Americans looking for evocative language from their public figures in 2009 had to turn to the anti-Obamas. It wasn't hard to find them – they have dominated the national soapbox since mid-year, outdoing each other in their preposterousness.

Picking the choicest quotes of 2009 is, hence, not quite the uplifting affair it might have been in 2008, when Mr. Obama was still compelling and Republicans still aspired to more than the political equivalent of demolition derby. The past 12 months have served up more sinister stuff.

Take Glenn Beck, the Fox News host who emerged last year as the U.S. right's conspiracy-theorist-in-chief. Government ownership of General Motors, he warned, enables the Obama administration to spy on Americans by way of the OnStar GPS devices installed in GM products: “I just don't believe in giving that kind of technology to this government.”

Sarah Palin launched her crusade against Obamacare with this: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's death panel so his bureaucrats can decide … whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

And Michele Bachmann, another syntactically challenged Republican politician on the rise, greeted a Dec. 15 rally against the Democrats' proposed health-care reform by crying: “That is our wish for fellow citizens here in the United States – for freedom, not for government enslavement.”

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

Sarah Palin has put a new face and voice to the long-standing, powerful, but inchoate movement in US political life that one might see as a mutant variety of Poujadism, inflected with a modern American accent. There are echoes of the Poujadist agenda of 1950s France in its contempt for metropolitan elites, fuelling the resentment of the provinces towards the capital and the countryside towards the city, in its xenophobic strain of nationalism, sturdy, paysan resistance to taxation, hostility to big business, and conviction that politicians are out to exploit the common man.

[. . .]

Most large American cities, especially in the West, are situated in counties that extend far beyond the city limits. Liberal urban governments with high property-tax rates and progressive environmental policies wield great power (some say tyranny) over their rural hinterlands, delivering ukases about land use and conservation: brush-cutting is to be limited to 40 per cent of the property; ‘setbacks’ of 100 feet are required from streams and wetlands; new churches are denied building permission because they are deemed ‘large footprint items’ in ‘critical habitat areas’ etc. So the householder or farmer sees ‘the city’ making unwarranted infringements of his God-given right to manage his land as he pleases, and imagines his precious tax-dollars being squandered on such urban fripperies as streetcar lines and monorails. These local quarrels spread to infect whole states. In Washington state, where I live, almost every ill that befalls people in the timberlands and agricultural regions, far from any city, is confidently attributed to ‘liberals from Seattle’, a nefarious conspiracy of wealthy, tree-hugging elitists with law degrees from East Coast universities, whose chief aim is to destroy the traditional livelihoods of honest citizens living on either side of the Puget Sound urban corridor.

When Ms. Bachmann accuses Mr. Obama of holding “anti-American views,” or when Ms. Palin decries “the agenda-driven policies being pursued in Copenhagen,” they feed into the same anger that drives thousands of Americans to show up for “tea parties,” where they give voice to many who feel dispossessed. “They refuse to listen” is the slogan of the Tea Party Patriots. It expresses the frustration of those who feel their country and their government have been usurped by Mr. Obama and his “socialist” cohorts.

The tea party movement has sent the Republican establishment (what's left of it) into a state of panic. You know what they say about imitation? A recent Republican National Committee Internet ad against Mr. Obama's health-care reform features a series of speakers uttering, in succession, the same plea: “Listen to me!”

That such a volatile and vitriolic faction as the tea party movement is now influencing the conduct of the party of Lincoln is indicative of the desperate state of Republicanism, which has embraced the paranoid style in a manner that would make even Mr. Goldwater cringe. At the party's meeting this month in Hawaii – which, at least if you believe what's written on his birth certificate, is where Mr. Obama came into the world – Republicans will decide whether to impose a “purity test” on prospective candidates seeking the GOP nomination in the 2010 congressional elections. If adopted, those who fail to profess their faith in at least eight of 10 core beliefs would be deprived of RNC backing and money.

Canadian ministers, it seems, are a bunch of Gerald Fords. Like the American president, who could not walk and chew gum at the same time, they cannot, apparently, cope with Parliament’s deliberations while dealing with the country’s economic troubles and the challenge of hosting the Winter Olympic games. This was the argument put forward by the spokesman for Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister, after his boss on December 30th abruptly suspended, or “prorogued”, Canada’s Parliament until March 3rd.

