It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was captured by American forces in Afghanistan in 2002 and has been locked up at Guantanamo Bay ever since. Omar made the news this week because his Canadian lawyers released some grainy video excerpts from his interrogation at Guantanamo by visiting CSIS officials. So far I’ve only found time to view the first one, which can be seen here.

Omar, now 21, was 16 when the video was taken, and much of the conversation will probably sound familiar to anyone who’s ever heard a frustrated adult reasoning with a sullen teenager. A male interrogator says banal things like “your feet are still at the end of your legs” and “you want a chocolate bar or something?” Meanwhile, Omar bitterly accuses the interrogator of not caring about him. At one point, however, Omar’s distress comes through. He buries his face in his hands and repeatedly moans what has been variously interpreted as “Kill me!”, “Help me!”, or the Arabic “Ya ummi!” ["Oh, mother!"]. All three are poignant in their very different ways.

What was Omar so upset about? Plausible answers can be found in a Rolling Stone piece describing his relentless interrogations at the hands of the Americans. For instance:

An hour or two later they came back, checked the tautness of his chains and pushed him over on his stomach. Transfixed in his bonds, Omar toppled like a figurine. Again they left… He urinated on himself and on the floor. The MPs returned, mocked him for a while and then poured pine-oil solvent all over his body. Without altering his chains, they began dragging him by his feet through the mixture of urine and pine oil.

Subjecting a teenager to such discomfort and degradation, with little prospect of obtaining useful intelligence, seems wildly disproportionate. And the cruelty apparently continued, not for months but for YEARS.

We shouldn’t forget that Omar was in the ranks of our Taliban enemies, and I think reasonable people can disagree on whether our government should try to get him out of “Gitmo” and bring him to Canada. However, the CSIS interrogation shown in the video brings our country awfully close to active complicity in his mistreatment. It’s time to stop and ask ourselves how far we really want to march alongside America in this “war on terror” nonsense.

Much of the blogging on this site has focused on environmental issues, world issues and discussions of diversity, all obviously related to globalization. My job is to bring cities into the discussion, and it turns out this is easy to do. It’s not well enough understood that globalization has brought about fundamental changes in just about everything urban, and especially in the political importance of cities. 

In part, this is because the power of national governments, while it remains very real and very important, has declined noticeably, especially in governments’ ability to regulate market activity and protect social welfare. Budget stringency, free trade agreements and competitive conditions in world markets have convinced governments everywhere, regardless of whether they are conservative, liberal or social-democratic, that that they must lower barriers to trade and cut corporate and upper-income taxes, social programs and funds for regional development. In an increasingly borderless world, therefore, local communities everywhere are less protected by national governments from the consequences of international economic competition than before, and many are suffering serious harm. 

But greater ease of communication is not just available to large corporations, despite what many people think. It also makes it possible, as never before, for social movements to organize themselves on a world scale, and these opportunities are being actively exploited. Globalization also greatly reduces many locational advantages. It is as easy to run a business dependent on high-speed communications from Winnipeg or Wuppertal - and perhaps from Ouagadougou or Wang-ts’ang - as from New York, London or Tokyo.

In other words, the tools of both entrepreneurship and political communication are becoming more and more widely available. An unavoidable outcome is that each city is much more directly in competition with other cities everywhere. As a result, cities have been thrown more than ever before upon their own resources. It has become the normal way of doing business for every municipality or metropolitan region to write its own economic development strategy and create an agency or agencies to implement it. Each municipality and each region has its own particular mix of resources, locational advantages and disadvantages, human capacities and shortcomings. As global market competition intensifies, it becomes more important for each community to assess its own potential strengths and design its economic development strategy accordingly.

If every region is doing that to its own best advantage, no two strategies will be the same. In those circumstances it becomes obvious that local initiative will become more important, and dictation from the federal government less functional. This applies, not only to entrepreneurship, but also to social policy. Inevitably, the forces represented by international markets and 21st Century communications are moving cities more and more to the centre of political gravity.

Jenny continues her excellent blogging on the Carbon tax debate.

While I am generally supportive of Dion’s ideas about how to use of “green funds” accumulated from his new carbon tax, I did have two quick comments/critiques. Of course, I welcome Jenny and others on here with greater expertise to set me straight, if I get anything wrong. Here goes.

First, while targeted tax credits can and should be used to achieve social or economic aims, I think the $3 billion “universal child tax benefit” is an inefficient use of public funds. Any kind of “universal” tax cut or credit basically subsidizes, through tax amounts returned as credits, wealthy taxpayers who don’t need any help in paying for their children’s care or early childhood education. A better strategy than a universal handout would be to retain the current child care tax benefit (CCTB) “progressive” structure– which uses income levels to determine eligibility and eligible amounts (to use the byzantine language of the Income Tax Act )— and expand it: make it easier for more middle class families to qualify, and increase the benefit received.

