Worth the Fee to Read It

It has been a long time between blog posts: a period in my life where my periodic depression once again got the better of me. Perhaps, however, this is a good thing: it has allowed the past few weeks, with the whole Bernier-Couillard nonsense, yet another abdication of responsibility in the voting on the final bills before the House this spring, and now the introduction of the Green Shift by the Liberals to pass without comment.

For none of them really required it, although all have received reams of commentary, and, indeed, when it comes to the Green Shift, I will enter the fray myself.

So, let’s begin at the beginning. Is the Green Shift necessary?

A societal change certainly is. It takes a particular kind of fool not to notice that, however measured, world oil production (supply) and world oil consumption (demand) teeter at a balancing point. Some believe that we have passed the point and are demanding more than the available supply, thus forcing weaker hands away from the purchasing table already. Others believe there is capacity waiting in the wings — that the Saudis can turn up the valves; that Iraq can be brought on stream quickly; etc. It’s important to note that oil isn’t a single commodity: sludge-filled oils such as Venezuela’s, the tar sands, or even what the Saudis put on the table last week require different kinds of refineries and more expense in converting them into useful products. A refinery meant for light sweet crude isn’t even given these feedstocks. Certainly the production balance is shifting to the residual sludge rather than the high quality, easy to refine product: a permanent shift, indeed, given what we know about residual deposits.

As the price rises, individual decision are made. Gas guzzlers are no longer used for daily driving; econoboxes are, instead. Or, where available and practical, transit becomes a daily option. Food choices change; so do vacation choices. In effect, the price mechanism alone is sufficient; it need not be “goosed into action” by governments.

Still, of course, there are still all those emissions. I have always supported the notion that air and water “consumption” needs to have a price: it is how pollution of the common asset is reduced (perhaps, with the appropriate incentives, nearly eliminated). Similarly, such prices — rather than treating our environment as a free good — act to create “market space” for new experiments in fuel production — something better than “food for ethanol”, which makes no sense either on a energy budget (energy in to energy potential created) or a food supply basis, one would hope. In other words, there is a reason to consider certain price mechanisms at work (and for the common assets these will probably take the form of taxes or regulations), whether one believes in the global warming theory as advanced by its supporters or not.

At this point, it becomes appropriate to ask what kind of strategy might make the most sense.

On this file the Conservative Government has been lamentably silent. Their original environmental focus on pollution was applaudable, but not followed up and that follow up communicated for understanding and acceptance. Oily the splotch and “screwing all Canadians” make for free media coverage but do nothing to advance an agenda. Here the Government is deficient; end of subject. (One could charitably hold, based on other actions, that the real position is that different provinces or regions will form their own styles of solution, suited to their own needs, in this regard, and certainly I do not think it makes sense to have both provincial and federal rules, regulations and taxes in this area, but the Prime Minister has not said this in so many words, either.)

Then there is the NDP approach, centred on cap-and-trade. Effectively, cap-and-trade systems propose to regulate the size of the market created by assigning a price to a “pollutant” — and then allow that market to arbitrate the price mechanism. (If you ever needed evidence that this issue does not turn on the old “left”/”right” categories used in the media still, this is a powerful inducement to change your mind.) The nice part of cap-and-trade is that the decision can be made in a rational fashion: to continue without a reinvestment to reduce emissions, you must ensure you have the capacity — which means paying for what was once free to you, and damaged goods to everyone. Or, you can reinvest, reduce your emissions, and benefit by the capacity you don’t have to purchase. (As an example at a personal level — and the proposed system is not a consumer-level system — for average driving distances each year, it takes more than five years to “pay for” the benefits of a hybrid vehicle in reduced fuel consumption (and emissions). If you drive less than the average, you might buy emission credits; if you drive more, the investment in the hybrid makes economic sense (since the emission credits required are reduced from the time of purchase and thus offset the higher cost of the hybrid).)

As an old Progressive Conservative, I am always on the lookout for any party speaking to those Red Tory values that are my core. The Greens come closest to this: they demonstrate, in general, quite good economic sense. Their Green Plan also has internal logic — and far less gerrymandering of the results. It is what it purports to be, and no more. I could probably extend myself to support it.

This brings us to the Liberal plan, which is, prima facie, unsupportable. It is a mish-mash of spending programmes masquerading as an environmental imperative. There is no revenue neutrality in diverting streams of funds coming in via the price put on carbon via taxation to new federal programmes, or expansions of same. Child care, for instance, has nothing to do with carbon reduction — in fact, it leads to more emissions, in that it helps maintain the two-income, two-car, suburban lifestyle a little longer.

Stéphane Dion’s plan is smoke and mirrors, one more turn of the big government crank. It is less effective than the Greens’ offering, less market-sensitive than the NDP’s. It slams itself down on provincial jurisdiction and proposes taxes on taxes every time the GST is collected. No thank you!

