Tag: politics
What if I told you…
Keep the sheeple afraid, and you can do what you want with them.
Is it sad, or scary, or both, that something that Hermann Goering said in the context of the Nuremberg trials seems to be poignantly relevant to the current political climate in North America?
“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Goering shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
My take on Quebec politics
My take on a classic Bado caricature. The original, it should be noted, was with Robert Bourassa and Pierre-Marc Johnson.
Baseless smear campaign my ass!
From Slashdot:
Canada’s election fraud scandal continues to unfold. Elections Canada just matched the IP address used to set up thousands of voter suppression robocalls to one used by a Conservative Party operative, and a comparison of call records found a perfect match between the illegal calls, and records of non-supporters in the Conservative Party’s CIMS voter tracking database, as well as evidence access logs may have been tampered with. Meanwhile, legal challenges to election results are underway in seven ridings, and an online petition calling for an independent public inquiry into the crisis has amassed over 44,000 signatures. The Conservative Party still maintains their innocence, calling it a baseless smear campaign.
The conservatives are leading Canada down a path that I don’t like
I’ve been reading the news on the CBC and on La Presse regarding the new tough crime omnibus bill that Harper’s Tories have rammed through the commons and I don’t like the way things are going for Canada. Having a bit of outside perspective, I’m seeing that Canada really is becoming the 51st state and I really don’t like it.
Prisons-for-profit are commonplace in the US, with the “land of the free” having the highest incarceration rates and prison terms in the world. Seriously. Numbers from 2008 show that approximately one in every 31 adults in the US was behind bars, or being monitored (probation and parole). The prison population has quadrupled since the 1980s, partially as a result of mandatory sentencing that came about during the “war on drugs.”
What’s really scary is that, both in the US and now in Canada, the people behind these tough new crime and immigration laws aren’t in it for the safety of the man on the street. They’re in it for the money. The lobby groups funding these bills and pushing them forward are basically the mouthpieces for privately run incarceration corporations, who want a bigger share of a billion-dollar industry. For these companies to do well, people have to go to prison. For this to happen, new policies need to be enacted, policies that serve them: harsher prison sentences and greater reliance on incarceration than on probation and parole.
I wholeheartedly agree with Bob Rae (scary!): “It makes no sense for the government to be going in this direction. It’s not a real crime prevention strategy, it’s a prison promotion strategy, it’s an incarceration strategy, that I think will prove to be a very costly mistake for Canada,” said Rae.
From the CBC:
The toughening of jail sentences and the introduction of new mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug and other offences are among the measures opposed by critics. Louise Arbour, former justice at the Supreme Court of Canada, is one of those critics and a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a group that studies and makes recommendations on national drug policies around the world. She told CBC News on Monday that mandatory minimum sentences are generally “bad criminal law policies.”
They preclude judges from considering the specific circumstances of the offender and the offence and tie their hands, Arbour said. With marijuana-related offences, mandatory minimum sentences “go completely against the modern thinking by world leaders about the direction that the so-called war on drugs should take after 40 years of failure,” she said.
The government says it is targeting drug traffickers, but Arbour says mandatory minimum sentences won’t put a dent in what is a global problem. In her opinion, the safe streets and communities act is “a very costly enterprise that is based on ideology rather than science and progressive experimental initiatives that Canada is very famous for,” Arbour said.
So yeah… Mandatory sentencing, strongarm political tactics, dodgy election practices. Welcome to the Land of the Free Up North, Eh?
Canada, what the fuck have you done to yourself?
From the CBC: With 99 per cent of polls reporting, the Conservatives won 167 seats, followed by the NDP with 102, Liberals with 34 and the Bloc Québécois with four and the Green Party with one. A party needs to capture 155 seats to win a majority in the House of Commons.
Canada, seriously! He was the first prime minister to lead a party that lost a vote of non-confidence with contempt, and you vote him back in with a majority government? What the hell were you thinking?