"Can we debate this thing as adults?"

Silly me, I just returned from a "Debate Watch" event with some Democrats Abroad in Yorkville, where I expressed the view to a fellow political junkie that there's greater comity in Canadian politics than the character assassination so often on display to the south.

Now that was obviously before I saw Stephen Harper's assertion that the Grits are "quite frankly sitting on the sidelines virtually cheering for there to be a recession."

Nice one, Steve, that qualifier "virtually." But you made your point. Which is Harper's keen observation of the "Leader of the Opposition and his leading critics going around and trying to tell Canadians the opposite [to the fact of Canada's economic health as shown by the $1.7-billion budget surplus for July reported recently by Ottawa], trying to drive down confidence in the Canadian economy without foundation."

We'll see if Kinsella calls this one of today's winners or losers. Harper certainly got under Dion's skin. "Do you want more of this?" an angry Grit leader said at a southwestern Ontario campaign stop Friday. "Do you think it's the way in a democracy to debate and to try to find the best solutions in a country? Can we debate this thing as adults?"

Maybe like Rip Van Winkle I'm just waking up and missed the calls for an economic downturn expressed by Iggy, Dryden, McCallum, Brison, Rae and so on, although I suppose the pom-poms and uniforms with the big "R" for recession should have been a giveaway.

He's a mean one, Mr. Harper, and this time just flat-out wrong. Saying the Green Shift was a threat to national unity was borderline; calling Dion "pro-Taliban" for daring to question our Afghan policy was over the line. And now this.

Why does Harper do this? The cuddly-sweater-guy thing was working. It may have been fake as all get out, but we at least appreciated the effort.

Dion's right about this much: Do we want a four-year majority of a paranoid Harper treating adversaries as enemies, scaring the children and making the leaves turn colour a month early?

In the spirit of Kim Campbell (a campaign is no time to discuss serious issues), I won't use this space to mention that we could use a national industrial policy to cope with the more than 200,000 manufacturing jobs lost in Central Canada these past two years; something better than the diluted version of the Kelowna Accord that Harper harpooned on taking office; a global warming strategy that isn't a global embarrassment; a serious attack on the pine-beetle infestation that's jeopardizing the livelihoods of forestry workers across Western Canada; a private-sector investment in R&D and new-product development that isn't also, once you subtract Research in Motion Inc. from the mix, another of our world-class shortcomings; and electronic record-keeping and other healthcare innovations yielding efficiencies and better health outcomes elsewhere in the world that could use a try-out here.

There's other stuff like the above that have an economic dimension. Raising them doesn't mean you want the economy to sewer. But I guess I'm an Enemy of the People for mentioning them, one more burden to live with.

Harper's running on leadership. That's pretty much his entire platform. So since it's the weekend, here's a reading list on that topic for the Leaside native: Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin's masterpiece on how Lincoln co-opted his adversaries by bringing them into his cabinet; Dale Carnegie's Power of Positive Thinking; and anything by Steven Covey.

One day, Lyndon Johnson, then a U.S. senator, happened into the office of his mentor, Sam Rayburn, House speaker, and the older man was transfixed by an image on the television. It was then-vice president Richard Nixon. "Look at that face," Rayburn said, shaking his head in disgust. "That hateful face."

Harper has never appeared to me to be enjoying his job. Is this man who used to lecture U.S. audiences on the inferiority of Canada destined to become downright hateful? It's not a fate I'd wish on anyone, obviously. But I do sometimes worry.       

A rare American who knows we exist

From Sarah Palin we learn that Alaska is bordered by Russia and Canada. And these are foreign countries. "They are right there, right next to our state." For a refresher course on lessons from Grade 3 geography, write to: Sarah Palin, Governor, State of Alaska, Juneau, Alaska. (Starts 38 seconds in.)

Chutzpah

McCain, career de-regulator, wants to scrap the first presidential debate so he can be in Washingto to help fix a Wall Street meltdown he helped bring about.

Jeff Skilling wasn't available?

Vladimir Ilyich Harper

Under that headline, Star columnist Thomas Walkom has a whack at our Loner in Chief, with echoes of the same Tory strongman earlier depicted by Andrew Coyne:

"Harper is a democratic centralist in the Bolshevik sense. Like Lenin, he feels that the leader, once chosen, has the right to dictate. He has little time for his own cabinet and less for the media, most of which he has cowed into submission.

