Archive for: September 2009
MacKay cheerleads stonewalling of torture inquiry
Hats off to Murray Brewster of Canadian Press for his chilling story on the Harper Government’s determined campaign to prevent a Military Police Complaints Commission inquiry from getting to the bottom of allegations that Canadian troops in Afghanistan abetted torture.
The commission is investigating complaints by Amnesty International and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association that Canadian troops knowingly handed over prisoners to torture in Afghan prisons. But federal lawyers invoked a little known national security clause in the Canada Evidence Act to bar a key government witness from testifying. Their fig leaf? They claimed Richard Colvin, who was political director at a Canadian-run base when troops began handing over prisoners, had no relevant testimony to offer.
Colvin’s lawyer said he has both personal knowledge and documents relating “to the risk of torture resulting from the transfer of detainees to Afghan authorities.” Lead commission counsel Freya Kristjanson said Colvin has “highly relative, credible and important evidence to provide on the issues.”
Colvin was the only government witness who agreed to speak with commission lawyers, but the Justice Department invoked the gag order before he could do so. They also invoked a classic Catch 22, saying other witnesses might be allowed to testify if the commission could show they have relevant evidence, something commission lawyers will find hard to do since the witnesses, including a retired general, refuse to speak with them.
In the Commons Wednesday, Defense Minister and Central Nova MP Peter MacKay pretended there is no cover-up. He noted that the commission had praised the government for its openness. Kristjanson said MacKay was referring to comments she made last spring in reaction to the promised disclosure by federal lawyers, but they stopped co-operating immediately after she praised them.
Late advice from William Safire
A tribute this morning by Maureen Dowd to fellow New York Times columnist William Safire, the conservative speechwriter and elegant arbiter of English usage who died Sunday, contains a couple of gems.
When White House officials wouldn’t return calls, Safire suggested leaving a one-word message explaining what the caller wanted to discuss: “Malfeasance.”
Dowd once saw Safire having lunch with Bert Lance, a former Carter administration official whom he had eviscerated in columns that won Safire a Pulitzer and cost Lance his job. When Dowd asked why he’d been breaking bread with this former nemesis, Safire explained, “Only hit people when they’re up.”
What attaches people to communities? [Updated]
Arts policy gadfly and longtime Contrarian friend Andrew Terris commends to our attention a new US study on community attachment, also reported in this morning’s Globe and Mail. The Soul of Community study found that money and jobs are not what binds people to place; rather, it’s matters of the heart—things like like aesthetics, openness, and ease of social gatherings. Money quotes:
After interviewing close to 28,000 people in 26 communities over two years, the study has found that three main qualities bind people to place: social offerings such as entertainment venues and places to meet – the top factor in 21 of 26 communities, openness (how welcoming a place is) and the area’s aesthetics (its physical beauty and green spaces). Access to quality education – whether at the elementary, secondary or college level – was also an important factor…
The top three qualities remained strong over two years of polling, unaffected by the national economic crisis. The levels of residents’ emotional attachment to their towns also remained steady … The study also looked at the relationship between how passionate and loyal people are to their communities and local economic growth. Researchers did find a significant relationship between the two. For example, from 2002-06, the most attached communities had the highest local GDP growth.
So perhaps the worst thing to happen to Cape Breton in the last quarter of the 20th Century was not the death of Sysco, but the political compromise that moved Cape Breton University from the heart of downtown Sydney to its current, lonely location halfway to Glace Bay.
The CBU campus is now so big, and so developed, it’s not practical to move it back. But why not move the rapidly growing Marconi Campus of the Nova Scotia Community College downtown, as the Chamber of Commerce has proposed? The cleaned-up site of the Tar Ponds and the steel plant would make a perfect location. Properly planned and executed, such a move could help reintegrate Whitney Pier, Ashby, and the North End of Sydney.
Anita on Roger
One of the gems Canada acquired when it joined Newfoundland in 1949 was the then-infant Anita Best of Merasheen Island, Placentia Bay. Anita was barely a teenager when Joey Smallwood expunged her fishing community of residents in the great and tragic resettlement. She grew up to be the greatest collector and interpreter of Newfoundland music, storytelling, and folklore of our era—a national treasure in both nations.
