I noted the Conservative government must done something wrong today when I saw the needle throttling deeply into the red of the internet outrage meter. Every web story pointing to International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda and her now famous insertion of the word “not” in a departmental memo is hemorrhaging unpleasant comments about the autocratic tendencies of the Conservatives. To wit, hyperbolic leftwing polemicist Murray Dobbin wasted little time in comparing Canada’s government to Egypt’s Mubarak and “political thuggery worthy of a dictatorship.”

Yes, well, while I’m sure it tickles some people to no end to compare Canada to the third world, the truth is that in most countries like Egypt the people would never have heard about this at all.

“Any reasonable person confronted with what appears to have transpired would necessarily be extremely concerned, if not shocked, and might well begin to doubt the integrity of certain decision-making processes,” said House of Commons Speaker Peter Milliken.

Well, it’s true that I’m shocked and concerned, but not immediately about the insertion of the word “not” on a document that revoked the funding for the anti-Israeli organization Kairos. No, I’m shocked and concerned that it actually requires the unilateral oversight of the minister herself to stop the government from needlessly and wastefully funding organizations with federal tax dollars that have little to no benefit for Canadians.

What surprises me is that a government can spend $1 billion for security on a wasteful and unnecessary economic summit with G22 countries, but what really riles people up is the idea of cutting off $7 million in federal aid to an insignificant and obscure church with clear and unequivocal political biases.

I can only really shake my head that it’s come to this. Did Bev Oda really feel that the only way to remove funding from Kairos was to overrule her department? And if so, what does this tell us about the difficulty of dismantling the welfare state? When cutting just one organization from the taxpayer trough requires this kind of ministerial interference and registers this level of public outrage, it is demonstrative of our entrenched culture of entitlement.

Shocked and concerned? Yes, that CIDA had signed off on continuing to fund this blatantly partisan organization despite the clear evidence that it had become vocal in “Israeli apartheid” rhetoric and “buycott” activism. It goes to show that the governmental Leviathan is so riddled with tiny suckerfish like Kairos that they don’t even know how to begin to identify the waste. It’s the reason that Tamil aid fronts in Canada were able to fund the Tigers in Sri Lanka for so many years.

I’m sure I don’t know why the minister even needs to provide a reason for cutting off the organizations sponsored by CIDA. But certainly one can argue with her methods. The problem isn’t the perfectly reasonable discontinuance of funding, but that she did so by misrepresenting her department.

“In particular, the senior CIDA officials concerned must be deeply disturbed by the doctored document they have been made to appear to have signed,” Milliken said in the House of Commons.

Though it has come to light today that the inclusion of the word “not” in the memo was only a departmental shortcoming whereby there was no space for the minister to reject the recommendations of her department, she made it sound as though the decision for the cuts had been departmental. I can understand the bureaucrats being upset at being pointed at for a decision they never made. In this respect the criticisms of Oda are justified. Added to this is the appearance she deliberately lied to Parliament and might now be found in contempt for her earlier answers to MPs.

It casts into question the competency of the minister when she considers it a reasonable thing to misrepresent other people. Surely she could have found the support of the government and the public at large to simply overrule the bureaucracy. Following this decision by lying about not knowing who put in the “not” speaks to her character.

[This blog entry has been significantly edited from its original form to reflect ongoing developments]

MORE TO THE STORY

It would appear that some people have done some deeper investigation and came up with an interesting, if not entirely satisfactory, reason for the insertion of the word “not”. From the minutes of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development that grilled Bev Oda on Dec. 9:

Mr. Jean Dorion:

Ms. Biggs, was the word “not” handwritten on the form that you signed on September 28, two months before the minister signed it?

Ms. Margaret Biggs:

No, it wasn’t, sir.

Mr. Jean Dorion:

So then, when you signed the form, you were in fact giving your approval. You were recommending approval, since the form states:
“Recommendation: That you sign below to indicate you approve a contribution of $7,098,756 over four years for the above program.”
So then, on September 28, you were recommending that the minister approve the project.

Ms. Margaret Biggs:

Yes, I think as the minister said, the agency did recommend the project to the minister. She has indicated that. But it was her decision, after due consideration, to not accept the department’s advice.
This is quite normal, and I certainly was aware of her decision. The inclusion of the word “not” is just a simple reflection of what her decision was, and she has been clear. So that’s quite normal.
I think we have changed the format for these memos so the minister has a much clearer place to put where she doesn’t want to accept the advice, which is her prerogative.

