From the backroom to centerstage

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 12:08 PM - 4 Comments

After consulting with the Twitter hive mind, it seems the most comparable precedent for what Brian Topp would be trying to do is Brian Mulroney. Mr. Mulroney worked within the Progressive Conservative party before becoming leader. He, though, only won the leadership on his second try and that, along with his public profile in general, makes the comparison to Mr. Topp imperfect.

A few other names to include in this discussion: Stephen Harper, John Tory, Ed Miliband and David Cameron.

Messrs Harper, Miliband and Cameron were party strategists, but each won election as an MP before seeking their respective party leaderships. Mr. Tory was a strategist for the Progressive Conservative before he was elected leader of the Ontario PCs, but there was an unsuccessful run for mayor in Toronto in between.

Good to be lucky, lucky to be good

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 2:58 PM - 6 Comments

Ian Brodie quibbles with the suggestion that luck explains Stephen Harper’s success.

Merging the Reform-Alliance into the Conservative Party may have looked easy to outsiders obsessed with the drama of David Orchard’s efforts to block his Party’s ratification of the merger deal.  But Harper had worked long and hard to overcome years of Reform-Alliance hostility to Toryism, and reaped the benefit of that work when the time came to do the deal.  Keeping the new party unified and focused in the face of predictions of the coming Martin “juggernaut” may have looked easy to outsiders, but required careful internal leadership and work.  Snatching victory from the jaws of victory in the 2005-06 campaign looks, in retrospect, like the inevitable unfolding of history, but required two years of brutal, disciplined work.  And is it lucky to be in charge during a mammoth economic crisis?  Does having an excuse for spending billions on economic stimulus lead to political success?  Please, someone, ask Barack Obama.

If Brian Mulroney had been lucky enough to be in power during a long, global economic boom with very low interest rates, he and Mike Wilson would have balanced the federal budget.  Instead, Jean Chretien and Paul Martin were the lucky ones.  But let the Liberals keep on thinking that Harper’s success is the result of luck.  Let them believe their current crisis is the result of bad luck.  Whatever we do, don’t ever persuade them they need to change their approach.  Let them keep rolling the dice and betting the house.

Newsmakers: August 4-11, 2011

By Kate Lunau, Richard Warnica, Alex Ballingall and Emma Teitel - Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 8:15 AM - 0 Comments

Stan Behal/Toronto Sun/QMI Agency

All grown up

Brian Mulroney’s youngest son, 25-year-old Nicolas, who was born while the Mulroneys lived at 24 Sussex, tied the knot this week at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church on McCaul Street in downtown Toronto. Nicolas and Katy Carlyle Brebner, 26, are both bankers at RBC, where they met. The former prime minister told reporters the service was “very, very nice” and his son’s new bride is “a beauty.” Three hundred guests attended the afternoon service, including Nicolas’s brothers Ben and Mark, who served as best men; Mila, with Brian close behind, walked her youngest child down the aisle.

The guidettes take Italy

The bronzed, undereducated, ever-intoxicated cast of Jersey Shore returned to the small screen this week for a fourth season, this time in Italy—you know, the country with the peso for its currency, according to Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi. Although her “Italian” was limited to ciao and gracias—yes, really—Deena Cortese was in her element in the homeland, though she hates the pizza’s “thin, thin crust.” The food, in fact, was a miss for the gang from Jersey. “They didn’t even have bagels!” complained Mike “the Situation” Sorrentino, now calling himself “The Situatione.”

Not a braid out of place

Ukrainian folk hero Yulia Tymoshenko appeared in court last week, trademark braids neatly coiffed, despite having spent the previous three nights in prison. Tymoshenko was arrested for contempt of court after refusing to stand before the judge and repeatedly mocking him on Twitter. She’s made her feelings clear about the trial, which she views as an attempt to block her from running in future elections. Tymoshenko, the darling of the 2004 pro-Western Orange Revolution and currently a fierce opponent of President Viktor Yanukovych, faces charges of abuse of power over gas deals with Russia. Apparently unbowed after her weekend behind bars, she refused, once again, to stand before the judge on her return to court, yelling, “Glory to Ukraine!”