Second — and this is more of a green point — my understanding of the carbon tax is that it’s supposed to change behavior. The theory being, is that polluters will invest and innovate and do whatever is necessary to stop polluting in order to avoid greater tax liability resulting from the new carbon tax. In other words, the surplus of funds the government will receive from the carbon tax are not an eternal or sustainable supply (unlike, say, GST… people need goods and services to live; but they would avoid polluting to avoid a pollution tax) and over time “green tax” surplus funds would shrink. If that is the economic reality, what is the best way to get the most out of these funds that won’t last forever?

Now, I understand the political necessity of selling Green Shift as tax neutral and the importance of addressing the other social concerns Dion has outlined, but I still would prefer to see some greener investments, especially as this is supposed to be a “Green shift”.

How about a national highspeed rail strategy? I remain a strong advocate for investment in light, highspeed rail to connect the country from coast to coast… sound crazy? Well wasn’t Sir Sanford Fleming a few bricks short of a load when he proposed to lay a rickety old rail across miles of tundra, prairie or impenetrable Canadian shield? I digress.

It is, in any case, a bit unfair for government to levy a new carbon or pollution tax without correspondingly investing in new infrastructure that will provide more options to people who, for example, need to go places, but would like the option of avoiding those massive gas guzzling climate changing air machines.

From a Canadian viewpoint, one interesting aspect of the war in Iraq is that Canada is reprising its Vietnam-era role as a destination for American deserters. Approximately 200 American military personnel are thought to have fled to Canada rather than fight in Iraq, and many of them have formally applied for refugee status. The War Resisters Support Campaign has a dozen or so of their individual stories here.

The case of one “resister”, Joshua Key, is particularly notable. Key served eight months in Iraq, but became disillusioned with the war. He went AWOL and turned up in Canada, claiming asylum. He subsequently published a book called The Deserter’s Tale, in collaboration with the writer Lawrence Hill. A long excerpt available online describes Key’s experiences as a participant in clumsy, heavy-handed raids on Iraqi homes, smashing furniture and arresting civilians but never finding “weapons or indications of terrorism”. Eventually Key came to a grim conclusion about U.S. involvement in Iraq:

It struck me then that we, the American soldiers, were the terrorists. We were terrorizing Iraqis. Intimidating them. Beating them. Destroying their homes. Probably raping them. The ones we didn’t kill had all the reasons in the world to become terrorists themselves. Given what we were doing to them, who could blame them for wanting to kill us, and all Americans?

Taking Key’s account at face value - which may be risky, considering that like other asylum-seekers he has an incentive to exaggerate - Joshua Key’s asylum application rests on the argument that he was ordered to violate the Geneva Conventions. Canada’s refugee board initially rejected this argument because the violations did not amount to systematically committed war crimes. However, a recent successful appeal to the Federal Court will force the board to reconsider its decision, taking into account the possibility that “military misconduct falling well short of a war crime may support a claim to refugee protection”. Meanwhile another U.S. deserter, Robin Long, was recently arrested in Nelson, B.C. and may be deported within days.

I have my opinions as to how we Canadians should handle the situation, but I don’t have space to argue them in this blog post. Should we send all the deserters back to America in handcuffs? Implement last month’s non-binding parliamentary resolution to give them all permanent resident status? Decide their asylum applications on a case-by-case basis? Just ask a Norwegian? Let us know what you think.

After weeks of unsubstantiated accusations that ‘The Green Shift’ (or whatever we’re going to be calling it) is nothing more than a back-door way of funding ‘Liberal social programs’, someone has actually gone to the trouble of trying to substantiate this position. Namely, Adam Radwanski of the G&M.

Is it really revenue neutral?

Short answer: Only if you accept the broadest possible definition of what qualifies as a tax cut. But then, that’s pretty much the definition we’ve been accepting for years.

Straightforward tax cuts, in the form of reductions to business and income taxes, add up to roughly $9-billion in Year 4 of the Liberal plan. The rest of the more than $15-billion the party expects its carbon tax to generate would go mostly toward spending initiatives dressed up as tax benefits and credits - a $465-million supplement for low-income workers, a $150 supplement for every rural resident (totalling $749-million) to help pay their bills, a $600-million capital cost allowance for green technologies, another $400-million for R&D, an $800-million boost to the guaranteed income supplement for low-income seniors. Biggest of all is a nearly $3-billion child tax benefit - quite possibly a worthwhile expenditure, as are many of the others, but not exactly a tax cut in the traditional sense of the word.

No, I suppose not. Quite right. I still wouldn’t call it a ’social program’ either, but at least someone is looking at this with a level head for a change.

My argument would be as follows:

Tax cuts benefit those who make enough money to pay taxes. The richer you are, the more you benefit. Tax credits (specifically refundable credits) benefit those who DON’T make very much money. The poor. The self-employed. Those in the film and television industry.

And since the ‘Green Shift Plan’ (can we call it that?) incorporates both tax cuts AND tax credits, and will therefore return all of the carbon tax to rich and poor, individuals and businesses, in proportions that approximate their ability to absorb the additional cost, I’m not sure how that isn’t “revenue neutral”.

But kudos to Radwanski for making a well thought-out critique of the ‘Liberal Green Shift’ (can we call it that?). Again, this is what we call civilized debate.