The McWetlog

You will agree, I think, that an ad for herbal weight loss products is an odd place to find a former Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, but here she is, in an ad I saw three weeks ago in the Renfrew Weekender:

Yes, it’s true: Sheila Copps is now a spokesperson for Herbal Magic. What, no corporate directorships? (This was announced last September. The things you miss when you have a day job.)

Jesus Christ: the NDP won Kirkfield Park tonight. If the Tories couldn’t even hold Kirkfield Park — the wealthy part of my former end of Winnipeg — they never had a prayer.

Today’s Globe and Mail points to Gary Doer’s pragmatism as the reason for his success as NDP premier of Manitoba. This resonates with what I’ve long believed: that in Manitoba, the NDP gains power when it can attract and hold votes that would otherwise go Liberal, and loses when Liberal votes either return to the roost (as they did, famously, in 1988) or go to the Conservatives.

Ed Schreyer was able to woo those moderates in 1969 — famously, when he inspired Larry Desjardins to cross the floor from the Liberals. Howard Pawley was more doctrinaire (and less competent) and scared ‘em off, but because of lingering concerns over the Conservatives (the quasi-draconian government of Sterling Lyon still vivid in Manitobans’ memory) and the appeal of Sharon Carstairs, they went Liberal rather than Conservative in 1988, and the NDP dropped to third place and its 12 safest seats. When the Liberals faltered, the NDP recuperated, so that when the Conservatives faltered, the NDP was that much closer to the finish line. Lesson: when the Liberal vote collapses, the NDP wins; whem the Liberal vote is strong, the NDP can’t — they’re chasing the same moderate voters.

Much is made about the PC-NDP dichotomy in my home province: the south and west is reliably Conservative, the north and east reliably NDP, and the electoral battles are fought along the frontier between the two. But there’s a good chunk of moderate voters out there as well: the electorate is more complex than winner-take-all choropleth maps make out. Parties that forget this dynamic and simply try to rally their own supporters do so at their peril.

Despite earlier reports, Richard Mahoney may not have been “encouraged” to run in my riding, Pontiac, by Stéphane Dion. Either way, he won’t be the Liberal candidate here: he was defeated by local farmer Cindy Duncan McMillan at the federal Liberal nomination meeting yesterday. Ms. Duncan McMillan didn’t come out of nowhere: she’s long been active in Quebec farm organizations; I remember covering a local farmers’ meeting in September 2003 (it was about the beef crisis) at which she spoke in her capacity as president of the Quebec Farmers Association.

To be honest, I’m relieved that we have a local candidate rather than an urban parachute (or, as I put it when I heard the news, “urban sloppy seconds” — Mahoney had lost twice as the Liberal candidate in Ottawa Centre).

But Mahoney himself, while no doubt a fine candidate on his home turf, presented certain problems. I was very concerned when I read, in last week’s Pontiac Journal, that Mahoney was not only anglophone (not a problem), but unilingual — and despite the large English-speaking presence in this riding, it’s still three-quarters francophone. Only the folks around Shawville — which, for better or for worse, is essentially Diefenbaker country — would not care about that, and they’ll be voting Conservative. Additionally, the fact that he’s a cottager here would not necessarily endear him to the year-round residents.

So, hats off to Cindy Duncan McMillan. Whether she stands a chance against Lawrence Cannon remains to be seen, but at least she won’t be carrying the baggage of either a parachute candidate or of the previous Liberal MP, who got into a mess of controversy over contracts awarded to his private company.

I’m getting old. My old friend Dan Hurley, with whom I conspired when I was politically active in my youth, is running for the Liberals in Winnipeg Centre against NDP MP Pat Martin. Of course, he used to be Stéphane Dion’s chief of staff, so he’s accomplished quite a bit in the interim. (Whereas I post cat pictures and make cracks about the Olympics. Sigh.)

Meanwhile, Richard Mahoney, the twice-defeated Liberal candidate in Ottawa Centre, has been asked by Dion to run in Pontiac — i.e., my riding — against Transport minister Lawrence Cannon. I’m ambivalent in that it feels like the Liberals are giving us their urban sloppy seconds, though to be fair to Mahoney he’s got a cottage in the riding. (But ask me some time about the tensions between full-time residents and cottagers.)

