Quotulatiousness

April 25, 2011

Majority in reach for Harper, if Ontario numbers hold up

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:17

The latest Nanos/Globe & Mail poll shows that the Conservatives might just be able to reach majority status if the Ontario numbers stay steady for the final week:

Nationally, the NDP is statistically tied for second place with the Liberals. But another story is emerging out of Ontario, where they are running third; the party’s surge in Quebec and other regions has not given it a similar bump in Ontario.

Pollster Nik Nanos sees this as a boon for the Tories — one that could well provide the Conservatives a route to that coveted majority.

“Talk about Jack Layton in Stornoway has actually helped the Conservatives in Ontario,” Mr. Nanos said Monday. “The Conservatives best chance to win a majority is in Ontario. If their numbers hold or start ramping up in Ontario that could be good news for the Conservatives. One of the scenarios that we could be looking at now is a squeaker of a majority government.”

Of course, the regional numbers are subject to a larger margin of error:

There is a margin of error of plus or minus 64 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, for the provincial sample.

I hope there’s a decimal place somewhere in that MoE.

April 14, 2011

Scott Feschuk is one of those “ethnic voters” for the Harper photo-op

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:38

Scott Feschuk is delighted to have the opportunity to have his photo taken with the prime minister. He’s overjoyed:

What a moment.

I never thought that I — a regular, ordinary Canadian — would get the chance to have my photo taken with the Prime Minister of Canada.

But as luck and crass political calculation would have it, he’s eager to be seen with me! All I have to do is attire myself in such a manner as to flamboyantly display my heritage, thereby rendering me a subhuman prop that Stephen Harper can exploit to woo more of my kind.

Needless to say, I’m in.

As is true of much national folklore garb, it can take quite a while to get into my ethnic costume. Each item has been carefully selected to represent a historic and sacred element relating to my suitably exotic but non-threatening culture.

Join me, won’t you, as I get dressed.

I think I can speak for all of us about our deep gratitude that this blog post is not illustrated.

It’s also nice to see that the Conservatives have not yet figured out how to avoid handing their opponents such wonderful opportunities for mockery.

Original tempest-in-an-ethnic-teapot here. 680News reported yesterday that the staffer who wrote the letter is no longer working for the candidate.

April 13, 2011

Leaders’ debate provides no significant changes

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:26

I didn’t bother watching the first debate on TV last night, as I didn’t think there would be any purpose in doing so. Lots of people seem to have felt the same way, as polling immediately after the debate showed little change in support:

It was Stephen Harper’s debate to lose — and he did not.

It was Michael Ignatieff’s debate to win — and he did not.

A poll done exclusively for QMI Agency immediately after Tuesday night’s English-language debate shows that English-speaking Canada was, by and large, unmoved by the two-hour duel among the four party leaders.

Asked who won the debate, 37% of those surveyed by Leger Marketing said Harper was the victor. About 21% said Ignatieff won.

Those numbers roughly mirror voter support in polls Leger has done before and during the election campaign.

April 11, 2011

Election bombshell in leak of Auditor General’s report?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:01

The Winnipeg Free Press has a potentially explosive article about a leak of part of the Auditor General’s report:

The Harper government misinformed Parliament to win approval for a $50-million G8 fund that lavished money on dubious projects in a Conservative riding, the auditor general has concluded.

And she suggests the process by which the funding was approved may have been illegal.

The findings are contained in the draft of a confidential report Sheila Fraser was to have tabled in Parliament on April 5. The report analyzed the $1-billion cost of staging last June’s G8 summit in Ontario cottage country and a subsequent gathering of G20 leaders in downtown Toronto.

It was put on ice when the Harper government was defeated and is not due to be released until sometime after the May 2 election. However, a Jan. 13 draft of the chapter on the G8 legacy infrastructure fund was obtained by a supporter of an opposition party and shown to The Canadian Press.

