I second that emotion.

@acoyne acoyne @

@Kady I guess all i can say is I'd rather be caught naked in a massage parlour than fully clothed working for SunNews.

 

 

Someday Andrew Coyne and I are going to launch an online Canadian political and DIY auto-repair mag. He hasn't said "yes." But I haven't yet explained about the $23-million grubstake; AC's title ("His Imperial Majesty, King of Kings, King of Zion, Invincible Lion of the Seed of Judah, Branch of the Tree of Solomon and Implement of the Holy Trinity" - I'm cribbing here from Haile Selassie); and the Antibes villa HQ. 

 

Last rites.

 
Iggy in Montreal, April 21. (Reuters)

Pundits are in a rush to get their Grit obits out ahead of rival scribes.

Susan Delacourt: What went wrong for the LIberals. (Toronto Star)

Justin Trudeau: "Honestly, we’re having a little bit of trouble connecting with voters.” (National Post)

Margaret Wente: Ignatieff's Kim Campbell moment. (Globe and Mail)

Jeffrey Simpson: The "strange death" of Liberal Canada. (Globe and Mail)

Pogge: There's the Iggy I know and loathe. (Peace, order and good government, eh?)

Jane Tabor: Liberal soul-searching begins as decision day nears. (Globe and Mail)

Rick Salutin: NDP's "teachable moments" for Harper and Iggy. (Toronto Star)

 

Uh, Prime Minister, we have a slight problem in the former capital of New France.

Two more campaign verities that may bite the dust.

1. The Tories were expected to handily retain their 10 seats in the Quebec City region. Uh, no.

2. And battleground Ontario is key to blocking a Tory majority. We'll see.

Here's seat-projector Eric Grenier at 308.com:  

Throughout the Quebec City region, [polling firm] CROP found the New Democrats to be extremely competitive. They are leading in Beauport - Limoilou, Charlesbourg - Haute-Saint-Charles, Louis-Hébert, and Portneuf - Jacques-Cartier, while being tied or closely trailing in Louis-Saint-Laurent and Québec. In other words, the NDP could sweep Quebec City, this after support that ran in the 9% to 13% range in the 2008 election. The New Democrats could, depending on what happens elsewhere, block a Conservative majority in Quebec City of all places. [Emphasis added.]

The Dippers currently hold one (1) seat in la belle province - that of a Grit-turned-Dipper in Montreal. In the CCF/NDP's 79-year history, it has never held more than one seat in Quebec. It now appears that at least five seats in 99% francophone Quebec City alone are within its grasp. 

 

 

 

NDP surge keeps rolling along.

 

LATEST POLLS HAVE NDP SOLIDLY IN OFFICIAL OPPOSITION TERRITORY.

TORY INSIDERS SAY MAJORITY HAS SLIPPED FROM THEIR GRASP.

BLOQUISTES ENDORSE LAYTON.

TRADITIONALLY GRIT TORONTO STAR ENDORSES LAYTON.

 
(CP)

1. Latest Angus Reid poll, in today's Star, has Tories just four points ahead of the Dippers, at 37% to 33% nationally, with Liberals dropping into the teens (19%). Confirms yesterday's Ipsos-Reid poll, with a five-point gap nationally between CPC and NDP, at 38% and 33% respectively, with Grits trailing at 18%.

In Quebec, the two polls have NDP leading, with 42% and 45%, respectively; and the BQ second, at 26% in both polls. Angus Reid has Grits third (16%) and Tories trailing, at 13%. Ipsos Reid has the reverse, Tories (15%) just ahead of Liberals (13%).

In battleground Ontario, Angus Reid has Tories maintaining strong, though slipping, lead, at 41%; NDP second, at 27%; Grits at 26%; Greens at 5%. Ipsos Reid similarly has Tories strongly ahead, at 40%, but much better numbers for Dippers (34%), and worse placing for Liberals (21%).

