Megapundit: Yes we can (do our best)

By selley - Monday, November 10, 2008 at 1:49 PM - 14 Comments

Must-reads: Daphne Bramham on child abductions; Scott Taylor tours the Caucasus.

Down to business
In which the audacity of hope meets reality, and a bunch of know-it-all newspaper pundits. Phooey!

The Globe and Mail‘s John Ibbitson looks at the delicate politics of dealing with the ongoing financial crisis when only Barack Obama’s plans really matter, but George W. Bush is still president, and Obama wants nothing less than to be seen to be cozying up to Dubya. “It is the president-elect who has a clear agenda to solve an economic crisis”—i.e., a stimulus package likely costing $100 billion or thereabouts, coupled with bailouts for crappy American automakers—”and who must convince a lame-duck Congress to pass it, and a lame-duck President not to veto it,” Ibbitson observes. And thus far, he says Obama has looked very “presidential” in handling the crisis. But events will dictate whether he’s able to use the recession “to justify strong measures in energy conservation, infrastructure renewal, reform of financial regulations and improvements to health care and education,” or whether he gets swallowed by it whole.

Obama faces much the same economic situation Bill Clinton did when he became president-elect, Terence Corcoran argues in the National Post. “Harold Poling, then chairman of Ford, called on Washington to bail the auto industry out of its health care costs by setting up a national health care system;” some economists demanded a stimulus package, while others urged restraint; and “environmental activists called for strategic taxes on investment to encourage capital to flow into energy efficient and waste-reducing activities.” What happened instead during the Bush-Clinton interregnum was that simple messages and solutions became burdened with complexity, doubt and conflict amongst experts. It “drown[ed] out any Yes We Can belief that solutions are simple and at hand and all that’s needed is a decisive can-do attitude,” says Corcoran. And he sees much the same fate befalling Obama.

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Megapundit Extra: A portrait of frustration

By selley - Saturday, November 8, 2008 at 3:57 PM - 6 Comments

Canada’s portrait gallery is on hold indefinitely, pending better financial times and locating a suitable strip mall. Allow me to preview Andrew Cohen‘s Tuesday column:

Farewell to Gitmo

By selley - Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 4:20 PM - 11 Comments

Further to this post, in which I expressed grave doubts that Obama’s America—however superior it will turn out to be than the Americas that preceded it—will convince Canadians of their neighbour’s overall benevolent nature, the New York Times has a sobering article on the topic of closing Guantanamo. (They also have incredibly detailed dossiers on all current and former detainees.)

Resident at the prison camp, according to the Times investigation, are:

-Men who were allegedly, at one time, potential 9/11 hijackers.

-Sixteen men “accused of some of the most significant terrorist attacks in the last decade, including the 1998 bombings at American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the 2000 attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen, and the Sept. 11 attacks.

-Twenty men accused of being Osama bin Laden’s “bodyguards.”

-And, perhaps most tellingly, “more than 60″ men who have been cleared for release or transfer, according to the Pentagon, but remain at Guantánamo because of difficulties negotiating transfer agreements between the United States and other countries.”

It’s unclear what Washington can do with some of these people even if it finds them innocent, in other words.

So, what to do? Continue…

What? What I say?

By selley - Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 2:53 PM - 18 Comments

“I will try to help relations between Russia and the United States where a new generation has come to power, and I don’t see problems for Medvedev to establish good relations with Obama who is also handsome, young and suntanned.” –Silvio Berlusconi in Moscow

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev (left)

Megapundit: And suddenly, Stockwell Day makes sense

By selley - Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 2:07 PM - 1 Comment

Must-reads: Don Macpherson on the Quebec election.

The day after the morning after
Audacity of hope, please meet the $455-billion deficit.

