Federal Politics – Page 190

“A leader for the 21st Century.”

April 7, 2013 by Peter Lowry

With those words, MP Justin Trudeau summed up his campaign Saturday for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. It is all over now but for the voting. In a modern campaign when time is supposed to collapse, the experience of the past six months was the bonus. It gave Liberals and their supporters time to consider. It gave candidates time to choose their route. It gave everyone time to grow.

It was a warm, chastened, intelligent and more experienced Justin Trudeau who discussed the leadership Liberals and Canadians need and want in the 21^st Century. Gone was the playboy who laced on boxing gloves with a Conservative Senator. Gone was the seat of the pants policy pronouncements. Gone was the young man who let his name speak for him. This was a leader.

And the other candidates knew that there was no brass ring for them. MP Joyce Murray carried on her campaign in the finest political tradition of finishing strong. She is obviously our Minister of the Environment post 2015 and hopefully she will have an effective voice in the Liberal Party for reform of Canada’s antiquated and creaky political structures. The best of her address was the claim that “Liberals are the heart of Canada.”

The weakness of Deborah Coyne’s campaign was obvious with her warm-up spot on the program. The realization, listening to her speech, was that she is a remarkably intelligent but is no politician. Ms. Coyne sees the attempts to unite the Liberal Party with the New Democrats in ridings where there is a sitting Conservative as an attempt to “bend the will of the electorate.” She does not see it as giving the voters a solution.

Speaking of non-politicians, Karen McCrimmon was there in a white pant suit. She was the first person we have ever seen running for office in Canada in a white suit. At least Martha Hall Findlay was there in a more feminine dress. She showed more skin than she needs to at her age but she still looked good. Watching her, you could only agree with her claim the “you know what you get with me.” She painted a strong picture of the 2015 election and it will be interesting to see where she runs in that election.

There is no comment on former MP Martin Cauchon as the streaming video from Toronto crapped out just when he was supposed to speak. Mind you, without simultaneous translation, Cauchon is hard to follow even for us sesquilingual Canadians. (That is those of us who grew up not needing to turn our cereal box to read it.) You would think that those cheap Liberal officials in Toronto would consider simultaneous translation essential for the Toronto event.

There were lots of old tricks used to make the crowd look bigger and they helped. Justin brought them all to life though but he warned the audience there and at home that “hope needs hard work.” He has a tough road to travel in the next two years and Liberals need to get behind him.

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Stephen Harper’s haphazard economics.

April 6, 2013 by Peter Lowry

It must be Stephen Harper’s biggest lie. Opinion polls consistently show that Canadians believe he is strong on the economy. Yet, it is in managing the economy that he continues to fail us. He is always pulling the levers of the economy in the wrong direction at the wrong time. And his ‘big lie’ government advertising program—the mythical Economic Action Plan—emphasizes his economic errors.

Canada lost a record number of jobs in April in the key provinces of Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. Here we have been shoring up the manufacturing losses in the east with resource jobs in the tar sands of Alberta and now we find out that both sides of the issue are losing.

And the budget full of federal job creation programs in both Ontario and Quebec is proving to be nothing other than smoke and mirrors promises. The Harper Conservatives are so busy firing civil servants in Ottawa, they have lost sight of what it takes to make this country a success.

Recently our Foreign Minister went to Baghdad to trumpet the opening of a consular mission in Iraq—which despite sectarian troubles has the fastest growing economy in the Middle East. The Canadian presence in Iraq is now an office for Canada in the British Embassy. That was the way Canada handled its foreign affaires before World War II.

And speaking of things British: Canadians thought they had come a long way from being a colony. Yet the Harper Conservatives are spending money to put the word ‘Royal’ back on the military and everywhere else.

But in foreign affaires, the Harper Conservatives have been making enemies for Canada around the world. A country that was once noted for its peace keeping activities is now recognized as a simple sub-set of American imperialism.

As Prime Minister, Stephen Harper has constantly proved that he does not tell Canadians the truth. He has defied parliament. He has defied his own budget officials. His government has gagged Statistics Canada. He makes it easy for his friends to control Canada’s news media. The truth becomes a random thing.

