Canada’s Commonwealth edge

By John Geddes - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 10:28 AM - 0 Comments

I’m not much of a monarchist, so I’m afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere for coverage of Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee. On the other hand, I am struck lately by new legal and economic research that strongly suggests paying close heed to old Commonwealth ties would be a shrewd foreign-affairs strategy, not a nostalgic distraction, for Canada.

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Harper finally takes some risks

By John Geddes - Monday, February 6, 2012 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

Chris Wattie/Reuters

Among Stephen Harper’s defining political traits, his standout skill has long been a knack for presenting himself as a pragmatist who would never overreach. In opposition, Harper succeeded in softening the image of his restored Conservative party to squelch fears he might be cooking up a sweeping right-wing overhaul of the federal government. He won the 2006 election with a platform of narrowly defined policies, like trimming the GST and paying parents a monthly $100-per-kid bonus. As a minority Prime Minister, he had to draft policies unthreatening enough to attract sufficient opposition votes to pass. But now, as he begins his first full calendar year with a House majority, Harper’s customary caution has evaporated. “In the months to come,” he declared in Davos, Switzerland, last week, “our government will undertake major transformations to position Canada for growth over the next generation.”

Major transformations? Plural? And this from a Prime Minister who, only days earlier, had sounded much his old self, pleading for a “practical, incremental” approach, rather than bold measures, for First Nations. It was a different Harper at the World Economic Forum, touting decisive fixes on daunting issues. He zeroed in on at least four big files, though offering frustratingly few details. On pensions, he vowed to make underfunded parts of the system sustainable “for the next generation.” On immigration, he promised “significant reform” to match newcomers to labour force needs. On exports, he pledged both to finalize new trade deals and to end regulatory delays on oil and mining ventures. On industry, he committed his government to finally tackling the perennial problem of lagging Canadian business innovation.

This ambitious agenda was scarcely hinted at in the Prime Minister’s re-election platform just last spring. Looking over his Davos list, it’s not hard to see why Conservative strategists might have deemed some of these ideas too risky for the campaign trail. Sure enough, soon after Harper’s speech, the formidable Canadian Association of Retired Persons served notice of its intention to fight any future curtailing of the Old Age Security or Guaranteed Income Supplement programs, even though the Tories stressed the coming cuts won’t affect seniors already collecting benefits. Harper’s plan to streamline environmental assessments for pipelines and other resource megaprojects is also bound to meet with angry opposition, and shifting the emphasis on immigration to workers with more in-demand skills also risks raising concerns among some of the Tories’ hard-won ethnic community supporters.

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Q & A: critical experts wade in on the OAS debate

By John Geddes - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 12:30 PM - 0 Comments

A tough, detailed appraisal of the government’s plan to somehow curb Old Age Security spending is available today both on 3D Policy’s webite and over at iPolitics as a featured opinion.

It’s by two former senior finance department mandarins, Scott Clark and Peter DeVries, and brings badly needed clarity to the debate sparked by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s surprise remark about his intention to reform pensions in his “major transformations” speech last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Clark and DeVries argue that since the government has already clamped down on spending growth in big-ticket areas like defence and health, the projected rise in OAS costs isn’t by itself large enough to pose any real threat to federal finances.

Their commentary is well worth reading, but I also took the opportunity to interview Clark this morning for a less formal sense of how he sees this volatile debate unfolding. He brings the unique perspective of a former deputy minister of finance, and a key insider during the fight to eliminate the deficit back in the 1990s—when the Liberals decided against cutting seniors benefits as too politically risky.

Here’s part of our conversation, edited and condensed:

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[UPDATED] Black History Month, and the Canadian at Lincoln’s deathbed

By John Geddes - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 3:31 PM - 0 Comments

A few years back I came upon one of those historical footnotes that gets you thinking: after Abraham Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865, as he lay dying in a boarding house across the street from the Ford Theater, one of the small group that watched over him was Dr. Anderson Abbott, Canada’s first black physician.

Reading the Prime Minister’s statement today in recognition of Black History Month, my mind’s eye again created the tableau of Lincoln’s deathbed and the singular Canadian in the room.

