Conservatives to review affirmative action

I guess they figured they had nothing to lose at this point.

The Conservatives have ordered a review of federal government affirmative action policies, saying the public service should hire based on merit, not race or ethnicity.

Cabinet ministers Stockwell Day and Jason Kenney announced the review of the Public Service Employment Act, along with any related practices and policies, on Thursday. “While we support diversity in the public service, we want to ensure that no Canadian is barred from opportunities in the public service based on race or ethnicity,” Mr. Day, the Treasury Board President, said in a statement.

Do we need the census?

A lot of people in my social networks are upset about the government decision to cancel the census. It’s a great information-gathering tool that helps us understand our country and our society better. But the Conservatives say it’s too intrusive. Not so, says the privacy commissioner. So what are we to do? Does anyone have a survey we can fill out on the issue?

The people behind the broken store windows

The Star visited the stores attacked by the rioters in the Toronto G20 event. Surprise — they’re not all evil corporate types!

“This isn’t violence,” one of the black clad mob told the Star during the rampage. “This is vandalism against violent corporations. We did not hurt anybody.”

More than 40 businesses were damaged. Many of them are independently owned small stores. Their owners have come from countries including Afghanistan, China and Cuba.

They were astounded at what they saw that afternoon.

“I watch the furies one morning”

Paul Vermeersch offers a poem for Canada Day 2010 that reflects on the G20 summit.

What could go wrong at the G20?

The Post’s Steve Murray takes a swing at predicting what will happen at the G20 meeting in the Occupied Region Formerly Known as Toronto.

How will you be using a sapling as a weapon?

Torontoist asks Twitter followers how they’d use saplings for weapons against the G20 folks, if the security staff hadn’t removed all the trees from Toronto. And people respond to this absurd situation the only way they can.  So much for my planned infiltration in my ent costume.

The rise of Christian nationalism in Canada?

I first published this over at my Goodreads account, but it’s worth repeating here.

Unlike many Canadians, I’ve never believed Stephen Harper is the Second Coming of George Bush. First off, I think he’s smarter than Bush, although I think Bush had more political cunning. And second, while Bush turned out to be even more religious and right than most of his followers anticipated, Stephen Harper has always appeared to me to be more of an economic conservative than a social one. Now that I’ve finished reading Marci McDonald’s The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada, I see no reason to change that viewpoint.

Sure, the book examines Harper’s religious beliefs and background — even down to what churches he has attended — but there’s nothing to be alarmed about in the details. Harper goes to church, yes, but his politics seem informed by the holy books of the economists, not the Bible. In fact, The Armageddon Factor quotes more than a few Christians who complain that Harper has courted them for their votes only to make token efforts to support their causes in office — the vote on gay marriage was designed to fail, for instance — while throwing all the resources of the government into economic and political reform. Hardly the theocon that nightmares are made of.

But as the book makes clear, it’s not Harper that poses a threat to our society of multiculturalism and tolerance. It’s the growing religious right movement in Canada. Or, more accurately, a growing religious right movement that embraces the American model of intolerance, paranoia and hate. It doesn’t matter what kind of conservative Harper is, because he’s turned to these people to shore up the party’s base, and they are driving the party deeper and deeper into American-style religious fundamentalism and social conservatism. The book cites example after example of Canadian religious zealots who have imported American religious right strategies and moved into the circles of power in Parliament along with the Conservatives, or who influence the Conservative Party through fundraising and social networking, or just plain organizing. Who, in short, are starting to affect policy in ways that even Harper, with his iron fist on his party, can no longer control. Call it Harper’s deal with the devil or just politics. It doesn’t matter. The Conservative Party of Canada’s future will be more Stockwell Day than Stephen Harper.

The Armageddon Factor is fearmongering, sure, but it’s fearmongering based on fact. Just take a look south at the border to see how much damage the fundamentalists have caused to that society. Now imagine the same fault lines spreading to this country. It wouldn’t take much for the same kind of civil cold war to happen here.

There are flaws with the The Armageddon Factor, of course. It’s more anecdotal than statistical, when at times stats would be useful. And it could certainly use more accounts from inside circles, although it’s not a surprise politicos are unwilling to talk on record. But what it needs the most is more voices from the religious left, or at least the religious centre. The book — hell, Canada — needs an alternative to the simple formulation of left vs. right/religious right. We need to recognize there are other voices in the religious community besides those who use their bibles to justify their hatred and anxieties, their rejection of modernity and their future. We need to recognize and promote those who embrace tolerance and pluralism, science and reason. In other words, we need to find ourselves in Christian Canada. If not, we’re destined to the same descent into madness as the U.S.

Elections Canada considers online registration

Umm, about time? (Via Michael Geist.)