What’s interesting is that if you continue to read the transcript, it does indicate that Oda previous assertion that Kairos didn’t meet CIDA’s funding criteria was false. Oda defended by arguing that it was her decision that the best value for taxpayers’ dollars was not being achieved by continuing to fund Kairos as recommended by her department, and she overruled them. She did, however, appear to lie about being the author of the word “not” on the document that she has admitted today was her word. The question now is why did she not simply explain this on Dec. 9?

1) Jonathon Narvey at The Propagandist, with kind words for Adrian:

Galloway Tour Organizers Don’t Like The Propagandist

One little incident at the George Galloway Stopwar-organized tour event in Vancouver before things even got started might give you a bit of the flavor for the evening. Having previously grumbled about Stopwar talking head Derrick O’Keefe’s weird communications and Galloway tour organizer and Omar (Fuck Canada Day) Shaban, I half expected to be stopped at the door by security. As it turned out, I walked right in with no problems…

But when my colleague, Adrian MacNair, tried to use his press pass from the Langara Voice, he allegedly was told by O’Keefe and Shaban that his press credentials were not valid. Why? Because, he was told, he was a writer for The Propagandist…

But MacNair doesn’t write for us. MacNair is as talented, insightful and courageous a writer as one could hope for, which is why I’ve often tried to get him on board with our growing roster of contributing writers…

The intrepid MacNair did purchase a ticket, so they reluctantly let him in. “I guess it’s one standard for the other newspapers and another for guys who don’t agree with your politics,” MacNair said. And that pretty much sums it up…

2) Terry Glavin at the National Post’s “Full Comment”:

Canada In Palestine, fascists on campus.

It would probably come as a surprise to most people to learn that Canada deserves credit for being one of the world’s leading financial contributors to the cause of Palestinian freedom and a functioning Palestinian state. You’d never know it from reading the newspapers or all the posters on campus, but the sinister Zionist bogeyman otherwise known as Prime Minister Stephen Harper appears to have arranged for more money and aid to find its way to the oppressed and downtrodden people of Gaza than all the George Galloway fundraisers, “Viva Palestina” crusades and Gaza Flotilla spectacles combined, by several orders of magnitude.

…you’d have to sift through CIDA’s voluminous “West Bank and Gaza” files to see for yourself how much Canadians are spending on aid and development in Gaza, but a cursory review reveals that among the Gaza-specific expenditures Canadians are currently supporting is a $4.1 million contribution to a UNICEF-run project for kids and an $8 million food-aid package for Gaza administered by the UN Relief and Works Agency, which appears to be on top of a $3 million food-aid contribution to Gaza through the UN and $1 million in food aid to Gaza through the Red Cross that Ottawa announced last January.

This, all by itself, should sufficiently expose the lie that Galloway’s Canadian activists tell about their aims to “break the seige” on Gaza. It should give you at least a clue as to what Galloway’s current Canadian tour is really all about. Despite his claims to the contrary, Galloway provides material, objective and propaganda support to Hamas, the worst tormentors of the Palestinian people. That is what his interventions in Palestine are for. It is what the various Gaza Flotilla spectacles are about, too…

Galloway and his friends have been allowed to get away with their dissembling not just because of the idiocy of certain currents on the “Left” in this country but also because of the laziness and self-serving purposes of Canada’s news media [emphasis added]. They run blaring headlines proclaiming something as “fact” just once when it was really just Galloway’s own propaganda and you’re not likely to declare to your readers, ‘Sorry, but this two-bit blackshirt and his friends actually hoodwinked us.’ In a sadly typical and error-riddled account of a recent Galloway speech from just the other day, the reader is treated to the bowdlerism that Ottawa banned Galloway from entering Canada last year but the ruling was “overturned by a Federal court judge.” That is Galloway propaganda. The opposite is true. The judge found that Galloway was not banned and that there was no ruling for him to overturn, and consequently, Galloway’s lawyers had their claim dismissed…

Read on for some truly fine polemical invective from a master.  And earlier from Adrian:

“Are Kurdish Lives Worth Less Than Gazans?”