Stephen Harper makes reference today to black Canadians who fought in the War of 1812 (thanks, Farandwide); last year, he reminded us of black icons ranging from a rodeo cowboy, to a newspaper owner, to Hall of Fame pitcher Ferguson Jenkins. All worthy of note, I hasten to agree.

But at the risk of hinting at a hierarchy of trailblazers, I can’t help wondering why we don’t hear more often about Abbott. What a story: a Toronto-trained black doctor who served with distinction in the Civil War, was befriended by the president, and returned to Ontario to forge an impressive medical career.

There’s a good biographical note on Abbott here, on the website of the Oxford African American Studies Center, which is headed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

UPDATE:

David Naylor, the current president of University of Toronto and a former dean of medicine at the university, sends a candid email, admitting that Abbott is “under-recognized” at U. of T., where he took some of his medical training, and stood for an examination in the discipline in 1867, two years before being admitted to Ontario’s College of Physicians and Surgeons.

“I heard nothing about Dr. Abbott in medical school in the 1970s,” Naylor writes, “and only encountered snippets about him later while doing thesis work at Oxford in social history of Canadian medicine and health policy.  In recent years, Abbott occasionally has been flagged by the Faculty of Medicine as a pioneering figure whom we proudly claim.  But frankly, he’s received limited profile, and I’m one of the culprits as a past dean.  Furthermore, so far as I can tell, Abbott isn’t mentioned in the 2001 official history of the University.”

Troubling news on attention-deficit medication for young people

By John Geddes - Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 11:22 AM - 0 Comments

hitthatswitch/Flickr

Just a few days ago the issue of psychiatric drugs being prescribed to kids having trouble concentrating in class arose in a private conversation I had with friends of high school-aged children. This morning the sorts of troubling questions we talked about were on the front on my morning Ottawa Citizen and an opinion piece prominently featured in the Sunday New York Times.

The Citizen’s story, by health reporter Sharon Kirkey, reported on a Canadian Journal of Psychiatry study that showed a dramatic increase in the prescribing of the latest generation of antipsychotic drugs to kids in Manitoba, a trend the researchers suspect is happening across the country. Most troubling is the finding that doctors are resorting to drugs to treat conditions for which they are not even approved by Health Canada. The scale is disturbing:

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REVIEW: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

By John Geddes - Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

A few years before his death last fall, Steve Jobs gave a commencement address in which he placed surprising emphasis on, of all things, a calligraphy course he took just after dropping out of college. The upshot, the Apple co-founder said, was his insistence on beautiful typefaces in his computers.

There’s something about the shapes of letters. The central figure in The Swerve, Italian Renaissance book hunter Poggio Bracciolini, was famous in his time for helping invent a more elegant handwriting style. This innovation partly propelled Poggio’s rise from scribe to senior official in the papal court. His fine hand more than hinted at the sophistication of his interest in the books he copied.

Greenblatt, the Harvard professor who made Shakespeare’s London swarm with life in 2004’s Will in the World, is just as compelling conjuring up 15th-century Italy. Greenblatt places Poggio in a circle of brilliant, squabbling humanists who loved pre-Christian books, often all-but-forgotten classics they dug out of monastic libraries. Poggio’s greatest rescue mission was an expedition in 1417, likely to the German abbey of Fulda, where he found On the Nature of Things, by the Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius.

In a sense, the mysterious Lucretius, who died around 55 BCE, is the real hero of The Swerve. Next to nothing is known about his life. But his book, after Poggio put it back in circulation, lived large. In gorgeous Latin verse, it conveys the even more ancient thinking of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. His ideas were potently radical in Poggio’s era and long after: everything is made of atoms that “swerve” around randomly; gods, if they exist, have nothing to do with the material world; and that leaves humans only to pursue pleasure and avoid pain.

Whether this tale of an intellectual watershed fulfills the subtitle’s promise to explain “how the world became modern” is debatable. But by making the life of a 15th-century book lover feel as relevant today as, say, that of a 20th-century computer mogul, Greenblatt accomplishes his own improbable feat of rediscovery.

A surprisingly clear sign of progress from the First Nations summit

By John Geddes - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 6:46 PM - 0 Comments

Few really expected any very specific progress to flow from today’s summit meeting between the Prime Minister and Aboriginal leaders, but an unexpectedly precise step forward on proper financing for reserves appears to have materialized.

