ottlib

Do the Republicans really expect to win the White House?

2012-01-28T14:24:00.000-05:00

I have been following the presidential election down south and I can only conclude that the answer to my question is not really.

Despite the troubles that President Obama has been having throughout his first term it would appear that the movers and shakers in the Republican Party have abandoned any real attempt to take it away from him. They do not seem to believe that his troubles will be enough to allow them to turf him so they are not really going to try.

Evidence of that can be found just by looking at the candidates for the Republican nomination. None of them really fire the imagination. None of them really seem to have any innovative or original policy ideas, just Republican Party boilerplate. None of them seem to have the political stature necessary to unseat a sitting president, even one as disappointing as President Obama during a protracted economic downturn.

I really have to wonder about the judgement of the decision makers in the Republican Party on this. After all they only need to look at President Clinton's election in 1992 to know what is possible. The Democrats did not have any expectations of winning the White House that year but they had to put up someone so the big names stayed out of it and allowed a bunch of unknowns to run for the nomination. The expectation was President Bush would win his second term and then one of those big names could run against Dan Quayle after that. They were wrong of course and a relatively unknown Governor from Arkansas won two terms and the opportunity for the big Democrat names was lost.

President Obama is vulnerable. He has been largely ineffective during a long economic downturn. Despite this the Republicans do not seem to be really trying to take advantage of the situation and they seem to be content to allow him to retain the White House for one more term.

Iran is not a threat to peace

2012-01-06T20:50:00.001-05:00

Stephen Harper disagrees with me of course because I read it on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen this morning. He goes so far as to state that Iran wants to acquire and USE nuclear weapons.

Such asinine statements coming from the leader of our country just left me shaking my head.

Of course his statements are partly the result of Iran's building of nuclear reactors and the assumption that they are being built to manufacture nuclear weapons. Any assertion that they are building them to satisfy their need for electricity is ignored because, the argument goes, once they build them to produce power it would not take much to convert them to produce weapons.

The thing with that argument is the same is true of all countries that use nuclear power. Once you have a working reactor it is really a small step to move it from producing electricity to producing weapons. Canada, Germany, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the Scandavian states, just to name a few, are just six months away from the capability of producing nuclear weapons. All it would take is the decision to do so and the conversion of their reactors would be completed in about half-a-year. That is why is is not illegal under international law to build nuclear reactors to the point where they can produce electricity. If it were there would be no legal nuclear reactors anywhere. A country only gets into legal trouble if it converts those reactors to produce weapons.

Of course, people will say that this is Iran so they cannot be trusted to play by the rules. Fair point although I would point out that they are no more guilty of breaking international rules as many other states that are considered more "respectable". However, from a practical point of view why would Iran want to build nuclear weapons? To use them? Of course not. One of their greatest enemies is Israel and that country already has hundreds of warheads and the means of delivering them. Iran has none of either so why would they begin building them and spark an arms race where they would be beginning such a race so far behind that they would lose it before it really began? If they ever actually tried to use them they would face a massive counterattack from Israel and probably the US. I know that many judge Iran by the statements of its president, who is somewhat of a loon, but we all know that the real power in that country lies with clerics behind the scenes and they have proven to be very pragmatic folks over the years. They will not risk their Islamic Revolution by being so stupid as to attack Israel with nuclear weapons. Iran's government stated last month that they have no interest in making nuclear weapons. I happen to believe them because to do so openly provides them with no advantage and a great deal of disadvantage and they would not be able to do it in secret.

Stephen Harper also made his statements as part of the ongoing campaign by hawks in the west, who want to attack Iran, trying to bring public opinion on to their side.

Hopefully they will be completely unsuccessful. If the goal of any attacks on Iran is to stop their nuclear development program they would likely fail. Iran is a modern country with a sophisticated arms industry feeding a sophisticated armed forces. They have a very capable air defence system that would play merry hell with western airforces and their armed forces are large and they are geared towards one goal and one goal only; to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. Given unlimited time and resources the West would prevail of course but the cost would not be cheap. The current western tactic of dropping bombs on their enemies from a safe altitude would not open the Strait if Iran closed it. The west would have to put both planes and ships into the danger zones and they would lose some of them. Western public opinion probably would not react too badly to the occasional news of lost airplanes but I do not believe the same could be said to daily reports of aircraft losses and the loss of one or more ships during a war with Iran.

Then there is the economic impact. In general, the economies in the west are teetering on the edge of another recession. Taking actions that would probably cause the cost of oil to double or even triple would not help matters. That would probably cause public opinion towards a third war in that region of the world, in a decade, to sour rather quickly.

Iran is no angel in the international community but they are not the devil either and they are not lead by a bunch of suicidal individuals bent on taking their enemies to Hell with them in a rain of fire. They bear watching as they develop their nuclear power capability but the overblown rhetoric that we saw today from Mr. Harper and from others in the West during the past few months is not useful at best and dangerous at worst. It could very well provide the hawks in the various western capitals the cover they require to begin a war with Iran that would result in the unnecessary loss of life of many Western military personnel as well as causing great economic upheaval that would result in the unnecessary loss of livelihoods of a great many citizens in the West.

Lots of smoke, very little fire

2011-12-09T21:37:00.003-05:00

After several years of negotiations Stephen Harper and Barack Obama finally announced the North American perimeter agreement.

The agreement is not an actual treaty. Instead it is a non-binding set of sub-agreements covering many facets of the relationship between Canada and the United States.

The question is why would both governments take this approach?

From the Canadian perspective I believe the Harper government saw what happened to the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada after it rammed the FTA down the throats of Canadians and decided not to risk a repeat. It is a simple fact that although the majority of Canadians do not actively dislike the United States they also do not actively like or trust it. Making binding treaties with them that could have implications for Canadian sovereignty is fraught with risks as different groups, who do not like the US, use the general distrust of Canadians to fight that treaty and hammer the government that negotiated it.

From an American perspective the political situation in Washington is toxic and any treaty the President would put forward would be rejected on spec by the Republicans. The result would be the real possibility of the US Congress rejecting any treaty negotiated by the President and he would not want that to happen during an election year. Negotiating a binding treaty at this point would just set him up for failure.

Will this agreement significantly change anything in the Canada/US relationship? Probably not.

Without the force of law to compel the two governments to implement this agreement in full there is no incentive to do so. The really significant changes in the agreement will require legislative action in both countries to be implemented and that is just not going to happen. Even the minor changes that can be brought about by simple changes to existing regulations could be stymied by bureaucratic inertia and the lack of political will to push these changes forward.

Again in the United States, the poisoned and rancid political situation would stand in the way of any legislation to implement the major provisions of the agreement. Even if the President were to make the attempt of introducing the necessary legislation he has shown on many occasions that he lacks the spine to fight for them. Whenever he has experienced push-back from the Republicans he has caved, including for his signature initiatives. I could only imagine his reaction to Republican objections to legislation about issues that he really does not care that much about.

In Canada our government has demonstrated many times that it will only use its precious political capital on legislation that it believes will make its base happy or on legislation it believes will buy it votes. Nothing in this agreement will meet those two criteria so this government will not be pushing too hard to implement all of the provisions of it.

This agreement was more about show than substance. It was good for a photo-op but in the end it will not change much.

Crossing a line

2011-12-04T09:34:00.000-05:00

I have written several times in this space that I believe that it is silly for anybody to make a big deal about a cabinet minister using military aircraft to travel, even if that travel may be for personal reasons. Ours is the only G8 country that expects members of the cabinet to travel commercial.

That being said I have to say that Peter MacKay had no business using the Cormerant helicopter to get out a fishing camp in Labrador.

The military has a whole fleet of aircraft available whose sole purpose is to move people, in luxury and otherwise. If he wants to use any one of these aircraft as his personal air taxi I have no problem with that. That is what they are there for.

The Cormerants on the other hand are there for Search and Rescue. The only people they move are SAR Techs and the victims of accidents. They are not meant to be used as taxies. Canada does not have many of these aircraft so we really cannot spare one for the personal transportation of a cabinet minister, even if it was not the "on-call" aircraft.

What would have happened if while this helicopter was off flying the minister around a major air or sea accident would have taken place requiring the services of all the SAR aircraft in the area? Thankfully, we did not have to find out but the potential was there, particulary at this time of year in that part of the world.

Mr. MacKay's utter lack of good judgement in this case is breathtaking so here is a piece of advice for him. Stay off the yellow birds.

Economic Storm Clouds Brewing

2011-11-13T15:49:00.004-05:00

It is only a matter of time before Greece defaults on its debts. Italy is on the brink of its own debt crisis. The United States has not recovered from the Great Recession of 2008 and appears to be heading for a second one. The projected economic growth rate for China is expected to decrease by as much as 2.5 percentage points next year, which would still give it very positive economic growth but which could be the pin that finally pops the extremely inflated real estate bubble in that country.

Any one of these events on their own could dump the world economy into the crapper. The fact that more than one of these events could happen within the next 6-12 months would be distasterous for the world economy, including Canada's. Although, we should be really worried about China. That is the country that is buying most of our natural resources, which is the sector of the economy that is keeping up Canada's economic growth. If China runs into a serious bout of economic trouble the economic recession that has been hammering Canada's industrial sector will come to its resources sector and the whole of the Canadian economy will go into a deep and probably prolonged recession.

What are we to do?

Do not count on central banks. Interest rates in the Western world are at or near zero so the central banks' ability to stimulate the economy by loweing interest rates is very limited.

That would leave only governments to take up the slack with fiscal measures to stimulate the economy. However, do not count on them. Any measures they take will probably just make things worse. Governments are completely unable to stop or reduce the duration of recessions. Unfortunately, most people do not realize that so they demand governments to act and when they do the situation invariably gets worse, which leads to demands for more action which leads increasingly desperate governments to take action, any action, that gives the appearance that they are dealing with the recession when in fact they are usually screwing things up more. At any rate, we should be watching what governments do after the next recession. They may not be able to stop or reduce the duration of a recession but they can make the recovery from one more even across their societies by what they do after the economy begins to bounce back.

Do not count on businesses either. They will demand that governments hand them billions of dollars to stay afloat "to save jobs" but they will retrench and lay people off by the 10s of thousands. As well, as they did in 2008 they will stay on the sidelines waiting for someone else to make the investments that will be necessary to finally pull the economy out of any recession.

So really, you can only count on yourself. Scary thought is it not?

The "Occupy" Movement

2011-11-08T19:39:00.001-05:00

With each passing year it is getting more difficult for ordinary citizens in the Western world to live well. Everything is becoming more expensive, from food to education to shelter to transportation. The middle class is shrinking and those who still remain there do so by means of credit. Most ordinary citizens of the Western world know that they are just one economic shock, international, national or local, from economic ruin. But for the most part it is just a slow erosion of the economic well being of ordinary citizens.

This trend has continued for decades and no government, of any political stripe, in any western country has been able to stop that erosion. Indeed, this erosion has accelerated.

The result is more and more ordinary citizens have turned away from politics, as demonstrated by the continuing trend of increasingly lower voter turnout in most Western democracies. This is disinheartening as part of the means of stopping this continued erosion is politics.

So, it is with some satisfaction that I see the creation of the "Occupy" movement. Finally, ordinary citizens are beginning to make their voices heard. Certainly many in this movement are activists but there are enough ordinary people who just want to see change to assert this movement is not just a slow motion G20 protest. Maybe it is a sign that political apathy can be reversed.

So, will the "Occupy" movement change anything?

No.

The key reason is the movement is targeting the symptom of the problem and not the underlying condition.

The 2008 recession was caused by the excesses of Wall Street and other corporate interests and that is a fact. However, the reason why they were allowed to go to such excess was the US government's decision to relax financial rules and regulations governing the work of Wall Street and the big financial players in the country. The result was a financial meltdown not seen since the 1930s that required the US government to bail out corporate America with a bailout package of more than $700,000,000,000. Considering the damage that Wall Street did to the world economy it would have been logical that US law makers would have reinstated some of the tougher financial regulations to prevent a repeat. Of course, that did not happen because Wall Street and other corporate interests took a portion of that $700 billion aid package and used it to lobby US lawmakers to keep things the way they were. They were successful. It is ironic really. Corporate interests fucked things up so much that they almost destroyed the world financial system. They demanded taxpayers funds to be used to pull their nuts out of the fire and then used that same taxpayers money to lobby the government to maintain the conditions that lead to them fucking things up to begin with.

That is the underlying problem. The voice of ordinary citizens in now completely drowned out by the very well funded voice of corporations through their lobby groups. They have proliferated to the point that ordinary citizens cannot put forward the consistant and sustained efforts necessary to convince policy makers to listen to their point of view. It is now a simple fact in the western democracies that money buys access. Corporations have the money and ordinary citizens do not. Therefore, corporations have the access and ordinary citizens do not.

Until ordinary citizens realize this and demand change to this situation nothing will change for the better for them. If the "Occupy" movement wants to begin that process they will have to change their focus. Instead of occupying Wall Street, set up their camps on the Washington Mall and demand the government begins governing for the people again, as it states in the Constitution. Of course, such protests would be broken up pretty quick for "security" reasons.

The "Occupy" movement is a reason for some cautious hope that ordinary citizens can eventually be shaken out of their apathy to redress the growing inbalance in addressing their interests over corporate interests but it still has a long way to go and you can be certain that the corporate interests will be using all available resources to maintain the current imbalance.

Low Voter Turnout

2011-10-08T14:51:00.000-04:00

Voter turnout for the Thursday election in Ontario was the lowest it has ever been and it continues a trend that has been occuring for more than two decades. This is not unique to Ontario as other provinces are experiencing the same trend, we are seeing it at the federal level and we are seeing it in other western countries where there are no laws making voting mandatory.

Seeing this trend I am reminded of the quote from Plato at the top of my blog.

Why is this trend occuring?

I think the main reason is that most of the populations of the western democracies believe politics is no longer relevent to their lives. They see the political classes in their respective countries engaging in short-sighted partisanship where the short-term interests of the political players trumps the broader interests of the societies in which they exist and that dynamic remains the same regardless of which party is in power.

Such a situation in untenable. It will eventually come back to haunt the societies that are experiencing it.

So how do we fix the problem?

Making voting mandatory is one solution but it is just a band-aid. It does not fix the underlying malaise that is the root cause of low voter turnout. As well, some of the western governments that do not already have it are predisposed to reducing what they consider to be the unreasonable burden governments already place on their citizens. Making voting mandatory would go against that predisposition.

The real solution is to make politics relevent again but that is easier said than done.

However, it is necessary for democracy to survive. I know many people believe democracy is the pinnacle of political development and that it will last forever but the same was believed of feudalism, mercantilism and communism. History proved those beliefs to be false as they all collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions. Democracy is not immune to this.

If democracy is to survive those who cherish it will have to revive it by taking it out of the hands of the current political classes of the western world. Failure to do so will eventually cause democracy to suffer the fates of the political systems it replaced. I am not smart enough to know how it will happen, wether it happens quickly or gradually, and I cannot say what will replace it but I do believe that it is inevitable unless we fight to save it.

Then again it might already be too late.

Election Night Coverage and Other Thoughts

2011-10-08T12:20:00.001-04:00

Who in the CTV and Global braintrust thought it would be a good idea to have former Ontario premiers and other hacks from the various political parties as analysts? Their reactions to how things unfolded was totally predictable spin, quite useless in explaining what we were watching unfold Thursday night. After watching that for 30 minutes I turned it off and only went back a few time during the evening to check the seat ticker.

Predictably the Liberal "analysts" stated it was a good night for the Liberals while the Ontario PC and NDP "analysts" stated it was a lousy night for the Liberals and a great night for their parties. Indeed, listening to Ernie Eves, I was almost believing the Ontario PC Party was winning on Thursday night.

Cutting through all of the spin here is what we are left with. The Liberals won the election. They won a minority government but they only came up short of a majority by one seat. That is it. Everything else that was said on Thursday night was spin, speculation and conjecture.

How all of this plays out in the coming months and years remains to be seen.

Things could go badly for the Liberals. There is no denying that is a possibility but they are not the only party that has to worry about the future.

Pay attention to the Ontario PC Party. Virtually all of their gains came from rural ridings, which is the base for Randy Hillier and his band of Tea Party wannabees. It will be interesting to see what happens if they decide to flex their new found muscle within the Ontario PC Party and how Tim Hudak responds to that. Any sign of internal dissent would not be good news for a party that may face a snap election at any time and if the more radical instincts of the Hillier wing of that party begins to seep into the Party's policies it could frighten alot of urban voters enough to hold their nose and vote for the party that is currently in the best position to keep them at bay, namely the Liberals.

Polled

2011-08-15T19:08:00.000-04:00

I just answered a poll from Ekos about a North American Customs agreement.

It will be interesting to see the estimates of this poll, provided they are published.

It's about time!

2011-08-06T18:23:00.000-04:00

Word out of the United States is a bond rating agency has downgraded the United States credit rating one notch from its AAA rating. This has created the predictable reaction from the US government and political class but for me my reaction is: What took them so long?

Since before Reagan this is a government that has:

Spent close to half-a-trillion dollars a year on defence despite the fact that there is no longer any threat to the US by any other country on the planet and the fact the US miliary has only won one war since end of the Second World War. Criminy, they lost the war in Iraq, are going to lose the war in Afghanistan and have been hopelessly incapable of getting rid of a dried up and desicated regime in Libya. Talk about a waste of money.
Spent more on non-military spending that the rest of the G-20 combined.
Lowered taxes on the very rich and on corporations, the two groups most capable of paying taxes without any undo hardship, reducing revenues just as they are increasing spending.
Generally, living beyond its mean with that situation accelerating at a time when it is becoming increasingly evident that the government and the country are becoming less and less capable of meeting their obligation.

It was only a matter of time before some one screamed, ENOUGH!!

Now if the American political class was smart and forward thinking they would look at this event as a wake-up call and the adults within their ranks would begin pushing the radicals and wingnuts to the fringes, where they belong, and work together to begin resolving this problem.

Not that we should hold our breath on that score.

The President, who should be the one leading the charge on this, is a major disappointment and it is increasingly obvious that he lacks the vision and the spine to take up this necessary task. Unfortunately, there is no one on the other side of the American political divide who can do it either. The adults within the Republican Party are so afraid of a small minority of radicals and wingnuts within their ranks that they are paralyzed and powerless to suggest let alone do what needs to be done to fix this.

In short the American political class is so caught up in their petty, short-term political interests to do what is necessary to right the American ship.

More and more governments around the world are looking at the situation in the US and they will be taking steps to insulate themselves from any fallout of it on their countries. As those processes proceed the relevancy of the US will decrease, probably at an increased rate as time goes on.

In a century or two historians are going to look upon the events of the past few months as the trigger for the beginning of the fall of the American Empire.

The United States is screwed

2011-07-30T13:45:00.001-04:00

Regardless of how the budget ceiling crisis is resolved in the United States in the coming days it is obvious that the US political class is, in all likelyhood, permanently split beyond any reconciliation.

There was a time not too many years in the past where the two parties, and their activists, in the United States disagreed on the means of getting things done but they agreed on the ends, the objectives for the government and Amercian society. That consensus began breaking down under Reagan and it accelerated under Clinton, creating a schism that has continued to grow until we see the chasm between the Democrats and the Republicans we now see.

The most recent crisis is only going to cause that gap to grow more and to cement itself into a permanent situation. The result is more of these self-inflicted crises will occur that will cause the already gradual decline of the US in the world to accelerate until Americans find themselves overtaken by other states like China, India and Brazil. In other words they will suffer the same fate as Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. The successor states will certainly take care not to offend the sensibilities of the US, at least until this diminished state drives the US into a new isolationism, but they will still be the ones making all of the important decisions in the world.

We are probably only a decade or so away from this situation. Barring a radical change in how the American political class conducts itself the decline of the US is probably irreversible.

The question for Canada is does it have a political class that recognizes this reality and is taking action to reduce our dependance on our deteriorating neigbbour to the South? Of course not. It is quite obvious that the current government and its supporters are completely oblivious to the long-term threat the current situation in Washington poses to Canada. However, it is also quite obvious that the part of the Canadian political class opposed to the current government lacks the vision to see the threat as well.

So, I guess you can probably say that Canada is also screwed.

Fill out your Census Form

2011-05-04T20:23:00.000-04:00

I received my a letter yesterday asking me to complete the Census and it gave me the opportunity to do it on-line.

I typed in the access code and then complete it. It took me 7 minutes to complete for a family of two.

After I submitted it I was informed that I was chosen to complete the new National Household Survey and that I could complete it right then. I did and it took me 40 minutes to complete the information for my wife and I.

The interface was good and easy to use and there were plenty of instruction. The one time I did make a mistake the application popped an error message and let me go back to fix it.

I know alot of Liberals and progressives reacted very negatively to the government's decision to eliminate the long form census last summer so I would urge you to put your money where your keyboard is and complete the Census asap. And if you are chosen for the National Household Survey complete it as well.

You do not owe anything to Canadians Mr. Ignatieff

2011-05-03T19:18:00.000-04:00

Since nobody else will probably do it I am going to pay tribute to Mr. Ignatieff and provide him with some parting advice.

Mr. Ignatieff had the attributes that could have made him a fine PM. There is no doubting his abilities and brilliance as one does not become the head of one of the most prestigious departments of one of the most prestigious universities in the world by being a dolt. I believe his natural abilities combined with his life experience would have put him in good stead for dealing with the myriad issues that are facing Canada and that are being largely ignored by our out of touch political elite.

What I found most impressive about him was his choice of how he wanted to serve Canada and Canadians when he decided to return to Canada.

Considering his background and where he was coming from Canadian universities like McGill, Queens, U of T, etc. would have been falling over themselves to offer him the presidencies of those institutions if he would have let it be known that he was available. He could have shaped the young minds of Canadians for years or he could have gone into business or some other vocation that would have allowed him to influence Canadian society without having to expose himself to the bullshit of the rotted political culture in this country.

Instead of taking that route he decided to go into politics. I cannot think of a more thankless job than being a politician. The hours are long and you have to give up anything resembling a private life. Every so often you have to overcome the ignorance and apathy of the electorate just to hang on to your job. This is true even if you are just a back bencher. If you actually manage to take the helm of a political party you then have to deal with the fact that a significant number of people will think you are an asshole, and that is just amongst members of your own party. Your opponents from other political parties would use much stronger language to describe your perceived shortcomings.

Despite this Mr. Ignatieff decided to to serve Canadians by being an elected member of our Parliament and then the leader of a major political party. And he was we resoundingly reputiated and rejected by those he wished to serve.

So Mr. Ignatieff, here is my advice. You have resigned as leader of the Liberal Party and you do not seem to be someone who wants to go off into a quiet retirement so find yourself a new challenge where ever you can find it. If that means that you have to leave the country again then sobeit. Certainly, many will crow that they were right about you but who cares. Canadians rejected you so you owe them nothing. Go and live the rest of your life where ever is best for you.

While you are there think about us here back in Canada and lament the fact that your experience will act as a cautionary tale for any other capable men and women, from all points political spectrum, and will cause them to think twice before deciding to serve their people and country as elected official. Thus leaving us to be governed by navel gazing professional politicians and hacks, with no vision, no scruples and no skills outside of being able to play politics.

