“Dion is toast”; “The Party of Toronto”; “We gotta change the sheets” – these are just some of the damning comments heard from inside the Liberal Party in the aftermath of the election on Tuesday. One party insider even suggested that if Liberal leader Stéphane Dion refuses to resign, the party should start moving the furniture out of his office. In the blogosphere new blogs have been started in support of future leadership candidates, such as Frank McKenna.

The “natural governing party” was the only party in Tuesday’s election to see its votes and support plummet, with Toronto being the last remaining holdout still beholden to the former Big Red Machine. Under Mr. Dion’s leadership the party moved to the far left and ignored the crucial centre ground. As Canada’s national newspaper The Globe and Mail puts it, “Liberals need to revive that nearly extinct animal, the blue Liberal.”

Blue Liberal, Red Tory – six of one and half a dozen of another. In the increasingly splintered political landscape today, the only way to obtain a majority, or a strong minority, leads right through the centre, the middle ground occupied by Blue Liberals and Red Tories. Red Liberals and Blue Tories really do not stand a chance in Canada, as either one is anathema to the vast majority of Canadian voters.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has therefore gone the route of incrementalism, moving from a once-deep-blue Tory to a pinkish-looking Tory – going by his liberal spending habits. Mr. Dion, by contrast, went in the opposite direction, painting himself as a crimson-red Liberal. This is why Mr. Harper is back on the job, while Mr. Dion is facing calls from his own party to resign.
(more…)

Thirty-seven days and about $300 million later, Canadians awake to a “new” government in Ottawa. The Conservatives under Prime Minister Stephen Harper have built on their previous minority position and added a substantial number of seats, just a tad short of a majority. The Liberals, meanwhile, have seen the biggest decline in support in at least twenty years, placing Liberal leader Stéphane Dion’s head squarely and firmly on the chopping block. The Greens have failed yet again to elect a single MP, which will shut them out of the televised leaders’ debates no matter how loudly leader Elizabeth May screams to push her way in again. The NDP has gained a good number of seats, but despite party leader Jack Layton’s determination to replace Mr. Harper, it is quite obvious now that there is a ceiling to how far the federal NDP can go in Canada.

While the election may have produced a result that is only slightly different from the last parliament, there have been some interesting developments at riding level. Trudeau scion Justin won his seat in Montréal under the Liberal banner, and is already being traded on the rumour mill as a potential leadership candidate to follow in his famous father’s footsteps. Garth Turner, a former Conservative, then Liberal, MP, has been defeated in his Ontario riding – too bad for his constituents, but certainly a boon for the fans of his blog, as Mr. Turner will now be a free agent who can speak his mind without any fetters imposed by party discipline.
(more…)

It is widely believed that all 28 ridings in Alberta will go to the Conservatives, but there are two ridings that might switch to a different couleur.

The first one is Calgary Northeast. This riding, which used to belong to Art Hanger, who is retiring from politics, is the scene of conservative infighting between the official Conservative candidate, Devinder Shory, and an independent conservative contender, Roger Richard. The battle between them has been anything but benign, with injunctions and other legal threats being traded liberally.

This could result in the same split of the vote on the right in this riding that was also instrumental in allowing the Liberals three majority governments under Jean Chrétien when the right was divided into Tories and Reform.

It’s a story as old as time: when two are engaged in battle like this, it is usually a third that comes up the middle and takes the prize – in this case, Liberal candidate Sanam Kang, for example. But the riding may also go to the Green Party candidate or the NDP. The only thing that the two conservative candidates have going for them is that the candidates of the other parties don’t seem too capable or promising, which may limit voters’ choices to Shory and Richard.

The other riding that warrants close attention is Edmonton-Strathcona. Here, the Tory incumbent is facing off against a strong NDP candidate, Linda Duncan. Duncan has enjoyed great momentum, as documented by Liberals4Linda, a blog of Liberals who have decided to endorse and vote for Duncan.

