Do-nothing Tories take a bold stand in favour of doing-nothing

Aaron Wherry follows-up on the New Democrats' call for a commission to study increasing violence in sport. He notes the un-surprising Conservative un-response.

"A spokesperson for Sports Minister Gary Lunn said it is up to the various leagues to police themselves. ”We feel it’s a question best left to the leagues and the role of the federal government is to support players and athletes in their development and to support their coaches to make a good training environment for youth,” press secretary Vanessa Schneider said."

So let's break it down for hockey moms and dads: not only do the Harper's Conservatives not share your concern about Manhunt III-levels of violence on the same ice as your 7 year-old, but they also plan to make you pay more for the privilege of agonizing over it through their HST on rec hockey fees.

And this is supposed to be Harper's base?

A swing and a miss for Stephen Taylor

Once again, careless Aerosmith fans are struggling to understand the latest content emanating from Stephen Taylor’s primordial blog.

Featured is a Dion-quality video of New Democrat MP Nathan Cullen being interviewed by what appears to be a less rugged Adam West from the original Batman series.

On the basis of four and a half minutes (blessedly edited) of childish questions, Taylor has seen fit to declare Cullen politically wounded – so much so that he compares the affible MP to right-wing footnote Randy White’s unfortunate running of the mouth circa 2004.

Now let’s take a step back and evaluate shall we?

Cullen answers off-color questions from some buffoon in a plastic suit with appropriate awkwardness.

Randy White was taped as part of a documentary saying he favored governments and legislators using the notwithstanding clause to overturn court cases he disagreed with … including extending rights to gays and lesbians.

Not only is the equivalence lost, it's afraid to ask for directions.

But keep up the … um, work, Mr Taylor.

Conservatives on party allowances: full coffers and empty words

Over at National Post, is this story about Harper’s oft-unhelpful former advisor Tom Flanagan. Flanagan is suggesting that the publicly funded political party allowances that the Conservatives have pretended to hate since November 2008 are now so entrenched in the system as to make them impossible to eliminate.

To prove his point, Flanagan need only look as far as his own party to find irrefutable evidence.

So convinced are the Conservatives that the $1.95 per vote allowance is the stuff of pure evil and “a waste of taxpayer’s dollars,” that they haven’t failed to cash all $40 million worth of these subsidy cheques since they became government. Seriously, has it not occurred to anyone in Harper’s HQ that it’s more than a little absurd to argue against the subsidies while gladly pocketing $2.6 million worth of them every quarter?

It’s not unheard of for parties to willingly disadvantage themselves to in the name of principle. There is no reason why Roy Romanow, Ed Broadbent or any other of a long line of New Democrat politicians shouldn’t have been appointed to the Senate. Past prime ministers have asked them to. Indeed the advantage of having sage NDPers organizing fundraisers and recruiting candidates from their perch in the Senate would be as big an advantage for the party as it is for Liberals and Conservatives. Yet, New Democrats, long opposed to the undemocratic Senate have denied themselves this perk. Indeed Harper’s Reform Party said they were so opposed to MPs pensions that several of them opted out in the 1990s … only to opt back in later.

So, where is this kind of principled opposition when it comes to the Conservatives and the $1.95 subsidy? Seriously, if they are opposed to it, when will they stop cashing the cheques? Until they do, they have zero credibility on the matter and are just playing the same old politics as the Liberals. Until they do, they should stop complaining about something they are as much a party to as any other.

Liberals respond to prorogation with the same old partisanship

The Ignatieff Liberals have once again poisoned the well of cooperation among opposition parties by putting their tired partisanship first.

The Conservatives never counted on a reaction like this. Weeks after Harper turned off the lights on the House of Commons, not only has the outcry and criticism continued – but it now appears to be snowballing. From Tim Hortons to call-in shows, Canadians – particularly small c-conservatives - are venting their disbelief with how indifferent Harper has become towards our national institutions. Today, a group of academics are weighing in with 200 of them slamming Harper’s heavy handed decision to silence parliament.

