So I was busy at the end of last week and missed the chance to comment on the Tories’ decision to scrap the full, proper census in favour of a “less intrusive” short form. David Eaves explains well enough that removing the long-form census hobbles government’s ability to perform social services for the general public (and of course it’s shocking that the Harper government would hobble the government’s ability to deliver public services) and Counternarratives pointed out that the reasoning behind the removal of the long-form census – privacy concerns – is stupid, considering that census participation is anonymized and then analyzed only in a giant aggregate mass.

But this isn’t about privacy, because that’s a silly concern, and Harper might be a bit of an ideologue but he’s never been a stupid one. And it’s not about the delivery of social services either, although that’s of course a wonderful bonus when you’re talking about a government which has made it quite clear they’re disinterested in providing them. This is, when you get to it, about accountability. Eaves mentions this when he points out that with less data, private citizens are less able to argue against government action (or, for that matter, large business action). But that’s just one aspect of it.

Censuses, at their heart, are the best single measure of longterm government performance, because they demonstrate longterm societal trends: population migration, demographic change, economic stability. When you consider the Harper government’s general lack of interest in accountability, them killing the census makes even more sense than it previously did; census data is among the best ways to hold a government accountable for their actions because it provides big-picture data, and a lot of it.

God, what a useless government we’ve got.

So the swirling rumour in Canadian politics of the day is that the Liberals and the New Democrats will unify to create a new, centre-left party.

Now, on the one hand, this sounds reasonable, because this is basically what the right-wing parties in Canada did years ago. On the other hand, the basic argument for this idea is that the Liberals are incapable of finding a leader with charisma, and at least Jack Layton looks vaguely human. (Note that the link points out that a “Liberal Democrat” party led by Layton would be victorious, and one led by Michael “useless limpdick” Ignatieff would lose. That Michael Ignatieff would lose an election in a country where generally only forty percent of the country at best is inclined to vote Tory tells you a lot about how useless a limpdick he in fact is.)

Of course, the problem is that in getting the strengths of both parties, you also get their weaknesses: this means you combine the funding collapse of the Liberals with the not-ready-for-prime-time economic strategies of much of the NDP (and, speaking as someone who has spent time in the NDP previously and is pretty reliably left in his politics, some of the lack of understanding of basic economic principles of many Dippers is just incredibly irritating to me). The potential voter has both the leeriness of voting soulless Liberal (and the Liberals will be soulless for as long as it takes them to start defending their record of leadership; why nobody in the party bothers to point out that Paul Martin’s government is largely responsible for Canada mostly avoiding the global financial meltdown is beyond me) and unready NDP. That combination is potentially toxic.

Of course, what’s more important is whether or not a reformed Liberal party would have any chance of picking up additional seats. Would they get a majority? Probably not. Looking at 2008 election results, if you go with a formula of “Liberal Democrats” getting a combined vote of the NDP and Liberals in any given riding and then subtracting ten percent (assuming the most pessimistic scenario with swing voters going Tory and disaffecteds voting Green), they pick up about another twelve to fifteen ridings, which still doesn’t win them an election. However, the upside is that the ridings they’ve already won become extremely solid, which means they can campaign harder in swing ridings and have more effect; they can also more reliably portray themselves as a national party, as they would become competitive in quite a few ridings in BC and Manitoba where they currently aren’t.

Is it a good idea? With the right leader, potentially. Unfortunately, they don’t really have the right leader. When Jack Layton is your best-case scenario, you have issues.

Darren Kramble writes to ask:

As a Canadian ex-pat, I know that the Tories currently have a minority government, but I have no idea how that is going. Anyway, I live in the UK, and the country seems to be freaking out at our hung parliament, as if it is the end of the political world. I’m fairly happy with it, as Labour is now out, as they inevitably would be, but the Tories don’t have a majority that would allow the more batshit crazy things they might want to try. So, any advice to the UK? How is having a minority government working?

Short version: not very well.

Longer version: In the past, Canada’s had very productive minority governments. Lester B. Pearson, for example, gave us major policy changes with a minority government, which included universal healthcare, armed forces unification, and our new flag. There’s nothing in a minority government that inherently says that they have to be unproductive or bad.

