Murray Dobbin's Blog

Stephen Harper, too, shall pass into history, recorded as one of the most destructive, personally malignant personalities ever to have soiled the Canadian political landscape. But in the meantime, Canadians are so distracted by his political blitzkrieg through the agencies, policies, programs and institutions that make Canada what it became over five decades, that we are in danger of losing our imagination regarding what is truly possible in this country. While it may seem counter-intuitive, now is the time for Canadians who actually believe in government and nation-building to be contemplating big ideas – the ones that will take us the next step to equality, economic stability and environmental sustainability.

Why? Because if we don’t try to get what we want we won’t even get what we need.

Is this just pie in the sky – are Canadians actually open to big ideas? Absolutely. Here are just a few of the signs. CARP, the Canadian Association of Retired Persons (membership: 330,000) has just witnessed a sea-change in its members’ voting intentions. For most of the past year just over 50% of them chose the Conservatives. But suddenly, two issues reversed that – giving the NDP (which had consistently run a distant third) first place with 39% and the Harperites 31%. The first issue was the changes to the OAS. But the “political game changer,” according to Susan Eng, vice-president of advocacy for CARP, was the omnibus bill. Eighty-five percent opposed bundling so many legislative changes into a single bill. Seniors, a key part of Harper’s broader base, apparently care about democracy even more than their own safety net.

Sign number two: perhaps we should call it free market fatigue, as increasing numbers of Canadians are questioning the Conservative ideology of minimalist government and a free hand for corporations. As I detailed in my last column, large majorities of Canadians are calling for higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations and are willing to pay more themselves to preserve what we have. And they see the tax issue tied directly to that of inequality – the new top-of-mind issue.

Number three: The Alberta election which seemed for weeks to heading towards the election of a Harper clone reversed course as Albertans suddenly paid real attention. This wasn’t just a vote against bigotry – though it was that, too – but a vote for good government, something the iconic Tory Peter Lougheed reminded voters of just in the nick of time.

Four: The re-election of Liberal and NDP governments in Ontario (where the NDP did well, too) and Manitoba respectively was not just a vote for incumbency – it was a vote for rational governance and against libertarian recklessness. So will be the almost certain election of the NDP in BC next year.

Five: The Quebec student rebellion. Deep rooted rebellions are always messy and imperfect but while many are uncomfortable with the scenes of violence the students are absolutely right to be protesting tuition fee increases And now the demonstrations are as much about human rights and the reactionary government of Jean Charest as they are about tuition fees. They are sustained by tens of thousands of our fellow citizens prepared to make real sacrifices for what the rest of us pay lip service to: equality.

But this is also a good example of the role of big ideas. Why wouldn’t we be demanding zero tuition fees – so that all education is free and paid for collectively? We are now, as a nation, well over twice as wealthy per capita (in real, inflation adjusted dollars) as we were when Medicare was established in 1967. The money is there – and in a democracy the people get to decide how those resources are used. We owe the Quebec students (and their hundreds of thousands of supporters in civil society groups) a huge debt of gratitude for shaking us out of our ideology-induced political torpor.

Their message: a better world is possible, but only if we fight for it.

Our preoccupation with Harper’s outrages though totally justified, is distracting us from imagining the kind of world we really want to build. Ironically, the projection of extremely low economic growth for the foreseeable future actually provides an imposed opportunity to examine what we desperately need to do anyway – begin to put together plans for a sustainable economy, a redefined prosperity that is not based on unfettered growth in the private sector – the economy of stuff.

If ever there was a time to move in this direction it is now – with corporations sitting on over $700 billion in cash which they refuse to invest because their own policy preferences and reckless behaviour has destroyed demand for private goods and services. Perhaps a tax on idle capital would make sense – a declaration by government that if the private sector can no longer allocate capital investment in the interests of the country and its citizens, then we will take some of it back and allocate it ourselves as public investment. It’s not that we don’t need investment. A no-growth economy is actually a misnomer, for what its advocates are really talking about is a different kind of growth – the kind that only governments can create: mass transit, green energy, a national food strategy, child care, pharma care, home care, culture, and anti-poverty programs including affordable housing.

Capitalism will be around for a while yet but its current incarnation, the savage capitalism of Wall Street and deregulation needs to be put to rest. The Canadian corporate sector has proven over and over again that it is utterly inept at improving its performance, its investment in research and development and its willingness to take risks and thus improve its productivity. The experiment with government “getting out of the way” of business has been an abject failure.

That should bring back the big idea of a much more planned economy – a robust, imaginative industrial strategy that directs the allocation of private capital to where it is most productive, produces the most and best jobs and provides stability and balance to the economy (NDP leader Thomas Mulcair is on the right track with his Dutch disease analysis). It is the other half of the capital allocation equation. The CAW has taken the lead amongst private sector unions with a ten point plan to promote the long-term growth of the auto industry. First on the agenda is a national auto policy.

Continuing with the theme of public investment it is long past time that we use the powers of the Bank of Canada to lend to governments (including provincial and municipal governments) at virtually zero interest rates (just enough to cover administrative costs). The insane practice of accumulating a massive public debt by borrowing from private banks ranks as perhaps the most perversely destructive practice of the past forty years.

Policies and programs administered by government bureaucracies will not give us what we want – especially given that these bureaucracies are now populated more and more by people dedicated to dismantling government itself. The big idea that will make the difference is a radical, deeply rooted democracy that includes the obvious reforms needed to the electoral system but involves far more than that. Participatory budgeting, institutionalizing citizen participation in the design and delivery of social programs, government subsidies for citizen study circles (as they have in Sweden where some 300,000 such circles are reported each year) which promote education, political literacy and discussion about the kinds of programs and policies people actually want should all be on the agenda.

That’s just a start – add to them yourself by simply using your imagination about what kind of world you would like to wake up to. How will these things ever come to pass? I have no idea – except than unless we think about them, imagine them, and talk about them amongst ourselves it is an absolute certainty that we will never achieve any of them. It is a question of choosing between despair over the historical accident of Stephen Harper and hope rooted in what we know in our hearts to be possible.

In the end it is all about reclaiming the commons – robbed from us by the 1% and the perverse ideology of neo-liberalism. Maybe we could begin with a small step in that direction – by reinstating Sunday closing. I know, there are lots of objections (its initial roots in Christianity being one) but imagine there actually being a day when you couldn’t buy more stuff. We could bring back an ancient commons tradition: talking to each other.

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Something is happening in Canada that seems, in the context of a majority Harper government, counter-intuitive. Harper continues implementing his right-wing revolution by fiat, and Preston Manning’s “democracy” institute says Canadians actually want “less” government and more individual responsibility. Yet a flurry of polls in the past few weeks and months suggest two dramatic counterpoints to this self-serving narrative.

First, in a development that is virtually unprecedented, inequality has become, by far, Canadians’ top concern displacing the perennial front-runner, Medicare. And closely related are a number of polls showing that Canadians in large majorities think wealthy people and corporations should pay more taxes. They are even willing to pay more themselves.

