Tag Archives: Harper

Attack ads and mixed martial arts

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Published Apr. 22, 2013, in The Waterloo Region Record

Out in computerland, they talk a lot about “hitting the reset button.”

This implies getting rid of all the bad stuff that went before, correcting mistakes and starting over again. A new beginning, you might say.

The expression has crept into politics. The Harper government promised to “hit the reset button” on plans to spend — what? — $40 or $50 billion on F-35 fighter aircraft. The government has not said what, if anything, has happened in the months since it ostensibly hit the reset button. Perhaps the bright lights in the Department of National Defence are still labouring 24/7 to wrap their heads around the awkward concept that there are more suitable aircraft available at a (much) more reasonable cost.

Perhaps the government will tell us before the next election (in October 2015) what it is up to. It may be hung up on a dilemma: how to launch a new beginning without admitting past mistakes on the F-35 file. But let’s leave the Conservatives to rationalize their way out of that dilemma and move on.

This seems to be an opportune moment to hit a few other reset buttons. Continue reading →

With the election still 30 months away, there is time to plan new beginnings and present them to the electorate. With Thomas Mulcair of the NDP, Daniel Paillé of the Bloc Québécois and now Justin Trudeau of the Liberals, there are three party leaders in Ottawa who were not there in the 2011 election. Conditions exist for new approaches.

The first reset button to hit is whatever button controls the temperature in the capital. There is a meanness, even viciousness, that did not always characterize federal politics. Without wishing to wallow in nostalgia, things were different in the first Trudeau era. Pierre Trudeau was never lovable. He was tough and often aloof, but he commanded respect and loyalty. Robert Stanfield, the Tory leader, was intelligent, moderate and every inch a gentleman. NDP leader Tommy Douglas was the soul of integrity; he’s sometimes described as the “last honest politician in Canada.”

The past is gone, but the present can be changed and the future improved. Let’s start with an all-party commitment to eliminate attack ads. Just because American politicians wallow in them, it doesn’t mean we have to indulge in them in Canada. They may or may not work — and I have grave reservations about the efficacy of Conservatives’ current attacks on Justin Trudeau — but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that they lower the level of politics for all participants. They squeeze out reasoned argument. They turn politics into a form of mixed martial arts.

As the level of discourse sinks, electors conclude that none of the combatants is worthy of their support, and voting turnout declines. The elimination of attack ads would help restore respect to politics as an honourable profession.

Another reset button is the transparency button. All politicians preach the gospel of openness. In opposition, Stephen Harper was an ardent advocate of open government. A Conservative government, he promised, would be an open book. Its policies and procedures would be transparent to all. Its ministers and officials would be held accountable for everything they did.

It hasn’t turned out quite that way. Today’s government is the least open since the Second World War (when there were grounds for opacity). Transparency is becoming a fiction (witness the deterioration of the Access to Information Act). And accountability is a joke (ministerial responsibility these days means ministers not doing anything that would embarrass the prime minister or his government).

Would it do any good to hit that transparency reset button? Sure. Let’s start with the F-35. The government could take the people into its confidence. After all, it’s taxpayers’ money. Why do we need new fighters? What role(s) would they be expected to fill? What planes has the government considered? Why did it choose the one it did? Not least, how much, honestly, will the darned machine really, truly cost?

How much longer until someone else takes Conservative party torch?

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Published Apr. 15, 2013, in The Waterloo Region Record 

One of the most iconic scenes in American cinema comes from the 1955 Billy Wilder film, The Seven Year Itch. It shows Marilyn Monroe, the love interest in the film, standing on a Lexington Avenue subway grate, trying to hold down the billowing skirt of her sexy white dress.

What does this have to do with Stephen Harper, you may ask? Well, maybe a bit.

In the film, the male lead, played by Tom Ewell, finds his eye wandering after seven years of monogamous marriage. (Enter the tempting Ms. Monroe.) It just so happens that Prime Minister Harper recently (in February) celebrated his seventh anniversary in 24 Sussex, and it is no secret that the affections of some members of his uncommonly faithful caucus are beginning to wander. The pre-Easter flap over abortion is one indication of caucus restlessness, and we are bound to experience more of that in the coming months.

How much longer? MPs wonder. How much longer will the ambitious among them have to wait for the leader to depart and give them a chance at the brass ring?