Neither of these seats are Liberal gimmes — Winnipeg’s urban core was solidly NDP in recent memory except between 1988 and 1997, and Pontiac has historically vacillated between the Liberals and Conservatives, making it one of the most Tory ridings in Quebec — and they have strong incumbents. We’ll see what happens.

Canada’s cult of the soldier continues unabated, but some veterans aren’t playing ball. The Canadian government has agreed to the Dominion Institute’s demand for a state funeral for the last Canadian veteran of the First War, but none of the three remaining veterans wants a state funeral. Veterans Affairs is exploring other, unspecified options, but I wonder what will happen when public opinion clashes with the families’ wishes? Because Canadians are well and truly wallowing in overt displays of support for soldiers of current and past conflicts.

It occurs to me once more that state acts of remembrance (about which I wrote some things a while back) have little to do with the welfare of those remembered. We hold ever-grander ceremonies and fulminate against drunks peeing on memorials, but it’s for our benefit, not veterans’. Wearing red on Fridays, while it may improve soldiers’ morale, doesn’t prevent them from getting killed or improve their care when they come home. All it does is give us a gesture to make without asking too much of us.

A question for Canadian politicians who insist that Quebec’s status as a nation is an incontrovertible fact:

Do I belong to this Quebec nation?

I was not born in Quebec, but have lived here for nearly four years. I live in the most anglophone, most federalist corner of the province. I understand French but speak it imperfectly.

If the answer is yes, I belong to this nation, then the definition of this Quebec nation is so amorphous that anyone can belong to it, and is therefore meaningless. I am, after all, much the same person I was four years ago when I lived in Ontario, and if I have changed since then, I would submit that it has not been as a result of my newfound québécoisitude.

If the answer is no, I do not belong, then you will have to explain why a taxpaying, voting, healthcare-using citizen of Quebec is excluded from this nation. What, then, are the criteria? Because if residency and citizenship are insufficient, then the nation is not civic, and this is not civic nationalism.

Which is what I’ve always believed to be the case.

As I expected — nay, predicted — back in April 2004, Edith Gendron has won her case: the Public Service Labour Relations Board ruled that while Gendron’s leadership of a local separatist group represented a perceived conflict of interest with her job at Canadian Heritage, firing her was an excessive response. She’s been ordered rehired, with two years of back pay.

As a general principle, you shouldn’t be fired for your political activism; it’s interesting to note — while I haven’t seen the ruling — that the PSLRB concluded that her activism could constitute a perceived conflict of interest. There are situations, particularly in the public service, where that might be the case. It’s good to see that it’s not a hanging offence, though.

So, Conservative candidate Lawrence Cannon was elected Member of Parliament for Pontiac last night, defeating incumbent Liberal David Smith, who finished third.

Final results, according to the CBC web site, are as follows:

• Cannon (Con) 16,067 (33.63%)
• Émond-Lapointe (BQ) 13,790 (28.87%)
• Smith (Lib) 11,539 (24.15%)
• Brault (NDP) 4,759 (9.96%)
• Garahan (Green) 1,512 (3.16%)
• Legros (M-L) 107 (0.22%)

The Conservative results are nearly 12 percentage points higher than their results with Judy Grant in 2004; the NDP are up nearly four points, the Bloc results are more or less even, the Greens are down a point, and the Liberal results are 14 points down from last time.

It’s also interesting to compare these results with last week’s poll: Cannon’s up 7½ points, Émond-Lapointe’s down nearly two, Smith’s up five, Brault’s down four. (Which doesn’t add up — the poll results added up to 88 per cent, which presumably means, and I didn’t notice this before, a full 12 per cent undecided, much but not all of which broke for Cannon.)

Never mind that I’ve all but ignored the election campaign on this here blog; like every other poseur with a blog I’ll be live-blogging the election results. Keep watching this entry!

To keep myself out of legal trouble, I will not be talking about the results until 10:00 PM EST, and comments will be closed until after that time.

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The Equity is reporting the following numbers from a recent CROP poll of the Pontiac riding (which is where I live):

• Christine Émond-Lapointe, Bloc Québécois, 27 per cent;
• Lawrence Cannon, Conservative, 26 per cent;
• David Smith, Liberal (incumbent), 19 per cent;
• Céline Brault, NDP, 13 per cent; and
• Moe Garahan, Green, three per cent.