How these attitudes will play out over the longer term is hard to predict. Other trends are not so encouraging.

The trouble with normal, Bruce Cockburn told us, is it always gets worse. And that’s the danger in times like this when we sit and the ratcheting back of democratic government and the things that it has provided. The longer term threat to democracy is that we become inured to the systematic assaults on it. It is easy to get demoralized with what one US writer called “surplus powerlessness.” Without an obvious short-term solution to the quasi-dictatorship of the Harper government the easiest response is to deny it is happening – and then get used to it.

No opposition party has so far said that they are committed to reversing all the reactionary and destructive actions of this government. Yet this is what we should be demanding of them.

The myriad assaults on the nation being implemented by Harper are really just the latest chapter in what has been a revolution of lowered expectations: a deliberate and systematic culture war on ordinary Canadians deeply held values about the role of government. Starting in the late 1980s with the FTA campaign corporations and their propaganda agencies like the Fraser Institute, set out to reverse the so-called welfare state, and the belief system it rested on. The slogan for the free-traders was simple and repeated endlessly: there is no alternative. Of course there were alternatives, just none that the corporate state was going to allow.

Neo-liberals and the Christian right have been engaged in a thirty year process of trying to change the political culture into something more akin to the individualism of the US. To do that they had to demonize government – the institution of collective action which distinguished us from our southern neighbours.

The free trade battle was followed by the deficit hysteria campaign promoting the spectre of hitting the (non-existent) debt wall, softening Canadians up for huge cuts to social spending (courtesy Paul Martin). Demonizing government and government workers (lazy, privileged, self-interested, overpaid) also prepared the ground for the laying off of 50,000 federal employees. And, of course, as programs were diminished so too was the average citizen’s trust in government.

Lastly was the whole question of taxes and tax cuts – the litmus test of a new political culture of smaller govt and individual responsibility. Framing taxes as a burden, and telling people they knew how to spend their money better than government, the Liberal and Conservative regimes handed out billions upon billions of tax cuts in their efforts to downsize democracy.

Yet the whole project is turning out to be a failure. Canadians’ values have changed very little since the 1960s and ‘70s. What has changed are people’s expectations of what is possible from government. We cling stubbornly to our values but no longer expect to see them reflected in government policies. Until now. Thanks in large part to the wonderful activists in the occupy movement, suddenly Canadians are emerging from this war on democracy with the beginnings of what it will take to turn things around.

There is growing evidence that for a majority of Canadians personal experience is beginning to trump propaganda. As they see services decline, inequality rise, infrastructure crumble and democracy erode, what they have always known comes to the fore – that a civilized society is fair and that you have to pay for it.

For 31% of Canadians to say (as they did in this Ekos poll) that inequality is their number one concern, placing fiscal issues at 9% means this sentiment has been growing for sometime. It just took the catalyst of the occupy rebellion to bring it forward.

And the many polls revealing we are prepared to pay more taxes is an obvious extension of that moral imperative. The Ekos poll showed 59% chose investing in social programs as the highest government priority, compared to 16% who wanted to keep taxes as low as possible.

The Broadbent Institute’s recent polling was even more encouraging. Seventy-seven percent identified inequality as a major problem undermining Canadian values, were willing to do their part to address it and believed it should be a government priority to deal with it. While a large percentage supported fairer taxes (with the wealthy and corporations paying more) a significant majority, 64%, were willing to pay more themselves to save social programs – 72% of Liberal and NDP supporters and even 58% of Conservative supporters agreed. The majority support held across regions, gender, age, education level, and family income.

When the provincial NDP in Ontario recently called for a modest 2% tax hike for those earning half a million dollars or more the public response was overwhelmingly in favour – by a margin of 78% in favour to 17% opposed. The Liberal government read the polls – and agreed to the tax increase to get the NDP’s support for its budget.

Even in Calgary – in the heart of anti-tax country – 55% supported increasing municipal taxes while only 10% called for a decrease.

The media seems completely caught off guard by these and other polls. The Globe and Mail did an interactive poll the day before federal budget and declared: “What stood out was the across the board call for higher taxes.” People were willing to see the GST restored to 7%. A columnist for the National Post worried that the arguments against taxing the wealthy were not very convincing – especially when the mainstream is supportive.

When it comes to tax cuts the message is clear: enough is enough. At the same time as the polling is showing these remarkable results, there are now several organizations calling for fairer taxes: Doctors for Fair Taxation, Lawyers for Fair Taxation and Faith Leaders for Fair Taxation. There is also a national group, Canadians for Tax Fairness(which I am associated with) and groups beginning to form at the provincial level – such as Nova Scotians for Tax Fairness. There is the Canadian section of the international Uncut anti-austerity movement, with fourteen local chapters across the country. NUPGE, the federation of provincial government employee unions has been running an amazing tax campaign called All Together Now for a couple of years.

The movement for equality and tax fairness is barely off the ground and it already has majority support across the country. Now the opposition parties have to show that they have the courage and the principles to respond to this progressive sentiment. If the Liberals and the NDP ever manage to form a coalition government the first item on which they should agree is the need tax fairness and sufficient revenue to restore the Canada we once had and go beyond it. The Ekos poll revealed that 60% of Canadians say they would be more likely to vote for a party that pledged to raise taxes on the rich.

For Canadians and opposition parties the time for lowered expectations is over. Expect more.

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There will be lots of soul searching and head scratching going on this week about what happened with the NDP leadership race. The mechanics of the convention, the interesting lack of deal-making, and how the balloting progressed are all fodder for those who enjoy going through the entrails of leadership conventions. Others will be analyzing the various campaigns of the frontrunners, looking for weaknesses to explain how they could collectively have let Thomas Mulcair, the right-wing Liberal, pro-Israel, political bully become head of their party.

Two things shocked me about this race and its final two days. The first is that so many NDPers, part of a tightly-knit, hyper-loyal political culture steeped in progressive values could so casually elect a man who contradicts so many of their principles. Besides the disastrous result for the party and all progressives in the country, the election of Mulcair raises profound questions about the health of the party. There are two possibilities, neither attractive. One is that NDPers, like increasing numbers of Canadians in general, simply don’t read as much and that information about Mulcair did not get through to them. To what extent did NDPers devote time and energy to finding out about the candidates? In general, what is the state of member education and engagement in the party?

More worrisome is the possibility that many thousands of NDP members had indeed heard the negative aspects of Mulcair’s politics and voted for him anyway. That’s a very different problem. It reflects what I have observed about the NDP for decades now: its decreasing emphasis on policy and philosophy and the increased — political machine driven — preoccupation with winning seats in elections, often out of context of the political moment and oblivious to unintended consequences. One prominent NDPer I spoke to responded to my shock that he was supporting Mulcair with a sort of football game enthusiasm. “I think he can take on the bastard [Harper].”

Facing a ruthless tough guy? Get your own ruthless tough guy. And possibly create a monster you can’t control. It is as if policy, philosophy, and vision for the country have simply been devalued to the point where they are an afterthought or some vaguely interesting historical relic. There seems to have been a kind of “We’ll worry about policies later, let’s pick someone who can win first.”

