Federal Politics – Page 144

M’sieur Mulcair’s mistake.

June 13, 2015 by Peter Lowry

There is a television commercial running at this time that is starting to grate. It begins with a totally unconnected part that has something to do with a dry cleaning shop. It abruptly cuts to a shot of New Democrat Leader Thomas Mulcair in what appears to be a coffee shop. Not a Tim’s! It could be anywhere.

And then this stuffy little man tells us that he was brought up with middle class values. What exactly he means by middle class is not clear.

But if that is the run-up to the fall election by the New Democrats, that gentleman and his party are in trouble. That is worse than the mistake Andrea Horwath made in the 2014 general election in Ontario. The provincial NDP leader forgot about being a New Democrat and tried to directly challenge the Liberals and handed a majority government to Premier Wynne.

First of all for Mulcair to come into the federal election fray using Justin Trudeau’s well worn line about the middle class is nothing but “me too!” You would think he would come out fighting for the 99 Per Cent and one-up the Liberals. For God’s sake, the guy does not even look middle class. He looks like a boring civil servant.

Mulcair’s mistake in the commercial is a classic error in branding. While there are some arguments from researchers at Leger Marketing about this, he is confusing the marketplace. For him to try to slug it out with Justin Trudeau on the Liberal leader’s turf is stupid. His orange party brand still has to be distinctive. It has to have mass appeal and strike a chord with the voters.

And he can hardly assume that the Conservatives are going to destroy Trudeau and leave him alone. He’s next. And Thomas Mulcair is no Jack Layton. Jack was the common man. Maitre Mulcair is a man far to full of himself. You can never forget that Jack Layton won those Quebec seats in the last two weeks of the 2011 federal election. There was no time for either the Conservatives or the Liberals to change the aim of their guns. And it helped the Conservatives win a majority so they did not care.

Thomas Mulcair’s New Democrats have to re-invent themselves. They have to decide what they want to be when they grow up. They cannot continue to stand with one foot in the unions and the other in small business. They come across as conflicted and the voter feels no affinity.

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The Hair’s Farewell Tour?

June 12, 2015 by Peter Lowry

You can hardly blame the Hair for not wanting to hurry home. He and his hairdresser are touring Europe in style—and Bavaria is so beautiful this time of year. There is nothing good waiting for him in Ottawa. With the daily bombardment from the Senate, poison pen memos from the Supreme Court, the tanking of the economy and the bad-news polls, he should stay in Europe.

Not that his G7 meetings were all that much fun either. He might be one of the senior citizens of that little club but they were not all that nice to him. President Obama is no buddy of his. Not that the Hair gives a damn about carbon emissions in the year 2100. And maybe that is when he will get that trade deal that the Europeans are stalling him on. Canadians think he is just jerking them around about it. With nothing on paper yet, there is no way he can announce it again before the election.

But he is reaping more than he deserves. The Ukrainians lionized him. Why not? They will kiss up to any western leader who will say publicly that Russia’s Vladimir Putin is a putz. He just might be doing it to play up to Canadian voters of Ukrainian origin. It is the same with the Poles. Stopping off in Poland was a good idea. With more than a million voters in Canada with ties to Poland, the Hair knows how his votes are buttered.

With his stop in Rome to spend ten minutes visiting the Pope, you would think that the Hair had all bases covered. And it is amazing when you do the mathematics. The Hair thinks he has Canada’s Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, Italians and Catholics, sewn up. That combination alone should inflate the base Conservative vote to well over 30 per cent.

But it does not. Most but not all of the pollsters are showing the Conservatives in a minority or losing position. And what must be driving the Hair nuts is that he is supposedly locked in what could be a three-way tie. His pollsters are telling him that the Liberals and New Democrats are doing just as well as he is.

What the pollsters do not seem to be telling him is about the votes who say “None of the above.” They do not tell him about the percentage of voters who have parked their vote and will not tell the truth when asked about it. They pick a party at random to confuse the figures. These people might know who they are going to vote for but they do not tell.