The Toronto Star’s Bob Hepburn elevates himself from the merely inimitable to the almost unbelievable by painting a portrait of an America that, despite having just elected its first black president, has achieved basically nothing in the field of race relations. A white Democratic candidate might well have done better, he suggests, and there will apparently be “55 million Americans who voted against [Barack] Obama … watching for him to stumble.” When he does, Hepburn predicts, many white people, such as an idiot friend of his who couldn’t decide on Tuesday whether she could bring herself to vote for a Muslim, “will be saying smugly to their friends: ‘I told you so!’” Now, we’re not saying Obama’s victory solved anything as far as day-to-day race relations. But Hepburn’s operating assumption here seems to be that every single American voted on the basis of race! It’s true, as he says, that nearly 90 per cent of white Mississippians voted for McCain and 98 per cent of black Mississippians voted for Obama, but the numbers in 2004 were 85 and 90, respectively, and John Kerry—last we checked, anyway—is quite fair-skinned. So the situation would seem to be rather more complex.

The Star’s Haroon Siddiqui, meanwhile, is well chuffed with Obama’s victory in a general sense, arguing he’s done nothing less than “make Americans rediscover the common weal.” But the president-elect needs improvements in the following areas: Afghanistan, where he “think[s] mostly in terms of a major military surge” instead of negotiations, and Pakistan, where he’s suggested “cross-border attacks” instead of a “Marshall Plan-like economic blueprint for the border region where [Taliban] militants are recruited.” Nevertheless, Siddiqui argues, Obama is already being well-received in the Muslim world, if only because he pronounces Taliban “taa-li-baan” rather than “tay-le-ban.” (Really? Who the hell says “tay-le-ban”?)

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The honeymoon's over

By selley - Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 11:49 PM - 20 Comments

Memo to all those Canadian pundits who believe Barack Obama will change vast numbers of Canadian progressives’ minds about the virtuousness of the United States of America. Maybe we should stay in Afghanistan, they’ll muse. What’s so bad about a common security perimeter, anyway? Surely we can trust Obama with our biometric data! Etc., etc. Anyway, it’s been 24 hours, and the media are already letting reality—or variations thereof—past security.

Progressive things Barack Obama probably won’t do, or help do:

• Send Omar Khadr home

Non-progressive things Barack Obama already did:

• Help get gay marriage banned in California

I’ll keep that updated as events warrant. (And, I should probably add, I hope I’m wrong—not about sharing our biometric data, but about Obama’s transformational abilities crossing the border.)

Megapundit: He "changed the subject"

By selley - Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 3:28 PM - 3 Comments

Must-reads: Robert Fulford, John Ibbitson, David Frum, Doug Saunders, Dan Gardner and John Ivison on the only thing that matters today.

Oh yes he did
What the 44th President means to the United States, Canada and the world.

The Ottawa Citizen’s Dan Gardner traces a brief history of racist American legislation and public opinion for the purposes of highlighting just how far the nation has come, and how quickly. He recounts the story of Jacqueline Henley, a Louisiana toddler whose aunt found it impossible to raise her amidst rumours the child’s father was black, and whose adoption by a black couple was rejected by the courts on grounds she was officially white, and they wouldn’t inflict official blackness on her unless there was irrefutable evidence. That madness was in 1952; today, says Gardner, everybody knows Barack Obama’s mother was white and nobody cares. Heck, it was only 41 years ago the Supreme Court nixed anti-miscegenation laws, and in that time public approval of intermarriage has gone from 80 per cent against to 80 per cent in favour. In short, don’t you tell Dan Gardner that “moral progress” is impossible.

Can this “new Democratic coalition of New Southerners, liberal northerners, wary blue-collars, African Americans, Latinos and suddenly mobilized” youth be sustained, John Ibbitson asks in The Globe and Mail, or will it “dissolve as [Obama] struggles to reverse economic decline and financial panic”? It remains, naturally, to be seen. But Americans made a historic decision yesterday, he contends, that “the last eight years were a waste” and that “we need to start again”—and the world will take note. More fundamentally, however, Ibbitson says Obama’s victory is a reaffirmation of what’s possible in the political world. “Peace can come to Ireland. The Cold War can end. America’s racial wounds can start to heal.”