The second shocker was the low turn-out. Around 50 per cent of the members, who have been inundated with campaign efforts for months now, bothered to vote. What happened? It was incredibly easy to vote and the conventional wisdom about the NDP is that it has the most enthusiastic and committed members of any party. Maybe not.

How will Mulcair’s “negatives” play out now that he is leader? These are significant negatives: his vicious, public attack on Libby Davies in 2010 showed unforgivably bad judgment. His failed negotiations with the Harper Conservatives for a cabinet position should by itself be a deal breaker for what it reveals about Mulcair’s ethics. When finance critic, he barely said a word about Harper’s destructive economic policies, and so one has to suspect he was in basic agreement. He boasted in 2007 about having slashed the work force of the Quebec environment department by 15 per cent, referring to himself as first and foremost a manager. That fits with his history of union-bashing — and support for NAFTA — while in Quebec’s Liberal cabinet.

It is impossible to predict what Mulcair will do on the whole range of issues that have people extremely worried. It could come down with serial games of chicken. How hard will the caucus fight, for example, on the Palestinian question? Will the caucus be willing to allow a fight to get out into the public? Mulcair has demonstrated that he is more than willing to do so, the consequences be damned. Do you protect the party from bad publicity or do you protect it from having its policies gutted?

Mulcair’s rigid fiscal conservatism may be another problem that comes up very quickly. Mulcair’s economic views are closer to Harper’s than they are to Jack Layton’s or any other recent NDP leader. How convincing will he be in attacking deficit slashing if he actually believes in it?

On the fair taxes front we will get nothing from Mulcair unless, again, the caucus uses all its power and authority to forces the issue. The strongest progressive voices in such a conflict may just find themselves in the shadow cabinet, making it tricky to criticize the party leader — and your “cabinet” boss.

On the critically important issue of Quebec, NDPers hoping that Mulcair is the man to retain what Jack built may quickly be disappointed. You would be hard-pressed to find a social activist in Quebec who thinks Mulcair is a progressive. He is widely disliked. With the Bloc resurgent, open rejection of Mulcair’s leadership by NGOs and movement groups could be disastrous. The scores of Quebec MPs have no social base of their own, and the vast majority have no riding associations. The party needs to build that base to keep its seats and Mulcair could be a barrier.

It all seems to be starting off well enough and we can hope that now that he has the position he wants, Mulcair will work hard to ensure unity — which one would assume is in his interest, too. He has kept Libby Davies as deputy leader and has said there will be no house cleaning of the party staff, most of whom opposed his candidacy.

Whatever happens, it will likely happen sooner than later.

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There are so many factors that NDP members have to look at when choosing who to vote for in their leadership race that I don’t envy them (I am not a member). How do you weigh the various elements: policies, philosophy, engaging personality, ability to take on Stephen Harper in the House, co-operation with the Liberals, and support for proportional representation? Are they likely to bring people together or cause divisions within the caucus and party? Are they their own person – do they have enough depth and self-confidence to stand on their own or are they too dependent on staff for their persona?

All of these factors are critical ones and all the potential winners – Peggy Nash, Brian Topp, Thomas Mulcair, Nathan Cullen, and Paul Dewar – have their strengths and weaknesses. Indeed, one of the reasons it is so difficult to predict a winner is that there many good candidates in this race. Most have a good set of policies all are committed to bringing in proportional representation. They are all smart.

But there are two other factors created by the current political moment which is dominated by a radical, right-wing libertarian with a majority in Parliament. The unprecedented threat to the country represented by Stephen Harper puts these two leadership traits at the top of the list to consider when NDPers mark their preferential ballots.

In my assessment only Nathan Cullen makes the grade and if I had a vote he would get it.

One of those traits is whether or not the candidate is stuck firmly in the old mold of the traditional politician. You know what I mean – calculating every word, dividing the audience into sectors to be massaged, being careful not to attract too much attention – or too little – by anything they say, saying the right things even if you know they aren’t committed to them, word-smithing to the point where they never say anything bold. And not saying things you know from other evidence that they believe. In short, all the things that contribute to Canadians’ cynicism about politics.

These traditional traits of politicians and those running for leadership arise primarily out of the culture of the party in question. Thousands of hours spent in hundreds of meetings with people equally dedicated to the party create these politicians. It is the source of excessive partisanship and it is reinforced by political staffers. In ordinary times these characteristics were not so problematic. Today, they could be fatal.

If the NDP is going to win on a political landscape characterized by Stephen Harper’s misanthropic politics at one end and the liberationist politics of the Occupy movement at the other, whoever wins the leadership had better be doing politics differently right out of the gate after March 24th . If they don’t – and I would bet money on this – the NDP will fail to maintain its current status in the House of Commons and certainly will not move beyond it. The next NDP leader absolutely must be able rebuild ordinary Canadians’ trust in politics and government. If they can’t do that, it won’t matter a whit if they can “take on” Stephen Harper in question period or have great policies.

Canadians have developed an unerring instinct for flim-flam in politics. One whiff of phoniness or calculation and you’re off the bus. There is not a phony bone in Cullen’s body – he breaks the mold.

The second, and closely related trait whose absence should be a deal-breaker, is whether or not the candidate is willing to put the country first and the party second. Of course they all claim to do this but the proof is in the pudding and only Cullen is clearly and genuinely committed to this principle. The reason this is important should be obvious to anyone who paid attention to the last three elections and the rise of Stephen Harper. Hyper-partisan politics put Harper where he is today – a calculating, narrow politics that decided on when to pull the plug Harper minority governments based almost exclusively on how many additional seats the NDP could win.

Watching the NDP make these calculations it was almost as if the possibility of Harper winning a majority never even entered into the calculation. The euphoria at NDP headquarters on election night last May when there should have been tears over a Harper majority demonstrated the price we pay for this kind of simplistic, almost cultish partisanship. We are losing our country as a result of it.

I happened to catch Nathan Cullen at his brief appearance in Powell River where I live. He talked about doing politics differently – building his campaign support at and among the grass roots, rejecting the traditional game of quickly getting MPs and other party luminaries lined up, being more NDP than the next candidate. It is apparently working – he has had the momentum in terms of member donations since mid-February. It took Jack Layton many years to develop the rapport with people that made him so popular. Cullen has it in spades without having to learn it – he is almost the anti-candidate.

It’s not just that he is instantly likable but when he speaks it is clear he has the country in mind and is acutely aware of the threat that Harper poses to the nation. He simply states: “We cannot have eight years of this man …who is not a conservative but a radical libertarian.” It took amazing courage to promote the idea of co-operating with the Liberals and Greens, pre-election, in a party that values loyalty almost more than anything else. It isn’t likely to happen – but the message was crystal clear: this time’s its different because the very existence of the country is at stake.

I was impressed by Cullen’s grasp of economic policy, the impact of trade deals and the change in corporate culture with the advent of globalization. But mostly I was just taken by how easy it seemed for him to be honest without having to try. On the partisan question he argued, I think correctly, that especially when it comes to young people, party loyalty just doesn’t matter the way it used to. Listening to him, with that perpetual optimistic grin, the thought came to me that this is perhaps the only candidate who could successfully engage with an Occupy crowd. When he speaks he is addressing all progressive Canadians, not just party members – and that’s contrary to convention, too.

