Defining The Government

The outcome was inevitable. The mail will be delivered on Tuesday. But the parliamentary filibuster was worth it. What we finally had in this country was a genuine debate. And the "Harper Government" -- remember that's the phrase they themselves chose  -- is finally being defined by the other side.

As Tim Harper notes in The Toronto Star, the Conservatives "have left no doubt they will use legislative muscle to blunt the inalienable right of workers to withdraw services as their last bargaining tool, even going as far as demand that workers accept less than their employer had offered."

It is true that 7 of 10 Canadians wanted their mail delivered. But it's a safe bet that  the government's path to that objective isn't going to sit well with a significant number of them. Likewise, the government's decision last week to stand alone on the side of the asbestos lobby will also alienate another significant portion of voters.

For years, Conservatives have declared that it's all about money. Government, they say, spends too much of it. But, once in power, it becomes clear that it's all about power -- the concentration of it. The Harperites were willing to legislate the employees of a private company back after one day. The have dictated the terms at Canada Post. They no doubt are congratulating themselves.

Voters in Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida have discovered that they were played for chumps. If the opposition continues to successfully define the new government, it won't be long before some of its most ardent supporters begin to doubt the party of  "free choice."

The New War On Crime

In his latest blog post, Alex Himelfarb warns that -- after the Canada Post filibuster is over -- the opposition should turn its attention to the government's omnibus crime bill. That bill takes its inspiration from the four decade old American war on crime. The problem is that several Americans, who have been front line soldiers in that war, have declared it a failure.

Consider Asa Hutchinson, the former head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. Hutchinson "is now saying that we in Canada should avoid their mistakes, singling out often unfair mandatory minimum sentences and insufficient investment in preparing prisoners for reintegration."

Jonathan Simon has written a blistering critique of the American war on crime. His book, Governing Through Crime compiles a list of the collateral damage:

Simon tells us that the policy not only drew on the fears of Americans, fears about crime, fears about the future, fears of “the other”, it validated and nurtured those fears. And, in so doing, created a self-perpetuating machine. Tough could never be tough enough. It wasn’t enough to take away an offender’s freedom, hard time had to become harder and longer. Any new incident, every grizzly crime begged for more intense punishment, more people in jail for longer. When crime continued to rise, that called for more of the same, redouble the punishments, build more prisons. That’s how policies that just about nobody believes make any sense – three strikes and your out, for example – become law.  A self-perpetuating machine.

And, despite the clear evidence of failure, the Harper government proposes to boldly go where the Americans have been before. Their policy meets Albert Einstein's definition of insanity -- doing the same thing over again and expecting different results.

The opposition is going to be very busy.

Facing Facts

My wife and I used to live a half hour away from the Jeffrey Mine in Asbestos, Quebec. My grandmother grew up on a farm just outside Thetford Mines. So asbestos is part of the family history. The problem is that the history of asbestos is fraught with pain, suffering and unnecessary death.

We have known for decades that asbestos, like tobacco, kills. But, like the presidents of the big tobacco companies, Canadian governments -- federal and provincial -- have lived in denial, claiming with Industry Minister Christian Paradis, that asbestos is safe when used  "in controlled circumstances."

As Susan Riley writes in today's Ottawa Citizen, the science is incontrovertible. As for  Paradis' defence of asbestos,

This claim has been roundly rejected by medical and scientific experts, including Peter Goodhand of the Canadian Cancer Society, who insists "all forms of asbestos, including the chrysotile asbestos mined in Quebec, cause cancer."

And yet this week, at a meeting  of the Rotterdam Convention in Switzerland,  Canada refused to recognize asbestos as a hazardous substance. Campaigning in Quebec in April, the prime minister promised that, "this government will not put Canadian industry in a position where it is discriminated against in a market where sale is permitted."

Asbestos used to be vital to the economy of the Eastern Townships. But, more than the health hazards of asbestos, the urbanization of Canada  led to the economic decline of that region. My grandmother was one of twelve children. Six stayed in Canada and moved west -- to Montreal, Ontario and Saskatchewan. Six boarded a train on the old Grand Trunk Railway and headed south to Portland, Maine, spreading out from there. When the population of the high school  where I used to teach declined from 1100 to 300, the four of us -- our two eldest sons were born in Sherbrooke -- headed west. Our third son was born in Ontario.

To this day, I love the Townships. There is no more beautiful place on the planet. But facts are facts. We had to face them and change our trajectory. The Harper government refuses to deal with facts. That is why we are fast becoming an international pariah.

Leaving Afghanistan

America has reached a crossroads.  And Barack Obama has a difficult road ahead, because it is his task to lead the nation into a world of limits. From the very beginning, Americans have seen their country as a land of infinite opportunity. And, as long as the frontier beckoned, anything seemed possible. It was the frontier, after all, which nurtured Abraham Lincoln.

Now another president from Illinois has told his fellow citizens, as Richard Cohen writes in The Washington Post, that "the American century is over." That knowledge will be a bitter pill for many. But America has been here before. Cohen writes:

I have heard this speech before. I heard echoes of Richard Nixon explaining “Vietnamization.” Gonna turn the war over to our stolid allies. We put them on their feet. We trained them. We supplied them. We schooled them at our elite military academies. They looked splendid in their uniforms. But when the U.S. pulled out, South Vietnam collapsed. It will happen again in Afghanistan. I think Obama knows that. He fought this war -- authorized the West Point surge -- because he did not know how to get out. Now, he does. As any previous president could have told him, it’s by getting out.

Some will see the retreat from Afghanistan, like the withdrawal from Vietnam, as a defeat. But the Vietnam War was a mistake. It was the wrong response at the wrong time. After 911, the enemy was Al Qaeda, not the Afghans; and Iraq had nothing to do with the attack on the World Trade Center.

It has taken awhile to put Vietnam in perspective. And it will take time to see the last decade -- with the benefit of hindsight -- clearly. Recognizing the finite nature of one's circumstances is the beginning of wisdom. And with that recognition comes another kind of wisdom. We are not merely citizens of the country of our birth or our choice. We are also citizens of the world -- a world that has always been finite.

This entry has been cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

A Post Mortem

In the latest edition of The Walrus, Warren Kinsella analyzes the reasons for The Liberals' disastrous election outcome. It's clear that he has little patience for Michael Ignatieff's strategic skills. More importantly, he claims that when Ignatieff had a chance to form an alliance with the NDP, he got cold feet. Others in both parties were talking of an alliance:

In the spring of 2010, a number of eminent Liberals (among them Jean Chrétien) and New Democrats (Ed Broadbent, Roy Romanow) started musing, once again, about bringing the two parties together — through co-operation, or a coalition. The impetus was simple: Harper and the Conservative Party were getting stronger; Ignatieff and the Liberals were getting weaker. Grassroots progressives were worried, too. After four years of a Conservative minority government, many in each party’s base were prepared to consider a coalition, despite concerns by some about the suitability of the right-leaning Ignatieff as its leader.

