A price must be paid—but by whom?

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, April 28, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 454 Comments

Photograph by Cole Garside

Voting is a kind of jury duty, and like the jury system, derives much of its strength from the participants’ lack of specialized knowledge of the subject. A specialist can become jaded, or obsessed with finer points; the public has the benefit of distance. My own experience as a political writer confirms this. I will frequently get exercised about this or that controversy, and wonder why the public is not of the same mind. But the public is called upon to judge not only this controversy, but a great number of issues of varying weights, and in the fullness of time, as that particular issue takes its place among the others, it often does not seem quite as all-important to the public as it had earlier seemed to me. And most of the time the public is right.

To vote is to distill a complex array of different, possibly conflicting considerations into one: the parties, the leaders, the local candidates, plus whatever issues are pertinent to you, and the parties’ positions on each. Which makes that perennial journalistic search for the “ballot-box question” such a preposterous enterprise. Every single voter will have his own ballot-box question, or questions. I cannot tell you what yours is, or should be. I can only tell you mine.

For me there are two issues of overwhelming importance in this election. The first is the economy, not only in its own right but for what it means for our ability to finance the social programs we have created for ourselves. The second is the alarming state of our democracy: the decaying of Parliament’s ability to hold governments to account, and the decline, not unrelated, in Parliament’s own accountability to the people.

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The odds are against the Grits

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 at 6:30 PM - 143 Comments

You say you’re bored by this campaign? Nothing seems to happen, nothing much will change? Be not downhearted. Dull the election may be, but the aftermath promises to be fascinating.

It’s true the polls have barely budged—not during this campaign, not for much of the last five years. On current form, we might well elect a Parliament that looked a whole lot like the last one. But just because we get the same result doesn’t mean we get the same result. Unless, in an ironic twist, we do.

To take an obvious example: throughout the campaign, the Conservatives have told voters that if their party does not win a majority, the result would be certain disast—no, a coalit—er, a Liberal minority government, propped up by the NDP and the Bloc Québécois. A Tory minority, that is, would swiftly be defeated in the House, with the Governor General then calling upon Michael Ignatieff to form a government—a possibility Ignatieff himself has lately acknowledged.

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What the party leaders just won’t say

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, April 15, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 64 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

Back and forth rolls the popular wisdom. There are no real differences between the Liberals and Conservatives! It’s an empty, issueless election that will change nothing! No, the differences between them are stark! It’s a clash between two fundamentally different visions!

Perhaps, when the waters have settled, we will conclude: there are small but significant differences between the parties. There are policy issues in this campaign, even if we in the media are doing our traditional stellar job of ignoring them. True, the government of Canada would continue to do almost all of the same things it does now, at much the same cost, no matter which party is elected—at least for the next few years. But where the parties do disagree, there are clear differences in direction signalled, and over time these could grow to be large indeed.

And there’s a wild card—with a minority government looking increasingly probable, the policies of the other parties, notably the NDP, take on rather greater significance than they might otherwise, as potential bargaining chips in any post-election haggling over power. So the main parties’ platforms must be assessed in light of the gravitational pull likely to be exercised upon them by these lesser stars.

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Time for a Truth in Politics Act

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 85 Comments

Photograph by Cole Garside

If there is one thing Gilles Duceppe would like you to know about Stephen Harper, it’s that he’s a liar. The Prime Minister, he says, is “lying” about his past dalliances with coalition government, “lying” about Employment Insurance rules, lying, well, generally.

There’s a lot of that going around. Harper has much the same to say about Michael Ignatieff: when he tells you he won’t form a coalition government after the election, he’s lying. “He did it before, and he’ll do it again.” Jack Layton pretty clearly thinks both Harper and Ignatieff are liars, even if he never quite uses the word. Ignatieff, for his part, challenges Harper with the old line that “if he’ll stop telling lies about me, I’ll stop telling the truth about him.” And so on and on.

The sad thing is, all of these liars are telling the truth. A culture of lying has overtaken our politics, and every party has been caught up in it, to a greater or lesser extent.

