The Harper budget: Always leave ‘em wanting more

By Paul Wells - Monday, April 2, 2012 at 4:27 PM - 0 Comments

PostMedia columnist Michael Den Tandt is still struggling with last Thursday’s budget, which was a good deal less earth-shaking than one of his columns a couple of weeks ago predicted. This is to Den Tandt’s credit: many writers would have forgotten what they predicted and moved on, new day dawning, without a fuss. But why was it such a middle-of-the-road budget, given that a Conservative majority could pass whatever it wished?

Den Tandt indulges apocalyptic speculation:

At what point do red-meat conservatives, and Conservatives, begin to wonder if their chosen political vehicle has become all that it once despised? When do they grow tired of being taken for granted, while the Harper government curries favour with retired teachers, fans of the Canada Council and the like?

Harper “is beginning to look a lot like Chrétien, policy-wise” and “At what point do the most stalwart Conservatives… start thinking about making the Wildrose Alliance a federal party?”

I’m going to guess “not yet.” But Den Tandt is hardly alone. Continue…

Why Harper turned toward Asia: Ask Carney

By Paul Wells - Monday, April 2, 2012 at 2:47 PM - 0 Comments

An extraordinary speech today from Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney. Since it draws on trends that are years in the making, and analysis that would have been done some number of weeks or months ago at the Bank, one suspects it has much to do with Harper’s recent turn to China and the rest of Asia.

In a speech today to the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber of Commerce, Carney flattered his hosts for a minute and then said Canadian recessions have always been cured, eventually, by export-led recoveries. But not this time.

“Exports still have not regained their pre-crisis peak, and in fact remain below their level of a decade ago. Canada has steadily lost global market share throughout this period.” Continue…

Everything that is wrong with Ottawa, for now at least

By Paul Wells - Monday, April 2, 2012 at 12:24 PM - 0 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP Images

We’re all positively giddy here on the Hill, ladies and gents. The stimulation is so intense we could plotz. There are things happening. There is action. And so much of it is… why, it’s as near as the blackberry in your hand, is what it is! Fun at our fingertips! Insta-politico-tension-drama! And it’s kind of about us, about Hill types, about those who rub elbows with — with — well, with those who know those who — who — well, who are in the know!

You see, Don Martin said something to Dimitri Soudas and something happened. Who’s Don Martin, you may ask? Who’s Dimitri Soudas? What, precisely, happened? Shush. It happened at Hy’s. This is all anyone here needs to know. So there is a story about it and another and, one feels secure in predicting, more soon to come.

You see, the tall skinny Parliamentarian turned out to be pretty good at hitting the shorter stockier Parliamentarian. And le tout Ottawa was there! And it didn’t go the way Ezra Levant expected! And there was a decorous amount of blood! Frissons!  Continue…

The Harper Decade, now an iBook

By Paul Wells - Friday, March 30, 2012 at 10:49 PM - 0 Comments

The Harper Decade, the e-book that compiles my best writing on Stephen Harper over the decade he’s been a party leader, is now available in Apple’s proprietary iBook format. This link will take you to it in iTunes, if you have iTunes.

Things were simpler when books were on paper. The Harper Decade is now available as a .pdf download directly from our website; as a download for owners of the Maclean’s iPad app; in Kindle format for all sorts of Kindle-compatible platforms; and now as an iBook. This page will launch you toward all those other formats, and it also contains a link to the half-hour interview I was lucky enough to do this week with the folks at CBC Radio’s The Current.

Budget: Gwyn Morgan would be so upset

By Paul Wells - Friday, March 30, 2012 at 9:45 PM - 0 Comments

How to begin? Let’s use boldface.

“By establishing the Public Appointments Commission, the Government is implementing a key component of its overall plan to strengthen accountability in government as outlined in the Federal Accountability Act,” Stephen Harper said in a 2006 news release. “The Commission will provide the necessary oversight to ensure that the selection of individuals is based on merit and is done in an open and transparent way.”