Ottawa pundits, weary of Harper, are asking the same questions, to the point of suggesting that the prime minister has some sort of obligation to inform his party whether he intends to hang around to lead into the next election, scheduled for October 2015. If he is going to leave, or so say the pundits, he should tell his followers now so that they can plan an orderly succession.

(Don’t pay too much attention to the pundits. The last thing Ottawa journalists really desire is an orderly transition. That’s boring. A wide open scramble among inflated egos makes much better copy, especially if the scramble spills a bit of political blood.)

There is no reason to suspect Harper cares about any of this gratuitous advice. The job of his Conservative MPs is to show up and vote the way they are told before lapsing back into silence. And Harper has never paid any attention to the opinions of the media; there is no reason to think he will start now.

But the polls are interesting. As might be expected, Harper leads when respondents are asked which of the party leaders has the best experience to lead the country, but he trails Justin Trudeau when they are asked to name the most inspiring leader. A Nanos poll last week gave the Liberal party a four-point lead nationally over Harper’s Tories. Given the hype surrounding Trudeau and the Liberal convention, that’s not particularly surprising, either.

Of potentially greater significance is the decline of the NDP, the official Opposition in Parliament, into third place on most indicators. The Orange Revolution seems to be over. For the moment, it appears that Trudeau is retrieving the youth and soft Liberal votes that went to the NDP in 2011. It’s not so much that Thomas Mulcair has been an inadequate leader. He’s done and been everything the NDP could realistically have expected. In the beginning, he suffered by not being Jack Layton; now he suffers by not being Justin Trudeau. But, hey, no one ever said politics was fair.

The competition changes as of this week. Now that Trudeau is officially the Liberal leader, he will be vulnerable to attack from both the left and especially the right.

He knows the attacks are coming and claims he will be ready for them. But he says he will not indulge in the negativity that characterizes Tory politics under Harper.

“The biggest difference between a party led by me and one by Stephen Harper will be one of tone, one of respect for Canadians and their intelligence,” Trudeau says. “We don’t have to play by his rules.”

There’s a meanness, a nastiness, in federal politics these days, but no one is forcing anyone to play by Harper’s rules. After seven years, perhaps it’s time to scratch that itch.

The three problems with the Canadian senate

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Published Mar. 4, 2013, in The Waterloo Region Record

The headline fairly leapt off the front page of the Toronto Star last week:

“Senate in crisis.”

A subhead, printed in black and red, declared: “PM backing off support of Wallin as swirling controversies over spending, shocking sexual assault allegations have upper chamber on the defensive.” A separate box invited Star readers to look inside for “in-depth coverage” in four additional stories.

Wow! Swirling controversies and shocking allegations! Senators on the defensive! One can picture the scene: wizened senators deployed strategically in the nave of the red chamber, muskets loaded as they prepare to defend their perks and constitutional prerogatives against an invading horde of accountants, auditors and mean-spirited abolitionists from the lower house. The upper house hasn’t seen such excitement since 1986 when Pierre Trudeau’s pal, Senator Jacques Hébert, staged a 21-day hunger strike in the Senate foyer to protest the elimination of federal funding for Katimavik, a youth program he had created.

By the end of the week, the government had moved into damage control. Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that all senators had met their residency requirements — this assurance being given before the facts were in — before the Senate had completed its review of members’ residency declarations. Next we will be told that the expense accounts of all 104 sitting senators are in perfect order, even if the accountants haven’t gotten around to checking all of them. The honour system prevails.
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There are three problems, of which the third is the most serious. The first is expense accounting fiddling. That happens in all organizations, and it strains credulity to be told the Senate, with its bloated spending and notoriously weak oversight, is immune.

The second is residency. The Constitution needs to be fixed, but until it is, senators are required to have their principal residences in the province they represent. If they can’t produce a health card, driver’s licence or income tax return from that province, they can theoretically be forced to forfeit their seat. Does such strict construction of the Constitution make sense these days? Not much, but it’s still the law.

It appears that 40 to 50 senators may be on thin ice on the residency issue. Harper’s assurance that they are all good to go is based on the declaration senators must make that they own at least $4,000 worth of property — a house or condo or conceivably just a garage — in the province they represent. Whether they actually live there is anyone’s guess, and that’s an issue the Senate is still trying to figure out. Until it does, the honour system will prevail.

