Trading places

If the polls are correct, this election is winding down to a fundamental switch in Canadian politics -- New Democrats, instead of Liberals, as the main alternative to the Conservatives. Last night, Jack Layton got a taste of what it's going to be like if he does end up as the official opposition leader, and the relentless, negative attacks that will ensue. Discouragingly, there's nothing he can do to prepare himself for the onslaught either, because when his rivals run out of actual, random events of Layton's  past, they will then start making things up. This is how it goes in Canadian politics, circa 2011. 

Of course, on the upside, Layton, also like the Liberals of the past, enjoys the backing of the Toronto Star's editorial board. I'm assuming this means now that Star reporting will be dissed now by Conservatives as pro-NDP, as opposed to pro-Liberal, and the paper will now be called the "orange Star" etc. (I'm only half-kidding there.) 

A few other things that are going to change if the NDP does, as predicted, eclipse the Liberal party for second place.  

•  The merger talk will be back, if it isn't already. Unite-the-left will become the preoccupation of the political class in the next couple of years, just as unite-the-right dominated the political realm  from 1993 all the way to 2003. 
• The Senate, filled with Conservatives and Liberals, no New Democrats, will look like an even stranger relic of the past. 
• Our politics could become more sharply polarized, resembling  the two-party politics of the United States. Some will argue this is a good thing, with more clarity for voters. Some will say it's evidence of creeping republicanism (small r intentional) north of the 49th parallel. 
• All those Liberal strategists on the TV panels will slowly be replaced by New Democrats. It's become increasingly customary for political shows to keep their panels to two people: one Conservative-leaning, one Liberal-leaning. This has frustrated the heck out of the NDP, reduced to spectators of political chit chat. Now the Liberals will be the third man/woman out. And yes, this will happen quickly. 
• Government-relations firms will start bulking up with New Democrats and wondering what to do with the Liberals they've kept on hand, just in case  the Grits  do end up back in power. 
• It's going to become more difficult for the NDP to retain its strong proportions of women in caucus and positions of authority. The closer parties move to power in Canadian politics, the more the balance shifts toward men. As Sylvia Bashevkin noted at a conference I attended a few months ago, women tend to fare better, numbers-wise, in faltering  parties and failing states. It should not go unnoticed that when the NDP and Conservatives had women leaders in the election of 1993, both were tossed out of official-party status for the next four years. I don't think that was strictly because they had women leaders -- it's far more complicated than that. But it is generally true that the farther parties are from power in Canada, the more women they've had in important roles. 
• And finally, during future election campaigns, media will debate whether to bother covering the Liberals at all in any sustained fashion. In this election, the New Democrats deeply discounted the price for reporters to be on the planes, to make sure that media maintained a presence. It has been common for media outlets to cover the third party only in the first and final week of the campaign, to save some money. Now it will be the Liberals who have to fight for journalists  to maintain interest in their campaign and their conventions. 

Welcome to the new, traded-places world of Canadian politics. For Liberals, a lot of this won't be pretty. 

Peter Russell speaks out

Peter Russell was a hero to me as a political-science student 30 years ago (from afar, I was at Western, he was at U of T, but I wanted to take his classes). He doesn't wade into politics that often. But extraordinarily, he has now. I'll say no more. Whatever I could say, he'll say a lot better. 

 

Making lists, checking them twice

In today's Star, novelist Margaret Atwood describes her own Election 2011 checklist, written on a paper napkin. 

This isn't the first time I've heard of people trying to grapple with their choices in this fashion during this campaign. As Mia Rabson and I were discussing with Don Martin on CTV's Power Play last night, it may be that this election has been so much about process -- hypothetical scenarios of how a future Parliament might work, etc. -- that the public has caught the strategic bug too. Now everyone is playing three-dimensional chess. 

Over the weekend, another checklist  came into my hands, after a chance encounter in a walk through my Ottawa neighbourhood.  It's  a plus-minus assessment of voting Conservative, meticulously created by Ottawa resident and career-development expert  Lynne Bezanson and her husband, Alan Landsberg. The list is now circulating among  their friends,  and their friends, and beyond.  I'm putting the file here:

Download BEFORE YOU VOTE CONSERVATIVE rev 6 (8)-1

 Apologies in advance for the formatting difficulties. I'm sure greater technical minds may be able to sort it out on their own computers, but this is the best version I can come up with. Here's what Bezanson is saying about the handmade "ledger" in the email that's flying around cyberspace. 

