Quotulatiousness

March 31, 2022

Canada’s F-35 procurement process — “Dysfunctional, but, like, a masterpiece of dysfunction.”

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, Government, Military, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney reveals the embarrassing secret of his life: he has “a favourite Canadian military procurement fiasco”. He’s quite right that there’s a distressingly wide variety of procurement cock-ups to choose from since the 1960s, but in his opinion the F-35 saga is the best:

“F-35 Lightning II completes Edwards testing” by MultiplyLeadership is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Having a favourite Canadian military procurement fiasco feels perverse, in a way. It’s like having a favourite gruesome sports injury. Procurement fiascos are bad. We want fewer of them. There’s nothing to be celebrated when yet another one barfs all over the national rug. And yet I find myself indulging a bizarre fondness for a mostly overlooked low point in our long, embarrassing journey to this week’s re-decision to buy a fleet of F-35 fighter jets for the Royal Canadian Air Force. As bad as the low point was — and it was really bad — it also so perfectly summed up our utterly manifest dysfunction that I’ve come to almost admire it. It’s awful, but it’s a pure form of awful. Dysfunctional, but, like, a masterpiece of dysfunction. You couldn’t ask for a better example of what’s wrong with us.

[…]

That wasn’t the original plan; the Liberals first proposed buying 18 new F-18 SuperHornets, the more advanced American successor to the original F-18. That idea fell through due to a trade spat between Canadian darling Bombardier and Boeing, the SuperHornet manufacturer. This was the point of no return: the Boeing dispute was another opportunity for the Liberals to sigh, pop a few Tums and then just do the right thing and proceed with the full replacement as quickly as possible.

They did not. And this, dear readers, is where this embarrassing chapter of our already pathetic history of military procurement reached maximum absurdity.

With our CF-18 fleet at a state of exhaustion, and Boeing in Trudeau’s dog house, instead of actually replacing our old, exhausted jets with new jets, we just gave the air force enough old, exhausted Australian jets so that the RCAF could cobble enough workable jets and spare parts together to allow the Liberals to further delay any decision on a real replacement program.

When you write a lot about military procurement, as I certainly have, you can’t help but grow a bit (!) jaded and cynical. Even by the standards of my appallingly lowered expectations, though, this was an outrageous decision. As I said above, it’s so bad, so cynical, so crassly political, that it has perversely become something I almost admire, in a twisted way. It’s an almost too-brutal-to-be-believed example of politicians dodging accountability and leadership like Keanu bobbing and weaving out of the path of CGI bullets. Every dollar and hour of time we put into scooping up Australia’s leftover jets — they were unneeded because Australia was competent enough to procure more advanced SuperHornets and, ahem, F-35s — was money and time spent not to improve the readiness and capabilities of the Canadian Armed Forces, but to permit the Liberals to avoid acknowledging they’d made a dumb campaign promise.

Stephen Harper failed the Canadian Armed Forces and Canada generally by not getting the ball rolling on a replacement during his majority term. This was a major failure by the Conservatives that they get all awkward and squirmy about when you bring up, but we should bring it up. The CPC botched this, badly, and should feel shame. Justin Trudeau then repeated that failure, and then took it up a level. In this race to the bottom, where no one looks good, Trudeau “wins” by simple virtue of snapping up used jets — the last of which only arrived last spring! — to buy his government time to do absolutely nothing.

March 30, 2022

The RCAF’s long, sad F-35 story

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Mitch Heimpel tries (without either laughing or crying) to tell the story of how the Canadian government finally got around to admitting they should have bought the F-35 fourteen years ago (when the RCAF told them it was the best fit for our national requirements):

If you’re looking for a simple meta-explanation for all of us, it would be this: Canadian politicians refuse to tell the public one simple truth — military procurement is expensive. There isn’t an inexpensive version of this. That doesn’t mean we should accept any and all costs just because it’s going to be expensive. It does mean that politicians have to stop trying to sell us on there being an inexpensive, or perfect, version of this. There is no MacGyver version of military procurement. No amount of rubber bands and paper clips replaces jet engines and submarines, no matter how many times we pretend it will. Indeed, the longer you delay, the more it’ll cost — the weapons generally get more expensive, and you end up spending more money to wring every last bit of use out of what equipment you already have, instead of replacing it in an efficient, orderly way.