"The fact that during this campaign he has appeared at no events open to the general public is indicative. Harper sees a leader's role as speaking to the people rather than hearing from them. Unlike most politicans, he takes no joy in meeting strangers...

"But perhaps the most striking aspect of Harper's political personality is the thread of bitterness that runs through his statements and actions..."

Any resemblance is purely coincidental.

 

Youth justice a la carte

Harper proposes stiffer sentences on youth offenders, although in Quebec his get-tough-on-crime stance would more closely resemble the soft-on-crime status quo he inveighs against elsewhere.

Where to begin?

1. This is the cheapest, easiest kind of pledge to make since there's little or no money attached to it.
2. There is no statistical evidence to show that tougher sentences are a deterrent to crime - not for youth-related crimes or other criminal activities.
3. Worse, as Barack Obama has pointed out in fighting "hanging judges" in his hometown Chicago, condemning 14-year-olds to prision principally achieves one thing: "They earn a degree in advanced criminality."
4. This is downloading. It's the provinces that administer the prisons that will have to pick up the tab.
5. This is yet another example of the decentralization of Confederation - or dismantling, to be blunt - still favoured by the former Reform policy chief, since it allows each province to decide the age at which youth offenders will dealt Canada's maximum punishment, life imprisonment.
6. This is deeply cynical. Harper and his aides separately made a point of informing francophone media that the minimum age for such rough justice would likely be 16, not 14, in Quebec, where the public aptitude favours rehabilitation. Quebec, of course, is where the two dozen or so BQ seats that could fall to the Tories Oct. 14 will likely make the difference between a Tory majority and another minority.

Youth violence is a problem, although Statscan figures show it is on the decline in most categories.

The way to tackle it is holistically, with more federal funding for municipal police officers, stiffer handgun controls and interdiction of firearms at the border, a witness protection program to rustle up information particularly on gang members who intimidate communities, and investments in youth programs like "midnight basketball" that keep idle youth occupied and provide them with alternative activities to crime. Oh, I see I'm quoting Jack Layton's prescription. Which figures, given his extensive background in municipal politics, where councillors actually know something about youth crime, its causes and how to curb it.

Of course, you can't reduce that comprehensive approach to a crowd-pleasing soundbite. Ridding communities of youth crime requires an investment in social workers, more comprehensive policing, the development of innovative community programs, teaching dispute-resolution practices to recent immigrants from countries where violence is a way of life, and much more.

It requires vision, one of the PM's weak suits. At the least, it requires not making a problem worse, which is what this proposal does.

Even the Globe's editorial board sighs:

"Mr. Harper may have thought it a stroke of genius to appeal to the tough-on-crime crowd and Quebec at the same time. But instead he is tampering with Canadian unity, while obscuring the debate on youth justice."

Still more compelling is Suman Virk, whose 14-year-old daughter, Reena, was drowned in a Victoria waterway by teenagers in 1997:

"It's a biological fact that the brain of a child has not developed...and also, our children don't have the life experience. A lot of times I do believe the children don't even understand the full consquences of their actions."

Harper doesn't have that excuse.

*

Turns out the Grits' election platform boils down to an asterisk.

John McCallum (opposite) former Grit cabinet minister and bank economist, briefed Liberal candidates and officials shortly before the Liberal platform was released Monday, warning them that the Tories have been spending like "drunken sailors" (someday that metaphor, which I believe dates from the fate of the Spanish Armada, will be retired), so there's not enough money to fund the Grits' proposed $55 billion in new spending programs and tax cuts over the next four years.

"Because we have relatively little money, because the Conservatives have emptied the bank account to a large degree and because the economy is weak, some of our initiatives will have to be phased in slower than we had originally planned," McCallum said.

Moments later, McCallum's leader went before the cameras to open a treat bag that contained, among other things. $70 billion for infrastructure improvements, $8.6 billion in corporate and small-biz tax cuts, $1.5 billion for childcare enhancements, $1.3 billion for drugs for catastrophic illnesses...and so on.

