The centre in crisis

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, July 29, 2011 at 5:13 PM - 47 Comments

Bob Rae draws lessons from the U.S. debt crisis.

The deep partisanship that has marked the crisis in the United States Congress has some lessons for Canadians.  Polarisation is not the “new normal,” as New Democrats and Conservatives are preaching.  It corrodes the body politic and takes us away from the simple truth that most people want a moderate, intelligent politics that’s based on facts, evidence, good values and compromise … we need to understand that most goals in politics, as they are in hockey or soccer, are scored from the centre.  That’s where the action is, and that’s where most Canadians are. But not the dead centre where it’s safety first and always ‘on the one hand and the other hand,’ but rather an action-filled, resilient, and lively centre that is not afraid of ideas, debate, and looking at issues afresh.  And that’s where the Liberal Party needs to be as well.

Copps considering Liberal party presidency

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 1:53 PM - 3 Comments

Sheila Copps says she’s been doing some “serious research” into running for president of the Liberal Party of Canada. The former Hamilton East MP and deputy prime minister says she’s already spoken with Bob Rae about the job. Copps says she will decide whether to put her name in for candidacy at the January 2012 convention by the end of the summer. Copps held her federal seat for 20 years, from 1984 to 2004. The outspoken political veteran says given the Liberals’ third party status, “it’s time for people to step up to the plate and either put up or shut up.”

The Hamilton Spectator

The Liberals' wake and some parting remarks

By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, May 23, 2011 at 9:35 AM - 33 Comments

A new day: Peter Milliken with Ted Hsu

The final humiliation: a cash bar

Last week the Liberals gathered the night before what would be their final caucus meeting with both defeated and elected MPs. One Liberal staffer called the party a “wake”; a Hill security guard predicted it would end early because it was a cash bar. Surviving Toronto Liberal MP Kirsty Duncan arrived with a bandaged hand that will need surgery. “I fell on Wednesday and the government fell on the Friday,” she says. Five weeks campaigning didn’t help: “Even when you break your hand,” said Duncan, “people still want to shake it.” Some days ended with Duncan in excruciating pain. Defeated MP Marlene Jennings arrived with a white cane, announcing that she is now officially vision-impaired. The one person who spoke at the party was surviving MP Ralph Goodale, but no one seemed to be listening; former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff left before Goodale spoke. The Liberals’ only two rookie MPs were there: Sean Casey from Charlottetown and Ted Hsu from Kingston, Ont., which was previously represented by Speaker Peter Milliken. Hsu’s win was a surprise for the Conservatives, who for years said that once Milliken retired they would easily win the riding.

Continue…

Some Liberals still see Bob Rae as their next saviour

By Erica Alini - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 20 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

On the subject of the Liberal party circa May 2011, and specifically how the most dominant political institution of the 20th century has come to be in its present situation, Bob Rae recalls some words offered to him by the late Philip Givens, a former mayor of Toronto who also served in the House of Commons and the Ontario legislature. “He once said to me,” Rae recalls, adopting a nasal tone to impersonate Givens, “ ‘Bobby, in politics, you don’t get what you deserve, you get what’s coming to you.’ ”

So fated does the Liberal Party of Canada now find itself with 34 seats, relegated to third-party status in the House of Commons for the first time in its history and confronted with myriad questions about its purpose and future. From his place within this shrunken caucus, Bob Rae has to decide, after a long and varied career of public life, what he is to do next. And with the stories of the Liberal party and Rae having come to this, the first question seems to be how they will move forward together.

“I want to be a constructive member of the team and I’m happy to help in any way that I can,” he says, “but obviously I want to make sure, I think everybody wants to make sure, that everybody knows what we’re getting ourselves into—and right now it’s still a little unclear to me.”

Continue…

Old friends

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, May 1, 2011 at 10:33 AM - 32 Comments

Michael Ignatieff maintains his pitch.

My sense is that Canadians value moderate, evidence-based, pragmatic, fiscally-responsible government right down the center. That’s what they really want. They’re being told by every poll, every expert, every smart aleck in the country what they want, but I think actually what Canadians want is good, moderate, pragmatic government and I’m very convinced looking at every rally I’ve been to since the campaign began, that that yearning to get back to that, to get back to the Canada that that represents, is the true, authentic yearning of the Canadian people, and that’s what I’ve got to serve and fight for and defend.

