All posts tagged Brian Mulroney

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.

Wicked Witch war of words: ‘Has Thatcher bashing crossed a line?’ Well, er… no!

by David Climenhaga on April 13, 2013 in Canadian Politics, Ezra Levant, Freedom of Expression, Margaret Thatcher, Neoconservatism, Ralph Klein with 13 Comments

The Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz. Below, Ezra Levant in an orange wig with a can of Orange Crush mocks Jack Layton’s funeral. RIP or give it a rest?

Oh my – quelle horreur! – naughty Britons still appalled by the depredations visited upon their country by Margaret Thatcher’s government have shocked and appalled the world by pushing “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead!” to the top of the charts.

In case you missed it, the former British prime minister, who was in office from 1979 to 1990, died on Monday at 87. But it took until yesterday for the song from the Wizard of Oz – an apt metaphor itself for the operational side of neocon governments everywhere – to mischievously reach No. 1 on the British Broadcasting Corp.’s weekly music chart.

The right-wing media in Britain and, quite naturally, here at home in the colonies were full of opprobrium for the posthumous protest that cheekily pushed Ding Dong! to the top.

But really, given the misery the neoliberal project championed by Mrs. Thatcher and the likes of Ronald Reagan and Canada’s own Brian Mulroney has created throughout the world – consigning half the population of the planet to the status “surplus humanity” for the convenience of the 1 per cent – I’m surprised it took this long, and that the commentary has been this humourous and mild. (I mean, other than what Respect MP George Galloway had to say.)

We have a tradition – or maybe it’s a taboo – here in the West that one ought not to speak ill of the dead. But this needs to be treated with the proverbial grain of salt when it comes to politicians, even freshly dead ones, when the hagiography begins before they’re even planted in the ground.

Of course, the people penning hagiographies are bound to try to use this cultural squeamishness about speaking frankly with the goal of suppressing all criticism of the policies of the people they are deifying – as is most certainly happening now with Mrs. Thatcher and as happened last month here in Alberta upon the death of Ralph Klein.

This is especially true in the case of people like Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Klein whose noxious neoliberal policies continue to be enthusiastically proselytized by politicians of the right despite their unremitting record of economic and social failure.

This, in turn, is important because, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out in the Guardian, “those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized.”

So they need to be countered, and quickly – and it does no harm if this is done with a touch of humour.

Here at home, naturally, universally right-wing media coverage of this brouhaha has mostly taken on the tone of “more in sadness than in anger,” with a heaping side dish of “we just don’t do that sort of thing in Canada.”

Yet, in fact, we do. It’s just that we rarely do it when the likes of Mrs. Thatcher, Mr. Reagan or Mr. Klein pass on to whatever reward awaits them.

On the other hand, never forget, if the recently dead political figure is someone on the left, one can say pretty much whatever one feels like and not invoke the supposed taboo.

And I’m not just speaking of press coverage of the death of Hugo Chavez here – although he’s a perfectly good example of this phenomenon in the Canadian media.

Who can forget Sun News Network TV commentator Ezra Levant marking the death of NDP leader Jack Layton in 2011 by donning an orange wig and sipping Orange Crush while exchanging mocking repartee with that great public intellectual Michael Coren?

The typical tastelessness of Mr. Levant’s display notwithstanding, what he had to say about Mr. Layton is directly applicable to those on the right who today purport to be horrified by even the mildest criticism of Mrs. Thatcher’s dark history.

“At what point,” asked Mr. Levant, “does somebody say, you’re putting that body on a bloody campaign tour? At what point does someone say, how many spin doctors … are allowed to set up a funeral before we say, ‘You’re getting creepy, guy?’”

“At what point do we say … this is a macabre attempt to, I dunno, bring back some political spirit from the dead,” he went on, noting that, “if I am not sufficiently deferential … if I am not being obedient and super polite, oh, they just open the sewer pipe.”

On this, for once, I think Mr. Levant basically got the principle right.

There can be very little doubt those who support the continued neoliberal project are using the death of Mrs. Thatcher to bring back a political spirit from the dead, and using our traditions of respect for the dead to open the sewer pipes if we dare to mention the obvious.

So in response to the Edmonton Journal’s timorous headline writer, who asked, “Has Thatcher-bashing crossed a line?” the answer is, “I’m afraid not.”

Cue the music!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Idle No More protests successfully wind up Alberta solicitor general

by David Climenhaga on January 21, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Idle No More with 4 Comments

Alberta Solicitor General and Justice Minister Jonathan Denis, right, reacts to word of an Idle No More road blockade while Calgary Sun columnist Rick Bell looks on. Actual Alberta politicians and commentators may not appear precisely as illustrated. Below: the real Denis the Menace before he popped a gasket and the real Dinger.

Surprising as this may seem to alert readers in other parts of the country, protest is in fact permitted out here in Alberta. However, like strikes by unionized workers, it is usually only allowed if it’s completely ineffective.

So it should be easy for us to understand the anger and bewilderment, no matter how crudely expressed, of Alberta Solicitor General and Justice Minister Jonathan Denis, who was “pissed off” at Alberta’s Idle No More protesters for, quelle horreur, delaying pickup trucks for a few minutes.

After all, the Idle No More protesters actually succeeded in capturing our attention for a few minutes last Wednesday, and that means their protest worked. As Mr. Denis didn’t quite explain, that’s not supposed to happen here in Alberta!

