All posts in Stephen Harper

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.

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.

How far will Prime Minister Stephen Harper go with separatists to hang onto power?

by David Climenhaga on June 26, 2012 in Canadian Constitution, Canadian Politics, Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair, Wedge Politics with 4 Comments

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, left, with Parti Quebecois Leader Pauline Marois … or something very much like that. The politicians pictured above may not be exactly as illustrated in real life. Below: Thomas Mulcair, Jack Layton.

Now that our sullen neo-conservative prime minister is on speaking terms once again with former PM Brian Mulroney – in desperate hopes of staving off an eventual electoral disaster in Quebec at the hands of the federalist NDP leader, Thomas Mulcair – one wonders how long it will be before the Harper Government sits down to sup with separatists.

Sure enough, it was only a few hours after Mr. Harper’s meeting with Mr. Mulroney that Industry Minister Christian Paradis, the PM’s “Quebec lieutenant,” had proclaimed a rapprochement between the Harper Conservatives and the separatist Parti Quebecois. Details, it is reported, will follow.

What a catastrophe from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s perspective that he must eventually face an opponent who is both immensely popular in Quebec and a demonstrably a committed federalist!

Indeed, it can be persuasively argued that Mr. Mulcair is a much better federalist than Mr. Harper. Mr. Mulcair, after all, took a chance on the federal NDP at time when being anything but a sovereignist in Quebec looked like a recipe for electoral suicide. Mr. Harper is well known as a signatory to a sovereignist screed in Alberta that refuses to go peaceably down the Memory Hole, despite the best efforts of the Conservative media establishment here and elsewhere.

So now Mr. Harper, after long rejecting Mr. Mulroney as a political embarrassment over the Airbus Affair, has come hat in hand to his elder for some tips on how to make Quebec behave itself.

And one of the key secrets to Mr. Mulroney’s electoral success, as is well known, was his willingness to welcome Quebec nationalists into the federal Conservative fold.

This is not to suggest that Mr. Mulroney was making common cause with the separatist movement in Quebec for cynical reasons. On the contrary, the Conservative apologist Robert Fulford likely had it right when he stated that Mr. Mulroney “set out to bring permanent internal peace to Canada by dissolving the arguments for separatism.”

This is what drove the genuinely patriotic Mr. Mulroney’s efforts to recognize the reality that Quebec constitutes a “distinct society” within Canada, which culminated in the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords that had failed so irrevocably by 1992.

It was English Canada’s deep discomfort with recognizing that reality – with Mr. Mulroney’s vision of Canada as two nations in one country – that provided the wedge for the Reform Party under Preston Manning not only to defeat Mr. Mulroney’s constitutional proposals in a national referendum, but to set up the takeover by the Reform Party of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada in 2003.

There is no little irony in the reality these were the circumstances that allowed the rise of the American-influenced and ideologically fundamentalist wing of Canada’s conservative movement – eventually led by the steely eyed Mr. Harper after Mr. Manning and Stockwell Day proved insufficiently hard edged – to form the government.

And now the grip on the country by Mr. Harper and his fellow ideologues is weakening, in no small part because their neoconservative nostrums are so unconvincing to the people of Quebec.

But if Mr. Mulroney only welcomed Quebec nationalists to get them to become Canadian nationalists, can we trust Mr. Harper to be motivated by the same thing?

This seems unlikely. Mr. Harper’s (neo) Conservative Party, after all, is the one that has been willing to slap Quebec at every turn and on every issue – whether it’s support for the arts, the long-gun registry or military adventures abroad – the better to drive effective electoral wedges within English Canada.

This was the party that was prepared, for example, to scream that former Liberal leader Stephane Dion and the late NDP leader Jack Layton were “selling out to separatists” when they dared in 2008 to talk of a democratic coalition that would depend on votes from the sovereignist Bloc Quebecois, a story that has now been mostly purged from the Internet.

And this was the party whose MPs shouted down Quebec MP Gilles Duceppe, then the leader of the BQ, by singing O Canada when he tried to speak about the coalition in Parliament – a crude riposte that, quite literally, must have been music to the ears of Quebec’s die-hard separatists.

“This deal that the leader of the Liberal Party has made with the separatists is a betrayal of the voters of this country, a betrayal of the best interests of our economy, a betrayal of the best interests of our country, and we will fight it with every means that we have,” said Mr. Harper at the time. …But that was then.

Do you seriously think that facing a popular national NDP leader from Quebec with impeccable federalist credentials, Mr. Harper won’t take greater risks, drive deeper wedges, make more dangerous promises, make deals with anyone, in his efforts to keep his increasingly unpopular government afloat?

