[LINK] "Astronaut Steve MacLean named new head of Canadian Space Agency"

The Canadian Press, among other news agencies, carries the news article "Astronaut Steve MacLean named new head of Canadian Space Agency".

The country's space program is at a crossroads and decisions will have to be made about its future, new president of the Canadian Space Agency Steve MacLean said Tuesday.

MacLean, one of Canada's first astronauts, said it's an exciting time to be at the helm of the space agency, shaping the future of space exploration and the technologies that drive it.

"Canadarm is an icon, Canadarm 2 is making an operational and security difference for the international space station, and we have a laser on Mars right now," he said at a news conference in Cambridge with Industry Minister Jim Prentice.

"No other country has a laser on Mars that gives us the weather and the winds on Mars. I want to continue that kind of approach."

Immediately after the announcement, MacLean began meeting with industry partners and stakeholders for their input to go toward developing a new, long-term space plan - which he said could include more missions.

"The last time we had a long-term space plan was 1994 and we're at a crossroads now where we need to make some decisions," he said.

For more on the Canadian Space Agency, see the Canadian Space Agency's official website and the relevant Wikipedia page.

[BRIEF NOTE] Voting Green

The Green Party of Canada (official site, Wikipedia) been making a certain amount of headway in Canadian public opinion, at one point in late 2007 claiming more support than either the Bloc Québécois or the New Democratic Party. Because the Green Party's supporters are spread out across Canada, however, the party has never had a Member of Parliament and accordingly has been something of a lurker. The recent decision of former Liberal Party MP Blair Wilson to join the Green Party has changed this. After this achievement, given the near-certainty of a federal election on the 14th of October, party leader Elizabeth May is trying to claim a spot in the leaders' debates.

Green Leader Elizabeth May's fight to get a spot in the televised leaders' debates could wind up in the courts.

The Green party has hired Toronto lawyer Peter Rosenthal to press May's case and is suggesting it could resort to legal action to make sure the party leader is able to join the four other political leaders for the election debates.

"The question is still up in the air, as we understand it, and the legal questions are pretty important. We want to have a focus on those. These are public airwaves. The airwaves belong to no private network," May said in an interview yesterday. "The obvious thing we would have to do ... would be to seek an injunction to ensure the leaders' debates did not take place in my absence."

May says she cleared the last hurdle to participating in the debates with her surprise weekend announcement that independent MP Blair Wilson had decided to sit as a Green MP. With a member of Parliament, May says the party meets all the conditions used by the media consortium to decide participation in the past.

Whether or not the Green Party of Canada can break out into wider popularity, perhaps with one or two MPs elected as Green Party members is an open question. Chantal Hébert argues that if May does get into the leaders' debates, Liberal Party leader's Stéphane Dion's backing away from his support for a carbon tax might let May gain a lot of attention hence credibility from attacks on Harper. I wonder, though, whether a more successful Green party might require continued fragmentation and more minority governments in order to be a credible contender--Germany's Alliance '90/The Greens seems to do well in a relatively more fragmented German political scene. Here's to hoping that May (and Dion and Duceppe and Layton) manage to prevent a Conservative majority government, I suppose.

[FORUM] What's wrong with a bit of separatism?

The thing that has most strongly caught my attention about Sarah Palin's so far disastrous time as McCain's putative Vice President is her long association with the Alaskan Independence Party. There's the novelty of hearing of a separatist movement in the fifty states of the Union, for starters, and the whole 1970s retro feel of this radically anti-center movement like something I'd expect Toffler to write in Future Shock.

All that said, I don't see what's necessarily wrong with separatism. Fustel de Coulanges' pointed out that the national affiliations of Alsatians couldn't be determined by the fact of German conquest. Wouldn't it naturally follow that a government couldn't continue to retain legitimate authority over a particular region by force of arms? That seems to increasingly by the norm in the developed world. Take Canada, where the 2000 Clarity Act established clear procedures by which a province (i.e. Québec) could accede to independence. From everything I've read, if Scotland voted in favour of independence by British government would--perhaps eventually, perhaps quickly--recognize its independence. In the case of Belgium, the affiliation of the city of Brussels is allegedly the main thing keeping that federation together. Et cetera.

I'd make exceptions for situations where hopeful states didn't guarantee the rights of people belonging to minority groups of whatever kind. The Confederacy wouldn't pass muster, for instance, while Croatia in the early 1990s would have had to seriously improve its relationship with its Serb minority. (Then again, interethnic relations in the SFRY were already, what with the militias and the early ethnic cleansings and the jokes about mutilation and murder that were too much the rage.) If these rights are guaranteed or better yet taken for granted, what's wrong with (say) a democratic Republic of Alaska, or a [name your own future polity]? I don't want to go so far as to suggest that what better way would there be to demonstrate a polity's democratic nature than to allow some of its citizens to secede in a democratic manner, but still.

Thoughts? Does this make sense? Or am I being facile?