Bev Oda’s ‘rough time’ and the PM’s racy songs
By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, April 18, 2011 - 4 Comments
Photographs by Mitchel Raphael
You have to love those seniors
Bev Oda has three campaign offices in her large Ontario riding of Durham. The one in Port Perry is right across from the only McDonald’s in town. As one volunteer noted, everyone in town sees it because it is right by the drive-through. It’s almost as good a location as the one Oda had during the last campaign when her office was right across from the liquor store.
Port Perry recently had a Tartan Day parade, which Oda marched in. She wore an RCMP tartan she picked up at the Wee Tartan Shop, a store in town that specializes in British goods. The owner of the shop, Stewart Bennett, is the person who organized the parade; he’s also often the person who sings the national anthem at Oda’s fundraisers. While looking around in the shop before the festivities, Oda spotted a DVD trivia game for the British TV show Coronation Street and considered picking one up for the Prime Minister because, she says, he’s a big fan of the show. The store also sells pickled garlic, which Oda buys as gifts for people, though she herself isn’t a big fan of it. She often gets Defence Minister Peter MacKay Nova Scotia scarves from the shop “because he keeps losing them.”
Like most MPs, during the election, Oda’s duties as minister of international co-operation are curtailed, with the exception of dealing with international catastrophes such as earthquakes or hurricanes. On the campaign trail, people are clearly aware of the big “not” scandal. (Says one Oda supporter: “This a seniors’ community so they have nothing to do but read.”) But no one ever says anything directly to the minister. It’s more along the lines of: “You’ve had a rough time, eh?” Maybe that’s because everyone is also well aware of all the things Oda has brought to the riding, including fixing up the waterfront in Port Perry.
While campaigning at an event put on by Durham Farm Connections, Oda spent time with the farmer working the alpaca section. When Oda inquired about the animals for her own farmland, she was told she would have to get at least two because they are herd animals. “Do they spit?” she asked. She was assured they could be trained.
There aren’t many visible minorities in the riding. Oda, who is Japanese Canadian, lives in the town of Orono where she counts “the people who run the Chinese restaurant and the guy at the convenience store” and herself as the “multicultural centre.”
‘Dirty Picture’ in Ajax
Stephen Harper has attempted to run a risk-free campaign, but his soundtrack is a little out there. First there was the photo op with 10-year-old Maria Aragon singing Lady Gaga’s gay-bi-transgendered anthem Born This Way. Then, during a rally in Ajax, Ont., one of the songs pumping up the room before Harper came in was Taio Cruz and Ke$ha’s Dirty Picture club anthem, which includes the lyrics: “So take a dirty picture for me / Take a dirty picture / Just take a dirty picture.”
When the lights went out for May
Just as Green Leader Elizabeth May was about to launch her party’s platform at the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto, the TV crews’ lights went out. “Thanks for observing Earth Minute,” joked May, not missing a beat as people went to check the breaker switch. She then filled time by talking about her very first press conference, when she was four and was used as a “prop” by her activist mother.
They all scream for…
It’s not often hundreds of people flock to an MP. But Toronto NDP candidate Olivia Chow recently had them eating out of her hand. She was helping give out free mini ice cream cones to promote the Big Chill, an ice cream parlour in the city’s hip Little Italy. Too bad she couldn’t have any herself. Chow happens to be lactose intolerant so settled for mango sherbet, “the colour of the NDP,” the MP astutely added.
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Is Gilles Vaillancourt Canada’s most powerful mayor?
By Martin Patriquin - Monday, April 18, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 7 Comments
Corruption allegations fly, but voters love him
Photographs by Roger Lemoyne
The cabane à sucre is an annual rite for many Quebecers, and on a recent Friday afternoon, 650 golden agers from the city of Laval, a vast suburb north of Montreal, bused into the nearby town of St. Eustache to eat crepes with maple syrup, cretons, and maple syrup-flavoured fèves au lard, and to indulge in a spot of line dancing. Aside from the festive sense common to sugaring-off events, though, this one had a spirit of civic pride. “Our mayor is number one!” said Gino, an ebullient 58-year-old. “Every year he invites us here.” “It doesn’t cost us anything. It’s a gift from Mayor Vaillancourt,” said Gabriel, who along with his wife was on his fourth free cabane à sucre outing.