Mr Harper’s supporters might argue that there is nothing wrong with this. Precedent allows it, and Canada is a decent, well-run place, where much is decided at the provincial level. Since most countries already have too many laws, a pause for parliamentary reflection might count as progress. Some places, such as Texas, manage well with only a part-time legislature. Politicians’ ritual slanging matches should not be allowed to distract Canadians from weightier battles, such as the bobsleigh, the giant slalom or round-robin curling. Come to think about it, why not shut down Parliament altogether, perhaps until the economy is growing again at full throttle? At least that would help cut the federal deficit.

The argument that previous prime ministers frequently prorogued Parliament is no more convincing. In almost every case they did so only once the government had got through the bulk of its legislative business. The Parliament that Mr Harper prorogued still had 36 government bills before it, including measures that form part of the prime minister’s much-vaunted crackdown on crime. When it reconvenes, those bills will have to start again from scratch. Past prorogations were typically brief (see article). This time sessions will be separated by a gap of 63 days.

Never mind what his spin doctors say: Mr Harper’s move looks like naked self-interest. His officials faced grilling by parliamentary committees over whether they misled the House of Commons in denying knowledge that detainees handed over to the local authorities by Canadian troops in Afghanistan were being tortured. The government would also have come under fire for its lack of policies to curb Canada’s abundant carbon emissions. Prorogation means that such committees—which carry out the essential democratic task of scrutinising government—will have to be formed anew in March. That will also allow Mr Harper to gain immediate control of committees in the appointed Senate, where his Conservatives are poised to become the biggest party.

This year, Canada will play host to a Group of Eight summit followed by a Group of 20 summit that it will co-host with South Korea. In the fall, another G20 summit will take place in Korea, organized and led only by South Korea.

The confluence of the two summits in this country will be trumpeted by the Harper government as an example of Canada's relevance, whereas the more accurate story line suggests the reverse.

For a long time, the G8 (the G7 before Russia joined) suited Canada perfectly. It got a seat at the table when Gerald Ford was U.S. president because the Europeans overplayed their hand, demanding a seat for Italy. Mr. Ford said yes, provided that Canada entered the club to balance the new European country.

Canada became a member of a group that, by population or economic weight, it should not have been allowed to join. But now the G8 is finished. From one of eight, Canada will henceforth be one of 20.

The annual Davos conference that will open shortly has already announced that this year's session of G8 representatives will be the last. The Canadian G8 meeting might also be the last, but even if the organization lingers, its utility will have shrunk, because the main action has moved to the G20. Indeed, at the last G20 summit in Pittsburgh, the communiqué described the group as “the premier forum for our international economic co-operation.”

Procedure aside, the morphing of the G8 into a G20 was a Canadian idea back when Paul Martin was finance minister. The question now for the federal government is what relevance Canada might have in the larger group, because axiomatically the country will have much less.

Maybe countries won't want a secretariat for this new organization, but it would be worth it for Canada to sound out the others and offer to place a permanent secretariat, and to pay for some of the costs, in an international city such as, say, Montreal.

Canada could argue that it is not a major power such as the United States or China, and not a European country, there already being too many international institutions located there. Canada does know how to organize events, is relatively innocuous yet more or less efficient, and once had a reputation for being constructive, even innovative, in international affairs.

Or Canada could propose a kind of secretariat in cyberspace, with headquarters moving around, and membership at the top of the secretariat involving the U.S., China and the hosts of the previous and next year's summit, plus the host of this year's.

If Canada were really innovative, it would understand that the major international issue remains climate change. The Copenhagen disappointment showed that a smaller group of countries is needed to work on something better, and the G20, or a subset of G20 countries, would be a sensible group.

Of course, this idea would never be advanced by the Harper government, which dislikes the climate-change file and wishes it would disappear. Instead, news reports this week suggest that Mr. Harper wants the G8 meeting to revolve around nuclear non-proliferation, a worthy subject but more a matter of U.S.-Russian relations. The subject really smacks of an attempt to divert debate away from climate change.