So, let’s recap: We are, in fact, so bad at procurement that we ran a process for years, and then cancelled it. And then pledged not to buy the jets we’d originally pleged to buy. We then bought seven old Australian F-18s so we could keep our elderly and dwindling CF-18 fleet from experiencing a “capability gap” caused mostly by not just buying the F-35 in the first place. Then, almost 12 years after announcing we were going to buy the F-35, after all the drama above, we’ve announced we’ll buy the F-35, after all. Eighty eight of them, in fact. So there’s that, I guess.

In so many ways, the F-35 saga is another symbol of seven years of Trudeau governance. In 2015, the Liberals could not have been more clear in their campaign platform, which included a whole section titled “We will not buy the F-35 stealth bomber-fighter.”

What were Ministers Anand and Tassi out saying when the F-35 announcement was made this week? “Best plane” and “best price.” Which was true in 2008 when we were first told it was the only fighter that met our needs. It was still true when the Harper government blinked in 2012, and still true when Justin Trudeau was accusing the government of “whipping out” our CF-18s while on the opposition benches in 2014. Remained true in 2015 when the Liberals campaigned against it, too, and every year since.

We have no reason to believe that what is supposed to be a $19-billion announcement for 88 planes to begin delivery in 2025 will actually end up being any of those things. Don’t be surprised if we spend more money to get fewer jets at a later date. But we are now well past the point of being able to blame anyone other than ourselves for cost overruns or late deliveries. The Canadian government failed the Royal Canadian Air Force in this procurement. That is beyond dispute. These guys need the planes. They have for years.

Let’s hope we’ve at least been sufficiently embarrassed by this experience to be more serious when we have to talk about submarines, which is now, come to think of it.

But I doubt it.

February 24, 2022

I guess the “emergency” is technically over, question mark?

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

My original headline for this piece was

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but we need to depend on Canada’s Senate to turn down Trudeau’s Emergencies Act

Fortunately, perhaps because Mr. Trudeau realized he might lose the vote in the Senate, he announced earlier today that the government will relinquish the powers granted under the Emergencies Act. The province of Ontario is also rescinding the state of emergency. This makes much of what follows less immediately relevant, but I’m too lazy to delete it I feel it still has some informational value to offer:

I’ve never had much faith in our Senate — and given that most Prime Ministerial appointments to the upper house are given as rewards to former political backroom organizers, bagmen, and the occasional prominent citizen, the role of the Senate in daily life is virtually nil. Now, thanks to a provision of the Emergencies Act, our last chance of prying the undemocratic emergency powers Trudeau has claimed is to have the Senate vote against the use of the act. This is not how the upper house normally operates.

“In the east wing of the Centre Block is the Senate chamber, in which are the thrones for the Canadian monarch and her consort, or for the federal viceroy and his or her consort, and from which either the sovereign or the governor general gives the Speech from the Throne and grants Royal Assent to bills passed by parliament. The senators themselves sit in the chamber, arranged so that those belonging to the governing party are to the right of the Speaker of the Senate and the opposition to the speaker’s left. The overall colour in the Senate chamber is red, seen in the upholstery, carpeting, and draperies, and reflecting the colour scheme of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom.”
Photo and description by Saffron Blaze via Wikimedia Commons.

Even as it enables the government to take such far-reaching actions, the Emergencies Act provides safeguards against abuse. One such safety valve is that the government’s declaration of an emergency has to be approved, in short order, by both the House of Commons and the Senate in order to continue in force. In the Act’s words, “If a motion for confirmation of a declaration of emergency is negatived by either House of Parliament, the declaration, to the extent that it has not previously expired or been revoked, is revoked effective on the day of the negative vote.”

The House of Commons approved the motion to confirm the government’s declaration of emergency on Monday. It is up to the Senate to consider it now. And so, it may be useful to review the principles that govern the role of this much misunderstood and often maligned institution.

The Senate is not a deus ex machina that can rescue us from bad government. The suggestion, put forward by some of the “freedom convoy” leaders, that a constitutional chimera made up of the Senate and the governor general could oust the federal government and redress whatever grievances they came to air was arrant nonsense. For the most part, the Senate’s role in the government of Canada is very limited, and rightly so.

