No nuance in Ottawa's foreign policy

Tim Harper: Stephen Harper’s lightning quick foreign policy overhaul

By Tim Harper, Toronto Star, December 4, 2012
Canada essentially stands alone in the world today, silently nodding or mouthing platitudes while Israel forges ahead with the construction of 3,000 new homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as punishment for the Palestinian victory.

The Conservative government has taken Canada so far from its foreign policy roots and exposed this country as such a high-profile outlier, it defies explanation.
But it should not be a surprise. Stephen Harper told us his foreign policy would see us pick our friends, stand by them and ignore those who don’t like it.
“We also have a purpose,” Harper told the Conservative convention weeks after winning his 2011 majority, “and that purpose is no longer just to go along and get along with everyone else’s agenda.
“It is no longer to please every dictator with a vote at the United Nations.
“Now, we know where our interests lie, and who our friends are. And we take strong, principled positions in our dealings with other nations whether popular or not . . . and that is what the world can count on from Canada.”
Harper essentially told the convention that the days of Canada as honest broker, or “global boy scout,” were over. Anyone who doubts this country is being fundamentally transformed under this government should look at this stunningly quick overhaul of foreign policy.
It has meant slavish devotion to Israel, breaking ties with Iran, embracing our colonial roots, giving the back of our hand to the UN when it serves our purpose and using foreign aid to promote Canadian economic interests over poverty relief.
When it comes to the Middle East, it is highly debatable whether this country ever had any influence during its years hewing to the double-barrelled two-state solution.
But at least Ottawa did not get in the way of peace.
Today, its lack of balance under this government has eliminated any constructive role in the Middle East peace process, a role it abdicated with its silence as the punitive settlement building proceeds.
The U.S. voted with Canada on last week’s Palestinian motion, but that did not prevent Washington from being harshly critical of its ally.
“We urge Israeli leaders to reconsider these unilateral decisions and exercise restraint as these actions are counterproductive and make it harder to resume direct negotiations to achieve a two-state solution,’’ said Jay Carney, spokesperson for U.S. President Barack Obama.
Five European nations summoned their Israeli ambassadors in protest over the settlement construction push.
France, Britain, Sweden, Spain and Denmark accuse Israel of undermining peace efforts.
Monday, Canada was one of only six nations in the UN General Assembly to vote against a resolution that called on Israel to quickly open its nuclear program for inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. As usual, we stood with the U.S., Israel, Micronesia, Marshall Islands and Palau.
Tuesday in Ottawa, Baird, along with International Co-operation Minister Julian Fantino, met with his recalled heads of missions from Geneva, New York, Tel Aviv and Ramallah.
After 90 minutes, the government’s position had changed little. There was no condemnation of the Israeli action.
“Unilateral action on either side is unhelpful,” said Baird’s spokesperson Rick Roth. “The Palestinian Authority’s actions and provocative rhetoric at the UN General Assembly would obviously elicit a response from Israel. Neither is helpful to advance the cause of peace.”
Roth said Ottawa is concerned about a potential Palestinian move to take Israel to the International Criminal Court, but said the government will work with the Obama administration at the UN as it plots its next step.
Baird has appeared to shelve his foolish threat to cut off the $300 million aid Ottawa provides to the Palestinians, although not all of it may be spent and it will be up for review when the current agreement ends.
But he will not do what friends do — tell the Israelis that their most recent move is damaging to peace prospects.
If you work so hard to make good friends, you owe it to them to tell them they are making a mistake.
It was George Dubya Bush who famously uttered the words, "I don't do nuance!"
Stephen Harper, John Baird and the current talking heads in Ottawa apparently graduated from the George W. Bush Diplomatic Finishing School. In the not-so-distant-past, Canada was often characterized by the words, "If America gets a cold, Canada gets pneumonia!" Now, it seems that we get pneumonia a decade plus after the U.S. has recovered her diplomatic and geopolitical health and wellbeing.
Obama's nuanced, balanced and mature foreign policy course now stands as a beacon of hope in a world gone uber-complex, and exploding under the weight of so much bigotry and religious perversion, not to mention rising global temperatures, falling economic prospects and controls and exploding bombs and bodies in the name of some kind of god that most cannot imagine.
Harper's kindergarten narcissism, in foreign policy, is not a mere turn of the ship of state's wheel of a degree or two, it is a turn-around from which we will spend decades recovering, as we will the fiscal policies Harper has bequeathed the country.

