The Bloc wants in on the inquisition

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 12:52 PM - 0 Comments

I’ve got a piece about what Duceppe’s wee tumble from grace means to the sovereignty movement in this week’s dead tree, but a bit about the nuts and bolts.

As we now know, courtesy of La Presse’s excellent Ottawa bureau, Gilles Duceppe paid Bloc director general Gilbert Gardner (to the tune of $100K a year by the end of his mandate) with funds designated for parliamentary, not partisan, ends. Yesterday, Le Devoir tried mightily to run interference, saying the wording was broad enough to allow for such a thing. For the record, here’s the wording of the parliamentary bylaw: “The funds, goods, services and premises provided pursuant to the by-laws are to be used only for the carrying out of Members’ parliamentary functions.”

Do “parliamentary functions” include a campaign to attract the cultural community vote to the Bloc Québécois, which Gardner spearheaded in 2004? Does it include coordinating research and activities with the Parti Québécois, which Gardner also did in 2004? Continue…

Meanwhile, in Quebec

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, December 11, 2011 at 3:10 PM - 0 Comments

Former MP and party finance critic Daniel Paille is the new leader of the Bloc Quebecois.

He and the Prime Minister are well-acquainted.

The Bloc’s four on the floor

By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Christopher Pike

Every weekday morning at 9 a.m. when the House of Commons is in session, the four remaining Bloc Québécois MPs venture from their offices scattered about Parliament Hill to room 577 of the Confederation Building for their daily caucus meeting. It is an inauspicious venue for a party that for nearly two decades held the majority of Quebec’s seats, not to mention a near monopoly of virtue over the province’s political mindset. The room is roughly 10 by 20 feet and painted a pale blue. Bloc MP André Bellavance secured it last June, and then outfitted it with a table, chairs and a television. Fellow Bloc MP Louis Plamondon, the longest-serving MP in the country, recently joked that the room is so small they can hardly get the door closed once everyone is inside.

On one crisp Tuesday morning in October, room 577 was abuzz with the news of Michael Moldaver, Stephen Harper’s nominee to the Supreme Court. Moldaver, an Ontario native, doesn’t speak French, and to the Bloc his appointment was another linguistic slight on the part of the Conservative government. A month earlier, Harper had appointed as his director of communications a newspaper columnist who doesn’t speak French, and had recently announced that Michael Ferguson, a unilingual anglophone, would be the next auditor general.

The reddest of red-meat issues, though, was the government’s plan to scrap the long gun registry. A majority of Quebecers support the registry, and in November the province’s national assembly passed a unanimous motion opposing its demise. Yet the Conservative government was pressing ahead regardless—and would scrap the registry database itself, ensuring no other government could ever take up the cause. The two dossiers went to Bloc MP Maria Mourani, who serves as the Bloc’s spokesperson on both public security and official languages. Registering firearms and protecting the French language are ancient Bloc Québécois warhorses, and prior to last spring’s federal election Mourani would have been the go-to face of Quebec’s perpetual opposition to all things Conservative and/or Canadian.

Continue…

The war on crime is now a fight about federalism

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 at 2:34 PM - 0 Comments

Quebec’s justice minister takes a stand, a Bloc MP goes even further.

Quebec will not absorb the additional costs associated with the crime bill the Conservative federal government has promised to pass within 100 sitting days of Parliament, the province’s justice minister told a Commons committee Tuesday … While Fournier didn’t go quite so far, Bloc Quebecois MP Maria Mourani later suggested Quebec may simply choose not to enforce the legislation.

Welcome to the club

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 10:58 AM - 30 Comments

The Conservatives formally initiate Brian Topp with a leaked memo of partisan attacks.

“Topp is a union boss and has deep union ties,” they say in a memo to MPs and party faithful. “How could Brian Topp speak on behalf of all Canadians, when he is so tied to big union special interests…

“Topp is not just the candidate of union bosses but also NDP insiders,” the Tories say, noting that he worked for former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow, former left-wing Toronto mayor David Miller and former NDP leader Audrey McLaughlin.

And if that does make Tories shake in their boots, the party back-roomers add that “Brian Topp is most notable for being NDP Leader’s hand-picked negotiator in the coalition talks with the separatist Bloc Québécois … Brian Topp will do anything – including forming a wreckless [sic] coalition with separatists – in order to gain power.”

