Resign

I have a pretty high threshold for cabinet firings, especially amid election campaigns. But ag minister Gerry Ritz should go.

Here's what Ritz said during an Aug. 30 government conference call on the listeriosis outbreak that has killed 17 people:

"This is like a death by a thousand cuts. Or should I say cold cuts."

When told of a new death in PEI, Ritz said, "Please tell me it's Wayne Easter."

Easter is the Grits' ag critic.

Here are Harper's reasons for keeping Ritz on:

• Stress: "It obviously was an inappropriate joke by a minister who was under a lot of stress."
• Competence: Ritz should not be removed from "the good work" he has done in dealing with the outbreak.
• Everyone makes mistakes: "Look I suspect everybody in this room if they're honest with themselves will admit in private conversations they probably said things that were pretty insensitive and inappropriate if somebody shines a light on them."
• It was "a private conversation."

If you can't cope with stress you don't belong in a position of responsibility. Ritz has not exuded any special competence in this crisis. Everyone does make mistakes, but the standards are higher for folks in leadership positions, whose conduct must be worthy of emulation. And it was not a private conversation, but was attended by 30 bureaucrats, government scientists and communications staff from at least three departments.

Confronted by reporters, Ritz actually ran away. He should keep running. We've heard enough.

Afghanistan Agonistes

Finally, Layton re-stakes his claim on the ill-advised, in my view, Afghan mission. The NDP has owned this issue but, oddly, has been silent about it until now.

Pollster Michael Adams, assessing Dion's bleak prospects for the CBC last week, had this to say about the electoral potency of the Afghan issue:

The majority of Canadians (56 per cent) do not approve of Canada's participation in military action in that country while only 41 per cent do. More tellingly, only 14 per cent strongly approve of our current role while one in three (34 per cent) strongly disapproves of our soldiers being in harm's way in that distant and troubled land. Two thirds of Canadians (65 per cent) do not think the Canadian mission in Afghanistan will be successful. Only 28 per cent think it will.

Adams notes Dion would risk a caucus rebellion by breaking his pact with the Tories by promising to bring the troops home as soon as possible after the election. And that Canadians are sufficiently conflicted on the issue that it would be difficult to make it a winning call in the few weeks remaining.

It's a different story, I think, for the Dippers, who have consistently opposed this high-risk, low-reward venture from the start. Adams doesn't mention that for Dion, calling for an end to the mission would be something of a flip-flop, since it was the Grits who launched it even if Dion was far removed from that decision.

Mea culpa

In a kind note, Andrew Coyne corrects me that he was not a "unite the righter," as I described him, and simply has wished the union well. Also that despite his must-read take-down of Harper the other day, he still finds virtue in the Tory leader and hasn't decided how he'll vote.

Andrew is not someone you want to misrepresent. I'm not alone among sometime and full-time bloggers inspired by his pioneering and instructive exploitation of the Web's possibilities. So as a protege and admirer, I apologize to Andrew.

That said, I highly recommend Coyne's character study of Harper. It's a classic. 

The difference between an election and a circus act?

Lipstick.

(Click on image to enlarge it.)

Department of Bad Ideas

My apologies for just catching up with this insight from Stephen Gordon's Worthwhile Canadian Initiative:

Just when you think that Conservative tax cuts can't get any dumber...

... they surpass themselves.

Tories to cut diesel, jet fuel excise taxes: Conservative Leader Stephen Harper is promising to cut federal excises taxes on diesel and aviation fuel in half over four years.

Mr. Harper is pledging to cut the tax by 2 cents -- taking it to two cents per litre from the current four cents. It would cost Ottawa $600-million per year.

This is unfathomably stupid. In one stroke, it takes two serious and pressing problems - the deteriorating fiscal situation and greenhouse gas emissions - and makes them both worse.

Update: From the CBC story, we have this gem:

Harper himself said Tuesday the diesel-tax cut highlights the choice between the parties' two different plans in the face of uncertain economic times.

"Our plan is practical, theirs is based on theory," he said. "That's what the election is all about."

Gaahh. The election is still five weeks away, and I'm already running out of synonyms for 'stupid'.

... they surpass themselves.

Tories to cut diesel, jet fuel excise taxes: Conservative Leader Stephen Harper is promising to cut federal excises taxes on diesel and aviation fuel in half over four years.

Mr. Harper is pledging to cut the tax by 2 cents -- taking it to two cents per litre from the current four cents. It would cost Ottawa $600-million per year.

This is unfathomably stupid. In one stroke, it takes two serious and pressing problems - the deteriorating fiscal situation and greenhouse gas emissions - and makes them both worse.

Update: From the CBC story, we have this gem:

Harper himself said Tuesday the diesel-tax cut highlights the choice between the parties' two different plans in the face of uncertain economic times.

