Government had no right to seize pension surplus, must return it
Unbeknownst to many Canadians, there's a pivotally-important question at the centre of the ongoing -- and escalating -- postal workers' strike.
That question is: to whom do the pensions of Canadians belong? To themselves? Or to someone else?
In 1999, the Liberal government of Jean Chretien had an answer that should outrage all Canadians. They essentially decided that the pensions of public service employees belonged to them, to do with as they please.
They took it upon themselves to seize a $6 billion surplus in pension funds belonging to public service employees, the RCMP and the military and use it to eliminate the federal deficit.
"It was a money grab," fumed Public Service Assiance of Canada Executive Vice President Patty Ducharme. "The federal government has a responsibility to its employees, to the plan members; but they just took that money out of the plan ... and stole it."
"Stole" is a strong word. But it's bloody well close.
As the faceoff between Canada Post and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers draws on, it pays to remember that one of the issues at play in the strike is the state of the CUPW pension fund. The union wants to use funds from a profit-sharing program to restore solvency to the fund.
But they shouldn't have to. The funds snatched from the pension fund should have been returned long ago. They should have been returned, at the latest, five years ago.
It's largely Jean Chretien and Paul Martin who are responsible for this scandalous outrage. (It's one of many underhanded means they used to balance the deficit, including cutting transfers to provinces, raiding EI premiums, and cutting funding to health care and education.) But they don't carry it alone.
It's an absolute outrage that the Conservative Party has bothered fighting this at all. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty should have smiled and obligingly introduced a program to restore the pilfered pension funds in 2006. They didn't, and the government is fighting it still.
The figure under discussion? $30 billion. That's $30 billion being withheld from hardworking public servants, including the woman who brings you your mail (and in this author's neighbourhood, doesn't at all mind when a well-behaved dog accompanies her on her rounds), the RCMP officer you call when you need help (even if he occasionally writes you a traffic ticket), the military personell who risk their lives for us, and countless others.
It's absolutely mind-boggling that the Ontario Superior Court of Justice could decree that public service unions are not entitled to those surplus funds, and sign of a deep rot in that institution.
It's a simple idea: in Canada, our pension funds belong to us. It should be not a whit different for public employees. If their pension managers do such a splendid job that they have a $30 billion surplus, that surplus belongs to the fund, not to the government.
This doesn't mean CUPW is right about everything in this strike. But they are right about this.
Fair is fair. And it's beyond the time for the government of Canada to do the right thing, and restore that $30 billion surplus to these pension funds.
Showing posts with label Paul Martin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Martin. Show all posts
Monday, June 13, 2011
Monday, April 04, 2011
The Case for Elizabeth May in the Debates
As the 41st Canadian federal election unfolds, one thing that is becoming clear is that the media has managed to make itself one of the main issues in the campaign.
On one front is the issue surrounding the number of questions Prime Minister Stephen Harper is taking at each of his campaign stops: two from the national media in english, one from the national media in french, and another from local media.
The media is resentful of this, and not without cause. No one should blame Harper for wanting to keep control of the amount of time he spends answering questions. But answering a finite number of questions not only frustrates the media, but it focuses media attention away from his party's campaign and toward his own relations with the media. It reduces his party's ability to message.
But the media has its own controversy to handle. The decision to exclude Green Party leader Elizabeth May from the televised leaders' debate has proven to be unpopular in some circles.
This is especially the case within the Green Party itself.
"Fundamentally, we expect to be treated like the other national parties," May complained. "With the support of nearly a million Canadians in the last election, it seems pretty obvious that the Greens deserve a voice at the table."
May has even sworn to take this matter before a court to have the decision overturned -- a rather dubious act, as May cannot force the broadcasting consortium, who decided unanimously to decide only the parties represented in Parliament, to put her on television.
But there are many good reasons to include the Greens. This is only underscored by the recent support May has received from former Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin and former Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Joe Clark.
Martin spoke to the need for Canadians to be as well-informed about their electoral options as they can possibly be.
"Canadians are entitled to points of view of all of the valid players and Elizabeth May and the Green party are certainly valid participants," Martin insisted. "In terms of the popular vote, the Green party has demonstrated that there is a strong group of Canadians who are prepared to support that party."
Joe Clark echoed these sentiments, then continued to talk about the importance of democracy.
"The decision to exclude flies in the face of the worldwide demand of democratic citizens for more open-ness and more alternatives," Clark said in a statement. "As education and technology are forcing political systems to open up, this consortium proposes to use its power to limit the choices Canadians can consider."
"There are good arguments to change the format of these debates; there is no justification for an arbitrary decision to shut out a significant and legitimate political party, like the Green Party," Clark added.
There are many reasons to include the Green Party in the televised leaders' debates. Paul Martin and Joe Clark articulate them well.
This author isn't entirely decided on this issue just yet, but one thing is clear: the media cannot expect to complain on one hand that Stephen Harper is restricting their ability to ask him questions, then shut another party out of the debate entirely.
On one front is the issue surrounding the number of questions Prime Minister Stephen Harper is taking at each of his campaign stops: two from the national media in english, one from the national media in french, and another from local media.
The media is resentful of this, and not without cause. No one should blame Harper for wanting to keep control of the amount of time he spends answering questions. But answering a finite number of questions not only frustrates the media, but it focuses media attention away from his party's campaign and toward his own relations with the media. It reduces his party's ability to message.
But the media has its own controversy to handle. The decision to exclude Green Party leader Elizabeth May from the televised leaders' debate has proven to be unpopular in some circles.
This is especially the case within the Green Party itself.
"Fundamentally, we expect to be treated like the other national parties," May complained. "With the support of nearly a million Canadians in the last election, it seems pretty obvious that the Greens deserve a voice at the table."
May has even sworn to take this matter before a court to have the decision overturned -- a rather dubious act, as May cannot force the broadcasting consortium, who decided unanimously to decide only the parties represented in Parliament, to put her on television.
But there are many good reasons to include the Greens. This is only underscored by the recent support May has received from former Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin and former Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Joe Clark.
Martin spoke to the need for Canadians to be as well-informed about their electoral options as they can possibly be.
"Canadians are entitled to points of view of all of the valid players and Elizabeth May and the Green party are certainly valid participants," Martin insisted. "In terms of the popular vote, the Green party has demonstrated that there is a strong group of Canadians who are prepared to support that party."
Joe Clark echoed these sentiments, then continued to talk about the importance of democracy.
"The decision to exclude flies in the face of the worldwide demand of democratic citizens for more open-ness and more alternatives," Clark said in a statement. "As education and technology are forcing political systems to open up, this consortium proposes to use its power to limit the choices Canadians can consider."
"There are good arguments to change the format of these debates; there is no justification for an arbitrary decision to shut out a significant and legitimate political party, like the Green Party," Clark added.
There are many reasons to include the Green Party in the televised leaders' debates. Paul Martin and Joe Clark articulate them well.
This author isn't entirely decided on this issue just yet, but one thing is clear: the media cannot expect to complain on one hand that Stephen Harper is restricting their ability to ask him questions, then shut another party out of the debate entirely.
Sunday, April 03, 2011
The Uncomfortable Truth of Class War & Tax Evasion
David Miliband finds clever way to avoid paying tax he helped implement
Former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has some 'splainin' to do.
In the year since Miliband's Labour party lost an election to David Cameron's Conservative Party of Britain he has moved from being a high-paid member of Britain's cabinet to finding clever ways to avoid paying the 50% top tax rate that the government he was a member of implemented.
As one of the fortunate strata of British society who earns more than 150,000 Pounds Sterling, Miliband would be paying a snowballing tax rate, wherein anyone earnign this amount has to pay an additional 50% of the 40% of their earnings they already pay in taxes.
However, it turns out that he doesn't.
Rather, Miliband has set up a company named "The Office of David Miliband Limited", which manages income that he earns through his work outside of Parliament. Instead of paying the 40% tax rate that he would otherwise pay on these funds (as well as the additional 50% of that figure), Miliband will instead pay a corporate tax rate of 20%.
This underscores a rather startling fact of life about many high-taxing politicians: they're more than willing to levy high taxes against other people, but they're frequently reluctant to pay.
It's true that corporations have many tricks to avoid paying taxes that private citizens often do not have at their disposal. As York University's Dr Neil Brooks explains, many corporations do this through shell companies established in the Cayman Islands.
While Miliband has stopped far short of setting up his shell company in the Cayman Islands, The Office of David Miliband Ltd, at least on its face, very much looks like a shell company.
Dr Brooks points out the costs to government of chasing down revenue otherwise lost through these shell companies, regardless of where they are registered. These costs should be on the minds of Canadians as they compare electoral platforms during the ongoing election.
After all, it isn't merely in Britain where politicians avoid paying taxes. In Canada, Michael Ignatieff's Liberal Party is campaigning on rescinding a promised corporate tax cut, even while former Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin operates a steamship line which operates out of the aforementioned Cayman Islands in order to avoid paying the full share of taxes it would pay if it ran all of its operations in Canada.
That's the uncomrotable truth about class warfare and tax evasion: often those who push for the wealthy to pay the highest taxes are the first to look for ways to skip out on their own cheque when they join the wealthy elite they so eagerly attack.
Former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has some 'splainin' to do.
In the year since Miliband's Labour party lost an election to David Cameron's Conservative Party of Britain he has moved from being a high-paid member of Britain's cabinet to finding clever ways to avoid paying the 50% top tax rate that the government he was a member of implemented.
As one of the fortunate strata of British society who earns more than 150,000 Pounds Sterling, Miliband would be paying a snowballing tax rate, wherein anyone earnign this amount has to pay an additional 50% of the 40% of their earnings they already pay in taxes.
However, it turns out that he doesn't.
Rather, Miliband has set up a company named "The Office of David Miliband Limited", which manages income that he earns through his work outside of Parliament. Instead of paying the 40% tax rate that he would otherwise pay on these funds (as well as the additional 50% of that figure), Miliband will instead pay a corporate tax rate of 20%.
This underscores a rather startling fact of life about many high-taxing politicians: they're more than willing to levy high taxes against other people, but they're frequently reluctant to pay.
It's true that corporations have many tricks to avoid paying taxes that private citizens often do not have at their disposal. As York University's Dr Neil Brooks explains, many corporations do this through shell companies established in the Cayman Islands.
While Miliband has stopped far short of setting up his shell company in the Cayman Islands, The Office of David Miliband Ltd, at least on its face, very much looks like a shell company.
Dr Brooks points out the costs to government of chasing down revenue otherwise lost through these shell companies, regardless of where they are registered. These costs should be on the minds of Canadians as they compare electoral platforms during the ongoing election.
After all, it isn't merely in Britain where politicians avoid paying taxes. In Canada, Michael Ignatieff's Liberal Party is campaigning on rescinding a promised corporate tax cut, even while former Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin operates a steamship line which operates out of the aforementioned Cayman Islands in order to avoid paying the full share of taxes it would pay if it ran all of its operations in Canada.
That's the uncomrotable truth about class warfare and tax evasion: often those who push for the wealthy to pay the highest taxes are the first to look for ways to skip out on their own cheque when they join the wealthy elite they so eagerly attack.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Canada Chided For "Lack of Interest" in Jeffrey Sachs' Agenda
Jeffrey Sachs disappointed in lack of ideological commitment
If anything is absolutely certain about Jeffrey Sachs, it's that he has everything about poverty in the developing world figured out.
Or at least he thinks he does.
Sachs' policies regarding alleviating poverty in the developing world have been nothing if not a spectacular failure. Yet instead of examining his own policies to figure out what's gone wrong, he prefers to simply blame countries that don't share his agenda in all its ideological glory.
Especially Canada.
But not Canada alone. Apparently, the United States is to blame as well.
“Where we are in 2010 is mostly a testimony about ourselves,” Sachs said. “Neither the Harper government nor the Obama administration is doing close to what I would expect of our countries living in the wealth and comfort of North America.”
So not just Canada. But mostly Canada.
“It’s just been very disappointing for me,” Sachs complained. “I’ve grown up believing in Canada’s leadership.”
Of course Sachs may simply be forgetting that Canada has taken the lead on a maternal health initiative for the developing world.
Sachs seems upset that countries in the developing world have hard choices to make.
“All of them were discussing whether to have children in school or whether to have mothers saved in childbirth or whether to have vaccine problems, because [they] can’t do all of these things,” Sachs fumed. “It’s an impossible choice.”
Former Prime Minister Paul Martin, who committed Canada to following Sachs' agenda, is similarly disappointed.
"When the Canadian numbers were revised down, that was a reneging on our commitment," Martin complained. "The 'reclarifying' of numbers, which Canada, Italy and France engaged in, is exactly the kind of thing that must not happen in the future."
Of course what Martin fails to mention is that the commitment Martin speaks of was the commitment of the government that he led. A future government was well within its rights to reevaluate the decision, and in the case of the Millenium Development Goals, was particularly right to have done so.
But Martin also admits that many of the countries due to be recipients of this generous aid commitment have their own part to play -- one they haven't played.
"Recipient countries have got to come to the table," Martin insisted. "When the MDGs were set up, it was with governments that said they would do certain things, for instance in education, and a number of those countries have not done it."
But even the commitments made by the countries in question were the wrong commitments.
New York University Economist William Easterly has been clear about the shortcomings of the economy of the developing world.
One of these shortcomings is the lack of key economic infrastructure -- banks, stock exchanges, securities regulators, courts of law -- that make a healthy economy possible in the first place. While the developing-world versions of institutions don't currently need to be nearly as sophisticated as they are in the developed world, they do need to impose a basic degree of law and order over these economies -- the kind that can contain and eliminate corruption and cronyism.
Beyond even that, Sachs' prized MDGs represent everything that has been wrong with the developed world's approach to fighting poverty in the developing world: they are centrally-planned, largely by the donors, and do not necessarily reflect the real needs of these economies.
They reflect the opinion of what Jeffrey Sachs and his cohorts think these countries need, and following the same broken model of sending billions and billions of dollars into the coffers of governments that have tended to either waste the funds, or steal them outright.
