Who pays for what?

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, January 16, 2012 at 4:41 PM - 0 Comments

In an interview with the CBC—to be broadcast this evening—the Prime Minister rejects the idea of a health care innovation fund (as proposed by Brad Wall and endorsed by Dalton McGuinty).

“What I think we all want to see now from the premiers who have the primary responsibility here, is what their plan and their vision really is to innovate and to reform and to make sure the health-care system’s going to be there for all of us,” Harper said, according to an excerpt from the interview. “So I hope that we can put the funding issue aside, and they can concentrate on actually talking about health care, because that’s the discussion we’ll be having.”

The idea of a separate fund for the provinces to use for innovation in the delivery of health care got no support from the prime minister. ”I’m not looking to spend more money. I think we’ve been clear what we think is within the capacity of the federal government over a long period of time.”

Meanwhile, in an interview with CTV yesterday, Mr. McGuinty mused intriguingly of “disentanglement.”

The feds do jails and we do jails. The feds do training and we do training. The feds inspect meat and we inspect meat. Why don’t one of us, alone, take responsibility for some of those areas. I think that introduces more efficiencies, it introduces more transparency, accountability is more easily evident. I think those are the kinds of conversations that we need to have going forward in an era of fiscal restraint.

The Ontario premier arrived at this point in response to a question about the Harper government’s crime policies and the burden they will place on the provinces, so perhaps this seems tangential to the health care debate. But maybe it’s all part of the same discussion. Consider the analysis of Scott Clark and Peter DeVries that I noted this morning. Continue…

The real federalism problem with crime legislation

By Brendan van Niejenhuis - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 2:18 PM - 0 Comments

Pawel Dwulit/Canadian Press

In November 1983, Elijah Askov and three others were charged in connection with a plot to extort money from a man who ran a business supplying exotic dancers to Ontario strip clubs. Their case was plagued by delays from the start; nearly three years after the men’s arrest, and two years after their preliminary hearing, Askov and his co-defendants had not yet had their day in court. The Supreme Court of Canada was eventually asked to interpret the Charter guarantee to “be tried within a reasonable time.” And in its then-controversial Askov decision, the Court put a stop to the proceedings, giving birth to the modern and frequently employed practice of throwing out criminal charges based on unreasonable delay.

That Askov didn’t mean an end to unreasonable delays makes it hard for the provinces to mount a credible case against the federal government as it proposes sweeping changes to the Criminal Code. The Conservatives’ controversial omnibus crime bill has sparked a flurry of attacks for its substance, including its introduction of American-style mandatory-minimum sentencing. Quebec, Ontario and now Newfoundland have also introduced a new ground of opposition—the impact the federal government’s “tough new measures” will have on provincial balance sheets. It’s not clear, though, why voters should believe Ottawa is doing anything worse than adding to a problem the provinces had a hand in creating. Continue…

Harper swings and misses on Insite

By Paul Wells - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 86 Comments

Andy Clark/Reuters

The limits of Stephen Harper’s power are becoming as interesting as the extent of it. Most days, life looks pretty good. His MPs form a comfortable majority in the Commons. Three of the caucuses he faces have no leader. The leader of the fourth, Elizabeth May, has no caucus. He inherited and did not ruin a well-performing economy. Even Americans envy Canada’s fortune.

But there is a clinic in Vancouver the Prime Minister cannot shut down by the hair of his chinny chin chin. The clinic is called Insite, and every morning drug addicts line up waiting for it to open. They keep it full until evening, injecting their veins full of heroin and other drugs. This just seems wrong to the Prime Minister. Three times he has sent federal government lawyers to court to say so. Each time they come up snake eyes.

Last week it was the Supreme Court of Canada. Two justices Harper named joined the unanimous decision against his lawyers’ arguments. Insite will stay open. Other supervised-injection sites may follow. (That last part isn’t clear. We’ll walk you through it in a minute.)

Continue…

A state of perfect disharmony

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 4:30 PM - 8 Comments

So the harmonization comedy continues. Scant weeks after the people of British Columbia, in a magnificent fit of self-destructive fury, voted to unharmonize their provincial sales tax from the now-misnamed Harmonized Sales Tax, word came that talks between Ottawa and Quebec on a plan to compensate the province for harmonizing its own tax were at an impasse.

