Les Québécois méritent mieux que ça
By the editors - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - 0 Comments
Les électeurs québécois ont prouvé qu’ils supportent mal les politiciens corrompus. Cela permet d’espérer.
Francis Vachon/CP
La semaine dernière, Maclean’s consacrait sa une à un article sur la politique au Québec intitulé “La province la plus corrompue du Canada.” Dans une chronique qui accompagnait l’article, Andrew Coyne prédisait que notre travail, tout comme la majorité des critiques de la société québécoise issues de l’extérieur de celle-ci, serait dénoncé par la classe politique de la province comme du “Québec bashing” (dénigrement systématique du Québec).
Il avait vu juste. L’article a été attaqué avec virulence par tous les politiciens qui se sont trouvés à proximité d’un microphone. Le chef du Bloc Québécois, Gilles Duceppe, a traité l’article de “xénophobe.” Le président de la Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal, un organisme souverainiste, l’a décrit comme “haineux et diffamatoire.”
Le premier ministre du Québec, Jean Charest, qui venait tout juste de témoigner devant une commission d’enquête sur la corruption, nous a envoyé une lettre pour exiger que nous présentions nos excuses aux Québécois. Le chef libéral Michael Ignatieff a fait chorus, selon toute apparence sans avoir lu l’article.
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We believe Quebecers deserve better, and they seem to agree
By the editors - Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 3:30 PM - 0 Comments
PLUS: The House of Commons is profoundly sad at Maclean’s
Francis Vachon/CP
[Cliquez ici pour lire la version française]
Last week, Maclean’s ran a cover story about politics in Quebec entitled, “The most corrupt province in Canada.” In an accompanying column, Andrew Coyne predicted that our work, like most criticisms of Quebec society coming from outside the province, would be attacked by its political class as “Quebec bashing.”
Quite so. The story was loudly and stridently denounced by every politician within reach of a microphone.
Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe claimed the story was “xenophobic.” The head of the sovereignist organization Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal called it “hateful and defamatory.”
Quebec Premier Jean Charest, fresh from his appearances before a corruption inquiry, sent us a letter demanding that we “apologize to Quebecers.” Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff joined the chorus apparently without having read the article.
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What lies beneath Quebec's scandals
By Andrew Coyne - Friday, September 24, 2010 at 5:50 PM - 0 Comments
COYNE: The factors behind the province’s penchant for money politics
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.
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Quebec: The most corrupt province
By Martin Patriquin - Friday, September 24, 2010 at 5:45 PM - 177 Comments
Why does Quebec claim so many of the nation’s political scandals?
JACQUES BOISSINOT/CP/ TOM HANSON/CP
Marc Bellemare isn’t a particularly interesting man to look at, so you’d think the spectre of watching him sit behind a desk and answer questions for hours on end would have Quebecers switching the channel en masse. And yet, the province’s former justice minister has been must-see TV over the past few weeks, if only because of what has been flowing out of his mouth.
Bellemare, who has been testifying in an inquiry into the process by which judges are appointed in Quebec, has particularly bad memories of his brief stint in cabinet, from 2003 to 2004. The Liberal government, then as now under the leadership of Premier Jean Charest, was rife with collusion, graft and barely concealed favouritism, he says—the premier himself so beholden to Liberal party fundraisers that they had a say in which judges were appointed to the bench. “It happened in [Charest’s] office. He was relaxed, he served me a Perrier,” Bellemare testified. The two spoke about Franco Fava, a long-time Liberal fundraiser who, according to Bellemare, was lobbying for Marc Bisson (the son of another Liberal fundraiser) and Michel Simard to be promoted. “I said, ‘Who names the judges, me or Franco Fava?’ I was very annoyed. I found it unacceptable,” Bellemare recalls. He remembers Charest saying, “ ‘Franco is a personal friend. He’s an influential fundraiser for the party. We need men like this. We have to listen to them. If he says to nominate Bisson and Simard, nominate them.’ ”
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Nordiques arena: A pricey precedent
By John Geddes - Wednesday, September 22, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments
Winnipeg built an NHL-calibre arena with ‘minimal’ money from Ottawa. It’ll be different for Quebec City.
Yan Doublet/Le Soleil/CP
In the annals of hockey heartache, Quebec City and Winnipeg are forever twinned. Both lost their NHL teams to the bright lights and bigger markets of America—the Nordiques to Denver in 1995, the Jets to Phoenix the very next year. After they were left in the lurch, though, the tales of the two wintery cities diverge. In Winnipeg, a modest new downtown arena, the MTS Centre, was completed in 2004, built with mostly private money, as a home for minor-league hockey and concerts, and maybe, just maybe, an NHL team again someday. In Quebec City, a plan for building a much grander arena, mainly with public money and expressly to lure back the NHL, has only recently taken shape—and sparked political controversy.
The issue is whether the federal government should contribute heavily to the project. Quebec Premier Jean Charest has pledged $180 million, and Quebec City Mayor Régis Labeaume $50 million, leaving about $170 million they hope the feds will ante up. After Quebec Conservative MPs donned vintage powder-blue Nordiques sweaters last week to promote the scheme, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s confirmation that he’s considering the request came as no surprise. But Harper said he won’t be playing favourites. “In terms of financing these things going forward,” he said, “we’re going to have to respect the precedents we have had in the past, and be sure any treatment we’re prepared to make to one city we’re prepared to make to all.”
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It’s the investment opportunity of a lifetime (II)
By Philippe Gohier - Friday, September 10, 2010 at 5:29 PM - 0 Comments
I should start with a confession: when I wrote that really long post slamming…
I should start with a confession: when I wrote that really long post slamming governments for getting into the NHL arena-building business, I hadn’t yet read the Ernst & Young feasibility study (summary here; full report here) about the project. Had I read the report, my opinion would have been different. I would have hated the idea even more.
