What Canadians have LOST under this "Harper" Government.

Tommy Banks, Canadian conductor and pianist,
host of the CBC television’s “The Tommy Banks Show” for 15 years.

A letter from my partner Senator Tom Banks

By Sharman King on Wednesday, April 13, 2011

I apologize for this long re-post, but I'd like to share with my friends this letter from my business partner and musical associate Senator Tommy Banks. It's worth noting that Tom was a Conservative when he was appointed to the Senate. If you agree with this “food for thought” please feel free to send it to your friends of whatever political stripe. The bigger message here is how we want our government to behave, no matter who forms that government. Here's Tom's missive:
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Tommy Bank’s letter:

There is only one thing about the outcome of the May 2nd election on which Mr. Ignatieff and Mr. Harper agree. It is that one of them will be the Prime Minister of Canada. Mr. Layton, Mr. Duceppe and Ms. May are not in the running to form a government. They can’t. It will be either Mr. Ignatieff or Mr. Harper.

That is the choice, and it is a very clear – in fact, stark choice.
We will choose between openness or secrecy.
Between listening or refusing to listen.
Between someone who respects Parliament or someone who disdains it.
Between things we can and will do now or things that, (provided of course that everything goes well), we might do in five or six years.
Between someone who answers all questions from Canadians, or someone who won’t accept any.

Between Mr. Harper who said “It’s past time the feds scrapped the Canada Health Act”,
or Mr. Ignatieff who said “ . . . we don’t want user fees. We want universal, accessible, free-at-the-point-of-service health care, paid out of general revenue. That’s just bottom line. Otherwise we get two-tiered”.

Between buying jets or helping vets.
Between real early childhood learning and care or Saturday-night babysitting.
Between respect for our great institutions or contempt for them.
Between helping families or helping big corporations.
Between the Canada that we think we have, or the way in which Mr. Harper has already changed it.

Over the past few years Mr. Harper’s government has quietly engineered so many changes that there are some ways in which our country is barely recognizable. Many of us don’t yet realize the extent of those changes, because many of them have been brought about very carefully and gradually – almost imperceptibly in some cases.

This is diabolically clever. If these things had all been done at once, there would have been loud protests and reactions. But moving just one little brick at a time doesn’t cause much fuss – until you realize that the whole house has been renovated. And we’ve hardly noticed.

These are changes that are at the very heart of who and what Canadians are.
They are changes to the protections that used to exist against the tyranny of the majority – or against a single-minded my-way-or-the-highway autocrat.
These changes are losses to our very Canadian-ness. Let me remind you of some of them:

The Law Commission of Canada was created by an Act of Parliament in 1997. It worked very well. It kept an eye in a sort-of avuncular way, on necessary reforms of the law, including election law. The Commission couldn’t actually change law; but it was very good at letting governments and everybody else know when changes needed to be made and why. It was our legal Jiminy Cricket, and it performed a valuable service for Canada. The Commission was created by an Act of Parliament, and any government wanting to shut it down should have been up-front about it.
It should have come to Parliament with a Bill to rescind The Law Commission of Canada Act.
That’s what any of our 21 previous Prime Ministers would have done.

But to Mr. Harper, Parliament is an inconvenience. Somebody might ask “Why are you doing this?” But he didn’t want to go through all that Parliamentary trouble; so, rather than proposing the abolition of the Commission (a proposal about which there would have been pretty fierce debate on all sides),
they just eliminated all funding for it in the federal budget. Governments can do that.
Poof – no Law Commission.

Nice and quiet. Just one little brick. Hardly noticed.

Then there was the Court Challenges Programme, set up in 1994, which was the means by which a bit of legal help could be provided to a private individual or small organization who didn’t have a lot of money, and who was taking on, or being taken on by, the Government of Canada. It leveled the legal playing field a bit. It was a perfect example of fundamental Canadian fairness.

By convincing a tough panel of judges of the reasonableness of your cause, you could get a little help in paying for some lawyers to go up against the phalanx of legal beagles that could always, and forever, and at public expense, be brought to bear against you by the State. In other words, if you weren’t rich, and if you were taking on or being taken on by the Feds, you might have had a chance.
But Mr. Harper doesn’t like being questioned, let alone challenged. It’s so inconvenient!
Solution? Quietly announce that the Court Challenges Programme is being, er, discontinued.
Poof – no Court Challenges Programme – no court challenges.

Hardly noticed.