[M]iddle power status is usually identified in one of two ways. The traditional and most common way is to aggregate critical physical and material criteria to rank states according to their relative capabilities. Because countries’ capabilities differ, they are categorized as superpowers (or great powers), middle powers or small powers. More recently, it is possible to discern a second method for identifying middle power status by focusing on behavioural attributes. This posits that middle powers can be distinguished from superpowers and smaller powers because of their foreign policy behaviour – middle powers carve out a niche for themselves by pursuing a narrow range and particular types of foreign policy interest. In this way middle powers are countries that use their relative diplomatic skills in the service of international peace and stability. Both measures are contested and controversial, though the traditional quantitative method has proved more problematic than the behavioural method.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon has done a lot of reporting on Afghan women over the years and writes for The Daily Beast that there’s little support for the departure of American troops among the organizations doing work with Afghan women and girls:

Even while some political activists and pundits in Washington and London sound the call for a full troop withdrawal, women here argue that a complete pullback would only exacerbate the battery of formidable problems plaguing their struggling nation. Though nearly all say the international community could have done a far better job in securing a teetering Afghanistan, where practically every citizen can now rattle off a personal tale of corruption, few women say they believe foreign forces should go. In a series of conversations with a dozen women leaders spanning a range of sectors, from health care to business to politics, some of whom rarely speak to journalists, the consensus was that existing troops must stay for now—if only because things would be far worse were they to leave. Insecurity would rise, the Taliban would gain power, and women and girls would immediately lose ground.

I think the best thing to say is that American troops aren’t in Afghanistan in order to help Afghan women, and there are a lot of things America could do in the world that would be more effective ways of advancing women’s rights if that were our primary goal, but Afghan women are nonetheless beneficiaries of the mission.

That said, when it comes to military operations you can’t just bracket the question of feasibility. If the administration’s plan is fatally flawed and simply leads to several more years of fighting followed by inevitable withdrawal and Taliban takeover, then we’re not actually helping anyone. This is why things like Richard Just’s insistence on trying to understand everything through a lens of “realism” versus “idealism” are so annoying. If the administration has a workable plan to bring stability to Afghanistan, then implementing that plan will have humanitarian benefits. But if the plan’s not workable, then it’s not workable, and it doesn’t matter how idealistic or ambitious you try to make it.

Dale Orr Economic Insight says the Canadian domestic economy largely stood still during the 2008-2009 slump that shaved $100 billion from where economic output would have been.

That is precisely the loss in the value of exports from where they would have been had the economy continued to chug along at a stable 2.7-per-cent rate of growth that preceded the downturn.

Economist Dale Orr says since most of those exports would have been bound for the U.S., the recession was mostly a "Made in the U.S.A." phenomenon.

Although Orr says all provinces fell into recession, the downturn impacted Ontario and Newfoundland the most.

The hit to Canada's most populous province was so severe that it elevated Saskatchewan into second place in terms of standard of living, past Ontario and behind Alberta.

Orr says the standard of living of residents of Saskatchewan, as measured in terms of per capital gross domestic product, rose to 104 per cent of the Canadian average, past Ontario, which fell to 103 per cent of the national average.

When Toronto mayoral candidate George Smitherman kissed his spouse, Christopher Peloso, before a bank of cameras this week, he announced his campaign with a public display of affection normally reserved for heterosexual candidates and their spouses.

The gesture may have appeared casual, but it signalled two things to Canadians: that same-sex marriage is becoming an acceptable part of the country's social and political geography and that being openly gay is no longer a liability for politicians. As David Rayside, a University of Toronto professor of political science and sexual diversity, notes, “Visibility counts.”

Mr. Smitherman will be getting a whole lot more visibility during the next year as he seeks to become the first gay mayor of Canada's largest city. And he may not be the only candidate reaching for that goal: He will probably be challenged by another openly gay politician, Glen Murray. The two-term former mayor of Winnipeg has not yet formally announced his candidacy, but he has acknowledged that he is considering joining the race.

Their opponent, in turn, will almost certainly be businessman and radio host John Tory, a socially progressive conservative who once lost a hard-fought provincial riding race to another openly gay candidate, Kathleen Wynne.

As a one-time health minister, Mr. Smitherman, 44, will certainly face far more questions about his role in the eHealth Ontario scandal than about his sexual orientation. That's as it should be. Few Torontonians – or Vancouverites or Montrealers – would be surprised to learn that lifestyle is no longer an issue in local politics. But are Canadians outside large urban centres – especially those in small towns or rural areas – prepared to elect openly gay politicians to top leadership roles, such as premier or prime minister?