Jeffrey Sachs can be as disappointed as he likes that Canada has backed away from his agenda. His policies have overwhelmingly failed -- something that Sachs has declined to even acknowledge, let alone take responsibility for -- and it's time for a more constructive approach.
If anything is absolutely certain about Jeffrey Sachs, it's that he has everything about poverty in the developing world figured out.
Or at least he thinks he does.
Sachs' policies regarding alleviating poverty in the developing world have been nothing if not a spectacular failure. Yet instead of examining his own policies to figure out what's gone wrong, he prefers to simply blame countries that don't share his agenda in all its ideological glory.
Especially Canada.
But not Canada alone. Apparently, the United States is to blame as well.
“Where we are in 2010 is mostly a testimony about ourselves,” Sachs said. “Neither the Harper government nor the Obama administration is doing close to what I would expect of our countries living in the wealth and comfort of North America.”
So not just Canada. But mostly Canada.
“It’s just been very disappointing for me,” Sachs complained. “I’ve grown up believing in Canada’s leadership.”
Of course Sachs may simply be forgetting that Canada has taken the lead on a maternal health initiative for the developing world.
Sachs seems upset that countries in the developing world have hard choices to make.
“All of them were discussing whether to have children in school or whether to have mothers saved in childbirth or whether to have vaccine problems, because [they] can’t do all of these things,” Sachs fumed. “It’s an impossible choice.”
Former Prime Minister Paul Martin, who committed Canada to following Sachs' agenda, is similarly disappointed.
"When the Canadian numbers were revised down, that was a reneging on our commitment," Martin complained. "The 'reclarifying' of numbers, which Canada, Italy and France engaged in, is exactly the kind of thing that must not happen in the future."
Of course what Martin fails to mention is that the commitment Martin speaks of was the commitment of the government that he led. A future government was well within its rights to reevaluate the decision, and in the case of the Millenium Development Goals, was particularly right to have done so.
But Martin also admits that many of the countries due to be recipients of this generous aid commitment have their own part to play -- one they haven't played.
"Recipient countries have got to come to the table," Martin insisted. "When the MDGs were set up, it was with governments that said they would do certain things, for instance in education, and a number of those countries have not done it."
But even the commitments made by the countries in question were the wrong commitments.
New York University Economist William Easterly has been clear about the shortcomings of the economy of the developing world.
One of these shortcomings is the lack of key economic infrastructure -- banks, stock exchanges, securities regulators, courts of law -- that make a healthy economy possible in the first place. While the developing-world versions of institutions don't currently need to be nearly as sophisticated as they are in the developed world, they do need to impose a basic degree of law and order over these economies -- the kind that can contain and eliminate corruption and cronyism.
Beyond even that, Sachs' prized MDGs represent everything that has been wrong with the developed world's approach to fighting poverty in the developing world: they are centrally-planned, largely by the donors, and do not necessarily reflect the real needs of these economies.
They reflect the opinion of what Jeffrey Sachs and his cohorts think these countries need, and following the same broken model of sending billions and billions of dollars into the coffers of governments that have tended to either waste the funds, or steal them outright.
Jeffrey Sachs can be as disappointed as he likes that Canada has backed away from his agenda. His policies have overwhelmingly failed -- something that Sachs has declined to even acknowledge, let alone take responsibility for -- and it's time for a more constructive approach.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Dalton McGuinty: Yesterday's Man Renewed
Desperate, pathetic McGuinty cries 'hidden agenda'
The Toronto Star calls it "feisty". Anyone with a memory of what transpired in Canadian politics over the past 20 years will recognize it for precisely what it is: pathetic.
Of course, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty must expect that Ontarians have a short memory. How else to explain his desperate "hidden agenda" gambit?
Canadians are very familar with the "hidden agenda" gambit. It was a fear tactic, invoked by former Prime Minister Paul Martin, suggesting current Prime Minister Stephen Harper had a "hidden agenda".
How did the story end? The train wreck of corruption that was the Liberal Party became unigorable in the eyes of Canadians, Martin's government was rightly found wanting, his desperation recognized, and Martin was rightly sent packing, never to return.
Four years later, another embattled Liberal -- McGuinty -- has resorted to this pathetic and transparent gambit, just as his opposition seems poised to relegate him to the opposition benches.
This time it's Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak, and it comes as Hudak points to the increasing burden McGuinty's government has become to the citizens of Ontario.
“After seven years it has become very clear Premier McGuinty believes in his heart that Ontario families have an infinite capacity to pay for every idea that your team dreams up,” Hudak announced. “They can’t keep up with your hydro bills, they can’t keep up with your HST increase, they can’t keep up with your eco taxes. Families need a break.”
For his own part, McGuinty predictably wanted to change the subject -- to health care.
“Ontario families better ask themselves what’s their secret agenda when it comes to health care," McGuinty announced. "What’s going to happen to their hospitals, their nurses and doctors?”
Of course, the switch to health care wasn't by any means a random change of topic. It was deliberate. Nothing so frightens Canadians as the prospect of deep cuts to health care -- even as health care becomes more and more unsustainable, as governments such as McGuinty's continue to allow it to slide.
“We have a broader, and I think more intelligent understanding of what Ontario families’ concerns are," McGuinty preened. "Yes they’re concerned about their expenses ... levels of taxation.”
“But we will not take our eye off the ball of those other concerns families have,” he continued.
Yet it seems that as support for the Progressive Conservative Party strengthens, and support for the Liberal Party erodes, more and more Ontarians are questioning the broadness or the intelligence of McGuinty's purported understanding of their concerns.
So the Ontario Liberal Party's option of choice is to rewind to yesterday -- regurgitate the "hidden agenda". Run against Mike Harris rather than against Tim Hudak.
It won't work any better for Dalton McGuinty than it did for Paul Martin.
While the Toronto Star may applaud it as "feisty", Ontarians will surely recognize it for what it really is: desperate and pathetic.
The Toronto Star calls it "feisty". Anyone with a memory of what transpired in Canadian politics over the past 20 years will recognize it for precisely what it is: pathetic.
Of course, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty must expect that Ontarians have a short memory. How else to explain his desperate "hidden agenda" gambit?
Canadians are very familar with the "hidden agenda" gambit. It was a fear tactic, invoked by former Prime Minister Paul Martin, suggesting current Prime Minister Stephen Harper had a "hidden agenda".
How did the story end? The train wreck of corruption that was the Liberal Party became unigorable in the eyes of Canadians, Martin's government was rightly found wanting, his desperation recognized, and Martin was rightly sent packing, never to return.
Four years later, another embattled Liberal -- McGuinty -- has resorted to this pathetic and transparent gambit, just as his opposition seems poised to relegate him to the opposition benches.
This time it's Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak, and it comes as Hudak points to the increasing burden McGuinty's government has become to the citizens of Ontario.
“After seven years it has become very clear Premier McGuinty believes in his heart that Ontario families have an infinite capacity to pay for every idea that your team dreams up,” Hudak announced. “They can’t keep up with your hydro bills, they can’t keep up with your HST increase, they can’t keep up with your eco taxes. Families need a break.”
For his own part, McGuinty predictably wanted to change the subject -- to health care.
“Ontario families better ask themselves what’s their secret agenda when it comes to health care," McGuinty announced. "What’s going to happen to their hospitals, their nurses and doctors?”
Of course, the switch to health care wasn't by any means a random change of topic. It was deliberate. Nothing so frightens Canadians as the prospect of deep cuts to health care -- even as health care becomes more and more unsustainable, as governments such as McGuinty's continue to allow it to slide.
“We have a broader, and I think more intelligent understanding of what Ontario families’ concerns are," McGuinty preened. "Yes they’re concerned about their expenses ... levels of taxation.”
“But we will not take our eye off the ball of those other concerns families have,” he continued.
Yet it seems that as support for the Progressive Conservative Party strengthens, and support for the Liberal Party erodes, more and more Ontarians are questioning the broadness or the intelligence of McGuinty's purported understanding of their concerns.
So the Ontario Liberal Party's option of choice is to rewind to yesterday -- regurgitate the "hidden agenda". Run against Mike Harris rather than against Tim Hudak.
It won't work any better for Dalton McGuinty than it did for Paul Martin.
While the Toronto Star may applaud it as "feisty", Ontarians will surely recognize it for what it really is: desperate and pathetic.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Paul Martin Offers Advice on "Good Government". Don't Laugh.
There's irony in all of this
Speaking in Kingston, Ontario recently, former Prime Minister Paul Martin offered his thoughts on what good government is.
Don't laugh.
"Good government is transparent and we're not seeing this in the numbers," Martin said, pointing at the projected cost of security for the G20 and G8 Conferences. "It seems inconceivable that this is the price. This is five to 10 times what we were told a couple of months ago."
Of course, Martin seems to have forgotten that was before Ottawa-area anarchists firebombed a bank. When thousands of protesters are set to descend on downtown Toronto, that's one thing. When anarchists are running about in the nation's capital, blowing shit up in advance and promising more such acts during the summit, that's another thing entirely.
But moreover, it's actually more than a little amusing to see Martin trying to lecture Prime Minister Stephen Harper about "good government". Not only does Harper now have double Martin's experience as Prime Minister, but his lecturing about transparency comes off as far short of convincing.
After all, it was Paul Martin who, along with Ralph Goodale, made the decision not to hold a public inquiry into the Income Trusts leak. That led NDP MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis to write a letter to the RCMP to get them to investigate.
The news that the RCMP had opened the investigation came at a very poor time for the Liberals, many of whom think that the investigation cost them the 2006 election.
In other words, the Liberal Party's lack of transparency cost them government. This was after the unprecedented revelations of the Gomery Inquiry -- it is, in fact, unprecedented to find a governing political party literally stealing from the citizens of Canada.
It should have been even more unprecedented to have an electorate docile enough to reelect that party to government after it becomes clear that party has stolen.
After 2004, it wasn't unprecedented at all.
Yet Paul Martin, the former Prime Minister who got that inexplicable free pass in 2004 and found that it couldn't bear further scandal in 2006, wants to lecture the Conservative Party on good government.
It is to laugh.
But don't. At this point, it's just cruel.
Speaking in Kingston, Ontario recently, former Prime Minister Paul Martin offered his thoughts on what good government is.
Don't laugh.
Of course, Martin seems to have forgotten that was before Ottawa-area anarchists firebombed a bank. When thousands of protesters are set to descend on downtown Toronto, that's one thing. When anarchists are running about in the nation's capital, blowing shit up in advance and promising more such acts during the summit, that's another thing entirely.
But moreover, it's actually more than a little amusing to see Martin trying to lecture Prime Minister Stephen Harper about "good government". Not only does Harper now have double Martin's experience as Prime Minister, but his lecturing about transparency comes off as far short of convincing.
After all, it was Paul Martin who, along with Ralph Goodale, made the decision not to hold a public inquiry into the Income Trusts leak. That led NDP MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis to write a letter to the RCMP to get them to investigate.
The news that the RCMP had opened the investigation came at a very poor time for the Liberals, many of whom think that the investigation cost them the 2006 election.
In other words, the Liberal Party's lack of transparency cost them government. This was after the unprecedented revelations of the Gomery Inquiry -- it is, in fact, unprecedented to find a governing political party literally stealing from the citizens of Canada.
It should have been even more unprecedented to have an electorate docile enough to reelect that party to government after it becomes clear that party has stolen.
After 2004, it wasn't unprecedented at all.
Yet Paul Martin, the former Prime Minister who got that inexplicable free pass in 2004 and found that it couldn't bear further scandal in 2006, wants to lecture the Conservative Party on good government.
It is to laugh.
But don't. At this point, it's just cruel.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Torture Derangement Syndrome
When dealing with The Chickenwankers, that collection of "Progressive" bloggers who lacks the courage to decide for themselves who may or may not comment on their blogs, one can expect one thing above all others:
The intellectual dishonesty and cowardice of The Chickenwankers truly knows no bounds.
A typical case in point is Sister Sage's Musings proprietor CK. In a recent post there, she decides that the CBC is afflicted with "Liberal derangement syndrome" for reporting on the most recent development in the allegations regarding the torture of Afghan detainees:
"It never seems to stop. This time, it appears that the CBC is now afflicted with LDS. It is now helping the Harpercons do that whole 'blame the Libruls' thang back in order to deflect and distract. Yikes!"Apparently, in the mind of CK, the role of the CBC isn't to report the news -- not by a long shot. Rather, CK seems to think that the role of the CBC is to suppress any story that doesn't directly benefit her ideological agenda.
And it would now seem that the CBC is off the reservation.
For those not in the know, it turns out that Liberal party received even more warnings about the potential torture of Afghan detainees than a recently re-revealed story in La Presse indicated.
Recently, Eileen Olexiuk, who was the second-in-command of the Canadian embassy in Kabul, recently reported that she warned the Paul Martin government on many occasions that torture was common in Afghan prisons.
Her warnings went unheeded.
"I don't think anybody really cared, quite frankly," she said.
The Martin government had apparently considered establishing a Canadian detention centre in Afghanistan, or handing detainees over to US Forces to be held in their facilities. Both options were rejected out of fear of a Guantanamo Bay-esque scandal.
Instead, the Liberals ignored the warnings regarding torture, and negotiated a prisoner transfer agreement with the government of Afghanistan that did not allow Canadian forces sufficient monitoring powers over detainees transferred -- an oversight that the Stephen Harper government has since corrected.
An apologist for anything left-wing no less esteemed than fellow Chickenwanker John Baglow insists that if the Liberal Party is guilty of anything, it's of signing a flawed PTA.
Baglow previously insisted that the obvious Liberal complicity in torture be discounted out of "Canadian fairness". "Canadian fairness" apparently doesn't apply to the governments that actually fix the problems left behind by their predecessors.
CK goes on to insist that the Liberal Party isn't very troubled by the notion that their complicitly would -- or, rather, already has -- come to light. Admittedly, Ujjal Dosanjh certainly doesn't seem worried.
