Just How Significant Is The Niqab Debate

So who is more oppressive? The culture that
the Conservatives claim, compels women to
wear the Niqab, or the Conservatives who
Say they cant?

It is being said that the Niqab debate is nothing more than a "con-trap" - a wedge issue to distract Canadians from a dismal Conservative track record and a Prime Minister who has absolutely nothing of value to show for his nine years in power. 

We say that  there are more important issues to discuss, like healthcare. Which is indeed a critical issue and one that has been grossly mishandled by the Harper Government. 

But the fact of the matter remains, that Harper, Kenney and I would think, a great many other members of the conservative caucus, are racist, misogynist pigs. And that should be a significant fact for many Canadians. 

Do we, as a nation, want to be led by a bunch of angry old white men

Just another angry Old-Stock Canadian

who's values create varying levels of citizenship - that Old Stock Canadians are more - well - CANADIAN than several million newly arrived people?  Do we want leaders who are as misogynistic about women's rights to their own bodies and what they wear, as the culture they claim oppresses them? Are women now, also second class citizens? 

This exclusive, male domineering, racist mind set  sits at the core of the conservative ideology and it becomes reflected in everything that they do, such as how they treat first nations, how they remove health care for refugees in need, by use of racist slogans, rather than elevating the level of health care for all Canadians - How they support harassment of women who seek abortions. Not to mention how  foreign aid for Maternal Health Care denies support for countries with exploding populations but permit abortions. 

We don't cotton to them kind
of folks is these here parts!

So maybe there are more pressing issues to discuss, but this one speaks to the nature of the beating heart of the man who would be our Prime Minister for four more years. 

Hudak Aims To Recreate "Harper's Follies"

Hudak's bad math has been under a
microscope since day one of this campaign.

No matter how you add, subtract, multiply or divide Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak's  bogus "Million Jobs"numbers, the outcome would not be good for thousands of Ontarians. 

Hudak is, of course, proposing the slashing of 100,000 public sector jobs - one out of every six public employee in the Province. This would include teachers, educational assistants, paramedics, welfare workers, child protection workers, occupational therapists, behaviour therapists, group home staff, probation officers, jail guards, personal support workers, speech and language pathologists, communication disorder specialists, nursing home staff, water safety inspectors (think Walkerton here) and the list goes on and on. These are highly trained, dedicated people who make a difference in our communities.

Hudak wants to eliminate these 
dedicated people who make 
a difference in our communities 
in favour of a 30% corporate
tax cut

This "public sector genocide" would, of course, supposedly offset the gigantic loss of revenue that would occur as a result of reducing corporate taxes in Ontario by 30%. Hudak's conservative ideology would have us believe, that this tax break to big business, would "trickle down", thereby creating a million jobs and reinvestment in the Province. 

It's a quaint fairy tale that, but Mr. Hudak either doesn't understand or doesn't care about the devastating impact of his destructive platform, either on the middle class of this Province (a great number of those public service jobs are middle class), or the vulnerable and needy people  whose lives depend  on the hardworking public servants he wishes to fire. 

The truly sad part is, that there are so many citizens who take the Conservative leader's numbers at face value and also don't understand the devastating course Hudak is plotting. They simply don't grasp that what he is proposing, is nothing less than a crime of colossal proportion against our Province, our communities and the citizenry as a whole.  

But Hudak's corporate tax cut theory has already been disproved by circumstances at the federal level. 

In 2005, the year before Stephen Harper came to power, unemployment in Canada stood at 6.8%  

After drastically slashing corporate taxes across the country to record low levels and imposing similar crippling cuts on the federal public service that has devastated the lives of multitudinous  Canadians (such as our veterans), unemployment currently sits at 6.9%. And this does not include the 39% of unemployed Canadians who have simply "given up" looking for work.  Since Harper's tax breaks then, Canada has seen a net increase in unemployment of +.1% nation wide over eight years. So there are actually slightly more people unemployed now (discounting the 39% who have given up) than there were before the massive tax cuts. What happened to all the jobs?

