By John Klein (aka Saskboy):

We’ve had a few days of no new news reported in the robocalls criminal investigation. The story yesterday on the CBC website, while factual, does make one claim that is disputable.

With the public paper trail cold for almost two months, there’s still little that’s certain in the Elections Canada investigation[...]

Alison’s preemptive retort says it best:

The trail is not so much ‘cold’ as overwhelming.

No, the main story is :

Why did someone in the Guelph Con campaign – who would normally call RackNine to set up legit campaign robocalls directly via their Rogers IP- feel the need to use a proxy server to hide their ID at all?

There are the facts CBC presents, and there are the obvious deductions to make from them. Those deductions should have led to charges being laid, and/or a Royal Commission to be called into how Elections Canada could bungle and delay this investigation so badly that a random Canadian in Regina with an IT background could stay ahead of their progress to a certain extent. How well do you think the perpetrators feel knowing they’ve had a year to cover their tracks, and let evidence like the Shoppers Drug Mart tapes be destroyed?

CBC also left off this big fact (as reported in newspapers):

Why is one of the three CIMS reports downloaded by Andrew Prescott – phone numbers identifying supporters and non-supporters – now missing from CIMS?

That fact points to a cover-up, because the CPC haven’t claimed their system security was violated, and that sort of log doesn’t just go missing. The person at a local campaign who downloaded the phone numbers would not have had the system permissions to remove the log for what they did at CPC HQ’s database. A co-conspirator is at large, (more likely, many of them, in many ridings too) and the media isn’t talking about them because Elections Canada hasn’t revealed any details (or the media hasn’t uncovered them in courts) yet. Since it’s taking EC’s Mathews more than a year to gather evidence for fraud in one riding, if we assume little overlap in the people conducting crimes in 200 ridings, it should only take 100 years to finish investigating so we can get on with trials. (EC added a second investigator, Lamothe, sometime in the last couple months.)

Justice Delayed, is Justice Denied. You’re being denied justice.

For more facts, including recordings and documents revealed so far in the investigation, check out my list. If you know of documents related to this election fraud not yet listed, please leave a comment with a link.

OK. So I was wrong.

When Christy Clark became the latest Con stooge to denounce Thomas Mulcair,  for simply pointing out that the Dutch Disease is killing our manufacturing sector, I said it could only mean one thing.

Big Oil and its Con puppets were scraping the bottom of the barrel.

But I forgot I was living in the sinister petro state of Harperland.

Where the bottom of the dirty oil barrel goes all the way to China.

And I forgot about the Con Senate, and particularly Pamela Wailin’ . . .

“This is a cheap political ploy to pit eastern citizens against those in the West. Will Mulcair next attack the lentil business, the wheat and grain producers who have long fed the world — or perhaps the potash industry that allows the poor to bolster their depleted farmland in overpopulated areas?

“It’s time for Mulcair to act like a Canadian.”

And that like the Con turkey Mike Duffy, Wallin is capable of saying ANYTHING.

I mean can you believe that? As if Big Lentil is as dangerous as Big Oil. As if Mulcair wasn’t right. As if telling the truth was a crime.

These diatribes against anyone who even acknowledges potential downsides or side effects of the bitumen boom seem to herald a new, dangerous tendency in Canada’s political culture. Opposing a bitumen-exporting pipeline in Canada these days makes you a foreign-financed subversive. And it seems that questioning the economic effects of the bitumen export strategy makes you equally seditious. I call this “energy McCarthyism,” and it should be rejected forcefully not just by those concerned with Canada’s de-industrialization and staples dependency, but by those worried about the quality of our democracy.

As if those Cons weren’t selling us out to foreign interests. As if Albertans haven’t been screaming at those damn Easterners for 40 years over the National Energy Program. Which did to Alberta what Harper’s oil pimp policies are doing to the rest of Canada.

Which explains why the Cons and the other Big Oil stooges are attacking Mulcair like piranhas. They know a killer issue when they see one. But why is Stephane Dion joining in the feeding frenzy?

Stéphane Dion, the former Liberal leader, says he turned down a proposal from advisors to accuse Prime Minister Stephen Harper of favouring Alberta and the oil sands industry during the 2008 election campaign because he feared it would harm national unity.