Update

Here's the latest Nanos Research's three-day rolling poll: Tories, 38%; NDP, 29.6%; Grits, 23.3%; BQ, 5.2%; and Greens, 3.1% In Quebec, Nanos also has the Dippers far ahead, at 39% (these three polls have Quebec NDP support almost identical, at 39%-41%); BQ at 22.2%; Liberals at 19.1%; and Tories at 16.3%. Nanos latest numbers have Ontario a three-way tie, when accounting for the usual margin for error: Tories, 35.3%; Grits, 31.7% and NDP, 28.5%.

 
(CP)

2. Top Team Harper officals tell Star they can't win the 23 additional seats in Ontario needed to secure a majority, and cover expected Tory losses in B.C. and Quebec. An ironic outcome of the Tories determined - and successful - anti-Iggy campaigns has been to drive Grit vote into Layton's camp, not Harper's.

"Harper dusts up Iggy for a year," a Tory source says, referring to anti-Grit TV ad campaigns soon after Ignatieff took the Grit leadership and a second wave of demonizing TV portrayals beginning in December, "but the benefactor of the collapsing Liberal vote is not Harper, it's Jack."

3. In an open letter to La Presse, biggest-circulation Quebec daily, BQ operatives Maxime Bellerose and Benoit Demuy say BQ is past its sell-by date in advancing the separatist cause in Ottawa. Pending a Quebec City initiative to put Canada through a third gruelling referendum on sovereignty - sooner than later, as the avowedly separatist Parti Quebcois is poised to oust a deeply unpopular Liberal regime led by Jean Charest - it's best for now to park our votes with the party that best represents Quebec's social-democratic sentiment.

"It would be a shame if Quebecers did not take advantage of this opportunity to send to Ottawa MPs who loudly and proudly share Quebec's values of justice and cooperation," the turncoats write. 

4. I just saw a pig fly past my front-room picture window. My paper, routinely described as a Liberal Party house organ, has today endorsed Layton for PM:

"Ignatieff has spent the past few days lamenting the loss of the centre ground of Canadian politics and attacking the NDP as spendthrifts and "boy scouts" [on a tragically wrong Afghan mission the NDP has always opposed.] His party's collapse in Quebec raises the question of whether it can truly be considered a national force at this point...The Liberals have not made a persuasive case for themselves as an alternative in 2011... Voters who believe Canada should aspire to something greater than the crabbed, narrow vision offered by the Harper Conservatives should look to Jack Layton and the New Democrats on Monday."

 

 

A 12-year-old could have seen this coming.

"Too bad there's never a 12-year-old around when you need one." -Groucho Marx

1. Layton has been the most popular party leader for, like forever. As far back as May 2010, an Angus Reid poll in Quebec found that Quebeckers were longing to vote NDP, if only it had a shot at power. Too bad for Layton's rivals that they "misunderestimated" him, didn't notice the spadework Layton has been doing in his native province since winning the NDP leadership. And that someday he might be seen by Bloc-weary Quebeckers as having a shot at power.

2. If the election issue were ever to become likeability rather than the economy, as Harper banked on, Layton could do exceeding well.

Again, a March 2011 Angus Reid national survey had Layton as Canada's most popular leader, with voters attributing these words to him: "intelligent" (32), "down to earth" (29%), "honest" (28%), compassionate (27%), open (27%).

By contrast, Harper was "secretive" (39%), "arrogant (38%), "intelligent" (33%), dishonest (30%) and "out of touch" (29%). Ignatieff was "arrogant" (49%), "out of touch" (38%), "boring" (32%), "inefficient" (32%) and "dishonest."

Even before he'd given up on his Grits mid-campaign, Kinsella noted the oddity that neither of the leaders of the two major parties was able to connect with Canadians.

3. The cane, a humanizing touch. Did Jack time that hip surgery well or what?

   
Lucien Bouchard, seen here with his wife, Audrey Best, single-handedly turned an out-of-favor "Oui" sentiment in the 1995 Quebec referendum into a nail-biting 49.9% near-sovereignty result, his immense, almost cult-like Quebec popularity of the time deriving in no small measure from his having survived a near-fatal brush with flesh-eating disease. Layton, seen here with his wife and fellow MP Olivia Chow, has for months had the sympathy of Canadians over his struggle with prostate cancer. The cane appeared only after his hip surgery in March, which deluded Harper strategists into believing Layton unwilling to force and fight an election. Oops. 