The Coordination of Access to Information Request System (CAIRS) was created (by a Progressive-Conservative government) in 1989 so that departments of government could harmonize their responses to access-to-information requests that might need multi-departmental responses. It was efficient; it made sure that in most cases the left hand knew what the right hand was doing, or at least what they were saying; and it helped to keep government open and accountable.
Well, if you’re running a closed-door government, that’s not a good idea, is it?
So, as a Treasury Board official explained to the Canadian Press, CAIRS was killed by the Harper government because “extensive” consultations showed it wasn’t valued by government departments. I guess that means that the extensive consultations were all with government departments.

Wait! Wasn’t there anybody else with whom to extensively consult? Wasn’t there some other purpose and use for CAIRS? Didn’t it have something to do with openness and accountability? I guess not. Robert Makichuk, speaking for Mr. Harper’s government, explained that “valuable resources currently being used to maintain CAIRS would be better used in the collection and analysis of improved statistical reporting”.

Right. In other words, CAIRS was an inconvenience to the government. So poof – it’s disappeared. And, except for investigative reporters and other people who might (horrors!) ask questions, its loss is hardly noticed.

And the bridge too far for me: Cutting the already-utterly-inadequate funding for the exposure of Canadian art and artists in other countries. That funding was, by any comparison, already laughably miniscule. Mr. Harper says that “ordinary” Canadians don’t support the arts. He’s wrong.
And his is now the only government of any significant country in the world that clearly just doesn’t get it.

All these changes were done quietly, cleverly, and under the radar.
No fuss. No outcry. Just one little brick at a time.
But in these and other ways, our Canadian house is no longer the kind of place it once was.
Nobody minds good renovations. Nobody even minds tearing something down, as long as we put up something better in its place. That’s not what has happened.

Mr. Harper fired the head of the Canadian Wheat Board because he was doing his job properly.
He removed the head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission because she wanted to make sure that the Chalk River nuclear reactor was safe.

Hardly noticed.

There are many more things that were hardly noticed: Cuts to funding for the Status of Women,
Adult Learning and Literacy, Environmental Programs, museums funding, and more.
All quietly, just one brick at a time.

Hardly noticed.

As to campaign promises, everybody in sight on every side is guilty of breaking those. Except the Federal NDP of course, who haven’t yet had the opportunity. (It’s very easy to make promises that you know you will not likely have to keep).

But the government promised to end wait times in health care. They didn’t.
They promised to end, once and for all, the whining of some provinces about the non-existent “fiscal imbalance”. They didn’t.
They said they had brought final resolution to the softwood lumber problem with the U.S. They haven’t. They promised to create thousands of new child-care spaces in Canada. They haven’t.
They promised not to tax income trusts (“We will NEVER do that!” they said). They taxed them.
They promised to lower your income tax.

They raised it.

They said they had a good “made-in-Canada” plan to meet our obligations on climate change. They don’t. Mr. Harper has said plainly that whatever the Americans do is what we’ll do too.

They campaign on a platform of transparency and accountability; but they’re now trying to discredit the Parliamentary Budget Officer that they created, because he’s trying to do the job that they gave him.
Mr. Harper said that our form of government, evolved over centuries from the 900-year-old British Westminster tradition, was all wrong. We had to have fixed election dates, because otherwise, democratic principles would be trampled. “Fixed election dates”, he said, “stop leaders from trying to manipulate the calendar. They level the playing field for all parties”.

So Parliament (remember them?) at Mr. Harper’s insistence, passed a law requiring fixed election dates, which Mr. Harper promptly broke.

Somebody once said that we get the kind of government we deserve.
What did we do to deserve Mr. Harper?
He once said that we should all “Stand Up for Canada”. Well, let’s do that.
We just have to decide whether the present version of Canada is the one that we’ll stand up for. Or stand for.

Thank you

Tommy Banks (an Alberta Senator - Retired)

Seems our personal freedoms are being usurped.

The Bitch is Back: Bill C-6 reincarnates as C-36

Dee Nicholson | July 11, 2010 at 11:24 am | Tags: Activism, Bill C-36, Canada, Canadians, choices, constitution, due process, education, freedom, health care, Health Freedom, justice, natural health, propaganda, Urgent Action, W.H.O. | Categories: Activism, Big Pharma, Bill C-36, Bill C-6, Codex Alimentarius, Corruption, Uncategorized | URL: http://wp.me/pFEkY-f7

By Dee Nicholson

Battle-worn health freedom activists waited six months for the shoe to drop, knowing full well that at any moment, their latest nemesis, the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act called C-6, might reappear.