The Hair is going to find that this election will be decided after Labour Day. It will be about where the economy is headed by then and the Hair does not know what to tell them. He does not know.

What will be the mood after Labour Day? Will Canadians be up and positive? The Hair is coming home to a troubling summer.

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“The good is oft’ interred with their bones.”

June 10, 2015 by Peter Lowry

There is no brief held here for the Canadian Senate. It is an anachronism. It serves Canada’s past and has nothing new to offer for its future. It has not grown with the needs of the country. The Senate is but one of the many outdated and unneeded vestiges of Canada’s colonial past. It is long past its ‘best before’ date.

But do not in damning the Senate damn those who have served us well as senators. Yes, many senators have been political hacks, bagmen, organizers, retired MPs and used-up party officials. When searching for talent, you search among those you know.

It brings to mind the late Senator Richard Stanbury. He was appointed to Canada’s Senate by Prime Minister Lester Pearson. He was a Toronto lawyer. He served his community. He helped ensure that it had libraries, hospitals and churches. He was president of the Liberal Party of Canada. He was a devout Presbyterian. He was a person who earned your trust. And he was an intensely loyal friend.

Dick Stanbury spent 30 years in the Senate. He loved the work. He took on the chair of Senate committees and lead trade missions on behalf of Canadian exporters. For those who think the Senate is some kind of sinecure, he could have more than quadrupled his income in the private sector.

And then there is our long-time partner in politics, Senator David Smith. He was there to fill the gap as Liberal Campaign Chair when Alzheimer took away our friend and mentor the late Senator Keith Davey. David falls into ideal situations. It was like when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau gave him the cabinet portfolio for tourism: when we stopped laughing, we had to explain to the Prime Minister that he had just appointed Canada’s most avid tourist. Mind you former Prime Minister Chrètien, who appointed him to the Senate, always razzes him for winning all but one seat in Ontario in the ‘93 election.

But as much as much as some people complained that just another apparatchik had been appointed to the Senate, they did not know David. Some of the most important work he ever did for Canadians was his appointment by Prime Minister Trudeau in 1980 as Chairman of the House of Commons Special Committee on the Disabled and the Handicapped. His committee report was not only one of the most readable, engrossing reports ever to come from the Commons but it added important words to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The original concept of the senate was a house of sober second thought to be of assistance to Canada’s law makers. We need to think about ways to provide that in a modern setting. We know we need balance and today’s senate cannot provide that.

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Canadians are owed answers on the Senate.

June 9, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Do you have a mental image of the three major party leaders cowering in their campaign bunkers this year afraid of questions on the Senate? They will all tell you that they are in favour of Senate reform and just what that reform might entail and how they will accomplish the task are the questions they are afraid to answer.

Stephen Harper had been stiff arming questions about the Senate since his record of 27 appointments to the chamber in 2009. Yet the other day in Kiev, he said that the Senate was an independent body. And if you believe that, he has another Conservative zombie for you to vote for as MP in October.

Referred to in the media as the Class of ’09 Harper’s appointments to the Senate are a mixed bag of sycophants, trouble makers and childish entitlement. After initially saying he would only appoint persons elected to the Senate by their province, he gave up that idea and appointed enough new Conservative Senators to ensure him control of voting. He is still paying the price for that control.

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau thinks he has solved the problem by saying that there are no longer Liberals in the Senate and that he will appoint no Liberals if he is Prime Minister. Instead he will take his lamp of Diogenes and search out the honest man or woman willing to serve. (It is the mark of the true politician that Justin Trudeau can so easily replace logic with glibness.)

Thank goodness that New Democrat Thomas Mulcair does not equivocate. He tells us that he is going to put an end to the Senate. Just how he is going to get the agreement of the provinces is the million dollar question.

What Canadians have to recognize though is that there is much more to address in Canada’s constitution than just the archaic Senate. At some point the country is going to have to elect a constitutional parliament to rewrite and update the way we run this country. It is something that we all need to approach with an open mind. We must redraw our country on a clean slate.

