Politics Redux

Just when I thought I was done with politics, sigh.

Well, I have to say Canadian politics are certainly not dull; I was ready to settle down for probably two years of Conservative rule and hoping that the NDP and Liberals would squeak and speak up if Harper got too "Reformish."  I was not happy that he had swaggered back into Parliament, but was willing to put up with it with the small comfort that he still had a "minority."

But, when Harper came out swinging last week using his minions to introduce his core Reform beliefs I was angry.  Not only was he ignoring the fact that only 38% of Canadians supported him, but he was acting like a bully and kicking a kid in the stomach when he was already down.  While some people believe that government is a full contact sport, I long for the days of civil discourse and disagreement; he had no intention of doing either.  So he pushed it and pushed it hard thinking that a downtrodden and bruised Liberal party would just take another licking and like it, but you can only batter a person so long until they roar back and hit you with everything they got, and this time he brought two new friends with him.

Today I watched history as Mr. Dion, Mr. Layton and Mr. Duceppe sat at a table and agreed to an accord to govern collectively until June 30 2010, possibly 2011 if the Bloc agrees to an extension.  Certainly longer then Mr. Harper would have had.  That's what you get in a Parliamentary system folks, you don't elect the person, you elect the party, and while who you have at the head of the ship may swing your vote it's all about the seats, and Mr. Harper just doesn't have them.

In essence, if Mr. Dion was as weak and ineffectual as he was portrayed then Mr. Harper should have had a landslide majority, but he didn't because people were scared of his right wing ideology and now he's paying dearly for it. I've seen peopel lash out angrily at this saying that it's not democratic, it's night right, when in reality it is the most "Canadian" way of doing things.  Too long have Canadians been mesmerised by the flashy politics south of the border with their Air Force Ones and Shiny new Presidents; they forgot that in Canada it's all about Peace, Order and Good Government...of which none Mr. Harper had accomplished.

So now it comes down to the Governor-General a woman who was appointed nearly 4 years ago who i'm sure never envisoned her role in this pivitol moment in history, but how appropriate that it is Michalle Jean; a woman who epitomises the new face of a changing Canada.  So knowing Mr. Harper he'll have a tantrum and cry and try to bully Her Excellency just like he bullied that last Parliament, but hopefully now he is quaking in his boots and realizing how much he fucked up and will just blissfully go away and let a more moderate Tory take over if he ever hopes to see the Conservatives form a majority one day...

As for the Bloc, people complain that a seperatist party bent on breaking up Canada is part of the agreement and how it's wrong and evil, yet Mr. Harper was willing to do it in 2004....please.  While I disagree with the Bloc on the Nation of Quebec, the truth is they will never have enough seats in Parliament to do any damage, and  they lean to the left like the NDP and Liberals do, and in all reality they are the elected representatives of the Canadians living in Quebec.  Even though you don't like them, you still have to respect who they've chosen to represent them.  perhaps if the Conservatives and Liberals had done their job right there wouldn't be that many of them....

Sadly though, this is how I see Canadian politics existing from now on...too many people feeling polarised because of Mr. Harper's Bush Lite approach.  So no one will be happy with a majority and minorities will continue to exist, unless you pass true electoral reform.  I welcome the Coalition Government and ask it to do it's job and truly represent the majority of Canadians.

And by 2010, I hope I can vote!

Comments

[James]

when in reality it is the most "Canadian" way of doing things

What could be more Canadian than forming a committee?

[West End Bob]

Who would have thought that the opposition parties would have the sense to FINALLY put aside their differences to rid Canada of harper and his minions?

Today is a great day, and, hopefully, next Monday will be a greater one . . . .

[Scott]

Well said!! I especially liked the bully/victim analogy. I have just a few points to add:

1. BLOC QUEBECOIS. I think that the point the Federal Reform Party (how can I call them Tories when they are utterly bereft of a Tory sense of noblesse oblige?!) is trying to make vis-à-vis the Bloc is a rhetorical red herring. We must not forget that, as you say, they are the federal representatives of La Belle Province, Quebec. Moreover, they served ably a few sessions back as Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition. Has all of Canada forgotten that?

2. HARPER 2004. What happened in 2004 was a bald grab for power. What Harper wanted in 2004 was a quasi-coalition in which his number two party would govern, supported by the number three and four parties, but with none of the latter in the cabinet. Harper, which should come as no surprise, wanted all the power for himself. Why did it not work? He struck too soon: It is not possible for a parliament to have lost confidence in a governing party when that governing party has yet to sit! Before he ran off to then Governor General Adrienne Clarkson asking her to hand him the reins of government he needed to (a) let the parliamentary session begin; (b) let the GG present the government’s agenda for the session (i.e., the Throne Speech); (c) wait until Paul Martin’s governing party had actually lost the confidence of the parliament; and (d) measured that loss of parliamentary confidence by a non-confidence vote. That is the way of the game in Canadian parliamentary politics. Mr. Harper should have asked an earlier Progressive Conservative (they really were then!) Prime Minister, Joe Clark, how this sort of stuff works. But, Harper’s thirst for power caused him to shoot his wad to soon. Today, Harper’s and his lackeys’ cries that everything that the opposition parties are trying to do is undemocratic does not lie in their mouths to say since they tried the same gambit in 2004. They’re just pissed that they failed then and it looks like the opposition may succeed against them now.

3. MODERATE TORIES. There are none. The Reform party has devoured them, led into the ring of death by their former leader, the left-at-the-alter, Peter MacKay.

