The Liberal ‘debate’ in Winnipeg: so laid-back, not much laid bare

By John Geddes - Saturday, February 2, 2013 at 6:13 PM - 0 Comments

Liberal party leadership candidates Joyce Murray, Justin Trudeau, Marc Garneau, David Bertschi, Martha Hall Findlay, Deborah Coyne, Karen McCrimmon, George Takach and Martin Cauchon at the end of the Liberal Party of Canada leadership debate in Winnipeg, Saturday, Feb. 2, 2013. (John Woods, The Canadian Press)

What are the most urgent matters confronting the federal government just now?  I ask because I wonder if anybody heard the issues they’d list mentioned much at the Liberal leadership debate—well, not really a debate, but a series of laid-back on-stage interviews—in Winnipeg this afternoon.

Reasonable observers will naturally differ on such a broad question. Still, I’d expect, if we’re talking domestic policy, many to cite the dicey problem of budget-making during such a prolonged stretch of slow economic growth. How to shrink the deficit while still maintaining, even expanding, priority programs? It’s the daily dilemma of governing. It didn’t come up.

On foreign policy, Mali is driving home the lesson that even with Canadian troops no longer fighting in Afghanistan, the pressures of Islamist extremism in vulnerable, far-away countries will continue to demand responses from western nations, Canada inevitably included. Again, not touched at today’s Liberal event.

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Live: The Liberal Not-A-Debate in Winnipeg

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, February 2, 2013 at 1:50 PM - 0 Comments

The Liberals are holding their leadership debate (or, rather, their first series of “Davos-style” conversations with the candidates) in Winnipeg this afternoon. Each of the contenders will sit down for an 11-minute conversation with Harvey Locke, the Liberal candidate in last year’s Calgary Centre by-election.

You can stream the proceedings here. We’ll start the live blog shortly (hit refresh for the latest update).

2:00pm. So, again, this is “Davos-style,” only without all the powerful and influential people that make Davos interesting. At least Winnipeg is a more interesting place than Switzerland.

2:03pm. First up is Karen McCrimmon. First question from Mr. Locke isn’t actually a question: “Please tell us a personal insight that you’d like Canadians to have about you.”

2:05pm. Second question: There is a perception that we’re an urban party beyond the Maritimes, should we do more to attract rural voters? Tough one. Ms. McCrimmon goes with “absolutely.”

2:10pm. There now seems to be some kind of disruption. Someone is banging on a drum and shouting.

2:11pm. Mr. Locke and Ms. McCrimmon are attempting to talk over the noise. Apparently the disruption, now concluded, was related to Idle No More.

2:14pm. Next up, Marc Garneau. He likes to do household chores, particularly vacuuming.

2:18pm. Adam Goldenberg argues this format is valuable because a party leader will do many one-on-one interviews. Perhaps. But these seem to be the easiest interviews a politician will ever do. If this is a test, it’s a pretty basic test.

2:24pm. If the challenge is basically surface-level: looking and sounding the part, Mr. Garneau did fairly well there. Looks and sounds like an experienced politician.

2:30pm. Joyce Murray might make a good environment minister in a Liberal government.

2:32pm. I hope one of the candidates answers one of Locke’s questions with “no comment.”

2:34pm. Ms. Murray busts Mr. Locke for being too long-winded in this questions. That will be the sharpest exchange of the afternoon. Suggested headline: “Murray lands knockout punch on Locke”

2:36pm. Justin Trudeau goes with the “no jacket/rolled up sleeves” look. Very Jack Layton. Asked for a personal anecdote, he says he misses his children. Boom. That is how you do politics. And then, somehow, he segues from that into a comment on the young people in Idle No More and an acknowledgement of the protester. Double Boom.

2:38pm. Mr. Trudeau launches into a defence of supply management, which serves as a swipe at Martha Hall Findlay.

2:41pm. Thinking back on Mr. Trudeau’s opening remarks, he probably missed an obvious opening to sing the first verse of the Greatest Love of All. Bit of a mistake. But he’ll learn not to let those opportunities go missed.

2:46pm. Mr. Trudeau explains that he has been to Sweden and that Canada needs its own Ikea (I’m paraphrasing). So there’s Scott Feschuk’s next column.

2:48pm. Deborah Coyne’s personal anecdote is that it’s Groundhog Day and she loves the movie, Groundhog Day, and that the movie is sort of an analogy for the Liberal party’s present challenge. Idea alert: What the Liberal party needs is Bill Murray.

2:59pm. David Bertschi comes out wearing a Liberal party scarf. In case there was some doubt about which party he supports.

