Pro-Omnibus, Anti-Abortion?

 

Two things that caught my attention today:

 

1) The Conservative Government is looking to pass another omnibus budget bill.  The last one didn't just deal with the budget - it included far-reaching changes that Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page is still fighting to get details about.  While the bill was widely derided by Opposition and the media, the average Canadian didn't really much seem to care. 

 

2) Jason Kenney favours Bill M-312 - ostensibly about mandating a Parliamentary Committee (on which the Tories would have a majority and their committee-disruption manual at hand) to decide when human life begins but, come on - it's really about declaring abortion as murder.  Kenney is far from the only Member in the Harper Caucus that is anti-abortion; many of their base is, too.

 

Kenney is a Senior Pitbull in the Harper team.  He's not beyond using creative means to realize his own personal agenda.  He probably gets to have some say-so on the contents of far-reaching omnibus budget bills, too.

 

We have a Harper government that, now entrenched with a majority, is testing just how little the Canadian public cares about the functioning of our parliamentary democracy.  They're enacting massive budget bills that cynically include all kinds of things that relate to their partisan agenda and then aren't telling us what those things are.  We have a Tory Caucus, including senior Cabinet Members, who are advocating for policy changes unpalatable to the majority of Canadian voters.

 

Would Stephen Harper include anti-abortion provisions in an omnibus bill and then bury the details so that the public can't find them?  If I can think of this, you can bet the Stephen Woodworths of the world have as well.  Someone, somewhere, has surely whispered this message in a political ear: come on, the public doesn't care.  The Opposition can't do anything to stop us.  You know it's the right thing to do.  We have the chance, now, we can't afford to lose it.  Put a clause in the the budget bill.  You'll regret it if you don't.

 

Sound dramatic?  It's also entirely possible, if the Canadian public doesn't start to actively care about how Stephen Harper is abusing our system of democracy.  There will certainly be things in the upcoming omnibus budget bill that don't belong there, but support the CPC's partisan agenda.  If Canadians don't make a fuss about it, we are reinforcing the message that omnibus bills are a great tool for skirting the process and implementing partisan agendas without scrutiny or transparency.  The people with unpalatable notions will seize on that and apply internal pressure to get what they want, whether it's in Canada's best collective interests or not.

 

This is why we have to start caring.  To paraphrase Burke, all that is necessary for the triumph of small-minded and harmful policy is for the average Canadian to not pay attention.

 

CFN - Abortion, a Necessary Evil

My latest for the Cornwall Free News.  For the full column, go to the CFN page.

There’s a good reason why all but the most ideological politicians are loath to touch abortion as an issue. If a woman has an obligation to carry any pregnancy through, what are society’s obligations to that woman, or to that child? How do you tackle the use of abortion as a form of selective birth control? Is there an obligation to teach our youth about the birds and the bees so that they can make informed choices – and does that obligation rest with parents or with society? What about cases of rape, of mental illness, etc? Is it hypocritical to be pro-life but pro-capital punishment, or pro-choice and anti-capital punishment? While abortion might be a black-and-white issue for the pro-choice and pro-life partisans, for policy makers it’s a Pandora’s Box of complex legal ramifications that touch on fields ranging from justice to education to healthcare.

Individual Right to Choose / Society's Responsibilty to Think Ahead

Oh, Lorrie...

(2) NDP godfather Tommy Douglas was advocating mass sterilization and special colonies for "defective" and "sub-normal" families -- including those whose ancestors were "French-Irish" and "low type of woman" -- right around the time Adolf Hitler was rising to power in Germany.

But the fact a politician today can't even raise the issue without being smeared by the liberal political/media establishment speaks volumes.

Yes, the first quote is not a reference to the second.  Yet, they are in the exact same article.  Should a politician be allowed to raise eugenics as an issue today without reprimand?  What about segregation, which is what "firewall" could very easily amount to?  What about indentured servitude?  Where do we draw that line?  What are the risks if we don't?

It's not enough to say "there's no appetite for a debate on (insert contentious issue here)."  There was no appetite for genocide in 1930s Germany, either - only a bitterness against others and a need to come across as dominant.  Feelings can be manipulated and, when the manipulators continually get away with ignoring societal standards, they open the door to all kinds of abuses.  Somewhere, someone has to say "enough;" the successful perpetrators aren't going to regulate themselves.   

Along the same theme; a very common post-war response from these perpetrators is denial.

Another quote, again from the same article:

In the real world, the death penalty isn't coming back because no political party supports it and because, even if they did, our courts view it as cruel and unusual punishment and thus unconstitutional.

How many selection-of-the-fittest, Far Right (not Conservative, because Conservative is a much broader category) folk feel the courts have too much power?  How many of them are sceptical about immigration, think tough-on-crime is the way to go and don't believe in "social handouts?"

One last Goldstein quote:

On abortion, polls show most Canadians support a woman's right to choose, but are conflicted on issues such as whether the state should pay for non-emergency abortions in the latter stages of pregnancy. But again, among liberal elites, there is only one "correct" view for a politician to hold -- abortion on demand, regardless of the circumstances.

Individual responsibility and personal feeling trumps all, I get it.  What about when that doesn't work?  Less public education means less educated people.  Less information gathering means less informed decisions.  Less central coordination?  That's proven to lead to unnecessary duplication, waste and missed opportunities.

Let's stick with education for a second, though.  Less educated people reproduce more - that's not speculation, but a lesson from history.  When you don't have facts, you rely on feelings, which rarely take into account such things as long-term costs.  That's one of the main reasons we bother to learn at all; so that we can avoid repeating mistakes.  Uneducated people tend to be more likely to experience poverty.

What do you think a lack of knowledge, a tendency to reproduce more and less easy access to birth control methods (and yes, abortion) leads to?

The more poor, uneducated people you have, the more poor, uneducated people you're going to end up with (keeping in mind that wealthy, educated people reproduce less).  Now, correlate poverty and crime rates.  Then, crime costs on the economy and the price of punishment and incarceration - both fiscally and, over time, socially.  Then look at natural resource dependence in places like Easter Island or Central America.  In fact, look at any failed civilization and you'll see short-term, resource-intensive and elite-centric policies at the root of the collapse - including the Soviet Union.  Where you see successes - like here in Canada - the reverse is true; more shared services, more planning, better education and a broader economic basket with a decent focus on production lead to better, lasting results for all.

The Far-Right, Two-Row Wampum conceptualizers seem to feel they can do it on their own and everyone should be left to their own devices, despite shared geography.  They appear to believe that helping others through centrally coordinated social services is too much like rewarding failure.

It's reactive, not proactive thinking - and it's doomed, time and again, to fail.

You can't consider the individual's right to choose without considering society's responsibility to think ahead.  Consider it a quality over quantity thing.

Maybe the proactive, liberal approach doesn't feel right to the Far Right - but that's the point, isn't it?  The best decisions aren't made based on gut-instinct alone, but are informed.

Those who fail to understand history, etc.