For Kinsella, Ignatieff's chief weakness was his  inability to recognize an opportunity when it presented itself  -- and his ability to confuse opportunity and disaster:

The second reason for the Liberals’ failure was the terrible strategic error of voting to defeat the government when they did. The Tories had been out polling the Grits for months and had an overwhelming fundraising and organizational advantage. Experienced senior Liberals, like campaign manager Gordon Ashworth, pleaded with Ignatieff to wait for the political environment to become more favourable. Despite all this, however, Ignatieff pushed for an election he could not win.

One can argue that Ignatieff was backed into a corner. He had to respond to the government's continued contempt for Parliament. For Kinsella, Ignatieff -- despite his smarts -- was simply a lousy politician. He admits that Ignatieff ran a good campaign; but Ignatieff failed to recognize, as Shakespeare wrote in King Lear, that "the ripeness is all."

Kinsella still sees some kind of Liberal-NDP merger as the way to defeat the Harper government. "Personally, [he writes] I’m motivated to do what Stephen Harper himself did and bring together like-minded partisans to do some good for the country." That conclusion -- and his analysis -- remains controversial. But Ignatieff's claim that he is "a teacher borne and bred" is an honest admission that politics isn't his forte. The next Liberal leader will have to be a consummate politician.

The Face Of The Conservative Revolution

Two stories this morning -- one in The Globe and Mail and the other in The National Post -- put the Conservative Revolution in perspective. In The Globe, John Ibbitson claims that the Conservatives still see themselves as underdogs. Their summer strategy is to shore up their beachhead around Toronto and to storm B.C.'s lower mainland, warning that the Liberals are coming. They hope to become "Canada's Party"

by convincing themselves and their supporters that the big, bad liberal elites are still Goliath and Mr. Harper’s Conservatives remain the underdogs, even if every shred of evidence suggests that it is the Tories who are the giants now.

Harper's Conservatives, born of Western alienation, arrived in Ottawa with a chip on their collective shoulder. That chip has grown bigger with their majority. But there is more than Western alienation behind the Harper Conservatives. There is a distinct world view which defines all Conservatives these days. That world view was best expressed by Scott Fitzgerald ninety years ago. "The rich," he wrote, "aren't like the rest of us."

And this morning, in The National Post, we have an illustration of that observation. Affidavits, filed by U.S. prosecutors, suggest that time behind bars has not humbled Conrad Black:

“Black initially demanded special treatment, expecting counsellors to prioritize his requests over those of other inmates,” said Tammy Padgett, the unit manager of Lord Black’s prison ward. “During the time that Black was at Coleman, I observed that he gathered a following of inmates who performed services for him, acting like servants,” she said in a two-page affidavit filed by U.S. prosecutors in advance of a June 24 re-sentencing hearing.

“These inmates cooked for Black, cleaned for him, mopped his floor, ironed his clothes and other similar tasks. This is not at all frequent at Coleman.”

Conservatives are convinced that class matters -- and that class distinctions, which have been fudged by the welfare state, need to be re-established. It's time, they proclaim, to reassert privilege.

And So It Begins

True to its prime directive -- that the private sector can do anything better than government -- the Harper regime announced yesterday that it will close down Audit Services Canada, which -- according to The Globe and Mail --"bills itself as having 'a fifty year record of helping to improve public sector accountability and operations.'" What the announcement means is that 92 government auditors across Canada will lose their jobs and be replaced with an unspecified number of private contractors.

It's interesting -- and deeply revealing -- that the first job cuts made by this government  are to government auditors. This is the government which,  just two weeks ago, revealed that there was no paper trail to accompany G8 and G20 security costs. When John Baird and Tony Clement admitted to that "oversight," their defense was that they needed to expedite arrangements -- even those costs associated with Mr. Clement's riding.

And, yes, that would be the same Tony Clement who announced the death of Statistics Canada's long form census.  This is the same government which refused to offer complete cost estimates for its purchase of F35 jets and new federal prisons. This is the same government which insisted that reports on Afghan prisoners  not  be made in the usual way -- by memos to various government departments.

Perhaps Environment Minister Peter Kent will soon tell us that the government is trying to save trees. Stranger pronouncements have emerged from other ministers. But a pretty clear pattern has emerged over the last five years: This is a government which wants to leave no paper trails.

Evidence -- facts -- are this government's enemy. They undermine almost all of its policies. This is a government based on certain theological assumptions -- that unfettered markets are sacred; that social policy is an individual choice, not a communitarian one; that foreign policy is only credible if you can intimidate your rivals with hard power -- and that it's time to return to the strong and stable 1950's.

Never mind that the 1950's were neither strong nor stable. Never mind that they were dominated by paranoia and prejudice. For this Prime Minister --  born in 1959 -- they were a Golden Age. And so the march backwards begins.

The Press Is The Enemy?

Two weeks ago, Conservative Party President John Walsh sent a missive to party supporters: "During this election campaign, we faced an onslaught of negative attacks like never before from the media, from pundits and from anti-Conservative lobby groups and union executives,” he wrote. The clouds were gathering: “The fear among the opinion establishment is that if our government is successful, and Canadians see the benefits of lower taxes, sensible and less-interventionist government and more personal freedom, the Conservative Party of Canada will continue to win future elections.”

Based upon Pamela Wallin's performance yesterday on CTV's Question Period, one would be well advised to take that forecast with a grain of salt. Debating Senate reform with the NDP's  David Christopherson, -- who suggested such basic constitutional change should be put to a referendum -- Wallin responded that the result of the last election, "in our system, sir, is a mandate."

When Christiopherson shot back that Wallin was being "arrogant and elitist," Ms. Wallin lost her cool. Mr. Christopherson, she said, was being "simplistic and ill informed."

Mr. Harper appears to be having some difficulty commanding the loyalty of certain Conservative senators. Obviously, Ms. Wallin is not one of them. She has undergone an interesting political evolution. Starting as a member of the NDP's Waffle, she was later appointed Consul General to New York by Jean Chretien, and -- most recently -- to the Senate by Stephen Harper. Harper also appointed former journalist Mike Duffy to the Senate. Both members of the chattering class are still chattering. But they know who the boss is.

Mr. Harper's strategy seems to be to co-opt whatever opinion makers he can -- and then use the same attack machine, which doomed Stephane Dion and Micheal Ignatieff, against the others. Our prime minister is quite a piece of work.

The Future Is In The Hands Of The Young

Frank Graves has sifted through the entrails of the last election, trying to figure out why he and all the other pollsters didn't see Stephen Harper's majority coming. His conclusions merit careful attention:

 In a nutshell, what went wrong is that Mr. Graves created state-of-the-art methodology to effectively random survey the entire voting-age population. In doing so, he drew in a big segment of potential voters who use cellphones only – 15 per cent of the total, double the percentage in 2008. This segment of the voting-age population has been either excluded or underrepresented in conventional polling methodology. They tend to be younger and to belong to the more than 50 per cent of the electorate under the age of 45 who don't vote.

