Be very afraid: Stephen Harper is inventing a new Canada
gerald caplan
Globe and Mail Update
Published Friday, Dec. 16, 2011 6:09PM EST
Last updated Friday, Dec. 16, 2011 6:22PM EST
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Increase text size Stephen Harper first became Prime Minister in 2006 and has already dramatically transformed the old Canada. But with no election due for four more years, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
It’s in the nature of true believers and ideologues to believe that any means to their sacred ends are justified. This makes them extremely dangerous people. It’s also typical of such people that they’re often motivated by unfathomable resentment and anger, a compulsion not just to better but to destroy their adversaries. These are good descriptions of Stephen Harper and those closest to him.
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Justin Trudeau admits losing his cool There was never a Trudeauland or Mulroneyland or Chrétienland, but as The Globe’s Lawrence Martin has made us understand, there is already a Harperland whose nature is quite apparent. Like the American conservatives whom the Harperites so envy, our government has concocted a new reality of its own that it is systematically imposing on the Canadian people. The values and moral code of Mr. Harper’s new Canada are clear.
A central tenet of the new reality is the repudiation of the need for anything as irrelevant as evidence, facts or rationality whenever they are inconvenient. As in cancelling the long-form census, without a shred of reason. As when Injustice Minister Nicholson defends his back-to-the-jungle crime bills by reminding us of a Harperland article of faith: “We don’t govern on the basis of statistics.” Or, as we now know, on the basis of the findings of serious experts both in and out of the government.
Jason Kenney can stand as a past master at inventing evidence to serve his unfailingly partisan needs. This is a man, after all, who has shamelessly claimed a dramatic rise in anti-Semitism in Canada contrary to all the facts. Just days ago, Mr. Kenney employed gratuitously inflammatory language when he created a crisis over a handful of women who wear a veil, and who are of course Muslim.
But lying is the very mother’s milk of Harperland morality. When you invent your own reality, you can also invent your defence. Just follow the distinguished careers of ministers Peter MacKay, Peter Kent and Tony Clement. Old joke: How do you know when certain politicians are lying? Their lips are moving.
In Harperland, hitting below the belt is standard equipment, as the dirty tricks used against Montreal Liberal MP Irwin Cotler nicely demonstrate. Straightforward dishonesty as in the Cotler caper is just the Conservative version of free expression, as Government House Leader Van Loan earnestly explained. When the Speaker of the House brands the tactic as “reprehensible,” you know we’re no longer in Kansas, kids.
On the complex aboriginal file, Harperland blames the victims for their own wretched circumstances and blames local NDP MP Charlie Angus for not cluing in the clueless Aboriginal Affairs Minister. The minister’s assertion that the chief of Attawapiskat had accepted the government’s imposition of a ludicrously expensive third-party manager was, of course, immediately contradicted.
Harperland values demand fundamental changes in our governance processes – the outright attacks on trade unions, the unprecedented measures taken to silence critical NGOs, the muzzling of ostensibly independent federal watchdogs.
But the new values also reverse decades of cherished Canadian policies. Look at the contempt the Prime Minister shows for the United Nations, as described in a new paper for the McLeod Group by former Canadian diplomat and senior UN official Carolyn McAskie, “Canada and Multilateralism: Missing In Action”:
The Prime Minister says he has little use for the UN. ... After losing a bid for membership of the Security Council, many government members made disparaging comments about that “corrupt organization” and right wing press commentators referred to it as an organization run by “dictators.” Is this the Canada that played such a front-line role in previous decades? How can we behave in this childish manner, spurning a whole system of organizations critical to world peace, security and development?
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Increase text size To damage Canada’s reputation even further, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has gravely disappointed those who had high expectations of him as the country’s senior diplomat. Sadly, Mr. Baird has proved incapable of eschewing the cheap politics by which he demeaned the House for so many years, complete with endlessly-repeated spin lines that substitute on the world stage partisan slogans for real thought.
The new Canada is a place where militarism is given pride of place over peacemaking. Watching Defence Minister Peter MacKay taking bows at the Grey Cup game for Canada's part in the Libyan campaign, Globe columnist Lawrence Martin observed:
The blending of sport and the military, with the government as the marching band, is part of the new nationalism the Conservatives are trying to instill. It is another example of how the state, under Stephen Harper’s governance, is becoming all-intrusive. … State controls are now at a highpoint in our modern history. There is every indication they will extend further.
The University of Ottawa's Ralph Heintzman, who created and headed the federal Public Service Office of Values and Ethics, provides an important insight into what’s happening here: There is a “lack of sense of inner self-restraint on the part of the prime minister, a sense that it is some kind of war and therefore anything is legitimate, that it's quite acceptable for a prime minister to lie, for example, about how our parliamentary democracy works.”
Politics as war is exactly what former Harper strategist Tom Flanagan has long advocated. A Globe piece by Mr. Flanagan before the 2011 election was actually titled “An election is war by other means.” Mr. Flanagan also chose to compare the 2008 campaign to ancient wars in which Rome, the Conservatives, defeated Carthage, the Liberals, and “razed the city to the ground and sowed salt in the fields so nothing would grow there again”.
As Alan Whitehorn of the Royal Military College of Canada wrote: “This suggests a paradigm not of civil rivalry between fellow citizens of the same state, but all-out extended war to destroy and obliterate the opponent. This kind of malevolent vision and hostile tone seems antithetical to the democratic spirit, not to mention peace and stability.”
In fact like Mr. Harper, Prof. Flanagan seems to get a kick out of “destroying and obliterating” those he’s not fond of. When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was making news, Prof. Flanagan commented: “Well, I think Assange should be assassinated, actually. I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something. … I would not feel unhappy if Assange ‘disappeared’.”
To a woman who e-mailed him objecting to his (presumed) flippancy, Prof. Flanagan responded: “Better be careful, we know where you live.” What would Freud have made of such kibitzing, I wonder? After all, the good professor has cited Machiavelli's odious comment that “fortune is a woman and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force.”
Ironically, if you want to hear from the other Canada, the former Canada, the one so much admired by the world, you should (and still can) listen to last Sunday’s interview on CBC radio’s Sunday Edition between host Michael Enright and Iceland’s President, Olafur Grimmson. There, in Mr. Grimmson, was the voice of humanity, thoughtfulness, pragmatism and commonsense. He is the perfect Canadian and would make the perfect Canadian prime minister. No wonder the masterminds of Harperland want to disappear the CBC.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
29 November 2011 - Lawrence Martin
Under this PM, the state is everywhere
Lawrence Martin | Columnist profile | E-mail
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
Published Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2011 2:00AM EST
What does the Grey Cup football game have to do with the Canadian military? Not much, you say. True enough. But chalk up another public-relations triumph for the governing Conservatives. They turned the opening ceremonies of our annual sports classic into a military glorification exercise.
For our part in the NATO Libya campaign, the Defence Minister took bows on the field. A Canadian flag was spread over 40 yards. Cannons boomed.
More related to this story
•A three-peat for prorogation? Bring on reform
•A tale of two democracies: Harper steamrolls, Obama grinds gears
•Tories take over as party of Big Government
Photos
Leak in the bucket The blending of sport and the military, with the government as the marching band, is part of the new nationalism the Conservatives are trying to instill. It is another example of how the state, under Stephen Harper’s governance, is becoming all-intrusive.
Conservatism, as defined by Ronald Reagan, was about getting government off the backs of the people. Conservatism, as practised by team Harper, is more akin to an Orwellian opposite. State controls are now at a highpoint in our modern history. There is every indication they will extend further.
The propaganda machine has become mammoth and unrelenting. The parliamentary newspaper The Hill Times recently found there are now no fewer than 1,500 communications staffers on the governing payroll. In the days of the King and St. Laurent governments, there were hardly any. In recent decades, the numbers shot up, but Mr. Harper is outdoing all others, a primary example being his institution and maintenance of a master control system wherein virtually every government communication is filtered through central command.
In his minority governments, the rationale was that tight controls were necessary for survival. With a majority, it was thought that the controls that brought on parliamentary shutdowns and contempt of Parliament rulings would ease up. Those who thought that way didn’t know Stephen Harper.
In recent weeks, the government has invoked closure or time limits on debate at a record-breaking clip. The limits have come on key legislation, driving the combustible New Democrat Pat Martin to proclaim, “There’s not a democracy in the world that would tolerate this jackboot [expletive].”
On the propaganda ledger, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney put on a show in committee last week. In what may have been a first, his spinners set up a billboard behind him replete with bright Conservative blue colours and flags. Everything except a marching band.
In the message-massaging department, news has arrived that the government is imposing new communications controls on the RCMP. The same is being done with the Defence Department. Secrecy surrounds the government’s plans to spend a whopping $477-million on a U.S. military satellite.
State surveillance, the rationale being security, is being taken to new levels. The Conservatives are bringing in legislation that will compel Internet service-providers to disclose customer information. A Canada-U.S. agreement is on the way that will contain an entry-exit system that will track everyone.
In Parliament, more and more ministers are showing up for Question Period with prewritten answers. If the scripted stuff is far afield of the questions posed, it doesn’t matter. In our shining democracy, they use it anyway.
Research that contradicts the government line is discarded. Civil liberties fade, new jails proliferate. Those who speak out better watch out. When the NDP’s Megan Leslie stated an opposing view on the Keystone XL Pipeline, she was accused by the government of treachery.
In that conservatives cherish freedom, it’s rather strange. For a book on the government, Harperland, I chose the subtitle The Politics of Control. I now plead guilty to understatement. With their populist nationalism and drive for domination, these guys are everywhere, even on our football fields.
82 comments
Lawrence Martin | Columnist profile | E-mail
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
Published Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2011 2:00AM EST
What does the Grey Cup football game have to do with the Canadian military? Not much, you say. True enough. But chalk up another public-relations triumph for the governing Conservatives. They turned the opening ceremonies of our annual sports classic into a military glorification exercise.
For our part in the NATO Libya campaign, the Defence Minister took bows on the field. A Canadian flag was spread over 40 yards. Cannons boomed.
More related to this story
•A three-peat for prorogation? Bring on reform
•A tale of two democracies: Harper steamrolls, Obama grinds gears
•Tories take over as party of Big Government
Photos
Leak in the bucket The blending of sport and the military, with the government as the marching band, is part of the new nationalism the Conservatives are trying to instill. It is another example of how the state, under Stephen Harper’s governance, is becoming all-intrusive.
Conservatism, as defined by Ronald Reagan, was about getting government off the backs of the people. Conservatism, as practised by team Harper, is more akin to an Orwellian opposite. State controls are now at a highpoint in our modern history. There is every indication they will extend further.
The propaganda machine has become mammoth and unrelenting. The parliamentary newspaper The Hill Times recently found there are now no fewer than 1,500 communications staffers on the governing payroll. In the days of the King and St. Laurent governments, there were hardly any. In recent decades, the numbers shot up, but Mr. Harper is outdoing all others, a primary example being his institution and maintenance of a master control system wherein virtually every government communication is filtered through central command.
In his minority governments, the rationale was that tight controls were necessary for survival. With a majority, it was thought that the controls that brought on parliamentary shutdowns and contempt of Parliament rulings would ease up. Those who thought that way didn’t know Stephen Harper.
In recent weeks, the government has invoked closure or time limits on debate at a record-breaking clip. The limits have come on key legislation, driving the combustible New Democrat Pat Martin to proclaim, “There’s not a democracy in the world that would tolerate this jackboot [expletive].”
On the propaganda ledger, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney put on a show in committee last week. In what may have been a first, his spinners set up a billboard behind him replete with bright Conservative blue colours and flags. Everything except a marching band.
In the message-massaging department, news has arrived that the government is imposing new communications controls on the RCMP. The same is being done with the Defence Department. Secrecy surrounds the government’s plans to spend a whopping $477-million on a U.S. military satellite.
State surveillance, the rationale being security, is being taken to new levels. The Conservatives are bringing in legislation that will compel Internet service-providers to disclose customer information. A Canada-U.S. agreement is on the way that will contain an entry-exit system that will track everyone.
In Parliament, more and more ministers are showing up for Question Period with prewritten answers. If the scripted stuff is far afield of the questions posed, it doesn’t matter. In our shining democracy, they use it anyway.
Research that contradicts the government line is discarded. Civil liberties fade, new jails proliferate. Those who speak out better watch out. When the NDP’s Megan Leslie stated an opposing view on the Keystone XL Pipeline, she was accused by the government of treachery.
In that conservatives cherish freedom, it’s rather strange. For a book on the government, Harperland, I chose the subtitle The Politics of Control. I now plead guilty to understatement. With their populist nationalism and drive for domination, these guys are everywhere, even on our football fields.
82 comments
29 November 2011 End of Wheat Board
steven chase
OTTAWA— From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
Published Monday, Nov. 28, 2011 6:44PM EST
The Harper government has flexed its majority muscle to push through the Commons a controversial bill that will forever change the lives of 70,000 Canadian grain farmers.
With this, the Conservatives fulfilled a long-promised goal of stripping the Canadian Wheat Board of control over western grain sales – a move that the agency’s dissenting chair has warned will ultimately doom the Prairie institution.
More related to this story
•Senate plans extra sittings to pass budget, Wheat Board bills before Christmas
•Wheat Board bill gets pre-screening – and debate limit – in Senate
•Sound and fury as Tories limit debate on packed agenda
Video
Wheat Board files suit against Ottawa Conservative MPs easily outvoted their NDP and Liberal rivals Monday evening to pass the Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act in the Commons. The vote passed 153 to 120.
As of Aug. 1, 2012, western Canadian farmers will be free of the wheat board’s monopoly and no longer forced to sell their wheat and barley through the agency.
Instead, for the first time in nearly seven decades, they will be able to negotiate their own deals.
“This is a tremendous day; this is a movement forward; this is what we have been waiting for, [for] decades,” Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz said Monday.
“For far too long, western farmers have been shackled by an outdated monopoly and today they got one step closer to having the marketing freedom they want and deserve.”
The Conservatives and their predecessor parties, including Reform, had long campaigned against the board as a symbol of big government gone awry – a nanny state intrusion into the lives of farmers that, like the gun registry, the Tories were determined to end.
Before it can become law and take effect, the legislation must still be approved by the Senate, where the Tories also outnumber their rivals and can ensure its passage.
Western Canadian farmers are sharply divided on the legislation, plebiscites conducted by the board show.
The Conservatives have been adamant about passing the bill before year end so that millers, maltsters and farmers can begin negotiating contracts for summer 2012 delivery.
The wheat board debate is fundamentally a battle between individualism and collectivism – over whether, in 2011, these farmers should be obliged to pool their grain to seek a better price or whether they should be free to pursue their fortunes alone.
Interim NDP Leader Nycole Turmel predicted farmers would suffer when producers are free to exit the board. Those who wish may stick with the board but it will no longer have the selling volume to command as much influence in the market.
“For generations, farmers relied on the wheat board to get the best possible price for their grain and to support their families,” Ms. Turmel said. “But this government ignored them and now that stability is gone.”
More related to this story
•Ottawa accused of hoarding wheat board fund
•‘It’s beyond Big Brother,’ Ritz says of wheat board
•Wheat-board chief fears final harvest if Harper has his way
•Canadian Wheat Board sues Tories over plan to dismantle monopoly
•Wheat Board takes fight to the people
•Wheat board directors broke ranks with lawyers to sue Ottawa
•Farmers slap Canadian Wheat Board with countersuit
•All farmers are equal – but some are more equal than others
•Canada’s Wheat Board wars: The future of farming cut two ways
•End of wheat-board monopoly bolsters Tory stand against regulation
More
OTTAWA— From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
Published Monday, Nov. 28, 2011 6:44PM EST
The Harper government has flexed its majority muscle to push through the Commons a controversial bill that will forever change the lives of 70,000 Canadian grain farmers.
With this, the Conservatives fulfilled a long-promised goal of stripping the Canadian Wheat Board of control over western grain sales – a move that the agency’s dissenting chair has warned will ultimately doom the Prairie institution.
More related to this story
•Senate plans extra sittings to pass budget, Wheat Board bills before Christmas
•Wheat Board bill gets pre-screening – and debate limit – in Senate
•Sound and fury as Tories limit debate on packed agenda
Video
Wheat Board files suit against Ottawa Conservative MPs easily outvoted their NDP and Liberal rivals Monday evening to pass the Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act in the Commons. The vote passed 153 to 120.
As of Aug. 1, 2012, western Canadian farmers will be free of the wheat board’s monopoly and no longer forced to sell their wheat and barley through the agency.
Instead, for the first time in nearly seven decades, they will be able to negotiate their own deals.
“This is a tremendous day; this is a movement forward; this is what we have been waiting for, [for] decades,” Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz said Monday.
“For far too long, western farmers have been shackled by an outdated monopoly and today they got one step closer to having the marketing freedom they want and deserve.”
The Conservatives and their predecessor parties, including Reform, had long campaigned against the board as a symbol of big government gone awry – a nanny state intrusion into the lives of farmers that, like the gun registry, the Tories were determined to end.
Before it can become law and take effect, the legislation must still be approved by the Senate, where the Tories also outnumber their rivals and can ensure its passage.
Western Canadian farmers are sharply divided on the legislation, plebiscites conducted by the board show.
The Conservatives have been adamant about passing the bill before year end so that millers, maltsters and farmers can begin negotiating contracts for summer 2012 delivery.
The wheat board debate is fundamentally a battle between individualism and collectivism – over whether, in 2011, these farmers should be obliged to pool their grain to seek a better price or whether they should be free to pursue their fortunes alone.
Interim NDP Leader Nycole Turmel predicted farmers would suffer when producers are free to exit the board. Those who wish may stick with the board but it will no longer have the selling volume to command as much influence in the market.
“For generations, farmers relied on the wheat board to get the best possible price for their grain and to support their families,” Ms. Turmel said. “But this government ignored them and now that stability is gone.”
More related to this story
•Ottawa accused of hoarding wheat board fund
•‘It’s beyond Big Brother,’ Ritz says of wheat board
•Wheat-board chief fears final harvest if Harper has his way
•Canadian Wheat Board sues Tories over plan to dismantle monopoly
•Wheat Board takes fight to the people
•Wheat board directors broke ranks with lawyers to sue Ottawa
•Farmers slap Canadian Wheat Board with countersuit
•All farmers are equal – but some are more equal than others
•Canada’s Wheat Board wars: The future of farming cut two ways
•End of wheat-board monopoly bolsters Tory stand against regulation
More
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Tony Clement's G8 Spending Spree
2 November 2011 Greg Weston
The federal minister responsible for cutting government waste is being called before a parliamentary committee Wednesday to explain how his own Ontario riding became paved in $45 million of political pork.
