A no-name race to replace Jack Layton

By Paul Wells - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 15 Comments

Jacques Boissinot/CP

These days, after question period, Thomas Mulcair gives a little nothing-has-changed statement, through teeth clenched into an approximation of a cheerful smile, before he comments to reporters on the issues of the day. What hasn’t changed is Mulcair’s indecision over whether he’ll run for the leadership of the New Democratic Party. He is widely assumed to be a candidate. He isn’t a candidate yet. He’ll get back to us.

So will Niki Ashton, Paul Dewar, Peter Julian, Robert Chisholm and maybe more. Decent people, maybe more than that. But not really names to set the heart pounding. “There’s no excitement about this race,” a veteran New Democrat told me. “People aren’t excited about this. But it makes sense that they wouldn’t be. Their guy just died.”

Indeed. Jack Layton is gone barely five weeks. The NDP leadership convention isn’t until March 23. There’s half a year between the party’s last leader and its next. The hesitation of potential candidates is natural. The breakthrough party of 2011 is heading into a world of uncertainty.

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The benefits of mental illness

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 18 Comments

Photographs by Jodi Hilton/Getty Images

NASSIR GHAEMI is a physician and professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. In A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Health, he argues that in times of crisis, a lifetime of sanity can be a serious liability for political and military leaders, while the lessons and legacy of madness have proven invaluable.

Q: To put your counterintuitive thesis in a nutshell, would it be that too much of anything, including normality, is a bad thing?

A: You could put it that way. I would add that mentally normal leaders, who often have enormous success in normal times, often do not have the personal resources to cope with crisis change. But those who have struggled with mental illness—not outright psychosis or delusions, but the common mental illnesses of bipolarism or depression—have often developed just the traits that crisis leaders need and demonstrate: realism, resilience, creativity and empathy.

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'It's not going to be fixed by picking a cute leader'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 5:00 PM - 18 Comments

Justin Trudeau isn’t sure if he should run for leader of the Liberal party.

“Because the work that needs to be done is work on the ground. It’s not going to be fixed by picking a cute leader or the right leader or whatever. It’s going to happen by us putting our nose to the grindstone and really, really leaning into it, and right now I’ve committed and I am committed to making sure that the Liberal Party does those things,” said Trudeau, who was first elected in 2008. ”I honestly don’t know if me as leader is something that would help the party or the country,” he said.

Ms. President

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 1 Comment

Chris Bolin Photography, Photograph by Andrew Tolson

When Elizabeth Cannon showed up for her first day of engineering school in 1979, women made up five per cent of the program. Now, as she takes the reins of the University of Calgary, women make up 23 per cent of the school’s future engineers and more than half of the university’s student population, a trend reflected in schools across Canada.

But as Canadians fret over the feminization of lecture halls and ponder affirmative action for males, they seem to have missed the fact that the number of women sitting in the president’s chairs remains stubbornly low. In the fall of 2000, 12 of the 68 leaders of Canadian universities—18 per cent—were female. A decade later, just 13 of 70—19 per cent—are women. The U.S. saw a similar rise and plateau: in 1986, women made up nine per cent of university and college heads; the number grew to 19 per cent in 1998 before growth stalled again, settling at just 23 per cent today. Female professors are being hired in almost equal numbers to men—45 per cent of new full-time teaching positions were awarded to women in 2008—but the upper ranks are still overwhelmingly male. Just 22 per cent of full-time professors are women, although they make up a majority of education departments and nearly half of arts teachers.

