Who Are We? Where Are We Going?

Standing back and looking at the two big Canadian political stories in the past month – Afghan torture revelations and Copenhagen – I have been struck by how utterly changed we are in Canada. We are now one of the global foot-draggers on climate change and a country that is actively trying to cover up human rights violations (real ones, not ones that are less inconveniencing than the passport office, like Ezra Levant having to answer a couple questions one time) made by its own military. The contrast between this and Chretien’s wise decision to sit out the Gulf War in 2003 could not be greater.

Liberals: Get Your Act Together

I’ve been watching this internal Liberal struggle over what will happen with the Liberal nominations in the Quebec riding of Outremont and at this point I’m just baffled at the extent to which the Liberal party wants to fight and refight its various internal power struggles. I don’t mind a party that has a policy debate, but this isn’t about policy, it’s about ego and how much pull does the Quebec guy have relative the leader of the whole party.

Now, I’m not naive, I know that these things happen in politics, but the failure of the Liberals to deal with this quietly and quickly is frankly cringeworthy. One of the reasons I was okay with Iggy as the leader was that I felt that he might be able to impose some party discipline after Martin let his partisans fight an unrestrained civil war in the party against Chretien’s people and Dion just appeared to not be in control. Now it appears that the Liberals, even in the face of the worst election result in their party’s history, are still more concerned with infighting than anything else.

Given that the NDP is still not making the sort of breakthrough in popularity that they always appear to be almost able to make, we may be in for more years of Harper – perhaps with a minority, but able to have a free hand as long as no one gets their act together enough to challenge him.

Control, Control, You Must Learn Control

I have not studied the polls with the sort of depth needed to have a really solid sense of what would happen if the Harper government fell this fall. My quick-and-dirty guess is another minority, maybe Conservative, maybe Liberal. What looks better for the Liberals is the appearance that Ignatieff is in control of the situation. He has said that he’s not satisfied that the Cons are working hard enough, especially on EI reform – a non-trivial issue given the economy. By talking in this manner, Ignatieff gives the impression that he is prepared for an election and has an actual issue over which he could conceivably fight it. It’s a much better appearance than the one Dion presented where the Liberals appeared mortified at the thought of an election. Dion barely seemed in control of his party at times, let alone the overall situation in the House.

Like a lot of progressive-minded Canadians, I’m still not a super-Iggy fan but it’s nice to have a political tactician who can do the realpolitick thing as well as Harper. Also, it has to be a huge benefit for the Liberals to have Bob Rae playing the role of the good soldier and pointing out that “[a]n election is not a political game. An election is about fundamental choices. It’s about our values. It’s about our interests, where we think the country needs to go and there is a sense that this government is just not up to the job.”

A Sandbox Nation

Harper’s stupid, false cheap shot at Ignatieff at the G8 summit reminded me of this old Duncan MacPherson cartoon:

Harper has certainly done nothing quite so well as to bolster this notion of Canada as a backwater more devoted to partisan infighting than anything else.

Busted!

“Fuck Toronto” or so says John Baird for the city’s request for money to buy new streetcars. How dare Torontonians try get their greasy paws on some federal dough. Of course the Con response is to say that Toronto’s request didn’t fit the program, therefore, no money would be forthcoming. Toronto tried to find a way to make this funding happen, but the Cons just wouldn’t budge. If you can’t fit new transit into the (arbitrary) rules of the stimulus plan, then you aren’t getting any money.

Wait a sec though, what’s this? Kitchener-Waterloo gets $160 million for rapid transit?! What? That’s right kids, Spacing and Steve Munro have the goods on a federal announcement to fund K-W’s new LRT project:

“No sooner had Waterloo approved the LRT line, but local Cambridge MP Gary Goodyear announced that Ottawa would contribute $160-million to the project whose total estimated cost is $790-million.  This took Regional Chair Ken Seiling completely by surprise.  Support also came from Kitchener MP Stephen Woodworth who pointed out that this money will come from the “Build Canada Fund”, not the ‘Stimulus Fund’ and therefore the project is not constrained by the latter’s March 2011 cutoff.”

Of course, not to be outdone, the province lined up behind the same project:

“Meanwhile, the Liberal MPP for Kitchener, John Milloy, announced that Queen’s Park will provide two-thirds funding for this project.  If you do the math, this leaves Waterloo Region with a comparatively small cost, roughly 1/6 of the total.  The project also has support from local Conservative MPP Elizabeth Witmer.  Bipartisan enthusiasm for transit is a refreshing change from Toronto where transit projects are used to score political points by the right wing of Council.”