While Graves clearly identified two voting significant cohorts, the data on non voters is highly volatile. But when he revisited the data, Graves discovered that:

if under-45 Canadians had voted in the same proportion as over-45 Canadians, there would have been no Conservative majority but more likely an NDP-led coalition. 

Those non voters swung the election to the Conservatives. It is in the party's interest to keep non voters disengaged. And  appealing to the young does not appear to be part of the game plan. By micro-targeting voters and  programs to the over 45 crowd, the Conservatives have discovered how to win a majority with 24% of eligible voters.

Graves analysis does, however, show where opportunity lies. The party that can reach the young is the party of the future. The present government is devoted -- in the words of the American economist Paul Krugman -- to "eating the future."

The Importance of Undergraduates

Jeffrey Simpson raises an important and controversial issue this morning. At Canadian universities, he writes, undergraduates are at the bottom of the totem pole:

They arrive at many campuses – this doesn’t apply at smaller schools – and spend the first two years in monster classes of hundreds and hundreds of fellow students. They might actually interact with a teaching assistant in a seminar, but face-to-face time with a professor would be rare. It’s a poor way to learn.

As the father of three sons -- two who have graduated, and  another -- God between us and all harm -- who will be heading to university in September, I know that the picture Simpson paints is accurate. Our two older sons  have received funding by serving as teaching assistants. I am grateful  that door has been open to them.

Simpson surely does not begrudge graduate students their ability to pay for their education. Nonetheless, his contention that

In most schools, and across the academic world, the professorial Holy Grail is research. Tenure and promotion, by and large, depend more on research and publications than teaching. (Again, there are scattered exceptions.) There are few sticks and carrots – or not enough of them – to get professors back in the classroom more frequently, which is the single best thing that might improve the quality of undergraduate education

is absolutely true. The people who generate a major portion of university funding "get the shaft."

The prime purpose of university is not the prime purpose of the faculty. That is not to say that there are not superb teachers on university faculties. Any of us who have been lucky enough to spend time in that world have encountered them. The problem is that the incentive system on campuses does not prioritize teaching. Governments should readjust funding formulae to focus efforts on undergraduate education.

Not only in education, writes Simpson, but.in other areas of public policy, it's time to re-conceptualize the delivery of public services:

The biggest problem of public management today, and not just in higher education, is that public agencies lack systematic incentives to improve quality. Performance toward certain objectives that society has every right to demand for its tax dollars – a better undergraduate experience, better health-care delivery, better education results – is not adequately measured. Measurements are not compared and the financial results do not follow from those results.

 I rarely agree with  Mr. Simpson. But, as New Democrats and Liberals meet this weekend, restructuring the incentives which drive public policy should be at the top of their agendas.

The Calm Before The Storm

Lawrence Martin, in this morning's Globe and Mail, makes a strong case for the ascendancy of Stephen Harper. Rarely have the stars aligned themselves so thoroughly in a Prime Minister's favour. He controls the House; he controls the Senate; he has absolute control of his party. Even the Parti Quebecois -- the bane of so many other Prime Ministers' existence -- seems to be imploding before him.

And, writes Martin, Harper is not going to tamper with fate by presenting the country with a grand vision and grand promises:

Lifelong politicians think first and foremost of politics. This Prime Minister is a lifelong politician. Policy is not his top priority; stacking the political deck is. Brian Mulroney and others have urged him to do something grand, and a case can certainly be made that now’s the time to do it. But you get the idea that Mr. Harper has developed a strong sense of what governments are defeated by and that he will devote much energy to avoiding those traps.

Mr. Harper has been very good at stacking the deck. However, that is also his weakness. His government -- and yesterday's budget -- favours winners. The last thirty years have seen an international order which favours winners. Harper has not come to power by rowing against the current. But, as several commentators -- including the Globe's John Ibbitson -- have pointed out, things change once the people who have been dealt a lousy hand organize:

In the past, when governments have swung the axe aggressively to save money, people have taken to the streets. Labour has brought its workers to the lawns of legislatures. Brian Mulroney and Mike Harris faced major demonstrations and public-servant strikes.

But people don’t seem to demonstrate against the Harper government, apart from the odd smatterings of curmudgeons who show up at this event or that. The unpleasantness at the G20 summit last June was more about globalization in general.

"Will people take to the streets?" Ibbitson asks. Regardless, the Conservatives are hell bent on making drastic cuts, while they spend huge sums for jets, overseas military bases and jails for "unreported" criminals. It's pretty clear that the budget cuts will hit the youngest the hardest. The deck has been stacked against them. That's what Brigette Depape's act of civil disobedience was all about last Friday.

In this age of social media -- which Ms. Depape and her generation understand very well -- it would be wise to recall the summer of 1968.

It's Not Just The Young

It's not just the young who understand what Brigette Depape's protest was about. There are members of my own generation who understand what has happened in the last thirty years. Some -- like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich -- keep trying to deliver the message. However, as academic economists, they are working at a disadvantage.

There is a significant part of the population who are skeptical of anyone from the academy who tries his or her hand at politics. John Perkins comes from a much different background. As a former employee of Charles T. Main of Boston, he has served as an enabler of the kind of economic policies which have been sacrosanct for the last thirty years. He has also documented the disasters which have followed in their wake.

In a recent interview with Amy Goodman, Perkins -- the author of Confessions of An Economic Hitman -- talks of the havoc he helped cause; and he worries about the future which his grandson will inherit. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, he has undergone his own conversion.

The Times They Are A Changin'

Elizabeth May and Carolyn Bennett think it was "inappropriate." But what Brigette Depape did yesterday is not a one day story. Her generation has the most to lose from a Harper government -- and they know it.

They also know that the Harper government commands the "respect" of 24% of Canadian voters.

The times they are a changin'. Ms. May, Ms. Bennett -- and Mr. Harper -- be forewarned.

Headed in the Wrong Direction

On the day that the U.S unemployment rate went up for the second month in a row, Paul Krugman wrote that: "To be sure, things could be worse — and there’s a strong chance that they will, indeed, get worse." History is repeating itself. Unfortunately, The Great Depression occurred eighty years ago, and today's politicians have no long term memories and very short attention spans:

Somehow it became conventional wisdom that the deficit, not unemployment, was Public Enemy No. 1 — a conventional wisdom both reflected in and reinforced by a dramatic shift in news coverage away from unemployment and toward deficit concerns. Job creation effectively dropped off the agenda.