Via Twitter, Brian Topp pronounces himself honoured.

Good news, bad news: August 4-11, 2011

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

Thailand elected its first female prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra

Clearing the way

The apparent defeat of the Islamist group al-Shabaab in central Mogadishu offers a glimmer of hope to those trying to get food into famine-stricken Somalia. With the country’s wobbly central government in control of key districts of the capital, workers can now fan aid out to other parts of the country. With luck, they can prevent at least some of the hungry from attempting deadly treks into neighbouring Kenya or Ethiopia. The next challenge: keeping the aid out of the hands of insurgents, while persuading the rest of the world to give.

Grade ‘A’ idea

The U.S. grocer Whole Foods introduced a meat-labelling system in its Canadian stores that outlines how various producers treat livestock on a scale of one to five. It is an enlightened approach to animal welfare, both educating consumers and offering them a choice while forgoing preachy attacks on the meat industry or the livelihood of farmers. It also offers a nice rebuttal to a wave of bad press set off by a disgruntled former Toronto employee who claimed the organic-food-focused company didn’t put its money where its mouth was. Other retailers should be so transparent.

Continue…

Mrs. Harper’s run-in with some hoary marmots

By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 8:59 AM - 5 Comments

Mitchel Raphael

Wild kingdom

Laureen Harper has gone on an annual summer hike for a few years now. It started off as a solo venture, plus the mandatory RCMP detachment, but soon blossomed into a group event that includes women such as Minister of Public Works Rona Ambrose. This year the group went to the Yukon, for a trek through Tombstone Territorial Park. Mrs. Harper noted, “It never got dark so we could hike until 11:00 at night.” Last year the group had to scare off bears. No bears this year, but Mrs. Harper says there was other company. “We did run into lots of hoary marmots [large ground squirrels]. The valley bottom was very boggy so we had to walk up on the mountain ridges, and the marmots would hike along with us for a while.”
Continue…

The Turmel referendum

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 11, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 8 Comments

Respondents to a Harris/Decima survey seem mostly unmoved by Nycole Turmel’s Bloc Quebecois membership.

The Canadian Press-Harris/Decima survey found that only about 20 per cent of respondents considered it a major issue. Almost half — 46 per cent — said her earlier affiliation with the party isn’t an issue. Just over a quarter of those polled called it a minor issue.

A majority of respondents said they had heard about her Bloc membership — which she ended in January — while 41 per cent said they were unaware.

Denis Lebel and the sovereignists

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 64 Comments

Denis Lebel’s dalliance with the Bloc Quebecois is now being detailed.

In a statement to Radio Canada he said he took out the membership in part to ingratiate himself with Michel Gauthier, a former Bloc leader who served as the area’s MP. SRC reported that Mr. Lebel was a member of the Bloc from July 1993 to April 2001 and that he also donated hundreds of dollars to the party during the 1990s.

Less than a week ago, Stephen Harper described Nycole Turmel’s similar run with the Bloc as “very disappointing.”

This weekend in Nycole Turmel

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 9:09 AM - 20 Comments

Elizabeth May defends the interim NDP leader. Stephane Dion has questions.

The Canadian unity issue: Turmel’s judgment has to be questioned. It is one thing to vote for the Bloc as a private individual without being a sovereignist; it is something else entirely to buy a membership in a party whose primary objective is to separate Quebec from Canada. Turmel says she was attracted to the Bloc’s social program. Did she, and does she still, believe that the Bloc’s social program is better than that of the NDP — a party that also runs candidates in Quebec?

She says she became a Bloc member because one of her friends was a Bloc MP, but what does friendship have to do with political affiliation? We all have friends with different allegiances: do we have to become card-carrying members of their parties to prove our friendship?

Mr. Dion also wants to know how many New Democrat MPs were, or still are, members of separatist parties and how many would vote for independence in a referendum held today.

Meanwhile, our own Emma Teitel argues in defence of changing one’s mind.