3:04pm. The professionalization of politics is a touchy subject and it’s problematic to argue against political participation: But can we have a Davos-style conversation about who should be running for leader of a political party? If you’ve never held political office, how well can you hope to lead a party in a parliamentary system? Set aside the question of finding a seat to win so that you can sit in the House (Jean Chretien, Stephen Harper and Jack Layton didn’t have seats when they became party leaders). What evidence is there that individuals who’ve never been elected can win a party leadership and then succeed in that role? Haven’t the most successful political leaders of the last 20 years been experienced, practiced politicians? What evidence is there that outsiders or unconventional politicians can succeed? What does this tell us about politics? Should we, perhaps, view politics as we do any other profession: something at which you must be experienced in to succeed?

3:14pm. Martin Cauchon warns that dumping supply management means eating unsafe food.

3:18pm. Here’s one request I’d make: If you enter a party leadership race as a relative long shot, bring some unique angle to the race. Call it the Ron Paul Rule (or the Rick Santorum Rule, or maybe the Nathan Cullen Rule). Joyce Murray is sort of doing this with electoral cooperation and Martha Hall Findlay is kind of doing this with supply management. But you should have either a particular ideology or a set of really bold policy proposals.

3:24pm. Martha Hall Findlay defends ending supply management. This is a fun debate. Ms. Hall Findlay is smart to make it about the cost of food for families.

3:32pm. Ms. Hall Findlay accuses Mr. Locke of asking too easy a question about crime policy.

3:33pm. Ms. Hall Findlay says the Liberals should have done a better job standing up to the government’s crime bills in the last two parliaments. The party needs more courage. Fair enough. Where was that courage at the time?

3:36pm. George Takach describes him as the “tech candidate.” I’m not sure that meets the Ron Paul Rule. Unless Mr. Takach’s answer to every dilemma is computers. (Although that would be interesting.)

3:39pm. Mr. Takach really wants to fight somebody.

3:44pm. Mr. Takach, answering a question about supply management, “And I will weave in my modest upbringing.” Very meta.

3:46pm. Closing statements. No lectern and all the candidates are on the stage at the same time. Ms. Murray pitches cooperation and picks up on Ms. Coyne’s Groundhog Day analogy. Mr. Trudeau pitches his democratic reforms. Mr. Garneau says the Liberal leader needs to be clear and specific about what he or she wants to do (subtext: Mr. Trudeau isn’t being clear enough about what he would do and where he stands). Ms. Hall Findlay says she’s pretty good with substantive policy and that this is about substance, experience and intelligence and tough decisions and courage and that there are no silver bullets (subtext: Mr. Trudeau is the silver bullet I’m contrasting myself with). Mr. Takach criticizes Mr. Locke for not asking enough questions about the economy.

4:01pm. And that’s that. This changes… probably not much. My general take on this race remains the same as it was two weeks ago.

Aaron Wherry’s formerly live blog of the Liberal leadership debate

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, January 20, 2013 at 3:44 PM - 0 Comments

From left to right, federal Liberal leadership candidates Justin Trudeau, Martin Cauchon, Karen McCrimmon, Joyce Murray, Martha Hall Findlay, George Takach, Deborah Coyne, David Bertschi and Marc Garne after the party's first leadership debate in Vancouver, B.C., on January 20, 2013. (Darryl Dyck, THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Welcome to live coverage of the first Liberal leadership debate. The debate begins at 4 p.m. EST and can be streamed at CPAC.ca, Liberal.ca and CBC.ca. CPAC and CBC News Network are also carrying the proceedings on television.

We’ll commence the live blog shortly. Hit refresh for the latest updates.

3:49pm. The theme of this debate is “Can anyone here pierce the aura of invincibility that surrounds Justin Trudeau?” The first round will focus on hair care. Officially, there will be opening statement, then two questions for all nine candidates, then 12 mini-debates among groups of three candidates and then closing statements.

3:52pm. Despite the fact that there are nine candidates, the Liberal party has apparently declined to use a Hollywood Squares setup.

3:56pm. Here are your official themes for the afternoon: aboriginal issues, the environment, social housing, Pacific Rim Trade and electoral cooperation and reform.

4:05pm. Legalized weed obviously gets the first applause of the afternoon.

4:10pm. Marc Garneau goes with a Kim Campbell joke. (The one about how she said an election wasn’t the time to discuss policy serious issues.) Probably gets his point across: He’s about policy, not nice hair. But Kim Campbell said that 20 years ago. Most of the NDP caucus wasn’t even in grade school when she made that gaffe. It’s time to get a new punchline.

