All Posts Tagged With: "stephen harper"

PM Harper: Don’t call this bullying

The cousin of a young woman who committed suicide after an alleged assault and months of bullying issued an emotional appeal to people Thursday not to use violence to avenge her death.

Angella Parsons stood before a sombre crowd of about 300 people in a Halifax park to reflect on the short life of Rehtaeh Parsons and the lessons that should be learned from her loss.

“My family asks people not to respond with violence and aggression to this terrible tragedy,” she told the crowd through tears.

“We’re all angry. … Rehtaeh was angry, however, feeling angry and responding in anger and aggression are two very different things.”

The gathering came after Rehtaeh’s family said she hanged herself last week and was taken off life-support Sunday, following months of bullying linked to an alleged sexual assault by four boys at a house party in 2011.

Continue reading Halifax vigil remembers Rehtaeh Parsons

What students are talking about today (March 5th)

Jepsen (Dance Photographer - Brendan Lally/Flickr)

1. Carly Rae Jepsen, the 27-year-old Canadian singer, has cancelled a performance at the Boy Scouts of America Jamboree in July because the Scouts still ban gay members. In a series of Tweets she wrote: “As an artist who believes in equality for all people, I will not be participating in the Boy Scouts of America Jamboree this summer. I always have and will continue to support the LGBT community on a global level and stay informed on the ever changing landscape in the ongoing battle for gay rights in this country and across the globe.” This seems like a smart move.

2. It’s Israel Apartheid Week again and both Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney and Prime Minister Stephen Harper condemned the annual hate-fest on Monday. So did at least one student op-ed, in Trent University’s Arthur, whose author argues the term apartheid is inaccurate. There was also a review of a film that compares Israel and apartheid South Africa in The Concordian. Here’s part of Kenney’s statement, which one might call overheated, even though he makes a valid point:

Continue reading ‘Israel Apartheid,’ Oberlin College & pro-gay Carly Rae

Hard to know which celebrities have ghost-tweeters

LeWEB12/Flickr

About 290,000 people follow Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Twitter, perhaps to read what he has to say about the country’s affairs or to glean a little personal insight into what makes him tick.

Thing is, most of the messages that are sent from his account aren’t really his.

Harper only “occasionally” sends out tweets himself, according to a spokesman.

Much like many other high-profile Twitter users, most of the short-form messages that appear under Harper’s name and avatar are actually crafted by ghost-tweeters charged to work social media on his behalf.

“I assume if it’s an institutional individual — if it’s a CEO, if it’s a big personality, a singer, or it’s a politician — then they are not doing it themselves,” said Greg Elmer, director of the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University studying social media.

Continue reading Who’s really tweeting and who’s not?

Chuck Norris, Quebec election and Stanley Cup rioters

1. Chuck Norris, known for on-screen martial arts and a certain intractable meme, has a message for Americans. If you love your family and freedom as much as he and his wife Gena do, don’t vote for Obama. America is headed toward “socialism or something much worse,” says Chuck. Gina predicts “a thousand years of darkness.”

2. A Quebec election, which was at least partly called to settle the nightly student protests against tuition, is happening today. Polls put Liberal Premier Jean Charest in third place, but this is Quebec so anything could happen. Charest does look especially desperate. He warned over the weekend that a Parti Quebecois government could jeopardize the chances of NHL hockey returning to Quebec City. Read full coverage here.

Continue reading What students are talking about today (Sept. 4 edition)

Canadian Mennonite University students campaign against government cuts

A group of Winnipeg university students has started a grassroots campaign to prevent cuts to refugee health care by mailing 59 cents to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and encouraging others to do the same.

Photo by coffeego/Flikr

The students from the Canadian School of Peacebuilding at the Canadian Mennonite University created the 59 Cents Campaign to battle the government’s cuts to the Interim Federal Health Care Program, which will see Citizenship and Immigration Canada stop paying for the supplemental health care of refugees during their first year in Canada.

Matt Dueck, 25, told the Winnipeg Free Press that since the cuts are projected to save $100 million over five years, the annual cost per Canadian to preserve the refugee health care is 59 cents. Dueck and his fellow students made a Youtube video to encourage the public to mail Harper a few quarters and nickels and pennies.

