O Edward, thou art mighty yet.
August 16, 2009
It’s too bad Ed’s around so seldom any more.
On federal politics: an interview with Marjory Loveys
August 14, 2009
Marjory Loveys worked for years in the Prime Minister’s Office. I leaped at the chance to talk to a woman who understands federal politics. Marjory is running for the Leeds and Grenville Liberal nomination.
Why is it important that the Liberal Party of Canada form the next government?
It’s worth looking at the current government and defining for ourselves what makes people so uncomfortable with Stephen Harper. For me there are two things: 1. he is mean and divisive, and I fear that over time Canada will become like him, meaner and more divided; 2. he seems to have very little ambition for Canada. I don’t see any big ideas coming from Stephen Harper; I don’t see big plans for progress for Canada. I don’t see him excited about new industries, new technologies, or major reforms of any kind. He likes the oil sands, law and order, and ethanol. That’s about it.
Yes, but he’s an oilman, from Calgary.
He’s no oilman. I worked with guys from the oil patch and they were builders. They wore iron rings and they built things. Stephen Harper is not a builder. He has plenty of ambition for himself, but not for Canada.
What’s Michael Ignatieff doing talking up the oil sands?
It’s a big industry and a big resource, and it has to learn to operate sustainably. In Calgary there are lots of iron rings and a can-do attitude. In terms of climate change if we had fewer economists and lawyers and more engineers, we could accomplish a whole lot. It’s like anything else. You don’t do it until you’re pushed, and the trick for government is that we will push them in a way that works for them.
Engineers are taught to solve problems, and that’s what politics needs: people to solve problems. That’s what I did for ten years in Mr. Chretien’s office: listen to all sides. Find an approach that is supportive, not destructive, that works for everybody.
One blogger suggested that Michael Ignatieff should stop trying to appear a statesman and speak to Canadians the way he would talk to members of a book club. Are there enough readers in Canada to make Michael Ignatieff our next Prime Minister?
I look at Mr. Ignateiff as someone who is learning very quickly in one of the toughest jobs in the country. He has a strong philosophical framework for the job. He has actually thought about the role of government. He is liberal in the finest sense of the word.
Mr. Harper is like Mike Harris: he doesn’t believe in the organization he is leading. He is there to weaken it, not to make it work well. He has instructed his MPs to make Commons committee work totally partisan and dysfunctional. If Conservative Party of Canada MPs don’t like where the committee is going, they often get up and leave.
Stephen Harper is caught up in an ideology of not believing in government. He does not believe in government as a force for good. By contrast Michael Ignatieff believes in a government which functions well and is doing the right thing.
George W. Bush’s ideology demanded that he cut taxes, deregulate, and wage war. He left the United States bankrupt. To what extent has this Republican trend influenced the Conservative Party of Canada?
One of the great myths is that Liberals are spendthrifts and Conservatives are good fiscal managers.
The Chretien Liberals inherited a huge deficit from Brian Mulroney. By the end of the Chretien years we had surpluses that were being used to pay down the nation’s mortgage. Stephen Harper increased spending and cut taxes to the point where the surplus was gone before the recession began. With no rainy day funds, the entire stimulus package was funded by going into debt. No prudent family would run their finances this way. We have seen this pattern in Saskatchewan, and in the United States in Republican years. The right wing ran up the debts and the left wing paid them off.
What local and national challenges will the next government face?
The big challenge for Canada over the next few years will be to recover from the recession. What I would push very hard for is more help for small business because they are spending lots of money on stimulus. If you are a car company it’s great, if you build infrastructure it is great, but the vast majority of enterprises in Leeds and Grenville are small businesses, and Ottawa hasn’t beefed up support for small business.
Your next hurdle is to gain the nomination. Why should members of the Leeds and Grenville Liberal association choose you as their candidate?
I know how government works and I know what it feels like to be in a small business and feel that you’re not being heard. I grew up in a village in Oxford County and I have seen a lack of understanding of rural and small communities in the federal government.
Mr. Ignatieff has made a commitment to use a rural lens on his policies. This is his way of recognizing that one size does not fit all and he is committing that all of his policies will work for small towns as well as for cities. I’m particularly interested in day care programs, for example. They will need to be designed quite differently in rural communities than in downtown Toronto.