4:15pm. Justin Trudeau does his Trudeau thing: staring into the nation’s soul, enthusing about the possibility of greatness and so forth.

4:19pm. There are four people on stage who ran for the Liberals in 2011 and lost. If you ran for the Liberals in 2011 and lost, there’s a 1.5 per cent chance that you’re a leadership candidate now.

4:24pm. Opening statements give way to a discussion of aboriginal issues. Time for collaboration and discussion and cooperation and leadership, everyone seems to agree. Martha Hall Findlay is really mad that Thomas Mulcair suggested that some progress had been made with last week’s meeting between the Prime Minister and First Nations. “The gaul!” she says. For that matter, if the NDP hadn’t helped defeat the Liberal government in 2004, the Kelowna Accord would’ve been implemented. Liberals love talking about the Kelowna Accord. New Democrats and Conservatives would probably love to talk about why the Liberal government fell in 2004.

4:37pm. Nobody but Joyce Murray wants to work with the NDP. She is the Liberal party’s Nathan Cullen. Well-positioned for a strong third-place finish. Karen McCrimmon argues that the best countries in the world have more than two parties. Risky move to openly disparage the United States and China like that.

4:42pm. Marc Garneau notes his ranked ballot proposal. Martha Hall Findlay endorses the idea. How about a coalition? Are any of these candidates willing to say they’d entertain the possibility of forming a coalition—either as the junior or senior partner—after the 2015 election?

4:46pm. With everyone but Ms. Murray having dismissed electoral cooperation with the New Democrats, an audience member asks how the Liberals might cooperate with the New Democrats in 2015 (because Mackenzie King did it once, apparently). Deborah Coyne allows for the possibility of post-election cooperation.

4:51pm. Martha Hall Findlay raises the example of Liberals voting for Joe Clark in Calgary in 2000 as an example of… something. The Liberals need their Joe Clark? Liberals need to be willing to vote for other parties?

4:53pm. On the issue of energy development and sustainability, Marc Garneau notes that he was an astronaut. David Bertschi and George Takach make fun of him. Mr. Takach refers to himself as “the tech candidate.” Mr. Garneau says he is also a tech candidate. Mr. Takach suggests that Mr. Garneau cannot be both the astronat and the tech candidate. That’s about the extent of the disagreement so far.

5:00pm. Joyce Murray shouts out a “price on carbon.”

5:06pm. A mini-debate on scrapping first-past-the-post. Karen McCrimmon wants to circulate petitions to determine what people want. I suspect this would result in the people demanding a Death Star.

5:09pm. Justin Trudeau wants a ranked ballot. Joyce Murray wants to cooperate with the NDP. Mr. Trudeau happily takes the opportunity to champion a principled Liberal party. Ms. Murray challenges him to demonstrate he has a plan to defeat Stephen Harper. Mr. Trudeau happily takes the opportunity to champion the Liberal party. Here’s my question: How do you cooperate with the NDP if the NDP doesn’t want to cooperate? Are you hoping that NDP riding associations will go maverick and dare Thomas Mulcair to stop them from cooperating with Liberals?

5:16pm. I think David Bertschi just took another shot at the fact that Marc Garneau was in space while Bertschi was doing stuff on earth. How big is the anti-space vote in the Liberal party? Is this an attempt to repeat the Conservative campaign against Michael Ignatieff?

5:24pm. Mr. Takach loves the Internet. He needs to go further with this. Replace the House of Commons with gchat. Reorient our military to cyber-warfare. Give every citizen an iPhone. Turn Manitoba into a cyberworld like Tron.

5:34pm. A three-person debate about living conditions for First Nations and social housing gives Marc Garneau, Justin Trudeau and Martha Hall Findlay a chance to perform directly beside each other. All three probably come away feeling fairly good about their 90 seconds. Give those three an hour on stage together and you might get a real debate (or the sort that could shake this race up a bit).

5:44pm. There’s obviously a good reason to avoid a divisive leadership race: you want to avoid splitting the party, you don’t want to give the Conservatives or New Democrats any fodder for future attacks (remember those Conservative ads with Michael Ignatieff telling Stephane Dion that the Liberals didn’t get it done?). But the conventional wisdom here is that there’s an obvious and clear frontrunner (Mr. Trudeau). So can the other candidates resist the urge to attack him? Can they afford to (if they truly think they have a chance of winning)? Do they just hope he self destructs with his own gaffes? One possible caveat: if, say, the Garneau campaign has some sense that on the ground Mr. Trudeau’s advantage isn’t as great as the conventional wisdom assumes and that, as a result, they can win without having to tear him down.

