Lobbying in B.C. : What are the Next Steps in Accountability and Transparency?

{The following responds in part to a major historical pattern of BC politics: the tendency of measures to improve transparency and accountability to come from newly elected governments, and not from re-elected ones. It is based on a section of a chapter I wrote for the forthcoming book, BC Government and Politics (Emond Montgomery 2009). In that chapter I also look at another historical pattern, the tendency of re-elected governments to reward client groups by expanding or contracting the scope for collective bargaining in the Labour Code}.

Gerry Kristianson’s 1996 article on lobbying and private interests in BC politics began by observing that the small number of visible lobbyists in Victoria as compared to Washington state or other American jurisdictions was a misleading indicator of the level of pressure group activity: “the half-dozen or so people who are to be found around the legislative buildings on a daily basis while the house is in session are only the advance guard of a host of individuals and groups who attempt to influence provincial government decisions on behalf of an endless variety of private interests.” (Kristianson 201). Kristianson’s point, echoed by more recent academic literature (e.g. Montpetit 307), was that the parliamentary state organizes a lot of interest group activity out of public forums such as US-style legislative committees or other apertures afforded by the separation of powers and into the offices of public servants and cabinet ministers, “away from the glare of public attention and media scrutiny” (Kristianson 202). To some extent, parliamentary government replaces lobbying with governance; to some extent lobbying is merely cloaked by the realities of party discipline and cabinet solidarity.

Despite the growing consensus that a registration of lobbyists, similar to the ones required by the federal government and several other provinces, was desirable in order to have a more comprehensive list of groups attempting to influence decision makers, there was also concern expressed that such a registry would still fail to resolve the issues of transparency, equality of access and the implications of partisanship, due to the many links, both informal and formal, that would continue to exist between the private sector and public officials beyond the purview of legislation. Kristianson, himself the dean of ‘government relations’ specialists working in Victoria in the 1980s and 1990s, suggested that true transparency might require something more:

"Instead of asking lobbyists to register and even to disclose their their specific contacts with public officials, it might be better to require public officials to disclose the sources of information upon which they base their decisions. Weekly or monthly disclosure of a log of contacts between decisionmakers and the public would shed a great deal more light on the flow of political influence than does the registration of lobbyists. Reducing the level of secrecy in the BC political system would be an effective way of ensuring greater transparency (214). "

The Lobbyists Registration Act (LRA) of 2001 has confirmed both the realistic hopes of its proponents and the reasonable fears of skeptics. Created early in the Liberal government’s first term in office as part of its “New Era” platform commitment to open and accessible government, the LRA established a registry in the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner requiring “registration of anyone who is paid to lobby the government to influence government legislation, regulations, programs, policies, the awarding contracts or the awarding of benefits.”(Plant 2001). The Act covers both “consultant” and “in-house” lobbyists, and section 4 requires not only their registration but the filing of names and business addresses of their clients/employers, as well as particulars to identify relevant legislative proposals, regulations or contracts, as well as the name of any ministry and public office holder lobbied or whom the lobbyist expects to lobby during the relevant period. The Information and Privacy Commissioner is designated as registrar, who maintains the registry and makes it available to the public and online. The LRA does not make the fees received by lobbyists available to the public, however; nor does it count as “lobbying” a wide range of actions by public office holders, or citizens or businesses contacted or consulted by public office holders, or constituents’ communications with their MLAs. It does make the contravention of the Act an offence punishable by a fine of not more than $25,000, but has not yet given the registrar clear enforcement powers, such as the ability to levy administrative penalties or ban persons who fail to comply with the Act from lobbying.

