Mining tar sands oil at Ft. McMurray, Alberta, Canada. Credit: Chris Arsenault/IPS

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Oct 6 2014 (IPS)

Canada’s tar sands oil boom may be in jeopardy and it appears the ruling Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper does not have any plan B in its ambition to remake this resource-rich country into “an energy superpower.”

“This is one of the sectors that creates some of the most jobs, not just in the oil patch, but around the country in terms of manufacturing and support services, and this government will continue to do everything to promote the Canadian energy sector,” Harper told reporters in December 2011.“The game changer in all of this is that the world’s governments are supposed to negotiate a new agreement to constrain fossil fuel emissions for 2015. [And] Canada may be forced kicking and screaming to stay within reasonable limits." -- economist Marc Lee

But now, in the fall of 2014, Toronto Star columnist Chantal Hebert blames a hardnosed approach in Ottawa which she suggests jeopardised what might have garnered greater political support for its energy strategy from Canadians.

“It is playing out in the courts, in the provinces and in public opinion, with the Harper government almost always on the losing side of the argument,” she wrote in a Sep. 27 column.

Hebert was referring to efforts by the Harper government to loosen environment assessment rules, speeding up pipeline projects by gutting scientific research funding to investigate the climate change impact of fossil fuel emissions (including tar sands oil) on domestic regions like the Canadian Arctic, and to question the loyalty of environmental NGOs.

“While the majority of Canadian voters support the development of Canada’s energy potential, most continue to expect their governments to act as honest brokers in the search for a balance between the economy and the environment,” she added.

All the major pipeline projects designed to carry tar sands crude oil, which is extracted from the bitumen tar underneath the boreal forest and wetlands of northern Alberta, to markets in the U.S. and Asia (the later via British Columbia’s Pacific coast) are experiencing delays due to local and vocal opposition.

These projects are all slated to be built by either Enbridge or TransCanada Pipeline, both major Canadian pipeline construction companies.

“Right now there are 2.2 million barrels per day of capacity, production from the tar sands. And the federal and provincial governments have jointly handed out permits to take that to five million barrels per day. That is a huge increase, even if they never approve another project, which they will, and the limiting factor in all of this is pipelines,” says Keith Stewart, climate change and energy campaigner for Greenpeace Canada.

Despite occasional prodding from the Harper government, U.S. President Barack Obama appears loath to make a quick decision on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico because of stiff opposition from environmentalists, including some who are his supporters.

Keith Stewart notes that the Conservatives face the prospect of losing parliamentary seats in the vote-rich Pacific coast province of British Columbia in the national federal election in 2015 because of concerns about potential oil spills from either of the two planned pipelines in the pristine wilderness environment.

Northern Gateway, which has received formal regulatory approval coupled with 209 conditions, would travel across various First Nations indigenous territories in the BC interior to the coastal port of Kitimat. Supertankers would then load up the tar sands oil and navigate the narrow waters of the Douglas Channel for the open sea.

Many commentators, including Stewart, are doubtful that the project will ever get built because of the legal challenges from the First Nations, whose lands claims were given further reinforcement in recent Canadian court decisions.

The second project, by Kinder Morgan, is an extension of an existing pipeline in British Columbia that would slice through both wealthy suburban communities in the province’s lower mainland and First Nations territory.

Then there is Energy East, which is currently at an earlier stage of regulatory approval than the other two pipeline projects. It would transmit Alberta tar sands crude oil from the west to eastern Canada, which currently imports foreign oil, and is supported to various degrees by all the three major federal political parties.

But its route through Quebec has also ignited opposition because of climate change concerns. This is a province that prides itself on being green due to its reliance almost exclusively on hydroelectric power, “resulting in very low greenhouse emissions per capita,” adds Stewart.

“There is not a lot in [Energy East] for Quebec. It is all risk and low reward. You are taking the risk of spills into the St. Lawrence River and into the drinking water,” he notes.

Meanwhile, Jim Stanford, an economist with the UNIFOR union, warns of a boom-bust syndrome that is intrinsic to resource commodity investment. He says that tar sands oil is no exception to the trend.

Stanford points to the slide downward in the world price of oil from the 100-dollar a barrel level – the minimum required by energy producers to justify ploughing money into the expensive extraction process of applying chemicals, water and machinery to dig the bitumen out of the ground.

“Commodity prices go up and they always come down. And getting excited in a period of relatively high prices usually ends in tears [among the investors] when the prices come back down the other way,” Stanford says.

Another economist, the Vancouver-based Marc Lee, observes that the Harper government is keen to extract as much tar sands oil as possible over a short period of time before renewable energies like solar and wind, with fewer consequences for the warming of the planet, come on stream at more affordable pricing.

“The game changer in all of this is that the world’s governments are supposed to negotiate a new agreement to constrain fossil fuel emissions for 2015. [And] Canada may be forced kicking and screaming to stay within reasonable limits,” says Lee.

Looming over all of this is Canada’s historical dependence on the development and export of raw resource staples, starting with trade in fur and fish from the New World to Europe under French and British colonisation in the 1500 and 1600s, says Mel Watkins, a retired University of Toronto political economist and the author of various books and articles on what he and others call the “staples theory,” to explain this country’s evolution.

Other important resources for Canada have been lumber, minerals and petroleum. Watkins speaks favourably of the wheat boom which began in the 1890s and provided, he recounts, positive spinoffs for the Canadian prairies, including the spread of family farms, expansion of agricultural, railway construction and settling of new communities and towns.

But often, says Watkins, resource-dependent countries – including Canada, Australia and nations in Latin America – get “addicted” to resource exports to the point where other parts of their economies fail to receive the full benefits of the commodity. He calls it “the staple trap.”

Watkins explains how the energy companies in Canada rely on foreign-made machinery to extract the tar sands oil and that once dug up the crude is invariably refined outside Canada.

Furthermore, continues Watkins, the tar sands boom has helped to raise the value of the Canadian dollar and thus upped the price of domestically manufactured products in a competitive world market.

Finally, resource-dependent countries like Canada “are too deferential” when it comes to the multinational energy companies paying sufficient royalties and taxes back to the government, adds Watkins, “which [could] can then be used to seed diversified, greener, development.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

With adequate extension support, women farmers can increase productivity and food security in Africa. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, May 8 2014 (IPS)

An estimated one billion small farmers scratching out a living growing diverse crops and raising animals in developing countries represent the key to maintaining food production in the face of hotter temperatures and drought, especially in the tropical regions, says Sarah Elton, author of the book, “Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet.”

The Canadian journalist travelled to southern France, China, India and the province of Quebec in her own country to observe how small farmers apply their practical knowledge of agriculture – defined as either organic, agroecological or sustainable.“We are now aware that the unthinking application of yield-boosting technologies around the world has brought both many good things as well as many bad things." -- Evan Fraser

“What I found most surprising as a journalist was to see how pervasive the social movement was at the grassroots. So, rather than it being a policy perceived by government, people [in the rural areas] are not waiting for government. Government is not there to solve their problems. [Small farmers] are figuring out better ways themselves.”

At the moment a “very big but brittle” global industrial food system is supplying the world’s supply of food, she explains. Typically, it is reliant on the massive growing of single crops like wheat, corn or rice, which in turn are assisted by commercial agriculture inputs such as hybrid seeds, chemical based pesticides and fossil fuel-based fertilisers, as well as an overuse of water.

Global industrial food is praised for its efficiency and high yields and so small farmers get aboard. But in the process some become too dependent on these expensive commercial agricultural inputs by borrowing money to pay for them and thereby incurring large debts.

The journalist relates in her book how Chandrakalabai, today a resourceful and thriving farmer in the agricultural state of Maharashtra in the western part of India, managed to avoid that economic fate.

Originally, she struggled in terms of growing a range of items – millet, sorghum, vegetables and cotton – while simultaneously investing into the commercial agricultural inputs when she could afford them.

By the early 1990s, she made the switch to organic farming, minus these inputs and with the assistance of an NGO, the Institute for Integrated Rural Development.

“Chandrakalabai’s story shows us that smaller farmers in the developing world can lessen their input costs and grow organically. If they can then embed themselves in a local food system with a minimum of intermediaries between them and the consumer, they can earn more money and secure a better future,” Elton writes in her book.

The other problem with global industrial food is that single crop farming undermines the soil’s fertility and makes these kinds of operations especially vulnerable to storms, floods and drought, associated with climate change, adds Elton.

She cites how 880 small holders based farming plots in Nicaragua with diverse crops and minus the commercial agricultural inputs managed to survive the catastrophic battering of Hurricane Mitch in 1998. On average these agro-ecological operations retained 40 percent more topsoil after the storm and lost 18 percent less arable land in landslides.

Isabel Michi carefully tends seedlings in the greenhouse on her small organic farm in the settlement of Mutirão Eldorado in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

The latest report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) paints a stark picture of a hotter future where crop yields decline, demand for food increases and food prices rise.

Farming operations are being urged by scientists to alter their growing practices as a part of a general mitigation strategy for a range of human activity (which also includes reducing the amount of fossil fuels burned for energy) in order to avoid the worst case scenario of world temperatures rising way past two degrees Centigrade.

“One of the things that the report makes very clear is how farmers respond and how farmers behave will have a huge impact on the effect of climate change,” says Evan Fraser, a University of Guelph geography professor, food security specialist and Canada Research Chair in Global Human Security. He worked on an earlier draft on the food section of the IPCC report.

Fraser says that sophisticated weather forecasting tools are being developed to make it possible for government authorities to react before a catastrophic storm arrives to cause devastation to crops, infrastructure, homes and people. And he also maintains that drought conditions represent a far more serious threat to agriculture single episodic events like storms and floods.

“I think that drought is going to be the bigger problem over the long term, in the 21 century. Certainly drier conditions in the tropics are going to lead to significant challenges for farmers,” he says.

With that in mind, Fraser calls for going in the direction of traditional small farmers by planting diverse crops. Furthermore, he say, one should include drought tolerant crops with a deeper root structures to access water. Furthermore, the food security specialist suggests a ramp up of organic matter, be it recycled manure or what is left of last year’s crop, to serve as a sponge in the soil to trap or restore water.

“We are now aware that the unthinking application of yield-boosting technologies around the world has brought both many good things as well as many bad things. Developing and applying new technologies to boost yields into the future will require a deft handling of both science, agricultural extension, social policy, and a very context-specific understanding of the needs local farmers face,” Fraser told IPS.

But experimentation in agricultural practices is less likely to happen in North America where farming operations, because of their size, are tied up in loans and big contracts to corporations in agribusiness and their unsustainable practices, says food security specialist Danielle Nierenberg, president of the Chicago based Food Tank, a food security think tank.

But small farmers, especially in developing countries, are better able through necessity to innovate and so, “we have a lot to learn from them,” she told IPS.

Many farmers have been encouraged to practice more industrial methods and they are finding in the face of drought and extreme flooding that going back to more traditional and indigenous practices they are able to better combat climate change,” says Nierenberg.

But the president of Food Tank warns against a rigid definition of what constitutes sustainable agriculture. In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, where are the soils can be deficient, “an extra boost” of artificial fertiliser may be needed to make the land more productive, she explains.

Meanwhile, some government and international development agencies including the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation are jumping on the “sustainable” bandwagon without completely breaking away from chemical inputs, says Julia Wright, deputy director at the UK-based Centre for Agroecology and Food Security at Coventry.

“Sustainable intensification, for example, can mean a concentrated form of industrial agriculture, and conservation agriculture – one form that the FAO likes to promote,” she told IPS.

One piece of good news, Wright adds, is that there are a number of national governments which have genuine programmes for agroecological or organic smallholder farmers.

“Bhutan is planning to become the world’s first organic country. Bolivia has some supportive policies. Parts of Germany are quite forward thinking in this respect, and of course the Cuban government supports smallholder organic urban agriculture,” Wright said.

Mining tar sands oil at Fort McMurray. Credit: Chris Arsenault/IPS

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Mar 17 2014 (IPS)

Job cuts totalling 1,000 announced at Environment Canada’s climate change division this month means there will be even fewer government scientists onboard to monitor the impact of the extraction, development and transportation of crude oil from the carbon-intensive oil sands in Alberta.

The oil sands are a major source of fossil fuel emissions which are heating areas of the planet, including the Arctic.“These audits are clearly designed to intimidate and disrupt their work." -- Dennis Howlett

Ironically, this same department, just weeks earlier, produced new research confirming that toxic chemicals from oil sands tailing ponds covering 176 square kilometres in northern Alberta are leaching into the local groundwater and seeping into the Athabasca River.

But two experts on Canadian environmental policy say they expect fewer such studies to be financed by a Conservative government in Ottawa focused on the development of the Alberta oil sands.

“This government is taking out specific forms of [research] capacity and those are the kind of things we need to have if we are ever going to tackle climate change,” said John Bennett, executive director of Sierra Club Canada.

“[With] any government that comes into power in the future, it’s going to take them two or three years to get the staff, to review what they have to do,” he told IPS.

Picking up the investigative slack but without the same amount of resources are the environmental NGOs such as the David Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute, said Mark Winfield, a professor in the faculty of environmental studies at Toronto’s York University.

“These functions of NGOs in the public policy process have become even more important as the capacity to provide evidence-based analysis — contrary to what the current government wants to hear — continues to be diminished in Ottawa,” Winfield said in a recent blog post.

He points for instance to a report by the Pembina Institute that offers evidence of  a “significant increase” in fossil fuel emissions if a proposed west-east pipeline from Alberta to New Brunswick carrying crude oil from the oil sands is built.

Both Suzuki and Pembina are among several leading environmental organisations that have charitable status under Canadian tax regulation and thus are able to provide tax receipts for Canadians donating money for research into climate change, oil and gas development and other pollution issues.

However, since the 2011 federal election when Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative party won a parliamentary majority, these same NGOs have faced the prospect of losing their charitable status for allegedly straying past the legal 10 percent budget limit for  political activity.

The federal government’s rhetoric heated up when natural resources Minister Joe Oliver in early 2012 warned publicly of “radical” environmentalists “threaten[ing] to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda,” with their opposition to proposed oil pipeline projects.

Oliver stated then that these same groups rely on funding from “foreign special interest groups.”

Mark Winfield worries that CRA is raising “profound issues about the rights of Canadians,” by its actions.

The scorecards that NGOs introduce at election time to compare the positions of the various political parties on specific environmental issues including climate change may represent a crossing of the fine line between research and political advocacy, said Philippe Brideau, a spokesperson for the Canada Revenue Agency.

“In general, the CRA would likely consider a charity that rates political parties to be carrying on a partisan political activity.”

University of Toronto political scientist Nelson Wiseman is not adverse to some restrictions, although he is uncomfortable with some of the government’s rhetoric directed towards the NGOs.

“I think it is perfectly okay to publish data. But I am not sure it is proper to get tax money and get up and say ‘the Conservatives are killing the environment,’” he told IPS.

At the same time, Wiseman said he is not sure that Canadian organisations taking foreign money is necessarily illegal or even a bad thing.

“If there is some group that arises and wants to build democracy in the Ukraine, we want to give them some money. It could be illegal according to Ukrainian law. I suspect it is not illegal here.”

Recently revealed internal documents indicate that the Canada Revenue Agency is investing 12 million dollars (U.S.), more than then the 7.2 million previously announced, in an ongoing multi-year audit until 2017 of environmental NGOs with legal charity status.

CBC TV recently reported that CRA is investigating the following environmental charities — David Suzuki Foundation, Tides Canada, West Coast Environmental Law, The Pembina Foundation, Environmental Defence, Equiterre and the Ecology Action Centre — for possibly exceeding the allowable 10 percent for political activity.

John Bennett at the Sierra Club, which is not being currently audited, said the political restrictions were never an issue for the NGOs until the Harper government came along and unleashed the CRA.

“There are things that groups have been doing for years and years and are now being told those are not qualified activities,” he explained.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has made vague allegations about ties between NGOs and organised crime. Credit: Joey Coleman/cc by 2.0

Environmental NGOs, for instance, have historically worked with corporations within an industry like forestry to establish a sector-based code of conduct that respects the land, water, flora and fauna during any resource extraction activity.

Now, under a “retroactive” interpretation of political activity for charities by the CRA, that kind of consultation is being disallowed, said Bennett.

“This is the kind of activity which we thought was very positive, so trying to say that we can’t do that anymore is a way to get us out of the business of being an influence for change in society,” he said.

Philippe Brideau at the CRA counters that the issue of a code of conduct is not as clear-cut with regards to consultation.  “It depends on whether the actual activity fits the definition of political activity,” he said.

But Dennis Howlett, executive director for Canadians for Tax Fairness, argues that the Harper government is using the CRA to conduct a political “witch-hunt,” against NGOs daring to criticise public policy.

He notes that a similar form of “intimidation” of ongoing auditing is also occurring with organisations focused on international development.

“These audits are clearly designed to intimidate and disrupt their work, so instead of going in and auditing and saying, ‘no everything’s fine,’ they keep the audit open, and they don’t conclude the audit. They don’t come to any resolution; they just keep the charities hanging… I know of audits that have been going on for a year.”

Furthermore, Howlett points to the reported staff cuts at the Canada Revenue Agency over a three-year period totaling close to 3,000, plus another approximately 100 jobs lost in the units assigned to investigate overseas tax evasion and aggressive tax planning, and finally the disbanding of a special unit devoted to organised crime.

“These would be the more experienced trained auditors, forensic accountants, people with a fair high level of education and training and experience,” Howlett told IPS.

“CRA has lost a lot of key staff and their ability to investigate both individuals using tax havens to hide their money, as well as corporations who are shifting profit through tax havens to reduce their product and their tax bill.”

Brideau counters that the CRA “takes its commitment to detecting and addressing non-compliance with Canada’s tax laws seriously.” He denies that any auditors have been cut in his department.

“Reductions in staff are limited to individuals performing programme or corporate support functions,” he told IPS.

Many of the challenges faced by the Conservative government in its relations with Canada’s aboriginal peoples may come to a head at the 200th birthday events for Sir John A. Macdonald, the country’s first prime minister, set for Jan. 11, 2015.

The emphasis in the events organised by the officially non-partisan and non-profit bicentennial commission – underwritten by Ottawa to the tune of one million dollars plus another 300,000 dollars from private donors – is on Macdonald’s record as the consummate politician, speech-maker, provider of humour and statesman who in the end forged a transcontinental nation starting in 1867 out of a string of disparate colonies in British North America.“There is denying that Macdonald built the country, but the collateral damage in building the country the way he did was the legacy of Canadian aboriginal relations.” -- James Daschuk

Commission spokesperson Arthur Milnes says there will be no “whitewash” of Macdonald’s decisions or personality (for example, his alcoholism is often discussed and is the butt of some jokes). He intends to get Canadians, who are not known to be up on their history, to start talking about their founder.

“In some ways we are still dealing with some of his negative policies towards aboriginal people,” he concedes.

But Milnes declined to comment on the interpretation that the Stephen Harper government itself will place on the Macdonald bicentennial.

Today, some First Nations’ bands in western Canada are challenging the building of oil sands energy projects and pipelines because the Harper government failed to fully consult and accommodate them as required constitutionally under a treaty that began with the royal proclamation of 1763 under the British crown.

The same government is resisting making available to a judge-led inquiry complete documentation of credible instances of physical and sexual abuse experienced by approximately 100,000 aboriginal children who were forced by law to attend church-managed residential schools from 1876 (when Macdonald set them up to reduce the “savage” in them) to 1996, when they were finally closed.

The problems faced by aboriginal peoples in Canada today – poverty, high rates of diabetes, poor nutrition, lower life expectancy and broken treaties, especially the 1876 treaties in the Canadian northwest – can be traced to Macdonald’s government, when he held the jobs of both prime minister and minister of Indian Affairs during much of the 1867 to 1891 period, argues historian James Daschuk.

He is the author of a new scholarly work, “Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life,” which outlines the spread of infectious diseases such as smallpox, influenza and tuberculosis in the northwest following the first contact with Europeans beginning in the 1600s and leading to the decimation of certain First Nations tribes.

Daschuk’s calling public attention to Macdonald’s starvation policies has struck a political “nerve,” says another colleague who wishes to remain nameless. Despite guarantees of food in times of famine under 1876 treaties, rations were withheld from destitute and malnourished First Nations (following the disappearance of the buffalo) from Regina to the Alberta border on the western prairies in order to force them to leave their traditional lands for selected reserves. This was done to pave the way for white settlement and the construction of the cross-country Canadian Pacific Railway.

“There is no denying that Macdonald built the country, but the collateral damage in building the country the way he did was the legacy of Canadian aboriginal relations,” Daschuk told IPS.

Daschuk is scathing in his criticism of his own “self-referential” profession that is focused more on “theory” and “deconstruction,” versus doing the hard slogging of researching the lesser-known chapters of Canadian history.

“We as citizens in Canada have not engaged in this kind of debate about what the state did on our behalf. Canadians don’t know their own history and don’t know the uglier parts of their history,” says Daschuk, an assistant professor in the faculty of kinesiology and health studies at the University of Regina.

Why did Macdonald, who as prime minister had a lot on his plate, bother with the additional job of Indian Affairs? He faced, among other things, a major railway corruption scandal which temporarily threw him out of power in one election for a single term of office and a struggle to keep the new country (still connected to the British Empire) united, despite being divided between English-speaking Protestant Ontario and French-speaking Catholic Quebec.

Additionally, his army fended off two separate insurrections in the newly acquired northwest by the Métis (a separate distinct people of mixed First Nations and European ancestry) over Ottawa’s failure to follow through with promised land grants – the subject of a 2013 Supreme Court of Canada decision favouring the Métis in Manitoba.

Blair Stonechild, a historian at First Nations University in Regina and a member of the Muscowpetung Saulteaux First Nation in the province of Saskatchewan, suggests that Macdonald’s effort to erase the traditional First Nations’ cultures through residential school education amounted to “cultural genocide.” But one must not single out Macdonald from a 19th century Canada or world where the social Darwinist notion of a superior white race was widely held, he told IPS.

“Obviously, [Macdonald] was the founder of Canada and he was a hardworking person, very dedicated. Those are good points, but he was a creature of his time and he didn’t see First Nations as equal or advanced or anything. He saw them as inferior people who needed to be basically assimilated,” Stonechild says.

The shrinking of the First Nations people on the Canadian prairies – they numbered as low as 20,000 in the 1880s – seemed to fit racist theories that weaker people were bound to disappear, he adds.

Another historian, Patrice Dutil, a professor at Ryerson University, is currently compiling a series of scholarly essays on Macdonald for an upcoming book. He told IPS that he is uncomfortable making “tidy conclusions” about Canada’s first PM.

Macdonald, he explains, functioned in a nastier and laissez-faire 19th century where government did very little for its citizens while politicians mostly focused on building things like roads, canals, railways and harbours.

“Workers worked in miserable conditions, women were beaten, orphans were abused, indigenous peoples were starved, labourers worked to their deaths, Catholics were routinely disparaged, Jews were condemned. This was Canada,” explains Dutil.

Also, Dutil notes that Canada does not have a pristine record with regards to aboriginal peoples but it never went as far as the Americans did with a strategy of “extermination” during the Indian wars while pursuing an equivalent western expansion within North America.

Furthermore, University of Calgary professor emeritus and a specialist in indigenous history Donald Smith suggests that more research is required by his colleagues to obtain a fuller picture of Macdonald’s aboriginal policies before drawing any conclusion about the man.

He notes, for instance, that Macdonald supported the right to vote in federal elections for First Nations adult males with property in eastern Canada without the loss of their treaty Indian status.

“The topic is a difficult one for it demands a review of Macdonald’s Indian policy in Central and Eastern Canada as well as Western Canada [before and after 1867]. I would wager by the standards of his age, not ours, he emerges as a complex and relatively tolerant individual.”