And even then, the agreement of the provinces should come in a country-wide citizens’ vote. The more democratic we make the process of change the more democratic will be our country’s future.

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Justin Trudeau brought his perfect game.

June 8, 2015 by Peter Lowry

When somebody bowls a perfect game, you have to admire it. In politics a perfect game is a rare event. You have to remember that in politics there are people out there who are lurking to ridicule, there are professional scoffers and there are the people paid to deride any and all suggestions from the opposition parties. And then you are treated worse by our news media.

All these people will attempt to ridicule, scoff, and laugh off Liberal suggestions but this time they will fail. They will have to fall back on commenting that the Liberal leader’s hair was not properly coifed. They might even accuse him of lisping.

But there is no denying that the Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference in Edmonton this past weekend was a high stakes event. New Democrat Thomas Mulcair, Liberal Justin Trudeau and Conservative Joe Oliver all brought their ‘A’ game.

Trudeau won. He bowled the perfect game. It offered practical solutions, ones that could live through changes of government, with independent finance structuring and private sector support. He wrapped the package in just the right balance of rhetoric and promised that there is more to come that assured him they would be listening. And the ideas were understandable to the folks at home.

Tom Mulcair’s penny of gas tax from the New Democrats paled in comparison. It was a hollow promise at best.

But it was Joe Oliver who came across as petty and unimaginative. The federal finance minister’s litany of Conservative promises in the distant future—should Canadians persist in voting Conservative—came across as tired and unlikely. He devoted too much of his time to bashing his opponents in the fall election and little time on the subjects his audience wanted to hear.

Trudeau, in the meantime, recognized that the cities are facing a crisis in affordable housing and that the federal government has to assure that funding is available. He also pointed out that restoring the long-form census will go a long way to helping all levels of government to understanding the increasingly complex growth needs of our urban areas.

The Liberal leader offered the municipal leaders a glimpse of the new thinking needed to address needs in an increasingly urbanized country. It was the kind of inspired and novel thinking that Liberals can bring to government. We sincerely hope that Justin Trudeau can keep it coming.

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How history harries the Hair.

June 6, 2015 by Peter Lowry

The Hair seems to be trying so hard to remake Canada into an image only understood by the Prime Minister and a few of his friends in Calgary. It seems to be an image something like that of 19^th Century Dodge City, Kansas without the dust. It is a vision of a country of rugged men, petticoated ladies and indolent Indians. It is a country where every man is a king on his own land and he does with it as he wishes.

The Hair might have had to at one time make an apology over the treatment of Canada’s native peoples and he did create the truth and reconciliation commission. Now that the commission’s report is in, the Hair appears to want no part of it. It is like there will be no environmental controls of the oil and gas industries while the Hair rules in our parliament in Ottawa.

The Hair’s greatest problem is his failure to change Canada’s history.

In the days of dusty Dodge City, the cattle people of the day could dehumanize the native peoples, take their lands, use their women and answer objections with their six-gun. Not so in Canada where the treatment of the native peoples had a supposedly benign aspect. We thought we knew what was best for them. We shunted them to reservations, took their children to ‘civilize’ them and talked of how benevolent we were. And what we did in the name of the main-stream religions was horrifying.

And how can the Hair be so inured to the plight of so many native women—missing and maybe murdered and mostly ignored. Are we that brutal a society?

Is the Hair using our weaknesses as a country to allow tribalism to triumph over decency and acceptance? Is this a land of French versus English versus Mètis versus aboriginal versus any and all newcomers?

And why is the Hair trying to change history? The truth and reconciliation commission should have recognized that it is only the future that we can change.

But the truth of our past has to be acknowledged. Our ancestors often screwed up. They did not know better. They did not live to our standards. They had many fears that we have overcome. A hundred years from now, maybe our progeny will recognize, understand and accept our failings.

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Mulcair spends a penny on wrong audience.

