Harper v Trudeau 28 Nov 2012 - Lawrence Martin

Harper’s attacks on Trudeau will be vicious

Special to The Globe and Mail
Last updated Wednesday, Nov. 28 2012, 5:14 AM EST


For Stephen Harper, losing to a Trudeau would be the ultimate humiliation. It was his visceral hostility to Pierre Trudeau’s attitude to the West, exemplified by the national energy program, that propelled him into the Reform Party in the first place.



So you can imagine how Mr. Harper felt when a poll came out last week showing that the Liberals under the leadership of Justin Trudeau would defeat him handily. And you can imagine his relief when, right on the heels of that poll, the storm emerged over an interview Mr. Trudeau gave some time ago in which he spoke of how the country would suffer with Albertans at the helm. This was almost in a league with Mr. Harper once saying that Albertans, owing to their treatment from Central Canada, should build a firewall around the province.



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The two men are polar opposites. Their deep differences mark a time of unusually deep divisions in our politics – a time of contrasting ideologies, regions and visions, making the stakes extraordinarily high. Mr. Harper wants to further his dismantling of the house Trudeau built and cement a conservative ethic. Progressives are of the hope that if George W. Bush could make a Barack Obama possible in the United States, Stephen Harper is making a new force for liberalism possible here.



Mr. Trudeau’s reckless remarks will link him more closely with his father. Given the lingering animosity toward Pierre Trudeau on the Prairies, his son had been trying to distance himself by disowning the despised NEP.



The challenge for Justin, who lacks the diamond-hard intellect of the père, will be to show his mettle in other ways. He has the charisma and the potential for appeal to a new generation. But does he have the ice in the veins that his father showed in standing up to terrorists, separatists and haters of all stripes? In Mr. Harper, he is facing an opponent who has that ice-cold glare and the smarts behind it.



Mr. Harper is not spoken of in such terms too often, but for my money he ranks with Pierre Trudeau as having the sharpest mind among our prime ministers of the last century. It’s a brain that is penetrating, razor-sharp, cold, calculating. Mr. Trudeau’s was more rounded and better-schooled, subject to broader experiences before his political ascendancy. Mr. Harper is essentially a career politician, and his mind, not long on imagination, is more predisposed to political priorities than was the philosopher king’s. But there is no shortage of storage space in that cranium. It is like a warehouse, one in which every issue is fitted, slotted, understood in considerable detail and strategically weighed.



Combine that with his appetite for going for the jugular with every tactic imaginable – he is still running a campaign of lies against NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair on the carbon-tax issue – and you see what the young Trudeau is up against. Mr. Harper will come at him more viciously than other opponents because of the name.



The Liberals were serious in their bid to recruit Mark Carney to run for the leadership, and he actually gave them the go-ahead to put out some feelers. As we learned Monday, there is currently no hope of that: Mr. Carney will be off to the Bank of England for a five-year term as governor. After that, who knows?



Former astronaut Mark Garneau is to enter the Liberal race Wednesday. U.S. Democrats thought they had a promising astronaut candidate in Senator John Glenn in the 1980s, but he disappeared fast. He had a solid but stolid reputation. Too stolid, which is the knock on Mr. Garneau.



The challenge to Mr. Harper will likely be left to Mr. Trudeau. Now that his armour has been dinted, there will be thorough searches by the Conservative hit squad through every inch of his record. It’s likely more ammunition will be found. We’ll see whether he has the steel to withstand.

McGregor & Maher 16 Nov 2012 - Robocall Plot Thickens

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Elections Canada email trail points to growing suspicions over voter suppression ‘mischief’ during 2011 election

Robbie the Friendly Robot.



Photo: David Kawai / Ottawa Citizencomment Email

Stephen Maher



Glen McGregor

Published: November 16, 2012, 7:16 pm

Updated: 5 days ago OTTAWA — Three days before the last federal election, Elections Canada confronted the Conservatives about suspicious calls directing voters to the wrong polling stations but were met with denials of any wrongdoing from the party’s lawyer, internal emails show.



In one email, an official with the agency reported a growing number of misleading calls as voting day approached and said some were worried that a “scam” to mislead voters was under way.



The emails, released under the Access to Information Act, show that voters in ridings across Canada believed they had been misled by Conservative callers.



They also cast doubt on the theory, advanced by some Conservatives, that reports of so-called “poll-moving calls” were invented by voters who flooded Elections Canada with nearly 1400 complaints after news of the robocalls scandal first broke in February.



