By Dennis Gruending

The Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan is poised for sale to the highest bidder, and shareholders, not to mention company executives, stand to stuff their pockets from a deal when and if it occurs. The company has spurned as inadequate an offer of $38.6-billion (U.S.) from an Australian-based giant called BHP Billiton and has also been in talks with other companies, including two from China. The great and tragic irony for the people of Saskatchewan is that in 1989 a provincial government sold Crown-owned PCS for $630 million, a minute fraction of what it may sell for now. It’s like selling your house and having the new owner flip it for 60 times the price. What has this to do with a blog called Pulpit and Politics? Let’s start with the morality of greed, market fundamentalism, and the common good.

I was a young journalist with a ringside seat in Saskatchewan in 1975 when a government led by Premier Allan Blakeney took over half of the potash industry. I later wrote a biography of Blakeney called Promises to Keep and the potash story is told in that book. Potash (potassium chloride) is used as a component in farm fertilizers, which are in growing demand, notably in China and India, countries that have enormous populations to feed. Saskatchewan has the largest potash deposits in the world. (Read on …)

By Dennis Gruending

It’s been a good month for the religious right in Ottawa. The Hill Times newspaper reports that Stephen Harper has promoted religious conservatives to two senior positions in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) – the government’s political nerve centre. Darrel Reid, Harper’s former director of policy, becomes his deputy chief of staff. Harper also promoted Paul Wilson to replace Reid as PMO policy director. What has this to do with the religious right? Allow me to back into the story. Lloyd Mackey, a journalist in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, reports for print and online Christian publications and he has good contacts among both Christian and political conservatives. Mackey was a guest presenter in our Faith and Public life Class at the Ottawa Lay School of Theology early in March.

Mackey provided the class with a handout containing a list of religious organizations active in political Ottawa. Among them were the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada (IMFC), a conservative research and advocacy organization created by its parent organization, Focus on the Family Canada. Another organization on Mackey’s list is Trinity Western University, based in Langley, B.C. and one of the largest evangelical educational institutions in Canada. Trinity established an Ottawa “campus” in 2001 in an old mansion near Parliament Hill. It houses the Laurentian Leadership Centre, which places students as interns with Ottawa-based organizations, many of them with MPs.

Both Reid and Wilson have deep roots in both the religious right and in the Reform and Canadian Alliance parties. Reid was chief of staff to Reform Party leader Preston Manning while he was leader of the opposition. Reid later left to become the president of Focus on the Family Canada in its Vancouver head office for six years. Under his leadership, the group lobbied against public childcare, against legislation on same-sex marriage, and against adding sexual orientation to a list of minorities protected from hate crimes. Focus on the Family has also promoted conversion therapy for gays. Reid later made an unsuccessful attempt at a Conservative nomination for the 2006 election in Richmond, near Vancouver. When the Conservatives won that election, he returned to Ottawa as chief of staff to Rona Ambrose during her brief and tumultuous tenure as environment minister.

Focus on the Family in Canada is an offshoot of a powerful American organization of the same name created by psychologist James Dobson. It is a well-funded conservative lobby group that also trains activists and produces magazines, videos and books. Two hundred million people listen to Dobson’s radio broadcasts, making his the most extensive network in the world, religious or secular. Harper’s magazine has described Dobson as among the most powerful evangelical Christians in America and says that he was instrumental in getting the vote out for George Bush. Dobson believes that Christians are being persecuted in the U.S., and according to Harper’s he also holds toxic views about gays, lesbians, those who support same sex marriage, and even the public school system. Dobson’s daily broadcasts are available over the website of Focus on the Family Canada and the Canadian organization has received financial support from its American counterpart.

Dobson also created the Family Research Council in Washington D.C. as a conservative research and advocacy group. Focus on the Family Canada created the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada (IMFC) in Ottawa with the same intent. The Institute worked closely with the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and other groups in opposing the Liberal government’s same sex marriage legislation. Dave Quist, now the IMFC’s executive director, spent six years working for a Reform-Alliance MP from British Columbia. Quist ran for the Conservatives there in the 2004 election and after losing he spent a year working in Stephen Harper’s office.