And where are we as Canadians? We no longer trust the media. We no longer trust the government. We no longer trust our institutions. We are a nation of distrust and anguish. We are a country seeking a future.

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Just how much should Liberals stand for?

April 5, 2013 by Peter Lowry

The federal New Democrats are still trying to hide their socialist roots. They will debate the question of deleting any reference to their socialist origins from their history again at their meeting this year. Thinking of this lead us to a re-examination of what Liberal.ca had to say about the principles of Liberals. It is a pleasure to report that we have some.

In a section of the Liberal web site, entitled What we stand for, there is a list of stands that reads like something written by committee. It seems that we not only stand for opportunity but for equality of opportunity. That is as close as the current crop of Liberals get to admitting they are a party that once cared about individual rights.

This list features a stand in favour of fiscal responsibility. The Tories must have accused us of irresponsibility again. This must also be why we only stand for affordable access to post-secondary education. If we really worried about individual rights, we would ensure access to post-secondary education for all.

It must also be why we add the word ‘sustainable’ to universal public health care. God forbid that Liberals should look like spendthrifts over healthcare.

Maybe some people do not understand the difference between principles and promises. That is like the Tories being tough on crime, while Liberals say they stand for an ‘evidence-based crime policy.’ Does that mean we are not soft on crime but want more evidence in court?

We were particularly pleased to see, in this otherwise insipid list, that Liberals stand for “open, fair, and strong democratic representation. We must have been out for a beer though when Liberals decided they were ‘committed to exploring parliamentary and electoral reform.’ You would think that if this was the case, there would be more than a groundswell of support for British Columbia MP Joyce Murray’s efforts for voting reform and cooperation with other progressive parties.

Besides needing a more knowledgeable editor to fix the grammar and punctuation in this pathetic manifesto, the creators of Liberal.ca will need to check with the new leader to see if he (or she) wants to be connected with such tripe.

And there is also the possibility that the new leader will want to check with the party rank and file and find out where they want to go and how they want to identify their efforts.

Frankly, we are willing to bet that Liberals and most Canadians would very much like to return to the pride they once felt for their country. Mr. Harper has damaged it enough.

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The Citizen says pipelines are here to stay.

April 4, 2013 by Peter Lowry

You have to hand it to the Ottawa Citizen. Despite its right-wing bias and hand-in-glove obeisance to the Harper Conservatives, it is still one of Canada’s better newspapers. Which, to be honest, does not say much for the rest of the newspapers in Canada. In a country that used to have inspired, inquisitive, insightful newspapers, written with integrity and intelligence, the road downhill has been a sorry sight. That was why there was a deep sadness felt the other day when reading an Ottawa Citizen editorial in praise of oil pipelines. It shows how far the craft of journalism has fallen!

The editorial has the colossal nerve to start by recognizing the anguish of the citizens of Mayflower, Arkansas who had Alberta bitumen pooling on their streets from a ruptured pipeline. The Citizen writer thinks that the Mayflower incident should have no influence on President Obama’s decision in regards to the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline. That is certainly one opinion.

The premise of the editorial is that pipelines are here to stay and we better get used to it. It daringly says that Ottawa needs to put more pressure on the tar sands companies to improve safety and their environmental record. It thinks turning down Keystone XL would be a costly, symbolic gesture.

What this editorial and most apologists for the tar sands ignore is that there are different types of oil products moved around the continent via pipelines. The first was crude oil. This commodity makes for messy spills that are hard on the local wild life but can be mopped up with a lot of work. And now we have bitumen slurry. This highly corrosive tar sands product has to be moved through pipelines at a higher temperature and under higher pressure. This is why we are seeing ruptures such as in Michigan and Arkansas. The pipeline people are trying to send bitumen through older, less reliable pipelines.

The big difference is in the clean up. Oil floats; bitumen sinks And that is why Enbridge is still trying to clean up the Kalamazoo River. There are no estimates of the long term cost in Mayflower, Arkansas.