Mark
Ottawa

Excerpts from a very useful post at Milnews.ca (worth checking every day):

…
• What does this mean for the Canadian-led and run Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team (PDF copy of page here if link doesn’t work?  This from the Globe & Mail:  “Canada is slashing aid to Afghanistan and abandoning any presence in Kandahar by withdrawing not only troops but civilian aid officials next year. Despite the approval of a new training mission, the moves mark a turning point where Canada is significantly disengaging from Afghanistan: dramatically reducing the outlay of cash, reducing the risk to troops, and quitting the war-scarred southern province where Canada has led military and civilian efforts. There will be a deep cut to aid for Afghanistan. International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda said Canada will provide $100-million a year in development assistance for Afghanistan over the next three years, less than half the $205-million the government reported spending last year ….”
• According to Postmedia News, late decision on new mission = rush to get ready for it...
• Who’s happy?  “The White House and the NATO military alliance applauded Canada’s plan for a military training mission in Afghanistan Tuesday as Prime Minister Stephen Harper assured opposition parties that the armed forces will work safely “in classrooms behind the wire on bases.” ….” Here’s what NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen had to say: “I warmly welcome Prime Minister Harper’s announcement that Canada will deploy a substantial number of trainers to the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan. Canada has contributed substantially, over many years, to the operation in Afghanistan. Canadian forces have made a real difference in the lives of the Afghan people, often at a high cost ….” More from the Canadian Press on that…
• Meanwhile, the transition continues on the ground in Afghanistan:  “A scouting party from the NATO unit that could replace Canadian troops in Kandahar will be touring the area over the next few days. Planning for the departure of Task Force Kandahar is underway and a proposal on how the transition will take place is still being finalized, a senior U.S. officer with the alliance’s southern headquarters said Tuesday. The Canadians “are in a critical location,” said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was authorized to discuss the situation on background only. “We’ve got to make sure that area is still covered, and covered well.” ….”

What will strike readers of the NY Times:

Canada to End Combat Role in Afghanistan at End of 2011

Does the world need more Canada? As far as I can find the British media ignored the government’s decision rather completely. Typical.

Meanwhile Maj.-Gen. (ret’d) Lew MacKenzie explains clearly, to enlighten those who scream otherwise, the future non-combat role of our forces (as I have tried to do):

Our trainers won’t be ‘Omleteers’

Regarding our civilian presence at Kandahar, I wrote this ten days ago:

…I have heard from someone well up on Canadian activities in Afstan that the government is currently planning to remove all or almost all Canadian civilians and civilian police from Kandahar as the CF withdraw, and have our civilians based in Kabul. So there goes Canadian participation in the PRT…

Yesterday:

Fighting the good fight for Afghans–and all of us

Update: A very good Nov. 9 story (via Defense Industry Daily) on what’s happening in the Canadian sector of Kandahar Province now that the US surge has peaked:

Afghanistan: Before fighting season ends, one last push
Photos: Coalition troops sweep through remaining Taliban strongholds.

A month ago:

Canadians work to corral Taliban as major operation begins
U.S., Afghan forces launch air assault in Horn of Panjwaii stronghold

Mark
Ottawa

Photo: Globe and Mail

It was Ekos President Frank Graves who put into words what the “culture war” is all about, but the fact is that the Liberal Party never needed his advice. They’ve been playing games for years now, but it’s only been recently that they’ve really struck some divisive pay dirt. The current squabbling over maternal health in the third world and Afghan detainee documents are perfect examples that the Liberals don’t need to find domestic issues in order to hammer the government.

Every moment that the Liberals attack the government on alleged torture Afghan detainees, further reveals how utterly uninterested they actually are in human rights and torture. Because the truth is that nobody who actually cared about human rights and torture would spend all of their time focusing on just one tiny aspect of the broader issue in the country.

But the Liberals realized that the detainee issue could have resonance with Canadians, particularly the ones who already buy the myth that the Harper government has a “hidden agenda”. By obsessing on the detainee documents under the guise of supporting human rights, the Liberals make it appear as if the government has something to hide, or that they’re complicit in torture. If they have nothing to hide, the argument goes, then just release the documents. Simple right?