The message from Elections Canada staff trace a timeline that began with the first reports of the calls on April 29, three days before the vote, when the agency began to field inquiries from concerned voters.



At 8:16 p.m., Sylvie Jacmain, the director of field programs and services, sent an email to agency lawyer Ageliki Apostolakos, reporting problems in the ridings of Saint Boniface, Manitoba, and Kitchener-Conestaga, Ontario.



“In the course of the last half-hour, it has come to my attention (in two ridings) that is seems representatives of Mr. Harper’s campaign communicated with voters to inform them that their polling station had changed, and the indications offered to one would lead her more than an hour and a half from her real voting place, which is found a few minutes from her home,” she wrote in French.



Half an hour later, procedures officer Sylvain Lortie wrote to Jacmain to say that the Conservative campaign in Saint Boniface “has communicated with (party) headquarters, who were doing the calls.”



Apostolakos quickly followed up with an email to the Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton.



“In the course of the last half-hour, Elections Canada has heard that two representatives of the Conservative campaign office are communicating with electors in two electoral districts to inform them that their polling station has changed to another location,” Apostolakos wrote.



Hamilton responded just after midnight the following night — 27 hours later, according to time stamps on the emails — writing that because some polling locations had been changed, some Conservative candidates were contacting voters to ensure they were going to the right places.



“The calls being made by our candidates request the voter to confirm her or his polling location,” Hamilton wrote, saying he had looked into Elections Canada’s concerns.



“There is no indication by the caller that the location may have changed or words to that effect. And no voter is being directed to a polling location one and a half hours away from the correct polling location.”



By Sunday afternoon, Elections Canada had received reports of the calls from 13 different ridings. Legal counsel Karen McNeil sent another email to Hamilton:



“These calls are continuing and the frequency of calls seems to be increasing,” she wrote, providing a list of the originating phone numbers that some voters had recorded. Voters who called the numbers back heard only recorded messages identifying them as Conservative Party lines, she said.



McNeil told Hamilton the poll-moving calls had been reported by voters in the ridings of Avalon (Newfoundland and Labrador); West Nova (Nova Scotia); Ajax-Pickering, Halton, Kingston and the Islands, Kitchener-Conestoga and Vaughan (Ontario); Kildonan-St. Paul, Saint Boniface and Winnipeg Centre (Manitoba); and Cardigan (Prince Edward Island).



There were also later reports of poll-moving calls in two Quebec ridings: Outremont and Lac-Saint-Louis and Prince George-Peace River in British Columbia.



Hamilton replied at 10:45 a.m. the following morning — election day — saying only that he would forward the same response he had sent Apostolakos.



As Hamilton sent the email, hundreds of voters in Guelph were heading to vote at the Quebec Street Mall, victims of an as-yet-unsolved mystery call from “Pierre Poutine.”



In spite of the two emails to Hamilton, the calls continued.



Email traffic shows the officials were becoming increasingly suspicious about the nature of the calls.



On Sunday afternoon, Elections Canada lawyer Michele Rene de Cotret wrote to Jane Dunlop, manager of external relations, giving her a heads up on “some mischief purportedly done by representatives of the Conservative party calling people to tell them that the location of their polling site has been moved.”



The same day, elections officer Anita Hawdur wrote to Apostolakos: “The polling station numbers given out by the Conservative Party…are all wrong. Most of them are quite far away from the elector’s home and from the initial polling place that showed on their VIC (voter information card.)”



Later that afternoon, Hawdur sent Apostolakos a message warning that, in one riding, officials received four calls from voters saying they had been misdirected. “This is getting pretty suspicious,” she wrote. “The workers in the returning office think these people are running a scam.”



Hawdur reported at 3:32 p.m. Sunday that “we are starting to get more calls now.”



At 5:10 p.m., Natalie Babin Dufresne emailed a number of officials lining up advertising to warn voters in Prince George-Peace River, where no polling stations had been changed, as a result of “alleged Conservative and Elections Canada calls.”



The next morning, election day, the number of calls seemed to intensify.



At 11:27 a.m., as the agency struggled with chaos at a polling station in Guelph, Hawdur sent an email to a number of colleagues: “It’s right across the country except Saskatchewan; a lot of the calls are from electoral districts in Ontario. it appears it’s getting worse. Some returning officers reported that the calls are allegedly identifying Elections Canada.”



Asked about the allegations in the emails, Conservative Party spokesman Fred DeLorey denied the party tried to mislead anyone.



“To ensure our supporters knew where to vote, our script read that ‘Elections Canada has changed some voting locations at the last moment. To be sure could you tell me the address of where you’re voting?’” DeLorey said in an email.



