Maritime Morning - Andrew Krystal

For months we have been waiting for some signs of life from the man who wasn’t many Liberals first choice. Having Stephan Dion as Liberal leader is a little like getting the last date when the lights go on.

Now we have life.

That being said, many in this region wonder how punishing coal and heating oil with a Liberal carbon tax is going to translate to their wallets, and will Dion’s proposed tax cuts be enough to offset higher costs elsewhere?

The average Nova Scotian family has two kids and an average combined household income of $50,190. In that case the Liberals will kick back $1,000.00 in tax relief. But will that be enough? Lower income earners get a bigger break and upper middle class will get pummeled, I suspect. Overall, for the region here, I am doubtful that the tax cuts are deep enough.

Deeper tax cuts would have been more comforting.

The Liberals say their “Green Shift” plan will be “revenue neutral” and will, in the process, curb pollution and wean ourselves off dirty, increasingly expensive, fuel. But when was the last time somebody told you “it won’t cost a thing”?

The Conservatives cut the GST because the GST is simple to understand. Now our collective eyes are glazing over with carbon taxes, tax cut calculators, the NDP’s “Cap and Trade system” (companies are issued emissions permits and if they go beyond it they have to buy more credits from companies who pollute less), followed by the Conservative’s ventriloquism of singing the environmental anthem without moving their lips. The whole thing is quite a show.

Unlike the nonsensical Liberal policy in Afghanistan, where a non-combat role was preferred in a war zone and the NDP wanted out entirely with the Conservatives wanting to stay the course, there is now bold policy leadership from Dion.

Today the voters have a clear choice and the NDP are the ones left out. The NDP “Cap and Trade” system is even more arduous to explain and administrate. However, it might be the least costly politically due to its industrial targeting.

But higher costs for businesses always transfer to the consumer, correct?

But how do you ever motivate a company like Nova Scotia Power to change from using coal when they are so profitable and their executives pay themselves more than any other public utility?

Stephan Dion has given voters leadership with a bold plan that moves us into the new age but forces us to examine, and self-examine, and change behavior in the process.

It is not the path of least resistance.

In Homer’s epic, the Odyssey, the ancient protagonist, Odysseus, asked his ships’ crew to tie him to the mast head and blindfold him, but keep his ears free to hear the Siren’s song, the embodiment of temptation itself, where the Siren’s womanly attributes and heavenly songs drove ships toward them — only to perish into the rocks. For their part, the crew was instructed to wear wax in their ears to protect them from the call of the wild.

Knowing neither Greek oral history nor common sense, (or paying heed to the history of his paramour Julie Couillard), former Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier dated her anyway – very publicly. He even brought her with him to the United Nations.

The siren in question, Julie Couillard, and her problem isn’t her past criminal associations, it is her street fighting present, her sense of entitlement, her malice. When trying to appear as a non-opportunist, for example, Julie says: “Everyone knows it: A minister earns $250,000 dollars per year. What’s left after taxes: $125,000, $130,000? I am constantly with businessmen who make a lot of cash. A minister has no money.”

What a wonderful act of social and sexual charity for Julie to deign to lower herself to Federal Cabinet status!

Hers is an interesting and telling statement from a woman who has never earned that much money, a woman who lost a house, has no professional or educational pedigree, who operated a “casting service” for wannabe actors and models (most of those operations are specious at best) and who describes herself as an “actress”. Now, she claims to be in real estate — although the company she has been associated with denies it (?!)

Wasn’t it singer Billy Joel who, in his song The Piano Man, characterized these types of people with unachievable pretensions as “real-estate novelists”?

With a Daddy who, himself, has a criminal past with drugs, it appears that her abandonment issues with an absentee Daddy plunged herself, and her neckline, into the arms of the Hell’s Angels (I guess they made more money than Max). I also guess she considered them “businessmen” as well.

The old line about lying down with lions or swine applies here.

The facts are the facts: two of Couillard’s former husbands are dead by violent means; a third man is in witness protection. The link to organized crime enforcers, or operatives, has been consistent. There is a long pattern. Moreover, her style is still from the street: knowing that she had destroyed the career of her former boyfriend Bernier when she went on Quebec TV to reveal that he had stupidly left Government documents regarding Afghanistan at her place, she continued with the media the next day saying “He was spineless” and “Should have protected me” from revelations about her past.

But shouldn’t she have known herself that her past would come out when she dated such a political figure and met President George Bush?

Julie Couillard did not find her way in life because of her brains or because of her character.

And as far as her Hell’s Angels association goes, she is even rumored to be a police informant in that regard, or a past one. It sounds familiar: no rules, no loyalty. Just like the street.

The only true love of her life Julie Couillard says was Montreal crime figure Gilles Giguere who was shot three times in the face and left in a ditch three months before their wedding.

If Maxime Bernier had any brains at all, which he obviously doesn’t, he would have listened to Homer and worn wax plugs in his ears like Odysseus’ crew or would have had someone tie him to the mast.

It is much more honorable to live a life loving those who play it straight instead of those who play the angles. That principle applies to both Julie and Maxime.