The Prime Minister’s nominee to run the appointments commission was Gwyn Morgan, who had just stepped down as chairman of Encana. Setting up this commission was a big deal. Naming Morgan was a big deal. But it ended very badly indeed when Peggy Nash, an NDP member on the committee charged with approving the nomination, led the opposition in rejecting it over statements Morgan had made about immigration.

Harper scrapped the whole notion of a commission. But not forever.

“So what that tells (us) is we won’t be able to clean up the process in this minority Parliament. We’ll obviously need a majority government to do that in the future. That’s obviously what we’ll be taking to the people of Canada at the appropriate time.” Continue…

Music: Quantum fiddling

By Paul Wells - Friday, March 30, 2012 at 12:08 AM - 0 Comments

I’ve made it clear before that I’m a big fan of the work Edwin Outwater is doing as music director of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. When I met the young Californian two and a half years ago I asked whether he had any projects cooking with the region’s other outstanding eccentrics, whether at RIM or Perimeter Institute. He didn’t then, but he wasted little time. Last month Outwater and Raymond Laflamme, the director of the Institute for Quantum Computing (which is run jointly by Perimeter and the UPDATE: actually not run by anyone except the University of Waterloo), put on an elaborate and meticulously prepared concert to explain ideas in quantum physics using music.

The concert started with Mozart (representing classic Newtonian physics) and moved on quickly to Charles Ives, Xenakis and other wild stuff. Laflamme, one of the great communicators in Canadian science, was key to the concert’s success. Here are excerpts from the show:

And here’s a documentary about how it came together. Continue…

Harper’s very political budget

By Paul Wells - Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 4:21 PM - 0 Comments

Revolution, ladies and gents! Light the torches! In his December year-end interviews, Stephen Harper used the term “major transformations” a half-dozen times. He made fun of earlier majority prime ministers. They let the bureaucrats put them to sleep! For years! No chance of that happening to Harper. Major transformations, coming right up.

Fast forward to this afternoon. “We will eliminate the penny,” Jim Flaherty told the Commons. It was literally the first new policy measure he announced. “Pennies take up too much space on our dressers at home.”

Now you know why Trudeau and Mulroney and Chrétien were such snoozers. It was the pennies. Weighing them down all day. Cluttering their dressers at night. Pennies wear a guy down. Harper, the Interac Prime Minister, will be fleet of foot, full of vim, and ready for —

— major transformations? No. I don’t have a searchable electronic text of Flaherty’s speech, but I do not see the word “transformation” anywhere in it. The rhetoric is altogether more reassuring. “The reforms we present today are substantial, responsible, and necessary,” he said, and “We will stay on course,” and “We will maintain our consistent, pragmatic, and responsible approach to the economy,” and “We will implement moderate restraint in government spending.”

A decade ago at the National Post, we’d have squeezed a month’s headlines out of the spin war between the Prime Minister and his Finance Minister over how to characterize this budget, because I am here to tell you there is one. “Some of the stuff that’s been out there about ‘major transformations’  may have been a bit off,” a government staffer who does not work at Langevin Block said to me.

Diverging motivation has led to diverging rhetoric. Flaherty needs to calm markets, so he speaks a language of continuity and reassurance. Harper needs to persuade movement conservatives a decade’s work was worth it, so he has become his own loudest cheerleader.

Which one of them is right on the substance of the thing? Both of them. There is no revolution in this budget. Most of the changes it announces have been coming for years and will take years to implement. Some of them are prudent and some less so, but together they add up to a few significant course adjustments. Advantage Flaherty.

Under the surface, however, this is an intensely political budget, perhaps the most interesting since Flaherty’s first in 2006.

Click here for all the latest news and insight on the 2012 federal budget

Continue…

Wells on Harper on CBC

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 at 4:07 PM - 0 Comments

It was a great pleasure to be a guest on CBC Radio’s The Current this morning. We discussed my new Maclean’s e-book, The Harper Decade.

