Katimaviktimhood

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 5:32 PM - 0 Comments

It’s rare that someone tries to gain public attention by doing something that is unequivocally wicked. But I think that this must be said of Colleen Cleve, the St. Catharines mom who intends to try to gain class action certification for a lawsuit over the Tories’ closure of the Katimavik program. From HuffPo’s Althia Raj:

[Cleve] believes she may have a breach of contract claim, since the federal government pulled out of a three-year funding agreement with Katimavik one year early. But she knows she’s unlikely to win.

“That’s not my intention; my intention is to basically raise public awareness of what the government has done,” she said. “So many people are not even aware of this program.”

Katimavik’s marketing and communications director Victoria Salvador told HuffPost the court challenge is unlikely to be successful because the contract includes a standard notice clause.

Cleve has given a pretty good outline of the definition of a vexatious lawsuit here, hasn’t she? She knows her lawsuit is an absurdity, since the government’s contract with Katimavik explicitly provided for cancellation on 90 days’ notice; she acknowledges she doesn’t care whether she can win the lawsuit; and her explicit aim is to punish the respondent by consuming time and energy and using the court as a publicity platform. She’s pushing her way onto a finite docket ahead of people with real complaints and grievances—and for what? A great human-rights cause? An injury that cries to heaven for vengeance?

Cleve’s two children were supposed to join Katimavik this July and volunteer in different communities across the country, but their plans for the next six months were thrown into limbo by the government’s decision. Melanie, 20, a finishing student at Niagara College was lucky to get her old summer job back at MarineLand, her mother said. While her 17-year-old son Erik decided to go back to high school for an extra semester after missing application deadlines for college and university.

Yes, Mom’s outraged because her grown children had to find something else to do with a whole summer. I fear that almost every word I can find to characterize her attitude ends in either “-bag” or “-hole”. We shall see if Ms. Cleve’s fellows in the “Nous sommes tous Katimavikeux” movement continue to endorse this behaviour.

Roger Gibbins against Senate reform? The hell you say!

By Colby Cosh - Monday, May 14, 2012 at 6:07 AM - 0 Comments

Even the departing head of a Western Canadian think tank that preached the Senate reform gospel for decades has had a sudden conversion on the road to Damascus.

Roger Gibbins, who steps down later this month as president and CEO of the Canada West Foundation, joins Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall and former Stephen Harper campaign strategist Tom Flanagan among influential westerners who’ve come to the conclusion Senate reform—as currently envisioned—is either unnecessary or misguided.

…Gibbins said “another reality is starting to sink in”—a reality he concedes is “preaching against the doctrine” of the Canada West Foundation during his 14 years of leadership.

“If we have a Senate that’s elected and effective to some degree—but the seat distribution doesn’t change—then we’re into a situation where an elected Senate may be detrimental to the interests of the West,” said Gibbins.

The four western provinces are vastly under-represented in the 105-seat chamber, with only six seats each. The four Atlantic provinces, despite much smaller populations than the West, have a combined 30 seats; Ontario and Quebec each have 24.

As long as that distribution remains unchanged, Gibbins said: “To the extent that the Senate becomes a more influential body—and that’s uncertain—but to the extent that it does, it would shift power into Atlantic Canada and away from the West.”

That Gibbins is repeating the very arguments made by former Liberal intergovernmental affairs minister Stephane Dion is nothing short of jaw-dropping. -Bruce Cheadle for CP, yesterday

It’s jaw-dropping, that is, if you haven’t been following Roger Gibbins through twenty years of steady personal opposition to Senate reform, and particularly the “Triple-E” form which would make the Senate elected, equal (amongst the provinces), and effective. It’s a matter of a few minutes’ work to prepare a dossier on this, complete with hilariously antiquated dates: Continue…

The undiminished power of Robert Caro

By Colby Cosh - Monday, May 14, 2012 at 5:14 AM - 0 Comments

I am 532 pages into Robert A. Caro’s The Passage Of Power, the fourth installment of what was originally meant to be a three-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Caro is now doing five volumes in all…or at least that’s what he is saying at the moment. A sixth book would not be out of bounds, on the precedent of Dumas Malone’s series on Thomas Jefferson, but five will probably do the trick. Johnson did not have the fascinating, full post-presidential life Jefferson did; he seems to have practically sprinted toward death after he was driven out of the White House.

There has been some discussion of Caro’s LBJ series as possibly the last of its kind—the multivolume biography whose creation takes up half or more of the life of a master prose artist. I find the idea funny. In their real lives, monumental figures like Johnson, or even much less accomplished and ambitious leaders, unthinkingly consume the time and energy of hundreds of bootlicking devotees. Nay, any simple count of just the people who died premature deaths because of Johnson’s policies would smash upward through six digits pretty quickly. And what of the American lives altered in the meantime by the programs of the Great Society? Hint: that would be literally all of them.

Can it really be too much to ask, then, that an independent thinker and gifted historian like Bob Caro should spend forty years studying Johnson? If forty men spent forty years on the task, that would not seem like too much. And anybody who has read the first three books in The Years of Lyndon Johnson knows that the series is not just the story of a remarkable individual: it is the story of the 20th century, near-essential reading for anyone who wishes to comprehend the United States Congress (and particularly the Senate), the nation-within-a-federation known as Texas, or any of a dozen other topics. Volume Four contains, for example, the clearest practical explanation I have ever seen of why the U.S. vice-presidency is such a nullity—why it could not be turned into a power base even by a genius like LBJ, who had literally spent his whole life transforming crappy ceremonial jobs like “Speaker of the Little Congress” into overwhelming political fortifications. Given the vice-presidency, he couldn’t pull it off again. It nearly drove him mad. It was an unsquareable circle.

