All posts in Canadian Politics

Wildrose deftly defuses robo-call crisis while federal Cons suffer Scotch verdict

by David Climenhaga on May 24, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Canadian Politics, Electoral Fraud, Robo Calls with No comments

Members of the Wildrose Party try out their new robo-calling technology, which should avoid future problems with the CRTC. Right-wing Alberta politicians may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: Wildrose Party Executive Committee President David Yager.

You don’t have to agree with Alberta’s right-wing Wildrose Party to admire the skill with which it stick-handled yesterday’s revelation it had been fined $90,000 by the federal broadcast regulator for a series of improperly identified robo-calls made to voters during the 2012 election campaign.

Compared to the federal Conservative Party’s blundering response to its various recent troubles, it seems mildly astonishing the two parties are essentially the provincial and federal branches of the same organization.

Slapped with the significant fine by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Wildrose Party officials responded deftly.

When the CRTC decision was reported by Global TV, party officials fessed up immediately, then followed with an immediate, contrite and seemingly sincere admission they were wrong and a promise never to do it again. They’d already paid their fine by the time the matter was in the news and that was the end of it. There will be no appeal.

Party leaders left the embarrassing admission to David Yager, president of the party’s executive committee, instead of Opposition Leader Danielle Smith.

The tone and speed with which the matter was handled was pitch perfect. Under the circumstances, the party’s claim it didn’t realize it was breaking the rules will sound quite believable to voters. As a consequence, the whole potentially embarrassing business will likely fall off the radar within 48 hours.

Given the size of the fine and the Canadian right’s issues with regulators like the CRTC, the temptation must have been strong in Wildrose circles to make a fight out of the dispute – but someone obviously made a cool-headed assessment of the facts and realized that would only prolong and magnify the agony.

This contrasts dramatically with the federal Cons’ ham-handed handling of the continuing Duffygate Senate expense scandal and the coincidental court ruling yesterday in the election fraud case stemming from the last federal vote in May 2011 – a case less that coincidentally involved Rack 9, the same Edmonton robo-call company that made the Wildrose calls.

In fairness, there’s a significant difference in gravity between the Wildrose Party’s failure to identify itself as the source of partisan robo calls and the outright electoral fraud in which targeted Liberal supporters were misdirected to incorrect or imaginary polling stations by callers pretending to be from Elections Canada.

Still, if the federal Conservatives had adopted a similar strategy, contritely admitted they had done wrong, paid the party’s debt to society and perhaps tossed in a few extra “overenthusiastic” low-level flunkies to accompany party operative Michael Sona under the bus, the whole affair could have been forgotten by now.

But Prime Minister Harper is almost pathologically incapable of admitting error. His party tried to block the proper investigation at every turn.

Now, in a classic “Scotch Verdict,” the judge in the federal case appears to have let the Conservatives off the hook because, despite powerful circumstantial evidence, the facts were well enough hidden to make it difficult to tie the well-established fraudulent activities to the only party in a position to benefit from them.

According to the Globe and Mail, this result clears Mr. Harper’s Conservatives, Tory candidates and two telemarketing companies of wrongdoing. However, the political reality is quite different. The case is merely “not proven,” while the odour of corruption will stick to Mr. Harper’s party like a miasma.

Moreover, federal Tory pain is bound continue, since the Council of Canadians will now likely take its demand for election results in six ridings to be overturned to the Supreme Court of Canada. Win or lose before the Supremes, the Council’s case will continue to bedevil the Harperites.

Given the ways they dealt with these superficially similar cases, you’d almost think the Harper Conservatives in Ottawa were the farm team, and the Wildrose Party in backcountry Alberta were the pros!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

(Prime) ministerial responsibility and all that … surely the wrong man has quit!

by David Climenhaga on May 20, 2013 in Canadian Politics, Ministerial Responsibility, Nigel Wright, Parliamentiary Government with 10 Comments

The home of Canada’s Parliament, held in contempt by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Reform Party, doing business under the name of the Conservative Party of Canada. Below: former chief of staff Nigel Wright, Mr. Harper and Senator Mike Duffy.

Surely the wrong man has quit!

Nigel Wright, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff, resigned yesterday in the imbroglio that followed the revelation he gave disgraced Senator Mike Duffy $90,172 to pay back the Parliamentary expenses the supposed representative for Prince Edward Island in the Upper House had improperly claimed.

The purpose of the controversial payment, obviously, was to make the political problem created by the discovery of Senator Duffy’s unethical behavior disappear.

But the doctrine of ministerial responsibility, surely, requires that the prime minister himself must go.

Calm down, people! Your blogger recognizes this is not very likely. Mr. Harper, his cabinet, and significant portions of his Reform Party caucus, which does business under the name of the Conservative Party of Canada, hold Parliament, Parliamentary tradition, Parliamentary conventions, and Parliamentary democracy itself in contempt. This has been well understood since 2011.

Nevertheless, the doctrine of ministerial responsibility itself is quite clear.

“According to the doctrine,” says my favourite Canadian politics textbook, “the minister who heads each department must be accountable to the House of Commons for the conduct of each and every civil servant working in that department.”

“On the most basic level, this means that ministers may be asked in the House to investigate allegations of incompetence or impropriety in their departments and take appropriate measures,” explain authors Patrick Malcolmson and Richard Meyers in The Canadian Regime.

“If the incompetence or impropriety is substantial and may be attributed to poor management, however, the stakes become much higher,” they write. “Under the doctrine of ministerial responsibility the minister must take personal responsibility for major problems of mismanagement.

“In more serious cases of mismanagement, this means the minister must resign.” (In every case, the italics were added by me.)

Now, there can be no doubt that Mr. Harper is the minister responsible for the Prime Minister’s Office.

It is true that the employees of the modern institutionalized Canadian PMO are partisan political appointees outside the rules of the Public Service of Canada. Nevertheless, they are public employees paid by the taxpayers of Canada through the budget of the Privy Council Office, the prime minister’s government department. So it can be persuasively argued that under the ministerial responsibility doctrine their behaviour is the clear responsibility of the PM.