5:54pm. Joyce Murray shouts out marijuana. More applause. How does the Marijuana Party respond to this? Their central agenda has been completely hijacked by the Liberals. Do they move on to harder drugs? Do they present the Liberals with a proposal to run joint nomination meetings ahead of 2015?

5:57pm. A question about putting a price on carbon. Deborah Coyne says “carbon tax.” Justin Trudeau says a lot of nice words about the unfortunate tenor of political discourse, notes that the Conservatives have acknowledged the need to put a price on carbon, but he doesn’t commit to how he’d put a price on carbon. George Takach says lots of nice words about political centrism and says there are “at least five ways” to put a price on carbon, one of which presumably the Liberals would go with if he was leader. I dare say the Conservatives have successfully scared the crap out of some of their rivals on this file.

6:06pm. Closing statements and that’s that. All in all, it was… fine. Nine candidates squeezed into two hours doesn’t allow for much of a debate. Probably a good day for Justin Trudeau, who showed again what he has to offer as a public figure and wasn’t obviously taken down a peg by any of the other candidates, and Marc Garneau, who made a concerted effort to set himself up as the anti-Trudeau and might’ve succeeded. See this tweet and this tweet from John Geddes. (And then this tweet from Alice Funke.) Not sure the conventional wisdom on this race changes much after this, but Mr. Garneau has to hope that, at the very least, the narrative now makes him the obvious (if still distant) second place.

Why no one is in a hurry to lead the Liberals

By Paul Wells - Monday, July 9, 2012 at 2:28 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

And now we bring you exciting news from the Liberal Party of Canada, where—no, wait! Come back!

The latest news from the Liberals is that Deborah Coyne has entered the race to become, more or less, depending on definitions, the party’s sixth national leader in a decade. (I never know how to count Bill Graham.) This is an exciting development if you’re the sort of person who wishes a conversation about politics were about any other conceivable topic, just, please, not politics, because it’s pretty easy to segue from talking about Deborah Coyne to talking about how Pierre Trudeau was the father of her daughter.

Bam! Suddenly the Liberal Party is about 14 times as interesting as it was a few minutes ago. You can measure this. There are instruments to measure such things.

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Toronto Pride draws most colours of political spectrum. (Anyone see blue?)

By Mitchel Raphael - Sunday, July 1, 2012 at 9:00 PM - 0 Comments

Liberal Interim leader Bob Rae.

Politicians were out for Toronto’s annual gay pride parade.

Toronto NDP MP Olivia Chow.

Sticker in honour of bearded NDP leader Thomas Mulcair.

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Deborah Coyne on her surprise bid for Liberal leadership

By John Geddes - Wednesday, June 27, 2012 at 12:44 PM - 0 Comments

Deborah Coyne, the Toronto-based lawyer and policy consultant, and mother of the late Pierre Trudeau’s only daughter, launched a surprise bid for the federal Liberal leadership today. True to her reputation for not holding back when it comes to discussing policy, Coyne’s website features her positions on everything from the environment to foreign policy.

She told Maclean’s that her connection with Trudeau is inevitably part of her personal story, but that as a political influence she sees his vision of federalism as part of a longer lineage of Canadian leaders going back to Sir John A. Macdonald. At 57, she hasn’t ever won an election, although she ran in 2006 in Toronto-Danforth, losing to the NDP’s Jack Layton.

Her most memorable foray onto the national political stage came in opposing the Meech Lake Accord, alongside Trudeau, and then leading one of the committees that campaigned successfully against the subsequent Charlotteown Accord, in the 1992 referendum on the constitutional reform package.

She is not close to Montréal MP Justin Trudeau, Pierre Trudeau’s eldest son, who is also contemplating a run for the party leadership. Her daughter Sarah, Justin’s half-sister, is entering her final year of undergraduate studies at a U.S. university, and reportedly won’t be part of her mother’s campaign.

We spoke by phone this morning.

Q: When did you decide to have a run?

A: I’ve been thinking about it since the election in May, when the party really bottomed out. But it’s been clear for a long time that the party has lost it’s raison d’etre. It came together in the last few months.

Q: Do you have a team to support your campaign?

A: I certainly have a lot of supporters and so forth. But that’s what I’ll be spending the next weeks doing—putting together a more formal team and a plan of action.

Q: You have a thorough policy dossier up on your website. Could you comment on just one aspect of it, your focus on the Occupy movement?

A: I’m the kind of person that sees connections everywhere. Last fall you could sense the mood out there, this sense that we’ve lost this social contract, even here [in Canada], although obviously the movement was more successful in the U.S.