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From the battlefield to the boardroom

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Fred Chartrand/CP/ Photograph by Andrew Tolson

As a man who believes that poor leaders have their uses—in the way they make what not to do so blindingly clear—Rick Hillier certainly found a target-rich environment during his career in the Canadian Forces. The former chief of defence staff, Canada’s highest-ranking soldier, Hillier, 55, left the armed forces in 2008, and now, a self-described “failure at retirement,” is fully occupied with philanthropic work, writing, and providing strategic and leadership advice for various companies. But he hasn’t forgotten what he calls the Forces’ dark decades, particularly the budget-squeezing ’90s, and the panicky, money-driven decisions they spawned, like selling the military’s eight Chinook helicopters to the Dutch air force. Years later, “nothing pissed me off more,” Hillier writes in his new book, Leadership: 50 Points of Wisdom for Today’s Leaders, than having to be ferried about in Afghanistan by a Dutch copter with its painted-over maple leaf still visible underneath.

But the most “vivid lessons I remember,” Hillier says over the phone from St. John’s, where he’s chancellor of Memorial University, came from the way some officers responded to the situation. “That senior officer who apologized to his men after his command ended that he’d spent too much time in the office? When I heard him say that, I promised myself I would spend half of every day mixing with the people under me, looking them in the eye and listening to them.”

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Trust Lula, she's good

By Claire Ward - Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 3:40 PM - 0 Comments

Buda Mendes/LatinContent/Getty Images

Brazil has all but ushered in its first female president in advance of the Oct. 3 general election. Despite lacking her boss’s charisma, widespread popularity and elocution, Dilma Rousseff, the 62-year-old chief of staff to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (or “Lula,” as he is affectionately known), is riding a widening gap in the polls with 50.5 per cent popularity, according to a Sensus poll. Her main opposition, São Paulo Gov. José Serra of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PDSB), sits at 26.4 per cent, down from 28 per cent in August. Rousseff’s surge in the polls is widely attributed to the popular outgoing president’s early endorsement of her as his successor, and his ongoing involvement in her campaign. “Today there is no one more prepared to govern our country than our future president, our comrade,” Lula said, pointing at Rousseff at a small-town appearance over the summer.

The president is enjoying 80-plus per cent approval ratings as his second and final term ends, arguably the kind of popularity that can rub off on even the most unlikely of candidates. “I can’t think of any other case in Latin America in the recent past where this has been the case: a twice-elected president simply saying, ‘Trust me,’ ” Riordan Roett, director of the Latin American program at Johns Hopkins University, has said. “The attitude is, ‘If Lula says she is the right person, she is the right person.’ ”

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Maclean's Interview: Steve Yzerman

By Charlie Gillis - Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 2 Comments

Photography by Fabrizio Constantini/Getty Images

It held no earthmoving surprises, yet the list of 23 names Steve Yzerman produced on New Year’s Eve touched off varying degrees of applause, condemnation and second-guessmanship in bars and on open-line shows across the country. It was an early taste of the scrutiny on Yzerman, the Hall of Fame centre with the Detroit Red Wings who, as executive director of Canada’s men’s Olympic hockey team, chose the squad that will carry the hopes of a nation in Vancouver. As a player, Yzerman had a way of exceeding expectations. As a manager, his challenge may be keeping them in check.

Q: You are managing Canada’s team, in Canada’s sport, at an Olympic Games to be played in Canada. Given the enormity of the event to people in this country, did you have any qualms about taking the job?
A: No, none at all. It’s a very rare opportunity. I’d be amazed—bewildered may be the better word—at anybody who said no.

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Haiti: are we ready to lead?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 4 Comments

As the entire world laments the difficulties of delivering aid and succour to Haiti, one inevitable question hangs in the distance. What will it take to make Haiti function as a country? Canadians are already answering the immediate call for help in a very significant way. But are we prepared to make the same commitment to Haiti’s future?

Haiti is undoubtedly the most benighted country in our hemisphere, with a long history of failed governments and repressive dictatorships. Yet history also shows it once enjoyed a brief period of relative calm and progress. While under U.S. control from 1915 to 1934, Haiti actually functioned in a way that today seems impossible. It is instructive to consider the successes and failures of that time.

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Stop, or I'll tour!

By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 at 3:45 PM - 225 Comments

So: Parliament has been prorogued. What is to be done about it? Answer: not bloody much.