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Megapundit Extra: Sports journalism, heal thyself

By selley - Tuesday, November 4, 2008 at 6:13 PM - 7 Comments

We would be remiss if we did not note a most auspicious addition to Canada’s roster of pundits: Theoren Fleury. (Well, “Theoren Fleury As Told to George Johnson,” anyway.) No one will be surprised to learn that Minipundit is not fan of The New NHL:

I think there’s something honourable in fighting through the interference, in being challenged. I mean, those great one-on-one battles everyone remembers, you don’t see them anymore. If you don’t have any opposition, people making it difficult for you, how tough is it? Hockey should be a tough gam

…

I don’t want to see the puck Dave King-ed around the boards for 60 minutes.

Slide a Wayne Gretzky disc into the DVD player and then a Nashville Predators “highlight” tape and just try and tell me you can’t see the difference. Go on. I dare you.

And as for marketing the game?

There are lot of intelligent, funny, personable guys in our sport. But all you hear is cliche, cliche, cliche. It drives me crazy. I guess the powers-that-be just want the players to sound boring. Guys, it’s entertainment. But they don’t want anybody rocking any boats. They don’t want them to say anything, tell anyone how they feel, what they think about different issues.

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The waiting is the hardest part

By selley - Tuesday, November 4, 2008 at 4:55 PM - 12 Comments

Why does it take so long to vote for President?

Would you prefer a Republican railroad commissioner, or a Libertarian one? Video lottery terminals to fund public education—yea or nay? How about euthanasia? Gay marriage? Adoption rights for unmarried couples? Think fast! These are the sorts of agonizing questions Canadians don’t have to deal with during federal election campaigns. But in Texas, Maryland, Washington, Arizona, Arkansas and other states, voters must decide on these crucial matters of statehood at the same time they choose between John McCain and Barack Obama (and Bob Barr and Ralph Nader, for that matter). To take a purely random example, residents of Crystal, Minn., vote today for a President, a Senator, a Congressman or woman, a state representative, mayor, and soil and water conservation supervisors for three separate districts, as well as on amending the state constitution to protect safe drinking water and on two separate funding issues regarding the local school board. In Fort Bend County, Tx., there’s all that plus a state senator, a straight-party vote (Republican, Democrat or Libertarian), the aforementioned railroad commissioner, more than a dozen judgeships, and county attorney, sheriff, tax assessor, comissioner, justice of the peace and constable.

In part, this explains one of the other key differences between Canadian and American elections: the often enormous queues, especially in urban areas. There are reports today of 75-to-90 minute waits in Virginia (a state notorious for election mayhem), and three hours in New York City. Computer glitches during early voting in Georgia, meanwhile, led to waits of up to eight hours during the early polling last Monday. Having whittled the wait down to two to three hours by the next day, election officials in Gwinnett and Fulton counties actually sounded pleased. “So far, so good,” one told the Journal-Constitution.

Macleans.ca asked Stuart Comstock-Gay, director of the Democracy Program at Demos, a non-partisan public policy research organization that monitors voting irregularities, for his top three causes for long lines at the polls. Continue…

Megapundit: The first day of the rest of America's life

By selley - Tuesday, November 4, 2008 at 3:16 PM - 5 Comments

Must-reads: Doug Saunders and Jonathan Kay on President Obama; John Ivison on Ontario’s finances.

Y’all better be right
Note to supremely confident pundits: if Barack Obama doesn’t win tonight, we’re coming after you.

The Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson wins the prize for most strident premature declaration of Obama victory, arguing “this business in recent days of ‘how [John] McCain can win’ was sheer journalistic foolishness,” and that Americans “will vote—and vote decisively—for Senator Obama” today. And while he’s sure Obama will break some of his election promises—indeed, as is Simpson’s habit, he urges him to—and that “there will be some Americans who will resent him as a black president,” we can now look forward to having “that most cherished of attributes: judgment” back in the White House. Good judgment, he means, and we agree. But if McCain somehow pulls off a miracle, Simpson’s pretty much going to have to resign his column.

