the Walnut Diary

Years ago an incoming director of education called us together for a meeting to wow us with a speech and set the tone for his tenure as our boss.  The central feature of his presentation was an anecdote about his experience with a little girl who proudly defied her teacher’s assumptions in the classroom.  His talk went over quite well with secondary teachers, but our elementary colleagues were livid:  most had read Everything I Know in Life I Learned in Kindergarten from which the central anecdote had been cribbed.  These teachers were outraged that the leader of a respected educational institution would pass off as his own a story lifted from a current best-seller and worse, that he would be stupid enough to think these rubes in Lanark County hadn’t read the book.

Confronted with the charge of plagiarism on his first day on the job, the director for the next few weeks toured the County, meeting with each school’s staff to deliver a personal apology.  These extra meetings further annoyed the teachers, as did his insistence that he had bought the speech from a public relations firm in Toronto and couldn’t really be held responsible for its content.

Why were we so angry?  As educators we expected a director to be someone to whom we could look up as our intellectual superior, a leader who had found the position by virtue of his or her ideas.  That someone in an exalted position would perform an act on the level of the most despicable, dishonest and underachieving kid in a class, well, it left us a bit breathless.

We had had a lifetime of experience with plagiarists: those who are caught early, show remorse and mend their ways can still do well.  Those who succeed a few times in their deceptions quickly become trapped in their mindset and can’t get out of it.  From my observation these people usually fail in life.  That’s why good teachers try so hard and so early to teach habits of intellectual honesty to their students:  we want them to have successful lives.

When it comes to politics the lines begin to blur.  Leaders we could admire can’t get elected because of the sound bite and what columnist Alex Strachan called last week “the way the medium trumps the message every time on television.”

In March of 2003 Stephen Harper read in the House of Commons a speech plagiarized from remarks made three days earlier by Australian P.M. John Howard.  Perhaps Harper’s writer would have been a bit more careful had he known that Howard’s speech would go into the history books as one of the turning points of the era.  What’s the problem?  A man who would lead our country is so unsure of his beliefs and the needs of his people that he must steal ideas and pass them off as his own?  Then why lead?  Politics is a game, and getting power is how you score. That’s all that matters.  The rest is just “fairly standard political rhetoric,” as Harper told a CTV reporter after a second charge of plagiarizing a speech from fellow intellectual giant, Mike Harris.

O.K., we can write Harper off as a lazy character who farms out to speech writers the tedious duty of finding words to feed the masses.  That makes him a useless sort to many of us, but the ballot box can take care of that.

But even scarier is the Sarah Palin phenomenon south of the border.  Palin is a good looking woman with a clear voice, excellent enunciation, and she can read a teleprompter.  What terrifies me is the words she will find on that screen and pass off as her own.

After her acceptance speech Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote an impassioned criticism of the use of the quotation:  “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.”  Speechwriter Matthew Scully did not name its author, Westbrook Pegler, and the question Americans must face is whether they should hold Palin accountable for the actions and opinions of the author whom she quoted.

Here’s what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote about Pegler in the Huffington Post:

“Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that ‘some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.’  It might be worth asking Governor Palin for a tally of the other favorites from her reading list.”

I don’t think Sarah Palin is aware enough to realize the implications of this quote.  To those who could read the code, though, it was a strong statement that the candidate will be a willing puppet for the far right.  By the end of his career Pegler had become so radical that even the John Birch society canceled his membership, yet George W. Bush’s head speechwriter chose to channel his views through Sarah Palin.

We must hold our leaders to a high standard.  Money, if wasted, can be re-earned and replaced, but the flow of history is a raging current in a river:  unexamined ideas can have irrevocable consequences, because there is no going back.  If the speech Harper plagiarized had had its intended effect, Canadian soldiers would have already endured half a decade in Iraq.

Peak Oil News, an online forum, posted a Globe and Mail article from September 18, 2008 which treated as a fait accompli plans to join the EU at a meeting in Quebec City three days after the Federal Election.  All provinical premiers are onside, according to the article.  Why have we heard nothing about this during the election campaign?  Don’t Canadians have a right to input on something this fundamental to our nation?

http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic45453.html

The Globe and Mail
September 18, 2008 at 2:00 AM EDT

LONDON — Canadian and European officials say they plan to begin negotiating a massive agreement to integrate Canada’s economy with the 27 nations of the European Union, with preliminary talks to be launched at an Oct. 17 summit in Montreal three days after the federal election.