Exposing "myths" of gender inequality and infantilizing

It is the "frail" woman syndrome that requires re-thinking, especially by men who continue to harbour this stereotype, and all that goes with it. And it is long past time that women disclaimed such protection, from men, from organizations and especially from those whose real "axe" is to destroy men whom they consider have "taken advantage" of women.
There is a cultural phenomenon known as "the sisterhood" in which and by which women find protection from those they consider "dangerous," "threatening," "intimidating," "abusive" and "violent". Clearly, there are women who are, this minute, being abused by their male partners, whether in a formal marriage or a common law union. And that abuse must stop! Yet, that abuse often results from a power-differential in the male-female relationship, not the physical kind, but one that can be characterized by intellectual, verbal, emotional, psychological and assertiveness criteria. On all of those counts, women generally score much higher than men, especially the last one, assertiveness.
Men are commonly considered "blow-hards," or "macho," or "alpha" and yet, is it not past time for the world to recognize such attitudes and behaviours as manifestations of insecurity? Silence, often considered abuse by some women, is more likely retreating or cocooning by the male, who really doesn't know how to act or to respond to whatever he is being confronted with/by...in his female partner. (There is no attempt here to excuse inappropriate or abusive behaviour, insults, name-calling, threats or intimidation, by either male or female in an adult, consensual and mutual relationship!)
However, women have a need for, a desire for and sometimes an obsession for control, given their own insecurities, and men who wish to participate in a mutual, equal and reciprocal relationship are likely to "give in" to such a strong motive, or to withdraw. Men, too many women believe, are irresponsible, irrational, unpredictable, and immature and therefore as a stereotype, need "parenting" or significant refining and reigning in, in order not to be an embarrassment. Often the difference between the two genders takes the form of the difference between "micro" and "macro" managing...the female using the former and the male using the latter. There is no generalization that can be applied here, as in male = macro and female = micro....sometimes, in fact, it is the inverse of this model.
Neither micro nor macro is "the right" approach; in fact both are essential. It is the equation that brings both into a working relationship, when both parties can see the advantages and the need for one approach or the other, or some simultaneous combination. However, there is a myth running around that "micro" is more responsible, because it depends on the accurate and detailed focus on the fine print, where the "devil lives"...
Often, however, by over-concentration on the micro, the bigger picture is completely missed to the disadvantage of all parties.
Men, at least too many from my experience and observation, are not, have not and likely will not assert their point of view in relationships as often or as confidently as their female partners, and consequently are failing those relationships, while continuing, in most cases, to provide adequately for their fiscal support. Arguing with a female partner is by conventional wisdom, a "no-win" proposition. Put another way, "a happy wife means a happy relationship" and so, to continue to aphorism, "make her happy, doing whatever it takes," and count on being happy in the relationship. Women have learned how to negotiate through political, social, cultural and power thickets since they were in grade school. Most men have not learned those lessons, at least as extensively as their female partners. And women have different ways of using verbal language, body language, facial expressions, and attire to convey nuanced messages, with many more arrows in their "social arrow quivver"...some will call that statement "sexist"; however, re-read it, think about what it is saying and I believe you will see that it is merely based on evidence. Nuanced communication is clearly not the forte of most males in adult relationships with women. In fact, we are a bumbling, stumbling and somewhat inarticulate gender, when it comes to nuanced and emotional and intimate communication. Some of us have even tried to learn the language of our own emotions, as part of our discovery of what it means to be a human being, although, as most males will testify, "women do it much better than we ever will." (That observation, too, will be classified by some as sexist, only this time it will be against men. Re-read it, and consider what it says before jumping to the sexist charge.)
Take that to the level of an organization with the advent of feminism. The argument that men have, for centuries, conspired to keep women "barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen," may have had some relevance in the past in some cultures; it has no currency in the modern world. However, in order to "make up for the perceived mistakes of men who came before our generation, men of the late twentieth century have been expected to make right a situation they did not cause, cannot claim responsibility for, and do not have the tools or the inclination to correct. Even if they did, they would have to accept the premise that the perceived inequality between men and women is, was and will always be the result of the error(s) of men's ways, and that therefore, men are supposed to "make it right."
