Janesdiggo's List: Harper

• one of the Conservatives’ legislative priorities: an omnibus crime bill containing a far-reaching rewrite of justice laws to fulfill their tough-on-crime agenda.
• Mr. Harper lost four cabinet ministers in the May 2 election and his first order of business will be filling vacancies left by defeated MPs including Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon. “You can’t go without a foreign affairs minister for too long,” one senior Tory said. Also needing to be replaced are Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Josée Verner, Veterans Affairs Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn and Minister of State for Sport Gary Lunn.
• Measures would include an end to house arrest for serious and violent criminals, tougher sentences and mandatory jail time for sexual offences against children and a crackdown on the handling of violent and repeat young offenders.

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• The federal Conservative party has sent a threatening email to the widow of an asbestos victim in the latest chapter of Canada’s debate over the hazardous mineral.

     

  A top Tory official is warning the woman to stop using the party logo in an online ad campaign against the controversial industry — a campaign she started after her husband died of an asbestos-related cancer.

• Conservative party executive director Dan Hilton warned Keyserlingk to stop using the Tory symbol immediately.

     

  “Failure to do so may result in further action,” Hilton wrote in a July 29 email which carried the subject title, “Unauthorized use of trademark.” The email, which The Canadian Press obtained from Keyserlingk, went on to advise her: “Please govern yourself accordingly.”

• Since 2004 — as the country’s mission in Afghanistan was ramping up — the defence department began swelling up, according to a Star analysis. But the dramatic growth happened far from the front lines with more civilians, more contractors and a ballooning headquarters staff.
• Military experts say the numbers tell the tale of a bureaucracy run amok, even as the uniform ranks — especially the navy — remain stretched for manpower
• The number of civilian employees has grown by 31 per cent — from 22,710 in 2004 to 29,843
• “There’s no question the front lines, the sharp end, is woefully under strength,” said Brian MacDonald, a retired colonel who is now a senior analyst with the Conference of Defence Associations.
• Uniform ranks have grown by 8.5 per cent — from 87,653 in 2004 to 95,123
• Another 5,000 civilian contractors work for the defence department, mostly in the Ottawa
•  In fiscal year 2009-2010, the department spent $2.8 billion on professional services, consultants and outside contracts, up almost $1 billion since 2004
• numbers that are publicly available reveal sharp increases in the civilian staffing and the spending on professional contracts and consultants, including $339 million for business services, $1.2 billion for engineering and architecture services and $549 million in contracts lumped under the vague category of “other services.”
• Almost $50 million went to management consulting and another $43 million on temporary help
• “It’s a flag that indicates some difficulties in management over time but also in the almost uncontrolled development of the bureaucracy. Maybe it’s a symptom of what’s going on in the rest of government,” Bland said.

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• The country’s foremost legal organization has delivered a grim assessment of the Harper government’s get-tough-on-crime agenda, attacking mandatory minimum sentences and questioning Ottawa’s eagerness to put offenders behind bars.
• the Canadian Bar Association’s annual conference bristled at inaccessible courts, inappropriate jailing of mentally ill offenders and costly measures that threaten to pack prisons.
• After several years of highlighting its crime agenda only to have opposition parties thwart the passage of its bills, Mr. Nicholson has pledged to bundle all of the unpassed laws into an omnibus bill that would become law within 100 sitting days of the new Parliament.
• The finding – by the World Justice Institute – underlines the fact that justice is increasingly available only to the wealthy or a small minority who are so poor that they qualify for legal-aid programs, she said.

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• An auditor general’s report in June has already painted a disturbing picture of how $45.7 million in legacy fund cash was dished out with no bureaucratic oversight or paperwork. Reacting to that report, the government conceded there were administrative shortcomings but said none of the cash was misspent.
• Municipal records from Gravenhurst and Bracebridge show that as far back as 2008 Clement and his local Conservative political team in Huntsville began drumming up projects in the Muskoka area that would qualify for G8 legacy funds. Those who had a hand in shepherding the proposals through the approval process were Clement’s constituency team, staff in his ministerial office and government officials under Clement’s authority.
• Under the heading “Review of Project Summary Submissions to Date,” it says: “It was noted that all submissions are to be sent to Minister Clement’s Huntsville Constituency Office and would (from) there be distributed electronically to all committee members.”
• In early 2009, the town of Gravenhurst sent its proposal for $12.2 million worth of G8 projects directly to Clement’s Huntsville office, adding in a note, “thank you for this opportunity.”
• documents show that federal bureaucrats were actively involved in the file at various points, suggesting that senior government officials were either consciously involved in a cover-up or had been kept in the dark about the activities of employees in Industry Canada, including FedNor, Infrastructure Canada and Foreign Affairs, which housed the Federal Summit Management Office.
• “This is a government that has to follow the rules. Ministers of the crown have to be accountable. We cannot have them going and setting up their own processes beyond the clutch of the auditor general and then having to go retroactively and try and figure out where the auditor general should have reached,” said Angus. “We have a system in place for spending money. It’s an accountable system. It should be a transparent system. We cannot have rogue ministers or rogue governments setting up their own processes.”

