The Conservative (???!!!!) Budget
January 30, 2009Sometimes the best way to put present circumstances in perspective and to figure out what to expect in future is to look back on the past.
With that in mind, I dug out an old report card.
The comments started out well:
“The positives are impressive: he has a brilliant strategic mind, a sound grasp of public policy, and good communications skills in both French and English.”
Not bad. On the other hand:
“The negatives – his mistrust of the grassroots, his tendency not to be a team player … and the tendency to withdraw – are manageable if they are acknowledged and compensated for by the strengths of others.”
Well, there you have it. The good and the bad. A blunt assessment of protégée by mentor.
The protégée, in this case, is the Prime Minister of Canada. And the mentor is no political detractor, but rather Preston Manning, the man who gave Stephen Harper his first job in politics, as his trusted lieutenant in the Reform Party that Manning founded and led.
The Reform Party, of course, morphed into the Canadian Alliance, which Stephen Harper eventually led into a merger with the old PC Party. The united Right party – the big-C Conservatives – then took power, Harper became Prime Minister, and the small-c conservative revolution that Manning championed became reality in Canada.
Not so fast.
Did you happen to hear about the federal budget released the other day? Huge deficits, massive spending, the addition of a forecasted $85-billion to the national debt over five years, the creation of a new Trudeauesque regional development agency – this one for recession-ravaged Southern Ontario, and… hard to believe, but true… money for culture and the arts.
The old Reform Party – indeed, the old Harper – would have furiously attacked any government that dared to propose this kind of a budget. The old Harper would have called it wasteful, irresponsible… liberal.
Instead, it was his party and his government that introduced just such a budget.
Clearly, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
What we’re in, of course, is a global economic crisis. And the budget is a reaction to that. Governments – conservative and liberal alike – all over the Western world are proposing similar measures to stimulate their economies.
In their budget document, Canada’s Conservatives described their measures as “timely”, “targeted” and “temporary”. Whether or not they turn out to be any of those things won’t be evident for many months.
What the measures clearly aren’t:
Conservative.
The government anticipates that once things improve, it will be able to revert to its more traditional approach of slashing spending, paying down the debt, and shrinking the role of government in the economy instead of expanding it.
This may be wishful thinking. History has shown that it’s much easier to open the spending taps than it is to close them again.
Of course, every budget is not only an economic blueprint, but also a political document. This one perhaps more than others because it comes after the government’s near-death experience last fall. The budget was designed to save the government from defeat at the hands of a newly united opposition.
In that respect, it seems to have succeeded, at least in the short run. The morning after the budget’s release, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff told reporters he was putting the Conservatives “on probation” and the Official Opposition would support the budget as long as the government agreed to regular reports to Parliament on the progress of the economy.
That’s a heck of a lot better for Harper than what Ignatieff’s predecessor, Stéphane Dion, was offering last fall – namely, an immediate vote of non-confidence in the government and its replacement by a coalition government.
Which brings us back to Preston Manning’s observations about Harper, taken from Manning’s 2002 autobiography.
Global economic crisis aside, the reason the government had to move as far as it did from its core philosophical beliefs in introducing such a budget is tied to some of the negative characteristics that Manning observed in his former lieutenant.
Harper’s mistrust of consultation, his go-it-alone instincts, led him astray, revitalized his political opposition and created a situation where his government will be forced to consult Liberals more than ever before and put a tremendous amount of water in its ideological wine if it wants to survive.
If you disagree with the Conservative Party’s ideology, you’ll see that as a good thing for the country. But if you’re a true believer, you may be pining for the days of Reform.
Programming note: I produced an interesting televised panel discussion on this very topic the other day, where smarter minds than I weighed in. You can download a podcast here.
Anything can happen in Canadian politics… who’da thunk it?
December 3, 2008So how’s it going to end?
Will the Conservative government fall and be replaced by a Liberal/NDP coalition propped up by the Bloc Québecois?
Will Stephen Harper manage to prorogue Parliament and live to be Prime Minister for a little while longer?
Will we end up with our fourth election in 4.5 years and our second in three months? Or will a best-of-five coin flip decide on who gets to govern?
Or maybe Governor-General Michaëlle Jean will declare “off with their heads” and end up ruling by decree…
Here’s something to contemplate:
Anything can happen in Canadian politics.
That’s not a sentiment you hear too often from too many quarters. But after five days of things happening in Canadian politics that no one would have ever predicted, and with the prospect of another five days or five weeks or five months or so of unpredictable things happening in Canadian politics… well… that’s something to contemplate…
Here’s another interesting thing. Yesterday was exactly two years to the day that Stéphane Dion became leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.
