Editorial : Inflation woes - Thursday 5th May 2011

Source : http://www.dawn.com/2011/05/05/inflation-woes.html


PRICES are surging again. Food became more expensive last month. Energy prices shot up. Healthcare and transportation costs rose. House rents spiked. The common man is worried because his wages are not keeping pace with the swift change in prices. Industry is baffled as its input costs are soaring while its profits are eroding. The central bank is in a bind, not least because it is finding it more difficult to strike a balance between growth and inflation. The government, as always, is confused and doesn`t know where to look for a solu-tion to its plethora of economic troubles. Apart from a short interval, prices have shown a sustained growth in the last three years. The consequences of price inflation are already having an impact on the people and the economy. Poverty levels are rising and low- to middle-income people are forced to cut their spending on food, healthcare and education. Unemployment is spreading.
In a recent report, the Asian Development Bank has warned that the continued rise in prices (in countries like Pakistan) is bound to pull many below the poverty line. Economic uncertainty has increased, dampening investment confidence and slowing growth. Industry is curtailing production and cutting jobs. Experts agree that the price inflation will continue in the months to come owing to both domestic and international factors. Internationally, oil and food prices are escalating. Domestically, the resource-constrained government is forced to raise energy prices to contain its deficit. Also, provincial governments have been unable to check hoarding of various food items, making it difficult for consumers. The situation demands that policymakers formulate an effective strategy to push growth and contain inflation simultaneously. Also, the government must follow the economic and financial reforms agenda to improve its fiscal position and put in place a mechanism to prevent the artificial increase in food prices. The common people are least bothered about the internal and external causes of rising prices or CPI numbers. What they want is price stability and availability of food, energy and transportation at affordable prices. The government must work towards ensuring this.

Editorial : The way forward - Thursday 5th May 2011

Source : http://www.dawn.com/2011/05/05/the-way-forward.html

HAVING failed to capture America’s prime enemy on Pakistani territory while the US launched a unilateral ground and air operation to do so, where do we go from this point? At stake is the future of American and Pakistani cooperation on counter-terrorism. The incident raises several difficult questions about the future of the US-Pakistan relationship as a whole, but it is in this area that the parameters will be most deeply questioned. Will America conduct more unilateral strikes in Pakistan if it has information about high-value targets? Will Pakistan hold back intelligence it might have about targets in the future? Some statements from both sides already indicate that collaboration on counter-terrorism could be threatened. The Foreign Office statement released on Tuesday mentioned “deep concerns and reservations” about the US operation. CIA chief Leon Panetta told the press that Pakistan was kept in the dark about the strike because “they might alert the targets”. The idea that even Bin Laden might have been protected speaks volumes for the level of American mistrust and the negative perception that the Pakistani state has managed to create about its intentions.

In the midst of all this back-and-forth, both sides must remember one thing: we have a common enemy. This was once America’s war, but for several years now it has been waged on Pakistani soil and at the cost of a huge number of Pakistani lives. The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and some other militant groups say they attack the Pakistani state — and kill civilians in the process — because it cooperates with America. It was this very ideology that Bin Laden promoted, seeking retaliation for American interference in the Muslim world through attacks against the US and the Muslim governments who work with it. His second-in-command, Ayman al Zawahiri — who had given calls for jihad against the Pakistani state and the ‘un-Islamic’ politics practised in the country — and other senior members of the group remain at large.
The events of this week cannot be allowed to derail what is a shared goal: to secure both nations from a common threat. The post-Osama world requires a new chapter in counter-terrorism cooperation between the two countries. Fortunately, there is plenty of precedent to build on; on several occasions they have shared intelligence or conducted joint operations that have resulted in the arrests of high-profile terrorists in Pakistan, including Umar Patek as recently as March this year. One hopes that the recent operation was an exception resulting from Bin Laden’s status as Al Qaeda’s leader. Going
forward, cooperation is the only way the two countries will be able to fight the terrorist threat.