New friends

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, May 1, 2011 at 10:16 AM - 45 Comments

Having spent much of his political career trying to destroy the Liberal party, Stephen Harper now appeals to its supporters.

I believe Mr. Ignatieff and the Liberal party are in trouble not because they’ve been true to liberalism, but on the contrary. I think their platform represents a departure from the Liberal party at its best. The Liberal party has been its best – now, you know, I have problems with the Liberal party, I think sometimes think flexibility becomes something else in the case of the Liberal party – but nevertheless, you have to be realistic about the economy and the NDP has not been prepared to be realistic about the world in which we are living and have economic choices that are fitting for that.

Liberals unveil electoral platform

By macleans.ca - Sunday, April 3, 2011 at 1:27 PM - 67 Comments

The Liberal Party has unveiled their $8-billion electoral platform, entitled “Your Family. Your Future. Your Canada,” that focuses on strengthening families and post-secondary education. Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff presented the platform at an “online town hall” in Ottawa on Sunday. Chief among the Liberals’ platform proposal is the Liberal Family Care plan, which will provide $1-billion dollars for families to care for sick and dying relatives by allowing six months of compassionate care leave and a $1,350 tax benefit, and the Canadian Learning Passport, which will also cost $1-billion and would provide $4,000 to the RESPs of high school students applying for university. Ignatieff said the Liberal Party would pay for their platform spending without raising taxes but by restoring corporate tax rates back to 2010 levels while eliminating tax breaks for oil sands development, canceling the Harper government’s F-35 fighter jet deal and the Public Private Partnership Infrastructure Fund. Ignatieff took a dig at Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s proposed Family Tax Cut, which would allow couples to split their incomes but would not be implemented until the deficit has been eliminated in 2015-2016, saying “we can do it now.” Finance Minister Jim Flaherty called the Liberal platform a “high-spending, high-tax agenda,” and will be giving a press conference in Toronto on Sunday afternoon to comment on it.

CBC News

Ignatieff finds his fight

By Paul Wells - Friday, April 1, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 159 Comments

Photograph by Roger Lemoyne

“You know, Mr. Harper doesn’t like elections,” Michael Ignatieff told a room full of Liberals in Mississauga, Ont. For the Prime Minister, he said, elections seem to be just “a kind of pesky interference in the normal course of things.” The crowd of 500 packed into the Payal Banquet Hall obligingly made disapproving noises.

“I’ll tell you why he doesn’t like elections very much,” the Liberal leader went on. “Because it’s the moment when the power returns to the people of Canada. We love elections, don’t we?” The crowd started to applaud. “We want an election!”

It was the first weeknight of the election campaign, barely 80 hours after Stephen Harper’s government fell to a non-confidence vote in the Commons. A few hours before Ignatieff spoke, Harper had promised an income-splitting plan that would allow one spouse to transfer income to another so the two could pay a lower total tax bill. “Fine and dandy,” Ignatieff allowed as he described the plan to the crowd.

Continue…

Inside the Liberal effort to resurrect Michael Ignatieff

By Paul Wells - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 10:19 AM - 361 Comments

Photograph by Christopher Pike

Michael Ignatieff has been among the people.

“I’m in Newfoundland two weeks ago,” the Liberal leader said over tea in the sunroom at Stornaway, the official Opposition leader’s residence. On the wall behind him was a landscape by the Winnipeg artist Ivan Eyre, all slate-grey skies and autumn foliage. “And I’m in a training centre run by the operating engineers’ union. Great union. And this training site is training people in heavy machinery. Everything from bulldozers to cranes.

“A third of the kids in the course are women. Half of the women are on social assistance. They’re desperate to get a union ticket to be bulldozer drivers or crane operators. They’re fabulously determined. It’s a tough course. They put me into these damned cranes and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, and they look fabulous. One of the women said to me, ‘You know, this is my ticket out of here. This is the ticket that allows me out of social assistance. This is my ticket that allows me to feed my kids. But I can’t do this if I don’t get child care.’

Continue…

They can't all stand for the little guy

By Paul Wells - Friday, March 4, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 90 Comments

Youtube

Remember when “permanent campaign” was just a figure of speech? Ah, lost innocence of youth. A few days ago, the Conservative Party of Canada released a new wave of television ads, at least the fourth since Michael Ignatieff became Liberal leader. The New Democrats responded by releasing ads of their own. When a for-real election campaign does begin, the emotion you should feel is a premonition of relief: voting day will mean a break from election ads. That break may last as long as a couple of weeks.