Certainly there’s no evidence the public is up in arms about it, notwithstanding the Star’s typically tendentious headline. Smug Tory types whose response to every principled objection is “nobody cares” are, unfortunately, right: the 38,000 plus who have subscribed to that facebook page are indicative of very little: most, I would bet, are opposition partisans. Were their situations reversed, they would be saying the same things the Tories are.

Neither can we expect much from the opposition leaders: neither Ignatieff nor Layton could apparently be arsed to postpone their vacations — though Iggy at least managed to release a wan op-ed piece denouncing the government in the series of sentence fragments (“Messy. Inconvenient. Frustrating. Democracy is all those things.”) that are the preferred idiom of the contemporary politician. “Last week’s shutting down of Parliament was a key moment,” he writes. “It was one of those moments of supreme clarity. The audacity. The epic scale of the cynicism. The arrogance of a regime that thinks it can get away with just about anything.”

But that’s all going to change now. The opposition leader isn’t going to take this lying down. Nosir. No, to protest this outrage, he’s going to … go on a listening tour. “Mr. Harper may not want to face the public, but we will get out there and meet Canadians in universities, in town hall meetings and other public events from coast to coast to coast. We will seek their views and exchange ideas.” That’ll show ‘em. Just wait till he gets back from the south of France.

But as for more substantive protests — such as convening a mock Parliament, as suggested by A. Hothead — n’incluez nous pas.

In a way, I can’t blame them. You can only rouse the public to defend something if the thing is generally considered worth defending. But so degraded is Parliament’s condition already — the consequence of many previous such assaults on parliamentary rights, each of which was thought too trivial on its own to be worth making a fuss — that it’s hard for the public to see what is being lost. It’s only Parliament, after all. It’s not as if it’s something important.

This is the problem. It’s not prorogation, on its own, that puts us on the path to despotism. It’s the cumulative weakening of our democratic defenses, and more important, of our democratic instincts. Each new precedent conditions us to accept the next, and the next, to the point that if we ever do arrive at the end of the Tyranny line, no one will even know, let alone care: we will have nothing left to compare it to. (We scoff at such overheated rhetoric now, but if Canadians in the 1950s had been presented with the package of changes that have occurred since then in the way we are governed, they would have risen up in revolt.) And if the public doesn’t care, neither will the opposition. You might think it was the job of a political leader to get out in front of the public on this — to, you know, lead — but if so, you don’t know Canadian politics.

In any case, the party leaders are in something of a conflict of interest. For one day they will be in government, or hope to be, and the powers and prerogatives the Harper conservatives have arrogated to themselves will be powers and prerogatives they may wish to enjoy. As, if experience is any guide, they almost certainly will. If there is one sure lesson of Canadian history, it is that no political principle long survives its first encounter with power. What most provokes a party leader in opposition is what he is most likely to practice once in government.

This isn’t really a contest, in other words, between the parties. It is between Parliament and government — present or prospective. If anyone is to defend the rights and privileges of Parliament, it will not be the party leaders. It will have to be ordinary members of Parliament.

But how likely is that? If MPs had the kind of backbone that would induce them to come to Parliament’s defense, they would have done so long before this. But of course they don’t. Any MP who showed the slightest tendency in that direction would find himself unable to get his nomination papers signed, and without the party’s backing could not hope to be elected. Independence of mind has been bred out of our MPs, much as dogs are bred not to bite.

So nothing is going to come of this, I’m afraid. It might, if Parliament mattered much, but as Parliament does not matter, it won’t.

UPDATE: In the interest of equal time, I should point out that there is also a facebook page for Canadians FOR Proroguing Parliament. So far they have 19 members, but one of them is Ezra.