Moreover, the mismanagement in the case of Mr. Wright’s outrageous payment to Senator Duffy is of the most egregious kind, carried out by the prime minister’s closest aide.

So the prime minister’s alleged lack of knowledge, much emphasized by Conservative Party spokespeople and the media, is no excuse.

As the Wikipedia’s excellent and accurate entry on ministerial responsibility explains, “the minister is responsible even if the minister had no knowledge of the actions.”

In other words, it changes nothing if we take Prime Minister Harper at his word that he knew nothing of the actions planned and perpetrated by his closest advisor.

Mr. Wright may “accept sole responsibility” if he wishes, but under the doctrines of our Parliamentary democracy and the practicalities of real political life, the responsibility is not his alone, whether or not he or his erstwhile boss like it.

Nor is the prime minister’s statement that “I accept that Nigel believed he was acting in the public interest, but I understand the decision he has taken to resign” good enough, notwithstanding his fatuous addition of the standard Conservative Party talking points that “securing jobs and economic growth for Canada … is the focus of all our efforts and attention.”

Well, obviously not! Unless, of course, we are talking about jobs and economic growth for Tory insiders.

“A minister is ultimately responsible for all actions by a ministry because, even without knowledge of an infraction by subordinates, the minister approved the hiring and continued employment of those civil servants,” states the Wikipedia’s entry. Well, this is most certainly true in the case of Mr. Harper, who personally chose and hired Mr. Wright as his chief of staff.

Even if we accept the view that the most senior civil servants may be called before Parliament, bypassing their minister, Mr. Wright is simply too high in the food chain for such treatment.

Yet so far, unsurprisingly, not only has Mr. Harper refused to take personal responsibility in this case, he appears to be denying that he has any responsibility at all.

Nevertheless, his public acceptance of Mr. Wright’s resignation, ipso facto, acknowledges the responsibility is his.

Ergo, it is the prime minister that should resign.

Don’t hold your breath.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Message to Gary Doer: Now might be a good time to place a call to Ottawa, before you have to cross a picket line!

by David Climenhaga on May 4, 2013 in Canadian Politics, Diplomacy, Labour Relations, Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers with 2 Comments

Canadian diplomats, as seen in the public’s imagination and doubtless as they will soon be portrayed by the Harper Government. Actual Canadian diplomats abroad do not appear quite as illustrated, even when dressed casually for picket line duty. Below: Gary Doer, Canada’s Ambassador to the United States; Treasury Board President Tony Clement.

The working stiffs of Canadian diplomacy, members of the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers, were walking a picket line in Washington, D.C., yesterday – which raised some eyebrows in the Imperial Capital and must have created some minor discomfort for the Canadian ambassador, a former NDP premier.

At least Gary Doer, premier of Manitoba from 1999 to 2009, didn’t technically have to cross a picket line if he came in to work at the Embassy yesterday – this event was what’s known in the argot of labour relations as an “information picket.”

That is, it’s just there to inform folks there may soon be a real picket line, which good New Democrats aren’t supposed to cross with any joy in their hearts.

Unions usually hold information pickets – which are really just a matter of exercising members’ right to free speech, using placards – when they can’t get anywhere in negotiations and have the feeling a little public support would be welcome.

Unfortunately for PAFSO, which only has about 1,400 members and therefore not much of a community back home to support it, this will be hard to do in an era when there’s no shortage of Americans and Canadians who apparently don’t know the difference between Czechoslovakia and Chechnya.

That disturbing factoid came to light two weeks ago in the wake of the tragic Boston Marathon bombings, when some of the braniacs on Twitter started screeching about the poor “Czechoslovakians” for their imagined tendency to commit mayhem in Russia and America.

The explanation, in case you missed it, is that the two accused bombers are of Chechen origin, that is, from Chechnya, a predominantly Islamic territory of the former Soviet Union with a troubled relationship with the Russian government.

They weren’t from Czechoslovakia, which hasn’t actually existed as a political entity since 1993, but used to be in central Europe. About the only thing the poor Czechs have in common with the Chechens is a troubled relationship with the Russians. Plus the sound of the first two letters of their names, of course. If this upsets the Czechs, you can imagine how the Slovaks feel!

But, je digresse. PAFSO’s issue is that its members are paid significantly less than other Canadian public servants doing the same work in the same offices but working for some reason for different departments.

Indeed, there are commercial officers, economists and Justice Department lawyers doing exactly the same work in exactly the same work units, both in Canada and abroad, for up to $10,000 more per year in base salary than their PAFSO colleagues.

And since PAFSO’s membership is made up of the grunts of diplomacy, rather than its masters and commanders, they have many other complaints, including the uncomfortable high-risk living conditions they must endure in many Canadian missions abroad – for example, in tents in Haiti, inside armed compounds in Pakistan – and the fact that if they’re not married to another diplomat for obvious reasons they’re likely to be their family’s sole income earner.

So far, PAFSO’s concerns have been pretty well ignored by the chattering classes, so without a little showmanship they barely register on the domestic radar. Worse, like all unions, PAFSO faces the outright hostility of the Harper Government, the entity previously known as the government of Canada.

When the Harperites and their official flunkies were confronted with PAFSO’s bargaining position, they told the folks serving Canada in places like Kabul and Islamabad that that their jobs were “well paid and highly sought after” – in other words, drop dead or we’ll replace you with someone more compliant.

That’s certainly disrespectful to a group of public employees who, in many locations, are literally putting their lives on the line for Canada, but it’s not entirely unexpected from a political party that thinks the best way to deal with what it calls “the greatest threat to world peace” is to close down the embassy there and stop talking to it!

Knowing this government’s staffing inclinations, it would be a surprise if the Tory brain trust didn’t think Canada could be represented better abroad by hiring Temporary Foreign Workers – you could pay them even less than PAFSO members, and there’d be less political embarrassment when they showed up at work than at a Tim Horton’s in Brampton.

Indeed, after yesterday’s Washington picket finally generated a little publicity in the Globe and Mail, the Harperites set their Online Tory Rage Machine loose suggesting just that, apparently seriously, in the national online newspaper’s comments section.

