Category: New

Now Bob Hepburn at the Toronto Star is giving unsolicited advice to to Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff. In an oped column today (Sept. 10), Hepburn tells Ignatieff how to overcome the Conservative “just visiting” advertising. That would be helpful if Hepburn did not misunderstand the effect of the advertising: to-date, there is no reason to think that the money spent on this is harming the Liberals.

If the advertisement is designed to show Ignatieff as some kind of elitist, it fails. The Conservatives did not make that point. Canadians are very proud of fellow citizens who achieve recognition for themselves and their country outside of Canada. To suggest that they are jealous of this success is an insult to Canadians.

In hopes of something more effective, the Conservatives have leaked their intent to add attack ads that tell Canadians about the Ignatieff ‘villa’ in France. Michael should have a good laugh if they do. The summer place that his father purchased in Les Martins, Provence many years ago pales in grandeur and financial appreciation beside many similar retreats in Muskoka. It was an astute buy for a diplomat who travelled so regularly around the world. Others in his family will have to make decisions about the future of the place. Michael has an election to win.

Hepburn makes much of Ignatieff having to cancel a planned trip to China in early September. This cancelation is regrettable but is obviously because of the heavy workload in getting ready for Parliament to meet. The Conservatives failed to deal honestly and openly with the task force on Employment Insurance since June and that was the last opportunity that could be afforded a lacklustre Tory administration. What Prime Minister Harper does not seem to understand is that issues at home come first.

What Mr. Harper’s brain trust also fail to appreciate is that there is no fairness or truth in attack ads that are cut and paste from many different situations. They should realize how ridiculous Mr. Harper could appear if the Liberals decided to fight fire with fire using the same technique.

The one thing Ignatieff is not going to do if we are into an election in the next few weeks is to let Harper’s people define him. This time, the Liberals are on the attack and they smell blood.

Under Harper’s Tories, Canada continues to lose manufacturing jobs that can never be recovered. We have lost the lead in serious areas of communications technology that we might never recover. We are continuing to bleed jobs. Fixing Employment Insurance is a stop-gap to help people. Building Canada’s future is the challenge.

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David Crane of the Toronto Star has always been one of my favourite writers on economics. He usually takes a left-of-centre approach and I find I am more often inclined to agree with his positions than not.

But not today (Sept. 8)! His commentary in an oped for today’s Toronto Star, entitled: What do the Liberals have to offer? reads like something a junior editorial writer would cobble up on the curt instruction of a dyspeptic editor. The effort might please the editor but it sheds little light or reason on a complex subject. David is far too good a writer to be digging up clichés to support someone else’s headline.

He starts from the premise that nobody wants an election. David needs to live for a while in a country where people are unable to vote when there is a need. Stephen Harper called an election a year ago because he saw an opportunity to savage then Liberal leader Stéphane Dion and win a majority government. He failed. Now Michael Ignatieff sees an opportunity to fight it out with the Conservatives with a level playing field. David needs to explain what is wrong with that.

And, how dare David complain that the Liberals are not explaining their platform before the election? Dion did that last summer and the Tories spent the summer and millions of dollars to vilify him and his policy ideas. What rule is it that says that the Liberals have to give the cash-rich Tories an unfair advantage?

He complains that it is remarkable that the Liberals have not explained their new thinking on Canada’s future and that Ignatieff is not bound to resolutions from the convention the Liberals held in Vancouver that acclaimed him. David knows very well that the Liberal party directs with a very broad policy brush and it is up to the leader to refine and articulate the direction to those goals.

He wonders why the leader appoints critics for different ministries of government such as John MCallum and Bob Rae. As skilled as those people are at examining the subject matter, David knows how little attention the media pay them. It is very much our media’s fault that all the attention runs downhill into the leader’s office.

We were all amused during the 1993 federal election when Prime Minister Kim Campbell claimed that election time is no time for serious debate on the issues. It is quite another matter when a supposedly knowledgeable economics writer repeats the comment in an article for the Toronto Star.

David concludes that “Unless Liberals can come up with compelling and credible policies, there is no reason to have an election this year.”

What he ignores is that not only our country but the world is in the worst economic slump seen in the past 50 years. We cannot and must not leave the solutions to right-wing ideologues currently in power in Ottawa.

And the problem is not just Employment Insurance (EI). The economic need is to get the critically needed stimulus funds into the hands of the people who will spend it immediately and help the economy recover. We have to stem the flow of jobs out of the country. We have to stop the fire sale of Canadian technology. We need a party in power that has a balanced view of all of Canada.