Last month, their impatience was rewarded, as Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq rose to introduce Bill C-36, complete with the same troublesome, rights-stomping provisions as in its momma. And of course, the same really, really nasty language making Canadians “subject to the dictates of foreign authorities”, the words that allow foreign committees (like trade groups) decide how we’re going to run things.

It’ll be their way, or the highway.

Witness the fact that the 106th US Congress voted to change American corporate tax law, not because it wanted to, but because it was ordered to – by the World Trade Organization. Now, if the WTO can yank the chains of the Yankees that easily, do we really think domestic Canadian laws are any less vulnerable?

There have been ten major trade agreements signed by Canada over the past sixteen years, and there are twelve more pending, including the “Free Trade Area of the Americas”. These trade obligations, signed eagerly by our successive governments, have Canada in shackles, and somehow, hardly anybody’s noticing.

Recently, master filmmaker Kevin P. Miller released a documentary showing Canadians how this has happened, in a dynamic retrospective leading to a dubious future: “A Question of Sovereignty” is now online for viewing at http://vimeo.com/13024940, and every red-blooded Canadian needs to see it, and now. It’s 23 minutes of jaw-dropping wakeup call.
Miller describes the film as “patriotic and sentimental” and I have to admit that it brings an uncomfortable lump to the throat as you watch our sovereignty being hijacked. But it also sets your couch on fire.

Miller’s take: “Quietly, over a period of many years, unconstitutional legislation encompassed in Bills C-51, C-6, and the current Bill C-36 have placed not only basic civil liberties and freedoms at risk, but Canada's national sovereignty as well. The film shares how entangling alliances with groups like the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, Codex Alimentarius, the United States and even multinational corporate interests have become so powerful that they literally threaten to make elected officials in Parliament irrelevant.”

I have to thank Kevin for saving me a whole lot of time explaining what’s going on, and let the film speak for itself, because it does. And it’s going to play an important role in how Canadian health freedom fighters will be approaching the nascent battle against Bill C-36, while proving especially valuable in rousing more Canadians from their sleepwalking state.

Take a moment to absorb the very real danger of Canada’s virtual absorption into a global trade network that hovers over this nation right now. Piece by piece, department by department, our self-rule is being eroded by obligations to committees where our vote doesn't matter. For example, at the World Trade Organization, Canada is one out of nearly 200 nations. One. None of the other members really give a rat’s behind what we want. Worse yet, if we insist on doing our own thing, we face sanctions, in some cases cross-industry trade sanctions of millions per day, or quitting and being viewed as anathema by all the other suckers in the group.

So, no sovereignty, no health freedom. No freedom guaranteed at all. That candle is going out, bit by bit, as the trade groups meet and decide what the whole group will do, and if our laws conflict, too bad, so sad for our laws. And our self-rule.

Meanwhile, there are massive collisions set to happen. All these contracts with all sorts of terms, and what happens when they start to need enforcing? Gridlock. And what do you need when you have gridlock? A traffic cop. Do you see the platform for global government being "necessitated into existence" by the ongoing commitments of our governments, no matter which party was in power? Commitments to trading. To profit. Not to people. To share wealth, meaning spread what we have across the whole slice of bread while they retain the loaf. This is what Harper meant at the G8 when he spoke of "shared prosperity".

And those were the exact words used by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth at the UN this past week.

Bill C-36 swings the doors to Canada wide open to outside domination by foreign authorities that we will never vote for and who could not care less what we want. These are the same foreign authorities waiting, butter knife in hand, to spread the wealth, which really means to bring the world equal-opportunity poverty.

Without sovereignty, we have nothing, and Bill C-36 takes away a sizeable chunk of it with Codex looming, as well as a big pact with the EU, where the food regulations are just as bad as Codex already. You need to understand the depth and breadth of what Codex will do, and how our government is absolutely committed to going there. (See www.thenhf.com for full details on Codex, and read constitutional lawyer and health freedom advocate Shawn Buckley's analysis of Bill C-36 at www.nhppa.org)|

Bear in mind that Health Canada, with C-36, is asking to be granted police and judicial powers, the right to be judge, jury and executioner at will, to impose fines and imprisonment, without recourse to courts or recompense. But we're supposed to be satisfied by the fact that they promise to call a judge for a warrant? These are the powers that Leona Aglukkaq says are necessary for her agency to "protect Canadians against hazardous consumer products".

