Clement: "Ignore anyone who says I have porked!"

Tony C. Repeatedly busted for inane utterances in defense of a whole string of dodgy, ideology-driven government doofinesses, and porking on the public dime. Again, today, from the looks of it. Yet still fighting a valiant rearguard action against anything resembling reality. Ya gotta admire his sheer, pigheaded tenacity. It's as if he's trying to hypnotize an entire country into not seeing what's as plain as the nose on your face...

Foreign interests

Last week, the federal natural resources minister, Joe Oliver, came out all rabid attack-doggy on "radical foreign elements" set on infiltrating and hijacking the Northern Gateway pipeline hearings to bring up environmental issues. Some kafuffle, huh?

Northern Gateway would be, if you've had your head buried in the, ummm, sands, these last weeks, a really big pipe for pumping great wads of sludge from the Athabasca tar sands, through some of BC's most pristine remaining wilderness to the west coast, where megatankers (...none, we hope, named Exxon Valdez...) would bug out for China with it.

It's the government's, ummm, better alternative to the now-shelved Keystone XL project, another big-jeezuz pipeline that was designed to pump that self-same sludge through some of Nebraska's most pristine wilderness, and thence to the refineries of Texas et.al. Are you starting to see a theme? And what could possibly go wrong?

Yesterday, in another vaguely-fawning Peter Mansbridge interview, the PM appeared to cool the hot oil cauldrons. Although we should remember that: A) This is a guy who's all about appearance over reality; and: B) He'd have to have approved Oliver's frothy yappin' in the first place. There's a definite strategic messaging advantage in that kind of thing: He looks about as reasonable as he's capable of of - which ain't very - as he sweetly opines that "Canada shouldn't be one giant national park for the northern half of North America."

This is pretty much standard operating procedure. The Prime Minister's Office tells the useful idiots on the back benches and in the ministers' thrones to say the really dumb/incendiary crap, so he can later look prime ministerial while he pours heavy oil on troubled waters.

The troubled waters in this case, though, are in the Athabasca River. As an Alberta doggy, I can vouch for its beauty if you ever get that far north. Not to mention the Beaufort Sea, where it empties. You know. The Arctic Ocean. Where, notwithstanding all those, well-enforced environmental regulations, increasing masses of escaping toxic aromatics seem likely to eventually ooze from the giant settling ponds surrounding a growing bunch of heavy oil mines - pretty much owned by, ummm, foreign elements.

One is China. Judging by the monumentally appalling way that country's government treats its own environment in the name of economic gain, I don't imagine they'd give a rat's ass about screwing up Canada - good - to feed their own strategic oil wants. Ditto the U.S. of A.

If Joe Oliver thinks I'm some kind of dangerous radical for considering that environmental concerns deserve a serious airing in any discussion of the tar sands, let him. He's kind of heavily biased. And kind of wrong. In his own way as much as a fossil as the animals from which all that evil-smelling goo in Athabasca came from. Hey! Maybe he's so defensive about the tar sands because he's related!

Way I see it, Canada being one giant national park may indeed be dreaming in technicolour. But it shouldn't be one giant black national toxic waste dump, either.

Peter Kent: Lost in the Ozone

Here I was, duct tape wadded round my snout to bung yet another frothy yowl on the political class. Although. Truthfully, dignifyin' 'em with the epithet "class" twists the facts awful hard. Screw it. Twisting fact has become their standard operating procedure.

Ergo I rant. Bear with me.

Back in Alberta, even now, remain fans of a last-century band of psychedelic rockabilly space cowboys called Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen.

They're an acquired taste. And perhaps better known for other songs. But us coyotes wish to dedicate Lost in the Ozone Again to alleged federal environment minister Peter Kent.

Who didn't seem to be an idiot back when he read the news on TV. Shows what half-assed-decent research and scripting departments can do for a guy... and, whoopsy, there's my tradmark digression. Blink and ya miss it.

As a news person, Kent was about getting facts right. Now that he's federal environment minister, and so a front-row sock-puppet for the Stephen Harper Information Torquing machine, not so much.

Pete is lately pinned in the high beams of an expert advisor's memo that, ummm, pretty much negates his excuse for axing half of Environment Canada's critical ozone monitoring system. He says both parts are the same, so he'll cut one. Since Kent has so far not proven that he even knows what the hell ozone* is, this does not comfort. Especially since the actual, ummm, expert, is adamant there's no duplication: both form halves of a coherent whole.