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• Secret U.S. government cables show a stunning willingness by senior Canadian officials to appease American demands for a U.S.-style copyright law here.

     

  The documents describe Canadian officials as encouraging American lobbying efforts. They also cite cabinet minister Maxime Bernier raising the possibility of showing U.S. officials a draft bill before tabling it in Parliament.

• “Not only is it emphasizing severity on sentences, not only squandering money for prisons that don’t need to built on this basis of build-and-they-will-come, not only is it going to end up housing an inordinate number of native people who should be treated altogether differently, but these programs that are foreseen to reduce the effort made to help people to overcome their problems and therefore become more likely candidates for successful reintegration into society, and even more appalling to me, these plans to crack down on contact between prisoners and their visitors is just a terrible and barbarous thing.”

   

  Black said weekly prison visits by his wife Barbara Amiel and others sustained him. Post-visit inmate strip searches were conducted under the excuse of checking for smuggling “but smuggling into prisons is conducted entirely by corrupt guards.”

   

  “That families will not be even able to shake hands let alone embrace their relatives and will be separated by glass and speak through speakers, is simply barbarous and a giant step backwards and it is being undertaken for precisely the wrong reasons,” Black said.

• Stephen Harper’s plan to bring back controversial anti-terrorism legislation signals an acrimonious fall in the House of Commons, the opposition is charging.
• In addition, it wants to scrap the long-gun registry and bring in reforms to the Senate and to political financing
• Arguing that the major threat to Canada “is still Islamicism,” he vowed to resurrect the two contentious clauses from the Antiterrorism Act that expired in 2007. One clause allowed police to arrest suspects without a warrant and hold them for three days without charges if they believed a terrorist act had been committed; the other clause allowed a judge to compel a witness to testify in secret under penalty of imprisonment if the witness refused.

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• Without new pipe of some form, it will only be a few years before Canada’s oil gets backed up and begins selling at a deep discount, a prospect that stands to erode corporate and government revenues by billions of dollars a year.
• Some have warned that prices could fall by $10 to $20 a barrel. With Western Canada now producing 2.6 million barrels per day, even a $10 discount threatens some $9.5-billion a year.
• Outside of new pipes to B.C., several alternatives are already on the table. Enbridge Inc., TransCanada’s chief competitor, could, with the addition of more pumps, push an additional 350,000 barrels a day of oil through existing pipes to Flanagan, a small Illinois town 170 kilometres southwest of Chicago. Enbridge has also considered two new pipelines, Flanagan South and Wrangler, that could move oil to the Gulf Coast, the target market for Keystone XL, which is designed to carry 700,000 barrels a day.
• It’s also possible some new oil won’t be carried in pipes. The past year has seen energy companies increasingly experiment with rail cars. There are important obstacles: it would take huge construction of rail cars to move big new volumes of oil, and there is not, for now, enough loading and unloading capacity built around train tracks.
• Part of Keystone is to be filled with oil from Montana and North Dakota, where a new oil play is producing rivers of new oil. By 2013, the State review suggested, there will be enough capacity there to load 750,000 barrels a day onto railcars – up from just over 100,000 last year. That dramatic growth curve shows how rapidly new transportation forms can be adopted.