Indeed it was: the merry event was entirely paid for by PRO Lavallois, the political party that has governed Laval for 22 years—the last 10 unopposed. Paying for seniors to go to a cabane à sucre has been a tradition for over 15 years. Over the course of two days, the party footed the bill for some 2,600 seniors, at an estimated cost of $16 per person, and most were quite appreciative. Attendees interviewed by Maclean’s said cabane à sucre was something they looked forward to every year. Across the room, the object of their affection, Gilles Vaillancourt—the bespectacled 70-year-old architect of PRO Lavallois’s two-decades-long supremacy and a man currently mired in allegations of bribery, favouritism and influence peddling—shook every hand, listened to every anecdote and chuckled graciously at every joke.
The event had all the hallmarks of a campaign stop, down to the huge “Team Vaillancourt” banners decorating the sugar shack and the PRO Lavallois pens handed to every senior as they left. Yet the next election isn’t for two years, and the people in attendance aren’t all PRO members. Arguably, Vaillancourt wouldn’t need to campaign even if there were an election—he beat his last opponent by nearly 40 percentage points in 2009. He just seems to love doing it.
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Joey Votto: baseball’s anonymous superstar
By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, April 18, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 1 Comment
He won the National League’s MVP and led the Cincinnati Reds to the playoffs. Still, he’s working even harder on his game.
There’s an etiquette about batting practice in the big leagues. It’s fine to goof around outside the cage, talking to teammates, opponents, or the various hangers-on, as you wait your turn. But once you’re standing at the plate, it’s all business—take your hacks and make way for the next guy.Then there’s Joey Votto. It’s not that the Toronto-born first baseman for the Cincinnati Reds violates the convention—far from it. He just makes it seem like an extra commandment. The preceding hitter has barely cleared the box before the 27-year-old is in his crouch, bat at the ready. He slashes the first pitch down the left-field line, then works his way right across the diamond—tock, tock, tock. The next five balls get launched into or over the high netting that tops the outfield walls at the Reds’ spring training complex in Goodyear, Ariz.—three in a row to right, then two to left. It’s all so workaday that Votto doesn’t even bother to watch them go, he’s already waiting for the next pitch. Focused is a term that hardly does him justice.
So when the reigning National League MVP, coming off a season where he hit .324, smashed 37 homers, and batted in 113 runs and led the Reds to their first playoff berth in 15 years, proclaims that he can get better still, who’s to argue? “I want to be great at what I do. I take a lot of pride in it,” says Votto. “And I try not to sell myself short in my work and preparation.” Between awards ceremonies this past winter (Votto also collected the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada’s top athlete, and the Hank Aaron Award as the NL’s top hitter), he worked out five hours a day, six times a week at his Florida home. The guy who had the best on-base percentage in baseball, and went an entire season without an infield pop-out, talks about how he hopes to be a more efficient hitter, stronger defensively, and a better teammate. He speaks earnestly about proving himself all over again, and how he really measures himself against the man who finished a distant second in the league’s MVP voting, Albert Pujols of the St. Louis Cardinals, “the best player in baseball.”
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Is the Pope Catholic?
By Brian Bethune - Monday, April 18, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 36 Comments
From evolution to safe sex, a surprisingly activist Pope is remaking the Church as we know it
Franco Origlia/Getty Images
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, not according to confounded Vatican watchers. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was already 78 years old when he became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. He was widely seen as the arch-conservative doctrinal enforcer, the sharp spear point wielded by his charismatic rock star predecessor—Joshua to Pope John Paul II’s Moses, in the words of one Jewish scholar. The consensus opinion was that Benedict would provide a quiet, business-as-usual continuance of John Paul’s 27-year reign and, given his age, a brief pontificate that would allow the 1.1 billion-strong Roman Catholic Church time to catch its breath and consider its future options.