"Our plan is practical, theirs is based on theory," he said. "That's what the election is all about."

Gaahh. The election is still five weeks away, and I'm already running out of synonyms for 'stupid'.

Department of Blogger Error

Commentor Alison points out my error in identifying Sarah Palin as "pro-choice." Thank you, Alison, who can't be alone in wondering if I re-read posts before committing them to cyberspace. The scary thing is, I do. Yikes.

If I've lost Walter Cronkite...

...I've lost the war, LBJ famously fretted when the CBS anchor, a champion of America's Vietnam conflict, finally turned against the ongoing tragedy in Southeast Asia.

Political columnist Andrew Coyne takes a backseat to no one in having promoted the movement that united the Canadian political right, and having promoted its prospects of supplanting the Grits as the country's new Natural Governing Party.

So it's astonishing - and astonishingly honest - to see Coyne take Stephen Harper to the end of the dock and gut him like a freshly caught bass. I think the problem here is that Harper's shift to the centre, a tack I explained he would have to take of political necessity in a This Magazine essay two years ago - you simply can't govern Canada as a right-wing theocracy - is giving the kind of minimalist government Coyne has for so long fought for a bad name. Harper turns out to be no minimalist - a betrayal for Coyne and like-minded - but as we've seen it's electorally successful.

Still, the new, cuddly Hockey Dad style of governing is anathema to a free-market purist. In this Coyne lament, excepted at length, we see that it requires a sporadic or, in Harper's case, sustained departure from principle. I doubt we'll soon see as effective a vivisection as this for some time:

"Harper’s reputation as a 'strong leader' (the central message, as I take it, of the Tory campaign) is undeserved, and that so far as it is earned, derives largely from his penchant for slapping people about: his party, his opponents, senior bureaucrats.

"Usually, the term 'strong leader' is reserved for someone who sets out a vision, sticks to his principles, takes risks, invests political capital, and ultimately prevails in the face of entrenched opposition, whether through the strength of his ideas, the force of his oratory, his own personal magnetism, or sheer doggedness.

"None of these, I argue, apply in Harper’s case. He has not set out a vision: rather he has spent much effort persuading the public he has none. He has not stuck to his principles: he has abandoned them at every turn. He has not taken risks or invested political capital, but rather has stuck to sure-fire crowd-pleasers (GST cuts, tough-on-crime) and precisely targeted pandering (tax credits for children’s sports, the “nation” resolution).

"He has generally bested his opponents by the simple but effective tactic of the jaw-dropping about-face: discarding convictions, breaking promises, saying one thing and doing another, even (in the case of fixed election dates) going so far as to make hash of his own law. This has given him the element of surprise, it is true, but only because of a serial inability on the part of his opponents to imagine he could be quite so untrustworthy. [Emphasis added.]

"None of this is to deny that Harper has the capacity to be a strong leader. Indeed, for pure talent he is easily the most impressive federal leader since Trudeau: intelligent, self-assured, strategic. But he has not yet put those talents to use in a way that would merit the title."

Opposite: The housebroken Hockey Dad

Blame Steve

Putting aside his centrepiece Green Shift which no one understands and he can't explain himself, Dion today, um, shifted, to the economy:

"Stephen Harper has allowed what was a booming economy to hit a brick wall," Dion said during a campaign stop in St. John's, Nwfd.

It's true. Descending from Mount Olympus sometime last fall, Harper adroitly and with remarkable persistence began engineering the crisis in U.S. subprime mortgages that begat the collapse of venerable Wall Street financial institutions and the wider economic slowdown in the U.S. markets on which the Canadian economy and global commodities producers are so reliant. Somewhat counter-intuitively, Harper arranged for oil producers in his home province of Alberta to suffer a cut in oil revenues by slashing world demand for crude, now priced at $95.71 (U.S.) per barrel, down from its July high of $147 (U.S.). In another move apparently against his own and his party's interests, Harper directed manufacturers in Central Canada to kill some 200,000 jobs in ridings the Tories need to hold or capture from the Grits. When the Canuck economy finally slammed into the wall, the Tory leader rubbed his hands, saying, "Now we have a record to run on. It's time for an election."

Canadian economic growth is anaemic, true, but Canada's growth prospects are generally brighter, its fiscal position stronger, and its financial system far healthier than is the case for its G-8 peers.

Here, for Dion's edification, is an incomplete list of industrial regions and nations suffering economic downturns more severe than ours: the U.S., Western Europe, Japan. The latter, according to its own government two weeks ago, has slipped into outright recession. Britain, it emerges, has a burst housing bubble not unlike the U.S., with similar, if lagging, consequences. Ireland is no longer a "miracle economy"; Dell Inc. announced yesterday it will relocate its Irish operations to a lower-cost jurisdiction in Asia. Australia, even more dependent than Canada on resources, has seen its decade-long economic boom abruptly end with the global collapse in most commodity prices.

