the Walnut Diary

Everywhere I look on the Internet and Canadian TV these days I am inundated with advertisements for Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. This seems increasingly strange because St. Mary’s is a small school. Why are they funneling so much of their limited resources into advertising?

Google quickly put me onto last fall’s viral frosh-week video in which a group of students performed what became known as the rape chant.

Oh. Crisis control in this case apparently involves burying that ugly story under an avalanche of ads touting the excellent career opportunites which come with your degree from St. Mary’s. Perhaps they don’t want any more parchments mailed back to them by offended graduates.

If I were an administrator at St. Mary’s I would probably try the same tactic. After all, a university is dead without applicants for next semester.

But my issue has to do with the look and feel of the ads. I find it hard to distinguish them from the current round of publicly funded government propaganda ads masquerading as apprenticeship program announcements. The look and feel of the St. Mary’s and the PMO ads closely resemble each other. Both programs attempt to inspire the same sort of hope for a prosperous future.

Both also seem designed to pave over serious credibility gaps and are best not examined too closely.

Last week many heads of state traveled to Paris to participate in a massive demonstration in reaction to the Paris shootings. The French and German leaders were front and centre. I scanned the photos for Stephen Harper. Nowhere to be seen.

Mr. Harper turned out to be in Kingston to make a speech on the occasion of the 200th birthday of Sir John A. Macdonald. At no time during this speech did he name any of the other fathers of Confederation. It was all John A.

In a Globe and Mail column today Jeffrey Simpson laments “presentism” as the re-interpretation of history in the context of contemporary values. But then he returns to comparing Macdonald and U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, effectively falling into the presentism trap himself. Insofar as Confederation was put together a couple of years after his death, Lincoln was largely irrelevant to the formation of the Canadian federation. But of course presentism presents Canadian history through an American, Republican lens.

Apart from providing an excuse to avoid a potential combat zone on a Paris street, Harper’s mission in Kingston last week was apparently to purge Sir Georges Etienne Cartier from the Confederation myth. Any student of Canadian history will tell you that Cartier partnered with Macdonald in the grand project. As a young man Cartier fought in a couple of rebellions against British rule. He brought Quebec and then Manitoba into the federation. He was the equivalent of the premier of Lower Canada. He made the deal with the Hudson’s Bay Company. He controlled the Grand Trunk Railway. Most historians give Cartier the nod as the most important father of Confederation.

But according to Stephen Harper and the English media in Canada at the moment, the man never existed. For example I have just read four National Post articles about John A. and his birthday and only one of them made a passing reference to Cartier.

We get it, Steve. You want us to believe in the great man myth. But you’d be more convincing if you quit pointing at yourself when you say John A.’s name.

UPDATE:

Turns out I’ve been scooped by the Montreal Gazette:

http://montrealgazette.com/opinion/opinion-happy-200th-birthday-sir-george-etienne-cartier

But at least I was ahead of Lysane Gagnon of the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/stephen-harpers-parisian-no-show/article22441877/

Canada sells crude oil to the United States at a hefty price reduction. Is this discount tied to a specific price level for crude, or does the export price of crude fall at the same rate as global prices?

Respose by:

Muhammad Abduhu, Process Engineer in Training
(2 upvotes by Rod Croskery and Branden Pronk.)

At some fundamental level, Canadian oil/bitumen prices (WCS = Western Canadian Select) move up/down with WTI (West Texas Intermediate) which is an American oil price benchmark (see graph).

In 1990 a fifteen-year-old girl known only as Nayirah gave a four-minute interview which was widely quoted in the U.S. Senate and mesmerized American T.V. audiences.

I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital with twelve other women who wanted to help as well. I was the youngest volunteer. The other women were from twenty to thirty years old. While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. [crying] It was horrifying.

George Bush quoted Nayirah’s interview ten times in the week which followed.

Nayirah al-Sabah turned out not to have been in Kuwait at all at the time of the Iraqi invasion. In fact, she was living with her family in the Kuwaiti Embassy in Washington D.C.  Nayirah’s father was the ambassador.

Nayirah’s interview before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus turned out to be a $12 million fraud funded by the Kuwaiti government and organized by Hill and Knowlton, a U.S. public relations firm. CIA personnel coached Nayirah for her performance.

Historians agree that this piece of atrocity propaganda galvanized U.S. and world support for the first Persian Gulf War. They further note the similarity of her testimony to propaganda used during the First World War to encourage American participation: tales of German soldiers bayoneting babies.

Most westerners don’t know what to make of ISIS, the latest barbarian invaders of the Persian Gulf. Their showy public executions of captives gross us out. But numbers are small, and these actions aren’t all that different from what we consume as entertainment on vivid TV crime dramas.

Now we’re receiving accounts of sex slavery. I read one of these stories yesterday and it moved me. Clearly we need to put boots on the ground to set these perverts to rights.

But then I thought of Nayirah….

“We no longer seek the high road so into a valley of consequence we tread.”
@patio888

Stephen Harper has led Canada from the middle of the road with his personal foreign policy project in Israel and armed adventures in the Arab world.

The ease with which a gunman made his way through the Parliament Buildings yesterday underlined the basic disconnect of this government from reality: Harper’s warnings of threats from IS were to scare up votes, not to justify preparations for an actual attack. No doubt he was as astounded as everyone else in the building when the mad gunman appeared.

