Harper, S PM
mike roman
ding dong b2 clone bye bye
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/10/20/canadians_oust_stephen_harper_right_wing
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CDA: NO LNX
Among the names of 18 people indicted in Georgia along with Donald Trump for allegedly conspiring to steal the U.S. election is one few Canadians know: Mike Roman.
And why should we? He’s never grabbed headlines like some of the others charged — big shots like former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani or former presidential chief of staff Mark Meadows.
But Canadians had better get acquainted with Roman — an American whose resume includes preaching to Conservative party insiders and working alongside former prime minister Stephen Harper at a multinational body built to deliver elections for right-wingers.
Roman matters because in Canada, as well as the U.S. and many other countries today, third-party groups, often homegrown and emphatically authoritarian, pose a real threat to democracy. They are helping to elect governments that are subverting basic freedoms in the West.
Roman’s exposed role in the Georgia election scandal should act as a wake-up call to everyone who worries about what can only be called fascist-creep in democracies around the world.
In service of the Big Lie
Roman’s indictment alleges that in late November 2020, he urged other campaign officials to contact state legislators in Georgia to encourage them to appoint Trump electors — after Trump had clearly lost the election.
Roman also organized speakers for a Dec. 10, 2020 hearing before a Georgia house committee to spread false information, namely that the state’s vote was riddled with fraud. Giuliani, also indicted under the same racketeering statute as Roman, was the star of that shit show.
But Roman’s role was even bigger. According to testimony before the select congressional committee probing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Roman handled most of the organizing of the fake electors scheme in seven battleground states.
During his own testimony before the select committee on Aug. 10, 2022, Roman asserted his Fifth Amendment rights at least 130 times. Remember what Trump said? Only guilty people plead the fifth.
Roman’s backstory is a tangled tale, but one worth telling. That’s because in today’s politics, borders mean nothing. What happens in the U.S., and elsewhere, doesn’t stay in the U.S. All politics, like commerce, is globally linked.
After dropping out of the University of Miami, Roman found a career in politics, first as a fixer, later as a dirty-trickster.
One of his earliest claims to fame was his role in overturning the results of a special election for the Pennsylvania state senate in 1993, the same year Stephen Harper won a seat in Parliament in this country.
On behalf of the loser of that election, Republican Bruce Marks, Roman came up with the strategy of taking the case to court, alleging that the election was rife with voter fraud.
And that’s how the ostensible loser in the election became state senator via the courts. This was believed to be a first in American politics, and the GOP establishment took notice of a promising new way to turn losing into winning. Sometimes the courts could give you what the electorate did not — a tactic later tried on steroids by Trump. The key was never to concede defeat.
Roman became something of a backroom boy wonder. He went on to work on the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush, John McCain and Giuliani.
Despite his claims of being a political researcher and consultant, he was actually a sultan of scaremongering. In the 2008 presidential election, he promoted a video of two alleged members of the New Black Panther Party standing outside a polling station in Philadelphia. One of the alleged intimidators was holding a nightstick.
The video was played on a loop on Fox News. Richard Hasen, a professor at the University of California and an expert on election law, made this comment:
“The video was certainly used by political operatives to create this false impression of voter intimidation and fraud being a major problem.”
The racially charged video raised Roman’s profile even higher, both within the Republican party, and with its wealthy supporters. He landed a job with the network bankrolled by the oil magnate Koch brothers, tasked with investigating Democrats, environmental activists and others on the left. He had a staff of 25 like-minded, partisan dirt-diggers, according to Politico.
A 2014 tax return for Freedom Partners, the Koch-supported organization where he worked, showed Roman as vice-president of research, at an annual salary and benefits worth over $285,000.
After working on Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign, Roman joined the White House staff as a special assistant to the president’s director of special projects and research. His office was inside the impressive Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and his salary was $115,000 a year.
Roman left that post in 2018 to begin work on Trump’s re-election campaign. In the run-up to the 2020 election, Roman used social media to repeatedly cast doubt on the integrity of the vote — part of a carefully laid plan to claim voter fraud in advance to allow Trump to remain in office should he lose the election.
And Roman provided another service. Trump had advocated for an “army” of poll watchers to monitor voting in Democratic areas during the presidential election. Under Roman’s direction, the campaign hired full-time staff to organize the “Army for Trump” in 11 battleground states.
Professor Hasen again took note:
“Mike Roman has made many unsubstantiated allegations of fraud and rigging, he has a history and general reputation as someone who stirs things up, so his presence in any election day issues gives me pause.”
Roman’s Canada file
As busy as Roman was with his Republican machinations, he found time to help out the Conservative Party of Canada. On April 11, 2019, Andrew Scheer, then-Conservative leader and leader of the official Opposition, was the keynote speaker at a closed-door event held at a luxury resort in the foothills of Alberta.
At that meeting, the leader and Conservative party strategists talked to oil company executives about political campaigns. Not energy policy, but campaigns.
Then-Conservative party campaign manager Hamish Marshall spoke about what he called “the new third-party campaign model.” In other words, making use of people not directly affiliated with the party who might be able to help the Conservatives win. People flying under the radar of Elections Canada.
(Harper has been obsessed with the effort to allow third-party actors to spend unlimited amounts of money during elections since his days as head of the National Citizens Coalition. He took that fight all the way to the Supreme Court, where he lost in 2004.)
Discussions at the Alberta meeting included topics like “network campaigns” and “campaign techniques.”
Conservative party lawyer Arthur Hamilton spoke about using litigation to “get tough” on environmental groups — in other words, intimidate them.
At the same meeting, Roman had some ideas of his own about how to deal with opponents like environmentalists. He talked about “countering such groups with opposition research.” It was a euphemism for something he was very familiar with — digging up dirt on your opponents. What the Russians would call “kompromat.”
This meeting, that included the leader of the Conservatives, members of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and an American Trump operative, would be concerning under any circumstances. What strange bedfellows for a meeting on campaign strategy. And why bar the public from looking in?
The confab was all the more worrying because it took place just six months before the federal election of Oct. 21, 2019. Why would Scheer be discussing U.S.-style campaign tactics with the oil executives unless, like Harper, he carried a brief for their industry?
And what was Roman, a notorious Republican political operative who had served on the Republican National Committee, doing there? Who invited him?
Roman, Harper and the International Democrat Union
At the time of Roman’s participation in that closed-door meeting in Alberta, the Republican operative was closely associated with an organization named the International Democrat Union. Roman first shows up as the organization’s treasurer, later as assistant chairman. The chairman of the IDU was then, and is now, Stephen Harper.
Harper shares top Republican connections with Roman. On April 7, 2016, Harper travelled to Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas mansion. Adelson, now deceased, was at that time one of the wealthiest donors to the Republican party. He had not yet donated to the 2016 presidential campaign.
After Donald Trump promised to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a change that flew in the face of international consensus that East Jerusalem belonged to the Palestinians, Adelson endorsed the maverick populist who would soon be president.
During his Las Vegas visit, Harper delivered a speech to the Republican Jewish Congress. His subject was how to unite fractured political parties. It was Harper’s first public appearance since losing the 2015 federal election to Justin Trudeau and the Liberals. Harper was still a sitting member of the House of Commons at the time.
According to a hacked email from Colin Powell to Peter McKay, Harper was also invited to the mysterious, highly secretive and ultra-exclusive Bohemian Grove gathering in July 2016. It is the private club of the most powerful conservatives in the United States. Colin Powell and Henry Kissinger were there the year that Harper attended.
Eighteen months after resigning his seat in Parliament, on Feb. 21, 2018, Harper became chairman of the International Democrat Union. Founded in 1983, the IDU is dedicated to getting right-wing governments elected around the world. Influence or interference? It is a very fine line.
The IDU has its main office in the headquarters of the Christian Social Union in Munich, Germany. The CSU, a founding member of the International Democrat Union, is a socially conservative party created in 1946.
Very little is known about exactly what the IDU does, or who funds it. But a surfaced CIA memo originally produced on July 23, 1985, indicated that at that time, the IDU received half its funding from the 17 European founding member parties of the organization.
Of that group, two West German, right-wing parties and the U.K. Conservative party reportedly “carried the heaviest financial burden.”
The other half of the IDU’s funding came from the U.S. Republican party and the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party. Canada’s former Progressive Conservative party also was a founding member of the IDU.