“In the days leading up to and including Election Day we were only calling our identified supporters to get out our vote, and in every call we identified ourselves as calling on behalf of the Conservative Party, so any accusation that we were misleading voters doesn’t hold up to those simple facts.”



DeLorey said Elections Canada changed over 1,000 polls locations and the country.



When Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand appeared before a parliamentary committee in March, he said only 473 polls of more than 20,000 locations were changed, and only 61 moved in the last week, when it would have been too late to send out revised voter cards.



In his report on the election tabled in August 2011, Mayrand made brief mention of the “crank calls” that incorrectly advised voters of changed polling locations but there was no indication that these were a widespread or coordinated effort. Mayrand said only the Commissioner of Canada Elections was investigating.



Hamilton’s emailed response to Elections Canada is consistent with evidence in a robocalls-related court challenge given by Andrew Langhorne, an executive with the Conservative’s main phone bank company, Responsive Marketing Group.



Langhorne swore an affidavit earlier this year saying that RMG agents called identified Conservatives to ensure they had the right polling location printed on their voter identifications cards.



“If the address provided by the voter for their polling station did not match the address in front of the RMG agent, the RMG agent was directed to provide the voter with the polling station address displayed from the (get-out-the-vote) data,” Langhorne said.

But Langhorne allowed that voters and callers may have different addresses because of errors in the database the callers used, or errors in the voters list provided by Elections Canada.

In its postelection report, Elections Canada said that it had “indicated to political parties that the list (of polling stations) supplied should only be used for internal purposes and that parties should not direct electors to polling sites.”

Politics of Fascism 30 October 2012

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/michael-ignatieffs-timely-warning-on-the-politics-of-fascism/article4753299/

Ten Things Stephen Harper Hopes You Forget by 2015

Ten things Stephen Harper hopes you forget by 2015


By Michael Harris
Jun 13, 2012 5:05 am

Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. He is currently working on a book about the Harper majority government to be published in the autumn of 2014 by Penguin Canada.

Tyranny, the arbitrary exercise of power by a government, usually pads up behind you in stockinged feet. It has to. In a democracy, stealth is the only way it can succeed.



But in Canada these days, it pokes you in the chest with an index finger while shoving you backwards with the other hand. As it turns out, Blaise Pascal might have been right: mankind can get used to anything, including the breathless loss of democratic freedoms when the usurping party masquerades as strong, competent government. Six years in to Harper rule, blue eyes and mascara apparently have everyone taking a few steps backwards.



Bill C-38 is the first thing Stephen Harper hopes you forget in time for the next election. It is passing through parliament like an institutional kidney stone the size of the Ritz. Wags in Ottawa who briefly portrayed it for what it is, the demise of parliament, are already slipping into discount mode. There have been omnibus bills before, they say; all’s fair in love, war and politics, they say; why, it’s just Elizabeth May’s slumber party, that’s all.


Even principled journalistic stands are subject, it seems, to the summary execution of the fifteen minute news wheel. The second coming of Christ would be bumped by Lindsay Lohan running her Porsche into the back of an 18-wheeler. Pity. What we have here is a coup. Bill C-38 upends the primacy of parliament. The government has effectively dealt out every federal MP, including the ones on the government side, from having a say in the radical makeover of Canada. What else can you call it when 74 pieces of legislation are changed without debate or due process? These are the ideas of one man, the ideological love child of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.



More disconcerting, what is to stop Dear Leader from returning next year with another “budget implementation bill” that builds on his deconstruction of Canada as we know it? Certainly not Speaker Andrew Scheer. Personally, I think it’s time Scheer took down that portrait of Sir Thomas More that graces the Speaker’s Office. It’s time to hang his real hero, Pierre Poilievre, patron saint of coming when you’re called.



The PM also hopes Canadians will forget 20,000 police on Canadian streets during the obscenely expensive G-8 and G-20 meetings of 2010. In Toronto, the guys in the riot gear would have done Hosni Mubarak proud. The security arrangements included kettling, beatings, unlawful arrests, and other examples of excessive force not normally associated with Canada.



According to the Office of the Independent Police Review (the sort of office Harper has done away with at CSIS) there was no legal justification for arbitrary searches by police and the debacle ended with the largest mass arrests in Canadian history. And now we find out that one of the threats to national security identified by Canadian Forces was “embarrassment to the Government.” Finally, the transformative touch of humor: if embarrassment is the measure of danger to the state, Canada faces no graver national security threat than the ones posed by Peter MacKay, Bev Oda, and Christian Paradis.



