Canada Reborn
By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
Coyne v. Wells on the Olympics
By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 4:57 PM - 7 Comments
Our video podcast
-
Private lives and the public interest
By Andrew Coyne - Monday, February 22, 2010 at 1:39 PM - 40 Comments
Whenever a scandal arises, the same debate is replayed: does the public have a right to know about a politician’s private affairs?
The hypocrite in our times is not, as of old, the libertine posing as moralist—Tartuffe, or Angelo in Measure for Measure—but moralists posing as libertines. Today we are most keen to advertise not our virtue but our worldly indifference to others’ faults, fearing not that we might be accused of the same so much as that we might be thought of as prigs. Judge not lest ye be judgmental.
This is particularly so when it comes to the political arena. On those not infrequent occasions when a politician is found to have behaved badly in his private life, there is always a crush of apologists racing to the nearest rooftop to shout how little they care. Cheats on his wife? Yawn. Drunk every night? Big deal. Takes hundreds of thousands in cash from fugitive international arms dealers? Doesn’t everyone?
From Adam Giambrone to Maxime Bernier, from Bill Clinton to Brian Mulroney, whenever the issue arises the same debate is replayed. Does the public have a right to know about a politician’s private affairs? How much? How far?
-
Coyne v. Wells on Jim Prentice, Danny Williams, and sacred cows
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 26 Comments
Our video podcast
-
The west is in. Now what?
By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 12:30 PM - 74 Comments
Can the West shape the national agenda? A Maclean’s debate.
The rise of Western Canada was the topic of a round table discussion last week in Calgary, broadcast live by CPAC. Joining Paul Wells and Andrew Coyne were Fort McMurray’s Mayor Melissa Blake, Alberta’s Minister of Culture Lindsay Blackett, Saskatchewan’s Environment Minister Nancy Heppner, Lloyd Axworthy, the University of Winnipeg’s president, and the Wildrose Alliance’s Rob Anderson. CPAC’s Peter Van Dusen moderated the event.Coyne: How do we define the West beyond geography? Is there such a thing as a kind of western agenda, a western political culture?
-
And you all laughed
By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 4:48 PM - 35 Comments
Jack Layton, Sept. 1, 2006. “A comprehensive peace process has to bring all the combatants to the table.”
New York Times, today. Afghanistan’s president declared Thursday that reaching out to the Taliban’s leaders should be a centerpiece of efforts to end the eight-year-old war there, setting in motion a delicate diplomatic process that will carry great risks for both Afghanistan and the United States.
Ahem. Continue…
-
Are taxes the only way out of the deficit?
By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 10:51 AM - 48 Comments
ANDREW COYNE: The government has a choice. It can either break its promise not to raise taxes. Or it can break its promise not to cut transfers.
The Great and the Good have come down from on high, and delivered their decree: there shall be tax hikes. The deficit that was once our friend is now our enemy, no longer “stimulative” but “structural.” The spending spree that gave us that deficit cannot be reversed, or not altogether. If the deficit is to be slain, it must therefore be by raising taxes. Thus sayeth the elders, including former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge, two former deputy ministers of finance, and Jeffrey Simpson.Well, maybe. What is certainly true is that the fiscal forecast, once an unbroken line of surpluses as far as the eye could see, has darkened considerably. Not only is the deficit headed for $56 billion this fiscal year, but it will still exceed $11 billion even four years from now. And that’s on the government’s cheery numbers. The parliamentary budget officer forecasts the 2014 deficit at $19 billion—after four years of (assumed) steady economic growth. Just in time for the next recession to blow it sky-high again.
-
It's all Andrew's fault
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 8:46 AM - 104 Comments
Christopher White, founder of that Facebook group, talks to the Tyee.
Q. How did this all begin?
“It was the day I got back to Edmonton from the Christmas holiday. I slept in a bit. I was still in my pajamas, reading the news online, when I learned that Stephen Harper had asked for another prorogation.
“My first reaction was outrage. Here it was, happening again. It was so irresponsible, so undemocratic. And the worst part was, I could already feel the apathy starting to creep in.
“I looked at a couple other articles, and found a blog post Andrew Coyne had written on Maclean’s. He brought up this idea of the Long Parliament of 1640 in England, when the Parliamentarians defied the King and kept the Parliament going when he was out of the country.
“And I started wondering, ‘What if our Parliamentarians sat anyway?’ It just seemed like a really great idea.”
-
The Mailbag: Pat Robertson, The Beaver, Andrew Coyne’s satire problem
By Scott Feschuk - Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 10 Comments
Scott Feschuk makes fun of answers your most pressing questions
Welcome to the Tuesday Mailbag on Wednesday, where humourless religious reactionaries are encouraged to react to the reference to God herein by ensuring their response is wildly out of proportion, that it misses the point entirely and that it wishes upon the author an eternity of hellfire and damnation. (A question of my own: Could I request a recurring loop of The Nanny in hell, or do I have to actually sit next to Fran Drescher?)