Since its start 40 years ago, the IDU has expanded dramatically. It now has 84 member political parties, some dedicated to increasingly harsh versions of right-wing politics. India’s ruling right-wing party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, joined the IDU in 2016, and Israel’s Likud followed suit in 2018.
Both India’s PM Narendra Modi and Israel’s indicted PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, have made hard turns to the nationalist right. In Netanyahu’s case, his government is pursuing legislation that would give the party the power to overturn rulings of Israel’s Supreme Court by a simple majority vote in the Knesset.
One of the IDU’s members, Victor Orbán’s governing party in Hungary, has been criticized by the European Union for the steady erosion of democratic institutions. The EU has even openly questioned if Hungary is still a democracy.
Human Rights Watch has accused Orbán of sustained “attacks on rule of law and public institutions” by undermining judicial independence and putting journalists under surveillance.
Yet Stephen Harper publicly congratulated Hungary’s right-wing nationalist leader after his most recent electoral victory in April 2022. And on July 6, Harper had a warm and fuzzy face-to-face meeting with Orbán in Budapest.
Harper tweeted that the two men discussed “the importance of centre-right parties strengthening their collaboration.”
Orbán’s tweet left out the word “centre.” “Had a great meeting IDU Alliance Chairman @Stephen Harper. International cooperation between right-wing, conservative parties is more important than ever. Chairman Harper is a great ally in this respect. Thanks for your support, Mr. Chairman.”
Signs of US-style fascism
In the United States, the anti-democratic strain of conservatism that currently dominates the Republican party may already have morphed into fascism. The evidence for that proposition is powerful. The authoritarian playbook is to relentlessly seek to undermine government institutions, educators and the news media, paving the way for cult-like acceptance of the strong-man’s narrative. Namely, that any who dare thwart his will are nefarious nemeses.
As well as trying to overturn an election, Trump has called for the suspension of the constitution and gutting the department of justice and the FBI. He has repeatedly told Americans that journalists are “enemies of the people.”
MugShotsMikeRoman.jpg
One of 19. Mike Roman’s mug shot is second from right in the bottom row. He was charged by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis with seven criminal counts related to Trump’s attempt to unlawfully overturn the US presidential election. Photo via Twitter.
Apparently taking his cue from Trump, Republican Florida governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis has fired elected state prosecutors for disagreeing with his interpretation of how the law should be applied. He presided over a selective whitewash of how Black history is taught, including the absurd notion that slavery provided useful skills to the enslaved, and the banning of certain books in schools, including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Endlessly identifying “enemies within” and dividing the citizenry against itself is a hallmark tactic by would-be fascist leaders. There has been a spate of legislation in GOP-controlled states undermining the rights of the LGBTQ+ community.
State Republican governments have criminalized abortion, with Nebraska sending a teenage girl to prison for three months after she induced an abortion by taking a morning after pill. Her mother faces a possible five years in jail for assisting her daughter.
And some state Republicans in Georgia have threatened to remove District Attorney Fani Willis from office to stop her case against Trump and the 18 co-defendants, who include Mike Roman. Never mind that Willis too was elected by voters.
The legislators gave themselves the power to do that last spring, and their new authority kicks in this October. It is not accidental that several members of the state Republican party have also been indicted by Willis, a huge embarrassment for the state GOP. So far, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is publicly supporting Willis.
Questions for Harper
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Stephen Harper Heads a Global Org That Helps Get Right-Wing Parties Elected. What Will It Do for Andrew Scheer?
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In all, Willis charged Mike Roman with seven criminal counts, including violation of the Georgia RICO act, two counts of conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree and conspiracy to impersonate a public officer.
As part of his effort to organize the seven slates that came up with fake “Trump electors,” it is alleged Roman even prepared a spreadsheet of their names and addresses.
While Roman was allegedly playing a key role in a giant Batman plot to steal a presidential election, surely the ultimate crime in any democracy, he was a senior official of the IDU. Which raises questions for Stephen Harper.
Did IDU chairman Harper know what his assistant chairman was doing?
Did Harper have any knowledge of Roman’s participation in the meeting with Andrew Scheer and others prior to the 2019 federal election in Canada?
Harper has so far not commented on Mike Roman’s wide-ranging indictment.
That is strange, since Roman was promoted from treasurer to assistant chairman of the IDU while he was allegedly helping Trump to subvert the 2020 election.
Harper might well claim that he didn’t know anything about what Roman was up to in the aftermath of Trump’s election loss to Joe Biden.
There is precedent for such a claim. When Harper advisor Bruce Carson left public service in disgrace, the then-prime minister claimed that he did not know before he hired Carson that his senior advisor had done jail time and been disbarred for defrauding his clients. Perhaps that was true, though it strains credulity given how carefully senior PMO hirings are vetted.
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As Scheer Falsehoods Pile up, Postmedia Gives Its Blessing
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PM Harper also exhibited something less than respect for due process in other circumstances. When Conservative Party of Canada campaign director Doug Finley was under investigation by Elections Canada during the “in-and-out” election spending scandal, Harper appointed Finley to the Senate. Sen. Doug Finley was assistant chairman of the IDU until his death on May 11, 2013.
And if Harper, as head of the IDU, has a commitment to garden variety democracy, you would never know it from his political record.
Three major scandals, involving election cheating, occurred during his time in office. Harper had a surly relationship with the Supreme Court and the press, and legislation like the Fair Elections Act fronted by Pierre Poilievre made it easier to cheat and harder to vote in Canada.
The new legislation was a strange reaction to the voter-suppression robocalls scandal, given that the phone numbers used to mislead thousands of voters came from the party’s own computer system.
And then there is the light that Harper’s business dealings shine on his notion of democracy. Harper has been a major player in AWZ Ventures Inc., a group that finances Israeli surveillance technology systems.
Harper is not only a partner, but president of an advisory board that manages over $350 million in funds. The investment firm also includes former members of Mossad, and various U.S. intelligence agencies.
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Why Is Stephen Harper So Tight with the ‘Moonie’ Church?
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Why does that matter?
According to CBC reports, AWZ is selling its facial recognition technology to countries not known for their respect for human rights or democracy.
Countries like the United Arab Emirates, where it is a crime to make the slightest complaint against the government. The UAE has been accused of spying on journalists and activists. AWZ’s hollow disclaimer? “AWZ Ventures invests solely in commercial and defensive applications of security and intelligence technologies.”
The absurdity of that claim? Once you sell such potentially anti-democratic, invasive and repressive technology, you don’t get to say how its owners use it. Look what happened with misuse of the Pegasus spyware technology.
This final point about the IDU, Mike Roman and Stephen Harper. On a website where he was once featured as a major player, Roman has disappeared down the memory hole. When you search for him now, you don’t get the former treasurer and assistant chairman. You get a 404 error.
So who is Mike Roman and why should Canadians who care about preserving their democracy know his name?
Consider Roman’s own words, which date back to 2008 but resonate darkly today. “If an election is worth winning,” he wrote in his blog, “then there is someone willing to steal it.” [Tyee]
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http://www.nationalobserver.com/2017/05/18/news/canadas-spies-collude-energy-sector
Part Two: Government spies collude with energy sector:
Canada's spies collude with the energy sector
By Bruce Livesey in News, Energy, Politics | May 18th 2017
Critics say the federal government is spying on environmentalists and First Nations and sharing their findings with the oil patch. File photo of oilsands by Kris Krug
This is the second installment of a two-part investigative series on government, spies and the oil industry
In the fall of 2013, Jason Augustine was in the thick of one of the most important standoffs First Nations activists have ever had with energy companies.
As a district war chief with the Mi'kmaq Warriors Society, and a member of the Elsipogtog First Nation near Rexton, a village on the east coast of New Brunswick, Augustine and his band were engaged in a protest against fracking. For weeks he and his fellow activists blocked the entrance to a compound where a fracking company had stored equipment, among other protests. Augustine notes that they did this because with fracking, "the gas (that is released) contaminates drinking water."
In October of that year, RCMP officers, with guns drawn and dispatching pepper spray, descended on the blockade, arresting 40 protesters, Augustine among them. Five RCMP vehicles were set on fire during this final confrontation. Augustine was later sentenced to 18 months of probation, and pled guilty to assaulting a police officer, two counts of obstructing a police officer, and one count of mischief. This standoff, however, galvanized attention to the issue of fracking and the province soon placed a moratorium on it.