A perusal of the Lobbyists Registry permits a clearer picture to emerge of the size of the industry, the names of the most important lobbyists and their clients/organizations, and the policy issues and ministries that attract the most lobbying activity. At the time of writing, there were over 450 active lobbyists currently registered under the Act (210 senior officers of organizations,135 consultant lobbyists, and 109 In-House lobbyists), engaged in over 3300 “current lobbying activities”. Fully 243 of those activities were with MLAs, followed by 211 with the Office of the Premier. Other agencies attracting large numbers of lobbying activities include Finance (176), Environment (131), Attorney-General (116), and Energy, Mines and Development (109). Currently, the most active business lobbyists evidenced by the Registry include consultant lobbyists Michael Bailey, John Moonen, Gary Ley, Bruce Young, Kimanda Jarzebiak, Andy Orr, Andrew Wilkinson and Christopher Smith, and Senior Officers Jock Finlayson and Ed Wong of the Business Council of British Columbia. Many more are in-house lobbyists working either as public affairs specialists or lawyers for particular firms and organizations, including organizations that engage in public interest advocacy on behalf of broader social causes. Of course, this information does not indicate which contacts are most influential, but does help to point us in the right direction (one suspects that, ceteris paribus, a meeting with the Premier’s Office carries greater potential for influence than with most backbench or opposition MLAs, and that a close advisor to Gordon Campbell such as Wilkinson or spokespersons for the larger business community like Wong and Finlayson are more likely to gain an influential audience than other lobbyists.)

The Opposition New Democratic Party (NDP), although supporting the LRA as a continuation of their own policy commitment to transparency and accountability, nonetheless raised concerns at the LRA’s inception that, while trade unions and public interest NGOs would have to register in order to gain access to government officials, those whom the government asked for advice (disproportionately from the business community in the case of the Liberals—via such bodies as the Progress Board of BC , and the Premier’s Council on Science and Technology) were exempted, thereby leaving important channels of influence uncovered and creating inequities between interest groups. These criticisms may have been overstated in the sense that the vast majority of business interests that make specific claims upon the state have had to register or hire registered lobbyists to speak on their behalf, and the vast majority of entries in the register refer to specific business interests.

Nevertheless, the claims that there are inequities of influence between interest groups, and a lack of enforcement and investigatory powers on the part of the registrar, have proven to be warranted. At least two subsequent incidents clearly illustrate this. Ken Dobell was the deputy minister to the premier from his election in May 2001 until he resigned in June 2005, when he began a consultancy business through his company Dobell Advisory Services Inc. As part of that business he accepted, later in 2005, a contract as special advisor to the Premier in various areas and he also accepted, in April 2006, a contract as advisor to the City of Vancouver and the City Manager respecting development of a cultural district and social housing. Each job paid Mr. Dobell about $250 an hour. Since the LRA requires a consultant lobbyist to file a return within 10 days after entering into an undertaking to lobby on behalf of a client, and Dobell did not do so until October 28, he was clearly in contravention of the Act.

Dobell explained that he had not considered himself to be a lobbyist but rather a “content consultant” engaged in the “substantive work of policy and process analysis” (Loukidelis 2007, 2), but chose to register anyways in the interest of transparency and in order to quell controversy surrounding the question of compliance with the LRA. He also indicated that his communications with provincial government officials were much more in the nature of public policy discussions or debate than lobbying, and maintained that there was an important distinction between his services to government, which he said were in the public interest, and consulting services to private interests. The following spring, Dobell pleaded guilty in a Vancouver provincial court to the charge of failing to register as a lobbyist under the LRA and was granted an absolute discharge. His successor as deputy minister, Jessica McDonald, wrote the premier a memorandum clearing Dobell of conflict of interest.[1] The Information and Privacy Commissioner and Registrar of Lobbyists, David Loukidelis reviewed the question of Dobell’s registration and found that he while he was indeed a lobbyist within the meaning of the Act, “there was no intention by the City or Mr. Dobell to hide the consulting contracts” and that there needed to be a greater commitment to “simple and unstigmatized disclosure” and candid acknowledgment that the current system is not geared or funded to undertake active––much less extensive––compliance and enforcement measures”(Loukidelis 2007, 4).