The “Crown-First Nations Gathering Joint Statement” issued at the end of today’s sessions here in Ottawa includes an “Immediate Steps for Action” section. The very first item promises that “Canada and First Nations will work on a renewed relationship that is based on… movement toward a single, multi-year Government of Canada financial arrangement for First Nations with high-performing governance systems.”

The wording might sound bureaucratic, but the two underlying points are of critical importance. Ottawa will provide multi-year funding, but only to reserve communities that meet proper standards of governance.

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Clashing visions at the First Nations summit

By John Geddes - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 1:59 PM - 0 Comments

The stark contrast between Stephen Harper’s defence of “incremental” change to the Indian Act and the demand of  key Aboriginal leaders for a much more dramatic new start looks likely to define today’s so-called Crown-First Nations Gathering.

“To be sure, our government has no grand scheme to repeal or to unilaterally re-write the Indian Act,” the Prime Minister said in a speech opening the summit in Ottawa. “After 136 years, that tree has deep roots. Blowing up the stump would just leave a big hole.”

Of course, Harper didn’t advocate a shrugging acceptance of the status quo. Instead, he asked for cooperation from the gathered chiefs for replacing “elements of the Indian Act with more modern legislation and procedures, in partnership with provinces and First Nations.”

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[Updated] More on the oil industry’s hand in a federal museum’s energy show

By John Geddes - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

CBC has an interesting story (from its French service Radio-Canada) on the Imperial Oil Foundation’s involvement in the Canada Science and Technology Museum’s current exhibition “Energy: Power to Choose.”

Last month, here at Maclean’s we published an exclusive related piece, touching on the foundation’s sponsorship of the show, but focusing more on Access to Information documents detailing how the museum courted industry support, and how the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers influenced the museum’s portrayal of the oil sands. Over at Le Devoir, Helene Buzzetti has also done original reporting on this issue.

UPDATE: And, this morning, the Ottawa Citizen wades in with a follow that adds comments from the museum’s former vice-president, confirming what I called “pervasive influence from the energy sector in shaping the exhibition’s content.”

On Newt’s Canadian comment: Harper’s long view of Canada-U.S. trade

By John Geddes - Monday, January 23, 2012 at 2:02 PM - 0 Comments

After he won the South Carolina primary on Saturday, Newt Gingrich’s derisive remarks about Barack Obama’s relationship with Stephen Harper had a ring of partial truth about them.

Gingrich is quite right of course to point out that the Prime Minister is “conservative and pro-American.” And Newt stayed within the realm of reasonable comment—not always rigorously adhered to in this oddball Republican race—in suggesting that Obama’s rejection of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline has gone piece toward forging a “Chinese-Canadian partnership.”

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Health spending: what Harper said, and the real outlook

By John Geddes - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 11:44 AM - 0 Comments

The Prime Minister gave us plenty to mull over in his interview this week with CBC’s Peter Mansbridge—on oil pipelines, the Iranian nuclear threat, public service pensions—but the line that popped out for me was Stephen Harper’s surprising claim about the generosity of federal health transfers to the provinces.

His boast sounded precise. Asked by Mansbridge about the premiers wanting more money than the take-it-or-leave-it offer Finance Minister Jim Flaherty recently put on the table, Harper said: “In fact, our transfers on health care, according to projections, are going to grow more quickly than provincial spending on health care.”

If this were true, it would amount to an all but irrefutable rebuttal to anyone who argues the Conservative government isn’t doing its bit to shore up the health system. If Ottawa is on track to increase its share of health funding, then the provinces can hardly complain.

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Rae’s legalization digression: a clip some might find worth saving

By John Geddes - Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 7:03 PM - 0 Comments

I’m going to venture a wild guess that certain Conservative party operatives might be taking a close look at the video of Bob Rae’s final speech at the Liberal party convention today, particularly the part where he cracks a joke by way of introducing the touchy subject of legalizing marijuana.

“If you want to be part of a group of free-thinking, innovative, thoughtful, pragmatic, hopeful, positive, happy people, come and join the Liberal party,” Rae said, then couldn’t help adding, with a grin, “And after the resolution on marijuana today, it’s going to be a group of even happier people in the Liberal party.”