Volume Four also reveals new details of the overrehearsed history of the Kennedys, authoritatively establishing the facts of Johnson’s blood feud with Bobby and showing how Johnson was reluctantly added to the 1960 presidential ticket (despite Bobby melting down and spending an entire day, probably behind his brother’s crippled back, trying to persuade Johnson not to accept the offer). It goes behind the scenes of the assassination drama, showing how Johnson began to build a new administration before Air Force One even left Love Field on Nov. 22. While still at Parkland Hospital waiting for the final word on the wounded president, for example, LBJ sent an aide to go find Jack Valenti, a Houston public-relations man Johnson remembered mostly from a few rhapsodic newspaper columns. Valenti boarded the plane, got into the famous photo, followed Johnson to Washington, and parlayed a few thousand words of kiss-ass into four decades of running Hollywood.

For the first time, one of Caro’s books has been released with a slight whiff of hype, with dueling (and oddly overlapping) profiles of the maestro appearing more or less simultaneously in Esquire and the New York Times Magazine. Both articles fetishize Caro’s antiquated, intricate creative process: gosh, can you believe he wrangles all those documents and interviews without even using a computer? Well, pardon me, but duh. We already knew you didn’t need a computer to be Macaulay or Mommsen or Ranke. What these articles tell us, despite themselves, is that if Caro found it natural to use a computer, he would probably find it quite helpful. He insists that he writes quickly, and while this is obviously a fib, computers would reduce the time he does spend on pure cross-referencing and document flow.

His successor will find it thus, anyway. And there is bound to be one, irrespective of how the internet has changed publishing-business models and reader habits. Historians of Caro’s type and calibre are never common, and have rarely if ever paid their own way on a pure commercial basis. All the same, the English-speaking world has spit them out pretty reliably, at long intervals, since Gibbon. In fact, while we’re speaking of Gibbon, let’s recall that the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in an England of seven million souls, about half of whom could not write their own names. Kind of puts the “challenge” of finding room on the shelf next to the Xbox in perspective, doesn’t it? It’s a simple matter: you just have to be able to write like Gibbon. Or like Caro.

10 more things you need to know about the Alberta election

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 8:14 AM - 0 Comments

Jason Franson/CP Images

1. Proportional representation just won itself a whole passel of new right-wing fans.

2. Alberta Liberal morale remained high throughout an election in which pollsters warned continually of disaster. And the pollsters proved to be almost exactly right about this (if nothing else). Yet even as the mortifying results rolled in, Alberta Liberal morale still remained high. Then their egomaniac not-really-Liberal disaster of a leader, Raj Sherman, won his seat by the skin of his teeth. This means he will not have to be replaced unless an awful lot of people smarten up fast. Alberta Liberal morale after this event? Easily, easily at its highest point in ten years. “Please, sir, may I have another?”

3. NDP leader Brian Mason’s first words on reaching the podium? “The phone booth [two seats] just doubled [four seats]!” Message: we like the phone booth. We’re never leaving it. Not us.

4. Total votes cast for Senators-in-Waiting, with complete results not quite yet in, are about 2,486,858. If everybody voted for three Senators, that implies about 829,000 ballots cast—which in turn suggests that around 458,000 eligible voters selected a candidate for the Assembly but refused or spoiled their Senate ballot. The practice was certainly widespread, and if these numbers are close to right, the Senate election has been boycotted quite significantly.

5. Those who did boycott the Senate election seem awfully proud of themselves, because it was a “meaningless” election. Why, one wonders, does it have to be meaningless? The “progressive” parties could have agreed on a single Senate candidate in advance; if they had done so, that candidate would certainly have ended up first in the queue, and provided an excellent test of Stephen Harper’s integrity, which I am told is much doubted.

The problem is that Harper might pass the test, you say? Then what’s the harm? You get some smart, popular left-wing independent speaking for Alberta in the Senate? That’s bad for “progressives” how?

6. It is not unusual for candidates to get 70%, 75%, or even 80% in Alberta provincial or federal elections. By this measure, however, the Alberta electorate is now unusually divided: the highest vote share earned by any candidate, of any party, was NDPer Rachel Notley’s 61.98% in Edmonton-Strathcona. (There was talk in advance of the vote that electoral redistricting would hurt Notley, though no one thought for a moment she would lose.)

7. Only one Conservative candidate received 60% of a riding’s votes cast: Human Services Minister David Hancock in Edmonton-Whitemud. PCs relishing their first-past-the-post “landslide” [see item 1, supra] would do well, I suppose, to realize that only 19 of the 61 victors have the approval of more than 50% of their fellow-citizens.

8. Voters don’t like turncoats much. There was a lot of floor-crossing in the 27th Legislative Assembly of Alberta: three PCs (Heather Forsyth, Rob Anderson, and Guy Boutilier) left for the Wildrose Party, one (Raj Sherman) bolted for the Liberals, and the PCs got one back from the Liberals in the person of Bridget Pastoor. Forsyth had a hideous scare in Calgary-Fish Creek, taking it by just 74 votes. Boutilier was turfed. Sherman, like Forsyth, narrowly escaped garroting. Only Anderson (in Airdrie) and Pastoor (Lethbridge West) got the usual easy ride that comes with incumbency.

9. Ted Morton’s widely anticipated whupping in Chestermere-Rocky View lived up, or down, to all expectations. His challenger, broadcaster Bruce McAllister, beat him 10,168 to 6,156; McAllister earned the highest vote share of any Wildrose candidate (58.4%) and, along with Danielle Smith, was one of only three to amass 10,000 votes.