And those two years may go down in history as some of the worst two years ever experienced by a leader of a major federal party in Canada.
They seemed to have culminated in a disastrous campaign and election loss this past October, which seemed to have sealed Dion’s fate as leader.
Here’s how I described it last month:
“Sadly for Dion, he will not get a second chance. The political promise that won the hearts of Liberal delegates on Dec. 2, 2006 got trumped by a deficit of political skills…”
Shows how much I know.
Well, I was probably right on the political skills part. But I may have been wrong on the second chance.
My crystal ball is as bad as anyone’s who claims to have one, but it looks as if Dion has about a 50-50 chance of shedding his likely epitaph of “Only the second Liberal leader in history never to become Prime Minister” and gaining one that reads “23rd Prime Minister of Canada”.
With an asterisk, of course, because he will be gone as Liberal leader next May whether or not he is also PM.
And then there is the matter of the 22nd Prime Minister of Canada.
As I write, Stephen Harper remains Prime Minister, and is using “every legal means at his disposal” to keep from losing the job. Will he succeed? People have lost money underestimating the man.
But no matter what happens to Harper going forward, this entire incident may have critically wounded his political career, the success of which depended on a reputation for competent management and serious purpose.
The wound was self-inflicted.
When Harper won a second minority mandate following an election this fall that many thought was unnecessary, his marching orders seemed clear:
Drop the extreme partisan shtick and get down to the serious work of governing this country through a looming economic crisis.
That’s what he said he was prepared to do on election night. And his statesmanlike tone continued into the opening of Parliament.
But on the major challenge of the day, the international economic crisis, he dropped the ball in what could be a history-changing way.
An economic update to set the agenda for dealing with the crisis instead became an opportunity for partisan political gamesmanship, which only succeeded in uniting opposition parties against the government.
And so an economic crisis begat a political crisis, which begat a constitutional crisis, which may have begat a national unity crisis in both Quebec and the West.
Harper may survive in the short term. But he will come out of this one way or another as a weakened leader, his political future uncertain in a way that was unimaginable just a few days ago.
***
Programming note: If you are looking for a more in-depth look at all of the twists and turns of the ongoing Canadian political crisis, you could do worse that have a look or listen to an hour-long televised discussion I co-produced on Monday night. But you should tune in soon. At the pace that developments are developing, what gets discussed one night may be out of date by the next morning.
Stéphane Dion, Joe Clark and John Tory
November 1, 2008On the evening of Dec. 2, 2006, in a wide corridor of Montreal’s Palais des congrès, I bumped into a political lobbyist of my acquaintance.
Both of us were trudging slowly through the middle of a large, loud and excited crowd of people, everyone leaving the main hall of the convention centre and heading out the doors toward the charms of downtown Montreal Saturday night.
Not too much earlier, inside the main hall, Stéphane Dion stood on a confetti-laden stage, flanked by Jean Chrétien, John Turner, and Paul Martin, three former residents of 24 Sussex Drive.
As the music blared and Dion waved to the thousands of convention delegates who had just elected him as the newest – and perhaps unlikeliest – leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, he had every reason to believe he would one day also live in the same house, and hold the same title of Prime Minister, as had the men surrounding him.
After all, of the ten Liberals who preceded Dion as leader, only one – Edward Blake – had failed to become Prime Minister of Canada. And Blake’s leadership of the party came to an end in 1887.
Dion had just won a job that had provided a surefire ticket to the Prime Minister’s Office for almost twelve decades straight.
The delegates seemed as united as could be expected after a dramatic, emotion-laden convention that saw Dion go from fourth to first place over two days and four ballots.
He had come into the convention with the estimated support of about 15 per cent of the delegates, well behind front-runner Michael Ignatieff’s 28 per cent.
But on the final ballot, with only Dion and Ignatieff left standing, he beat the former front-runner 55 to 45 per cent.
He was a compromise candidate, sure, coming up the middle of a bitter, divisive rivalry between Ignatieff and Bob Rae. But as they streamed out of the convention hall, most delegates seemed happy with the choice, many of them won over by Dion’s fresh message of change, integrity and environmentalism. Some felt they had dodged a bullet by picking the best candidate to unite the party behind a new kind of politics and a new, greener vision of Liberalism.
My hard-bitten acquaintance in the crowded hallway wasn’t buying any of it. He had come to the convention as a Rae supporter, and was departing it shaking his head, unmoved by the victory of the bookish Dion.
“The Liberals,” he said to me moments after I offered my greetings, “just had their Joe Clark moment.”