Resentment against men, by strident feminists, has resulted in too many "protect women" rules, regulations, training programs, and punishments of too many men, who, at least in too many cases, have been the unsuspecting, sometimes innocent victims of female jealousy, insecurity, revenge and certainly female conspiracy against some abusive man, long ago encountered, but now the anger is projected onto the current target. If women seek equality, true equality, then they have to act like equal adults, and it is their responsibility to find out what that looks like.
It does not look like targetting the male as the "dominant" one or the abuser whenever a man and woman enter a relationship of mutual consent. It also does not look like refusing to admit full responsibility for choosing the relationship freely and without force, or undue influence or persuasion, and then, if and when the relationship "goes south" claiming victimhood, as clearly too many women have done, with the support and sanction of both the sisterhood and the frightened and gullible men whose spine has permanently departed, leaving them the pawns of the women seeking retribution, justice and revenge.
It also does not look like fawning over males onto whom they have projected their ideal man, in order to get the attention of those males, and then, when the male has made a commitment, finding out that they never intended the relationship to be permanent in the first place, and exiting without so much as a healthy closing.
Men, traditionally, have been pursuers, hunters of a life partner. However, that stereotype is also being blown out of the water. Females have claimed equality as pursuers, and have overcome unsuspecting males in many situations, only to be unwilling or unable to accept a termination of a relationship, if and when the male discovers its basis is not one of long-term sustainability and equality. Their response, too often, has been, revenge, without acknowledging their adult consent to the relationship in the first place.
And, when there is a perceived "power imbalance," for example in the military or a quasi-military organization where hierarchy prevails, and where the male is a superior officer to the female, then the existing "zero tolerance" policy while in force, contributes to the imbalance in gender relations. A man and a woman will be subject to varying emotions and emotional connections in all situations, professional and private. And no rule that claims to "control" those emotions or the implications of their being "uncontrollable" can be justified, even given the neurotic perceived need of the organization to separate personal and professional lives.
We cannot justify the separation of humans from nature, anymore than we can justify the separation of man from woman. And to attempt to seal such separations in hierarchical structures only demonstrates our fear that without those separations and the punishments that "warn" and deter others, we would devolve into chaos. The truth is just the opposite. If we were to adopt a more honest, less frightened and less neurotic position, based on the acceptance of the full truth of our humanity, including our sexuality, our emotional lives, our biology and our innate hard-wiring to be part of a healthy social network, we would not be hiding so much of ourselves from one another, from God and from exposure to the light of day. We would not find the emergence of untimely relationships, as currently judged from the perspective of "social convention" based on the exposure of our "evil natures" so frightening. And, as a consequence, we would not be spending wasted time punishing individuals whose emotions do not "fit" with the expected and sanctioned behaviour.
Tomorrow, that "misfit" could be anyone of us, and who is to say that "not fitting" is either unethical or immoral, given a full understanding and acceptance of what it means to be a human being.
And the church, as a quasi-military structure, must bear most of the responsibility for attempting to create and then to sustain the divide(s). The church is an institution not of love and forgiveness but of "control," "domination," "infantilising," and "seeking and finding evil" as if to provide controls for the human "savage" that we would otherwise be, if we did not have its parenting. Similarly, military segregation of ranks, of private and professional lives, while undergirded by volumes of both case law and courts martial, is not congruent with the full truth of who we are and who we will remain.
We are engaged in a compulsive pursuit of both lies and denials, as we expose what is clearly an important part of our human nature, only restricted by men in skirts who have never, in too many cases, come face to face with their own sexuality, fearing that it may lead them away from God.
How preposterous!
What kind of God would set us here, driven as we are, both men and women, by our sexuality, and our gender differences, and our affinity for each other, only to find such pursuit evil, and punishable by excommunication if expressed at times and in places not sanctioned by the church "fathers?"
And the feminist postulate that women are "inferior" unsupportable by the evidence, only further complicates the attempts by both healthy men and women to enter, to grow and to evolve into healthy mature, if fragile mutual, respectful life relationships.

