Scandal Brewing

We may have a pretty serious scandal brewing in Ottawa; certainly very bizarre.

In a soon to be released biography of the late Independent MP Chuck Cadman who famously kept the Liberals government alive in 2005 by voting for the budget, it is alleged by none other than Mr. Cadman's widow that two Conservative Party officials offered him a 1 million dollar life insurance policy in exchange for voting against the budget. For a man diagnosed with a terminal illness, this was a pretty tempting offer. And just to add another curious twist to it all, Mr. Cadman's widow in currently running in her husband's old riding... for the Conservative Party.

But things get more serious. The CBC has been given this evening a scratchy tape where the unmistakable voice of Stephen Harper is admitting to Cadman's biographer Tom Zytaruk that two party officials had indeed met with Cadman and offered him some sort of money deal.
"The offer to Chuck was that it was only to replace financial considerations he might lose due to an election" said Harper.

He doesn't mention anything about a million dollar life insurance policy, but it is nonetheless cash, which is clearly illegal.

So where will this thing go? Nobody knows. It could turn out to be a fabrication, in which case we'd have a second edition of the infamous Gurmant Grewal tapes. Most likely, it will simply disappear and be shelved for lack of evidence and new revelations. If it were to have legs though, it could be a killer to the government.

The big thing is that amazing tape. Steven Harper's voice playing on a scratchy recording and telling a biographer about a money offer to Cadman, making sure to ask beforehand "this is not for publication?" I couldn't have thought of anything more damaging to Mr. Harper at this time; Maybe Stéphane Dion will start believing in god!

Anyhow, regardless of what transpires, there are a few mind-numbing questions that need answering:

-why is Dona Cadman, a Conservative candidate, alleging in a book (and confirming again today) that the Conservative Party tried to bribe her husband? What does she gain?
-how on earth could a life insurance policy been found for a terminally ill man? Was it really a life insurance policy or just a plain money offer?
-how can the Conservative Party deny an allegation coming from one of its own candidates? against a tape recording?
-why did Dona Cadman wait three years to release that information? Was this all planned in advance to try to hurt the Conservative Party?

The affair is all so bizarre. I mean, I'm not a great believers in conspiracies, but just smells so awfully odd. For tomorrow, at least, we'll have to see how Stephen Harper defends himself against his tape recorded admission that money was offered to Chuck Cadman. Things will only keep getting more interesting.

Budget

So the budget will pass. No surprise.

In fact, this wasn’t really a budget. The economic update delivered last fall was the budget; this is just a repetition of the same.

It’s long been the practice of governments to under-promise and over-deliver. Chrétien was a master in that art. But this time, the government has effectively under-promised and under-delivered. Really, there was no other way. The GST cut is has cost so much that, with the current economic woes, the government has simply run out of cash. And even though this was a very thin budget, they’ve already had to break the 3 billion dollar cushion which was traditionally inserted in the budget as a defence against unexpected economic disasters like 9/11. It’s unlikely, but, by the end of the year, the Conservatives could be in deficit.

The sad note of this budget is the environment as the Conservatives have clearly decided that it would not become an election issue. All they’ve included is a 500 million dollar plan for building public transit (needless to say, it’s peanuts), 300 million for nuclear research and 240 million for a “clean coal” plant in Saskatchewan. To put things into perspective, the GST cuts will cost 12 billion dollars a year.

So it looks like we’re destined for the status-quo. Let’s wait for the next budget!

Smart En vironment

Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic carried out yesterday the world's first commercial flight of an aircraft powered with biofuel. “This breakthrough will help Virgin Atlantic to fly its planes using clean fuel sooner than expected,” he told reporters after the flight.

Clearly, there’s some good intent on the part of Branson and his firm. They seem serious about helping to address global warming, and have invested a significant amount of money into improving the energy efficiency of their firm.

But looks can be deceiving. This flight used a biofuel mixture of coconut and babassu oil. And while I couldn’t tell you the mixture’s exact carbon footprint, I’d be prepared to bet a significant chunk of change that overall, it’s about the same as plain old gasoline.

Why?

Because once again, when accessing the environmental impact of biofuel, we made the classic mistake of only factoring only the carbon emissions of the fuel consumption while forgetting entirely about the production. Biofuels are supposed to be carbon neutral because they produce very little CO2 during combustion and take carbon away from the atmosphere as they grow. But in fact, we’re realising today that the environmental impact of growing organic matter for biofuel makes it just as bad for the environment as fossil-fuel gasoline. Remember, biofuels are in most cases derived from corn or the sugar cane. To grow they need green space, water and heat. But finding space usually means cutting down trees and watering the crops excessively. So once you factor in all that heating and water, that biofuel business doesn’t seem quite as exciting.

This isn’t the only time this kind of thing happens. There was an article in a recent publication of the New Yorker magazine which essentially explained that lamb or apples imported from New Zealand have a lower carbon footprint that locally bought lamb or apples. Why is that? Because New Zealand farms don’t use fertiliser and the government doesn’t subsidize them.

So what does this teach us? Simple: we need to be careful and smart about helping the environment.

Botched Independance

Things don’t look too rosy in Serbia. First Kosovo unilaterally declares independence with Western help, then riots, then more riots, and now there are reports of a charred body in the U.S. Embassy. We’ve seen these kinds of problems for centuries in that part of the world, and the result has always been disastrous.

But the irony of the current state of affairs is that it could all very easily have been avoided.

Kosovo is a dangerous part of the world suffering from abject poverty and bitter xenophobia. The wounds left from the Yugoslav war won’t be healed for a long time, so separation from Serbia is all but inevitable. As we know, the trouble is that Serbia is refusing any form of separation, which leads directly to an impasse.

