[PHOTO] "The Alliums of Toronto"

Allium flowers, my mother the gardener told me, filled this Toronto front yard last summer. Various sources, here and here, lead to a more specific identification of these as being a specific type of allium, the Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’.

Native to Iran. Dense spherical umbels of starry lilac-purple flowers in May on stems two to three feet tall. For maximum effect, plant in clusters of 10 bulbs or more.

Two favorite cultivars are the stunning dark lilac 'Lucy Ball' long (named for the late entertainer Lucille Ball), and the violet-purple 'Purple Sensation'[.] Both grow about three feet tall, and make good cut flowers.

[LINK] "Misleading robocalls went to voters ID'd as non-Tories"

The CBC's Terry Milewski reports on the latest development in the robocalling scandal. If the reports are accurate, there was at least some active targeting of non-Conservative supporters.

An investigation by CBC News has turned up voters all over Canada who say the reason they got robocalls sending them to fictitious polling stations was that they'd revealed they would not vote Conservative.

Although the Conservative Party has denied any involvement in the calls, these new details suggest that the misleading calls relied on data gathered by, and carefully guarded by, the Conservative Party.

Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand announced Thursday that he now has "over 700 Canadians from across the country" who allege "specific circumstances" of fraudulent or improper calls. CBC News examined 31 ridings where such calls have been reported and found a pattern: those receiving those calls also had previous calls from the Conservative Party to find out which way they would vote.

[. . .]

Elections Canada says it never calls voters at all. However, it is only now emerging that calls impersonating Elections Canada followed previous calls by Conservative workers asking which way voters were leaning. That suggests that the "Elections Canada" calls, which are illegal, came from people with access to data gathered by the Conservative Party, which carefully controls access to it.

Asked about that, party spokesman Fred Delorey had no comment and declined an interview.

The pattern of legitimate so-called "Voter ID" calls, followed by bogus "Elections Canada" calls, occurs in ridings across the country.

Charles Cochrane of Saint John, N.B., made it very clear to the Conservatives that they did not have his vote. Then, on election day, he said, "The phone rang and it was a recorded message. This is Elections Canada calling, your polling station has now changed." He checked. It had not changed.

From the outset, the Conservative Party leadership has insisted it had no involvement in these calls.

"The Conservative party can say absolutely, definitively, it has no role in any of this," said Prime Minister Stephen Harper. His parliamentary secretary, Dean Del Mastro, calls claims to the contrary "baseless smears."

However, opposition leaders say the scheme could never have gone forward without callers having access to the Conservatives' proprietary database on voter intentions. Known as "CIMS," the database assigns a "smiley" face to supporters, and a "sad" face to non-Conservatives. Liberal and NDP politicians say it would make no sense to call randomly, since many of the voters misled would be Conservatives.

[LINK] "Thomas Mulcair would bring Harper’s dream of Liberals’ demise closer to reality"

At the National Post's Full Comment blog, Michael Den Tandt makes the plausible point that the Conservative Party might well want Québec NDP MP Thomas Mulcair, front-runner in the NDP's leadership race, to win. Why? Mulcair might be a good enough leader to help eviscerate the remains of the Liberal Party, and his leadership would strengthen the NDP position in Québec, but Mulcair might also be unable to pull the NDP close enough to the economic centre to let it challenge the Conservative Party.

(Of course, the mention of Tony Blair and New Labour is something that should make people worry. Right, Britons?)

The Harper Conservatives are already training their cannons on the New Democrat front-runner, some say, because he is the one they most fear. Mulcair’s combativeness, experience and brains make him a formidable foe. Moreover, he’s the New Democrat best placed to pull a “Tony Blair,” and shift the party further to the centre, where conceivably, it might contend for power.

But there’s another line of thinking, which suggests a Mulcair victory would suit Prime Minister Stephen Harper just fine. It gets back to Harper’s lifelong dream of destroying the Liberal party. Mulcair, it is believed by those who’ve seen him work in Quebec, has the capacity to wipe out or to absorb the Liberals. A Liberal-Democratic Party would necessarily position itself left of where the Liberals stood in their small-c-conservative period in the late 1990s. And that would at last leave the economic centre unobstructed, which is precisely what Harper wants.

[. . .]