10. There is this weird consensus among intellectuals and creatives that the progressive vote in Alberta will coalesce around the Alberta Party by 2016. All my techie and designer-y friends seem as convinced of this as if it were divine revelation (and, in truth, the Alberta Party’s election materials do look pretty badass, graphics-wise). I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, because these are the same people who were sure that a single-button mouse was a good idea ten years ago, but then the top young organizers in the Wildrose Party told me that the AP was full of smart, hustling people and that they, too, believed it would soon become Alberta’s party of the left.

Yes, there is plenty of embarrassment to go around this morning, but I still cannot understand why I was assured so often that the Alberta Party would win multiple seats; they were never above about 3% in the polls, and if there can be such a thing as a calamitous performance for a fledgling movement with not much of a platform and a kinda-fake leader, this must be it. The Alberta Party got 1.3% of the vote last night. If the NDP lives in a phone booth, what do you call this? A really tight pair of rubber underpants?

Alberta surprise: what went right for Redford

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 6:04 AM - 0 Comments

An Alberta astronaut returning from Titan and seeing the result of last night’s election would say “Meh, so what else is new? The PCs carried 61 of 87 seats? Kind of an off year for them, I guess.” Yet the ostensibly boring, familiar outcome wrong-footed much of the media and absolutely all the pollsters. Even PC insiders, correctly detecting a last-minute shift away from the Wildrose Party heirs-presumptive, envisioned a much smaller vote share than the 44 per cent Alison Redford’s party achieved. The public polling firms all botched the job, with none forecasting anything but a Wildrose majority even on the final weekend.

The Wildrose Party’s final count of 17 seats must surely leave its braintrust, heavily stocked with Conservative Party of Canada veterans, obliterated with horror. The CPC has built a pretty good electoral machine, but as old Ralph Klein hand and Wildrose supporter Rod Love reminded CBC, the Alberta PC brand is the most successful in the country. He probably could have gone even further afield if he wanted to. (On August 24, 2014, the PCs will officially become the longest continuously serving government in the annals of Confederation.) In 1993 the PCs were in trouble late, but succeeded in outflanking a popular Liberal opposition and running against their own record. They did it again in 2012. Redford succeeded in making herself the “change” candidate—though not without help from the Wildrose insurgents, who suffered late “bozo eruptions” of the sort the CPC itself has long since succeeded in extinguishing.

It wasn’t all about the bozos, but they did help inspire a shift of progressive voters away from the Alberta Liberals—a party that is never quite healthy but now seems positively moribund. With overall turnout still fairly dismal (probably not much higher than 50%), the Wildrose was able to capture 34% of the vote. Almost all of that support, without any doubt, came from citizens who backed the PCs in 2008. But the Liberal vote share fell from 29% to 10%, and it seems almost all of those voters went PC, often reluctantly, in defence of Redford.

Redford seemed destined to be the Alberta PCs’ Kim Campbell for so long that it is difficult to do an about-face and assess her strengths. She played hardball when it came to the Wildrose “bozoes”, succeeding in making them a metaphor for a potential Wildrose caucus of uncertain size, ideological allegiance, and ability. That turned out to be shrewd, and the Wildrose campaign, which was rigidly committed to a tactical plan laid out before the election writ, did not react fast enough. (The WRP strategic doctrine has been that it is better not to get caught “reacting” at all. This is ideal if your preparation has been thorough. If there are weaknesses, look out.)

But what really strikes one now is the way Redford has emphasized Alberta’s national and international image from day one of her career as premier—indeed, from day one of her candidacy for premier. Whether or not Alberta is a particularly insular and self-regarding place (which, duh, it is), it has elected a few heads of government in a row who were far from cosmopolitan. With the last couple, you’d honestly be a little reluctant to let them use a really nice bathroom. Meanwhile, Alberta’s government has been guilty of neglecting or underestimating outside sentiment, most notably when it comes to environmental attacks on the tar sands.

Criticisms of Alberta began as an easily-ignored celebutard problem, but because of Alberta’s landlocked status, it grew to become a serious diplomatic one, one with a quantifiable impact on Alberta’s take from oil. Professional enviros went after pipelines connecting Alberta to U.S. and world markets because they are an easy choke point; Alberta business leaders and its government bean-counters are increasingly, unhappily aware of just how easy.

That means the province can no longer count on market-access issues to take care of themselves. Oil is not just a commodity anymore. It needs a sales pitch. And Redford has been preaching the axioms that naturally follow. Lord, has she ever. She hardly ever mentions Alberta without squeezing Canada, or the world, or both into the sentence. This turns out, as of tonight, to not just be the irritating vocal tic of a baggage-lugging, UN-certified internationalist.

Danielle Smith’s view on climate change—that the science pinning it on human activity is provisional, and it’s not clear that we really have power over the weather—has a broad constituency in Alberta. So does her view that people who literally believe in Hell are eligible for public office, provided they give a firm promise of religious tolerance. None of this is “radical”, per se. But the net effect of the last half of the campaign was to make Smith look defiantly “Albertan”, to appear to be an Albertan contra mundum and-to-hell-with-what-anyone-else-thinks.

In most years, in most Albertas, that would work. It may even work again in the future, when Albertans feel less insecurity about finding a way to force our boutique oil into foreign markets and more comfortable about reverting to “Let’s all get super drunk at the Stampede” mode. But in 2012 Albertans are feeling vulnerable about identity, and Smith’s problems provoked a late, instinctive counter-reaction. Herself a promising avatar of change and modernity, the Wildrose leader found herself endlessly defending men who looked and sounded like an old Super-8 film of Socreds at a 1968 ribbon-cutting for a curling rink. Redford, meanwhile, stuck to her game and got it right: keep reminding Albertans that the world exists, and is watching, and is very large.

