Approval noted

My boss told me this morning that if I mentioned the words "beautiful" or "gorgeous" in my messages to him one more time  that he was making me come home from the Liberals' retreat in Baddeck. 

But someone doesn't mind. Here's a front-page story from the Cape Breton Post today, noting the ardour felt for this venue by Kady O'Malley, David Akin, Sharon Musgrave and yours truly. 

Dancing, etc.

I'm not sure what's set off dance-mania in Canadian politics this summer, but I like it. From Harper's little dance in the Arctic, to Ignatieff's multiple dance performances aboard the Liberal Express, it seems everyone's dancing this summer. Last night, those accustomed to watching politicos sitting on TV panels would have done a double take to see the entire crowd at the Baddeck Firehall -- we're talking reporters, MPs, senators, and the senior staffers for Ignatieff -- all out on the dance floor while Liberal whip Rodger Cuzner was belting out rock and roll with the band on stage. Those familiar with Twitter might want to go to the #lpcx tag and see some of the candid shots filed from the dance floor. 

Last night's gathering was a fundraiser for a scholarship set up in the name of the late Jerry Yanover, the parliamentary-procedure guru for the Liberals for decades, going back to the Trudeau era, who died a year ago.  At some point last night, for reasons unclear to me, there seemed to be a bidding war for a police shirt, which was being alternately sported by Ignatieff staffers Pat Sorbara and Leslie Church. I did not see a shirtless policeman anywhere in the room, but somehow the exercise yielded $350 for the Yanover fund apparently. 

News-wise, so far this Baddeck retreat for the Liberals has produced more dancing than headlines, but that may change today when the full caucus meetings start in earnest. Ignatieff is making a speech at 1:15 p.m. (local time) so that may be the next chance to hear what's on Liberals minds for this fall. 

Beautiful Baddeck

This is the scene here in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, about an hour before the expected arrival of Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and the Liberal Express. This summer caucus retreat for the Liberals is off to a very leisurely start (bosses, please disregard adjective).  It's a hot summer day here, MPs are meeting, occasionally chatting to reporters who are hanging around the lawn and lake outside, waiting for news. There are worse ways to make a living. I'll be updating the blog here through the next couple of days as it gets busier here. 

Broken Ottawa?

I've spent a lot of this summer away from the Parliament Hill bubble -- not far away, but far enough that I've been able to get some distance from the more toxic forms of politics.  By toxic, I mean politics that appeals to the worst in people and journalism that aids and abets those impulses. 

Yesterday, the funeral of Mario Lague in Montreal, while enormously sad, was also a chance to bask a bit more in political civility that has become increasingly rare in Ottawa. I was heartened to see the Prime Minister's communications director, Dimitri Soudas, at the funeral, as well as the New Democrats' communications chief, Brad Lavigne and NDP chief of staff Anne McGrath. "How could we not be here?" Lavigne said. It was also good to see fellow journalists like Paul Wells and former journalists such as Rosemary Thompson there. It meant a lot to the family, I'm told. 

On the way home on the train, I read a piece in Vanity Fair's new, September, issue, which  only reminded me of the  sharp  discrepancy between the real world (where people generally try to be decent to each other) and the daily political circus. "Broken Washington" is a sobering read. It is descriptive rather than prescriptive, but it's vivid in the telling of how politics, political journalism and the lobbying business are enmeshed in a web of near-total dysfunction in the U.S. capital. It left me thinking that Ottawa is not that bad (thank goodness), but it could be.  Some paragraphs that jumped out: 

It could be argued that the level of congressional discourse has gone steadily downhill since 1789. “My esteemed colleague” has often been polite code for “You son of a bitch.” The sometimes cynical rules of engagement are well understood. Nearly 50 years ago, in the movie version of Allen Drury’s novel Advise and Consent, one character tells a child to lie to a senator who has called to ask if he was home. “Son, this is a Washington, D.C., kind of lie—that’s when the other person knows you’re lying, and also knows you know he knows.” But the partisan calumny and contempt in Washington are today all-consuming. When the Republican Scott Brown was elected to fill the unexpired Massachusetts Senate seat that had been held for 47 years by Ted Kennedy, not a single Republican senator bothered to come to the floor to hear the farewell speech of Kennedy’s interim successor, Paul Kirk—as if to snub the very idea of friendships and alliances across the aisle that Kennedy himself had nurtured. Democrats and Republicans in Congress now vote against one another more regularly than at any time since Reconstruction.