This is how a Westminster model is supposed to work

By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, December 1, 2009 at 5:40 PM - 43 Comments

The Australian Liberal party has just replaced its leader. It took all of a couple of days, from caucus revolt to leadership vote. That’s because the Australian Liberals choose their leader on the classic Westminster model: by a vote of the caucus, rather than, as in this country, by the wholesale purchase and sale of thousands of instant memberships, busloads of elderly drunks etc.

And they do this because in Australia they believe a party leader’s chief task is to lead the caucus in Parliament — because, in Australia, Parliament matters.

In the end, the incumbent, Malcolm Turnbull, lost to challenger Tony Abbott, 42 to 41. I pass no judgement on the proximate cause of Turnbull’s downfall, his endorsement of the governing Labour party’s climate change policy. But you can bet that any leader of the Australian Liberal party has to be awfully solicitous of his caucus’s views. The balance of power between leader and caucus is very different there than it is here, where MPs have aptly been described as “$140,000 voting machines.”

It also signals a strategic shift on the Liberals’ part: they intend to stand and fight on this issue, sharpening their differences with the government rather than minimizing them. Again, whatever your views, it’s refreshing to see a country where voters are actually given a choice.

The nature of leadership

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 3:15 PM - 6 Comments

Carleton professor Waller Newell talks to Steve Paikin about political leadership.

The full discussion—including our Andrew Coyne—is here.

77.4%

By Andrew Coyne - Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 9:22 PM - 56 Comments

…. for Alberta’s Ed Stelmach. Is it enough?

INSTANT WISDOM: Perhaps the perfect result for the Wildrose Alliance: tepid enough to leave Stelmach limping, but not so bad as to force him out.

Smile like you mean it

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 1:10 PM - 3 Comments

Bruce Anderson considers the politics of grinning.

When characterizing what we like or don’t like, we often rely on concepts such as strong or weak, hard-nosed or vacillating, warm or cold, introspective or popularity addicted, determined or lacking fire in the belly. All good, all relevant, based on my work. But one thing that’s frequently underestimated is the enormous power of optimism, an infectious enthusiasm for the future. It’s human nature: offered a menu of hope or fear, we dine on hope.

… there is actually quite a bit of science about the social effects of smiling, and even a name (Duchenne smile) for the type of facial expression that seems the most sincere and spontaneous. Leaders who smile, who signal that we are going to succeed, are leaders we are drawn to. Leaders who signal just how bad things are or could be, who appear to be bearing the weight of the world on their shoulders, find us slipping their embrace.

What will they run on now?

By John Geddes - Thursday, September 17, 2009 at 1:40 PM - 5 Comments

Predicting the defining issue of a federal campaign is notoriously tricky. Old political hands will tell you elections always end up turning on the question of leadership. But leaders need something to talk about—that’s why they invented platforms. A well-crafted one can sometimes set the agenda, the way Stephen Harper managed to do in his last two campaigns with easy-to-understand pledges aimed at middle-income voters. Often factors beyond a politician’s control take over, the way the fresh memory of the sponsorship scandal blighted Paul Martin’s first run as Liberal leader. Perhaps the only time an election’s core concern is thought to be obvious going in is when the economy is in the tank.

Now, though, with speculation about a fall election heating up, even the formerly safe bet that this campaign would be all about the recession looks uncertain. Only a few months ago, just about everybody in Ottawa’s political set thought Harper had slipped in under the wire by winning last fall’s election just before Canadians realized that the financial meltdown of 2008 was the prelude to a full-blown recession. But with only a minority, there was no way he could dodge having to run this year or next on how his Tories managed through the slump.

Or could he? Listen to Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff spelling out exactly what he wants voters to base their next choice on. “The ballot question,” Ignatieff said as his caucus girded for battle at a summer’s-end meeting in Sudbury, Ont., “is, ‘Who is best placed to lead Canada into the economy of tomorrow?’ ” That’s a far cry from, say, “Who can best lead Canada out of its current economic miseries?” Or, “Who screwed things up here in the first place?” The clear implication of Ignatieff’s ballot question is that Liberals no longer believe voters can be counted on to punish Harper for leading Canada into hard times.