Well, that's it for me

2011-04-26T18:42:00.000-04:00

Believe it or not but I do not really like partisan politics. Our politicians' obsessive focus on each other instead of on the issues that are really important to the lives and livelihoods of Canadians is infuriating.

However, I am addicted to partisan politics. I have known that for sometime but I had a WTF moment last Tuesday that really got me thinking. I won't bore you with the details but I will say I have spent the last week thinking and reflecting on it and I have decided to walk away from partisan politics.

The upshot for this blog is that I will be doing a lot less blogging than I did in the past, which was not much to begin with really. As well, going back to the beginning of this blog I stated in my first post that I wanted to engage in intelligent debate about issues. It certainly did not take long for that idea to be swamped by partisanship. So, I am actually going to do what I intended to do with this blog. I will talk about issues instead of the personalities and the organizations that so pollute our political culture.

The last week has also allowed me to put the current election into a non-partisan perspective and I have concluded that it will be what it will be. I will do my bit to effect the outcome on Monday but after that it is out of my hands. Otherwise, the final result will have very little impact on me or society at large with only political partisans from all parties being the most effected.

So long, I wish you all good fortune.

Go Habs! Go Canucks!

Stasis

2011-04-19T14:02:00.000-04:00

I usually do not comment on polls. They are all polling the same population but they always seem to come up with radically different estimates so I generally do not give them much thought or credibility.

For example, if you are following Nanos the Conservatives seem to have been on the verge of a majority government for weeks. However, if you look at EKOS and Harris Decima the Conservatives are firmly planted in minority territory with the Liberals not as far behind as the Conservatives would like.

In short, the polls are giving us very conflicting information on where the parties stand in the eyes of Canadians, which to my mind make them largely useless.

However, something all of the polls seem to be indicating is there has not been much change in the opinions of Canadians for about a week. The last time we saw any real movement was a week ago today, after the leaked AG draft report caused a tightening of the race. Since then we have had the debates but the estimates have really not changed.

Yes, yes, yes, some in the media have been touting an NDP surge but if you look at said surge most polls are showing the differences between the national horse race estimates today being within the MOE compared to where they were this time last week. In other words, the difference is statistically insignificant, statistical noise. This is true for all of the parties.

What about the regionals you might ask. The same is true there as well. The MOEs are much greater for these regional breakdowns so if you look at the estimates for each of them you will note any changes in the estimates for the regional breakdowns today are within the MOE compared to this time last week. Certainly there appears to have been large fluctuations but that always happens with polls with large MOEs. There is no way you can discern statistical noise from actual changes in public opinion.

It is as if the electorate is holding its breath. So the question is why.

Has the electorate made up its mind and we are just playing out the string?

Or is conventional wisdom wrong, and Canadians are still not paying as much attention to the election as expected at this point in the campaign?

Who knows. However, I do know that a significant portion of the electorate makes up their mind during the final weekend of any election campaign, with a significant portion of them waiting until they pick up the pencil behind the voting screen. So, I am leaning towards the second choice.

This election is not over yet.

What are the trolls trying to accomplish?

2011-04-17T17:26:00.000-04:00

As can be expected with the election the blogsphere has been humming. More people have been posting their ideas in their blogs and more people have been commenting on them.

One thing I have noticed with these comments is the number of Conservative trolls who have invaded Liblogs. Sometimes their comments make sense and are even insightful but most of the time it is just drivel I can only conclude is designed to agitate and often their comments are out and out lies.

What are these people trying to accomplish? Do they believe that their comments will be seen by anybody else besides partisans from other political parties? Do they seriously believe that they can sway those partisans to change their support for their parties?

I visit the blogs of supporters from other parties to see what they are saying but I rarely feel the need to comment on them because I know that none of my comments will sway that person's opinion. I really do have better things to do with my time.

So why do Conservative supporters insist on commenting on Liberal blogs? Are you really getting paid for it? If so, what a colossal waste of money that is. Do you really have that much time on your hands? If so, get a job, unless commenting on Liberal blogs is your job, in which case carry on I guess.

But if you are not getting paid to do it might I suggest that you could be something much more useful with your time.

Rise Up Video

2011-04-17T17:13:00.000-04:00

I have been watching the reaction to the Rise Up video.

As expected that reaction depends on your political bent. Conservatives pan it and Liberals love it. As for the media pundits I really could not say. I concluded they were idiots a long time ago and stopped reading or listening to them.

What everybody seems to forget is that you cannot always predict what Canadians will care about. As well, you cannot always predict how they will react at any given point to any given situation or statement.

Will this video and the sentiment it hightlights resonate with Canadians? Who knows. The Conservatives hope not, the Liberals hope so and the media pundits will try to tell Canadians what they should think but it will be ordinary Canadians who will have the final say.

Use Humour in advertizing

2011-04-17T16:46:00.000-04:00

Today is was revealed that the $30 billion dollar cost for the new F-35 jets may not include the engines for them. I hope that the folks doing the ads for the Liberals are on top of this and that they use humour because really this whole situation is side splittingly funny.

Here is an idea.

Take the photo Stephen Harper is his silly leather Calgary Stampede getup. Animate it like South Park. You know those characters where the top of the heads bounce up and down while speaking.

Give this animated Stephen Harper the classic used car salesman voice and then have it "sell" the F-35 to Canadians using all of the information that has come out showing that these are the wrong planes for Canada.

At the end of the sales job have the animated Stephen Harper make the statement: "And you can have all of this for the low, low price of $30 billion, (pause) engines not included."

This whole F-35 situation is absurd and one of the best ways to show absurdity is to use humour to mock it. The Liberals should use that to their advantage.

Oh yes, the Liberals need to make certain that they run it as much as possible in the last few days of the election as well as on Youtube.

Week Three in the books: Now the real election begins

2011-04-15T19:45:00.000-04:00

The debate week of the election is now over and the real election campaign is underway. How do we assess the week gone by?

For the Liberals they had both positives and negatives.   The debates did not help them as much as they would have liked but at the same time they did not hurt them either. They can take some solace from the fact that 10 million Canadians tuned into watch the debates and that was probably their first look at Mr. Ignatieff without the media or Conservative filter. Although he did not blow the doors off I would imagine that he did make a reasonably positive impression, one that he can build on for the next two weeks.

The Liberals are showing signs that they are focusing their message with the new healthcare ads. That is a good start. Now I would like to see four other ads before the end of the election. One to tie all of the undemocratic actions of the Conservatives together, including the attempted disenfranchizement of those students in Guelph. The other three each focusing on jets, jails and corporate tax cuts and contrasting them with the Liberal family plan. One ad for each of those Conservative priorities. Then blanket the airwaves with them from now until E-day.

Mr. Ignatieff is still packing them in at rallies and the enthusiasm of Liberals has not waned since the beginning of the election. That bodes well for the GOTV efforts on May 2 and it could mean those 800,000 or so Liberals who stayed home in 2008 will come out this time. If they do that will have a profound effect on alot of ridings in this country.

Finally, if you believe the public polls the Liberals have cut the initial Conservative advantage, at the beginning of this campaign, in half. Not bad when you consider that voters were not really paying attention during the first weeks. Now that they probably are the Liberals have a great opportunity to keep moving up if they can continue to run a good campaign.

The Conservatives began their week with a controversy and ended it with two more. In between the debates did not help them or hurt them. It seems they just cannot run their campaign without stepping in it.  Their position has been on a steady and slow decline even though voters were not paying attention. If they continue to suffer from more controversies in the next two weeks their fortunes would probably continue to wane, possibly beyond the point of no return.

Of the two controversies today watch the effects of the Guergis controversery. Her experience could reinforce the notion amongst professional women in this country as to why they do not like nor trust Stephen Harper. They contributed to costing him majorities on two other occasions and they could do the same thing this time, or worse.

The NDP had a good week. The polls tell me so, if you can believe the public polls. However, one good week out of three is not nearly good enough and it is doubtful that they can sustain it over the next two weeks.  It would not surprise me one bit to see them fade in the coming days and weeks.

The Bloc also had a good week. However, they are still not doing nearly as well as they did in 2008. It is an open question as to whether they will be able to sustain their post-debate bounce for the next two weeks.

For the Green Party the debates gave them another opportunity to get noticed by complaining that they were not in the debates. However, while that might get them some sympathy I doubt that it will get them any votes.

At the third week mark of the campaign it is still a toss-up as to who will win it. Certainly, the Conservatives have the advantage in the public polls but their campaign is still being beset by scandal and controversy while the campaign of their chief opponent is being run smoothly. The campaign is still the Conservatives' to lose but they are alot closer to doing so now at the beginning of the real election campaign than they were three weeks ago.

No knockout

2011-04-12T18:29:00.000-04:00

As much as we would all like to see Mr. Ignatieff reducing Mr. Harper to a pile of goo during these debates it is not going to happen. Neither will it happen in reverse. There will be no knockout blow during either debate. There are two reasons. One, each of the participants will be too well briefed and prepared. Two, the debate format is not conducive to knockout blows.

So, with this in mind the mindset of Mr. Ignatieff going is should be to focus on what he can control, namely delivering his message with passion and resolve. Being a former TV journalist he should have no problems in front of the cameras. If he just falls back on that experience he should be fine.

Week Two in the Books: Liberals with momentum and Conservatives in trouble

2011-04-08T16:57:00.000-04:00

So week number two is pretty well over and if we are to assess the results from it we can say that the Liberals seem to have a little bit of momentum heading into debate week and the Conservatives have some real troubles in the present and probable future.

The sense of momentum for the Liberals can be felt in the polls with most of them seeming to indicate that the Liberals and Mr. Ignatieff have made up alot of ground on the Conservatives in week two. As well, they seem to be taking support from the NDP, which is a necessary step in gaining power. Reducing vote splitting and convincing soft Conservative supporters to switch sides has always been the key to victory for the Liberals.

However, the real momentum can be seen in the campaign itself. Mr. Ignatieff is playing to packed houses. As I stated in a previous post in most cases these people are Liberal partisans. So, if Mr. Ignatieff can attract 1200 Liberal partisans in Hamilton that probably means that the candidates in Hamilton and surrounding areas are attracting alot of volunteers. That bodes well for the GOTV effort on election day. As well, all reports seem to indicate that fundraising is going very well which would seem to indicate that Liberals are engaged in this election. Remember folks that the Conservatives lost votes during the 2008 election but still won because almost 1 million Liberals decided to sit out that election. If they decide to come back things will be very good for the Liberals.

The Conservatives are having real difficulties. Week two of their campaign was just a brutal, if not more so, than week one. They stomped on their own message with three days of reports of their tactics for keeping undesirable young people out of their rallies, the illegal use of the RCMP in doing so and the ongoing Carson saga. It is starting to rattle Stephen Harper. That is the only reason why he would release the Conservative platform in the setting he did today. The bubble boy campaign claims are beginning to hit home and he desperately wants to appear to be reversing it without actually doing so of course. Then there is the content of the platform. Only a party that is feeling the heat would stomp on their own budget 17 days after tabling it in the House.

The Carson Affair is the real danger for the Conservatives. I know that Conservative supporters and their apologists in the media have been trying to downplay the whole thing and they have had some success so far. However, this affair just does not seem to end and with every new revelation more Canadians are wondering just what is going on there.

Further the elements of the affair can be very easily stitched together into a nasty narrative for the Conservatives.

"Stephen Harper appointed, as one of his senior advisors, a man who was convicted of a felony five times and who seems to have had links with a money launderer, a man who is now under RCMP investigation for allegations that he illegally lobbied the government for government contracts that could have kicked back 10s of millions of dollars to him and his fiancee, who happens to be a former high prices prostitute."

Do you think such a narrative could be nicely explained in a 30 second spot? One that is run, alot, from the end of the debates to the end of the election. As the Adscam ads the Conservatives used during the 2006 election demonstrate, they do not need to be totally true. They just need to tell a plausible story.

Mr. Carson could very well bring down the Conservative Party on May 2.

The Liberals are exactly where they want to be going into debate week. They have the momentum and they are facing a chief opponent that is showing signs that they may not be able to turn things around before election day.

The genius of Stephen Harper

2011-04-06T18:51:00.000-04:00

I now believe I know Stephen Harper's plan for winning this election. It is to run a campaign filled with so many gaffes, mistakes and errors that the war rooms of the other parties will not be able to keep up.

Afterall, just in the last two days the Conservative campaign has had revelations that it is using Facebook to screen out undesirables from their rallies. This is still ungoing as more people who have been victimized by this are coming forward. Then there is the ungoing Bruce Carson saga and the questions of if Stephen Harper knew he was a five time convicted felon when Mr. Harper tagged him as a senior advisor. These two events are on top of the other stuff we saw during week one.

This is very clever of the Conservatives. In fact it is genius. Keep your opponents off balance by running a lousy campaign. It is so crazy it might just work. As well, it gives the Conservatives the added benefit of hiding the fact that they do not have anything they can campaign on, at least not for this campaign. The 2015 campaign, they have it covered, but this campaign the cupboard is bare.

Genius I tell you.

Note: In case anybody does not realize it my tongue is firmly planted in my cheek for this post. So, on a more serious note has anybody noticed that the media are no longer talking about "coalitions" and they are no longer using the phrase "Conservative majority government"? The two key messages of the Conservatives have beem stomped on by their own ineptitude. Can the Conservative advantage in the polls be maintained if this continues?

Plunging

2011-04-05T19:21:00.000-04:00

The title of this post is not referring to a poll. It is referring to the moral of the members of the Privy Council Office (PCO) after they found out that Stephen Harper threw their whole department under a bus in yet another attempt to distance himself from the smell wafting up from the Carson Affair. You could only imagine their chagrin at being accused of not doing their job and being unable to respond to defend themselves.

I have disagreed with many conservative politicians over the years but I never had a personal dislike for any of them. The same cannot be said of Stephen Harper. I think the man is despicable. The PCO's function is to serve the Prime Minister. They are his very own department. These people bust their butt each day to serve him, which in many cases means watching his political back. You would think that he would appreciate that enough to do the same, after all that is what leaders do.

Canada is blessed with one of the most professional public services on the planet so Mr. Harper can rest assured that the PCO will not respond to his outrageous claims of their incompetence. Indeed, Mr. Harper probably took that fact into account when he came up with his latest defence.

However, there would be some justice if some damaging leaks began appearing in the media about some of the more controversial decisions this government has made over the last five years, which I will bet a large amount of money will not happen.

Politicians do not call elections unless they think they can win

2011-04-03T11:56:00.000-04:00

An obvious statement I know but one that needs to made because of all of the BS we saw leading up to this election.

Many in the chattering classes were on Mr. Ignatieff because of his desire to have an election. They pointed to the public polls and stating he had no chance so why force one now?

The obvious answer is he believes he can win and he is proving that by his performance this past week. He knows that the Conservatives are vulnerable in a number of fronts and that their expressed desire to not have an election was genuine. In politics it is generally a good idea to force your opponent to do something they do not want to do.

As the last week has demonstrated all of the reports in the media on how Mr. Harper wanted this election and how he maneuvered the opposition into bringing him down to force one was unadulterated bunk. Mr. Harper is not performing like someone who wanted to be campaigning. Quite the opposite is true. Many have noted that he does not seem to be campaigning to win. That is not true, of course he is campaigning to win. The problem is he did not want this election and he was not ready for it.

Of course, these men did not come to their decisions at random, they did seek out data and one source of that data in internal polling. Political parties poll to assist in their decision making and as a result they ask many questions the media do not think of or just refuse to ask. The "desire for change" question happens to be one that we used to see all of the time but has now disappeared from the media polls.

Armed with this data, the knowledge of the progress of their election planning processes and some political instinct the two party leaders determined whether they could win an election. Mr. Ignatieff believed he could and Mr. Harper could very well believe the same thing. We saw the result in Week one.

Are they correct in their beliefs. That question will be answered on May 2.

This election will be decided on the ground

2011-04-02T16:32:00.000-04:00

I went to my local Liberal candidate's campaign office this morning to give her a big fat monetary political contribution. I no longer have the time in my busy life to actually volunteer so I now just give them money. I will be doing the same for the national campaign.

I arrived at the office just before the candidate was heading out to do some canvassing. She had a good team to accompany her, she also had other teams that were going canvassing without her and the telephone canvassing stations were all occupied. Since I was there, and not being a stranger to campaign offices, I took a quick look around and noticed that she already has over two dozen volunteers for e-day. Just a week in and already that many have decided to take part in the GOTV effort on May 2. Impressive.

This is just one local campaign but we may be seeing signs of it being more widespread by the size of the crowds coming out to see Mr. Ignatieff at his campaign stops. Make no mistake, these people are not ordinary Canadians. They are Liberal partisans, probably working for a local campaign in the area. So, if Mr. Ignatieff can draw almost a 1000 people in say, Winnipeg, that probably means that the local campaigns in that city and the surrounding area are seeing a good turnout of volunteers.

The national campaign is important but as 2008 demonstrates without a good ground game to pull the vote you will not see success.

The first week of the national campaign was encouraging. Seeing the crowds that Mr. Ignatieff has been speaking to and the buzz I saw today at my local candidate's office is also encouraging that the ground game for the Liberals will be much better than the last two elections.

Week One in the Books: Something for Everybody

2011-04-01T19:06:00.000-04:00

The election is one week old and it has been an interesting week. If you are sitting at home assessing how things went it can probably be concluded that every one of the campaigns can take away some positives from the week.

The Liberals can take the most positives. Michael Ignatieff is proving, so far, to be a good campaigner. He has been focused and that is rubbing off on the campaign. The ads they have released are good. He is doing a good job of comparing the Liberal and Conservative positions and priorites. The chattering classes are beginning to see that the caricature that the Conservative Party created of him does not match reality. The only real hiccup was the gentleman from Vaughn (sorry I am lousy with names) deciding to back the Conservatives. Other than that it has all been good news and if they can keep it up the Liberals could win, maybe even win big.

The Conservatives have had a terrible first week. Stephen Harper did not want to have this election and it shows. From his first news conference at Rideau Hall to the present he has not looked comfortable campaigning. His head is not in the game as demonstrated by the coalition gambit and the debate challenge. By most accounts it was his idea to pursue the coalition angle and how he believed that his own words about the issue, from 2004 and 1997, would not enter into the conversation is astounding. Then there is the debate challenge. Making the challenge undid everything the Conservatives have been trying to do since Michael Ignatieff became leader of the Liberal Party. It made him an equal. Backing out of the debate just 24 hours after issuing the challenge makes him look weak. This and other gaffes have made Mr. Harper go further into the bubble that he started the campaign in, freezing out the media, much to their chagrin, which could have some negative impacts on the campaign in the medium to long-term. His campaign has been Seinfeldian in nature. He only made two real promises this week. One that will not take effect until Jim Kirk starts his 5 year mission and the one today, which everybody could see coming, and which he announced on a Friday afternoon. Again, people are noticing, including the media, and some serious questions regarding the Conservative campaign are being posed.

All that being said, the Conservatives can take some solace from two polls today. Despite all of their troubles they have not seemed to have suffered for it, yet.

However, Conservatives had better take those estimates with a grain of salt. Conservatives just need to look to Prime Minister Martin's campaign of 2006 to see what happens to party leaders who focus mainly on fear during an election campaign and who leads a campaign beset with problems like the Conservative campaign has been of late. If it continues it will catch up to them.

Some state that the Conservatives could turn things around and that is certainly true. However, the kind of campaign the Conservatives are having can feed on themselves and no matter what the party or leader does they just cannot right the ship.

The NDP is having its typical election campaign. It is trying to be heard and trying to appear relevant. So far, its policy proposals have been underwhelming. It too can take solace from the latest EKOS poll as they were the only party that saw their estimates move outside of the MOE. The other parties were all pretty static.

The Bloc is the Bloc. Gilles Duceppe is a seasoned campaigner and he has the advantage of only having to campaign in Quebec. So far, his party seems to be holding its own. If Quebecers collectively decide, again, to be disengaged from the governance of Canada they should do well. If that begins to change, watch their fortunes change for the worst, quickly.

The decision of the media consortium to not include the Greens is a gift for them. It allowed them to be heard at least for a short time this week. Any other decision and the Greens would not have received any attention at all.

Four questions per day?

2011-03-29T19:32:00.000-04:00

Word out of the Conservative campaign is Stephen Harper is now only going to answer four questions per day. At any other time I would find such a report as lacking credibility. However, Stephen Harper has a history of running away form situations when he finds it getting too hot, from not answering journalists' questions to proroguing Parliament.

In one of my previous posts I asked how the media would play this election. I stated that they would side with the campaign they believed had the greatest chance of winning. As I said, the corporate bosses of the MSM will want to be on the good side of the victor.

I am certain that the journalists on the Conservative Leader's campaign tour are not too enamoured with these new restrictions on them. I am also certain that some of them will see this a blood on the water. However, I believe they will bide their time for another few days. If the Conservative campaign continues to stumble and if polls begin to show the Liberals closing the gap then we may see the media turn against the Conservatives, possibly with gusto.

This really turning into an interesting election.

First Impressions

2011-03-28T20:55:00.000-04:00

Some initial impressions of the party leaders after three days of the election.

Michael Ignatieff is looking like Jean Chretien in the sense that he seems to be enjoying himself. I am not saying he has the political smarts of Mr. Chretien or anything but one thing I noticed about Mr. Chretien during his three campaigns is he always seemed to be having fun regardless of the daily vagaries of them. The same seems to be true of Mr. Ignatieff. He looks like he is having fun.

Stephen Harper does not look like he is having fun. He has always been a gloomy individual having to work really hard to appear cheerful and friendly. So far he has not been totally successful in that goal and on top of that he is channelling Paul Martin. The Liberals have a "hidden agenda"? Canadians have been there and done that.

Jack Layton has surprised me so far. For the first time in longer than I can remember he has actually made the Conservatives a target of his campaign as opposed to the Liberals. It seemed during the 2008 campaign Mr. Layton talked more about the Liberals than the Conservatives. The past three days have been much different. I am certain as things go forward he will change his focus but it is refreshing to see the NDP focus on the governing party for a change.

Gilles Duceppe also surprised me with his focus on Stephen Harper. Mind you the Bloc has a better chance of taking away the few Conservative seats in Quebec than the Liberal seats. As well, since the Conservatives tend to target the same voters as the Bloc they are a bigger threat to the Bloc than the Liberals right now.

Lizzy May has been invisible which is not surprising considering the environment is not front and centre in this campaign. She will not be included in the debates this time and there will not be a backlash to that fact either.

How will this election play in the media?

2011-03-27T17:10:00.000-04:00

The Main Stream Media (MSM) in this country is not objective or balanced. That is a journalism school fallacy. This is particularly true of political reporters.

In a few cases it is because of ideology, with the Sun and the National Post being the best examples. In most cases though the media chooses the side they believe will win.

The reason is simple, money. Ownership of our MSM is pretty much concentrated in three large corporations. Those corporations want access to government (taxpayer) funds and the best way to do that is not to piss off the party that is governing or looks like it is about to become the governing party.

We saw this throughout the Liberal years. With the exception of the Sun and the National Post the MSM largely ignored or downplayed some of the more outrageous actions of the Chretien government, focusing on the positive instead. At the same time they nitpicked the Reform Party/Canadian Alliance relentlessly. This reached its peak during the 2000 election when they hounded Stockwell Day for even the most minor gaffe. Certainly he provided them with alot of content but I have always believed that the media was extremely unfair to him and the Canadian Alliance in 2000.