Terror of borrowed idioms - Jawed Naqvi - Thursday 5th May 2011

Source : http://www.dawn.com/2011/05/05/terror-of-borrowed-idioms.html


US COMMANDOS had killed the world’s most savage terrorist, exulted the petit TV anchor during a live programme near Delhi. I asked her if Osama bin Laden was more savage for India than Pakistani cleric Hafiz al Saeed, for example, who is accused of planning the ruthless Mumbai massacre of November 2008.
She toned down her screaming after that but the question remains. Why do our media unthinkingly borrow idioms and motifs that do not reflect the reality for their people, including those fighting terrorism in their own way?
For the Sri Lankan government it was Velupillai Prabhakaran who posed the biggest threat to their survival, not the messianic zealot who died in Abbottabad on Sunday. Russia is grimly fighting the well-armed Chechens, usually called rebels, not terrorists, by the western media.
When the Tamil rebel was killed by Sinhalese troops, though not without a dubious annihilation of Tamil civilians, something the world has so far failed to address, young Sinhalese men and women danced in Colombo. And so did the Americans in Time Square and Pennsylvania Avenue on Sunday.
Therefore, give it to the good old British for not threatening the world with the ‘with us or with the enemy’ choice when they had declared the IRA a terrorist organisation. There were Irish Americans at the time together with so many unrelated people across the world that saw in Bobby Sands’ death by fasting a heroic act. No one was denied a British visa for holding that view.
And what was the global war on terror anyway, which we are all supposed to have been a party to? Was it not rooted in a quarrel between two Saudi Muslims of the puritanical Wahabi sect?
Osama bin Laden was a religious man with a mission. After he helped defeat communist atheists in Afghanistan he wanted to rule Saudi Arabia because its rulers were corrupt and not quite as Islamic as he would have liked them to be.
Sadly for him, Riyadh was already ruled by a barbaric system that Bin Laden could have scarcely improved upon. It remains a country after all where convicts are publicly beheaded after Friday prayers, they are flogged, their hands are chopped off, their eyes gouged out. The Indian government recently managed to save a citizen from being thus blinded. But every convict in Riyadh is not as lucky.
The US-led war on terror started by forcing the world to choose between one of two barbaric systems on offer, an idea that was repugnant to most Muslims as it was for the rest of humanity. America’s less than honest support to Saudi rulers will not abate with the death of Osama bin Laden. The Saudi-led and Washington-backed assault on pro-democracy protesters in Bahrain validates the fear.
It is perhaps part of the way big powers conduct their affairs that the US had to lie through the teeth about an imagined calamitous plot that Saddam Hussein was brewing.
It became a ruse to invade and occupy Iraq. Yet the Indian media did not question the idiom. Saddam Hussein was perhaps the only Arab leader who described Kashmir as an integral part of India. If anything, New Delhi should have been grateful to Baghdad for that view. Yet, the Indian government lost no time in turning its back on Saddam. That America conducts the foreign policies of many a country is axiomatic. But India takes the cake in this regard. It broke its 50-year-old aloofness with Riyadh and invited the Saudi king to be its chief guest at its Republic Day celebrations.
However, the monarch refused to abide by a key protocol. He did not go to Mahatma Gandhi’s shrine as that would offend his version of Islam. It must be added here that Pakistan’s former president Gen Pervez Musharraf did not have such qualms when he offered flowers at Gandhi’s shrine in 2001.
That the Indian middle classes loved George W. Bush when the rest of the world had abandoned him was spelled out by the Pew opinion poll.
However, fudging the Indian calendar to make it sound similar to the way Americans read their dates is unnecessarily servile.
TV channels routinely use 9/11 and 26/11 to refer to the dates when the attacks happened in New York and Mumbai respectively. It matters little that the months and the dates were entirely different in the two attacks.
Possibly the most outrageous part of the celebration of Sunday’s killing of Osama bin Laden was the codename assigned to it — Operation Geronimo. How I wish Marlon Brando were alive today to knock some sense into the gung-ho minds of the Obama team.
Geronimo was an Apache Indian hero who was trapped by deceit by western settlers in the late 19th century. He died in virtual captivity after becoming a Christian. Brando, who had fought assiduously on behalf of the American Indian community, would not have hesitated to see the codename as a white supremacist slur. Did President Obama choose it?
The story of Geronimo may unwittingly give more credit to Osama than is his due. Though outnumbered, Geronimo fought against both Mexican and United States troops and became famous for his daring exploits and numerous escapes from capture from 1858 to 1886.
One such escape, as legend has it, took place in the Robledo Mountains of southwest New Mexico. Geronimo and his followers entered a cave, and US soldiers waited outside the cave entrance for him, but he never came out. Later Geronimo was spotted in a nearby area. The second entrance to the cave has yet to be found and the cave is still called Geronimo’s Cave.
Was Geronimo a terrorist? Victors, and in this case the Obama team, can have us believe what they wish.
It is for us to remember that not too long ago, another US president had used ‘terrorist’ for an entirely different mission.
Ronald Reagan went on to subvert the democratically elected regime in Nicaragua as terrorist. Whose turn is it next? Perhaps a certain maverick who uses women guards to protect him in an oil-rich North African country?
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Delay in justice By Kunwar Idris - Thursday 5th May 2011

