Demarchy

Proportional Representation? Might be a good idea.

Listen - Pat Martin, Justin Trudeau, the Globe and Mail, Mary Magdalene and the almighty Zeus can speculate about an NDP-Liberal merger, but it’s just not going to happen. The likelihood of the two parties shacking up for anything other than an awkward, sweaty, one-election-coalition is so beyond the realm of possibility, it’s absurd.

Let’s imagineer a narrative here.

The NDP has three times as many seats as the Liberals. That makes them three times bigger. The Liberals are the “natural governing party.” Maybe the NDP has a streak of self-confidence because of the so-called ‘orange wave’ and are thus over-evaluating their self-worth just a tad, but the Liberals self-perception is so out of whack with the current status of their party that nothing short of absolute control of the proposed merged party would satisfy them.

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It’s been a long time coming for Canada to finally take action and end the disparaging record of human rights abuses committed by our mining companies. John Mckay, a Liberal MP from Ontario, has taken the first steps;

“The word “Canada” is so reviled in some places that travelling Canadians mask their citizenship by wearing American flags on their caps and backpacks…

…International Trade Minister Stockwell Day says there will be no legislative action because it would not work, and the companies do not need it.

“As you know, one country doesn’t develop laws that apply in another country,” he said in an interview.

The allegations of human rights abuses come from at least 30 of the world’s poorest countries and have named companies of all sizes, from giant corporations to junior mining companies…

.. watchdog groups like MiningWatch Canada and the Halifax Initiative, both based in Ottawa, allege some companies spend money buying guns, employing paramilitaries, bribing officials and forcefully relocating entire communities.

Allegations like these caused John McKay, Liberal MP for Scarborough-Guildwood, to introduce the private member’s bill being debated in committee.

“Not only is there a behavioural risk to an individual company, but there is also a risk to our national reputation.”

The Conservative Party’s stance on this is nothing short of reprehensible and disgusting. To oppose a bill that would subjugate Canadian companies to the same human rights laws that they must respect here in Canada would be funny if it did not have such a bloody punchline.

The government has signaled that it won’t support the bill because doing so would encroach on the sovereignty of foreign countries, while the mining companies are blaming the violence on the lack of power and the corruptibility of these governments.To employ an idea of the late, great Kurt Vonnegut when speaking of misdirection; “See the cat? See the cradle?”

The fact is that by not legislating these companies, Canada is complacent in the corporate imperialism that we are so swift to decry elsewhere. We are not only allowing but facilitating the barbaric rape and pillaging of the resources and people of the third world countries that we imagine we are protecting. The fact that they have not been stopped as of yet represents a fundamental failure of every political party in parliament.

The myriad of ethically questionable companies operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, were shamed and exposed for their backroom deals,

“Ten Canadian companies were implicated in the UN report entitled “Report on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and other Forms of Wealth in the Congo,” published in 2002. One of the most comprehensive and damning reports on Western activities in the Congo, the UN report implicated 157 companies and recommended travel bans, legal action and investigation by states where these companies were located.

Though all 10 companies were accused of violating the guidelines of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and some were accused of bribing officials in order to have access to land, the Canadian government has failed to investigate the companies’ role in the Congo war, said Mining Watch Canada.”

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Then there’s the evidence that Canadian companies are responsible for poisoning Hondourans.

“According to the ecologists who organised the study, lead and arsenic levels in the blood were higher than the maximum recommended by international standards (70 ug/dl) in a sample of 10 people who live near the San Martín mine, in San Ignacio, a municipality located in the central Siria Valley.”

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And then, of course, there’s the complete degradation of our environment with no respect to the immediate and long term ramifications.

“A Canadian company is proposing to “relocate” massive glaciers in the Andean Mountains in order to get to the gold underneath. The problem is that the glaciers are an immensely important source of fresh water for the ecosystem, and removing them would lead to unimaginable disruption of the ecosystem. Though many Latin American governments are eager to reap the jobs and revenues mining operations bring, grassroots opposition to some mining projects has been impressive.”

Source

Even though some of these corrupt governments are so flagrant in their absolute violence and agression, the companies and our government still stay absolutely quiet,

“On Friday, June 5, an estimated 600 Peruvian police officers in helicopters and on foot opened fire on thousands of peaceful Indigenous protesters blocking a road near Bagua in the Peruvian Amazon. For the past two months, over 30,000 Indigenous Peruvians have sustained nonviolent protests along the roads and waterways of the Amazon in response to a series of presidential decrees issued in advance of the implementation legislation for potential U.S. and Canadian free trade agreements.

Protesters point out that these decrees violate indigenous rights, discourage environmental protection of the Peruvian rainforest and open the way for an unprecedented expansion of new transnational petroleum, mining, logging and plantation agriculture. Indigenous leaders are calling for international solidarity to safeguard the Amazon, 72 per cent of which is already leased for petroleum exploration and extraction, almost half of it by Canadian companies.

