Quotulatiousness

July 17, 2023

Canada has been one of the biggest freeloaders in NATO for more than 40 years

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

From the weekend Dispatch from the editors of The Line, some indication that even the American legacy media are tired of Canada’s generations-long peace dividend freeloading at the expense of our allies:

American media doesn’t often notice Canada, and as much as Canadians like to whinge about being ignored, the lack of interest in our affairs from south of the border is usually a good thing. If you’re looking for a rule of thumb here, it’s this: attention from the Americans is almost always negative.

A case in point this week was an editorial published by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, headlined “Canada is a military free-rider in NATO”. The subhed was “Ottawa still spends only a pathetic 1.38% of GDP on defense”. The editorial makes a number of points almost all of which will be familiar to readers of the Line, which are all variations of: Canada shirks its NATO commitment to spend two per cent of GDP on defence, while engaging in relentless virtue signalling and moral preening, both domestically and to its allies. It treats national defence as social project, while doing little to nothing in the way of actually projecting the power that is needed to defend the values it purports to advance.

There are some absolutely killer lines in the editorial, beginning with the lede: “Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in Lithuania this week for the annual NATO summit, but it’s too bad there wasn’t a junior table where he could sit.” A few paragraphs later: “Last week Ottawa put in its two cents against cluster munitions. But asking its citizens to meet their actual obligations to the cause of freedom is apparently too much to ask.” And then: “Nowadays Ottawa can be counted on to ‘fight’ for human rights, which is to say that it talks a lot about them.”

Again, for anyone paying attention here in Canada, these are not new arguments. But the editorial does add one twist at the end, suggesting that if Canada can’t be bothered keeping its NATO commitments, then perhaps it should be kicked out of the G7 and replaced by a country willing to play a leadership role. They suggest Poland as a possibility.

Reaction in Canada has been surprisingly muted. On our own social media feeds, we noted a lot of rather sad attempts at dismissing the editorial — the paper is a Rupert Murdoch owned rag; this is Trumpist nonsense; Europeans juice their defence spending through useless mandatory service requirements. But curiously, we didn’t see anyone try to pull a Julie Dzerowicz and argue that, despite all evidence to the contrary, Canada is actually punching above its weight in NATO.

Look, some of us here at The Line have been reading harsh editorials on Canada’s defence spending for decades. (We’ve written a few, too!) And we’ve never seen anything remotely this harsh from an American outlet. This is absolutely devastating stuff, and it can’t be simply shrugged off because of the source.

A bit of history: In 1995, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial calling Canada “an honorary member of the Third World” in an editorial that also referred to the Canadian dollar as the “northern peso”. This was in response to Canada’s national debt and tax rates hitting unsustainable levels. We were an economic basket case, and the Americans were starting to notice.

Lots of Canadian commentators dismissed the editorial on the grounds that the WSJ was just pushing the supposedly-discredited Reagan/Thatcher/Mulroney “neoliberal” agenda. But later that year the Chrétien government, with Paul Martin as finance minister, introduced one of the most significant budgets in Canadian history. They slashed federal spending in ways not seen since the end of the Second World War, slashed the public service, gutted the department of defence. But three years later they had balanced the budget, inaugurating an extended period of federal fiscal responsibility that lasted until the election of the Trudeau Liberals in 2015.

The point is not that there’s a cause and effect here — Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin didn’t sit down and go “oh shit, the Journal has weighed in, we have to do something”. It’s that when serious American media get around to noticing stuff about Canada, it is usually because the stuff they are noticing has become such a problem for other countries that our national Emperor’s New Clothes routine is no longer tenable. It is a sign that things have to change, and quickly.

Remember, the Liberal government doesn’t deny that Canada is a NATO laggard and a free rider on defence. Justin Trudeau has admitted as much, both publicly and privately. But up till now, his attitude has been to sort of smirk at the Americans, give his usually smarmy shrug, and say “what are you going to do about it?”