Count Peter Worthington, who can’t get past McCain’s “uncanny gift of salvaging victories from seemingly certain defeats,” among the journalistically foolish. Polls “indicate a certain volatility among the electorate,” he opines in the Toronto Sun, and the wide range of polling results indicates “unease among those who analyze and predict.” In short, he says, “uncertainty reigns.” Who’ll stay home? Where will the undecideds go (to McCain, Worthington suspects)? Will there be a meteor strike? Stay tuned…

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Megapundit: Unscrambling the egg, vexedly

By selley - Monday, November 3, 2008 at 4:09 PM - 9 Comments

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

Must-reads: Rex Murphy on the Martin memoirs; Haroon Siddiqui on Barack Obama; Gary Mason on Robert Dziekanski; Jeffrey Simpson on the Tories in Quebec; Chantal Hébert on Iggy’s chances; Robert Fulford on gambling; Randall Denley on frugality.

The fat lady, or the choir of angels?
Canadian pundits have apparently never heard of the jinx.

The Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson attempts to explain the historical significance of Barack Obama, who isn’t just black, but potentially the first “northern liberal” president since John F. Kennedy. “His victory would acknowledge an ongoing reformation of the republic: the halting, inconstant but unmistakable breaking down of barriers; the political debut of a new generation; the transformation of whole regions of the nation,” Ibbitson argues. It would embarrass “those skeptics who believe [the United States] is a failing giant.” Heck, he’s already “re-enfranchised African Americans” and “convinced Latinos to submerge racial suspicions toward African Americans and join them in common cause,” and he hasn’t even won!

The Toronto Star’s Haroon Siddiqui recaps all the indignities Obama has faced from various Republicans determined to make his race and his purported Islamic faith defining issues among the rednecks. And he suggests it was Colin Powell’s powerful endorsement, during which he asked why a young Muslim shouldn’t (hypothetically) aspire to be President, that really highlighted the meaning of the campaign. “By just being who he is,” Siddiqui concludes, he “has put fellow Americans on an irreversible journey to national reconciliation.”

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Megapundit: The meaning of Jim Prentice

By selley - Friday, October 31, 2008 at 2:35 PM - 7 Comments

Must-reads: Christie Blatchford on the David Frost trial; Colby Cosh on what to do with murderers; Richard Gwyn on the global economy; Dan Gardner on young jihadis; Lorne Gunter on Tasers; Susan Riley on the cabinet shuffle.

Brave new world?
With Stephen Harper’s cabinet successfully shuffled, it’s time to play cards.

The Globe and Mail‘s Jeffrey Simpson seems fairly pleased by Harper’s choices, calling Steven Fletcher’s promotion “heartwarming” and well-deserved, appreciating the redeployment of Peter Van Loan and John Baird to less partisan positions and suggesting if anyone can strengthen the Conservatives’ woeful climate change plan, it’s probably Jim Prentice. His one lament is that the cabinet “contains not a single multicultural Canadian, despite the impressive Conservative gains in some of those communities.” (This seems a tad unfair to Bev Oda, we have to say.)

The National Post‘s John Ivison likens the new dream team to “a Volvo—safe and reliable but not particularly sexy,” and designed to instil confidence in its owners (i.e., Canadians). He didn’t promote anyone “beyond their level of competence or experience,” in other words, and “prudence” was the guiding principle for the major portfolios that got shuffled. Ivison doesn’t quite buy the party spin on Prentice’s appointment, however—i.e., that “his reward for having done a good job in a difficult portfolio, is another difficult portfolio.” He’s “said to be unhappy with the move,” for one thing, and “reduce[ing] emissions without harming the energy industry” is less “difficult” than it is “impossible.” Ivison still believes Prentice’s leadership ambitions, or Harper’s perceptions thereof, played a role.

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Megapundit Extra: Line of the day

By selley - Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 4:52 PM - 7 Comments

…goes to David Menzies over at the National Post Full Comment blog, where he skewers the Toronto District School Board’s impossibly fussbudgety Halloween guidelines—sorry, Black and Orange Day guidelines. One TDSB warning: “The images and icons associated with consumer-oriented Halloween can come into conflict with some students’ and their families’ religious beliefs.”