However, our recent minority governments, while certainly not outright disastrous, is less than satisfactory. There’s a few reasons for this, some of which are specific to Canada and some of which I’m pretty sure are universal.

What’s specific to Canada is that here, our parties have become regionalized to a certain extent – the Liberals in the eastern half and more urban areas of the country, the Tories in the western half and more rural areas, the NDP competing mostly with the Liberals for space. There’s less incentive to cooperate because excacerbating cross-party and therefore regional tension is, frankly, better for your electoral prospects. (In a UK context, this seems like it could potentially be an issue, given that Labour and the Tories have their regional strongholds to an extent.)

What’s not specific to Canada is this: in a minority government, somebody has to take power. This seems like it’s not an issue, but it is because the minority government, Parliamentary power or not, is in charge and therefore can determine when an election takes place, either by calling one or by putting forth a bill which gets defeated.

This seems like a precarious position, but in practice it isn’t, because in Canada the Tories have figured out something which is obvious on its face but which has no real applicable context beyond a minority government position, which is this: the electorate mostly doesn’t like elections. Which isn’t surprising, because elections tend to be vast resevoirs of bullshit expunged forth combined with general nastiness and pettiness, made even less pleasant thanks to the omnipresence of mass media. (This is my general theory as to why electoral participation has steadily trended downward in most democracies over time.)

So if voters don’t like elections, what do they want? As few elections as possible. But what do minority governments generally guarantee? An election sooner rather than later. So whenever the minority threatens to bring down the government over an issue, you get the endless caterwauling about “endless elections” from both the citizenry and the media willing to complain about it (and they are more than willing, believe me). Which in turn means that the minority is generally blamed for the extra elections which come with minority governments, even when that doesn’t actually make sense given the track record. (Note that the 2006 and 2008 federal elections were both called by the party in power trying to seize electoral advantage; the former failed for the Liberals, the latter succeeded for the Conservatives.)

So there’s essentially a built-in political downside to forcing an election if you’re in the minority. What happens? Well, in Canada we mostly have feckless dipshits for political leaders (really – David Cameron looks good in comparison), so their natural political cowardice combines with the disincentive to call a federal election and thus you have a minority government more or less governing as a majority government, which just pisses off and disenfranchises everybody who didn’t vote for them. (Which, in Canada, right now means more than 60 percent of the country.) This just perpetuates the vicious cycle: voters are disillusioned by their lack of control over political process, so they don’t vote, which results in them having even less control, and so on and so forth.

In short: first-past-the-post systems are terrible for minority governments. A proportional system like Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems want is much better for producing responsive minority governments because they basically require cross-party cooperation to work in the first place; that’s what you want.

Torontoist asked me to weigh in on whether Toronto should be its own province, so I did that very thing.

Grazzt requested

A comparison of our Reform Party and the American Tea Party movement, and anything the Americans can learn from the Canadian experience with a successful fledgling grassroots movement.

Unfortunately, due to societal differences, the answer is “probably not a lot.”

First off, a quick dime’s worth of exposition for Americans unfamiliar with the history of Canadian politics: the Reform Party was a political party that spun off from the old Progressive Conservatives1 back in the late 80s, grew to dominate western Canada’s conservative political scene, and then rebranded itself as the Canadian Alliance party because they decided they needed a stupid name too before ultimately re-unifying with the remnants of the PCs to become the new Conservative Party of Canada, which the Reformers dominated far more greatly.

Now, with that exposition out of the way, the first distinguishing factor between the Reform Party and the tea partiers is that Reform had its genesis as an explicitly regionalistic party. Reform was created for no other reason than to address western Canadians’ conservative political concerns. Now, granted, you can argue that the tea partiers are disproportionately located in one portion of the United States (e.g. the South, and to a lesser extent the Midwest), but their concerns aren’t really regional in basis.

