The west is in. Now what?

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 12:30 PM - 74 Comments

The rise of Western Canada was the topic of a round table discussion last week in Calgary, broadcast live by CPAC. Joining Paul Wells and Andrew Coyne were Fort McMurray’s Mayor Melissa Blake, Alberta’s Minister of Culture Lindsay Blackett, Saskatchewan’s Environment Minister Nancy Heppner, Lloyd Axworthy, the University of Winnipeg’s president, and the Wildrose Alliance’s Rob Anderson. CPAC’s Peter Van Dusen moderated the event.

Coyne: How do we define the West beyond geography? Is there such a thing as a kind of western agenda, a western political culture?

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Changing a society, one step at a time

By Paul Wells - Friday, January 29, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 110 Comments

The excitement is winding down at Rights and Democracy. Last week I wrote here about the conflict between newer and longer-standing board members of the Montreal-based, federally funded rights organization. A majority on the board had been complaining about the new board chairman, Aurel Braun, since last spring. The government kept sending Braun reinforcements, in the form of newly appointed board members, throughout 2009. By the new year, Braun and his supporters had a majority on the board. Two of the old-guard board members quit in frustration at the new direction. The president of Rights and Democracy, Rémy Beauregard, was dead of a heart attack. The organization’s full-time staff circulated a letter, signed by nearly all of the employees, calling for the departure of Braun and two of his closest associates from the board.

That’s where we left things last week. A few days later the Rights and Democracy board met in Toronto. Now securely controlled by recent appointees, they selected a new interim president. The guy they chose was Jacques Gauthier—one of the three top board members whose resignation the staff had demanded. This was a crisis moment. The staff had asked for Gauthier, Braun and a third board member, Elliot Tepper, to resign or be fired. Instead one of the three, Gauthier, was the staff’s new boss. The new board appointees obviously weren’t going to back down. Would the staff?

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Coyne v. Wells: Looking west

By Coyne VS Wells - Monday, January 18, 2010 at 11:30 AM - 45 Comments

On Jan. 20, Maclean’s will present a round table discussion on “The West is in. Now what?” at Calgary’s Theatre Junction Grand, the third in a series of national debates. Broadcast live on CPAC, it will feature Nancy Heppner, Saskatchewan’s minister of environment, Lloyd Axworthy, the University of Winnipeg’s president, Lindsay Blackett, Alberta’s minister of culture and community spirit, and Melissa Blake, mayor of Fort McMurray, Alta. The event will be moderated by CPAC’s Peter Van Dusen, and include Maclean’s columnists Paul Wells and Andrew Coyne as panellists. Tickets can be bought at macleans.ca/inconversation. This week, Wells and Coyne kick off the debate.

Andrew Coyne: Paul, I’ll start by softening you up with a barrage of statistics. In 1896, when Sir Wilfrid Laurier laid the foundation for a century of Liberal dominance with his first of four election wins, Quebec held 30 per cent of the population of Canada. The whole of the territory of Canada west of Ontario accounted for less than 10 per cent. As late as 1980, when the National Energy Program was launched, Quebec held nearly as many people as the four western provinces combined. Half the seats in Pierre Trudeau’s majority government that year came from Quebec.

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I'm Colby Cosh, and I approve this sullen cynicism

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 11:01 AM - 12 Comments

Revealing moment in the new CoyneWellsCast: A.C. calls for an American-style “I’m Joe McGraft and I approve this message” rule for Canadian political campaigning. That’s certainly what he seems to be doing about ten minutes in, anyway. But isn’t “Stand By Your Ad” regulation already a canonical instance of failure in trying to meliorate political discourse by means of a procedural tweak?

Coyne v. Wells on those Liberal attack ads, and others

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 12:03 AM - 28 Comments

Producer note:
There’s a bit of a quality issue half way through, but we’ve left it in for continuity’s sake.

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In Conversation with Maclean's

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 8, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 4 Comments

Click here to Buy Tickets.

