the Walnut Diary

On August 14 in a column in this newspaper I asked, “Would Canadians support a coalition between Tom Mulcair and Stephen Harper?”

“If it came to a hung Parliament, I would suggest that Thomas Mulcair would find more in common with Stephen Harper than either would find with Justin Trudeau. Trudeau seems unwilling to compromise his Federalist, pro-constitution, pro-charter of rights position. This may leave him in a strong position as leader of the opposition against the strange bedfellows across the aisle in the next parliament.

“But would 63% of Canadians still support a coalition if it involved Stephen Harper’s Conservatives?

“Perhaps more to the point at this juncture of the campaign: will Mulcair’s cooperation in Harper’s boycott of the national debates cause him trouble with his supporters?

“According to the August 14th Ekos poll, 81% of NDP supporters stand firmly in favour of more large-scale debates, televised nationally with all four national leaders in attendance.

“Thomas Mulcair may have to decide whether it’s better to forsake Stephen Harper and face Liz May, Justin Trudeau, and an empty chair in debate rather than to risk the loss of the university graduates, that critical 14% of his support which this spring parachuted in from the Trudeau camp during the height of the attack ad campaign. If he slips up, these activist voters can just as easily return to the Red Tent and carry election victory with them.”

No doubt the blame for the demise of the NDP dynasty in Quebec will go to the niqab controversy and the highly questionable practice of strategic voting, but I would suggest seeds of the Liberal romp across the ridings of Eastern Canada last night lay in the 25 million dollar program of attack ads against Justin Trudeau and in Tom Mulcair’s tacit support of Stephen Harper’s boycott of syndicated leaders’ debates.

When just before the election NDP candidate Andrew Thomson commented that the NDP could work with the Harper Conservatives to form a government, something clicked in the minds of millions of voters. This election was all about weeding Stephen Harper’s strain of divisive politics out of the Canadian garden, and the potential of a missed root cropping up and re-infesting our Canada was more than progressives could bear.

They came out to vote in droves. First Nations polling stations ran out of ballots. What we saw last night on CBC was the product of many, many individuals deciding that they wanted no more of Stephen Harper. Thomas Mulcair’s NDP was swept away in the rush.

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The real nail-biter for me on election night was the race in Burnaby North-Seymour, a suburb of Vancouver, where our son Charlie Croskery managed newcomer Terry Beech’s campaign. Strategic voting sites had unanimously favoured NDP candidate Carol Baird Ellan, a retired provincial court judge, claiming that Terry continued to poll in the mid-teens in a two-party race between Ellan and Conservative, Mike Little. Charlie told me last week that he had to decide whether to devote their advertising to correcting the misconception or competing with Mike Little.

Yesterday morning when I wished him well he responded that it all depended upon how good a job they could do in getting out the vote. By 1:30 a.m. my mental math had improved considerably as I watched the differential in the votes steadily grow as Terry’s lead increased from under a hundred to almost 2000, at which point Canada.com stepped in and declared Terry Beech the MP-designate for Burnaby North-Seymour. CBC followed shortly after.

I’ve no doubt Charlie, Roz, Ravi and Terry were door-knocking dynamos, but the Liberal wave floated a lot of boats in B.C. In politics you take your breaks where you can get them.

Congratulations, Terry Beech M.P., your courageous family and your dedicated crew.

This fine article provides warnings in a historical context for the burst of racism we are seeing in this federal election campaign from the Conservative Party of Canada.

http://www.embassynews.ca/news/2015/10/14/echoes-of-mid-century-xenophobia-in-harper-campaign-historians/47732/?mlc=947&muid=37192

8:30 a.m. October 13, 2015

The deadline for my newspaper column approaches. The empty page stares back at me. It’s not as though I have nothing to write: I have read and thought about little else but the election campaign for the last week.