An even greater embarrassment to the government and the Lobbyists Registry came in October, 2008 when Patrick Kinsella, former principal secretary to Social Credit premier Bill Bennett and longtime Liberal campaign advisor, refused to cooperate with the Privacy Commissioner’s investigation that he improperly lobbied the government. The investigation was triggered after Sean Holman, the legislative reporter for the Vancouver newspaper 24 Hours, obtained copies of records obtained under Washington state’s Freedom of Information legislation, which included a May 2006 contract between the Washington State government and Kinsella’s firm, The Progressive Group, in which the firm committed to "facilitate opportunities for Washington State to develop important relationships" with "key individuals within target business, political and Olympic circles" -- including cabinet ministers and senior bureaucrats. (In a 2004 interview, Kinsella had stated, "I don't consider myself a lobbyist. I hold myself up as a communications consultant. I don't do any lobbying. They don't need me to pick up a phone and talk to the government or any members of the provincial government. I make it very clear to my clients that I don't do that.")

In September 2008 Kinsella’s lawyer Paul Cassidy published a review of the LRA which found that the Registrar of Lobbyists had “no legislative or other power to accept complaints, or to conduct any investigation or reporting on the activities of individuals alleged to have contravened the Act” and that , accordingly, any investigations by the Registrar concerning the alleged lobbying activities of our client have no legal basis”. Loukidelis once again wrote to the attorney –general, pointing out that previous investigations taken unde the LRA had only been possible with the cooperation of those being investigated—i.e. that the BC system was essentially an honour system. The Kinsella case showed that the LRA needed amendments, similar to those found in the Alberta Lobbyists Act, the federal Lobbying Act, and Quebec’s Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Act, that gave the responsible officer powers to investigate non-compliance, including the power to compel production of records and testimony. The Commissioner added that in the meantime, he would no longer investigate complaints against lobbyists because of the de facto veto that lobbyists under investigation have (Loukidelis 2008, 4-5). The Opposition NDP responded by stating that in the future it would therefore ask the RCMP to conduct such investigations, starting with the “Kinsella affair”.

Largely as a result of the complaints concerning Dobell and Kinsella, both of BC’s major parties have signalled that the LRA will be expanded and improved in line with the leading legislation elsewhere in Canada. But besides providing an impetus to legislative reform, these cases also illustrate that the lines between “lobbying”, “communications” and “governance” can be very fine. The growing institutionalization of interest group influence and legalization (in the sense of growing proceduralism and use of legal norms) of the political and policy environment is continuing to alter the way that the state interacts with society and the context in which policy decisions are made.





Endnotes
[1] McDonald, Jessica. Memorandum to the premier of British Columbia, April 27, 2007. “I remain satisfied that Mr. Dobell fulfilled his obligations with respect to managing potential conflict of interest, and that the discussion he and I had and the procedure we agreed to effectively safeguarded the Province’s interest.”

Capitalist Fools

Recent Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman have long been known as left-liberal critics of conservative economic dogma. I offer here my own summary of Stiglitz's recent article in Vanity Fair , entitled "Capitalist Fools", both because it might benefit someone who doesn't have time to read the original article, and because it accords nicely with several of my own recent commentaries.

Stiglitz's column singles out five key mistakes by policy makers which contributed to our current malaise.

1. Firing the Chairman (Replacing Paul Volcker with Alan Greenspan)

In 1987, former president Ronald Reagan This meant replacing a noted pragmatist and believer in the need for financial regulation with an ideological follower of ultra-libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand. The timing of the appointment helped to obscure the fact that it was Volcker, not Greenspan, who had done most of the work in wringing inflation out of the economy.

No. 2: Tearing Down the Walls (The Deregulation Philosophy)

The deregulation philosophy would pay unwelcome dividends for years to come. In November 1999, Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act—the culmination of a $300 million lobbying effort by the banking and financial-services industries, and spearheaded in Congress by Senator Phil Gramm. Glass-Steagall had long separated commercial banks (which lend money) and investment banks (which organize the sale of bonds and equities); it had been enacted in the aftermath of the Great Depression and was meant to curb the excesses of that era, including grave conflicts of interest.