There is no real threat to Conservatives in any of the other 26 ridings, which will be won by the Conservatives by five-digit margins – as usual – including, unfortunately, Calgary West, where the always-absent and abrasive Conservative incumbent should have been removed from office a long time ago. So, in Calgary West, people’s hopes are that Jennifer Pollock can pull it off and restore democracy in the riding at long last.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) had an ingenious idea for this election campaign, called Canada Votes: X-Challenge: a townhall-like meeting where voters have a chance to confront candidates of the main political parties. The CBC ran two instalments, one taped in Toronto and the other in Vancouver. The way it works is that members of a studio audience, all of whom state their voting preferences prior to the show, ask candidates questions. The candidates, then, have one minute each to respond, followed by two minutes each for rebuttal – or “free-for-all”, as the show’s host called it.

After each question, the studio audience votes on who they thought answered the question most expertly and truthfully. The results are revealed before the next round starts. At the end, the audience is asked to vote on the final winner based on his or her performance throughout the entire townhall meeting.
(more…)

The Calgary Herald has been tracking opinion through one of its online forums:

Of the 17 people who firmed up how they’re going to vote in the last week of the campaign, 41 per cent picked the Greens, 24 per cent are headed to the NDP, and 18 per cent plan to back the Conservatives. The Greens are also the top choice for 34 voters who haven’t yet made up their minds. Stephane Dion’s Liberals, however, trail all parties among the survey’s decided and undecided voters.

That poll, of course is anything but scientific and representative, but it’s quite interesting all the same. It may, however, reveal traces of a very general trend. Then again, it’s not really news that Liberals finish dead last in Alberta, particularly in Calgary.

After the Liberals were defeated in the federal election of January 2006, there was a sense of renewal in the air. Both Liberals, who had grown tired of the old ways after thirteen years in government under Jean Chrétien and then Paul Martin, and non-Liberals saw a golden opportunity in defeat to give the party a new sense of direction and purpose, to transform it into a party that would reflect small-l liberal values and be well-positioned as one of the main parties in 21st-century Canada.

In those heady days the Liberal Party attracted a considerable number of people who had never been members of the party, or even voted for it, before. I was one of them. In Alberta, building a new movement or political party from scratch is in our blood. The Reform Party, for example, was a product of this passion so typical of Albertans. For me, therefore, it was a great opportunity to be part of a process that would breathe new life into an old and stale party that had long forgotten its roots.

Albertans are often erroneously labelled as conservatives when, in fact, they are small-l liberals in the traditional sense: protecting people’s freedoms and ensuring that every individual can unfold his or her full potential, while keeping government and its reach to a reasonable level and cracking down on those whose excesses of freedom, such as criminal activity, make it impossible for others to enjoy their freedoms. In that sense, and in that sense only, I am a liberal. As far as I am concerned, a party that uses the word “liberal” in its name must live up to those principles.
(more…)

Look at these numbers:

Nationally, however, the party appears to have stopped its week-long slide and come to rest with between 33 and 35 per cent support from decided voters – a shade below the 36 per cent of the vote it won in 2006, allowing it to form a minority government.

What does all this really mean? Very little, to tell the truth. First of all, polls are never accurate. To achieve any real representative accuracy or significance, polling companies would have to poll at least 3,500 people for each poll, rather than only 1,200, 1,000 or 800-900. Given the sample sizes in Canadian polls, all of them are for the birds.

Second, there is the issue of Canada’s undemocratic and antiquated first-past-the-post system – i.e., the winner takes all, as they say. Even if the polling numbers are accurate, which they are not, and we assume that the Tories will get, say, 34%, they can still form a majority government. All they have to do is win by at least one vote in 155 ridings, and the majority is in place. Or to put it in more drastic terms, if they obtained as little as 10% of the votes in 155 ridings, and 10% happens to be the highest count for any of the candidates in the ridings, they would also win a majority.

Always keep in mind what happened in the provincial election in Alberta this March: with only 22% of the electorate supporting them, the Alberta Tories formed a majority government, holding 72 of 83 seats (!).

Finally, the above numbers may not be all that accurate, as I said:

University of B.C. political scientist Fred Cutler, a voting specialist, warned that polling numbers early in a campaign can be suspect and that the decline in support is probably exaggerated.