Mulcair has taken great pains to avoid open comparisons with former British prime minister Tony Blair, who held power in the U.K. from 1997 to 2007, after jettisoning the most impossible of the British Labour Party’s socialist policies. But the parallels are clear. A couple of weeks ago, I asked Mulcair about the NDP’s reputation as a party that doesn’t understand kitchen-table economics. “To concede the point,” he said, “we’ve always been very conscious of the fact that a majority of Canadians share most of our goals and values. It’s been difficult in the past to convince them that we can provide good, competent, confident public administration.”

His solution, he said, would be to demonstrate while in Opposition that “we’re capable of running a G7 country.” Reading between the lines, in my judgment, that means he intends to pull a Blair.

Small wonder then, that there’s more than a whiff of fear, in Liberal ranks, at the prospect of a Mulcair victory. Should he transform the NDP into a mass-market party, as Blair did to New Labour, what remains of Liberal support could easily bleed away, permanently. In that event, a merger — say in 2014, after the smoke of the Liberals’ own leadership race has cleared — would be more akin to a takeover.

How would this benefit the Conservatives? Gerry Nicholls, a conservative consultant who worked alongside Harper at the National Citizens Coalition, holds that this PM would love nothing better than to do politics in a two-party system. That’s because, in a standup fight between a socially moderate party of the centre-right and a party of the centre-left, this PM believes Conservatives will win every time — because most Canadians, while socially moderate, are economic conservatives. The Liberal party, because of its chameleon-like ability to mould its ideology as needed, will always be a threat to the Conservatives. But a Liberal-Democratic Party, with the history of the NDP embedded in its DNA? Perhaps, not so much.

[URBAN NOTE] On expert panels and Sheppard light rail

The Sheppard subway line that runs east from Yonge Street in suburban North York shouldn't be extended east to Scarborough, an expert panel has concluded. An above-ground light rail route makes much the most sense, Kelly Grant reports in the Globe and Mail today, with the limited amount of money available for construction and the relatively small number of likely passengers.

“With the exception of [subway advocate Gordon] Chong, a strong consensus exists among the panel members that the LRT option is superior to the subway option(s) across the range of evaluation options considered.”

After assessing three expansion possibilities, the panel awarded a score of 87.3 to a light-rail extension from Don Mills station to Morningside, according to a source familiar with the panel’s work.

That was a much higher score than the virtual tie it gave to the other two choices, a subway to Scarborough Town Centre and a hybrid of two subway stops and a light-rail extension. The former scored 59.3; the latter scored 59.5.

The report goes beyond endorsing light-rail on Sheppard Avenue East. According to a draft of the recommendations stamped confidential and obtained by The Globe and Mail, the panel also urges council to take a serious look at new revenue tools to pay for future transit expansion, in concert with the province’s transportation authority for the Greater Toronto Area.

The document asks the “deputy city manager and chief financial office to prepare a comprehensive review of revenue tools and report back to council with appropriate recommendations to Metrolinx on an investment strategy to finance the provincial Big Move transit plan.”

[. . .]

[Mayor Rob] Ford dismissed the panel's conclusion out-of-hand.

"The advisory panel is a biased panel. We all know that. We know what they're going to say," the mayor told reporters Thursday.

"I listen to the residents, the taxpayers, the people who pay our wages. They're the boss."

He said he took the bus out to a demonstration by Subways Are for Everyone (SAFE), in a parkette at Sheppard and Victoria Park, and "every single person" wanted subways.

I suppose it's worth noting that going to a demonstration composed of people supporting a particular cause, finding out that they all support that cause, and then generalizing wildly from that unrepresentative sample isn't a good idea. But then, the report of this panel essentially shuts down Ford's desire for subways: this is the panel of experts that was convened after TTC chair Karen Stintz led a majority of city councillors in overriding Ford's ill-sourced (and inevitably ill-funded) plan for building subways across Toronto, a peace offering. Without this gesture to Ford likely to be supported as a viable option, I suppose that the fights over Toronto's transit future will heat up. What does Ford have to lose?

[LINK] "Afghanistan fears becoming `orphan' as international forces withdraw"

Postmedia News' Jeff Davis reports that, as Canada's involvement in Afghanistan winds down, Afghans and their allies worry the country might be abandoned altogether.