My husband and I have pored over newspaper columns, internet blogs, and stretched our memories to tabulate the Harper record.  We are distributing this “ledger” through our email contacts and the social media in the hope that it will reach a number of folks who are still undecided or indifferent.

We also plan to use our grandchildren’s Facebook networks; we need to get the youth stirred up! 

If this resonates with you, we would appreciate you doing the same.  If on the other hand, it does not, then we apologize for any intrusion you may feel.  Voting is an individual and personal choice of course.  At the same time, we know that people’s memories are short and it is very dangerous to base one’s vote solely on the campaign discourse and the marketing advertisements.  So this is our attempt to jog memories and encourage reflection. 

 

Travels in Kitchener-Waterloo

In today's paper, you'll find a story about my travels through Southern Ontario this week and in particular, the search for sleeping Liberals. 

I chose Kitchener-Waterloo for this search because I've walked over that ground a lot over the past decade or so, watching the waxing and waning of Liberal fortunes. In the 1990s and well into the 2000s, it was very friendly territory for Paul Martin. Some of Martin's most staunch supporters hailed from the region and every time I followed Martin on visits to Kitchener-Waterloo from the late 1990s up to 2003 or so, it was like watching the return of a hometown celebrity.

Waterloo is also home to Research in Motion, inventor of the BlackBerry, and so a technological Mecca to political junkies hooked on serial email communication. (Pointless trivia: I'm pretty sure I was the first reporter in the press gallery with a BlackBerry, introduced to the miracle technology in early 2001 by long-time Martin supporter, and early-adopter  David Herle. I know for sure I'm the first reporter to have filed a story by BlackBerry -- and it was, fittingly, Martin's exit from cabinet in June, 2002.) 

Back in the election  of 2004, I hopped aboard Martin's campaign around Week 2 or 3. It was his first campaign as prime minister and the spring had been dominated by stories about the Liberal sponsorship scandal. The schedule that week included a stop in Kitchener-Waterloo and the mood change was palpable. I  saw people giving the finger to Martin's bus as it rolled through the streets. We went to one event where the crowd was tiny and distinctly unenthusiastic; they barely applauded when Martin spoke. At a bar that night, where all the reporters went after  our stories were filed, two Kitchener men opened up a hostile discussion with some of us about why Martin had to be voted out of office because he put health-care premiums in the recent budget (that was actually Premier Dalton McGuinty, but this distinction was lost on these angry voters.) Martin emerged from that campaign with a minority, but it wouldn't be long before he'd face another election and, well, we know how that ended. And in 2008, the Kitchener-Waterloo electoral map went all blue. 

Anyway, all this is to say that Kitchener-Waterloo is a pretty good vantage point to test the mood of Liberals. As you'll see from the story, there are encouraging signs for Liberals in this region right now; some highly motivated volunteers, and maybe voters too. We'll see.  I went door-to-door with the NDP candidate in Kitchener-Centre, Peter Thurley, and the main antipathy we encountered was against Harper. (Though no one seemed to be blaming him for things McGuinty had done.)

At the all-candidates' debate as well, as noted in a previous post, the Conservative candidate got a bit of  a rough ride. I read that this also was the case in the Kitchener-Centre debate. 

It's probably worth noting that I did that door-to-door with Thurley just  before the media began to dominated by reports of the "NDP surge."  There wasn't much evidence of this at the doors Thurley knocked on when I was accompanying him and (his very expert, amiable) team of volunteers.  People were polite, even attentive, for the most part. Thurley also encountered several voters who were definitely interested and/or voting for the NDP.  He did get a few folks, though, who said they needed to vote for Redman to be sure of "not wasting" their anti-Harper sentiments.  We did get a "this is an unnecessary election," and a slammed door from a woman who also managed to shout praise of Harper  -- "he's doing a good job" -- as the door was banging shut.

But I was repeatedly surprised by how nice people were, generally, at the political interruption in their day. I saw the same thing going door-to-door with Karen Redman earlier in the morning. It somewhat restores your faith in the system, to see people talking politics without smears or snappy one-liners or vitriol. As Thurley said,  there are sometimes moments when you see "a light go on," when people suddenly realize that the politician is at the door to listen, and they start telling their stories.

Some of those stories are heart-breaking -- and you think, no wonder they turn off the political TV chatter from Ottawa or Toronto; none of that smart-alecky jousting solves the problems they have. I'm thinking in particular here of a woman who was talking to Redman about juggling the care of her aging parents, with neither adequate money or time to do it properly. She was tired; her dad was on the way home from hospital and her mother, slipping into dementia, was upstairs, awaiting a breakfast she would need to be force-fed. 