Rather than argue about this though, maybe we should wait until the old Enbridge Line 9 is reversed to take tar sands bitumen east through Ontario to the sea. That line goes right through Toronto in the area where Paul Godfrey used to live. It was Paul who cobbled together the American and Canadian investors for his billion-dollar PostMedia Network that owns the Ottawa Citizen. It would be fun to watch what happens when Paul’s neighbours show up with a long pole and a sack of feathers. They can use the tar that will be running down Bathurst Street. It might be an old-fashioned idea Paul, but publishers should take responsibility for their papers’ editorial opinions.

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Trudeau is Quebec; Cauchon is the past.

March 31, 2013 by Peter Lowry

Former MP Martin Cauchon was (figuratively) kicked off the Liberal leadership train because we do not believe he represents modern Quebec. Like many of his contemporary provincial and federal Liberals, Cauchon is right of centre and fails to recognize the vibrant and growing legions of Quebecers who want to be part of a greater world.

That is why it is wrong to assume that Pauline Marois’ Parti Québècois won the government in the 2011 provincial election because they are separatists. It is safe though to assume they only won a minority because they are separatists. They won because they were the only social democrats in the race.

But Marois and the PQ are part of the past in much the same way as the union-dominated New Democrats hold onto attitudes out of the 1930s. In the same way, Charest’s Liberals were more in the image of the Union Nationale out of Quebec’s past. His government’s clash with the university students over tuition fees was classic Maurice Duplessis style obstinacy. Marois, at least, knew to bang pots with the students.

Why Quebec politics is tied so tightly to the past seems to be part of the insularity of Quebec. By tightening the noose on their own people, Quebec politicians think they can keep them docile. By allowing only the elite to be bilingual, they can try to keep les habitants down on the farm. The language police of Quebec are really only amusing to people from France.

But they are threatened by Justin Trudeau as federal Liberal leader. Cauchon explained it as Justin’s failure to try to appease Quebec. Cauchon sees that as the old Ottawa-knows-best attitude of when Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister.

On the other side of the argument is Justin Trudeau’s claim that people in Quebec want to be more involved in their country. He says creating the opportunity for involvement is the real challenge. He rejects the demand that Ottawa constantly come up with gestures to placate Quebec politicians. He says it does not work.

Only time and a federal election will prove who is right. Justin Trudeau has a long hard struggle ahead of him over the next two years to win the hearts and minds of all Canadians. We bet he can do it.

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Here are two votes for Justin Trudeau.

March 30, 2013 by Peter Lowry

It is hardly a secret. The wife also likes Justin Trudeau. He is the same age as our daughter. The wife thinks that, in many ways, Justin is more like his mother than his father. He is certainly not the overpowering intellect of Pierre Trudeau. Nor does he show the same impatience as his father. He has far more empathy with people and, wow, does he ever know how to work a crowd.

We helped organize a fund-raising dinner three years ago with Justin as the guest speaker. He made it a highly memorable event. He kept smiling and had his picture taken with every paying guest. His speech was one that made everyone feel good about themselves as Canadians and as Liberal supporters. It was a class event and everyone got their money’s worth.

What a difference from his father. First time we met Pierre Trudeau, he had just been elected an MP from Quebec in the Pearson minority government and we had recently been made communications chief for the Liberal Party in Ontario. And we got into a very loud argument. The argument included some very rude words on both sides about his being part of a media interview. He shouted. We shouted. And somehow we won. The interview landed Pierre on the front page of the next issue of the Globe and Mail and the rest was history.

Pierre would laugh about that argument whenever we met during his career in Ottawa. It helped him to learn about the Canadian news media. He never did like them but that was probably for the best. They are not all that likeable and they have a job to do.

Justin seems to know about the news media already. He has been learning to choose his words better during this leadership contest. And if the media do not like his lack of policy specifics, the party and Liberal supporters are listening and liking what he says to them. Sure, we all gave him a bit of a push on his positions but he would be crazy to keep announcing positions without listening carefully to the party. With over a 100,000 Canadians choosing the leader, they are today’s audience.

It is supposed that MP Marc Garneau had to cut his losses and leave the leadership race but he added to the quality of leadership debate. He will be a hard working part of Justin’s team. So will MP Joyce Murray. We just hope that she will continue to question and challenge the status quo. The party needs to be constantly reminded that it is the party of real reform in Canada.

