"Bring back attention to individuals" (recipe for Liberal Party)?

By Andrew Steel, Globe and Mail, May 5, 2011
Liberals must abandon the fantasies of denial that have been our curse, really since 1984. The proud reality is that we are the party of minorities, be they religious, linguistic, cultural, gender or economic.

We held the West when they hated those Toronto bankers, until they got rich and became bankers. We held Quebec until francophones stopped thinking of themselves as minorities in Canada, and started thinking of themselves as majorities in Quebec. We held rural and Northern Ontario until they began to see us as too elite and downtown. We held the cultural and ethnic minorities of the Greater Toronto Area and Montreal and Vancouver until we stopped defending them and the Charter.
Now we are left with a handful of seats held through incumbency and organization and tribal loyalty, but without a regional base that unites them. The best choice for Liberals is to return to our core principal to protect the sanctity of the individual to be themselves.
In the past, we protected vulnerable people from government excess with the Charter and eliminating the deficit, and protected vulnerable people from economic catastrophe with pensions and medicare. We legalized same-sex marriage and produced a Canadian flag and introduced multiculturalism, acts that infuriated many people at the time, but made Canada a country where you can be proud and free to be yourself, as a minority or not. But mythologizing our past has made us forget the values that underlay it.
Being a Liberal is hard. We speak for the rights of minorities. Sometimes minorities are unpopular. But all of us are minorities, in some way. That makes our party the biggest tent possible.
The future of the Liberal Party comes from these values, this timeless defence of a person’s right to be themselves. That is our foundation and the beginning of our path forward.
Entitled, "The Culture of Defeat," Steele's piece is an inspiring call for a re-visiting and a re-implementation of the Liberal (liberal) value of paying attention to the individual without getting lost in the mythology of the past.
However, there is a thoroughness, and an intimacy and an authenticity to the pursusit of the opportunity of the individual that seems to have vanished from the social, political landscape today.
With the digital information technology, and the superficiality of human "faux-relationships" dedicated, for the most part, to climbing the ladder, and "what can you do for me next" the question poses itself: "How many people can even hear the argument for individual opportunity and individual responsibility?"
Michael Ignatieff attempted to articulate the idea, without really catching on. One could argue that the fault lies with the messenger, not with the message. But wait. Is the message really "relevant" when there seems to be a deliberate attempt to wage a "class war" by the Conservatives (obviously favouring the economic elite) and the NDP (obviously favouring the 'little guy'). How is the individual going to find his/her voice, opportunity, or even life mission, when work is disappearing for the bulk of the middle class, and when even a university education is no longer enough to qualify for the jobs that are available and when most attempts to give workers a voice in the economy run afoul of the "right wing" of all political groups and parties.
Clearly, work is not the definition or purpose of life. However, putting food on the table and paying the bills seems to require more and more of our attention, time and physical effort, especially in a climate where workers are valued about as much as yesterday's raw materials become today's sludge heap after the extraction of the most treasured part for "the purposes of making a profit" in the business.
Worker's rights, like environmental protection, do not interest corporate leaders. Both would increase the cost of doing business, and both the government and the culture worship at the altar of reducing the cost of doing business, at the expense of both workers and the environment.
Individuals are mothers, fathers, workers, coaches, tax-payers, volunteers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles and citizens....and there is a case to be made that political parties that pay attention to the needs of individuals will be swept away by those paying attention to the interests of "groups...especially "interest groups" that can afford to pay lobbyists to argue their case before specific cabinet ministers, and even before the PM.
With the Harper government commitment to remove all  state funding from political parties, he will with one stroke of the pen and one vote in both the Commons and the Senate, place his own party at the front of the line for fundraising given the growing intimacy between the largest bank accounts, corporate investments and holdings, and his own party.
The Liberals, in attempting to sell "the rights of the individual" will be met with "we did that with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms" as if that political fight is over, done, finished and needs no more attention or dollars.
School drop outs, while they are individuals, are not going to have any political resonance individually, because the specific cause of the specific drop-out is considered unique, and while those dedicated to lowering those numbers can detect nuances and clusters in the reasons, at the political level, the issue has no sex appeal.
Neither does the plight of single mothers.
Nor does the plight of First Nations peoples living on reservations without adequate clean water supplies, and without adequate health care, or adequate housing. Of course, they are individuals, but their cause lacks political sex appeal.
Workers who die or suffer injury on the job, are also individuals, whose pain and whose families' pain does not have any political clout, because to bring such an issue to the front pages would require a change of attitude in the corporate board rooms where profits continue to flow, without paying attention to such annoying issues. And governments, consequently, do not have to pay attention to them either, or do so at the risk of being considered "marginal" because such issues are not at the heart of the national debate.
Foreign policy, that greatest of all abstractions, in the Canadian government's file cabinet, concerns how Canada acts, reacts and inter-acts with the rest of the world. And while those positions are formulated in some deep dark recesses of the Foreign Affairs building in Ottawa, they do affect individual lives, both here and abroad. However, covering our international relations with the misguided purchase of F-35 Fighter Jets is not going to eliminate our national indifference to the nuances of foreign policy, foreign policy debate and diplomatic discussions.
Health care affects every individual living here. And yet, it is the policy wonks and the economists who will make the decisions about how much money will be directed to the negotiations moving forward toward 2014, when the agreement with the provinces has to be renegotiated. And their individual concern for the individual at the end of the system, the user, will be very small compared with their attention paid to government deficits, and government debt, and balance of payments. And the politicians will merely echo the selected policy wonks and the selected economic theorists who "fit" their picture of the kind of health care they would like to see for the nation. And where will the individual be in that debate, if there even is one.
And let's not turn a blind eye to the media, and their contribution to the political life of the nation. This most recent election demonstrates the thin veneer of coverage that policy details generate, compared to the "horse race" of the polls that anticipate the victor and the loser. If the individual party leader's ability to "connect" with voters, according to the media, trumps the intellectual depth and nuance, along with his capacity to lead, (as different from completely controlling a Cabinet) then we are subject to a continuing reduction of our political life to the lowest common denominator.
And, while that too has an individual component, it will never see the light of day, except perhaps in a courtroom, with bags of cash to fund the petition, under laws written and promulgated by those whose interests is primarly, if not exclusively, selfish.
Everyone of us is more vulnerable today then we were even a decade ago, and vulnerable to forces that we perceive governments have less and less capacity to influence. Consequently, we live in a state of anxiety and uncertainty about those things like jobs that we took for granted for decades, provided we performed at or near capacity. And yet, our interests as individuals, have never mattered less to our governments.
And bringing back a real authentic interest in the issues facing real Canadians that can and does find adequate and articulate expression in our national political debates seems like a far-off dream, in a far-away land of never-never.