Mr. Harper hopes you forget the F-35, an unprecedented fiscal, military, and political fiasco brought to you by a corrupt military procurement system in the U.S. and a rogue DND in this country unchecked by the civilian side. Too many zeros on the cheque is the government’s best defense; that, and the availability of robots like Julian Fantino, who will apparently read anything that is put in his hands. The public money about to be wasted is unimaginably staggering and on that account meaningless – or so the government hopes.



But lying about the program’s costs to the tune of at least $10-billion, as the Harper government has done, is different. It offends the stuff they taught in Sunday School. People get that. Souring the mendacity even further is the brazen illogic of the cover story. How could it be a good idea to start production on a jet fighter before testing it, choose between options before running a competition amongst prototypes that actually fly, and decide to buy it without knowing the cost? Would any of us buy a lawnmower that way? A gas can? Dazzle me with numbers, but don’t ask me to die stupid.



The Harper government would like you to forget that the Liberals in Canada haven’t been the only fiscal drunken sailors of Confederation. Only once in the 20th century did a Conservative government balance the budget – Robert Borden in 1912, thanks to a surplus handed to him by Sir Wilfred Laurier. By the next year, Borden was back into deficit.



So far, the Conservatives have repeated the feat once again in the 21st century, in 2006. This time the surplus was inherited from Paul Martin. Within a year, the government was back at the job of building the largest deficit in our history. Of course, that didn’t stop them from pillorying the other guys as the signature wastrels of the public purse. As they say in Newfoundland, if you get the reputation for being an early riser, you can lie in bed until noon.



It would also be convenient for you to forget that Stephen Harper once promised that he would not change the Old Age Security system to fight the deficit. He did just that.



Former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney made a similar promise in his day. He declared entitlement payments to be a “sacred trust”. How sacred? He promptly announced that pension benefits for seniors would no longer be fully indexed to the cost of living. The chin that walked like a man was skewered by a pensioner whose words shot across the nation back in 1985: “You made promises that you wouldn’t touch anything…you lied to us. I was made to vote for you and then it was goodbye, Charlie Brown.”



Stephen Harper doesn’t want to meet his Solange Denis, but certainly not because he has any idea of backing down the way Mulroney did. He’d rather you just forgot about it.



As he would like you to forget about the Accountability Act, that dress rehearsal for better Tory governance that never went into production. Other politicians give you their word, Stephen Harper gives wording. His gift as a rhetorical trickster has rarely been more in evidence than in the voluminous charade known as the Accountability Act. Duff Conacher, the founder of Democracy Watch, has graded this piece of legislation appropriately – a belly-flop from the high-diving board of political BS. It features a commitment to language and an aversion to acting on the language that conjures up the PM’s greasy undermining of the Atlantic Accord. Best forgotten.



It would also be appreciated by the Harper government if you took a nice long drink from the Lethe on the subject of what used to be called federal/provincial relations. The prime minister has eschewed a meeting with the premiers like a man making a detour around a leper colony. In Mulroney’s day, the view was that consensus was the only way for the country to compete and prosper. That’s what his National Economic Conference and fourteen First Ministers’ gatherings were all about. Stephen Harper’s idea of a meeting of the minds is his mind and a lot of stenographers. Just ask Jim Flaherty’s provincial counterparts on the matter of health transfers.



It would also be nice if you could forget that the Harper government’s first instinct on regulating the Internet was giving police the right to snoop into the private lives of Canadians without warrants. This they called law and order. Government, the hapless Vic Toews assured us, has business in the computers of the nation. And if you didn’t see it that way, you stood with the child pornographers. Yes, exactly the way that you were a subversive radical if you had misgivings about the government’s lust to build pipelines, leaky or otherwise, while paying lip service to environmental issues.



The government would be especially grateful if you could just let slip into oblivion that whole unfortunate incident about the beautification of Tony Clement’s cottage-country riding, that exercise in rural renewal that came at the small price of misleading parliament and misappropriating money – from the Border Patrol Agency to the Conservative Party of Canada. And if you are good enough to forget that slushy little fact, the government would be doubly grateful: that way you might not wonder before marking your ballot the next time how this particular fox could have then been put in charge of all those chickens over at Treasury Board.