What the Wall Street Journal editorial does is suggest that there could be real consequences for our professed indigence. It is one thing to be left out of AUKUS, which the Liberals continue to falsely characterize as a submarine procurement deal. Getting kicked out of the G7 would something else entirely — it’s the sort of thing the sorts of people who vote Liberal tend to care about.

Canada’s current attitude to collective defence is not sustainable. Our allies have noticed. Either we change, or our allies will change things for us.

September 21, 2021

QotD: Canadian international virtue signalling is not a new thing

Filed under: Asia, Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[I]n January, after the tsunami hit, [Canadian prime minister Paul Martin] flew into Sri Lanka to pledge millions and millions and millions in aid. Not like that heartless George W. Bush back at the ranch in Texas. Why, Prime Minister Martin walked along the ravaged coast of Kalumnai and was, reported Canada’s CTV network, “visibly shaken.” President Bush might well have been shaken, but he wasn’t visible, and in the international compassion league, that’s what counts. So Martin boldly committed Canada to giving $425 million to tsunami relief. “Mr. Paul Martin Has Set A Great Example For The Rest Of The World Leaders!” raved the LankaWeb news service.

You know how much of that $425 million has been spent so far? Fifty thousand dollars — Canadian. That’s about 40 grand in U.S. dollars. The rest isn’t tied up in [Sri Lankan] bureaucracy, it’s back in Ottawa. But, unlike horrible “unilateralist” America, Canada enjoys a reputation as the perfect global citizen, renowned for its commitment to the U.N. and multilateralism. And on the beaches of Sri Lanka, that and a buck’ll get you a strawberry daiquiri. Canada’s contribution to tsunami relief is objectively useless and rhetorically fraudulent.

Mark Steyn, “Bolton’s sin is telling truth about system”, Chicago Sun-Times, 2005-05-15.

July 1, 2017

QotD: Lying about our age on Canada Day

Filed under: Cancon, History, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“We are a young nation,” declared Prime Minister Paul Martin. “Look into the face of Canada, and you will see the world.”

Well, maybe. But, more likely, if you looked into the face of Canada, you’d wonder why the old gal keeps lying about how old she is. “We are a young nation.” How old were you when you first heard a Liberal apparatchik drone about what a “young” nation we are? Maybe you were young yourself, and now, as the healthy glow of late middle-age fades from your cheeks, you’re wondering why you’re so old but your country is younger than ever. It’s like The Passport Photo of Dorian Gray.

For me, no sooner did Paul start burbling about what a young nation we are than the years fell away, like calendar leaves signalling flashback-time in an old movie — the sort Hollywood used to make before it discovered there was a young nation up north where you could make them a lot cheaper. Anyway, the years fell away, and suddenly I was a wee slip of a thing again and it was 1497 and on the windswept prow nice Mister Cabot was saying to me, “Aargh, Mark lad, is me eyes deceiving me or is that a big rock up ahead?”

No, hang on, that can’t be right. We’re a young nation. My mistake, it was 1997 and I was at the “Canada Day” festivities at the Old Port in Montreal. We’re a young nation with an old port, don’t ask me how that happens. And Lucienne Robillard, then our citizenship minister, was addressing a couple of dozen brand new Canadians: “Fifty years ago we were British subjects,” she said. “We forget how young a country we really are.” Mme Robillard forgets more than she realizes: it was only 20 years — 1977 — since the term “British subjects” was discreetly removed from Canadian passports. But what’s a decade or two when you’re shaving half a millennium off your age?

Isn’t there something deeply weird about an entire nation that lies about its age? Canada is, pace Mr Martin, one of the oldest countries in the world — the result of centuries of continuous constitution evolution. Even if one takes the somewhat reductive position that Canada as a sovereign entity dates only from the 1867 British North America Act or the 1931 Statute of Westminster, that would still make us one of the oldest nations in the world. We are, for example, one of the founding members of the United Nations, ahead of three-quarters of the present membership.