Demographic change didn’t hurt Redford’s cause, of course. Alberta’s fast growth should, in theory, make old political axioms and patterns untrustworthy, as new Albertans remake the electorate every decade. Alberta remains the youngest of all provinces, and it’s now far from the whitest. But when I look at the vote totals from here in Edmonton, for example, what I see is Edmonton actually reasserting its classic liberal identity, angrily. Friends my age and younger were able to accept the bizarre logic of the PCs as the party of “change”, and voted PC for exactly the same reasons they were once determined to keep the city PC-free.

Of the 19 core Edmonton ridings, 13 went PC; more surprisingly, the PCs made a clean 5-for-5 sweep of the bedroom communities of St. Albert, Sherwood Park, Spruce Grove, Stony Plain, and Strathcona County. None of these were remotely close for the Wildrose; one of the highest vote totals in the whole province belongs to St. Albert PC Stephen Khan, who was running in a riding that has sent Liberals to the legislature at least once under every Alberta government. (At this hour, Redford herself has the very highest total—yet another surprise within the larger surprise.)

In the final weekend of the campaign, both Smith and Redford stuck close to Calgary, and in light of the polls, this looked for all the world as though Redford was desperately playing defence. Would she ignore rural Alberta if she thought there was any hope there? Redford did lose a few Conservative stalwarts in the hinterland, but, frankly, she is probably not too unhappy about losing golf-mad Ray Danyluk or Wildrose-in-all-but-name Ted Morton.

The Wildrose took no seats at all north of Lacombe (which is a little less than halfway from Edmonton to Calgary), apart from Danyluk’s northeastern Franco-Ukrainian fiefdom (Lac la Biche-St. Paul-Two Hills). Basically, the Wildrose is left with a dryland/foothills caucus and a couple of Calgary outposts. Urban Alberta has regained the upper hand in the electoral calculus after more than three decades of control by plain-spoken, half-animist, multi-tentacled PC county bosses of the Danyluk type.

And Redford has gained what no one expected her to have: a big winner’s unquestioned dominance of her caucus, with a generous helping of like minds replacing the old dinosaurs. Hopefully she will be conscious of this and enforce a regime of positive urban values, starting with honesty and transparency in government, social tolerance, and respect for innovation. (I am not convinced that throwing billions of dollars at an improvised “innovation” project like AOSTRA-2 is a good example of the latter, but in that case the goal isn’t wrong, just the old-school centrally-planned execution.) There are also negative urban values Redford needs to avoid: impecuniousness, laziness, and the eternal temptations of social engineering. But the idea of making Alberta a place people think of as cool is not a bad one. I live here, I already know it’s pretty cool: we apparently need to convince you.

Alberta election: close but not touching

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, April 22, 2012 at 2:03 PM - 0 Comments

I was chatting with Éric Grenier of ThreeHundredEight.com Saturday about Monday’s Alberta election. Grenier’s seat projection from late polls predicts a slim Wildrose Party majority for the next Alberta legislature, with 45 seats for the insurgent WRP and 37 for the incumbent Progressive Conservatives. I don’t really know the details of how he gets from the polling numbers—which show the PCs closing somewhat in recent days—to the seat counts. But because he treats the cities as homogenous metropolitan areas, as he is forced to by his commitment to a purely numerical method (that is how they are handled by the pollsters themselves), I tend to think Éric has the WRP just a tad low. He is implicitly mixing in urban-core ridings, where there is a lot of “progressive” vote to be skimmed by the fearmongering Tories, with ones that are “urban” only in the slightly demented eyes of the census, and are straight WRP-PC fights that will be hard for the WRP to lose given the polling numbers.

Four important words there: “given the polling numbers”. This Alberta election is a case in which an educated guess that incorporates local knowledge is certainly better than a purely automated model. But the educated guess can also fail in a million ways, and that is especially true here. The Wildrose Party is going stronger with “certain to vote” survey respondents, but a late break toward an incumbent is a bad sign for the opposition. Amongst individuals, the act of voting will carry high emotional stakes, and almost nobody, it seems, will be repeating his own 2008 vote.

Liberals and New Democrats who have waited long lives to throw out the PCs are now being asked to protect that very regime, and they’re obviously considering it, given that the polls show two-thirds of the 2008 Liberal vote vanishing. I haven’t seen local news reports of any mass suicides or Raptures, so some of those people will be backing Alison Redford, who would have been their dream leader anyway. I don’t mean this as a gratuitous shot; I mean literally that if the Liberals could fashion the perfect leader of their fantasies from Frankenstein-like parts, they would certainly end up with a lady lawyer who had done loads of international development work and favours Hillary Clinton pantsuits and pearls.

Conservative voters, meanwhile, will have to decide whether they are truly ready to abandon a brand they have supported since Apollo 15 took off. But there’s a third component to the electorate here that nobody’s talking about: “progressive” switchers to the Wildrose.

Madness, you say? The PCs have been making the case that the Wildrose must be stopped at all costs because a couple of its candidates have questionably acceptable views: one is a Christian who believes in the reality of Hell, and another is a guy who’s worked amongst ethnic communities for years—a gentleman not seriously suspected of capital-R racism by anybody, as far as I can tell—who was willing to say to those groups in their own media, repeatedly and in an admittedly awkward way, that his being a white dude is probably a practical electoral advantage. (A third is Alberta Report publisher Link Byfield, whose conservative political views are so freaky and far-out that he could only amass a quarter-million votes in Alberta’s 2004 Senate election.)