So the PAFSO members tried negotiating politely, then they tried wearing sweatpants to work and now they’re experimenting with information pickets. They’ve been in a legal position to strike since early April, but they’ve kept on serving Canadians even as they made every day Casual Day at the embassy. (With allowances for local sensibilities, of course.)

What Canada’s front-line diplomats really need, it’s said here, is for a couple of well-placed ambassadors to show some intestinal fortitude, pick up the telephone and place a call to Treasury Board President Tony Clement, the government’s point man in the negotiations.

An appropriate message to Mr. Clement might be: “Respectfully, sir, we need to get this settled. Right flippin’ now!” Leastways, we do if we want to salvage what’s left of our credibility on the international stage.

It seems to me that a former NDP premier of all ambassadors might have the moral credentials needed to send just such a message.

Hello? Mr. Doer? Anybody home in Washington?

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Former Tory strategist Allan Gregg rips Harper Cons’ ‘systematic attack’ on facts and reason

by David Climenhaga on April 30, 2013 in Allan Gregg, Canadian Politics, Conservative Party of Canada, Stephen Harper with 9 Comments

A couple of old guys born just before the last King passed on, one of them your blogger, the other the pollster and former Tory strategist Allan Gregg. Below: Mr. Gregg in his iconoclastically Conservative heyday.

Long-time Tory pollster and strategist Allan Gregg ripped into the Harper Government on Saturday for what he termed its “systematic attack on evidence-based research.”

But since Mr. Gregg was speaking to the annual convention of the Alberta Federation of Labour, his startling comments went completely unremarked by Alberta’s mainstream media – notwithstanding the readily available “local angle” of an Edmonton native who did well in the big cities down east returning to his old stomping ground for a few hours.

Back in the day, Mr. Gregg was an influential pollster for the then-still-Progressive Conservatives under prime ministers Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, and a proponent of negative political advertising. He is credited with having devised the cruel images of Liberal Jean Chretien that went so badly awry for the Conservatives in the 1993 federal election. Perhaps that is why by 2001 Mr. Gregg had undergone a much-publicized change of heart on that topic.

Nevertheless, Mr. Gregg’s harsh view of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, given his history of service to Canada’s Conservatives, was eye-popping – although it is perhaps less so when one considers the fellow has made his money for decades toiling in the field of public opinion research, which inevitably encourages a certain respect for measurable facts.

Indeed, that background no doubt informed his view that “effective solutions can only be generated when they correspond with accurate understanding of they problems they are designed to solve. Evidence, facts and reason, therefore, form the sine qua non not just of good public policy, but of good value.”

Alas, as Mr. Gregg told the 500 or so trade unionists at the AFL conference, “it seems as though our government’s use of evidence and facts as the basis of policy is declining, and in their place, dogma, whim and political expediency are on the rise.”

He added: “Even more troubling, especially from the perspective of a public opinion researcher, is that Canadians seem to be, if not buying it, certainly accepting it.”

Mr. Gregg cited a long list of evidence-based government activities that have been gutted by the Harper Government – often saving only insignificant amounts of money – since 2010.

The rampage, he noted, began with the notorious abandonment of the mandatory long-form census. “Why would anyone forsake these valuable insights and the chance to make good public policy, rather than bad public policy, under the pretense that rights were being violated when no one ever voiced concern? Was this a crazy one-off move … or was there something larger going on?”

It was pretty quickly clear to Mr. Gregg – as it was to many of the rest of us – that there was indeed something larger going on.

The demise of the long-form census was followed by the destruction of the national long-gun registry, despite the pleas of virtually every police chief in Canada that it be saved. After that, under cover of an austerity budget, there were massive cuts to Statistics Canada, Library and Archives Canada, science and social science activities at Parks Canada, the Parliamentary Budget Office, the CBC, the Roundtable on the Environment, the Experimental Lakes Area, the Canadian Foundation for Climate Science and so on.

At the same time, the government proposed multi-billion-dollar spending where the evidence didn’t support it – as in its penitentiary-building spree.

“This flew directly in the face of a mountain of evidence that suggested that crime, far from being on the rise, was on the decline,” noted Mr. Gregg. “This struck me as costly, unnecessary. But knowing the government’s intention to define itself as tough on crime before all else, once can see, at least ideologically, why they did it.”

However, he said, “when the specific cuts started to roll out, it became clear that something else was starting to take shape” – something that went beyond mere ideology.

“This was no random act of downsizing, but a deliberate attempt to obliterate certain activities that were previously viewed as a legitimate part of government decision making,” Mr. Gregg stated. “Namely, using research, science and evidence as the basis to make public policy decisions.

“It also amounted to an attempt to eliminate anyone who would use science, facts and evidence to challenge government policies,” he added.

Mr. Gregg also assailed the Harper Government’s use of intentionally misleading titles for legislation – which often do the opposite of what their names declare, as in the case of the Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act, which will result in more pot smokers being thrown behind bars.

“In George Orwell’s 1984, the abandonment of reason is twinned not simply with unthinking orthodoxy, but also by the willful dissemination of misinformation,” he said. “Today, more and more, we see the same kind of misdirection and Newspeak in the behaviour of our legislators.”

So why does the Harper Government want to disguise the substance of its legislation, Mr. Gregg asked, when a “fulsome and rational debate” would help Canadians make the best decisions? The pretty obvious answer: “By obfuscating the true purpose of laws under the gobbledygook of Doublespeak, governments are admitting that their intentions probably lack both respect and support.”

His explanation in the case of the Harperites: “I do believe that this particular government is pursuing a not-so-hidden agenda that few truly understand. It starts from a premise that the Canadian political spectrum has over-swung in a direction of liberalism.”

Mr. Harper and his government, the pollster argued, intend to “systematically right what they see as this wrong.”

“Their problem is, notwithstanding the fairly widespread consensus around the orthodoxies of balanced budgets, market economies, open trade which does exist and is embraced by the public today, Canadians by and large still believe in tolerance, compromise and egalitarianism.

“Policy for them should be based on conviction, and not bloodless statistics. Governments should be guided by what they believe is morally right, and not by reason and rational compromise. From this view, science, statistics, reason, and rational compromise are not tools of enlightened public policy, but barriers to the pursuit of swinging that pendulum back to where they believe it belongs.

