NGOs and the Conservatives

Margaret is at it again today-- it seems that anything our present government does is OK by her, so long as it only hurts people and groups she disagrees with. The question she poses is straightforward enough: why, she asks, do we support NGOs? Oddly, for someone who often seems attracted to the idea of privatization, Ms. Wente dismisses the possibility that such groups might actually do a good job of promoting and serving the valuable causes they are devoted to. Her concern is that some such groups adopt positions and policies that she objects to-- and her conclusion is that, if she objects to something an NGO group does or says, it's OK by her for the government to cut off their funding, regardless of what impact that decision might have on the people the NGO actually helps.

There are too many NGOs, she says-- and somehow, the fact that government funds are not used for political advocacy, but instead for actual aid as approved by CIDA, a government agency that oversees these funds and ensures they are properly spent, is passed over as insufficient or irrelevant-- the crucial fact, for Margaret, is that that the very same groups also engage in 'politically undesirable' activities (such as criticism of Israel), and this, she thinks, is perfectly good grounds for cutting off the funding that they use to help people in accord with the goals of established government programs.

The idea seems to be that anyone who accepts government funds, for a purpose that government policy supports, is not just responsible to the government for making proper use of those funds-- they are also required not to inconvenience the government by taking positions and expressing views, as private organizations, that the government doesn't want to hear. This attack on freedom of speech doesn't upset Margaret because she agrees with the government on these issues, and punishing and even shutting down organizations she disagrees with is a good thing. This fits all too well with the recent attack on a SSHRC funded conference at York University, which also featured some speakers who are critics of Israeli policies. The minister demanded that SSHRC break its own rules (under direct threat of budget cuts) regarding how and when the funded activities would be reported, and SSHRC complied. Government funding is no longer contingent just on operating within the rules and respecting the standards for use of funds--it's also contingent on not expressing views that the government doesn't like. Somehow Margaret doesn't see this as a threat to free speech and open debate-- so long as she has her own paid soap box at the Globe, it's fine if other people and organizations are bullied into silence. What a disgrace. And there's a broader pattern here that should worry all Canadians, whatever their politics.

The pattern this government is following is all too clear-- their aim (modeled on the Bush administration's public relations policies) is to shut down any independent voices that might criticize the government's policies. The Bush administration eagerly attacked anyone critical of the disastrous war in Iraq for 'not supporting the troops', and Republican administrators at NASA systematically limited James Hansen and other NASA scientists' access to the press and public to ensure the administrations' policies on global warming would not be undermined by reports and analysis showing how irresponsible they were. Similarly, this fall the Conservatives in Ottawa conducted a smear campaign against a diplomat who testified to inconvenient facts from Afghanistan (after ignoring and suppressing his original reports), and now they have shut down Parliament to delay any further examination of the facts and avoid a Parliamentary order to release documents that have been crudely censored to protect the government.

This pattern is not entirely new to Canada, though-- it has long been a part of Alberta politics, where our one-party government has cut access for press outlets that reported inconvenient stories, shut down institutions such as the health care boards that were in a position to speak out about government policies (they were, at first, supposed to be elected-- a promise Mr. Klein never kept, since elected boards would have been far too free to speak as an independent, voter-supported authority on health policy questions), and derided as 'irrelevant' and as 'special interests' any group that wasn't one of the special interests (the oil and gas industry prominent among them) the government sees itself as allied with. Inconvenient and dissenting voices are silenced whenever possible, and branded as 'extreme', 'unAlbertan' and (worst of all) 'liberal' when they can't be silenced. Coming soon to a country near you...