Social liberals who want to vote for the Wildrose must be prepared to tolerate the possible presence of such people in a Wildrose caucus, just as social conservatives who want to vote for the Wildrose must somehow be prepared to tolerate voting for a pro-abortion, pro-gay premier. Meanwhile, anybody at all who wants to vote PC must be prepared to tolerate the perpetuation of a government that has taken, and aggressively hidden the evidence of, well-documented illegal kickbacks for party purposes from schools, municipalities, and healthcare. Indeed, they must not only tolerate it: they must accept a share of moral responsibility for it, must stand up and applaud it. Some unknown number of voters will reach the conclusion that the PCs must be humbled as the Liberal Party of Canada was humbled—their offence is objectively worse than Adscam—and that a Wildrose vote is the most effective way of doing this. If you have to hold your nose, why not at least hold your nose for change?

Under the circumstances, the election is nearly impossible to handicap, with genuine four-way races likely in parts of Edmonton. What one notices is that the leaders are spending the last day of campaigning in outer-Calgary city ridings that would otherwise be rock-solid for the PCs. The ridings in question would, I think, be somewhere in the low 50s on a Wildrose wish list and maybe the low 30s on a PC one. That is what I expect to see in the seat counts on Monday, because I know of no stronger evidence apart from the polls, and the polls, interpreted properly, agree with this seat distribution. I can almost get to Grenier’s outcome if I assign everything close to the Conservatives, but the sum of individual voter decisions in the booth is impossible to foresee; that’s why we go ahead and have these election thingies. On this sunny Sunday, Alberta voters are writhing in the private hell of the potential parricide, and must grope their way toward peace with themselves.

Alberta election: an appeal to the hold-your-nose vote

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, April 18, 2012 at 8:22 PM - 0 Comments

Leave aside for a moment the Baptist Church Teen Talk quality of this viral third-party plea for strategic voting that is circulating around Alberta today in advance of the Apr. 23 vote. (Have you ever seen a mass-market political ad that wasn’t fundamentally cheesy and unintelligent?) Let’s ask a more interesting question: what does it tell us about the state of the campaign? It doesn’t seem to have been bought and paid for by the Progressive Conservatives; it may, for example, have merely been made and shot pro bono, in their interest and with their blessing. But it is hard to believe they didn’t have some hand in it. I am hearing a lot of conspiracy theories about “Wildrose black ops” and “rogue teenagers” and whatnot, but—hello? The message of the ad is “Vote for the PCs, even if you don’t really want to”. (Or, to take a literal direct quote: “F—k it, I’m voting PC”.)

It’s a risky move. The ad will alienate old-fashioned, loyalist blue Tories who happen to see it. It is not just old fogies in Alberta who like guns and vote for Stephen Harper. And it is not just young people who watch YouTube videos. At the same time, the sentiment that the ad is trying to appeal to is real; I have already talked to strategic voters who are going to cast their first PC ballot out of fear of the Wildrose Party. I’m actually kind of sorry to see them caricatured so brutally.

This ad—or this political tract in video form, pending its use as an ad—is both a wager and a frame-change. The wager is that an appeal to strategic-voting Liberal and NDP sympathizers will attract more marginal voting power than is given up in the form of horrified Tory loyalists, or in the form of people who aren’t especially partisan but are horrified anyway. Certainly the core idea here is strategically sound: if the Tories want to pull out some of their formerly close-run ridings in northern Alberta and even Calgary, it will help to appeal to the atavistic fears that have been raised about the Wildrose slate. This ad/tract/viral vid suggests that the PCs have given up on the hinterland and most of Calgary; the trouble is that to work even in the places where it might implicitly do some good, it must succeed in making viewers identify with the people onscreen. I have some trouble imagining a likely voter watching it and saying “Damn, the ‘I’m not like dat’ guy and the super-angry ‘Danielle Smith doesn’t believe in gravity’ chick are ME!”

The attempted frame-change is this: the 2012 election very quickly turned into a “Roust the crooks” bonfire-type occasion, with voters of all stripes sharing their disgust at the Progressive Conservative government’s bullying and corruption. Albertans will get the kind of behaviour from their next government that they choose to honour: if they reward the overwhelming sense of entitlement that the PCs have developed after 41 years in power, they will be sending a signal that anything short of murder will go unpunished. “Roust the crooks” is a recipe for electoral annihilation. The PCs need to move voters into a “Defend the status quo” mode, and that’s what this ad is about. Forget the PC kickbacks; forget decades of PC ad-hockery in healthcare; forget even that any PC caucus will probably contain dozens of people who believe that the gays are going to hell. The question—the hidden inner challenge of the ad—is: after 41 years, years which have seen plenty of liberal social progress and fairly impressive relative prosperity, do we really dare change? Things could be worse!

