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ATTN: @pmharper + #CPC re: #FirstNations + #Aboriginals + #ReconciliationActionPlan = #cdnpoli #NurembergSolution

July 17, 2013 @opHarper 1 Comment

Before this gets outta hand it may be time to begin the act of reconciliation in Canada NOW, as opposed to delivering empty apologies. Here is what may be a simple initial solution that may, possible, potentially, maybe, kinda, sorta acceptable, if you are lucky. while that simmers a bit, we utilized a hashtagged tweetable title to remind ya when we share this article around the interwebs, so be sure to have Harper’s Kiddies lots o’ RedBull and other keep awake and alert remedies. Continue reading ATTN: @pmharper + #CPC re: #FirstNations + #Aboriginals + #ReconciliationActionPlan = #cdnpoli #NurembergSolution →

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#Harper #Gold #Davos #Soros and #CurrencyWars

January 24, 2013 @opHarper Leave a comment

#Harper #Gold #Davos #Soros & #CurrencyWars

By @livewordcanada 2013/01/24 via #Ottawapiskat… The birth of a hashtag

We are perplexed and puzzled about the timing of why Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s wife Laureen [1], “liquidated her entire portfolio of stock market investments late last year.” Oddly enough, several other “global” factors, central banks [2], investors [3] as well as other anomalies that add to the confusion. This brings us to another topic and point to ponder, Why is Deutsche Bundesbank demanding it’s gold reserves back and will this escalate and initiate more global currency wars? Then we consider the rather bleak announcement and admission from Bank of Canada’s outgoing Mark Carney “The slowdown in the second half of 2012 was more pronounced than the Bank had anticipated”. One thing is certain, something is rotten in #Ottawapiskat and Martha Stewart comes to mind for some reason. For our next chapter in the #Ottawapiskat for #Upsettlers: #ShagTheDog series featuring #Bundesbank, #Gold and #CurrencyWars.

Continue reading #Harper #Gold #Davos #Soros and #CurrencyWars →

China, Corruption, Ideology, Malayasia, Uncategorized

Prime Minister’s Wife Sells Off Entire Stock Portfolio

January 10, 2013 @opHarper 1 Comment

Prime Minister’s Wife Sells Off Entire Stock Portfolio

By GLEN MCGREGOR, Ottawa Citizen January 10, 2013

According to an ethics disclosure filed in December, Stephen Harper’s wife, Laureen, has liquidated her stock market investments.
Photograph by: Sean Kilpatrick , The Canadian Press

OTTAWA — An ethics disclosure filed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper shows that his wife Laureen liquidated her entire portfolio of stock market investments late last year.

The prime minister last month amended a disclosure of assets and liabilities he had filed with Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson and removed its reference to his wife’s investments.

Previous versions of Harper’s MP disclosure said his wife held an “investment account with Raymond James Ltd. partly composed of publicly traded securities.”

That line item was not found in an updated December 8 version of the document, which lists no other declarable assets.

“Mrs. Harper’s updated disclosure reflects the fact this account was liquidated,” explained Andrew MacDougall, Harper’s director of communications.

MacDougall did not respond to a follow-up email asking why she had suddenly sold off her portfolio at a time when the economy is still recovering from a deep recession.

Unlike his apparently bearish wife, the prime minister has been an enthusiastic booster of Canadian equity markets, and once advised investors to increase their stake in public securities during the darkest days of the global economic downturn.

“I think there are some great buying opportunities out there,” Harper said during a 2008 interview with the CBC.

Since then, the TSX index has climbed by about 32 per cent.

Harper’s disclosure did not itemize the individual stocks his wife owned.

The prime minister declared no stock investments of his own, suggesting that those made in his wife’s name may effectively be joint assets. The disclosure notes that the Harpers share a joint line of credit from the Bank of Nova Scotia.

In October, the Prime Minister’s Office declined a Citizen request to provide a list of equities in Laureen Harper’s portfolio. The PMO also refused to say whether any of her stocks were among the resource sector companies that would be affected by her husband’s decision on foreign investments by China’s CNOOC and Malayasia’s Petronas.

Under federal ethics rules, cabinet ministers are required to either sell their shares in publicly-traded companies or place them in blind trusts while in office. But, as the Citizen reported, there is no such requirement for equities held in their spouses’ names. The specific contents of their stock portfolios are not revealed in the disclosures they sign as cabinet ministers or as MPs, and it is unclear if even the ethics commissioner knows which equities the spouses hold.

The spouses of seven other ministers in Harper’s cabinet currently have publicly-traded securities not governed by any blind trust agreements — among them, the wife of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and the husband of Labour Minister Lisa Raitt.

Flaherty’s wife, Ontario Progressive Conservative MPP Christine Elliott, is required to make her own disclosure under the separate provincial ethics regime, which requires her to list in more detail her stock holdings.

Elliott’s 2012 provincial disclosure showed that she owns shares in the Bank of Nova Scotia, BCE Inc., and Leon’s Furniture Ltd., among others. Flaherty’s office says he and wife do not discuss cabinet confidences so there is no conflict of interest with her holdings.

It is unclear whether Laureen Harper simply saw last year’s rise in stock prices as a good time to cash in her portfolio or if the move was made in response to the Citizen story pointing out the apparent loophole in the ethics rules.

Under an agreement with ethics commissioner, Harper is required to step aside from any decision involving Talisman Energy, where his brother Grant works as an accountant.

Original source article: Prime minister’s wife sells off entire stock portfolio

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Canada, China, Economic, Energy, Foreign Policy, Ideology, Intel, Political, South Sudan, Sovereignty, Sudan, Telecom, Trade, Uncategorized, US

Canada blocks $5.2 billion Petronas bid for Progress Energy

October 20, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

By Euan Rocha and Stuart Grudgings
TORONTO/KUALA LUMPUR | Sat Oct 20, 2012 7:57pm EDT

Analysis & Opinion

Canada rejects $5.9-billion Petronas bid for Progress Energy

October 20, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

By Jameson Berkow
Oct 20, 2012 8:42 AM ET
Last Updated: Oct 20, 2012 5:44 PM ET
More from Jameson Berkow | @crudereporter

Malaysian state-owned Petronas, which said on Saturday it was not ready to comment, has 30 days to make its offer more palatable. Otherwise the deal will not be allowed to proceed.” alt=”Goh Seng Chong/Bloomberg

CALGARY — In a surprise late night move on Friday, Ottawa rejected Petronas’ $5.9-billion bid for Progress Energy Resources Corp., marking the third foreign takeover Canada’s federal government has blocked.

Christian Paradis, Minister of Industry, issued a brief statement three minutes before midnight ET on Friday, saying he was “not satisfied that the proposed investment is likely to be of net benefit to Canada.”

Mr. Paradis refused to comment on the deal earlier Friday, telling reporters in Saint-Hubert, Quebec only “when the decision is … made, I will announce it properly.”

Progress Energy chief executive Michael Culbert said in a statement released Saturday afternoon that Petronas will appeal the federal government’s ruling and Progress will help “determine the nature of the issues and the potential remedies.”

“The long-term health of the natural gas industry in Canada and the development of a new LNG export industry are dependent on international investments such as Petronas.” Mr. Culbert said.

The government’s decision sheds some light on whether the far more controversial $15.1-billion offer from CNOOC Ltd. to buy Nexen Inc. will be approved. CNOOC’s status as a wholly-controlled entity of China’s Communist Party has generated widespread public concern over the proposal, which represents China’s largest attempt at a foreign acquisition to date.

Ottawa has promised its decision on China’s bid for Calgary-based Nexen would provide a framework for how future takeover bids from state-owned companies would be reviewed. CNOOC has made several promises — including retaining all of Nexen’s approximately 3,000 Canadian staff and listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange — in hopes of passing the government’s test. However, the law is unclear on what exactly defines a “net benefit.”

The decision on CNOOC’s bid for Nexen is expected in mid-November.

Maybe Canada is using this to attach more conditions to the Nexen deal

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The Chinese are coming! And other challenges to Canadian self-determination….maybe

October 19, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

Some analysts say a little bit of economic imperialism isn’t all that bad.

By Massoud Hayoun
Posted: Oct 19th, 2012

The Chinese are coming! And other challenges to Canadian self-determination....maybe

(Massoud Hayoun)

They’re coming – The Chinese. The Americans. And of course, experts in empire, the British.

They want to slice a nation into concessions. They want to guzzle its fresh water and pump its oil into their cars, tractors and factories – extract more and more of its fuels for their burgeoning economies. Even move into its embassies abroad.

Surprisingly, the nation victim to this frenzied rush for resources isn’t in the so-called ‘developing’ or post-colonial world. It’s Canada.

Canadian politicians, environmentalists and media are perennially abuzz with news of a pending imperialist takeover. But the kind of imperialism they describe isn’t imperialism in the traditional sense, where the oppressor pushes an economic agenda – a wholesale heist of natural resources – after a political takeover.

The kind of economic imperialism Canadians seem to fear starts off with business and spills over into politics.

Red scare?

Some politicians and environmentalists say China – once bent into submission by Western nations, which divided Shanghai into colonial ‘concessions’ and forbade ethnic Chinese (except nannies and cooks) from entering certain parts of Central, Hong Kong – is now guilty of going after Canadian land, oil and politics.

Green Party leader Elizabeth May maintains Chinese enterprises bidding for Canadian natural energies represent a threat to national sovereignty.

“Chinese state-owned enterprises are an extension of the Communist Party of China and threaten to erode sovereignty in different ways than other foreign investors,” May told The Vancouver Observer in an article on Chinese energy company CNOOC’s bid for Canadian gas and oil giant Nexen last month.

While the CNOOC bid awaits approval until November on Parliamentary Hill, it seems Chinese Communism has yet to infiltrate Canadian politics.

Still, in an unpublished segment of May’s interview, she argued business deals with the People’s Republic have already harmed Canadian self-determination.

“We are experiencing a loss of decades of environmental laws in order to satisfy the Chinese government and state-run oil companies,” she said.

“Harper defied expert advice to ensure all foreign takeovers were reviewed against an objective definition of ‘national security.’ In the 2009 amendments to the Investment Canada Act, Harper and the PC refused to define “national security” saying the term was too fluid to be capable of definition.”

What May described then was a kind of economic imperialism.

“We will lose sovereignty and the ability to regulate to protect the environment if Harper follows through with a free trade deal with China,” she said.

The Canada-China Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Act (FIPPA), slated to come into effect at the end of the month, will allow Chinese enterprises to sue the Canadian government for any measure seen as discriminatory to its operations, analysts say.

“If we have state-owned enterprises operating in Canada and if – on top of that — they get the same rights to sue Canada as the US and Mexico do under the Investor-State provisions of Chapter 11 of NAFTA, then we will have given away the store, lock stock and barrel,” May said.

Old friends

China is only the new kid on the block when it comes to Canada’s sovereignty woes.

May noted in the same interview that “Under NAFTA, [Canada] is hard-wired to be the number one supplier of foreign oil to the US,” and the United States has, in its ongoing presidential debates [see Republican candidate Mitt Romney on what he considers a kind of domestic supply] and legislative documents repeatedly referred to Canadian energy as part of its domestic ‘North American’ reserves.

Questions of sovereignty have colored the debate on various multi-billion-dollar bids to funnel more Canadian natural resources into the US – Kinder Morgan’s proposed pipeline expansion and the Keystone XL pipeline.

And of late, Britain has entered the mix of allegedly nefarious super powers. Canadian commentators criticized a joint Ottawa-London initiative to collocate several Canadian and British embassies, saying the move, while economically sound in its gesture to cut back on public funds in the aftermath of a crippling global recession, would jeopardize “the ability of Canadian diplomats to act fully independently in certain foreign countries,” as The National Post writes.

The ebb and flow of the Canadian sovereignty woe

A sense of sovereignty under siege appears to be a kind of defining feature of Canadian national identity.

“Fears about Canadian sovereignty are as old as our country,” UBC political science professor Kathryn Harrison told The Vancouver Observer.

“After all, concern about a potential US invasion was one of the motivations for Confederation. I don’t think it’s surprising that there’s persistent anxiety either, though usually at a pretty low well. We are next door to a country with ten times more people and the largest economy in the world.”

Canadians worry about national sovereignty at some times more than others.

“There are some periods when economic or policy developments bring those concerns to the fore than others. For instance the debate about Canada-US free trade in 1988. The proposed expansion of shipments of natural resources – coal, oil, natural gas — towards Asian markets is new, at least in scale,” she said.

High-profile pipeline expansion deals, slated to bring more Canadian fuels to the US have in turn fueled polemics on Canadian self-determination, Harrison argues.

“Export of large quantities of oil and gas is not new, but as long as we could rely on existing pipelines to do so, it was under the public’s radar. With the debate in the US over the Keystone XL pipeline and in Canada over the Enbridge Northern Gateway and, potentially, the Kinder Morgan pipeline [expansion] as well, people are more aware of those exports,” she added.

The problematic politics of polemics

Some analysts at both ends of the political spectrum say the debate on Canadian national sovereignty – directed most often against international business deals and pitting politics against profit – works against the national interest.

“They are classic know-nothing arguments. They are in some cases suicidal — maybe suicidal is too strong a word, but they certainly don’t support Canada’s national interest,” said renowned libertarian and McGill University economics and public policy professor Tom Velk.

Velk believes that what has been worded as an argument against economic imperialism is in fact a blow to globalization and economic development.

“Politically imposed isolation have been costly and unwise. I suppose the extreme examples are places like North Korea or Cuba,” Velk said.

“The word imperial has an automatic negative notion or weight attached to it. Great nations large and small are far more likely to benefit from working with one another,” Velk added.

“Where would we be without Roman empire and its language?” he asked.

Velk believes that the arguments for Canadian sovereignty are economically unsound, because various gestures to develop stronger economic ties with the Chinese and non-traditional partners will lessen Canada’s dependence on US business – and political directives.

“We don’t have the ability to pursue national goals against those of the United States… [but] Canada does have some levers,” Velk said.

“What Canada has been doing with the rest of the world is trying to expand a range of trading partners in Asia and Europe that may give Canada some limited degree of flexibility vis-a-vis the US markets,” he added.

Not only does Chinese business offer Canada a way out of a politically compromising tie to its neighbors down South, but there is a moral imperative behind selling natural resources to countries like China, Velk says.

“Canada has an enormous surplus of fresh water… China is in great need of water. They are trying to get water from the Tibetan highlands, at great political costs to the places that supply it. So it would be in the world’s interest, as well as in the Canadian interest to trade bulk water across the ocean,” he said, explaining that the “know-nothing” sovereignty crowd is “immoral.”

