Parliamentarians of the Year Awards party
By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, November 25, 2011 - 0 Comments
Maclean’s 5th annual Parliamentarians of the Year Awards ceremony at the Fairmont Château Laurier. See winners here.
Immigration MInister Jason Kenney (left) and Ken Whyte, President of Rogers Publishing Limited
Liberal MP Rodger Cuzner (left) and NDP MP Pat Martin.
NDP MP Peter Stoffer accepts his award.
Stephen Harper’s communications director Angelo Persichilli and CBC’s Julie Van Dusen.
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A novice bureaucrat (and future PM) on supply management
By John Geddes - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 1:11 PM - 0 Comments
Here’s a stray bit of commentary from the distant past to mull over along with the news that the Harper government just might be willing to consider reforming Canada’s politically sacrosanct, economically dubious protection of poultry and dairy farmers:
“Price support is only a means; the end we seek should be a livable income for every citizen. And as a means, price support cannot be used systematically; for it naturally tends to prevent equilibrium of demand and supply.”
That’s from the six-page memo “On Price Support for Commodity Surpluses,” written by very junior civil servant named Pierre Trudeau in 1949, when he was briefly assistant to Gordon Robertson, the head of the Privy Council Office’s economics division. His sensible advice on the economics of agricultural and fisheries is quoted in the new biography Trudeau Transformed: The Shaping of a Statesman, 1944-1965 by Max and Monique Nemni.
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In the shadow of 9/11
By macleans.ca - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 2 Comments
Debating the impact of the attacks and how it changed Canadian life, laws and liberties
Photography by Greg Locke
Last week in St. John’s, Maclean’s and CPAC hosted a round-table conversation entitled, “How has 9/11 changed our world?” In this wide-ranging discussion of the emotional, practical, political and cultural fallout in the decade following the attacks, Maclean’s columnists Andrew Coyne and Paul Wells were joined on the stage by David Collenette, Canada’s minister of transport at the time of 9/11 attacks, Sukanya Pillay, director of the national security program for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and Tarek Fatah, political activist, author, broadcaster and founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress. The discussion was moderated by CPAC’s Peter Van Dusen. The following is an edited excerpt.
Andrew Coyne: I don’t know what future historians will make of the grand sweep of September 11 and its place in world history, but there’s no doubt the last 10 years of our lives have been in the shadow of it and very much dominated by it. If there’s one thing that we should certainly remember on this anniversary it is the nature of the threat that al-Qaeda presented and still to some extent presents. It is, I think, unique and new, something new in world history, the combination of the willingness to inflict casualties on just an enormous scale, and the technological capacity married with it. I do think, though, we should, if we’re putting everything in the balance, take stock of the fact that 10 years later we have seriously degraded al-Qaeda’s capacity. We’ll discuss a lot of the pros and cons of how the battle has been fought, but I just want to leave people with the impression that it was a battle worth fighting, and it’s been broadly successful.
Paul Wells: The question before us is how did his happen, and I think it’s a combination of two things, extremism—or, to use a simpler term, evil—on one side, and complacency on the other. The extremism persists, and the complacency is gone, but it’s important to understand what those 19 men in those airplanes were trying to do: they were trying to provoke the West. The nature of asymmetrical warfare is you use the limited means at your disposal to essentially trip up a much larger and more powerful opponent, and to some extent those 19 men have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. We have to keep our vigilance up, we have to keep working. This is not a war that is going to go away just because a zero comes up at the end of the anniversaries. I think we are still in this for a very long time, which is why we have to make sure that, in defending our values, we don’t betray them.
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Jack Layton’s last act on the public stage
By Andrew Coyne - Friday, September 2, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 40 Comments
Andrew Coyne on how Layton inspired the public even in the shadow of death
Andrew Vaughan/CP
In ancient Athens, attendance at the theatre was compulsory. The theatre was where the politics of the polis were acted out—not in the everyday sense of how to collect the garbage, but of what it was to be a man: social being, plaything of the gods, contested ground of character. It was the duty of the citizen legislator to watch, and reflect.
If the theatre is no longer where we conduct our politics, politics remains a kind of theatre: not only the arena for deciding who should have power, but a stage on which we see acted out great questions of character and judgment, some of which might find some echo in our own lives. We watch the players struggle—against each other, against their fates, against themselves—and we reflect.