Incidentally, First Nations people or treaty status Indians living on reserves, as they are also called, did not become full-fledged Canadian citizens with the right to vote until 1960.

Maybe the issue is about how Harper’s government is promoting a “jingoistic” and “nationalistic” interpretation for recent and upcoming anniversaries marking the Macdonald bicentennial, as well as Canadian involvement in the war of 1812 and World War I, suggests James Daschuk.

Harper himself provided in an official web site statement a listing of Macdonald’s accomplishments on Jan. 11 for the latter’s 199th birthday – that is “the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the founding of the North-West Mounted Police (later the Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and the defeat of the North-West Rebellion” – without mentioning the tragic back story of the first nations and Métis peoples.

Queens University historian Brian Osborne, who studies national narratives, expects that the current prime minister will put a “conservative” face on Canada’s founder. “I think Harper has a partisan political view of Sir John A because he was also a Conservative party leader.”

Gossip and rumour based on secret intelligence sources may be all that is needed to deport a foreign national from Canada on national security grounds, legal experts say.

Secret evidence has been used “in a whole range of immigration procedures,” such as applications for permanent residence or citizenship in Canada, “which do not involve actual hearings but are simply administrative procedures,” says Sharryn Aiken, a Queen’s University law professor and immigration and refugee expert."It is next to impossible for the person concerned to mount a response to the allegations against them." -- law professor Sharryn Aiken

“What we are seeing is a stunning intensification of the use of secret evidence in a range of procedures,” she told IPS. “What we have seen, frankly even before 9/11, [but] a trend that has intensified in the aftermath of 9/11, is the increasing tendency of the federal government to criminalise and securitise non-citizens.

“And by that I mean to basically subject non-citizens – and in particular Muslim and Arab men, as well as other racialised non-citizens from certain parts of the world – to a disproportionate degree of suspicion and scrutiny.”

Toronto immigration lawyer Barb Jackman agrees, reporting that she has found 100 examples of Federal Court of Canada immigration and refugee cases where secret evidence has been applied against immigrants already in Canada or other foreign nationals outside the country who are arriving and sponsored by families or employers.

“The [Federal] Court has not generally questioned the secret evidence. It seems very comfortable with deciding cases on secret evidence without the assistance of counsel to challenge or question that evidence,” Jackman said.

One difficulty for the accused is that there is “a different threshold in terms of burden of proof required for the immigration proceeding” in Canada, says Mike Larsen, a criminologist at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia.

Immigration officers and adjudicators consider “an objective reasonable suspicion or balanced probability standard, as opposed to a criminal proceeding [in Canada] where you have [beyond] reasonable doubt,” Larsen told IPS.

Jackman says her own client, Douglas Gray Freeman, faced “gossip” from U.S. intelligence files before the Federal Court.

Freeman is an African-American and U.S. citizen who fled to Canada in 1969 after shooting and wounding a police office in Chicago in what he described as an act of self-defence during a period of racial tension in the U.S.

Freeman (not his original name) married a Canadian woman, fathered children and worked quietly and illegally at the main reference library in Toronto. His presence was eventually discovered and he was extradited back to the U.S. where in 2008 he pleaded guilty to a single count of aggravated battery, for which he served a 30-day jail sentence. Freeman also donated 250,000 dollars to a charity and was given two years probation.

His subsequent effort to immigrate legally to Canada and reunite with his family has been met with tough opposition from Canadian authorities. After a hearing before the Federal Court of Canada, Justice Anne Mactavish ruled in October that Freeman was denied “procedural fairness.” Despite the lack of evidence, the government had claimed that he had “terrorist” links with the Black Panther party.

Jackman says other federal court cases have popped up involving intelligence mistakenly released from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and based on unnamed informants.

“There may be cases where [the government authorities] have ‘hard’ evidence but in most I think it is soft intelligence, which is based on talking to people and constructing an image of the person from rumour and gossip,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Canadian courts have been wrestling with the constitutionality of the security certificate provision in the immigration and refugee protection act, which also allows for secret evidence.

It was not introduced by the current right-wing Conservative government but by the previous centrist Liberals in 2001, when the latter were in power and “overhauling” Canadian immigrant law, says Aiken.

Since 1991, Canada has issued security certificates against several foreign nationals on its territory on the basis that they are national security risks who should be deported back to their home country.

The security certificates allow authorities to indefinitely detain those who resist the removal process with a court challenge. One of them involves a successful refugee claimant from Egypt, Mohammad Mahjoub, who has been imprisoned without trial for 13 years while fighting deportation.

But Canadian authorities are running into resistance from the courts, which have ruled that foreign nationals cannot be sent back to countries known to practice torture in their criminal justice systems to elicit confessions for alleged crimes.

The Supreme Court of Canada in 2011 also ordered the cancelling of a security certificate against the Moroccan-born Adil Charkaoui and the amending of the security certificate system because it was unconstitutional in its then current form. The Canadian government followed through with new security advocate provisions in the legislation.

But Aikin calls the new provisions problematic because the accused person has limited access to the security advocate, who cannot disclose the secret intelligence information gathered on him or her.

“The general pattern of withholding contact after the special advocate has had access to the evidence means it is next to impossible for the person concerned to mount a response to the allegations against them,” she says.

Secret evidence is still being introduced in other immigration and refugee situations, not related to security certificates, where judges and adjudicators routinely deny people access to security advocates, says Janet Dench, the executive director of the Montreal based Canadian Council for Refugees.

Here, people are “worse off” because they often face the secret evidence against them without a lawyer present, Dench told IPS.

“What we are concerned is that …if the government stopped using security certificates because it may not be productive for them, they were not getting the results they wanted. So, [they] will just use the secret evidence in the other procedures,” Dench says.

Meanwhile, Melissa Anderson, a communications spokesperson for the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, says an increasing number of refugee cases involving national security are being transferred from the IRB to the Federal Court.

In those circumstances, the Minister of Public Safety and the Canada Border Services Agency then become engaged in what turns into an admissibility hearing and a more “adversarial process,” to boot, Anderson told IPS.

“My understanding and I don’t have any statistics on it is that the Minister of [Public Safety] is participating in more refugee protection claims than ever before.”

The transfer case carrying the remains of Master Corporal Byron Greff, 3rd Battalion Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, rests in the cargo hold of a C-130 on Bagram Air Field as a Canadian bag pipe player bows his head in prayer during a ramp ceremony Oct. 31, 2011. Greff was killed in an Oct. 29 Taliban attack; he served as a NATO Training Mission adviser and instructor. U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Kat Lynn Justen

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Jul 22 2013 (IPS)

NATO member countries like Canada will continue to be asked to shoulder the burden of a military mission stuck in Afghanistan because of the continued vulnerability of the Kabul-based government.

Although Ottawa has announced that the approximately 900 Canadian soldiers training the trainers within the Afghan security forces will return home next year, most experts expect that this contribution to the NATO will continue past that date."The dilemma lies in how to balance between a strong desire to get out of Afghanistan and an equally deep fear… of suffering an obvious and humiliating defeat." – King's College Professor Anatol Lieven

The speculation is that starting in 2014, the U.S. will withdraw most of its troops but leave behind about 9,000 for training and other assistance for the Afghan forces, said Graeme Smith, a Canadian and a Kabul-based analyst for the International Crisis Group. A former Globe and Mail foreign correspondent, he is the author of a forthcoming book, “The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan”.

“Americans haven’t clarified their commitment so other NATO countries are waiting [before announcing their contribution.] There will be pressure for Canada to have something [available],” Smith told IPS.

History repeating?

In 2011, Canada formally withdrew its force of 2,500 soldiers from combat in Kandahar province after 10 years of contributing to the U.S.-led NATO mission, but it cannot quite shake off its connection to a Kabul government that most experts agree would not survive a complete withdrawal of Western forces.

Afghan security and police forces reportedly rely a great deal on U.S. and NATO forces, especially for air power and logical support.

What keeps the U.S. in Afghanistan is the nightmare of history repeating itself, said Professor Anatol Lieven at King’s College in London. He is referring to the 1975 fall of Saigon and the defeat of the U.S.-supported South Vietnamese army to the superior North Vietnamese army, following the withdrawal of hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers and leaving behind a decade of fighting a bloody and controversial war on the ground.

“The dilemma lies in how to balance between a strong desire to get out of Afghanistan and an equally deep fear, especially on the part of the U.S. military, of suffering an obvious and humiliating defeat through the rapid collapse of the Kabul regime,” said Lieven.

The U.S. is ambivalent about a continued commitment because of its own budget challenges and difficulties with a suspicious Kabul government that balked when President Barack Obama’s administration sought recently to start talks with the Taliban insurgents, said Mark Sedra, president of the Security Governance Group and a political scientist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

Subsidising security

Also, as the February 2013 Government Accountability Office report, “Afghanistan – Key Oversight Issues” points out, the U.S. and NATO countries are not providing sufficient funds to maintain the Afghan security forces over the long haul.

Afghanistan does not generate sufficient tax revenues to pay and maintain its security forces which now number 350,000 troops, and so it relies on the U.S. to fork over more than four billion dollars in subsidies annually, Sedra said.

At the same time, he continued, that outlay of money is probably not sufficient to pay for that amount of protection required to safeguard the Kabul government and the Afghan population.

“The reality is that the current size of the Afghan security forces is completely unsustainable. So unless you see those subsidies continue to roll in for an indefinite period, there is a high probability of [a] breakdown or even the collapse of the Afghan security forces,” he told IPS.

Among the potential scenarios painted by Sedra is a takeover by the Taliban Islamist insurgents – who ruled the country before 9/11– or new conflicts among the former Northern Alliance warlords who joined together to support the coming to power of the current government of Hamid Karzai in late 2001.

The major challenge for the Afghan security forces is not their fighting ability or pay level for individual soldiers, but the weakness of the logistical support and civilian administration of the defence ministry, said David Perry, a defence analyst with the Ottawa-based Conference of Defense Associations Institute and who has followed the training provided by Canada. He warns that it will take a “generation” for these issues to be resolved.

“All of the institutional stuff that you need to run [a military], supply lines as well as headquarters, planning function, that kind of stuff, [the Afghans] haven’t gone outside of the so-called mentoring stage. They need units that do administration. The ministry of defence needs to be more administratively competent,” he told IPS.

Another concern is that the costs of maintaining the Afghan security forces means that other programmes like health and education, in which NATO countries like Canada have invested considerable sums, may be sacrificed, said Canadian opposition MP Matthew Kellway, who is a defence procurement expert for his party, the New Democrats.

“Many countries, including Canada, went in at least nominally with the view to build up civil society institutions and government institutions in Afghanistan – education and health, and all those other kinds of issues. There is a huge question of how does the Afghan state support eduation, health and etc. and maintain its security forces independently,” Kellway told IPS.

The Canadian government invested in the range of 13 to 18 billion dollars, of which nine billion dollars went towards combat and the rest in development assistance for Afghanistan, according to internal government estimates and the public budget office in Ottawa.

The new Silk Road

So what will keep the U.S. and NATO inside Afghanistan despite the challenges? Michael Skinner, a York University University researcher and PhD candidate, argues that geo-political strategic planners in Washington have since the 1990s wanted their country to take advantage of Afghanistan both as a source of mineral wealth (especially in copper and iron) and its geographical position in the heart of the Eurasian continent.

Dubbed “the new Silk Road”, the strategy envisions investing billions in infrastructure development for highways, railways, electric lines and fibre optic cables across Afghanistan.

Future applications, says Skinner, include “transmitting electricity from Central Asia to Pakistan and India; transporting oil and gas from Iran and the Caspian basin to China, Pakistan, and India; laying fiber-optic cables from India to Russia and from China to Europe; improving road and rail connectivity from India to Russia and from China to Europe.”

Seeing the potential between 2001 and 2011, the Asian Development Bank invested 17 billion dollars in 7,000 kilometres in road and rail links across Central Asia, with all but six routes passing through Afghanistan.

“From my analysis, the concern for keeping the government in place is a greater concern about protecting Western investors than it is about governance in Afghanistan,” said Skinner.

Ultimately though, it will not be enough to have the Afghan security forces protect power lines and railway tracks from Taliban attacks for the benefit of investors, including ironically Chinese and Indian companies which will benefit if NATO stays in the country.

Preferable, Skinner told IPS, is for the West to come to some kind of peace agreement with the Taliban.

The uncertainty surrounding the future U.S. role puts a lot of this planning in doubt, said Sedra. “There is always a tendency to find where oil and natural resources factor in. But I am not so sure if in this case it will be a factor that is going to be enough to keep the United States and other NATO states to continue to invest their blood and treasure in Afghanistan.”

Canada’s major Israel lobby organisation is running into conflict with critics who say it is betraying the historical liberal legacy of this country’s 380,000-member Jewish community.

The barely two-years-old Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) is supporting restrictive Canadian refugee legislation, Bill C-31, that has sparked opposition from traditional human rights groups including Amnesty International, the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers and the Canadian Council for Refugees.

For prominent Toronto Jewish refugee doctor, Dr. Philip Berger, CIJA is rejecting traditional sympathy in his community in Canada for people fleeing oppression. This included fellow Jews escaping Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s, when an earlier Canadian government under Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King enforced a “none is too many” policy towards people seeking refuge from Nazi rule.

“CIJA is a disaster for the Jewish community. It is actually starting to become evident a little bit already,” he told IPS.

The new Canadian refugee law provides wide powers to Minister of Immigration Jason Kenney to designate countries as “safe” and “democratic” and thus more liable to generating “bogus” refugees versus those who are genuine.

The inclusion of Hungary on the Canadian government list despite reports of the Budapest government’s failure to protect its Roma minority population from discrimination and physical attacks is also upsetting some Jewish organisations, including the Toronto Board of Rabbis and the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre.

Says Alice Herscovitch, executive director of the Montreal Centre, “People should have access to a fair refugee system. There are countries that produce refugees despite the fact that they are democratic and have an elected government.”

But CIJA’s Steve McDonald counters that Bill C-31 makes “significant improvements toward protecting the safety and security of Canadians”, as well as “deterring human smuggling and dispensing with unsubstantial refugees fairly and quickly”. The centre is refusing to join others in demanding Hungary be taken off the safe list.

CIJA has also unsuccessfully urged the Canadian government to rethink its decision to restrict health services to refugees from its designated list of safe countries.

But this is not enough for Berger. “CIJA should be leading front and centre (on
this issue),” he said. “They know damn well what is going on. They are so manacled to the Conservative government that they have forfeited any notion of an independent organisation that represents the true interests and views of the Jewish community.”

CIJA came into being as Canadian foreign policy, first under the Liberals and now under the Conservatives, became decidedly more pro-Israel versus taking an even-handed stance between Israel and the Palestinians, notes University of Victoria political scientist and professor emeritus, Reg Whitaker.

“The uncritical alignment of the (Stephen) Harper government with the Israeli Right (i.e. Israel’s governing Likud party) has obviously created a much more welcome climate for aggressive AIPAC-style lobbying in Ottawa,” he told IPS.

Whittaker was alluding to the U.S.-based American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which he describes as having a higher profile in Washington than is the case with CIJA in Ottawa.

This is not for lack of trying on the part of CIJA, he added. Whitaker suggested that the powerful donors who decided to merge various organisations, including the century-old Canadian Jewish Congress, to create CIJA wanted a Canadian version of AIPAC to buttress the case for Israel in Canada.

“The effect of the takeover is to subsume the wider and diverse interests of the (Jewish) community, previously served by a variety of institutions and advocacy groups, under an aggressive AIPAC-style umbrella that conflates ‘Jewish’ interests with Israel’s interests – or in fact with the interests of the Israeli Right. The flip side of course is to automatically label any criticism of the Israeli government as anti-Semitic,” he said.

But CIJA has been clumsy at times, said Carleton University political science professor Mira Sucharov. She pointed to CIJA’s effort to discourage a U.S. author, Peter Beinart, from addressing Jewish Hillel student groups on two university campuses in Ottawa and Montreal. He was on a tour advocating a boycott of products manufactured in illegal Jewish settlement on Palestinian lands under Israeli control.

Also calling for a similar action, Sucharov predicted being barred personally from speaking to the same students. “Through my annual donation to my local Jewish Federation’s annual campaign, I help fund both CIJA and Hillel, the very organisations that would seek to muzzle me and the many others who oppose economic support of the settlements.”

In its defence, CIJA contends that a boycott of settlement products plays a part in “delegitimize(ing)” the state of Israel.

“A boycott of Jews – no matter where they live – is not a tactic of debate or engagement. It’s a tool of conflict. One who calls for the singling out of our fellow Jews for punishment, economic or otherwise, has rejected an essential principle of people hood,” CIJA CEO Shimon Fogel said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Bernie Farber, who headed the old Canadian Jewish Congress before it was forced to merge with the new CIJA, refuses to be drawn into a criticism of the new governing Jewish body.

“CIJA did come out with a couple of statements in support of the Roma. Some feel that it wasn’t strong; some feel they should not have said anything,” he told IPS. “It is typical of the Jewish community where you are going to have a number of opinions.”

Farber also maintained that Jews and Roma groups share a special historical bond because both were specifically targeted in Europe for genocide during the Holocaust by the Nazis.

And he recalled the significant legal and human resources that his organisation under this leadership invested in the past decades on behalf of the Roma in Canada. “There is no longer a Canadian Jewish congress, but the (Jewish) community is still finding ways (to speak out), maybe not through its official spokesbody,” he said.

Steve McDonald defended the different emphasis at CIJA. “I have to say, in general, I’m not sure I can conceive a situation in which we take a position that isn’t met with some disagreement within the diverse landscape of Canada’s Jewish community. This goes back to our view that we should strive for unity of purpose rather than uniformity of viewpoint.”

Meanwhile, to discourage potential asylum seekers the Canadian government is paying for billboard advertising in the Hungarian city of Miskolc where many members of the Roma community reside.

“Virtually all Hungarian asylum claims are abandoned or withdrawn by the claimants themselves, or determined to be unfounded by the independent Immigration and Refugee Board,” said Alexis Pavlich, a spokesperson for Canadian minister Jason Kenney in an interview with the Toronto Star.

“Canadians have no tolerance for those who abuse our system and seek to take unfair advantage of our country at great expense to taxpayers.”

Master Warrant Officer Scott Bridger, of the Canadian Contribution Training Mission – Afghanistan (CCTM-A), salutes during the 9/11 10-year anniversary ceremony at Camp Phoenix in Kabul. Credit: DND-MDN Canada

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Nov 21 2012 (IPS)

Canada’s military buying binge under the current Conservative government has hit a financial brick wall in these austere times, but there is no nostalgic return in sight for Ottawa’s once robust participation in United Nations-led peacekeeping missions.

Walter Dorn is one of the very few professors in the Canadian Forces’ military schools still teaching a course on peace support operations to Canadian officers. “There is a tendency in the senior ranks to look down on U.N. peacekeeping,” he told IPS.

During the Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, Canada was a recognised international leader in terms of offering its military to mediate between warring parties in hotspots like Cyprus and the Suez.

But following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and especially after the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington, Canada has reoriented the Canadian Forces with new purchases of planes, ships and other expensive hardware to play its part in the so-called “war on terror” led by the United States.

The tipping point came in the last decade, when Canada contributed a few thousand soldiers and support personnel to the NATO mission in Afghanistan, now fighting a difficult and protracted war against the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban forces, which previously ran the Central Asian country.

Compared to the U.S. or UK contingents, it is a relatively modest deployment. But for Canada, the self-declared “peaceable kingdom”, the Afghan engagement also represented a sea change for a country that had not participated in a major war since sending soldiers to the Korean peninsula in the early 1950s.

“(We) have put so much more emphasis on counterinsurgency operations that peacekeeping dropped by the wayside. Plus, there are now so many (Canadian) officers who don’t have experience in peacekeeping operations,” added Dorn.

Another major change was the planned long-term outlay of 490 billion dollars for new military hardware, including the controversial F-35 stealth jet fighters and an array of new naval vessels, as part of the Canada First defence strategy –ironically introduced by the pro-military Conservative federal government in 2008, the year of the world financial crisis.

Canada First also included a commitment to both extended international missions such as Afghanistan and shorter term deployments “in response to crises elsewhere in the world” such as Libya, where Canadian jet fighters and one naval war ship participated in the 2011 NATO mission to assist in the overthrow of the Muammar Gaddafi.

But the promised 490 billion dollars was never very realistic and is finally being reconfigured to meet a new financial situation in Canada, said Philippe Lagassé, a University of Ottawa defence expert.

“It wasn’t affordable to begin with, and it certainly is not affordable now,” he told IPS.

Recently, Prime Minister Stephen Harper made it plain in his across-the-board austerity cuts for federal government departments and agencies that the very large Department of National Defence can easily reduce its excessive administrative costs without doing damage to the Canadian Forces operations.

“Within very real budgetary constraints, Canada needs to maintain a modern, general purpose military capability,” Harper told reporters.

Essentially, DND is being instructed to take out 2.5 billion dollars from its annual 22.8-billion-dollar annual budget.

University of South California Canada specialist Patrick James describes this announcement as a “blessing in disguise” for Harper because it permits the PM to fully implement his 2006 election promise to ramp up security for a resource-rich and insufficiently defended Arctic, now undergoing warming because of climate change.

“Canada doesn’t have anything like the military spending of the United States, even per capita for the moment. But it is getting pretty big and it is not a bad idea when you have a bureaucracy that has been expanding steadily for an indefinite period of time to have a pause as you will and take a really cold, hard look,” James, author of “Canada and Conflict”, told IPS.

Yet there is resistance in DND, resulting in a rift between these natural allies, the Conservatives and the Canadian military, observes Lagassé.

“I think this government feels burned by the procurements. They don’t feel that Afghanistan really turned out all that well for them,” he said.

“Both the military and the Conservatives approached each other with the assumption that they were going to be very close. Like any government, they are starting to realise that DND kind has a mind of its own, and it does its own thing. That is not easy for them to deal with.”

This is a complete switch from what occurred after Harper and the Conservatives came to power in 2006, initially heading a minority government, and faced an Afghan combat mission started by the previous Liberal government. The then new prime minster made the declaration that Canada would not “cut and run” from its responsibilities under NATO.

Michael Skinner, a researcher with the York Centre for International and Security Studies, argues that the differences between Harper and the military are somewhat overblown.

“Whether it is orchestrated or not, the options are really good for the government, they can play both sides. On one side they can say ‘we are pro-military and want to support Canadian forces,’ and on the other side, they can say to all of the peaceniks, ‘look we have to cut back on military spending,’” he told IPS.

Skinner says that the planned 2.5-billion-dollar cut in defence is reasonable and doable since it will probably include both buyout packages for middle-level DND administrators and close to retirement senior officers, and the winding down of the expensive Canadian Afghan combat mission.

“The Harper government is playing an accounting shell game in order to maintain its aggressive foreign policy regime while simultaneously instituting domestic austerity. Considering the CF/DND budget increased 30.9 billion since 2001, a rollback of two billion (or even 2.5 billion as one analyst claims) is not very significant,” he noted.

Scepticism continues in Canada about why the national government abruptly cut off diplomatic relations with Iran earlier this month, although ties between the two states have been rocky since the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

One explanation provided by John Baird, Canada’s foreign affairs minister, is that Iran and its ally Syria are now being officially designated by his government as “state sponsors of terrorism” under the Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act, which allows Canadian victims of terrorism to sue either nation’s government.

Meanwhile, his cabinet colleague and immigration minister, Jason Kenney, told a CBC Newsworld television show, Power & Politics, that the Iranian embassy in Ottawa was spying and intimidating people of Iranian origin in Canada.

