How much is an MP worth?

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

The Liberals have apparently decided that 308 MPs is enough.

“It doesn’t make any sense in these days of financial restraint,” Liberal MP Marc Garneau said Tuesday at a Commons committee studying the legislation that would give 15 extra seats to Ontario, six seats each to B.C. and Alberta, and three seats to Quebec … “Canadians are concerned about the added cost of such an inflationary measure,” Garneau said. “The government’s new proposal sends the wrong message to Canadians: that it wants to increase the number of politicians, while it slashes the public services that are provided.”

We presently have 308 MPs for 34.6 million people (one MP for approximately 112,000 people). For the sake of comparing Westminster systems, the United Kingdom has 650 MPs for 62.2 million people (one MP for approximately 96,000 people), while Australia has 150 MPs for 22.3 million people (one MP for approximately 149,000 people).

But if the concern is “cost,” then perhaps the Liberals should propose reducing the number of MPs. Never mind, how many we need, how few could we get away with? That, if the Liberals want to get into it, makes for an interesting debate about what exactly our MPs do to justify their respective existences.

A young Stephen Harper, for instance, advocated for a ten percent reduction in MPs. That would’ve reduced a 295-member House to a 265-member House. So instead of adding 30 seats, perhaps we could get away with 43 fewer than we already have.

Bye to the books

By Leah McLaren - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 8 Comments

Martin Godwin/Guardian News & Media

Earlier this month, Lauren Smith, 23, graduated with a masters in librarianship from the University of Sheffield. Her timing could not have been worse. “The idea that anyone can free themselves from ignorance through public libraries is an important one for Britain,” she says. “What’s happening now is hacking away at culture for the everyman.”

The “hacking” Smith refers to is the coalition government’s radical spending cuts, which are expected to culminate in unprecedented public library closures across Britain in the coming months.

As local councils reveal their budgets, it is estimated that up to 800 public libraries—18 per cent of the country’s total—could face closure. At present, almost 400 are already on the chopping block. In Doncaster, a down-at-the-heels former industrial centre in south Yorkshire, 14 of 26 public libraries are slated to close. It is especially grim during recessionary times when, according to Smith, research demonstrates that people use public libraries more. “People say, ‘Why do you need libraries now that everyone has the Internet?’ But actually 30 per cent of British homes don’t have home Internet access at all. Many people come to libraries not just to borrow books but to apply for jobs online.”

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Losing is in the eye of the beholder

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 39 Comments

In his chat with Mr. Mansbridge, the Prime Minister again asserts a rule for coalition government.

Of course, and David Cameron’s an interesting example because they had that debate there, and what I think the public concluded was undemocratic and not really legitimate was the coalition of parties that lost an election. Mr. Cameron won the election. And then was able to form a coalition.

It’s unclear if Mr. Harper intends this judgment of legitimacy to be applied to the governments of Israel, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, not to mention the Liberal government that oversaw the province of Ontario between 1985 and 1987.

How ethical is your oil?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 7, 2011 at 5:32 PM - 188 Comments

The Environment Minister observed yesterday (around the 12-minute mark of that interview) that Canada is a supplier of ethical oil—a phrase recently employed by Ezra Levant—because the revenues derived from that oil are not used to “fund terrorism or the destabilization of other governments.” This may or may not beg questions about the origins of our own oil imports.

The latest release of Statistics Canada’s Energy Statistics Handbook lists our sources of crude oil and equivalents going back to 1989. Our noted individual sources in 2010 (through September) were, in order: Algeria, the United Kingdom, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Iran, Iraq, Mexico, Venezuela, Russia and the United States.