Here’s an audio archive of the interview.

Here’s the Q&A we did last week about the project, with links to the book in its various release formats.

What’s newest since we launched The Harper Decade last week is that it’s now available for Kindle, in addition to the original .pdf and iPad app formats. Here’s a link to The Harper Decade at the Kindle Store and, while we’re at it, to the e-book that preceeded mine, Michael Friscolanti’s extraordinary coverage of The Shafia Honour Killing Trial.

We’re still working to get it out on Kobo. These things apparently take longer than you’d think sometimes. I’ll keep you posted.

And, since some have asked, I continue to work on a full-length traditional book full of new reporting on Stephen Harper’s time in power. Random House will publish that book in 2013.

The Herman Cain bunny ad

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 at 2:15 PM - 0 Comments

Why… why no, I don’t have any questions.

Broadbent and everything after

By Paul Wells - Sunday, March 25, 2012 at 11:56 AM - 0 Comments

It’s hard to do one of these insta-bake histories of a complex historical event for the next day’s paper, and Joanna Smith has produced a good one in The Star. Now I’m going to pick away at some assumptions her sources make near the end.

Nothing seemed to stick, whether more details about his flirtation with the federal Conservatives — anonymous senior New Democrats piled on, in addition to the usual suspects — or an eleventh-hour broadside from a bitter-sounding [Ed] Broadbent.

Instead, the attacks backfired.

“Ed is like most politicians, first and foremost a competitive animal,” says Michael Byers, echoing a perspective of many in all camps. “His particular horse was lagging in the race and therefore he did what competitive people do, and sought to bolster Brian’s chances.”

This analysis is solidly in line with the hearts-aflutter concern trolling we heard from just about everybody after Ed Broadbent, a card-carrying member of the New Democratic Party with a demonstrated history of concern for its fortunes, said his support for Brian Topp reflected concern about Mulcair. What followed from some of the graybacks of the Gallery was a familiar two-step: (1) criticize Broadbent; (2) note that Broadbent was “facing criticism.”

Of course there’s not a scrap of evidence for a backlash. Continue…

The complete Carl Sandburg talking points against Tom Mulcair

By Paul Wells - Saturday, March 24, 2012 at 8:38 PM - 0 Comments

I.

They tell me the new NDP leader is wicked and I believe them, for I

have seen the new NDP leader’s painted women under the gas lamps

luring the farm boys.

Continue…

Brian Topp, just short

By Paul Wells - Saturday, March 24, 2012 at 7:59 PM - 0 Comments

As I write this, New Democrats are voting on a fourth ballot for no very obvious reason. Basically Brian Topp is doing Jack Nicholson’s “Sure I’ll tell you, but you gotta ask me nice” speech from A Few Good Men. He knows Tom Mulcair is the next leader, but he will not lift a finger to make it easier, and indeed he’ll make many thousand New Democrats do a little extra work to make it official. (If he ends up winning the leadership on the fourth ballot, I’ll sure look silly. Oh well.)

Once again we see that personality is the most salient factor in political division. Topp and Mulcair could, one strongly suspects, have sat together in a caucus for 40 years and never voted differently on any issue. Not that they agree on everything, but all politicians are flexible and if bound by the requirements of ordinary politics, they could have filed off the sharp corners of any differences.

But neither can stomach the fact of the other. Continue…

Free advice to New Democrats: Let yourselves fall in love

By Paul Wells - Friday, March 23, 2012 at 2:31 PM - 0 Comments

Kevin Gonsalves/Flickr

I’m on a slow train to Toronto, confident that our NDP leadership coverage is in good hands with Colleagues Geddes, Wherry and Ballingall onsite at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre until I get there. While I speed westward, let me share the only thing I know about picking a party leader:

If you don’t follow your gut, you’re sunk. Continue…

Hey look: Hewers of wood, drawers of power

By Paul Wells - Friday, March 23, 2012 at 12:03 PM - 0 Comments

In Ottawa a few weeks ago, I ran into an old friend who used to work for the Chrétien Liberals. He’s in the private sector now. I was fresh back from China and I said one of the big surprises was the heavy resource orientation of the business delegation accompanying Stephen Harper — Oil, diamonds, gold, pork and lentils, not boutique software firms.