Trade Minister Michael Fortier and his staff have been engaged for the past two months with EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson and the representatives of European governments in an effort to begin what a senior EU official involved in the talks described in an interview yesterday as “deep economic integration negotiations.”

If successful, Canada would be the first developed nation to have open trade relations with the EU, which has completely open borders between its members but imposes steep trade and investment barriers on outsiders.

The proposed pact would far exceed the scope of older agreements such as NAFTA by encompassing not only unrestricted trade in goods, services and investment and the removal of tariffs, but also the free movement of skilled people and an open market in government services and procurement – which would require that Canadian governments allow European companies to bid as equals on government contracts for both goods and services and end the favouring of local or national providers of public-sector services.

Previous efforts to reach a trade pact with Europe have failed, most recently in 2005 with the collapse of the proposed Trade and Investment Enhancement Agreement.

But with the breakdown of World Trade Organization talks in July, European officials have become much more interested in opening a bilateral trade and economic integration deal with North America.

A pact with the United States would be politically impossible in Europe, senior European Commission officials said.

A newly completed study of the proposed deal, which European officials said Prime Minister Stephen Harper decided not to release until after the election, concludes that the pact would increase bilateral trade and investment by at least $40-billion a year, mainly in trade in services.

Ottawa officials say they have overcome what they see as their biggest hurdle: the resistance of provincial governments to an agreement that would force them to allow European corporations to provide their government services, if their bids are the lowest.

Although Ottawa’s current list of foreign-policy priorities does not include European issues, European and Canadian officials say Mr. Harper has been heavily engaged with the proposed trade pact.

The two governments have completed a detailed study of the proposed agreement that will be unveiled shortly after the election, should the Conservatives win.

Both Ottawa and Brussels have had staff work on a draft text for a deal they had hoped would be introduced at a Canada-EU summit, to be attended by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and Mr. Harper in Montreal on Oct. 17. France currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU, and Mr. Sarkozy has said that he hopes to make economic integration with Canada one of his accomplishments.

Last Wednesday, a top Ottawa trade official wrote to Mr. Mandelson to propose “the launch of comprehensive negotiations toward a closer economic partnership at the Canada-EU Leaders Summit, to be held on October 17,” and stressed that all 13 provincial and territorial governments had agreed to the proposed pact at a July 18 meeting in Quebec City.

Because of the election, Mr. Harper appears to have decided not to unveil a full text of the proposed agreement, but instead to use the summit to inaugurate the trade talks with the launch of a “scoping exercise” that will quickly set the goals of the pact and lead to formal “comprehensive trade and investment negotiations” to begin in “early 2009,” according to communications between senior Canadian and European officials examined by The Globe and Mail.

Proponents, including all of Canada’s major business-lobby organizations, are in favour of the deal because it would open Canadian exporters to a market of 500 million people and allow the world’s largest pool of investment capital into Canadian companies without restrictions.

Because Canada’s fractious provinces have killed attempts at a trade pact in the past, Europe is demanding that Canada accept a more far-reaching agreement than Canada and Europe had attempted before, in an effort to win a stronger commitment, EU officials said.

Major “deal-breaker” conditions, officials said, include full agreement by all 10 provinces, especially on the issue of European companies providing government services, and what are known as “geographic indicators,” which forbid products such as champagne and feta cheese to be produced under those names outside their nations of origin. Controversially for Canada, this may soon be extended so only English producers can use the name cheddar on their cheese.

However, both sides agree that there is far more political will to negotiate a major deal, on both sides than there ever has been.

“I am far more optimistic this time than I’ve ever been in the past. … I feel very confident that we will be able to launch something on Oct. 17 that will give us a better chance than we’ve ever had before to get a full deal in place,” said Roy MacLaren, head of the Canada-Europe Round Table, a pro-trade business organization that has been heavily involved in the negotiations.

As a trade minister in the Jean Chretien government and later as a diplomat, Mr. MacLaren was involved in several previous attempts at a Canada-EU pact.