Treasury Board head Tony Clement certainly has a lot to answer for.
The $45.7-million spending spree was supposed to provide essential facilities to host last year's G8 summit of world leaders in Clement's riding in Muskoka cottage country north of Toronto.
Instead, almost all of the money was scattered across Clement's electoral domain for local pet projects that had little or nothing at all to do with the summit — everything from a $17-million community centre expansion to a $100,000 gazebo in the middle of an empty lot an hour's drive from the meeting site.
So far, Stephen Harper's government has successfully stonewalled all attempts by the opposition parties to get to the bottom of the great Muskoka pork barrel.
That may help to explain why the Conservative government's master of political bafflegab, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, will be seated next to Clement at the committee hearing.
At the time of the G8 spending, Baird was the minister responsible for managing billions of dollars of infrastructure money, allegedly including giving final sign-off on what is unaffectionately known in political circles as Tony's Porkfest.
With Clement and Baird in the hot seat at committee, opposition MPs will be after answers to five key questions:
Auditor General Sheila Fraser, in her final report released just after she retired in June, revealed that the $50 million used for the so-called G8 legacy projects in Clement's riding had been wrongly, if not illegally, taken from funds Parliament had approved for Canadian border crossings.
Question: Exactly who in government approved the pilfering of the border improvement fund, and given the severity of the auditor general's findings, what disciplinary action has been taken against those responsible?
The auditor general also reported that public servants were not involved in selecting the 32 projects in Clement's riding that received the $50 million.
Question: Who selected the projects, by what criteria, and who authorized those responsible to circumvent all of the normal government funding procedures in place to ensure the prudent use of taxpayers' money?
The auditors who dug into the G8 spending were unable to find any of the usual government documentation showing how the projects were selected for funding.
Question: What happened to all the paperwork, and if it was destroyed, has the government called in the RCMP?
Documents obtained by Postmedia journalists and NDP researchers suggest Clement was personally involved in getting at least one friend hired to work on a G8 contract, and the minister may have also tried to pressure federal officials not to conduct a routine review of G8 spending.
Question: How do Canadian taxpayers benefit if a minister becomes involved in nepotism and meddling with officials trying to protect the public purse?
As head of the Treasury Board, Clement is now responsible for ensuring the Conservative government adheres to stringent rules intended to get the best value for Canadian taxpayers in all federal spending.
Question: Given all that has happened on the G8 spending file, if Clement cannot clearly and convincingly answer all of the above questions, why should Canadians trust him in such a pivotal cabinet role?
The federal minister responsible for cutting government waste is being called before a parliamentary committee Wednesday to explain how his own Ontario riding became paved in $45 million of political pork.
Treasury Board head Tony Clement certainly has a lot to answer for.
The $45.7-million spending spree was supposed to provide essential facilities to host last year's G8 summit of world leaders in Clement's riding in Muskoka cottage country north of Toronto.
Instead, almost all of the money was scattered across Clement's electoral domain for local pet projects that had little or nothing at all to do with the summit — everything from a $17-million community centre expansion to a $100,000 gazebo in the middle of an empty lot an hour's drive from the meeting site.
So far, Stephen Harper's government has successfully stonewalled all attempts by the opposition parties to get to the bottom of the great Muskoka pork barrel.
That may help to explain why the Conservative government's master of political bafflegab, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, will be seated next to Clement at the committee hearing.
At the time of the G8 spending, Baird was the minister responsible for managing billions of dollars of infrastructure money, allegedly including giving final sign-off on what is unaffectionately known in political circles as Tony's Porkfest.
With Clement and Baird in the hot seat at committee, opposition MPs will be after answers to five key questions:
Auditor General Sheila Fraser, in her final report released just after she retired in June, revealed that the $50 million used for the so-called G8 legacy projects in Clement's riding had been wrongly, if not illegally, taken from funds Parliament had approved for Canadian border crossings.
Question: Exactly who in government approved the pilfering of the border improvement fund, and given the severity of the auditor general's findings, what disciplinary action has been taken against those responsible?
The auditor general also reported that public servants were not involved in selecting the 32 projects in Clement's riding that received the $50 million.
Question: Who selected the projects, by what criteria, and who authorized those responsible to circumvent all of the normal government funding procedures in place to ensure the prudent use of taxpayers' money?
The auditors who dug into the G8 spending were unable to find any of the usual government documentation showing how the projects were selected for funding.
Question: What happened to all the paperwork, and if it was destroyed, has the government called in the RCMP?
Documents obtained by Postmedia journalists and NDP researchers suggest Clement was personally involved in getting at least one friend hired to work on a G8 contract, and the minister may have also tried to pressure federal officials not to conduct a routine review of G8 spending.
Question: How do Canadian taxpayers benefit if a minister becomes involved in nepotism and meddling with officials trying to protect the public purse?
As head of the Treasury Board, Clement is now responsible for ensuring the Conservative government adheres to stringent rules intended to get the best value for Canadian taxpayers in all federal spending.
Question: Given all that has happened on the G8 spending file, if Clement cannot clearly and convincingly answer all of the above questions, why should Canadians trust him in such a pivotal cabinet role?
Friday, September 30, 2011
Stinky Steve 2011
This is an on-going list of things that Stinky Steve is doing to Canada:
1. Omnibus crime bill despite falling crime rates:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2011/09/20/pol-omnibus-crime.html
2. Dissolution of the Canadian Wheat Board despite protests from farmers:
http://www.cwbeyeswideopen.blogspot.com/
1. Omnibus crime bill despite falling crime rates:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2011/09/20/pol-omnibus-crime.html
2. Dissolution of the Canadian Wheat Board despite protests from farmers:
http://www.cwbeyeswideopen.blogspot.com/
Bad News for Steve 2011
Insite Injection Site may remain open:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2011/09/29/bc-insite-supreme-court-ruling-advancer.html
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2011/09/29/bc-insite-supreme-court-ruling-advancer.html
Monday, June 13, 2011
Kenney v. MacKay - Ivison 13 June 2011
Kenney, MacKay duel will play on
John Ivison, National Post · Jun. 13, 2011 | Last Updated: Jun. 13, 2011 2:02 AM ET
Like Macbeth weighing up the murder of King Duncan, there was "no spur" for the actions of Peter MacKay and Jason Kenney at the Conservative convention, beyond "vaulting ambition" -an intense desire for power -that threatened to o'er leap itself and tear the party apart.
The Conservatives should be on the crest of a wave. Stephen Harper even suggested that the best is yet to come if the Tories can profit from the inevitable end of the fairytale romance between the NDP and Quebec.
Yet, even as the talk of wooing Quebec was still hanging in the air, delegates were being asked to vote on a proposal to reform the way the party elects its leaders, in favour of a system that would have further alienated a Quebec delegation that already feels unloved.
The resolution would have ended the system under which every riding carries equal weight regardless of membership numbers, in favour of one where larger associations would have more votes. The motion was proposed by Ontario MP Scott Reid, but everyone at the convention knew he was really a proxy for Mr. Kenney, who will likely be a contender in any race to succeed Mr. Harper and would benefit if large associations in the West and Ontario had more votes.
In the other corner, Mr. MacKay presented himself as the trusty defender of a status quo that he claimed was responsible for delivering a majority. This was a less altruistic position than it appeared at first blush. If he is to have any hope of succeeding Mr. Harper, the former leader of the Progressive Conservative party needs Quebec and Atlantic Canada to punch above their membership weight.
The resolution was eventually defeated, thanks one suspects, to direction from above (i.e. Mr. Harper) to get it off the floor with minimal damage to party unity. It was noticeable that an electronic vote was not taken after the show of hands suggested a majority were opposed. Many Conservatives wanted the weekend to be a raucous celebration of the majority victory. And it was. The hospitality suites were hot, blue and righteous on Friday night with over-served Conservatives flocking from room to room in search of further refreshment as the stocks of booze ran low.
Yet the seeds of discontent have been sown by ambitious men who put their own agenda ahead of party unity. There are valid arguments on both sides. The resolution put forward by Mr. Reid would provide an incentive for riding associations to add members. Enshrining the status quo in the constitution would have been a signal to Quebecers that the party was serious about making the party a comfortable home for them. But both sides knew that this one point of disharmony would obscure all the other points of agreement, and still they forced the issue. It's important to note that this was not just a media obsession -delegates were equally preoccupied by the outbreak of open warfare on the convention floor.
This could all be presented as healthy debate within a democratic party. But some of the discourse was pretty salty and everyone knows that it will be even more vitriolic at the next convention, when the party is not revelling in the rosy afterglow of an election victory. This was the first serious skirmish in a war between Peter MacKay and Jason Kenney that looks as if it will be waged for years to come.
jivison@nationalpost.com
John Ivison, National Post · Jun. 13, 2011 | Last Updated: Jun. 13, 2011 2:02 AM ET
Like Macbeth weighing up the murder of King Duncan, there was "no spur" for the actions of Peter MacKay and Jason Kenney at the Conservative convention, beyond "vaulting ambition" -an intense desire for power -that threatened to o'er leap itself and tear the party apart.
The Conservatives should be on the crest of a wave. Stephen Harper even suggested that the best is yet to come if the Tories can profit from the inevitable end of the fairytale romance between the NDP and Quebec.
Yet, even as the talk of wooing Quebec was still hanging in the air, delegates were being asked to vote on a proposal to reform the way the party elects its leaders, in favour of a system that would have further alienated a Quebec delegation that already feels unloved.
The resolution would have ended the system under which every riding carries equal weight regardless of membership numbers, in favour of one where larger associations would have more votes. The motion was proposed by Ontario MP Scott Reid, but everyone at the convention knew he was really a proxy for Mr. Kenney, who will likely be a contender in any race to succeed Mr. Harper and would benefit if large associations in the West and Ontario had more votes.
In the other corner, Mr. MacKay presented himself as the trusty defender of a status quo that he claimed was responsible for delivering a majority. This was a less altruistic position than it appeared at first blush. If he is to have any hope of succeeding Mr. Harper, the former leader of the Progressive Conservative party needs Quebec and Atlantic Canada to punch above their membership weight.
The resolution was eventually defeated, thanks one suspects, to direction from above (i.e. Mr. Harper) to get it off the floor with minimal damage to party unity. It was noticeable that an electronic vote was not taken after the show of hands suggested a majority were opposed. Many Conservatives wanted the weekend to be a raucous celebration of the majority victory. And it was. The hospitality suites were hot, blue and righteous on Friday night with over-served Conservatives flocking from room to room in search of further refreshment as the stocks of booze ran low.
Yet the seeds of discontent have been sown by ambitious men who put their own agenda ahead of party unity. There are valid arguments on both sides. The resolution put forward by Mr. Reid would provide an incentive for riding associations to add members. Enshrining the status quo in the constitution would have been a signal to Quebecers that the party was serious about making the party a comfortable home for them. But both sides knew that this one point of disharmony would obscure all the other points of agreement, and still they forced the issue. It's important to note that this was not just a media obsession -delegates were equally preoccupied by the outbreak of open warfare on the convention floor.
This could all be presented as healthy debate within a democratic party. But some of the discourse was pretty salty and everyone knows that it will be even more vitriolic at the next convention, when the party is not revelling in the rosy afterglow of an election victory. This was the first serious skirmish in a war between Peter MacKay and Jason Kenney that looks as if it will be waged for years to come.
jivison@nationalpost.com
The Harper Doctrine - Ibbitson 12 June 2011
The Harper Doctrine: Conservative foreign policy in black and white
JOHN IBBITSON
OTTAWA— From Monday's Globe and Mail (Includes Correction)
Posted on Sunday, June 12, 2011 10:43PM EDT
724 comments Email Print/License Decrease text size
Increase text size A few years ago at a conference in Washington, an American diplomat asked a Canadian journalist a blunt question.
“Why doesn’t Canada show up any more?” he wanted to know. “You’re just not at the table like you used to be.”
Canada under Stephen Harper is, emphatically, back at the table – pounding it, actually, while loudly brandishing what could be called the Harper Doctrine.
Not that long ago, the Canadian military had been starved to the brink of extinction, the federal government had been forced to cut back on peacekeeping commitments, foreign aid was all aspiration and little execution, and our diplomats trumpeted soft power because we had no other kind to offer.
Today, Canada has the political will and military muscle to back up a new and more militant foreign policy.
The Prime Minister reflected this new reality in his triumphalist speech to the Conservative party faithful on the weekend, where he articulated Canada’s approach to the world in a single, potent sentence.
“We know where our interests lie and who our friends are,” he declared, “and we take strong, principled positions in our dealings with other nations, whether popular or not.”
He didn’t call it the Harper Doctrine, but we can. It is startling both in its boldness and its utter lack of nuance.
Under the Harper Doctrine, Canada doesn’t just support the state of Israel. It supports Israel four-square, without reservation.
It doesn’t contribute to NATO and United Nations missions by sending a rusting destroyer or some other token measure. The army has been re-equipped, the air force is being re-equipped, the navy will be re-equipped, despite plans to rein in the dramatically enlarged defence budget. And this government doesn’t hesitate to send that military overseas in the service of Canadian and allied interests.
The Harper Doctrine permits real money to be spent on foreign aid, but that aid must mirror core Conservative values – so no funding for abortion or for aid groups seen as soft on Israel.
The Harper Doctrine aggressively asserts Canadian sovereignty in the far north, even as it seeks closer integration with the United States on security and trade.
And to execute the Harper Doctrine, Canada has for the first time in a decade a powerful new foreign minister who has the ear of the Prime Minister and who intimately shares his world view. John Baird could be in that job for a while, unlike the seven in ten years who came before.
Harper's detractors in the opposition parties, on university campuses and among some nongovernmental organizations abhor everything about his doctrine: Its slavish adherence to Israel, they say, renders Canada useless as an honest broker in Middle East conflicts.
For them, the billions spent on bringing the military up to grade could have been used to bring the deficit down more quickly, or to reduce inequalities within Canadian society; the interventions in Afghanistan and Libya are simply modern imperialism dressed up in humanitarian garb; Canadian assertions on Arctic sovereignty are unenforceable and wrong in international law, while negotiating a continental security perimeter with the United States will further compromise sovereignty.
For these critics, the empty-headed belligerence of the Harper Doctrine lay behind Canada’s humiliating defeat in its bid for a seat at the Security Council.
The Harper Doctrine is so categorical, and so starkly at odds with NDP and Liberal values, that foreign policy could increasingly become a polarizing element in Canadian politics.
But at least Canada has a foreign policy again. No one is asking where Canada has gone any more.
Editor's Note: The original newspaper version of this article and an earlier online version incorrectly said Afghanistan is part of the Arab world. This online version has been corrected.
More related to this story
•Canadian foreign policy needs to be more independent: Harper
•Calling for patience, Ottawa prepares to extend fight against Gadhafi
•Harper shifts aid policy from grants to backing multilateral lenders
•Ottawa risks a lack of focus in Latin America
724 comments
JOHN IBBITSON
OTTAWA— From Monday's Globe and Mail (Includes Correction)
Posted on Sunday, June 12, 2011 10:43PM EDT
724 comments Email Print/License Decrease text size
Increase text size A few years ago at a conference in Washington, an American diplomat asked a Canadian journalist a blunt question.
“Why doesn’t Canada show up any more?” he wanted to know. “You’re just not at the table like you used to be.”
Canada under Stephen Harper is, emphatically, back at the table – pounding it, actually, while loudly brandishing what could be called the Harper Doctrine.
Not that long ago, the Canadian military had been starved to the brink of extinction, the federal government had been forced to cut back on peacekeeping commitments, foreign aid was all aspiration and little execution, and our diplomats trumpeted soft power because we had no other kind to offer.
Today, Canada has the political will and military muscle to back up a new and more militant foreign policy.
The Prime Minister reflected this new reality in his triumphalist speech to the Conservative party faithful on the weekend, where he articulated Canada’s approach to the world in a single, potent sentence.
“We know where our interests lie and who our friends are,” he declared, “and we take strong, principled positions in our dealings with other nations, whether popular or not.”
He didn’t call it the Harper Doctrine, but we can. It is startling both in its boldness and its utter lack of nuance.
Under the Harper Doctrine, Canada doesn’t just support the state of Israel. It supports Israel four-square, without reservation.
It doesn’t contribute to NATO and United Nations missions by sending a rusting destroyer or some other token measure. The army has been re-equipped, the air force is being re-equipped, the navy will be re-equipped, despite plans to rein in the dramatically enlarged defence budget. And this government doesn’t hesitate to send that military overseas in the service of Canadian and allied interests.
The Harper Doctrine permits real money to be spent on foreign aid, but that aid must mirror core Conservative values – so no funding for abortion or for aid groups seen as soft on Israel.
The Harper Doctrine aggressively asserts Canadian sovereignty in the far north, even as it seeks closer integration with the United States on security and trade.
And to execute the Harper Doctrine, Canada has for the first time in a decade a powerful new foreign minister who has the ear of the Prime Minister and who intimately shares his world view. John Baird could be in that job for a while, unlike the seven in ten years who came before.
Harper's detractors in the opposition parties, on university campuses and among some nongovernmental organizations abhor everything about his doctrine: Its slavish adherence to Israel, they say, renders Canada useless as an honest broker in Middle East conflicts.
For them, the billions spent on bringing the military up to grade could have been used to bring the deficit down more quickly, or to reduce inequalities within Canadian society; the interventions in Afghanistan and Libya are simply modern imperialism dressed up in humanitarian garb; Canadian assertions on Arctic sovereignty are unenforceable and wrong in international law, while negotiating a continental security perimeter with the United States will further compromise sovereignty.
For these critics, the empty-headed belligerence of the Harper Doctrine lay behind Canada’s humiliating defeat in its bid for a seat at the Security Council.
The Harper Doctrine is so categorical, and so starkly at odds with NDP and Liberal values, that foreign policy could increasingly become a polarizing element in Canadian politics.
But at least Canada has a foreign policy again. No one is asking where Canada has gone any more.
Editor's Note: The original newspaper version of this article and an earlier online version incorrectly said Afghanistan is part of the Arab world. This online version has been corrected.