Yesterday’s grainy attack ad on Mr. Mulcair – almost a parody of itself – was one part of Mr. Harper’s strategy. Seeking out strange bedfellows is obviously another.

So will Mr. Harper sup with the separatists? It is said here he is bound to. And don’t count on him using a long spoon!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Be very afraid … Prime Minister Harper wants to woo Quebec!

by David Climenhaga on June 22, 2012 in Brian Mulroney, Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair, W.L. Mackenzie King with 9 Comments

Yikes! Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper: It’s always dangerous when Conservatives decide to counter threats to national unity. Below. W.L. Mackenzie King.

Be afraid! Be very afraid!

Why should you be afraid, you wonder? It’ll be right there on the front pages of tomorrow’s Alberta newspapers: Prime Minister Stephen Harper is heading to Quebec to, in the words of Postmedia News, “counter a potential threat to national unity.”

Now, it’s never a good thing in this country when Conservatives start messing with the national unity file. Those of us who were around at the time saw what happened when Brian Mulroney succumbed to this temptation – and Mr. Mulroney was reasonably well intentioned, at least as far as Quebec’s role in Confederation went.

But Mr. Harper, it is said here, is not all that well intentioned, and he sure as heck has a tin ear when it comes to what will play in la belle province.

But naturally our dour neo-Con prime minister wants to save his own political skin – what with Thomas Mulcair and the New Democratic Party continuing to hold onto their lead in Quebec public opinion – so this dangerous foray into French-speaking Canada was probably inevitable.

To hear Mr. Harper’s friends tell it, the PM merely has an image problem, and it’s not his fault. He’s practically the next William Lyon Mackenzie King, some of them say, an unloved but effective strategist.

“Party supporters say Quebecers generally agree with the Conservative government’s economic policies, but the problem comes from personal attacks and criticism directed at Harper that rarely draw a response from the government,” intoned the friendly Postmedia stenographer in what’s bound to typical of the coverage of the PM’s upcoming charm offensive – an oxymoron, come to think of it, that’s astonishingly appropriate for what is likely to happen.

But one of those friends had a more revelatory quote about the mood in Quebec: “People hate the guy,” Postmedia quoted a veteran Conservative organizer from Quebec explaining. “They really hate him. They think he’s got horns and a tail and eats babies, and I’m sure Harper has no idea that this is the case.” (Emphasis added.)

Sorry, but his doesn’t sound like Mackenzie King to me. The trouble, from the perspective of the prime minister’s professional spinners, is that it’s what the prime minister actually stands for that really seems to bug Quebeckers.

Remember, Mr. Harper and his coterie are the people who repeatedly told tout le monde Quebec to bug right off on the topic of the long-gun registry, and who indeed continue to do so, the better to play wedge politics in the last federal election and the next one. The arts? Ditto. Afghanistan? Ditto. F-35s? Ditto. The environment? Ditto. Neo-conservative economic calls for the privatization of everything? Well, maybe ditto there too, or at least enough agreement to get some good pot bashing going in certain parts of town on a Saturday night. And, yeah, I think you can add “Dutch Disease” to that list too.

Hell, maybe they don’t even like it in Quebec that this government seems determined to kick the crap out of refugees who wash up on our shores to win a few votes in some of the more backward corners of the West.

Let’s face it, Mr. Harper’s problem with Quebec may not be that the criticisms directed at him are unjustly effective – it may be that Quebec’s voters are actually paying attention to what he says and does!

Well, nobody’s going to accuse us of paying attention out here in Alberta! (Jason Kenney, c’mon down!)

What’s dangerous about this charm offensive is that it’s being mounted by the most divisive prime minister in Canadian history – quite willing to pit one region of the country against another for transitory electoral advantage. (And never mind his projecting his own strategies onto Mr. Mulcair, who had the temerity to speak the obvious truth about the impact of Canada’s petro-loonie on its manufacturing regions.)

Facing a tough and focused opponent for the first time in a spell, he’s likely to do or say anything to hang onto his majority.

Add this to his tone deafness on Quebec and his now-closeted history as a firewall-touting Western independentiste, something that’s bound to be useful to genuine Quebec separatists, and you can see how this adventure has the potential to end badly for everyone.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The trouble with A-Bombs: if the blast doesn’t get you, the fallout just might

by David Climenhaga on June 21, 2012 in Alison Redford, Danielle Smith, Fred Horne, Jason Kenney, Mike Harris, Preston Manning, Rob Anderson, Stephen Harper, Thomas Lukaszuk with No comments
A typical Canadian reads the news from the Ottawa Press Gallery while Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney sends another email in the background. Below: Wildrose Party House Leader Rob Anderson; former federal PC leaders Joe Clark and Peter MacKay discuss the interesting pod marked “Return to Preston Manning” they found outside a party meeting in 2002.