Double standards

On the other end of the political spectrum but equally opposed to sovereignty scares is Yves Engler, a liberal historian and political commentator and recent author of The Ugly Canadian, a book on the Harper administration’s foreign policy.

“It’s in the interest of Canadian companies to have local communities and the national government have greater control over natural resources,” Engler said, “Most Canadians want higher royalty rates and national control over resources. The more that becomes internationalized, the less likely that is.”

“But it’s a bit hypocritical of Canadian politicians to criticize foreign enterprises – and not to be critical of Canadian purchasing of international resources.”

Nexen, the Calgary-based Canadian energy giant at the heart of the China debate, owns oil operations in places like Colombia, Europe’s North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and beyond.

What’s to lose?

Much of the discussion on sovereignty, as Engler noted, is about Ottawa and Canadians being able to dictate the destiny of their natural resources. But inherent in claims from politicians and media that the ostensibly communist Chinese government’s companies threaten Canadian sovereignty is the idea that they are threatening a Canadian way of life

The implicit fear is a loss of individual rights that set Canada apart from both China and the United States – healthcare, marriage for all and relatively unthreatened women’s reproductive freedoms.

Engler believes this idea bespeaks a fundamental misunderstanding of those rights.

“Those gains are won by unions, farmers’ groups, feminist groups, LGBTQ organizations – I certainly wouldn’t frame it in the kind of Canada sovereignty angle,” he said.

Civilian fights for basic human rights go both ways between Canada and the US.

“The influence is beyond borders. It’s no coincidence that you find most progressive states are border states- what Vermont is doing with health care, for instance.”

Analysts like Engler note that Canadian and US activists often work beyond borders for various social causes. The anti-corporate economic justice movements that swept the world in the Occupy movement that started last year were a cross-border, continental affair, for instance.

What is unclear from reactions against Canada’s various international business deals is what the alternative would look like in practice — a Canada where Canadians are empowered to determine the destiny of their own natural resources, or, as Velk says, something akin to hyper-isolated states like “North Korea or Cuba.”

Massoud Hayoun is a North African American writer and speaker on Middle East, North African and Chinese affairs. He has written for The Atlantic, TIME Magazine…Read Massoud Hayoun’s bio » http://www.vancouverobserver.com/contributors/massoud-hayoun

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The end of the New World Order

October 19, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

The upheavals of the early 21st century have changed our world. Now, in the aftermath of failed wars and economic disasters, pressure for a social alternative can only grow

By Seumas Milne
The Guardian
Friday 19 October 2012 18.00 BST

Culture shock … the collapse of Lehman Brothers ushered in the deepest economic crisis since the 1930s. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

In the late summer of 2008, two events in quick succession signalled the end of the New World Order. In August, the US client state of Georgia was crushed in a brief but bloody war after it attacked Russian troops in the contested territory of South Ossetia.

The former Soviet republic was a favourite of Washington’s neoconservatives. Its authoritarian president had been lobbying hard for Georgia to join Nato’s eastward expansion. In an unblinking inversion of reality, US vice-president Dick Cheney denounced Russia‘s response as an act of “aggression” that “must not go unanswered”. Fresh from unleashing a catastrophic war on Iraq, George Bush declared Russia’s “invasion of a sovereign state” to be “unacceptable in the 21st century”.

As the fighting ended, Bush warned Russia not to recognise South Ossetia’s independence. Russia did exactly that, while US warships were reduced to sailing around the Black Sea. The conflict marked an international turning point. The US’s bluff had been called, its military sway undermined by the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan. After two decades during which it bestrode the world like a colossus, the years of uncontested US power were over.

Three weeks later, a second, still more far-reaching event threatened the heart of the US-dominated global financial system. On 15 September, the credit crisis finally erupted in the collapse of America’s fourth-largest investment bank. The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers engulfed the western world in its deepest economic crisis since the 1930s.

The first decade of the 21st century shook the international order, turning the received wisdom of the global elites on its head – and 2008 was its watershed. With the end of the cold war, the great political and economic questions had all been settled, we were told. Liberal democracy and free-market capitalism had triumphed. Socialism had been consigned to history. Political controversy would now be confined to culture wars and tax-and-spend trade-offs.

In 1990, George Bush Senior had inaugurated a New World Order, based on uncontested US military supremacy and western economic dominance. This was to be a unipolar world without rivals. Regional powers would bend the knee to the new worldwide imperium. History itself, it was said, had come to an end.

But between the attack on the Twin Towers and the fall of Lehman Brothers, that global order had crumbled. Two factors were crucial. By the end of a decade of continuous warfare, the US had succeeded in exposing the limits, rather than the extent, of its military power. And the neoliberal capitalist model that had reigned supreme for a generation had crashed.

It was the reaction of the US to 9/11 that broke the sense of invincibility of the world’s first truly global empire. The Bush administration’s wildly miscalculated response turned the atrocities in New York and Washington into the most successful terror attack in history.

Not only did Bush’s war fail on its own terms, spawning terrorists across the world, while its campaign of killings, torture and kidnapping discredited Western claims to be guardians of human rights. But the US-British invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq revealed the inability of the global behemoth to impose its will on subject peoples prepared to fight back. That became a strategic defeat for the US and its closest allies.

This passing of the unipolar moment was the first of four decisive changes that transformed the world – in some crucial ways for the better. The second was the fallout from the crash of 2008 and the crisis of the western-dominated capitalist order it unleashed, speeding up relative US decline.

This was a crisis made in America and deepened by the vast cost of its multiple wars. And its most devastating impact was on those economies whose elites had bought most enthusiastically into the neoliberal orthodoxy of deregulated financial markets and unfettered corporate power.

A voracious model of capitalism forced down the throats of the world as the only way to run a modern economy, at a cost of ballooning inequality and environmental degradation, had been discredited – and only rescued from collapse by the greatest state intervention in history. The baleful twins of neoconservatism and neoliberalism had been tried and tested to destruction.

The failure of both accelerated the rise of China, the third epoch-making change of the early 21st century. Not only did the country’s dramatic growth take hundreds of millions out of poverty, but its state-driven investment model rode out the west’s slump, making a mockery of market orthodoxy and creating a new centre of global power. That increased the freedom of manoeuvre for smaller states.

China’s rise widened the space for the tide of progressive change that swept Latin America – the fourth global advance. Across the continent, socialist and social-democratic governments were propelled to power, attacking economic and racial injustice, building regional independence and taking back resources from corporate control. Two decades after we had been assured there could be no alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, Latin Americans were creating them.

These momentous changes came, of course, with huge costs and qualifications. The US will remain the overwhelmingly dominant military power for the foreseeable future; its partial defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan were paid for in death and destruction on a colossal scale; and multipolarity brings its own risks of conflict. The neoliberal model was discredited, but governments tried to refloat it through savage austerity programmes. China’s success was bought at a high price in inequality, civil rights and environmental destruction. And Latin America’s US-backed elites remained determined to reverse the social gains, as they succeeded in doing by violent coup in Honduras in 2009. Such contradictions also beset the revolutionary upheaval that engulfed the Arab world in 2010-11, sparking another shift of global proportions.

By then, Bush’s war on terror had become such an embarrassment that the US government had to change its name to “overseas contingency operations”. Iraq was almost universally acknowledged to have been a disaster, Afghanistan a doomed undertaking. But such chastened realism couldn’t be further from how these campaigns were regarded in the western mainstream when they were first unleashed.

To return to what was routinely said by British and US politicians and their tame pundits in the aftermath of 9/11 is to be transported into a parallel universe of toxic fantasy. Every effort was made to discredit those who rejected the case for invasion and occupation – and would before long be comprehensively vindicated.

Michael Gove, now a Tory cabinet minister, poured vitriol on the Guardian for publishing a full debate on the attacks, denouncing it as a “Prada-Meinhof gang” of “fifth columnists”. Rupert Murdoch’s Sun damned those warning against war as “anti-American propagandists of the fascist left”. When the Taliban regime was overthrown, Blair issued a triumphant condemnation of those (myself included) who had opposed the invasion of Afghanistan and war on terror. We had, he declared, “proved to be wrong”.

A decade later, few could still doubt that it was Blair’s government that had “proved to be wrong”, with catastrophic consequences. The US and its allies would fail to subdue Afghanistan, critics predicted. The war on terror would itself spread terrorism. Ripping up civil rights would have dire consequences – and an occupation of Iraq would be a blood-drenched disaster.

The war party’s “experts”, such as the former “viceroy of Bosnia” Paddy Ashdown, derided warnings that invading Afghanistan would lead to a “long-drawn-out guerrilla campaign” as “fanciful”. More than 10 years on, armed resistance was stronger than ever and the war had become the longest in American history.

It was a similar story in Iraq – though opposition had by then been given voice by millions on the streets. Those who stood against the invasion were still accused of being “appeasers”. US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld predicted the war would last six days. Most of the Anglo-American media expected resistance to collapse in short order. They were entirely wrong.

A new colonial-style occupation of Iraq would, I wrote in the first week of invasion, “face determined guerrilla resistance long after Saddam Hussein has gone” and the occupiers “be driven out”. British troops did indeed face unrelenting attacks until they were forced out in 2009, as did US regular troops until they were withdrawn in 2011.

But it wasn’t just on the war on terror that opponents of the New World Order were shown to be right and its cheerleaders to be talking calamitous nonsense. For 30 years, the west’s elites insisted that only deregulated markets, privatisation and low taxes on the wealthy could deliver growth and prosperity.

Long before 2008, the “free market” model had been under fierce attack: neoliberalism was handing power to unaccountable banks and corporations, anti-corporate globalisation campaigners argued, fuelling poverty and social injustice and eviscerating democracy – and was both economically and ecologically unsustainable.

In contrast to New Labour politicians who claimed “boom and bust” to be a thing of the past, critics dismissed the idea that the capitalist trade cycle could be abolished as absurd. Deregulation, financialisation and the reckless promotion of debt-fuelled speculation would, in fact, lead to crisis.

The large majority of economists who predicted that the neoliberal model was heading for breakdown were, of course, on the left. So while in Britain the main political parties all backed “light-touch regulation” of finance, its opponents had long argued that City liberalisation threatened the wider economy.

Critics warned that privatising public services would cost more, drive down pay and conditions and fuel corruption. Which is exactly what happened. And in the European Union, where corporate privilege and market orthodoxy were embedded into treaty, the result was ruinous. The combination of liberalised banking with an undemocratic, lopsided and deflationary currency union that critics (on both left and right in this case) had always argued risked breaking apart was a disaster waiting to happen. The crash then provided the trigger.

The case against neoliberal capitalism had been overwhelmingly made on the left, as had opposition to the US-led wars of invasion and occupation. But it was strikingly slow to capitalise on its vindication over the central controversies of the era. Hardly surprising, perhaps, given the loss of confidence that flowed from the left’s 20th-century defeats – including in its own social alternatives.

But driving home the lessons of these disasters was essential if they were not to be repeated. Even after Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on terror was pursued in civilian-slaughtering drone attacks from Pakistan to Somalia. The western powers played the decisive role in the overthrow of the Libyan regime – acting in the name of protecting civilians, who then died in their thousands in a Nato-escalated civil war, while conflict-wracked Syria was threatened with intervention and Iran with all-out attack.

And while neoliberalism had been discredited, western governments used the crisis to try to entrench it. Not only were jobs, pay and benefits cut as never before, but privatisation was extended still further. Being right was, of course, never going to be enough. What was needed was political and social pressure strong enough to turn the tables of power.

Revulsion against a discredited elite and its failed social and economic project steadily deepened after 2008. As the burden of the crisis was loaded on to the majority, the spread of protests, strikes and electoral upheavals demonstrated that pressure for real change had only just begun. Rejection of corporate power and greed had become the common sense of the age.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm described the crash of 2008 as a “sort of right-wing equivalent to the fall of the Berlin wall”. It was commonly objected that after the implosion of communism and traditional social democracy, the left had no systemic alternative to offer. But no model ever came pre-cooked. All of them, from Soviet power and the Keynesian welfare state to Thatcherite-Reaganite neoliberalism, grew out of ideologically driven improvisation in specific historical circumstances.

The same would be true in the aftermath of the crisis of the neoliberal order, as the need to reconstruct a broken economy on a more democratic, egalitarian and rational basis began to dictate the shape of a sustainable alternative. Both the economic and ecological crisis demanded social ownership, public intervention and a shift of wealth and power. Real life was pushing in the direction of progressive solutions.

The upheavals of the first years of the 21st century opened up the possibility of a new kind of global order, and of genuine social and economic change. As communists learned in 1989, and the champions of capitalism discovered 20 years later, nothing is ever settled.

This is an edited extract from The Revenge of History: the Battle for the 21st Century by Seumas Milne, published by Verso. Buy it for £16 at guardianbookshop.co.uk

continue reading source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/19/new-world-order

dfsg

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Canada, China, FIPA, Trade, Uncategorized

#FIPPA: The Canada-China Investment Treaty

October 17, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

If Stephen Harper gets his way with FIPA the Canada-China Foreign Investment Protection Agreement, it would pave the way for foreign investors to sue the Canadian government if it puts in regulations that may interfere with their profits! Sign the petition and spread the word!

Chinese companies can sue BC for changing course on Northern Gateway, says policy expert: http://www.vancouverobserver.com/sustainability/chinese-companies-can-sue-bc-changing-course-northern-gateway-says-policy-expert

Sign the petition: http://leadnow.ca/canada-not-for-sale

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Published on Oct 17, 2012 by weavingspider

Category: News & Politics

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Canada, China, Intel, Police State, Sovereignty, Uncategorized

China Propaganda Chief Makes Secretive Visit to Canada

October 15, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

China Propaganda Chief Makes Secretive Visit to Canada

Missteps with Chinese officials shows Canadian PM getting bad advice on China, says ex-secretary of state

By Matthew Little
Epoch Times Staff Created: April 26, 2012 Last Updated: October 15, 2012

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper meets with Chinese Communist Party propaganda chief Li Changchun in Ottawa on April 19. (Jill Thompson/PMO)

OTTAWA—Normally when the prime minister of Canada receives a high-ranking foreign official, the visit follows a predictable protocol. There are press releases, advanced agendas, and photo ops.

When Li Changchun, the fifth-ranked member of the Chinese regime’s ruling Standing Committee, came to Ottawa last week, there was none of that. Instead, the entire visit was kept under wraps. Details of the meeting emerged only via Chinese press likely in Li’s entourage.

Even after the visit, few details were released by the Prime Minister’s Office save for a photo of Stephen Harper and his guest facing each other in armchairs.