Pollster Michael Adams, who tracks social values in Canada, says sexual orientation isn't an issue. “We're at the point where we're past it,” he says. “There are groups whose cultural differences are more controversial than being gay.”

he United Church of Canada and other Canadian churches are demanding Prime Minister Stephen Harper explain why one of his cabinet ministers accused them of being anti-Semitic.

The United, Catholic and Anglican churches are part of KAIROS, an aid group that was shocked to hear Immigration Minister Jason Kenney say its funding was lifted as part of the Conservatives' effort to cut off anti-Semitic organizations.

"It's a horrible charge to make, and to do it with so little thought cheapens the reality of anti-Semitism in the world and diminishes the very careful attention that it deserves," said United Church spokesperson Bruce Gregersen. "We're quite disappointed in the government on this.

"The policies of KAIROS have all been approved by the collective board of KAIROS, so in a sense what Mr. Kenney is doing is accusing Canadian churches of being anti-Semitic and I think that's really unfortunate," Gregersen said in an interview.

Sam Carrière, director of communications for the Anglican Church of Canada, said the church supports a statement released Friday by KAIROS, which condemned Kenney's remarks as false and warned the Harper government against letting politics dominate Ottawa's foreign aid priorities.

Besides the United and Anglican churches, Toronto-based KAIROS's members include the Presbyterian Church in Canada, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Mennonite Central Committee – Canada.

Working with 21 partner organizations around the world, KAIROS sponsors projects promoting social and economic justice in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

Canada's development community appeared stunned after Kenney, in a speech in Jerusalem, cited Ottawa's decision to end 35 years of funding for KAIROS as an example of the Conservatives' push to cut funding for anti-Semitic groups.

KAIROS was "defunded," Kenney said, because it took a leadership role in "the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign" against Israel.

"Minister Kenney's charge against KAIROS is false," the group said in its public response.

KAIROS has raised questions about Israeli government policies but rejected the idea of a national boycott against Israel two years ago, its executives pointed out.

"To label KAIROS's criticism of Israeli government actions as `anti-Semitic' silences dissent and honours no one," the statement said. "KAIROS has a clear position of support for the legitimate right of the Israeli people to a safe and secure state."

zibblsnrt

The Harper government on Thursday invited investors to submit bids on the CANDU reactor division of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the latest step in the government's plan to restructure the Crown corporation.

In a news release, the government said bids would be assessed on how well they meet a number of objectives, which include: "ensuring that Canadians have nuclear as a safe, reliable, and economic clean energy option; controlling costs to the government while maximizing the return on the taxpayers' investment; and positioning the nuclear industry in Canada to seize domestic and global opportunities."

"Nuclear energy is an emission-free source of power that is experiencing a renaissance around the world," Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt said in a statement.

[. . .]

A government review released at the time concluded the reactor division was simply too small to compete with global nuclear giants. This fall, investment bank Rothschild submitted recommendations on how the restructuring should proceed, but the government has so far declined to release the report.

A number of nuclear players are believed to be interested in the CANDU division, including Areva, which is majority owned by the French government, as well as SNC-Lavalin and Bruce Power.

There were two major factors that made last December’s opposition coalition a tough sell and, ultimately, likely doomed it to failure: the presence of the Bloc Quebecois if only on the tertiary, and the unpopularity of Stephane Dion. The fact we’d just had an election that had increased Conservative seat count didn’t help any either. But what if Dion and the BQ weren’t in the equation – does a coalition become more viable?

Some numbers today from pollster Angus Reid suggest that, while it would still be an uphill battle to sell it, under the right circumstances a Liberal/NDP coalition may not be as toxic as originally thought by some, including, well, me.

Asked if they’d support formal power-sharing coalition between the Liberals and the NDP, 42 per cent said yes and 47 per cent said no, with 11 per cent undecided. Those 11 per cent would be critical, and much would demand on the circumstances at the time: electoral result, issues of the day, and so forth. Some 64 per cent of Liberals would support a coalition, and 70 per cent of NDPers. Interestingly, a majority of Green supporters, 51 per cent, would be opposed.