“We believe that if Canadians stop to consider the effect which these changes will have on the most vulnerable portion of our global society, that our country’s annual savings of 59 cents per person to keep the federal Interim Health Program open for refugees will be seen as insignificant,” the video says. “In 2011, Canada was proudly a place of hope and healing to 25,000 refugees. This is a fact in which we take pride and wish to take pride in for generations to come.”

New poll data shows young voters aren’t any more likely to vote for Layton. It’s everyone else who is.

The NDP is surging in Quebec and many point to the party’s popularity among young voters as the reason why. Jack Layton’s progressive message, the logic goes, makes him stand out as a legitimate alternative to Gilles Duceppe among left-leaning voters.

But here’s a problem with that storyline: data from the Historica-Dominion Institute’s poll of young voters suggests there isn’t an NDP surge among Quebec youth at all. Its 2011 Inter-generational Study shows young Quebecers are no more likely to vote NDP now than they were in 2008. Back then, the party captured a mere 12 per cent of the vote in Quebec.

The Historica-Dominion survey gathered the opinions of 831 youth aged 18 to 24, including 189 from Quebec. The NDP was the most popular party among young voters in Quebec, capturing 27 per cent support, while the Liberals got 23 per cent, the Bloc Québécois got 21 per cent, and the Conservatives came last with 8 per cent.  (For more results from the study, including a look at which issues matter to young voters, read the next issue of Maclean’s.) Those figures are virtually unchanged from the Institute’s 2008 Youth Election Study, which found 27 per cent of young Quebecers leaning toward the NDP, another 27 per cent supporting the Bloc, 20 per cent behind the Liberals, and 7 per cent leaning Tory.

The youth numbers also mirror last week’s EKOS and CROP polls, give or take a few points. “That seems to indicate the rest of the population is catching up to the youth in considering the NDP rather than a youth surge,” says Allison Harell, a political scientist at the University of Quebec at Montreal. That may be good news for Jack Layton. If his support is more broadly distributed across age groups, she adds, it may translate into more votes on election day. Historically, only about a third of Canadian youth end up voting, compared to nearly two-thirds of the electorate overall.

The big question is whether the current NDP supporters—young or not—will change their minds before election day. Houda Souissi, a 21-year-old labour law student at the University of Montreal has already switched back to Duceppe after a brief dalliance with Layton. After scrutinizing the NDP record, she worries an NDP government could take away provincial powers. She’s also turned-off by Layton’s stance on the long gun registry. Most importantly, she’s wary of inexperienced MPs. “I don’t want to say they’re nobodies,” she says. “But outside of Outremont, we don’t really know who the NDP candidates are.”

Souissi’s worries may be moot come May 3. If the NDP’s surge in the polls translates into actual votes, the party’s Quebec candidates could be well on their way to becoming decidedly mainstream among voters of all ages.

Student unions pour money into political causes that many members don’t even know about, let alone support

The story made headlines everywhere: it was Feb. 11, 2009, and Daniel Ferman was a member of Drop YFS, a group dedicated to overthrowing the York Federation of Students. Drop YFS was presenting a petition with 5,000 signatures—enough to stage a coup of sorts. They were protesting the student union’s support for a teachers’ strike, which would potentially leave students on the hook for missed class time. They were also against the union backing the Israeli Apartheid Week, which many pro-Israel students despised. As the press conference began, Ferman and his fellow Drop YFS members were faced with a crush of student union members who came in to denounce the petition rally. After a volley of shouting, the crowd moved to the Hillel student lounge where some of the Drop YFS members took refuge. “Students were barricaded in the lounge,” says Ferman, who was Hillel @ York’s president at the time and helped organize the Drop YFS effort. “It got very nasty. Police were called. There were racist slurs.”

Students like Ferman don’t think it’s the student government’s role to take sides on political issues. “I think students have every right to speak up when they feel student dollars are promoting hate and a toxic atmosphere on campus,” says Ferman. Since the 1980s, student unions have been growing in power. They take money from undergraduates every year, which is charged separate from but alongside tuition, and they’re supposed to work for students. Some of that cash funds services, such as health and dental coverage, and student athletics. But much of it goes to advocacy and clubs students may find offensive. “They’d taken very controversial stances on what to fund in pro-life versus pro-choice issues, on Tamil issues going on in Sri Lanka. On every worldwide issue, they’d taken a position,” Ferman says of the YFS, which operates with a $2-million budget. They rarely take the position he would take.