November 1, 2013 photo of Jason Augustine outside Moncton Law Court from twitter by Jessica Doria-Brown, CBC
Yet Augustine's problems with the RCMP have continued: the 42-year-old is frequently followed by what Augustine believes are government vehicles. “And it’s just not me that’s been followed,” he remarks. “A lot of our Warriors Society members get followed. It’s just going to a different reserve and they still get followed. They are always monitoring us and trying to figure out what we are doing.”
“I see it as harassment,” he continues. “Why can’t we live our lives without being watched? We stood up for our water and our land, you know. We did that, and under our treaties we have the right to do that.”
As discussed in Part One of our two-part series, the federal government has created a massive and sophisticated spying apparatus – overseen primarily by the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) – designed to track the actions of First Nations and environmental activists opposed to so-called "critical infrastructure" projects, namely the tar sands, pipelines, fracking and mining. But critics of this network say it does more than just spy on people – it tries to intimidate too. More importantly, the fruits of all of this espionage are often shared with the energy sector.
As an example of intimidation, in May of 2012, the Yinka Dene Alliance in BC decided to take a “Freedom Train” across Canada to Toronto, bringing attention to Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, which was slated to connect the oilsands to the BC coast (last year, the Trudeau government canceled the pipeline after former PM Harper had approved it). The Alliance planned to arrive in Toronto in time for Enbridge’s annual shareholders’ meeting. Among the 37 band members who left BC on the train was John Ridsdale, the Hereditary Chief of the Na'Moks, Tsayu Clan, Wet'suwet'en, who lives in Smithers, BC.
On the train with them, recalls Ridsdale, were undercover officers, presumably RCMP or CSIS, or both. “When you have people going up and down an aisle of a train – you know you are being watched,” he says. “They were easy to pick out. They were not really trying to be undercover – they wanted us to know we were being watched.” The trip went off without incident, culminating in a rally and march in downtown Toronto.
Ridsdale says that First Nations people protesting resource development “take it for granted we are all monitored… (but) we are nonviolent and we are here to protect the land and water and freedom. We are not against development – we are against the manner (in which) they do it.”
In response to questions furnished by the National Observer, the RCMP said as part of its mandate "the RCMP does have the requirement to identify and investigate criminal threats, including those to critical infrastructure." They also noted "the RCMP has instituted a measured approach to large-scale public order events."
Wet'suwet'en First Nation Hereditary Chief Na'Moks (John Ridsdale) signs the Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion in Vancouver, B.C. on Thurs. Sept. 22, 2016. Photo by Elizabeth McSheffrey
Idle No More panics the intelligence bureaucracy
Yet the culmination of this type of espionage and intimidation occurred after the birth of Idle No More. Founded in late 2012 by four Saskatchewan women in response to Harper’s omnibus bills that gutted laws designed to protect the environment over resource development projects, Idle No More led to teach-ins, blockades, protests and rallies as well as a National Day of Action. It even sparked solidarity protests in other countries.
Yet Idle No More caused panic within the federal government’s intelligence and surveillance bureaucracy, which swung into action. “Idle No More was, as far as I know, the most completely surveilled social movement in Canadian history,” says Carleton University criminologist Jeffrey Monaghan, who has studied this issue. “Every single event had intelligence gathering about it. Whether it’s open source or more covert methods. We’re talking about very remote events in like Prince Albert, Saskatchewan to the more contentious ones, like Sarnia. Every single event was being scrutinized, was being monitored and was being cataloged."
Idle No More protesters march against then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper's policies on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on December 22, 2012. Photo by Isabeau Doucet.
“On top of that, you had formations of national security working groups at the highest level of the bureaucracy having regular updates and streaming information directly to the prime minister and national security adviser and cabinet in real time.”
Indeed, a heavily-redacted 11-page report obtained by the National Post in 2014 shows that CSIS was involved in preparing an all-of-government approach to dealing with the First Nations protests. The report, and a PowerPoint presentation, revealed that Ottawa was planning for every eventuality, concerned by the decentralized, leaderless nature of Idle No More. Moreover, says Clayton Thomas-Muller, a former Idle No More organizer: "There were multiple reports of CSIS and RCMP agents contacting individuals at their homes and in public over participation in Idle No More. Any time an officer of the settler colonial state... approaches an Indigenous person, it is considered threatening, given the statistics around the criminalization of Indigenous peoples and our over-representation in Canada's jails."
Intelligence shared with energy sector
What happens to all of the information and data gathered about activists?
For one thing, some of it is shared with the energy sector. Starting in 2005, Natural Resources Canada, in collaboration with CSIS and the RCMP, began hosting twice-yearly classified briefings with executives from energy companies at CSIS’s headquarters in Ottawa - which continue to this day.“You have the RCMP and CSIS giving these briefings to the private sector – but the private sector wanting those briefings to be driven by the demands of those receiving the information,” says University of New Brunswick sociologist Tia Dafnos, who has researched this topic.
File photo of CSIS sign by the Canadian Press
In 2012, Tim O’Neill, a senior criminal intelligence research specialist with the RCMP’s Critical Infrastructure Intelligence Team, wrote an email in which he said the purpose of these meetings “is to provide intelligence briefings to select energy representatives so they are able to implement the required security precautions to protect their assets. The briefings also provide a forum for the private sector to brief the Canadian intelligence and law enforcement community on issues we would not normally be privy to.” This email noted that the energy sector executives possess at least a “Level II (Secret) Security Clearance.” Indeed, Keith Stewart, head of Greenpeace Canada’s climate campaign, estimates “there are over 200 executives in the natural resources sector who have security clearance from CSIS and RCMP around these things like critical infrastructure.”
Agendas for these briefings, that have emerged through access to information requests, show that items of discussion include issues such as “security challenges presented by Radicalized Individual Groups to Canada’s Energy Sector” and “Extremist Activities within Aboriginal Communities”, and topics such as "Improvised Explosive Devices”, or on specific projects, such as the oilsands and Northern Gateway pipeline.
These briefings are well-attended, too. On the government side, they include people from the RCMP and all of Canada’s intelligence services, as well from the departments of Natural Resources, Defence, Public Safety, Transport, Industry Canada, National Energy Board (NEB), Atomic Energy Canada Ltd., the governments of New Brunswick, Quebec and Alberta, and the federal Office of the Auditor General, among others.
On the corporate side, however, it's unclear who attends. All federal documents have been censored prior to release under access to information legislation to remove the names of companies that send executives to the meetings.
Nonetheless, in 2013, minutes to one meeting reveal that networking and coffee receptions at the briefing was sponsored by the pipeline company, Enbridge Inc., along with the (US) $250-billion Toronto-based global conglomerate, Brookfield Asset Management Inc. (Enbridge did not respond to requests for a response while Brookfield says it has been a number of years since they have participated in the briefings, and did so only because they were concerned about cyber-security and loss prevention).
Meanwhile, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., which operates the Horizon oilsands project in Fort McMurray, Alberta, was an invitee to the briefings, according to one RCMP email (the company refused to discuss its participation in these briefings when approached by National Observer). “This is how the energy companies have become part of the national security bureaucracy themselves,” observes Monaghan. “They are embedded within the bureaucracy because now, for the most part, 'critical infrastructure' is privately owned… It’s a two-way street: the police and CSIS have deputized the companies and their security actors to provide intelligence as well. This emerges from the energy companies putting pressure on the governments saying ‘You are not doing enough to stop these activists from disrupting whatever’.”
Jeffrey Monaghan, Carleton University, Ottawa, spies, Canada, oil patch
Ottawa-based criminologist Jeffrey Monaghan has researched espionage targeting environmental and First Nations activists for years. He is seen here at Carleton University. Photo by Alex Tétreault
Astonishingly, it seems that some of the information collected has been passed on to the companies before it’s even seen by all divisions of the RCMP. In a 2010 email from O’Neill, he mentions that another RCMP officer “was very concerned that the private sector was receiving intell prior to the Detachments, which of course should not be the case as the Divisional CICI (Critical Infrastructure Criminal Intelligence) analysts should be disseminating our products within their Divisions.”
