For some reason it is being treated as news that the Prime Minister said he would work with a Parti Quebecois government in the unfortunate circumstance of a PQ victory.
What else was he supposed to say? The PQ has held power several times since Rene Levesque’s first victory in 1976. It’s a democratic country, and provinces can elect whoever they want. Ottawa doesn’t have a choice whether it wants to work with the victor or not. Harper worked with Danny Williams — well, he tried, anyway — when the Newfoundland caudillo declared himself the supreme power of El Rocko Independanto and waged a personal war against his Canadian oppressors. Pauline Marois, the PQ leader (at least until the next revolt) can’t be half as annoying as Danny was.
Kelly McParland, “Why is it news that Stephen Harper would recognize a PQ government?”, National Post, 2012-06-25
June 25, 2012
QotD: Working with the PQ
No innovation can survive the bureaucratic process
A story that won’t surprise anyone who has ever worked in a large bureaucracy is still eye opening — even Scott Adams’ Dilbert characters have it easier to get their suggestions implemented:
It was the summer of 2010, and the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) was about to launch the Employee Innovation Program — kind of like the employee suggestion drop box by the water cooler.
Except, nothing like it at all, as TBS employee Anna Bevilacqua was about to discover.
[. . .]
The employees who answered the call for creativity had to follow several rules, including: An employee could not make a suggestion without his or her boss’ approval; and proposals that might lead to a change in TBS policy would be rejected.
Managers tracked the proposals using a spreadsheet that noted the date and exact time a proposal was received, whether an individual or team of workers made the submission and the date it was received by a committee of three TBS managers.
The program designed to cut waste was taking shape. A bloated, forbidding shape.
[. . .]
Four managers formed a “Sub-Committee for Initial Triage” to conduct a “pre-screening” of the proposals. The selection process would be guided by a flow chart with text inside parallelograms and rectangles connected by arrows.
[. . .]
Bevilacqua needed to complete an “implementation framework” document. If she failed to “clearly define objectives, benefits, deliverables, exclusions, assumptions, responsibilities, estimated costs and timelines,” if her plan did not identify possible “slippage in target dates,” if it did not use a “risk log” or a “risk mapping approach,” it could die in Phase Two.
She and the other applicants were warned: “A wrong plan is worse than having no plan at all.”
[. . .]
The vetting and revising and perfecting continued. Each surviving proposal was screened by the Treasury Board’s chief information officer, deputy chief financial officer and chief financial officer.
[. . .]
The months of meetings, memos and emails confirmed her idea was a no-brainer. Her plan would be put into action.
A congratulatory note was vetted by three people before it was sent to her.
Then, the extensive trail of TBS paper — nearly 550 pages obtained by the Star through Access to Information legislation — ends in late 2010.
The employee who suggested this had already retired before the suggestion was implemented — and it was implemented outside the suggestion program anyway. The final line of the article sums it up perfectly: “Not one employee has received a cash award.”
H/T to Andrew Coyne:
https://twitter.com/acoyne/statuses/217238022482169857
The rot began at the top: Britain’s rotten state
David Conway reviews The Rotten State of Britain by Eamonn Butler:
In fourteen pithy, well-documented chapters, Butler guides the reader through the maze of political, economic and social changes to which New Labour subjected Britain during their period in office. After noting that ‘the rot starts from the top’, Butler summarize the main political changes the country was made to undergo so:
‘From Magna Carta in 1215, our rights and liberties have been built up over the centuries. Trial by jury, habeas corpus, the presumption of innocence — all these and more grew up to restrain our leaders and prevent them from harassing us. Yet within a decade almost all these protections have been diluted or discarded. Our leaders are no longer restrained by the rule of law at all [22]…The Prime Minister and colleagues in Downing Street decide what is good for us and then it’s nodded through Parliament. It’s hardly democracy: it’s a centralist autocracy.’ [31]
One by one, Butler explains how each of the country’s traditional constitutional restraints on uncurbed executive power was deliberately weakened, if not altogether discarded, by New Labor in pursuit of their master political project which was, having come to equate the national good with that of their own party, to perpetuate their hegemony indefinitely. Their first step was to effect a massive centralization of power in the hands of the Prime Minister and a small clique of unelected advisors that led to a systematic downgrading of Parliament, the Cabinet and civil service.