You could tell the talks were at an impasse because the two sides put out a press release announcing the talks were going swimmingly. “HST and QST harmonization,” it read: “Discussions proceeding normally.” And so they were, if by “normally” you mean sailing past the Sept. 15 deadline for an agreement to which the federal Conservatives had pledged themselves in the recent election campaign. The most they would say now is that they hoped to have a deal by the end of the month.

Mind you, it was always a mystery just what they had to talk about, the feds having already promised, publicly and often, to yield to Quebec’s demands. They’d even named the figure, $2.2 billion—by a remarkable coincidence, the very sum the Charest government had asked for at the start. What was there left to negotiate?

Continue…

Gilles Duceppe, federalist hardliner

By Andrew Coyne - Sunday, March 27, 2011 at 3:10 PM - 67 Comments

“Mr. Duceppe clarified that he, too, would never be part of a formal coalition with the other parties, saying it would be “against nature” for the separatist party to be government ministers.”

Thus putting him offside with the countless Canadian academics, politicians and blog commenters who are quite ready to explain why it’s perfectly all right for a party dedicated to the destruction of Canada to also be governing it.

To what end? (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 71 Comments

In the process of reviewing Harperland, Allan Gregg considers Mr. Harper’s larger goal.

Upon assuming power—and without a moment’s hesitation—Harper abolished an already-negotiated national daycare program and the landmark First Nations Kelowna Accord. Since then, not only has he refused to resurrect or replace these initiatives, but he has also made it clear that he has absolutely no plans for any significant reforms in health care or the environment. In his tenure, he has roundly turned his back on the tradition of federal-provincial decision making and has never bothered to call a single First Ministers’ Conference. In all these cases, Harper did not do anything. But in not doing, he has revealed a vision that is no less clear—and arguably more radical—than Diefenbaker’s un-hyphenated Canadianism, or Trudeau’s Just Society. Harper’s refusal to use his spending power to enter provincial jurisdiction suggests he is a BNA purist who sees little, if any, role for the federal government in social policy.

A conservative love-in in Quebec

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

RLQ co-founder Joanne Marcotte (right) and Conservative MP Maxime Bernier | Francis Vachon/CP

There are many places in the country where a self-described “Jewish redneck from Calgary” would get a standing ovation for preaching his liberal-baiting, small-government, pro-oil-sands gospel. Conventional wisdom suggests that Quebec, home to powerful unions and subsidized daycare, isn’t one of them.

Yet, there was conservative commentator, author and cheery scourge of the left Ezra Levant in front of an overflow crowd at a Quebec City hotel last weekend, deriding government intervention and touting the wonders of Alberta’s oily bounty—in English, no less—and winning roars of approval.

The people behind Réseau Liberté-Québec were ebullient. The RLQ, which calls itself a “citizens’ movement” and not a political party, managed to bring together a fair chunk of the province’s fractured conservative movement in one place, attract considerable media attention, and even draw the ire of a few token lefties, who delivered a load of horse manure to the hotel steps earlier in the day. “Quebec’s right is more and more ardent, tenacious, resilient and credible,” whooped RLQ co-founder Joanne Marcotte in a speech.

Continue…

Two appendices to 'The coming Tory majority'

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 5:06 PM - 0 Comments

My story for print Maclean’s on Conservative fortunes in provincial politics is now on the web. As is often the case, I had help with the story from lots of people who didn’t make it into the finished version, and gathered information and had thoughts that didn’t quite fit.

1) A lot could still happen to derail or deplete the in-progress “blue surge”, but the mere possibility does create problems for the folk wisdom that the party in power in Ottawa tends to lose in the provinces. Trudeau’s dynamic personality had completely wiped out the Liberal brand in provincial politics by 1980; the Mulroney years left the Conservatives barely hanging on in the Prairies; Chretien’s brought them back, in ’04 and ’05, to the peak they’re now trying to re-climb. Wouldn’t we expect the Harper government to create costs for Conservatives like David Alward?

The thing is, if you ask a political scientist about this folk wisdom they’ll make an unsweetened-lemonade face. Despite the apparent trends of the last 30 or 40 years, there’s still a sizable controversy about how independent the federal and provincial political scenes are.

