New Environics poll reveals Canadians reject SPP priorities

Ottawa - As Stephen Harper prepares to attend the North American leaders’ summit on the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) in New Orleans next week, a new Environics Research poll shows that Canadians disagree with key elements of North American integration. The survey commissioned by the Council of Canadians shows considerable opposition to regulatory harmonization, energy integration and bulk water exports. It also reveals that Canadians are not sold on security cooperation with the U.S. and would overwhelmingly like to see the SPP debated publicly and voted on in Parliament.

“It’s been four years since the launch of the SPP, and while corporations have been given a seat at the negotiating table, the Canadian government has never asked the public how they feel about it,” says Maude Barlow, chairperson of the Council of Canadians.

Highlights:

* 87% of Canadians agree that Canada should be able to set its own independent environmental, health and safety standards and regulations even if it could limit trade with the United States.

The SPP commits Canada to widespread regulatory convergence which has already resulted in Canada adopting weaker standards, most recently through consumer product legislation.

* 89% of Canadians agree that Canada needs an energy policy that protects Canadian supplies and the environment even if it means placing restrictions on exports and foreign ownership.

The SPP calls for greater energy integration and a fivefold expansion of the environmentally destructive tar sands project in Alberta.

* 88% of Canadians want a national water policy that recognizes clean drinking water as a basic human right and that also bans bulk water exports.

But at an SPP-related meeting in Calgary last year, commissioned by all three governments, the issue of bulk water exports was firmly on the table.

* Only 47% of Canadians feel that improving the Canada-U.S. trading relationship would justify harmonizing our security policies with the US and sharing personal information with American security agencies.

This means that Canadians are not sold on the very raison d’être of the SPP, yet the last Harper budget committed an additional $165 million towards security initiatives in the SPP agreement.

* 86% of Canadians feel there should be an open, public debate on the SPP, and that the agreement should be brought to Parliament for a vote.

Four years after the launch of the SPP there has been no public consultation or any parliamentary debate. “How can the government continue to push this agenda behind closed doors, when the public overwhelmingly rejects it?” asks Barlow.

The organization is calling for public consultation and parliamentary debate on the SPP and an end to all talks aimed at promoting continental integration between Canada and the United States.

Environics Research interviewed 1,007 Canadians by telephone during the period: April 7th – 10th, 2008. The margin of error for a survey of this magnitude is +/-3.1 percent, nineteen times out of twenty.

- 30 -

For more information, please contact:
Meera Karunananthan Media Officer: Tel.: (613) 233-4487, ext. 234; Cell: (613) 795-8685; meera@canadians.org.

–
The Council of Canadians
700-170 Laurier Avenue West, Ottawa, ON K1P 5V5.
Tel: (613) 233-2773; Toll-free: 1-800-387-7177
Fax: (613) 233-6776
inquiries@canadians.org
www.canadians.org

http://www.thestar.com/News/Ideas/article/410662

Great Lakes levels are plunging yet we still treat water like it’s a limitless resource. We have to get our act together and start paying the real price. And soon
Apr 06, 2008 04:30 AM
Chris Wood
Special to the Star

The Great Lakes, and those who work or live around them, are witnessing profound changes in climate. No one knows that better than Linda Mortsch.

Her childhood was spent near the banks of the St. Lawrence River, at Cornwall, in a house built in 1958 from lumber salvaged from an historic inn that was due to be submerged, along with half a dozen riverside villages, to make way for the St. Lawrence Seaway. Today, she teaches geography at the University of Waterloo, investigating how the changing weather will affect the Great Lakes.

Mortsch walked me through the Lakes’ historic water calendar. Typically, the year begins with most smaller lakes and rivers – and large expanses of the great ones – locked in ice. Snow covers the land. As spring comes, the snow and upland ice melt, releasing a vast pulse of fresh water to the Lakes.

Superior, the largest lake, receives the biggest pulse. As the winter’s snow-melt flows in, the Lakes’ levels rise, with Superior reaching its peak earliest and the lower lakes peaking progressively through the summer until the annual pulse of winter runoff reaches Lake Ontario, usually around Labour Day. The Lakes are at their lowest in December and January, when the cycle begins again.

