Someone had to say it, so it might as well be me

Chuck Cadman was a great and honourable man, and the allegations that the Conservatives offered a dying man financial inducement in return for his vote is an extremely serious matter.

It is therefore with the utmost respect for the man's legacy and in full recognition of the gravity of the situation that I propose the following catchy term for this egregious scandal.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...

CadScam^TM

(This is an official declaration of DIBS. Unless another blogger can offer evidence of prior reference, all subsequent use of the term 'CadScam' must henceforth be attributed to me, Jennifer Smith, aka 'runesmith' and be linked back to this blog at runesmith.blogspot.com)

_______________

On a more serious note, I thought it was rather sad watching a steady procession of Conservatives, including the PM, insisting that Chuck Cadman himself had publicly denied to the Duffinator and all of Canada that the Conservatives offered him any sort of inducement other than the magnanimous offer to take him back into the Tory fold.

Let's just listen to that interview, shall we?

In case you missed it (about four minutes in), this is how the exchange went:

Duffy: "Craig Oliver reported... that the Conservatives offered you an unopposed nomination if you would vote with them, and also help with campaign financing and so on. Was that offer actually made?"

Cadman: "Well, there was some talk about that. As far as an unopposed nomination, you know, the discussion did come up, the talk did come up, yeah."

Duffy: "So they were making and offer to you and in the end you refused."

Cadman: "Yeah, well, you know, that was the only offer on anything I had from anybody, you know, there was no offers on the table up to that point about anything from any, uh, from any party."

Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't see how that could possibly be interpreted to exclude the notion that he was offered additional inducements from the Conservatives - only that he never received any other inducements from any other party.

This, on top of the fact that Cadman's wife and daughter have both confirmed that Chuck told them about the million dollar life insurance offer.

It's anybody's guess as to whether this scandal is going to actually grow legs, but I can tell you one thing: I'll bet Stephane Dion is really wishing this story had broken about two days ago.

Paranoia

I am usually amused when someone from the PMO, or the House of Commons (hi, Garth!), or the Ministry of Natural Resources, or even AECL pays a visit to my blog. Since I frequently write about topics related to these organizations, it's understandable and even flattering that they should check in from time to time.

However, when the Sergeant at Arms of the U.S. Senate pops by to check out my piece on the dubious hazards of incinerator bottom ash - not once, but twice in the past 24 hours - you'll forgive me if I start getting a little paranoid.



There's no indication of how he found my blog or what he was looking for. What's the interest here? Has someone threatened the U.S. Senate with a terrorist attack involving bottom ash? Or fluoride? Did I inadvertently use a keyword on a list somewhere? Is this interest official, or is it just some guy on his break who has relatives in Halton or a deep personal interest in public water treatment policy?

So, Mr. Sergeant at Arms: if you are reading this, please drop me a line and let me know that I can stop freaking out about this.

Thank you very much.

Of Red Dogs and Radicals

It looks like I'm going to lose another bet.

The last time I put money on the outcome of anything political was about 28 years ago when I bet my little sister ten bucks that the Americans couldn't possibly be stupid enough to elect a creepy, geriatric, uber-conservative warmonger as President.

This time I bet my husband twenty bucks that we'd see a spring election. Sigh.

Despite all the shrieking and wailing from the progressive blogosphere yesterday, there is just no getting around the fact that this is a budget the Liberals simply cannot vote against. If they did, the Conservatives would just spend the next thirty-six days asking why Dion brought on an election by voting against his own policies.

This is, of course, precisely the intended result - just as it was when Harper suddenly softened his stance on Afghanistan and adopted what was essentially the Liberal position. Unfortunately, he has only been able to do this because the Liberals themselves have drifted so close to the centre that they are in mortal danger of tipping over to the right.

When the Reformers killed the Progressive Conservative Party and stole their identity, they left a vacuum in the centre-right, so it would seem only natural that the Liberals be drawn in that direction. Unfortunately, that leaves a vacuum on the centre-left, resulting in the entire ship listing dangerously to starboard.

As an old Trudeau girl with leftist leanings, I find this shift alarming. But many Liberals with far more influence than I see this as a good thing. I'm sure my ex-PC MP does.

This strategy of playing the middle in order to broaden the base has been used for years by the centrist wing of the Democratic Party in the U.S., popularly known as the Blue Dog Democrats (or sometimes as 'Bush Dogs'). It seems like a sensible strategy on the face of it, especially if your main goal is to get re-elected. However, in the U.S. it led to the unsightly spectacle of House and Senate Democrats continuing to vote in favour of billions in Iraq war funding and unlimited extensions of the Patriot Act, despite holding a majority in both houses.