Menzies asks: “Does dressing up as a zombie mock the resurrection of Christ?”

Megapundit: Warning—graphic content

By selley - Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 1:06 PM - 17 Comments

Must-reads: John Ivison on aboriginal education; Greg Weston on yet more campaign finance reforms.

Let’s get gruesome
The Canadian justice system is already in the Halloween spirit.

The Globe and Mail‘s Christie Blatchford reports from the David Frost trial, which just gets sicker and weirder and more twisted with every passing day. One of Frost’s “massively inarticulate” former players happily testified yesterday as to the various sexual activities that went on between the players and various local young women (and, allegedly, Frost himself). But he freaked out, Blatchford reports, when he thought the prosecutor was suggesting something a wee bit gay might have been going on. This “may offer clues as to … the lack of actual complainants in this dog’s breakfast of a case,” Blatchford suggests.

The Toronto Star‘s Rosie DiManno devotes considerably more attention to the matter of—ugh, please don’t make us say it—the, argh, no, the “two-inch-by-two-inch-by-two inch plum-sized sac of blood that appears like a third testicle,” a condition from which Frost apparently was suffering at the time of his alleged crimes and, the defence argues, which his female sexual conquests ought to have remembered.

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Megapundit Extra: This is our country

By selley - Wednesday, October 29, 2008 at 6:59 PM - 46 Comments

UPDATE! Behold: the Stand up for Margaret Wente Facebook page!

Behold: the Fire Margaret Wente Facebook page, where a simple, defensible message—basically, that Margaret Wente is a lazy hack—is almost totally subsumed by shrieking accusations of racism, thus summoning all manner of right-wing pundits and bloggers to her defence on grounds that a racist is a liberal losing an argument with a conservative, or some other devastatingly droll summation of the great battle of our times, when really we all should be able to agree that lazy hackery shouldn’t be gobbling up column-inches in The Globe and Mail. Another opportunity for harmony and bliss safely averted.

(Here’s the column that started it all, by the way. She ought to have known defending Dick Pound is never a good idea.)

UPDATE: That wasn’t one of my clearer blog posts ever. Just to clear up any confusion, I absolutely reject the idea that what Wente said on this issue should be some kind of firing offence, or that it was prima facie evidence of racism. Continue…

"Suspended with pay"

By selley - Wednesday, October 29, 2008 at 6:25 PM - 3 Comments

Kudos to the Vancouver Sun for finally naming the RCMP officer who was involved in both the ill-fated takedown of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver Airport and, allegedly, the death of a 21-year-old motorcyclist in Delta on Saturday night. He is, by the Sun‘s reckoning, Cpl. Benjamin Monty Robinson. I take no pleasure in repeating his name here. He might be innocent of all wrongdoing, and he’s entitled to all the due process he can eat. But he is not entitled to a red serge cloak of anonymity that the rest of us aren’t when we make a mess and the relevant authorities investigate us. That’s just one of many rules the RCMP made up for themselves.

What’s particularly remarkable about the RCMP’s conduct on this file is that even if the inquiry clears its officers of all misconduct—it seems unlikely, but we don’t even know what role, if any, the Tasering played in Mr. Dziekanski’s death—the force will still come off reeking of the third world. Indeed, they blew every ounce of credibility right at the beginning, when they claimed three officers had confronted Mr. Dziekanski even though a tape they had in their possession quite clearly showed there were four—a lie that, by virtue of its total futility, displayed an arrogance and an invincibility complex so profound as to make it genuinely frightening to think of these people being in charge of public safety. (Public safety at the Olympics, for example, a unit to which Robinson was assigned.)

What they can do now is hand over the material Crown prosecutors have requested, so the Crown can decide whether to press charges, so the Braidwood Inquiry can get to the bottom of Dziekanski’s death. They can act like civilized human beings, in other words. Clearly they don’t give a fat damn what the public thinks of them, and it’s surely too much to ask that they play ball simply because it’s the right thing to do. But maybe now that one of their own, Cpl. Robinson, is left holding the bag all by himself, they’ll do it out of the same warped sense of solidarity that kept his name a secret this long. Means to an end, as they say.