Coherent? Can't have that! Whenever Harper Government spin faceplants against reality, the first instinct is to kill it, and the messenger, to remove any threat to his beeyootiful conservative ideomythology. It's Statistics Canada and the long form census all over again. Harperites don't seem to care how bush-league lame they look while they put the boots into reality. And citizens. And really, the whole planet.

* For the science-illiterate among our federal ministers, ozone is a type of oxygen molecule in the high atmosphere, that reflects a whole lot of the ultraviolet rays in raw sunlight. Which prevents people and other living things from suffering multiple horrible cancers whilst frying and dying from solar radiation. At least on my planet...

Hero worship

Autumn overtakes us coyotes with all the wit and subtlety of a drunken buncha city cowboys shooting varmints from the box of a careening half-ton. So, it seems, do the ripening fruits of the Cons' comfortable federal majority.

In the flush of their win (A flush that'll rattle through Canada's sclerotic political plumbing until something inevitably breaks... I digress), they've wasted no time ticking off citizens who didn't vote for 'em and items on their long-deferred bucket list: dusting and re-hanging old queen portraits at Foreign Affairs (Minister John Baird is apparently a fan of queens. We have no information if he's a fan of foreign affairs. The evidence is murky. And I've just digressed a second time in one paragraph.) Pushing an overreaching bill to throw money the country doesn't have at crime that doesn't exist. Hiring $90,000-a-day consultants to tell them how to save money. (Now they admit they don't actually know how...?) And oh, hey, doing their level best to rehabilitate John Diefenbaker.

F'rinstance by renaming icebreakers and public buildings, most lately Ottawa's old city hall, now a satellite office of Foreign Affairs, which for decades has lived up the block in the blasphemously-named Pearson building. For the kids who haven't blown us off for Twitter yet, Pearson was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and a diplomat as well as a liberal PM. Diefenbaker's diplomatic coups seem to have been confined to alternately boring and pissing off John F. Kennedy.

Yet vast mittsful of latter day ReformaTories have declared John Diefenbaker their personal hero. I suspect because they were in utero or in diapers in his heyday, so have no personal experience of the jowly old coot. They do not recall why his own embarrassed party belatedly kidney-punched him, kicking and screaming, into extended care.

Certain six-thousand-year-old coyotes were around. And we can tell you. He was a mean-spirited partisan, a quivering, glittering-eyed paranoid whose idea of a really great joke was to verbally acid-wash non-conservatives. His grip on reality was sweaty and tenuous. Many of his policies were logical looneytunes. Long after his best-by, he soldiered on in Parliament, resurrecting petty gripes best left in history's dustbin and hallucinating happier endings for himself.

Oh, ummm, wait... Sigh.

Phoning it in

For about six-odd millenia, human behaviour has more or less baffled us semimythical coyotes.

It is September. A neoconservative prime minister has his, ummm, fully transparent mitts, fully wrapped around the sooty levers of federal power, manipulatin' dog-knows-what with 'em. Summer's green leaves are beginning to turn colour. And perhaps most foreboding of all, our medicinal dark chocolate stash is damn near empty. We are necessarily forced toward the philosophical. You know -- cogitatin' on the big unanswerable questions.

Take the ever-thinner smartphone. Now so impossibly thin that it cannot spoil the drape of that summerweight silk Italian suit or Chanel shift that every smartphone owner wears. Because you can afford to own those, even after you sign your soul over to Satan, who administers all of the more serious phone data plans. I digress. Oopsy.

Nude, the latest devices would dance comfortably beneath a ten millimetre high limbo bar. Ummm, so, basically, so thin and delicate that many of the fone phashionistas (at least the ones on the Route 14 bus...) feel an urgent need to wrap their statusy, ever-so-svelte electronic fetishes in even fetishier stretchy rubber slipcases. Roots' f'rinstance, clocks in at three millimetres.

Since most of these elegant devices apparently now barely power themselves through an average working day before collapsing in an anorexic puddle of melted lithium ions somewhere just slightly south of your early afternoon Starbux break, would not that extra three millimetres you're gonna add to the thing anyway not be better dedicated to, say, battery space? Just askin'.

And I've also been lately pondering: why lately am I so attracted to the comfort of hot soup? And if I and my similarly disgraceful friends make off to a Chinatown eatery to demolish huge bowls of soup, are we guilty of wonton destruction?