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Avoiding pitfalls, the Liberals give themselves a chance

By John Geddes - Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 3:51 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Blair Gable

There was nothing the Liberals could have done at their convention, which just wrapped up in Ottawa, that would have justified anyone declaring with a straight face that this party, so badly mangled in last spring’s election, is back in fine form.

A mere policy convention—considering that the Liberals won’t pick their new leader until next year, and that the next federal election is three or four years off—just couldn’t accomplish anything so decisive.

On the other hand, the 3,000-plus Liberals who showed up here for the three-day confab might easily have taken missteps with the potential to seriously compound their deep-seated problems. And the fact that they didn’t sabotage their own chances of renewal counts as a success of sorts.

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The Liberals’ not-so-catchy catch phrase: evidence-based policy

By John Geddes - Saturday, January 14, 2012 at 5:44 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Blair Gable

The most frequently repeated phrase printed in today’s program at the Liberal party convention here in Ottawa and tossed around in sessions by delegates is “evidence-based policy.”

As a political slogan, it might not have a bright future. But as shorthand for what has emerged as the prevailing criticism of the way the governing Conservatives devise policy, the phrase does the job.

The realization that Stephen Harper’s government doesn’t bother much with assembling evidence to support its main policies started to set soon after he won power in 2006. I didn’t realize how self-conscious the Tories were about brushing off expert opinion, and even dismissing data, until I heard former Harper chief of staff Ian Brodie speak to the subject in 2009.

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Some Liberals look to France for party reform inspiration

By John Geddes - Friday, January 13, 2012 at 5:24 PM - 0 Comments

Could a French political inspiration be the key to success or failure in revitalizing the Liberal Party of Canada? It seems improbable, but the Liberals’ outgoing party president, Alf Apps, touched on the possibility this afternoon at the party’s policy convention in Ottawa.

The big decision Liberals must make here is whether or not to open up their club, humbled as it was in last spring’s election, by accepting new rules for the selection their next leader and nominating candidates at the riding level. Apps, who will be replaced in a vote at this convention, is championing controversial reforms that would allow Canadians who sign up as Liberal “supporters”—but not as paid-up members—to vote in the leadership race and at riding nomination meetings.

Answering questions from party members at a session at the convention today, Apps mentioned that a promising model for the reform push is France’s Socialist Party. That allusion would of course have meant nothing to most Liberals, or other Canadians for that matter, but it’s surprisingly relevant.

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The Liberals and the muddled middle

By John Geddes - Friday, January 13, 2012 at 7:10 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Cole Garside

If any prominent Liberal might be expected to think of the party as a family affair, it would have to be Montreal MP Justin Trudeau. Heading into the federal party’s convention in Ottawa this week, though, the son of the iconic former prime minister, the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau, says Liberals must use this opportunity to start projecting a new, decidedly non-familial party image. “The sense is that the party has too long looked at itself as a family, or a club, or a very strict hierarchy,” Trudeau told Maclean’s. “We need to make a shift to being much more of a movement. It’s hard to join a family.”

Talk of wrenching the Liberal mindset from cliquish to welcoming, its processes from top-down to bottom-up, might sound like mere hopeful rhetoric from a party laid low in the election last May 2. But the 1,500 or so hard-core Liberals expected to attend the Jan. 13-15 biennial convention will be debating concrete ideas for changing the rules about who gets to shape their party’s direction. The key proposal would give designated supporters—Canadians who would have to sign on to Liberal principles, but not be required to buy memberships—the right to vote in the party’s leadership race, and maybe at nomination meetings for candidates at the riding level.

It remains to be seen if the paid-up Liberal members who make the effort to travel to Ottawa for the convention agree to empower far less committed supporters. The idea is being championed by the party’s national board. After last spring’s drubbing at the polls, hardly a Liberal official or MP left standing denies that the Conservatives and New Democrats do a better job of keeping their bases energized and engaged. Instead of calling for their party to just copy Tory and NDP approaches, however, senior Grits are arguing they must chart a different course from their more ideologically motivated adversaries.

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A Rae day on Parliament Hill

By John Geddes - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 5:23 PM - 0 Comments

I’ve used words like “temp” and “stopgap,” I confess, to describe Bob Rae’s job as the Liberal party’s interim leader. But after listening to Rae’s rip-snorting speech to his party’s MPs on Parliament Hill today, I think I’ll be searching for new terminology.