The second distinguishing factor is that the Reform Party had its real arrival as a national force (okay, still primarily a regionally based national force, but even so, one able to compete electorally across the country) because the Progressive Conservatives from whom they split off were the party in power. The PCs had attempted an ambitious and unpopular Constitutional reform which failed, plus instituted the GST2 and led the country during a period of recession and were deeply, deeply unpopular. The new, invigorated base of the Reform Party was thus former PCs. Again, you can attempt to draw similarities by suggesting that the majority of tea partiers are somewhat disaffected Republicans, but there are less Republicans than Democrats in the USA and they’re not in power. This is why you see tea partiers more interested, in a lot of cases, in “taking back” the Republican party by supporting tea-party-friendly candidates over moderate Republicans: they’re still reacting against the party in power, but the party in power is the Democrats, to whom they’re ideologically opposed.

However, the tea partiers have the same problem that Reformers did back in the day, which is that the bulk of the political mainstream sees them as stupid hicks who are, at the very least, slightly racist. The Reform Party dealt with this by disavowing or dropping support for the occasional prominent member or candidate who fucked up and said something too obviously racist or homophobic in public, but generally didn’t bother reprimanding or commenting when one of their run-of-the-mill members did so. This is at least in part the reason why the Reform Party – and later the Canadian Alliance – never really broke through in Ontario or Quebec, which are more liberal provinces than the western half of Canada generally.3

And ultimately, it’s worth remembering that the Reform Party’s success at finally becoming mainstreamed into Canadian politics (rather than a permanent opposition party) only happened when they merged with the remnants of the old Progressive Conservatives, a rebranding which made them more accessible to the Canadian general public. However, that rebranding also caused them to become slightly more moderate, or at least to accept more moderately conservative politicians into their framework. I don’t think the tea partiers are really interested in doctrinal inclusivity – mostly because a lot of them don’t have any fucking clue about policy other than they like to shout a lot – so this route to success might pose problematic for them.4

Finally, note that this rebranding created a balancing act which is problematic because Stephen Harper is probably the only politician in the entire party that the old-school moderate Tories and the right-wing Reformers will accept as a leader, and Harper can’t be the leader forever: as he straddles the fault line of the conservative movement in Canada he gets stretched further and further, and more and more of the old Reformers grow alienated. Eventually, they’ll demand that one of their idiot MPs take command, and that’ll work about as well as Stockwell Day’s tenure as leader did.

1. Yes, we all know it was a stupid name. Whatever. [↩]
2. New sales taxes have always been a formula for unpopularity. [↩]
3. People think British Columbia is some sort of massive hippie commune because of the existence of Vancouver, but outside of Vancouver there are people so conservative they’re still not sure about these newfangled telephones. [↩]
4. And finally, although I don’t want to get into the details, a parliamentary system such as Canada’s is a lot friendlier to the genesis of new parties than the United States’ governmental system is. [↩]

…working on this in response to the Adam Giambrone sex scandal.

Hey, this is the most exciting Toronto municipal politics have gotten in ages!

It’s never been an actual secret that John Baird, Canada’s current Minister for the Environment, is gay. He’s just not openly gay; he doesn’t advertise it because, well. Tory.

Anyway, the Tory candidate running in a Toronto MP by-election was asked about the Tories’ record on gay issues, and was challenged to name one openly gay Tory MP, and she named John Baird. So he’s basically been outed.

This is almost entirely meaningless, except for the life-affirming fact that gay people can now take pride that they can be stupid dipshits just like straight people. And isn’t that a wonderful thing?

So I don’t know if the non-Canadians have been paying attention, but this latest bit of Stephen Harper’s fuckery should probably merit it. Remember this story the next time you complain about your country’s politicians, because there simply isn’t a more pathetic political class in any first-world country than Canada’s.

See, the thing is that right now, the Tories are undergoing a bit of a scandal. Well, they’re always in a bit of a scandal – that’s Canadian politics for you – but right now there’s the Afghan detainee scandal, wherein it increasingly appears that the Conservative government did not merely turn a blind eye to what happened when Afghan detainees were transferred to Afghan custody – where those detainees were almost certainly tortured – but in fact deliberately tried to cover up the fact that they were taking a blind eye (seeing as how that would be illegal). There’s been numerous calls for a independent public inquiry to investigate the matter.1 The Tories have been very clear that this will not happen on their watch.

