Time's up!

The Harper government was given five days back on July 27th to produce documents supporting their claim that the census long-form was so intrusive to have caused a tidal wave of complaints by Canadians.

They have failed to produce.

Eliminate weekends, a stat holiday and add a couple of days for Harper-hillbilly factor and midnight last night (Muskoka time) would have been the double-double fudged deadline.

We have been handed... squat.

Buckdog leads us to this editorial which says the Harper Conservatives are arrogant. Indeed, they are, but it's actually worse than that.

The arrogance of the Tories, we are now seeing more clearly, is little more than bluster to cover the fact that they are truly lacking when it comes to governing. Harper knows that without tight control over anything said in the media, they will very quickly be revealed as bumpkins.

That's right and we've been pointing out that oft missed characteristic for quite some time now.

Tony Clement, devoid of any actual evidence of any of his prior claims, takes a leap into the bizarre defending his Dear Leader's pillaging of national census collection by suggesting that the information is just too good and actually having a law compelling people to provide it made the Conservatives feel like... the government.

“Hey, listen, they had a good deal going,” he [Clement] added. “They got good, quality data and the government of Canada was the heavy.”

Pick up that jaw, citizen. What Clement just told you is that the information from the census long-form was quality stuff. He's also being economical with the truth because he was attempting to tell you that anybody who wanted the washed data was getting it for free. Not so, as provided by Pogge:

Ah. So StatsCan has been providing "good, quality data" all along. Thanks for admitting it. Now you can wear it. And since Brian Mulroney's day, it's the federal government that has had a good deal going by being able to charge the rest of us for the data it should have been gathering anyway.

That's right. The Mulroney "user fee" doctrine which made your taxes nothing more than a membership fee in a club with a sales kiosk. The only people getting census information for free is the federal government. Everybody else has to cough up cash.

As David Eaves points out, every level of government relies heavily on accurate data produced by the census. Data which, by Clement's own admission, was accurate and reliable.

Clement has further suggested that the varying layers of government can get their data by paying private firms to gather it for them.

“All these provincial governments and these social institutions and private businesses – we’ll get them some data that will be useful and reliable,” he said. “If they don't want to use that data, it's up to them. They can pay for it another way. … You don't have to rely on the government of Canada.”

All these provincial governments?! Is that disdain we read? What Clement hasn't told you is that the federal government too will have to go out and buy the information. You'll be paying for that and you can rest assured they will not be sharing anything they get. And there will be no guarantee of reliability beyond the kind of error factor we see in polling data. For example, think of how many times you toss consumer surveys in the garbage after buying an item.

Aside from being worse liars than most governments, these clowns really are unfit to govern.

Harper, Ritz, Clement rag time: Mean Mr. Mustard

Let's keep it Konservative, shall we? Of course. Tell your son why we played this one for you, Steve.

Harper's boys are such kidders...

Except that their sense of humour seems to come at the expense of dead Canadians and contaminated food. It seems to be a habit with this lot.

Remember, the first we heard of the humourous aspect of a tainted food tragedy was from Harper's Health Minister, Tony Clement. Instead of staying in Canada and managing his portion of a file which saw over a dozen Canadians dead and over 40 seriously ill, he went to Denver to get some face time with Harper's oil buddies. At a posh little lunch affair, hosted by our dollars, Clement unfolded a little funny. (Emphasis mine)

The Canadian government sponsored a swish lunch reception at its consul-general's Denver residence.

The food included bite-sized bits of beef, shrimp, tortellini and potatoes gratin. Health Minister Tony Clement, whose absence from Canada during the tainted meat crisis has not gone unnoticed, was there and introduced himself:

"I'm Health Minister Tony Clement, and I have to say I approved this food."

Oh, I say, Tony old boy. How very drole.

Then along comes information that Gerry Ritz, Harper's Agriculture Minister (who had taken over lead on the file) was unable to keep his funny-bone covered up.

Sources who took notes during the call said Ritz fretted about the political dangers of the affair before quipping:

"This is like a death by a thousand cuts. Or should I say cold cuts."

The disease was linked to cold cuts from Maple Leaf Meats.

And when told about a new death in Prince Edward Island, Ritz said: "Please tell me it's (Liberal MP) Wayne Easter."

Easter is the Liberal critic shadowing Ritz's Agriculture Department.

Yeah, you guys are just killing us. As Aaron Wherry asks,

Would Gerry Ritz still be the Agriculture Minister if he’d been caught joking about 17 Canadians dying in a bus crash? What about if it was the deaths of 17 Canadian soldiers? Or if the deaths had simply been more centralized around a single place (a la Walkerton)? If the answer is no to any of those scenarios, what makes this situation different?

The "joking" however, is a trait of this bunch. These are right-wing authoritarian scumbags. To them the misfortune of others is always funny. We shouldn't really be surprised.

What is more interesting is that, in both the case of Clement and Ritz, their initial concern was the political risks they were now facing; not the fact that people were dying. They made it all about themselves. Once both of these clowns were faced with their own misspeaks however, notice how the grins disappeared from their faces. Not because they really regret saying what they did, but because they got caught doing it.

