Democracy is coming

It's probably not a coincidence, but Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and NDP leader Jack Layton are spending some time this week talking up the need for democratic reform.

Ignatieff gave an interview to columnist Lawrence Martin yesterday at Stornoway, in which he promised a "People's Question Period," among other reforms.You can see the Ipolitics.ca story here (registration may be required.)

Meanwhile, tomorrow morning, we're told, Layton will be holding a news conference at 9:15 a.m. in the National Press Theatre to outline his plans for democratic reform.

Oh... and as a P.S. to the previous post, it should be noted (h/t Kady O'Malley) that the Conservatives have also released a not-so-feel-good-ish kind of ad today too. Link here. 

An election or just a campaign?

I'm still a skeptic about whether we're headed for an election this spring, but I'm starting to think that we're getting a campaign, whether we vote at the end of it or not. A flurry of evidence today for that latter view:

1.  New TV ads from the New Democrats. 
2. A new, platform-like announcement from the Liberals.
3. And finally, after punctuating our Oscar viewing last night with negative ads (worst foreign short?), a more feel-good offering from the Conservatives.

Always coping

One of my colleagues directed us to this gem of a TVO video, circa 1982. If you watch at the 3:40 minute mark or so, you'll see an earnest young fellow who is now Canada's Industry Minister. 

 

Wrecking cousins: Part 5

** (Yes, yet another instalment in my work-vacation project: reading Thomas Frank's book The Wrecking Crew, and singling out some parallels to conservatism here in Canada.) 

 

 

Former Reform Party leader Preston Manning has a piece in today’s Globe and Mail on the subject of grassroots movements. Funny, I’d been thinking of Manning as I read The Wrecking Crew.  It struck me that Manning would have never been able to preside over some of the more brazen imitations of those politics that we’ve been seeing in Canada -- Manning was just not cynical enough; he was/is far too decent a politician. Manning  was an outsider to the political establishment -- an important aspect of conservatism -- but as we’ll see farther down this post, he was never going to be able to pitch himself as the kind of  bully-boy leader that the new conservatism requires. 

 

Frank writes about how U.S. conservatives, like Canadian ones,   often have to jettison their past (Mulroney, anyone? Manning?) and constantly pitch themselves as anti-government, even when they’re in government. 

 

For a political faction to represent itself as a rebellion against a government for which it is itself responsible may strike you as a supremely cynical maneuver. If so, you are beginning to understand conservative Washington. Cynicism is of this movement’s essence. It is cynical not only in the way it wriggles about denying everything, dumping its former heroes, endlessly repositioning itself; but more fundamentally it is cynical about the very possibilities of improvement through government. 

 

Frank writes extensively of how decency and fair play are signs of weakness in a brand of conservatism that is obsessed with war and battles. You’re either tough or you’re a sissy.   

 

This is a movement that adores bullies, that cheers their bullying slogans at its conventions, that longs for a bully mean enough to put the wimps back in their place...

 

Seen from this perspective, politics is a showdown in which the soft and the weak get pounded by the hard and the strong. The symbolism is important in winger Washington, with its heroic “hammers” coming down implacably on the people it calls “squishes.” 

 

That frame of thinking, exported north of the 49th parallel,  explains why Canadian Conservatives had  a  hard time taking on a streetfighter like Jean Chretien, but revel in portraying his subsequent successors -- Martin, Dion and Ignatieff -- as hapless or weak.  Dion was especially the target of these  “you’re a sissy”  style of attacks, but have a look at the pictures being used of Ignatieff in the latest attack ads -- blowing kisses, for instance.

Tough guys don’t do that. And conservatives have to be tough guys, as Frank writes in his book --  tough enough to wreck stuff. 

 

Media management: welcome to the future

Liberal MP Glen Pearson has a very nicely written blog post this morning in which he gently suggests that the media may be getting tired of the message-control tactics of the Harper government. 

if a government is determined to keep its own dealings in hiding from the Parliamentary process itself, and opposition parties remain powerless to crack open the door of accountability, then only the media can alert the country to the danger to which we are descending. Put simply: if the media can’t get access and accountability, then democracy no longer has efficient oversight. The culture of secrecy and deceit is a threat to the media’s own estate and to the welfare of any open society. We require good journalism now for our very survival and it’s my sense the fourth estate is coming to grips with that reality.

A glance at National Newswatch today would show that some columns bear out Pearson's forecast. Carol Goar, in my own paper, for instance, or Barbara Yaffe. Other columnists, however, seem to have shrugged and moved on to subjects that make Conservatives less uncomfortable.  