Continue…

Prime Minister of the last 43 years

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 3:11 PM - 26 Comments

Angus-Reid asks a thousand Canadians to identify the best and worst prime ministers since 1968. The results below (with changes from four years ago in parentheses).

Best
Trudeau 36% (+3)
Harper 19% (+5)
Chretien 12% (+4)
Mulroney 6% (-8)

Worst
Mulroney 19% (-1)
Harper 19% (+4)
Trudeau 13% (-)
Chretien 10% (-3) 

Mr. Trudeau tops 36% in British Columbia, the Prairies, Ontario and Atlantic Canada and bests Mr. Harper in every region except Alberta. Quebec is the only jurisdiction that ranks Mr. Harper less than second.

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…

This year's models

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 10:43 AM - 65 Comments

Welcome to live coverage of this morning’s cabinet shuffle, wherein we find out which backbenchers we have to pretend to take more seriously for the next little while.

There’s been a steady stream of Conservatives arriving at Rideau Hall and the Prime Minister is due shortly. So far we seem only to know for sure that John Baird will be the next Foreign Affairs Minister. Presumably he will be counted on to bluster away opposition criticism of the government’s international endeavours, charm foreign officials and periodically convene breathless news conferences to report the latest breathtaking developments in our make-believe war with Russia. Presumably he’ll do fine. His image problem notwithstanding.

10:45am. Our Andrew Coyne is already deeply disappointed with all of this. Follow his Twitter feed this morning to watch his head explode repeatedly.

10:52am. The Prime Minister has now arrived. The swearing in is to commence in about 20 minutes.

11:04am. CTV reports a 39-member ministry, which equals an all-time high mark. Welcome to the new era of smaller government.

11:07am. Peter Van Loan apparently goes back to House leader. Welcome to the new era of non-partisan Harper governance. Continue…

Ignatieff's pitch

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 11:55 AM - 29 Comments

I have a story in this week’s print edition about Michael Ignatieff’s position going into the last two weeks of this campaign and the complicated electoral math with which he is presently faced.

On Monday, somewhere between Yellowknife and Winnipeg, we sat for a chat. Some of what Mr. Ignatieff had to say made it into that story, but for your enlightenment—and as a demonstration of what a few days of travel does to my ability to form coherent questions—here is the transcript. Continue…

Putting Mulroney through the wring cycle

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 12:33 PM - 1 Comment

Alliance Atlantis

When they read the script for Mulroney: The Opera, the lawyers were anxious about the money shot: the scene of Brian Mulroney breast-stroking like Scrooge McDuck in a swimming pool full of cash. They feared it could be libellous. The former prime minister, after all, had admitted to taking a mere $225,000 from German lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber, not enough to fill an entire pool. When director Larry Weinstein explained that the wads of bills wouldn’t actually fill the pool, just float on the water’s surface, the lawyers figured that was okay.

Mulroney: The Opera is one of the most bizarre concoctions this country’s eccentric film industry has ever produced: a $3.8-million musical satire, almost entirely funded by the federal government, that amounts to a snake-oil portrait of an ex-prime minister as a lying, delusional, power-mad showboat of grotesque proportions. An original work riddled with allusions to Wagner and Mozart, Bizet and burlesque, this campy biopic condenses Mulroney’s life story into a 75-minute cartoon.

It may invite comparisons to last year’s Score: A Hockey Musical, a $5.3-million folly that bombed at the box office. (Next to hockey, political satire is arguably Canada’s most popular, and vicious, national sport.) But while Score was earnest romance, Mulroney: The Opera is monstrous caricature. And, spooked by Score‘s failure, its producers at Rhombus Media have come up with a novel way to spring it on audiences, using high art as the commercial hook. Mimicking the format of Cineplex’s The Met: Live in HD series, the movie is set to play on 72 screens across Canada as a single Saturday matinee, on April 16, followed by just one repeat showing on April 27. The general manager of the Metropolitan Opera will even introduce it on video.

Continue…

Statistical probabilities

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, March 3, 2011 at 9:18 AM - 51 Comments

Pollsters continue to debate the meaning and prominence of their work.

