Maudits hypocrites. Kate McMillan lays it out:

The First American Prime Minister

In the pocket of the American rich;

Last week, Michael Ignatieff and 142 other Members of Parliament voted in favour of a motion to ban oil tanker traffic on the north coast of British Columbia. This week, Liberal MP Joyce Murray from Vancouver Quadra introduced Bill C-606 to put that motion into law by amending the Canada Shipping Act to prohibit oil tanker traffic on the north and central coast of British Columbia.

[...]

If marine conservation were really the issue, the ban wouldn’t be only for the north coast of British Columbia and U.S. foundations would be funding a tanker ban in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, on the Eastern Seaboard and in the Gulf of Mexico. But no, U.S. foundations are funding a tanker ban campaign only for the central and the north coast of British Columbia — right smack where oil tankers, export-bound for Asia would need to travel…

Mark
Ottawa

Read this Washington Post story and see who ain’t there:

Wariness abroad of new order in U.S.

“Canada’s National” whatever is certainly running up the wariness flag as fast as it can:

With new Congress, Canada can expect trade, border flare-ups

But wasn’t it the Democrats who were trying to block the planned new pipeline for Alberta oil sands crude, besides hammering the sands themselves? So why the Globe’s instant wariness?  Creating more “news” to suit their agenda?  And Postmedia News is no better with a piece that really has very little to do with trade, and in which Jumpin’ Jack Layton tells a real porkie:

Republican tide likely to hit Canadian trade
Obama also ditches plan to legislate carbon cap-and-trade system
…
NDP leader Jack Layton said he suspects trade relations will continue to dog the Canada-U.S. relationship…

He predicted Canada-U.S. trade will emerge as an issue in the run up to the presidential election in 2012, as it did during the campaign that ended with Obama’s election two years ago…

What blinking balderdash. If Canada-U.S. trade (as opposed to Mexico and NAFTA) was an issue in 2008 not one American in a thousand knew it. Canadians really need to get a grip on reality instead of stupidly navel gazing.

Otherwise some sense from Norman Spector about the Americans needing fewer Canadian pols:

Dumbest Canada-U.S. initiative ever
…
In short, can we now agree that it’s a good idea for Canadian politicians to stay out of U.S. partisan politics entirely — however tempting it might be to curry favour back home by being seen to stand up for our values in the United States?

Mark
Ottawa

Second in the line–for now–of succession to head of state if…Talk about kow-towing to the Yankees:

Flex U.S. muscle on oilsands, groups tell Pelosi

About a dozen protesters gathered on Parliament Hill Wedneday to demonstrate against the oil sands. Nancy Pelosi, one of the most powerful lawmakers in the United States, was in Ottawa to discuss the oilsands with premiers and federal officials and met with environmentalists.
Adrian Wyld/THE CANADIAN PRESS…

Imagine the uproar and outrage if prominent Canadians were groveling to a senior Republican in the Congress thinking of acting against our national interest. But Democratic environmental neo-colonialism is quite tolerable apparently.

Earlier:

Aussies get Nancy Pelosi

Update: Meanwhile the Democrat with the royalest jelly should be further disappointing his Canadian acolytes; but will they even notice as this acute observer does?

Obama stiffs Maher Arar

Mark
Ottawa

Further to the mild tone of optimism in a recent post of mine (with a major reservation), Publius looks to Alberta and describes a dark side:

…
This is not talk of freeing the market for health care – perish the radical thought – but allowing private entities to offer care with public funds. The hope is that by contracting out, the services will be delivered more efficiently, while keeping the provincial governments as paymasters. The latter part is suppose to reassure the electorate in some deeply mystical way. Because the government is paying for it, it will be good and humane. Repeat until numb.