The third and larger problem is the shabby way successive prime ministers have used the Senate. They do not scour the land in search of candidates who have ability, legislative experience or eagerness to serve. They limit their search to supporters, people who have money to donate or who have served the party loyally in the past and can be trusted to continue to serve it from the comfort of the upper house.

Harper is not the first PM to abuse the Senate this way, but he has become the most blatant offender. He appoints only Conservatives, and his insistence that they support the government in everything makes a mockery of senatorial review of government legislation and spending. His Tories control the lower house; now he has shackled the upper one.

But is the Senate in crisis, as the newspaper would have it? Not really — not any more than it has been over the years. It’s just getting a lot more attention.

The spotlight, however, makes this a very good time to get serious about a proposal that Conservative Senator Hugh Segal has been promoting for eight years. Segal, who would rank near the top of any list of most valuable senators, wants a national referendum on the future of the place: to reform it; keep it as it is; or abolish it. Yes, it’s time to ask the people.

Senate remains Harper’s bugbear

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Published Feb. 11, 2013, in The Waterloo Region Record.

A case can be made that the prime minister of Canada, when armed with a majority, is more powerful politically than the president of the United States.

As long as he keeps his caucus on side, he can do pretty much anything he wants. He can amend laws and suspend regulations. Unlike the president, he does not have to beg and wheedle for the support of legislators. He can force the adoption of unpopular measures, as Brian Mulroney did with free trade and the goods and services tax. If he feels like it, he can use his power of prorogation to send MPs home until he feels like calling them back.

Being prime minister is not a bad gig — until it comes to doing something about the Senate. Ah yes, the Senate.

The Senate is Stephen Harper’s personal bugbear. He has wanted to do something, something meaningful, about the Senate since his Reform party days. He has tried. My, how he’s tried! Since becoming prime minister in 2006, he has made four or, depending on how you count these things, five attempts to reform the upper house. All to no avail.

His frustration became apparent early in his tenure. “This party’s preference is to see a reformed and elected Senate, but the Senate must change,” he told the Commons in 2007. “If the Senate cannot be elected, then it should be abolished. Those are the choices.”

Six years on, the Senate has not been reformed. It is not elected. It has not changed. It has not been abolished. It still stands, an irksome reminder that even great power is not absolute.
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Early on, Harper refused to replace retiring senators. Perhaps he thought if he ignored the place and let the numbers run down, the Senate would come to embrace his passion for reform.

When that didn’t happen, he reversed course, stuffing the red chamber with every living, breathing Conservative he could find (58 at last count). He asked two things of his appointees. First, they agree to serve for a limit of eight years (keeping alive his hope of eventually overhauling the place). Second, they agree to pass anything the Tories put before them (so much for a chamber of sober second thought). Not surprisingly perhaps, some of the Harper 58 — comfy in their $132,300-a-year sinecures — are balking at retiring prematurely or doing whatever they are told with no questions asked.

Also not surprisingly, in his haste to pack the place with compliant Tories, Harper made a few gaffes due to poor staff work or to misjudgment on his own part. Senators are required to legally reside in the province they represent. Mike Duffy hasn’t been a Prince Edward Island resident in decades; he keeps a summer place there, but to my knowledge he’s lived in Ottawa for roughly 40 years.

And anyone who pays attention to aboriginal politics could have warned Harper that Patrick Brazeau was trouble even before Harper hand-picked him in 2008. He was facing an allegation of sexual harassment at the time and now is charged with sexual assault and is being investigated for spending irregularities. Prime ministers can’t fire senators; all Harper could do was to suspend Brazeau from the Tory caucus. Some punishment!

The Brazeau and Duffy episodes are distractions to a prime minister who still wants to do something about the Senate. His Senate Reform Act is still technically before Parliament, but is going nowhere. There’s resistance in the Senate, opposition among the provinces, and impediments created by the Constitution.

Parliament, acting alone, may set term limits for senators, but more fundamental changes — such as the powers of senators and the number and distribution of seats — would require constitutional amendments. The government has asked the Supreme Court for its advice, referring six questions to it. One asks the court to tell it what hoops the government would have to jump through to abolish the Senate.

Don’t expect an early or easy answer.