Clive Doucet

I’m not sure how many people outside of my generation have any idea what a hootenanny is, but way back near the dawn of time, young people which at the time was us used to gather with musical friends and not so musical friends to sing.  We would do this in the oddest places, on the steps of churches in Rome, in small city parks, in school gyms, in people’s back yards.  Fortunately, this public menace to good taste died a natural death as our generation moved on to raise children and forget about our own childhood.

The hootenanny leaders were frequently terrifically talented (which for the non musical like me meant they could chord a tune and keep reasonable time) and sometimes not.  Hootenanny tunes leant towards social justice and anything Bob Dylan or Joan Baez sang.  They could be really corny and sound like cats wailing but mostly they were just fun.

On May I at the NAC’s Fourth stage in memory of the labour leader Gil Levine we held a hootenanny.  Gil was a big hearted labour leader with a killer smile and a gravelly voice that you couldn’t just resist when he asked you to do anything.  Like me, he couldn’t sing worth talking about, but he loved to sing all the same and so someone had the brilliant idea to celebrate his passing with a hootenanny – with some really, talented musical leaders.  Stephen Richer, Pierre Fournier, Lynn Myles, Eve Goldberg and others, tunes from South Africa, Yorkshire, Canada, Quebec.

I forgot my grandfather days and was reminded that songs of social justice are always about hope and courage and these sentiments have no age limit.  They soar on the wings of peppermint and the lives of people like Gil.  Happy May Day, Gil!

If you check the recent comments in this blog, you will notice that a person hiding behind the name, Mabel Blow, concludes his/her comment with this specific threat: ‘I’m going to be pushing the city to sell Lansdowne’, (should the city lose in court).  Be careful about what you wish for,’ Mabel Blow warns.

Bingo!  Plan B!  Sell the land!  It solves so many problems for the current Mayor who has been trying to give the park to developers for a very long time.  He’s come close. In his first term as Mayor 1997-2000, Mr. Watson did his best to sell the site to Canderel Corp. for condos.  He didn’t because the Regional Council under the then Chair Bob Chiarelli took it off his hands for a dollar in order to protect it from privatization.

He’s now leaning hard on Mr. O’Brien’s efforts to divest this public land to local developers and is held up only by the courts.  Should he lose, going quickly back to his original plan – selling the park – solves a whole raft of problems for him in one fell swoop.  There’s no public debate, no way of opposing a city land sale except for council which, given the runny jello backbone of this council, is impossible to imagine.

Once the land is sold, the stadium construction will be put on hold. Why? Because all staff reports of past years give Lansdowne, as a site for a new stadium a low priority, sixth out of seven potential sites. A land sale will be excellent news for the Mayor because the city never wanted to re-build there anyway. Now they can run a ‘competitive’ stadium process, which would qualify the city to scoop up some provincial and federal cash (not currently available due to sole-sourcing) and solve a pending horrendous “public transit to the ball game” debacle that would be a renewed Lansdowne stadium.

Secondly, there won’t be much anger from local merchants about big box stores because the unpublished reality is – Lansdowne is not an attractive spot for the likes of megastores anyway.  For the same reasons, it doesn’t make sense to build a stadium there.  Old Lansdowne Park will become as it would have become under the original Watson/Canderel proposal a collection of ‘stunning’ condos for some very rich folks and I’m sure, a very nice place to live.

Meanwhile on the corner of Fifth and Bank St., there hangs a large and handsome banner announcing STUNNING CONDOS coming soon, MINTO@ Lansdowne.  There have also been advertisements on the buses and in local newspapers inviting customers to invest in Lansdowne Condos.

The total lack of interest in the outcome of the various legal actions regarding Lansdowne by both the city and its developers has always intrigued me.  Whether or not simply selling Lansdowne is Plan B, we’ll have to wait and see but one thing we can be confident of is there is a Plan B and it won’t be about actually holding a worldwide competition to determine the reconfiguring of such an ancient and important piece of the city’s public land.

Nonetheless, it shouldn’t surprise anyone the courts are taking their time.  This is serious stuff.  There are billions of dollars of gold plated profit on the line, an irreplaceable public landscape next to a UNESCO World Heritage site and a precedent which will resonate right across Canada.

Yesterday, the Friends of Lansdowne held their third cabaret and fund raiser at the Mayfair Theatre for their legal case against the city’s privatization of Lansdowne Park.  It was a happy and exuberant event with lots of confidence expressed in the Friend’s case before the courts.  But regardless of the oracle’s pronouncement in Toronto, the history of our city will record this struggle over whether the city has the authority to give away public lands for private profit as a watershed moment for the city of Ottawa for many years to come.

