Peggy Nash’s not-so-long shot at the NDP leadership
By John Geddes - Monday, March 5, 2012 - 0 Comments
The Toronto MP pitches government as the great job protector
Photo by Blair Gable
The seeds of a political life can be planted in the most unlikely places. For Peggy Nash, the Toronto MP who ranks among the serious contenders for the NDP leadership, the Languedoc countryside in southern France proved fertile ground. As a 20-year-old University of Toronto French major, she spent the summer of 1971 there as an au pair to polish her language skills. The couple who employed her happened to be French journalists back from covering political upheaval in Latin America. For a suburban Toronto kid who hadn’t been much engaged by politics, their worldly talk made a deep impression. “It got me interested and led me afterwards to doing solidarity work with Chileans and Salvadorians,” Nash recalls.
In fact, she went on to work for causes of all sorts—from feminism to environmentalism. But her main route to politics was that thoroughly traditional New Democrat path, the labour movement. Starting out as an Air Canada ticket agent straight out of university, Nash climbed the union hierarchy to become the first woman to lead the negotiation of a major auto industry contract, bargaining for the Canadian Auto Workers with Ford Canada in 2005. Her prominence in Toronto left-wing circles put her squarely in Jack Layton’s sights. The NDP leader, who died last summer from cancer, recruited her to run for Parliament. In what turned into one of the country’s most hotly contested ridings, she was defeated in Toronto’s Parkdale-High Park in 2004, then won there in 2006, lost the seat to to high-profile Liberal Gerard Kennedy in 2008, and took it back in 2011. [Thank you to commenter Christopher W Schulz for correcting the earlier version of the sequence of election results in Parkdale-High Park.]
In Nash’s leadership bid, that track record for tenacity matters. Her manner is typically unflappable, occasionally to the point of blandness. Evidence of a fighter’s streak helps among the NDP undecided. In the most recent leadership debate in Winnipeg, she positioned herself as keeper of the Layton flame, taking rival Thomas Mulcair to task for suggesting the NDP still needs to modernize itself, even after the late leader’s 2011 election breakthrough. “We got the support of 4.5 million people,” she said. “Don’t you think that proves that our party has been renewing itself?”
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Many, many complaints to Elections Canada, not just a few
By John Geddes - Friday, March 2, 2012 at 11:32 AM - 0 Comments
In the government’s highly improvizational response to the fraudulent phone calls story, one of the least persuasive elements (and that’s saying something) is the claim that very few complaints were actually raised during last spring’s election.
Just yesterday in the House during Question Period, the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary Secretary, Dean Del Mastro, said this: “We know that Elections Canada received 30 complaints nationally. That is what the report of the Chief Electoral Officer says and now some nine months later we have the NDP coming forward with new complaints and new evidence. It is all nonsense.”
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Bogus calls, real outrage
By John Geddes - Friday, March 2, 2012 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments
The robocalling scandal that’s sweeping Ottawa is raising troubling questions about the state of Canadian politics
Nathan Denette/CP
During last spring’s federal election, Anthony Rota, a Liberal MP fighting for his political life in the northern Ontario riding of Nipissing-Timiskaming, didn’t pay much attention to the odd report of strange phone calls to some of his supporters. He heard a few complaints about obnoxious calls from what his campaign concluded were opponents masquerading as Liberals to annoy voters. Then on May 2, election day, some voters took calls, purporting to come from Elections Canada, misdirecting them to phony polling locations. It wasn’t until he heard news last week of similar widespread incidents that Rota woke up to the possibility of something beyond local dirty tricks. “I started thinking, ‘Okay, maybe this wasn’t isolated,’ ” he says.
So did many others. The pattern Rota describes was echoed, with variations, in accounts from more than a dozen ridings. But his case stood out: Rota lost to Conservative Jay Aspin by an ultra-thin margin of 18 votes. In Nipissing-Timiskaming, at least, the possibility that bogus calls resulted in even a handful of lost votes is clearly consequential. Overall, though, the uproar was less about the impact fake calls might have had on outcomes than what the controversy says about the state of Canadian politics—especially the way Stephen Harper’s Conservatives play the game. Bob Rae, the interim Liberal leader, labelled current Tory political culture “Nixonian.” The Prime Minister’s 2011 campaign manager, Jenni Byrne, insisted Conservatives won with “clean and ethical” politics, although she hinted that stray local operatives might have done wrong.
It’s a good bet the truth lies somewhere between Rae’s vintage Watergate intimations and Byrne’s broad denial. The focus of the spreading story, broken by journalists with the Ottawa Citizen and Postmedia, is Elections Canada’s ongoing investigation into calls received by voters in Guelph, Ont., falsely telling them their polling locations had changed. Last November, the federal agency’s investigators used a court order to get detailed information about those Guelph calls from RackNine Inc., an Edmonton technology company the Conservatives used extensively to send out automated recorded messages—often referred to as “robocalls.” After the robocalls story exploded, a Conservative staffer who worked on the Guelph campaign lost his job with a Tory MP, although the party declined to explain exactly why.