That became a big problem for Mr. Denis, apparently, because nowadays all those PO’d guys have cell phones in their trucks!

Mr. Denis, a coruscating legalist from Calgary before his election as MLA for Calgary-Acadia and subsequent elevation to cabinet, was quite offended that local law enforcers worked with the Aboriginal protesters and their supporters last week to keep the peace and ensure public safety during the two brief protest blockades in the Edmonton area.

The man the Calgary Sun risibly refers to as Alberta’s “top cop” – he’s no more a cop than I am, regardless of whom comes under his cabinet portfolio – seems to think the police ought to have been in there swinging truncheons and putting the boots to the peaceful protesters.

Because, you know, just the thought of someone getting between a pissed off person in a pickup truck and an open road he (or she, as it happened) is anxious to speed down is almost enough to give a fellow palpitations! God help us if Mr. Denis himself had come upon the 15-minute smudge ceremony on St. Albert Trail or the two-hour slowdown on Highway 2 just south of town. Given a provocation like that, he might have been tempted to ram an RCMP cruiser himself!

Well, I’ll admit to feeling a certain empathy for Mr. Denis – as my unhappy passengers will attest, I spend my days behind the wheel directing abuse at trucks and buses that move too slowly, swearing at trains that have the temerity to use level crossings I’m planning to cross, grumbling at pedestrians, cyclists and other cars for their very presence in my path, cursing potholes and the municipalities that don’t fix ’em fast enough, and so on.

So I’m not entirely unsympathetic to the notion that anything that keeps a fellow from his appointed rounds via his preferred route is a legitimate cause for some serious griping – although I’m not about to risk a fine and violate Alberta’s new distracted-driving law by phoning Mr. Denis up about it.

It’s only when you operate your mouth in public without engaging your brain that this kind of thing can be a problem. This is especially so if the local right-wing news network is hanging on your every word and making you think that just because you have something to say means you’re smrt.

So, Mr. Denis told Calgary Sun columnist Rick Bell, not only is he “pissed off” at the protesters (his words, so don’t blame me!), but so are nine out of 10 of the people who call him. Well, duh! Would a reasonable person bother to call about this? (The answer to that is no. A reasonable person would be listening to the traffic report on the radio and would have taken another route home, as I did, as a matter of fact.)

“I’m prepared to face this issue head on with the police when I meet them on Monday,” Mr. Denis told Mr. Bell, who is known as The Dinger after the noise a bell makes, but who in my opinion ought to be called The Clapper, after the part of the bell that does the dinging as well as for the way he encourages right-wing politicians to agree with him. Just saying…

“Oh crap, I wonder if I can phone in sick,” senior police officers all over the city must have mumbled to their spouses when they heard about The Dinger’s column.

“People’s patience is wearing thin,” Mr. Denis rambled on – what? After one day of protest? “They respect the right of individuals to peacefully protest in a democracy but when you start blockading a roadway, it’s going too far. There is a right to peaceful assembly but there are limits.” (Emphasis added for humourous effect.)

Yeah, yeah… In Alberta, as previously noted, there’s been a longstanding limit on doing things that are effective, that can’t be easily ignored, that actually get people’s attention – like making them slow down for a few minutes and think about a problem.

So I’ve got a bulletin for Mr. Denis: Sometimes you have to inconvenience people to get anything fixed around here. And with a bunch of Albertans running the show in Ottawa, that goes for the rest of the country too. From the perspective of the Idle No More protesters, the last couple of hundred years of being polite don’t seem to have been terribly effective.

Indeed, you could make a case that the last time First Nations people negotiated a deal to which they could hold Canadians – the very treaties the government of Stephen Harper is now trying to gut through legislative sleight of hand – was the last time they were in a position to inconvenience the colonial authorities.

So we signed a deal in perpetuity – the deal, for all its imperfections, that Mr. Harper would now like to sidestep.

As former prime minister Brian Mulroney told the same news network soon after Mr. Denis was blowing off steam, it’s not all that surprising Aboriginal Canadians are protesting these attacks on their treaty rights, especially in light of Canada’s dismal record to date in its dealings with its First Nations.

Unfortunately, it was impossible to understand from the Sun’s “exclusive” story just what Mr. Mulroney proposes ought to be done – which at least raises the possibility that it’s not the same as Mr. Harper’s neoconservative agenda, which the Sun News Network exists to promote.

That wasn’t the problem with Mr. Bell’s account of Mr. Denis’s opinions, however, which seemed perfectly clear.

Fortunately, as Mr. Denis himself appeared to realize, since he’s not really the top cop, or even the top deputy, he can make suggestions like the rest of us, but he can’t actually tell the police what to do.

So my suggestion for the Mounties, Edmonton Police Service and Alberta Sheriffs who have to protect public safety when there are public demonstrations – effective or otherwise – is that they simply ignore Mr. Denis.

If he calms down and thinks about it, he might even thank them. Then again, this is Alberta…

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Order of Canada for Stevie Cameron sets the right tone for the coming Year of Mulroney

by David Climenhaga on December 31, 2012 in Brian Mulroney, Canadian Politics, Lobbying with 5 Comments

Happy New Year … and this time I mean it! Author and cook Stevie Cameron wearing the official regalia of a member of the Order of Canada. Actual Order of Canada recipients may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: The real Ms. Cameron; Brian Mulroney, the 18th prime minister of Canada, wearing his OiC pin in his official portrait by Igor Babailov, which kind of captures the guy, you have to admit.

