Mediaboss Marketing

OTTAWA The Justice Department wants to know what Canadians think of changing some of the former Conservative government'scontroversial tough-on-crime sentencing legacy including mandatory minimum penalties before the Liberals bring in their promised reforms.

An online survey asks respondents to judge several scenarios involving mitigating circumstances surrounding a crime, such as a brain-damaged offender whose condition leads to poor decision-making skills, or an offender who acted out of character and has apologized to the victim in court.

Consider, for example, the fictional case of Sarah, a 36-year-old single mother struggling with addiction who was convicted of drug trafficking after she was caught selling some of her prescription opioid pills.

The survey says she had a knife in her backpack, which she claimed was for her own protection, and after she went to jail, her two children were placed with child welfare services because she had no family to take them in.

The survey, conducted by EKOS Research Associates, Inc., says everyone convicted of drug trafficking while carrying a weapon must be sentenced to at least one year behind bars, no matter the circumstances,and then asks respondents whether they believe the sentence is appropriate and fair.

The Liberals have promised legislative changes to mandatory minimum sentences, including at least some of the dozens the Conservatives imposed, or increased, over the decade they were in power.

Proponents of mandatory minimumpenalties argue they help ensureconsistency in sentencing, whilecritics have decried them for taking away the ability of judges to use their discretion in handing down a consequence that fits not only the crime, but also the person convicted of committing it.

Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, who said earlier this summer about half the charter challenges her officials are tracking involve mandatory minimum penalties, is expected to introduce legislation this fall.

Ottawa-based criminal defence lawyer Michael Spratt said he is concerned the surveysuggests the Liberal government is looking to public opinion, rather than evidence, when it comes to shaping its justice policy.

"Governing your justice policy based on the popular opinion is a dangerous game that potentially could undermine the rule of law and important constitutional protections," Spratt said.

Yvon Dandurand, a criminologist at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, B.C., said he does not share that view because he knows the Liberal government is doing much more than polling when it comes to its review of the criminal justice system.

"They have done just about everything else to develop a good, rational policy on sentencing so to find out where public opinion lies is just part of that," Dandurand said.

Kathleen Davis, a spokeswoman for Wilson-Raybould, said the survey, which was not crafted by her office, is part of a broader effort by the department to engage the public on such issues, includingfocus groups and a more traditional public opinion survey using a randomized sample.

She said othertopics they will explore this fall include restorative justice, sexual assault, court delays, Indigenous issues and mental health.

Davis also said she has seenpreliminary results of the survey, which she would not release, and that she was surprised by the level of support for repealing mandatory minimum penalties.

"That goes against the narrative that's out there that the public would not be in favour of that," she said.

Carissima Mathen, a University of Ottawa law professor, said she would be concerned if the survey results were being used to determine policy, but said it could serve to educate people about "complexities in the criminal justice system," including how sentencing goes beyond the crime.

NDP justice criticAlistair MacGregor said he hopes the polling means the Liberals are getting closer to acting on their promise.

"I guess at the end of the day, you have to say better late than never," he said.

Follow @smithjoanna on Twitter

Joanna Smith, The Canadian Press

See the rest here:
Justice officials testing waters for sentencing reform promised by Liberals - rdnewsnow.com

Surrey-Panorama Liberal candidate Puneet Sandhar tops the charts for South Surrey

Financial disclosures published Aug. 15 show that BC Liberal Party candidates in South Surrey spent the most on the 2017 election compared to their counterparts.

Surrey-Panorama BC Liberal candidate Puneet Sandhar led the pack, spending $171,542 to lose the May 9 election to NDP MLA Jinny Sims, who tallied $100,521 in expenses.

The biggest discrepancy between the two candidates was Sandhars $55,462 bill on media advertising, compared to Sims $2,210. Sandhar also spent $67,153 on newsletters and promotional material, while Sims spent $29,003.