It took a while, but the level of disgust among the party's grassroots at this sort of unprincipled political pandering seems to have finally risen sufficiently to bite centrist Hillary Clinton in the ass. Unfortunately, it took eight years of George W. Bush to get them there.

From all accounts, Stephane Dion is no Blue Dog - or in this case, Red Dog. He's a principled progressive with a clear vision of what he wants Canada to be. But whatever his principles may be, he doesn't yet have enough support from the party's grassroots or the old guard to make a firm stand on anything, least of all the party's position in the political spectrum. And that may be just the way the Liberal Red Dogs like it.

From my comfy spot in the cheap seats, I would say that Dion's biggest tactical error this week wasn't Afghanistan or the budget, both of which were carefully engineered to be unassailable. No, his only legitimate shot at triggering an election would have been to allow the Senate to thumb it's nose at Harper's arbitrary deadline on passing his omnibus crime legislation. Why? Because it would have put the responsibility and the blame squarely in Stephen Harper's court.

Conventional wisdom is that nobody wanted to trigger an election over a fight between the House and the Senate, and that the obvious impropriety and possible constitutional violation in Harper's demand that the Senate bend to the will of the House would be completely lost on most Canadians.

I disagree.

Despite decades of western Reform propaganda, the fact remains that the average Canadian's principal complaint against the Senate is that it is redundant - merely a rubber stamp to legislation already passed by the House. By showing a little spine and refusing to be bullied into passing some deeply flawed crime legislation transparently based on failed U.S. policies, the Senate would have been seen to be doing its job, and would have been admired for doing so.

You can blame the Liberal party establishment for allowing Stephen Harper to back them into a corner over Afghanistan and the budget. The Liberal abstentions in the Senate yesterday rest squarely on Stephane Dion's shoulders.

Local Environmentalists Ban Dirt

Here we go again.

Region committee has turned down a proposal to accept bottom ash from Peel's energy-from-waste facility in Halton's landfill.

The planning and public works committee endorsed a motion to that effect Wednesday. Region staff had recommended the bottom ash -- an inert byproduct from the incineration process that's collected from the bottom of the furnace -- be trucked to the Halton Waste Management Site to use as a daily cover, which is a material placed over the garbage in the landfill each day to control things like blowing litter.

And who exactly is responsible for this? Why none other than the same group who nixed the construction of a low-emissions gas-fired power plant in Milton, resulting in a different and possibly worse-polluting gas-fired power plant being built just north of the Milton town line.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you P.O.W.E.R.:

Before passing the motion, the committee first heard from two local residents' groups -- Protect Our Water and Environmental Resources (POWER) and Oakvillegreen. Both are strongly opposed to using the bottom ash at the local landfill.

"It makes no sense to choose cover that contains toxic material," said POWER past president Barbara Halsall. "Vote no on this report."

Liz Benneian of Oakvillegreen shared similar sentiments.

"Bottom ash is not adequately tested and may pose health and environmental hazards," she argued. "There doesn't appear to be any benefit to Halton citizens."

A brief reality check here:

1) Bottom ash from incinerators has been tested and re-tested for decades by every country that uses waste incinerators. The most hazardous thing about bottom ash is the presence of metals like zinc and lead, but these are tested for regularly and are well below the levels that could pose any risk to the environment even if they did manage to leach into the soil. Which they probably couldn't because...

2) This is a LANDFILL. It is full of GARBAGE. In fact, it is full of exactly the same kind of garbage that is being burned to produce the bottom ash - except that in an incinerator all the really toxic crap is either burned off or removed with the fly ash.

In other words, bottom ash is considerably less toxic than the garbage it is being used to cover. If you dared me to I would probably eat it. Saying it ‘may be’ hazardous is like saying is like saying the earth ‘may be’ hollow or the moon landing ‘may have been’ a hoax - just because someone said so on a website doesn't make it true.

Yet despite all evidence and rational analysis, those who believe these things can simply point to ‘studies’ by the one or two people who agree with them, and dismiss the overwhelming scientific consensus to the contrary as part of a vast government and corporate conspiracy to poison them and their children. And they always manage to talk the local politicians into going along with them because face it - would you vote for a guy who wants to poison your children?