We saw this again in 2004 but when Stephen Harper reduced the Liberals to a minority things began to change in the MSM. They were still hard on the Conservatives but they were not as easy on the Liberals as they had been just a few years before.

Since 2006, we have seen the same thing with only the players changing. The Conservatives have enjoyed a rather easy time of it compared to the Liberals.

So which way will the media jump in this election?

That will all depend on how the election goes. I think the corporate bosses in the media will hedge their bets this time because this election is a crap shoot for both the Liberals and the Conservatives. They will want to be able to point to whoever wins that they treated them fairly during the election so they deserve a place at the public trough.

The Liberals will not enjoy an easy time of it as demonstrated by the hounding about the coalition the day before the writ was dropped but neither are they going to be nitpicked about every little thing happening in the Liberal campaign. (Remember the MSM reaction to the trouble with the campaign plane the last time?) However, the Conservatives will not receive the easy treatment they received during the 2008 election either, as demonstrated by the fact the media actually asked Mr. Harper about his coalition letter of 2004.

Both Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff are going to have to work hard to impress the MSM this time and it will be interesting to see how each one of them handles that reality.

"We categorically rule out a coalition or formal arrangement with the Bloc Quebecois."

2011-03-26T16:52:00.005-04:00

That is the key point in the Liberal Party media release from this morning.

I would guess that most people opposed to a coalition, who are not Conservative partisans, are opposed to it because of the idea that the a seperatist party might gain some power in our Federal Government.

Remove that worry and the idea of a coalition is no longer so objectionable, except of course to Conservative partisans.

Now all the Liberals have to do is take the above statement and place it beside the letter Mr. Harper wrote to the GG in 2004 and the statements made by Mr. Duceppe today regarding the process that lead to that letter.

Not only would the Liberals neutralize the coalition issue as a threat in this election they would turn it back on Stephen Harper, making him look like the hypocrit that he is on this whole issue.

On a related note, did Stephen Harper and the Conservatives really believe that their machinations of 2004 would not be brought back into the light when they began trying to scare Canadians about the "evil coalition" again?

Stephen Harper is not a political genius

2011-03-26T14:18:00.005-04:00

It is with great amusement that I read many media commentators claiming that Stephen Harper is poised to win a majority government because he is a seasoned campaigner while Mr. Ignatieff is a rookie.

How they have such short memories.

In the last two elections the Conservatives were given remarkable electoral gifts. The first was Adscam the second was a political opponent who did not have his whole party behind him and wound up having to deal with the perception that he was proposing a new tax just as a recession was starting.

In both of these cases Stephen Harper had majority governments virtually handed to him but he still managed to blow it.

I could just imagine what Jean Chretien would have done with either of these electoral gifts. Actually I do not need to imagine. Just look at what he did in 2000.

So why would anybody believe it will be different this time?

One of the other advantages that the Conservatives had the last couple of times was they did not have to defend their record over much. Things were not all great on that front in 2008 but they could deflect any flak by pointing to the Green Shift. This time around their government fell because they were found in Contempt of Parliament and they are facing all sorts of little scandals, which on their own would not be that bad, but when taken together could be trouble.

Now Mr. Ignatieff just sucked the air out of the one issue that they could have used to deflect attention away from those scandals.

In short, this election might not be as easy for Mr. Harper and the Conservatives as the last two.

The last two times the Liberals gave the Conservatives great electoral gifts and they failed to take advantage. There are only so many times that the Liberals will do the Conservatives this favour. Will they do it again this time? That remains to be seen but if they do not I wonder how Mr. Harper the political genius will react.

The secret to a good nights sleep

2011-03-26T10:58:00.007-04:00

Do not live and die by the polls.

Watch and listen to the leaders of the parties instead. They will tell you how this thing is going much better than Nanos, EKOS, Ipsos, etc. ever will.

Oh yes, I am going to go out on a limb right now and make a prediction on how this election will end.

It will end when all of the polling booths across the country close during the evening of May 2 and the ballots are counted.

More like 2004

2011-03-25T11:52:00.012-04:00

Warren Kinsella seems to believe that the upcoming election will be like the 1984 election. I think he has missed it by 20 years.

The beginning of this election is more like the election of 2004.

For that election the sitting government began the it under a cloud of scandal but the scandal, that eventually became Adscam, was still not fully explored, since Justice Gomery had barely begun his work. So there was a suspicion that things were not quite right with the ethical conduct of the government but it had not yet hit that critical mass that caused the sitting government to suffer for it at the polls. Although it did suffer for it at the only poll that really mattered. (More on that in a minute)

The sitting PM had a huge lead over his chief opponent in every leadership score there was. Actually the lead was embarrassingly large. So much so the media had pretty much written off his chief opponent and expected the government to be returned with a majority despite the scandals.

Hell, there was even a poll published by a government friendly newspaper just days before the writ was dropped and the banner front page headline in that paper was "Liberals heading for majority: poll". The story then went on to explain that the governing party was in majority terrritory with almost a 20 point lead.

The economy was booming and the governing party wanted to focus on that while downplaying the brewing scandal.

The governing party spent a great deal of time and money demonizing their chief opponent.

Sound familiar?

Of course, we all know how that election turned out. The governing party was reduced to a minority government and its main opponent set itself up for a victory just 18 months later.

This does not seem to bode well for the Liberals this time because if the same thing happens this time as it did in 2004 they lose.

However, there are some big differences that need to be explored.

First and foremost, the governing party had a majority government heading into the 2004 election. It could afford to lose a bunch of seats and still retain power. The margin for error for the current government is much smaller.

Second, Paul Martin was actually liked by most Canadians. They knew he was partly responsible for the good times that we were enjoying at that time. As well, he was on the right side of many issues that mattered to Canadians such as health care and child care. The current government leader is not liked and the governments priorities seem to be out of step with the electorate.

Third, the government of PMPM and of PMJC before him enjoyed majority support and double digit leads over their cheif opponent, in poll after poll, from every polling company, for years prior to that election. That remained true right up to when the writ was dropped. With the exception of the past 6 weeks the current government has been mired in minority government territory and has bounced back and forth between small leads to statistical ties with their chief opponents for the past 24 months. And if you go back to the time between the 2004 election and the 2006 election you see a similar pattern.

The parallels between this coming election and the one that we enjoyed in 2004 are quite striking. However, there are several key differences that will have an impact on how things unfold going forward so I am certain that his election will eventually turn out like the 2011 election instead of the 2004 or 1984 elections.

It's a coalition, run for you lives!!

2011-03-24T20:09:00.005-04:00

If the Liberals want to put this issue to bed they need to take a page out of Stephen Harper's book.

At the beginning of the 2005/2006 campaign Stephen Harper neutralized the SSM issue by stating what he would do about it during his very first campaign stop. Everybody thought he was nuts but it allowed him to put the issue behind him early and focus on getting the Conservative message out there.

Michael Ignatieff should do the same thing. On his very first campaign stop, when the inevitable questions about a coalition comes up he should anwser them in three parts.

Part one, make the following statement:

"The Liberal Party is running to win this election. When we win the election and if Canadians entrust us with only enough seats to form a minority government the Liberal team and I will work with any Member of Parliament who wants to work with us towards building a better Canada for all Canadians."

Part two, when the inevitable follow-up questions about what happens if the Liberals lose but the Conservatives only win a minority government are asked make the following statement.

"We expect to win but if the Conservative Party wins the most seats in a minority Parliament they will have the first opportunity to form a government. That is just how our system works. It will then be the responsibility of Stephen Harper to to work with the other Parties in the House to gain the confidence of the new Parliament and to continue governing.

Part three, if follow-up questions about what the Liberals would do if the Conservatives failed to gain the confidence of the House are asked Mr. Ignatieff should ask, with a wry smile:

"You really do not believe that Stephen Harper would not do whatever it takes to hang on to power do you?"

Stick to this message and repeat it everytime these questions are asked. It would not be too long before they stop asking these questions.

Handicapping the election

2011-03-22T18:58:00.013-04:00

With an election campaign seeming to be inevitable maybe its time to take a look at the main combattants in it.

Conservatives: The Conservatives are entering this campaign mired in scandal. True it is not a big, headline grabbing scandal like Adscam but it is a bunch of smaller ones that inconveniently for them fit nicely into a rather negative narrative about their government and its ethical compass. Scandals kill governments and distract parties during elections campaigns so I am certain that there is a fair amount of unease going into this campaign with these scandals still developing.

As well, the Conservatives are on the wrong side of several key issues. Corporate tax cuts, F-35s and prisons are not on the list of priorities for Canadians so the Conservatives could have some difficulty trying to sell these to the electorate.

Then there is Stephen Harper. Even his friends would say he is not really liked or a likeable man. That fact is probably the key reason why he has been unable to achieve the majority government him and his party so crave. This fact has not changed and he is now going into his fourth election as leader of the Conservative Party. If this election becomes a referendum on Stephen Harper the Conservatives could be in tough.

All that being said the Conservatives have almost double the number of seats as their next closest and chief opponent. That is a hell of an advantage to begin with going into a campaign. There will have to be a massive swing in seats for the Conservatives to lose government and it would probably take the Conservatives having the wheels really coming off of their campaign to have that happen.

I see the Conservatives in the same position that Paul Martin was in before the 2004 election. In seems likely that the Conservatives will be returned with a much smaller minority facing a much stronger Liberal Party.

Liberals: It would appear the Liberal Party is stronger than it has been since Mr. Chretien left the scene. There is a certain swagger in their step on the eve of this election and I believe that the reason for that is they know the Conservatives are very vulnerable on a number of fronts.

The wildcard in this election will be Mr. Ignatieff. He is a journalist and author making him a natural communicator. He is not very well known outside of the political classes so he has an opportunity to use those skills to define himself to Canadians. Unlike Mr. Harper he is a likeable fellow and if Canadians begin to like him the Conservatives are in real trouble. As well, if he can use his communications skill to forcefully push the Liberal message they could enjoy some success. Of course, that message better be a coherent one that resonates with Canadians or all of his communcations skill will be for naught. That is my biggest complaint about the last three Liberal campaign. They had no direction, no theme, they just threw seemingly random policy proposals out there hoping some of them would stick.

The Liberals have a rather tough hill to climb and they would have to run the perfect campaign to reach the summit so I am not really expecting them to do so this time around. If they run a decent campaign they should be able to pick up quite a few seats, perhaps even reaching the century mark again, and setting themselves up to retake government, probably in 2014.

NDP: The fate of the NDP will rest with the desire amongst progressives to finally be rid of the Harper government. If that feeling is strong many progressives will turn to the only party that has any chance of defeating the Conservatives, namely the Liberals. If that happens the NDP suffers. If that feeling is not strong the NDP will probably not take as big of a hit.

However, the NDP probably did hit its high water mark during the 2008 campaign so it can probably expect to lose some seats this time around.

Watch out for Jack Layton. He is battling health issues and that could effect his ability to campaign and there is no predicting how it might effect the internal party politics of the NDP.

The Bloc: They seem to be the most comfortable of the four big parties. However, I would not take anything for granted when it comes to Quebec voters.

Greens: Sorry Green Party supporters, with the environment no longer so prominent in the minds of Canadians the Green Party will be hard pressed to make any big inroads during this election. Like the NDP, if progressives decide they have had enough of Mr. Harper and go to the only party that can push him out the Greens will suffer.

They will again fail to win a seat in Parliament.

There you have it. Take these opinions as you like. I know myself that I will come back to his post later this spring and either say to myself that I am a freaking genius or ask whether I am willing to share what I have been smoking because it would appear it was really good shit.

Conservatives feeling the heat?

2011-03-22T18:25:00.009-04:00

After my disgust over the attacks on Mr. Ignatieff's father abated somewhat I had to ask myself why the Conservative War Room would have taken such a direction.

Surely they really cannot believe it was a good idea. I do not know of anybody who would appreciate it if someone were to attack their dead father or grandfather, particularly if it were for personal gain. So why would they believe that such an attack would resonate with Canadians when it was directed at their chief political opponent?

If they would have done that in the heat of an election campaign I could imagine that it could have become the Harper Conservative's "reptilian kitten eater moment". In short they blundered and badly.

That is the type of blunder political parties make when they begin to feel the pressure of an election campaign that is slipping away from them. We have seen it before, Kim Campbell, Ernie Eves, and Paul Martin, just within the last 20 years.

If the attack was the result of the above it would speak volumes about the state of mind of the Conservatives going into a campaign. After all, if they make such blunders before an election campaign begins just imagine the potential for equally serious blunders if things begin to go awry during an actual campaign.

Stephen Harper won the last two elections because he imposed iron discipline on his party and its apparatus. Then again he was not really challenged during those elections so it was rather easy to do so. If Mr. Ignatieff turns out to be a greater challenge it will be interesting to see if he can maintain that discipline

It is going to be an interesting election campaign I think.

Will he or won't he?

2011-03-09T22:01:00.005-05:00

Considering the ethical troubles the Conservatives have found themselves in during the past few weeks.

Considering Stephen Harper is a control freak whose head would explode if he was forced to fight an election he did not call.

Considering the fact that Stephen Harper has a tendency to hide from accountability whenever the media or the Opposition managed to corner him on the issue.

Will Stephen Harper prorogue Parliament for a third time to avoid all of the above?

What do you think?

Where's our revolution?

2011-02-26T19:50:00.015-05:00

For a person who believes in democracy the recent events in the Arab world is very heartening. Leaving aside the idea that nothing will really change in these countries you cannot but be moved by seeing all of these people coming out and demanding changes and a more powerful voice for themselves in how they are governed.

In all cases these people are revolting against a rich and priviledged elite in their countries. These elites control all of the levers of power and they make decisions for the benefit of themselves, often shafting those who do not share their elite status in the process.

Upon looking at these events and who the main protaganists are in them I could not help but see many parallels between their societies and ours. Western society also suffers from the same inequalities that the Arabs are fighting against. There is a rich and priviledged elite that countrols much of the economy and has many friends within the governing class of our societies. You just need to see the reaction of governments to the 2008 financial meltdown to see that, both the immediate reaction and their reactions in the aftermath. The financial meltdown was caused by recklessness amongst the rich and powerful, whose greed caused them to make decisions that almost brought down the entire global financial system. It was criminal really but did they suffer any consequences. Of course not, during the crisis they were bailed out with taxpayer funds so that none of them even had to sacrifice their wealth and lifestyles to pay for their folly. Since then we have seen that they have not even suffered medium or long-term consequences because governments have ignored their culpability in the events of 2008 and instead seem to rewarding them and going after ordinary people instead. The corporate tax cuts proposed by the Harper government and the removal of collective barbaining rights in Wisconson are two example.

This in itself is bad enough but what is really maddening and mind boggling is the reaction of ordinary people to all of this. They are poorer because of the actions of the wealthy elite in Western society but they are siding with them against ordinary citizens in most cases. You just need to see their reaction to the fights by the unions on Wisconson and in other juristictions where governments have been trying to reduce union rights to see that. The wealth elites in Western society are building up their wealth and power to the detriment of ordinary citizens and those very same ordinary citizens are cheering them on. It really is mind boggling and it puts paid to all of those Economics textbooks that state people make decisions based on their own economic interests.

The problem is we all believe that because we can vote in actual free and fair elections we are not really in the same position as the Arabs. On the surface that is true but looking deeper it is very apparent that a wealthy and priviledged elite are using their power and influence to protect themselves from the most harmful consequences of their actions and to further their ability to gather wealth to the detriment of ordinary citizens.

So, when are those ordinary citizens going to realize this and demand change? If the Arabs can do it certainly we should be able to.

The Conservatives are not unassailable

2011-02-26T18:55:00.026-05:00

With the release of some "bad news" polls recently I have been seeing some doom and gloom amongst some Liberals. They seem to believe that the Liberals cannot win the next election.

Rubbish!!

First of all do not worry about the polls because they are not predictive. If they were, John Turner, Kim Campbell, Ernie Eves, and Paul Martin would have all won majority governments. Sitting governments always do better than the Opposition in between elections but that often hides an underlying weakness that only manifests itself during an election. As well, do not actually look at the polls themselves but at the reactions of the various players on the Canadian political scene to these polls. Neither the Liberals or the Conservatives appear to be reacting as they should be considering what the public polls are saying. I find there is more enthusiasm for an election amongst the Liberals than the Conservatives, which is strange considering what the public polls are saying. Then there is the media. The last time the public polls were saying the Conservatives were leading by the current margins they were all saying that Stephen Harper would engineer his own defeat to go for his majority. We have not seen that reaction this time. They are not saying boo about it this time.

Second, as I have stated in this space before governments have life cycles and they tend to permanently lose support as the life of the government progresses. It is a function of the government having to piss people off in the course of governing and the fact people eventually get tired of a government and begin looking for a change. I recently went on a business trip to Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary. When the people I was meeting with found out I was from Ottawa many of my private consersations did turn to politics and of the dozen or so people that I talked to about it none of them had anything good to say about the current government in general and Stephen Harper in particular. It was surprising really. If people in Edmonton and Calgary are stating they are not liking Stephen Harper very much it stands to reason that such an attitude would be much more widespread in areas of the country that are not the Conservative Party bedrock. By no means are my observations "scientific" and these folks are not likely to vote Liberal in any case but it still significant and it could be an indication that the Conservatives have passed that point in the life of a government when they are vulnerable to the desire for change amongst the electorate hitting critical mass.

Third, the Conservatives have been dogged by controversy and scandal since the 2008 election. The Oda Affair and the charges laid in the "In-and-Out" scheme are just the latest. By themselves they do not do significant damage but taken together they tend to add up and a government tends to die a death of a thousand cuts because of them. As well, they are election campaign gold for Opposition Parties.

Fourth, the Conservatives are on the wrong side of several issues right now and that could hurt them during an election. From corporate tax cuts, to F-35s, to prisons the Conservatives have taken positions that could cost them significant support during an election and despite their seemingly big lead it would not take much of a shift away from them to the Liberals to put them on the Opposition benches.

Fifth, Michael Ignatieff appears to be enjoying himself on his tours of the country. I know many have dismissed these tours but they are allowing Mr. Ignatieff to gain much needed experience in retail politics, which was sorely lacking in Mr. Dion during the last go round. Mr. Ignatieff spent his life communicating with people and we all know that being a good communicator can make a big difference in election campaigns. Just look to JFK, Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan to see that in action. If Mr. Ignatieff combines his communications skills with an enhanced ability to play the retail political game he will be hard to beat.

The Conservatives are vulnerable and they are certainly not unbeatable. Of course, it would take a good campaign by the Liberals and it is still an open question if they can come up with such a campaign. However, as it stands now the next election will be a crap shoot for the government and there is a strong possibility they could come up snake-eyes when it is all over.

No substantial change in Egypt is coming

2011-02-11T13:07:00.008-05:00

The upheaval in Egypt is great if you love democracy. A long suffering people, victimized by a powerful and arrogant elite, has risen up to fight it. They have finally had their first real substantial victory in forcing the President to resign, which will also preclude the President's son from replacing him as planned.

So who will replace him?

That remains to be seen but one of the most powerful forces in Egypt after the current ruling elite is the Muslim Brotherhood and if there is a free and fair election held in Egypt within the next few months they would probably win the government.

As Muslim parties go the Brotherhood is not overly radical. They really do not care about what is happening outside of Egypt and its immediate surroundings. Over the years they have really just fought to have what wealth Egypt has to be more evenly distributed. However, they are openly Muslim so they will immediately frighten the US government. Although there are many in the US government who would recognize the Brotherhood as being non-threatening to US interests in the Middle East they will be quickly overwelmed by the voices of bigotry in the US which will force the Obama Adminstration to act in ways that will not be in the best interests of ordinary Egyptians.

Hosni Mubarak was the tip of ruling elite in Egypt. He was sacrificed by them in the hope that his removal would turn down the temperature in that country enough for them to hang on to their current status and the wealth that comes along with it. They will be working behind the scenes over the next few months to retain that status, regardless of what is happening out in the open, and the Obama Administration will be working with them to help them succeed.

The uprising in Egypt is a spontaneous expression of anger and resentment but it is unorganized. The same cannot be said about the focus of this resentment. The ruling elite in Egypt is very organized and it will eventually prevail. Certainly they will allow the appearance of real change in Egypt but with the assistance of the US government it will go no deeper than appearance. In five years ordinary Egyptians will still be in the same position they were before the uprising, nothing will have change for the better for them.

The Sorry State of Political Reporting

2010-12-21T19:09:00.009-05:00

I do not know why I bothered but I read the most recent article today in the Globe and Mail by Jane Taber and the only thing I could think of was "no wonder mainstream news organizations in the Western world are having difficulties".

I am a political animal and I found that article to be boring and pointless beyond belief. I had to force myself to finish it. I could only imagine the reaction from those who do not care about politics.

That article really sums up the MSM's troubles. They publish articles that the vast majority of their consumers will not read and they are doing it with increasing regularity and then wonder why their readership and ratings are down across the board.

The alternatives to that article are many, the agreement on the changes to pensions reached by the country's finance ministers being an obvious one. As someone who is middle aged I read the story about it and I will read any analysis of it in the future because it will actually have an impact on my life at some point.

An article about Conservative election strategy, not so much. Particularly since the article was unadulterated BS. Somebody should tell these "political" journalists that political parties generally do not make their election strategy public as they do not want their opponents to know what it is until an election is called. So, if a source within a political party calls you up and wants to talk to you about such a strategy all sorts of red flags should go up in your head and you should be a little more critical of what the source is telling you instead of taking it as whole cloth truth.

For instance the obvious question is why would you be making any part of your election strategy public? I am certain that you would not get a straight answer but you should at least give it the old college try.

One obvious answer.

The Conservatives want to give the impression that they have the "Big Mo" going into the Spring. The target audience for that message is not the electorate but the Liberals. The Conservatives know that Stephen Harper will be fighting his fourth election. They know that his esteem amongst the electorate is at its lowest since he was elected to government. Certainly Mr. Ignatieff is lower but he is the Leader of the Opposition so that is to be expected. They know that a large majority of Canadians now believe the country is heading in the wrong direction and that number has been growing steadily for about a year. In short, they know that the next election will be a crap shoot that they could very well lose so they want to postpone it as long as possible. So, they come up with some bullshit story and peddle it to any journalist that is willing to take it at face value.

The MSM in the Western world is having difficulties and the big brains in their head offices are attempting to come up with all sorts of ways to reverse the trend. Here is a little bit a free advice on how you may be able to contribute to such a reversal; Stop allowing your news organizations to be manipulated by political parties and remember that the main reason why people consume the news is to find out what is going on in the world that will directly effect their lives and their livelihoods. Until you do that you can expect the downward trends in readership and ratings to continue.

Clusterf**k

2010-12-10T18:17:00.023-05:00

It was with great amusement that I read the story in the Globe and Mail last week about how the Conservatives were "on track" to a majority government using a "cluster" strategy in Ontario to put them there. They managed to weave together the Conservative win in Vaughn, the latest Nanos poll and some interesting speculation on Conservative strategy into a wonderful piece of political fiction.