Well, not exactly. The fact is that we’re a country at war, and while we should be focusing on the mission objectives of that war and the secure creation of a stable Afghan state, we’re busy trying to rifle through mountains of paperwork pertaining to the allegations of possible prisoner abuse which occurred long after they left Canadian custody. To borrow a metaphor, this is like looking for a needle in a haystack, except that the needle happens to be completely inconsequential to the job of farming.

We’ve established that the opposition parties don’t actually give a damn about human rights. If they did, they’d actually travel to Afghanistan to ask people about them. If they did, they wouldn’t be spending all of their time focusing on something that not even the Taliban seem to care about.

Take the maternal health program as another example of the Liberal “culture war.” Not happy with the nebulous “legality” of abortion in Canada, they wanted to push the issue on the Conservative Party to spawn a debate about it in the hopes that the government would reveal itself to be full of ideological social conservatives. Nothing would please the Liberals more than an open argument about women’s rights and to put themselves as being “on side with women.”

But the Conservatives wouldn’t engage them in such a vote-killing initiative. So when the government made the announcement that they were pursuing a maternal health plan for CIDA, the Liberals saw their golden opportunity to bring it in the backdoor. And you can’t help but be impressed with how unscrupulously Machiavellian it is.

Don’t for a moment think the Liberals actually care about women in the third world, whether that be access to health care, abortions, or anything else. That’s what’s so sick about the “full range of services” euphemism for abortion. It has absolutely nothing to do with people living in a country that, just like Afghanistan, they don’t care one iota about.

No, it’s all about the “wedge”. The Liberals know the position is “win-win”, because if the Conservatives cave in and allow abortion to be part of the CIDA maternal health plan, then the social conservatives who actually support the party, will think the government gave in on a key ideological issue. But if they hold firm to the no-abortions mandate, the Liberals can accuse them of being ideological and of having a hidden agenda.

It isn’t that I’m saying that Liberal supporters don’t care for people in the third world. I’m sure some of them actually do care, in a sort of vague and peripheral way that one might care about bloated and malnourished children shown in a World Vision infomercial. But what bothers me is that they let their political leaders manipulate genuine concern for people, into these divisive and disgusting wedges between Canadians.

Like Frank Graves says, the Liberals want to place a wedge between educated people living in the cities and the rednecks in the countryside. The intellectuals who believe in a society led by an educated aristocracy, and the popcorn and beer slobs. The secular humanists and the religious wingnuts. The tolerant progressives and the homophobic racists.

The irony of all of this is that the shamefully relativist, racist, morally superior view is the one held by the Liberals, in that the Afghans aren’t capable of taking care of their own judicial matters, or that countries in the third world shouldn’t be polluting the Earth with more of their children. The tragedy is that they can’t seem to see that.

Canada has recently announced an increase in spending on foreign aid for the country of Haiti, but that money will come in the form of increased funding for the Canadian International Development Agency [CIDA].

An additional $54.6-million will go into a Haitian hospital and to local police. $65.15-million will go to the Red Cross, the United Nations, and NGOs. This is coming from the existing 2006-11 budget of $555-million for Haitian foreign aid.

The government has also pledged to match the $220-million in aid raised by Canadian donations, following the January 12 earthquake, of which about half has been “earmarked” for various projects.

But how much money has CIDA actually spent on earthquake relief in the wake of its devastation? Unfortunately for Canadians, we have no idea. That’s because CIDA has spent most of the past four months earmarking the donations for disbursement to various NGOs, but one month ago today not a penny had even been spent yet.

It certainly doesn’t engender a great deal of confidence in CIDA.

UPDATE

CIDA responded to me via email, by saying that the first $85 million Canada gave to CIDA went to NGO’s following the Earthquake, which is over and above the $220 million matching fund that Canada promised.

The $65 million announced last week, from the matching fund [Haitian Earthquake Relief Fund], has gone to the following organizations listed here.

Bernard Etzinger, Director General of Communications told me that Minister Bev Oda said that the major Canadian organizations who received the initial $220 million from Canadians directly say that they don’t need more government money immediately, which is why CIDA is waiting:

“In keeping with its mandate to manage Canadian aid effectively, CIDA will disburse funds from the Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund in a manner that achieves meaningful and sustainable results. The Government of Haiti has urged all donors to take a measured and coordinated and approach to distributing additional funds.”