The posts at www.canadiansforhealthfreedom.org show what sort of “protection” Canadians got from their government when Health Canada foisted that particular hazardous product on the population. Bear in mind, they did so at the advice of whom? The same WHO that's been exposed as being in a huge conflict of interest beneficial to Big Pharma for its re-jigging of the very definition of a pandemic in order to declare one, on the advice of people connected to Big Pharma, which made a gazillion dollars feeding the toxic stuff to people around the world, from which many people suffered severe health problems. People like the ones on that page.

This is the same Health Canada that is asking for quasi-judicial powers, to "protect Canadians from hazardous products".
Remember Leona Aglukkaq, cajoling the Senate with portents of babies dying from faulty crib and playpen designs, if Bill C-6 didn't pass? She's trotted that one out already again for its doppelganger, C-36.

Now, unfortunately for Aglukkaq, there are actual dead babies which would today in all likelihood be alive, were it not for Health Canada's following of foreign "suggestions" in the promotion of the largely-untested H1N1 vaccine to Canadians, with the full expectation of “collateral damage”. And this Minister wants us to believe that this agency could be trusted with police and judicial powers? This Minister wants us to believe that the agency honors the rights of Canadians, after the shameful raid against Dr. Eldon Dahl last year, holding his family at gunpoint for 11 hours because he sold some vitamins in a sting operation by the health police? Dahl had what looked to him like the G20 security force bash in his front door. This protects Canadians, how? In my humble opinion, it doesn’t.

Instead, it endangers the very fabric of our nation.

Thankfully, there is a new army being assembled against Health Canada’s assault on our sovereign right to health freedom, with the establishment of The National Health Federation (Canada). Its parent organization, the NHF (www.thenhf.com), is the world’s largest and oldest health freedom organization, with branches in nine nations and membership in thirty countries, and is a recognized International Non-Governmental Organization.

The move gives Canada, for the first time, standing as delegates to Codex Alimentarius with the right to speak to the committee, and to Canadians, the ability to speak truth to power. In addition, the organization’s international scope means that we speak with the voices of twenty-nine other nations behind us, sharing the same concerns. That’s more votes than Canada has at the WTO.

I am honored to be one of three Co-Executive Directors of the new NHF Canada, and am gleefully sharpening my teeth. My partners in crime are both heroines in health freedom: Marilyn Nelson, founder of Freedom of Choice in Health Care and veteran of decades of skirmishes with ministers of health; and Candace Hill, nutritionist, passionate educator, and master instigator of stuff happening. With us will be many of the health warriors from Canadians for Health Freedom who barraged the Senate last year with a demand they couldn’t refuse.

Bill C-36, the bitch, is back. We think that calls for neutering.

The cost of safety for G8 and G 20

The federal government put the G20 in the middle of Toronto and the cost is below, almost 1 billion dollars. What a waste of money this is when you consider the poor people in Canada and how better to use this money. It is irresponsible to do this and shows a complete disrespect for the people of the country. But it does show the ego of the PM and his need to look big.



OTTAWA (AFP) - Canada has boosted its budget for security costs for upcoming G8 and G20 summits in and around Toronto next month, with some estimates approaching a billion dollars, officials said.The costs were original estimated at 179 million Canadian dollars, but an additional 654 million Canadian dollars was requested Tuesday, for a total of 833 million Canadian dollars (780 million US).

The figures were outlined in a document presented to parliament. They include 321.5 million Canadian dollars for federal police, 262.6 million for the public safety department, 63.1 million for the military and 6.7 million for other agencies.But officials said the costs could be even higher than requested so far.
"Based on a medium threat assessment, we're budgeting up to 930 million (Canadian) dollars," Christopher McCluskey, spokesman for Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, told AFP.

"It costs what it costs," he said. "We're prepared as hosts to respond to any possible threat and ensure all of the delegates' safety."

The Group of Eight summit is to take place in Huntsville in the Muskoka region north of Toronto on June 25-26 and be immediately followed by a G20 summit in Toronto on June 26-27.

Steven Harper, Conservatives and Totalitarian ideas.

Steven Harper says groups like C.R.U.S.H. -Canadians Rallying to Unseat Stephen Harper who oppose his government are subversives and are watched. He sets a dangerous anti-humanitarian precident. In a democracy such as ours disagreement is allowed and in totalitarian regimes it is not.

It is the same when his Government promotes the idea of employees tattling on their company to the Government. Soon children will be reporting parents to authorities. This is not the kind of world I want to live in. Do you?