Now it’s the opposition’s turn. For their part, the Liberals have decided not to work with the New Democrats and Bloc, but instead have planned to gather in Ottawa to hold hearings with “experts” this month on what House Leader Ralph Goodale calls “an agenda that would guide a future Liberal government”.

It’s so typical that it barely needs mentioning, but yet another national crisis is upon us, and the Liberals have defaulted to deciding that this about them and their nostalgia for government - not the broader public interest. Why on earth would New Democrat or Bloc MPs want to participate in hearings to "guide a future Liberal government”?

But Liberals don't care about that. On their chess board, their entitlement beats every other piece. Just like they did in the coalition period a year ago, Ignatieff has seen the opportunity to work with other opposition parties, but is rejecting that to instead focus on himself and tinkering with his broken political machine.

They are missing the point that it's precisely this hyper-partisanship that has been killing our federal politics. It is this this hyper-partisanship that has gotten us to where we are. It was Harper's own partisanship that resulted in the Conservatives shuttering parliament in the first place. How does Ignatieff responding with even more partisanship help?

It doesn't, which is why more and more, the Liberals aren't the answer to Stephen Harper.

"A culture of cover-up": Prorogation backlash sticks to Harper

Process doesn’t matter.

That’s the conventional wisdom in the Conservative backrooms. The strategists who whisper earnestly into the ear of Stephen Harper believe that Canadians aren’t inclined to remember how we got from A to B, only that “the Conservative government is delivering on B.”

And that’s certainly the lens through which prorogation must have been viewed at the planning stages. The strategic braintrust in the PMO collectively concluded that closing down parliament for more than 60 days would be viewed as a yawner for most. The majority of Canadians could care less about parliamentary procedure, or Harper’s weak-as-dish-water reasoning for it.

Those strategists seem to have miscalculated, as today's Angus Reid poll concludes.

The second prorogation in as many years isn’t the story. Instead, the story is that a majority of Canadians are growing into the perception that the Conservatives are being led by a uncompromising autocrat who routinely puts his political fortunes ahead of the country -- in the current example, engaging in a cover-up over what his government knew about detainee abuse in Afghanistan.

Much like the Liberals' "cluture of entitlement," a "culture of cover-up" is the kind of impression that can stick to a party.

Stephen Harper ends 2009 the same way he began it: on the run

Like most things that happen in Ottawa, this had been predicted.

The rumours of prorogation were rampant weeks ago. That’s when the New Democrats put out this release calling 2009 “Stephen Harper’s Year on the Run”. The clever release contains a few examples - like the PM skipping-out of questioning on detainee abuse to attend an apparently urgent photo-op with lacrosse players - that a lot of observers may have forgotten.

With only a total of 141 House sitting days, the first two sessions of Stephen Harper’s second parliament have been among the shortest in Canada’s history. Indeed, one has to go all the way back to Louis St. Laurent’s 1949 parliament to find two opening sessions of shorter duration.

But unlike St. Laurent, Harper is leading a minority parliament. And in this context, Harper has taken to overusing prorogation the same way sports teams are inclined to use up all of their time outs at the end of a losing period – to regroup and hopefully throw the winning team off their momentum.

The irony of course is that once upon a time, Stephen Harper was an avowed defender of the supremacy of parliament. He doted on every way in which the Liberals had weakened the ability of MPs to effectively represent their constituents. He loathed the concentration of power in the Chretien / Martin PMOs. When Chretien moved to prorogue in 2003, then opposition leader Harper blasted:

"What we are also learning once again is that the Liberals apparently want to prorogue the House … They want to run out of town, get out of town just one step ahead of the sheriff. Is the Liberal government committed to staying here as planned throughout the month of November so that it can be held accountable in the House for its actions?'' - Stephen Harper, Canwest News Service, 20 October 2003

But all of that was before 2006 -- before Harper found himself in the Prime Minister’s chair and transformed himself into a power - and prorogation – addict, just like the Liberal leaders he once loathed.

But as we end 2009, there is some good news. Yesterday, Nanos put out their year end leadership numbers which show a larger number of Canadians are turning to the New Democrats’ Jack Layton. Honest, approachable, and the one leader with experience to work across party lines to get results, 2009 has solidified Layton’s position as the anti-Harper.