What the boomers are leaving their children

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 184 Comments

Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images; Andy Clark/Reuters

This January, the first baby boomers turn 65. The huge post-Second World War generation—which numbers 76 million in the United States, makes up almost a third of Canada’s population, and according to one estimate, controls 80 per cent of Britain’s wealth—will continue to enter their dotage at the rate of tens of thousands per day for the next 20 years. By 2050, there will be 30 million Americans aged 75 to 85, three in 10 Europeans will be 65-plus, and more than 40 per cent of Japan’s population will be elderly. In Canada, the ratio of workers to retirees—currently five to one—will have been halved by 2036. And despite the odd dissenter, the generation that still oddly finds Paul McCartney relevant has made clear its intention to take everything it feels it has coming. It will be up to all who trail in their wake to pay for their privilege.

Common sense, not to mention decency, wouldn’t call that just. But an outsized, over-entitled, and self-obsessed demographic is awfully hard for politicians to ignore. Take Britain’s example. In last spring’s general election, the most effective ad run by David Cameron’s Conservatives was also one of the simplest: a close-up of a newborn baby, wriggling in a bassinet as a music box tinkled in the background. “Born four weeks ago, eight pounds, three ounces. With his dad’s nose, mum’s eyes, and Gordon Brown’s debt,” intoned a female voice. “Thanks to Labour’s debt crisis, every child in Britain is born owing £17,000. They deserve better.” The point was impossible to miss: the time had come to stop mortgaging the country’s future.

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The good ole days

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 27, 2010 at 1:36 PM - 0 Comments

Neil Reynolds pines for the days when our politicians were (likening female colleagues to prostitutes?) wittier.

We don’t need a better kind of good behaviour in the Commons. We need a better kind of bad behaviour – in the Commons generally and in QP specifically. We especially need a better kind of invective. Canadian MPs have demonstrated occasional brilliance in putting down their honourable opponents. (One classic: Prime minister John Diefenbaker’s reference to MP Flora MacDonald, his colleague, as “the finest woman ever to walk the streets of Kingston” – an excellent example of an insult that offends a person and a place at the same time.)

Whatever your definition of wit, we need to retire the idea that the British Parliament is some great temple to lively and smart repartee which we should strive to emulate. For one, it shouldn’t matter—if we’re not happy with our lot that should be enough to seek change, regardless of how it compares to how it is elsewhere. For another, the Brits have more than enough of their own problems. Indeed, their current Speaker came to his post with an explicit call for reform amid much lamenting about the decline of the institution. There are plenty of reasons why there’s might seem a more interesting debate—not least being the tremendous amount of close coverage that is dedicated to PMQs—but for the most part, I suspect, we here in the colonies are simply fooled by the fact that a British accent makes everything sound wittier.

Will it fly again?

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 1:40 PM - 2 Comments

Reuters

The Concorde, the world’s first supersonic commercial aircraft, made its final transatlantic flight in October 2003. After a 3½-hour flight from New York, the pointy-nosed jet touched down at London’s Heathrow Airport in front of a crowd that had gathered to say goodbye. But now enthusiasts are hoping to get the Concorde off the ground once again at an estimated cost of $22 million—ideally in time for the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Olympics in London.

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Letter from Europe: who cares about 'Posh'?

By Tom Rachman - Thursday, June 3, 2010 at 11:42 AM - 0 Comments

CARL DE SOUZA / GETTY IMAGES

The theatregoers were a mixed bunch: a gentleman in silk cravat, a young woman in torn jeans; some guzzled beer from plastic cups, others drained champagne from flutes.
What united the crowd was poshness—not that they all possessed it, but that they all wished to see it pilloried onstage in Posh, a sold-out play at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square denouncing the debauchery and corruption of the British upper classes.

Class is a notorious obsession here, its intricacies understood only by those imprisoned within the system and a farce to those outside. The issue has become even more topical of late, after the May 6 elections that brought to power the Conservative leader, David Cameron, Britain’s poshest prime minister in decades.