It has mobilized thousands of citizens from Kanata to Orleans to stand up and say no.  Friends of Lansdowne have raised entirely by private means hundreds of thousands of dollars to take their case to the courts as well as paying their own taxes to support the city’s case.  If Friends lose in Toronto, the condo park and big box stores which will arise on what has been for 140 years the city’s premier public space will forever be a testimony to corporate greed and compliant, supine local government.  If the Friends of Lansdowne win, it will forever remain a testimony that the rule of law and fair play is not dead in the nation’s capital.

Whenever I write a few words about Lansdowne on this blog, there’s always a flurry of vitriolic comments from someone named Jake or Frank, the name changes but the message is always the same.   ‘Doucet, you lost the last election.  The people of Ottawa got rid of you.  Sit down and shut up.’  This is a quote and it fairly summarizes the messages from supporters of the Lansdowne for developers folks.   It’s great virtue is that it is a spare and uncompromising message but it doesn’t convey the significance of what is happening around the Lansdowne privatisation.  Yes.  Indeed, I lost the last election, but 40,000 people voted for Doucet.   That’s more people than will ever attend a CFL football game at Lansdowne  - should this sport ever return.

The reality is it never will.  The idea that all Ottawa needs is a prettier stadium to attract fans to CFL football is ludicrous.   Should the city actually blow 300 million on a new stadium at Lansdowne,  it will pass the years as a large, sculptural decoration in the Glebe much as the present stadium is a decaying sculptural decoration because regardless of how opulent the box seats are, there’s no way to get to events at Lansdowne that makes any sense for the ordinary Joe.   In 2012, it would be hard to find a worse place to build a 40 to 50,000 outdoor stadium than old Lansdowne Park which sits on a peninsula with a two lane access road.

What Lansdowne Park  will become is condos and big box stores.  The conceptual plans the developers regularly flash at Council are nothing more than eye candy for the Ottawa Citizen.  1) The developers will not build anything at Lansdowne that they don’t have bank financing for; 2) the banks won’t give them money for anything that doesn’t have down payments on or leases for stores signed; 3) private condos and big boxes are the only thing people will put money down for at Lansdowne. Ergo.

The up side of this whole sorry mess is that it is slowly killing the Ottawa Citizen.  While the Citizen is suffering from the same circulation woes of all large city dailies, these woes have been multiplied in Ottawa by the Citizen’s relentless support of the Lansdowne privatization when it’s been clear to many of the people who actually used to buy their paper,  (I’d say about 40,000 of them), that the Lansdowne giveaway is not good for our city in any way.

The paper’s blind support of the city’s largest developers has steadily eaten into the newspaper’s credibility and the affection people used to have for the paper.   I am sure that the subscription cancellation rates over the last five years are one the paper’s most closely guarded secrets.   Fortunately, the demise of the Minto Times, as it is often referred to by Friends of Lansdowne, will be no loss to the city.   When that moment comes, investors will have the chance to bring forward a new and at the same time old fashioned independent daily that will be ready to print ‘all the news that’s fit to print’; not just what the advertisers for condos at Lansdowne will permit.

I need a majority.  These four words were repeated endlessly by Stephen Harper during the last election campaign.  He needed a majority for building pipe lines to Louisiana, China and to gut environmental legislation like the Fisheries Act  - that much was clear.   Stephen Harper was famous for his commitment to selling tar sands oil to anyone who will take it, shutting down Kyoto and the environmental community.   No surprises here.

What wasn’t so clear in the ‘I need a majority’ mantra was how it  related to shutting down Canada as a knowledge based society.  Canadians had hints of it with the firing of the Chalk River Nuclear Plant Director who advised the government a shut down of the plant was necessary and the suppression of the Statistics Canada Long Form.   Earlier, Harper closed  down Canada’s feisty, little Law Reform Commission, and there was the ongoing de-funding of Environment Canada and the National Research Council.   But the extent of the Harper commitment to less knowledge and less citizen participation in government was not well understood outside his inner Calgary circle.

As I prepared the ‘because Stephen Harper is smarter than you’ post, it became easier to appreciate how wide ranging the attack on evidence based knowledge and all forms of citizen participation has been.  Some examples from that post are:

Community Access to Internet de-funded.  Canadian Council on Children and Youth de-funded. Public funding of elections cancelled.  (Private is better – just like in the U.S.)  Elections Canada financing cut.  Robo call inquiry request defeated.