He said Mr. Mulcair is effectively “giving up” on much of Western Canada and, if he forms a government in 2015, risks having little or no representation from provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan in his Cabinet.

Oh boy. When will he ever learn…

What Thomas Mulcair understands so well. He doesn’t have to win any seats in Alberta or Saskatchewan. All he has to do is win most of the seats in Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec, and he will BURY the Cons in the Tar Sands.

Which is one of the reasons he’s looking like a winner, and thanks to people like Stephane Dion, the Liberals are going nowhere.

Liberal support in Canada is steadily slipping as the New Democrats and Tories continue to battle for the top spot, the results of an exclusive poll for Global News indicate.

While the Grits may say that their troubles lie in finding the right candidate to lead the party, Ipsos Reid’s Darrell Bricker suggests the party may be losing a distinct voice in the political arena.

“The problem they’ve got is that they’re having a hard time finding their place in a debate about economic issues,” Bricker told Global News.

Yup. Mulcair is ruthless, the kind of leader these times demand. 

He has found a mighty issue, the truth is on his side. That’s why the Cons are running scared.

For 40 years Alberta used regional alienation like a blunt weapon.

Now it’s our turn . . .

Despite Wednesday’s somewhat dampening headline, Pierre Poutine robocalls trail goes cold in Saskatchewan, the main story here is not that Elections Canada’s Al Mathews was unable to secure phone records from a proxy server company in Saskatchewan a whole freakin year after the fraudulent election calls were made.

No, the main story is:

Why did someone in the Guelph Con campaign — who would normally call RackNine to set up legit campaign robocalls directly via their Rogers IP — feel the need to use a proxy server to hide their ID at all?

Why did Guelph and Poutine both use the proxy server IP and the Rogers IP from the same computer to call RackNine for two days prior to the election?

Why did Guelph and Poutine both call RackNine from the same IP address via that proxy server exactly four minutes apart at four a.m. in the morning on election day? First Poutine, then Guelph deputy campaign manager Andrew Prescott.

Why is one of the three Constituency Information Management System reports downloaded by Andrew Prescott — phone numbers identifying supporters and non-supporters — now missing from the CIMS?

How did Poutine manage to crack the Guelph CIMS database in order to upload a list of 6,738 phone numbers to RackNine to send voters to the wrong polling stations?

And the biggie: Is Prescott, who has cancelled further interviews with Elections Canada, “Poutine” or is he being framed or is he merely the tip of a previously unsuspected and ongoing elections fraud iceberg in 200 ridings across Canada?

And so on and so on. The trail is not so much “cold” as overwhelming.

A Tale of a Boy and his TV Show is doing a breakdown of the RoboCon stories one by one. Good resource.

Uh oh. It  looks like my Quebec student’s victory celebration party, from which I’m still recovering, was a little premature.

Students in a half dozen colleges and 10 university faculties and departments voted to reject the agreement on Monday after the Charest government boasted of having won the battle. Students at other schools are set to vote on the deal throughout the week, but the trend is clearly running against it.

So premature in fact that when I return to Montreal, after having praised this “deal” as a decent “compromise” in a post the other night, I’m going to have to wear a mask or a hoodie. So some of my friends don’t recognize me and beat me up. Or at the very least call me a fool.

But hey, how did I know that the Quebec Liberals would cheat?

After weathering criticism from members on the weekend, student leaders claimed Monday the agreement they signed was not a true reflection of the 22-hour-discussions held Friday night to Saturday afternoon in Quebec City.

They also accused Premier Charest and Line Beauchamp, the Education Minister, of gloating the government had not conceded on the tuition increases.

How did I know that I couldn’t trust the Education Minister?

How could I ever have imagined that the pathetic ex-Con Jean Charest would strut around like a barnyard rooster, crowing about how he had put the province’s students in their place, in a desperate attempt to try to take the spotlight off his corrupt government?

The big man. The big chicken . . .

Oh well. One day I’ll learn to lead with my head instead of my heart.The good news is that the Quebec students are showing amazing strength and solidarity, even if many of them face losing the whole semester.

Helping Canadians understand that there are better models …

Under the more sensible Scandinavian approach — banned under the business dogma that dominates here — the tax and transfer system helps citizens move through the stages of their lives.