“So to realize this agenda, given that continued point of view on the part of the public, it becomes necessary to pursue it by stealth and circumvention rather than through transparency and directness. This too explains the apparent obsession with secrecy message control and misdirection we see every day coming out of Ottawa.”

Instead of reason, he said, the Harper Tories encourage “prejudice, fear and wishful thinking.”

Mr. Gregg may be a man who once favoured red shoes, wore a rock ‘n’ roll haircut, and worked for Brian Mulroney, but it’s hard to dispute his scary assessment of the Harper Government.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Tory Slime Machine is losing the fight it picked with Justin Trudeau – for now, anyway…

by David Climenhaga on April 25, 2013 in Alberta Civic Politics, Alberta Politics, Attack Advertisements, Canadian Politics with 9 Comments

Justin Trudeau’s riposte to the first blast of the Tory Slime Machine. So far, it looks like Mr. Trudeau is winning. Below: Mr. Trudeau with fake tattoo gets ready to punch out a Tory, for real; Calgary developer Cal Wenzel.

Round One in the fight started with Justin Trudeau by the Tory Slime Machine pretty clearly went to Mr. Trudeau – well, to Mr. Trudeau and the Canadian Liver Foundation.

Now, Round Two, Mr. Trudeau’s riposte, a 30-second video ad released by the Liberal Party yesterday, seems to have gone his way too.

I am speaking here as a guy who’s spent a lot of time and money over the past decade working on advertising campaigns. Naturally, there are tons – or should that be tonnes? – of qualifiers about this. Just for starters: Where will the ads run? Who will actually get to see these things?

Still, it’s starting to look very much as if Mr. Trudeau could mop the floor with the Conservatives’ negative advertising thugs – which, without a doubt, will just goad them into worse and more hysterical attacks – just as he did with then-Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau in an actual boxing ring a year ago.

An awful lot of Canadians – maybe most of them – were offended by the Harper Conservatives’ use of the striptease segment in the Tory attack ad, which attempted to paint Mr. Trudeau as a flake and a kid, the minute they learned the footage came from a charity fund-raiser for the Liver Foundation. The Foundation’s donations soared immediately as a result of the Tory attack, it’s been reported.

I’m not so sure, however, if it registered with the same fair-minded Canadians that the creative clipping of Mr. Trudeau’s tortured explanation of his father’s views about Quebec, done to make it appear as if they were his opinions, was, in effect, a new low point for the Tory Sleaze Machine and an outright lie.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives may feel, like their Republican mentors and models south of the Uninsured Medicine Line, that a lie told with a bare face can winkle its way into the public consciousness over time – and perhaps they’re right.

Naturally, as well, these fierce guardians of the bottom line will find a way to ensure that we, the taxpayers of Canada, have to pay the freight.

But from an advertising industry perspective, the 30-second Trudeau clip released yesterday is a highly effective response.

It permits Mr. Trudeau to rise above the fray. Portraying him in the classroom – holding a real job, something Prime Minister Harper has never done – is pure genius.

As they say in ad-agency talk, this provides Mr. Trudeau with an effective meta-narrative that asks, “Are we going to stand here and behave like destructive children, or are we going to talk about building Canada.”

Or, as Mr. Trudeau actually put it in the ad: “We can keep mistrusting and finding flaws in each other or we can pull together and get to work.”

This will drive the Tories crazy, because they know as any politically alert person does that the job of any opposition politicians is to find flaws with the government. But every Canadian who is not a Tory partisan also knows in their bones that whatever it is the Harper Cons are up to, it has very little with building Canada.

No doubt the Liberals are running focus groups that tell them Canadians like Mr. Trudeau’s positive demeanour, especially compared to the manners and styles of the other party leaders.

Still, Liberal supporters are entitled to feel a little disquiet at Mr. Trudeau’s promise never to respond to Tory attacks with negativity of their own. Nobody, it is said here, is more vulnerable to such an approach than Mr. Harper. And, count on it, the Tories are running focus groups of their own that have identified lack of experience as Mr. Trudeau’s greatest weakness.

Just the same, even though I’m not a Liberal Party supporter and I’m inclined to view television advertisements by any party with large dose of salt, this one made me smile and laugh out loud.

Round 2: Trudeau.

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Failing grades all round for Alison Redford – literally!

Give an A+ to the Alberta NDP’s minuscule Legislative caucus for coming up with a clever-boots way to highlight Premier Alison Redford’s signal lack of success to date in her first term in the province’s top political job.

The New Democrats certainly got more media coverage than a party with only four members could normally expect by putting it’s assessment of Ms. Redford’s lack of achievement in the form of a grade school report card.

Who could resist the gentle sarcasm of the four Fs and a D-minus the Knee-Dippers’ gave to Ms. Redford, no doubt to her fury.

Comments with her best mark, that D-minus for health, noted in part: “Seniors’ long-term care and drug plan shows little effort. Some progress in the area of physician compensation.” And the rest:

Social Services – F – “Shows little support for vulnerable classmates, despite noble sentiments at the beginning of term.”

Education – F – “Little comprehension of the impact of severe cuts to post-secondary education.”

Basic Finance – F – “…Basic lack of understanding of the basic concepts of the course.”

Environmental Studies – F – “…Class presentation to U.S. students factually incorrect.”

Click here to read the whole report card for yourself.

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What happened to ‘Never apologize, never explain’?

It was simultaneously excruciatingly embarrassing and highly entertaining to watch Calgary developer Cal Wenzel and his high-zoot PR team trying to wriggle off the hook for what he himself had said on a secretly recorded tape last November.

Alert readers will recall the recent Global News report from Cowtown that played the digital recording of Mr. Wenzel’s remarks at a Calgary builders’ bunfest, as well as Alberta Diary’s publication of the Manning Centre’s talking points about how to respond to Mr. Wenzel’s mention of their effort to unseat certain Calgary city councillors who are apparently too concerned about what their constituents want.

There’s no need for me to summarize Mr. Wenzel’s remarks when you can listen to them for yourselves.