Megapundit Extra: When celebrity pundits attack

By selley - Wednesday, October 29, 2008 at 4:24 PM - 18 Comments

“Usually I don’t notice politics,” Björk writes in The Times of London. “I live happily in the land of music-making.” But no more. She’s mad as hell at Iceland’s leaders for getting her and her happy-go-lucky nation of geothermally coddled poets, experimental musicians, hobbits and winged reindeer into their current financial fix, and she’s also right pissed at… the aluminum industry? Really? Huh. It seems we know nothing about Iceland. Go, learn.

Keep an eye out for tomorrow’s Independent, too, where Jónsi from Sigur Rós will weigh in on the IMF bailout in Hopelandic. Okay, not really.

Megapundit: The Royal Bananadian Mounted Police

By selley - Wednesday, October 29, 2008 at 2:37 PM - 4 Comments

Must-reads: Ian Mulgrew on the Robert Dziekanski fiasco.

Canadian justice
Shameless cops, creepy hockey coaches and random urban gunfire. What a country.

The Vancouver Sun‘s Ian Mulgrew believes the RCMP may have blood on its hands in the death of 21-year-old motorcyclist Orion Hutchinson, who was struck and killed Saturday night by an off-duty RCMP officer who happened to be inebriated, and who happened to have been one of the four officers who so professionally dealt with Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport. Those officers “have had a horrible cloud over their heads and their careers” while the RCMP dithers over what to do with them, he argues, and it’s not tough to imagine that stress leading to “self-destructive judgements.” As for the RCMP’s refusal to name the officer, on grounds he hasn’t yet been charged in either Dziekanski’s or Hutchinson’s death, Mulgrew says he can’t believe they “have the audacity to pull a stunt like this.” It really is staggering, the third-world depths to which the RCMP is capable of sinking.

The Globe and Mail‘s Christie Blatchford and the Toronto Star‘s Rosie DiManno report on yesterday’s developments from the David Frost trial, where a 28-year-old woman testified as to the various acts of depravity Frost forced her and his players to perform. DiManno’s is a little more in-depth when it comes to the legalese, but you won’t want to read either piece with a full stomach. (Interestingly, we note the Star seems to have reversed course and is now only identifying the female witnesses by their first names, just like the Globe.)

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Megapundit: Aftershocks from the blowback of the tsunami

By selley - Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 3:08 PM - 4 Comments

Must-reads: Don Macpherson on Mario Dumont; Murray Campbell on how politicians shouldn’t deal with gun violence.

Shuffling towards liberty
Who will be in Stephen Harper’s new cabinet? And will they be allowed to speak?

Sun Media’s Greg Weston believes it’s “safe to say that [PMO communications director Kory] Teneycke has achieved more for his boss through improved relations with the national press in three months than his predecessor did in three years,” and he suspects that newfound spirit of (more) openness will translate into Harper’s new cabinet as well. It’s not just that the PM is softening up, of course. Part of it, an unnamed insider tells Weston, is that his ministers simply have more experience. So those who “know how to conduct themselves and their office,” in the insider’s words, will have more wiggle room. Implicit in that statement, it seems to us, is that there will still be ministers who don’t know how to conduct themselves and their offices. We can’t wait to find out who they are.

The Calgary Herald‘s Don Martin says Jim Flaherty is a lock to stay at finance and wear the goat horns for what seems sure to be a significant deficit. Continuity is a good thing in troubled times, he argues, but it’s also just desserts, since Flaherty’s the one who “whittled down the inherited Liberal surplus to where he sits now on the film of a bursting fiscal bubble.” Harper himself “is notorious for calling the shots,” of course, so Flaherty may not be entirely to blame. But given his “quibble-worthy performance” overall—notably slagging off Ontario repeatedly, apparently just to satisfy a personal grudge—it’s difficult to muster much sympathy for the guy.