What a delightful and ironic twist on which to end one year and start another was the announcement yesterday that Stevie Cameron had been awarded the Order of Canada!

And here I thought I was finished writing about – or at least during – 2012, with my bloviations yesterday on the future of Alberta’s NDP.

Ms. Cameron’s appointment on the cusp of 2013 makes up for some of the rather inferior choices by the committee that has picked the Order’s recipients over the past few decades. (You all know who I have in mind, I’m sure.)

Now, Ms. Cameron was supposedly given “Canada’s highest civilian honour” for her work as a philanthropist and a chef, but we all know better, surely?

The fact that Ms. Cameron strove to drive a stake (metaphorically speaking) through former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s Conservative heart must have been factored into this decision – if only at the committee’s subconscious level.

Alert readers will recall that Ms. Cameron is also a journalist and author, who wrote about Mr. Mulroney at some length in her 1994 tome, On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years.

For some reason, the Toronto Star did not mention this notable fact of authorship in its summary of this year’s excellent crop of OiC winners, a list that also includes former Liberal Deputy PM Sheila Copps, former Newfoundland Liberal premier Brian Tobin, former B.C. NDP premier Mike Harcourt and pianist Jane Coop.

But who can forget On the Take, which Amazon.com describes on its sales site to this day as the “stunning expose of greed and crime in the Mulroney era” that “confirmed and detailed” the “widespread corruption the public suspected during Brian Mulroney’s regime”?

Mr. Mulroney and his many supporters of course vigorously dispute this assessment by the editors at Amazon – a fact that leads us to the irony in Ms. Cameron’s elevation to the heights of Member of the Order of Canada. For 2013, whether we like it or not, is surely bound to be the Year of Brian Mulroney.

That is, 2013 will be the year that Mr. Mulroney – a Companion of the Order, its highest rank, since 1998 – will almost certainly subject Canadians to the full-court press in his tireless campaign to salvage his tattered reputation before the final judgment of history is rendered. (The court referred to in this expression, I am reasonably certain, is the kind on which one plays tennis, not the kind Mr. Mulroney’s former associate Karlheinz Schreiber appealed to in hopes of not being extradited back to Germany to face accusations of tax evasion.)

Mr. Mulroney will do this, as has been previously reported in this space, with the able assistance of the professional lobbyists at the Earnscliffe Strategy Group, many of whom have past associations with the former PM.

For her part, Ms. Cameron has a fairly low opinion of Mr. Mulroney. She once told an interviewer she’d really rather write about serial killers.

That cruel assessment notwithstanding, Mr. Mulroney did some things right, and history should recognize his achievements.

But his record, in toto, is hardly universally lustrous. Perhaps Ms. Cameron’s appointment to the Order of Canada late in 2012 can remind us, at those moments in 2013 when the 18th prime minster of Canada positively seems to glow, that may be because a group of professional lobbyists are shining us on.

Again, Happy New Year! And Happy New Year to you, Stevie!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The rehabilitation of Brian Mulroney: There’s a reason he’s looking so good these days

by David Climenhaga on October 9, 2012 in Brian Mulroney, Canadian Politics with 5 Comments

Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney in his heyday, grabbed from the website of Libraries and Archives Canada, and doesn’t he just look terrific! Below: Mr. Mulroney as he appears nowadays; Earnscliffe Strategies Principal Robin Sears.

Have you noticed how Brian Mulroney is looking pretty good lately?

Back in the day, after Mr. Mulroney left office in 1993 as the Conservative prime minister who brought us “free” trade, failed constitutional change and sundry other disasters, real and imagined, he could have been fairly described as the most unpopular man in Canada.

And that was before the sleazy sounding but never proven allegations made the rounds about whatever the heck was going on between the former prime minister and Karlheinz Schreiber, plus those envelopes of cash and those airliners.

Mr. Mulroney’s replacement to lead the then-still-Progressive Conservative Party to another term in government, the hapless British Columbian Kim Campbell, was swept from the board by angry voters along with all but two of the party’s Members of Parliament.

Canadians were particularly incensed by a comment of Mr. Mulroney’s that he had “rolled the dice” by deliberately timing a first ministers’ conference on constitutional change in 1990 to provoke a sense of crisis.

A long (and some might say happy) period of Liberal rule followed in Ottawa. Alas, it also paved the way for the hostile takeover of the PC Party by the Reform Party of Canada in the Invasion of the Party Snatchers of 2003, spelling the end of traditional Conservatism in Canada.

Mr. Mulroney is now 73, and all of a sudden our assessment of the man is changing for the better, and changing quickly.

Well, people, this isn’t just happening. There’s a major campaign under way to improve Mr. Mulroney’s image for posterity. It has to be costing big money and it may have an agenda that’s bigger than just history’s view of Mr. Mulroney.

Indeed, while I can find no direct confirmation with my primitive Googling skills, the footprints in the snow strongly suggest Mr. Mulroney has either hired Earnscliffe Strategy Group, a high-powered Ottawa lobbying house with ties that go back to his government, or that Earnscliffe is working to rehabilitate Mr. Mulroney’s reputation for some other reason.

Perhaps it is just motivated by friendship and loyalty. Two Mulroney insiders – Bill Fox, his former press secretary, and Harry Near, his campaign manager in 1984 and 1988 – played key roles in the establishment of Earnscliffe.