Nycole Turmel: It’s not a crime to change your mind

By Emma Teitel - Friday, August 5, 2011 at 5:29 PM - 26 Comments

I took the Quebec referendum very seriously in 1995, maybe because I was six years old and believed that separatism was exactly what it sounded like: Quebec would literally cut itself off of Canada with a giant machete and float away, taking the Maritimes and the United States with it. Unfortunately I was wrong: not only would the French province remain Canadian (and wholly responsible for prolonging interruptions to in-flight movies) but the ghost of separatist past would linger on, and spawn a uniquely Canadian kind of McCarthyism—the sort that dug the sovereign skeleton out of Nycole Turmel’s closet. Because what we’ve learned from this past week of parliamentary theatrics, is that Jack Layton’s choice for NDP Interim leader (Turmel—GASP—a former member of the Bloc Quebecois and current member of Quebec Solidaire) was simply not cool. Or as Prime Minister Stephen Harper put it, “disappointing”. Forget that Turmel tore up her Bloc membership prior to running for the NDP, promised to tear up her Quebec Solidaire membership this very week, and publicly denounced the notion that she ever held separatist sentiments in the first place; her apparent shift in allegiance was a death knell. But if Dumbledore could forgive Professor Snape for his darker indiscretions, can’t we forgive Nycole Turmel her Sovereign past? Or, do we even have to? Maybe we should be congratulating her instead, for having the temerity to change her mind.

For starters, Turmel isn’t unique in her willingness to lean one way before gaining office, and another way after. She has a fellow leaner in, hey, Stephen Harper. Harper has both endorsed and opposed gay marriage in his political career (his promise to reopen the issue in 2005 remains unfulfilled), and his signature on the infamous Firewall Letter of 2001, must have been equally disappointing to any self-avowed Federalist. The letter, which Harper signed on Alberta’s behalf as president of the National Citizens’ Coalition, states: “It is imperative to take the initiative, to build firewalls around Alberta, to limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach upon legitimate provincial jurisdiction.” Such “hostilities” included the Royal Mountain Police and the Canada Pension Plan. Separatism, anybody? The salient point here is, Stephen Harper apparently came to the same conclusion that Ralph Waldo Emerson did:  “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”.  Harper changed his no- longer-little-mind (or appeared to) and it’s a good thing for Canada that he did.

Blind Steadfastness can be a virtue of the slow. Consider Ronald Reagan. In March of 1981 he was shot and wounded by his would-be murderer John Hinkley—an assassination attempt that also left White House Press Secretary James Brady with permanent brain damage. Brady and his wife subsequently sponsored a bill to change laws regarding the purchase of handguns in the U.S. (the gun that Hinckley used was a classic “Saturday Night Special” purchased at Rocky’s Pawn Shop in Dallas, complete with exploding bullets). Reagan, on the other hand refused to change his stance on gun control until 1991. It’s possible that he was already in the opening stages of Alzheimer’s, but this is hardly an exoneration of ideological consistency. It just makes his refusal to reconsider his stand, pathological instead of stubborn. Someone should have told him earlier that it’s not a crime to stand corrected.

Apparently though, in this country it is: Nycole Turmel has been asked to account for her political past in almost every major Canadian newspaper, and the The Toronto Star’s National Affairs columnist Tim Harper (no relation to Steve) wasn’t merely incensed by the Interim leader’s alleged turncoat behavior, but practically spooked: “The Bloc,” he wrote in his Tuesday column this week, “is unlike any party, given its ultimate goal”. That “ultimate goal” is of course, sovereignty, which according to Harper (not Steve) renders any politician who’s had the slightest brush with it is automatically unfit for Federal duty. Turmel claims she only joined the BQ to support a friend who belonged to it (a strange explanation, probably made to quell the backlash and avoid further reproach) but it’s entirely possible that sovereignty no longer agreed with her, and so she chose instead to join a party committed solely to endeavors of the lefty, socialist ilk, minus the often distracting and counterproductive “national question” engrained in Quebecois politics. If so, it’s not as though she switched sides in a war. She simply saw things differently. Better a leader with a wealth of perspective, than a pittance.
At the end of the day, however, it doesn’t matter if Nycole Turmel is, in her heart of hearts, a reformed separatist, self-loathing Federalist, or woman with a secret evil plan to realize the “ultimate goal” of sovereignty. The truth is that her feelings towards our great nation are most likely irrelevant, because it’s not the personal politics that dictate a politician, but the party line. Turmel is NDP Interim leader and come Canada Day, it won’t matter if she was a Black Panther, or card-carrying member of the Bloc Quebecois, because she’ll be waving the Canadian flag in a Roots windbreaker with the rest of them.