 

 

Early returns: Make mine orange, sight unseen.

Eric Grenier, at seat-projector 308.com:

Trois-Rivières [is] a Bloc riding ready to vote NDP despite only 24% of voters being able to name the NDP candidate (Robert Aubin). At 42%, that's a 33-point bump for the NDP.

"It is very hard to wean ourselves away from self-centredness."

Take away the spectacle, and we had Friday morning a couple making a solemn vow to look ceaselessly  to each other's welfare. A love story.

My ex and I were fortunate in a superb homily, and so were Catherine and William on Friday. An abridged version of the homily yesterday by Dr. Richard Chartres, Anglican Bishop of London (shown), follows. (Emphasis added)

“Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.” So said St Catherine of Siena whose festival day it is today. Marriage is intended to be a way in which man and woman help each other to become what God meant each one to be, their deepest and truest selves. ...

A spiritual life grows as love finds its centre beyond ourselves. Faithful and committed relationships offer a door into the mystery of spiritual life in which we discover this; the more we give of self, the richer we become in soul; the more we go beyond ourselves in love, the more we become our true selves and our spiritual beauty is more fully revealed. In marriage we are seeking to bring one another into fuller life.

It is of course very hard to wean ourselves away from self-centredness. ... 

We shall not be converted to the promise of the future by more knowledge, but rather by an increase of loving wisdom and reverence, for life, for the earth and for one another. ...

Marriage should transform, as husband and wife make one another their work of art. It is possible to transform as long as we do not harbour ambitions to reform our partner. There must be no coercion if the Spirit is to flow; each must give the other space and freedom. Chaucer, the London poet, sums it up in a pithy phrase:

“Whan maistrie [mastery] comth, the God of Love anon,

Beteth his wynges, and farewell, he is gon.”

As the reality of God has faded from so many lives in the West, there has been a corresponding inflation of expectations that personal relations alone will supply meaning and happiness in life. This is to load our partner with too great a burden. We are all incomplete: we all need the love which is secure, rather than oppressive, we need mutual forgiveness, to thrive. ...

I pray that God will bless you in the way of life that you have chosen, that way which is expressed in the prayer that you have composed together in preparation for this day:

God our Father, we thank you for our families; for the love that we share and for the joy of our marriage. 

In the busyness of each day keep our eyes fixed on what is real and important in life and help us to be generous with our time and love and energy.

Strengthened by our union help us to serve and comfort those who suffer. We ask this in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Amen. 

This is a commendable re-statement of the Golden Rule, our truest guide, which finds expression in the founding doctrines of all the world's major religions, from Judaism to Islam to Native North American spiritualism.

Bishop Chartres also alludes to loneliness, the widespread bane of this new century, best assayed in Bowling Alone: The Collapase and Revival of American Community. You can, of course, be alone in a marriage, a common and wretched state. I've long felt that loneliness, on its own and twinned with anxiety, grief and every manner of social and bodily suffering, is the worst of fates.

By now in the Western world, upward of 40% of people live alone. This isn't the place to explore the demographic reasons for a phenomenon as profound as the discovery of fire. But it's worth being mindful of, that our struggles are vastly compounded when we are alone in dealing with them.

The cure is the outward-directedness invoked by Chartres on Friday morning. Which costs nothing and is its own rich reward.

Related

Richard Chartres, 132nd Anglican Bishop of London, is a vegan and an environmentalist committed to reducing his Church's environmental footprint by 60% by 2050. He made headlines in saying that "making selfish choices such as flying on holiday or buying a large car" were a "symptom of sin"; and oversaw the publication of How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Change a Christian?, a booklet describing the effort combat global warming as a "moral duty." The Guardian profiles him here.

  

 

Compare and contrast.

1.

"It will look more like Ireland, more dynamic, more attractive to investors, brighter, more positive, outward looking." -Tory finance minister Jim Flaherty, asked by interviewer Diane Francis, "What do you think Canada will look like in five years if you win a majority?", Financial Post, May 23, 2006.