No one, it seems, asked Benedict what he thought of the caretaker idea.
From inflaming the Islamic world by quoting medieval anti-Muhammad remarks to welcoming disaffected Anglicans into the Roman fold, becoming personally embroiled in the clerical sex-abuse scandal, endorsing the (sometimes) use of condoms, writing a passage in his newest book exonerating Jews from the charge of killing Christ, and a host of less headline-grabbing initiatives (including a casual acceptance of the theory of evolution), Benedict—as he celebrates his 84th birthday and sixth anniversary as Pope (April 16 and 19, respectively)—continues to be far more active, innovative, and outright newsworthy than expected.
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Tiger, Jack Nicklaus and me
By Scott Feschuk - Monday, April 18, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment
I grew up watching the Masters with Dad on TV. Actually going was another thing.
AP; Corbis; CP; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute
I’ve never drawn up a bucket list, for doing so would only remind Death that he eventually needs to claim me. But going to the Masters—as I did last week— would have ranked right up there with: a) seeing the Great Pyramids and b) sealing the inventor of Auto-Tune inside the Great Pyramids.
I grew up watching the Masters—sprawled on the floor as my dad cheered and cursed and snored in his chair. I remember Jack in 1986 and Tiger in 1997 and Greg Norman falling short in what felt like every Masters from 1942 to 2005. Plus, going to the tournament in person would save me from having to endure the TV guys going on about the damn azaleas. Such fragrant majesty!
Augusta National has so meticulously crafted its image as a place of tranquil, otherworldly beauty that it’s surprising to discover the club exists on our plane of reality, near strip malls and Waffle Houses and the like. I had anticipated moats and centaurs.
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Tim Hortons: always profitable
By Michael Friscolanti - Monday, April 18, 2011 at 6:10 AM - 12 Comments
A court battle over frozen doughnuts offers a rare glimpse inside the books of Tim Hortons franchises
Photograph by Andrew Tolson
Anyone who has ever waited in a winding Tim Hortons lineup (i.e. every Canadian with a pulse) has shared the same fantasy: imagine owning this place. Brew. Sell. Repeat. Count. Ronald Joyce—the man who built “Timmy’s” into the national icon it is today—confirmed as much in his autobiography. “If there was ever a sure thing,” he wrote, “owning a Tim Hortons franchise was it.”
Joyce’s book doesn’t provide specific dollar figures, and the company isn’t in the habit of disclosing the annual earnings of individual franchisees. But a nasty court battle in Ontario has provided a rare glimpse of exactly how much cash the average Hortons store owner pockets in a year: $265,558.That’s 170,000 large cups of profit. Or, more fittingly, 332,000 frozen donuts.
As Maclean’s reported in September, a small group of angry franchisees has filed a $1.95-billion proposed class-action lawsuit against the Hortons head office, claiming the company’s decision to scrap in-store deep fryers and introduce “par-baked” goods (manufactured at a warehouse, then trucked frozen to stores) has taken a gigantic bite out of their bottom lines. A preliminary hearing was scheduled for this month, but it’s been postponed until August.
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This year's national unity crisis
By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, April 17, 2011 at 6:38 PM - 98 Comments
Stephen Harper, 2008. The Liberals’ carbon tax plan will plunge Canada into recession, sparking economic unrest that will revive Quebec’s separatist movement, Prime Minister Stephen Harper says. Harper revived the ghosts of regional divisions today as he painted the Liberals’ greenhouse gas strategy as a costly folly whose impacts will reach far beyond the country’s economy. ”By undermining the economy and re-centralizing money and power in Ottawa, it can only undermine the progress that we have been making on national unity,” Harper told a breakfast audience this morning.