Li is the head of the Chinese regime’s notorious propaganda and censorship system.

Bad Advice

The Canadian prime minister appears to be getting some bad advice.

Those were former member of Parliament David Kilgour’s first words when he heard Stephen Harper had met with another senior Chinese cadre who is among the most notorious rights abusers in China today.

It simply has got to stop or Canada is going to be a laughing stock among the people that believe in human dignity and rule of law.
—David Kilgour

“I am very sad to hear that. It simply has got to stop or Canada is going to be a laughing stock among the people that believe in human dignity and rule of law,” said Kilgour, a former secretary of state for Asia-Pacific.

Kilgour said the fact that Li was making the rounds in Ottawa while trying to keep his presence unknown to the Western press should have tipped off Harper’s staff that Li had something to hide.

Meetings With Top-Level Targets for Ousting

Li comes to Canada amid factional infighting in the highest ranks of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is claiming some of Li’s most powerful allies.

Li has long been counted among the core members of the faction loyal to former chairman Jiang Zemin, as opposed to the faction headed by current leader Hu Jintao and his premier, Wen Jianbao.

Several top members of Jiang’s faction are now targets for ousting. It’s a messy process that has caught the attention of the international press as former Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai, another Jiang ally, comes under investigation.

Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper (L) and his wife Laureen wave as they disembark from their aircraft after arriving at Beijing international airport on Feb. 7. While in China, Harper met with Chongqing City’s Party Secretary Bo Xilai, a notorious rights abuser now ousted from his position and under investigation. Harper’s meeting with Chinese propaganda chief Li Changchun has raised questions over how much the PM knows about the people he is meeting with. (Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images)

Harper met with Bo on Feb. 11, just weeks before Bo was purged from his position, a move The Epoch Times predicted before Harper’s meeting. Once considered a rising star, Bo is now under investigation for “serious discipline violations.”

“[Harper] should never have gone to see Bo in Chongqing, that was colossally bad advice. It was abundantly clear to everybody that follows China closely that Bo was on his way out,” said Kilgour.

Kilgour also noted Bo’s leading role in the organ harvesting crimes against Falun Gong practitioners, arguing he is not someone Canada should have been looking to build ties with.

“Our PM is supposed to get better advice than that. He’s got a lot of stuff to keep track of and he’s not supposed to be an expert on all these nuances that are happening in China at breakneck speed,” said the former parliamentarian.

Click www.ept.ms/ccp-crisis to read about the most recent developments in the ongoing power struggle within the Chinese communist regime. In this special topic, we provide readers with the necessary context to understand the situation. Get the RSS feed. Get the Timeline of Events. Who are the Major Players?

Abrupt Terminations

Kilgour said the prime minister needs capable China advisers able to understand the situation unfolding in that country now. Otherwise, Canada will look absurd as events play out and its closest China connections continue to be cadres with careers marked by brutality and abrupt termination.

Those terminations are climbing ranks, and Epoch Times analysts are expecting Bo’s former protector and one of the regime’s most powerful figures, Zhou Yongkang, will be next to fall. Zhou heads China’s all-powerful internal security apparatus, which controls a massive surveillance network as well as China’s police and courts.

For several weeks, The Epoch Times has been pointing to evidence that Zhou is on the ropes, and recently many large media organizations have also reported that the sharks appear to be circling the communist security chief. It’s all bad news for Li, a close ally of both Bo and Zhou.

Li may have left China for a trip to four nations to escape the fallout of those struggles, said Sheng Xue, a prominent Chinese democracy activist in Toronto.

“He wants to keep his power after the struggle, so he chose to leave,” said Xue, adding that Li may actually have connections on both sides of the struggle and so left the country to avoid having to position himself.

Li has already been forced to oust his past ally Bo after his fellow eight members on the regime’s ruling Standing Committee supported purging Bo.

While Li may now wish to avoid stating allegiances, he has traditionally been associated with Jiang’s clique. According to one news report from Hong Kong’s Apple Daily, Li has already come under censure amid the fallout surrounding Bo.

Propaganda Czar Zealous in Persecutions

A spokesperson from the Prime Minister’s Office said Thursday’s sit-down with Li was a courtesy meeting, a casual chitchat with Li to exchange niceties with no formal business agenda.

Li is due to be retired from the Politburo’s Standing Committee, the nine-member organ that rules China, due on an age limit put in place by Jiang. Though Li has no official government role, his position within the Party—and the Party’s control of the government—makes him one of the most powerful people in China.

In his role as head of the Orwellian-titled Central Guidance Commission for Building Spiritual Civilization and Central Leading Group for Propaganda and Ideological Work, Li controls what 1.3 billion Chinese people see, hear, and speak.

Like Bo and Zhou, who Jiang raised from lesser positions, Li climbed through the ranks by making zealous efforts in Jiang’s campaign to crush Falun Gong. Before being banned in 1999, the spiritual group had attracted 100 million adherents pursuing spiritual enlightenment via its tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

As the regime’s propaganda czar, it has fallen to Li to maintain the demonization of Falun Gong necessary to justify the crackdown. Meanwhile, he must also ensure all media in China follow the Party line, regulate censorship, and carry out propaganda campaigns as needed.

In March 2008, it fell on Li to formulate propaganda to justify a violent crackdown on protests in Tibet on the eve of the 2008 Olympics.

Fear of Protests, Lawsuits Abroad

Li’s propaganda responsibilities include enhancing China’s soft power abroad.

During his trip, Li opened another Confucius Institute in Canada at Carleton University in Ottawa.

The schools have come under criticism from experts in the intelligence community for possible espionage work while others criticize the institutes for giving students a distinctly communist perspective on contemporary issues.

The institutes are a central plank in the regime’s efforts to extend its soft power.

But even that ribbon cutting ceremony was not announced. A spokesperson from the university said it was because it was a private ceremony and the public was not invited.

Lucy Zhou with the Falun Dafa Association of Canada said she suspects Li is afraid of attracting critics if his agenda is known in advance.

“I can certainly understand when officials heavily involved in persecution come overseas, they want to keep their itinerary secretive because they are afraid of protests and lawsuits,” said Zhou.

Efforts to sue Li for persecuting Falun Gong adherents were made when Li went to Ireland in 2010 and France in 2004.

Such lawsuits against Bo Xilai caused his downfall in 2007, according to U.S. diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks.

Premier Wen Jiabao argued at the 17th National Congress that Bo, then the minister of commerce, should not be promoted to the Standing Committee because of the bevy of lawsuits against him. Bo was instead demoted to Party chief of Chongqing.

Click www.ept.ms/ccp-crisis to read about the most recent developments in the ongoing power struggle within the Chinese communist regime. In this special topic, we provide readers with the necessary context to understand the situation. Get the RSS feed. Get the Timeline of Events. Who are the Major Players?

Tags: Canada, Li Changchun

continue reading source: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/china-propaganda-chief-makes-secretive-visit-to-canada-227636-print.html

China
Regime

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Canada, Foreign Policy, Latin America, Panama, Trade, Uncategorized

Prime Minister Harper’s free trade strategy endorses conflict-ridden mining industry

October 15, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

By Jen Moore
Published on Monday October 15, 2012

An indigenous protest in Panama.(February, 2012)

The Harper government’s trade agenda is front and centre this parliamentary term as the Conservatives seek to open new markets.

While coverage of Asia-Pacific and EU agreements dominate public debate, other bilateral agreements have been quietly making their way through Parliament. The House of Commons trade committee recently passed legislation to implement the Canada-Panama free trade agreement that could come before the House for third reading as early as this week.

As in other parts of Latin America, Canada has considerable interests in Panama’s mining sector, and as MiningWatch told the trade committee during recent hearings, the free trade deal is stacked in favour of mining firms at the expense of indigenous rights and environmental protection.

Ensuring greater legal stability for the Canadian mining industry in Panama means locking in a regulatory regime that has proved ineffective at preventing harm to the well-being of people and their living environment. It gives Canadian companies access to a costly international dispute settlement process to challenge pretty much any government decision they don’t like.

In other parts of the region, where Canadian mining companies have access to similar trade and investment agreements, they have not hesitated to threaten or launch such lawsuits. Such is the case in El Salvador, where Vancouver-based Pacific Rim Mining is suing the government for tens of millions of dollars after failing to obtain an environmental permit, a case which is before the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) in Washington. The case has cost El Salvador $5 million (U.S.) to date, enough to provide one year of adult literacy classes for 140,000 people. Regionwide, a third of the 137 pending cases before ICSID relate to natural resources, and half are against Latin American states, up from three cases pending before the same tribunal 12 years ago.

Meanwhile, mining-affected communities are not afforded such guarantees. The environmental side chapter of the Canada-Panama FTA is a non-binding declaration, which relies on political will for its implementation. This political will is as questionable in Panama as it is in Canada, with the Canadian government’s open antipathy to environmental concerns and environmental groups. Recently, we have seen Canadian mining companies undermine legal environmental protections — with the support of Panamanian government institutions — and the Panamanian state violently cracking down on recent indigenous protests over mining activities.

For example, a group of Canadian and Chilean consultants working in the name of Vancouver-based Corriente Resources — now a Canadian subsidiary of a Chinese consortium — has been operating in western Panama without the consent of representative indigenous Ngäbe-Buglé organizations that administer the region, and without any licence from Panamanian authorities. Traditional Ngäbe-Buglé authorities have accused the consultants of fomenting divisions, spreading malicious rumours, and supporting particular local electoral candidates — and have declared them personas non grata.

The Ngäbe-Buglé, Panama’s largest indigenous population, has also recently staged massive protests in opposition to changes to state-led mining reforms. In January 2012, one protester and one bystander were killed when police initiated a brutal crackdown on a Ngäbe-Buglé blockade.

The lack of effective channels for peaceful dispute resolution in Panama and the government’s lack of compliance with promises and agreements it has made with the Ngäbe-Buglé have resulted in a loss of credibility of the governing regime and loss of confidence in the political will to genuinely solve existing problems. Nonetheless, a representative of Corriente Resources testifying to Parliament about the Canada-Panama FTA claimed, “Canadian industry, in our experience, is generally well received by people in Panama and particularly in the Ngäbe-Buglé comarca.”

Toronto-based Inmet Mining has a large copper project in northern Panama and has also claimed before the House of Commons committee to be a good corporate citizen. But its efforts to obstruct environmental protection measures, taking advantage of weaknesses in the Panamanian regulatory and justice system, put the company’s claims in question. In particular, the company sought a constitutional injunction against the creation of a protected area in the district of Donoso where it’s operating, within the highly biodiverse Mesoamerican Biological Corridor and with an average rainfall of five metres per year.

The Panamanian Supreme Court overturned this injunction in July 2011, but only announced its decision a day after the Panamanian Environmental Authority approved the company’s environmental licence in late December 2011. Later, in April of this year, an administrative tribunal, under a magistrate who was named by, and is a former adviser to the current Panamanian president, suspended the protected area status.

This project would also entail the displacement of a number of Ngäbe-Buglé indigenous communities and, according to a recent CBC report, lacks the prior consent of indigenous peoples. In early 2012, Martín Rodríguez, a local community leader, told CBC reporter Mellissa Fung that: “People who are working for the mine turned up in our community and explained that at some point everyone would have to be evicted, because they say the lands here are part of the mining concession.” When community members refused to leave, Rodríguez said Inmet tried to gain their favour through other means: “They (Inmet) say they are going to give us a health centre and a school, but I don’t want that from them. As a leader, I can see through that. How much destruction and pollution is there going to be? Schools and health centres, that’s the government’s responsibility.”

In the context of such conflicts, proposals to consider banning open-pit mining or suspending mining development have gained high-level attention in Panama. In early 2011, the national ombudsman was among those calling for a moratorium on mining until the country could strengthen its institutions. A national survey carried out around the same time found that 67.7 per cent of Panamanians were opposed to mining in the country, and 68.8% of Panamanians disagreed with pro-mining legal reforms. In 2012, the Ngäbé Buglé declared a prohibition on mining within their administrative area, or Comarca.

Implementing the Panama-Canada Free Trade Agreement under these conditions, therefore, is tantamount to giving Canada’s seal of approval to a discredited political and regulatory regime that is failing to protect democratic expression or protect the lives and living environment of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Panamanians. At the same time, it shores up already favourable conditions for a conflict-ridden industry — so much so that it is hard to avoid the conclusion that protecting and promoting investment, and not opening markets, is the main objective, with no consideration for the well-being of affected communities and the environment.

Jen Moore is Latin America program co-ordinator for MiningWatch Canada.

continue reading: http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1271936–prime-minister-harper-s-free-trade-strategy-endorses-conflict-ridden-mining-industry

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Sovereignty, Telecom, Uncategorized

Canada ‘at risk’ from Chinese firm, U.S. warns

October 9, 2012 @opHarper 1 Comment

Head of U.S. committee says ordinary Canadians should be worried about Huawei

by Greg Weston, CBC News
Posted: Oct 9, 2012 5:17 AM ET
Last Updated: Oct 9, 2012 5:22 AM ET

The head of the powerful U.S. Intelligence Committee is urging Canadian companies not to do business with the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei as a matter of national security.

In a scathing report released Monday in Washington, the congressional committee branded Huawei a threat to U.S. national security, and urged American telecommunications companies using the Chinese firm to “find other vendors.”

The committee concluded that allowing Huawei to help build American networks could potentially be used by Chinese cyber-spies to steal U.S. state and commercial secrets, or even to disrupt everything from electrical power grids to banking systems in a time of conflict.

But in an exclusive interview with CBC News, committee chairman Mike Rogers warns that Canada is equally at risk.

The world’s second-largest telecommunications equipment supplier, Huawei is already providing high-speed networks for Bell Canada, Telus, SaskTel and Wind Mobile – deals that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has openly applauded.

But the next big deal could be helping to build a new super-secure telecom system for the Canadian government, a multi-billion project in part to replace data systems contaminated beyond repair by a massive Chinese cyber-attack in 2010.

Allowing Huawei near any part of that network, says the chairman of the U.S. Intelligence Committee, could be courting disaster.

‘This is your personal data. This could be your medical records, your financial records, everything that you hold dear that you think is locked away in a safe place on your computer…’ —Mike Rogers, chair of U.S. Intelligence Committee

“I absolutely would not do it,” Rogers said. “The key word there is new secure network; I would not have the faith and confidence.”

Rogers says the information about Huawei gathered by his committee “puts at risk consumer data, and puts at risk security interests certainly of the United States, and I would argue of Canada as well.”

The telecommunications systems in the two countries, he says, “are so integrated I would urge the private sector to find other vendors.”

