Quotulatiousness

January 26, 2012

The fate of London’s diesel locomotive plant

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media, Politics, Railways — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:38

In the Toronto Star, Martin Regg Cohn (who claims he “is not an anti-globalization crusader”) does his level best to put forward a case for massive government intervention in a labour dispute between Caterpillar and the Canadian Auto Workers:

At the old locomotive plant now owned by U.S.-based multinational Caterpillar Inc., the Canadian Auto Workers union is not even on strike. The CAW has been locked out since New Year’s Day because it refused to sign its own death warrant by agreeing to slash wages in half for most workers from $34 an hour to $16.50.

When a powerful multinational negotiates in bad faith, it becomes a story that governments in Queen’s Park and Ottawa can no longer wash their hands of. To put it in language that resonates with Premier Dalton McGuinty: When a bully tries to humiliate people, you can’t just watch in silence.

When high-paying skilled local jobs can be shredded at the whim of a combative multinational giant, it dramatically undermines all the upbeat rhetoric we hear from McGuinty and Prime Minister Stephen Harper about Canada’s global appeal. It sends a signal that Ontario is not so much open for business as it is closed for unions.

We jump directly from Caterpillar’s demand for wage reductions to an assertion that the company is negotiating in bad faith (I guess, from the union’s point of view, anything other than a wage increase is proof). No indication whether the company’s demand is economically justifed — if sales of the plant’s railway locomotives are as bad as the wage offer implies, then the next step will be closing the plant — just straight over to bad-mouthing the company.

And, of course, it’s merely objective reporting to use pejorative descriptors when discussing the eeeeevil multinational firm. Not content merely to malign the company, he then calls on the Premier to support the union to the hilt:

So what can our anti-bullying premier do?

If I were McGuinty, I would ask myself a simple question: What would Bill Davis do?

The former Tory premier of Ontario wasn’t perfect, but he was always plugged in. He took labour seriously, listened closely to business and wooed foreign investors (remember Renault?). He knew how to leverage the power of the premier’s office to stand up for Ontario’s greater interests.

A phone call to Caterpillar’s corporate braintrust would show that Ontario’s premier is no pushover. If that didn’t work, a phone call to Harper — who is still trying to live down the tax breaks he gave the locomotive factory’s former owners a few years ago — might find a receptive ear.

And finally we get to a good point: the foolishness of governments in giving special tax breaks to certain industries or companies. If it’s in the company’s best interests to locate in your jurisdiction, they’ll probably do it. If you have to bribe them with tax breaks, low-interest or interest-free loans, or other special incentives, then once the incentive runs its course, the company has no further requirement to stay in your location.

Update: In the National Post, Kelly McParland has some suggestions for union leaders:

1. A lot of people (the membership figures suggest it’s the vast majority) think unions are concerned solely with their own members and couldn’t give a bird’s turd for anyone or anything else, including other working stiffs, members of other unions, the fortunes of the company they work for or the customers they deal with. When you display a total lack of interest in others, they generally adopt the same attitude towards you.

[. . .]

4. Union politics might consider moving out of the stone age. The world evolves over time, but unions persist in peddling the same trite bromides as if it’s still the dawn of the industrial revolution. The “us against them” mentality; the pretense that all employers exist to exploit workers and can never be trusted; the assumption that every contract must be succeeded by an even richer one no matter the health of the industry, the economy or the company; the fealty to leftwing political parties — all are symptoms of an exhausted, outdated perspective that has barely changed since “modern technology” meant the telephone.

If unions really want to save themselves, they might take a lesson from the market economy. If no one buys what you’re selling, it’s not because they buyers aren’t bright enough. It’s because people see no value in your product.

Update, 3 February: The plant is being closed. Here’s the official announcement:

Progress Rail Services has announced that it will close Electro-Motive Canada’s (EMC) locomotive production operations in London, Ontario.

Assembly of locomotives will be shifted from the London facility to the company’s other assembly plants in North and South America, which will ensure that delivery schedules are not impacted by the closing of the London facility.

All facilities within EMC, EMD and Progress Rail Services must achieve competitive costs, quality and operating flexibility to compete and win in the global marketplace, and expectations at the London plant were no different.

The collective agreement and cost structure of the London operation did not position EMC to be flexible and cost competitive in the global marketplace, placing the plant at a competitive disadvantage. While the company’s final offer addressed those competitive disadvantages, the gulf between the company and the union was too wide to resolve and as such, market conditions dictate that the company take this step.