__________________

Ireland forced to take EU and IMF bail-out package

Ireland has accepted an EU and IMF bail-out thought to be worth up to 77 billion pounds after emergency telephone conference talks. -headline, UK Daily Telegraph, Nov. 22, 2010.

 
2.

Harper suggests 'Belgian-style' federalism

CBC News | Last Updated: Wednesday, October 20, 2004 | 6:27 PM ET

Conservative MPs are defending an idea put forward by Stephen Harper to model the Canadian federation after Belgium, where federal authority is divided along linguistic lines.

The Conservative leader first floated the idea during a speech in Quebec last Friday. He said there are some areas where Ottawa could hand over some of its powers to linguistic groups, such as francophones or anglophones.

"By devolving authority, not solely to a province, but to have an arrangement based on linguistic groups that cross the country," he said.

_____________________________

Belgium goes a year without government

(Euronews | April 22 2011) It has been a year today since Yves Leterme, Belgium’s caretaker prime minister abandoned his attempt to form a government but the country does not appear any closer to end its crisis. ...

Belgium’s political paralysis has now set a new world record and things could get worse with early elections scheduled in June. The Flemish nationalist leader Bart De Wever has signalled he is ready for a fresh round of talks with the Francophone socialist leader Elie Di Rupo.

 

 

"October surprises" in April.

 

LAYTON CAUGHT IN MASSAGE PARLOR!

HARPER'S ANTI-CANADA QUOTES REVEALED!

IGNATIEFF EXPOSED AS WANNABE YANK IRAQ-INVADER!

We're into the Hallowe'en phase of the federal election campaign.

A fat dossier of potentially damaging Harper quotes over his lifetime, first compiled nearly a decade ago, somehow lands in the Grit camp two weeks ago.

The leader of the Grit camp, meanwhile, is depicted an Iraq-invasion mongering tool of George W. Bush, sort of, in a photo that a high-ranking Tory operative is accused of providing the upstart Sun News Network (SNN) last week. 

And now Jack Layton (shown campaigning Friday in Courtenay, B.C.), who especially couldn't hope to escape the smear season, given the NDP surge, is reported by the same SNN to, according to an unnamed, now retired, Toronto police officer, seen by the officer and his partner naked in a Chinatown massage parlor in Toronto some 15 years ago.  

Full disclosure: On eight separate occasions in the mid-2000s, someone bursting into the massage room of my chiropractor would have found me lying starkers on a bed. I can feel my reputation rapidly slipping away as I try to explain my conduct. Of  how the young woman massaging me was gradually (miraculously) removing the previous decades' of accumulated stress from my major muscle groups, notably in my shoulders, that had seized up. I swear nothing untoward happened. I was lectured incessantly on the merit of bike lanes by possibly the GTA's only masseuse who knew the names of each anti-bike-lane member of city council. This work was done in her basement clinic on a Toronto sidestreet, which makes the whole enterprise sound even dodgier.

Layton insists that, while he did obtain a massage from a facility properly licensed with the city as a registered massage parlor, he also did not engage in improper behavior. He recalls the two officers telling him the premises were suspected of being used for illicit purposes, and that he should stay away from the place. Layton gave the cops his telephone number and address and left. Later that day he told his wife, Olivia Chow, MP for Trinity-Spadina, about the incident. She issued a statement yesterday saying she had known previously of her husband's massage-clinic appointment, "as I always do," and has seconded Layton's assertion he had done nothing wrong.  

What's interesting here is that through Layton's eight election campaigns since 1996, that incident has never been revealed. Has been non-newsworthy until this highly convenient time, though it occurred in the news-media capital of English Canada, and starred an individual even then among the most prominent people in the city.

By 1996, Jack Layton had served for ages on Toronto city council, and had endured a high-profile loss in a run for mayor. In a world of "gotcha journalism," Layton would have been a prize indeed for the scandal-hungry Toronto papers.

But no, we did not learn about this incident - an entirely innocent one, according to the only two people who will go on the record about it - for a decade and a half. We're first learning of this stale "news" 72 hours before Election Day, on the only occasion in its 79-year history when the CCF/NDP is poised to form a national government or official opposition.