The Canadian Federation of Students—an umbrella organization for student unions—has been heavily criticized for rash advocacy using student funds. The national organization, with its provincial subsidiaries, lobbies on behalf of 600,000 student members across Canada. These “members,” who automatically gain that status if their student union is a member organization, each pay $4.01 per semester to the CFS. In 2010, that came to $3.7 million in membership fee revenue—money used to fund the not-for-profit’s advocacy work. Students also pay an average of $4 per semester to be members of their provincial CFS. That’s before student union fees, which average out at around $30 per student, depending on the school. CFS national chairperson David Molenhuis acknowledges that some of the national campaigns, such as its current effort to fight the Canadian Blood Services’ decision to ban gay men from donating blood, are hot issues—but he doesn’t think they’re controversial. “They attempt to address head-on issues that perhaps college and university administrators don’t feel comfortable addressing,” he says. Some students also feel uncomfortable with their fees going to such politically sensitive issues.

For example, last June, the CFS wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty joining the cry for a public inquiry into the “unprecedented curtailment of civil liberties” that took place at the G20. “The federation stands up for the rights of students to participate and to assemble publicly and to participate in demonstrations,” said the letter. “We defend the rights of students to mobilize in public, and the G20 is no exception.”

Some students at the University of Ottawa were upset to learn that not only does the CFS take a political stand on the G20, their own student union spent at least $1,000 to rent a coach bus to shuttle about 50 protesters to Toronto during the G20. Student Peter Flynn, who also heads up the University of Ottawa Campus Conservatives, blasted the expenditure as a “blatant misuse” of student fees. “I highly doubt that every single student who has to pay those fees would be happy to know their money was being spent to send a few individuals to protest for the weekend,” Flynn told the Ottawa Citizen.

York student Gregory Kay was also irked by his student union’s support for G20 protests. The YFS and the student union at the University of Toronto co-sponsored “Toronto vs. the G20: a teach-in.” Class included Black Bloc tactics, which ended up seeing storefronts and public property smashed during the summit in downtown Toronto. “That’s something most students don’t believe in at all,” says Kay, who is the business representative for the YFS board of directors. “Most students aren’t anti-capitalist. They’re not interested in civil disobedience.”

Of course, if students are unhappy with their student government, they aren’t doing much to change it. While voter turnout tends to be higher when contentious issues can be resolved with a ballot, the average voter turnout sits at between 25 and 30 per cent. Many students see student government as too divisive—or too inflexible—to even bother running. Ferman, for one, considered running for a seat on the executive in 2009, but couldn’t put his academic career on hold for a year as the bylaws dictate. He ran for—and won—a seat on the board of directors instead.

“It’s an interesting dichotomy—that the student president isn’t even a student,” he says. “There are lots of inherent problems with the organization, but the lack of flexibility is a major one.” In late August 2010, the university’s ombudsman released a report saying the student union’s electoral process needed a massive makeover, making recommendations Ferman believes might one day legitimize the organization. “Now the onus is on the student federation to take some of these recommendations to heart.”

Photo: Christinne Muschi/Reuters

Profs pick a uni president to replace Michaëlle Jean

Last autumn Stephen Harper decided he had a rare luxury, a few free months to plan ahead without worrying the opposition would try to defeat his government. He visited China and India and then, throwing caution to the wind, invited hundreds of journalists to 24 Sussex Drive for a pre-Christmas cocktail.

During the obligatory small-talk portion of the evening, Harper confessed amazement over his visit to the Great Wall of China. Not because the wall is big or beautiful, but because its construction extended over centuries, so that almost everyone who worked on it was committing to a project that could not be completed while he lived.

Other people are moved by a sonnet or a perfect game. Stephen Harper mists up at the thought of long-term planning. This makes him an odd mix for Ottawa, where Monday’s scandal or cause is generally forgotten by Friday. But the long view helps guide his action when he selects the only public official with the power to simply decide, one day, whether Harper gets to remain prime minister. That’s the governor general.

The question is not abstract. In 2008 the Liberals brokered that coalition with the NDP that depended on Bloc Québécois support. Every Liberal MP, including Michael Ignatieff, signed a letter to the Governor General endorsing that pact. Harper’s own cabinet told him that if he lost power he should not expect to hold on to the Conservative leadership. He had to go to Rideau Hall and plead with Michaëlle Jean to prorogue Parliament. It’s the sort of thing that sticks in a prime minister’s memory.