Senators are not elected and, as a result, lack the legitimacy to oppose the will of the House of Commons, whose members (the MPs) are, and the cabinet, led by the prime minister, which is responsible to the House of Commons. When the cabinet proposes that a law should be enacted, and the House of Commons agrees, constitutional propriety (a “constitutional convention”, in the jargon) dictates that the Senate’s role is limited to, at most, making suggestions for improving this law while respecting its general principle.

[…]

Will the Senate act independently? I do not know; I am just a boring law professor, and this question is above my pay grade. But I would like to conclude with an observation about how either answer to this question should make us reflect on the attitude the current prime minister and his predecessor have taken to the Senate.

If the Senate defeats Mr. Trudeau’s government, it will be in part because he cut his ties with what used to be the Liberal caucus there, releasing existing Liberal senators and new appointees to act with greater independence (though, in fairness, senators were always somewhat more independent-minded than MPs; not having to get re-elected does that to one). What may have seen a cost-free symbolic gesture might yet turn out to have been quite consequential.

Conversely, if the Senate ends up siding with the government, this will in part be because there are fewer Conservative senators than one might have expected. The reason for that is that Stephen Harper simply stopped appointing senators, in a fit of pique over the failure of Senate reform plans. That was a dereliction of constitutional duty ― the prime minister must fill Senate vacancies as they arise. And now, if not Mr. Harper himself, then at least many of his erstwhile supporters may come to regret that he did not.

August 31, 2021

The Line‘s She-lection Bullshit Bulletin No. 2

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Yes, it’s time to publish some of the silliest political bullshit our “leaders” and their parties are slinging around in the federal “she-lection”:

Let’s start with an interesting one.

We’d recommend watching the whole clip (and we’d also note that there’s a second video clip further down in the thread; technical limitations broke one long clip into two shorter ones). But there’s two piles of dung here, and it’s worth breaking them out separately.

The first is, of course, the patented non-answer to a direct question. Glen McGregor asked Trudeau about our people in Afghanistan who were in that very moment in immediate danger. Trudeau talked about something nice he did in 2015. We understand that this is a campaign, but imagine you or someone you love is stuck Afghanistan in now, and the leader of the country is asked about you/them, and that’s the answer? Really?

The second pile of scat is more nuanced. Check out the part of the clip starting at 1:25. Trudeau says that O’Toole and the Conservatives are “promising to end the very program that brought in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, the very program we’re using to bring in tens of thousands of Afghans fleeing to [safety] in Canada. That doesn’t make sense.”

Well, we mean … it doesn’t make sense because it’s not true.

The Tories are proposing changes to how Canada accepts refugees. Specifically, they want to shift to more heavily rely on privately sponsored refugees, citing research that shows these refugees more easily and more quickly settle into Canada. There would be both government-sponsored and private-sponsored refugees under what the CPC is calling a “joint model” model. This is broken out in the CPC’s campaign platform on page 129.

This seems … pretty reasonable? The Tories are not only promising to maintain current funding levels and numbers of accepted refugees, they just want to structure it differently. Not even very differently, at that: of the 62,000 Syrian refugees that Canada has resettled since Trudeau came to office, half were privately sponsored. The CPC platform also very specifically notes that this wouldn’t apply in “cases of emergency”, which the fall of Afghanistan clearly is. You can criticize that as policy, or even doubt they’ll follow through. Just saying they’ll cancel the program, though, is nonsense.

Of course, Trudeau isn’t the only bullshitter on the campaign trail, so RTWT for the rest of the antics that The Line felt were bullshitty enough to register this week.

February 8, 2021

QotD: The deeply rooted anti-Americanism in Canadian politics

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

… in 2011, the only time Conservatives have managed to win a federal majority in the last three plus decades, they ran one of the most effective campaigns in recent memory against Michael “just visiting” Ignatieff by waging a patriotic campaign against him. In Ignatieff the Conservatives had the perfect rival to attack; a patrician member of the Laurentian new class. But the campaign against Ignatieff wasn’t just effective because it successfully portrayed him as an elite, it was effective because in attacking the time Ignatieff had spent aboard and at Harvard especially, they actually managed to make the Conservatives the champions of Canada, and the Liberals the more American party.

Ben Woodfinden, “True North Patriotism and a Distinctly Canadian Conservatism”, The Dominion, 2020-10-20.