Just askin' the big questions... it's what us coyotes do right now.

(Flickr image by Quosquos, licensed under Creative Commons)

Lug nuts and the census

So, even when faced with near-universal opposition, and even when the Chief Statistician quits in protest, the government has no problem trashing the mandatory census long form: "It's intrusive!!!! We're pandering to our loony fringe base, dammit!!!!"

So we coyotes will try to explain the issue in terms that make sense to the would-be defenders of this move, WHO ALWAYS SEEM TO FULL-CAP THEIR (OFTEN FURIOUSLY UNGRAMMATIC AND ANONYMOUS) FORUM COMMENTS: the lug nuts on that cherished Chevrolet half ton you use to earn your living.

Suppose your neighbourhood garage guys - call 'em Steve and Tony - say outta the blue that they want to replace all your lug nuts with Dodge lugs, because they think Chevy is arbitrary and intrusive for insisting on Chev lug nuts. Hell (they reason), Dodge lugs look pretty much the same, so no problem, right? Oh, and? Steve and Tony can pump gas, but neither's ever worked as a mechanic.

Would ya buy that, Durango? Nope. Because you, lug nut connoisseur that you are, know that Chev and Dodge lugs have different diameters, thread pitches and chamfers. Assuming they even sorta fit, those babies are gonna strip out, or leave wheel slop. Your wheels will come off, someplace inconvenient and possibly fatal.

There are a bunch of trucky things you could customize that, arguably, wouldn't wreck the ol' Silverado's utility: running boards, exhaust stacks, a big pair of them fine-looking chrome bull balls hanging off the trailer hitch. Dodge lug nuts, not so much.

Now, assume your pickup is a census. (It's a metaphor, Durango. Work with it.) See, reliable census information is Canada's business edge. Lotsa smart people rely on it to make sure the country as a whole can earn its living more efficiently. As every civilized country in the world aspires to.

A mandatory long form is intrusive, but a small price to pay for citizenship in this country you claim to love so much. Much like obeying stop signs at intersections. We work co-operatively toward common goals, unlike, say, those anarchists you hated so much at the G20. To do anything else is to court rump of skunk, and madness.

A voluntary long form is pretty much like Dodge lug nuts on your Chevy - doesn't match. Reading statistical trends properly makes tracking changes accurately over time really important. Even if you label the data you collect by the same name, changing the method you use to collect it means that you can't reasonably compare it with, well, anything that came before. The wheels come off. Just like that Chevy.

Now, I'm only a dumb coyote, so here are my questions: why would you trust an ill-fitting lug nut named Steve to change that? Why does Steve think some lug nuts are more equal than others? And why, if Steve keeps saying his opponents are unpatriotic and unCanadian, is it always him that seems hell-bent on changing this country, lug nut by lug nut, into something unrecognizable...?

Just askin'...

Like Zoom says!

Y'know, I've been watching the whole Census Long Form thing and thinkin' that the Prime Minister must be denser than a black hole to have decided to scrap it. Exactly what kind of hole that makes him is a subject for a whole 'nother post. I dogress.

Anyway, I'd lined up my arguments and was about to launch 'em into the near blogosphere when I happened upon Zoom's latest post over at Knitnut. You tell 'em, Zoom! Our personal styles might differ a little teensy bit, but in the particulars we agree. 100 per cent, as statisticians would say. If they weren't hobbled by idiotic governments...

That cell phone law

I held out some hope last fall when Ontario enacted a law banning drivers from using handheld cell phones.

Huh. Didn't make a damn bit of difference. Drivers still yak - and endanger lives - openly.

The observant among you may note the statute exempts police. I'm left to ponder why, since the law came in, every cop who drives past suddenly has a handset glued to their ear. How much back-channel chatter do they need? And why? I digress.

I've filed tonsa anecdotal evidence in my doggy rounds through Ottawa's mean streets. I hafta say, it proves to me that cell phone addicts make the streets meaner. Drivers, walkers, it doesn't matter - I've been mowed down by both, and my once-fine bushy tail is a stomped shadow of its former self.

People on phones do not see their surroundings when they look inward to channel the other end of the line. I have not figured out the mechanism by which drivers think they should continue to (ab)use phones when research suggests strongly that they're so gosh darn bad at it, but the conviction seems universal. Salient signs are a thousand-yard stare and a deep obliviosity to surroundings. So much obliviosity that pedestrian offenders' glazed eyes do not even flicker as they lurch against other sidewalk citizens.