There are plenty of things for which the Tories can be faulted, but rank mismanagement of the economy isn't among. Failure to expedite the process by which new Canadians have their professional credentials recognized might be. Failure to streamline securities regulation by replacing the current 13 provincial and territorial securities regulators with a national one is closer to the mark. Not exhorting Alberta to reinvest its oil windfall in a diversified economy could count.

Mind you, those all are areas of provincial jurisdiction, and the feds' moral suasion alone has not been sufficient for Harper's predecessors to bring those reforms about. And there's only so much moral suasion one can throw about as leader of a minority government.

Among the most scathing attacks I can mount against Harper is the insufficent vigour this Hockey Dad has thrown into securing an NHL franchise for Waterloo or Hamilton. But the NHL, as a Grit named John Manley once discovered, is a power to itself.

Harper has been anything but an economic visionary. We still lack an national industrial policy worthy of the name. But absurd attacks on Harper's economic stewardship only remind us of how ill-informed the Grits' own economic outlook has been so far in this campaign.

 

Stephane the Unready

By now it's a truism the Grits spent the 20 months since the last election waiting for Canadians to quickly sour on Harper in his new PM role and for 24 Sussex to revert effortlessly to the Natural Governing Party. At this writing, Harper is about two dozen Quebec ridings short of a majority.

An historian would note that David Lewis' reward for propping up the minority Trudeau government of 1972-74 was for his NDP to be decimated as the Grits came roaring back with a majority in the next election. Which was Bob Rae's fate in 1987, after installing David Peterson in power at Queen's Park two years earlier.

If it's too early to write the Grits' post-mortem, not so what some the elements of it will be:

• The Grits underestimated how impressive Harper would appear as PM, even if he was governing with a minority.
• They didn't rebuild their warchest, and remain deeply in debt, cobbling their campaign efforts.
• Dion didn't reach out to his leadership rivals, binding the wounds from that protracted contest.
• Dion made the Green Shift proposal his campaign centrepiece; that it's muddled and no one can explain the gist of it in under 200 words is a failure not of Dion, but a non-existent policy shop. 
• The Grits didn't swiftly begin recruiting star candidates, despite the fragile minority status of a government that would be returning to the polls, if tradition serves, with two years. As recently as last week the Liberals were still nominating candidates - for the most part, folks unknown to Dion - in la belle province.
• The Grits didn't plan for the usual war room, policy shop, logistics squad, and marketing and image department until the election was on top of them. There was no one to foresee that Harper would not spring from the starting blocks, but amble as a likeable, housebroken Hockey Dad.
• Even logistics were ignored. Well into Week 2 of the campaign, media references persist to the Grits' difficulty in lining up a campaign plane. And the rustiness of the Liberal's rapid-response (?) war room is the failure of the Liberals to respond to attacks that their aging aircraft is a more significant polluter than that of the Tories by pointing out that Dion & Co. are buying "carbon offsets" for their travels, which the Tories are not, making the Conservatives the big polluters on the aircraft front.

Iggy Stardust is campaigning for Team Dion in the same desultory fashion Hillary Clinton is applying her efforts on behalf of the Obama cause, and for the same reason - they're both waiting for their parties' standard-bearers to falter badly and then supplant them. It might be different If a background supremo like Keith Davey or David Smith was weilding the whip, but as the Star reported today, Senator Smith is among very few of the veteran faithful lending a hand to this campaign.

You could argue the cause was lost when the Grits selected a leader whose Clarity Act makes him reviled among Quebec nationalists, whom the Tories are successfully wooing; and whose English is so poor he simply can't communicate outside Quebec.

But no standard-bearer is ideal; the Grits have known about this challenge since Dion won his narrow leadership victory; and loyalty to the party demands putting misgivings about the leader aside for the duration. The only departure from those iron rules arises when a party really doesn't want to take power under its current leader, which is the message the media is taking - and subtly conveying - from the Grits' behaviour thus far. 

Would it have hurt?

As they say in the magazine and fashion trades, "everyone's an art director." There is no shortage of second-guessing.

So as a Grit strategist here's what I might have done on Day One (and it's hardly without precedent): I would have presented Dion as merely part of a Grit team of all-stars, having Dion make his first post-writ appearance in the company of an A-team of Iggy, Bob Rae, Gerard Kennedy, Ken Dryden and so on, many of whom poll better than Dion.

That would have been a nice contrast with a Harper most Canadians by now rightly perceive as a micro-managing loner.

Instead, the Grits allowed the contest to immediately become a mano-a-mano contest between an overtly cunning, man-in-charge PM and a head-in-the-clouds ivory tower refugee.