However, the Tories have come up with a clever tactic to hopefully make this all go away: Stephen Harper has prorogued Parliament. Or, in less arcane English, he’s shut it down until the budget is due in March, over two months from now. This is the second time in a year Harper has prorogued Parliament in order to buy time and make a difficult political situation go away; the first time was to avoid a coalition government from removing him from the seat of power, which was, to say the least, ethically questionable.

But there isn’t anything questionable about this time: Harper and the Tories are simply trying to buy time so that people will get distracted from the scandal, hopefully by the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. And there’s no question that there’s no other reason for them to do this: Harper’s excuse is that the federal government needs to “recalibrate” its response to the economic downturn, which is just an insult to Canada’s collective intelligence. Harper proroguing Parliament stalled progress on his own crime bills – which are terrible, terrible bills, don’t get me wrong, but that he’s done it illustrates just how desperate he is for this to go away.

If Canada’s political leadership had any balls worth mentioning, Harper would be a walking dead man politically. But they don’t, so he might get out of this intact. Which is a shame, because a goddamn three-year-old could pin him to the wall if he felt like it. This is pathetic, a new low in Harper’s only very slender respect for the political traditions of this country: he and his government simply don’t give a damn about the politics of compromise. All those years of jerking off to the Bush Administration’s antics taught Harper the wrong lesson: namely, that government only works when you’re willing to play by the unwritten rules.

It’s not an incorrect lesson, because it’s true. But in order to use it, you have to be amoral in the worst kind of way. And look who we’ve got as Prime Minister.

1. Unsurprisingly, Bob Rae has had to basically lead the Liberals on this issue. This is partially because Michael Ignatieff’s track record on torture makes him look like a staggering hypocrite when he tries to talk about the issue, and partially because Michael Ignatieff is a useless limpdick. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

I’ve also done another of those “hey look at these comments” posts , this time about David Miller announcing he won’t run for a third term as Mayor of Toronto.

And if you haven’t read this Leonard Pierce special, you should.

So the Tories up here in the Theoretically Frozen North have managed to stave off an election once again, and what irks me is that they did exactly what they pilloried the Liberals and NDP for doing last year: namely, they got the Bloc on their side with governmental concessions. Somehow I doubt the screaming harpy chorus that cried out “cooperation with the Bloc is treason” when Stephane Dion suggested that maybe the parties which received the support of a majority of Canadian voters should run things will find their indignation quite so stoked.

People complain about the American media all the time, and with good reason, but the Canadian media has its own set of quirks that can really be annoying. One of them is the conceit that governing in Canada’s seemingly permanent minority government environment is difficult, and it simply isn’t. The Harper government figured out the two-part secret of how to do it a long time ago: run policy through the Prime Minister’s office and administrative channels of the government rather than legislating through Parliament, and bribe the Bloc whenever things get dicey.1 The fact that the Harper Tories have figured out this relatively simple equation and the Canadian media by and large has not is depressing; the fact that the Harperites could figure it out and then be basically dogshit at the actual job of governance, moreso.

Still, we’re most likely stuck with the useless assholes for another couple of years until the Liberals realize that Michael Ignatieff was a huge, huge mistake. (For American readers: Michael Ignatieff is kind of like Evan Bayh, except you want to punch him in the face even more.)

1. You can bribe other parties, but frankly it’s simplest to bribe the Bloc: you just find something the Quebec government wants, and give it to them. That’s the power regional parties bring to the table. [↩]

Iggy Popped

Poor Michael Ignatieff. For months he’s been neck-and-neck with Harper in the polls, and people have been warning him that if he doesn’t force an election soon it’ll make him look weak. Then no sooner does he say he won’t support the government any longer but his support drops by ten points, because people say they don’t want another election. Even the publication of a nearly hagiographical profile in The New Yorker probably can’t cheer him up now.