Dodging political fallout from his much publicized “A-Bomb” attack on Alberta’s deputy premier, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney was trying to persuade his credulous compatriots yesterday the relationship between Alberta’s many Conservative MPs and its similarly numerous Progressive Conservative MLAs is “phenomenally positive.”

Good one!

This just ain’t so, as everyone understands who is in the loop – a group that is quite large, although apparently not so big it includes the crème de la crème of the national media in Ottawa.

For this reason, we shouldn’t be astonished by scuttlebutt that several of the grandees of the Parliamentary Press Gallery for several days sat on Mr. Kenney’s A-Bomb email expressing his frank opinion of Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk while they debated whether or not he had actually intended to click “reply-all.”

Our national media doesn’t do a very good job of explaining the various parts of this country to one another, and from the perspective of some members of the Ottawa press gallery, this may not have seemed like such a big deal. Others, of course, are in on the conspiracy.

But – trust me, people – the deep and growing gulf between Premier Alison Redford’s PCs and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party is a big deal – big enough, at any rate, to have some implications for the rest of the country.

Airdrie-Chestermere MLA Rob Anderson, House leader of the rightward-tilting Wildrose Party, summed up reality most succinctly yesterday: “It’s clear that there aren’t great relations between Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s team and Premier Redford’s team,” he told the Edmonton Journal.

From Mr. Anderson’s perspective, this is knock on the Redford PCs. After all, from the Wildrose point of view, Mr. Harper’s grim ideological puritans have it right, and Ms. Redford’s idea that you can put a human face on capitalism is a shocking heresy.

But whether or not we accept the Wildrose viewpoint, Mr. Anderson called it bang on when he advised the Journal: “There are very, very few federal MPs that are supportive of the provincial Tories. … The vast majority are supportive of the Wildrose.”

Indeed, he accurately stated, “the provincial wing of the federal Conservative Party is the Wildrose, there is no doubt.”

Maybe it wasn’t wise of him to admit that the Wildrose Party is nothing more than a branch office of the federal Conservatives – increasingly dominated, as the federal branch is, by Mike Harris loyalists and other dead-enders from Ontario. After all, aren’t Albertans supposed to have a maverick streak of Western independent-mindedness?

But it is reality. Indeed, as was said in this space during the recent Alberta provincial election campaign, the Harper Government’s open support for the Wildrose Party was the elephant in the room. “A case can be made that at the strategic and technical levels, the federal and provincial neo-Con parties are virtually interchangeable,” I wrote on March 21. “This is a big change from the not-so-distant past when it was Alberta Conservatives at the provincial and federal levels who were essentially the same people.”

Mr. Harper’s party lent seasoned campaign staff and expertise to Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith and contributed candidates and workers from the ranks of federal Tory MPs’ staffs. Tory MPs endorsed individual Wildrose candidates and, in the closing days of the campaign when a Wildrose victory really seemed possible, Mr. Harper let loose his Alberta caucus to campaign openly on behalf of Ms. Smith’s party.

It is said here that this means we will increasingly see divergent approaches on many issues taken by the Redford Tories and the Harper Neo-Cons.

For example, beholden as they are to the Lake of Fire set, I doubt you ever would have seen the A typical Canadian reads the news from the Ottawa Press Gallery while Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney sends another email in the background. Below: Wildrose Party Deputy Leader Rob Anderson; former federal PC leaders Joe Clark and Peter MacKay discuss the interesting pod marked “Return to Preston Manning” they found outside a party meeting in 2002.Wildrose Party or their Harper Tory head office admitting, as Ms. Redford’s health minister did this week, that it was “derogatory and insulting” for Alberta Health to classify homosexuality as a mental illness in the province’s health care billing code. The code was changed at the end of last month, Fred Horne told the Whitecourt Star.

You can expect increasingly divergent positions on a variety of other funding and policy questions where in the past the Alberta Tories would have played ball – to the prime minister’s great distress. Indeed, they may even no longer be singing from the same hymnbook on pipeline development!

The upcoming nomination fight in the federal riding of Calgary Centre may also become the scene of a rumble between Redford and Harper Conservatives.

During the Alberta election campaign, Mr. Harper’s strategists clearly hoped to engineer a reverse takeover of the big-tent Alberta Tories, just as the far-right Reform Party under Preston Manning used the mechanism of the Canadian Alliance to colonize and destroy the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada during the Invasion of the Party Snatchers in 2003.