Because he sure sounded like a guy auditioning for the permanent lead role in the third-place party in the House. Billed as half-hour address, the speech stretched for about 45 minutes—and featured a pointedly personal political message.

Rae’s obvious political liability is, of course, the lingering memory of his difficult 1990-95 stint as Ontario’s NDP premier. But given that he’s not supposed to be in the running for the federal Liberal leadership—a condition the party executive imposed when Rae accepted the interim job after last spring’s election—that historic baggage shouldn’t matter much these days. Continue…

Hockey and the prime ministers: Harper vs. Trudeau

By John Geddes - Tuesday, January 3, 2012 at 1:41 PM - 0 Comments

Over at the Globe and Mail, Lawrence Martin writes today that Stephen Harper is the first prime minister to use his passion for hockey to political advantage. Certainly Harper’s plan to finally publish his much-discussed book on early professional hockey history should allow him to stake a claim to being our most hockey-wonkish PM.

But I think Martin went off side in dismissing Pierre Trudeau’s shinny credentials, asserting that Trudeau preferred individual to team sports, and “could barely tell a hockey stick from a tennis racket.”

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Another year’s federal politics in 12 chapters

By John Geddes - Friday, December 30, 2011 at 2:07 PM - 0 Comments

Stages in the legislative process that make a bill law in the Canadian Parliament; ministers (not including the Prime Minister) on cabinet’s powerful Priorities and Planning committee; former political figures (not including sovereigns or social activists) memorialized in bronze around Parliament Hill—twelve is the number in each of these interesting categories. But for our purposes here, in this second annual stocktaking of the year just ending, it’s the 12 calendar months that matter. Pick just one political story for each page, and 2011’s kaleidoscope might just take a turn from jumbled to intelligible.

January: We glimpsed how Ignatieff thought a leader should look

By the start of 2011, we had long since figured out Stephen Harper’s disciplined style and thought we understood the limits of Jack Layton’s appeal. But Michael Ignatieff had taken over as Liberal leader in an odd way, with no conventional leadership race to bring him into focus. Instead, Ignatieff had been defined for many Canadians by Conservative attack ads. For those who had paid attention to him before politics, his globetrotting-intellectual persona still loomed large.

Then came his Jan. 25, tone-setting address on Parliament Hill to the Liberal caucus, with the media invited in. This was no detached thinker. Sleeves rolled up, Ignatieff ripped through a 15-minute speech in which he mocked Harper, invoked Barack Obama, and answered his own question—“Are we ready to serve the people who put us here?”—with a shouted, “Yes, yes, yes!” Hopeful Liberals saw a fiery campaigner, astute Conservatives a man ripe for ridicule. We didn’t know it then, but this was a clear foreshadowing of the campaign to come.

February: We watched Conservatives smoothly execute a key transition

As an opposition leader and especially as Prime Minister, Harper has shown a remarkable ability to shed and replace chiefs of staff, communications directors, and other key advisors. But the one constant in his electoral machine was the beard and brogue of Doug Finley, his  campaign director. When Finley stepped down at the very end of January as he recovered from colon cancer, the party began a testing transition. Guy Giorno and Jenni Byrne stepped into new roles.

For a lesser partisan machine, the loss of a figure as dominant as the Scottish-born Finley would have been a marked setback. Instead, the transition seemed to go off without a hitch. Spring election speculation continued unabated. As for Finely—who ran Harper’s winning 2006 and 2008 campaigns and was rewarded with a Senate appointment in 2009—Twitter awaited.

March: We marveled as the PM fell, yet defined the moment his way

It was no surprise when the Conservative minority was voted down by the opposition Liberals, NDP and Bloc Québécois on March 25. The House had been an increasingly fractious and angry place. The actual non-confidence vote, only the sixth in Canadian history, found the  government in contempt of Parliament for refusing to supply full cost estimates for fighter jets, crime bills and corporate tax cuts.