Today, Easter Sunday, with one week left to go in the election campaign, it's probably not a bad a idea to dwell on the kind of politics we see at the door, as opposed to the kind we see in the sporting ring or the political theatre. Another woman I met in Toronto this week said she always tries to remember that politicians, no matter what their stripe, have families who care deeply for them. Whenever she gets angry at something a politician says or does, she keeps this in mind. I'm pleased to report that most voters I saw this week lean in that same  direction of civility -- good to keep in mind as we head into what could be an intense week in Canadian politics. 

 

When politics is show business

We still don't know exactly what's going to be in the 30-minute Liberal TV show tomorrow night, but I wouldn't be surprised if this little video found its way to the airwaves in some form.  It showed up on YouTube yesterday, and it's apparently not an official Liberal Party production.  

But it's definitely Liberal-friendly, featuring Michael Ignatieff's "Rise Up" speech, and student "vote mobs" from Carleton, McGill, and the University of Guelph. I'm sorry to say I can't find any information (yet) about the young woman who's featured prominently in the foreground of the video. But have a look; it's a very positive contribution to Election 2011. 

 *** Update: Here's a link to how the video came about: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhNKhbpXecE&feature=watch_response

They're not buying

Over the past few days, away from the Ottawa bubble, I've received a couple of glimpses into the disconnect between Canadian voters and the political-message machine. They're worth sharing, I think: 

1. The first was in the parking lot after an all-candidates' debate in Kitchener-Waterloo. This was a highly well-attended event at the huge Research in Motion park  -- standing room only, and many, many questions from the crowd. The Conservative candidate, Peter Braid, got a bit of a rough ride when he tried to sell the message of "unnecessary election" and other talking points from the centre. But then again, he also had supporters in the crowd, who applauded him heartily when he said how hard the Harper government was working. All to say, everyone had supporters and detractors in the room. 

One of the audience members had posed an intriguing question during the debate -- he said MPs are valued for their independent-mindedness, so in that spirit, could all the candidates say what part of their party's platform they don't endorse? Former Liberal MP Andrew Telegdi said he had some problems with his party's support of some law-and-order measures by the Conservatives. The Green Party candidate, Cathy MacLellan, said she was still "working through" some of  the finer points in her party's platform  on genetically modified organisms. Then, when it came time for the NDP candidate to speak up, Bill Brown said sorry, he supported the NDP's platform in its entirety and wouldn't be standing for office if he couldn't. Peter Braid said more or less the same thing. 

So -- back to the parking lot. Two older, white-haired gentlemen were walking to their car. They were saying that Braid had generally done well, but were perplexed and grumpy about his reply to this question. "He should have said he didn't support that prorogation,"  one said to the other. "He could have said that he didn't go along with everything Harper did." Interesting. 

2. The second glimpse comes from a conversation with a young man in his early 20s, finished his undergraduate education and still deciding what to do about graduate studies. He's inclined to support the Liberals, but he's actually a bit annoyed with them for releasing their "learning passport" -- which includes $1,000 annual tuition relief -- in the midst of the election campaign. This young man liked the learning passport, however: "If they really believed in supporting students, they would have announced it long before they were trying to get my vote," he said. 

What we have here is an important insight into the attitudes of voters who are also consumers. It's become standard for all political parties to save their best pieces of the party platform for an election campaign, to make sure they get a major splash, and also to make sure that other parties don't steal the good ideas. We in the political-reporting game know this -- we wait for elections to see platforms in their entirety. 

But Canadians are sophisticated buyers -- and they see campaigns now as raw salesmanship, even hucksterism.  If this young man is typical of his peers, they're bringing a healthy skepticism to the all the advertising razzmatazz of the politicians in the midst of an election. So what looks to us like a big-deal piece of a party platform looks to voters like those "today only, deep-discount" signs that merchants put on end-of-season merchandise. Again, interesting.  

"Shocking ignorance" and "mis-education"

Last night, I attended an event for constitutional survivors at the Munk Centre at the University of Toronto. I mention that "survivors" line with only half a smile -- there was a bit of a post-traumatic feel to the meeting, with about 50 folks in the room discussing the battering that Canada's poor old Constitution has taken during this election campaign. 

The headline on this post comes from the quick web story I filed after the event, which you can see here (but not in the actual print copy of the Star, simply because it happened too late.) I also decided -- in a bit of 18th century meets 21st century -- to live-Tweet the proceedings, and if you  click on my Twitter profile, and scroll down, you can see the events as they happened, in 140-character bits. 