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Define "poverty." Seriously, do it.

By selley - Monday, October 27, 2008 at 6:14 PM - 63 Comments

Yesterday’s Toronto Star editorial notes a wonktastic OECD report, released last week, which shows both poverty and income inequality on the rise across most of the OECD, including Canada, from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s. Inequality fell in Ireland and Turkey; poverty fell in Belgium, Denmark, Mexico, Portugal and the United States; and both fell in France, Greece and Spain. But other than that, it’s bad news, not least for Canada.

It’s confusing news, too. The Star, as per usual, pegs the number of Ontarians living in poverty at 1.3 million, which is roughly the number that fall below Statistics Canada’s after-tax low-income cut-off (LICO), a measurement of what percentage of a household’s earnings go to essentials like food, shelter and clothing. But while they tip hat to the OECD’s analysis, the Star‘s editorialists don’t use any of its stats. Cynical readers might assume that was because it low-balled the poverty numbers, but in fact it’s the opposite. The OECD defines poverty as living with less than 50 per cent of the median income, and by that measure establishes Canada’s poverty rate at 12 per cent. That’s actually slightly higher than the LICO, which is 11.4 per cent for Canada and 11.1 per cent in Ontario.

Two totally different measurements of poverty; two nearly identical results. But neither LICO nor less-than-half-the-median is an absolute measurement of poverty. They’re both relative. Give every Canadian a cheque worth 20 per cent of his annual income and the OECD poverty rate would stay exactly the same. Continue…

Megapundit: Sticking it to the Ayatollah

By selley - Monday, October 27, 2008 at 2:35 PM - 29 Comments

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

Must-reads: Daphne Bramham on Nazanin Afshin-Jam; David Olive and Greg Weston on tough economic times; Scott Taylor, off to the Caucasus; Haroon Siddiqui on the Iacobucci inquiry; Dan Gardner on ending the oil addiction; Barbara Yaffe on Bloc Québécois fundraising.

About those election promises…
Prepare to be disappointed for your own good.

The Toronto Star‘s David Olive observes the “awkwardly choreographed dance” currently being performed by the prime minister and the provincial premiers on the matter of deficit financing, whether it’s necessary and who should be blamed for it if it is. “It’s not just that if a swimming pool somewhere has to be closed next year, the premiers want Ottawa to wear it,” he writes. “They also want Ottawa to speed up its spending on job-creating infrastructure projects for which the premiers and territorial leaders could claim some credit when the unemployed start pounding on the doors of legislatures from Charlottetown to Victoria.”

So long as deficits are short term and exist only when times demand them, The Globe and Mail‘s Jeffrey Simpson says there’s nothing inherently wrong with them. But as a habit, they’re a ruinous addiction that’s incredibly hard to break. Consult Hansard from the 1980s and you’ll find “Liberal and NDP MPs … predicting that any attempts at fiscal prudence would result in tens of thousands of people becoming unemployed, communities being crushed, grim fates awaiting millions of vulnerable people,” says Simpson. As such, it would behove the Tories to ditch as many useless, costly election promises as they can—he suggests the two-cent cut to the diesel excise tax and the $5,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers—before they’re forced to ditch the one about never running a deficit.

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Megapundit: Ottawa's accountant vs. Washington's poet

By selley - Friday, October 24, 2008 at 2:37 PM - 14 Comments

Must-reads: Colby Cosh on Obama’s geneaology; Dan Gardner takes on Margaret F***ing Atwood; Don Martin on Canadian asbestos; Rick Salutin on Stéphane Dion.

Get over it
Some pundits are turning their gaze to the future. Others can’t stop post-morteming the election.