This could be the big break that the opposition parties have been waiting for: the leak is just about perfectly timed for maximum effect (just before the first debate), and the Auditor General has refused to discuss the news story or to give any interviews during the election campaign.

April 2, 2011

QotD: The nature of Harper’s “slap in the face” to Quebec

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:19

I labour over this history to place in context the astounding, even outré, comments offered by Canada’s First Separatist, Gilles Duceppe, on hearing of the proposed arrangement — which, I hasten to mention, is merely a $4.2-billion loan guarantee from Ottawa, not some massive outright subsidy. Mr. Duceppe, with a logic that can only belong to a man who gets paid to be a separatist by the government he’s trying to extinguish, called the deal “a direct attack on Quebec.”

What really bothers Mr. Duceppe and other separatists is that they want to retain Quebec’s monopoly on southbound power sales to the United States — something the Lower Churchill project, including its 1,100 km of underwater transmission cables, would threaten. “By financing the Newfoundland project, Stephen Harper has given Quebec a slap right in the face,” the BQ leader declared.

It’s one of the continuing risibilities of the Canadian federation that we cosset and pamper and pay for the separatist faction in the House of Commons, and go along with the pretense that they’re parliamentarians like any other. They are not. They displace the natural balance of the federation. They have a vested interested in seeing the parliament they attend not working. And they leap to any perceived or manufactured imperfection in our system as evidence of dark perfidy or contempt for Quebec. They warp the system. Nowhere do these observations meet with greater validation than these ludicrous comments by Duceppe on the proposed assistance to the Lower Churchill.

Rex Murphy, “Newfoundland’s three-gigawatt insult to Gilles Duceppe”, National Post, 2011-04-02

March 31, 2011

Corcoran: Harper’s family tax plan full of “shabby contradictions”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:28

I think it’d be fair to say that Terence Corcoran is not a fan of Stephen Harper’s proposed “family tax plan”:

By calling this a “family tax cut,” and playing it as a matter of tax fairness, the Conservatives have managed to gloss over the shabby contradictions it introduces into Canadian tax policy. The Tory announcement said that the United States, France and other countries allow some form of income splitting. They do, but that’s not saying much about taxation or fairness.

France has a full-blown family tax regime, in which the incomes of both spouses are blended at a tax rate that is based on a formula that includes the number of children. But so what? France has one of the highest marginal tax rates in the world, and a notoriously dysfunctional tax burden that distorts behaviour and incentives. The U.S. income-splitting regime isn’t exactly revered for its soundness, in part because it clearly discriminates against single earners or anyone not part of a married couple. Nor are children a requirement to be part of the U.S. splitting regime.

[. . .]

The Harper family tax cut, based on the debatable tax policy ideal of taxing families instead of individuals, is a misguided income-splitting scheme that demonstrates once again that the Conservatives will never, ever get around to cutting personal income tax rates. The cost of the family tax cut will come at the expense of across-the-board income tax cuts for other Canadians. To pay for the family cut, other Canadians will have to continue to pay marginal tax rates that are too high.

The family tax cut, in some ways, is just another tax expenditure, a special tax treatment aimed at fulfilling some social-policy objective. The major beneficiaries are likely to be higher-income single-earner couples with children. Everybody else is out of luck.

To pull out the old saying, “that’s a feature, not a bug” to the Conservative party faithful.

March 30, 2011

Nanos poll for CTV/Globe still shows large Tory lead

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:25

The latest election poll is from Nanos, conducted for CTV and the Globe and Mail. The numbers show a smaller lead for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, but it’s still ten percent over Michael Ignatieff and the Liberal party:

Nationally, the Conservatives are in front with 38.4 per cent. The Liberals are 10 points behind at 28.7 per cent, followed by the NDP at 19.6 per cent, the Bloc Quebecois at 9.1 per cent and the Greens at 4.1 per cent.

In comparison, a March 15 Nanos survey found the Tories at 38.6 per cent, the Liberals at 27.6 per cent, the NDP at 19.9 per cent, the Bloc at 10.1 per cent and the Greens at 3.8 per cent.