"We want to be transparent, and learn what mistakes were made, and who knew what and what was hidden from the public, either by the Liberal government or the current Conservative government," Dosanjh insisted.
Of course, Dosanjh has every reason to be confident. His party has been doing everything it can to make an issue out of the highly-questionable Richard Colvin allegations for months, all while the media declined to report on the pre-2006 timeline.
All but overheard in Liberal Party circles was "seriously, do you believe this? Do you fucking believe this? It's a matter of public record that our government negotiated and signed the PTA under which the torture took place, and the media isn't saying 'boo'. We get to tar the Conservatives for our supreme fuck up! Do you believe this? It's too good to be true!"
If CK and John Baglow are guilty of anything, it's of two things.
The first is trying to sell something that was too good to be true. They both knew, just like any Canadians who have paid even passing attention to this story, that the Liberal Party made the torture of detainees transferred by Canadian forces possible in the first place.
The second, clearly, is an act of historical revisionism. They are just as guilty as anyone else for the phenomenon of the orphan timeline, a bizarre rhetorical approach to the matter that has attempted to omit the entire pre-2006 timeline and the entire post-2007 timeline from the public discourse.
Having invested so much time and energy in peddling a derangement syndrome to anyone foolish enough to listen to them, they simply cannot bring themselves to admit that if the Conservative government is guilty of anything it's of not taking torture allegations seriously enough. The Liberal Party is clearly guilty of the same.
Considering the well-known Al Qaida/Taliban tendency to falsely claim torture, it would be hard to blame either.
The difference between the two, of course, is that the Conservative Party didn't sign a fatally flawed Prisoner Transfer Agreement despite having been warned.
The Liberals did.
CK and John Baglow may consider themselves free to desperately try and spin that.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Thank Fucking God
Buzz Hargrove not interested in federal politics
When it was suggested that Buzz Hargrove may enter politics after retiring as the President of the Canadian Auto Workers union, it was difficult to take him seriously.
After all, Hargrove had alredy been kicked out of the NDP after it was judged that his endorsement of various Liberal candidates had violated the party's constitution. Hargrove had also proven to be a liability for Liberal leader Paul Martin when he called on Quebeckers to vote for the Bloc Quebecois during a Liberal party press conference.
But apparently Hargrove did take the idea of running for Parliament seriously -- at least for a little while.
But what dissuaded Hargrove wasn't the notion that a great many Canadians wouldn't want to vote for him, but rather the idea that federal politics was simply too acrimonious.
"It seems like every day in the House and the legislatures across the country, political parties of all stripes are just trying to find a way that they can attack the personal side of individual members of Parliament or the prime minister or whoever," Hargrove explained. "And that's not the politics that I grew up with. You stuck with issues and you challenged people on issues and what they stood for. So I just didn't see standing up in the House and criticizing somebody for an expense sheet that they billed for a coffee or something as being very substantive or contributing much to the country."
Of course, one may wonder what issue Hargrove was really challenging Stephen Harper on when he suggested that Harper's view of Canada was a separatist vision of Canada.
Martin was left will little recourse but to interject, stating that he had never doubted Harper's patriotism.
Buzz Hargrove's previous forays into federal politics have uniformly proven to be trainwrecks for whatever hapless party happened to be involved with him at the time.
That's why a great many Canadians should breathe a sign of relief when they find out that Hargrove is uninterested in federal politics. At least the admittedly viperous nature of Canadian politics has turned out to be good for something.
When it was suggested that Buzz Hargrove may enter politics after retiring as the President of the Canadian Auto Workers union, it was difficult to take him seriously.
After all, Hargrove had alredy been kicked out of the NDP after it was judged that his endorsement of various Liberal candidates had violated the party's constitution. Hargrove had also proven to be a liability for Liberal leader Paul Martin when he called on Quebeckers to vote for the Bloc Quebecois during a Liberal party press conference.
But apparently Hargrove did take the idea of running for Parliament seriously -- at least for a little while.
But what dissuaded Hargrove wasn't the notion that a great many Canadians wouldn't want to vote for him, but rather the idea that federal politics was simply too acrimonious.
"It seems like every day in the House and the legislatures across the country, political parties of all stripes are just trying to find a way that they can attack the personal side of individual members of Parliament or the prime minister or whoever," Hargrove explained. "And that's not the politics that I grew up with. You stuck with issues and you challenged people on issues and what they stood for. So I just didn't see standing up in the House and criticizing somebody for an expense sheet that they billed for a coffee or something as being very substantive or contributing much to the country."Of course, one may wonder what issue Hargrove was really challenging Stephen Harper on when he suggested that Harper's view of Canada was a separatist vision of Canada.
Martin was left will little recourse but to interject, stating that he had never doubted Harper's patriotism.
Buzz Hargrove's previous forays into federal politics have uniformly proven to be trainwrecks for whatever hapless party happened to be involved with him at the time.
That's why a great many Canadians should breathe a sign of relief when they find out that Hargrove is uninterested in federal politics. At least the admittedly viperous nature of Canadian politics has turned out to be good for something.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Navigating Canada's Way Out of Recession Redux
Preston Manning calls for post-recession roadmap
In an op/ed column appearing in the Globe and Mail, Preston Manning writes about the current federal deficit, and compares it to the 14-year quest to put an end to Canada's last deficit.
He argues that a lack of planning undermined efforts to control that deficit, and argues that a plan is needed to tackle the current federal deficit.
The best reason for doing this, he insists, is not necessarily the deficit itself, but some of the unconsidered consequences of accumulating debt:
The skyrocketing public debt and debt service payments that Manning alludes to were thus only one consequence of the Trudeau-Mulroney deficit spending era.
As the '90s wore on, so did public anxiety about Canada's debt. That anxiety was also felt in financial markets, where there was speculation that Canada could potentially default on its foreign debts. This anxiety, however, was not born in the 1990s. Public concern about Canada's debt had begun to solidly take root in the 1989s:
But appearances could be decieving. Free Trade was the central issue in the 1988 election campaign, with Mulroney supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement, and his opponents opposing it. Mulroney won a majority on the back of the free trade issue. But at their earliest opportunity (which came later in 1988), Albertans sent Deborah Grey, their first Reform MP, to Ottawa. Stephen Harper (who will also be remembered as one oc Canada's biggest deficit spenders) went with her as her Parliamentary Assistant.
At a certain point, legislators couldn't ignore the signs the Canadian people were sending them -- get the debt under control. Now. Or else:
As Manning notes, the Reform party is still remembered as the only party in the 1993 election to present a credible plan for reducing the federal deficit:
The Chretien government, at the time, was also conducting a social services review under Lloyd Axworthy. It took considerable time and effort for Martin to out-maneuver Axworthy in order to impress the importance of his agenda upon Chretien.
Various political tensions -- both inter- and intra-party -- led to the exacerbation of Canada's deficit and hampered the best-intentioned efforts to get it back under control.
Manning seems to suggest that these kinds of tensions are characteristic of a political environment in which there is no real consensus on the matter, and what is needed to ensure Canada can efficiently shed its deficit once the recession is over is a policy similar to Reform's "zero in three" policy:
From the archives:
August 5, 2009 - "Navigating Canada's Way Out of Recession (And Beyond)"
In an op/ed column appearing in the Globe and Mail, Preston Manning writes about the current federal deficit, and compares it to the 14-year quest to put an end to Canada's last deficit.
He argues that a lack of planning undermined efforts to control that deficit, and argues that a plan is needed to tackle the current federal deficit.
The best reason for doing this, he insists, is not necessarily the deficit itself, but some of the unconsidered consequences of accumulating debt:
"To combat the current recession, governments around the world have instituted economic recovery measures breathtaking in their magnitude and scope. These include dramatically expanding the money supply (printing money), taking significant ownership positions in key sectors of the economy and heavily engaging in deficit spending.Manning notes that the 14-year struggle to end balance the budget and begin paying down debt stemmed from not a lack of a coherent plan:
Such measures have other significant and long-lasting effects besides stimulating economic growth.
Rapid expansion of the money supply can lead to a tsunami of inflation. Government ownership of businesses can lead to unhealthy dependencies, unfair competition, corporate inefficiencies and serious conflicts of interest when governments must also regulate businesses in which they have an ownership stake. And heavy engagement in deficit spending leads invariably to increased public debt, increased interest payments and the necessity of cutting services and/or raising taxes in the future to rebalance the books.
So what must be done to recover from the adverse effects of these measures?
Let me focus particularly on what might be done to recover from the orgy of deficit spending in which virtually all governments in Canada are now engaged."
"At the federal level, Canada's last big deficit-spending binge began in the Pierre Trudeau years. Fourteen federal deficits in 17 years eventually led to a national debt of $572-billion and annual interest payments of almost $40-billion in today's dollars (or stated in 1984 dollars, $250.5-billion debt and $21-billion in interest costs).By the time the Jean Chretien Liberal party was in power and ready (however reluctantly) to start tackling the national deficit, all then-Finance Minister and future Prime Minister Paul Martin could think to do was slash spending on health care, education and transfers to the provinces -- something the Liberals only recently admitted was a mistake.
In 1984, the Liberals were replaced by the Brian Mulroney Conservatives, who promised a more responsible approach to public finances. But federal spending continued to soar, the annual deficit and national debt continued to rise, and the government resorted largely to increased taxation rather than spending reductions to try to tame the deficit dragon."
The skyrocketing public debt and debt service payments that Manning alludes to were thus only one consequence of the Trudeau-Mulroney deficit spending era.
As the '90s wore on, so did public anxiety about Canada's debt. That anxiety was also felt in financial markets, where there was speculation that Canada could potentially default on its foreign debts. This anxiety, however, was not born in the 1990s. Public concern about Canada's debt had begun to solidly take root in the 1989s:
"According to the pollsters, as early as 1984 there was significant public support for deficit reduction as a policy objective, including major cuts in public spending, but politicians were slow to recognize or respond vigorously to this shift in public attitudes. So the leadership of the deficit-reduction movement began largely outside the formal political arena.As Manning notes, it was only a matter of time before deficit-fighting arrived as the raison d'etre for a federal political party:
Market-oriented think tanks such as the Fraser Institute and the CD Howe Institute provided much of the intellectual capital for the movement, hammering away on the problem's dangers and offering alternatives for alleviating it.
Interest groups such as the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, the Canadian Chambers of Commerce, the Business Council on National Issues (as it was then called) and later the newly formed (1989) Canadian Taxpayers Federation added their voices, energy and resources to generate public and political support for budget balancing by governments at all levels.
Grassroots publications such as Ted Byfield's Western Report and the radio talk shows gave media voice to the movement, and later several national newspapers joined the fray."
"And on the fringes of the political arena, the embryonic Reform Party (with Stephen Harper as its policy chief and fiscal critic) made budget balancing a central plank of its election platform and set out to prove that it was possible to elect candidates to Parliament on the pledge of saving taxpayers' dollars rather than spending more of them."The Reform party contested its first federal election in 1988, the year Canadians bequeathed a second straight majority on then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Although he had inherited a structural deficit from Pierre Trudeau, history remembers (and will continue to remember) Mulroney as one of Canada's biggest deficit spenders.
But appearances could be decieving. Free Trade was the central issue in the 1988 election campaign, with Mulroney supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement, and his opponents opposing it. Mulroney won a majority on the back of the free trade issue. But at their earliest opportunity (which came later in 1988), Albertans sent Deborah Grey, their first Reform MP, to Ottawa. Stephen Harper (who will also be remembered as one oc Canada's biggest deficit spenders) went with her as her Parliamentary Assistant.
At a certain point, legislators couldn't ignore the signs the Canadian people were sending them -- get the debt under control. Now. Or else:
"As the movement for deficit reduction grew in public support, municipal and provincial politicians finally began to take notice. (Federal parties, because of their distance from grassroots voters and taxpayers, are usually the last, not the first, to respond to major shifts in public sentiment.)But, as Manning suggests, the federal government can often be the slowest to respond. It took the Reform Party and scathing criticisms from Andrew Coyne to convince Paul Martin that he needed to get Canada's fiscal house in order.
Though rarely recognized for it, the first provincial government to commit itself seriously to the goal of budget balancing was the Conservative government of Gary Filmon in Manitoba. At the time (1988), the province was running a $500-million deficit on total revenues of about $4-billion and it took seven years to reduce the deficit to zero. Manitoba was also among the first to pass budget-balancing laws making it illegal to run deficits except in specifically defined emergency situations.
Next it was Alberta, where Ralph Klein made a similar commitment in 1993, eliminating that province's $3.5-billion deficit in two short years while at the same time decreasing revenues as a percentage of gross domestic product.
And then in Ontario, where the annual deficit was in excess of $10-billion, the Mike Harris government, elected in 1995, reduced it to zero in four years."
As Manning notes, the Reform party is still remembered as the only party in the 1993 election to present a credible plan for reducing the federal deficit:
"Meanwhile, in the federal arena, where the deficit was approaching $40-billion a year, the 1993 election saw the demise of the Mulroney Conservatives and the election of the Jean Chrétien government. But that election also resulted in the election of 52 Reformers committed to reducing the federal deficit to zero in three years. Eventually, the Liberals, though philosophically inclined to ever-increasing public spending, felt the political pressure to move in the opposite direction, and by 1998 the budget was finally balanced."This was not nearly so simple for Paul Martin as some would have suggested it was.
The Chretien government, at the time, was also conducting a social services review under Lloyd Axworthy. It took considerable time and effort for Martin to out-maneuver Axworthy in order to impress the importance of his agenda upon Chretien.
Various political tensions -- both inter- and intra-party -- led to the exacerbation of Canada's deficit and hampered the best-intentioned efforts to get it back under control.