Stephen Harper, 2011. Stephen Harper urged voters Sunday to elect a Conservative majority government as the best defence against a renewed drive by Quebec separatists to break up the country … “He has said that they are moving towards, they are walking towards his objective — the sovereignty of Quebec and another Quebec referendum,” Mr. Harper said of Mr. Duceppe. “And he says step one to achieve that is to stop a federal Conservative majority government in Ottawa. Step one is to weaken the country, have a weak government in Ottawa, and that is another reason why Canadians, we believe, must choose a strong, stable, national Conservative government.”
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Still Super Serial
By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, April 17, 2011 at 4:29 PM - 7 Comments
Soon Game of Thrones will be here, and however it does (I can’t see it not being picked up for a second season; the amount of promotion money HBO has put into it, not to mention maximizing its initial viewer numbers by showing it several times across several platforms, demonstrates that they consider this one of their new flagships), it will add to HBO’s new brand: the place where the pure TV serial thrives and flourishes, at a time when it struggles on most other networks. As Todd points out, HBO’s dramas are uncompromisingly serial in a way that even The Killing or Breaking Bad are not. (Even the early episodes of HBO’s first-generation hit dramas, The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, were much more self-contained than Game of Thrones and True Blood , which are almost literally novels for TV).
As I mentioned in a previous post, John Landgraf of FX has said that it’s no longer economically viable for him Continue…
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The stakes
By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, April 17, 2011 at 3:45 PM - 77 Comments
The latest spot from the Liberal side.
There’s also a suite of new French ads.
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Hip check
By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, April 17, 2011 at 2:42 PM - 21 Comments
Despite what his sister said, Jack Layton says his hip was not replaced, merely repaired.
“Some people have hip replacements—I didn’t have a hip replacement,” Layton, 60, told the media after touring the Halifax Farmers Market on Sunday morning. “There’s some metal there … to strengthen, but that’s very, very common when you have a fracture.”
This can obviously only be settled once and for all with a national televised x-ray. Possibly as an opener to that Harper-Ignatieff debate we’re all still waiting for.
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Policy alert
By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, April 17, 2011 at 1:06 PM - 30 Comments
Michael Ignatieff promises that a Liberal government would convene a meeting with the premiers within the first 60 days of taking office to discuss the health accords that expire in 2014. Among the topics up for discussion: home care and drug coverage.
Here is the official explanation.
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What it sounds like
By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, April 17, 2011 at 10:57 AM - 75 Comments
Last night, preceded to the stage by Paul Martin, Michael Ignatieff addressed a crowd of something a thousand people at a community centre in Edmonton. This was his first speech since the Sudbury outing and among the signs held aloft in front of him was a single one that read, in big, block letters, “Rise Up.”
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Week Three
By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 4:27 PM - 80 Comments
This is the week that was. Week One was recounted here. Week Two was recounted here.
The NDP tabled its election platform. The leaders debated in primetime. And agreed to build a bridge to Verdun. Muguette Paille’s vote loomed large.
Michael Ignatieff went shopping for a tub and called for an uprising.
Stephen Harper said it would be easy to cut $11-billion from the federal budget and claimed Canada for the Conservatives. He and Helena Guergis continued to disagree. Ethnically attired extras were invited to pose with the Prime Minister, while student votes in Guelph were challenged and then redeemed.
Canadian Press obtained the first draft of the Auditor General’s report on the G8-related spending in Tony Clement’s riding. The Conservatives leaked a second draft. John Baird lauded the symbolism of publicly funded toilets. Jack Layton asked for the final report to be released and everyone agreed, except the Auditor General, who decided it had to wait until Parliament returns. Continue…
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Is the PQ 'all united' behind Marois?