Source : http://www.dawn.com/2011/05/05/delay-in-justice.html


IN the surge of sympathy for Mukhtar Mai, a thought must be spared for the accused who suffered the rigours of jail for nine years without being found guilty of rape or abetting it.
The real cause of concern in the Mukhtar Mai saga should not be the Supreme Court’s “deeply disappointing” judgment, as the Dawn editorial of April 23 put it, but the horrendous delays in the dispensation of justice (or injustice) in our legal system.
There has been an understandable outpouring of anger over the final acquittal of all but one accused. What is not so clear, however, is the absence of any expression of remorse on the agony suffered by the accused (and their families).
Most comments on the judgment have been unjustifiably harsh or patently unfair, some touching the fringes of contempt.
Particularly regrettable has been the hurried statement of Asma Jahangir, the president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, that appears to imply that the judges had given the decision without weighing the evidence on record.
The US-based Human Rights Watch betrayed both ignorance and bias by observing that the “Supreme Court had repeatedly shown itself quite capable of demanding more evidence and reinvestigation in instances where it served a political purpose”.
This seems to imply public popularity. That purpose would have been better served if the Supreme Court had convicted all the accused.
The same must be said about the comment of the Human Rights Watch that “while Pakistan’s judiciary is now independent, it retains a deeply embedded bias against women in particular and on rights issues in general”. The perception of many within the country is to the contrary.
While the charge of bias against women has no basis, the Supreme Court, and the high courts as well, need to be more vigilant, prompt and sympathetic in enforcing human rights. The petitions for rights take long to be admitted and longer to be heard and decided, if they are at all admitted. For this, some of the blame must be shouldered by the government and the political parties who through their malpractices, corruption and unnecessary references keep the courts preoccupied, and the judges, seemingly, revel in that.
The courts would have much more time to spare for human rights if the government were not to appoint and promote civil servants arbitrarily or, taking another instance, if the legislators were not to conceal their assets and forge their degrees. Now the ruling party has found yet another device to keep the judges of the Supreme Court occupied and enable a larger number of lawyers to earn fees (perhaps from a depleted exchequer) by seeking the court’s opinion on issues related to the hanging of its founder Z.A. Bhutto.
This is unlikely to serve the intended purpose as it may prove difficult to question legal propriety or to impute dishonourable motives to judicial predecessors of more than 30 years ago. Nearly all of them are dead. But no doubt the petition would prolong the uncertainty for more than hundreds of convicts on death row waiting for their more or less final plea for life to be heard and thousands of other citizens waiting for their fundamental rights to be vindicated.
An increasing tendency to approach the apex court for the review of its orders further detracts from the normal responsibilities of the superior judiciary. It can only be hoped that the government and supporters of Mukhtar Mai do not add to the delay by filing review petitions against the order of acquittal. If the facts were to be sifted from the flurry of received wisdom and wishful thinking that characterise the critical comments, there appears to be little ground for such a review.
Dawn, too, fell victim to this ‘received wisdom’ when it argued that “this is no ordinary case … if rape with multiple witnesses and such extensive media coverage goes unpunished, what Pakistani rape victim will try to obtain justice?” The law admits of no distinction between an ordinary or an extraordinary case. The expectation that the accused should have been punished because the crime was widely publicised at home and abroad is preposterous. Further, no court is expected to be “pro-people”. But nor should it be anti-people.
The courts must apply the law with cold reason as the only guide without fear or favour. If not, the whole judicial system at least the highest court of the land should be free not from political meddling alone but also from vested interests, professional lobbies and, more important, street pressures.
Reverting to the point that was made at the beginning of this article what most ails the system of our criminal justice is delay at every stage — in lodging the complaint, in investigation and then in trial, appeals and now also reviews. In this long course, the facts are distorted and in the case of well-known persons, passions or vengeance may come to dominate.
Pakistan’s tribal areas turned restive once the rough-and-ready jirga justice was replaced by complex penal laws and cumbersome procedures. Adjudication that took days and little expense now takes years and costs a fortune without improving the quality of justice. Hence the tribal insurgency. In fact, that fate seems to be befalling the whole country.
kunwaridris@hotmail.com