This sort of thing is particularly endemic to Milton for some reason. Over the years, various factions of the local ‘That Shit’ll Kill You’ Coalition^TM have come out against lawn pesticides and cell phone towers, and for decades have managed to preserve Milton as one of the last remaining municipalities in Canada without water fluoridation - thus guaranteeing it’s perpetual dominance as the Dental Decay Capital of Halton. Hell, when I first moved here 14 years ago they didn’t even chlorinate the water. Just ask the people of Walkerton how dangerous they think chlorine is.

(And please - do NOT just run out and Google up a bunch of links to send me proving that this shit really will kill you. I've seen it. It's rubbish.)

Now, I should mention here that POWER is not nearly as irrational as some of the other citizens groups which have formed themselves around such imaginary threats. In fact, POWER does some good work on escarpment water quality and pushing back on local quarry expansion, which makes their bizarre obsession with marginal issues like this so frustrating. Not only does it damage their credibility by making them look like a bunch of ‘nimby’ crackpots, but the best they can hope to achieve is to banish these projects to neighbouring jurisdictions, making them someone else’s problem while still affecting us here in Milton.

Worse, they may well be damaging the environment by actively discouraging potentially beneficial technologies like energy-from-waste incineration.

In trying to figure out just what motivates an otherwise rational person to suddenly decide that cell phone towers cause brain cancer or that public water fluoridation is a chemical industry plot, I thought I’d Google the words ‘environmental’ and ‘hypochondria’ and see what popped up.

Looks like I’m not the only one to make this connection.

Unfortunately, the perceived line between legitimate and imaginary or exaggerated environmental hazards can be pretty thin unless you actually examine all that complicated sciencey stuff, so the term ‘environmental hypochondria’ is used pretty freely by anti-environmentalists to bash any and all environmental legislation. However, I did run across a fascinating article in ‘The Environmental Practitioner’ that takes a serious look at the problem from an environmentalist’s standpoint (emphasis mine).

As a general environmental practitioner, I have encountered many environmental hypochondriacs over the years, most of whom fall into one of the following categories:

1. Clients, generally promoting major projects, who have a limited appreciation of environmental issues, are concerned about threats to the project caused by bureaucratic delays or legal challenges, and are prepared to pay the necessary price to eliminate such threats.

2. Members of the community opposing a development for environmental reasons. In some cases the environmental hypochondria reflects genuine concern based on ignorance and sometimes fuelled by provocative or imaginative media reports. In other cases, it is contrived as an excuse to mask the real reasons for such opposition, which may relate to real estate prices or basic ‘nimbyism’. Such contrived concerns can be compared with the child who feigns illness to avoid having to go to school.

3. Staff of consent or advisory authorities who either lack the professional experience to make confident decisions in relation to environmental issues or, like the community- based malingerers, deliberately play up their concerns to support a hidden agenda of personal or institutional opposition to a proposal.

…As a consultant, I find that about one third of my time is devoted to addressing issues arising from environmental hypochondria, and that the results of this work contribute nothing towards better environmental outcomes. In some cases the net effect is negative, as human resources and funding are diverted away from discretionary projects which would enhance the environment or the state of environmental knowledge (e.g. rehabilitation projects, monitoring or research). This is one of the tragic aspects of environmental hypochondria

(‘Environmental Hypochondria’ by David Hogg, from ‘The Environmental Practitioner’, journal of The Environment Institute of Australia and New Zealand, Issue 1, June 2006)

I may just run off a few copies of that article and hand them out at the next Halton Regional Council meeting.

Chalk River: And One More Thing...

In my previous post, commenter shun mentioned something that I hadn't noticed before. It has to do with the timing of a statement Gary Lunn made on Thursday, November 29th, 2007:

Lunn announced Thursday, in concert with the decision to join GNEP, that AECL's future is up for grabs.

"It is time to consider whether the existing structure of AECL is appropriate to the changing marketplace," Lunn said in the government release.

He announced a review of the Crown corporation.

Hmm... wait a minute... that date rings a bell. Oh, yeah:

"I sent an e-mail on Nov. 29 or 30 ... which said this is serious, we need to get on this," the source said.

But of course that's just a coincidence. Riiiiight...

The Price of Power

I was thrilled yesterday when I saw the front page of the Toronto Star. Thrilled to see this issue finally rise above the fold in the mainstream media, but also nauseated as I always am when I see these pictures.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is mountaintop-removal coal mining.



I first read about this brutally efficient method of coal mining last fall over at DailyKos, where a number of diarists have been slogging away at the issue for some time now, trying desperately to be heard above the din of the Democratic Primaries. This one in particular just took my breath away.