Manning seems to suggest that these kinds of tensions are characteristic of a political environment in which there is no real consensus on the matter, and what is needed to ensure Canada can efficiently shed its deficit once the recession is over is a policy similar to Reform's "zero in three" policy:
"The most disturbing aspect of this story is that it took 14 years (1984 to 1998), and an enormous effort at great expense by tens of thousands of people outside the formal political arena, before the federal government could be persuaded to take the self-evidently necessary actions required to balance its books.If Canada's political leaders establish a deficit-busting concession now, as opposed to waiting until Canada faces the threat of a complete fiscal collapse, Canada will be able to navigate itself out of the recession fairly quickly -- and perhaps even without an additional five years of deficit spending.
Given this history, what will it take to tame the current deficit, the one being incurred in the name of economic stimulation? Political leadership, more likely to come from conservatives than liberals or social democrats, would certainly help. But no doubt another major effort outside the formal political arena – by think tanks, interest groups and media committed to fiscal responsibility – will be needed to create the public pressure required before politicians will act.
That effort would be greatly aided if someone – perhaps one of the think tanks or a respected academic institution – were to provide a definitive history of the last deficit-reduction movement. Most of us involved in that exercise have only partial knowledge of who did what, of what worked and what didn't, and of how the whole process might have been expedited. A road map to deficit elimination, based on a comprehensive analysis of past experience, will be extremely helpful to the deficit-fighters of the future. Hopefully, this time it will not take 14 years to get the job done."
From the archives:
August 5, 2009 - "Navigating Canada's Way Out of Recession (And Beyond)"
Monday, September 07, 2009
And Only 16 Years Too Late
Liberals admit transfer cuts were a mistake
For those Canadians wondering how, precisely, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff plans to eliminate the deficit without raising taxes, Canadians recently got an idea of how he doesn't plan to do it.
"We will absolutely not reduce transfer payments to the provinces," announced John McCallum, the Liberal party's Finance Critic. "It's true that this is something we have done in the past — but we have learned from our mistakes."
Canadians have been waiting a long time to hear the Liberal party admit that their cuts to provincial transfers were a mistake.
McCallum went on to claim that the Conservative government has blemishes of its own as it pertains to provincial transfers -- that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government cut billions of dollars in transfers meant to finance a day care program, and cultural funding and general funds for aboriginals.
Some of this money, McCallum reportedly noted, would have gone to provincial infrastructure. Apparently, despite the fact that it was intended to be spent on financing a day care program and on aboriginals.
But then again, as an editorial in the Halifax Chronicle Herald notes, the Liberal party has had a long and not-so-proud history of diverting funds toward ends they weren't intended for.
Some of this even casts doubt on Michael Ignatieff's claim that the Liberals conquered the Mulroney-era deficit (which originated in the Trudeau era) without raising taxes.
As the Herald notes, then-Finance Minister Paul Martin raised government revenues by closing taxation loopholes worth $800 million. While that certainly wasn't an explicit tax increase, the additional billion levied against Canadian corporations the following year certainly was.
Fortunately for Martin and Ignatieff, few people shed crocodile tears for corporations when they're taxed.
Martin also repeatedly raided Employment Insurance funds to general revenue. The Liberals would later perform this act unlawfully. In effect, Paul Martin transformed EI premiums into a proxy tax.
John McCallum's pledge not to slash federal transfers again may have come in the wake of realizations that doing so would effectively be political suicide in the province of Quebec.
"It's clear that there's one thing the government of Canada cannot do: that's to touch federal transfers," said Quebec's Finance Minister, Raymond Bachand. "We recently heard [Prime Minister Stephen] Harper say he wouldn't touch federal transfers to rebalance the budget in Canada. ...I'm certainly expecting the Liberal Party of Canada to make the same guarantee."
Of course, if the Liberal party did break their pledge not to cut provincial transfers, it wouldn't be the first time they broke such a promise. In 1993 the Liberal party promised to abolish the GST, then promptly went back on their promise.
But that's beside the point. Apparently, Canadians can rest assured that the Liberal party learns from its mistakes -- it just takes 16 years for them to admit to them.
For those Canadians wondering how, precisely, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff plans to eliminate the deficit without raising taxes, Canadians recently got an idea of how he doesn't plan to do it.
"We will absolutely not reduce transfer payments to the provinces," announced John McCallum, the Liberal party's Finance Critic. "It's true that this is something we have done in the past — but we have learned from our mistakes."Canadians have been waiting a long time to hear the Liberal party admit that their cuts to provincial transfers were a mistake.
McCallum went on to claim that the Conservative government has blemishes of its own as it pertains to provincial transfers -- that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government cut billions of dollars in transfers meant to finance a day care program, and cultural funding and general funds for aboriginals.
Some of this money, McCallum reportedly noted, would have gone to provincial infrastructure. Apparently, despite the fact that it was intended to be spent on financing a day care program and on aboriginals.
But then again, as an editorial in the Halifax Chronicle Herald notes, the Liberal party has had a long and not-so-proud history of diverting funds toward ends they weren't intended for.
Some of this even casts doubt on Michael Ignatieff's claim that the Liberals conquered the Mulroney-era deficit (which originated in the Trudeau era) without raising taxes.
As the Herald notes, then-Finance Minister Paul Martin raised government revenues by closing taxation loopholes worth $800 million. While that certainly wasn't an explicit tax increase, the additional billion levied against Canadian corporations the following year certainly was.
Fortunately for Martin and Ignatieff, few people shed crocodile tears for corporations when they're taxed.
Martin also repeatedly raided Employment Insurance funds to general revenue. The Liberals would later perform this act unlawfully. In effect, Paul Martin transformed EI premiums into a proxy tax.
John McCallum's pledge not to slash federal transfers again may have come in the wake of realizations that doing so would effectively be political suicide in the province of Quebec.
"It's clear that there's one thing the government of Canada cannot do: that's to touch federal transfers," said Quebec's Finance Minister, Raymond Bachand. "We recently heard [Prime Minister Stephen] Harper say he wouldn't touch federal transfers to rebalance the budget in Canada. ...I'm certainly expecting the Liberal Party of Canada to make the same guarantee."
Of course, if the Liberal party did break their pledge not to cut provincial transfers, it wouldn't be the first time they broke such a promise. In 1993 the Liberal party promised to abolish the GST, then promptly went back on their promise.
But that's beside the point. Apparently, Canadians can rest assured that the Liberal party learns from its mistakes -- it just takes 16 years for them to admit to them.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
It's the Regime, Dalton
Regime change overdue in Ontario
If Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty were beginning to look an awful lot like former Prime Minister Paul Martin, it isn't simply because each is at the head of a seemingly well-entrenched Liberal government.
When it comes to the undeniable ability of each man's government to rack up considerable political standard, one could easily be forgiven for having trouble telling the two apart.
The emerging story of the Dalton McGuinty government appears to be rather similar to the story of the fall of the Paul Martin government. Like the latter, the former is unlikely to have an entirely happy ending.
Meanwhile, if Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak is beginning to look an awful lot like former Opposition Leader Stephen Harper (who, it becomes more and more apparent month by month, was actually a very different entity than Prime Minister Stephen Harper), it isn't simply because each has been offered a delectable meal of political scandal by the governments they oppose. It isn't only because each man clearly intends to feast.
Hudak, as some may recall, has been described by some as a potential conservative saviour. Harper came to the leadership of the Conservative party amidst similar sentiments.
Each man, however, seems to be encountering a government entrenched within a political regime that has become prone to scandal. Accordingly, the challenge each man faces -- one that Harper has begun to meet, and that Hudak must yet face -- is nothing less than changing the institutional political culture of their respective (in Harper's case) and prospective (in Hudak's case) state.
In It's the Regime, Stupid! Barry Cooper theorizes that the political regime of any country -- which he defines as the common notions of who is entitled to govern, to what ends, and by what means -- tends to centre around the economic centre of any particular state.
Cooper's argument, as it pertains to the federal government, is that the economic power of the west has drawn Canada's political regime into the influence of western values.
In the book, he surmises that the ultimate significance of Stephen Harper's tenure of Prime Minister is his slow diversion of Canadian governance from the politics of public virtue and toward more pragmatic ends and means.
In Cooper's account, this was as much out of necessity as out of any yearning by Canadians for a different style of governance. He notes that the sponsorship scandal represented the nadir of the politics of public virtue -- as he argues was actually ironically introduced to Canadian government by John Diefenbaker.
Cooper muses that the sponsorship scandal represented in utmost clarity the extent to which the politics of self service had dribbled into the politics of public virtue. Among the other sponsorship scandal-related episodes he focuses on is a particularly telling episode in which a high-ranking public servant -- an employee of the state -- attempted to withhold the minutes of a cabinet meeting from the Gomery Commission in which those present had suggested that strengthening the Liberal party in Quebec should be a primary goal of the federal government in its fight against Quebec separatism.
The infection of the politics of public virtue by the politics of self service had allowed the government of the day to dress up their petty partisan interests as the interests of the state itself.
Cooper further surmises that this infection -- which he suggests is nearly inevitable -- allows partisan-minded civil servants to come to view themselves as entitled to raid the state for their own benefit. They begin to view themselves as entitled to their entitlements.
This "culture of entitlement", Cooper argues, is very much the political culture of the politics of self service.
Those who paid attention to the events of 2004-2006 in Canadian politics are well aware of what transpired during that period of time. Rumblings about the corrupt nature of the sponsorship program first began in 2000, when it was first discovered that Alfonso Gagliano had been awarding sponsorship contracts to companies that subcontracted printing to his son's company. It was a tiny -- and seemingly trivial -- taste of things to come.
In 2002, the ugly truth slowly began to emerge. By 2004, Canadians had a disturbing picture of what was transpiring within that program. An election fought in that year returned Paul Martin's Liberal government not with the overwhelming majority Martin had expected to win, but a minority government.
By 2005, Justice John Gomery finally decided that Canadians were entitled to the full picture, and lifted the media blackout on his Commission's proceedings. Canadians finally got the full picture, and it was decidedly not a pretty one.
The sponsorship scandal should have been destructive enough to Martin's Liberal government. But it took an RCMP investigation into leaks regarding Income Trust taxation policy to turn the tide.
Many particularly partisan Liberals continue to complain that the RCMP was blatantly interfering in the election taking place at that time. But they forget that Martin's Finance Minister, Ralph Goodale, declined to investigate the leaks in question, and thus made the RCMP's involvement necessary.
If one thing can be said about Dalton McGuinty, he is doing a much better job of addressing the political sins of his government.
McGuinty's Finance Minister Dwight Duncan recently fired Ontario Lottery Gaming Corporation CEO Kelly McDougald amidst the resignations of its entire board of directors. At issue were findings that OLGC board members had used OLG expense accounts for their own personal benefit, including for golf club fees and bar tabs.
This is only the most recent scandal involving the OLGC. In past concerns have been voiced about how the OLGC investigates fraudulent winnings, and the reported use of subliminal messaging in slot machines in Provincially-operated Casinos.
The Ontario government had previously fired Duncan Brown for the clearly inept discharge of his duties.
However, it now seems that the problems at the OLGC have certainly gone deeper than its CEO, and possibly even deeper than its Board of Directors.
Like Martin, McGuinty's latest troubles come hot on the heels of the eHealth scandal, one that involved some of McGuinty's aides. At the centre of the scandal was hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts issued untendered and without sufficient documentation.
Although McGuinty promptly issued new directives for the management of public contracts, his government shut down an independent investigation of the matter.
When one looks into the past troubles with the OLGC, however, one finds the same individual as at the heart of the eHealth Scandal: then-Minister responsible for the OLGC and current Health Minister David Caplan.
The political regime in Ontario has become so bereft of accountability that a Minister who has proven to be utterly inept at overseeing the OLGC not only did not face any consequences for that failure, but actually received a considerable promotion.
This is the challenge that Tim Hudak must face. If scandals continue to emerge, and continue to be addressed as the eHealth scandal has, defeating Dalton McGunity in the next provincial election will not be Hudak's greatest challenge.
Hudak's greatest challenge will be in turning Ontario away from the evidently polluted politics of public virtue that has led to these scandals, and back toward Cooper's described politics of pragmatic ends and means.
Tim Hudak's challenge will be to change the Ontarian regime. With no newly emerging centre of the Ontarian economy, Hudak's work will be cut out for him. Then again, Dalton McGuinty may have enough bullets left in his gun to shoot himself in the foot until his government bleeds to death.
If Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty were beginning to look an awful lot like former Prime Minister Paul Martin, it isn't simply because each is at the head of a seemingly well-entrenched Liberal government.
When it comes to the undeniable ability of each man's government to rack up considerable political standard, one could easily be forgiven for having trouble telling the two apart.
The emerging story of the Dalton McGuinty government appears to be rather similar to the story of the fall of the Paul Martin government. Like the latter, the former is unlikely to have an entirely happy ending.
Meanwhile, if Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak is beginning to look an awful lot like former Opposition Leader Stephen Harper (who, it becomes more and more apparent month by month, was actually a very different entity than Prime Minister Stephen Harper), it isn't simply because each has been offered a delectable meal of political scandal by the governments they oppose. It isn't only because each man clearly intends to feast.
Hudak, as some may recall, has been described by some as a potential conservative saviour. Harper came to the leadership of the Conservative party amidst similar sentiments.
Each man, however, seems to be encountering a government entrenched within a political regime that has become prone to scandal. Accordingly, the challenge each man faces -- one that Harper has begun to meet, and that Hudak must yet face -- is nothing less than changing the institutional political culture of their respective (in Harper's case) and prospective (in Hudak's case) state.
In It's the Regime, Stupid! Barry Cooper theorizes that the political regime of any country -- which he defines as the common notions of who is entitled to govern, to what ends, and by what means -- tends to centre around the economic centre of any particular state.
Cooper's argument, as it pertains to the federal government, is that the economic power of the west has drawn Canada's political regime into the influence of western values.
In the book, he surmises that the ultimate significance of Stephen Harper's tenure of Prime Minister is his slow diversion of Canadian governance from the politics of public virtue and toward more pragmatic ends and means.
In Cooper's account, this was as much out of necessity as out of any yearning by Canadians for a different style of governance. He notes that the sponsorship scandal represented the nadir of the politics of public virtue -- as he argues was actually ironically introduced to Canadian government by John Diefenbaker.