The Conservatives have proved that they are not adept at that. The Liberal attitude is to be aggressive and help people weather this recession. Not because the Liberals have already told us that is what they will do when in office but because they are the people who have shown us time and again that they can put people ahead of ideology.

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There have got to be people in Ontario who can take a stand. They have to be able to say to Dalton McGinty and his cabinet cohorts that enough is enough, stupid! While the defence of the incandescent light bulb might appear to be of less than life-threatening concern, there are principles at stake, freedoms at issue, conflagrations to be prevented and our eyesight to save.

In the rash foolishness of the Ontario government trying to save us consumers from ourselves, the banning of incandescent light bulbs by 2012 is a ridiculous and unnecessary step into the realm of big brother. The government has managed to put itself—once again—into the position where it will have to backtrack and overrule itself as it has in the case of banning coal-fired power generation. If there is no adequate replacement for the old technology, banning it does not work.

It’s not that we are Neanderthals who do not want to save our planet. There is no question but that a clear majority of Ontario citizens respect and support sensible efforts at energy conservation. We contribute with heroic efforts at recycling. We have been buying energy-conserving appliances and low-flow toilets for years. We are the very best recyclers of beer bottles in the world. We want to do our bit.

But that does not mean we should be saddled with a technology that is basically crap! And that is the only suitable term for the present state of development of the compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulb. By no stretch of the imagination is this technology ready to replace the faithful incandescent bulb. Any light bulb that takes time to come up to full lighting capacity is a step back in time. While the amount of mercury in these CFL bulbs is miniscule, it is still a unique recycling problem. And once they have come to full luminescence, CFL bulbs are not much to read by. We could get closer to the damn things but they still have a tendency to blow up and that discourages us from getting too close. Even when they are only smoking and sputtering, you are wary about getting near enough to remove the source of power to them.

We should also note that some of the so-called weaknesses of incandescent bulb technology are also strengths. The incandescent bulb gives off heat as a by-product of the energy it uses to give us light. That is why the bulb can be used as a safety measure to prevent freezing in water lines, to warm incubators and to add additional heat where needed in washing areas. It is a highly developed and versatile technology.

CFL technology is not as developed. Not, we should note, that CFL problems cannot be solved in time but that we do not know the cost. Maybe we should bet on a combination of light-emitting diode (LED) and CFL technology to meet our long-term needs. Whatever we do, there is no forgiveness for people who threaten us that they are taking the incandescent bulb off the market. There are carrots and there are sticks. We do not take kindly to people who think they can use a stick on us.

Mr. McGinty and friends, take heed.

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When writing recently about ward heelers, someone told me that my term was old-fashioned and the new term for ward heeler was retail politician. I was going to correct my previous article but first I did some research.

What I learned was that a ward heeler and a retail politician are not the same concept. A ward heeler came into being in 19^th Century America as the local eyes, ears and legs of the political bosses and, in exchange for hard work and delivering the votes, the ward heeler’s reward was some minor job through city hall or state legislature, wherever the party had power. Some ward heelers supplemented their pay and social status by being the local insurance debit collector or by being the local numbers runner.

‘Retail politician’ is a much newer concept that applies to an elected politician. This is a politician who is adept at working at the lowest common understanding of the voters. In effect, they are very good at merchandising themselves to appeal to the broadest possible segment of their potential voters. Two very different American politicians are held up as examples of this talent. The very best in this category was believed to be Lyndon Johnson, long-serving Congressman and then Vice President and then President. The second, more current, American example, is Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska and candidate for Vice President with John McCain. While some political pundits will bristle at combining these two very different people, there is no question but that they were outstanding in working political crowds. Johnson never lost touch with the voters until, as President, he was unable to compromise his communications style to deal with the realities of foreign affairs. Palin certainly works her magic at the lowest common denominator but it will be her ability to learn that will determine where she will be on the political scene a few years from now.

The very best in Canada was the senior Paul Martin who represented Essex East in the House of Commons for 33 years. His son, Paul Martin Junior, who became Prime Minister briefly, something his father failed to accomplish in three tries for the office, always appeared aloof and lacked the warmth his father exhibited in dealing with people.  He was never the retail politician as was his father.

So, they are not the same. I stand by my earlier story about a specific ward heeler. He is also a Member of Canada’s Parliament, but that can be fixed.

What I also found out in my digging about retail politicians is that an American researcher had discovered that more people who shop at upscale stores prefer to vote Democrat than those who prefer to vote Republican. This, once again, proves that researchers still like to waste money proving the obvious.