Happy new year, Canadians.

The narcissism of small Liberal and Tory differences

This kind of thing has become sadly predictable. But, reassuringly, not so predictable that it doesn’t merit the criticism it is receiving.

In fairness, let’s first acknowledge that Canadian politics has always been home to its share of baseless and tasteless attacks. But let’s also accept that recent years have also witnessed a spike in both the number and viciousness of childish political attacks – particularly between the Liberal and Conservative teams.

Who can forget these rhetorical high-points? ...

Conservatives forced to remove image of bird defecating on Liberal leader

Conservatives accuse Liberal MP of bring “anti-Israel”

Liberal MP apologizes for calling Conservative MP “fat”

Liberal MP calls Conservative an “idiot" who should "go back to making tea"

Liberals demand apology for Prime Minister’s slur (Incredibly, Liberals made this their lead in question period for about a week, if memory serves)

So, why has debate between the Liberals and Conservatives become so poisonous that a photo of the PM being gunned down is deemed “okay” by the professional communications staff running the Liberal website?

Consider this: Speaking about student politics at the University of Toronto, the Old Bob Rae once famously opined that “the reason it was so acrimonious and so divisive is because the stakes were just so low.”

In other words, when what you are debating are matters of such small difference – bringing in the HST tomorrow or next week; appointing 17 Senators instead of 18; torture versus “torture-lite” – the tone of the debate becomes the only thing you actually control.

Unlike New Democrats who can put real differences on the table between them and Stephen Harper, Liberals find relief in the ad-hominem. It’s all they have left.

Telegram to Kevin Page: TORIES RUNNING LOW ON DITTO PAPER [STOP]

What if you held an Economic Action Plan and nobody noticed?

That's kinda what the Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page has been asking. Seems to him you can't talk about what the stimulus is or isn't achieving, or where it is or isn't going (hear that Gerard Kennedy?) unless you can analyse the raw data.

Realizing that "the secretive Conservative Government" was beginning to appear "the paranoid Conservative Government", Harper finally relented by providing the data Page asked for in the paper format preferred by accountants of 40 years ago.

The New Democrats' finance critic zinged the Cons on their retro-style of transparency in question period today:

Mr. Thomas Mulcair (Outremont, NDP): Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives have the ability to secretly record another party's caucus meeting. They can get HD copies of the Prime Minister's audition tape on every government website. They have even found a way to turn Mike Duffy into spam.

However when it comes to providing the parliamentary budget office with details of stimulus funding they are still in the Diefenbaker era.

Does the minister realize that providing boxes containing thousands of pages of untreated information without so much as a synopsis, much less a spread sheet, is less than useless?

Even with all the brain tonic the Conservative front bench had consumed, they weren't able to provide much in the way of an answer.

Liberals and Conservatives: Two parties, same problem

How about that. It was only four years ago this month that the inquiry onto the Sponsorship scandal wrapped up its first report. A report that damned the Liberal Party as an institution for its culture of entitlement. For "clear evidence of political involvement" in the sponsorship program. For kickbacks and illegal contributions. For treating public money like their own.

The punch line is that Stephen Harper pledged to be different. He promised to do away with the old politics. But the second he became PM he jettisoned the very principles of accountability that got him there.

Liberals and Conservatives: two parties, same problem ...

Are you kidding? Are we back to doing THIS again?

The last time we had political parties walking around town passing-off taxpayer money as if it was their own, it ended with a whole bunch of people going to jail and this guy getting involved.

Oh, and as for you, Gerald Keddy, "I would absolutely do it again," sounds awfully Jean Chretien of you don't you think?

Mr Harper? Alphonso Gagliano on line one.

You stay classy, Gerald Keddy.

Fear makes people do strange things.

That’s the only plausible explanation for the Red Bull-fueled ramblings that Nova Scotians woke up to in their Chronicle-Herald this morning.

Rounding out four paragraphs of half-baked accusations against Jack Layton and the NDP, Conservative MP Gerald Keddy charges that New Democrat MPs abstained from the vote to give $1 billion in needed EI improvements for the unemployed last month.