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The Tory party reborn

By Charlie Gillis - Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 6 Comments

Steve Forrest / PANOS

At some point, this may start to sound familiar: a well-established party cruises to office in three straight elections, riding the popularity of a dominant, if sometimes ruthless, leader. Then, entitlement sets in. The party’s policies turn stale. Its senior statesmen grow irksome to the public. Power-drunk members succumb to petty corruption, and a few party operatives even set out to game the political system to personal advantage. Finally—repelled by the steady drip of scandal—voters send the rascals packing.

The post-Margaret Thatcher experience of Britain’s Conservatives can read at times like a roman à clef for Canada’s Liberals after Jean Chrétien—another sometime dynasty that, like the U.K. Tories, once saw itself as its country’s “natural governing party.” In both cases, the succession battle to replace the warlord PM left the party crippled and divided. In both cases, a brief interregnum in office under a new leader merely staved off the inevitable. In Canada, as in Britain, a formerly hapless opponent restyled itself into a credible political alternative, occupying wide tracts of the deposed party’s electoral base and pushing the perennial incumbent further into the wilderness.

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Britain’s headache

By Charlie Gillis - Sunday, May 16, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Stefan Rousseau/AP

There are no short cuts on the long journey back from fiscal crisis—take it from someone who knows. Paul Martin was a rookie cabinet minister when he assumed the reins of Canada’s Finance Department back in 1994. But as a businessman, he understood a balance sheet, and the politician in him sensed the risk of promising half-measures. “You cannot tell people it’s going to be easy and then think they’re going to accept harsh medicine,” the former prime minister says from his office in Montreal. “And don’t think people are going to stay with you through the tough measures if you don’t hit your targets.”

To many Canadians, Martin’s role in leading the country from the brink of financial ruin is now a fading memory, overshadowed by his anticlimactic turn as prime minister. But in Britain, where five days of fevered negotiation this week produced a minority Conservative government, he is an exemplar to those contemplating the Herculean task that lies in wait: tackling the U.K.’s disastrous finances. “What Paul Martin did has been incredibly influential in Whitehall and academic circles,” says Patrick Dunleavy, a political scientist at the London School of Economics. “It’s seen as a good way to go about budget rebalancing, while limiting the damage that’s done in the process.”

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The mother Parliament

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 3:57 PM - 42 Comments

As Britain embarks on—dear lord, no!—coalition governance, Chris Selley attempts to draw lessons.

In short, what we’re seeing in Britain this week is a wakeup call. Canada has been playing Parliament in “beginner” mode. It’s in everyone’s best interests, I think, to give “intermediate” mode a try. I fail to see how it could make things worse.

The People vs. Ex-Generalissimo Blair

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 59 Comments

It’s supposed to be Sept. 12—that’s to say, the post-9/11 era. For over seven years the entire Western world was forced to live out a kind of geopolitical Groundhog Day in which Bush, Cheney, Rummy and the rest of the gang woke up each dawn to the same eternal Tuesday morning in September, the same long shadows of the Twin Towers, the same undying certainty of another six decades of hard, cold, martial winter. It wasn’t only the ideologically opposed among the campus left and the Euro-elites: the vast mass of a once supportive citizenry got ground down, too, exhausted by the very lingo of the “war on terror” and anxious to inter it with the Bush presidency. That’s why Barack Obama was cheered from Berkeley to Berlin. He offered liberation. To invert the old line, war may be interested in him, but he wasn’t interested in war. And in those heady days of late 2008 that seemed almost plausible.
Jaw-jaw is better than war-war, as Churchill said, although he might feel differently if he had to sit through an Obama state of the union. But what about law-law? In the United States, the United Kingdom and even Canada, it’s not enough to move on to Sept. 12: the Bush era itself has to be put on trial. In London, something called “the Chilcot inquiry” has been investigating the process by which the country signed on to the Iraq invasion. For weeks, the usual bunch of shifty grandees have killed any potential awkward line of inquiry with the all-purpose brush-off, “You’ll have to ask Mr. Blair about that.” So finally they did, summoning the now reviled prime minister into the witness box to grill him on the “legality” of the Iraq invasion. Outside, protesters denounced “Bliar,” as his name is now universally spelled: “BLIAR LIED! THOUSANDS DIED!” Like a pedophile serial killer, he was smuggled into the building before dawn, lest the mob turn on him: “The People vs. Ex-Generalissimo Bliar”—or, at any rate, as near as his former comrades on the left seem likely to get to hauling him up before a war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
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A beacon unto the world

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, December 4, 2009 at 1:25 PM - 1 Comment

The Constitution Unit at London’s Global University has released its report on minority parliaments (previously cited here). The chapter entitled “Canada’s Dysfunctional Minority Parliament” begins at page 26.