Cullen – quick, witty and passionate – emphasizes the need to engage Canadians in a positive vision, saying he doesn’t want to just sit in a corner constantly going after the latest Harper outrage. And here, perhaps, he has the key to reviving Canadian democracy and politics. Harper has been nailed hard on several issues in recent weeks, from the email-snooping fiasco to robo-calls scandal and his poll numbers have not budged an inch. People’s expectations of politicians are a new and dangerous low. Politics as usual will get us the usual results. Doing it differently at least gives us a chance.

If that’s what you want, a chance to save the country and rebuild it, vote for Nathan Cullen.

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It might be useful for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to read a U.S. state department cable from Israel released by Wikileaks. It reveals that talk of Iran’s imminent production of nuclear weapons goes back to the early 1990s: “The head of the MFA’s [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] strategic affairs division recalled that GOI [Government of Israel] assessments from 1993 predicted that Iran would possess an atomic bomb by 1998 at the latest.”

The March 2005 cable to Washington cautioned that Israel’s estimates of Iranian nuclear capability “…need to be taken with caution.” While Harper recently reiterated the need for diplomacy and did not support military action, his emphasis that such action was “on the table” and his acceptance of Israel’s declaration that Iran is seeking to build a weapon makes the call for diplomacy hollow. Harper seems immune not only to the facts surrounding the Iranian nuclear issue but to the consequences of adopting Israel’s position as Canada’s own.

One of those consequences is that it encourages Israel to consider a military attack on its own without U.S. support. Accepting Israel’s declaration that Iran is seeking — and would actually use — nuclear weapons, threatens to keep the price of oil climbing and undermines any hope of global economic recovery. The other critical consequence is that Harper’s carte blanche for Israel is directly at odds with the U.S. position and undermines President Barack Obama’s efforts to prevent a catastrophic military adventure in the most volatile region in the world.

Harper is proud of his lock-step support of the U.S. on most foreign policy issues. But he has made it known that Canada will support Israel no matter what, which in effect means that Israel, not the United States, is Canada’s de-facto closest ally on Middle East policy. That is a reckless foreign policy based not on Canada’s interests but on Harper’s domestic politics. While you would never know it from mainstream media coverage, the U.S. officially remains unconvinced that Iran is actually seeking to build a nuclear weapon. And no one in the U.S. military actually believes that Iran would ever adopt a first strike policy even if it did have a weapon. In short, the U.S. does not accept Israel’s insistence that Iran is an “existential threat” to Israel as Harper clearly does.

Three developments on the Iran-Israel front should be of interest to a prime minister actually engaged in a rational foreign policy. The first is the recent parliamentary elections in Iran which severely weakened the political clout of the unpredictable and provocative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The elections resulted in a resounding victory for the supporters of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme ruler, who in the past had supported Ahmadinejad. Khamenei’s increased power is especially significant because before the election he made the clearest statement yet about Iran’s intentions regarding nuclear weapons.

In a speech to nuclear scientists he stated: “The purpose of the uproar they [the West] cause is to stop us. They know that we are not after nuclear weapons. They already know this. I do not have any doubts that in the countries that are opposed to us, the organizations in charge of decision-making are fully aware that we are not after nuclear weapons.

“Nuclear weapons are not at all beneficial to us. Moreover, from an ideological and faqih [Islamic legal] perspective, we consider developing nuclear weapons as unlawful. We consider using such weapons as a big sin. We also believe that keeping such weapons is futile and dangerous, and we will never go after them. They know this, but they stress the issue in order to stop our movement.”

One of the predicted outcomes of the election is that it will unify political power in the country — a change from the factional infighting which has allowed the West to portray Iran as volatile and unpredictable and also played into the hands of those promoting the position that Iran was seeking nuclear weapons. There is increasing evidence that the U.S. and Israel are getting further apart on their positions on Iran, especially regarding the possibility of a military attack. In an interview in mid-February, Army General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “A strike at this time would be destabilizing and wouldn’t achieve their long-term objectives. I wouldn’t suggest, sitting here today, that we’ve persuaded them that our view is the correct view and that they are acting in an ill-advised fashion.”

This is the context for Harper’s position of supporting Israel no matter what. Yet he seems unaware that the U.S. could use Canada’s help in persuading Israel to back away from the threat of military action. Or he is simply ignoring it.

More evidence of the growing divide between Israel and the U.S. was the reaction of Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu to Dempsey’s interview. Netanyahu was furious and actually accused the top military commander of the U.S. of “serving Iranian interests.”

What he meant was Dempsey was weakening the credibility of Netanyahu’s carefully constructed propaganda that Israel and/or the U.S. would bomb Iran if it didn’t comply with demands to abandon its nuclear program. For the first time it seems that Obama is confident enough to stand up to Israel and the awesome power of its lobby in the U.S. – AIPAC, the American Israel Political Action Committee. According to U.S. blogger Jim Lobe, Netanyahu and AIPAC were both pushing for the U.S. to drop the option of “containment” (through sanctions and other measures) and that stopping Iran from developing a weapon is a “vital national interest” of the U.S.

That would have left military action as the only real option if diplomacy didn’t work. But Obama did not comply (though in his speech to AIPAC he denied that U.S. policy amounted to containment). It’s not hard to see why Netanyahu was so furious. A recent poll in Israel shows lukewarm support for a go-it-alone Israeli attack on Iran’s multitude of nuclear facilities. Just 19 per cent favoured such an attack while 42 per cent did so if the U.S. approved (and presumably helped). Thirty-four percent opposed an attack while 19 per cent thought it would have no effect on Iran’s program.

One of the most telling responses of the comprehensive poll was the 68 per cent who believed that such an attack would unleash retaliation by Hezbollah, the well-armed and highly disciplined force that humiliated the Israel army in its invasion of Lebanon in 2006. What is probably worse for Netanyahu is that the Israeli military believes a strike by Israel alone would fail — it is just not strong enough, has too few planes and effective armaments and would have to risk flying through other countries’ air space to make a strike. Worse, this failed strike could unleash Iran’s very effective and highly accurate Shahab-3 medium range ballistic missiles (flying time: 10 minutes) on dozens of targets in Israel.

According to Nahum Barnea, a journalist with the Israel’s largest Hebrew newspaper Yedihot Ahahronot “… the IDF [Israeli Defence Force] Head of Staff Beni Gantz, Mossad Director Tamir Pardo, Head of Aman (IDF Military Intelligence Corps) Aviv Cochabi, and the Head of Shin Beth Yoram Cohen — in other words, Israel’s leading generals — oppose an attack on Iran.”