But I’ve become utterly addicted to my morning hit of numbers. Nic Nanos posts overnight polls every morning at 6:00 a.m. EDT. All across Canada journalists and information junkies have adjusted their sleep to this new addiction. We have watched the Liberals slowly trend upwards as the NDP just as slowly moved down. One by one, it seems, the university-educated voters are flying back to the Liberal roost after a summer with the NDP.

This morning there were no Nanos Numbers, something about Thanksgiving Day.

Yikes! We need those numbers for our peace of mind. We’re watching for the Liberal lead over the Conservatives to exceed 8%. For some reason there’s a consensus that Trudeau needs that cushion in the polls to be safe from last-minute manipulations of the vote by Conservative mechanics.

In fact, there’s even an international surveillance team on site in Ottawa to guard against voting irregularities. Embassy magazine reports that Hannah Roberts, a Brit, heads the team mandated to pay particular attention to potential voting difficulties emerging from changes instituted by the Fair Elections Act. Students, aboriginals and the elderly are particularly at risk. Robocalls and financial irregularities also fall under their purview.

A B.C. story popped up this morning on National Newswatch identifying a series of irate voters who complained that they have either been dropped from the Elections Canada computer, or in one case, moved to Saskatchewan. Changes of polling station aren’t too bad in Eastern Ontario. I can stand driving to Delta instead of Portland. But some poor guy on an island off the B.C. coast has to travel a long distance to another island in order to vote, and he doesn’t own a boat.

Another issue emerged in Burnaby North-Seymour. My son’s candidate, Liberal Terry Beech, has finally emerged as the front runner by a couple of points over the Conservative candidate, but all of the strategic voting sites resolutely insist that the NDP candidate, now in third place and outside the margin of error, is their choice to defeat Harper. So where does Terry’s ad budget go in the final week, into fighting a misconception the strategic voting sites have failed to correct, or into competing with the Conservative challenger?

An issue which may strike closer to home has to do with the TPP and compensation for dairy farmers. We all watched Stephen Harper promise $4.3 billion to leave farmers whole. Today Elizabeth Thompson in iPolitics quotes a privy council source claiming that so far there has been no legislation passed to authorize any such payment. It sounded like a done deal on CBC when Harper said it, but apparently it isn’t.

So I return to the polls. Quebec graphs are quite soothing. They have smooth, sinuous curves, rather like a bedpost built by a skilled French-Canadian craftsman. By comparison the BC graphs look like a shattered window. I asked Dr. Roz, the family statistician. She responded that the sample size is considerably smaller in B.C. than in Quebec and Ontario. Another online commenter explained that pollsters have traditionally had trouble making sense of BC voting patterns.

Conservatives enjoy wheeling out their favourite John Diefenbaker comment about polls: “Dogs like them.” No doubt Stephen Harper echoes this sentiment at this point, but one wag on Twitter this morning pointed out that Harper’s quite happy to quote polls as long as they support his initiatives like Bill C-51, bombing Syria, and banning the niqab.

Meanwhile, the Blue Jays’ fortunes are no big deal: I’m on pins and needles until Wednesday at 6:00 a.m.

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I love the way Mr. Smith writes. See below.

http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2015/10/10/Cultural-War-Muslim-Women-Must-End/?utm_source=weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=121015

Columnist Tasha Kheiriddin has offered a credible explanation for Stephen Harper’s resurrection of the niqab controversy in response to Rosie Barton’s question in the middle of an interview on the Trans Pacific Partnership. Kheiriddin insists it wasn’t a mistake. Harper clearly intended to revive the issue.

She refers to an incident in India on September 28th where a group of Hindus beat a Muslim farmer to death for eating beef, leading to protests and further deaths. The Hindu/Muslim flareup has reverberated throughout the worldwide Hindu community.

Harper’s micro-analysis has evidently identified a substantial population of Hindus in tightly-contested ridings in the Toronto area.

According to this logic, the anti-Muslim rhetoric is for them.