That they failed means Ms. Redford is likely to be premier until well after the next federal election, and with Mr. Kenney’s help the elephant in the room has undeniably materialized – large, betusked, red eyes glaring with hostility and quite possibly of a mind to stand by while a few more federal non-Conservatives are elected in Alberta.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Alberta Silly Season starts with fallout from Jason Kenney’s A-Bomb blast

by David Climenhaga on June 20, 2012 in Alison Redford, Blaine Calkins, Candice Malcolm, Danielle Smith, Ezra Levant, Graham Thomson, Jason Kenney, Peggy Anderson, Stephen Harper, Thomas Lukaszuk, Thomas Mulcair with 7 Comments
Federal Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, centre, with Public Safety Minister Victor Toews, left, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper, right, get ready to assure members of their party’s Alberta caucus they’ll be protected from a*****e visitors from their home province. Actual federal Tory ministers may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: The real Mr. Kenney, sort of, Thomas Lukaszuk and MP Blaine Calkins.

Here in Alberta, summer Silly Season arrived a few hours early with the revelation moments past midnight yesterday that federal Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney had dropped the A-Bomb on Thomas Lukaszuk, the province’s deputy premier.

“The A-Bomb,” of course, is a prissy euphemism for a seven-letter word beginning with A and ending with E that aptly describes the attitude of those federal Conservatives like Mr. Kenney who are working hard to bring the level of political discourse in Canada to historic new lows.

So “A-Bomb” is just the sort of squeamish circumlocution you’d expect from a fastidious old-timer who would try to “censor” Sun News Network commentator Ezra Levant’s foul-mouthed on-air eruptions or take exception to Mr. Kenney’s charmlessly frank assessment of Mr. Lukaszuk.

But there you go. Your blogger will now try to be up-to-date and in tune with the new neo-Conned Canada of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and tell readers exactly what was said by Mr. Kenney, who in addition to fulfilling the dual roles of Canada’s Chief Censor and Commissar of Ideological Purity is at 44 the country’s only known self-proclaimed 40-Year-Old Virgin.

To wit, apparently misunderstanding the purpose of the “reply all” button on his computer’s email application, Mr. Kenney sent to all the world the information that he thinks Mr. Lukaszuk is “a complete and utter asshole.”

According to Edmonton Journal political columnist Graham Thomson, who owns the scoop, Mr. Kenney was explaining in the email to the office of Wetaskawin MP Blaine Calkins, chairperson of the federal Conservatives’ Alberta caucus, why the distinguished federal minister wasn’t about to break bread with Mr. Lukaszuk when he visited Ottawa as part of Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s ongoing charm offensive.

This is a pity, because Mr. Lukaszuk had a short meeting with Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair during the New Democrat’s recent bitumen sands tour, after which he claimed after not to have been impressed with the NDP leader’s observations. Lunch with Mr. Kenney could have given him some Conservative intellectual firepower to compare and contrast with Mr. Mulcair’s. Plus, unlike his visit with Mr. Mulcair, they could have guiltlessly gone Dutch.

But Mr. Kenney’s response, sent to everyone in the Tories’ leaky federal caucus and all of their assistants, read: “I say a definite ‘no’ to Lukaszyk. (sic) I don’t think it makes sense to create a precedent to do a special caucus meeting for every visiting minister from the provincial government. Plus he is a complete and utter asshole.”

Now, I have met and interviewed both Mr. Lukaszuk and Mr. Kenney over the years and I can assure readers that Mr. Lukaszuk is not what Mr. Kenney described him to be. Indeed, the deputy premier’s measured and diplomatic response to the revelation illustrates this.

On a more serious level, though, Mr. Kenney’s unexpectedly public ejaculation and his perfunctory apology late yesterday illustrates just how deep and broad the rift has become between Prime Minister Harper’s Tea Party of Canada and Ms. Redford’s Alberta Progressive Conservatives.

Indeed, Mr. Kenney’s tepid apology came only after a full day of unexpected political fallout from his outburst, and, by the sound of it, a talking-to from the prime minister.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the Harperites despise Ms. Redford and her supporters – all the more so because of their embarrassing failure to push the neo-Con Wildrose Party under former Fraser Institute apparatchik Danielle Smith into power in the April 23 Alberta election.

Blogger Dave Cournoyer reminds us of Mr. Kenney’s connections to the Wildrose campaign. Mr. Kenney’s former spokesperson, Candice Malcolm, returned to Alberta to work for the Wildrose Party during the campaign. In addition, his Regional Affairs Director is Peggy Anderson, who was allied with Ms. Smith on the dysfunctional Calgary Board of Education from 1998 before then learning minister Lyle Oberg dissolved it in 1999.

Clearly, with Mr. Kenney firmly entrenched on the banks of the Rideau thanks to the inattentive voters of Calgary-Southeast, where he is actively working against Ms. Redford, the ambitious Alberta premier will need her Ottawa lobbying office to “advocate Alberta’s perspective on important federal and provincial matters,” as it was put in her government’s Throne Speech on May 24.