As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.” A nation’s collective memory is the unseen seven-eighths of the iceberg. When you sever that, what’s left just bobs around on the surface, unmoored in every sense. Orwell understood that an assault on history is an assault on memory, and thus a totalitarian act. What, after all, does it really mean when Mme Robillard and Mr Martin twitter about how “young” we are? Obviously, it’s a way of denigrating the past. Revolutionary regimes routinely act this way: thus, in Libya, the national holiday of Revolution Day explicitly draws a line between the discredited and illegitimate regimes predating December 1st, 1969, and the Gadaffi utopia that’s prevailed since. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge literally reset the clock, to “Year Zero.”

Mark Steyn, “Happy Dominion Day!”, The Western Standard, 2005-07-01 (reposted at SteynOnline, 2015-07-01).

May 29, 2014

Harper’s “starve the beast” policy continues

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:22

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells updates us on the multi-year diet Stephen Harper has been running on the government’s “revenue generating” tools:

If I were the Conservative Party, I’d be using the latest report [PDF] from the office of Parliamentary Budget Officer Jean-Denis Fréchette to fundraise too. By the standards that motivate Conservative donors, this report is highly motivating.

The report, by PBO analyst Trevor Shaw, examines the reduction in federal revenues resulting from all the major changes to personal income tax and the GST since 2005. It’s an odd choice of starting point — 2005 was the second of Paul Martin’s two calendar years as prime minister — but only a small part of the reduction Shaw measures is attributable to that second Martin budget. Most has happened since.

And the net effect is striking:

    “In total, cumulative changes have reduced federal tax revenue by $30 billion, or 12 per cent. These changes have been progressive, overall. Low and middle income earners have benefited more, in relative terms, than higher income earners.”

Shaw attributes $17.1 billion of the reduction to changes to personal income tax level and structure, and $13.3 billion to changes in GST/HST rates. He doesn’t count revenue reductions from changes to corporate income tax. We’ll get back to that. But on the personal income-tax and GST side, the final number is probably actually a little bigger than $30 billion: Shaw writes that he couldn’t get enough data to make his own estimate of revenue reductions due to Tax Free Savings Accounts, but passes along a Finance Canada estimate that it’s good for $410 million in revenue reductions. So, figure $30 billion and change in the current tax year that Ottawa would have raised if it hadn’t been for the past decade’s worth of tax changes.

NDP leader Thomas Mulcair is apparently hoping to make up the “shortfall” (from the point of view where any reduction in government spending is bad) by jacking up corporate taxes. This may not work as well as he hopes:

First, Mulcair is fooling himself if he thinks corporate taxes can be increased to make up for the shortfall in personal-tax income Harper has engineered. As the PBO points out, “Personal income tax and the federal portion of the GST/HST account for 75 per cent of federal tax revenues.” There’s way less room to make money off rich fat cats than Mulcair pretends. I mean, he’s welcome to keep pretending, but if he keeps his word an NDP government will remain short of cash. And a Liberal government, more so.

Second, this is why Stephen Harper is in politics. I wrote a book about that. He may one day stop being prime minister, at which point the real fun begins, because his opponents are promising to run a Pierre Trudeau government or a Jack Layton government at John Diefenbaker prices. It can’t be done. Their inability to do it will be Harper’s legacy.

February 22, 2014

Federal Liberals to switch emphasis to the economy

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:37

David Akin recounts the last few federal campaigns the Liberal Party ran and the dismal results they achieved:

When the Conservative war room in the 2011 general election first saw video of then-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff hoarsely exhorting Canadians to “rise up!”, they could hardly believe their good fortune.

As Maclean’s political editor Paul Wells reports in his latest book, The Longer I’m Prime Minister, Conservative operatives at first thought it was a hoax. But, no, there was Ignatieff running around the country, literally calling for a revolutionary overthrow in the midst of the worst recession since the Depression.