Korean FATHER SCHOOL spreads across U.S.

By Nicole Laporte, New York Times, May 6, 2011
  A soft-spoken electrical engineer named Edmond Rhim sat in a packed gymnasium with his wife, Hanna, gripping her tiny hand in his. It was the last of four five-hour-long sessions of Father School, and by the end of the night, 70 men — all of them Korean, and almost all of them Christian — would be declared more emotionally adjusted dads. They would even get a certificate, a group photo and a polo shirt to prove it.
“She’s happy now,” Rhim said, smiling.
Hanna nodded her head. “I love my husband,” she said. “But he is” — she searched for the right bit of recovery jargon — “under construction.”
Like many of the men in the room, Rhim never wanted to come to Father School. (Seven dropped out after the first day.) “I’m not a bad father,” he told me a week earlier. But realizing how difficult it was for him to relate to his wife and two teenage kids — and realizing, finally, how empty that left him — he paid the $120 course fee and agreed to show up.
Father School has been helping Korean men like Rhim become more emotionally aware since 1995, when it started at the Duranno Bible College in Seoul. The mission, drawn up at the height of the Asian financial crisis, was to end what the Father School guidebook calls “the growing national epidemic of abusive, ineffective and absentee fathers.”
“Traditionally, in the Korean family, the father is very authoritarian,” Joon Cho, a program volunteer, told me a few weeks before this session of Father School began. “They’re not emotionally linked with their children or their wife. They’re either workaholics, or they’re busy enjoying their own hobbies or social activities. Family always comes last.”
In 2000, Father School spread from Korea to the United States, and the program — part 12-step recovery, part Christian ministry — was tailored to meet the needs of Korean immigrant fathers dealing with Americanized kids who wondered why their fathers weren’t more like the touchy-feely dads they watched on TV. Since then, Father School has exploded. It now operates out of 57 American cities and has graduated nearly 200,000 men worldwide.
“They are ready to cry,” said Young Chung, a veteran Father School volunteer, as he looked out at the sea of men arranged at a dozen or so small tables in the gymnasium here in this heavily strip-malled suburb of Los Angeles. “All you have to do is touch them.”
There is no denying it has been an emotional journey — the boxes of Kleenex on every table are there for a reason. Over the course of the program, the students, who range in age from 30 to 70, have been asked to examine issues that many of them have never dared to think about, much less share with a group.
“Our communication was lacking so much,” a man in his early 40s wrote in a letter to his father — one night’s homework assignment. “You expected so much from me, but I gave much more than you think. All your time was work, work, work. . . . You really didn’t put much into family life.”
In the midst of another participant’s group testimony, in which he talked about how he neglected his 16-year-old son when his son was battling drug and gambling addictions, he crumpled to the floor in tears. When he stepped down from the podium, a few members of the group gathered around him in a consolatory huddle while the rest applauded.
The syllabus also called for students to practice saying “I love you” and to ask their wives out on dates. One man drew laughs when he said that his wife was so flabbergasted by the invitation that she refused to go. At another session, they learned how to hug, albeit grudgingly. Only when the volunteers who run these sessions insisted did the men rise from their seats and offer a few stiff embraces.
But on graduation night, the mood was far more festive. For the first time, wives were invited to attend, and the men gallantly pulled out their chairs and introduced them around the room. Platters of spicy kimchi and rice were passed around the table, as a quartet of volunteers sang Korean spiritual songs set to a poppy beat. With all the attendant sincerity and awkwardness, it felt an awful lot like prom night.
Toward the end of the evening, the lights dimmed, and the students filed out of the room. Twenty minutes later, they returned carrying a small, plastic tub filled with water. They knelt down before their wives and removed their stockings and shoes. Some of the women wept as their husbands gently massaged their toes.
Over in a corner, Rhim was hunched over, drying Hanna’s feet. She wasn’t crying, but as he worked, she leaned down to rest her head on his shoulders.