January 20, 2012

Paul Wells on the shady characters behind “Ethical Oil”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

He pretty much blows the lid off this conspiracy to sell Canadian oil to unaware, easily duped foreigners who don’t realize how evil the conspirators are:

In hindsight, Stephen Harper’s new fight against the world’s oil sands detractors was a long time coming. Last November in Vancouver, the Prime Minister gave a local television interview in which he warned that “significant American interests” would be “trying to line up against the Northern Gateway project,” Enbridge’s proposed $3.5-billion double pipeline from near Edmonton to a new port at Kitimat, B.C.

“They’ll funnel money through environmental groups and others in order to try to slow it down,” Harper told his hosts. “But, as I say, we’ll make sure that the best interests of Canada are protected.”

In early November, U.S. President Barack Obama announced he was putting off final approval of TransCanada’s $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline until after this November’s presidential election. Harper has long viewed Obama as an unsteady ally. Now he’d had enough. “I’m sorry, the damage has been done,” he told CTV before Christmas. “And we’re going to make sure we diversify our energy exports.”

January 18, 2012

Stephen Harper “[C]ertain people in the United States would like to see Canada be one giant national park”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

Investigative blogger Vivian Krause discusses American environmental groups’ interference in Canadian affairs in the Financial Post:

For five years, on my own nickel, I have been following the money and the science behind environmental campaigns and I’ve been doing what the Canada Revenue Agency hasn’t been doing: I’ve gathered information about the origin and the stated purpose of grants from U.S. foundations to green groups in Canada. My research is based on U.S. tax returns because the U.S. Internal Revenue Service requires greater disclosure from non-profits than does the CRA.

By my analysis and calculations, since 2000, U.S. foundations have granted at least US$300-million to various environmental organizations and campaigns in Canada, especially in B.C. The San Francisco-based Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation alone has granted US$92-million. Gordon Moore is one of the co-founders of Intel Corp. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation have granted a combined total of US$90-million, mostly to B.C. groups. These foundations were created by the founders of Hewlett-Packard Co.

[. . .]

The Great Bear Rainforest is a 21-million-hectare zone that extends from the northern tip of Vancouver Island to the southern tip of Alaska. Environmentalists now claim that oil tanker traffic must not be allowed in the Great Bear Rainforest in order to protect the kermode bear (aka the Great Spirit Bear). Whether this was the intention all along or not, the Great Bear Rainforest has become the Great Trade Barrier against oil exports to Asia.

Speaking on CBC last night, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, “But just because certain people in the United States would like to see Canada be one giant national park for the northern half of North America, I don’t think that’s part of what our review process [for the Northern Gateway] is all about.”

January 6, 2012

Paul Wells: Harper has big plans for 2012 … maybe

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:13

Yes, it’s the constantly threatening hidden agenda!

What does Stephen Harper want to do with his parliamentary majority? “I want to make sure that we use it,” he told CTV’s Lisa LaFlamme in a year-end interview. “You know, I’ve seen too many majority governments, the bureaucracy talks them into going to sleep for three years, and then they all of a sudden realize they’re close to an election.”

[. . .]

You don’t have to like this list. I’m not saying Harper’s predecessors were heroes. I am saying they were not sleeping. If the Prime Minister’s comments have any meaning, he must have something up his sleeve at least as big as those accomplishments. If he doesn’t, he won’t be the first politician to congratulate himself for his achievements before he fails to achieve them.

His interviews suggest Harper plans something big. Four times during his CTV interview, and once with the Chinese-language Fairchild network, he used the adjective “major” to describe his plans for 2012.

[. . .]

It’s striking how rarely Harper sounds bold when any discussion descends from slogans to details. Take foreign policy. On Syria, he pleads the lack of a Security Council resolution. On Egypt: “We’ll try and do what we can do to encourage stability and encourage the forces of democracy, but we don’t go into these things blind. There are some very real risks.”

A policy of bold action only where success is assured is a policy of offering help where none is needed. It is a bold decision to join others’ victory parades. There is nothing major about it.

