former Dept of Fisheries and Oceans scientist spills beans on suppression of science

          The Harper conservatives won on a platform promising governmental transparency.To date this commitment has not been honored. In fact, the Harperites are probably the most secretive, paranoid, control freaks this country has ever elected. Obviously, all such generalizations are, at best, approximate. Still, the general trends are there for all to see and, at this late date, have become unequivocal if not notorious.


Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not? and do ye not remember? Mark 8: 18

          Thus environmental science as it impacts the federal government's jurisdiction is, to varying degrees, "muzzled": research centers, libraries are closed, defunded. The excuse, of course, is provided by the neocon / Free Market idiotology: cut social services (education, aid to the poor or disempowered, the environment..) in order to "stimulate economic growth" which will then "trickle down" to lower socio-economic classes. The problem is that despite decades of following neocon economic gurus, the wealth she just ain't a trickled down no where, folks. In fact, the gap between rich and poor both within and between nations has, contrary to predictions, continually increased. Normally, when one tries a policy (or tests a hypothesis in science) and it produces results more or less contrary to those predicted, one scraps the policy (or hypothesis). This has not happened with the neocon / Free Market idiotology. Why?


http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-may-20-2015-1.3080098/canadian-scientist-steve-campana-quits-over-government-muzzling-1.3080114 

           Check out the audio link - the "Listen" button. The interview with recently retired Dept of Fisheries and Oceans scientist Steve Campana begins at about minute 2 of the audioclip.  (Campana, be it noted, is not "retired" for reasons of age. In fact, he seems hale and hearty and is working in Iceland where the air, apparently, is a bit freer.)

internal blog links: keywords: censorship

This link gives numerous internal blog links to suppression of environmental science by the Harper government

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-imperial-prime-minister-wither.html

Sometimes the neocon government spending cut mania leads to tragedy, for example when deregulated industries - left to "self-regulate" - prove to be menaces to public health and safety.

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2013/09/regulations-violated-in-alberta-tarsands.html 

A series of 6 articles on Lac Mégantic train wreck of July 2013 is accessible using the keyword: accident. On that terrible night, 47 Friday night partiers were burned alive when a runaway, driverless train carrying shale oil careened into the town center, overturned and burst into a sea of burning oil. The deregulated rail industry (and the government who took part in that deregulation) are, in very large part to blame for this mass collective homicide (not intentional murder but literally "homi-cide" = "man killing"). Also to blame, more indirectly, our collective failure to develop green energy when we still had cheap energy to burn. Wind towers if they fail do not envelope people in seas of flame..

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2014/05/canada-new-face-of-authoritarianism.html 

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2013/03/blow-open-doors-and-let-real-world-in.html

This one goes back 3 years, so the policy of muzzling science that is inconvenient for a "business-as-usual" economic, social and technological agenda goes back quite a way!

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2012/04/decline-and-fall-of-canadian-science.html 

guns don't kill, people do

           We've heard that old tired refrain from gun nuts and reactionaries for many years. But the libertarian baffle gab conceals many issues. Let's look at a few..

             The registration and control of firearms in North America turns out to be a tricky business. This suggests that it is not as straightforward an issue as one might at first think. 

              Firstly, why - exactly - do we have so many guns in the hands of civilians? Polls indicate that something like 40% of US households possess one or more firearms. "In the beginning", Americans, it is argued, lived on the land and guns were a means of self-defense for isolated families and a means of obtaining food. Also their political tradition gives the People the right to change their government if it serves them badly. (One could argue that this is the right of every People, so why so many guns in N. America?)

            Today, though, most of us live in cities and obtain our meat from the store. Even the argument about the right to change government is a bit weak on at least two points:

1- Though the People may indeed possess the right to change their government if it represents them badly, is arming the average household the most efficient way to obtain good government? We are no longer living in the 18th century with a weak central State. Modern military weaponry is highly specialized, modern standing armies large, well trained and equipped. Are citizens' militias a match for these modern fighting machines? Sure, one can argue that technology is not everything. Did not the Vietnamese pull off the impossible: beat the American behemoth, the mightiest military power that ever existed? (The Americans could, of course, have dropped the Bomb on Nam but would that could have been political suicide, hindering, rather than facilitating their future access to relatively undepleted 3rd world reserves of non-renewable resources like petroleum.) And look at the trouble the West is having today controlling ISIS! Their technology is relatively primitive compared to the resources of the West and we are having a gawdawful time controlling them. 