National Unity & Mlticuluralism...two cornerstones of Liberal history

By Robert Silver, Globe and Mail, May 3, 2011
From a personal perspective, there were two low-points of the Liberal campaign. The first was when the issue of national unity was raised. For at least 40 years, this has been the Liberal Party’s bread-and-butter, our raison d’etre. We are the party of national unity. When the issue was brought up, Harper quickly wrapped himself in the flag and took on the role of Captain Canada. He intentionally decided he would own the issue and try to turn it into a strength for him and his party. We said we don’t want to discuss national unity. Pass. We wouldn’t speak out against extending Bill 101 to federally regulated industries, we wouldn’t defend the Clarity Act, wouldn’t speak out against NDP nonsense on the Constitution – that was literally verbatim from Brian Mulroney’s misguided constitutional adventures. We didn’t want to go there, had nothing to say in response. My anger over this decision was not great for my blood pressure.

The second low point of the election for me was during the English debate when Gilles Duceppe and Jack Layton were debating reasonable accommodation, multiculturalism and immigration. Duceppe started highlighting a very Quebec-centric position on the issues in the one-on-one segment, Layton played along. Stephen Harper jumped in and gave a fairly impassioned defence of multiculturalism – of diversity as our strength. Michael Ignatieff did not.
To understand how our politics have changed in the last decade stop and let those two low points sink in. The Conservative Party of Canada now, at least in this campaign, owns national unity as an issue – we had nothing to say about it. The Conservative Party of Canada now owns multiculturalism and immigration as an issue – we had nothing to say about it either.
National unity and multiculturalism...two issues on which the Liberal Party has been solid, pragmatic, visionary and historic...for decades...and yet as Silver points out, SILENT in this election.
The Liberal Party cannot walk away from either the history the party has forged on these issues, nor from the silence it shrunk to in the 2011 campaign.
Quebec is taking the NDP for a test drive; they have not bought the car. And if Thomas Mulcair continues his "fatigue" rants, they never will. But there are a plethora of other loose canons in the Quebec version of the NDP that will require more fingers than Jack Layton posses to squelch by inserting those fingers into those loose "throats".
Meeting with a candidate in this election, at the very inception of the campaign, I made the following observation: There is a crisis in North America among men. That crisis often takes the form of a dichotomy between detached, nuanced and intellectual discourse on one hand and a kind of bully-street fighter mentality on the other. It is as if Wayne Gretzky is fighting his own bodyguard, McSorley, in the public arena. And, I continued, there are so many more different and more interesting masculinities available, if only the public were interested. Nevertheless, among all the other issues you will face, I continued, the representation of the males in our society is one that is on nobody's radar, but will have an impact nevertheless.
Ignatieff represents that detached, nuanced and intellectual who, while espousing the "party line" of fighting for the middle class, really doesn't bring the kind of the credentials of the lunch-bucket, blue collar kind of world to the party. Harper, on the other hand, is the master of the "bully" as unnuanced, uncompromising, unfettered by reality and the complexities of the facts, ( he even makes up his own set of facts to suit his political, ideological agenda).
In a world of competing masculinities, the bully is going to trump the "intellectual" every time, especially in the
boardrooms of the many corporations, where nuance will always take a back seat to increased sales, no matter how distorted is the sales pitch. George W. Bush famously remarked, "I don't do nuance!"
Neither does Harper, although he is not so short-sighted as to make such a comment in public.
It is those same corporate cheque-writers that are now in charge of the Conservative party, and thereby the country.
And national unity and multiculturalism are both subjects beyond both the intellect and the pay grade of most of those CEO's.
However, they are not beyond the parameters of a national leader; in fact, they may be the most important files on the PM's desk, even though he doesn't have a clue about how to manage either.