The fact a Conservative provincial government feels the need to create and staff an “ambassadorial” office in the Alberta-Tory-packed national capital brightly illuminates just what a bad job this province’s wall-to-wall Conservative MPs do for the Albertans they are elected to represent.

Alberta’s premier will no doubt breathe a private sigh of relief when Mr. Harper no longer heads the government of Canada, although she may leave the lobbying office in place for a spell to ensure better relations with whatever party replaces Mr. Harper’s potty-mouthed ideological puritans.

Indeed, Ms. Redford may then even give some thought to going to Ottawa herself – though not necessarily as the head of a mere lobbying group. Remember where you heard that first.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Sun News Network’s vulgar response reveals CBSC as toothless, demonstrates need for meaningful rules

by David Climenhaga on June 19, 2012 in Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, CRTC, Ezra Levant, Jason Kenney, Kory Teneycke, Lawrence Martin, Pierre Karl Péladeau, Stephen Harper, Sun News Network with 3 Comments
This Sun News Network truck has now moved on, obviously the result of your blogger’s bullying. Below: Ezra Levant assails the CSBC. Below that: Ezra Levant comments on the passing of NDP leader Jack Layton. Below that: Well, actually, it’s pretty hard to go any lower than that.

Radio and television network owners join groups like the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council to inoculate themselves against the possibility of actual regulation being enforced in the interests of Canadians, who own the airwaves from which these companies generate such handsome profits.

So the response by Sun News Network and its on-air commentator Ezra Levant to a ruling of the CBSC on June 13 censuring them for using on the air a Spanish profanity universally understood to mean “f**k your mother,” and for clearly identifying the individual at whom he directed this and other insults, is illuminating.

It is said here that Mr. Levant’s disrespectful response to the CBSC ruling, which was broadcast by Sun News Network the same day and which gleefully repeated the offensive phrase, clearly illustrates the confidence Canadian businesses generally have in their freedom from any regulation or enforcement by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa.

Moreover, it is said here that the Sun TV commentator’s vulgar response – which it is difficult to conclude did not have the full support and approval of the Sun News Network – indicates the absolute freedom this right-wing broadcasting network enjoys from the rules that apply to others, and indeed from normal standards of discourse and decency, as a result of its close connection with and support for Prime Minister Harper and his government.

It is a short and clear line, after all, that connects Mr. Harper to Sun News Network and its potty-mouthed commentator, who is well known for over-the-top commentary and grandstanding on the air and in print.

Kory Teneycke, once Mr. Harper’s spokesperson, later became “the point man for Quebecor’s Pierre Karl Péladeau in his effort to create a right-wing television network modelled along the lines of Fox News,” the Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin wrote in 2010. Today, of course, Quebecor is the parent company of both Sun News Network and the Sun Media national newspaper chain.

“The new network is a high priority for Mr. Harper, for whom controlling the message has always been – witness his government vetting program – of paramount importance,” Mr. Martin explained.

As for Mr. Levant, he is well known as a supporter of Mr. Harper’s Conservative Party. In 2002, he gave up the predecessor Canadian Alliance party’s nomination in the Calgary Southwest riding so that our esteemed prime minister could have a comfortable political home.

The June 13 ruling published by the CBSC’s four-member panel found the obscenity spoken on-air by Mr. Levant was a violation of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ Code of Ethics. Accordingly, under the rules it had agreed to as part of the voluntary organization, Sun News Network was required to read a statement on the air, twice, acknowledging that it had broken the organization’s rules.

Now, this may not seem like much of a punishment for Mr. Levant’s offensive commentary, but that after all is the point of organizations like the CBSC – to shield their members from the threat of meaningful enforcement of even minimum standards.

Nonetheless, this was apparently too much for Prime Minister Harper’s favourite network – whose commentator’s re-use of obscenity and open contempt for this industry self-regulation group was favourably touted in print and on-line stories by Sun Media’s newspaper division, complete with links to a recording of the broadcast.

This blog came in for particular vituperation on Mr. Levant’s program because it was acknowledged in this space that your blogger filed one of the 22 complaints received by the CBSC. This in turn was followed by a flurry of insults on various social media by some of Mr. Levant’s on-line supporters.

The substance of Mr. Levant’s broadside seemed in part to be that by accepting the CBSC’s invitation to make an on-line complaint about on-air behaviour and language I believed was inappropriate, I was a snitch and was attempting to “censor” Mr. Levant’s opinions, which no matter how ridiculous he has a right to express.

In addition – in a kind of backhanded compliment to the influence of this tiny, imperfect blog – Mr. Levant is accusing your 60-year-old blogger of being a bully. Readers are reminded that the person making this assertion is a political associate of our prime minister, well connected to the governing party and the star of a national TV program on which he is apparently able to toss insults and obscenities at people with whom he takes issue without restraint.