By Martin Patriquin - Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 3:47 PM - 21 Comments
The Parti Québécois leader looks to placate hardliners at the party’s convention in Montreal
They were scattered around Montreal’s Palais des Congrès last night, quiet and deferential to a fault, politely handing out cards to anyone who would take them. Printed on these cards—well, let’s call them photocopied and apparently hand-cut bits of paper—was the following message:DURING THIS 16TH CONGRESS
ALL UNITED
IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE
QUEBEC SOVEREIGNTYTo the uninitiated, the message is surely puzzling: after all, isn’t achieving sovereignty exactly what the PQ is about? Should we also remind people that water is wet, the sky is blue and Carey Price is somewhat better than last season? Continue…
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Geezers need excitement
By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 3:45 PM - 33 Comments
While Stephen Harper details new ways he’ll get tough on crime, Frances Woolley considers cost-effective approaches to reducing crime.
A study by Michael Ward published this month in Contemporary Economic Policy (earlier version ungated here) suggests that there is. He finds that an increase in video game availability, as measured by the number of video game stores, leads to a significant reduction in rates of robbery, burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft and mortality.
Video game availability makes more difference than police officers, Ward argues. He found that the relationship between crime rates and the number of police officers was statistically insignificant, except in the case of robbery.
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From the magazine
By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 1:09 PM - 55 Comments
I spent last Sunday hanging around with Stephane Dion. Here is what that was like.
If you’re interested in a director’s cut, full of never-before-seen material, see below.
You can add this as a post-script to what I wrote the night of the 2008 election.
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Fiscal faceoff on Capitol Hill
By Luiza Ch. Savage - Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 12:10 PM - 1 Comment
Why America’s budgetary battles may just be getting started
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
The weeks of threats of a government shutdown, and the late-night political brinkmanship between House Republicans, Senate Democrats and President Barack Obama, turns out to have been a mere warm-up. America’s grand fiscal drama is just getting started.
The standoff that kept the public on edge about national parks and tax-return processing only resolved spending for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30. Leaders ultimately agreed on US$38.5 billion in budget cuts across a range of government departments. It’s a massive one-year cut not seen since the Reagan era, but in terms of the projected 2011 deficit of $1.6 trillion (all figures in U.S. dollars), a mere rounding error. Still, Republican House Speaker John Boehner claimed victory for wringing the concessions from the Democratic-led White House and Senate. But the Republican lawmakers—swept into office by Tea Party fury and a promise to cut $100 billion in spending the first year—pronounced themselves disappointed.
Democrats shielded spending for early childhood education, university grants for low-income students, and medical research grants, among others. And Republicans failed in their effort to use the funding deal to cut off government funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides contraception and abortion, and to roll back some environmental regulations. (Social conservatives did, though, extract a price for the final late-night compromise: a ban on government funding for abortions in Washington, which is overseen by the federal government. This led to the remarkable sight of the outraged Democratic mayor of the nation’s capital, Vincent Gray, arrested as he protested the deal in front of the Capitol building.)
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A final public service in a long, distinguished career
By macleans.ca - Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 2 Comments
At this difficult time, we wish the best for Ralph, Colleen and the rest of the Klein family
Nathan Denette/CP Andy Clark/Reuters
Ralph Klein always tackled problems head-on. And he generally got the last word.
As a crusading journalist in Calgary, he took frequent and deliberate aim at city hall. After an improbable victory as mayor, there were numerous tussles with balky bureaucrats. As provincial environment minister, he had many memorable scraps over government policy and finally, as premier of Alberta, he battled countless interest groups and unions—he once joked that his “day was not complete without a protest or two, or three”—while bringing fiscal rectitude to the province. His repeated electoral successes, and defeat of Alberta’s deficit, are the stuff of Canadian political legend.
That same determination held for his personal trials as well: when his drinking became an issue in 2001, he promptly admitted he had a problem and quit cold turkey.
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What it will take to rock the vote
By John Geddes - Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 48 Comments
Sure, apathy is up. But the numbers indicate it’s not all bad news.