Gregg said the proliferation of sometimes conflicting polls and the hypeventilating analysis that frequently accompanies them does not strengthen democracy. On the contrary, he said: “Rather than have a public that’s informed, you have a public that’s misinformed.” He said he’s not arguing that polls should be ignored; only that their import needs to be interpreted much more cautiously. Rather than pontificate on weekly fluctuations in individual polls, he said it makes more sense to average the results of various surveys and look at the trends over longer periods of time.

It is probably important to consider, as Eric Grenier did this week, how much and how often polling responses change when an election campaign is conducted. Consider, for instance, that the last three changes in government were not obviously foretold by publicly available polling data released immediately before the election was called. Continue…

Go big, go home

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, January 24, 2011 at 2:50 PM - 25 Comments

Brian Mulroney offers some free advice to Stephen Harper.

“We make enough mistakes in politics but it’s important that you try to get the big things right,” the 71-year-old former Conservative prime minister says in an interview from his Montreal law office. “History remembers the big-ticket items.”

… His advice to Prime Minister Harper, especially given the partisan fighting that is so much part of a minority Parliament, is to create a blue ribbon panel of non-partisan, distinguished Canadians. “Someone has to provide some unbiased, thoughtful but effective leadership in the thinking on this,” he says. “Without some new thinking and some visionary approaches, health care is going to consume 70 to 75 per cent of provincial budgets.”

Setting aside what lessons Mr. Mulroney’s premiership may provide about the wisdom of striving for big change, Mr. Harper already dismissed this specific idea in an interview with Postmedia two weeks ago. Continue…

Those who do not remember history

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 at 12:42 PM - 138 Comments

From the Prime Minister’s statement today on last night’s by-election results.

“Though it is rare for a governing party to win by-elections, we are buoyed by the fact that the Conservative Caucus in the House of Commons has increased.”

As noted previously, and according to Wikipedia’s records, heading into last night 31 seats last held by the incumbent government have been contested in by-elections over the last 30 years, 22 of those—71%—remaining with the government.

Since taking office in 2006, the Harper government has now picked up four seats that were held by opposition parties. The Chretien government won an equal number of opposition seats between 1988 1993 and 2004. The Mulroney government retained six two of its nine six seats and picked up two opposition seats.*

You have to go back to the The Trudeau government to find an incumbent administration that significantly struggled in by-elections—between 1968 and 1979 1984, 20 25 Liberal government seats were contested, 11 13 of those going to the opposition by my count. Over But over the same period, the Liberals picked up three four opposition ridings.

Going back to 1968 then, a total of 57 53 seats last held by an incumbent government have been contested, 34 32 of those retained by the incumbent. Over that same period, the governing party has picked up a dozen seats held by opposition parties.

*Wells checked my math and it seems I took a slightly wrong turn somewhere in the 80s. Larger trend still holds.

Health care costs: putting our worries in context

By John Geddes - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 2:45 PM - 34 Comments

Worry about the cost of Canadian health care is growing among those who pay attention to how governments pay for programs, which is a good thing. But I think we should get straight on the strengths of the system before we start arguing in earnest about how to reform it.

Continue…

Brian Mulroney's frontbench top three

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 5:25 PM - 0 Comments

The former prime minister picks his three stars.

Instead the Mulroney honours go to Government House Leader John Baird, Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae and NDP Leader Jack Layton. He feels they are the three best “performers” in the House.

… Mr. Milnes said Mr. Mulroney gave his assessment in the “context of how important it is for a leader – or any effective politician – to inspire a crowd or the Commons itself.”

'A serious, adult discussion is called for'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 at 12:34 PM - 0 Comments

Brian Mulroney considers the future of health care (among other matters).

On health care, for instance, we need to strike a better balance between the intrinsic value of universal coverage for basic medical service and the capacity of Canadians to pay the necessary taxes to support the system. The OECD, not exactly known for radical analyses, recently concluded that, because our health-care system is not sustainable in its current form, some form of user fees and greater scope for competition within the system will be necessary.