A couple of years ago, UBC’s Fred Cutler made a close study of Ontario’s 2003 election and found that the decisions of Ontario voters were dominated by “arena-specific factors”. Cutler’s analysis confirmed what I suppose we all imagine to be true of ourselves: we mostly aren’t blind automatons who adhere to national brands. Knowing a voter’s national-level identification gave you surprisingly little additional information about how he would vote in Ontario in ’03, even though there was a perfect one-to-one mapping between federal and provincial ridings and the same parties were contending in both arenas. Voters chose their party pretty strictly on within-Ontario criteria, especially economically. Their degree of satisfaction with the federal government didn’t affect their Ontario decision.

Cutler has been building and juggling a dataset that contains every provincial and federal election since Confederation, and he has ransacked it for several different types of effect of federal politics on provincial ones. He says you can find evidence for common forces in the background—policy fashions, economic factors—that predispose voters to choose the same party on both levels. At the same time there is also evidence the other way, for the folk wisdom that voters act to “check” the party in power at the top—particularly after three or four years in office. “But electorates,” Cutler told me, “neither check nor balance the federal government when it is a minority. They don’t need to.”

2) There’s a passing mention in my story of new Toronto mayor Rob Ford, Canada’s one-man tea party. I was talking to people a full week before the election, and I had to be careful about presuming a particular result. But the writing was on the wall. Ford’s name came up a lot; he could easily have been the whole story.

Ford terrifies all the right people. How he will perform as mayor, God knows. But his triumph has relevance for provincial and federal politics. Graham Murray, editor of the Inside Queen’s Park newsletter, was the first to talk to me about how a Ford win would affect the prestige of “strategic voting”. We agreed that it is hard to say exactly how.

Some people think Ford’s win is so overwhelming that a concerted push behind one candidate of the left could never have mattered. I wonder what Linda Duncan thinks about that? Ford didn’t win half the vote, and the next two candidates’ combined votes would have beaten him—even though Rocco Rossi dropped out (or was forced out by defecting advisors) so late that his advance voters weren’t available to help anybody. It seems to me, from a very distant vantage point, that Ford couldn’t have arranged the campaign any better to suit himself. In the debates he almost seemed to take on the heroic aspect of a Roman gladiator fending off concerted attacks from a half-dozen smaller animals—ocelots? Weasels?

For many Torontonians, particularly the ones most inclined to think of themselves as representing the spirit of the city, the idea of Ford bedecked in the velvet-lined chain of office may be an ongoing torture. That, in turn, could encourage strategic voting and even overt trade-offs on the polite left—which has always found such affairs distasteful, because its adherents see politics as a means of self-expression and cosmic justice rather than a method of selecting managers and keeping them appropriately off-balance. The idea of voting for the least horrible bastard who can actually win isn’t very romantic. But maybe it has a certain appeal today that it didn’t before?

Would you like some freedom fries with that?

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 25, 2010 at 9:01 AM - 0 Comments

Maxime Bernier addresses the faithful in Quebec City.

Supporters of big government have been in power for fifty years. They have brought us to a constitutional and economic dead end. Every day they endanger our prosperity and freedom a little more. It is high time for supporters of freedom to get together and propose a new realistic vision of Quebec’s future.

Let’s state it loudly and forcefully: we need a smaller, less interventionist and less centralized government in Ottawa; but also a smaller, less interventionist and less controlling government in Quebec City. A new chapter in Quebec’s history is being written beginning today. And together, through the strength of our convictions, we are the ones who shall be its main characters!

As to the question of federal spending power, there is plenty to be read. For the sake of argument, a paper written for the Library of Parliament in 1991 concludes as follows. Continue…

A splash in Ontario makes waves in Alberta

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 11:01 AM - 0 Comments

The Ontario Superior Court’s Charter finding against prostitution-related provisions of the Criminal Code has unexpectedly cast light on the new Alberta politics. The hard-charging Wildrose Alliance talks a good game when it comes to defending provincial rights; the logical corollary, one might suppose, would be for it to observe a dignified silence about matters reserved to the federal government. This is never how things work, of course, and the Alliance couldn’t move fast enough to issue a joint statement in the names of its two turncoat MLAs, Heather Forsyth and Rob Anderson.

Just as the mind of Newton was instantly discernible by contemporaries from his anonymous solution to the brachistochrone problem, so the corresponding organ inside Heather Forsyth is recognizable from the language of the press release. Forsyth never heard an idea for “protecting children” she didn’t like, and certainly never, as an Alberta cabinet minister, implemented one she would recognize as a failure.