“You’ve got Stephen Harper on the one hand saying times are dangerous and we need a stable government and then you got a guy yelling at people to rise up?” a Conservative told Wells.

Canadians, of course, did not rise to Ignatieff’s call to arms, and instead dumped Liberals in record proportions. New Democrats and Conservatives had stuck doggedly to themes that revolved around pocketbook issues and reaped the electoral rewards.

The Liberals ignored pocketbook issues, too, in 2008 focusing instead on Stephane Dion’s “Green Shift”. Dion’s plan could quite easily have been sold as a job creation plan with a huge tax cut but instead was sold as the solution for a problem — climate change — Canadians were not nearly worried about as much their own household economic security.

And in 2006, Paul Martin had a rock-solid economic record that should have helped him glide right by the sponsorship scandal and back to power. Incredibly, he tried to seal the deal in the last weeks of the campaign with a surprise pledge to eliminate the “notwithstanding clause.” Riiiight! Canadians love to vote for parties promising constitutional amendments!

This time, the party appears to have decided to fight the 2015 election campaign on economic grounds, and Justin Trudeau’s video appearance is intended to be the beginning of that new tack. As Akin points out, the Tories and NDP have been occupying that part of the agenda for the last few years, so the Liberals have to find a way to draw the public attention to them and away from the other parties. That may be a key advantage for them in media terms, as Trudeau is far more mediagenic than Harper or Mulcair, so they have a fighting chance to catch attention but still need to work on what to do when they get it. The next election is starting to look more interesting all the time.

Update: Stephen Gordon is attending the Liberal convention and while he applauds them for allowing non-party members to sit in on their economic discussions, he’s not blown away by the quality of the economic arguments and suggestions:

I don’t want to be overly harsh (really!), because the proposals were the result of a lot of work and thought on the part of the people bringing them forward. Engagement on that level is something we need more of. The problem is that they came from people whose views on economics have been largely conditioned by the dirigiste approach that Liberal governments have adopted in the past. I counted no fewer than nine calls for a ‘National Strategy’, a few ‘National Policies’ and countless other ways of spending enormous amounts of money, often for no better reason than ‘it’d be really neat if we had this.’ For example, the “Building a More Competitive Economy” session was chock-a-block with proposals for infrastructure spending, and bereft of anything that would have actually created more competition in the Canadian economy.

The fault lies within the policy process itself. None of the proposals were accompanied with estimates of their costs, and I’m informed that party members are warned against discussing costs when they put their proposals together. (I can only infer that the party would rather avoid controversial stories on proposals that had not been endorsed by the leadership.) This is unfortunate, because cost-benefit analysis is at the heart of economic policy analysis. Virtually all of the policy initiatives proposed here bring some benefits, but the really hard and interesting question is whether or not these benefits outweigh their costs. The problem is that answering this question is the prerogative of the leadership, and not the delegates.

January 21, 2014

Jean Chrétien’s long service award

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

The former PM is being honoured (in Toronto, of all places) for 50 years of public service. I wasn’t a fan (to say the least) while he was in power, but as an old Mark Steyn column points out, he was a much more talented political survivor than his successor:

Back in the early eighties, during the back-and-forth over patriating the Constitution, Jean Chrétien is said to have walked into Buckingham Palace and been greeted by the Queen with a cheery “You again!”