Michaëlle Jean’s replacement will almost certainly be waiting at Rideau Hall if Harper ever again faces another coalition challenge. It’s fantasy to think Harper left the choice of a new governor general to chance.

So it was entertaining to watch his staff multiply their descriptions of the ornate, arm’s-length process by which David Johnston, president of the University of Waterloo, was selected. It was all so exquisitely non-partisan, they said and repeated. Political staffers were barred. “This is not about politics,” Harper’s spokesman told the newspapers.

Then the PMO released the names of the committee who helped select Johnston. Some of its members are indeed not about politics. Sheila-Marie Cook has been secretary to the Governor General since 2006. She’s like Michaëlle Jean’s senior bureaucrat.

But at least three others have strong opinions about the role of the GG, and those opinions can best be summed up as, “Know your limits.” Christopher McCreery, a historian who is private secretary to the lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia, wrote an op-ed in 2006 detailing all the ways Adrienne Clarkson had overstepped her role. “Sadly few senior officials in the PMO/PCO or at Rideau Hall have been willing to stand up to a governor general,” he wrote, “and tell them what is appropriate and what is not.”

The two most interesting committee members were two political scientists. Christopher Manfredi is dean of arts at McGill. He studied at the University of Calgary, where Rainer Knopff is a professor. The PMO release on the committee says Manfredi “is an authority on the role of the judiciary in democratic societies,” whereas Knopff “is well-known for his views about the influence of judicial decisions on Canadian public policy.”

Hmm.

What are their views on the role of the judiciary? Broadly, that judges are political actors the same way legislators are. And, broadly, that that’s been a problem. In 2004, Manfredi told a Commons committee that closer scrutiny by MPs of Supreme Court nominees wouldn’t politicize the court because that cat was already out of the bag. “I would argue that the character of the 21st century Supreme Court is that it is already a political rather than a legal institution.”

These aren’t heretical notions. They are solidly in the mainstream of debate about the role of courts. They’re also really popular with Stephen Harper, whose first chief of staff Ian Brodie has said he “found Manfredi’s lessons on the power of the courts and judicial appointments were constantly helpful” in his own studies. Knopff’s signature appears with Harper’s at the bottom of the 2001 “firewall letter” to Ralph Klein advocating limits on federal influence in Alberta’s jurisdictions.

So these guys go back a ways. That’s not unusual either. If a Liberal prime minister had concocted an arm’s-length advisory board before naming a governor general, he might reach out to liberal academics like Errol Mendes or Sujit Choudhry. They would pick somebody fine and upstanding with an expansive view of the governor general’s role. Somebody like Adrienne Clarkson.

This crew has picked somebody fine and upstanding who is a good deal likelier to take a more modest view of his role. That will come in handy if Harper goes to Rideau Hall as an incumbent PM against another 2008-style coalition of other parties.

The irony is that in 2008, when Michaëlle Jean was the referee, she did precisely as he asked. But she made him nervous. He has done what he can to ensure that next time, he won’t have to be nervous.

If you unleash some of those hundreds of millions of minds you help Africa and you help the world.

PM announces 70 post-doctoral scholarships

Stephen Harper dropped in on famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking on Tuesday bearing scholarly gifts — a new post-doctoral scholarship for Canada. The prime minister announced 70 fellowships a year will be awarded, with a total value of $45 million over five years.

“We must invest in the people and ideas that will produce tomorrow’s breakthroughs,” Harper said. “The Banting post-doctoral fellowships will give scholars in research institutions across the country the support they need to explore and develop their ideas to the fullest.”

Hawking took up residence at the Perimeter Institute for theoretical physics last month and will continue his work through July. Harper thanked Hawking for coming to the institute and praised him as an “inspiration” to Canadian scientists. Hawking was to have visited the southwestern Ontario institute last summer as a research chair but illness forced him to cancel. The research institute is a public-private partnership that receives funding from the Canadian and Ontario governments as well as individual donors.

The author of “A Brief History of Time” retired from Cambridge University in England last year at age 67.

Harper also announced $20 million to help establish five science, math and technology centres in Africa. “This is a revolutionary approach to development,” the prime minister said. “It aims to nurture the brightest minds in Africa.”

The Canadian Press