The Republican congressman from Michigan says ordinary Canadian consumers have every reason to worry about threats to cyber-security.

“This is your personal data. This could be your medical records, your financial records, everything that you hold dear that you think is locked away in a safe place on your computer that goes across these networks and becomes subject to being gathered by the Chinese government.”

House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers says allowing the Chinese access to Canadian telecom networks isn’t logical. (Yuri Gripas/Reuters)Rogers says the fear is that electronic bugs will be embedded in telecom systems to secretly transmit data back to China, also known as beaconing or opening back doors.

“There are bugs, back doors and beaconing going on in Huawei gear,” he claims. “We have had lots of reports of that happening.

“I will bet my bottom dollar, as we say in the U.S., that activity is happening in Canada as well.”

While there is little concrete proof to back Rogers’ claim, a former Canadian spymaster agrees it is certainly possible.

Ray Boisvert, who until recently was assistant deputy director of intelligence for Canada’s spy agency, told CBC News: “The threat comes down to…can a company that manufactures hardware embed certain codes that would allow them to back-door a lot of information that goes through the network?

”I have seen it hands-on through my own experience. It is true.”

In the past two years, Canada has been hard-hit by China-based cyber-attacks on government, corporations and even Bay Street law firms.

The latest attack managed to penetrate the computer systems of a Calgary-based company that makes the digital control systems for almost all of Canada’s oil and gas pipelines.

Rogers says allowing the Chinese access to American or Canadian telecom networks simply isn’t logical.

“China is the leading cyber-espionage country in the world today,” he said. “Why we would open up our networks, and give them control of our information doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

Huawei Canada employs hundreds in Ontario

Huawei Canada, which employs about 400 people in Markham and Ottawa, did not respond directly to the U.S. committee report.

“We recognize, that as a Chinese-based telecommunications company, it is fair and reasonable to expect that we would be under some scrutiny from Government,” the company said in a prepared statement.

“For this reason, we have worked to conduct ourselves in a manner that positively reflects our contribution to Canada.”

The Canadian government referred all questions about Huawei to the federal department responsible for building the new secure telecommunications network.

Shared Services Canada issued a statement saying the government “takes cyber-security seriously and operates on the advice of security experts.”

The government has given itself the power to exclude Huawei from the entire network project, but won’t say if it has any intention of doing so.

U.S. and Australia have bans on Huawei

In contrast, both the U.S. and Australia have simply banned Huawei from bidding on major telecommunications projects, or attempting to take over American companies.

NDP MP Paul Dewar accused Harper of not taking the issue seriously.

“There is a real question of competence with this government if other countries – Australia, the U.K. is wrestling with this issue, and of course the U.S. with this report – if they are taking this seriously, why aren’t we?”

The last time the prime minister addressed the issue, he told the Commons: “…we do not take dictates on security from the United States.”

Huawei’s American spokesperson, William Plummer, had harsh words for Rogers’ committee and its report.

Plummer denied the committee’s allegations, suggesting the report was more about politics than security.

“There are politics and then there are facts. And the facts are this company is globally trusted, and our product is world proven in terms of its security and integrity.

“That is the truth today. Those are the facts today…political distractions aside – dangerous political distractions.”

Hong Lei, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, hinted that the stinging U.S. committee report on Huawei could damage trade relations between the two countries.

“We hope the U.S. Congress will set aside prejudices, respect facts, and do more things that are beneficial to Sino-American economic and trade ties, but not the opposite.”

The issue of Huawei and the threat of cyber-spying in the U.S. and Canada is likely far from over.

Rogers said that during the past year of investigations, his committee was also presented with allegations of corruption and bribery – allegations his office plans to turn over to the FBI today.

P.O.V.

Should Canada ban Huawei from bidding on government projects? Take our survey.

continue reading: Canada ‘at risk’ from Chinese firm, U.S. warns
Head of U.S. committee says ordinary Canadians should be worried about Huawei

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Canada, China, Crime, Intel, Sovereignty, Telecom, Uncategorized

Canada needs to take threat of Chinese cyberespionage more seriously: former top spy

October 9, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

Colin Freeze
The Globe and Mail
Published Tuesday, Oct. 09 2012, 1:28 PM EDT
Last updated Tuesday, Oct. 09 2012, 2:24 PM EDT

A cleaner wipes the glass door of a Huawei office in Wuhan, Hubei province October 9, 2012. (DARLEY SHEN /REUTERS)

One of Canada’s former top spies says that the damage done by economic espionage is now on par with the threat posed by al-Qaeda and other radical groups.

“It has become equal to the threat of terrorism. Why? It has such long-term repercussions. The future prosperity of Canadians,” says Ray Boisvert, who had served as the assistant director of intelligence for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service until his retirement six months ago.

More Related to this Story

Telecom: Video: U.S. report slams China’s Huawei, ZTE

Mr. Boisvert made his remarks to The Globe and Mail after Washington released a scathing report about the cyberespionage threat posed by China’s Huawei Technologies Co.

The expanding telcom giant simply “cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence,” according to the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The report suggested Huawei and the billions of dollars worth of Internet-infrastructure equipment that it sells could facilitate “the ongoing onslaught of sophisticated computer network intrusions that originate in China.”

Citing classified and unclassified intelligence, the lawmakers – versed in Washington’s own clandestine hacking efforts – recommended that Huawei be kept far away from contracts to install sensitive U.S. government systems. Their fear? Chinese spies could prevail on Huawei to install backdoors that would allow for sneak peeks at propriety data – or worse, allow them to mess with U.S. infrastructure.

Huawei remains opaque about its ongoing ties to the one-party Communist state that nurtured it. So much so that the House intelligence committee is also telling private companies to give Huawei a wide berth.

The multibillion-dollar company counters that American fears are based purely on rumour and innuendo. Yet Australia and Great Britain, too, have also taken precautions to ensure their own networks are free of prying eyes where Huawei equipment is involved.

Such arrangements now threaten to leave Canada as the odd man out in the decades-old intelligence fraternity of major English-speaking powers – the only partner that hasn’t yet publicly grappled with the significance of selling its data pipelines to a multinational often seen to be aligned with a rival power.

How significant is this Huawei issue from Canada? Here, Mr. Boisvert, who left CSIS to start a risk-management consultancy known as I-Sec Integrated Strategies, reflects on how Ottawa has been grappling with the issue.

The Globe and Mail: The U.S. seems to be very proactive about the Huawei issue.

Ray Boisvert: In this country, it’s a lot more about doing business – Canada is a trading nation, we’re small, and we need to take greater risks.

When it comes down to the U.S. polity versus ours, there’s a lot more weight placed on security requirements.

There’s a made-in-U.S.A. factor, too, that can’t be ignored. In the U.S., there are a lot of telecommunications suppliers that could supplant Huawei’s deliverables.

Well, we used to have a pretty good telecom equipment company in Canada. A lot of people suggest Huawei ate – or stole – Nortel’s lunch …

There was a bunch of stuff going on – a bunch of poor decisions were made. The Year 2000 high-tech collapse that played against Nortel.

But there have been enough stories including the head of IT [information technology] at Nortel who said that “We got done by cyber-attacks.”

And at the same time Huawei rose, Nortel fell. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

How well equipped is the Canadian government to address espionage?

At the end of the day, we’ve all been focused on the post-9/11 environment. The single most important threat has been the threat of terrorism.

That has distracted us from a very important national security threat that all of us in the business are very conscious of.

Espionage in the 21st Century is not spy-versus-spy but it’s really about gaining strategic economic advantage, globally. That means agencies facilitating the companies to gain strategic advantage to dominate economically.

In my view, it has become equal to the threat of terrorism. Why? It has such long term repercussions. The future prosperity of Canadians.

What should Canadian lawmakers think about U.S. counterparts sounding the alarm about Huawei?

It comes down to: Is our policy attuned at the right level?

There’s a two-part decision. One – Huawei, do you accept them as a legitimate player in the marketplace? If the answer to that is yes, then you are really hard-pressed not to allow them to compete for contracts in the private sector.

The second part is, are they a security threat? If they are should they be able to bid on shared [critical government] infrastructure?

It’s one thing to lay down the backbone of a really large set of pipes. If you had some malware embedded in the coding of the system, you’re fishing in a pond that’s billions and billions of litres deep.

Versus, if you’re sitting on a specific network where right away the fishing is pretty clear – you’re in a small pond of a hundred litres. It’s easier to identify which one of those data packages, which fish you want to spear.

But aren’t people getting a lot better at sifting the important stuff out of torrents and torrents of data?

There are limits.

If you’re asking me “Would you let them install hardware into the main telecommunications networks?,” my answer would be “Yeah you could, but you really want to put in a lot of checks and balances – initial verification of the code, and ongoing auditing of all of the mechanisms that Huawei would implement.”

Does this inform the Nexen Inc. takeover debate? Or are oil and telecom two different kettles of fish?

It’s not the same national-security concern. It’s one thing to look at the fact that here’s a huge investment in a strategic resource – oil – and ask “Is this in Canada’s best interest?”

But the Huawei one is very greatly debated. I think there is a preponderance of legitimate evidence, there is enough layman and specialist understanding, that an organization like Huawei could take incredible advantage of owning the network that all of your communications are crossing.

Have the security implications of Huawei been discussed in places like the Langevin Block? 24 Sussex? Your old shop at Blair and Ogilvie?

I’ll just say that I know, when I was at CSIS, these issues were raised. Whether they have an audience or not, I’ll leave that for others to comment on.

Canada has taken a look at those issues when the larger telecommunications companies [Telus, Bell, Rogers] wanted to buy Huawei equipment.

The role of CSIS is to give advice to Industry Canada.

So Industry Canada plays the middle man role – in terms of responding to concerns that industry may have [to government] or bringing those concerns the security community may have to industry.

Isn’t there always a tension between the security guys and the “Do Business” guys? Does it make any sense to put the cybersecurity issue within the “Do Business” Ministry?

There is certainly a tension. It’s a tension that an organization like CSIS is fully aware of.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

continue reading: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/canada-needs-to-take-threat-of-chinese-cyberespionage-more-seriously-former-top-spy/article4598561/

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Alberta, Canada, China, Ideology, Sovereignty, Trade, Uncategorized

Nexen takeover bid raises difficult policy questions for government, Harper says

October 4, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

Nexen takeover bid raises difficult policy questions for government, Harper says

By Jason Fekete, Postmedia News October 4, 2012

A security officer keeps watch outside the headquarters of China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) in Beijing in this February 19, 2008 file photograph. China’s top offshore oil producer CNOOC, is hoping to buy Calgary energy company Nexen. Photograph by: REUTERS/Claro Cortes IV , Postmedia News

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Stephen Harper says CNOOC’s takeover bid for Canadian energy company Nexen “raises a range of difficult policy questions” for his government as it decides whether to approve the $15-billion transaction.

The prime minister’s comments Thursday — some of his strongest yet on the issue — added more intrigue to a day that saw the NDP announce it opposes the deal as currently structured, due to what it says is a secretive review process, government’s history of “rubber stamping” deals and CNOOC’s poor track record.

The Conservative cabinet is currently reviewing, under the Investment Canada Act, whether China National Offshore Oil Corporation’s (CNOOC) $15.1-billion takeover of Calgary-based petroleum producer Nexen is of “net benefit” to Canada.

The government’s review — and the ramifications of its decision on future foreign investment and takeovers, especially in the oilsands sector — is proving to be a somewhat divisive issue within the Tory cabinet and caucus.

Harper said his government is generally welcoming of foreign investment, but he noted it has significantly modified some previous takeover bids and rejected a couple of others.

The prime minister has previously indicated public opinion, which repeated polls have shown is quickly souring on the deal, will be a factor in the government’s decision, and he reinforced that again Thursday.

“This particular transaction raises a range of difficult policy questions, difficult and forward-looking issues, and those things will all be taken into account under the Act in assessing the net benefit of this investment to this country before we take a decision. And obviously we continue to gather information and opinion on that,” Harper told reporters on Parliament Hill.

Harper said concerns raised by U.S. officials about CNOOC’s acquisition of Nexen — and the company’s assets in the Gulf of Mexico — won’t influence his government’s decision, nor will the NDP’s opposition to the deal.

“The NDP is an ideologically socialist party that’s opposed to all investment so their position on this is not a surprise,” the prime minister added.

“We do have to remember as Canadians that a lot of jobs in this country, a lot of jobs and growth depend on the investments that come to this country.”

The NDP announced its position a day after Conservatives defeated the official Opposition’s motion in the House of Commons that called for public consultation on the deal and public hearings into foreign ownership in the Canadian energy sector by state-owned enterprises such as Beijing-based CNOOC.

The party is also looking for the Harper government to fulfil its two-year-old promise to clarify the concept of “net benefit” in the Investment Canada Act.

Instead, reviews under the Investment Canada Act, like the CNOOC-Nexen transaction, are all handled in backrooms with nebulous criteria on how a decision is made, the NDP says.

“We think the concerns outweigh the benefits,” NDP energy critic Peter Julian told reporters Thursday in Ottawa as he announced the party’s position.

“We do not have confidence in the government’s ability to handle this transaction,” he added. “They’ve completely botched this file. This is a mess of the government’s own making.”

Julian maintained the NDP welcomes international investment, but said the Harper government is simply “rubber stamping” most foreign investment and takeovers, and failing to enforce approval conditions from past transactions.

The “starting point” for the NDP to support the deal is for the Conservatives to implement the details of a 2010 motion endorsed by all parties that called on the government to: amend the Investment Canada Act to include public hearings for foreign investment reviews, ensure conditions attached to an approval are made public and clarify that the goal of the Act is to attract new capital and create new jobs, among other measures.

The changes are particularly needed because of what many observers believe is a “tsunami” of foreign investment and takeovers coming to Canada, Julian said.

The official Opposition said it also has a number of specific worries about state-owned CNOOC buying a major Canadian energy company with a large stake in the oilsands, with little guarantee of reciprocity for Canadian companies trying to access the Chinese market.

Treasury Board president Tony Clement said this week the federal government would be breaking the law if it held public hearings on the deal as the opposition demands.

Harper has promised the government will release a road map governing foreign takeovers around the same time it announces its decision on the CNOOC-Nexen deal.

Alberta Premier Alison Redford said Thursday her province needs foreign investment, but noted it’s important that jobs stay in the province, economic development continues in an environmentally sustainable manner and that corporate governance of foreign companies follows Canadian standards.

“It’s important for us to welcome foreign direct investment. That has been a very large part of how our energy economy has grown in Alberta. We have provided some advice to the government of Canada with respect to that,” Redford told reporters in Edmonton.