Plus or minus six percentage points, 19 times out of 20, yadda yadda yadda. (I’d seen other numbers elsewhere for the same poll — Bloc 30, Conservative 29, Liberal 22 — but can’t source them; they’re proportionate, in any event.)

If these numbers are correct, they represent a significant shift in votes, particularly in terms of the near-total collapse of the Liberal vote — due not only to the Liberals’ unpopularity in Quebec due to the sponsorship scandal, but also because of incumbent MP Smith’s own difficulties — and a doubling of the NDP’s vote from last time, as the following graph shows:

If you had asked me at the start of the campaign, I would never have predicted a single-point spread between the Conservative and Bloc candidates, with Smith well behind. A lot has happened since.

Former Governor General Ed Schreyer is apparently running for the NDP in Selkirk-Interlake; an announcement is scheduled for later today. This would mark the first time that a former vice-regal representative has re-entered the political arena, though Schreyer has said some partisan things during elections after his term ended in 1984.

Somehow, though, this feels a bit unseemly — as though Prince Charles decided to be a candidate for the Liberal Democrats. But it raises an interesting question about what heads of state, ceremonial or otherwise, are supposed to do with themselves after their terms end, especially when they’re appointed so young (Schreyer is 69 now, so he was in his forties during his term). This wasn’t a problem when governors general, presidents and the like were generally old men; what was next was they retired, and probably died in fairly short order.

If nothing else, this plus Ed Broadbent’s return last time (he’s not running again) suggests that the NDP has definitely got an elder-statesman jones going on.

Proposed amendments to the Copyright Act were announced today. Cory Doctorow, writing on Boing Boing, says it could have been a lot worse. U of O law professor Michael Geist outlines the changes.

The local-paper-I-used-to-work-for published a major jawdropper of a story last week but, for whatever reason, telegraphed it.

Five local politicians and one bureaucrat have been charged — and, since the article says they were fined, presumably convicted — under provincial electoral law. Their offence? Having their municipalities or organizations reimburse them for attending a $200-a-plate fundraiser for the provincial Liberal riding association. For the record, the people charged are as follows:

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Modernization comes in spurts and starts. Nova Scotia may well be the only jurisdiction anywhere that has gay marriage before it has legalized Sunday shopping.

(At least Steinbach narrowly legalized alcohol last year, before gay marriage came to Manitoba.)

Imagine the following intriguing scenario: the Green Party defeats the Conservatives to become the government in Alberta.

Farfetched? For the next election or two, yes, but not necessarily beyond that. Just ask Preston Manning. In a piece in today’s Globe and Mail (registration may be required), he argues that, based on past history, the next party to govern Alberta will not be one of the two current opposition parties:

No provincial government has ever been replaced by its traditional opposition. When Albertans change governments, the party in power has always (thus far) been replaced by a new group with a big, new idea.

The Liberals, replaced by the UFA, replaced by Social Credit, replaced by the Progressive Conservatives. There’s 99 years of Alberta political history in a nutshell — and in each case, the new government came out of nowhere.

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James writes about the inefficacy of negative campaigning in the last federal election:

But the Conservatives never seemed to crack the 33% barrier, primarily because while Canadians knew every reason why the Liberals deserved defeat, they were short on reasons why the Conservatives deserved victory… .

In my opinion, Canadians seem to tune out negative advertising saying, in effect, “Yeah, yeah, Stephen Harper is the anti-Christ, whatever! But what would you actually do for this country?”

I take a slightly different view. I’m of the opinion that negative campaigning does in fact work, but you can’t win an election on negativity alone. This was the mistake that both the Liberals and Conservatives made: they spent all their time explaining how terrible it would be to elect the other guys, without making the case for themselves. In a nutshell, they both ran terrible campaigns — the minority result is, I think, proof that neither side was persuasive on their own behalf.

Governments tend to get elected on positive messages — Chrétien in 1993 with da liddle red book, Clinton in 1992 — even if they’re combined with a strong negative message. “We can do better than that crap, and here’s how” is much better than “This is crap, and they’re all assholes” — which may well be true, but it doesn’t necessarily make the case why someone should vote for you.