But what I find difficult in a federation like ours is that so many people might be interested in pensions, or about employment, but there’s more than one level of government involved. It’s very hard to focus. They should have transparency. We don’t we have EI that isn’t at loggerhead with social assistance.

A lot of what I’ve written about is how you can get more coherence, and accept that the national government has a role to play in all these areas that people are concerned about.

Q: Doesn’t that bring us back to some old fed-prov jurisdictional and constitutional disputes?

A: What I’m talking about is not disputes and tiresome old debates. It’s about collaboration, putting some more structures—not constitutional at all—so we can have more collaboration, such as the do down in Australia.

Q: You environmental policy ideas will remind some Liberals of the disastrous Stéphane Dion campaign of 2008.

A: You’re talking about the so-called “Green Shift” and the fact that I’m putting forward a national carbon tax. The difficulty with Mr. Dion’s tax, and indeed the NDP’s position now, is the criticism that it’s a redistribution of wealth. That’s not what I’m talking about at all. The consensus is amazing, from environmental groups to the corporations, around a carbon tax that is across the country, levied on producers and consumers, in which the revenues go back to the provinces in which they are generated. I’m proposing a more effective way to bring to bear the cost of using fossil fuels.

Q: So you feel you’ve inoculated yourself against the criticism that a carbon tax is just a revenue grab against Alberta and the other oil and gas producing provinces?

A: Well, exactly. The whole idea is not to make money or redistributing money but to bring to bear the cost of using fossil fuels, and the damage of climate change, to all our daily lives.

Q: You seem to be broadly for a strong central government, as opposed to provincial autonomy.

A: The role of the national government is to ensure that all Canadians have access to essential services of comparable quality. We send billions and billions of dollars from the federal government to the provinces to try to achieve this. And yet we keep seeing greater and greater disparities. We need to get back to looking at that fundamental role of the federal government, how it can work with the provinces, but with clear direction to establishing acceptable national standards, whether in heath care or a wide range of services, in a collaborative way.

Q: Why try to revive the Liberal party, rather than urge a merger with the NDP to give voters who are interested in a plausible centre-left alternative to the Conservatives a clear choice?

A: I don’t see that as the obvious solution. I’m in this race because I’m hearing from so many Canadians that they don’t like being polarized, they don’t think it has to be big government and high taxes or small government and low taxes. There’s clearly room for a third party, and I would like to see it be a party of principle that really governs for all Canadians.

Q: You have a lot of ideas, but no track record of winning in electoral politics. Why shouldn’t Liberals look for someone who has won somewhere, at some level?

A: That’s true, I haven’t been elected to Parliament yet. I’ve been in various national debates, if you go back to Meech and Charlottetown. I don’t think that’s a negative. This is about rebuilding the great institution of the Liberal Party of Canada. Eventually I will get elected, the fact that I haven’t found the time or place to do it is also part of politics.

In this video from her website, Coyne explains her motivations: 

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

Deborah Coyne looks abroad.

We need to rethink how government should work with the social sector to overcome the inertia of a bureaucratic, rule-bound public sector. We should open up public services to new providers like charities, social enterprises, and private companies with the goal of increased social innovation, diversity, and responsiveness to public need.

One model of this kind of forward thinking is Barack Obama’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. Through the Social Innovation Fund, this department is creating new partnerships among government, private capital, social entrepreneurs, and the public.

Another model, the British “Social Impact Bond,” facilitates considerable up-front funding to non-profit organizations to create successful models for helping the young or the elderly. This Dragon’s Den approach secures long-term funds for promising ideas, with public investment tied to positive social, environmental, or economic benefits.

The Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation is online here. Last month, the British government launched a pilot project aimed at prisoner reform.

'Etherized upon a table'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 10, 2009 at 1:34 PM - 49 Comments

Susan Delacourt alerts us to Deborah Coyne’s call to arms in today’s Star, and reminds us that the government’s diminished capacity is not just a figment of Ms. Coyne’s imagination.

Eyes glaze over when such facts are laid out, but Canadians must resist and recognize this trend toward fiscal weakness means our national government will be unable to fulfill its duties across the broad spectrum: national standards for social, educational and environmental programs; comparable national public services and infrastructure; strategic investments in innovation and leading-edge industries; adequate support for our troops; equity and justice for aboriginal Canadians.

Almost every aspect of our daily lives, every serious challenge, has a global dimension necessitating global cooperation and solutions. Yet Canada’s influence and effectiveness on the international stage are being undermined by our internal incoherence and diminished national strength.