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Don't call it a coalition

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, April 1, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 132 Comments

Adrian Wyld/CP

The first mistake people make when they talk about the coalition question is to talk about coalitions, when they usually mean something quite different. So let’s clear this up right off the top: a coalition government is a very specific arrangement, in which two or more parties agree to share executive power, that is to sit in the same cabinet, and divide the ministries among them. Just because two parties co-operate on something, or support one another in the legislature, does not make it a coalition.

For example, if the Conservatives were to win the most seats in the election, but not a majority, and if Michael Ignatieff were to enlist the support of Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe to defeat the Conservatives in the Commons soon after, and if the Governor General, rather than call new elections, asked him to form a government, that would not necessarily imply a coalition government. He might govern as a minority, issue by issue, as Stephen Harper has for the last five years. Or he might strike a more formal agreement, such as the Liberal-NDP accord that brought David Peterson to power in Ontario in 1985. Neither would be a coalition.

So when the Liberal leader disavows, as he did on the campaign’s first day, any intention of forming a coalition government with the NDP, or any “formal arrangement” with the Bloc, that does not mean he has ruled out taking power by the process described above. By the same token, that Harper, when opposition leader in 2004, schemed to defeat Paul Martin’s Liberal government by exactly the same process with exactly the same people, does not mean that he was bent on coalition, either: or at least, there is no hard evidence that he was.

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All the wrong reasons for an election

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, March 25, 2011 at 2:20 PM - 66 Comments

Chris Wattie/Reuters

An election? Over that?

Well, no. Whatever the election, if that is indeed where we are now headed, is about, it will not be this week’s thin pamphlet of a budget. The government may or may not succeed in contriving to be defeated on it, but it is hard to imagine how it could run on it. Or, for that matter, how the opposition could run against it.

One would have supposed, prior to Jack Layton’s surprise announcement that his party would not support it, that that was the point: to write a budget that was so innocuous, so inoffensive, so utterly inconsequential that it would be bulletproof. And indeed, the betting line in the budget lock-up was that the government had offered just enough to the NDP—money for the poorest of the old, incentives for doctors to practise in rural areas, an extension of the EcoEnergy retrofit boondoggle—without giving away the store on the deficit.

The rest is a mist of microscopic subsidies and tax credits sprayed in all directions, intended to remind their recipients at every turn of all the good things Mother Ottawa has done for them. Once, you might have invested in an exciting new sector like the digital economy in the expectation of profit: now you do it in expectation of a grant. Once, parents might have decided for themselves whether their kids should take piano lessons: now the government badgers them into it, with children’s arts tax credits. Once, there were volunteer firefighters. Now they are paid volunteers, via the volunteer firefighters tax credit.

Yet the amounts involved are so trivial that it is hard to take them seriously. Nor are the differences between the parties so large as to suggest the sort of fundamental divide that might justify defeating the government and dissolving the House. The Conservatives would enrich the Guaranteed Income Supplement by $300 million; the NDP had demanded $700 million. A general election, over $400 million—one-sixth of one per cent of federal spending? The election itself would cost very nearly as much.

So no, we are not going to have an election over tax credits for volunteer firefighters. But what is the reason, then? Normally the surest guide to how politicians make decisions is crass self-interest. But even that old faithful appears to have let us down. There is simply no clear upside for any of the parties in an election at present. Two and a half years have passed, and the parties all stand at exactly the same level in public opinion as they did in the last election. I mean to the percentage point: an average of recent polls gives the Conservatives 38 per cent, the Liberals 26 per cent, and the NDP 18 per cent.

The Tories might have been supposed to enjoy some momentum, before the rash of incriminating news stories of recent weeks: though these have yet to register in the party standings, they appear to have taken their toll on the Prime Minister’s personal approval ratings, according to the latest Nanos poll. The Liberals, besides starting 12 points back, are saddled with a leader who trails the party by a similar margin, while the NDP, for all Layton’s personal popularity, must surely wonder how he will stand up to the rigours of a long campaign, given his failing health.

So, just as a thought experiment, let’s suppose this really is what some in the opposition claim it is: an election about this government’s abuse of power, its disregard for Parliament, its refusal to be held to basic norms of democratic accountability. Put that way, it is hard to see how we could avoid an election: if ever a House has lost confidence in a government, it is surely this one.