Now this timeless rhythm is changing. Average air temperatures in the Great Lakes region rose by nearly a degree Celsius over the last 100 years, faster than the world average. Winter and spring have warmed even more, with highs as much as 4 degrees Celsius above those of the last century.

By 2003 places like Sault Ste. Marie and the Kawartha Lakes were getting a month fewer days below freezing and nearly two months fewer of cold nights each winter than in 1950, but 30 more very hot days and nights each summer.

With less snow hanging around anywhere in the Lakes’ basin, the yearly pulse of melting snow and ice starts earlier and carries less water into the Lakes.

By far the greatest threat to the Lakes, however, comes from the insidious amplification of evapotranspiration (ET). Evaporation already extracts more water from the Great Lakes than all our human diversions combined.

Across Ontario, calculated losses to evaporation claim two-thirds of every centimetre of rain or snow the province receives. Scientists who monitored lakes in northwestern Ontario between 1970 and 1990 discovered that as temperatures rose by 1.6 degrees Celsius – more than twice the global average for that period – rainfall declined. But evaporation ballooned by 50 per cent. Annual runoff into Lake Superior plummeted by almost two-thirds, from 40 centimetres to only about 15.

[The combination of late-forming ice on the Lakes, and that invisible thief evaporation, may have been largely responsible for this past winter's record snowfalls in eastern Ontario and Quebec. With little ice to protect the Lakes' water, it easily evaporated into the dry arctic air that flows south during the winter, riding the wind to fall back to land later as snow. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, the record heaps of snow were not evidence of climate change slipping into reverse — but of it going into overdrive.]

If less water flows into the Great Lakes each spring, and more of it is drawn out by evaporation over longer ice-free seasons, exactly how much lower will the Lakes be at the end of each year?

If Mortsch and her colleagues are correct, Lake Superior’s seasonal low-water levels could fall 38 centimetres below present-day lows before mid-century. Lake Ontario could drop more, losing 54 centimetres from present-day lows, with the deepest impact in the spring. But Lake Erie, already the shallowest of the five, could fall as much as 85 centimetres below its current low-water level. Another study has suggested that the St. Lawrence River at Montreal could in some late summers be at barely half its present volume.

THE CONDITIONS that will give our society its best shot at flourishing through the new climate’s violent mood swings are evident. We must use less water whenever we can, extracting more work from every drop we do use. We must minimize our vulnerability to extremes of weather. To reduce our risk, we must “design in” flexibility and resilient adaptive capacity from the get-go. At every turn we should copy or employ the original and still best example of resilience to climate change: nature itself.

And one more thing: any response that would prepare us adequately and in time for the turbulent weather ahead must surely find a way to work with the aspirations, psychology and economy of our society, rather than against them.

Improvements to the water efficiency of industrial processes, cropping and livestock practices and our personal sanitation occur incrementally, in the small or large innovations each of us makes. They can’t be centrally prescribed, any more than one device could solve every industry’s pollution problem. At best they can be motivated.

So why are we so unmotivated to make our water last? Perhaps for the same reasons so many of us fail when we try to diet: we cheat. While praising water as “priceless” in the abstract, we value it at next to nothing at the tap. When we treat water that way, it’s cheaper to let it leak from old pipes than to fix the holes.

Our systemic dishonesty about the value of water is of a piece with the larger fraud we’ve perpetrated by failing to account in full for the myriad other services that natural ecosystems provide to our dollar economy. These range from the “free” fish in the ocean to the marsh-raised wild waterfowl that fill the larders in many northern communities; from the carbon dioxide that forests scrub out of the atmosphere to the forests’ moist exhalations that cool the local environs before returning downwind as welcome rain.

They include the waters bearing freighters through the Rock Cut south of Sault Ste. Marie and the crust of ice that shoulders the weight of winter traffic into Manitoba’s St. Theresa Point. At the grandest scale, they embrace the vast planetary distillery and filtering system that cleanses our water.

Sixty per cent of these critical services are now over-exploited and run down, the United Nations Environmental Programme found in its Millennium Assessment of the global ecosystem, precisely because they are undervalued in commerce.

“Technology and knowledge can reduce considerably the human impact on ecosystems,” the project’s scientific board underscored in a statement. “They are unlikely to be deployed fully, however, until ecosystem services cease to be perceived as free and limitless, and their full value is taken into account.”