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• Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who met with Barack Obama at the summit of Pacific-rim leaders in the U.S. President’s native state of Hawaii on Sunday, told reporters that last week’s surprise decision on the Keystone XL project proves Canada needs to diversify its trade ties.
• “This does underscore the necessity of Canada making sure that we’re able to access Asian markets for our energy products, and that will be an important priority of this government going forward,” he said before a discussion with Mr. Obama at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in Honolulu.
• Strains in the Canada-U.S. relationship and efforts to mend fences were at the top of the agenda as Mr. Harper and Mr. Obama met. They talked about a pending Canada-U.S. trade and security pact as well as the consequences of the State Department’s decision to put off until 2013 approval of the $7-billion Keystone KL pipeline that would carry oil sands crude to refineries in Texas.
• There are other irritants in the U.S.-Canada relationship: the Obama administration’s decision to revive “Buy American” purchasing rules and a plan to raise more than $100-million from Canadian travellers with a $5.50 (U.S.) “passenger inspection fee.”
• Virtually 100 per cent of the oil and gas produced in Canada is destined for the United States via a massive installed infrastructure of roads, rails and pipelines. Overall, 75 per cent of Canadian merchandise exports went to the United States last year. Just 3.3 per cent was destined for fast-growing China.

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• A contingency fund managed by the board is on track to surpass $60-million in cash, but Ottawa says this is not money it will rebate to farmers.
• Instead, the Tories plan to use available cash to underwrite the shift to a free market for the agency, and they’re in the process of raising the amount this fund can hold to $200-million.
• As the Conservatives prepare to free western farmers from having to sell through the board, a pile of cash is amassing in the agency’s contingency fund – an account that contains the proceeds of futures market trading to hedge against risk

• The Harper government has twice in recent weeks moved to raise the fund’s ceiling. It gave formal notice Nov. 9 that it was hiking the limit to $100-million from $60-million.

  On Wednesday, government officials said Ottawa would raise the cap further to $200-million.

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• The Harper government has flexed its majority muscle to push through the Commons a controversial bill that will forever change the lives of 70,000 Canadian grain farmers.
• “For generations, farmers relied on the wheat board to get the best possible price for their grain and to support their families,” Ms. Turmel said. “But this government ignored them and now that stability is gone.”

• Canada and the United States will announce a new security perimeter deal Wednesday that is expected to move more inspections off the border and onto factory floors, expanding the type of goods – including food – that can be fast-tracked between the two countries.
• A central feature of Wednesday’s agreement will be a pledge by both governments to share far more information between government agencies in an effort to improve North American security. But Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, has laid out several concerns given the two countries’ very different privacy laws.
• Ms. Stoddart recently warned of drawing “ever closer to the bleak reality of a surveillance society” if the collection of Canadian biometric data – such as iris scans or fingerprints – end up being stored in U.S. databases.
• In addition to the “Beyond the Border” initiative, a second part of the deal led by a Regulatory Co-operation Council focuses on harmonizing safety regulations between the two countries – particularly for food and transportation

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• The prime minister announced during a Wednesday White House visit that Canada plans to track entries and exits as part of a perimeter security pact with the United States, a deal that requires Canadians to march in lockstep with the Americans on threat monitoring.
• At the same time, Canada and the U.S. are pledging to harmonize regulations in 29 areas from food to health to eliminate minor differences that block trade
• While Canada is pledging to tighten controls on screening, the Americans are promising to negotiate agreements that will “pre-clear” U.S.-bound goods and travelers from Canada that are shipped by land, rail and water -- so all can pass more quickly across the shared border.
• But while Canadian business has long requested help on easing border crossings, Wednesday’s deal is heavy on pilot projects and promises rather than concrete deliverables.
• At the heart of this perimeter deal s the notion that the ports of Halifax, or Vancouver, for instance, form part of a common perimeter encircling North America and must be secured to the Americans’ satisfaction so Washington can more readily trust shipments that enter the United States at the Canadian border.
• Under the perimeter-security plan, Canada has committed to increasingly sharing with the United States the security intelligence gathered by its police and law authorities.
• Canada has also pledged to ratchet up scrutiny on foreigners – even from countries that don’t need a visa to come to Canada. Citizens of countries that require no visa for Canada will be obliged complete a form before arrival that supplies what officials refer to as visa-type information .
• Canada is also promising to adopt U.S.-approved bomb detection machines for luggage screening; and to a system for verifying the identities of inbound foreign travelers and goods that matches the American system
• Critics say Canada is ceding autonomy over border controls to the United States in this perimeter security deal but Canadian officials say they’re merely co-operating more closely with Americans.