Since this is government-run health care by other means, there is little to cheer about. Its main advantage is circumventing the militant health care unions. Its disadvantage is that, in the Left hands, it can be used to discredit further reforms in the direction of the market. Just regulate privately delivered care in such a way as make it even worse than the purely public system, and wait for the Toronto Star – and its sisters across the Dominion – to denounce it as capitalism run amok…

As I’ve often said in this space, Medicare isn’t a government program, it’s a cult…

…Any sort of health care financing scheme will have to rely on the principle of putting a bit in and using as needed, something akin to insurance. The overwhelmingly majority of Canadians can afford private insurance premiums, if they could not the tax base would not exist to support the current system. Like with food and housing, those who could not afford the premiums would be subsidized. Such a system would have its abuses, as any system does, but it will allow the great majority of Canadians access to health care on their own terms, rather than those of the Minister of Health. It would also ensure that even the poor could get quality health care, since they would be just another customer of the hospital or clinic. While such an approach would be logical, it would challenge the sanctity of government delivered care. The Cult of Medicare is not interested in quality health care, it is interested in preserving state health care…

Cult. Quite. We have ministers, not of health but of cults.

Mark
Ottawa

Publius has at the great federal cash cow rip-off:

Most of Canadian politics can be explained by one word: Quebec.

Equalization is supposed to allow the six recipient provinces to provide “comparable services” to the four donor provinces.

But Quebec, which received $8.3 billion or 60% of all equalization transfers in the last fiscal year, provides services as a have-not province that are nowhere available among the haves…

Quebec is a have-not province in the sense that a psychosomatic is sick. From time to time members of the mainstream media ask, genuinely perplexed, why some in Alberta want to separate. The above is the answer…

Whatever the well intentioned rhetoric at the start of the Equalization program, in practice it has become a colossal bribe to keep Quebec in Canada, and the Atlantic provinces voting for the government of the day…

To break Equalization would mean breaking the culture of dependency across much of this country. It would be a dramatic victory for freedom in Canada…Any politician who would dare challenge the Cult of Equalization would face a barrage ten times worse than Tony Clement now faces. Stephen Harper, we can be sure, doesn’t have that kind of guts.

One does rather long for the Conservatives of January 2006:

Why not let the provinces look after their constitutional responsibilities?

The Globe editorializes today: (full text not online)

At its most radical, it [the Conservatives' platform] could mean the elimination of enourmous portions of federal spending in areas of provincial jurisdiction such as health care coupled with parallel moves moves to reduce federal taxes. That would allow the provinces to raise their taxes by many billions of dollars. They would then be able to spend the funds as they wished, implicitly [surely explicitly] edging Ottawa out of much of its role in the nation’s social skein. That would be an unacceptable loss…

Why is the Globe obsessed with an overweaning federal government trying to control things not its constitutional responsibility, moreover things it does not know how to administer? What is wrong with the provinces having enough money, raised themselves, to do what they are supposed to do, and directly accountable to their electorates for success or failure?

A newly-elected Quebec Conservative, on the other hand, seems to have the right idea.

Maxime Bernier, elected Monday in the riding of Beauce, south of Quebec City, says the new government will look at transferring taxation powers to the provinces, at the expense of the federal government. “There are many possibilities,” he said. “Transfers to provinces. Tax points to provinces. The money in the federal government’s surplus could be transferred to the provinces.

“Or the surplus could be put back into Canadians’ pockets by reducing taxes, so that provinces would then have more taxation room, to get the sums they need from the pockets of Canadians.”

Mr. Bernier said the Conservative government will bring a breath of fresh air to federalism in Canada, “with provinces that are autonomous and a federal government that is autonomous in its field of jurisdiction.”..

There’s still something to said for Minimum Max:

That was a remarkable speech Maxime Bernier delivered the other day [Jan. 21, 2010] in Calgary. That is, it was an entirely unremarkable speech, the kind you would hear every other day in any normal democracy: a fairly pedestrian restatement of conservative principles by a leading conservative politician.