Stiglitz opposed the repeal of Glass-Steagall, for reasons that now seem obvious:

"The proponents said, in effect, Trust us: we will create Chinese walls to make sure that the problems of the past do not recur. As an economist, I certainly possessed a healthy degree of trust, trust in the power of economic incentives to bend human behavior toward self-interest—toward short-term self-interest, at any rate, rather than Tocqueville’s “self interest rightly understood.”

"The most important consequence of the repeal of Glass-Steagall was indirect—it lay in the way repeal changed an entire culture. Commercial banks are not supposed to be high-risk ventures; they are supposed to manage other people’s money very conservatively. It is with this understanding that the government agrees to pick up the tab should they fail. Investment banks, on the other hand, have traditionally managed rich people’s money—people who can take bigger risks in order to get bigger returns. When repeal of Glass-Steagall brought investment and commercial banks together, the investment-bank culture came out on top. There was a demand for the kind of high returns that could be obtained only through high leverage and big risktaking.

There were other important steps down the deregulatory path. One was the decision in April 2004 by the Securities and Exchange Commission, at a meeting attended by virtually no one and largely overlooked at the time, to allow big investment banks to increase their debt-to-capital ratio (from 12:1 to 30:1, or higher) so that they could buy more mortgage-backed securities, inflating the housing bubble in the process. "

"In agreeing to this measure, the S.E.C. argued for the virtues of self-regulation: the peculiar notion that banks can effectively police themselves. Self-regulation is preposterous, as even Alan Greenspan now concedes, and as a practical matter it can’t, in any case, identify systemic risks—the kinds of risks that arise when, for instance, the models used by each of the banks to manage their portfolios tell all the banks to sell some security all at once. "...

"As we stripped back the old regulations, we did nothing to address the new challenges posed by 21st-century markets. The most important challenge was that posed by derivatives. In 1998 the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born, had called for such regulation—a concern that took on urgency after the Fed, in that same year, engineered the bailout of Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund whose trillion-dollar-plus failure threatened global financial markets. But Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, his deputy, Larry Summers, and Greenspan were adamant—and successful—in their opposition. Nothing was done."

No. 3: Applying the Leeches (The Bush Tax Cuts)

Then along came the Bush tax cuts, enacted first on June 7, 2001, with a follow-on installment two years later. The president and his advisers seemed to believe that tax cuts, especially for upper-income Americans and corporations, were a cure-all for any economic disease—the modern-day equivalent of leeches. The tax cuts played a pivotal role in shaping the background conditions of the current crisis. Because they did very little to stimulate the economy, real stimulation was left to the Fed, which took up the task with unprecedented low-interest rates and liquidity. The war in Iraq made matters worse, because it led to soaring oil prices. With America so dependent on oil imports, we had to spend several hundred billion more to purchase oil—money that otherwise would have been spent on American goods. Normally this would have led to an economic slowdown, as it had in the 1970s. But the Fed met the challenge in the most myopic way imaginable. The flood of liquidity made money readily available in mortgage markets, even to those who would normally not be able to borrow. And, yes, this succeeded in forestalling an economic downturn; America’s household saving rate plummeted to zero. But it should have been clear that we were living on borrowed money and borrowed time.

No. 4: Faking the Numbers (Dishonest Accounting)

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act that followed on the heels of the Enron scandal failed to deal with stock options; it also failed to deal with a collateral problem with stock options: that they provide incentives for bad accounting. Top management has every incentive to provide distorted information in order to pump up share prices.