Incidentally, the bureaucrats I talk to aren’t plotting to put Harper to sleep. On the contrary. Many wonder whether this government will wake up. One of Ottawa’s most experienced civil servants tells me the widespread belief is that Harper’s government is so obsessed with each morning’s headlines that it cannot plan. This official predicts a year of high-level early retirements from the civil service if Harper does not start using his majority.

December 13, 2011

Canada’s withdrawal from Kyoto was inevitable from the beginning

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

I was against the Kyoto agreement from the start, but the government of the day had to be seen to be more “green” than the Americans. John Ibbitson explains:

The Harper government’s decision to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol tarnishes Canada before the world. Liberal and Conservative incompetence and mendacity are to blame. You and I are to blame. And Lehman Brothers had something to do with it as well.

It isn’t easy for a country to descend, in the space of a single decade, from crusader to pariah, as Canada has done on the environment. But our political leaders were up to the task.

The first, worst mistake occurred at Kyoto itself in 1997, when then prime minister Jean Chrétien told Canadian negotiators to meet or beat the American commitment, whatever it took. The problem was that while the American commitment was ambitious, Bill Clinton never expected the Senate to ratify that commitment, and he was right.

The Liberals found themselves stuck with Draconian targets that, if met, would hobble oil sands production, hammer big industry in Ontario, and send home-heating bills through the roof. Their solution was to study the issue. And study. I remember sitting through an interminable briefing in 2003, in which officials patiently explained how Canada would meet its Kyoto targets. The only problem was that there was this enormous gap, which was to be closed through “future reductions.” It was like having a household budget in which Miscellaneous was bigger than Mortgage.

Given the hammering that British PM David Cameron has been taking in the British press, he should send a bouquet of flowers to Stephen Harper for giving the media a different villain to abuse.

Update: Stephen Gordon says the same thing: inevitable from the beginning.

Notwithstanding economically illiterate attempts to pretend otherwise, higher consumer prices for GHG-emitting goods and services are an essential component of any serious attempt to reduce emissions. Counting on people to reduce GGE emissions out of the goodness of their hearts was the strategy of the Chrétien-Martin Liberal governments, and adopting this policy made Canada’s Kyoto failure inevitable long before Stephen Harper’s Conservatives came to power.

Political parties rarely win when they campaign on a platform that promises to increase the price of fossil fuels — the Progressive Conservative government of Joe Clark lost power in large part because of its proposal to increase the gasoline excise tax by 18 cents a gallon (4 cents a litre).

Update, the second: Oh, it’s okay, apparently we’re not allowed to abandon the “voluntary” agreement:

Remember how this was phrased? “sign it, it’s just voluntary!”

Recall Rio 1992 “Earth Summit” where the meme was “hey, it’s voluntary! … with a negotiating schedule attached”. Apparently, like a Roach Motel, “countries check in but they can’t check out”. This email is from UNFCCC’s list server and note my bolded section below. The arrogance, it burns.

[. . .]

    “I regret that Canada has announced it will withdraw and am surprised over its timing. Whether or not Canada is a Party to the Kyoto Protocol, it has a legal obligation under the Convention to reduce its emissions, and a moral obligation to itself and future generations to lead in the global effort. Industrialized countries whose emissions have risen significantly since 1990, as is the case for Canada, remain in a weaker position to call on developing countries to limit their emissions.”

November 13, 2011

Stephen Harper’s government is not small-c conservative

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:44

The National Post editorial board surveys the federal government’s economic record and discovers it’s really the old Liberal party in disguise:

There is no question the Harper government has been profligate and could easily cut federal spending dramatically without doing further damage to the economy. Since 2006, the Tories have increased nominal federal spending from about $175-billion to just over $250-billion. That’s a shocking rise of almost 43%. Even after accounting for inflation and population growth, plus factoring out the money the Conservatives have spent on anti-recession stimulus (over $75-billion), the real growth in federal spending since 2006 has been nearly 10%.

The size of the federal civil service has increased rapidly, too, as has its composition. The Tories have added 13% to the rolls of the bureaucracy in just five years. Some of this is the result of their expansion of the military, police and border service, but much of it has nothing whatever to do with national security. Health Canada, for instance, has seen a nearly 50% increase in its staff under the Tories, the largest percentage increase of any department.

Mr. Flaherty would not have to be motivated by ideology to pare some of that spending and hiring back. If the Tories simply reversed federal spending to the levels they were at when the worldwide financial crisis hit in the fall of 2008, Ottawa’s budget would be balanced this year. Even if the Tories wanted to hold off on any cuts in transfers to individuals — such as pensions and GST credits — and preserve provincial transfers, they could still find enough cuts to non-essential spending to return to balance in two years.