We dare not carry on this way. The health of our habitat must become as automatic and seamless a consideration in our economic decisions as the price of money (which affects everything from billion-dollar takeovers to personal credit-card spending).

Far from segregating nature from human commerce, in other words, we must urgently reintegrate the two. Bringing natural services “onto the books” of our conventional economy would mean not only fully acknowledging their benefits, but also paying for their maintenance. It would give each of us a sharp new awareness of the load we place on the planet and an immediate reason to lighten it.

NO DEVICE CAN accomplish this task better than a correctly set price. Price includes an entire chain of costs that go into a product’s creation and supply, from raw materials to labour. There’s more to getting a mango than a Macintosh apple to Toronto in January, so the mango costs more.

Over time, multiple considerations have entered pricing: the cost of insuring the workers who make the product, the cost of taxes to pay for the roads over which it gets delivered, and so on. Increasingly, prices for some products, like electronics, include disposal costs.

Certain social costs that should be included in prices aren’t yet: in particular, the burdens borne by the “low-wage” societies that manufacture exports. Overall, however, the trend is in the right direction. But while we’ve made progress in integrating human social costs in prices, we’ve done extremely poorly at including nature’s contribution. A more inclusive price for water would dramatically change the incentives in the countless decisions we make in our daily lives

“People say you can’t put a price tag on the priceless,” remarks ecologist Gretchen Daily. “I agree – nature is priceless. But if we don’t (put a price on it), it’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet: People go whole hog and it’s gone.”

Those who advocate the public commons and a human right to water are correct that water runs through us all. It infuses every aspect of economic, social and cultural life and every hour of the day. For this very reason, neither government, no matter how powerful and intrusive, nor any self-appointed overseer from “civil society,” can possibly ensure its wise use.

Only we can do that, through the decisions we make in our homes, fields, office cubicles, plant floors, schools and shopping malls or wherever else we spend our time. It’s what we each do daily in the marketplace that will determine whether collectively we protect our water and the natural systems that provide it, or despoil both.

The marketplace is the most flexible problem-solving institution we have. Adapting it to the smarter use of water veers away from the one-size-fits-all frame of last century’s “big engineering” and outdated eco-Marxism that sets disciples of Blue Gold on course toward a tragedy of the commons.

It directs us instead toward a liberating ecology of persistent innovation in which a diversity of solutions can prosper.

http://parentcentral.ca/parent/article/410900

Data analysis method urged for all provinces
April 7, 2008

Kristin Rushowy
TORONTO STAR

Poor students are doing far worse on standardized tests than the results themselves indicate, says a groundbreaking study that links children’s birth and health records to education data.

A study of Winnipeg children in Grades 3 and 12 in 2001-02 showed that while three quarters or more of those from lower socio-economic groups writing provincial tests earned a passing grade, when all eligible children at those ages from poor homes were included, only about one-third were successful test takers, says the study out of the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy at the University of Manitoba.

By linking birth, health and education data, researchers were able to conclude how many kids from poor homes had left school, had failed at some point to place them in a lower grade, were otherwise absent or exempt from the provincial test or hadn’t completed it.

“The Manitoba data linking provided this most remarkable result,” said Clyde Hertzman, president of the Toronto-based Council for Early Childhood Development, part of a group of researchers pushing for every province to create such databases.

“Rather than using the classroom as the denominator, you use the population as the denominator. At the upper end, the pass rate drops slightly, but at the low socio-economic end, the pass rate drops in half,” he said.

Many of the children counted were “so weakly attached to the school system” they simply didn’t show up to write the provincial test, he said.

These were kids “off the radar system,” he said.

While such data comparisons aren’t available in Ontario, there’s no reason to think the situation is much different here, he said.

Manitoba’s shared data system is an example of methods all provinces should be using to monitor the well-being of children, he added.

The Manitoba research was one of four approaches cited in a recent report by early childhood researchers as “the building blocks of the system of early childhood development statistics that Canada needs.”

Dr. Kellie Leitch, the federal government’s adviser on healthy children and youth, recently called for better information management, calling it “invaluable in the development of public policy and programs which can have a meaningful impact on child and youth health.”