Cooper muses that the sponsorship scandal represented in utmost clarity the extent to which the politics of self service had dribbled into the politics of public virtue. Among the other sponsorship scandal-related episodes he focuses on is a particularly telling episode in which a high-ranking public servant -- an employee of the state -- attempted to withhold the minutes of a cabinet meeting from the Gomery Commission in which those present had suggested that strengthening the Liberal party in Quebec should be a primary goal of the federal government in its fight against Quebec separatism.
The infection of the politics of public virtue by the politics of self service had allowed the government of the day to dress up their petty partisan interests as the interests of the state itself.
Cooper further surmises that this infection -- which he suggests is nearly inevitable -- allows partisan-minded civil servants to come to view themselves as entitled to raid the state for their own benefit. They begin to view themselves as entitled to their entitlements.
This "culture of entitlement", Cooper argues, is very much the political culture of the politics of self service.
Those who paid attention to the events of 2004-2006 in Canadian politics are well aware of what transpired during that period of time. Rumblings about the corrupt nature of the sponsorship program first began in 2000, when it was first discovered that Alfonso Gagliano had been awarding sponsorship contracts to companies that subcontracted printing to his son's company. It was a tiny -- and seemingly trivial -- taste of things to come.
In 2002, the ugly truth slowly began to emerge. By 2004, Canadians had a disturbing picture of what was transpiring within that program. An election fought in that year returned Paul Martin's Liberal government not with the overwhelming majority Martin had expected to win, but a minority government.
By 2005, Justice John Gomery finally decided that Canadians were entitled to the full picture, and lifted the media blackout on his Commission's proceedings. Canadians finally got the full picture, and it was decidedly not a pretty one.
The sponsorship scandal should have been destructive enough to Martin's Liberal government. But it took an RCMP investigation into leaks regarding Income Trust taxation policy to turn the tide.
Many particularly partisan Liberals continue to complain that the RCMP was blatantly interfering in the election taking place at that time. But they forget that Martin's Finance Minister, Ralph Goodale, declined to investigate the leaks in question, and thus made the RCMP's involvement necessary.
If one thing can be said about Dalton McGuinty, he is doing a much better job of addressing the political sins of his government.
McGuinty's Finance Minister Dwight Duncan recently fired Ontario Lottery Gaming Corporation CEO Kelly McDougald amidst the resignations of its entire board of directors. At issue were findings that OLGC board members had used OLG expense accounts for their own personal benefit, including for golf club fees and bar tabs.
This is only the most recent scandal involving the OLGC. In past concerns have been voiced about how the OLGC investigates fraudulent winnings, and the reported use of subliminal messaging in slot machines in Provincially-operated Casinos.
The Ontario government had previously fired Duncan Brown for the clearly inept discharge of his duties.
However, it now seems that the problems at the OLGC have certainly gone deeper than its CEO, and possibly even deeper than its Board of Directors.
Like Martin, McGuinty's latest troubles come hot on the heels of the eHealth scandal, one that involved some of McGuinty's aides. At the centre of the scandal was hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts issued untendered and without sufficient documentation.
Although McGuinty promptly issued new directives for the management of public contracts, his government shut down an independent investigation of the matter.
When one looks into the past troubles with the OLGC, however, one finds the same individual as at the heart of the eHealth Scandal: then-Minister responsible for the OLGC and current Health Minister David Caplan.
The political regime in Ontario has become so bereft of accountability that a Minister who has proven to be utterly inept at overseeing the OLGC not only did not face any consequences for that failure, but actually received a considerable promotion.
This is the challenge that Tim Hudak must face. If scandals continue to emerge, and continue to be addressed as the eHealth scandal has, defeating Dalton McGunity in the next provincial election will not be Hudak's greatest challenge.
Hudak's greatest challenge will be in turning Ontario away from the evidently polluted politics of public virtue that has led to these scandals, and back toward Cooper's described politics of pragmatic ends and means.
Tim Hudak's challenge will be to change the Ontarian regime. With no newly emerging centre of the Ontarian economy, Hudak's work will be cut out for him. Then again, Dalton McGuinty may have enough bullets left in his gun to shoot himself in the foot until his government bleeds to death.
Monday, June 22, 2009
The Whininess of Whiners And Their Enablers
Liberal party unwillingness to accept responsibility for its own defeat reinforced by "experts"
One of the disappointing institutional character traits to emerge out of the Liberal party's christening of itself as "Canada's natural governing party" has been an unwillingness on the party's part to accept responsibility for its own defeats.
Over the past three years, the Liberal party and its supporters have rarely hesitated to blame its last two electoral defeats on something other than itself -- anything other than itself.
They blamed the NDP for competing against them and winning seats that would otherwise be won by Liberals. They blamed the RCMP for announcing an investigation into a leak involving a taxation decision on income trusts. They blamed CTV for airing an interview which revealed Stephane Dion's inability to use the English language functionally.
But an opinion article appearing in the Victoria Times Colonist written by Carleton University's Andrew Cohen reveals a disturbing tendency by partisan "experts" to peddle these excuses under the guise of their expertise.
Cohen's article is a feverish mish-mash of what-ifs, ands, or buts, suggesting that Dion may have won the election if not for that dastardly Mike Duffy, just as Paul Martin may have won the 2005/06 campaign if not for the dastardly RCMP:
Cohen seems to overlook the fact that Paul Martin and Ralph Goodale had declined to launch an inquiry into the allegations. When one considers that criminal charges were laid in the affair, Goodale and Martin's decision was grossly irresponsible. It took the NDP's Finance Critic, Judy Wasylycia-Leis, writing a letter of complaint to the RCMP to get the investigation launched.
If Goodale and Martin had done the responsible thing and launched a probe before the election, the RCMP investigation would have likely already been underway by the time the election began.
In other words, even if the RCMP investigation was the Liberal party's undoing, it was their own doing in the first place.
This is before one even mentions the fact that the Liberal party was already extremely vulnerable to charges of corruption after the ground-shaking revelations of the Gomery Inquiry into the Sponsorship Scandal. They knew it well enough to threaten then-Opposition Leader Stephen Harper with a lawsuit for so much as speaking about the implications of the scandal for the Liberal party.
Harper wisely told the Liberal party to stuff a sock in it.
Likewise, Cohen seems to overlook the fact that, as it pertains to Dion's language issues, Canadians -- citizens of an officially bilingual country, and Cohen may want to remember that -- had a right to know. When the matter was discussed a few days later on Mike Duffy Live, the story was Dion's language issues.
Cohen, himself a Journalism professor, would know full well that if the false starts were the story, the rest of the interview is not part of that story and would be discussed later, if at all.
Cohen goes on to lob accusations that Duffy received his Senate seat as a reward for the allegedly-scandalous Dion segment -- Green party Elizabeth May, herself no stranger to self-indulgent whining, has also suggested that Duffy received his seat as a reward for a media hit job on her. He tries to bolster his case by noting that Duffy has been particularly partisan since being appointed, attending various party fundraisers, and noting that Pamela Wallin hasn't done the same.
Yet Cohen would also be overlooking the fact that Duffy realistically showed no such fervour for partisanship during his career as a journalist, although he was often accused of partisanship by each side of Canada's partisan divide.
It isn't at all as if Mike Duffy ever wrote an op/ed column making excuses for the Conservative party's electoral defeats -- which is more than can be said for certain journalism professors.
One of the disappointing institutional character traits to emerge out of the Liberal party's christening of itself as "Canada's natural governing party" has been an unwillingness on the party's part to accept responsibility for its own defeats.
Over the past three years, the Liberal party and its supporters have rarely hesitated to blame its last two electoral defeats on something other than itself -- anything other than itself.
They blamed the NDP for competing against them and winning seats that would otherwise be won by Liberals. They blamed the RCMP for announcing an investigation into a leak involving a taxation decision on income trusts. They blamed CTV for airing an interview which revealed Stephane Dion's inability to use the English language functionally.
But an opinion article appearing in the Victoria Times Colonist written by Carleton University's Andrew Cohen reveals a disturbing tendency by partisan "experts" to peddle these excuses under the guise of their expertise.
Cohen's article is a feverish mish-mash of what-ifs, ands, or buts, suggesting that Dion may have won the election if not for that dastardly Mike Duffy, just as Paul Martin may have won the 2005/06 campaign if not for the dastardly RCMP:
"The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council conducted a review. The council is a self-regulatory body comprising more than 720 Canadian radio and television stations. It administers the industry's broadcast code of conduct.The fact that millions of other Canadians understood Steve Murphy's question to Dion perfectly well seems to be lost on Cohen. As does the fact that if one of the political leaders running to be Canada's Prime Minister is severely hampered in his ability to use of one Canada's official languages, the public has the right to know about this.
Its two reports, which were released recently and largely ignored by the media, criticized CTV for breaching the code, a finding CTV strenuously rejected. That was revealing.
But what's more revealing is what this little saga tells us about how things are done in this country. It's about politics, ethics and maybe ambition, too.
On CTV Atlantic, the council concluded that Murphy asked a question that was 'confusing, and not only to a person whose first language is other than English.' It said that Murphy mixed tenses (past and present) and moods (subjunctive and indicative). In other words, Dion was justifiably puzzled.
In light of the badly worded question, which Murphy could have clarified, the panel called the restarts "a courtesy" to Dion. It also said repeating questions isn't unusual in broadcasting and particularly justified here, given Murphy's convoluted question.
Moreover, because Murphy never refused Dion's requests to restart the interview, Dion had reason to believe that the embarrassing footage would not be used.
On Duffy's broadcast, the council's judgment was harsher. It called his performance unfair and unbalanced. It said that Duffy misrepresented the views of one of his guests, Liberal MP Geoff Regan. In the end, Duffy breached the industry's code of ethics.
Is all this a grammarian's revenge, Miss Thistlebottom in full flight? A silly parsing of sentences? A regulator's punctilious dressing down on decorum? Does it really matter how Dion was treated by CTV, particularly by Mike Duffy?
Actually, yes, particularly in a country where the RCMP might well have determined the outcome of the 2006 election, when it announced an investigation, in mid-campaign, into allegations of irregularities on the part of finance minister Ralph Goodale. It caused a sensation. The Liberals lost that election; no charges materialized.
Last October, polls suggested the Liberal party's ascent stalled after the interview. While we cannot say if Dion's momentum would have brought his party victory, it isn't impossible.
In other words, CTV may have thrown the election to the Conservatives. In running the embarrassing outtakes, it reinforced an image of Dion as incomprehensible and indecisive."
Cohen seems to overlook the fact that Paul Martin and Ralph Goodale had declined to launch an inquiry into the allegations. When one considers that criminal charges were laid in the affair, Goodale and Martin's decision was grossly irresponsible. It took the NDP's Finance Critic, Judy Wasylycia-Leis, writing a letter of complaint to the RCMP to get the investigation launched.
If Goodale and Martin had done the responsible thing and launched a probe before the election, the RCMP investigation would have likely already been underway by the time the election began.
In other words, even if the RCMP investigation was the Liberal party's undoing, it was their own doing in the first place.
This is before one even mentions the fact that the Liberal party was already extremely vulnerable to charges of corruption after the ground-shaking revelations of the Gomery Inquiry into the Sponsorship Scandal. They knew it well enough to threaten then-Opposition Leader Stephen Harper with a lawsuit for so much as speaking about the implications of the scandal for the Liberal party.
Harper wisely told the Liberal party to stuff a sock in it.
Likewise, Cohen seems to overlook the fact that, as it pertains to Dion's language issues, Canadians -- citizens of an officially bilingual country, and Cohen may want to remember that -- had a right to know. When the matter was discussed a few days later on Mike Duffy Live, the story was Dion's language issues.
Cohen, himself a Journalism professor, would know full well that if the false starts were the story, the rest of the interview is not part of that story and would be discussed later, if at all.
Cohen goes on to lob accusations that Duffy received his Senate seat as a reward for the allegedly-scandalous Dion segment -- Green party Elizabeth May, herself no stranger to self-indulgent whining, has also suggested that Duffy received his seat as a reward for a media hit job on her. He tries to bolster his case by noting that Duffy has been particularly partisan since being appointed, attending various party fundraisers, and noting that Pamela Wallin hasn't done the same.
Yet Cohen would also be overlooking the fact that Duffy realistically showed no such fervour for partisanship during his career as a journalist, although he was often accused of partisanship by each side of Canada's partisan divide.
It isn't at all as if Mike Duffy ever wrote an op/ed column making excuses for the Conservative party's electoral defeats -- which is more than can be said for certain journalism professors.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Hollow Triumphalism Interrupted
The numbers don't support the portrayal of the Tories as economic goats
With Canada on the brink of at least two years of budget deficits, opponents of the governing Conservative party couldn't be happier.
The message coming from most of Canada's opposition is very simple: oh, if only the Liberals were still in power. Then we wouldn't be facing down a deficit.
The theorem is basically divided into two parts: through spending increases and tax cuts, the Conservatives spent Canadians right down to the brink of a deficit. Even if the hit to government revenues were too big, the maintained Liberal surpluses would at least render the deficits smaller, and more managable.
But those actually paying attention to the numbers know this isn't true.
As done previously here at the Nexus, National Post Full Comment editor Kelly McParland compares the current budget numbers to those forecasted by the Liberal party, and reaches a not-so-shocking conclusion: they aren't that different.
First, there's the matter of the "wasted surplus". As it turns out, then-Finance Minister Ralph Goodale was planning a program of tax cuts and increased spending worth a total of $39 billion to implement if the Liberal party managed to win the 2006 federal election.
The Liberal party had forecasted annual surpluses of $1.6 billion to $3.4 billion.
According to the fiscal plans made by the Liberal party under economic models that forecasted continuing surpluses, the deficit under the Liberals would have been at most $2 billion smaller. This is also before the addition of any additional costs due to the national daycare program the Liberals had planned to put in place.
The possibility is very real that this surplus would have been larger under the Liberal party. The possibility is also much more likely that Canada would have sustained a structural deficit under the Liberal party.