Here’s why: Continue…
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Long live the Nordiques! (But let someone else pay for them)
By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, September 8, 2010 at 7:20 PM - 0 Comments
The chips appear to be falling into place for Quebec City as it looks…
The chips appear to be falling into place for Quebec City as it looks to revive the Nordiques franchise. The province announced Tuesday it would kick in about $180 million to build a new home for the as-yet-non-existent franchise, adding a plea to the feds to do the same. And if the Conservatives have no plans to fund the rink, they’re doing a brilliant job of hiding it—their Quebec City MPs were out and about sporting vintage Nordiques jerseys on Wednesday:“As far as a new arena is concerned, our government is very interested to know if this can be done,” John Babcock, a spokesman for Transport Minister Chuck Strahl, said in an e-mail Wednesday.
“As the prime minister has clearly said, we would be very happy if (the) Nordiques could make a comeback to Quebec City.”
On the political front, Pierre-Karl Péladeau (the presumed owner of the new Nordiques) couldn’t have hoped for a more perfect set of circumstances to extract money from all three levels of government. Quebec City’s mayor, Régis Labeaume won the last mayoral election with a Stalin-esque 80 per cent of the vote after making his pro-Nordiques pitch a central part of his campaign. Given Labeaume’s immense popularity—the man’s a demi-god in la vieille capitale—it’s hard to imagine a better politician to be seen cozying up to. Moreover, absolutely no one wants to be seen as the politician who put a stick in his wheels. And if it takes a new arena to win a public handshake with the mayor, Jean Charest and Stephen Harper seem all too willing to oblige.
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Marc Bellemare remembers the sponsorship scandal (or does he?)
By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 3:14 PM - 0 Comments
Perhaps the most impressive part of Marc Bellemare’s testimony at the Bastarache commission is…
Perhaps the most impressive part of Marc Bellemare’s testimony at the Bastarache commission is the former Justice Minister’s seemingly infallible memory. Bellemare has been able to recall specific conversations on specific dates, not to mention many other innocuous details about his time in government—the brand of sparkling water he was served by Charest, the outcome of Montreal Canadiens’ hockey games, etc.
All of which makes it difficult to make sense of this exchange between Bellemare and the commission’s chief prosecutor, Giuseppe Battista, concerning Marc Bisson’s nomination as a judge for the Court of Quebec (see pp. 93-95 of the transcript):
Bellemare: [...] and [Liberal MNA] Norm MacMillan had also told me in August 2003 that Bisson the father was a delicate subject. The Auditor General’s report into the Gomery affair had been produced—I think it was in mid-February 2003, just before the election—and Mr. Guy Bisson, the father, was, apparently involved in that story, so we had to be careful. The father…
Battista: Who told you that?
Bellemare: Norm MacMillan and Franco Fava
Battista: Okay.
Bellemare: But not at the same time.
Battista: What did you have to be careful about?
Bellemare: Because Guy Bisson was involved in… with the sponsorship scandal.
Battista: And? What does…
Bellemare: Well, that he… that it was delicate because… for him and for the father, because he might be investigated and he might eventually have to testify before Gomery. Because Judge Gomery’s mandate had been confirmed, but the hearings hadn’t happened yet. I was being told to be careful because the father…. but with the son, there was no problem.
There’s a serious problem with the timeline here. The Auditor General’s report wasn’t released in February 2003, but on February 10, 2004—nearly three months after Bisson’s nomination was confirmed by the Charest government on November 26, 2003. (The Gomery inquiry was announced February 11, 2004.)
While it’s true the A-G’s investigation was well underway by then—a spokesperson for the A-G’s office confirmed to Maclean’s the investigation took about 18 months—there isn’t a single mention of Guy Bisson in Sheila Fraser’s report. In fact, Bisson’s name didn’t come up in connection with the sponsorship scandal until March 2005. By then, Bellemare had been out of government for nearly a year and was meeting with… the very same Franco Fava mentioned above to see if the Liberal organizer would help him raise money for his run for mayor of Quebec City.
[Hat tip to The Globe's Daniel Leblanc for hinting at the inconsistencies early Tuesday. Read his take on it here.]
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The unsinkable Jean Charest is here to stay
By Martin Patriquin - Monday, July 26, 2010 at 8:39 AM - 0 Comments
The scandals keep coming, his ratings are abysmal, but he keeps going and going
Ryan Remiorz/ Canadian Press Images
Jean Charest wants to be Quebec premier for the foreseeable future. As headlines go, it’s about as exciting as “Worthwhile Canadian initiative.” Politicians, even those as terminally unpopular as Charest, always say they’re sticking around, if only to stymie opposition and further confound pundits.
Yet the premier’s frank declaration on CBC Radio’s The House recently that he wants to fight an unprecedented fifth election, which must take place before December 2013, goes against the loud whispers in both Quebec and Ottawa. Charest, goes the speculation, is effectively a spent force in Quebec; the 52-year-old premier is rumoured to be returning to federal politics, where he got his start as an MP in 1984, as early as this fall—for a Senate seat, perhaps, or a plum government appointment.
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Even Liberals don’t like the Charest government
By Philippe Gohier - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 at 6:50 PM - 0 Comments
Has the provincial party bottomed out in Quebec?