The plight of Suaad Hagi Mohamud
August 12, 2009
The Toronto Star is full of the story of Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon and Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan
This is ugly. It looks very much as if the cabinet has decided to let the Somali woman stew a bit just to give the redneck voters something to feel mean about. This divisive, mean-spirited attitude, separating Canadian citizens according to skin colour, harkens to the very worst traditions of Republican bigotry in the United States. We don’t want the ghost of American racist Westwood Pegler here. We don’t want our conservative-minded voters to be invited to “get their bigot on” as Pegler famously suggested. That’s not what Canada is about, and if this sort of garbage produces political gains for Stephen Harper and the CPC, then Canada has already become a colony of the United States.
Debt and the Canadian family
August 7, 2009
Breaking up the logjam of Canadian politics
July 29, 2009
Jeffrey Simpson’s column in today’s Globe speaks of the four blocks in Canadian federal politics, and how they consign Canadians to minority governments for the forseeable future. The Conservatives hold the west and rural Ontario. The Liberals hold urban centres in Ontario, English-speaking Quebec, and the maritimes. The NDP pulls 15%. The Bloc controls Quebec. Simpson does not mention the Green Party in his analysis.
When speaking to veteran political observer and Leeds and Grenville Liberal nomination candidate Marjory Loveys this week I formed the impression that she is well aware of this logjam, but an interesting impression emerged from the discussion:
The philosophical differences between the NDP and the Liberals are certainly no wider than those of the Reform party and the Progressive Conservatives. When’s the last time the NDP tried to nationalize a bank? Oh wait: the Republicans did that. And Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party of Canada has practically nationalized the auto industry. Uh… so what’s keeping the Liberals and the NDP from forming a coalition of the left to balance the CPC? And the Green Party doesn’t fit anywhere on the political spectrum. It’s a trend, a fashionable place to park a protest vote. If the Liberal/NDP get a platform together and involve the Green trendites, a majority may well be within reach.
Don’t count the Left wing out just yet.
A response to Neil Reynolds
July 22, 2009
Neil Reynolds’ review of Michael Ignatieff’s speech last week in his column (The Globe and Mail, July 22, 2009) demanded a comment. While I greatly admired Mr. Reynolds during his days as editor of The Kingston Whig Standard and even later as the founder of the Libertarian Party of Canada, I fear this review showed a careless reading of the subject and sloppy thought.
Mr. Reynolds: You seem to be reviewing the speech you wish he had given, rather than the one he did. I’m wondering how carefully you read the thing, frankly, for while bashing away for what the Liberal leader failed to say or said badly, you seem inadvertently to end up supporting Ignatieff’s main point in this carefully-veiled jab at his chief opponent: within the traditions of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, Michael Ignatieff is a better conservative than Stephen Harper.
The new “Conservative”
July 21, 2009
James Travers’s column in today’s Toronto Star bemoans the loss of civility in parliament, laying the blame squarely at the feet of Stephen Harper and the CPC. I keep thinking of Swift’s Liliputians when I watch Harper at work. Here’s a rope-balancer who isn’t very good at it. He keeps letting someone else have the centre and then has to squawk and flap his arms like crazy to keep from falling, first to the left and then to the right. Ignatieff has planted himself more or less in the centre, so the increasingly strident Harper has to struggle on the margins.
Then Stephen Chase of the Globe and Mail has an article on Harper’s announcement that the deficit will continue if growth does not eliminate it, even if it takes ten years, as most economists predict, to get over the current $17 billion/year drain (July 21, Ottawa likely stuck with deficits for a decade: economist).
Funny, when Bob Rae ran a deficit like that in Ontario back in the nineties, he became a pariah, labelled variously a communist, an idiot, a fool, a traitor to his class. Most tellingly, public employees revised the calendar to include the Rae-day, an ironic tribute to his leadership, and the NDP has never recovered.
So when a man leading a party which attempts to call itself “Conservative” adopts the same strategy, do these labels no longer apply? To be a “Conservative” do you have to act like George Bush and ignore the facts, using reckless spending and relentless tax cuts to shore up personal popularity until the country is bankrupt?
Where I grew up a conservative spent what he earned and saved a bit for tomorrow. He shared with his neighbours and cared for the needy. He had no thought of helping a few friends get rich so he could eat at their tables later. Not everybody agreed with the conservative, but they respected him.
Can Ignatieff use George Grant to gain Tory cred?
July 14, 2009
George Grant still carries some weight with my generation of Canadians. His pessimism ignited our nationalism; his acceptance of the inevitability of American domination left us determined to prove the prophet wrong. But the stimulus and the passion came from Lament For a Nation.
In True Patriot Love Michael Ignatieff uses Grant to establish his Conservative chops. Last week in London he served notice in the Berlin Lecture that the CPC is no legitimate heir to the support of Progressive Conservative voters. He stated in his lecture that Progressive Conservative leaders subscribed to a liberal-democratic tradition very like that of the Liberal Party of Canada. He’s not wrong in this.