Well aside from the fact that there was a recession midway through those eight years which saw unemployment peak at 8.3% in 2009, jobs have been slow to rematerialize in the five years since then. There has been no evidence of "trickle down" and in fact, corporations are sitting on any savings they may have gained from their tax breaks. All of which prompted former Bank of Canada Governor, Mark Carney to call on corporate Canada in 2012, to reinvest the vast amounts of "dead money" they were sitting on. In essence, big business has been hoarding it's savings from lower taxes rather than using them to benefit the economy and the country. 

And recently, The Conference Board of Canada has found that cuts to corporate taxes alone will not create new jobs without Government stimulus. In fact, they discovered that government spending on it's own, will create more jobs than reducing corporate taxes. But Harper, clinging to his Calgary School dogma, has already implemented what Hudak is proposing -  austerity measures that are just the opposite of The Conference Board's findings and that have proven to be detrimental to our economy and to our society as a whole. 

But what Harper has succeeded in achieving, is the creation of a large number of part-time "McJobs" with no benefits, no retirement savings and low wages. Hardly the kind of employment that is suitable for Canadian families. And Mr. Hudak is proposing the exact same thing for Ontario. The PC's plan would guide Ontario down a dark and foreboding path that would lead to  large scale, long term suffering. Our economy would experience immeasurable if not irreparable damage. 

And in the meantime, those 100,000 out of work public servants would end up selling their homes and slinging burgers at McDonald's in a desperate attempt to make ends meet. And only God knows what would happen to the people who used to depend on them. But it's a safe bet that their diminished and discontinued services would likely result in thousands of them ending up on the streets, in hospitals and in our jails, thereby negating any savings Hudak ever hoped to gain from terminating their supports. 

Ontario's most vulnerable would be hurt the worst.

James Moore Let The Cat Out Of The Bag

Jimmy Moore reminds me of that fake signing
interpreter at the Mandela funeral. 

On Friday, Federal Industry Minister (and hopeful Harper successor) James Moore told a Vancouver radio station that child poverty is not Ottawa's problem.

He pointed a stubby finger at the provinces and accusingly said it was THEIR problem that one in seven Canadian children is living in poverty  and that it's not HIS job to feed his neighbor's children. 

And then Little Jimmy went on to spout ReformaCon talking points about fighting poverty through "jobs, growth and long term prosperity" (or as Canada's poor might suggest, long term austerity).

And therein lies the foundation of the Conservative mindset. 

Our Straussian Neo-con government would still have us believe in the rather whimsical, mythical creature known as the "invisible hand of capitalism". 

According to this tall tale, prosperity in business equals prosperity for everyone. That the wealth and success realized by the business class will "trickle down" to the peons laboring in the fields, thus stimulating greater consumerism and a very Merry Christmas for one and all. 

But of course, the Invisible Hand is as much a children's tale as is Santa Clause. The truth of it is, the success of big business has resulted in unprecedented hoarding of grotesque sums of cash in offshore tax free havens. None of that manna is trickling down any further than the CEO's yearly bonuses. 

And if that weren't enough to purchase a yacht or two for the affluent 1%, they are colluding with our Government to kill organized labor and drive down wages across the country. And in the process, they want to cut huge holes in our social safety net that has taken decades to weave. 

Let's not forget that for years, citizen Stephen (Harper) was president

Colin M. Brown
Rich Insurance Magnet
And founder of the NCC

of the National Citizen's Coalition. This highly secretive lobby group which represents the interests of the business class, was founded by a rich insurance man who felt that our national health insurance program was undercutting his bottom line. 

But since Canada still tends to be a rather progressive place with strong progressive values (as opposed to Stephen's assertion that the Conservative party's values are Canadian values) Mr. H and company have had to soft-peddle their Neo-Con rhetoric in order to implement incremental change in the fundamental way Canadadians look after one another and do it in such a way that was hardly noticeable.  Hence, Stephen's hard line on talking points and message control lest one of his apostles accidently lets the cat out of the bag regarding the Conservative agenda as Moore did Friday. 