Government by Stephen Harper is all bombast and spin with no thought of consequences except at the ballot box.

Canadians will absorb this week’s hits and resume our lives because we are a resilient people, but we must not allow anyone to take political advantage from this egregious error.

So the Conservatives plan to sweep to power by rousing ordinary Canadians against the “Elite” who want to take over the Government of Canada.

They’d better get the new talking points out to the trolls haunting newspaper comments sections. They’re still running Justin Trudeau down as a part-time supply teacher with no background and no experience and no ideas, in over his head.

Now at the stroke of Harper’s pen Justin is “Elite.”

Harper’s had good luck with Harperspeak before. Stephen Lewis’s “Corporate Welfare Bums” became “Job Creators” in Harper’s new language.

Members of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition became “traitors” and “losers” when they formed a coalition.

“Canadians (didn’t) care about…” a variety of things including flouting the rules of Parliament, misappropriation of funds by government representatives, multi-million dollar ad campaigns for non-existent jobs, and I guess the systematic torture of prisoners in Afghanistan.

Remember “You’re not supporting our troops”? It was a popular heckling line in the House of Commons until it grew so threadbare that not even Fantino would try to wheel it out after stories in the “elite media” revealing the extent that veteran’s affairs has slid off the table of this government.

So expect to see lots of footage of the elite Trudeau and his elite wife in the elite classic Mercedes convertible he inherited.

It’ll be interesting to see how this one backfires.

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First reaction to the new edict was a tweet by Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s main advisor: “My dad mined coal for 40 years in Cape Breton. He’d be proud the prime minister thinks his son’s an ‘elite.'”

If there is one job I would not want, it’s that of food taster to defrocked Canadian Senator Mike Duffy. This week Duffy has faced 31 criminal charges relating to bribery, breach of trust, and fraud, most stemming from his creative use of senate expense accounts and office expenditures.

The most notable issue has to do with a $91,000 cheque from PMO chief Nigel Wright to Duffy to enable him to pay back housing expenses declared invalid by the auditors. RCMP investigators have paradoxically deemed that awarding the $91,000 to Duffy was not a bribe, but Duffy’s receiving the payment was, they allege, bribery.

Canadian journalists and even Conservative MP’s are still slack-jawed about this one. But through-the-looking-glass logic also turns up in Bill C-36, the new prostitution legislation to replace the old laws struck down by the Supreme Court. In C-36 it is not a crime for a prostitute to receive payment for sexual services, but it’s a crime to make the payment. I think it makes more sense if you read the bill in a mirror.

Ottawa prostitutes mentioned to media Thursday that they find this one pretty hilarious, as a lot of MP’s are regular customers. They’re talking about making John lists public as a way to block the bill, but the consensus is that they are too principled to do such a thing.

The Duffy cheque and the bizarre legal position Bill C-36 creates illustrate how confused the Harper Government has become in its old age. It can’t seem to keep its ducks in a row.

The Duffy trial is almost certain to overshadow the run-up to the fall 2015 federal election, Duffy has hinted that he is out for revenge, and Canadian media are preparing for a feeding frenzy as PMO officials and even the PM himself are called to testify.

The only clear road to another term for Stephen Harper involves a period of hazardous employment for Mr. Duffy’s food taster.

Dr. Simon Anholt suggests in his TED talk that a major problem with globalization is that the globe is populated by countries looking inward.

He has devised the Good Country Index which measures how well a country looks out for the rest of the world. Canada doesn’t fare very well, despite rating #2 in climate.

http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_anholt_which_country_does_the_most_good_for_the_world?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2014-07-05&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_content=talk_of_the_week_button

Now the CBC is after Minister of Justice Peter MacKay for his comments about why so few women become federal court judges. He suggested that women don’t want to be separated from their young children.

Someone no doubt googled Chauvinistic comments by Peter MacKay and came up with a follow-up story based on an old comment to NDP leader Alexa McDonough during an election battle: “I think you better stick to your knitting and win your own riding.”

MacKay seemed taken aback by criticism of this particular bon mot, and I can agree that he probably had no sexist intent in the jibe. “Stick to the knitting” is one of the key slogans for organizational success in Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence, a 1980’s book on organizational structures.

Perhaps more appropriate reading for Mr. MacKay would be The Peter Principle by Laurence J. Peter, in which he suggests that a characteristic of organizations is that the ambitious and capable individual is gradually promoted to his own personal level of incompetence.

Nonetheless, I have become rather fond of Mr. MacKay of late. His good-hearted bloopers lighten my day. (Update: July 3, 2014) Imagine another minister who would handle a question in the manner he did the latest F35 single-engine fighter jet concern.
Asked what will happen if the engine fails, Peter MacKay replied, “It won’t.” Of course an F35 engine blew during takeoff in Florida a week later, grounding the fleet, but you’ve gotta love MacKay’s spunk.

Imagine the fun in 2015 if by some miracle Peter MacKay faced Justin Trudeau in a general election. Journalists would pay attention again. Photographers would have a ball at photo ops where exceptionally attractive couples and their toddlers competed to be Canada’s royal family.

Both of these guys are just loopy enough to get everyone’s attention and involvement. Neither likes a script. What if a national dialogue broke out?