First the poll.

The key feature of the Nanos poll was if you look at the estimates from the current poll and compare them to the estimates from the last poll you notice that the change in the estimates for all of the parties is within the margin of error. In fact, the aggregate change of both the Liberals and the Conservatives is well within that MOE. What that means is there was no real change in the estimates from one poll to the next. The fluctuation of the numbers is the natural differences you will see from one poll to the next when you use the same polling methodology poll after poll.
The other two big polls that came out this week show the same thing.

The most interesting thing about all three big polls is they are either monthly or quarterly polls and in all cases they showed that over that time there has been no change in the political dynamic in this country. They demonstrate that Canadians are in a holding pattern, with the Conservatives holding the incumbent advantage. In fact, you can go back farther with these polling companies to see that this pattern is one of long standing so it is probably going to take an election to change it.

As for the actual estimates themselves you just need to remember that all polling companies poll the same survey population using slightly different polling methodologies and that is the reason why each polling company has different estimates. The only constant for all of them is the "holding pattern" dynamic that I mentioned above. Which one of these polls best reflects the current reality as far as the level of support each party enjoys amongst Canadian voters? Who knows and it really is not relevent right now because an election is not imminent.

Second the "Cluster Strategy".

The biggest and most obvious flaw in the logic of this strategy outlined by this story is it is based on the very unreasonable assumption that the Conservatives will hang on to their current seats. Therefore, they only need about 10 seats to win a majority and they seem to be available in the 416 and 905 area codes.

What is missing is, if you believe the polls, the Conservatives could lose all but one of their seats in Quebec. No serious Conservative strategist would not take that possibility into account when planning strategy so in fact they are looking at the possible requirement of winning from 15 to 20 additional seats in those two Ontario area codes. Looking at those two area codes there do appear to be around 9 seats that the Liberals won by a small margin so they could be vulnerable. However, there are a like number seats in that part of Ontario that the Conservatives won by very slim margins (Mr. Fantino, I am looking at you). So, this "cluster" strategy must be able to accomplish the goal of winning all of the "vulnerable" Liberal seats without losing any of the "vulnerable" Conservative seats and then take another half-dozen or so Liberal seats where their margins of victory were much higher. Is this possible? Certainly but it I were a political strategist I would not be counting on it happening.

The above also does not take into account that the Conservatives won many more seats in other parts of the country by small margins so the Conservatives would need to bat a thousand in keeping all of them just to keep their "seats to majority" requirements under 20.

Another obvious flaw is the strategy as outlined in the story is the Conservatives seem to be planning on accomplishing this feat by preaching law-and-order in the cities and suburbs while preaching their anti-gun control gospel in rural areas. Do Conservative strategists really believe they can keep their message on gun control from seeping into the urban and suburban areas of this country where gun control is popular? Good luck with that.

The whole "cluster strategy" story was a piece of political fiction. Their analysis of the Nanos poll was superficial at best as they did not mention the fact the estimates had not changed from one quarter to the next. Their analysis of the "cluster strategy" was also very superficial and it was based on some extremely questionable assumptions.

All-in-all an interesting read but not one that could be taken seriously.

Well, that's a relief

2010-11-30T19:32:00.005-05:00

With the mixed results of the by-elections last night it looks like we will be saved from the inevitable wingeing, hand wringing and cringeing from Liberals, activities that had already begun to happen in some parts of the Liberal blogsphere ever before the elections results were in.

Certainly the usual suspects are going to spin this in a way that suits their interests.

Conservatives are spinning it as a big victory.

Some in the media have stated the results are a further indication that the Liberals are in trouble. Then again the MSM in this country has been writing the political obituary of the Liberal Party for more than 5 years yet it just keeps sticking around.

Then there are some Liberals who are spinning it as really bad news but invaribly they are all Liberals who have expressed great displeasure in Mr. Ignatieff as the leader of the Party and they take any setback, real or otherwise, to butress their prejudice. They remind me of Habs fans who seem to relish the idea of Carey Price having a bad season just so they could be proven "right" in their assessment that the Canadiens traded the wrong goaltender. Or in other words their dislike of Mr. Ignatieff is more important to them than finally relegating Mr. Harper and his government to the dust bin of history. Sad really.

The reality of course is these were by-elections. They do not indicate any big trends for the upcoming general election; the results of them do not change the political landscape in Parliament and the only people who really care about them are the few that voted in the by-elections, political commentators who work for free and seem to have way too much time on their hands and paid political commentators who need to keep their bosses happy. The wider Canadian public probably were not even aware that by-elections took place last night until they read about it in this morning's newspapers.

In the end these were victories for the individual candidates that won in each riding and nothing more.

What would a debate on the Afghan mission accomplish?

2010-11-19T20:08:00.019-05:00

There has been a fair amount of negative reaction to the decision of the government to extend the Afghan mission and their assertion, with the support of the Liberals, that no debate is necessary in the House.

My original reaction was just as negative but after thinking about it for awhile I am now wondering if it is such a big deal.

Many have argued that such a debate is necessary to assert the supremacy of Parliament. While I agree with such a sentiment I would point out that Parliament began its descent into irrelevancy under Trudeau and every government since then continued its descent with the current government taking it to extremes.

Further, even if we eventually have a Parliamentary debate and a subsequent vote we all know that Stephen Harper will make certain that such a debate is in the form of a non-binding motion which they will use to reinforce their position if they win the vote and ignore if they lose. So, really the interests of Parliamentary supremacy would not be served by such a debate and vote.

I have argued before that the true test of the actual Supremacy of Parliament will come after the current paranoid government is removed from power and we see how its successor deals with Parliament. On that score the actions of the Liberals in this case have disappointed me.

Looking at the situation on the ground, not much has changed. The Taliban is still winning the war in Afghanistan. The Karzai regime is still incompetent and corrupt and they only control Kabul. The rest of the country is still ruled by warlords who are still financing themselves and their warbands with drug money.

Here at home the war is still not very popular but that unpopularity has not really been galvanized into an actual anti-war movement. Canadians do not really want to be there but at the same time they are not clamouring for the troops to be brought home either. Further, much of the chattering class is still firmly behind the war as witnessed by the claims that the agreement between the Conservatives and the Liberals was "bipartisan" and by the fact that none of the MSM have made a real effort to analyze the implications of the proposed new assignment.

So, in the end any Parliamentary debate on the new assignment would just degenerate into jingoism, false patriotism and generally useless BS just like the last "debate" we had on the Afghan mission. No really important questions would be answered or even discussed and Canadians would eventually just tune it out and have their belief that our Parliament is useless further reinforced.

Further, do not mistake the hooting of the Bloc and the NDP as a serious desire to debate this new assignment. They merely see a an opening for gaining some political advantage.

Finally, when all is said and done, the decision on whether Canada remains in Afganistan depends of Barack Obama. He is now focusing on re-election in 2012 and part of that effort will be the removal of troops from Afghanistan before November 2012. The US may not remove them all by then but they will remove a large proportion of them and when that happens the pressure from Canadians on our government to remove our troops will be irresistable, regardless of who is in power. I would expect the Obama Administration to begin making serious noises about withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan next summer with the buildup of pressure on our government to correspond to increased momentum of that withdrawal going into 2012.

All of this talk about Canadian troops remaining in Afghanistan until 2014 is bunk. The draw down of Canadian troops next summer will be the beginning of a process that will probably end no later than the summer of 2012.

I am not surprised by the decision to keep Canadian troops in Afghanistan after 2011. Anyone who really believed that Canada would pull its troops out of that country next summer, as promised, is naive in the extreme. While I am disappointed that the Liberals have decided to go along with this decision that disappointment is the result of what the decision might mean about how a future Liberal government treats Parliament. I am not really disappointed that there will be no Parliamentary debate because I do not believe such a debate would really accomplish anything useful.

Blah, blah, blah

2010-11-05T21:07:00.015-04:00

The mid-term elections in the United States were quite unremarkable. What was expected to happen, happened.

What I found funny and fascinating was the reaction of the commentariat in the US and to a lesser extent here in Canada. The arguments put forward by these folks were quite amusing in how overblown and breathless they were. You would almost think that something profound happened in the US during the elections.

They made several arguments that I found really overblown.

1) The election was going to bring about change in the United States.

They certainly caused some changes in who occupy seats in Congress and in some governors' mansions but other than that not much is going to change in the US as a result of these elections.

The founding fathers of the United States were all movers and shakers in the American colonies in the 18th century. After they threw out the English king they knew that any danger of another king rising up to take his place would come from within their ranks. So they created a form of government that would prevent any of them from acquiring ultimate power with the now famous check-and-balances. It was a wonderful system for preventing the rise of a king but a by-product of it was it caused change in the United States to be slowed to a crawl. This was true when there was a general consensus in the United States on the direction of the country, with the only disagreement being on how to get there. That consensus broke down decades ago and we now see different segments of US society trying to pull the country in different directions. Their objectives for the country are not the same. In that kind of atmosphere the very design of the US political system has put American society and its politics into a kind of stasis. Not much is changing in the US and certainly not much is changing for the better for the citizens of the United States. This election did not change that dynamic. If anything it just made it worse.

In addition, the US Congress is now divided into five major factions. Liberal Democrats, conservative Democrats, moderate Republicans, conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers. (Note the Republicans are fractured into three.) None of these factions have a majority in either chamber and party discipline is a foreign concept to members of Congress so we have a recipe for mayhem even without any intervention of the President, who if he is smart, will take advantage of these divisions, particularly within Republican ranks.

2) President Obama is in trouble and there is a real question as to whether he will win another term.

No one can really predict the future so such an outcome is certainly possible but I would not say it is very probable. Mid-term elections in the US are similar to by-elections in this country. They tend to attract the protest vote while others who have no real problem with how things are going in the country stay home. The big prize in the US has always been the presidency so when it is not up for grabs during an election there is not much incentive amongst most of the electorate to get out and vote.

As well, the President drives the political agenda in the United States not the Congress. The Tea Partiers might think they are in a position to harm the President but he can keep throwing bombs at them to keep them off track. Indeed, the President has a little more freedom to act. He can now propose and if the Congress balks he and his supporters can claim it is just the Republicans playing partisan games instead of looking out for the best interests of the American people. And like I said in point number 1 he can begin throwing legislative bombs at the Republicans in Congress to force them to actually take potentially unpopular positions on important issues.

The President has two years to work with this new reality and if he uses his time wisely he should be able win another term.

3) The Tea Partiers are now a force in US politics.

Let's wait to see the results of another election or two before coming to such conclusions.

Much more was said about the mid-term elections but most of it was nothing more than newsies and their employers trying to justify their existance. They were certainly interesting to politicos in both the US and Canada but the sad reality is they will not have a profound impact on the US or on the well-being of its citizens.

Potash and politics

2010-11-05T19:36:00.008-04:00

I had a chuckle at the Conservative decision not to allow the takeover of the Canadian potash industry by the Australians.

Of course the simple reason was the Conservatives did not want to put those 13 seats in Saskatchewan in play during the next election.

This is a sharp contrast to three years ago when the Conservative government shafted the Saskatchewan government out of equalization payments. At the time there was much complaining from the people and the media in that province but the Conservatives did it anyway. Back then they knew that they would suffer no political damage as a result of that decision.

Now they know the opposite is true and they also know that they will be hard pressed to win the next election as it is without risking seats in what they consider to be safe Conservative areas of the country.

I noticed that a few commentators have characterized this move as "pragmatic" on the part of Stephen Harper but I think the more accurate characterization of this move is "being scared".

Jim Who?

2010-11-05T19:28:00.005-04:00

I was impressed with the amount of ink and time that was spent on the story about Mr. Prentice's resignation but I was also wondering why so much time was spent on it.

Really, except for politicos, few Canadians would have been able to pick him out of a lineup two days ago and the same will be true again is a week or two after his picture disappears from the news sites.

All of that speculation as to why he made the decision and its implications for the leadership of the Conservative Party, who cares? This is just another example of how out of touch the professional political class is in relation to ordinary Canadians. A simple announcement would have sufficed.

President Obama Cannot Lose in November

2010-10-27T19:36:00.008-04:00

And he might even come out the biggest winner in the end.

The reason he cannot lose is because his job is not up for grabs. He is safely ensconced in the White House for another two years.

The reason he might win is the Republicans taking back one or both chambers of Congress would provide a foil for the President in the coming years. Remember folks, President Clinton enjoyed his greated successes when Congress was controlled by the Republicans.

The reason of course is the Republicans would no longer just be the Opposition bitching about what the Democrats were doing but they would actually have their hands of some of the levers of power in the United States government. The blame for the problems of the country would no longer be solely placed at the feet of the President and the Democrats. The Republicans would have to share that blame and as history has shown in that situation the sitting President usually has the advantage.

I doubt President Obama is hoping the Democrats lose control of Congress in November but I imagine he is not losing any sleep over that prospect either.

The Limits of the Politics of Anger

2010-10-27T18:56:00.013-04:00

At any given time the electorate if pissed off about something. That is just the nature of politics, it is the root cause of partisanship and it is the reason why negative advertizing works.

For a politician to be successful they need to be able to tap into that anger. That is the reason why Mr. Ford won his election in Toronto. I followed that election and it was obvious that a significant number of the citizens of Toronto were very angry. At what? Take your pick. It was just a general anger but Mr. Ford did manage to tap into it very effectively.

There is, however, an inherent trap in coming to power on a wave of anger. That trap is two fold. Politicians who win by this means have great expectations placed upon them. If they are unable to meet those expectations the anger that gave them power quickly turns on them. As well, if the politician meets these expectations the anger cools somewhat and those who were angry begin to think clearly and examine what the consequences of the actions of the politicians they put into power and it is often the case that they do not like what they see.

There are many examples of the first part but I will name two.

Larry O'Brien was the Rob Ford candidate in Ottawa four years ago. He was the political outsider railing against the political establishment and tapping into the general anger of the people of Ottawa to the former administration. Although not as bombastic as Mr. Ford he made many of the same promises that Mr. Ford made this time around. Of course, Mr. O'Brien could not keep those promises and the results of the October 25 election speaks for themselves.

The Chretien Liberals came to power on a wave of anger against the GST. Although Jean Chretien never stated that he would get rid of the tax leading up to his victory he did not try to dissuade any Canadian who believed that he would, and there were alot of them. Of course, the Liberals did not repeal the GST and that was a big contributor to Mr. Chretien having his majority reduced from 20+ seats to 5 in 1997 and he would have lost alot more if it were not for the division of the political right handing him virtually every seat in Ontario.

Incidentally, that should be a story Mr. Hudak should take to heart over the next few months.

There are many examples of the second trap as well but I will name one.

Mike Harris rise to power was fueled by anger against Bob Rae. He made all sorts of promises that resonated with the voters on Ontario and they elected him. He did keep his promises and Ontarians gave him a second mandate but the original anger that put him in power faded and Ontarians became more aware of the cost of his promises, with Walkerton being the most dramatic. The result was alot of "buyers' remorse" amongst those who supported him and that resulted in Mr. Harris leaving half way through his second mandate and a massive loss for the Ontario Progressive Conservatives in the subsequent elections.

Tapping into the anger of the electorate is very important requirement if politicians wants to enjoy political success. However, if that is the sole basis of their success they will find that it will be short lived. Anger will not sustain a government for the long-term.

Backfire

2010-09-23T18:14:00.008-04:00

The vote on the gun registry last night was a major loss for the Conservatives and it has made abolishing the gun registry in the future much more difficult.

It is true, as many Conservative defenders have pointed out today, the loss will probably assist the Conservatives in their fund-raising and it will energize their base somewhat. However, those defenders are missing or at least failing to acknowledge the big political downside of last night’s vote. I will address that in a minute.

The really interesting thing about last night’s vote is it has probably guaranteed the survival of the registry for the foreseeable future. It should be around for a long time.

For about a decade the Conservatives have had the advantage in the debate about the registry because they could always point to the AG report about the cost overruns in building it and then claim is was expensive waste of money. That has changed. Proponents of the registry have been able to credibly refute that claim by demonstrating that it costs very little to maintain the registry and more importantly that it is considered to be a vital tool by law enforcement. As well, the statements by the Ecole Polytechnique survivors leading up to the vote has reminded a lot of Canadians of why the registry was created in the first place. Those considerations will not be forgotten by Canadians and opponents of the registry will find them hard to overcome. Finally, Parliament has spoken. For all but the most ardent opponents of the registry the issue is resolved. Like SSM and abortion, revisiting this issue would not be a popular move amongst the electorate. Certainly Canadians are not embracing the registry but they are not clamouring for its dismantling either. They are probably satisfied with the outcome of the vote and would like to put the issue to bed. Incidentally, if the vote had gone the other way they would feel the same way and any party which proposed resurrecting the registry would be met with disapproval.

From a political standpoint we need to call a spade a spade. The Conservatives lost a key vote at the beginning of a Parliamentary session after what they would consider to be a summer-from-Hell. Anybody that believes that will not have an impact on their political fortunes going forward is dreaming.

As well, Mr. Harper’s statements after the vote will not help him. I realize he had to make them to assuage is base. However, those statements will not help him beyond that base and they could actually hurt him. The much documented supporters of the registry (eg. Quebecers) will not be happy with such statements and Mr. Harper would be hard pressed to win an election let alone a majority without these registry supporters. Mr. Harper really is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Abolishing the registry is not a winning ballot question in most of the country so he needs to change the channel quickly but he will also have to deal with some in his base that will demand he make this an election issue. It will be interesting to see if he can square that circle.

Another consideration is what the vote did to his opponents. After a successful summer tour the Liberals followed it up with a demonstration of severe unity on this vote. Every Liberal member showed up and every Liberal member voted with the Party. The punditry in this country will ignore that fact of course but it will not be lost on Liberal partisans. This summer and early fall has allowed Liberals to feel good about themselves again and that cannot be good news for the Conservatives.

On top of that the NDP completely flubbed this vote and that has weakened them. The only way Conservatives can win elections in this country is by having the NDP siphon off enough votes from the Liberals to allow the Conservatives to win. If the NDP wanes the Conservatives lose.

At the time it must have seemed like a good idea to the Conservatives to attempt to kill the registry by means of a Private Members Bill. Kill the registry and avoid too much political blowback in the process, its win-win. Unfortunately for them the exact opposite has happened. The debate and the concluding vote have actually made killing the registry much more difficult and in the process the political fortunes of the Conservatives have been harmed. I cannot believe any Conservative can be happy with that outcome.

Somebody please check the temperature in Hell

2010-09-10T20:27:00.002-04:00

I actually agree with Maxime Bernier on his statements about not using taxpayers funds for a new hockey arena in Quebec City.

Incidentally, I also do not believe governments should finance similar projects in other cities. If these projects are financially viable those pushing them should have no problems finding private investors.

If they are having difficulties doing so that should be a sign.

I don't think Stephen Harper cares any more

2010-08-19T11:39:00.014-04:00

The recent decisions to replace some high profile dissenters within the government bureaucracy and the word out today that the Harper government may not yet be finished doing so is very curious behaviour for a man who wants to retain power.

After a summer of controversy that has totally derailed your plans to hold a Fall election and caused serious harm to Conservative support, the last thing you would want to do is to create more controversy or to give what was once a friendly media more reason to take you to task. (When you have a columnist from the Conservative Party's in-house newspaper calling you a liar over your statements about the replacement of the Gun Registry head you know you have lost the media.)

Stephen Harper and his government are vulnerable and they know it. It all began with the first prorogation and it has just increased from there. That decision put a majority government permanently out of reach for the Harper government but it was not fatal. However, that event did begin a pattern where this government has been mired in controversy for most of its second term. That culminated in the Census decison and the reaction to it, which I am certain took the Conservatives completely by surprise and which Stephen Harper might believe was the tipping point for his government. I am certain they are further surprised by the quiet competence the Liberals have shown with the Liberal Express. If the Liberals can do the same during a real election campaign against a tired and old government the result is pretty much a foregone conclusion.

I have always believed that the first proroguation of Parliament was the beginning of the end of the Harper government and that they would never win another election. It would appear that Stephen Harper now agrees with me.

He has seen the writing on the wall. He knows he will be a former head of government very soon and that there is very little that he can do about it so he is now doing whatever he can to implement the imfamous "hidden agenda" and/or hamstring the Liberals when they take power.

Polled by EKOS

2010-08-12T10:52:00.014-04:00

For the first time in my life I received a telephone call from a polling firm asking me about my political preferences. I have been surveyed many times about my favourite toothpaste or radio station but never have I ever been called for a political poll.

It was an automated poll. The system asked me questions and I pressed buttons on my phone to answer.

It was a short poll, only nine questions, of which, five were the standard demographic questions.

The poll asked one question each on whether I thought the country and Ontario were heading in the right or wrong direction.

Then it asked me who I would support if an election were held in Canada and Ontario.

Interesting that they asked the direction questions first. The answers to those questions could influence how someone answers the subsequent party support questions.

Having designed surveys and polls in the past my choice would have been to put the party support questions first. It would make analysis of the estimates from those questions much simpler and reliable. Done the other way I cannot really determine the level of influence the direction questions would have on the party support questions so any analysis of the party support estimates would be much less reliable.

Not that it matters any more as I have been out of that business for almost a decade but I still have an interest in how these companies design their polls.

It was an interesting 3 minutes.

Piling on the straw, part 2

2010-08-11T11:37:00.008-04:00

A few days ago I stated in this space that the Census controversy would probably not hurt the Conservatives too much on its own.

With the release of the e-mail exchanges between Tony Clement and StatsCan that could change. This is written proof that the Conservatives lied and then attempted to use StatsCan to cover-up that lie.

If the media decides to pursue this angle in this latest development the Conservatives could find themselves hurt badly by this controversy. These e-mail exchanges could make this whole controversy about the credibility of this government instead of the merits of why they made the decision.

For the past six weeks we have heard mostly about the reasons why the long-form Census should be retained and it is apparent that the Conservatives have taken a hit. If the next week sees the focus switch from the esoteric statistical issues from the first six weeks to issues of Conservative credibility that hit will be much harder.

My only question is will the media pursue this angle? We will have to wait and see.

Is the other shoe dropping?

2010-08-10T13:20:00.008-04:00

The word out on the economic front today is American productivity is dropping, and the Canadian housing market is cooling off, which I can attest to as there are two houses on my street that have been up for sale for weeks without even a hint of a sale. This is just more bad economic news to go along announcements of other bad economic news in the past weeks.

The underlying factors that caused the 2008 recession have not gone away. They were only covered up by the trillions of dollars in stimulus funding governments threw at the world economy back then. It is almost a certainty that the problems that caused the recession will rear their ugly heads again once the stimulus funding runs its course. It is just a question of how serious would be their impacts on the world economy.

There have been increasing signs that the world economy is heading towards another economic slowdown. It still remains to be seen whether it will be a full blown recession or just reduced economic growth.

Piling on the straw

2010-08-09T18:35:00.012-04:00

It has been over six weeks since the Harper government made their announcement about the long-form census and the controversy is still rumbling along.

I find that amazing. Really, it is the census. I cannot think of much else the government does that could be less controversial. I certainly cannot think of much else that most Canadians would not give a second thought to, even on Census Day. After all, it is just one of those little things we all have to do once in a while.

