A Few Things

I’m finally back home in Ottawa after two weeks of music camp and a yearlong sojourn in the French capital.

There hasn’t really been that much breaking political news as parliamentarians are currently enjoying three and a half months of leave, but there are a few little events on which I’d like to comment.

I just read this morning in the Ottawa Citizen that the government has decided to put an end to the tradition of MPs being served free gourmet hot meals by replacing the current Parliament Hill French restaurant with a canteen service which will serve the members airline meals packaged in a west Ottawa plant. I have to applaud Conservative MPs for so happily forfeiting such a luxury for the good of the Canadian taxpayer, but I think they may have been pushing things a little too far by having themselves served airline food. On my flight back from Paris yesterday, I was served Air Canada food. And although it wasn’t as awful as I expected, I don’t think I would have wanted to have it before question period or a committee meeting. That’s why I’m feeling apprehensive! Our country needs its parliamentarians to do a good job, and if they’re eating airline food, that may become more difficult…

I’ve also heard that Harper decided to schedule by-elections in two Quebec ridings, including the traditional Liberal stronghold of Outremont, for the 17^th of September. It will be extremely interesting to see how these contests play out, as all four parties will have a shot at winning a seat. It’s sad to see that by-elections weren’t called in the four other vacant ridings, including those of Bob Rae and Martha Hall-Findlay, but the costs savings of calling them all at once are actually quite minimal, and previous Prime-Ministers have been just as bad.

Leaving For Music Camp

I'm leaving for a two week music camp today and won't have access to a computer until I get back. I'll therefore be taking a two week holiday from blogging. I wish you well, and I'll see you in two weeks.

Selling Like Hotcakes

I don’t know if you recall my post of … in which I talked about the government’s unwillingness to support Canadian firms on the international playing field. Well, wouldn’t you know it, Canada’s largest miner, Alcan, has just announced its takeover by the Rio-Tinto group of London. It took a month for my prophecy to materialise!

I really don’t think that people understand just how important an issue this is to our country’s economy. I’m by no means an economic nationalist and believe that takeovers are natural processes which play an important role in a stable and functional economy. Canada’s problem is that the number and value of the takeovers is alarmingly high, and to make matter worse, they majority of them involve the mining industry (Inco, Falconbridge, Dofasco, LionOre, Algoma, and now Alcan).

Although buyers usually assure the government that all Canadian operations will be conserved, the problem has much less to do with the company itself than with its supporting industries who are reliant on orders from the giants to make ends meet. The reality is that foreign companies are much less likely to invest in Canadian projects and technology than our own firms, so a sudden disappearance of a large number of domestic companies can have a devastating impact on the whole sector.

And it goes beyond pure financial issues; a decrease in investment in a specific industry can also create a knowledge void with extremely long lasting impacts. As Ian Telfer, CEO of GoldCorp, one of Canada’s last remaining giants: "It's not only the financial impact of them not being here, it's also the knowledge base that starts to disappear".

It’s no fluke that so Canadian companies are being taken over; the government is to blame. This gets us back to my previous post: the government needs to finally give Canadian firms the tools to compete.

A Farce

I just want to make a quick comment about the government’s latest 4.5 billion dollar commission of 8 new frigates mandated to defend the Northwest Passage. I don’t want to sound like a permanent cynic, but this purchase really is a farce. It’s an important addition to our navy, but it doesn’t even come near to what is required to defend our arctic.

The government had initially gotten it right by promising to construct three new armed heavy ice-breaking ships and an underground network of listening posts. They would have made it possible for our military to constantly monitor the passage for foreign vessels such as US submarines, and make a swift deployment of the scene. Instead, they abandoned the plan for underground listening posts and replaced the proper armed ice-breakers with a few frigates that can only break through one meter of ice and will therefore only be able to cross through the passage during the summer months.

This is a farce.

Censored

Globe and Mail has just revealed that Canadian Forces top soldier Rick Hillier recently ordered our soldiers posted in Afghanistan to halt the release under the federal Access to Information Act of documents relating to captured detainees. He claimed that their diffusion could endanger Canadian troops and pose a national security threat. At the same time, the newspaper has also uncovered the existence of a panel created a few weeks after the eruption of the detainee scandal which was mandated by General Hillier to screen all Access to Information requests about detainees before their release.

To put it squarely: this is scary. The Canadians Forces, a branch of the Government of Canada, are now censoring public information relating to the treatment of captured detainees. The Government of Canada is hiding information from the public, and knowing the military, it is almost certain that whatever information they are hiding will be human rights related.

I have always firmly supported the notion that Canada should play a leading military and humanitarian role in Afghanistan for the simple reason that we have stayed away from deadly conflicts for a good number of years now, and that it is our duty to the international community and to NATO to pull our weight. But at the rate this mission is going, I almost feel that we would have done more good by staying out of the place.