CSIS spokesperson Tahera Mufti does not deny the agency shares intelligence with other parties, saying in a statement to the National Observer: "The role of CSIS is to investigate activities suspected of constituting threats to the security of Canada, and to report on these to the Government of Canada. CSIS collects and analyzes threat-related information, which is typically disseminated to government partners through intelligence reports and other intelligence-related briefings."
In a response to question by National Observer on these briefings, the RCMP said that they, "through the National Critical infrastructure Team, assists in the identification of criminal threats to Canada's critical infrastructure and develops information products that may be used by first responders and the private sector to assess and mitigate risks associated to these threats."
National Energy Board (NEB) collects intelligence on activists
The intelligence gathered is also shared with the federal energy regulator, the National Energy Board (NEB), which is supposed to be a neutral tribunal over the approval and oversight of pipelines and other projects.
Yet documents released by the NEB show that its security staff have been alarmed about protesters showing up at hearings – and gathers intelligence on who they might be. To this end, CSIS and the RCMP provides the NEB with information. In 2013, the NEB’s head of security, wrote in an email that the Board’s security team had consulted with CSIS “at national and regional levels,” noting that they would continue monitoring all sources of information with police and intelligence partners.
Emails that have come to light through access to information requests show that the NEB security staff have been in constant contact with the RCMP's Critical Infrastructure Intelligence Team (CIIT) about potential protests at hearings, too.
In 2013, for instance, a member of the CIIT wrote to NEB staff and at least one CSIS official, Tom Lanzer, regarding the risk of interference with the Board’s hearings by groups opposed to oil sands and pipeline development. Despite acknowledging that CIIT had no intelligence indicating a criminal threat to the NEB or its members, the email advises that CIIT “will continue to monitor all aspects of the anti-petroleum industry movement” and said this information was also being shared with CSIS.
In response to a query from the National Observer, the NEB did not deny it monitors people who appear before the hearings. Sarah Kiley, a communications officer with the Board, said "we are required to continuously assess any potential security risks and take the appropriate steps to make sure that our staff, our Board Members and those attending our hearings, are safe and can freely participate in our hearings. Advice, guidance and other services provided by lead security agencies support federal agencies, such as the National Energy Board, in maintaining acceptable levels of security."
Is spying on peaceful protesters legal?
But is all of this espionage and sharing of data actually legal?
Paul Champ doesn’t think so. The Ottawa-based human rights lawyer is involved in two on-going complaints launched by British Columbia's civil liberties association against the RCMP and CSIS over their role in spying on peaceful protesters. Launched in 2014, Champ says the complaints have become "bogged down... These processes are ridiculously slow and unresponsive and obviously lack transparency" and he says there is no end in sight.
Champ argues that the Mounties and CSIS have no legal grounds to spy on people who are opposed to projects that don’t even exist – which is true for most of the pipelines being discussed.
“It’s one thing if it's a pipeline that’s already been built and people are protesting that, than maybe, theoretically, there’s a threat to that critical infrastructure,” says Champ, “but here these environmental and Indigenous groups are opposed to the policy of a pipeline. And a policy, in my mind, cannot be viewed as an aspect of national security. Therefore the jurisdiction of national security by CSIS cannot be engaged.”
Lawyer Paul Champ responding to questions in the House of Commons on March 12, 2015, on Bill C-51. Screencap from Vimeo
Champ notes that in order to justify this surveillance, “there is a legal threshold that must be crossed before an individual or group can be actively investigated... We think they need some kind of grounds to suspect, in the case of the RCMP, that someone has committed a criminal offense, is about to commit a criminal offense or, in the case of CSIS, that a group is, or might be, a threat to national security as defined by the act. We have a set of legal thresholds and until they are met CSIS and RCMP should not be getting themselves involved in gathering information about groups that are otherwise lawfully exercising their democratic rights.”
Champ also notes that “there’s no authority to be a sharing their intelligence reports with third parties such as corporations. Or the NEB, for that matter. Sharing information in that way is outside their jurisdiction and the CSIS Act and is a breach of (people’s) Charter rights.”
Has this espionage under the Trudeau government continued? In fact, evidence suggests nothing has changed. After all, Trudeau has approved or supports the Kinder Morgan, Keystone XL and Energy East pipelines, and greenlit a $11.4-billion liquefied natural-gas (LNG) mega-project in British Columbia. And the twice-yearly briefings held at CSIS's headquarters with the energy sector continue.
“The bottom line is that Canada’s entire economic paradigm is fundamentally based on the oppression of Indigenous people’s collective rights, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands to provide open-door access to extractive companies to get resources to international markets to sell to the highest bidder,” says tar sands campaigner and Manitoba Cree, Clayton Thomas-Muller, who has been the target of RCMP surveillance himself. “When we look at all of the pipelines and all of the oilsands and all of the mining and all of the mega-hydro dams and the places where Canada’s most toxic and destructive industries are placed, it's in the backyards of First Nations peoples. So it’s a very big issue.”
Indeed, shortly after the Kinder Morgan and Enbridge Line 3 pipelines were approved by the Trudeau government late last year, Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr gave a speech to a group of business leaders in Edmonton, where he assured them: “If people choose for their own reasons not to be peaceful, then the government of Canada, through its defence forces, through its police forces, will ensure that (your) people will be kept safe.”
A few days later, Carr said he regretted his remarks and apologized.
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Harper Suggests Canada Likely Won't Match U.S. Emissions Targets (Globe and Mail)
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This is an excerpt from Donald Gutstein’s new book Harperism: How Stephen Harper and his Think Tank Colleagues Have Transformed Canada.
Neoliberalism came later to Canada than to Britain and the United States because of the re-election of Pierre Trudeau in 1980. But after the 1984 federal election, the Progressive Conservative Mulroney government adopted neoliberalism as its guiding light, throwing open the country to foreign investment, eliminating the National Energy Program, transforming the Foreign Investment Review Agency into Investment Canada, bringing in the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and signing the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Neoliberalism became entrenched under the Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, who accepted the ideology as their own policy orientation, as Chrétien signed NAFTA and Chrétien-Martin brought in an era of privatization and fiscal restraint. These policies are properly called neoliberal because, in contrast to libertarians who want a small, powerless state that leaves people alone, neoliberals require a strong state that uses its power to create and enforce markets, and prop them up when they fail, as happened after the 2007-08 financial meltdown. By the time Stephen Harper took over the reins of government, neoliberalism was normalized as the accepted way of running the country. That was Harper’s starting point. He earns the “ism” label because of his unique way of furthering neoliberalism, as the book documents.
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s initiatives — and Mulroney’s — were mostly high-profile, garnering heated support and provoking fierce opposition. Harper’s moves, in contrast, are subtle, low-key, incremental, hidden from view, although three files — promoting bitumen pipelines, bypassing First Nations organizations and downgrading government science — have engendered opposition. Incrementalism is both practice and theory for Harper. He was forced to move slowly during his years of minority government to stay in office. He continues to deploy this strategy with a majority because it works. “Any other approach will certainly fail,” he told the 2003 conference of the Civitas Society, the secretive association — secretive because it allows no public access to its website — of three hundred conservative academics, politicians, journalists and think-tank functionaries who meet annually, free from media oversight, to debate issues important to conservatives.
(Harper was ruling out another method of policy change, the “blitzkrieg” or lightning strike. This strategy also involves “a policy goal radically different from the existing configuration,” but is “attained in a short period following a surprise announcement and a very rapid implementation.”)
Reaganism and Thatcherism are not just about economic policy. Underlying the success of each political leader is a unique blend of neoliberalism and socially conservative family and cultural values. Harper, who was then head of the Canadian Alliance, laid out his version of the program in his 2003 Civitas address. He claimed that the ideas of the economic conservatives had already been adopted by government. As a result of the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, Harper argued, both “(s)ocialists and liberals began to stand for balanced budgeting, the superiority of markets, welfare reversal, free trade and some privatization.”
Of course, much more needs to be done, he reassured them. “We do need deeper and broader tax cuts, further reductions in debt, further deregulation and privatization, and especially the elimination of corporate subsidies and industrial-development schemes” that distort the market. But the arguments for this program “have already been won,” he declared. The task was now to bring social conservatives of various stripes into the Conservative tent. There aren’t enough economic conservatives to win a majority government, so alliances must be formed with ethnic and immigrant communities, who historically vote Liberal but espouse “strong traditional views of values and family.”