Looking remarkably uncomfortable, like a man quite unused to being asked mean questions by insufficiently deferential reporters, Mr. Wenzel used his news conference yesterday to complain the spin put on his remarks was “wrong and hurtful,” assail the anonymous micro-videographer as a coward, and offer the opinion home-building ought to be “market driven and we seem to be under a social engineering program.”

The effect was unintentionally hilarious and tended to reinforce the very impression Mr. Wenzel was trying to put to rest.

It’s said here the money Mr. Wenzel put into his PR offensive was not well spent. He would have been better to say: “You’ve seen the tape. Judge for yourself what I meant. Now get lost!”

From the look of him, that’s what Mr. Wenzel thought, too, before his PR brainiacs talked him into the newser.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Is Chuck Strahl’s dual role on the Manning Centre and security committee appropriate?

by David Climenhaga on April 22, 2013 in Canadian Politics, Conservative Party of Canada, Manning Centre, Security & Intelligence, SIRC with 7 Comments

Chuck Strahl listens to a participant in the Manning Centre conference in Ottawa in March. Below: Manning Centre founder and figurehead, Preston Manning.

Should Chuck Strahl be able to serve simultaneously on the board of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, a partisan political organization tied to the ruling Conservative Party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other provincial conservative parties, and on the apolitical Security Intelligence Review Committee?

The SIRC is supposed to be, in the words of its website, “an independent, external review body which reports to the Parliament of Canada on the operations of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.”

“Parliament has given CSIS extraordinary powers to intrude on the privacy of individuals,” the website explains. “SIRC ensures that these powers are used legally and appropriately, in order to protect Canadians’ rights and freedoms.”

Mr. Strahl is a former Reform Party, Canadian Alliance and Conservative Member of Parliament from the British Columbia Interior who served as Deputy Speaker and held several cabinet portfolios during his political career. He retired from politics after the 2011 election and was appointed to a five-year term on the SIRC in June 2012. His biography on the committee’s site is open about his dual role, stating clearly that in 2011 he was appointed as a director of the Calgary-based Manning Centre.

As readers of this blog know, according to an email the group sent to its supporters, Mr. Strahl has now been appointed chair of the board of the Manning Centre, the organization founded and led by former Reform Party leader Preston Manning that works openly to keep the Harper Government in power and is now trying to extend the reach of neoliberal politicians into Canadian municipal governments.

Well, it’s still a relatively a free country, so the Manning Centre can call itself whatever it likes and work for the political outcomes it supports, but the question of whether the chair of this partisan organization’s board should serve in a sensitive and apolitical Parliamentary security review position is another matter entirely.

A claim by B.C. Premier Christy Clark last Wednesday that Mr. Strahl has been campaigning for her Liberal Party in the current election in that province has proved highly controversial and prompted swift backtracking by Ms. Clark.

The B.C. Conservative Party issued a press release Thursday stating Mr. Strahl was barred from campaigning in the election because of his membership on SIRC and demanding Ms. Clark apologize for saying he was doing so.

The Globe and Mail reported Ms. Clark quickly “clarified her statements,” explaining, “he has been active for the last two years and when he took on his non-partisan role just very recently, he stepped back from that.”

No doubt spokespeople for the Manning Centre will try to claim that organization is non-partisan too, but, really, how can they?

“The Manning Centre is dedicated to building Canada’s conservative movement,” the group’s website states. At the federal level, there is only one Conservative party. As the statements, speeches and participants at last March’s Manning Centre “Big Ideas” conference in Ottawa made perfectly clear, time and again, the “conservative movement” means Mr. Harper’s Conservative Party and, here in Alberta, the Wildrose Party of Danielle Smith. “Us” and “the Conservatives” meant the same thing for most participants in the conference.

For example, Mr. Manning staked out a partisan position in Alberta politics in one of his principal speeches, stating, “in Alberta an aging Progressive Conservative administration has lost its way ethically and fiscally and needs to be overhauled or replaced.”

Mr. Strahl, naturally given his position, attended the conference.

As for the Manning Centre’s foray into municipal politics, its so-called “Municipal Governance Project” is also a directly partisan activity whether or not the group is actually backing a slate or trying to unseat Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi. It is most certainly backing individual candidates, one or more of whom, presumably, may challenge Mr. Nenshi directly.

If it is inappropriate for Mr. Strahl to serve SIRC and work for the B.C. Liberals’ at the same time, surely it is equally inappropriate for him to have a similar dual role with the Manning Centre and SIRC.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The Annals of Digital Recording: ‘Preston is out of the country and cannot comment’

by David Climenhaga on April 20, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Canadian Politics, Manning Centre, Preston Manning with 9 Comments

Your blogger with Preston Manning, both exactly as illustrated, although, in fairness, Mr. Manning may not have known just who your blogger was. Then again, maybe he did. He did say something like, “Oh, you…” Below: Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Is somebody going around trying to pull a Mitt Romney on Preston Manning and the boys?

Mr. Romney, alert readers will recall, was the U.S. Republican presidential candidate who not so long ago was captured in a digital recording telling a bunch of well-wishers that, oh, about 47 per cent of the American population is made up of lazy bums so dependent on government handouts they’re willing to do anything – even vote for Barack Obama – to stay that way!

If you enjoy playing Clue, you’ll appreciate the irony that it was the Bartender, in the Dining Room, with a Cellphone, who did in Mr. Romney.

Now it would seem that some similarly inspired bright spark infiltrated a meeting of Calgary homebuilders last November and made an interesting recording. No doubt bartenders everywhere are praying the culprit of this latest outrage doesn’t turn out to be another bartender.

Anyway, here’s the exact text of an email sent Thursday by the Manning Centre for Building Democracy (sic), the right-wing boiler room established in Calgary by the former Reform Party leader and Mitt Romney soul mate to assist the spread of neoliberal doctrine into all corners of Canadian life, to some of its supporters:

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Dear participants,

We were contacted on April 17th by a Global News Calgary reporter who informed us that a meeting of Calgary home builders held last November had been secretly recorded.