Though only two journalists attended last night's meeting (the CBC's Keith Boag and yours truly, who've travelled down many many roads together), there are signs that other journalists are feeling uncomfortable about our own contribution to what was lambasted last night as "civic illiteracy" in this election campaign. Graham Thomson in the Edmonton Journal has a great column today on the same theme.  While I'm at it, I'd also like to point your attention today in the direction of the Canadian Press's Joan Bryden, who is writing again about how all this focus on the polls is also dumbing down the discourse of the 2011 campaign. Watch some of the panel discussions these days about polls; while okay in themselves, that's all they're about, it seems. Not a mention of the issues or policies beneath the numbers. 

Let me try to explain why journalists of my vintage are doubly surprised at what the politicians are getting away with saying about Parliament and coalition government in this campaign. Back in the early 1990s, the reverse happened in  Canada. Elites and constitutional experts/professors/journalists  were confident that the public was too disengaged to care about the fine points of two constitutional accords that were hammered out by the Mulroney government.  Twice, in the Meech and Charlottetown sagas, the public surprised the political elite with their passion for grappling with the details of the agreements. People showed up at town-hall meetings in 1993 with annotated, heavily scribbled-over copies of the 50-so-page Charlottetown accord, fiercely arguing those "finer points." 

Flash forward to 2011, and we find ourselves in a meeting room at U of T, with only 50 or so people and  just two journalists, wondering how the basic laws of the land could be so determinedly trashed during this election campaign, with barely a peep of protest from the public. If I understand things correctly, the public has decided to hand  its  interest in these matters back to the elites and the professors. From this perspective, it looks like de-democratization. I hope I'm wrong. 

About that coalition thing

This  campaign  may be giving us a new adage (a twist on Kim Campbell's infamous 1993 comments about serious issues and elections). Specifically: elections are no times for civics lessons. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff tried in his interview with Peter Mansbridge last night, but with mixed results.  

 

At the outset of this current  campaign, I (perhaps naively) believed that all the coalition hysteria could be dispelled if voters understood that this is actually the topic of an adult conversation currently under way among some of Canada's leading  constitutional and government-formation experts.   Here's an article about their conversation. Here's one  report. Here's another. (Click on the links. Take your time. This blog post will still be here when you get back.) 

It may well be that people prefer to let these matters be decided by emotion, prejudice, partisanship or grudges, but I'm kind of fond of the cool, rational approach when it comes to the questions surrounding who will run Canada. Tonight, there will be another meeting of cool heads on coalition law and conventions, at U of T's Munk Centre.

 If you're the type to click on those above links, you're probably interested in matters of government, law, civics and such.

And I'll leave you with this thought for today: what's more destructive to the country? People who would like tear up the constitution after  a referendum, or people who want to  rewrite the constitution with a  PR campaign? 

 

 

 

The dirty war

On the road this week in Southern Ontario, I stopped by Frank Valeriote's campaign office in Guelph yesterday to see how things were going. 

Guelph has already been the epicentre of a Liberal-Conservative dispute over ballot boxes at the university. When I arrived at Valeriote's office, he and his campaign workers were talking about how and when to issue a news release about some questionable tactics they've been seeing in that riding. They're not blaming anyone, but Valeriote says that none of the other candidates seem to be the target of these tactics/pranks. 

One of Valeriote's campaign workers said they  have had "numerous" complaints from Guelph residents who say they're getting calls after 9 p.m. from people claiming to represent the Liberals. 

Valeriote isn't the only Liberal candidate complaining of these tactics. Joe Volpe alleges that it's happening in Eglinton-Lawrence too, and Bob Speller has told  the media that harassing calls are being lodged in his name in Haldimand and Norfolk as well. 

Valeriote also says that people with Liberal signs on their lawns have been getting visits from volunteers identifying themselves as Conservative campaign workers, who are warning these would-be Liberal voters that voting for Michael Ignatieff will result in handing control of the country to Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe. 

Like Volpe, Valeriote is saying that this is all part of a voter-suppression effort. Green Party leader Elizabeth May talked about this at the Star's editorial-board meeting a couple of weeks ago -- the nasty tactics may not drive any votes toward  a particular party, but instead,  disgust people enough about politics that they simply stay away from the ballot box on May 2. Much of the Liberals' whole campaign this time has been focused on boosting turnout, so these 12-year-old-kid pranks could be a real problem.

Then again, it all does give average citizens a glimpse of what's become business as usual in Ottawa in recent years. 

 

The troubles they've seen

Samara, the democracy-research project founded by Michael MacMillan and Alison Loat, has a new report out this morning, and it's a sobering look at the average MP's life through the eyes of the folks who lived it. 