This shouldn't be terribly shocking. The Liberal and Conservative parties used the same economic projections to plan their spending. In terms of raw numbers, Ralph Goodale and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty made the same plans.
As such, an important question looms: do both the Liberal and Conservative parties have to "wear" the deficit considering the similarity of their spending plans? Or is there something else to blame for this deficit?
This is a false choice. The answer is a little bit of both.
No matter what they may insist now, few people, if any, predicted the sheer scale of the economic crisis that has led to this deficit. Considering that the government has jumped from budgeting a $2 billion surplus to budgeting a $36 billion deficit (with a $30 billion deficit next year), external influences are responsible for the majority of the surplus.
The Conservatives, however, very much do have to answer for their share of the deficit. They ran on the premise of being more fiscally responsible than the Liberal party, and they delivered something very different. Then again, the Liberal party also campaigned on being more fiscally responsible than their competitors, and their spending plans also speak for themselves.
Given the current levels of spending by the Canadian government, there should be little question that this deficit was inevitable regardless of whomever was in power. This economic crisis was one born in a foreign country, albeit one with ever-closer economic ties with Canada.
It's becoming increasingly difficult to deny that Canada has become much more vulnerable to economic crises born in countries that irresponsibly under-regulate their economies -- in particular, their financial markets. Then again, considering that the United States is Canada's number one trading partner, perhaps the impact would have been just as inevitable in NAFTA's absence.
This is a matter for much more experienced economists to debate.
The bigger picture is that of the comparison between Canada's current economic and fiscal situation and the one the country would be in if the Liberal party was in power. The pictures are scarcely any different.
Not that those eager to pin this matter squarely on the Conservative party are in any rush to admit this. Which only underscores the opportunism and hollow triumphalism of the argument that the Conservatives, and the Conservatives alone, are to blame for the deficit.
Other bloggers writing on this topic:
The Phantom Observer - "We're All Guilty of 'Budget Bias'"
With Canada on the brink of at least two years of budget deficits, opponents of the governing Conservative party couldn't be happier.
The message coming from most of Canada's opposition is very simple: oh, if only the Liberals were still in power. Then we wouldn't be facing down a deficit.
The theorem is basically divided into two parts: through spending increases and tax cuts, the Conservatives spent Canadians right down to the brink of a deficit. Even if the hit to government revenues were too big, the maintained Liberal surpluses would at least render the deficits smaller, and more managable.
But those actually paying attention to the numbers know this isn't true.
As done previously here at the Nexus, National Post Full Comment editor Kelly McParland compares the current budget numbers to those forecasted by the Liberal party, and reaches a not-so-shocking conclusion: they aren't that different.
First, there's the matter of the "wasted surplus". As it turns out, then-Finance Minister Ralph Goodale was planning a program of tax cuts and increased spending worth a total of $39 billion to implement if the Liberal party managed to win the 2006 federal election.
The Liberal party had forecasted annual surpluses of $1.6 billion to $3.4 billion.
According to the fiscal plans made by the Liberal party under economic models that forecasted continuing surpluses, the deficit under the Liberals would have been at most $2 billion smaller. This is also before the addition of any additional costs due to the national daycare program the Liberals had planned to put in place.
The possibility is very real that this surplus would have been larger under the Liberal party. The possibility is also much more likely that Canada would have sustained a structural deficit under the Liberal party.
This shouldn't be terribly shocking. The Liberal and Conservative parties used the same economic projections to plan their spending. In terms of raw numbers, Ralph Goodale and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty made the same plans.
As such, an important question looms: do both the Liberal and Conservative parties have to "wear" the deficit considering the similarity of their spending plans? Or is there something else to blame for this deficit?
This is a false choice. The answer is a little bit of both.
No matter what they may insist now, few people, if any, predicted the sheer scale of the economic crisis that has led to this deficit. Considering that the government has jumped from budgeting a $2 billion surplus to budgeting a $36 billion deficit (with a $30 billion deficit next year), external influences are responsible for the majority of the surplus.
The Conservatives, however, very much do have to answer for their share of the deficit. They ran on the premise of being more fiscally responsible than the Liberal party, and they delivered something very different. Then again, the Liberal party also campaigned on being more fiscally responsible than their competitors, and their spending plans also speak for themselves.
Given the current levels of spending by the Canadian government, there should be little question that this deficit was inevitable regardless of whomever was in power. This economic crisis was one born in a foreign country, albeit one with ever-closer economic ties with Canada.
It's becoming increasingly difficult to deny that Canada has become much more vulnerable to economic crises born in countries that irresponsibly under-regulate their economies -- in particular, their financial markets. Then again, considering that the United States is Canada's number one trading partner, perhaps the impact would have been just as inevitable in NAFTA's absence.
This is a matter for much more experienced economists to debate.
The bigger picture is that of the comparison between Canada's current economic and fiscal situation and the one the country would be in if the Liberal party was in power. The pictures are scarcely any different.
Not that those eager to pin this matter squarely on the Conservative party are in any rush to admit this. Which only underscores the opportunism and hollow triumphalism of the argument that the Conservatives, and the Conservatives alone, are to blame for the deficit.
Other bloggers writing on this topic:
The Phantom Observer - "We're All Guilty of 'Budget Bias'"
Saturday, November 01, 2008
Saturday, October 04, 2008
Paul Martin - King of Wishful Thinking
Could Paul Martin be considering a comeback?
When considering recent comments made by former Prime Minister Paul Martin in Calgary, three possibilities come to mind.
Either he's considering a comeback attempt as Liberal leader, he really believes the Liberals can still turn this election around, or he's hopelessly deluded.
"Let me simply say, on October 14, we will elect a Liberal government," Martin pronounced.
Martin made the comments during a speech in which he took current Prime Minister Stephen Harper -- the man who unseated him from the country's top job -- for task about allegedly not having an economic plan.
"Stephen Harper hasn't come up with a plan. If he's so good, why doesn't he come up with a plan? If he's the prime minister of this country, why is he afraid to deal with the issues?" Martin demanded.
Martin then touted his own (mostly) considerable record as finance minister in Jean Chretien's Liberal government.
"When we took office in 1993, the Conservatives left us with a $43 billion deficit. Four years later, that deficit was gone, and when we left office 2.5 years ago, there was a $12 billion surplus and no other country in the world can match that record," Martin crowed.
Of course he isn't mentioning that Pierre Trudeau's Liberal government left a considerable deficit for Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative government, nor is he mentioning that his party accomplished this by cutting billions of dollars from health care.
If one were to ask Martin himself he would insist that he isn't thinking about attempting a political comeback. In fact, he isn't even running for reelection.
"I've been there, done that. Time to go on to other things and I've been very clear that the aboriginal issues in Canada and Africa are where I'm going to be putting my time," Martin insists.
Yet Paul Martin Jr, the man who so badly wanted to accomplish what his father, Paul Martin Sr, never could simply cannot be expected to walk away from politics so easily. With his goal of winning a majority government (prior to the 2004 election Martin speculated that he thought he could win the biggest majority in Canadian history) still unaccomplished and his successor, Stephane Dion, set to be turfed out of the Liberal leadership following an impending electoral defeat, it isn't hard to imagine that succeeding his own successor isn't too far from Martin's mind.
Of course, if Martin had any such designs, he couldn't be seen predicting anything but a Liberal victory on October 14.
Of course, if Martin imagines that his political career hasn't been hopelessly damaged by the sponsorship scandal and by all the intra-party animosity that has arisen as a result of his fingering of Jean Chretien as the party's fall guy, then he is hopelessly deluded.
Martin likely knows these things as well as anyone. He certainly must know that Calgary is the last place to look for a foothold to win a Liberal victory.
But if Paul Martin doesn't, then he is the king of wishful thinking.
When considering recent comments made by former Prime Minister Paul Martin in Calgary, three possibilities come to mind.
Either he's considering a comeback attempt as Liberal leader, he really believes the Liberals can still turn this election around, or he's hopelessly deluded.
"Let me simply say, on October 14, we will elect a Liberal government," Martin pronounced.Martin made the comments during a speech in which he took current Prime Minister Stephen Harper -- the man who unseated him from the country's top job -- for task about allegedly not having an economic plan.
"Stephen Harper hasn't come up with a plan. If he's so good, why doesn't he come up with a plan? If he's the prime minister of this country, why is he afraid to deal with the issues?" Martin demanded.
Martin then touted his own (mostly) considerable record as finance minister in Jean Chretien's Liberal government.
"When we took office in 1993, the Conservatives left us with a $43 billion deficit. Four years later, that deficit was gone, and when we left office 2.5 years ago, there was a $12 billion surplus and no other country in the world can match that record," Martin crowed.
Of course he isn't mentioning that Pierre Trudeau's Liberal government left a considerable deficit for Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative government, nor is he mentioning that his party accomplished this by cutting billions of dollars from health care.
If one were to ask Martin himself he would insist that he isn't thinking about attempting a political comeback. In fact, he isn't even running for reelection.
"I've been there, done that. Time to go on to other things and I've been very clear that the aboriginal issues in Canada and Africa are where I'm going to be putting my time," Martin insists.
Yet Paul Martin Jr, the man who so badly wanted to accomplish what his father, Paul Martin Sr, never could simply cannot be expected to walk away from politics so easily. With his goal of winning a majority government (prior to the 2004 election Martin speculated that he thought he could win the biggest majority in Canadian history) still unaccomplished and his successor, Stephane Dion, set to be turfed out of the Liberal leadership following an impending electoral defeat, it isn't hard to imagine that succeeding his own successor isn't too far from Martin's mind.
Of course, if Martin had any such designs, he couldn't be seen predicting anything but a Liberal victory on October 14.
Of course, if Martin imagines that his political career hasn't been hopelessly damaged by the sponsorship scandal and by all the intra-party animosity that has arisen as a result of his fingering of Jean Chretien as the party's fall guy, then he is hopelessly deluded.
Martin likely knows these things as well as anyone. He certainly must know that Calgary is the last place to look for a foothold to win a Liberal victory.
But if Paul Martin doesn't, then he is the king of wishful thinking.
Thursday, October 02, 2008
The Toronto Star Plays the Blame Game
Liberals have no one to blame but themselves, says Star
Ever since their defeat in the 2005/06 federal election, the Liberals have spent a good deal of their time blaming the NDP for their defeat at the hands of now-Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
"The Stephen Harper government is the House that Jack built," Bob Rae recently remarked, following the recent Liberal tradition of blaming Jack Layton for the Liberals' defeat.
It was Layton, they reason, that helped the Conservatives defeat Paul Martin's Liberal government.
But as the Star asserts, it really is the Liberals themselves who are to blame for their current predicament. Adscam and the ill-fated and ill-conceived Green Shift policy may be the least of their blunders:
But few people realize the extent to which those cuts strained the unity of the Liberal party membership. In the time in which the cuts were made the party was split between three major priorities: Social Service Minister Lloyd Axworthy's social services review and the reform package he wanted to implement, Martin's deficit-fighting agenda, and Jean Chretien's focus on the upcoming 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum.
With little perceived importance of the budget issues to the referendum, and seeking to alleviate pressure being exerted by Preston Manning and the Reform Party, Chretien wound up effectively taking Martin's side in the dispute.
Martin, for his own part, had once believed he could effectively juggle his deficit-fighting agenda with Axworthy's social program reforms until writers such as Andrew Coyne lambasted him in the press.
In the end, Martin's desperation to be a popular leader became his -- and perhaps even his party's -- undoing.
The obvious missing piece of the once-dominant Big Red Machine of the 1990s? Warren Kinsella, who has made his dismay with the current state of the Liberal party known on many different occasions.
He's also holding a grudge for the party's attempts -- under Martin -- to lay the bulk of the blame for the Sponsorship Scandal on Jean Chretien.
To be fair, however, Chretien and Martin shouldn't be made to wear the entire blame for the feud that has diminished the Liberal party and its effectiveness. The Martin/Chretien feud finds its roots in various previous internal conflicts within the party: conflicts between Trudeau and Pearson supporters (although Pearson was welcoming to Trudeau, many of his supporters felt he never should have been allowed into the party, even at the cost of losing the opportunity to recruit Jean Marchand), liberal and conservative wings of the party, Walter Gordon-styled nationalists and Mitchell Sharp-styled neo-liberals.
The very real tensions within the party -- and the failures to resolve them -- derive from many different interrelated conflicts. Many of these conflicts will only continue to intensify as the party attracts dissident conservatives such as David Orchard and as individuals such as Bob Rae continue to rise in prominence within the party.
Tom Axworthy has long been considered the godfather of the left wing of the Liberal party. Any renewal commission acting under Axworthy's direction would inevitably find itself pushed toward left-wing policies (such as, per se, the Green Shift) that would alienate conservative Liberals.
Not only was the necessary renewal of the party never really taken seriously, but it was doomed from the get-go.http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=9149446
Dion believed he was going to be key to Liberal political fortunes from the moment he entered the leadership campaign. As it turns out he has been, but not in the way he imagined.
It's said that its darkest before the dawn.
With the Liberals continuing to sink in the polls, it's becoming obvious that the dawn still has yet to break.
Things will get darker still for the Liberals.
Ever since their defeat in the 2005/06 federal election, the Liberals have spent a good deal of their time blaming the NDP for their defeat at the hands of now-Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
"The Stephen Harper government is the House that Jack built," Bob Rae recently remarked, following the recent Liberal tradition of blaming Jack Layton for the Liberals' defeat.
It was Layton, they reason, that helped the Conservatives defeat Paul Martin's Liberal government.
But as the Star asserts, it really is the Liberals themselves who are to blame for their current predicament. Adscam and the ill-fated and ill-conceived Green Shift policy may be the least of their blunders:
"Paul Martin must assume a good deal of responsibility.Indeed, Martin's budget cuts have made for good ammunition for both the NDP and the Conservative party.
When he was finance minister in the 1990s, he ruined a good part of the Liberal's left-wing legacy by slashing federal social programs, right down to reversing promises made by Jean Chrétien in his 1993 campaign Red Book.