It is for this reason that it will be a long time before any of the mainstream parties will ever agree to change to a system of proportional representation. As they surely see it: Why fix it if it ain’t broke?

Canadians heading to the polls on October 14 do not really have much of a choice, because there is not one leader who really stands out – except, perhaps, NDP leader Jack Layton, who has displayed real pizzazz in this campaign and the ability to connect with real Canadians and their main concerns, unparalleled by any of the other leaders, for which he may yet be rewarded with the job as leader of the Official Opposition . Still, of the mediocre-to-outright-poor choices for the top job in the country available, one emerges as the clear and reasonable choice on election day: Stephen Harper.

The minority prime minister of two and a half years has not exactly wowed Canadians with visionary ideas, but he has provided steady leadership. Were mistakes made? Of course, they were. Government by definition is highly imperfect, and there is no government that has not botched things at some point during its term.

The British newspaper The Economist has endorsed Stephen Harper, just as it did prior to the last election in early 2006. That by itself speaks volumes, because, as the saying goes in Canada, the British publication is more influential than any of the Canadian media. When The Economist favours one leader over another, it is the former that invariably wins. Last time, the Brits dished up a double whammy: not only did one of the oldest magazines in the world endorse Mr. Harper, but it also trashed the then-prime minister Paul Martin by calling him “Mr. Dithers”. In the current campaign, The Economist has described Liberal leader Stéphane Dion as “wimpish” and now come out with its support for Mr. Harper – another double whammy.
(more…)

It’s the same old story, isn’t it? The Liberals send Canadian troops to Afghanistan, but the Conservatives get blamed for it.

Listeriosis kills several people across Canada because of lax food-safety inspections, and who gets blamed? The Harper government.

However, the lax inspection regime with respect to food safety was implemented by the previous Liberal government:

The architecture of the recently revamped food-inspection system–an issue that has dogged the Tories during the election– was crafted when the Liberals were in power in 2005, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has confirmed.

The design of pilot tests for the Compliance Verification System (CVS), rolled out at federally regulated meat plants in April, began in August, 2005, said Brian Evans, the agency’s executive vice-president.

At the time, the agency was operating under the direction of former Liberal agriculture minister Andy Mitchell, who lost in the 2006 election. Ujjal Dosanjh, currently seeking re-election in Vancouver, was in charge of food-safety policy as minister of health; he now serves as health critic for the Liberals.

If anyone needs to resign over this, it is Andy Mitchell, but he’s already gone, and Ujjal Dosanjh.

Fingers need to be pointed in this tragic mess, but they need to be pointed directly at the Liberals, who have blood on their hands.

This information is noteworthy and should be read and internalized by all Canadians before heading to the polls on October 14. It is proof positive, yet again, that on October 14, the only right way to vote is Anything But Liberal (ABL) or Anyone But Dion (ABD) – emphasis added:

Strange, isn’t it? Along with other Canadian journalists, CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge (to cite only one example) uses the word “massive” to describe the $700-billion (U.S.) economic rescue package in the United States – but declines to use it to describe the cost of Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion’s election promises. Why this deference? Most analysts say that Mr. Dion’s promises would cost $80-billion (Canadian). Based on population numbers and using the usual 10-to-1 conversion ratio, Mr. Dion’s promises would thus cost the U.S. equivalent of $800-billion in supplementary spending. If the U.S. credit crunch expenditure is massive, Mr. Dion’s campaign promise expenditures must necessarily be massive, too.

Throw in a high-speed train service between Toronto and Montreal, which Mr. Dion has endorsed but hasn’t promised (at a cost of another $20-billion), and the Liberal Leader – his promises again expressed in cross-border conversion – hits $1-trillion in campaign commitments, making the credit crunch relief operation look quite restrained and, in an odd way, less important than the restoration of Liberal rule in Canada.

In this relative kind of comparison, useful in keeping things in perspective, Mr. Dion’s election promises exceed the cost of the U.S. government’s emergency credit crunch bailout. Yet Mr. Dion’s promises exceed the U.S. bailout in absolute terms – when compared on a per-capita basis. Mr. Dion’s promises would increase government spending by $2,424 for each man, woman and child in the country; the U.S. emergency funding package would increase government spending by $2,330.