I think it hit me especially hard because I had just recently driven through a more northerly part of the Appalachian range in Pennsylvania, and was completely blown away by the beauty and peace and presence of these pristine green mountains. Rising serenely above the freeways and the drab grey industrial towns, they loomed impossibly high, covered in an unbroken blanket of trees. I have never seen the Rocky Mountains, but I cannot imagine them to be any more beautiful than these.

So it wasn't all that difficult for me to imagine what those mountains would look like stripped of their trees, slashed by access roads, with the top third of their height blasted away entirely.



Here in Ontario, where we call our electricity "hydro", we like to pretend that abominations like this have nothing to do with us. But the fact is that 20% of our electricity still comes from coal, and 40% of that coal comes from Appalachia. How much of that comes directly from mountain-top removal no one will say, although it is practised to one extent or another by just about every coal company in the region and is becoming more widespread every day.

Still, asking how much of our electricity comes from MTR coal is kind of like asking how much of your hamburger meat comes from human corpses.

Go. Read. Me, I'm turning off the computer now.

Chalk River: The "Holy F!@#$ing S$#@t!" Edition

This story is starting to take on almost Watergate-like dimensions. Except, you know, on that way smaller, 1/10th Canadian scale.

Yesterday, the Washington Post Globe & Mail ran a story illustrating just how much better and more profitable the world has become for AECL since Linda Keen was replaced by a more... cooperative regulator.

Today the Globe & Mail ran two more stories that pretty much blow the government's spin on Chalk River out of the water, as well as exposing Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn as a lousy, stinking liar.

You really need to read them both.

The first article dispels any remaining notion that any of this ever had anything to do with isotopes or public safety. Even after following this story rather closely over the past few months, this particular section caused my jaw to drop to the floor (emphasis mine):

Ms. Keen's suggestion that her overstretched commission would no longer prioritize prelicensing was seen as obstructionist.

AECL's private-sector partners, including SNC-Lavalin, GE Canada and Hitachi Canada, hired some of the best-connected lobbyists in Ottawa to carry that message forward; other industry members complained directly to the Prime Minister's Office, sources said.

"We've tried to communicate however we could to whomever we could, to make this point," said Patrick Lamarre, president of SNC-Lavalin's nuclear division.

Michael Burns, the B.C.-based wind power executive who Mr. Lunn appointed as chairman of AECL, began to lobby the minister, whom he said he spoke with once a week during his chairmanship, about addressing the problems with Ms. Keen and her commission.

"I told [Mr. Lunn] then the dysfunctional relationship was going to cause serious trouble for commercial operations at the company. I told him we were going to have a train wreck. And I gave him a plan to fix it," Mr. Burns said.

The goal, he said, was to induce the government to legislate an overhaul at the CNSC, including Ms. Keen's position.

Mr. Lunn refused to discuss whether he attempted to push that reform in Ottawa, saying he is "not at liberty to talk about … discussions with cabinet colleagues."

No. Of course he isn't. But since the guy he appointed as chairman claims that Lunn was making a serious effort to bring this suggested overhaul to pass, I think it's pretty safe to assume that such discussions did, in fact, take place. Which means that even then, a government minister was attempting to interfere with the operation of a quasi-judicial tribunal at the behest of a Crown corporation for purely commercial reasons.

Another jaw-dropper is the revelation that the reactor would probably have been allowed to re-start anyway on December 18th, just two days after it actually did. Seems the AECL had screwed up some paperwork justifying a re-start with just one back-up powered pump, which was all the CNSC had asked for to give its approval. If they hadn't screwed up the paperwork (known as a 'safety case'), the reactor could have been re-started as much as a week earlier.

The second article reveals the existence of emails and at least one witness who can prove that Gary Lunn lied to a parliamentary committee when he claimed that he knew nothing about anything until Dec 3rd:

"I sent an e-mail on Nov. 29 or 30 ... which said this is serious, we need to get on this," the source said.

Mr. Lunn took a break from skiing in British Columbia on Dec. 1 to respond to the e-mail, the source said, adding that Mr. Lunn confirmed he "knew it was a situation he needed to work on."

"He certainly knew there was a situation and he was going to get on it Monday morning," the source said. "I assumed in my conversation he had ingested all the data in the [e-mail]. My assumption may be wrong, but when he said to me he'd received my message and acted on it, as far as I could tell he knew everything there was to know."

When confronted with this evidence, Mr. Lunn sputtered, looked around nervously, repeated his claims of ignorance, then suddenly tore off all his clothes and ran screaming into the snow.

And then he exploded.



H/T to Dave, Lord Kitchener's Own, Impolitical, and all you other bastards who found time to blog on this today while I was at work. Hmph.