The signs of Canada Day

Here's how to tell it's the day before Canada Day:

• Half of Ottawa is off work; the rest of us are in our offices listening to the rehearsals of the Canada Day stage show.  I'm actually looking forward to Blue Rodeo's rehearsal, if the rain holds off.
• It's time for the annual reflection on "what is a Canadian?"

The Dominion Institute has some ideas, based on a survey it released today and discussed yesterday on CBC Radio's Cross-Country Checkup program.

And south of the border, the Washington Times has its own quirky answer to "what is a Canadian?" 

Answer: Barack Obama.

"What kind of "change" does Barack Obama want? He seeks to transform America into Canada. Mr. Obama is not proposing "new politics," but is a champion of the well-known, already enacted policies in the Great White North. His proposals are more reflective of Canadian values than American national ideals," The Times writes.

 

Long memories

Here's a riddle: What is the similarity between Prime Minister Stephen Harper throwing a football on the lawn of Parliament in 2005 and Liberal leader Stephane Dion doing the weather on CITY TV in 2008?

On immediate consideration, the answer would seem to be - nothing much.

But the Conservative spin machine sees a similarity, I guess, which explains why TWO of us at the Star have received messages from the party's HQ in the last 24 hours - asking us if we're going to write or comment on Dion's weatherman stint the same way we did about Harper throwing the football with Peter MacKay after Belinda Stronach's dramatic floor-crossing in May, 2005.

I apparently was on TV afterward in 2005, saying the Harper-MacKay stunt made me cringe (still does, actually). So Conservatives wanted to know if Dion doing the weather made me cringe too. Another of us had called the football game a PR display, so the Conservatives wanted to know if that's how he'd write about Dion doing the weather.

I'm assuming that if two of us got these messages at the Star, there are other reporters out there getting them too. In other words, they're now digging through their three-year-old records, looking for stuff said about Harper while he was in opposition - stuff that made them mad, apparently - and trying to leverage that into negative coverage of Dion.

I don't recall any political party doing this in the past - despite some Conservatives' conviction that the Liberals dictated negative media coverage of Harper, then and now. For the record, when Liberals did try to get me to write that Harper had a "secret agenda" or that he was scary in opposition, I'd usually tell them "you would say that, wouldn't you?" and tell them it was hardly front-page news that Liberals didn't like Harper. Same thing applies to Conservatives.

The new guard

Yesterday, the Liberal Party of Canada issued a statement on this whole business of Jean Chretien winning his case against Justice John Gomery.

The statement makes very clear that this version of the Liberal party has very little to do with a certain prime minister named Paul Martin. Note the first part of the first sentence.

"The Liberal Party of Canada has always held that the judicial process should be allowed to take its course with regards to the sponsorship program, and we are extremely pleased that former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his former Chief of Staff Jean Pelletier have been completely cleared by the Federal Court."

For the record, it was Chretien's Liberal party who believed that "letting the judicial process take its course" was enough to deal with the sponsorship program. It was Martin's Liberal party, circa 2003-05, which believed that position wasn't sufficient -- that a full-fledged inquiry was needed.

Liberals at large are still deeply divided on whether the Gomery inquiry was a good idea. But I read that statement yesterday to be saying that the current occupants of the party office -- the people who wrote those words -- are not divided at all in thinking it was a bad idea. Yes, Paul Martin has left the building.

Buckler rides the resignation wave

Sandra Buckler, the Prime Minister's communications chief, is leaving her job. Will this change things between the PMO and the media in Harper's Ottawa? My view is, probably not much. I was never really sure what Buckler did, frankly, beyond implementing higher-ups' wishes to antagonize the parliamentary press gallery and sending out terse, non-informational emails. I'm sure they'll be able to find someone else to do that job. Ottawa is filled with folks who can follow orders.

Buckler's departure, actually, is part of a larger wave of resignations we have been seeing and are going to see in the days ahead. Many will be prompted simply by the fact that "it's time" - Buckler, chief of staff Ian Brodie, etc.