Almost two years later, the comparison has proven apt. Dion, like Clark three decades earlier when he won the Progressive Conservative leadership, had few allies in his party, won the leadership by default when more charismatic and prominent rivals failed to earn enough delegate trust, and promptly developed a reputation as an honorable-but-bumbling leader with big ideas but few political smarts to implement them.
After leading his party in last month’s federal election to one of the worst electoral defeats in its history, and then reluctantly announcing he was stepping down from the leadership, Dion has joined Edward Blake as the answer to a newly rephrased political trivia question:
Who were the only two Liberal leaders who failed to become Prime Minister?
In his electoral campaign, Dion resembled not so much Joe Clark but more John Tory, the Ontario PC leader who crashed and burned in last year’s provincial election campaign.
Both Dion and Tory ran big policy ideas up the flagpole for voters – Tory’s was public funding for non-Catholic faith-based schools and Dion’s was the so-called Green Shift, which promised income tax cuts to balance out a new carbon tax that would help fight climate change – but neither leader bothered to check beforehand if members of his own party were saluting.
After Tory lost the election last year, here’s what I wrote about his campaign here:
Conviction does matter, of course. And yes, principles and policies also matter. But in the absence of politics – the process by which those-who-would-lead persuade those-who-would-be-led to follow them down any particular path – conviction and policies can be as hollow as… well… as hollow as John Tory’s campaign turned out to be.
The description fits Dion’s campaign, too.
Sadly for Dion, he will not get a second chance. The political promise that won the hearts of Liberal delegates on Dec. 2, 2006 got trumped by a deficit of political skills perceived that day by at least one clear-eyed observer in the crowd.
Picking through election entrails
October 15, 2008Suppose they held an election and nothing happened?
Not too much, anyway.
In September, Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared the 2.5-year-old minority Parliament to be unworkable.
In search of a more workable mandate, he violated his own fixed-election-date legislation to dissolve that Parliament and send Canadians to the polls for the third time in four years.
Five weeks, 300-million-dollars, one pooping puffin controversy, two roundtable debates, dozens of negative ads, and one international economic crisis later, did he get that mandate?
Well… kinda.
Sorta.
In his third kick at the can as party leader, Harper’s Conservatives gained a few seats, but still fell short of a majority government. And thanks to some ill-received policies and poorly executed strategies, the party failed to build upon its big Quebec breakthrough in the last election, once again winning ten seats in that province.
The NDP, under Jack Layton, also picked up a few more seats, but fell far short of the goal Layton publicly and repeatedly set. He said he was running for Prime Minister, but ended up once again as the leader of the fourth party in the House of Commons.
With the help of some Conservative self-inflicted wounds, Gilles Duceppe’s Bloc Québécois won by holding steady. Once again, the Bloc showed that rumors of its death were greatly exaggerated, as it won the lion’s share of Quebec seats for the sixth straight election. More than any other factor, it is the Bloc’s enduring ability to hold onto dozens of Quebec seats that accounts for the fact that Canadians have elected minority governments in three elections running.
The Green Party won a plethora of publicity and media attention, a seat at the table of the televised leaders’ debates for leader Elizabeth May, and in the end, exactly zero seats in the House of Commons for all its efforts.
And then there is the Liberal Party…
Oh, the Liberals…
It was one of the worst election results ever for the Grits, once known as Canada’s Natural Governing Party. The Liberals won only eight seats west of Ontario, suffered a net loss of seats in their Atlantic Canada stronghold, and made some marginal gains in Quebec, where they continued to be almost exclusively limited to the island of Montreal.
But the most telling results for the Liberal Party came in Ontario. A decade ago, the party regularly won almost all of the available seats in this province. This time around, it didn’t even take most of those 106 seats.
Conservative candidates won almost half of all Ontario ridings, the NDP increased its seat count in the province by almost 50 per cent by taking away Liberal seats in Northern Ontario, and the Liberal Party was in retreat everywhere save its electoral fortress of Toronto.
Even in the country’s largest city, the Conservatives began showing signs of breaching the Liberal castle walls. They took several seats in the suburban 905 region just outside of Toronto.
And Conservative star candidate Peter Kent won the riding of Thornhill, which borders the city of Toronto.
Thornhill happens to be the riding with the largest per-capita Jewish population in the province. It also happens to be the one riding the provincial Progressive Conservative party picked up in their wretched campaign during last year’s Ontario election.
Picking through the entrails of this year’s federal vote, there were several other signs the Conservative Party has made some headway in their attempts to win over the support of the traditionally big-L-Liberal so-called ethnic vote.
The Conservatives took several ridings with diverse multicultural populations from the Liberals in Ontario and British Columbia. And in Toronto proper, ridings such as Eglinton-Lawrence, York Centre, and Willowdale – ridings with significant minority-group populations that are usually among the safest Liberal seats in the country – featured much tighter races.