More related to this story
•Canadian foreign policy needs to be more independent: Harper
•Calling for patience, Ottawa prepares to extend fight against Gadhafi
•Harper shifts aid policy from grants to backing multilateral lenders
•Ottawa risks a lack of focus in Latin America
724 comments
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Liberals have to create new political centre - The Star
Liberals have to create a new political centre
Published On Sat May 14 2011
David Eaves and Taylor Owen
Canadians may have once valued the Liberal party, but they reject what it has become. The reason is simple. The centre is dead. Worse still, Liberals let it die. What once was the pragmatic core of Canadian politics, today is a wasteland devoid of an imaginative, progressive vision, occupied by a largely obsolete electoral strategy.
Don’t believe us? Consider the issues the Liberal party managed over the 20th century. The creation of universal health care and the social safety net. The management of the Canada-U.S. relationship by balancing opportunities for Canadian businesses with our desire to preserve our identity. Engaging Quebec and seeking to affirm its place within the country. Cultivating multiculturalism while simultaneously securing individual rights in a charter. Fostering peacekeeping to ensure local conflicts did not escalate into nuclear confrontation.
These were significant accomplishments that defined three generations of Canadians. They are also no longer relevant.
Today Canadians, especially young Canadians, are confident about themselves and their identity — no longer is there a “lament for a nation.” The sovereignty movement, while not dead, struggles. Individual rights continue to erode discrimination and the hierarchical relationships that impeded free expression and liberty. While some progressives continue to bang these drums, no one should be surprised that they no longer resonate.
In other cases, the solutions offered in the 20th century are no longer relevant. Canadians know — as health care threatens to eat up 50 per cent of provincial budgets and service levels remain mixed — that their health-care system is broken. Young Canadians don’t even pretend to believe a pension system will exist for them. Anyone can see that peacekeeping cannot solve today’s international conflicts.
On all of these issues, the traditional offerings of progressive rings hollow. But there is an opportunity for progressives. An opportunity to build a new centre. A centre that moves beyond the debate between conservatives of the right and conservatives of the left.
On the right is a Conservative party that, at its core, doesn’t believe in the federal government. It’s a vision for Canada grounded in the 1860s, of a minimalist government that is responsible for little beyond law and order and defence. Its appeal is the offer to dismantle the parts of the system that are broken, but in so doing it will leave behind many of those who are protected and enabled by the government.
On the left is a party whose vision is to return Canada to the 1960s. It’s a world of a strong national government, of an even bigger health-care system, social safety net and welfare state. Its appeal is a defence of the status quo at all costs, which in the long run will be many. The conservatism of the left means protecting what is unsustainable. It is the unreformed arc of old ideas.
If there is going to be a new centre between these conservative poles, Liberals will need to stop lying to themselves — and to Canadians. They need to acknowledge — loudly and publicly — that they failed to reform the institutions of the 20th century and, as a consequence, health care is broken and the welfare state as presently constructed is financially insatiable. A progressive future lies in taking these challenges head on rather that passively avoiding them.
Moreover, a modern progressive view of government needs to meet the consumer expectations created by Google, Apple and WestJet. Fast, effective, personalized, friendly. In short, progressives need a vision that not only safeguards citizens against the extremes of a globalizing market, but also meets the rising expectations Canadians have of services in the 21st century — all this in a manner that will be sustainable given 21st century budgets and demographics.
No party has figured out how to accomplish this, on the left or the right. And trolling through 20th or 19th century ideologies probably isn’t going to get us there.
The future for progressives rests in figuring out the political axes of the 21st century around which new solutions can be mined and new coalitions built.
We suspect these will include open vs. closed systems; evidence-based policy vs. ideology; meritocratic governance vs. patronage; open and fair markets vs. isolationism; sustainability vs. disposability, and emergent networks vs. hierarchies. It is these political distinctions, not the old left versus right, that increasingly resonate among those we speak to.
The challenge is enormous but progressives have done it before. In the 19th century, the rise of industrial capitalism led to a series of tense societal changes, including the emergence of an urban working class, increasing inequality and the terrifying possibility of total war.
A centrist party turned out to be the place where three generations of pragmatically driven progressives were able to lead nearly a century of Canadian politics. Doing this again will require starting from scratch, but that is the task at hand.
David Eaves is a specialist on public policy, collaboration and open source methodologies.
Taylor Owen is a Banting Fellow at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia
Published On Sat May 14 2011
David Eaves and Taylor Owen
Canadians may have once valued the Liberal party, but they reject what it has become. The reason is simple. The centre is dead. Worse still, Liberals let it die. What once was the pragmatic core of Canadian politics, today is a wasteland devoid of an imaginative, progressive vision, occupied by a largely obsolete electoral strategy.
Don’t believe us? Consider the issues the Liberal party managed over the 20th century. The creation of universal health care and the social safety net. The management of the Canada-U.S. relationship by balancing opportunities for Canadian businesses with our desire to preserve our identity. Engaging Quebec and seeking to affirm its place within the country. Cultivating multiculturalism while simultaneously securing individual rights in a charter. Fostering peacekeeping to ensure local conflicts did not escalate into nuclear confrontation.
These were significant accomplishments that defined three generations of Canadians. They are also no longer relevant.
Today Canadians, especially young Canadians, are confident about themselves and their identity — no longer is there a “lament for a nation.” The sovereignty movement, while not dead, struggles. Individual rights continue to erode discrimination and the hierarchical relationships that impeded free expression and liberty. While some progressives continue to bang these drums, no one should be surprised that they no longer resonate.
In other cases, the solutions offered in the 20th century are no longer relevant. Canadians know — as health care threatens to eat up 50 per cent of provincial budgets and service levels remain mixed — that their health-care system is broken. Young Canadians don’t even pretend to believe a pension system will exist for them. Anyone can see that peacekeeping cannot solve today’s international conflicts.
On all of these issues, the traditional offerings of progressive rings hollow. But there is an opportunity for progressives. An opportunity to build a new centre. A centre that moves beyond the debate between conservatives of the right and conservatives of the left.
On the right is a Conservative party that, at its core, doesn’t believe in the federal government. It’s a vision for Canada grounded in the 1860s, of a minimalist government that is responsible for little beyond law and order and defence. Its appeal is the offer to dismantle the parts of the system that are broken, but in so doing it will leave behind many of those who are protected and enabled by the government.
On the left is a party whose vision is to return Canada to the 1960s. It’s a world of a strong national government, of an even bigger health-care system, social safety net and welfare state. Its appeal is a defence of the status quo at all costs, which in the long run will be many. The conservatism of the left means protecting what is unsustainable. It is the unreformed arc of old ideas.
If there is going to be a new centre between these conservative poles, Liberals will need to stop lying to themselves — and to Canadians. They need to acknowledge — loudly and publicly — that they failed to reform the institutions of the 20th century and, as a consequence, health care is broken and the welfare state as presently constructed is financially insatiable. A progressive future lies in taking these challenges head on rather that passively avoiding them.
Moreover, a modern progressive view of government needs to meet the consumer expectations created by Google, Apple and WestJet. Fast, effective, personalized, friendly. In short, progressives need a vision that not only safeguards citizens against the extremes of a globalizing market, but also meets the rising expectations Canadians have of services in the 21st century — all this in a manner that will be sustainable given 21st century budgets and demographics.
No party has figured out how to accomplish this, on the left or the right. And trolling through 20th or 19th century ideologies probably isn’t going to get us there.
The future for progressives rests in figuring out the political axes of the 21st century around which new solutions can be mined and new coalitions built.
We suspect these will include open vs. closed systems; evidence-based policy vs. ideology; meritocratic governance vs. patronage; open and fair markets vs. isolationism; sustainability vs. disposability, and emergent networks vs. hierarchies. It is these political distinctions, not the old left versus right, that increasingly resonate among those we speak to.
The challenge is enormous but progressives have done it before. In the 19th century, the rise of industrial capitalism led to a series of tense societal changes, including the emergence of an urban working class, increasing inequality and the terrifying possibility of total war.
A centrist party turned out to be the place where three generations of pragmatically driven progressives were able to lead nearly a century of Canadian politics. Doing this again will require starting from scratch, but that is the task at hand.
David Eaves is a specialist on public policy, collaboration and open source methodologies.
Taylor Owen is a Banting Fellow at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Maclean's Andrew Coyne on Election 2011
Andrew Coyne's Blog Ottawa’s new power couple
by Andrew Coyne on Wednesday, May 4, 2011 6:12pm - 27 Comments
Liberal
Conservative
Reform/Cdn Alliance
Bloc Québécois
NDP
Progressive
Anti-Confederation
Here’s a little chart (wouldn't copy - drat, it was good)that might help to explain the significance of what happened Monday night. It breaks down every election since 1867 according to whether the winning party carried a majority (50% plus 1) of the seats in each region, as indicated by their party colours (white indicates no party won a majority ): The numbers show how many seats the winning party won in each region. The years with shaded bars on them denote minority Parliaments.
Only very rarely – three times under Macdonald, twice under King, and once each for Diefenbaker and Mulroney – has a party carried all four regions. Usually majorities are won with majorities in two regions, sometimes three, with a smattering of seats elsewhere. Very occasionally – Borden in 1911, Chretien in 1997 – it’s been done with just one: Ontario.
No party has ever won a majority without carrying at least one of Ontario and Quebec. Before Chretien, only three majorities were won without Quebec (1891, 1911, and 1930). After Laurier, only King (1921, 1945) and Mulroney (1988) have won majorities without Ontario. Before Harper, Atlantic Canada voted with the majority in every election but five 1896, 1911, 1968, 1988, and 1997.
I’ll be going into this in my piece in tomorrow’s Maclean’s, but for now you can see how the winning power blocks have evolved. In the early years of the Liberals post-Macdonald dominance, after Laurier took Quebec for the first time in 1891, their majorities were essentially based on Quebec and Atlantic Canada, with growing help from the West. Conservatives won with Ontario and Atlantic Canada under Bennett and Meighen.
The next watershed year is 1935, when King carried Ontario for the Liberals for the first time in 60 years. For the next 45 years, Liberal dominance was assured: win a majority of the seats in Quebec all of the time, and Ontario most of the time, and you will win a lot of majorities. In 22 elections from 1935 to 2006, the Liberals carried Ontario 15 times; on four other occasions, it gave the Liberals enough seats either to sustain the Liberals in power, or to hold the Conservatives to a minority. Looked at another way: before 1935, the Tories won 9 majorities. After, only 3: Harper is the fourth.
But over time the forces of opposition to Liberal rule began to amass. The West, which for many years after Laurier split its vote among a number of parties, was united under the Conservative banner by Diefenbaker in 1958. Conservative parties, whether in their Progressive Conservative, Reform, Canadian Alliance, or reunited Conservative guises, have dominated the region ever since. Indeed, the last time the Liberals carried the West was in 1949.
Worse was the loss of Quebec in 1984. It proved possible, just, for the Liberals to carry on winning majorities under Chretien largely by sweeping Ontario, with help from Atlantic Canada and whatever seats the Bloc left on the table in Quebec. But they were increasingly running on fumes.
And yet, as solid as the Tory lock was on Western Canada, they, too, could not win a majority so long as they were unable to carry any other part of the country, as they have been unable to since 1988.
But now all that has changed, with the addition of Ontario to the Tory column. This is an altogether new majority coalition: the West and Ontario, and only them, for the most part. Before Monday night, there had been only two majorities in Canadian history that did not include majorities in Quebec or Atlantic Canada: Borden in 1911, and Chretien in 1997. But both of those were essentially Ontario operations. This is the first to rely equally on Ontario and the West.
The Diefenbaker and Mulroney sweeps included both regions, of course. But because they were so broadly based, with such divergent interests and values, and because they flared up so quickly, they proved unwieldy and unstable. A nearer example is Clark in 1979. Yet even though he carried two-thirds of the seats west of Quebec, plus a majority of Atlantic Canada, Clark did not have enough for a majority. Today, that would be enough.
So the West is very much in. This is the first majority government, and only the third of any kind in our history, in which the West has more seats in the governing caucus than Quebec and Atlantic Canada combined. The Ontario half of the partnership, moreover, far from the hasty marriage of opposites that undid Diefenbaker and Mulroney, has been built slowly, over several elections, and on a coherent ideological base. These are, after all, the prosperous, wealth-creating, parts of the country, the ones most attuned to a wealth-creation agenda. Just possibly, this could prove to be a lasting combination.
Of course, the Tories can’t expect to take three-quarters of the seats west of Quebec every election. But even if they take no more than about 60-65% — typically, that means 40-45% of the popular vote, rather than the nearly 50% they won this time — it gives them a base from which to reach out to Quebec and Atlantic Canada. They don’t have to make the kind of extravagant pass that Mulroney made at Quebec: it would be enough to take 20 seats or so, plus 10 or 15 in Atlantic Canada to secure a majority most years— especially with the coming addition of 30-odd seats in Ontario and the West (which would still leave them under-represented). Two-thirds of the seats west of Quebec, and they’ll win every time.
Categories: Andrew Coyne's Blog Ottawa’s new power couple
by Andrew Coyne on Wednesday, May 4, 2011 6:12pm - 27 Comments
Liberal
Conservative
Reform/Cdn Alliance
Bloc Québécois
NDP
Progressive
Anti-Confederation
Here’s a little chart that might help to explain the significance of what happened Monday night. It breaks down every election since 1867 according to whether the winning party carried a majority (50% plus 1) of the seats in each region, as indicated by their party colours (white indicates no party won a majority ): The numbers show how many seats the winning party won in each region. The years with shaded bars on them denote minority Parliaments.
Only very rarely – three times under Macdonald, twice under King, and once each for Diefenbaker and Mulroney – has a party carried all four regions. Usually majorities are won with majorities in two regions, sometimes three, with a smattering of seats elsewhere. Very occasionally – Borden in 1911, Chretien in 1997 – it’s been done with just one: Ontario.
No party has ever won a majority without carrying at least one of Ontario and Quebec. Before Chretien, only three majorities were won without Quebec (1891, 1911, and 1930). After Laurier, only King (1921, 1945) and Mulroney (1988) have won majorities without Ontario. Before Harper, Atlantic Canada voted with the majority in every election but five 1896, 1911, 1968, 1988, and 1997.
I’ll be going into this in my piece in tomorrow’s Maclean’s, but for now you can see how the winning power blocks have evolved. In the early years of the Liberals post-Macdonald dominance, after Laurier took Quebec for the first time in 1891, their majorities were essentially based on Quebec and Atlantic Canada, with growing help from the West. Conservatives won with Ontario and Atlantic Canada under Bennett and Meighen.
The next watershed year is 1935, when King carried Ontario for the Liberals for the first time in 60 years. For the next 45 years, Liberal dominance was assured: win a majority of the seats in Quebec all of the time, and Ontario most of the time, and you will win a lot of majorities. In 22 elections from 1935 to 2006, the Liberals carried Ontario 15 times; on four other occasions, it gave the Liberals enough seats either to sustain the Liberals in power, or to hold the Conservatives to a minority. Looked at another way: before 1935, the Tories won 9 majorities. After, only 3: Harper is the fourth.
But over time the forces of opposition to Liberal rule began to amass. The West, which for many years after Laurier split its vote among a number of parties, was united under the Conservative banner by Diefenbaker in 1958. Conservative parties, whether in their Progressive Conservative, Reform, Canadian Alliance, or reunited Conservative guises, have dominated the region ever since. Indeed, the last time the Liberals carried the West was in 1949.
Worse was the loss of Quebec in 1984. It proved possible, just, for the Liberals to carry on winning majorities under Chretien largely by sweeping Ontario, with help from Atlantic Canada and whatever seats the Bloc left on the table in Quebec. But they were increasingly running on fumes.
And yet, as solid as the Tory lock was on Western Canada, they, too, could not win a majority so long as they were unable to carry any other part of the country, as they have been unable to since 1988.
But now all that has changed, with the addition of Ontario to the Tory column. This is an altogether new majority coalition: the West and Ontario, and only them, for the most part. Before Monday night, there had been only two majorities in Canadian history that did not include majorities in Quebec or Atlantic Canada: Borden in 1911, and Chretien in 1997. But both of those were essentially Ontario operations. This is the first to rely equally on Ontario and the West.
The Diefenbaker and Mulroney sweeps included both regions, of course. But because they were so broadly based, with such divergent interests and values, and because they flared up so quickly, they proved unwieldy and unstable. A nearer example is Clark in 1979. Yet even though he carried two-thirds of the seats west of Quebec, plus a majority of Atlantic Canada, Clark did not have enough for a majority. Today, that would be enough.
So the West is very much in. This is the first majority government, and only the third of any kind in our history, in which the West has more seats in the governing caucus than Quebec and Atlantic Canada combined. The Ontario half of the partnership, moreover, far from the hasty marriage of opposites that undid Diefenbaker and Mulroney, has been built slowly, over several elections, and on a coherent ideological base. These are, after all, the prosperous, wealth-creating, parts of the country, the ones most attuned to a wealth-creation agenda. Just possibly, this could prove to be a lasting combination.
Of course, the Tories can’t expect to take three-quarters of the seats west of Quebec every election. But even if they take no more than about 60-65% — typically, that means 40-45% of the popular vote, rather than the nearly 50% they won this time — it gives them a base from which to reach out to Quebec and Atlantic Canada. They don’t have to make the kind of extravagant pass that Mulroney made at Quebec: it would be enough to take 20 seats or so, plus 10 or 15 in Atlantic Canada to secure a majority most years— especially with the coming addition of 30-odd seats in Ontario and the West (which would still leave them under-represented). Two-thirds of the seats west of Quebec, and they’ll win every time.
Categories: Andrew Coyne's Blog Ottawa’s new power couple
by Andrew Coyne on Wednesday, May 4, 2011 6:12pm - 27 Comments
Liberal
Conservative
Reform/Cdn Alliance
Bloc Québécois
NDP
Progressive
Anti-Confederation
Here’s a little chart that might help to explain the significance of what happened Monday night. It breaks down every election since 1867 according to whether the winning party carried a majority (50% plus 1) of the seats in each region, as indicated by their party colours (white indicates no party won a majority ): The numbers show how many seats the winning party won in each region. The years with shaded bars on them denote minority Parliaments.
Only very rarely – three times under Macdonald, twice under King, and once each for Diefenbaker and Mulroney – has a party carried all four regions. Usually majorities are won with majorities in two regions, sometimes three, with a smattering of seats elsewhere. Very occasionally – Borden in 1911, Chretien in 1997 – it’s been done with just one: Ontario.