We have not yet heard the actual recording, but we were told that a Manning donor is heard saying he had exceeded his maximum legal political contributions, as well as claiming that Calgary home builders hadbought the support of Preston Manning for over $1M in donations.

We understand that the story may run this evening.

Our Response:

  • The Manning Centre is indeed involved in the training of political candidates/campaign organizers in the upcoming municipal election – this should not come as a surprise.
  • The Municipal Governance Project adheres to the vision, mission, and values of the Centre, and is not directed by our donors.
  • Calgary is the pilot project for the Municipal Governance Project. However, the aim is to apply it across the country.
  • Preston is out the country and cannot comment.
  • Incoming Manning Centre chair Chuck Strahl is prepared to respond to media as needed in Preston’s absence.
  • If you have any question and would like to discuss this further, please contact Manning Centre Vice-President Dave Quist at 403.255.8100 or dquist@mcbd.ca.
  • All media enquiries are to be forwarded to Morten Paulsen (403.399.3377 or morten@paulsengroup.ca).

Olivier Ballou

Director of Communications

Manning Centre for Building Democracy

514 11 Avenue SW

Calgary, AB  T2R 0C8

www.manningcentre.ca

t  403.255.8100 x 564

c 613.720.0688

e  oballou@mcbd.ca

+ + +

The story or the video does not appear to have run on Global. I don’t know anything about this matter except what I read in the Manning Centre email that founds its way into my hands, so if you have any questions, I guess you’ll have to speak with Mr. Quist, the former executive director of the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, or Mr. Paulsen or Mr. Ballou.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Today’s weather: blue skies, seasonally adjusted temperature of Fahrenheit 78, not 451

by David Climenhaga on April 18, 2013 in Canadian Politics, Conservative Party of Canada, Propaganda with 6 Comments

You can’t trust anything you read on a website that is not coloured blue. This is important to remember. If you accidentally open a website that is not blue, turn your computer off immediately and dial 1-800-TORYBLU. Technicians like these will come to your house and help you reset it. Anyway, it shouldn’t take a weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blowing…

And now the weather forecast from Environm… I mean from the Harper Government of Canada… 

Good mooooorning Edmonton!

It’s going to be another beautiful day today – and I mean beautiful – with clear, Tory-blue skies and beautiful warm temperatures.

Pack up your winter coats, people! Just put ’em away! Because just like yesterday and the day before and the day before that, the seasonally adjusted temperature is a beautiful 78 degrees Fahrenheit!

And don’t worry, because this is a Conservative forecast, if you take my meaning!

Thank your lucky blue stars, Edmontonians, because none of this would have been possible without the government of our beautif… I mean, wonderful, Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, the Genius of the Laurentians! And his beautiful wife, of course.

Do you remember back when always used to be freezing this time of year?

Well, that never happens in Edmonton any more because your Harper Government of Canada doesn’t waste time and money collecting useless statistics and making dumb old forecasts that never turn our right anyway, and what’s more only used to remind you how the weather always used to be crappy this time of year!

And let’s not hear any of that trash talk about global warming because there is no such thing as global warming. Just try to find a statistic that supports it!

Where was I? Oh yeah, depressing Edmonton forecasts… Well, you can forget about them! You can leave your gumboots and cheap padded cotton jackets at home because it’s going to be a beautiful, glorious, warm spring day today – like we said, 78 degrees under the Great Big F, and no more of that Frenchiefied metric stuff either, seasonally adjusted.

The seasonally adjusted skies will be sunny and your seasonally adjusted mood will be upbeat and your seasonally adjusted inclination will be to vote for the Harper Team, every member of which is a normal person with a blue tie and nice cufflinks who would never, never do stripteases, on camera or off, and none of whom would even think of having anything wrong with their livers! People you can trust!

Sunny skies are great, people, because not only will you never need a coat again – which is a good thing, because your salary is going to have to go down like the temperatures used to go drop this time of year just to stay in line with what we’re paying the temporary foreign workers – but they’re needed so Laurie Hawn can fly his beautiful new radar-evading Royal Conservative Air Force (RCAF) F-35 back to Ottawa, where the sun is also shining and the seasonally adjusted temperature is also 78.

Instead of wasting money on boring old statistics – I mean, c’mon, people, who reads statistics? – we’ve put some of that money to work to build you a new Enviro… I mean, Harper Government of Canada weather website to serve you better!

And your weather website is blue, blue, blue – just like the beautiful skies over Edmonton tomorrow and every tomorrow ever after and just like our Maximum Prime Minister’s signs in the next election, speaking of which, don’t be surprised when the new automatic voting machines we’ll be putting in your polling place the year after next automatically correct your vote if you accidentally vote for a striptease artiste or a really, really angry old guy with a scraggly beard!

There are also lots of links to websites with good info on the many great ways Prime Minister Harper, the North Saskatchewan of Thought, is saving you money by painting the town blue. No more stupid long-form censuses, that’s for sure, just for starters.

Tomorrow’s forecast? More of the same! Sunshine, glorious Tory blue skies, just like the beautiful banner on our new weather website, and no need to bother with a coat ever again! And 78 degrees! Heck, if we’re lucky it might get up to 78! Or even 78!

If that’s not what the page shows right now, don’t trouble your pretty little heads about it. Our technicians will be working on just as soon as they can get to it.

Turning to this morning’s traffic, it’s smooth sailing through the streets of Edmonton again today. And I’ve got to say, people, our roads here are as smooth as a billiard table – if any of you can remember what a billiard table was – and there’s not a pothole in sight.

If the axel on your car broke, you’re obviously not maintaining it properly and you don’t deserve it anyway.

If you want information on your low taxes, which just keep getting lower and lower, especially if you drill a lot for oil, well, turn to the Revenue Canada web page, which is also blue – but never in a bad way!

And people, you can’t trust anything you read on a website that is not coloured blue. This is important to remember. If you accidentally open a website that is not blue, turn your computer off immediately and dial 1-800-TORYBLU. Our technicians will help you reset it.