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There’s trouble among Harper’s happy helpers.

March 29, 2013 by Peter Lowry

Why should Prime Minister Stephen Harper have all the fun? If you had worked hard for good-ole Stephen in the 2011 federal election, would you think he is being fair? When do the Conservative MPs from the religious right get their licks in? And it is not as though Stephen is delivering on everything he promised these people. They are complaining that he is doing lots of stuff to please those damn libertarians in the party but ignoring the religious right? They certainly did their part in getting Stephen his majority? Hell, the Conservative Party would never have gotten close to a majority without those who have been washed in the blood of the lamb!

Canadians are starting to hear more and more from these malcontent Conservative MPs. They are people of principle you know. They are there in Ottawa to protect the rights of the unborn. They also want to get back to hanging, they tell us. Mind you, there is the matter of protecting the sanctity of marriage. They will have none of that same-sex marriage business. These people have an agenda and that dictatorial Stephen Harper is not cooperating.

It is alright for Stephen Harper and his hairdresser to fly around the world like they are important or something. It is just that these people think the Lord’s work needs to be done in Ottawa. And it is not just those libertarians with their tax cuts and small government demands that are getting in the way. There are also those nebbishes who got elected on Stephen Harper’s coat tails and have no idea what they are supposed to be doing in Ottawa—other than what Mr. Harper tells them.

If Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney was Prime Minister, the priorities would sure get changed. There is a movement among the religious right Conservative MPs to make Kenney Mr. Harper’s replacement sooner rather than later. There is no telling just what Canadian voters would make of that nice Jason Kenney.

Until, they get their own leader, the religious right is using guerrilla tactics to show that they are still alive and complaining in Ottawa. They sneak in motions on abortion in Parliament, take their complaints about not being allowed to speak to the House Speaker and rail on other issues at committee meetings. It gets them noticed if not reviled.

The problem for the religious right is that they are not strong enough by themselves to take control of the House of Commons. They have to have a coalition. They need the grab bag of populists, libertarians and regional greed to cobble together a Conservative party such as Stephen Harper’s. They need to understand the last three Conservative Prime Ministers: John Diefenbaker, the populist (forget Joe Clark), Brian Mulroney, with his regional base and Mr. Harper’s libertarians. Thankfully, it does not happen very often.

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Lib-NDP bedfellows make strange computations.

March 26, 2013 by Peter Lowry

There was the strangest blog yesterday about some professor computing that an agreement between the Liberals and New Democrats would elect 130 NDP MPs and 70 Liberals in the next federal election. No wonder some Liberals have their nose out of joint about the proposal. There needs to be some clarification of the ground rules before everyone goes off half-cocked.

First and foremost, this one-time non-competitive deal can only be made at the electoral district level. Second, it can only be made in an electoral district held by a sitting Conservative. That means that for the next 338-seat house, we are only dealing with, at the most, 165 electoral districts. These are the ridings that we are addressing—no others.

If you think that the NDP have any chance of holding all 57 seats currently held in Quebec, you must be smoking something that is not yet legal. Those seats are fair game for Liberals who are seeking redemption in Quebec. And they are going to win a bunch of them.

And nobody said there is a safe NDP seat elsewhere. Frankly, the NDP has much to answer for after this current Parliament reaches the end of its rope. The NDP has been a weak and ineffective official opposition. Under Leader Thomas Mulcair, the NDP has lacked a game plan and has shown no sign of a strategy heading into the next election.

Looking at the figures from the 2011 federal election, you would not expect more than 100 or so electoral districts to reach agreement on selecting a single candidate to run under the Liberal-NDP banner. In some cases the nomination process could be a disaster with highly partisan candidates from each side not accepting the joint decision. You could then end up with just 80 or so ridings running a candidate under the combined Liberal-NDP banner.

For the sake of argument, suppose that the outcome of the election was 100 Conservatives, 100 Liberals and 100 New Democrats with just 38 Lib-NDP. Those 38 MPs would have the power to choose the next Prime Minister and to write the conditions of their support. They would be fools to just return to their normal party.