“Those kinds of things do put a shine on significant problems – problems you don’t see when you only look at school data,” added Dr. Robin Williams, chair of the early childhood council and Niagara Region medical officer of health.

http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/410520

Apr 05, 2008 04:30 AM
Laurie Monsebraaten
Staff Reporter

A Toronto plan to provide safe, affordable homes for more than 200,000 vulnerable families and individuals in the next 10 years may never get off the ground if Ottawa doesn’t contribute, warns Ontario Housing Minister Jim Watson.

“Unless there is federal funding there’s going to be virtually no new affordable housing because we can’t afford to do it on our own,” Watson said in an interview. “I can’t speak for all the municipalities … but they are stretched, as you know, to the limit.”

Watson’s comments come in the wake of a provincial-territorial housing ministers’ meeting this week with federal Human Resources Minister Monte Solberg, which ended with no assurances Ottawa will fund federal-provincial housing programs beyond next March.

It comes as Toronto begins the first of four public consultations this month on its proposed Affordable Housing Framework. The $469 million, 10-year plan, unveiled last fall, targets just about everyone from the homeless to people trying to buy their first home. It relies on Ottawa and Queen’s Park to cover most of the cost.

Toronto Mayor David Miller said the city is taking Wednesday’s federal-provincial stalemate in stride. “We’re going to go ahead and we’re going to set out our strategy and define the federal and provincial role,” Miller said yesterday. “But without Ottawa’s enthusiastic participation we can’t do as much as is needed.”

If Ottawa won’t come to the table, Miller said he expects Queen’s Park to support the city.

The previous Liberal government in Ottawa approved $1.6 billion in federal housing and homelessness programs nationwide that expire next March. If funding isn’t renewed, Ontario will lose its share: $301 million for affordable housing construction and repair and $67 million for homelessness projects.

Solberg has said he’s not prepared to renew or extend funding until he has completed a review to ensure the money is being used effectively.

Provinces and municipalities have also been trying to get Ottawa to develop a national affordable housing strategy so the three levels of government can work together to help some 4 million Canadians in need. Nearly 67,000 Toronto households are on housing waiting lists.

Watson said Ontario welcomes the federal review.

But with no assurance of funding for next year, many programs will be closed.

“We want to be constructive. But we’re hitting a brick wall with the federal government,” he said.

http://parentcentral.ca/parent/article/410906

April 7, 2008

Mary Ormsby
TORONTO STAR

The barbed wire atop fencing facing Unwin Ave. is a stark indication that a pair of never-used, artificial turf playing fields are off limits.

“No trespassing” signs, a padlocked gate and heavy black tarps flapping in the spring breeze are also keeping athletes from this verdant, landscaped oasis rising out of the portlands’ industrial blight.

Not only are the durable, regulation-sized fields nearly one year late in their planned opening and $1.5 million over budget, but also, bureaucratic paperwork about an adjacent parking lot continues to keep them closed even though they are safe to use.

But as long as the heavily polluted lot – formerly the site of an oil recycling facility – remains untouched, no one is allowed on this spectacular east-end playing area near Cherry Beach.

“We’re in dire need of fields and they’ve got to get it open,” said Rolston Miller, a director of the Toronto Central Sport and Social Club that has 15,000 to 20,000 adults playing spring field activities including ultimate frisbee, soccer and flag football.

“It’s very disappointing because it’s an awesome site, we can play under the lights (and) because it’s turf we can play late (into the early winter) … but we can’t even get a permit.”

The holdup has been due, in part, to the many stakeholders from three levels of government and other agencies all having input on these “desperately needed” fields, Toronto Mayor David Miller said.

“If the city issued environmental approvals, these fields would be open,” said the mayor, who sits on the board of Waterfront Toronto.

“We would have found a way, it’s a high priority for us … there’s lots of blame to go around but we’re at the point now where we simply need to sign off and it’s time to (open the fields).”

Waterfront Toronto, TEDCO, the City of Toronto, Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment and Toronto Public Health are the key partners in redeveloping the fields, to be part of a larger sports complex in the portlands that will include a four-pad arena scheduled for completion in 2010.

Since much of the 400-hectare portlands – bounded by Lake Shore Blvd. E. and the Don River to the north, Toronto’s inner harbour to the west, Ashbridges Bay to the east and Lake Ontario and Tommy Thompson Park to the south – is contaminated from prior industrial use largely involving coal and oil, the stakeholders have worked on risk assessments. They determine contaminant levels in air, soil and water and potential exposure to people and the environment, and are sent to the province for review.