Martin and I spent the morning poring over polling data to sort out whether the vultures circling above Jean Charest are onto something. Here’s what we compiled using data from Léger Marketing’s monthly polls:
Liberal support:
June 2010: 30%
May 2010: 31%
April 2010: 30%
March 2010: 32%
Feb. 2010: 37%
Jan. 2010: 39%PQ support:
June 2010: 41%
May 2010: 40%
April 2010: 40%
March 2010: 38%
Feb. 2010: 40%
Jan. 2010: 41%ADQ support:
June 2010: 13%
May 2010: 12%
April 2010: 9%
March 2010: 10%
Feb. 2010: 9%
Jan. 2010: 6%Government approval rating:
June 2010: 20%
May 2010: 20%
April 2010: 21%
March 2010: 24%
Feb. 2010: 33%
Jan. 2010: 35%Government disapproval rating:
June 2010: 76%
May 2010: 76%
April 2010: 77%
March 2010: 70%
Feb. 2010: 62%
Jan. 2010: 58%Charest as best candidate to be premier:
June 2010: 18%
May 2010: 18%
April 2010: 17%
March 2010: 20%
Feb. 2010: 28%
Jan. 2010: 27%Marois as best candidate to be premier:
June 2010: 25%
May 2010: 26%
April 2010: 27%
March 2010: 24%
Feb. 2010: 24%
Jan. 2010: 26%Public opinion of Charest (rating in December 2009):
Positive opinion: 24% (40%)
Negative opinion: 68% (48%)Public opinion of Marois (rating in December 2009):
Positive opinion: 42% (42%)
Negative opinion: 44% (44%)Here’s what stuck out to me:
(1) The drop in Liberal support has seemingly gone to the ADQ. And yet, I suspect this is a bit of a red herring. The ADQ’s finances are nothing short of a complete mess, as are its membership numbers: donations tumbled to $441,946 in 2009 from $2,078,427 in 2008, and membership fell to 6,120 in 2009 from 12,275 in 2008 and 25,887 in 2007. Liberals might be parking their votes with the ADQ, but Quebec’s right-wing hardly seems on the cusp of a breakthrough as a result.
(2) Charest’s government is now significantly less popular than his party. This is unusual because it means even Liberal voters think the Liberal government is on the wrong track. Furthermore, it suggests virtually no one outside the party supports the government.
(3) While Charest’s personal popularity numbers have jumped off a cliff—the gap between the number of people who like Charest and those who don’t has grown to 44 points from eight points in December 2009—Marois’s ratings are unchanged over the same time period. People have really grown to dislike Charest regardless of the alternative.
(4) Amazingly enough, these aren’t even the worst numbers Charest and the Liberals have posted since coming to power: in April 2005, the Liberals were running at 21% and 78% of people disapproved of the government.
(5) Unless Charest somehow manages to drive his government’s reputation even further into the ground, the Liberals may be bottoming out at 30% in the polls, which really isn’t so bad considering the staggering number of scandals they’re fighting off. If that’s true, with Mario Dumont gone from the ADQ and Marois entrenched as PQ leader, this might be as polarized as the electorate gets in Quebec these days.
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Finally, some good news for Charest
By Philippe Gohier - Thursday, May 6, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 10 Comments
Charest was the second most popular choice to succeed Harper
CP Images
While Quebec Premier Jean Charest’s popularity has dwindled to record lows in his home province, with 74 per cent of voters now saying they would gladly turf his government from office, the story in the rest of Canada couldn’t be any more different.
A Léger Marketing poll taken earlier this month found Charest was the second most popular choice among a list of potential candidates to succeed Stephen Harper as leader of the federal Conservatives. Only Peter MacKay, who had the support of 17 per cent of respondents, proved more popular than Charest, who at 13 per cent was the only other candidate to make it into double digits. Stockwell Day and Jim Flaherty were a distant third at eight per cent each.
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Inkless dialogue: the transcript
By Paul Wells - Monday, May 3, 2010 at 5:01 PM - 22 Comments
Macleans.ca: Chat will start at 3:00pm EST, you can submit you questions or comments before then. As usual, keep your questions clean and well written if you would like them to be answered. InklessPW: All right. Let’s see if this works. If it does, let’s live the dream, everyone! SeanStok: Why do the Liberals increasingly seem to lack focus? I don’t know if it’s Ignatieff or the broader ‘brain trust’, but they seem fundamentally unable to hone in on a substantive matter and stick with it cohesively. Why? InklessPW: Sean, I’m not sure it’s fair to say the Liberals “increasingly” lack focus, as they haven’t been busting out with focus ever since they lost the 2008 election on a focussed program of taxing carbon and using some of the savings to cut income taxes. I think it’s fair to ask what Michael Ignatieff wants to do in politics — or at least what he wants to do that would be different from what the government is doing. It’s also fair to note that he’s begun to address that question, especially in the speech he gave at the end of the Canada 150 conference in Montreal. (…) InklessPW: But escapades like yesterday’s scrum on renewing the Governor General’s mandate don’t help him. At worst, it’s a dreadful attempt to politicize the Crown (Colleague Coyne’s interpretation). At best, it’s random and distracting. It’s not a great day when spectators who are giving the Liberal leader the benefit of the doubt conclude he’s not sure what he’s saying or doing. Craig: Read your Afghan piece in the print addition. Give the change you think is/maybe taking place, what do your think Harper (or Parliament) will do as we draw closer to 2011? InklessPW: Craig, I’m honestly not the most reliable guide on what the government should do in (and about) Afghanistan after 2011. I’ve been all over the map on that, sometimes calling for the mission to be extended, sometimes calling for it to be cut short. All I can say is, I would really like any decision to be evidence-based, not inspired by a desire to keep a promise the prime minister made in 2008, an eternity ago by the fast-moving standards of the Afghan theatre. dejrabel: lol Why don’t you guys purchase the Mcleans.ca web address? That’s where I end up more than half the time that I’m looking for a Coynegasm. InklessPW: We are stuck hoping you folks will learn how to spell our magazine’s title. So far, 106 years in, it’s going so-so. Adam: Does the Conservative Party lack new ideas or is it just Harper’s obesession with tactical positioning that is dragging them down? InklessPW: Adam, I’m not sure they’re being dragged down. I know, I know, Harper has never held a majority of the House. Which makes him sort of like Lester Pearson. What he has done is governed, without interruption (OK, without interruption imposed by anyone but himself and the GG), for close to four and a half years. During that time, I believe he has sought to change the attitudes and comportment of the Canadian electorate more than the objective policy landscape: he does tactics, not