We call for an end to DRONE attacks and an international treaty to ban their acquisition, storage and deployment

Much has been spoken and written about DRONE attacks by the United States in recent months. Some 3000+ have been killed in Pakistan, according to some reports. Hundreds have been killed in Yemen and elsewhere, as the US attempts to "eradicate" AlQaeda operatives wherever they may be congregating, training, planning or even executing their sinister plots to kill Americans.
Secrecy surrounds most of these reports, unless and until a "signficant" leader has been wiped out, and then it becomes front page headlines. Whether or not the U.S. has some kind of legal justification for these attacks, while in some dispute, is not the most important question. Should there be, and according to some observers there are, pieces of paper, executive orders, or some other "formal and legal" authorization for DRONE attacks, that kind of literal, empirical and evidenciary "order" or even legal brief will do nothing to stem the tide of reciprocal recruits to AlQaeda cells that are being generated by these heinous attacks some eleven years after the equally heinous attack of 9/11 on the twin towers in Manhattan. So what started as a megaphoned, "The rest of the world will hear from us!" from Dubya on the pile of rubble in lower Manhattan has slithered into nearly official government policy, just barely shy of the US position not to take the life of another government leader, in the form of an assassination.
Everyone agrees that there will always be "collateral damage" from these DRONE attacks, innocent men, women and children, who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and whose lives count for nothing, from the perspective of the antiseptic, clinical, even surgical weapon fired from a computer hard drive in some office or bunker in Nevada by some military agent "obeying orders"...which orders, by the way, have to either originate or terminate, or both, in the Oval Office.
An outside observer, especially one north of the 49th parallel, can easily see that if Obama was going to be successful as a two-term president, he had to wrest the "military" reputation, the national security epaulet from the Republicans who have held it in much of the recent past. Democrats have a reputation for "being soft" on military deployment, on "protecting the US from enemies. No longer!
Obama has not only wrestled that mantle from the Republicans he may have denied their recovery of the upper hand for a decade at least. He gave the order to "take out" bin Laden; he has increased the use of DRONES against terrorists. However, as one insightful caller to NPR's On Point with Tom Ashbrook asked, this morning, "How would we know if and when these DRONES were being deployed? and What is the likelihood that, at some point, they could be used, for example, to take out a foreign dictator whose elimination might be in the national interest of the US?"
The DRONE legacy is not one sufficiently legitimate to be permitted to tarnish or even diminish the legacy of a president of the United States, no matter how important the political exigency or the security threat. Furthermore, on both fronts, the US stands to enhance its reputation within the global community by discontinuing the deployment of all DRONE attacks. Such a decision would reduce the number of terrorist recruits, the number of innocent deaths, and the danger of the United States being hoisted on its own petard, should another country take advantage of the opening provided by the U.S. "leadership".
And another perspective: How long will it be before some different country, like China, or Russia, or even Iran for example, decides that it will deploy similar DRONES against a different target, one perhaps that might be "friendly" to the US? How would or could the US then protest such deployments, having already committed to their deployment in what they consider their own national interest?
DRONES, while the latest military technology to find multiple uses and theatres, are nevertheless, a step on a very slippery slope toward several potential outcomes:

• a significant increase in the potential for the 'war on terror' to continue long into the future, with no requirement or expectation of responsible termination by any participant, including the United States of America
• the detached, and thereby much less messy destruction of human lives, in the pursuit of national goals
• the enhancement of military deployments against terror threats, both public and secret
• the generation of who know's how many terrorists willing to be trained and then to commit suicide as martyrs in the service of Allah, while attacking their incarnation of Evil, the Great Satan, United States of America
• the provocation of other countries to enter the DRONE theater for their own national interests, with a similar kind of both national and international immunity that the current US deployment seems to enjoy
• the absence of any international treaty, agreement, monitoring agency, and court in which the issue of DRONE attacks can and will be addressed leaving a significant gap in the international community's capacity to regulate these weapons
• the apparent immunity of a military solution to what otherwise could and might be a diplomatic approach to serious and complicated global conficts
• the failure of the global community to address the human rights issues involved in the deployment of these weapons by the chest-thumping champion of "democracy and due process," the United States of America

Therefore, we submit, respectfully and with as much vigour as we can muster, that the U.S. must immediately abandon its use of the DRONE as a military weapon, regardless of who or what the target, and call for either a conference hosted by the U.S. or by the United Nations, to begin to debate and design an international agreement that would restrict, and eventually eliminate the deployment of such weapons, just as a similar treaty has been drafted for nuclear weapons.
While there is not, of course, unanimous agreement or a complete list of signators to the nuclear proliferation treaty, at least an attempt has been made to both monitor and regulate their acquisition, storage and deployment. A similar initiative needs to occur with respect to DRONES. Also, in the treaty, the United States must be held accountable for the innocent lives lost in the hundreds, if not thousands of DRONE attacks they have already perpetrated. The families who have lost loved ones, through no fault of their own, or of their deceased family members, must be compensated for their loss, and the world community must have an objective and transparent agency to verify that such a process has been completed.

Blum: Supreme Court's neo-con political agenda

Alito Rising: What to expect from the Supreme Court's New Alpha Conservative
By Bill Blum, truthdig.com,November 27, 2012
“The Supreme Court follows the election returns,” or so opined satirist Finley Peter Dunne in 1901 in language purged of its original Irish brogue (see Chapter 3 of Dunne’s Mr. Dooley book). Back then, the court was headed by Melville Weston Fuller, its eighth chief justice, under whose enlightened stewardship it handed down Plessy v. Ferguson, the infamous decision that upheld the constitutionality of state laws requiring people of different races to use “separate but equal” public facilities.