It would be wonderful. Parliament would be able to return to the original concept. It would be the party leader who could gather the most support who would go to the Governor General and claim the job of Prime Minister. It would return the real power in Parliament to the Members of the House of Commons—where it is supposed to be.

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Is it the malaise of Canadian liberalism?

March 25, 2013 by Peter Lowry

An Ottawa Citizen sponsored event presented by the Macdonald Laurier Institute last week debated the resolution: The Liberal Party has no future in Canadian politics. Frankly, it seems silly to try to eulogize a corpse that keeps complaining about what people are saying about him.

The proposition should not be about the future of the Liberal Party but the future of Canada. This country is liberal. Canadians from coast to coast have constantly proved themselves to be more liberal than their politicians. The political sands that shift with time in this country are the positions of the parties. Not since the days of Pierre Trudeau has the Liberal Party of Canada kept truly abreast of the needs of Canadians.

Positions that should have been those of the Liberal Party have been usurped by others. True liberalism has been discarded for expediency in short term political needs. There is little traffic on the intellectual highroad. Dishonesty has become the political norm in a country in need of solutions. Lies have replaced reason. Propaganda is the new dialogue.

Historian Michael Bliss proposed in the debate that the work of the Liberal Party is done. He thinks that the party has completed its mandate. That is untenable. Canada is a country in name but with a different reality. It has no checks and balances on its government other than the courts. It uses a foreign monarch for head of state. It has constant tensions between the state and its provinces. The present government uses those tensions to confound and control rather than attempting to build consensus.

What kind of a government should even be allowed to pit West against East in establishing a resource-based economy against a technological and intellectual future? The politics of division so blatantly used are undermining Canada’s peace-making identity and turning the world against us.

Taking the other side of the debate, former Liberal Party advisor John Duffy points to the consistently strong Liberal showing in opinion polls as proof that the Liberal Party has a heartbeat. He likes Prof. André Turcotte’s description of the “nagging resilience of the Liberal brand.”

But as with all such debates, the protagonists deal in the past and not the future. While Liberals owe much to MP Bob Rae for keeping the party afloat during the recent doldrums, it is the new leader who will carry the party forward into the next election. If our new leader can tie the individual rights of Canadians into a more progressive future for all, liberalism will live on.

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Nobody is off the island. It sank.

March 24, 2013 by Peter Lowry

You would think that by the time of the fifth debate in the federal Liberal Party leadership race, the party would get something right. They did not. Before we could declare the last unlucky candidate off the island, the party sank the Island of Montreal.

In an obviously unscripted and ill-considered argument during the debate between MP Joyce Murray and MP Justin Trudeau, you had to ask which one of these two people is a Liberal. The answer is not apparent. The argument was over Elizabeth May’s offer to both of them to not run a Green Party candidate in the Labrador by-election that has to be called to replace Conservative Peter Penashue. Trudeau treated the offer with derision that it did not deserve and Murray responded in obvious anger.

This was not pretty. Nor was it appropriate on either side. Justin Trudeau needed to soften his comments to explain his view. Even if he disagrees with Joyce Murray’s idea of unheld electoral district associations getting together with the local New Democrats to produce a single candidate, it hardly guarantees that Thomas Mulcair would become Prime Minister. That is the most singularly defeatist attitude we have heard in some time.

And there was no need for the MP from Vancouver-Quadra to fly off the handle. The other candidates have obviously been hard on her for her views on voting reform but she needs to lighten up. It was great in the beginning that we had a legitimate candidate willing to question the status quo on such issues. We expected that she would expand on the issues and be more open to input on them.

But she seems to believe the clap-trap spread by the Fair Vote Canada group and is spouting their opinion instead of treating it as just another possibility.

And we know that Justin Trudeau is more open to reform than he was letting on. Besides, there are only 34 other Liberal MPs in Parliament and we have to look after every one of them. You hardly start a fight over an issue of that sort.

All we could say at the end of the debate was “thank goodness.” The party might not be able to survive more debates where people spend 90 per cent of the time agreeing with each other for a bored audience and the other 10 per cent fighting over something that might have nothing to do with what they are ostensibly talking about.

And there is no point kicking anyone off the island, we all know who has won.

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