Reports have indicated the Alberta government has provided Ottawa a list of conditions it wants included in any federal approval of the transaction, including guarantees that at least half of Nexen’s board and management positions will be held by Canadians, for CNOOC to maintain current staffing levels for at least five years and a commitment to maintain planned capital spending.

Redford said those reports are “certainly consistent” with her government’s advice to Ottawa.

The Harper government officially launched its review of the deal in late August. The government has 45 days to review the proposed takeover (which would be until mid-October), but can extend the deadline by 30 days if necessary — meaning a decision might not come until mid-November.

Nexen shareholders voted overwhelmingly last month to approve the takeover, along with its 61 per cent premium on the price of the company’s shares.

Chief executives from some of Canada’s largest energy companies have also been urging the government to adopt new rules to protect major Canadian oilsands companies from a deluge of foreign investment expected in the coming years.

As part of the proposed acquisition, CNOOC has promised to make Calgary its North and Central American headquarters, retain Nexen’s current management team and employees, and to list CNOOC shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

jfekete@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/jasonfekete

Original source article: Nexen takeover bid raises difficult policy questions for government, Harper says

continue reading: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/National/Nexen+takeover+raises+difficult+policy+questions/7343396/story.html

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Canada, China, Corruption, Crime, Economic, Energy, Foreign Policy, Ideology, Trade, Uncategorized

Hackers infiltrate Calgary-based technology firm

September 28, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

By Greg Weston, CBC News
Posted: Sep 28, 2012 9:47 PM ET
Last Updated: Sep 28, 2012 9:41 PM ET

A leading international expert on computer hacking says cyber-attacks are increasingly targeting the heart of Canada’s infrastructure, including oil pipelines and major public utilities.

CBC News has confirmed a recent cyber-attack successfully breached a Calgary-based supplier of control systems for electrical power grids, municipal water systems, public transit operations, and most of Canada’s major oil and gas pipelines.

Sources say the incident was serious enough to spark action from Canada’s spy service, the RCMP, military intelligence, and the federal government’s special cyber response agency.

Cyber-security expert Daniel Toboc tells CBC News that computer hacking aimed at the control systems of major utilities is becoming both common and potentially among the most serious of all cyber-attacks.

“On a scale of one to 10, I’d give that an eight or nine. God forbid, we ever get a 10.”

continue reading: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2012/09/28/cyber-attacks-canada-infrastructure.html

Affected some files

The company, Telvent Canada, says the security breach of its corporate network “affected some customer files.”

The firm would not reveal whether the hackers managed to steal information that might endanger any of the country’s major utilities.

“Customers have been informed and are taking recommended actions with the support of Telvent teams,” the company says.

It is also “actively working with law enforcement, security specialists and its affected customers to ensure the breach has been contained.”

The federal public safety department refused to provide details of the incident “for operational reasons,” nor would officials say whether ordinary Canadians are at risk as a result of the attacks.

“The Government of Canada takes cyber threats seriously and has measures in place to address them,” the department said in a statement.

“The Canadian Cyber Incident Response Centre is aware of this incident, and is already working with stakeholders in government and the private sector.”

Officials at Telvent and the law enforcement agencies involved in the investigation are refusing to speculate about the source of the cyber-attack.

Similar to attacks from China

But an online cyber-security news website — KrebsOnSecurity.com — cites experts saying the job bore the fingerprints of similar attacks from China.

Only a week ago, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) used its annual report to issue a stern warning that corporations in this country are being attacked by hackers engaged in foreign cyber-espionage.

The report said federal government computers are being hit on a daily basis.

While CSIS doesn’t single out any country by name in its report, federal documents released under the Access to Information Act in recent months show law enforcement agencies and federal officials pointing a finger at China.

One way or another, the latest attack on the Calgary high-tech company is bound to stir even more public concern and political controversy surrounding the proposed Gateway pipeline from the Alberta oilsands to the B.C. coast.

Much of the public debate around the project turns on the reliability of the pipeline, and the potential environmental impact of a major spill.

The possibility raised by the Telvent attack — that hackers could conceivably get their hands on computer codes used to control the pipeline — is bound to spark heated controversy.

The incident also won’t be helpful to the proposed takeover of Nexen, a Calgary-based oil company, by the Chinese petroleum giant CNOOC.

The Harper government still has to approve the $15.4-billion deal, and is under pressure from opposition parties and some large corporations to wring concessions out of the Chinese government as part of the deal.

Friday in the Commons, NDP MP Kennedy Stewart cited the attack on Telvent and reports pointing to a Chinese group as the possible culprits.

“In light of this, can the Conservatives tell us if national security is part of the criteria for the Nexen takeover review?”

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Canada, China, NAFTA, Trade, Uncategorized

Tories quietly table Canada-China investment treaty

September 27, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

By Bill Curry and Shawn McCarthy
OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail
Thursday, September 27 2012

The Conservative government is poised to adopt a sweeping new investment treaty between Canada and China without a single Parliamentary vote or debate.

The text of the Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement was released for the first time this week and members of Parliament are just starting to work their way through the legal document.

Canada and China first announced a draft deal in February during a visit to Beijing by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The final version was signed Sept. 9 in Vladivokstok, Russia, on the sidelines of the 2012 APEC leaders summit.

The treaty promises to set clear investment rules for Canadians in China and Chinese investors in Canada, but questions are already being raised over the treaty’s provisions for resolving disputes.

It allows companies to file claims for financial damages against other firms or against Canadian or Chinese governments for failing to abide by the agreement.

The claims would be resolved by a tribunal, but the hearings would only be open to the public if both sides agree that it is “in the public interest.”

Such dispute provisions are common in agreements of this type, but opposition MPs warned Thursday that the treaty merits much closer debate and scrutiny given the fact that many Chinese investments come in the form of companies that are directly controlled by China’s communist government.

“I think we should have a full debate about this,” said NDP trade critic Don Davies.

“Surely we can take the time to make sure the agreements we sign are sound and good for Canadians.”

The proposed $15.1-billion takeover of Canada’s Nexen Inc. by China’s CNOOC Ltd., a state-owned energy firm, has triggered a debate across the country and inside government over how Canada should respond to China’s huge appetite for investment opportunities.

Yet there is no government-sanctioned debate planned on the new treaty that will govern investment between the two countries for at least the next 15 years.

The Conservative government is of the view that adopting the treaty does not require it to introduce legislation in Parliament.

Instead, it is following a process approved in 2008 that allows treaties to be adopted by cabinet without a vote in Parliament 21 days after the text of the treaty has been tabled.

The text of the Canada-China treaty was quietly tabled in the House of Commons on Wednesday.

Adam Taylor, a spokesman for Trade Minister Ed Fast, said the opposition is free to use one of its “opposition days” to debate the treaty.

Unlike other trade promotion and protection deals, the Canada-China version contains provisions that only apply to investors who are already operating in the other’s country and not to investors who wish to enter.

“It’s a fairly weak deal,” Carleton University trade specialist Michael Hart said Thursday.

“It’s not the desirable version; it’s the ‘we’ve got started’ version. And with China, that’s where we’re at,” he said.

Mr. Hart said it is not unusual for trade agreements to include closed-door arbitration hearings in the event of a dispute.

“Arbitration panels are closed door or else you don’t get amicable agreement.

“Once you make the thing open to the public, you make it far more difficult to get it resolved,” he said.

Dispute-panel hearings under the North American free-trade agreement are often held in private, though there is typically a public record of the facts and arguments of the case, he said.

Similar dispute provisions in Chapter 11 of NAFTA agreement have provoked considerable controversy, as critics say the provisions limit the ability of governments to approve regulations in areas like the environment and health.

Mr. Hart said governments are free to impose new environmental or other regulations on foreign investors, so long as the regulations don’t discriminate against them or single them out.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/tories-quietly-table-canada-china-investment-treaty/article4573635/

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Canada, CETA, Economic, Ideology, NAFTA, NAU, Political, Sovereignty, TPP, Trade, Uncategorized

Government’s fall agenda will unfold behind closed doors

September 15, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

By Greg Weston, CBC News
Posted: Sep 15, 2012

‘Most of the contentious issues facing the Conservative government this fall will be decided behind closed doors — explanatory memo to follow.’

As MPs take their Commons seats for the fall sitting of Parliament, Canadian and European Union negotiators will be huddling elsewhere in the capital, trying to hammer out a free-trade deal that could significantly impact this country and its citizens for decades.

But don’t ask what’s in the deal, or even what Canada wants and is prepared to give up.

Public debate? Forget it. Canadians won’t get to see details of the agreement until after the deal is done.

It’s the same story for the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership, a huge trading bloc that Canada has been actively lobbying to join.

Of course, membership has its price — a free-trade deal with some of the fastest growing economies in the world, potentially impacting every sector of the Canadian economy.

Details to follow, likely after the deal has been initialled.

As Parliament reopens this week to consider the pressing affairs of state, the Harper government of promised openness and accountability is operating increasingly as though the nation’s business were nobody’s business.

It’s not just huge trade deals with Europe and the Pacific Rim that are being kept under wraps, and well away from Commons debate.

In fact, most of the contentious issues facing the Conservative government this fall will be decided behind closed doors — explanatory memo to follow.

Foreign takeover ‘framework’

For example, the prime minister is promising a new set of rules on foreign takeovers.

The move was prompted by a takeover bid by CNOOC, one of China’s largest energy companies, for Alberta-based Nexen and its significant stake in the oilsands.

This potential political powder keg is not so much the Nexen takeover itself, but the possibility the Chinese could use the deal as a template to go on a shopping spree for other Canadian energy companies and possibly control of the oilsands.

On the other hand, Stephen Harper has been begging the Chinese to invest some of their trillions in Canadian energy development, and now that a cheque is on the table, it would be difficult for the PM to block the sale.

The whole issue of foreign takeovers has been a matter of intense public interest since the Conservatives made up the term “strategic asset” as an excuse to nix the politically unpopular takeover of Saskatchewan’s Potash Corp. in 2010.

Similarly, the government’s promised new “foreign takeover framework” would be certain to spark heated national debate — if details were actually known by anyone outside the Prime Minister’s Office.

Instead, sources say the new takeover rules probably won’t be announced much before the government’s decision on the Nexen deal.

Omnibus bill, part 2

Government insiders say the one thing most likely to preoccupy parliamentarians over the coming months is the same issue that dominated the spring sitting: implementing the federal budget.

Most of the budget measures were passed in June in a 425-page omnibus bill that also contained dozens of other totally unrelated pieces of legislation, a hodgepodge of everything from Employment Insurance reform to streamlining environmental assessments.

The move all but eliminated meaningful debate on sweeping changes to Canadian law and governance.

This sitting of Parliament is about to get more of the same.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty will introduce a second “budget” bill he promises will contain “quite a bit.”

The most contentious parts of the actual budgetary measures will be changes to pensions for parliamentarians and public servants to bring them in line with private retirement plans.

True to form, the government isn’t saying what other legislative changes it will toss into the mix this time.

One thing is certain: They will be measures the government of openness and accountability would rather not discuss in public.

source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/09/14/pol-vp-greg-weston-fall-parliament-conservatives.html

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Canada, China, Foreign Policy, Syria, Trade, Uncategorized

Mr. Harper’s new diplomacy

September 11, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

By Jeremy Paltiel
The Globe and Mail
Tuesday September 11 2012

What a difference six years make.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s initiation into summit diplomacy came in 2006 at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation meeting in Hanoi. There, he buttonholed Chinese President Hu Jintao over the detention of Husseyin Celil, a Canadian citizen imprisoned on terrorism-related charges, and was given a cold shoulder and a brushoff. It took two years for Sino-Canadian relations to reach room temperature.

On the weekend, Mr. Harper met formally in what’s likely to be a valedictory meeting with Mr. Hu on the margins of the APEC summit in Vladivostok. By now, the two are old friends, with Mr. Harper’s having visited Mr. Hu twice in Beijing and Mr. Hu’s having travelled to Canada for a state visit ahead of the G8/G20 meetings in 2010. Mr. Hu will be stepping down as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party later this year and as President early next year.

This time, Mr. Harper signed a key deal on investor protection with his Chinese counterpart. The Foreign Investment Protection and Promotion Agreement is likely to temper any criticism of China’s growing footprint in the oil sands and Canada’s resource and energy sector.

For good measure, Mr. Harper put China’s leader on notice over issues of reciprocity in our bilateral trade and investment relationship but deftly stopped short of linking these to pending cabinet approval of China National Offshore Oil Corp.’s $15.1-billion takeover of Calgary-based oil and gas producer Nexen Inc. Mr. Hu knows how to take a hint.

Mr. Harper also raised human-rights concerns, as well as Canadian impatience with Iran’s nuclear program and dismay over the slaughter in Syria. No cold shoulder this time, and no break in the smiles before the cameras. Canada and China are once and future strategic partners.

Our Prime Minister has learned to align our interests when he should, and speak directly and frankly when he must. Mr. Harper’s performance at APEC is a telling benchmark of his emergence as a statesman and as an interlocutor for Canada’s interests on the global stage. For this, he should be applauded.

Jeremy Paltiel is a professor of political science at Carleton University.

source:

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Canada, China, Foreign Policy, Ideology, Media, Political, Uncategorized

Harper quietly holds face-to-face talks with Chinese propaganda chief

September 10, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

Harper quietly holds face-to-face talks with Chinese propaganda chief

CAMPBELL CLARK
OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail
Last updated Monday, Sep. 10 2012, 2:03 PM EDT

Li Changchun arrives at the London Book Fair on April 15, 2012. Mr. Li, head of propaganda and member of the Communist Party of China’s Standing Committee of the Politburo, later met British Prime Minister David Cameron. (PAUL HACKETT /Reuters)

One of China’s most powerful figures slipped into Ottawa unannounced. Unless you were watching Chinese TV.

Li Changchun is ranked No. 5 in the Chinese hierarchy, one of the nine members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China, and the party’s propaganda chief. When he arrived in Ottawa Thursday, he met with Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The government of Canada had never announced the powerful official was coming.

However, Mr. Li’s visit was covered widely by Chinese television and print media like state news agency Xinhua. And then, after Mr. Li’s meeting with the Prime Minister, Mr. Harper’s PMO sent out a photograph of the two men chatting, just before 8:30 on Thursday night. It was the first time they’d told the press about Mr. Li’s visit.

On Friday, the PMO would not say what the two discussed and played down the face-to-face meeting as a “courtesy call.”