‘Profound unease’

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, August 5, 2011 at 3:31 PM - 40 Comments

An anonymous NDP staffer claims deep concern within the party over Nycole Turmel’s political past.

“The profound unease that’s taken over the party is that there was a large number of people, the majority of people, who voted didn’t know then. And that’s a very, very serious unease, because it’s a crisis of confidence. When we take a party membership, it’s not a sign of friendship…. It’s a commitment, it’s an adherence to a philosophy,” he said. ”You can’t lead a federalist party when you were sufficiently involved in a separatist party or parties.”

‘In Quebec it is not that big a deal’

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 4, 2011 at 4:20 PM - 18 Comments

Francois-Pierre Gingras defends Nycole Turmel’s sovereignist associations.

“It will make a good number of Canadians itchy, but in Quebec it is not that big a deal,” he said. “In the case of Quebec, provincial nationalism permeates politics. Almost every party for the last 50 to 75 years has been nationalist one way or another. Nationalist doesn’t necessarily mean in favour of independence, it means in favour of [Quebecers].”

This is similar to the argument our own Martin Patriquin made yesterday.

‘Anger is another word for fear’

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 4, 2011 at 1:36 PM - 67 Comments

Brian Topp pushes back against the criticism of Nycole Turmel.

Certainly, none of the current noise has anything to do with the unity of the country. Because if the unity of the country were the issue, then the recruitment of an articulate, effective, high-profile female Francophone Quebec labour leader to the cause of Canada would be widely celebrated — not subjected to buckets of obsessive anger.

Rob Silver mocks.

Nycole Turmel disappoints Stephen Harper

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 4, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 8 Comments

The Prime Minister says he is profoundly saddened by Nycole Turmel’s associations with sovereignists.

“I think it’s very disappointing,” Harper said when asked about Turmel by reporters while handing out scholarships at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. “I don’t know that I have a lot to say but I do think Canadians will find this disappointing. I think Canadians expect that any political party that wants to govern the country be unequivocally committed to this country. I think that’s the minimum Canadians expect.”

Mr. Harper’s own historical attitude toward Quebec politics might be said to be somewhat complicated. The NDP says, for instance, that there are two ministers in Mr. Harper’s cabinet who were previously associated with sovereignists. There is, as well, whatever he and Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe discussed in 2004 and what he and Tom Flanagan wrote in 1997 about the role Quebec nationalists might play in bringing a conservative government back to power.

Turmel and the Bloc: er, so what?

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, August 3, 2011 at 12:02 PM - 152 Comments

As a person who digests the news as part of my job, I love the fact that the Nycole Turmel was until recently a member of the Bloc Québécois. It’s a brilliant story: the interim leader of a wholeheartedly federalist party was until this past winter a member of another, this one dedicated to removing roughly eight million of its citizens from the Canadian equation. Big kudos to the Globe’s Daniel Leblanc for digging it up.

But as someone who has lived in this delightful province for all but five years of my life (there was an exile to New Brunswick that’s a bit of a blur), I say this: big deal. The deep lefty streak that runs through Quebec is, by definition, proudly coloured fleur-de-lys blue. Translation: Continue…

Nycole Turmel and the sovereignists

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 at 12:16 PM - 103 Comments

This post last updated at 5:30pm.

The Globe and Mail discovers that Nycole Turmel was a member of the Bloc Quebecois.

According to information obtained by The Globe and Mail, the 68-year-old became a member of the Bloc Québécois in December, 2006, the year she retired as president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada. She sent back her membership card to the Bloc on Jan. 19 of this year in a signed letter to then-Bloc MP Carole Lavallée. “Enclosed is my Bloc Québécois membership card, which I wish to cancel. I wish to state that my request has nothing to do with the party’s policies, I am doing this for personal reasons,” Ms. Turmel wrote. She then wished “good luck” to Ms. Lavallée, who went on to be defeated by an NDP candidate in the May 2 general election. In addition to her membership in the Bloc, Ms. Turmel made four donations totalling $235 to the party between 2006 and 2011, according to party records. The donations, which ranged from $35 to $100, were not made public because they are under the $200 threshold for disclosure by political parties.