“Yeah,” said my interlocutor. “When I tried to figure out where the money is in Canada, I noticed the same thing. Really fast.” So I got to thinking.

Hence this week’s Maclean’s cover story. Written with Tamsin McMahon, with an assist from Alex Ballingall, it extends themes I’ve been exploring all year, beginning with the article about Ethical Oil’s ties to the government; continuing with the account of Harper’s China trip; continuing when I predicted the faultline for the next election will run through the oil patch.

The new piece attempts to show how changes in global trade patterns, especially the rise of a China that isn’t interested in much except raw commodities, is shifting money, population and power in Canada.

Canadian universities’ Brazilian ambition

By Paul Wells - Thursday, March 22, 2012 at 4:25 PM - 0 Comments

Last October I wrote a really strange column noting that the government of Brazil is sending 75,000 students abroad on scholarships, and Brazilian businesses were bankrolling another 25,000, and Canada was way behind in recruiting those students to Canadian universities.

Who else is getting ready to play host to the Brazilian scholarship students? The United States, of course: they’ll take 35,000 students, nearly half of the total. In June, the Institute of International Education held conference calls with 80 U.S. universities to tell them how to make sure the Brazilian kids choose those schools as their study destination.

Who else? Germany’s on board for 10,000. France will take 5,000. That leaves 15,000, spread among “institutes in Asia and other countries in the Americas and Europe.” Probably some will wash up on Canadian shores, more or less by accident. That’s the way it usually goes.

But today I’m here to tell you it’s not going to go the way it usually goes. From the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada:

The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada is collaborating with the Canadian Bureau for International Education to bring Brazilian university students to Canada. Through the CBIE/AUCC program and other agreements between Canadian institutions and the Brazilian government, an estimated 12,000 Science without Borders scholars are expected to come to Canada between now and 2016. Continue…

Jean Charest, prospector

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 at 11:53 PM - 0 Comments

Jacques Boissinot/CP Images

It was a tweet yesterday from Andrew McIntosh at QMI that finally got me thinking about what Jean Charest’s government is up to in Quebec’s north. I’ll cut to the chase: basically he’s turning it into Alberta.

What Andrew noticed was that, while most of the reporters in Quebec City were safely tucked away in the provincial budget lockup, Charest’s former chief of staff announced he will become an executive at Canada Lithium, which means he’ll be spending a lot of time in Abitibi setting up a mine that will provide 12% of the world’s lithium and, in return, make everybody rich as thieves.

There’s not a whiff of scandal to this. It’s good to see former government people getting honest work. (And the guy involved has been out of government for five years.) But Stéphane Bertrand’s new line of work reflects where things are going in Quebec these days. The whole province — or at least its teetering Liberal government and its investment community — is going resource-crazy. Continue…

The Conservatives’ new ad. No, not Rae, the other one.

By Paul Wells - Monday, March 19, 2012 at 3:39 PM - 0 Comments

Everyone’s going to be talking about the giggling Bob Rae ad the Conservatives finally get to unleash, five years after they prepared similar ads on the assumption Rae would win the 2006 Liberal leadership.

On that ad, I’ll say only this: The Conservatives still can’t believe the Liberals didn’t launch a strong ad campaign to counter their blitz against Stéphane Dion in 2007. They still pinch themselves when they recall that the Liberals let their opponent define their leader without response. That the Liberals let it happen a second time, to even more devastating effect, with Michael Ignatieff is even harder for Conservatives to fathom.

If the Liberals don’t respond to this ad campaign immediately and with some ambition and creativity — not to hit Harper, but to define Rae — they might as well fold up the party and go home.