So a rogue Israeli attack on Iran is extremely unlikely, especially in this U.S. election year. Last time around Barack Obama received 78 per cent of the Jewish vote. He is totally confident that he can repeat that in November and will not back an Israeli attack. But he must be very anxious about another consequence of Israeli hysteria over Iran — the rise in gas prices, something the Republican candidates are already attacking him for. Not only will high prices anger American voters, it will have a chilling effect on the now-growing U.S. economy (227,00 new jobs in February).

Does Stephen Harper even know these facts about the Israeli-Iran situation, and if he does, does he care? It’s impossible to determine for sure, though given his contempt for the expertise in the foreign affairs department, we can expect the worst. Harper might want to reconsider contributing to the Iran hysteria and higher oil prices. Canada lost 2,800 jobs in February — it needs a robust U.S. economy to help recover those lost jobs. [Tyee]

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You can say one thing for the powers that be in the banking industry. They’ve got a lot of nerve.

This past week our own finance minister Jim Flaherty, along with Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, came out strongly in opposition to a modest proposal to regulate the US banking system. Their interventions followed a concerted effort by American bank lobbyists to spark international opposition to US regulatory reforms.

What a shameful spectacle. Less than four years ago the world was holding its breath for fear the crisis in the hyper-deregulated US financial system would cause a second Great Depression. Now Canada and other foreign governments, cheered on by US banking interests, are doing their best to block US legislation that would curb the industry’s worst excesses.

The initiative Flaherty and Carney attacked is a proposal by Paul Volcker, the former chair of the US Federal Reserve. Simply put, the “Volcker rule” would prevent financial institutions – US or subsidiaries of foreign banks – that are backstopped by US taxpayers from behaving like hedge funds and trading for their own account.

Flaherty and Carney are trying to cast their opposition as standing for Canadian regulatory sovereignty. But since all five of Canada’s largest banks drew on emergency loans from the US Federal Reserve during the crisis, the US certainly has a moral argument in favour of being able to regulate the behaviour of Canadian bank subsidiaries operating within its territory.

After the financial industry’s speculative bets on the US housing market went sour, US and foreign banks got $1.2 trillion of the American public’s money in emergency loans and $700 billion through the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The banks’ weak defence is that they have paid all the money back – an argument that can be challenged because the US government is still holding the bag for bad deals the banks made with companies like AIG.

But why banks get to have first call on this extreme level of government resources when they get themselves into trouble speaks loudly about their influence over the political system. Analysts of the secret loans given to Wall Street during the crisis point out that $1.2 trillion they got is enough to cover all the 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages in the US.

Secure in the notion that their companies were too critical to the global economy for the US government to let them fail, CEO’s of the big US banks had continually ratcheted up the level of risk they tolerated in their trading divisions. It was a kind of “heads I win, and tails, I still win” ultimatum to taxpayers that the Volcker rule would help put an end to.

So did Wall Street learn anything from its near-death experience in 2008? In the immediate aftermath of the financial meltdown, the heads of US banks were called before Congressional inquiries to explain what went wrong. Some of their statements suggested they were genuinely shaken by the scale of the catastrophe and understood the need for government regulation. John Mack, CEO of Morgan Stanley, admitted that government support had prevented “a collapse of the financial system”. Mack stated that “the financial crisis has also made it clear that regulators simply didn’t have the visibility, tools or authority to protect the stability of the financial system as a whole.”

But that was then. Like a heart attack survivor who immediately goes back to eating fries and gravy, Wall Street’s biggest firms have quickly returned to lobbying against regulatory reform. Even though during the financial crisis Morgan Stanley topped the list in the size of loans it drew from the Federal Reserve, now the bank is organizing international opposition to the Volcker rule.

Lobbyists from the US banking industry are visiting foreign embassies like Canada’s and issuing anti-Volcker rule position papers. According to one analyst, “The criticism of foreign governments on behalf of their banks is helping U.S. banks fight the rule.” Mark Carney, for example, is claiming that somehow the Volcker rule will do irreparable harm to the Canadian government’s ability to sell its bonds and will “undermine the resilience of the Canadian financial system.”

Simon Johnson, a former chief economist with the IMF, called Carney’s criticism absurd. He wrote in the New York Times that he could understand why the big banks would oppose the Volcker rule because they want to continue to engage in high risk/high return activities with the implicit backing of the US taxpayer. Johnson questions, though, why the Bank of Canada would be siding with Wall Street given that the Bank “would ordinarily be expected to take a broader perspective, at least aligned with the social interests of the Canadian population.”

Johnson notes that Carney worked for Goldman Sachs for thirteen years, but charitably says that he does not think this background explains Carney’s position on the Volcker rule. I’m not so sure. Bankers make up the world’s most powerful boys club and Carney is clearly still a member in good standing. What better way to maintain that standing than by helping out your Wall Street buddies.

In his own clearly exasperated response to Carney’s argument, Paul Volcker has written a Financial Times editorial explaining that nothing in his proposal would prevent American commercial banks from finding buyers for foreign government’s debt – they just would be prevented from speculating on this debt themselves. He also points out that foreign governments seemed to be able to raise money in international markets before the US market was deregulated in the 1990’s to allow their banks to trade in this debt. Volcker said we should “not be swayed by the smokescreen of lobbyists dedicated to protecting the interests of some highly compensated traders and their risk-prone banks.”

There are two significant initiatives to try to advert another financial catastrophe. In Europe, governments are proposing a financial transaction tax to curtail the turbo-charged speculation going on in securities markets. In the US, there is the Volcker rule, a key component of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. Canada is on record as opposing them both. To use a Lord of the Ring’s analogy, Flaherty and Carney are playing the supportive roles of Orcs to the Dark Lords of international finance.

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There are so many areas of conventional democratic governance being challenged or eliminated by the Harper wrecking crew it is hard to keep up. Those searching for a line in the sand that even this government won’t cross still haven’t found it. So far, it seems, there is nothing in the broad field of democratic governance (save the military and prisons) that is sacrosanct.

Minimally, all governments take seriously the protection of their citizens; otherwise there is scarcely any point in having one. Yet a recent CBC report reveals that that the Harper government has virtually eliminated monitoring of the ozone layer over Canada. The government has shut down four of five very sophisticated monitoring stations leaving only a single station – at UBC in Vancouver – still gathering information about this critical aspect of our environment.

In doing so, Canada is once again demonstrating that it is becoming a rogue state. The monitoring of the ozone layer – which protects the earth from harmful radiation – is an international task requiring the co-operation of many countries. Canada, because of it enormous territory and its large share of the Arctic where the ozone layer is most threatened – is absolutely key to global monitoring. Last week, according to CBC TV’s Environmental Unit, “…five scientists from high-profile U.S. universities and NASA released a scathing critique of Canada’s cuts to its ozone monitoring, saying it is jeopardizing the world’s ability to watch for holes in the ozone layer and pollutants high in the atmosphere.”

But beyond the contempt shown for the international community, the deliberate sabotage of ozone monitoring again demonstrates two of the most prominent features of the Harper government: its disdain and even hostility towards science (and it own scientists) and its determination to promote the oil industry and protect it from any possible criticism.