That this well-praised piece of tripe — loved by academics and media personalities alike — doesn’t even have any idea of what reduction targets might be expected for something that slams itself down as a permanent addition to the Canadian body politic, rides roughshod over our sovereign treaty commitments (China cannot easily be assessed for special carbon tariffs under the WTO regime, which we are both signatories to, for instance) and is, in effect, another wealth transfer scheme from the West to the East (this may be harsh, but it needs to be said), speaks volumes. It betrays the Liberal Party’s continuing view of what this country is, and their expectation that we will all just sit still and let “Big Daddy” tell us what to do.

I am no fan of the Campbell Government’s ill-thought-through carbon plans, but they are incremental in nature and can be changed. Dion’s plan is national social engineering, grandiose in conception, a blatant attempt to buy votes and a permanent degradation of the prospects of Canadians. No sensible person should give it — or the Liberals — the time of day, unless, of course, they do secretly want to be (in the words of Stephen Harper), “screwed”.

One final note: while heading out this morning I heard Bill Good’s rapid-fire phone-in on CKNW asking “if a federal election was held today, who would you vote for and why?”. (He asked this question last week for provincial politics, and got a decent split between the BC Liberals, BC NDP and BC Greens.) In the first 15 minutes of the call-in there were 20 callers — and 20 votes for “Conservative”. Not one caller mentioned the Green Shift; many mentioned their expectation that the Liberals, back in power, would steal (à la “sponsorship”) again. The first caller to offer a different opinion supported the NDP. Finally, as I was turning the car off, the first Liberal supporter showed up — and she didn’t mention the Green Shift, either. This is, of course, nowhere near scientific — but I find it interesting as a quick touchstone, given that the callers are all from the “ecotopian” Wet Coast, where greenish thinking is concentrated. Make of it what you will.

I have taken a few days off to watch the latest tempest in a teacup bring itself to a boil. That, of course, would be the swirl of controversy surrounding Maxime Bérnier, our Foreign Affairs Minister.

Gentlemen and ladies, of course, do not gossip about the private lives of others. I have nothing to say about M. Bérnier’s choice of former girl-friend. That, of course, is what ought to have been the norm.

But there is little to no danger of finding gentlemen and ladies of principle on the Opposition benches, or in the trenches of the MSM, in Canada, in 2008. To quote the last election’s Liberal tagline, “Choose your Canada”. They have — and a rather sickly and unappetising place it is, indeed, filled with cynicism from the Office of the Leader of the Official Opposition to the lowliest of hangers-on in the blogosphere (a certain group of people writing under the brand of “Canadian Cynic” comes immediately to mind).

Here’s the funny thing. At the moment, I’m not happy with the state of our nation’s Government. I’d be hard pressed to vote for its return at this juncture: I dislike the very notion of “the best out of a bad lot”. That, unfortunately, is what the Harper Government has become. It’s not enough reason to support it.

On the other hand, the behaviour of the Opposition since last fall has absolutely destroyed any chance at all that I would support the Liberals in the next election. This is not a matter of the leader of that party at all. All Liberals wear the badge of shame they themselves have earned by threatening elections and then abstaining on votes, up to and probably including today’s NDP non-confidence motion (the last Opposition-led one before the House rises for the summer session). Meanwhile the Nation’s business, which could have been discussing matters of substance, has been hijacked for a steady diet of innuendo, slime, reputation-destroying perilously close to either libel or slander most of the time: in other words, a complete and utter failure to attend to their purpose in being MPs. “A Government in Waiting”? That is what an Opposition is supposed to be.

These Liberal MPs — along with their cousins dans la dépravation in the Bloc — are anything but. I am utterly and completely ashamed that my own riding’s MP, the now dishonourable Joyce Murray, has done nothing since scratching out her by-election win in March, but add to the chorus of braying asses.

A strange day, indeed, when one looks to see Parliamentarians and finds them in the New Democrat benches, but there you are.

I do not excuse the Conservatives. Almost every Canadian with a Conservative MP has been as ill-served as those with a Liberal MP. Where are the matters of substance from the Government benches? Oh, yes … message controlled out of existence.

I look at the Harper Government’s record and am generally in favour of it. (I neither expect perfection — my views are just one amongst many and the Governing party is a big tent with many strains of political opinion — nor demand it. Show me a party closer to my views and I’ll give it a good hard look. Until then, I’m satisfied with the one that comes closest, most of the time.)

I look at the behaviour of the Government and consider them little better than Liberals, when it comes to being quality MPs. Committee chairs who undo meetings, repetition of the same point day after day instead of a quiet “that has already been asked and answered, Mr. Speaker” — for heaven’s sake, you can defend your position without descending to their vitriolic and bombastic level! — local voices stilled.

The Prime Minister’s Cabinet might well have been filled in 2006 with Ministers who lacked experience in Government — by 2008 they ought to be competent. Centralisation in the PMO has ensured they are not. Failing to build a viable bench of both party and policy leadership is a severe failing of this Prime Minister.

Yet the indignation continues, on both sides. It is strongly rumoured, for instance, that Stéphane Dion will make a carbon tax similar in intent to the Gordon Campbell carbon tax in BC a lynch-pin of his policy platform. (I shall save, for another day, my views on the whole carbon tax issue.) Nevertheless the attack guns are trained on this, with hyperbolic (and thus unbelievable claims) even before the policy statement is made.