Him again! Who’d have thought we’d miss him? You can thank Paul Martin for that. It took Mister Competent, the genius budget-balancer, the supposed real brains of the operation, smoothly urbanely fluent in at least two more official languages than his predecessor, to reveal da liddle guy as a towering colossus. Mr. Martin, so ruthless and efficient in plotting and manoeuvring to seize the crown, never gave a thought to what he would do with it once it was on his head. In the final chapter of his new book, M. Chrétien reveals that, with Sheila Fraser’s report on the sponsorship scandal looming, he offered to stay on a few weeks and take the hit for it on his watch. But Martin was in a hurry, and wanted the old man gone. And so he came roaring in, and all the stuff that never stuck to the wily Shawinigan ward-heeler stuck to King Paul like dog mess on his coronation robes – Adscam, Flagscam, Earnscam, Crownscam, Alphonso Scammiano, the Royal Scamadian Mounted Police — until the new broom swept himself into a corner and wound up running against the legacy he’d spent the previous decade claiming credit for.

What would Chrétien have done? He’d have said, “Waal, da scam is da scam and, when you got da good scam, dat da scam. Me, I like da scam-and-eggs wid da home fries at da Auberge Grand-Mère every Sunday morning. And Aline, she always spray da pepper on it. Like Popeye say, I scam what I scam. Don’ make me give you da ol’ Shawiniscam handshake …” Etc., etc., until it all dribbled away into a fog of artfully constructed incoherence, and the heads of the last two journalists following the story exploded, and he won his fourth term. If you follow the headlines, Chrétien’s memoir supposedly “blames” Martin and “rips” Martin and “blasts” Martin. But, of course, ripping and blasting isn’t the Chrétien style, and this amiable book could use a bit more of it. Telling the tale from election night in 1993 in his A-frame on Lac des Piles to his final walk from the Governor General’s office through the grounds of Rideau Hall and into private life, My Years As Prime Minister is a rewarding read if you’re prepared to do a bit of decoding. Thus, throughout the text, his preferred designation for his successor is “my successor” (“Unfortunately, when my successor took too long to make up his mind …”, etc.). In Britain, Edward Heath used to refer to Margaret Thatcher as such, because her very name used to stick in his craw. So the formulation, intended as condescension, sounded merely pathetic: Mrs. T. was the consequential figure and Sir Ted was merely the flop warm-up act. By contrast, Chrétien pulls the condescension off brilliantly. It’s a cool sneer — and, for a successor distinguished only by his conspicuous lack of success, wholly deserved: say what you like about Kim Campbell, but she didn’t spend her entire adult life scheming for the role of designated fall guy.

[…]

Is he a nice guy? I like to think not. I’m a nasty piece of work myself, and I always had a sneaking affection for the rare public glimpse of Chrétienite viciousness — the moment when he seized that Toronto Star reporter by the wrist and snarled “Get outta da way!” (I believe, after two months waiting for wrist surgery, the journalist was eventually treated in Buffalo, and, after a federal retraining course, now works happily as a tour guide at the Museum of Canadian Literature in Shawinigan.) But that’s the p’tit gars: he got everyone outta da way — Martin, Mulroney, Campbell, Manning, Day, Clark, Charest, Bouchard, Parizeau … No one will remember NEPAD or any of the other acronymic global-summit-fillers he claims credit for, but he kept the Liberal show on the road, which, as “my successor” discovered, is a lot harder than it looks. In his own autobiography, Paul Martin would be ill-advised to try to respond in kind.

July 1, 2012

“… except in Canada”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:25

The National Post editorial board celebrates Canada Day by making a case for Canadian exceptionalism:

The acronym “EIC” can refer to a newspaper’s editor-in-chief, the various forms of the storied East India Company, the Engineering Institute of Canada, and, in scientific circles, Electromagnetically-induced chirality. But in these odd times, they might also be deployed, for verbal economy, to denote “except in Canada.”

As in: Banks all over the Western world have suffered a series of shocks since the 2008 financial crisis – EIC. Economies have slowed — EIC. Real estate bubbles have popped — EIC. Deficits have ballooned to crisis proportions — EIC.

OK: Perhaps national pride leads us to exaggeration. A more truthful acronym might be EICAG — to include Canada “and Germany.” Various smaller European nations, as well as countries in Asia and Latin America, also have fared well. Yet it is hard to remember a time (if ever there was one) when Canada’s fortunes, taken as a whole, were so rosy compared to those of all other Western nations. This good fortune is something worth celebrating as we prepare to celebrate Canada’s 145th birthday this weekend.