June 5, 2015 by Peter Lowry

The New Democrats expect their leader Tom Mulcair to propose spending another cent of gas taxes on municipalities. This will be proposed to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) at its meeting in Edmonton tomorrow. Despite the New Democrats suggesting that it is a dramatic offer and it will certainly garner some polite applause but it is the wrong message to the wrong audience.

You can hardly expect good pass-along of the news to municipal voters when better than 80 per cent of Mulcair’s Edmonton audience are Conservative or Liberal supporters. Municipalities are the minor league training grounds for the federal political parties. And it is those with higher ambitions who value connections they can make at FCM meetings.

If it was Prime Minister Harper or Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau making that offer it would get far better air play back home.

But it is an offer that has pitfalls for the one making it. To begin with it is going to be passed on to municipal gasoline users—which are any of us who drive. If it is that easy to hand off some of the gas tax, the offer can remind us that it is just as easy to increase it. And this is despite the average taxpayer having a hard time getting his or her mind around the fact that a penny per litre on the gas tax adds up to over $400 million in the federal treasury.

The only problem with this offer is that it is really small potatoes when you look at the overall infrastructure assistance requirements of Canada’s municipalities. Most experts are going to say “Ho-hum.”

And with most voters failing to understand the offer and most experts seeing it as a waste of breath, Tommy Mulcair is again shooting blanks in the election game.

But you have to appreciate the rhetoric. It really sounds wonderful when Tommy Mulcair says “Dedicated, predictable and transparent federal funding would help municipalities plan to meet their priorities while creating tens of thousands of new jobs in local municipalities.” That is what the media says he is going to say.

Oh well, we know what federal Finance Minister Joe Oliver is going to tell our municipal minders. Oliver has already promised lots of money in four or five years if everyone just votes Conservative. Since that is not too likely, the main interest will be in Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s offer. And maybe he will surprise us with an offer everyone can understand.

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Chong’s Reform Bill hardly matters.

June 4, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Quiet encouragement was the best we could ever offer MP Michael Chong’s reform bill. At its earliest it was idealistic and in its final form it is probably immaterial. Whether the Senate passes it or not, it is really necessary to wait for the next parliament to see if the Conservative MP’s bill really matters.

Chong’s first problem is that you hardly need to pass a law to recognize a caucus revolt among any party’s elected politicians. A revolt is a revolt; it is not something a party leader can ignore. While most political parties in Canada have some clause or other that says how the party can dump its leader, the customs of the Canadian parliament agree that a party leader no longer recognized by the party’s elective caucus is de facto no longer the party leader in parliament.

This writer was a very young and very inexperienced radio reporter at the convention of the Progressive Conservative Party that saw the confrontation between Leader John Diefenbaker and Party President Dalton Camp. It not only made great theatre but it affirmed the ability of the party to change its leadership.

And it hardly matters whether the demand for a leadership review vote comes from the party or the parliamentary caucus. It does not seem proper though for Chong to base part of his bill on the British practice of party leadership being under control of the elected caucus as opposed to the political party. We have a much better system in Canada where the party and the caucus are different wings of the party and they work together.

What is amusing about Chong’s bill is that he forgets that in Canada, the appointed Senators are part of the Conservative Party caucus but not the Liberals or the New Democrats. Chong would have a hard time convincing all those friends of Stephen Harper if he tried to lead a revolt against his leadership.

What we always agreed with Michael Chong on was that the power of the party leader to decide who can be a candidate for their party had to end. This was the stupidest change Canadians had ever allowed in our political system. It was ill-considered and is destroying the ability and will of our MPs to represent their constituents.

With the loss of a vibrant news media, voters have little information to base their choice for their MP and have more and more voted just for the party leaders. Canadians have been electing larger and larger caucuses of drones to our parliament and legislatures.

Michael Chong and other reformers have a long road ahead in fixing this mess.

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Color Justin Trudeau Liberal Blue.

