Harper sends in the lightweights

If you haven't listened to CBC's The Current today it's well worth the time if only to realize that Barry Cooper, one of the Calgary School feeding Harper-government policy, is still peddling a line which flies in the face of rule of law, shows a distinct lack of respect for established convention and thinks people are worth wasting in the name of, what he described as, "foreign policy".

It doesn't matter what you think of Omar Khadr or his family. The question put before the Federal Court of Canada was, "Did Canada participate in the violation of rights of the individual as protected by the Charter of Human Rights and the Constitution of Canada?"

The court said "Yes," to that question and, for the sixth time, ordered the Government of Canada to present a plan to remedy the violation in which Canada actively participated.

When questioned about the Federal Court decision on today's The Current, Cooper, dismissed rule of law and tried to make it a foreign policy issue in which he says the courts have no jurisdiction. That would be egregious enough, but then he played his Karl Rove by stating that Justice Russell W. Zinn, the Federal Court judge who issued the order and the deadline, was an activist judge who should keep his opinions to himself.

Really?

Either Cooper thought he could pull one over on the listeners or he simply wasn't prepared to be speaking in such a public place because Nathalie Des Rosiers of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association nuked him on the spot.

Justice Russell W. Zinn was appointed to the Federal Court on 20 February, 2008 - by Stephen Harper.

Throughout the rest of the piece Cooper did little more than duck and weave in an attempt to turn a legal matter into something it isn't.

Listen to the whole thing. It's really worth listening to Cooper make himself irrelevant.

RepubliCon shenanigans

In his post "Conservative coup d'état?", Dr. Dawg relates that Gerry Chipeur, "the Alberta lawyer who drafted a power-sharing proposal between Stockwell Day, Gilles Duceppe and Joe Clark in 2000 is now suggesting that the Conservatives should defy the Governor-General if she were to ask the Liberal-NDP coalition to form a new government if the Conservative administration falls on January 27.

"CanWest : "Chipeur's argument foreshadows a possibly drastic response from the Conservatives should they be turfed from power. He suggests that Conservatives may not readily accept the governor-general's decision should she refuse the prime minister's request for an election."

Just five days ago we heard this same dismissal of the Governor General from John Baird in an interview with Don Newman when he said - twice! - "We're going over the heads of the politicians and the governor general directly to the Canadian people."

Several commenters have taken Dawg to task for either fear-mongering or taking Chipeur too seriously but so-con Chipeur has a history of laying groundwork for the Cons through his Republican contacts, some of which follows :

New York Observer : (additional bracketed info - mine)

"From: Paul Weyrich[co-founder of the Moral Majority and the Heritage Foundation]

Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2006 9:38 AM
To: Bob Thompson[a staffer at Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation]
Subject: Message from Canada
Importance: High

Please get this message to the Stanton, Family Forum and Wednesday lunch groups:I received a call last night from Gerald Chipeur, an important figure in Canada’s Conservative Party. He told me that Conservatives are with-in striking distance of electing an outright majority in Parliamentary elections Monday.

He said the Canadian media, which is trying to save the current Liberal government, has a strategy of calling conservatives in the USA in the hopes that someone will inadvertently say something that can be hung around the Conservatives.

Canadian voters have been led to believe that American conservatives are scary and if the Conservative party can be linked with us, they perhaps can diminish a Conservative victory. Chipeur asks that if Canadian media calls, please do not be interviewed until Monday evening at which point hopefully there will be reason to celebrate.

Many thanks."

When contacted by Canadian Press about the email, Weyrich denied any personal involvement but later on his website, he bragged about his "small victory" in the Canadian elections.

This August, Chipeur, past Alberta chair of Republicans Abroad, teamed up with the American Chamber of Commerce to hold a $1000-a-plate fund-raising campaign for John McCain for the 80,000 Americans who live and work in Calgary.

Canadian citizens' proceeds went to Friends of Science, Tim Ball's oil industry-funded anti-Kyoto "charity", whose funding was laundered through the University of Calgary by Harper's buddy, Prof. Barry Cooper, before the U of C put a stop to it.

When Friends of Science ran ads which attacked the previous Liberal government's support for the Kyoto Protocol, pledging "to have a major impact on the next election," Chipeur acted as their lawyer in the ensuing investigation by Elections Canada.


Chipeur is also credited with introducing Republican Frank Sensenbrenner to Canadian embassy officials at the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004, attended by Stockwell Day, Chipeur's choice for coalition PM in 2000. Sensenbrenner had previously attended Reform Party conventions and Stockwell Day insisted he be hired by the Canadian Embassy over their objections.
Sensenbrenner was subsequently accused of the Naftagate leak. which sought to damage Barack Obama's credibility during the Democratic primaries, but an internal investigation by Harper's deputy minister failed to provide any evidence.

The Star : "In failing to plumb the leak, the report effectively protects the ruling party from awkward questions. With an election not far in the future, voters might reasonably ask if Conservatives put this country's seminal relationship [with Obama] at risk to give Republicans a helping hand."


One might also reasonably ask if the Cons' continuing ties to the Republican Party through Gerald Chipeur put the rest of us at risk.


Cross-posted, more or less, at Creekside

Republicans and Cons - just one big happy cross-border party

G&M :

Americans living in Calgary are being asked to help fund Republican efforts to elect John McCain through the visit of an influential Republican senator who doubles as one of Mr. McCain's campaign co-chairs.

Kansas Senator Sam Brownback is being invited to the city in August by a well-known Tory supporter and lawyer, Gerry Chipeur, who also has significant links to the U.S. Republican Party.