Anita writes:
Just read the comment on Roger Howse’s Hendrix night at Bearly’s. Thanks for posting it. I miss Roger’s music a lot.
High praise indeed.
Steve Murphy on bias — [updated]
Steve Murphy responds enigmatically to Contrarian’s post on Michael Enright’s introduction of Jane Taber:
I do find that “bias,” like beauty, often resides in the eye (or ear) of the beholder (listener).
UPDATE, in response to a query: Murphy’s comment is not enigmatic in the don’t-know-what-he-means sense; only in the wonder-who-he’s-thinking-of sense. Hmmm.
A way out of a wrongheaded promise
I’ve criticized the NDP’s carbon subsidy (here, here, and here,), but I understand the value of keeping campaign promises, even dumb ones. In my contrary view, public cynicism about politicians is so deep, it threatens to destroy the minimal level of public trust democracy needs to survive. This may be why the Tories and the Parliamentary Press Gallery have been so successful at drumming up absurd faux-outrage at the prospect of a fall election.
So even as two of the Dexter government’s promises (keeping all rural emergency rooms open and using tax rebates to encourage electricity consumption) make me shudder, I can’t help but admire Dexter’s determination to implement them.
Contrarian’s friend Mike Targett suggests a way out of this self-set trap:
While the NDP’s home insulation & energy-efficiency improvement program for low-income earners is a good idea, the electricity rebate is an inefficient fossil fuel subsidy that will likely encourage wasteful consumption precisely because it is not targeted at those in need.
Here’s my idea: those on one side of the wage gap donate their rebate to a fund that feeds into the energy-efficiency program for low-incomers. This fund could be set up by a charity or the province itself. If only 6 or 7 thousand people did this, it would double the program’s current budget.
How about it, Darrell?
On the debate over the Wark Principle, Targett adds:
Home-heat is a necessity; carbon emissions are not. A carbon tax (exempt low-incomers) would fund renewable energy development in order to decouple energy from carbon. Of course, as we’ve seen, it can’t be called a tax. Since averting climate catastrophe ensures a livable future for our children and grandchildren, we could just call it an RFSP: Registered Future Saving Plan.
Helping the poor (and everyone else) burn dirty coal
Bruce Wark’s defense of the NDP subsidy on dirty, coal-fired electricity as a way to help the poor drew fire from several readers. In a minute, one reader corrects a factual error that tripped up both Wark and Contrarian. But what most objected to what is we might call The Wark Principle:
You don’t tax necessities, then ask poor people to apply for rebates. That’s why we don’t tax groceries. How is electricity any different?
Contrarian reader Martin MacKinnon thinks Wark’s objection to taxing necessities is ill-considered:
There are indeed far too many Nova Scotians who can ill afford the necessities of life. However, why should the rest of us benefit from their poverty? Wark seems to miss an important point. If those of us (including Wark and I) who could well afford to, do not pay tax on power, then governments who need to pay for things like health care and education will have to collect those taxes elsewhere. We need tax breaks for the necessities of life to be targeted at those who need help, not at the rest of us who don’t.
After the jump, a more vehement reader, and a factual correction.
CBC Radio’s iPhone app finds Nova Scotia (pretty soon)
CBC is awaiting approval from Apple for an update to the terrific CBC Radio iPhone app. The updated version, which should appear on iTunes soon, will include live streams of CBC stations Halifax, Calgary, Edmonton, Fredericton, Grand Falls, Moncton, Ottawa, Regina, Saint John, St John’s, Thunder Bay, Windsor, and Winnipeg. (Can Sydney be far behind?)
The original app (free download here) did not include any streams from the Mountain, Central, or Newfoundland time zones, and only Goose Bay in the Atlantic zone. Stations in the missing locations streamed in Windows Media format, which the app could not handle. As stations switch to MP3 streaming, they can be added to the app via updates like the one that’s pending.
