{"id":22562,"date":"2013-10-17T07:13:46","date_gmt":"2013-10-17T12:13:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22562"},"modified":"2013-10-17T07:13:46","modified_gmt":"2013-10-17T12:13:46","slug":"yesterdays-throne-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/10\/17\/yesterdays-throne-speech\/","title":{"rendered":"Yesterday’s throne speech"},"content":{"rendered":"

The big news from yesterday’s throne speech appears to be that there was no big news. In Maclean’s<\/em>, John Geddes<\/a> sounds underwhelmed:<\/p>\n

To my ear, the pro-consumer rhetoric is flat. The job-creation talk is slightly better, but still pretty prosaic. I think these Conservatives know what they want to say, and how they want to say it, much better when it comes to Canadian history and the Canadian military.<\/p>\n

So the opposition parties should be worried when they hear the revving of the 2017 Anniversary of Confederation engines. That\u2019s a huge political marketing opportunity. Next year\u2019s centennial of the start of World War I isn\u2019t bad either. I was surprised, however, that the Tories risked tarnishing the history-commemoration theme by linking it closely to, of all things, the Senate. \u201cThe road to 2017 is a fitting time to strengthen our institutions and democratic processes,\u201d the throne speech said, segueing awkwardly from great moments in Canadian history to the depressing present reality of Parliament\u2019s upper chamber.<\/p>\n

On the military, the throne speech hit some effectively brassy notes. For instance, touting their purchase of transport aircraft for the air force, it said: \u201cNo longer does Canada have to hitch a ride with out allies. Our serving men and women can now carry out their vital missions.\u201d That\u2019s good, straightforward material. The challenge will be sustaining that tone as the Department of National Defence moves from expanding to cutting.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Paul Wells<\/a> considers this the government’s moment to “seize Canada’s moment, and suffocate it”:<\/p>\n

In an excellent season for Canadian literature, the Prime Minister will pay personal tribute to Stephen Leacock by riding madly off in all directions.<\/p>\n

He will introduce balanced-budget legislation as reliable and airtight as his fixed-election legislation. He will sell off federal assets, if he feels like it. He will encourage foreign investment, if he likes it. He will, by state fiat, find the Franklin Expedition. He\u2019ll release a new science strategy. He\u2019ll \u201ccrack down on predatory payday lenders,\u201d something he already did once this year when he fired Nigel Wright. He\u2019ll implement the Leslie Report on moving military resources from National Defence Headquarters to someplace more useful \u2014 not because the report\u2019s ideas were self-evidently useful, but because Andrew Leslie is now in the business of giving ideas to Justin Trudeau. He\u2019ll make Malala a Canadian citizen. He will celebrate the hell<\/em> out of Canada\u2019s 150th birthday.<\/p>\n

Somewhere in there, at about the point where Tom Hanks would be starting to feel mighty thirsty if this had been a screening of Captain Phillips<\/em>, there are a few paragraphs about consumer rights. Far less than there is about the 150th birthday celebrations. And far, far less than there is about continuing to crack down on criminals, people who look like criminals, people who might be criminals, and people who might know where there are some criminals. But the PMO assiduously leaked these table scraps about consumer protections for days before the big read, and everyone played the consumer stuff up big in the pre-throne-speech stories, and the CBC spent two hours talking nonstop about the \u201cconsumer agenda\u201d after<\/em> the speech as though there had actually been one in<\/em> it. The great thing about leaking news is that you can create news where there is none<\/em>, durably, long after your ruse should have been noticed. No wonder it\u2019s so addictive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The big news from yesterday’s throne speech appears to be that there was no big news. In Maclean’s, John Geddes sounds underwhelmed: To my ear, the pro-consumer rhetoric is flat. The job-creation talk is slightly better, but still pretty prosaic. I think these Conservatives know what they want to say, and how they want to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,25,84,5],"tags":[697,458,214,258],"class_list":["post-22562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-economics","category-government","category-military","tag-budget","tag-parliament","tag-rcaf","tag-stephenharper"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5RU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22562"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22563,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22562\/revisions\/22563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}