Despite being shrouded with a deficit of over $50 billion, Ottawa, along with a struggling Queens Park, is going to help them out. This year, the Provincial Liberals and Federal Conservatives will continue doling out welfare to Canada’s corporations, but don’t call it corporate welfare. These are called tax cuts. It’s a rather convenient arrangement. The reasoning goes a little something like this: According to KPMG, Canada already has some of the lowest corporate tax rates in the industrial world. Cutting these taxes further is like a trust fund baby, silver spoon in mouth, begging for welfare.

Of course, the main issue here is that the Canadian public is picking up the tab. When the G20 met in Toronto in late June, Prime Minister Stephen Harper urged leaders to cut budget deficits in half by 2013. For the next few years, we will be living in the world of hollowed budgets, nurse shortages, deteriorating public transit, and declining investments in education.

But there will still be money in the purse for billions in corporate tax cuts.

And at least $16 billion for 65 fighter jets from American aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, according to a story in Macleans published on Monday.

So the message is clear: Education, health, and the quality of your daily life as manifested through efficient public services and quality infrastructure are to take a back seat to padding the bottom lines of inefficient corporations and purchasing multi-billion dollar weaponry to defend the country from…

It’s unfortunate that our stubborn government is refusing to budge from its erroneous stance on the status of Iraq war resisters who are currently attempting to claim permanent residency here in Canada.

It appears that the Prime Minister Harper and his fellow conservatives are suffering from short-term amnesia when they refuse to acknowledge (or remember) that the Iraq war was sold to the American people through the shadiest of tactics. Faulty intelligence, incompetency, and most of all, a bogus claim that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. (Interestingly, stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq after the invasion. Ironically, they were sold to Iraq by Americans, the British, and the French, all who were once on cordial terms with Saddam Hussein and his regime).

Many young Americans, deeply affected by the events of 9-11, chose to join the army and play a role in preventing another attack on their fellow citizens. They didn’t sign up for regime change in Iraq.

Many of these war resisters face the possibility of incarceration if they are refused residency here and are forced to return south of the border.

To claim that these individuals do not need our protection is plain ignorance.

Unfortunately, the paper’s small c conservative editorial board, which disguises it’s true political stripes with its impotent calls to eliminate poverty, dismissed electoral reform as a possible solution to our democratic deficiency, claiming it “would result in an even more fractured Parliament, with likely more power in the hands of the executive”.

An often quoted statistic by The Official, and routinely ignored by big bland media, is that Stephen Harper was elected with the support of less than 23% of eligible voters in the country.

It is ludicrous that the Star is willing to write an editorial on Canada’s weakening democracy, and not acknowledge the fact that our electoral system gives the title of Prime Minister to individuals with pathetic levels of popular support, while shunning the aspirations of millions of voters.

Even though most of these lists have already been published, The Official decided to meditate on the shocking and ground-breaking events of 2009 to make some predictions for 2010. Brace yourself.

1. Stephen Harper will remain as Prime Minister.

Which is quite unfortunate, because he’s doing a piss-poor job at governing the nation and isn’t the principled politician he claims to be. Most Canadians look to the Conservatives for prudent fiscal management, although recent history paints a much different picture. The far right in Canada, as well as the United States, LOVES deficits, and nobody runs up deficits like right-wingers. Just check out the legacies of Brian Mulroney, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan. Harper has joined this neo-con club while overspending by over $50 billion in 2009. Most right-leaning pundits will tell you that this is the result of recession-fighting stimulus spending. Perhaps Canadians should wait and see how hundreds of thousands of dollars spent renovating an ice rink in rural Nova Scotia will benefit the national economy.

2. Michael Ignatieff will continue to suffer from John Kerry Syndrome.
Following Senator Kerry’s failed strategy in the 2004 U.S presidential election, Ignatieff will attempt to win hearts and minds by not offering Canadians anything different in 2010, much like he did in 2009 when he won the leadership of the Liberal Party. Harper will keep his tight grip on Parliament, obtained by earning less than 23% of votes from eligible Canadians, something he calls a “mandate”. Anways, Ignatieff will keep telling us that Harper stinks and we need to shift priorities. His Liberal predecessors were all tax choppers and sent Canadian troops into battle in Afghanistan. Little has been said by Ignatieff as to how he will do things differently. Canada patiently waits for a reason to vote Liberal.