But to be an election worth having, it can’t just be a referendum on the government. The choice, after all, is not between a Conservative government and no government at all. It is between one party and another (or others: see “coalition”). If the Liberals, in particular, wish to make an issue of ethics and accountability, they will have to overcome the public’s understandable doubts about them on both counts: a recent Ipsos Reid poll, while identifying honest and open government as a key public priority, found people trust the Conservatives to deliver it more than the Liberals—though both parties trailed behind “none of the above.”

An election about restoring our democracy should be an example of it. If the parties want the public to trust them, they’re going to have to trust the public—by bringing forward specific proposals for reform, and seeking a mandate for them. If Parliament has ceased to be relevant, let’s give it real power to hold the executive to account: for example, by giving committees the staff and research budgets to do their jobs properly, or by taking from government the power to invoke closure (in Britain, it’s the prerogative of the Speaker). If MPs are too beholden to party, let’s see some bold proposals to empower them: like abolishing the requirement for candidates to get their party leader to sign their nomination papers, or restricting the confidence convention, to reduce the whips’ sway.

Let’s clean up nomination races. Let’s give MPs the right to choose their leader. Let’s trim the size of cabinet. Let’s ban the use of public dollars for partisan advertising, as Ontario has done. Let’s pass Michael Chong’s package of reforms to question period. Let’s reform our broken electoral system, and give new parties with new ideas a chance to breathe.

And before we do any of that, let’s find some way to persuade the voters that the party that promises these things will actually do any of them.

Electoral fraud? Tell it to the judge.

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, March 11, 2011 at 6:45 AM - 217 Comments

Tom Hanson/Cp

You know, just because they’re talking points doesn’t mean they’re not true.

Ever since the “in and out” affair blew up 3½ years ago, Conservative party officials have maintained a consistent, not to say mono­tonous line of defence. The transfers of funds from the national party to local riding campaigns, the pooling of riding funds to make “regional media buys,” and the purchase of these from the national party: all are both legal and common across all parties, separately and in combination.

To my knowledge, no one disputes this: Sect. 404 (2.1) of the Canada Elections Act in fact makes explicit provision for such transfers. So all of the breathless, tick-tock coverage—”at 2:32, $20,399 was transferred in; at 2:47, $20,399 was transferred out“—is beside the point. Notwithstanding the titillating name, there is nothing illegal or unusual in such “in and out” transfers.

Rather, Elections Canada’s case that the Conservatives exceeded national spending limits in the 2006 election campaign is based entirely—entirely—on how the transferred funds were dispersed. Specifically, the agency contends that although the 66 participating campaigns agreed to take part in the regional media buys, and although they were invoiced for them and wrote the cheques to pay for them, they did not actually incur these costs: the national party did. How does it know?

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Time for a new political party

By Andrew Coyne - Sunday, March 6, 2011 at 11:02 PM - 184 Comments

Reuters; Photo illustration by Taylor Shute

It’s only March, but in Quebec the signs of a political spring are unmistakable. Decades of obsessing over the national question, it is now widely recognized, have stifled other debates, leaving the province’s politics frozen in time. The bitter federalist-separatist divide has only made more rigid the bipartisan consensus in favour of the “Quebec model,” forestalling action to trim the province’s bloated public sector, reduce its massive debts, or liberalize its constricted, underperforming economy.

And so the more disaffected among the province’s citizens, rather than endure this stagnation, have of late been attemping to break up the duopoly and crack open the debate, by means of a series of new parties and political movements: first the Action Démocratique du Québec, then Lucien Bouchard’s “lucides,” later the Réseau Liberté du Québec and now Francois Legault’s Coalition pour l’Avenir du Québec, all calling for a fundamental rethinking of the province’s social and economic policies. The CAQ’s inaugural manifesto struck many as disappointingly vague, but Quebecers’ openness to its broad aims was clear: a poll released last week showed the CAQ, a group that at present has neither platform nor candidates nor a leader, leading both the Liberals and the Parti Québécois.

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The biggest hurdle to reform: unions

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, February 28, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 117 Comments

Jeffrey Phelps/AP

At one of his sporadic encounters with the press the other day in Vancouver, a statesmanlike Prime Minister implored opposition members of Parliament to dispense with political games and “focus on the economy.”

