Quebec's religious vote (no, really!)

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, October 3, 2008 at 1:51 PM - 14 Comments

Surprising fact number one: Quebec has a sizable voting bloc consisting of regular church going folk. Who knew?

Surprising fact number two: Despite its overtures, most of this vote has remained out of the hands of the Conservatives.

Surprising fact number three? That voting bloc is and has long been the domain of a party headed up by a pro-choice, left-wing former Communist who has often decried the church’s meddling in state affairs.

See more after the jump.

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Coyne: This isn’t a culture war, it’s a good old class war

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, October 2, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 0 Comments

When Stephen Harper launched his now celebrated broadside at the cultural-industrial complex (“all sorts of people at a rich gala all subsidized by the taxpayer, claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough”), the response was as predictable as it was incoherent. In most countries, the argument for subsidy is couched in a huffy insistence that art is not a business like any other. But this is Canada, where rent-seeking is both our highest art and our most profitable business, so here artists have learned to protest that, in fact, they are a business, and should be subsidized like any other.

I don’t propose to rehash the whole argument here. (Interested readers will find the subject explored at punishing length at andrewcoyne.com/essays/Against_arts_subsidies.html.) Suffice it to say there is a difference between support of the arts and state support of the arts, and that the separation of art and state would be as much to the benefit of art as anything else. (“Above all,” said Dégas, “we must discourage the arts.”)

What was more interesting was the political response. The instant analysis from all corners of the political class was that Harper was playing “wedge politics,” using a largely symbolic issue—the $45 million in funding cuts that precipitated the fracas is a tiny fraction of the Heritage Department’s budget—as a means of splitting off one group of voters from another. This is commonly agreed to be a heinous crime, especially as practised by Conservative politicians. The possibility that those on the other side of the issue—the Liberals quickly announced an increase of $250 million in arts funding in response—might be doing the same thing does not seem to have occurred to anyone.

But of course they do. Just as Harper was appealing to his base (“ordinary working people” who “come home, turn on the TV” and see all those “rich galas” they paid for), so the Liberals were appealing to theirs (the people who receive the subsidies, and those who identify with them). Harper may have been tapping into the resentment his people feel for their people, but rest assured Stéphane Dion was doing exactly the same. Each, in his own way, was offering to protect his’n from their’n. In a word, it was about class: class envy, class snobbery, call it what you will, but that’s what it was.

Stumped

By John Geddes - Wednesday, October 1, 2008 at 10:32 AM - 7 Comments

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s always a pleasure for me to campaign here in Brisbane… Wait, that can’t be right…

So, let’s say, a pleasure to campaign in this particular city or town within the recognized borders of Canada, I would think.

Because in places like this I get to meet properly vetted folks, particularly those of you willing to array yourselves inside the camera shot behind me at my portable podium, fixing blank expressions on your faces even though you’re thinking the whole time about the possibility that we’re hurtling toward another Depression.
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A prayer for Owen Lippert

By John Geddes - Tuesday, September 30, 2008 at 4:38 PM - 28 Comments

“We’re going to put an end to the culture of entitlement, and replace it with a culture centered on accountability,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper, April 20, 2006.

But who is accountable for what a member of Parliament says in the House of Commons?

Warm feelings, strategic voting

By John Geddes - Saturday, September 27, 2008 at 7:34 PM - 17 Comments

How much strategic voting will go on come Oct. 14?

It’s an increasingly pressing question. Polls tells us a lot of traditionally Liberal voters are now leaning toward the NDP. In the remaining 17 days of the campaign, Stéphane Dion must persuade them either them to change their minds—a tall order once impressions have taken hold—or to stifle their favourable view of the NDP, and vote Liberal anyway.

In other words: vote strategically in order to block the Conservatives from winning a majority.

(Warning: much ivory-tower-eggheadishness ahead, which is almost as bad as rich-gala-going-artsy-elitism. Everyday common-sense folk, avert your eyes.)
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The culture thing

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 at 4:19 PM - 30 Comments

Now that opposition to Harper’s War on Culture™ has burgeoned from mere impolitic bitching from a few choice uppity artists to a full-blown, cross-platform, two-solitudes-smashing media extravaganza (Nat Post here; Globe and Mail here; CBC here; Radio-Canada here; Montreal Gazette here; La Presse here and here and here; TVA/LCN here), you have to ask yourself, as Deux maudits anglais did a few long days ago, how Stephen Harper, the supposedly brilliant campaigner, allowed this to happen. We haven’t talked to him recently–damned if he’ll return our calls!–but I’ll take a swipe at guessing his strategy regardless.

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Prostates are sexy too

By Cathy Gulli - Monday, July 28, 2008 at 5:09 PM - 0 Comments

Breast cancer is sometimes referred to (aptly if crassly) as the sexy cancer—the one that gets all the money and attention. Besides ribbons, you can find pens, mugs, clothing and journals in that ubiquitous pink.

But over the last couple of weeks another type of cancer or two has caught my eye.

There’s “The Underwear Affair” campaign for “cancers below the waist.”

And I just came across Pints for Prostates, which organizers say is “designed to reach men through the universal language of beer.”  

Let’s hope this is even more effective than it is amusing.