[BRIEF NOTE] Me on Federal Politics

There appears to have been some confusion about my earlier post about my hope for an election some time this year. Let me clarify.

Let's be honest: The Liberals are corrupt. We all know that. We also know that, wild rumours aside, it isn't P-2/Vatican Bank-style corruption by any means. Rather, it's more like Prince Edward Island-style corruption: excessively generous, highly personalized, motivated by short-term thinking. I've no doubt whatsoever that the Conservatives wouldn't be equally corrupt if they were elected to form the federal government. Likely they are already, inasmuch as Conservative MPs are situated in patronage networks, just like their Bloc Québécois counterparts, perhaps even like their NDP counterparts.

Patronage is a fact of Canadian politics, and shouldn't be unduly penalized. Parties caught red-handed should be scared, though. What better way to do this than to have a tight-fought election? Yes, people might raise the spectre of Canada's 1993 federal election, when the old Tories' share of the vote dropped by more than half and the Liberal vote rose by a quarter and the Tories got annihilated thanks to Canada's lack of proportional representation. The election occurred after eight years of government by the exceptionally unpopular prime minister Brian Mulroney, though, and in the context of an outraged population wanting to get the Tories good.

That sort of intense anger, broadly distributed, just doesn't exist towards the Liberals. All of the opinion polls suggest that the Liberals haven't suffered nearly as much of a collapse in popularity as the post-Mulroney Tories; in fact, the Liberals seem to have a lead over the new Conservatives. Plenty of things can still happen, but the Conservatives are still weaker than the Liberals, lacking that much of a foothold east of Manitoba and depending on their alliance with the Bloc to threaten the Liberals. A Conservative-Bloc coalition government might manage to do a lot of damage to Canada, but given how the only policies these two parties--the one rather right-wing, the other somewhat left-wing--could agree on would involve radical decentralization, they would only accelerate Canada's shift towards a federation rather less well-integrated than the European Union.

Thoughts?

UPDATE (8:50 PM) : autopope has very interesting thoughts indeed.

[NON BLOG] Bonne fête à toi ...

Happy birthday wishes go out to eclips1st. Similar though belated greetings also go out to mortonofski. If there's anyone I've forgotten, please comment here and I'll add you to the list.

[BRIEF NOTE] How (Some) Religion Links Sex and Death

While reading Dan Savage's most recent column in Now, my attention was caught by three paragraphs.

Researchers have been hard at work on two vaccines for HPV, vaccines that could save thousands of women's lives. In clinical trials the vaccines have prevented 90 percent of new HPV infections. Good news, huh? Not for the religious right. Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told New Scientist magazine that "giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex."

While the religious right's war on gay people gets all the headlines, their war on straight rights gains ground daily. They've destroyed sex education in this country, undermined abortion rights, and successfully prevented emergency contraception from being made available over the counter. Now they're going to block the HPV vaccine. Why? Because the American Taliban would rather see sexually active women dead than vaccinated.

Hello, straight people? If you don't want to live in a world where you need a license from the likes of Bridget Maher to have sex, premarital or otherwise, you had better start speaking up. Most of you seem content to merely rubberneck while gay people have the shit kicked out of us, and while that's maddening, I suppose it's understandable. It's not your fight. But what explains your passivity when your own rights are being attacked?

This, alas, fits into a long tradition of religious conservatives deciding that nothing should be done to save the sexually impure from death. This is a global phenomenon, of course, not limited to Christendom. Compare Iran, if you will, and Iranian officialdom's ambivalence towards serial killer Saeed Hanaei. He killed sixteen prostitutes, true; but didn't they deserve it?

Hanaei confessed to the killings, smiled for news photographers and proudly told the court that he was fighting a crusade against moral corruption and vice. He and his lawyer cited an ambiguous provision in Iranian and Islamic law that refers to sinners as a "waste of blood", arguing that Hanaei deserved lenient treatment.

The case provoked a debate between reformers who condemned the authorities for failing to catch him earlier and some conservatives who shared the killer's disgust with a rise in prostitution.

"Who is to be judged?" wrote the conservative newspaper Jomhuri Islami. "Those who look to eradicate the sickness or those who stand at the root of the corruption?" Such sentiments are expressed by the killer's merchant friends at the Mashhad bazaar, one of whom says with a laugh: "He did the right thing. He should have continued."

The argument over the spider killings represented a kind of microcosm of a wider battle still being waged in Iran over the proper role of Islam in society. Reformists in parliament and government have tried to push for a relaxation of the country's theocratic system, advocating what they call a "democratic interpretation of Islam". Their opponents fear the reformists will only undermine Islam and open the floodgates to secular, western influences.

The most disturbing defence of Hanaei comes from his own 14-year-old son, Ali, who says his father was cleansing the Islamic republic of the "corrupt of the Earth". "If they kill him tomorrow, dozens will replace him," Ali says. "Since his arrest, 10 or 20 people have asked me to continue what my Dad was doing. I say, 'Let's wait and see.' "

On the good news front, the Bush Administration has backed off on requirements that groups receiving funding for anti-AIDS programs issue a blanket condemnation of all prostitution, regardless of the contexts of specific situations.

It's nice to know that the murderous religious bigots don't have a complete stranglehold on the current government of Canada's great southern neighbour, not least because (continuing yesterday's theme) what we fear in the Other is often what we see around ourselves. I doubt that Robert Pickton wouldn't have gotten away with killing so many dozens of prostitutes if my fellow Canadians in Vancouver had actually cared about all those (marginal, often drug-addicted, disproportionately First Nations) women disappearing off of their city's shining streets. We Canadians (and Iranians, and doubtless every other national population in the world) have enough problems with empathy for the impure already. Surely we don't need more foreign examples of criminal apathy and contempt to let us feel unjustly morally superior?

[LINK] Restorative Justice in the Fijian Context

Over at the Head Heeb, one of Jonathan Edelstein's many worthwhile recent posts concerns Fiji, where, in the aftermath of a coup attempt aimed against that country's large Indian population, an amnesty has been declared so as to avoid further tumult in the Fijian tradition. Unfortunately, the proponents of this amnesty forgot to consult the Indian victims.

[MUSIC] Feist, Let It Die

I've been listening to Feist's album Let It Die quite a lot lately.

Feist--the stage name of the musician Leslie Feist, noted until recently for her membership of the group Broken Social Scene--recorded her second album in Paris, collaborating with leading French musicians and drawing upon French chanson and jazz and indie rock. The album was first released in France, only later making its way across the Atlantic to Canada. Last year, Now gave Let It Die an ecstatic review. This year, Let It Die won the New Artist of the Year and Best Alternative Album prizes at the Juno Awards, the Canadian equivalent to the United States' Grammys.

Her soft supple voice works wonderfully with her varied arrangements. I'm fond of the gentle and gleeful humour of Mushaboom and its lyrics ("in the meantime I've got it hard/Second floor living without a yard/It may be years until the day/my dreams will match up with my pay"), the romance of the shuffling title track ("Let it die and get out of my mind/We don't see eye to eye or hear ear to ear./Don't you wish that we could forget that kiss?/And see this for what it is--that we're not in love."), and the bossa nova of "Gatekeeper." Feist's choice of covers is excellent: Françoise Hardy's "L'amour ne dure pas toujours," Ron Sexsmith's "Secret Heart," best of all a suave strong RNB cover of the Bee Gees' "Inside and Out" that makes me think rather more highly of the Bee Gees than I ever did before.

This album has managed the impossible: I think that I'm becoming a desperate romantic under its influence.

Go, listen and buy on your own.