Just imagine how far (backward) we have regressed from the days of Lester Pearson. Can anyone imagine him ever lowering his sights to such a reduction as did Dubya? Can anyone imagine the words, "I do not do nuance" coming out of Pearson's mouth? And yet, he authored Canada's multiculturalism policy and history, along with our peace-keeping policy and history, and brought those three "wise men" into the federal cabinet from Quebec, as a demonstration of his good intentions to make Quebec a more integral part of the federal government.
Whether Ignatieff was warned not to open this can of emotions and history during the campaign or not, we will likely not even know. Whether he personally felt he was attempting to avoid the "intellectual" tarring from the Harper assassination brush by avoiding that part of the debate will likely onlly come out in his memoires.
Until then, the Liberal Party must suck up its pride, and its imagination, along with the few remaining men and women who can and will be prepared to put their complexities and their nuances on the line for both the country and the party.
This test drive by Quebec is on a road with the potential of many recalls.

Mean-spirited, deceptive and dangerous is the new Canadian government

With a few days to reflect on the Conservative monstrosity that is now the Canadian government, based on its impermeability (167 of 308 seats) there are some tragic observations that can be made about how the result was manipulated.
When we heard all three opposition leaders, in the campaign, utter the words. "We do not trust Stephen Harper," apparently not enough of us were listening. When the Conservative Party decides, as it apparently did, to target specific groups, such as the Roman Catholic church, and the Jewish community and the several ethnic communities, each with different messages. For the Roman Catholics, it was a hint of removing a woman's right to choose from the foreign aid budget, as a signal of what's to come in Canada; for the Jewish community, it was a stronger "pro Israel" position in the conflict with Palestine; for the various ethnic communities, it was an invitation to share our "family values" as they overlapped the values brought from the homelands.
However, whenever one of the Conservative candidates puhsed "too hard" for example, by declaring that the government would actually terminate the therapeutic abortion option, Harper told reporters he was not going to re-open the abortion debate. On last look, it seemed that there was no "half-way position" here. There is no half a fetus position possible, just as there is no "half-pregnant" position. So we can look forward to the removal of therapeutic abortions from the Canadian Health Act.
With respect to the Israel-Palestine conflict, previous Canadian governments have taken a balanced position, for two states, with mutual guarantees of security, a position that both groups in Canada supported. Now, we have a government that, on one hand, professes to be friend to all various immigrant groups (presumably that includes the large Canadian Islamic population) while also expressing a "pro Israel" position in diplomatic discussions about the Middle East. So, we have to wonder how the Canadian government can play a significant role in fostering a Middle East solution, when it has tipped its hand in favour of Israel.
All of these cynical manoeuvres have been conducted under a shield of "jobs and the economy" as the top priority of the Conservative government.....and yet there is no evidence that their previous policies were better than average in creating jobs and in stabilizing the economy. However, we do know, and can be confident that their financial backers, the large corporations, will continue to throw large cheques to the party, so large in fact, that the government is now committed to the elimination of public fundiong for all political parties, leaving it the sole recipient of the largesse that effectively creates a corporate-government cabal that is running the country. So what is good for the large corporations will become government policy, just as it has with respect to the environment...where nothing has been even attempted on this party's watch.
We can confidently look forward to more of the same, in keeping the wishes of their lobbyists from the large corporations.
We now have TeaPartyNorth in government in Ottawa, and if the world wishes to know how that will play out over the next four years, stay tuned, because political assassination advertising is only the nuclear tip of their poitical missiles. They have ruined the political careers of both Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, both outstanding intellects, and worthy potential Prime Ministers, except for the bags of money that generated those hateful and despicable assassination ads, all of them distortions of the truth, and all of them unworthy of any political party, let alone the one currently in government in Canada.