The current federal-provincial funding formula ends in 2014. A serious, adult discussion is called for and I believe a blue ribbon panel of medical and financial experts could provide a sensible framework for the debate and for the decisions needed. Not surprisingly, the fundamental assumptions on which Justice Emmet Hall based his recommendations for medicare almost 50 years ago have changed and we need to adapt accordingly.

What lies beneath Quebec's scandals

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, September 24, 2010 at 5:50 PM - 0 Comments

JONATHAN HAYWARD/ JACQUES DESCHENES/CP

No, Quebec is not the only province where political scandal sometimes erupts. Governments and business have been corrupting each other across this country since pre-Confederation days. But in no other province does it feel quite so . . . inevitable. British Columbia has thrown up the odd chiselling premier, Atlantic Canada is famously steeped in patronage, but there is no comparison to the kind of octopussal industry-union-mob-party configuration lurking just below the surface of politics in Quebec. Toronto may have been scandalized by the cronyism of the Mel Lastman era, but only in Montreal would a candidate for mayor publicly confess to being afraid for his life. When a senior adviser to Ontario premier David Peterson was forced to resign after it was revealed he had accepted a refrigerator from a party donor with ties to a developer, puzzled Montrealers phoned their friends in Toronto, asking, ‘What was in the fridge?’ ”

The roots of corruption run deep in the province. Scrounging for funds to carry him through the 1872 election, the eminently corruptible Sir John A. Macdonald didn’t have far to look: Montrealer Sir Hugh Allan, said to be the richest man in Canada, was even then angling for the contract to build the CPR. Fifty years later, with Prohibition in force and Montreal a flourishing centre of the cross-border smuggling business, Mackenzie King saw fit to put Jacques Bureau in charge of the customs department, with comically debauched results: the scandal that ultimately led to the King-Byng affair.

Continue…

The inexperienced lifer

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

Over the weekend, Jeffrey Simpson lamented for the lifers he sees as presently dominating federal politics. He defined a lifer as one who has been involved for a long period of time at any level of politics, not just as a candidate or elected representative. In this way, for instance, Mr. Harper is a lifer because he has been involved in politics since the mid-80s.

The academic research in this regard—though Simpson’s definition complicates a direct comparison and his focus on party leaders is relevant—has generally raised the alarm about the exact opposite concern: that our MPs have too little experience and are too prone to turnover. To wit. Continue…

There’s a new Brian Mulroney

By Philippe Gohier - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Mila Mulroney

As a successful television host, Ben Mulroney has carved out a niche well outside the political world. But the eldest—by one minute—of his two sons born at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital last week won’t have to look far to find a reminder of his family’s connections to power. That’s because Ben and his wife, Jessica Brownstein, named him Brian Mulroney.

Ben had reportedly struck a pact with his siblings to ensure his first-born son would carry the paternal grandfather’s name. (The younger Brian’s twin, John, is named after his grandfather’s older brother, who died just hours after birth.)

Continue…

Better know a talking point

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, July 19, 2010 at 11:53 AM - 0 Comments

From the official government lines distributed over the weekend.

The Ignatieff Liberals promise to force all Canadians to answer personal and intrusive questions about their private lives under threat of jail, fine, or both.

Though the threat of imprisonment is included in the Statistics Act of 1970, no one has ever apparently been sent to prison for refusing to answer the census. The threat of a fine appears in both the Statistics Act and the Census Act of 1870. Until 1951, the census was conducted every 10 years, afterwards every five years.

The following prime ministers then—assuming the threat of a fine was not momentarily suspended between 1870 and 1970—would seem to have forced Canadians to answer personal and intrusive questions about their private lives under threat of jail or fine: John A. Macdonald (thrice), Wilfrid Laurier (twice), Arthur Meighen, RB Bennett, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Louis St. Laurent (twice), John Diefenbaker, Lester B. Pearson, Pierre Trudeau (thrice), Brian Mulroney (twice), Jean Chretien (twice) and Stephen Harper.

The judge isn’t buying it. Nor should we.