So let's give the Conservatives credit. They managed to take something as innocuous as the Census and turn it into a full blown political crisis for them.

So will it hurt the Conservatives?

In and of itself, no. However, this is just one more controversy for this government which seems to have been mired in nothing but controversy since their re-election in 2008. Really, can anybody remember a time since then when they have not been trying to put out some kind of fire? Hell, sometimes they are trying to put out more than one at the same time as we witnessed during the detainee document controversy and the concurrent Guergis controversy.

I can guarantee that these non-stop controversies are having a negative impact on the Conservative fortunes and that when they go a controversy too far that negative impact will be politically fatal.

This government was on borrowed time before the Census long-form fiasco and it has just brought them that much closer to the end of their time in government.

Now that is what I am talking about

2010-07-15T20:06:00.009-04:00

It hit the news yesterday that an environmental group is taking direct aim at Alberta and urging Americans to rethink any plans they may have in visiting Alberta because of the Oil Sands.

I have seen the billboards and I have seen the video and they are one-sided and full of half-truths. In short this group is engaged in propogating propaganda to Americans about the Alberta and the Oil Sands.

Good on them.

It was really quite amusing this morning to see the Alberta Premier complain about the inaccuracies of the message from this group. He actually sounded like a progressive when they respond to inaccuracies and blatant lies told by the political right. It was quite the role reversal considering his own advertizing campaign expounding the Oil Sands is unadulterated propaganda.

I have argued in this space before that progressives have to begin using these kind of tactics if they want to advance their agendas and their causes in the face of fierce opposition from the political right. The political right on this continent developed and perfected the concept of "truthiness" and they have used it to good effect to advance their causes and agendas. They are still using it.

I read a story today about a tea-bagger group in Iowa putting up billboards that put Obama between Hitler and Lenin. It was an obvious attempt draw parallels between the three men. After cries of outrage they did pull it down and made a mea culpa but the fact they even conceived of and then paid for such advertizing speaks volumes.

Propaganda works. It has always been so. The political right on this continent has figured that out and they have used it to good effect. It is heartening to see that some groups from the progressive side of the political spectrum seems to have figured that out as well.

It is unfortunate that we have to go down this path where debate will essentially become nothing more than competing propaganda campaigns but this is a reality as one of the successes of the right has been the general discrediting of intellectuals and intellectual thought. If progressives are going to rebuild that credibility they are going first going to have to push back the political right and discredit some of its "truthiness". Once that happens progressives can then reassert truth into debates.

This advertizing campaign by the environmental group is a start. I only hope that other progressive organizations follow their example and begin to play the political game to win instead of playing it to be fair.

2B or not 2B

2010-07-14T18:36:00.009-04:00

While it is heartening to see the reaction of many to the bone headed decision of the Harper Government to eliminate the long form of the Census it is not so much to see who the reaction is coming from.

It is universally coming from academics, experts, bureaucrats and the media, those folks the Conservatives label the "liberal elite".

I can guarantee that the bleatings of this group is falling upon deaf ears and in fact I would not be surprised if the Conservatives make statements, in the near future, to the effect that they are defending Canadians from intrusiveness of the liberal elites in Canada. My guess, it will come in the form of a request for financial support from the party faithful before the expected fall election.

That would cause the anti-intellectual, knuckle dragging mouth breathers that infest the Conservative Party to shout out a lusty "Ya", while writing cheques, while the rest of the Canadian public would shrug and turn back to their BBQs and the users of the Census long-form data would be left to find the data they need to do their work elsewhere.

Part of the problem for the critics of this decision is they are again using long-winded dissertations on the importance of the data. Certainly, everything they say is based in fact but the Conservatives do not care about facts and Canadians are too busy enjoying their summer to really pay attention.

What the critics have to do is grab the attention of Canadians by showing them how this decision will effect them at personal level. They need to do it in a short and punchy way that allows for the short attention spans of the typical voter.

There are dozens of programs, at all levels of government, that involve writing cheques to Canadians and that use this data in their administration. The critics should identify each and every one of them and make the statement:

"If you receive cheques from any of these programs the decision by the Harper Government on the Census could reduce the amount of that cheque or whether you receive it at all".

Certainly that would be a broad statement but as I have stated in this space before the critics of this government have to stop playing fair and start playing to win. If that means using propaganda then so be it.

Certainly the Conservatives would deny this statement but we all know that the nature of politics is the accusation always receives more play and bigger headlines than the subsequent denial.

This is a party and a government that believes any kind of compromise or conciliation is a form of weakness so this decision is final. However, that does not mean that the critics of this decision cannot make the government regret it.

Liberal Majority Government by 2015, at the latest

2010-07-11T10:48:00.003-04:00

Governments have life-spans.

At the federal level in this country that life-span is generally 8 years and/or two consecutive elections. It is very rare for a government to last more than eight years or for a government to win more than two successive elections. That is why Jean Chrétien’s feat of winning three straight majority governments and governing for 11 straight years is considered such an extraordinary political achievement.

As the life of a government progresses it is inevitable that Canadians begin looking for a change. That desire usually begins to manifest itself around year 6 of the life of the government or soon after they win a second straight mandate. The Conservatives have won two back-to-back mandates and they have been in government for 5-and-a-half years and we are beginning to see that desire for change. From their polling numbers being in the low 30s to the media reaction to the Fake Lake, which would have been ignored by them two years ago, there are signs that the desire for change is slowly but surely building. The Conservatives are already on borrowed time.

So, how will we get to a Liberal majority by the middle of this decade? Assuming there is an election this fall, as many believe, the following five scenarios are the likeliest outcomes.

1a) Liberal Minority government: If the Liberals win the government in the fall Stephen Harper is gone from politics and all of a sudden it is the Conservatives that would be in disarray. They would be the Official Opposition Party suffering through questions of leadership, dealing with fundraising issues as donations become fragmented between the various leadership candidates, and dealing with questions about party unity as a leadership race inevitably opens up rifts between the candidates and their various camps within the party. These problems would not be resolved and the new leader would not have enough time to get his act together in time for the next election which would probably be 18-24 months after the 2010 election.

We also cannot forget about the possibility that the loss of the-discipline-of-power might cause a rift to develop along the old Tory/Reform Party fault line within that party which would highlight and amplify any questions about party unity and could do long-term damage to the Conservatives.

This scenario could also see the replacement of one or more of the other federal party leaders, which would break the current political logjam and leave Michael Ignatieff as one of the “seasoned” federal leaders going into the election after the next one.

We cannot forget some of the questionable funding decisions from the stimulus program and the G-20 summit that would probably come out during that period and there might even be some revelations from the Afghan detainee documents.

Finally, the media would fall over itself to curry favour with the new government. The corporate bosses that run our MSM are always looking for something from the government and being overly critical of the party in power is not conducive to successful lobbying efforts. So we would see a much more positive media environment for the Liberals while a not so good one for the Conservatives.

Combine all of the above and it is very likely that we would see a Liberal majority government after the election following the next one, probably in 2011 or 2012.

1b) Conservative minority government and Stephen Harper resigns as leader of the Conservatives: In this situation the Conservatives would be going through the process described in 1a) plus attempting to govern at the same time. That never works. It just provides voters with more incentive to make a change.

I am making no assumptions about how Stephen Harper leaves his job (ie. Is he pushed?) but it would have an impact on Conservative fortunes during a subsequent election.

The new leader would also have to deal with the Harper record, which could include some rather damning reports from the AG when she reports on the stimulus and G-20 spending.

1c) Conservative minority government and Stephen Harper stays on: The Conservatives would be saddled with the problem they face now but more magnified. They would be in the same position that Paul Martin found himself in after the 2004 election. They would be in government but Canadians would grow increasingly disenchanted with them and Stephen Harper so that at the next opportunity they would make a change.

Again, I am making no assumptions about how Stephen Harper hangs on to his job or how firm his hold would be on it.

Finally, if Stephen Harper reacts to any AG reports critical of the stimulus and G-20 spending as he usually responds to criticism he will just be reinforcing the desire for change.

For both 1b and 1c we would see a change in the media narrative as it becomes somewhat more positive to the Liberals and somewhat more negative to the Conservatives. The corporate bosses of our MSM would not want to offend the Conservatives too much but they would also want to make some inroads with the Liberals as it would be apparent to them that a change of government is inevitable and imminent.

The likely result of the next election after 2010 for 1b and 1c is a Liberal victory, likely by a very large margin. That election would probably occur in late 2011 or early 2012.

2) Liberal majority government: In this situation the Liberals beat my assumption by 5 years and not much more needs to be said.

3) Conservative majority government: This situation would provide the Liberals with the opportunity to renew itself without the constant pressure of being ready for an election. They would be able to fundraise, develop policy, renew the party and, if they desire, change leaders in a more orderly manner. As an added bonus, the prospect of not even being able to compete for power for another four years would cause all of the current crop of hangers on and hacks to leave the party. Most of these people are only involved because they believe they will be rewarded with lucrative jobs when the Liberals win the government so they would desert because very few of them would want to put their careers on hold for four years.

As for the Conservatives, by the time the next election comes along in 2014 they would be beyond stale and the desire for change would be quite high. This is assuming having unshackled power does not bring out the baser instincts of the Conservatives and/or Stephen Harper does something to keep them under control. If this assumption is incorrect then that desire for change becomes very intense which would probably increase the margin of victory for the Liberals in 2014 and potentially greatly damage the Conservative Brand. As well, this government acts in a dictatorial manner in a minority situation so it can only be imagined how it would act with a majority. Mike Harris and Brian Mulroney ran their governments in that fashion and you just need to look at what happened to them and their governments after their last elections to see how that would turn out for the Conservatives.

In all probability Stephen Harper would leave at some point during a majority mandate forcing the Conservatives to choose a new leader before the 2014 election. That would leave a new leader trying to defend the record of his predecessor and leading an old government. You only need to look at the fate of Ernie Eves, Paul Martin, Kim Campbell and John Turner to see what usually happens in those situations.

For all of these scenarios I do not make any assumptions about unforeseen events, such a natural disasters, economic downturns or economic upturns. These kinds of events could have an impact but that impact would only delay or accelerate the inevitable it would change it.

We will see the end of the political limbo that we have been living under for the past half decade or so after the next election. At that point the Liberals will be on the road to forming a majority government before the middle of this decade.

Earthquake Question

2010-06-23T16:48:00.002-04:00

Considering an earthquake hit Toronto was a tsunami warning issued for the Fake Lake?

Perspective please

2010-06-16T21:53:00.009-04:00

Two issues seem to have some Liberals a little miffed at the Liberal Party. The first is the Afghan detainee documents deal and the other is the foreign policy positions outlined by Mr. Ignatieff.

To the first point if this whole exercise was about Parliamentary supremacy then the Opposition has succeeded in making it so. The government actually argued that they were not required to release these documents to Parliament. They have been forced to reverse that position completely as a result of Parliament, in the persons of Opposition MPs, asserting that Parliament is supreme.

If this whole exercise was just a political gambit then I could see why some people would be a little upset with the agreement. After all, we will probably not see the quick release of these documents as a result of this agreement. Then again that was never going to happen anyway as the wheels of our Parliamentary system have never been known to turn quickly.

The principle of Parliamentary supremacy has been defended with this deal. If that is your main concern in this issue you should find this agreement satisfactory. If your main concern is using this issue as a weapon against the Conservatives then I guess you have reason to be upset.

As to the second issue I have to agree that I am not completely happy with all of the foreign policy positions outlined by Mr. Ignatieff but as a whole it is a damn sight better than the foreign policy being pursued by the current government. Since this is just a proposal it is not written in stone and it can be changed as circumstances dictate going forward, particularly when the Liberals become the governing party.

Fox News North, whatever

2010-06-15T19:04:00.007-04:00

I feel no need to worry about such a channel up here in Canada.

Looking down South, it has the genuine article but all of its efforts could not prevent the Republicans from being crushed in the 2008 election. They lost the Presidency, the House and the Senate despite Fox News' best efforts.

Looking in Canada, the current MSM has been carrying Stephen Harper's water for over half a decade and he still has not been able to close the deal with Canadians. Hell, he actually seems to be regressing.

What "success" the Sun papers have had has been the result of the fact they are easy and quick to read while riding the bus to work. Hell, I have even picked up a discarded copy from time to time to read the sports section. That will not translate in a TV news station.

The National Post is the self-professed Conservative newspaper in this country and it is losing money hand over fist. So much so that it might be purchased by the Toronto Star. (The irony is delicious)

In short, from a political partisan standpoint Fox North will probably not change the political landscape in this country and it will probably be as financially successful as the Sun papers and the National Post.

I have better things to worry about besides this.

Mr. Ignatieff, ignore the noise and focus

2010-06-09T19:37:00.017-04:00

Modern politics seems to conspire to distract political parties from what is important. It is a function of a media that gave up reporting the news in favour of infotainment a long time ago and the fact most modern politicians are so bereft of ideas that they have to resort to hyper-partisanship to appear relevant.

Mr. Ignatieff you need to rise above all of this.

It is a reality that most people vote against something as opposed to voting for something. That is why negative advertizing works and that is the root cause of partisanship. If it were the other way around our Parliament would be a hotbed of debate about different ideas on how to make the lives of Canadians better instead of the juvenile crap we see there now.

However, despite this reality a political party still needs to be able to present ideas and, dare I say it, vision to really enjoy success. That is one reason why the Conservatives have never won a majority government. They have figured out the "vote against" reflex of the average voter but they have not been able to take it to the next level because they are a complete failure on the "vision" front.

The Conservatives have been presenting you with all sorts of ammunition for you to begin convincing Canadians that they need to vote against these clowns. I do not believe they have gone one week since Parliament resumed where they have not been defending some kind of bonehead decision, the Fake Lake being the latest in a long line. You and I both know that these are the kinds of things that plant the seed in the electorate that will germinate into a desire for change over time or during an election campaign.

However, you need to do more. You need to present a vision or at least an election theme. The campaigns of seemingly random election promises are not working. They have not worked for the Liberals in the last three elections and they have only been marginally more successful for the Conservatives.

You do not need to present individual policy proposal yet. The ground is not ready for that anyway. When the time comes you will need to present these proposals in the context of an overarching theme if you are to take increasing anger at the Conservatives and turn it to Liberal advantage.

Last Fall, when you gave your non-confidence speech in the House of Commons, you articulated just such a theme. I blogged back then that the theme you talked about was a proven winner in this country and I urged you to follow through on it. I am quite disappointed that you did not, however it is not too late.

You have a summer BBQ season coming up so you should spend that entire period talking about your vision. At every event talk to Canadians about how you believe government can be an agent of good in the lives of Canadians, using topical examples such as the oil spill in the Gulf to demonstrate your point. Talk about your vision for Canada and where you would like it to be in the next 5 to 10 years and beyond. In short, establish the broad objectives of a Liberal government under you so that when you begin to present individual policy proposals during the next election Canadians can put them into some context and see how they would achieve the objectives you have outlined.

The Conservative have been planting the seeds of their own defeat since Stephen Harper prorogued Parliament the first time. They will be ripe for the taking during the next election so you need to prepare Canadians to accept the idea of a Liberal government. Letting the Conservatives self-destruct will go along way in doing that but if you really want to seal the deal you will need to provide them with an alternative that they can like.

You only have the summer to do that so I would suggest you focus on that and not worry about the rest of the political noise out there right now.

Look past the next election

2010-06-09T18:14:00.014-04:00

One thing about all of this merger talk is it is motivated solely by short-term considerations.

However, if you look past the next election there is no political logic to the NDP joining the Liberals and the idea of a merged Liberal/NDP Party should scare the shit out of the Conseratives. Such a situation would eliminate the NDP from the federal political scene and ensure the Liberals are the dominent party in this country for the foreseeable future.

As I stated in my previous blog the Liberals have dominated the Canadian federal political scene for more than half a century despite the centre-left being divided between two parties. The simple fact of Canadian politics is the progressive habit runs deep and there has not been any signs that it is changing.

So, imagine what would happen in the Canadian political scene if there were only two political parties, one a conservative party the other a liberal party. Liberal dominance would be virtually guaranteed.

I know many would dispute that assertion but just look at the last 60 years. In all but two cases the Conservatives only won government because the NDP siphoned off enough votes from the Liberals to hand them victory. The two exceptions are the first election of the Chief and the 1984 election. However, you only need to look at the 1988 Free Trade election to see what I am talking about. The Conservatives won that election with 43% of the vote. That leaves the remainder voting against them. Fortunately, the NDP took enough of that 57% away from the Liberals to deny them government. Just imagine if that election would have been fought between just the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives. Joe Clark's experience really sheds a light on that dynamic. Then there is Stephen Harper who has only won his minorities because Jack Layton has managed to increase his seat count in Parliament to the detriment of the Liberals. Again, imagine if the NDP did not exist.

Of course, you cannot just add up the Liberal popular vote and the NDP popular vote and think that they would mesh perfectly. Some Liberals would go to the Conservatives, but not that many, and some Dippers would refuse to join the new party but enough of them would put power over principle to make the new party the dominent party on the federal scene.

I am certain that some NDP supporters would disagree with my assertion that the NDP would be eliminated but you only need to look at the two "partners" in the proposed merger. Despite its current problems the Liberals are bigger, better financed and they have the better party apparatus than the NDP. We only need to look at the "merger" between the Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance to see what happens to the smaller party in such a situation. A merger between the Liberals and the NDP would be a takeover and nothing else. The NDP and its ideals would cease to exist on the federal scene, much like old time Toryism has disappeared from federal politics.

Looking past the short-term a political merger between the Liberals and the NDP makes no sense from an NDP point-of-view. It would be political suicide for them. That is why you can probably believe Jack Layton when he states that he does not want to merge the two parties.

As for Conservatives you had better pray that it does not come to pass if you are entertaining any ideas of becoming a more competative political party in the 21st century.

For the Liberals, such a merger would be advantageous to you in the longer-term but not so much in the short-term. I would wager a sizable chunk of money that you will be enjoying majority government status by the middle of this decade without a merger so you have no real need to make it happen at present. Who knows, once the dynamic I described in my previous post re-asserts itself, and the NDP is struggling to maintain official party status, maybe then discussions can be opened up to take over the NDP.

Why would any Liberal suggest a deal with the NDP right now?

2010-06-03T19:01:00.011-04:00

The short answer is fear. They believe it is the only way to defeat Stephen Harper. The logic of those making this suggestion is the centre-left is divided so it needs to be united in order to take on the big bad Conservatives.

The biggest hole in that logic is the centre-left in this country has been divided for over 60 years. With the exception of the 1990s, the centre-right in this country has had only one party to represent it for the last 6 decades yet in those 60 years the Liberals have dominated the Canadian federal political scene.

You see, the pattern in this country for the past 60 years is the Liberals govern, often for long stretches at a time. As usually happens, with long standing governments, they get tired, they run out of ideas and the electorate decides it is time for a change. At that point Liberal support tends to bleed to the NDP in sufficient numbers that the a conservative party forms a government. Then when Canadians grow tired of that government those that lent their votes to the NDP go back to the Liberals, often in very big numbers. In short, Canadians believe there are only two parties that can be trusted to govern. The Liberals and their conservative alternative.

We have seen no evidence that this pattern has changed. Yes some would point to the polls indicating that Jack Layton is the most popular federal leader right now but one thing about respondents to polls is they know that they can answer the question any way the like without consequences. No government has fallen and no party ever formed a government based on a poll from Nanos, Ekos, Strategic Council, et al.

It is only the ballot box, where the decision of a voter has profound consequences, where we should be looking and it you look there it is as plain as Stephen Harper's hair style that the decades old voting pattern is still alive. Despite Adscam, the Liberals came in second in the 2006 election and despite the worst showing of the Liberal Party since 1984 the Liberals still have double the seats of the NDP after the 2008 election.

The spanner in the works is the Bloc. It is a big enough force in Quebec to be a problem. However, twice in this decade it looked like their grip on Quebec was loosening only to have the two big parties give them another lease on life. The Liberals did it with Adscam in 2006 and the Conservatives did it with their policy proposal of locking up 14 year olds and attacking the arts in 2008. Long standing stalwarts of the seperatist movement have called into question the whole concept so if the Liberals can exploit that and provide Quebecers a reason to vote Liberal again they should be able to whither the Bloc.

The other argument is Canadians are becoming more conservative. Again the ballot box proves that argument wrong.

A third argument is Conservative voters are more motivated while progressive voters have washed their hands of politics. Again, the ballot box prove that argument wrong and when Canadians finally decide to rid themselves of the Conservative government they will come out to vote to do so. It is funny, whenever Canadians become motivated to get rid of a government voter turnout goes up. We saw that with Brian Mulroney's, Jean Chretien's and Stephen Harper's first election victories.

There is no reason for the Liberals to make a deal with the NDP right now. The current Conservative government has passed its best before date. There is a malaise in the electorate right now that will change into a desire for change. Once that happens many voter who deserted the Liberals will come back to them. Liberals should be patient and not let fear cloud their judgement or make them do something that would be counter-productive in the extreme.

If after the next election the Liberals are in a position to form a government and they need help from another party to do so then seeking that help from the NDP should be an option. Until then just focus on being an effective opposition and winning the next election.

Do the Liberals have a hidden agenda?

2010-05-29T14:22:00.036-04:00

There has been a fair amount of complaining about the Liberals and the fact they have not bothered to release even a part of their election platform and that they do not stand for anything. Many are saying this is the reason why the Liberals are not doing so well in the polls.

We, of course, have seen this before. Leading up to the 2006 election Stephen Harper talked about nothing but Adscam and absolutely refused to talk about anything else. At the time it was assumed that the reason for this was he had a hidden agenda. So that must be the reason for the Liberals reluctance to release any policy.

So, what is that hidden agenda? Do they have one?

Or are we just seeing again that it sucks to be the Official Opposition in this country?

Some Thoughts

2010-05-22T15:30:00.025-04:00

I have been way too busy to blog in depth about what has been going on these days so I thought I would just summarize some of them.

The polls: As many have noticed the polls have not been giving any of the three national parties any love. There does seem to be a general malaise amongst the electorate.

Although this is not good news for any party right now it is the Conservatives that should be the most worried about it. It does not take long for this kind of malaise to morph into a desire for change. Once that happens there is not much the government can do to stop it and Mr. Harper's own experience should tell him that once that does take root even an Opposition Leader who has been largely written off can win an election.

The Conservatives know this as demonstrated by my second point.

The Conservative capitulation on the Afghan detainee documents: No media have characterized the deal as such but considering the lengths the government went to prevent their release, the statements, a month ago, by senior Conservative officials about calling an election before they would release them and the fact that the government agreed to each and every major demand by the Opposition would indicate they completely surrendered on this issue.

They are afraid of an election and I only hope the Opposition are aware of that fact and begin to use it to their advantage.

Abortion: This particular Djinni has been let out of the bottle and the Conservatives have been trying to stuff it back in ever since.

It still boggles my mind that the great chess master actually let it out. The Conservatives have been playing with fire for over a year by throwing red meat at their base while risking alienating the broader electorate in the process. They have more or less escaped each one of these instances without damaging themselves too much but their luck cannot hold indefinitely and they might have just run out of it this time.

I still question why the Conservatives feel the need to keep shoring up their base. I have stated in this space before that I believe they see something happening within their base that frightens them and this latest episode just reinforces that belief.

