O Edward, thou art mighty yet.
August 16, 2009
It’s too bad Ed’s around so seldom any more.
Ignatieff? He’ll do. Let’s get to work.
December 10, 2008
The crowning of Michael Ignatieff gives the Liberal Party a unique opportunity to attract young Canadians, especially those at universities and those planning to attend. Face it, the guy’s a world-renowned and respected academic. Who wouldn’t want to be on his team?
Following Stephen Harper’s self-mutilation over the last two weeks, the CPC’s main competitive advantage is its bank account. It’s time to refill the Liberal coffers to neutralize that edge. Bob Rae had a good point about the need for grass roots support for a resurgent Federal Liberal Party in Canada. The Achilles’ heel of the one member-one vote leadership campaign he proposed was the creation of instant Liberals to distort the vote. I once joined the Conservative party just so that I could vote against Jim Flaherty in a leadership contest. Those new memberships might work very well as a fund raising strategy, though.
When Rick Mercer’s online petition to ask Stockwell Day to change his name scored hundreds of thousands of signatures in a short time, it signalled that the Internet was here to stay as a force in Canadian politics. Internet use has replaced pubbing as the time-waster of choice of this generation. You Tube, Facebook, Twitter, blogs and websites attract active minds during their times of idleness. These minds look for interesting, arresting ideas which they can’t find in the mainstream.
Ignatieff and company should be able to capitalize on this opportunity. The Green Shift was a good idea sold badly. Liberalism is a compelling idea which has captivated young minds since the days of Bertrand Russell. My opinion of Ignatieff stems from his address to the Liberal National Convention back in 2005(?). It was a terrific speech on what it is to be a liberal.
Who says Canadian federal politics has to be grimy and dull? The mud wrestling of the last month has certainly drawn attention, but it shouldn’t be that hard to raise the level of discourse — if Ignatieff and team act quickly.
Another thing. In Eastern Ontario where I live the ridings are traditionally safe Tory seats. But this may have occurred because strong Liberal candidates haven’t made the commitment while out of power. Kingston MP and Speaker Peter Miliken for twenty years has taken his duties to his constituency seriously. His approach seems to be, “If there are five events to attend and you can’t get to all of them, go to four.”
If a Liberal candidate showed that kind of commitment in Leeds and Grenville, and even in Lanark, the outcome might be very different in a few years.
In the meantime, we geezers should get out our chequebooks… Uh… I don’t use cheques any more. Iggie: how about an email address to which we can send online contributions?
The Road to Power
December 7, 2008
The road to power in Canada is to march to the left while claiming to march to the right, and to adapt to every eventuality while proudly proclaiming that you will never change.
Nobody I asked was able to give me the source or precise wording of the above truism, but all agreed that it has been around Canadian history for generations. If any reader can clarify the statement, please drop me a line.
My point with the quotation is that Canadian politicians invariably change after they are elected and discover the true nature of their jobs. Honourable men and women, regardless of their politics, once in parliament form a strong commitment to doing the best they can with what they have. For this reason I trust Gilles Duceppe a lot more than Stephen Harper because Duceppe has long demonstrated pragmatic behaviour in the House of Commons, despite his claims to the contrary. He does his job as defined by his constituents as well as he can, and I believe he will honour his commitment should the coalition take power.
Stephen Harper gained re-election on a promise of pragmatic leadership, but as soon as the opportunity arose, he tore off to the right wing in a spectacularly un-Canadian manner, seeking to settle a few personal scores and upsetting everyone to no good purpose. When cornered, he let loose blasts of vitriol which I fear have blistered relations within the country for the foreseeable future. As more and more analysts are now saying, it seems he can’t help himself: he just has to attack.
In all fairness, though, I can’t go through with my suggestion that Harper is to blame for the closing of the Chaudiere Bridge to Quebec from Ottawa because of crumbling arches. Last week’s bombast, even though fired in that direction, just wasn’t that powerful.
Speaking of bombast, we had an amazing evening of television last week when Harper asked the networks for time to make a public service announcement and the coalition members asked for equal time. I wonder if Simpson, Jaccard and Rivers had any inkling of what could happen when they named their 2007 publication Hot Air. Stephane Dion’s inadvertent endorsement of the book on climate change turned into one of those bizarrely cruel accidents on which the fates of nations turn.
