Reposting in the tradition of the people’s mic
h/t LeDaro
democracy
Power To The People!
Attended the Hamilton CAPP rally, what an inspiration. Canadians of all ages, income groups, ethnicities and political stripe joined together in a common cause it was all so…Canadian!
Stephen Harper – Canadians HAVE noticed, we DO care, and all your Parliament are belong to us!
Power to the People
Pics from the Rally
“I will be heard – one way or another.”
More than half a century ago Paul Robeson, one of the greatest men who ever lived, was forbidden to enter Canada not by Ottawa but by Washington, which had taken away his passport. But he was still able to transfix a vast crowd of Vancouver’s mill hands and miners with a 17-minute telephone concert, culminating in a rendition of the Ballad of Joe Hill. Technology has moved on since then. And so from coast to coast, minister Kenney notwithstanding,
If you are enraged by this fascist action by the Canadian Government please join me in posting this video. Show Ottawa that the democracy of technology overrides their tyranny.
Harper Kat
COAL for Christmas
Little Stevie has been very naughty. Going around thinking he is special, breaking things he sees no value in — like democracy — and generally not playing well with others.
Traditionally Santa brings such children coal for Christmas. I think this year should be no exception, Harper deserves a coal [ition government] and while that is punishment for him it will be a grand gift for the rest of us.
The last few years have been very depressing watching the opposition waste opportunity after opportunity bowing to the manipulations and machinations of a party for whom ideology trumps all. Duceppe put it best;
What the Conservative government presented today was not an economic statement but an ideological statement. This ideology so blinds the government that it fails to see how urgent it is to act.
Instead of presenting a plan to help the economy recover and breathe some air into it, the Prime Minister has chosen to smother it. . . The Prime Minister has preferred ideology to economics. He has placed partisanship above democracy.
Despite the surpluses accumulated over 10 years, the Conservative government not only refused to present its plan, to provide relief, it consciously chose to stifle the economy to advance its outdated ideology on the reduction of government.
Naturally, we are prepared to cut our salaries and to reduce growth of expenditures by the government bureaucracy. But the purpose of these savings should not be to reduce government in order to avoid a one-time deficit, but to support the economy, to support the people.
The government has decided to take advantage of the crisis to attack the rights of women and workers. The government is proposing to suspend public servants’ right to strike. It has decided to attack women’s rights by submitting their right to pay equity to negotiation. Since when are rights negotiable? It is scandalous. We will never accept such an attack by the government on women’s and workers’ rights. We will never allow it.
Not content with putting ideology before the economy, not content with attacking workers, women, and Quebec, the Prime Minister is adding insult to injury by putting his own extreme partisanship before democracy. When speaking on December 8, 2005 about reforming the financing of political parties, the Prime Minister said:
“These measures are directly inspired by reforms introduced by René Lévesque 30 years ago, reforms of which all Quebeckers can be very proud. Quebec has led the way in electoral reform.”
By announcing his intention to eliminate public funding of political parties, the Prime Minister is betraying the memory of René Lévesque. Public funding was at the heart of René Lévesque’s reform. This desire to slash funding is a direct attack on democracy. Using the economic crisis as an excuse and under the pretense of saving $30 million, the Conservative government has shown the world the extent of its hypocrisy.
Hardly a few weeks ago, the Prime Minister called an election for strictly partisan reasons. He spent $300 million, ten times more than what he is trying to save by eliminating political party funding. What will the Prime Minister announce next in the upcoming budget? Does he plan to shut down Parliament to save $500 million?
The Prime Minister has manufactured a democratic crisis, simply to give himself a partisan advantage, because this government’s goal is to silence all forms of opposition: silence artists, silence women, silence unions and silence the opposition.
The latest rumour is that Harper has taken a step back and will reverse the decision to end the public financing of all parties.
Giorno, Harper’s Chief of Staff, has released a memo with such gems as;
* We’re not even two months removed from the last election, and a group of backroom politicians are going to pick who the Prime Minister is. Canadians didn’t vote for this person. We don’t even know who this person will be.
Oh Noes!!! we don’t know who it will be. How can we start smearing them?