“There is illicit listening, there is diplomatic listening and then there is national security violations. And there is harassment, and intimidation and monitoring of our own community by forces of a dictatorship,” Kenney said.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper told Sun News Network after the unrelated murder of the U.S. ambassador in Libya of potential dangers facing Canadian diplomatic staff.

“When you can’t be certain, as we can no longer be certain, of the security of our diplomatic personnel, this is the measure we have to take,” Harper said.

He added that, “We assume our diplomats can conduct the business of the country or their respective countries free from fear of persecution or violence.”

John Measor, a Middle East expert and assistant professor of political science at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, counters that Canada will now lose the ability to know what is happening on the ground in Iran.

Canada’s diplomats in Iran have acted for the U.S. and Britain, neither of which have a diplomatic presence in Tehran, Measor told IPS.

“The U.S. hasn’t been in Iran since the revolution and the hostage crisis, the British withdrew when their embassy was overrun by state-sponsored thugs and paramilitary almost two years ago, and no other such NATO states maintain a presence,” he said.

“Switzerland has and will act on behalf of Americans and Brits for consular matters , but Canadians were providing on-the-ground eyes and ears as well as invaluable assessments of meetings with members of Iranian society from low to high. While not ever recognised, that means that Canadian personal and diplomatic pouches were also the sole remaining truly trusted avenue for British and American intelligence efforts as well,” Measor added.

The Canadian government`s intelligence on Iranian diplomats doing “inappropriate” things in Canada is certainly “plausible” but should be intepreted with some caution, said Reg Whitaker, ajunct political science professor at the University of Victoria and the author of various books on national security

“The problem is that the Harper government has a consistent record of relentlessly demonising the Iranian regime and interpreting everything it does in the worst possible light,” he told IPS.

“The most notorious example is the (the prime minister’s) statement that Iran is not only pursuing nuclear weapons but that they have indicated that they would use them against Israel: a grotesque misrepresentation for which there is not a shred of evidence in the words of any Iranian official,” Whitaker said.

Another explanation involves Canada’s relationship with Israel, which in some minds appears stronger and deeper even than what exists between Tel Aviv and Washington during the U.S. presidential race.

While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “locked into an increasingly fraught conflict” with the U.S. as well as Britain, France and Germany over a potential and unilateral military strike by the Jewish state on Iranian’s nuclear facilities, the Harper government seems to be tilting in the opposite direction, says Whitaker.

In closing its Tehran posting on Sep. 7 and expelling Iranian diplomats at this sensitive movement, the Harper government was demonstrating a subtle bias against the current administration in Washington during a tight race in the U.S. between the Democratic incumbent U.S. President Barack Obama and the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, says Whitaker.

“Tossing the Iran decision into the hopper at this point might be seen by the prime minister`s office as a small contribution to the campaign,” he said.

Also upsetting Ottawa – closely tied to the oil and energy sector – was the Obama administration’s decision earlier this year to delay the construction of the Keystone pipeline ferrying the thick bitumen-based petroleum from the Alberta tar sands through the central U.S., Whitaker added.

Meanwhile, John Measor predicts that Ottawa`s action on Iran will only hurt Canada in its relationship with the U.S.

“Such escalation in opposition to publicly espoused U.S. policy (is) the kind of thing that puts U.S. military and diplomatic personal at increased risk (and) most tend to not react kindly to such a cavalier attitude to their personal safety, not to mention Canadian personnel,” said the Halifax professor.

Offering a broader context, Thomas Woodley, president of the Montreal-based Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, argues that Canada under both the previous Liberal and current Conservative governments has abandoned a decades’old “honest broker” status in the Middle East.

“Over the last few years Canada has increasingly gone to bat for the Israeli government. Canada’s votes at the U.N. and its diplomatic pronouncements increasingly have a ‘Made in Israel’ feel. Be it silence on Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza in 2008-09, silence on Israel’s 2010 attack on the Gaza Aid Flotilla, opposition to Palestine’s bid for U.N. membership, or other issues,” Woodley told IPS.

Furthermore, Woodley says that Canada is “implicitly” encouraging Israel and other countries to be “belligerent towards Iran” and thus encouraging Iran’s authoritarian leaders to call on Iranians to set aside their reform demands and “rally round the flag” in the face of an external threat.

“Canada’s move is also undermining the efforts of Israeli moderates, opposition politicians and even prominent Israeli military and intelligence figures to discourage Netanyahu from initiating a first strike against Iran,” Woodley said.

Carl Meyer, a reporter for the Ottawa-based Embassy Magazine, revealed from the confidential briefing notes of John Baird that the Canadian foreign affairs minister was, during a visit to Israel in January, briefed at length on the Iran “threat” by half a dozen top Israeli officials, including the head of Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad, Tamir Pardo, and Israeli PM Netanyahu himself.

Meyer reported that Baird was “prepped” with a list of “key messages” such as how “Canada strongly supports Israel’s right to defend itself and live in peace with its neighbours, within secure boundaries,” and “Canada is profoundly concerned by the threat Iran poses to regional and global security.”

Toronto's Bay Street represents the epicentre of the Canadian finance industry. Credit: Michael Swan/CC BY 2.0

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, May 30 2012 (IPS)

Potential storms are on the horizon for much praised, regulated and privately-owned Canadian banks which survived the 2008 financial meltdown unscathed, unlike some of their larger counterparts in the United States.

During the crisis, Canada was given the thumbs up for having the soundest banking system in a survey of corporate executives by the World Economic Forum.

Nevertheless, the interrelated nature of the international banking system makes Canadian banks, valued at 6.3 trillion dollars in total, still vulnerable, says David MacDonald, a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in Ottawa.

“The Canadian banks aren’t exposed directly to the European sovereign debt crisis. (But) the effect that they would feel would be (serious) if other banks they did business with suddenly went under or if confidence in the wholesale banking markets suffered, then it would be harder for Canadian banks to get liquidity,” MacDonald told IPS.

Here, Canada’s central bank, the Bank of Canada, along with other federal government agencies would assuredly intervene with a second “backstop/bailout” programme, he said.

Some controversy developed when MacDonald applied the word “bailout” in his recent report to show how the Canadian government between 2008 and 2010 relieved domestic banks of more than 100 billion dollars in unmarketable mortgage securities to maintain liquidity.

That three of Canada’s major banks – CIBC, BMO and Scotiabank – received financial support greater than they were worth at the time “is concerning frankly”, MacDonald told IPS.

His comments countered the accepted wisdom in Ottawa and the financial community that more profligate and shaky U.S. banks were “bailed out” by Washington for investing in overvalued securities containing subprime mortgages, while the better managed Canadian banks were rewarded with a mere “backstop” from their own government.

“There is a concern that you are creating a story that doesn’t exist,” one interviewer, Anna Maria Tremonti, pointedly asked MacDonald on a national CBC radio morning news programme, The Current.

University of Toronto finance professor Laurence Booth described the Canadian bank bailout story from MacDonald as pure “conspiracy” thinking.

In an interview with IPS, Booth defended the assistance provided by the Bank of Canada and Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, as well as the U.S. Federal Reserve, which also provided bailouts to non-U.S. financial institutions operating in the United States during the 2008 financial crisis.

“The banks have the right to borrow under the standing liquidity facility and/or the emergency liquidity facility from the Bank of Canada. This provides purchase and resale agreement (PRA) financing with securities determined as eligible by the Bank of Canada,” Booth said.

Nevertheless, Canadian investors also got burned buying securities containing toxic U.S. mortgages from Canadian financial institutions.

Canadians are living with legacy of national governments in North America and Europe that allowed banks to purchase brokerage houses and engage in high-risk gambling on the stock market, says Jim Stanford, an economist with the Canadian Auto Workers trade union. In Canada, for instance, the rules were loosened to allow this in the early 1990s, he noted.

Domestic banks which primarily lent credit to customers in return for interest suddenly went wild with aggressive selling to investors and the rewarding of inflated compensation payments in the millions to their CEOs, Stanford told IPS.

“You also just had a shift where the money made on those speculative casinos was so enormous. That is where banks put their smartest and bright people and more and more of their attention,” he said.

The darker aspects of the Canadian stock market are discussed in a provocative new book, “Thieves of Bay Street: How Banks, Brokerages and the Wealthy Steal Billions from Canadians.”

Toronto’s Bay Street represents the epicentre of the Canadian finance industry.

The author, award-winning investigative journalist Bruce Livesey, describes in detail the scamming of large sums of money, often retirement savings from vulnerable older Canadians, through the unscrupulous selling of stock in overvalued shady enterprises that eventually go bust and leave the unsophisticated investors out of pocket.

He says that fewer than 20 Canadians have gone to jail for securities fraud even though in 2010 alone nearly 15 billion dollars worth of losses stemming from securities fraud were pursued in lawsuits in Canada.

“The legal, political, financial and business establishment in places like Toronto all work together in the same tightly knit circles. They live in the same neighbourhoods. They do not want to regulate each other. They don’t want to put their friends in jail,” Livesey told IPS.

“Most (provincial Canadian) securities commissions don’t have a serious investigation branch. They have dual roles, which is to facilitate investment in Canada and secondly to protect investors,” according L.S. (Al) Rosen, a Toronto-based forensic accountant, academic and author of “Swindlers: Cons and Cheats and How to Protect Your Investments From Them”.

Unknown is the extent of Canadian bank exposure to risky investment instruments, particularly derivatives, Rosen told IPS.

“Canadian banks are exposed, but by how much is hard to say,” he said. “Canadian laws allow banks to hide information.

“The point is if you are the average crook, and look at where you can work a scam, then Canada is perfect because it is an easy prey,” Rosen adds.

Economist Jim Stanford, who writes a regular newspaper column and is an author of a book on the stock market, worries more about Canadian banks over lending in so-called hot commodities and causing damage to the “real economy”, where the majority of the population participates and is employed.

“I think we absolutely will have another (world) financial crisis. The question is where and when and what the particular sparks will be. It could be speculation in Apple shares, it could be rare earth shares. It could be an oil meltdown (if the oil price falls significantly from the present level),” he said.

“The dynamics of the crisis is that you start with something that moves positively, the speculators jump on board, they pump it more than it is worth and eventually it busts,” added Stanford.

But the “conservative” nature of Canadian bankers will ultimately discourage that kind of risky investment behaviour witnessed in financial sectors elsewhere, counters Professor Laurence Booth. He cites, for instance the “primitive development of credit default swaps in Canada”.

Canada’s five largest banks in 2011 generated about 22.4 billion dollars, up 15 percent from the previous year, and employ about 300,000 workers at home and abroad.

The image of United Nations peacekeeping operations has become seriously tarnished in recent years, say some independent experts who monitor the U.N. missions around the world.

Members of the Brazilian peacekeeping contingent in Haiti at a ceremony to hand over responsibilities to the new U.N. Force Commander. Credit: UN Photo/Marco Dormino

The latest example is the persistent report that its soldiers introduced a deadly cholera epidemic to a ravaged Haiti following the 2010 earthquake. Peacekeepers there have also been accused of sexually assaulting a young Haitian man in an incident which was recorded on a cellphone video.

Taking a close look in a new book at the 100,000 or more soldiers serving under U.N. auspices, a past advisor to the United Nations, Walter Dorn, says there is substantial room for improvement.

He concedes that the high-profile United Nations military missions in both Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo represent “mixed successes”.

A Canadian professor who teaches a course on peace missions at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto, Dorn is the author of “Keeping Watch: Monitoring, Technology & Innovation in UN Peace Operations.”

Dorn intends with his new book to make U.N. peacekeeping operations “more effective”, in terms of offering security for civilian populations facing warring factions or humanitarian disasters in a country like the Congo.

For instance, the modestly sized U.N. force of 22,000 uniformed personnel in the DRC “has been a very important stabilising force”, Dorn says.

But he adds the U.N. soldiers’ failure to a stop a 2008 massacre of at least 150 civilians in the eastern Congo village of Kiwanja despite the presence of peacekeepers a kilometre away stems from a still existing failure by the contributors of United Nations soldiers to take full advantage of affordable surveillance and communication technology for ground operations.

“In many of the developing countries where the majority of peacekeepers are today, they don’t have a familiarity with the technology,” Dorn adds.

A Canadian military historian at the Royal Military College in Canada in the city of Kingston, Ontario, counters that U.N. military missions are really counterinsurgency operations.

“In the Congo, the U.N. is not exactly neutral, going after militias on behalf of the government,” says Sean Maloney, a professor at the Royal Military College in Kingston Ontario.

What occurs today under U.N. auspices has nothing to do with the original concept of armed peacekeeping as an impartial force. That is keeping the peace under international agreement between warring sides as developed by a Canadian general E.L.M. Burns in the mid-1950s for the Arab-Israeli conflict, continues Maloney, the author of the 2002 book, “Canada and UN Peacekeeping – Cold War by Other Means, 1945- 1970.”

Maloney told IPS the impartial style of peacekeeping as represented by Canadians serving as U.N. soldiers and keeping armed Greek and Turkish-speaking people at bay in Cyprus in the 1970s was rendered “obsolete” starting in the 1990s.

“We are going to see more interventions. They will be more coercion- style interventions (like the NATO mission in Afghanistan where Canada had upwards of 3,000 soldiers) that will be siding with one side or another,” adds Maloney, describing himself as pro-military and “libertarian”.

Laura Seay, an assistant professor of politics at Morehouse College in the U.S. and an expert on the DRC, says a tiny U.N. mission faces an “impossible” task by operating in a country like the Congo that is the size of Western Europe but minus sufficient resources to do its job.

“They are too spread out. If there was a problem in one area, they would have to leave civilians behind vulnerable to attack,” she told IPS.

Among the litany of complaints is that the U.N. peacekeepers in the DRC who tend to come from various south Asian countries are ill- trained, ill-equipped, cannot communicate in the common language of Swahili and do not interact with the local population.

Seay confirms that the U.N.’s support of the central government in the capital Kinshasa has a downside.

“The Congolese army is a source of human rights violations. If you are supporting the army and its activities, you have a perverse affect on civilian protection,” she said.

Nevertheless, the U.N. has created “a semblance of normal life” in the strife-ridden eastern Congo and made commercial activity possible, which in turn has made the peacekeepers popular, she added.

However, the U.N.’s stabilisation mission in Haiti is quite overbearing, reports Courtney Frantz, the author of a recent report for the Council of Hemispheric Affairs in Washington.

“They have become an instrument of the U.S., France and Canada in terms of their economic interests (including privatisation in Haiti),” he said.

A little under 10,000 U.N. “blue helmets” were dispatched to Haiti in 2004 following the overthrow of the democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide under chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, where the Security Council has determined that the situation “constitutes a threat or breach of the peace”.

“There is no international threat; there is no war going on in Haiti, as there was in Iraq, Afghanistan or the Congo,” Frantz, a research associate at the COHA told IPS.

The party of the former president, Aristide, the Lavelas Party, was not permitted to participate in the recent Haitian election.

Finally, Frantz adds, the U.N. peacekeeping mission has not played a significant role in alleviating the damage caused by the earthquake in early 2010.

“The U.N. has done very little humanitarian assistance that they said they were going to do. More on preventing looting,” he said.

Walter Dorn maintains that the U.N. has delivered “law and order” in Haiti following the high-profile 2006 raid of Cite Soleil in Port-au- Prince, the capital.

But Courtney Frantz counters that the U.N. has ignored extrajudicial killings in Haiti and “perpetrated acts of violence” against local people in Cite Soleil.

Not everybody is convinced that pure peacekeeping is passé.

“The idea of Canada being a peacekeeping nation is not a bad thing for Canadians to identify with,” journalist Jamie Swift, co-author of the upcoming book, “Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety,” told IPS.

“You don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. But you cannot ignore the imperial and post-colonial (circumstances) in which peacekeeping forces have been deployed.”

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Aug 15 2011 (IPS)

Canada has flexed its military muscles, first in Afghanistan for nine years alongside NATO forces, and now in Libya in its supply of ships and combat planes for the rebel forces, but little debate has happened on the ground among Canadians themselves on this direction.

A recent summer opinion poll by Environics discovered that among priorities for Canadians, the economy or job creation factors as high as 29 percent, compared to health care at 13 percent, deficit reduction and cutting taxes tied at six percent, and defence and crime tied at a mere four percent.

“This is a consistent trend,” said Marc Zwelling, president of Vector Research and Development, a market research firm. “National defence and defence spending rank low in Canadians’ long-term priorities when your pollsters prompt respondents.”

Furthermore, 52 percent of Canadians told Environics the Conservative government should not purchase 65 expensive F-35 fighter jet aircraft, totaling at least nine billion dollars by Canadian government estimates – versus 37 percent who are in favour of a deal.

That division on the planes didn’t help the opposition Liberals, who put particular pressure on the Conservatives on the issue but ended up – for a variety of reasons, including leadership – being reduced to third party status in the May 2011 federal election. Here, the militarily hawkish Conservatives led by Stephen Harper won for the first time a majority of seats in the House of Commons.

A similar disconnect has happened in Afghanistan, with Canadians in ever larger numbers telling pollsters they oppose the involvement of their soldiers in NATO’s protracted battle against the Taliban insurgents. In one Ekos 2010 poll, it was 49 percent opposed, 36 percent in favour and 14 percent with neither position.

But Afghanistan has not translated into a major issue either, even though one party, the social democratic New Democrats – now the official opposition since May – have consistently favoured withdrawal of Canadian troops from the Central Asian country, notes defence analyst Philippe Lagassé, an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa.

Furthermore, the Canadian mainstream political parties, right and left, appear to have developed a common consensus on the necessity for increased defence expenditures, he said.

“I find that to be a very problematic notion simply because it does lead us down to situations like Afghanistan and like Libya, where all parties agree among themselves to be quiet and not say much,” Lagassé told IPS. “When everybody agrees then it is not necessarily a good thing for oversight and debate.”

Another defence analyst, Walter Dorn, an associate professor at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto, says the failure of NATO to bring the war to a conclusion in Afghanistan could result in Canada returning to participating in U.N. peacekeeping missions, in which the country has had considerable expertise since the 1950s.

“We’ve had this terrible experience in Afghanistan, 157 military personnel dead, and 20 billion dollars spent,” he told IPS.

The difficult problems of debt and finance will force the governments of the United States and European countries like Britain and France to scale back defence spending and in the process “their military adventures”, Dorn suggested.

“The pendulum will start to swing back,” he predicted. “Canada will provide the forces when needed in the circumstances, and I think the U.S. will be much less interested in being involved in wars that [former U.S. president George] Bush launched [in Iraq and Afghanistan]. The budget cuts are going to be great throughout the Western world.”

But the Conservative government in Ottawa may stick with its current two percent annual growth expenditure for defence while trimming and even cutting other federal departments and programmes, says David MacDonald, an economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in Ottawa.

Defence spending can be a mixed blessing economically, MacDonald told IPS. While the new proposed ships for Canada’s navy will be built inside Canada, such will not be the case for the F-35s once the deal with the U.S.-based manufacturer Lockheed Martin is signed in the next few years.

“The F35s cost a lot more money than the ships and they are going to be built in the U.S. So Canada does not see an economic benefit from any major job creation,” he said.

Starting in 2006 near the end of the Liberal government in Ottawa, the pro-military lobby has successfully convinced politicians of the necessity to reorient the Canadian Forces towards a greater combat role and outfitted with the best equipment for that scenario, said Lagassé.

The policy of curtailing defence expenditures in the 1990s by the previous Liberal government of Jean Chretien meant that Canada was “not being taken seriously” in the world, he said.

“The mission in Kandahar has given Canada a more prominent place in NATO and a greater degree of respect from larger allies, such as the U.S., UK, and France. In order to retain that prominent place and the favour of allied governments, successive governments have been willing to invest more in the military and take on more difficult missions,” he explained.

The military lobby has sought to rebrand Canada “as a nation forged in fire”, dating back to World War I when the country lost about 60,000 soldiers in combat, says Jamie Swift, co-author of a forthcoming book, “Warrior Nation, Rebranding Canada in a Fearful Age”.

“I don’t believe it has been entirely successful,” Swift told IPS. “The military has gone on a huge public relations campaign at our expense since 2006, Operation Connection, to increase a military presence at public gatherings and sports. To try to convince Canadians that the military must be a central institution in Canadian life and indeed that military spending should go up.”

A weak anti-war movement at home has made countering this message a challenge, adds Swift. But he remains hopeful. “If Canada got involved in a big shooting war, the peace movement might be rekindled,” he concluded.

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, May 5 2011 (IPS)

It was a highly disciplined campaign focused on the core base of Canadians, especially in greater Toronto, where a large number of citizens of recent immigrant origins helped to boost the Conservatives Monday to a comfortable parliamentary majority status of 167 seats out of a total 308.

Author Marci McDonald says the Conservatives successfully appealed to the core social values of various communities, including people of South Asian and Chinese origin who had been traditional Liberal voters.

“When Harper devised this strategy of appealing to social and religious conservatives, most people assumed he was going after the white evangelical Conservative Christian that [also] made up the Republican Party in the U.S.,” she told IPS.

“But what he understood was that Canada was a different country. If he crafted social and religious policies, they would appeal across faith and ethnic lines,” said McDonald, who just released the paperback version of her book “The Armageddon Factor: the Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada.”

The Conservatives were able to take advantage of local electoral contests for future members of Parliaments in Canada which are decided on a matter of a few hundred or thousand votes.

Newspaper columnist Tom Walkom says it was vote-splitting among the two main opposition parties with similar centre-left platforms, Liberals and New Democrats, that allowed Conservatives to win 18 of the 24 seats in the greater Toronto area – which Stephen Harper needed to gain a more secure positioning in power after a shaky period of minority government rule under his belt following the 2006 federal election.

The normally second-place Liberal party had dominated politics in Canada’s largest city, where generations of waves of immigrants settled in the past 60 years. What was once the leading political party in Canada has found itself relegated to a rump of 34 elected members the House of Commons.

Simultaneously, the smaller and more leftist NDP made sufficient gains under its popular leader Jack Layton across Canada, particularly in French-speaking Quebec, to permit him and his party to vault over into main opposition status with 102 seats

“Harper owes his majority to the voters of the GTA [greater Toronto area],” said Walkom, pointing to how the Conservatives lost seats in both Quebec and British Columbia.

“The second notable fact is that most of these GTA gains resulted from vote splitting between Liberals and New Democrats – vote splitting that, ironically, was fuelled by a last minute surge of support toward Jack Layton’s NDP,” he noted.

Walkom says the Conservatives will continue to win national elections with as little as 40 percent of the vote even as the other 60 percent of Canadians throw their weight behind more than one progressive political party. He suggests the Liberals and NDP will have to consider merging despite their rivalry and historical differences.

“Eventually, both parties will be forced to face the mathematics of the situation. Each wants to be the one to defeat the Harper Conservatives. Neither can do it alone,” he wrote in his Toronto Star column.

But Reg Whitaker, a professor emeritus at the University of Victoria, told IPS he expects that Stephen Harper will attempt to satisfy his base.

“It is also quite possible that he may decide to throw some raw meat to his redneck social conservative base – even where he promised to lay off, such as abortion rights,” Whitaker said. “They may think he owes them, and if he agrees, best to get it through quickly, with four years of untrammeled power ahead of him rather than later in the game.”

During the election, one Conservative MP, Brad Trost, who was running for re-election in Saskatoon-Humbolt riding in Saskatchewan, had boasted that his petitioning had resulted in the Harper government’s decision to refuse a 18-million-dollar funding request from the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

Later in a press conference, Harper stressed that the current situation, where women can receive free abortions under Canada’s public health care system, will remain in place.

“I’ve been clear as party leader, I think I’ve been clear as prime minister and I think our government has been clear notwithstanding the people who may feel differently. As long as I’m prime minister we are not opening the abortion debate,” Harper said to reporters.