“No little girl,” reads the statement, “ever dreams of growing up and becoming a prostitute, and no parent wants to see their child become a sex worker.” As an argument in favour of the existing prostitution laws, this immediately raises the question whether the parents of Robert Pickton’s victims dreamed fondly of their fate, complete with a soundtrack of swine gnawing bone. No little girl does foresee becoming a sex worker, any more than little boys imagine becoming garbagemen or sheet-metal cutters. (Hands up, all those of you who do have the job of their dreams! I’ll admit I’m relatively blessed in that regard, but then again I am not writing this note from the deck of the space shuttle.)

It is precisely the unpleasantness of such professions that demands we attend carefully to their occupational safety. That is the ground, for better or worse, on which Justice Susan Himel acted. The Wildrose statement does not object that Himel’s decision will fail to make prostitution safer; it concedes the point, and specifically rejects the idea that prostitution should be made safer for women. Why, one wonders, is Robert Pickton in prison at all? By the Forsyth standard, surely he should be freed, perhaps even subsidized as a public benefactor.

The fact is, Alberta already has a governing party that was happy to implement Forsythian ideas of justice and child welfare, dozens of them, before Forsyth became the victim of a geographic squeeze and left the PCs in a snit. The party’s statement thus leaves one wondering whether a vote for the Wildrose is a vote for ideological change, or just the same old formula with a different gang of ministers. It suggests tentatively that Danielle Smith’s “big tent” is going to fly the Oriflamme of social conservatism rather than the Gadsden flag of libertarianism.

Whatever happened to Intergovernmental Affairs?

By Philippe Gohier - Friday, August 20, 2010 at 5:39 PM - 0 Comments

For reasons I imagine have a lot to do with the 20th anniversary of Gilles Duceppe’s election, a lot of ideas are being floated about on how to get rid of the Bloc. For the most part, these appear to be based on the premise that the problem with the Bloc isn’t that its long-term goal of an independent Quebec is fundamentally incompatible with the survival of the Canadian federation; rather, it’s that the Bloc prevents the Conservatives or the Liberals from getting a Parliamentary majority. (For the record, since Duceppe got to Ottawa, he’s spent 14 years opposing a majority and six opposing a minority.)

Jeffrey Simpson has suggested the party be bankrupted into obsolescence; pollster John Wright, abiding by the time-honoured principle that if you ignore your problems they just go away, figures the federalist parties may be better off waiting for demographics to run their course; William Johnson recommends having Mel Hurtig take over the Quebec Liberal party and working in the phrase “le plusse meilleur pays au monde” into speeches more often; the Toronto Star‘s editorial board advises that either the Liberals should transform into credible Quebec nationalists or the Tories should go Bolshevik (what happens if they both take the advice?); the National Post, meanwhile, is stuck on the rather existential question of whether Quebec “matters.”

The stunning decline of the intergovernmental affairs portfolio at the federal level is rarely, if ever, mentioned in the discussion. Is it possible the Bloc has become Canada’s de-facto Ministry of Intergovernmental Affairs? Because they’re the only ones who seem burdened by the task.

Since 2006, four different ministers have handled the portfolio and Josée Verner has now held the job for nearly two years. During that time, Verner has made a grand total of one speech (I don’t count MPs talking about government work in the House of Commons as a speech). Of the three announcements made by the government’s Intergovernmental Affairs division over the past year and a half, two were for appointments to the Transportation Safety Board (apparently the true lynchpin of Canadian federalism) and the other about a grant to fix the water system in the town of Shannon. The picture above is the first one you’ll see if you go to the former ministry’s website. In case you were wondering, that’s Stephen Harper announcing upgrades to the Vancouver aquarium.

It’s not clear to me what the federal government and its institutions can do to regain their legitimacy in Quebec. Still, it’s striking how little interest they’ve got in even trying.

Hard right? Hardly

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, March 22, 2010 at 7:28 PM - 115 Comments

Just so we’re clear: I don’t really care whether the Harper government conforms to one definition of conservatism or another. Neither do I carry any brief for conservatism, as such, though I might hold conservative views on specific issues. When I say that conservatism is dead in Canada, I am not mourning or despairing. I am merely stating a fact.

The reason that’s worth stating is that there is a party that continues to carry on as if it were conservative, though it conforms to no known definition of the word. And all right, yes, I’d prefer that people should be who they say they are and do what they say they will do, and that things should be called what they are and not what they are not.