The incentive structure of the rating agencies also proved perverse. Agencies such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s are paid by the very people they are supposed to grade. As a result, they’ve had every reason to give companies high ratings, in a financial version of what college professors know as grade inflation. As Stiglitz puts it "the rating agencies, like the investment banks that were paying them, believed in financial alchemy—that F-rated toxic mortgages could be converted into products that were safe enough to be held by commercial banks and pension funds. "

NO. 5: Letting It Bleed (The Bush Bailout)

The crisis started when the US Treasury bailed out Bear Stearns--but then did not bail out Lehmann Brothers. "The original proposal by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a three-page document that would have provided $700 billion for the secretary to spend at his sole discretion, without oversight or judicial review, was an act of extraordinary arrogance. " But while the purpose of this act was to "restore" confidence" , how could it do that without addressing the cause for the lossof confidence--that too many bad loans had happened and too many foreclosures were happening.

The initial bailout plan was a failure. As Stiglitz puts it, "When he finally abandoned it, providing banks with money they needed, he did it in a way that not only cheated America’s taxpayers but failed to ensure that the banks would use the money to re-start lending. He even allowed the banks to pour out money to their shareholders as taxpayers were pouring money into the banks."

Stiglitz concludes by saying that the fundamental problem was an ideological one: a naive faith in the Self -Regulating Market:

"The truth is most of the individual mistakes boil down to just one: a belief that markets are self-adjusting and that the role of government should be minimal. Looking back at that belief during hearings this fall on Capitol Hill, Alan Greenspan said out loud, “I have found a flaw.” Congressman Henry Waxman pushed him, responding, “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right; it was not working.” “Absolutely, precisely,” Greenspan said. The embrace by America—and much of the rest of the world—of this flawed economic philosophy made it inevitable that we would eventually arrive at the place we are today."

enough, already: STOP THE F***ING TAX CUTS!

Conservatives. They think that money grows on trees. And they think that all they need to do to make the money tree grow is prune it with tax cuts and sprinkle it with tax expenditures and tax incentives. And that is the part of their Economic Action Plan that they actually believe in. The rest is even worse: that just consists of reluctant scattergun spending on various political constituencies without any intellectual coherence. They give more money to culture ("after all we got burned by Quebecers in the last election for not doing so") but give less to social science research ("most of them are against us"); they say that they're on board with Barack Obama and the G-20 in providing economic stimulus, but then avoid investments in the green economy and wind and solar power that would keep Canada in the lead on climate change (guess where the research and development jobs in wind and solar and renewables will be?); they deal with child care and First Nations issues through more "targetted spending".

• Remember when Gordon Campbell campaigned to reduce income taxes by 20% and reassured us that the cuts "would pay for themselves" and therefore would not impair social spending? Not only did he blow a huge hole in revenues and create the largest deficit in BC history, but within a few years he and Carole Taylor were claiming that "health care costs were getting out of control". Actually, international comparisons showing France spending 1.1% more of its GDP on health care than Canada and the US spending 5% more of its GDP on health care than Canada suggest that it is private and two-tier systems that are "out of control"; Canada at 10% and Britain at 8% are doing just fine (although they should spend more). So why all the bullshit? The Conservatives are leading us down the same path as the BC Campbell Liberals: cut, cut, cut, cut taxes and then complain that single-payer health care is "unsustainable".