Waterfront Toronto forwarded its third revised assessment last month to the Environment Ministry, which must approve completed cleanup procedures and, if needed, make remediation suggestions.

The proposed 200-vehicle parking lot, which abuts the western field, has had no salvaging work done on it even though Waterfront Toronto chief executive John Campbell favours installing a safe buffer zone between the field and the lot, then blocking off the rest of the unclean land until a permanent lot is constructed this winter.

“We want to open (the fields) as soon as possible because I don’t think we want to have the visual of brand new fields … closed off in nice weather,” said Campbell, who feels June would be the earliest use of the fields – first planned in 2004 to cost $5 million.

“It’s taken longer (than expected). We thought they’d be open last year and we’ve got to get them open.”

But the lot can’t be touched until the ministry gives its go-ahead – and that can’t happen until the assessment documents are delivered. Waterfront Toronto has had two prior risk assessments, from January and August of 2007, sent back for revisions. Campbell is to meet with ministry officials this week.

“I’m told the ministry is being co-operative but this really is an issue of common sense,” said David Miller.

“The pollution below ground doesn’t affect the fields and … surely reasonable people can come up with a solution pretty quickly so we can actually start using them.”

Rolston Miller wonders why the sports-minded public is served at a glacial pace when an event like Cirque du Soleil (which paid to have temporary parking built just north of Unwin on Commissioners St. for its performances last summer) was eagerly accommodated.

“If it was some other aspect of big business (such as) the Toronto symphony or the Toronto opera, would they get it done? Damn right they’d get it done,” said Rolston Miller, who is also a volunteer member of the Toronto Sport Council advocacy group.

The City of Toronto identified the need to build more artificial and grass sports fields as a priority in 2004. The new turfed surfaces are coveted because of their long wear and good drainage. They can be used as soon as the snow melts, unlike fragile grass fields. A Waterfront Toronto document emphasizes the necessity for fields in the underserved south end of the city.

Toronto Councillor Paula Fletcher, whose Toronto-Danforth ward includes the Lake Ontario Park project, said that, since the fields are clean and safe, people should use them now.

“I am moving heaven and earth to get these open ASAP,” Fletcher said recently.

“I’m hopeful – my fingers are crossed, my legs are crossed, my eyes are crossed – that at least one of (the fields) can be permitted early. That’s the suggestion I’ve made; permit one now and get the other one ready.”

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http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/411040

Apr 07, 2008 01:39 PM
THE CANADIAN PRESS

Too many people only consider the environmental impacts of global warming and don’t realize public health is at serious risk as well, the Ontario College of Family Physicians said today as it added its voice to the chorus of climate change concern.

The effects of climate change could bring on a new onslaught of health problems nationwide and even small incremental rises in temperatures could have a “profound effect” on public health, the review suggests.

“When we think about climate change, we typically think about how it will affect our environment, but we need to start thinking about how it affects our health too,” said college president Dr. Renee Arnold.

“The negative health effects of climate change are profound, and will be irreversible if we don’t get our act together now and stop damaging our environment.”

The review, which the college calls the most comprehensive of its kind worldwide, states there’s already evidence that abnormal heat waves can trigger public health crises.

A two-week heat wave in France in 2003 is cited as one startling example, when about 15,000 people died prematurely as the country was struck by intense heat.

The report also envisions a future where Canadians commonly return home from Caribbean vacations with malaria or dengue fever, and warns the medical community will have to be prepared to deal with conditions they’ve never dealt with before.

Warmer weather would also allow ticks that carry Lyme disease to survive in areas where they couldn’t before; if left untreated, Lyme disease can cause chronic arthritis and neurological symptoms.

Public health units could also be faced with more cases of the West Nile virus, which can cause meningitis, encephalitis and a polio-like syndrome.

The American Public Health Association raised similar concerns about climate change last week and said its effects on the public could be one of the top challenges facing the health community.

http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/410909

Canadians denied information to which they are entitled
Apr 07, 2008 04:30 AM
Richard Brennan
Ottawa Bureau

OTTAWA–Canadians are increasingly being kept in the dark by the federal government and its agencies on matters ranging from the war in Afghanistan to the most routine information, experts say.