But I find myself more intrigued by the other ad, which seems like an afterthought:

Stephen Harper, strong leadership, blah blah blah. One thing to watch will be how frequently this ad plays in the rotation. I’ve got a hunch it’ll be quite prominent, because I think the prime minister has a problem and its name isn’t Bob Rae.

Continue…

The New Mulcair Party

By Paul Wells - Saturday, March 17, 2012 at 9:43 AM - 0 Comments

I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking Tom Mulcair probably wins the NDP leadership next weekend. If so, it would hardly be the first time the party’s members pick a leader the party establishment finds distasteful. In 2003 Jack Layton was a Toronto city councillor with almost no support in the tiny NDP caucus, who mostly backed big Bill Blaikie. Ed Broadbent did endorse Layton then, but for the most part he looked too big-city, too comfortable with Liberals and conservatives, and altogether too glib for people who thought they knew what was good for the NDP.

The NDP — the card holders — had a different opinion, and Layton worked out okay. These people don’t always do what they’re told. And indeed, the apparent stubborn popularity of Mulcair, who called himself a (Quebec provincial) Liberal for longer than he has called himself a New Democrat — and to a lesser extent the well-run campaign of Nathan Cullen, who supports formal cooperation with the Liberals — suggests New Democrats are open to the notion that the party needs something more, in its strange new circumstance, than more of the same.

Continue…

Slaughterhouse Quebec, or, That’s a halal of a way to make a country

By Paul Wells - Thursday, March 15, 2012 at 10:33 AM - 0 Comments

The Journal de Montréal website is this morning running footage of chicken heads being cut off. This is an excellent step up in verisimilitude for Quebecor, which had heretofore preferred chicken suits and anchors who act like chickens with their heads cut off. But already I digress.

The thinking behind today’s QMI Two-Minute Hate is that “everybody in Quebec eats halal,” and that a Parti Québécois MNA with some extra time on his hands has decided this is the biggest threat to Quebecers’ health. English story here in the Globe. And you can see why the PQ and its house organ in Quebec’s biggest city, the Journal, would be concerned. I know a separatist who ate some wings once and turned into a Muslim. True story. Continue…

Ontario: McGuinty doomed! Or possibly saved!

By Paul Wells - Thursday, March 15, 2012 at 9:36 AM - 0 Comments

Toronto Star:

The poll also found that the Progressive Conservatives, led by Tim Hudak, sit at 40 per cent, ahead of Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals at 28 per cent. Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats are at 23 per cent…

Globe:

Progressive Conservative support came in around 30 per cent… with Dalton McGuinty’s team sitting at 39.9 per cent, according to the latest Nanos Research numbers. Support for the Ontario NDP, meanwhile, has seen incremental increases… to 24.7 per cent.

Universities: Who loves you, baby?

By Paul Wells - Thursday, March 15, 2012 at 9:28 AM - 0 Comments

Consternation in France over the country’s lousy showing in the Times Higher Education world university reputation rankings. This isn’t the overall university rankings, which are constructed with piles of indicators on a bunch of measures. This ranking simply asks people at universities what they think of other universities. Which makes it kind of awesome because it skips objective criteria and goes straight to the stuff that makes people most insecure.

Hence the garment-rending in France, which has only four institutions in the top 100, the highest being Paris-Sorbonne university, way down in 71st place.

What makes it all interesting to Canadians is that the guy who runs the ranking system attempts to comfort French readers by saying that, after all, 4 out of 100 is “better than Canada.” Continue…

Battleground 2015: NDP vs. Conservatives on energy and environment

By Paul Wells - Sunday, March 4, 2012 at 11:15 PM - 0 Comments

“It would be senseless,” Tom Mulcair said Sunday at the NDP debate in Montreal, “to stop developing the oil sands, but we should stop subsidizing them and we should internalize the carbon cost,” that last bit a slightly insiderish way of saying some sort of carbon-emission pricing mechanism should attach to oil sands products. This falls well short of wild-eyed extremism; as Mulcair likes to point out, the Conservatives have considered, but not implemented, ending subsidies to oil-sands development that were implemented under Jean Chrétien, and Stephen Harper spent the 2008 campaign pretending to offer a carbon cap-and-trade scheme, which it later took three successive Conservative environment ministers to bury without a trace.