So I suppose in that sense I should be delighted to find, via my friend Paul Wells, that I’ve got it all wrong: that the Conservatives are in fact robustly, unabashedly conservative, that indeed conservatism is “on the march across Canada.” Why, it’s the biggest swing to the right in “half a century.” It’s Harper’s hard right turn.

This is contrarian analysis at its finest. Under the Conservatives, spending, which conservatives once promised to cut, has been growing at a rate of 8 per cent a year. The budget, which conservatives once aimed to balance, is now in deficit to the tune of $54-billion, with literally no end in sight. Corporate subsidies, which conservatives once vowed to eliminate, continue to be doled out by the billions every year; much of the auto industry has been nationalized; the number of regional development agencies has increased by one. Conservative MPs now run around the country boasting of the pork they are bringing home to their ridings, complete with novelty-cheque signing ceremonies.

The top marginal rate of income tax remains where it was a generation ago, while the tax system has been further complicated with the addition of a slew of special credits for children’s sports, transit passes and other good causes. Employment Insurance has been larded up with supplementary payments that make a return to insurance principles more remote than ever. The Canada Pension Plan has been allowed to swell to Caisse de Depot-like dimensions. The great statist vehicles of the 20th century — Canada Post, Via Rail, the CBC — likewise continue to stalk the land, subsidies and privileges intact, while private oligopolies in air travel, finance and telecommunications remain largely protected from foreign competition. All were once the objects of conservative reform efforts. No longer.

The political reforms that were the bedrock of democratic conservatism in the age of the Reform party, aimed at giving more power to ordinary MPs and, via referendums, to the citizens at large, are now but a memory, replaced by a PMO whose all-controlling zeal exceeds even previous records. The philosophy that distinguished the conservative approach to constitutional matters — decentralizing power to the provinces, commitment to the equality of provinces and citizens — has been replaced by massive increases in transfers to the provinces generally and a raft of special concessions — powers, money, an ill-defined “national” status — to Quebec.

But that is to look at the matter through the narrow lens of fiscal, economic, democratic and constitutional conservatism. Rather than obsessing on such arcane matters — you know, the whole size and role of government thing — friend Wells encourages us to see the glass as socially full. Because even as it was giving ground on every one of all those other fronts, the government has been delivering for social conservatism. Why, “look at the victories” social conservatives have won, Wells suggests, “in just the past few months.” Yes, let’s.

Continue…

But with the wind chill it's…

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, February 10, 2010 at 6:07 PM - 20 Comments

Just what we need: a precise measure of regional resentment.

A newly devised “Canadian Grievance Index” — which quantifies the level of griping about the federal government by people across the country — shows British Columbians are currently the nation’s most aggrieved citizens while Ontarians are most satisfied that Confederation is functioning fairly.

Way to go, BC! The acme of acrimony! The peak o’ the piqued! Says the whinometer’s inventor:

“Federalism is like a marriage,” he said. “Some people don’t like the concept of grievance, and just see it as complaining. But another way of looking at it is provinces articulating their concerns and needs.”

Or in other words, complaining.

Insite, foresight, hindsight

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 10:27 AM - 70 Comments

The B.C. Court of Appeal’s ruling on Vancouver’s Insite shooting gallery for heroin addicts makes for interesting reading. We are all so busy arguing over the merits of harm reduction, and the wisdom of the Harper government’s attempt to shut down the clinic, that it is easy to forget the big constitutional issue that was the chief concern of the court here. You would think that Canadian jurisprudence had developed a clear objective rule for settling even the trickiest “double aspect” issues, wherein both federal and provincial governments can claim that some crumb falls within their respective spheres of constitutional power.

You would, apparently, be wrong. Continue…

Joseph Pierre Adélard Lambert 1939-2009

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

Joseph Pierre Adélard Lambert was born in Joliette, Que., on Nov. 21, 1939, to Antonio Lambert, a tailor, and Yvonne Poirier, a secretary. Known as Pierre, he worked throughout his high school years, at one point as the projectionist at Cinéma Venus, Joliette’s movie theatre. He liked movies but liked being busy even more. Struck by the young man’s work ethic, Roger Cloutier, who ran the local farmer’s co-op, taught him the rudiments of running a business. Soon, Pierre was the co-op’s accountant.