While Harper has stayed away from the hot-button issues of abortion and gay marriage, notes McDonald, the prime minister quietly announced a number of measures including a recent election promise of an income splitting scheme which primarily benefits families where one parent is a breadwinner at work and the other parent stays at home with the children.

Another perspective comes from Christopher Waddell, director of the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University and a former journalist.

He says that in the last days of the election campaign, the Conservatives also made gains in Ontario from fiscal conservatives/social liberals in some greater Toronto ridings.

“That boosted the Conservative share of the vote in the province to 44.4 percent from 39.2 percent in 2008 and meant Liberal MPs such as Martha Hall Findlay in Willowdale and Glen Pearson in London North Centre among others lost to Conservatives,” he stated in his Political Perspective blog.

Pleasing both constituencies in an expanded Conservative base will be a challenge, Waddell says.

Excerpt:

The just-announced Canada-U.S. security perimetre discussions are comprehensive and potentially wide-ranging and could impact Canadian sovereignty. However, the domestic opposition appears to have been caught off-guard.

It is hard to fight a deal when Ottawa and Washington are offering few details, said Vancouver-based international lawyer, author and commentator Michael Byers in a recent interview with IPS.

“The people who are opposed to this are left pointing at shadows rather than anything concrete,” he noted.

Both Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and U.S. President Barack Obama were vague in January about what a Canada-U.S. security perimetre would entail in a predicted deal later this year.

Canadian media reports indicate that the negotiators’ high priority includes a formal sharing of intelligence, law enforcement, and migration data by Canada and the U.S. in exchange for greater movement of goods, people and services across the border between the two countries.

“My view is that in each case we have improved our relative situation. Is it the optimum? No. The day is long, there are always new little barriers coming up,” Robertson told IPS. “We will never give [the U.S.] exactly what they want. We couldn’t do that from a sovereignty perspective and it wouldn’t be practical.”

Robertson predicts that in any deal, Canada will conform its copyright legislation to the U.S. model in exchange for greater export of Alberta tar sands oil (that is bitumen, or “dirty oil” in the minds of its many critics) to the U.S. market via a pipeline – yet to be approved – heading south towards the Gulf of Mexico coast for refining.

Meanwhile, one contentious aspect of a security perimetre could involve the merging of Canadian personal information into North American databases that are accessible to U.S. security and law enforcement

Already, legislation is going through the Canadian Parliament that would oblige Canadian air carriers regularly crossing U.S. territory to get from one part of Canada to another, for the shortest route possible, to make their passenger data available to U.S. authorities.

At a recent Ottawa conference, Michael Wilson, a former Canadian ambassador to Washington and the ex-finance minister in the 1980s Conservative government that negotiated the first Canada-U.S. free trade agreement, was forthright on this point.

“This border agreement does raise some very significant issues on sovereignty, on privacy, on the form of collaboration between both sides. Sharing of information is very important to being able to make this agreement work,” he told reporters.

A second speaker, Michael Hayden, a former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, indicated that a thinner Canada-U.S. border means a common North American approach to security.

“I understand that these are national decisions on both sides of the line. And we’re each free to take the decisions we feel appropriate,” said Hayden, CIA director from 2006 to 2009.

“You just need to understand that if your decisions are markedly different than ours, it affects our view as to how thick the border should be,” he said.

Another observer, Scott Sinclair asserts that business has been given “privileged access” to the secret discussions surrounding the harmonising of U.S. and Canada regulatory standards with regards to products and services.

“The security perimetre deal, as I understand it, is not about harmonising to the highest regulatory standards. Its goal is to reduce the regulatory burden on cross-border business. Combining pressure from corporations to cut regulations with a secret decision-making process is a sure- fire recipe for eroding regulation and moving to the lowest common denominator,” said Sinclair, senior trade policy researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

This is a continuation of a recent trend within Canada towards government deregulation, the CCPA recently reported, in a host of areas including butcher shops, restaurants, water fil¬tration plants, freeways, elevators, rides at the fair, food labels, prescription and natural drug approvals, air travel, toys, and baby gear.

Meanwhile, Michael Byers says the lack of transparency in the Canada-U.S. negotiations represents a deliberate strategy to undermine the ability of anti-free trade and critics of globalisation to marshal effective public campaigns against their latest effort.

“The two governments have concerns that opposition to negotiations will mount if people know what’s being discussed, and so this is an end run around democracy. And it is particularly ironic that it is occurring now as Canadians and Americans are celebrating revolution in North Africa and the Middle East,” he noted.

One potential scenario, adds Byers, is that the ruling Conservatives will sign a deal following a predicted win in a spring federal election – during which the Canadian electorate will hear very little of what has transpired in the negotiations with Washington.

On the other hand, previous efforts at a cross-border deal have flopped, says Steven Staples, president of the Rideau Institute. “We have seen this before. It has not worked out.”

He notes that Washington under President George W. Bush walked away from a proposed easing of restrictions on truck traffic at busy border crossings because of an Ottawa- Washington disagreement over fingerprinting citizens.

This time around, energy politics and specifically the desire for increased sales of tar sands oil are increasingly driving Canadian policy towards border trade within North America, says Sinclair.

“[Ottawa] will be looking for commitments such as expedited regulatory approval processes for pipelines and assurances that Canadian tar sands oil will not be disadvantaged by state or federal environmental protection measures regulating the carbon content of fuels.”

Byers charges that the Harper government will do anything to get around opposition in the U.S. toward the importing of Canadian bitumen, including surrendering unique Canadian policies in immigration, refugees, copyright and human rights.

“The Harper government is beginning to realise that there is a serious question as to whether the United States or Europe will actually want to buy our bitumen in the future and it is fighting really hard to keep that access open,” he added.

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Dec 22 2010 (IPS)

Six months after the chaos surrounding security and policing at June’s G20 leaders’ summit in Toronto, there is little agreement about where the buck should stop.

More than 1,000 people were arrested and temporarily detained. Close to 100 are facing criminal charges, and fewer than 10 remain in jail.

An estimated 20,000 officers from police forces across Canada faced off with perhaps 25,000 labour-led peaceful marchers on Jun. 26. The latter were carrying signs critical of the actions of the world leaders meeting in Toronto and representing different perspectives.

On Tuesday, the first Toronto police officer was charged with assaulting a protester following the march.

The prominent Toronto Star newspaper is now echoing calls by leading human rights groups like Amnesty International for a public inquiry. But the Conservative government in Ottawa has been steadfast in opposing any investigation since the summer.

Former Toronto Mayor John Swell, the author of two books on policing, says the current closed-door investigations will fail to dispel the uncertainty surrounding decisions made by the Integrated Security Unit (ISU), which coordinated federal, provincial and municipal officers. He notes that these inquiries lack the power to subpoena key players and cross-examine them under oath.

“We obviously have great troubles trying to find what’s happened on the police side of things,” he told IPS. “It looks as though the police were just let loose – nobody was in control of them. It would be nice to talk to some of the police supervisors, [to ask] do you know what [your officers] were doing?”

Critics say the Toronto police took take advantage of obscure provincial legislation to suspend civil liberties in the city during the summit.

“Ordinary citizens were shocked to discover that police had the power to detain and search even people who did not try to breach the fence or who declined to produce ID and tried to walk away,” said Andre Marin, the Ontario government ombudsman, or watchdog, in a recent report.

He told reporters that the Ontario provincial government quietly passed an order in council which gave Toronto police greater latitude to arrest, search and detain people under an obscure 71-year-old wartime Public Works Protection Act during the last weekend of June.

However, these extraordinary measures to “protect public works” were limited legally to the small fenced-off area in downtown Toronto where the world leaders, including Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and U.S. President Barack Obama, were meeting.

Marin described as “opportunistic and inappropriate” the decision by the Toronto police to exercise these powers beyond the security perimetre in the city’s downtown area.

Meanwhile, Toronto Police Chief William Blair has refused to resign in the face of calls from a few columnists. He has defended his position not to cooperate with Marin’s investigation in interviews with reporters.

“I’m responsible for the conduct and discipline of police officers and I’m doing my job. My job is to ensure we conduct appropriate investigations, that we cooperate with all of those properly constituted independent bodies that are tasked with conducting their investigations,” Blair said.

“I think it can be demonstrated that I am willing to hold my people accountable where there’s evidence of misconduct,” he added.

Don Davies, a New Democratic member of Parliament, says that while Blair “committed errors”, he should not be “the fall guy” for what happened at the G20 summit.

“The federal government is trying to escape any responsibility,” he told IPS. “They were responsible for the event. They paid for the [$1 billion security]. So they should accept responsibility.”

At recent parliamentary hearings, it was difficult to determine clear chains of command and levels of accountability for G20 security in the ISU, he told IPS. Davies and fellow MPs lacked subpoena power to force officials to testify under oath.

“The federal government is saying, ‘We didn’t make any decision, it was the Toronto police’. And the Toronto police is saying, ‘We weren’t making any decisions, it was the Integrated Security Unit’. And the ISU is saying, ‘It wasn’t us. It was the minister [of public safety]’. The minister is saying, ‘We were taking advice from the RCMP’. So it is a circular application.”

One University of Windsor criminologist doubts that even a public inquiry would be allowed to explore the Toronto police’s decision to focus on the peaceful protesters rather than confront the Black Bloc vandals on the G20 weekend.

Professor John Deukmedjian predicts that national security considerations will trump any effort to examine the role of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service or other government security agencies in the infiltration of the groups intent on committing vandalism downtown during the G20.

“We know that counterintelligence tactics are central to infiltrating groups and we know various groups were infiltrated,” he told IPS. “A good question then becomes to what if any extent did agents promote certain forms of illegal activity and for what ends – maintain a cover, to raise levels of fear among police or public?”

University of Toronto professor Nelson Wiseman, who teaches Canadian government and politics, doubts that any government, federal or provincial, will respond favourably to calls for a public inquiry.

“It would cost many millions of dollars because there are so many parties [in Canada] that could claim to be a party to this,” he told IPS. “The result of a public inquiry, especially in this matter, would probably take three years to get the report. Maybe two, at best.”

By that time, at least three more G20 summits will have taken place, he said, adding, “I am not sure much more will come out [from a lengthy public inquiry].”

Deukmedjian, who has advised the RCMP in the past, contends there has been a similar security ramp-up for all of the G20 summits. He suggests they started before 9/11 and are roughly parallel with the growth in globalisation and marketisation of the world economies of the last few decades.

Deukmedjian describes the policing strategy in Toronto and other host cities as military in approach, with the emphasis on “containing, pre-empting, disrupting, infiltrating and in extreme cases exterminating an enemy.”

“The G20 reflects to me a shift away from a more disciplined approach to demonstrations decades ago, where the police were there to basically facilitate a protest or march,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Nov 8 2010 (IPS)

The corporate clout of the mining industry trumped political ideology in Canada when members of all political parties helped to narrowly defeat a bill late last month that would have imposed standards on Canadian mining companies operating in developing countries.

“We had an opportunity and we blew it,” said the bill’s architect, John McKay. He faced 13 no-shows from colleagues in his own party, the Liberals, the largest of the opposition parties in the House of Commons. In the end, the Oct. 27 vote resulted in 140 against to 134 in favour.

“Both domestically and internationally, there is a huge amount of disappointment in the Parliament of Canada,” McKay told Canadian reporters.

The opposition from the ruling free market-oriented Conservative minority government was not surprising. What caught the eye of some observers was the number of centrist and centre-left politicians – a total of 22 – who stayed away from the vote or voted against the bill.

Michael Ignatieff, the leader of the centrist Liberals, the largest of the opposition parties, did not show up for the vote. While he failed to explain his decision publicly, another senior Liberal MP, Martha Hall Findlay, complained about the lack of a financial mechanism to back up the mining reform bill. “C-300 was seriously flawed,” she told the Ottawa-based Embassy Magazine.

At the heart of C300 was a provision that government assistance would be withdrawn from Canadian companies that failed to adhere to certain standards of behaviour.

Canadians are involved in three-quarters of the mining operations outside Canada, according to the Toronto-based Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC).

Canadian companies make up a third of the 171 mining and exploration companies where there have been reports of conflicts with local communities in developing countries, environmental degradation and unethical behaviour, stated a fall 2009 independent report commissioned by the PDAC and leaked to the media.

Community conflict included “significant negative cultural and economic disruption to a host community, as well as significant protests and physical violence,” the report said.

Typically, “the hot spots” where Canadian companies figure prominently involve gold, copper and coal operations in countries such as India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Latin America provided the largest number of complaints in terms of region.

“You can literally do a world tour on issues involving Canadian mining companies which do not reflect well not only on the industry but what I worry about as much as anything, our own country [Canada],” McKay told IPS.

However, Dennis Jones, chair of corporate responsibility panel for PDAC, downplayed the leaked report.

“We recognise that we need to improve [corporate social responsibility] performance in the industry and that is what we are trying to. What we don’t agree with the NGOs is the extent to which Canadian mining companies are involved, in these incidents,” he said.

Jones also told IPS that the bill’s provisions, in which foreign complaints would be lodged in Ottawa during a time- consuming quasi-judicial process, would be detrimental to the reputation of both the firm targeted and the Canadian industry as a whole.

But Catherine Coumans, research coordinator with Mining Watch Canada, countered that the Canadian mining industry is already receiving a black eye from a number of lawsuits launched against individual corporate players.

“What people need to understand is that this bill was not just about corporate accountability, it was about government accountability. It was about making sure that the Canadian government is not shoveling tax dollars to mining companies that are facing serious allegations of human rights and environmental abuses without being able to assure accountability and transparency about these operations to Canadian taxpayers,” she told IPS.

Figures on how much money is forked over to the companies by various Canadian government agencies, including the Canada Pension Plan and Canadian International Development Agency, are not publicly available, she says.

The Financial Post recently estimated that the Canadian government’s Export Development Corporation alone provides Canadian mining companies more than $20 billion in subsidised financing and political risk insurance.

Mining is a big deal in the resource-oriented Canadian economy, and the industry’s overseas activity is backed by large Canadian banks, says Yves Engler, the author of the “Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy”.

About 10 of the world’s largest mining companies are based on capital raised on the Toronto Stock Exchange, he said, adding, “There is no other example of an economic sector where Canada is dominant.”

The result is a great deal of influence in Canadian politics. Engler cited the example of how the Canadian government successfully lobbied the support of G20 countries in an official statement at the Toronto summit this summer to apply the lever of debt relief to pressure the Democratic Republic of Congo – saddled with enormous debts incurred by the notorious dictator Joseph Desire Mobutu. The DRC had drawn Ottawa’s ire for withdrawing a controversial 1997 mining concession granted to a Vancouver mining company during a vicious civil war, he told IPS.

“The fact that [this company] was able to get the Conservative government to help them [shows] that the Canadian mining industry has immense influence,” Engler said.

Both the mining and the business community ramped up their opposition in the days leading up to the vote on John McKay’s mining reform.

“If passed, Bill C-300 will undermine the competitive position of Canadian companies. It could cause an exodus of mining companies from Canada,” Michael Bourassa, a partner and co-coordinator of the global mining group in the law firm of Fasken, Martineau, DuMoulin, warned in the Financial Post.

Catherine Coumans says what might have rattled Canadian politicians was the mining lobbyists’ new emphasis on the potential impact of the bill’s passage on the domestic operations of Canadian mining industry.

“The mining industry likely felt they weren’t getting enough traction with their campaign, arguing that they would be less competitive abroad if they had to live up to international environmental and human rights standards. So, they started to target members of parliament in Canada in ridings with mining constituencies in Canada and argued that the bill is going to kill mining jobs in Canada,” she told IPS.

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Oct 30 2010 (IPS)

The world is ill-prepared for the human toll from the expected increase in floods, droughts and extreme storms and hurricanes on the horizon.

Pakistanis affected by their country's widespread, torrential floods receive wheat flour and other provisions from the UN World Food Programme. Credit: UN Photo/WFP/Amjad Jamal

So say experts like Peter Walker, director of the Tufts University-based Feinstein International Center near Boston. In late 2008, his organisation authored a report titled “Humanitarian Costs of Climate Change” for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

“We may be keeping people alive, we may be helping people to survive,” Walker told IPS. “But we are not doing it in a way that helps people recover and be able to face the next crisis.”

Walker advocates moving away from the current ad hoc nature of international humanitarian relief efforts.

“We are getting to the point where these crises are sufficiently frequent and large that you need to shift to having a much more formal international system that allows pre-disaster assistance and relief [to be] deployed more quickly,” he said.

Walker said that his comments would apply to all natural disasters whether or not they are caused by climate change, including earthquakes and tsunamis.

The other complicating factor in countries receiving humanitarian relief such as Pakistan and Haiti is that recovery remains difficult and long term in the face of lack of resources, basic infrastructure, government services, and economic equality in the population, he said.

Although the people of Aceh province in Indonesia managed to recover from the tsunami of 2004, individual family savings ended up getting spent in the process of survival, he added.

“Five or six years after the tsunami, if there is another hit, people will not be in a good situation to recover as they were last time,” Walker said.

Robert Fox, executive director of Oxfam Canada, told IPS that there is greater recognition among aid agencies and nongovernmental organisations of the need “to increase our capacity” in humanitarian crises, as well as to “be more strategic”.

With millions of rural people displaced and in internal refugee camps following the floods in Pakistan, relief workers were in short supply even with a strong aid agency presence on the ground, he observed. “We can do more than one crisis at a time, but more than one mega crisis at a time is a stretch,” Fox said.

One controversial aspect in relief is the increased role of foreign militaries. U.S. and Canadian soldiers arrived in Haiti to deliver supplies, beef up communications and rebuild infrastructure. In addition, U.S. military helicopters were used for rescue and delivery of supplies to Pakistan’s flooded areas in the Indus River basin.

Fox is opposed to aid agencies working closely with the U.S. military – which is viewed with great suspicion and resentment, for instance, in Pakistan in light of the U.S. military’s role in that country, including its drone attacks against suspected Islamist forces.

“When the military do things, they do it in a very expensive way,” he said. “They often do it in a slow way because of the level of preparedness and scale which they do it. And this isn’t their core competency. They are not very sensitive to local leadership, local ways of doing things.”

Fox cited the example following the Haiti earthquake of the U.S. military’s initial monopolisation of the Port-Au-Prince airport which served as a temporary hub for incoming airborne humanitarian relief. “A number of agencies [including Doctors without Borders] found it hard to get things through,” he noted.

Nevertheless, the world’s major militaries remain the best source for the combination of helicopters, lift vehicles and engineering capability needed to sort out the disruption and chaos following future natural disasters, says Michael Byers, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia.

The biggest obstacle is the military itself, especially in Canada, where defence planners are not jumping at the expanded opportunities in humanitarian relief, even with their soldiers’ battle weariness in war-torn Afghanistan, he told IPS.

“It is a question of changing the mindset of the Canadian military leadership that humanitarian missions are going to be an essential component. I think humanitarian disaster relief is going to be the primary role for the Canadian forces in the coming years, I don’t think the military leadership understands that now,” Byers said.

Martin Shadwick, a military analyst at Toronto’s York University, agrees that ambivalence exists in Canada’s military.

“There is not really a negative connotation in the military towards [disaster relief] I think they would only get concerned if they were being called upon day in and day out and were turning into disaster relief 911 [telephone emergency] service,” he said.

Shadwick warns that an insufficient supply of military equipment and services has developed in the militaries of the European Union and North America in wake of recent austerity measures.

“Compared to 10 or 20 years ago, even the Americans’ capabilities to provide disaster relief capabilities, that is military-based capabilities, has been going down, because in many ways, defence budgets have been slashed,” he said.

Also, it appears that some humanitarian crises receive more attention in terms of aid assistance than others.

Niger, Mali and sub-Saharan Africa in general are experiencing a significant food crisis following flooding and then drought. But they are receiving less attention than Haiti, for example, in terms of relief even though climate change has been a major factor, notes Robert Fox.

“Those are slow onset disasters, something we knew was coming. The challenge there is that there will be more of those. It is difficult to get the world’s attention to those crises, difficult to mobilise donor response to those crises, and yet they are huge and acute,” he said. “Hundreds of thousands of lives hang in the balance.”

Fox suggests that extreme weather events such as hurricanes receive more international media attention than a shortage of rain. “Yet, we know there are more droughts lasting and they are more widespread, and so you have challenges around [aid agency] surge capacity. Challenges as to we need to be operating in a number of different places at scale at the same time.”

The good news is that the United Nations’ role in relief is getting better in terms of dividing up responsibilities for items like food, health and refugees among different U.N. agencies, says Andrew Mack, who directs the Human Security Project at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Yet, he continued, “It is a huge problem that the U.N. has in any of these missions in trying to get everybody to work together. The old herding cats problem.”

Also, humanitarian work tends to be immediate and not long lasting. The result is that NGOs are competing with each other for new government contracts all the time, Mack told IPS.

“The moment they start on one project, they are already looking around [for another humanitarian crisis],” he said.

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Jul 16 2010 (IPS)

Canada’s parliament is so broken and dysfunctional that the country is in danger of becoming “the laughing stock” of the world.

So says Peter Russell, a University of Toronto political scientist and author, and he is not alone.

Both Stephen Harper’s minority-led Conservative government and the various opposition parties are on a continuous war footing in preparing for the next election. As a result, they are accomplishing little and turning off the Canadian public, which is voting in fewer numbers, Russell told IPS.

“The math of parliament is that no party has the majority in parliament, no party is popular [enough] with the people. And to adapt to that you have got to figure out ways on working together, to pass legislation and to get policies through and we’ve had a dysfunctional parliament mainly because of that failure of political leadership,” he said.

Russell was referring to the Canadian political conundrum where since 2004 the appearance of five competitive federal political parties in a highly regionalised nation, including the Greens and a Quebec-specific sovereignist party, the Bloc Quebecois, has made minority parliamentary governments likely inevitable for the foreseeable future.

Defenders of minority governments had hoped that more compromise would occur when none of the five parties were able to form a government out of the majority of seats in the elected House of Commons. Although sometimes in the low teens in public opinion polls, the Greens in Canada’s first- past-the-post parliamentary system have not won a seat yet.

Instead, says Reg Whittaker, a University of Victoria political scientist, a right-wing party led by Prime Minister Harper is managing to implement its agenda both through appointments and intimidation of a “weak” main Liberal opposition party which is loath to go to the polls again for another round. The country has had an election roughly every two years in recent times.

This month, for instance, the Liberals chose – to the consternation of some political observers – to support the latest Conservative budget even though it contains extraneous and controversial measures that would limit environmental assessment of projects in federal jurisdiction and privatise a Canadian government agency that manufactures nuclear reactors.

Whittaker cited a Conservative party agenda that includes the gutting of a climate change strategy and the sacking of heads of commissions and senior civil servants.

One prominent example is the decision not to renew the appointment of Peter Tinsley. The chair of the military police complaints commission, he unsuccessfully sought to hold hearings into the handing over of Afghan detainees by Canadian soldiers to certain torture at the hands of Afghan government prison authorities.

“The prime minister’s office is the control centre of the most hierarchically disciplined administration ever. Harper is a notorious control freak but the extraordinary degree of centralisation reflects a Tory need to fight a military- style campaign around every issue,” says Whittaker.

Nonetheless, the Conservatives have overreached themselves ideologically and hurt their chances of winning a majority of parliamentary seats, Whittaker told IPS.

“The Tories face a glass ceiling of somewhere around 33-35 percent, which is well below what they need for a majority, and the opposition parties just fluctuate around in futility with the Liberals in the mid-20 percent range and the NDP [New Democratic Party] in the high teens.”