It is no surprise to political observers that the upscale shopper is often better educated. They also know that better educated voters tend to be more democratic or liberal. The poor voter tends to be more right wing because of ignorance. The ignorant are more apt to accept the mindless slogans and prejudices of the political right.

The researcher found that Barack Obama won the hearts of more than 50 per cent of the voters at Bloomingdales, Macy’s and Neiman Marcus and other upscale stores. At the same time, John McCain was ahead at Walmart and Sears. I always wondered why McCain got the best response on the David Letterman late show. Now I know where Letterman’s producers get his audience. I should find better quality late night TV.

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In trying to find something to say on Premier Dalton McGinty’s behalf about the harmonization of the provincial and federal sales taxes in Ontario, we can only come up with the excuse that it was not Mr. McGinty’s idea. It was federal conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s. And yet, while Ontario conservatives go out for a beer, it is the governing liberals who will carry the can with the voters for the huge tax grab represented by the move.

One can only wonder what sweet words Mr. Harper whispered in Mr. McGinty’s ear that lured him into taking the blame. His caucus is looking at him as though he might be crazy as he pleads with them to get out and sell the benefits of the harmonized plan. How do you sell a harmonized tax that is in harmony with nothing. The very word “harmonized’ is supposed to mean that it creates something better—if only in sound.

For the federal goods and services tax to be in harmony with the provincial sales tax, you first have to decide if the tax is going to be fish or fowl. What kind of harmony do you get when all the changes are so one sided? What Ontario is faced with is a new, slightly modified goods and services tax that will produce as much as $3 billion more in revenue each year for the province.

And it is not as though the province does not need the money. It is faced with record deficits in the current year and looks like it will be in deficit for a few years to come. For the Premier to be promising Ontario voters a “cash back” deal to accept this tax change should leave every voter suspicious of just what he is trying to pull. It is similar to Mr. McGinty’s claim that the new harmonized tax will streamline operations for business—while sucker punching the consumers.

There is no question that the change, slated for July 1, 2010, will be the most extensive tax change in Ontario in a long time. What Ontario voters need to think about is that the Harper Conservatives are paying the Ontario government $4.3 billion in tax transfers to do it. And if it is really worth that much, you need to figure out if it was their right wing ideology or some nefarious scheme that lead them to it?

All I know is that, as a liberal, I am opposed to sales taxes and in favour of progressive income taxes. The simple reason is that sales taxes require a larger proportion of the income of the poor than do progressive income taxes. Why then would I agree to a cut in income taxes for Ontario because of the increased potential of the combined federal and provincial goods and services tax?

Mr. Harper and Mr. McGinty, in simple words: stuff it!

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Addendum: Please send comments to: [email protected]

The last American President to tell people he could solve the problems with their medical care was Bill Clinton. He gave it his all. He sent Hilary to solve the problem while he and Monica went into the back office to delve into other matters. His failure on medical care was the failure of his presidency. President Barack Obama is a different kind of cat.

Obama will solve the medicare problem for Americans but please do not refer to it as Canadian style medicare. It will be a mishmash solution. It will be private care. It will be government funded care. It will be delivered by a melange of doctor owned, public owned, HMO owned hospitals. Health care will be delivered by the self-serving members of the American Medical Association. The only guarantee that anyone can give Americans is that they will continue to have the most expensive—per capita—health care system in the world.

There is nothing surprising in the stridency of the American right wing in making their last-ditched battle to forestall the juggernaut of realism with which they are faced. There will be more name calling and bigotry exhibited but the American Congress will pass Obama’s plan. It is just a process. Canada went through those days in the 1960s. Those were gentler times maybe but the cause was the same and the liberals won.

It hardly matters if Americans pay for health care through their taxes, or though individual premiums, or through their employer or through welfare. What matters is that the drug companies will continue to take their share of the pie, so will the HMOs, the private hospitals and the doctors and the nurses and the orderlies and the administrators and the cleaners and the ambulance drivers and the politicians. Health care costs eventually must become finite. The goose that lays the golden eggs of profit will eventually feel that pinch.

It might be 40 years from today, or as little as 20 that Americans will come to the realization that the socialized medicine that they thought was anathema to their republic has happened whether they like it or not.

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Addendum: Please feel free at any time to comment on any posting. Comments are welcome at [email protected]

Admittedly, I am not predisposed to liking Mr. Brown. He is unappealing and I am not sure he has any qualifications to be a Member of Parliament. I certainly have never voted for him. I do not believe in sending people of his ilk to Ottawa. It is a disservice to our country. He seems to be self absorbed, self serving, self promoting and self constituted. And he does not appear to represent anyone in Ottawa but the leader of his political party. Our local Conservative Party members should be ashamed.