The NDP is playing down the revelation, but it is being reported—and the NDP now confirms—that Ms. Turmel remains a member of Quebec Solidaire. Rob Silver has eight questions for the New Democrats.

12:41pm… The Globe reports that Conservative MPs and supporters were briefed on Ms. Turmel’s ties to separatists in a memo distributed late last week. The Star notes that some of these issues were raised in April during the election campaign. Continue…

Talk of the town

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 7:45 AM - 2 Comments

Graham Hughes/CP

On a recent Wednesday, Liette Carle was bicycling along the main strip of Louiseville, Que., a town of about 7,500 about an hour’s drive northeast of Montreal, when she came upon a swarm of journalists in front of the town hall building. In the midst of it all was Ruth Ellen Brosseau, the local NDP candidate, who earlier this month defeated the two-term Bloc Québécois incumbent seemingly despite herself.

“I’m happy to meet you,” Carle said, en français. Brosseau said the same back, thereby exploding one of the myths about the 27-year-old politician: her French is actually quite good, despite claims to the contrary floated in the press during the election.

The non-journalist crowd, Carle included, was instantly smitten with the intensely friendly woman in a black pantsuit. Really, though, Carle would have voted for just about anything with an NDP orange hue. She didn’t care that Brosseau had never set foot in the district until that day, or that she’d spent a considerable part of the campaign vacationing in Las Vegas. Carle didn’t even blink at the post-election news that Brosseau’s resumé had been mildly embellished on the party website. “I didn’t vote for Brosseau,” Carle says over red wine and radishes at her kitchen table. “J’ai voté pour Jack.”

Continue…

Where the votes were

By Philippe Gohier - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 4:31 PM - 43 Comments

Working with the rebate threshold, Alice Funke tallies the number of ridings in which each party received at least 10% of the vote. Those totals are as follows, with changes from 2008 in brackets.

NDP 306 (+63)
Conservatives 283 (-15)
Liberals 217 (-52)
Bloc Quebecois 65 (-6)
Greens 8 (-34)

Alice also busts a few myths while she’s at it.

How in God’s name do you explain?

By Rick Mercer - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:25 AM - 111 Comments

Rick Mercer

Having led the Conservative party to a majority government, with the Liberal party lying bloodied and dying at his feet, Stephen Harper saw the breadth of his domain and wept, for he had no more worlds to conquer.

Twenty-four hours before Canada went to the polls, I went on BBC Radio International to explain to a very pleasant radio personality with excellent diction why Canada was having yet another election.

Now it’s one thing to go on the radio and blather about politics in Canada—the audience knows the cast of characters and it’s safe to assume they are somewhat familiar with our recent history. But when you go on BBC International, the audience is in the tens of millions worldwide and you have to bear in mind that the average listener is likely tuning in from a shantytown in Nigeria or a loft in Oslo.

Continue…

The untold story of the 2011 election: Chapter 6

By Paul Wells - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 59 Comments

Jonathan Hayward/CP

Introduction: Politics turned over
How Harper got what he’s always wanted, Layton took centre stage, and Ignatieff and Duceppe were done in

Chapter 1: The first mistake
The seeds of Michael Ignatieff’s troubles were planted last fall, and by the Liberals themselves

Chapter 2: Not feeling the love
Harper was tightly controlled, Ignatieff loose and freewheeling. Layton? Just a guy most Canadians would rather have a beer with

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation
The PM had problems: the auditor general kerfuffle, Bruce Carson, the folks kicked out of rallies. The Liberals railed, but the NDP stepped up.

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat
The leaders clashed predictably in the TV debates, but the election would soon turn unexpectedly on two key speeches: one by Ignatieff, one by Duceppe

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises
Years of quiet preparation in Quebec begin paying off for the NDP—Layton’s rivals wake up to a new reality

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead
What do Harper and Layton have in common? An understanding of what works in Canadian politics in the Twitter age­—patience and determination.