3. The New Democrats and Jack Layton will continue to tell Canadians that THEY are the alternative to Harper and the Cons. Somehow, the nation’s Conservatives will continue to convince everyone that they are closeted communists.

4. Despite earning just under 1 million votes in the last election, Elizabeth May’s irrelevant Green Party will continue their fruitless campaign to gain relevance in our remarkably un-democratic electoral system. Canadians looking for change will continue to be blind to the fact that their “protest” vote is maintaining the status quo.

5. The Bloc Quebecois will continue to piss off Canadians with their disproportionate power in Ottawa, all while saving the nation from a potentially disastrous Conservative Majority in the next election. Go figure.

6. More of our soldiers will die in Afghanistan for a war that everyone has agreed is un-winnable and with objectives that are about as clear as the sky over Shanghai. Canadians will mourn the dead as they are paraded down the Highway of Heroes, a hollow, jingoist tribute to our armed forces. Credible sources on the file will rightly continue to argue for less war while U.S. President Barack Obama pounds the war drums.

7. Political commentators who don’t have a goddamn clue how to decipher the science behind global warming will continue to deny that it’s happening or going to happen (check out the Post’s Lorne Gunter and the Toronto Sun’s Lorrie Goldstein).

8. Canadians who don’t have a goddamn clue how to decipher the science behind global warming will continue to support initiatives aimed to fight global warming while filling up their gas tanks, eating loads of beef, flying around the globe, and supporting schemes like carbon credits and costly carbon sequestration.

9. Toronto will continue to get snubbed by the Federal government and the rest of Canada, even though it’s the only place in the country that knows how to make a dollar without digging stuff out of the ground or chopping something down. (Chill, it’s only a joke…Sort of).

10. Stupid Torontonians will continue to flock to the Air Canada Centre to cheer on the Maple Leafs like illiterate peasants migrating to some monastery seeking heavenly powers to prevent a pestilence. In a shocking turn of events, the Maple Leafs will win the Stanley Cup, but all will be quickly forgotten when everyone wakes up the next morning and realizes Stephen Harper is still Prime Minister.

“Product of Men and Materials of all Provinces of Canada”

What do we think of these type of statements today?

Canada has long been admired around the globe as a nation of high ethics, human rights and respect for law.

But Canada’s sterling reputation is being seriously degraded by the spreading scandal over involvement in torture in the increasingly sordid Afghan conflict.

All Canadians should thank the courageous diplomat, Richard Colvin, who did the right and honourable thing by exposing the government’s very dirty Afghan secret.

Emulating the Bush administration, senior government officials and military officers in Ottawa closed ranks, stoutly denying any Afghan scumbags were tortured.

They are either amazingly ignorant or deceiving the nation.

To understand the roots of this ugly business, we must go back to the 1980s.

The Soviet intelligence service, KGB, created the Afghan Communist secret police agency, known as KhAD. Its mission was to liquidate or terrorize all suspected or real anti-Communists and opponents of Soviet occupation. Most prisoners arrested by KhAD were subjected to frightful, sadistic torture, particularly at Kabul’s dreaded Pul-e-Charkhi Prison.

Prisoners were buried alive by bulldozers. Others were electrocuted, beaten to death, castrated and blinded.

Some 27,000-30,000 political prisoners were killed at Pul-e-Charkhi by KhAD.

Torture centres also existed in all other major cities.

The Soviets (who withdrew in 1989) and Afghan Communists killed more than one million Afghans.

By 1995, the anti-Communist Pashtun religious movement, the Taliban, backed by Pakistan and the Gulf Arabs, had driven the Communists from most of Afghanistan. The Afghan Communists retreated to the far north, and became part of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks, many of whom collaborated with the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, dominated the Alliance.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, using Russian-armed Northern Alliance soldiers to overthrow the Taliban, and install Hamid Karzai as figurehead president. Real power in Kabul was held by the Northern Alliance.

Two of its strongest figures were pro-Soviet Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum, and Tajik general Mohammed Fahim — KhAD’s former chief. Both have close links to Russian intelligence.

After 30 years of civil war, the minority Tajiks and Uzbeks had become blood enemies of the Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s majority. Most Taliban are Pashtun.