The Osama phenomenon - I.A Rehman - Thursday 5th May 2011

Source : http://www.dawn.com/2011/05/05/the-osama-phenomenon.html


IT is difficult to believe that the story of Osama bin Laden has ended though his active role in it may have come to an end.
Equally clear is the fact that the circumstances of his extermination pose a new, and fairly serious, challenge to Pakistan.
The wave of jubilation across the US and Europe at Osama’s death is understandable; a large number of people had been convinced that he was mainly responsible not only for 9/11 but also for all the hardships and the erosion of their rights the hunt for him entailed.
Also understandable is the apparent disarray in the pro-Osama camp, which seems to be larger than the Pakistan Taliban, who have vowed vengeance, and the group that answered the Al-Dawah chief’s call for funeral prayers in absentia for Osama in Lahore. Before long the Osama loyalists will resume the pursuit of their leader’s dream of capturing the state of Pakistan.
They are likely to step up their attacks on important Pakistani institutions and personalities. Of this threat the authorities are to some extent aware, as indicated by their routine ‘high alert’ reports. One is not sure of their awareness of the second threat from the Osama followers, namely, a propaganda war aimed at putting the Pakistan government in the dock. The process seems to have already begun.
The controversy over the disposal of Osama’s body is unlikely to end soon. Seemingly innocent questions will be asked, such as whether throwing a corpse in the sea is allowed in Islam and whether the Islamic rites that are claimed to have been performed merited this description. The government of Pakistan will be asked to explain as to why and how the US commandos were allowed/helped to take Osama’s body, and possibly one of his sons, out of its jurisdiction.
Besides, quite a few issues have been raised about the US operation at a place not far from the Kakul Military Academy. The story that Osama’s presence in Bilal Town, near Abbottabad, was not known to any Pakistani agency and that the CIA carried out the final operation without intimation to Pakistani authorities is much too damaging to this country to be allowed currency.
Apart from questions about the breach of sovereign rights, one might ask that if Osama could live near Kakul undetected for years and US helicopters could land in Abbottabad without being challenged, similar acts could be carried out by others determined to hit Pakistan’s vital interests. In the sharply polarised state that Pakistan has become, such questions will be pounced upon by the opposition and it could harry the government without being lambasted as a friend of Al Qaeda.
Thus, pragmatism demanded adoption of an alternative version: that the Pakistani intelligence agencies had found out Osama’s hideout before the Americans did so, that they cooperated with the latter to the extent feasible, but for a variety of reasons they decided that no Pakistani should have Osama’s blood on his hands. While the president and the prime minister took this line and the ISI chief and the Foreign Office did refer to the Americans’ reliance on Pakistani intelligence reports, the official statement released by the Foreign Office on Tuesday carries a muted protest against the US decision to act unilaterally.
Further, the CIA chief has ended all confusion by confirming that Pakistan was neither consulted nor even informed about the Abbottabad raid. He has also rubbed salt in Islamabad’s wounds by declaring that Pakistan could not be trusted with his agency’s secrets. That means all the questions about the breach of Pakistan’s sovereignty and the inefficiency of its intelligence outfits have re-emerged in force.
All these questions could further divide the already fractured Pakistan society and the government should realise the hazards of allowing any prolonged controversy and speculation about the Get Osama operation. It must therefore constitute a high-level commission to probe all matters related to Osama, his hosts for a decade, their success in protecting the world’s topmost fugitive for such a long period, and the circumstances that led to his liquidation. The Osama loyalists are unlikely to accept any commission’s findings, however independently and fairly it may address the matters referred to it. But such findings could at least persuade a sizeable section of the people to stop viewing the matter emotionally.
This is not the time to undertake a detailed assessment of the Osama theory of jihad but the havoc caused by lack of clarity about his objectives is quite clear. According to the most charitable interpretation of his mission, he sought to free the Muslim communities of their oppressive and avaricious rulers by attacking their chief patron. This assumption has been belied everywhere. And, as a perceptive observer has noted, Osama’s followers have had nothing to do with the public awakening in Arab lands.
It is not impossible that history may deny the Osama brand of terrorism any nexus with a lofty undertaking and record only the colossal damage done to the world’s Muslim populations, not only in terms of loss of life, economic opportunities and political standing but also in terms of distortions in their thought processes. However, a sizeable population of Pakistan has fallen under the spell of Osama’s rhetoric and some of his defenders are quite prominent in public life. Therefore the need for a concerted effort to disabuse the youth’s minds is obvious The doctrine of terrorism attributed to Osama is the by-product of an apparently heretical movement, an irrational interpretation of Islam, a distorted view of history and a flawed strategy for Muslim people’s revival. The assumptions used by Osama and his associates to recruit dynamic elements should have been countered years ago. A heavy cost has already been paid for neglecting this task and relying on force alone for fighting terrorism.
Unfortunately, Pakistan has allowed the religious discourse to be dominated by extremely conservative elements who do not hesitate to bend the scriptures to suit their ends that are as un-Islamic as they are inhuman. This unforgivable policy must be replaced with a coordinated effort to free Pakistan of its bondage to the concept of a restrictive, illiberal and violent Islam. No such effort can begin unless Pakistan’s politicians stop building their power bases on the debris of an open, humane and tolerant faith.
Osama may be dead but the seeds of violence sown by him will take a long time to be gorged out of the Pakistani people’s mindset.