Sandhars bill was paid in full by the BC Liberal Party. Sims fundraised nearly $13,000 of her expenses, with the BC NDP picking up the rest.

Sandhars bill was nearly doubled by a party colleague in a more northern part of the city. Surreys biggest-spending candidate was former BC Liberal cabinet minister Peter Fassbender, who dropped more than $317,000 to lose his Surrey-Fleetwood seat to BC NDP Jagrup Brar. Brar spent about $96,000.

Surrey-South BC Liberal MLA Stephanie Cadieux spent $68,037 to secure the newly created seat, while her opponent, NDP candidate John Silviera, spent $19,690.

Cadieux whos bill was fully covered by the BC Liberal Party spent $13,200 on media advertising and $19,128 on newsletters and promotional material.

Surrey-White Rock BC Liberal MLA Tracy Redies spent $76,215 to win the election. Her nearest opponent, New Democrat Niovi Patsicakis, spent $23,858.

Redies spent $15,244 on promotional material and $12,350 on media advertising, her two largest expenses. Patsicakis spent $120 on media advertising and $7,504 on promotional material.

Redies campaign was funded almost entirely by the BC Liberal Party. Patsicakis raised $1,459 and chipped in $727.70 out of her own pocket for her campaign; the rest of her bill was paid for by the NDP.

Surrey-Cloverdale BC Liberal MLA Marvin Hunt spent 15 times as much as the ridings next highest spender. According to the disclosures, Hunt spent $84,308 to NDP candidate Rebecca Smiths $4,860. Hunt spent $11,612 on media advertising while Smith spent $588. Hunt spent nearly $16,000 for promotional material and Smith claimed just under $1,300.

Go here to read the rest:
South Surrey BC Liberals spend the most in election - Surrey Now-Leader

And heres Eric Boehlert of Shareblue, the social media network that was created by David Brock to help lead the online resistance to Trump:

Liberals often use alt-left to describe progressives they consider rude or with whom they have Twitter beef; it is personal animus disguised as politics. James Wolcott, writing in Vanity Fair in March, captured the general spirit of disdain and irritation:

Disillusionment with Obamas presidency, loathing of Hillary Clinton, disgust with identity politics, and a craving for a climactic reckoning that will clear the stage for a bold tomorrow have created a kinship between the alt-right and an alt-left. Theyre not kissin cousins, but they caterwaul some of the same tunes in different keys.

The events of Charlottesville should clarify that the only tune the so-called alt-left is singing is that it hates fascists. And yet Markos Moulitsas, founder of what is supposed to be one of the most progressive blogs in the world, decided to regurgitate red-baiting canards the very day a white supremacist killed a counter-protester:

The function of the term alt-left is to collapse the distinction between the activist left and the racist right. Thats why reactionaries like Sean Hannity use it. Thats why Donald Trump has taken it up. We are likely to hear a lot more about the alt-left in the coming months and yearsand if liberals continue to use it, they will be doing the right-wings work.

So it is time for the entire left to permanently retire the term. It insults the dead and the work the left is doing to stop the rise of fascism in our country. It serves the cause of the right wing, amplifying its noxious tactics of delegitimization. These liberals have invested a lot of energy in an effort to discredit anyone sitting to their left. They are so furious, so disturbed by the emergence of this invigorated movement, that they paint them with the brush of fascismeven while the very people they vilify are on the streets fighting the Ku Klux Klan. In so doing, they have served the purposes of Donald Trump and no one else.

Follow this link:
Liberals Helped Create Trump's New Bogeyman, the Alt-Left - New Republic

Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Nashville, Tennessee. Photograph: Mark Humphrey/AP

Did I tell you Donald Trump is a vulgar, foul-mouthed, meat-faced, 71-year-old redneck buffoon? To be honest, he is a fossil-fuel guzzling, Big Mac-eating, pussy-grabbing, racist dick. He has hubris syndrome with paranoid narcissistic disorder. Do you read his tweets? The English is dreadful. How can a man run the country who is so uncouth, with that hair, those ties, those baggy suits? He is a Baathist generalissimo, the president of a banana republic. He is anti-Christ. There. Does that make you feel better?