They even have some praise to lavish on two former prime ministers who don’t normally get a kind word from the right:

Canada’s relative lack of red ink also is no accident. Two decades ago, Canada was what Greece was today: a bloated welfare state running up massive bills that it couldn’t pay. The unpopular job of fixing the balance sheet feel primarily to Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin — and they accomplished the task without any of the political chaos that has been gripping Athens and other southern European capitals in the last year. The prosperity and stability we enjoy today is in large part due to what those two men did with the fiscal mess bequeathed to them by Brian Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau.

Of course, not everything is going wonderfully well in the Dominion: we still have not emulated one of the notable successes of our European friends:

One of the few institutional factors holding Canada back is its healthcare system. As Shaun Francis writes elsewhere on these pages, our refusal to explicitly permit full-blown private alternatives to the current government-payer health monopoly is bad policy that is out of keeping with that of leading European jurisdictions.

Fortunately, this is a shortfall that can be cured easily. As the furor over Obamacare in the United States shows, building a universal public health system is difficult. But Canada has already done this heavy lifting over the last 50 years: All we lack now is a parallel private track — and that is something that will spring into being without any governmental action at all, save the legislative stroke of a pen needed to modify the Canada Health Act accordingly.

February 3, 2012

Paul Wells: Harper and the Tories acted like “trust fund kids”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:06

An interesting column at Maclean’s this week, where Paul Wells recasts Stephen Harper’s recent speech at Davos as autobiographical confession:

This passage should be read as thinly veiled autobiography and confession. This week a former senior public servant told me that when the Conservatives came to power in 2006, they inherited structural surpluses, booming oil prices and shrinking public debt, and they acted the way trust-fund kids do. “These were like kids in a candy store who had all this allowance. ‘Wow, we can do all this stuff?’ ”

But don’t take my nameless source’s name for it. Take Jim Flaherty’s. His first budget speech, in 2006, carried the title “Focusing on Priorities.” And what did he describe as priorities? In order: “Providing immediate and substantial tax relief,” he said. “Encouraging the skilled trades.” “Families and communities.” “Investing in infrastructure.” “Security.” “Accountability.” “Expenditure management.” “Restoring fiscal balance for our Canadian federation.” And right down there at the bottom, “prosperity.” So you can’t say it wasn’t the No. 1 priority. It’s right there in ninth place.

In Flaherty’s 2007 budget speech, the word “growth” appeared once.

But sometimes the world changes and the trust fund goes bust. For Harper, that happened in the first week of December 2008, when he had to fight like a street gang to keep the job he thought he’d just been re-elected to. So much changed after that. He won in 2011 by running on the economy after years of running away from it. And now here he was in Davos to tell everyone about “the good, growth-oriented policies. The right, often tough choices.”

Flaherty is my local MP, so I’m well acquainted with his habit of talking like a conservative, but running the finance ministry like one of Pierre Trudeau’s acolytes. It must really be galling him that he has to act like a grown-up for the coming budget. As I’ve said more than once, if you factor out the military and foreign affairs aspects, there were few things that Harper did that wouldn’t have been done just as readily by Paul Martin. And I mean Martin as PM, not in his more successful guise as minister of finance.

August 11, 2011

Canada’s debt crisis happened at a fortunate time

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Father Raymond J. de Souza explains why Canada’s financial success story can’t be easily replicated by Europe or the United States:

The slaying of the deficit by Paul Martin saved Canada from the sovereign debt turmoil now afflicting Europe and America. While full credit is due to Mr. Martin, and it is gratifying to see other countries look to our experience, the turnaround in fiscal policy that Canada achieved in the 1990s is simply impossible to achieve in Europe or the United States in the near term. When we had our debt crisis, sparked by downgrades of the federal government’s credit rating between 1993 and 1995, we could make tough choices with the prospect of almost immediate results. No country has that option today.