Whatever it is, though, Mr. Mulroney’s reputation certainly has a new shine on it, and Earnscliffe is clearly involved.

First there was that long and balanced, but ultimately positive story about Mr. Mulroney in the Globe and Mail back on Oct. 1. The opinion piece was written by Robin Sears, the former national director of the New Democratic Party. Mr. Sears’s current role? Why, he’s a “principal” of the Earnscliffe Group, of course.

On Oct. 3, the Canadian Diabetes Association sent out a “media advisory” noting that it would be the beneficiary of a tribute dinner for former prime minister Mulroney. Mr. Mulroney would be the featured speaker at the dinner that night, which was timed to mark the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement, the news release noted.

“The net proceeds for the event will be donated to the association to help lead the fight against diabetes by helping people with diabetes live healthy lives while working to find a cure,” said the release, and you have to agree that was a nice thing for Mr. Mulroney to do.

The contact on the bottom of the release for journalists who wanted more information? Well, in addition to someone from the Diabetes Association, it was none other than Mr. Sears of Earnscliffe.

On Oct. 4, Mr. Mulroney held a meeting with the editorial board of the Globe and Mail, which prompted some very kindly reviews. For example, under the headline “Brian Mulroney’s lasting legacy,” a fawning Globe and Mail editorial stated that for free trade, “Mr. Mulroney deserves a great deal of credit.”

“His willingness to roll the dice made all the difference,” the Globe’s smart-aleck editorialist added cleverly, presumably assuming the rest of us have long forgotten about Mr. Mulroney’s original use of the phrase and Canadians’ reaction to it.

The Globe’s editorial writer didn’t see fit to tell us what Earnscliffe’s role, if any, was in setting up that meeting. Nor did the Globe reporter who wrote a friendly news story on the event. But here’s a confident bet that Earnscliffe was involved.

Two days after the anniversary, better a little late than never, Postmedia News published a similarly supportive piece by L. Ian MacDonald, editor of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s house publication, which contains a story on the negotiations by Mr. Mulroney himself. Mr. MacDonald’s conclusion, like that of Mr. Mulroney in his own piece, was that free trade has been a resounding success.

None of this may be news to Parliamentary insiders, of course. But it is to most of us who just pick up our papers or read them online out here in the hinterland and wonder, “Gee, maybe we did misjudge that Mulroney fellow.”

Did we? My guess is that history will be a little kinder to Mr. Mulroney than most Canadians were at the time he left office. Indeed, it’s been said in this space that he was probably right about the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, though it hardly seemed so at the time.

But will it be as kind as the Globe and Mail and Postmedia News writers with their paeans to the benefits of freeish trade deals? This is highly doubtful. Indeed, historians may mark Mr. Mulroney’s NAFTA as the beginning of the end of Canada as a sovereign nation, a trend the current Harperist government in Ottawa seems determined to accelerate.

Beyond the former Conservative prime minister’s own understandable desire to repair his still-tarnished reputation, this is what likely lies behind the full-court press to rehabilitate Mr. Mulroney.

The Globe’s editorial ended with a call for new rounds of free-trade negotiations with Europe, East Asia and beyond. It emphasized the need to end “agricultural protectionism” – a veiled shot at Canada’s supply management of dairy, poultry and eggs. It suggested no one should worry about that, though, because all will be well thanks to “generous phase-out provisions.” And it advised us that “in light of the challenges facing Canada today, it’s important to recall Mr. Mulroney’s example.”

In other words, it is said here, free trade and globalization, and the bogus sense of crisis and attacks on working people that go with them, are at the base of the full-blown professionally organized campaign to rehabilitate Mr. Mulroney’s reputation.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

XL Foods, Tories and a frightened, politicized inspection agency offer a textbook case of brand destruction

by David Climenhaga on October 8, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Branding, Canadian Politics, Food Safety with 11 Comments

“If it ain’t Alberta, it ain’t beef!” Not any more, though, thanks to the efforts of Alberta politicians, companies and the federal food inspection agency. From left to right above: Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry “Cold Cuts” Ritz, Alberta Agriculture Minister Verlyn Olson and Alberta Premier Alison Redford. Actual politicians may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: The actual Ms. Redford and Mr. Ritz.

Today is Thanksgiving, and we give thanks the XL Foods plant in southeastern Alberta doesn’t process turkeys!

Because XL Foods, its parent company, the Alberta Progressive Conservative Government, the federal Conservative Government and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency have effectively destroyed the reputation of Alberta beef in the span of a single month.

In addition to the as-yet-undetermined problems that caused E. coli contamination inside XL Foods’ massive plant in the town of Brooks, they’ve provided a textbook example of how not to handle a public relations crisis.

First, it’s obvious that no one did any planning about how to respond if something like this happened – even though it was bound to be a possibility in any industrial food processing operation.

When it did happen, at least on the public relations file, each of the parties involved said and did the wrong thing at every turn!

First they tried to ignore the problem, then they downplayed it, then they refused to respond to questions from journalists and the public, then they looked for someone else to blame.

Meanwhile, when they finally got around to organizing a recall of the products from the plant, the task that should have been Priority 1 on Day 1, the list of already-sold products had gown so long it was impossible for anyone to keep track of it. More than 2,000 products are now on the list, we are told. Cases of E. coli infection tied to the plant have literally spread across the country.