The Battle of Castle Downs: an Alberta election sideshow

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, April 11, 2012 at 4:16 AM - 0 Comments

Elections are made up of a lot of little things, and this controversy from Alberta’s election is perhaps a very little thing for me to belabour you with, but it is amusing. On Saturday, Edmonton-Castle Downs MLA and provincial education minister Thomas Lukaszuk was doorknocking in his riding when he had a surprising confrontation with Al Michalchuk, a grouchy 67-year-old homeowner who lives on the city’s 97th Street. The news broke in the form of an alarming tweet from Stephen Carter, a senior communications strategist for the Conservatives:

BREAKING: While door knocking, PC Candidate and Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk was assaulted. Police on scene. #abvote #pcaa Continue…

Ba-a-a-attle for the Alberta voter

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 at 4:50 AM - 0 Comments

Photo from Wildrose.ca

To kick off the Alberta election, here’s Danielle Smith with some sheep, as featured on Wildrose.ca. This should not be taken as some sort of sly joke about voters, either on her part or on mine. It’s an excellent photo-op, and will be all over the news this morning; it is literally irresistible. In general, the early days of the campaign have me formidably impressed with the Wildrose tacticians. I imagine, if only because I’m used to pretty slapstick Alberta oppositions, that some snickering comic-book brain-thing in a jar is using servomotor arms to thrust and slam the levers of a great machine. But it’s probably nothing as romantic as all that; just Tom Flanagan dashing off a few memos.

Why is Danielle Smith messing about with mutton? Continue…

Mr. Irrelevant vs. Mr. Angry

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 at 12:09 PM - 0 Comments

Because Ed Broadbent has tremendous moral authority in the New Democratic Party, he must never be allowed to exercise it. That seems to be the prevailing response to the sudden hatchet assault Broadbent made last week on NDP leadership contest frontrunner Thomas Mulcair. It is a curious spectacle: a throng of columnists and observers is questioning almost everything but the factual truth of Broadbent’s comments. Continue…

Pray for Alberta’s Mar-tyr to probity

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, March 15, 2012 at 9:39 AM - 0 Comments

When Alison Redford suspended Gary Mar as head of the Alberta Hong Kong Office and summoned him home last week, it looked a little like a settling of scores between the premier and the man she narrowly edged out in October’s PC leadership battle. Mar had enjoyed the support of a crushing majority of the PC caucus, amidst whose ranks Redford found exactly one (1) backer not named Alison Redford. Giving Mar the Hong Kong job looked like a graceful and generously-compensated way of ushering him out of the drama of Alberta politics. And when he presented a pretext for genuine retaliation, she was not slow to seize upon it.

Except I have a question: what exactly was the pretext? Continue…

Resource curses, West and East

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, March 15, 2012 at 6:29 AM - 0 Comments

Ex-Colleague Coyne has an excellent column on the emerging political split between the resource-extracting parts of the country and the sentimental nationalists who think every drop of bitumen and chip of timber sent abroad makes baby Jesus cry. I noticed one snippet, though, which goes to show how even the most trend-aware and detail-oriented columnist (that’s what he is!) can be held prisoner by persistent images of the past: Continue…

Ink-stained wretches, arise!

By Colby Cosh - Friday, March 9, 2012 at 3:22 PM - 0 Comments

I don’t know much about the Globe & Mail’s strategy for dominating the National Newspaper Awards, but it’s working. They received an outlandish 24 nominations for the highest honours in Canadian fishwrap this year. And 23 of them are probably rock solid! But I believe there’s a problem with the one they’re proudest of—at least, it’s the first piece they mention in their own story on the nominations, and the first item on the list of links they have attached.

I refer to Ken Dryden’s colourful, typically Drydenesque 3,000-word essay on concussions in ice hockey. It appeared in the Globe’s Oct. 1 edition, and there’s the wrinkle: the same essay appeared on Bill Simmons’ Grantland.com subsite for ESPN, where it is dated Sept. 30. The NNAs are intended for original content written specifically for Canadian newspapers, as Rule 1 of the competition reflects:

To be eligible, an entry must have been published first in 2011 by a Canadian daily newspaper —whether in print or online—in English or French.

The Globe has not yet responded on the record to a request for comment. (The Dryden essay may also have a problem under Rule 3 if the lawyer-goaltender was paid by both ESPN and the Globe for the copy.)

I noticed yesterday that the Dryden piece was not original to the Globe, and my initial instinct was not to make a big deal of it. Anyone who’s been a freelancer as long as I was has an overdeveloped resistance to offending even the most unlikely future employer. But then I thought: as if Ken Dryden really gives a crap whether he wins a “Newspaper Award”? Five Six Stanley Cup rings and two pensions aren’t enough?

The letter of the rule isn’t the only issue here. These awards are supposed to be a morale boost for professionals who do good work on deadline. I’m not sure the net effect of journalism awards is positive, but the explicit idea behind them is to encourage support for ambitious journalism—to bestir editors to big projects, to provide incentives for applying plenty of resources to breaking news, and to buy time and column-inches for individuals to work on the biggest stories of their careers. In that light, I don’t see the point of nominating Ken Dryden for such an award at all, and especially not for a piece that got sold twice after being written at leisure, as a rich, influential man’s intervention in a policy debate.

Dryden is competing with one of the Globe’s own sportswriters for the shiny bauble in the Sports category. Some other professional inside or outside the Globe, someone to whom an NNA nom would have literal hard cash value, has already been denied. I can’t be the only one irked about this. In fact, Dryden is such a nice guy and has such a keen sense of fair play that I suspect he’d be on my side.

Mudslinging: Alberta’s latest growth industry

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 4:36 PM - 0 Comments

Behold: the first-ever extramural attack ad from an Alberta Conservative government. Don Braid says it’s the first, anyway, and if I didn’t know whether it was the first, he might be the person I’d ask.