***

The big worry is not a threat from the other party but a primary challenge from the extreme fringe of your own party—that is, from someone who doesn’t think you’re red enough or blue enough. As a result, the basic mechanics of the electoral process act to harden ideology and to punish statesmanship. 

***

Now, thanks to cable, the Internet, Twitter, and Facebook, there is no such thing as a “news cycle” in Washington—only one endless, undifferentiated full-color stream of fact, opinion, and attitudinizing, where lies and misinformation flourish equally with truth. It used to be that news outlets had space to report or comment on only a fraction of any day’s events. The pace of events has picked up, sure, but the capacity to assert, allege, and comment is now infinite, and subject to little responsible control. The White House communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, still has a BlackBerry alert to tell him when The Washington Post and The New York Times have gone live online with their next day’s stories, but this is almost an antique holdover, given that any blogger at any moment can generate a story that forces the White House to respond. “What they teach you on the first day of press-secretary school is to worry about blowing something up by giving attention to it,” Pfeiffer told me this spring. “‘Don’t blow something up!’” But today, he says, there’s no choice—the story will get blown up anyway, and you simply have to respond.

Those are just a taste of what the article contains; not really doing justice to the overall piece. I'd call it a must-read for political junkies; probably of the cautionary sort.

Post-Mario

Post-Mario

Peter Donolo, chief of staff to Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, sent this note out today:

Dear Liberal Colleagues,

As we still struggle with the sudden loss of our friend Mario Laguë, we must move forward to pay tribute and honour his life and to ensure that the great adventure that Mario was so dedicated to carries on.

To that end, I want to let you know that:

· Visitation will take place in Montreal at the Centre funeraire Côte-des-Neiges, 4525 Chemin de la Côte-des-Neiges (514-342-8000) on Sunday, August 15, 2010, from 2-5 p.m. All of Mario’s many friends are welcome.

· A public memorial and reception, will take place on Monday, August 16, 2010, at 11 a.m. at the Centre funeraire Côte-des-Neiges, followed by a private burial.

· The OLO will be closed on Monday out of respect for Mario and so that his colleagues can attend the memorial in Montreal.

· Mario’s friends and colleagues in Ottawa will also organize a celebration of his life to take place on Parliament Hill, early on when Parliament returns next month. Once the date and time have been established, we’ll let you know.

· The Liberal Express will take an early week hiatus both to honour Mario, and to ensure that Michael Ignatieff has the chance to pay his respects in Montreal. After that, the Liberal Express will get rolling again. 

· I have asked Leslie Church, OLO Director of Issues Management to take on the responsibilities of Director of Communications on an interim basis.

· Life stories and tributes to Mario can be shared online at www.liberal.ca and in lieu of flowers the family has asked that memorial donations be made to a cancer foundation or cancer research facility of your choice.

As our Leader said, Mario’s loss leaves us all with “a hole in our hearts.” But we must carry on. Nobody would have understood that more completely and embraced the challenge more heartily than Mario himself.

Peter Donolo

 

Paul Martin on Mario Lague

This statement just out from the former prime minister: 

 

Mario Lague

It is with sorrow and disbelief that I'm reporting the death of Mario Lague, Michael Ignatieff's communications director. Lague died in a motorcycle accident this morning on his way into work when his bike collided with an SUV, according to the CP report. He was just 52 years old, and leaves his wife and two children. 

I intend to do a larger story in the next few hours, but I do want to say a few personal things. Just last weekend, I was on the road with Ignatieff's tour, as was Mario. He'd switched assignments to cover this leg of the journey, and I'm so glad he did, now in retrospect. 

On Sunday, he was out on the road with his current boss and his former one, Paul Martin. If you look closely in the picture to the right, you'll see Mario beside Ignatieff at a Tim Horton's. I'm sorry that's the best picture of the most recent ones I have; I'll look out some more later.  Just a couple of nights ago, Mario sent me a picture of myself at a demolition derby: "In case anyone doesn't believe you were there."   

Mario was a gentle bear of a man, who loved his family, his work and his friends. Just a couple of weeks ago, we talked about what jobs we imagined ourselves doing at this age when we were in our 20s -- where did we dream of working? Mario, somewhat surprisingly to me, told me he'd wanted to be a filmmaker; he'd gone to school for that. But he somehow glided into the political communication business, working first for Quebec premier Robert Bourassa, then landing in the civil service, then becoming Paul Martin's first comms director when Martin landed as prime minister.  Martin appointed Mario to the ambassador's spot in Costa Rica; then, after a stint in Switzerland with an environmental organization, he landed last fall as Ignatieff's communications director.  He was doing a lovely job, as anyone on the summer tour would attest. And he loved the job. Maybe not the hours (14 a day during the week, 6 to 8 a day on weekends).