June 3, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau wants your vote. If you think of yourself as a Liberal, he hopes he already has your vote. And if you are what is called a progressive or Red Tory, he will go out of his way to win your vote. It is likely that as much as a third of the Conservative Party’s base vote is made up of these socially conscious voters and they are really the ones being fought over in the upcoming October election.

A shift of as little as five per cent of voters moving from the Conservative to the Liberals can make the difference between a Conservative or Liberal government. And at the same time, both the parties have to stem any losses to the New Democrats.

Luckily for Trudeau’s Liberals, the Quebec battle is head to head confrontation between the Liberals and the New Democrats. The Conservatives have mostly deserted that field and the Bloc is already vanquished. All the Liberals need is the same turnout this year as there was for Philippe Coulliard’s provincial blue Liberals last year.

Badly weakened New Democrats in Ontario change the dynamics there. Yet it is the right wing Liberals at Queen’s Park that Trudeau needs to copy. He will get lots of support from that bunch. He needs to mine the affluent suburbs of Ontario to win over that soft red Tory potential. Women voters will tip the balance in many of those ridings and you can see why Trudeau was ruthless with potential candidates who were anti-abortion.

While British Columbia can no longer offer a balance for Alberta and Saskatchewan, the province is still a strong ally in fighting Harper’s energy policies. Mind you this is one province where it will be a three-way fight between the parties.

But Trudeau’s latest problems are the sops he needs to handle the growing concerns of the left-wing Liberals. His middle class drive remains purposely undefined and his return to the classless baby bonus approach says that he can share left-wing solutions.

Trudeau has to remember how former Prime Minister Paul Martin gave the back of his hand to the party’s left-wing when he was Finance Minister under Jean Chrètien. He might have won the convention for the party leadership after that but he never won back the Liberal Party.

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Elmer is the politician, Peter is the son.

June 2, 2015 by Peter Lowry

While the name MacKay might be prominent in Nova Scotia, it is not held in as high esteem today in Canada’s House of Commons. Peter MacKay is leaving the building. With his political career finished as of the federal election, Peter MacKay is taking his family home. Looking back over that career, it is hard to believe that he is Elmer MacKay’s son.

It is hard to tell whether Peter MacKay’s has had a career or a careening. He was given Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party as a trust and he handed it off to Stephen Harper. He borrowed on his father’s political legacy and squandered it. He acted the bon vivant and man about town and the women used him. He played soldiers as Minister of National Defence and was their pin-up boy. As Foreign Affairs Minister, he played the fool. And as Minister of Justice, he finally showed his true blue conservative extremism.

The senior Elmer MacKay was not quite as flamboyant as the son. He was just one of the Cabinet that could not count that shortened the life of the Joe Clark Conservative government. His loyalty to Clark’s successor Brian Mulroney was unquestioned. It might only be a deathbed repentance that gives us the details of the Karlheinz Schreiber-Brian Mulroney/Airbus affair. If Elmer really figured out how to save Prime Minister Mulroney from jail, he certainly deserved more than just a pat on the back from his buddy Brian.

Those of us following politics of the era always figured that Elmer MacKay was far smarter than his son. He certainly held on to all the family political acumen.

Peter MacKay’s worst hours were with women. MP Belinda Stronach appeared to use and discard him at her convenience. That still does not excuse his lack of manners in commenting on the affair. The condescension of the older American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice toward him as Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister was also an embarrassment for Canadians.

But Peter MacKay showed his true colours when shepherding the anti-terrorism bill C-51 through the House of Commons as Minister of Justice. This is a draconian and extremist bill. It is flawed even in its extremism as it fails to provide the means for government agencies to achieve the purposes of the bill. MacKay’s mindless cant in supporting the bill both within and outside the House of Commons is an affront to our democracy.

Originally many of us saw Peter MacKay as a possible softener for the starchy approach of Stephen Harper. We were wrong. We were counting on genetics. That apple must have been a windfall and it got obviously got blown a distance from the tree.

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