Back to the coalition question, while it appears the battle wouldn’t be as uphill as I’d previously thought, I still think it’s highly unlikely. For starters, I think both parties would need to signal openness to the possibility before an election. You can do it after, but to try to arrange one after an election when you went into it saying no makes the sales battle all the much harder. It could be overcome, but it wouldn’t be a good start.

Declaring openness to a coalition before an election though is highly unlikely, at least for the Liberals. The NDP would probably be fine with it. That’s because the possibility of a coalition going into an election will bleed Liberal votes to the NDP. The Liberals run to win, and part of that strategy is always going to be “we’re the only party that can stop Harper and form a government” which means solidifying the anti-Harper vote in the Liberal column. Openness to a coalition gives license to NDP swing voters to avoid going Liberal to stop Harper, ie. voting strategically. I know that’s cynical, but this is politics.

The unknown insurgent, if he’s still alive and somehow following Canadian politics, must be cracking up at the Canadian chaos he’s unleashed.

The unidentified Taliban fighter, rescued from a severe Afghan beating by Canadian troops more than two years ago, is now threatening to force a public inquiry to be held in faraway snowy Ottawa and may yet terminate a mission-leading cabinet minister.

All this because he was detained by suspicious Canadian soldiers back in mid-2006 with a scratched nose, had his picture taken to prove he didn’t have any serious injuries before being turned over to Afghan police where he was badly roughed up and promptly reclaimed by our sympathetic troops.

This one allegedly isolated situation forced Chief of Defence Staff Walter Natynczyk to mea culpa a humbling correction on Wednesday, admitting this was indeed the Exhibit A of a Canadian detainee surrendered to face Afghan-inflicted torture.

There is now clear and credible evidence that this government has lost deniability on the Afghan torture file and that diplomat Richard Colvin, whose damning testimony was so viciously ridiculed by the government and top generals, is gaining plausibility.

But nobody has taken a harder believability beating than the top military brass.

For the Chief of Defence Staff to suggest he stumbled on incendiary field notes just six hours before his defence minister was placed on the hot seat at a parliamentary committee, a report already published in the Globe and Mail, is beyond logical comprehension.

[. . .]

Mr. MacKay may have repeatedly misled the Commons by saying there were no credible cases of detainee torture, but only because the military insisted that was the case. The chain of command between the military and the minister links at the Chief of Defence Staff’s desk. If he’s in the dark, so is the government.

Yet the way the entire Conservative front bench, including a testy, albeit jetlagged Prime Minister Stephen Harper, remains angrily antagonistic and combative to questions on the file.

The Conservatives attack at every legitimate query as a slur to the uniform, when the opposition is making no such allegation.

The point is worth repeating, because the government clearly doesn’t get it. All evidence suggests Canadian soldiers showed considerable restraint when apprehending Taliban who were, after all, on a mission to kill them.

The political concern is whether anybody in the government or the military were aware of ongoing torture in Kandahar prisons while making ongoing transfers into its cells. If so, that’s called a war crime under international conventions.

The government’s ugly mood is amplified by behavior that has all the optics of obstruction, if not a cover up. They stonewalled a Military Police Complaints Commission probe of the allegations, threatened diplomat Colvin with legal consequences if he testified publicly, unleashed a character smear of his reliability when he did and reluctantly produced a blizzard of blacked-out documentation that, when the odd sentence did appear, conveniently showed no wrongdoing.

[H]ere I am [in Toronto], watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.

In 2006 the new Canadian government announced it was abandoning its targets to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto protocol. No other country that had ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant to have cut emissions by 6% between 1990 and 2012. Instead they have already risen by 26%.

It is now clear that Canada will refuse to be sanctioned for abandoning its legal obligations. The Kyoto protocol can be enforced only through goodwill: countries must agree to accept punitive future obligations if they miss their current targets. But the future cut Canada has volunteered is smaller than that of any other rich nation. Never mind special measures; it won't accept even an equal share. The Canadian government is testing the international process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too easily. By demonstrating that climate sanctions aren't worth the paper they're written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen void.

After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the other nations striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007, it singlehandedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations. After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country that had done most to disrupt the talks. The climate change performance index, which assesses the efforts of the world's 60 richest nations, was published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th. Canada came 59th.