October 21, 2020

“Canadian conservatism often suffers from a unique form of self-loathing”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In his latest essay for The Dominion, Ben Woodfinden reviews an old book by Peter Brimelow and how it influenced the Canadian conservative scene at the time and why the book’s insights mattered so much to Stephen Harper:

Published in 1986, The Patriot Game captures the ideas and sentiment of an entire generation of Canadian conservatism. One quick note on Brimelow. He’s a controversial figure and has been called a “leader within the alt-right.” He’s also the founder of VDARE, an American anti-immigration website. I’m not getting into a back and forth with anyone about how best to describe his views, I’ll just say that none of this means his older work like The Patriot Game should be discounted or ignored, especially given the influence it’s had.

The game Brimelow is describing is the manufacturing of a new national identity that was undertaken by what he terms “Canada’s New Class.” This is a term he borrows from Irving Kristol. It refers to Canada’s politicians, civil servants, academics, business elites, writers, and journalists, who have a disproportionate influence shaping public discourse and national consciousness.

The manufacturing of a new national identity by this class, centred on the Liberal Party, was one that both rejected our heritage and replaced it with a self-serving and contradictory ideology that serves the interests of this New Class. The strategy of the Canadian New Class throughout Canada’s history has been “to concentrate rents from a resource-based economy in Central Canadian hands.”

The nationalism they manufactured to do this was an entirely artificial one, built around multiculturalism, bilingualism, anti-Americanism and heavy federal government involvement in the economy. At its core Brimelow’s argument is that 20th-century Canada is the creation of the Liberal party, but ultimately that it is fake and built to serve the interests of the New Class. This was done especially by placating Quebec at the expense of the West, and attempting to construct a new national identity that could unite English and French Canada.

This game played by Canada’s elite to enrich them and their bases of support in places like Quebec not only took money from the West and transferred it elsewhere, it dragged down the Canadian economy by crippling it in overbearing and burdensome regulation and the heavy hand of government involvement.

The most interesting, and clarifying part of the book to me is Brimelow’s description of the identity and nationalism that he thinks the Liberals consciously destroyed and then replaced with their own. Brimelow thinks that the New Class are consciously and actively anti-British, not just anti-American, and that this new identity was built as both a rejection of British heritage and the cultural affinities English Canada has with “North American identity.”

According to Brimelow “All of Anglophone Canada is essentially part of a greater English-speaking North American nation … Canada is a sectional variation within this super nation.” Our British heritage is at the core of who we are along with our common Anglo affinities with Americans, and this new national project is doomed to failure. Brimelow suggests that “Canada’s fundamental contradictions cannot be resolved in the present Confederation” and while English Canada is currently in a strange period of identity agnosticism, it will eventually recover and “assert its North American identity.” This process will only be accelerated by regional tensions within Canada that expose the futility of this new Liberal national identity. Modern Canada, in short, is a fraud and doomed to failure.

July 30, 2020

“Muzzling” scientists only ever happens under Conservative governments…

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government, Health, Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

… so even though the circumstances might look remarkably similar to the layman’s eyes, Justin Trudeau can’t possibly be accused of doing the same thing as that evil, anti-science Stephen Harper:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaking at the Annual Meeting 2012 of the World Economic Forum at the congress centre in Davos, Switzerland, January 26, 2012.
World Economic Forum photo via Wikimedia Commons.

In fact, Grant Robertson reports, the Trudeau regime effectively shuttered a small, cheap (less than $3 Million dollars ~ petty cash in Canada’s government) research and early warning team called the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) which

    was among Canada’s contributions to the World Health Organization, and it operated as a kind of medical Amber Alert system. Its job was to gather intelligence and spot pandemics early, before they began, giving the government and other countries a head start to respond and – hopefully – prevent a catastrophe. And the results often spoke for themselves.

Unfortunately, by the time the COVID-19 pandemic was getting started, just when the GPHIN should have provided “early warning,” it had been told, by the Trudeau regime, to focus on domestic issues. But global pandemics don’t often start in Canada, do they? The GPHIN sifted through data from around the world, often from places like China, Iran and Russia which hide or manipulate medical information, conducting something akin to military reconnaissance so that Canadian (and global (WHO)) officials could “see” what might be headed our way.

