Clear the tracks, here comes the tax

Well, here's the official announcement of the Liberal carbon tax:

For Immediate Release

June 18, 2008

Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion Announces the Liberal Green Shift

Date: Thursday, June 19, 2008

Time: 10:00 10:30 AM

Location: House of Commons

Railway Room

253-D Centre Block

Ottawa, Ontario

Please note that all details are subject to change. All times are local.

UPDATE: In my travels today on the Hill, I ran across three fellows who are putting together the show for the carbon-tax release. They say there will be puppets. I believe they are joking.

Take me out to the ballgame

Politicos of different partisan stripes don't work all that well together in this Parliament (and yes, that's new), but they still can, on rare occasions,  play together.

There's a softball league on the Hill, made up of aides from all different parties, and the names they've chosen for their teams reveals a little of their political leanings. Well, I'm not sure the "Ballsheviks" would mirror anything in the major party platforms.

Guess which ones are the Conservatives amid this team lineup (bonus points for anyone who can come up with a team cheer for "Ritz's Barley Freedom Fighters" -- a reference to the Conservative efforts to break some  commodity marketing boards and Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz):

The 'A' Team 
Heroes
Harper's Hot Shots
Ballsheviks
Monte's Pythons
Adult Fun Superstore Swingers   
roCSTars
Flaherty's Fighting Irish
The Pitch Slappers
Here-4-Beer
Ritz's Barley Freedom Fighters
The Naturals
Argentina
Dougouts 
The Masterbatters

Impish hint on the Hill

There seems to be a widespread assumption out there that the Liberals are unveiling their carbon tax tomorrow. We here at the Star have been told, with some certainty and from several senior quarters, that the announcement, complete with a media briefing, will come on Thursday. By Friday, the House of Commons should have risen for the long, summer break and Dion and other Liberals plan to hit the road to sell the carbon tax "shift."

See Garth Turner's blog post yesterday for an impish hint about what the announcement might look like.

High-flying ideas

I'm betting that neither Loyola Hearn nor Josee Verner extolled the excrement-hiding abilities of this noble bird when they announced $5,000 in support for the "Bird Island Puffin Festival."

Worried is as worried does

The smartest politicians, usually, are the ones who know how to read the fear in their rivals'  strategies -- and then know what to do with that fear.

Stephen Harper is one of those politicians. It's said that back in the spring of 2006 he watched Paul Martin making a budget deal with Jack Layton and realized then that Liberals were desperate to hold on to power.  Less than a year later, Harper was Prime Minister.

So where would Harper's rivals look for fear in his actions today?

One tiny hint is contained in the aforementioned post by Stephen Taylor, where the Conservative blogger acknowledges that the governing party feels vulnerable on the environment. He describes this as one of the "rare, if wrongly perceived strengths" of Liberal leader Stéphane Dion.

That same message turns up at the end of a good column in the Sun yesterday by Greg Weston, in which we learn that the Conservative government -- not party, government --  was looking to pay people to "evaluate" the long-dead Liberal government program on climate change. (Guess what kind of evaluation it was seeking?)

Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn has nixed the contracts, probably because the whole thing looked a little transparently political.

It's also possible that Lunn realized that this was just more evidence of Conservative nervousness about the environment. Why give the enemy any proof that you're worried about the issue?

Liberal ships in the night, er, afternoon

This afternoon, around 1 p.m. at the Westin Hotel, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty was asked whether he'd be getting together with Liberal leader Stephane Dion while he's in Ottawa this weekend for his party's convention (and leadership review.)

"Nope," said McGuinty.

But then we just got this press release. Now we are a bit confused. Perhaps the two Liberal leaders aren't on speaking terms?

Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion will attend the Ontario Liberal Party Annual General Meeting

Date: Saturday, June 14, 2008
Time: 12:00 PM
Location: Ottawa Congress Centre, 55 Colonel By Drive, Congress Hall, Ottawa, Ontario

Dion's next job: Weatherman?

The New Democrats have decided that Liberal leader Stephane Dion is a man of all seasons -- at least when it comes to election avoidance.

They've put out a cute little graphic, featuring a smiling Dion in four parts of the yearly circle. Click on one of the pics and you get a quote from Dion explaining why this season or that season is just not right for a campaign. It's pretty funny when you look at all of them together.

Out, out damn spot

Stephen Taylor, of the Blogging Tories, has a must-read entry on his own blog -- the back story of the Conservatives' grease-spot attack ads on the carbon tax.

It explains the strategy as an all-out  response to research on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Liberals and Conservatives.

Liberal leader Stephane Dion, for instance, has some credibility on the environment front, so the carbon-tax idea had to be framed as a tax. And then, as Taylor writes:

"In focus groups and telephone-based market research, Conservative planners came to understand that a carbon tax in the abstract is a well-received concept to most Canadians. What they also found, however, that when the details of achieving such a policy objective are understood, a broad majority of Canadians don’t think of it as feasible. Words like “tax-shifting” and “revenue neutral” were panned and uncomfortably rejected by focus groups when polled and the general distrust of politicians regarding new tax became a palatable conclusion for Conservative strategists. Conservative-Liberal switchers, a group that holds victory for either party, was found to have a distrust for any politician with a plan for creative tax manipulation."

Liberals and Conservatives should have a read of Taylor's post. It's well-written, well-researched and contains some foreshadowing of how things could unfold in the next election campaign.

Here's a little cartoon (Liberal-produced, you can assume) that has the little grease spot explaining how he's come to be out of work. 

Ottawa social calendar update

This ought to be interesting.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain, in Ottawa next week. The audience will be as interesting as the guest of honour, no doubt. It's happening just in time to prod memories about the controversy over whether Canada interfered in the U.S. presidential race - a question at the heart of some provocative Jim Travers' columns in recent weeks.

Watching for copyright reform reaction

The copyright-reform legislation has been released, at last.

For reaction, we'll watch the opposition parties of course, but Facebook is the place to go to see how this is landing at the grassroots.

A Facebook group, Fair Copyright for Canada, amassed tens of thousands of members last Christmas when the reforms were merely a rumour. As of this morning, the Facebook group has 41,670 members and there is talk on the site of doing a big invitation push today in the wake of the announcement by Industry Minister Jim Prentice and Heritage Minister Josee Verner.

The founder of this site, incidentally, is University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, who will be weighing in with his reaction in tomorrow's Star.