The injustice of rape By Razeshta Sethna - Thursday 5th May 2011

Source : http://www.dawn.com/2011/05/05/the-injustice-of-rape.html


GOING by the charged reaction to the Mukhtar Mai verdict, it is clear that loopholes in the investigation mechanism and the law need to be fixed. Women victims of violence in Pakistan do not find redress whether through the courts or the country’s policing and investigation apparatus.
The police refuse the mandatory registering of cases, and incomplete evidence-gathering through a weak investigation process results in judicial irregularities. It doesn’t take the Mukhtar Mai case alone to show how or even why women are dealt poor cards.
The acquittal of five of the six accused of gang-rape was not simply because an SC bench ruled against Mukhtar Mai for reasons circulated (some suggesting the incident was fabricated; that her testimony alone was unacceptable) but because investigating authorities and lawmakers were lax, ill-equipped, unable to produce DNA and semen tests which should be used as required evidence in rape cases.
Her case goes back to 2002, when she was gang-raped on the orders of the local panchayat as punishment for her 12-year old brother’s alleged illicit liaison with an older woman from the powerful Mastoi tribe. Fourteen men were initially charged, an anti-terrorist court sentenced six to death; and in 2005 the Lahore High Court overruled the judgment acquitting five, and commuted the sentence of the main accused to life imprisonment.
Omission of key evidence is negligence, say social justice crusaders as the SC ruling becomes cause for debate, with the press weighing the decision on their own turf without exercising restraint: a talk show host even set up ‘court’ for the slotted one hour cross-examining Mukhtar Mai on the ‘witness stand’ not as a victim but as a ‘shamed woman’.
Is the sensitive issue of rape understood as a crime with enormous psychological scars inflicted on the survivor aside from grievous bodily harm, scars remaining for a long time? In a country with misogynist politico-legal institutions rape shield laws could benefit women victims.
They are statutes (in the US and Europe) prohibiting evidence about a victim’s character history, repute or past conduct
during a trial, making it easier to report the crime. When Mukhtar Mai decided to make her rape case known publicly, believing that justice would take its course, she was prepared to accept the court’s judgment but given the alleged accusations of ‘a fictitious gang-rape’, her case has highlighted that justice for women is perhaps impossible under the current scenario.
Two opposing schools of thought have emerged after the judgment. Criticised furiously, the decision to release the alleged perpetrators could in the future not only impact other such rulings setting a dangerous precedent. Because the state did not provide a watertight prosecution as was the case in 2005 due to the lack of independent evidence gathering, the SC bench had no choice: the flipside was keeping five men in jail for nearly a decade without evidence.
Justice Nasir-ul-Mulk’s dissent judgment believes Mukhtar Mai’s testimony because the fundamental statement in any rape case is of the victim constituting as important evidence. But in Pakistan the inefficient criminal justice system, the patriarchal mindset of the police and judiciary and the lack of sufficient medico-legal facilities frighten victims.
Justice Nasir-ul-Mulk’s statement concurs that the jirga played a role in the rape and four persons facilitated and assisted the main accused but doesn’t find sufficient evidence to stamp the charge of gang-rape on the accused. Jirgas cannot be allowed to arbitrarily punish in the form of watta satta marriages and gang-rape to settle disputes without being answerable to the law.
In a Pakistani court of law, the burden of proof is on the woman victim. “The high court … erred in holding that the delay in lodging of [an] FIR is fatal to… corroboration. The court had overlooked that there was corroboration of the complainant’s testimony,” the judge explains. Mukhtar Mai’s statement was not adequately recorded by the police nor have courts taken the statement as evidence. There were no sperm tests or DNA tests done to corroborate her version.
In 2010, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan stated that according to police reports 2,903 women were raped. Eight women were raped everyday, including at least 51 gang-rape cases. The prospect of sitting in a police station and then a courtroom in Pakistan especially is enough to deter many women from bringing their cases forward.
Portrayed as ‘immoral’ and party to the crime even her testimony at the case registration stage is botched and later her ability to identify her rapist (s) in court lead to character insinuations often by the police, media and even politicians. Historically the act of rape is about wielding power, about punishing women and morally condemning them and this takes on an uglier face in patriarchal societies.
Circumstantial evidence is not admissible. However, unrepressed tolerance of women’s rights is expected from the superior judiciary when the crime reads heinous bodily harm. Why is it recurrent that often the legal paraphernalia silently expresses visible negation of the victim and her fate? Most importantly, protecting women legally has failed in Pakistan.
The Federal Shariat Court ruled that the Women’s Protection Act, 2006 was unconstitutional because it sought to amend the Zina and Hudood Ordinances so that rape is not a confession of adultery.
There’s a fallacy that regular evidence (medical examination, the victim’s testimony) is not permissible in zina and rape trials.
Because zina remains an offence there is a risk that a victim reporting rape could be charged with zina. With the new amendments the procedure for a complaint is stricter ensuring that those making an accusation of rape cannot be tried falsely for adultery.
The Mukhtar Mai case will silence many women. It has become a symbol of everything that is wrong with Pakistan. Not because the Supreme Court has failed but because the entire mindset we live with has failed to understand what it entails to protect women and their rights.
The writer is senior assistant editor at Herald.
razeshtas@gmail.com