4. COOPERATION. Since the 2008 election when Harper's party was returned with a “mandate” — their words, since anything less than a majority is never a “mandate” — pundit after pundit, veteran politician after veteran politician counseled him through op-ed pieces and television and radio round tables that he had to cooperate in parliament this time around, that the opposition parties would not take any more of his “my way or the highway” leadership style. Did he listen? Well, supposedly he was alleged to have issued an edict that his party members were to no longer sabotage and subvert the work of the committee system, a system his predecessor Reform Party all but destroyed during the Chretien era. Yet, then comes his finance minister’s economic statement to the House last week, which was a complete about-face to statements Harper had made while in Peru, and were completely at odds with Flaherty’s own opening lines during that economic statement in which he said that we were in the worst economic catastrophe since 1929 … and then proceeded to do nothing about it, while at the same time slitting the financial throats of the opposition parties in an attempt by the Federal Reform party to hold on to power for years to come. That is not what any of us would call “cooperation.”

5. PUBLIC SERVICE. Let’s not forget the unwarranted attack on the Canadian public service in Flaherty's economic statement. By taking away their right to strike he was, effectively, poking the caged bear with a stick. The likelihood of a PSAC strike was so low as to not register as a blip on the political radar. But hey, when one is a prisoner of one’s own ideological box, one has to go after labor every chance one gets. What of PSAC? Well, my understanding is that they just agreed to a wage increase of 6% over the next four years, which works out to 1.5% per annum, an amount that will more than be eaten up by inflation. So, in real terms, PSAC actually agreed to be paid less each year by the federal government. That is, the inflationary growth of federal tax revenues — out of which PSAC employees are paid — will grow faster than the wages of the PSAC members, which means that the government will actually save money (assuming deflationary factors do not result in negative inflation measures). Also, the PSAC contracts now negotiated meant no strikes for the period that Harper and his minions were making illegal anyway. Thus, it was mere political posturing for the sake of Harper’s great unwashed supporters.

6. STEPHANE DION, UNDEMOCRATIC? Dion’s problem is that he is not a good politician. But, he is a terrific minister. Why? Dion is a policy wonk to the nth degree, a man who gets the job he is assigned done. While he may not have what it takes to be a party leader, his task-oriented mind will serve him well from now until May, when his successor takes over. By the way, since we do not elect leaders and prime ministers in a Westminster system, there is nothing undemocratic about the new liberal leader (Dion’s replacement) becoming prime minister in May with the nation not going to the polls: Alexander Mackenzie, John Abbott, John Thompson, Mackenzie Bowell, Charles Tupper, Arthur Meighen, Louis St-Laurent, Pierre Trudeau, John Turner, Kim Campbell, and Paul Martin — to name a few — were all automatically elevated to prime minister after becoming leaders of their respective governing parties.

7. GOVERNOR GENERAL & THE PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEM. This is a parliamentary system in which it is not undemocratic for a governor general to refuse to dissolve parliament, or for a governor general to refuse to grant prorogation. To prorogue parliament would be to allow Harper to do what Byng refused to allow King to do: escape the verdict of parliament. There is no constitutional basis for prorogation in the Westminster system when the session has only just begun. Under our Constitution, the Governor General is not to bother herself with the will of the people or the sentiment of the public: this is not a nation governed by plebiscite. Constitutionally, her only concern is the will of the House of Commons. Moreover, on a similar note, should Harper attempt to pack the 20 empty seats in the Senate with a spate of appointments in his government’s dying days, the constitutional precedent in Canada is for the Governor General not to honor those appointments. (One of the wise old men in this area is constitutional expert and emeritus professor Peter H. Russell, the author of the book, “Two Cheers for Minority Government,” a book in which the author reminds us that most majorities in Canadian federal politics are “false” majorities in that, while they may have over 50% of the seats in the House, they got them with less than 50% of the popular vote. As Belinda Stronach pointed out, thank G-d Harper has only had a minority or else his socially conservative agenda would have prevailed, an agenda which he alluded to making front and center this session in a speech he gave in the Maritimes this last election.)

8. ONTARIO REFORM MAFIA. I really want to remind people that Harper, Flaherty, Clement, Harper’s Chief of Staff, Guy Giorno, et al., are the same team that either directly or indirectly played pivotal and major roles in Ontario’s Mike Harris Common Sense Revolution. This is the team that gave us Walkerton and practically bankrupted the province’s finances. Yet, Canadians chose to elevate them to running the nation’s finances, where they trotted out all of the same rhetoric to shrink the government’s share of GDP — and thereby shrink GDP — to fulfill their ideological goal of smaller government as measured by its expenditures. This means that government accounts that were in surplus when they got them, are now shrunk so small, and balanced so precisely, that they cannot weather even the mildest of economic hiccups, let alone “the worst economic catastrophe since 1929.” What was Flaherty’s first idea when the economic news started turning really bad a month or so ago: Let’s privatize federal crown agencies and sell off their capital assets (“Anyone want to buy the CN Tower?” Flaherty asked.). That was the very recipe that led to the Ontario Liberal’s coming to power to discover that, contrary to Ontario Reform Party (aka, the Ontario Tories) rhetoric, the books were so bad that there was a $5,000,000,000 deficit because of “fudged” entries — clearly violative of generally accepted accounting principles — which falsely created the vaunted Ontario balanced budget: The black ink hemorrhaged red in one reading. My point is this: Harper has squandered the surplus budgets he inherited from Paul Martin. I shudder to think what Dion will inherit on December 8 — G-d and the Governor General willing! — when the coalition gets a look at the Harper/Flaherty books. If history repeats itself, the Ontario Reform Party Mafia will have screwed us again and then the coalition’s economic stimulus will be added to the deficit Flaherty’s hiding somewhere. We may end up discovering we are worse off, but at least we won’t be in the dark about it.

Thanks boys for letting me rant. I needed that!!