Krugman warned back in 2008 that the stimulus package was too small and too short lived. His opinion was considered too radical by those who supposedly knew better. Those who "knew better" had not just found a home in Washington. They were also ensconced in Europe. The same economic stagnation has been occurring there for sometime.

If there is one consistent reaction from those in power, it is what the American historian Barbara Tuchman has called "wooden-headedness" -- which inevitably leads to folly. Tuchman wrote that foolish policy is marked by three identifying characteristics. It

1) “must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight;” 2) “a feasible alternative course of action must have been available,” and; 3) that alternative must have been in existence beyond the life of a single individual and recommended over time by significant political opposition.

Krugman and other economists like Robert Reich and Joseph Stiglitz warned that the response in 2008 was an example of folly. Time has proved them right. The question is: Is anybody listening?

A Sense of Balance

In his recent book, A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada, John Ralston Saul writes of this country's deep aboriginal roots, which have profoundly influenced how Canadians view the world and themselves. One of the values Canadians cherish, Saul writes, is a sense of balance -- balance between man and nature, balance between us and others, balance between rich and poor.

It is precisely the balance between rich and poor which neo-liberalism -- and the Harper government -- threatens. Everywhere the economic policies of the Chicago School have been applied, there has been stark -- and rising -- inequality.

In a recent blog post, Alex Himelfarb reminds his readers of the work of Karl Polyani. Polyani understood the power of the word freedom. But freedom means many things -- and the problem with neo-liberalism is that it defines freedom as "economic freedom."

Polanyi warned some sixty years ago against a narrow economic definition of freedom that could too easily mean freedom from our obligations to others and, at worst, the freedom to abuse and exploit. For Polanyi, such an approach meant real freedom for the few, not the many, and was built on delusion, the pretense that earnings reflect only individual effort and merit, rather than the contributions of many and the investments of previous generations more willing than we to pay their taxes – not to mention the role of luck and inheritance. Polanyi rejected the notion that the economy, the market, was the basis for all human organization and freedom. Instead, he viewed the economy – and freedom as well – as embedded in society.

Polyani feared that such a narrow emphasis on economic freedom would lead to a deep social schism between those who were devoted to protecting their privilege and those who were protecting themselves from the privileged.

It's clear that Stephen Harper is profoundly ignorant of Canada's Aboriginal roots. His long term goal is to bury those influences and replace them with a more European -- and, frankly, a more American -- philosophy of government. Whoever wins the battle for balance will affect the long term future of this country.

Seeing the Future

Robin Sears has an interesting piece in this morning's Huffington Post. Those who are predicting the demise of the Liberal Party should read it. Sears' take is particularly interesting, given his deep roots among New Democrats:

It is facile to suggest that faced with surging social democrats on their left and entrenched conservatives on their right that there is no place for a third party in between. If that were true, the Liberal Party of Canada would long ago have faced this squeeze play.

No, the reality is that a series of bad choices in leadership, a decline in support in its previous bastion of Quebec, and flukes of circumstance have reduced one of Canada's great parties.

A strong new leader, with a strong contemporary vision, could well seize ground back from a fading second-term Conservative government, or an undisciplined NDP Opposition. Let us assume that such a powerful man or woman can be recruited by new, wiser elders of the Liberal party than those whose idea of good political leadership hunting ground was Oxbridge and the Ivy League.

The Conservatives bridge to the future is essentially a return to the past -- when life (supposedly) occurred in straight lines and the population was smugly complacent. The future for the New Democrats will probably be something like life for Brian Mulroney's Conservatives. Jack Layton will have to work hard to hold his coalition together -- and it will always exist on a knife's edge: capable of fracturing at any moment.

Those conditions provide an opening for the Liberals, writes Sears. The key lies in figuring out how to overhaul the 21st century nation state:

A new Canadian Liberal leader cannot out-promise other opposition parties, nor can he claim better governance or fiscal chops than a conservative government. But there is a huge unsatisfied political hunger among middle-class voters for a leader with a credible message of reform in the delivery of services in health, education, public safety and innovation.

Bob Rae's task is to set the stage for such a leader. It is an enormous responsibility.

Pap The Republican

The news that forty Republican senators have announced their support for Paul Ryan's budget plan is not surprising. But, when you review what passes for the usual Republican boilerplate these days, what is surprising is how much the Republicans sound like Pap Finn.

Pap only puts in a quick appearance at the beginning of Twain's novel, where he goes on at some length about the tyranny of government:

They call that govment! A man can’t get his rights in a govment like this. Sometimes I’ve a mighty notion to just leave the country for good and all. Yes, and I told ‘em so; I told old Thatcher so to his face. Lots of ‘em heard me, and can tell what I said. Says I, for two cents I’d leave the blamed country and never come anear it agin. Them’s the very words. I says, look at my hat-if you call it a hat but the lid raises up and the rest of it goes down till it’s below my chin, and then it ain’t rightly a hat at all, but more like my head was shoved up through a jint o’ stove-pipe. Look at it, says I-such a hat for me to wear-one of the wealthiest men in this town, if I could git my rights.

The government, Pap fumes, is always standing between him and the money which is rightfully his. Never once does it occur to him that his circumstances are self inflicted. A recent chart, published in Talking Points Memo puts the deficit into perspective:

While they rail against the profligate Obama administration, the fact is that Republicans have been the chief architects of the problem. Like Pap, they go through occasional periods of remorse and pledge themselves to fiscal sobriety. But the conversion never lasts long.

Twain wrote that Huck Finn suffered from a "deformed conscience." His salvation lay in the fact that he was willing to rebel against the conventional wisdom of his time and place, even if it meant -- wrongly, of course -- that he would "go to hell." If Republicans (and Democrats) had the courage to rebel against the prevailing economic theology of the age, they just might find salvation.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

The Jet Set

Last week in Washington, as the Senate discussed the F35, the red flags were everywhere. Robert Haddick, in Foreign Policy, reported that:

The troubled and long-delayed F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program came under renewed scrutiny this week. The Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and many foreign partners plan to buy thousands of the fighter-attack jets over the next two decades to replace a variety of aging aircraft, but the development schedule of the stealthy fighter has slipped five years to 2018 and the projected cost to the Pentagon for 2,457 aircraft has ballooned to $385 billion, making it by far the most expensive weapons program in history.

Defence Minister Peter Mackay has assured Canadians that there is no cause for concern. Canada, he says, has ordered the stripped down version of the airplane -- the equivalent of the family sedan, not the Dodge Viper. And, besides, there are more immediate concerns to be dealt with -- like the per vote subsidy, which sucks a whopping $27 million from the nation's purse.

And now that Tony Clement holds the strings to the nation's purse, we should all be able to sleep at night -- knowing that the man who was so parsimonious with government funds in his own riding will now ride shotgun on those who wish to waste the people's hard earned money.

We live in the best of all possible worlds. We have entrusted the nation to Canada's new Jet Set.