I suspect the only reason everybody thinks they can drive and talk on a cell at the same time is because the very act makes them so heedless that they never register the carnage in their wakes. Recently, f'rinstance, some nit in a high-buck Teutonic conveyance was so other-focussed that he nearly splattered me across a red-lit crosswalk. The shock on his face after he screeched to a hasty halt was compounded when I planted my muddy paws on his window sill, stuck my pointy snout in, and conversationally suggested he turn off his fucking phone so as to forestall another near-murder at the next traffic signal.

Sadly, he was not so shocked that he couldn't whine back a shaky riposte. Along the lines of, "Oh yeah? Fuck you, too!" But we both knew it was the lamest of bids to save his red-lit face...

Feeling Funked Up

The past couple of weeks have not been happy ones for coyotes. After a series of events that would confound even the most optimistic contrarian among us, we have been reduced to sitting in the dark, sucking our frozen paws in what might be considered an anguished funk.

Why am I so depressed? I mean!

City buses are running around with HO HO HO on their route signs so they can whiz by you in the freezing dark, a topic Shorty has already raised in some detail.

The mayor, as some appalling cynic infamously predicted, now mistakes his erstwhile legal acquittal as a resounding endorsement of his term in office. Worse, he is flying trial balloons about running again, now that he's nearly finished his error-ridden first term of egregious cluelessness.

The current federal government's unprecedentedly aggressive campaign to prove that it can out-yell, out-lie, and out-sleaze all previous comers continues unabated. If possible, with a side-dish of fatally hobbled democracy.

Stephen Harper's Canada increasingly is being revealed as a wannabe-autocracy that only serves people who have the same shamefully narrow world view as he. The fact that people who think like him are still (Yay!)in a minority does not stop him from pulling Bush-administration-style dirty tricks, so he can pretend.

The prime minister has also heartily approved of the non-binding sorta-not-quite-agreement on global warming mitigation that came out of Copenhagen, which to thinking coyotes everywhere is pretty much a dead-certain sign -- emphasis on the 'dead' -- that the deal sucks for this small blue planet we share.

All of this relates to people elected by far less than a majority of the franchised voters, in each case. Weakening democratic underpinnings effectively gives control to people who are not necessarily entitled. And makes coyotes froth at the mouth. Not rabies! Just the soap I use to wash out my mouth after reading and commenting on what I see in the morning papers.

The increasing loss of daylight through December has really been the last straw. We semimythical coyotes get Seasonal Affective Disorder, too, people! So: get out there and celebrate the passing of the Winter Solstice. Days are getting longer again. And about bloody time. And start thinking again about the things that make democracy work. Like voting when there's an election. It's also about bloody time...

Image: Arctic solstice, by Eric Hoogstraten at Cambridge Bay Blog, Victoria Island, Nunavut

Down to...

This morning, the ol' inbox washed up a veritable tsunami of friends, well wishers and ummm, others, pointedly informing me of the Petfinder's latest screed about the Zero Means Zero blog

I have no idea why...

Zero Means Zero is apparently written by an administration insider, and as such has been a thorn in Mayor Larry's side almost since the moment he strutted into City Hall. It's scathing, mean-spirited and entertaining. It's been a bit tiresome recently, but still packs a nifty assortment of pointed words. And it has often publicly asked the questions that some of us were thinking privately. That it has also (somehow) remained anonymous all of this time seems to piss off the Larry partisans all the more.

I realize I may attract all manner of hurled debris toward Casa Coyote's infamously glassy walls when I ask this, but... the person(s) responsible for sending the lawyers after Zero by trying to force Google to reveal (his/her/its/their) identity? You noticed that they wanna be anonymous, right?

Oh, the irony. Or, ummm, possibly the paradox. Maybe the sarcasm. Er, the satire...? The oxymoron...? Crap! I dunno! Much like Alanis Morissette, we coyotes are frequently iffy on literary nuances. But doesn't it seem kinda goofy...?

No whore like an old whore *

For a guy hellbent on preserving, what he seems to believe is a, ummm, statesman's legacy and good name, former PM Brian Mulroney has quite an approach.