Julie knows that too. Deep down, she knows who, and what, she is.

George Orwell, in 1984, has his dystopia, the story’s ruling elite, reducing the dictionary word count every year in order to reduce the means of expression and qualification – thinking itself. You take away language and you take away meaning and critical thinking; without language there is no soul, no opposition, and no humanity — but boy, if you are government, do you get great poll numbers!

Today, we awake to Globe reporter Steven Chase who reveals that the NDP, through freedom of information act access, have revealed that the Department of National Defense sets quotas for how many times a year a military think tank it subsidizes must appear in the news media. The verb “appear” really means engaging in state sponsored propaganda.

The “Conference of Defense Associations” is one such organization. The March 2007 government contract sets out “13 expected results” including:
Attain the publication of a minimum of 15 opinion pieces (including op-eds and letters to the editor in national or regional publications (including programs like mine). Attain a minimum of 29 media references to the CDA by national or regional journalists and reporters – including talk radio. This includes taping and making transcripts of my program.

I have had, in the past, the uniquely eerie experience of encountering a senior military member who told me that he never has a chance to listen to my show very often but he enjoys reading the transcripts! (We never provide transcripts.)

Media are also monitored by government organizations for their approach and political proclivities.

Even the Executive Director of the CDA, Alain Pellerin, is embarrassed by the media quotas revealed today and thinks they are a ridiculous measuring stick. The reason: they were found out.

The quotas were put in place in 2002 by a consulting firm because the government wanted, and the Defense department wanted, more measurable results. By results they meant better propaganda. Make no mistake about it — and it doesn’t matter if the Liberals or the Conservatives are in power because they both play the same game. The difference this time is that the government is actively trying to sell the Afghan war, and lives are on the line.

Meantime, Prime Ministerial powers, in both Canada and the U.K., are getting stronger and have already eclipsed, in relative terms, the power of the U.S. Presidency.

Consolidation of power is a reaction to both increased media scrutiny and an enlarged
Bureaucratic class that slows things down by the nature of its glacial ponderousness and red-tape loving ways (you know the kind of people in the office who love “meetings.”)

Consolidating power allows things to get done faster, but it also means an erosion of the democratic process.

Donald Savoie is worried about this; despite the fact he thinks things are bureaucratically top-heavy. He currently holds the Canada Research Chair in Public Administration and Governance at l’Universite de Moncton. He has been advisor to many Prime Ministers, and talked to me about them, most notably, for me, Pierre Elliot Trudeau (“He was painfully shy, but if you bit him he would bite back”).

Professor Savoie was speaking to me today about his new book Court Government and the Collapse of Accountability (in Canada and the United Kingdom). By “Court Government”, he means a King’s Court.

Prime Ministers these days, whether a Minority Government or not, are like Kings.

Donald Savoie mentioned to me that when in Charlottetown recently, Prime Minister Harper was asked about increased powers and government accountability and transparency and increased powers within his office, all things he complained about as opposition leader. In essence, what he said was that when in opposition you see things one way, and when you are inside of government other things become clear.

What really becomes clear is power: its accretion, assemblage, and execution.

The only complaint is when you don’t have enough.

Can you name your Lieutenant Governor? I can’t. Moreover, I don’t care. Do you? Does he/she matter anymore? These people are a complete and utter waste of space, time, and money.

People in the Maritimes have trouble paying their heating bills, and these “representatives” sit around in mansions paid for by the “common people.” Oh yes, they work – they work cocktail parties, ceremonies, and boring government functions – things for which we pay.

The recent visit by Governor General Michel Jean to see the squalor of Vancouver’s Downtown east side is a case in point: there she was, in all her stilted, privilege-dripped over-enunciation, shielded by security, talking about the little people and how being told to #@& — off by residents over the shoulders of her entourage was simply a “manifestation” of their frustration”.

I am sure that she holds the same bemused, hollow, words of distanced empathy for others less fortunate: “Isn’t that a shame they live that way?” Tsk, tsk, my, my, too bad”.

It is not her fault, she is an elitist. The system will always create a privileged class; however, their deportment, and our systemic, structural support for them is another matter.

And we have to stop it. The position of Governor General is a provocatively useless waste of resources that merely serves to further illuminate class divides.

Michel Jean’s recent visit to Vancouver’s mean streets as part of a camera opportunity was a disgraceful sham. If she was serious about either concern or empathy she would have gone there with only one or two bodyguards late at night, unreported, not drawing attention to herself in televised daylight while using homeless people as live backdrops.

People will speak to me of “tradition.” It was also traditional for women not to vote, to have slavery, to have landed gentry, to have dictatorial monarchies. It was also traditional to have duel with wheellock and flintlock pistols during disputes in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth centuries.

I, personally, would like to have duels with the Governor General and the provincial representative, the Lieutenant Governor, but I just can’t remember her name. And I don’t even know what she looks like.

I bet you don’t know either. Nor do you know what you are paying for.

And you never get an invite to the cocktail parties either, do you?