Then Tom Flanagan wrote the think-piece in the Globe accusing Liberals of squealing like little girls over a few attack ads, and Harper found himself inadvertently tarred with the Republican brush. All of the sudden Uncle George starts to look pretty good to us wannabe Canadian nationalists, and Harper’s made-in-America politics doesn’t look Conservative at all.
Book Review: True Patriot Love. Michael Ignatieff
July 13, 2009
This week I ran into an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail by Tom Flanagan, expatriate American, University of Calgary professor and former Conservative campaign manager. Flanagan’s thesis in the article is that “Liberals are whining like sissy girls” over CPC attack ads when the ads in question are no worse than some of their own. This is what passes in Canada today for political discourse: our campaign is no more disgusting than yours, and the only reason you whine is because Obama got away with it when he conned the media and muzzled McCain.
What I find distressing about Flanagan’s argument is the way he assumes that this is the only way that politics and government can operate. He likens an election to a game of football, all tactics and force.
Whatever happened to ideas? To pride in one’s country? Is there no place for optimism in politics today?
In desperation I turned to True Patriot Love: Four Generations in Search of Canada. Michael Ignatieff builds his narrative of the Grant family around a few vivid mental pictures. The first is of his great-grandfather George Monro Grant galloping across the prairie with Sanford Fleming to chart a route for the new railroad. The account pieced together from Grant’s own journals is an entertaining read and an interesting look at a Victorian adventure.
The next most vivid picture is one of thousands of Canadian high school students, their teachers and veterans swarming over Vimy Ridge at the 90th anniversary of the Battle in April of 2007. William Grant’s myth of Canada as a community of sacrifice came to fruition with the hordes of young Canadians who came to the shrine to learn about and celebrate the heroic young men and women who with their lives enabled Canada to emerge as a nation.
A sadder image is that of the bombed-out shelter in London where a young Rhodes scholar, George Grant, lost his optimism and turned forever against the war machine which could view the bombing of Hiroshima as a reasonable tactic.
A final, poignant image shows Ignatieff and his wife retracing his great-grandfather’s path and finding the railway spike George and Sanford Fleming drove into a giant pine along a river bank just outside Jasper, 128 years before.
The Grant dynasty wrote the myths which have made Canada.
George Monro Grant set out with Sanford Fleming to map the new railway line across the continent, but his real impact was through his lectures and publications in which he sold Canadians on how the railroad would extend the British Empire to the Pacific and elevate Canada far above lowly colonial status before King and Empire.
For King and country, William Lawson Grant led a generation of young men to war in 1914 with his pamphlets, his recruiting efforts, and his personal leadership in training camps and at the Somme. Later in his career he shaped the study of Canadian history with his textbooks, his educational leadership, and his unending devotion to the memory of those who gave their lives that Canada might emerge as a nation.
Seared by his experiences as an air raid warden during the Battle of Britain in London, George Grant revolted against the prospect of American nuclear weapons on Canadian soil with the pamphlet Lament for a Nation. Grant created the myth of the inevitable colonization of Canada by American economic and cultural interests. Inflamed by his defeatism, my generation mobilized against it, and over the ensuing fifty years we have proven the prophet wrong.
And now it is up to Michael Ignatieff, the fourth in the Grant line, to forge a new myth of Canada, a myth which gives purpose and connection to the many diverse points of view of Canadians. For the need is immediate. As Ignatieff says in the first chapter, “The lives we live alone do not make sense to us unless we share some public dimension with others. We need a public life in common, some set of reference points and allegiances to give us a way to relate to the strangers among whom we live. Without this feeling of belonging, if only imagined, we would live in fear and dread of each other.”
What we need to take Canada into the future is a new and better myth to give us hope and meaning, and to galvanize Canadians into patriotic action on behalf of our country. If Stephen Harper wants to compete with Michael Ignatieff in the next election, let him find his own myth to inspire Canadians, not look to the divisive and mechanical tactics of the Republican Party to the south.
Who is the better conservative?
July 10, 2009
Compare the leaders.
If you read Ignatieff’s speech at Whitehall this week, you’ll agree that he came across as a model of decorum and statesmanship. He still made a critically important point, though. He explained that Canadian conservatives have traditionally adhered to the liberal-democratic model. By inference, the CPC’s fixation on divisive regionalism and narrow ideology is a departure traditional conservatives should not accept.
While Stephen Harper acted the buffoon on one world stage, Michael Ignatieff showed himself the better conservative on another.
the Walnut Diary 