Rolling all the dice

We thought Hail Mary passes were John McCain's department. But here's Stephen Harper with a last-minute request that the format for the leaders debates tonight and tomorrow be rejigged to provide a full hour on the economy.

With all the turbulence on Wall Street, the Tories explain, Canadians need reassurance. Funny, that's not quite how the Tories saw it when Jack Layton called for an all-party economic summit premised on the same concern about U.S. market chaos migrating to Canada.

For viewers, an hour on the economy is better than the 12 minutes now scheduled for the topic. But for Harper, I dunno.

The Tories believe the economy to be their high card. But the economy has only weakened since Harper took power in January 2006. That's not his fault; we're in a global recession over which no one has control.

But try explaining that to the 200,000 Ontario manufacturing workers who've lost their jobs in the past two years. Or workers in the devastated forestry sector. Even Western Arabia Alberta has seen some of the glow come off its economy as plunging crude prices have postponed new oil-sands projects.

Bad enough for Harper that it's four against one, and that his gambit would enable his adversaries to cavil about him and showcase their own economic agendas at greater length. It would be different if the Tories had an innovative agenda of their own. But they've chosen instead to fight this election by knocking down the ideas of their rivals.

So if I was on the defensive, as incumbents like Harper tend to be, I'd want to stick with 12 minutes each for a cornucopia of topics. Let the other yakkers get their two cents in. And walk away relatively unscathed for lack of a sustained attack on any one topic.

But what do I know? I was cut from the short list of offensive coordinators at the West End Euchre Guild.

Will we pass up Sarah Palin?

Interesting to see that yesterday's most-read Star story online was "Best of Sarah Palin on YouTube." 

But, as I said before, I know you won't even peek at the Palin-Biden debate Thursday scheduled against the first English-language Canadian leaders debate. Despite the Canadian (and global) fascination with all things Palin. Will she self-destruct? I know you'll wait to read about it the next day. Wontcha?

Even if it means missing Palin gems like this: "I found my son's skates this morning. How hard could it be to find bin Laden?"

Those "Country First" Canadian commercial broadcasters are right to broadcast these two events simultaneously. No doubt about it. Oy.

Is plagiarism reason to fire Stephen Harper?

It would be in literature, academe, and journalism. Ask historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, made to surrender prestigious posts including Pulitzer Prize juror, and Jayson Blair, erstwhile New York Times reporter fabulist.

And in politics. Ask Joe Biden, who dropped out of a promising 1988 U.S. presidential run after it was revealed that his moving stump-speech description of his rags-to-riches background had been lifted from a speech by then-British labour leader Neil Kinnock.

Should it matter that Stephen Harper did the same thing in a 2003 speech commiting his party to support of the U.S.-led Iraq invasion?

The Tories argue that the speech is stale-dated. But there is no statute of limitations on plagiarism.

They're on stronger ground in arguing Canadians care more about the economy than a five-year-old speech.

Still, there are some problems here:

• Harper is a writer who has long prided himself on drafting most or all of his speeches. He is at work on a history of the NHL. How could he approve and then read a speech with passages lifted almost word-for-word from then Australian PM John Howard, knowing the words were not in his own voice?
• This was no ordinary speech. This was arguably the most important speech in Harper's career to that point, a formal Parliamentary address by the Leader of the Official Opposition rebuking the government of the day and making the case for joining U.S. President George W. Bush's "coalition of the willing" in Iraq.
• Plagiarism is theft. Passing off someone else's words as his own, dismissing the incident as irrelevant, and letting then-speechwriter Owen Lippert hang out to dry without offering an apology of his own all speak to Harper's character, hardly in a positive way. In the absence of an apology, at the very least, Harper is dangerously close to endorsing the plagiarism rampant in academe and the media.

But, does the theft rise to the level of firing? It does for Stephane Dion, who said yesterday that Harper "should be expelled" and "doesn't have the ethics to choose his own words."

Dion would use "expelled." For Dion, a longtime academic, plagiarism of a term paper or Ph.D dissertation is cause for expulsion.

Then again, so far as we know, Harper is a first-time offender. Real plagiarists are chronic thieves. Psychologists believe they actually hope to be caught out.

And we look to leaders at Harper's level of responsibility for a host of qualities, especially sound decision-making. Harper's current healthy poll standings, which put him within easy reach of a majority, suggest Canadians are satisfied with Harper's competence, even if he keeps qualities of vision or courage he may possess well hidden.

Besides, Harper's substantive mistake five years ago was supporting America's biggest foreign-policy blunder of modern times. Would it really matter if he'd done so in his own words?

The optics of a Harper apology now would be dreadful. It would be a three- or four-day story, in a compressed campaign (compared with the U.S. election marathon), with editors summoning up stories about the epidemic of plagiarism and other forms of lying in society. Harper cheated, and that's something easy to relate to, including among the swing voters Harper will need to achieve his majority.

Of course, the right thing to do - following the example of Barack Obama in his masterful disucssion of race in a March 18 speech in response to the rantings of his longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright - would require courage.

Don't hold your breath.