        So while it is true that human willpower is a wonderful and powerful thing, do we really want to govern ourselves by facing off poorly trained and equipped citizens' militias against modern armies in our city streets? It seems there should be better ways to implement democracy in the 21st century.

2- Another, practical, problem arises when one starts to examine the views and goals of militiamen. While posing as citizen "patriots" and opponents of tyranny, they often promote reactionary, racist even (proto-)fascist worldviews. The links below present a fairly balanced (moderate) view of the affair, I think.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/05/southern-poverty-law-center-militias-gun-control/1964411/

http://archive.adl.org/learn/ext_us/militia_m.html?xpicked=4&item=19

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/militia-madness 

          In the present context I can't help but think that our violent, militaristic culture accords a high status symbolic value to the gun and the cult which has grown around it: I have a Big Gun that can kill a lot of people in a short time; that makes ME a Real Big Man.

The gun is the Great Equalizer. It makes the small man equal to the tall man.
                                                               - anonymous (American)

         The need for the Big Gun and the cult grown around it may, in fact, be more psychological than political or material. The role the gun plays in the urban gang culture may be reinforced by our collective social values. Perhaps, at the beginning of the third millennium we need to ask ourselves: if we want to survive as a civilization, perhaps we need a new set of value to live by?

The background: December 6, 1989, avowed anti-feminist Marc Lépine walked into the École Polytechnique, Montréal and cold-bloodedly murdered 14 female engineering students with a rifle because "you're all feminists!" To do his dirty work, he separated males from females, then gunned down the women. Afterwards, as so often in these cases, Lépine took his own life..

           Québec society was heavily traumatised. This type of thing was only "supposed" to happen south of the Canada / US border, and most certainly not in peace loving, tolerant Québec! We lost whatever semblance we had of (false) innocence in the months following the massacre.

            Families were broken, scarred, destroyed in complex and ramifying ways. Ripples of violence spread out from the Polytechnique massacre for years afterwards. Some  of the men present were crushed by feelings of guilt: "We should have done something! We should have rushed him en masse even if he did kill a couple of us.." A few of those directly connected with the tragedy or members of their families committed suicide: "post-traumatic stress". No man is an island, they say..

            The pro-gun regulation movement in Québec was mobilized (or born?) in those days and years following the massacre. Some of the survivors, their families and the families of the victims started a popular movement which led to the Canadian Firearms Registry  of 1993 under the Federal Liberal government of Jean Chrétien. The original cost of the registry was set to be a modest $2 million. But implementation costs inexplicably ballooned to a (possible) $2 billion: a mind-shattering 1,000 fold cost overrun! (Does this make the Guiness Book of Records? It should.) 

             This was also the time of the downfall of the Chrétien government, plagued by corruption scandals, broken promises such as failure to live up to the Kyoto Accord on Greenhouse Gas Emissions, budgetary muckups in military spending resulting from the government's attempts to pander to neoconservative pennypinching ideology and severe (and probably unpopular) cuts to the armed forces.

           The successive revelations of cost overrun and redtape, combined with rise of the New Right, eventually spelled the death of Registry. I believe it served as a convenient scapegoat around which to mobilize the forces of the resurgent Right. Harper and his crowd never tired of attacking the Registry for both good reason (overruns, redtape, missed deadlines, incompetence..) and bad ones (inconvenience for traditional - rural - gunowners or the idea that "urban criminals don't register their weapons"). It is interesting to note that police departments were among the biggest defenders of the Registry, claiming that it was a valuable tool in assessing the danger of a potentially violent confrontation: domestic violence with or without seizure of hostages, arrest of a citizen on their property..

            The Chrétien government are the real villains of the piece. They have, in effect, dishonored the memory of the slain through their incompetent destruction of a piece of potentially valuable legislation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Firearms_Registry

http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/polytechnique-massacre-lives-forever-changed 

The final chapter:  "On October 25, 2011, the government introduced Bill C-19, legislation to scrap the Canadian Firearms Registry. The bill would repeal the requirement to register non-restricted firearms (long-guns) and mandate the destruction of all records pertaining to the registration of long-guns currently contained in the Canadian Firearms Registry and under the control of the chief firearms officers.The bill passed second reading in the House of Commons (156 to 123). On February 15, 2012, Bill C-19 was passed in the House of Commons (159 to 130) with support from the Conservatives and two NDP MPs. On April 4, 2012, Bill C-19 passed third reading in the Senate by a vote of 50-27 and received royal assent from the Governor General on April 5. The Province of Québec protested, appealing to the Supreme Court to save that portion of the database relating to the Province. "On March 27, 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the destruction of long-gun registry records was within the constitutional power of Parliament to make criminal law, denying the Quebec government's legal challenge and allowing for those records to be destroyed." (Wikipedia) 

            Thus the Registry became history, in the grave 18 years after its passage (or 22 years if you consider the Province of Québec where it continued to be used by police until the court ordered the destruction of the database for Québec in 2015).

