Update, Friday, March 19: It seems to me that it’s impossible to truly know where the government stands. One moment the foreign minister says birth control isn’t included in their G8 maternal health push. The next the prime minister’s backing up on that, saying discussion around birth control’s not out of the cards.

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There were mumblings during the Olympics about our government’s plans to focus on maternal and children’s health during the upcoming G8 meeting in Muskoka. At the time, it was announced that abortion would not be discussed during the talks—an unfortunate revelation, but really not terribly surprising.

But now the Tories are saying they won’t even be discussing birth control during the meetings—yet another backwards decision from the powers that be in Ottawa.

The decision, they say, is based on the fact that they plan to focus discussion on “saving lives”—implying that birth control isn’t part of that. An article in the Globe and Mail quotes Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon as saying:

“It does not deal in any way, shape or form with family planning. Indeed, the purpose of this is to be able to save lives,” Mr. Cannon told the Foreign Affairs committee.

Maternal and children’s health will be forever tied to access to birth control, not least access to abortion. As comedian Rick Mercer wrote on Twitter when the news came out, “…caucus, read a book.” The idea that contraception use doesn’t have anything to do with saving lives is so out-dated I’m astounded the government would be actually say it out loud. Condom use decreases the spread of HIV/AIDS and other STDs, and it can be argued that hormonal birth control saves the lives of countless children who would have been born into dangerous, unhealthy situations.

Aside from this is the idea that women use birth control only because of the desire to not have children. Birth control is about more than just reproduction. There are a variety of health reasons as to why birth control is important. Many women risk their lives when pregnant due to underlying health issues. Many women are only able to stabilize and handle their monthly periods thanks to the hormones that birth control provides. And men avoid not only fatherhood, but sexually transmitted infections also through the use of condoms. Having, or not having, children is part of a more complex equation.

All of this to say that contraception will continue to play a role in saving lives around the world, and can have a strong impact in helping countries develop. The fear, of course, is that the Harper government is taking up right where the Bush administration left off—promising global health funding on terms that birth control not be included in the plan.

In a level-headed statement, the assistant medical dean at the University of British Columbia, Dorothy Shaw, told the Globe we need to focus on common ground to save lives. But in politics, common ground is uncommon—and I fear this is only one more step in eroding our government’s commitment not only to public health, but to women’s rights as well.

Here’s Anthony talking with the American investigative radio magazine Flashpoints on KPFA 94.1 FM, broadcasting out of Berkeley, California. (Drag the slider to about the one-third mark to skip straight to the interview.)

A few days before that, Anthony was on the Jeff Farias Show, a progressive podcast from the U.S. (the show is one and a half hours, and he is the last half hour. You can listen to the broadcast through Jeff’s website.

Finally, later in September Anthony was heard on Gorilla Radio, the Victoria, B.C. social justice radio show, heard every Monday at 5 PM PST on CFUV, 101.9. His interview is the first part of the program.

Let me get this straight: The United States finally elects a credible president; moves to enact more humane health care policies; attempts to rein in its legions of lunatic financiers; and gets a clue on climate change. Meanwhile, Canada chugs along with its boring-but-stable banks and an imperfect but respected single-payer healthcare system. And we’re the ones who’ve “grown up,” according to National Post comment editor Jonathan Kay, in a preposterous commentary on Newsweek‘s website:

Suddenly Canadian attitudes have matured at a breakneck pace—and not just because Americans elected Barack Obama (though of course that’s a part of it). As Prime Minister Stephen Harper prepares to visit the Oval Office on Wednesday, Canada’s chronic anti-Americanism has entered a period of remission. […]

Canadian anti-Americanism is fueled, fundamentally, by envy and fear. But over the past year, the United States has been laid low by a devastating financial collapse, a crash in home prices, and a worsening jobs crisis. Canada’s economy, on the other hand, has escaped relatively unscathed. … [The] healing trend comes primarily as an unintended effect of recent developments in Washington and on Wall Street. But it’s also a sign that Canada has grown up.

The drippy, patronizing tone of the piece is entertaining but wildly at odds with the facts: For the last decade or so, Canadians have gazed south with bemusement, horror, even—to quote Kay himself—”eye-rolling disapproval,” of American politics, economics, social policy, and military conduct. And why wouldn’t we? Kay says it himself (repeatedly): the U.S. is a basket case. This isn’t about Canada “maturing” enough to be nice to the U.S., as if it even had anything to do with Canada; it’s about the U.S. finally starting to dig itself out of the nightmare farce of the Bush years and attempting to be a reasonable partner in international diplomacy again.

If you missed the Daily Show this week, on Wednesday it offered a kind of condensed, sweetened version of the current political moment in the U.S., a methodical and droll demolition of the out-and-out insanity that has gripped the American right. In the segment—which, by the way, earns every ounce of smugness it exudes—the archives of Fox News are deployed against itself, showing clips that completely contradict one another, just a few years apart. The Daily Show’s thesis? Fox News personalities have become the “liberals” they so loathe.

The American right has essentially invited a vampire over the threshold, and is now being sucked dry: by giving legitimacy to the no-nothing fringe of kooks, racists, militiamen, birthers, and assorted other lunatic rumps that orbit the Republican Party, they diminish themselves. For a party that once declared it was “Morning In America,” the GOP today appears to be receding into a kind of senile twilight. The palpable glee with which people watched Barney Frank deliver a verbal bitchslap to that poor unsuspecting woman at a Dartmouth, Massachusetts health care reform town hall (see the YouTube clip, right), whiffed strongly of schadenfreude. After the long dark tunnel of the Bush years, it was pure catharsis for millions to watch an elected senator stand in front of a public microphone and call her a fool to her face.

Is this good, functional, meaningful, constructive politics? Hell no. But is it kind of fun to watch—from north of the border? You betcha.

Sam Graham-Felsen of The Notion lays it all out:

No, the troops are not stupid, but let’s state the obvious: a great many of them join the military because college isn’t an option.
The military recruiters know this. That’s why they specifically target inner-city and rural schools, and stay away from places like Phillips Andover, where you can go to Yale even if you get crappy grades—where you never have to make a choice to potentially sacrifice your life for financial reasons.

It’s a shame when reactionary Republicans and their supporters can frame this news item as an outrageous slight against brave soldiers, when any way you slice it Kerry had a point. When, in the current issue of This, Murray Dobbin said that “those who successfully frame the issues will almost always win the battle of ideas,” he wasn’t kidding.