Hmmm. That’s curious. Because the record shows every NDP MP was in their place and voted in favour of the $1 billion at second reading.

Keddy, who on occasion has been known to represent Nova Scotia’s South Shore riding, says he was there. You’d think he would have noticed the New Democrats voting in favour of the bill.

But fear makes people do strange things … like flying off the handle with attacks on your political opponents based on make-believe and fairy tales.

So why is Gerald Keddy afraid?

Likely because his South Shore riding, which looked like this in 2008:

Now looks like this following last spring's provincial election, which swept Darrel Dexter’s NDP to a historic majority government.

You stay classy, Gerald Keddy.

New Democrats will match your party’s record on fighting sales taxes any day, Mr. Harper.

As the Globe and Mail reports, this week the federal NDP has taken dead aim at Harper’s plan to hike sales taxes in Ontario and BC.

Yet in response to a question from Jack Layton on the HST, Stephen Harper recounted this heart-warming childhood anecdote “when I was a boy, my father used to say that I should work on things that I am good at. The NDP is not good at fighting taxes.”

Well, that ends all that, doesn’t it? Um, no. Not really. Primarily because it’s not true.

Let's review the facts, shall we?

FACT: It was the Conservative Prime Minister who Harper had worked for in the 1980s who introduced the GST. It was New Democrat MPs who voted against it.

FACT: It was the Conservative Premier of Saskatchewan who signed a deal to harmonize that provinces’ provincial sales tax with the GST. It was the New Democrat Premier Roy Romanow who killed that deal dead.

FACT: It is the New Democrat Premier of Nova Scotia who today fulfilled a promise to take the HST off of home heating for families in that province.

FACT: What Jack Layton's NDP are fighting against today is a Conservative Prime Minister’s plan to pay $6 billion to the Ontario and BC Liberal governments so they will agree to hike the federal sales tax by 8% and 7% respectively. The very same Conservative Prime Minister who way back in December 1996 said:

“We need another way. This harmonization of the GST, this tax collusion between provincial and federal Liberal governments, is not the way to reverse the economic decline of this country.”

Far from being “not good at fighting taxes,” it’s been the New Democrats - and only the New Democrats - who have demonstrated the most consistency and courage fighting regressive sales taxes.

It’s a shame that the PM’s pater hadn’t also imparted the virtues of being correct on his doe-eyed progeny.

On “propping up” ...

If you go to the store and pay the $1.99 posted for a loaf of bread, are you “propping up” the store or just getting the bread you came for?

Similarly, if the NDP supports the EI reform don't they get something in return ... something called EI reform?

Most would see it that way, but it’s clearly in the interests of some to see it the other way.

It’s not propping up if you get what you came for. It’s not propping up if you make parliament work in the same way that parliaments work in every developed legislature on Earth: through principled pragmatism and collaboration to improve the lives of Canadians.

Jack Layton said it best on Monday: he spent the summer listening to the people for whom an extra five weeks of EI is the difference between losing their home, car and dreams. Not helping them if you can is irresponsible.

There is no parallel to what the Liberals did since the January 2009 budget. Under the questionable leadership of Michael Ignatieff, they passively handed over the votes of their 77 MPs for a shopping cart full of nothing.

Layton's caucus is making parliament work by getting results: $1 billion worth for the unemployed. For their part, the Red Team is buying time for a Liberal leader who still doesn't know what he's doing (see: Iraq, torture, Employment Insurance and Harper's HST on Ontario and BC families).

Say, does this looking like "propping up" to you?

Jack Layton weighs the second election in two years against $1 billion for the unemployed as depicted by the deft eye (and pen) of Globe cartoonist Brian Gable ...

Liberals could have sat in cabinet -- instead they will sit with Pierre Poilievre

Every time you see him on TV, it's easy to remember that the only reason Stephen Harper is still prime minister today is because Michael Ignatieff left him there. Given the choice of Liberals governing in a legitimate coalition, or more of the same from Stephen Harper, Michael Ignatieff voted confidence in the latter.

The book end of Ignatieff's capitulation in January was the one earlier this month, in which Liberals patted their backs bloody boasting that their noble leader forced the Conservatives to agree to a "Blue Ribbon" panel to consider changes to EI for the fall.