In the past, the centrist Liberals have managed to win power by making comparisons between the religious right component of the Conservative party and the highly unpopular – among Canadians – U.S. administration of George W. Bush when the latter was in office.

At first Harper attempted to “moderate” his party’s image upon winning power in 2006 in a minority government by keeping his religious conservatives in line and under wraps, says Marci McDonald, author of ‘The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada’.

Religious conservatives, she recalls, were wondering if indeed they had an ally in Ottawa, since the PM was not attempting to reverse the country’s same sex marriage legislation of the previous Liberal administration or introduce anti-abortion laws.

However, following the 2008 election, Harper annoyed his fiscal conservative supporters by introducing an economic stimulus package in the face of a potential world financial downturn along with other Western governments, McDonald notes.

Hence, the PM had to turn to shoring up the religious right portion of his base by being more public about his fealty to moral issues.

Harper “has been more overt in his outreach to religious conservatives,” in such areas as a staunchly pro-Israel foreign policy and funding of private Christian universities, McDonald said.

“Some of the most far-reaching changes have been institutional. That is changing the bureaucracy and the vast power of patronage that the prime minister has at his disposal,” she said.

For instance, Harper has started to appoint more conservative judges to the courts without having to go through the review process that is a staple of the U.S. political scene, she added.

Nevertheless, Peter Russell sees some glimmer of hope, especially in the decision by at least three of the parties in Ottawa, the Conservatives, the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois to agree on a means to handle sensitive documents regarding the transfer of Afghan detainees to Afghan authorities, which Harper’s government had initially refused to share with the opposition.

Rather than seek one consistent partner in Parliament, the Conservatives will go issue by issue and pick the appropriate party that will assist in getting an agreement in the House of Commons, he says, citing a Liberal- Conservative accord on ending Canadian military involvement in Afghanistan by 2011 for instance.

“I rather doubt that Harper is ready to go [into an election right now], Russell said. “I think that most members of Parliament are of the same mood.”

Steven Staples is more pessimistic, with his conviction that the highly partisan nature of Canadian politics will not end during the current stalemate.

The Conservatives are especially canny in maintaining the loyalty of their fiscal and religious right supporters in the face of a divided opposition, Staples told IPS.

“A unified minority beats a divided majority every time. So the calculation is on any issue. The government asks itself ‘will this rally our base, or will it divide our opposition or will it help us bring incremental gains on the way to majority [in parliament after an election].'”

“So people are trying to hold their base, as doggedly as possible and that requires red meat for your base, which means a greater partisan approach,” he said.

The centrist Liberals, the main opposition party, and formerly the major governing party in Canada historically, have had the hardest time holding on to their traditional urban immigrant, working class and women supporters. Some parts of this base have dribbled over to the social democratic New Democrats or the Greens, notes Staples.

Furthermore, Marci McDonald’s warning of Harper’s coddling of a minority of evangelical Canadian Christians who see that the end of the world is at hand is a bit “late” politically, Staples told IPS. The Liberals are especially hurt by this, he continues.

“The longer that Harper is able to hang on in there [as PM], the less scary he becomes,” he explained.

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Feb 9 2010 (IPS)

Ottawa’s refusal to repatriate a former child soldier, 23-year-old Omar Khadr, back to Canada to face justice in the country of his birth opens to the door to a trial before a controversial U.S. military commission process that has been challenged for its use of evidence gleaned from interrogation after torture.

Omar Khadr Credit: Public domain

“The interrogation of a youth detained without access to counsel, to elicit statements about serious criminal charges while knowing that the youth had been subjected to sleep deprivation and while knowing that the fruits of the interrogations would be shared with the prosecutors, offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects,” the Canadian judges stated in their decision.

But the Supreme Court of Canada turned down orders from lower Canadian courts to have the Conservative government of Stephen Harper request the return of Khadr to face justice in a Canadian court system.

“Our first concern is that the remedy ordered [by the lower court] gives too little weight to the constitutional responsibility of the [Harper government] to make decisions on matters of foreign affairs in the context of complex and ever changing circumstances, taking into account Canada’s broader national interests,” Canada’s top judges wrote.

Canadian justice minister Rob Nicholson hailed the Supreme Court’s ruling, reiterating his government’s line that “Omar Khadr faces very serious charges including murder, attempted murder, conspiracy, material support for terrorism, and spying.” The minister told reporters in a statement that “the Government will carefully review the Supreme Court’s ruling and determine what further action is required.” A number of commentators have suggested that U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration might respond favourably to a Canadian request.

“There is reason to believe the United States would like to be able to repatriate him if Canada would ask, but Canada refuses to ask,” said Audrey Macklin, a law professor at the University of Toronto.

The circumstances of his capture in Afghanistan remain murky. He is accused of committing a war crime for allegedly lobbing a grenade and killing a U.S. military officer, following a shootout between U.S. forces and al Qaeda fighters in July 2002. (As a child, he had been taken to Afghanistan along with his sibling and his reportedly al Qaeda-leaning parents).

However, last fall, the Toronto Star obtained classified defence documents which indicate that “Khadr was buried face down under rubble, blinded by shrapnel and crippled, at the time the Pentagon alleges he threw a grenade that fatally wounded a U.S. soldier.” Michelle Shephard, the journalist who broke that story, told IPS that Khadr’s trial in July before a U.S. military commission will be the first held at Guantanamo Bay under Obama’s watch, despite the U.S. president’s initial pledge to close it following his election a year ago.

“I also think from a political standpoint that the Obama administration would not want to hold a trial at Guantanamo just for the optics of it,” says Shephard, the author of “Guantanamo’s Child”, a book on the Omar Khadr case.

The U.S. military commission process, set up under former president George W. Bush to deal with alleged terrorists in the post 9/11 period, has been modified under Obama but it is still being described as “an illegal” process by U.S. civil liberties organisations, Shephard said.

She noted that Khadr’s U.S. defence lawyers will attempt in a pretrial motion in April to have tainted evidence obtained during their client’s interrogation excluded from the actual trial in July.

In contrast to other terrorism cases in the U.S., more reliable pieces of evidence on Omar Khadr, especially from Afghanistan, may be available to the prosecution, including a video allegedly showing the child soldier making improvised explosive devices, Shephard added. “I presume there is a lot of intelligence out there on the Khadr family,” she said.

Meanwhile, security specialist Reg Whitaker suggested that the Canadian Supreme Court wanted to avoid a constitutional clash with Prime Minister Harper. The latter is keen to have Khadr stay in the U.S. to satisfy “his core conservative constituency,” he explained.

Whitaker echoed other commentators who interpret the top judges’ decision as a plea for Ottawa to set the stage for the amelioration of Khadr’s situation, but without any specifics laid out in terms of appropriate action or a timeline.

“The implication is if the Canadian government does not come up with any effective remedy for the violation of Khadr’s rights, that it might then be incumbent upon the courts to then impose a remedy, to say ‘you failed to respond to our exhortations in this matter, then we will then have to take the next step,'” said Whitaker, a political scientist and professor emeritus at York University.

University of Ottawa law professor and human rights specialist Errol Mendes added that the court decision indicates that the judges did not order Ottawa to seek Khadr’s return to Canada because the ex-child soldier’s lawyers failed to demonstrate evidence of negotiations with the U.S. administration on Khadr’s legal status.

“The Supreme Court was basically restrained from agreeing with the lower courts,” Mendes told IPS. “I was blown over by the fact that Khadr’s lawyers are saying this is the end of the line for them [in the Canadian courts].”

But one of Khadr’s Canadian lawyers, Nathan Whitling, counters that the ambiguity of the Supreme Court decision leaves open the option for the Canadian government to essentially “do nothing” despite the illegal aspects of Khadr’s incarceration.

“I suppose in theory I could start a whole new claim to review [the Canadian government’s] decision to do nothing, but the Supreme Court has not said [Ottawa] cannot do nothing, right. There is nothing inherently wrong [from the judges’ point of view] with doing nothing,” he told IPS.

“We hope the Canadian government will do the right thing but we don’t think they will. And there is nothing obliging them to do any particular thing,” Whitling added.

The Supreme Court has essentially told the Canadian government that it has broken the law with regards to Omar Khadr, and that illegality is continuing, said University of Toronto law professor Audrey Macklin.

“Now, if the government decides that the law is just an obstacle that stands between it and the exercise of its power, to do what it wants to do, then it will say, ‘hey, no court is twisting our arm, so we are free to do or not whatever we want,'” she explained.

Macklin told IPS she is not surprised by the Supreme Court of Canada’s “extreme caution in any matters concerning national security [after] 9/11.”

Canadian agents ignored their country’s signature on international protocols which stipulate that child soldiers must be accorded separate, less severe treatment from that given adult combatants, said Reg Whitaker, noting that Khadr was 15 when he was captured and was still a teenager while under interrogation.

The security specialist says the Canadian government appears to be downplaying the whole notion of a child soldier in international law.

“Indeed, they have ordered the department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade to stop using the term ‘child soldier’ in any departmental communications. It’s now a banned term in [Canadian Conservative party] discourse. The denial is logically and legally unsustainable, but they are unlikely to own up to this in public,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Dec 30 2009 (IPS)

Restrictions on art displays and signage critical of the upcoming February 2010 Winter Olympics and the creation of a massive high-tech security network are putting a damper in some residents’ minds on what should be a celebratory sports extravaganza in Vancouver.

A group of Canadian academics issued a statement last month expressing concern that “a climate of fear, heightened security and surveillance” surrounds the upcoming event.

A spokesperson for Vancouver’s Integrated Security Unit (ISU), made up of local city police and the federal police force, defended the security blanket that is enveloping the upcoming Winter Olympics.

“V2010 ISU is committed to and will continue to uphold and respect individuals’ charter rights in accordance with Canadian law, all the while ensuring safe and secure Winter Games for Canadians and visitors to Canada,” ISU’s Sgt. Mike Cote told local media over the summer.

But critics should not be solely directing their ire at the Vancouver Organising Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympics Winter Games (VANOC), which is made up of representation of all three levels of government, said Helen Lenskyj, a professor emeritus in sociology at the University of Toronto.

Their authoritarian aspects originate with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) which imposes a series of strict conditions on the cities, including Vancouver, that have won the highly prized bid to host the Olympics, she told IPS.

The author of three books on what she calls “the Olympics industry”, Lenskyj said the IOC’s charter specifically demands that the host city prohibit political demonstrations or assembly in or near the Olympic venues.

She was referring to section 51 of the latest version of the IOC charter, which stipulates that “no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas”.

In addition, the IOC’s contract with the current host city Vancouver includes a provision that “no propaganda or advertising is placed within the Olympic venues or outside the Olympic venues in such a manner so as to be within the view of the television cameras covering the sports at the Games or of the spectators watching the sports at the Games”.

“The IOC calls the shots and if that contravenes the human rights provisions of a country, so be it because a country forfeits the right to challenge the human rights legislation,” Lenskyj warned.

Also adversely affected are a group of young Canadian female ski jumpers who have been unsuccessful in eliminating the IOC’s ban on women’s participation in the official Olympic ski jumping competition.

In a series of “head-scratching decisions”, Canadian courts have told the women that the equality provisions in the constitutionally entrenched Charter of Rights do not apply to VANOC, said Micheal Vonn, policy director for the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association.

“VANOC is running a sports event that is deeply embedded within the governments of the city Vancouver, the government of British Columbia and the government of Canada,” she told IPS. “So, the charter should apply. Unfortunately, because VANOC is governed by the IOC, even though the charter applies, it can’t be enforced.”

She described VANOC as a highly secretive body that does not make the minutes of its meetings with government officials publicly available, and is exempt from freedom of information laws.

One bright spot, Vonn added, is that Canadian courts have overturned a law that gave the host municipalities the power to enter residences and other private property to seize signs deemed “anti-Olympic”, and allowed for fines of up to 10,000 dollars and imprisonment for up to six months for violations.

“The city caved and amended its bylaws,” she said.

On the other hand, concerns abound that Vancouver may be following in the footsteps of other Olympic host cities in purging the downtown where the Games’ venues are situated of poor people and the homeless.

Vancouver’s measures include a security zone and the passage of a law by the province of British Columbia that allows local police to force homeless people into shelters during extreme winter weather, Vonn stated.

“The idea here is if you have the ability to essentially take people off the streets, you assuredly have another tool in the tool kit to remove unsightly people,” she said.

But it is the application of military-style security technology in recent mega sporting events such as the Vancouver winter Olympics, where the budget is approaching a billion dollars – a sharp rise from the initial estimates of a little under 200 million – that is drawing considerable scrutiny in some quarters.

A raft of security measures are being implemented at the upcoming winter Olympics “to make people, places and processes visible in new ways using diverse tactics and technologies,” said Kevin Haggerty, a University of Alberta sociologist and an expert on policing surveillance technology.

In a recent report for the privacy commissioner of the neighbouring province of Alberta, Haggerty cited the adoption by VANOC and the ISU of CCTV cameras, satellite monitoring, cellular telephone monitoring, computerised background checks, biometric identification cards, toxic material scanners and detectors, traveler profiles and overhead communications/monitoring blimps, among other technologies.

“[Authorities] are capitalising on the fact that in anticipation of the Games, citizens tend to be more tolerant of intrusive security measures,” he told IPS.

However, Haggerty warned of surveillance overkill, where Olympic-style security can percolate into more mundane contexts in a relatively peaceful city like Vancouver. “The [Olympic] Games themselves provide a glimpse of a possible militarised, surveilled urban future,” he said.

In interviews with VANOC and the ISU, Haggerty said he faced an insurmountable brick wall in terms of getting a handle on their security and surveillance strategies.

One item that Haggerty could confirm is that Winter Olympic officials plan to photograph Vancouver neighbourhoods with high resolution satellite-mounted cameras.

“Satellite imaging is a fairly new and intensive way for physically dispersed audiences to view phenomena that were previously more difficult to monitor,” said Haggerty.

At the same time, Haggerty added that he does not expect Vancouver to adopt the level of security witnessed in Beijing, where about 300,000 CCTV cameras were installed in what was described as the largest CCTV network in existence.

Meanwhile, Helen Lenskyj suggested that increased security is the direct result of the need to protect valuable corporate sponsorships in the mega sports event, especially since the highly profitable 1984 Los Angeles summer games and coupled with the real potential for terrorism following the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes in the Munich Games and the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington.

“The big multinationals in the categories of IT [information technology], sportswear, bottled water, airlines, car rentals and whatever pay a huge amount of money for that privilege [of corporate sponsorship] and they get exclusive rights,” she said. “And security is actually protecting their rights from ambush marketing [from competitors].”

Albeit stretched by its Afghanistan commitment, Canada’s military will be providing possibly thousands of troops to back up efforts by the local police and the federal Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) at Vancouver’s winter Olympics.

“There will be a lot of surveillance missions as well as securing the backcountry in an alpine environment,” Captain Chris Poulton, a Canadian Forces spokesperson, told reporters recently. “They will be the ears and eyes of the RCMP.”

The role of U.S. law enforcement authorities in the neighbouring state of Washington, across the international border from Vancouver, remains a bit of a mystery, added Micheal Vonn.

Concerns have been raised by civil libertarians that information about Canadian citizens has flowed into U.S. databases, but Vonn’s organisation has no solid evidence so far to back this up.

However, “There is no doubt that there is coordination with security folks across the border,” she told IPS.

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Nov 28 2009 (IPS)

Canadians appear unlikely to get the entire story behind their military’s transfer of Afghans captured in war to Afghan government authorities and possible torture.

Unless Stephen Harper’s Conservative government relents and agrees to a public inquiry, as demanded by opposition parties and human rights organisations, or at least to release now secret government memos and other documents pertaining to Afghan prisoners of the 2,700 Canadian military mission in Kandahar, the story is expected to remain incomplete, says Toronto Star columnist and respected Ottawa watcher, Chantal Hebert.

It is not surprising, she wrote in a Nov. 27 column, that a special parliamentary committee on Afghanistan, albeit led by well-briefed opposition members of Parliament, has been stymied by an inability to sort out conflicting testimony among government spokespersons, generals and critics as their hearings wind down in December.

“Opposition MPs may make up a majority on the committee but in this instance, they might as well be passengers strapped in their seats aboard a pre-programmed flight to nowhere,” Hebert said.

Explosive allegations were made in mid-November by Richard Colville, a former senior Canadian diplomat in Afghanistan from April 2006 to October 2007 and now currently a senior intelligence official at his country’s embassy in Washington.

Colville revealed before the parliamentary committee what he described as the indifference of top Canadian government officials towards Canada’s “complicity” in torture despite this country’s international treaty obligations.

He told the parliamentary committee that in that time period, Canadian soldiers had transferred a large number of possibly innocent farmers to Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, which in turn transferred many of them to the notorious Sarpoza Prison.

“They were picked up … during routine military operations, and on the basis typically not of intelligence [reports] but suspicion or unproven denunciation,” Colville said.

He also alleged that his boss, David Mulroney, then head of the Canadian government Afghanistan Task Force, had censored his internal briefings.

“There was very widespread and incredible understanding that there were lots of problems in the Afghan justice system, in Afghan prisons, with Afghan police, as there were throughout the Afghan system,” Colville testified.

Mulroney has denied Colville’s assertion of a cover-up, stating instead that in 2006 and 2007, the Canadian government was grappling with the chaos of a growing insurgency in southern Afghanistan.

While the Harper government continues to deny that it knowingly transferred prisoners to certain torture, it had announced in 2007 an improvement of Canada’s detainee transfer agreement with Afghan authorities over what the former Liberal government had signed in 2005.

Rather than admit that mistakes might have been made, the Conservative-led minority government has attacked the credibility of Richard Colville in a well-orchestrated partisan public relations campaign, says Jeffrey Simpson, Globe and Mail political columnist.

“The attack script written this week for Conservative MPs by the Prime Minister’s Office and party research office impugn Mr. Colvin for a) wanting to assist the Taliban, b) undermining the morale of the Armed Forces, and c) making recruitment difficult,” he said.

But however the Conservatives project their story to voters, the detainee issue will reinforce the desire of the majority of Canadians to have their military vacate the NATO mission in Afghanistan after eight years of involvement, Ottawa-based defense analyst Steven Staples told IPS. (Canada’s soldiers are officially exiting in 2011 from the conflict-ridden Afghan province of Kandahar)

“It really slams the door shut on the Afghan mission. on top of the deaths, the cost, the stolen [Afghan] election and now this. The public’s mind must be just ‘lets get the heck out of there,’ “adds Staples, president of the Rideau Institute.

Canada began transferring in 2002 its war captives to Afghan authorities rather than hand them over to the larger U.S. military force in Afghanistan following revelations of torture in the U.S.-managed Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

But the preceding Liberal government had rejected calls by Amnesty International and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) that Canada and other NATO countries set up their own detention centre as an alternative. That has remained the position of the current Harper government.

“Obviously, our primary concern is that we want to ensure Canada respects its international human rights obligations and also its domestic applications, not to be complicit in the torturous use of detainees in Afghanistan,” said Grace Pastine, litigation director at the Vancouver-based BCCLA.

However, she declined to comment on the possibility that Canadian politicians and generals could be held liable for war crimes prosecution if Colville’s accusations are proven accurate. “That isn’t an issue that we have taken a position on,” she said.

Canada’s top courts have rejected efforts by Pastine’s organisation and Amnesty to ensure that Afghans captured and imprisoned by Canadian soldiers in war have access to the Charter of Rights under the Canadian constitution.

Nonetheless, Federal Court judge Anne McTavish ruled in one 2008 judgment that the two human rights organisations have demonstrated “substantial evidence with respect to the alleged inadequacies in the safeguards that have been put into place to this point to protect detainees transferred to Afghan authorities by the Canadian Forces.”

She cited eight complaints of abuse in Afghan detention centres where prisoners were kicked, beaten with electrical cables, given electric shocks, cut, burned, shackled, and made to stand for days at a time with their heads raised over their heads.

“While it is possible that these complaints were fabricated, it is noteworthy that the methods of torture described by detainees are consistent with the type of torture practices that are employed in Afghan prisons as recorded in independent country condition reports, including emanating from DFAIT [Department of Foreign Affairs and International Relations,” Judge McTavish added.

Both the Canadian MPs and the independent Military Police Complaints Commission have been prevented from gaining substantial access to internal Canadian military documents on the transferring of Afghan detainees, compared to what is available in other NATO countries that face the same issue in the war against the Taliban, states Amir Attaran, University of Ottawa law professor and former counsel for Amnesty International.

“The Canadian military has been unduly backward on any question to do with detainees,” he told IPS.

Meanwhile, he continued, “The British are handing over a million pages of documents and they are conceding before the courts, ‘yes we have a torture problem [with regards to Afghan detainees],'” Attaran said.

Canadians know from media reports that several hundred Afghan prisoners were transferred two years ago, but no information has been made available from Canada’s military since then on the subject, he added.

“There is no evidence implicating Canadian boots on the ground in Afghanistan [in torture themselves] It isn’t there. But what is happening is the Canadian military is obstructing [the probe of allegations regarding transfer].”

However, Philippe Lagassé, who teaches defence studies at the University of Ottawa, told IPS that resistance to releasing information pervades the entire Canadian bureaucratic culture and there is little that opposition MPs can do about it if the government in power – Liberal or Conservative – does not wish to free up access to information.

“The Canadian government tends to be more secretive overall. This isn’t just a defence or military issue. In effect, it comes down to the power of legislative committees. The committees in the U.S. and UK are strong and are able to get documents out into the public domain more effectively. Also, Canada’s access to information laws are stricter,” he noted.

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Oct 12 2009 (IPS)

Stephen Harper’s ruling Conservative government has managed to muddy the ideological right-wing aspects of his political agenda to stay in power in Canada without alienating his western and rural base of moral and social conservatives.

In the wake of the recent financial crisis originating in the U.S., Harper has been obliged to pursue a stimulus package to boost the Canadian economy, a position advocated by the major opposition party, the Liberals. The move has driven up Canada’s national deficit, which is an anathema to the prime minister’s fiscally conservative supporters.

“If you didn’t know the name of this party, and you just looked at the policies [of the Conservatives], they come across like right-wing Liberals,” said Nelson Wiseman, a University of Toronto political scientist.

He told IPS the Conservatives have backed off on a host of issues dear to their supporters, such as restrictions on abortion and same sex marriage, as well opposition – under its former incarnation as the Reform party – to immigration and multiculturalism.

Harper has also abandoned his original vow “not to cut and run” regarding the contribution of close to 3,000 Canadian soldiers to the NATO mission in Afghanistan.

Instead, Wiseman said, the Conservatives and Liberals are on the same page in terms of supporting a Canadian combat presence in Afghanistan until a planned pullout date in 2011.

With 40 percent of the electorate staying home in recent national elections, Canadians appear more and more disengaged from their politicians, Wiseman added.

The Liberals’ effort to force an election through a non-confidence motion in the House of Commons was stymied, ironically by the smaller social democratic New Democrats, which has chosen temporarily to keep a right-wing minority government in power until new measures expanding the scope of unemployment insurance payments for workers in economically hard-hit communities have been implemented.

Not all members of Canada’s religious right are happy – even though a 2006 poll indicated that 64 percent of weekly-attending Protestants in Canada voted Conservative, up 24 percent from their poll two years earlier.

“My feeling is that most religious conservatives will stick with Harper, [even though he] has been very disappointing to religious conservatives and many have experienced a sense of frustration with him,” said the Alberta-based Michel Wagner, author of “Standing on Guard for Thee: The Past, Present and Future of Canada’s Christian Right”.

“The top priorities for the Christian Right would be placing some restrictions on abortion and restricting marriage to heterosexual couples, but Harper has clearly stated he is not interested in addressing these issues. There are, however, members of the Conservative caucus who would like to deal with these issues; at this point, it seems Harper won’t let them,” he told IPS.