So it was as we watched Jack Layton dying. It is his death, of course, that the last week was about. Had we been marking merely his retirement from politics, and not his passing from the Earth, there would not have been anything like the same reaction. That he was a fine man, dedicated to important causes, decent with others; that he had a successful career, a loving family, in all a full life: all of these would explain why so many people were fond of him. They do not explain why thousands filled the streets.
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That old deficit war re-revisited: the tale of the taxes
By John Geddes - Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 12:25 PM - 16 Comments
How much can a government afford to cut spending if economic growth is tepid? It’s a question Finance Minister Jim Flaherty must be asking himself these days, poor guy. No doubt Flaherty would like to keep cutting to shrink the deficit, but as the economy weakens, he’s coming under pressure for another round of stimulus spending.
This was not a problem then-finance minister Paul Martin faced back in the mid-1990s. In those days, economic growth was bettering all expectations, and spinning off more tax revenues that Martin’s fiscal strategists foresaw. I’ve argued this helped him mightily in his deficit-shrinking task, easing the need to reduce spending.
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Andrew Coyne on the Liberals' platform
By macleans.ca - Monday, April 4, 2011 at 4:00 PM - 1 Comment
Your daily campaign minute from Maclean’s columnists
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Mitchel Raphael on Jason Kenney versus Justin Trudeau
By Mitchel Raphael - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 12:21 PM - 20 Comments
Photograph by Mitchel Raphael
Why this MP needs a lot of coats
Liberal MP Kirsty Duncan keeps boxes of toothpaste at her constituency office. Because she represents Etobicoke North, one of the poorest ridings in the country, she has turned her office into a quasi drop-in centre for those in need. During the winter, she keeps a collection of donated coats because some constituents come jacket-less to her office in freezing temperatures. About 65 people a day come through. (Duncan keeps only one staffer in Ottawa so she can have more in Toronto.) One of those seeking help was particularly memorable: a woman named Linda came in with a crumpled brochure the MP had distributed, which said, “We can help.” Linda had been severely abused by her husband, was terminally ill, and had no official status in Canada. “You said you would help,” she said. Duncan asked Immigration Minister Jason Kenney to give her special status so she could receive palliative care and he did. When Duncan visited Linda in the hospital, she brought her a necklace: “I don’t think she had anything that sparkled in her life.” Linda said she had a gift in return and sang a song to her visitors. Before she died the nurses helped make a recording of her singing, and Duncan helped set up an endowment fund at a shelter in her memory.
Photograph by Mitchel Raphael
Jason versus Justin
The next election will be a battle for the hearts of Canada’s ethnic communities. Things have heated up between Liberal immigration critic Justin Trudeau and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. Trudeau attacked Kenney for mixing partisan politics and government business with such things as award certificates. (In 2009, Ottawa Chinese restaurateur Yang Sheng got one “for creating an authentic multicultural dining experience.”) Then when Trudeau evoked his father’s name in question period, Kenney went for blood: “Mr. Speaker, let me tell members what his father did with immigration when we hit a recession, led by the Liberals, in the early 1980s. He slashed immigration to 80,000. Our government has maintained historically high immigration levels during the recession. In terms of social justice, his father’s government refused to apologize to Chinese Canadians for the head tax, to the Ukrainian Canadians for their internment, to Japanese Canadians for their internment, or for the shame of the Indian residential schools, unlike our Prime Minister.” Kenney has spent a lot of time working with ethnic communities who have, he has noted, “conservative values” but who vote Liberal. The minister has mastered the art of eating all sorts of cuisine, including getting out of difficult culinary situations by keeping a napkin in his pocket to help make some delicacies that don’t agree with his stomach discreetly disappear.
Power to 16-year-olds
NDP MP Don Davies recently introduced Bill C-634, a private member’s bill that would see the federal voting age lowered from 18 to 16. Davies says that with voter turnout getting more dismal, a “get them while they are young” approach will hopefully work. Davies notes his main rationale for lowering the voting age is that 16-year-olds work and pay taxes in most provinces. In some, he says, it is even lower. Davies says he took as his inspiration the famous American Revolution phrase: “no taxation without representation.” It’s an idea that has been tried before in Parliament, but Davies hopes this time it will see success.
Photograph by Mitchel Raphael
Layton, Chow and the election
Last week pundits were mixed about the chances of an election. On CBC’s The National, the Toronto Star‘s Chantal Hébert thought yes, while Andrew Coyne of Maclean’s said no way. The panellists agreed, though, that Jack Layton was skilled at keeping people guessing which way his party would go. Maybe Layton’s wife provided a clue. Toronto MP Olivia Chow secured her campaign office last week.