Others may be looking at next week - July 2, 2008, when the measures of the federal accountability act come into force. Why is that relevant? Because the act creates something known as "designated office holders" - ministers, ministerial staff and others - who are not allowed to lobby for five years after leaving their jobs on the Hill.

So there will be plenty of folks in Harper's Ottawa right now, envisioning a lucrative lobbying career, who may be packing up their desks as soon as  today. Never  mind that Harper once famously said: "If there are (Parliament) Hill staffers who dream of making it rich trying to lobby a future Conservative government, if that's true of any of you, you had better make different plans, or leave."

One of my colleagues, returning from the 2005  news conference where that statement was  uttered, translated it this way: "Liberals can't be trusted, but I don't trust you guys much either."

At any rate, watch for a trickle or even a flow of exits before next Wednesday. And then we can start speculating on who's going to replace all these people.

UPDATE: Garth Turner has an extensive list of what Ms. Buckler did in her job at the PMO.

I join Garth, by the way, in wishing her well in future endeavours.

Newspaper delivery

Every now and then, I check in on this blog to see what one of the Prime Minister's closest friends is thinking.

He's John Weissenberger, an old Calgary friend of Stephen Harper, now chief of staff to Immigration Minister Diane Finley. He and Harper go way back. When Harper was being sworn in as Prime Minister, Weissenberger flew to Ottawa to spend the weekend with the future PM and his family.

Weissenberger doesn't write about immigration or his Harper friendship on his blog, though - he and co-blogger George Koch write about an eclectic variety of things on their minds.

The latest installment is about newspapers - delivery, to be precise, and a question about why adults, not kids, are delivering the papers these days. (A little known fact - a young kid named Stephen Harper used to deliver the Star in Toronto about four decades ago.)

Weissenberger's not the first to pose the question. The excellent Freakonomic blog at the New York Times wondered the same thing a couple of years ago.

Well, as it turns out, I work at a newspaper. I might as well ask, right?

And here's what I was told.

"The main reason is that in this day and age, too many parents did not want their kids out on the streets unaccompanied in the dark, and thus it was too hard to find enough kids to do the job, the turnover was tremendous," one manager told me in an email.

"Circulation people found adult carriers more reliable and available."

A couple of other colleagues told me, as well, that the trend away from child delivery really began when newspapers moved to early-morning delivery - as opposed to the afternoon kind that you saw on Leave it to Beaver or in Mayberry.

It just wasn't safe or practical to expect kids to be up at 4 a.m., papers delivered by 6 a.m.

Best and worst of the year in politics

Before tonight's big "At Issue" panel on CBC's The National - the season-ender, which is always great TV for political junkies - I'm wondering if readers out there have their own ideas for most overrated and underrated politician, or the best/worst moments of the past year in politics.

My vote for best moment was the Conservative-Liberal agreement on extending the mission in Afghanistan, including that press conference by the Manley panel.

The worst moment is harder to choose. There were just so many bad moments in Question Period.

Strange new respect

Green Party leader Elizabeth May is quickest off the mark on the no-women angle of today's cabinet shuffle. She issued a release moments ago, condemning how "Harper missed the opportunity to promote some of the very few strong women in his caucus when he shuffled his cabinet."

"Women Members of Parliament are scarce in the Conservative Party, but Diane Ablonczy and Josée Verner are two who display competence without the attack - dog qualities of so many of others in Mr. Harper’s Conservative caucus," May's statement says. "But the Prime Minister has instead chosen to continue relegating women to minor portfolios and the backbenches. It is no wonder that Mr. Harper’s Conservatives are so unpopular with Canadian women."

May also speaks in defence of Rona Ambrose - remember her?

“While I condemned the disastrous climate policies of Ms. Ambrose when she served as Environment Minister, it was always clear the fault lay with the Prime Minister and not Ms. Ambrose. The appalling performance of current Minister John Baird confirms that a change of minister changed nothing for the environment. Surely it is time to give her a decent portfolio.”

Cabinet shuffle

A contingent of us from the Star bureau are here at Rideau Hall for the so-callled mini-shuffle.