What do the new ads tell us? Stephen Harper’s telling us we’re lucky to live in Canada. “We’re lucky to live in Canada,” he intones. See? The screen shows a Maple Leaf flag flapping. “A land where merit means more than privilege. Where who you are matters more than who you know or where you came from.”

Only six weeks earlier, the Conservatives released ads that showed Harper locked in his office while mobs threw rocks in the streets outside. “There’s uncertainty in the world,” a worried narrator explained. But already things are looking up. The new ads show Harper getting out of the office and walking around. Nobody throws any rocks. Still, in one scene the PM is seen wearing a hard hat. Better safe than sorry.

“Today our country is walking taller,” Harper says. There’s a shot of him walking next to Felipe Calderón, the diminutive president of Mexico, who comes up just past Harper’s belly button. Who is our country walking taller than? Mexican pipsqueaks, that’s who.

Harper’s voice-over brings it all home. “Together, as Canadians, let’s strengthen our country, make it better for families, and ensure our kids have even more opportunity than we did.” It’s the kind of ad most parties run in the last weekend before an election, ads designed to make voters feel good about a choice they may have made reluctantly.

The Conservatives have plenty of the other kinds of ad, too, the kind designed to make the opposition look like a big ball of stink. The latest shows only Michael Ignatieff’s face. The script repeats Ignatieff’s name three times and the word “tax” ?ve times. But what’s striking is that the Conservatives are running the flag-waving, walking-taller ad as often as they’re running the stink-bomb ads. This party still views its leader as one of its biggest assets.

So does the NDP. That party’s ads begin with Ordinary Canadians asking a question, then cut to Jack Layton with his tie knot loosened and his shirt sleeves rolled up. “Is it just me or has Ottawa stopped working?” Ordinary Canadian One asks. “It sure looks that way,” Layton responds. “Lobbyists, senators and insiders are getting all the breaks while more and more seniors are struggling just to pay their bills.”

Oh my. What can be done? “Roll up our sleeves, put the partisan games aside and start getting results.” Clearly Layton is the man for this job: he already had his sleeves rolled up before you came in. He lists the sort of results he would like to start getting. “Increasing assistance for seniors in need. And giving a little bit of help to those who are caring for a parent at home.”

Layton famously has other results he would be willing to take, just in case seniors and their caregivers get left in the lurch on budget day by Prime Minister Walking Tall. The NDP leader has spent the year preparing to vote in favour of the budget if he can find any pretext to do so. From that perspective, his party’s latest ads look more like an ounce of prevention than like the first act of a real election battle.

Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals have no new ads. In 2004, when Harper became leader of the Conservative party, the Liberals ran pre-writ ads seeking to define him as an awful fellow. Now that he is the one running ads against them, they have decided it’s not cricket to run ads outside of an election campaign. The Liberals are the party of late-breaking scruple.

They would be more flexible on such questions if they could afford to be. What would their ads look like? Probably roughly the same: the Liberals would depict their man as the only leader who glimpses the Canadian soul and protects the little guy. Increasingly, the big parties present interchangeable faces to an electorate that would, on the whole, prefer to be left alone. Their endless pre-electoral posturing is not matched by their ability to capture our attention.

What would a really surprising campaign ad look like? It might feature a politician admitting he gets things wrong, too. It might list areas where our country falls short and challenge its citizens to do better, instead of lining up to flatter Canadians and bribe them with their own money.

Of course all of that is fantasy. We see the ads we see because they work. Their weakness isn’t immorality: every party always believes its members are defending virtue against the barbarians. The endless ads’ only weakness is banality. In five-week doses, separated by decent intervals of two or three or four years, parties that flattered themselves on TV at our expense used to be a novelty. Now they are a fact of life.

In time for the vote, as it happens

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, September 22, 2010 at 10:17 PM - 0 Comments

We learned via the Star’s Susan Delacourt that MP Scott Simms “has a raw, recent and personal reason for his decision to support the long-gun registry in the Commons today. Simms’ father, Reginald, took his own life with a long gun in June.”