Chinese officials said Mr. Li’s visit was to discuss a variety of topics, notable cultural exchanges. Mr. Li issued a statement on Canada-Chinese relations. He also met Governor-General David Johnston and was to meet Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird Friday night, as well as witnessing the signing of an agreement on “cultural co-operation” and the official opening Carleton University’s Confucius Institute. He is to travel to Kingston on Saturday.

Mr. Li has been on a tour. He’d just come from London, where he’d met British Prime Minister David Cameron to talk about relations. But he was also there to talk about the case of Bo Xilai, another ranking Communist Party official who has been suspended from his Politburo amid accusations his wife killed British businessman Neil Heywood. There have also been rumours Mr. Li is reassuring foreign leaders that the change in China’s leadership will go ahead smoothly this fall.

Mr. Harper’s government, however, barely mentioned the three-day visit of the powerful Communist Party official. How powerful? Forbes ranked Mr. Li No. 19 on a list of the world’s most powerful people. In their words, he “controls what 1.3 billion Chinese see, hear, speak.” As chairman of the party’s Central Guidance Commission for Building Spiritual Civilization, he is the de facto controller of media and information censorship.

continue reading source: http://m.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/harper-quietly-holds-face-to-face-talks-with-chinese-propaganda-chief/article4101798/

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Canada, China, TPP, Trade, Uncategorized

Statement by the Prime Minister of Canada at the conclusion of the APEC Leaders’ Meeting

September 9, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

9 September 2012
Vladivostok, Russia

Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered the following remarks at the conclusion of the APEC Leaders’ Meeting in Vladivostok, Russia :

“It has been a pleasure to attend this APEC meeting, here in Vladivostock.

“APEC provides us the opportunity to engage with the growing economies of the Pacific Rim.

“We are, for example, negotiating with the Trans Pacific Partnership, conducting exploratory talks with Thailand, and are undertaking free trade negotiations with Japan and South Korea.

“Today, with President Hu, we witnessed the signing of a Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement, something that offers greater protection for Canadians doing business in China

“We also had a range of meetings with our APEC partners on economic matters.

“Finally, I’d like to acknowledge the warm hospitality that we have received here on our visit to Russia.”

source: http://www.pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?category=3&featureId=6&pageId=49&id=5023

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APEC, Canada, China, Foreign Policy, Ideology, Sovereignty, Trade, Uncategorized

Harper, Chinese leader wrap APEC summit with trade deal

September 8, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

Harper, Chinese leader wrap APEC summit with trade deal

The Canadian Press
Posted: Sep 8, 2012 7:39 PM ET
Last Updated: Sep 8, 2012 11:55 PM ET

Prime Minister Stephen Harper met with Chinese President Hu Jintao on the final day of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit on Sunday, after witnessing the signing of a wide-ranging investment pact.

The two leaders watched as Ed Fast, Canada’s minister of international trade, and Chen Deming, China’s minister of commerce, signed the Canada-China Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement, which was announced during Harper’s visit to China in February.

“Our government is committed to creating the right conditions for Canadian businesses to compete globally,” said Harper. “This agreement with China — the world’s second largest economy — will provide stronger protection for Canadians investing in China, and create jobs and economic growth in Canada.”

The Sunday morning meeting is considered the centrepiece of the prime minister’s trip to the APEC summit in Russia because of his government’s focus on expanding trade with the Asian economic giant.

“Mr. prime minister, we attach great importance to the China-Canada relationship,” said Hu, as the two leaders took up seats opposite a long table, flanked by their officials.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper looks on as ministers exchange documents being signed at the APEC Summit in Vladivostok, Sunday. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)

“I look forward today to discussing with you a range of issues and finding ways to further strengthen our relationship,” Harper replied.

The meeting also comes at a key time because Industry Canada’s ongoing review of the China National Offshore Oil Co.’s $15.1-billion deal to buy Calgary-based Nexen Inc.

China has already invested heavily in Canada’s natural resources sector, but the Nexen bid has sparked concern because CNOOC is a state-owned company, not a private company.

Prior to arriving at the summit, Harper said the onus is on China to show that its state-run enterprises can be trusted to play by the same rules that apply in Canada.

Harper’s other big meeting at the summit came Saturday with his host, Russian President Vladimir Putin, when the two men essentially agreed to disagree on the crisis in Syria.

The summit is being held in the Pacific port city of Vladivostok.

Harper told a business audience in Vancouver that Canada can conduct its relations with China respectfully, “but (is) not afraid to further our own interests and to raise our own concerns on things like human rights.” He added that Canada has “important things that the Chinese want.”

Harper said he wants to deepen economic relations with China but that relationship must be a two-way street, or “win-win to use the Chinese expression.”

Trans-Pacific Partnership: A few questions

June 20, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

By Jim Stanford
June 20, 2012

Stephen Harper with Mexican president Felipe Calderón at the 2012 G20 summit. Photo: Gobierno Federal/Flickr

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The Harper government currently lists 18 different sets of free trade negotiations “in play.” (See my recent post on this.) The government recently announced (from the G20 meetings in Mexico): Canada has been invited to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks. The TPP negotiations were initiated several years ago by a number of smaller Pacific countries. The Obama government jumped on board in 2009, arguing that it could be a “new kind” of trade deal, one that supposedly embodies more “humane” founding principles (side deals on labour and environment, and all that claptrap). This is window dressing, of course; it’s clear that (with a couple of exceptions noted below) this deal will be very much founded on the NAFTA template: investor rights and mobility, protections for intellectual property, and disciplines on state interventions. Mexico has also now been invited to join the talks. Reporters already breathlessly refer to this invitation as a big “prize,” like we’re being admitted to an elite club.

Let’s take a breath and ask a few concrete questions about the whole TPP process:

N.B.: In writing the first version of this post I forgot that Canada already has a FTA with Peru, as well as with the U.S., Mexico and Chile. I have corrected the discussion below accordingly; thanks to Scott Sinclair for pointing this out. Check out the Council of Canadians’ comprehensive brief on TPP from February.

Who’s involved?

They refer to this as a “blockbuster” pact, but that’s really stretching it. There are 10 other countries (other than Canada) in the talks. We already have FTA relationships with four of them (U.S., Mexico, Chile and Peru), so there will be no significant change there. What about the other six? Australia, Brunei (???), New Zealand, Malyasia, Vietnam and Singapore.

What’s our current trade pattern?

Our combined trade with those six potential new free trade partners is small and highly unbalanced. 2011 merchandise exports to the six of them were worth a total of $4.2 billion (under 1 per cent of Canada’s total exports). Our imports equalled $7.4 billion. Trade deficit is $3 billion. Among those six new partners, our biggest trade deficit is with Malaysia; with Australia, we enjoy almost exactly balanced trade.

What will we sell them?

Our trade with the six new TPP partners reflects the same quantitative and qualitative imbalances as our trade with almost everyone in the world (other than the U.S., with whom our trade is much more favourable on both grounds). Quantitatively, we import much more than we export. Qualitatively, we export resources while importing value-added manufactures. Based on past experience, free trade can only accelerate this deindustrializing trend: we will sell them more stuff dug out from the ground under our feet, and we will buy more value-added manufactures.

What about the Southeast Asian connection?

The qualitative imbalance in the composition of our TPP trade is most acute with the three Asian “tigers” represented in the group (Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam). With those three countries alone, Canada incurs a $4-billion manufacturing trade deficit. That would get much bigger under a free trade deal, since all three of those countries are pursuing aggressive export-led trade strategies in the Asian tradition (premised on generating domestic demand and employment through the maintenance of large, ongoing trade surpluses). Free trade with Malaysia and Vietnam (two countries with dynamic export sectors, low wages and iffy labour freedoms) would certainly pose real challenges to Canadian labour standards — accentuating the pressure that is being felt across tradable industries by the continuing migration of investment to Mexico.

Will Canada be a full negotiating partner?

Media reports based on leaked material indicate that Canada and Mexico may in essence be “second-class citizens” in the negotiations. We have been “invited” to participate, but may not have the right to either alter draft text that has already been agreed to, nor to veto future clauses. That means we may have to basically take or leave what the others negotiate. This opens some dangerous scenarios, where Canada accepts inferior or damaging provisions (like the abolition of supply management in agriculture) under pressure of being booted out of the talks altogether.

Will the TPP have a Chapter 11?

It is interesting that some of the TPP partners are presently led by left-wing governments (including Australia, Peru and Vietnam), which will not be amenable to some of the traditional neoliberal provisions of trade agreements. Australia refused to accept a NAFTA-style Chapter 11 (investor-state dispute settlement provision) in its FTA with the U.S., and is unlikely to accept one here. Some other provisions regarding pure national treatment or other protections for investors might be non-starters with some of those governments. It will be interesting to see how those tensions play out. At the WTO stage, a similar difference in approach between northern neoliberals and southern “structuralists” (led by Brazil) have led to a complete stalemate in trade liberalization.

Would anyone notice?

The TPP talks fit into the Harper government’s overall push to cement as many free trade deals as possible, no matter how marginal the trade flows involved, while it enjoys the authority of a majority government. Expect proponents of the TPP to argue vociferously that Canada can’t afford to be left on the sidelines as this trans-Pacific pact is assembled. But in practice joining a TPP would make no measurable difference to Canada’s export potential; only 1 per cent of our exports is affected, and we’ve already seen from other FTAs (especially those with developing countries which follow the export-led model) that free trade has no measurable positive impact on our exports (and may in fact slow down our exports). It will certainly lead to faster import penetration and continuing downward pressure on Canadian labour markets (especially in our relations with the three Asian tigers in the group). Which raises the final question…

Why is the government doing this?

It fits with the political optics of “being seen to be busy” on the economic portfolio, and with the general ideological strategy associated with “free trade.” It will give the government an excuse to end supply management in agriculture (something they want to do anyway, as evidenced by their actions with the Wheat Board). It will give corporations an opportunity to tighten up rules (including intellectual property) above and beyond what’s already written into the NAFTA.

Jim Stanford is an economist with CAW. This article was first posted on The Progressive Economics Forum.

continue reading source: http://rabble.ca/print/columnists/2012/06/trans-pacific-partnership-few-questions

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Economic, Energy, Libya, Sovereignty, Trade, Uncategorized

The IMF and US African Command (AFRICOM) Join Hands in the Plunder of the African Continent

January 6, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

The IMF and US African Command (AFRICOM) Join Hands in the Plunder of the African Continent

by Nile Bowie

January 6, 2012

Lagos Dissents Under IMF Hegemony

Nigeria: The Next Front for AFRICOM

On a recent trip to West Africa, the newly appointed managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde ordered the governments of Nigeria, Guinea, Cameroon, Ghana and Chad to relinquish vital fuel subsidies. Much to the dismay of the population of these nations, the prices of fuel and transport have near tripled over night without notice, causing widespread violence on the streets of the Nigerian capital of Abuja and its economic center, Lagos. Much like the IMF induced riots in Indonesia during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, public discontent in Nigeria is channelled towards an incompetent and self-serving domestic elite, compliant to the interests of fraudulent foreign institutions.

Although Nigeria holds the most proven oil reserves in Africa behind Libya, it’s people are now expected to pay a fee closer to what the average American pays for the cost of fuel, an exorbitant sum in contrast to its regional neighbours. Alternatively, other oil producing nations such as Venezuela, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia offer their populations fuel for as little as $0.12 USD per gallon. While Lagos has one of Africa’s highest concentration of billionaires, the vast majority of the population struggle daily on less than $2.00 USD. Amid a staggering 47% youth unemployment rate and thousands of annual deaths related to preventable diseases, the IMF has pulled the rug out from under a nation where safe drinking water is a luxury to around 80% of it’s populace.

Although Nigeria produces 2.4 million barrels of crude oil a day intended for export use, the country struggles with generating sufficient electrical power and maintaining its infrastructure. Ironically enough, less than 6% of bank depositors own 88% of all bank deposits in Nigeria. Goldman Sachs employees line its domestic government, in addition to the former Vice President of the World Bank, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who is widely considered by many to be the de facto Prime Minister. Even after decades of producing lucrative oil exports, Nigeria has failed to maintain it’s own refineries, forcing it to illogically purchase oil imports from other nations. Society at large has not benefited from Nigeria’s natural riches, so it comes as no surprise that a severe level of distrust is held towards the government, who claims the fuel subsidy needs to be lifted in order to divert funds towards improving the quality of life within the country.

Like so many other nations, Nigerian people have suffered from a systematically reduced living standard after being subjected to the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Policies (SAP). Before a loan can be taken from the World Bank or IMF, a country must first follow strict economic policies, which include currency devaluation, lifting of trade tariffs, the removal of subsidies and detrimental budget cuts to critical public sector health and education services.

SAPs encourage borrower countries to focus on the production and export of domestic commodities and resources to increase foreign exchange, which can often be subject to dramatic fluctuations in value. Without the protection of price controls and an authentic currency rate, extreme inflation and poverty subsist to the point of civil unrest, as seen in a wide array of countries around the world (usually in former colonial protectorates). The people of Nigeria have been one of the world’s most vocal against IMF-induced austerity measures, student protests have been met with heavy handed repression since 1986 and several times since then, resulting in hundreds of civilian deaths. As a testament to the success of the loan, the average laborer in Nigeria earned 35% more in the 1970’s than he would of in 2012.

Working through the direct representation of Western Financial Institutions and the IMF in Nigeria’s Government, a new IMF conditionality calls for the creation of a Sovereign Wealth Fund. Olusegun Aganga, the former Nigerian Minister of Finance commented on how the SWF was hastily pushed through and enacted prior to the countries national elections. If huge savings are amassed from oil exports and austerity measures, one cannot realistically expect that these funds will be invested towards infrastructure development based on the current track record of the Nigerian Government. Further more, it is increasingly more likely that any proceeds from a SWF would be beneficial to Western institutions and markets, which initially demanded its creation. Nigerian philanthropist Bukar Usman prophetically writes “I have genuine fears that the SWF would serve us no better than other foreign-recommended “remedies” which we had implemented to our own detriment in the past or are being pushed to implement today.”

The abrupt simultaneous removal of fuel subsidies in several West African nations is a clear indication of who is really in charge of things in post-colonial Africa. The timing of its cushion-less implementation could not be any worse, Nigeria’s president Goodluck Jonathan recently declared a state of emergency after forty people were killed in a church bombing on Christmas day, an act allegedly committed by the Islamist separatist group, Boko Haram. The group advocates dividing the predominately Muslim northern states from the Christian southern states, a similar predicament to the recent division of Sudan.