He met Lise Lasalle at a baseball game in 1961. Baseball enthralled Pierre, but he noticed Lise’s green eyes, brown hair and (soon enough) her remarkable calm in the face of his bluster; they married in September 1962 and had three children together: Martine, François and Bruno.

Pierre left the co-op in 1975 and opened his own accounting firm. He was also president of the local chapter of Quebec’s construction association. This, his children joke, was a matter of convenience; their father could hardly hammer a nail into the wall. (He also owned a gas station, yet could barely pump his own gas.) His obsession was politics, and Pierre was a partisan among partisans whose red glasses, ties and shirts advertised his allegiance to the Liberal brand. “If you dressed a pig in red my dad probably would have voted for him,” Martine says.

He became an organizer for both the provincial and federal Liberals. His leanings made him a rare bird in Joliette, long represented federally by the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois afterwards. It was also the home riding of long-time Péquiste minister Guy Chevrette; Pierre spent years trying to find a Liberal who could unseat him,always in vain. During the 1980 referendum he worked for the No campaign, enlisting Martine to pass out buttons at her high school. He was so ecstatic at the victory that he let his daughter smoke in front of him at the after-party. (He came to regret this; Martine smokes to this day.) His own political ambitions were dampened by Lise, who was unwilling to lose her husband to Ottawa or Quebec City for a large part of the year. The stress, she said, would kill them both. Being a municipal councillor was an honourable compromise: Lise would keep her sanity, while Pierre could still keep the long-standing tradition of watching the Montreal Expos with his kids. He won a council seat in Notre-Dame-Des-Plaines, a neighbouring village to Joliette where the family lived, by acclamation in 1987. In 1992 he easily defeated his first opponent; he would only be challenged once more in his political career.

No one was ever indifferent to Pierre. Those who weren’t put off by his federalist sympathies (or his Fred Flintstone appearance and intensity) were often touched by his uncommon tenderness. He gave Alexandre Cantin, who lived in an apartment block Pierre owned and in whom Pierre saw a Lambert-like propensity to stay busy, his first job. He then helped him find work in Joliette once he graduated. “You are the most important person in my life,” Alexandre would later write.

Lise succumbed to breast cancer in 2004, and Pierre lost his life’s anchor and council. He stopped eating at home, often favouring caisses-croûte (snack bars)—or worse—for his meals. “My father was the only person I knew who could eat breakfast at a dépanneur,” says his son François. In Joliette, he often held court at La Belle Excuse, the local restaurant, whose owner would call him whenever chopped veal liver was on the menu. He guzzled Coke and drove around in his Cadillac with Shaggy, his 110-lb. Bouvier, happy but unhealthy. In 2007 he suffered an acute diabetic attack (a normal blood sugar level after a meal is between five and eight; when doctors tested Pierre’s it was at 57). He promised his kids he’d lay off the Jos. Louis cakes and try sugarless Coke.

Earlier this year, Pierre learned that Jean-Guy Forget, a former police officer, would run against him in the November elections. It was a tight race—voters were unhappy with the pace and quality of road work in town—and Pierre campaigned with even more intensity than usual. His knees hurt, he was tired all the time and, as he found out on the night of the election, the results were very close. At 10:25, François called Pierre and found him to be a nervous wreck. Minutes later, though, the good news: Pierre had won by 20 votes. Overjoyed, he drove to the community centre, where he thanked his well-wishers and volunteers. To the assembled journalists he acknowledged the close vote and said he would work for all constituents. He then suffered a heart attack and collapsed. No one could revive the freshly re-elected member for Notre-Dame-Des-Plaines. He was 69.

A study in contrasts

By Philippe Gohier - Friday, June 5, 2009 at 5:02 PM - 3 Comments

Le Devoir on Iggy’s speech in Montreal: Giving Quebec more powers is out of the question

According to Ignatieff, federalism in its current form “works well” and Quebec has all the powers it needs. The Liberal party, like the Conservative party, therefore has no intention of handing Quebec complete control on issues of culture and communications, as the Charest government has requested.

The Globe and Mail on Iggy’s speech in Montreal: Ignatieff courts Quebec nationalists

Michael Ignatieff moved to woo Quebec nationalists and bring them into the Liberal fold Thursday, saying that the Bloc Québécois has kept the province’s francophone electorate on the sidelines for far too long.