Something like that is pretty much inevitable, I fear. Canadians tend not to have very positive associations with Afghanistan. The goal of a stable, pluralistic Afghanistan is seen as mission impossible, especially in the light of all the negative press of late.

The Afghan embassy in Ottawa is calling on Canada to continue supporting the war-torn country, amid fears it could become an "international orphan" after Western forces withdraw in 2014.

Afghanistan's top diplomat in Canada, charge d'affaires Mirwais Salehi, said he worries that much-needed support from Western countries may be coming to an end.

"We want a kind of assurance that in 2014 not everybody will close their eyes and go back home," he said. "We want Canadian support very, very long beyond 2014."

Salehi said Afghans are worried Western countries will abandon them, leaving the country in situation similar to the 1990s, when civil war broke out following the departure of Russian military forces.

The lack of international support during this critical period allowed the Taliban to seize power, he said. "We don't want to repeat history again and again, because it will cost the lives of many innocent people," Salehi added.

Fen Hampson, a professor of international affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, said Afghanistan became an "international orphan" in the 1990s. The current situation, he said, is becoming eerily similar.

"I think there's a sense of deja vu in many, many ways," he said.

Hampson said many NATO countries appear to have run out of patience with the country, having decided it is "mission impossible." U.S. President Barack Obama, for example, is coming under increased pressure to accelerate plans to withdraw from the country before 2014, he said.

"I think there's a deep sense of pessimism, quite frankly, about Afghanistan's future," he said. "In NATO the British, the French, everyone is pulling back, getting ready to pull out."

[BRIEF NOTE] On Kony 2012 and American Christian fundamentalists gone transnational

Reacting to the Kony 2012 film, Tim Gueguen noted that, apart from Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army, in recent years Uganda got the most notice for virulent state-sponsored homophobia.

Uganda's treatment of gay people has generated a lot of negative press for the country. Equally disturbing is that much of the recent prominence of the issue in Uganda is due to the work of US evangelists, who have been pushing the issue of late. One of them, Scott Lively, is being sued by an African group, Sexual Minorities Uganda, that advocates for gay rights.

Towleroad's Andy Towle linked to a post by Alternet's B.E. Wilson that makes the point that Invisible Children, the US-based NGO that made the Kony 2012 film, is actually closely connected to the transnational nexus of American Christian fundamentalists and their Ugandan allies, accepting funding from the National Christian Foundation that has sponsored all manner of homophobic and/or creationist NGOs in the United States. "Invisible Children Funded By Antigay, Creationist Christian Right" sets out the link in detail.

Why does it matter, if Invisible Children was funded by controversial donors? Two reasons - one, we can assume those donors thought IC aligned with their agenda - which is antagonistic to LGBT rights. Two, it fits an emerging pattern in which Invisible Children appears selectively concerned about crimes committed by Joseph Kony but indifferent to crimes, perhaps on a bigger scale, committed by their provisional partner, the government of Uganda - whose president shot his way into power using child soldiers, before Joseph Kony began using child soldiers. Like Kony, the government of Uganda was also indicted by the International Criminal Court in 2005, for human rights abuses and looting in the DRC Congo (PDF file of ICC ruling against Uganda). Like Kony, the Ugandan army preys upon civilians and is currently accused, by Western human rights groups, with raping and looting in the DRC Congo, where it is hunting for Kony. In the late 1990s, Uganda helped spark a conflict in DRC Congo that, by the middle of the next decade it is estimated, had killed up to 5.4 million civilians, more than any conflict since World War Two.

Kony 2012 simplifies the situation in Uganda. Kony 2012 also is associated with a very strong bias on affairs in Uganda and central Africa more generally that doesn't deal terribly well with root issues.

Kony is a madman controlling a few hundred fighters, and lacks international patronage. He's a terrible man who has done terrible things, but his power is now limited.

Yoweri Museveni controls an aggressive state with a large army that has inflicted suffering and death on millions of people, not only Congolese but the more than one million Acholi of Uganda whose homeland saw most of the fighting and who've been confined to terrible refugee camps for decades by their own government. Unlike Kony, Museveni certainly doesn't lack for international patronage; he has, besides the pragmatic support of the United States government, the backing of Christian fundamentalists who want Museveni to implement all manner of Christianist policies including state-supported homophobia. Who's worse? (Who didn't get a film made about him?)