Yet Harper largely succeeded in burying those reasons by asserting doggedly that the real issue was the opposition’s refusal to support his government’s budget. “There’s nothing, nothing, in the budget that the opposition could not or should not have supported,” he said. “Thus, the vote today that disappoints me, will, I expect, disappoint Canadians.” His refusal to even minimally acknowledge that the election was triggered by anything other than a clash over economic priorities carried him into the campaign and, arguably, to victory.

April: We absorbed the potential of Layton’s NDP surge in Quebec

The orange wave surged over Quebec so unexpectedly that even senior NDP veterans had difficulty knowing what to make of it. By April 23, when Jack Layton climbed to the podium at Montréal’s Olympia Theatre to address his party’s largest ever campaign rally in the province, the possibility of an NDP breakthrough was widely acknowledged. The Bloc was running scared. The Tories and Liberals were looking elsewhere in the country for any gains.

At the back of the Olympia, Layton’s young Quebec organizers spoke, wide-eyed, of a dozen or so new Quebec seats being within reach. That seemed remarkable enough. Yet had they been able to fully take in the spectacle of Layton podium performance, and the crowd’s reaction, they might have dreamed bigger. Holding his talismanic cane aloft, smiling as only he could, hitting his applause lines like the pro he was, “Bon Jack” embodied an unlikely convergence of long, careful political preparation and recent, inspiring personal determination. You can’t make this stuff up.

May: We experienced Harper’s majority win as an inevitability

It’s an illusion of course, maybe even a delusion, to think anything in politics had to happen the way it did. There are always too many variables. Still, Harper’s May 2 election victory had that it-was-written feel about it. He steadily built toward the moment, from his near miss in 2004, through his two minority wins in 2006 and 2008. The train was rolling toward this destination.

And Harper’s campaign-trail consistency was remarkable. His rallies were a model of methodical planning and error-free execution. He refused to be badgered by media complaints into taking more reporters’ questions or exposing himself to unscripted encounters with voters. He stuck to his key economic message even when Layton’s rise might have unnerved a more skittish campaigner. Election night was full of compelling stories—Bloc and Liberal failures, NDP ascent—but it belonged, in the end, to the Prime Minister.

June:  We shrugged as a political financing experiment was cancelled

On June 6 Finance Minister Jim Flaherty reintroduced his spring federal budget, which was never passed in the rush to an election, with a key twist: Flaherty added a measure to phase out the $2-per-vote subsidy to political parties by 2015-16. The taxpayer subsidy was introduced by the former Liberal government in 2004, to compensate for the curtailing of corporate and union contributions.

The Conservatives’ first attempt to get rid of the subsidy, announced in the fall of 2008, triggered the ill-fated bid by opposition parties to form a coalition and replace Harper’s minority. But with Harper leading a majority, there was no chance of his being thwarted this time. Few Canadians took much notice. And so an attempt to make raising money less central to our politics comes to an end. Constant, clever, insistent fundraising appeals to the party faithful—a Tory strong suit—will be essential to any party’ success for the foreseeable future.

July: We saluted as our troops left a battle zone still in question

When Canadian soldiers moved in large numbers into Afghanistan’s violent southern province of Kandahar in 2006, military and political leaders were unprepared for how much the mission would come to dominate foreign and defence policy. The hard fighting they were soon engaged in was unlike anything Canadians had experienced in decades. Before exit day, 158 Canadian soldiers had been killed in Afghanistan, along with a diplomat, two aid workers, and a journalist.

The last Canadian commander of Task Force Kandahar, Brig.-Gen. Dean Milner, didn’t really want to leave. He would have preferred to stay a bit longer to help the Americans, whose troop surge into the province had put the Taliban on the run and stabilized previously volatile districts. Canadian troops remain in Afghanistan, but mainly engaged in training the Afghan National Army. But the years of fighting changed the place of the military in the Canadian public imagination—and Canadian political calculations.

August: We mourned Jack Layton, moved by what he’d come to mean

The death of the NDP leader on Aug. 22 at just 61 was not entirely surprising. The previous month Layton had announced that he was battling cancer for a second time, his ravaged face and desiccated voice shocking the country. But the way he died was unprecedented. He drafted a farewell letter and organized a public funeral in Toronto, knitting together the personal and political in his final weeks and days in a way that made them indistinguishable.