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From the archives: "Nation? You can have it."
By John Geddes - Monday, March 28, 2011 at 8:44 PM - 8 Comments
I read my colleague Andrew Coyne’s impassioned, insightful “Is Canada a nation?” item, and remembered posting on closely related questions back in November 2006, just after Prime Minister Stephen Harper passed his motion on the nationhood of the Québécois. For what it’s worth, here it is:
The word nation does not have a very secure place in the rhetoric of Canadian patriotism, at least not as a label to be applied to the whole country. Arguably the most important early use of the word in Canadian political discourse came in Sir John A. Macdonald’s sage 1856 letter to William Chamberlin, an English Montréaler, on the need to respect the “nationality” of the French Canadians. “Treat them as a nation and they will act as a free people generally do—generously,” Macdonald famously wrote.
There can be no more favourable light than the warm glow of that quote in which to consider Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s motion in the House of Commons, easily passed on Monday, recognizing the Québécois as a nation within a united Canada.
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Coyne v. Wells on the protests in Egypt
By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 4:47 PM - 34 Comments
Columnists Paul Wells and Andrew Coyne discuss the prospects for democracy
RELATED: Maclean’s special report ‘Portrait of a tyrant: the life and times of Hosni Mubarak’
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Coyne v. Wells on five years of Harper
By macleans.ca - Thursday, January 27, 2011 at 10:04 AM - 39 Comments
Paul Wells’ and Andrew Coyne’s weekly podcast is back
ON NEWSSTANDS NOW: Paul Wells and John Geddes’ special report ‘What you don’t know about Stephen Harper’ and Andrew Coyne’s column ‘The damage done by doing so little’
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When ministers of the crown tweet
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 9:28 AM - 41 Comments
With the government announcing new funding for Pratt & Whitney yesterday, Greg Weston posted a series of questions and concerns last night about the loans involved and the jobs promised.
The government announcement also claims the deal will “create and maintain an average of more than 700 highly skilled jobs during the project work phase, and more than 2,000 jobs during the 15-year benefits phase.” The company later explained that it hopes to hire about 200 new staff for the research and development project, expected to take about five years. At $300 million from taxpayers, that works out to $300,000 a year per job.
As for the rest of the jobs, Clement’s press secretary, Lynn Meahan, explained that “hypothetically, without the project, the workforce would have shrunk.” She said the promised 2,000 long-term jobs would come from manufacturing the new engines yet to be developed, and it is not clear how many of those positions, if any, would be new.
Economist Stephen Gordon and our own Andrew Coyne duly tweeted their criticisms. And it was soon thereafter, perhaps inevitably, that Industry Minister Tony Clement attempted again, 140 precious characters at a time, to explain and defend himself.
To wit. Continue…
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Here's a crazy thought, Chantal
By Paul Wells - Friday, October 1, 2010 at 11:19 AM - 0 Comments
No political commentator working in Canada today is read with as much anticipation as Chantal Hébert. She’s obviously the class of the field, and I’m belabouring the point only because her column today is rather spectacularly beneath her usual standards.
In early 2009 I spoke to a pretty conservative audience in Toronto. (OK, it was a Fraser Institute event, an error of youth I won’t repeat.) I was in a fair snit about the Harper government at that time, and I uncorked a long list of critiques of the way the prime minister was going about his business: arbitrary, contradictory, yadda yadda. Frosty applause when I finally stopped. The question-and-answer period began, and a dotty matron dressed, approximately, like Milburn Drysdale drew herself up to her full height and said, as one might to an idiot: “Yes, well, that’s all very good, but what would you prefer? Would you prefer that… that… Michael Ignatieff and his gang govern the country?” She awaited my response with the grand satisfaction of somebody who had shut a troublemaker up but good.
Well, no, I replied, or at least not necessarily. There is another option: the government we already have could govern better. Continue…
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Coyne v. Wells on thin ice
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 at 6:58 PM - 0 Comments
Our Video postcast with Andrew Coyne and Paul Wells
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Playboy + Strombo + Coyne = TIFF evening 2
By Stephanie Findlay - Saturday, September 11, 2010 at 8:58 PM - 0 Comments
Policing the Playboy bunnies, Big Boi’s tame set, and the secret to TIFF partying from George S.