Chris Hedges: On the death of Osama bin Laden

By Chris Hedges, from truthdig.com, May 3, 2011
Posted on May 1, 2011

Chris Hedges, speaking at a Truthdig fundraising event in Los Angeles on Sunday evening, made these remarks about Osama bin Laden’s death.
I know that because of this announcement, that reportedly Osama bin Laden was killed, Bob [Truthdig Editor Robert Scheer] wanted me to say a few words about it … about al-Qaida. I spent a year of my life covering al-Qaida for The New York Times. It was the work in which I, and other investigative reporters, won the Pulitzer Prize. And I spent seven years of my life in the Middle East. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I’m an Arabic speaker. And when someone came over and told ... me the news, my stomach sank. I’m not in any way naive about what al-Qaida is. It’s an organization that terrifies me. I know it intimately.
But I’m also intimately familiar with the collective humiliation that we have imposed on the Muslim world. The expansion of military occupation that took place throughout, in particular the Arab world, following 9/11—and that this presence of American imperial bases, dotted, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Doha—is one that has done more to engender hatred and acts of terror than anything ever orchestrated by Osama bin Laden.
And the killing of bin Laden, who has absolutely no operational role in al-Qaida—that’s clear—he’s kind of a spiritual mentor, a kind of guide … he functions in many of the ways that Hitler functioned for the Nazi Party. We were just talking with Warren [Beatty] about [Ian] Kershaw’s great biography of Hitler, which I read a few months ago, where you hold up a particular ideological ideal and strive for it. That was bin Laden’s role. But all actual acts of terror, which he may have signed off on, he no way planned.
I think that one of the most interesting aspects of the whole rise of al-Qaida is that when Saddam Hussein … I covered the first Gulf War, went into Kuwait with the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, was in Basra during the Shiite uprising until I was captured and taken prisoner by the Iraqi Republican Guard. I like to say I was embedded with the Iraqi Republican Guard. Within that initial assault and occupation of Kuwait, bin Laden appealed to the Saudi government to come back and help organize the defense of his country. And he was turned down. And American troops came in and implanted themselves on Muslim soil.
When I was in New York, as some of you were, on 9/11, I was in Times Square when the second plane hit. I walked into The New York Times, I stuffed notebooks in my pocket and walked down the West Side Highway and was at Ground Zero four hours later. I was there when Building 7 collapsed. And I watched as a nation drank deep from that very dark elixir of American nationalism … the flip side of nationalism is always racism, it’s about self-exaltation and the denigration of the other.
And it’s about forgetting that terrorism is a tactic. You can’t make war on terror. Terrorism has been with us since Sallust wrote about it in the Jugurthine wars. And the only way to successfully fight terrorist groups is to isolate [them], isolate those groups, within their own societies. And I was in the immediate days after 9/11 assigned to go out to Jersey City and the places where the hijackers had lived and begin to piece together their lives. I was then very soon transferred to Paris, where I covered all of al-Qaida’s operations in the Middle East and Europe.
So I was in the Middle East in the days after 9/11. And we had garnered the empathy of not only most of the world, but the Muslim world who were appalled at what had been done in the name of their religion. And we had major religious figures like Sheikh Tantawi, the head of al-Azhar—who died recently—who after the attacks of 9/11 not only denounced them as a crime against humanity, which they were, but denounced Osama bin Laden as a fraud … someone who had no right to issue fatwas or religious edicts, no religious legitimacy, no religious training. And the tragedy was that if we had the courage to be vulnerable, if we had built on that empathy, we would be far safer and more secure today than we are.
We responded exactly as these terrorist organizations wanted us to respond. They wanted us to speak the language of violence. What were the explosions that hit the World Trade Center, huge explosions and death above a city skyline? It was straight out of Hollywood. When Robert McNamara in 1965 began the massive bombing campaign of North Vietnam, he did it because he said he wanted to “send a message” to the North Vietnamese—a message that left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead.
These groups learned to speak the language we taught them. And our response was to speak in kind. The language of violence, the language of occupation—the occupation of the Middle East, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—has been the best recruiting tool al-Qaida has been handed. If it is correct that Osama bin Laden is dead, then it will spiral upwards with acts of suicidal vengeance. And I expect most probably on American soil. The tragedy of the Middle East is one where we proved incapable of communicating in any other language than the brute and brutal force of empire.
And empire finally, as Thucydides understood, is a disease. As Thucydides wrote, the tyranny that the Athenian empire imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. The disease of empire, according to Thucydides, would finally kill Athenian democracy. And the disease of empire, the disease of nationalism … these of course are mirrored in the anarchic violence of these groups, but one that locks us in a kind of frightening death spiral. So while I certainly fear al-Qaida, I know its intentions. I know how it works. I spent months of my life reconstructing every step Mohamed Atta took. While I don’t in any way minimize their danger, I despair. I despair that we as a country, as Nietzsche understood, have become the monster that we are attempting to fight.
Thank you.