Kheiriddin’s unique view of this is certainly worth a read.

http://ipolitics.ca/2015/10/08/the-niqab-is-dog-whistle-ethnic-politics-but-maybe-not-the-kind-you-think/

Columnists have looked around for a cultural figure to whom to compare Justin Trudeau in this campaign. I would suggest the former Chinese teacher Mao Tse Tung provides the most useful exemplar. Mao’s long march occurred as a defensive measure to avoid Deng Xia Ping’s Amercian-supplied air force. Mao took to the countryside in the north of China and spent two years staying alive and growing support among the Chinese peasantry. The harder Deng tried to destroy him, the larger the crowd on Mao’s long march.

Mao’s early story stands with the other heroic epics as an archetype of intelligent strategy in the face of overwhelming opposition. Critics called Trudeau’s comment about his admiration of Chinese leadership an unplanned gaffe. They may have been wrong.

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I’m looking forward to Trudeau’s battle with the companies which administer the offshore tax havens. I think he’s looking to harvest income tax from the offshore tax cheats whom Harper has gone to considerable lengths to protect.

Trudeau’s “make the richest 1% pay a bit more” is code for going after tax cheats, and it is resonating with salaried Canadians (with no way to avoid taxes) every bit as much as Harper’s coded racism appeals to the xenophobes among us.

Harper originally invoked “Greece” to put down Trudeau’s deficit projections, but has eased off that gambit. The biggest cause of Greece’s bankruptcy has been its culture of tax avoidance, and as Uber driver and Angry Conservative Earl Cowan says, “You idiot! Stephen Harper doesn’t read income tax forms!”

Stephen Harper has entered the final two weeks of the federal election campaign slightly ahead of, tied with, or slightly trailing Justin Trudeau, depending upon the poll. Contrary to expectations “Justin” has refused to give up despite withering air attacks over the last two years, and like another former teacher, a guy named Mao, he just keeps growing stronger and picking up support in spite of the relentless propaganda barrage during his long march to 24 Sussex.

But all is not lost. Harper has hired political fixer extraordinaire Lynton Crosby to revitalize his floundering campaign. With elephants in the room like Duffy, Carson, Del Mastro, Cadman, murdered aboriginal women and the Senate, he definitely needs a distraction from pointed questions about his record over the last 9½ years.

Crosby has thrown a dead cat onto the table. It is the niqab dispute, and everybody has instantly become obsessed with the issue. That’s the genius of the dead cat move: everybody hates it, but nobody can think of anything else while the dead cat’s lying there on the dinner table, offending everyone. Dead cats are Crosby’s stock-in-trade. Most have to do with racism. In Australia Crosby went after immigrants with the slogan, We get to determine who comes to our country. John Howard won the election.

In the last week in Canada we’ve seen how Mulcair and Trudeau have offered conventional positions on the wearing of the niqab at citizenship ceremonies and have been shouted down by the loudest and the stupidest of the mob in Quebec.

That’s Crosby’s specialty, bringing out the worst in voters using dog whistle politics. Crosby’s anti-Muslim bent also comes out in Harper’s reaction to the Syrian refugee problem. After weeks of dithering, Harper is receiving plaudits from a significant percentage of voters for doing nothing to help Syrian refugees, even over the pleas of Christian churches, NATO allies, and the U.N.

But perhaps Harper could have selected a better distraction, as this particular dead cat can scratch back. On Monday the “dead cat” herself, Zunera Ishaq, was cleared by the Federal Court of Appeals to take her citizenship oath while wearing a niqab (CBC). The Court ruled that The minister acted illegally in creating a policy that went contrary to the legislation.

In an accompanying story, the CBC series Baloney Meter judged that the following statement by Conservative MP Costas Menegakis, parliamentary secretary to the minister of citizenship and immigration, is “full of baloney.”

I think for the citizenship ceremony, someone needs to identify themselves. We need to know who they are.