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Nanosteria

By Andrew Potter - Friday, February 13, 2009 at 10:40 AM - 9 Comments

Nik’s back and there’s gonnna be numbers. Here’s his latest on leadership:

Budget Performance Question:

For each of the following leaders I would like you to rate their performance in handling the federal budget as very good, good, average, poor or very poor.

Net Leader Performance in Handling the Budget

Michael Ignatieff +21 (n=1,000)
Gilles Duceppe +18 (n=263)*
Stephen Harper +15 (n=1,000)
Jack Layton -6 (n=1,000)

*Note: Quebec only

Net Performance is calculated by subtracting those who thought a leader had done a poor or very poor job of handling the budget from those who thought a leader had done a good or very good job.

Who'd want to lead the Liberals now?

By John Geddes - Friday, October 24, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 0 Comments

As the depth of the Liberal defeat was sinking in on the evening of Oct. 14, Michael Ignatieff strolled out to console the party faithful crowded into a basement room below a bar in his suburban Toronto riding. Actually, his crowd didn’t need all that much bucking up. Sure, their party had lost 19 seats and collected only 26 per cent of the popular vote, its lowest share ever. But their candidate had held his Etobicoke-Lakeshore constituency, and was now poised to be a top contender for the leadership that everybody knew Stéphane Dion would soon have to resign.

Given the moment, Ignatieff might have chosen to unleash a defiant partisan assault on the victorious Conservatives, or offered the media a preview of the policy vision he would soon be pitching in the race to replace Dion. Instead, the celebrated author and former Harvard professor tried out a new persona: the highbrow grease monkey of Canadian politics. “We have to examine every piece of the great Liberal machine,” he told reporters. “We have to put it up on blocks, we have to take the wheels off, we have to empty the oil, look at the gears. The Canadian people have said, ‘This isn’t working for us.’ ”

Ignatieff’s garage metaphor summed up a widely held conviction among insider Liberals about what really went wrong for them in this fall’s campaign—and long before it even began. Many of the party’s most influential organizers and elected politicians, including Dion himself, point not to any failure of leadership style, policy vision, or even ideological bent, but rather to nuts-and-bolts organizational deficiencies. In particular, they’re looking enviously at the Conservative party’s far superior ability to raise money in small increments, month after month, from thousands of determined supporters.

In the coming weeks, Maclean’s will explore the post-election challenges facing all of the major parties. For the Liberals, it’s all about rebuilding from the ground up, and figuring how to restore themselves to the vaunted status of Canada’s natural governing party.

Among Liberals taking a long view, the soul-searching these days has surprisingly little to do with how they first gambled on the improbable Dion as leader, then doubled down on his Green Shift as their platform centrepiece. Instead, they are preoccupied with how the party fell so far behind the Tories, and even the New Democrats, when it comes to the practical art of connecting with rank-and-file members. The leadership contest that will likely culminate at a Liberal convention next May in Vancouver is on; a sweeping platform rethink is inevitable. But many top Liberals insist the real action is resolutely workaday. “My number one priority,” says party president Doug Ferguson, “is to change the fundraising culture of the party.”

How badly that culture needs changing can be proven with remorseless arithmetic. Last year the Tories raised close to $17 million from 107,492 contributors, leaving the Liberals, who collected just $4.5 million from 23,442 backers, in their dust. The Liberals are, in part, victims of their own 2004 political financing reforms. Even though the party had long relied heavily on corporate donations, along with sizable individual contributions gathered at big fundraising dinners, Jean Chrétien’s government moved to limit businesses to giving $1,000 a year and capped individual donations at $5,000. The Conservative party—especially its grassroots-oriented Reform predecessor—couldn’t tap companies as easily. So by necessity they had come to rely mainly on support that flowed in steadily, in smaller increments, from individuals. When Harper won power, he shrewdly tightened the rules further, banning business and union donations, and limiting individuals to $1,100 a year.