Martin, the leader of the socially conservative wing of the party, pushed the party away from its liberal social agenda roots by cutting spending on initiatives such as affordable housing and health care. These moves made many progressive Liberals wonder why they continued to back the party."
But few people realize the extent to which those cuts strained the unity of the Liberal party membership. In the time in which the cuts were made the party was split between three major priorities: Social Service Minister Lloyd Axworthy's social services review and the reform package he wanted to implement, Martin's deficit-fighting agenda, and Jean Chretien's focus on the upcoming 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum.
With little perceived importance of the budget issues to the referendum, and seeking to alleviate pressure being exerted by Preston Manning and the Reform Party, Chretien wound up effectively taking Martin's side in the dispute.
Martin, for his own part, had once believed he could effectively juggle his deficit-fighting agenda with Axworthy's social program reforms until writers such as Andrew Coyne lambasted him in the press.
In the end, Martin's desperation to be a popular leader became his -- and perhaps even his party's -- undoing.
"The Chrétien-Martin wars took their toll. For years, Martin and his cronies actively worked to discredit Chrétien, even though Chrétien won three majority governments for the party. The feud still bitterly splits the party, including its rank and file."That Chretien-Martin war has also cost the Liberal party the services of some of its best election personnel.
The obvious missing piece of the once-dominant Big Red Machine of the 1990s? Warren Kinsella, who has made his dismay with the current state of the Liberal party known on many different occasions.
He's also holding a grudge for the party's attempts -- under Martin -- to lay the bulk of the blame for the Sponsorship Scandal on Jean Chretien.
To be fair, however, Chretien and Martin shouldn't be made to wear the entire blame for the feud that has diminished the Liberal party and its effectiveness. The Martin/Chretien feud finds its roots in various previous internal conflicts within the party: conflicts between Trudeau and Pearson supporters (although Pearson was welcoming to Trudeau, many of his supporters felt he never should have been allowed into the party, even at the cost of losing the opportunity to recruit Jean Marchand), liberal and conservative wings of the party, Walter Gordon-styled nationalists and Mitchell Sharp-styled neo-liberals.
The very real tensions within the party -- and the failures to resolve them -- derive from many different interrelated conflicts. Many of these conflicts will only continue to intensify as the party attracts dissident conservatives such as David Orchard and as individuals such as Bob Rae continue to rise in prominence within the party.
"The party failed to undergo a desperately needed renewal after being defeated in 2006 by Stephen Harper and the Conservatives.Not only did Axworthy's commission become an afterthought, but it was ill-conceived in the first place.
Martin quit as party leader right after the election, launching a 10-month search for a successor.
Before the race officially started though, the party selected Tom Axworthy, a long-time Liberal policy adviser, to co-chair a Liberal Party Renewal Commission, with two dozen task forces to bring fresh perspectives to "policies and structure," from youth involvement to Canada's role in the world.
But once the leadership race began in earnest, Axworthy's commission was virtually shunted aside and ignored. It published several reports, but few Liberals read them and none of them have had any real impact on the party."
Tom Axworthy has long been considered the godfather of the left wing of the Liberal party. Any renewal commission acting under Axworthy's direction would inevitably find itself pushed toward left-wing policies (such as, per se, the Green Shift) that would alienate conservative Liberals.
Not only was the necessary renewal of the party never really taken seriously, but it was doomed from the get-go.http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=9149446
"The 5,000 delegates at the Liberal leadership convention in December 2006 made a fatal mistake when they elected Dion as party leader over Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae, both of whom have proven more effective campaigners on the election trail. Their strong performances in this election have only further highlighted Dion's weaknesses.Dion clearly failed to grasp the importance of the grassroots to the Liberal party. Instead, he spent a good deal of the time spent reorganizing the party at a fundamental level meeting and greeting Al Gore and striking electoral deals with marginal political figures (read: Elizabeth May).
In addition to his obvious shortcomings as a campaigner, Dion has also failed in his 22 months as leader to rebuild grassroots membership, undertake a major policy review open to all Liberals, get the depleted finances back in shape and prepare for the election."
Dion believed he was going to be key to Liberal political fortunes from the moment he entered the leadership campaign. As it turns out he has been, but not in the way he imagined.
"The ongoing feud between Ignatieff and Rae, while often overly hyped by political pundits, still divides the party internally."Which is perhaps nothing less than what Canadians should have expected. This is also something that is going to get much worse before it gets better. After all, with Dion set to be put out to pasture following a potentially humiliating electoral defeat, the leadership question is only going to intensify over the coming months.
It's said that its darkest before the dawn.
With the Liberals continuing to sink in the polls, it's becoming obvious that the dawn still has yet to break.
Things will get darker still for the Liberals.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Will Martin's Release Finally End the Media Circus?
Or will the government's efforts be rebuked again?
If recent history has taught us anything, it's that Canadians in legal trouble can bail themselves out by attracting a large enough media circus.
Recent history has also shown us that they need not always be honest about their situation, either. Brenda Martin and her supporters politicized her predicament by claiming the government had "abandoned" her and not done enough to help her -- claims that were proven to be false.
Now, the Brenda Martin case has come to a sad conclusion a Mexican court has found her guilty of knowingly accepting fraudulently-obtained funds, despite an alleged lack of evidence (her lawyer, Guillermo Cruz, says as much).
Regardless of whether or not Martin is guilty of her alleged crime -- and given the equally-sad state of Mexican "justice", there's an excellent chance she is innocent, and merely being hung out to dry so the system can save face -- there is little question that she and the terminally dishonest Liberal party hacks who have been milking her story for all the political gain they can manage are guilty of concocting a media circus around false pretenses.
Now Secretary of State for Multiculturalism Jason Kenney is riding off to Mexico to prod the release of Martin into the custody of the Canadian justice system along, and now another Canadian family has decided to try their luck at the media circus game, too.
This particular case swirls around Jimmy Chen Jian Yuan, who is currently imprisoned in China while being tried on a four-year-old $2 million fraud case.
Predictably, Chen's family is insisting that the government hasn't done enough to help him, despite the fact that, unlike Martin, he has been formally charged in China, has been tried, and is now awaiting a verdict.
Given the way in which details trickled out of the Martin case painfully slowly (and all too often were simply disregarded once it became apparent they didn't fit the standard politicized narrative), judgment will be reserved on the Chen case here.
Chen may be as innocent as his family insists, and as abandoned by the Canadian government. Or, as with Brenda Martin, there may be more to the story. Only time will reveal the details of this particular case.
However, one has yet to see if Brenda Martin's return to Canada -- and inevitably almost immediate release from Canadian custody -- will put an end to the partisan media circus that has surrounded the entire sorry affair.
One thing remains certain: only the in hands of a pack of unrepentantly dishonest Liberal spin doctors could the Conservative government -- which had done almost everything possible to ensure Martin's fair treatment -- be cast as the villain in this case over the irredeemably corrupt Mexican justice system.
Will Martin's return to Canada end the media circus? Only time will tell. But with the real masterminds of the media circus apparent -- Liberal MP Dan McTeague and former Prime Minister Paul Martin -- one has to suspect that will be rather unlikely.
If recent history has taught us anything, it's that Canadians in legal trouble can bail themselves out by attracting a large enough media circus.
Recent history has also shown us that they need not always be honest about their situation, either. Brenda Martin and her supporters politicized her predicament by claiming the government had "abandoned" her and not done enough to help her -- claims that were proven to be false.
Now, the Brenda Martin case has come to a sad conclusion a Mexican court has found her guilty of knowingly accepting fraudulently-obtained funds, despite an alleged lack of evidence (her lawyer, Guillermo Cruz, says as much).Regardless of whether or not Martin is guilty of her alleged crime -- and given the equally-sad state of Mexican "justice", there's an excellent chance she is innocent, and merely being hung out to dry so the system can save face -- there is little question that she and the terminally dishonest Liberal party hacks who have been milking her story for all the political gain they can manage are guilty of concocting a media circus around false pretenses.
Now Secretary of State for Multiculturalism Jason Kenney is riding off to Mexico to prod the release of Martin into the custody of the Canadian justice system along, and now another Canadian family has decided to try their luck at the media circus game, too.
This particular case swirls around Jimmy Chen Jian Yuan, who is currently imprisoned in China while being tried on a four-year-old $2 million fraud case.
Predictably, Chen's family is insisting that the government hasn't done enough to help him, despite the fact that, unlike Martin, he has been formally charged in China, has been tried, and is now awaiting a verdict.
Given the way in which details trickled out of the Martin case painfully slowly (and all too often were simply disregarded once it became apparent they didn't fit the standard politicized narrative), judgment will be reserved on the Chen case here.
Chen may be as innocent as his family insists, and as abandoned by the Canadian government. Or, as with Brenda Martin, there may be more to the story. Only time will reveal the details of this particular case.
However, one has yet to see if Brenda Martin's return to Canada -- and inevitably almost immediate release from Canadian custody -- will put an end to the partisan media circus that has surrounded the entire sorry affair.
One thing remains certain: only the in hands of a pack of unrepentantly dishonest Liberal spin doctors could the Conservative government -- which had done almost everything possible to ensure Martin's fair treatment -- be cast as the villain in this case over the irredeemably corrupt Mexican justice system.Will Martin's return to Canada end the media circus? Only time will tell. But with the real masterminds of the media circus apparent -- Liberal MP Dan McTeague and former Prime Minister Paul Martin -- one has to suspect that will be rather unlikely.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Gay Marriage Hardly "Canada's Biggest Mistake"
But it's not altogether unsurprising Michael Coren would think so
It hasn't taken Michael Coren very much effort to be one of Canada's most controversial media figures.
From managing to get blackballed by the CBC to suggsting we should drop a Nuclear weapon in Iran, Coren has proven to be a walking, talking controversy machine -- one only marginally more worrying than Peter Worthington.
As such, it's unsurprising that Coren would use the National Post's Canada's Biggest Mistake series to rock the boat on a very controversial topic: same-sex marriage.
Not-so-shockingly, he's not a fan. He does, however, have some lucid moments in the course of his ruminations:
Very recently, they represented a group that had largely been pushed to the margins of Canada's political discourse, and literally had to pull the rug out from under Canada's conservative elites in order to get their voices heard.
While Canada's social conservatives enjoy a more secure place in Canadian political discourse -- yet never quite as comfortable as they'd like -- the stigma remains, and that stigma has underscored the entire debate regarding same-sex marriage.
But one also remembers the Conservative party's controversial move to reopen the issue of same-sex marriage for debate in the House of Commons. One also remembers that Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself declared the issue closed, once the motion -- which was debated in the House -- was defeated. It had been both supported and opposed by members of both the Liberals and Conservatives.
Canadians have had plenty of opportunity to discuss same-sex marriage -- once while the same-sex marriage-supporting Liberals were in power, then again with the largely same-sex marriage-opposing Conservatives in power. And now, again in the pages of the National Post.
How much more discussion does Coren really want?
And while common law marriage certainly represented a milestone in the eventual legal recognition of same-sex marriage -- same-sex couples were recognized as entitled to the benefits of common law marriage in 1999 -- the argument is largely moot.
Common law marriage, like same-sex marriage was a legal reaction to the need for individuals under many emerging familial models to be legally recognized. It was a recognition of the evolving nature of the Canadian family.
Certainly social conservatives can't be expected to appreciate that -- certainly not with any enthusiasm -- but the fact is that social conservatives aren't the only ones with a stake in the matter.
It isn't the role of the state to rule which human relationships are legitimate and which ones aren't. Refusing to recognize common law or same-sex marriages is akin to precisely that.
Beyond that, any comeback for polygamy -- imagined, real, or otherwise -- has little to do with same-sex marriage. That is a recognition demand of an entirely different -- often religious -- nature.
But polygamy presents the dilemma of sexual abuse prevalent within many polygamist religious sects. Recent events in Texas only underscore this.
At least when domestic abuse arises within a same-sex relationship -- and often it's a good deal more brutal than within heterosexual relationships, according to sociological study -- it's between adults of consulting age. It's unlikely any eleven-year-olds will be forced to marry fifty-year-olds under Canada's same-sex marriage legislation.
Yet even in the case where physical abuse is being perpetrated between adult partners, the strongest remedy the law can legitimately -- or reasonably -- offer is the jailing of the offending partner.
The law has no ability to terminate a relationship against the wills of those within it. That should be deemed unacceptable to all Canadians -- social conservatives included -- on absolute terms.
On the flip side, it should be deemed unacceptable to all Canadians -- again, social conservatives included -- for the state to encourage (or coerce) legal marriage on anyone, as Coren seems to suggest. Again, this should be deemed unacceptable on absolute terms.
Our society has spent the last forty years fixing those mistakes. It was only a matter of time that we fixed the mistake -- made countless years ago -- of not recognizing homosexuals as full and equal members of our society.
And fortunately for Michael Coren, he's never lived with the consequences of those mistakes -- countless other people have.
Coren's objections aside, same-sex marriage is hardly "Canada's biggest mistake".
It hasn't taken Michael Coren very much effort to be one of Canada's most controversial media figures.
From managing to get blackballed by the CBC to suggsting we should drop a Nuclear weapon in Iran, Coren has proven to be a walking, talking controversy machine -- one only marginally more worrying than Peter Worthington.
As such, it's unsurprising that Coren would use the National Post's Canada's Biggest Mistake series to rock the boat on a very controversial topic: same-sex marriage.
Not-so-shockingly, he's not a fan. He does, however, have some lucid moments in the course of his ruminations:
"What makes the national mistake of legalizing same-sex marriage unique in Canadian history is that to even discuss the issue is considered by many, particularly our elites, to be at the very least in extraordinarily bad taste. Although this is a valid and vital debate about social policy, anyone critiquing the status quo is likely to be marginalized as hateful, extreme or simply mad. Social conservatives aren’t just wrong, they’re evil."Social conservatives do indeed carry a demonstrable stigma. Labeled as selfish, uncaring and compassionless, social conservatives have often had to tiptoe around their own views.