Here's a pithier explainer from Warren Kinsella:

  WINNERS: Bob Rae and the Liberal War Room. This one’s easy: on a crowded news day – and at exactly the right moment, just before the televised leaders’ debates – Rae and some anonymous Liberal staffers seriously kicked Tory ass. Their plagiarism discovery was about more than plagiarism, of course, and as the Tories eventually realized to their horror – it made the case (with accompanying video, no less!) that the Harper administration lifts its foreign policy straight out of the Dubya playbook. And that is something that Canadians, of all stripes, do not like. At all. Huge win – biggest war room score of the campaign so far, I reckon.
• LOSER: Not Owen Lippert! Sure, the Conservatives threw the Fraser Institute acolyte under the bus without a moments’ hesitation – where, along with Ryan Sparrow and a litany of creepy and kooky Conservative candidates, he will find lots of company. The Tories want the disaster – which has attracted international attention – to end with the ritual sacrifice of poor Owen (who I have met, and who didn’t seem like a bad guy, even if he was a dirty rotten conservative). So, for the Grits, the challenge is to ensure that the Tories aren’t permitted to change the channel. The challenge is to keep making the point, in the leaders’ debates and elsewhere, that – if these guys win a majority – going to war in a place like Iraq isn’t just possible, it’s a given.

Released, finally

Paul Godfrey's record in propelling the Jays into the post season during his CEO tenure: 0-8.

Enough said.

Are we serious about poverty or not?

The NDP's platform released Monday calls the other parties' bluff on poverty.

Two things about poverty:

1. Eighteen years ago, Parliament voted unanimously to eradicate child poverty. Today, close to 900,000 Canadian children live below the poverty line.
2. Eradicating poverty isn't a "spending program." It's an investment in lower crime rates, a more literate and scientifically-skilled populace, a reduction in social costs associated with poverty (malnutrition; TB, AIDS and other communicable diseases; under-weight babies, teenage pregnancies, incarceration, spousal, child and substance abuse, to name just a few), and the foundation for a more globally competitive nation with a higher standard of living.

In business, the maxim is that if you can't measure it, you can't achieve it. One of the knocks on Layton's goal of cutting child poverty by more than 50 per cent and the overall poverty rate by more than 35 per cent in his first, five-year mandate is that the timeframe is unrealistic. But CEOs are hired to set and strive to meet ambitious goals. The lingering shame dating from the well-meaning 1990 Parliamentary vote arises from a lack of goals, ambitious or otherwise.

Layton is asking Canadians about their priorities. Would they prefer the $40 billion in income-tax cuts the Grits expect to finance with their proposed Green Shift carbon-tax program to fund? A corporate tax rate that Harper plans to cut from 22.12 per cent to 19 per cent? (John McCain complained in his debate with Barack Obama last Friday that America suffers the world's second-highest corporate tax rate, at 36 per cent. It's not like the Dippers aim to chase away corporate investment, even if Dion sides with Harper than the Canadian corporate tax rate apprently needs to be cut.) Or eradicating the cycle of poverty by which we keep producing new generations of impoverished Canadians?

And it's not as though the Dippers' total platform costs - proposed spending and tax cuts - are out of line with the competition. The NDP costs its platform at $51.6 billion, the Grits platform rings in at $55 billion, and the yet-to-be-released Tory platform is predicted to be $48 billion, although that figure is expected to rise.

A widening disparity between rich and poor is a cancer on any society, no matter how ostensibly affluent, because it nurtures an "underclass" of alienated folks who in time lose a sense of hope and, with it, of social responsibility. It's a largely unseen burden on society because we don't calculate its total cost. But like gravity, widespread deprivation is there all the same, weighing us all down.

Paul Newman (1925-2008)

Loving husband and father, stage and screen actor, progressive political activist, entrepreneur, race-car driver, philanthropist, survived by the actor and summur-stock impresario Joanne Woodward and by millions of admirers of Newman's decency, self-deprecation, and peerless skill at subtlety in realizing characters in a wide range of films.

As I write this, the U.S. House of Representatives has just voted down the $700-billion (U.S.) bailout that was to have rescued the global financial system from total meltdown, throwing the stock markets into panic. The fragility of Gen. David Petraeus's vaunted anti-insurgency campaign in Iraq is becoming more apparent by the day. Pirates have seized a ship bristling with Russian tanks and other war materiel off the coast of Somalia, vowing to slaughter its Ukranian crew unless they're paid $20 million.

And all I can think of is Paul Newman.

Unlike, say, Aubrey Hepburn, who made relatively few films, I can't complain that Newman, with scores of films to his credit, left us too soon - though his last films were among his best. Newman's legacy is an immense body of work, so many immortal characters from Hud to "Fast Eddie" Felson to the starchy husband in Mr. and Mrs. Bridge to the maniacally devious anti-hero of the Coen brothers' Hudsucker Proxy to the 50-something rapscallion who refused to grow up but was the soul of decency in Nobody's Fool.