Liberal aide Mike Gzowski mustn’t be much of a photographer. The camera’s automatic focus seemed to be oriented toward the upper left corner of the screen, rather than Mr. Dion’s face in the centre. Thus the only thing clearly in focus for the entire speech was the end paper of the volume at the corner of the bookshelf in the background, Hot Air.
As I watched I found it very difficult not to take this as an editorial comment upon all that was happening on this fevered and painfully amateurish evening in Ottawa. First we had Stephen Harper-as-vampire in a darkened red room, heavy with draped Canadian flags, speaking soothing banalities in a strange lisp through bad pancake makeup.
Then came a half-hour of Peter Mansbridge ad-libbing – not an unpleasant experience, by the way.
At long last the tape began with a flash of red, and then Dion’s nose. Why in the world would anyone set up a camera at this angle? Gzowski couldn’t figure out how to raise the tripod? At first I thought it must be deliberate sabotage, or that the nutty professor was trying to use the camera by himself. If I were to write a comic scene for a novel I couldn’t do better than this.
My mind flipped back to the defining moment of the election campaign in which Dalton McGuinty replaced Ernie Eves as Ontario P.M. The initial goof was a Friday press release from the Tory war room calling McGuinty “an evil, reptilian kitten eater from another planet,” but that wasn’t the defining moment. It came the following day when at a media stop on a dairy farm, a kitten wandered over to the feet of the candidate. With a grin to the photographers he picked it up and they snapped away. As soon as I saw that picture Monday morning, I knew the thing was won.
In this case, amid the hyperbole, distortions and outright lies emanating from Harper and his Myrmidons, I ran across this word from the gods: “Hot Air!” But the only lie so far I had heard from Dion was a vague claim to competence. From the looks of this film, though, that claim was a real whopper, and it has left Dion’s leadership in tatters.
On Sunday evening as I write this the political landscape in Canada has again changed. Stephane Dion will resign the leadership prior to the Liberal caucus meeting on Wednesday, and Dominic Leblanc and Bob Rae will throw their support behind Michael Ignatieff as Liberal House Leader. This puts Ignatieff into the game in time for the return of Parliament on January 26th.
Stephen Harper can’t be happy about this development: the Liberals have used his time-out to their advantage, and what’s more, he still has a trunkload of anti-Dion ads and only a month or so to dust off some anti-Soviet, anti-Harvard stuff. What’s more, Iggy will be no pushover.
The play which could still win the day for the CPC would be if Harper resigned or the caucus removed him. Coalition support would evaporate on the spot. If they have the guts to do it my next vote is Conservative, because the local MPs seem to be pretty good guys.
Searching for the proper quote
December 3, 2008
22 DECEMBER: OMIGOSH! DID STEPHEN HARPER READ THIS COLUMN??? HES…MARCHING TO THE LEFT, JUST LIKE IN THE QUOTE!!!
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I’m going nuts trying to find the correct version of the following quotation:
The road to power in Canada is to march to the left while claiming to march to the right, and to adapt to every eventuality while proudly proclaiming that you will never change.
I think John Diefenbaker, Dalton Camp or Peter C. Newman said it, and it’s at the heart of my argument, so I would very much like to nail it down.
My pitch is that I trust Gilles Duceppe a lot more than Stephen Harper because Duceppe has long demonstrated pragmatic behaviour in the House of Commons, despite his claims to the contrary. I believe he will go along with the coalition in order to do a good job.
Stephen Harper gained re-election on a promise of pragmatic leadership, but as soon as the opportunity arose, he tore off to the right in a spectacularly un-Canadian manner, thereby upsetting everyone to no good purpose. Such a man cannot be trusted.
Laurence Peter once said: Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.
Such is certainly the case in Canada at the moment. The less informed the speaker, the more certain he or she is about the current situation in Ottawa. Astonishingly, most accept Harper’s argument that it must be illegal to overthrow an elected, minority government. Only the educated few realize that this is a normal function of the parliamentary system, however seldom used.