After the revelation, delivered in Wednesday’s in camera caucus meeting, “many MPs were in tears and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff was visibly emotional.” In a separate blog post, Delacourt elaborates:

Reportedly Ignatieff choked up when it was time to take the floor again and caucus members lined up to embrace Simms.

It makes all the games and the jeering and the attacks look pretty petty.

Indeed: politics can be such a cynical game. Thank goodness, with emotions running as high as they were, somebody found the strength, and the courage, to leak the story to the Star.

Liberals utter the dreaded ‘C’ word

By John Geddes - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 4:45 PM - 47 Comments

Chris Wattie/Reuters

Alfred Apps is fed up with all the talk lately about his Liberals forming a coalition with the NDP. “This whole discussion is inane,” the Toronto lawyer and Liberal Party of Canada president groans when asked about it by Maclean’s. “This is the stupidest political discussion that the media has promoted that I have ever seen.”

Apps doesn’t think the discussion is inane because a coalition is an outlandish idea. On the contrary, he argues that the stupidity of this line of inquiry rests in the fact that a coalition should be such an obvious and uncontentious possible outcome of the next election that the prospect isn’t worth fussing about—until after the votes are counted. “There is no coalition discussion,” he says. “You have a discussion about a coalition after an election or when a government falls.”

Continue…

Really, Grits? You're going to drag the Governor General into it?

By Andrew Coyne - Sunday, May 2, 2010 at 2:52 PM - 258 Comments

This is just outrageous. I cannot remember any opposition party, ever, politicizing the appointment of a governor general before in this way.

Of course, it’s always a political appointment, to a greater or lesser extent. But it has not previously been a point of partisan controversy, and on such calculatedly divisive lines. The appointment is entirely within the purview of the prime minister, and as long as that power was not abused via a manifestly unsuitable appointment, opposition parties have always gone along with it.

They have been right to do so: the Governor General is supposed to be above party politics. As the personification of the state the Queen must be, and must be seen to be, impartial as between rival contenders for power; so must her representatives. Dragging the Governor General down into the mudpit of partisan politics can only cast an overtly partisan light on the appointment, and thus diminish respect for the office.

Worse, in mounting this highly public lobby for her to be retained, the Liberals have chosen to emphasize her demographic credentials: as a woman, black, francophone and immigrant. These were in large part why she was appointed, of course, and perhaps that’s fair enough, though some of us grumped at her signal lack of other qualifications to the job. But to invoke these in the debate over whether she should be reappointed is deliberately to suggest that the government’s decision to replace her is an insult to these groups — making whoever replaces her, should they happen to be white or male or some other genetically incorrect makeup, the embodiment of that insult. That’ll do wonders for his or her legitimacy.

And so an office that is supposed to unite the people is now to be just another casualty in the culture war. What a cynical, destructive ploy.

Iggy’s fresh start

By Peter C. Newman - Monday, April 5, 2010 at 2:39 PM - 91 Comments

Photograph by Graham Hughes/THE CANADIAN PRESS

Ramrod straight, white-bearded and enunciating each word as if he were reciting the Psalms, Robert Fowler, a 38-year veteran of nearly every senior posting that counts in the federal civil service and Canada’s diplomatic corps, last week delivered his sour benediction at the Montreal Liberal thinkers’ conference. His double-barrelled rant left the audience—consisting in part of mandarins toilet-trained in deference—troubled and bewildered. That was obvious from their body language; none came up to congratulate Fowler for his courage.

The heroic Canadian bureaucrat unexpectedly took advantage of his position as an equal opportunity inquisitor by blasting both Stephen Harper, his Conservative rescuer, and his Liberal host. He accused Michael Ignatieff’s party of being “in danger of losing its soul,” and Stephen Harper, who helped secure his release from terrorist capture in North Africa, of sponsoring a foreign policy designed strictly to gain domestic votes from ethnic communities.

Appointed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as his special envoy to bring peace and stability to Niger, where Tuareg rebels were fighting the government over mineral rights, the Canadian bureaucrat had been kidnapped in December 2008 and held for ransom—until he was set free four hair-raising months later. Fowler’s appearance at the Montreal Liberal conference reminded some delegates that there was one other witness to international violence and double-dealing in the hall, namely the not-so-freshly-minted-anymore Liberal leader, who had survived forays into similarly dangerous venues while researching his elegant essays on Third World tinpot potentates and their slutty attitudes on human rights.