Layton came at the end to represent, in an era of deep cynicism about politics, an unapologetic zeal for total immersion in public life. All through the spring campaign, struggling back from a broken hip, Layton had exuded his relish for the democratic fray. Facing death, he didn’t shy from explicit partisanship. “Let’s demonstrate in everything we do in the four years before us,” he told the New Democrats in that last letter, “that we are ready to serve our beloved Canada as its next government.”

September: We were reminded by judges that even majorities face setbacks

With Parliament in session again, the Conservatives sitting pretty with their fresh majority, it seemed that nothing could slow the implementation of Stephen Harper’s vision. Then came the Sept. 30 Supreme Court of Canada ruling that the federal government could not shut down Vancouver’s Insite supervised injection clinic for intravenous drug users.

The unanimous 9-0 decision delivered a rebuke to the Conservative position that Insite’s clear track record since 2003 of helping addicts avoid infections and overdose deaths should be trumped by the government’s desire to send a strong anti-drug, law-and-order message. The ruling also validated the pro-Insite positions of the British Columbia provincial and Vancouver municipal governments. For those left disheartened by Harper’s resounding spring victory, the court offered a fall tonic.

October: We witnessed the lasting emotional power of a populist cause

From the time it was implemented in 1995, the federal registry for rifles and shotguns was deeply controversial. In the broadest of strokes, rural gun owners resented it, while urbanites who feared gun crime approved. Opposition gathered steam after a 2002 report from Auditor General Sheila Fraser put estimated the registry tab would climb to $1 billion by 2005.

With hot-button right-wing populist issues like abortion and capital punishment largely off the table in Canadian politics, the long-gun registry took on disproportionate importance for that portion of the Conservative base. Harper extracted maximum political benefit from attacking the registry. On Oct. 25, the bill to eliminate it was finally tabled in the House. A drawn-out, culturally fraught episode in Canadian political life was coming to a bitter close. Even the data in the registry was to be destroyed, so no province or future federal government, not to mention police force, could make use of the information. Few outcomes politics are so categorically one-sided.

November: We took comfort from a Canadian’s prominence in troubled economic times

The Cannes summit of the G20 club of major developed and developing nations was dominated by gloomy, even alarming, news about Europe’s deepening debt crisis. This was the backdrop for the appointment of Mark Carney, the Bank of Canada’s youthful governor, to head a key oversight body called the Financial Stability Board. Never mind what the FSB does—highly technical banking stuff. Pay attention to what Carney represents—solid Canadian economic management.

Carney is a fascinating story in his own right. His assessments of the state of banking regulation, economic policy and its international coordination, are parsed closely by rapt global market players. Beyond his personal qualities, he embodies the new Canadian swagger concerning our sound banks and solid government finances. But can Canada’s political and business leaders build beyond those oft-mentioned fundamentals to more innovative manufacturing and competitive service sectors?

December: We watched a familiar national shame unfold in the hinterland

On the first day of the last month of 2011, the federal government imposed what’s called third-party management on the Northern Ontario reserve community of Attawapiskat. That meant an administrator appointed by Ottawa would run the Cree community of 1,800 on James Bay, where a crisis of abysmal housing began drawing national attention in late November.

It was yet another example—they happen every few years—of a burst of media attention to the plight of an impoverished, remote First Nations village briefly forcing Canadians to contemplate the worst policy failure of successive federal governments. But how to break that desultory cycle? As Attawapiskat took centre stage, the Harper government was quietly introducing legislation to reform band council elections and improve financial transparency. Maybe this incrementalism will help where past grand gestures did little.

A late, glittery Christmas card: Byzantium in Ottawa

By John Geddes - Thursday, December 29, 2011 at 3:32 PM - 0 Comments

Canadian Conservation Institute

Every so often, it’s a good idea to change the way you look at things. I have a little trick for that: on my way into work at the National Press Building just off Parliament Hill, a few times a year, when I’m feeling stale, I’ll duck into the next-door Wellington Building and just tip my head back.

Above me then is an intricate, complex mosaic in the Byzantine manner, covering the entire vaulted ceiling of the vestibule, made of many thousands of brightly and subtly coloured pieces of glass. At first glance, the style prepares you for a theme drawn straight from the Bible or classical mythology.