As an English teacher I find it hard to believe that a man with responsibility for Canadian citizenship and immigration would have so much difficulty with the very pronouns which allow precise distinctions between the one and the many. No wonder Menegakis wants to have a peek, just to be sure. Language has utterly failed him.

Harper/Crosby have also come up with an anti-Muslim snitch line to the RCMP for neighbours suspected of barbaric acts. That’s McCarthyism in all but name.

Then Monday morning the dead-cat distraction campaign had to give way to the “dead rat” in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.

Globe and Mail reporter Alexander Panetta quoted Tim Groser, New Zealand’s trade minister, on the subject of the compromises necessary to achieve a 12-country trade agreement:

And when we say ugly, we mean ugly from each perspective — it doesn’t mean ‘I’ve got to swallow a dead rat and you’re swallowing foie gras.’ It means both of us are swallowing dead rats on three or four issues to get this deal across the line.

Dead rat or not, it sounds as though the TPP is a victory for the Conservatives. Dairy farmers should be happy. Auto workers don’t vote for Harper, anyway. Let them eat the dead rats.

And the timing of the TPP announcement couldn’t have suited Harper better. Buoyant from the massive Liberal rally in Brampton on Sunday, Justin Trudeau had just begun to unveil the Liberal Platform at the University of Waterloo when the CBC cut away from the live announcement to catch Stephen Harper’s triumphal introduction of the TPP agreement to Canadians.

So no unicorns today, Justin.

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The Munk Debate on foreign policy Monday night turned into a battle of mythologies between Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau.

As Trudeau suggested, Stephen Harper would have you believe that there is a terrorist behind every leaf. But Trudeau spun his own myth of a warm, accommodating Canada made strong by its refugee population.

Trudeau made the case that immigrants have greatly strengthened Canada. The 30,000 American draft dodgers during the Vietnam War undoubtedly did that. These young men and women were the cream of the crop and Uncle Sam’s loss was Canada’s gain.

In contrast Stephen Harper sounded very much like William Lyon Mackenzie King in his statements about refugees. Ever the bureaucrat, Harper repeated the words “generous” and “careful” but moved the chains no further toward the goal of lessening the human suffering among refugees from Syria.

The largest blot on Mackenzie King’s reputation was his refusal to admit Jewish refugees in the period leading up to WWII. King once asked an official in his immigration department how many Jews he should admit. “None is too many” was the infamous response.

In 1939 the SS St. Louis, a German tour ship, was turned away from Quebec City with over 900 Jewish refugees aboard. They returned to Europe, having failed to find refuge in North America, and many were murdered at Auschwitz.

In the most heated exchange of the debate, Trudeau and Harper clashed over the revocation of the Canadian citizenship of convicted terrorist Zakaria Amara. Trudeau stood by his belief that citizenship is a basic human right, and to countenance its removal, regardless of the provocation, is to devalue the citizenship of every other Canadian.

History is on Harper’s side. After the attack on Pearl Harbour Mackenzie King took advantage of a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment to pass a series of orders displacing those of Japanese ancestry from the B.C. coast to road camps in the interior. Then the Japanese-Canadians’ ships, land, houses and bank accounts were confiscated by the government.

Confinement in the internment camps transformed the citizenship of many Japanese Canadians into an empty status and revoked their right to work. Regardless of Trudeau’s protestations, citizenship revocation has happened before in Canada.

King’s reputation as a racist solidified when publication of his diary revealed the following: August 6, 1945, “It is fortunate that the use of the bomb should have been upon the Japanese rather than upon the white races of Europe.”

The Niqab scuffle in the French debate has resulted in a boost for Harper in the polls.

If history is on Harper’s side in his politics regarding terrorism and the Niqab, should we support him when he channels William Lyon Mackenzie King?

If Trudeau’s vision of Canada as a beacon of hope to refugees is a product of a selective reading of Canadian history, should we support him when he channels the human rights policies of his father?