Let em eat cake!

Today, Jimmy Moore apologized for his heartless comments. But it is a case of too little too late. In a moment of weakness (or strength depending on how you look at it), Moore spoke his mind and gave us all a glimpse inside what the Harper Government REALLY thinks. 

So When Did Welfare Become a Dirty Word?

"Stupid fucking Canadians"!

In 1997, Stephen Harper made a speech to a group of uber-conservative Americans in which he made several derogatory comments about Canada and Canadian society. He claimed that Canada was: "...a Northern European Welfare State in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it"- like this was a bad thing or something. 

The terms"Welfare" and "Welfare state" have of course, become dirty words in our society. They have come to mean that the recipients of the state's good will are nothing but bums and sponges who are a drain on our economy and a lead weight around the necks of the middle and upper classes. 

And the term Welfare State is connected to and often confused with "Socialism". Socialism, as I understand it, is an economic and political school of thought while Welfare is the notion of the state's duty to provide for the economic and social well being of it's citizens. 

Socialism has been around since the industrial revolution and has spoken to the inequality of our society for generations. It has acknowledged that the affluent few, the 1% as they are referred to today, have an obligation to help improve the lot of the laborers who slave to make them rich. 

Welfare on the other hand, refers to a system of progressive taxation that compels the richer classes to contribute proportionately to the state's largesse in order to create greater social and economic equality. Citizens who are able, might pay more personal taxes, but by and large, a more equitable society is created where everyone has the same rights to quality education, health care and benefits in the event of unemployment, old age or personal hardship. In Canada, we have come to refer to this as our "Social Safety Net".  

But Socialism and Welfare are today regarded as being inextricably connected and Socialism has, of course, been connected with what the west has called the "scourge" of free will and individual rights known as Communism. This despite the fact that Socialism can and regularly does, exist in free and open democratic nations.  

No, neither of these men are
Stephen Harper. But he may
have learned a lesson or two
from them.

We'd have to go back to pre World War II Europe and take a peek at what was going on in order to understand where all this started. Nazi Germany was being governed by a party that- as many right-wing commentators today like to point out- referred to itself as Socialist while Russia, which considered itself to be Communist, was being governed by the controversial Joseph Stalin. 

Despite his cold, callous brutality and the numerous deaths attributed to his tactics, many in Russia still regard Stalin as a hero and a recent poll has claimed that fully a third of Russian people would vote for Stalin if he were alive today. 

But while Germany was, of course, no where near being a true socialist country, the Soviet Union under Stalin, still adhered to many Communist principals but has since been painted by the west, rightly or wrongly, as a blood-thirsty totalitarian regime.   

It wasn't hard then for countries like the U.S., who adhere to their constitution with the same religious zeal that Christians adhere to the ten commandments, to demonize these concepts as purely evil. There was no separation between what these countries purported to be and what they really were. Which caused one post-war British M.P. to declare that: "It is probably true that Western Europe would have gone socialist after the war if Soviet behaviour had not given it too grim a visage". Hence, Stalinist Communism and Socialism are not yet sufficiently distinguished in many minds." In other words, Socialism was getting a bum rap. 

Our "Betters" would 
have us believe that 
Communism would rot 
our teeth and stunt 
our growth!

But of course, even without the bum rap, America is and always has been an ardent capitalist society who's every institution and politician is driven by the rich and the well placed. There was no incentive whatsoever for them to embrace the concepts of social equality and duty of the state to it's citizens. Since birth, every American citizen had, and continues to have, the myth of the righteousness of free enterprise and the myth that anybody can be anything they aspire to be through hard work, driven into their heads. Armed with these popular notions, it wasn't hard for the American elite to persuade the masses of the evils of Socialism. They wrapped themselves in the flag of nationalism, pointed their bony fingers at the Soviets and shouted "j'accuse"! 