Those fonder of reality have rightly pointed out that the "pound of flesh" Ignatieff walked away with was indeed far less than he said he wanted from negotiations: namely, help for the unemployed this summer and a 360 hour rule.

But none of this nonsense will move Liberals off their tales of heroic daring-do.

Well, this should: Harper's appointment to the Conservative chair on the panel? None other than Pierre Poilievre. That's right, the very same Pierre Poilievre whose singular role in the House of Commons and everywhere else has been to enrage Liberals by endlessly hectoring at them with mindless talking points about their leader's plans to raise taxes and his 34 year absence from Canada.

Far less than a victory, naming Poilievre is Harper's oh-so-subtle way of thumbing his nose (if not extending another appendage) at Liberals for playing politics for a week about a summer election they had no intention of forcing.

Well played, Iggy. Well played, indeed.

How to build a structural deficit (or where will we cut so Suncor can keep another billion?).

This is a no brainer.

At some point - likely with little help for the Conservatives' stimulus - the economy will begin to show signs of stabilizing.

And when it does the knives will truly come out for the $50 billion federal deficit.

You can already hear Ignatieff Liberals chortling that Canadians are dying to give the Red Team another chance to re-live their dubious "glory days" of the 1995-98 era in which they brought down a $42 billion deficit by heroically slaughtering transfers to the provinces for health care, education and social assistance.

Canada has already lost $140 billion in corporate taxes becasue of an unprecedented reduction of the business tax rate from 28.12% in 2001 to 19% today. Incredibly, both the Conservatives and Liberals say they are committed to lowering it a further 4% by 2012!

A cut of that magnitude will cost the federal treasury another $8 billion a year. A hole that size would leave precisely the structural deficit every party says they don't want. This will put health care, the CBC and countless other Canadian institutions on the chopping block. This suits the Tories just fine, but there was a time when Canadains could expect better from the Liberals.

It's like volunteering for a pay cut while you are trying to pay down the mortgage and take care of a sick family member. No sane person would agree to it.

Enter the Harper Conservatives and Ignatieff Liberals.

A good strategy if the ballot question in 2012 is "Who likes Brian Mulroney more?"

So Michael Ignatieff thinks the way to hurt Stephen Harper is to blow kisses at a Conservative politician who left office with an approval rating of 21 percent and who is currently the subject of a commission of inquiry into his business dealings.

And people say 30 years out of the country has hurt Professor Ignatieff's connection with the Canadian zeitgeist.

Tisk, tisk.

Exit Stage Right? (or Harper's walk in the slush)

There are no doubt a lot of Conservatives – as well as hapless politicos - reading Don Martin’s column today with a tanker-load of askance.

But rather than being an apple short of a fruit plate, Martin may be on to something when he predicts an early exit for Stephen Harper.

“What does all this mean? Search me. But some who orbit just outside Mr. Harper's innermost circle speculate that a Conservative party with no heir apparent could lose its leader before the next election.”

A month ago, it seemed far more likely that Harper might be forced out by a palace putsch aimed at ending Harper to sue for peace with the now-defunct Liberal-NDP coalition. But why now? Having survived the debacle of the November economic statement, and having seen to the Dion-ification of Michael Ignatieff for the foreseeable future, why would Harper walk away from the PMO?

The answer lays in the man himself.

Those familiar with the personal history of Stephen Harper will also know of his penchant for calling it quits prematurely.

Months into his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto, he dropped out to take a mail room job at Imperial Oil in Calgary. Likewise, after a falling out with Preston Manning, Harper didn’t even complete his first term as a Reform MP, resigning 1997.

The nub of it is that more than griping about marginal tax rates, Stephen Harper likes to be right. And with the economy shedding 230,000 jobs in three months, with commercial and personal bankruptcies on the rise, and with a historic trade deficit, Harper, his team and their dogmatic attachment to yesterday’s ideology look very, very wrong right now. If someone is going to have their picture next to R.B. Bennett in the next generation’s text book, better to have be a Prentice, a Baird, or better still a Charest, Harper must be thinking.