It is not just ozone monitoring that has been gutted. In a response to the revelation Environment Canada acknowledged that other pollutants-monitoring was also being downgraded: “The number of staff in measurement activities for the monitoring of ozone, tropospheric pollution and atmospheric transport of toxic chemicals has remained constant but their work now includes other departmental priorities.”

Tropospheric pollution is essentially pollution particles caused by combustion – industrial, automobile, forest fires, etc. – the kind of pollution that is the most dangerous to human health.

The same day that the revelations about the Conservatives’ cuts to pollution monitoring were published, an article in the New York Times reported on several new studies that revealed living in polluted air is even more hazardous to your health than previously thought. One study found that air breathed by most Americans (it’s hardly any different in Canadian cities) “…greatly accelerates declines in measures of memory and attention span.” A study in Boston concluded that the odds of having a stroke increased by 30% even on days when pollution was classified as moderate – a category that is supposed to suggest minimal danger to health. It went up to 60% for bad pollution days and the effects were almost immediate – within 12-14 hours.

A study published in the American Journal of Medicine revealed a strong link between common pollutants – carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide – “…raised a person’s immediate risk of suffering a heart attack..” increasing heart rates and thickening the blood, accelerating the development of atherosclerosis.

Why would any government deliberately take steps that they know will make it more difficult to protect the health of its citizens? A Health Canada report published in 2005 concluded that nearly 6,000 people a year in Canada died as a direct result of air pollution and that the health costs of that pollution were a billion dollars a year. So clearly the Harper government isn’t concerned about Canadians dying or the strain on the Medicare budget.

The Harper government’s priority is not the health of Canadians or the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink. Its single-minded purpose seems to be to promote the oil industry and protect it from any criticism. Demonizing critics of the tar sands as enemies of the country is just one small part of that goal. Eliminating scientific data that could link the oil industry to negative health effects is another. Why else would the government stop monitoring for pollution?

If the message is giving you trouble, shoot the messengers. That’s exactly what Harper has done and will continue to do in his March budget. Last fall Environment Canada announced that some 700 scientists and researchers would be losing their jobs. Sixty were fired in January.

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It is hard to credit the latest statements and actions by Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. On both Iran and Israel Baird seems to almost deliberately seek to humiliate both himself and the country he is supposed to represent on the international stage. Taking an ultra-orthodox rabbi (whose organization opposes any Palestinian state) with him on an official visit to Israel is not just bizarre but dangerous. And suggesting, essentially, that Iran has a first-strike policy against Israel (with non-existent nuclear weapons) while comparing its leader to Hitler, puts Baird firmly in the company of drunks in a bar room exchange of tough talk.

For Stephen Harper to let this crude and ignorant buffoon loose as our principal face to the world may only be understandable if we assume that everything Harper does is for a domestic audience. He simply doesn’t care what the world thinks. There has always been a kind of visceral disdain for things foreign amongst the population which makes up Harper’s core vote. Perhaps willful ignorance and a penchant for bar room tough talk is exactly what qualifies Baird for his job.

It is hardly new that Harper’s ministers and Harper himself operate with little reference to the professional civil service that most governments rely on for policy advice. He doesn’t trust bureaucrats or their traditional role of guiding government policy. For Harper the civil service is at best an impediment to his agenda, at worst a political enemy — the equivalent of another political party. He has now effectively gagged every public employee who might otherwise brief the media — and citizens — on even on the mundane day-to-day operations of government.

By now the Harper government’s Middle East policy is well known — continuous posturing about Arab dictatorships and terrorists and a sycophantic pandering to the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Harper treats all Palestinians, even elected representatives, as if they were terrorists. While Canada’s official position on a two-state solution (based on 1967 borders) hasn’t changed, Harper refuses to utter the phrase. While he pays lip service to the need for diplomacy regarding Iran, his predominant posture is war-mongering at it worst. If he had a sabre, he would be rattling it.

But even in this extremist context Baird’s recent behaviour is outrageous and a national embarrassment. His recent trip to Israel caused cringing by his hosts who, according to the Globe’s Patrick Martin, were extremely uncomfortable with Baird’s companion, Rabbi Chaim Mendelsohn, the head of the Chabad organization in Canada — an ultra-orthodox Hasidic movement noted for its aggressive proselytizing. The movement believes its former leader, Menachem Schneerson, was the Messiah.

What nuanced public policy goal was intended by bringing this controversial rabbi on an official trip is impossible to decipher. Indeed, it seems to contradict any public policy objective, certainly any that might have been put together by the professionals at foreign affairs. Baird was so over the top in his praise of Israel — constantly repeating that Canada was Israel’s best friend — that Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz mused: “I think Canada’s an even better friend of Israel than we are.”

Orthodox Jews and their parties have always played an important role in Israeli governments, being part of any governing coalition. But in recent years they have become more aggressive in Israel society, especially in their efforts to restrict the rights of Israeli Arabs. Secular and liberal Jews have become so uncomfortable with this trend that many have left the country.

Just what message Baird thought we was delivering to his hosts and to Israelis in general is anyone’s guess. But it is in the area of the peace process, such as it is, that Baird’s choice of companion is most troublesome. Chabad is a firm believer in Greater Israel — which includes all of the Palestinian land seized in the 1967 war. According to Chabad, Greater Israel “. . . is the land promised to us by G-d – not the UN. And we may not give away an iota to our enemies, for it is ours by Divine Will.” This stance effectively eliminates any possibility of land for peace and certainly any negotiations based on 1967 borders — the position of virtually every key player in the “peace” process, including the United States.

It is also the basis for Canada’s official policy. Indeed last June it was Baird who made this clear telling the media after the G8 meetings: “We support, obviously, that that solution has to be based on the ’67 border, with mutually agreed upon swaps, as President Obama said.” If it’s so obvious, then why would Baird bring with him as part of his official delegation the head of Chabad in Canada, an organization whose beliefs make such a solution impossible?

It begs the question: who is actually determining Canada’s policy towards Israel and who, or what organization, persuaded Baird that taking Rabbi Chaim Mendelsohn along on an official visit was a good idea?

Baird’s statements on Iran are almost as bizarre and troublesome. It is as if Baird simply shoots from the lip without any consultation with his own officials — but with the apparent blessing of his boss in the PMO. Responding to hyperbolic rhetoric from Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei about excising the Israeli “cancer” from the region, Baird casually compared the religious leader to Adolph Hitler: “Hitler wrote Mein Kampf more than a decade before he became Chancellor of Germany. . . ” But he was just warming up: “. . . it’s not just an Israeli question. The fear in the Arab world, in the entire region, the Gulf, and the entire Middle East is palpable on this issue. And it’s increasingly a significant security threat for the West: for Canada, the United States and our allies in Europe.”

This is little more than adolescent running off at the mouth — again, no strategic thought involved, just a reckless analogy and sweeping, unsubstantiated statements about the most politically complex region in the world. In the same CTV Question Period interview Baird stated that “of course” diplomatic efforts must be maximized and given every chance of succeeding. I wonder how Baird would explain his comparison of Iran’s leadership to Hitler were he to play a role in such diplomacy.