But it may be too late for pro-lifers and so-called advocates of the traditional family. Canada’s constitutionally entrenched and widely popular charter of rights represented the catalyst that led the country’s judges to strike down laws restricting access to hospital abortions two decades ago, and more recently regulatory barriers for same sex marriage.

A quiet evangelical Christian who rarely speaks about his personal religious faith, Harper has been loath to raise moral issues publicly.

“If he is looking at governing for a long term even in a majority parliament situation, [Harper] would be unwise to be a champion and a leader that speaks disproportionally to the social conservative movement,” said Bob Plamondon, a former Conservative party insider and the author of “Blue Thunder: The Truth about Conservatives from Macdonald to Harper”.

With the exception of the Jewish community, which is appreciative of Harper’s strong pro-Israel stance, the Conservative party has been less successful in drawing support from the growing numbers of religious conservatives in non-Christian faiths, such as Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, he told IPS.

Canadian privacy laws make it difficult to discover the identities of Conservative party donors.

Nevertheless, Plamondon says that Harper would be foolish to completely ignore a constituency that probably provides a lot of small cash donations and volunteers in election time for the Conservatives, especially in western Canada.

“It matters in activism, as people are prepared to get out the vote. So, it is a constituency that has nowhere else to go. But it is important to keep it content, some way,” he said.

Plamondon noted that in a number of areas, the Harper government has kept its religious right supporters onside through various “family” based politics. He cited the decision by the Conservative minority government after its election in 2006 to have small amounts of money mailed to parents rather than pursue a publicly-funded child care system, as advocated by the more centrist and centre-left opposition parties.

Feminist scholar Sylvia Bashevkin notes that a number of decisions including the Conservatives’ gutting of the court challenges programme – which subsidised the funding of legal challenges of onerous laws and regulations by disadvantaged groups, including the poor, women and minorities – is a sign that the religious right has considerable influence in Ottawa.

In a recent videotaped speech to supporters in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario in September that was inadvertently released to the media, Harper touted the elimination of the court challenges programme, which he charged has been largely used by “left-wing fringe groups”.

As one of his government’s major achievements, he also talked about how the Conservatives have improved the process of appointments in contrast to his Liberal predecessors.

“Imagine how many left-wing ideologues they would be putting in the courts, federal institutions, agencies, the Senate,” Harper said.

Bashevkin predicts that a lengthy stay in power for the Conservatives will result in the selection of less progressive people to the judicial bench, which she fears could potentially reverse the advances achieved by women and others legally.

“It is early to say that there are no affects. I am arguing that the power to make appointments offers the government, minority or majority, long-term ripple affect possibilities,” she said.

Author of “Women, Power, Politics – The Hidden Story of Canada’s Unfinished Democracy”, Bashevkin adds there is a convergence of social and anti-state fiscal conservatives within the Conservative coalition in their joint opposition to expensive social programmes such as child care.

David Rayside, a gay activist and University of Toronto professor, abhors the animus that Harper and his party have displayed towards same sex marriage in the past, and more recently in curtailing federal financial support for municipal gay pride events.

However, he told IPS that he still regards the core aspects of the Conservative party philosophy – such as curtailing the role of the Canadian national government, and cutting government services and reducing taxes – to be more threatening from his centre-left perspective.

“[The religious right] is highly constrained. Yes, they might do stuff that I would be deeply offended at and scared of, but in terms of the larger picture, it is more they will do things economically, fiscally [in] social spending that would really shift Canadian politics” if they had a majority government in Parliament, Rayside told IPS.

The smaller number of Protestants of both liberal and evangelical persuasions in Canada, at 29 percent, compared to the larger group of Roman Catholics at 43 percent (the latter have historically voted Liberal) ensures the limitation of the political clout of Conservative Protestants generally in Canada, added Rayside, relying on the most up to date polling.

He contrasted that with the United States, where approximately 25 percent of the population is Catholic versus 50 percent who are Protestants. In both countries, the majority of Protestants involve various strains of evangelicalism.

“There is a conservative Protestant constituency in [Canada] but by any measure, it is at most half of the proportion that conservative Protestants constitute in the U.S.,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Jul 20 2009 (IPS)

Amid reports that the Barack Obama administration is quietly lobbying the Conservative government in Ottawa to keep Canadian troops in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province beyond 2011, Stephen Harper is finding himself in an increasingly awkward dilemma.

The Canadian prime minister needs to appease a popular U.S. president who just deployed 4,000 Marines in a new Afghan offensive in Helmand, and at the same time avoid further alienating a war-weary electorate.

One recent national poll revealed that 54 percent of Canadians oppose the Canadian military contribution to the NATO mission in Afghanistan.

The Conservatives are looking pretty unsteady on this file. A few weeks back, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs made haste to contradict Defence Minister Peter MacKay when he suggested the government was considering lifting Canada’s decade-old arms embargo against Pakistan.

The uncertainty surrounding Canada’s continued involvement in Afghanistan has increased as the war against the Taliban spreads across the porous border into northwest Pakistan, said Shibil Siddiqui, a Pakistan-born, Toronto-based research analyst on central Asian affairs. He was recently consulted on the region in Ottawa by Foreign Affairs.

“I think Canada is only now waking to the possibility of having sort of a specific engagement with Pakistan around this issue,” he told IPS. “I don’t think there is a very coherent or effective Pakistani policy so far.”

But Steven Staples, president of the Rideau Institute in Ottawa and a defence analyst, told IPS it is quite possible that the Harper government already has a clear idea of its post-2011 mandate – and that air strikes, which the Canadians haven’t used so far, could be a major component.

Case in point, Staple said, is the March announcement that the Canadian Department of National Defence will be spending half a billion dollars on new armed drones (unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs) to be available in 2012 and similar to the Predators and Reapers used by the U.S. in its air strikes in Pakistan.

“While the role of ground troops may diminish simply because the army is exhausted from years of war, the air force could be called upon to support the U.S.-led combat mission through air strikes by CF-18 fighter bombers or armed drones,” Staples said.

He predicted that Canada is about to repeat the mistakes made by its NATO allies, whose aircraft killed more than 500 Afghan civilians in 2008 alone, and by the U.S. in particular, whose drones used for assassination attempts in Pakistan are also responsible for hundreds of civilian deaths.

Not all defence experts, however, worry that the target of the new craft (in departmental parlance called the Joint Unmanned Surveillance Target Acquisition System) will be Pakistan.

“If the concern is that we are going to use drones along the Afghan-Pakistani border, that’s unfounded,” said Lee Windsor of the University of New Brunswick’s Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society.

Still, he admitted in an interview with IPS, there’s no reason to rule out their use. “There will be circumstances where they could be extremely useful in the way Canada applies deadly force in the mission in Afghanistan,” Windsor said.

Another Ottawa-based defence analyst who requested anonymity said he can’t “see Canadian UAVs used in Pakistan, for the simple reason that the U.S. has more than enough drones and doesn’t want to share that highly classified intelligence it is gathering.”

His take is that Canadian drones will be primarily used for domestic coast and Arctic surveillance and in selective international military missions where they would be a cheaper alternative to Canadian troops in the field.

But Yves Engler, author of “The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy”, counters that Pakistan is the only place on the planet where a military campaign using UAVs is being conducted. There’s no end in sight for an expanded “Af-Pak” war in which Canada has a major stake, he said.

“It is all speculation, [but] the Canadian military is not buying JUSTAS drones to monitor playgrounds in Toronto,” Engler told IPS. “Like most Canadian arms purchases, the drones are being acquired with interoperability – supporting U.S. war-making capacities – in mind.”

And certainly there’s evidence that unmanned bomb conveyors are the war machines of tomorrow. P.W. Singer, the U.S. author of “Wired for War”, notes that pilots are an endangered species. He told IPS that the future of warfare can be seen in Pakistan, where drone attacks are remotely controlled by military personnel on an air base near Las Vegas, Nevada.

Countries, he worries, might be tempted to launch attack drones for short-term strategic gains to avoid the sight of dead pilots in body bags. “If you aren’t thinking about the risks,” he said, “maybe you don’t weigh drone attacks the way warfare demands.”

It’s not just the UAV decision stirring air power speculation. There was also that mysterious little dust-up in April when Major-General Duff Sullivan told reporters he favours deployment of CF-18 fighter planes and that the Department of National Defence is considering the matter.

MacKay’s office quickly declared Sullivan mistaken.

His denial is reinforced by DND’s Lieutenant Sébastien Monger, who told the publication NOW: “We have a fully operational air wing in Afghanistan [helicopters, unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles]. Canada has no plans to deploy CF-18 fighter aircraft.”

So why would a shaky minority government in Ottawa entertain a political nightmare like a Canadian CF-18 misfire and the potential deaths of Afghan civilians?

Some experts think it’s plausible that DND could decide to join the air war. “The idea of sending a squadron of CF-18s over there has always been something floated within the academic community paying attention to this,” said James Fergusson, head of the Centre for Defence and Security Studies at the University of Manitoba.

“What does it mean when we say we’re going to end our combat mission? It doesn’t mean we can’t do other things out of Kandahar,” he said.

The University of New Brunswick’s Windsor also thinks there’s a logic to sending CF-18s. “If Canada wants to maintain a commitment to the total NATO mission, planes might be the way to do it. You can buy some time for the army to recuperate,” he said.

Conservative Senator Hugh Segal, the former chair of the Canadian Senate committee on foreign affairs and international trade, says that an entirely new airborne operation of perhaps 200 people, including a squadron of 12 pilots, as well as backup pilots, maintenance and ground crews, is feasible as a replacement for the Canadian combat mission – which currently has close to 3,000 troops in Kandahar.

“There will be many people in the military who would disagree with that,” Segal said. “They would say perhaps it is too expensive. It is the wrong theatre for those, but the truth of the matter is that the CF-18s have over the last 10 years been modernised.”

The senator was referring to new targeting pods in the CF-18s that improve the pilot’s view of the ground and potential targets, as well upgraded precision guided munitions. (That is the GBU Unit 49 bombs – the exact same ones raining down on northwest Pakistan by armed U.S. drones).

Although on the outs with the Harper government after being turfed from his Senate committee chairmanship, Senator Segal disagrees with any assertion that the decision has already been made in Ottawa on the planes or other possible options for the Canadian military in Afghanistan.

“You know people often say, ‘Are there secret meetings to which we are not being invited, or planned in which we are not being included’? My bet is there is none of the above. I don’t know that, but I am just saying from my perspective, my bet is there are no plans. There are probably some options kicking around somewhere, but I don’t think they have reached the point of formality that you might call plans.”

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, May 29 2009 (IPS)

Canada and the United States are on different wavelengths when it comes to a shared and increasingly hardening of what had been a sleepy border within North America.

One University of Toronto political scientist doubts this will change anytime soon in the wake of how “paranoia” in the U.S. about its northern frontier has continued under the administration of Barack Obama.

“The U.S. approach to border security has been consistently unilateral,” said Stephen Clarkson, the author of “Does North America Exist: Governing the Continent After NAFTA and 9/11” . “Canada and Mexico have the option of doing what the Americans want and then consulting about how they will do that,” he told IPS.

“As for the continental perimeter, there is one in the sense that antiterrorism and visa regulations [for both countries] have largely been harmonised to U.S. standards. At the same time, the U.S. has reinforced its land borders. The result is that we have both a fortress North America and an internal U.S. wall,” he said.

Some of this has been fuelled by the insecurity within the U.S. towards the traditionally undefended northern border in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington and the mistaken notion among some U.S. politicians, including the new U.S. Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano, that some of the airplane hijackers arrived via Canada.

She reiterated upon visiting Canada last week that she had been mistaken in her initial assertion about Canada but then urged her hosts to move on.

“What I regret is that Canada can’t seem to get beyond one misstatement to what I’m trying to suggest,” she said. “And what I am suggesting is to say we share security concerns, just as we share trade concerns, just as we share all kinds of other concerns,” she told reporters.

While Canadians are worried about illegal guns and drugs coming into their country, the U.S. is preoccupied with terrorism and illegal immigration going south, as well as the presence of a large Muslim population in Canada, observed Clarkson.

At the same time, both Ottawa and Washington have maintained the posture that the insurgency in Afghanistan represents a real threat to the North American continent, he noted.

“Canada is one of the few countries along with the U.S. that defines the Afghan situation in terms of our national security,” he said.

Nevertheless, the joint statement by Napolitano and Peter Van Loan, the Canadian public safety minister, that Canada and the U.S. will jointly assess security threats on their shared border is a major breakthrough and a departure from the unilateralism of George W. Bush, commented Reg Whittaker, political scientist at the University of Victoria and a security specialist.

“The U.S. would just make unilateral decisions about what they consider to be, who they consider to be threats, and what they consider being threats. So, it is perfectly appropriate that we have some kind of machinery in place to facilitate and create cooperation,” he told IPS.

Greater sharing of perceived threats by Canadians and U.S. police and intelligence may eliminate the scenario where a Syrian-born Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, was automatically “kidnapped” in a U.S. city by U.S. officials and sent to a prison in his country of birth for torture during the Bush administration, Whittaker said.

“Instead of having ad hoc kind of arrangements that are subject to abuse, to have something that is more institutionalised and recognises from the American point of view that Canada has something to contribute, here, and Canadians should be respected and not told what to do,” he said.

Also, it appears that the Conservative government in Ottawa has abandoned its initial position – while the party was in opposition – of negotiating a joint immigration and refugee arrangement under a so-called North American security perimeter.

This represents a recognition by even a right-wing, supposedly more pro-U.S. administration in Ottawa that Canada as the smaller player in North America would invariably have to adopt U.S. laws and approaches in total if it went this route, added Whittaker.

“That is the problem with a security perimetre. One set of rules that are exactly the same [on] who gets into the country, and so on. Given the power relationship between Canada and the U.S. that means Canada gives up its autonomy to have its own policies. And there are all kinds of issues where Canada has really distinctive rules abut immigration. For example, positively encouraging francophone immigration [because of Quebec in the Canadian federation],” he said.

Nevertheless, despite the advance of a joint threat assessment, Brian Masse, the opposition Member of Parliament from the border city of Windsor, Ontario pointed to what he described as the “militarisation” of the Canada U.S. border. He expressed concern about the presence of U.S. gunboats, Black Hawk helicopters, drone planes, fences and spy towers on the U.S. side.

Masse is critical of a new feature in the Napolitano/Van Loan announcement that will allow U.S. and Canadian law enforcement personnel to ride in each others’ vessels in the lakes and waterways along the shared border and enforce the other countries’ laws. “It allows on the Canadian side Americans to arrest Canadians and also on the American side Canadians to arrest Americans,” the Canadian politician told IPS.

He remarked on the introduction on the U.S. side of Coast Guard vessels carrying auto cannons that have the capacity to shoot 750 1,200 rounds per minute.

Masse remarked this follows an earlier and little discussed announcement that U.S. troops will be allowed with the permission of Ottawa to enter Canada in an emergency situation.

He also stated that the Canadian government missed the opportunity in the recent discussions with the homeland security secretary to push for a loosening of the Canada U.S. border.

“[The U.S. policy] is making our border like the Mexican border… I can’t imagine a threat coming from Canada. I mean we all want to be more secure. Does that require Black Hawk helicopters [and] gun boats?” he asked.

Canada has not recovered from the negative impact that the 9/11 attacks have had on north-south trade within North America, commented Steven Globerman, who teaches business at Western Washington university in Bellingham, Washington and is the co-author of the recent book, “The Impact of 9/11 on Canada-US Trade”.

While U.S. exports to Canada returned to a normal level by 2004, Canadian exports have between 2001 and 2007 declined by about 15 to 20 percent because of a hardened 9/11 U.S. border, Globerman told IPS.

Among the factors contributing to this trend has been the disruption of a formerly seamless border under the North American free trade agreement where parts produced within continental manufacturing operations such as auto and steel crossed back and forth without disruption.

Another manifestation of this has been the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative travel rules in the U.S. which obligate the carrying of valid documentation by anyone including Canadians crossing into the U.S. Many commentators have observed that because more Canadians carry passports than Americans, it is widely expected that U.S. travel to Canada will decline.

“All of these various phenomena [of disruption] contribute to Canadian goods costing more in the U.S. because it costs more to bring them across the border,” Globerman said. “If you raise the price obviously you are going to reduce your sales, whether we are talking about goods that are sold to other producers in the U.S. or goods that are sold to retailers.”

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Apr 3 2009 (IPS)

The murky post-9/11 sharing of information between western security and intelligence agencies and Sudan’s notorious human rights-abusing regime appear to be at the heart of a year-long marooning of Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik at his country’s embassy in Khartoum.

The 47-year-old unemployed former resident of Montreal had been cleared of terrorism charges following imprisonment by Sudanese officials in 2003 and subsequent interrogation by a team of Canadian and U.S. counter-terrorism agents.

“It was a close relationship [between Canadian and Sudanese security] and of course now has broken down largely over the handling of Abdelrazik. The Sudanese are justifiably angry with us,” said Amir Attaran, a University of Ottawa law professor.

Attaran is one of the lawyers assisting Abdelrazik in his case before the Federal Court of Canada against the Canadian government, which has refused so far to provide the exiled man with the travel documentation that would allow him to legally return home.

Official government memos obtained by the Globe and Mail national newspaper show that the Canadian department of Foreign Affairs arranged to have Abdelrazik arrested while visiting Khartoum to see his mother in 2003.

By 2007, Sudanese and Canadian security and intelligence officials had separately reached the conclusion that Abdelrazik, a practicing Muslim, has no links to either criminal activity or al Qaeda-style Islamic extremism.

Furthermore, it is apparent that the Sudanese government wanted to send back the exiled Canadian on a private jet but Ottawa declined the offer, Attaran told IPS.

“Canada gave the promise to Sudan that if Sudan would release him from prison, Canada would bring him home. We reneged on it,” he said.

Also an editor for medical journals, Attaran expressed concern for Abdelrazik’s physical health, which includes high blood pressure, poor vision and possible symptoms of a stroke. Currently, the man is living in the Canadian Embassy, reluctant to go to a local hospital in the city and get a medical examination for fear of being re-arrested by the Sudanese police who had previously tortured him, Attaran said.

“Is Canada torturing him? No. But is Canada abusing him? Oh my God, yes, most definitely yes. I would say beyond the legal process, the international prohibition in law is against torture and cruel and degrading treatment. Torture is the one that you hear about. But the treaties we’ve signed also prohibit cruel and degrading treatment.”

Abdelrazik, in a rare recent public statement to the Canadian media, blames his exile on continued suspicions of the Conservative government of Stephen Harper.

“I have been imprisoned and tortured. I am safer now because I live in the Canadian Embassy but I miss my children in Canada. They grew up and my ex-wife died. My teenage daughter is an orphan now and still the Harper government does not let me go home,” he said. In a recent twist to the case, the Canadian foreign affairs minister, Laurence Cannon, has indicated that Abdelrazik could not fly back to Canada on Friday, Apr. 3, courtesy of an airline ticket purchased by about 200 Canadians, until he can get himself removed from a United Nations Security Council 1267 list of alleged terrorists.

“It’s up to him, it’s incumbent on him to make sure he gets off that list,” the minister told reporters, even though his predecessor in the same Conservative government had sought unsuccessfully in December 2007 to have Abdelrazik de-listed from U.N. Security Council 1267 Committee’s terrorist watch list after both the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had cleared him of any involvement in terrorism or crime.

“The Security Council watch list expressly allows Mr. Abdelrazik to return home, and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms compels the government to respect a citizen’s right to re-enter the country,” stated Irwin Cotler, an opposition Canadian Member of Parliament and former justice minister in the former Liberal government, in an online commentary for the Globe and Mail.

Also in question is the role of Deepak Obhrai, the Calgary-based Conservative MP, the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Canadian government spokesperson on the stranded Canadian’s file in the House of Commons.

During testimony under oath from a department of Foreign Affairs official, it was revealed that Obhrai flew to Khartoum last March and personally interrogated Abdelrazik inside the Canadian embassy about alleged links to terrorism, adds Attaran.

[The MP did not return repeated phone calls from IPS].

“[Abdelrazik] was living destitute on the streets of Khartoum. He had no means of support, beside 100 dollars a month that the Canadian embassy was loaning him, not give but loan, and Deepak Obrai, member of parliament, shows up in Khartoum to question him, I mean this is the most shocking thing on earth,” Attaran said.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) is seeking a formal probe by the agency overseeing its activity, the Security Intelligence Review Committee, to clear its name from the charge that it had any role in the detention of Abdelrazik.

A Canadian academic with reputedly close ties to CSIS backs up the Canadian spies’ assertion.

“I had my doubts that CSIS was involved in this matter. It simply doesn’t fit with what we know about CSIS operational practices,” said Martin Rudner, director of the Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies and professor emeritus at Carleton University in Ottawa.

He also said that Sudan’s ties to Islamic radicals and western abhorrence regarding serious human rights violations and war crimes in that country’s Darfur region has made it a pariah in Washington and other western capitals including Ottawa.

“We have no information, other than reports that [Abdelrazik] himself has given to journalists as to whether or not CSIS actually forwarded questions,” Rudner told IPS.

But a number of journalists, including the U.S.-based Ken Silverstein in a piece for the Los Angeles Times in 2005, have documented the supplying to the CIA of information by Sudan’s Mukhabarat on the activities of Osama Bin Ladin’s al Qaeda network which had been active at one point in that African country.

“The head of the Sudanese intelligence service, Salah Gosh, came to [Washington DC] when I was working on the story, flown from Khartoum on a CIA jet sent to fetch him in Khartoum. He had multiple meetings with top CIA officials while here,” Silverstein told IPS.

“What I wrote was subsequently (maybe a year or so later) picked up and expanded by two excellent intelligence reporters at the LA Times,” he said.

Silverstein added that “[Rudner] doesn’t know about anything of which he speaks with such certainty.”

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Mar 27 2009 (IPS)

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has no choice but to project optimism about his nation’s ability to pull out of the economic recession by next year, although various economists and a former central bank chairman have all offered grimmer forecasts that the downturn will persist for a longer period.

That is because there are financial costs for countries when leaders are candid about the economy, says Marc Lee, the Vancouver-based economist for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

“If they paint too gloomy a picture, then the risk is that they undermine consumer and business confidence ever the more and make the situation worse,” Lee told IPS.

At the same yet, there will be an economic price for not investing in infrastructure projects past 2010, Lee continued.

“It is going to take a few years for the economy to get back any steam. We will probably have a situation of jobless growth for a few years where the economy does indeed grow but not at a pace that actually lowers unemployment rate,” he said.

Canadian members of Parliament from the ruling Conservatives in a recent finance committee hearing were unhappy, reported the Globe and Mail national newspaper, when Kevin Page, the independent parliamentary budget officer, projected among other things a 385,000 job loss for Canada by July and a 15.3 percent “plunge” in the country’s gross national income in the last quarter of 2008.

“I am not sure if an economist needs to use that harsh a language – but that’s your decision,” said Ted Menzies, parliamentary secretary to Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty.

The same newspaper also reported that the Conservatives have so far provided less than two-thirds of the promised 2.27-million-dollar to fund Page’s office – set up by the same Harper government to ensure “truth in budgeting” and economic forecasting.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives continue to be dogged by the former chair of the Bank of Canada, David Dodge. He told a recent Toronto economic conference that the economic rebound “is likely to be considerably slower than in previous times, and it’s going to be well into 2011, 2012 and 2013 before we see the level of output and the rates of growth return to something approaching capacity.”

A group of forecasters at IHS Global Insight recently projected that the world economy will contract by more than two percent this year, the U.S. economy 3.7 percent and the Canadian economy by 2.5 percent.

