Canadian Politics News

Brigette DePape, the courageous page who stood with a "Stop Harper" sign in the Senate Chamber reading of the budget, has a message for Canadians.  It is half right and half dangerously wrong!

The act of naming Stephen Harper and the Conservative Members of Parliament in Contempt of Parliament ruled out Mr. Harper's legitimacy as a candidate for the May 2, 2011 Election... and probably did the same for all Conservative members.  The Election as conducted, therefore, was illegitimate.  The evidence follows. Canadians must demand Elections Canada request a full review of the Elections Act by the Supreme Court of Canada in order to end any false claims of legitimacy by the Stephen Harper group.

Torture has been a grim component of nearly every aspect of the current war in Afghanistan. Setting aside the behaviour of the Taliban regime and their Afghan opponents, the warlords of the Northern Alliance, which included grievous violations of human rights, US forces were involved in torture from almost the moment of their arrival in Afghanistan in late 2001.

In the years after 2001, the US government attempted to justify its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan through narratives of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that were based almost entirely on confessions elicited by torture from actual or suspected associates of Osama bin Laden.

And torture has been an integral part of the counterinsurgency tactics employed by the US, its NATO allies, and the Karzai regime. These tactics—involving infantry sweeps through communities in whose vicinity resistance has been encountered, more or less indiscriminate arrests, and the handing over of prisoners to the Afghan police or to the National Directorate of Security, whose ‘intelligence’ (based on torture) then serves as a guide to further arrests—have victimized large numbers of civilians, most of them people with no connection to the Afghan resistance.

Canada, as a practitioner of these tactics, has been implicated for at least the past six years in a detainee-torture scandal, one of whose consequences has been very serious damage to Canada’s international reputation. There is evidence that this scandal reaches to the very highest levels of the Canadian government.

full article http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24473

The continuing anti-democratic behaviour of the Harper Conservatives is disturbing.  Canadians are going to have to consider if they are facing a neo-Fascist movement in formation.  Defence of Democracy by ordinary Canadians demands they consider the worst-case scenario ... and act on their conclusions.

The "tidy-up" hearing in the Basi, Virk, and Basi case [the BC Rail Scandal] in the B.C. Supreme Court opens more questions than it answers.  What to do with the (expensive) thousands upon thousands of pages, tapes, etc. brought together at great cost and with great diffuculty over more than four years?  Was the judgement on the matter credible?  Did Associate Chief Justice Anne MacKenzie serve the people of B.C. ... and "justice"?

And, if nothing else, please remember the utter contempt our present Prime Minister expressed for Canada, just over a decade ago.

Under the gavel of Associate Chief Justice Anne MacKenzie of the B.C. Supreme Court the (BC Rail Scandal) Basi, Virk, and Basi trial came to a horrendous, aborted end.  The Gordon Campbell government which effected the corrupt transfer of BC Rail to CNR paid all the costs ($6 million) of the Defence even though two of the three accused were convicted. Who is Anne MacKenzie, and what was the milieu in which she worked?

The early death of James Travers, national affairs columnist for the Toronto Star, at the early age of 62, has evoked genuine grief and mourning.  An award winning column Travers wrote in 2009 has been reprinted - and it opens the whole, ugly question of the failure of the Mainstream Press and Media in our time.

The latest development in the BC Rail Scandal suggests a complete breakdown in BC society.  Social media fight Mainstream Media openly - mirroring a breakdown of confidence in the courts, the RCMP, government probity.

Billions in shipbuilding contracts will make waves for Harper
 

In recent days RCMP officers met with and gave information (or disinformation) about major figures in the BC Rail Scandal to a Vancouver blogger, some of which has been (internet) published.  The behaviour of RCMP officers is surprising and may be seriously unethical.

The present shake-up of the RCMP - setting the scene to remove present Commissioner William Elliott - may not be a move to clean-up the soiled Force but to entrench the worst kind of RCMP behaviour.