But in the Conservative Party of Canada, in its present moribund state, it counts as Luther’s 95 Theses. It must surely rule out any return to cabinet, if it does not lead to his outright expulsion from caucus, since it contradicts every line of current Conservative — well, I was going to say “policy,” but that’s not quite right, is it? Policy, after all, tends to proceed from some sort of underlying ideas or philosophy, and as we know today’s Conservatives have worked very hard to expunge those from their thoughts. Say “positioning,” then.

But back to Bernier. Consider, in particular, this passage:

One way to change the terms of the debate would be to announce that the government is not going to grow any more…

Also today, on a similar theme:

Pneus ABC Tires Inc: Your tax dollars at work…

Canadians are addicted to being bribed by governments; governments are hooked on buying votes. In the end nothing but a Ponzi scheme.

Mark
Ottawa

It ain’t about race, it’s about class and one colour (plus some geography):

The Roots of White Anxiety
…
Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

This may be a money-saving tactic. In a footnote, Espenshade and Radford suggest that these institutions, conscious of their mandate to be multiethnic, may reserve their financial aid dollars “for students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students,” leaving little room to admit financially strapped whites…

But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”

This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts…

Among the highly educated and liberal…the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what’s being plotted in the heartland. In the Bush years, liberals fretted about a looming evangelical theocracy. In the age of the Tea Parties, they see crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs everywhere they look.

This cultural divide has been widening for years, and bridging it is beyond any institution’s power…

A, er, bright, shining exemplar of these attitudes in Canada is the Globe and Mail’s inimibitable Mr Ibbitson. Earlier at Daimnation!:

John Ibbitson’s supercilious and wrong-headed view of Canada

Immigration: The more the merrier–and what the effects will be

Plus my investigative reporting:

One way to confirm you’re in Alberta

And some fun from Kate McMillan:

…
I can’t believe I’m stuck here covering the stinking Redneck Olympics

…

Update: Meanwhile that certain stinkin’ agenda hits the Globe’s sports section–with Mother Corpse as the redneck surrogate!

Calgary Stampede an uneasy rider on CBC
‘The Stampede is truly a Canadian institution,’ exec says, though animal-rights advocates aren’t so happy

Cry me an Elbow river.

Mark
Ottawa

They’re as different as a Venusian night and a Plutonian day, but Quebec and Alberta have found some common ground against higher taxes and a national securities regulator. Alberta’s Finance Minister Ted Morton blasted the federal Conservative government on Monday for a proposal to increase taxes on Canadians through Canada Pension Plan Premiums.

So could the provinces form a coalition of the unwilling?

Quebec chose not to take a position, but said the concerns raised about the plan need to be addressed.

Combined, the population of the two provinces is such that they could likely veto any national attempt to change the CPP.

[...]

Their united show of strength against Ottawa comes as both provincial governments are under political threat at home. Their stand suggests plenty of arm-twisting ahead if the Harper government is to succeed on pension and securities overhaul.

For now it sounds more like media speculation disguised as news, but it’s nice to think the two provinces could come together harmoniously on something.

Unfortunately, Quebec is also cooperating with another province, but this time on something less worthwhile. Jean Charest and Dalton McGuinty are busy concocting a way to destroy the recovering economy by discussing a “cap-and-trade” climate change plan.

It’s a shame that despite Quebec’s big talk about carbon emission reductions and complaining about Canada abandoning Kyoto, that the province isn’t doing so well living up to its own rhetoric.

Photograph by: Rick MacWilliam, edmontonjournal.com

Alberta, like practically every other province in Canada, is struggling to fund education, so they’re asking teachers to forgo a raise this year in contravention of their five-year contractual agreement. But the teachers are having none of that, despite the fact that Education Minister Dave Hancock warned it could lead to layoffs.

“Our fiscal reality is there is very little spare money in the provincial government coffers,” Mr.Hancock told media.