Fahim and the Tajik-Uzbek-Communist Northern Alliance took over the revived secret police, the National Directorate of Security (NDS) and the prison system. In short order, the KhAD’s old torturers were back in business.

Pashtun prisoners captured by Canadian forces were routinely handed to the NDS-KhAD. There were many reports of brutal torture and executions.

Today, Fahim is officially Karzai’s No. 2. But as commander of the Tajik-Uzbek militia and secret police, Fahim is the Afghan regime’s most powerful figure and strongman.

Every child in Afghanistan knows this. But somehow, Canada’s see-no-evil/hear-no-evil generals and civilian officials claim they were sweetly unaware Afghan prisons were being run as torture centres by the revitalized Communists.

Amnesty International and the Red Cross warned Ottawa that prisoners Canada was handing to the Afghan government faced torture — and worse. The U.S. State Department repeatedly warned of widespread torture in Afghan prisons, including “pulling out fingernails, burnings … beatings … sexual humiliations, sodomy” and rape of children. So did the UN.

Canada should have run its own prisoner camps under the proper rules of war.

Yet Canada kept handing prisoners to the Afghan NDS.

Ottawa’s disgraceful fig leaf: A memo from Afghan officials promising not to torture captives.

Now we see military men and high government officials trying to bluff away what seem to be some serious misdeeds. A disgusting spectacle that deeply shames and sullies this good nation.

As Shakespeare wrote:

“Who steals my purse steals trash … But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed.”

eric.margolis@sunmedia.ca

Scrap that.

To get respect, you got to earn respect, and this minority Conservative Government has done little to earn the reverence of Canadian voters.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s ruthless clan, a motley crew of ideological radicals, are so venomous in their quest to avoid relinquishing power that it never ceases to amaze and infuriate any sane political observer.

It is understandable that one would feel some empathy for the Conservatives, who’ve been flirting with an elusive majority that lies just beyond their gasp.

But their actions reek of paranoia, although you would never know it from Harper’s stiff hockey dad façade.

Nevertheless, a Stanfield fumble could be just around the corner, so when a potential fire starts, the Cons are on it like a pack of wolves on a moose carcass.

Take the fate of former senior diplomat, Richard Colvin, for example.

The poor guy blows the whistle on Afghan detainees at a House of Commons committee meeting, only to get his credibility trashed by Harper’s posse, sent out like Nazgûl to destroy the petty civil servant who poses such a valiant threat to their minority existence.

However, it’s not just the Con’s disproportionate responses to blips that periodically come up on their radar screen that get the fires of Mordor blazing.

The scheming Cons and their fine tuned propaganda machine are busy at work, plotting the castration of their political opponents and wiping out their historical glory.

Last November, under the guise of stepping up to the times to deal with an economic crisis, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, who spends like Paris Hilton with daddy’s credit card, announced a plan to end political funding to all political parties in 2009.

While only an unashamed partisan nimrod would support such a measure, seeing that money doled out to the parties will likely amount to less than 0.02 per cent of total Government expenditures in 2009, the move nearly led to the Government’s demise, only to be saved after given CPR by Her Majesty’s representative in Ottawa.

Lucky Harper picks up the fumble.

But they’re not satisfied trying to hinder their political adversaries’ ability to fight the next election, so the Cons have started working on the next batch of new Canadians, a group that traditionally votes Liberal.

The recently released guide for new Canadian citizens is certainly an improvement over its predecessor, but Immigration Minister Jason Kenney may have had more in mind when he included a popular photo of the 1982 signing of the Canadian constitution showing Queen Elizabeth alone at the table.

Former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who was at her side at the time of the signing, was thrown down the memory hole by Kenney’s staff, neatly photoshopped out of the picture in a crude move devised to wipe away any hint of Liberal association with the document that gives many newcomers rights that they may have previously been denied.

The list of vile Conservative party sanctioned propaganda keeps on growing, which includes a website featuring a bird defecating on former Liberal leader Stephane Dion, and the recent mailings sent out to Jewish neighbourhoods at the taxpayer’s expense.

Still not convinced of rabid Tory bloodthirstiness? Google some photos of Transport Minister John Baird.