              Québec is debating whether to invest in its own, provincial, Gun Resgistry.

             But what does this pathetic "debate" over gun control say about our society? That our political parties are vacuous? (And if they are, why?) That they have no real positions on anything of importance and so are forced to appeal to the lowest common denominator (division, scapegoating, spreading fear and hate)?

Harper: who lives by the sword dies by the sword

 abbreviations used in this article:

GW - Global Warming

         Prime minister Stephen Harper has championed the cause of mothers and children on the world stage. Here is a glowing review recently published in the Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/blake-bromley/maternal-health-summit_b_5441546.html

http://globalnews.ca/news/1363979/ban-ki-moon-to-speak-at-child-health-summit-in-toronto/ 

          Harper's traditional Christian evangelical values may be partly responsible for his position. We simply give credit where credit is due. His support is welcome. On the international scene, family issues - including women's and children's rights to education, health and security and the right to birth control - do not receive the attention they deserve. This is both tragic and stupid. World leaders speak of the need for "sustainable development" but scant attention is paid to the fact that the fastest way of reducing population growth to sustainable levels is to promote female literacy. Military spending makes money for the those who can afford the biggest lobbies and pay for the biggest goodies (defense industry contracts) for compliant national politicians who jump through hoops.. We fail to reflect upon the fate of children brutalized in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria: as adults they will fill the ranks of tomorrow's terrorist gangs. Disempowered, brutalized children will eventually strike back as brutalizing adult fanatics. As a planetary society we fail to recognize the wisdom of the African proverb: it takes a whole village to raise a child.

            Prime minister Stephen Harper recently berated parents duped by pseudo-scientific fraudsters who link autism to childhood vaccination. Their refusal to have their kids vaccinated is now allowing formerly "conquered" diseases like measles and even the dreadful polio to make a comeback. Harper expressed irritation and confusion at this behavior. Who, in their right mind, would deny proven science! All very rational.. till, of course, you look at Harper's own precedents..

            Stephen Harper has not exactly been a paragon of rationality when it comes to judging the value of published science. He accepts that there is no valid statistical evidence linking autism to vaccination. But when it comes to atmospheric physics, he rejects established, peer-reviewed science and joins the cultlike global warming (GW) deniers and "sceptics". In other words, he does not judge science on purely rational grounds but "cherry picks" the "science" that fit his own political and economic world view. In one of his more egregious outbursts - admittedly made when he was still an Albertan provincial politician and had not made the move yet to the Federal arena - Harper addresses a letter to Reform party members denouncing the Kyoto Accord on Greenhouse Gas Emissions as a "socialist scheme" - ! sic ! to "suck money out of wealth-producing nations". Those Evil Commies again! - gee, I thought they all died out years ago, sort of like dinosaurs..

http://www.one-blue-marble.com/harper-and-climate-change.html

           From a scientific perspective, Harper's lies (or confusions) are as egregious as anything the autism / vaccination crowd ever came up with - and for the future health and stability of this planet, probably a hell of lot more destructive in the long run. GW, pontificates Harper, is based on "tentative" science. (It isn't but his readers want to believe it just like the autism / antivaccination crowd want to see "official" medical science tumble in the dust.) Worse, GW science is "contradictory" (???) Well, yes, science - based on the public demonstration of truth: experiment and peer- review - is necessarily based on the public confrontation and conflict of opposed models of reality. That's like, duh, the way it's supposed to work.. What Harper failed to convey was the fact that the existing evidence weighs strongly in favor of the human causation of GW.