In areas with marginal radio reception, but good WiFi or cell signals, the app beats the hell out of radio. You can time-shift effortlessly to catch an interview you missed, and you can hear many CBC programs on demand. You can do this on your computer as well, though less easily, but not in a car or out walking.
Larry Hughes responds
A few weeks ago, I posted a critique of an opinion piece in the August 25 edition of AllNovaScotia.com [subscription required] by Prof. Larry Hughes of the Dalhouse University’s Computer Engineering Department. Hughes is currently toiling as a visiting professor of Global Energy Systems at Uppsala University in Sweden. Shockingly, Contrarian is not yet daily reading in that particular corner of Scandinavia, so he only recently learned of my comments. Hughes writes:
Contrary to what you have written, [my article in AllNovaScotia.com] has nothing to with NSP’s existing 2010 or 2013 requirements. The article is about NSP’s new 25% renewables energy target for 2015 — this is made quite clear in the first two paragraphs.
The jumble of targets and deadlines set forth various provincial government plans, strategies, regulations for coping with climate change is confusing. Hughes is correct that I overlooked his emphasis on the NDP’s newly announced, and very tough, 2015 target of generating 25 percent of our electricity from renewable sources, but I’ll leave it to readers to judge whether this obviates my disagreement with several with his assertions.
No one thinks meeting the 2015 targets will be easy. Even if electricity demand remains flat between now and 2015, Hughes says NSP’s use of renewable energy “must grow from 1,068 GWh (gigawatt-hours) in 2008 to 2,919 GWh in 2015, an increase of 1,851 GWh.”
The Nova Scotia Power website gives slightly different figures. It puts renewable generation at 12 percent, or 1,560 GWh, of its total production of 13,000 GWh. That would leave a gap of 1690 GWh, assuming no growth. If NSP’s energy conservation and energy efficiency programs bear fruit, we could conceivably have consume less power by 2015.
No matter what route we take, it’s going to be a tough slog, which is another reason why the province should not be squandering $30 per year on subsidies to home energy consumption.
Subsidizing dirty coal – rebuttal – updated
My old pal Bruce Wark endorses the NDP subsidy for dirty, coal-fired electricity with some knee-jerk left-wing cant contrary-minded views:
You’re forgetting about an important and well-established principle. Governments should not tax necessities. Sales taxes on electricity and home heating fuels fall most heavily on the poorest Nova Scotians and are therefore regressive. Under NDP pressure, the Tories removed the provincial sales taxes on all home heating fuels. But later, they restored the tax on electricity. The NDP is being consistent in removing the provincial portion of the HST on electricity.
Right now, there are thousands of Nova Scotians who are behind on their power bills, not because they wantonly use too much electricity, but because they can’t afford to pay the rates Nova Scotia Power charges. The electric utility has steadfastly opposed variable rates based on family income. The experience in the U.S. shows that income-based rates that lower electricity costs for the poorest do not increase everyone else’s bills. That’s partly because power companies save the administrative costs of chasing so many people for unpaid bills as well as the costs of disconnecting their power.
One other thing. Poor Nova Scotians can’t afford to participate in provincial rebate programs designed to make their homes more energy efficient. Imposing a sales tax on electricity only worsens things for people who are always on the verge of having their power cut off.
A means test to determine power rates? Now there’s a swell idea. Never mind that we already have a refundable HST credit to give low-income Canadians back the HST they pay on necessities.
Wark is quite right that it’s hard for poor Nova Scotians to participate in home energy refit program. The $30M per year Dexter is pissing away spending on a Michael Harris-style election bribe to the middle class promise could have fixed that shortcoming, and produced permanent meaningful reductions in heating costs for the poor, while helping curb Nova Scotia’s scandalously high greenhouse gas emissions.
[UPDATE] Wark responds:
The principle remains. You don’t tax necessities, then ask poor people to apply for rebates. That’s why we don’t tax groceries. How is electricity any different?
In 2007, Utility and Review Board held fairly extensive hearings at the UARB on schemes for variable power rates. The Affordable Energy Coalition presented a number of ideas on how to reduce rates for the poor, while including the poor more effectively in energy conservation programs. [The UARB rejected the proposals.]
I point out again, it’s being done in the States.