No party has ever won a majority without carrying at least one of Ontario and Quebec. Before Chretien, only three majorities were won without Quebec (1891, 1911, and 1930). After Laurier, only King (1921, 1945) and Mulroney (1988) have won majorities without Ontario. Before Harper, Atlantic Canada voted with the majority in every election but five 1896, 1911, 1968, 1988, and 1997.
I’ll be going into this in my piece in tomorrow’s Maclean’s, but for now you can see how the winning power blocks have evolved. In the early years of the Liberals post-Macdonald dominance, after Laurier took Quebec for the first time in 1891, their majorities were essentially based on Quebec and Atlantic Canada, with growing help from the West. Conservatives won with Ontario and Atlantic Canada under Bennett and Meighen.
The next watershed year is 1935, when King carried Ontario for the Liberals for the first time in 60 years. For the next 45 years, Liberal dominance was assured: win a majority of the seats in Quebec all of the time, and Ontario most of the time, and you will win a lot of majorities. In 22 elections from 1935 to 2006, the Liberals carried Ontario 15 times; on four other occasions, it gave the Liberals enough seats either to sustain the Liberals in power, or to hold the Conservatives to a minority. Looked at another way: before 1935, the Tories won 9 majorities. After, only 3: Harper is the fourth.
But over time the forces of opposition to Liberal rule began to amass. The West, which for many years after Laurier split its vote among a number of parties, was united under the Conservative banner by Diefenbaker in 1958. Conservative parties, whether in their Progressive Conservative, Reform, Canadian Alliance, or reunited Conservative guises, have dominated the region ever since. Indeed, the last time the Liberals carried the West was in 1949.
Worse was the loss of Quebec in 1984. It proved possible, just, for the Liberals to carry on winning majorities under Chretien largely by sweeping Ontario, with help from Atlantic Canada and whatever seats the Bloc left on the table in Quebec. But they were increasingly running on fumes.
And yet, as solid as the Tory lock was on Western Canada, they, too, could not win a majority so long as they were unable to carry any other part of the country, as they have been unable to since 1988.
But now all that has changed, with the addition of Ontario to the Tory column. This is an altogether new majority coalition: the West and Ontario, and only them, for the most part. Before Monday night, there had been only two majorities in Canadian history that did not include majorities in Quebec or Atlantic Canada: Borden in 1911, and Chretien in 1997. But both of those were essentially Ontario operations. This is the first to rely equally on Ontario and the West.
The Diefenbaker and Mulroney sweeps included both regions, of course. But because they were so broadly based, with such divergent interests and values, and because they flared up so quickly, they proved unwieldy and unstable. A nearer example is Clark in 1979. Yet even though he carried two-thirds of the seats west of Quebec, plus a majority of Atlantic Canada, Clark did not have enough for a majority. Today, that would be enough.
So the West is very much in. This is the first majority government, and only the third of any kind in our history, in which the West has more seats in the governing caucus than Quebec and Atlantic Canada combined. The Ontario half of the partnership, moreover, far from the hasty marriage of opposites that undid Diefenbaker and Mulroney, has been built slowly, over several elections, and on a coherent ideological base. These are, after all, the prosperous, wealth-creating, parts of the country, the ones most attuned to a wealth-creation agenda. Just possibly, this could prove to be a lasting combination.
Of course, the Tories can’t expect to take three-quarters of the seats west of Quebec every election. But even if they take no more than about 60-65% — typically, that means 40-45% of the popular vote, rather than the nearly 50% they won this time — it gives them a base from which to reach out to Quebec and Atlantic Canada. They don’t have to make the kind of extravagant pass that Mulroney made at Quebec: it would be enough to take 20 seats or so, plus 10 or 15 in Atlantic Canada to secure a majority most years— especially with the coming addition of 30-odd seats in Ontario and the West (which would still leave them under-represented). Two-thirds of the seats west of Quebec, and they’ll win every time.
NDP
Progressive
Anti-Confederation
Here’s a little chart that might help to explain the significance of what happened Monday night. It breaks down every election since 1867 according to whether the winning party carried a majority (50% plus 1) of the seats in each region, as indicated by their party colours (white indicates no party won a majority ): The numbers show how many seats the winning party won in each region. The years with shaded bars on them denote minority Parliaments.
Only very rarely – three times under Macdonald, twice under King, and once each for Diefenbaker and Mulroney – has a party carried all four regions. Usually majorities are won with majorities in two regions, sometimes three, with a smattering of seats elsewhere. Very occasionally – Borden in 1911, Chretien in 1997 – it’s been done with just one: Ontario.
No party has ever won a majority without carrying at least one of Ontario and Quebec. Before Chretien, only three majorities were won without Quebec (1891, 1911, and 1930). After Laurier, only King (1921, 1945) and Mulroney (1988) have won majorities without Ontario. Before Harper, Atlantic Canada voted with the majority in every election but five 1896, 1911, 1968, 1988, and 1997.
I’ll be going into this in my piece in tomorrow’s Maclean’s, but for now you can see how the winning power blocks have evolved. In the early years of the Liberals post-Macdonald dominance, after Laurier took Quebec for the first time in 1891, their majorities were essentially based on Quebec and Atlantic Canada, with growing help from the West. Conservatives won with Ontario and Atlantic Canada under Bennett and Meighen.
The next watershed year is 1935, when King carried Ontario for the Liberals for the first time in 60 years. For the next 45 years, Liberal dominance was assured: win a majority of the seats in Quebec all of the time, and Ontario most of the time, and you will win a lot of majorities. In 22 elections from 1935 to 2006, the Liberals carried Ontario 15 times; on four other occasions, it gave the Liberals enough seats either to sustain the Liberals in power, or to hold the Conservatives to a minority. Looked at another way: before 1935, the Tories won 9 majorities. After, only 3: Harper is the fourth.
But over time the forces of opposition to Liberal rule began to amass. The West, which for many years after Laurier split its vote among a number of parties, was united under the Conservative banner by Diefenbaker in 1958. Conservative parties, whether in their Progressive Conservative, Reform, Canadian Alliance, or reunited Conservative guises, have dominated the region ever since. Indeed, the last time the Liberals carried the West was in 1949.
Worse was the loss of Quebec in 1984. It proved possible, just, for the Liberals to carry on winning majorities under Chretien largely by sweeping Ontario, with help from Atlantic Canada and whatever seats the Bloc left on the table in Quebec. But they were increasingly running on fumes.
And yet, as solid as the Tory lock was on Western Canada, they, too, could not win a majority so long as they were unable to carry any other part of the country, as they have been unable to since 1988.
But now all that has changed, with the addition of Ontario to the Tory column. This is an altogether new majority coalition: the West and Ontario, and only them, for the most part. Before Monday night, there had been only two majorities in Canadian history that did not include majorities in Quebec or Atlantic Canada: Borden in 1911, and Chretien in 1997. But both of those were essentially Ontario operations. This is the first to rely equally on Ontario and the West.
The Diefenbaker and Mulroney sweeps included both regions, of course. But because they were so broadly based, with such divergent interests and values, and because they flared up so quickly, they proved unwieldy and unstable. A nearer example is Clark in 1979. Yet even though he carried two-thirds of the seats west of Quebec, plus a majority of Atlantic Canada, Clark did not have enough for a majority. Today, that would be enough.
So the West is very much in. This is the first majority government, and only the third of any kind in our history, in which the West has more seats in the governing caucus than Quebec and Atlantic Canada combined. The Ontario half of the partnership, moreover, far from the hasty marriage of opposites that undid Diefenbaker and Mulroney, has been built slowly, over several elections, and on a coherent ideological base. These are, after all, the prosperous, wealth-creating, parts of the country, the ones most attuned to a wealth-creation agenda. Just possibly, this could prove to be a lasting combination.
Of course, the Tories can’t expect to take three-quarters of the seats west of Quebec every election. But even if they take no more than about 60-65% — typically, that means 40-45% of the popular vote, rather than the nearly 50% they won this time — it gives them a base from which to reach out to Quebec and Atlantic Canada. They don’t have to make the kind of extravagant pass that Mulroney made at Quebec: it would be enough to take 20 seats or so, plus 10 or 15 in Atlantic Canada to secure a majority most years— especially with the coming addition of 30-odd seats in Ontario and the West (which would still leave them under-represented). Two-thirds of the seats west of Quebec, and they’ll win every time.
by Andrew Coyne on Wednesday, May 4, 2011 6:12pm - 27 Comments
Liberal
Conservative
Reform/Cdn Alliance
Bloc Québécois
NDP
Progressive
Anti-Confederation
Here’s a little chart (wouldn't copy - drat, it was good)that might help to explain the significance of what happened Monday night. It breaks down every election since 1867 according to whether the winning party carried a majority (50% plus 1) of the seats in each region, as indicated by their party colours (white indicates no party won a majority ): The numbers show how many seats the winning party won in each region. The years with shaded bars on them denote minority Parliaments.
Only very rarely – three times under Macdonald, twice under King, and once each for Diefenbaker and Mulroney – has a party carried all four regions. Usually majorities are won with majorities in two regions, sometimes three, with a smattering of seats elsewhere. Very occasionally – Borden in 1911, Chretien in 1997 – it’s been done with just one: Ontario.
No party has ever won a majority without carrying at least one of Ontario and Quebec. Before Chretien, only three majorities were won without Quebec (1891, 1911, and 1930). After Laurier, only King (1921, 1945) and Mulroney (1988) have won majorities without Ontario. Before Harper, Atlantic Canada voted with the majority in every election but five 1896, 1911, 1968, 1988, and 1997.
I’ll be going into this in my piece in tomorrow’s Maclean’s, but for now you can see how the winning power blocks have evolved. In the early years of the Liberals post-Macdonald dominance, after Laurier took Quebec for the first time in 1891, their majorities were essentially based on Quebec and Atlantic Canada, with growing help from the West. Conservatives won with Ontario and Atlantic Canada under Bennett and Meighen.
The next watershed year is 1935, when King carried Ontario for the Liberals for the first time in 60 years. For the next 45 years, Liberal dominance was assured: win a majority of the seats in Quebec all of the time, and Ontario most of the time, and you will win a lot of majorities. In 22 elections from 1935 to 2006, the Liberals carried Ontario 15 times; on four other occasions, it gave the Liberals enough seats either to sustain the Liberals in power, or to hold the Conservatives to a minority. Looked at another way: before 1935, the Tories won 9 majorities. After, only 3: Harper is the fourth.
But over time the forces of opposition to Liberal rule began to amass. The West, which for many years after Laurier split its vote among a number of parties, was united under the Conservative banner by Diefenbaker in 1958. Conservative parties, whether in their Progressive Conservative, Reform, Canadian Alliance, or reunited Conservative guises, have dominated the region ever since. Indeed, the last time the Liberals carried the West was in 1949.
Worse was the loss of Quebec in 1984. It proved possible, just, for the Liberals to carry on winning majorities under Chretien largely by sweeping Ontario, with help from Atlantic Canada and whatever seats the Bloc left on the table in Quebec. But they were increasingly running on fumes.
And yet, as solid as the Tory lock was on Western Canada, they, too, could not win a majority so long as they were unable to carry any other part of the country, as they have been unable to since 1988.
But now all that has changed, with the addition of Ontario to the Tory column. This is an altogether new majority coalition: the West and Ontario, and only them, for the most part. Before Monday night, there had been only two majorities in Canadian history that did not include majorities in Quebec or Atlantic Canada: Borden in 1911, and Chretien in 1997. But both of those were essentially Ontario operations. This is the first to rely equally on Ontario and the West.
The Diefenbaker and Mulroney sweeps included both regions, of course. But because they were so broadly based, with such divergent interests and values, and because they flared up so quickly, they proved unwieldy and unstable. A nearer example is Clark in 1979. Yet even though he carried two-thirds of the seats west of Quebec, plus a majority of Atlantic Canada, Clark did not have enough for a majority. Today, that would be enough.
So the West is very much in. This is the first majority government, and only the third of any kind in our history, in which the West has more seats in the governing caucus than Quebec and Atlantic Canada combined. The Ontario half of the partnership, moreover, far from the hasty marriage of opposites that undid Diefenbaker and Mulroney, has been built slowly, over several elections, and on a coherent ideological base. These are, after all, the prosperous, wealth-creating, parts of the country, the ones most attuned to a wealth-creation agenda. Just possibly, this could prove to be a lasting combination.
Of course, the Tories can’t expect to take three-quarters of the seats west of Quebec every election. But even if they take no more than about 60-65% — typically, that means 40-45% of the popular vote, rather than the nearly 50% they won this time — it gives them a base from which to reach out to Quebec and Atlantic Canada. They don’t have to make the kind of extravagant pass that Mulroney made at Quebec: it would be enough to take 20 seats or so, plus 10 or 15 in Atlantic Canada to secure a majority most years— especially with the coming addition of 30-odd seats in Ontario and the West (which would still leave them under-represented). Two-thirds of the seats west of Quebec, and they’ll win every time.
Categories: Andrew Coyne's Blog Ottawa’s new power couple
by Andrew Coyne on Wednesday, May 4, 2011 6:12pm - 27 Comments
Liberal
Conservative
Reform/Cdn Alliance
Bloc Québécois
NDP
Progressive
Anti-Confederation
Here’s a little chart that might help to explain the significance of what happened Monday night. It breaks down every election since 1867 according to whether the winning party carried a majority (50% plus 1) of the seats in each region, as indicated by their party colours (white indicates no party won a majority ): The numbers show how many seats the winning party won in each region. The years with shaded bars on them denote minority Parliaments.
Only very rarely – three times under Macdonald, twice under King, and once each for Diefenbaker and Mulroney – has a party carried all four regions. Usually majorities are won with majorities in two regions, sometimes three, with a smattering of seats elsewhere. Very occasionally – Borden in 1911, Chretien in 1997 – it’s been done with just one: Ontario.
No party has ever won a majority without carrying at least one of Ontario and Quebec. Before Chretien, only three majorities were won without Quebec (1891, 1911, and 1930). After Laurier, only King (1921, 1945) and Mulroney (1988) have won majorities without Ontario. Before Harper, Atlantic Canada voted with the majority in every election but five 1896, 1911, 1968, 1988, and 1997.
I’ll be going into this in my piece in tomorrow’s Maclean’s, but for now you can see how the winning power blocks have evolved. In the early years of the Liberals post-Macdonald dominance, after Laurier took Quebec for the first time in 1891, their majorities were essentially based on Quebec and Atlantic Canada, with growing help from the West. Conservatives won with Ontario and Atlantic Canada under Bennett and Meighen.
The next watershed year is 1935, when King carried Ontario for the Liberals for the first time in 60 years. For the next 45 years, Liberal dominance was assured: win a majority of the seats in Quebec all of the time, and Ontario most of the time, and you will win a lot of majorities. In 22 elections from 1935 to 2006, the Liberals carried Ontario 15 times; on four other occasions, it gave the Liberals enough seats either to sustain the Liberals in power, or to hold the Conservatives to a minority. Looked at another way: before 1935, the Tories won 9 majorities. After, only 3: Harper is the fourth.
But over time the forces of opposition to Liberal rule began to amass. The West, which for many years after Laurier split its vote among a number of parties, was united under the Conservative banner by Diefenbaker in 1958. Conservative parties, whether in their Progressive Conservative, Reform, Canadian Alliance, or reunited Conservative guises, have dominated the region ever since. Indeed, the last time the Liberals carried the West was in 1949.
Worse was the loss of Quebec in 1984. It proved possible, just, for the Liberals to carry on winning majorities under Chretien largely by sweeping Ontario, with help from Atlantic Canada and whatever seats the Bloc left on the table in Quebec. But they were increasingly running on fumes.
And yet, as solid as the Tory lock was on Western Canada, they, too, could not win a majority so long as they were unable to carry any other part of the country, as they have been unable to since 1988.
But now all that has changed, with the addition of Ontario to the Tory column. This is an altogether new majority coalition: the West and Ontario, and only them, for the most part. Before Monday night, there had been only two majorities in Canadian history that did not include majorities in Quebec or Atlantic Canada: Borden in 1911, and Chretien in 1997. But both of those were essentially Ontario operations. This is the first to rely equally on Ontario and the West.
The Diefenbaker and Mulroney sweeps included both regions, of course. But because they were so broadly based, with such divergent interests and values, and because they flared up so quickly, they proved unwieldy and unstable. A nearer example is Clark in 1979. Yet even though he carried two-thirds of the seats west of Quebec, plus a majority of Atlantic Canada, Clark did not have enough for a majority. Today, that would be enough.
So the West is very much in. This is the first majority government, and only the third of any kind in our history, in which the West has more seats in the governing caucus than Quebec and Atlantic Canada combined. The Ontario half of the partnership, moreover, far from the hasty marriage of opposites that undid Diefenbaker and Mulroney, has been built slowly, over several elections, and on a coherent ideological base. These are, after all, the prosperous, wealth-creating, parts of the country, the ones most attuned to a wealth-creation agenda. Just possibly, this could prove to be a lasting combination.
Of course, the Tories can’t expect to take three-quarters of the seats west of Quebec every election. But even if they take no more than about 60-65% — typically, that means 40-45% of the popular vote, rather than the nearly 50% they won this time — it gives them a base from which to reach out to Quebec and Atlantic Canada. They don’t have to make the kind of extravagant pass that Mulroney made at Quebec: it would be enough to take 20 seats or so, plus 10 or 15 in Atlantic Canada to secure a majority most years— especially with the coming addition of 30-odd seats in Ontario and the West (which would still leave them under-represented). Two-thirds of the seats west of Quebec, and they’ll win every time.
Categories: Andrew Coyne's Blog Ottawa’s new power couple
by Andrew Coyne on Wednesday, May 4, 2011 6:12pm - 27 Comments
Liberal
Conservative
Reform/Cdn Alliance
Bloc Québécois
NDP
Progressive
Anti-Confederation
Here’s a little chart that might help to explain the significance of what happened Monday night. It breaks down every election since 1867 according to whether the winning party carried a majority (50% plus 1) of the seats in each region, as indicated by their party colours (white indicates no party won a majority ): The numbers show how many seats the winning party won in each region. The years with shaded bars on them denote minority Parliaments.
Only very rarely – three times under Macdonald, twice under King, and once each for Diefenbaker and Mulroney – has a party carried all four regions. Usually majorities are won with majorities in two regions, sometimes three, with a smattering of seats elsewhere. Very occasionally – Borden in 1911, Chretien in 1997 – it’s been done with just one: Ontario.