October 28, 2011

“The ultimate measure of this institution’s value [is] the elevation of human dignity and liberty for all their citizens”

Filed under: Asia, Cancon, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

Stephen Harper made a speech yesterday that expressed a lovely sentiment. It’s not clear if the other heads of government attending the meeting will be quite as taken with it:

­ If the Commonwealth continues to ignore member countries that violate human rights and ignore the rule of law and democratic principles, the 60-year-old organization will fade into irrelevance, Commonwealth leaders meeting here are being told.

It¹s a message Canada and Prime Minister Stephen Harper strongly endorses but one which is expected to produce divisions at the biennial summit of Commonwealth Heads of Government. The summit got underway Friday morning in a ceremony presided over by Queen Elizabeth II.

“The ultimate measure of this institution’s value going forward will remain the commitment asked of member governments to the elevation of human dignity and liberty for all their citizens,” Harper said in a speech here Thursday after arriving from Ottawa. “In the next few days, it is my strong hope, that the Commonwealth shall reaffirm, and reinvigorate, this great purpose.”

Member countries are typically loathe to point fingers at the laggards in the 54-country Commonwealth when it comes to human rights and democracy but not Harper.

He has already singled out Sri Lanka’s government for sharp criticism over Sri Lanka¹s failure to investigate what a United Nations panel called “credible allegations” that the Sri Lankan army committed war crimes as that country’s 25-year-old civil war was drawing to a close in 2009.

October 26, 2011

Dan Gardner on how to rate politicians

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

Dan Gardner provides a handy way to scale the achievements of politicians:

The central dilemma facing any elected politician is this: What is good is often not popular and what is popular is often not good.

Most politicians want to do good. But in order to do anything, good or otherwise, they must first hold power, and the only way to do that is to promise and deliver what is popular. Thus, politicians are pulled between doing what is good and what is popular.

Imagine a Venn diagram with two partially overlapping circles. One is labelled “good politics.” The other “good policy.” That’s the whole game.

It’s also a handy way of judging politicians.

The Bad Politician is one who is only concerned with the “good politics” circle. Fortunately, they are less common than cynics think. H.L. Mencken had the Bad Politician in mind when he observed that “the saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.”

The Average Politician finds the area that clearly lies in both circles and stays there. He may make occasional road trips into good politics/bad policy but he avoids good-policy/bad politics like an alcoholic avoids dry counties. This is a crowded category.

The Good Politician finds previously unidentified areas where policy and politics overlap and occasionally risks his popularity by supporting good policies that are bad politics. Every politician claims to make this grade — “It may not be popular to promise sunshine and lollipops but, by golly, it’s the right thing to do!” — and yet only a minority ever do.

The Great Politician expands the “good politics” circle so that more good policy — as he sees it — becomes good politics. In a phrase, the Great Politician leads.

As he quite correctly points out, our current prime minister is an Average Politician, and Gardner is being neither too critical nor too generous in that assessment. Stephen Harper is very good at finding ways to back popular policies without alienating too many of his supporters (the recent shipbuilding contract process is a good example).

October 15, 2011

The secret way Supreme Court justices are appointed

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

Christie Blatchford isn’t a fan of the secret and convoluted way that our Supreme Court is staffed:

According to the latest serious rumour, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson are poised to make two appointments to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The two will be chosen from a secret short list of six names produced by an all-party selection committee which whittled down a bigger secret list (given to them by the Justice Minister after his officials mysteriously came up with what is believed to have been 12 names) and only after consultation with unnamed officials from provincial law societies and law schools and unnamed senior judges.

[. . .]

The lack of openness is a particular concern with the Supreme Court, which, as has been evident recently, and even in its current ostensibly non-activist form, is plenty activist about telling government when it is wrong.

I refer of course to the Insite decision, which effectively told the federal government, particularly the former health minister Tony Clement, that its policy against this particular supervised injection site was arbitrary, ill-conceived and violated drug users’ rights to “life, liberty and security of the person” as defined by the Charter of Rights.

As it happens, in the end I reluctantly concurred with the result (that Insite stays open), but there’s no getting away from the bottom line that a group of unelected judges over-ruled the elected government and effectively legislated policy, albeit in a specific case.