At the same time that he was pointlessly demonizing Iran’s leadership, Baird was repeating one of his most preposterous claims — that Iran would actually use nuclear weapons if they had them. On the latter point, Baird and Harper ignore the fact that U.S. intelligence agencies and the Pentagon — despite renewed rhetoric about Iran’s nuclear program — are still not even convinced that Iran is trying to build a bomb. Baird has stated: “We believe Iran constitutes the greatest threat to peace and security in the world.” This is a country that has never invaded any of its neighbours and compared to the Israeli penchant for intervening wherever it pleases, is isolationist. Yet for Baird it is more dangerous than Pakistan and North Korea which actually have nuclear weapons and are extremely unstable.

Baird’s conviction that Iran would use nuclear weapons matches Stephen Harper’s rhetoric: “In my judgment, these are people who have a particular, you know, a fanatically religious worldview, and their statements imply to me no hesitation about using nuclear weapons if they see them achieving their religious or political purposes.” Such a thoughtless analysis is irresponsible. The suggestion that Iran would use a nuclear weapon against Israel (which has 200 of them) for “religious or political purposes” is an opinion unsupported by any other Western leader.

Were this rhetoric emanating from a youth parliament or an all night pub we could treat it with bemusement. But these casual and ill-informed “diplomatic” interventions are focused on one of the most volatile regions in the world where every word from Western leaders is pored over, parsed and parsed again in a search for new trends or positions. If Iranians pay any attention to them (let’s hope they don’t) the effect will be to generate even more public support to the Ayatollahs and political hard-liners — the most likely sources of support for the development of nuclear weapons. All of the Harper government’s statements imply support for military intervention in Iran. And that, according to literally every Middle East expert, would be catastrophic.

A conservative foreign policy is one thing. A reckless one something else again. At the moment Canada’s approach in the Middle East is simply dangerous. We would contribute more by saying nothing.

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Two recent stories out of Ottawa underline the ongoing political and economic assault on ordinary Canadians. More Canadians are now working for low wages than at any time in decades, continuing a trend that began in the early 1990s, and Stephen Harper has announced major changes to retirement benefits — including delaying Old Age Security (OAS) eligibility to age 67. What kind of society beggars those of its citizens who worked all their lives and now want to retire in dignity while privileging the rich and super-rich by slashing their income taxes and allowing them to transfer wealth to their children untouched?

Since the mid-1980s, and accelerating with the signing of the Canada-U.S. “free trade” deal, the guiding principle of neo-liberalism seems to have been “Ask not what your economy can do for you, ask what you can do for your economy.” This reframing of the relationship between the economy, society and democracy has been largely successful, with most Canadians accepting this personification of the economy and willing to adjust their lives to accommodate it. The economy is now defined as the narrow interests of global corporations. The old notion that economy should serve the national interest and that of workers and their communities now seems almost quaint.

But the results of this remaking of the world of work are increasingly disastrous for working people and the economy, even using capitalism’s own measures. Capitalism has to grow just to survive and the fact that the biggest firms in Canada are sitting on up to half a trillion dollars of cash that they cannot or will not invest does not bode well for growth. Ultimately that’s a good thing as the obsession with growth is at the root of climate change and the rapid depletion of resources. But until we have governments which recognize this, we are all trapped in a growth paradigm and suffer when it fails.

Yet there is precious little recognition that deregulation and the endless promotion of the interests of capital are at the root of the problem. The half trillion in unusable capital represents part of the distortion of the economy caused by policies of labour flexibility and the suppression of wages and salaries. That much and more has no doubt been accumulated by the wealthy, as their share of annual income continues to grow — from seven per cent in the 1970s to close to 15 per cent today (just above the level of 1929). Like the cash-bloated corporations, the wealthy will only spend so much. The rest they squirrel away in stocks and bonds.

This inequality train is picking up speed, according to the OECD, which in a recent study pointed out not only that the wage gap here is at a record high (and well above the 34 country OECD average), but acknowledged its impact on stable economic recovery. Nations with high levels of income inequality experience shorter, less sustained periods of economic growth.

But neo-liberal ideology is immune to rational analysis and mere facts. There is no interest shown by governments or corporations in the question of inequality. The federal government is set to fire some 30,000 federal public employees (How many will end up “self-employed?”), and Caterpillar Inc. feels completely at ease demanding an almost 60 per cent roll-back in wages and benefits at its Electromotive plant in London.

So having succeeded in giving capitalists everything they asked for (and some things they didn’t ask for), what do we have? Keep in mind that the object of consumer capitalism is to sell stuff. It seems that the captains of industry have forgotten this. But while the advertising and marketing of more and more stuff goes on apace, the facts facing working and middle class families paint a totally unsustainable spending picture.

Some 60 per cent of wage and salary earners state that they are one paycheque away from financial insolvency.

The Canadian savings rate is the lowest it’s been for decades.

The debt to income level is the highest it’s ever been, as people try to maintain their standards of living through borrowing.

The net real increase in average pay between 1980 and 2005 was a grand total of $51.

And, of course, the criminal greed of the financial industry is still threatening the world economy. Its aftermath here has resulted in Canadian un- and underemployment, which averaged 10.6 per cent in 2011, and for youth aged 15-24 a brutal 19.7 per cent.

But it is not just private sector income that has declined. The social wage — public services provided by our taxes — has also been dropping thanks to labour flexibility policies and spending cutbacks. Cuts to EI eligibility and social assistance were made in the mid-1990s on the unsupported assumption that they provided a disincentive for workers to work. By 2005, a quarter of Canadian workers were putting in 50 hour weeks, often for no extra pay. Again, these measures enhanced the corporate bottom line and filled corporate coffers — with the money they now can’t invest because there is no new demand.

The rationale for these policies in the 1990s was to enhance Canada’s competitiveness in its trading relationship with the U.S. Indeed, Paul Martin made it clear that pushing international trade was the country’s only economic development strategy. But when the country you want to export to is pursuing the same policies of driving incomes down, exports decline just as domestic consumer spending does.

There is a solution to this ideological insanity, but don’t hold your breath for any Canadian government, federal or provincial, to implement it any time soon. If private capital refuses to invest because its policy preferences have snuffed out demand, then governments must do two things. First, they must reverse labour flexibility policies and return the social safety net to, at least, its previous state. This goes beyond providing dignity for ordinary Canadians. For tens of thousands of small and medium businesses, it actually means more money being spent in their stores.

Secondly, if the private sector refuses to invest the money it has accumulated (with the help of government policies), then this is the time to massively increase public investment. This cannot simply be temporary stimulus but a permanent policy shift back towards a coherent and creative — and high wage — industrial policy that directs the economy rather than assuming allocation of capital can only be done by the market. Public investment must also bring back some dignity to working people in the form of child care, home care, Pharmacare and accessible post-secondary education — all measures that would also enhance the economy.

Public investment could also begin address the crisis of over-production by gradually exploring a long term de-growth strategy (including a different kind of growth) which addresses climate change and the rapid depletion of resources that scientists tell us is threatening the planet. Only by radically reducing the role of private capital can such an outcome even be imagined.