Maybe it goes without saying, but the dearth of attack ads in recent Alberta politics is not special testimony to the politeness of those politics. It’s testimony to Alberta’s one-party nature. The Conservatives took over from Social Credit in 1971, in a youth-driven power shift: Peter Lougheed, in pushing aside a government that had delivered prosperity but was increasingly behind the times socially, was so civil and restrained and all-around decent about it that the whupped Socreds practically said “Please, sir, may I have another?” The federal Liberals and the radical ’70s NDP obligingly kept Lougheed in power for another decade and a half, and as Braid notes, the premier never so much as referred to the existence of other parties. Why would it have been in his interest to do so? Continue…

The NHL should help those who help themselves

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, March 4, 2012 at 6:22 AM - 0 Comments

Reporting from the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, the Edmonton Journal’s David Staples breaks intriguing news about a new idea for discouraging late-season “tanking” by pro sports teams who want to improve their draft position. Reading about Adam Gold’s scheme, I had the pretty firm reaction: “Yeah, this is right. We’ll see somebody adopt this soon.”

Right now, in the NBA and the NHL, teams eliminated from the playoffs are supposedly discouraged from sending out sub-par lineups by the use of a draft lottery. Lottery systems, which basically add some statistical random noise to the end-of-year standings before the draft order is set, have curbed the worst abuses (best exemplified, I think, by the bizarre ending of the 1983-84 NBA season). If a hypothetical NHL team, let’s call it the Deadmonton Boilers, finishes in last place, it is not guaranteed to get the number-one pick. The problem, however, is that the randomization, being random, doesn’t really reverse the powerful incentive to be horrible: finishing in last still gives the Boilers the best statistical chance of getting the number-one pick in the Entry Draft, and guarantees that they will pick no lower than second. Continue…

Housing bubble: listening for the pop

By Colby Cosh - Friday, March 2, 2012 at 4:14 AM - 0 Comments

Here’s a blog post that is going to be worth exactly what you paid for it. I promise. Like the rest of you I’ve been reading a lot of “pro” and “con” material about the possibility of a Canadian housing bubble. Including the dramatic material from our latest issue. And I have a couple of problems many of you will have shared in trying to follow the debate. One, my own involvement in the housing market (and we’re all involved, on one side or the other) makes it difficult for me to set aside wishful thinking. Two: the data are awfully slippery. A lot of what we hear is anecdotal; a lot more of what we hear, even from informed sources, seems little better than anecdotal; and where there is solid information about things like debt-to-income ratios and movements in good indices of housing prices, it’s hard to interpret.

The fact is, no one is really sure what to make of the many natural laws of housing prices whose existence has been asserted and whose revenge upon us (us owners) has often been promised. Though we do now know that one formerly popular law, “Housing always goes up”, ain’t much good. (Damn. No free lunch, you say?)

What I decided to do was this: Continue…

No, the Wheat Board’s not in the Constitution

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, February 25, 2012 at 12:54 PM - 0 Comments

Because it’s a little difficult to find on the Web, I’ve uploaded a PDF copy of the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench decision on the former CWB directors’ application for an injunction against the demise of single-desk wheat and barley marketing. It contains setbacks within setbacks for the directors’ case: their constitutional argument that the dismantling of the single desk violated the rule of law isn’t serious enough to be considered, says Justice Shane Perlmutter, and even if it were, it doesn’t meet the urgency test for injunctive relief. Perlmutter’s take is, needless to say, very different from Federal Court Justice Douglas Campbell’s.

Will no one rid us of these turnout nerds?

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 8:11 PM - 0 Comments

A few weeks ago, Eric Duhaime wrote an op-ed for QMI arguing for a voting age of 16 in Canada. I’m a leading ridiculer of this idea, partly because the same people who propose it are the same nerds who worry endlessly about low voter-turnout figures. It so happens our voter-turnout figures are low by historical standards partly because we made a decision, in 1970, to lower the voting age from 21 to 18. Lowering the cutoff still further as a cure for perceived turnout malaise is like doubling a dose of poison. I shouldn’t single out Duhaime here, but… well, let’s single him out, because he wrote this: Continue…

Dog, cat, and mouse in the South Atlantic

By Colby Cosh - Friday, February 17, 2012 at 3:58 AM - 0 Comments

Argentina, the world press tells us, intends to rename its top soccer league the “Cruiser General Belgrano First Division”, in honour of the Argentine ship sunk by the Royal Navy during the 1982 Falklands War. Far be it from any outsider to prescribe how a country honours its war dead, but honour is not what the move is about: it’s part of a continuing, exhausting barrage of Falklands agitprop from Argentina’s Kirchner government. Kirchner is scrambling to keep Argentine economic growth rolling, barracking businesses and workers in the classic caudillo manner as inflation outpaces the dubious official statistics. She has tried, with some success, to close off Southern Hemisphere ports to boats flying the maritime flag of the Falklands and to weld traditionally UK-friendly neighbours into a regional bloc against “colonialism”. Tensions are high and the Falkland Islanders are feeling besieged. Continue…

Justin Trudeau: reflections on a grown man

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 5:06 AM - 0 Comments

If you enjoy seeing somebody injure themselves trying to occupy two positions at once, have a look at Josée Legault. The Montreal Gazette columnist and former PQ strategist was largely responsible for viralizing Justin Trudeau’s weekend remarks on separatism; transcribing his remarks on her blog, she accurately noted how unthinkable Trudeau’s position would have been to his late father, and how surprising they were coming from any Liberal. Yet when the story blew up in English Canada a couple days later, Legault took umbrage. Those hysterical Anglos had distorted the story. Continue…

And it’s Rent-Seeking by a nose

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 3:33 AM - 0 Comments

(Nathan Denette/CP)

On Monday, Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan gave the Economic Club a sneak preview of economist Don Drummond’s upcoming report on some ways in which the province might conceivably clamber back into surplus sometime within the 21st century. Duncan noted that the Ontario horseracing industry receives more than $300 million a year in money from the slot machines hosted at Ontario racetracks. “Wow, that’s a huge subsidy,” I hear you saying. Silly reader. No business ever admits to being subsidized! Continue…

NDP’s Nash: caught off guard on user fees?