But Mulcair’s rhetoric, like most politicians’, often jumps ahead of his substantive positions. In Montreal he mentioned that in 2010 he wrote the foreword to a book by veteran journalist Andrew Nikiforuk whose French title translates to English as “Oil Sands: Canada’s Shame — How Dirty Oil is Destroying the Planet.” (Skipping slightly off topic, one notes that Nikiforuk’s next opus is titled “The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude.”)

During the debate, Mulcair allowed as how he could be talked into considering either a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade mechanism for, well, internalizing carbon costs, depending on circumstances. He can expect the Conservatives to start claiming he would do both. It’s important to note that Mulcair is hardly alone. A strong consensus unites the opposition parties’ leadership candidates to the effect that the oil sands’ environmental cost is unacceptable and that oil exports must be sharply curtailed. Nathan Cullen, whose riding includes Kitimat where the Northern Gateway pipeline would wind up, can hardly believe his luck. He’s calling on New Democrats to help him stop Gateway.

So that’s the NDP. Meanwhile, over on the other side, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver will on Monday deliver a keynote address to the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, on what a news release called “the government’s plan to streamline the approval process for major economic projects across Canada. In addition, Minister Oliver will highlight Canada’s leadership role in exploration, mining and processing, which alone employees [sic] more than 320,000 people across the county (not counting related support sectors).”

Note that the word “environmental” didn’t make it into that release before “approval.” I’m guessing Joe Oliver won’t be writing the foreword to The Energy of Slaves. Continue…

Obama on Iran: “We’ve got Israel’s back”

By Paul Wells - Friday, March 2, 2012 at 10:24 AM - 0 Comments

On the eve of a visit from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a North American head of government gives a detailed interview about his views on Israel and Iran. Guess which leader it was!

Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with Obama should be required reading for everyone who plans to follow  Netanyahu’s visit to Ottawa today. Netanyahu’s host, Stephen Harper, may be even more congenial than Obama will be on Monday, but the United States still counts in Israel’s calculations in a way Canada won’t. In the interview, Obama takes pains to portray himself as an unconditional strategic ally of Israel; an opponent of Iran’s “unacceptable” nuclear ambitions; and as a tough guy. He even dusts off his “Vulcans never bluff” stance for the occasion. Do have a look.

Mario Dumont and the NDP

By Paul Wells - Thursday, March 1, 2012 at 9:28 AM - 0 Comments

Well, how apropos: The NDP will use Mario Dumont as the host of its leadership debate Sunday in Montreal.

Dumont is a congenial figure of the slightly-righter-than-centre-right, a genuinely likeable guy — I covered him only very occasionally during his long political career, and my readers were never his key vote base, but he always had a kind word when I showed up in the press pack — and one of the most recognizable personalities in Quebec. He runs a talk show now that’s a mix of politics and lighter fare.  He’ll run a debate well.

He is also an excellent incarnation of the danger facing the NDP in Quebec. In the 2007 election, Dumont’s fourth as leader, his tiny Action Démocratique du Québec party increased its caucus tenfold to 41 seats, reducing Jean Charest’s Liberals to a minority and pushing the Parti Québécois to third place. It was a historic breakthrough.

In the 2008 election the ADQ was cut to seven seats. Dumont resigned in disgrace. His party lost a by-election in his own riding, and a few weeks ago, five years after the greatest electoral triumph the party ever knew, it was legally dissolved and combined with another party, the CAQ.

So really, all Dumont needs to do on Sunday is ask one question: How do you plan to avoid the NDP winding up the way the ADQ did?