• Economists frequently make cogent arguments for shifting taxes away from income taxes (or taxes on productive activity) to expenditure taxes (in order to promote saving and investment) and Pigouvian taxes (to discourage pollution and other negative externalities). So why was the Conservative priority to have $12 billions in reduced GST instead? Because it was ideologically congenial, politically opportunistic, and the business lobby wanted it.
• If most economists place less stress than the government does on tax cuts for stimulus (because tax cuts mean larger deficits, and spending on students, EI recipients and low-income households yield a larger multiplier effect), why did the government persist? Because it was ideologically congenial, politically opportunistic, and the business lobby wanted it.
• If childrens' sports tax credit has been criticized because it disproportionately benefits middle-class suburbanites and doesn't help the most needy 1/3 of children; if the childcare tax credit has been criticized for not doing enough to either stimulate supply or guarantee high quality of universal early childcare learning; if 95-97% of those being subsidized by the public transit tax credit were riding public transit anyway and a consultant's report told them that the cost of the tax credit would be a wasteful $800 per tonne of greenhouse gas eliminated and would have little impact on transit usage, why did the government persist? Because it was ideologically congenial, politically opportunistic, and the business lobby wanted it.
• If the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development has dismissed the $1.5 billion Clean Air and Climate Change Trust Fund as being little more than a transfer payment ot the provinces "conducted [with]almost no analysis", why did the government persist? Because it was ideologically congenial, politically opportunistic, and the business lobby wanted it.
• If reliable analysis backed up by extensive international research suggests that every dollar spent on early childhood intervention can save 8 or 9 dollars down the road in improved productivity and reduced social costs; or that preventing a single fetal alcohol syndrome child can save society a million dollars in costs to health, education, and criminal justice systems; or that strategic investment in scientific research, universities, and alternative energy can make Canada a more competitive and productive country in the future, why didn't the government go for it? Because it wasn't ideologically congenial, wasn't politically opportunistic, and the business lobby didn't want it.

It's such a shame--all those years when we were light-years ahead of the conservatives in Washington and could have led the world in productive social investments. Pretty soon we'll be playing catch-up to the Americans, all because the Liberals didn't believe in half or what they were saying, and the Conservatives didn't believe in half of what they were doing.

Billions for Carbon Sequestration?

From the ringside seat to the oil sands project that we have in Athabasca/Edmonton, it would be easy to take comfort in the $2billion plus committed by governments in Canada to finding improved cost-effective carbon sequestration ( or "carbon capture and storage", CSS). But, personally, I would find the announcement of two or three new nuclear reactors for northern Alberta and Saskatchewan to be more comforting. There is absolutely no guarantee that a cost-effective and sustainable CCS will ever come into being; the search for CCS also represents public resources diverted from the search for greener and more sustainable forms of alternative energy. Indeed, I am cynical enough to believe that this expenditure of money is as much about public relations as anything else.



On this subject, the recent leader in the Economist of March 7 (pp.22 and 74-75) put it quite well:



"With the private sector sitting on its hands, Western governments are lavishing subsidies on CCS. Some $3.4 billion earmarked for CCS found its way into America’s stimulus bill. The European Union, which already restricts greenhouse-gas emissions through a cap-and-trade scheme, unveiled further incentives for CCS last year. Britain, Australia and others have also vowed to help fund demonstration plants partly because they reckon the private sector is put off by the huge price-tag on a single CCS power plant, and also in the belief that the cost of CCS will fall with experience.


Burning cash
The private sector, however, is reluctant to fork out not just because of the upfront cost of power plants, but also because, tonne for tonne, CCS looks like an expensive way of cutting carbon. The cost of it may fall, but probably not by much, given the familiarity of the technologies it uses.

Politicians should indeed encourage investment in clean technologies, but direct subsidies are not the way to do it. A carbon price or tax, which raises the cost of emitting carbon dioxide while leaving it up to the private sector to pick technologies, is the better approach. CCS is not just a potential waste of money. It might also create a false sense of security about climate change, while depriving potentially cheaper methods of cutting emissions of cash and attention—all for the sake of placating the coal lobby."

Alberta could teach BC a thing or two about Climate Change Policy

Using the selling and trading of carbon credits to develop viable alternative energy projects is already a reality in BC's greener neighbour to the east--Alberta.

Alberta? If you don't believe me, just visit http://www.carbonoffsetsolutions.ca/ . That is where Alberta companies can peruse offers of carbon credits that have been earned through the curtailment of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. As journalist Sheila Pratt has written in a couple of important articles in the Edmonton Journal in February , this carbon-trading system has made it easier for a company named Highmark Renewables to profitably turn almost any kind of organic waste -- slaughterhouse waste, sugar beet waste, municipal sewage -- into biogas. Not only can the energy be sold, but so can the carbon credits they earn for reducing GHGs. And--even better--Highmark's ethanol plants need not take land out of food production, since they are powered by manure from adjacent feedlots.