So we had an election last night, did you know that? I assume you already know the results. (Liberal minority, tight races, yadda yadda.) Some random thoughts thereon:

Liberal candidate I’m most sorry to see lose: Glen Murray (Charleswood—St. James). I knew he shouldn’t have quit as mayor of Winnipeg to run federally. He was the best mayor Winnipeg has had in decades. And who told him that that was a safe seat? It’s a seat that expects and rewards constituency work: that’s how Harvard owned it all these years, not by being Liberal. (How else do you think we put up with Dangerous Dan McKenzie all those years? Because we frigging agreed with him? Ha.)

Liberal candidate I’m most sorry to see win: Jean Lapierre (Outremont). For the obvious reasons.

Former Young Liberal associates: It’s a disconcerting thing to see people who I knew when I was — I must confess — a member of the Young Liberals (1988-1992) now running for office. I mean, I’ve seen some of these guys drunk. Expected: John Bethel (Edmonton East) and Bill Cunningham (Burnaby—Douglas) losing. Unexpected: Ruby Dhalla — who must’ve been under 16 when I first met her — winning in Brampton—Springdale.

Strategic voting: It cost the NDP seats, as left-leaning voters held their nose and voted Liberal in terror of the Conservatives. Look at the results in North Vancouver and West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast: disproportionately high Liberal votes; disproportionately low NDP votes. But it backfired in Saskatchewan, where vote-splitting on the left — irony, that — put 13 of 14 seats in Conservative hands. Bottom line: second-guessing doesn’t work, you spineless pussies.

I’m not much of a political blogger. Oh, I’m capable of it; I just lack the fervour and the need to spout off on a regular basis. More power to them that do; I just find the non-political niches that much more interesting at the present time.

Canadian political bloggers have been giving their predictions over the past few days — see here and here, for example — about the results nationwide and in their own particular ridings.

For my own riding (Pontiac), the usual conventional wisdom is whether the seat will stay Liberal or go to the Conservatives, what with Judy Grant as a strong local candidate. But I think that the riding could go to the BQ tomorrow.

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For future reference, the web pages of the major candidates in my riding (Pontiac); some have full-blown sites, others seem to have just bios on the party sites.

• Judy Grant (Conservative)
• Hubert Leduc (Bloc Québécois)
• Gretchen Schwarz (NDP)
• David Smith (Liberal)

I’d like to say more about the local race, once I know more about it. Information’s scarce so far.

What do you do when your MP barely shows up for work, says outrageously loony things, and is generally embarrassing — such as, being the only one in the House of Commons to vote against granting Nelson Mandela honourary citizenship? You set up a web site called Vote Out Anders, that’s what. It’s dedicated to the defeat of Rob Anders, MP for Calgary West, by, well, anyone at all. Good on them. Via James Bow.

While I haven’t been blogging it, I have been following the story of Edith Gendron, who was fired yesterday by her employer, Heritage Canada, for being the president of a separatist group called “Le Québec, Un Pays.” (CBC News archives.) Surprisingly, in a town that went collectively bonkers when David Levine was hired to run hospitals, the opposition is united behind her, and her union is challenging the dismissal. I think she’ll win.

The issue is whether being the head of a separatist group represents a conflict of interest. Her job is to administer official languages grants in Atlantic Canada — decidedly mid-level. Her group is so obscure I wasn’t able to find its web site — I found something with the title “Le Québec, Un Pays”, but it was really badly done, and not necessarily the site of an organization.

It’s not, in other words, as though Raymond Villeneuve was working for the Canada Information Office. As far as I can tell, there’s no direct conflict here. Either people have the right to associate freely, and to believe whatever they like, or they don’t. Belief and association are not in themselves a conflict of interest; while it may seem strange for the president of a separatist organization, however minor, to work for the federal government, the government has no business imposing a set of beliefs as a job requirement. There’s a whiff of a witch-hunt going on here.

Claude Charron in 1982. Lorne Nystrom in 1990. And now Svend Robinson. Is there some connection between shoplifting and stressed-out politicians?

Stephen Harper didn’t win too many constituencies in Quebec today, but my own riding was one of them, according to the Conservative Party’s leadership results page: Harper 54.9%, Stronach 38.9%, Clement 6.2%. (Of course, he got nearly 82 per cent on the other side of the river in Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, but that seat was won by the Alliance in 2000.)