To observers of the Canadian system, this critique sounds hauntingly familiar: change “Downing Street” to “Sussex Drive” and it’s equally valid here. Some of the centralization was already well underway before 2001, but it was accelerated by terrorist attacks and governments’ response to them:
9/11 also served New Labor, Butler argues, as a pretext for making a power-grab in the name of security that turned Britain into ‘a surveillance state’ where ‘freedom exists only in name’. [106] He chillingly observes:
‘Of course, the terrorism threat is real… But in response, we seem to have given our government powers to track us anywhere, stop and search us in the street, arrest us for any imagined offense, imprison us for peaceful protest, hold us without charge for 28 days, extradite us to the United State without evidence, ban us for being members of non-violent organizations that they don’t happen to like, export us to other EU countries to stand trial for things that aren’t a crime here, take and file our DNA samples before we’ve been convicted, charged or even cautioned for any offense — and much more as well. In the name of defending our liberties against terrorism, we seem to have lost them.’ [92-93]
Euro 2012: “I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.”
I watched yesterday’s game with a deep sense of foreboding … that it just might come down to penalties. Again. Richard Littlejohn obviously felt the same way:
We might have guessed it was always going to come down to penalties. We’ve been here before.
There was a grim inevitability about England’s elimination from Euro 2012 on penalties. And Italy deserved their victory. But that’s not to pretend it still doesn’t hurt.
Every two years, I kid myself I don’t care. Why invest emotional energy in a bunch of footballers? It’s only a game.
When England kicked off against France 10 days ago, I feigned indifference. So what if England lose? Life goes on. World Cups, European Championships, it’s bound to end in tears.
But England didn’t lose. They drew with France, beat Sweden and Ukraine, finished top of their group and qualified for the quarter finals. Suddenly, it mattered. Three more wins and four and a half decades of bitter disappointment and under-achievement would be consigned to history. Football’s coming home.
Against my better judgment and years of experience I discovered I did care after all. As England progressed and last night’s game against Italy approached, the pulse began to quicken, the optimism returned. This time we really could be in with a chance.
To be honest, it was better when England stuck to the script and crashed out of tournaments prematurely, consumed by hubris and an inflated sense of their own abilities. We’re used to being let down. We can handle it. As John Cleese said in the movie Clockwise: ‘I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.’
H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.
If NAFTA was real free trade “it wouldn’t contain 22 chapters of rules and regulations”
Free trade is the way to go, if you want to benefit the consumer. Producers don’t benefit as much: it increases their competition and means that bad producers are more likely to go out of business. Protectionists always rely on the visible “damage” that free trade does to these bad producers and minimize or completely ignore the (larger) benefits to consumers.
Jesse Kline explains why moving toward freer trade will benefit most Canadians, and the drawbacks will be to those who are least able or least willing to face real competition:
Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced this week that Canada will join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks, along with he United States, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, Mexico and, we hope, Japan. Some say this will be a historic free trade deal that will extend the NAFTA zone into emerging Asian markets; others believe the United States is using the process to impose its own draconian copyright regime on its trading partners, while protecting key industries, such as auto manufacturers. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
The problem is that the agreement is being negotiated under a veil of heavy secrecy. And if rumours that the negotiated sections of the agreement already contain over 1,000 pages prove to be correct, it is certain that the TPP will not give us anything resembling real free trade. Indeed, the Canadian public has little idea about what we are getting ourselves into, or how much the government knew about what it was agreeing to. Based on a leaked chapter of the agreement, it looks as though we just signed up for an entirely new copyright regime, a mere hours after the government passed its own made-in-Canada solution.
To the government’s credit, it is simultaneously pursuing trade deals with the European Union and China. But in these times of global economic uncertainty, we need to see the benefits of trade sooner, rather than later. Free trade leads to higher standards of living, and benefits society through lower prices and increased variety of consumer goods; it forces domestic industries to be more efficient. Fortunately, there is another way to achieve these benefits: The Canadian government could open our borders to the world by unilaterally removing all our trade barriers.