So what’s behind the about-face? Were people’s eyes just bigger than their electoral stomachs? Personally I think the not-another-election thing is a smokescreen, a rationalization for the ugly truth: people feel they ought to want to vote for Ignatieff, but nobody really does. Outside of the West nobody much wants to vote for Harper — certainly nobody wants to hand him a majority government — but they’re not ready to vote for Iggy either. He’s the classic case of someone who looks good on paper, the computer-selected date that generates no chemistry: he’s everything we say we want in a prime minister, but when it comes down to it we just can’t get behind him.

The reason, I think, is that he isn’t mean enough. It seems odd to say it, since Canadians are renowned for our polite and easygoing nature, but the fact is we like our leaders to be sons of bitches. Sure, we tell ourselves we like Trudeau because he was charming and did pirouettes and brought home the Constitution, but what we really liked was that he fought with US presidents and gave people the finger and invoked the War Measures Act. No wonder Robert Stanfield and Joe Clark — nice guys both; try to get anyone to say a bad word about Joe Clark — didn’t stand a chance. Mulroney was certainly mean: the only thing more dangerous than being his enemy was being his friend, always a temporary condition. And Chretien? The man choked a protestor! He made jokes about people being pepper-sprayed! He FOUGHT OFF A BURGLAR WITH A PIECE OF INUIT SCULPTURE! (That’s to say nothing of the damage he did to the English language daily.)

But Ignatieff is in a bind, because if he goes on the attack too much he’ll sound like he’s lecturing, which nobody ever likes. He also seems to be a guy who instinctively plays defense rather than offense, which doesn’t bode well for him. So Harper, whom we all say we don’t like, will probably stay, because he’s mean enough for us to respect him. (He’s also learned the secret to governing with a minority, which is to bypass Parliament completely and run the country through the PMO.) And we’ll all grumble and complain about the money that was wasted for yet another election that doesn’t change anything, and six months later we’ll be wondering why Ignatieff doesn’t man up and bring down the government already.

Revenge of the third banana

In all the hoopla around the Marvel-Disney deal and the Warner-DC restructuring, one point that’s come up again and again is the rich bank of characters each publisher owns, with the assumption that this is a good thing. The problem is that each company only owns one or two genuine first-tier properties (with first-tier being defined as “someone with whom a non-comics fan is almost certain to be reasonably familiar.”) For DC it’s obviously Batman and Superman; for Marvel it’s Spider-Man and maybe the X-Men or the Hulk — the X-Men weren’t really familiar to non comics-fans before the movies, but their fanbase was enthusiastic enough to guarantee good sales, while the Hulk is well-known to a certain part of the population which is, unfortunately, not the part that goes to movies. When you’ve only got a small number of properties, you’ve got to get them right: it took eight years for Warners to relaunch the Batman franchise after Batman and Robin, and they’ll probably have to wait ten years before the stink from Superman Returns blows away.

The success of Iron Man has people saying that the future is in the second-tier properties — which is a reasonable argument to make if you forget about Daredevil, Fantastic Four and Ghost Rider. I would argue, in fact, that Iron Man was successful because it wasn’t a comic book movie, or at least it didn’t look like one to the general public. After all, no matter how successful a comic book is, there simply aren’t enough fans to make a movie successful, never mind a franchise; you’ve got to appeal to people who don’t read the comic, and in most cases the trappings of a superhero comic — the costume, the secret identity, even the superpowers — work against that. But Iron Man, as presented in the movie, doesn’t have any of those things. The suit is presented as a tool or a vehicle throughout (note the direct comparison to a car), and the emphasis is always on Tony Stark as the pilot of the suit; we’re not invited to conflate the two into a single identity, as we are with Batman or Superman. As well, note that the villain uses the exact same technology as the hero, removing the two-origins problem that afflicts so many superhero movies. Even though it’s not actually more plausible than a typical superhero story, Iron Man feels more believable to people who aren’t accustomed to the tropes of superhero comics.