Canada doesn’t need to protect freshwater fish habitat any longer. Nor does Canada need an Arctic air quality monitoring station in the high arctic.  Defunded and closed.

No funding for main line Canadian churches working for social justice (Kairos) or former Prime Minister Mulroney’s International Right’s and Democracy Institute.  Nor does Parliament need to see the fine print on the Chinese resource extraction deals – because Stephen Harper is smarter than you.

And while we’re at it, let’s get rid of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, the First Nations Statistical Institute, the National Council on Welfare; and let’s reduce Statistics Canada and CBC funding again, but there’s 25 billion for a plane that it is not clear the Air Force needs – that pesky evidence based knowledge again.

Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the government had the time and energy to focus on  defunding a little civic service program like the Community internet access but didn’t have the time and energy to focus on making the correct costs available to Parliament for the F-35, the largest armaments deal the nation has ever committed to?  That it took the auditor-general to make this clear it had happened?

“I need a majority,” said Stephen Harper.  Well it turned out he didn’t.  All that was required was some cleverly targeted automated technology from the Republican Party’s dirty tricks arsenal.

It is a curious thing when a fist fight seems civilized, courteous and brave while the political fighting seems vicious, mean and cowardly.  There was something old fashioned and dignified in the Trudeau/Brazeau boxing match for cancer.  Both men had courage.  Both men fought hard, fairly, to the best of their abilities and at the end shook hands.  Why can’t politics be like that?

It can’t because unlike boxing, politics no longer has fair rules.  Boxing without the rules is no more than two men in an alley way trying to hurt each other with their fists much like chimpanzees when they fight.  The Marquis of Queensbury’s rules civilized that primitive combat by giving it some elegance, by containing the violence, protecting the boxer’s bodies and time limiting the damage.

We used to have the equivalent of Marquis of Queensbury’s political rules in Canadian politics.  Indeed, Canadians were famous for their ability to compete hard politically but always with respect for the other guy’s opinions and positions.  We are one of the very few nations in the world where people have elected a substantial separatist contingent and these representatives (the Bloc Quebecois) took their position in Parliament with calm but clear opinions on the need for Quebec to separate itself from the federation.  It is difficult  to imagine what would happen in the United States if Oregon or New England decided it no longer wanted to be part of the American Union and elected sent powerful orators to the the American Congress to seriously argue that case.

What happened to us?  That’s what I hear everywhere I go.  What has happened to Canada?  Justin Trudeau, one of the combatants asked the same question in a powerful ‘cri de coeur’ far stronger than any punches he threw in the ring.  Well, what has happened is the normal democratic rules that used to govern the heartbeat of the country have collapsed.  That’s the only way you can explain the voter suppression scandal and Parliament’s inability to deal with it.  The opposition parties behave like deer caught in the headlights.  The enormity of people being denied their right to vote by a clever, nationally organized automated phone campaign still hasn’t really penetrated their collective consciousness, perhaps because they are afraid of the consequences if they do.

Canada no longer has a legitimate Parliament that is the consequence.  I don’t know if the election outcomes of two ridings or twenty were affected by voter suppression.  Nor does anyone.  That’s the point.  This kind of electoral manipulation happens routinely in third world petro states where a multitude of voter suppression techniques have been refined over many years to make sure the ruling party remains in power.   Now it’s come to Canada and like the citizens of third world countries, we see anger and we see opposition, but it is too inchoate, too diffuse to change anything.

The ruling party rules on and as they do they continue to chop away at all the impediments to them remaining in power.  That’s what we saw with this budget.  It was all about changing the rules of public engagement so that fairness is reduced and partisan advantage maximized.  In the next election, the financing will less fair and evidence based opposition further reduced.  This matters.  Just like the Marquis of Queensbury’s rules mattered. They are the difference between a tough sport and criminal assault.  (last sentence added April 6th 2012)

You can understand why Paul Dewar’s ‘family first campaign’ is strong when a city family of four with a household income of $50,000 has difficulty making rent, child care, car care, food, clothes, family celebrations and looks down the road at smaller pensions and smaller incomes than their parents had.

You can understand why Peggy Nash ‘unions matter campaign’ is strong when union pensions and wages are disappearing from the Canadian heartland as very rich companies simply stop paying living wages unless Canadians accept no benefit, low wage jobs.

You can understand why many New Democrats think some elegance dans la langue de Michel Tremblay is important when more than half the NDP caucus is from Quebec.