Coyne v. Wells on the prime minister's prorogative

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 at 12:16 PM - 56 Comments

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Coyne v. Wells on China and last year's coalition madness

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 9:45 AM - 17 Comments

Producer note:
Please excuse the video problems near the end, internet troubles led to some video degradation.
And a big thanks to our very own commenter Sean Stokholm for sending in some music!

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Coyne v. Wells on torture spin and HST pirouettes

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 1, 2009 at 11:23 AM - 11 Comments

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Coyne v. Wells on Afghan prisoners and Tory flyers

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 23, 2009 at 4:51 PM - 24 Comments

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Noble fight or lost cause?

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 2:35 PM - 16 Comments

Wells: In Kandahar, they actually poll the residents quite frequently about how they feel. Kandahar residents feel substantially less safe than they did a couple of years ago. They have a lot less confidence in the government than they used to. No wonder, after the lurid spectacle of the elections this summer.

Until 2009, the deadliest month for coalition forces in Afghanistan was July 2008: 46 soldiers died. We are now four months in a row with a substantially higher—nearly double—death toll than in July 2008. These rates could be sustainable if there was some kind of light at the end of the tunnel, but what we keep seeing is more tunnel. Afghanistan is the smaller of a sort of duplex of international terrorism, which is Afghanistan and Pakistan. When we concentrate on Pakistan, the bad guys just move across the mountains into Afghanistan and vice versa.

Coyne: Afghanistan has to be seen in the context of the situation in Pakistan—where we have an insurgency that would take enormous heart from a defeat for NATO in Afghanistan—and in the broader fight against “jihad international,” where the best slogan for recruiting al-Qaeda fighters is, “We’re winning.” Everybody wants Pakistan to get serious about going after its own Taliban. Why are the Pakistanis going to do that if they think we’re going to leave Afghanistan, if they’re going to have a Taliban government on their doorstep? It’s true that we have not defeated the Taliban. But the Taliban haven’t defeated us either; they cannot seize power as long as we’re there. As long as NATO remains we can train up the Afghan army.

If we were proposing no change in strategy that would be one thing, but we are on the verge right now of bringing in 40,000 more troops from the U.S., of changing fundamentally the strategy toward counter-insurgency. That’s an odd time to pull out.

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Maybe we'll have have an election in… 2011

By Paul Wells - Friday, November 13, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 71 Comments

“I don’t think 2011 should be out of the question,” a Liberal MP told me, leaning in conspiratorially.

For what? A summer full of sunshine? A return to three-button jackets? “For an election,” the MP said.

This guy’s thinking, which I’ve since learned is shared by at least a few other veteran Liberals in Ottawa, is as follows. The polls don’t favour Michael Ignatieff right now, and haven’t since he announced in September he would work to bring down the Harper government at the first chance. Indeed the polls have been so stinkeroo for the Liberals that Ignatieff has had to un-announce his September announcement. Now he’s in no hurry to replace the Harper government. Some Liberals suspect Ignatieff replaced his inexperienced, poorly connected chief of staff, Ian Davey, with the wily Chrétien-era fixer Peter Donolo because Davey didn’t foresee the popular backlash against Ignatieff’s “Mr. Harper, your time is up” announcement. Continue…

Let's save Question Period

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 9, 2009 at 5:04 PM - 33 Comments

Here, again, is Frances Ryan’s look at Question Period reform. Here is the longer essay from which that article is derived. Lots in there, but the discussed changes are essentially as follows:

1. Extend the amount of time allotted to each question and answer.
2. Switch to a “roster” system, whereby the Prime Minister is available once a week, with separate ministers assigned to each day.
3. Limit the ability of party whips to determine who gets to ask questions and the use of supplementary questions.
4. Broaden the ability of government backbenchers to ask actual questions of minister.

Some of this mirrors what our Paul Wells proposed in June. Some of it refers directly to what Conservative MP Michael Chong argued in a previous issue of the CPR.

Now then, here, as an amalgam of all that plus a suggestion of my own, is what I think I’d do. Continue…

Coyne v. Wells on guns and germs

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 7:30 PM - 20 Comments

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Afghanistan: Noble fight or lost cause?