This simply destroys Conservative credibility — what little was left, that is, after a do-nothing record laid down by Baird even on matters championed by this Government itself — even further. There are good reasons to question a carbon tax as a vehicle in a northern climate, especially one with a surfeit of geography to be traversed, and an urban planning model best described as “let’s sprawl, baby, ’cause energy will be cheap forever!”. When Garth Turner, for instance, realises that the problem with the housing bubble in his riding of Halton is as much driven by Halton’s need to drive everywhere — and thus house prices in Halton will collapse as energy costs rise, carbon tax or not — and that there is little to be done other than recognise the malinvestment and to salvage what can be salvaged from it, instead of crying out for “relief” on his blog, we’ll actually see some reality enter the situation.

But no, there are points to be made, and that takes precedence over sound policy, honest debate about contentious approaches, respect for the other party even in disagreement — all required elements to approach the truth of hard matters and gain a consensus that supports the course of action taken.

There was a time, not long ago, when the House would be raucous, and then members would cross over the lines to meet up and head off for a drink and dinner together. They were Parliamentarians first, and partisans second.

There was a time, not long ago, when policies were debated and a national consensus allowed to build. The citizens were respected first and not treated (are you listening, purveyors of Victory Funds and “oh, we’re under threat” letters such as Dr. Gerstein’s) as simply cash cows to be milked and X-markers once in a while.

The modern Conservative Party has given up on speaking to the electorate as adults. Paradoxically, it is the NDP and Green parties that hold onto a small vestige of that. (The Liberals, of course, adopted a permanent sneer toward the House and the citizens with Trudeau, never to lose it again.) Now we have — as I have oftimes said — two Liberal parties, for neo-cons are simply neo-liberals in disguise.

The indignation in the House and in the news is manufactured. The indignation of the electorate, on the other hand, will be real. It is as yet small. It threatens an earthquake if you keep going this way.

Whether that earthquake tears this Dominion apart, in a righteous anger at the very idea of Ottawa, or whether it simply leads to the sudden promotion, to Government, of one of the perennial also-rans, remains to be seen.

The odour of decay wafts gently on the spring breezes these days from the manure mound that Parliament has become. Yet another week of “will they or won’t they?” politics, as the Liberals hem and haw, posture and pose, stamp their feet and consider whether now is the optimal time for them. Buttressed by the latest Nanos poll (which everyone trusts because, after all, it is Nanos who got the last two elections right), we may see the government fall. Or not, as the case may be.

I have been thinking about what it would all mean to go to the polls now. Who, pray tell, is there to vote for?

Politics in a Parliamentary system depends on mutual respect. The players may and will disagree as to policy. They may even huff and puff in feigned indignation from time to time. (It was a horrible move, to put cameras and microphones into the Commons; it converted debate into theatre, and sacrificed the calm and the constructive to the farce of playing up. Good-bye reasoning; hello sound bite.) But Members should respect each other. They should see each other as the head-and-tails of the same coin.

This they no longer do. We are all impoverished for it.

Afraid of “eruptions”, Stephen Harper centralised and controlled his Conservative benches, and remained on an election footing even before accepting the Queen’s Mandate in 2006. Since then the difference between reality and electioneering has been lost (I shudder to think he might mean the words that his Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries utter in the house; that he might well believe the rhetoric as reality). With it, no new platform, no new directions have been taken on.

What the Harper legacy leaves me with is the conviction that a Conservative Government will squander this country just as the Liberals have done and would do again. How else does one see a failure to clean up the cesspool of programmes left from the “something-for-everyone” Chrétien-Martin years? How else does one see the sloshing of money at potential votes? How else does one see the loud rhetoric and the timid actions?

I cringe every time I see someone refer to the Harper Conservatives as Tories, for they are anything but.

But the Liberals do not comfort, either. Picturing Stéphane Dion in power is akin to picturing Joe Clark’s worst day in office as the best we will see. Behind the scenes, it will be as when the Don is dying, and the subordinates are carving out their own turf, preparing for the internecine war to come and grabbing as much as they can on the way. Is it cruel to compare the Liberal Party’s grandees to pseudo-Mafiosi? It is, and yet there is truth in it. For buying the Dion party means buying the Dion team: who on earth wants a rerun of Goodale, Coderre, and the like? Who wants to see a Cabinet riven by the Ignatieff-Rae manoeuvring? None of that lot should be allowed near the levers of power.

There is no reason to desire (nor expect) a Layton/NDP breakthrough or a May/Green arrival. Once again this election will come down to the main two parties. Perhaps, had either minor party leader actually been a Parliamentarian and a calm public debater we would see them differently, but shrill and loud is just more of the same. I can get crud from Harper and Dion; I don’t need more of it assaulting me from the others.

(The Bloc does not, of course, run outside Québec. The maggots run over the decayed corpse of that party. It has gone from raison d’être to raison de pension. As with the rest of the country, it has its voters who now vote for it reflexively, from habit, and without care.)