                          Traditional science versus Neocon NewScience


          Like a polished charlatan Harper grossly distorts fact by a deft combination of "misinforming through omission" and a folksy, down home appeal to "common sense". GW science is refuted because it "focuses on carbon dioxide, which is essential to life, rather than upon pollutants". Can't be more commonsensical than that: I imagine Harper, Stetson crowned, leaning back in an old rocking chair on the homestead back porch, sucking on a full headed wheat stalk, chatting with the folk. In the background, the great prairie sunset blazes redly on the horizon amidst rocking oil rigs.. What Harper omits is that too much of a good thing can, in fact, be deadly. Carbon dioxide, like salt, fits in that category. Too little salt and your life expectancy drops because sodium and chloride are "essential to life". Too much salt, though, and your life expectancy falls: that's why governments' and medical bodies promote reduction in salt use..

         Like pseudo-science gurus, Harper creatively mingles speculation with self-evident truth. Thus the Kyoto Accord will destroy jobs. In reality, nothing is likely further from the truth! Years of studies by economists suggest rather the contrary. High Tech energy industries like the petrochemical and the nuclear produce few long term jobs. Aside from some initial, temporary job creation in the construction sector, high tech energy is capital intensive and labor dis-intensive. High tech energy production: a few guys walking around big buildings full of lots of heavy - and expensive! - equipment. Green energies - based on renewable sources like sun, wind, tide, geothermal energy, biomass.. - actually tend to have lower capital to labor ratios: more guys working in smaller buildings with smaller, less expensive, pieces of equipment.

         Finally, Harper plays the populist, (one fears ,racist), redneck card again. He doesn't like 3rd world nations who, initially, do not have to conform to the Kyoto Accord gas emission reduction targets. Such a delay of implementation, while admittedly controversial - and debatable, is at least the admission of the need for some kind of international social justice. Historically, the industrial world built up its wealth on the backs of the colonized races (cheap labor and raw materials) while having a free hand to pollute for a century and a half (since the Industrial Revolution). The controversial provision to phase in 3rd world compliance at a later date was, at least, an attempt to deal with this flagrant historical injustice. Harper hypocritically seems to imply that all the right is on one side, no need for debate..

          It is a bit difficult for me to reconcile 

1- Harper's apparently sincere and (aside from some unfortunate concessions to Right wing conservative christian groups) rational promotion of mother / child health issues with 

2- the inanity of his positions on GW (and environmental issues in general). 

         Perhaps we see here another example of the (apparent) "hypocrisy" or "multi-faceted" personality noted so often in authoritarians. The left hand of the authoritarian rarely knows what the right is doing. The authoritarian personality seems to lack "integrity" (especially in the senses of psychological "unity", of the ability to argue rationally or of attitudinal "coherence"). Authoritarians therefore often provide flagrant examples of the very vices they denounce so vehemently in the groups they detest.

          In the present case, Harper experiences apparently heartfelt consternation with parents who do not accept scientific knowledge regarding infectious disease and refuse to have their kids vaccinated. Yet has not Harper gone out of his way to discredit and muzzle GW science? Does he not condemn in others what he freely does himself? Inconsistent - like a good authoritarian..

           In a more philosophical vein, I'm led to an observation on human nature from the newly emerging science of Evolutionary Biology (AKA: Sociobiology). Because humans evolved from back stabbing, power hungry dudes similar to modern chimpanzees, we use guile and deception to advance our social status - "primate politics", in other words. Thus chimps are said to possess a "Machiavellian psychology". Unfortunately, humans also make lousy liars. Unconscious tics and visual / auditory cues give the lie away, except for psychopaths: they have an ace up the sleeve when they can lie with a straight face. But crafty mother nature (natural selection / evolution) came up with a solution: humans are naturally hypocritical. We don't scrutinize our own positions with sufficient rigor. Therefore, we readily end up believing our own lies, our own BS. Like the psychopath, we, too, end up lying with a straight face (the psycho just knows he's BSing everybody..) From this perspective, the authoritarian, having a more "polyfaceted", less internally integrated personality, accepts his own BS a bit easier than the rest of the population. 

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2013/09/book-review-moral-animal-by-robert.html

             The author of The Moral Animal (above link) suggests a pedagogical approach to morality originally advanced by Charles Darwin and his circle. We should educate ourselves to compensate in the opposite direction of our natural (hypocritical) bent. We should be instructed in school to learn to look at all sides of issues, to learn to critically scrutinize our own positions for flawed logic or self interest (and not just criticize reflexively the opinion of our adversaries).

author of autism / vaccination scam loses medical licence 

Canada: the new face of authoritarianism?