You know, the photo-op’s great, but I’m sure the people would rather have the money. Photo: Corporal Pierre ThŽriault

Michael Petrou paints a fairly disturbing story of CIDA’s absolute incompetence in the face of human tragedy, today in Macleans Magazine.

As of the cutoff date, the 14 Canadian charities reporting donations to CIDA raised $154.4 million, of which $128.8 million is “potentially eligible” for the government’s fund matching mechanism. This is on CIDA’s website. What accounts for the $26 million difference is not. I asked the CIDA person I actually spoke to what “potentially eligible” means. She didn’t know.

[...]

I asked how much of the money raised through the Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund has been spent. CIDA’s response included a paragraph about where Canada has spent money that doesn’t come from the Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund, before adding the line: “Funds from the Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund will be disbursed in the near future.”

In other words, they haven’t spent a penny.

According to recent figures, Canada’s $150 million aid represents the world’s second largest total of Haitian philanthropy after Norway. Shame it’s in the hands of bureaucrats who don’t seem to understand what the word “urgent” means.

Photo: Flickr

The opposition parties have, since that fateful day in January of 2006 when scary Stephen Harper became the Prime Minister of Canada, tried to impress upon Canadians that the amalgamated elements of Progressive Conservatives, Alliance, and Reform Party members, had a “hidden agenda” that runs contrary to Canada’s socially liberal values.

In fact during the election, former Prime Minister Paul Martin promised to get rid of the notwithstanding clause that can be used to override court decisions involving charter rights. The Liberals and NDP repeatedly insisted that a vote for the Conservative Party would be a vote against abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

As the years went by, the Liberals tried in vain to provoke a manufactured political crisis by trying to get the Conservatives, or any single MP, to admit that they wanted to outlaw abortion. The occasional Toronto Star or Globe and Mail article would randomly suggest that it was an agenda in the works. And when that failed, they resorted to pointing out the “Evangelical influence” inside of the Conservative Party, as a means of hinting that social conservative reform is inevitable, if not imminent.

Alas, the Liberals found the abortion issue a difficult one to tie down, not least because of divisiveness in the party itself over whether it should be an issue. The game plan of letting sleeping dogs lie seemed to be the most prudent course of action, since anything else would seem contrived, and was nevertheless ineffective.

But the past year has not been kind to the Liberal Party of Canada and her hapless leader of anointment Michael Ignatieff. Unable to manufacture any original ideas of their own on how to better govern the country, they have instead spent the better portion of it complaining about how the Conservatives have been running it, or more recently, how they haven’t been running it at all, owing to prorogation of Parliament.

So when an opportunity presented itself to manufacture perhaps the most contrived controversy since the Prime Minister ate a communion wafer, Michael Ignatieff fired a ridiculous salvo that has since, unsurprisingly, caught on with the media.

Stephen Harper was trying to gather international support in a G8 initiative for improving maternal and child care health in the developing world at a meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Calling for help of the world’s poor hit hardest by the global recession, Stephen Harper said that Canada would champion the health and welfare of women and children in the world’s poorest regions.

This rather innocuous announcement of future responsibility for CIDA may have been nothing more than a byline in the news section of most newspapers, but the feminist media pundits soon picked up on the story with Antonia Zerbisias making the preposterous claim that the Prime Minister was focusing on women as “baby makers.”

Enter the dragon. Michael Ignatieff took an issue that had never been raised in Canada, and seizing the opportunity to bring it up internationally, he called on the government to ensure access to safe abortion services in the third world. But even more diabolical than that, the Liberals made the issue appear to be one of abortion rights, in which Canada and the G8 apparently have the sudden obligation to uphold. To deny the Liberal request of upholding abortion rights for the women of the third world would be seen as a de facto admission that women don’t have them.

It’s a brilliant plan, worthy of the praise of Machiavelli. Since the Canadian government obviously doesn’t have the means, nor the intent, of guaranteeing abortions for the women of plant Earth, it gives the Liberals something to point to and claim that the Conservatives don’t protect abortion rights. It’s utterly preposterous, of course, since it would be like extending a part of Canadian social security to every country in the third world, making us accountable for their safe disposal of fetal infection.

While we’re at it, why not guarantee safe injection sites as well? Surely the Canadian government has a responsibility to ensure the safe and supervised habitual use of illicit drugs in the third world? We could call the initiative “social security spending without borders”. Bah, we’ll work on the title.