I could forgive Mr. Brown for filling my mailbox with junk on a regular basis. It is easy to throw out junk. I could even forgive him for all the advertising he does in the local print media. I already ignore those pseudo newspapers anyway. All his self promotion proves is that he is desperate to get re-elected. What I cannot and will not forgive is him telephoning me to promote his self aggrandizing hockey event in support of Royal Victoria Hospital.

I will leave it to more astute legal minds than mine whether Mr. Brown is even within the law in promoting this event through his office as M.P. He is obviously out of control but nobody wants to be a curmudgeon and derail his actions on behalf of Babel’s favourite charity. You can break the law a little bit in Babel if it is in aid of RVH.

But his telephone call was the final unforgivable sin. I have difficulty even telling you about it without gnashing my teeth. I was given the privilege of listening to that bumptious, ignorant person in a recorded promotion of his hockey night event. He recorded the spiel and had a company autodial my home so that I could listen to his squeaky voice describe the joys of paying to attend his event. This is an affront to every civilized resident of Babel.

Mind you, this is not all bad news. I am not the only person who was called. There has to be a legion of Babelites out there who now have a fresh reason to want to lynch that person. Let’s organize folks, let’s get a stout fence rail, heat the tar, sacrifice some pillows for their feathers and clear a path down Yonge Street. The time has come.

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Addendum: There is some justice, I should add. Do you remember Mr. Brown’s silly little effort to rally support for A Channel? He wants us to pay for the station on our cable and satellite bills. He claimed a victory when the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) ruled that there will be an increase in the Local Programming Improvement Fund (LPIF) from one per cent of our cable or satellite service fee to 1.5 per cent. This is not the fee-for-carriage funding that Mr. Brown was requesting we pay but an entirely different fund that A Channel is unlikely to ever access.

Mr. Brown is getting his comeuppance in that Rogers has become annoyed by the entire campaign and has just told all its customers in Babel that the 1.5 per cent fee for the LPIF will be added to their cable bill each month—starting this month. If Mr. Brown wants the credit for that, we should give it to him!

You think everything is quiet now in the dog days of summer. Wrong. The issues are simmering just below the surface. There is much to puzzle through. Much to think about. There are strategies to decide, tactics to consider.

Stephen Harper currently seems to be enjoying the prestige of office, meeting with U.S. President Obama and Mexican President Calderon. With their mathematical majority, the other less likely three amigos, the Bloc’s Gilles Duceppe, the New Democrat’s Jack Layton and the Liberal’s Michael Ignatieff are doing their duty rounds of their parties and contemplating strategies for September. Each, in their spare time between duty appearances, must decide their future.

Harper will make his party’s decision about the path to follow in attacking Michael Ignatieff. The public has tired of the Conservative campaign that attempted to vilify Ignatieff for spending years outside Canada, completing his education and teaching in England and the United States. More of the same will just show Harper to be mean spirited and desperate for something with which to defame his opponent.

Ignatieff is a very different person from his predecessor Stéphane Dion. Dion’s inability to respond effectively last fall played right into the Conservative election strategy. Ignatieff is not as easy a target. He can handle Conservative smear campaigns with wit and intelligence.

The Liberal leader is active shoring up his party’s hopes and enthusiasm for an election, when and if it comes. He can convince the rank and file to be ready for an October/November election but knows he might have to leave them hanging for another year if the party gurus see no victory when they look into the entrails. He has no choice but to listen to the advice.

Duceppe and Layton already know that there is no victory for them in an election this fall. Gilles Duceppe has nothing to gain beyond the Quebec seats his party now holds. Jack Layton has too much to lose in the fragile position of the New Democrats. The smaller parties will find they are also rans in the second dust-up between the Conservatives and the Liberals within a year.

Their respective advisors have told all party leaders that an election over an issue such as Employment Insurance (EI) could be a non-winner. EI is an issue that directly effects less than 20 per cent of the voters. There are many misconceptions and urban myths attached to it. And Harper and company are hardly going to worry about attacks on their handling of any part of the recession as long as Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney is going around telling Canadians that the recession is over.

Assuming, we hope, that Carney was just trying to shore up consumer confidence with his obviously premature announcement, nobody wants to continue to run around claiming that the sky is falling. One ponders, in this light, what avenues are still open for Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition?

The light at the end of the political tunnel is that there is a trap there for Harper if he just falls into it. Unemployment figures that will come out in late October could be devastating. Ontario is already running at over ten per cent unemployment and continuing to drain jobs at a serious rate and Quebec is close behind. The rates in the Atlantic are not going to be any rosier. The West will be supported by resources and B.C. by the coming Olympics but there are lots of people out there who can read the signs of trouble.

