What your humble e-scribbler said:
this guy could be an accident waiting to happen.
Wait no longer.
After musing about breaking his major campaign promise to the people of his riding, noob Bloc NDP member of parliament Ryan Cleary decided to inject himself into another discussion on a subject he knows nothing about, namely international trade talks between Canada and the European Union.
The comments turn up on his blog, something he may well be forced by jack Layton to shut down very soon [hotlinks in the original]:
Why should Newfoundland and Labrador be concerned about the Harper government’s secret free-trade negotiations with the European Union?
Because they could screw us to the wall.
The same Europeans nations that fished out/raped the Grand Banks are negotiating a deal with the Government of Canada.
And no one reports to Parliament on the status of negotiations.
In other words, Canada is doing a back-room deal with a group of serial rapists.
How scary is that?
How scary indeed.
Well, it is pretty scary when a member of parliament cannot even report accurately and factually on things that are already well established. This is a guy, after all, who is expected to render thoughtful judgment on all sorts of issues ranging from the taxes you pay to the criminal law in Canada.
So if he doesn’t know basic stuff, then it is a pretty good bet his lack of information has a good chance of coming back to bite you and me on the ass.
The talks aren’t secret. The national media have been reporting it for years. So too did the local media in Newfoundland and Labrador all during the time the former investigative reporter was plying his trade. They even carried a story on it this past March, noting that the provincial government in Newfoundland and Labrador had joined the talks.
Evidently, they weren’t so secret after all.
Then there’s the issue of blaming Europeans for destroying fish stocks on the Grand Banks. That’s a line pushed by Cleary’s buddy Gus Etchegary. The only problem: it is a load of codswallop. The Europeans, Japanese and – you guessed it – Canadian companies including one Cleary’s buddy used to help manage all had a hand in driving cod to the brink of extinction.
As for reporting to parliament, the federal cabinet shows up in parliament every day the House of Commons sits. When Cleary is in his desk in the House, they are all the people to the left, right and immediately behind that fellow the Speaker keeps calling “the Right Honourable the Prime Minister.”
Each day, people around Cleary get to ask questions of those ministers. If they wanted, they could even ask about these talks because – as ministers of the Crown – they are directing the talks. If Cleary wanted, he could ask about them so they could report on the talks. They might not give him intimate details – negotiations are usually confidential – but they will confirm the talks are going on. In other words, they aren’t secret.
And if Cleary and his buddies have a problem, then they can raise their concerns in the House and in the media and maybe provoke some discussion about it.
So in six sentences, Cleary gets off to a rotten start and that’s before we consider the issues that are at stake for Newfoundland and Labrador if the talks fail.
Instead he has opted to shoot his mouth off based solely on an opinion derived entirely from – you guessed it – obvious ignorance.
In the greater scheme of things, the House of Commons has seen its fair share of these self-important blowhards over the decades. Usually, they tend to frequent provincial politics in these parts but every now and then one of the little darlings gets into a position where they can display their profound ignorance on a national scale.
Cleary will likely delight the punters. The tinfoil hat brigade will cheer him on as he rants about things he – and they – evidently know nothing about. So much for looking after the best interests of his constituents and the people of Newfoundland and Labrador.
The Bloc NDP may have a few days of embarrassment. But since Cleary has already confirmed your humble e-scribbler’s first prediction, we can go a step farther.
It is only a matter of time before the new Chief Spokesperson of the League of Professional Victims launches into a tirade on another of his favourite targets: the nefarious, perfidious and generally odious crowd from Quebec and their efforts to take control of Labrador and destroy Newfoundland.
Perhaps Cleary will tell his fellow Bloc NDP MPs what he told macleans.ca:
“I don’t think I have a big mouth. I just have something to say and I’m going to say it.”
Oh to be a fly on the caucus room wall after he flings that crap at every fan in sight.
- srbp -
5 comments:
Unsurprisingly, Ryan appears to run his little blog the same way he ran his "newspaper". Only comments that agree with his jaded and small view of the world seem to be permitted.
Nor is it a surprise that provincial NDP president Dale Kirby is taking a decidedly arrogant and unprogressive stance on the matter.
Nor will it be a surprise when you and I are smeared at PAP.
For Ed Hollett to lecture anyone on the use of incendiary language is rich with hypocrisy.
This coming from someone who referred to Jack Harris as a 'teabagger.'
http://bondpapers.blogspot.com/2010/09/left-wing-tea-bagger.html
Like any good practitioner of public relations the word obscures more than it illuminates.
A reasonable reader would conclude one of two things. First, you're saying that Jack Harris, is intellectually shallow and part of a fringe movement or, second, you're calling him a cocksucker. Since Harris won his riding twice with 70% of the popular vote and is the most respected politician in NL today, I'll go with the latter.
Before pointing out Cleary's (non-existent) problem with diction, I suggest you change your own first.
Now onto what Cleary wrote. What Cleary discusses here is how the Canada-EU trade negotiations will aid large transnational fishing firms and further privatize commonly-held natural resources.
You completely avoid this central issue and go into a patronizing diatribe about how Cleary should ask the relevant minister what are the central government's various positions on these negotiations.