governance. That’s really frustrating for a lot of people. But one thing that’s worth noting is, while the Harper Conservatives have been stuck below an absolute ceiling of about 38% in polls, and usually closer to 32%, they have also never sunk below about 29%. Contrast with, say, Trudeau and Mulroney, whose popularity was roller-coaster unpredictable. Harper has a hard floor, something his opponents should contemplate more often. Mark: Paul, I recall reading you have recently become a convert to proportional representation. What do you think are the chances that a majority of federal MPs might ever share your opinion? InklessPW: Really low. What would help would be if any province could pass an electoral reform that stuck and seemed, from the outside, to work. For that to happen, advocates of reform MUST ABSOLUTELY admit to themselves that all reforms proposed to date were too complex to be embraced by enough voters. Instead, reform advocates prefer to whine about the dumb voter. That rarely works well. peter: What do you think is the explanation for the recent Chritie Blatchford piece falling in such black hole? Do you think her angle repudiates Colvin’s story? InklessPW: I hope everyone reads Blatch’s column from the weekend, and Tim Powers’ blog post, also in the Globe, saying everyone should read Blatch’s column. Colvin’s testimony should have kicked off a debate, and several months after she spent a weekend dismissing Colvin with cheap contempt, it’s good to see Christie rejoining the debate. I’d add that any point of view supported by a marquee Globe columnist and a noted Globe blogger is not exactly in a “black hole.” AJP: Is it just me, or do you see the connection between the Wildrose Alliance and the Federal Tories? Danielle Smith is unwaveringly supportive of Harper, has his former inside man as one of her top guys, and they share strategists like Ezra Levant. Coincidence? InklessPW: AJP, Wildrose is more an illustration of the divisions in the federal Conservative party than of a straight-line connection between Harper’s party and Smith’s. Very roughly, former Reformers like Wildrose a lot, whereas former Progressive Conservatives — and there still are a lot in Alberta, especially in Calgary — think shifting support from the Stelmach Conservatives is pointlessly divisive. Both groups are well-populated, so far they manage to remain civil to one another, and I think the rift is more interesting than potentially dangerous to the federal Conservatives, as this is not really their fight. Out West: Paul, with the new trade deal signed by AB, BC and Sask last week do you think that the EU-Canada free trade deal is more likely? Also, is the gradual expansion of this agreement what will end interprovincial trade barriers? InklessPW: I do know for a fact the provinces have surprised European negotiators with their seriousness in attempting to deliver a coherent internal Canadian market for the purposes of free-trade negotiations. The “buy Canada” deal, which contained important provincial concessions on procurement, was one piece of evidence. So are the assorted interprovincial trade deals. I used to joke that Canada-EU trade couldn’t work because “Canada isn’t a real country, but Europe is.” That seems to be changing. Of course many hard decisions still lie ahead. dejrabel: Is there any hope for a truly fiscally conservative party in this country?Iggy wants to find as many grand projects to spend money on as possible (ie local food)& Harper is on the treadmill of infrastructure & announcements lead to more votes. InklessPW: We had a truly fiscally conservative part in the country once. It was called Reform and it topped out at 61 seats. (If I were mischievous I would say the Chrétien Liberals of autumn 2000 were pretty fiscally conservative too.) Stephen Harper decided a broader definition of conservatism, one based on social cues more than fiscal policy, was needed to achieve power. So far he is having a better few years than his monomaniacally fiscal-conservative critics. AJP: Does Maclean’s have an internship program for bloggers, or if not, are you open to that idea? there are many who would love to learn from you and the folks at Macleans. InklessPW: We have a one-year internship program, and I continue to be amazed at the quality of the people we hire for it. I’d frankly be leery of hiring young people to blog, a verb that so far in Canada means “bloviate about what reporters said in this morning’s newspapers.” We’ve had more success so far encouraging our young recruits to pick up reporting skills. Even our dear departed Colleague Kady was a print reporter for nearly a decade before she started blogging, and her qualities are the qualities of somebody who likes to dig up facts rather than pushing out opinions. Craig: GG replacement…does it REALLY matter? (And feel free to weigh in on AC’s commentary on the Grits using it as a political point). InklessPW: Craig, my interpretation wasn’t Andrew’s — as I’ve said elsewhere, I think Ignatieff was wandering through his day in a cheerful daze, not launching a Machiavellian plot against the (to me highly hypothetical) independence of the office of the GG. But I do like Andrew’s blog post, because it at least posits a motive for Ignatieff’s behaviour yesterday, whereas I can’t really come up with one. Scott: Any thoughts on the new Pirate Party of Canada? There are some who think they may help engage younger and/or disaffected voters. InklessPW: First I’ve heard of it. Godspeed, Pirates! From what little I know about European Pirate Parties, this sort of clean-government group could be a small but welcome voice. margery: what is the mood in Ottawa re Igs Gov general comments InklessPW: I think it’s fair to say the mood is “extremely calm.” As in, the government didn’t even bother to try to shove his comments down the Liberals’ throats at QP today, from what I saw. I think the whole thing will be forgotten within days, and Mr. Ignatieff won’t much mind. Yijun: As an anglophone who has seemed to make quite a headway on your French language ability, I’m curious about your thoughts on the bilingual requirement for Supreme Court justices. InklessPW: I ran into the Language Commissioner, my old friend and colleague Graham Fraser, in an airport the other day, and if anyone could persuade me it’s a good idea it’s Graham, and he almost managed it. His argument, of course, is that the SCC is an appeals court, and a disproportionate number of the appeals it hears are from Quebec courts, and a single unilingual anglo forces every other Justice to deliberate in English. And finally (…) InklessPW: …that of course a bilingualism requirement would severely restrict the number of potential candidates. As would any competency requirement. It’s really sad that unilingual Canadians can’t aspire to the top court, but then, neither can the great majority of hard-working Canadians who don’t know much about the law. Life’s a two-by-four sometimes. InklessPW: Anyway, Graham didn’t entirely sway me, but he sure launches into an argument with a lot of