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…

Sino-Forest: a prolonged moan from the investigators

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 6:48 AM - 0 Comments

Recommended to those following the Sino-Forest story: the final report from the independent committee empanelled by the company’s board of directors to investigate the company’s claimed assets and its relationships with suppliers. I have to say the report confirms what I thought in June: the issue with Sino-Forest is not necessarily fraud, but with the practical impossibility of confirming almost anything about its secretive business model. The committee did confirm that Sino-Forest’s cash holdings had been reported accurately, and was able to follow some selected title claims to timber more or less back to the actual trees. But with some extra emphasis on the “less”.

Could a curious investor look at actual maps of timber controlled by Sino-Forest agents, you ask? Well, you see, it’s not exactly kosher for foreigners to carry around maps of remote parts of China. You can borrow them from forestry officials if you really need to. Will the local forestry bureaus confirm Sino-Forest’s claims about plantations operated by its agents? Well, sometimes they’ll give you a certificate of sorts, for all the good it might do. “The confirmations are not title documents, in the Western sense of that term,” the committee report notes. (As I understand it, the Western meaning of “title document” is that it gives one an unquestioned, justiciable claim to ownership of something, whether the Party or the Army or the good Lord in heaven approve or not.) Continue…

GOP: not even the end of the beginning

By Colby Cosh - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 8:37 AM - 0 Comments

A data refresher for those who are following U.S. politics and feeling winded after all these Republican royal rumbles:

Republican debates held so far: 19

Democratic debates already held by this date in 2008: 20

Candidates still remaining in the Democratic race on this date: 3 (Barack Obama, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton)

Date of 26th and final Democratic debate in 2008: April 16

Date on which Hillary Clinton suspended her campaign and endorsed Obama as the candidate: June 7

Yeah, so get comfortable. It is easy to forget how much happened, and how late, in the Democratic race of 2008. The swollen Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, was all but tied. Obama’s money advantage pulled him slightly ahead through February (remember Austan Goolsbee’s back-fence chat about how Obama’s threats against NAFTA shouldn’t be taken too seriously?). Clinton bounced back on “Mini-Super Tuesday”, March 4. The Jeremiah Wright controversy hit the Obama campaign on March 14, during a long stretch without primary events. Clinton won Pennsylvania April 26; much of May was consumed by a wrangle over pro-Clinton Florida and Michigan delegations that had been chosen in primaries held on unlawful dates; and Obama didn’t seal the deal mathematically until a rush of superdelegate endorsements arrived June 3.

There is a perception in this Republican contest that Mitt Romney has been a tad slow to wrap things up, but the Republicans weren’t done either by this point in 2008; John McCain only saw off Romney on Super Tuesday, and Mike Huckabee hung around until Mini-Super Tuesday in March. (Ron Paul’s 2008 campaign just kept going. In fact, it’s pretty much still going.) Only 11 states hold primary events on this year’s Super Tuesday, March 6, so this contest could easily have some life in it until June. It is much too early to be talking of a brokered convention, although people will keep talking about it because it’s what every political journalist hopes for. (They love nostalgia, spectacle, and expense accounts. A national convention without a preordained ending would be Elysium.)

Crowns and chaos in the Middle East

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, January 22, 2012 at 7:45 AM - 0 Comments

Abstract: This paper helps explain the variation in political turmoil observed in the MENA [Middle East and North Africa] during the Arab Spring. The region’s monarchies have been largely spared of violence while the “republics” have not. A theory about how a monarchy’s political culture solves a ruler’s credible commitment problem explains why this has been the case. Using a panel dataset of the MENA countries (1950-2006), I show that monarchs are less likely than non-monarchs to experience political instability, a result that holds across several measures. They are also more likely to respect the rule of law and property rights, and grow their economies. Through the use of an instrumental variable that proxies for a legacy of tribalism, the time that has elapsed since the Neolithic Revolution weighted by Land Quality, I show that this result runs from monarchy to political stability. The results are also robust to alternative political explanations and country fixed effects.

I wouldn’t suggest taking this classic bit of political science too seriously, with its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink regressions on a small data set and its inherently dubious use of an “instrumental variable” to ferret out causation. That said: Victor Menaldo’s basic observations would be hard to refute. Monarchies in the Middle East and North Africa have been stable relative to their republican neighbours; the replacement of a monarchy with a republic rarely if ever makes the people better off; and the monarchies in the region tend to be more liberal economically, even if they don’t have particularly liberal political structures.

In the ci-devant monarchies of the Arab and Persian world, nostalgia for overthrown Western-friendly regimes of the past seems fairly common. When the Libyans got rid of Gadhafi last year, for instance, they promptly restored the old flag of the Kingdom of Libya (1951-69), and some of the anti-Gadhafi protesters carried portraits of the deposed late king, Idris. From the vantage point of Canada, constitutional monarchy looks like a pretty good solution to the inherent problems of governing ethnically divided or clan-dominated places. And in most of the chaotic MENA countries, including Libya, there exist legitimist claimants who could be used to bring about constitutional restorations.

The most natural locale for such an experiment would have been Afghanistan, where republican governments have made repeated use of the old monarchical institution of the loya jirga or grand council. The U.S. met with overwhelming pressure from Afghans to include ex-king Zahir Shah in the first post-Taliban loya jirga in 2002, but twisted the old man’s arm to ensure that his participation would be no more than ceremonial. At least one South Asia analyst, Shireen Burki, thinks this was a regrettable missed opportunity that can only be attributed to reflexive suspicion of monarchism by U.S. officials.

“We don’t do kings,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once said when she was asked if restoration could help solve the problems of the south Slavs. “Pity you don’t,” the happy Commonwealth realms and the peaceable kingdoms of northern Europe might have added. The U.S. turned out to be more interested in easily-overwhelmed American clients like Ahmed Chalabi and Hamid Karzai; and how has that turned out?

Things The King’s Speech was silent about

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, January 22, 2012 at 3:34 AM - 0 Comments

I got the book The King’s Speech for Christmas and just finished it; in the very wide field of “slender material adapted into a thrilling hit movie, on whose strength it is then flogged”, it must be some kind of record-breaker. I enjoyed the book, as a reader with about a degree-and-a-half in European history and a keen interest in the pre-war period, but I do not have the creative imagination to have imagined it as fodder for Hollywood. The plain fact is that Lionel Logue scored his big breakthrough in treating the Duke of York (the future King George VI) very quickly, taking a matter of literally a few weeks in late 1926 to help him overcome his stammer and to raise his oratorical abilities to a standard of adequacy. After that time, Logue was consulted very occasionally, serving the King as a sort of good-luck totem on major occasions like the Coronation.

The men obviously got on well, and for decades His Majesty treated Logue with a touching solicitude. Logue’s life was otherwise uneventful. As even the most unschooled reader must have intuited, most of the stuff of the movie—the shouting match in the street, the poignant reconciliation, the surprise royal visit to Logue’s home—is a fairy tale.

But the Hollywoodization of the source material, which researcher/grandson Mark Logue waited until the Queen Mother’s demise to bring to the big screen, goes even further than that. A year after the Oscar triumph of The King’s Speech (still a marvellous film, in my view), most of the audience may still not know that the real Lionel Logue didn’t look anything like Geoffrey Rush. I was surprised to flip to the illustration plates in the book and find that Logue, far from being a vaguely ruined-looking, sad-faced fellow, was actually handsome in a Kennedy-family way. He seems to have positively shone with health and confidence—which, when you think about the background, should really be no surprise at all.

As the movie concedes, Logue had no professional credentials to speak of. He fell into “speech therapy”, a field that did not really exist when he started out, almost by accident. Elocution was about all Logue was any good at in school. In his day, that talent opened the door to a career in entertainment, as a reciter of poems and dramatic monologues. Mark Logue records that, as a young stage performer, he was an erotic sensation among the “goldfield girls” of Western Australia during a resource boom. The movie, by contrast, suggests that Logue’s acting career was no more than a pathetic fantasy. (How could somebody who looked like Geoffrey Rush ever have been a star of stage and screen?)

It was only with the return of Australian soldiers from the First World War that Logue’s calling as an elocution teacher began to tilt, almost imperceptibly, toward the bailiwick of medicine. Like chiropractors of today, he was ostensibly able to assist some afflicted people for whom scientifically validated medical care cannot do much good. His looks, along with a bit of actor’s training, must have helped a great deal.

(Incidentally, after Logue climbed to the top of the new discipline with royal help, he shrewdly pulled the ladder up after himself, employing George VI in an effort to establish standards and licensing criteria he could never himself have met when he was starting out. Public-choice economists will find this a textbook example of how health cartels establish “restricted entry” barriers.)

There’s something else the movie doesn’t disclose: Logue had cash. His grandson’s book shuffles around this topic a tad, but he mentions that the founder of the Logue family in Australia ran a leading brewery that eventually became part of a South Australian beer cartel. Young Lionel went to the best private schools, had the means to travel the world more or less on a whim, and seems to have had no trouble coming up with the cash to obtain office space in London’s Harley Street in 1924—the key decision of his life, amounting to a more or less outright purchase of instant quasi-medical respectability. (Even today Harley Street is the world’s most recognizable physical marketplace for private medical consulting.) Logue was not what you call rich, but the movie depicts a sort of brave, shabby gentility that probably understates the class standing of the real Logue—just as Geoffrey Rush’s rubber mug does poor justice to Logue’s looks.

Of course, “Handsome, affluent guy works his way into the good graces of royalty without much difficulty” wouldn’t have made for much of a movie, would it?

The ecstasy and the agony

By Colby Cosh - Friday, January 13, 2012 at 4:01 AM - 0 Comments

Curtis Gregory Perry/Flickr

In recent weeks, it seems, adulterated ecstasy (MDMA) has left Alberta and B.C. with a sizable heap of young corpses. A tragedy has thus come home to roost in the West: namely, the tragedy of policy that incentivizes adulteration of drugs that, if manufactured in the open and checked for purity, would kill hardly anybody. Pure MDMA has a larger “therapeutic index”—a wider safety margin for overdose—than alcohol. It would probably make a pretty reasonable substitute for alcohol in many settings if we were to sit down and rebuild a drug culture from scratch. But over the past ten years or so, both Liberal and Conservative governments have worked to increase penalties for and monitoring of the flow of “precursor chemicals” used in the manufacture of MDMA.

It has been their goal to make pure MDMA more difficult to manufacture; when precursors are seized it is hailed as a triumph. But illicit drug factories never do put out the follow-up press release announcing that they’re putting less MDMA in their “ecstasy” and replacing it with other party drugs that have much smaller safety margins, or with drugs that interact dangerously with MDMA. And when rave kids die as a result, the RCMP chooses not to pose imperiously alongside the body bags giving a big thumbs-up. They are eager to take credit only for the immediately visible results of their work. Continue…

A little Rae of sunshine

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 2:43 AM - 0 Comments

“Better a Rae Day than a Harper lifetime.” Not a bad line, is it? I take this minor witticism to be a major portent for the Liberals. When the Conservatives attacked Michael Ignatieff for his truancy, his response was all tear-streaked indignation. A lot of people still think the attacks on Ignatieff were harmful and despicable; I think they weren’t answered properly because there was no good answer. But we might still agree (and by this I mean it would now be insane not to) that the man could have afforded to display a little more self-awareness, a little less wounded amour-propre. By denying the possibility that any amount of time out of the country could impinge on his moral eligibility for leadership of it (MAH PATRIOTIZM!), he forced his defenders into absurd logical postures while allowing undecideds to suspect that he was protesting just a little too much. “How dare these colonials expect me to have actually lived amidst their kooky regional accents and odd cooking smells?”

The important thing to notice about Rae’s little gag is that he is actually part of the punchline. He’s acknowledging (by referring openly to Rae Days) that people still have bad memories of his Ontario premiership. He has assembled the first draft of a defence of his record, rather then shrieking at the temerity of those who might bring it up. Rae says he’s learned from the mistakes he made as a young New Democrat premier, and if he’s going to lead the Liberals, we shall have to hope he has. In the meantime, it sure looks like he’s learned from his pal Iggy’s experience.

SCTV in Edmonton: notes toward an FAQ

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 2:00 AM - 0 Comments

There’s a movement—it’s a clever piece of magazine marketing, actually, but we’ll call it a movement—to build some sort of local monument in Edmonton to the SCTV television series, which was produced here from 1980 to early 1982. Why would Edmonton build a monument to SCTV? Continue…

A Double-E G-G?

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, January 7, 2012 at 2:57 PM - 0 Comments

In the journalism game, we call it “burying the lede”. Friday’s Postmedia papers have a column by Stephen Maher in which he waxes utopian about “modernizing” Canada’s monarchy by introducing an elected head of state. “Pfaugh,” I hear you say, “I’ve read it all before.” For the most part, you have. After all, most of the heavy lifting in the argument is done by the mere use of the loaded word “modernizing”; who’s against modernity? Maher chats admiringly about other countries (Jamaica and Ireland) for a few hundred words before letting fly with an easily-overlooked bomblet of originality:

If the prime minister is able to hold consultative elections to select senators—a question the Supreme Court may ultimately decide—then surely we could select our governor-general the same way.

My reaction to this idea was: “Good heavens, I suppose that’s right.” I’ve never heard anyone suggest it before, even in technical literature on the constitution. But like Senate elections, it would appear to be a natural consequence of responsible government: the prime minister can presumably use whatever process he likes—a reality show, a Ouija board, a lottery—to arrive at a candidate for recommendation to the Queen.

It’s hard even to count the things that would have to happen before it would be in some credible political leader’s interests to advocate an elected governor-general. But, then, it wasn’t political leadership that got the Senate-reform ball rolling in the first place.

Banknotables: a holiday conversation starter

By Colby Cosh - Friday, December 23, 2011 at 8:14 AM - 0 Comments

Hilarity! Both of the metropolitan broadsheets in Alberta are throwing a tantrum about the Mint’s plans to dump the Famous Five feminists of the 1920s from the $50 bill and replace them with a picture of an icebreaker. Like most pundits who take a thwack at the occasional issue of personages and emblems on our currency, the authors of these editorials act like they have never been east of Flin Flon.

I ask you to sincerely disregard the epic loathsomeness of the Famous Five—that quintet of unsmiling prohibitionists, pacifists, and white supremacists, at least three of whom bear direct personal responsibility for a four-decade regime of sexual sterilization of the “unfit” in Alberta. Leave aside, too, the fact that women would obviously have been admitted to the Senate soon enough if there had never been a Persons Case. No, I ask you merely to look at the people other countries put on their paper currency. With the exception of Australia, which shares our fetish for early female politicians utterly unknown elsewhere, you’ll find they mostly like to put world-historical figures on there. Japan honours Noguchi, who discovered the syphilis spirochete. England honours Darwin and Adam Smith. Sweden remembers Linnaeus and Jenny Lind. New Zealand commemorates Edmund Hillary and Ernest Rutherford. Continue…

Securities Reference: the power of one

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 9:28 PM - 0 Comments

If you’ll pardon an off-the-cuff reaction to the Supreme Court’s securities-regulation finding: the federal government tried to argue that the right number of securities-regulating bodies for our country is, eternally and as a matter of Euclidean certainty, “one”. The counter-argument is that the optimum number might be higher than that: it might be one, or two, or three, or ten. Leaving aside the actual constitution, and going only from first principles, you could only support the federal reference if you believed no answer but “one” was ever, under any circumstances, appropriate for a country.

Ten systems seems unlikely to be a sensible choice, of course, but then, the SCC’s decision doesn’t obligate us to keep ten (or 13) systems running in parallel; it leaves the provinces free to devise cooperative arrangements between themselves if they perceive no benefit in the independent exercise of that constitutional power. It is not really difficult to imagine a collaborative process that leaves us with one regulator in the medium term (or maybe two, CPP/QPP-style), the moreso since the efficiency argument for one regulator is ostensibly strong. (Let us note that Alberta has had a change of government, a change that looks increasingly radical with each passing week, since this whole brawl started.)

What, then, has been lost by this decision? As I see it, a finding in favour of the federal government would have closed off one future path permanently, and ended the debate; the finding we got leaves any overall arrangement for securities regulation attainable. That seems like a positive feature. Continue…

The doge of Des Moines

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 5:32 AM - 0 Comments

What has me concerned is that on Main Street Iowa people are coming up to me and saying, ‘What do you think about Dr. Paul?’ These are folks who have to be informed. They have to get past the 30- and 60-second ads. If you ask Iowans if they’re for legalizing marijuana or legalizing heroin, they’d say no. But Dr. Paul has said on many occasions that that’s OK. But people don’t all know that.

I’m not sure whether to be delighted or depressed by the reaction of Iowa Republicans like Andy Cable to the suddenly-real possibility that Ron Paul might win—and thereby discredit!—the state’s first-in-the-nation nominating caucuses. The anomalous importance of Iowa within the U.S. election system has traditionally been defended on two major grounds: (a), that the state is pretty representative of the American “middle” in both geographic and demographic senses, and (b), that a small state like Iowa (or New Hampshire) can scrutinize candidates with a salutary close-up intensity, given a long pre-election period in which to do it.

There is no doubt something to these arguments. (Along with obvious rebuttals to both.) But how can a major party have its cake and eat it too? Specifically, how can the concept of Iowa’s special mission as a testing range for candidates be reconciled with Mr. Cable’s panicky Yuletide talk of uninformed goon voters flying off the handle? Cable’s state has benefited significantly from being a political bellwether, both from the quadrennial media activity and attention and from the political pork that follows. (Ethanol accounts for 9% of the state’s GDP.) Yet Cable is not even waiting for Paul to be nominated before undermining the whole basis for taking Iowa seriously.

Maybe it should be taken seriously; it would be hard to argue, at any rate, that Ron Paul is doing well in Iowa just because he’s so friendly to federal ethanol subsidies. Iowans have taken a good look at Paul, with his anti-Drug-War stance and his isolationist foreign policy and his constitutional literalism, and they appear to have tentatively decided that they like what they see. The response from the “elites”–specifically described as such in Jonathan Burns and Alexander Martin’s story for Politico—seems very much like Brecht’s line about dissolving the people and electing a new one.

You say the party’s insanely elaborate nominating procedure is threatening to deliver a frontrunner who doesn’t want to bung dope-smokers into jail or garrison the lunar surface? In that case, the governor of Iowa warns, “People are going to look at who comes in second and who comes in third.” This is not, I hasten to add, how Iowa chooses a governor.

Most people don’t realize just how far removed the “Iowa caucuses” are removed from any actual end-result in the form of a delegate count. It is not especially easy even to find out this information, though you will have a sense of it if you have ever viewed the chaos on C-SPAN. The marquee event is actually a process of selecting delegates from each precinct for county-level Republican conventions; after some free-form canvassing, voters in any individual precinct may be given a preprinted ballot, may be handed a blank scrap of paper, or may simply be asked to participate in a show of hands. There is no requirement that delegates even represent a specific presidential candidate.

Nonetheless, by some shockingly vague and opaque procedure, the state Republican Party manages to immediately generate and publicize a tally of notional “votes” for each nominee. But the precinct delegates to the county conventions don’t actually get together until March, at which time they assemble to select delegates to the congressional district conventions (which happen in April) and the statewide convention (in June). Iowa’s ultimate national delegation consists of three representatives each from the four congressional districts; 13 at-large delegates representing the entire state; and three state party mucky-mucks.

The whole system captures the arbitrariness, the ceremoniousness, and the rampant bargaining of the infamous electoral system of the pre-Napoleonic Venetian Republic. The Venetians used ten unsummarizable, half-daft rounds of lot-drawing and delegation to select their chief magistrate, the doge. For five centuries, nearly everybody in Europe, including the Venetians themselves, found this system incomprehensible. But it had virtues. In particular, it made the identities of the ultimate electors so difficult to predict that it was inefficient to target any person in particular for corruption or for what we now call “lobbying”. At the same time, it promised a clear and objective result if the procedures, which themselves acquired a charming patina of sacredness over time, were followed religiously.

Today’s U.S. party nominating process has the same totemistic quality, but without any of the benefits to democracy. The reported “outcome” of the January precinct caucuses may not reflect the reality of voter will, and it usually takes the form of a subjective “message” anyway. The perceived winner, as the governor says, might be the fellow who finished third—as long as he was expected beforehand to finish sixth. (Who creates these expectations? Don’t ask!) And far from dispersing and concealing the potential targets of “lobbying”, the Iowa caucuses make the whole state a focus of lavish promises by candidates for the national executive. If Ron Paul really does win, and thus turn Iowa into a sideshow, it may actually end up counting as the most consequential accomplishment in a long lifetime of public service.

The latest in world-needs-more-Canada news (Nordic dep’t)

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, December 11, 2011 at 1:46 AM - 0 Comments

I learn from a sister publication that a handful of economists in Iceland is recommending that the volcanic statelet adopt the Canadian dollar. News from Iceland is always of special interest in Canada, where the Icelandic diaspora has given us legitimate world-historical notables like William Stephenson and, er, the other William Stephenson. The inherent vulnerability of Iceland’s own currency, the króna, has had Icelanders looking at the euro as a refuge, but that option has been yanked off the table for the time being, and may be permanently unavailable within weeks.

One of Canada’s contributions to humanity, as it happens, is the theory of optimum currency areas. The loonie-ization advocates argue that the Canadian dollar is a good choice because Iceland is dependent upon commodity exports and thus has a business cycle more or less in sync with Canada’s. Iceland is also part of the EFTA, with which Canada has a rudimentary free-trade agreement. But that agreement doesn’t cover services and credentials. Mundell’s test for optimality would require free movement of labour between the countries, a common language, and, ideally, some fiscal-transfer mechanism to smooth out the differential effects of the single exchange rate. There is a strong presumption that a currency area should actually be a contiguous area, or very nearly one. Continue…

‘Fundamental constitutional imperatives’, the man says

By Colby Cosh - Friday, December 9, 2011 at 7:53 AM - 0 Comments

Canadian judges are rightly protective of their independence. It takes no more than a whisper of political interference in their work—indeed, arguably much less than a whisper—to raise their hackles and bestir them to the clamorous defence of this most sacred principle. But this principle ought to cut both ways, yes? Mischievous interference in politics by judges should be castigated just as seriously, if we are to preserve the proper relationship between elected institutions and the bench—if only because involvement in law-making by judges invites reaction, pushing us toward an open contest of force between the branches of government. The branch that doesn’t command fighter jets probably shouldn’t want that.

This is worth considering, I think, after Hon. Douglas Campbell’s Wednesday afternoon decision in the Federal Court case of Friends of the Canadian Wheat Board et al. vs. Canada. Campbell’s decision has inspired an immediate loathing and derision from lawyers of a sort I don’t remember seeing since the Miglin case (2003).

Campbell was presented by the government with the argument that section 47.1 of the Wheat Board Act, which Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz pretty obviously violated, contravenes parliamentary sovereignty. 47.1 was added in 1998; it forbids the minister from introducing a statute to take grains out of the single-desk marketing regime without holding a plebiscite of growers. As I wrote earlier, the section has never been considered quite kosher. Parliaments can bind their future successors by means of “manner and form” procedural rules, but (leaving aside some quibbles and wrinkles and impish theoretical contrarianism) they can’t put a fence around their legislative legacy by making it harder to repeal individual statutes than it was to pass them in the first place. This is as much a matter of rudimentary logic as it is of the “constitution” per se, for whose will would we expect and desire to prevail in a contest between the Parliament of 1998 and the Parliament of 2011? Continue…

R. v. The Doobie Brethren

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 4:26 PM - 0 Comments

Smokers High Life/Flickr

From the Postmedia wire, today:

Christopher Bennett, who claimed that he should be allowed to smoke up to seven grams of marijuana—about 35 joints—every day for religious purposes, argued that Canada’s drug laws infringed upon his religious rights.

But in a 21-page ruling, Judge Michel Shore wrote, “While the applicant has shown that his practice is based on the belief that cannabis is the tree of life, this, in and of itself, does not make it a religious practice.”

Kind of bizarre if you think about it, isn’t it? The idea that “cannabis is the tree of life” could not more obviously be a religious concept, in the ordinary meaning of the term “religious”. What else would you call it? And what would you call an activity predicated on such a belief? If the belief is assumed to be sincere, and Judge Shore specifically concedes this assumption, then it’s a religious practice. The sentence in quotation marks is, when read as plain English, oddly nonsensical. Continue…

Occupy protests & the Falun Gong precedent

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, November 19, 2011 at 6:14 AM - 0 Comments

As Occupy Toronto gets a slightly bumpy ride in court from Superior Court Justice David Brown, I’ve been waiting for just one legal analyst, amateur or professional, to stumble across what appears to me to be the best, highest-level judicial treatment of the Charter issues that the Occupy movements raise. The case, Vancouver v. Zhang, is all of a year old, and involved a unanimous decision of the B.C. Court of Appeal.

I’m no lawyer, but Zhang seems awfully instructive. The BCCA was presented with a question of crucial importance to the Occupy situations: can a non-artistic structure, in itself, have protected expressive content? Falun Gong protesters had erected a “meditation hut” and a billboard in front of the Chinese consulate on Granville Street. The City Engineer ordered it torn down as an admittedly minor, hypothetical sort of traffic “obstruction”, and the city argued that removing a structure didn’t unduly restrict the protesters’ free-expression rights. City officials weren’t making a political distinction between types of speech, the lawyers contended; they simply had an inflexible mandate to smash any structure that was on city property without a permit. Continue…

Want political change? Talk to a farmer

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, November 6, 2011 at 11:43 AM - 0 Comments

In parks and public squares across the land, Occupy protesters are bivouacking in the name of social justice as the mercury dwindles. On Parliament Hill, MPs are battling in comfort over the fate of a bill to chop up the Canadian Wheat Board’s “single desk” control of wheat and barley exports.

Unrelated phenomena? Maybe. But it’s worth remembering that the moral case against the CWB was driven home by civil disobedience—in particular, by Manitoba farmer Andy McMechan’s 1996 cross-border protest trip with a wagonload of his own wheat. Continue…

NDP adventures in Westpolitik

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 7:28 AM - 0 Comments

ULaval economist Stephen Gordon cracked me up on Twitter yesterday afternoon with his reaction to NDP candidate Paul Dewar’s “Western strategy”. In a CP interview, Dewar proposed “investing in strategic industries and developing ways to help Alberta and Saskatchewan make the transition from natural-resource based economies.” In a series of tweets, a baffled Gordon asked

Why does Paul Dewar want Alberta and Saskatchewan to transition away from resources? That’s where the jobs and money are!… Another victim of the Manufacturing Obsession. …I think Dewar has stumbled across why [the] NDP is weak in [the] West. “Vote NDP! We’ll make you stop doing the things that are making you rich!”

Brian Topp has also said that the NDP needs a “Western strategy”; he flew out to B.C. to announce one last month, but ended up making no discernible mention of it, instead becoming embroiled in controversy over his (and Thomas Mulcair’s) explicit advocacy of overrepresentation in the House of Commons for Quebec. Could “relatively less voting power for B.C. and Alberta” be part of a “Western strategy” along with insisting that we leave our hydrocarbons and minerals in the ground, not to mention whipping the hide off of gun-control opponents? Is all this “strategy” predicated on some perception of Western masochism, or is it just comic-book-style “reverse psychology”?

A natural place to look for the rudiments of an NDP approach to the West might be in the party’s single Alberta outpost—the riding of Edmonton-Strathcona, currently manned by MP Linda Duncan. Masochism actually seems to work for Duncan: having been returned to the House of Commons by Alberta voters, she displays what looks a bit like contempt for them.

Linda Duncan, NDP MP for Edmonton-Strathcona, said she supported the spirit of the [electoral rebalancing] bill, but questioned what Albertans would gain from their new representatives. “What difference will it make?” she asked, making reference to a lack of federal funding for projects such as the Royal Alberta Museum, announced Wednesday. “Are we going to get six more Conservatives that don’t stand up for Edmonton?”

As Jack Layton’s environment critic, Duncan also upheld the “Stop doing the things that are making you rich” pillar of the grand Western strategy, calling for a moratorium on new tarsands development and for much heavier federal intervention in the sector. She did this because she thinks tarsands exploitation does more harm than good, which is at least coherent. Dewar apparently has some economic objection, with West Texas Intermediate around $90 in spot and futures markets, to the extraction and sale of oil (and presumably gas and uranium and potash and diamonds and coal).

I don’t know what he expects Albertans and Saskatchewanians to end up doing instead—baking artisanal bread? Writing folk songs?—but it should be noted that it’s the rest of the country that would be required to foot the bill for this “transition”. Either that, or we’re gonna need to recruit a few more “have” provinces somehow.

[UPDATE: A Dewar spokesman phoned this afternoon, hoping to clarify the wire story mentioned supra. What Mr. Dewar was driving at, Kiavash Najafi tells me, was "diversification" and the capture of "value-added" jobs "in partnership with the industries on the ground" as opposed to limitations on the output of raw-resource businesses. "We've heard from Westerners that they're frustrated about sending B.C. logs to China, sending raw Alberta bitumen to the United States for processing."

I'm sure Najafi is right about this: he is describing the philosophy by which Alberta was actually governed throughout the 1970s and '80s. I'm also sure this is unlikely to placate Gordon, who gnashes his teeth routinely over this very philosophy. But Dewar, for those who are keeping score, is eager to set himself apart from candidates who would suppress resource extraction for its own sake.]

A short public service message

By Colby Cosh - Friday, October 28, 2011 at 5:14 AM - 0 Comments

It’s the damnedest thing: when I visit the website of discount store Winners, I find nothing in its “In the News” section or in its “In the Community” section about an Edmonton outlet’s clumsy mistreatment of an autistic child. The store’s behaviour certainly counts as interaction with the community, and has certainly made news. International headlines, even!

Young Emily Ainsworth travels with an “autism service dog” named Levi. Emily’s mother points out that service animals are “permitted in public under human rights legislation”, which is a very slight simplification. Alberta law actually specifies [PDF] that retailers cannot discriminate against customers on the basis of “physical reliance on a guide dog [or] service dog”; there is no Alberta Human Rights Commission caselaw on autism service animals.

But the likely reason for this is that Emily would certainly win any such case in a resounding slam-dunk. Most people working in retail jobs are probably vaguely familiar with the functions performed by guide dogs for the blind, and would know better than to challenge one. It may be somewhat natural, however, for a cute, physically well child accompanied by a dog to arouse skepticism—even though certified service dogs like Levi have special identifying vests and papers that can be produced on request.

So it would probably help prevent embarrassments if people realized that autism dogs are not just present for emotional support. Autistic children are impulsive, and can’t always interpret signs and orders; an autism dog is trained to physically protect them. A service dog training facility in Lynden, Ont., explains it this way:

One of the key roles of ADS service dogs is to provide safety outside of the home, in public settings and at school. The service dog acts as a physical anchor for the child with autism. A tether made of nylon webbing joins the service dog and child. The webbing is connected around the child’s waist, like a belt, and links up to a ring on the dog’s service dog jacket. ADS trains the service dogs to respond to commands given by the caregiver or educator. The service dog is specially trained to stop on command. As a result this prevents the child from entering into potentially dangerous situations (i.e. roadways, parking lots, bodies of water, ravines, etc.) and gives the caregiver or educator the much needed time to intervene and direct the child back onto the safer path. The service dog also prevents the child from wandering away from the family while out in public settings.

In short, autism service dogs are not much different in principle from guide dogs for the blind, and provide for personal independence in a closely analogous way. If you’re a retail clerk, host, receptionist, or proprietor, you should be aware of this. If only for your own good.