Canadian Senators Make Big Corporate Cash

Did you know that Canadian Senators are allowed to sit on the boards of huge multinational corporations and serve in the Senate at the same time? It kind of makes you wonder who they’re really working for. At least Members of Parliament have to wait until they leave office to cash in on all the favours they’ve done for their corporate buddies. The revolving door between corporate Canada and the government is an insult to democracy. We here at Operation Maple think it’s just plain wrong, and we’d like to highlight some of the worst offenders.

The Senator Representing Oilsands Quest: Pamela Wallin (Conservative).

Former TV journalist Wallin has been a senator since 2009. She received $136,885 from Oilsands Quest— a Saskatchewan based oil exploration and development company— in 2010. Wallin got a whopping $442,083 in executive compensation from Oilsands Quest in 2009. As a side note, anybody else find it interesting that a woman who made her career working in journalism is now representing a political party hellbent on dismantling our nation’s only public broadcaster? She sure does look at home in that throne though, doesn’t she?

30 Seconds of Democracy

By Dr. John Conway, Professor, University of Regina

Now that Harper has a majority, we are on the cusp of Canadians again learning the naked truth about our political system. It is a truth learned many times before by past generations, and then forgotten by subsequent generations: Canada is not a democracy. Despite all the propaganda and prettification we endure during our officially sanctioned self-celebrations, Canada is very undemocratic and is getting more so under Harper.
The reality is that we live in a system that combines a parliamentary dictatorship with an aristocracy of wealth. The real rulers of Canada are the capitalist class, increasingly unbridled by democratic constraints. Granted they must govern through Parliament, and hence must persuade political parties and politicians to do their bidding. Parliament remains supreme and presents a constant threat to the authority of those who rule. That’s why each election poses a degree of uncertainty; hence voters who have given up are preferred. But Parliament still remains a constant danger because each election provides a window of popular possibility, the danger that the people might be swept up and effectively enjoy that one brief second of democracy they are allowed….casting a secret ballot.
Casting a secret ballot is the one act of participation Canadians are allowed. After that moment Parliament rules and who rules Parliament rules Canada. Levels of popular support become legally and constitutionally irrelevant. No theory of democracy seriously argues that democracy means that for one brief moment, the moment of casting a ballot, the citizen lives in a democracy and that is the singular essence of democracy.
Real, living democracy is the ability to effectively participate in civil society and continuous democratic debate. We don’t have that. We don’t have a free press. We don’t have the means to organize effectively against the powerful. We are quite powerless, but for those few popular organizations we can build to battle things out between elections with the hope – always there is that glimmer of hope – that the next time we cast ballots we will be able to change things.
The world is witnessing the Arab spring, a wholly unexpected spontaneous uprising. Perhaps the harshness of four years of right wing rule will bring a democratic spring to Canada. We can call it the Harper spring, as we bring him down and replace his regime with something closer to the will of the majority of Canadians. Something closer to a true democracy.

Real Killers of Democracy

Mike Duffy says the “stunt” by Bridgette DePape was “bad for democracy”. Know what’s bad for democracy?

This man! And all the other senators who killed two bills already passed by Parliament.

Bill-311 would have helped our environment; Bill-393 would have helped the dying through cheaper drugs.

The man behind all this? Our Prime Minister: A man held in contempt by the House for his disrespect of parliamentary house rules.

The one Canadian to go straight to the heart of things?

A 21 year old Senate page.

Enough Is Enough!

I was born in the small Acadian community of Cheticamp, Cape Breton, a fishing village dominated by the Church and an English fish buyer (Robin Jones & Whitman) for more than 100 years. The Church set rigid rules on how people should behave (no haymaking on Sunday and, in earlier days but still not that long ago, the need for members of the Sisters of Jesus to confess their sins in an open church while kneeling at the alter before a nun). Robin Jones, as the sole fish buyer in the area, set the price the men got paid for their fish, the price they paid for their fishing supplies and, as owner of the only grocery store in town, the price we all paid for our food. As in most company towns, not much cash exchanged hands. There were grumblings, of course, but these were easily stomped out by the local priest who’d stand in his pulpit in his flowery robes and warn his parishioners that showing disrespect towards one employer was a sin against God.