On Friday, media reported cases showing up on Vancouver Island in the Pacific Ocean and Newfoundland in the Atlantic! Yesterday, new cases were reported showing up again throughout Canada – as will continue for months, because many people buy meat, throw it in the freezer and forget about it until they need it.

The public relations implications of this kind of food poisoning, even from a massive meat-packing plant like the one in Brooks, could have been minimized with a swift, honest and open response, with an action plan for fixing the problem that caused the poisoning set out clearly and transparently for the worried public.

Instead, every one of the parties to this public relations disaster turtled, acting slowly if at all on the core problem while insulting us with their explanations and evasions.

Under these circumstances, calls for a public inquiry into what went wrong made by the food inspectors’ union seem entirely reasonable. How else are consumers in Canada, and beef buyers abroad, ever going to be able to trust meat from Alberta again?

After all, when we needed action and openness, everybody in a position to do anything waited for days, effectively denying there was anything wrong at all after U.S. Customs detected E. coli in beef shipped from the XL plant on Sept. 3.

The responses of both XL Foods and its parent company Nilsson Brothers were pathetic. They left recorded telephone messages for reporters, for crying out loud.

Having your spokespeople refuse to appear on camera and describe what’s being done to fix the problem – no matter how uncomfortable it makes them – just doesn’t make the cut. What conclusion are reasonable people left with but that they’ve gone into hiding?

Meanwhile, Conservative politicians at two levels of government blandly assured us we had nothing to worry about and advised us to keep eating beef. “Let’s remember to cook it well,” Alberta Premier Alison Redford patronizingly advised us. Alberta Agriculture Minister Verlyn Olson went shopping for steaks with TV cameras in tow.

CFIA blamed the company (which still wasn’t saying anything) for being slow providing information. It insisted it had enough inspectors. Provincial Tories denied it was their problem and made it clear the feds regulate the plant. Everybody pointed out it was just one plant – forgetting to mention it’s one plant that’s so big it processes 40 per cent of the beef in Canada!

Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry “Cold Cuts” Ritz held a news conference and then had his media flunkies help him escape when he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer the questions reporters threw at him. Someone even tried to blame a cow!

The damage from this gong show to Alberta beef’s hitherto impeccable “brand” – that hard-to-define concept of a promise of values, benefits and costs, consistently delivered, that establishes satisfaction when compared with the competition – is immeasurable.

In the case of Alberta beef, it may take a generation or more to fix it. Photo opportunities of politicians buying steaks in their local grocery stores or right-wing bloviators calling consumers names for being rightfully concerned about the health and cleanliness of the food they plan to feed to their families won’t help one bit.

Damaged brands can be repaired, of course – just look at the successful effort by former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney, once the most hated man in Canada, to get good ink in the media. But it takes time and costs money.

Drug-maker Johnson & Johnson’s swift and open response to the 1982 Tylenol tampering murders in Chicago is generally held to be the textbook example of the right way to deal with a public relations crisis.

The company co-operated with authorities, was completely open and honest with the public and media about the nature and magnitude of what happened, immediately and voluntarily recalled the product, and aggressively and transparently moved to ensure nothing like that could ever happen again.

Tylenol sales plummeted briefly, then rebounded. Tylenol, its name unchanged, today remains the one of the most popular painkiller brands in North America, even as we curse the multiple layers of packaging that make another case of deadly tampering all but impossible.

So what’s the plan for cleaning up the XL Foods plant and making sure this won’t happen again either? Informing the public about where their meat originates? Hiring lots of federal inspectors, unbiased and not beholden to the company?

The trouble with these ideas – which would help to solve both the E. coli problem and the resulting PR disaster – is that they’re not what either our provincial or federal Conservatives governments want to do.

No, they’re all for “less regulation” and more privatization. They’re determined to cut government services to “save” us from tax increases. And there’s no way they want to make it easy for consumers to identify where their meat comes from because they know how we would respond – we’d buy our beef from anywhere else and, like General Motors, XL Foods is too big to fail.

So don’t expect any more openness in the weeks ahead from the party whose unofficial motto is “never apologize, never explain” than we’ve seen up to now.

Alberta’s beef producers spent a lot of energy and money on a brand-building campaign that persuaded the world, “If it ain’t Alberta, it ain’t beef.”

In one month, the disaster perpetrated by two companies, two Conservative governments and a frightened, politicized food inspection agency have turned this into, “If it’s from Alberta, it ain’t safe!”

You can’t fix this problem by changing what we call beef, after all, although it wouldn’t be surprising if we discovered these clowns were thinking of something like “If it ain’t from the unnamed territory between Saskatchewan and B.C. … it ain’t … uh …  bovine comestibles!” (And I do mean clowns. Who can forget Mr. Ritz’s side-splitter about the death of a thousand cold cuts during the 2008 listeriosis crisis?)

Well, Alberta beef’s brand is going to have to be fixed. Unfortunately, that’s going to cost us taxpayers a lot of money and Alberta’s beef farmers a lot of time, tears and bankruptcies.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Neocon slapheads beware! This may not be just a Frank Prank?

by David Climenhaga on September 14, 2012 in Canadian Politics, Media with 6 Comments

The message from worried Canadians, in and out of uniform, to former Frank publisher Michael Bate. Below: Frank’s semi-iconic logo, Mr. Bate, a typical Frank cover from the Paul Martin era.

TORONTO

If you’re a Canadian politician, you should be afraid, very afraid.