Sad day in Canadian politics

Conservatives: 167
New Democrats: 102
Liberals: 34
Bloc: 4
Green: 1
So Quebec has finally agreed that it would rather have a large cadre of Members of Parliament who support the federation and who support left-leaning social policies than a group of separatists representing her in Otawa. For that, Canadians can be relieved.
However, giving the Conservatives under Stephen Harper a majority is a horse of a different colour.
Is the Liberal Party relegated to a footnote in Canadian history?
Is the NDP so ascendant that they could conceivably take power in another election?
Now, after five years of watching a minority parliament, Canadians have wrought a neo-con government without restrictions. There is simply no opportunity for any clustering of opposition to force them out of government.
Sad day in Canadian politics.
p.s. Congratulations to Dr.Ted Hsu, who won the riding of Kingston and the Islands for the Liberals.

CTV's W5: Exposes CRA as exercising "terror" on targets

Anyone who watched CTV's W5 yesterday has to be scratching her head in both amasement and fear at both the targets and the tactics of the Canada Revenue Agency. In the time allotted for a one-our documentary, the producers at CTV were able to provide at least four examples of what to this viewer looked like harrassment verging on terror, and one "target" taxpayer actually used the word "terror" in his account of his own story.
First, deploying rookie investigators alone on innocent taxpayers is not a good start.
Even to target such candidates, without actually listening to both their story and the story of their accountant, is reprehensible.
Failure to follow even CRA's own protocol guidelines, by making apppointments, and by treating every client with courtesy, represents how, in the recorded words of one phone call from CRA, "the government is out to screw you" and "I'm going to make your day worse today".
Canadians are an extremely compliant group, for the most part. We believe in both the government and the need for taxes. We are not the U.S. where the need for the government's existence is barely established in many parts of the country. The individual American taxpayer would like nothing better than to deprive the government of more taxes, believing that Uncle Sam already takes too much.
Every single example depicted on W5 expressed the belief that, not only were they very careful in their preparations of their tax returns, but that they did not resent the "tax-man" at all.
However, as one sitting Member of Parliament from Newfoundland and Labrador, whose constituent was one of those targetted by CRA, put it, "If people knew what power was held by unelected people in Canada  they would be terrified."
The accountants interviewed, acting on behalf of their clients, not those representing CRA, commented that they had never seen "anything like this" in thirty years of practice.
What has happened in Ottawa, that when the reporter from CTV attemtps to make an appointment to interview the Commissioner of CRA, he is refused, and then when he shows up in the lobby of their office building, he is ushered out door unceremoniously, with barely a "we do not comment" on indivudal cases by some civil servant? And then, upon encountering the Minister in charge of the Canada Revenue Agency, and asking why the investigators do not follow even minimal protocols in their investigations, he comments, on camera, "We have a very good service that serves the people of Canada very well."...and refuses even to engage in addressing the questions and the issues raised by the reporter.
Has this country become a kind of "police state" with respect to the collection of taxes?
Has CRA become impenetrable to the mere posing of reasonable questions from reasonable people?
And,  why, in the words of former CRA auditors, does  "Canada Revenue Agency believe that everyone is guity until proven innocent, and  why is the burden of proof is on the taxpayer to prove that CRA is wrong in their claims, when the matter reaches court?