What Dunne meant, of course, was that the court was a partisan political institution, often less dedicated to following constitutional values than currying favor with the nation’s elites, and that it was also capable of responding to shifts in public opinion. So it was at the turn of the last century and so it is today.
But exactly how the court reads and reacts to elections is by no means a given. Thus we must ask whether the court’s current ultraconservative Republican majority will interpret Barack Obama’s re-election as a call for reflection and moderation or as a signal to lurch even harder to the right. At least one member of the Republican majority—Justice Samuel Alito—has answered that he sees no reason to do anything but double down on past practices.
Speaking in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 15 at a Federalist Society convention dinner, Alito delighted an estimated throng of 1,500 with a self-righteous defense of the court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which overturned decades of federal campaign finance law, ushered in a new era of corporate personhood and unleashed an orgy of political spending through super PACs and thinly regulated nonprofit organizations. Rebutting criticisms of the decision leveled by many liberals, lawyers and the president, Alito praised Citizens United as a common-sense ruling that merely extended the same First Amendment rights to corporations that had been long accorded to individuals, newspapers and media companies. “Surely the idea that the First Amendment protects only certain privileged voices,” he declared, “should be disturbing to anybody who believes in free speech.”
Also disturbing, Alito continued, were the administration’s positions on health care and other issues that had come before the court, which illustrated a view of the country “in which the federal government towers over people.” Such a vision, he suggested, quoting out of context a passage from Charles Reich’s 1970 best-selling book, “The Greening of America,” confirmed that the nation had entered a “moment of utmost sterility, darkest night, most extreme peril.” Still, the current danger, he assured, was nothing new and in any event the remedy was to stay the course.
Although it is not unusual for Supreme Court justices to address legal organizations like the Federalist Society or to deliver college commencement orations, Alito’s speech was something different, at once an expression of contempt for a sitting president and, like Mitt Romney’s infamous 47 percent remarks, a transparent repudiation of the exercise of federal powers to rein in corporate excesses and mitigate the harshest aspects of the private market. The speech also marked something of a coming out party for Alito. After several years of operating as a second banana to Justice Antonin Scalia, the court’s aging conservative standard-bearer, Alito may be ready to assume a leading ideological role. Scalia will turn 77 in March. Alito, by contrast, will turn 63 —no kidding—on April 1.
Progressives who closely monitor the court have long been wary of Alito. In 2006, the national board of the ACLU, citing Alito’s “troubling decisions on race, religion and reproductive rights” while a federal appellate judge, opted to oppose his nomination to the Supreme Court, marking only the third time in its long history that the organization had sought to block a high-court appointment. (The other two challenges involved Robert Bork and the initial nomination of William Rehnquist.) After a filibuster suggested by John Kerry failed to attract support, the Senate voted 58 to 42 to confirm Alito.
Although he had promised in his confirmation hearings to keep an open mind on all issues, Alito wasted little time once seated showing his partisan colors, both on and off the bench. In 2007, he authored the 5-4 majority opinion in the Lilly Ledbetter case, barring gender-based pay discrimination complaints under the 1964 Civil Rights Act if the claims are raised more than 180 days after the discrimination first occurred. (The ruling was effectively overturned by Congress and President Obama two years later in the federal Fair Pay Act.)
In 2008, Alito joined Scalia’s concurring opinion endorsing Indiana’s harsh voter ID law (Crawford v. Indiana). In 2009, he headlined a fundraiser for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a right-wing nonprofit active on campuses across the country and closely linked through its board of directors to Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks Foundation. And in 2010 came the now-famous confrontation at Obama’s State of the Union address, when Alito sneered openly on national TV, mouthing the words “not true” as the president predicted that Citizens United would open the “floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.”
During the 2011-2012 term, Alito bolstered his record as a reliable right-wing crusader, voting identically with Scalia in 88 percent of the court’s opinions and joining the elder conservative’s blistering dissent from the majority’s approval of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate. Alito also dissented from one of the court’s few progressive 2012 opinions, expressing outrage and ire as the majority struck down mandatory life sentences without parole under the Eighth Amendment for juveniles convicted of murder (Miller v. Alabama).
This term, as the court takes up a historic challenge to the continuing validity of the Voting Rights Act and examines the constitutionality of same-sex marriage, Alito’s votes are all but a foregone conclusion. We know that he’s seen the election returns and is entirely unfazed by them. The only unknown, at least in the short run pending Scalia’s retirement and replacement, is whether the court’s minority liberal bloc can persuade one of the tribunal’s potential swing justices—either Anthony Kennedy or even Chief Justice John Roberts after his work on the Affordable Care Act—to read the returns differently.