By Colby Cosh - Monday, February 13, 2012 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

Sorry, do I have this right? Peggy Nash is running for the NDP leadership…to the right of the Chrétien government on health care? In Sunday’s NDP debate, Paul Dewar asked Nash what she would do if the Quebec government introduced hospital user fees, as indeed it promised/threatened to do in its 2009 budget before eventually relenting. Nash’s answer, translated by the Star: “We hope that we want our health care system to be public, but really it’s a provincial jurisdiction [c'est une compétence provinciale], so it’s the decision of Quebecers.”

Some accounts of the debate overlooked this gotcha move by Dewar, but Nash’s answer could not have been more surprising if she had opened her mouth and ten thousand butterflies had come fluttering out. Nash, widely perceived to be at a disadvantage in Quebec against opponents who call the place home, was certainly motivated by hyperconsciousness of Quebec’s constitutional sensitivities. Her answer, however, would seem to open the door to facility fees in provinces that were actually penalized between 1992 and 2004 for allowing private free-standing clinics to impose them (in some cases while billing the government for the physician services). Alberta had $3.6 million in transfers withheld; Manitoba, $2.4 million; B.C., $2.2 million; Nova Scotia, $372,000; and Newfoundland $284,000.

Among the items that have normally been deemed provincial territory is the definition of “medical necessity” under the Canada Health Act. The CHA provides no core list of medically necessary services, and coverage varies from province to province; but at about the time the provinces were playing chicken with Ottawa and losing, the Alberta government came under fairly significant pressure to defund abortions. It was informed pretty sharply by federal Health Minister Diane Marleau that abortion was definitely always “medically necessary” and that this was NOT a decision to be left to Albertans. One wonders whether Prime Minister Peggy Nash would say the same thing to a province that tried to defund abortion now. Alberta probably isn’t a candidate anymore, but Prince Edward Island seems to find them pretty distasteful. C’est une compétence provinciale?

Whitney Houston, R.I.P.

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, February 12, 2012 at 3:10 AM - 0 Comments

Sometimes, news is sad not because it’s surprising but because it isn’t. Whitney Houston, who became a recognizably troubled artist late in the last century, was denying crack use by 2002, and was admitting to it by 2009, has died at the age of 48. Every major news organization had canned obituaries ready (it’s been reported that MTV prepared one in 2001); the CBC’s struck multiple notes of grim accuracy.

The New York Times wrote that Houston “possesses one of her generation’s most powerful gospel-trained voices, but she eschews many of the churchier mannerisms of her forerunners. She uses ornamental gospel phrasing only sparingly, and instead of projecting an earthy, tearful vulnerability, communicates cool self-assurance and strength, building pop ballads to majestic, sustained peaks of intensity.”

Houston’s decision not to follow the more soulful inflections of singers like Franklin drew criticism by some who saw her as playing down her black roots to go pop and reach white audiences. The criticism would become a constant refrain through much of her career. She was even booed during the Soul Train Awards in 1989.

The Times found a polite way to say that Whitney was the possessor of a terrific vocal instrument but no abilities as a song interpreter. It wasn’t a question of “black roots”, or if it was, they were the kind of “black roots” that a young Amy Winehouse was somehow able to find in the record shops of North London. Houston would go on to inspire a generation of performers to overpower audiences with sheer vocal force; it is not quite true that she sang everything loud and high, but it is probably fair to say that in all the classic Whitney Houston hits, the chorus is something you sit through to get to “the moment”. And that “moment” is always loud and high. (Did she really sing in churches as much as she is supposed to have? Imagine the din.)

For every hundred people who know her fire-engine version of “I Will Always Love You”, maybe three have heard the Dolly Parton original—an admittedly schlocky number, but one in which the individual words at least have some emotional impetus of their own. And yet it took Whitney’s rendering to make Dolly unimaginably rich off that song. Houston was, literally and metaphorically, the anthem performer to end all anthem performers. In her songs as in her life, she took a powerful, even innovative shortcut to success. Yet when she reached an age at which emotional maturity must take over from laryngeal athleticism, she had no apparent ability to respond, coming to lean heavily on producers, dance-club remixes, and duets with other singers. Viewed in retrospect, this part of her career was much longer than the time she spent as a leading global star—about twice as long, really.

She did not cope well with the search for a second act, and that is the element that strikes me as the saddest. Whitney Houston’s original public image emphasized, to the point of obnoxiousness, her status as the heiress to a great tradition of song: mother Cissy, godmother Aretha, cousin Dionne. Houston didn’t sound much like any of them, and doesn’t seem to have learned much else from them, either. These are all women who managed to grow old with reasonable grace. Whitney, it turns out, couldn’t pull off either half of that equation. If she couldn’t survive mega-celebrity with such advantages, how the hell does anybody do it?

50 yards from Parliament Hill

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, February 4, 2012 at 6:53 AM - 0 Comments

I almost never disagree with Chris Selley. Indeed, I am almost willing to make it a rule not to disagree with Chris Selley. But his analysis yesterday of Brad Trost’s groping for more backbencher power in Parliament is uncharacteristically superficial. Selley celebrates Trost’s public ruminating over his inability to spurn the party whip on polarizing issues; wouldn’t it be nice, he asks, if we had a Conservative Party more like the eclectic, dissent-tolerating one in old Westminster? Perhaps it would be. But there is an awkward plain fact staring us in the face. Continue…