Now, I don’t want to begrudge K-W its fancy new transit line, if anything, having more transit lines in medium-sized cities 1) obviously helps reduce air-pollution and 2) probably helps more Canadians to see transit as a truly national (as opposed to big city-only) issue. But why is it that other levels of government find it so difficult to write a cheque for Toronto’s transit needs? Why use one set of rules and one fund for K-W and another set of rules for another fund in the case of Toronto? Here’s a clue, these are from the 2008 federal election:

 

Federal Election Results for Toronto

and here’s K-W and environs:

 

Federal Election Results for Kitchener-Waterloo

Now, as to why the province is so eager to fund transit in K-W, it may not be as straightforward, but I’m guessing that McGuinty and Co. are far more worried about the Cons making gains in that part of the province than in Toronto.

Iggy and Steve’s Brilliant Dance

“So this is strange / our sidestepping has come to be a brilliant dance / where nobody leads at all”

-Dashboard Confessional

I don’t know what’s going to happen when Mike and Steve sit down and meet today. Paul Wells is playing up Steve’s persona as the master tactician. The reality is that Harper has a style that has, up until now, served him reasonably well. There is of course the counter-example of last fall’s near collapse of the Conservative minority government that would seem to indicate that Harper can certainly overplay his hand. Right now though this whole thing does have the appearance of a sort of dance where no one wants an election but everyone wants to appear “tough” and ready to fight another election if need be. Neither Harper nor Ignatieff want to be seen as Stephane Dion (rightly or wrongly) was, as someone who was frightened of going to the people. Both leaders have to appear to win in this scenario and that sets off the real possibility that we may just blunder into a summer election.

Flaherty’s Follies

The deficit in this country is now apparently $50 billion or more. I personally stand by my earlier estimate of eleventy billion dollars as being every bit as legitimate as any other guess. Now Flaherty’s party has leapt to his defense saying that these are tough times and that it’s difficult to predict what will be needed in order to bail out this or that industry or to fund EI. (I thought EI had a surplus, what happened?) The Conservatives are saying that this is money that the other parties would like to see spent to revive the economy, so how can the opposition complain?

I think what is significant here though is that this is part of a series of revisions, first there was to be no recession in Canada, then there was to be a small recession but no deficit, then there was to be a deficit, now it’s a bigger deficit. The pattern here is of the Conservatives confidently asserting that the best-case scenario was the most likely outcome – how convenient – only to later come back with a revision to the new best-case scenario. This is in stark contrast to the Liberal approach throughout the 1990s and early 2000s where Paul Martin and later Ralph Goodale consistently under-promised and over-delivered with cautious budgets that were actually derided by the Cons and their precursors for being overly, what’s that word, oh yeah, conservative when figuring out the numbers.

Given the magnitude of our economic woes I would find it likely that even Martin and Goodale would run deficits in times like these (unless they went for a wholesale shift towards a radically shrunken government or dramatically increased taxes) but given the track record of those two, I’d expect that we would have been given the bad news up front, as if we were adults.

Iggy’s Meme

I suppose on some level, things in this parliament are similar to the last one where the leader of the opposition and the prime minister were engaged in a game of electoral brinksmanship. The difference this time, at least when I glance at newspaper headlines and what not is that the meme this time is that Ignatieff is in the driver’s seat, whereas the narrative meme with Dion was one of Dion running from Harper. I’m not sure whether this is owing to Iggy actually doing a better job of playing the parliamentary game, reporters being more sympathetic to Iggy, the new perception in the national media of Harper as the less-than-master strategist or all of the above, or something else completely. What I do know is these sorts of narrative memes are powerful in electoral politics, and should Ignatieff preserve this one – where he is confident and in charge, it may bode well for his electoral prospects.

Big Surprise: Cons Release Attack Ads Aimed At Iggy

We all knew this was coming, didn’t we? All I will say is: How provincial do you have to be to attack your opponent for having worked abroad? In the nation that is our largest trading partner no less! While Iggy was there he made significant connections in the corridors of government and academia while Harper was at home, a self-hating Canadian calling us “a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term.”

Iggy is certainly not above criticism, but if this is the Cons preferred angle (and it probably is since when Iggy errs, he errs in the direction of Conservative ideology) they look like a bunch of parochial twits who can’t see beyond there own crude nativism.

BC RCMP at it again

This story about the RCMP raiding the wrong apartment does not, in the light of the Braidwood Inquiry, terribly surprise me. What I wonder about is why one of the major parties in the BC election is not screaming from the rooftops about how they will get rid of RCMP as the provincial police if elected. A quick check of the party website reveals that, if this is a policy, it’s not immediately obvious to the voters who might be looking for information on it. Maybe it’s the Goodale effect?

Edit: It appears that the Greens are promising to rid BC of the RCMP. I did check their site and I couldn’t find this info, this may or may not be a function of my terrible record on scavenger hunts. Either way, like I said, I would be shouting this to the voters everywhere I could.