It should also be noted here that the complaint process used by the CBSC, as one might expect from an organization run voluntarily by broadcasters themselves, seems designed to discourage complaints. Certainly my first communications were deflected because they made reference to an on-line video, not an actual over-the-airwaves broadcast. I was subsequently asked if I was sure I wanted to make a formal complaint, and given every opportunity not to do so.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, by the way, the federal agency that should deal with complaints and enforcement of this type, will not do so, referring complaints instead to the CBSC.

While I have formally complained again to the CBSC about Mr. Levant’s June 13 commentary and I am sure other Canadians will do so too, it is abundantly clear the organization is toothless and its sanctions meaningless – even if, as is clearly not the case with the well-connected Sun News Network, its member broadcasters make an effort to play along.

Which brings us to the point of this post. If we are going to have civil standards of discourse on the airwaves that are owned by all Canadians, those airwaves need to be properly regulated by the government of Canada and not by a powerless self-regulating entity, no matter how well intentioned it may be.

This is obviously not a call or censorship, but merely for the enforcement of minimal standards of civility on a publicly owned resource.

Of course there is no hope of even marginal standards of civility being encouraged let alone enforced under a Harper Government, which encourages the decline of public discourse in order to turn young people, seniors and others who might not support its neo-conservative ideology off of voting altogether. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s just revealed “complete and utter” A-bomb, illuminates this tendency quite nicely.

Canadians who believe the F-Word and its foreign equivalents do not belong on the air during the afternoon and early evening, or who simply think that the same rules ought to apply to everyone in a democratic society, need to keep this in mind the next time they are asked to choose a federal government.

Acting on that understanding in the polling booth and in Parliament would be a better response to Sun News Network’s ugly on-air excesses than leaving it to a toothless industry self-regulator and hoping for the best, or, worse yet, adopting Mr. Levant’s repellent language and conduct in response.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Pesky people’s politics plague premier’s petroleum pipeline plans

by David Climenhaga on June 18, 2012 in Alison Redford, Christy Clark, Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline, Gleniffer Reservoir, Pipeline Leak, Stephen Harper, Stephen Hume, “Ethical Oil” with 2 Comments
The Gardner Canal, a Pacific Ocean inlet near Kitimat, B.C., planned terminus of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline. What’s in the project for British Columbians? Not much, and they know it. Below: B.C. Premier Christy Clark, Alberta Premier Alison Redford.

Premier Alison Redford’s biggest problem with Alberta’s leaky pipeline file isn’t really the breach that recently dripped 450,000 or so litres of light crude into the Gleniffer Reservoir, just upstream from the city of Red Deer.

For all the news that’s been generated in the past few days, and for all that its timing and location were far from ideal for the well-heeled folks who would like to build pipeline mega-projects hither and yon from Alberta, this particular leak will soon be forgotten.

The bitter fact is Alberta is crisscrossed with petroleum pipeline infrastructure – some of it pretty old – and somewhere it is leaking nasty stuff pretty much all the time.

As former Edmonton Journal managing editor Stephen Hume, now a semi-retired author in British Columbia where he grew up, warned British Columbians in the Vancouver Sun: “When enthusiasts for the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline project rush to hype the safety of pipeline technology and denounce doubters as part of some sinister conspiracy while scoffing at questions about risk as public hysteria, take it all with several pounds of salt.”

Now, Mr. Hume will no doubt be dissed and dismissed as a wrecker, a bully and a left-winger by the industry’s “Ethic Oil” shills – he is none of those things, of course, but that’s the fate that awaits pretty much anyone who talks back to these well-financed and well-connected propagandists.

But you can be confident he speaks the truth when he says, “oil spills, explosions, fires and toxic pollution as a consequence of ruptures are anything but exceptional. They still happen on an almost daily basis.”

But nowadays, if the leaks are noticed at all, there’s only a brief hit in the news, and then the story goes away.

In Alberta, too many people – and it must be acknowledged that includes many working people – are making too much money from oil for that to be very likely to change. About the best we can hope for here is that a decent monitoring system can be put in place to keep track of problems and nip them in the bud.

No, the biggest problem for Alberta, no matter which direction the new pipelines the government would like to build are pointed, is what happens in the jurisdictions the line needs to pass through.

And this is a particular problem for the Redford Government’s enthusiasm for the Enbridge Northern Gateway project, also beloved by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, because it runs through British Columbia, which has, to be blunt about it, very little to gain from the idea.

The pipeline industry that is pushing this project just doesn’t have much in the way of economic benefits for British Columbians it can promise to deliver. For if the pipeline is built, once the dust from the construction project has settled, there will be very few jobs and negligible economic spin-offs west of the Alberta border. What’s more, British Columbians of all political stripes know it.