Remember – there are no stupid questions, except for the question of whether Barack Obama is boned.
•••
Dear Scott:
Pat Robertson’s been in the news for saying that stuff about Haiti and the devil and whatever. It reminded me: Don’t you usually tell us about Pat Robertson’s annual conversation with God. Did God stand him up this year? I NEED TO KNOW. – Darren V.
Darren –
I was a little disappointed by Robertson’s most recent chitchat with The Man Upstairs. Usually, Pat’s God can be relied upon for at least one high-impact, attention-grabbing, pants-wettingly terrifying prediction: a high-casualty terrorist attack on American soil, a devastating hurricane conjured as payback for letting some gays have spouses, a reboot of the Rambo franchise starring Andy Dick.
But not this year. This year, during His annual Christmastime chinwag with Pat, the Big Guy apparently said only that “there is a Continue…
-
Coyne v. Wells: Looking west
By Coyne VS Wells - Monday, January 18, 2010 at 11:30 AM - 45 Comments
How much clout do the western provinces have? And to what end?
On Jan. 20, Maclean’s will present a round table discussion on “The West is in. Now what?” at Calgary’s Theatre Junction Grand, the third in a series of national debates. Broadcast live on CPAC, it will feature Nancy Heppner, Saskatchewan’s minister of environment, Lloyd Axworthy, the University of Winnipeg’s president, Lindsay Blackett, Alberta’s minister of culture and community spirit, and Melissa Blake, mayor of Fort McMurray, Alta. The event will be moderated by CPAC’s Peter Van Dusen, and include Maclean’s columnists Paul Wells and Andrew Coyne as panellists. Tickets can be bought at macleans.ca/inconversation. This week, Wells and Coyne kick off the debate.
Andrew Coyne: Paul, I’ll start by softening you up with a barrage of statistics. In 1896, when Sir Wilfrid Laurier laid the foundation for a century of Liberal dominance with his first of four election wins, Quebec held 30 per cent of the population of Canada. The whole of the territory of Canada west of Ontario accounted for less than 10 per cent. As late as 1980, when the National Energy Program was launched, Quebec held nearly as many people as the four western provinces combined. Half the seats in Pierre Trudeau’s majority government that year came from Quebec.
-
The dirty little secret behind attack ads
By Andrew Coyne - Friday, January 15, 2010 at 10:43 AM - 144 Comments
The Liberal ads are an appeal to the reptile part of our brains, the ‘fight or flight’ part, where panic, rage and fear reside
Even the words are creepy. “Cover-up. A description far more familiar to other countries. Until now.” But as we all know, it’s the sounds and imagery that make an attack ad. “When questions arose [ominous, metallic hum; barbed wire graphic] about what he and his government knew about torture in Afghanistan [clanging noise; more barbed wire], Stephen Harper shut down Parliament. Why doesn’t he want to face Parliament? [Militaristic snare drum; bell tolls.] What does Stephen Harper know that he doesn’t want other Canadians to know?”
I give up. His age? The combination to his gym locker? We’re never told. But we’re plainly invited to assume the worst. All is insinuation, right down to the sneer in the announcer’s voice.
-
I'm Colby Cosh, and I approve this sullen cynicism
By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 11:01 AM - 12 Comments
Revealing moment in the new CoyneWellsCast: A.C. calls for an American-style “I’m Joe McGraft and I approve this message” rule for Canadian political campaigning. That’s certainly what he seems to be doing about ten minutes in, anyway. But isn’t “Stand By Your Ad” regulation already a canonical instance of failure in trying to meliorate political discourse by means of a procedural tweak?
-
Coyne v. Wells on those Liberal attack ads, and others
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 12:03 AM - 28 Comments
Our Video podcast
Producer note:
There’s a bit of a quality issue half way through, but we’ve left it in for continuity’s sake. -
The market has spoken
By Aaron Wherry - Monday, January 11, 2010 at 9:24 PM - 71 Comments
Catching a point our Andrew Coyne missed, Stephen Harper explains the trouble with this democracy of ours.
“The games begin when Parliament returns,” he explained. “The government can take our time now to do the important work to prepare the economic agenda ahead. That said, as soon as Parliament comes back . . . the first thing that happens is a vote of confidence and there’ll be votes of confidence and election speculation for every single week after that for the rest of the year. That’s the kind of instability markets are actually worried about.”
-
In Conversation with Maclean's
By macleans.ca - Friday, January 8, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 4 Comments
Featured panellists include Melissa Blake, Lindsay Blackett, Lloyd Axworthy and Nancy Heppner
-
'We deserve better'
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 at 5:15 PM - 28 Comments
Beginning at about the 23-minute mark here—and after an interview with Michael Douglas—George Stroumboulopoulos unleashes a Merceresque rant on the proroguing of Parliament, then talks things over with our Andrew Coyne.