Auditor General wanting to audit Member's expences: To what end?

Sorry folks but I am going to have to disagree with the consensus.

It is very common for senior public servants to build empires and our AG has shown herself as being very adept at doing so. This is just more of her empire building and it should be nipped in the bud. There are much greater issues with how this government spends our tax dollars that should be investigated before looking at how individual Members spend their 200K a year office budgets.

The Stanley Cup playoffs: Go Habs Go!

The elections in Britain: Interesting result but it has no bearing on our politics in Canada. It is a different political culture with different values and different personalities. Our form of government may be based on theirs but that is as far as the similarities go.

As well, any similarities that are pointed out about their situation and the ones here miss the mark. For this election the Brits were actually in the same spot we were in 2006. A government that had been in power for a long time, a great desire for change amongst the electorate, but a distrust of the change presented by the only viable alternative to the government. So, the electorate opted for change but they also opted to keep the new government on a tight leash.

That is the limit of any similarities however because the winner of their election decided to enter into a formal agreement with one of its opponents as opposed to trying to govern alone. Once the British Conservatives made that agreement they and the governance of Britain started down a much different path than the ones we have been on for the last four years.

You know you are desperate when...

2010-05-02T10:34:00.003-04:00

You spend a whole week talking about the statements of a pollster.

To my Conservative friends if the only thing you can think of to attempt to put some daylight between yourself and your chief political opponent is to attack a pollster you guys are in serious trouble.

Wanted: One Prime Minister, a person with ideas need not apply

2010-03-31T19:12:00.016-04:00

I took in some of the recent Thinker's Conference on the weekend and followed it some more by reading the various blogs of folks who attended. All in all I would say it was a success.

However, to judge by the reaction in some of the media you would expect that it was an unmitigated disaster. It is an interesting reaction as the event ran smoothly and there was a good exchange of ideas on many different issues.

And therein lies the problem with this event. The media does not do ideas. They prefer to act as "political strategists" even though they are not very good at it and even though there are much greater issues they should be concerned with.

Part of the reason for this is the generation of ideas in this country as become industrialized like many other sectors of our economy and it is an industry that is dominated by corporate interests.

You only need to take a look at all of the "experts" that now weigh in on many of the issues of the day. They are from banks, various interest groups, and industry groups such as The Conference Board. Then there are the lobbyists. They are now the ones that generate most of the ideas for government but only for the highest bidder.

The idea industry reflects the general lack of innovation of the corporations it supports. Canadian corporations do not care about innovation or ideas. Their job is largely to manage their corporations in a way that contributes to the profits of their parent company, whether they be in the US, Europe or China. For them coming up with good ideas is to rock the boat, which is something they do not want to do and they want to be certain that the Canadian government supports their endeavours so it cannot rock the boat either.

The Thinker's Conference goes directly against that. Not only did the conference have a diversity of opinion it also had a diversity of the sources of that opinion. The corporate interests were not the only voices and ideas presented.

This would not be so bad except that the Liberals have had two big thinkers as successive leaders. They have had leaders that can take ideas and synthesize them into policies that could upset the status quo. It is even worse that the current Liberal leader takes every opportunity to acquire the opinions of ordinary folks. That, combined with some of the ideas expressed on the weekend, combined with a big thinker holding down the position of Leader of the Opposition is not something to make the heart of some Canadian corporate leader flutter with delight.

That is the kind of thing they would want to discourage and since all of the media is this country is owned by those same corporate leaders we see a generally negative reaction to what should be a positive idea, a politician listening to people to determine what are their priority isses and how they might resolve them.

It could be argued that after almost 20 years of having managers running our country that we could use an ideas person for the next Prime Minister to help bring us fully into the new century.

How do we overcome voter ignorance?

2010-03-21T11:50:00.029-04:00

It seems many Liberals want to have an election on Parliamentary Supremacy. Such enthusiasm is based on the assumption that Canadians will embrace the argument Mr. Harper is defying Parliament so he needs to be kicked out of government for it.

While I agree with the sentiment it is not an argument I would consider to be a strong one.

One reason is the ignorance of Canadians with regards to the workings of their political system. The coalition argument last year should be a demonstration of that. What I would like to see is a poll asking respondents "What is the Prime Minister and the government responsible to in our system of government?"

I would bet a sizable chunk of money that a large majority of them would respond with "to the voters", instead of the right answer which is to Parliament.

Stephen Harper exploited that ignorance last year to good effect and I believe him and his people are coming up with another campaign to do it again. It will be based on lies, but it will be easy to understand and it will sound plausible. All he needs to do is neutralize this issue in the campaign but if he can turn it against the Opposition to carry him to victory that would be gravy.

The Opposition will have the much greater burden. They want to not only keep this issue front and centre in the campaign but they want to make certain that it fatally wounds the Conservatives in the process. They have the truth on their side but as I have stated in this space before progressives always have the facts on their side but they always seem to lose arguments to the right anyway because they just cannot seem to present the facts in a way that grabs the audience. We have seen that with gun control, health care and taxes to name just three issues. I have serious doubts they will be any more successful on such an esoteric concept as Parliamentary Supremacy.

A second reason, which helps explain the first one, is successive Prime Ministers have been marginalizing Parliament for the last 40 years or so. They have concentrated power more and more in the PMO and the Executive and they have reduced the average Parliamentarian to a barking seal.

Now the Opposition wants to fight an election asserting Parliamentary Supremacy?

That is what we are faced with. I have yet to see an argument put forward by Liberals, either at the official or grassroots level, that would be able to overcome voter ignorance and what will be a very concerted effort by Mr. Harper and the Conservatives to exploit that to their benefit.

Until that happens I just will not be as enthusiastic about fighting an election on this issue as many other Liberals seem to be.

Parliamentary Supremacy is not a political gambit

2010-03-20T18:54:00.014-04:00

I know that I am in the minority but I still have many reservations with the idea of having an election where the central theme of the Liberals or any of the Opposition parties is the supremacy of Parliament.

Having an election based on that concept is not the slam dunk that many Liberals believe it would be. The result could be a serious setback for the central concept of Responsible Government.

Elections decide questions. If the next election asks Canadians to choose between Parliamentary Supremacy and something else that the Conservatives present as a rebuttal and the Conservatives win then a basic concept of Responsible Government would be seriously weakened, perhaps permanently.

We need to be careful not to let short-term political opportunity cause great harm to the future health of our institutions. Yes, the fact Mr. Harper is defying Parliament is outrageous but he is just one man and his defiance will not cause permanent harm to the institution.

That will only happen if the Opposition decides to use that defiance as a political gambit and fails.

Unless the Liberals have something else with which to combat the Conservatives so that they can use Mr. Harper's defiance as just another example of Mr. Harper's style of government ande his unsuitability to occupy the office he is currently occupying they should be very careful on this issue.

Mr. Harper does not care about our institutions. He has proven that over and over again. It is up to those of us who do to safeguard them. If that means letting a political opportunity go by then sobeit.

The Opposition did some thinking this week

2010-03-18T18:41:00.020-04:00

For a couple of weeks there have been rumblings from sources in the PMO that Stephen Harper would call an election if the Opposition attempted to invoke Parliamentary privilege in their desire to see the Afghan detainee documents.

I had serious reservations about the Liberals doing just that as indicated in my last post.

However, the actions by the three opposition parties shows that they did some thinking before taking action. They did not just react in a knee-jerk fashion they actually did some planning.

Presenting a united front on this issue is crucial. If it were just the Liberals doing this the Conservatives could have invoked National Security for not releasing the documents and accused the Liberals of just playing partisan games. As well, if all three opposition parties are singing from the same hymn book on this, at least for a little while, then it will likely carry much more weight than if just one party is invoking privilege.

As well, the questions from today have not actually set any mechanisms in motions for finding the government in contempt of Parliament. They essentially just formalize what the Opposition has been saying informally for months. They, as Parliamentarians, have the right to see the Afghan detainee documents.

Again, this is important because it takes away the government's ability to conflate a contempt charge with lack of confidence in the government. If the government wants to use an election to stop the release of these documents they will have to call it. There is nothing in today's Opposition questions that can be construed as the Opposition not having confidence in the government.

So what happens now?

In all likelihood we will see the government squirm some more. The amount of squirming is going to depend on how far ahead the Opposition Parties thought beyond today. They are going to need follow through on this and part of that follow through will be to educate Canadians on the meaning of Parliamentary Supremacy. As well, they are going to have to be ready to take the next step and introduce a motion of contempt. They cannot reverse themselves from the course they charted today.

Ultimately, I do believe we will have an election over this. There is no way Stephen Harper will allow himself to just meekly take a contempt charge from the Opposition. However, if the Opposition has the forethought to use the time between then and and now to give Canadians a crash course in the meaning of Responsible Government this issue could very well fatally damage the Conservatives' chances of re-election.

The ground is not ready

2010-03-15T18:18:00.013-04:00

The terms of reference for the detainee document review has been released and predictably they just prove that the whole exercise is a stall tactic.

Equally predictably many in the Liberal blogsphere are demanding that the Liberals table the Contempt of Parliament motion and dare Mr. Harper to call an election over it. Of course, they assume that such an action would be political suicide so he would not do it.

Such assumptions are wrong because they are based on a false premise. It is believed that if the Conservatives call an election to prevent being held in Contempt of Parliament and to prevent the release of what could be very damaging documents that the electorate will punish the Conservatives badly.

What many are forgetting is leading up to the dissolution of Parliament the Conservatives would be screaming that they are doing so in the interests of National Security. Meanwhile, the Opposition will be screaming about Parliamentary Supremacy. Considering how the Conservatives managed to exploit Canadians' ignorance of their own political system to make the idea of a coalition government very unpopular 14 months ago Liberals should not be too confident that they will come out on the winning end of an argument between National Security and Parliamentary Supremacy.

At the very least there are enough Conservative apologists in the media who would help the Conservatives muddy the waters enough to neutralize the detainee documents issue as an election issue. That would mean the election would be fought on other issues and as many in the same Liberal blogsphere have pointed out the Liberals do not seem to have many policies to campaign on at the moment.

So, putting forward the Contempt motion right now might be problematic because the Canadian people are not prepared for it. Remember, the opposition to proroguing the House in the country, earlier this winter, centred around MPs taking a "holiday". The detainee documents were barely on the radar for most ordinary Canadians.

The groundwork needs to be done before this issue can really be used to hurt the Conservatives. Unfortunately, that has not happened and it is pretty late in the game to begin doing so. The Liberals had almost three months to do just that and to develop a coherent plan of attack when Parliament resumed and they failed to do both.

As an aside I am having serious doubts about Mr. Ignatieff. He is faced with a principle opponent who is making all sorts of serious political errors. If Mr. Harper were facing someone with even half of the political instincts that Misters Chretien, Trudeau or Mulroney had he would be toast. Fortunately for him he is not facing that. Mr. Ignatieff is making it easier for him.

The Conservatives will still probably lose the next election because they are just getting old and tired and it is showing. However, it will be a rather indecisive defeat which will have us dealing with yet another weak minority government.

Finally, do not fear for Parliament. The Canadian Parliament has been in existance since before Confederation. There is very little that the current dickhead and his minions can do to really harm that institution. It will be in existance long after Stephen Harper's government is tossed into the dustbin of history.

You should only fear for Parliament if the next Liberal government, saddled with a minority government and facing a hostile House decides that Mr. Harper was on to something in his actions of the past 15 months. That is when I will begin worrying about Canada's Parliamentary Democracy.

Canada's old government

2010-03-10T19:07:00.009-05:00

The Jaffer judgement and the reactions to it shows some interesting dynamics in Canada's current political climate.

The same can be said of a recent junior minister's temper tantrum in Charlottetown and Mr. Flaherty's jaunt to a London photo-op in an airplane he may not have had a right to take.

Not too many months in the past all three incidents would have been largely ignored by the media and by Canadians. The reason is simple. They really do not amount to much.

Mr. Jaffer's sentence certainly is light but the Canadian legal is system is what it is for better or for worse. Sometimes someone will receive woefully inadequate consequences for their actions and others will receive much greater for less serious crimes. It is unfortunate but it is the nature of all systems devised by humans.

Mr. Flaherty's trip on the Citation was no big deal. Really, Canada is the only Western country where we expect senior ministers to take commercial transportation to go to events. It is silly. It was silly when the Conservatives tied themselves into knots complaining when Liberal ministers used to do this and it is silly now when the Conservatives are doing it. Although I do find it ironic that Conservative ministers are doing what they used to forcefully condemn when they were in opposition. Conservative hypocracy, I am shocked.

Ms. Guerguis' (sp) temper tantrum was a little more serious but in the grander scheme of things it was still pretty minor.

So, what do the reactions to all of these incidences say about the political dynamic in this country?

The Conservatives have hit that point in being the government where every perceived misstep by it or its supporters becomes more magnified and frankly blown out of proportion.

This usually happens to governments that have grown old in the eyes of voters and the media. It seems they just cannot do anything right and every transgression, regardless of its insignificance becomes a major issue. We saw this in the past with Mr. Dingwall's pack of gum.

As well, when a government reaches this point it is pretty much doomed. It does not take long for Canadians to believe a government is old and beyond its best-before-date to believing it is time for a change. And there is virtually nothing a government can do at that stage to reverse that belief.

The reactions to these three events demonstrates that the Conservatives days are numbered on the government side of the House. They are on a well worn path to electoral defeat, one that has been tread by governments, Liberal and Conservatives, before it and there is probably not much they can do to get off of it.

The next election will likely see the end of the current Conservative government.

Going out on a limb

2010-03-07T11:45:00.012-05:00

If the allegations of Professor Attaran become the topic of conversation for the remainder of the Spring Parliamentary session the Liberals will win a majority government in the next election, regardless of when it occurs.

Very few Canadians will support a government that appears to have been complicit in committing war crimes. Certainly, some of the more ardent Conservatives, who see the Afghan and Iraq wars as some kind of holy crusade will continue to support the Conservatives but anybody who does not believe that will find somewhere else to go on election day. If not to one of the opposition parties then the couch.

I have my doubts about the allegations and I need to see more evidence before I can conclude that the government was complicit in torture, to conclude that the government actually did commit a war crime. So far there are no facts to support these allegations.

However, I have been around politics long enough to know that facts do not count for a hill of beans in politics. You just need to look at past scandals, such as Adscam, to see that in action. If the government is perceived to have committed a war crime they are done.

If these allegations prove to be true then the Conservative Party of Canada will be destroyed. Oh it will resurrect itself as another conservative leaning party, or a couple of different conservative parties but the current incarnation of the Conservative Party will self destruct.

Did the Conservatives really think the anthem gambit would work?

2010-03-05T23:22:00.005-05:00

Really c'mon!

They propose changes to the anthem to appease women.

Did they really think the traditionalists in this country would just say "Oh, OK".?

Did they really believe that women in this country would really be impressed by this?

Did they really believe that feminists would forgive them for all of the cuts to women's programs?

Perhaps this was just something to distract Canadians from other issues but they could not use something else?

These guys and gals are really losing it folks. The death watch has begun and do not be surprised to see some rats abandoning this sinking ship very soon.

What Now Mr. Harper?

2010-03-05T18:37:00.015-05:00

You blew it!!

You managed to alienate Canadians enough that the best performance by Canadian athletes in the Olympics, on Canadian soil, did not cause you to even enjoy a temporary bounce in your polling numbers.

The result was a Throne Speech that was forgotten 5 minutes after the GG finished reading it and a budget, whose most positive review was it is bland, innocuous and inoffensive.

You are in a political pickle. Budgets are really the only tool you can use to pick up more support from voters and the one you just produced will be a complete failure in achieving that. You see, restraint is not cool. It does not gain votes. You need to provide something to grab the attention of voters and there is nothing in the budget to do that. Certainly there is the attack on the public service that all Conservative governments do when their fiscal incompetence forces them to deal with deficits that they create. Unfortunately, that kind of thing only appeals to your base it does not cause others outside of it to support the Conservatives. Indeed, I would argue that you will lose more votes than you will gain. The decisions in this budget are going to negatively effect over 150 thousand people in the National Capital Region and Eastern Ontario directly and indirectly effect 100s of thousands more. That is more than 25 seats that you just put in play without any counteracting benefit elsewhere.

Now the one thing that might have stuck out from that past few days, the national anthem proposal, is being withdrawn after just three days, probably because your internal polling demonstrated that Canadians recognized it for the deeply cynical move that it was and they rejected it in droves.

This was the last week where you had the opportunity to drive the agenda for the next few months. Instead, now it will be the Opposition as they hound you some more on issues that caused you to prorogue Parliament in the first place. It is ironic that you took this action to escape those issues only to be faced with them again just 10 weeks later but from a political position much weaker than it was before Christmas. A position you find yourself in because of your own actions and decisions.

I am not certain how you are going to escape this one. The once compliant media is becoming more critical and the Opposition seems content to let you twist in the wind for a few more months waiting for the negative reactions of Canadians to your government over the last few weeks to be cemented in their consciousness.

I am certain you have some things up your sleeve but will any of them be any different than we have seen from your crew before? Can you be truly innovative in your approach?

I guess we will see but if not then I suspect we are beginnning the death watch for your government and your term as the leader of the government of this great country.

Looks like John and Pierre lost the argument

2010-03-03T18:58:00.003-05:00

A Throne speech that goes out of its way to mention reducing Public Service pensions and public service spending (read wage freezes) and this even before a budget is released.

This is not good news for John Baird and his familier to the South.

I am certain they have been trying to fend off these measures, knowing the effect they could have on their re-election prospects, but it would appear they failed.

It is certainly going to look good seeing Ottawa, West Quebec and Eastern Ontario awash in Liberal red again.

Year End Review

2010-01-02T12:49:00.027-05:00

Happy New Year everybody!!

So another year has gone by and I decided to review some of the politics we saw in Canada in the last year or so.

Most overrated politician: It's a tie. Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff.

Stephen Harper because he has bookended the year with two prorogations of Parliament for the only purpose of escaping two self-inflicted political traps. Anybody who really believes this will not come back to haunt him and the Conservatives sometime in the future is dreaming. Both traps could have been avoided if Mr. Harper would have been more strategic and less ideological. I still cannot believe people in this country think this guy is a political genius.

Michael Ignatieff because he has not been the saviour for the Liberal Party his supporters believed him to be. Under his leadership the Party's standing with the public is no different than it was in 2008. As well, he has been utterly incapable of taking advantage of Mr. Harper's many political mistakes in 2009. By God, Mr. Harper just Prorogued Parliament for the second time in just over a year, for extreme partisan purposes, and where is Mr. Ignatieff and the Liberals? They should be shouting about Mr. Harper's attacks on Canadian democracy from the roof tops but instead the silence is deafening.

Most underrated politician Stephane Dion.

His reaction to the November 2008 economic statement and the actions that grew out of it knocked the Conservatives on their collective butts, a position they did not recover from until September of 2009.

Smartest political move The Sudbury Declaration by Mr. Ignatieff. That declaration caused panic in both the Conservative and NDP camps. It forced the Conservatives to definitively state that they did not want an election just when they were ramping up the government funded advertizing for their Action Plan to increase their polling numbers. Now the advertizing is done and the Conservative polling numbers are slowly but surely sinking again.

Dumbest political move Letting the Afghan detainee issue morph from being about torture to being about the credibility of the Conservatives. The Conservatives forgot an axiom in politics; it is not the crime that will get you it is the coverup. This issue is going to haunt them for awhile.

Most overrated political move Stephen Harper channeling the Beatles at the NAC. The reaction of the chattering classes to it demonstrates just how stupid Canadian politics have become.

Most underrated political move Michael Ignatieff's non-confidence speech in September. That speech set out an election theme, something that has been missing from the Liberals for over a decade. It gave me hope that Mr. Ignatieff would be different but so far I have not seen any follow through on that speech so maybe I am mistaken.

Most unreasonable expectations The idea the Olympics will give the Conservatives a boost. They will be forgotten long before any Canadian marks their X on a ballot and any attempt by the Conservatives to somehow take credit for the efforts of our athletes will be greeted with contempt and scorn.

Least unreasonable expectations A spring election, although I believe it will be closer to the end of May beginning of June than mid-April.

Sleeper issue to watch for in 2010 The deterioration of the economy this year as the stimulus spending of Fiscal Year 2009/10 stops in the new FY and all of the unrepaired structural problems that lead to the last recession, but were masked by the trillions of dollars in stimulus spending around the world, reassert themselves.

There you have. Just one man's opinion of the year just past.

The Beginning of the End for John and Pierre

2009-12-31T12:31:00.013-05:00

I read in the Globe and Mail yesterday that the government is considering going after the Public Service pension plans as a way to reduce the deficit. This, of course, is only the beginning.

This is a common tactic of Conservative governments when their gross mismanagement of the public purse finally catches up to them.

The Mulroney government found themselves in the same situation in the 1990s and they went after the Public Service pay and benefits.

The result was Ottawa became a Liberal bastion for three straight elections.

Now we are seeing the beginning of the same thing again in 2010. The Public Service is still the biggest employer in the National Capital Region and many of those folks live in Nepean, Barrhaven and Orlean, suburban ridings currently held by Conservatives. However, pissed off Public Servants could tip the balance back to the Liberals again. As well, the 416, 417 highways have caused many of them to live further out of town which could cause problems for Conservatives in the broader Eastern Ontario Region.

It is nice to know that Conservative ideology does not make allowances for past mistakes. I am really looking forward to the National Capital Region and Eastern Ontario being painted red again.

Deep breath everybody

2009-12-31T11:52:00.014-05:00

Stephen Harper has prorogued Parliament to escape a Speakers Warrant being issued in the new year for the Afghan detainee documents.

This is not surprising and it is certainly an outrageous affront to our democracy but let's not get too excited.

This is not permanent. He has not put troops into the streets. He has not otherwise done real harm to our institutions. He has merely taken a longstanding Parliamentary practice and abused it. Like I said not very surprising with this guy as we all know ideologues like him always believe that the end justifies the means.

Besides pointing out this abuse to Canadians, Liberals should be quietly ensuring that their own leadership would not do the same thing in the future. Mr. Harper's diminishing of Canadian democracy will only become permanent if his Liberal successor does the same thing, given similar circumstance. That may seem like an odd statement but politicians, when in power, always do what has been proven to be successful in the past regardless of their rhetoric when they were not in power. If Stephen Harper does indeed get away with this then some of his successors may decide to take similar actions as him if they find themselves in a little bit of political trouble. This may be particularly true in another minority government situation.

If Liberals believe otherwise about their leadership our democracy really is in danger from Mr. Harper's actions.

As an aside to Conservatives do not think for a moment that Canadians will not notice Mr. Harper's actions. You may be correct that it will have no immediate impact on Conservative fortunes and it is obvious that Mr. Harper and his advisors are only thinking of the immediate but his actions reek of arrogance and cynicism and these are always the downfall of governments. Canadians recognise them and do not like them in their politicians and eventually punish them for it.

To Liberals, provided that a Liberal government does not pull a similar stunt in the future, there is a silver lining to what Mr. Harper has done. The level or arrogance we are seeing from this government is usually followed by a big fall. Think Mulroney, Harris or Trudeau. Mr. Harper has bought himself three months but it could cost the Conservatives four or more years soon afterwards.