Talk about something long enough, and it may just happen. Wish for something, and the universe may just listen and grant you your wish. Some would call it the underlying principle of The Secret; to others, it is merely a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In some ways this is how special-interest groups operate in order to drive public debate on their pet issues. They keep shining the spotlight on an issue in the hope of influencing people’s behaviour or attitudes. This, for example, is how wearing real fur has come to be considered gauche, and the global warming movement has been planting similar seeds in people’s minds.

Liberal leader Stéphane Dion has been driving his own mind-and-behaviour-altering campaign by talking incessantly about how sick the Canadian economy has become. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, realizing the effect that this could have on people and the economy, retorted that Mr. Dion was panicking and might actually trigger an economic crisis by repeatedly talking it down. It is for this reason that Mr. Harper has assumed a position some consider standoffish and even cold. When one political leader runs around like a headless chicken screaming “The sky is falling”, the other must step in and counteract any negative effect this will invariably have.
(more…)

Former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin is coming out with a score-settling book, Hell or High Water. In it he takes swipes at his predecessor, Jean Chrétien, and generally tries to get even with a Liberal Party that is not quite working anymore.

The book is not out yet, but some newspapers have started publishing unauthorized excerpts. Just a week away from October 14, the day of the federal election, Liberals are worried that Mr. Martin’s tell-all book could harm them. The party has therefore issued a call to all candidates and party faithful not to discuss the book with anyone, especially members of the press.

But with the excerpts floating around, the damage already seems done. Liberal leader Stéphane Dion, who has made his past track record on the Clarity Act one of his oft-repeated mantras in stump speeches, is also coming under attack in Mr. Martin’s book, who writes that “the law, which Mr. Dion oversaw, was unnecessary in light of a previous Supreme Court ruling.”

There you go: considered one of his biggest accomplishments – and arguably his only accomplishment to date – the Clarity Act has just been relegated to the landfill of political ideas by a former prime minister.
(more…)

Voters must stop expecting the impossible from government:

If Mr. Harper comes up with his own new plan for the economy, he could be accused of improvising and will undercut his campaign, during which he has accused Mr. Dion of making up policy as he goes along. If he doesn’t acknowledge the Canadian economy is vulnerable and fails to offer a solution, he may be accused of a “what-me-worry” attitude, the kind of approach that appears to have hurt him in the wake of the debate.

Newsflash: There is no solution to be offered up by government. This is a crisis brought on by human behaviour, such as greed, and the only thing to do is to ride it out with as steady a hand on government as possible.

The crisis now affecting global markets was caused by nothing short of sheer stupidity, with one average American summing it up better than any of the Goldman Sachs economists and analysts:

“You can’t give an $8-an-hour worker a $500,000 home.”

Nor is this a time for experiments, as NDP candidate Tom King has explained:

“Here’s one little story,” he tells the captivated audience in his baritone campfire voice. It’s about Stéphane Dion’s “revenue neutral” Green Shift program. “I’m reminded of a guy with a horse,” he says. “He feeds that horse hay on one end, then walks to the other end and checks to see if he gets the same amount of hay out — and in the same form.”

One of NDP leader Jack Layton’s recurring themes in this election campaign has been Stephen Harper’s “$50-billion giveaway in corporate tax cuts“.

If there’s anything we have learned, it’s “It’s the economy, stupid”. But equally important is: “Keep it simple, stupid.”

When Layton speaks of cancelling the corporate tax cuts, Harper immediately counters that it would be insane to saddle companies with an extra $50 billion in the current economic climate. Maybe this take is overly simplistic, but I doubt that the reversal of the cuts would result in companies being slammed with $50 billion.

Here’s why:

No matter what the tax rate, companies have a variety of options and tricks to reduce their taxable income – more so than any personal income taxpayer, a lot more, in fact.
(more…)

I endorsed Linda Duncan a while ago, because I think that we need people like her (i.e., those committed to education issues) in the House of Commons.