Thatcher and Reagan had “ism” appended to their names because their influence extended beyond their administrations. They have been accorded status as doctrines or systems of beliefs. Thatcherism was promoted even more vigorously by the succeeding New Labour government of Tony Blair. And in the United States, Democratic president Bill Clinton furthered Reaganism through policies such as “ending welfare as we know it” after Reagan had targeted “welfare queens” as the enemy.
Harper has fundamentally modified the relationship between state and society. The theme is simple: we must remove obstacles to the attainment of a state governed, not by duly elected officials, but by market transactions, because the market and economic freedom are more fundamental than democracy and political freedom.
Is Harper deserving of an ism? I believe he is and hope to demonstrate in this book that Harper’s program will outlast his years as prime minister. The combined firepower of neoliberal think tanks over forty years has reshaped the Canadian climate of ideas to such an extent that it will take years — perhaps decades — for those views to change again. On top of these ideological underpinnings, Harper has fundamentally modified the relationship between state and society. The theme is simple: we must remove obstacles to the attainment of a state governed, not by duly elected officials, but by market transactions, because the market and economic freedom are more fundamental than democracy and political freedom. This will not be easily undone no matter who follows. Future Canadian prime ministers, like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton before them, cannot ignore the dominant influences of Harperism and neoliberalism. They must find their space to operate within these frames.
As of this writing in mid-2014, a tightly knit, smoothly operating neoliberal propaganda system has been installed in Canada. The foundations of wealthy businessmen, corporations, and individuals are investing more than $26 million a year in neoliberal think-tanks and single-issue advocacy organizations. (This figure doesn’t include Calgary’s School of Public Policy, whose financial statements are buried within the university’s accounts.) The long-term goal is to discredit government as a vital institution and to champion market alternatives.
The system hinges on the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, George Stiglitz, James Buchanan and other members of the Mont Pelerin Society(MPS) that provide neoliberal doctrine. Think-tanks transform the doctrine into research; sympathetic academics provide research studies compatible with the think tank’s goals; corporate executives and the foundations of wealthy businessmen finance the research; and sympathetic media owners and commentators disseminate the research to target audiences. It’s a package deal. Canada’s neoliberal think tanks rarely discuss the connection, but they operate comfortably within the MPS orbit.
Most Canadian policy entrepreneurs — Brian Lee Crowley at the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies and then the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Michel Kelly-Gagnon at the Montreal Economic Institute, Peter Holle at the Frontier Centre, and Michael Walker at the Fraser Institute — are MPS members. They’ve also been president or a director of Civitas. Two generations of Canadians — the Fraser Institute celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2014 — have been exposed to neoliberal ideas. The repetition of these ideas, especially through the vehicle of annual indexes, has been effective in incorporating them into the common-sense understanding of the world held by Canadians of all political stripes.
As a result of the massing on the right, the political space is crowded with a seemingly endless flow of studies, reports and commentaries supporting neoliberal perspectives. Of course, people are not automatons who blindly internalize these messages. But gradually, and especially as a result of constant repetition, some ideas rise to prominence, while others fade away. People are presented with a changing set of ideas from which they must make selections to make sense of their world: economic freedom and school choice are unqualified good things; the tax burden is burdensome and requires relief; government is inefficient because it harbours bloated bureaucracies and overpaid public employees; the private sector is hobbled by red tape; and so on.
The success of the Fraser Institute’s school report card exemplifies the strategy. To advance Milton Friedman’s doctrine that competition in education is the only way to improve it, with Weston Foundation funding, the institute has ranked schools in British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario annually for over a decade. It created a research technique that purports to demonstrate that a school itself — its administration, teaching and counselling — is the key factor in student achievement. The methodology is flawed because the indicators the institute selects and the weightings it gives them, “exaggerates the differences between schools and school systems,” writes retired teacher Dietmar Waber, and makes the school into the factor being measured and ranked.
Neoliberalism largely supports the Harper government, but that’s not its main purpose. Its role is to change the climate of ideas to such an extent that it doesn’t matter who forms the government.
To appear to do this the institute ignores information about socio-economic status, race, ethnicity, disability, ESL and school location in determining its rankings. To create seemingly large differences among schools it magnifies small differences in test results by double-counting them. Nonetheless, the rankings are an unqualified success, as real-estate agents tout properties near high-ranking schools, mothers-to-be discuss where to buy houses, and divorcing parents fight over child custody based on which parent lives closer to a higher-ranking school. The Fraser Institute brought choice and competition into the public education system; there’s no going back.
Neoliberalism largely supports the Harper government, but that’s not its main purpose. Its role is to change the climate of ideas to such an extent that it doesn’t matter who forms the government. Of course, its ultimate goal is to see the election of a Margaret Thatcher, a Ronald Reagan, or a Stephen Harper, who can then use state power to accelerate the transition to a market state. Harper has used that power assiduously, as if he was born for the job, creating a philosophy of government that will outlast his administration.
He’s hobbled government’s long-standing social-democratic obligations by slashing revenues to their lowest levels — in relation to the size of the economy — they’ve been at in fifty years, when the state first implemented its major social programs. One estimate pegs Harper’s tax cuts at $45 billion a year in foregone revenues. With total revenues at about $250 billion, that’s nearly a 20 per cent cut. Call it privatization by default. If there’s not enough money in the public coffers to finance health care, post-secondary education and rising old age security needs, they will have to be provided by the private or voluntary sectors or by individuals.
Brian Lee Crowley comments that there’s “basically a strong political consensus now” for a smaller government and lower government revenues and expenditures. Both Liberals and New Democrats have indicated they will not stray far from the economic consensus. The New Democrats’ Tom Mulcair pledged to not raise personal income tax nor the sales tax, and to increase corporate taxes only for large corporations. Justin Trudeau of the Liberals says “we are not going to be raising taxes.” They’ve accepted Harperism — the new reality.
But Harperism is more than fiscal conservatism. While he’s cut government’s ability to look after its citizens, Harper has inched forward in his quest to remove obstacles to the market state: replacing scientific understanding of the environment with market signals,weakening the role of trade unions in the labour market, bringing private property rights to First Nation reserves, and undermining the effectiveness of non-profit organizations critical of business and the market. The opposition parties may not even be aware of the extent to which the changed climate of ideas will constrain their actions.
Donald Gutstein writes for The Tyee, Georgia Straight and rabble.ca. he is an adjunct professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University and co-director of NewsWatch Canada.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics
https://ipolitics.ca/2015/01/23/harperism-its-steves-world-were-just-living-in-it/
from FoS:
"The 'hockey stick' graph has been discredited and should no longer be used as a tool to demonstrate the presence of climate change". [119]
* 3. Carbon dioxide is dangerous pollution.
In the same 2005 committee hearings referenced above, Bob Mills stated:
"My next question is this. Is CO2 really a poisonous, hazardous waste? We seem to talk about CO2 being hazardous. From my biology background, I have basically always thought of CO2 as being the basis of photosynthesis, necessary for all life on earth, and very valuable."
This echoed the long standing position of Stephen Harper himself, as stated in October, 2002 (and never repudiated since that time):
"The minister will know hopefully that the Kyoto accord targets only carbon dioxide emissions, not pollution. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant." [120]
Conservative position on climate change and Kyoto
Official Conservative environmental policy at the time of the election campaign kickoff (and at the time of initial airing of the FoS ads) can be found in Section I of the Conservative 2005 Policy Declaration. The policy does not mention (let alone acknowledge the urgency of) global warming, climate change or the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The policy does call for "a review of all environment and energy initiatives, including the Kyoto Accord". It also lists the presumably higher priority issues of smog and air pollution, contaminated sites, offshore oil and gas development, Great Lakes water clean up, illegal oil dumping and aquifer mapping. Section 44 on "Alternative Energy and Alternative Fuels" lists "the expense of assuring the security of traditional fuel sources and concerns over pollution" as motivation for developing these energy sources, but pointedly omits any reference to climate change or the need to reduce greenhouse gases.
Similarly, the website summary of the Conservative environmental platform, found in the section on "Stand up for our communities", refers to "action to ensure clean air, land, and water", but does not mention climate change.
