The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This certainly rings true in the world of health policy: there’s a lot of talk, and the idea of change or reform is nice to think about, regardless of whether it ever happens. Recently, it seems that absolutely nothing is changing at all. Because for some reason we’re still debating about the needs of women in developing countries —and in particular we’re trying to decide if those women deserve access to safe and law-abiding abortions.

For just one second, lets forget the fact that Canadian women have this right and have had it for more than 40 years. Lets forget that it is, in itself, ridiculous for our government to have any say whatsoever over what happens in other countries, other than by providing advice and guidance through our own trial and error.

The Harper government was not saying, this week, that they would debate the legality of abortion. But by insisting that leaders at the G8 summit in Halifax remain silent on abortion while discussing other women’s health issues in developing countries, they placed a gag order on the issue.

This is indicative of not only of our foreign presence and international ideology, but of how the Conservatives in particularly see women in Canada, and especially in their own party. Watching Bev Oda take a strong stance against yet another women’s rights issue is becoming tiring. Last month it was debated if birth control would be talked during the meeting at all. Harper quickly jumped in the ring after protests took off.

I’d hate to say that women in the Conservative party are there as demographic placeholders, but it can often seem that way. With scandals surrounding former Conservative MPs Belinda Stronach and Rona Ambrose, I know more about the personal lives of our female MPs more than their politics—especially those politics pertaining gender issues.

And, as if Helena Geurgis needed more attention, the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women sent out a press release yesterday stating they’d like a review of the funding handed out under Ms. Guergis as Minister of the Status of Women. According to CRIAW President Judy White, many women’s advocacy groups were denied previously delegated funding this year:

“SWC has turned down a growing list of women’s groups this year, that they previously funded. Some are afraid they will lose more government funding if they speak out.”

“This is deeper than the government’s decision to eliminate funding for advocacy, lobbying and most research when they changed the SWC funding mandate 4 years ago… What could be more important than a project to ensure that all women can access shelters when they need refuge from oppressive and violent relationships?”

Through all this I’m left wondering: What are our women in government here for?

One would hope one part of their role would be to champion women’s health—and all that brings along. In a meeting drawing leaders from around the world to Canada with a focus on maternal health, I would have hoped those women elected to office (not to mention the men!) would have pushed harder for discussion and debate.

Rahim Jaffer, Noted Businessman Who Is Smart, says he wouldn’t touch Nazim Gillani with a bargepole:

“We realized very quickly after a few meetings with him that our firms were very divergent, that we had no synergies where we could develop a relationship, so that exploration ended at that stage,” Mr. Jaffer said.

“If you are a businessman who is smart, you don’t jump into bed with anyone immediately. You take the time to learn about them, and if you find there is no synergy, you leave them in good nature and you don’t work with them. That is what happened with Mr. Gillani,” he said.

Ah, but Gillani has a bunch of recent emails and signed contracts that say different, and the contract explicitly touts “connections” with government departments and ministries as being “valuable”:

Nazim Gillani’s business dealings last year with former Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer were more extensive and formal than previously thought, according to documents tabled at a parliamentary committee today. […] Mr. Gillani has revealed details of a written contract with Green Power Generation, the company founded last year by Mr. Jaffer and business partner Patrick Glémaud.

In the contract, signed by Mr. Glémaud, Green Power Generation states that “it is in ongoing dialogue with, and has valuable connections to and with, the government of Canada and various departments, ministries, and wholly or partially owned entities thereof.”

The whole story is worth reading here, along with the Globe‘s live-blog of Gillani’s testimony.

Bonus round: notice the hilariously vague, semi-grammatical corporate slogans on Gillani’s website, including “Assisting companies identify and access various resources which they may be unaware of,” and “A relationship based approach makes it possible to source the level of people required to successfully grow a business.” Businessmen Who Are Smart are always looking to Access Various Resources through a Relationship Based Approach, but perhaps “Being Married To A Sitting Cabinet Minister” isn’t quite what those motivational posters were implying.

“While timeliness is the cornerstone of the Act, delays continue to be its Achilles’ heel,” said Legault. The findings of a special report tabled in Parliament this morning “show that little progress has been achieved so far to remedy the root causes of delay across the system.”

The bottom line is, important parts of Canadian government have become near-completely opaque, operating out of the oversight of citizens. They aren’t small departments or ministries, either: we’re talking big, important divisions of the bureaucracy, and their report card scores are much worse than “needs improvement.” The Globe story:

…core departments including the Privy Council Office and Foreign Affairs were singled out for slow response times and for creating a bottleneck that causes delays in other departments.

Five departments received F rankings and seven earned Ds, while the performance of Foreign Affairs was deemed so poor that its report card ranking simply states “red alert.”

There’s a little ray of sunshine here, the launch of OpenParliament.ca, which launched yesterday — good timing! — and allows you fast searching of Hansard records to easily follow what’s going on in the House of Commons. Different MPs’ statements are tagged by topic, party, and more. So it’s not all bad news. Just most of it.

Former Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer was clocked doing 93 km/h in a 50 zone one evening last September. At the time, police charged him with impaired driving and cocaine possession. A few months go by, and—abracadabra!—the drunk-driving and the drug possession charges disappear, replaced by a guilty plea for “careless driving”:

Crown attorney Marie Balogh told the court the initial charges were dropped because there was no reasonable prospect of conviction.

The judge, Mr. Justice Doug Maund said he could read “between the lines” of the evidence presented to him.

“I’m sure you can recognize a break when you see one” the judge told Mr. Jaffer.

The former MP was sentenced to a $500 fine.

Of course, us Canada-hating commie crybabies are all whining that Jaffer is getting a wrist-slap just because he’s a former MP, just because he happens to be married to a federal cabinet minister, and just because the presiding judge was chief of staff to a Mulroney cabinet minister.

All in all, the John Howard Society, which advocates for justice reform, seemed to have the most substantive, sensible take on the whole mess:

“It’s really easy to disparage discretion for judges — until you need it,” [John Howard Society executive director] Craig Jones told The Canadian Press in an interview. […] Conservatives, up to and including the prime minister, have publicly criticized judges for sentences they deemed too light. Harper, unsolicited, publicly questioned the sentence handed to a Toronto terrorism convict in January. […]

The experts say the truly perverse aspect of mandatory minimums and “truth in sentencing” provisions is that in real life they actually make the administration of justice more “surreal and bizarre and unjust,” in Jones’ words. […] “Prosecutors and judges strike deals to preserve proportionality. But because they can’t do it in public, they do it behind closed doors.”

At the moment, this is an optics problem for the Conservatives, a few sleazy headlines and nothing more. But it does highlight a serious, pervasive inequity in the justice system, in which “respectable” people get nudges, winks, and savvy deals from prosecutors, while the destitute, the mentally few-bricks-shy, the politically unpopular and the un-snappily dressed are swallowed whole.