But, alas, it's not to be. And, we're to believe, the Grits learned only on Monday that the Tories' spendthrift ways make a hash of the aforementioned goodies, which would be delayed, undertaken in half measures, or scrapped altogether in a Liberal regime.

Harper's response to Dion's generally well-received plan for Canada's short-term future was that "If this were a CEO [meaning Dion] the board would fire him."

And it might, too, if for the simple reason the Grits either knew they were promising the wildly impossible, or that they rolled out their costly promises without any grasp of Canada's fiscal straits.

So, Mr. Dion, we hope one of debate questions goes, "Which, specifically, of your promises will you have to postpone, scale back or deep-six because Harper emptied the treasury? And why did you put out such an alluring but meaningless platform, given that by your own admission it's not anywhere near fully costed?

Since the cupboard already is bare, the Grits can't even depict Harper as holding back funds that would make the Grit promises possible.

Harper will trot out his own "drunken sailor" description of the Liberals' lavish $55  platform. But he needn't do so. It would suffice for the PM merely to assert that the Grits are such economic naifs - or cynics - that they tantalize the public with promises they break even before the polls open. 

Stealth trade pact

You know, of course, that Canada has been negotiating a NAFTA-like trade pact with the European Union, a deal that would utterly eclipse NAFTA, and open the door to still more deals with say, Japan and India, as those countries and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives have advocated.

You didn't? Oh.

Odd, since all 13 provincial and territorial governments agreed to the proposed Canada-E.U. trade pact at a meeting July 18 in Quebec City. And Harper, E.U president Jose Manuel Barroso and French president Nicolas Sarkozy, current holder of the rotating E.U. presidency, apparently are scheduled to meet in Quebec City on Oct. 17 - three days after the Canadian federal election - to get the formal deal negotiations underway.

Oh, but then, maybe you're in the dark about this trailblazing, transformational event because, uh, Harper has chosen not to release a text of the outlines of the deal until after the election.

Which I, for one, quite understand. The last time we had an election about free trade, with the Americans, in 1988, I got a sense, as a thirtysomething too young to be around for them, of how the country was nearly torn apart by the conscription crises of the First and Second World Wars.

I favoured the FTA, rather lustily, and have the lost friends to show for it. It really was brother against brother, hand-to-hand combat in the rhetorical trenches in an election that Mulroney had hoped to contest under the meaningless slogan "Managing Change" and which ended up creating schisms in, as I recall, everything from the food processing industry (Western grain farmers in favour, the McCain potato kings against) to the Writers Union of Canada (venerable publisher Jack McClelland against, Mordecai Richler in favour).

No, you wouldn't want to mar a de facto issue-free Tory campaign with an inflamed debate in every Tim's across the country about whether Canada should, as the "anti's" had it in the FTA debate, "surrender our sovereignty" to the Eurocrats in Brussels. Who, among other things, might oblige us to respect Britain's insistence that only cheddar made across the pond can be labelled as such.

Andrew Coyne, who lauds the very real possibility of a Canada-E.U. trade pact, points to one its undeniable virtues:

"If we pull this off, then Canada would be the only developed country (Mexico has its own deal) with guaranteed access to both the European Union and the United States - the two richest markets in the world, with 800 million consumers between them. Locating [a business] in either the U.S. or the E.U. would give a firm guaranteed access to only one. Only by locating in Canada would they get both."

This deal has implications for labour mobility, government procurement, and supra-national governance across a wide spectrum of economic and national activity that ranks it among the most significant events in Canadian history.

And somehow it's not a campaign issue.

Because Harper doesn't want it to be one. And I have to guess the other parties don't, either, because the only folks to whom all this is a secret is the Canadian electorate.

We used to call this the power of the elites - the people who know best shoving the FTA, Meech Lake, the Charlottetown Accord, the GST, and NAFTA down our throats with as little debate as possible. We thought those days were over, after the psychodrama of the FTA and Meech Lake.

Ottawa plainly wants to keep the waters from being stirred up on this cravenly undemocratic unfolding of events. Even Coyne and the Council of Canadians - an unusual pairing - thinks Harper should release the proposed Canada-E.U. trade outline before, not after the election.