Critics are alarmed at the growing trend to deny basic information that Canadians are entitled to, especially in the two years since the Conservative government came to power with a promise to be open and accountable.

Suzanne Legault, assistant federal information commissioner, says that government and its institutions have to “move from disclosing information on a need-to-know basis to disclosing information on the right-to-know basis.”

Legault said the John Manley-led panel report into the Afghanistan mission “hit the nail on the head when it said the government has to understand that Canadians have an interest in what is going on in Afghanistan and various issues that the government is tackling.”

“The government has to do a better job at disclosing information,” she told the Star last week.

Former Ontario Liberal MPP Sean Conway, who spent 28 years in politics before leaving in 2003, said the simple truth is that Canadians have a right to know.

“It is one of the assumptions of a democratic society that its citizens are going to be provided with timely, relevant and understandable information,” said Conway, a former cabinet minister and now special adviser at Queen’s University.

Conway said when governments frustrate that flow of information “they are doing something quite destructive to one of the key pillars of democratic society.”

During its more than two years in power, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has often been criticized for being unnecessarily secretive.

Just recently, Harper’s aides refused to confirm whether the Prime Minister talked with Mexican President Felipe Calderón. But Mexican officials released a page-long news release not only confirming the two leaders spoke but providing highlights of the topics they discussed.

Meanwhile, Legault said Canadian should not have to resort to using the Access to Information Act to get information that should be readily available.

“The Access to Information Act should only kick in as an exception. It should not be the norm,” Legault said.

“The norm should be that we proactively disclose information.”

Legault noted that complaints filed under the Access to Information Act have doubled in the past year, to 2,164 from 1,050. But she is quick to point out that 70 institutions, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, are now subject to the act, as a result of changes included in the Conservative’s Accountability Act.

Legault said the Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada is investigating additional layers of approval needed before information is released that are creeping into the process, as well as the routine applications for extensions.

Critics say the access to information act is also proving to be less and less useful.

National security and other exemptions are cited to deny the release of information. And even when Canadians are lucky enough to pierce the wall of secrecy, the information is either so heavily edited that it is virtually useless, or is so dated because of delays that it’s no longer timely.

The Conservative government promised during the last election campaign that it would be more accountable and transparent in the wake of the Liberal sponsorship scandal.

Recent stories by The Canadian Press show the lengths the government or its agencies will go to restrict information.

The national wire service found that government refused to release information on compensation paid to Afghan civilians or their families for accidental deaths or injuries.

The Canadian Press’ access to information request was returned almost entirely censored.

The agency also discovered through another access to information request that the RCMP is now refusing to release information on the use of Tasers that must be recorded each time an officer draws the electronic weapon.

The information – such as whether the person on whom the Taser was used was armed or injured – used to be released, but the national police force unilaterally decided to stop.

Taser report forms obtained under the Access to Information Act show the Mounties have used the weapons more than 4,000 times since introducing them seven years ago.

“In the last 15 years, as governments advertise great openness often through legislated mandate like freedom of information and other such policies, … citizens get less information,” Conway said.

On Parliament Hill, access to Harper and his cabinet has been so restricted that it’s a standing joke among reporters. The Hill Times recently carried a story on how Harper goes to great lengths to avoid reporters by taking the freight elevator and slipping out the back door.

Harper runs a very tightly controlled government where MPs are expected to toe the line and where permission must be granted in many cases before they are allowed to talk to reporters.

Conway said he has been struck by Harper’s reluctance to make himself available.

“Mr. Harper, now Prime Minister for over two years, has certainly made no bones of his desire to run a highly centralized government and … intends to give the Canadian public such information as he thinks they should have at that particular time.”

With files from Bruce Campion-Smith and Tonda MacCharles

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT . . .

OTTAWA–Conservative MPs have been told to carry a card with them at all times reminding them what to do when dealing with reporters.

The wallet-size laminated card obtained by the Star instructs MPs to ask a series of questions before going to the PMO for permission to speak to the journalist.

Critics say this is just another example of the tight control that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office, and in particular his director of communications, Sandra Buckler, has over elected members.

Buckler did not respond to an email from the Star, nor did the Prime Minister’s Office.

The card was given to Conservative MPs during a caucus meeting in the summer of 2006. Along with the card came a lecture from Buckler, said Liberal MP Garth Turner, a former Tory MP.