Some readers may be inclined to suggest the Prime Minister should tell this to Stephen Harper. But he is hardly the first political leader to sound this theme: of the vital necessity of elected representatives maintaining a constant vigil on the economy, undistracted by elections, polls or any of the other things that politicians think about all day long, else the whole thing collapse.

It’s never entirely clear what this means. Is it that the economy is kept alive by a kind of collective wish of the political class, like Tinker Bell? (“Focus on the economy, boys and girls: focus really hard!”) Or are we to believe that the economy is waiting for them to actually do something? That would require no less of an imaginative leap: these days, the agenda facing governments at every level consists, in the main, not in fresh openings for the application of government’s miraculous healing powers, but in undoing the mistakes of past governments.

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Why Canada has nothing to fear but itself

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, February 21, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 28 Comments

Norm Betts/Bloomberg/Getty Images

This is, as it is often said, Canada’s moment. Relatively unharmed by recession, with the soundest public finances and strongest banking system in the developed world, we have a historic opportunity to discard once and for all our self-image as a small country, and join the front ranks of global economic powers.

And yet, we’re in danger of blowing it. With the world at our feet, at the very instant we should be pressing our advantage, we seem instead to have decided to turn inward. Those old Canadian devils—fear of foreigners, a vacuum of national leadership, petty provincialism—are conspiring to rob us of our place in the sun.

All three were very much in display in the Potash fiasco, in which the premier of a province with three per cent of the country’s population was able to bend the government of Canada this way and that like a voodoo doll, merely by uttering the incantation “strategic asset”—as if a resource buried thousands of feet below the ground could be made to disappear at the stroke of a pen. Or as if a majority foreign-owned company headquartered in Chicago was somehow a jewel of national pride and identity.

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The Liberals should pick a side, any side

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, February 14, 2011 at 10:46 AM - 176 Comments

Ryan Remiorz/CP

The difference between them and the Conservatives, the Liberals would like you to know, is all about “values.” That is, it’s about “priorities.” I mean to say, it’s about “your Canada” versus “Stephen Harper’s Canada.” Indeed, the Liberals have three favourite examples of how the two parties’ values diverge, which they will rhyme off for you at the least provocation. In a phrase, they are: fighter jets, prison cells, and corporate tax cuts.

I refer, respectively, to the proposed purchase of 65 F-35 fighter jets at a cost of $9 billion, plus a projected $7 billion in maintenance costs over 25 years; the addition of 2,700 new prison beds, with the construction of several new jails planned for the longer term, at a cost of—well, no one seems to know, exactly; and a three percentage point cut in corporate tax rates, from the current rate of 18 per cent to 15 per cent by 2012, which the Liberals claim would cost $6 billion a year in foregone revenues.

There isn’t any doubt about where the Liberals would like you to think they stand on these. “Instead of spending $16 billion on untendered stealth fighters and…borrowing $6 billion more to give tax breaks to the largest corporations,” the Liberal website proclaims, “Liberals want to address the economic pressures facing Canadian families when it comes to family care, pensions, learning and jobs.”

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The damage done by doing so little

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, January 28, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 152 Comments

Photograph by Ian Barrett

Most of our prime ministers have been scoundrels: the successful ones, almost exclusively. They say Arthur Meighen was quite a stand-up guy. Alexander Mackenzie, the same. Possibly John Turner or Kim Campbell or Joe Clark might have proved brave and principled leaders, given time. But that’s the thing: they weren’t given time, dispatched instead at the first opportunity by their more unscrupulous rivals. Whether of necessity or simply tradition, in Canadian politics, nice guys really do finish last.

So if the past five years seem a peculiarly ugly, depressing episode in our nation’s political history, it is not because Stephen Harper is unusually unencumbered by principle. Rather, it is the absence of compensating achievement that distinguishes his tenure—if by achievement you mean something more than simply holding onto power. Scoundrels our past prime ministers may have been, but scoundrels with a purpose. Harper’s record, by contrast, is rare in its combination of longevity and vapidity. Seldom has a government lasted so long that did so little.