The key, if Michael Ignatieff’s communications people can start to humanize the problems with EI, is to shame Duceppe and Layton into helping bring down Harper at the end of September. Harper looks like he will help because he and his brain trust are not going to go along with any major improvements in EI.

But then the crucial need will be to develop a secondary issue that Harper cannot handle as easily as EI. If I was strategizing for the Liberals, I would come up with a policy to bring home our troops from Afghanistan as soon as possible.

The truth is that Canadian soldiers are equipped and trained for peace keeping, not war. They are disciplined peace keepers. They are willing warriors but not all that good at sacrificing themselves as cannon fodder in a war of attrition with the Taliban. It is time to admit that we have put our soldiers in harm’s way in a war where they do not belong. Since the first British soldier set foot in the Khyber Pass almost 200 years ago, the Pashtun and other tribes of Afghanistan have feasted on foreign rations. They drove out the British, defeated the Russians and seriously bruised the Americans. Are we doing a better job? Are we doing it smarter?

In war, as in politics, you can only win if you can take ownership of the issues.

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Most adults in the Greater Toronto Area, at one time or another, have been to Lester B. Pearson International Airport. The old joke about that place is that it might just work if they ever finish building it. Since it never will be finished in that sense, it is also never going to work for people.

There was a time in my life when I was a heavy user of airlines. I experienced the strengths and weaknesses of airports in many parts of the world. It was an education. My favourite remains Paris’ Charles de Gaulle for its French architectural pomposity and my least favourite London’s Heathrow for its cold deteriorating English stoicism. For airports that take you as long to drive to as most flights take, it is hard to beat the 40 kilometre (25 mile) drive to Stockholm-Arlanda Airport or the impositions on the unwary traveler on the 60 kilometre (35 mile) trek to Tokyo’s Narita. Definitely not worth the trip is any major airport in or out of the New York area which includes John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia or Newark Liberty. Americans obviously do not like to encourage people to fly. They build nicer public washrooms than those facilities.

But this is about Lester B. Pearson International Airport. If one is going to be critical, one should always start at home. A frustrated London bobby explained it to me very simply one time at London’s Heathrow. I had arrived there early one morning on an overnight, very full, Air Canada 747 along with another full 747 from Montreal along with two more Air India 747s from Bombay (now called Mumbai). It made for a depressingly long queue of very tired people at the sole open gate for citizens of the Commonwealth. I explained to the bobby, who seemed to be there to teach us how to form a proper British queue, that I would willingly forgo my allegiance to the Queen—on a temporary basis, of course—so as to go through the gate for American citizens that seemed to be unused at the moment.

Besides being outraged at my frivolous disloyalty to Her Majesty, the bobby detected my implied criticism of how Brits run their airport and in a damn colonial accent yet.. He had obviously been born within the sound of the bells, as in a cockney accent he raged, “Oi’ an’ yers do things so bloody smart in yers country, do yer?”

That bobby might not have been armed but he was carrying a very large and very hard baton and he looked like he knew how to use it. I promised myself then and there that I would be sure that Lester B. Pearson International Airport was perfect before again voicing a public critique of anyone else’s airport.

The problem with airports is obviously an international problem. Each country and city wants to outdo all other cities and other countries with the architectural grandeur of their latest airport. Often, the authorities have competitions to see which of the various avant-guarde architects available to them is going to design something that will capture the essence of their glorious country, or city. When given their instructions, these architects are told that planes are protected by their wing span and height requirements, but people are considered much more flexible.

And that is why at Pearson, people are herded from pen to pen as cattle on the way to becoming hamburgers. It is why passengers are expected to climb mountains of stairs as the escalators never work as the architect expected. You walk vast distances weighted down with luggage where the architect made no provision for signs or logical direction. It starts even when you park your car. You know the odds are 90 to 1 that you have parked at the end of the terminal furthest from the gate from where you are departing or meeting someone who is arriving.

Once they had built the new terminal three at Pearson, they staffed it with the absolutely minimum number of the most bored, uninterested people they could find. If confronted by a traveller speaking a language they do not understand, they go down the list of cleaners who speak that language–none of whom are on duty. And, have you ever noticed that at any time, day or night, half the restaurants and bars and public washrooms will be closed (hopefully not by the Mississauga Board of Health).

There is more wrong but if you are one of the abused who use it, you will have your own view of the inadequacies. All I do now is act very respectful of other people’s airports. Nobody is perfect.

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