While saying he will not use constitutional promises to entice Quebeckers to vote for the Liberal Party, Mr. Ignatieff said it’s time to stop voting for the Bloc, which has won a majority of seats in Quebec in every election since 1993.

Conservatism is not the issue

By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 at 11:20 PM - 131 Comments

My recent piece on the federal budget as marking the end point of conservatism in Canada seems to have been the subject of some misinterpretation. Many people have taken it as a lament, as if this were something to be mourned. I rather thought I was just stating a fact.

I hold no particular brief for the Conservative Party of Canada. I was opposed to the party’s formation, preferring that Reform and the Progressive Conservatives should have remained separate parties that formed a strategic alliance — a coalition! — as European  parties do. Nor have I ever been able to see much point in conservatism, as such: why one would want to subscribe to a whole set of unrelated ideas simply because they all fell under the conservative label remains a mystery to me. It’s less an ideology than a grab-bag of habits and emotional leanings, not least the deep nervoses and resentments of a party that has lost too many elections.

The party/movement’s general predisposition towards user fees and private insurance in health care always struck me as simplistic (and not particularly market-oriented, properly understood), its willingness to rent itself out to the provinces in general, and Quebec in particular, has been terribly damaging to the country, and its refusal to deal seriously with global warming was blinkered and counter-productive. Over the years, I’ve had occasion to quarrel with conservatives over gay rights, immigration, drug policy, and the whole tangled archipelago of issues surrounding the Charter of Rights, the notwithstanding clause and judicial review.

But at least these were positions! Conservatives may have been wrong on these things, but anything’s better than a party that is incapable of being right or wrong, because it does not stand for anything. Conservatism may not be my thing, but it is for a lot of other people, and I grieve for their sake that the party they have invested so much of their hopes in has turned to such warm beer. And all Canadians, whatever their leanings, should wish for more balance and diversity in our political choices. Continue…

Can Saskatchewan be nationalist?

By Philippe Gohier - Thursday, July 31, 2008 at 7:18 PM - 0 Comments

It’s not often I find myself agreeing with Lawrence Martin, but I think he raises a few good points in his column in today’s Globe about the Tories’ decision to grant more economic autonomy to the provinces:

There’s plenty of room for cynicism. It’s well known that the PM will do anything to woo Quebec politically. Letting the province negotiate a unilateral labour-mobility agreement with France can be seen as some rather timely toadying. Shouldn’t he be doing more for labour mobility between Ontario and Quebec?

Extending his autonomy push to other regions smacks of smart politics as well. Headwaiter to the provinces? How about head cashier at the polling booths. Westerners will lovingly see it as a kick at the Toronto-Ottawa dictatorship. It’s gravy for la belle province and down East, loud guys like Danny Williams won’t be complaining.

Continue…

It's come to this

By Paul Wells - Monday, July 21, 2008 at 3:09 PM - 0 Comments

Belgian editorialist recommends Canadian model for fixing what ails a federation.

Luc Delfosse at Le Soir has been busy lately, bemoaning his lovely country’s latest national-unity crisis.

It’s complex. (It’s Belgium. You didn’t think it would be complex?) Yves Leterme, the hard-nosed Flemish guy who has resigned three times from the prime minister’s job, has been returned a fourth time by the head of state, King Albert the Not Very Flexible. But Albert has, at a minimum, clipped Leterme’s wings: His mandate now is to govern only on economic matters — to give Belgium the simple administrative government it has lacked during more than a year of excruciating attempts to square assorted communitarian circles. To handle that headache, Albert has appointed a three-person wise persons’ committee to contemplate (yet another) constitutional reform. Continue…

Christmas came early for federalism geeks

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, July 16, 2008 at 11:33 AM - 0 Comments

I’m shocked that I didn’t learn until now that Ronald L. Watts’ classic Comparing Federal Systems in the 1990s has been updated. From the publisher’s blurb for Comparing Federal Systems, Third Edition:

At present there are twenty-five functioning federations worldwide, which contain over forty percent of the world’s population. A distinctive feature of federalism is that it has taken a variety of forms, including new variants and innovations. In Comparing Federal Systems Watts provides a clear analysis of the design and operation of a wide range of federations.