In baseball, a pitcher who is on his game is said to be "giving a clinic out there," teaching other pitchers how it's done. That was Newman in most of the more than 65 films in which he acted in a career lasting more than 50 years. Newman made maximum use of the shrug, the raised eyebrow, the sheepish grin that conveyed four pages worth of dialogue. About 15 years ago, Esquire editors in a rare interview with the actor went through more than 40 of Newman's films with him, asking for his assessment. In more than 80 per cent of the films, Newman faulted himself for overacting. "That could have been a good movie if I hadn't pushed so hard," he said of more than one classic. 

It was Newman who introduced Bill Clinton to presidential politics, employing the future president as a gofer while managing the Connecticut campaign of 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern. He took his speedway exploits seriously enough to accumulate a slew of trophies from them. He was an instant success as a seat-of-the-pants entrepreneur with his Newman's Own line of condiments ("If we ever get a business plan we're screwed"), and donated the proceeds to his network of Hole in the Wall summer camps for kids from distressed inner-city neighbourhoods ($220 million in donations by 2007). Newman kept his sanity for decades in a celebrity culture, finding a rather coarse way of describing his durable second marriage to Joanne Woodward: "Why would I leave home for hamburger when I have steak at home?"

Newman had an arrangement with Woodward, whom he directed brilliantly in the film version of Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God (screen name, Rachel, Rachel). Woodward would tolerate his race-car-driving addiction, and Newman would heed his wife's judgment on scripts. Newman explained, more or less, how this worked in a 1982 Time interview about how the couple came to make the 1963 film A New Kind of Love:

"Joanne read it and said, 'Hey, this would be fun to do together. Read it.' I read it and said, 'Joanne, it’s just a bunch of one-liners.' And she said, 'You son of a bitch, I’ve been carting your children around, taking care of them at the expense of my career and taking care of you and your house.' And I said, 'That is what I said. It’s a terrific script. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.' This is what is known as a reciprocal trade agreement."

Newman should have been a sporting-goods merchant. He was good at it. But within a year of inheriting his father's Cleveland store, Newman sold it and headed off to New York and the Actors Studio. ("I wasn't driven to acting by an inner compulsion. I was running away from the sporting goods business.")

More proof there is a God. There is no "greatest actor who ever lived." But I can't dwell on that proposition without thinking of Paul Newman. We won't see his like again.

Photos: Above, with Robert Redford as Butch Cassidy in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Below: Newman and Woodward at home; Life cover of Rachel, Rachel's Newman and Woodward, star and director/producer, respectively; A New Kind of Love (1963), released the same year as Newman's Hud; Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, a Woodward-Newman vehicle that Woodward has described as best reflecting her husband's real-life personality (1990); as "Fast Eddie" Felson in The Hustler (1961); in Cool Hand Luke (1967).

Greed and the debates

I know you'll do your civic duty and watch this Thursday's Canadian leaders' debate, which begins at 9 p.m., rather than the debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, the first woman GOP presidential running mate in history, which also begins at 9 p.m. Thursday.

As the Grits, Greens and NDP struggle to establish who has the most genuine green credentials, you won't even peek to see how Tina Fey Sarah Palin, the rookie Alaska governor, is faring against Biden, who has more tenure in the U.S. Senate than all but four of his peers, having first been elected to the chamber at age 29, is current chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and former chairman of the judiciary committee, in which role he famously scuppered the U.S. Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork (to be "borked" is now part of the U.S. political vernacular), and has forgotten more about foreign policy than most experts remember.

We know you won't even switch channels briefly to see how Palin, the brief supernova whose poll numbers began sliding even before her straight-to-YouTube embarrassment of vacuity was revealed by Katie Couric last week, will be handled by the genteel Biden, who has the near-impossible task of responding to anything the specialist in aerial moose hunting says without knocking the stuffing out of a woman and thus handing her the sympathy vote. They each face an extraordinary challenge, without precedent in political debates. (George H.W. Bush and Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman presidential running mate and a national politician as a member of Congress, were more equally matched in the 1984 U.S. veep debate.)

I've told myself since this unfortunate timing was revealed more than two weeks ago that the broadcast coalition handling the Canadian debates and the leaders themselves would by now have changed the date for their first encounter, which is certain to garner subprime ratings. I couldn't figure out why this obvious blunder hadn't been rectified until reading this report by Richard Brennan of the Star's Ottawa bureau. Here's the relevant para:

"A source close to the discussions told the Star the [broadcast] consortium, at the behest of the private broadcasters, picked the same date and time as the Biden-Palin debate to avoid lost revenue from the cancelled American programming, since the U.S. networks would be postponing their shows anyway to accommodate the U.S. debate."

In free-trade discussions with the U.S., it has always driven the Americans nuts that Canadian broadcasters "simulcast," or basically steal, American TV signals of popular U.S. shows and plug their own Canadian-market ads in those programs. This long-standing dubious practice has helped rob Canadian trade negotiators of a place on the moral high road in every trade dispute, since it is invariably - and quite properly - cited by U.S negotiators.

Apparently, our commercial broadcasters are insistent on maximizing profits even against the national interest - even facing the likelihood that Canadians' attention will inevitably be divided between these two historic debates.

And they're doing it for the money. Plain and simple.