The timing alone was sufficient reason for Sun News Network (a.ka. Faux News North) to hold the story until it could be confirmed with real people whose names aren't lifted off tombstones.

And, obviously, the big question for our unnamed retired police officer? Why tell your story now, what's your motive in doing so, and what contacts have you had with any political parties or individuals? A less obvious question: With three all-news TV networks to choose from, why did contact the weeks'-old conservative one with your story?

I can guarantee that curious minds that want to know the identify and motive of this snitch with nothing to actually snitch about won't be satisfied prior to May 2. After May 2, the story will simply die. It will no longer matter, the smear having done his damage. That's how smears work.

Only in the second case above do we know the alleged smear artist. And Patrick Muttart, erstwhile deputy chief of staff to then-prime minister Stephen Harper, has been summilarly exiled by the Tory camp. (Goodness, the company our PM keeps! As if Bruce Carson wasn't enough.) Having been made to walk the plank, Muttart has reverted to omerta, though, again through unnamed sources, he is said to be upset by how the Tory campaign has treated him, poor dear. 

It's odd that Faux News North would examine the purported Iggy photo the Tory operative provided it, determine that it was not a photo of Ignatieff but of a U.S. soldier, and therefore not use it. Yet just 48 hours later, FNN stooped to shoddy journalism in running an unsourced story in which Ignatieff's chief rival, Layton, is hazily depicted as a patron of an illicit bawdy house.

Odd that this tale would lie dormant until the first time in its 79-year history the NDP was a threat to replacing the Grits as the official opposition or even the Tories as the governing party.

We shouldn't call them "dirty tricks," which suggests Lucy pulling Charlie Brown's football away at the last minute. Dirty tricks, executed properly (that leaves out Gordon Liddy, planner of the botched Watergate burglary), can subvert democracy. Indeed, that's the point.

By this means, of course, we first had Stephen Harper thrust upon us as PM in 2006. On that occasion, it was the Grits that were smeared, and too late in the day to recover.

The RCMP, world's least competent national police force - which almost allowed one of our PM's and his wife to be killed in their beds at 24 Sussex, then Tasered an innocent, tragically confused immigrant to death at Vancouver International - took it upon itself at about this point in the 2006 campaign to insert itself into the political process.

In the 2006 campaign, the Mounties "revealed" that then finance minister Ralph Goodale had possibly acted improperly in his handling of income-trust policy. With the very real Liberal sponsorship scandal as the background context, a great many voters were prepared to believe this new, unfounded "report" of possible misconduct. From which, in the fullness of time, no hint of actual misconduct was ever shown to have occurred. Too late, of course. And to this day we don't know who or for what purpose the RCMP operatives chose to meddle in an election campaign.  

There's a natural inclination to feel badly for the victims of smear jobs through history. Save it. We're the victims. We the electorate. The thought that even one among us will vote against Harper, or Ignatieff, or Layton, because of dirty tricks is repugnant. Smears are an assault on our democracy in denying voters the full range of honorable candidates to choose from.

John McCain (shown, in 2007, preparing for a second South Carolina primary race) was sailing toward the Republican presidential nomination in 2000 when shoppers in South Carolina emerged from supermarkets to find fliers under the windshield wipers of their cars informing them that McCain, frontrunner in the Palmetto State primary, was the father of a black love child. Signed, unsigned. And that, plus the votes of the five Republican-appointed justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, is how George W. Bush became president. From which followed 9/11, the botched Iraq invasion, Katrina, the Great Recession, a record trillion-dollar-plus deficit, and eight lost years in stem-cell research. 

That's why my despair for McCain is measure. My sorrow is directed, instead, at a great country deprived of a genuine democratic choice in an election.

McCain, of course, went down in flames in the 2000 South Carolina GOP primary, breathing life, finally, into a Bush campaign which to that point had lost a series of contests to McCain.

And, as I noted earlier, we still don't know who smeared the hero of the Hanoi Hilton on behalf of Dubya, the chronically AWOL National Guard airman. Karl Rove is widely assumed to have been the mastermind, and the fact he's not tried to clear his name - establish his honor - more than a decade later suggests the widely held assumption is true. But smear-job artists, Muttart aside, very seldom pay a price. Rove thrives as a TV talking head and campaign stratgeist for hire.