Well, that’s enough of that. If there’s anything you can say about the Harper Government of Canada ™ it’s that there’s absolutely nothing subtle about them! This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Count on it: Alberta’s doctors got more than the government’s press release indicates

by David Climenhaga on April 16, 2013 in Alberta Medical Association, Alberta Politics, Canadian Politics, Labour Relations, Post-Secondary Education with 6 Comments

Dr. Michael Giuffre jots down the Alberta Medical Association’s wish list before yesterday’s agreement with the provincial government. Actual AMA negotiators may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne, Advanced Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk.

It will take a while to sort out what really happened in yesterday’s deal between the Redford Government and Alberta’s doctors, but you can count on it there’s more there than meets the eye.

Premier Alison Redford, Health Minister Fred Horne and Alberta Medical Association President Dr. Michael Giuffre were all smiles at a news conference in Calgary yesterday afternoon where they announced the seven-year agreement that will run from April 1, 2011, to March 31, 2018. The deal will give the physicians three years with no pay increase, followed by two years with 2.5-per-cent increases, then two years of cost of living adjustments.

This will allow the government or its proxies to go into negotiations with its public sector unions and say the teachers did it, now the docs have done it, so you’ll just have to take your zeroes too. Smile while you swallow your medicine.

It will also give the government a spell of “labour peace” that will last until well after the next provincial election with a group that’s made plenty of trouble in the past.

So what’s in it for the docs? The saw-off as it’s being described by the media is that the deal will let the doctors keep several generous programs that pad their bottom lines, give them a role in future consultations on how they are paid, provide the AMA with the comfort of what a real collective agreement would call a “union rights” clause, plus hand them a $68-million one-time lump sum that will “address various financial challenges faced by physician practices,” whatever that means.

But you can count on it that there’s more to this deal than meets the eye – and that the docs got far more than the media coverage or the government’s press release suggest.

The two-year-plus fight this agreement ends, it is said here, has always been about who controls the province’s health care system, the doctors or the government.

After this, without being able to read the fine print, it’s probably safe to put your money on the doctors.

+ + +

Programs and jobs go over the side as post-secondary education cuts start to bite

When progressive Alberta voters suddenly switched their votes in April 2013 from their traditional parties to Ms. Redford’s supposedly Progressive Conservatives, it’s unlikely they expected to trigger a wholesale attack on public post-secondary education. It certainly wasn’t what they wished for.

But thanks to Ms. Redford’s conveniently timed and already dissipating “Bitumen Bubble,” that is what they got.

In the latest episode, the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees revealed Friday that the budget attack on post-secondary education will result in elimination of paramedic, practical nursing and other programs at Lakeland College sites in Camrose, Lloydminster, Vermilion, and Edmonton. Lakeland’s American Sign Language training program will also go over the side.

The cuts at Lakeland will result in the loss of 60 jobs in those communities, including 20 teaching positions.

But the situation at Lakeland barely scratches the surface of what’s happening in post-secondary education as the Redford Conservatives – to whom progressive voters naively turned out of legitimate fear of what the seemingly more market fundamentalist Wildrose Party might do – move sharply back to the right.

The day before AUPE’s revelation, Advanced Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk met with the presidents of 26 post-secondary institutions, but refused to retreat from his plans for destructive budget cuts.

The government has hinted it will temporarily freeze tuition increases, which would keep students out of the streets and the whole fiasco out of the media.

Meanwhile, however, the post-secondaries are left to figure out how to trim millions from their budgets – $42-million at the University of Alberta alone, with entire programs like the U of A’s Master of Library and Information Services degree rumoured to be facing the chop.

In this atmosphere of gloom, faculty at Athabasca University exchanged bargaining proposals with their employer on last week. The university is seeking two years of salary and grid freezes, plus 10 days without pay.

Free spending university administrators, who have rewarded themselves generously in the past, are threatening layoffs if they don’t get their way – potentially a problem since one in seven Athabasca employees have already been laid off or bought out.

For its part, the faculty proposed a one-year agreement (July 1, 2013, to June 30, 2014) with a cost-of-living adjustment 2 per cent effective July 1. In 2010, teachers also took zero and five pay-free days.

Mr. Lukaszuk has said he thinks the answer is “creative solutions” to open up more post-secondary seats in Alberta. This has led to speculation he doesn’t understand the difference between “creative” and “imaginary.”

+ + +

Classless federal Tory attack ad likely to backfire

Liver disease may not be as sexy as heart disease or cancer when it comes to fund-raising, but the Canadian Liver Foundation gave Justin Trudeau a boost just the same on his first day on the job as Liberal leader by making it obvious just how cheesy that long-anticipated first Conservative attack ad was.

The classless ad released within minutes of Mr. Trudeau’s victory announcement yesterday showed the new Liberal leader slipping off his shirt and tried to imply that means he’s some kind of flaky kid.

The Liver Foundation pointed out in a Tweet that Mr. Trudeau was raising money for them in the clip: “We feel @JustinTrudeau should be applauded for his support of a serious health issue that affects 3.4 million Cdns,” the message said.

Now, this wasn’t quite as bad as the Kim Campbell Conservatives mocking Jean Chretien’s appearance back in 1993, but it’s likely to be about as effective.

It’s said here the Conservative smear machine’s broadsides against previous Liberal leaders Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff worked in large part because most Canadians knew very little about them when the sleaze machine set about to define them for us.

But Canadians, even those who don’t support him, have a much better picture of whom Mr. Trudeau is, what he stands for and what he’s usually doing when his shirt comes off. (Viz., raising money for charity, even if it means he has to beat the snot out of a Tory Senator.)

Moreover, we all expected the Tories to attack Mr. Trudeau on the grounds of inexperience – an odd strategy by a party led by a man like Prime Minister Stephen Harper who has never held a real job outside politics.

In this context, the ads are likely to flop as badly as Mr. Harper’s bizarre and muddled suggestion Mr. Trudeau is calling for lower taxes in China. Possibly, they even have the potential to flop as badly as Ms. Campbell’s election campaign, way back when.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Advice for Tom Mulcair and Justin Trudeau: Hammer Stephen Harper on the economy

by David Climenhaga on April 15, 2013 in Canadian Economy, Canadian Politics, Justin Trudeau, Oil Politics, Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair with 3 Comments

The neoliberal Harper economy at work: a Toronto street scene, last week. Below: Thomas Mulcair, Justin Trudeau, Stephen Harper and Margaret Thatcher.

