It's Callted "Research," Michael...

Research! You would think, perhaps, that iPolitics' Michael Harris would have heard of it?

Well, if you read his most recent column with a careful eye, you may be forced to conclude that, no. He hasn't heard of it.

In something of a desperate bid to confuse the Harper governments Economic Action Plan ads for the Liberal Party's own Adscam, Harris winds up making some rather scurrilous comments about the ads:

"No one is better at giving himself straight As than this PM. The new explanation went something like this: The ads were worth it because after seeing their key message — that Canada was doing better than any other developed country in tough economic times — Canadians would burst with pride at what a good government they had.

Setting aside the neck-snapping shift in the justification, there was another problem with the ads.  They weren’t true either. Canada does not have the highest growth rate in the G7 — the United States does. Outside the G7, the economies of Australia and some Scandinavian countries also grew faster than Canada’s did."

Looking back on 2012, we can quickly see that Harris' claims here are tacitly false. The United States GDP outgrew Canada's... in the third quarter. Through the entirety of 2012, the GDP of Canada and the United States each grew at 2.1%. It took an unexpected third quarter for the US to pull even with Canada in 2012, but the shine wore off through the final quarter.

It's especially worth noting that Canada out-performed the United States in per-capita GDP growth, widely considered to be a better predictor of overall economic growth.

So in other words, Harris would have to make a single quarter a microcosm for the entirety of 2012's comparative growth, ignoring all other quarters, for Harris' claims to even seem true.

It certainly also helps that Harris is using current economic numbers -- the US has once again had a strong third quarter -- when the numbers used in the ads, aired during the 2013 NHL playoffs, were most likely from the first quarter of 2013. Canada's GDP numbers blew the US away in quarter number one. Talk about shifting the goalposts in truly epic fashion.

It's enough to make you wonder about the editing that takes place in the iPolitics offices. This is far from the first time Michael Harris has thrown caution to the wind and committed a savage burn on his oblivious readership. It's actually become quite routine.

My Open Letter to Olivia Cole

Hi, Olivia.

Allow me to begin this letter by doing something I suspect is unthinkable to you: I honestly don't give a rat's ass if you're white. That you would begin your "open letter to the three white students who filed a discrimination complaint against their black teacher" by mentioning that only doubles my contempt for you.

Does it stun you to hear that one white person can feel contempt for another? Well, you'd better get used to it.

In a sense, I almost feel sorry for you. You must really think that white people walk around all day wearing invisible knapsacks and high-fiving each other for being white. All the while, hiring all sorts of people solely because they're white. And apparently all the more ready to listen to your "white privilege" tripe because apparently we take things more seriously coming from other white people.

These assumptions about how other people think about race speaks volumes about how you think about race. Who the hell was ever taught that "white is always right?" Were you taught that? Really? Really?

Now, I know these are trying times for you. The push-back against your extreme and socially-corrosive ideology is growing. The more you and the people who share your ideas have attempted to tighten your oppressive fists around the minds of others, the more minds have slipped through your fingers. It's not going to go away any time soon.

Perhaps what stuns even more than your obvious lack of self-knowledge is the sheer extent of your condescension. You have the nerve to lecture these students about their lessons in what you believe the "true" history of the United States is without bothering to acquaint yourself with the fact that Shannon Gibney is supposed to be teaching an English course.

Or perhaps even your assertion that Gibney is trying to make them "better." "Better" than who? "Better" ...like you?

Here's the truly stunning thing. And seeing as how you've revealed that you take what you hear more seriously when it comes from a white person (right?), I'm sure you'll take it seriously indeed.

The people who stuffed your too-empty-by-half mind with this nonsense are oppressing you. And you've internalized your own oppression. And if that makes you feel good about yourself, then so be it. But the least you can do is stop demanding that other people submit to the same oppression to which you've submitted.

If you want to internalize your own oppression, that's fine. Stop demanding the rest of us do the same.

When Passive Aggression Meets "Microagression"

Ralph Haddad's recent column in the McGill Daily is more than just a reminder that dumb people also go to university; it's also essentially the nadir of anti-oppression ideology.

Haddad penned more than 1,000 words denouncing the Movember campaign -- in which men grow moustaches in order to fundraise to fight prostate cancer, but his column can essentially be summed up in two words: fucking stupid.

Haddad insists that Movember is "sexist, racist, transphobic and misinformed." In order to back this up he falls back on some of the most comically-flawed counter-logic to ever make it to newsprint in a Canadian newspaper, even in a student newspaper.