If you're in the market for a permanent governing majority that lasts six years, Karl's your man. And somewhere out there is a retired cop who can regale you with tales of naked men he's seen in Chinese massage parlors. Can't say he witnessed anything beyond the "wink wink" stigma, but that may suffice.

Related

Kinsella: "I was on Sun News tonight. My take: if a political party was ultimately behind this story – and it’s highly unlikely a political party wasn’t – they’ll be really, really sorry if they get found out. Voters aren’t stupid. Things like this don’t happen by accident."

Edmonton Sun report.

Photos: Layton, CP; McCain, Getty Images.

 

Those who ignore the past are doomed...

...to relive it as Liberals circling the drain.

William Manchester on America's underestimation of Japan, late December 1941:

[The Japanese soldier] may have been the most underrated infantry weapon in history. On parade he resembled a poorly wrapped parcel of brown paper- soiled, crumpled, and threatening to come apart. His leggings were sloppy, his blouse bulged, his trousers were baggy, and his bandy legs ridiculously short...Any barhop could tell you: America had been winning battles since 1775, and had never lost a war.

But the Japanese hadn't lost a war since 1598....[War] Secretary Stimson warned the country in the fourth week of the war: 'We'll defeat the Japanese in the end, but we shouldn't look at the war with them throught rose-colored glasses...The Japanese soldier is short, wiry and tough. He is well disciplined." By then, the fiction that any red-blooded American could lick 10 Orientals had yielded, in Washington, at least, to a shocked realization that the capital had already entered its grimmest period since the Civil War...

Everyone was wrong [about the Japanese]. By New Year's Day the troops of Dai Nippon had not only thrust southward from Saigon; they had also made landings on Guam, Hong Kong, Borneo, Wake, and the Philippines. Tojo was outblitzing Hitler. He was carving out an enormous salient - a tenth of the globe - into the direct route between the [U.S.] West Coast and Tokyo.

Chantal Hebert today on the Grits' hubris in forcing an election that may destroy it:

'The end of the world' was how one shaken lifelong Liberal insider described his party’s slide to third place behind the NDP this week...Throughout its distinguished history, the Liberal Party of Canada has never been further from power than official opposition...Nothing in the culture of the federal Liberals has prepared them for life as a third party. That culture may account for the blind spot that has brought the party to the edge of this abyss.

One of the most remarkable features of the current campaign is that the Liberal team brought this election upon itself...Michael Ignatieff and his strategists chose the timing of this battle as long as six months ago. They did so with the pre-election wind squarely in their party’s face and in the absence of any tangible indication that it was about to turn in its favour...

A reduced Conservative minority government was their worst-case scenario. In most ways, Ignatieff did do better. The Liberal leader has turned out to be at least twice the campaigner that his predecessor was. His campaign has been a model of discipline and relative grace under duress. But the Liberal game plan overlooked the possibility that Jack Layton might also run a better campaign than last time.

It is not that the possibility was not in the air. Pre-election polls pegged Layton higher than Ignatieff in the leadership ratings. In Quebec he had become the most popular federalist leader on the ballot and his party was already on the move.

Liberal strategists did not factor a potentially surging NDP into their calculations because they presumed the Liberals were playing against the Conservatives in the major leagues and the NDP was not. They approached the election with the mindset of a governing party but the physique of a third party.

As dangerous as the past month has turned out to be, the next few days could be more perilous. For the Liberals, things could still get worse. The so-called orange wave of the NDP could turn into a tsunami and sweep into Ontario. Or the sight of the NDP in the official opposition window with attending speculation that Monday’s vote could put Layton within reach of the Prime Minister’s Office could see the right flank of the Liberals collapse to the Conservatives.

On the highway to Montreal’s Trudeau airport — one of the rare landmarks of the past Liberal glory in Quebec — there is a big Ignatieff billboard. 'Quebecers have the power to change things', it proclaims. That part of the Liberal message has obviously resonated.