Northman's Fury

A month ago, Stephan Harper made a big kerfuffle over the issue of Muslim women voting while veiled. It was, as I noted, a tempest in a teapot. The number of women in question was miniscule, not to mention that they all were willing to lift the veil to identify themselves.

At the time, I limited my criticism of Harper's motives to the fact that the Conservatives were under investigation by the Elections Commission for overspending in the last federal election, and this was a good way to attack the credibility of the Elections Commissioner.

There are, of course, much darker and more sinister motivations for such attacks, and those were on display in Harper's adopted home base of Calgary this weekend.

Protesters from both sides of a white supremacists rally were hauled away in handcuffs after tempers and profanity flared on the steps of Calgary city hall.

A group of 15 neo-Nazis, most wearing balaclavas and carrying black flags bearing a "white pride" Celtic symbol, clashed with a crowd of over 60 counter-protesters Sunday afternoon.

On the eve of a civic election, the white supremacist group handed out leaflets protesting Canadian legislation allowing women to vote wearing face-covering burkas.

Kudos to the counter-protesters. Western Canadians, and Albertans in particular, have enough trouble being painted as racist red-necks without idiots like those being unchallenged.

Via Impolitical, who does an excellent job taking Harper to task for setting the tone and amplifying this non-issue to national prominence for his own ends.

I think this would actually be a great idea.

Now, Davis and other local sex workers have banded together to establish Canada's first cooperative brothel in an attempt to offer women a safe place to work.

The group, formed by a sex workers' alliance based here, called the British Columbia Coalition of Experiential Women, will incorporate next month and is already setting the groundwork to open the co-op brothel.

Members have begun scouting for a location and are enlisting the backing of local businesses, police and labor organizations.

Faced with the task of cleaning up the city to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, Vancouver authorities said they are open to the idea.

For the most part, the major problems with the sex trade come as a result of it being pushed into the margins where the women are isolated and vulnerable. And while there are some rumblings about dealing with the pimps and violent johns, the vast majority of legal action and stigma always seems to fall onto the women themselves.

Giving it a legal face and a location where it can be watched and controlled may not do much for the stigma, but it will certainly put a spotlight on and probably curtail the exploitive bastards who are the real issue.

Prostitution itself is legal in Canada. However, since most activities associated with it are not -- such as soliciting sexual services in a public place, operating a bawdy house and living off the avails of prostitution -- the group is planning to appeal to the federal government for an exemption.

Damn, so close. No chance Harper and the Conservatives go for this. Their religious base would go ape-shit. Unless we elect a new government in the near future, it appears as though the ladies of the night will be out of luck.

So oil companies in Alberta are crying about plans for the government to actually start charging them the royalty rates that they should have been paying for the last several years.

And they’re saying that despite record high oil prices and the record high profits that go with them, they’ll be so put out by this increase that they’ll have to cut jobs and production.

Not even the world’s smallest violin will be playing any sympathy notes over this one.

Frankly, even if they did cut back on some jobs, and I’m pretty sure they’ll find a way to keep pumping the black gold out of the ground so the real gold keeps flowing into their wallets, it isn’t like the Alberta economy is exactly hurting for employment.  I’m betting there are more than a few employers that would be delighted to see the oil industry lay off a few people so that they won’t be so hard up for workers.

Besides, it will allow some of the Newfoundlanders to go home and work on the new offshore deals Danny Williams signed recently. The ones the oil companies said would never get signed because Premier Williams was asking for too much ownership and royalties for the people of Newfoundland.

I sense a pattern.

No status Indians could be left in Canada within 200 years if current laws defining who qualifies are not changed, according to a Winnipeg demographer.

Currently, federal legislation eliminates the treaty status of some children if one parent is a certain type of registered Indian and the other is not.

That means fewer and fewer children will qualify for status, Winnipeg demographer Stewart Clatworthy told CBC News.

"If nothing changes and intermarriage rates stay the same, and the rules of the act stay the same, and you string it out long enough, you could essentially create a situation where there would be no one born who would qualify," Clatworthy said Thursday.

Within six generations — roughly 180 years — Clatworthy's projections suggest no one born could qualify to register as a status Indian.

I won’t bother disputing the numbers, since I can think of several scenarios where this would wind up being the case.  It would only take a slight imbalance to produce such a result over time, and I know from some relatives who do and don't qualify for status that the rules are rather less than intuitive when one considers their actual ancestry.  (Side note:  Are we still supposed to be calling them Indians?  My sister always yells at me every time I use the term.)

Back when we treated our aboriginal populations in such a way that it was thought to be a good model for the South African apartheid regime, this sort of issue probably didn’t come up too often.  But since we started allowing natives off their reservations and noticing that they’re, well, people, human nature has kicked in and the mingling has begun.

Change the definition slightly so that anyone descended from a status Indian remains a status Indian and the same demographic trends would likely find all Canadians becoming status Indians in roughly the same time frame.  Intermarriage has that effect.

I doubt such a proposal would be very popular, and setting things up so that status natives die out hardly seems a fair way to go either. Its a thorny issue at the best of times, and I'm not going to try and offer some pat solution, because I've long been convinced that none exist.

I will say this though. I don't think that assigning people a distinct legal status based upon their ancestry is the kind of thing that we should be looking to try and perpetuate.

Harper said he doesn't want an election before 2009. But the prime minister added that he would consider any votes during the upcoming parliamentary session on items in the speech from the throne as confidence motions.

"If they get approval of the throne speech, we're going to expect those things to be passed," Harper said.

This is a totally empty threat, as Harper can't rewrite how Parliament works to go along with his wishes. The arrogance of this remark would piss me off even if I agreed with everything he puts into the throne speech. And that's actually possible, as the throne speech in the parliamentary version of campaign promises; long on vision and short on details.

As an example, I expect they will say nice things about defending Canada's Arctic Sovereignty, which I obviously support. I also have significant disagreements with what the Conservatives are actually doing about it. And what Harper says doesn't always mean what it means.

In June, Harper said he wanted to find a consensus among all parties about what Canada should do when the February 2009 mission deadline in Afghanistan expires.

On Wednesday, Harper said consensus was perhaps the wrong word but that he does need some agreement.

"We have to have the support of some members of the opposition — parliamentary support to get a majority vote in favour of deployment," Harper said.

It is fairly obvious that Harper is just hoping to get an election called before the Liberals can get their house in order, if they ever do, though the latest polls suggest that they would be headed for another minority, if not a Liberal one. Only probable strategy I can see is to make Canadians so sick of elections they finally give them a majority.

. . . of what happens when a party is in power too long. In this case, the party in question is the Alberta Tories, and Calgary Grit does a run-down of the financial irregularities that the government there is beginning to amass. The major one being the fact that the oil and gas sector has been getting away without paying its fair share of royalties to the Province, but the others are notable for the culture of entitlement and greed that always seem to accompany a governing party that has no effective opposition.

When you can take your support for granted, you stop governing for the people and start governing for the party. All a good sign that the system requires a serious shake-up.