What a dumb political move by the Conservatives

2009-12-22T18:49:00.012-05:00

I have been watching the Conservatives' reaction to the detainee scandal with a critical eye since Mr. Colvin made his first statements in front of a Parliamentary Committee. Since that time they have had failed strategy after failed strategy and they have forgotten one of the axioms of politics.

It is not the crime that will get you it is the cover up.

I happen to agree with the Conservatives to a certain extent that Canadians will not get too worked up if it is proven that Canadian troops handed over Afghan detainees for potential torture. You see, Canadian are reasonable people who do not believe the troops or the government are evil or condone torture. The Conservatives should have realized that early on and came right out and admitted that the original agreement regarding Afghan detainees was woefully inadequate which probably lead to some Afghans being handed over to Afghan authorities who might have tortured or abused them. With a large dollop of mea culpa they could have admitted they dropped the ball on this file but they did eventually get around to fixing it.

Certainly the usual suspects would have condemned the government but that could have easily been dismissed as partisan politics and all of the revelations that we have been seeing in the last few weeks would have had less of an impact as Canadians would already have known that the government made mistakes.

Instead of course, the Conservatives have lied, obfuscated, smeared and otherwise did the opposite of what I suggested above. The result, weeks of bad press. Being placed in the position of being seen to defy the will of Parliament and being forced to consider Proroguing Parliament once again.

What a mess for the Conservatives.

The Conservatives made the mistake of making this whole scandal about what they are covering up and the lengths they are willing to go to cover whatever it is they are covering. That has the potential to be extremely damaging to the Conservatives and perversely their efforts have reached a point where the honest course is no longer viable. They are going to have to continue trying to cover up their actions and each day, week and month that they do so is like an acid dripping on their credibility.

It is ironic, if the Conservatives would have made this scandal exclusively about torture it would have probably gone away by now or at least been less toxic. Instead it has become about their credibility and it will not be going away any time soon, regardless of whether we have a new Parliament in the New Year or not.

As an aside, if Mr. Harper does Prorogue Parliament in the New Year he will get away with it in the short-term. It will be up to the Opposition to try to make it harm them in the medium to long-term.

Nice Spin, Globe and Mail

2009-11-28T10:22:00.012-05:00

So the Globe and Mail published an article yesterday stating that the introduction of the enabling legislation for the HST was bad news for the Liberals. I really liked their argument. They essentially stated that if they voted for the measure they would lose support in Ontario and BC and if they voted against the measure they would lose support in Ontario and BC.

What crap!! As I have stated on this blog before the enabling legislation has a greater potential to hurt the Conservatives than it does the Liberals.

So far, the Conservatives have managed to fly under the radar on the HST in both provinces. It should be remembered that it was Jim Flaherty that proposed the idea to both provinces. It should be remembered that it was Jim Flaherty's department that negotiated the HST deal with both provincies. It should be remembered that it is Jim Flaherty that will have to table the legislation. It should be remembered that because this bill deals with taxes it will be a confidence motion. Therefore, the Conservatives are going to have to fight for this bill just to survive as the government.

Suddenly, the Conservative government's role in the HST will be highlighted.

Yet somehow this is very bad news for the Liberals.

Of course, the spin the Globe and Mail published is quoted directly from the Conservative talking points. It is SOPs for the Conservatives that when they are going to do something that can potentially harm them politically they try to deflect blame to someone else, with the Liberals being a favourate target.

I have no real problem with the Conservatives trying to give this porker a whole makeover but I have a real problem with the Globe and Mail publishing a story about the HST enabling legislation that just puts forward the Conservative Party position with barely a hint of independent analysis.

My already low regard for the Globe and Mail went even lower yesterday.

Will progressives ever learn?

2009-11-14T14:10:00.025-05:00

Steve commented on a Decima poll the other day regarding opinions of the Gun Registry. I will not add much to his analysis of the poll.

However, that poll did start me thinking about why we would see this kind of result.

Leaving aside my distrust of polls sponsored by the media there is still a question of why we would see these kinds of estimates. It is a given with most progressives that gun control is a popular concept in this country. I am certain many are asking how can Canadians show such ambivalence towards a tool central to controlling guns in this country?

I think the simple answer is the political right in North America have developed a winning strategy for changing the societies that our fathers and grandfathers created in the 40 years after the Second World War. It is not just gun control. We are seeing it with other issues, such as health care, the environment, crime and taxes. It still boggles my mind that the political right on this continent has managed to convince the middle class that it is in their best interests to shift the tax burden from the wealthy and big business to the middle class. It defies all that I learned in economics about people making decisions in their best economic interests.

All of this is a neat trick since their arguments are so often wrong. In most cases progressives have the facts on their side but we are still watching the slow but steady erosion of the just society. So how do they do it? They are motivated, organized and well financed. They are masters of agitprop. They have no scruples. If it will achieve their goals they will lie through their teeth or instill fear. They just care about making their arguments sound plausible. The truth is secondary.

Little set backs, such as losing the American presidency will not deter them. It has been quite remarkable to see how people who were defeated and discredited last November still managed to put President Obama's health reforms on the brink and even though they did not kill them they still managed to water them down a great deal.

Progressives on the other hand seem to be none of these things. In addition they seem to be complacent, seeming to believe that since they have the facts on their side everything will work out for the better. Of course, when that proves to be a false assumption they are left scambling. The gun registry is a case in point. Progressives are going to be trying to prevent its abolition but they are late into the current round. The right has stolen a march on them.

It is time for progressives to change.

The first change is a change in attitude. This is not a game. This is a fight to maintain a just society as opposed to the goal of the other side to create a society that is only just for a chosen few and the other side is playing for keeps. So stop trying to play fair and play to win. I know many progressives recoil in horror at the idea of using agitprop to advance their agenda but if your goal is to maintain that just society then you are going to have to get your hands dirty. If you cannot do that then watch helplessly as that society drifts away. Bottom line, propaganda works. It has been doing so since our species learned how to talk and it really took off when it learned how to read and write. Use it and if you think doing so is somehow beneath you then I would respectfully suggest that you get over yourself.

The second change is be more proactive instead of reactive. Start setting the agenda and the frames for the arguments and stop ceding that advantage to the right. That means progressives are going to have to be as motivated, organized and well financed as the right. The dozens of progressive organizations out there fighting for different causes are going to have to unite into a progressive network and pool their resources and talent.

This should be happening now and these groups should support each other regardless of the cause, whether it be health care, taxes, or legalized drugs.

Third, keep going when you achieve a victory. Do not stop, do not think it is permanent and do not become complacent.

Fourth, come up with better arguments when confronting the right. The right are masters at coming up with the simple and punchy arguments for their positions. They realize that their audiences, whether they be their fellow citizens or legislators, are harried, time crunched people who want their information in nice neat packages that can be displayed on the screens of their mobile phones. The progressive response is usually long boring dissertations full of facts and figures that has their audiences' eyes glazing over before they finish the first paragraph.

Fifth, develop "think tanks" like the Fraser Institute. I cannot think of a single progressive think tank that takes the same approach to issues as Fraser. Certainly their work is intellectually suspect but they do not care. Their goal is not to advance academic arguments but to provide an academic veneer to the positions of the right. To give their positions the appearance of respectability.

The development of a just society was the goal of our fathers and grandfathers and although we had not achieved it we were heading in the right direction. That direction has since changed and we are actually moving farther away from it. It does not need to be that way. Progressives on this continent can still keep us moving towards that society but they are going to have to change their approach to achieving it if they want to succeed.

Stay positive my friends

2009-11-13T18:24:00.039-05:00

I have recently been criticized by some other Liberal bloggers because they claim that I refuse to see the reality of the current situation of the Liberal Party and that my attitude is part of the problems that they are having. Although he was too polite to say it in so many words one blogger even implied that I may be deluded.

I have been called much worse and I take none of the criticisms personally.

However, I would like to explain my seeming indifference to the current situation the Liberals find themselves in and even my optimism as we look into the future.

First, everything in politics is transitory. It is ever changing and that is particularly true in between elections. So I never become too upset or too happy about what is happening during that period. Indeed, that holds true during elections. I wait until election night before I become either one.

I remember at the beginning of February 2004, every pundit in the country was stating that Paul Martin would sweep the country. There were even hints that he could take more than two seats in Alberta and sweep the Bloc out of Quebec. By the end of that Februrary every pundit in the country was questioning whether Paul Martin would be able to hang on to government.

Or a more recent example. At the beginning of June of this year many Liberals were saying Michael Ignatieff should force an election. The Liberals were leading the Conservatives and had been doing so for about six months so the time was right to strike. Of course, by the time the most probable election date rolled around that lead had evaporated.

The nature of politics is such that getting upset or ecstatic about what is happening in the moment is counter-productive and probably not good for your health. In addition, any political party that makes major decisions based on what is happening in the here and now generally does not enjoy long-term success.

That is why I generally put less importance on the the here and now of politics, preferring to look beyond it. It is too easy to get lost in the forest when you are looking at the trees.

Second, we will never know what Canadians will care about. The pundits try to tell us differently and they may even try to get Canadians to care about their pet projects and pet peeves but when all is said an done Canadians will choose for themselves. This also means that you can never really understand why one party will be in or out of favour at any given time. Therefore, giving a political party some advice to take this action or that based on what is happening now is a useless gesture and could actually do more harm than good.

Third, we do not have all of the information necessary to give good advice. We as bloggers and citizens have to rely on the media for our information. As has been pointed out many times before our media cares more about advancing a narrative than giving us any real information. I often find bloggers giving the Liberal Party all sorts of advice based on this incomplete information and I am left shaking my head, particularly since the Party and its paid operatives have access to information sources we could only dream about. Then there are those bloggers who give advice to the Party based on information and analysis by media types who are well known to be hostile to the Liberals.

The final point is completely political. That is, it is usually a bad idea to acknowledge to the world that things are tough for your Party. Certainly things could be going badly but that does not mean you need to admit that publicly. Many argue that admitting a problem is the first step towards solving it and that is true but admitting it publicly usually just complicates matters. That is why there are all sorts of organizations and programs that allow people to admit their problems anonymously. As much as we like to believe honesty is the best policy being honest at the wrong time or to the wrong people tends to make matters worse.

As well, the most successful political organizations are the ones that can exude a quiet self-confidence regardless of the situation. The most successful politicians in recent history have all had it. Reagan, Harris, Clinton, Thatcher, Chretien, Obama. I would even say that Stephen Harper has that trait. Those who did not have it tended to enjoy less or no success. Bush Sr, Dion, Joe Clark, McGuinty during his first go around, Eves, John Major, John Kerry and McCain. Remarkably Paul Martin had it as Finance Minister but lost it when he became PM.

This trait often manifests itself in the ability to spit in the eye of your political opponent even as you find yourself being politically wounded. Chretien was a master of it. There were some tough times during his administration but by all outward appearances he and his administration never showed their effects and often he would just become more defiant when things did go wrong.

Of course, there is always a danger that quiet self-confidence can morph into arrogance and hubris leading to a great fall. Mulroney and Harris come to mind and it does look like Stephen Harper may be straying into that danger zone. We will have to see how far he goes. Incidentally, the really successful ones are the ones who can strike a balance between self-confidence and humility. Chretien was a master at it as was Bill Clinton. Both probably would have won another election if they had stood for it.

I have seen the beginnings of a quiet self-confidence in the current Liberal leadership and it is the first time I have seen such in the Liberal leadership for half-a-decade. The Sudbury Declaration was a great example of such. Since that time the Party has gone on to ignore the minutae of daily politics and it seems to be pursuing a plan despite it. You can read my previous posts to see what I mean. That is good news and one of the reasons why I am optimistic for the future. They have not been perfect at it. I was steaming when I saw the statement by Mr. Ignatieff after the by-elections. They were by-elections that you had no chance of winning so he should have just ignored their results and let everybody else have their nice little circle jerk over them. Fortunately, his statements were ignored so no harm was done.

Politics is a funny business where you can be on top of the world one day and in the depths of despair the next, but only if you let it happen. I choose not to. I am well aware of the current political situation but I have seen politics from within a party apparatus and without so I know that the situation can change at any time and I also know that there is alot more going on behind the curtain than we as ordinary voters ever see.

I will go on being optimistic about the chances of finally getting rid of this government so feel free to call be deluded if you wish.

Some observations from the weekend

2009-11-11T09:52:00.021-05:00

I had reserve duty last weekend. As usual I stay on Base Trenton and drive out to our ops area in Prince Edward County. To do so I have to cross a railroad overpass on the western edge of the City of Belleville. This riding is held by a Conservative.

On Saturday morning I noticed one of the "Economic Action Plan" signs with vague references to bridge improvements next to that overpass. However, there was no sign of any kind of construction activity. No equipment, no construction warning signs, not even a worn out orange cone.

I found this odd. That sign was not there a month ago when I had my last reserve duty. So it is very recent. I began to wonder who begins a major construction job in November? The answer is no one. The freeze/thaw cycle plays havoc when you are pouring concrete so in all likelihood not much or even no work would be done on this bridge this year. Instead the work would be done next spring, probably beginning in earnest in May.

That had me thinking that the Federal government's fiscal year ends on March 31. No work will probably begin on this bridge until May. So, is the money slated for this bridge improvement really going to be used? Has the money already been transferred knowing that it would not be used during this fiscal year?

I am really looking forward to the Auditor General examining this whole Economic Action Plan. The sooner she does it the better.

Anyway, Saturday morning I arrive at our Ops area, with my fellow reservists, to discover that a vital piece of equipment for our work is in pieces and unservicable. Apparently, an engineer took it apart on Friday and went home before putting it back together again. We called that engineer to come and fix our equipment so we had to wait until he did so.

In classic military fashion, having no work to do until the thing was fixed, we all sat down, drank coffee, ate Timbits and talked. It took awhile to fix the equipment so it was a long conversation covering many topics. Included amongst those topics was the giant novelty cheques fiasco and I swear I did not bring it up. I will save you the details but I will let one of my fellow reservists speak for the consensus of the group when he stated; "It really does not bother me that the Conservatives put their logo on these government cheques but it pisses me off that they seem to think Canadians would be too stupid to notice. I cannot support people who think I am stupid."

One of my fellow reservists is an air traffic controller in Montreal. He controls the upper level airspace. He is one of those people who prevents your airplane from hitting another while you enjoy your delicious airline meal and the latest Hollywood blockbuster.

At breakfast on Sunday he mentioned that he had been talking to the plane carrying the Royal Couple last week. The conversation ventured to how he has talked to the airplanes carrying Stephen Harper on several occasions. He knows this because the plane carrying him always has the call sign of CanForce One. (How original)

So he stated; "Yep, I have told the pilots of the planes carrying Steve what to do."

To which another sitting at the table stated; "Then maybe you should tell him to go and slap the douchebag sitting in the back."

There was much chuckling and nods of agreement from those around the table.

There is only one irrefutable implication of the by-elections

2009-11-10T18:02:00.005-05:00

The political make up of the House of Commons has not been significantly changed.

The Conservatives still need the support of another party to maintain the confidence of The House.

The Opposition still needs to unite to defeat the government.

The rest of the theories, analyses and prognostications that we have heard following these by-elections is speculation, conjecture and spin, much of it very self serving, and all of it of little value.

Keep your eye on the puck!!

2009-11-05T18:43:00.022-05:00

The Conservatives have had a terrible month. It began with accusations of using stimulus funds for partisan purposes and using taxpayers funds for partisan advertizing. The partisan use of stimulus funds was backed up by independent observers. More recently, it has become increasingly apparent that the Conservatives have FUBARed the roll-out of the H1N1 vaccine. Again, independent observers, including the Auditer General, have backed up that assertion and the intervention of the AG even puts paid to any accusations of the Opposition politicising this issue.

Considering all of this would it be smarter of Liberals to keep hammering away at the government on these issues or to self-immolate themselves ONCE AGAIN over some silly issue, like for example, Liberal Members voting to support a Bill to scrap the gun registry?

It would appear for some Liberals that they would prefer the latter.

The reaction from some Liberals has been quite over the top. Accusations of violating Liberal principles, claiming that those who voted with the Conservatives last night are not "real" Liberals and taking pot shots at the party leadership for letting it happen.

Talk about misplaced priorities and an overreaction. Those Liberals need to take a pill for many reasons.

1) It's a freaking private members bill. The lowest of the low of bills in Parliament. It took months to go from first reading to last night's vote and it will take months more to complete the parliamentary process, probably dying on the order paper in the Spring when we have an election.

2) It was second reading. There is alot of time left to modify this bill in committee.

3) This could be an opportunity for the Liberals to exploit a law and order issue that the Conservatives consistantly find themselves on the wrong side, provided the Liberals play it right. The Conservatives used a back door method to make this attempt and they whipped the vote, including forcing a Member to vote despite H1N1 concerns. That gives the Liberals a golden opportunity to again make gun control an issue. There is a reason why the Conservatives chose this method. They know they are vulnerable on this issue so the Liberals should be exploiting that vulnerability. Incidentally, Mr. Ignatieff looked like he was trying to do just that last night but it was lost in the cacophony of recriminations from some Liberals. If Liberals really want to save the Registry make it uncomfortable for the Conservatives to continuing to back this bill. That is going to take a disciplined communications strategy, involving independent observers and experts over the next few weeks and months. Degenerating into recriminations and accusation is probably the best way to embolden the Conservatives to continue on their present course and speed up the Registry's demise.

4) To claim that someone who disagrees with you is not a real or good Liberal is hubris of the highest order. Such assertions indicate that you believe you are the only ones with the right answers. That is the hallmark of an ideologue and an extremist. It is not something I have come to expect from Liberals.

Many Liberals proudly claim that the Party is a big tent party. Well, if that is what you want the Liberal Party to be then you better be prepared to tolerate those who disagree with you.

5) In politics expediency sometimes trumps principle. That is just the way it is. If you cannot accept that fact then I would suggest you find another interest besides politics. You will live longer.

I find it kind of funny that many of the same Liberals who ridiculed the NDP for taking the expedient route of supporting the government are now complaining about expediency within their own party. Many of those Liberals gave NDP supporters the advice that they should just acknowledge that the NDP is like any other political party. I would suggest that they take their own advice.

As well, do not assume that the Liberals who voted with the Conservatives made their decisions because of expediency. The creation of the Register was controversial amongst Liberals from the beginning because not all Liberals agreed with its creation. Some of these Members might have made this decision because they thought it was the right thing to do.

Again, if you believe their principles are somehow inferior to your own I would suggest that is the height hubris as well. It is that kind of hubris that eventually leads to the fall of governments. It is disconcerting that we are seeing it among some Liberals before the Liberals have won anything.

6) The days of the Registry were numbered as soon as the Conservatives won government. The fact it has survived this long is quite amazing and a testement to the fact it is supported by the majority of Canadians. To make certain that it continues to survive until the Liberals win an election Liberals are going to have to be smart about opposing the government on it and they are going to have to avoid complacancy.

If Liberals really want to save the Registry they are going to have to win an election, full stop. That is the only way to secure it. So Liberals have to stop handing their opponents the gift of disunity over what the Party says or does. It is the right thing to do politically and it is the right thing to do for a party that claims to tolerate different viewpoints and ideas.

Will H1N1 derail the "economic recovery"?

2009-10-30T17:39:00.016-04:00

I really do not believe that the economy is recovering, which is the reason for the quotes in the title.

The global ecomomy was pushed off of a mountain last Fall and it fell for a long time, hitting hard outcroppings all the way. If finally hit bottom and it is now stumbling along the very rough terrain of the valley floor heading for the next peak. It is not even close to reaching the point where it can begin climbing to that peak but it is moving that way. While it is doing so will a big boar come out of the underbrush and knock it back on its ass again?

Ok, I think I have taken that analogy far enough.

I ask this question because I am seeing a significant drop in productivity at my place of business as a result of H1N1. So far only one person in my organization has been away as a result of a confirmed case of H1N1. He came through alright and he is back to work. However, the number of people who have taken time off because of normal seasonal illnesses, either for themselves or in their families is quite a bit higher than last year. We had one situation where one member of a team was coughing and hacking. It was just a chest cold but he finally said the heck with it and took a day off. That very same day 4 out of 5 of his fellow teammates took the day off as well, even though they were not sick but just worried that their sick teammate would make them sick. That is five lost person days that can be attributed to the fear of H1N1 but not the actual virus.

I wonder if this is happening elsewhere?

Regardless of how bad this outbreak actually becomes, just the fear of it seems to be causing work disruptions. We are still early in the season, could these disruptions become longer and more widespread? I believe they could and if it does happen then I think we can count on the economy not showing consistant signs of recovery until at least the Fall or even beyond.

Why the Fall?

The flu season will last until Spring. Any distruption it creates will probably not work through the economy until late spring, early summer. On April 1 we will see the beginning the the new fiscal year for the government, which mean most of the stimulus funds that are being spent right now will dry up. The stimulus package was meant as a short-term tonic for the economy and most of it was slated to be spent in this fiscal year. The amount slated for next year is much smaller. Incidentally, this is true for most of the developed world.

So possibly before the economy fully works through the effects of H1N1 the funds that have managed to smooth the sharper edges of the recession will be removed. I cannot believe that combination will create the best conditions for an economic recovery.

Are the Conservatives dropping the political H1N1 ball?

2009-10-29T18:20:00.018-04:00

My wife is like the majority of Canadians in the sense she does not give a damn about politics. She could not care less about all of the things I read and write about here on Liblogs.

I mention this because a couple of nights ago we were sitting at the supper table talking about the H1N1 vaccine. She is concerned and had questions on whether she should get it. Our family doctor says yes but a family friend, who also happens to be a doctor, is much more circumspect, mentioning such things as the lack of testing of the vaccine in Canada and possible side effects.

So my wife decided to look to see what the government has to say about it. Thus my wife and I had one of our rare "political" discussions. She mentioned she was confused because of the mixed messages she was receiving from the doctors and that the government did not provide much useful information and at one point in the discussion about the government information she asked the question: "Is the government giving us all of the information, are they holding any of it back?"

After thinking about it yesterday she decided to get the shot. She falls into one of the groups that are considered high risk so she can get it before the rest of us. We had a prior commitment last night but she said we will be done by 8:00pm, the clinic closes a 9:00pm, so we should get there with plenty of time. We arrived at 8:15 and she was told the clinic was closed. They were so overwhelmed they had to stop taking new recipients almost as soon as they opened the doors at 5:00pm. They told her if she wanted to have any chance of getting the vaccine she should show up at the clinic around 1:00pm, a full four hours before it opens.

She was not impressed, in fact she was downright angry.

She again asked me my opinion on the situation and I told it was simply that they did not have enough of the vaccine. She then asked me who was responsible for getting the vaccine and I told her it is the federal government. She then made the statement: "How can they not have enough vaccine? Everybody knew the Swine flu was coming back. What the fuck has the government been doing for the last 6 months?"

My wife is concerned about H1N1, although she has decided to receive the vaccine she is still confused about it and still has doubts about the decision and now she is frustrated and at least partially blames the federal government for that frustration and confusion.

Concern, confusion and frustration. A heady mix, that if it infects enough of the Canadian population would spell the end of a sitting government because when they rear their heads the person feeling these emotions begins to look for someone to blame and the federal government is an easy target.