For example: he claims that Movember is sexist because it doesn't include women, who tend to not like growing moustaches.

And while this is certainly dumb, it doesn't even begin to match the sheer stupidity of his racism argument. Prostate cancer affects black men at a disproportionate rate. Yet it tends to be mostly white men who participate in Movember. So get this: all those white guys fundraising to help cure a disease that disproportionately affects black men? Racist.

It's the kind of logic that has become far too common among those indoctrinated into anti-oppression ideology. The flimsiness of it is actually reinforced among those who share this ideology by the need to denounce anything and everything heterosexual white males do as oppressive. And even if the evidence doesn't fit this -- even if Haddad's own evidence actually contradicts it -- then it must be warped and twisted until Haddad can at least say it supports his argument. Which he would have said no matter what. And he did.

It's enough to make you hope that this spurred one of Haddad's professors in the English and Cultural Studies department to roll up this issue of the McGill Daily and gave him a good, hard smack in the nose with it. It isn't as if Haddad hasn't embarrassed his department and his university as well as himself.

I imagine the past week has been rather tough on Ralph Haddad, but it's hard to feel sorry for him. For example, if his father is alive I imagine he has some 'splainin' to do about how he actually tried to take cover behind his battle with prostrate cancer. But that's just for starters. In writing -- and then actually publishing -- this column, he has metaphorically magnetized his own crotch and then distributed steel toed boots. Not wise in the slightest.

Justin Trudeau is >Not< Qualified to be Prime Minister

Come 2015, if the Conservative Party hasn't adopted new leadership -- and it certainly looks that they won't, as talks of replacing Prime Minister Stephen Harper are not even on the party's radar screen -- a good number of people who have lost confidence in him will likely hold their nose and vote Conservative anyway

I know that I certainly will.

Neither of the party's principle competitors offer anything even resembling an alternative. Thomas Mulcair would be an absolute disaster as Prime Minister, but at least he possesses some experience that could be considered as qualification for the role.

Not only does Liberal leader Justin Trudeau not possess any experience that would qualify him to be Prime Minister, during the past week he managed to actively disqualify himself.

This came on the back of a question asked by a wannabe political maven trying far too hard to be anything more than what she really is. At the #AskJustin "ladies night" event that has been nothing short of a complete disaster for Trudeau and the Liberal Party, Amanda Alvaro asked what she must have imagined was a real substantive question: which foreign political administration he admires the most.

Trudeau's answer has reverberated disturbingly across Canadian politics, despite the Canadian media's best efforts to not report on it. "There's a level of admiration I actually have for China," Trudeau quipped. "Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime."

Wow.

Trudeau admires China's dictatorship for the things it can do because it's a dictatorship. Which means, in short, that he admires China's dicatorship FOR being a dictatorship.

The CBC's Terry Milewski fell all over himself trying to pretend that Harper had said anything even remotely similar. As close as it gets is Harper lauding China for specific economic achievements. Not quite the same thing as admiring a dictatorship's dictatorial powers.

It's really not so stunning. Justin Trudeau's dad was very much the same way.

For anyone who aspires to leadership of a democratic country to publicly express admiration for a dictatorship very much immediately disqualifies them for such leadership. Not that this will matter much to the no-information voters currently planning to vote Liberal in 2015.

So Exactly What Was it All For?

So, Prime Minister Stephen Harper got his way. Senators Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau have been suspended without pay, presumably because they allegedly violated Senate spending rules -- although Canadians still don't know for certain whether or not they did.

And now that they have been suspended, what do we find? That Senator Brazeau won't have to pay a dime on his alleged expense bill for the duration of his two-year suspension.

Presumably he won't be alone to this end. Which once again provokes a very serious question:

What exactly has all of this been for?

It obviously wasn't to get to the bottom to the entire affair. In fact, the suspension of Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau seems to have been calculated to avoid the sort of due process that would lead to a definitive answer to just what, if anything, these three have actually done wrong.

And it very clearly wasn't to prompt Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau to get the money repaid. Duffy paid -- part of an ethically-dubious deal hatched with the PMO -- despite the conclusions of a Deloitte audit that found his total ineligible expenses was much lower than the $90,000 Nigel Wright gave him to repay. And on top of all this, we now have the revelation that Brazeau won't have to pay for quite a while because of his suspension.