We used to have the ability to consciously vote “none of the above” in this country, and that is what the system needs: formal abstentions at the ballot box. Alas, party interests wiped out this option, and legislation made promoting it when it matters — during a campaign — illegal. Now our option is to simply not vote, or to go and spoil the ballot.

I do hope we are at least offered a decent and honourable candidate in my riding, someone I can vote for as an individual. Goodness knows, from her first day in the House, my new MP, Joyce Murray, demonstrated she’s not it, as she joined the cackle and disparage brigade in her maiden appearance. But on a party basis, a pox on all their houses; let them be anathema!

The long dying of the country’s politics will continue.

The past week has been a feast, if one prefers to feast on putrefaction in its many forms. We are faced with a veritable cornucopia these days of scandale du jour, where no ancient videotape from a party, no innuendo on the order of the pseudo-Marxian “have you stopped beating your wife — answer yes or no” can be passed up. I almost expect to actually see the Opposition in their seats in the House of Commons, shoes off, ready to bang them on the desks to the tune of one or another of the Liberal Party’s chefs dans l’attente chanting “We will bury you”, in direct appreciation of Ники́та Серге́евич Хрущёв, a historically accurate symbol of an institution in terminal decline, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing more or less than the emptiness at their own core.

I do note “Leaders in waiting” rather than “Leader”, of course, for it is a common conceit amongst certain circles in the MSM and in and around the Liberal Party that we have not yet seen le vrai Dion emerge. Let us be — what the braying Honourable Members are not — charitable and fair. If he is yet to emerge and be made welcome by Canadians, then surely he is a Leader in waiting, hien? (As for those who surround him, at his seat opposite the Prime Minister, that they remain, in the minds of many, “the next Leader in Waiting” need not be further dissected. It is so, and all know it.)

Unlike other things we do not know about this band of snarling scandal-mongers, worthy of the penny yellow press of over a century ago operating on the premise, attributed to Hearst, of “providing the war”. For this has been the Commons and the state of public political discourse in this fair land from the time leaves began to fall from the trees last fall to today, when we begin at last to hope that winter’s grip is loosened enough for it to begone for another year. They care not, actually, for any of the so-called scandals, be it Schreiber, Lukiwski, Cadman or any of the other trial balloons floated across the aisle on a wave of outrage feigned solely for the eye of the cameras.

For the lesson of 2005 has yet to be learned by these stalwart mouths that roar, these Little Fenwickians, “Little” as they do not have any cause célèbre as grave as the destruction of an ages-old marque, but merely sit, resentful that they are not in power.

2005, of course, was the year that the Liberal Party discovered that the poisoned chalice left it by its ousted leader, former Prime Minister Chrétien, in the form of the sponsorship programme kickbacks and payments were not going to slip quietly into the good night, thence, as with the thing the cat threw up, to be buried, but instead would remain as public evidence of the utter contempt shown for the Canadian people by their more-often-than-not Governing Party. What Jane Stewart in HRDC, Chrétien’s own hand in the remodelling of resort facilities in Shawinigan, the never-ending expenditures of the long gun registry, the ever-growing backlogs in Immigration, the decay of the Canadian Armed Forces, the sheer and utter waste of the Innovation Agenda, and so on, couldn’t do, sponsorship did. It was the scandal that stuck in the public imagination.

Vote buying, influence peddling and funds illegally moved into the hands of a political party from Government coffers — brown manila envelopes stuffed with cash over expensive meals may not quite have the apparent cachet of luxury attaché cases filled with money, but handing money to the party as opposed to for services to be rendered is clear enough for all that — these are things we as citizens understood, and found the purveyors of such behaviour wanting.

Alas, the lesson in the Liberal Party was that scandal can bring down a government, and the Canadian people will reward such behaviour by transferring their vote and allegiance to those who do the deed. Pity that wasn’t the lesson of the Sponsorship issue and subsequent Gomery Report — that lesson was “don’t steal from the taxpayer”. Still, dumbfounded at having had their luck at escaping political justice run out, the party’s MPs sit on the Opposition benches, not to work, but to muckrake.

It is not my place to suggest, even for a minute, that they are working purely from smoke, mirrors and a sense of fantasy. We have seen Karlheinz Schreiber testify, ever attempting to weasel his way along for just one more day. We wonder at former Prime Minister Mulroney’s poor judgement in taking up with the man, and even more at his own lacunae, starting with apparently doing no work for his fees and taking years to report them for tax purposes. We have seen the author of Like A Rock: The Chuck Cadman Story, Tom Zytaruk, bob and weave his way between the Scylla of publicity to promote sales and the Charybdis of softening his initial claims, until little is left but the clouding of a honoured dead MP’s memory.

This is, after all, a set of leather-lunged screamers who are dissatisfied with a to-the-point apology made directly and in detail demonstrating full understanding of what was wrong, not trying to evade by saying “times were different then”, and made to many different audiences. It simply would not do to accept, after all — for then there would be no possibility of a story. That the Prime Minister has stood by Lukiwski after his public abasement shows the measure of the Prime Minister, a measure not seen in this past year across the aisle.