“This is the deepest and longest world recession in the postwar era,” said Nigel Gault, the firm’s chief economist in the U.S. “The global depth and reach of this downturn make it much more difficult for any individual country to pull out because there’s such a drag coming from the rest of the world.”

Canada’s high degree of economic dependence on the giant U.S. economy next door makes this northerly neighbour highly vulnerable to what comes out of Washington in terms of the stimulus package that is finally passed by the U.S. Congress.

Andrew Jackson, an economist with the Canadian Labour Congress, warns that even if U.S. President Barack Obama succeeds in his current ambitious multi-trillion-dollar strategy to kickstart the U.S. economy, Canada might not find a sufficient number of customers south of the border for its manufactured and resources products.

“I think there is a very facile notion out there as well that somehow the U.S. will bottom out and that most importantly the world will return to normal, as the world as it was,” he told IPS. “I find it very difficult to believe that we are going to go to be seeing a U.S. economy and a global economy driven by a big increase in consumer spending.”

Jackson foresees a U.S. export-driven recovery propelled by domestic public investments and a lower U.S. dollar. “What it means for us [in Canada] could be problematic,” he said.

Even though domestic product outsourcing for state and local government is legal under the North American Free Trade Agreement, there was “this very knee-jerk response” in some Canadian government circles towards the ‘buy America’ provisions in the U.S. stimulus package, Jackson said.

He notes that the Montreal-based Bombardier has been building buses in the U.S. market without running into any opposition or barriers.

Jackson and his colleagues in the Canadian labour movement have so far been unsuccessful in their campaign for a ‘buy Canada’ provision in Ottawa’s infrastructure spending.

Political scientist Reg Whittaker told IPS that Harper risks being blamed by Canadian voters in the next federal election if the Canadian economy tanks and so he must maintain his optimism as he ties his fate to Obama making the correct economic decisions.

The irony, states Whittaker, a professor emeritus at the University of Victoria, is that Harper is introducing a set of liberal policies, such as raising the deficit to ramp up public spending to stimulate the economy, run counter to his conservative political philosophy of allowing the free market to correct itself.

“I guess that is a problem in terms of selling himself to the Canadian public because there is going to be a degree of distrust out there. That people don’t really think that this represents a proper kind of conversion to a more appropriate way of looking at the set of problems,” Whittaker said.

One source of credible optimism comes from the fact that the well-regulated Canadian banks were not susceptible to the speculative frenzy which culminated in bankruptcies in the financial sector elsewhere in the world.

“Canada starts from a better position than other countries, which actually now look to Canada for some degree to see models of how they might do things [differently],” adds Whittaker.

But Marc Lee counters that the Canadian and U.S. governments are so focused on ensuring the stability of their respective banking systems that they are missing out on the primary cause of the current recession which is the growth in household debt, rising unemployment and a drop in consumer spending.

Rather than engage in tax cuts, political leaders in Canada should be increasing investment in social programmes like unemployment insurance, social assistance and child tax benefits to get low and modest income people spending again, he argues.

“You want to channel money down to people who are already cash constrained, who are basically going to go and spend all of that money right away as opposed to saving it or trying to pay down debt with it,” Lee said.

Statistics Canada has reported that the country’s unemployment rate is as high as 11.7 if one includes those unemployed who are not actively looking for work either because they are discouraged or anticipate returning to a job.

“The banks will take care of themselves if the underlying situation can improve. But you don’t help the underlying economic situation by starting with the banks, I think it is the opposite case and you need to deal with the macroeconomic first,” added Lee.

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Feb 4 2009 (IPS)

Canada’s reluctance to institute a full stimulus package in the recent federal government budget has international parallels, says Armine Yalnizyan, a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

“Many of the governments that were very quick to act to restore credit to the system have been much slower to roll out money to respond to the need to replace the jobs that are being shed,” she told IPS.

The longer time that governments take to implement a full stimulus package to create jobs and encourage citizens to spend money in their respective countries, the greater the likelihood of “something that is far worse than it needs to be” in the world economy, Yalnizyan said.

She observed that it is hard for most national governments, including Canada’s right-leaning Conservative-led minority administration in Ottawa, to wean themselves from the philosophical path known as the Washington Consensus.

“It is very difficult to turn that around because government has been perceived for almost 30 years now as the problem and the market as the solution. And it is very difficult to change a very firm mindset among the governing elites that it is not serving people very well,” she said.

Nevertheless, Tuesday’s passage of the budget in the House of Commons in a 214 to 84 vote with the reluctant support of the Liberals, the major opposition party, was inevitable, given the promised spending of 28.3 billion dollars over two years on everything from income tax cuts and help for home renovations to enhanced jobless benefits and funds for urban reconstruction.

Given the weariness of the Canadian public towards the notion of another federal election – Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives were just reelected with an increased minority government last October – there was little appetite for having the federal budget, albeit not entirely perfect, turned down and forcing a national vote in the process, says Chantal Herbert in a column for the Toronto Star.

“In their quest for parliamentary survival, the Conservatives have cut and pasted a lot of old-style Liberal spending initiatives and spread them pretty much across the board. It is hard to think of a constituency, friendly or hostile to the Conservatives, that will not get a piece of the multibillion-dollar stimulus package the government has cobbled together,” Herbert said, adding, “Environmentalists are the possible exception. True to Conservative form, the notion of adjusting Canada’s economy to the realities of climate change comes across as an afterthought.”

The Conservatives were almost ousted last November when they introduced an economic statement that contained no stimulus package and also included measures to reduce election financing for political parties, which particularly threatened the defeated Liberals – in debt from the last election.

Herbert adds that Harper and his government appeared to have learned their lesson this time and introduced a budget minus the noxious measure that was designed to win the support of the bruised Liberals, ill-prepared to fight another election so soon under a new leader.

Nevertheless, the Liberals could have legally helped to defeat the Conservative minority government under Canadian parliamentary rules and taken over the country with the support of two other opposition parties in some form of coalition, commented Nelson Wiseman, a University of Toronto political scientist.

But with no political precedent of that ever happening before in Canadian history, this was not a real option, given the regional divisions that might have resulted – with the Conservatives strong in western Canada and the Liberals more of a force in the east, he continued.

“The coalition idea however has now taken root and I expect it to sprout,” Wiseman told IPS.

A formal coalition led by the Liberals joined to the hip with the social democratic NDP is not ruled out by Wiseman down the road with minority governments becoming the norm in a four-party Canadian parliament.

“As the economy continues to weaken,” added Wiseman, “[Canadians] will be more disenchanted with whoever is in charge, and that happens to be the Conservatives and Harper.”

One of the concerns of the mayors of Canada’s major cities is that much of the promised 3.2 billion dollars in urban infrastructure spending under the Building Canada Fund will be held up by regulation and that little of the funds will flow immediately to needy areas such as public transit.

Toronto Mayor David Miller has complained of delays in the past in the availability of previously promised financial assistance by the same government. “Placing rigid requirements on funds like this does not work. The dollars need to be invested, not written down on paper. This is full of red tape,” he told reporters.

Insufficient infrastructure spending to spur new jobs and the resistance by the current Conservative government in its latest budget to ease up on the tight regulations to access jobless benefits could prove disastrous in the coming months when six out of 10 Canadians will find themselves ineligible for income support and be forced to live on their savings instead, warns Yalniziyan.

“Far more serious and far more grave is the fact that this government is looking at the hundreds of thousands of jobs that were lost in the last few months and full knowledge that many more hundreds of thousands will be lost in the coming year,” she said.

Leo Panitch, a Canada research chair of comparative political economy at York University, observes that Canada’s economic stimulus package amounts to only one percent of gross national product, compared to the five percent about to be invested in comparable moves in the U.S. by the administration of Barack Obama.

He also noted that the Canadian government’s “rosy” predictions of 2.4 percent initial growth followed by a further advance have been contradicted by the International Monetary Fund – which forecast a mere 1.6 percent growth for Canada.

Panitch is not sure that the Canadian strategy of maintaining a tightly regulated banking system, a reliance on the high demand for its commodities, particularly oil, and economic integration with the U.S. will save this country from the economic downturn.

“People had been saying that Canada will suffer least from this recession because at least we were doing very well in commodity prices. But now commodity prices and oil prices have tanked,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Jul 30 2008 (IPS)

A rollercoaster ride of spurned treaties, efforts to fund new weapons and the expansion of potential targets for nuclear strikes under the George W. Bush administration to include Iran and North Korea may be drawing to a close after eight years.

A UGM-96 Trident missile clears the water during an October 1984 demonstration launch from the nuclear-powered strategic missile submarine USS Mariano G. Vallejo. Credit: U.S. Navy

“Today, we deploy thousands of nuclear warheads,” Republican presidential candidate John McCain said in May. “It is my hope to move as rapidly as possible to a significantly smaller force.”

Still, Boese describes arms control and nuclear disarmament as largely under-the-radar political issues in the U.S. election.

“There is not much to look at right now [in the candidates’ positions]. They all have said the right things in the sense that we need to reduce our nuclear forces, we need to show leadership,” Boese said, adding that Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, appears willing to take a more aggressive reduction approach.

“I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance,” Obama said a year ago, with a pause, “involving civilians.” Then he quickly added, “Let me scratch that. There’s been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That’s not on the table.”

Boese is concerned that other bigger issues like U.S. military involvement in Iraq could “distract” the next U.S. administration from seriously tackling some of the complexities behind nuclear disarmament.

Another arms control watcher, David Culp, foresees a substantial change in U.S. policy whoever is elected president in November. “There is pretty broad bipartisan frustration with the Bush administration policy,” he told IPS. “The feeling is that they went way too far, that it’s damaged U.S. standing in the world, that it has undermined our anti-proliferation efforts.”

The devil is in the details on the amount of change that will occur in any U.S. administration on the matter of disarmament, said Culp, legislative representative for the Quaker group Friends Committee on National Legislation. The ultimate decision will lie with the secretary of defence appointed by the elected president, and especially the expertise he or she brings along to set a specific direction. “The cabinet officials end up being the people that drive this policy,” Culp said.

Both Obama and McCain are on the record as supporting the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, slated to be reviewed at an international conference in New York City in 2010, and increased U.S. funding for the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is responsible for the treaty’s implementation, stated Culp.

Nonetheless, Culp pointed to substantial differences between the presidential candidates, and their respective parties. “I know [the Democrats] are looking at very sharp reductions in the strategic arsenal,” he said.

Both Obama and McCain have parted company with the Bush administration’s determination to allow the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, a verification process oriented toward U.S./Russia nuclear arms control, to expire in December 2009, the Quaker spokesperson reported. The Russians apparently would like to negotiate a shrinking of the respective U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, which includes the more than 1,000 nuclear warheads they and the U.S. have aimed at each other.

While the Democrats are looking at cuts of missile stockpiles by half, McCain and the Republicans are not talking about doing anything similar or specific beyond letting the treaty continue, stated Culp. Indeed, the Republican presidential contender would leave the decision regarding the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal up to the U.S. military command in terms of “what numbers we need to go to,” he noted. “That is not very encouraging to me. Almost every [arms control] agreement that we have gotten has been driven by the political leadership [in the White House].”

Obama has also promised to make the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) a priority. Among those who voted to defeat its ratification in the U.S. Senate in 1999 was McCain, who has since cautiously stated only that he will take a second look at the issue, Culp said.

Furthermore, McCain who has sat for a long time on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has supported the controversial U.S. missile defence system, including the deployment of missiles in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic. Here, Obama is more “sceptical”, commented Culp. “I think there is some chance that the missile base in Poland and Czech Republic would be cancelled [if the Democrats are elected].”

Unclear, however, from either campaign is whether the Bush administration’s expanded targeting plans for nuclear strikes against Iran, North Korea and Syria will be revisited, stated Culp. Encouraging for him is that the U.S. Congress is undertaking a review of the U.S. nuclear posture after rejecting proposals for the financing of new nuclear weapons under the current administration, including a controversial nuclear “bunker buster” bomb that would have been aimed at Iran’s underground uranium enrichment facilities.

Martin Butcher, a policy researcher at the British-based Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy, emphasises the relevance of the U.S. nuclear posture in the wake of continued bellicose talk in U.S. and Israeli political circles directed against Iran, which is accused of enriching uranium to create nuclear bombs – notwithstanding U.S. intelligence reports to the contrary.

“The U.S. doctrine allows for the use of nuclear weapons to prevent a country like Iran which has the potential to produce nuclear weapons from turning that potential into reality,” Butcher told IPS.

Within NATO, he says, unresolved differences pit the European countries, which want to limit first-strike capability to major conflicts with states already armed with nuclear weapons like Russia and China, against the U.S., which has sought to broaden the targets to include enemy states with other weapons of mass destruction, particularly chemical, biological and powerful conventional arms.

Expanded first-use, he says, was a “last resort” under U.S. President Bill Clinton, but his successor, George. W. Bush, made it “the central plank” of military strategy, Butcher said.

However, military analyst Lowell Schwartz at the RAND Institute says that the U.S. and NATO nuclear military posture should not be taken literally since it is essentially used to discourage threats without actually going to war.

“Even the Bush administration, when they talk about striking first, it is generally in a kind of conventional sense. This is not about using nuclear weapons first,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Apr 30 2008 (IPS)

Like an aging group of retro rocker musicians, the Jewish Defence League (JDL) resurfaced in Toronto recently after a decade of dormancy, trying to look a little more mainstream.

The group made its largest public foray in quite some time on Mar. 27, when it hosted a meeting of about 150 for Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin at the Shaarei Tefillah Synagogue on a stretch of Bathurst south of Wilson that conjures Jerusalem’s Mea Shirim with its black top hats, piety and peyes.

Once targeted by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation as “domestic extremists” and linked to two banned anti-Arab racist groups in Israel, the JDL now considers Feiglin, leader of the hard-line Jewish Leadership faction of the already right-wing Likud party, its political mentor.

Feiglin saved most of his bile at the meeting for Israel’s leadership, accusing them of caving in to the violence perpetrated by the enemy, namely the Palestinians, whom he referred to as simply “Arabs”.

“We are not going to get used to it,” he declared to an applauding audience about Hamas rocket attacks on Israel. Nevertheless, said this West Bank settler, “The Arabs are not the problem; [some] Jews are.”

Feiglin advocates an Israel without Arabs, citing the example of the peaceful Golan Heights, emptied of its Arab population after the Six-Day War when the territory was taken from Syria. Where U.S. JDL founder Rabbi Meir Kahane, assassinated in New York City in 1990, advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israeli-controlled territory, Feiglin, in a new wrinkle, urges they be paid to vacate.

“We are talking about more than 60,000 people on the military payroll,” he says. “We’re talking about 150 billion dollars that Israel spends every 10 years. That money is enough to give every Arab family in Yesha [Gaza and the West Bank] 250,000 dollars.”

Meir Weinstein, aka Meir Halevi, national director for the JDL of Canada, spoke with IPS after the event and directed attention to the growing Muslim population of more than 750,000 and the shrinking number of Jews living in Canada – a little above 300,000.

“The significance of that is that Muslims come from countries that don’t have a friendly view of Jews. A lot of these countries promote material denying the Holocaust, so when they come here in greater numbers and their population is on rise…,” he said.

Weinstein said he is willing to go to court to refute any racist tag attached to his organisation. Recently, he issued a letter of intent threatening to sue Canadian Arab Federation president Khaled Mouammar for defamation over comments allegedly made on the CAF’s website. Mohamed Boudjenane, CAF exec director, told IPS the organisation has no comment at this time.

In fact, the JDL is in on the offence on more than one front. One of its directors, Lou VanDelman, a white-haired militant who began his participation in the late 1960s, says the group’s thuggish reputation is overblown.

“People always like to dramatise. The JDL was always a defensive organisation, and it always will be. If somebody hits us, we have the legal right to hit back,” he said.

VanDelman regrets “the deterioration” in the relations between the JDL, in its heyday, and U.S. authorities, in contrast to what occurred in Canada, particularly in Montreal. “We had an association with the police, we had association with members of parliament,” he said.

On the other hand, in 2002, U.S. JDL leader Irv Rubin died in jail awaiting trial on charges of allegedly planning to bomb a mosque and the office of a local U.S. congressman in California.

Currently, the JDL is supporting a public campaign both in Israel and North America by Feiglin to be included on the list of candidates for the Likud party in the upcoming election, which recent public opinion polls indicate it has a shot at winning. Feiglin came in a significant second at 22 percent in a leadership contest up against the subsequent winner and former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

But how serious a force is Feiglin in Israel’s complex political landscape? According to Beate Zilversmidt, a spokesperson for Israeli peace group Gush Shalom, even within Likud he is considered “too extreme”.

“But he definitely has some leverage, and the more relevant question might be how much influence he can exert on the more mainstream Likud candidates. They don’t want him to break away and compete with them from the outside, forming powerful blocs together with other Judeo-supremacists,” Zilversmidt said.

Meanwhile, Bernie Farber, chief executive officer of the Canadian Jewish Congress, casts doubt on the re-emergent Jewish Defence League’s ability to be anything but a marginal force in Canada.

Farber says his organisation had “serious concerns” about the JDL in the past regarding its “highly inappropriate, even racist” language.

“They have come back again, as I understand it, a different version of what they were. As long as they maintain the peace, as long as they do not engage in racist language or hate or violate Canadian law, they have the right to exist. They will not in any way be connected to the mainstream, nor do they want to be, from what I understand,” he said.

Michael Neumann, a Trent University philosophy professor and the author of “The Case Against Israel”, also warns against getting diverted by fears of JDL ultra-nationalism.

“Hell, if I’m going to be concerned about violent or extremist Jews, I’ll be concerned about the Israel Defence Forces. By far the greatest threat to peace are the lobbying efforts of impeccably well-behaved, well-connected Zionists and the decent but fence-sitting Jews who allow these lobbyists to speak in their name,” he asserted.

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Feb 26 2008 (IPS)

As Canada’s parliament debates whether to extend the country’s mission in Afghanistan beyond next year’s withdrawal deadline, some peace advocates and conflict resolution experts say a U.N.-led mission is the best bet to negotiate a peace settlement involving all of the major parties in the ongoing civil war.

Walter Dorn, a Canadian professor who has been a training advisor for the U.N. department of peacekeeping operations, told IPS that with more than 100,000 peacekeepers in the field, including military and civilian personnel in 17 missions around the world, the U.N. has had an excellent record in building the peace in a variety of countries, including Sierra Leone, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and El Salvador.

An instructor at the Canadian Forces College in suburban Toronto and author of the forthcoming “Global Peace Operations 2008”, Dorn said that a U.N.-hosted force in southern Afghanistan could be deployed to provide security during a period of negotiations for a peace settlement. Such a force should, he said, include troops from Muslim countries so as to make the mission less of “a [U.S. President] George Bush-initiated operation that looks to locals like an invasion.”

While Canadians could play a civilian administrative role, he believes their soldiers – of whom there are currently 2,500 deployed in Afghanistan – would have to be excluded from any potential U.N. force because their presence in a NATO combat force in the field has already tainted them as biased toward one of the sides in the civil conflict.

“In fact, U.N. forces would be more effective on the ground, because they will have more elements of impartiality. They are not the enemy, and obviously, it would require a large number of soldiers to protect themselves, but I think they would be seen as less of a target than the NATO force,” he said.

A recent panel headed by former deputy prime minister John Manley of the previous Liberal government and appointed by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper has recommended staying the military course against the Taliban, the Islamist movement that ruled Afghanistan until it was overthrown in the fall of 2001 by U.S.-led forces following the 9/11 attacks.

“A premature military withdrawal from Afghanistan, whether full or partial, would imperil Canadian interests and values. It would diminish the effectiveness of Canadian aid in Afghanistan, by further constraining the ability of Canadian aid workers to move among Afghans,” wrote Manley and other appointees to the independent panel on Afghanistan in their final report.

“It could encourage insurgents. It could weaken the confidence of some Afghans living in Kandahar in their own future and in their own government, increasing their susceptibility to the Taliban insurgency. It would undermine Canada’s influence in the U.N. and in NATO capitals, including Washington,” the panel concluded.

Since the report came out in late January, both the Conservatives and the largest opposition party, the Liberals, have reached a common position on Canada’s continued participation in the NATO ISAF force until 2011 if other alliance members cough up an additional 1,000 troops for the battlefield to fight the resurgent Taliban.

“I find it a curious thing that there is such silence in the Manley report on the question of reconciliation,” said Ernie Regehr, a senior adviser at Project Ploughshares. He and a number of others who offered insights into the panel can’t fathom why the idea of negotiations with insurgents – beyond Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s few initiatives – has so little traction.

“When the panel does mention reconciliation, what they are really promoting is a kind of amnesty, discussions with those elements in the Taliban that reject violence,” he said. “But that is not a serious attempt to deal with people who have genuine grievances against the current order.”

The fact is, Regehr said, one of the things that makes Taliban recruitment in the south possible is that “there is not a social stigma against joining the rebels, because the feeling is that the government is not theirs in any event.”

He and his colleagues say the people governing Afghanistan largely represent the Northern Alliance, one side in the ongoing Afghan civil war that was installed in Kabul after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 – thus leaving a major Pashtun-speaking political force in the south out in the cold. The Afghan resistance will remain entrenched, Regehr and others believe, as long as the mission remains the wrong one, in the wrong hands.

His other point is that the NATO-led mission is not a true U.N. mission, although it has received the sanction of the international body. What’s needed, Regehr and others argue, is a “multi-dimensional” United Nations-led peace process of mediation, reconciliation and political dialogue, a reliance on local institutions and customs and the negotiated disarmament of armed factions.

The question of what can be negotiated in terms of protection for human rights with a misogynistic force like the Taliban concerns the Vancouver-based Lauryn Oates, vice president of Canadian Women for Afghanistan and one of the signatories to a recent press release supporting the continued presence of NATO and Canadian troops in Afghanistan under U.N. auspices.

She told IPS she parts company with peace advocates who are pushing for talks with the Taliban. “No one is talking about talking to ordinary Afghan civilians. This is a small group of so-called experts in Canada that is just sort of deciding among themselves what should happen in Afghanistan,” she said.

Erika Simpson, a University of Western Ontario political scientist and author of “NATO and the Bomb: Canadian Defenders Confront Critics”, believes that NATO is the appropriate international military body for Afghanistan because the “bankrupt” United Nations and its department of peacekeeping operations lack the resources to achieve long-term security in that country.

“[NATO headquarters] hallways are buzzing with officers from all around the world, not just the 26 allies, and they are focused and they are committed to Afghanistan,” Simpson said.

According to Peggy Mason, an early critic of the U.S. and NATO in Afghanistan, and a former Canadian ambassador for disarmament who worked with Ernie Regehr on a submission to the Manley panel, “The issue is not whether we want to promote basic human rights in Afghanistan. The issue is how we best do this.”

Mason advises caution towards any notion of NATO as a potential replacement for the U.N. when it comes to so-called failed states. A document with the august title, “Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World”, written by a group of former defence chiefs from the U.S. and Europe, offers a strong hint in that direction.

“This is the opposite of where we should be going,” Mason responded. “NATO cannot do this. NATO commanders who really understand know that the answer is to get NATO back into the U.N. blue helmet game because an integrated mission is the only way you can get the military strategy subordinated to the political one.”

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Jan 11 2008 (IPS)

As the Conservative government of Stephen Harper awaits a panel report on Canada’s military role in Afghanistan beyond February 2009, when the current mandate expires, there is widespread unease among analysts on both sides of the North American border that operational decisions are deep-sixing political goals and about the possibility of a widening conflict.