No party has ever won a majority without carrying at least one of Ontario and Quebec. Before Chretien, only three majorities were won without Quebec (1891, 1911, and 1930). After Laurier, only King (1921, 1945) and Mulroney (1988) have won majorities without Ontario. Before Harper, Atlantic Canada voted with the majority in every election but five 1896, 1911, 1968, 1988, and 1997.
I’ll be going into this in my piece in tomorrow’s Maclean’s, but for now you can see how the winning power blocks have evolved. In the early years of the Liberals post-Macdonald dominance, after Laurier took Quebec for the first time in 1891, their majorities were essentially based on Quebec and Atlantic Canada, with growing help from the West. Conservatives won with Ontario and Atlantic Canada under Bennett and Meighen.
The next watershed year is 1935, when King carried Ontario for the Liberals for the first time in 60 years. For the next 45 years, Liberal dominance was assured: win a majority of the seats in Quebec all of the time, and Ontario most of the time, and you will win a lot of majorities. In 22 elections from 1935 to 2006, the Liberals carried Ontario 15 times; on four other occasions, it gave the Liberals enough seats either to sustain the Liberals in power, or to hold the Conservatives to a minority. Looked at another way: before 1935, the Tories won 9 majorities. After, only 3: Harper is the fourth.
But over time the forces of opposition to Liberal rule began to amass. The West, which for many years after Laurier split its vote among a number of parties, was united under the Conservative banner by Diefenbaker in 1958. Conservative parties, whether in their Progressive Conservative, Reform, Canadian Alliance, or reunited Conservative guises, have dominated the region ever since. Indeed, the last time the Liberals carried the West was in 1949.
Worse was the loss of Quebec in 1984. It proved possible, just, for the Liberals to carry on winning majorities under Chretien largely by sweeping Ontario, with help from Atlantic Canada and whatever seats the Bloc left on the table in Quebec. But they were increasingly running on fumes.
And yet, as solid as the Tory lock was on Western Canada, they, too, could not win a majority so long as they were unable to carry any other part of the country, as they have been unable to since 1988.
But now all that has changed, with the addition of Ontario to the Tory column. This is an altogether new majority coalition: the West and Ontario, and only them, for the most part. Before Monday night, there had been only two majorities in Canadian history that did not include majorities in Quebec or Atlantic Canada: Borden in 1911, and Chretien in 1997. But both of those were essentially Ontario operations. This is the first to rely equally on Ontario and the West.
The Diefenbaker and Mulroney sweeps included both regions, of course. But because they were so broadly based, with such divergent interests and values, and because they flared up so quickly, they proved unwieldy and unstable. A nearer example is Clark in 1979. Yet even though he carried two-thirds of the seats west of Quebec, plus a majority of Atlantic Canada, Clark did not have enough for a majority. Today, that would be enough.
So the West is very much in. This is the first majority government, and only the third of any kind in our history, in which the West has more seats in the governing caucus than Quebec and Atlantic Canada combined. The Ontario half of the partnership, moreover, far from the hasty marriage of opposites that undid Diefenbaker and Mulroney, has been built slowly, over several elections, and on a coherent ideological base. These are, after all, the prosperous, wealth-creating, parts of the country, the ones most attuned to a wealth-creation agenda. Just possibly, this could prove to be a lasting combination.
Of course, the Tories can’t expect to take three-quarters of the seats west of Quebec every election. But even if they take no more than about 60-65% — typically, that means 40-45% of the popular vote, rather than the nearly 50% they won this time — it gives them a base from which to reach out to Quebec and Atlantic Canada. They don’t have to make the kind of extravagant pass that Mulroney made at Quebec: it would be enough to take 20 seats or so, plus 10 or 15 in Atlantic Canada to secure a majority most years— especially with the coming addition of 30-odd seats in Ontario and the West (which would still leave them under-represented). Two-thirds of the seats west of Quebec, and they’ll win every time.
NDP
Progressive
Anti-Confederation
Here’s a little chart that might help to explain the significance of what happened Monday night. It breaks down every election since 1867 according to whether the winning party carried a majority (50% plus 1) of the seats in each region, as indicated by their party colours (white indicates no party won a majority ): The numbers show how many seats the winning party won in each region. The years with shaded bars on them denote minority Parliaments.
Only very rarely – three times under Macdonald, twice under King, and once each for Diefenbaker and Mulroney – has a party carried all four regions. Usually majorities are won with majorities in two regions, sometimes three, with a smattering of seats elsewhere. Very occasionally – Borden in 1911, Chretien in 1997 – it’s been done with just one: Ontario.
No party has ever won a majority without carrying at least one of Ontario and Quebec. Before Chretien, only three majorities were won without Quebec (1891, 1911, and 1930). After Laurier, only King (1921, 1945) and Mulroney (1988) have won majorities without Ontario. Before Harper, Atlantic Canada voted with the majority in every election but five 1896, 1911, 1968, 1988, and 1997.
I’ll be going into this in my piece in tomorrow’s Maclean’s, but for now you can see how the winning power blocks have evolved. In the early years of the Liberals post-Macdonald dominance, after Laurier took Quebec for the first time in 1891, their majorities were essentially based on Quebec and Atlantic Canada, with growing help from the West. Conservatives won with Ontario and Atlantic Canada under Bennett and Meighen.
The next watershed year is 1935, when King carried Ontario for the Liberals for the first time in 60 years. For the next 45 years, Liberal dominance was assured: win a majority of the seats in Quebec all of the time, and Ontario most of the time, and you will win a lot of majorities. In 22 elections from 1935 to 2006, the Liberals carried Ontario 15 times; on four other occasions, it gave the Liberals enough seats either to sustain the Liberals in power, or to hold the Conservatives to a minority. Looked at another way: before 1935, the Tories won 9 majorities. After, only 3: Harper is the fourth.
But over time the forces of opposition to Liberal rule began to amass. The West, which for many years after Laurier split its vote among a number of parties, was united under the Conservative banner by Diefenbaker in 1958. Conservative parties, whether in their Progressive Conservative, Reform, Canadian Alliance, or reunited Conservative guises, have dominated the region ever since. Indeed, the last time the Liberals carried the West was in 1949.
Worse was the loss of Quebec in 1984. It proved possible, just, for the Liberals to carry on winning majorities under Chretien largely by sweeping Ontario, with help from Atlantic Canada and whatever seats the Bloc left on the table in Quebec. But they were increasingly running on fumes.
And yet, as solid as the Tory lock was on Western Canada, they, too, could not win a majority so long as they were unable to carry any other part of the country, as they have been unable to since 1988.
But now all that has changed, with the addition of Ontario to the Tory column. This is an altogether new majority coalition: the West and Ontario, and only them, for the most part. Before Monday night, there had been only two majorities in Canadian history that did not include majorities in Quebec or Atlantic Canada: Borden in 1911, and Chretien in 1997. But both of those were essentially Ontario operations. This is the first to rely equally on Ontario and the West.
The Diefenbaker and Mulroney sweeps included both regions, of course. But because they were so broadly based, with such divergent interests and values, and because they flared up so quickly, they proved unwieldy and unstable. A nearer example is Clark in 1979. Yet even though he carried two-thirds of the seats west of Quebec, plus a majority of Atlantic Canada, Clark did not have enough for a majority. Today, that would be enough.
So the West is very much in. This is the first majority government, and only the third of any kind in our history, in which the West has more seats in the governing caucus than Quebec and Atlantic Canada combined. The Ontario half of the partnership, moreover, far from the hasty marriage of opposites that undid Diefenbaker and Mulroney, has been built slowly, over several elections, and on a coherent ideological base. These are, after all, the prosperous, wealth-creating, parts of the country, the ones most attuned to a wealth-creation agenda. Just possibly, this could prove to be a lasting combination.
Of course, the Tories can’t expect to take three-quarters of the seats west of Quebec every election. But even if they take no more than about 60-65% — typically, that means 40-45% of the popular vote, rather than the nearly 50% they won this time — it gives them a base from which to reach out to Quebec and Atlantic Canada. They don’t have to make the kind of extravagant pass that Mulroney made at Quebec: it would be enough to take 20 seats or so, plus 10 or 15 in Atlantic Canada to secure a majority most years— especially with the coming addition of 30-odd seats in Ontario and the West (which would still leave them under-represented). Two-thirds of the seats west of Quebec, and they’ll win every time.
Maclean's - Michael Ignatieff's defeat 2 May 2011
Read it and weep. Liberals reduced to 34 seats in the HoC.
------------------------------------------------------
No country for good men
by Andrew Potter on Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Perhaps the cliché has it right and all political careers end in failure. But few end as abruptly, and with as much a feeling of missed opportunity, as that of Michael Ignatieff.
There is no stronger indictment of Canada’s political class than the treatment of Michael Ignatieff during the years from 2005 to 2011. Never has such a torrent of abuse been poured on any Canadian figure; never have the small-town and the small-minded been so united as they were in their joint attack on the son of George Ignatieff, the best Governor General we never had. His torment by the Tory gang of cynics and liars, egged on by party hangers-on and cheered, too often and by too many of us in the press, testifies to the ongoing suspicion Canadians have with leaders who exhibit a modicum of intelligence, accomplishment, and worldliness.
It is hard for me, now, to think myself back to the enthusiasm I initially felt at the prospect of his entry in Canadian politics. More than any one else, and for better or for worse, Michael Ignatieff is responsible for my career as someone trying to find a place somewhere between philosophy and politics, between academia and the journalism. Before I met Mark Kingwell, before I met Joe Heath, I was reading Ignatieff’s work. I was given a copy of Blood and Belonging in my last year of undergrad, and it struck me at the time as exactly the sort of writing I’d like to do. Ignatieff’s excellent 2000 Massey Lectures, The Rights Revolution, only cemented my belief that he was a smart man who had something to offer the world.
Yet while I admired his career path, I didn’t always love his ideas. Ignatieff’s writing was not always as coherent (or as “tightly argued”, as they like to say in philosophy departments) as it should have been. He tended to hem and haw, especially when it came to touchy subjects like torture and the war in Iraq, and his frequent inability to come out and say exactly what he thought and why ended up seeming less like journalistic even-handedness, more like intellectual indecision.
Funny story: When I was teaching at Trent University in the early 2000s, I had the luck to teach a course on the philosophy of law and rights, and I put Ignatieff’s new book, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, on the syllabus. It wasn’t a huge success, partly because the book’s argument has some serious flaws, but more because my students thought it was a species of right-wing American imperialist propaganda. Later that summer I was talking to a friend who had taught the same book to some students at a college in New York. He laughed and said that his students also hated the book, for the exact opposite reason: they dismissed it as mushy-headed Canadian left-liberalism.
I’ve tried, on occasion, to mine from that anecdote a parable that will help explain precisely why Ignatieff’s eventual return to Canada was greeted with such immediate suspicion, even both those who might have been expected to welcome him. But the moral, if there is one at all, is simply that Canada and the US are different countries with substantially different political cultures, and that jumping into the former after marinating for decades in the latter was always going to be far harder than anyone, not least of all Michael Ignatieff, might have anticipated.
And that isn’t taking into consideration just how poisonous our political culture is. In the summer of 2005, I wrote an essay for the National Post that tried to frame Ignatieff’s return to Canada against the Liberal Party’s desperate search for a saviour “philosopher king” in the Trudeau mold. The piece was over-thought and over-written in bunch of ways, but I did flag two problems I thought he would face. The first was what became known as his “pronoun problem” – his habit of saying “we” when talking to both Canadian and American audiences.
The story of Ignatieff’s failure to properly deal with this issue is one major piece of the puzzle of why he went to such jaw-dropping defeat this week. For two years, the Conservatives hammered the airwaves with attack ads accusing him of being not really Canadian, someone who was “just in it for himself.” Someday we might get an explanation from the Liberal camp about why they allowed those charges to go unanswered for so long, and why they were never able to come up with a decent counter-narrative, a positive story that would place Michael Ignatieff’s return to Canada within the broader frame of his earlier career as a self-pronounced cosmopolitan, a global traveler and thinker whose interests for so long seemed to lie anywhere but within his home country.
But this points to a second piece to the puzzle, and that is the fact that the Liberal Party of Canada is a complete disaster, and has been for some time. It was mid-way through Jean Chretien’s second term that people started to point out that the party had no real identity, no sense of purpose other than power for its own sake. And so Michael Ignatieff’s failure to tell a plausible story about his own candidacy for prime minister was the precise mirror of the party’s own existential conundrum: The Liberal Party of Canada has no idea why it exists, so it is hardly surprising that they settled on a leader who didn’t seem to have any idea why he was here.
What is so remarkable about Ignatieff’s tenure as Liberal leader, and with this past election campaign in particular, is how little he tried to take advantage of intellectual strengths and interests. Confronted with a cartoonishly small-minded prime minister acting as chief puppeteer over a caucus of frat boys, yes men, and idiocrats, surely there was an opportunity for a leader who would speak to those Canadians who see themselves as responsible citizens of the world. We spent much of the 2000s telling ourselves that “the world needs more Canada”, and if anyone embodied that slogan, it was Michael Ignatieff.
But instead, the Liberals spent Ignatieff’s leadership playing along with the Conservatives’ completely un-serious approach to foreign affairs. Here’s something a friend send me during the campaign:
It’s pretty weird: Here’s Ignatieff, whose life has been devoted to precisely the challenges and “foreign policy” nuances that are front and centre in everything that’s happening of any consequence in the world today, in the so-called Muslim world. If he weren’t running for the prime minister’s job in Canada, he’d be one of the few go-to guys in the English speaking world on Egypt, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, the latest Hamas-Fatah deal. . . . and here we are in the middle of a Canadian federal election, with all these issues that make Ignatieff look totally world-class and massively relevant, and which make the Tories look stupid but make the NDP look infinitely worse, and we’re not supposed to notice that any of it is even happening. Like it’s an election for the Orillia school board.
Why did Michael Ignatieff – or more plausibly, the people helping devise his political brand and their electoral strategy – stay as far as possible from these issues? Probably because they believe that Stephen Harper actually has us pegged, that we are a nation of Tim Horton’s-addicted moral suburbanites for whom that “the world needs Canada” was always just a slogan for selling books and lattes to the elites downtown. But if the Liberals are afraid to speak to their natural constituency in their native tongue, and if their leader’s CV is largely a cause for quiet embarrassment, what does that say about the party, or the country?
Here are the closing paragraphs of my 2005 essay on Ignatieff:
In a profile published in these pages [National Post] back in April, Tony Keller suggested Ignatieff’s views could be “a bracing tonic for the Canadian body politic.” He would lead us out of our smug anti-Americanism and help us accept our global responsibilities.
This is doubtful. More likely, this sort of thinking will be rejected by the Canadian political immune system. Whether it is about health care, missile defence or the war on terror, Canadians are incapable of having an adult discussion, and woe to any politician who dares do anything so radical as obey reason. Our political discourse takes place in a dogma-addled environment that would swallow up an intellectual alien like Ignatieff, and it would be a shame to see him forced to mouth the banalities that are required for survival in Canadian federal politics.
Immanuel Kant was right when he opposed the notion of the philosopher king, on the grounds that “the possession of power is inevitably fatal to the free exercise of reason.” We should certainly be wary of any philosopher who would be king. But in the case of Michael Ignatieff, he should be wary of us.
Watching Michael Ignatieff resign yesterday, it was hard not to be moved by his parting hope that there might be someone watching, maybe a woman, who is looking at him and saying, “he didn’t make it, but I will.” But is there any chance of that? Having seen how Michael Ignatieff was treated, can any reasonably intelligent and ambitious person be ever expected to go into national politics?
As Michael Ignatieff’s uncle, George Grant, once wrote about John Diefenbaker: Nothing in his political career became him like the leaving of it.
------------------------------------------------------
No country for good men
by Andrew Potter on Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Perhaps the cliché has it right and all political careers end in failure. But few end as abruptly, and with as much a feeling of missed opportunity, as that of Michael Ignatieff.
There is no stronger indictment of Canada’s political class than the treatment of Michael Ignatieff during the years from 2005 to 2011. Never has such a torrent of abuse been poured on any Canadian figure; never have the small-town and the small-minded been so united as they were in their joint attack on the son of George Ignatieff, the best Governor General we never had. His torment by the Tory gang of cynics and liars, egged on by party hangers-on and cheered, too often and by too many of us in the press, testifies to the ongoing suspicion Canadians have with leaders who exhibit a modicum of intelligence, accomplishment, and worldliness.
It is hard for me, now, to think myself back to the enthusiasm I initially felt at the prospect of his entry in Canadian politics. More than any one else, and for better or for worse, Michael Ignatieff is responsible for my career as someone trying to find a place somewhere between philosophy and politics, between academia and the journalism. Before I met Mark Kingwell, before I met Joe Heath, I was reading Ignatieff’s work. I was given a copy of Blood and Belonging in my last year of undergrad, and it struck me at the time as exactly the sort of writing I’d like to do. Ignatieff’s excellent 2000 Massey Lectures, The Rights Revolution, only cemented my belief that he was a smart man who had something to offer the world.
Yet while I admired his career path, I didn’t always love his ideas. Ignatieff’s writing was not always as coherent (or as “tightly argued”, as they like to say in philosophy departments) as it should have been. He tended to hem and haw, especially when it came to touchy subjects like torture and the war in Iraq, and his frequent inability to come out and say exactly what he thought and why ended up seeming less like journalistic even-handedness, more like intellectual indecision.
Funny story: When I was teaching at Trent University in the early 2000s, I had the luck to teach a course on the philosophy of law and rights, and I put Ignatieff’s new book, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, on the syllabus. It wasn’t a huge success, partly because the book’s argument has some serious flaws, but more because my students thought it was a species of right-wing American imperialist propaganda. Later that summer I was talking to a friend who had taught the same book to some students at a college in New York. He laughed and said that his students also hated the book, for the exact opposite reason: they dismissed it as mushy-headed Canadian left-liberalism.
I’ve tried, on occasion, to mine from that anecdote a parable that will help explain precisely why Ignatieff’s eventual return to Canada was greeted with such immediate suspicion, even both those who might have been expected to welcome him. But the moral, if there is one at all, is simply that Canada and the US are different countries with substantially different political cultures, and that jumping into the former after marinating for decades in the latter was always going to be far harder than anyone, not least of all Michael Ignatieff, might have anticipated.