The Calgary Herald‘s Don Martin understands just how impossible Canadian politicians feel it is to kill 700 jobs in a nation of 33 million people just to save a bunch of lives in the third world, but is baffled at “how Canada can argue that a commodity the government says is too dangerous to permit on domestic construction sites is okeedokee for a developing world where safety measures are far less stringent.” He speaks, naturally, of asbestos. And while he concedes a distinction must be drawn between “the old toxic fibre they’re extracting from office walls and the lower-health-risk asbestos they’re exporting as a cement additive,” he says scientists and doctors make a rather compelling case for caution. The least the government could do, he very reasonably suggests, is stop actively marketing the stuff and release the Health Canada-commissioned report on the subject that was delivered to them months ago. (The Post‘s editorial board and Terence Corcoran take the contrarian view on this.)

The Vancouver Sun‘s Barbara Yaffe speaks to Michael Byers, who had his academic cap handed to him in Vancouver Centre by Hedy Fry (and Lorne Mayencourt, for that matter), about what he learned from life on the campaign trail. Among other things, he tells her, “I now realize the demands of political debating, how difficult it is to perform at that level. As an armchair quarterback, it’s easy to criticize and focus on weaknesses.” Interestingly enough, that’s something we’ve felt like saying to Mr. Byers ourselves on a few occasions…

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Megapundit extra: A teachable moment

By selley - Thursday, October 23, 2008 at 4:55 PM - 25 Comments

I’ve long argued (not here, but elsewhere) that despite legitimate concerns over how Canada’s legal vacuum on abortion came about, ours is the single most logically coherent way for any nation to allow its citizens freedom of choice. A fetus is a fetus, and subject to the choices of its host, until it’s entirely outside the mother, at which point it’s a human being. The other pro-choice frameworks out there in the world aren’t without virtue, but they suffer from arbitrariness. In Sweden, for example, restrictions kick in at the 12th week, well before any definition of fetal viability. Why 12? Ten’s an even nicer round number, surely. And in systems that bestow protection on fetuses at or around the point of viability, such as in the UK, the arbitrariness is revealed whenever gaggles of politicians, very few of whom are OB/GYNs, start campaigning to lower it.

Canada doesn’t mess around with any of that. And as Cynthia Gorney pointed out in a brilliant piece in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, neither does Sarah Palin. Her views, says Gorney, represent “abortion opposition at its most coherent.”

If a fetus is genuinely a child from the instant of conception, then the law can’t permit killing it for any reason except the extraordinary circumstance of an emergency to save a woman’s life (and in some right-to-life circles there’s argument about that, too, or whether equal measures should be taken to save woman and unborn alike).

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Megapundit: The wrong side of the Rubicon

By selley - Thursday, October 23, 2008 at 2:39 PM - 1 Comment

Must-reads: Haroon Siddiqui on the Iacobucci inquiry; John Ibbitson, lost in Wyoming; Murray Campbell and John Ivison on Ontario’s deficit.

Please welcome Jim Prentice, Minister of Everything
So many portfolios, so few competent people to staff them.

The Toronto Star‘s James Travers advises the Prime Minister to worry less about Quebec in making his new Cabinet and worry more about “managing what’s happening in the United States”—i.e., the financial crisis and the impending challenges and opportunities of a Barack Obama presidency. Harper “needs broad foreign affairs shoulders to help carry the Atlas load of change and crises,” for example—that’s some classic Travers prose right there!—and those shoulders, he says, belong to Jim Prentice. He expects Lawrence Cannon to replace Prentice at Industry, David Emerson to be dispatched to Washington as ambassador “to explain to Washington Democrats why protectionism may be good short-term politics but a lousy way to advance the long-term interests of either country” (which strikes us as a fine idea) and Jim Flaherty to remain at finance, where he can “absorb the inevitable blame for hard times.” (We have no problem with that, either.)

Sun Media’s Greg Weston expects few fireworks in the Cabinet shuffle. He has Prentice staying at Industry “to deal with the growing upheaval in the manufacturing sector, including the possible demise of the auto industry as we know it,” and he thinks Cannon would be ideal for Foreign Affairs except that “he will likely be Harper’s lieutenant for Quebec,” which is “a full-time job in itself.” That leaves… holy Hannah, Stockwell Day? Oh, come on!

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