gusto. Sol: How vulnerable is the government on the Afghan-detainee file, in the wake of the Speaker’s ruling last week? InklessPW: Well, I continue to think the detainee file is one Canadians should care about, regardless of its (probably very limited) impact on voter intentions. We’ve had a fun four years around here, more like six years really with the Paul Martin minority, viewing every issue through the lens of its likely electoral impact, but that’s not the only reason to care about something. As for the Speaker’s ruling, it depends how the opposition parties press what the Speaker ruled is their essentially uncontested right to call for the production of any documents the majority in Parliament deems relevant. I know the Conservatives are betting that at least one opposition party won’t push hard. SeanStok: Am I too cynical in thinking that the current ‘detainee document’ negotiations will be more influenced by the respective parties’ desire (or lack thereof) for an election than anything else? InklessPW: You are probably not too cynical. David: Would Canadian federal politics be improved in party leaders didn’t have the power to approve or reject candidates? InklessPW: Yes! In fact I believe, with the Toronto historian Christopher Moore, that it should be roughly the other way around: sitting MPs should have the power to change leaders, at any time, on any day. Suddenly the choice of a local MP would become very important. Of course this sort of change is usually dismissed as “undemocratic,” which means it is too democratic. Crit_Reasoning: Kevin Rudd’s government recently shelved its proposed emissions trading scheme until 2013. Do you think this is indicative of a broader trend? InklessPW: Yeah. Now, Rudd absolutely still wants an emissions-trading scheme and has been stopped only by an opposition majority in Australia’s upper house. So he hasn’t really changed his mind, he’s just been stymied. But here we see something interesting: politicians generally prefer a tradings scheme over a simple carbon tax, because it’s easier to be in denial about what you’re doing. But tradings regimes are so cumbersome and complicated to implement that the number of opportunities to derail the process is multiples higher than with a simple carbon tax. Dennis: Paul, this isn’t a question, but I read Right Side Up a few months ago, and it’s the best political book I’ve read in a while. You should write more books about this silliness we call Canadian politics. I’ll buy each one. InklessPW: Thanks very much. Right now, though, I’d need somebody else to write each one. I may regain my self-discipline and journalistic ambition at some point. I came damned close to writing a Harper book this year. I have a hunch this isn’t the last year I’ll have a chance to do so. Crit_Reasoning: If you were to grade all MPs based on their performance in the past six months, who would get an “A” or “A minus”? InklessPW: Um. This question has been lurking down there in the moderation queue for a while, and I still can’t think of a lot of MPs who’d get really good grades. Generally speaking, I’m impressed with Siobhan Coady, Tom Mulcair, Bob Rae, and others. I like to tweak my colleagues by saying I’m often impressed by Pierre Poilievre, but I also say it because it’s true. I do think the general decline of our parliamentary debate, led by the morass of Question Period, makes it hard to tell who’s a good MP and who’s not. And I should admit that I suffer from a form of Pundits’ Disease, which makes me too rare a presence on Parliament Hill to observe MPs directly. My younger colleagues Aaron Wherry, Kady O’Malley, Althia Raj, Jeff Davis, and many others are way better positioned to hand out letter grades than I am. Carolyn: Have you ever done an interview with Harper? If so, what was your impression of him in that setting? InklessPW: I’ve interviewed him I think three times since he became Conservative leader, including most recently during the 2008 campaign, and many times before then when he was easier to get at. He’s a very strong interview, always consummately well-briefed, confident, low-key and amiable. As a bonus, he never hesitates to misstate the positions and arguments of his opponents, so an interview with Harper is always a highly entertaining festival of straw men. (…) InklessPW: So, I’m often asked, why don’t reporters call him when he sets up a straw-man argument? One reason is because he is careful to make himself available rarely, and to provide only a very short window for any given interview. Sometimes 15 minutes, often 10. If a reporter gets caught up trying to cross-examine him on any given point, that 10 minutes drains away. So a lot of us, including me, prefer to leave an apparent contradiction hanging and get on to the next question topic. Imperfect, but there it is. danielblouin: Jean Charest is down to 16% approval in Quebec. Is this really it for him, or is he going to enter yet another down-but-not-out phase of his political life (comedy option: leader of the federal Liberals)? InklessPW: I’d be really surprised if Charest leads the Quebec Liberals at the next election. He’s had a long run of it, and made useful changes to the Quebec political culture, but I think he’s worn out and these assorted scandalettes will grind him down further. Will he jump back to Ottawa? No. Money, family, and an endless vacation from the likes of me will beckon him to the private sector. Harbles: Have You found Twiiter a useful addition to your reporters toolbox or more of an ammusement? InklessPW: I see Twitter more as a social tool and a way of staying connected with friends, although I’m happy to hear from all the strangers who follow me too. Well, most of them: anyone who pushes argument anywhere close to confrontation gets blocked. I’m not paid to tweet and I don’t need to put up with nasty people there. I’ve found I rarely need to block anyone. Crit_Reasoning: You probably get asked this question a lot by guys on the street: Do you think we’re likely to have an election this year? InklessPW: I get asked that a lot. I don’t know; honest people from every party admit that no party controls the agenda on this question; but my hunch is that we’ll likely stumble through to the end of the year and into the new year before there’s an election. Only a hunch. InklessPW: This is apropos of nothing, but as I write this, Justin Trudeau is debating youth criminal justice legislation on CPAC in the background, and he’s doing a pretty good job of it. David: Stephen Harper keeps his party under tight control. What do you think will happen to the CPC when Harper steps down? InklessPW: I think the divisions among the “sisters” of Canadian conservatism — Loyalist Tory, prairie populist, Quebec nationalist — will re-emerge and do a lot to define the race to succeed Harper. He’s managed to forge a durable amalgamated Conservatism, but a lot of people in his party have never learned the tune or aren’t interested. So there’ll be a Jason Kenney candidate (who may well not be Jason Kenney), a Max Bernier candidate, a Jim