Politics, as it has been noted many times, is a blood sport, and a certain amount of attempted blood-letting by the Opposition upon the Government is to be expected. For this Opposition, however, it is all that is of interest. They have very little else — other than the sound of one hand clapping as their names are called during a Division — to stand on or for, after all.

Not only is their reliance on destructive behaviour a result of their certainty in the lesson of 2005 — the lesson they got wrong — but it is craven twice-over, once for it being the tactics of a bully, and once for the Liberals’ refusal to actually stand for something.

What, pray tell, is the Liberal Agenda? There is no real policy — oh, a few scraps of mindless generalities here and there, but no real policy effort as yet seen in public. Some would, of course, say that it would be “foolish to reveal it too soon”. Perhaps, as a campaign tactic, that might be so. But if they have a policy, and are not revealing it, then couldn’t one say the Liberals are the one with the “hidden agenda”? After all, when he was the Leader of the Opposition, Stephen Harper (who was repeatedly then and to this day accused of “having a hidden agenda”) brought forward policy planks. In effect, even before the Martin Government finally toppled into its long-prepared grave — it had, by that point, been over half a year since Martin’s national television appearance pleading to stay on in the job he felt he was entitled to — Canadians had been repeatedly told what turning to the Conservatives would mean.

Cowards in the bullying tactics, certain that eventually something will stick — if this is leadership, then the Liberals have none. Dion, Ignatieff, Rae (and more, one presumes): these are mere placeholders. A politician who won’t risk saying what he or she stands for and would do in office is, simply, a loser.

Mud, it appears, may not stick on its targets. It does seems to affix itself fully to those who throw it.

Yesterday, in the first part of this article, we dealt with the Greens, NDP and Bloc. Today, let’s turn to the Liberals; tomorrow, the Conservatives.

Liberals Cannot Be Led By Reason Alone

In a front-page story this morning, The Globe and Mail discusses the difficulties the Liberals are facing in their Québec wing. “[Dion] has no instinct”, as Liza Frulla, the former Heritage Minister, put it. This may well be true — certainly Stéphane Dion’s shifts between threat, bluster and invective followed by abstentious quiet, his failures in Outremont and Desenthé-Missinippi-Churchill River with appointed candidates, and the general disarray portrayed by various caucus members in their press quotes and blogs over the last fifteen months do suggest a person who is trying, but not succeeding, at marshalling his party and preparing for the challenges of a general election. There are many — including Dion himself — who hold to the thought of “once Canadians get to know him, they will support him”. Alas, after all this time, there is the slight possibility that we have come to know him.

There is little question in my mind but that Dion is an intelligent man. Not only that, but his intelligence is that of academic success and reasoned argument. Those who believe we still need to get to know him base this, I believe, in large measure upon someone who no doubt shines in small settings, able to carry a scintillating conversation over dinner, or (en français) engage in the cut-and-riposte of laying out a position, then dealing with the questions that follow.

Some of the comments heard from Dion over this time — about having a team, listening to caucus and advisors, etc. — are, I believe, genuine. He does expect a reasoned discussion, and, through the processes of reason, a consensus to emerge, which all will then support.

Alas, this is politics, and, unlike another former professor turned cabinet minister before him, Pierre Trudeau, Dion lacks the capability to handle the other sides of politics: the reaching out and mobilising a crowd, the balance between passion about an issue and shrillness about it (in this, he shares the harsh light that also falls on Elizabeth May), and a sense of how to make people work with him and for him, especially people with their own power base, their own agendas and their own ambitions. (Effectively it was only John Turner whom Trudeau could not keep on side [what is it with Finance Ministers and unbridled ambition coupled with a sense of entitlement, whether this be Turner-Trudeau, Martin-Chrétien or Brown-Blair?].)

Whatever is missing remains missing, and is now unlikely to be discovered and put to work.

This says that it is not Dion’s fractured English that is at fault, or the forces of other leadership candidates refusing to do their jobs (in Québec, in particular) or any of the other common thoughts about him. He has, of course, run himself up the flagpole to flutter in the breeze by the policy of election avoidance followed under his leadership, especially in 2008, but most of that is from his attempts to act indignant in Question Period. Poseurs for the cameras are easily exposed in the harsh light of the kleigs as ingenuine: we sense that, whatever Dion is, this is simply an act.

And a bad one, for Dion (unlike Trudeau, or his mentor Chrétien) is unable to suspend his critical thinking and play the role with the wholeness needed to succeed. If we found ourselves wondering at Paul Martin’s use of the “Harper wants troops in Canadian cities” television spot during the 2006 election, we at least could blame his team for it trying to respond to their leader’s need to hold power; Chrétien we would have believed instantly as having designed the spot. But for Dion, we would wonder if it was just another case of the last advisor through the door having bent him in a new direction. This is what a tin ear for political life brings you.