Black proposes prenuptial agreement for Quebec divorce as secession mov'ts grow

Conrad Black: Clearing the Quebec air
By Conrad Black, National Post, November 17, 2012
What is needed now is an omnibus clearing of the air. Any province that votes by 60% or more to secede can do so, provided that any federal voting constituency that votes by 60% or more not to secede will remain in Canada, and referenda cannot be more frequent than every 10 years. Any seceding province will assume half the percentage of the Canadian federal debt that the seceding province has as a population of Canada’s (pre-secession) population. If necessary, joint censuses will establish these figures. Any federal government assets in the seceding province will be paid for, if the seceding province wants them, over 10 years, at a price agreed by joint commissions, with a casting vote, if necessary, from the International Court of Arbitration. If the province doesn’t want those federal assets, the federal government may sell or keep them as it wishes. All normal intergovernmental matters, such as ease of passage, trade and so forth, will be negotiated de novo, as between sovereign states, but existing contracts not abrogated automatically by the dissolution of the federal relationship, will continue.
Such measures as these should be enacted by Canada as a whole and it should be understood that in the event of violations, resolution could be by armed force. There should be no doubt of retention of the required level of force by the federal state to enforce such a policy. It won’t happen. But the maxim that the surest guaranty of peace is preparedness for war applies equally to civil as to foreign conflicts.
Mr. Black's piece documents, in his own ascerbic prose that evokes parlours of the past and its elite power, some of the history of the quest for sovereignty among Quebecois, and the federal responses, including Trudeau's constitutional "exclusion" and Mulroney's attempt at Meech Lake, Chretien's narrow referendum win and then his appeal to the Supreme Court with the Clarity Act.
Black, in his incisive proposal, is attempting to cut through the fog of ambiguity, and the smog of both uncertainty and "settling" that clokes Canadian culture, politics and especially the complex and unresolved relationship between Quebec and the rest of the country.
Quebec, just like any other self-respecting person/family/entity will not, in the long run, permit herself to be "bought" with the short-term rush of cash from Ottawa, collected from the provinces then categorized as "haves". We have tried that (Chretien and Mulroney) and achieved more papering over of the divide but certainly not a bridge of confidence between Quebec and Canada. Federalism, if it is worth respect, is much more than a commodification of a culture or a people, and certainly worth more than merely another transactional exchange, like buying laundry soap.
Reducing the meaning of a community, like Quebec, to the numbers of exports, imports, immigrants and roads and bridges, escapes and denies the much more complicated matters of pride of identity, language of both arts and culture, theatre and the creative imagination, cafes and bistros and 'ethos'....something that much of the rest of the world does not include in the political calculations. How Quebecois see, feel and express the world is not reduceable to political, minimalist rhetoric, as most politicians seeking a "solution" would prefer, and especially male politicians, endowed with the biology of "fixing" whatever is broken or threatening to break. Perhaps a poor analogy might be the archetypal difference in perception between a man and a woman, in a marriage...that the man considers he has "contributed" to somewhat generously while the woman believes something important is "missing"....without being quite willing or able to articulate that missing "sine qua non"....The man scratches his head in confused puzzlement, listing all the various gifts and compromises he has proferred, while the woman tells the therapist 'he really doesn't understand me or know who I am'...
There is a qualitative difference between the two realities: one based on the perfunctory, the measureable and empirical, the other based on the spiritual, etheral and unmeasureable...the feelings about the divide...
Only with Quebec, history, language, the relationship to the religious community, the homogeneity of the struggling 'minority' in a 'majority sea' of both precedent and assumptions make the divide more layered and complicated.
Trudeau railed against 'nationalism' or any kind of 'special status' for Quebec, firm in his belief that Quebec was not, and never has been, in need of special support in the melee of the federalist state. Black, on the other hand, seems to want an even more "declarative" and final and formal clearing of the legal, fiscal, air within which any province might divorce from Canada, including a military punishment should agreed terms not be assiduously and carefully adhered to.
He seems to be writing the first draft for a prenuptial agreement, well into the second century of the marriage, as if divorce were now the most likely and perhaps most preferred outcome, based on the high percentage of divorces that emanate from the marriage altar in domestic relations.
And yet, Canada has a history of leaving the terms of relationships sufficiently vague, incomplete, pliable and open to interpretation, a condition that might have resulted from benign neglect or willful disdain or some combination, but has resulted in a flexibility permitting this federation to bend, sway and not break in many winds from different directions. Duties and responsibilities have been spelled out for provinces and for Ottawa, but even then, literalism has not triumphed, as it has in so many micromanaged interpretations of reality recently.
There is a reasonable and sustainable case to be made for leaving some things unwritten, unpredicted, and off in the mist of both consciousness and mystery, in order to provide maximum flexibility and openness to change, should those in positions of leadership wish to negotiate new ways of doing "Canada" under an umbrella that leave such options available.
Debating tightly defined terms for the breakup of the country, would not only be untimely and irrelevant for most Canadians evoking instead complex and bitter confusions about our attempts in the past, but would anticipate a fate most Canadians, even the most detached from the political process, do not wish to even imagine, let alone pre-negotiate. Our ambiguity may be one of , if not our most treasured, if somewhat denial-inducing and complicating, Canadian qualities, on both sides of the Ottawa River. It could well be the glue that has made this loose federation hold, however awkwardly that "holding" has proven to be given its many dysfunctional and technically impaired sins of both commission and omission.
On the international stage, however, things are changing around the question of secession, especially from those who, in some cases, consider themselves the cheque-writers for their poor cousins, from whom they wish to separate:

• Catalonia, the rich uncle in eastern Spain is about to hold a referendum on separation from Spain, at a time when that country is facing mounting pressure over its debt and deficit problem,
• Flanders, the northern and more wealthy segment of Belgium, is seeking separation from their French-speaking "countrymen and women" in the south
• Prime Minister Cameron has recently agreed to terms under which Scotland, the poor cousin of Great Britain, may form its own country, in the reported hope that it will then be able to dig for oil in the North Sea, and improve it's economic prospects

And there will likely be others, who see themselves, not necessarily similarly to Quebec, as paying the "freight" for the bills of the country, while their less well-to-do countryfolk reap the benefits of that re-distribution of national income.
Does this argument not sound remarkably familiar to the perception of the Republican candidate for president, in the U.S. that 47% of the people in that country are "takers" who would never vote for him no matter what he did.
Not incidentally, in the U.S. a movement on the White House website includes the names of hundreds of thousands of individual people, from a large number of differenet states, who wish their state to secede from the union, the largest and most vocal and most reported of these states is currently Texas, while some 120,000 people have signed to leave the union.
So the historic context for secession is changing by the minute, on more than one continent and in multiple locations....we will have to continue to watch to see where these streams lead, and whether they gather strength from each other.

Siddiqui: Harper not helping Israel in UN vote on Palestine

Stephen Harper is not doing Israel any favours: Siddiqui

By Haroon Siddiqui, Toronto Star, December 1, 2012
If the UN decision to recognize Palestine was as meaningless as it’s made out to be, why did its opponents fight so ferociously against it?