* Not a single voter voted for a Liberal-NDP coalition. Certainly not a single voter voted for the Liberals to form a coalition with the separatists in the Bloc.
Actually the PR vote went more to a coalition than to the CONs
* This is what bothers me the most. The Conservatives won the election. The Opposition keeps saying that the Conservatives have to respect the will of the voters that this is a minority and so on.
* …how about Liberals, NDP and Bloc respecting the will of the voters when they said “YOU LOSE”.
YOU LOSE!? HAW HAW You’re rubber I’m glue… This is the best a government that thinks they were born from gods right nut can do?
* And what’s this going to do to the economy. I’m sorry, I don’t care how desperate the Liberals are — giving socialists (Jack Layton) and separatists (Gilles Duceppe) a veto over every decision in government — that is a recipe for total economic disaster.
SOCIALISTS RUN!!! HIDE!!! LOOK UNDER THE BED. Oh hai Sarah
* But how more phony could these guys be?
Yours? Geez I don’t know I don’t think we’ve seen the worst of them yet
* I mean, I follow the news, virtually every single day you have Harper or Flaherty out there telegraphing exactly what they plan to do with the economy. And not once did you hear the Liberals, NDP or separatists talking about toppling the government in response.
* No — do you know what set this off. When Flaherty said he was going to take taxpayer-funded subsidies away from the opposition. Now there is a reason to try and overturn an election— because the Conservatives the audacity to say “Hey, it’s a recession, maybe you should take your nose out of the trough.”
* And I wish the media would be more clear on this point — the opposition aren’t being singled out by this fact the Conservatives stand to lose the most money of all. The only difference is that Canadians are voluntarily giving money the Conservatives, so they don’t need taxpayer handouts. The only reason the opposition would be hurt more is because nobody wants to donate to them. They should be putting their efforts towards fixing that problem.
* I don’t want another election. But what I want even less is a surprise backroom Prime Minister whom I never even had the opportunity to vote for or against. What an insult to democracy.
Hmm so every other democratic country has the system you guys want to dismantle but anyone who calls you on it is against democracy? So how are things there in the Ministry of Truth?
Sign the Petition. Support a Coalition
Giorno memo from the G&M
Rights, the Right doesn’t believe in them
Rainer Knopff, a political scientist at the University of Calgary, said the program was “a biased boondoggle that had gone well past its `best before’ date.”
The program only funded groups on “one side” of the political spectrum while “socially conservative groups never got any money. Not a penny, as far as I know,” said Knopff.
He also echoed then-Treasury Board president John Baird’s suggestion, made in defending the decision to kill the program, that it made no sense for Ottawa to spend public money helping groups challenge its own legislation.
“I don’t want to pay for surrogate litigants,” said Knopff, arguing public interest groups should raise their own money for Charter cases. “If they can’t raise the money – tough.”
Today CTV has a story about the further erosion of rights in Canada;
OTTAWA — A Montreal court may be about to make Canadian legal history in a case that could see offenders considered guilty until proved innocent.
A bail hearing at the court this week is believed to be the first involving so-called “reverse onus,” in which a defendant must prove why they deserve less time behind bars and why they should be released on bail pending trial.
This ‘test case’ involves gangs. Naturally one chooses the circumstance least likely to garner public sympathy to launch such an attack. It goes without saying that any argument to democracy and rights will be met with an allegation of supporting gangs and violence. It being the case, unfortunately that some cannot hold more than one thought in their mind at a time. This law may start out as being about gangs and gun crime but it will not end there.
Image via Wikipedia
Dave Schroder of Edmonton’s Guardian Angels network thinks the reverse onus rule is “long overdue.”
“When somebody has demonstrated their lack of respect for Canadian law, we do have the right to expect them to be put away,” he said.
We certainly do have a right to expect criminals to be “put away”, right after they have been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of their peers.
I say this as someone whose life has been touched by violent crime. The criminals never even charged. While I still am affected by these crimes, I don’t believe the Canadian criminal system should be built upon whatever revenge fantasies I may hold.
Our rights and freedoms are being stripped away by those who value sound bite over substance, authoritarianism over democracy and big brother over individual freedom. It is time for us, all of us, to speak up before our right to speak is taken too.
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