I couldn’t resist, the chance was too great to pass up. I had to check out the Playboy Party. It was held at Muzik, a huge Miami-style club at Exhibition Place. At 41, 000 square-feet, the club can hold a capacity of 3,000 people and there are nine bars. After flying solo last night and feeling like a loner, I decided to bring a friend. So around 11 pm my pal Vic and I set off to the event. When we arrived there was already a frenzy of cabs at the entrance, all of which was red carpet. There were a group of scantily clad women who were wearing fur coats that welcomed you at the door. Inside there were other groups of scantily dressed women, sans fur coats, in Playboy uniform sporting bunny tails, ears, corsets, and nylon stockings with black heels.
After getting into the party, we walked through a huge red cavernous hall before getting to the main bar in the middle of the club. There were Playboy bunnies everywhere. Four were dancing on the bar, others were posing in groups, still others were mingling with the crowd. The energy was high and the music was pumping. There were some serious Jersey-shore types. You could just sense the fist pumping in the air. Big Boi was dj-ing, he was at the booth dressed in a white tux. He was texting on his phone. Oddly enough, he was playing a generic mix of top 40, Katy Perry and even some Journey thrown in. Was this really the mastermind from Outkast?
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Oh, Mr. Munk….
By Paul Wells - Monday, May 31, 2010 at 3:39 PM - 38 Comments
“Your article is malicious, ludicrous, and possibly libelous as well. For all intents and purposes, it calls Brian Mulroney a perjurer. Is Andrew Coyne’s bias and venom so uncontrollable that he couldn’t wait to pass his judgment until Justice Oliphant’s report?… This type of persistent public witch hunt is reminiscent of the McCarthy era. It is unworthy of your standards.”
— Peter Munk, letter to the editor of Maclean’s, June 22, 09
“Having carefully considered the evidence respecting the amount of cash paid by Mr. Schreiber to Mr. Mulroney, I have decided not to accept the evidence of either of them unless there is independent evidence to support one of the two positions taken.”
— Statement by the Hon. Jeffrey J. Oliphant, today
It’s sad that Mr. Munk couldn’t wait to pass his judgment until Justice Oliphant’s report, but now that it’s out, I’m sure he’ll agree with me that Andrew’s column from a year ago stands up a lot better than does Munk’s letter in response to it.
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In Conversation: Rethinking health care
By macleans.ca - Monday, May 10, 2010 at 1:20 PM - 1 Comment
Join Andrew Coyne and Regina Herzlinger on May 18th
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Coyne v. Wells on Helena Guergis and Jean Charest affairs
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, April 20, 2010 at 2:59 PM - 10 Comments
Our Video podcast
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How to stop the next financial meltdown
By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 at 9:23 AM - 40 Comments
Andrew Coyne talks with Mark Carney
Blair Gable/Reuters
Born of the Great Depression, the Bank of Canada has found new relevance, 75 years later, in averting another. As Canada emerges, surprisingly strong, from what many had feared would be at least a Great Recession, the governor of the bank, Mark Carney, credits its interventions in large part for sparing us the worst of the financial crisis.
In an interview to celebrate the bank’s 75th birthday, Carney said one of the lessons of the near-collapse of global finance was the crucial part that central banks play in the smooth running of financial markets, especially in a panic. “The need for a lender of last resort, and not just a lender but a liquidity supplier of last resort, was made absolutely clear by the crisis.”
The corollary lesson: markets are not always self-correcting. Having worked in capital markets for many years at Goldman Sachs, Carney says he acquired “both a respect for [markets] and a skepticism of them. You know, I’m not a market fundamentalist. There are periods of excess in both directions in financial markets and it’s important to recognize that.”
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Coyne v. Wells on Obamacare
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 5:29 PM - 20 Comments
Our video podcast
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UPDATED: Wrong again
By Paul Wells - Monday, March 22, 2010 at 7:49 PM - 29 Comments
Colleague Coyne explains where I went astray.
UPDATE, Tuesday: I won’t be responding to Andrew at length. I put some time and effort into describing what the Harper government is doing. Andrew put considerable ingenuity into thinking of all the things it isn’t doing but, in his view, could or should. The second thing is not like the first and I don’t see how I could improve the world by adding a third thing.