WATCH COYNE V. WELLS ON FIVE YEARS OF HARPER (VIDEO)

Let us dispense at the outset with some of the more common critiques. It is not true, as the Liberals claim, that the Harper years have been marked by an unending decline in living standards and rising unemployment—or, to the extent either is true, that a massive worldwide recession could be laid at the feet of the government of Canada. To the contrary, the recession here has been notably less severe than in virtually any other developed country, which if you follow the Liberals’ logic should be accounted to the government’s credit.

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We get the politics we pay for

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 180 Comments

Watching the latest batch of Tory attack ads, the overwhelming feeling is not of revulsion, but fatigue. They’re disgusting enough, in places; the slurs on Michael Ignatieff’s loyalty, the misleading quotations, the half-truths. But my God, are they familiar.

Is there a school somewhere where they churn out these announcers with the perpetual sneer in their voices? Do they get extra credit for mastering the derisory half-chuckle? The grainy surveillance-camera footage, the unflattering images, the sense of mortal danger if this criminal/madman were ever let near the levers of power: how many thousands of times have we seen exactly the same tone, the same approach, the same ads?

That’s not to say there aren’t grains of truth in the ads. It’s true that Ignatieff went along with the last attempt to form a coalition government, and won’t rule out another; that he once proposed a carbon tax; and yes, that he used to live in America. On some of these, criticism is legitimate. But criticism, not vilification. The literal truth of a charge is not sufficient. Tone is also important, as is proportion, and context. That’s if you want to be, you know, persuasive.

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Why Harper should hire Bob Rae

By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 11:01 AM - 98 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

Bob Rae’s recent intervention in the continuing dispute between Canada and the United Arab Emirates over airline landing rights has earned him a rebuke from the National Post. Under the headline “Liberals forget they’re Canadians first,” the paper editorialized on how unseemly it was of the Liberal foreign affairs critic to have, er, criticized the Harper government, after meeting with U.A.E. officials in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, for its “ham-fisted” handling of the dispute.

While it conceded that “a case could indeed be made that Ottawa has been ‘ham-fisted’ in its approach to the U.A.E.”—could, and has: by Peter MacKay, among others—the paper nonetheless observed that “patriotic politicians don’t bash their own government on other people’s shores.” For his part, the Prime Minister’s spokesman, Dimitri Soudas, accused “the Ignatieff Liberals” of taking the U.A.E.’s side in the dispute, “rather than defend the interests of Canadian workers and the Canadian economy.”

Well, that’s one interpretation: Rae is sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong, and advancing a position that is contrary to Canadian foreign policy. The other is that he is auditioning for the role of Canadian foreign minister. Indeed, “a case could be made” he looks rather more convincing in the part than the incumbent.

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How to make a cabinet

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, January 7, 2011 at 4:00 PM - 12 Comments

Peter Kent, Diane Ablonczy, Ted Menzies and Julian Fantino were sworn in | Sean Kilpatrick/CP

Parliamentary traditions matter, and so what would a cabinet shuffle be without the ritual counting of the genitalia? Hardly had the Prime Minister had time to repeat his lengthy remarks of self-congratulation in English before the Liberals’ Marcel Proulx was lamenting the “missed opportunity” to appoint more women to the cabinet, there being just 10 in a cabinet of 38, or 26.3 per cent—although if you don’t count the Prime Minister (on the arguable grounds that he can’t help being a man) that’s 10 out of 37, or 27.0 per cent. Just so you know.

Mind you, the insult to women was nothing beside the shocking affront to Quebec, which was held to just five ministers (13.5 per cent). According to the NDP’s Thomas Mulcair, this showed the Prime Minister had not made the province a “priority.”

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Raise taxes now, cut them later

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, December 20, 2010 at 6:00 AM - 24 Comments

Carolyn Kaster/AP

Announcing he had reached a deal with the Republicans to extend the tax cuts enacted under his predecessor, President Barack Obama extolled the virtues of compromise.

Yes, he had agreed to hold taxes at current levels, not only for those earning less than $200,000 ($250,000 for couples), as he had previously vowed, but for everyone, as the Republicans had insisted. But in return, he had obtained GOP agreement to extend eligibility for unemployment insurance for another 13 months to those whose benefits would otherwise have run out.