What I can’t understand is how New Democrats will troop off to Toronto this week to celebrate the patriot life of Jack Layton who championed a coalition which could have easily defeated Harper to elect a go for gold leader that won’t.  How does that compute?   Is it the Quebec orange wave means no worries?  It’s ‘orange uber al’ in next election? If so – that’s sad for it looks little different from Michael Ignatieff’s ‘no’ to the coalition and evanescent dreams of ‘me Prime Minister – soon’.

If you held a national poll now and asked Canadians, who aren’t members of any political party (that’s most of us),  – do you think the New Democrats, the Liberals, the Greens and what’s left of the BQ should cooperate for one election to rid us of rant radio government?  The majority answer would be yes, please.  Yet the four front runners in the NDP leadership race all say ‘no’.  We can’t co-operate with the nefarious former NDP Rae Liberals.  It’s not possible.

I don’t understand.  Nor do I think do most Canadians who continue to suffer from a rant radio government that listens to no one but polls of their party faithful. (I am told that responses in the house are now based on daily polls.  No wonder the government feels it doesn’t need public servants any longer.)

What I do understand is the cutting board of ‘my way’ politics is killing the United States and it will kill Canada.

What I do understand is Stephen Harper is sleeping well.  No worries.  Il est bien dans son assiette.

Thomas Mulcair is clearly a talented politician but like so many other NDP leadership hopefuls, he’s like a deer caught in the headlights at the thought of being the next Prime Minister.  As he said in the last debate, he wants to go for gold. Going for gold works in a hundred metre race, it’s not so great for a nation.

The problem with going for exclusive power in a first past the post system where your potential supporters have always been split is dreams of exclusive power are possible, but not probable. We’ve now have had 25 years of the NDP and Liberals splitting the opposition vote, the proportions change from one side to the other with each election, but the split remains sufficient to keep the opposition in opposition or like the present government with a tiny pluarlity.

The tiny plurality is the other problem.  Even if you ‘go for and get’ Harper or Rae gold – 36 per cent for Bob Rae in Ontario when he was NDP or 39 per cent as Stephen Harper today -you still don’t have a majority mandate.  A Mulcair 39 per cent may suit you more than a Harper 39 per cent, but it doesn’t make it any more legitimate.  Canada will still be in the situation where two out of three Canadians voted against the government and that plurality isn’t a mandate – as Bob Rae quickly found out in Ontario. Nonetheless, Mulcair, Topp et al. want their own version of Harper gold. Why?  Why not just focus on doing as Cullen is proposing – displace Harper, then get an electoral system in place where everyone’s vote counts and true majorities can be formed?  This will give Canada more hope than another 39 per cent plurality for whomever.

There’s a reason one of Harper’s very first administrative moves was to close down the Law Reform Commission. It had just released a large report, two years in the making which recommended federal electoral reform.  Rightly so, Mr. Harper fears electoral reform more than he does any opposing politician.  The problem for Canada is Harper’s ruthless manipulating of the first past the post system is literally tearing the country apart. This latest round of cuts will include pensions, the CBC, fresh and saltwater fishing protections which follow on gun control, mandatory prison sentencing and the magic of moving a Quebec that had never been so federalist to one that is deeply alienated.

Quebec extended a hand to Canada in the last election and the Robo calls effectively stopped Canada from shaking that hand.  My bet is Quebec’s orange wave was a once in a lifetime event.  It won’t happen again, no matter who gets consecrated to lead the NDP.  Meanwhile the NDP and the Liberals are busy missing so many boats it’s like watching a fleet leave the harbour.  Instead of simply insisting that re-elections in the fraudulent ridings be held, – every time they rise in the house, they’re crowing over passing good vibration bills and walking right into the same trap Mulroney set for Justice Minister Allan Rock years ago.  The trap of ‘let’s go to court and we’ll see whose guilty’.  Well Parliament did, but it took decades and was more of an embarrassment than of any significance when a link was finally ‘proved’.

This is why Harper insists all fraud reports must go to Elections Canada.  Letters, complaints, information once parked with EC investigation will be safe from inspection and action for years. When the true story finally emerges, it finally did with the  Mulroney prosecution, it will be just another historical footnote.  The damage will have been long done, but the damage here is a just a little graver than Mr. Mulroney’s hand in a lobbyist’s pocket.  It’s nation ending.

Unless true elections can be held in the ridings subjected to election fraud, my prediction is:

In 2012 the Parti Quebecois will displace the Charest Liberals and the non partisan panel presently studying the sovereignty issue in Quebec will report to Quebec that a new relationship is necessary with Canada.  The key recommendation will be for Quebec re-appropriate all of its taxing powers from the federal level and withdraw from joint cost agencies, bureaucracies and Parliament itself. The reason will be the ‘value gap’ that has emerged between Harper’s Canada and Quebec’s Quebec.