Photograph by Peter Bregg
Here’s an unrepresentative moment from the campaign trail. Michael Ignatieff emerges from a hotel ballroom in London, Ont., where he has just whipped up an overflow crowd of supporters. As he wades through the packed lobby toward his waiting bus, shaking hands and gripping shoulders, a breathless young women in a bright red coat presses up and asks to pose for a photo with him. It’s high school student Katie Miller, 18, who’s leaning toward casting her first ballot ever for Ignatieff’s Liberals, although she hasn’t quite made up her mind. “I really enjoyed it, how personal it was,” she says of the rally experience a moment later. “But I want to know what each party stands for.”
Expressions of responsible enthusiasm like Miller’s are almost enough to make discouraged old believers in democracy take heart. Unfortunately, they are fleeting. More durable are the hard statistics showing that her attitude is rare. Voter turnout has been falling for decades, and studies reveal that the decline is concentrated overwhelmingly among the youngest potential voters. A soon-to-be-published study by two Canadian academic researchers, André Blais and Daniel Rubenson, tracked the same long-term pattern across eight countries—from Canada and Britain, to Sweden and Spain. Differences among voting systems, party structures, and the flavours of national politics, it seems, don’t count for much against the tide of youth disengagement. “Young people nowadays are less likely to view voting as a civic duty,” says Rubenson of Ryerson University in Toronto. “They think you can choose to vote or choose not to vote, and a lot of them choose not to.”
Turnout in Canadian federal elections has slid from the high of 79.4 per cent of registered voters who cast ballots in 1958, when John Diefenbaker’s Conservatives won with a landslide majority, to the 58.8 per cent who voted in 2008, when Stephen Harper’s Tories won their second consecutive minority. By far the biggest drop-off has come among those in the 18 to 24 age group. More than two-thirds of potential new voters turned out at the polls in the 1960s; by the 1980s, only about half of those eligible for the first time were voting; in the 1990s, it was down to 40 per cent; and, by 2004, only a third of those who might have cast their first ballots bothered to do so.
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Tony Clement makes no apologies for G8 spending
By Kate Lunau - Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 16 Comments
‘We got our fair share’
Adrian Wyld/CP
At an all-candidates’ debate on Monday night in Burk’s Falls, a village of 1,000 in the Ontario riding of Parry Sound-Muskoka, Conservative MP Tony Clement stood at a small wooden podium, emphasizing the need for a “strong, stable majority government.” His promise to abolish the long-gun registry was, in this community of hunters, met with big cheers. Clement and three other candidates fielded questions on everything from CBC funding to industrial espionage, but things really heated up midway through the evening when local Liberal campaign manager Dan Waters stepped up to the microphone and asked Clement about news that was making headlines everywhere, it seems, but in Burk’s Falls.
Earlier that day, the Canadian Press had cited a draft report from Auditor General Sheila Fraser suggesting the Conservatives “misinformed” Parliament to win approval for $50 million invested in the riding for last June’s G8 summit, held at the Deerhurst Resort in nearby Huntsville. It suggested the process by which funding was approved may have been illegal. The story set off a firestorm, though by day’s end, a later, less damning draft was making the rounds—one that omitted suggestions of illegality or of misinforming Parliament, though it was still critical of the government.
At the candidates’ debate, Clement urged the crowd not to “jump the gun,” and to wait for Fraser’s final report. He then took a harder tack. “They’re suggesting that you or I have something to be ashamed of because we got infrastructure funding. Billions of dollars were spent across this country on roads, bridges, waterworks, you name it,” he said to loud applause. “We got our fair share, and I will never be ashamed of that.”
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On the campaign trail with Olivia Chow
By Mitchel Raphael - Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 2 Comments
Toronto NDP MP Olivia Chow gives out free mini ice-cream cones as part of a promotion for The Big Chill, an ice-cream parlour in the city’s hip Little Italy.