So are those thousands of characters, the ones that Disney just paid a mint for and Warner just realized they own, actually worth anything? Sure — but not the way people think they are. It’s very unlikely that Deadpool or Green Lantern or Thor or Wonder Woman are going to be franchises or even successful movies — cripes, I don’t know why Wonder Woman is even still a comic — and, more to the point, a flood of unsuccessful superhero movies, like the one that followed the 1989 Batman, will most likely make comic-book movies in general radioactive. If either studio is sensible, they’ll focus on the properties they own that, like Iron Man, can be sold to a broader audience: it’s probably no coincidence that the next two DC movies to hit the screen will be Jonah Hex and The Losers, both non-superhero comics. Another good example is Blade: could anyone have guessed that a supporting character from a long-cancelled comic would wind up being one of Marvel’s most successful licensed movies? But in fact it was the lack of baggage, the absence of superhero trappings that let Blade just be an action/horror movie, and that’s what let it be successful.

See, as comics fans we tend to assign an inordinate value to these properties, but to the movie industry they’re just more grist for the mill: they don’t care if something’s had one issue or a thousand, they don’t care if someone read it by flashlight under the covers when they were nine, they just want something that can be quickly made into one of the hundreds of scripts that keep the development cycle flowing — the more cheaply the better. If I were a production company, I wouldn’t even look at a DC or a Marvel property; I’d be scanning the small presses and webcomics, looking for the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Men in Black.

A few comments from yesterday’s general blogrequest post were Canada-themed and today is Canada Day and all, so it seems appropriate.

Lurkerwithout: Why people who call Canada “socialist” are, you know, stupid

Well, they’re kind of not entirely wrong. They’re wrong to directly equate socialism with communism, which they do all the time. But the modern point of balance of government is between socialist impulses and capitalistic ones, and Canadian society is certainly more socialist than the United States is. (Then again, most of the first world is more socialist than the United States is, but that is neither here nor there.)

But it is important to point out that officially, Canadian corporate tax rates are lower than American corporate tax rates. (Of course, unofficially there are so many loopholes in the American tax code that American-based corporations effectively pay barely any tax or often no tax at all.) The tax expense of being a Canadian citizen is not staggeringly higher than that of being an American citizen, and when you take into account that our taxes pay for most of our healthcare it’s probably about even.

But the counterpoint to the actual monetary argument is one of people’s attitude towards government. Canadians may gripe, but in the end we genuinely like government services and there is a general cultural attitude of being willing to pay taxes for those government services. Certainly we’d like to pay less, generally speaking, but there’s a difference between wanting to save money and the American anti-tax attitude that treats taxation as nothing more than theft.

So there’s that.

Canadave: I’d be interested to know what you think Canadian TV needs to do to in order to become\stay interesting and\or relevant.

Honestly, this is kind of a gimme question, because right now I think Canadian teevee is mostly already doing the right things: creating lower-than-American-budget television shows with pre-guaranteed markets (Canadian and American networks) that are of decent quality. I may not like The Listener or Flashpoint, but that’s because I watched them and decided they were just not my thing; it wasn’t because they were bad shows.

Would it be better if the Canadian television industry wasn’t one that over-relied on simulcasts of American shows with Canadian commercials and re-airs of old American content? Yes, undeniably. It wouldn’t be hard, either. Just limit a channel to, oh, fifteen hours a week of prime-time American shows. Even in the heyday of the old traditional “fall season” format of television, this would have only amounted to nine hours of Canadian shows in prime-time per week, which isn’t onerous to achieve (and a fifteen hour cap would have let Canadian networks air all of their most popular American shows, easy – you miss out on re-airing According to Jim, oh darn).

But given the refusal of the CRTC to make Canadian networks do anything that might make them cry bitter tears, I think things are about as good as they can be right now.

Bunnyofdoom: Your thoughts/feelings on being Canadian and what it means to you, and/or your idea of what Canadian Identity is.

You know, it’s funny, because whenever somebody asks me this question I always think of that episode of Friends where Phoebe is blathering on about past lives, and Joey gets worried because he thinks he doesn’t have one, so she responds, “Oh no, sweetie! You’re brand new!” Which is weird both because Canada is 140ish years old now and because I’m flashing to friggin’ Lisa Kudrow on a question about Canadian identity, but nobody ever claimed that I don’t have issues.