Did Justin Trudeau give the order to “muzzle” the GPHIN scientists? No, of course not … no more than Stephen Harper gave the order to “muzzle” scientists in Environment Canada. The decision to “refocus” the GPHIN on useless, domestic busywork was likely made by an Assistant Deputy Minister who was acting on yet another demand from the Treasury Board Secretariat to justify every programme dollar … again.

You should be glad that the Treasury Board Secretariat casts a sceptical eye on every single government programme and is a constant thorn in the side of operational people (like I was when I was serving and like the GPHIN folks were, too). They, skilled, hard-working civil servants, are just trying to ensure that your tax dollars are not being wasted. They are good people doing good work. But sometimes the wheat gets tossed away with the chaff. That appears to have been the case with the GPHIN. In retrospect, it seems almost criminally stupid to have deprived Canada of a valuable medical reconnaissance agency just because there had not been an “attack” recently. But that appears to have been the bureaucratic justification ~ it’s like me saying that since my house hasn’t burned down recently we should disband the fire department.

Did Justin Trudeau muzzle scientists? No.

Did Justin Trudeau’s government disable a valuable (and cheap) “early warning” system just to make its own wild spending look a little less careless? Yes, that’s what the Globe and Mail‘s investigation says ~ and we have paid a horrendous price in lives for that decision.

This story, it seems to me, is very much like the “Harper muzzles scientists” stories from a few years ago … but minus the massive media attention. It appears very evident, from Mr Robertson’s investigations that bureaucrats, acting on their own, internal priorities, emasculated the GPHIN just when we needed it most. That, bureaucratic action, was I believe what was, mainly, behind the “Harper muzzles scientists” stories, too. But in the 2010s much of the mainstream media was in a sort of undeclared war against Stephen Harper and so the claims of climate activists became “news” and opinions were treated as facts.

July 1, 2020

QotD: The Quebec play (that never works) (for long)

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

Certain things recur eternally, in time with the rhythm of the seasons. Flowers bloom in spring. The swallows return to Capistrano. And the federal Conservatives prostitute themselves for the Quebec-nationalist vote.

Well, that’s a bit strong. Prostitutes, after all, expect to be paid. Whereas the Conservatives’ periodic efforts to sell themselves, their principles and their country to people with a proven lack of interest in all three are as notable for their unremunerativeness as they are for their self-abasement.

The Conservatives have been trying this same act now for several decades, most notably — and destructively, to both country and party — under Brian Mulroney, but in their different ways under Robert Stanfield (“deux nations“), Joe Clark (“community of communities”) and even Stephen Harper (“the Québécois nation” resolution).

Occasionally, they manage to attract some attention in the province that has remained largely indifferent to them since 1891. If they are particularly extravagant in their offerings, as under Mulroney, they may even win their votes — but only for as long as it takes to sink in that there is no support in the rest of Canada for what they are proposing, and no possibility of their being implemented.

At which point the whole exercise sinks in a heap of dashed expectations and accusations of bad faith, leaving the country divided and the Tories in ashes. Until, inevitably, some genius gets it into his head to launch the whole routine again.

Andrew Coyne, “It’s that time again, when Conservatives say anything to woo Quebecers”, National Post, 2018-05-16.

April 3, 2020

QotD: Canadian senators

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

When I heard that Sen. Tommy Banks had died of leukemia at age 81, I thought maybe the newspaper notices ought to be left to the people who knew him better — and in Edmonton that number comes to thousands upon thousands of people. I interviewed Banks a few times as a young political reporter. I think every such person has learned the procrastinator’s trade secret that if you’re doing an issues story, senators are easier to get hold of on a short deadline than elected MPs, and a lot easier than cabinet ministers, especially if you’re an unknown lightweight.

This, at least, used to be the case. I am not sure whether it applies to the Brave New Senate that now exists after the somewhat cynical appointments of Stephen Harper and the experimental renovations of Justin Trudeau. But if you have ever wondered why political beat writers and old codger columnists often have surprisingly positive sentiments about the Senate, which nine-tenths of the people reading these words despise, this is probably one reason: a senator might call you back soon enough to be of some use.