Paul Wilson, Darrel Reid’s successor in the PMO, worked for both Preston Manning and Stockwell Day in the Reform-Alliance and Conservative parties. Later he served with Trinity Western’s leadership centre. Among his tasks was coordination of the internship program for students, many of who served in the offices of opposition MPs when Reform, the Alliance and Conservatives occupied that role. When Stephen Harper won in 2006, Wilson left Trinity Western to become a senior policy advisor to Vic Toews, the justice minister. Wilson later served in a similar policy role for Diane Finley, the minister of human resources.

Trinity Western has close informal ties with many Reform-Alliance and Conservative politicians. The university hosts an annual lecture by a prominent public figure. The speaker in 2009 was former Reform–Alliance-Conservative MP Deborah Grey. Previous lecturers include: Preston Manning, Chuck Strahl, the federal Indian affairs minister and Ralph Klein, the former Conservative premier of Alberta.

When journalist Lloyd Mackey spoke to the Faith and Public Life class in March he pointed to a range of events that week which involved religious groups on or around Parliament Hill. Trinity Western was hosting John Redekop, retired professor of political science, for a lecture called: What does God expect of governments and of citizens?  Cornelius Van Dam, a professor at the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary in Hamilton, was here to talk about: God and government: a biblical perspective on the role of the state.

Dave Quist’s Institute on Marriage and the Family Canada hosted a conference for about 120 people and Monte Solberg, a former Reform-Alliance-Conservative MP and cabinet minister, gave a welcoming address to the guests. (Mr. Quist also sent me a message inviting me to attend – and in doing so identified himself as a reader of this blog. I was not able to make it).

The Manning Centre for Building Democracy also had an event in Ottawa that week, which was described on its website as a “networking conference and exhibition”. Preston Manning and his wife Sandra created the centre in 2006 and it is focused on training conservatives to win in politics. Manning’s conference featured Rick Hillier, the retired chief of defence staff, as the speaker for a gala dinner, and included an array of researchers from the right-wing Fraser Institute and columnists from the National Post. The event also featured Frank Schubert, campaign manager for Proposition 8, a plebiscite in the November 2008 American election aimed at enshrining the traditional definition of marriage into California’s constitution. The proposition carried.

Manning also used his website to promote Quist’s IMFC conference occurring on March 12 — for obvious strategic reasons and perhaps as a favour to his former chief of staff.

One does not have to agree politically or theologically with these individuals and organizations to respect the networks that have been built and the growing influence that they appear to have with government.  Political and religious progressives, should they be aware of this activity, must be envious indeed.

George Lakoff, the well-known American linguist, describes in his book Don’t Think of an Elephant how political conservatives in the United States made a conscious decision in the 1970s to spend the money to build an intellectual culture for the right. Donors included the Coors family – famous for their breweries and their right wing politics. Lakoff says these wealthy people set up professorships and scholarships at many universities, including Harvard. “These institutions have done their job very well,” Lakoff writes. “The conservatives support their intellectuals. They create media opportunities . . . Eighty per cent of the talking heads on television are from conservative think tanks.” Lakoff adds, “Nothing like this happens in the progressive world, because there are so many people thinking that what each does is the right thing.”

There is little in progressive Ottawa to rival the networks that have been created by the religious and political right. The right is a minority in Canada but groups that are well organized can punch above their weight as the saying goes – particularly in an era of fractured parliaments and minority governments.

By Dennis Gruending 
 
Stephen Harper is poised to call a fall 2008 election whether Canadians need one or not. Pollster Andrew Grenville said that in 2006 the vote of evangelical Christians and Catholics who attend church services on a weekly basis was instrumental in the election of a Conservative minority government.  Mr. Harper, MP Jason Kenney and others have continued to work assiduously to build a coalition of conservative Christian and Jewish voters. It will be interesting to monitor the messages of churches and various religious organizations in the coming campaign, and to see whether people in the pews take the advice of those who claim to lead them.

I have received some informative comments that urge caution about polls and what is read into them. Bill Stahl, a sociologist from the University of Regina, writes: “It is true that the Evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly support the Tories, just as they supported the Alliance.  What is different from the US is that in Canada Evangelical Protestants make up only 8% of the population, as opposed to 40% in the US.  There just aren’t enough Evangelicals in Canada to play the same kind of role as they do in the US.  That does not mean they cannot play a decisive role in an otherwise close election, but since they have voted overwhelmingly for the Alliance/Tories for some time they are not a place where the Tory vote is going to grow.  They maybe locally important, but national elections are decided by others.”