And that isn’t taking into consideration just how poisonous our political culture is. In the summer of 2005, I wrote an essay for the National Post that tried to frame Ignatieff’s return to Canada against the Liberal Party’s desperate search for a saviour “philosopher king” in the Trudeau mold. The piece was over-thought and over-written in bunch of ways, but I did flag two problems I thought he would face. The first was what became known as his “pronoun problem” – his habit of saying “we” when talking to both Canadian and American audiences.
The story of Ignatieff’s failure to properly deal with this issue is one major piece of the puzzle of why he went to such jaw-dropping defeat this week. For two years, the Conservatives hammered the airwaves with attack ads accusing him of being not really Canadian, someone who was “just in it for himself.” Someday we might get an explanation from the Liberal camp about why they allowed those charges to go unanswered for so long, and why they were never able to come up with a decent counter-narrative, a positive story that would place Michael Ignatieff’s return to Canada within the broader frame of his earlier career as a self-pronounced cosmopolitan, a global traveler and thinker whose interests for so long seemed to lie anywhere but within his home country.
But this points to a second piece to the puzzle, and that is the fact that the Liberal Party of Canada is a complete disaster, and has been for some time. It was mid-way through Jean Chretien’s second term that people started to point out that the party had no real identity, no sense of purpose other than power for its own sake. And so Michael Ignatieff’s failure to tell a plausible story about his own candidacy for prime minister was the precise mirror of the party’s own existential conundrum: The Liberal Party of Canada has no idea why it exists, so it is hardly surprising that they settled on a leader who didn’t seem to have any idea why he was here.
What is so remarkable about Ignatieff’s tenure as Liberal leader, and with this past election campaign in particular, is how little he tried to take advantage of intellectual strengths and interests. Confronted with a cartoonishly small-minded prime minister acting as chief puppeteer over a caucus of frat boys, yes men, and idiocrats, surely there was an opportunity for a leader who would speak to those Canadians who see themselves as responsible citizens of the world. We spent much of the 2000s telling ourselves that “the world needs more Canada”, and if anyone embodied that slogan, it was Michael Ignatieff.
But instead, the Liberals spent Ignatieff’s leadership playing along with the Conservatives’ completely un-serious approach to foreign affairs. Here’s something a friend send me during the campaign:
It’s pretty weird: Here’s Ignatieff, whose life has been devoted to precisely the challenges and “foreign policy” nuances that are front and centre in everything that’s happening of any consequence in the world today, in the so-called Muslim world. If he weren’t running for the prime minister’s job in Canada, he’d be one of the few go-to guys in the English speaking world on Egypt, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, the latest Hamas-Fatah deal. . . . and here we are in the middle of a Canadian federal election, with all these issues that make Ignatieff look totally world-class and massively relevant, and which make the Tories look stupid but make the NDP look infinitely worse, and we’re not supposed to notice that any of it is even happening. Like it’s an election for the Orillia school board.
Why did Michael Ignatieff – or more plausibly, the people helping devise his political brand and their electoral strategy – stay as far as possible from these issues? Probably because they believe that Stephen Harper actually has us pegged, that we are a nation of Tim Horton’s-addicted moral suburbanites for whom that “the world needs Canada” was always just a slogan for selling books and lattes to the elites downtown. But if the Liberals are afraid to speak to their natural constituency in their native tongue, and if their leader’s CV is largely a cause for quiet embarrassment, what does that say about the party, or the country?
Here are the closing paragraphs of my 2005 essay on Ignatieff:
In a profile published in these pages [National Post] back in April, Tony Keller suggested Ignatieff’s views could be “a bracing tonic for the Canadian body politic.” He would lead us out of our smug anti-Americanism and help us accept our global responsibilities.
This is doubtful. More likely, this sort of thinking will be rejected by the Canadian political immune system. Whether it is about health care, missile defence or the war on terror, Canadians are incapable of having an adult discussion, and woe to any politician who dares do anything so radical as obey reason. Our political discourse takes place in a dogma-addled environment that would swallow up an intellectual alien like Ignatieff, and it would be a shame to see him forced to mouth the banalities that are required for survival in Canadian federal politics.
Immanuel Kant was right when he opposed the notion of the philosopher king, on the grounds that “the possession of power is inevitably fatal to the free exercise of reason.” We should certainly be wary of any philosopher who would be king. But in the case of Michael Ignatieff, he should be wary of us.
Watching Michael Ignatieff resign yesterday, it was hard not to be moved by his parting hope that there might be someone watching, maybe a woman, who is looking at him and saying, “he didn’t make it, but I will.” But is there any chance of that? Having seen how Michael Ignatieff was treated, can any reasonably intelligent and ambitious person be ever expected to go into national politics?
As Michael Ignatieff’s uncle, George Grant, once wrote about John Diefenbaker: Nothing in his political career became him like the leaving of it.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Understanding a Coalition
COALITION GOVERNMENTNo stranger to Canada's system
Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff kicked off his election campaign by ruling out forming a coalition government, if no party wins a majority of seats in Parliament once the ballots are counted on May 2.
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper says the choice is a Conservative majority or a coalition. Adrian Wyld/Canadian PressConservative Leader Stephen Harper's not buying it.
"Let me be perfectly clear: unless Canadians elect a stable national majority government, Michael Ignatieff will form a coalition with the NDP and Bloc Québécois," Harper said moments after announcing the election date.
Ignatieff noted that the party that wins the most seats gets to try to form a government.
"If that is the Liberal Party, then I will be required to rapidly seek the confidence of the newly-elected Parliament," Ignatieff said in a statement released before the election writ was dropped. "If our government cannot win the support of the House, then Mr. Harper will be called on to form a government and face the same challenge. That is our c onstitution. It is the law of the land."
Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff and his team kick off the campaign by insisting a coalition government is not in the cards. Ryan Remiorz/Canadian PressThat's the way things run in countries that have adopted the Westminster system, a democratic parliamentary system of government modeled on what's been in place in the United Kingdom for centuries.
Under that system, if no party wins a majority of seats in an election, the party that wins the most seats gets an invitation from the monarch (the Governor-General in Canada) to form a government. That government gets to govern as long as it can rely on support from enough opposition members to get its legislation through the House of Commons.
If that party can't secure enough support, the Governor-General has two choices: dissolve Parliament and call another election or invite the leader of the party that has won the second greatest number of seats to try to form a government.
The leader of that party can then try to secure the confidence of the House by putting forth a legislative agenda that enough opposition members will support.
Opting to co-operate
Countries where coalitions are common
Germany: coalition is the norm as it is rare for either the Christian Democrats or Social Democrats to win a majority.
Belgium: coalition governments of up to six parties are common.
Italy: constant coalition governments since the end of the Second World War.
Finland: no party has held a majority of seats since independence in 1917.
Israel: while Labour or Likud usually dominates, each has to rely on several partners from the dozens of small parties to form a government.
There is a third option: a formal coalition, like the one that's governing Great Britain right now. David Cameron's Conservative Party beat Gordon Brown's Labour Party in the May 2010 general election, but fell short of a majority.
Brown negotiated with the third-largest party — the Liberal Democrats — to secure their support as he tried to remain in power. Those talks failed.
Cameron's talks were successful. He negotiated a deal with Nick Clegg — the leader of the Liberal Democrats — that led to Britain's first coalition government since the Second World War.
That deal saw Clegg win the post of Deputy Prime Minister. Four other members of his party were appointed to cabinet. While it is a Conservative government, the Liberal Democrats are a formal part of the government and have a say in the legislative agenda.
A coalition government happened once before in post-Confederation Canada — and it could happen again, although Ignatieff says it won't in 2011.
In 1917, Conservative Prime Minister Robert Borden attracted enough Liberals to form a coalition known as the "Union Government," which eventually pushed conscription through Parliament. When the First World War ended a year later and the issue of conscription disappeared, the coalition began to fall apart as many of the Liberals who signed on returned to their original party.
Canada has no roadmap when it comes to how to form a coalition government. The Westminster system, which relies heavily on tradition and unwritten rules, doesn't spell out rules on forming coalition governments. But it clearly allows them.
In 1985, an accord between the Liberals and New Democrats in Ontario led to the end of a four decade-old Progressive Conservative dynasty. However, it was not a coalition government as no New Democrats sat at the cabinet table.
The New Democrats agreed to support the Liberals for two years, as long as the Liberals included certain issues in their legislative agenda. The NDP offered the same deal to the Conservatives, but they turned it down.
The closest Canada has come since the Union Government to a formal coalition was the agreement hammered out between the Liberals and New Democrats in 2008. It was a deal that the Bloc Quebécois said they would support. It was rife with problems, including the fact that the bigger party in the coalition had a leader who already pledged to resign — and tepid support from Michael Ignatieff, the man who was poised to replace him.
The accord that would have formed that coalition would have remained in effect until June 30, 2011.
Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff kicked off his election campaign by ruling out forming a coalition government, if no party wins a majority of seats in Parliament once the ballots are counted on May 2.
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper says the choice is a Conservative majority or a coalition. Adrian Wyld/Canadian PressConservative Leader Stephen Harper's not buying it.
"Let me be perfectly clear: unless Canadians elect a stable national majority government, Michael Ignatieff will form a coalition with the NDP and Bloc Québécois," Harper said moments after announcing the election date.
Ignatieff noted that the party that wins the most seats gets to try to form a government.
"If that is the Liberal Party, then I will be required to rapidly seek the confidence of the newly-elected Parliament," Ignatieff said in a statement released before the election writ was dropped. "If our government cannot win the support of the House, then Mr. Harper will be called on to form a government and face the same challenge. That is our c onstitution. It is the law of the land."
Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff and his team kick off the campaign by insisting a coalition government is not in the cards. Ryan Remiorz/Canadian PressThat's the way things run in countries that have adopted the Westminster system, a democratic parliamentary system of government modeled on what's been in place in the United Kingdom for centuries.
Under that system, if no party wins a majority of seats in an election, the party that wins the most seats gets an invitation from the monarch (the Governor-General in Canada) to form a government. That government gets to govern as long as it can rely on support from enough opposition members to get its legislation through the House of Commons.
If that party can't secure enough support, the Governor-General has two choices: dissolve Parliament and call another election or invite the leader of the party that has won the second greatest number of seats to try to form a government.
The leader of that party can then try to secure the confidence of the House by putting forth a legislative agenda that enough opposition members will support.
Opting to co-operate
Countries where coalitions are common
Germany: coalition is the norm as it is rare for either the Christian Democrats or Social Democrats to win a majority.
Belgium: coalition governments of up to six parties are common.
Italy: constant coalition governments since the end of the Second World War.
Finland: no party has held a majority of seats since independence in 1917.
Israel: while Labour or Likud usually dominates, each has to rely on several partners from the dozens of small parties to form a government.
There is a third option: a formal coalition, like the one that's governing Great Britain right now. David Cameron's Conservative Party beat Gordon Brown's Labour Party in the May 2010 general election, but fell short of a majority.
Brown negotiated with the third-largest party — the Liberal Democrats — to secure their support as he tried to remain in power. Those talks failed.
Cameron's talks were successful. He negotiated a deal with Nick Clegg — the leader of the Liberal Democrats — that led to Britain's first coalition government since the Second World War.
That deal saw Clegg win the post of Deputy Prime Minister. Four other members of his party were appointed to cabinet. While it is a Conservative government, the Liberal Democrats are a formal part of the government and have a say in the legislative agenda.
A coalition government happened once before in post-Confederation Canada — and it could happen again, although Ignatieff says it won't in 2011.
In 1917, Conservative Prime Minister Robert Borden attracted enough Liberals to form a coalition known as the "Union Government," which eventually pushed conscription through Parliament. When the First World War ended a year later and the issue of conscription disappeared, the coalition began to fall apart as many of the Liberals who signed on returned to their original party.
Canada has no roadmap when it comes to how to form a coalition government. The Westminster system, which relies heavily on tradition and unwritten rules, doesn't spell out rules on forming coalition governments. But it clearly allows them.
In 1985, an accord between the Liberals and New Democrats in Ontario led to the end of a four decade-old Progressive Conservative dynasty. However, it was not a coalition government as no New Democrats sat at the cabinet table.
The New Democrats agreed to support the Liberals for two years, as long as the Liberals included certain issues in their legislative agenda. The NDP offered the same deal to the Conservatives, but they turned it down.
The closest Canada has come since the Union Government to a formal coalition was the agreement hammered out between the Liberals and New Democrats in 2008. It was a deal that the Bloc Quebécois said they would support. It was rife with problems, including the fact that the bigger party in the coalition had a leader who already pledged to resign — and tepid support from Michael Ignatieff, the man who was poised to replace him.
The accord that would have formed that coalition would have remained in effect until June 30, 2011.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Sponsorship Scandal
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the "Sponsorship Scandal" in Canada.
Contents
1 Involved parties
2 Timeline
2.1 1995
2.2 1996
2.3 2000
2.4 2004
2.5 2005
2.6 2006
2.7 2007
3 Political consequences
4 See also
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links
The sponsorship scandal, "AdScam", "Sponsorship" or Sponsorgate, is a scandal that came as a result of a Canadian federal government "sponsorship program" in the province of Quebec and involving the Liberal Party of Canada, which was in power from 1993 to 2006. The program was originally established as an effort to raise awareness of the Government of Canada's contributions to Quebec industries and other activities in order to counter the actions of the Parti Québécois government of the province that worked to promote Quebec independence.
The program ran from 1996 until 2004, when broad corruption was discovered in its operations and the program was discontinued. Illicit and even illegal activities within the administration of the program were revealed, involving misuse and misdirection of public funds intended for government advertising in Quebec. Such misdirections included sponsorship money awarded to ad firms in return for little or no work, which firms maintained Liberal organizers or fundraisers on their payrolls or donated back part of the money to the Liberal Party. The resulting investigations and scandal affected the Liberal Party of Canada and the then-government of Prime Minister Paul Martin. It was an ongoing affair for years, but rose to national prominence in early 2004 after the program was examined by Sheila Fraser, the federal auditor general. Her revelations led to the government establishing the Gomery Commission to conduct a public inquiry and file a report on the matter. The official title of this inquiry was the Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and Advertising Activities.
In the national spotlight, the scandal became a significant factor in the lead-up to the 2006 federal election where after more than twelve years in power the Liberals were defeated by the Conservatives, who formed a minority government that was sworn in February 2006.
[edit] Involved parties This section requires expansion.
Jean Chrétien — Prime Minister of Canada at the time the Sponsorship Program was established and operated. The Gomery Commission, First Phase Report which assigned blame for the Sponsorship scandal cast most of the indemnity for misspent public funds, fraud on Chrétien and his Prime Minister's Office staff, though it cleared Chrétien himself of direct wrongdoing.
Jean Pelletier — Prime Minister's chief of staff and later chairman of VIA Rail. VIA Rail was accused of mishandling sponsorship deals, though mostly not under Pelletier's tenure.
Alfonso Gagliano — Minister of Public Works, and thus in charge of the program. Also the political minister for Quebec.
André Ouellet — member of Prime Minister Chrétien's Cabinet, longtime Liberal politician and later head of Canada Post, who was also accused of violating sponsorship rules.
Chuck Guité — bureaucrat in charge of the sponsorship program. Arrested for fraud by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) - convicted on five counts on June 6, 2006.
Jean Brault — head of Groupaction Marketing, one of the companies to which deals were directed. Arrested for fraud by the RCMP, he pleaded guilty to five counts of fraud and on May 5, 2006, was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
Jacques Corriveau — Liberal organizer and head of Pluridesign to which millions in sponsorship dollars were directed.
Paul Martin — former Prime Minister of Canada. He was Minister of Finance, and Senior Minister from Quebec during most of the years the program occurred. When he became Prime Minister in December 2003, he claimed that he put a halt to it. He also set up the Gomery Commission which later cleared him of formal responsibility by Justice Gomery in his November 2005 'First Phase Report' of the Gomery Commission. The Gomery findings claimed that Martin, as finance minister, established a 'fiscal framework' but he did not have oversight as to the dispersal of the funds once they were apportioned to Chrétien's Prime Minister's Office. A report on the issue by the Auditor General's Office of Sheila Fraser came to the same conclusion. Nonetheless, Martin was frequently accused of tying Gomery's hands and using the sponsorship scandal as an excuse to purge the Liberals of members who supported Chrétien. The scandal played a factor in the federal election of 2006 and the fall of the Liberal Government. Shortly thereafter, Martin resigned from the liberal party leadership.
Joe Morselli — Liberal Party fundraiser. Jean Brault testified that the money exchanges were with Morselli.
Jean Lafleur — former CEO of Lafleur Communication Marketing Inc. One of the advertising executives that accepted money from the federal government. Pleaded guilty to 28 counts of fraud.
Allan Cutler — former civil servant and whistleblower who reported anomalies in a Canadian sponsorship program, triggering the Scandal.
[edit] Timeline[edit] 1995Allan Cutler first attempts to raise concerns about bid-rigging and political interference to the attention of senior management at the Department of Public Works and Government Services Canada.
[edit] 1996Ernst & Young conducts an audit of contracting and tendering practices. The initial draft, which identified recurring problems and the risk of legal action, was altered in the final report. Ernst & Young representative Deanne Monaghan later indicated that she did not recall why the report had been changed to remove those references.[1]
[edit] 2000February — An internal audit reveals that none of the recommendations of the 1996 Ernst & Young audit have been implemented.
September — Minister Alfonso Gagliano receives the 2000 audit and suspends the Sponsorship Program. Later that year, the Office of the Auditor General of Canada begins investigating the program.
[edit] 2004February 10 — Auditor General Sheila Fraser's report reveals up to $100 million of the $250 million sponsorship program was awarded to Liberal-friendly advertising firms and Crown corporations for little or no work.
February 11 — Prime Minister Paul Martin orders a Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and Advertising Activities. The Commission of Inquiry will be headed by Justice John H. Gomery. Martin fires Alfonso Gagliano from his post in Denmark. Martin asserts that he had no knowledge of the scandal prior to the Auditor General's report.
February 13 — The National Post newspaper publishes a 2002 letter leaked to it by an unidentified third party, between the Liberal Party's then National Policy Chairman and Paul Martin, urging Martin to stop partisan financial abuses in the Sponsorship Program, thereby casting doubt on Martin's defence of personal ignorance.[2]
February 24 — Martin suspends Business Development Bank of Canada president Michel Vennat, VIA Rail president Marc LeFrançois and Canada Post president André Ouellet giving each an ultimatum to defend themselves or face further disciplinary action.