That is only partly due to politics. Many have observed that the Liberal majority government of the day had the power to take dramatic action. That understates the case. Not only did the Grits have a majority, they had the near-certainty of another majority in 1997, given the disarray among the four opposition parties. The Chrétien government of 1995 was the most electorally secure government in Canadian history. No other country — not even Canada — has that circumstance today.

[. . .]

Europe and America face weak economic growth, rising debt service costs and no tax reforms to provide robust new streams of revenue. Even if granted the vast powers of the Chrétien government — not for nothing was it called the “friendly dictatorship” — neither Europe nor America have a path to slaying their deficits, aside from ever more brutal spending cuts. And indeed, if serious spending cuts add to unemployment and, in the short term, restrain economic growth, then the deficit may not shrink as welfare costs rise and revenues shrink.

Canada did well to respond to our crisis in the 1990s. We were lucky to have had it when we did.

January 25, 2011

Margaret Wente: Harper has found the “sweet spot” in Canadian politics

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:14

Margaret Wente is sympathetic to her Liberal friends:

I’ve been feeling kind of sorry for my liberal friends. They can’t stand Stephen Harper. They wince when they hear his name. And yet, in spite of his disagreeable personality, his grip on power is stronger than ever. He has lasted an improbable five years. He has run the longest minority government in Canada’s history and held office longer than Lester Pearson. Aaargh!

On the radio Monday, a Liberal academic was explaining just what makes Mr. Harper so despicable. He’s been stealing Liberal policies! Now that’s dirty. Everyone was certain he would move the country to the right. Instead, he moved the party to the left. He racked up stimulus deficits by the billions and expanded the size of government. He pleased the people by handing them deductions for their kids’ hockey gear. He even quashed an unpopular foreign takeover — only the second veto of a foreign bid in 25 years. The Financial Post went nuts. Who does this guy think he is — Maude Barlow?

Put another way, for everyone who’s attacking Mr. Harper for being too conservative, someone else is attacking him for not being conservative enough. In politics, this is known as “finding the sweet spot.” Both the Liberals and the right-wing National Citizens’ Coalition, which he used to head, are accusing him of reckless spending. Even Peter Mansbridge challenged him for failing to live up to his small-c conservative ideals. (I wonder how the conversation would have gone if Mr. Harper had slashed the CBC.)

Wente may well be right, but I wonder how long Harper can keep the small-c conservatives happy while he does a very credible imitation of Paul Martin’s Liberal government. They wanted a change, but this is a change in labels, not in actual policies.

To be fair, Harper has been able to provide a more distinctive foreign policy than Martin would have done: his outspoken support for Israel is more than enough to set him apart from his Liberal predecessor. On domestic issues? The difference is much more in tone than in substance. On some issues, Michael Ignatieff is running to the right of Harper, which unnerves his own party no end.

December 24, 2009

Jonathan Kay in praise of Paul Martin

Filed under: Cancon, Middle East, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:52

In a column ostensibly about the triumph of Canada’s conservatives, Jonathan Kay makes a pitch for both Paul Martin and former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson as unsung political heroes:

Paul Martin will forever be known primarily as the guy who fumbled Jean Chrétien’s dynasty away to Stephen Harper. But if there were more justice in the world — or at least among pundits — he would get his due for making the single most momentous prime ministerial decision of the decade: sending a Canadian combat mission to Kandahar in 2005.

At the time, it hardly seemed epic: Most Canadians didn’t know Kandahar from Kunduz. But the military wonks immediately could tell this was a game-changer. Putting our troops in Kandahar, at the ideological and political center of Taliban territory, meant the Liberals were shedding decades of peacekeeper posturing, and were putting the country on a very real war footing.

[. . .]