This explains the obvious ambivalence of B.C. Premier Christy Clark, notwithstanding the presence in her inner circle of a well-known former Enbridge lobbyist, when she talks about the Northern Gateway proposal. In a recent CBC interview, she described it as “a balance of risk and benefit,” and then couldn’t think of any benefits. “…It would create almost no jobs in British Columbia,” she accurately observed.

On one hand, the deep-pocketed folks who finance her party’s campaigns are determined to see the pipeline built. It’s certain they’ve let her know that if her misnamed Liberal Party fails to deliver, there’s a so-called Conservative Party waiting in the provincial wings.

On the other hand, she also knows darned well the people of B.C. aren’t persuaded of the merits of the plan. With an election looming, and lagging far behind the NDP in the polls, it doesn’t take a PhD in political science to see that’s a problem for Ms. Clark.

Repeating the mantra that the polls were wrong about Ms. Redford isn’t likely to help her much either – unless some British Columbia New Democrat decides to start musing about the future inhabitants of the Lake of Fire.

And what, pray, can Ms. Redford do to persuade Ms. Clark to take a chance on the politically radioactive Enbridge proposal, at least before May 14, 2013, the fixed-election date the B.C. premier is pretty much locked into?

Even after the election, even if Ms. Clark’s B.C. Liberals manage to eke out an unexpected victory, the political circumstance of any party advocating a project that’s a no-win proposition for the province’s voters is likely to be a precarious one.

Which means Ms. Redford and her Alberta Progressive Conservatives are likely to continue have a frustrating time making their pipeline dreams come true, even though they totally dominate the political landscape of this province.

Unless, that is, there was something in Mr. Harper’s Bill C-38 making opposing the Enbridge Pipeline a criminal offence. Too bad that doesn’t sound like a joke any more in Mr. Harper’s Canada!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

It’s not necessarily the European economy running out of runway, it’s neo-Cons like Stephen Harper

by David Climenhaga on June 11, 2012 in Francoise Hollande, John Maynard Keynes, Paul Krugman, Preston Manning, Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair, Thomas Walkom with 2 Comments
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper warns his countrymen about the fate awaiting Europe if it doesn’t crush unions and eliminate defined-benefit pension plans. Canadian Conservatives may not appear exactly as illustrated, but pretty close. Below: Francoise Hollande, John Maynard Keynes and Thomas Mulcair.

With the anticipated triumph of France’s Socialists obviously weighing heavily on his mind, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has donned the robes of an Old Testament prophet and taken to making apocalyptic predictions about the fate of Europe.

Europe is running out of runway, the Prophet Harper warned us last week, conjuring up the picture of a flaming plane wreck at the edge of the airport. Or maybe the picture is of the crash of a flaming wheel within a wheel!

Whatever… Europe’s in trouble all right, but because it’s been enacting the neo-Con “solutions” Mr. Harper and his fellow market-fundamentalist ideologues propose, not because France is sensibly turning away from them.

Thanks to the success of his Socialists in yesterday’s French elections, recently elected President Francoise Hollande should have the mandate he needs to push through bold stimulus policies instead of the destructive market-fundamentalism favoured by France’s previous president and Canada’s so-called Conservatives.

Toronto Star national affairs columnist Thomas Walkom recently suggested Mr. Harper’s comments mean our sour neo-Con prime minister is preparing us for the punishing regime he intends to impose on Canada in the months ahead. “This time around, his government won’t respond with another stimulus package to boost jobs,” the Star correspondent wrote. “Instead, Ottawa will forge ahead with its current strategy of deregulation and wage reduction, a strategy aimed at reducing costs for business.”

In other words, Mr. Walkom concluded, the PM’s “brief flirtation with Keynesian economics is over and he is reverting to the Harper of old.”

Now, let it be said that this is a perfectly reasonable explanation for Mr. Harper’s behaviour, entirely in character with what we know about the man and his core beliefs – which are quite capable of withstanding both logic and empirical evidence. It doesn’t take a professional “mentalist” to figure that out.

Still, taking into account the principle of Occam’s Razor – that is, that the simplest explanation is usually the right one – it seems more likely that Mr. Harper’s petulant outburst was merely the public expression of his fear that the French Socialists’ plan might actually work.

Where will he and his bench mates from the Conservative Party of Canada (Manningite-Harperist) be then?

How’s he going to keep us down on the farm now that we’ve seen Paree – especially if the Socialists in power in that city manage to restore their economy to health using the Keynesian economic techniques our prime minister and other followers of his primitive 19th Century economic cult despise as heresy?