The Commons: Questions without end

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 at 7:39 PM - 14 Comments

The Scene. There was some general discussion of Afghanistan, U.S. President Barack Obama, the Canadian Forces and the American effort, before Michael Ignatieff, with his third opportunity, narrowed in on a specific concern.

“Mr. Speaker, the government’s approach has neglected the crucial importance of political and diplomatic engagement,” he ventured. “Other countries have created high-level envoys for the whole region. The United Kingdom, France, the United States, Germany have done this. Canada has earned the right to be at the table and to participate in those efforts. Can the government explain why, over month after month after month, it has refused to take that step, which will co-ordination to our diplomatic and political efforts in the region?”

Peter MacKay, the Defence Minister allowed to lead the government’s response this day, dismissed this quite quickly.

“Mr. Speaker, I know the leader of the opposition would model himself after other countries,” he said. “We are taking a unique Canadian approach.”

Rising for a fourth time, Mr. Ignatieff turned to the matter that has dominated these last two weeks, reminding the government of last night’s vote and asking if it might now relent to the inquiry requested therein. It was this point, for whatever reason, that John Baird stood. Continue…

The incurably cheerful Queen Mum

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, October 1, 2009 at 4:00 PM - 2 Comments

The 20th century is rich with iconic figures, but in many ways no one, at least not in the former British Empire, embodied it better than the child born Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon on Aug. 4, 1900. Queen Elizabeth II’s mother was born on the cusp of the century and turned 14 on the day the Great War began. Thrust unexpectedly into prominence by her brother-in-law’s abdication and widowed for almost half her life, the last empress of India lived through all of Britain’s modern changes, dying at the age of 101 in 2002. As William Shawcross points out in his massive official biography Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother (HarperCollins)—1,096 pages weighing in at two kilograms—the organizers of her 100th birthday celebrations got it just right.

About 450 adults and children—some in dress-up, some the real thing—paraded the 20th century past Elizabeth on her flower-bedecked dais: First World War troops, ballroom dancers from the ’20s, a Blitz-era fire engine, VE Day revellers from 1945, Enid Blyton’s Noddy in his postwar yellow car, James Bond’s 1960s Aston Martin, punk rockers and—more bizarrely—Hells Angels on motorcycles. Spitfires, Hurricanes and Lancasters flew over, while the band played on. Continue…

Your family is being watched 24-7

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 3:20 PM - 131 Comments

To passing tourists, catching yet another government poster apprising you of electronic surveillance looming in the distance, the initials “CCTV” can be oddly reminiscent of “CCCP,” the Cyrillicized abbreviation for the U.S.S.R. CCTV is the United Kingdom’s ubiquitous acronym. Nobody needs to be told what it stands for. It accompanies you as you make your way to work, whether by car, bus, train, or taxi. And it’s there waiting for you at the end of your shift, as you go to buy your groceries or head to the movies. Last year, when David Davis resigned from the shadow cabinet because of the remarkably bipartisan insouciance about the “erosion of fundamental British freedoms,” he said there was “a CCTV camera for every 14 citizens.” The British, according to another well-retailed line, are apparently the most video-monitored people in the world other than the North Koreans. In an aside in his new novel The Defector, the American author Daniel Silva lays out the background:

“ ‘So how are the British so certain about what happened?’

“ ‘Their little electronic helpers were watching.’ Continue…