Prentice candidate, and so on — each very offensive to a large part of the party base because each is closely identified with a faction in the party. (…) InklessPW: That makes it possible to imagine a sleeper candidate who is not, today, closely identified with one of the factions. Somebody bilingual. Somebody who presents as a low-key central Canadian moderate, but is able to speak in red-meat social-conservative terms Reformers will love. Somebody hard to attack, who comes with a ready-to-run campaign organization close at hand. (…) InklessPW: I speak, of course, of Diane Finley. You heard it here first. Stop giggling. I’m kind of serious. Chris: In your opinion, given Harper’s distaste for reporters and his governments failing grade on access to information, why don’t more reporters speak out? Does the press have anything to lose by reporting there lack of access to the PM? InklessPW: Chris, I just don’t think anyone cares if the government is mean to us. Just as I don’t think anyone cares if the government is mean to, say Carolyn Bennett or any other opposition MP. Well, some people care: typically highly politically engaged people who were already likely to vote against the Conservatives every chance they get. But elections are won and lost when people who voted for the governing party last time decide they will vote for another party next time. And those people tend to swing when they get the impression that a government used to care about them but cares no longer. That has very little to do with access to information. The prime minister understands this better than his opponents have, which helps explain why he generally manages to hang on to a modest poll avantage. Crit_Reasoning: I’ve often wondered: Are you a monarchist? Do you think Canada should keep its ties to the British crown, post-QE2? InklessPW: I’m this much of a monarchist: I like a clear distinction between the state and the government. I don’t care for three seconds that our head of state is, to use my illustrious predecessor Fotheringham’s phrase, “a foreigner who lives in a castle in another country.” I find that perfectly charming. It reminds us of our history, and by “our,” I mean every Canadian’s. (I’m an Adrienne Clarkson nationalist that way: she likes to tell people at citizenship ceremonies that they are inheriting all of the rights and obligations of citizenship along with the shared heritage of every Canadian, with all its fascinating contradictions.) (…) InklessPW: So I think a monarchy is handy, on balance, to keep around, and painless to maintain. But I have struck a kind of personal deal with the Royal Family: I will support the system for as long as I don’t have to pay any attention to that horrible family. Jason: Speaking of Justin, when do you think he makes a run at the leadership? Does he jump at the first opportunity regardless of timing, or does he wait 5-10 years to gain more experience as an MP? InklessPW: Justin Trudeau has impressed a lot of people because he has been willing to bide his time, learn his craft, and resist overestimating himself. He does, it must be said, often show up at social functions on the Hill wearing ridiculous footwear, but nobody’s perfect. I’m not 100% sure he’ll ever run for the Liberal leadership, but I suspect he would be a candidate if Ignatieff and Rae ever became part of the party’s past. And I think his name and charm would make him a formidable, but not unbeatable, candidate. linda: if harper is still found in contempt at the end of two weeks, can harper go to the g.g and ask for an election while in comptempt also would he call an election just before g8 and g20 would he hold these meetings while in comtempt InklessPW: I believe the prime minister will essentially ignore any finding of contempt, if the Commons majority or the Speaker reaches such a conclusion, and continue to proceed according to a reading of parties’ strengths and weaknesses among the electorate. His estimate of those strengths isn’t always flawless: he thought he could prorogue over January and February at no cost and he was wrong. But I’m quite sure he would depict, and perceive, a contempt finding as “the opposition doesn’t like me. So what?” InklessPW: Okay folks, that took a little over an hour. I’m going to bring this session to a close. Thanks once again for your excellent questions and all your support. AJP: thanks for engaging with us! c_9: Thanks Paul, always a pleasure. -
Jean Charest's last stand
By Martin Patriquin - Sunday, April 25, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 4 Comments
A radical, unpopular plan for Quebec, now a corruption scandal: can he survive?
Jacques Boissinot/ CP
If by some chance you arrived at the Quebec Liberal party convention last weekend after having lived under a rock for several weeks, you’d be forgiven for thinking things were peachy for the provincial party. The mere mention of Premier Jean Charest’s name evoked whistles and cheers from the 600 or so partisans. Wearing a perpetual half-smirk, Charest studded both of his boisterous, campaign-style speeches with cheery statistics: roads built, jobs created, money saved, dollars spent. For one weekend, at least, the Hôtel des Seigneurs in St. Hyacinthe, a town better known for the quality of its chocolate than its support of anything remotely federalist, gleamed Quebec Liberal red-and-blue.
Yet it is quite a different story beyond the partisan fold. Less than 18 months after securing a third term, Charest and the Liberals are more unpopular than they’ve ever been. A recent poll suggested 77 per cent of Quebecers are unsatisfied with the government, while a mere 17 per cent believe Charest is fit to lead the province. The poll, which came out shortly after a budget replete with tax, tuition and electricity rate hikes, not to mention the introduction of user fees for health care, represents a dubious honour for Charest: he is even less popular now than he was in 2004, the previous benchmark for unpopularity in modern Quebec politics—and, not coincidentally, the last time Charest attempted major changes to Quebec’s traditional social democratic model. In response to the more recent changes, some 50,000 Quebecers took to the streets (on a Sunday, no less) to protest the tax hikes, christening Quebec’s own version of the Tea Party movement. “It’s unprecedented,” pollster Christian Bourque told Le Devoir recently.
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It's a small world after all
By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 5:50 PM - 5 Comments
I’d normally use the words “delicious” and “irony” to describe this, but Marty kinda…
I’d normally use the words “delicious” and “irony” to describe this, but Marty kinda ruined them for me the other day:
The lawyer Lu Chan Khuong, the associate and spouse of Marc Bellemare, will become the next president of the Quebec Bar Association May 6… It’s worth noting the president of the bar has a say when it comes to judicial nominations and that the job of president can sometimes lead to an eventual nomination to the judiciary.