By Andrew Coyne and Paul Wells - Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 11 Comments

On Nov. 10, Maclean’s will present a round table discussion on “Afghanistan: Noble Fight or Lost Cause?” at the Neptune Theatre in Halifax, the second in a series of talks. The debate, broadcast live nationwide on CPAC, will feature Scott Taylor, a former soldier and the publisher and editor of Esprit de Corps, and Mercedes Stephenson, military analyst and vice-president of Breakout Educational Network, among others. The event will be moderated by CPAC’s Peter Van Dusen, and include Maclean’s columnists Paul Wells and Andrew Coyne as panellists. Click here for tickets.

This week, Wells and Coyne kick off the discussion.

Paul Wells: Andrew, last week I spent a day with soldiers of the 2nd Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group at Petawawa while they trained for deployment to Afghanistan next spring. I was impressed as always by the seriousness and professionalism of our troops. I saw weapons and equipment that were far superior to the army-surplus clichés that are too easily peddled about the Canadian Forces. But I’m haunted by a remark from one young woman who was asked whether she’s looking forward to going to Afghanistan. “Of course,” she said. “I mean, this is why we signed up, right? To go someplace and make a difference.”

That’s what you want to hear from a soldier: resolute eagerness to go where the job will take her. But I felt my conscience tug anyway—because I’m less and less sure that woman and her colleagues from 2 CMBG will be making a difference when they get to Kandahar.

Until the end of 2008, the deadliest months in the entire Afghanistan war for the International Security Assistance Force (NATO and allied Western forces) had been June and August of that year, when 46 soldiers had been killed. As I write this, October is the fourth month in a row in 2009 with a higher death toll. The casualty rate has grown for six years running, but the human cost is still sustainable—as long as it leads to a safer Afghanistan, to a South Asia that isn’t a hive of Islamist extremism, and to more secure Canadian and Western homelands. That’s the rub. After enthusiastically supporting Canada’s Afghan deployment since 2001, I see less and less evidence that any of those strategic objectives is brought closer by the work Canadians do in Afghanistan. So one question we’ll debate in Halifax is whether Canada’s troops should stay in Afghanistan past 2011. But lately I wonder whether they should even stay that long. Continue…

When the referee wasn't looking

By Paul Wells - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 164 Comments

We’re all exhausted up here in Ottawa. We are so busy telling you whether there will be an election (Yes!) (No!) (SO EXCITING) that we sometimes don’t notice things. Sometimes the government doesn’t mind our not noticing, and it plays little tricks to encourage the not noticing. So on a Friday afternoon the government announced it was putting a question to the Supreme Court of Canada. Friday afternoons are an excellent time to say things if you don’t want them noticed. Yet it is such a rare thing for a government to put a question to the Supreme Court that some of us reported it this time, even though it had happened on a Friday afternoon. All the same, by Monday most of us had forgotten it had even happened, because we needed to spend more time wondering whether there will be an election (Yes!) (No!) (SO EXCITING).

The question the Harper government has put to the Supremes is whether the federal government has the power to establish a national securities regulator, a body for writing and enforcing the rules around transactions like stock trades. The question really is whether Canada will provide a single regulatory climate for investors, or a patchwork of different ones. Continue…

Coyne v. Wells on Obama’s Nobel and Iggy’s month from hell

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 16, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 20 Comments

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How to fix democracy. Step one …

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, October 6, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 25 Comments

Last week, CPAC and Maclean’s presented ‘Our Democracy is Broken: How do we fix it?’, a panel debate featuring former NDP leader Ed Broadbent, author John Ralston Saul, former Reform party strategist Rick Anderson, Jean Chrétien’s senior policy adviser Eddie Goldenberg, and Andrew Coyne and Paul Wells from Maclean’s. CPAC’s Peter Van Dusen served as moderator. An edited excerpt of the discussion:

Coyne: The British question period is so much better than our question period it makes you weep. The questions in the British question period are actually questions, the answers are actually answers. There’s a lot of ribbing and heckling, but it looks like how parliament is supposed to look.