Finally, Stephen Harper would really like you to forget that he is a niche prime minister who has consistently served the wealthy and the corporate while “managing” the great unwashed as the problem children of society – the ones who go on strike, who dare to disagree, who expect too much, who cost rather than contribute to the treasury – even if they have spent a life-time doing just that. There is little patience, tolerance, proportional thinking or moral imagination in his government. What there is, spun out of a weird amalgam of Austrian economics and American neo-conservatism, out of personal rebukes and unlikely triumphs, is one man’s unalterable conviction that he, and he alone, knows best.



The metamorphosis of democracy into something else begins with forgetfulness and ends with an eerie silence where once there was a multitude of voices.



Readers can reach the author at michaelharris@ipolitics.ca. Click here to view other columns by Michael Harris.

Is this new thing working?

How Long will Harper Stay? Lawrence Martin 8 May 2012

.Canada is right to be troubled by Ukraine’s treat... Back to Watchlist The perfect tool to help you manage and track your investments. LAWRENCE MARTIN How long will Stephen Harper stay? Lawrence Martin | Columnist profile | E-mail From Tuesday's Globe and Mail Published Tuesday, May. 08, 2012 2:00AM EDT Last updated Tuesday, May. 08, 2012 8:37AM EDT 509 comments Email 14Print Decrease text size Increase text size By the time of the next election, should this government’s term run four years, Stephen Harper will have been prime minister for almost a decade. He’s still relatively young, he relishes the exercise of power and there is much he still wishes to do in transforming Canada into a conservative society. The likelihood is that he will run again and try to extend his stewardship of the country to 14 years. More related to this story •Tread carefully, Tories: Governments can live to regret omnibus bills •Tories debate how best to keep middle-class voters •Harper unbound: An analysis of his first year as majority PM Slideshow How Stephen Harper is remaking the Canadian myth Infographic Where federal parties stand a year after the 2011 election Photos Europe's engine That’s what the smart money tells us. It almost makes me wonder why I’m writing this – but a number of other possibilities do need to be considered. One possibility is that in a couple of years’ time, our suzerain will decide he’s had enough, call a leadership convention and leave with his reputation intact, a major political success story in the conservative pantheon. Another is that he will prefer to stay, but circumstances will force his hand; the public grows weary of him before the next campaign date, perhaps, and he senses it. There’s also the scandal scenario, in which Mr. Harper’s standing falls so low, because of accumulated evidence and belief that he is a serial power abuser, that he has little choice but to step down. Chief among the Prime Minister’s worries here is that the Elections Canada robocalls probe turns up wrongdoing. Mr. Harper’s image is already taking a beating over the F-35 jet fighter file. To date, Mr. Harper has gotten away with his style of governance. When his government was found in contempt of Parliament last year, it barely registered with the public – or, it seems, with him. In the past week, he has been pilloried (with conservative commentators leading the way) for embedding important legislation on the environment and employment insurance in the bowels of the mammoth 420-page budget bill. The Prime Minister turned up his nose at the critics, imposing a seven-day time limit for debate on the hugely complex legislation before it’s sent to committee. In opposition, Mr. Harper railed against the Liberals for bill-bundling practices nowhere near this magnitude, but this duplicity probably won’t register with the public, either. Still, there’s the old saying: What goes around comes around. One day, it may be that the billy club turns on him. Another possibility, if ominous clouds gather in the next year or two, is that rather than step down, Mr. Harper calls a snap election to seek a new mandate, arguing that he is being falsely accused. Everyone thinks the next election will be in 2015, but the Prime Minister has already ignored his own fixed-date election law once, in calling the 2008 campaign, and he could well do it again. Any number of surprises are possible, but the character of the PM suggests that he will hunker down for the long haul. If the robocalls probe goes against him, for example, he is likely to use every tactic at his disposal. That’s been the modus operandi so far: Mr. Harper has routinely rejected the word of the courts, of independent agencies, of watchdogs such as the Parliamentary Budget Officer. In the campaign to dismantle the Canadian Wheat Board, the Conservatives ignored a democratic plebiscite among farmers that went against them and a Federal Court ruling censuring the move. The toolkit continues to feature smear and intimidation tactics, as seen in Environment Minister Peter Kent’s latest charges against groups opposed to the Northern Gateway pipeline. Mr. Harper appears oblivious to the toll all of this is taking on his reputation. He is essentially saying that he doesn’t care, that he will not be constrained by the limits of traditional democracy. In speculating about how long he will be in power, don’t underestimate the degree of this defiance. His instincts are such that he will attempt to trample anything or anyone seeking to remove him. 509 comments

Harper Unbound - John Ibbitson

28 April 2012 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/john-ibbitson/harper-unbound-an-analysis-of-his-first-year-as-majority-pm/article2416555/