Very recently, they represented a group that had largely been pushed to the margins of Canada's political discourse, and literally had to pull the rug out from under Canada's conservative elites in order to get their voices heard.
While Canada's social conservatives enjoy a more secure place in Canadian political discourse -- yet never quite as comfortable as they'd like -- the stigma remains, and that stigma has underscored the entire debate regarding same-sex marriage.
"The discussion, we are told, is over. Which is what triumphalist bullies have said for centuries after they win a battle. In this case, the intention is to marginalize anyone who dares to still speak out. In other words, to silence them."Clearly, the discussion is not over. The fact that Coren is discussing the matter at all -- let alone under the heading of "Canada's biggest mistake" -- is evidence enough of that.
But one also remembers the Conservative party's controversial move to reopen the issue of same-sex marriage for debate in the House of Commons. One also remembers that Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself declared the issue closed, once the motion -- which was debated in the House -- was defeated. It had been both supported and opposed by members of both the Liberals and Conservatives.
Canadians have had plenty of opportunity to discuss same-sex marriage -- once while the same-sex marriage-supporting Liberals were in power, then again with the largely same-sex marriage-opposing Conservatives in power. And now, again in the pages of the National Post.
How much more discussion does Coren really want?
"It’s important to emphasize that this is not really about homosexuality at all, and has nothing to do with homosexual people living together. Opponents of same-sex marriage may have ethical and religious objections to homosexuality, but they are irrelevant to the central argument. Which is not about the rights of a sexual minority but the status and meaning of marriage.Perhaps so, but it was done long in advance of the legalization of same-sex marriage.
Indeed, the deconstruction of marriage began not with the gay community asking for the right to marry but with the heterosexual world rejecting it. The term "common-law marriage" said it all. Marriage is many things, but it is never common. Yet with this semantic and legal revolution, desire and convenience replaced commitment and dedication. The qualifications, so to speak, were lowered."
And while common law marriage certainly represented a milestone in the eventual legal recognition of same-sex marriage -- same-sex couples were recognized as entitled to the benefits of common law marriage in 1999 -- the argument is largely moot.
Common law marriage, like same-sex marriage was a legal reaction to the need for individuals under many emerging familial models to be legally recognized. It was a recognition of the evolving nature of the Canadian family.
Certainly social conservatives can't be expected to appreciate that -- certainly not with any enthusiasm -- but the fact is that social conservatives aren't the only ones with a stake in the matter.
"And one does indeed have to qualify for marriage; just as one has, for example, to qualify for a pension or a military medal. People who have not reached the age of retirement don’t qualify for a pension, people who don’t serve in the armed forces don’t qualify for a military medal. It’s not a question of equality but requirement. A human right is intrinsic, a social institution is not.Yet this doesn't change the number of people who live together under marriage-like conditions -- people who will continue to do so whether the law recognizes it or not.
The four great and historic qualifications for marriage always have been number, gender, age and blood. Two people, male and female, over a certain age and not closely related. Mainstream and responsible societies have sometimes changed the age of maturity, but incest has always been condemned and, by its nature, died out because of retardation."
It isn't the role of the state to rule which human relationships are legitimate and which ones aren't. Refusing to recognize common law or same-sex marriages is akin to precisely that.
"As for polygamy, it’s making something of a comeback — and here begin the objections."In all reality, the nail-biting over polygamy in Canada is overrated. Then-Prime Minister Paul Martin commissioned a study into the legality of polygamy mere weeks after commissioning the study that culminated in the legalization of same-sex marriage, and polygamy hasn't been legalized yet.
Beyond that, any comeback for polygamy -- imagined, real, or otherwise -- has little to do with same-sex marriage. That is a recognition demand of an entirely different -- often religious -- nature.
"Whenever this is mentioned by critics of same-sex marriage we are accused of using the slippery-slope argument. Sorry, some slopes are slippery. Polygamy is an ancient tradition within Islam — and was in Sephardic Judaism and some Asian cultures. When the precedent of gay marriage is combined with the freedom of religion defence, the courts will have a difficult time rejecting it.But it's also important to mention that same-sex marriage and polygamy each present different dilemmas to society. Same-sex marriage effectively separates marriage from sexuality -- there's nothing in legislation to suggest that bisexuals couldn't get hitched under a same-sex marriage, for example.
At the moment, the Muslim community is not sufficiently politically comfortable to pursue the issue; and the clearly deranged polygamous sects on the aesthetic as well as geographical fringes of Canadian society cloud any reasonable debate. But the argument will certainly come and the result is largely inevitable. If love is the only criterion for marriage who are we to judge the love between a man and his wives?
The state, though, should have a duty to judge and to do so based on its own interests. The most significant of which is its continued existence, meaning that we have to produce children. As procreation is the likely, if not essential, result of marriage between a man and a woman, it is in the interests of the state to encourage marriage."
But polygamy presents the dilemma of sexual abuse prevalent within many polygamist religious sects. Recent events in Texas only underscore this.
At least when domestic abuse arises within a same-sex relationship -- and often it's a good deal more brutal than within heterosexual relationships, according to sociological study -- it's between adults of consulting age. It's unlikely any eleven-year-olds will be forced to marry fifty-year-olds under Canada's same-sex marriage legislation.
Yet even in the case where physical abuse is being perpetrated between adult partners, the strongest remedy the law can legitimately -- or reasonably -- offer is the jailing of the offending partner.
The law has no ability to terminate a relationship against the wills of those within it. That should be deemed unacceptable to all Canadians -- social conservatives included -- on absolute terms.
On the flip side, it should be deemed unacceptable to all Canadians -- again, social conservatives included -- for the state to encourage (or coerce) legal marriage on anyone, as Coren seems to suggest. Again, this should be deemed unacceptable on absolute terms.
"Of course lesbian couples can have an obliging friend assist them in having a baby, and gay men can adopt or have an obliging friend have one for them, but this is hardly the norm and hardly going to guarantee the longevity of a stable society. Just as significant, it smashes the fundamental concept of a child being produced through an act of love. The donation of bodily fluid by an anonymous person, or that obliging friend again, is an act not of love but of lust, indifference, profit or a mere, well, helping hand."Yet plenty of children are already born as a result of acts of lust, not love, and ironically, it's unlikely that Coren would object to those parents getting married. As a matter of fact, he thinks the state should encourage it.
"For the first time not only in Canadian but in world history we are purposefully creating and legitimizing families where there will be either no male or no female role model and parent. Anyone who speaks of uncles, aunts, communities and villages raising children has no real understanding of family life. Single-parent families exist and are sometimes excellent and, obviously, not every mother/father family is a success. But to consciously create unbalanced families where children can never enjoy the profound difference between man and woman, mother and father, is dangerous social engineering.Michael Coren is wrong. Our society made a terrible mistake when it outlawed interracial relationships (just think what repealing that has done for the porn industry -ed). Our society made a terrible mistake when it outlawed homosexuality. Our society has made plenty of mistakes in the name of social conservatism.
We made a terrible mistake, and may not appreciate the full consequences for a generation. We allowed emotion to obscure logic and belittled anyone who appeared out of step with the current fashion. To marry without good reason in regrettable, to divorce good reasoning from public policy is a disgrace."
Our society has spent the last forty years fixing those mistakes. It was only a matter of time that we fixed the mistake -- made countless years ago -- of not recognizing homosexuals as full and equal members of our society.
And fortunately for Michael Coren, he's never lived with the consequences of those mistakes -- countless other people have.
Coren's objections aside, same-sex marriage is hardly "Canada's biggest mistake".
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Dion Needs New Take on Federalism
Federalism is not a wedge issue, it’s the foundation of our country
According to John Ivison, Liberal leader Stephane Dion may be looking to the concept of federalism in his continual search for wedge issues to divide Canadians.
This is, quite simply, bad news for Canada.
According to Ivison, the issue is coming down to a conflict between two visions of federalism: Paul Martin’s vision of assymetrical federalism, under which Quebec would be afforded powers and privileges not afforded to Canada’s other provinces, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s vision of open federalism, under which the jurisdictions of the federal and provincial governments are defined and defended.
The disagreement is fairly simple: Stephen Harper believes the spending and legislating powers of the federal government should be both limited and enshrined, while Stephan Dion believes they should be limitless.
Each side actually has a case. Harper’s belief in defending provincial powers from federal encroachments actually has historical foundations, dating back to the establishment of the country, and the conflict between John A MacDonald and various provincial premiers (spearheaded by Ontario) over various points of conflict.
Yet Stephane Dion has a fair case as well. There always remains the possibility that the federal government may need to step in and establish necessary programs in provinces that are unwilling to establish them on their own, or act in order to prevent the citizens of some provinces from being unduly disadvantaged.
Enshrined federal spending powers laced with contingency clauses seems like a reasonable compromise between the two views.
But this has little to do with symmetrical or assymetrical federalism.
The fact is that federalism cannot be assymetrical and also be just. Not only would assymetrical federalism entrench inequality (and, thus, injustice) in the short term, but it would commit us to that inequality and injustice in the long term. Worse yet, it would establish it as a foundation upon which the country is established.
Assymetrical federalism represents the same threat to Canadian unity as any coercive policy of official bilingualism ever could. Just as many French Canadian scholars were noted to remark with glee (perhaps naively) how official bilingualism could have been used to transform Canada as whole into a French state (at least as acknowledged by Peter Brimelow), assymetrical federalism represents a tool by which extreme Quebecois nationalists could mould Quebec into an increasingly exclusive enclave, while possessing a disproportionate amount of influence over the rest of the country. Assymetrical federalism may not necessarily transform Quebec into a sovereign state nearly by default, but it will certainly do the next best thing.
The granting of such powers to Quebec would only be tenable under circumstances in which those powers are also extended to the other provinces. Then again, that isn’t assymetrical federalism. That would be symmetrical.
Yet the granting of additional powers to, for example, western provinces has rarely been considered seriously because those in power have rarely considered western separatism to be as threatening as Quebec separatism. On the same not, those men have disproportionately tended to be French-Canadian. One may make of that what they will.
If Stephane Dion is truly prepared to depart from his party’s flirtations with assymetrical federalism, as Ivison has suggested, this is a good thing. But turning to the very foundations of Canada as a wedge issue is not.
It shouldn’t be suggested that Dion should consider federalism topica non grata, but rather that he should engage that topic in a responsible, collaborative manner, not a divisive one.
Any discussion of federalism should seek to unite Canadians, not divide them. There are simply some ways in which a country cannot be divided and still remain whole. This is one of them.
The fact is that no politician can reasonably expect to politicize the very concept on which the country was established without risking the break-up of the country. It is in this sense that Dion’s reliance on divisive issues may finally bear fruit, but it will be very bitter fruit, indeed.
The nature of Stephane Dion's take on federalism is bad news for Canada.
According to John Ivison, Liberal leader Stephane Dion may be looking to the concept of federalism in his continual search for wedge issues to divide Canadians.
This is, quite simply, bad news for Canada.
According to Ivison, the issue is coming down to a conflict between two visions of federalism: Paul Martin’s vision of assymetrical federalism, under which Quebec would be afforded powers and privileges not afforded to Canada’s other provinces, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s vision of open federalism, under which the jurisdictions of the federal and provincial governments are defined and defended.
The disagreement is fairly simple: Stephen Harper believes the spending and legislating powers of the federal government should be both limited and enshrined, while Stephan Dion believes they should be limitless.
Each side actually has a case. Harper’s belief in defending provincial powers from federal encroachments actually has historical foundations, dating back to the establishment of the country, and the conflict between John A MacDonald and various provincial premiers (spearheaded by Ontario) over various points of conflict.
Yet Stephane Dion has a fair case as well. There always remains the possibility that the federal government may need to step in and establish necessary programs in provinces that are unwilling to establish them on their own, or act in order to prevent the citizens of some provinces from being unduly disadvantaged.
Enshrined federal spending powers laced with contingency clauses seems like a reasonable compromise between the two views.
But this has little to do with symmetrical or assymetrical federalism.
The fact is that federalism cannot be assymetrical and also be just. Not only would assymetrical federalism entrench inequality (and, thus, injustice) in the short term, but it would commit us to that inequality and injustice in the long term. Worse yet, it would establish it as a foundation upon which the country is established.
Assymetrical federalism represents the same threat to Canadian unity as any coercive policy of official bilingualism ever could. Just as many French Canadian scholars were noted to remark with glee (perhaps naively) how official bilingualism could have been used to transform Canada as whole into a French state (at least as acknowledged by Peter Brimelow), assymetrical federalism represents a tool by which extreme Quebecois nationalists could mould Quebec into an increasingly exclusive enclave, while possessing a disproportionate amount of influence over the rest of the country. Assymetrical federalism may not necessarily transform Quebec into a sovereign state nearly by default, but it will certainly do the next best thing.
The granting of such powers to Quebec would only be tenable under circumstances in which those powers are also extended to the other provinces. Then again, that isn’t assymetrical federalism. That would be symmetrical.
Yet the granting of additional powers to, for example, western provinces has rarely been considered seriously because those in power have rarely considered western separatism to be as threatening as Quebec separatism. On the same not, those men have disproportionately tended to be French-Canadian. One may make of that what they will.
If Stephane Dion is truly prepared to depart from his party’s flirtations with assymetrical federalism, as Ivison has suggested, this is a good thing. But turning to the very foundations of Canada as a wedge issue is not.
It shouldn’t be suggested that Dion should consider federalism topica non grata, but rather that he should engage that topic in a responsible, collaborative manner, not a divisive one.
Any discussion of federalism should seek to unite Canadians, not divide them. There are simply some ways in which a country cannot be divided and still remain whole. This is one of them.
The fact is that no politician can reasonably expect to politicize the very concept on which the country was established without risking the break-up of the country. It is in this sense that Dion’s reliance on divisive issues may finally bear fruit, but it will be very bitter fruit, indeed.
The nature of Stephane Dion's take on federalism is bad news for Canada.
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