Continue…

Three days in Montreal

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 5, 2010 at 11:12 AM - 43 Comments

Michael Ignatieff writes about his weekend bender in Montreal.

Everything I heard at Canada at 150 suggested that addressing these challenges will require a new kind of federal leadership. Federal leadership should be about convening, not command and control. Ottawa needs to bring the country together in common purpose, and build networks of responsibilities that are focused on outcomes. Instead, all the current government offers is cuts and reduced expectations, because they have no other plan to address the $54 billion deficit they created.

It remains to be seen

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 29, 2010 at 1:53 PM - 18 Comments

Glen Pearson considers the weekend.

I’ve already spoken to some of my MP colleagues who were there in Montreal and I detect a bit more authenticity in their voice. The speeches galvanized them; the public participation alerted them; and Michael Ignatieff’s speech at the conclusion called on them to put the trite and political things aside and fight for issues that truly matter.  But that was in Montreal, not Ottawa, and it remains to be seen if the Liberal party can enact what they discovered about themselves this weekend and keep it alive in that most partisan and skeptical of all political spaces. Yet for one brief three-day period we witnessed the enemy, and it was us. Perhaps the true genius of it all was that we accepted all that criticism in good spirit, looked inward at our own shortcomings, and came out of it a little wiser as to our faults as public servants. The truth set us free in Montreal; now we’ll see how it does in Parliament.

Day 3, epilogue

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, March 28, 2010 at 5:27 PM - 40 Comments

Here is video of Michael Ignatieff’s closing remarks. The speech itself will neither change the course of human history, nor is it likely to doom him to political failure. That’s my expert analysis.

Searching for the Liberal Party. Day 3.

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, March 28, 2010 at 8:38 AM - 96 Comments

Greetings from Montreal, where, for the next three days, we’ll be hanging around the Liberal party’s Canada 150 conference. Herein a running diary of the proceedings. Day 1’s diary is here. Day 2 is here.

8:33am. Good morning again. The lights are now blue and the subject is The World. Up first is Robert Fowler, the former Canadian diplomat who spent a few months in 2009 as a hostage in Niger. Mr. Ignatieff is briefing his caucus by phone at noon and is then due to speak here at 2:30pm, with a press conference to follow.

8:39am. I arrived at about 8:15am and the tables reserved for media were empty except for three bloggers. Bloggers are like journalists who’ve not yet lost the ability to be genuinely interested in things.

8:42am. Liberal partisan John Mraz argues, quite rightly, that one shouldn’t make too much of yesterday’s carbon tax discussion. Indeed, he says pinning the policy on the Liberal party now would be “somewhat akin to having held Stephen Harper to account for the maddeningly hateful babblings of Ann Coulter.” Unfortunately, the Liberals tried to do exactly that last week.

8:48am. Mr. Fowler is here, officially, to speak about Africa, but he is now spanking the Liberal party. “I believe that the Liberal party has lost its way … and is in danger of losing its soul.” The Liberals don’t stand for principle, they stand for anything that will return them to power. “It’s all about getting to power and it shows.” He applauds this conference as a step in a better direction. Continue…

Day 2, epilogue

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 6:43 PM - 30 Comments

As I was leaving the conference today, Michael Ignatieff was participating in a quick interview with the online audience and, asked for his impressions of the event so far, he ventured an interesting attempt to split the difference between the ideas of big and small government. The segment is not yet online—it will hopefully appear here at some point—but Susan Delacourt has the gist.

“I think the really interesting thing that’s coming out of the conference for me—and I’m still still trying to formulate it—is a different vision of government, that is not command and control,” Ignatieff said in an online interview on Saturday afternoon. “We can’t do it from Ottawa. And an activist government doesn’t mean another big, high-ticket federal program. What it means is getting a network of deciders together to face common problems.”

This was, by his own admission, not yet a fully formed idea. But he is due to deliver remarks to close the conference tomorrow afternoon. And that speech may prove to be an interesting one.

Searching for the Liberal Party. Day 2.

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 8:30 AM - 58 Comments

Greetings from Montreal, where, for the next three days, we’ll be hanging around the Liberal party’s Canada 150 conference. Herein a running diary of the proceedings. Day 1′s diary is here.

8:29am. Good morning. Montreal is chilly and quiet. In a few moments we will be roused by the dulcet tones of David “The Dodge” Dodge, former governor of the Bank of Canada.