-
Coyne v. Wells on the prime minister's prorogative
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 at 12:16 PM - 56 Comments
Our Video podcast
-
Look who crashed the NDP Christmas party
By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, December 24, 2009 at 12:11 PM - 5 Comments
MP Nathan Cullen (right) and MP Glenn Thibeault with half moustaches.
.
MP Don Davies attempts to impersonate Chantal Hébert of the Toronto Star.
-
Parliament will fight
By Andrew Coyne - Monday, December 21, 2009 at 12:10 PM - 263 Comments
What’s at stake here is nothing less than our system of government
We are not yet in a constitutional crisis over the government’s refusal to release the Colvin memos to Parliament, but we probably should be. A secretive and overbearing government has turned an ordinary political dispute into an extraordinary confrontation over the powers and privileges of Parliament. Unless some compromise is found, Parliament will fight, and Parliament will be right.
What began as a manageable controversy over the Harper government’s faltering attempts to deal with a problem it inherited from the Liberals—what to do with the prisoners our forces captured in Afghanistan—has been transformed, via the Conservatives’ reflexive paranoia and insularity, into a full-blown political debacle, complete with martyred whistle-blower, outraged former ambassadors, self-correcting generals, and befuddled ministers. And running throughout, a drumbeat of press reports contradicting virtually every aspect of the government’s story.
It now appears, contrary to the government’s repeated assurances, that at least some of the prisoners we transferred to the Afghan police and security services were tortured, or at least abused; that at least some of our troops knew this; and that serious concerns about the treatment of these prisoners, and about our own procedures for reporting on their whereabouts, were relayed to government and Defence officials, not only from Richard Colvin, the diplomat at the centre of the storm, but from multiple sources. Continue…
-
Where to draw the line on child poverty
By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 10:12 AM - 46 Comments
COYNE: We need a measure of poverty that tells us if we’re making progress against it
Introducing his famous motion in Parliament committing the government of Canada to abolish child poverty by the year 2000, NDP leader Ed Broadbent conjured a Dickensian vision of Canada. “Being a poor kid means box lunches from food banks and soup from soup kitchens. Mr. Speaker, to be a poor kid means trying to read or write or think on an empty stomach . . . One quarter of our children are wasting away.” The motion passed, unanimously.That was on Nov. 24, 1989. Twenty years later, writing in the Globe and Mail, Broadbent found little improvement. “Canada’s level of poverty is virtually unchanged . . . After two decades, the child-poverty rate has dropped a mere two percentage points, to 9.5 per cent. Why do more than 600,000 Canadian kids wake up hungry and go to school trying to read, write and think on an empty stomach?”
The answer is: they don’t. More than 600,000 Canadian kids are not waking up hungry today, any more than one quarter of Canadian children were “wasting away” 20 years ago. What Broadbent means by poverty is clear from his rhetoric: a state of absolute privation—hunger, an empty stomach, wasting away. But the numbers he cites are all based on relative measures: that is, how many children were less well-off than other children. Continue…
-
Coyne v. Wells on China and last year's coalition madness
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 9:45 AM - 17 Comments
Our weekly video podcast.
Producer note:
Please excuse the video problems near the end, internet troubles led to some video degradation.
And a big thanks to our very own commenter Sean Stokholm for sending in some music! -
Coyne v. Wells on torture spin and HST pirouettes
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 1, 2009 at 11:23 AM - 11 Comments
Our weekly video podcast.
-
The “Help Stephen Harper Name His Next Senator” Challenge
By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 9:49 AM - 127 Comments
Scott Feschuk suggests we could really use an ‘adorable senator’
*Update: Challenge winner announced in the Comments below.
In today’s Ottawa Notebook, Jane Taber describes Tom Flanagan as “super Tory strategist.”
Does she mean “super,” as in “especially good at what he does?”
Does she mean “super,” as in “possessing extra-human powers such as the ability to strategize faster than a speeding Stephanopoulos?”
Or does she mean “super,” as in “I’m sorry I had to take a whole day off from saying nice things about Laureen Harper or directly quoting Conservative talking points, so I’m doing this instead?”
More important, the Notebook points out that Senator Jerry Grafstein is soon retiring, which gives the Prime Minister yet another opportunity to appoint someone new, or the rest of Mike Duffy, to a seat in the upper chamber.
[Brief pause to allow outraged readers to use comments to assail fat joke...]
I’m actually pretty sure there are a couple senators stepping down before Grafstein, but the point remains – soon it will be time yet again for Stephen Harper to respect his promise never to fill a single Senate seat through patronage, except for all of them.
Suggestions:
Janine Krieber – Think of the play this would get: the disaffected wife of a former Liberal leader welcomed into Continue…