Twenty years ago, when the Berlin Wall was breached and the Soviet empire was collapsing, only diehard believers in a communist utopia felt unhappy. A few people, of course, clung to the possibility of what was once called “actually existing socialism.” Others criticized the triumphalism of the “new world order” promised by George H. W. Bush. And the way West Germany rolled over the wreckage of its East German neighbour seemed almost cruel.

Still, except in China, 1989 was a good time to be alive. Many of us felt it was the dawn of a new liberal age in which freedom and justice would spread, like fresh flowers, across the globe. Twenty years on, we know it was not to be.

Xenophobic populism is stalking Europe’s democracies. Social democratic parties are shrinking, while right-wing demagogues promise to protect “Western values” from the Islamic hordes. And the economic debacles of the past few years seem to bear out Mikhail Gorbachev’s recent warning that “Western capitalism, too, deprived of its old adversary and imagining itself the undisputed victor and incarnation of global progress, is at risk of leading Western society and the rest of the world down another historical blind alley.”

As it looks now, liberals, in the “progressive” American sense, may actually have been among the losers of 1989. Social democrats were always despised by communists, and vice versa. But many social democratic ideals, rooted in Marxist notions of social justice, were thrown out, like the proverbial baby, with the bathwater of communism.

This process was already under way before the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the free-market radicalism of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Society doesn’t exist, Mrs. Thatcher declared – only individuals and families count. Everyone is for themselves.

For many people, this had the ring of liberation – from overregulated markets, from overbearing trade unions, from class privilege. That is why it was called neo-liberalism. But free-market radicalism undermined the role of the state in building a better, more just, more equal society. Neo-liberals are less interested in justice than in greater efficiency, more productivity, the bottom line.

While the neo-liberals were slashing and burning their way through old social democratic arrangements, the left was dissipating its energies on cultural politics, “identity” and ideological multiculturalism. Democratic idealism was once the domain of the left, including social democrats and liberals. In the United States, it had been John Kennedy’s Democrats who promoted freedom around the world.

But in the late 20th century, it became more important to many leftists to save “Third World” culture, no matter how barbaric, from “neo-colonialism” than it was to support equality and democracy. People on the left would defend brutal dictators (Mao, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, Ruhollah Khomaini) simply because they opposed “Western imperialism.”

As a result, all politics derived from Marxism, no matter how loosely, lost credibility and finally died in 1989. This was, naturally, a disaster for communists and socialists – but also for social democrats, for they had lost an ideological basis for their idealism. And without idealism, politics becomes accounting, a management of purely material interests.

This explains why Italy, and later Thailand, chose business tycoons as leaders. Voters hoped these men who had accumulated so much wealth could do the same for them.

Yet, the rhetoric of idealism has not quite disappeared. It has merely shifted. This, too, began with Mr. Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher. They took up JFK’s promotion of democracy in the world. Once the left abandoned the language of internationalism, democratic revolution and national liberation, it was taken up by neo-conservatives. Their promotion of U.S. military force as the strong arm of democracy may have been misguided, crude, arrogant, ignorant, naive and deeply dangerous, but it was indisputably idealistic.

The allure of revolutionary élan has drawn some former leftists to the neo-conservative side. But most liberals haven’t found a coherent response.

Having lost their own zest for internationalism, a common liberal response has been a call for “realism,” non-interference and withdrawal from the world. This often may be the wiser course, but it hardly inspires. So it is that a left-wing internationalist such as French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner can find a home for his idealism in his country’s conservative government.

For the first time since the Kennedy administration, the United States is one of the only liberal democracies in the world with a centre-left government. Can President Barack Obama lead the way to a new era of social and political idealism? It seems unlikely. His efforts to provide Americans with better health care, for example, is not so much an innovation as an attempt to catch up with programs other countries have long taken for granted. For this, he is being called a “socialist” by his enemies.

Mr. Obama is neither a socialist nor a mere political accountant. He has some modest ideals, and may yet prove an excellent president. But what’s needed to revive liberal idealism is a set of new ideas on promoting global justice, equality and freedom. Mr. Reagan, Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Gorbachev assisted in the end of an ideology that once offered hope and inspired real progress, but resulted in slavery and mass murder. We are still waiting for a new vision that can lead to progress – this time, we hope, without tyranny.

Originally appearing in The Globe and Mail