One Canadian company that will benefit directly from this rollback of indigenous rights is the Alberta-based petrochemical firm Petrolifera. The Peruvian government recently signed an agreement with Petrolifera to explore land inhabited by one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes –- a decision that the Instituto del Bien Comun has appealed to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.”

Source

The Star mentions a few examples as well,

Debate kicked up in 2002 after a United Nations report called on the Canadian government to investigate the actions of seven Canadian companies accused of illegally exploiting resources from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has been in a state of civil war since 1996.

The Canadian government didn’t investigate.

Then in 2004 came reports of bloodshed.

From Africa: Where the UN says 73 people were killed in Kilwa, a fishing town in the Congo. Killed, according to a UN report, by the Congolese military, which used vehicles, supplies, pilots and drivers from a Canadian-Australian mining company to transport them to the site of the massacre. The company, Anvil Mining, says its vehicles were confiscated by the military and that it had no choice but to comply under Congolese law.

To Southeast Asia: Where 15 Canadian-employed mine workers were gunned down in a remote Philippine jungle strip, victims of a feud between Canada’s TVI Pacific Inc. and the indigenous peoples of Mindanao.

So thank you, John Mckay, for finally standing up and forcing the government’s hand into saying “We will not condone murder.”

Conclusion being; the NDP needs to buy a newspaper.

There is a real disconnect between the reality of our platform, our successes and our goals and what the public perceives our ideology to be. Our party has the best record, provincially, of balanced budgets (the sore thumb being Bob Rae, now a Liberal.)

Here is a conversation I had yesterday;

Her:

I support the Conservative Party because I want less government in my life, not more.

Me:

Here’s the irony; the Conservatives have presided over some of the most wasteful spending in our history, one of the largest expansions in our defense spending, a hugely wasteful war, programs that have jailed teenagers and adults alike for possessing marijuana and a large infringement onto our civil rights. Do you support gay marriage? Abortion? Do want the government to just stay out of your social life? Well Harper disagrees. Meanwhile they’ve cut back on essential social services that we’re paying for and justified it by saying that we should have small government. Prime Minister Harper has left Canadians stranded halfway across the world and refused to stand up for their rights as Canadians. How do you reconcile that?

Her:

Well…Uh…

So you’re a Conservative? Fine. There are many justifiable reasons to be a Tory. However, to defend all of Harper’s policies is in itself an exercise in hypocrisy. Harper has hopped around the political spectrum in an effort to retain power and make himself out to be a pragmatist, however, his rhetoric just does not match his record.

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When I spoke with Michael Ignatieff last week, I decided to ask what I thought were the two oddest curiosities about the Liberal party under the very intelligent, yet politically hopeless man.

First, I reject the assertion that coalitions are somehow undemocratic or inferior to a tradition Canadian parliamentary make-up. This is utterly false. While Ignatieff, and perhaps smartly so, stops short of denouncing the idea, he brushes it off politely as though to say “Oh that looks nice, but I’d just as rather not have any.” Which carries the same message, just in a way so as not to offend the more forward-thinking in his own party. He rejects it without looking to the previous coalitions in Canadian history. He further forgets that he is running against a very strong coalition; the Conservative party. The party that united groups from different areas of the Canadian political spectrum (from the relative center-right to the far-right) to decrease divisions and defeat a powerful foe. Gosh, that sounds familiar.

The fact is that as the NDP and Greens become more powerful, coalitions will be inevitable. The parties that embrace this early will have more time to smooth out the bumps. So the question is; will the coalition be Liberal-Conservative, or NDP-Bloque-Liberal? Of course, if neither of these two happen soon, the makeups could change drastically, as permutations such as NDP-Bloque(-Green) could become possible. Iggy would do well to put his best foot forward, before the progressives leave him behind.

I further take offense to the fact that we have a prospective prime minister who is, by any account, quite worldly. So that begs the question; is he ignorant to European democracies or just intentionally oblivious. Coalitions are a way of life in many European democracies and the idea of governing without one is practically impossible. It leads the way to natural bipartisanship, a stronger democracy and a push from independents, issue parties and regional parties. This leads to a much, much vibrant government that represents more people, more minorities and more issues.

As for the economy, I would find it ironic that Mr. Ignatieff initially attacked Harper for not doing enough for infrastructure spending, only to turn around and snub it. He insists that EI reform is the best way to spur recovery, which is inherently wrong. Yes, putting the money in the pockets of people is a great idea, but it won’t work if you only marginally increase the income for less than 8.5% of the population. What’s more, infrastructure spending creates jobs, which attacks the disease instead of just the symptom. Sure, EI reform needs to happen, but it must be coupled with target job creation to really create growth without causing inflation.