Of course, the vote was significant. Its critics knew that as well — hence the panic, before and after it.
The vote was overwhelming, more than two-thirds in favour — 138 for, 9 against and 41 abstentions. Much to Canada’s shame, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird was among the loudest pipsqueak noises against the tide of history.
Even the United States, chief patron of Israel, was subdued, dishing out brief boilerplate statements. But the voluminous Baird was keen to showcase Canada in the august company of the Czech Republic, Panama, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru and Palau.
Now he’s threatening to retaliate against the Palestinian Authority. Earlier this year, he retaliated against Iran by ending all ties. Before that, the Harper government offended so many Arab and African states that they killed Canada’s 2010 bid for a Security Council seat.
The resounding UN call in support of a viable, independent Palestinian state came days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was forced to retreat from his war on Gaza and agree to a detailed deal with the terrorist Hamas.
At the UN, he lost to Hamas’s rival, the Palestinian Authority, whose non-violent leader Mahmoud Abbas is ostensibly the favoured Israeli interlocutor. The Gaza operation only helped garner more support at the UN, including that of Hamas.
Earlier, Netanyahu had lost the gamble of forcing President Barack Obama into a war on Iranian nuclear facilities. And in siding with Mitt Romney, he failed to sway Jewish American voters, 70 per cent of whom voted for the president.
Netanyahu has not served Israel well. But that’s for Israelis to judge in their election next month. However, in supporting his recklessness, Harper has not done Israel any favours, either.
The prime minister portrays himself as a staunch ally of Israel, and tends to brand those who don’t agree with him as anti-Semitic and bully them — as discovered by the Christian ecumenical group Kairos, the Canadian Arab Federation and Palestine House, whose funding was cut, and Montreal-based Rights and Democracy, which was destroyed.
In fact, what Harper has done is to take sides with the right wing in an ideological and political struggle within Israel and the Jewish diaspora. He could have sided with those who do not agree with Israeli expansionism and permanent war on the Palestinians.
At the UN, the Palestinians were not taking a “short cut” to statehood, as he charged. The vote does not replace the peace process, only augments it. But that process has already been undermined by Netanyahu, who refuses to end illegal Jewish settlements.
As Ehud Olmert, former Israeli prime minister, said, the Palestinian path to the UN is “congruent” with the two-state solution.
There’s also nothing “unilateral” in turning to the world’s biggest multilateral institution, which, pre-Harper, Canada used to support enthusiastically. The Palestinians have gone to the same body that helped create Israel in the 1940s.
They are not breaching the 1993 Oslo Peace Accord, either. That was derailed long ago, by Netanyahu during his first stint as prime minister. He may now use the UN vote to gut it completely and move the goalposts with new conditions for peace. On Friday, he approved additional Jewish housing in East Jerusalem, which Hagit Ofran, of the Israeli Settlement Watch project for Peace Now, called a potential “deal breaker for the two-state solution.”
UN “non-member state” status would let the Palestinians participate in General Assembly debates. It may allow them to join the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the World Bank and the International Criminal Court.
The fuss over the UN vote comes from those who want to keep the Palestinians at the mercy of Israel — and whack them at the slightest show of defiance.
This is what the U.S. did last year after UNESCO voted overwhelmingly to grant them membership. It yanked its $80-million annual contribution. That did not stop the organization from defining West Bank holy sites sacred to both Jews and Muslims as “Palestinian.”
Now, Congress might cut its $500-million-a-year funding to the Palestinian Authority — even though that would only reduce the ability of the PA to maintain security for Israel.
Netanyahu may go further. He may withhold the tax revenues Israel collects on behalf of the PA. His foreign minister may want to “topple” Abbas, as per a leaked memo.
It is such self-defeating tactics, and the 45-year occupation of Palestinian lands and the perpetually expanding Israeli borders, that have left Israel so sadly isolated.
By backing those policies, Harper has isolated Canada as well and undermined Canada’s once-honoured place in the world.

It is male neurosis that declares women "inferior" nothing else

While I have always acknowledged the statistics that women are the recipients of more physical abuse than men, and that men are the deliverers of that violence, I have never, and never will, accept the larger and more important natural and undisputable reality that women are physically, emotionally, spiritually, fiscally, psychologically or even potentially politically inferior to men.
There is clearly much data that demonstrates that women do not hold as many positions of leadership in too many organizations, and that women continue to make $.77 for every dollar a man make in North America, and that young girls are prevented culturally, politically religiously and violently, from securing a legitimate education in too many parts of the world, none of it proving that women are inferior to men.
It was Pierre Trudeau who wailed and gnashed his teeth against nationalism as a protection for the Quebecois, and he resisted with his whole being any attempt by others to shield Quebecois from the ravages of English domination and American absorption. Quebecois, he believed, were up to the challenge of demonstrating their equality, if not their superiority, and special protections would only inhibit such a demonstration.
So equally, do I, have I, and will I continue to, wail and gnash my teeth against any who perceive, and who generate policies and practices that are based on the false assumption that women need special protection from anyone, including men. And then, for those people, no matter their status in politics, government, the church, education, or the corporation to justify those policies and practices as ethical, moral, spiritual, religious dogma or even economic "necessity" is to send their flag flying in order for it to be shot down by the truth.
As the father of three daughters, I have never considered it essential to picture or to characterize those now young women as "second class" especially in comparison to men of their generation.
I was raised in a home where there was no disputing that the female gender, the mother, acted, and expected everyone else to act and to demonstrate, at least her equality, and in most cases her superiority to her male partner. She lived by the Charlotte Whitten axiom, "Women have to be twice as good as men, in order to prove their equal, and fortunately, men did not make that task very difficult.
It is a travesty today to listen and to read of the continuing arguments that women are not equal to men, not fit for combat, not up to the challenge of military action, not open to the hundreds of thousands of positions in all organizations including the military, for which men are eligible to apply and to compete.
I have suffered, by the assumed authority of too many men, who took the "protective" and patronizing stance "on behalf of women" to punish men who, in many cases were victimized by those same women, without even having the courtesy to ask the men for their "side" of the story, thereby precluding even the bare essentials of "due process" in their decision-making.
I remain pessimistic that this patronizing, condescending and unjust attitude/ approach and the policies and practices that sustain such attitudes, beliefs and dogma will change in the next century, given the blindness, the hubris and the insecurity of the male gender to see the tragic error of their ways.