Frank Magazine will soon be back… Or so it’s rumoured and so we fervently hope.

The last Canadians heard officially from former Frank editor and publisher Michael Bate, back in 2010, was that he’d “morphed into a Canadian composer.” Like, of music.

This was disheartening news. I don’t care if the guy is Charlie Flippin’ Parker, what our country needs is his ability to spin hilarious yarns, not to make music with a steel guitar and a mouth harp or even a battered old anglo-saxophone.

Back in 2008, Mr. Bate pulled the plug on his venerable effort to keep Canadian politicians (and labour leaders, and media meat puppets, and senior bureaucratic elflords … no one was safe) honest. It wasn’t making money any more, he said at the time, and was no longer in tune with the zeitgeist of the era.

The publication was usually described as “a satirical magazine” or “a Parliamentary tip-sheet,” either of which goes only part of the way to explaining the Frank phenomenon, and neither of which does the concept justice. It wasn’t just that Frank was scurrilous, it was that under Mr. Bate’s editorial hand it was scurrilous, laugh-out-loud funny and in possession of an unerring sense of where to strike to inflict maximum damage to deserving targets.

No one was safe – even former Frank contributors. All of the aforementioned categories of subject matter despised it, and prime minister Brian Mulroney was said to have a particular loathing for the publication, probably because of a contest thought up by Mr. Bate about who would deflower the then PM’s daughter.

Offensive, yes, but funny too given the way Mr. Mulroney was shamelessly using the lass to assist with his campaigning. There was also a regular feature, purportedly a diary written by Mr. Mulroney’s beloved wife Mila, known to Frankistes as “Imelda,” that was either a brilliant parody or really was written by Mila Mulroney!

Frank’s Remedial Media column was loved and hated in newsrooms across the land – loved by hard-pressed “sluggos,” that is, hated by the managers who made their lives a misery, a class of people who were notoriously unwilling to let anyone fearlessly report the media’s own foibles.

House o’ Labour happily skewered unions, specifically the people who ran them. But I’m sure there’d also be room under the general heading for the likes of the union-hating foes and their coruscating legalists. Now and again, as I recall, Frank would even go after the clergy. Identifying hypocrisy and cowardice among the puffed-up and self-righteous was Frank’s stock in trade, after all, and with Mr. Bate at the helm, no publication did better.

Loosely based on Britain’s Private Eye magazine – although Mr. Bate’s Canadian publication was always far funnier, at least from any vantage point on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, if as badly printed – Frank provided the useful function of a place where any unauthorized report from inside the Parliamentary Bunker or its environs could see the light of day. This was true no matter how shabbily researched the piece might be, but what the hey!

Just the same, often a week or two after a Frank report, a shamefaced little unattributed item could be counted on to show up saying pretty much the same thing in the pages of the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star.

Another staple was the Frank Prank, in which Parliamentarians and media had the opportunity to prove just how dumb they were, or, occasionally, weren’t. Case in point: In 2007, the Canadian Magazines blog reports, Frank fooled everyone by setting up a completely bogus support group for Conrad Black, then facing legal troubles in the United States.

Lord Black is now happily back in the land of his birth if not of his citizenship, so that function has been taken over by his Lordship’s Sherpas in the stenography department of the National Post and in the Harper cabinet. “I am again flattered by such a thing. I will give you all CONRAD WILL WIN shirts when you are here,” Lord Black is said to have written “Alistair Smith,” who, naturally, turned out to be Mr. Bate.

And speaking of his Lordship, who can forget Conrad’s Prison Diary, another product of the same imagination that gave us the Diary of Mo and Mila (Mo being Maureen McTeer) and the musings of Royal Canadian Legionnaire Dick Little. (Aesthete’s Diary in the early nineties is said to have been penned by none other than Michael Coren!)

Frank had its own private argot: men with balding pates were known as slapheads, over-enthusiastic authors of press releases risked being known as “wind therapists,” those rare journalists who actually did work were inevitably “sluggos,” government media spokesthingies were labelled “fart catchers,” broadcasters were “bingo callers” or “sock puppets,” bullying corporatists “obbergruppenfuhreren.” Drink too much and Frank might record your more “moist and garrulous” moments. And all that’s without even getting into details of what Canada’s notorious stickmen, avid pianists, flautists, ardent heterosexualists and the like might be getting up to.

Frank was founded in 1987 in Halifax, and a Halifax edition still exists. The Bluenose edition was published separately throughout the interregnum, never made any sense and still doesn’t. (It can be found at Frankmagazine.ca if you don’t believe me.) The two totally different editions shared a masthead and logo at least part of that time.

Mr. Bate’s “Central Canadian Edition” started publication two years later and managed to survive until its majority. It wasn’t run by Mr. Bate throughout that time, however, and therein lay a significant part of its problem, which it is said here was not so much with the zeitgeist but the fact the fellow who bought it from Mr. Bate and tried to run it for a spell in the early Zeroes just wasn’t very funny. Apparently he wanted to take it upscale. Well, that couldn’t be done, and it ought not to have been tried.

Now the rumour mill has it that Mr. Bate hopes to re-launch this important Canadian institution quite soon, possibly later this year. With the Globe in Mail a pathetic shadow of its former self, a revivified Frank would be a worthy challenger for the title “Canada’s National Newspaper.”