On Saturday night, we had dinner and drinks, as we often did on the road. We were in London, sitting on the outdoor terrace of the Ceeps, and Mario was talking, among other subjects, about the motorcycle he'd bought. I expressed my misgivings about motorcycles (I had a bad fall off one many years ago), but Mario assured me that he was a cautious driver. I'm sure he was. 

I can't imagine the grief now being felt by all those on the tour, let alone Mario's family. I'm finding it hard to believe, frankly. My profound sympathies and condolences to all who knew and loved Mario. 

Liberal Express: The story so far

I’ve now finished my third and final stint aboard the Liberal Express; Michael Ignatieff’s summer-long tour of Canada. Unless another reporter decides to spend 10 days  aboard the bus next month, I guess I can boast (?) that I’ve given it the longest look of anyone in the media. 

First of all, I should probably say why I spent so much time there.  One of my jobs at the Star is covering the Liberal Party; this was also my job at The Globe and Mail in my 16 years there and it was also among my duties at the National Post in my brief employment acquaintance with that newspaper. Michael Ignatieff was out on the road this summer, meeting Liberals. If you want to understand the Liberal Party, it seemed like this was the place to be. I’m actually surprised that no other media outlet, with the exception of Macleans magazine, thought it was worthwhile to spend more than a day or two aboard the bus.   

Beyond that, I’m working on a feature that begged for me to get out of Ottawa, see something other than the spin and noise of Parliament Hill, and this was an ideal hitchhiking opportunity. 

Anyway, 10 days on the bus gives me some licence to make some observations, I figure, and here they are, in no particular order: 

• I’m repeatedly asked whether Michael Ignatieff is “getting better.” Better than what? I usually ask. What this usually means is whether he’s better than the Conservative ads make him out to be. And yes, he is better than that.  Not once did he stand in a satanic pentagram and invoke the gods of socialism or socialist coalitions.  Nor did the bus stop at Harvard or a villa in France. 
   
• What are the crowds like? They are very young on the bus -- young, highly engaging, whip-smart, efficient people on the official tour; elderly, mainly retirement-age people in the audiences. There are probably many demographic reasons for this wide disparity in age representation, but something tells me that 30- and 40- and 50-somethings are most  absent from political-party  participation unless someone is paying them to be interested. Usually, there are about 100 people, give or take a dozen or two, at each stop. 
• Is Ignatieff talking about policy? Yes, in broad strokes, no in real specifics. Mainly the speeches are about positioning the party in opposition to the Conservatives. They are also about Ignatieff himself -- his history, his values, and how they fit with the Liberal past. The crowds like the speeches. They tend to be surprised. See the earlier point about him “getting better.” They are usually expecting a Harvard prof, just leaving for the airport, blowing air kisses goodbye to Canada.   
• What’s this whole tour about anyway? It’s not about getting front-page headlines. Mainly it seems to be a rehearsal for an election campaign, getting Liberals on the bus and off it used to the idea of the rigours of a road trip. What’s different about this tour is that it doesn’t have to contend with other tours; Ignatieff isn’t doing a whole lot of reacting to other campaigns. Harper, as we know, has been on vacation. 
• Is this tour a game-changer, in terms of federal political dynamics? Have a read of Chantal Hebert’s column in today’s Star. Like her, I remember Chretien’s bus tours of 1993 and just yesterday, was telling folks on the bus that those forays were far more modest in terms of travel and media coverage. They weren’t a big deal while Ottawa was preoccupied with the race to replace Brian Mulroney as Conservative leader and focus on the brief public-opinion honeymoon of Kim Campbell. But they did establish the Liberals as road-worthy.

 I agree with Chantal -- this tour, at about the three-quarters mark, has probably accomplished the same thing. So rather than read about the bus tour in local media or Conservative talking points, it might be a good idea for national reporters to get out there and have a look. And hey, the food’s great too. My only complaint is that there’s too much of it -- along with too many Tim Horton’s stops. 

Paul Martin aboard the Liberal Express

In Windsor today, former prime minister Paul Martin joined Michael Ignatieff aboard the summer-long tour.   They met -- where else? -- at a Tim Horton's, along with Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan, and then they all headed to a big Liberal rally. (See photo, right)  You can find my story on the day here.  Below  are some YouTube clips of the event. 

Politics and demolition

The Liberal Express touched down today at the Comber Fair in Southwestern Ontario, and here's a little video or two of some of the fun.