Since I don’t live in her Edmonton riding, I won’t be able to vote for her personally, but the good news is that a Liberal, daveberta, has now announced that he’ll be voting for her:

After some long and difficult thinking, I have decided that I will be voting for Edmonton-Strathcona NDP candidate Linda Duncan.

It seems that Linda’s momentum is growing, and she may even have a real chance of winning the riding – yes, in a province where all 28 seats are currently held by Conservatives. If anyone can pull it off, it’s Linda. Go, Linda, go.

In the United States, and to a lesser degree in Canada, there is a libertarian movement afoot, with some of its proponents tacking hard to extreme positions by calling for the outright abolition of all government. A scenario like that would not see freer people, but total and destructive anarchy.
As is true of all things in life, the truth is found in the middle. Government must be reduced, since it has become too bloated and wasteful in most Western countries, particularly in Canada, but at the same time a healthy balance must be struck between people’s own responsibility for their actions and the areas where government does, and must, have a role to play.

Such a balance, however, will differ from country to country, because such a reform must take into account a country’s history and traditions – after all, where would the average Scandinavian be if his beloved Nanny State were to be taken away from him?
(more…)

This election is like no other. After two and a half years of a minority government, all the parties have been in campaign mode, always having had to expect an election call any day. This is probably why most voters had their votes already locked in even before the writ was dropped in early September.

Consequently, each party has held steady in the various polls, more or less, with Liberal leader Stéphane Dion finding it next to impossible to shed his negative image.

The televised debates, therefore, likely matter a lot less in this campaign than in any other. In fact, the debates are the least crucial factor determining the outcome of elections. The only exception came in the last election when out of sheer desperation, then-prime minister Paul Martin decided to make up new policy on the fly, vowing that he would scrap the notwithstanding clause from the constitution. It was then that his fate was sealed.

Jeffrey Simpson, of the Globe and Mail, notes in his column today that the debate format is inherently unfair and wrong – he calls it “lop-sided” and says that Harper “did as well as he could” under these circumstances:

One after another, the four opposition party leaders blasted Mr. Harper who, under the four-against-one format, was given relatively limited time to reply to the onslaught.

Predictably, the opposition leaders were mostly warm and cuddly about each other, while they were fierce about Mr. Harper. How any prime minister could emerge with a fair shake in such a one-sided arrangement wherein critics gets many, many more minutes than the incumbent remains a pressing question after last night’s gang-up.

The debate raised an issue no one wishes to address: how can any prime minister (leave Mr. Harper out of the question) get a fair debate under the circumstances that prevailed last night, wherein the leaders of small parties such as Green Leader Elizabeth May and Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe get equal billing with the leader of a party with three or four times as many voters?

(more…)

Columnist Jeffrey Simpson is so predictable. There is a guy who professes himself a non-voter (”pundits don’t vote”), yet he never hides his true Liberal colours – and they shine in bright and overly partisan shades.

He recently wrote yet another anti-NDP column, which was so disrespectful of NDP leader Jack Layton that it caught the attention of the Progressive Economics Forum.

My comment to the Forum was this:

There used to be a time when I believed in that dichotomy of right v. left. But then I realized there is really only right v. wrong, or reasonable/commonsensical v. unreasonable/foolish. Tony Blair, for example, put it in similar terms when he addressed a Calgary audience last year (and yours truly was fortunate enough to be included in that number). Simpson may still think in these old terms, e.g., when he suggests that the NDP move to the centre.

Well, here’s the way I see it, comparing current Liberals and NDP:

The NDP has an infinitely more reasonable/commonsensical/practical, etc. platform than the Liberals. What is more, the NDP has a leader who knows what people want and need and who knows how to connect with people — something the Liberals can only dream of.

In other news — this arrived in my inbox earlier this evening:

I would like to invite you to join our Debate Night in Calgary at the Pinoy Village Restaurant & Lounge this Thursday, October 2,  Candidates, volunteers, and staff will be watching the English Debates starting at 6:30pm to 9pm. This promises to be a relaxing evening to socialize with fellow NDPers and cheer on Jack as he takes on Stephen Harper.