What this meant for Liberals was obvious long before Dion won the leadership in late 2006. At the same tumultuous convention, the party reformed its constitution to allow it to begin the slogging work of catching up with the Tories. The biggest step was to centralize the party membership lists, previously controlled by provincial wings, which sometimes guarded them to give their own fundraising first priority.

Ferguson says the task of creating that national membership list is completed. But Liberals are still squabbling about establishing nationwide rules for joining the party, including a common membership fee. More problematic, according to a senior party official, is the fact that Liberal riding associations are not required, as they are in the Conservative party, to share key information about local supporters—like who takes lawn signs and shows up to meetings—with the party’s national database. This sort of detail is considered crucial when it comes to targeting members for direct mail and email appeals.

At his news conference this week, Dion announced unexpectedly that he would stay on as leader until his successor is chosen. He vowed to devote himself to modernizing Liberal fundraising. The party has been in a prolonged “financial crisis,” he said, which left it too poor to return fire in early 2007 when the Tories took deadly aim with TV ads portraying him as a weak, vacillating non-leader. “We have to bring our fundraising machinery into the 21st century, or the Liberal party will be at a permanent political disadvantage,” Dion said. Ferguson says it’s more than a matter of getting on an equal financial footing with the Tories: “We need to engage members who have been feeling disconnected from the party.”

The results of the past few month’s efforts are not all that encouraging. Last spring the Liberals launched what they called their Victory Fund, a bid to coax party supporters into giving as little as $10 a month through an automatic credit-card deduction. But a party official said only about 1,000 donors are signed up under the program, out of a national membership roll of about 60,000. The technology and the approach seem up-to-date, so what’s going wrong? One difficulty could be the way self-defined centrists, who tend to identify with the party, are also temperamentally less fervent than staunch right-wingers, left-wingers, or, for that matter, separatists. “The Bloc, the NDP and the Conservatives operate from a core of ideological support,” says Tim Murphy, former chief of staff to prime minister Paul Martin. “They’re motivated to give no matter what.”

Ignatieff speaks

By John Geddes - Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at 11:32 PM - 3 Comments

Here at Michael Ignatieff’s election-night bash you’d never know the Liberals have lost. Bedouin Soundclash is throbbing in the basement of Hollywood on the Queensway—a bar in his west Toronto riding—campaign workers are eating pizza, and nobody seems all that glum.

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Megapundit: "Obtuseness and stupidity"

By selley - Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at 12:14 PM - 3 Comments

LONG-WEEKEND ELECTION DAY ROUNDUP!

Must-reads: Scott Taylor on shortsighted thinking in Afghanistan; Chantal Hébert and Dan Leger recap the campaign; Konrad Yakabuski on Harper’s Quebec caucus.

Wasn’t that fun?
Congratulations to Canada’s political leaders on a job… done. Now, let’s talk about high-speed rail!

Memo to anyone being interviewed by the Vancouver Sun‘s Barbara Yaffe: if she agrees to start the interview over again, she really hasn’t. “CTV was on solid footing,” she writes, in deciding to air Dion’s confusion over what she calls “a simple question.” Why? Because “voters surely were entitled to make up their own minds” about what, if anything, the exchange meant. This strikes us as rather weak, especially if CTV has any other political do-overs in the can, but we certainly agree with her second point—which is that Harper’s reaction to the tape represented yet another needless and counterproductive “meany” moment.

“Harper’s move was perhaps cheap and dirty,” says Sun Media’s Greg Weston, “but such is the current five-week mudfest.” Thankfully for Canadians, he adds, “Dion’s faulty earfull [whatever that is] didn’t happen during a crucial tete-a-tete between prime minister and president at the White House.” Indeed, we hear both John McCain and Barack Obama rely heavily on hypothetical questions that transcend the space-time continuum.