The funds raised by Americans attending the event will be used to help defray costs incurred by the Republican nominating convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul in September, as well as help elect a Republican the next president, said Mr. Chipeur in an interview.

Those wanting to hear Mr. Brownback speak at a dinner will be asked to pay $1,000, said Norman Leach, executive director of the Western Canadian division of the American Chamber of Commerce, which is helping Mr. Chipeur organize the event.
About 80,000 Americans live and work in Calgary, he said."

Possibly the best part is that the proceeds from the proposed $1000 a plate Brownback dinner will go to Friends of Science, Tim Ball's oil industry-funded anti-Kyoto "charity", whose funding was laundered through the University of Calgary by Harper's buddy, Prof. Barry Cooper, before the U of C put a stop to it.

Gerry Chipeur, a dual citizen himself, is an anti-SSM ReformaTory Alliance lawyer and supporter with ties to the evangelical movement on both sides of the border.
Here he is, for instance, on Bill O'Reilly's US talk show, The O'Reilly Factor, ragging on about activist judges and how Canada is a secular society.

Once upon a time however, Chipeur was much more coy about Canadian Con ties to US Republicans :

From: Paul Weyrich
[co-founder of the Moral Majority and the Heritage Foundation]
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2006 9:38 AM
To: Bob Thompson
[a staffer at Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation]

Subject: Message from Canada
Importance: High

Please get this message to the Stanton, Family Forum and Wednesday lunch groups:
I received a call last night from Gerald Chipeur, an important figure in Canada’s Conservative Party. He told me that Conservatives are with-in striking distance of electing an outright majority in Parliamentary elections Monday.

He said the Canadian media, which is trying to save the current Liberal government, has a strategy of calling conservatives in the USA in the hopes that someone will inadvertently say something that can be hung around the Conservatives.

Canadian voters have been led to believe that American conservatives are scary and if the Conservative party can be linked with us, they perhaps can diminish a Conservative victory.

Chipeur asks that if Canadian media calls, please do not be interviewed until Monday evening at which point hopefully there will be reason to celebrate.

Many thanks.

When contacted by Canadian Press about the email, Weyrich denied any personal involvement but later on his website, he bragged about his "small victory" in the Canadian elections, recounting the entire email incident as true after all.

More recently Chipeur was credited with introducing Republican Frank Sensenbrenner to Canadian embassy officials at the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004, attended by Stockwell Day, Alberta MP Jason Kenney and John Reynolds, co-chair of the Tory 2006 election campaign.
Sensenbrenner had attended Reform party conventions and Stockwell Day insisted he be hired by the Canadian Embassy. Sensenbrenner was subsequently alleged to have leaked the Canadian memo which wounded Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama in the Naftagate leak.

Republicans and Cons - just one big happy cross-border party.

h/t files from Polunatic, Tilting at Windmills, Toe at Bread 'n Roses

Cross-posted at Creekside

Canada and torture : Getting around our own principles

From "A History of Hypocrisy" by Regan Boychuk, in the Literary Review of Canada :

"To judge by the statements of government officials, Canada is—as it should be—staunchly opposed to torture. Just over two decades ago, Canada became one of the first countries to ratify the United Nations Convention against Torture, adopting an absolute ban on “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person.”

In the 1980s, Canada was instrumental in creating and supporting the UN Working Group on Involuntary Disappearances, and in 2007 the Canadian delegate to the UN Human Rights Council reaffirmed that those responsible for enforced disappearances should not go unpunished. Nonetheless, as Human Rights Watch reported in 2006, Canada also worked aggressively to dilute key provisions of an international treaty on forced disappearances:

"To their disgrace, the United States and Russia strongly opposed the [treaty] effort, not least because each had begun using forced disappearances itself …Canada contributed to this shameful opposition, not because it is known to forcibly "disappear" people, but apparently because Prime Minister Martin, eager to improve relations with the United States that had been strained under his predecessor, decided to run interference for one of his neighbor’s unsavory practices."

Despite the efforts of the U.S. and Canada, the text of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance—modelled after the UN Convention against Torture—was approved by the General Assembly in December 2006. Seventy-two countries have since signed it, neither the U.S. nor Canada among them. "

Mr. Boychuk then cites the 74 CIA flights made through Canada since 9/11 and Foreign Affairs department spokesman Rodney Moore's 2006 statement that "whether any particular rendition is lawful would depend on the facts of each individual case".

A depressingly familiar Canadian refrain, this public purporting to support progressive principles on the international stage while working secretly behind the scenes to prop up regressive American interests conflated with our own.
More recent examples include our non-commitment commitment to Kyoto and our backroom watering down of the provisions against the use and manufacture of clusterbombs.


Professor Barry Cooper, friend to PM Harper, Senior Fellow at The Fraser Institute, and creator of a slush fund at the University of Calgary which accepted monies from Alberta oil and gas companies to help finance Tim Ball and his anti-Kyoto Friends of Science group, doesn't much care for Mr. Boychuk's essay on Canadian complicity in the history of torture.
After dismissing it as "smug, and wholly predictable, anti-Americanism", Prof. Cooper complains,

"In contrast, one might consider the [ancient] Greeks"

- no, I'm not kidding! that's what he said! - and complains that :

"Mr. Boychuk accepts the sentimental definition of the United Nations, namely inflicting severe pain or suffering."

Yes, do let's look at something else entirely, Prof. Cooper.
Asshat.
If we cannot accept that we have been both complicit and blind to that complicity, we will never learn how to stand on our principles.

Cross-posted at Creekside