It wouldn’t surprise me if folks around here had something to do with it: it’s a really socially conservative area that would have an affinity for Harper’s pitch. I once heard the mayor refer to women by their husbands’ first and last names (e.g., Mrs. John Smith). Things like that make me think I’m living in a time warp — it’s the 1950s, but with high-speed Internet and no railroad. And Harper did come to speak in Quyon a few weeks back. But then all the local politicians seem to be active in the Liberal party around here, social conservatism notwithstanding. So go figure.

Sheila’s not alone; incumbent Liberal MPs have been dropping like flies of late, losing their nomination battles. My own MP, Robert Bertrand, lost the nomination for Pontiac to newcomer David Smith from Maniwaki, my old newspaper reports. Though the story only gives the barest bones of an outline — who’s the new guy, anyway? — it seems that Bertrand was simply outhustled for the nomination.

Pesky Joe (see previous entry), who was elected as an Alliance MP in 2000 but switched to the Liberals in 2002, met a similar fate in Richmond, B.C., losing the nomination to Raymond Chan, the Liberal MP he beat in 2000.

Neither of these guys had much of a profile in the House: Bertrand always struck me as the ultimate rural constituency MP; we’re not sure what Peschisolido’s been up to. But it’s interesting to note that while the Pesky Joe/Raymond Chan battle gets national coverage on the CBC web site, thanks in no small part to the notoriety of the story, Bertrand’s defeat is all but invisible. It’s not showing up anywhere in my Google searches. It’s like you now need the interesting angle to get any coverage at all — a sitting MP with a decade in the House losing his nomination battle (and, quelle horreur, being magnanimous about it) is no longer sufficiently newsworthy outside the riding.

Am I the only one unnerved by the sight of Liberal nomination candidates touting their closeness to the prime minister as a reason for voters to support them? Richard Mahoney did it in Ottawa Centre, Tony Valeri just did it this past weekend, and so did Ottawa South Liberal candidate David McGuinty (brother of). It’s somewhat unsavoury: vote for me and you’ll have a representative who’s buddy-buddy with the boss. I didn’t think that was a qualification for office — at least not in a system not rife with cronyism.

A related argument is to vote for a member of the government party: we’re going to win anyway, so you may as well have someone on the “right” side. This is, essentially, the argument David Northcott is making in Winnipeg Centre.

Now that Jean Pelletier has been fired as VIA chairman for his remarks about Myriam Bédard (see previous entry), is the media having second thoughts? The Saturday papers mostly put it above the fold (except the Toronto Star). Now John Ibbitson is saying that Pelletier has been treated badly. Warren Kinsella is making hay as well, but he’s not at all neutral. While I think the reason given by the government for the firing — we don’t want to intimidate whistleblowers — is defensible, I think the main reaction is shock that he was actually fired for it. Lots of people in government, after all, have said much more offensive things (as Kinsella points out) without getting fired for it. We’re used to fulminating against people to no avail, damn it!

The next time VIA Rail hits the news, it had better be something to do about trains, or so help me.

Note to VIA Rail Chairman Jean Pelletier: it’s bad optics to speak this way about a two-time gold medallist like Myriam Bédard, even if she’s making allegations about the federal sponsorship scandal that impugn your corporation. It will backfire on you, big time.

Pelletier, formerly Jean Chrétien’s chief of staff, told La Presse that Bédard was asked to leave because she was insubordinate and didn’t fit in with the team.

“We told her that if she wasn’t happy, maybe she would have been more comfortable at an advertising agency,” said Pelletier.

“I don’t want to be mean, but this is a poor, single woman. She’s feeling the tension of being a single mother who has financial responsibilities. She’s essentially looking for pity.”

Bédard countered that Pelletier’s comments were “very low level” and that she didn’t expect a president to talk that way about single parents.

Neither did I. It was undignified for Pelletier to respond that way, and draws him into a scandal that otherwise had not touched him.

Update 5:12 PM: VIA issued two statements today, which I received as a subscriber to their mailing list. They’re also available on their media page.

The first is an apology from Pelletier:

During a media interview yesterday, I made certain comments concerning Ms. Myriam Bédard that I now realize were inappropriate. I regret making those comments and want to apologize sincerely to Ms. Bédard for any embarrassment or hurt I may have caused her.