What is more serious however, is that while they made light of a tragedy and then wrung their hands over the political minefield that lay ahead, not once did they acknowledged that this entire event was a thing of their own making done at the insistence of Harper. And that's what really matters. It was their de-regulation of meat inspection which led to this. It was their failure to accept the basic responsibility of government in the safety of the Canadian food supply.

As Ross says, forget Ritz. It goes higher than him. This is a fundamental failure of leadership right at the top. This is the Harper school of government: You're on your own. Get sick from bad meat? Oh well. Canary in the coalmine. It's cheaper than actually doing inspections and look at how we cut taxes for all those who survived.

It's not over yet. As Scott points out, there is a lot more to come if Harper regains a government from this election.

While we do not yet know if this case is in any way related to the Maple Leaf Foods listeriosis outbreak, perhaps we can get a preview of the ministerial humour on the subject.

Tony's overwhelming sense of urgency

So, how are things in Denver today, Mr. Health minister? Having fun are we? Did you get some good face time with Harper's oil industry buddies?

Don't let a major national health crisis get in the way of your itinerary. Why worry about it? Once they're dead, they're of no further use to you.

I could not possibly add to Impolitical, POGGE, BCer in TO or Accidental Deliberations. Except to point out that this detached, imperious behaviour is becoming something of a habit among the Harperites along with bouts of dereliction of duty.

Acceptable losses

That's the term a military or naval planner uses to excuse the cost in lost troops and material to achieve an objective.

Tony Clement, in suggesting that the government response to the listeriosis outbreak at Maple Leaf foods is in any way a success, is telling you that he subscribes to the idea that four dead are acceptable losses. Further, his language indicates that he doesn't give a red rat's ass about it. (Emphasis mine)

Health Minister Tony Clement says Ottawa's response to a deadly listeriosis outbreak shows the health system is working the way it's supposed to -- even though it appears to have taken a month from the time the first suspicions arose until a recall order was issued for tainted meat from Maple Leaf Foods. [...]

Clement acknowledged, when pressed, that there's always room for improvement. But he maintained that once Ottawa was notified of the problem it acted as quickly as possible.

"In those terms, certainly, I think this was a success," he said of the federal response.

"When there's a loss of life involved it is always tragic . . . It should force us to review our protocols, review how we deal with things and see if there are better ways we can do things.

"But once we were aware of the situation (federal officials) acted very quickly."

Catch that last line?

It's not that Clement is minimizing the deaths of four people - he's dismissing them to pump life into his "success story".

Old adage about the word "but". When and where the word "but" appears in language is an indication of what in a sentence or paragraph is actually relevant to the speaker. Whatever is spoken before the word "but" is meaningless to the speaker; whatever is spoken after the word "but" is what the speaker really means.

By way of an example, I'll reorder a sentence and you decide what information is relevant to both the speaker and the listener.

a. I think you're good looking but you dress funny.

b. I think you dress funny but you're good looking.

What part in each sentence has the speaker dismissed as irrelevant? And what part in each sentence do you, the listener, take away as having the greatest meaning.

Clement did that and made it clear that four dead is acceptable losses in his attempt to make himself look like the leader of a "success".

Impolitical puts it a different way although the meaning is the same:

Good to know that the automatons of the federal government are noting the deaths and chalking them up like canaries in the coal mine that help to illustrate how the system is working.

Precisely, and this is the same mob that will feed you a line on the free market system being better able to regulate itself in consumer food than be subjected to government inspection. The premise being that since the corporation wants desperately to hang on to you as a customer they will go to extensive lengths to prevent things like the listeriosis outbreak from happening, and if it does happen, they will quickly resolve the problem.

Really? That doesn't jive with the fact that Maple Leaf McCain only expanded the recall of their products after government testing of the Toronto plant identified that production facility as the problem.

Four dead, many more ill and the cases are expected to grow. The "wish we were unregulated" free market response? Sorry.

Here's an idea for Tony "I'm not in the pocket of Big Food" Clement. When the Maple Leaf Foods, Toronto plant is up and running again, let's have Tony Clement become the official food taster. A different sandwich every day, perhaps with some spinach and some imported tomatoes. Later on, a hamburger or two. If he dies... oh well. At least we'll know the stuff was bad and we'll chalk his corpse up as an acceptable loss.

They would give you another Walkerton

Via Steve V, Stephane Dion leveled one very clear charge against the Conservatives and their plan to let the Canadian food industry inspect themselves. And he linked the one watershed disaster, Walkerton, with those who slashed government services in Ontario which helped precipitate that event. (Emphasis mine)

A leaked government proposal to give the food industry a greater role in the inspection process is backed by the same Conservative politicians responsible for Ontario's Walkerton water tragedy, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion charged Thursday. [...]

"These are the same people – Mr. Flaherty, Mr. Baird, Mr. Clement – who are responsible [for] what happened in Walkerton, who privatized [Ontario's] propane inspection, and they want to do something equivalent about food inspections, which is at the core of what the government should do," he said.

"This very conservative government does not understand what is at the core of the responsibility of a government in a society."

No they don't. And as the voters of Ontario learned during the Harris years, big tax cuts translate into big cuts in essential services.

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