Is notorious right wing anti-union, pro aparthied hack Rob Anders in trouble in Calgary West?
We can only hope so.
Like his pals Jason Kenney and Ezra LeRant, Anders is a graduate of the Fraser Insititute intern program.
He went on to become the point man for the joint Fraser Institute/ National Citizens Coalition campaign against unions in the ninties.
And like Kenney he cut his teeth in politics south of the border working for the Republicans. And he still keeps his Republican ties.
He was the spokesman for Canadians Against Forced Unionisation, a Fraser Institute/NCC front group to push for Right To Work laws in Alberta,in 1995, thinking the Klein government would be open to these 'reforms'.
In his bio on the Conservative.ca election page they coyly refer to his union busting attempts;
"Prior to entering Parliament, Mr. Anders directed a labour market project (sic) for the National Citizens Coalition."
Labour market project, yeah right, he was pushing for Right to Work laws, and ending 'compulsory unionization' in Alberta.
In 2000 Anders got into hot water for denying, whether by commission or ommission, student employment projects for his riding.
Rob Anders, Canadian Alliance MP for Calgary West, refused to approve 83 out of about 200 grants recommended for his riding by Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC), which has been the subject of an ongoing financial scandal. The funding provides summer jobs and work experience for students by helping organizations and businesses cover the cost of hiring them.
And then he really made the news with his denouncing Nelson Mandela;In 2001, the Federal Government decided to give Mandela honorary Canadian citizenship, making him only the second foreigner to receive such an honour. Rob Anders disagreed, calling Mandela, "a communist and a terrorist," decrying Mandela as "the politically correct Left-lib poster boy of today", and predicting that he would be forgotten in 30 years.
For this Warren Kinsella placed Rob Anders in both the second and third place catagories for top ten political outrages of the Parlimentary session of 2000-2001
As a poster boy for the extreme right in the Reform/Alliance and now Conservative party, he has used his position as an MP to do little for his constiuents and much to advance his own personal right wing agenda.
As a result in the 2004 election residents in his Calgary West riding launched the Vote Out Anders Campaign, complete with website. And apparently they are back as of this week.
His problems don't end there. On the CBC forum on Calgary West where folks can leave their comments they are overwhelming against Anders.
One of his personal political campaigns is against China. Now being the complete opportunist he is, he has latched onto the Galun Fong and Tibetans in order to persue his personal anti-communist agenda.
Just as the old right wing would admonish about the communist reds in Russia and Cuba, Anders is opposed to Red China. And he has the support of friends who are even slimier, like the notorious racist and fascist, Paul Fromm who is associated with White Power and Nazi groups in Canada and internationally.
It is typical of proto-fascists to disguise their poitics as anti-communism. It was traditional in the the 1960's for folks involved in the KKK and White Power and Nazi movements to claim that they weren't racist but saving America from communism. When it came to Martin Luther King these same creeps claimed he was a communist. Anders is no different, his attack on Mandela was racist and fascist, using red baiting as a cover.
Today he does the same around China.
Reform MP Rob Anders was asked to leave a Chinese New Year celebration
on Parliament Hill because he was wearing a T-shirt calling for China to
get out of Tibet. The 27-year-old MP for Calgary West appeared at the Wednesday night event wearing the T-shirt, which a1so bore the slogans Stop Tiananmen
tanks, forced abortions, burning books, and independent Indo-China,
Korea and Taiwan.
As a flack for the NCC he is Stephen Harpers loyal syncophant. Harper defended Anders outrageous comments about Mandeala and offered no criticism around his Anti-China provocations.
Certainly we all remember Tianamen square, and I have blogged here critically of the state captialist regime in China but Anders is an opportunist. He is not genuinely concered with Tibet or even the Falun Gong. He is doing this because he is a fascist and red baiting anti-communist propaganda is a sure sign of it.
At a Conservative fundraiser in Calgary this past spring it is reported that he raised the old right wing bugaboo about bilingualism being forced on all us good White English Canadians.
"Bilingualism is a problem today" Rob said. He complained that plaques that had been unilingual are now English and French and that it "didn't help" that people spoke "Chinese and Arab and other languages too" in Canada.
Yep he really feels for the oppressed Chinese peoples.
During the second week of the election campaign Anders used his parlimentary franking privleges to send out a torrid pamphlet denouncing crack addicts, homosexual sex marriage, and calling for law and order, in Richmond B.C.!
But take a look at the front of this pamphlet, typical scare tactics and fearmongering so commonly used in Nazi like propaganda campaigns.
Does this look like an election pamphlet to you?
Wow I didn't know Richmond B.C. was New York. But considering the crime rate and the increasing gun violence in the Lower mainland which has people worried this was a provocation. And you paid for it with your tax dollars.
The term homosexual sex marriage, used in this pamphlet is another provocation. He deliberately called it that. He did not call it Same Sex Marriage. He attempted to conjure up lewd sexual imagery with his misanthropic malapropism. Again from last spring Anders said this;
Then we got to Rob's favourite topic - "moral decay". "The problem with homosexuality and gay marriage" was that it led to a declining birth rate
Huh? The man defintely has sex on the brain, but the decline in the birth rate is not the fault of gays or lesbians.