Rae To The Rescue

The Liberals have chosen wisely -- although there are those who wonder if Bob Rae has been equally wise. His is a daunting task. For the immediate future, he leads a party which was decimated at the polls, is woefully short of resources and -- when the Prime Minister axes the per vote subsidy -- will be even more bereft of resources.

Stephen Harper has been out to destroy the Liberal Party ever since he arrived in Ottawa. Bob Rae's job is to make sure that doesn't happen. And, as dark as things seem, the truth is that Rae -- at this point in time -- is the most important resource the Liberal Party has.

Conventional wisdom holds that the Prime Minister will love to go up against Rae, because Rae's record as Premier of Ontario will give Harper piles of ammunition. The truth, however, is that Harper's most trusted ministers -- John Baird, Jim Flaherty and Tony Clement -- are retreads from the old Mike Harris regime. They left all kinds of debris behind them -- and Rae knows where all the garbage was dumped. Moreover, Rae is a much better politician -- and a much more accomplished communicator, in both languages -- than anyone on the Conservative benches, including the Prime Minister.

Rae's real advantage is his character. He's known difficult circumstances and he's had time to reflect upon defeat. Unlike Stephen Harper, he has not always gotten his way. Through it all, he has never become cynical. Harper is nothing -- his recent Senate appointments underscore the point -- if not cynical. In the end, Rae's optimism can trump Harper's puritanical hypocrisy.

And Rae has another truly appealing characteristic: he has a quick and ready sense of humour. Rumour has it that Stephen Harper also has a sense of humour. But few have seen it. Unfortunately, Harper fits the stereotype of the dour, well fed Conservative. The Liberals do not possess the vicious attack machine which Harper has had at his disposal. But someone like Bob Rae can make Stephen Harper look ridiculous.

No, uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Where Are The Woodwards and Bernsteins?

Lawrence Martin has a timely column this morning on the the state of Canadian journalism. Martin writes of the late James Thomson, who warned that the biggest occupational hazard for journalists is being co-opted by the powerful. Martin then turns to the press in Canada:

Much wonderment has been expressed recently on why stories of abuse of power don’t seem to hurt Stephen Harper’s government. The stories don’t stick, it is said. The reason may well be, to cite Mr. Thomson’s cautionary words, because we in the media don’t stick to them. It’s episodic journalism. We report one story, then move on. We don’t probe deeply. If a Watergate was happening, the public would never know it.

The economic environment is much different than it was forty years ago. Newspapers, which used to generate huge profits, are now hanging on by the skin of their teeth. And to date, no one has been able to come up with a model which makes electronic journalism a reliable source of income. Last but not least, with the advent of the 24 hour news cycle, the need to feed the beast causes not just sloppy reporting but ephemeral reporting. Journalists just don't dig the way they used to.

Still, Martin writes, Canadians could take a page from the New York Times or the Washington Post:

During the election campaign, there were stories of voter-suppression tactics by the Tories, of barring people from rallies, of pork-barrelling with G8 funds and the like. In the last week of the campaign, there was a seeming attempt by a Conservative operative to present Michael Ignatieff as an Iraq war planner. One can imagine what would happen if this kind of thing, straight out of Nixonland, happened in a U.S. campaign. The media would blow the roof off. Here, the story passed in a day or two without further comment.

The Times and the Post are not above criticism. After all, both papers were hoodwinked by the second Bush administration in the run up to the Iraq War. And they were not alone. Frank Rich has chronicled that sad tale in his book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold. Rich maintains that modern politicians are masters not only of voter suppression but of information suppression. They use access to buy spin.

The sign of a healthy democracy is a vigorous, and courageous fourth estate. The young Woodward and Bernstein personified that kind of courage. The question is, who are this generation's Woodward and Bernstein?

The Austerity Myth

At last summer's G20 Conference, Stephen Harper worked hard to get all the participants to buy into the Austerity Myth. That myth is based upon the belief that, in Paul Krugman's words, "sound money and balanced budgets [are] the answers to all problems."

It's the same myth which 39.6% of Canadians bought in our recent federal election. Unfortunately, writes Krugman in today's New York Times, it is public policy grounded in fantasy:

Underlying this insistence have been economic fantasies, in particular belief in the confidence fairy — that is, belief that slashing spending will actually create jobs, because fiscal austerity will improve private-sector confidence.

Unfortunately, the confidence fairy keeps refusing to make an appearance. And a dispute over how to handle inconvenient reality threatens to make Europe the flashpoint of a new financial crisis.

Working from this theory, the European Union bailed out Greece and insisted that government spending be cut to the bone. The same model was applied to Ireland, Portugal and Britain. And what have been the results? Things have gone from bad to worse. In all cases, the private banking system was saved, while the public picked up the tab. And the public now must endure the consequences, because the so called "best and brightest" have concluded that, while pain is not good for elites, it is good for the common man.

Stephen Harper, who has always seen himself as a card carrying member of the best and brightest -- with his newly minted majority -- plans to implement the same "wisdom" here. As Krugman writes, " . . . if this seems incredibly foolish, who ever said that wisdom rules the world?"

A Broken System

Angelo Perischilli and I share few opinions. But this morning, I find myself heartily agreeing with him. In today's Toronto Star, he writes that Ruth Ellen Brosseau can "take credit for exposing the inconsistencies that are weakening the Canadian political system and changing the attitude of the electorate toward it." Brosseau is a symptom, not a cause:

How can we criticize a 27-year-old single mother for going on holiday during the campaign without criticizing the voters who elected someone they didn’t even know existed?

But nor can we criticize the voters for acting in such an apparently irresponsible way without asking why they did it.

What happened in Berthier-Maskinongé on May 2 was not an isolated anomaly but the result of conditions that are now common in nearly every riding. The only difference is that in Berthier-Maskinongé all those anomalies piled up and produced an unexpected offspring, one conceived by the unhappy marriage of a dysfunctional political system and flawed electoral laws.

The problem is that, with an unassailable majority, Stephen Harper is not going to fix a system which has rewarded him so handsomely. He may talk "reform" -- after all that was the name of the party which thrust him into the spotlight. But, as his appointment of three failed Tory candidates to the Senate illustrates, that was then, this is now.

And, as far as that contempt of parliament motion is concerned, one need only note that Bev Oda -- who misled parliament and whose actions were at the heart of the contempt motion -- is still a minister in charge of the same ministry.

If there is one ray of hope it is this: Historically, Conservative governments -- even when they are ushered in with overwhelming majorities -- are inherently unstable. That was true of both the Diefenbaker and the Mulroney governments. They rotted from within. You can already see the signs of Conservative discontent brewing in the reaction to Harper's Senate appointments and in the looming battle over the status of Conservative riding associations. And then there is the problem of all those backbenchers who have remained loyal and who have been consistently passed over for cabinet appointments.