We have a story about the report in today's paper, and if you want to read the whole thing, you can click here. As well, I  talked yesterday via email to Alison Loat about the report (she'll also be on  CBC Radio's The Current this morning, too.)  Here's the full text of her replies to some of my questions yesterday.  (Photo at right courtesy of TVO and the website channels.com.) 

Question: By releasing the report now, do you intend this as a cautionary  tale  to the 1,587 people vying to be MPs?

 

Alison's reply: Our goal is to contribute to a greater understanding of how our politics work among Canadian citizens more widely so that they can understand what works well, and why politics can fail to produce the results we might like.  The hope is that by bringing together the collective voices of those who’ve served on the front lines of our democracy – so to speak – we can better illuminate what’s working and not.   With time, we hope these stories will resonate with Canadians beyond those who follow politics every day to that they’re better able to engage in how our country runs.

As an aside: We’re already working with educators and other NGOs to develop ways to adapt this work into curriculum materials and educational activities.  They’re interested, because they like how the stories/personal reflections provide a more engaging way to present politics to students that polls, surveys or the “how a bill becomes a law” type thing.

Question: As long as I've been in Ottawa, MPs have been complaining that partisanship got in the way of public service, but it gets worse, not better with each new Parliament, majority or minority.  So how do you take politics out of politics? (i know, big question, but the complaints I read in here have been around since the 1980s, when I arrived in Ottawa, and they were dated then. I just think if people wanted to fix the system, they would have by now. Question is why they don't want to fix things, it seems to me.)

 

Alison's reply: An easy question for a Sunday morning!  The biggest message I took from these MPs’ stories is the need to re-examine the role of a political party in our democracy.  They are extremely important organizations that perform essential democratic functions - engage citizens, select candidates for office, develop and aggregate policy ideas and contest elections – and are heavily supported by public money, yet we rarely ask ourselves if they’re performing these functions in the way we’d like. 

 

From what the MPs told us (and it’s notable that these views were consistent across political parties), it may be time to talk about how to revitalize our political parties.  If even the stalwarts (the MPs) feel poked in the eye, is it any surprise citizens don’t want to participate?

 

If I read your question correctly, though, you suggest we are in a vicious circle that’s hard to break, and I agree.  Political parties need citizen participation to thrive, but parties turn people off politics.  Disengaged citizens do not want to join parties, so parties are not renewed in the direction citizens might like.

 

A first step is to systematically lay out the problem, which I hope these MPs, with our help, have done.  The next step is to openly discuss how Canadians want political parties to work within our democratic system.  This could include series in media that focuses less on Parliament being broken, and more on how the parties within it can better serve the needs of citizens. It could also include a discussion on how parties are financed, how nomination processes take place and how riding associations engage citizens on the ground both during elections as well as throughout the year.  After all, there are few organizations with  the potential to touch Canadians in every community across the country, but our political parties can. 

 

As well, there is probably an internal discussion parties can have on how they manage themselves and relate to MPs in Ottawa so they don’t turn off the very people with the courage to stand up and serve citizens in Parliament.

Question: In a couple of reports now, you've seemed to be leaning toward the idea that Parliament should be run more like a business. (job descriptions, performance evaluations,  franchises, etc.) Why do you think that's the solution?

 

Alison's reply: A lot of issues the MPs raise are what I’d term management challenges that faced by all kinds of organizations, public, private or non-governmental.  In that way, politics is perhaps an extreme case of what many Canadians face in their workplace every day. 

 

Yes, I think better management practices would help.  For example, better clarifying the roles, responsibilities and expectations of MPs would help them know how to perform their job better.  It’s notable that not a single MP we interviewed came close to articulating the classic definition of an MP’s role, and there were vastly different and often competing descriptions of what is, essentially, the same role. Any in any organization, when roles and responsibilities are not clear – never mind conflicting - it’s difficult to work effectively.

 

But more important than that, it will also help citizens better understand what to expect from their elected leaders. If the MPs themselves are unable to describe their own roles clearly and coherently, it is hard to blame the media or the public for not understanding the MP’s role either, and not understanding how to assess whether or not they’re doing it well.

 

 

Question: The Liberals, NDP and Greens have all proposed solutions in their platforms for tone -- Liberals, for instance, promising monthly meetings of party leaders. You don't see this as a campaign issue though. Should it be?

 

Alison's reply: The issues raised by the MPs go well beyond any one campaign and get to the heart of how our democracy works every day.  I hope these reports help shine a light on how our politics work and what can be done to improve them.