And there’s another, related reason. In phoning a senator to chat about issues because you can’t get a “real” politician to return your inquiry, you would (or, anyway, I would) sometimes find surprisingly strong evidence that the Senate quietly lives up to its original constitutional promise. Spared the effort of endless electioneering and toilsome constituent service, senators do have time for deep study of projects and problems, and some freedom to develop independent opinions. I do not say that most of them use the time and the freedom, but it was, and I’m sure it still is, fairly easy to avoid the duds.

Colby Cosh, “R.I.P. Senator Tommy Banks, a figure from Edmonton’s pantheon”, National Post, 2018-01-26.

January 17, 2020

The crying need for “regime change” … in Canadian newsrooms

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley discusses the amazingly tone-deaf “corrections” issued by CBC and CTV over their malicious misquoting of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s comments on the Iranian government:

Harper did not advocate military intervention in Iran, or indeed any particular intervention whatsoever. Despite describing Iran (accurately) as an “anti-Semitic state” premised on “religious fanaticism and regional imperialism” that is standing resolutely in the way of cooperation between other Middle Eastern nations, Harper didn’t even advocate “a complete change of government.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaking at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 26, 2012.
World Economic Forum photo via Wikimedia Commons.

“I do believe we need to see a change in Iran if we are going to see peace in the Middle East,” he said.

“Without a change in the nature of the government of Tehran,” he said, “the Middle East will continue to be in turmoil.”

He said he hoped the furious protests in Iran might nudge the country toward “a better trajectory.”

These are perfectly anodyne statements. Who doesn’t want the Iranian regime to alter its behaviour?

Clarification or correction? I would say this calls for something more like “colossal embarrassment necessitating deep introspection.”

The root problem, I think, is that so much of Canadian politics is purely for show. We are a sparsely populated, not very powerful nation where the differences between the two major federal parties are remarkably small — and thus so are the stakes. It requires special measures to keep people interested, as much for the media as for politicians.

[…]

That’s how the big outlets like CBC and CTV make the sausage of the day, and it’s understandable. They do great investigative work, but the beast needs feeding not just every day, but all day every day. During the campaign I would watch colleagues set up for live hits in various parking lots and back yards and sometimes even on the campaign bus, and imagine them speaking the truth: “I’m here in Delta, B.C. and there’s f–k-all to report. Back to you, Kent.” But the viewers must never know. They need drama, as weak as it might be. I can easily imagine how that principle transformed “a changed regime” into “regime change.”

The real problem with this reporting regime is when it’s applied to things that actually do matter. There are serious potential consequences to telling the world that Stephen Harper thinks, in essence, that we should declare war on Iran with an eye to bouncing the ayatollahs. Harper’s successor and his government are in the midst of an extremely delicate and frankly improbable operation to find out precisely what happened the morning of Jan. 8 in the skies above Tehran and seek justice for the victims and their families. Those families don’t deserve fake news about a warmongering former PM, and I’m sure our diplomats would prefer members of the unchanged Iranian regime didn’t come across it either.

This isn’t a Canadian federal election. It’s real life, and needs to be covered as such.

November 14, 2019

Albertan separatism – “we don’t want to become Newfoundland”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh discusses the hot topic in western Canada, separatism:

In trying to puzzle out the immediate future of Greater Alberta’s struggle with Confederation, one is naturally exposed to many varieties of the question “What are you blue-eyed sheiks complaining about?” Alberta is still a province with relatively high incomes despite a labour market that has been in the doldrums for years: why, people ask, is there separatist panic in a place that is still far wealthier than, say, Newfoundland? A good short answer to this would be “That’s why everybody here is going nuts: we don’t want to become Newfoundland.”

Newfoundland, unlike Alberta, was given the choice of joining Confederation on a bare majority vote; the result, in time, is that the province’s defining cod industry was permanently annihilated … thanks to expert, scientifically informed, completely well-intentioned centralized management from Ottawa. Hey, mistakes happen! One long-term consequence of this one is that a large fraction of the ethnic stock of Newfoundland now lives and works in Alberta. It might be that “Wexit” sentiment is especially strong in this expatriate community, though no one has any hard data to hand yet.