To read the entire article now, pick up the latest issue of Maclean’s at your favourite newsstand.

*****

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead

In the end, Stephen Harper’s party won 167 seats and 39.62 per cent of the popular vote. The players in the Conservative war room betting pool guessed low. But then conservatism is sometimes associated, even by conservatives themselves, with pessimism: it holds that human nature is not perfectible on this Earth, and that it rarely does any good to sit around hoping for the best. Harper marked his victory by receiving congratulatory calls from Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron. The laconic accounts of these calls from Harper’s spokesman mentioned that the current shooting wars in Afghanistan and Libya, where Canada still has soldiers risking their lives, were among the subjects of conversation. Silver linings always come tucked into clouds.

At its worst, Harper’s pessimism about human nature hurts the country and discourages his own government’s political staff. They believe they are doing good work for Canadians. They would like to say so. The layers of threat and secrecy Harper has relied upon feel silly to them. Harper has pursued free trade with Europe without talking about the merits of trade with Europe. He wants to redefine Canada’s border relationship with the United States a lot more than he wants to explain what that would entail.

The budget he will now use his majority to pass listed, but did not describe, more than $2 billion in cuts to government spending. On many days during this campaign, a bored reporter could amuse himself by seeking an explanation for those very considerable cuts from incumbent Conservative cabinet ministers or senior staffers. Not a peep. Now we will all find out. The two drafts of Sheila Fraser’s G8 audit that leaked during the campaign were not the final draft. Now we will get to see the final draft. What the French call “l’usure du pouvoir”—the wear of power—will continue.

Continue…

The untold story of the 2011 election: Chapter 5

By Paul Wells - Sunday, May 8, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 38 Comments

Photograph by Jenna Marie Wakani

Introduction: Politics turned over
How Harper got what he’s always wanted, Layton took centre stage, and Ignatieff and Duceppe were done in

Chapter 1: The first mistake
The seeds of Michael Ignatieff’s troubles were planted last fall, and by the Liberals themselves

Chapter 2: Not feeling the love
Harper was tightly controlled, Ignatieff loose and freewheeling. Layton? Just a guy most Canadians would rather have a beer with

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation
The PM had problems: the auditor general kerfuffle, Bruce Carson, the folks kicked out of rallies. The Liberals railed, but the NDP stepped up.

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat
The leaders clashed predictably in the TV debates, but the election would soon turn unexpectedly on two key speeches: one by Ignatieff, one by Duceppe

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises
Years of quiet preparation in Quebec begin paying off for the NDP—Layton’s rivals wake up to a new reality

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead
What do Harper and Layton have in common? An understanding of what works in Canadian politics in the Twitter age­—patience and determination.

To read the entire article now, pick up the latest issue of Maclean’s at your favourite newsstand.

*****

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises

“It’s whether we elect parliamentarians to bicker or build that will be the defining issue of our time,” Jack Layton said at the Toronto convention where he became NDP leader on Jan. 26, 2003. “And we say, let’s build.”

Kudos for prescience, then. (The same weekend, Layton also said, “Canadians must rise up.” Spooky.) But when the building finally paid off and the rising began, it was in Quebec. There are reasons for that. Neither the weakness of the Bloc Québécois nor the NDP’s ability to capitalize on it came out of nowhere. Indeed, the NDP’s attempt to reach out to Quebec francophones is as old as the party itself.

Since the 1930s, the party’s predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, had support only among Quebec’s anglophone Montrealers. Francophones saw it as a creature of English Canada. The archbishop of Montreal warned Roman Catholics not to support this socialist menace. So at the NDP’s founding convention in 1961, organizers were so happy to see a few francophone nationalists show up that they basically let them write the party’s constitutional policy. The results included very Quebec-friendly language on “co-operative federalism, equality of rights for the French and English languages, the right of a province to opt out of joint federal-provincial programs within provincial jurisdiction without financial penalty, and the recognition of French Canada as a nation,’’ Michael Oliver and Charles Taylor wrote in a 1991 book, Our Canada. The party’s first president, associate president and vice-president were Quebec francophones.