In 2006, Liberal Joe Volpe won Eglinton-Lawrence by defeating his Conservative rival by more than 11,000 votes. This time around, Volpe’s margin of victory was reduced to 2,200.
Within hours – minutes even – of the final vote count, quotes from anonymous Liberals began appearing in the media calling for the head of leader Stéphane Dion.
Fighting his first election as leader, Dion failed miserably to reverse his party’s slide of the past few years.
But the nearly bankrupt and disunited Liberals can ill-afford another lengthy, expensive and divisive leadership race.
After all, we’ve ended up with another minority Parliament, and Canadians may be going to the polls yet again before too long.
Election night cheat sheet for political junkies
October 14, 2008UPDATE: Election post-mortem here
Will tonight’s federal election result in more of the same or are we in for a surprise or two? Here’s a cheat sheet on the tightest local races, which are likely to decide the election. Clip, save, place next to your chips, beer and TV remote, and consult as results pour in from east to west:
Atlantic Canada
Newfoundland and Labrador: The big question here is how effective Premier Danny Williams‘ Anyone But Conservative campaign has been. The Conservatives went into this election holding three of the province’s seven seats — St. John’s East, St. John’s South – Mt. Pearl, and Avalon — and are in danger of losing all three: Two to the Liberals and St. John’s East to the NDP’s star candidate, Jack Harris, the party’s former provincial leader.
Prince Edward Island: The Island’s four ridings have not gone anything but Liberal for 20 years. The Conservatives seem to think they have enough of a shot in the riding of Egmont, which takes in the city of Summerside and the western part of PEI, that Prime Minister Stephen Harper made PEI the first stop in his big final-day cross-country push yesterday. The Liberals are running former PEI Premier Keith Milligan there against the Tory candidate Gail Shea, a former provincial cabinet minister.
Nova Scotia: No riding here has garnered more interest than Central Nova, where Green Party leader Elizabeth May is trying to topple Defence Minister Peter MacKay. If she succeeds, it will be one of the top stories of the election. Elsewhere, former Conservative MP Bill Casey will try to hold onto Cumberland – Colchester – Musquodoboit Valley as an independent candidate, and the NDP hopes to add to its two N.S. seats (Halifax and Sackville-Eastern Shore) by poaching Dartmouth-Cole Harbour from the Libs and South Shore – St. Margaret’s from the Tories.
New Brunswick: The Liberals tend to dominate in the northern half of this province (with the exception of the NDP stronghold of Acadie-Bathurst). and the Tories tend to dominate in the southern half, leaving a trio of adjoining swing ridings in central and western New Brunswick worth watching: Fredericton, Tobique – Mactaquaq and Madawaska – Restigouche.
Quebec
Montreal / Laval : The Conservatives are not a factor anywhere in the metropolis, where the Liberals still hold on to their core Quebec vote. There are four races to watch here, all in traditional Liberal ridings the Grits hope to retake from opponents. In Papineau, Ahuntsic and Jeanne-Le-Ber, those opponents are Bloc MPs. Papineau Liberal candidate Justin Trudeau hopes to become the third son-of-a-Prime-Minister in Canadian history to sit as an MP (trivia points to anyone who can name the other two). In Outremont, the Liberals hope to unseat NDP incumbent Thomas Mulcair, who won the seat in a byelection. If Mulcair holds on, it will be the first time in history that an NDP candidate won a Quebec seat in a general election.
Quebec City / Northeastern Quebec: These are the areas where the Conservatives made their great breakthroughs in the last election – breakthroughs they hoped to build on this time around. Instead, an erratic campaign has them hoping to preserve what they already had. Their seats on the south shore of the Saint-Laurent, across from Quebec City, seem safe, but several in the provincial capital and in Saguenay-Lac Saint Jean are in danger of swinging back to the Bloc. These ridings include Beauport-Limoilou, Charlesbourg-Haute-Saint-Charles, Louis-Hébert, Roberval-Lac-Saint-Jean, and the Jonquière-Alma riding of cabinet minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn. The only safe Conservative seat north of the river seems to be Louis-Saint-Laurent, held by Heritage Minister Josée Verner.
Elsewhere: It’s all safe Bloc seats, including Vaudreuil-Soulanges, where previously unelected cabinet minister Michael Fortier is expected to remain unelected. The only exceptions are the three Outaouais ridings, across the river from Ottawa. Hull-Aylmer is the only remaining safe-ish Liberal seat outside of Montreal. Pontiac will continue to be held by Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon if the other three major parties continue to split the vote. And in Gatineau, NDP candidate Francoise Boivin hopes to win back the seat she lost to the Bloc as a Liberal incumbent last time around.