A crucial purpose of Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s “Fair Deal Panel,” announced on the weekend, is to gather some. Kenney announced, in a speech which reaffirmed his own strong commitment to federalism, that Preston Manning will head a group of MLAs and academics whose job will be studying ideas for giving Alberta more autonomy within Confederation. The “Fair Deal Panel” is going to look at a number of concepts that have been swirling around for decades but which were ignored by Alberta’s Progressive Conservative governments. One notes, however, that the panel does have a mandate to sound out public opinion quantitatively, through polling and focus groups.

Some of the political concepts recommended to the Fair Deal Panel for study appeared in what is remembered as the Alberta “Firewall Letter,” authored by Stephen Harper and a group of Calgary School fellow-travellers (not including Kenney); the letter was first published in this newspaper in 2001. The firewall had five components: Alberta withdrawal from the Canada Pension Plan, Alberta withdrawal from the federal Tax Collection Agreement, the revival of an Alberta Provincial Police force, a request for tax points from the federal government in place of cash transfers for health and welfare, and a provincial referendum on Senate reform, which was still a thing back then.

October 12, 2018

Stephen Harper, premature populist?

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Coyne reads the new book by former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, so you don’t have to:

Throughout his time as prime minister, theories abounded as to what philosophy of government, if any, could explain Stephen Harper’s apparently rudderless course. A few die-hards on the left persisted in describing his government as ideological or hard-right, even as it was borrowing billions, adding new regional development agencies and nationalizing the auto industry.

Others insisted he was a libertarian at heart who was either forced or tempted, by reality or expediency, to alter his approach once in power. A couple of loyalists essayed a reconstruction after the fact, in which the Harper government’s many disparate and contradictory policies were somehow made to fit into a single philosophical template called “ordered liberty.”

Well now we have it from the proverbial horse’s mouth. The young firebrand who famously deserted Preston Manning for being too populist and not enough of a conservative now claims the mantle of populism for himself: if not as a whole-hearted adherent, then as the statesman who understands where others only condemn. His new book Right Here, Right Now, is indeed in large part an attempt to portray his own government, not as the cynical power-seeking machine it appeared to be, but as populist before its time. In defending populism, he defends himself.

And yet the mind it reveals is not that of the subtle, sometimes rueful voice of experience he clearly wishes the reader to imagine. It is, rather, all too conventional, even banal. What are presented as iconoclastic insights, in which the rise of populism is explained in terms of the failings of conservatism — former Conservative prime minister breaks with decades of conservative orthodoxy! — are a mix of received wisdom and undergraduate shibboleths, many of them long debunked.

April 3, 2018

Governments are like diapers – they need to be changed regularly and for the same reason

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Paraphrasing an old joke in the headline, but as Andrew Coyne points out, it’s close enough to observed federal reality to qualify:

Is it inevitable that every government becomes what it once despised — a matter of the realities of power overtaking the dreams of opposition? Or do their broken promises, ethical lapses and abuses of power remain, in the end, choices, for which they can be held to account? Do governments turn to seed, or were they that way before they took office? Or is the problem not of any particular party at any particular time, but of a larger culture of cynicism and deceit, in which all parties share?

I do not know the answers to these questions. I only see the same pattern repeated in every government over the last several decades. The Mulroney government came to power promising to clean up the sodden mess left by the Trudeau Liberals (“you had an option, sir — you could have said no!”), only to indulge in its own orgy of patronage appointments and dubious ethics.

The Chretien Liberals were elected to clean up the mess left by the Mulroney Conservatives. Instead they ramped up a massive kickback scheme overseen by a parallel government of party officials and Liberal-friendly advertising executives — to say nothing of their shameless pork-barreling, habitual disdain for Parliament or the prime minister’s personal portfolio of shame.

The Harper government ran and won on a promise to break this pattern, even including the passage of a Federal Accountability Act among their “five priorities.” In power, they invented whole new ways to evade accountability and step on Parliament, while going back on nearly every principle they had ever held or promise they had ever made. Unsurprisingly, compromises on principle ended up begetting compromises on ethics, if only because, in the blur, people forgot which was which.

And now the Trudeau Liberals, again, dynastic succession being the surest sign of the democratic health of a polity. But then, Trudeau fils went to unusual lengths to stress how different he was, not only from his father but from pretty much every leader who went before.

September 23, 2017

The end of Andrew Scheer’s brief political honeymoon

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Being the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition isn’t quite the easy job some people seem to think it is. Paul Wells explains why Andrew Scheer’s brief time in office is already becoming much more of a grind than he may have anticipated:

There comes a time in every new opposition leader’s career when he discovers it’s a horrible job. This usually happens early.