UPDATE: 7, 11:58 a.m. The irrepressible Senator Fortier did manage to say a few words to the media, but he spoke only of what a nice day it was and his vague plans for lunch. Paradis, new to cabinet, didn't buck the gag order much, saying only he'd "work hard." Moore said he "had a lot of work to do." I don't think anything uttered here today will be making it into Columbo's Canadian Quotations.

UPDATE: 6, 11:31 a.m. The PMO spokesperson, Dimitri Soudas, is just explaining to reporters why neither the Prime Minister or ministers are talking to reporters after this swearing-in. It has something to do with the fact that it's only a small shuffle.

UPDATE: 5, 11:20 a.m. And here's the official announcement, just handed to us: Emerson confirmed as Foreign Affairs minister. Fortier is now Minister of International Trade. Christian Paradis is Minister of Public Works. James Moore is secretary of state for the Pacific Gateway, the Olympics and Official Languages. The press release calls these "small but important changes."

UPDATE: 4, 11:10 I've just been reminded that this is the 15th anniversary of Kim Campbell taking office as Canada's first woman prime minister. And now, 15 years later, women are, uh, actually, nowhere to be found at this shuffle.

UPDATE: 3, 10:59 a.m. And now the Prime Minister has arrived. No sign of his wife, Laureen, and only a couple of communications folks. More evidence of a very low-key shuffle.

UPDATE 2, 10:53 And now Senator Michael Fortier, the unelected minister of public works, has rolled up to Rideau Hall, wife and children in tow. This is looking like a reprise of that first shuffle in February 2006, with Emerson and Fortier in starring roles.

The only thing to report so far is the arrival of James Moore, the B.C. MP who is finally getting a spot in cabinet it seems. Word is that he'll be a junior minister with responsibility for the Vancouver Olympics and the Pacific Gateway.

1. 

   We also have a protester here carrying a sign protesting David Emerson as a "hypocrite, coward and fraud."

   Emerson, who attracted a lot of attention at Harper's first cabinet swearing-in because of his floor crossing, is due to be confirmed today as foreign affairs minister.

Copyright clashes

It's now clear that if you want to be a savvy political operator in Canada, you better take a course in intellectual-property law.   Once upon a time, it helped to know the constitution when Canadian politics was all about national unity. Nowadays,  copyright and trademark law seem to be the weapons of choice in the information age. 

The little fracas over the Green Shift - is it a Liberal program or a Toronto company? - is just the current example. Given how things are going, I'm not sure why we haven't heard yet from Green Shift Music and Comics in Florida,  or Richard Underhill, a Canadian saxophonist who put a song called Green Shift on his album, Kensington Suite. And, as someone pointed out to me today, what about this "Shifty" bag from North Face (available in Green). Isn't it offended too?

Before this latest copyright/trademark fray,  let's not forget, we had the Conservatives in hot water for using the name Eco-Trust and using the O'Jay's tune For the Love of Money in one of their attack ads. 

And just yesterday, Conservative blogger Stephen Taylor strayed into copyright peril at his new "shifty green" website, which we mentioned in this blog a few days ago.

As Taylor describes his mostly good-natured dispute with the Liberals, he also explains: "In knocking-off the Liberal website, I neglected to "knock-off" the Liberal logo enough to satisfy the legal concerns of the Liberal Party. I received a call from their lawyer letting me know that my use of their logo poses trademark concerns and we very amicably agreed that the solution to their dilemma would be to create a derivative work of their logo."

If all of this isn't enough to send would-be political operatives back to the intellectual-property books, it should also be pointed out that copyright law itself may be the sleeper political issue of the season. The proposed changes by the Conservative government recently announced by Industry Minister Jim Prentice have whipped up a storm on the Net. The Facebook group formed to oppose the changes  now stands at roughly 78,000 members - about 30,000 more than it had before the Prentice changes were announced.

 

Ignatieff's new file

Here's Michael Ignatieff blogging on the latest addition to his to-do list.

As we reported in the Star yesterday, Ignatieff and Maurizio Bevilacqua have been put in charge of finding a new immigration policy for the federal Liberals.