February 27 — Past Olympic gold medallist Myriam Bédard reveals she was pushed from her job at VIA Rail for questioning billing practices. VIA Rail chairman Jean Pelletier publicly belittles Bédard and calls her pitiful.
March 1 — Pelletier is fired.
March 3 — Jean Carle, a close confidant of Chrétien and his former director of operations, surfaces in close connection to the sponsorship initiative.
March 5 — LeFrançois is fired.
March 11 — Allan Cutler, former public works accountant, testifies before the Commission of Inquiry. He places responsibility for the program and its irregularities with Chuck Guité.[3]
March 12 — Vennat is fired.
March 13 — An unidentified whistle-blower reveals that high-ranking government officials, including Jean Pelletier, Alfonso Gagliano, Don Boudria, Denis Coderre, and Marc LeFrançois, had frequent confidential conversations with Pierre Tremblay, head of the Communications Coordination Services Branch of Public Works from 1999 until 2001. The claim is the first direct link between the scandal and the Prime Minister's Office. Coderre and LeFrançois denied the allegation.[4]
March 18 — Gagliano testifies in front of the Public Accounts Committee, a committee of the House of Commons chaired by a member from the Official Opposition. Gagliano denies any involvement by himself or any other politician; he points blame at bureaucrat Chuck Guité.
March 24 — Myriam Bédard testifies at the Public Accounts Committee. In addition to repeating her earlier assertions, she also claims that Formula One driver Jacques Villeneuve was given a secret $12 million payoff to wear a Canadian flag logo on his racing suit (however, Villeneuve sharply denies this allegation, calling it "ludicrous"). Bédard also testifies that she once heard that Groupaction was involved in drug trafficking.
April 2 — Previously confidential testimony from a 2002 inquiry into suspicious Groupaction contracts is made public. In it, Guité admits to having bent the rules in his handling of the advertising contracts but defends his actions as excusable given the circumstances, saying, "We were basically at war trying to save the country... When you're at war, you drop the book and the rules and you don't give your plan to the opposition."[5]
April 22 — Guité testifies. He claims Auditor-General Fraser is misguided in delivering the report, as it distorts what actually went on; he claims the office of then-Finance Minister Paul Martin lobbied for input in the choice of firms given contracts; and he denies that any political interference occurred, because his bureaucratic office made all final decisions. Opposition MPs decry his comments as "nonsense" and claim he is covering up for the government.[6] The French language press gives a very different account of Guité's testimony; a La Presse headline states that Guité is involving the Cabinet office of Paul Martin.[7]
May 6 — An official announces the inquiry deadline is set for December 2005.
May 10 — Jean Brault, president of Groupaction, and Charles Guité arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for fraud in connection with the sponsorship scandal.
May 23 — Paul Martin requests that the Governor General dissolve Parliament and call a federal election.
May 28 — Alfonso Gagliano launches a lawsuit for $4.5 million against Prime Minister Paul Martin and the federal government for defamation and wrongful dismissal claiming that he has been unfairly made to pay for the sponsorship scandal.
June 28 — The Liberals win 135 of 308 seats in the 2004 election, forming the first minority government in almost 25 years.
September — First public hearings of the Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and Advertising Activities begin in Ottawa. They will move to Montreal in February 2005 and conclude in the Spring.
December — In a year-end media interview, Justice John Gomery refers to Chrétien's distribution of autographed golf balls as "small-town cheap", which later prompts an indignant response from the former prime minister.
[edit] 2005March 29 — A publication ban is imposed by the Gomery commission on Jean Brault's testimony.
April 2 — The United States blogger Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters[8] discloses information about Brault's testimony, countervening the Canadian publication ban. Until the revocation of the ban five days later, the publication itself was a news event in Canada, with Canadian news media struggling to report on the disclosure without putting themselves at risk of legal action.[9]
April 7 — The publication ban on Jean Brault's testimony is lifted by the Gomery commission. Brault's testimony triggers a rapid shift in the public opinion of the Liberal Party. Whether or not the government is defeated in the imminent confidence vote, most political pundits are predicting an election call this year—many predicting by this summer.
April 20 — The official opposition party, the Conservatives, puts forward a non-confidence motion in the government. Due to procedural rules, this vote which was to be held May 3 was postponed. If a non-confidence motion passes, the government will be dissolved and a new election will be held.
April 21 — A national televised appearance by Prime Minister Paul Martin discusses the scandal. This was highly unusual in Canadian politics. The Prime Minister announced that a general election will be called within 30 days of Justice Gomery's final report. Martin emphasised that he was trying to clean up the scandal and had not been involved. In the following rebuttal speeches, Jack Layton of the New Democratic Party offered to keep the parliament alive, provided the Liberal Party makes some major concessions in the budget in their favor. However, the other Opposition parties were still ready to bring down the government and force an election before the summer.
May 10 — The Conservatives and Bloc Québécois win a vote, by 153-150, in the House of Commons on what they argue is equivalent to a no confidence motion; three MPs are absent due to health reasons. The motion ordered a committee of the House of Commons to declare that the government should resign rather than being a direct motion on the House's confidence in the government. The opposition parties and several constitutional experts claim that the motion is binding and that the government must resign or immediately seek the confidence of the House; the government and several opposing constitutional experts suggest that this motion was merely procedural and therefore cannot be considered a matter of confidence. Ultimately, only the Governor General has the power to force an election, it is not clear what actions tradition would require her to take in such a case.[10]
May 11 — The government tells the House that it will consider a vote to be held on May 19 on the budget, including the concessions which the Liberal party ceded to the NDP in turn for their support on it, to be a matter of confidence. The government refuses to directly seek the confidence of the House and blocks the Opposition from putting any vote to the House; in consequence the Opposition continues a policy of non-cooperation and disruption of the other business of the House.
May 17 — Conservative MP Belinda Stronach crosses the floor to the Liberals and is simultaneously given the Cabinet position of Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development as well as made Minister responsible for Democratic Renewal. Prime Minister Paul Martin states that Stronach will be responsible for implementing the recommendations of the Gomery commission, a statement that Opposition critics claim casts doubt on the sincerity of the Prime Minister's promise for an election within 30 days of the tabling of Justice Gomery's report. For some time afterwards, media attention is focused away from Gomery testimony onto Stronach's move and its implications on the budget vote.
May 19 — The government passes the first of two budget bills easily after the Conservatives promise support, but the second bill with the NDP concessions ends as a cliffhanger. Speaker Peter Milliken breaks a 152-152 tie in favour of the bill, keeping the government alive.
November 1 — Gomery's preliminary report into the scandal is released. The report criticizes Chrétien and his office for setting up the sponsorship program in a way as to invite abuse, and Gagliano as the Minister of Public Works for his behaviour. Prime Minister Paul Martin is formally cleared of any responsibility or wrongdoing in the matter as Gomery found his role as Finance Minister was to set up a 'fiscal framework' at the instruction of then Prime Minister Chrétien, but did not have oversight on the spending of the funds after they were passed to Chrétien's Prime Minister's Office.
Conservative leader Stephen Harper and Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe announce their intention to try to force a pre-Christmas election; however, New Democrat leader Jack Layton says that he will try to have the Liberals implement some New Democrat policies, particularly with regard to a ban on private healthcare as the price for his support in keeping the government up.
November 28 — The Liberals refuse to agree to the New Democrats' terms and the latter withdraws their support. The Liberals also turn down a motion sponsored by the three opposition parties which would have scheduled a February election in return for passing several key pieces of legislation. As a result, the Liberal government loses a confidence vote in the House by 171 to 133, resulting in the fall of the minority government and triggering a mid-January election after a long holiday election campaign that is expected to be dirty and hard-fought.
[edit] 2006
Gomery Commission hearings in MontrealJanuary 23 — After twelve consecutive years in power, the ruling Liberals are defeated in the general election. The Conservatives have enough seats to form a minority government. Paul Martin immediately announces that he will not contest the next federal election as party leader, and Bill Graham is appointed interim parliamentary leader.
February 1 — Justice John Gomery delivered his final report consisting mostly of recommendations for changes to the civil service and its relation to government.
February 6 — The new Conservative government, led by Stephen Harper, are officially sworn in as the new government in Canada. Stephen Harper becomes Canada's 22nd Prime Minister.
March 18 — Paul Martin resigns the leadership of the Liberal party, handing the post to Bill Graham for the interim.
May 5 — after pleading guilty to five counts of fraud, Jean Brault was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
May 11 — the Conservative government is reportedly preparing to file a lawsuit against the Liberal party.[11]
June 6 — Chuck Guité was convicted on five counts of defrauding the Government of Canada; on June 19, he was sentenced to 42 months in prison.
[edit] 2007April 27 — Jean Lafleur, after returning from two years in Belize, pleaded guilty to 28 counts of fraud. He was sentenced to 42 months in prison, and was ordered to repay $1.6 million to the federal government.
[edit] Political consequencesWithin the Liberal Party during 2004-05, revelations of scandal and the subsequent Gomery Commission highlighted the rift between the "Chrétien camp" and "Martin camp". These two groups had been fighting perhaps even prior to Chrétien's election as party leader in 1990; the Chrétienites were descended from long-serving Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau while the Martinites were linked to the right-leaning (and briefly Prime Minister) John Turner.[citation needed]
The Liberals, for the most part, have weathered the damage from the scandal[according to whom?] by pointing out the conclusions of reports of the Auditor General and the Gomery Commission: misdeeds were committed by a small, isolated, and corrupt subculture within the previous Liberal government and in particular the PMO of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien.[citation needed]
Similarly, supporters of then Prime Minister Paul Martin argued that the "culture of corruption" was a byproduct of Chrétien's leadership and that any malicious elements had been purged, both from the government and the party, since the discoveries of wrongdoing. When he assumed the leadership of the party and then the country, Martin made an active effort to dissociate the Liberals and himself from Chrétien's supporters, arguing these individuals were implicated in the scandal, thus hoping to illustrate that the Liberal Party bore little or no connection or resemblance to party elements involved in the sponsorship program.[citation needed]
Martin supporters contend that many Chrétien loyalists left with or shortly after Chrétien left in 2004, before the scandal was revealed. They point to the departure of John Manley and other Chrétien cabinet ministers from the party, many of whom did not stand for candidacy in the 2004 federal election. Martin's supporters assert those expunged from the party were ejected for their impropriety and not for their leadership affiliations.[citation needed]
Chrétien supporters alleged that Martin used the scandal as an excuse to remove Chrétien supporters from their positions in government and the party. Often cited examples include Martin's major cabinet change after taking power and Martin's refusal to sign nomination papers of MPs who were known to support Chrétien, with many of these controversial moves occurring before the sponsorship scandal broke out.[citation needed]
The Chrétien camp also contended that the Gomery Commission was established to make them look bad, and that it was an unfair investigation. Martin's supporters responded to such allegations by pointing out that the commission was set up to search for facts under independent judicial oversight. They also argued that Justice Gomery's commission operated without undue influence from Martin or anyone outside of the investigation, having all due and necessary authority to investigate and draw conclusions on the matter.[citation needed] Chrétien's supporters were outraged[according to whom?] that they shouldered all of the blame for the scandal, even though the commission was directed not to make any conclusions or recommendations on criminal charges or civil liability.[citation needed]
Detractors of Martin's innocence point out that he had a particularly powerful role in government, not only because of being Finance Minister, but also because he had significant support within the party due to his strong showing in the 1990 leadership contest. This forced Chrétien to make concessions to Martin, allowing the latter to wield considerable influence. Another cited example was a speech that Martin made in 1995, stating that separatism would be bad for Quebec's economy, which damaged support for federalism in the province and relegated Martin to a backroom role in fighting the referendum.[citation needed]
Many[who?] inside and outside of the Liberal Party contended that, going into the 2006 election, Martin-vs.-Chrétien issues are effectively behind the Liberals. There were few publicized nomination battles, although some Chrétien strategists complained that they have been left out.[citation needed] Formally, the two leaders have remained publicly respectful of each other.[citation needed]
Critics of the Liberal Party and even former Liberals, like Sheila Copps, argued that the sponsorship scandal has highlighted a "culture of corruption" within the Canadian government.[citation needed] Some Conservative critics alleged that the problems within the Liberal Party are so systematic it could only be effectively reversed (or cured) by a change of government and argue that the Liberals, who had been in power for over a decade, were too arrogant and complacent to be trusted with instituting necessary reforms.[citation needed] The sponsorship crisis thus became a key election issue, and remained a rallying-point for conservative opponents of the Liberals in the 2006 federal election.
Quebec sovereigntists—led by the Bloc Québécois in the federal parliament and the provincial Parti Québécois—have cited the scandal as "proof" of institutional corruption and dysfunctionality of the federal government. Critics have argued that the entire sponsorship scandal, originally intended to encourage pro-Canada sentiment in Quebec, has done exactly the opposite and instead, emboldened separatist forces in Quebec: polls before the election indicated increased support for sovereignty, rising to approximately 53% (around 19 December 2005).[citation needed] Ultimately support for separatism declined and the Bloc Québécois lost both popular vote and seats in the Parliament of Canada in the 2006 Federal Election.[citation needed]
The New Democratic Party (NDP) caucus of Jack Layton has also been criticized for alleging major corruption in the Liberal Party of Canada, while simultaneously working with the Martin government to achieve NDP policy objectives.[citation needed]
Unlike the 2004 Election, the Conservatives did not spend the initial part of the campaign attacking the Liberals for Adscam. The sponsorship scandal was brought back to national attention after an NDP member tipped off the RCMP to launch a criminal investigation into the Finance Department, regarding allegations of insider trading from the leaking of the news on the taxable status of income trusts.[citation needed]
The Conservative minority government of Stephen Harper introduced the Federal Accountability Act which included new lobbying rules and electoral law reform; it was granted royal assent on December 12, 2006. Still unfulfilled are promises for a Public Appointments Commission and registrar for lobbyists which is an independent officer of Parliament [1].
Communication Canada was created after the results of the 1995 Quebec referendum to increase intergovernmental communications. The agency was connected to the scandal and labelled as a propaganda machine and eventually disbanded in 2004.[citation needed]
[edit] See alsoCanadian political scandals
Politics of Canada
Gomery Commission
[edit] References^ CBC.ca News Indepth: Federal Sponsorship Scandal
^ National Post article
^ CBC.ca News Indepth: Federal Sponsorship Scandal Timeline
^ Toronto Star article
^ Globe and Mail insider edition article
^ Toronto Star article
^ Cyberpresse article
^ Captain's Quarters posting
^ Edmonton Sun article
^ CBC article: Liberals will not quit despite losing vote
^ Government may sue Liberals for sponsorship funds: report
[edit] Further readingGomery, John (2005). Who is Responsible? Phase 1 Report. Ottawa, ON: Public Works and Government Services Canada. ISBN 0-660-19532-1. http://www.gomery.ca/en/phase1report/index.asp.
[edit] External linksWho Is Responsible: Phase 1 Report
CBC.ca Indepth: Federal sponsorship scandal
2003 Reports of the Auditor General of Canada
Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and Advertising Activities
Testimony from Jean Brault on the activities of the Government in the Sponsorship Program
Official transcripts of the hearings available on the website of the Gomery Commission
Liberals brace for release of Gomery report on sponsorship scandal
Whistleblowers Canada: Information regarding the inadequacy of legislation introduced in response to the scandal
Scandal nomenclature contest
Maple Leaf Web: Ethics & Government in Canada
Maple Leaf Web: Auditor General Report on Sponsorship Scandal
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponsorship_scandal"
Categories: Jean Chrétien | Paul Martin | Political scandals in Canada | Corruption in Canada
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This article is about the "Sponsorship Scandal" in Canada.
Contents
1 Involved parties
2 Timeline
2.1 1995
2.2 1996
2.3 2000
2.4 2004
2.5 2005
2.6 2006
2.7 2007
3 Political consequences
4 See also
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links
The sponsorship scandal, "AdScam", "Sponsorship" or Sponsorgate, is a scandal that came as a result of a Canadian federal government "sponsorship program" in the province of Quebec and involving the Liberal Party of Canada, which was in power from 1993 to 2006. The program was originally established as an effort to raise awareness of the Government of Canada's contributions to Quebec industries and other activities in order to counter the actions of the Parti Québécois government of the province that worked to promote Quebec independence.
The program ran from 1996 until 2004, when broad corruption was discovered in its operations and the program was discontinued. Illicit and even illegal activities within the administration of the program were revealed, involving misuse and misdirection of public funds intended for government advertising in Quebec. Such misdirections included sponsorship money awarded to ad firms in return for little or no work, which firms maintained Liberal organizers or fundraisers on their payrolls or donated back part of the money to the Liberal Party. The resulting investigations and scandal affected the Liberal Party of Canada and the then-government of Prime Minister Paul Martin. It was an ongoing affair for years, but rose to national prominence in early 2004 after the program was examined by Sheila Fraser, the federal auditor general. Her revelations led to the government establishing the Gomery Commission to conduct a public inquiry and file a report on the matter. The official title of this inquiry was the Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and Advertising Activities.
In the national spotlight, the scandal became a significant factor in the lead-up to the 2006 federal election where after more than twelve years in power the Liberals were defeated by the Conservatives, who formed a minority government that was sworn in February 2006.
[edit] Involved parties This section requires expansion.
Jean Chrétien — Prime Minister of Canada at the time the Sponsorship Program was established and operated. The Gomery Commission, First Phase Report which assigned blame for the Sponsorship scandal cast most of the indemnity for misspent public funds, fraud on Chrétien and his Prime Minister's Office staff, though it cleared Chrétien himself of direct wrongdoing.
Jean Pelletier — Prime Minister's chief of staff and later chairman of VIA Rail. VIA Rail was accused of mishandling sponsorship deals, though mostly not under Pelletier's tenure.
Alfonso Gagliano — Minister of Public Works, and thus in charge of the program. Also the political minister for Quebec.
André Ouellet — member of Prime Minister Chrétien's Cabinet, longtime Liberal politician and later head of Canada Post, who was also accused of violating sponsorship rules.
Chuck Guité — bureaucrat in charge of the sponsorship program. Arrested for fraud by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) - convicted on five counts on June 6, 2006.
Jean Brault — head of Groupaction Marketing, one of the companies to which deals were directed. Arrested for fraud by the RCMP, he pleaded guilty to five counts of fraud and on May 5, 2006, was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
Jacques Corriveau — Liberal organizer and head of Pluridesign to which millions in sponsorship dollars were directed.