          Stephen Harper has never projected a Mr Nice Guy image.

          To reveal my own biases, I find him pompous, stiff, ideologically rigid and biased, (silently) arrogant, petulant when opposed, a bit "full of himself". Except for ideological rigidity and bias, none of these qualities necessarily make for a bad politician. It is even arguable that a bit of chutzpah sometimes helps in his job.. (Consider another field, music. Richard Wagner wrote great music but that didn't prevent him from being a racist jerk..)

          Harper's election, it must be admitted, marked a new style (and to a lesser degree a new orientation) in Canadian federal politics, one based on the gritty, dirty, below-the-belt American neoconservative / New Right style. 

http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/angry-white-men/

(note: this article is from the conservative Macleans magazine, so this is how the Center and moderate Right see things - not just us flamin' Lefties. My major disagreement with the author might be about the chances of the "dinosaurs" going extinct anytime soon. I personally don't think they have hit their full stride yet. We ain't seen nothing yet..)

           Harper's gritty, mean-spirited populism shows in several areas, which we have treated in our articles the last few years. Primary among these:

1- critical, negative, demeaning attitude toward the media. Many journalists have complained about the chill and the Stalinoid control of the media (ironically, the Harperites like to beat up on Communist countries and parade about in the robes democracy, liberty and "individualism").

http://voices-voix.ca/en/issues/transparency/media

2- the muzzling of science when it does not accord with neoconservative "Free Market" ideology. This is especially obvious on issues relating to the environment and Albertan Tarsand exploitation.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/federal-scientists-closely-monitored-during-polar-conference-1.1248559 

Talk about a Stalinoid time warp: beam me up, Scotty, UP! FAST!

http://www.terry.ubc.ca/2014/02/19/is-the-canadian-government-censoring-its-scientists/

Kafka would have loved this..

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2013/03/experimental-lakes-areas-curious-episode.html

A true national tragedy this one. F'ng obscene: deliberate destruction of World Class science - philistines!

Update: a happy ending, for a change (you don't see many when it comes to environmental issues). There are some good folks and forward looking institutions out there. The Experimental Lakes Area project and infrastructure were saved in the nick of time.

http://saveela.org

3- The Nadon affair. After the supreme court refused a Harper nominee for the bench, Stephen went for the jugular.

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/05/05/andrew-coyne-pmo-has-created-another-needless-controversy-by-picking-fight-with-canadas-top-judge/

           Again, we choose the conservative Maclean's magazine, to avoid the argument of excessive ideological bias on our part. Andrew Coyne even seems a bit worried about Harper's mental health. Thinking conservatives seem to be having the doubts about the drift of the Harper government as the following comment from a reader suggests:

"Edmund Burke believed a conservative was someone who respected the accumulated wisdom within existing institutions and defended them from radical assault.
Some conservative Harper is."

Are we, well.., decadant?

           Speaking as a Canadian and a North American, it is probably safe to say that we are not immune to the political and racial fanaticism that are emerging as disquieting symptoms of social decadence in Europe. Witness the recent debate in Québec over banning the wearing of "ostentatious religious symbols" by employees of public institutions: hospitals, government offices, schools, day cares..

left-wing-populism-in-quebec  (internal blog link)

             Ultimately, one can begin to pose questions about the long term viability of democracy in radically inegalitarian, capitalist / corporatist economies. Already, one begins to see the beginings of this questioning among political scientists:

link - democracy bankrupt?

             One of the things that strikes one as a "sign of the times": the nastiness of political debate. Why such nastiness in supposedly affluent societies where everyone (supposedly) has enough to eat? This may have a rational explanation: empty barrels make the most noise. When political parties have nothing to offer, they go on the attack. This is a way of hiding their intellectual vacuousness and moral bankruptcy: their sole reason for existing is to prop up a dying Old Regime as long as possible. This is the core set of values of reactionary politics, very visible in North America today. Just think of election time "attack" or "negative" ads. Our political leaders, with few exceptions, cannot be positive exactly because they have no proposals, no program founded in a critical analysis of reality. One gets the impression that our democratic institutions are exhausted.

link: noam-chomsky,10-strategies-of-manipulation

              Everywhere a "devil may care" attitude flourishes. Witness the antics recently of Toronto's high living, crack smoking, "man of the people" mayor Rob Ford.

link: character assassination as politics

               Everything which is "virile" - mean spirited, vicious, violent - is lauded. Cynicism is the norm, especially among the young. Many are convinced that all politicians are crooks, something which the Charboneau Commission hearings into corruption in the construction industry in Québec tend to confirm. 

 internal blog links:

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2012/10/charbonneau-commission-when.html

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2012/11/the-right-hand-knows-not-what-left-hand.html

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2012/11/turning-over-rocks-things-you-find.html 

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2013/06/montreal-rock-n-roll.html 


                These are dangerous times. It is at such times that the disempowered and the disenfranchised finally opt out of the System and begin searching for Messiahs to save them. This has had terrible consequences in the 20th century. One need only think of the great dictators that century produced: Hitler, Stalin, Mao.. 