And if the zeitgeist isn’t right for Frank Magazine now – with Stephen Harper pulling the electoral levers behind the green curtain in Ottawa, the media reduced to flotsam by the reefs if the Internet and a separatist party back in power in Quebec City – well, Canadian civilization as we know it has already come to an end!

This is our nation’s hour of need. Your country calls you, Frank! You too, Bate!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Preston Manning is no saint, as secretive Carleton University scheme illustrates

by David Climenhaga on July 17, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Canadian Politics with 9 Comments

Preston Manning and his then-protégé Stephen Harper back in the day. Below: Mr. Manning as he now appears (United Church Observer photo): Alberta premier E.C. Manning, Preston Manning’s father; Mr. Harper as a Reform Party candidate.

Nowadays, folks think of Preston Manning as a benign force in Canadian politics – possibly because of his scratchy voice and grandfatherly demeanour, and partly because on a personal level he is most certainly an honourable person.

This is a dangerous misunderstanding.

It’s worth remembering that while the former Reform Party of Canada leader may not be a sinner, he is certainly no saint, as the media echo chamber here in Alberta would like to lead us to believe.

Mr. Manning is an unflinching market ideologue as dedicated as his sometime protégé Stephen Harper to destroying the Canada we have built together over the past 150 years and remaking it in the brutalist image of Tea Party USA. He is an effective and sometimes sneaky opponent of the great public services like our universal health care system that it has been our particular Canadian genius to build up over generations.

Notwithstanding his grandfatherly image, Mr. Manning has been prepared to play politics in the corners with his elbows up over his long political career, which has always been about pushing Canada as far to the right as possible as quickly as possible.

In this, of course, Mr. Manning learned at the feet of a master – his father, Alberta premier Ernest C. Manning, who took the Social Credit movement of William Aberhart in one generation from an almost revolutionary uprising and turned it into one of the most regressive and reactionary political parties in Canadian history.

Moreover, despite his undoubted personal rectitude and well-known Evangelical Christian convictions, Mr. Manning and his neoconservative followers, many of whom were and are concentrated within the so-called “Calgary School” at the University of Calgary, have been quite willing to use subterfuge and trickery to achieve their political aims.

So, for example, the reverse takeover of the loyal old Progressive Conservative Party of Canada – which traced its antecedents all the way back to John Alexander Macdonald, visionary patriot, Father of Confederation and first prime minister – was steeped in artifice and manipulation. That National Defence Minister Peter MacKay, the last leader of the PCs without whom this takeover could not have happened, can walk in public with his head held upright shows more brass than most of us could muster in such circumstances!

It is also said here that with the benefit of 20-20 historical hindsight, we can see the same tendencies at work in Mr. Manning’s effective campaign to derail Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney’s effort to make Quebeckers feel at home in Canada through the far-sighted mechanism of the Charlottetown Accord.

Thus it is fair to say that Sun News Network bloviator Ezra Levant is quite right when he describes Mr. Manning as “the Godfather … of conservative successes all across the country today.”

So we should not be surprised by the key role the Godfather played in the secretive attempt to engineer what amounted to a reverse takeover of parts of Carleton University’s political and economic studies programs that has recently been exposed by the Canadian Press.

According to a CP report last week, Mr. Manning himself and his so-called Manning Centre for Building Democracy – which really ought to be called the Manning Centre for Making Neo-Conservatism Palatable to Inattentive Voters – were up to their necks in the scheme to create a supposedly non-partisan “showcase school of political management” at Carleton.

There is absolutely nothing non-partisan, of course, about the Manning Centre – which boasts openly its goal is “building Canada’s conservative movement” and sends handpicked students from its summer program to work at such right-wing Astroturf organizations and think tanks as the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the Institute for Marriage and Family Canada and Fraser-Institute-spinoffs like the Frontier Centre in Winnipeg, the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies in Halifax and the Montreal Economic Institute.

The Carleton plan, we can now see, was never just to pour a $15-million donation from Calgary businessman Clayton Riddell into a legitimate academic program. Rather, it called for the Clayton H. Riddell School of Political Management’s contributors to enjoy what the Canadian Association of University Teachers has condemned as an “unprecedented and unacceptable” level of control over who the school’s teachers would be, what they would teach and how.

Like the U of C’s “Calgary School” from which it no doubt drew inspiration – which is nothing more than a Fraser Institute-style neoconservative indoctrination centre paid for with taxpayers’ dollars – the Riddell School was clearly meant to continue the process of turning Canada’s public university social science programs into hothouses of far-right ideology and creating an elite corps of neo-Con cadres to serve Canada’s New Establishment under Prime Minister Harper and his successors.

The danger that unbiased empirical research would go on at this supposedly “cross-partisan” institute under Carleton’s roof is extremely slight, to say the least, as would be the chances of students who wanted to pursue it. This is true notwithstanding the presence of a token New Democrat among the organizers.

The plan in which Mr. Manning played such a pivotal role has now come a cropper – or at least suffered a serious setback – thanks to the efforts of the CAUT and CP.

Leastways, embarrassed by the public and institutional pressure they applied, Carleton seems to have backed away from the worst of its plans for the moment and insists that it used proper procedures to hire staff at the school, which has been in operation for one academic year.

“Carleton quietly released the donor agreement on the Friday afternoon before Canada Day after stonewalling The Canadian Press for almost a year to keep it under wraps,” CP reported last week. “The contract reveals the Riddell Foundation effectively appointed three of five people on a steering committee. That committee was given sweeping power over the graduate program’s budget, academic hiring, executive director and curriculum.”

