New Year's Rule book for Canada's Conservatives

1.       1. Remember Harper’s Birthday:  30 April 1959 (He’s a Taurus)

2. Give more allegiance to the Party than to the Constitution (Prorogation crises what prorogation crises?)

1.       3. All Canadians elect – and a few maybe vote against – the Prime Minister of Canada (He is not to be known as “Leader of the House of Commons”, now an antiquated notion)

2.       4. MPs  and Cabinet members are only puppets for the Prime Minister and the (non-elected) PMO (see also above)

3.       5. Multiple omnibus bills sind immer gut für die Gesundheit (forget the contrary - what Harper said in plain English while in Opposition)

4.       6. Think big:  we could have withdrawn from the League of Nations United Nations after most of the world voted Canada down over the issue of Palestinian ‘state’ status (the only significant vote Harper has lost in years)

5.       7. But it’s “Serenity Now!” with the Prime Minister’s yin and yang ways: we will have an uninterrupted investment pact with China for 31 years – all without a single public vote in any land (quite a coup: the hapless Mulroney’s trade deal with America was an election issue)

6.       8.  Citizens are not always citizens (you can be deported)

9.  Child soldiers in war are to be known as murderers (especially when they are Muslim)

1.       10. Those considered mentally ill are always responsible for their acts (this makes people feel better about themselves)

11. Remember:  Canada outspends Poland on its national broadcaster (Hurray!)

1.       12. Free trade if necessary but not necessarily free trade (the Nexen oil company takeover by  Communist China’s state-owned enterprise , CNOOC, is now a celebration of Canadian “multiculturalism”)

2.       13. Memo to the Minister of Heritage:  Karl Marx first published his Das Kapital in London in July 1867.  The Conservative quest to return Canada to nineteenth-century values is complete.  We may now observe Communism as part of Canada Day (see above)

3.       14. Robo-calls are really a minor issue (it’s the pollster behind the Supreme Court case that has a character problem!)

4.       15. The Great Recession is ‘not a problem for the government, but a problem for the people’ (so a wise man says)

5.       16. Canada’s police are never violent (G20 ‘activity’ was an overreaction by the people of Toronto, who are prone to excitement)

17. Apartheid is a foreign word (it applies neither to our indigenous peoples, nor to the homeless)

1.      18. Bitumen is not carcinogenic but it can be cancer causing (“let me be clear”)

2.       19. F-35 Economics (avoid any conversation thereof or your head will go into a tailspin)

An Open Letter to MP James Moore

Dear James Moore,

I am writing to express my utter dismay at the lack of public discussion over the Canada-China Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Act (FIPA).  The old problem is that the Canadian mentality is still encumbered by colonialism: first Britain, then the USA, next China.  The other problem pertains to the nature of Harper’s rule.  If we look to Karl Popper writing on Plato, Canadians should be asking themselves the question: “What if it is the will of the people that they should not rule, but a tyrant instead?”  But Canadians are not fond of asking difficult questions.  That includes Cabinet, Conservatives and many Parliamentarians.

Parliament is broken because there is no leadership respect for it as an institution in the light of prorogations and multiple omnibus bills and the dismantling of party subsidies. There is no longer any responsibility at the national level; we have a mania for free trade where accountability and vital matters are withheld from the public. With FIPA the Government of Harper betrays our sovereignty and our national interests as Canadians genuflect towards China, with little reciprocity and openness.  Parliament amounts now to a cult of irresponsibility, and you Mr. Moore have contributed this crisis, as you, yourself, have had a heavy hand in hacking away at our treasured institutions.

As Minister of Heritage you have also tried to reconstruct Canadian values and “dignity” on the paradigm of one war – that of 1812, 200 years on.  But time moves on, Mr. Moore.   Generations from now, historians will wonder what happened to Canada, and they will compare this period with the Napoleonic era (which includes that other war of 1812), where the friends of liberty were suppressed by “leadership” – and by a public that just did not take the time to care. Congratulations, Mr. Moore, you now belong to a government of non- citizens.  It also sounds a bit like China, to me.  Well done![1]

Joerge Dyrkton

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[1] First published in The Coquitlam Now, Friday, November 2, 2012.

Canada's Parliament - not

Here is Winston Churchill describing the British Parliament in his first term as elected MP in 1901:

Parliament reassembled late in February and plunged immediately into fierce debates.   In those days the proceedings in the House of Commons were fully reported in the Press and closely followed by the electors.  Crucial questions were often argued with sustained animation in three-day debates.  During their course the parties took decisive trials of strength.  The House used to sit till midnight, and from 9:30 onwards was nearly always crowded.[1]

Whither Parliament in Canada today?

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[1] Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission (London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1989 [1930]), p. 377.

Winston Churchill speaks to Harper on prison reform

In his astonishing autobiography, My Early Life (1930), Winston Churchill speaks of his “hybrid” life as war correspondent and cavalry officer.  The most compelling passages regard the Boer War where he relates the events leading up to his life as a P.O.W. (retained as a political prize and because of his leadership role when under fire); followed by his captivity; and then his stunning escape, which earned him a national and international reputation.  His period of captivity, which lasted less than a month, shaped his attitude towards prison life and prison reform.

As Home Secretary in 1910, while remembering his P.O.W. experience, Winston Churchill introduced penal reform and began ameliorating prison conditions, dragging England out of the nineteenth century.   Stephen Harper, on the other hand, with his more-than-Spartan prison reform about 100 years later, is presently dragging Canada back to the nineteenth century.   In October 2012 Public Safety Minister Vic Toews announced that the services of part-time, non-Christian chaplains will no longer be required in federal prisons next year.  The cost savings is about $1.3 million annually.

Here is what Winston Churchill might say to Harper and Toews:

… the whole atmosphere of prison, even the most easy and best regulated prison, is odious. Companions in this kind of misfortune quarrel about trifles and get the least possible pleasure from each other’s society.  If you have never been under restraint before and never known what it was to be a captive, you feel a sense of constant humiliation in being confined to a narrow space, fenced in by railings and wire, watched by armed men, and webbed about with a tangle of regulations and restrictions. I certainly hated every minute of my captivity more than I hated any other period in my whole life.  Luckily it was very short.  Less than a month passed from the time when I yielded myself prisoner in Natal till I was at large again, hunted but free, in the vast sub-continent of South Africa.  Looking back on these days, I have always felt the keenest pity for prisoners and captives.  What it must mean for any man, especially an educated man, to be confined for years in a modern convict prison strains my imagination.  Each day exactly like the one before, with the barren ashes of wasted life behind, and all the long years of bondage stretching out ahead.  Therefore in after years, when I was Home Secretary and had all the prisons of England in my charge, I did my utmost consistent with public policy to introduce some sort of variety and indulgence into the life of their inmates, to give to educated minds books to feed on, to give to all periodical entertainments of some sort to look forward to and to look back upon, and to mitigate as far as is reasonable the hard lot which, if they have deserved, they must none the less endure.[1]

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[1] Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission (London: Mandarin Paperback, 1989), pp. 273,274.  Churchill’s autobiography was first published in 1930.