The answer of course, as anyone accomplished in the arts of public relations knows, would obfuscate more than enlightened.
Any astute observer knows that the real work of parliament and MPs is not Question Period, but in parliamentary committee.
We do not know what the federal government's position because the Standing Committee on International Trade just began a fact-finding mission in February.
As Cleary quite rightly points out we'll probably never know what the position is because the negotiations are done with little public oversight.
The more intriguing question is how a bilateral free-trade agreement between Canada and Europe would affect the workings of multilateral institutions such as NAFO?
If the Canadian government's position at recent NAFO negotiations is any indication it seems that large transnational food and fishing firms are going to win the day. Not NL's fishers.
This leads me to my next point.
Like any PR person worth their weight in salt, bringing up what Gus Etchegary did as head of FPI is a distracting sideshow to what is really being discussed.
In case you missed it, the principal issue is how the Canada-EU agreement will further codify the privatization of common-held marine resources.
Moreover, the model of exploiting a commonly-held natural resource is broken. A free-trade agreement would only serve to help large transnationals and exacerbate the problem of trying to conserve a resource under tremendous ecological stress.
Etchegary is right in pointing out that foreign overfishing was one of the cardinal reasons for the collapse of the Northern cod stocks.
Another is one which you conveniently avoid; namely, various central governments' inability to protect NL's vast marine resources. If the Canadian government cared less about the cod stocks they would take every precaution to protect it; much like they are doing now with the oil and mineral resources in the Arctic.
DFO, headed by Grit and Tory ministers alike, have done precious little to protect and conserve the resource.
The Europeans were shocked by the Canadian government's very weak-kneed positions at Law of the Sea negotiations, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, when it set its territorial waters to only three nautical miles.
No, wait they did protect it. Only when Brian Tobin wanted to advance his own political ambitions. To say that Tobin's capture of the Estai was not mixed in with xenophobia and empty jingoism would be a distortion worthy of the industry sired by Edward Bernays.
Given this awful historical precedence to believe that the central government would behave any differently would be hopelessly naive.
Lastly, for a Liberal partisan to call Cleary a blow-hard is laughable.
This coming from a party who supports such ingenious proposals as Gerry Byrne's wish to characterize PETA as a terrorist organization.
Or Senator Mac Harb's, who is incidentally under investigation for bribery in Bangladesh, wanting to ban the Canadian seal hunt.
Demagoguery worthy of VOCM indeed.
The reason why someone like Cleary gets elected by over 7,000 votes against an incumbent Liberal MP is because he has stead-fast principles and integrity. He does not put the NDP's partisan interests ahead of his constituents and province.
This is unlike Siobhan Coady and other Liberal sycophants who have to ask permission of their leader to vote once against an austere budget that penalizes NL.
You would not see Cleary doing the same thing. Cleary would vote against it from first reading to the budget's Appropriations Act. This position would come as a shock to Liberal MPs like Scott Andrews, who told the Business Post some years back that he voted against the budget "when everyone's paying attention."
Perhaps NL fishermen could fish a new endangered species to extinction: the NL Liberal MP. It's anatomical claim-to-fame would be that it is a bottom-feeder that is both spineless, gutless, and spews its offal through its mouth when under threat. Wonder if they'd need DFO or NAFO regulations for that?
Hi John:
Perhaps you'd like to actually read my post rather than engage in a rather tired recitation of partisan claptrap based not on what I wrote but what you hallucinated.
Three specific points to consider:
1. My criticism of Cleary is not for the incendiary language but the fact that his comments display a fundamental ignorance of the subject at hand.
I think his words are ridiculous but I'll accept your characterisation of his words since they don't get any better informed either way.
2. I used the word teabagger in that post precisely because Harris was using ideologically oriented criticisms to speak to his political base, in the fashion of an American Tea Party type.
Teabagger is a derogatory reference to Palin and her ilk and I used the term in the full sense of its worst meaning for an argument based on ideological drivel.
How in the name of heavens you considered that to obscure the real meaning is beyond me. I thought saying he was like Sarah Palin but without the subtlety was plain enough.
Clearly I was mistaken.
3. As for what else Cleary wrote about, I can see why you would accept it unquestioningly. Your summary of the background to the record on fisheries conservative is spotty and largely inaccurate. It pretty much matches what Cleary was pushing, including the supposed privatisation of a common property resource. Between that and laying the blame for Northern Cod on foreigners suggests you missed entirely the way Canadian companies fished from 1977 onwards.
The fact you descend fairly rapidly into a pile of partisan drivel aimed at me and others personally pretty much makes it clear you didn't have anything else to run on.
What you appear to have missed is my own pretty clear perspective (in a great many posts) on the fishery AND on the blow-hard politicians of all political stripes who come on with plenty of bullshit but shag all in the way of serious ideas about how to sort out the industries problems.
It isn't a partisan issue at all: Cleary's just the latest in a long, sad line. The fact he belongs to the Bloc NDP is irrelevant; well except that it shows the extent to which the Bloc NDp is pretty much a party like all the others. Claims of intellectual or moral superiority are just so much pretentious bullshit.
Over to you.
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