In 2013, the Parti Quebecois will then use the non partisan panel’s report as talking points to craft a carefully worded referendum that will satisfy the Clarity Bill.

In 2014, with Harper still at the helm, the PQ will take Quebec out of Canada.

NDP stalwarts will then spend a lot of time wondering why when they had a choice, they elected a man who did the same thing to his party as Michael Ignatieff did to the Liberals when he refused to join the coalition, but it will be too late.

Canada gets Harper.

In 1680, a poet named Tom Brown composed a little, nursery rhyme that starts ‘I do not like thee Doctor Fell, the reason why I cannot tell’.  Unlike Tom, I know exactly why I don’t like Stephen Harper and it isn’t anything personal.  For all I know Mr. Harper is a hardy guy who plays hockey, goes out for a beer on Saturday and on to church on Sunday.  I don’t like Mr. Harper because he doesn’t like Canada.  He wants to tear it down and rebuild it into something the Tea Party would like.  Let me count just a few of the ways, he is doing this:

Leger marketing has confirmed  that Harper has personally revived the fortunes of the separatist  movement and the Parti Quebecois which were at 40 year lows when he won the last election.  Right now, his blame machine must be really missing the Bloc Quebecois.  Who is he going to blame for the ‘separatists’?  He could start with whoever wrote Pierre Poutin from Separatist Street as the Guelph contact in the Robo call scandal.  Or how about killing the gun registry in a province that has suffered terribly from easy access to firearms?  Or how about Texas style prison sentences for smoking weed in a province with the lowest  rate of recidivism in the country?  Or how about 1.5 billion in tar sands tax breaks in a province with an electricity based, not an oil based economy or being unable to decided if Michel Tremblay is a national treasure or not?   Harper’s values have even managed to push one of Pierre Trudeau’s sons to the point where he’s  feeling he may have make a choice between Canada and Quebec.  Justin Trudeau is not alone.

My Dad worked for sustainable fisheries and local fishing control all his life.  He fought along with many other people including Federal Fisheries Ministers from both east and west coasts to protect the small fisherman  from corporations buying up their licences and  fishing quotas.  Stephen Harper  wants to do the same thing to that protective licencing system as he did with the Canadian Wheat Board:  Destroy it.

Under the guise of Provincial Rights aka States Rights, Harper is cleverly defunding the Canadian health system.  Remember it was originally federal legislation, the Canada Health Act and national funding that created Canada’s fabulous health system. Harper is quietly making it as easy as possible for the American Insurance industries to take over the Canadian health system province by province by reducing  funding without providing any counter balancing taxing powers.

Harper is getting Canada ready for the 21^st century sustainability crisis by subsidizing to the tune of 1.5 billion annually the dirtiest oil extraction industry on the planet. Per capita, we’re 59 out of 60 nations just in front  of  Saudi Arabia as the largest carbon emitter on the planet.  No wonder we win ‘fossil’ prizes and get booted off the U.N. Security Council.

Stephen H has no confidence in Canadians.  He won’t allow French  citizens living in Canada to vote in their home elections because this somehow will jeopardise our own sense of being Canadian.  Be afraid Canada! He characterizes dissent by calling the people who disagree with him as socialist if they want to protect pensions or separatist is they don’t want to throw more people in jail, or radical environmentalists if they don’t want a slurry pipe to China in their backyard, or pedophile supporters if they won’t  let the government  in their email.  But without this Robo call scandal all these feelings would be nothing more than angry commentary.

But it turns out the elections weren’t legal.  People were stopped from going to the polls by fake calls from Elections Canada announcing  their poll was closed and/or had been moved.  It doesn’t matter if you love or loathe M r Harper as Prime Minister because he is no longer Prime Minister.  Nor does it  matter whether it was Elizabeth May who was the author of the fake calls from Elections Canada or Jack Layton or that master of all things confounding  Michael Ignatieff.  The last election was not valid and identifying the culprit won’t change this ugly reality.  In this matter, it’s all pretty simple. Cheating  Canadians out of their right to vote renders the election invalid.  It works this way in Afghanistan, in Russia and it should work this way in Canada.

If you do anything political in your entire lifetime, you should do this one thing.  Write to your M.P., copy Elections Canada and your local newspaper with the news that you want a legal election in all ridings where voters were falsely redirected to non existent polling stations.