Education is paid for by those in the workforce whose retirement will later be paid for by the students whose education they paid for. Over the life cycle, it all works out. Everybody contributes when they’re working, and gets a hand at the beginning and end of their lives.

Better models than the Made in America one, or the horror of Harper’s jungle.

The savage state or l’état sauvage . . .

And the bad news? The savage state is going to try to crush them.

Because Jean Charest dreams of winning an election, on the backs of the young.

Here’s to the Quebec students.

May their strong but gentle spirit never be broken…

Baird says Iran could build nuclear bomb within months screams the CBC headline over Evan Solomon interviewing John Baird under a giant picture of visiting Israel PM Shimon Peres.

Fans of the Iran got nukes! cry-wolf sweepstakes will recall both Peres and Netanyahu predicted in 1992 that Iran would have nuclear warheads by 1999, 1992 also being the year a former Mossad official advised “Iran has to be identified as Enemy No.1.”

“Remember,” said former IDF Chief of Strategic Planning Shlomo Brom in 2004 (page 167):

“the Iranians are always five to seven years from the bomb. Time passes but they’re always five to seven years from the bomb.”

Juan Cole lists his top four Iran got nukes! predictions in the 90′s from a longer list at Christian Science Monitor, which notes that the alarums predate the 1979 Islamic revolution to a time when the US, Germany, and France were selling 20 nuclear reactors to Iran.

Wide Asleep in America has a more extensive list beginning in 1984.

Boris : “Baird also won’t talk about why Iran might want to develop a threshold capacity for nuclear weapons for regional strategic reasons.”

Let’s go to the map, shall we?

The Gitga’at Nation of Hartley Bay, B.C. has reported an oil spill, between two and five miles long and 200 feet wide inside the Grenville Channel, not far from the proposed tanker route for the Enbridge Gateway pipeline.

According to a media release, the spill, believed to be from a sunken munitions ship, was spotted by a commercial pilot and reported to the Gitga’at Nation and the Canadian Coast Guard on Tuesday evening.

“If this spill is as big as the pilots are reporting, then we’re looking at serious environmental impacts, including threats to our traditional shellfish harvesting areas,” says Arnold Clifton, Chief Councillor of the Gitga’at Nation. “We need an immediate and full clean-up response from the federal government ASAP.”

Heavy oil is thought to be leaking from the USAT Brigadier General M.G. Zalinski, a U.S. army transport ship that sank in 1946 with 700 tons of bunker fuel on board. According to the Gitga’at, the Canadian government first promised to remove the oil and munitions from the ship in 2006, but has not followed through.

“This incident definitely raises questions about the federal government’s ability to guard against oil spills and to honour its clean-up obligations,” says Clifton. “As a result, our nation has serious concerns about any proposal to have tankers travel through our coastal waters, including the Enbridge proposal.”

The Conservative government recently introduced legislation that would give the federal cabinet final decision-making power over projects like the Northern Gateway Pipeline, including the authority to overturn decisions by the National Energy Board.

- Zeff Davies

It’s reached a point where I almost can’t bear to read or watch any MSM coverage of the Quebec student strike.

Because all I usually see is a bunch of kooky old right-wing pundits flapping their gums, or hissing like kettles. Like the grotesque Con dwarf Rex Murphy.

Who should have been locked in a padded cell, or a broom closet, for writing such fascist tripe.

So I thought I should straighten him and the others out by pointing out some other facts:

(1) The students staged massive peaceful marches for weeks, but the Charest government refused to even talk to them. Even as many of them were being arrested for no good reason.

(2) The government only changed its tune when student anger reached a boiling point, and a handful of the usual suspects broke a few windows. And only so the Quebec Liberals could pose as champions of law and order, to try to make people forget that they are one of the most criminally corrupt governments in modern Canadian history.

(3) The battle to keep university education affordable has been going on for more than forty years, since the days of the Quiet Revolution. And is one of the things that makes Quebec a distinct society.

“[University of Montreal political science professor Pierre] Martin sees the conflict linked to an unrealized promise of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution of the 1960s: free post-secondary tuition.’That’s the norm that people compare themselves to and that’s part of the reason tuition fees remained so low in Quebec for such a long time, because whenever the thought of raising them came to public debate, it was not in the minds of most people.’”