Whether the Liberals decide to bite the bullet and dump Dion now to present a new leader for a 2009 election, or whether they go with him into the next election and, from the Opposition benches again, go through Leadership II afterward, is somewhat irrelevant, for the time has run out. A putsch — and there is little else to call it — would create even deeper fractures in a party already rent by nearly four decades of them. Lose with the new leader, lose with the existing one, the result will no doubt be the same. For the other missing link in Liberal fortunes is the one we might well have expected Dion to have done something about: policy.

Over the years, the Liberal Party has been quite proud of its “big tent”, able to attract both Progressive Conservatives, the odd Reform/Canadian Alliance soul, and New Democrats to join them. There is nothing particularly wrong with the notion of a party able to attract people from other parties: what difference is there, really, between you deciding to give up your existing party membership and take out membership in another, and an MP crossing the floor, save only that your act does not appear in television footage and in the front section of the newspaper as a result? But, starting with Trudeau, policy began to take a back seat. Other initiatives were responses; all that mattered was his constitutional obsession. Turner didn’t have a clear policy, until the opportunity to oppose the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement handed him one: once the 1988 election was lost, the party was again effectively policy-less. The Chrétien-era “Red Books” (aside from mostly being ignored once the election was over) were more policy grab-bags — a little of this, a dash of that — than anything focused and coherent, and the thing we remember his governments most for now (other than scandalous behaviour far beyond anything Dion and company have attempted to dredge up in this Parliament) is curing us of deficit spending and eating into the interest burden of the accumulated national debt, something that was forced on him and did not come out of the much-bally-hooed Livre Rouge. Martin, in turn, had no clear policy — instead, he had hundreds of them, all equally vital and important: in other words, still dipping into the pay-off and grab-bag method, but with no restraint on his words.

The Liberals, in other words, have fallen out of the habit of needing policy. At their Montréal Convention in 2006, they ignored the whole question and shunted it off the agenda: there was a leader to elect! In Liberal thinking, we will respond to the leader, and accept whatever dross and floss he pulls out of his bag of tricks.

This, apparently, is something Dion cannot do. He commissioned, instead, a proper policy review, one that has produced less than nothing in the public eye. As a result, his party is defined by a vacuum: all we have to work with is the acting we see in Question Period.

It is the combination of the core Liberal vote — those people for whom a party choice is not a question (all parties have such a core: where it is distributed across the country defines likely lower bounds for seats if all else fails) — and those who so despise Stephen Harper that Stéphane Dion could eviscerate live kittens at his desk in the Commons and it would not sway them to reconsider their support that hold Liberal polling numbers up today, and it is the complete and utter lack of a coherent vision and policy for consideration that keeps them low.

It takes more than reason to do this. People who opposed Dion’s leadership bid will not fully come on side simply in the name of party unity (this is why even amongst the Liberal blogging community, Jason Cherniak’s exhortations on Dion’s behalf for everyone to sit down, shut up and get on the team are laughed at and pooh-poohed). They commit their hearts to the new leader because the new leader sells them on his future vision.

Alas, “Dion is not a Salesman”. The Liberals are stuck. With it, Canadians are stuck, for a vibrant and coherent Opposition with a positive vision of their own makes for better government, too.

Tomorrow: a look at the Conservatives (who have their own set of issues).

It’s been a very interesting night, actually, watching the by-election returns come in. If nothing else, tonight’s returns show just how isolated Toronto has become from the rest of the country — and, with it, the ideas of the Toronto élites in the various parties.

Toronto Centre and Willowdale were never, of course, in doubt: a political earthquake of extreme proportions would have been required to shake these loose from not only the grip of the laurels of incumbency being passed on to two new candidates (both of whom had received great quantities of news coverage not that long ago as the Liberal leadership campaign carried on). Indeed, both have (as of the 20:39 PT reading from the Elections Canada website) achieved a 59% true majority from the electors — slightly less than one in four — who turned out today. This puts two more possible alternatives to Dion on the Liberal benches for all to see, each and every day in Question Period: I do wonder why my mind’s eye keeps seeing Gaius Julius surrounded by his friends. Probably clapping as the knife goes in, too.

Desnethé-Missinippi-Churchill River, where Stéphane Dion’s hand-picked candidate, Joan Beatty, was expected to have a tough go of it tonight, but the battle was expected to be close for all of that. Nevertheless, this riding voted consistently, from poll to poll, to elect the Conservative, Rob Clarke. It would, in point of fact, have taken just about every NDP vote to have gone to the Liberal (I do recall more than one news article and blog post in the past few days who thought it would be a Liberal-NDP battle here!) to close the gap. (It may well be that that outcome does eventually come about — a Liberal & NDP merger, not unlike the Canadian Alliance & Progressive Conservative merger that gave us today’s Conservatives. Goodness knows there are enough former New Democrats already on the Liberal benches.)

“DMCR”, as one Maclean’s blogger put it, has another distinction: the highest turnout of the four by-elections. Still only 25%, but solidly so, not under the mark as in the Toronto ridings — or in Vancouver.