I hate to sound pessimistic, but for a while now, I've been more or less convinced that any future government, whether it's Liberal or New Democrat or Green or whatever, will simply not be able to resist the type of media-handling, even media-bullying tactics that the Conservatives have employed. Why? Because they work. By and large, reporters in Ottawa have simply stopped complaining about what would have been outrageous a few years ago (no access to ministers, vital information kept secret, vetting of questions at press conferences, etc.) It's just like the negative ads. They're working too, as Nik Nanos reported this week. 

So someday, when the Conservatives are replaced (sorry, partisans, democracy does tend to replace governments from time to time, unless martial-law is part of the plan too), we'll be stuck with the kind of media-management that we grew to accept over the last five years. I've heard senior Liberals  talk in  grudging admiration of how Harper has whipped the media into line. So down the road, when it's imitated, almost inevitably, we won't have anyone but ourselves to blame. 

The Wrecking Cousins: Part 3

And here's a third instalment of the parallels between the Conservative wrecking crew and their Canadian cousins.

U.S. conservatives dislike many things, writes Tom Frank in The Wrecking Crew. For example, they're not crazy about "the arts" or Ivy league universities. Here's a part of the book dealing with conservative zealot Howard Phillips and the effort to "defund the left." 

...virtually any federal program at all could be indicted: the National Endowment for the Arts, which funds (liberal) artists; the Department of Energy, which has a (liberal) "Earth Day" programs.... If we squint hard enough, we can almost see, as Phillips did, that "Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley are Establishments of Religion" (since "they advance a world view based on rationalist faith") and that "Left-wing professors Pick our Pockets" .... 

Defunding the left. Check. 

Suspicious about the  arts. Check. 

Suspicion of Harvard professors. Check. And check. 

The Wrecking Cousins: Part 2

As warned/promised , I'm using a few blog posts this week to show parallels between Canada's Conservatives and the U.S. brand of conservatism described in Tom Frank's book, The Wrecking Crew. 

The first post dealt with current events -- political distortion of bureaucrats' advice and the use of direct-mail letters to whip the public into conspiracy-theory fury. In this instalment, how  some good old-fashioned Reaganomics   seem to have seeped into Canada.

Frank writes of how former U.S. president Ronald Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, acknowledged how the conservatives could smash the state by bloating it first with record deficits.  Government-by-sabotage, he calls it. 

Stockman was remarkably candid about this: Once the tax cuts had been enacted, the conservatives would have the "craven politicians pinned to the wall. They would have to dismantle [the government's] bloated, wasteful and unjust spending enterprises -- or risk national ruin." The Reagan tax cuts, all by themselves, would thus be a "frontal attack on the welfare state."

Let us understand Stockman's confession for what it is: a plan for government by sabotage. Other high-profile conservatives celebrated the gigantic Reagan deficits -- for example, Milton Friedman, the dean of free-market economists -- but in Stockman's thinking we see the political logic of deficits most clearly. Deficits were a way to smash a liberal state that voters could not be persuaded to part with otherwise. 

 

Nah, they wouldn't try that in Canada, would they? Let's take a look at this not-sufficiently-noticed Canadian Press story from 2008, in which Stephen Harper's old mentor and chief of staff, Tom Flanagan, applauds the Conservative government for getting rid of surpluses that might be used to build up (rather than tear down) the federal government.

"They've gradually re-engineered the system. I'm quite impressed with it," said Flanagan, a political strategist who ran the 2004 Conservative campaign.

"They're boxing in the ability of the federal government to come up with new program ideas . . . The federal government is now more constrained, the provinces have more revenue, and conservatives should be happy."

And indeed, nowadays, just a few years after Flanagan was so pleased with the surplus-draining work of his old friend, the federal deficit now stands at $56-billion and Harper is still not blinking on corporate tax cuts, as my colleague Les Whittington wrote recently. 

 

 

The Wrecking Cousins

While Parliament is off this week, I'm away too, catching up on some overdue political reading. I've just finished Tom Frank's The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule. If you haven't read it, do -- the parallels between the U.S. Conservative movement and some of the things we're seeing in Canada are unmistakeable. 

Over the next several days, I'll post some excerpts from the book and links to the parallels/facsimiles here. Some are so obvious not to need links, but I'll throw them in anyway. I'll start with a couple of Wrecking Crew snippets that leap right out to current topics in today's  Canadian headlines. 

This one, for instance, in which Frank talks about U.S. conservatives' distrust of the civil service,   identified as a sinister "permanent government." (Emphasis mine.) 

Career employees began to run up against politics in all sorts of unexpected places, with expert testimony by government officials altered by political staff, proposed regulations dismissed and senior scientists overruled by college dropouts who happened  to be loyal conservatives.