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In conversation: Justin Trudeau
By John Geddes - Monday, February 27, 2012 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments
The Montreal MP on what would push him to the separatist side, and why he’s his mother’s—not his father’s—son
Photograph by David Kawai
Bearing what is arguably the most famous surname in Canadian politics, Montreal MP Justin Trudeau is no stranger to public scrutiny. But lately, he has drawn even more notice than usual, most recently for musing in a radio interview about separatism in a way his father never would have. Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s eldest son, now 40, has emerged as one of the most closely watched figures in a third-place Liberal party struggling to regain its stature on the federal scene.
Q: When you told a radio interviewer recently that you’d be tempted to switch to the separatist side in Quebec if Canada was dragged far enough down the road that the Harper government is travelling, what sort of reaction did you expect?
A: The emphasis of that statement was that someone who obviously loves Canada with everything he has, has been right here and fights for Canada all the time—for him to say something like that, something must be very wrong with Canada. The big frustration for me is that people are growing so cynical about politics that you see them basically shrug and say, “Oh, yeah. Who cares that Harper is shutting down debate? Who cares that he’s building prisons, and everything? All the politicians are the same so why should we be outraged about one rather than the other?” And my point is Canadians need to wake up. This is not the Canada they’d recognize if they looked closely.
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Best immigration minister ever? Meet Kenney’s competition.
By John Geddes - Thursday, February 23, 2012 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments
There’s some loose talk going around about Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney being perhaps the best ever in that job. Kenney’s fans especially like his recent move to speed up the processing of refugee claimants, the better to send the rejected ones packing fast.
Beyond any debate over the merits of Kenney’s policies, it seems a bit strange for today’s Conservatives, who have made something of a idol out of former Tory prime minister John Diefenbaker, to be forgetful of the towering achievement of Dief’s immigration minister, the late Ellen Fairclough.
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Canada’s foreign worker boom
By John Geddes - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments
Since 2006, Canada’s low-wage temporary workforce population has ballooned by 70 per cent
Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star
It was the worst imaginable way to jolt Canadians toward noticing that low-wage foreign workers are an increasingly important segment of the country’s labour force. Ten workers, nine from Peru and one from Nicaragua, recruited to fill jobs vaccinating chickens, were killed, and three others badly injured, when their van ran a stop sign and collided with a truck at a rural crossroads in southwestern Ontario. The truck driver, a Canadian, also died in the crash early this month. The accident thrust the reality of who works at the lowest tiers of farming and some other sectors briefly into the news. But even with that burst of attention, the swelling statistics on migrants remain little discussed. When Stephen Harper’s Conservatives won power in 2006, 255,440 foreign temporary workers lived in Canada. By 2010, their ranks had expanded to 432,682.
They are an increasingly diverse group. A changing mix of migrant occupations signals a shift in the way employers rely on foreigners to do jobs Canadians won’t. York University immigration expert Alan Simmons says the rapid growth has come outside traditional farm and domestic work, in industries like meat-packing, warehousing and hotels. Temporary workers now greatly outnumber newcomers accepted for good. From 2006 to 2010, the number of foreigners living in Canada as permanent residents on their way to citizenship increased only 12 per cent, from 251,642 to 280,681, during a five-year span when the foreign temporary-worker population ballooned by nearly 70 per cent.
The two groups enter Canada under starkly contrasting terms. Those admitted as permanent residents are joining family members who are already citizens, or have been selected under a federal points system that values education and a good grasp of English or French, or are refugees. Those allowed in temporarily are accepted only because their employers applied to the federal government to recruit abroad to fill vacancies they couldn’t interest Canadians in at the prevailing wage.
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Selling guns without mandatory checks on new owners [UPDATED]
By John Geddes - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 4:56 PM - 0 Comments
There’s not much point prolonging the argument about the government’s determination to scrap the registry for rifles and shotguns. But as Bill C-19, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Firearms Act, comes up this evening for a final vote in the House—its passage assured by the Conservative majority—Canadians on both sides of this bitter debate should consider the practical implications of the outcome.
One important matter is what will now happen when guns are bought and sold by individuals. After the gun registry’s introduction in 2003, any transfer of a gun’s ownership had to be approved by the federal firearms registrar, since the gun changing hands had to be registered by its new owner.
When the Tories shred the registry, of course, that obligation will disappear with it.
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About those pandas: a modest alternate proposal
By John Geddes - Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 2:36 PM - 0 Comments
The announcement during Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s recent trip to China that two giant pandas will be provided to Canadian zoos signaled a long-awaited turning point toward more cordial bilateral relations.For five years at Toronto’s zoo, followed by five more at Calgary’s, Er Shun and Ji Li will no doubt warm the hearts of many thousands. And yet, given China’s human rights record, it’s hard to celebrate the prospect without a slight pang of misgiving.