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Where will you be and what will you be doing when the first giant oil tanker, (there will be two plying the waters every three days) carrying over 200,000 gallons of tar sands goop diluted with solvent, spills its load into the pristine waters of the northern BC coast? We often remember catastrophic events by recalling exactly what we were doing and where we were when we first heard the news, I guess because they were so unthinkable they brought us to a halt, emotionally and psychologically – time stopped. I was driving down a street in Waterloo, Ontario when I heard the news of the Montreal Massacre and I can still vividly recall my stomach turning as disbelief turned to revulsion. I will never forget that moment – and you will never forget the oil spill moment, if we let it happen.

When the global oil companies run your country – when they own your government – economic and environmental catastrophe are literally guaranteed. In Canada the oil companies and the Harper government know with a sinister certainty that an oil spill catastrophe is coming. The precautionary principle, rooted in the notion of the common good and established on a foundation of science, has no place in the calculations of global capital. It is replaced by risk assessment, cost/benefit analysis. But the assessment isn’t aimed at ensuring something bad won’t happen as it seems to imply. It is based on a cost/benefit analysis. How much will the oil spill cost? That it will happen is actually part of the calculation. Remember the Ford Pinto?

Stephen Harper muses about the evil being practiced by environmental and “other radical groups” as they engage in the democratic process provided to them (the hearings on the Enbridge pipeline) by his government. It’s as if by doing exactly what they are called upon to do, they are endangering the nation. This follows Harper’s repeated talk about the pipeline being necessary for the good of the country and the economy – and his declaration that anyone who criticizes the tar sands or the pipeline is sabotaging the economy. He calls then “ideological.” But ideology is meaning in the service of power – and all of it to date is coming from Harper and Big Oil.

This spinning is part of the preparation his government needs as it plans to first, denigrate, and second ignore, the environmental panel set to spend 18 months examining the pipeline and its impacts. He needs to undermine the panel’s work because we already know the project’s impact. The opposition will be backed by science and popular opposition. Any panel decision that gives the go-ahead for Gateway will be one that ignores virtually all the evidence. To maintain its credibility the panel may well rule against it and force Harper to reject its findings. And without a massive public campaign that can actually threaten Conservative-held ridings in BC, that is what will happen.

Harper’s dogged dedication to the oil patch could be his undoing as it privileges one sector of the economy at the expense of virtually all the others (except the financial sector which with government borrowing and the CMHC ensuring mortgages, never loses). This puts the Harper government in a different category than previous neo-liberal governments of Mulroney, Chretien and Martin. All of these governments and their leaders developed most policy positions at the behest of the Business Council on National Issues, now the Canadian Council of Chief Executives.

By delivering on the list of priorities (Paul Martin was presented with an even ten in 1994 and delivered on them all) Canadian governments pre-Harper actually balanced their promotion of corporate interests. This was, said the 150 CEOs, good for the economy – that is, their economy. The BCNI/CCCE represented the biggest players in all the key sectors and their policy interests were balanced by the time the package of preferences (demands?) were presented to the sitting finance minister.

That practice, where no budget was ever presented to Parliament before being vetted by the most powerful CEOs in the country, effectively ended when Stephen Harper became prime minister. The smartest man in the room does not take kindly to being told what to do even by the most powerful. It might have something to do with the fact that they can’t buy favours any more with the new election financing rules.

But actually it goes back twenty years to the formation of the Reform Party where Stephen Harper, as Manning’s policy director, blended neo-liberal policies with culturally conservative policies to create a wholly new phenomenon: a right-wing libertarian party posing as populist to ensure a loyal and generous base. Of course it was Preston Manning who led the party. He had carefully chosen the timing (having got it wrong once before) to coincide with a growing populist discontent amongst prairie and Alberta Conservatives who felt betrayed by Mulroney.

But he and his party needed a kick start. And fortunately for him the oil companies were eager to find someone who could put together just such a party – one that would never mess with them again. The national energy policy of Pierre Trudeau still traumatized them and they wanted insurance that no one would ever get their hands on their oil. One renegade oil man told me, laughing, that people in the oil industry really, really believe that because they found it, it belongs to them – any tax paid or royalty extracted is simply theft.

The oil men knew Manning having researched him and believed he might just fit the bill. But seeing as they were paying the tab to get the party off the ground (an expensive proposition) they wanted Manning close by where they could keep an eye on him, and they wanted him to immerse himself in oil industry political culture to make it the dominant driver of the party. So they insisted that he move from Edmonton to Calgary. Manning obliged. And that was the beginning of the Big Oil Party, brilliantly peddled as a party of the little man all the while planning policies that would impoverish him.

And by declaring themselves a Western party – the slogan was “The West wants in” – Manning and Harper reinforced the importance of Alberta, its American-inspired sense of hyper-independence and, of course, its oil. Indeed, this sense of profound difference that dominates the ruling political elite – reflected in the “firewall letter” penned by Harper and others – that contributes to the privileging of the oil industry in Canada. Not only was Alberta the most “free market” province of all, it was the one that resisted most vigorously the social democratic state that evolved in the 1960s.

Many people from all sides of the political divide – including Peter Lougheed – have pointed out that the rapid expansion of the tar sands is just really bad economic and energy policy. It is also extremely bad national security policy. Most of Quebec and the Maritime provinces rely exclusively for their oil on the Middle East producers – the so-called “unethical oil” of Harper’s spinmeisters. Sending oil to China that could otherwise make the whole country self-sufficient is not just an absence of a national energy policy – it is a declaration the national government simply isn’t national and has no intention of becoming so.

But for all Harper’s touted strategic genius he sometimes seems perversely stuck to a policy that will actually hurt him. He couldn’t resist bashing culture in the middle of the 2008 election and infuriated Quebec, probably losing a majority. This time he is tying his political future in a high-stakes fight (it will dwarf anything seen before) for a pipeline which the majority of oiligarchs thinks is not even needed. Maybe he likes fighting with one hand tied behind his back.

There seem to be three fronts in this battle, each of them distinct and each playing a key and overlapping role with the others. The first comprises the scores of NGOs, First Nations and community groups (and individuals) who will bury the assessment committee in first rate evidence of the madness of the project and its looming, serial disasters. Then comes the provincial government of BC which, under the Liberals, is schizophrenic on then issue but may yet come out against the project. But under the NDP, who I predict will win handily in 2013 as the panel reports, the provincial government must be persuaded to use every power at its disposal to halt this monstrosity. And lastly, folks in the formal political arena (with the help of the NGOs) have as their task identifying 10 or 12 or more Conservative MPS for defeat on this issue.

All of this is on-going at different levels and speeds. And if you are not a part of any of these political fronts you need to take out you checkbooks or credit cards and ask yourself how much it is worth to not experience that horrible moment you will never forget. Not sure of who to give to? Here are five groups which my sources suggests are using their resources and strategic intelligence most effectively: West Coast Environmental Law, Headwaters Initiative, Dogwood Initiative, Friends of Wild salmon and the Wilderness Committee. They – though not just them – are your voice. Make it powerful.

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