In the meantime, we are mildly preoccupied, instead, by among other things the NDP's peculiar bad fortune with pothead and skinny dipping candidates in B.C. and a suddenly former Tory candidate in the riding Bob Rae is contesting given to hateful spewing on his blog.

Shift happens...

...though usually not quite this early in the campaign.

The centrepiece of the Grits' campaign was its Green Shift environmental policy, until it wasn't. After Green Shift reviews that were tepid at best, Dion last Thursday in Winnipeg abruptly demoted the convoluted policy, for good measure suggesting it had never been a major platform plank. "You have said it," Dion said to reporters gobsmacked at the sudden reversal, "but never me."

Oh right, except when the Grits unveiled it with great fanfare in June, and in the months since, with Grit apologist Robert Silver boasting as late as last Friday that the Green Shift was the only holistic environmental policy in the industrialized world, and shame on the environmental movement for not getting solidily behind it. Well, now that Dion isn't solidly behind it - his Liberal platform unveiling today stresses, of all things, balanced budgets (zzzz) - who can blame the Sierra Club?

Maybe it's something in the water.

On Canada AM this morning, Layton refused to rule out joining Dion in a coalition government if that's what it takes to oust Harper.

"Well, you know what, I've worked with any other party. I think people have seen that if they look back to my days on a municipal council," said Layton, a former Toronto councillor and one-time president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities.

"You roll up your sleeves and you try to solve a problem," he said.

Layton has made a great show since Day One of running for PM, of borrowing more than $18 million last year so the Dippers could run a "government-grade" campaign to win all the marbles. To buttress his claim that his sole aim was 24 Sussex, he laid off Dion and focused his attacks on Harper.

But, so soon, Layton is in climbdown mode. My guess is that the Dippers' surprisingly good numbers - Layton is second only to Harper among Canadians asked who can best run the country, with Dion trailing "none of the above" - is not translating into enough likely NDP gains in the Commons.

Layton said this morning that it would be him in the PM's chair with the upper hand in negotiating the outlines of an NDP-Liberal coalition. Normally that's called chutzpah - and Layton does of a certain flair for the outrageous, which comes more naturally to parties that have never formed a national government - but this time I'm guessing he's playing head games with Dion. If the Grits can be pushed off their Green Shift, let's see what other "bedrock principles" they'll demote or abandon.

Layton and Canada AM host Beverly Thomson this morning.

The Bernanke administration

Columnist Gail Collins of the New York Times, among the most consistently astute U.S. political observers and author of Scorpion Tongues: The Irresistible History of Gossip in American Politics (Harcourt Brace, 1998), notes the irrelevancy of George W. Bush in the current Wall Street crisis:

"Behind the-first-president-with-an-MBA-and-a-lot-of-good-it did-us stood the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke [head of America's central bank, the Federal Reserve Board], who appears to be actually running the government. On Thursday night, Bernanke had called Congressional leaders together and terrified them into supporting a quadrillion-dollar rescue plan. Legend has it that there was a time when these sorts of gatherings took place at the White House...

"Anyway, by the time Bush got around to making his speech [a brief reassurance the economy remains fundamentally sound], or at least a speechlet, Bernanke had already made the plan public. The stock market had rallied, and if the president had just stayed inside practicing his pending welcome for the Boston Celtics, the world would have little noted nor long remembered."

Ah, the Bush years, which began with a stolen election and a president ignoring CIA warnings about a pending al-Qaeda attack within the U.S. and ends with the biggest financial crisis in U.S. history since the Great Depression some 80 years ago, with a jobless recovery (fewer new jobs created in this administration than any since Hoover) and the colossal foreign-policy blunder of Iraq to entertain us in between.

I've always regretted the Constitutional amendment that term-limits U.S. presidents to eight years, spearheaded by Republicans wrathful about FDR's four election triumphs. The second terms even of the most able presidents, from Truman to Clinton, have been mediocre in large degree because immediately upon being re-elected, the president becomes a lame duck. One must acknowledge, though, that the Bush legacy offers the most compelling evidence for that amendment's merits.

Pictured below: Ben Bernanke, George W. Bush and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson at the White House this week. For the past few days, at least, the fellow with the beard has been de facto president.