All the above phrases are culled from a brief Google scan on the current American president. They reflect a melange of national shame, liberal trauma, snobbery and class hatred. They extend across the Atlantic and around the world. They assume two things. One is that Trump is so appalling it is inconceivable he could win a second term in office. The other is that deploying the same language as he did to win office is the best way to send him packing.

I hope the first is true, but I am not sure about the second. The comparison this week between Trumps scripted and spontaneous reactions to the Charlottesville riot spoke volumes of his technique and his appeal. He failed to fully address the one aspect of the riot where attacking the left might have had traction, its Orwellian history scrubbing of the Confederate hero General Robert E Lee. Instead he used the occasion to denigrate the alt-left, and ramp up his appeal not just to the alt-right but to the silent right that, perhaps ashamedly, sympathises with it.

Trump made it almost arrogantly clear that his formally scripted criticism of the right was merely to appease Washingtons liberal elite. He promptly erased it in the sort of street fight with the media that his followers love. Every time this happens, Fox, Drudge, Breitbart and his social media operators gleefully edit clips and feed them to his millions of supporters. A BBC documentary by Jamie Bartlett this week showed how Trump may be a gastronomic and sartorial throwback, but he is a master at social media. The 1990s thesis that the internet would turn the world into one vast lovable, liberal community has never looked less likely than today. It plays into the hands of the political polarisers.

Trumps approval rating is at a historic low for a first-year president of 34%. Republicans are almost as appalled by him as Democrats, since they fear he may lose them votes in next years mid-terms. This is even though they have not done badly in recent byelections. Hence the two former Bush presidents issuing a joint statement denouncing racismtoday. The basis of Trumps second-term appeal is already emerging: the tried and tested technique (see Margaret Thatcher) of taking on his own government and keeping up the fight.

Eliminating Trump will depend not on making liberal America feel good, but on detaching him from the bulk of his conservative support. The battle will not be for the elusive centre of American opinion, an entity that political scientists such as Jonathan Haidt and others have declared non-existent. It will be over a group that both Trump and the failed Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders identified as the white working class, urban as much as rural. Sanders did astonishingly well, given his socialist credentials.

Forty-two per cent of American adults are classified as white working class. For two decades they have seen incomes shrink in favour, as they see it, of welfare recipients, identity groups, graduates and the rich. Defining them as racist xenophobes and deplorables, as did Hillary Clinton, when they craved jobs and income security, was a sign of the class cluelessness, analysed by Joan Williams in the bestseller White Working Class. Written like a Victorian explorer encountering unknown tribes on the Congo, it has joined JD Vances Hillbilly Elegy in charting the origins of Trumps appeal.

Tolerating Trump may stick in the craw, but it must be counter-productive to feed his paranoia

These people made up the bulk of the 63 million who voted for Trump. Insulting him insults them. When the insults carry a tinge of cultural, intellectual and class superiority, they bite deep. As Edward Luttwak points out in the Times Literary Supplement, liberal America finds it hard to believe that since the crash the median American family cannot any longer afford a new car. That is the key to Trumpism, not the loud-mouthed spoilt brat but the word JOBS with which he ends his tweets.

In New York recently I read in the New York Times each day pages of columns competing with each other not just in criticising but in jeering at their president, to the point where I could understand his paranoia. Articles in the New Yorker discussed his mental health, his impeachment or his dismissal for incapacity under the constitutions 25th amendment. It was all preaching to the converted.

Meanwhile a deafening wall descended somewhere beyond the Hudson river, where there lay a frightened, puzzled, increasingly poor America, one that had put its faith in a man who seemed to speak its language and address its fears. No one was reaching out to them, calmly explaining that others than Trump felt their pain. Trump does not appeal to the Republican wealth nexus, as did Ronald Reagan. He appeals to those whom the left thought were its own, and whom it has long neglected. Hence perhaps the fury that lies behind the insults.