This is an idea that could be useful in the Cariboo, where the ranching industry could benefit from power generation by feedlots, or even elsewhere in British Columbia, by helping to make farmland more profitable, thereby reinforcing the viability of the Land Reserve. And that is no B.S.

Harper's Double Lie

If you were like me, you gagged when you heard the prime minister complain during President Obama's visit that it was 'difficult to regulate the environment when there was no regulation south of the border.' Is he implying that he has been chomping at the bit to limit greenhouse gas emissions, but has been held back by George W. Bush? C'mon Steve.

There is a second problem with the prime minister's statement--it isn't true. There has actually been a lot of effective regulation south of the border, for the simple reason that many state and local governments in the U.S. had the good sense to not follow their president. But Bush's policies have served as a convenient excuse for both Liberal and Conservative governments to drag their feet. I wrote about the Liberal record back in 2006-- from 1990 (Kyoto's base year for measuring changes) to 2002, global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas, increased 16.4 percent, according to the International Energy Agency. The U.S. increase was 16.7 percent, and most of Europe hadn't done much better. And Canada? Between 1990 and 2002, our greenhouse gas levels rose 23.6 per cent ! The reason: Chretien loved the optics of signing the treaty when the US didn't and loved setting ambitious targets, but caved to provinces and businesses who didn't want him to actually implement those targets, and whose cooperation was needed in order to implement them.

That proved to be a very convenient truth for the Conservatives when they took office in January 2006. As climate change soared to the top of opinion polls, Harper tried to change the topic (talking about smog) and then had his telegenic Environment Minister, Rona Ambrose, explain to Canadians and the world community that Canada had no intention of meeting its Kyoto targets, because the Liberals had left them so far behind that they couldn't catch up. (Of course, had the Tories been in power, Canada would never have signed or ratified the treaty in the first place.) But now that Obama is hugely popular, Harper finds it convenient to blame somebody else--his old pal, George W. Bush. Nice try, Steve.

A petition worth signing

The underfunding of science and technology in the Tories' so-called Economic Recovery Plan has already been pointed out in the media. But on closer inspection, it may be even worse than we thought. Another item on the Tory hit list is social sicence funding. It seems ridiculous to skew social science research funding toward business, after 20+ years of New Public Management and neoconservatism and neoliberalism. Does Canada really not have enough MBAs?

Manitoba NDP MP Niki Ashton has been circulating a petition to the government that will hopefully correct this telling flaw in the Tory budget.
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To sign the petition: http://nikiashton.ndp.ca/sshrc

Here's Nikki's petition:


To the House of Commons in Parliament Assembled

We, the undersigned residents of Canada, wish to bring to your attention the following: For more than thirty years, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) has been promoting and supporting university-based research and training in the humanities and social sciences. SSHRC funding has been used to complete ground breaking research in countless areas in Canada and around the world. The Federal Budget presented on January 27th contains a sentence that has the potential to halt this kind of research: "Scholarships granted by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council will be focused on business-related degrees". These measures are backward and insulting to the thousands of Canadians that are students and researchers in the social sciences and humanities. THEREFORE, we petitioners are calling upon the government to remove this sentence from the 2009 Budget and ensure that SSHRC funding not be allocated to one specific discipline but to the range of studies in the social sciences and humanities.

http://nikiashton.ndp.ca/sshrc

Niki Ashton is an NDP MP (Churchill) Parliament Hill: House of Commons Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6 Ashton.N@parl.gc.ca Constituency Offices: Thompson Office: 83 Churchill Drive, Suite 307 Thompson, Manitoba R8N 0L6 Hours: 9:00AM - 4:30PM Phone: (204) 677-1333 Fax: (204) 677-1339