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What happened to the Liberals?

By John Geddes - Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 0 Comments

Consider a political party that’s been governing in Ottawa for a couple of years with only a parliamentary minority. Its leader is seen as a strong but aloof prime minister, occasionally harsh, and hardly a man of the people. He decides the time is right to force an election anyway, even though grim economic news has voters worried. Saddled with the leader’s image liabilities and an unsettling economic backdrop, what sort of campaign would such a party mount to leap from minority to majority?

Start by repackaging the prime minister in a way “contrived to make him seem if not folksy at least accessible,” even cast him as “a gentle father, adoring husband.” Next, provide him with a reassuringly low-key platform, nothing too dramatic, but with niche policies aimed at attracting, say, women and the “aspiring middle class.” Finally, have him “ridicule” his main adversary “mercilessly,” painting his “awkward” rival’s more daring platform as foolish, particularly given the fragile economy.

This may sound like a sketch of Stephen Harper’s position going into this election, and of the Conservative strategy for winning it. But it’s actually drawn from the late Christina McCall’s masterful account of Pierre Trudeau’s 1974 campaign, masterminded by Jim Coutts and Keith Davey, that won back a Liberal majority. All the telling descriptive words and phrases in quotation marks are drawn from McCall’s take on that election, in her 1980 essay, “Jim Coutts and the Politics of Manipulation.”

If the classic Liberal approach to manipulative politics has a home in the present contest, it seems to be in the Conservative camp. To suggest that Harper’s 2008 campaign might be consciously modelled on Trudeau’s 1974 run—with Stéphane Dion in the hapless Robert Stanfield’s role—might be a stretch. But Harper does pride himself on his knowledge of political history, routinely talks about the Liberal party’s past dominance, and once wrote that it was Trudeau who “provoked both the loves and hatreds of my political passion.” Is it too much to imagine that he’s now applying know-your-enemy logic, adopting techniques that kept the hated Liberals so long in power?

There’s an essential Grittiness to Harper’s campaign, a combination of a cautious platform and unrelenting focus on the votes he and his strategists have identified as essential to expanding their base. But these same core old-school Liberal elements are less evident in Dion’s strategy and tactics. In place of the platform pragmatism of, say, the 1974 vintage Trudeau or the 1993 Jean Chrétien, Dion is running on his Green Shift. It’s a creative, signature policy, more like Stanfield’s wage and price controls, or—to cite a much more successful case of a Big Idea campaign—Brian Mulroney’s 1988 free trade platform.

Figuring out precisely what blocks of voters Dion aims to win over with his conviction-driven message is also tricky. Harper’s target audiences are well-defined, notably Quebecers ready to ditch the Bloc Québécois, and suburbanites, especially in heavily ethnic ridings in Ontario and B.C. By contrast, a senior Liberal campaign official admitted Dion has been forced to fight a diffused, multi-front campaign—fending off Tories on his right, the NDP, Greens and even the Bloc on his left, all while defending urban Liberal strongholds. “The Conservatives are running a very surgical campaign,” the official said. “We don’t quite have that luxury.”

Megapundit: Bland vs. bland, or "starkly contrasting visions"?

By selley - Monday, September 8, 2008 at 1:51 PM - 3 Comments

Must-reads: Barbara Yaffe, John Ivison (times two), James Travers, Randall Denley, Don Martin (times two), David Olive and Lorne Gunter on the road to October 14.

The Canadian conundrum
Are we more afraid of change or of Stephen Harper?

The Globe and Mail‘s Jeffrey Simpson says Harper both expects and “needs” to win a majority on October 14, based on his party’s “huge fundraising edge” and tax-cutting record, and the allegedly poor leadership of Stéphane Dion. But what about Harper’s stated expectation of a minority? Rubbish, declares Simpson, pointing to “pre-election polling” that he says promises gains in Quebec and what Harper’s “friends say privately.”