[. . .]

Pollster Nik Nanos said there’s reason for disappointment in the numbers for both the Conservatives and the Liberals.

For the Tories, it shows that so far Stephen Harper’s campaign for a majority mandate is not attracting enough support to actually win a majority of seats when Canadians vote again on May 2.

For the Liberals, Mr. Nanos noted that Michael Ignagtieff’s team might have expected its numbers to improve with the added attention that comes from a campaign, and the fact that they are now running TV ads in heavy rotation.

The Nanos numbers put the Conservatives back down in minority territory, unlike the two previous polls which indicated a majority government.

March 26, 2011

What Canada needs is an actually “conservative” party

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:44

Because right now, we’ve got so-called Conservatives wearing Liberal clothing (and Liberals pawing through the NDP’s cast-off pile). There’s no major federal party in Canada that actually pursues fiscally responsible government policies, no matter how much they may talk about the virtues of smaller government.

Shortly after his government’s defeat, Prime Minister Stephen Harper attempted to deflect focus back to Tuesday’s budget. The economy, he said, is the number one priority of Canadians and the budget was the key to the country’s economic future. Then he said: “There was nothing in the budget that the opposition could not or should not have supported.” True enough — but what does that say to Canada’s conservatives? Based on the budget, they are now called on to support a Conservative party that has presided over an extravagant full-scale national revival of big government by fiscal expansion.

Only a few days ago, it seems, Canadian politics was abuzz with the possibility of a new ideological era that favoured smaller government and lower taxes, with less waste, more discipline and a determination to cut taxes. There were signs of revolt in British Columbia, a shake-up in Calgary and reform in Toronto, where Mayor Rob Ford captured a staggering 47% of the vote in a town where The Globe and Mail is considered a right-wing propaganda sheet. Ford Nation, they called it.

There is no Harper Nation. After five-plus years in office, the Harper Conservatives have singularly failed to change the Canadian ideological landscape. Instead, Canadian politics changed the Conservatives. In power, they transformed themselves into another basely partisan party that willingly and even eagerly pandered to whatever the political three-ring circus put on display. This week’s budget, in which $2-billion in loose cash was promptly distributed to a score of special interests and political agendas, left in place a $40-billion deficit for 2010 and solidified a $100-billion increase in the national debt over five years.

There’s no threat on the right to force the Conservatives to actually live up to their talk, so they’re free to drift as far into Liberal territory as they like — and they seem to like it a lot — because small-C conservative voters have nowhere else to go.

March 23, 2011

Harper government teeters on the edge

Tasha Kheiriddin thinks this has been a deliberate trap laid by the Tories and that the opposition have tumbled right into it:

The Foyer of the House of Commons turned into a beehive on speed. Within the next hour came reports that the NDP and Liberals were moving staff into their war room. Mr. Layton, gaunt but with a glint of steel in his eyes, strode stiffly by the CBC booth, leaning on his cane, turned to a group of journalists and smiled: “Looks like an election”. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff tweeted the first slogan of the coming campaign “An out-of-touch budget from an out-of control government.”

But Mr. Ignatieff is dead wrong — on both counts. This is very much an in-control government, which played its cards brilliantly in the face of not one, but two confidence motions this week. By falling on the budget instead of the contempt of Parliament motion, the Tories escape the stigma of being the only government to ever have been found in contempt by the House. This gives the Opposition less mud to throw their way, which is helpful in light of the brewing Carson scandal, and puts the focus back on the economy, the Tories’ campaign issue of choice.

It is also a very in-touch budget — in all the ways that benefit the Conservatives. The Tories have reached out and touched most of their key voter groups: homeowners, families, seniors, the military, and rural Canadians. They ignored less promising sectors of the electorates, including Quebec, though it is likely they are saving a Quebec HST announcement for the campaign. Had they included it in the budget itself, the Bloc would have been force to support it, which would have meant no election — yet another sign that the Tories were more interested in going to the polls than getting a deal.