So to break that impasse, the United-States and the European triumvirate of France, Britain and Germany simply told the Kosovo government to unilaterally declare independence, promising in return to immediately recognize the new state.

It’s certainly radical, but it’s hugely naïve.

First and foremost, it goes against international law. The U.N. Charter is clear: Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter. The Helsinki Accords -signed by Canada, the U.S., all the European powers and the Soviet Union- are even more adamant, stipulating that relations between states must be guided by respect for the “rights inherent in sovereignty, inviolability of frontiers and territorial integrity of states”.

Serbia is a sovereign country with full sovereignty over Kosovo. In fact, the U.N. introduced in 1999 a declaration (number 1244) officially ending the fighting in Serbia and reaffirming its sovereignty over Kosovo. Therefore, since the Kosovo independence movement is clearly an internal matter, nothing would authorise the U.N. or its member states to intervene by recognizing Kosovo as an independent state.

So in the words of Former Canadian Ambassador to Serbia James Bissett, “we’ve now got an ironic situation where it’s the Russians who are standing up for the U.N. Charter and saying: look, you can’t do this, its illegal.”

This leads to my second point, that by encouraging a unilateral declaration of independence, the U.S. and its allies have all but guaranteed that Russia and China will veto any attempt at bringing Kosovo into the U.N. Never in a million years would Russia or China, countries that both have many Kosovos of their own, recognize a unilateral declaration of independence. The entire procedure would have to be revised for them to accept Kosovo’s entry into the U.N. This would take time and probably cause more blood to be spilt.

The Western countries could have been so much more creative with Serbia. With more time and imagination, they could no doubt have found a way to “convince” Serbia to accept Kosovo’s independence and sign a treaty that would have let the country keep its honour. This is what happened two years ago when Montenegro and Serbia “parted ways”.

But yet again, the Bush administration put passion before reason and let impulse dictate its international policy. The result will be more infighting at the U.N. Security Council, a new rise in the polls for Vladimir Putin, and a semi-state of Kosovo that will most likely spend the next ten years as a U.N. protectorate, awaiting official recognition and picking up in the process newfound hate for the Serbs.

The Greatest Tax In The World

B.C. Finance Minister Carole Taylor introduced today in her new budget the first serious carbon tax in Canadian history. Effective July 1, the carbon tax will start at a rate based on $10 per tonne of carbon emissions and rise by $5 a year to $30 per tonne by 2012. This is the equivalent of an extra 2.4 cents on a litre of gasoline, rising to 7.24 cents per litre of gasoline by 2012.

The carbon tax is expected to generate $1.8-billion over the next three years, all of which will be refunded to taxpayers through rebates and income tax reductions. It is not expected to pose a threat to B.C.s annual growth of 2.4% or to the government's $50 million surplus.

So just how good can this get ? The carbon tax encourages businesses to pollute less, it takes no money aways from the taxpayer, and poses no threat to economic growth. It's been used in Europe, and the results prove that it works.

So why not in Canada ? Go figure.

La semaine caricaturée

Parfois, quand je manque de temps ou d'informations à commenter, je me rabats sur les caricatures des journaux du pays pour résumer la semaine.

Aujourd'hui, j'ai choisi une caricature réalisée par Garnotte du quotidien Le Devoir, qui résume à merveille cette semaine en politique. Comme le montre son dessin, on a eu ces derniers temps beaucoup de secousses et de manoeuvres pré-électorales, mais la situation elle-même n'a pas du tout changée. Les Libéraux et Conservateurs sont encore à égalité dans les sondages, et Stéphane Dion contôle l'avenir du Parlement. Les prises de position libérales sur infrastructure et l'Afghanistan auront peut-être un effet positif à long terme, mais aujourd'hui, il semble que nous soyons de retour au point de départ!

Gun Control

There has been another shooting in an American University. At around 3pm today, a gunman walked into a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University and opened fire on fellow students, killing five people and injured 16 others.

This is the fourth shooting at a U.S. school within a week. In fact, it is the sixth this year, and the ninth since the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 where a mentally deranged student killed 32 people.

In Canada, we've had seven school shootings in the history of our country.

The first incident, in 1975, where a student murdered a teacher and classmate, was so traumatizing that our government decided to start regulating the sale of guns. In 1989, after the mentally ill Marc Lépine walked into the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal with a firearm and coldly executed fourteen women students, the devastation was such that the government decided to toughen gun control policies once more and create the national gun registry program, which, despite its huge cost, is popular with policemen across the country.

The young student who killed 32 innocent people at Virginia Tech in 2007 got his weapons from a licensed dealer and his ammunition from EBay.
The two students responsible for the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 got one weapon from a friend and another from salesman at the Tanner Gun Show.

In Canada, it's possible for almost everyone over 18 without a criminal record to get firearms. But the procedure is long and complicated, and you almost always have to register your gun with the government before being able to buy it. This makes it much less likely that a mentally ill student would kill peers out of revenge, as it forces that student to go through the long procedure of registering the gun, which takes a significant amount of time and patience, and increases the likelihood of that student being picked out as underage or unfit to own a gun. The student can't simply go to Canadian Tire, show identification proving he/she is over 18, and purchase the weapon.

The Harper Government has made it clear that it wants to scrap the national gun registry program, and has already exempted certain kinds of hunting rifles. It is undeniable that the cost of the gun registry program is extremely high (over a billion dollars), but judging by the low per-capita rate of school shootings and gun crimes in our country, it's part of a system that works.

Consider these figures: in the year 2000, the firearm homicide rate in Canada was 0,54 in 100 000. In the U.S., it was 2,97 in 100 000.

The gun registry program itself might not be the main factor explaining the low firearm homicide rate, but when a system as important as this one in working, we should be real conservatives and leave it as is. A billion dollars might be a very substantive amount of money, but if it helps keep the gun homicide rate this low, it's money well spent.