[. . .]

Canadians are comforted by the fact ours isn’t like the American system, where presidential appointments to the Supreme Court have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate (such an unseemly business, such a circus) and where, o! the horror, some lower-court judges actually run for office.

How is it better to have kings emerge from a secretive inside-baseball process, for all we know involving a witches’ chants and eye of newt, than to vote for them?

October 14, 2011

Harper back-pedals promises to adjust number of seats in the Commons

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:53

Quebec once again demonstrates that you don’t have to have many of your MPs in the government benches to “wag the dog” about representation in the House of Commons:

Fears of a Quebec backlash have delayed the Harper government’s plan to give the growing parts of Canada a larger share of seats in the House of Commons.

As a result, the changes the Tories promised in the spring campaign may not be in place in time for the 2015 election, leaving millions of voters once again underrepresented in Parliament.

The bill to change the way seats are allocated, which would give Ontario an expected 18 additional MPs, British Columbia seven and Alberta five, aims to redress the severe shortage of seats in large and growing urban areas.

But the Conservatives are still grappling with the fact that the change would disadvantage Quebec, which it continues to court despite being virtually shut out there in May. The province has 23 per cent of Canada’s population and 24 per cent of the seats in the House, but its share would fall to 22 per cent under the new formula. The NDP, which achieved a breakthrough there in the election, and many Quebec politicians vehemently oppose the plan.

July 6, 2011

That lack of historical perspective, again

Filed under: Cancon, History, Humour, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

Mark Steyn pokes some fun at Tim Naumetz who managed to confuse the Vichy regime with Vimy Ridge, in an attempt to portray Stephen Harper as a history-distorting warmonger:

As Lilley points out, it was the Liberal Defence Minister John McCallum who made Vichy “a household name” in Canadian history when he confused France’s Second World War collaborationists with Canada’s greatest First World War battle: Vimy, Vichy, what’s the diff? (The Defence Minister made his error in seeking to explain an earlier confession that he’d never heard of the Dieppe Raid.) After blog-mockery from Lilley and others, Mr Naumetz and/or his somnolent editors have belatedly corrected his piece, although without acknowledging the error, never mind addressing the broader question of the cultural void in which he’s operating. I mean, it’s not even a particularly Canadian question: If you don’t know what Vichy is, it’s hard to figure out Casablanca.

[. . .]

I have no idea who “Tim Naumetz” is. (Any relation to Admiral Naumetz, whom the Bush-Cheney warmongers singlehandedly made a household name in the Pacific?) But truly he is a child of Trudeaupia. He belongs in the same category as Miles Hopper and Jason Cherniak, apparently grown men who write stuff like:

Canadians have a right to Freedom of Expression. We have that right because the Trudeau Government negotiated and passed the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Gotcha. So before 1982 Canadians had no right to Freedom of Expression? Thank you, Boy Genius. As I said of young Mr Cherniak:

One can only marvel at the near Maoist elimination of societal memory required to effect such a belief.

For these guys, Charter Day 1982 is Year Zero in Trudeaupia, and that’s that. You get a lot of that on the review pages, of course. When a critic says “This is the best sitcom since ‘Seinfeld””, all that means is “This is as far back as I remember.” But it’s the collectivization of “this is as far back as I remember” that’s so creepy about this crowd, as if they all went through the same historical vacuuming in school.

Which is presumably why it never even seems to occur to them that “this is as far back as I remember” is an inadequate argument when you’re attempting to argue that the current regime is attempting a wholesale makeover of national identity. I have no particular views on that one way or the other, but I notice that, consciously or otherwise, Mr Harper seems to have a tonal preference for pre-Trudeaupian language. For example, he welcomed Their Royal Highnesses to “our fair Dominion”. How often did that word pass Martin’s or Chrétien’s or Trudeau’s lips? I suppose Mr Naumetz would find that a bit déclassé, too, even though, in its political sense, it’s one of the few genuine Canadian contributions to the English language.

June 13, 2011

QotD: Canadian foreign policy

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Further proof of the Americanization of our politics: the journalistic elevation of the drunkard’s walk known as Stephen Harper’s foreign policy to the level of a “doctrine.” We spent the post-Gulf War nineties hearing about “the Powell doctrine”, and in 2001, Charles Krauthammer gave George W. Bush a doctrine of his own as a post 9/11 present. Today, the Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson gifts our prime minister with his very own “Harper Doctrine,” spelled out as follows:

     “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.”