Buckler, he recalled, told MPs that they were not to speak to reporters without the PMO knowing about it, warning that could mean straying from the government message.

While some Tory MPs privately grumble about the tight reins on them, they keep their mouths shut for fear they will not only be passed over for promotions but be tossed out of the party.

The heavy-handed communications strategy has worked for the most part, particularly with backbench Conservative MPs.

Richard Brennan

http://www.thestar.com/News/article/410461

Criticism as common as praise in a nation where repentance, renewal are part of the national dream
Apr 05, 2008 04:30 AM
Brett Grainger
Special to the star

Several weeks ago, when Fox News started playing clips of Barack Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, hollering “God damn America,” the pastor’s views were condemned as inflammatory, racist and, perhaps most damning of all, “anti-American.”

Most commentators who attempted to justify or explain Wright’s comments framed them in light of African-American experience. In the black church, we were told, emotions run high, rhetoric runs loose and pastors rail against the private sins of the heart and the public sins of the state, in particular the social injustice that spun out from America’s original sin, slavery.

All this may be true, but it’s far from the whole story. By reading the Wright furor as evidence of the gulf dividing black and white in the U.S., it’s easy to overlook a long line of white evangelicals who have also used the pulpit to condemn America. “God damn America” has been as sturdy an article of American civil religion as “God bless America.” Wright’s invective is a perfect model of a time-honoured rhetorical tradition, one that cuts across racial lines: the jeremiad.

The jeremiad takes its name from the Old Testament prophet, whose harangues promised swift destruction to the Israelites whenever they strayed. “God built you up,” he’d say. “He can just as easily take you down.” As a feature of American public life, the jeremiad has offered a reality check on the unbounded optimism of “manifest destiny” and free-market capitalism.

America’s first jeremiad – John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” sermon – was delivered before the Puritans set foot in the New World. On board the Arbella in 1630, Winthrop told his rabble they were a chosen people, and that God would hold them to a higher standard. Whenever the colony suffered a setback (drought and famine, attack from natives, tragedy at sea), they should take for granted that God was pouring out his wrath for their disobedience.

Even Americans whose religious beliefs were less orthodox found it difficult to shed the harsh logic. In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln described the Civil War as a “scourge” on North and South alike for the gross offence of slavery. Though the nation might drown in blood, Lincoln affirmed, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

In many contemporary fundamentalist churches, such reasoning still applies. Jerry Falwell glossed the 9/11 terrorist attacks as the just retribution of an angry God for the sins of “the pagans, the abortionists, the feminists, the gays and lesbians.” Similarly, John Hagee, the Texas-based televangelist who recently endorsed John McCain’s bid for the presidency, described Hurricane Katrina as an “act of God” visited on the Big Easy for a planned gay-rights parade. “I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God,” he said. “I believe the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, God brings punishment sometimes before the Day of Judgment.”

The most distinctive trait of the American jeremiad is the notion that, however low the nation might sink, disaster might be averted through repentance and spiritual renewal. Change is possible. While clips of Wright suggest little of the spirit of forgiveness, he remains a devotee of the primal American creed: that every individual has the ability to seek redemption. In one sermon, Wright lists government “lies” propounded against blacks, natives, women and others, to conclude: “But I stop by to tell you tonight that governments change.” In the American narrative, damnation and redemption go hand in hand.

In his now-infamous sermon, Wright recounts the long struggle it took to make his government live up to its founding affirmation that “all men are created equal.” When Wright rails against America’s ugly history of racism, he isn’t telling folks to burn the flag – he’s trying to get it back above half-mast. When he says, “God damn America for treating us citizens as less than human,” Wright isn’t attacking the mythology of the American dream. He’s preaching it as gospel.

The civil religion of the United States – black and white – has always contained a healthy dose of incivility, of calling the nation to account whenever its makes itself into an idol. “God damn America,” said Wright, “for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.” The irony of the conservative backlash against Wright is that his sermons aren’t anti-American in the least. They’re the purest expression of patriotism imaginable.

Brett Grainger is a Canadian author based in Cambridge, Mass. He is the author of the recently published book, In the World but Not of It: One Family’s Militant Faith and the History of Fundamentalism in America.

http://parentcentral.caparent/article/408971

Keeping immigrant kids in school
Researchers suggest new teaching approach will engage those new to English language
April 2, 2008

Louise Brown
TORONTO STAR

Never mind special programs for struggling students of different cultures.