I remember vividly an interview with Bindee, an OAC English student in Carleton Place who chose to do a research project on Canada’s immigration policy. When she read about the Japanese internment and confiscations she exploded: “Yes, but this is CANADA!”

Google reports that Dr. Bindee Kuriya is now a physician associated with the University of Toronto with 23 publications on her specialty of rheumatology to her credit. I don’t think there’s much doubt as to which Canada Bindee will select in the coming election, but it will be up to all Canadians to choose their myth.

In the recent French language debate Justin Trudeau baited Thomas Mulcair with the latter’s proposal to sell water to the United States. Mulcair responded with an angry snarl. I wondered why, so I looked around on Google and a couple of blogs.

JT was deliberately baiting Mulcair with the reference to water exports, and he even got the response he was seeking, with Mulcair’s protest running along the lines of can’t-anybody-simply-discuss-something?

Both know water isn’t the issue. The real killer of Mulcair’s hopes of victory is likely to be the 2006 revelation of the Quebec government’s plans to privatize 650 hectares of Mount Orford Park, an idea Mulcair initially proposed to cabinet while Quebec Environment Minister, and then to developers, and then signed into law.

Then the story goes he turned on Charest and tried to use the illegal development as a lever to push his boss from power. The ensuing battle left Mulcair out of cabinet and soon in search of a new political home, first with the Harper Conservatives, and then with the NDP.

The whole Mount Orford Park debacle began with Mulcair proposing a debate in caucus about the privatization of public land. One thing led to another. The water debate videos show Mulcair’s M.O., his method of operation, when he has a scheme in his head.

The Mount Orford Park story further provides a more detailed context to Mulcair’s claim that he resigned from the Charest cabinet on a question of “principle.”

This story may well be why the Conservatives aren’t taking Mulcair seriously, and why they continued to attack Trudeau with an ad campaign even when his polls were in the twenties. They knew Mount Orford Park would come out later in Mulcair’s campaign.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/mulcair-charest-squabble-may-be-settled-but-still-sketchy-1.612259
http://www.canada.com/story.html?id=c82f8cf8-3279-4a26-8351-1d44577c7ef1

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/09/08/mulcair-bulk-water-exports-liberals_n_8106742.html

This afternoon I watched a live stream from CBC of Justin Trudeau’s speech in Halifax before an enthusiastic crowd on Pier 21. Initially I was worried if he could follow his warm-up act, Premier Stephen McNeil, who gave a barn-burner of a speech in the old evangelical style. Great big guy, excellent speaker, quite appealing. Would JT look pale by comparison?

Not to worry. Trudeau began quite formally, riffing on Halifax’s history as a destination for a million immigrants to Canada and the port of departure for a half million military personnel during the two world wars. Then came a segue into his announcements of day, commitments to military renewal and the accommodation of twenty-five thousand Syrian refugees.

The backdrop of supporters ranged from a babe in arms to old codgers like me, but the one individual who drew my attention away from JT’s speech was an attractive young woman in the front row on my right. She was absolutely chomping on a mouthful of gum.

This wouldn’t do, because this was a serious speech and nobody watching on TV would be able to pay attention. I wondered how well organized Trudeau’s staff was, and how they would deal with this distraction.

Unaware, JT responded to the Premier’s fulsome introduction and then went on into his speech, but McNeil strangely didn’t leave the stage. In fact, he took a position directly in front of the gum-chewing belle, blocking her with his bulk.

My attention returned to the speech. By the time McNeil eventually drifted away during a simultaneous translation, the gum chewer had been replaced by a young guy with a slightly restless toddler in his arms. Crisis averted.

My questions: 1. Was McNeil wearing an earbud and received instructions to stay on stage, or was his move just dumb luck? 2. Did anybody think to remind the members of the backdrop not to chew gum or make other distracting moves during the speech?

Anyway, Trudeau ran through the speech and then welcomed questions from the national media for about another half-hour and everybody seemed happy when the broadcast ended.