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, June 4, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 73 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

The word “inappropriate” appears literally dozens of times in the course of Justice Jeffrey Oliphant’s report on Brian Mulroney’s dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber. It was inappropriate, the judge found, for Mulroney to have met so many times with Schreiber while he was prime minister and Schreiber was an unregistered lobbyist, inappropriate for him to have entered into business with him scant weeks after leaving office—and on the same file, the Bear Head project, for which Schreiber had been lobbying his government all those years—inappropriate to have taken payments from Schreiber in cash, inappropriate to have kept them in cash, inappropriate not to have deposited the money in a bank account, or leave any other record of the transaction, whether contracts, invoices, receipts, expenses, tax returns or even a decent thank-you note.

Well, no. “Inappropriate” would be the word if Mulroney and Schreiber had entered into a legitimate business arrangement—if Mulroney had never had any dealings with Schreiber before leaving office, or if the business had nothing to do with government, or if it were anything, really, that anyone could attest to or understand or even describe—but had kept no record of it and dealt only in cash and done everything else they could do to conceal it. Or “inappropriate” would perhaps serve if Schreiber, having had privileged access to Mulroney in office and having enjoyed such notable success at winning lucrative contracts from his government, had retained him immediately afterward for some sort of murky “professional services” agreement but at least had kept all the appropriate records and perhaps used the odd bank now and then.

Continue…

The Commons: In search of loose change

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 at 6:17 PM - 49 Comments

The Scene. Michael Ignatieff began with an attempt to weave together various disparate strands to form a basket. A basket within which he could carry his message from one middle-class suburban door to the next.

Or something like that.

The Bank of Canada, he reported, had today hiked—the only word one can use when describing this action—interest rates. Canadian families are already more indebted than households anywhere else in the G20. The government is spending a billion to secure three days of meetings of G20 world leaders later this month. How, he wondered, could the government explain putting so much into the latter in light of the former?

Here, though, the Prime Minister stood with his own basket to weave. The interest rate hike, he said, was due to Canada’s sound economy. The G20 meetings, meanwhile, would bring as many delegates as the Olympics had athletes with even greater security risks. Ipso facto, the money simply has to be spent. Continue…

Oliphant on Mulroney and Schreiber: the last official report, perhaps

By John Geddes - Monday, May 31, 2010 at 5:40 PM - 30 Comments

Richard Wolson isn’t offering Canadians any hope of a satisfying conclusion—ever—in what must be the longest-running political scandal in the country’s history.

Wolson is the Winnipeg criminal lawyer whose trenchant questioning of witnesses was a big draw during the hearings held by Justice Jeffrey Oliphant is his Commission of Inquiry into Certain Allegations Respecting Business and Financial Dealings Between Karlheinz Schreiber and the Right Honourable Brian Mulroney. (Only the commission’s full name does justice to the interminable, wearying, dispiriting story beneath.)

Continue…

'I will leave it to others to assess the full impact of these events'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 31, 2010 at 4:18 PM - 44 Comments

Brian Mulroney releases a statement in response to the Oliphant report.

“While I have not yet had an opportunity to review Commissioner Oliphant’s final report, I have been briefed on its contents.

I was satisfied, but not surprised, to learn that the Commissioner has concluded that I did not, as Prime Minister, apply pressure to or attempt to influence my ministers or other government officials with respect to the promotion or approval of the Bear Head Project. The evidence presented during the inquiry demonstrated that the allegations made against me to that effect were completely false.

I was also pleased that the Commissioner confirmed that no agreement with Mr. Schreiber was reached while I was Prime Minister of Canada and, moreover, that the agreement reached after I left office was exclusively international in scope. To that end, I understand that the Commissioner was satisfied that I did nothing domestically to promote Thyssen or its objectives after I left office.

I genuinely regret that my conduct after I left office gave rise to suspicions about the propriety of my personal business affairs as a private citizen. I will leave it to others to assess the full impact of these events. For now, I am merely grateful that this unfortunate chapter is over and that my family and I can move forward with our lives.”

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.

'These dealings do not reflect the highest standards of conduct'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 31, 2010 at 1:24 PM - 64 Comments

Justice Oliphant’s public statement on his findings in the matter of Brian Mulroney and Karlheinz Schreiber is here.

His full report, in four volumes, is here.

Reviews from the Globe, Star, Canwest and CTV.