Canadian schools can do more to help troubled immigrant children by how they teach in regular classrooms, by providing almost twice as much help in English and by requiring all teachers be trained in how to work with these complex learners, say two leading researchers.

As a Toronto District School Board committee meets today to consider how best to help six immigrant groups at high risk of dropping out – including Vietnamese, Portuguese and Spanish-speaking children – research shows a systematic approach to teaching will buoy all students, especially those who struggle most, says education professor Charles Ungerleider, of the Canadian Council on Learning.

He says hundreds of studies show that crystal-clear lessons delivered in smaller chunks, almost minute-to-minute checks to see if children understand – and immediately re-teaching the lesson if they do not – help all children at risk.

“Rather than reorganize the whole school for different groups of struggling learners, you go into the class and reorganize the way you teach them all,” said Ungerleider. “It’s not a drill-and-kill approach, but a small-step type of instruction proven to help vulnerable kids best.”

Trustee Josh Matlow will propose today at a committee meeting that the board do all it can to help students at high risk of dropping out, including those who speak Portuguese (42.5 per cent drop out rate), Spanish (39.1 per cent), Somali (36.7), Vietnamese (24.6), Persian/Farsi (30.6) and Arabic (27.8).

The motion comes as board staff work on a master plan to boost the learning of all groups at risk, as well as a blueprint for an Africentric school to open in the fall of 2009 in a bid to lower the 40 per cent dropout rate among black students.

There has been no call from either Toronto’s Portuguese or Spanish parents for such a culturally focused school, possibly because “we’ve been so insular within our own population, we need to turn outwards and engage with the larger community,” says Marcie Ponte, director of Working Women Community Centre, which runs an after-school mentoring and tutoring program for Portuguese children.

Ponte said members of the African-Canadian community may want a black-focused school to counter the discrimination that can be faced by a visible minority, which the Portuguese community is not. Instead, Ponte said her community is emphasizing mentoring, tutoring and promoting role models.

“My parents don’t really speak English, so the tutoring has really helped me boost my marks,” says Melanie Ferreira, 14, a Portuguese-Canadian student.

While Ungerleider says he would like to see research on how the 100-plus Africentric schools have fared in the United States, he says “systematic instruction” in regular classrooms has been shown in nearly 300 studies to help black students more than others.

Professor Lee Gunderson, another prominent researcher in immigrant learning from the University of British Columbia, says immigrant children can need up to nine years of English as a Second Language help, instead of the current five funded by many provincial governments. “With Canada clearly heading for more and more diversity – in some schools 99 per cent of students don’t speak English as their first language – it’s not possible to tailor programs to each particular group. You need teachers trained to work with the whole range,” said Gunderson yesterday.

First in an occasional series about race and education in GTA schools.

http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/408989

Apr 02, 2008 04:30 AM
Vanessa Lu
City Hall Bureau Chief

Toronto Mayor David Miller is still going on a trade mission to China later this month, but he has promised to raise the issue of human rights in Tibet.

“I’ve said, where appropriate, I would raise human rights issues,” Miller told reporters yesterday, after meeting with representatives of the Joint Action Committee for Tibet, who had asked him to cancel the trip. He dismissed suggestions that going on the week-long mission to Beijing, Shanghai and Toronto’s sister city of Chongqing was tacit support for China’s government.

“City-to-city exchanges have an important role. Canada has decided to constructively engage with China, and as a result there have been tremendous changes,” Miller said. “It works in a way that often gets over disputes between national countries.”

He added he will specifically raise concerns about Tibet while in Sichuan province, which borders on Tibet. As well, the mayor promised to send a letter to China’s consul-general here outlining concerns raised by Torontonians about Tibet.

“We’re disappointed that he’s still going,” said Tsering Lama, national director of Students for a Free Tibet, after the meeting.

But Lama said it will be a step forward if Miller brings up these specific issues:

* Concerns about 15 monks who have not been heard from since the protests began last month.
* Urge the Chinese government to allow in foreign media and international fact-finding missions.
* Bar the Olympic torch from going through Tibet to avoid the possibility of more violence.