If the comedian’s adage is “always leave ‘em laughing”, Harper’s adage may well be “always leave ‘em before they forget about Brian Mulroney.”

Fix the economy, get rid of Harper

Over brie and Courvoisier this holiday season Conservatives have had plenty of time to figure out what they need to do to rehabilitate their party after the November 2008 Economic Statement debacle.

The obvious conclusion for all – save those few hopeless ideologues who still cling to the myth of Stephen Harper’s strategic mastery despite all evidence to the contrary – is that Harper himself must go.

Those needing further convincing that keeping Harper around will hurt more than the alternative consider this: On the very same day that economists are predicting we are now a toboggan run of job loses without even a set of black plastic handles to slow our descent, the only news out of Stephen Harper’s interview with Maclean's is that he’s still fixated on the political party allowances that landed him in the non-confidence penalty box in the first place.

In answer to the question have you “mishandled your relations with the opposition?” Harper incredibly tells Peter Whyte: “the government has decided to go [with] a freeze instead of an elimination. But make no mistake, the government believes that the elimination of these subsidies has to be done eventually, that that’s in the public interest.”

WHAT!!??

Harper is supposed to be saving a $1.2 trillion economy from collapse. He’s supposed to be managing a $250 billion federal budget. He’s supposed to be doing his part as a leader of a G-8 global economy to restore the confidence of investors and consumers. Instead he’s still obsessing over $20 million worth of political subsidies that are so gosh-darn important they merited ZERO mention in the Conservatives’ election platform. $20 million in political allowances that are dwarfed by the $95 million we are forced so spend on the Senate Harper said he wouldn’t appoint anyone to, but then did.

The issue here is not about political party allowances, nor should it be. The issue now is whether Stephen Harper possesses the self-discipline required of a Prime Minister in a minority government during a calamitous economic downturn. Based on Harper’s narcissistic obsession with partisanship in these times, the answer comes back resoundly “no”.

In a manner unseen since the disastrous bumbling of Stockwell Day at the head of the Alliance, Stephen Harper has climbed high, overplayed his hand, and crashed all the while using his party’s credibility on the economy, democracy and public accountability to break his fall.

Jack Layton and the coalition’s answer is simple: we have to fix the economy and get rid of Harper. You can’t have one without the other.

Harper must go. Even Conservatives must realize that his position is too compromised now.

Which leads to an interesting possibility: before the coalition has its first chance to get their hands on Harper, will more sober and statesmen-like Conservatives like Jim Prentice and Rob Nicholson step forward to call for the change in the leadership their party and our economy needs?

Structural deficits anyone?

For most of the fall and even after Harper pad-locked Parliament, Conservatives vowed against a return to structural deficits.

Jim Flaherty proudly told a business audience, "Ongoing, unsustainable budget deficits are quite rightly unacceptable for Canadians. These structural deficits must never return."

On this point the Conservatives would find little disagreement -- at least among New Democrats. Budgeting over the long term to spend more than you take in isn't smart for households, businesses or governments (incidentally, a point Jack Layton has been living and saying long before he was elected leader of the New Democrats).

Yet while the Tories have talked the talk, they are walking the walk right back into the kinds of structural deficits we saw over the 1980s and early 1990s. What Flaherty is musing about today is code for hobbling the federal treasury for years to come. More permanent tax cuts is precisely a recipe for a return to year-over-year deficits. In the post-Economic Statement-era, is it now too much to ask that the Conservatives at least be honest about that?

If Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty were honest, they would be reexamining the scheduled corporate tax cuts for 2010, 2011 and 2012, given what little those cuts have done to help forestall the current economic downturn. After all, what good is a tax cut to GM, or the larger economy, when the company isn't making a cent to be taxed?

Though if they were honest, Harper and Flaherty would have to admit that their predisposition towards larger and larger tax cuts has more to do with parochial ideology and constraining the federal government to provide infrastucture investment or child care than either with economic stimulus or preventing a return to deficits.

If nothing else, Flaherty's tax cut musings make the point that the Conservatives have learned little since the near-death experience of the Economic Statement. Because budget making through ideological lens has done so much to create jobs and secure their precarious position so far.