Marc Zwelling, president of Vector Research in Toronto, also cautions that some observers read too much into the evangelical vote. “You’re talking about a slim slice of the electorate. I am not convinced the religious right in Canada – being concentrated in a few ridings, probably – will have that much influence in federal elections.” Zwelling had this comment on the Catholic vote: “The Conservatives’ recent support from Catholics seems to be an artifact of the Conservatives’ growing support in Quebec – you get Catholic voters when you do better in Quebec but probably not because they’re Catholics.”

With those cautions in mind, let’s turn to what churches and religiously based organizations might say and do during the campaign. There is a common perception in society that same sex marriage and abortion are the two issues that really matter for churches and religious organizations. The religious right has been successful in framing the debate about “family values” around these two questions, and a few others. Mainstream organizations such as the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada  issued reasoned statements during the 2006 campaign, but  have invested much of their effort in court interventions opposing same sex marriage. Catholic clergy have denied full participation in the church to several Catholic NDP parliamentarians because of their party’s position on same sex marriage. Some Catholic bishops still threaten to deny the sacraments to any legislator who does not support the church’s position on abortion. No MP has been sanctioned, however, for supporting a war in Afghanistan – in fact, the bishops have had little of substance to say about that war.  

There are other religiously based organizations that can make no claim to be widely representative. The Defend Marriage Coalition distributed a pamphlet in churches during the 2006 campaign. It was a bogus “report card” on the policies of the various parties, and alleged that Liberal and NDP candidates “support physician-assisted suicide”, and that the NDP “supports defences for the possession of child pornography”. The Conservatives, however, were treated gently.  Defend Marriage includes groups such as Campaign Life, Real Women of Canada, the Catholic Civil Rights League and the Canada Family Action Coalition, which is led by Charles McVety of Toronto. These groups would all have been considered on the right wing fringe a few years ago but are now being courted by the Harper Conservatives.

The Conservatives have also been courting a Jewish constituency whose over-riding priority is to have Canada support Israel. Dr. Stephen Scheinberg, an historian from Montreal and a former long-time officer of B’nai Brith, writes about how that organization has forged an alliance with the Christian right, including McVety, who is also the Canadian chair of a group called Christians United for Israel. Scheinberg writes that B’nai Brith has thrown its weight behind the Conservatives.

What will religiously based organizations – mainstream and fringe – have to say in the coming campaign? Those who talk about family values might want to revisit the ones outlined by Senator Barack Obama in his recent convention speech in Denver: “… so many children to educate … so many veterans to care for … an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save … so many families to protect and so many lives to mend.”

There are religious organizations in Canada proposing action on those values but they have had trouble getting noticed. During the 2006 campaign, Anglican and Lutheran leaders urged their church members to question candidates closely about putting a priority on the needs of children and families living in poverty. The United Church raised environmental issues and those of peace. Citizens for Public Justice, a small but effective religiously based organization issued a special election issue of its magazine discussing what it really means to “vote Christian”. The publication talked about public responsibility, taxes, poverty, homelessness, the environment, fairness for aboriginal people and the treatment of refugees. 

Thomas Frank, in his excellent book What’s The Matter With Kansas?, writes about how the Republicans fight every election on family values but once elected they deliver only on neo-conservative economic policies. “Cultural anger,” writes Frank, ” is marshaled to achieve economic ends.” 

All too often religionists play along.

By Dennis Gruending

When Donald Rumsfeld left the Bush Cabinet, he quickly found a new job at Hoover Institution, one of dozens of powerful and wealthy right-wing think tanks (such as the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute and American Enterprise Institute) that wield tremendous influence in US politics. Canada’s best-known counterpart is the Fraser Institute, founded in 1974. Over the years, it has been joined by others, including:

· the Manning Centre, created by Preston and his wife Sandra to train people how to succeed at conservative politics;

· the Ottawa-based Institute for Canadian Values, which has as its executive director Joseph Ben-Ami, a former political organizer for Stockwell Day.; and

· the Ottawa-based Institute for Marriage and Family, created by Dr James Dobson’s powerful US Focus on the Family (Canada), to provide socially conservative research and advice.

Now meet the Hamilton-based Work Research Foundation (WRF). In mid-October, the WRF sponsored a lecture by Dr Paul Marshall, Senior Fellow Hudson Institute, at Ottawa’s exclusive Rideau Club. His topic: “God, International Affairs and the Global Economy.”