Which brings me to Vancouver Quadra, still a battleground at the time of writing (there are still 64 of the 237 polls to report, and although the Liberal Joyce Murray has been ahead often the lead has see-sawed). I am expecting (but not personally happy about) Murray to win it. However, Stephen Owen’s +20% legacy has been dissolved. The next go around in this riding should be more interesting, indeed. The Greens are coming out of Quadra with 15% as well — they and the NDP have traded the also-ran laurels all night long — and I suspect this represents the future general election in BC, at least along the coast: a four way battle.

The Aftermath

If there is a big loser tonight it is Jack Layton and the NDP. Across three of the four ridings (Toronto Centre, Desenthé-Missinippi-Churchill River and Vancouver Quadra) the party is in the 13-17% range, not enough to lead to more seats. True, all four of these ridings were Liberal pre-tonight, but if the NDP’s message — with its anti-war core and NDP opposition exercised in the Commons (no abstentions amongst the abstentious, so to speak) can’t make headway in a by-election, where both the prior incumbents and the current government could be sent a message, then they are unlikely to do so in a general campaign. The party has come to be seen as mostly “against”; it is going to need to be known as being “for” a coherent, integrated programme, or that merger with the Liberals is going to looking more and more appropriate as time goes on.

Our Opposition Leader, Stéphane Dion, also has failed to reinforce his position tonight, and may in fact have weakened it substantially. Four-for-four was — as with those who run websites and data centres — the price of admission. There will be those who link DMCR to Outremont and ask what other losses wait in the wings. The tussle amongst sitting MPs over whether to try and trigger an election or continue to avoid losing by winning a non-confidence measure will continue. No doubt the morrow will bring new analysis — perhaps first and foremost from the recently-installed President of the Central Region of the Liberal Party of Canada (Ontario) — but things are at a point with Dion where his supporters end up being countered not only by those who do not support the Liberal Party, but by those who do (and fear for it). In other words, the storm of sound and fury, signifying little to nothing, we have lived through for weeks will continue.

On the other hand, the Greens can see decent results in Toronto Centre (where they came second) and in Vancouver Quadra (where Dan Grice put on a solid showing). Both these results earn the party funding support for the next battle, having 13-15% of the total vote: this puts them on a part with the NDP. (The other two ridings showed a more standard breakdown of support.)

Finally, the Conservatives. Not only does Stephen Harper come out of tonight with a new MP on the Government benches, but it is clear that none of the attempts to plaster his party with goo — Schreiber, Cadman, etc. — have done any real damage. Neither have any of the decried “self-inflicted wounds”: income trusts, denial of the RESP tax change, etc. Whatever reservations may keep Harper from achieving a majority, he is also not losing ground. This is particularly important when we remember that by-elections give voters a safe place to “spank the government”. We come out of tonight with a government unspanked. Food for thought should the government fall in the near future.

The Anomaly That is Toronto

I close this piece by returning momentarily to the city of my birth, Toronto. There should now be little question but that Toronto has a political culture that is atypical. It was, as Ontarians well know, Toronto that has thrown up the “Progressive” end of Progressive Conservativism, both provincially and federally. Yes, there are other places that live and breathe a Liberal-NDP axis: Ottawa, West Island Montréal, the City of Vancouver. Toronto, however, exemplifies this. Couple that with the fact that many of the most influential Liberal bloggers are either transplants to Toronto, native Torontonians, or located just outside it in Southern Ontario, and that most of the English-language main stream media in the country is located there, and the disproportionate influence of the Toronto political calculus on national affairs starts to be seen.

But that influence wanes the closer the Liberal Party as elected comes to be the Toronto & District party. Tonight’s results move the Liberals a little closer to that: winning Vancouver Quadra, a seat where, from 1988 to 2006 inclusive, a box painted red with an “L” on it could have been elected with a 10%+ margin (and actual candidates did significantly better), by the less than 4% Joyce Murray is tracking to, suggests that urban Vancouver may be more susceptible to new types of races (against the Conservatives here; against the NDP elsewhere; every riding facing a growing Green challenge). The future, in other words, is changing: eventually, Toronto — even with its gerrymandered riding boundaries that split opposing party strengths to allow Liberals to sneak through (for Toronto is not monolithic) — will come to change, too.

For Toronto worships at the twin troughs of power and money, and eventually goes where these can be found. When they do, the Liberals as we know them are toast.

So here’s the real question from tonight: can the NDP (or the Greens) figure out how to compete successfully enough to tip the balance and make the residual Liberals the supplicants, when the time comes?

On this question the nation’s political future rests.

Update @ 21.41 PT: Vancouver Quadra takes the laurels for largest turnout and the gap between the Liberal Murray and the Conservative Meredith is closing. Nothing like a little “end of the night” (there are only 34 polls still to report) excitement, although I’m not expecting an upset here — just an extremely close result. 

Another Federal Budget has been brought down, and I must confess the whole thing was boring in the extreme. We might, of course, have had at least a frisson of excitement as to whether the Opposition would manage to combine forces and precipitate an election, but as we know Stéphane Dion, Follower of the Official Opposition, signalled his latest backing down from the electoral abyss even before the Finance Minister rose in the House. So we are left with a limp rag of a budget and a limp rag of an Opposition: hardly inspiring, although it does leave Opening Day free and clear on the horizon to enjoy another year of baseball.