Rob is a Roman scholar as well. He like many reactionaries before him uses the decline of the Roman empire to explain what he sees as moral decay in modern society. During the Same Sex Marriage debate in the House of Commons he said this;
Edward Gibbon goes on in his work, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, to cite several things that made for the decline of the Roman Empire. One of those, the first that he cites, was the immorality that destroyed the integrity of family life.The second thing that Gibbon talks about is gender confusion and the problems that had in the Roman Empire. The third is disregard for religion. I think we can see some parallels today.
Once again, Augustus Caesar, to elongate the Roman Empire, restored the sanctity of marriage. Those guilty of initiating divorce lost three-quarters of their property to their spouse. They did not get 50%. A woman would be stripped of her wealth and ornaments, and if the man introduced a new bride into his bed, his fortune would be lawfully seized by the vengeance of the exiled wife. We should think about that in terms of divorce rates. Offenders were even disabled from the repetition of nuptials. In other words, if people had a divorce they could not get remarried.
He stimulated the birth rate. He rewarded the parents of large families. As a matter of fact, if parents had as many as five children under the Emperor Augustus, they no longer paid any tax. One can imagine what not having to pay tax would do for a Canadian family with five children.
Yep you read that right Rob opposes divorce, and supports tax breaks for families with five children or more.
Another politician that was impressed by Augustus Ceaser and applied these same policies to his Reich was Adolph Hitler.
Augustus himself was not innocent of plotting executions to eliminate personal enemies. He favored loyalists like Herod who controlled their subjects, whatever the method. In fact, when he found that Herod was more effective in suppressing revolts than Roman governors In running the empire as a centralized corporation, he was more concerned to suppress public dissent than to promote social justice. Thus, he was also the father of the totalitarian state.
Both Hitler and Mussolin were fascinated with ancient Rome and attempted to ressurect it in the modern age.
For a self professed Christian, Rob sure does like them authoritarian pagan Roman Emperors who were slave owners and drenched in the blood of conquered peoples.
And despite his admonions about how great Augustus was, how moral, Rob did overlook Augustus Ceasars incestous affair with his sister. But then they hadn't run the HBO mini series Rome on cable yet.
Augustus' personal life, on the other hand, was a series of disappointments & disasters. He had no son & his only daughter's sons all died before him. So, he was forced to adopt his wife's son, Tiberius, whom he disliked. In public Augustus posed as champion of traditional family values; but the intrigues & scandalous behavior of his own family, including his wife, daughter & their children produced one of history's most lurid soap operas, complete with the murder of kin, public debauchery & incest.
In a commentary article in the right wing National Review Online Rob had an article on humour, a Canadian export south, where he said;the Liberal party supports what is increasingly becoming a dogmatic, one-party-state (secular) theocracy.
Huh? A what? How can you be a secular theocracy, is Paul Martin the Pope or Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire? Is this another Roman refernce by Rob? After all Canada is a Catholic country.
And Rob wrote this last January the Liberals were a Minority government. Minority as in there were more opposition members than Liberals. I think Rob has gotten Ottawa confused with Alberta.
Besides voting against Same Sex Marriage, during the past sitting of the House,
Anders voted against:
C-2, Child PornographyC-278, Employment InsuranceC-272, Sponsorship of a relative for immigration purposesC-283, Immigration and refugee protection and sponsorshipsC-206, Alcohol warning labelsC-21, Not-for-profit corporationsC-13, DNA data bankC-11, Whistleblower protection and procedureC-17, MarijuanaC-65, Street racingC-64, Prohibit removal of Vehicle Identification NumberC-63 An Act to amend An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and the Income Tax Act
C-260 An Act respecting the negotiation, approval, tabling and publication of treaties (Treaties Act)
C-48, Budget AmendmentsBut he did vote in favour ofC-30, Parliamentarian salaries to increase in accordance with private sector salaries
Rob has a real thingee about drugs, in an article in the conservatice weekly Human Events he attempted to link the bust of B.C. provincial Liberal party staffers, members of Gordon Campells government, with Paul Martin and the booming B.C. marijuana trade.
So the citizens of Calgary West are once again being asked to vote, but unlike last election they have an alternative to Mr. Anders.
Jennifer Pollack the former chair of the Calgary Board of Education is running against Mr. Anders. Ms. Pollack is a high profile canadidate.
And one who has faced the wrath of Ralph Klein. She and members of her democratically elected board were ousted after the Klein government, in an unprecidented move, because they refused to be his scapegoat for deficits that were a direct result of his governments failure to fully fund public education.
It appeared this coup de dat was organized with the conivance of Conservatives on the the board. Fights began right after the election between the minority of Conservatives and the majority Liberals on the board. After being deposed by the Klein government, Pollack ran again and was relected to the school board.
Last election Anders got over 55% of the vote, with a lower voter turn out. than the 2000 election. The Liberals got just over 29% with a low impact campaign with a no name candidate. With an active Vote Out Anders campaign, pragmatic politicks calls for a united front vote for Pollack.
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Canada
Federal Election
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Calgary West
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Rob Anders
Nelson Mandela