Mr. Harper's grasp of Canadian history seems to go back only as far as Pierre Trudeau and the National Energy Program. In the past, when he faced opposition from within, he banished the dissenters. Consider Belinda Stronach, Garth Turner, Bill Casey and the hapless Helena Geurgis. It will be interesting to see what happens when a growing number of Conservatives raise their middle fingers to the Prime Minister and then go public.

The Manufacturing Renaissance

On the day after Chrysler announced that it was repaying the U.S. Treasury $7.5 billion in debt, Paul Krugman wrote that manufacturing was making a comeback in America:

Crucially, the manufacturing trade deficit seems to be coming down. At this point, it’s only about half as large as a share of G.D.P. as it was at the peak of the housing bubble, and further improvements are in the pipeline. The Boston Consulting Group, which is now predicting a U.S. “manufacturing renaissance,” points to major U.S. firms like Caterpillar that once shifted production abroad but are now moving it back. At the same time, companies from other countries, especially European firms, are moving production to America.

And one potential disaster has been avoided: the U.S. auto industry, which many people were writing off just two years ago, has weathered the storm. In particular, General Motors has now had five consecutive profitable quarters.

America’s industrial heartland is now leading the economic recovery. In August 2009, Michigan had an unemployment rate of 14.1 percent, the highest in the nation. Today, that rate is down to 10.3 percent, still above the national average, but nonetheless a huge improvement.

Some worry about the decline of the American dollar. It's not without consequences for Canada. Our dollar is now worth more than the American dollar; therefore, our exports to the United States have become more expensive.

On the other hand, because of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the American and Canadian economies are joined at the hip. That is why, when President Obama rescued GM and Chrysler, the Canadian and Ontario governments joined in the bailout.

We are each others largest trading partners. When the United States does well, Canada does well. Both countries have a huge stake in an America which makes things.

Who Are the Real Opposition?

Those who are looking to the NDP to provide counter arguments to the Harper juggernaut should take a look at this morning's National Post. In a blistering comment on yesterday's festivities in Ottawa, Scott Stinson writes that those who are really furious with Harper are Canadians who consider themselves true Conservatives:

It’s not just that Mr. Harper decided to appoint three more unabashed partisans to the Senate. It’s not just that the Senators-to-be, Larry Smith, Fabian Manning, and Josée Verner, were rejected by Canadian voters only two weeks ago. And it’s not just that the PMO’s announcement of the appointments was seemingly timed to be as contemptuous of the public as possible — just after the new Cabinet was announced, and mere moments after the Prime Minister had completed a question-and-answer session with the media in Ottawa. It’s all of it, in one tidy package: more patronage, less respect for democracy and less accountability. He’s long since given up the pledge to only appoint “elected senators,” of course, but it takes some gumption to swallow all those principles at once.

Besides rewarding what Harper used to call a "coalition of losers," there's the problem of the bloated cabinet. Once again, Stinson is not impressed:

A 39-member Cabinet, nearly the largest in the country’s history, for the party of small government. The same attention to petty worries such as regional balance — Quebec has four Cabinet members out of five MPs, while Alberta has four out of 27 MPs — means that Cabinet becomes ever more bloated. Had Mr. Harper wanted to signal serious change, he could have easily whacked a bunch of positions and returned the ministry to a more manageable, less costly size. Was it surprising that Mr. Harper did not celebrate his majority victory by essentially firing a dozen ministers and returning them to the back benches? No, it wasn’t. But the point is, he could have done so. It would have been a clear sign that, as conservatives wait for Conservatives to show any sign that they haven’t forgotten the meaning of the word, Mr. Harper intends to govern like the politician he must have once intended to be — back before he had the balancing act of a minority government to worry about.

As everyone should know by now, there has always been a galactic distance between what Stephen Harper says and what Stephen does. Some of us had hoped that Canadians would have taken note of that during the election. It would appear that those who have now noticed Harper's political hypocrisy used to be his most ardent supporters. I suspect that a good number of them were among the 39.6% of eligible voters who gave the Prime Minister his majority.

The Triumph of the Philestines

The news in this morning's Globe and Mail that John Baird will become Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs is truly depressing. A graduate of Queen's University, Baird is not stupid.

The problem is that he is uniquely unqualified for the job. He proved that in spades last year when he carried the Prime Minister's water at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change. Baird argued that there could be no progress until China and India signed onto a deal. He stood for inertia as the planet continued to warm. And that, in a nutshell, encapsulates the Harper government's foreign policy: Despite the evidence, it's best to ignore inconvenient truths.

Harper's appointment of Baird reminds those of us who taught in Ontario of Mike Harris' appointment of John Snoblen as his first Minister of Education. Snoblen dropped out of high school in grade eleven, never to return. But he inherited his father's waste management company and became quite wealthy. He then set about "reforming" Ontario's education system by applying the same skill set he used to move garbage. He was famously videotaped, lecturing his ministry's employees on how to accomplish his objective. Sometimes, he said, one had to "create a crisis" to accomplish change. And that is exactly what he did.

Harris himself was a failed teacher. After dropping out of university following his freshman year, he attended teacher's college and taught elementary school for three years before moving on to more lucrative employment. Yet Harris and Snoblen -- based on their vast experience -- were certain that they knew how to fix education in Ontario. The province's schools have never recovered from their efforts.

Baird no doubt has the prime minister's confidence. That is the key qualification for the job. The fact that Foreign Affairs is not Harper's bailiwick is irrelevant. Harper would never appoint someone who he felt knew more about a portfolio than himself. When the United Nations rejected Canada's bid for a seat on the Security Council late last year, they grasped this inconvenient truth. The world does not need more philistines.

There Is Nothing So Powerful

Lawrence Martin sees difficult times ahead for the NDP. He writes that, even with their considerable numbers and their beach head in Quebec, the left has dreams, Harper has the cards. The evidence is compelling:

Just like the Liberals, the New Democrats are at a huge financial disadvantage. When the Conservatives feel so inclined, they’ll strike with brutal advertising that the NDP won’t have the resources to rebut. Does anyone think Thomas Mulcair’s outburst about Osama bin Laden won’t be aired countless times when the appropriate moment arrives? Or Jack Layton’s massage-parlour visit? Don’t put it past the Conservatives.

The Conservative advantage in the media is staggering. Beyond the Toronto Star, which is more Liberal than NDP, do the New Democrats have even one backer, one standard bearer, among major Canadian outlets? By contrast, the Conservatives have squadrons, not the least of which is Sun Media, which now has a television network (run by one of Mr. Harper’s former public-relations directors) devoted to the conservative cause.

The NDP has two advantages. It has ideas and the support of the young. Neither should be underestimated:

Young Canadians have become more politically engaged, and the New Democrats have a big slice of that market. The Dippers are out front of the Conservatives on green issues and health care. They’re out front on representing the proverbial little guy. If they handle it properly, they can make the issue of growing income inequality – the egregious gap between rich and poor – a front-burner issue, as opposed to a tiresome cliché.