This is a particularly upsetting state of affairs for Mr. Harper given the increasing popularity of his opponents in the House of Commons – New Democrats led by Thomas Mulcair who advocate roughly the same economic approach as is likely to be adopted by President Hollande.

After all, the historic success rate of the ideas of the British economist John Maynard Keynes is actually pretty good. If they work again in France – grind his teeth and tear his garments though the Canadian prime minister may – Canadians might just conclude the solution to their problems is political, not economic.

As Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman observed recently about the economic problems in Europe and North America: “None of this has to be happening. We didn’t have a plague of locusts, we were not hit by a tsunami, there wasn’t some act of God that created this terrible situation. It was acts of man.”

Men like Stephen Harper, as a matter of fact.

Under these particular circumstances, if more Canadians start to see Mr. Mulcair as the obvious solution to their political problem with Mr. Harper, even the Opposition leader’s famous French passport won’t help the Conservatives!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Harper Conservative response to NDP seems delusional – and apparently ineffective

by David Climenhaga on June 9, 2012 in Conservative Party of Canada, Dutch Disease, Jim Flaharty, Nanos Research, NDP, Nik Nanos, Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair with 4 Comments
The Conservative Party’s Parliamentary brain trust figures out how to respond to Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair during Question Period. Below: Nik Nanos.

No one should be particularly shocked that yelps of protest by western premiers and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in Ottawa have failed to dent support for the Opposition New Democrats after they dared speak the evident truth about the economic impact of Canada’s muscular petro-Loonie.

Indeed, according a reasonable analysis of the Nanos Research poll published yesterday by the Globe and Mail, screeches by various conservatives may have even helped Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair and the NDP Opposition.

In an interview with iPolitics, pollster Nik Nanos suggested Mr. Mulcair’s original reference to the effects of “Dutch Disease” on the Canadian economy was no gaffe – as repeatedly claimed by mainstream media commentators playing the role of the PM’s Greek chorus – but “should be seen as part of a longer-term plan that has broken the NDP’s strategic mold.”

Mr. Nanos argued in the interview that while the NDP once tried consistently to appeal to a broad range of Canadians, now Mr. Mulcair “seems ready to ‘take a page from Harper’ and focus on segments that he has a chance to bring on side.” In other words, practice wedge politics.

Well, it could be. New Democrats certainly chose Mr. Mulcair as someone who would play politics like a grownup. But it may also be simply that the Harper Conservative strategy on this issue to date has been so laughably crude most Canadians see right through it.

Given the astonishing lack of sophistication of the recent Conservative attacks in the House of Commons, Canadians may, in fact, find Mr. Mulcair’s plain talk refreshing!

Meanwhile, voters outside the two main petro-provinces may actually see the hysterical response by these Prairie conservatives as evidence of their self-interest, and indeed as affirmation of Mr. Mulcair’s arguments.

Really, it takes a lot of brass for the Harper Cons to claim their main opponent is dividing the country by stating an observation that makes eminent sense to Canadians in every part of Canada except those corners of the Prairies awash in petro-cash. This is especially so when the Conservatives are running the most openly divisive government in Canadian history.

As has been said before in this space, the severity of the problem can be disputed, as can the best solution, but acknowledgement of the impact of oilsands development on the dollar, or the strength of the dollar on the country’s manufacturing sector, is apparent to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of economics or a hankering to travel to the United States.

Moreover, instead of just sticking to this factually wrong but faintly plausible storyline, the Harper Government’s claims have grown more delirious by the day.

Mr. Mulcair calls oil patch workers themselves a disease, some Tory claims without a shred of evidence. Mr. Mulcair has a specific date in mind to close down Alberta’s bitumen sands, another one chimes in, failing to provide a hint of substantiation.

Where do they get this stuff? Does anyone believe them? (Other than the plethora of conservative commentators in the mainstream media, that is.)

Never mind Dutch Disease, the Tories apparently make stuff up out of whole cloth on any topic.

When Mr. Mulcair asked a Question in the House Thursday about the prime minister’s unexpected ramblings about the shortness of the European runway if neo-Con economic bromides are not adopted with alacrity, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty responded by pretending the Opposition leader wants to give money to the Europeans.

Since there’s no evidence whatsoever Mr. Mulcair ever said any such thing, presumably the finance minister just made it up.

We ought not to be too smug about this. Eventually, the deep-pocketed Harperites will turn responsibility for sliming Mr. Mulcair and the NDP over to their highly competent propaganda professionals, and the results will be neither pretty nor ineffective.

The form the NDP response takes will tell the story of how successful the Tory onslaught proves to be.

But for the moment, watching the supposedly cunning and devious Harper Conservatives unravel into pathological delusions and pathetically transparent fantasies is a highly salutary experience.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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