And that’s how things stood until another man arrived in town one day by the name of Moses Coady. He too was a priest but instead of cozying up to the company he went straight to the people, holding kitchen meetings and putting a new concept before them: they could gain control over their lives, he explained, if they formed a cooperative. In short, the buying and selling of fish, the cost of fishing supplies – even the price of groceries – would be set by this cooperative that would be owned by the community.

For a village that had been socially and economically dominated since its birth, this was a difficult notion to grasp. How would this actually take place? Was the whole concept even legal? But the person proposing this was a priest – white collar and all – so there had to be something to it. It was this that my mother and her neighbour were discussing one morning as the three of us made the 45 minute walk on a dirt road on our way to the Robin Jones & Whitman grocery store. I was only six at the time, kicking stones on the road to relieve my boredom but tuning in to the conversation and trying to get my head around the possibility that the kind of store we were headed for might somehow belong to “us”.

Father Coady’s challenge had awakened everyone. It took many more kitchen meetings before the community stood as one to establish a cooperative, but when it did it transformed not only the state of commerce in the town but the image people had of themselves. Today a large, well-stocked cooperative store graces Cheticamp’s main street along with a derelict Robin Jones building still standing as if in testimony to the power of people when they decide to come together.

But perhaps an even better example is the large black & white photograph pinned to the wall in the produce section inside the coop. It shows a packed community hall, taken back in the 40s, of people determined to do something to better their lives. It is this photograph that I long to see on my yearly visits back home. I gaze at the photograph over and over, going over every face that I can (several in the front row were my neighbours) and marvel at their resolve at the time to come together and say, enough is enough!

It is this resolve we seem to have lost. And as I reach my ripe old age and grudgingly try to make peace with it, it is this lack of people coming together to fight back that I find the hardest to accept. Yes, they’re fighting back all over the world – even giving up their lives for it. But here in Canada we re-elect a government that represents the wealthy versus the poor, the few versus the many, and then goes out of its way to frustrate the attempts of ordinary people and their organizations to create a better world. Instead of fighting this government tooth and nail we encourage it by giving it a majority.

So, much in the way I would take a shot of cortisone for my aching shoulders, I look forward to returning home to see that large photograph again at the “la Co-op” as it’s called in Cheticamp. To return to a time when fighting for human decency and human dignity was important enough for people to come together, talk it over and say, Yes, enough is enough!

Bert Deveaux

Fake News Update: Pope Announces True Location of The Garden of Eden... It’s Underneath the Alberta Oil Sands.

In an astonishing announcement from the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI announced that Catholic scholars have discovered the true location of the Biblical Garden of Eden. It turns out that the fabled paradise garden once sat squarely in the middle of what is now the Athabaska Oil Sands.
The discovery has come as a major blow to religious scholars everywhere. For years it was believed that the actual site of the garden was either underneath a mall parking lot in Cairo, Egypt or a Taco Bell in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Now that the discovery has been verified by the Pope himself and made completely official, Vatican officials have begun talks with some of the major oil companies who have operations in the tar sands.

 “We are deeply saddened to discover that one of the holiest sites in all of Christianity has been sullied by such an environmentally devastating operation,” said Cardinal Pierre D’Agneau, chief Vatican researcher. “That being said, we here at the Vatican feel that— as God’s true representatives here on earth— we should be entitled to some kind of royalty payments from the oil sands development. We may not be able to get back to paradise, but the Vatican summer beach party is coming up and it would be nice to buy a few jet skis for the other Cardinals.”

 A Vatican spokesperson says that the Cardinal is still waiting to hear back from the oil companies on this issue.

An Ode to Operation Maple

By Joy - The Tiger - Taylor 2011

All I did was ask a question

At the showing of "Poor No More".

Suzanne demanded I make a video

Before she'd let me out the door.

In my living room-- lights and a camera,

While I sat there nervously.

Suzanne questioned and I answered

While it was David filming me.

There I was the kindly oldster,

No unfriendly bone had I.

Suddenly I was an angry senior

Staring the viewer in the eye.

Hammered away at Stephen Harper,

He's a Bully we can't deny.

Those who support him on their ballot

Will find him out like you and I.

Was there ever such a Senior--

Eighty eight and still alert?

Operation Maple had an inkling.

Was I a monster in a skirt?

Many thanks to all the people,

What more is there that I can say?

You have made this old broad famous.

Hope you have a perfect day!

Joy Taylor 2011 -- Just call me Tiger!

Click Here to See Joy Taylor Take On Stephen Harper