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On the Supreme Court rejecting a national securities regulator

By John Geddes - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 10:12 AM - 0 Comments

The key thing to keep in mind about today’s Supreme Court of Canada rejection of the Conservative government’s bid to create a national securities regulator is that the nine judges didn’t say it was a bad policy idea.

Their unanimous opinion, handed down this morning, only said the federal attempt to usurp the longstanding provincial regulation of stock markets and other securities trading is unconstitutional. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s proposed law, they say, “overreaches the proper scope” of the federal government’s broad constitutional power to regulate “trade and commerce.”

The court doesn’t doubt—and in fact confirms—that valid reasons for national securities regulation exist. But that’s not the point. Flaherty’s problem is that the provinces, under the Constitution, have jurisdiction over contracts and property matters. They’ve long regulated securities. The federal government failed to make its case that something about trading stocks and bonds and derivatives has changed so fundamentally in recent times that Ottawa must now step in.

“It is not for the court to suggest to the governments of Canada and the provinces the way forward…” the judges delicately say, before going on to suggest just that: “Yet we may appropriately note the growing practice of resolving the complex government problems that arise in federations, not by the bare logic of either/or, but by seeking cooperative solutions that meet the needs of the country as a whole as well as well as its constituent parts.”

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Narwhals: the new baby seals

By John Geddes - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Paul Nicklen/National Geographic Stock/WWF-Canada

Narwhals made a surprise appearance this year at Cambridge Bay, on the south coast of Victoria Island in Canada’s High Arctic. The whales, famous for the single, spiralling tusk sported by the adult males, don’t usually venture that far west. So when dozens of them showed up offshore in late August, the mostly Inuit community of about 1,500 rejoiced. Hunters took to their boats with rifles and harpoons, and landed about 10. Fresh muktuk—the vitamin-rich outer layer of skin and blubber—was, as old ways dictate, widely shared. And photos of smiling hunters posing by dead narwhals were, as contemporary culture demands, posted on Facebook.

That social-media celebration of hunter-gatherer tradition might suggest that narwhal hunting is fitting in surprisingly well in the 21st century. But Inuit groups and federal officials are bracing for international scrutiny of the killing of about 500 of these photogenic marine mammals every year. Unless Canada can prove they are being protected, outcry from abroad is all but certain to become an issue. “Things may not have changed for the people living in the North,” says Steve Ferguson, a federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans scientist, “but there’s a lot more worldwide attention being given to Arctic mammals.”

The key reason for that concern is climate change. As Arctic sea ice shrinks, attention has focused on the fate of polar bears. But a study in the journal Ecological Adaptations, which rated the risk of global warming to 11 Arctic mammals, argued narwhals are more vulnerable. Ferguson, a co-author of that 2008 report, says the narwhal’s unique adaptation to living under the ice makes it especially vulnerable to its disappearance.

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The EU’s mess seen from Canada (bonus: fresh Mark Carney quotes)

By John Geddes - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 5:48 PM - 0 Comments

For any Canadians trying to keep track of the scramble to solve the European debt crisis (good overview here), certain elements of the story have to keep reminding us of our own economic situation. Two particular points of stark contrast stand out:

Firstly, Canada has kept its own currency, despite sharing a free-trade zone with the United States, something the eurozone countries gave up in order to gain the apparent advantages of the euro and monetary union.

Secondly, Canada is a highly decentralized federation, not altogether unlike the European Union is some (but obviously not all) respects, yet the EU hasn’t adopted anything similar to the Canadian system for automatically transferring wealth from richer to poorer parts of the federation.

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Flaherty’s non-negotiable terms fit health spending reality [UPDATED]

By John Geddes - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 12:33 PM - 0 Comments

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s decision to lay down the law, rather than open up negotiations, on health care transfers from the federal government to the provinces might have been a tad undiplomatic. But there’s only so much anyone can say about the etiquette of federal-provincial relations without losing all contact with reality, and that leaves us with numbers, not niceties, to consider.

And the figures Flaherty put on the table look pretty big. He promises to maintain the current 6-per-cent a year pace of growth in health transfers to the provinces until 2016-17, and after that peg the annual hike to nominal gross domestic product growth, or the increase in GDP plus inflation. Projecting with confidence that far out is impossible, but you’d expect nominal GDP to grow by at least 4 per cent [check the update below].

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