Lots of pundits have (correctly) called the budget a “boutique”: small but attractive lures for many of the key constituencies, so that the Tories will have lots of opportunities on the campaign trail to characterize the Liberals as “taking away” promised benefits. It may never have been intended to be implemented: it works far too well as a campaign paper.

To the despair of small-c conservatives, the budget does not address the things that matter to that market. As Kelly McParland points out, it’s really a Liberal budget in a blue wrapper:

[The Toronto Star] is a big [Liberal party] supporter. It would like nothing more than to help orchestrate a return of Liberal hegemony to Ottawa. Yet it’s having trouble finding bad things to say about the budget over which the Liberal leader is determined to force an election.

Here are Wednesday’s headlines from The Star:
Page 1: “2011 Federal Budget Highlights: A Sprinkling of Cash for Almost Everyone”
Page 6: “Budget Promises $300 Tax Credit for Family Caregiver”
Page 8: “Tories Blueprint Looks a Shade of Liberal Red”
Page 9: “Low-income Elderly to Get Supplement Boost”
Page 9: “Tories Revive Retrofit Funding”
Page 9: “Job Creation Still Key Priority in Federal Budget”

Yes, the Star managed to editorialize against the budget, arguing it “fails [the] nation’s needs,” but Finance Minister Jim Flaherty could happily stand at the Toronto GO station handing this newspaper to commuters and seeking their support.

March 22, 2011

Starting election watch now

With the opposition parties unified in their denunciations of the federal budget tabled today by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, we’re now looking at the strong possibility of a May general election:

The minority Conservative government tabled a 2011 budget Tuesday that was quickly rejected by its political opponents for falling short in helping the middle class, setting the stage for an election campaign that could begin any day.

The leaders of the Liberals, Bloc Quebecois and NDP said they could not support the budget as presently written — even though Finance Minister Jim Flaherty tried to appease the left-wing party through a series of modest, symbolic initiatives.

“We’re forced to reject the budget and we are also forced to reject a government that shows so little respect for parliamentary democracy and our democratic institutions,” said Michael Ignatieff, the Liberal Leader.

Gilles Duceppe, Bloc Quebecois Leader, said his party “can’t support what has been offered here.”

And Jack Layton, head of the NDP and viewed as the person most likely to lend the government support, said the budget fell short of NDP expectations.

I have to admit that I’m surprised that the NDP and the Liberals appear to be ready to force an election at this moment: neither party has had much of a “bounce” in recent polls from government scandals (both real and imaginary). Perhaps they’ve got something held in reserve to release during the campaign that they think will cause voters to turn away from the Tories.

Why nobody takes conservative promises too seriously

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

Today is budget day, when federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty will be introducing the Conservative budget for 2011. Unless something has suddenly changed in the government’s philosophy, don’t expect anything daring:

First and foremost, the budget should contain a plan for reducing federal spending in real terms over the next four or five years. Mr. Flaherty’s 2010 budget outlined how the federal government intended to restore balance to the federal books by 2015 by holding the line on spending increases to just over 1% a year while praying for a return to robust annual revenue increases. In fact, merely planning to hold the line on spending is never going to be enough. For one thing, the Conservatives have never proven themselves capable of pulling it off. Despite coming to power in 2006 on a message of fiscal restraint, the Tories raised federal program spending by an average of 6% in each of their first three budgets before the worldwide finance crisis of 2008. Since then, they have added $100-billion to the national debt, in large part thanks to stimulus spending of dubious worth.

According to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, as of last Friday, Canada’s debt stood at nearly $563-billion. This means the debt repayments made over the 11 years before the recession began have been wiped out, and that the federal treasury is back to where it was before the Liberals’ then-finance minister Paul Martin brought down his austerity budget in 1995.