In June this year the media obtained Canadian briefing documents which showed the government was scheming to divide the Europeans. During the meeting in Bangkok in October, almost the entire developing world bloc walked out when the Canadian delegate was speaking, as they were so revolted by his bullying. Last week the Commonwealth heads of government battled for hours (and eventually won) against Canada's obstructions. A concerted campaign has now begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth.

64 per cent of respondents to a Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey said rich nations have a responsibility to commit to higher and harder targets than developing countries.

Most also want to see a binding agreement come out of Copenhagen, and 81 per cent said Canada should act independently of the United States.

The Conservatives insist Canada must tie its policy to that of the U.S. because of the countries' extensive economic relationship.

The Harper government says it's waiting for the Obama administration to come out with a suite of policies to which Canada can synchronize its own.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency took a big step Monday toward regulating greenhouses gases, concluding that pollution from burning fossil fuels should be regulated.

The action, which lets the U.S. government control greenhouse gases without having to push legislation through Congress, appears timed to give a boost to the Copenhagen talks.

"This is a clear message to Copenhagen of the Obama administration's commitments to address global climate change," said Sen. John Kerry, a Democrat and lead author of a climate bill before the Senate. "The message to Congress is crystal clear: get moving."

Canadians had a similar message for the Harper government. The Harris-Decima survey shows that 46 per cent of respondents would like to see Canada play a lead role in Copenhagen.

"The number of people in society who feel like this is something that requires action is high," said Doug Anderson, senior vice-president of Harris-Decima.

"But most Canadians are still not at that emotional, 'I'm willing to step out of my house and go to a protest' kind of a situation on this. Yet that's not to say that they are not interested in seeing a pragmatic solution.

"It's no longer a situation where people say for the most part that this isn't something that's a concern, or this isn't something that requires action. It's both of those for most Canadians."

The telephone poll of just over 1,000 Canadians was conducted Nov. 26-29 and is considered accurate to within plus or minus 3.1 percentage points 19 times out of 20.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) gave its thumbs-up to the Qatar-based international news service Al-Jazeera English, which is headed by former Canadian Broadcasting Corporation senior executive Tony Burman as managing director.

The CRTC slapped no conditions on the approval for Al-Jazeera English, in contrast to 2003 when it green-lit the Arabic-language al-Jazeera service for Canadian carriage, but ordered cablers and other content carriers to edit out violence or potential hate messages.

No Canadian content carrier has yet taken up the expense, or bother, of editing the Arabic Al-Jazeera service as a condition of carriage.

"Despite concerns expressed by certain parties, there is nothing on the record of the current proceeding that leads the commission to conclude that AJE would violate Canadian regulations, such as those regarding abusive comment," the CRTC said in its Thursday ruling on Al-Jazeera English.

The CRTC received around 2,600 public comments in support of the carriage application by Al-Jazeera English, with only 40 parties expressing opposition, the regulator said.

The Canadian dollar rallied by more than a cent against the U.S. currency Wednesday after a report that the Russian central bank is preparing to buy loonies to include in its official reserves.

The Canadian dollar rose more than a cent against the U.S. currency Wednesday before falling back later in the day. There was no word on how much Canadian currency the Russian central bank intends to hold in its reserves, which are used to defend the ruble.

But Bloomberg quoted Sergei Shvetsov, the bank’s financial operations head, as telling lawmakers in Moscow that “technical preparations for transactions in Canadian dollars are underway.”

The Canadian currency closed at 95.65 cents US, up 1.13 cents on the day.

David Gilmore, a currency strategist with Foreign Exchange Analytics in Essex, Conn., told CBC News many central banks, particularly in emerging economies such as Russia, China and Brazil, have been diversifying after amassing American dollars in their reserves for years.

"Russia has over 200 billion in reserves so it makes some sense to add Aussie, Canada, and British pounds to its reserve mix," Gilmore said.

It's also a vote in favour of Canada's economic prospects, he suggested.

"It offers exposure to North America without any of the downside currency risks that owning U.S. dollars carries with it," he said. "Canada's banking system doesn't have anywhere near the problems the U.S. banking system has. Households in Canada are not nearly as indebted, overextended, leveraged and spent out the way American households tend to be, and so I think it makes some sense."