Today’s Bill C-32 roundup

People were posting fast and furious about Bill C-32, the proposed new copyright legislation, while I was in Toronto last week. I’m still trying to catch up on it all, but here are the bullet posts:

• Michael Geist’s 32 Questions and Answers on C-32′s Digital Lock Provisions, Part Two: circumvention exceptions
• Michael Geist’s 32 Questions and Answers on C-32′s Digital Lock Provisions, Part Three: exemptions from the bill found in other countries but not Canada
• Michael Geist’s 32 Questions and Answers on C-32′s Digital Lock Provisions, Part Four: the consumer provisions, such as they are
• Michael Geist’s 32 Questions and Answers on C-32′s Digital Lock Provisions, Part Five: business considerations
• John Degen on why Kobo is the e-reader service that might just be the solution to everybody’s problem: business and consumers. And if it works for books, it can work for movies and music too. I’ve been saying for years that server-side DRM and cloud-based access is the way to make everyone happy, and Kobo, my e-reader of choice, appears to be pulling it off.

“With digital locks come digital responsibilities”

Over at the Calgary Herald, Rory McGreal, the associate VP of research at Athabasca University, argues that allowing digital locks to override users’ other rights is a bad idea.

Well, at least we should still be able to back up our work for protection, right? Sorry, this will not be possible if the vendor decides to add a digital lock. If you think you can freely read classical books and view the old movies that are in the public domain, think again. Vendors can lock them up and render them accessible only to paying customers. What if you want to play a DVD on your machine, but don’t use MS Windows? Too bad if the vendor decides to limit your use to Windows because using decryption software to play your legal copy on your computer will be illegal.

Fake lake a test run for Sea of Alberta

Heh. URNews reports the fake lake the Conservatives are building in Toronto is actually the first step in Harper’s plan to remake Canada.

Harper’s G20 Revenge Strategy

Worth clicking through to this URNews story just for the pic of Harper.

Canada Post releases Mulroney infamy stamp

Via URNews, of course.

“We were bashing around a lot of ideas,” said Canada Post Official Commandante Ches “Ché” Woodrow. “There was a thought of putting an Airbus 320 on the thing, or maybe a stack of money symbolizing $2.1 million, but in the end we stuck with the two amigos.  It would have been three amigos but Frank Moores was slipperier than all of them.”

“Why, Bryan? Why?”

Dave Bidini on Bryan Adams jamming with Stephen Harper. I bet you never expected to see those names in the same sentence, did you?

What gives, Bryan? Have you gone crazy? Have you chosen to be Toby Keith instead of will.i.am? Have you crossed over to the dark side? Have you? Really, have you? And is it true that you played Run to You? Did that really happen? Did you not see the obviousness in the lyrics of the song? Did you not see that it showed you kneeling at the heel of the most powerful man in Canada like some kind of popstar lickspittle? Did you not understand that as a famous Canadian rock ‘n’ roll singer you don’t ever have to do that? Let Justin Bieber do that; not you.

Women should be breeding, not sciencing

You may have noticed the outrage over the recent announcement that there were no women among the researchers selected for the new Canada Excellence Research Chairs. In fact, there weren’t even any women in the shortlist. URNews offers its take.

Are the Conservatives targeting the CBC?

The Globe wonders why the government is so preoccupied with Canada’s public broadcaster these days.

On the face of it, the Conservative Party’s current obsession with the CBC borders on buffoonery.

But it isn’t. It can be seen as a goulish attempt to demonize the public broadcaster, to isolate it and, one suspects, an attempt to batter the CBC into compliance. Or one could imagine an even more ominous scenario: the possibility that the current battering is the minority Conservative government’s manner of preparing the public for a major cut to CBC funding and the eventual beleaguerment of the CBC as a fringe broadcaster.

Marc Emery ordered extradited to the U.S.

Vancouver’s Prince of Pot will shortly be sent to an American jail for selling marijuana seeds in the U.S. Kind of a no-win situation for everyone involved but the Americans — most Canadians don’t care about pot, and it’s sure as hell not going to win the government any voters. There’s still a chance Emery could serve his time in a Canadian jail though.

Based on a treaty Canada has with the United States over the transfer of prisoners, Tousaw said his client must be convicted in the U.S. and that country must then support the transfer.

“We have been advised that the U.S. will support the treaty transfer,” Tousaw said. The decision will then go to Canada’s public safety minister, but Tousaw said it’s “really impossible” to say when Emery could return to his home country.

(Image from mrbula’s Flickr stream.)

Open government—better than the real thing?

It is when it comes to access of information, as volunteer websites make available more information on Parliament than the official government site.

According to Legault, Canadians looking for information from Canadian Heritage (which could involve issues such as culture spending priorities, the digital television transition, or copyright policymaking) are likely to find their requests delayed by months.  The department has a deemed refusal rate of 40.8 per cent (third worst in the government), the product of short staffing and multiple layers of review with senior bureaucrats examining access documents on two occasions before formal release.

Legault’s official open government track may face systemic issues, but Mulley is working to create a parallel, unofficial track to make government information more accessible. Last week, Mulley launched OpenParliament.ca, a marked improvement from the official Parliamentary website.  The volunteer site captured thousands of pages of transcripts from the House of Commons and made them fully searchable, enabling anyone to easily review what any Member of Parliament has said on virtually any topic.

What is Obama reading?

Life of Pi. Oh, I bet StephenHarperisgoingtoreadaboutthat.

“More flags, less heads”

Province cartoonist Dan Murphy takes on Jason Kenney vs. Gayitude in an animated cartoon. Dan Murphy is a national treasure and should be encased in maple syrup to forever preserve him.