Spinor Info

Ottawa police is asking us to be vigilant. I am not sure what they mean.

I have a neighbor who is from the Middle East. Should I call police and warn them that he may have anti-Western sentiments?

I have a friend who has expressed leftist, dare I say anarchist, views on occasion. Should I call police and warn them that he may be a troublemaker?

Come to think of it, my own views of the authorities are not altogether charitable either. Can I be trusted? Or should I call police just in case and denounce myself?

While I was never overly fond of Stephen Harper’s brand of Canadian conservatism, I was reasonably comfortable with him leading a minority government.  I might have preferred, though, a Liberal minority. I supported Stéphane Dion’s coalition idea, and I was appalled by the way the Conservatives delayed, and eventually avoided, the confidence vote.

None of this seems to matter anymore. Ignatieff, who was expected to bring charisma where Dion supposedly had none, not only failed to do so, he seems hell bent on leading his party into ritual suicide. Take this harmonized sales tax business in Ontario and BC. While it may be the technically sensible thing to do (indeed, that’s the way the sales tax should have been done, would have been done back when the GST was introduced were it not for provincial opposition to the idea), many argue that it’s precisely the wrong thing to do at the time of a recession, especially as the provinces are unwilling to lower the provincial rate at the same time, which means that harmonization will turn into a sizable tax grab. But even if none of that is true, the HST is quite unpopular… and now Ignatieff’s federal Liberals are supporting it.

If I were Stephen Harper, I’d engineer an election in the near future. I think a majority Conservative government is all but guaranteed this time.

Concerned that Canada’s Conservative Party might win a clear majority in parliament in the next elections, some political commentators began offering ideas on how to prevent this from happening, how to defeat Stephen Harper and his government.

I am not interested in anyone telling me how I can stop the Conservatives. I don’t want to stop anybody. I want to vote FOR something, not against; I’d like to live in a country in which people from different political backgrounds can work together, as opposed to working to defeat one another. Let’s leave divisive partisanship to the Sarah Palins of this world.

What I’d like to be able to do is to vote for a party that tells me how they will actually govern and make things better. For instance, how they will:

• Balance the need to balance budgets with the need to use public funds to help the economic recovery.
• Formulate an intelligent policy concerning Afghanistan, not dogmatic deadlines (no “bring the troops home” populism but a policy that tells us what goals we’re trying to achieve there, why they’re achievable, and how they will be achieved).
• Fix Canada’s broken immigration system before we have to institute visa requirements for everyone just in case they claim refugee status here and manage to stay in the country for years while they wade through an antiquated and underfunded process.
• Examine the need for copyright reform (which may not even be necessary) that represents the interests of Canadians as opposed to secretly negotiated reforms like ACTA that are designed to turn everyone into a potential criminal for the sake of maximizing Disney’s profits.
• Address those social issues that prevented Canada from staying on the #1 spot in the UN quality-of-life lists.
• Address the need for a national infrastructure: for instance, an east-west electricity grid, an east-west highway network that is more appropriate for a first-world country (I just read an interesting article about this topic yesterday), and more domestic energy production, including a shift away from fossil fuels and towards nuclear, if necessary (I know my physics and I don’t duck-and-cover every time someone utters the word “uranium”).
• Perhaps tax reform, considering the idea of eliminating the income tax in favor of an increase in the GST, since it’s fairer, can be graduated to reflect public policy (e.g., reduced GST on essentials, higher GST on luxury items or items with a high environmental cost), MUCH easier and cheaper to administer, and removes a gross intrusion into privacy that income tax returns represent.
• Electoral reform that might include direct election of the head of government (like the US presidential elections; indeed, it’s not a shame to copy something if it happens to be a good idea), fully separating executive and legislative powers; no mandatory party-line votes, since MPs should represent their district, not their party leader; and runoff elections to prevent vote-splitting.
• Last but not least, in this security-conscious high-tech era, strengthened guarantees of individual rights and freedoms, yes, even if it means taking some security risks, as I’d much rather be free than safe.

OK, I’ll get off the pulpit now. The one thing I’m NOT interested in is defeating anybody. One defeats enemies, not fellow Canadians who happen to have a different opinion about some political topics.

Earlier this year, Michael Ignatieff replaced Stephane Dion as the head of the Liberal Party. This was supposed to change things: no more wimpy compromises, finally a charismatic (some even said scary) leader at the head of the official opposition who’ll surely fire Harper’s bumbling government soon.

Well, he didn’t. Ignatieff looks a great deal less scary today. And I can’t say that I agree with him. An all time record of a deficit, the incompetence of the minister handling the Chalk River affair, and a proposed crime bill that would seriously compromise our Internet privacy are just some of the issues that I have with Harper’s government and why I’d like to see him go.

The silver lining to this cloud is that we continue to enjoy the benefits of a minority government, which is far less likely to do harm than a government commanding a majority.

Of all the living heads of state, our Queen (yes, she’s the queen of Canada, too) is perhaps the only one who actually served in World War 2. So why on Earth is she not invited to next month’s 65th anniversary D-day ceremonies? If it’s the French doing it, then perhaps it’s time to rename French fries to, say, Quebec fries?

Yes, it looks more than a little suspicious: a former Prime Minister of Canada, meeting an internationally known arms dealer in secret at airport hotels and such, accepting large wads of cash in envelops, ostensibly for his lobbying efforts.

One thing Mulroney’s lawyers have not yet mentioned though is that in Europe, it is a lot more common to use cash, even for business transactions, than here in North America. So was Schreiber giving Mulroney cash because he thought it was normal? Perhaps… but then, why did Mulroney not just immediately deposit the cash into his bank account, like any normal person would?

Mulroney protests his innocence, even came close to tears at one point. I’d like to believe him… after all, I voted for him! But for now, I remain unconvinced.