                Fascism caught the Left like a bolt out of the blue. Not only had they not predicted it's emergence in the first decades of the twentieth century but they did not really understand it. It is only with the 20 / 20 vision of retrospection, fifty years after its birth, could the Left say that it had some sort of an intellectual handle on fascism. And what we do know is not very encouraging..

                One definition of fascism: the control or seizure of the State by the corporate elite. That sounds like North America today. One need only compare, for example, the Harper government's environmental policies and the desires of the petrochemical industry to see much overlap there is. Harper's environmental policy could have been written in the Oil Patch (cynics say it was). Young people understand things like this viscerally and its corrupting influence both on them and on the political process itself.

                One of the strategies worked out by the fascists early on (program of the Italian fascist party, circa 1920), was what one can call "contemporary populism". Fascism / populism aims to bypass the logical, critical thinking circuits of the brain and tap directly into the reptilian brain.

              Dimetrodon: an early synapsid reptile (Permian era - 275 million years ago)
            Mammals are modern or surviving synapsids. Dimetrodon slumbers in the                    core of our mammalian brains..

           Since reptiles were the earliest terrestrial vertebrates from which the rest evolved, their brains are involved in computing the basic stuff: sex, aggression and flight, the stuff you need to survive but not much more. The rawest, most powerful emotional, instinctive stuff. This is what the fascists aim to tap into. Their males want our women: a traditional motivational ploy of the racist. They want to take over the world. They want to destroy our values and our way of life. Everything is simple, black and white - as befits a small, early model vertebrate brain.

             But the reptile slumbers in all of us (till awakened). The fascist wants to tweak Dimetrodon's tail, stomp on it. They want to connect the raw emotions stimulated and liberated to cues: racial, religious, gender-orientation or political epithets. The goal is to get a knee jerk - unthinking "conditioned" - reflex when the cues are presented. Thus, critical rational thinking - emerging in higher (non-reptilian) brain centers - is bypassed by raw, survival oriented emotion. This was all well spelled out in the first Fascist Party program (circa 1920, Rome). Contemporary North American reactionaries have refined the procedures (many are from advertising firms and corporate funded Right wing think tanks including university profs). More sophistication in programming and delivery but the basic principles are the same. In the third link from the top, Toronto's high-flyin' populist mayor smears - by insinuation - an adversarial journalist with the hate label, "pedophile". The connection is obvious: threat to children (our children!) has been linked to this man, his name and, of course, his future opinions expressed in his columns.

             The reassertion of populism, reactionary politics and even neo-nazi movements is a worrying sign, if the history of the 20th century is any judge...

Transparency and the role of press freedom in a democracy

        Democracy is based on the rule of the People. The theory holds that, in order to make informed and intelligent choices, the populace must have access to the information required to make those choices. Traditionally, this information could come through a variety of chanals: word of mouth, public meeting including debate, theater, and street demonstration; the pulpit, the press and related printed or graphic materials (posters, artwork..)..

         The Canadian Journalism Project provides a litany of broken promises and bad faith on the part of the Harper government with regard to journalistic access to information, the very information - don't forget! - that democracy requires in order that the People make wise decisions in public matters.

http://www.j-source.ca/english_new/detail.php?id=3391

http://www.law.ualberta.ca/centres/ccs/issues/freedomofthepressandprimeministerharpersmediapolicy.php

          Thus we are left with the intriguing paradox that a goverment elected on a platform of "transparency" and "diversity of opinion" is guilty of seeking to control and direct the timing, spin and accessibility of information in the public domain. "One hand knoweth not what the other does"..

           One can even argue - I do - that even when the letter of the law (Charter of Rights) is respected, the spirit of the law - and of Democracy itself - is being violated. Justice must not just appear to be done, justice must be done.