Fully updated, this third edition encompasses reference to a wider range of federations and federal experiments. Included are mature federations such as Switzerland, Canada, Austria, Germany, and India; emergent federations such as Mexico, Malaysia, Pakistan, Spain, Brazil, Belgium, Russia, Argentina, Ethiopia, South Africa, Nigeria, and Venezuela; micro-federations such as Micronesia, Belau, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Comoros; federal-confederal hybrids such as the United Arab Emirates and the European Union; and post-conflict federal experiments such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sudan, Iraq, and Congo. Federations that have failed are also discussed.

Watts looks at interactions between social diversity and political institutions, the distribution of powers and finances, processes contributing to flexibility or rigidity in adjustment, the extent of internal symmetry or asymmetry, the character of representation in federal institutions, the role of constitutions and courts, provisions for constitutional rights and succession, the degree of centralization and non-centralization, and the pathology of federations.”

Watts has long been one of the leading figures at Queen’s University’s Institute for Intergovernmental Relations and his earlier books have been hugely helpful to me as I try to make sense of our federation and try to figure out how it compares to others. I’m always a little sad when I run into somebody who likes to think about federalism but who isn’t familiar with Watts’ work. I’m really looking forward to getting a copy of his new book.

Will wonders never cease

By Paul Wells - Saturday, May 10, 2008 at 10:48 AM - 0 Comments

Two provincial governments decide to do something useful without asking for Ottawa’s permission (or federal tax dollars) first. What hath TILMA wrought?

Yours to discover

By Paul Wells - Monday, May 5, 2008 at 10:59 PM - 0 Comments

I’d really hate it if John Geddes’ excellent article on Ontario’s economic situation got lost amid everything else going on here at macleans.ca. A highlight is the transcript of John’s interview with Dalton McGuinty, where the Ontario premier picks up the Flaherty/Poilièvre gauntlet with surprising elegance:

“This arose because Minister Flaherty took it upon himself to decide that Canada would offer the world a combined corporate income tax rate of 25 per cent. We had no discussion as to whether we would embrace that or how long it would take to get there. By the way, he’s decided it’s 15 for him and 10 for us. So I think there was frustration on their part about our not embracing that.”

Three-Card McGuinty

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, May 5, 2008 at 2:07 PM - 0 Comments

You have to tip your hat to Dalton McGuinty. Another premier, on discovering that his province was about to qualify for payments under the federal equalization program, might have seized the occasion to demand that the program be enriched. But as the premier of the largest province in Canada, McGuinty no doubt feels an obligation to rise above such petty concerns. Surely statesmanship, then, explains his demand that the program from which Ontario may soon be drawing $1-billion and change should be radically curtailed — or in McGuinty’s words, to “revisit the perverse dimensions of the existing fiscal network that ties us to the rest of the country.”

Statesmanship, or confusion. Perhaps aware that his adversaries would blame Ontario’s impending descent into “have-not” status on his government’s economic policies, McGuinty tried to change the subject by attacking the feds, dusting off his favourite complaint from yesteryear, the so-called $20-billion gap: the amount by which federal tax revenues collected in Ontario exceed federal spending in Ontario. The result was utter intellectual chaos, the premier shuffling numbers and definitions back and forth like a cardsharp at three-card monte, with casual disregard for logic, truth, or basic mathematics. Continue…

All dressed up. Now where to go?

By Paul Wells - Saturday, April 26, 2008 at 3:36 PM - 0 Comments

In Policy Options, the great Tom Courchene offers a tidbit: last year marked the second consecutive year in which every province and territory, in addition to the federal government, delivered balanced budgets. It had been 60 years since Canada had two consecutive years of balanced budgets across the board.

Already this suggests an interesting question: what did we spend 60 years balancing our books to do?

A second interesting question is suggested by the short article’s abstract, which makes a claim I cannot find in Courchene’s actual text: that “the excess of provincial over federal revenues has never been larger.” It’s fairly clear from Courchene’s (i.e. the federal budget’s) Chart 4 that the, ahem, fiscal imbalance in the provinces’ favour is larger than at any point in nearly 25 years, but that’s the extent of the chart’s ambit. Can anyone out there confirm the more sweeping claim?

If it could be confirmed, the second claim would suggest its own intriguing followup questions, such as: did we want the most decentralized federation in the world to decentralize further than ever before, or was that a surprise and is it a problem? I know a certain emeritus professor of comparative federalism, now recycled in politics with varying levels of success, from whom I’d love to hear the answer to that one.