 Again, kind of obvious. Political staff altering expert testimony, senior scientists overruled. Never in  Canada, eh? And of course, we all remember Stephen Harper's words in the late days of the 2006 election campaign and subsequently (see last quote in that link) in which he voiced his distrust of a civil service that he seemed to see as an adversary. 

 

Or how about this one? 

The New Right's story began at the retail level. The operation is familiar by now to just about everyone who owns a mailbox: letters, mailed by the millions, written in tones of the highest outrage, soliciting donations for conservative causes. .... "The fund-raising letters of the New Right groups depict a world gone haywire, with liberal villains poised to destroy the American Way of Life," wrote the conservative author Alan Crawford in 1980. The emphasis was on shrillness, on prose that would 'make [people] angry' and 'stir up hostilities.' .... wingers believed they had found a way to get around the traditional mass media, which they despised as much then as they do now, and to reach out directly to like-minded people suffering liberalism in silent frustration across the land. 

If we need a Canadian example for this, we need only take a glance at today's National Newswatch, where we see this story, headlined: Tories demand money for impending election campaign in 'confidential' memo.

 

As I mentioned, The Wrecking Crew is littered with parallels and in the days to come, I'll list some more. Those two enough should prompt some reflection. 

 

Bloggers: up close and personal

In honour of Family Day (in Ontario) and in homage to a smart-professor friend of mine (stay tuned, you will be hearing more from him on the Star's web pages soon), I'd like to invite all the political-blogging family, of all political stripes, to click here and fill out a comprehensive survey of the Canadian political blogosphere. 

I've filled it out and urge others to do so too, so that Thierry Giasson, of the Université Laval, along with his associates, can do some important, ground-breaking research into what exactly makes up the Canadian political-blogging community.  Here's how they describe the possible benefits of this  research: 

The study will describe the socio-political profile of Canadian political bloggers, including their intentions and motivations, their perception of the political role of blogging and of the Canadian blogosphere, and their specific political behaviours.  

Thierry has done some important work already in the emerging realm of political marketing and communication. People will be talking about this study once the results are compiled and analyzed, so why not make your voice heard now? That's what blogging is all about, isn't it?

Again, here's the link: https://profil.dexero.com/profil/INFOCOM/blogscan_en/fr

What's the big deal with Oda?

  This is the week where we find out whether the controversy over Bev Oda is a big deal or not a big deal. If it lingers in the headlines over the parliamentary break, conventional wisdom has it, then this minister will be gone. I'm actually away from the capital (even the country) as I write this, but I've been giving some thought to what's a big deal in federal politics these days. 

Some people like history that's filled with big stuff -- epic battles, struggles against the enemies, and so on. Others realize  that this is the history written by the victors, as the old saying goes -- all the greys edited out, whether that's the ordinary life of the people who stayed home while the soldiers fought or the sketchy stuff that makes it difficult to tell who was really on the side of good and who was on the side of evil. 

For people who see the world as a black-and-white struggle, there's going to be a temptation to say that this Oda business is either irrelevant (her supporters), or utterly contemptible (her detractors.) I think it's a big deal, but not because it's one single "test of democracy," as Liberals argue. 

I think, when we look back over the history of this period, that the Oda case  will be seen as a cultural marker -- a revealing moment for its sheer banality.  The scribbled "not" is a classic case of history being written by the winners, or in this case, the political masters in Ottawa at the moment. No big one, Oda's supporters say. Happens all the time. Nothing to see here. And indeed it did happen to Canada's chief statistician, to the private investigator in the Helena Guergis controversy and the diplomats who wanted to tell the truth about Afghanistan. The people with  power write the official record. And if facts or truth are distorted on the way to the greater good, well, that's the way it goes and the way it's always been. 

To my mind, Bev Oda is neither an epic figure of good or evil (despite, as one blogger wrote recently, her questionable decision to present herself in public in sunglasses, all in black, smoking, as a Russian mobster might.)That "not" however, is a big deal, because it tells us something about what's seen as acceptable behaviour in  a government that is convinced that it's always embroiled in a classic  battle of good against (Liberal, left) evil.

You want to know why this government spends so much time controlling its "message" and its portrayal in public? Because it's trying to enforce power over who writes its history -- criticism is tantamount to taking the enemies' side. We reporters in Ottawa are used to this by now. 

The Bev Oda controversy is not staying in the headlines  because we journalists are trying to bring down the government (much as many Conservatives love to believe). Most of us actually aren't in that good-versus-evil frame of mind. It's being reported because it was an open, ham-handed effort to distort the record. And it's part of a pattern. (See cases above -- there are more.) So is it a big deal? Yes. Precisely because it's so ordinary, and it's being portrayed that way by Oda's supporters.