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• Canada is formally withdrawing from the Kyoto accord, Environment Minister Peter Kent said Monday.
• "Kyoto for Canada is in the past. As such, we are invoking our legal right to formally withdraw," Kent said.
• The Conservative government has opposed any extension of the Kyoto Protocol framework in future agreements, arguing instead for a new international agreement that includes commitments from all major emitters, including those in the developing world.

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• The Safe Streets and Communities Act, formerly Bill C-10, is a collection of nine bills the previous minority Harper government had failed, since 2006, to pass separately.
• the crime bill include its provisions to implement minimum mandatory jail sentences for violent crimes and for some drug offences and property crimes; new restrictions on conditional sentences as alternatives to jail terms; tough restrictions on parole eligibility and conditions; replacing pardons with suspension of records for convicted criminals; eliminating record suspension eligibility for serious crimes; and increasing the wait times to apply for a "suspension of record".
• Abby Deshman, a lawyer with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said the national organization was denied its request to make a presentation to the government about its concerns with the legislation.
• Chief Robert Davies, of Sault Ste. Marie Police Service, questioned whether enough time had been given for public consultation and debate.

• The Ontario Police Chiefs Association is leery about the possible long-term consequences of the legislation, he said.

  "The police are after getting tough, but personally I would not want to see an American model," he said. "There is no doubt that this bill, with the various pieces of legislation they're overhauling, is really tough on crime. It's going to put a lot more people in jail, including young offenders, and it will keep people in jail longer because of revisions to parole and probation."
• "There is no component in this bill that talks about crime prevention. We have a community policing model here in the Sault, where we try to address the root cause of crime," he said. "We involve other agencies to deal with the root cause. We find that is a lot more effective and less expensive than just locking people up."

• Ontario's Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services expressed concerns about the possible impact of increasing the prison population.

  The ministry sent the following email to Sault This Week through a spokesperson from the Minister's office Rebecca MacKenzie: "The ministry has undertaken a preliminary analysis of Bill C-10 and determined that there will be significant financial implications for Ontario if the legislation becomes law. Further analysis is being completed but we anticipate the inmate population to increase by hundreds, and our operating costs to rise by millions."

• In its 100-page submission to the federal government earlier this year, the Canadian Bar Association, expressed its "serious concerns" over the general direction of the government's crime bill. Lawyers fear it will "move Canada along a road that has failed in other countries at great expense."

  In its brief, the association, which represents 37,000 members from the legal profession, rejected the "punitive approach" in the crime bill in favour of investing in crime prevention and rehabilitation.
• Chief Davies, however, offered a final caution of his own. "The government is promoting they want to get tough on crime and they want to make our streets safer. I sure hope that is what is going to happen and they are not releasing people who are hardcore and not rehabilitated because that certainly would impact police and society years down the road."

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• This week’s announcement by federal Environment Minister Peter Kent of Canada’s intention to formally withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol marks the country’s lowest point in the 40-year history of modern global environmental diplomacy. The protocol, which Canada signed in 1997 and ratified in 2002, committed Canada to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 6 per cent relative to their 1990 levels by the 2008-2012 period.
• The reality is that on the whole Kyoto has been far more a success than failure. Most of the parties that were subject to binding emission targets under the protocol have either met or exceeded their goals. Canada is among a relatively small number of countries, along with Australia, Norway, Spain and Ireland, that failed to do so.
• The international reaction — Canada’s decision is being given much more prominent play in the international media than in Canada itself — has been overwhelmingly negative from both developed and developing countries.
• Domestically, the government is operating on an assumption that its own core voters have limited concern for environmental issues and, unlike the majority of Canadians, accept the government’s consistent zero-sum framing of the relationship between environmental sustainability and economic prosperity.

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• University of Ottawa political science expert Michael Behiels said there is no doubt the Conservatives are responsible for the explosions of anger by continuing to press and to heckle and to try to undermine opposition parties at every opportunity despite having a majority government.

• “And I think the opposition has its back against the wall and doesn’t know what to do,” he said. “Not a single opposition amendment has been accepted. Everything they try to do is basically laughed at, dismissed. So the opposition MPs have had it, and it’s just pouring out.”

   

  Mr. Behiels predicted this pattern would continue for the foreseeable future.

   

  “Harper’s won his majority after 20 years [of] fighting for it and he’s basically decided he’s going to stick it in the opposition’s faces at every opportunity,” he said. “They just cannot let up with this sort of mentality.”