8:36am. For those of you scoring at home, the colour of the lights today is orange. And the subject is Families.

8:45am. This conference was apparently the most tweeted subject in Canada yesterday. The Liberals are immensely proud of this. Continue…

Searching for the Liberal Party. Day 1.

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 9:41 AM - 100 Comments

Greetings from Montreal, where, for the next three days, we’ll be hanging around the Liberal party’s Canada 150 conference. Herein a running diary of the proceedings.

9:36am. First things first, a requisite description of the surroundings. The conference centre at the Hyatt Regency doesn’t look anything like a conference centre. It looks like a terribly hip Swedish bar. The light fixtures are these silver blobby things hanging from the ceiling and the walls at either end of the room are emitting red light. The foyer is all white light and includes an actual bar. I believe the Cardigans are playing a set here tomorrow afternoon.

9:57am. Paul Martin has arrived. Let the party renewal commence. Continue…

The press as party whips

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 8:15 PM - 144 Comments

Here we go again. The press gallery are universally scornful of the Liberals for being “divided” on a vote: that is, because three Liberal MPs voted as their consciences dictate, rather than falling in line with the party whip.

That may indeed be a concern for the party leadership, but why is the press scoring it the same way? Why are we volunteering to be the enforcers of party discipline? MPs voting their conscience, ie using their brains, is the way the system is supposed to work. We should rather be celebrating those MPs who had the courage to buck the party line on a matter of principle than decrying the “weakness” of their leader.

TALKING OF ABORTION: I don’t doubt the Liberals were playing politics with the issue, but so are the Tories. The Liberals want to provoke a debate on abortion, to smoke out the Tory pro-lifers. And the Tories want to avoid a debate on abortion, for the same reason. But even though the Liberal resolution was defeated, it was revealing in its own way.

One, it’s helpful to know that the Liberal party line is entirely amenable to abortion, albeit in Third World countries, as part of (to quote the resolution) “the full range of family planning, sexual and reproductive health options.” Not just as an ineradicable evil that a society may choose not to restrict by law (though every civilized society but ours has), but as a value-neutral “option,” no more objectionable than birth control.

Two, it’s also helpful to be reminded that there are pro-lifers in every party: it is not just a Tory disease. Perhaps, if the press agreed to report that once in a while, Tory pro-lifers could borrow some backbone from their Liberal counterparts, and start defying their own leader. Or would we then mark the Tories down for being “divided”?

Three, it’s helpful to be reminded, notwithstanding how determined the Conservative leadership is to prevent an honest debate on the issue, how necessary it is to have this debate. More than twenty years after the Morgentaler decision, we remain in a bizarre legislative limbo: as I’ve written before, we did not choose as a nation to have no abortion law. It is not settled, nor was it ever decided, either by Parliament or the courts. Quite the opposite: the Supreme Court went out of its way to invite Parliament to draft a new law, which challenge the House of Commons duly took up, and passed it. The bill died on a tie vote of the Senate.

That’s no way for a democratic country to decide anything. But then, we aren’t really a democratic country, are we?

Attack of the Killer Attack Ads! In 3-Cheese!

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, January 11, 2010 at 10:15 AM - 113 Comments

The new Liberal ads get a broadly favourable review from friend Wells. Not so much from me. Can we please dispense with the Damien: Omen II mood music and snarky, insinuating voiceovers, the same stylistic devices used in every attack ad ever made? I know its only been several million times, but it’s really starting to get old. Just once, can we have a level-headed discussion about how we’re governed — without all the cheap theatrics?

Here’s the ad I’d like to see:

Rather than answer serious questions about its handling of prisoners in Afghanistan, the Conservative government has shut down Parliament. Your Parliament. The heart of our democracy.

This has got to stop. For years, governments of both parties — Conservative and Liberal — have been treating Parliament with contempt, gutting its powers, reducing its ability to hold governments to account. And now it’s come to this.

We’ll take our share of the blame for Parliament’s decline. Because we’re serious about fixing it. We want to put Parliament back at the centre of our democratic life.

Read the complete plan at Liberal.ca.

Or something like that.

It only takes about 30 seconds to read. But imagine if a party actually said something like that — if it talked to us as if we were adults? No cheesy crash-chords, no over-blown dramatics, no appeals to paranoia. Just level with us: lay out the problem, and suggest a solution.

I know. Never going to happen.

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.