As the United States African Command (AFRICOM) begins to gain a foothold into the continent with its troops officially present in Eritrea and Uganda in an effort to maintain security and remove other theocratic religious groups such as the Lord’s Resistance Army, the sectarian violence in Nigeria provides a convenient pretext for military intervention in the continuing resource war. For further insight into this theory, it is interesting to note that United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania conducted a series of African war game scenarios in preparation for the Pentagon’s expansion of AFRICOM under the Obama Administration.

In the presence of US State Department Officials, employees from The Rand Corporation and Israeli military personnel, a military exercise was undertaken which tested how AFRICOM would respond to a disintegrating Nigeria on the verge of collapse amidst civil war. The scenario envisioned rebel factions vying for control of the Niger Delta oil fields (the source of one of America’s top oil imports), which would potentially be secured by some 20,000 U.S. troops if a US-friendly coup failed to take place At a press conference at the House Armed Services Committee on March 13, 2008, AFRICOM Commander, General William Ward then went on to brazenly state the priority issue of America’s growing dependence on African oil would be furthered by AFRICOM operating under the principle theatre-goal of “combating terrorism“.

At an AFRICOM Conference held at Fort McNair on February 18, 2008, Vice Admiral Robert T. Moeller openly declared the guiding principle of AFRICOM was to protect “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market“, before citing China’s increasing presence in the region as challenging to American interests. After the unwarranted snatch-and-grab regime change conducted in Libya, nurturing economic destabilization, civil unrest and sectarian conflict in Nigeria is an ultimately tangible effort to secure Africa’s second largest oil reserves. During the pillage of Libya, its SFW accounts worth over 1.2 billion USD were frozen and essentially absorbed by Franco-Anglo-American powers; it would realistic to assume that much the same would occur if Nigeria failed to comply with Western interests. While agents of foreign capital have already infiltrated its government, there is little doubt that Nigeria will become a new front in the War on Terror.

:: Article nr. 84585 sent on 07-jan-2012 05:57 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=84585

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Afghanistan, Foreign Policy, Ideology, Iran, Israel, Libya, Military, NAU, SPP, Uncategorized, US

Tougher foreign policy vital to Canada: Baird

December 28, 2011 @opHarper Leave a comment

By Lee Berthiaume, Postmedia News
December 28, 2011

OTTAWA — Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird knows some of his government’s positions on the world stage are unpopular. Supporting Israel and walking away from the Kyoto accord earlier this month are two examples.

Baird won’t apologize for either.

“We don’t develop foreign policy to be popular around the world,” he says in a recent interview with Postmedia News. “Sometimes you’re alone saying something, and then a number of years later, it’s conventional wisdom.”

The refusal to concede on issues of importance to the government is one of the clearest marks that Canada’s approach to world affairs has undergone a dramatic change since the Conservatives first came to power nearly six years ago,

Gone is the so-called “soft power” and “human security agenda” of the previous Liberal government, symbolized by consensus building at the United Nations and diplomatic initiatives like peacekeeping.

In its place is a clear pursuit of interests linked to an uncompromising projection of values backed up by a strong military.

The government’s top concern, says Baird, is Canadian economic prosperity.

“It is a lens through which we view almost anything,” he says. “Foreign policy has become even more important to the economy. It’s really essential.”

The Foreign Affairs Department budget has increased by about $700 million since 2006 to $2.8 billion. Where it has resulted in more feet on the ground, those have largely been trade commissioners in trade offices opened in China, India, Brazil and other economic hotspots.

At the same time, Baird is quick to list the number of free trade and foreign investment agreements being pursued by the government. Perhaps not by coincidence, when Canada’s embassy in Tripoli, Libya reopened in September, the first officials deployed were trade officers, not political and human rights experts.

But nothing is bigger than the United States, and Baird identifies the recent Canada-U.S. border security agreement as the best example of “traditional diplomacy” from the last year.

“It took a solid, personal relationship at the top between the prime minister and the president in order to initiate something, successfully see its conclusion and announce it,” Baird says.

The same is true with the mission in Libya, he adds.

“I think Libya’s a big success because of strong leadership on behalf of the prime minister,” Baird says, though he also praises Gen. Charles Bouchard, the Canadian commander who oversaw the NATO operation.

In fact, the foreign affairs minister describes Libya as Canada’s biggest diplomatic accomplishment in the past year.

“No doubt the diplomatic work, the coalition-building and the military success in Libya was a big one for Canada,” he says. “How many thousands, tens of thousands, of civilian lives were saved? It’s just a remarkable accomplishment. (Moammar) Gadhafi was just the worst of the worst.”

The Canadian military has emerged as a major player in Canadian foreign policy in recent years, bolstered by the fact the Defence Department budget has increased nearly $5.6 billion to $20.3 billion since the Conservative government came into power. This has included the purchase of new aircraft, ships and armoured vehicles, as well as heavy combat roles in Afghanistan and Libya.

Critics have lamented what they say is the Conservative government’s prioritizing of military power over Canada’s traditional strength, diplomacy.

Sitting in his 10th-floor office at Foreign Affairs headquarters, known in Ottawa circles as Fort Pearson, Baird says the government is simply undoing years of damage wreaked by Liberal governments in the 1990s and early 2000s.

“The military was gutted for 13 years,” he says. “Hollowed out. Even the man the Liberals appointed to be chief of defence staff (Rick Hillier) called it a ‘decade of darkness.’ That didn’t happen here at DFAIT.”

But while the government is preparing to spend billions on new F-35 fighter jets, Baird refuses to rule out the closure of Canadian embassies abroad through budget cuts next year.

“I’m confident within the department we can achieve our mandate,” he says. “If spending is unsustainable, that’s the biggest threat to the public service, that’s the biggest threat to the department.”

Baird’s appointment to the Foreign Affairs portfolio in May came as a surprise to many. Known for his bombastic style in the House of Commons, many wondered whether he would be able to make the transition to becoming Canada’s top diplomat.

Baird says the biggest lesson he’s learned is that nothing matters more in Foreign Affairs than personal relationships.

“When we have an issue, whether it’s in the United States, whether it’s in Turkey, being able to pick up the phone and talk to my counterpart directly about it,” he says.

The country’s failure to land a UN Security Council seat in October 2010, ultimately losing to Portugal, has called into question whether the Conservative government has squandered the goodwill built up over the decades by previous Canadian governments.

Baird initially tries to blame North Korea and Iran, but eventually acknowledges some of the unpopular positions taken by Canada in recent years were a factor in turning away countries in the Middle East, Africa and other parts of the world.

When asked how he reconciles the importance of strong relationships with the fact a number of positions adopted by the government are unpopular with the international community, Baird indicates those who are most critical of Canada’s stances aren’t likely to be friends anyway.

“We’ve taken a tough stand on human rights in some parts of the world, and that makes some people feel very uncomfortable,” he says. “If you’re a government which doesn’t respect human rights, you’re probably not keen on Canada talking about the rights of women, the rights of religious minorities, the rights of gays and lesbians.”

In recent weeks, Canada has been called out by many nations, including European allies, for abandoning the Kyoto Protocol.

Baird says only a few countries have brought the issue up with him personally, adding that the government is simply leading where other nations will eventually follow.

He says this is exactly what happened with Canadian calls several years ago for all major emitters to be included in whatever climate change agreement is negotiated after Kyoto.

“People may not have liked our position on climate change in 2007, but they’ve adopted it almost wholly across much of the world today,” he said

original source: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Tougher+foreign+policy+vital+Canada+Baird/5916863/story.html

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Canada, Ideology

How Canada’s Christian right was built

May 7, 2010 @opHarper Leave a comment

How Canada’s Christian right was built
By Marci McDonald

From the moment I began this book, I was confronted by skeptics who insist that a truly influential religious right could never take root in Canada. For some, that denial seemed like an exercise in wishful thinking, a refusal to face the possibility that the idea of the country they cherish — liberal, tolerant, and not given to extremes of action or belief — might not be in sync with the changing reality. Others argued that if a Christian right did exist here it would have burst fully formed on to the political scene, a carbon copy of that in the U.S. — raucous and confrontational, openly pulling the strings of the Conservative party and captained by outspoken television preachers with millions of viewers ready to respond to their bidding. But the American movement has had more than three decades to take shape and flourish; by the time scholars and the mainstream media noticed, it had already infiltrated nearly every level of government from school boards to the Senate, often by stealth.

In this country, where the CRTC has kept the reins on religious broadcasting and Catholics make up a larger proportion of the faith community, the emergent Christian right may look and sound different than its American counterpart, but in the five years since the prospect of same-sex marriage propelled evangelicals into political action, it has spawned a coalition of advocacy groups, think tanks and youth lobbies that have changed the national debate. The “sleeping giant” that Capital Xtra! magazine had warned against in 2005 is now up and about, organizing with a vengeance that will not be easily reversed. As Faytene Kryskow, leader of Christian youth lobby called 4MYCanada, told a parliamentary reception, “We are here, and we are here to stay.”

With funding from a handful of conservative Christian philanthropists and a web of grassroots believers accustomed to tithing in the service of their faith, those organizations have built sophisticated databases and online networks capable of mobilizing their forces behind specific legislation with instant e-mail alerts and updates. Setting up an array of internship programs, they are also training a new generation of activists to be savvier than their secular peers in navigating the corridors of power. Already, their alumni have landed top jobs in the public service, MPs’ offices and the PMO, prompting one official from the National House of Prayer to boast in an unguarded moment, “If the media knew how many Christians there are in the government, they’d go crazy.”

In fact, as the movement focuses on taking over the “gateways of influence,” one of the portals within its sights is the mainstream media itself. Where once social conservatives regarded the fourth estate as hostile territory from which they had been sidelined, now the heads of religious-right think tanks, such as Dave Quist and Joseph Ben-Ami, have become regular spinmeisters for the social conservative point of view, their numbers on the speed-dial of Ottawa reporters seeking an instant quip or a quote. At the same time, Faytene Kryskow is training her young activists in the art of getting letters to the editor and opinion pieces published — furnishing online examples to copy and a daily index of articles demanding commentary — none of them betraying their links to 4MYCanada. As she crowed to a gathering of MPs, “You are likely reading our words much more often than you realize.”

Numerically, the Canadian religious right may still be a fraction of that in the U.S., but as Ottawa communications consultant Dennis Gruending points out, “Groups that are well organized can punch above their weight — particularly in an era of fractured parliaments and minority governments.” A former New Democratic Party MP, Gruending laments that “there is little in progressive Ottawa to rival the networks that have been created by the religious and political right.”

Moreover, pundits who predicted those networks would vanish in the wake of the same-sex marriage defeat have instead seen them proliferate. Amid the stormy U.S. health-care debate of 2009, most Canadians were stunned to discover that one of their own was the star of a $2 million television campaign warning Americans about the perils of this country’s publicly funded medical system. Shona Holmes, the poster girl for that attack, turned out to be fronting a lawsuit against Ontario’s health ministry spearheaded by a Calgary-based advocacy group named the Canadian Constitution Foundation.

And new battle fronts are emerging at a time when the old conflicts have by no means lost their power to inflame. On university campuses across the country, clashes between pro-life clubs and student governments have become more frequent and explosive. Many have been sparked by the Canadian branch of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, an American anti-abortion lobby founded by a former member of the Reagan administration, whose “Genocide Awareness” billboards feature montages of mangled fetuses next to photos from Nazi concentration camps. That blatant attempt to raise the emotional temperature in an already volatile debate comes as two U.S. polls show that, for the first time since 1995, opposition to abortion is on the rise while support for it is slipping even more sharply. Some pro-life activists credit advances in medical technology with boosting their cause in a way that picket lines outside abortion clinics never could — an argument with which Dave Quist of Ottawa’s Institute of Marriage and Family Canada concurs. “As we see ultrasounds and microscopic pictures of what goes on in the womb,” he told an evangelical conference, “I think science is going to help us a great deal on that issue.” The persistence of these moral disputes means that Christian-right organizations such as Quist’s will remain players in the political arena for years to come. Asked when he would consider his mission accomplished in Ottawa, he admits he cannot imagine such a time: “There’s always going to be a social issue to deal with,” he says.

At a New Brunswick press conference in the midst of the 2008 election campaign, Stephen Harper staked out his political legacy, arguing that under his government, the Canadian public had already become more conservative. Although he seemed to be referring to fiscal attitudes, social conservatives like Joseph Ben-Ami did not disagree. “In the real world, you measure success not so much on whether you won or lost but where the centre of gravity is,” Ben-Ami says. “And I think in this country, it has shifted somewhat to the right.”

When Harper came to office, he adopted an electoral script crafted by his ideological soulmates in the Republican Party, nurturing a religious-right constituency that had never before enjoyed such attention or access to government. But unlike George W. Bush’s evangelical base, Harper’s theo-conservative constituency is not large enough to guarantee him a clear majority. He cannot win without it, but he cannot win with theo-cons alone. That conundrum leaves him, in some ways, a prisoner of his own electoral calculations, consigned to tread an uneasy tightrope between the social- and economic-conservative wings of his party. In scrambling to present policies that appeal to both camps, he has often ended up pleasing neither.

For those hard-core believers who expected him to roll back same-sex marriage and enshrine fetal rights, he has been a major disappointment. Even the Evangelical Fellowship has noted the “lack of policy gains” on his watch. More importantly, because those measures he did proffer seemed born of calculation, not conviction, many came across as awkward and opportunistic, executed under a veil of secrecy and withdrawn at the first sign they might exact too high a price at the voting booth.

What he has accomplished, however, may be less obvious and more lasting. Without putting forth a single piece of provocative legislation, he has used the enormous patronage powers of his office to shift the ideological leanings of key institutions, from the federal courts to federal regulatory agencies, toward a more socially conservative worldview. At the same time, he has eliminated many of the forces that opposed such a policy drift. With the stroke of a budgetary pen, he has defunded agencies such as the Status of Women Canada and the Court Challenges Program, leaving both feminists and gay activists without resources to take on hostile government policies, while his cutbacks to scholarly granting bodies have helped silence environmental critics in academia and science.

Even arm’s-length agencies have not been safe from his reach. At Montreal’s Rights and Democracy organization, which had okayed three grants to the Palestinian cause, two Harper appointees — chairman Aurel Braun, a militantly pro-Israel political science professor, and vice-chairman Jacques Gauthier, the lawyer for the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem — engineered a coup that has been blamed for driving out respected international board members.