The second statement tries to square the circle by defending VIA’s position against her, even while apologizing to her, viz., no we didn’t ask her to leave. Curiouser and curiouser.

Update 6:20 PM: Globe and Mail coverage.

Update 2/28 8:12 AM: More Globe coverage, more comprehensive this time.

Jeffrey Simpson just throws this line away in today’s Globe: “There has been distressingly little of governing since the Martinites arrived, a strange state of affairs for a group that had so long to prepare.” Indeed; were it not for the sponsorship program scandal, the bulk of Paul Martin’s announcements would have been about upcoming candidates, floor-crossers, or various nomination-battle controversies. Between that and cutting out the embarrassing bits of the ancien régime, there’s been little else to my eyes.

Paul Martin’s Quebec strategy is to put as much distance between himself and Jean Chrétien as possible. It explains why so many Quebec ministers were moved to the back benches when he took power, especially ostensibly capable ones like Martin Cauchon and Stéphane Dion. (Apart from the purge, score-settling and distancing from the ancien régime in general that occurred in the cabinet.)

Insofar as Chrétien himself was unpopular in Quebec — and as the implementation of his policies by his minions was of, shall we say, dubious legality — this is a politically shrewd move. But Martin must be aware of the tightrope he’s walking by demoting the popular-outside-Quebec Dion and by welcoming former Bloquiste Jean Lapierre, and by adopting a more Mulroneyesque approach to the national unity file.

As Gary Doer, the NDP premier of Manitoba, points out, the Clarity Act, which Lapierre doesn’t like and Martin isn’t apparently fond of, is very popular in Western Canada, the CP’s Joan Bryden reports:

“The Clarity bill is probably, in terms of federal-provincial relations, one of the most sure-footed moves in my view in terms of Western Canada. I think from just a pure democratic perspective of having a clear question on something as important as the future of the country … it makes such good sense to people.”

If Martin wants to address western alienation head-on, as he says he does, he needs to be very careful: his Quebec strategy may blow up his Western strategy. (Which is what happened to Mulroney, of course.) Surely he must know that Chrétien’s policies, and Dion’s work, were very politically popular in some parts of Canada.

Image and comportment matter in politics, whether it’s Howard Dean’s Ballmeresque antics Monday night or Belinda Stronach’s announcement that she was running for leader of the new Conservative Party yesterday. Though her surprisingly moderate policies should have drawn considerable attention — she’s in favour of same-sex marriage, which is something even a lot of Liberals have trouble with — instead the media focus was on how she presented herself. The Toronto Star’s Chantal Hébert focused on Stronach’s flat delivery and lack of French. And here’s the Globe’s Roy McGregor:

[Stronach’s speech] so lacked cadence and a sense of the necessary political rhythms — carefully building, cleverly punching, climbing deliberately to an energizing ending — that it came across more as a Grade 9 oral presentation of one of her former company’s sponsored school essays, “If I were prime minister …”

Personally, I found Stronach painful to listen to, which illustrates the point. Politics is a verbal medium whose main structure is the podium speech. There have been some very good practitioners of the form — Sharon Carstairs is one. And while this skill isn’t called on in public administration — you can be a dreadful speaker but a superb minister, at least in theory — the ability to present your case coherently in politics’s standard format is necessary to getting there in the first place. No one will elect you to anything if they can’t bear to listen to you. How Chrétien ever managed, I’ll never know.

If Scott Brison’s defection to the Liberals is, in Peter MacKay’s words, “a completely cynical, manipulative move,” then what do we call (1) making a deal with David Orchard that emphatically rejects a merger with the Canadian Alliance in order to ensure your own leadership victory and then (2) merging with the Canadian Alliance a few months later? I don’t think MacKay can claim any sort of moral high ground on this point.

Update: I swear to God, I did not read this before writing the above.

Wouldn’t it be wonderfully ironic if the end result of a PC-Alliance merger is that the NDP polls higher than the new combined party? Polls suggest that possibility: the NDP is ahead of both parties now (but not combined) in one poll, and polls higher than the hypothetical combined party in an internal Liberal poll. Regardless of ideology, I love seeing untested ideological assertions — like the one that says that a united right wing would win — demolished in practice.