Or in other words, the two sides agreed that, in exchange for taking in less revenue, they would spend more of it. The cost of the agreement: an estimated $900 billion over two years, “to be financed,” as the New York Times reported, “entirely by adding to the national debt.” Amazing what can be done by people of goodwill, provided you leave the people who will actually pay for it all out of the negotiations.

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A rudderless ship of state sails on

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, December 10, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 25 Comments

Jonathan Hayward; Richard Lam/CP

It is an interesting experiment British Columbia has embarked upon, having disposed of not one but two political leaders in little more than a month. The question the province appears to be asking itself is: are leaders strictly necessary?

It is not uncommon for a province to declare one party leader expendable, though rarely a sitting premier, such as Gordon Campbell. But to attempt to do without a leader of either party, unless out of mere parsimony, is suggestive of a sort of generalized Presbyterian disdain for hierarchy.

Mind you, I suppose the NDP had no alternative, once the Liberals decided to “go commando.” The canny strategists in the Liberal backroom were plainly on to something: the party had already jumped several points in the polls since discarding Campbell, and might have gained still more, once more people realized he was gone. Clearly, voters were hungering for less leadership, and while it was always possible the Liberal leadership void was still enjoying a honeymoon, to be competitive in the long term the NDP had to close the leaderless gap with their rivals.

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A grasping riot of mutual pocket-pickers

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, December 6, 2010 at 6:00 AM - 59 Comments

Artist's rendering of EXPO 2017

The writer for the Edmonton Sun was measuring his words. Edmontonians, he wrote, “don’t feel we have been kicked in the teeth by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Edmonton ‘lieutenant’ Rona Ambrose.” Pause. “Because it’s far more comparable to being kicked in the groin.”

He was hardly alone in the sentiment. It was a “cold shoulder to the jaw,” said the Edmonton Journal. A writer for the paper complained the city had been “stonewalled, snubbed and rejected without appeal.” As for the mayor, well, “this is the most disheartened day I’ve had as an Edmontonian, as a Canadian, as an Albertan,” he said, accusing Ambrose of having “failed the city.”

And everyone agreed: come the next election, local Tory MPs would pay with their seats.
What had set off all this rending of garments? What terrible injury had the city suffered? The federal government had failed to cough up the $706 million the city was hoping would help defray the costs of putting on Expo 2017, on which it has bid. Edmonton was a pleasant, prosperous place to live before it ever entered anyone’s head to host a world’s fair, as it will be long after Expo 2017, wherever it is eventually held, has been forgotten. But at this particular moment in time, the fair’s promoters had worked themselves up into the belief that the whole future of the city depended on it.

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Why should polygamy be a crime?

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, November 26, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 306 Comments

Joe Sales/CP

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I’m against polygamy. I think it’s wrong, and harmful, for all the usual reasons: that it devalues women, impairs the trust on which marriage and family life depends, upsets the sexual balance in society at large, and is broadly incompatible with the egalitarian, individual-based political values of Western civilization.

So when it came to opening statements in the landmark British Columbia Supreme Court reference on the issue, the government lawyer had all the best arguments, in my view. And yet I found myself agreeing with the conclusions of the amicus curiae, the lawyer hired by the court to represent the other side of the case.

The specific question the court is being asked to answer is whether the Criminal Code ban on polygamy is in violation of the Charter of Rights. But at bottom the issue is the role of the criminal law in regulating conduct. If the reference helps to clarify our thinking on that, it will have served a much broader purpose.

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The least we could do

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 52 Comments

Chris Wattie/Reuters

Watching Peter MacKay at the press conference confirming that Canadian troops would indeed remain in Afghanistan past the 2011 deadline, albeit in a “classroom” role, I was reminded how much of human behaviour is governed by the furniture.

He was, after all, behind a desk, in a briefing room. There were microphones, and flags, and reporters seated in rows. We are familiar with such scenes, and we associate them with official statements of some seriousness. And so everyone felt obliged to act as if there were some reason to believe a word of what MacKay was saying: as if there were some more-than-accidental likelihood of the policy the government chooses to pursue in future corresponding to the policy being announced today.