Then came the era of McCarthyism where hundreds of thousands of Americans were wrongly accused of being Communist sympathizers. But of course, by then, Communism and Socialism were considered to be one and the same and both were believed to be the enemies of the "American Dream". 

But Canada went in a decidedly different direction. Despite living next to the most powerful country in the world, we had our own ideas about what society should look like and to what extent the state owes a sense of duty to it's citizens. Over successive generations since the second world war, Canada embraced the concepts of Welfare, universal health care, unemployment insurance etc. And we all became stubbornly proud of the way we looked after each other. And this all occurred without ever once referring to ourselves as a Socialist country. We were just a democracy with progressive social ideals. 

Then one day, one of our neighbors to the south looked at what was going on up here and loudly proclaimed that Canada was a Socialist state. And the notion took off like wildfire. And in shocked disbelief, we looked around at each other and said "Who? Us"?

But in fact, what Canada had become is a Welfare state, in the BEST sense of the word. Successive post-war governments took very seriously their duty to the citizens who elected them and took the concept of equality to heart. We are, if nothing else, a very fair minded lot. But to most observers, Socialist and Welfare States are one and the same, and Socialism is, of course, thanks to suffering from several generations of a bum rap, the same thing as Stalinist Communism, the antithesis of the capitalist notion of freedom as espoused by the world's power brokers. 

Enter Stephen Harper and his merry band of pranksters. Stephen was

"Fuck health care, fuck EI,
 fuck welfare and fuck
the people who use it"!

weaned on notions of the purity of the English tradition (sound familiar?) and the dogma of the American Neo-Conservatives. According to this dogma, human beings are mostly inert creatures. They are motivated only by pain or pleasure. So if not faced with either the pain of hunger or the pleasure of great reward, they become essentially inert. Unproductive. Useless.  

So then to Stephen and his like, concepts like Welfare and the Social Safety Net are "demotivators". The over-riding belief is that those who are poor, deserve to be poor and are undeserving of government assistance. They should use their hunger and that of their children as motivation to work at one or more poverty level jobs hundreds of miles from home. In this way, they are useful contributors to the economy and remain both beholden to, and subservient to their betters, namely their employers. So Stephen WANTS there to be inequality and distinct classes of citizenry. None of this "duty of the state" nonsense.  

How the western corporate
elites would have us view a
Welfare State

So it's no wonder that Stephen and the other elites consider the phrase "Welfare State" to be a dirty word. It goes against their system of beliefs and generally, undercuts their collective bottom lines. Hence the billions of dollars corporations have squirreled away in offshore accounts safely out of reach of governments who, if able to levy taxes on it, might actually be able to do some good with it. Nope, these companies and rich folk earned this money damn it and they aim to keep it. "Fuck the employees, fuck the poor and fuck their bastardly children to boot"!

So then it's worth it to the ultra right wing tea-party-like conservatives to blaspheme the concept of "Welfare" and to declare that it's recipients, the country's poorest and most vulnerable people, are useless slugs who are a burden on the hard working citizens of the country, never mind the fact that most Welfare States have considerably lower levels of poverty and hence, more consumers than their counterparts. 

Politicians like Stephen campaign on such notions and drive home this divisive and derisive notion about Welfare. And the right wing media (think Ezra Levant here) eats this kind of stuff up and regurgitates it for the evening news, thus proliferating the distorted perception of Welfare and the Welfare State. 

Now it may sound like I'm blaming Stephen Harper here for the bastardization of Welfare in Canada. Stephen is guilty of many societal ills but this is one crime I can't pin on him alone. He is but one of many faces in the Welfare lynch-mob. 

A better case could be made against former Ontario Premier Mike Harris.  During his tenure, "Hatchet-Man Mike" was responsible for slashing Welfare by a whopping 21%. Ontario's poor have never recovered from this crippling blow. But then, Harris and Harper are joined at the hip by ideology when it comes to the treatment of society's poor and most vulnerable. They view them with the bitterest of contempt and would sooner see them enslaved or worse, imprisoned. 

And the rich get richer and the poor go to jail!