Wells: Question period’s a good place to start. I don’t think it’s the cause of all of our problems, but it sits there in the middle of the parliamentary day like some malignant crow and poisons everything else. Imagine having an argument with your spouse or partner in which each of you could only have 35 seconds at a time to make your point. The evening would go downhill really quick! Well, they do that every day in question period. They implemented that 35-second shot clock because there were five parties in Parliament 15 years ago. Now that there’s four, one of my modest proposals is to give everyone 45 seconds. I also think we should move question period to the morning so that everyone has the rest of the day to recover. And, like the Brits, we should only require the prime minister’s presence one day a week. On another day, have the economic ministers taking questions about their economic policy, and on another have social ministers taking questions about social policy. We could actually discuss the complex affairs of a complex country as though we were grown-ups.

Broadbent: I think the electoral system and the lack of civility are related. Look at Germany, where [voter] turnout is about 80 per cent compared to around 60 per cent in Canada. They’ve had what we would call a minority government in Germany for the past three or four years. Two of the larger parties sat down and said, “No one’s got a clear majority so let’s reflect how Germans voted,” and negotiated a long-term agreement. If we did that here in Canada—recognize no party’s likely to have a majority—then we’ll also get some more stability. Continue…

Fancy footwear as The Hill Times turns 20

By Mitchel Raphael - Saturday, September 26, 2009 at 1:29 PM - 16 Comments

The Hill Times celebrated its 20^th anniversary at the Library and Archives Canada on Wellington Street in Ottawa. NDP MP Niki Ashton addresses the crowd below.

Montreal Liberal MP Justin Trudeau in Fluevogs.

Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells with a shoeless Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt.

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Econowatch

By Steve Maich - Friday, September 25, 2009 at 8:30 AM - 1 Comment

My colleague Paul Wells is fond of saying that when everyone in Ottawa knows something about federal politics, it invariably ends up to be false. While there’s no doubt this is true, it’s an affliction that is not unique to our nation’s capital. It applies just as much to the economy.

Right now, the accepted truth on our immediate economic future goes like this: “Oh sure, the worst might be over, but this is probably just a sucker’s rally. And even if we can avoid another nasty relapse on the markets, the recovery is going to be long, gruelling, and almost as bleak as the downturn itself.” No doubt, there is a strong rationale to back up this hardening consensus. After all, job losses continue in both Canada and the U.S., and while consumer confidence is rising, it’s still fragile. We are still bracing for the worst. Continue…

Canadian democracy is broken

By Andrew Coyne and Paul Wells - Friday, September 18, 2009 at 2:00 PM - 80 Comments

On Sept. 23, Maclean’s will present a round table discussion on the subject “Our Democracy Is Broken: How Do We Fix It?” at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts in Toronto, to be broadcast live nationwide on CPAC, the public affairs channel. Guests will include former NDP leader Ed Broadbent, former prime minister’s chief of staff Eddie Goldenberg, and author John Ralston Saul. Maclean’s columnists Andrew Coyne and Paul Wells will host the evening.

To get things started, this week they discuss what’s wrong with Canadian democracy.

Andrew Coyne: Paul, the title of our little show in Toronto on the 23rd is “Our Democracy is Broken.” This might strike some as provocative, even over the top. Surely “Is Our Democracy Broken?” would have been more, um, Canadian? Continue…

Coyne v. Wells on the chances of a fall election

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 4, 2009 at 4:43 PM - 49 Comments

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Coyne v. Wells on those Senate appointments

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 28, 2009 at 7:43 PM - 29 Comments

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Innovation isn’t in Canada’s DNA

By Paul Wells - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 38 Comments

I caught up with John Manley by telephone at his eastern Ontario cottage, where his summer vacation was already drawing to a close. The former Liberal minister, who served as deputy prime minister in Jean Chrétien’s last years as PM, will have a busy autumn.

Manley has had five years of relative calm as a corporate lawyer and member of assorted blue-chip boards—Canadian Pacific, CIBC, Nortel. Well, the Nortel chip used to be blue, anyway. He did agree to run that Afghanistan panel for Stephen Harper, a decision that earned Manley a lot of detractors in the Liberal party. But then, he never was much good at passing tests of ideological purity. Continue…