(4) Those who ask why Quebec students should complain, when their tuition fees are the lowest in the Canada, should really be asking themselves: Why are tuition fees so high in the rest of the country? Or why isn’t tuition FREE as it is in Scotland?

Because education is a right. We need educated citizens more than we need tanks and war planes. And the kind of society you live in depends on your PRIORITIES.

(5) If the strike and the massive marches have become more than just about education . . .

“How is it that so many people are so worked up about a relatively minor increase in tuition fees? In spending time talking to protesters, one thing becomes clear. This movement, if it ever was, is no longer just about tuition . . .

“‘The issue is bigger than tuition fees,’ [says one protestor]. ‘It is a question of re-establishing democracy. There is no democracy. We are closer to totalitarianism. Decisions are made without listening to the people.’”

. . . So much the better. For we will NEVER change the world by sitting on our asses. And I only wish that we could get 200-thousand people into the street to protest against the way the Harper regime is raping our democracy and our values.

But getting Canadians off their couches is harder than raising the dead. So I don’t just support the Quebec students, I’m grateful to them for showing us the way to resist.

And for giving younger Canadians role models like the leader of CLASSE, the largest student group, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois . . .

“In a speech this month, Mr. Nadeau-Dubois said the students are battling the same ‘elite’ that lays off workers at Aveos aircraft maintenance and Rio Tinto mines, and that prevents Couche-Tard convenience-store workers from unionizing.

“‘Those people are a single elite, a greedy elite, a corrupt elite, a vulgar elite, an elite that only sees education as an investment in human capital, that only sees a tree as a piece of paper and only sees a child as a future employee,’ he said.”

Who is my kind of hero.

Yup. Marching for a better world.

Shining like a light in the grubby darkness of Harperland.

Never giving up. On lâche rien.

Go students GO…

Gawd. What a horrible way to begin my day.

All I could think of was Stephen “Woody” Woodworth polishing his big teeth, and preparing for his big day.

Even my egg started to look like him, and I hardly dared boil it, in case it should hatch. For who knows when life begins eh?

But that’s OK. Because when I checked on Woody this evening, he had egg all over his face.

Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth’s motion proposing that a parliamentary committee study the legal definition of when life begins got zero support from MPs who debated it Thursday.

And to make matters even worse better, he was being whipped with a wet egg noodle by the gorilla from the military industrial complex Gordon O’Connor!!!!!

O’Connor said abortion is a serious decision for women to make and he wants all women to continue to live in a society where they can make that decision “without the threat of legal consequences.”

Although it must be said that old Gordo was clearly reading a speech written for him by the sinister thugs in the PMO. Because in all my years of watching Stephen Harper I’ve never seen him look so pale. Or sound so ridiculous.

The prime minister said party leaders do not have control over the motions introduced by MPs and that it’s “unfortunate” an all-party committee decided the motion is eligible for a vote.

He’s obviously still devastated by what happened to his beloved Wild Hog Party in Alberta. He offered his rabid base a bone, Woody bit him with his big teeth. So now he running scared, and wants to be known as a woman’s best friend.

Right.

Oh well. The struggle continues.

But the important thing is that today we WON. A lot of angry women, and their male allies, made sure the politicians heard their message. Women’s bodies are women’s bodies. And the days of shame and coat hangers are OVER.

So hooray for US!!!!!!!

As for old Woody, I can only imagine how he is feeling eh? Gordon, Gordon, et tu Brutus? Vic, Jason, hug me. WAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!

Lordy. I’d play “I am the Egg Man” if I thought it would cheer the old geezer up.

But since he believes that life begins at conception. Or somewhere between the cock-a-doodle doo and the egg.

I’m sure he’d prefer this one . . .

As a follow up to my earlier chart showing Steve’s Margin of Victory in ridings with the closest vote margins, I’ve adjusted it to include only the seven being contested in court for voter fraud and added two columns of polling data from an EKOS research paper based on a recent phone survey of 4797 voters. It compares 106 ridings where there were no reports of suspicious activity to the seven ridings where there was a lot — election phone calls made to voters to identify who they intended to vote for followed up by a call falsely telling them their polling station had moved.

Only one of them — Vancouver Island North — had an actual polling station change.

So according to the Ekos poll, if you lived in Winnipeg South Centre, for example, where the Cons took the riding by only 1.8% of the vote, you had a 71% chance of getting a phone call asking you who you were going to vote for. And if you subsequently got a follow-up call regarding polling stations, you had a 30% chance of being told your polling station had changed even though it hadn’t.