The full election platform, only released on January 13, 2006 [121], ten days before the election, contains an attack on Liberal Kyoto policies, saying: "[The Liberals] sign ambitious international treaties and send money to foreign governments for hot air credit but can’t seem to get anything done to help people here at home." The platform also contains the following vague and ambiguous promise: "A Conservative government will … address the issue of greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), with a made-in-Canada plan, emphasising new technologies, developed in concert with the provinces and in coordination with other major industrial countries." However the platform does not directly mention climate change or global warming, and does not acknowledge the clear scientific consensus on both the degree of human attribution and the urgency of action on the issue of climate change. No targets for greenhouse gas reduction, even long term, are mentioned. The Conservatives' Green Brochure, released during the campaign, calls for development of "scientific monitoring of climate change", which would appear to question the scientific consensus at the time.
In summary, the Conservatives de-emphasized climate change and greenhouse gas emissions in favour of addressing other forms of air pollution, a position supported by FoS president Douglas Leahey, who wrote approvingly that "the Conservatives understand that Kyoto is a failed policy, and the difference between pollution and CO2." [122]
Stephen Harper's position 2002-2007
The various official Conservative policy statements cited above contain no implicit or explicit acknowledgnment of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming, as outlined in the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Indeed, Conservative leader Stephen Harper often expressed skepticism about the "science", stating in 2002 fundraising letter that the Kyoto Accord was "based on tentative and contradictory scientific evidence." Harper also called Kyoto a "socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations" and repeated his oft-stated complaint that it focuses on "carbon dioxide, which is essential to life, rather than upon pollutants".
According to the Toronto Star, "[I]n September 2002, Harper said this when asked about the 'greenhouse effect:' 'It's a scientific hypothesis, a controversial one and one that I think there is some preliminary evidence for." [123] In fact, the greenhouse effect was discovered in the 19th century and refers to "the process in which the emission of infrared radiation by the atmosphere warms a planet's surface."
In 2004, as Conservative Opposition Leader, Harper had this exchange in an interview with the Frontier Center for Public Policy:
"FC: Do you believe that human activity is contributing to global climate change and what is your position on the Kyoto Accord?
"SH: I think these are subjects where we know a lot less than some claim we know. Climate is always changing. My suspicion is that human activities have some impact upon that but I think the jury is out on a lot of the actual specific trends. We don’t support implementation of the Kyoto targets. We think they are unfair and unrealistic and our platform proposes we focus more directly on pollution control."
As late as October 2006, Harper "still raised doubts about global climate-change research", according to an October 16, 2006 Vancouver Sun account of Harper's French-language interview with the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir:
"'It's a complicated subject that is evolving,' he said. 'We have difficulties in predicting the weather in one week or even tomorrow. Imagine in a few decades.'"
The Sun continues: "Harper's statement is at odds with the conclusions of the United Nations [IPCC report], which says science clearly shows warming will lead to 'frequently flooded coastlines, disruption to food and water supplies, and the extinction of many species.'"
Former FoS chief scientific advisor Tim Ball has made remarkably similar statements to Harper's, including this one from June 2006:
"Environment Canada can't even predict the weather. How can you tell me that they have any idea what it's going to be like 100 years from now if they can't tell me what the weather is going to be like in four months, or even next week?" [124]
In 2006 year-end interviews and especially after the release of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report in February 2007, Harper finally appeared to accept the scientific consensus. "I think the science is clear that these changes are occurring, they're serious and we must act," he said, according to a February 2, 2007 CBC article.
As Prime Minister, Harper has sought to counter charges that he was ever a "climate change denier". A December 21, 2006 Toronto Star article cites the above statements and others and states: "Prime Minister Stephen Harper, flying in the face of his past public comments, says now he has never questioned the science behind climate change." In a similar vein, Harper claimed in an exchange in the House of Commons on January 27, 2007: "This government has made it clear in the election campaign that we accept the science and that's why we're acting." [125]
2007 climate change conference...
==
Canada and the Kyoto Protocol - Wikipedia, the free ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Canada**_and_the_Kyoto_Protocol
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Canada formally abandons Kyoto Protocol on climate change
www.theglobeandmail.com › News › Politics
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Harper's Timeline: Canada on Climate Change from 2006 ...
www.desmog.ca/.../harper-s-timeline-canada-climate-change-2006-2014
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Canadians don't know Stephen Harper pulled out of Kyoto ...
o.canada.com/.../most-canadians-dont-know-stephen-harper-withdrew-fro...
Nov 6, 2013 - Survey results show Canadians overwhelmingly care about climate change, but a majority didn't know the Harper government abandoned ...
Canada pulls out of Kyoto Protocol - Politics - CBC News
www.cbc.ca/news/.../canada-pulls-out-of-kyoto-protocol-1.99907...
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Canada Kyoto Protocol - Huffington Post
www.huffingtonpost.ca/news/canada-kyoto-protocol/
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Canada pulls out of Kyoto protocol - The Guardian
www.theguardian.com › Environment › Kyoto protocol
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:{[PDF]:(style="color:#1a0dab;;font-weight:bold;cursor:auto;margin:0px 3px 0px 0px;float:left"):}:Canada quits Kyoto
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In their last PR foray before the veto, tar sands proponents offered up an IHS-CERA study which asserted that, facts to the contrary, approving Keystone would increase the reliable supplies of oil for domestic consumers. The study asserted “the overwhelming majority” of oil flowing to refineries in the Gulf Coast would be refined and consumed in the U.S., even after XL is built—which is true, but irrelevant. If I pour a glass of water (Keystone XL) into an already full bucket (Midwest and Gulf Coal oil markets) most of the water stays in the bucket—but the bucket does not hold any more water—the increment just slops on the floor, or in this case gets exported.
The President focused on a more relevant point in his comments in Fargo last week, saying that “I’ve already said I’m happy to look at increasing pipeline production for U.S. oil. But Keystone is for Canadian oil. Sending it down to the Gulf it bypasses the U.S., it estimated to create 250, maybe, 300 permanent jobs. We should be focusing on American infrastructure for American jobs for American producers … ”
Keystone is an enormously important environmental symbol. But it is also a commercial struggle. Alberta tar sands oil and North Dakota light shale oil flows into the same markets, have access to the same refineries, and rely on the same pipelines and railroads to get them to the same customers. So it was never terribly plausible that Keystone would be good for the U.S.—it was designed to make Canadian oil more competitive in global markets, which, on balance, is not good for American producers or, since the Canadians want to escape from American markets, American consumers.
The logic of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was, in some minds, that we would collaborate, rather than competing with Canada and Mexico, and would allow Canada, for example, to put U.S. territory, waterways and airsheds at environmental risk to provide the cheapest route for Canada’s oil to global markets. But the Canadians walked away from their Kyoto commitment to the curb to global warming emissions precisely because doing so would put them at a competitive disadvantage with U.S. oil and gas producers—so the kumbaya theory of NAFTA was always pretty threadbare. Obama now seems to recognize this. Canada needs Keystone. The U.S. does not.
Now the lack of permit for Keystone is the least of Prime Minister Harper’s problems. He bet Canada’s future on finding ever increasing markets for the world’s most expensive—$90/barrel+ break-even for new projects—crude. With global prices down at $60, returns from tar sands projects are a fraction of what they were a year ago. Even before global prices reached the bottom, three major projects had been cancelled. Shell just pulled out of its Pierra River Project last week. Investment is collapsing. Most companies will survive—but they survive by cutting payrolls and supply chains, the two factors Harper was counting on to keep the Canadian economy afloat through his reelection bid this year. But unemployment rolls are soaring, and the Canadian dollar has lost 20 percent of its value. Harper is now running barely even with his leading opponent, Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau, who acerbically attacks Harper’s bet on oil. “It’s not fiscally responsible,” said Trudeau in January, “to pin all your hopes on oil prices remaining high, and when they fall, being forced to make it up as they go along.”