Canadian forces on patrol in Afghanistan. Credit: Canadian Department of National Defence

She called for “massive investment in rural development to give local farmers an alternative to growing poppies” and for a more coordinated strategy overall, noting that “Allied efforts on the ground currently resemble a patchwork quilt”.

NATO’s Afghanistan mission totals 41,700 police and soldiers, 15,000 from the United States, 2,500 from Canada, and the remainder from other Alliance member states.

Peter Langille, a peace studies professor and defence analyst at the University of Western Ontario, is concerned that heavy firepower and armoured vehicles are undermining efforts to build a connection with locals. It’s “common knowledge” in the ranks, he says, that the Canadian Forces have downgraded operations by infantry foot soldiers in favour of artillery and armoured vehicles.

“We don’t have as many boots on the ground as the government would like us to think,” he said.

The Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies in Toronto estimates that of the entire Canadian contingent in Afghanistan, only about 450 are currently on foot or in armoured vehicles, and another 100 are engaged in big-gun artillery. The rest are playing support roles.

Langille claims Canadian soldiers have been shooting off thousands of rounds of ammunition from their M777 155-millimetre howitzers at suspected insurgents and risking the lives of civilians rather doing foot patrols and village visits.

These big guns can fire shells a distance of 30 to 40 kilometres but do not have pinpoint line-of-sight accuracy, says one artillery expert. Described as “area weapons”, they may hit anything or anybody within a 300-metre radius of their target.

Langille suggests the Canadian Forces are acting out of frustration with the refusal of other NATO countries to provide combat reinforcements. “By the time [the Canadians] chose to deploy tanks and heavy artillery, they had to know they were going to lose [the war]. So they chose systems to lose the fewest people,” he said.

University of British Columbia political scientist Michael Wallace also has concerns about the overemphasis on armoured vehicles. In a report for the Ottawa-based Rideau Institute last June, he targeted the Canadian department of National Defence’s decision to deploy Leopard 2 tanks in Afghanistan.

Besides being vulnerable to insurgents’ weapons, he says, they also demonstrate how easy it will be for the mission to go off the rails.

“The problem is not the technical details of the tanks,” he stated. “The problem is a combat strategy that seeks maximum isolation between the Afghan population and Canadian soldiers, whether it is fast-moving LAVs, tanks, or helicopters. The message is, if we need to use these on a long-term basis, we’ve lost, no matter what the relative body count.”

“The way societies get modernised is not by force, because that generally backslides,” he said, referring to colonising nations confronting tribal cultures. “Countries modernise by creating incentives for people to be modern.”

One parallel, he says, is how the British discovered they could not break the equally tight clan system in Scotland until after the 18th century when it finally became economically advantageous for rural Scots to move to the cities.

But could Canadian reliance on armoured vehicles signal an even more ominous trajectory? After all, the Defence Department has acquired 120 of them, and very few are currently on the ground in Afghanistan.

Not surprising, says Eugene Lang, co-author of “The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar”, and a former chief of staff to defence ministers. To field the 20 now in use, he says, 100 are needed for training. “Half the fleet is probably in maintenance at any given point in time.”

UBC’s Wallace, however, believes the reality is far scarier. One possibility, he says, is that the Canadian military will move into other theatres of war, such as the volatile northwest border region of Pakistan, where insurgent forces are scoring victories over the Pakistani army.

The stakes may have been raised with the assassination of Pakistani opposition politician Benazir Bhutto.

“If things really go pear-shaped in Pakistan, I can see the Americans wanting us there. The population of Pakistan is larger than Russia’s. What a mess it would be,” continued Wallace.

The other possibility? “The government wants to prepare for a large expansion of the Afghan mission but doesn’t want to announce it until it has a majority government,” he added.

Meanwhile, the federal government is signaling some changes in the approach to the mission.

At a House of Commons committee on Nov. 27. Foreign Affairs Deputy Minister Leonard Edwards declared the Afghan mission’s much-vaunted “three Ds” mandate – development, diplomacy and defence – to be dead.

When the New Democratic Party Foreign Affairs critic Paul Dewar noted that this sounded suspiciously like a policy shift, Edwards waved him off, replying that the change is only a matter of government branches working in one effort. “We don’t have a three-D strategy; we have a one-D strategy – we’re all working together,” he said.

Also, Defence Minister Peter MacKay was quoted in the Globe and Mail suggesting that NATO countries reluctant to provide combat reinforcements to the conflict might instead take over development and infrastructure-building in southern Afghanistan, thus “freeing” up Canada’s effort there.

Could all this be a prelude to shedding the development portion of the mission? The Defence Department won’t comment and refers calls to Foreign Affairs, which denies there’s anything to be read from current events.

According to the department’s Kristina Davis, the feds will continue to honour Canada’s 1.17-billion-dollar development assistance commitment until 2011. “Our civilian officials and military personnel are helping the Afghan government build the institutions required to achieve stability and good governance,” she said.

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, May 24 2007 (IPS)

United Nations-style peacekeeping is getting a bad rap these days within Canada’s military, 60 years after then Prime Minister Lester Pearson came up with the idea of mediating the Suez Crisis following the British-French-Israel attack on Egypt.

Afghan boys watch Canadian soldiers from the 3rd Battalion, Royal 22nd Regiment Battalion Group conduct a patrol in the mountains near Kabul. Credit: Canadian Department of National Defence

At the start of this year, 56 Canadians were serving with U.N. peacekeeping missions around the world, which altogether total 72,784 military personnel. In August 1991, 1,149 Canadians in blue helmets were engaged in U.N. operations, then consisting of 10,801 soldiers.

A switch from a focus on peacekeeping to ramping up and reequipping the Canadian military in recent years under successive Liberal and Conservative governments is being praised by one prominent historian, Jack Granatstein. The downside of Pearson’s action, which led him to win a Nobel Peace Prize, is that “Canadians began to fall out of love with the true purpose of a military – to be ready to fight wars,” he has written.

Sean Maloney, a younger historian and author who has been “on the ground” with NATO forces four times in Afghanistan, told IPS he was one of the first academics to challenge “the myth” of Canadian peacekeeping and “soft power” of the former Liberal government.

“To sit here as these people did [and say] the U.N. and peacekeeping as expressed at the U.N. can solve all of Canada’s overseas problems, and that is what they have suggested, they are wrong,” he said.

In an article for Policy Options, published by the Montreal-based Institute for Research on Public Policy, Maloney wrote that “the cosmetic policies of the ‘responsibility to protect,’ U.N. peacekeeping mythology and the Africanist tilt within the foreign policy and development elites have further distracted us from the primary problem our society faces: the challenge of radical Islam both internally and on the international stage, specifically in Afghanistan.”

But Walter Dorn, an associate professor at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto, who recently returned from a year-long assignment with the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping, where he studied the application of monitoring technologies, counters that a pure emphasis on military force in the post-9/11 world is not working.

He says that even after six years of “producing as many enemies as we are killing” in Afghanistan, it is not too late for the U.N.-supported NATO counterinsurgency mission, in which 2,500 Canadian soldiers are involved, to switch gears.

But it would mean abandoning the tough guy combat tactics which have led to civilian casualties, Dorn told IPS. He has positive words for the military contribution from the Netherlands within NATO, with its avoidance of offensive action, significant casualties on either side and a focus on reconstruction.

“The Dutch strategy in Afghanistan is much better in the long term. It creates more friends than enemies instead of vice-versa. But even the careful Dutch work is being jeopardised by the aggressive approach by other nations, especially the U.S. forces operating independent of the NATO chain of command under the U.S. ‘war on terror’, executed under Operation Enduring Freedom. It is hard to make new friends when your declared allies are shooting up the place.”

But the “war on terror” justification that lies at the root of the current Canadian contribution to the NATO mission in Afghanistan appears to be fraying at the edges politically, amid confusion in Parliament over the handing over of insurgent detainees to possible torture under Afghan authorities and a dip in support for the Conservative federal government.

In a recent surprise trip to Afghanistan, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited a school and stressed development aid and reconstruction rather the combat role of the Canadian presence.

“We know that Afghanistan’s future will not be secured through military means alone,” Harper told Canadian reporters.

A self-described optimist, Dorn told IPS that there is every possibility that a switch from brute force counter-insurgency to peace-building – witnessed recently, for instance, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo under U.N. auspices – is still feasible in Afghanistan if realism prevails. He observed first-hand while on U.N. business how a sophisticated combination of diplomacy and limited force in the DRC has culminated in the laying down of arms, refugees returning home, and an internationally recognised election.

“We can’t expect a corruption-free regime in the medium term in Afghanistan,” he said. “The most we can expect is a Pakistan-type government, which has, admittedly, plenty of corruption, abuse, cronyism and Taliban sympathisers. In the long term, there is hope Afghanistan might be more like India.”

Maloney strongly challenged this assertion, pointing to the failure of the U.N. blue helmets to halt genocide in Rwanda and Srebrenica in Bosnia, for instance, as well as the violent internal conflicts amidst the chaos of Somalia. “My argument is that [the United Nations] has had its day,” he told IPS.

One of the toughest critics of U.S. and NATO counterinsurgency efforts past and present is former U.S. National Security Council adviser Edward Luttwak. The conservative senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies and former Pentagon consultant notes that the Taliban appears to have the cooperation of local inhabitants.

In an interview, Luttwak pointed out that the ancient Romans managed with a small number of legionnaires to cruelly stamp out rebellions by destroying entire villages to set an example for the rest of their imperial subjects pondering resistance. But the Soviets did not dare cross that ethical line in Afghanistan, nor will NATO and the U.S. forces, he said.

“In other words, every empire knows how to [do counter-insurgency]. No democracy can do it. I mean, no democracy should do it,” Luttwak said.

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Mar 2 2007 (IPS)

Can Canadians have a fair debate on their military mission in southern Afghanistan when so many of the sources quoted in the domestic press are bankrolled by the Department of National Defence (DND)?

That’s the worry of peace studies experts who point out that a disproportionate number of those quoted by the media or penning op-eds on foreign affairs hail from the 14 defence, international studies and military history programmes across the country receiving DND dole-outs.

Peter Langille, a University of Western Ontario professor specialising in conflict resolution, has a word for the scholarly recipients of such funds – “embedded”. He’s critical of the federal department’s 2.13-million-dollar annual Security and Defence Forum (SDF) programme, which shells out funds for research.

“It has a near monopoly over discussion and programmes not only of defence issues, but also IR [international relations studies] within Canadian academe,” he said, referring to the prevalence of a paradigm inclined toward a “long war” policy and expansion of the military sector.

It’s a worry shared by Mark Vorobej, acting director at the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton. The problem for conflict resolution programmes everywhere, Vorobej says, is that they don’t have powerful allies but instead have to shuffle along on ad hoc funding and indifference from university administrations.

“We have a solid track record of delivering a substantial bang for the miserly buck the university gives us, but after 17 years, we still do have not a single faculty position,” Vorobej said.

Things are certainly flush at the SDF-supported Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary, headed by the oft-quoted David Bercuson, who champions a stronger defence sector and a sustained war against the Taliban. The last 18 months, he admits, have been good ones for advocates of military preparedness. “I’d like to think that we have had some impact on government thinking, both the previous government’s and the current one’s,” he said.

It’s the same sense of satisfaction expressed by Queen’s University’s Doug Bland, chair of the DND-financed defence management studies programme. He helped edit the book “Canada Without Armed Forces?”, which was instrumental in a 10.9-billion-dollar bump in military expenditures over the next five years in the 2005 federal budget.

Have proponents of a stronger military been able to set the tone? IPS asked. “Oh, absolutely,” said Bland. “In fact, I just got off the phone for an hour with somebody from CanWest News. The media come to us almost all the time looking for background.” Kim Richard Nossal, head of political science at Queen’s and a member of a committee that decides which centres get SDF funding, believes Langille has got it terribly wrong. But he does admit that defence academics tend not to stray too far from politics as they are now arranged. “At one level Peter is correct,” Nossal said. “There are very few people who do defence studies from a radical perspective, that is, non-mainstream and critical of the government’s perspective.”

One such “non-mainstream” scholar is University of British Columbia’s Michael Byers, an international law expert who’s been critical of Canada’s current Afghan mission. He talks about the potentially “chilling” impact DND munificence can have on academic research. That’s why he says he maintains a distance from the SDF funds flowing into the campus’s Liu Institute for Global Issues, where he is academic director.

“Out of respect for my colleagues’ freedom of decision making, the only steps I’ve taken are (a) not to use or benefit from the SDF money, and (b) to request that my name not be listed as part of the UBC stable of experts on applications for renewal of the funding.”

Not all of the SDF centres, however, are exactly alike. York University’s Centre for International and Security Studies, for one, promotes itself as more critical theory-oriented in areas like international relations than others. Last year, it had to go through considerable negotiation to fit the new scholarly priorities of DND, which include failed states, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and Canada-U.S. defence.

“There were very, very few references in York’s proposal to the word ‘defence’,” said Aaron Hywarren, director of public policy at DND, who says SDF gets a thousand inquiries a year from reporters seeking quotes from its subsidised academics.

David Dewitt, former director of the York centre, defends DND cash as a way of fostering new scholarship, but he is concerned nonetheless about a “narrowing” of the SDF criteria.

“The situation right now between the Department of National Defence and the pressure of the SDF group on academics is problematic and troubling, but is, perhaps, one of those things that will change when there is a change in government,” he said.

This is not to say that all defence scholars are wont to bolster the military quotient of Canada’s foreign policy. It’s just that those who don’t have a difficult time, as Walter Dorn, a professor at the Canadian Forces College (affiliated with the DND’s Royal Military College) has discovered.

Last March, Dorn found himself in the middle of a controversy when the minister of defence received complaints about his articles lamenting the demise of peacekeeping. The college’s principal stood up for Dorn’s academic freedom. The armed forces, Dorn says, resents “the public’s view that our soldiers are peacekeepers.”

But if not all military studies folk are hawkish, not all hawks get SDF funds for their research. Take the case of Jack Granatstein, York U professor emeritus and board member of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute. He is near the top of the list of military experts quoted by the media, according a study by independent defence analyst Steven Staples.

Staples’s survey, which doesn’t include the Globe and Mail, one of Canada’s national newspapers, concludes that from February to September 2006, Gen. Lewis Mackenzie was quoted 224 times in the press, Granatstein 133, the Conference of Defence Associations 96, the Mackenzie Institute 63 and Bercuson 56. Staples himself was the only conflict resolution expert to rate, with 126.

Granatstein, along with Bercuson, pushes an agenda that includes closer Canada/U.S. military cooperation and an abandonment of peacekeeping. But despite his high profile, he is demure. “I wish I had more influence,” Granatstein said, chuckling on the phone. He is working on a new lobby organisation, Canadians for Defence and Security, aimed specifically at countering peace advocates like Staples.

Staples, however, is doing some retrenching of his own, setting up a new think tank, the Rideau Institute. “My concern is that this intolerance for any discussion of policy that deviates from the priorities of the brass is spreading into the general public,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Oct 10 2006 (IPS)

Washington’s pre-emptive war, in which Muslims are picked up, labeled as Islamic terrorists and then sent to a foreign state where under torture they confess wrongly to membership in al Qaeda, is at the heart of what happened to an innocent Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, says Maureen Webb, an Ottawa lawyer and author of the forthcoming book, “Illusions of Security”.

Following the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001 and the signing of a series of security agreements between Canada and the U.S. under the former Liberal government, Canada’s national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), handed over its entire case file, including unsubstantiated allegations on Canadian citizens, to U.S. authorities, Webb told IPS.

“Without caveats, all of the junk as well as the good stuff, as well as the comments, they sent their entire file to the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) and probably the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency),” she said.

Telecommunications engineer Maher Arar was flying back from a vacation in Tunisia in September 2002 when he was unknowingly caught in the crosshairs of a new U.S.-led security regimen that was international in scope.

Upon arriving in New York on his way home to Canada, Arar was detained by U.S. authorities and deported to his country of origin, Syria, a country with a poor human rights record, even though he had a Canadian passport – a practice known as “extraordinary rendition”.

After a year in jail in Damascus, he was subsequently released and allowed to return home where he told the Canadian public that he had been tortured and forced to make false confessions in order to avoid ill treatment from his interrogators.

Although the U.S. government declined to send officials to appear before the Canadian commission of inquiry into the Arar case, the presiding judge, Dennis O’Connor, issued a critical report on Sep. 18 this year that placed much of the blame for his deportation to Syria on the RCMP, which provided information to the U.S. that erroneously accused Arar and his wife Dr. Monia Mazigh – who was never arrested or charged – of terrorist links.

“I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offence or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada, O’Connor concluded.

The judge also indicated that Canadian police agencies relied on information received from Syria about Arar “which was likely the product of torture”. He added that “no adequate reliability assessment was done to determine whether the information resulted from torture.”

Ten days later, at a parliamentary public safety and national security committee meeting, RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli formally apologised on behalf of his officers for the ordeal experienced by Maher Arar and his family. He admitted that although he subsequently realised that the force had mislabeled Arar as a terrorist after what happened in New York, this information did not get passed along to the Canadian government.

Zaccardelli also stated his force was unable to find the sources of several leaks from unknown RCMP officers to the press, who continued to accuse Arar of terrorist links even after he had returned home to Canada.

The RCMP commissioner conceded that the authorities committed errors amid the confusion following the Sep. 11 attacks and stated the force was undertaking internal reforms.

“Of course, this doesn’t excuse or allow us to avoid facing head-on the ramifications of that time. But the fact is, we were in a very different world on Sep. 12,” he said.

The commissioner’s defence has not lessened the calls for him to take more responsibility for what happened to Arar, and even to resign, by some newspaper editorial writers and opposition politicians.

“Also, no Mountie involved in this case has been disciplined. Some have even been promoted,” stated the Toronto Star in a recent editorial.

While Maureen Webb is not opposed to dismissals, she questions whether this is sufficient.

“I think the focus on whether Zaccardelli should resign or not or be fired is a little narrow, because certainly he should be fired, but I think it minimises the situation. It is not just about one bad manager or a few rogue officers, it is about a whole system,” said Webb, who is a lawyer at the Canadian Association of University Teachers.

“There is a falsity to say that there were rogue elements or that the RCMP was the only agency – that it was off the mark or incompetent, because the marching orders and the climate came from the top political levels.”

A recent internal FBI audit which found that U.S. agents have been carrying out investigations within Canada since 9/11 without the approval of Ottawa reinforces Webb’s concerns that this country is experiencing a serious loss of sovereignty to the larger power below.

She says that security has replaced trade as the “driver” for deep integration of Canada and the U.S. within North America.

“[The Canadian] government likes to spin it as information sharing, and who can argue with information sharing, it sounds like a good thing, but in fact what’s happened in these cases is much worse than information sharing,” she said.

What occurred in Canada in terms of U.S. intervention is comparatively mild compared to the secret U.S. special operations or “assassination teams” which are busy hunting down alleged terrorists in countries like the Philippines, she added.

“The war on terror has been a pretext for them to come back again [after a U.S. military withdrawal from the Philippines],” Webb added. “The U.S. military is doing ordinary police functions in the Philippines and it doesn’t even have a status of forces agreement.”

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Sep 8 2006 (IPS)

One of the lasting legacies of the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on Canada’s southern neighbour is the involvement of 2,300 Canadian troops as part of a NATO contingent in Afghanistan.

Although Canadian soldiers participated in the U.S.-led military campaign in late 2001 to overthrow the Taliban regime in Kabul, linked to the hijackings by Islamic fundamentalist extremists and destruction of landmarks in New York City and Washington, the then-government of Jean Chretien did not automatically support the subsequent U.S. intervention in Iraq in 2003.

Like many other governments around the world, Ottawa did not buy the argument by the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush that the Saddam Hussein-led government in Baghdad was connected to the events of 9/11.

Canada chose instead to support a rebuilding process in the Afghan capital of Kabul under the NATO International Security Assistance Force, while the U.S. military engaged in a mop-up operation to eliminate the remnants of the Taliban.

Five years later, the Taliban are on the resurgence in their stronghold in the southern Pashtun region. NATO commanders who took over the international force this summer from the U.S. are conceding that the task of defeating the insurgents is proving to be more of a challenge than had been previously contemplated.

“We cannot eliminate the Taliban,” Canadian Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor told a Reuters reporter in Australia this week, “not militarily anyway. We’ve got to get them back to some sort of acceptable level.”

Recently, the Conservative government of Stephen Harper has sought to ramp up recruiting for the Canadian Forces. One leading newspaper, the Globe and Mail, revealed a draft of the advertisement, which characterises going to Afghanistan as an exciting opportunity “to fight terror.”

But the continued unpopularity of Canada’s Afghan mission as demonstrated by recent polls – one in July found that 55 percent of Canadians opposed the country’s presence in Afghanistan, while another in August found 46 percent opposed – indicates that the invocation of “9/11” by leading politicians here lacks the same resonance it has in the U.S., said Scott Taylor, editor of Esprit de Corps, a magazine aimed at the Canadian soldiers.

While the spectre of 9/11 keeps the U.S. tied down in Afghanistan, citizens in the other NATO countries feel less of an emotional commitment to battling Islamic extremism in the form of the Taliban, says Taylor. He questions how long the NATO-led command can last as the casualties mount in the various national armies of the international mission.

Thirty-two Canadian soldiers have died since 2002 – half in the last three months. Last week alone saw the deaths of 19 British soldiers in Afghanistan.

“We have been told by a Canadian officer on the ground that every time we kill one of [the insurgents] they attract 15 more recruits just because it is setting an example. These guys become martyrs,” he told IPS.

Nobody in Canada wants to see Afghanistan turn into the equivalent of the quagmire experienced by the U.S. forces in Iraq, notes Steve Staples, a defence analyst with the Ottawa-based Polaris Institute.

“That is what people are looking at. It seems like a pointless cycle of attacks and counterattacks and claims of victory, which are then responded to [by the insurgents] with more suicide bombs. And Canadian troops are being put in a position where they are shooting at teenagers on motorcycles, and killing 10-year-olds because they are so afraid for their own safety,” he said.

Canadians have trouble getting their minds around the idea that their soldiers are engaged in a counter-insurgency, adds Staples, who says the Harper government has tried to rectify that by selling the current Canadian mission as “aid workers with guns”.

“I think they are banking on public opinion to support the mission if they believe it has a humanitarian aspect. They are basically trying to use the humanitarian aspect to replace peacekeeping,” he said.

But the provincial reconstruction teams, led by the various NATO armies, are having difficulty getting their job done in the volatile south of Afghanistan as long as there is a war going on, says John Watson, who heads Care Canada. He says that the major aid agencies, including World Vision and Save the Children, are staying out of the area because they do not want to be seen locally as siding with the U.S. and NATO-led counter-insurgency operation.

“You get caught in a situation where you end up building schools and they end up blowing up schools because the actual building of the schools becomes your project to win the hearts and minds. So the other side decides, if that is the main purpose of it, let’s get rid of them,” Watson told IPS.

Some military analysts place much of the blame for the rising insurgency on the kill-the-Taliban focus of the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom military force, which critics say leaves no room for either offering security to the villages or reconstruction in Afghanistan.

NATO’s broader mandate was supposed rectify some of these errors, but John Siebert, executive director of the group Project Ploughshares in Waterloo, believes that “the rules of engagement will not be changing, that they will be continuing to engage the counter-insurgency and [taking] aggressive action, going out to hunt down the Taliban.”

This strategy did not work when it was undertaken by the U.S.-led Operation force, adds Sam Zia-Zarifi, the Asia division research director for Human Rights Watch.

“You don’t beat an insurgency anywhere just by killing the enemy and as [Afghan president Hamid] Karzai pointed out, very rightly, each of these people who are being killed are Afghans and they have family and you don’t win hearts and minds by killing so many people,” he said.

Excerpt: