Quebec tuition protesters’ winning streak just never ends

By Paul Wells - Monday, May 14, 2012 at 11:03 PM - 0 Comments

Jacques Boissinot/CP Images

Bliss it is in this dawn to be alive, and to be young, Trotskyist, and a Quebec Cégep or university arts or humanities student or loosely-affiliated hanger-on is very heaven! What a time our friends are having. One of them’s on the cover of L’actualité! And that’s just the beginning.

The protesters have lately won a string of victories over the courts and over students who want to get to class and finish the academic year, but whose court injunctions to that effect have been voided by mobs of protesters blocking the students’ path. Then just over a week ago they forced the governing — oops, “governing” — Liberal party to decamp a party meeting from Montreal to Victoriaville under threat of violence. The protesters got their violence anyway, and they wrested a deal from Education Minister Line Beauchamp. It would have installed student representatives in a permanent governing directorate at every university in the province with a mandate to divert the schools’ finances from operations toward student-fee cuts. But Beauchamp and Jean Charest made the mistake of claiming not to have caved, and for their bravado the deal was rejected in wave after wave of (poorly-attended) student votes.

Then today Beauchamp resigned. So it’s going better every day. Guess who the protesters’ next trophy will be. No, guess. Think curly hair. Continue…

Oh you’re right, jazz isn’t dying

By Paul Wells - Sunday, May 13, 2012 at 11:10 PM - 0 Comments

There’s still a debate in jazz circles about whether jazz is dying. I just wanted to flag the two most awesome consecutive paragraphs I’ve ever read on this debate, from an interview with the excellent pianist Vijay Iyer:

“I think sounding a death knell for jazz is a marketing tactic. It doesn’t actually have any connection to reality. There’s a huge number of people in this area of music. In fact, more and more everyday– people coming out of these education programs and discovering it in all sorts of new ways. There’s a global circuit for the music. There are people performing all the time and all over the world. There’s no sense in which it’s dying. I don’t see it dying anywhere. If anything, I see the opposite so I really honestly don’t know what people are talking about.”

Yet it is his constant awareness of his placement that allows him to objectively scope out the artistic scene he’s in and flourish as he has. “I will say the infrastructure for the music is fragile, particularly in the US. So that’s kind of the biggest problem that we have to face right now: there aren’t a whole lot of gigs to be had in the US right now and there aren’t really many places to hear or see the music that’s not New York. It’s not on many radio stations and it’s not on TV except for very few exceptions. And it’s not really performed in most of the continental US. It’s usually hard to find if you don’t live near a big city or some college campus that has some kind of substantial arts budget and also a curator who cares enough to cultivate this music. A lot of these arts presenters will have maybe two jazz concerts a year.”

So if it’s not a problem that all these “people coming out of these education programs” have no audience, then everything’s fine.

Crunch time for the Euro. Yes, again.

By Paul Wells - Sunday, May 13, 2012 at 4:52 PM - 0 Comments

The Financial Times: “Fear Grows of Greece Leaving Euro.” Not sure fear is the word for it. Der Spiegel is calling for Greece’s exit on its cover, and opinion in Greece might best be described as fluid. (More background on the fallout from Greek and French elections is in our latest issue from Colleague Petrou. As always during a Euro crisis — a phrase I could usefully shorten to “as always” — attention turns to the German-French directorate, now featuring a new player.

François Hollande will be sworn in as France’s new president on Tuesday. After that he’ll announce the name of his new prime minister, drop by Paris City Hall to be fêted by the city’s Socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoë, then hop a flight to Berlin. He becomes the second French president to visit Berlin on his inauguration day, after Nicolas Sarkozy. Both times Angela Merkel has played host.  Continue…

The global conspiracy to make Canada’s energy debate sound ridiculous

By Paul Wells - Friday, May 11, 2012 at 12:10 AM - 0 Comments

JD Hancock/Flickr

Surely the only reasonable reaction to allegations that some Canadian environmental groups receive cash and instructions from beyond our borders is “Gee, I sure hope so. Otherwise they’d be doing it wrong.”

If you’ve looked at a photo of the Earth lately, you’ll notice what I did in 1970: somebody forgot to draw in national borders. Clouds and currents don’t have passports; nor should anybody expect a movement dedicated, as environmentalists see it, to protecting the whole planet to colour within national lines. I’m not sure how to make this clearer, since it should be pretty obvious, but it’s why Jacques Cousteau had a boat instead of a Paris Métro pass.

Similarly, I would have thought it’d be obvious that commodities are often traded among different countries. I don’t know a lot of mom-and-pop oil companies that pump the crude at one end of town and sell it to consumers at the other. And finally, it’s less shocking that broad political movements consult across international boundaries than it would be if they didn’t. (Here’s a wonderful piece of reporting on three French students of the 2008 Obama campaign who helped get François Hollande elected in France. Americans have sought to influence Canadian elections, and vice versa, forever.)

And yet here we are stuck in a crossfire of complaints that the environmental movement, the oil industry and Canadian conservatism, in the guise of the Fraser Institute, are receiving “foreign money.”  Continue…

Obama and marriage: The arc of the moral universe is pretty bloody slow

By Paul Wells - Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 3:59 PM - 0 Comments

Barack Obama, who ran for President in 2008 with a position on same-sex marriage that would have got him called a member of the Harper Conservatives’ social conservative wing if he were Canadian, has “evolved” until he now supports equal marriage rights for same-sex couples.

A lot of the commentary over his decision is ecstatic. A lot of the news coverage is, well, awkward. Is this how one makes a principled decision these days?

As described by several aides, that quick decision and his subsequent announcement in a hastily scheduled network television interview were thrust on the White House by 48 hours of frenzied will-he-or-won’t-he speculation after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. all but forced the president’s hand …

Advisers say now that Mr. Obama had intended since early this year to define his position sometime before Democrats nominate him for re-election in September. …

Initially Mr. Obama and his aides expected that the moment would be Monday, when the president was scheduled to be on “The View,” the ABC daytime talk show, which is popular with women. Certainly, they thought, he would be asked his position on same-sex marriage by one of the show’s hosts, who include Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg.

Yet the pressure had become too great to wait until then, his aides told him; on Monday, the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, was pummeled with questions from skeptical reporters…

And so it was that Mr. Obama on Wednesday afternoon sat down in the White House with ABC’s Robin Roberts…

Why, it’s Lincolnesque, isn’t it? Continue…

How did Edmonton get to Carnegie Hall? By thinking

By Paul Wells - Monday, May 7, 2012 at 10:54 PM - 0 Comments

By now many of you will have heard that the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra will be playing in Carnegie Hall in New York City on Tuesday night. Some will know it’s the ESO’s Carnegie debut. You may even have heard that a thousand Edmonton fans have travelled to New York to watch the orchestra strut its stuff.

This is all good news. Edmonton’s isn’t the kind of band that normally gets to play Carnegie. I’ve heard one prominent musician from another city sniff that if an Alberta orchestra gets that honour, it should be Calgary’s. But that brings me to a less-understood aspect of Edmonton’s triumph, which is that it won its Tuesday showcase fair and square, in a highly competitive environment. Therein lies a tale. Continue…

Sarkozy, fini

By Paul Wells - Sunday, May 6, 2012 at 11:24 PM - 0 Comments

Thibault Camus/AP Photo

Well, so much for that guy.

During his five years in Elysée Palace, Nicolas Sarkozy came up with one plan after another that had nothing to do with his election promises or with France’s most pressing problems. His economic reforms were amazingly consistent: they made every problem worse. He had one advisor who took care to ensure he never made sense on economics, and another who used to write fan notes about Jean-Marie Le Pen. He rigged a public appointment for his son and took a vacation on a billionaire’s yacht. When he was nominated as his party’s candidate five years ago he assured everyone, “I’ve changed.” This turned out to be optimistic. Continue…

Chatting with the Dalai Lama

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 at 3:09 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph: David Kawai

The Dalai Lama was in Ottawa to speak to 7,000 people at the Civic Centre. He did not intend to bring controversy. It follows him anyway. For days there was speculation about whether Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader would meet Prime Minister Stephen Harper. It would be their first meeting since 2006, when Harper was in the business of snubbing China’s ruling regime and gave His Holiness honorary Canadian citizenship.

Now, Harper is conspicuously in the business of cozying up to China’s rulers. He has steered clear of the ageless Buddhist cleric whose continued existence vexes Beijing. But in the end, wary of upsetting allies who used to like the old, anti-Communist Harper, the prime minister welcomed the Dalai Lama for a private “courtesy visit.”

The next morning as he prepared to address the crowd at the Civic Centre, the Dalai Lama dismissed the whole business with a trademark chuckle. “I don’t think about controversy,” he told Maclean’s. “I think some people, out of their fear or anxiety, create a sort of controversy. To me, no differences: Queen, prime minister, president, beggar, AIDS patient. No differences. So there is no basis for controversy.”

Richard Gere, the Hollywood actor and practicing Buddhist who was travelling with the Dalai Lama, had publicly complained that the meeting wasn’t public. The Dalai Lama disagreed. “No differences” between a public and private meeting, he said. “Meeting. Person to person. That’s important. Talk. I don’t like formality. Formality, no help. Chinese leaders, too much formality. Even to the point of not knowing how to breathe.” That laugh again.

Continue…

France’s next president, François Not Sarkozy

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 11:33 PM - 0 Comments

Christophe Ena/AP Photo

François Hollande was in Nevers today, in the Burgundy region south of Paris. Five days before the runoff vote in France’s presidential election, and on May Day, the Socialist candidate had come to lay a wreath at the grave of Pierre Bérégovoy, two-time socialist finance minister and then prime minister during the last days of the Socialist parliamentary majority from 1992 to 1993.

I was in Paris 19 years ago tonight when I heard Bérégovoy had shot himself to death. I’ll never forget where a bunch of us students were when we heard the news. It wasn’t just grief over the Socialists’ legislative defeat that made him do it; it was a personal humiliation. As budget minister in the 80s and again in the 90s, he had to rein in Socialist spending while defending social-democratic goals. He had been attempting a similar feat — think Chrétien or Clinton or Schröder a couple of years later — when France’s voters tossed his party out. He’d lost his party’s favour for being a bad Socialist, and the electorate’s for being a Socialist. It was brutal treatment at history’s hands, and he killed himself.

Of course everyone thought the world of him as soon as he was dead. The last honest man, focused on results instead of image, why can’t politics be more like him, all of that. Today he is not often mentioned. In France as in other places, politics is polarized, the engaged voters are the ones who like to pick a side, and Bérégovoy remains essentially a confusing figure.

His appeal between rounds of a Presidential election is obvious, however. Continue…

Mr. Harper is not pleased

By Paul Wells - Thursday, April 26, 2012 at 11:28 PM - 0 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP Images

Let us connect the dots. I think it’s been a damned interesting week.

It ends, or nearly, with the Chief Government Whip and designated general-purpose government hardass Gordon O’Connor shutting down a Conservative private member’s motion on abortion, or something distantly related to a motion about the circumstances within which a debate about abortion might arise (readers are invited to parse the fine print themselves.) Earlier the prime minister had said it was “unfortunate” that a parliamentary committee even deemed the thing votable, but it was, and it proceeds. But when the Chief Government Whip speaks in specific detail about his problems with a motion, the word should be considered to be out: the government has a strong preference that members not support it.

This comes a couple of days after Bev Oda, caught swanning around the finer orange-juice vendors of the old Commonwealth capital, was made to pay up, stand up and fess up in Question Period. Sure, other ministers have covered for her since. But the clip on TV will be Oda apologizing “unreservedly” for her own high living.

Taken together the two incidents suggest a marked and sudden tightening of discipline on the government benches. Continue…

France: Today’s Sarkozy flameout update

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 2:26 PM - 0 Comments

Campaigning on Tuesday, less than 48 hours after the first round of Presidential election voting in France, Nicolas Sarkozy said this:

“If there is a candidate from the National Front, it’s because she had a right to be a candidate….So from the moment you run in an election you have the right to run in the election, as far as I know. You are compatible with the Republic.”

Libération, the leftist newspaper, turned that into this morning’s front page:

A lot of people in Sarkozy’s party aren’t happy. “An outrageous, dishonest and unacceptable attempt at political misinformation,” the secretary-general of Sarkozy’s party says in a communiqué.  Continue…

Michael Ignatieff’s purgatory

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 12:05 PM - 0 Comments

Paul Chiasson/CP Images

About that Michael Ignatieff interview on Scotland and Quebec:

The way to rise in the BBC, in the world of letters, and in the United States national-security establishment is to say provocative things that sound plausible about important events. It’s not easy, and Michael Ignatieff was better at it than almost anyone in the world. Then he went into politics. Continue…

Meet the new boss, Alberta

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 7:41 AM - 0 Comments

Albertans did elect a woman as their premier last night, just not the one some of us gringos were expecting. Fortunately Colby Cosh sat down with Alison Redford five months ago, and the transcript of their conversation is here. As we’ve since had occasion to learn, she’s full of surprises.

The decline and fall of Nicolas Sarkozy

By Paul Wells - Monday, April 23, 2012 at 4:07 PM - 0 Comments

Take a look at Nicolas Sarkozy’s official campaign posters from 2007 and 2012.

In a lot of ways he’s running the same visual play: the blank stare, the sort of half-smile what-is-that expression, the reassuring message. And in a lot of ways, the French president must surely believe he has run the same campaign, in general, to be re-elected that he ran to win five years ago. He’s an outsider — son of immigrants, not educated at the grandes écoles, unpolished, friend to the little guy — running, not precisely against privilege, but against elite systems designed to keep guys like him out.

It was enchanting in 2007. He won without real difficulty. It has not worked in 2012. He came second in Sunday’s first-round voting and will probably lose in the runoff (the best short analysis I’ve seen, in French, is here). Obsessed by the record support French voters gave the far-right Front National under its founder’s less abrasive daughter, Marine Le Pen, Sarkozy apparently intends to double down on a populist, protectionist message with a dash of xenophobia (here’s Henri Guaino, the scuttling little thug who writes his speeches, losing his cool after an opposition spokesman busted him for musing on “the problem of national identity”).

The article I linked above quotes a Sarkozy advisor, who says the Sarkozy message leading to the May 6 runoff must respond “to a need for authority and protection: European protectionism, economic patriotism, defence of the authority of the State and of the Republic.” In the same article, Sarko helpers are gleeful at the high Front National turnout. They can go get that electorate! The socialist, François Hollande, can’t! Suddenly — well, actually, not suddenly at all — the Sarko campaign’s MVP is Patrick Buisson, who spent the 80s writing mash notes to Jean-Marie Le Pen in a Front National fan-club pamphlet called Minute. Continue…

Bev Oda: Overconfidence

By Paul Wells - Monday, April 23, 2012 at 12:48 PM - 0 Comments

Ben Fisher/CP Images

A very large number of the Canadians who have voted Conservative for the last four elections in a row would be pleased if they could spend $16 on orange juice in a month. So don’t tell me there is no reason to raise an eyebrow over Bev Oda’s decision to walk out on a reservation at the Grange St. Paul’s and check into the Savoy instead, where by all accounts they serve the really good stuff with breakfast.

Last autumn I defended Peter MacKay for staying at a posh Munich hotel during a security conference. My entire point was that the hotel he stayed at was the conference venue. Security delays, and missed schmoozing in the wings, would impose genuine opportunity cost on any minister who stayed anywhere else. So what’s striking about Oda is that she didn’t rack up her bill staying at the conference venue: she racked it up fleeing the conference venue for someplace nicer. Incidentally, this is what a room at the hotel she fled looks like:

But here’s the interesting question: Why on Earth would Bev Oda behave any differently? Continue…

On the existence of an NDP base

By Paul Wells - Monday, April 23, 2012 at 12:02 PM - 0 Comments

This column, a couple of weeks ago, posed a question about Thomas Mulcair’s ability to appeal to a broad segment of the population with an environmentalist, oil-sands-skeptical, protectionist-on-trade message. “To beat Harper, he needs issues that can rally active and broad support,” I wrote at the end. “I’ll offer no predictions, but whatever happens in Montreal on April 22 will tell much of the tale.”

What happened in Montreal was a great big rally for Earth Day whose messaging was, in part, overtly anti-oil-sands. And it seems to have been a hit. Apparently something like a quarter of a million people marched in lousy weather.

It would caricature the rally to depict it as, specifically, an NDP triumph. Mulcair and much of his caucus took part, but so did Pauline Marois of the Parti Québécois, and Daniel Paillé, who is reputed to be the leader of something called the Bloc Québécois. And no news acoount I’ve seen from the rally quotes Mulcair or anyone else from the NDP.

So you can’t directly translate this crowd into sustained or renewed support for the NDP. But my original point, I think, still holds: if our politics is going to polarize, increasingly, on questions of reource development vs. the environment, of prosperity vs. equity, then Mulcair is sunk if there is not even an engaged, emotive, base of any significant size on his side of those debates. But there is such a base. He’s not sunk.

Liberal Party to supporters: I love ya, tomorrow

By Paul Wells - Friday, April 20, 2012 at 2:53 PM - 0 Comments

An email from Liberal Party president Mike Crawley, in response to smart-ass heckling about the party’s refusal to respond to Conservative attack ads against their leader:

Dear [insert name]

A few weeks ago, Conservatives hit us with an ugly, Republican-style TV attack ad.

When we asked for your help, you didn’t hesitate. As one of the 3,892 donors who gave some $225,433 to that campaign, I want to thank you for your support.

Now, some of you are asking when we will respond. It’s a fair question. Continue…

Chuck Norris jokes rewritten with Mark Carney’s name

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, April 18, 2012 at 12:18 AM - 0 Comments

Canada’s central bank late Tuesday denied a report that its governor, Mark Carney, had been approached to become head of the Bank of England. — Wall Street Journal 

Mark Carney’s tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.

Mark Carney counted to infinity – twice.

Mark Carney does not hunt because the word hunting infers the probability of failure. Mark Carney goes killing.

If you can see Mark Carney, he can see you. If you can’t see Mark Carney you may be only seconds away from death.

Mark Carney sold his soul to the devil for his rugged good looks and unparalleled martial arts ability. Shortly after the transaction was finalized, Mark Carney roundhouse kicked the devil in the face and took his soul back. The devil, who appreciates irony, couldn’t stay mad and admitted he should have seen it coming. They now play poker every second Wednesday of the month.

When the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night he checks his closet for Mark Carney. Continue…

Stephen Harper’s Spite of Charter, 30th-anniversary edition

By Paul Wells - Monday, April 16, 2012 at 8:51 PM - 0 Comments

Adrian Wyld/CP Images

There was very little interesting about Stephen Harper’s decision not to fête the 30th anniversary of the Charter of Rights until he spoke about it.

Simply declining to celebrate an anniversary is no sin. Every day is an anniversary of something, and it’s a handy rule of thumb that quarter-centuries are best for festivity, or mourning, or any kind of acknowledgment. It’s true that Harper conspicuously didn’t celebrate the quarter-century of the Charter in 2006, but he was two months into office then and his government wasn’t exactly breathtaking in its agility. [UPDATE: Well, that's wrong. It was 2007. Insert some other mitigating rhetorical dance here. -pw ] Plus it’s a bit weird to use coverage of failure-to-commemorate-the-30th as a pretext to remind everyone of failure-to-commemorate-the-25th.

So, silence would have done little to placate people, including certain of my colleagues, who are pacing back and forth looking for something to be furious about. But it would have been essentially uninteresting. His motives would have been a matter of conjecture, and conjecture’s no fun in the absence of evidence.

But now he’s spoken and things are more interesting. Continue…

Music: Bach’s prayer

By Paul Wells - Saturday, April 14, 2012 at 10:44 AM - 0 Comments

I’ve been listening to a lot of Bach lately. It’s like diving into the ocean. I gave away some tickets to Les Violons du Roy’s Montreal performance of the St. John Passion because I had to be in Toronto for the NDP convention; the music student I gave them to told me I had to check out the Berlin Philharmonic’s performance of the St. Matthew Passion. So I did. It kind of knocked me out.

The Berlin orchestra is brilliant in its use of new media, both for marketing and just to spread good music. Long excerpts of the performance are on Youtube. The whole thing is online in high-definition video at their website, as is everything they’ve done since 2008, for a decent price. And you can buy the St. Matthew Passion on DVD, as I did. Here’s a taste of the performance:

And here’s the great American theatre director Peter Sellars explaining what he did with the chorus. Laugh at his hair, get it out of your system, and then listen to his insights about faith, pain and theatrical performance.

The full hour-long interview with Sellars is also on Youtube, here. The Bach performance and dozens of others are on the Berlin orchestra’s Digital Concert Hall here.

The Liberals: Smartest party in the universe

By Paul Wells - Friday, April 13, 2012 at 11:14 PM - 0 Comments

“You trying to get me to spend money?” a senior official in the Liberal party said to me this afternoon.

“Huh?”

“Your tweet. Cheeky.”

The fog cleared a bit. Ah. I had indeed written something on Twitter about how, weeks after the Conservatives had started running ads attacking Bob Rae’s record as Ontario premier, the NDP had managed to produce ads promoting their own leader, while the Liberals still hadn’t made a move.

So is that going to change?

“Ain’t gonna happen,” Senior Official in the Liberal Party said.  Continue…

Aboriginal affairs: a way forward — or back?

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, April 10, 2012 at 12:02 PM - 0 Comments

Eden Valley Reserve, south-west of Calgary (Jeff McIntosh/AP)

We’ll be doing another one of those CPAC “In Conversation With Maclean’s” events Wednesday night in Winnipeg. The subject this time is “First Nations in Canada: Is There a Way Forward?” Colleague John Geddes and I will join a formidable panel of experts. Here’s Manny Jules from the First Nations Tax Commission. Shawn Atleo will join us. Charlene Lafreniere is a city councillor in Thompson, the city with the largest aboriginal population share in Canada. Here’s a bit about what they’re up to in Thompson.

One thing I’ll be asking our guests is whether they discern any momentum in federal efforts to address the huge problems facing Canada’s aboriginal populations. The story from the Harper government this year is a decidedly mixed bag. As I noted in an optimistic column last December, annual growth in federal transfers to First Nations governments for basic services has been capped at 2% since the mid-90s. Last month’s budget didn’t touch that cap. It provides less for aboriginal education than the department will be made to cut in its internal spending, and less for housing than the government provided in the 2009 budget.  Continue…

France’s elections: Plus ça change…

By Paul Wells - Monday, April 9, 2012 at 11:07 PM - 0 Comments

Much debate in France over reforms to the country’s rules for obtaining a driver’s license. Nicolas Sarkozy, the incumbent centre-right arriviste incorrigible doofus, has a plan; so does François Hollande, the soft-focus socialist challenger who seems likely to beat him. Perhaps inevitably, a French car magazine followed the various candidates around and wrote about their violations of the highway code.

When The Economist devoted its cover, a couple of weeks ago, to an editorial complaining that the entire campaign was “in denial” about the economic trouble the country was in, the coverage in France was amused: Oh, look at those Brits with their odd preoccupations. But The Economist has a point.

France is not in existential crisis. Downgraded by Moody’s, it can still, after a fashion, afford a deeply frivolous campaign. Genteel capital flight, depressed investment, and the continuation of an oppressive pessimism caused in part by an absurdly over-complicated public sector are all luxuries the country can afford to give itself, election after election. Which is good because that’s what it’s about to do, again. 

Reading France’s top papers — I look at Le Monde and Le Figaro most days, Libération a couple of times a week — I’ve garnered little sense of François Hollande’s strengths and weaknesses as a campaigner. The French press is obsessed with Sarkozy, chronicling his every mistake with care, benefitting from his campaign’s eagerness to explain its every move. I’m surprised at how much energy Hollande shows in his campaign ads,  and tickled by his willingness to swipe his opponent’s most precious symbols and predecessors: yes, that’s Charles de Gaulle in a Socialist ad. Sarkozy did exactly the same in 2007, appropriating Socialist heroes, essentially accusing his opponent (Ségolène Royal, who was then Hollande’s domestic partner) of betraying her own party’s best instincts. It’s a tactic we haven’t seen yet in Canada. Imagine Tom Mulcair saying some variation of, “Diefenbaker helped build a great Canada and Stephen Harper has lost sight of what made Canada great.” Perhaps that’s too complex a manoeuvre for our politics.

But anyway, campaign symbolism has little to do with economic policy. Hollande would impose a 75% top tax rate, which is lovely but it would simply encourage rich French people to move to Switzerland, hardly a rare phenomenon already. My guess is that Hollande would manage to be worse for France’s economy than Sarkozy has been, but on balance I’m hoping for Hollande’s victory, so Sarkozy will exit in disgrace and the odds of a disciplined, simplifying candidate (come on, François Fillon) leading Sarkozy’s party in 2017 will increase slightly.

Sarkozy has been an abject failure. In 2007 he raised hopes he has done nothing to address. He visited the big cities’ banlieues frequently, scoring points with the far right by growling threats at neighbourhood hoodlums, but also promising economic opportunity. It was a rare, uncharacteristic and fleeting insight: if young, often Muslim French kids could hope to get out of the ghetto, they would not simply sink into bitterness.

At one point Sarkozy campaigned in the City of London, because economic opportunity had made it a global headquarters for young French kids. Le Monde covered that campaign stop, spoke to a couple of bright French kids who’d moved to London to work in the brokerage houses, mentioned only near the end of the article that one of the kids was Arab and the other black and that neither could hope to find as good a job back home. Sarkozy offered that hope. He suggested a better-functioning economy would allow kids to move out of the banlieue by moving up. Of course nothing of the sort has happened since.

It’s no coincidence that among the general French population under 25, Marine Le Pen, the more presentable daughter of far-right stalwart Jean-Marie Le Pen, is the candidate with the fastest-growing support. When no candidate offers realistic hope, resentment becomes more appealing.

Canada 2013: a world of fun

By Paul Wells - Saturday, April 7, 2012 at 10:01 AM - 0 Comments

With Danielle Smith stomping across Alberta in the boots of history (OK, lousy metaphor), Pauline Marois richly earning the most awkward political nickname in memory (she’s la dame du béton, the woman of concrete, but whatever: she seems on track to win 85 of 125 seats at the next election) and the British Columbia centre-right hopelessly divided, it’s time to ponder the mess Canada might be in in a year.

Or not. You know, polls are for dogs, these are tidings of Christmases which may be, not Christmases which must be, etc. etc. blah de frickin blah. But let’s pretend.

Smith is likely to be premier of Alberta in two weeks. This is in some ways the least problematic outcome for Stephen Harper, not just because Smith and Harper agree on most things but because Smith has shown no tendency to want to run against Ottawa. She was in Ottawa several weeks ago and delivered a perfect snoozer of a lunchtime speech. Which may even have been the goal.

But one of the things Smith and Harper agree on is that Enbridge good, oil sands good, Northern Gateway good. BC premier-in-waiting Adrian Dix is not so sure about any of that, and seems likely to get elected on a platform of opposition to the Northern Gateway pipelines to Kitimat. The Harper government is doing everything to get oil sands products to port at Kitimat, a question Joe Oliver called “an urgent matter of Canada’s national interest.” In the first place, I expect Harper to deploy rapidly-escalating feats of ingenuity to stop Dix in advance of a B.C. election, but if it doesn’t work, it’s reasonable to expect epic confrontations between Harper and a premier-elect Dix. Continue…