Canada’s cold new dawn By Heather Mallick - Thursday 5th May 2011

Source : http://www.dawn.com/2011/05/05/canadas-cold-new-dawn.html


CANADA woke up to an election shock recently. It was a self-inflicted jolt. After three minority governments in seven years, a man of the hard right named Stephen Harper finally has his win.
He triumphed over Michael Ignatieff who had returned to Canada to lead the Liberals, often described as the country’s traditional party of government. Instead, Ignatieff got whacked, and the left-leaning New Democratic party did very well indeed. The Liberals were humiliated, the New Democrats came in a powerful second and a Canadian version of George W.
Bush, minus the warmth and intellect, is now prime minister.
What happens now is the full-scale Americanisation of Canada, hinted at over the past seven years by Harper — he fired people who talked too loudly about this — but not acted upon because Canadians have always valued their distinctiveness from the angry country in decline south of the border.
It doesn’t win votes to say you want to de-Canadianise Canada, long known as a bastion of free healthcare, destination of refugees and immigrants, and a place that worries about climate change. But Harper once sneeringly referred to Canada as a typical northern European ‘welfare state’. He grew up in Calgary, Alberta, a western province that has long felt sneered at, and has spent his political career redressing the balance.
Harper’s Conservatives will pass an omnibus law and order bill within 100 days to make jail sentences mandatory for many offences, and begin building super-jails, copying a system that even its authors, the Americans, have begun to abandon. The huge purchase of fighter jets from Lockheed Martin, which was an election issue, will now go ahead — Harper says it will cost $9bn, government auditors say $39bn — as will massive military shipbuilding.
The Evangelist Christian right is at the heart of Harper’s Conservative party, and after years of being shushed, it will now demand an end to a number of things, including abortion rights. Canada has no law against abortions, and they are available free.
Corporate taxes will be cut almost immediately, Bush-style. Political financing laws will change — parties now get money for each vote — but this will end under the Conservatives, who will have a huge advantage in terms of the amount they can solicit in corporate donations.
Harper himself is a famously strange man. Humourless and awkward in gait, he was once photographed shaking hands with one of his own children. This will be on full display in the summer as William and Kate undertake their first royal tour, of Canada. Harper has picked the dullest bits of the country because they are the parts he doesn’t hate. You will see the royals in places where everyone goes to bed at 6:30. You will see Harper’s wife look glum while William and Kate smile gamely.
And what of Ignatieff’s defeat? Canada comprises cities separated by vast distances. It is a real achievement to lose the cities, and Ignatieff managed it. Again we feel the influence of Bush: the modern excoriation of intellect scared Ignatieff and he began droppin’ his g’s and decrying all that was “partisan” — which is American for believing in something.
The triumph of Harper’s Conservatives is a revolution in Canada. Grumpy old men are happy but modernists, women, young people, immigrants, people fond of evidence-based policy will be much less so. It’s the beginning of a kind of war, conducted in a dull, quietly agonising way. — The Guardian, London