In a 2003 speech to the secretive conservative organization Civitas, Harper called for a foreign policy based on morality — a criterion that he equated with unflinching support for Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. That shift not only altered the nation’s image as an even-handed power-broker on the world stage, it tied Canadian diplomacy to a less idealistic objective: sewing up both the Jewish and Christian Zionist vote for the Conservatives. Those same domestic considerations appear to have guided Harper’s belated trips to two emerging economic superpowers to which he had offered a cold shoulder, India and China, a vivid reminder that morality itself can be an elastic concept. On a visit to India aimed at selling nuclear reactors and uranium to a country that has already used Candu technology to build its own bomb — and still refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — Harper took pains to tour two sites representing only tiny fractions of the Indian population. Those sites, however, are sacred to key elements in his theo-conservative constituency back home: the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest of shrines to Canada’s nearly three hundred thousand Sikhs, and the Chabad-Lubavitch outreach centre in Mumbai, a symbol of Judaism attacked by Islamic terrorists.

For years, Harper and the Conservative Party had refused to consort with China, lambasting its human rights record. To social conservatives like Stockwell Day, who became the leading cheerleader for its island rival Taiwan, the mainland republic of Mao represented a twofold cause for concern: like the former Soviet Union, it was officially godless, and it had viciously persecuted Christians. That strategy left Canada at a marked disadvantage as China became a global powerhouse that controlled America’s financial fate in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown. When free-trade treaties with the U.S. proved no bulwark against congressional Buy America bills, a parade of Conservative heavyweights, led by Day — by then Harper’s minister of international trade — began shuttling to Beijing in search of new markets. In 2009 alone, seven ministerial missions visited China, almost as many as in all of the previous four years.

Some in the Christian right have also been agitating for another, more contentious shift in foreign policy, which has already found a champion in a Conservative backbencher. Only a few months after Obama ended George Bush’s ban on congressional funding for overseas aid groups that counsel abortion, Saskatchewan MP Brad Trost circulated a petition among religious-right groups to drum up support for a move in the opposite direction — one that may be a sign of things to come. In the letter, signed by thirty like-minded MPs, Trost demanded that the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) end its $18 million in annual grants to overseas programs run by the International Planned Parenthood Federation. That initiative may be useful to keep in mind in the wake of Harper’s proposal to the Group of Eight to focus on maternal health care.

Even Harper’s supporters fault him for producing few social Conservative policy victories, but he has changed the nation in far more profound ways, aligning it increasingly with the United States. A population that once basked in its image as an international peacekeeper now glories in a more muscular militarism, and Harper has been happy to trade the diplomatic independence of a middle power to walk in loyal lockstep with Washington on almost all matters of national security. But in keeping with that increasing Americanization, Harper has also altered the terms and tone of the debate, thrusting God into the centre of the national conversation. Whether signing off his throne speeches with a blessing or lavishing invitations on the leaders of the Christian right, he has brought religion out of the closet and into the public square for the first time in recent memory. “We’re talking about things in a different way than we did three years ago,” says Brian Rushfeldt, Harper’s old ally from the Canada Family Action Coalition.

Much of that new spiritual consciousness comes from the increasing presence of conservative Christians in the capital. As Harper has gradually unmuzzled his evangelical Christian MPs, allowing them a higher profile and letting them test public sentiments with private members’ bills, he has emboldened the religious right as a whole. “They’re more brazen and confident,” says Joyce Arthur, director of the Abortion Rights Coalition. “That’s the big change. Being in power has given them legitimacy.”

On talk radio and in the pages of the National Post, the best source of news on the religious right, a new stridency has emerged: critics of the government’s efforts to pander to its theo-conservative constituency are dismissed as god-hating secular zealots and opponents of its pro-Israel policy are routinely branded anti-Semites. In the blogosphere, the rhetoric has become even more shrill, fuelling an angry strain of faith-based intolerance. Scarcely three decades after Brian Stiller, of the Evangelical Fellowship, recoiled at the mix of religiosity and righteous patriotism spouted by Falwell and his fellow televangelists in the U.S., the Prime Minister now sends his public blessings to prayer rallies where Christian nationalists brandishing Canadian flags are calling for a Bible-based theocracy.

However delighted they might seem by Harper’s attentions and Governance — part of their credo is to honour those in authority — they are not likely to be mollified by his plodding incrementalism or cautious tweaks of the bureaucracy. Aggressive and insistent, they are driven by a fierce imperative to reconstruct Canada in a biblical mould. Waving their bright flags on the lawns of the Parliament Buildings, extolling the country’s Christian roots to a compelling soft-rock beat, they might seem to offer a refreshing recipe for morality and national pride, but their agenda—while outwardly inclusive and multi-racial — is ultimately exclusionary. In their idealized Christian nation, non-believers — atheists, non-Christians and even Christian secularists — have no place, and those in violation of biblical law, notably homosexuals and adulterers, would merit severe punishment and the sort of shunning that once characterized a society where suspected witches were burned. Theirs is a dark and dangerous vision, one that brooks no dissent and requires the dismantling of key democratic institutions. A preview is on display south of the border, where decades of religious-right triumphs have left a nation bitterly splintered along lines of faith and ideology, trapped in the hysteria of overcharged rhetoric and resentment.

For this new wave of Christian nationalists, united across the continent by the charismatic renewal movement, the signs and portents of the end-times are unmistakable, apparent in each new earthquake report or tremor of the global financial system, and they feel they have no time to waste. Their mission is to prepare God’s dominion on Earth, and they are unlikely to rest until they see their perceived scriptural prophecies fulfilled in Ottawa and Jerusalem alike. As Faytene Kryskow underlines in her book, Marked, she and her fellow revivalists are no longer content to agitate for policy crumbs. They have “a take-over mentality,” she writes: “They are convinced that God has called them to take over the world!”

Excerpted from The Armageddon Factor. Copyright 2010 Marci McDonald. Published by Random House Canada, which is a division of Random House of Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

NOTE: This article has been edited from a previous version that incorrectly stated the non-partisan Canadian Constitution Foundation is a Christian advocacy group.

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/806535–how-canada-s-christian-right-was-built

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Ideology, Iraq, Military, Uncategorized, US

The Reason Why

April 3, 2003 @opHarper Leave a comment

by George McGovern
April 3, 2003

Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die. ~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (in the Crimean War)

Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense of the nation’s true greatness. Appearing to enjoy his role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces above all other functions of his office, and unchecked by a seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, a largely subservient press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has set the nation on a course for one-man rule.

He treads carelessly on the Bill of Rights, the United Nations and international law while creating a costly but largely useless new federal bureaucracy loosely called “Homeland Security.” Meanwhile, such fundamental building blocks of national security as full employment and a strong labor movement are of no concern. The nearly $1.5 trillion tax giveaway, largely for the further enrichment of those already rich, will have to be made up by cutting government services and shifting a larger share of the tax burden to workers and the elderly. This President and his advisers know well how to get us involved in imperial crusades abroad while pillaging the ordinary American at home. The same families who are exploited by a rich man’s government find their sons and daughters being called to war, as they were in Vietnam–but not the sons of the rich and well connected. (Let me note that the son of South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson is now on duty in the Persian Gulf. He did not use his obvious political connections to avoid military service, nor did his father seek exemptions for his son. That goes well with me, with my fellow South Dakotans and with every fair-minded American.)

The invasion of Iraq and other costly wars now being planned in secret are fattening the ever-growing military-industrial complex of which President Eisenhower warned in his great farewell address. War profits are booming, as is the case in all wars. While young Americans die, profits go up. But our economy is not booming, and our stock market is not booming. Our wages and incomes are not booming. While waging a war against Iraq, the Bush Administration is waging another war against the well-being of America.

Following the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the entire world was united in sympathy and support for America. But thanks to the arrogant unilateralism, the bullying and the clumsy, unimaginative diplomacy of Washington, Bush converted a world of support into a world united against us, with the exception of Tony Blair and one or two others. My fellow South Dakotan, Tom Daschle, the US Senate Democratic leader, has well described the collapse of American diplomacy during the Bush Administration. For this he has been savaged by the Bush propaganda machine. For their part, the House of Representatives has censured the French by changing the name of french fries on the house dining room menu to freedom fries. Does this mean our almost sacred Statue of Liberty–a gift from France–will now have to be demolished? And will we have to give up the French kiss? What a cruel blow to romance.

During his presidential campaign Bush cried, “I’m a uniter, not a divider.” As one critic put it, “He’s got that right. He’s united the entire world against him.” In his brusque, go-it-alone approach to Congress, the UN and countless nations big and small, Bush seemed to be saying, “Go with us if you will, but we’re going to war with a small desert kingdom that has done us no harm, whether you like it or not.” This is a good line for the macho business. But it flies in the face of Jefferson’s phrase, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” As I have watched America’s moral and political standing in the world fade as the globe’s inhabitants view the senseless and immoral bombing of ancient, historic Baghdad, I think often of another Jefferson observation during an earlier bad time in the nation’s history: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

The President frequently confides to individuals and friendly audiences that he is guided by God’s hand. But if God guided him into an invasion of Iraq, He sent a different message to the Pope, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches and many distinguished rabbis–all of whom believe the invasion and bombardment of Iraq is against God’s will. In all due respect, I suspect that Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice–and other sideline warriors–are the gods (or goddesses) reaching the ear of our President.

As a World War II bomber pilot, I was always troubled by the title of a then-popular book, God Is My Co-pilot. My co-pilot was Bill Rounds of Wichita, Kansas, who was anything but godly, but he was a skillful pilot, and he helped me bring our B-24 Liberator through thirty-five combat missions over the most heavily defended targets in Europe. I give thanks to God for our survival, but somehow I could never quite picture God sitting at the controls of a bomber or squinting through a bombsight deciding which of his creatures should survive and which should die. It did not simplify matters theologically when Sam Adams, my navigator–and easily the godliest man on my ten-member crew–was killed in action early in the war. He was planning to become a clergyman at war’s end.

Of course, my dear mother went to her grave believing that her prayers brought her son safely home. Maybe they did. But how could I explain that to the mother of my close friend, Eddie Kendall, who prayed with equal fervor for her son’s safe return? Eddie was torn in half by a blast of shrapnel during the Battle of the Bulge–dead at age 19, during the opening days of the battle–the best baseball player and pheasant hunter I knew.

I most certainly do not see God at work in the slaughter and destruction now unfolding in Iraq or in the war plans now being developed for additional American invasions of other lands. The hand of the Devil? Perhaps. But how can I suggest that a fellow Methodist with a good Methodist wife is getting guidance from the Devil? I don’t want to get too self-righteous about all of this. After all, I have passed the 80 mark, so I don’t want to set the bar of acceptable behavior too high lest I fail to meet the standard for a passing grade on Judgment Day. I’ve already got a long list of strikes against me. So President Bush, forgive me if I’ve been too tough on you. But I must tell you, Mr. President, you are the greatest threat to American troops. Only you can put our young people in harm’s way in a needless war. Only you can weaken America’s good name and influence in world affairs.

We hear much talk these days, as we did during the Vietnam War, of “supporting our troops.” Like most Americans, I have always supported our troops, and I have always believed we had the best fighting forces in the world–with the possible exception of the Vietnamese, who were fortified by their hunger for national independence, whereas we placed our troops in the impossible position of opposing an independent Vietnam, albeit a Communist one. But I believed then as I do now that the best way to support our troops is to avoid sending them on mistaken military campaigns that needlessly endanger their lives and limbs. That is what went on in Vietnam for nearly thirty years–first as we financed the French in their failing effort to regain control of their colonial empire in Southeast Asia, 1946-54, and then for the next twenty years as we sought unsuccessfully to stop the Vietnamese independence struggle led by Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap–two great men whom we should have accepted as the legitimate leaders of Vietnam at the end of World War II. I should add that Ho and his men were our allies against the Japanese in World War II. Some of my fellow pilots who were shot down by Japanese gunners over Vietnam were brought safely back to American lines by Ho’s guerrilla forces.

During the long years of my opposition to that war, including a presidential campaign dedicated to ending the American involvement, I said in a moment of disgust: “I’m sick and tired of old men dreaming up wars in which young men do the dying.” That terrible American blunder, in which 58,000 of our bravest young men died, and many times that number were crippled physically or psychologically, also cost the lives of some 2 million Vietnamese as well as a similar number of Cambodians and Laotians, in addition to laying waste most of Indochina–its villages, fields, trees and waterways; its schools, churches, markets and hospitals.

I had thought after that horrible tragedy–sold to the American people by our policy-makers as a mission of freedom and mercy–that we never again would carry out a needless, ill-conceived invasion of another country that had done us no harm and posed no threat to our security. I was wrong in that assumption.

The President and his team, building on the trauma of 9/11, have falsely linked Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to that tragedy and then falsely built him up as a deadly threat to America and to world peace. These falsehoods are rejected by the UN and nearly all of the world’s people. We will, of course, win the war with Iraq. But what of the question raised in the Bible that both George Bush and I read: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul,” or the soul of his nation?

It has been argued that the Iraqi leader is hiding a few weapons of mass destruction, which we and eight other countries have long held. But can it be assumed that he would insure his incineration by attacking the United States? Can it be assumed that if we are to save ourselves we must strike Iraq before Iraq strikes us? This same reasoning was frequently employed during the half-century of cold war by hotheads recommending that we atomize the Soviet Union and China before they atomize us. Courtesy of The New Yorker, we are reminded of Tolstoy’s observation: “What an immense mass of evil must result…from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen.” Or again, consider the words of Lord Stanmore, who concluded after the suicidal charge of the Light Brigade that it was “undertaken to resist an attack that was never threatened and probably never contemplated.” The symphony of falsehood orchestrated by the Bush team has been de-vised to defeat an Iraqi onslaught that “was never threatened and probably never comtemplated.”

I’m grateful to The Nation, as I was to Harper’s, for giving me opportunities to write about these matters. Major newspapers, especially the Washington Post, haven’t been nearly as receptive.

The destruction of Baghdad has a special poignancy for many of us. In my fourth-grade geography class under a superb teacher, Miss Wagner, I was first introduced to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the palm trees and dates, the kayaks plying the rivers, camel caravans and desert oases, the Arabian Nights, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (my first movie), the ancient city of Baghdad, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent. This was the first class in elementary school that fired my imagination. Those wondrous images have stayed with me for more than seventy years. And it now troubles me to hear of America’s bombs, missiles and military machines ravishing the cradle of civilization.

But in God’s good time, perhaps this most ancient of civilizations can be redeemed. My prayer is that most of our soldiers and most of the long-suffering people of Iraq will survive this war after it has joined the historical march of folly that is man’s inhumanity to man.

George Stanley McGovern (born July 19, 1922) is a historian, author, and former U.S. Representative, U.S. Senator, and the Democratic Party presidential nominee in the 1972 presidential election. He is also the author of several articles related to the Bush Administration and “The Third Freedom: Ending Hunger in Our Time”

original source: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030421&s=mcgovern

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