The problem is that the government had promised a 3% increase in wages this year [$2,550 more per teacher on average, a $76.7 million raise for the 30,063 full-time teachers in the province], and the school boards simply can’t afford it.

Delegates representing Albertan teachers would rather the school boards go into deficit than renege on their promise to raise salaries or lay off teachers.

But how many people will feel sympathy for teachers in this battle, after just coming off a fierce economic downturn? Teachers in the province earn $85,000 in salary, on average, making them the highest paid for their profession in Canada. This, in a province where the flat tax rate is a generously low 10%.

Median after-tax income for families in 2007 was $61,800, and $75,300 in Alberta. Individual after-tax income in 2007 for the province of Alberta was $29,200. If the average salary of a teacher in Alberta is $85,000, then that individual would pay federal taxes of just under $16,000. Throw in the provincial tax rate, and a teacher can expect to bring home $60,500, or slightly below the median family income for Alberta.

I’d say the teachers in that province are doing just fine without a raise.

May 17, 2010, while speaking in Calgary, Alberta:

“It’s not just a public relations problem. It’s a real problem,” Ignatieff added. “I don’t want to run against the oilsands . . . we have to hang together as a country and clean up the oilsands.”

January 15, 2010, while speaking to students in Vancouver:

“Let’s understand something about the Tar Sands. I was just about to say something before the demonstration started. One of the key things about politics, one of the key things about Canada, is that we can’t pick and choose which facts we like. The Tar Sands are a fact of our national lives. We have one of the largest proven carbon oil reserves in the world. The question is, what do we do to make it sustainable?”

By the time he gets back to Toronto, they’ll probably be the Tar Sands again.

I don’t want to spend too much time on the man with a -26 approval rating tonight, but I do want to point out that he did open his mouth again today, and what came out is pretty much to be expected:

“This is the life of an Opposition leader … my adversaries have done a number on me and that’s politics,” he said.

By contrast, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, he said, has an easier job by hiding behind “scripted” answers.

“When people ask me a straight question, I’ll try to give you a straight answer,” said Ignatieff.

There you have it, folks. The job of Prime Minister is easier than the Leader of the Official Opposition.

When all else fails, throw money at a problem. Alison Redford, Alberta Minister of Justice and Attorney General.

It must be your fault. Why else would the Albertan government use $1.9 million of your money to treat the afflicted Somali youth who have been unfairly lured into drug-trade violence?

Justice Minister Alison Redford said that the problem starts when kids don’t feel involved in their communities. 30 young Somali men have been killed in Alberta in the past five years in violent battles for control of the drug trade.

So where have these victims been coming from? The answer is Toronto. Lured to Alberta for easy cash in the oilsands, they found much easier cash selling drugs. But who’s to blame for that? Not the personal choices of Somalis, naturally. It’s your fault.

“There are multiple barriers for the Somali community,” said Hassan Ali, president of the Somali-Canadian Cultural Society of Edmonton.

“There are employment barriers, there’s educational ones, and a lack of knowledge about the system and the culture and the language.”

“There is racism, too,” he added. “That’s a factor we might sometimes overlook or deny, but there is a race factor in terms of employment and education opportunities.

Yes, because the first thing that I think of when a Somali immigrant is reported killed in a drug shootout is: “I wish society had been less racist. This might all have been avoided.”

There’s a very interesting pair of sentences in the Toronto Star article that really look better when they’re put together, rather than 10 paragraphs apart. First, in describing why some Somalis can’t get jobs outside the drug trade:

“And (Somalis) don’t have a network. They don’t know people in the system and they need time to build that.”

Second, why Somalis get killed in the drug trade:

Criminologists say the Somalis, many of whom are unaware of the drug trade’s unwritten rules and key players, are angering rivals and setting off turf wars and murders.

Sounds to me like a similar problem in the “barrier to entry”. Maybe they just need “time to build that”? You can’t corner a new market overnight.

ALSO SEE

Even the Somalians kind of think this is a waste of money.