Blood in the snow on Parliament Hill
November 30, 2008
Last Friday the Finance Minister’s update created chaos on Parliament Hill. While journalists waited for a stimulus package to lead worried Canadians into the New Year, what they saw was a series of partisan attacks upon public servants, working women, and the opposition parties. To compound their amazement, Flaherty predicted a surplus. T.V. newsmen openly laughed at the math used to produce that set of numbers, but all through the weekend every Tory M.P. interviewed grimly stuck to the party line distributed by Chief of Staff Guy Giorno and condemned opposition bail-out plans “written on the back of an envelope.”
Minds of a historical bent immediately flipped back to the Harris-Eves years in Ontario when the route to a balanced budget lay in selling Highway 407 to an Arab consortium and the Bruce Generating Station to a British utility. The subsequent mess this crowd made of power generation in Ontario remains, with Walkerton, the enduring legacy of that government.
So Flaherty’s done it again. As ex-M.P. Garth Turner put it this week in his blog, “He did nothing to create a single job for one Canadian worker. But he walked us closer to the brink of deficit, started to sell off the furniture, and forced a needless war with his political opponents at a time when the country needs all oars in the water. http://www.garth.ca/weblog/2008/11/
Then Friday afternoon Stephen Harper waxed indignant because of “a plot to overthrow Canada’s government hatched by the opposition.” This stand was a little hypocritical for Mr. Harper, unless he somehow forgot a 2004 letter to the Governor General bearing his signature along with those of Layton and Duceppe in which he tried exactly the same tactic against Paul Martin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Harper).
Sunday Harper unveiled a taped phone conversation which suggested that Layton had been hatching this scheme for a long time. Uh, Steve, that’s what the opposition does, according to the BNA act. What’s illegal is when you record such a conversation without their knowledge. That’s a criminal offense.
In his victory speech six weeks ago Harper expressed his hope that this parliament would work smoothly to benefit all Canadians in a time of economic uncertainty. So why did he attack the right to strike of public servants, block pay equity legislation, and attempt to bankrupt the opposition parties by cutting off the $1.95 per vote public subsidy brought in to replace outlawed corporate sponsorship?
No one else in Ottawa could at a single stroke unify the three opposition parties, women in the work force and the public service of Canada, but Flaherty managed to do it and save $28 million in the process. This is either hubris or stupidity. I’m not sure which.
The best minds in the world right now predict a worldwide recession which may well degenerate into another depression as bad as the one in the 1930’s. The world looks to President-elect Obama as much for his calm and his apparent understanding of the circumstances as for his actions (Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money).
In the face of this we have this pair of buffoons: a personal injury lawyer (Flaherty) and a longtime Imperial Oil employee (Harper), who apparently see a world economic crisis as a great time to score points on their opponents.
Canadians were wise enough to keep Harper and company to a minority. The way the rules work, if a minority government fouls up — and it’s pretty clear they have — the Governor General is bound to replace the regime with another viable government, if such a coalition can be found.
Ask an auto worker if you’d rather have your interests represented by a bumbling-but-honest Liberal with a hearing problem or by someone who as finance minister publicly announced that “Ontario is the last place to invest.” The route out of a recession is generally through infrastructure spending, but Flaherty’s position on that one has been, “Cities should stop whining and repair their own crumbling infrastructure.” Furthermore, he offered that the Feds “are not in the pothole business.” Flaherty doesn’t sound like the man to assure financial markets. Oh yeah, there was that flip-flop on income trusts that caused the stock market to dive and even made the U.S. news. Alberta’s Ralph Klein took Flaherty and Harper to task on that one: “The only thing a politician has is his word.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Flaherty
If Klein is right, Harper’s on mighty thin ice, indeed. He promised a fixed term after he defeated Martin, then he broke his own law. He promised financial accountability until the travel invoices from ministers and their staffs hit the papers. Flaherty broke Treasury Board rules for so many single-source contracts to cronies that even the Wikipedia online editors despaired of recording them all.
I have already waxed indignant about Harper’s cribbing of speeches from other politicians, so I won’t go back to it here, though at the time I expressed my belief that those who plagiarize eventually have things come apart on them. Stephen Harper doesn’t appear able to see beyond partisan combat and his own interests. Canada desperately needs an inclusive leader who can help us through the next few months or years. Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty proved last week that they are not the men for the job, and they must go.
the Walnut Diary 