Since the Tories took power five years ago, program spending has expanded by nearly 40% and the federal civil service has grown by nearly 20%. We’re sorry, but we just don’t trust a government with a track record like the Tories’ to be able to regain budget balance simply by holding the line on new spending.

They can promise all sorts of things, but what they seem best at doing is pretending not to be “conservative” at all.

The government may fall, as the opposition are calling for even higher spending on “universities, home care, daycare, unemployment, seniors and Quebec”. This may work to the Conservatives’ advantage as they’re (temporarily) riding high in the opinion polls, so they might be able to win a majority if an election is forced on them over this budget. Of course, the opposition can read the polls too, so they may not be as eager to throw Stephen Harper an opportunity to win an easy victory.

Update: Well, the budget was tabled in the House, the opposition parties all rejected it “as it stands”, and the prime minister has stated they will not accept any amendments. For Thursday’s performance in the Ottawa Little Theatre, the budget will get first reading, which means the first opportunity for the government to be defeated . . . which means a May general election.

March 17, 2011

Rick Mercer on “the Harper Government”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Humour, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 14:02

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 5, 2010

Police complaint filed after Tom Flanagan’s “fatwa”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:41

Consistency, people! If we condemn Islamic leaders who call for the death of people who “offend” Islam, we should also condemn Canadian political operatives who call for the assassination of Julian Assange:

Vancouver lawyer Gail Davidson filed a written complaint today (December 4) with Vancouver police and the RCMP against Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s former campaign manager, Tom Flanagan.

Davidson alleged that on a November 30 CBC television broadcast, Flanagan “counselled and/or incited the assassination of Julian Assange contrary to the Criminal Code of Canada”.

Assange is the founder of Wikileaks, which is releasing 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables.

On the Power and Politics program hosted by Evan Solomon, Flanagan said: “Well, I think [Julian] Assange should be assassinated, actually. I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something.”

I doubt that the case will go very far, and it may not be meant to: it’s communicating a message.

November 30, 2010

Stinson: Fantino ideal for Tories

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:13

Scott Stinson thinks that Julian Fantino’s victory in yesterday’s Vaughan by-election is great for the Tories’ “tough on crime” rhetoric:

Here’s what Mr. Fantino, who won a byelection on Monday to end a 22-year Liberal hold on the riding of Vaughan, had to say five years ago in response to a weekend of gun violence in Toronto, where he was chief at the time.

“People don’t like me talking about stiffer sentences,” he told the Post. “But in actual fact, so many of the people we deal with have been given but a kiss by the system, and I would say that the majority of them are all career criminals.”

Chief Fantino’s solution? A 10-year mandatory minimum sentence for gun-related crimes. Why, it’s the kind of thing that must put a twinkle in Justice Minister Rob Nicholson’s eye.

[. . .]

And it’s the stuff for which Mr. Fantino has most recently been hotly criticized — allowing two-tiered policing at Caledonia, where native occupiers were allowed to break the law indiscriminately at a disputed housing development and his Ontario Provincial Police effectively abandoned the area rather than risk confrontation — that suggests he’s used to following orders.

The Ontario government didn’t want any trouble in Caledonia, and thanks to the see-no-evil strategy employed by its police force, it has so far avoided an Oka-type battle down in Haldimand County. That this tactic saw the OPP giving passes to the same criminals for whom Mr. Fantino would typically demand harsh punishment apparently did not trouble the force’s former commissioner. He seemed OK giving them “but a kiss by the system.” He was being a team player.

For someone carrying such a “tough on crime” reputation, he has an odd view of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and other trivial matters when they’re being exercised by the citizenry. Due process? Not something he appeared to care much about during his time at the OPP.

Update: Of course, no day is complete without someone trying to encourage the Liberals to bump off Michael Ignatieff:

Itching to see last night’s federal byelection result in Vaughan blown completely out of proportion? High-profile cop defeats Liberal nobody — when will Michael Ignatieff commit ritual seppuku next to the Centennial Flame? That sort of thing? The Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson has the goods for you.

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