I’m no foreign policy guy, and John Ibbitson has taught me more about how Canada works over the years than I like to admit. But apart from supporting Israel “four-square, without reservation” — which Harper does seem keen on — I don’t see the evidence for the rest of it. “No foreign aid funding for abortion” doesn’t seem like much of a doctrine to me. As for “aggressively asserting our sovereignty in the North” … how so?

Andrew Potter, “Canada’s foreign policy, in black and white and orange”, Maclean’s, 2011-06-13

May 12, 2011

Goar: Here’s why the poor voted Conservative

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:43

In another dispatch from an alternate universe where the Toronto Star isn’t the house newsletter for the Liberal party, Carol Goar tells poverty activists why the people they agitate for voted for Conservatives in the last election:

After being sidelined twice in the past eight months, anti-poverty campaigners need to figure out how right-wing cost-cutters connect with voters — especially low-income voters.

My soundings are limited, but a few themes keep popping up:

• People in low-income neighbourhoods are the biggest victims of the drug dealers and violent young offenders Harper is promising to lock up. They want relief from the violence they can’t escape. They want to rid their communities of the gangs that lure their children into gun-and-gang culture. Crime crackdowns make sense to them.

• What Canadians struggling to make ends meet want most is a job; not government benefits, not abstract poverty-reduction plans, certainly not charity. Harper tapped into that yearning, promising to stabilize the economy and create employment. The New Democrats, aiming to beat him at his own game, said they would cut small business taxes.

• It angers low-income voters to see secure middle-class bureaucrats getting pay hikes. Those trapped in entry-level service jobs seethe when public employees who earn far more than they ever will are rewarded simply for showing up. Those living on public assistance — employment insurance, welfare, old age security — dislike being treated with contempt by government officials. In both cases, cutting the public payroll has a lot of appeal.

Of course, her message not only won’t be heeded, it’s going to mark her as an apostate to be spurned and ridiculed by all right-thinking intellectuals — especially those in the poverty activist ranks. She may never lunch in this town again.

H/T to Elizabeth for the link.

May 7, 2011

Bring Mad Max back into cabinet?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

I admit I’m rather fond of Maxime “Mad Max” Bernier, so of course I’m in favour of bringing him back into cabinet:

Mr. Harper also needs to reach out to the inner conservative that lies dormant in the hearts of most Quebecers.

How to kill these two birds with one stone? Appoint Maxime Bernier as President of the Treasury Board.

The position is open, since incumbent Stockwell Day decided not to run in the May 2 election.

Maxime Bernier hails from Beauce, a fortress of entrepreneurship in the heart of the province. He is an efficient communicator who sticks to the message. He emphasizes fiscal conservatism and individual liberties, a stance that resonates with a core of enthusiastic supporters in the province. He preaches the entrepreneurial values that lie at the very centre of Quebec’s conservative past, but are too seldom celebrated nowadays.

May 3, 2011

Conservatives win majority, NDP break through to official opposition

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:26

A political earthquake in Canada, as the Liberal party vote collapses across the country and the separatist Bloc Quebecois vote collapses even further in Quebec. The result of division on the left is a majority for Stephen Harper’s Conservative party.

As I’m writing this post, the current numbers are:

  • Conservatives — 167 seats
  • New Democratic Party — 103 seats (historic high)
  • Liberals — 34 seats (with leader Michael Ignatieff losing his own seat)
  • Bloc Quebecois — 3 seats (below “official party status”, with leader Gilles Duceppe losing his own seat)
  • Greens — 1 seat (historic high, as party leader Elizabeth May wins the first Green seat in parliament)

As I posted in a Twitter update a few hours back, this is the same situation that allowed Liberal leader Jean Chretien to win three straight majorities: a divided opposition. This time, instead of the Progressive Conservatives fighting the Reform Party on the right, it’s the Liberal Party fighting the NDP on the left.

The test facing Jack Layton is how to manage his hugely inflated caucus in the new parliament (with new Quebec MP’s in the majority) and perhaps finding ways to keep the rump of the Liberal party willing to work with his new official opposition.

It must be a great day to be an NDP supporter, with historic gains for the party and new respect for leader Jack Layton.

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