Khuong was apparently the only person vying for the job.
[via La clique]
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Coyne v. Wells on Helena Guergis and Jean Charest affairs
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, April 20, 2010 at 2:59 PM - 10 Comments
Our Video podcast
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Charest's credibility gap
By Philippe Gohier - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 5:56 PM - 25 Comments
Why it’s getting harder and harder to give him the benefit of the doubt
Never mind that the inquiry Jean Charest called to look into judicial nominations in the province doesn’t get at the heart of the controversy surrounding his government—namely, that a former justice minister says he saw Liberal bagmen collecting cash donations to circumvent party donation rules. Even when it comes to the limited scope of Michel Bastarache’s inquiry, it’s getting hard to believe Charest isn’t already sunk, whether or not his government is eventually exonerated.Consider the government’s confusion over whether or not the judicial nomination process was indeed changed after Charest’s election in 2003. The current minister’s own assistant tells Le Devoir the list of potential candidates for judgeships is shared with the provincial cabinet before the nomination is made. After the justice minister makes his or her recommendation, “the cabinet will look at the other candidates and make a decision,” she says. Under the previous system, the justice minister alone would make the final decision, though it would be presented to the cabinet as a “recommendation” which would then invariably rubber-stamp it.
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The health care time bomb
By John Geddes - Monday, April 12, 2010 at 12:04 PM - 81 Comments
Our aging population will make unthinkable reforms inevitable
Jacques Boissinot/CP; Ryan Remiorz/CP
Experts who have been pleading for an urgent debate on fast-rising health costs might secretly have welcomed the appearance of irate demonstrators outside Raymond Bachand’s Montreal office last week, two days after the Quebec finance minister proposed a new health tax, and even user fees, in his March 30 budget. And when Montreal police in riot gear clashed with the protesters, those worried experts—doctors and economists who’ve long argued that Canadians must face up to the hugely expensive needs of a rapidly aging population—wouldn’t have been out of line if they thought, “Finally, this issue can’t be ignored any longer.”
Bachand’s daring budget, and the angry reaction to it, gave those who’ve been issuing warnings about the cost of care a flashpoint to talk about. Quebec faces relentless growth in hospital, drug and doctors’ bills, similar to most provinces. Health will devour 45 per cent of Quebec’s budget this year, up from 31 per cent in 1980, and on track to consume 67 per cent by 2030. So Bachand announced a health tax slated to rise from $25 per adult in 2010, to $100 in 2011, and $200 in 2012. Even more provocatively, he said Premier Jean Charest’s Liberal government will study the idea of imposing a so-called “health deductible,” perhaps $25 per medical visit, which would be incorporated into the income tax system. It took two days for anti-tax, anti-user-fee protests to erupt outside his office in Montreal’s old city. Bachand didn’t back down, succinctly summing up his motivation for making the cost of care more directly apparent to Quebecers: “Nothing is free.”
Of course, Canadians realize health care is expensive, when they think about it. But government insurance means they usually don’t. Anne Doig, the Saskatoon family physician who is also president of the Canadian Medical Association, said Quebec’s surprise move might signal the moment when politicians across the country finally begin to confront costs. “We are pointing out the problem, a stinking elephant in the middle of the room, that our governments have been able to sidestep up to now,” Doig told Maclean’s. “I think we’ve reached the tipping point where they can no longer sidestep it.”
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About Face
By Martin Patriquin and Charlie Gillis - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 at 8:30 AM - 174 Comments
A bill banning the niqab—supported by a majority of Canadians: how did our multicultural, tolerant nation get here?
Photograph by Peter Mccabe
Shama Naz, a mother of two young girls who lives in the Montreal suburb of Kirkland, visited the emergency room of the Lakeshore General Hospital last Sunday after her eldest daughter accidentally poked her left eye with a pencil. A native of Pakistan, Naz wears a niqab, a garment worn by some Islamic women that covers the entire face save for the eyes. A few days before, the Quebec government had announced legislation that would force her to remove her niqab to receive any government service; though it isn’t yet law, she wondered half-jokingly whether she would be turned away at the hospital.
She wasn’t. Her niqab stayed in place until she was able to see a doctor; then, as she has done countless times while writing exams, taking passport pictures and going across international borders, she took it off—without the prompting of the doctor, who happened to be a man. “Law or no law, it’s just about common sense,” Naz says. “For me, it’s never been an issue.”
Soon enough, Naz will be compelled by law, not only common sense, to doff her niqab whenever she visits the hospital, goes to school, has her licence renewed, or avails herself of any other service provided or funded by the provincial government. Introduced last week, Bill 94 is the first legislation in North America to place a de facto ban on any religious face coverings in any government building—including within the walls of every government-subsidized high school, CEGEP and university in Quebec.
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The league table
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 at 12:23 PM - 25 Comments
As a general rule, I limit the amount of polling discussed here—and avoid horse-race polls entirely. The horse race is almost always the least interesting thing going on in Ottawa.
And the following is almost definitely of questionable significance. But, for whatever it is worth, here are Canada’s most prominent political figures ranked by their most recent approval ratings (as determined by Angus Reid here, here and here). Continue…
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An Anglo truce
By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 24 Comments
Is the era of fighting over Quebec language laws officially over?
Photograph by Clement Allard/Canadian Press
Quebec, so the cliché goes, is home to poutine, smoky bars and maddening language debates, and indulging in all three is something of a rite of passage. Alas, a recent government health initiative means the combination of fries, cheese and gravy will effectively be outlawed from the cafeterias of many government institutions by 2012, while lighting up in any public space has been illegal for nearly five years. Language issues, meanwhile, are far less the stuff of spittle and hot blood than they once were. Battles between English and French used to occupy the headlines and even spill out onto the street. Now most English Quebecers apparently choose to stay quiet.