The Senate scandal has been a textbook case of how the actions taken to head off an embarrassing incident can balloon into an embarrassment far greater than that, and in time grow into a quite-genuine scandal.

In the wake of this revelation, Stephen Harper owes Canadians a damn good explanation. What was the rush to suspend Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau really for? At this point only Harper really knows for certain.

Stephen's Chosen, But the Hope of the Party Remains

As I recently noted on this blog, I've lost confidence in Stephen Harper as Prime Minister and as Conservative Party leader. His refusal to rein in the secretive backroom behaviour in the Prime Minister's Office, and his determination to double down on that by circumventing due process have become an utterly untenable position for anyone who values democracy.

That being said, I'm not pulling a sonakent. What I mean by this is that, unlike some, I never supported or joined the Conservative Party merely as a means to gain political prominence. Rather, I supported and joined the party because I cherish the values for which it stands, and principles upon which it was built.

To allow the political destiny of Canada to be dictated by unelected officials in a backroom of the PMO flies in the very face of that. It's the reason why then-Progressive Conservative leader Peter MacKay turned his back on the demands David Orchard made in such a backroom and put the destiny of that party before its membership.

Stephen Harper should know this very well. In the end, he was a beneficiary of that decision. It allowed him to negotiate the merger of the PC and Canadian Alliance parties. The events that followed culminated with him becoming Prime Minister of Canada. He seems to have forgotten this. But I haven't.

Today, rank-and-file delegates at the party convention voted to tighten party rules regarding financial reporting. It's an imperfect means to discourage -- if not outright prevent -- unilateral decisions to use party funds for questionable purposes, but it does serve to one very specific, and important, end: it reminds party brass that they are not to simply use party funds for any purpose they deem fit, up to and including making potentially-embarrassing episodes go away.

Interestingly enough, a number of labour unions in Canada -- those who donated funds to help Pat Martin fight a defamation lawsuit that he eventually settled -- have a very similar issue of their own to plumb. I'm not aware of any of these unions holding a convention since these donations became public knowledge, but whether or not rank-and-file union members try to head off such actions in the future will be interesting to see. As it will be interesting to see how hard their leaders may resist such rule-tightening.

The Stephen Harpers and Nigel Wrights of the party brass need to take note of the message rank-and-file members have sent today: we expect that party officials will take their direction from party members, and that unelected bureaucrats will take their directions from elected officials, not vise versa. Any of you who cannot abide this had best vacate your positions.

As for myself, I will not turn my back on the party and on my fellow party members; not so long as they continue to stand for the values and principles for which this party -- and this country -- stand.

What Stephen Harper Should Have Done Right

Apparently, my last blogpost here was something of a bombshell. I think I've made it quite clear what I think Prime Minister Stephen Harper is doing wrong.

But I haven't yet made it clear how Harper should have handled the matter.

There's one thing Harper isn't wrong about: perception matters. Which is actually why, in making the decision to harangue Senator Mike Duffy -- a Senator he himself appointed to the upper chamber -- into repaying allegedly-ineligible expenses, he committed more than a simple error.

It's because perception matters that issues such as the one confronting Harper over Duffy and his colleagues Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau should have been handled in the open through due process, and should have been seen handled in the open via due process. The only role Harper should have had any point in this entire sad affair was calling a public inquiry to sort through the allegations against Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau and sort through the explanations each has -- none of which I find to be tacitly incredible, one way or the other.

That's exactly how the PMO should have handled the entire matter as well. And while Nigel Wright may or may not have acted without Harper's knowledge -- my opinion is that he likely did --  he was acting within Harper's stated wishes. It was Harper's desire that this go away quietly instead of the requisite questions being answered through due process that drove Wright to act as he did.

No one can argue that Harper isn't responsible for the actions of the PMO. Even if he didn't know what was going on -- the absolute least of which was Wright's cheque -- he should have. After issuing a directive that the Senate scandal be made to go away quietly, he should have checked up on exactly what was being done to make it happen. Of course, even this never should have happened, because Harper never should have even been so involved.

And now that Harper has been so involved he's attempting to roll on everyone else involved. He's changed his story on Wright so many times in so many ways that it's nearly impossible to keep track of it all.

He did it to himself, seemingly out of nothing more than a disdain for letting the matter be handled through due process out of the fear -- the mere fear -- of due process. And it may now be too late for him to turn back.

\Over this one comparatively inconsequential issue he's managed to lend fire to one of the left-wing Twitterverse's most impotent slogans; for the first time, Prime Minister Harper must resign.