On hand to facilitate this lecture, on the 15th floor of a downtown office tower, was WRF’s vice-president of research, Ray Pennings, an unsuccessful Canadian Alliance candidate in the 2000 federal election. His colleague, senior researcher Russ Kuykendall, is a former legislative assistant to Manitoba MP Inky Mark and a graduate of the Alberta Bible Institute in Calgary.

Paul Marshall’s talk reflected the position of the Hudson Institute, which, in its own words, is particularly interested in the war on terror and the future of Islam. A corporatist institution, it is also concerned with market reforms and the 21st century welfare state.

Marshall said that the role of religion has been all but neglected in international relations. That lack of knowledge is dangerous, he said, and was one reason that the US was caught off guard on September 11, 2001. He also talked about what he called the “striking relationship” between religious freedom and economic prosperity, particularly in Christian countries. On the other hand, he posited that “closed systems” such as those found in many Muslim countries stunt economic growth.

Marshall didn’t say much about Canada, although he did take a passing swipe at Louise Arbour, formerly a Supreme Court Justice and now the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. He stated that in Canada one can be fined for speaking out against homosexuality, but he provided no example or corroborating detail.

Although Marshall’s talk was predictable, his presence in Ottawa was somewhat puzzling. Who, exactly, is the WRF and why did it feature a talk by someone from the Hudson Institute?

The WRF describes itself as a Christian-inspired think tank that seeks “an alternative model for industrial relations policy.” The group was created by the Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC), which in turn arose from the Christian Reformed church about 50 years ago. The CLAC describes itself as both a “bona fide trade union” and an “alternative labour movement” - one based on Christian social principles. It claims to support no political party.

The CLAC claims to have 43,000 members in five provinces, with a concentration in Alberta and southern Ontario, and describes itself as having the third largest union presence in Ontario’s long-term care sector. The CLAC is no fan of the Canadian Labour Congress. The labour movement, in turn, sees CLAC as essentially a company union (or worse), which is making inroads into Alberta’s notoriously anti-union tar sands industry.

The WRF insists that it is an independent organization and is sensitive about its ties with CLAC even though two of its seven board members, and several of its staff, are drawn from that organization. The WRF recently admonished a sympathetic religion writer who had written that the two organizations were “affiliated.”

Peter Menzies, a former publisher of the Calgary Herald, is a senior fellow of the WRF, and acting in that capacity he wrote a recent op-ed article in The Globe and Mail warning the Alberta government not to raise royalties in the tar sand sands. Menzies also has a consulting company and lists as clients two other conservative think tanks - the Manning Centre and the Fraser Institute. The Fraser Institute’s senior research fellows include Preston Manning, Mike Harris and Ralph Klein.

Conservative think tanks have been very profitable ventures in the US. The National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy 1999 report, called $1 Billion for Ideas: Conservative Think Tanks in the 1990s, concluded that, “the conservative policy establishment is perhaps the key generator and purveyor of public ideas.” Follow-up reports in 2004 (Axis of Ideology: Conservative Foundations and Public Policy) and 2005 (Funding the Culture Wars: Philanthropy, Church and State) traced the funding and influence of the ever-expanding field, in greater detail.

In Canada, too, the Fraser Institute has expanded beyond its initial Vancouver base to open offices in Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, and Tampa, Florida. The Institute offers tax-deductible receipts for donations, in the US as well as in Canada.

Together with the Manning Centre, the Institute for Marriage and the Family, and the Institute for Canadian Values, the Fraser Institute anchors a matrix of conservative organizations whose personnel attend each other’s conferences, write for each other’s newsletters and appear as spokespersons on sympathetic media to discuss the latest budgets, elections and court cases.

These organizations share a deep suspicion of government, an antagonism toward social programs and a dislike for the labour movement. They have taken ideas once considered to be on the fringe right and moved them into the mainstream debate.

News media regularly cover Fraser Institute news releases on topics like “Tax Freedom Day”, wait times in health care, and report cards on public schools. These terms frame the public debate and overshadow questions of corporate responsibility, human rights, and education as the foundation of democracy.

The emergence of all these organizations might indicate that Canada is now seen as fertile territory for the think tank industry. If so, we all (and unions especially) should brace for an onslaught of “free market” propaganda. The challenge for progressive groups is provide better information and to distribute it widely within the community.

Note: This article appeared in the October 31 edition of the online publication Straight Goods.