Martin didn’t throw a dart at a map of Afghanistan. He fought for Kandahar in the face of U.S. skepticism — even though he knew it would mean body bags, and even though he probably could have landed the Canadian Forces a relatively cushy Euro-style sentry-duty assignment in the northern part of the country.

Our deployment set the stage for many of the other, seemingly unrelated, changes in Canadian policy and politics that followed in the latter part of the decade. A nation at war doesn’t think about itself in the same way as a nation at peace. We got more respect in foreign capitals. We began to take care of our military. We even started to treat our country’s identity and history more seriously.

And equally surprising, the praise for Adrienne Clarkson:

Nor should we ignore the contribution of Adrienne Clarkson. Whatever her elitist, media pedigree, the Canadian Forces had no better friend than the former Governor General. She was a constant presence at Remembrance Day events at home, as well as WWII anniversary ceremonies in Europe. She spent New Year’s with CF members in Afghanistan — twice; and even celebrated Christmas with our naval forces in the Persian Gulf.

That she was a woman, a former CBC staffer, and a visible minority, only increased the symbolic importance of her outreach. It showed Canada that our military is fighting for all us, not just white guys with brush cuts in Shilo and Petawawa.

July 20, 2009

I look forward to Gordon Brown’s “Paul Martin” moment

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

For those of you who have already forgotten the premiership of Paul Martin, one of the most striking moments of his term in office was his leaving of it. His final speech, after the election results were in, was the best speech I think he ever made. There was a jauntiness, a cheerfulness in his voice that had been totally lacking at any point before that. After a successful term as Finance Minister under Jean Chrétien, Martin, like Gordon Brown, couldn’t wait to get the current PM out the door.

Martin, for all his faults, was not the ongoing disaster for his party and country that Brown has been. Martin also knew when to bow out. Brown has not been willing to go — and has been unwilling to risk the opinions of the electorate in a general election. Yet.

Christopher Hitchens looks at the wreckage:

Early this past June it became hard to distinguish among the resignation statements that were emanating almost daily from Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Cabinet. The noise of collapsing scenery drowned out the individuality of the letters — one female minister, I remember, complained that she was being used as “window dressing” — but there was one missive from a departing comrade that caught my eye. It came from James Purnell, a man generally agreed to have done a more than respectable job as minister for work and pensions, and it began like this:

Dear Gordon,
We both love the Labour Party. I have worked for it for twenty years and you for far longer. We know we owe it everything and it owes us nothing . . .

I sat back in my chair. Yes, it’s true. One suddenly could recall a time when membership in the Labour Party (or “the Labour movement,” as it would call itself on great occasions) was a thing of pride. [. . .]

The true definition of corruption, it seems to me, is the diversion of public resources to private or politicized ends [. . .] There are other and lesser definitions, such as milking the public purse or abusing the public trust by “creative accounting.” The cloudburst of lurid detail about the expenses racket, which has made the current Parliament into an object of scorn and loathing, is a cloudburst that has soaked members of all parties equally. However, the Brownite style is by far the most culpable. It was Brown’s people who foisted a Speaker on the House of Commons who both indulged the scandal and obstructed a full ventilation of it. As if that weren’t bad enough, Gordon Brown still resists any call to dissolve this wretched Parliament — a Parliament that is almost audibly moaning to be put out of its misery and shame — because he still isn’t prepared to undergo the great test of being submitted to the electorate. Say what you will about Tony Blair, he took on all the other parties in three hard-fought general elections, and when it was considered time for him to give way or step down, he voluntarily did so while some people could still ask, “Why are you going?,” rather than “Why the hell don’t you go?” For the collapse of Britain’s formerly jaunty and spendthrift “financial sector,” everybody including Blair is to blame. But for the contempt in which Parliament is held, and in which a once great party now shares, it’s Blair’s successor who is the lugubrious villain.

H/T to Ghost of a Flea for the link.

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