A brief pause to declare biases: my visceral hatred of the man and every oily thing he's done or stood for, has raged undying from the time he started smarming the backroom boys back in the antediluvian era, to this day. We keep punting the bastard out of the headlines. Still he has the nerve to keep coming back and re-offending, already! He once took voice coaching to lower his timbre and sound smoother. Still my large, sensitive ears must instinctively fold themselves shut periodically, to muffle an undertone of nails on a blackboard. Just so ya know.

My distaste stems from a sleazy style and an unidentifiable substance. I possess the clamouring sixth sense that every smirk - and he smirked a bunch, back in the day - signalled (yet another) gleeful skate to the thinnest edge of propriety. He was always more about clinching the deal - any deal - than what the hell actually came of it. Just as long as he could beat his chest in public and brag in private about being the smart guy that made it happen. And he seemed to truly love putting one over on just about anybody, then justifying it in technical terms so narrow and specious that only he and hangers-on seemed to be able to believe they were in the true spirit of the thing. It wasn't about the good of the country, or even his party, or the power. It was about putting one over on someone. Anyone.

You see where I'm going with this. Every time the guy did something, somebody got screwed. They knew they'd been screwed, and resented it. Their last sight usually was of Mulroney skating away on ice so thin it crackled, thumbing his nose over his shoulder. Eventually, most of the country felt that way. He skated off again, ducking humiliation by handing over the party to a Patsy (actually, a Kim...) so that he could say he'd always led the Tories to majorities. Technically.

Since, he has acted to save what he regards as his good name, in ways that beggar the idea of a good name. It's a world where being called Right Honourable is everything. Acting right honourably, not so much. This time he may succeed again - it's important for him to appear to be a success in others' eyes - but only in technical terms so narrow and specious as to hollow out the 'win' utterly. His performance at the inquiry on the Hill this week has been vintage: tightly scripted, smarmy, blustering, self-congratulatory, even crocodile tears. Along with gratuitous digressions that attempt yet again to rewrite history and re-shaft old enemies. Even now, he thinks he can charm the country one more time with sins of omission, half-truths and hubris. Possibly he will. Technically.

But it has been a performance. The guy wants to be liked and well thought of, and has no idea why so many hate him. Even as PM, he made a deeply flawed dramatic character: grandiose, venal, over-eager to be loved, fonder of appearances than actual substance. And pathetic. He still is. And he still deserves no sympathy.

* A curiously relevant Mulroney quote... don'cha think?

A fifth of Friday the 13th...

Another Friday the Thirteenth. I'm sure we had one of those just last month. Ho, hum. We must've gotten all the bad stuff out of the way, already then, right? What could possibly go wrong this time? You have to ask? How about another Top Five list?

1) Strangely, although our PM keeps telling us the Canadian economy is in great shape and we're all gonna be fine, and he's, like, never lied to us (repeatedly) before... markets are still tanking. I can't help but notice that he takes a certain approach to everything that might dispute his worldview, from what's actually happening in the economy (i.e. anything from the parliamentary budget officer he appointed), to Vancouver's InSite safe-injection facility, to, well, just good-quality research in general. Because deeply-held convictions, however unwarranted by facts, are necessarily the only Right things. I am shocked. Shocked! Never saw that one coming at all...

2) Now that mommy's defeat at the American vice presidential polls is a soi-disant distant political memory, Bristol Palin is no longer about to bear her child within the sanctity of holy matrimony. Or a shotgun marriage. Whichever is more, y'know, born-again. I am shocked. Shocked! Never saw that one coming at all...

3) John Baird's fattening fingers - and possibly his hair - are smearing oily DNA traces all over the aftermath of Ottawa's record transit strike. In the absence of any actual, like, unbiased information on the dangers of scheduling, he may wish to consider a prudent wait before plastering on pandering ideological band aids. Oh, wait... See 1), above! I am shocked. Shocked! Never saw that one coming at all...

4) The Ottawa Sun, in the tradition of intrepid journalism, has used promo material from a 5-year-old, just-released, low-budget Canadian Bollywood movie clone - starring current Liberal member of parliament Ruby Dhalla - as an excuse to run a lame-o "Hilltop Hotties" photo gallery online, while Dr. Dhalla tries to wish the whole thing away on grounds of Photoshop. I am shocked. Shocked! Never saw that one coming at all...

5) Heh.

I am shocked. Shocked! Never saw that one coming at all...