Harper must call an election by November. One of the major issues in that election is certain to be Canada’s next economic strategy—because the petro-exporter bubble just burst. Which is why Bloomberg’s suggestion—that Canada embraces its former climate leadership, and bet its economic future on low carbon energy and high knowledge manufacturing—is almost certain to have at least one taker among Canada’s three major parties? But it would be much better news for the climate if all three Canadian parties, led by Harper’s Conservatives decided that Canada doesn’t have the cheap oil resource base to become the next Saudi Arabia—and might not want to even if it could.
carp pope 3/15
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nyt
September 21, 2013
Silencing Scientists
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Over the last few years, the government of Canada — led by Stephen Harper — has made it harder and harder for publicly financed scientists to communicate with the public and with other scientists.
It began badly enough in 2008 when scientists working for Environment Canada, the federal agency, were told to refer all queries to departmental communications officers. Now the government is doing all it can to monitor and restrict the flow of scientific information, especially concerning research into climate change, fisheries and anything to do with the Alberta tar sands — source of the diluted bitumen that would flow through the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. Journalists find themselves unable to reach government scientists; the scientists themselves have organized public protests.
There was trouble of this kind here in the George W. Bush years, when scientists were asked to toe the party line on climate policy and endangered species. But nothing came close to what is being done in Canada.
Science is the gathering of hypotheses and the endless testing of them. It involves checking and double-checking, self-criticism and a willingness to overturn even fundamental assumptions if they prove to be wrong. But none of this can happen without open communication among scientists. This is more than an attack on academic freedom. It is an attempt to guarantee public ignorance.
It is also designed to make sure that nothing gets in the way of the northern resource rush — the feverish effort to mine the earth and the ocean with little regard for environmental consequences. The Harper policy seems designed to make sure that the tar sands project proceeds quietly, with no surprises, no bad news, no alarms from government scientists. To all the other kinds of pollution the tar sands will yield, we must now add another: the degradation of vital streams of research and information.
Meet The New York Times’s Editorial Board »
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icn 2/14
But while President Obama has encouraged citizens to "stand up and speak up" to demand change on energy, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's administration has tried to silence critics of pro-tar sands policies.
In the most recent evidence, seven influential environmental organizations have become the subject of rigorous audits by the Canada Revenue Agency.
Activists allege that the scrutiny is an attempt by the Harper administration to subdue tar sands opponents as decision time looms for pipelines needed to bring Alberta's landlocked oil to market—the Texas-bound Keystone XL and the Northern Gateway to the Pacific Coast of British Columbia.
"Canadians are starting to understand that the government has overstepped and overreached in its attacks against environmentalists and scientists," saidTzeporah Berman, a Vancouver-based environmentalist and co-founder of the activist group ForestEthics. "We're seeing a growing grassroots movement as a result. … People are angry."
The prime minister's office directed requests for comment to the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA). Noël Carisse, a spokesman for CRA, said that since 2012 "the CRA has conducted additional review activities focused on political activities. Audits are being conducted in addition to our regular audit activities, and will include charities from across the entire spectrum of charitable activity."
The revenue agency is auditing the environmentalists for possible abuse of their nonprofit charitable status, which exempts them from paying taxes and allows donors to claim contributions as tax deductions. Canadian law states that nonprofits can only use 10 percent of their resources for political advocacy work. The CRA is investigating whether the groups exceeded this limit.
For decades, Canadian nonprofits interpreted political advocacy to mean they couldn't endorse candidates or elected officials. Like in the United States for tax-exempt organizations, support for or criticism of government policy was customary.
"They are seemingly reinterpreting what they perceive as being political activity," said Tim Gray, executive director of Environmental Defence, one of the green groups being audited. "It is a shifting landscape."
If the CRA determines that the organizations passed their annual political advocacy limit, they could lose their charitable tax status, forcing them to pay taxes and potentially driving away donors. That could cause some of the groups to shutter their doors, Gray and Berman said.
In addition to Environmental Defence, other groups being investigated include the David Suzuki Foundation, Tides Canada, West Coast Environmental Law, the Pembina Foundation, Equiterre and the Ecology Action Centre, according to theCBC, which first reported the audits.
The targeted groups have been instrumental in raising public awareness about the impacts of tar sands development on the environment and climate. They stoked a grassroots movement that helped delay the Northern Gateway pipeline in Canada and, together with U.S. environmentalists, helped make the Keystone XL a climate red line for Obama.
Environmental organizations appear to be bearing the brunt of the recent investigations.
While most of the groups are still under review by the agency and are therefore staying mum, Gray said his organization received its results from the CRA.
"They told us that basically everything we do is no longer charitable," he said. The group immediately filed an appeal. If rejected, Gray said he is unsure what that will mean for his organization's future.
Across the Border
The audits are the latest in a string of attacks on environmentalists and scientists in recent years by a Harper government that has made oil sands expansion a centerpiece of its economic agenda. Since Harper took office in 2006, production of Alberta's carbon-intensive tar sands crude has doubled, and Canada has set a goal to at least double it again in the years ahead.
Simultaneously, the conservative administration has cut funding for climate science research, shuttered environmental research labs and buried government reports highlighting the dangerous climate and environmental implications of runaway oil sands development. It has also muzzled its own scientists from speaking about the issue, cancelled thousands of environmental assessments for pipelines, oil sands mining and other development projects, and gutted 70 environmental protection laws in 2013 alone.
In 2012, the government listed environmentalists as a terrorist threat.
Amid the erosion of environmental law in Canada, across the border in the United States the Obama administration has sought to apply federal law to combating climate change. The centerpiece of this work is an historic regulation under the Clean Air Act to cut carbon pollution from the nation's coal plants....
n a speech last year at Georgetown University announcing his climate plan, Obama called on citizens to "speak up at town halls, church groups, PTA meetings. Push back on misinformation. Speak up for the facts. ... Convince those in power to reduce our carbon pollution. Push your own communities to adopt smarter practices. Invest. Divest. Remind folks there's no contradiction between a sound environment and strong economic growth. ... Make yourself heard on this issue."
Berman, of Forest Ethics, said that despite efforts in Canada to quell such protest activity, the opposite is happening.
"Canadians value democracy. We value free speech and balance and fairness," Berman said. "This government has created the perfect storm at the grassroots level. What we've seen is that First Nations leaders, union leaders, community organizers, and generally a diverse array of Canadians are all starting to engage [on climate and the oil sands]."
The Ethical Oil Link
The Canada Revenue Agency conducts audits for a number of reasons, including in response to outside complaints that an organization is violating federal laws for charities.
Environmentalists believe that is why so many of them are being singled out. Shortly after the pro-tar sands group Ethical Oil launched a public campaign in 2012 to "expose the radical foreign funded environmental groups' activities attacking Canada's ethical oil and industry,"Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced an $8 million effort to more deeply investigate nonprofits' political activity.
Since then, Ethical Oil has filed formal complaints with the CRA about Environmental Defence, the David Suzuki Foundation and Tides Canada, saying the groups should be "stripped of their charitable status" for "engaging in partisan activity," according to Ethical Oil's website.
Ethical Oil has deep ties to both the tar sands industry and the Harper administration. In 2011, one of the group's co-founders, Alykhan Velshi, left his job as a spokesperson for Harper's government to help found Ethical Oil. A few months later, he left Ethical Oil and returned to the Harper administration to become director of planning in the prime minister's office. Today, he is the director of issues management for the prime minister.
The organization states on its website that it receives funding from companies working to develop the tar sands, though it does not say which ones.
Ethical Oil did not respond to requests for comment.
Environmental leaders told InsideClimate News the CRA's investigations are so intense that many of the groups involved have been forced to sideline their anti-tar sands efforts both for lack of time and for fear of upsetting government auditors.
"They are worried about being critical of the government because now it could mean the loss of their charitable status," Berman said. "Without that, many of them likely wouldn't be able to operate."
The audits have potential serious implications not just for environmental organizations, but for the entire Canadian nonprofit world.
"Most of the public policy work that has been done in Canada over the last 30 years has been led by charities," Gray of Environmental Defence said. "Everything from cracking down on drinking and driving to getting rid of smoking, phasing out acid rain to solving the ozone hole. If the CRA's interpretation of political activity is changing, it is a world that is going to be unfamiliar terrain [for non-profit groups and concerned citizens]."