The Conservatives have said absolutely nothing about income inequality. In fact, their policies -- and statistics -- continue to support it. But, as the young continue to find doors closed to them, and while the income gap between their parents and themselves continues to grow, "the Harper government"-- which presently thinks it is in the cat bird seat -- will find itself the target of youthful rage. Mr. Harper, whose foreign policy takes no note of Arab aspirations, seems to have forgotten that the Arab Spring grew out of the frustration of a younger, educated generation to find its place in a top down society.

If income inequality continues to grow in Canada, Stephen Harper will eventually face his own crowds of protesters. Despite the money and the media, as Victor Hugo noted, "There is nothing so powerful an an idea whose time has come." A Just Future with a Just Income is just such an idea.

On The Subject of Fiscal Stewardship

Only time will tell what kind of opposition Jack Layton's New Democrats will become. But four days after the Conservatives abandoned their pledge to balance the nation's books by 2015, Haroon Siddiqui examined Stephen Harper's claim that his party is the party of adult financial supervision while the New Democrats are wreckless, spendthrift adolescents.

It's true that New Democrats have never formed a government in Ottawa; but they have formed various provincial governments; and they have a long history of dealing with government finances. That history, Siddiqui writes, is revealing:

Allan Blakeney in Saskatchewan (1971-82) produced 12 balanced budgets. When his successor, Tory Grant Devine, left a huge deficit and a $14 billion debt, the NDP’s Roy Romanov (1991-2001) balanced the books. In Manitoba, Ed Schreyer (1969-77) produced surpluses in eight of his nine budgets. When his successor, the Conservative Sterling Lyon, racked up a deficit of $200 million within four years, his NDP successor Howard Pawley cleared it and created a surplus. (Pawley’s memoir, Keep True: A Life in Politics, published by the University of Manitoba Press, has just been released).

Only Bob Rae in Ontario (1990-95) left a big deficit, a legacy of a debilitating recession as well as poor management.

By contrast, look at the conservatives’ record — the deficits and debts created by Ronald Reagan, Brian Mulroney, Stephen Harper and Mike Harris.

It is also interesting to note that the last finance minister in the Harris-Eves regime was a man named Jim Flaherty. Of course, during the election campaign, Harper and Flaherty referred to the Rae government as a fiscal catastrophe. But, to be fair, Rae came to government at the beginning of a recession. And -- like Mr. Harper-- he left a deficit in his wake. It is one of Canadian history's political ironies that Rae -- who used to show his exasperation by referring to the Federal Liberals as "the red army chorus" -- has joined that party.

The history of Conservative governments -- on both sides of the border -- is a history not just of deficits, but of record deficits. Their claim to prudent stewardship is -- in financial terms, at least -- a fraud.

Making The World Safe For The Wealthy

The pledge was pretty straightforward. This, after all, was the government of the "steady" hand. The Conservative platform proclaimed that: "Through accelerated reductions in government spending, a re-elected Stephen Harper government will eliminate the deficit by 2014-15.”

Yet, when asked on Wednesday about keeping that pledge, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced that "the budget will account for commitments made during the campaign, including setting money aside to strike a deal with Quebec over sales taxes." So, no, the budget won't be balanced by 2015.

That news should surprise no one. The numbers never added up in the first place. What is surprising is just how quickly the Conservatives broke that pledge, which was their key argument for "stability." But, all huffing and puffing aside, this election was never about the deficit. It was about rewarding the Conservative base. It was always about rewarding the Conservative base. And that meant -- not to put too fine a point on it -- making the world safe for the wealthy.

If you treat those people well, Stephen Harper argued, they will create jobs for the less fortunate. We have thirty years of data which disprove that contention. Yet a good number of the less fortunate voted against their own economic self interest. And so the saga continues. It began when Ronald Reagan first agreed to act as a shill for General Electric. Stephen Harper has learned from a master.

Micheal Ignatieff In Retrospect

In a recent column, Kate Heartsfeld recounts an incident which occurred less than a week after the election:

Five days after the federal election, I was sitting in a car dealership in suburban Ottawa, reading the paper and drinking my watery free coffee. A woman next to me was reading a newspaper, too. At one point, she said to her husband, "I see Iggy's got a teaching job in Toronto." The husband made a listening noise. "He should go back to wherever he came from," the woman continued, bitterly.

It is one of those stories which makes you shake your head. As a grade six student back in Montreal, I read that Ignatieff's father, George, was Canada's Ambassador to the United Nations. Why did this woman not know that? More importantly, what does the anecdote say about us? How can a woman who never visited her riding -- and who vacationed in Vegas during the election -- be elected with such a significant majority of the votes?

Shalini K. Rao -- a Canadian writing in the Harvard Crimson -- sees Ignatieff's defeat as a defeat for traditional Canadian ideals:

Crafted as “elitist,” “insincere,” and “just visiting,” Ignatieff not only had to argue for broad political ideals regarding open democracy—which were oftentimes compromised by Harper’s politics, but he was also forced by his opponents and the media to prove himself as a legitimate candidate. Instead, Ignatieff ought to be thought of as the real icon of what a Canadian looks like; born to a Russian immigrant father and Canadian mother, he worked hard to achieve a world-class education and now stands as a prominent figure in both political thought and academia. Additionally, in his defense of human rights and the protection of democracy, Ignatieff represents the very ideals that Canada prides herself on in the first place.

During the Liberal leadership race in 2005, Ignatieff was not my choice. I argued that Bob Rae was the best politician of the lot. He had served in government and in opposition and would, therefore, make the best Leader of the Opposition. And, I wrote, the Liberal Party needed time to rebuild. I did not expect Stephen Harper to be pathologically partisan. I was wrong.

In retrospect, the Liberal Party has made quite a few mistakes. But to hang them all on Ignatieff is simply unfair. We have become a much different country during Stephen Harper's stewardship. Instead of a country which is open to the world, Rao notes that:

The defeat of Ignatieff and his Liberal Party is, indeed, a sad moment in Canada’s narrative not only for what it signifies politically, but also because it shows a widespread fear of progress. The close-mindedness that grips Canadian politics is manifest in the Opposition that maneuvered itself against Ignatieff for fear that he had spent too much time abroad and learned too much from the world around him. For a country that is stereotyped here in the U.S. as a country that is accepting of everyone and everything, this federal election depicts a Canada that is moving in a steadily more exclusive and narrow direction.

A man with Ignatieff's talents will survive his defeat. What worries me is that the Canada I love may not survive Stephen Harper's triumph.