Continue…

The untold story of the 2011 election: Chapter 4

By Paul Wells - Saturday, May 7, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 25 Comments

Fred Chartrand/CP

Introduction: Politics turned over
How Harper got what he’s always wanted, Layton took centre stage, and Ignatieff and Duceppe were done in

Chapter 1: The first mistake
The seeds of Michael Ignatieff’s troubles were planted last fall, and by the Liberals themselves

Chapter 2: Not feeling the love
Harper was tightly controlled, Ignatieff loose and freewheeling. Layton? Just a guy most Canadians would rather have a beer with

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation
The PM had problems: the auditor general kerfuffle, Bruce Carson, the folks kicked out of rallies. The Liberals railed, but the NDP stepped up.

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat
The leaders clashed predictably in the TV debates, but the election would soon turn unexpectedly on two key speeches: one by Ignatieff, one by Duceppe

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises
Years of quiet preparation in Quebec begin paying off for the NDP—Layton’s rivals wake up to a new reality

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead
What do Harper and Layton have in common? An understanding of what works in Canadian politics in the Twitter age­—patience and determination.

To read the entire article now, pick up the latest issue of Maclean’s at your favourite newsstand.

*****

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat

The Government Congress Centre across from the Château Laurier used to be the old Ottawa train station. In the 1960s, government planners decided they had a better idea and moved the trains out to a secluded corner of southeastern Ottawa. As is often the case with government planners, this was not, in fact, a better idea. They made taking the train a pain and left one of the grandest buildings in the Parliament Hill precinct nearly derelict. Sometimes men in suits shuffle in for conferences. Once a year, reporters are locked up in the old building for a few hours with sandwiches and copies of the federal budget. And for two nights in April, Stephen Harper faced his tormentors for the nationally televised leaders’ debates.

“There was a sense coming out of the debates last time”—in 2008—“that it was a four-on-one ambush,” a Conservative strategist said later. “Harper was under attack from all sides, and our positioning in the last debates was too defensive and we didn’t look our best. We knew that we would still face that three-on-one or four-on-one dynamic this time.” In the end it was three. Green party Leader Elizabeth May wasn’t invited. “The goal was to try and recast or reframe it so that rather than looking like we were the ones under attack, there would be a pivot away from the others, into the camera, to use the opportunity to drive the ballot question with the viewers at home. Number one, don’t make a mistake. Number two, try and strategically minimize the others by making a more direct connection with the viewer at home.”

And indeed, Harper spent the debate’s first night physically pivoting away from whoever was accusing him of something and staring into the camera. Angry Harper would come out if he fought back at his opponents, so he basically didn’t engage. “That’s simply not true,” he said again and again, before telling the home audience a tale of modest, responsible government that had not very much to do with whatever the other guy had just shouted at him.

Continue…

How Justin Trudeau could have changed electoral history

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 5 Comments

Mark Blinch/Reuters; Photograph by Mitchel Raphael

Victory moustaches!

At the Toronto NDP victory celebration, which was filled with people sporting fake Jack Layton moustaches, the partiers kept the music playing over Michael Ignatieff’s concession speech as it was broadcast on giant screens. They turned the music down for all of Gilles Duceppe’s, and for half of Green Leader Elizabeth May’s. When Layton acknowledged the campaigns of the other leaders, May got the most applause. Layton was happy about the re-election of his wife, Olivia Chow. There had been a huge battle to keep her riding safe. The week before the vote, Liberals Bob Rae (who won) and Gerard Kennedy (who lost) went to Chow’s riding to support the Liberal candidate there. The NDP claimed it was an attempt to get at Layton by doing everything they could to take down his wife. Chow had her stepson, Toronto city councillor Mike Layton, helping her with door knocking, since the area he represents overlaps with hers. For his efforts, he ended up with a pile of complaints from constituents about local problems, mostly broken sidewalks and potholes.

Mulcair’s strategy

Each day during the election campaign, Thomas Mulcair would have a conference call with all the other Quebec NDP candidates. There were ridings they knew they could win, ridings in which they thought they had a chance, and ridings where the odds were against them. When candidates would report suspicious things like a large number of their signs being removed, Mulcair said that was their way of knowing the competition must be worried and they took it as a signal they should up their game in those areas.

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