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naomi k:
In a 2012 essay that appeared in the influential scientific journal Nature Climate Change, Anderson and Bows laid down something of a gauntlet, accusing many of their fellow scientists of failing to come clean about the kind of changes that climate change demands of humanity. On this it is worth quoting the pair at length:
. . . in developing emission scenarios scientists repeatedly and severely underplay the implications of their analyses. When it comes to avoiding a 2°C rise, “impossible” is translated into “difficult but doable”, whereas “urgent and radical” emerge as “challenging” – all to appease the god of economics (or, more precisely, finance). For example, to avoid exceeding the maximum rate of emission reduction dictated by economists, “impossibly” early peaks in emissions are assumed, together with naive notions about “big” engineering and the deployment rates of low-carbon infrastructure. More disturbingly, as emissions budgets dwindle, so geoengineering is increasingly proposed to ensure that the diktat of economists remains unquestioned.
In other words, in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their research. By August 2013, Anderson was willing to be even more blunt, writing that the boat had sailed on gradual change. “Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significantevolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change tothe political and economic hegemony” (his emphasis).
We probably shouldn’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of even their own research. Most of them were just quietly doing their work measuring ice cores, running global climate models and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as the Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that they “were unwittingly destabilising the political and social order”.
But there are many people who are well aware of the revolutionary nature of climate science. It’s why some of the governments that decided to chuck their climate commitments in favour of digging up more carbon have had to find ever more thuggish ways to silence and intimidate their nations’ scientists. In Britain, this strategy is becoming more overt, with Ian Boyd, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, writing recently that scientists should avoid “suggesting that policies are either right or wrong” and should express their views “by working with embedded advisers (such as myself), and by being the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena”.
If you want to know where this leads, check out what’s happening in Canada, where I live. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper has done such an effective job of gagging scientists and shutting down critical research projects that, in July 2012, a couple thousand scientists and supporters held a mock-funeral on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, mourning “the death of evidence”. Their placards said, “No Science, No Evidence, No Truth”.
But the truth is getting out anyway. The fact that the business-as-usual pursuit of profits and growth is destabilising life on earth is no longer something we need to read about in scientific journals. The early signs are unfolding before our eyes. And increasing numbers of us are responding accordingly: blockading fracking activity in Balcombe; interfering with Arctic drilling preparations in Russian waters (at tremendous personal cost); taking tar sands operators to court for violating indigenous sovereignty; and countless other acts of resistance large and small. In Brad Werner’s computer model, this is the “friction” needed to slow down the forces of destabilisation; the great climate campaigner Bill McKibben calls it the “antibodies” rising up to fight the planet’s “spiking fever”...http://www.newstatesman.com/print/2013/10/science-says-revolt
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From October through November, bus stops in Washington, D.C. are displaying a series of provocative posters like this one, which depicts the Canadian government's alleged silencing of tar sands critics. The illustrations are the work of Canadian environmental artist Franke James, pictured in the poster.
Three years ago, James found her name on an "enemy list"of the Canadian government for her activism. Since then, she has dedicated her work to exposing efforts by Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government to undermine scientific understanding of climate change and restrict the flow of information about the climate and environmental impacts of the tar sands.
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OTTAWA-Federal Conservatives are downplaying concerns over Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s newly-selected boss for Environment Canada and the bureaucrat’s knowledge about global warming.
The department’s new deputy minister, Bob Hamilton, ran into trouble last Monday at a parliamentary committee when he was asked to explain what causes climate change.
“Wow. Umm. They didn’t tell me I’d have to answer questions like that when I took this job. I think that it’s – I don’t know the total answer to that –,” said Hamilton, before Conservative MPs interrupted to prevent him from continuing.
Globe and Mail)
The Harper government is pulling out of a United Nations convention that fights droughts in Africa and elsewhere, which would make Canada the only country in the world outside the agreement.
The federal cabinet last week ordered the unannounced withdrawal on the recommendation of Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, ahead of a major scientific meeting on the convention next month in Germany.
The abrupt move caught the UN secretariat that administers the convention off-guard, which was informed through a telephone call from The Canadian Press.
Stephen Harper is the current Prime Minister of Canada.
He was previously the leader of the Canadian Alliance and before that a member of the Reform Party of Canada and President of the National Citizens' Coalition, all considered "right of centre"by Canadian standards.
However,by US standards Harper would be considered actually further to the left on many domestic issues than any Democrat who holds a federal post other than**Dennis Kucinich**:he advocates continuation of single-payer universal health care, for instance, though he would permit private for-profit service providers (as would all US Democrats and Greens advocating similar health care in the USA). Some of his views derive more from the libertarian ideology he claims to hold personally, notably, he is not dead-set against marijuana decriminalization and seems to view this issue largely in terms of US-Canada relations.
On foreign affairs outside North America, however, Harper is, by left wing observers, considered to be a true neo-conservative. His views are sometimes compared to those of his colleague David Frum who tried unsuccessfully in the 1990s to "unite the right" and merge the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada with the Canadian Alliance, which Harper achieved in 2004.
The Canadian federal election, 2004 is often perceived as a battle between Harper and sitting Liberal Party of Canada Prime Minister Paul Martin. Jack Layton of the New Democratic Party of Canada won a seat in the House of Commons in the electoral district of Toronto-Danforth, and his party will likely play a role in the upcoming minority government. Harper had explicitly ruled out such a deal with Layton or the Bloc Quebecois, a regional Quebec separatist party, however in a statement released in the summer of 2004 following the election, all party leaders agreed to seek consensus on issues important to Canadians.
Contents [hide] |
Articles and resources
Related SourceWatch articles
References
External resources
- Harper at the CPC
- a history of Harper and the NCC - National Citizens Coalition
- Election Results [1]
External articles
- Lee Berthiaume, "Corporate Social Responsibility Rules for Mining Industry Blasted," Embassy (Canada), April 1, 2009.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Stephen_Harper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Party_of_Canada
The Conservative Party of Canada (French: Parti conservateur du Canada) is a political party in Canada which was formed by the merger of the Canadian Alliance (formerly the Reform Party of Canada) and the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (colloquially known as the Tories) in 2003. It is positioned on the right of the Canadian political spectrum. The party came to power in the 2006 federal election as a minority government, a position it maintained after the 2008 election, before winning its first majority government in 2011.
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Current leadership figures and conflicts [edit]
 | The neutrality of this article is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved. (May 2013) |
The current party leader is Stephen Harper, who has been the Prime Minister of Canada since 2006. He is the only leader the Conservative Party of Canada has ever had, thus it is accordingly almost indistinguishable from his personality, policies and tactics. Several early leadership contenders including Belinda Stronach and Garth Turner departed the Conservative Party prior to its taking power, and since then deviation from Harper policies has tended to lead to rapid exclusion from his caucus. No strong leadership contender has ever publicly challenged Harper for leadership of the Party from inside its ranks though Peter MacKay, John Baird and several other current federal cabinet ministers remain influential in the Party. Harper's close control of his caucus and cabinet, tendency to oust government agency heads who disagree even slightly, and close watch on his "back bench" have been noted often in international press, which often notes the unusually powerful executive power of a Canadian Prime Minister with a majority government [2]. At least one book has been written specifically on this topic, [3]. Of particular note is his close control of media contacts [4].
From time to time, "backbench" MPs break ranks on specific issues, leading to speculation that Harper has lost central control [[5]](http://en.princearthurherald.com/news/detail/has-harper-lost-control-of-his-backbench-/?language_id=1). This is notably evident on abortion [6]. See abortion below. However, some cabinet ministers have managed to express different views publicly without evident sanction, notably James Moore on the Northern Gateway pipeline, in which Moore took the position that the BC provincial government could refuse it regardless of what the federal government were to say or do.
Conservatives gathered Monday night to mourn the passing of a key architect in their rise to power — and to brace for the toughest test Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government has faced since taking office on a promise to clean up politics in the national capital.
A who's-who of Tories had few words for the handful of assembled journalists at Ottawa's National Arts Centre, where a memorial service was being held for Conservative senator and party stalwart Doug Finley, who died earlier this month.
Solemn-looking cabinet ministers, senators, aides and strategists declined to speak to reporters about a burgeoning Senate scandal which is likely to receive continued attention this week.
Harper will address the Conservative caucus and the media Tuesday morning, before departing to South America for trade talks.
The prime minister will no doubt field questions about his former chief of staff Nigel Wright, who quit his job this weekend over his role in the controversy over Senate expenses.