Of course, this is just an anecdote but my wife's experience is not an isolated case. It is happening all over the National Capital Region and probably all over the country. For the first time in several years my wife has noticed the federal government and she is not impressed with how it has handled this situation. If that sentiment begins to catch on amongst other apolitical Canadians the Conservatives could find themselves in deep trouble.

The Conservatives know they are vulnerable

2009-10-27T18:57:00.013-04:00

I am a little confused by the Conservatives' actions with regard to the blatantly partisan dispensation of the stimulus funds and the unprecedented amounts of taxpayer's money they are paying on partisan advertizing.

Both are high risk actions that have a very large potential downside for their political fortunes. They provide their main political opponents with ready made advertizement material where they can take Stephen Harper's statements of 2006 and place them beside his actions of 2009.

So, why have they done it?

Some would say it is hubris. They believed they would not get caught and even if they did they would not pay a price for it. There is some truth in that but I believe there is a deeper reason.

Simply put they are vulnerable and scared. For the first couple years of this government the Conservatives walked with a swagger. They believed they were unassailable and invincible. That swagger disappeared after Stephen Harper prorogued Parliament last year. It has never returned. Since then I have detected a very different attitude since then, an attitude of bravado covering up a great fear.

We saw that in the late spring and late summer when Stephen Harper first made a deal with Michael Ignatieff to prevent a summer election and practically begged Mr. Ignatieff to allow his government to survive come the Fall.

We have seen it in the fact the Conservatives are enjoying good poll numbers but there is not even a hint of Stephen Harper forcing or calling an election. We know he does not fear any negative fallout from the electorate about doing so because he totally ignored that threat last year. Certainly, we have seen speculation in the media that he will force an election but nothing from Mr. Harper, the guy who really counts.

We currently see it now in those poll numbers. The Conservatives have spent untold millions, maybe billions, of stimulus dollars in Conserative and swing ridings. He has spent an unprecedented amount of taxpayer's dollars on blatantly partisan government ads and they are still enjoying the afterglow of a backlash against their chief opponent when their necessary strategy to sever themselves from Mr. Harper's confidence games caused a widespread eruption of election speculation with Mr. Ignatieff being blamed for it.

In addition the Conservatives have enjoyed a national media that has been compliant at best and complicit at worst.

Despite this the Conservatives are not much better off than they were on election day last in 2008. They have failed to break the 40% mark for more than a couple of weeks and they are now slowly sinking back to the levels that they achieved before the Sudbury Declaration.

That is telling. Stephen Harper is almost four years into his government. He is at that stage where there is usually no great desire for change and where the government usually enjoys widespread support. If Jean Chretien would have had all of the advantages I describe above during his fourth year as PM the Liberals would have been sitting comfortably in the mid-40 range. The same could be said of Brian Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau.

Stephen Harper, he struggles to acheive 40% and even if he achieves that level it is not sustainable.

The Conservatives are not acting like a government that is strong and confident, like Jean Chretien did in the fourth year of his government or like Mike Harris for that matter at the same stage in his. Instead they are acting like a government that knows they are vulnerable and they are trying their damnest to turn things around, very much like Ernie Eves did leading up to his one and only election as Ontario Premier. You may remember that in the last few months of his goverment he lavished all sorts of money on Ontario voters while spending all sorts of government money on partisan advertizing. We all know that worked very well.

I have argued several times on this blog that the Conservatives are frightened. The fact they believe they need to take a huge political risk in playing partisan games with economic stimulus money during an economic downturn and spending an inordinate amount of government money on partisan advertizing would seem to confirm that argument has merit.

A warning to Liberals

2009-10-20T18:40:00.009-04:00

EKOS is scheduled to come out with a poll this Thursday. That poll is going to indicate that the Conservatives do not appear to have been harmed by the current Cheque-Gate scandal.

They may drop but if they do it will be within the margin of error (MOE). The same can be said of the Liberals. They may increase but again it will be within the margin of error. Then again the Conservatives could increase and the Liberals decrease but within the MOE.

One thing about these kinds of scandals is they do not have an immediate impact on the horse race estimates of polls. When Ms. Fraser broke Adscam, in a much more dramatic fashion than this scandal broke, the Liberals did not suffer an immediate hit in the polls and the Conservatives did not enjoy an immediate benefit. Indeed, throughout the three year Adscam saga the Liberals never trailed the Conservatives until the final three weeks of the 2006 election campaign.

What these kinds of scandals do is cause a slow burn in the electorate towards the party in power. It causes many to believe that a change may be in order, even those who continue to tell pollsters they support the government. In other words, these types of scandals sow the seeds of discontent amongst the electorate that can be reaped at a later date. As well, they create the impression in the electorate that the government may be corrupt, which then causes even the smallest transgression to become magnified. Witness David Dingwall's pack of gum to see that in action.

So, when the poll comes out on Thursday and you see that the estimates have not moved much please do not whine and cry about how the Conservatives are getting away with yet another scandal or how the Liberals are not taking advantage of this. The time will come when the seeds Mr. Harper and his members have planted this week will germinate and grow until they overwhelm them and they find themselves on the opposition benches looking over at PM Ignatieff.

However, if you really must obsess over the next polls then I would suggest you look at the undecideds. I would suspect that the estimate for that will increase at greater than the MOE.

The Conservatives are just keeping an election promise

2009-10-16T16:53:00.004-04:00

Remember back in 2006 when the Conservatives made an election promise to be a more transparent government.

Their using oversized novelty stimulus checks with the Conservative logo and being signed by individual members, cabinet Minister and Stephen Harper is them being transparent in using taxpayers money for partisan purposes. So they have kept that 2006 election promise.

The Conservatives cannot be blamed if everybody else interpreted their promise of transparency some other way.

Calvin Klein's Obsession for Politicos

2009-10-08T18:12:00.018-04:00

This particular fragrance comes in many bottles sporting such labels as Strategic Council, EKOS, Angus Reid, Ipsos Reid and Nanos. The fragrance is likened to that which comes out of the back end of a bull but that does not stop politicos of every stripe, both professionals and otherwise, from constantly marinating in it.

Why? Who knows but the obsession is real which is very strange. After all

Polls are not predictive. I still remember reading a banner headline in a newspaper just a couple of days before the writ was dropped for the 2004 election that stated "Liberals Heading for a Majority: Poll."

Polls do not measure support for parties. They measure the opinions of a sample of people at the time the poll was taken. The only true measure of support for a political party is what it received on election day. When a person marks his X on that little piece of paper and drops it into the cardboard box he is committed. He cannot change his mind.

Public opinion can change at any time. You just have to look at the 2004 election example. It is obvious that many Canadians changed their minds as the campaign wore on because on the Saturday before the election the Liberals and Conservatives were deadlocked at around 33%. Then many of these same people changed their minds again because the final result was a 6 point victory for the Liberals.

Then you can look at the 2008 election. Towards the end alot of people had changed their minds about the Liberals and Mr. Dion, which fact probably went into the calculation of Mr. Duffy as he was deciding whether to release the now infamous Dion Atlantic TV interview.

I know many out there would still argue that all of this is true but polls do matter because of two considerations.

Polls drive the media narrative. What came first the chicken or the egg? I am more convinced that the narrative drives the polls, not the other way around. We saw that at the end August, beginning of September. The media began hammering away at the narrative that Canadians did not want an election but it took them more than a week to publish polls stating that. Assume it takes at about three days to take and publish a poll and that works out to almost a full week to peddle that narrative before actually asking Canadians for their opinions. I can guarantee that had some effect on the subsequent polling estimates.

Then there was Paul Martin. When Mr. Brault gave his testimony during the Gomery Commission the Liberal polling numbers dropped 6 points overnight. The Conservative numbers did not budge either way. The Liberal numbers had fully recovered and were back to their pre-testimony levels within 10 days but that did not stop the media from stating in almost every political news story, in the subsequent months, that the Liberals were plunging in the polls.

Polls influence public opinion. There is some truth in that but do not overestimate that influence. If its influence was as strong as some people think we would never have a change of government. It is very rare for an opposition party to ever lead a sitting government. So, except in the rarest of instances the sitting government will always be seen leading its chief opponent. That is true of the horse race numbers and the individual leadership numbers for each party leader. If that situation has such a strong influence on public opinion we would not have seen some of the big changes we have seen in the last 20 years. Think Peterson, Campbell, Eves, George Bush Sr..

As well, if polls had such influence on public opinion we would probably have a two tier health care system by now. The Fraser Institute has published many studies, containing much polling data, demonstrating that Canadians are alright with the idea for more than a decade. Yet no politician out their will ever suggest converting the Canadian health care system into a two-tier system.

With this in mind I find it disturbing that some Liberals out their are stating that the Liberals should change their strategy to turn their numbers around. That is bad advice. They had better hope beyond hope that the Liberals do not succumb to the temptation to chase higher polling numbers. They are unlikely to succeed in overtaking the Conservatives.

As well, a political party or individual who makes decisions bases on polls, particularly the public polls is destined to fail.

As I have stated in a previous post the Liberals having finally shown that they have developed a long-term election strategy and an election theme. It is easy to see if you look past all of the political noise that we have subjected to since the Sudbury Declaration. It would be a shame if they let that strategy and theme fall by the wayside in a futile quest to improve their polling numbers. Instead, continue to implement the strategy and the polling will take care of itself.

A little piece of trivia. In the primary season leading up to the 1992 US elections none of the stars of the Democratic Party believed they could unseat George Bush Sr. He was extremely popular after winning the first Gulf War and the polling seemed to indicate he would take the '92 election in a walk. So none of these party grandees put their names into the ring. They figured they would lose, thus ending their hopes of winning in '96, so they decided to let a relative unknown win the nomination so that he could be sacrificed. Needless to say they were wrong, Bill Clinton won two elections and the time of these grandees passed, denying all of them a chance at the White House. I wonder if some of them regret allowing the polls to have such an influence on their decisions.

I know I am asking alot in saying ignore the polls but at the very least I would suggest that obsessing over them is probably not a good idea.

Sometimes Canadian politics bugs me

2009-10-05T18:06:00.015-04:00

Stephen Harper sang at an arts gala during the weekend and it becomes big news.

Liberal and Conservative bloggers begin examining this event like a witch doctor examining chicken entrails to try to determine whether this will help or hinder this reelection chances. Naturally, for the most part, the conclusions fall along partisan lines.

The media does the same thing. John Ibbotson in the Globe today was absolutely gushing and greatly demonstrated that his bosses should have left him in Washington. Dude, I really hope you wore a condom when you wrote that column.

Meanwhile, this weekend we saw evidence that the world economy is still not out of recession. The rate of descent has decreased for certain but otherwise it is still descending and this is before the stimulus spending governments pumped into the the world economy runs out at the beginning of the new fiscal year, which begins, in most countries, in April. That's only six months away folks. As someone in project management I can tell you that six months is a very short time indeed. Since the bulk of that stimulus was earmarked for this year, when April 2010 rolls around things will begin to change for the worst again and probably rather quickly.

Remember folks the thing that started this whole ride, the sub-prime mortgage collapse and the gigantic toxic debt it left behind is still there. It has been masked by the stimulus spending and the bank bailouts but those were only temporary measures to prevent the collapse of the global financial system and to give the illusion that governments were doing something about the recession. However, once that runs out that debt will rear its ugly head again and smack the global economy onces more.

Do we see anybody giving this issue the attention it deserves on the weekend or today?

Of course not. Instead we hear about Stephen Harper singing the Beatles.

Sad really.

Liberals are sticking to their strategy

2009-10-03T10:01:00.025-04:00

With the benefits of hindsight we are beginning to see that the Liberals have finally developed a medium to long-term strategy for winning the next election. Something we have not seen since before Jean Chretien won his third majority.

We have seen only the beginning and in broad strokes it looks something like this. Stop supporting the government and begin to lay the groundwork for having an election on competing values.

It began in June when they allowed the government to survive despite not receiving what many believed they could have received at that time. While others were thinking short-term political advantage it was apparent to some that the Liberals were playing the long game.

The summer was spent developing and fine tuning the strategy for the Fall and the Winter.

We saw the beginning of its implementation in Sudbury. A necessary first step was to extricate the Liberal caucus from Stephen Harper's confidence games and they did that beautifully, side swiping the NDP in the process. Of course that set off a storm that has lead to a predictable fall in their polling numbers. (Note I do not say support. Polls measure peoples opinions at a given time and we all now peoples opinions change all of the time.)

Despite this the Liberals did not flinch. They continued to implement their strategy.

The next step was for Mr. Ignatieff to outline the broad strokes of how the Liberals would handle the economy. It received as much play as you would expect for a speech by the Leader of the Opposition but it was generally well received.

Then we saw the Liberals begin to go after the Conservative record and set up their attack lines for the next election. Gerard Kennedy's report on stimulus spending is gold. It received very little attention at this time but it was never meant to. Again, the Liberals are thinking medium to long-term.

The final step of this part of the strategy that they have shown us is Mr. Ignatieff's speech for the non-confidence motion. It establishes an election theme. Something the Liberals have not had since I do not know when. As I stated in a previous post it is a winning theme. It is the one that has made the Liberal Party the Natural Governing Party in this country. If you do not believe me on this last point then I would point out the National Post is stating there is not much difference between the Liberals and the Conservatives. That is something I would expect to hear from Jack Layton. The Liberals should feel very good. When the house newsletter of the Conservative Party begins to spout decades old NDP talking points, when criticising your party, you are probably on to something.

I do not know the next steps in this strategy. I imagine we will see the Liberals continue to push their election theme over the next few months and I would expect to see more reports like that produced by Mr. Kennedy. As for other parts of that strategy we will just have to wait and see.

A month of bad press and dropping poll numbers did not deter the Liberals from pursuing their chosen strategy. That shows strength, resolve and courage. That should make Liberals happy and it should be a cause for concern to its opponents.

Why do the media try to be political strategists...

2009-10-01T18:39:00.015-04:00

because they are not very good at it.

As I have stated in this space before Stephen Harper does not want an election this Fall. His reasons are many and Mr. Ignatieff just gave him another reason today. (See my previous post).

That does not stop the media and others from speculating that Mr. Harper will engineer his own defeat by using some sort of poison pill.

I saw the latest speculation on this yesterday in the Globe where they stated that the Conservatives may use the HST enabling legislation as a poison pill.

What stupidity!!

The HST is deeply unpopular in BC and it is becoming increasingly unpopular in Ontario. It is widely seen in both provinces as a tax grab during hard economic times.

In that kind of atmosphere why would the Conservatives even think of introducing legislation that will enable this tax as a stand alone Bill, let alone use it as the hill in which to sacrifice their government? Up to this point the Conservatives have been distancing themselves from the two provincial government decisions on the HST. They made the necessary agreements with the two provincial governments but they are hoping no one will notice that it takes two to make such agreements.

Now people are suggesting that they will abandon this strategy and highlight their role in the imposition of the HST by using it as a Bill to trigger an election?! These people must be on crack. I cannot think of a strategy more likely to cost votes in the two most populous provinces in the country.

It is true that such a bill would make things ackward for the Liberals. They would either have to make things difficult for the Ontario Liberals and break a commitment by voting down the Bill or they would have to give Jack Layton ammunition to use against them by supporting it.

However, neither option would hurt the Liberals that much in the long run. Mr. McGuinty would be inconvenienced by having the bill defeated but I am certain he also remembers the fact that former Harris reformatories now in the Harper cabinet have overtly tried to undermine his political position, leading up to the last provincial election, on several occasions. Now that another Harris acolyte and former colleague of these same ministers is the leader of the Provincial PC Party he can probably expect more of the same if they are still occupying those posts. As well, considering how unpopular the HST is in both provinces the two premiers may welcome an out from having to implement it without being seen as giving into the opposition in their respective provinces. In other words, neither provincial government is likely to make too much noise if enabling legislation is defeated.

As for Jack Layton, voting for the Bill will allow him to again say there is no difference between the Liberals and the Conservatives. But they have been saying that for decades and the results speak for themselves. Canadians believe that there are only two parties capable of governing this country and if both are implicated in the implementation of the HST it will be cancelled out as an election issue.

The HST enabling legislation will not be introduced as a stand alone bill. It is too toxic. Instead it will be buried in a good news budget in the Spring or it will be buried in a big, good news omnibus bill just before or after the Christmas break.

Oh look, an election theme

2009-10-01T18:17:00.011-04:00

Today Michael Ignatieff did something that Liberal leaders failed to do in the last three elections. He actually set out an overarching theme for the next Liberal campaign. Good on him.

As elections themes go, it is a good one. The agreement amongst Canadians that governments are a force for good runs deep in this country. Canadians do not want governments to be all encompassing but at the same time they do expect their governments to actively contribute to the greater good of the nation and society.

This idea has been a core Liberal value for over a century and it is a contributing factor to its great success in that time in winning elections and forming governments.

From a strategic point of view it is a good strategy as well. Stephen Harper has never articulated his vision for Canada. There have been hints which have lead to accusations amongst his opponents of a hidden agenda and hopes amongst his supporters of the same thing. Mr. Ignatieff might have just removed that luxury from him. Depending on how well Mr. Ignatieff continues to articulate and elaborate upon his vision the greater the pressure he will put on Mr. Harper to put forward his vision. If it is as bad or as good as his opponents or supporters believe it could make things rather difficult for him.

During the last election he took some flak for waiting until almost the last minute to release a platform. He could take more if he is unwilling to offer his own vision when his chief opponent does nothing but talk about his.

If this theme continues through to the next election, in the Spring, then we could find ourselves in a campaign that we have not seen in awhile. One that is actually about competing visions for this country.

No election this Fall

2009-09-29T17:28:00.015-04:00

As expected Mr. Harper did not put any poison pills into his economic statement on Monday so I would expect the government to last at least until Spring. With the EI legislation still working its way through The House Jack Layton still has his excuse to support the government during the vote on the Liberal confidence motion.

This is the ideal situation for the Liberals. Although it was apparent that they were ready for an election their best outcome is to wait but not be blamed for the delay. Despite the likely defeat of the confidence motion they will have established themselves as the Opposition party in the House and they will have displayed strength and resolve. This will probably not overly impress the general public and the defeat of the confidence motion will have the media saying it is a crushing defeat but this motion will further energize Liberals for the Winter in preparation for a Spring vote. Hell, it might even convince many of those 800,000 some odd Liberal supporters who stayed home in 2008 to come out next time, which would have a significant impact on the final outcome.

Incidently, congratulations for the Liberals for sticking to their guns despite a concerted effort by the Conservatives and the media to force them to change their minds. The media in particular tried their best by publishing polls and telling us all that we did not want an election. Their final salvo was found in the G&M today and Bob Fife yesterday buy taking a little incident in Quebec and trying to conflate that into disunity within the Liberal Party. The Globe had about three articles, an editorial and a column by Mr. Simpson today on the Liberal Party's perceived troubles. Kind of excessive if you ask me but I guess that is what you call a full court press. Mr. Fife was funny last night though. His voice and body language demonstrated to me that he did not believe a word of what he was peddling about Liberal disunity. It was fun to watch.

Stephen Harper got what he wanted. He desperately wanted to avoid an election this Fall because he knows that it is an even bet that he would lose it and even if he were to win it he would probably only win another minority. I am pretty certain that after three kicks at the can, ending in minority governments every time, his own party would force him out. Or at least try, with him fighting it tooth and nail, which would be a great thing to see. He has bought himself the Winter with which to come up with a way to rehabilitate himself and his party. That probably involves waiting for the end of the Olympics followed by a budget then an election. It will likely fail. Him and his government are past their best before date and they will only become older and moldier as the cold winter months progress. The small rise in fortunes that they have enjoyed in the last couple of weeks will fade a little bit, as the threat of an election fades, and we will again settle into a pattern that should be very familiar to political observers and bloggers.

The NDP got what it wanted but at a price. They have avoided an election but at the cost of some of their credibility. In the long run it will not harm them but they are destined to lose support and seats as people grow tired of the Conservatives and gravitate back to the only party Canadians believe can govern competently, the Liberals. Jack Layton will be like Mr. Harper, looking to rehabilitate himself and his party but he will have as much success in that as Mr. Harper will in his efforts.

The Bloc is just trying to stay above the fray and they are succeeding. They will probably just spend the winter doing what they usually do.

All-in-all, everybody got what they wanted, for now.

Will Stephen Harper engineer his own defeat?

2009-09-25T17:24:00.019-04:00

There has been some speculation on Liblogs and in some of the media that Mr. Harper may engineer his own defeat this Fall, likely by placing a poison pill within some kind of confidence motion.

I find this unlikely.

Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are not lying when they say they do not want an election this Fall. There are several reasons for this.

Such issues as the partisan ads and partisan stimulus spending are issues that resonate with Canadians. Even if they are the recipients of such largesse most Canadians do not like governments using tax payers money for partisan purposes. As these issues are recent they would still be topical during a Fall election. The same will not be true in the Spring.

Their chief opponent is not the pushover it once was. The inter-writ ads with Mr. Ignatieff demonstrate that they have money to burn so they will be able to spend money during the next election dollar-for-dollar with the Conservatives. Analyses of the last election show that the Conservatives actually lost votes in 2006 compared to 2004 but the Liberals lost more because almost 1 million former supporters stayed home last fall. Now the Liberals seem to have a renewed purpose along with a leader who seems to have his stuff together so the Conservatives cannot count on Liberal supporters staying home on the next election day. I am not certain the same can be said of Conservative supporters. As I have stated before Stephen Harper seems to be spending a great deal of time throwing red meat to his base. A strange course of action at this stage of the game unless he fears that his support amongst his base may not be as solid as he would like. They would never vote Liberal or NDP of course, but they could just stay home as many Liberals did in 2006.

Then there is the NDP. They are not ready for an election and it is in Stephen Harper's interests to have a healthy and competitive NDP to pull votes away from the Liberals. As it stands now they will not do that.

This combined with the probable return of Liberal supporters to the polling booth puts between 40-50 Conservative seats in play plus another 20 NDP seats. This is not to say all of these seats will fall to the Liberals but the potential is there.

Now add a poison pill to the mix. By their very nature they are designed to piss off one or more parties opposing the government. So by extension, they will also piss off their supporters and depending on the poison pill it could alienate enough of the broader electorate to cost enough votes to cost another half-dozen seats. When governments engineer their own defeat they prefer to do it on something that is positive for them, such as good news budget. That will not happen until the Spring, which is when I expect the next window for an election will be.

Many people have pointed out the recent uptick on the polls for the Conservatives. However, it should be noted that they only returned to where they were in the last election. As well, this only came after almost 9 months where they were either trailing the Liberals or tied with them. For an engineered defeat to work he would need to see his party polling above the 40% range for a sustained period of time. Only then could he have a reasonable chance of surviving the inevitable decline in support that happens to all sitting government during election campaigns.

I do not believe we will see an election this Fall. The NDP does not want one so they will find an excuse to support the government. The Conservatives do not want one either so I do not believe they will try to goad the NDP into supporting the Liberals and the Bloc in any confidence motion.

Then again, Stephen Harper has demonstrated a political tin ear at crucial times on more than one occasion so he could decide to roll the dice anyway.

We will have to wait and see.