Toronto: The biggest Liberal bastion in the country. A couple of tight NDP-Liberal races worth watching are in Parkdale – High Park, where former Liberal leadership candidate Gerard Kennedy hopes to win back his old provincial riding from incumbent New Democrat Peggy Nash, and Beaches-East York, which former NDP MPP Marilyn Churley will once again try to win away from longtime Liberal MP Maria Minna.
The 905: The region surrounding Toronto where many elections get decided. Many interesting races to watch here. In the eastern part of the 905 semi-circle, Oshawa always hosts tight three-way races. Farther west, the Conservatives hope to retake Newmarket-Aurora now that Belinda Stronach has left politics and Halton, now that incumbent Garth Turner has left their party and become a Liberal. Similarly, the Liberals hope to retake Mississauga-Streetsville from Grit-turned-Tory Wajid Khan. Conservatives also have a chance in several other ridings that have gone Liberal for years: Mississauga-Erindale, Mississauga South, and Oakville. In the Hamilton-Niagara region, the Liberals hope to retake Hamilton East – Stoney Creek from the NDP and St. Catherines from the Tories. And look for a close three-way race in Welland.
Southwestern Ontario: The two closest races in this region are likely to be in Brant and London West, where Liberal incumbents defend their seats against Conservative challengers.
Eastern and Northern Ontario: Incumbents seem pretty safe in Eastern Ontario. The closest race in this region is likely to be Glengarry-Prescott-Russell, where Dan Boudria attempts to win back his father Don’s old riding, won by the Conservatives in 2008. The NDP has high hopes in the north, where New Democratic candidates have their eyes on a number of seats the Liberals won last time around, including Algoma – Manitoulin – Kapuskasing, Kenora, Nickel Belt, Thunder Bay – Rainy River and Thunder Bay – Superior North. Also worth watching is Parry Sound – Muskoka, which cabinet minister Tony Clement won last time in the closest race in the country.
Prairie Provinces
Manitoba: The Liberal’s three incumbent MPs in the province were all fighting tough battles in this election. The NDP hopes to grab Churchill, the Tories hope to win Saint-Boniface and Winnipeg South-Centre. If the Libs have any chance to regain an old seat, it will be in Winnipeg South, won by the Tories last time.
Saskatchewan: Ralph Goodale’s one Liberal seat in this province is probably safe, as are most of the other Conservative seats in the province, with the exception of Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar and Palliser, former NDP seats that party hopes to win back, and Desenthé-Missinippi-Churchill RIver, which Progressive-Conservative-turned-Liberal David Orchard hopes to win after being denied the nomination by Stéphane Dion in a recent byelection.
Alberta: The easiest province to pick should go all-Tory all-the-time. The two ridings where there could be longshot upsets are Edmonton-Strathcona, which the NDP often wins provincially and where it has the best (longshot) chance in he province, and Calgary Northeast, where a divisive nomination race resulted in one Conservative running as an independent against the official party candidate, with a (longshot) chance at splitting the vote.
British Columbia and the North
Vancouver Island: Three races to watch here: Esquimault-Juan de Fuca, where Liberal incumbent Keith Martin is in a three-way race, Vancouver Island North, which the Tories hope to take back from the NDP, and Saanich – Gulf Islands, where cabinet minister Gary Lunn faces an unexpectedly strong challenge from the Liberals, after the NDP candidate was forced to withdraw from the race.
Greater Vancouver: Many interesting races here. Liberal incumbents face strong Tory challenges in Richmond, Newton-North Delta, North Vancouver and Vancouver-Quadra, and the Liberals and NDP are in a tough race in Vancouver Kingsway, most recently held by Liberal-turned-Tory-turned-retired-cabinet-minister David Emerson. Two other ridings worth watching are West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country, which the Conservatives hope to win back from Liberal-turned-Green Blair Wilson, and Surrey North, once held by the late Chuck Cadman. Cadman’s widow Dona is running for the Tories in a riding won in 2006 by the NDP.
Elsewhere in B.C.: Many safe Tory and NDP seats all over rural British Columbia. The one exception may be Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo, which the NDP hopes to poach from the Conservatives.
The Arctic Territories: Yukon is a safe Liberal seat, Western Arctic is a safe NDP seat, but Nunavut may be tossup, which explains why so many leaders have visited Iqaluit lately.
Tune in tonight, and keep this guide handy…
Posted by Alan Echenberg
Posted by Alan Echenberg
Posted by Alan Echenberg 