If however you lived in one of the 106 other ridings used as a control group, you had a 44% chance of being asked your voting intention and only a 14.7% chance of later being given false polling station info.

From the Council of Canadians, who commissioned the EKOS poll and are supporting the court actions, come these other key findings:

• 16.9% of eligible voters received calls related to polling stations. Of those, 22.3% were told of polling station location changes (amounting to 3.77% of eligible voters).
• Of those who were told of polling station changes, the voter intentions were as follows: Liberals 32.6%, Greens 28%, NDP 25.6%, and Conservatives 10%.
• 42.5% of eligible voters who received calls related to polling stations had a call claiming to be from Elections Canada.

And I can already feel a chilly if friendly wind blowing from the infinitely more rigorous Alice Funke at Pundits’ Guide, who would never mix up apples and hand grenades like this in the same chart (ie., adding a polling sample onto Elections Canada Official Voting Results).

But if the EKOS poll is accurate, then up to 15% of the vote in those seven closest vote margin ridings — some 50,000 people — received phone calls deliberately intended to suppress the non-Steve vote.

Margin of victory riding data from Elections Canada Official Voting Results Table 12.

Last two columns in chart taken from data in EKOS Study

By Frank Moher

I’ll leave it to others to dissect why the PC’s ended up trouncing Wildrose in Alberta, despite all the polls and predictions. What interests me is what this portends for Stephen Harper and company.

Whether by happenstance or design, Wildrose leader Danielle Smith is a near-clone of Harper (except for her much-remarked upon charisma, which the Prime Minister is in no danger of catching). She is a field-operative for big-business, especially the oil companies, and for the Calgary School of economics, and its crash-diet approach to government. And she is a pragmatist who has separated out her party’s fiscal and social conservatism and placed the latter off to the side, where she hopes, bozo eruptions notwithstanding, it will be forgotten. It’s the latter which is a relatively new phenomenon in Canadian conservatism — this newfound recognition that separation of state and church might be a good idea after all, albeit it for strategic, not principled, reasons — and which makes her resemblance to her older sibling in Ottawa all the more striking.

And Albertans, of all people, have rejected her. Yes, I know she won her riding and led Wildrose to a total of 17 seats, up 13 from what they had before. But when an electorate turns on a party the way this one did in the last week of the campaign (and perhaps even in the last hours — it wasn’t until a Forum poll emerged on Sunday night, showing Wildrose down four points and the PCs up three, that we began to get an inkling of what might happen), then that electorate is sending a clear message: we have given you sober second consideration, and found you wanting. Sorry.

The big question is, of course, why they did so. Much emphasis will be placed on the bozo eruptions (which we chronicled here and here, while drawing attention to a longstanding one here), and on strategic voting (otherwise know as “anyone but the Wildrose Party.”) But if the results indicate, withal, a general exhaustion with Canada’s far right, it could spell a wider problem for non-progressive conservatives right across the country. Canadians have had a chance to take their measure, and increasingly, we don’t like what we see. Certainly where I live, in British Columbia, the Harper government grows more unpopular by the day, both for its aggressive pursuit of the Enbridge Pipeline and its ties to the even more unpopular provincial Liberal party. Torontonians look shamefacedly away from the ongoing bozo eruption in their Mayor’s office (and longingly towards, yes, Calgary, with its shiny, cosmopolitan Mayor). Quebeckers, of course, took Mr. Harper’s measure long ago. That’s what makes him so vulnerable to disaffection elsewhere — unlike most previous Prime Ministers, he doesn’t have Quebec to fall back on.

And so, as Warren Kinsella put it last night, “A hole has been kicked in a wall at 24 Sussex.” Or if it wasn’t, it should have been. The NDP are tied with the Conservatives in national support, even without Jack; indeed, much of their strength has to do with Thomas Mulcair’s strong showing out of the gate. Of course, all honeymoons eventually end. But as Stephen Harper looks to Alberta today and wonders, along with his fellow travellers, just what went wrong, he might also wonder how best to reconstruct his party to look quite a bit less like Wildrose than it does now. Because if Albertans are no longer buying what the far right is selling, what are the chances anyone else will?