But I think of that because Canadians don’t have an identity in the way that the French do, for example. “Polite, friendly and considerate” is a nice stereotype to have, I suppose, but A) it’s a little overblown and B) just about everybody is polite and friendly.1 Germans might be humourless, but they’re polite and friendly about not laughing at your jokes. Italians might sleep with your wife, but they will be polite and friendly about it. And so forth.

We’re still a young country, and unlike America, which was born in the sort of circumstance which immediately invents a national character, we were essentially created out of compromise and convenience. “Polite and friendly” is the sort of stereotype that gets invented in the absence of a national character. It’s like a default precisely because it’s so bland and inoffensive.

So we’re essentially a country in search of a national character. There are some appealing options beyond “we like hockey,” and one of the reasons I’m a member of the New Democrats (much as it pains me to admit it) is that I think the NDP provide the best opportunity to expand upon our instinctive search for a national character in ways that I approve of. (The Tories have their own ideas, which I disagree with. The Liberals like bland and inoffensive.)

1. Except the French, and possibly the Koreans. [↩]

A while back, one of my commenters asked me why I had such a low opinion of Michael Ignatieff, the Liberal party “leader” here in Canada. The events of the last few weeks have demonstrated why my opinion of Ignatieff as “useless limpdick” is precisely correct.

Some background for non-Canadians. Things here right now are not exactly peachy, much like in the rest of the world. (We’re better off to an extent because our banks weren’t allowed under Canadian law to take the Debt-Gambling Plunge of Death ™ that the rest of the world’s banks so eagerly performed. Interestingly, the reason for this is because under Paul Martin, the then-government-leading Liberal party decided it was a bad idea, despite intense lobbying from the banks and the Tories – including Stephen Harper – to remove those restrictive laws. Why nobody mentions this any more is something I do not quite understand.)

Long story short: the Harper government claims that their stimulus spending is very successful. This is despite most of the stimulus spending actually having been used for capital investment or job creation or, you know, actual stimulus type things. That in turn is because the Harper Tories are frankly pretty shit at their jobs. Now, one of the ways government can spend money very efficiently to create immediate economic stimulus is to boost employment insurance benefits.1 Ignatieff wanted the government to boost EI payments, because the unemployed turn right around and spend the money and it makes the economy go wham. Harper did not want to boost EI payments, because then the government would be giving money to jobless people, and that makes Tories cry.

When Harper said this, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe immediately said they’d vote no-confidence in the government again, because they hate the Tories like poison anyway and this was just another opportunity to make that point. Ignatieff, however, decided to play chicken with Stephen Harper and say “I want W, X, Y and Z or I will topple your government.” This was moronic, because there is absolutely nothing that Harper likes better than getting to have an election and blame other people for it. Ignatieff was essentially promising to give Stephen Harper what he loved best – or else!

Now this in and of itself would be questionable, but the bigger problem is that Ignatieff decided to play chicken without having the balls to go all the way with it. Because what happened? Stephen Harper said “no,” and Ignatieff caved. Caving is what Ignatieff does. He’s been doing it ever since he became the party leader. Partly he’s been doing it because his support within the party comes from the big Bay Street wing of the party that has whatever money the Liberals still have left, and they want things handled a Certain Way. But mostly he’s been doing it because he is, as previously stated, a useless limpdick who wants to be seen as “reasonable.” So he had a Big Secret Meeting with Harper, and came out and said that the Liberals would support the Tories.

Understand: ten days ago, the Liberals were steamrollering the Tories in Ontario and Quebec polls. (Which, for the Liberals, are really the only ones that matter; if they pick up seats it’s going to be in central Canada, not in the East or West.) Now they’re back to dead even when the country really doesn’t like Harper that much. And why is this?

It’s because Michael Ignatieff is a useless limpdick. Nobody wants to vote for a chickenshit, and Michael Ignatieff is the worst kind of political chickenshit. Stephen Harper isn’t, regardless of whatever other faults he may have. That’s why he survives.