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Harper’s hard right turn
By Paul Wells - Friday, March 19, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 465 Comments
Social conservatism is on the rise in Ottawa, and across Canada
Photograph by Chris Wattie/ Reuters
It says in all the papers the well has run dry. The commentators keep writing that Canadian conservatism has died on the vine, that four years into his reign of tactical obsession and fiscal profligacy, Stephen Harper has forgotten why he ever went into politics.
“Where’s the big, strategic agenda for the next election?” John Ivison quoted a senior Conservative in the National Post. “I haven’t found one yet.” In the same paper, Terence Corcoran ran a string of columns identifying programs the feds should cut, because Harper seems unwilling to do the work himself. And Andrew Coyne delivered his annual post-budget verdict of despair and mourning. “Those Conservative faithfuls who have been hanging on all these years, in the hopes that, eventually, someday, with one of these budgets, this government would start to act like conservatives, must now understand that that is not going to happen. Conservatism is not just dead but, it appears, forgotten.”
But it’s a funny thing. If Canadian conservatism is dead, somebody forgot to tell Canadian conservatives.
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Canada Reborn
By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 11:38 AM - 48 Comments
Own the Podium was more than just good sport. It was a picture of our country as it was always supposed to be.
Photograph by Brian Howell
For God’s sake don’t change the name.
Whether the Own the Podium program makes sense in overall policy terms can still be debated. The case for governments paying athletes to play games is far from clear, and it is easy to imagine all of the other uses that might have been made of the program’s $117-million budget.
But in terms of athletic excellence—winning medals—the program is an indisputable triumph. Do I need to rehearse the results? The most medals ever for Canada at a Winter Games, good for third place overall. The most gold medals of any country in these Games—indeed, more than any country has ever won at a Winter Games in their history.
As impressive was the breadth of the Canadian achievement. We medalled in nine different sports, spread amongst two dozen different athletes or teams. And lurking just off the podium, 23 fourth- or fifth-place finishers. All told, Canadians placed in the top five in 37 of the 86 events at these Games. Can any country match that?
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What has changed in Ottawa in two months?
By Andrew Coyne - Monday, March 1, 2010 at 11:28 AM - 121 Comments
Parliament’s first week back will see a war of narratives as Harper fires up his big guns: the budget and the Throne Speech
Parliament returns, to a changed political landscape. As late as mid-December, the Conservatives were still leading the Liberals by eight to 10 points. Two months and one prorogation later, the parties are statistically tied.
Yet the Conservative lead had begun to slip even before the disastrous decision to prorogue Parliament. At their mid-October peak, in the aftermath of the Liberals’ equally disastrous attempt to force an election, the Tories stood as much as 15 points in front. Prorogation, indeed, was supposed to arrest that decline.
And while the Conservatives may hope to put the prorogation debacle behind them, the fundamental reasons for their four-month tailspin have not changed. One of these is an improved showing by the Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, for whom prorogation has proved something of a gift: a chance to shuck off the persona of the scheming politician he had adopted, in favour of the high-minded wonk within.
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Cheering for our athletes and ourselves
By Andrew Coyne - Friday, February 26, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 15 Comments
ANDREW COYNE: We have all, to a greater or lesser extent, undergone a change in national temperament
People are talking about a wave of patriotism washing across the country as Canadians cheer on their Olympic athletes. I’m sure this is true, but why? What is it based on? Why exactly should we get excited because a Canadian athlete wins a medal—because our guy slid on a piece of wood down a snowy incline faster than their guys did? It’s clear why the athlete himself might be excited. But how is that a measure of our collective self-worth?
These are more than philosophical questions. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent, including $117 million targeted at elite athletes through the “Own the Podium” program, on the premise that we should get excited about our athletes’ achievements. Of course that implicates us in a simplistic sense: our dollars, we hope, will buy more medals than theirs will. But—leaving aside whether that’s the highest and best use of scarce public dollars—is there anything more to it than that? Why should we care whether “we” win any medals? What’s it got to do with us?
The answer, I think, is that the success of any one individual, in sports as in other fields, is not wholly attributable to that individual. It is also a collective endeavour. It emerges from a culture, and while the talent and effort of each individual are plainly of supreme importance to their success, the likelihood of such individual successes, on average and in the aggregate, will be the greater or lesser depending on the culture that surrounds them, and the cultural attributes with which they are imbued.
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Coyne v. Wells on the Olympics
By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 4:57 PM - 7 Comments
Our video podcast