Harper had the right idea. Initially, he opted for no infrastructure spending or stimulus package. That is an insanely flawed approach, and it was evidently coming from someone who had no idea of what the recession would become. In an effort to overcompensate, he gave in to opposition pressure and release a huge, wasteful and unfocused package that is most certainly not 80% out the door. It’s effects will be so delayed due to bureaucratic mess, it will come into effect exactly when we don’t need it and will push up consumer prices.

What’s he’s doing simultaneously, and for some reason not advertising as stimulus spending, is opening up trade with various countries. With more trade, we will see the growth of industry in countries with very little influence from the government and thus virtually not bureaucratic mess. What’s more, this is a fantastic way to aid third world countries hit hard by this economic crisis, as trade will support sustainable business growth without causing aid dependence. The irony is that Harper could be applying the same strategy he is using in foreign aid to Canada, and it would be a huge success. Employment reform is important, but it is not the answer to the recession. It is an important part to cementing Canada’s place as a compassionate social democratic state, but it is hardly a viable economic strategy. What Canada needs is jobs. The best way to do this is not to have the government give them to the unwashed masses, but rather to have the jobs spontaneously created by opening free trade with selected countries.

To illustrate that entrepreneurship is an excellent replacement for welfare, I leave you with a story from The World Is Flat by the eternal optimist Thomas Friedman.

One of the most interesting examples I have come across of this form of collaboration is a program run by Hewlett-Packard. HP is not an NGO. HP began with a simple question: What do poor people need most that we could sell to them? … In order to answer that question, HP created a public-private partnership with the national government in India and the local government in Andhra Pradesh. Then a group of HP technologists convened a series of dialogues in the farming village of Kuppam. It asked residents two things: What are your hopes for the next three to five years? and What changes would really make your lives better? To help the villagers (many of them illiterate) express themselves, HP used a concept called  graphic  facilitation,  whereby when people  voiced  their dreams and  aspirations, a visual artist whom HP brought over from the United States drew images of those aspirations on craft paper put up on the walls around the room.

“When people, particularly people who are illiterate, say something and it gets immediately represented on the wall, they feel really validated, and therefore they get more animated and more engaged,” said Maureen Conway, HP’s vice president for emerging market solutions, who headed the project. “It raises self-esteem.” Once these poor farmers living in a remote village got loose, they really started aspiring.

“One of them said, ‘What we really need here is an airport,’” said Conway. After the visioning sessions were complete, HP employees spent more time in the village just observing how people lived. One technological thing missing in their lives was photography. Conway explained: “We noticed that there was a big demand for having pictures taken for identification purposes, for licenses, for applications and government permits, and we said to ourselves, ‘Maybe there  is an entrepreneurial opportunity here if we can turn people into village photographers.’ There was one

photo studio in downtown Kuppam. Everyone around [is] farmers.  We noticed that people

would come back in from villages on a bus, spend two hours, get their pictures taken, come back a week later for the pictures, and find out that they were not done or done wrong. Time is as important for them as for us. So we said, ‘Wait a minute, we make digital cameras and portable printers. So what is the problem?’ Why doesn’t HP sell them a bunch of digital cameras and printers? The villagers came back with a very short answer: ‘Electricity.’ They had no assured supply of electricity and little money to pay for it.

“So we said, ‘We are technologists. Let’s get a solar panel and put it on a backpack on wheels and see if there is a business for people here, and for HP, if we make a mobile photo studio.’ That is the approach we took. The solar panel can charge both the camera and the printer. Then we went to a self-help women’s group. We picked five women and said, ‘We will train you how to use this equipment.’ We gave them two weeks of training. And we said, ‘We will provide you with the camera and supplies, and we will share revenue with you on every picture.’” This was not charity. Even after buying all their supplies from HP and sharing some of the revenue with HP, the women in the photography group doubled their family incomes. “And to be honest, what we found out was that less than 50 percent of the pictures they took were for identification pictures and the rest were people just wanting pictures of their kids, weddings, and themselves,” said Conway. The poor like family photo albums as much as the rich and are ready to pay  for  them.  The  local  government  also  made  this  women’s  group  its official photographers for public works projects, which added to their income.

End of story? Not quite. As I said, HP is not an NGO. “After four months we said, ‘Okay, the experiment is over, we’re taking the camera back,’”  said Conway. “And they said, ‘You’re crazy.’” So HP told the women that if they wanted to keep the camera, printer, and solar panel, they had to come up with a plan to pay for them. They eventually proposed renting them for $9 a month, and HP agreed. And now they are branching out into other villages. HP, meanwhile, has started working with an NGO to train multiple women’s groups with the same mobile photography studio, and there is a potential here for HP to sell the studios to NGOs all over India, with all of them using HP ink and other supplies. And from India, who knows where?