Paul Martin — former Prime Minister of Canada. He was Minister of Finance, and Senior Minister from Quebec during most of the years the program occurred. When he became Prime Minister in December 2003, he claimed that he put a halt to it. He also set up the Gomery Commission which later cleared him of formal responsibility by Justice Gomery in his November 2005 'First Phase Report' of the Gomery Commission. The Gomery findings claimed that Martin, as finance minister, established a 'fiscal framework' but he did not have oversight as to the dispersal of the funds once they were apportioned to Chrétien's Prime Minister's Office. A report on the issue by the Auditor General's Office of Sheila Fraser came to the same conclusion. Nonetheless, Martin was frequently accused of tying Gomery's hands and using the sponsorship scandal as an excuse to purge the Liberals of members who supported Chrétien. The scandal played a factor in the federal election of 2006 and the fall of the Liberal Government. Shortly thereafter, Martin resigned from the liberal party leadership.
Joe Morselli — Liberal Party fundraiser. Jean Brault testified that the money exchanges were with Morselli.
Jean Lafleur — former CEO of Lafleur Communication Marketing Inc. One of the advertising executives that accepted money from the federal government. Pleaded guilty to 28 counts of fraud.
Allan Cutler — former civil servant and whistleblower who reported anomalies in a Canadian sponsorship program, triggering the Scandal.
[edit] Timeline[edit] 1995Allan Cutler first attempts to raise concerns about bid-rigging and political interference to the attention of senior management at the Department of Public Works and Government Services Canada.
[edit] 1996Ernst & Young conducts an audit of contracting and tendering practices. The initial draft, which identified recurring problems and the risk of legal action, was altered in the final report. Ernst & Young representative Deanne Monaghan later indicated that she did not recall why the report had been changed to remove those references.[1]
[edit] 2000February — An internal audit reveals that none of the recommendations of the 1996 Ernst & Young audit have been implemented.
September — Minister Alfonso Gagliano receives the 2000 audit and suspends the Sponsorship Program. Later that year, the Office of the Auditor General of Canada begins investigating the program.
[edit] 2004February 10 — Auditor General Sheila Fraser's report reveals up to $100 million of the $250 million sponsorship program was awarded to Liberal-friendly advertising firms and Crown corporations for little or no work.
February 11 — Prime Minister Paul Martin orders a Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and Advertising Activities. The Commission of Inquiry will be headed by Justice John H. Gomery. Martin fires Alfonso Gagliano from his post in Denmark. Martin asserts that he had no knowledge of the scandal prior to the Auditor General's report.
February 13 — The National Post newspaper publishes a 2002 letter leaked to it by an unidentified third party, between the Liberal Party's then National Policy Chairman and Paul Martin, urging Martin to stop partisan financial abuses in the Sponsorship Program, thereby casting doubt on Martin's defence of personal ignorance.[2]
February 24 — Martin suspends Business Development Bank of Canada president Michel Vennat, VIA Rail president Marc LeFrançois and Canada Post president André Ouellet giving each an ultimatum to defend themselves or face further disciplinary action.
February 27 — Past Olympic gold medallist Myriam Bédard reveals she was pushed from her job at VIA Rail for questioning billing practices. VIA Rail chairman Jean Pelletier publicly belittles Bédard and calls her pitiful.
March 1 — Pelletier is fired.
March 3 — Jean Carle, a close confidant of Chrétien and his former director of operations, surfaces in close connection to the sponsorship initiative.
March 5 — LeFrançois is fired.
March 11 — Allan Cutler, former public works accountant, testifies before the Commission of Inquiry. He places responsibility for the program and its irregularities with Chuck Guité.[3]
March 12 — Vennat is fired.
March 13 — An unidentified whistle-blower reveals that high-ranking government officials, including Jean Pelletier, Alfonso Gagliano, Don Boudria, Denis Coderre, and Marc LeFrançois, had frequent confidential conversations with Pierre Tremblay, head of the Communications Coordination Services Branch of Public Works from 1999 until 2001. The claim is the first direct link between the scandal and the Prime Minister's Office. Coderre and LeFrançois denied the allegation.[4]
March 18 — Gagliano testifies in front of the Public Accounts Committee, a committee of the House of Commons chaired by a member from the Official Opposition. Gagliano denies any involvement by himself or any other politician; he points blame at bureaucrat Chuck Guité.
March 24 — Myriam Bédard testifies at the Public Accounts Committee. In addition to repeating her earlier assertions, she also claims that Formula One driver Jacques Villeneuve was given a secret $12 million payoff to wear a Canadian flag logo on his racing suit (however, Villeneuve sharply denies this allegation, calling it "ludicrous"). Bédard also testifies that she once heard that Groupaction was involved in drug trafficking.
April 2 — Previously confidential testimony from a 2002 inquiry into suspicious Groupaction contracts is made public. In it, Guité admits to having bent the rules in his handling of the advertising contracts but defends his actions as excusable given the circumstances, saying, "We were basically at war trying to save the country... When you're at war, you drop the book and the rules and you don't give your plan to the opposition."[5]
April 22 — Guité testifies. He claims Auditor-General Fraser is misguided in delivering the report, as it distorts what actually went on; he claims the office of then-Finance Minister Paul Martin lobbied for input in the choice of firms given contracts; and he denies that any political interference occurred, because his bureaucratic office made all final decisions. Opposition MPs decry his comments as "nonsense" and claim he is covering up for the government.[6] The French language press gives a very different account of Guité's testimony; a La Presse headline states that Guité is involving the Cabinet office of Paul Martin.[7]
May 6 — An official announces the inquiry deadline is set for December 2005.
May 10 — Jean Brault, president of Groupaction, and Charles Guité arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for fraud in connection with the sponsorship scandal.
May 23 — Paul Martin requests that the Governor General dissolve Parliament and call a federal election.
May 28 — Alfonso Gagliano launches a lawsuit for $4.5 million against Prime Minister Paul Martin and the federal government for defamation and wrongful dismissal claiming that he has been unfairly made to pay for the sponsorship scandal.
June 28 — The Liberals win 135 of 308 seats in the 2004 election, forming the first minority government in almost 25 years.
September — First public hearings of the Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and Advertising Activities begin in Ottawa. They will move to Montreal in February 2005 and conclude in the Spring.
December — In a year-end media interview, Justice John Gomery refers to Chrétien's distribution of autographed golf balls as "small-town cheap", which later prompts an indignant response from the former prime minister.
[edit] 2005March 29 — A publication ban is imposed by the Gomery commission on Jean Brault's testimony.
April 2 — The United States blogger Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters[8] discloses information about Brault's testimony, countervening the Canadian publication ban. Until the revocation of the ban five days later, the publication itself was a news event in Canada, with Canadian news media struggling to report on the disclosure without putting themselves at risk of legal action.[9]
April 7 — The publication ban on Jean Brault's testimony is lifted by the Gomery commission. Brault's testimony triggers a rapid shift in the public opinion of the Liberal Party. Whether or not the government is defeated in the imminent confidence vote, most political pundits are predicting an election call this year—many predicting by this summer.
April 20 — The official opposition party, the Conservatives, puts forward a non-confidence motion in the government. Due to procedural rules, this vote which was to be held May 3 was postponed. If a non-confidence motion passes, the government will be dissolved and a new election will be held.
April 21 — A national televised appearance by Prime Minister Paul Martin discusses the scandal. This was highly unusual in Canadian politics. The Prime Minister announced that a general election will be called within 30 days of Justice Gomery's final report. Martin emphasised that he was trying to clean up the scandal and had not been involved. In the following rebuttal speeches, Jack Layton of the New Democratic Party offered to keep the parliament alive, provided the Liberal Party makes some major concessions in the budget in their favor. However, the other Opposition parties were still ready to bring down the government and force an election before the summer.
May 10 — The Conservatives and Bloc Québécois win a vote, by 153-150, in the House of Commons on what they argue is equivalent to a no confidence motion; three MPs are absent due to health reasons. The motion ordered a committee of the House of Commons to declare that the government should resign rather than being a direct motion on the House's confidence in the government. The opposition parties and several constitutional experts claim that the motion is binding and that the government must resign or immediately seek the confidence of the House; the government and several opposing constitutional experts suggest that this motion was merely procedural and therefore cannot be considered a matter of confidence. Ultimately, only the Governor General has the power to force an election, it is not clear what actions tradition would require her to take in such a case.[10]
May 11 — The government tells the House that it will consider a vote to be held on May 19 on the budget, including the concessions which the Liberal party ceded to the NDP in turn for their support on it, to be a matter of confidence. The government refuses to directly seek the confidence of the House and blocks the Opposition from putting any vote to the House; in consequence the Opposition continues a policy of non-cooperation and disruption of the other business of the House.
May 17 — Conservative MP Belinda Stronach crosses the floor to the Liberals and is simultaneously given the Cabinet position of Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development as well as made Minister responsible for Democratic Renewal. Prime Minister Paul Martin states that Stronach will be responsible for implementing the recommendations of the Gomery commission, a statement that Opposition critics claim casts doubt on the sincerity of the Prime Minister's promise for an election within 30 days of the tabling of Justice Gomery's report. For some time afterwards, media attention is focused away from Gomery testimony onto Stronach's move and its implications on the budget vote.
May 19 — The government passes the first of two budget bills easily after the Conservatives promise support, but the second bill with the NDP concessions ends as a cliffhanger. Speaker Peter Milliken breaks a 152-152 tie in favour of the bill, keeping the government alive.
November 1 — Gomery's preliminary report into the scandal is released. The report criticizes Chrétien and his office for setting up the sponsorship program in a way as to invite abuse, and Gagliano as the Minister of Public Works for his behaviour. Prime Minister Paul Martin is formally cleared of any responsibility or wrongdoing in the matter as Gomery found his role as Finance Minister was to set up a 'fiscal framework' at the instruction of then Prime Minister Chrétien, but did not have oversight on the spending of the funds after they were passed to Chrétien's Prime Minister's Office.
Conservative leader Stephen Harper and Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe announce their intention to try to force a pre-Christmas election; however, New Democrat leader Jack Layton says that he will try to have the Liberals implement some New Democrat policies, particularly with regard to a ban on private healthcare as the price for his support in keeping the government up.
November 28 — The Liberals refuse to agree to the New Democrats' terms and the latter withdraws their support. The Liberals also turn down a motion sponsored by the three opposition parties which would have scheduled a February election in return for passing several key pieces of legislation. As a result, the Liberal government loses a confidence vote in the House by 171 to 133, resulting in the fall of the minority government and triggering a mid-January election after a long holiday election campaign that is expected to be dirty and hard-fought.
[edit] 2006
Gomery Commission hearings in MontrealJanuary 23 — After twelve consecutive years in power, the ruling Liberals are defeated in the general election. The Conservatives have enough seats to form a minority government. Paul Martin immediately announces that he will not contest the next federal election as party leader, and Bill Graham is appointed interim parliamentary leader.
February 1 — Justice John Gomery delivered his final report consisting mostly of recommendations for changes to the civil service and its relation to government.
February 6 — The new Conservative government, led by Stephen Harper, are officially sworn in as the new government in Canada. Stephen Harper becomes Canada's 22nd Prime Minister.
March 18 — Paul Martin resigns the leadership of the Liberal party, handing the post to Bill Graham for the interim.
May 5 — after pleading guilty to five counts of fraud, Jean Brault was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
May 11 — the Conservative government is reportedly preparing to file a lawsuit against the Liberal party.[11]
June 6 — Chuck Guité was convicted on five counts of defrauding the Government of Canada; on June 19, he was sentenced to 42 months in prison.
[edit] 2007April 27 — Jean Lafleur, after returning from two years in Belize, pleaded guilty to 28 counts of fraud. He was sentenced to 42 months in prison, and was ordered to repay $1.6 million to the federal government.
[edit] Political consequencesWithin the Liberal Party during 2004-05, revelations of scandal and the subsequent Gomery Commission highlighted the rift between the "Chrétien camp" and "Martin camp". These two groups had been fighting perhaps even prior to Chrétien's election as party leader in 1990; the Chrétienites were descended from long-serving Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau while the Martinites were linked to the right-leaning (and briefly Prime Minister) John Turner.[citation needed]
The Liberals, for the most part, have weathered the damage from the scandal[according to whom?] by pointing out the conclusions of reports of the Auditor General and the Gomery Commission: misdeeds were committed by a small, isolated, and corrupt subculture within the previous Liberal government and in particular the PMO of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien.[citation needed]
Similarly, supporters of then Prime Minister Paul Martin argued that the "culture of corruption" was a byproduct of Chrétien's leadership and that any malicious elements had been purged, both from the government and the party, since the discoveries of wrongdoing. When he assumed the leadership of the party and then the country, Martin made an active effort to dissociate the Liberals and himself from Chrétien's supporters, arguing these individuals were implicated in the scandal, thus hoping to illustrate that the Liberal Party bore little or no connection or resemblance to party elements involved in the sponsorship program.[citation needed]
Martin supporters contend that many Chrétien loyalists left with or shortly after Chrétien left in 2004, before the scandal was revealed. They point to the departure of John Manley and other Chrétien cabinet ministers from the party, many of whom did not stand for candidacy in the 2004 federal election. Martin's supporters assert those expunged from the party were ejected for their impropriety and not for their leadership affiliations.[citation needed]
Chrétien supporters alleged that Martin used the scandal as an excuse to remove Chrétien supporters from their positions in government and the party. Often cited examples include Martin's major cabinet change after taking power and Martin's refusal to sign nomination papers of MPs who were known to support Chrétien, with many of these controversial moves occurring before the sponsorship scandal broke out.[citation needed]
The Chrétien camp also contended that the Gomery Commission was established to make them look bad, and that it was an unfair investigation. Martin's supporters responded to such allegations by pointing out that the commission was set up to search for facts under independent judicial oversight. They also argued that Justice Gomery's commission operated without undue influence from Martin or anyone outside of the investigation, having all due and necessary authority to investigate and draw conclusions on the matter.[citation needed] Chrétien's supporters were outraged[according to whom?] that they shouldered all of the blame for the scandal, even though the commission was directed not to make any conclusions or recommendations on criminal charges or civil liability.[citation needed]
Detractors of Martin's innocence point out that he had a particularly powerful role in government, not only because of being Finance Minister, but also because he had significant support within the party due to his strong showing in the 1990 leadership contest. This forced Chrétien to make concessions to Martin, allowing the latter to wield considerable influence. Another cited example was a speech that Martin made in 1995, stating that separatism would be bad for Quebec's economy, which damaged support for federalism in the province and relegated Martin to a backroom role in fighting the referendum.[citation needed]
Many[who?] inside and outside of the Liberal Party contended that, going into the 2006 election, Martin-vs.-Chrétien issues are effectively behind the Liberals. There were few publicized nomination battles, although some Chrétien strategists complained that they have been left out.[citation needed] Formally, the two leaders have remained publicly respectful of each other.[citation needed]
Critics of the Liberal Party and even former Liberals, like Sheila Copps, argued that the sponsorship scandal has highlighted a "culture of corruption" within the Canadian government.[citation needed] Some Conservative critics alleged that the problems within the Liberal Party are so systematic it could only be effectively reversed (or cured) by a change of government and argue that the Liberals, who had been in power for over a decade, were too arrogant and complacent to be trusted with instituting necessary reforms.[citation needed] The sponsorship crisis thus became a key election issue, and remained a rallying-point for conservative opponents of the Liberals in the 2006 federal election.
Quebec sovereigntists—led by the Bloc Québécois in the federal parliament and the provincial Parti Québécois—have cited the scandal as "proof" of institutional corruption and dysfunctionality of the federal government. Critics have argued that the entire sponsorship scandal, originally intended to encourage pro-Canada sentiment in Quebec, has done exactly the opposite and instead, emboldened separatist forces in Quebec: polls before the election indicated increased support for sovereignty, rising to approximately 53% (around 19 December 2005).[citation needed] Ultimately support for separatism declined and the Bloc Québécois lost both popular vote and seats in the Parliament of Canada in the 2006 Federal Election.[citation needed]
The New Democratic Party (NDP) caucus of Jack Layton has also been criticized for alleging major corruption in the Liberal Party of Canada, while simultaneously working with the Martin government to achieve NDP policy objectives.[citation needed]
Unlike the 2004 Election, the Conservatives did not spend the initial part of the campaign attacking the Liberals for Adscam. The sponsorship scandal was brought back to national attention after an NDP member tipped off the RCMP to launch a criminal investigation into the Finance Department, regarding allegations of insider trading from the leaking of the news on the taxable status of income trusts.[citation needed]
The Conservative minority government of Stephen Harper introduced the Federal Accountability Act which included new lobbying rules and electoral law reform; it was granted royal assent on December 12, 2006. Still unfulfilled are promises for a Public Appointments Commission and registrar for lobbyists which is an independent officer of Parliament [1].
Communication Canada was created after the results of the 1995 Quebec referendum to increase intergovernmental communications. The agency was connected to the scandal and labelled as a propaganda machine and eventually disbanded in 2004.[citation needed]
[edit] See alsoCanadian political scandals
Politics of Canada
Gomery Commission
[edit] References^ CBC.ca News Indepth: Federal Sponsorship Scandal
^ National Post article
^ CBC.ca News Indepth: Federal Sponsorship Scandal Timeline
^ Toronto Star article
^ Globe and Mail insider edition article
^ Toronto Star article
^ Cyberpresse article
^ Captain's Quarters posting
^ Edmonton Sun article
^ CBC article: Liberals will not quit despite losing vote
^ Government may sue Liberals for sponsorship funds: report
[edit] Further readingGomery, John (2005). Who is Responsible? Phase 1 Report. Ottawa, ON: Public Works and Government Services Canada. ISBN 0-660-19532-1. http://www.gomery.ca/en/phase1report/index.asp.
[edit] External linksWho Is Responsible: Phase 1 Report
CBC.ca Indepth: Federal sponsorship scandal
2003 Reports of the Auditor General of Canada
Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and Advertising Activities
Testimony from Jean Brault on the activities of the Government in the Sponsorship Program
Official transcripts of the hearings available on the website of the Gomery Commission
Liberals brace for release of Gomery report on sponsorship scandal
Whistleblowers Canada: Information regarding the inadequacy of legislation introduced in response to the scandal
Scandal nomenclature contest
Maple Leaf Web: Ethics & Government in Canada
Maple Leaf Web: Auditor General Report on Sponsorship Scandal
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponsorship_scandal"
Categories: Jean Chrétien | Paul Martin | Political scandals in Canada | Corruption in Canada
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