Trump is easily depicted as a man whose narcissism renders him unsuited to the presidency. He is testing Americas constitutional power balance to the limit. Pundits assume that his ineptitude will be curbed by the grown-ups now gathered around him and by the weight of congressional opposition. Either by unforeseen accident, or by the rise of rivals, they predict he will be a one-term nightmare.

But Trump and his supporters thrive on the venom of their liberal tormentors. The old maxim should apply: think what your enemy most wants you to do, and do the opposite. Tolerating Trump may stick in the craw, but it must be counter-productive to feed his paranoia, to behave exactly as his lieutenants want his critics to behave, like the liberal snobs that obsess him.

If Trump wins again, it will be by convincing voters the system still cares nothing for them. He will say that it will be an eight-year job to bring his anarchic rage to bear on a smug establishment, and let him finish the job. I would rather not help him to that ambition.

Read more:
With every sneer, liberals just make Trump stronger - The Guardian

As for many of the great questions of our times, an explanation can be found in Russian classical literature. In this case, Fyodor Dostoyevskys novella The Double. It is the story of a government clerk who winds up in the madhouse after meeting his doppelgnger a man who looks like him and speaks like him, but who displays all the charm and self-confidence that the tortured protagonist lacks. The doppelgnger in Dostoyevskys story does not drive the protagonist insane just because they look alike but because he makes the protagonist realize what it is he doesnt like about himself. And such it is with the United States and Russia today.

The Soviet Union terrorized the West for most of the 20th century in part because it was so radically different. There was ostensibly no God, no private property and no political pluralism. America could be Sovietized only by losing the war against Communism. Mr. Putins Russia, by contrast, frightens Americans because they know that the United States and Russia should be very different, but many of the pathologies present in Russia can also be found in the United States. What disturbs liberal America is not that Russia will run the world far from it. Rather, the fear, whether liberals fully recognize it or not, is that the United States has started to resemble Russia.

It was the Kremlin that for the past two decades tried to explain away its problems and failures by blaming foreign meddling. Now America is doing the same. Everything that liberal Americans dislike Mr. Trumps electoral victory, the reverse of the process of democratization in the world and the decline of American power are viewed as the results of Mr. Putins plottings.

For liberal Americans, Russia is rightfully a frightening example of how authoritarian rule can function within the institutional framework of a democracy. Russias managed democracy provides a vivid illustration of how institutions and practices that originally emancipated citizens from the whim of unaccountable rulers can be refashioned to effectively disenfranchise citizens (even while allowing them to vote).

Russia also embodies what politics can look like when the elites are completely divorced from the people. It is not only a highly unequal society but also one in which rising inequality is normal, and a handful of very rich and politically unaccountable rulers have managed to stay on top without having to use much violence. The privileged few do not need to dominate or control their fellow citizens; they can simply ignore them like an irrelevant nuisance.

It may take a while before working-class Americans start to realize that while the American economy is dramatically different from that of Russia, the technological revolution led by Silicon Valley could in time tilt Western societies toward authoritarian politics in the same way that an abundance of natural resources has made Mr. Putins regime possible. Robots not unlike post-Soviet citizens are not that interested in democracy.

For many years, Americans were able to look at Russia and its social and political problems and see a country stuck in the past, perhaps someday to develop into a modern country like the United States. But thats no longer the prevailing attitude. Now, whether they realize it or not, many Americans fear that when they look at Russia they are looking at the future. What is most disturbing is that it could be their future, too.

Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies, a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, a contributing opinion writer and the author, most recently, of After Europe.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 17, 2017, on Page A1 of the National edition with the headline: For America, a disturbing resemblance.

Read more from the original source:
Why Are American Liberals So Afraid of Russia? - New York Times