of Parliament (information commissioner, privacy commissioner, auditor general) and protecting whistleblowers, while restricting access to information and starving the media's need for question opportunities, means you will only be able to fight the system from within, and wouldn't that be an inconvenient conflict of interest... Remember Radwanski?

In the end, it seems that the only tools we would have left at our disposal to change the course of a majority government between elections are:
-Demonstrations to grab the media's attention, at the risk of tarnishing our "pristine" image abroad;
-Demonstrations to grab the international media's attention, but we've seen how ineffective that is against China;
-As the situation gets more desperate: riots, rebellions, violence, kidnappings, etc., and the government has ample experience quashing such events (October crisis, Riel Rebellion, etc).

Sure I'm taking this to the extreme, but to me, these are all warning signs on the road to a totalitarian state where the government and the people are isolated from one another, the only bridge being the elections every 4years or so (note: at the sole discretion of the Prime Minister) and the propaganda that the current conservative government seems to be so good at already...

taxing my understanding

The Cons want to lower the GST among other tax-reducing promises (http://pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?category=1&id=1100).

Meanwhile, in the last Parliament the Liberal government passed a budget that reduced income taxes from 16% to 15% on the first tax bracket and also increased the personal exemption by $500. The savings to the average Canadian family making $60,000 with two children was about $400, which will probably be cut. That family would have to spend $40,000 on taxable goods to get the same tax savings. (According to Mr. Paul Szabo (Mississauga South, Lib.), as quoted in Hansard Address by Pierre Lemieux, MP for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell, Response to the Speech from the Throne, April 3, 2006, page 5)

Lowering income taxes means *only* those "hard-working honest Canadians" that actually declare their income get to keep some of their hard-earned money. Reducing the GST means *all* Canadians get to keep some of their money. Sounds good in the media.

But what does this mean to our society? Those who will benefit most are the rich and the crooks. An income tax is a disincentive for declaring your revenue - it only hurts those that choose to declare their meagre incomes; meanwhile money hidden away in the black market or offshore accounts can't be touched. A sales tax skims everybody evenly: if you want to save for a rainy day, it costs you nothing now; if you want to buy big expensive toys right now, you pay more.

I believe this is a short-sighted communications (public relations) attempt, since repetition is the key to a successful marketing campaign, like water dripping on a rock: Everybody pays the GST several times a day, but only a much smaller population segment pays income tax, which happens only once a year.

In the end, I guess people prefer to get screwed with a smile than looked after with responsibility.

Poor forecasting

Glad to hear the PM is keeping his promises...
http://pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?category=1&id=1098

...but maybe somebody should tell him that computers running models are too busy to notice what province they're in?
http://www.cbc.ca/nl/story/nf-forecasts-20050316.html

Another fine example of the mindless masses blinding common (and financial) sense.

conservative propaganda on taxpayers' time

Been watching a bit of CPAC during the days I stay home on diaper duty.
The Conservatives are getting more annoying than ever.
Every first speech by a new/returning MP was, I'm positively certain, written by the same guy (or girl, which for some reason would surprise me) that wrote their "5 priorities" election spiel. Anyway, it goes something like this:

Thank you mr (deputy) speaker, congratulations on your (re)appointment. First I would like to thank (family members). Next I would like to sincerely thank the people of (riding) for (sending/returning) me to this (fancy qualitative) chamber/house.

(Repeat entire election platform spiel about the "five priorities." Don't deviate from pre-election speech and DO NOT go into any more specifics).

(Emphasize "how important these five priorities" are to the (good/ hardworking/ honest) people of (riding). )

(Underhandedly slam the previous government for all the evils in the world (even if the things refered to occured under Chretien over 10 years ago and Martin canned most of those involved since) (ignore the fact that the Mulroney govt did the same stuff even before that, nobody important will remember that far back anyway.))

Their strategy is obvious: that by repeating the same bloody crap over and over (and over and over) again AND preventing any member from voicing any independant thought (by muzzling their members, writing their speeches for them, and cutting off the press' accessibility other than for well-rehearsed photo-ops with the military and little sick kids), people will start to give in to this obvious self-promoting and slanderous propaganda and give them a majority next time around. Seems like a funny way to ensure "fairness and accountability to the people" to me...

The second amendment

New Quebec: The second amendment
Who knows, maybe this is what they really meant?