Top comment: Looking at the comments, I can’t help but notice that even Canada’s failures will forever be looked upon as cheap imitations of U.S. failures. — Benman

1. Here in Canada, we have “employment insurance” and welfare. The former is essentially something you pay into every month, and then if you lose your job you get some money for a while in place of a paycheque. The latter is classic welfare. What is being discussed here is employment insurance. [↩]

In the fingerprinting post on Monday, will writes:

I’m still not clear on how the police having my fingerprints — or my DNA — on file could be used to oppress me.

Abandoning the dire fantasies of totalitarian government – for that is what they largely are – we can find the idea of oppression in harm inflicted on the citizen that is, by and large, unintentional. I’m not talking here about the Glenn Beck school of “I have to pay taxes and so I am oppressed.” I’m talking about mistake.

Like I said before: I’m not anti-cop. Cops do a hard job and most of the time they get it mostly right. But they never get it entirely right. There are always people who slip through the cracks of proper procedure. I spent a year working for the Innocence Project at Osgoode, helping people challenge convictions they argued to be unjust, and in every case where I think there was someone genuinely innocent convicted of a crime, there was a common thread: the police had already decided that this person was guilty.

Again: the police are right, most of the time, when somebody is guilty. But not always. And it’s the not-alwayses that become the horror stories of the justice system. The spouse isn’t always the person who murders their partner, regardless of how common it is for that to be the case (and it is common, believe me). The black drug dealer might be a drug dealer, but it turns out he didn’t kill anybody. And so on and so forth.

And so this is how having your fingerprints on file can be used to oppress you: you are a suspect in a murder that you did not commit. The police regard you as the likely culprit. They look for evidence to tie you to the crime, and because you knew the guy, hey what do you know your fingerprints are all over the place. The police have your fingerprints already, which paints you in the eyes of a jury as a shady individual. That combination of circumstantial evidence and worsening of your image is enough to get you sent away to a lengthy jail term for a crime you did not commit. And you can’t appeal based on the evidence being wrong – the justice system doesn’t work like that. You can only appeal on points of law, not points of fact (IE, you can argue that your fingerprints were wrongly introduced as evidence because the potential for creating bias outweighed the probative value of the evidence – but, in all seriousness, good luck with that approach).

The police have a tough job. Sometimes they take shortcuts. It happens, we shouldn’t really judge them for it, and most of the time it doesn’t hurt anybody – except when it does. That’s why we need institutional safeguards built into the system to make sure that poor evidence collection methods aren’t abused. And that’s why de facto fingerprinting of individuals who haven’t even been arrested for a crime is wrong.

The Tories introduced legislation that would allow police to collect fingerprints before a person is charged with a crime and would not require the police to destroy those fingerprints should the person never be charged. The Tories argue that this is about “streamlining” the affairs of police to make them more efficient. But here’s the thing. Consider this quote from Rob Nicholson, the Justice minister:

“Crime is constantly evolving in Canada so it is crucial that our criminal justice system evolves with it.”

Now, I like Rob Nicholson. But what the fuck does that even mean? Let’s be blunt: the only reason for this legislation is to give police the power to collect fingerprints of people who can’t be proven to be criminals, or even can’t be charged with a crime because there’s reasonable and probable grounds to charge them with a crime. How comfortable are you with the police having that power? Because I’m not.

I’m not reflexively anti-cop, or even generally anti-cop. I think cops in Canada do a valuable and difficult job and most of the time they do it very well. But here’s the thing: since policing is always going to be a political hobbyhorse of one stripe or another, the cops always feel a bit besieged. That sucks and it’s not fair to them, but it’s not fair that doctors are expected to be miracle-workers or that lawyers are fodder for jokes about amorality when we all know that we should be making those jokes about accountants instead.1

But the practical public downside of the cops feeling besieged is this: they tend to close ranks when one of their own is accused of wrongdoing, be that accusation merited or not. Usually it isn’t. But when it is, they protect bad actors within the system. And I this is exactly why I don’t like giving the police additional powers that are obviously and blatantly fodder for abuse – and this is definitely an abusive power just waiting to be used improperly.

Top comment: I look forward to you getting telepathic judges and super-speed cops to deal with the rampaging mutant criminal element. — lilacsigil

1. Take that, beanpushers. [↩]