It’s good strategy on Harper’s part to say he expects a minority, Lysiane Gagnon opines in the Globe, because Quebeckers are fond of minority governments but not so much of the dreaded right-wing agenda a Harper majority would purportedly usher in. In other words, ironically, signs of an impending surge in Quebec “could hurt the Tories if people ever become convinced Stephen Harper is on the brink of winning a majority government.”

Meanwhile, over in the National Post, John Ivison suggests Harper’s modest, “he’ll do the least harm” pitch, “which concentrates on the shortcomings of the opposition parties, could suffer from its lack of ambition.” For a party that’s been known to shoot itself in the foot every now and again—Ivison suggests their enthusiastic embrace of arts funding cuts, which had been suggested by bureaucrats, as an example—and a planeload of journalists “slobbering in their sleep” at the prospect of a similar story, low expectations can quickly be undone by low performance.

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Megapundit: Will Stéphane Dion defile the odds?

By selley - Thursday, September 4, 2008 at 1:26 PM - 6 Comments

Must-reads: Lawrence Martin on the Canadian election; Rosie DiManno and Margaret Wente on Sarah Palin; Christie Blatchford on getting our act together in Afghanistan.

Main Street Canadians like the status quo
How Stéphane Dion can become Prime Minister, and the 10,000 reasons he probably won’t.

We know what Jack Layton, Stephen Harper and Gilles Duceppe are going to do on the campaign trail, an unusually energetic Lawrence Martin opines in The Globe and Mail. The election’s result is all up to the unknown quantity: Dion. If he “appreciably exceeds his remarkably low expectations,” taking “dead aim at the Harper government” on Afghanistan, fiscal management and the environment, then he might just “eke out a two-seat minority.” But “if, as most expect, he trips over his own tongue and toes, it will be John Turner revisited.” The smart money’s on Harper, of course, but Dion has proven himself again and again as a “defiler of the odds”—that’s either a typo or a brilliant turn of phrase, we’d say, or possibly even both. And Martin says it’s tough to put anything past the man who “came out of a lunar module to win the Liberal leadership race.”

Dion certainly seemed to be taking dead aim at Harper in Winnipeg yesterday, Don Martin argues in the Calgary Herald, when he described the Prime Minister as a “secretive, manipulative, untrustworthy, intolerant, job-killing, climate-change-denying, all-round evil-doer.” All this would have gone down a little smoother if Dion hadn’t also announced alterations to his Green Shift, Martin adds, and if there weren’t “literally dozens of ridings … still without a candidate to carry the Liberal flag, including some that are potentially winnable.” But Dion, for one, appears ready to rumble, and Martin predicts we’ll soon be hearing lots of effective but “utterly preposterous” lines like, “Stephen Harper wants to give George W. Bush a third term in Ottawa.” Oh, goodie.

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Obama is ready to lead

By John Parisella - Friday, August 29, 2008 at 5:23 PM - 0 Comments

The Democrats in Denver can leave town with the calm assurance of a successful convention, united and with a clear sense of direction. Rarely have we seen four consecutive nights of solid and inspirational speeches. From Ted Kennedy, to Michelle Obama, to Hillary Clinton, to Bill Clinton, to John Kerry, to Al Gore, to Joe Biden, and finally to Barack Obama, America was once again treated to the best expressions of speech making in America. The speech delivered by Barack Obama yesterday, however, stood apart from all the others.

We all know that Obama’s candidacy is historic and the fact that he delivered his address 45 years after Martin Luther King made his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech only added to the historic occasion. What was more important was the content of Obama’s speech. He delivered a clear distinction between the America he wants to lead and a John McCain America. He showed a combative streak as we have rarely seen of him, and energized the crowd for the fall campaign. What was particularly significant was his description of his priorities should he become president as of January 2009. It was inspiring and it was clear. He concluded his speech by returning to the ideals and vision that has been so successful for him since he began his campaign in February 2007.

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