To reject outright China’s generous offer of exotic creatures for public display would be unwise, of course, in light of the realities of the changing global economy. Still, a compromise option might be worth considering.
Rather than flatly turning down the pandas, why not suggest a diplomatic alternative? What I have in mind is for Prime Minister Harper to request instead the loan for a decade of Liu Xiaobo, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.
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Jack Layton’s mother makes her pick
By John Geddes - Monday, February 13, 2012 at 11:23 AM - 0 Comments
Nobody saw this one coming. Doris Layton, mother of the late NDP leader Jack Layton, this morning endorsed her son’s former national campaign director, Brian Topp, for the New Democratic Party leadership.
For me, it’s fascinating to have this octogenarian wade into the fray. She has not been an overtly forceful political presence. When I interviewed Jack Layton and other family members and friends for a profile of him last spring, every description of his mother fit the portrait of the quintessential postwar homemaker. Her talent for needlepoint came up repeatedly.
Yet nobody I talked to, including Jack Layton, spoke of Doris Layton in patronizing tones. Continue…
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Canada’s unofficial (and unelected) opposition
By John Geddes - Monday, February 13, 2012 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments
Former high-ranking civil servants are outspoken critics of the Harper government
Photo by Blair Gable
For a particular set of policy wonks—generally identifiable by the telltale pallor and redness around the eyes that come from too many hours scouring spreadsheets—the recent news that Philip Cross is leaving Statistics Canada was big. The 36-year stalwart of the federal number-crunching agency, most recently its chief economist, has long been a prized source of analysis on questions from the depth of recessions to the problems of productivity. But Cross’s exit, prompted in part by his frustration with the Conservative government’s controversial 2010 decision to cancel the long version of the Canadian census, fits a pattern that has political implications beyond arcane economic debates. He is only the latest in a string of top former public servants to join what amounts to an extra-parliamentary unofficial opposition.
In policy disputes over deficit financing or defence procurement, the government’s stance on the Middle East, or its response to an aging population, the most cogent criticism increasingly comes from independent-minded lapsed bureaucrats. Unlike university professors or think-tank researchers, former mandarins bring insider intelligence on how federal policy is really made. The civil servant colleagues they leave behind keep them up to speed on new developments. All of that can make their critiques more intriguing to the media and, for beleaguered politicians, harder to dismiss. In past eras, retirement often cut them off from timely information sources and avenues for disseminating their views. No longer. “We now have the Internet and blogging and tweeting,” says Scott Clark, a former deputy minister of finance. “All that stuff allows people to do it so easily.”
By “it,” Clark means the kind of probing analysis that he and another top former finance official, Peter DeVries, produce for their website, 3D Policy. As two of the most seasoned budget-makers in Ottawa before they left the public service a few years ago, their typically unsupportive appraisal of Stephen Harper’s approach to taxing and spending resonates in official circles. Last month, for instance, they posted a detailed deconstruction of the Prime Minister’s claim that Old Age Security was “unsustainable.” Not according to Clark and DeVries. They pointed to the government’s own projections showing that restraint already imposed on big spending items like defence and health would allow OAS to go untouched without threatening federal finances. Cross has plans for his own online newsletter, to be called Inside the Numbers.
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Beatty’s list: business priorities and political realities
By John Geddes - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 4:52 PM - 0 Comments
The anxious tone the Prime Minister recently injected into the debate on Canada’s economic competitiveness was picked up today and amplified by one of the country’s top business lobbyists—Perrin Beatty, president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.
Beatty happens also to be a former Conservative cabinet minister from the long-ago days of Brian Mulroney’s government. So long ago, in fact, that he’s apparently forgotten how certain matters are not to be raised in polite political company. Like ending the way Employment Insurance rules favour perennially high-employment regions, notably parts of the Atlantic provinces and Quebec.
On a sensible list of 10 “barriers to competitiveness” laid out by Beatty in a news conference just off Parliament Hill, the Chamber’s plea for EI reforms to “improve fairness and increase incentives for the unemployed to return to work or relocate to find work” stood out. The very words send chills down spines around Ottawa.
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Dickens at 200: still the best we’ve got on being poor
By John Geddes - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 3:46 PM - 0 Comments
Andy Martini/Flickr
How apt that today’s bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens arrives at a moment when the widening gap between rich and poor is so prevalent in public-policy debate, and the grim conditions in China’s factories are back in the news.
Dickens is of course our greatest writer on the imperative to acknowledge what poverty is and try to do something about it. His way of forcing the reader to see and smell the squalor of 19th century England is still unmatched in its moral force.
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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. -
Harper finally takes some risks
By John Geddes - Monday, February 6, 2012 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments
The PM could be looking for trouble—especially on pensions
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.”
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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
Book by Stephen Greenblatt
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.
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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.”
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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.