The reasons why it seems like it shouldn’t be a horrible job are: (a) all you have to do is make fun of the government; (b) being an opposition leader, and therefore hating the government to your bones already, for reasons of ideology or team allegiance or both, it seems to you that everyone in the country will want to join you in making fun of the government; (c) it’s a nice job in general, with a suite of offices and an excellent seat in the House of Commons.

The reasons why it turns out to be a bad job anyway are: (a) you’re probably in opposition because your party has lost an election, and many Canadians haven’t yet forgotten why they wanted that to happen; (b) the rotten press corps will insist on poking and prodding the opposition’s behaviour, rather than focussing its wrath entirely on the government; (c) the job carries all of the perils of government — gaffes, caucus management, infighting — with none of the institutional clout.

And so hello to Andrew Scheer, who’s having a bit of a week.

Scheer (and his supporters) may have thought that just being not-Harper would be enough. It’s clearly not enough:

I don’t think Scheer’s performance on these files is determined solely by his temperament, either. It’s also structural. He sold himself to his party as a specific kind of cure to Harperism. It’s not clear he has the luxury to be that kind of cure.

By the time Scheer became Conservative leader, many Conservatives, probably most, were heartily sick of the Harper party’s oppressive message-control mechanisms. The forms you had to fill out, the layers of approval. Opinions diverged on whether the party needed to change its policy direction, but in its day-to-day communications and caucus management, the overwhelming consensus was that it needed a lighter touch.

Scheer’s selling proposition to Conservatives was that he could appeal to moderates by being a nicer guy than Harper, but that he could mollify the activist base by letting it act up a bit, without fear of reprisal. Blow off some steam. Have a few debates. The driving assumption seems to be that Harper brought the hammer down on his own people because Harper is the kind of guy who enjoys bringing the hammer down. And there’s some truth to that!

But there’s also the absolutely brutal purgatory the Canadian Alliance went through for two years before Harper became that party’s leader. Plummeting in the polls. Constant MP defections from caucus. Mockery in the news coverage. To some extent, this continued through the 2004 election, which Harper believed he lost because he could not trust his own candidates not to sound crazy. That’s why he clamped down.

Scheer will soon have to decide whether he can afford to let his caucus members say what they want. Until he does, the emerging pattern of his management style — laissez faire, followed by hasty backtracking — will come to define him.

December 19, 2016

Ontario PC leader Patrick Brown and the “hidden agenda”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

During the entire time Stephen Harper was Prime Minister, the opposition and the media kept frightening people about Harper’s “hidden agenda” that he was bound to implement at any moment. For a decade. It worked well enough that right up until the Liberals won the last federal election, the term “hidden agenda” worked to gin up fears about the “real” Harper plan for Canada. If it was bad for Harper it’s going to be much, much worse for Ontario’s PC party and their flexible leader Patrick Brown:

Any Tory leader would have this problem. Any Tory leader who was ever thought of as a social conservative would have it worse. Brown might have it worst of all: having bent like a palm tree in the wind on social issues, it will be easier than usual for the Liberals, New Democrats and media to portray any moderate stance he takes on anything as nothing more than a politically expedient façade on some kind of hidden agenda. For those who might support such an agenda, meanwhile, his record is an invitation to stay home: whatever he or one of his MPPs might promise them isn’t worth the sound waves that conveyed it. They might reasonably conclude he has no agenda at all, hidden or otherwise.

Stephen Harper had considerable trouble with his purported “hidden agenda,” despite the gymnastics that were necessary to pin it on him. Brown having inhabited every position imaginable on a perfectly reasonable sex-ed curriculum, he cannot inspire much confidence in anyone, on any side of any truly contentious social issue, that his stated positions during campaigns would bear any resemblance to his actions as premier.

Perhaps the Liberals are finally unpopular enough that they’ll lose in 2018 no matter whom they’re up against; perhaps Ontarians will deem Brown’s apparent lack of principles an acceptable replacement for the Liberals’ long-demonstrated lack of principles. But if I were Kathleen Wynne, I’d be considerably more confident than my 16 per cent approval rating suggested I should be.

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