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The price of power
By Josh Dehaas - Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 6 Comments
The “incumbent disadvantage” is at play in the tone of election coverage
A new Liberal ad presents a series of scandalous headlines. First, a story about Stephen Harper’s former adviser, Bruce Carson, complete with a photo of his ex-fiancée in pink lingerie. Next, a headline about Harper’s prorogation. And finally, an article referencing “possible jail time for Conservative senators.” That script must sound familiar to Harper’s 2006 campaign advisers. They ran a similar ad back then in which a man sitting at a coffee shop shakes his head at a newspaper headline: Martin Liberals took illicit cash. Then, more anti-Liberal headlines and more head shakes. Both ads end with the same conclusion—the incumbent can’t be trusted.
This “incumbent disadvantage” is at play in the tone of election coverage, says Stuart Soroka, the McGill political scientist who runs the 2011 Federal Election Newspaper Analysis (Maclean’s is publishing the results of the project each week of the campaign). “You can’t really assess an opposition’s record because they don’t really have one,” he says, “so we’re naturally harder on incumbents.”
Newspapers certainly are. That’s borne out in Soroka’s results from the first two weeks of this campaign, and the first two weeks of the 2006 campaign. Net tone is determined by reviewing the words in stories found near each leader’s name to determine how positively or negatively the leader is portrayed. A leader with a higher net tone one week is likely to enjoy a boost in the polls the next, says Soroka. For the first two weeks after the government fell in 2006, Harper’s Conservatives had the advantage. Their score was 1.38, compared to Paul Martin’s 0.79. Now, Michael Ignatieff leads with a score of 1.20, compared to Harper’s 0.80. “Ignatieff can still deal primarily in the hypothetical,” says Soroka.
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Yes, Stéphane Dion is running again
By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 25 Comments
Despite all he suffered through during the 2008 campaign, Dion refuses to quit the race
Photograph by Roger Lemoyne
The office of the man who would have been prime minister is located in the corner of an L-shaped suburban strip mall in northwest Montreal, next to Planete Pizza. Twenty-nine months after he led the Liberal party to defeat in the 2008 election—27 months after he nearly led an audacious coalition into government—Stéphane Dion is simply the incumbent candidate for Saint-Laurent–Cartierville.
He sits at a desk below a large Liberal banner and a poster of Michael Ignatieff. He doesn’t want to talk about the past, but it’s unavoidable. “Well, we tried our best and it did not work, but I think we fought for what I was committed to as leader, to have a country that would bring together economic growth, social justice and environmental sustainability,” he says. “But what is great in democracy is that if it doesn’t work, you try again. And now I’m very committed to make Mr. Ignatieff the prime minister.”
So here he is. However resounding his defeat—however much he may now be defined by the caricature that was created by the campaign against him—Dion, now 55, is still trying to get a Liberal government elected, seeking for himself a seventh mandate.
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The Commons: Rise up
By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 12:32 AM - 205 Comments
Michael Ignatieff had been speaking for something like an hour, without so much as a sip of water, pausing only to let members of the audience pose questions for him. Eleven hours earlier he’d been in Orleans, standing in a family’s garage, between their snowblower and their barbecue, to explain how a Liberal government would help families just like this take care of sick and aging loved ones. Now he was standing in the middle of a hotel ballroom in Sudbury, surrounded on all sides by rows of people—both faithful partisans and the merely curious.He’d taken 13 questions and offered 13 responses and maybe he’d swayed a vote or two. Maybe he hadn’t. Whatever he’d accomplished, Day 21 of his first campaign as leader of the Liberal party of Canada was nearing its end. After this was a drive to the airport, after that a flight to Regina. By this time tomorrow he’d be in Edmonton, preparing to fly to Vancouver.
Before he left though he wanted to tell these people in this hotel ballroom about this song he’d been thinking about. “While I was on the bus this afternoon I found myself thinking about a wonderful singer called Bruce Springsteen,” he said. “Does everybody like Bruce Springsteen? I like Bruce Springsteen.”
It was not immediately clear where this was going.
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On the campaign trail with Bev Oda
By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, April 15, 2011 at 11:41 PM - 14 Comments
Minister of International Cooperation Bev Oda checked out the Tartan Day parade in Port Perry, Ontario. Before she started the parade she went to the The Wee Tartan Shop.