Afghanistan is not a straightforward nation-state with a strong central government whose civilian population is barred from freedom by a few mean Islamic Taliban fighters. It is rather tribal multi-ethnic and multi-lingual tribal state which is ruled by local chiefs and religious leaders and whose way of life has existed for over a thousand years. The Taliban are simply a particular group of militants who happen to believe that the Koran should be interpreted literally and who have won over the confidence of a majority of tribes by providing them services such as water, food and healthcare.

The goal of our mission if Afghanistan should not be to kill as many mean Taliban as we can possibly manage, because they are actually seen by a lot of Afghans as good people who saved lives (and who are doing it in the name of Allah, not the Western God). Killing Taliban is a vain exercise as it only breeds more hate and encourages young Afghan men to join the fight against the evil westerners who are attempting to kill the noble men who saved their villages from malaria by bringing them drugs. Our real objective should be to convince the Afghan population and leaders that Westerners can bring them a better quality of life than the Taliban without harming their way of life. Once we succeed in doing that, getting rid of the Taliban will be a cakewalk, as they will no longer have the support of the Afghan population.

This is already a daunting objective, and will have no hope of being met unless our troops and military leaders observe the highest standards of transparency and respect of human rights. The censoring of all information regarding the treatment of prisoners is an admission of the contrary, and if the situation doesn’t get reversed immediately, we should simply pull out.

Billy Elliot et la GRC

Le Ministère de la sécurité publique vient de prendre une décision surprenante en nommant le bureaucrate William Elliot à la tête de la GRC. Une tradition vieille de 143 ans exigait en effet que le commissaire de la Gendarmerie Royale soit promu des rangs de l’organisation, et le non-respect de celle-ci a fortement agacé plusieurs mounties et des députés néo-démocrates qui craignent une politisation du corps de police. Cependant, compte tenu du piètre état actuel de la GRC, attaquée de tous côtés par des scandales et allégations d’abus, la position du gouvernement conservateur se défend et paraît à vrai dire, assez bien réfléchie.

Dans les prochaines années, la GRC va se voir obligée de suivre un long et difficile processus de remaniement pour faire face à la nouvelle remise en question de son intégrité. Cela conduira inévitablement à une période de remous et d’agitation au sein des rangs du noble corps policier. Or il est bien connu que dans ce genre de situation, une personne étrangère à l’organisation est souvent mieux placée pour sortir celle-ci de ses difficultés car son passé extérieur lui donne un regard différent sur l’état des choses et lui fournit une plus grande impartialité. Ceci est encore plus vrai dans le cas d’un bureaucrate comme M. Elliot, qui a passé toute sa vie a gérer du personnel.

Il est vrai que la tradition de nommer un policier à la tête de la GRC était belle, mais quand il s’agit de gérer un corps policier de 24 000 membres en pleine effervescence, il vaut mieux laisser faire les pros.

Expand The G8

In a June the 6^th letter to the Globe and Mail titled “Global leadership is about sharing power”, former Prime-Minister Paul Martin argued that an enlargement of the G8 had become necessary to “make globalization work in a world where the major actors, and the economic, social and religious contexts in which they operate, have created an interdependent but increasingly dysfunctional system”. And with the latest G8 summit is Germany having passed just a few weeks ago with nothing to show but a few minor agreements and travel expenses, the reality that Mr. Martin's letter expressed couldn’t be any more apparent.

The main reason for which an enlargement is due is simple: the G8 is no longer the G8. What used to be a meeting of the eight leading industrialised countries in world has become a meeting of eight industrialised countries wanting to feel on top of the world. The group is no longer sufficiently representative and economically powerful to act as a strong and significant voice, a voice, Mr. Martin adds, "that can provide a consensus the rest of the world can either accept or reject, but one that at least provides a strong sense of direction."

But this isn't just an international matter concerning the poorer countries of the globe; it is also of the highest relevance to Canada's national interests. If the G8 does accept new members to better reflect the new world reality, it could force emerging powerhouses such as China and India to form their own competing group –which they have already started doing-, that would easily trump the G8 demographic and economic power and end up forcing the noble institution to break up. The US, Russia and Japan would then probably be invited into the new club, leaving the other ex-G8 members, including Canada, to bite their tongues in frustration. And as Mr. Martin pointed out: “Smaller countries such as Canada may well find themselves shut out from having a reasonable say in world affairs and larger countries like the United States will find themselves in a perennial balancing act comparable to that which occurred after the defeat of Napoleon, the stresses and strains of which bedevilled Europe for 100 years.”

Happy Canada Day!

Happy Canada Day!

It's a holiday today, and parliament has adjourned, so I've decided to send you to the Globe and Mail's online edition to read their Canada day section.

Enjoy.