Fighting language laws seems especially passé. Twenty years ago, the right to have English on exterior commercial signs spawned an English rights movement that saw the birth of the Equality Party, and renewed linguistic tension across the province. Now, as Premier Jean Charest’s Liberals prepare to clamp down on English education rights, the old guard of that movement is lamenting the distinct lack of rage in its ranks. “Anglos don’t want to stick their necks out anymore,” says Robert Libman, former leader of the Equality Party. “There’s a sense of ‘What’s the point?’ The white flag has been waved, and it’s now lying encrusted on the ground.”
The current fuss—or lack thereof—is over an amendment to the current language law. In 2002, alarmed by a trend of parents exploiting what it called a legal loophole, the governing Parti Québécois outlawed a somewhat obscure practice that allowed certain students, otherwise ineligible under the province’s language law, to attend English school: if they attended a private English school for a year, they and their siblings could receive public education in English forevermore. (Under Quebec law, only those with a grandfathered right can attend English school.) The PQ’s Bill 104 closed the loophole—but lawyer Brent Tyler challenged the law all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled it unconstitutional last October.
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Amid the stench of cronyism, Charest strikes a lousy deal with Jewish schools
By Philippe Gohier - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 8:26 PM - 14 Comments
The cynical side of Jean Charest has to be loving this controversy about the…
The cynical side of Jean Charest has to be loving this controversy about the presence of French at the Olympics. It’s such an easy play for someone in his position: weigh in just enough to look concerned, but not enough to look like a grouch. Leave the heavy lifting to people like Réjean Tremblay, who was annoyed at the lack of French even before the Olympics started and who has since cranked up the outrage-o-meter to eleventy-billion, and Pauline Marois, who somehow imagines joining a three-day-old pile-on that’s doing perfectly fine without her is good politics.
But make no mistake—Charest needs this controversy more than anyone else, if only for the distraction it provides. The past two weeks have exposed a potentially devastating fact about his government: it is incapable of learning from crises. Nowhere is this more evident than in the special rules the Quebec government recently implemented to make life easier for ultra-religious private Jewish schools that openly flout the province’s education guidelines.
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Aim at the oil sands, and you hit Quebec
By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 24 Comments
One pundit suggests Jim Prentice suffered from ‘Quebecophobia’
One guess what lesson Pauline Marois drew from Jim Prentice’s recent criticism of Quebec’s environmental policies. Why, yes: it just clinches the case for sovereignty. “Quebec is a leader [on the environment]…and Canada is dragging us down,” the Parti Québécois leader declaimed. “If we were independent tomorrow, we could speak with our own voice…We could have signed the Kyoto agreement ourselves.” Etc., etc. “Federalism does not suit the Quebec reality…The real solution for Quebec is sovereignty…” zzzzzzzzz.
But if Marois’s response was predictable—in a sovereign Quebec, the very air would be purer—so was that of the rest of the province’s political class. In La Presse, Alain Dubuc found it “surreal” that a federal environment minister would “harshly attack” the province for “doing too much” for the environment. My sometime colleague Chantal Hébert agreed in her Toronto Star column that the minister’s “attack” was “unprecedented,” even suggesting on our CBC panel that it verged on “Quebec-bashing.” Le Soleil’s Raymond Giroux diagnosed the minister as suffering from “Quebecophobia.”
All this, over one paragraph in a half-hour speech! Prentice’s harsh and unprecedented attack on Quebec was to suggest it is “folly” for provinces to pursue their own individual strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions rather than the continental approach the feds prefer, citing as an example “the new and unique vehicle regulations in the province of Quebec.” That’s it. That’s the Quebec-bashing that set off this firestorm: a brief critique of a particular policy of the government of Quebec, delivered half a continent away in a speech at the University of Calgary.
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'Serge Marcil's story is one of thousands of people'
By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 8:07 PM - 1 Comment
The former Liberal MP is still missing.
Members of Marcil’s family are scouring hospitals in the Dominican Republic based on reports that he had been transferred to the country’s capital, Santo Domingo, on Thursday.
Two people on the ground in Haiti have said Marcil was found and transferred to the Dominican Republic, said a source close to the family Tuesday. But another tip placed Marcil at a Red Cross camp in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, the source said.
Marcil’s family has also received word that the search operation at the hotel where Marcil was staying has now gone from a rescue operation to one of recovery – meaning that crews do not expect to find anyone alive, the source said.
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Jean Charest and the burden of being amazing
By Philippe Gohier - Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 7:35 PM - 5 Comments
The Gazette‘s Don Macpherson boldly predicts 2010 won’t be all wine and roses for…
The Gazette‘s Don Macpherson boldly predicts 2010 won’t be all wine and roses for Quebec Premier Jean Charest:A year of recession and losses at the Caisse de dépôt ended with Charest being hounded by demands for a public inquiry into alleged corruption in the construction industry and with his government’s satisfaction rating at only 34 per cent.
And this year, things might get even worse.
The new year begins with Charest’s government facing problems in three key areas: political morality, public finances, and identity.
According to Macpherson, those problems are: persistent demands for an inquiry into dodgy dealings in the construction sector, as well as a perceived need to tighten ethics rules; a budget that will need balancing in the short term; and lingering identity and language issues that could prove to be a boon to the PQ’s fortunes. There’s nothing really, truly terrible on Macpherson’s list, but I can see why Charest and the gang might want to start burnishing the government’s image as soon as possible to prevent any of those issues from snowballing into something like, say, the Bouchard-Taylor Comission. Continue…
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Get back to work! I mean, get back to Parliament!
By Paul Wells - Monday, January 11, 2010 at 1:33 PM - 63 Comments
It’s just easier for a prime minister, any prime minister, to stay in the headlines than for an opposition leader, any opposition leader. Stephen Harper sat for an interview with BNN today — we’ll see the results later — and will be in Rivière du Loup (Mario Dumont’s old riding) tomorrow for a joint announcement with Jean Charest and, I’m told, Charest’s environment minister. There will be several more weeks like this before March.