Looking for volunteers to join me in organizing a media event on the NDP’s plan to ensure a head start for kids by investing in a Canada wide Child Care and Early learning plan, develop a Children’s Nutrition initiative to support and expand provincial and local programs that provide healthy meals to school children, as well as phase in a new child benefit system for families.

Volunteers are needed to help with identifying a location for the media event, identify people willing to speak in support of the NDP’s plan, as well as identify families willing to join us in support of the plan. Your help and suggestions would be greatly appreciated and make this event a great sucess.
Please join our Facebook group to show your support to end child poverty once and for all by voting for a new direction with Jack Layton as Prime Minister.

You can join our group Calgary New Democrat Supporters to end Child Poverty in Canada
www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=27231914356

Here’s the proper address of the restaurant: 3132-26 St. NE

This whole “plagiarism” non-issue is still being talked about – by bloggers and the media, but not by ordinary Canadians who are more interested in the issues, such as the economy and how to get taxes down in this country.

The media, and certain bloggers, are wasting their time dissecting Harper’s “Howard speech“, just as they are wasting their time chasing after speeches that Dion lifted from David Suzuki (it was much worse when Dion stole a company’s name to use for his Green Shift plan).

The only blogger – a Liberal no less – who had anything smart to say about this nonsense was Red Tory (as I wrote yesterday)

[I]t really is a measure of the Liberals’ desperation. Is this actually the best the LPC can come up with… “a debate about a five year-old speech that was delivered three Parliaments ago, two elections ago, when the prime minister was the leader of a party that no longer exists”? Quite pathetic really.

So, get on with it, talk about the excessive tax burden in this country, the economy, education and health care, but don’t waste voters’ time with such utter nonsense.

So far, the only exciting thing in this election has been the distinct possibility that Jack Layton could be the next leader of the Official Opposition – it would add a new and different flavour to the House of Commons, for sure.

Other than that, though, the election campaign has been dragging on and on, turning on gaffes and wild accusations that have absolutely nothing to do with what voters are concerned about.

So, we saw a puffin drop its excrement on a political leader’s shoulder. Big deal.

Some candidates have had to resign over controversial statements, conduct or blog posts in the past. Big deal.

Now one of the oldest lies is being peddled yet again – no one cares, because everyone knows it’s not even close to the truth. Big deal.

Here’s a newsflash: the election will not fundamentally improve the situation of Canada. The best we can hope for is to slog along as we have for the last two and a half years – and essentially any stretch of time before that.

These guys will continue as before, tossing chump change at us and making us believe they’re giving us actual tax cuts.

These nutters are about to embark on an extensive and far-reaching social(ist) experiment. They tell us it’ll work. What if it doesn’t work? Will they just say, “Oops, we’re so sorry. Won’t happen again. Promise.”?

These clowns here want to run the same experiment, just a slightly improved one from the previous one.

This little party is partying like never before and telling us that we should all gather around the kitchen table.

All the while, one last holdout clinging to the past has not realized yet that the next sovereignty movement will emerge from the West. Difference between the old and the new? The latter will prevail one day.

So, are you prepared to take a look at this poll? Are you sitting down? Hold on to your chair, mouse, keyboard and monitor, because what this poll is about to reveal to you is going to blow you away (very much like getting caught in the slipstream of the TARDIS, I should say):

Sixty-three per cent of respondents said they view the Liberal party as dishonest; 80 per cent as stale; 63 per cent as phoney; 67 per cent as risky; and 66 per cent as “out of touch with Canadians like you.”

The Conservative party didn’t fare much better: 55 per cent viewed the party as dishonest; 63 per cent as stale; 56 per cent as phoney; and 58 per cent as risky.

[...] Meanwhile, the feeling toward the NDP was mostly positive with the large majority of respondents viewing it as fair, honest, compassionate and genuine. However, those surveyed said the NDP was risky.

It was the Green party that received the best rating. Sixty-nine per cent of respondents found them fresh; 74 per cent as fair, 75 per cent as honest; 77 per cent as compassionate; and 65 per cent as genuine.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.