I’m not about to whinge about the Liberals. They are as entitled as anyone to make fools of themselves in public, and I must say that I think, along with Jeff Jadras of A BCer in TO and many other Liberal bloggers, that this is one opportunity missed too many. How, really, can anyone take any bluff or bluster out of the mouths of the chicken pen seriously after this? Why, indeed, even listen to it, other than habit? Steve V of Far and Wide this morning asks the key question, which is that if this was about simple lack of readiness to compete then why not just admit it and head onward to mid-October 2009, when the fixed election date comes up, and no more snorting and pawing the ground only to tuck tails between legs one more time. When even the columnists of the Liberal Party’s House Organ, the Toronto Star, start questioning why we should care, as reported in Blogging a Dead Horse, I think the answer is clear: we shouldn’t.

Yet there were reasons for disappointment with this budget, and they’re not the ones laid out by Garth Turner. From the point of view of the twenty-first century, as opposed to the twentieth, not dumping money on dying industrial models is a good thing. Yes, in Ontario times are tough. All the money that’s been sloshed at the extended automobile industry over decades, however, hasn’t protected that economy, those jobs or the affected families. The industry - as with any industry - is prepared to take any hand-out on offer, and then do exactly what it was going to anyway. Border constraints imposed by the US Department of Homeland Security make just in time inventory processes that cross the border inefficient and unpredictable. We will end up with other marques prospering that source parts not made in Canada from outside North America, and American marques dying unless there are exceptional reasons to deal with that border. Slopping money is simply filling up the pig-trough and not solving the real problem - which is essentially beyond a Canadian solution in any case.

It’s what isn’t being done by what is ostensibly a Conservative government that bothers me, as I suspect it bothers Aaron Wudrick of the Wudrick Blog when he comments on just how “Liberal” our Conservative Government is. Oh, well, as Joanne of Blue Like You points out, there are political implications, and perhaps we should be satisfied with the opportunity for yet more self-immolation on the Red(-faced) Team’s side of the aisle. But I am not.

There is so much slop in the system already - programmes for every two-bit cause known to mankind and every supplicant under the sun, delivered through Industry Canada, the regional economic expansion arms (ACOA, WD and the rest of the handout brigade), dribbles from Heritage, pork pie from HRSDC, a bit of IRAP money from the NRC here and some CANARIE droppings there (I defy you to find the year or two you’ll need to sort through the many layers of “beg and receive” set up over the years by previous governments) - and really, after two years in office, there is little excuse for this continuing. Then, too, the whinge from the more hawk-like Liberals is that “we left you guys a whopping surplus and you’ve handed it out all over the map, so now you get to flirt with the danger of not breaking even”. True enough, but the problem isn’t with the GST reductions, the income tax changes, the new tax saving account, or the child care money. The problem is with all the other new programme spending on top of all the existing programmes, most of which have carried on blindly and blithely spreading their steaming droppings onto the Canadian economy, distorting it. Why, indeed, would anyone in VC land actually think about the size of investment needed to make the company they’re interested in successful when they know there are all those programmes out there to pick up their slack? Why would managers care to invest in their own business’s future out of earnings, or worry about whether their products have a viable market, when there’s all that money slopping around to go prop things up, or build a new product that can attract the cash but has no proven market applicability?

All this largesse, in other words, has created a Canadian entrepreneurship good at complaining, good at buck-passing, and good at form-filling and report writing, but not one that cares to get down and do the hard work of scratching out a living the old fashioned way: earning it.

A Conservative government ought to be expected to, at the very least, challenge the 400,000+ civil serpents who are busy running this national slush account in its many forms. If they wanted to keep certain types of programme - perhaps they, too, have some sort of Chrétienite “Innovation Agenda” - then at least they could clean them up, rationalise them, sweep away the programmes hanging on for the last 1% of the job they originally were specified to carry out that will never finish, and the like. But no: we just add to the pile, and the Canadian taxpayer and productive business person groans under the load.

After all, if Conservatives won’t bring fiscal order to government, who will? The “never met a handout for Québec I didn’t like” Bloc? The “there’s airtime and the pretense of relevance in asking for money” New Democrats? The “none of you are doing enough” Greens? Or the “hey, you’re being Liberal enough for us” Liberals? Don’t make me laugh.

But we’re stuck, aren’t we? It’s much more fun to hand it out than to clean it up, and it always will be. The notion that taxes are an impost (and hence an imposition) on taxpayers is long dead: the question is now put as “how much will taxpayers be left with” as opposed to “how little should we take”. The notion that programmes should have a defined end-point and then be shut down is long gone in favour of perfection, “finishing the job” (which is never done, and always expanding). We as a nation will be sucked dry - although what’s been done to this point is precisely why Ontario is dying, Québec and the Atlantic provinces died and the West - the country’s last bastion of productivity and growth - is at risk.

It’s the being stuck that made Flaherty’s budget yesterday a yawner, not the items in it.