Shifting Blame

I suspect that the 24% of Canadians who gave Stephen Harper his majority don't read Paul Krugman. But, as Mr. Harper and his acolytes rest smugly in their certitude that corporate tax cuts create jobs, the rest of us should read Krugman's column in this morning's New York Times. He writes that the so called wise men of economic policy are blaming the public for the financial meltdown:

The idea is that we got into this mess because voters wanted something for nothing, and weak-minded politicians catered to the electorate’s foolishness. So this seems like a good time to point out that this blame-the-public view isn’t just self-serving, it’s dead wrong.

The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes.

Mr. Harper's entire campaign was about getting serious. To make matters worse, the opposition parties bought his framing of the issue. It was all about who was more serious about the deficit. They all claimed that they would eliminate it by 2015. Even more preposterous was the Prime Minister's taking credit for the wise economic decisions of his predecessors. He not only shifted blame -- away from the people who got us into this mess; he also shifted responsibility for Canada's good economic fortune to himself and his "steady hand." In short, he created a fable and Canadians bought it.

Those fables are the problem, writes Krugman. They perpetuate a state of ignorance, because:

by making up stories about our current predicament that absolve the people who put us there, we cut off any chance to learn from the crisis. We need to place the blame where it belongs, to chasten our policy elites. Otherwise, they’ll do even more damage in the years ahead.

Convinced that Stephen Harper is a reliable messenger, Canadians have done precisely the opposite.

Something Wicked

In the same week that Canada's political pundits hailed Stephen Harper's "remaking of the political landscape," -- the week that Micheal Ignatieff resigned as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and headed to the University of Toronto -- Andrew Coyne recounted a meeting with one of Harper's operatives, a veteran of the Conservative War Room. Obviously proud of his work, he distinguished between the two strategies the Conservatives used in the attack ads which took down Stephane Dion and then Micheal Ignatieff:

They say that we try to portray Ignatieff in our ads and so on as a weak and flailing professor,” the war room staffer said. “No, that’s how we portrayed Dion. Dion was weak, you know, Dion was ‘not a leader.’ We’ve never said Michael Ignatieff isn’t a leader. We’ve never called him weak. And we’ve never called him a flip-flopper. Even when he changes his mind, we don’t say he’s a flip-flopper. Michael Ignatieff, in our narrative, is a political opportunist who is calculating, who will do and say anything to get elected.

“He’s a schemer. When he says one thing and then he changes his mind the next week, it’s not because he’s indecisive and a flip-flopper. It’s because he’s an opportunist who will say different things to different people. I don’t think we’ve even used the phrase, even internally, ‘He’s a malicious human being.’ But that’s kind of the sentiment we’re getting at. With Dion, we were trying to portray him as weak. You can’t trust him to lead us out of the economic recovery because he’s a weak man. With Ignatieff, it’s ‘He’s a bad man,’ right? He’s someone you don’t want your daughter to marry, right?

I bears repeating that the man who hired this Apostle of Sweetness and Light hired Bruce Carson. He smeared Richard Colvin. He fired Linda Keen. And then there is the sad tale of Remy Beauregard. Yet despite all the evidence -- on the public record -- last Monday a majority of Canadians chose to re-elect Stephen Harper for a third time. The difference was that this time they gave him the keys to the car and told him that he could drive it unsupervised.

It was an act of folly which will have tragic consequences. As Shakespeare's three weird sisters warned, "Something wicked this way comes."

The Mushy Middle?

Those who are hailing the new "clarity" reflected in Monday's election results should read Dan Gardner's column in this morning's Ottawa Citizen. Looking back at the demise of the British Liberal Party, Gardner writes:

Something similar is quite possible here. In a matchup between the Conservatives and NDP, particularly at a time when voter turnout is appallingly low, the electoral math may show that moving to the centre to grab some of the dwindling number of Liberal voters is no longer the smartest option. The more effective strategy may be to identify, engage, and energize the party’s base.

If the government and the opposition begin to define themselves in terms of their differences, the eventual result could be stalemated government. An example, writes Gardiner, is close at hand:

If that sounds impossible, look south. A mountain of research shows that Americans are overwhelmingly clustered in the political middle. Very simply, most Americans are moderate centrists. And yet, American politics is divided and polarized like never before because, in part, the political dynamics reward division and polarization.

Americans seem to have forgotten the strategic advice of the man who led the D-Day Invasion, kept his country out of Vietnam and Suez, and built the Interstate Highway System:

People talk about the middle of the road as though it were unacceptable. Actually, all human problems, excepting morals, come into the gray areas. Things are not all black and white. There have to be compromises. The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.

As what some see as an historic realignment begins to take shape in Ottawa -- and before more people begin to write the obituary of the Liberal Party of Canada -- they should contemplate both Gardner's and Eisenhower's counsel.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Russell's Nightmare

Canada changed last night. It was a change which voters made consciously and deliberately. In doing so, they ignored the warning of one of Canada's best known constitutional scholars. A week before the election, Peter Russell appeared in what will become a seminal video. "This is the most important federal election in my lifetime," he declared:

What is at stake is nothing less than parliamentary democracy. If the electorate rewards Mr. Harper with a majority, it will mean that he will be able to operate as a presidential prime minister without the check and balance of Congress. It will also mean that two out of five Canadians think very little of the need to hold government accountable to Parliament. Mr. Harper has reduced parliamentary debate to "bickering" and the role of parliament in the formation of government to irrelevant constitutional stuff. I hope and pray that the parties of parliamentarians win a majority next Monday.

Russell warned Canadians that Stephen Harper has absolutely no respect for Canada's constitutional conventions. Retiring Speaker of the House Peter Milliken made the same point when he found the Harper government in contempt of Parliament.

A significant number of Canadians have forgotten that it was respect for those conventions which helped us through some of our most trying times. When Quebec separatists chose the Algerian terrorist model as the way to independence, Rene Levesque moved the cause from planting bombs in mailboxes to seeking legitimacy through ballot boxes. When he lost the 1980 Quebec Referendum, it was Levesque's respect for those conventions which was behind his pledge, "A la prochaine!"

And the next time, when Quebecers voted again on Quebec Independence -- and lost the vote by one half of one percentage point -- they returned to their homes, secure in the knowledge that they still had a voice in the House of Commons through Gilles Duceppe. Respect for those conventions allowed for a party dedicated to the breakup of the country -- a party which, for awhile, served as the Loyal Opposition. It was those conventions which have allowed Canadians, despite their differences, to talk through their problems.

Last night Canadians elected a man who does not talk to his opponents. He demonizes them. He demonized the Bloc Quebecois in 2008, when his decision to cancel vote subsidies -- a decision he made without consulting his caucus -- almost cost him his government. He belittled Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, a man whose international reputation will survive, even in defeat.

Canadians now have the government they deserve. Only a little more than 61% of us cast our ballots -- a result foreshadowed in an earlier Angus Reid Poll. I suspect that -- like voters in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan -- it won't be long until voter remorse sets in. But the nightmare has just begun.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.