The chairperson of the steering committee, naturally, was Mr. Manning himself.

So, for the moment it seems, Carleton will run the Riddell School along more traditional lines, although it is likely that its funders have been offered private assurances by the university nothing really will change.

What will not change will be such attempts to take over public institutions by stealth and lead our country down the garden path to the right by groups that draw their inspiration from Mr. Manning’s views and career.

Preston Manning remains an influential and key ideologue on the Canadian far right. He is more than just another jolly Calgary grandfather.

For this reason and as his recent involvement in the effort to establish an ideological base camp in Ottawa with the Riddell School both illustrate, Canadians would be wise to view Mr. Manning’s activities and enthusiasms with skepticism as unlikely to benefit our country.

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.

Time to wax philosophical about Ralph Klein and the Order of Canada

by David Climenhaga on June 25, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Canadian Politics, Conservative Party of Canada, Order of Canada with 3 Comments

Former Alberta premier Ralph Klein, back in the day. Below: Former Quebec premier Jacques Parizeau, also back in the day.

Now that the campaign to give the Order of Canada to Ralph Klein has all but met its goal, one wonders when the effort to hang the same gong on Jacques Parizeau will begin? Seriously! The former premier of Quebec meets the essential qualification.

For months now, a relentless campaign has been under way by a group of journalists, sometime Klein caucus mates and political allies, and other loyalists of the former Alberta premier to ensure that Mr. Klein is awarded the country’s highest civilian honour.

Mr. Klein – who is now 70 and was premier from 1992 to 2006 – is seriously ailing and that has added to the pressure not to deny him this award during his lifetime. So Mr. Klein’s supporters have now broken the rules (not that the rules matter very much for the well-connected in the Canada of Prime Minister Stephen Harper) and proclaimed that they have been privately informed the deal is done. It will be announced on or close to Canada Day, they say.

Mr. Klein deserves it, his supporters principally argue, because … because he used to be a premier.

At any rate, that Mr. Klein collected sufficient votes to become premier of Alberta is the foundation of the argument offered at various times by such journalists as Don Martin, Don Braid and the anonymous editorialist of the Edmonton Journal whose opinions have now evaporated from the Internet.

They also note that Mr. Klein, who was an undeniably popular political figure in this province, also balanced the budget, and sometimes they will remember too that he gave all us Alberta citizens enough cash to purchase a Sony Walkman or an iPod!

Understandably, Mr. Klein’s supporters often gloss over some of the more divisive qualities of his time in politics, such as his famous remarks about eastern bums and creeps, made when he was mayor of Calgary in 1988, and his intoxicated late-night visit to a men’s homeless shelter in 2001. Just as understandably, they defend Mr. Klein’s more controversial policies – for example, leaving the provincial health care system in a calamitous shambles that persists to this day – as necessary and laudable.

Now, there was a day when merely having held office as a premier was clearly not sufficient to get someone an Order of Canada. But it would seem by the arguments we have heard over the past year or two and, more importantly that seem to have been heard in Ottawa, that those days are behind us.

Well, so be it! And perhaps Mr. Klein’s supporters have a point when they say arguments he was a knocker-down of institutions rather than a builder-up of them are just sour grapes by people who disagreed with his policies while in office.

Which is why it seems not so outlandish that someone will soon argue that Mr. Parizeau, who managed after all to get elected premier of a majority government in a Canadian province just like Mr. Klein, should be awarded the Order of Canada too!

Thankfully for those here in English Canada likely to fly into a swivet at the thought of such a thing, one has the sense Mr. Parizeau would not be much interested in that particular honour. He has, after all, been declared a Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec. (And before you start to sputter and kick, dear readers, remember that our sullen neo-Con prime minister’s newest Quebec advisor, none other that former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, holds the same rank in the same order.)

What’s more – unlike Mr. Parizeau, I guess – when Mr. Klein received a manifesto urging sovereignty-association for Alberta from a gang of dangerous Western separatists, he had the good sense to file it where it belonged, in the trash bucket.

But all this history brings us to a serious point. Perhaps it’s time to recognize what has been obvious all along about this Order of Canada to anyone who has been paying attention – to wit, that it is now and ever shall be essentially political.

To the winners go the spoils and, in an era where conservatives dominate the government, a disproportionate number of conservatives are going to be awarded Orders of Canada. If Mr. Klein gets one too, well, there are certainly worse people who nowadays remain qualified to wear the pin of the Order in their lapel!

So let’s not lose any sleep about this particular award, although we should make darned certain that at least one more former Conservative Alberta premier gets one too. To wit: surely the hapless Ed Stelmach deserves the honour! To him, after all, fell the political risk and the political cost of trying – not always with much success – to straighten out the catastrophic mess Mr. Klein left in Alberta’s health care system, its crumbling infrastructure and its give-away petroleum royalty regime.

While we’re at it, perhaps we should change the rules so that no one who has been awarded an Order of Canada can be stripped of the award – no matter what his or her subsequent sins may be.

Remember Stephen Fonyo, who made a valuable contribution to Canadian life by raising money to fight cancer, which had taken his leg, yet who was stripped of his membership in the Order for flaws not so different from those that bedevilled Mr. Klein.

Mr. Fonyo’s greatest failure, it can be seen now, was not having been the premier of a Canadian province.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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