Here’s some free advice for a couple of would-be Canadian prime ministers who are both in the news these days, the NDP’s Tom Mulcair and the Liberals’ Justin Trudeau: Hammer Prime Minister Stephen Harper on the economy.

Both of them were with their party faithful yesterday – Mr. Mulcair at the final day of the NDP’s policy convention in Montreal and Mr. Trudeau at his coronation as Liberal leader in the evening in Ottawa. Either of them, it is said here, has the potential to form the next government of Canada if the planets line up the right way.

But that means, to succeed, something is going to have to go wrong for Mr. Harper – because, as we pretty well all know, more often than not opposition parties don’t win elections so much as governments lose them.

And the strongest card in Mr. Harper’s hand right now is the economy – crazy as it may seem to readers of this blog, public opinion polling consistently shows voters trust him on it, and they don’t necessarily trust either opposition party as much on economic matters. Moreover, until recently the economy has been ticking along smoothly enough for government work.

As a result, though, the economy is also Mr. Harper’s greatest weakness.

The Big Three issues that matter to Canadians on just about every pollster’s radar screen nowadays are the economy, health care and the environment.

Combined with our sourpuss prime minister’s unappealing personality, they have the potential to add up to the Four Horsemen of the Tory Apocalypse – but it’s the economy that rides the pale horse!

These issues don’t always come up in the same order from poll to poll, but the economy will tend to bob to the top of the worry list whenever the real economy doesn’t seem to be doing as well as it ought. So it should concern the Mr. Harper’s so-called Conservative Party of Canada that so many Canadian public opinion surveys show concern about the economy trending upward as the economy itself softens.

As for hea

lth care and the environment, Canadians don’t trust the Harper Conservatives on either file – and with good reason, as their agenda on both is well known. Those agendas, it can be said with confidence, are to destroy public health care and ignore the environment, especially where either issue gets in the way of encouraging the pursuit of private profit.

Still, they’ll try – if only half-heartedly – to do better in those areas. Look for more fluff in the months ahead about “Green Conservatism” and more pledges not to mess with health care … at least until the next ginned-up economic crisis.

If the Harper Conservatives’ stewardship of the economy is not particularly sound in reality, they’re stuck with their approach because they view the funds it can raise as essential to their long-term effort to implement the other key planks in their plan for the political and economic deconstruction of Canada.

With only a few words changed, Tariq Ali’s brilliantly pithy assessment of Margaret Thatcher’s program in Britain could as easily be used to describe Mr. Harper’s plans for Canada today: “On the economy the Thatcherite model (astonishingly, still being praised by blind politicians in denial) was effectively the deindustrialization of the country, the purchase of working-class votes by squandering the monies that accrued from North Sea oil and laying the foundations for a financialized economic model that exploded with the Wall Street crash of 2008.”

Replace the worlds “North Sea oil” with “Alberta Oil Sands” and you’ve pretty much got the Harper scheme in a nutshell. No need to drop the term Thatcherite.

That’s why they’re in such a lather to complete those pipelines so quickly.

But as long as the economy is perceived to be burbling along as well as can be expected, the Harper Conservatives can likely cobble together enough votes between their die-hard market-fundamentalist and social conservative s

upporters and wet Tory voters fearful of upsetting the economic applecart.

Voters for whom either the environment or health care is the top-of-mind issue are much more likely to have figured out where the Harper Government really wants to go in these areas and hence are much less likely to vote for Conservatives.

Then there’s the matter of the PM’s personal popularity. As pollster Frank Graves put it in iPolitics Friday, Mr. Harper’s personal approval numbers are not particularly auspicious lately.

“…But he has shown considerable resilience in the face of such challenges in the past,” observed Mr. Graves, who is the founder and president of EKOS Research Associates Inc. “The more important threat to Mr. Harper is the state of public outlook on the economy – and its impact on how confident Canadians are that the country and the government are moving in the right direction. This is the challenge which – unaddressed – is most likely to be fatal to Mr. Harper’s future prospects.” (Italics added by me.)

“Numerous indicators show that concerns about the economy are the dominant concerns of Canadians and that long-term anxieties about our economic future are mounting,” Mr. Graves noted elsewhere in the piece. “The notion that we were the stalwart economic performer in the G8 has been displaced as our growth and growth forecasts have cooled substantially. There is a broad sense that the middle class (Mr. Harper’s prime political constituency) is in deep trouble. While they may be comforted by the thought that at least we aren’t Greece or Spain, the long grind of growing fears of economic stagnation – or worse, erosion – weigh heavily on an incumbent after a certain amount of time.”

I hope Mr. Graves will forgive me for quoting him at such length, but this is a key point. It’s not just that the economy is Mr. Harper’s greatest strength. It is his only strength.

This is why the Harperites “came out swinging” at Mr. Trudeau within moments of his victory last night – they have been swinging at Mr. Mulcair for some time, of course – mocking his famous name and claiming he lacks experience.

Well, good luck to them on that. Unlike Mr. Trudeau, who has been a teacher, their own leader is a political and Astroturf hack who has never held a “real job” in his life.

But both the Liberals and the New Democrats will do better not to rise to that bait but to attack Mr. Harper on the economic front instead.

Indeed, for the reasons noted above, it is axiomatic that his opponents attack him now, strongly, consistently and continually, on his current economic performance and its future economic potential.

Every doubt that can be raised about the ability of the Harper fundamentalists to manage the economy needs to be raised now – especially while the economy is clearly foundering – because the perception Tories are competent economic managers is the foundation that underlies Mr. Harper’s only chance of continued success.

The evidence is in: the Thatcherite market fundamentalism that Mr. Harper espouses is a cruel fraud. It has proved to be a catastrophe wherever it has been implemented. Even as we ponder this, it is hollowing out the economy of Central Canada and leaving future generations of Western Canadians with the bill for the environmental cost of financing his scheme.

Mr. Mulcair, Mr. Trudeau: Hammer him on the economy!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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