Why? Why would we attach any credibility to a formal announcement of policy by a minister of national defence with troops in the field? Just because he said it? There is some context here, after all. The policy the minister was announcing is the diametric opposite of the one that every minister in this government, including the Prime Minister, had sworn blood oaths to for the last two years: that every last soldier, apart from the odd embassy guard, would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by July 2011—no ifs, ands, or training missions. Which policy was itself the diametric opposite to that to which the government had previously committed itself, namely that we would not “cut and run” from Afghanistan before the job was done, that such missions could not be subject to “arbitrary timetables.”

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Politics all the way down

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, November 15, 2010 at 6:00 AM - 169 Comments

Pawel Dwulit/CP

The story is told of the farmer who had an axe: a fine, handsome axe, of which he was very fond. Why, it had been in his family for generations. Mind you, over the years they’d had to replace the head twice and the handle three times, but to the farmer it was still the same axe his grandad split logs with.

The reaction to the Conservatives’ now extensive history of replacing their principles with something more convenient strikes me as similar. After each abrupt reversal of field, each casual discarding of the principles of a lifetime, the discussion centres on how hard this decision must have been for the Tories, how it “went against their principles.”

Yes, there’s nothing quite as hard as expediency, is there? Someday, historians will write about those Tory ministers who, under pressure, had the courage to do the wrong thing. Still, after so many such examples, it might occur to someone that these are their principles: not the ones they are presumed to have, based on past statements, but the ones they actually practice.

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Where's the harm in selling potash?

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

Hannelore Foerster/Bloomberg/Getty Images

They say the stakes are high in this potash business, but really, I’d no idea. Apparently, if BHP Billiton’s bid for Potash Corporation goes through, a part of Saskatchewan will have to be dug up and moved to Australia.

Or what else can Ralph Goodale possibly have been on about? The normally phlegmatic Liberal deputy leader—and the party’s only Saskatchewan MP—had been in high flight for weeks over the deal. As federal officials pondered whether the takeover was of “net benefit” to Canada, he appeared to enter the stratosphere.

“Never before has there been a takeover of this magnitude,” he quivered, denouncing the deal as a “fire sale” of one of our “key national champions.” And not just a single company: “Canadians will lose control of an entire industry.” And not just the industry: “53 per cent of the world’s reserves [of potash] are in Saskatchewan, and that’s about to move into foreign ownership, presumably permanently.” To sum up: “At stake here is the global supply of a strategic resource vital to food production for generations to come.”

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What would Ignatieff do? He's not saying.

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, October 22, 2010 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Chris Wattie/Reuters

Generally speaking, political parties have two broad strategies available to them. There’s the safe one: take no positions on anything, avoid specifics, and wait for the other guy to make a mistake. And there’s the risky one: stake out firm ground, tell it like it is, and hope to win credit for your frankness. The first is common, the second rarer, but the Ignatieff Liberals are probably the first to attempt both at the same time.

The Grits sense the Tories are vulnerable on the question of fiscal management, and they are right. The Tories have increased spending by nearly 50 per cent in just five years. They inherited a surplus of $13 billion and turned it into a $56-billion deficit in the last fiscal year. They would take far too long to erase the deficit—the recent economic update was the first even to project a balanced budget, and then only by fiscal 2016—and have identified next to nothing in the way of specific measures to that end.

So the way is open for the Liberals to steal the Tories’ clothes on this issue. It’s a sharp strategy for an opposition party, turning its adversary’s supposed strength to its own advantage. But to make it work, you have to put forward something that actually differs in some way from what your opponents propose.

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A diplomatic game worth losing

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The votes have been counted, the coveted “Western Europe and Others” seat on the UN Security Council has been decided, and it’s time to congratulate Portugal on its stunning victory. In a clear endorsement of the foreign policy of Prime Minister José Sócrates and his Socialist Party government, UN member states elected Portugal to a two-year term for only the third time in the republic’s history.

That at any rate is what you would gather from the Portuguese press, where it was celebrated as “a victory for Portuguese diplomacy” and confirmation of the country’s “influence and prestige”—though it rated somewhat less coverage than a 3-1 victory over Iceland in a qualifying round for the 2012 European futebol championships. My knowledge of Portuguese is a little rusty, but my sense is comparatively little credit was given to the failings of Canadian foreign policy.

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