Justin Trudeau Creativity Challenge

Now that an official announcement is imminent on Justin Trudeau's leadership intentions, the new challenge for the commentariat  is to say something about him that hasn't been discussed to death already. 

Here, as a service to those looking for a new angle, are the top 12  already-shopworn talking points on  Trudeau, the prospective candidate. 

1. Does he have what it takes?  
2. Is he his Dad's son or his Mom's son? 
3. Nice hair. 
4. He won a boxing match once, against a senator. Cue the "lightweight/heavyweight"  headlines. 
5. He was born on Christmas Day. But that doesn't make him a Messiah. 
6.  He's 40. We used to call that "approaching middle age." But in politics, we call that "appealing to youth." 
7. He's running against the mother of his half-sister. Politics as Coronation Street. 
8. Yes, there must be a way to have fun with "Justin" and "Just Society," but no one has figured out how to do that cleverly. Move on. 
9.  Why can't Sacha, the other brother, be the one who entered politics? (Because there are enough members of the Trudeau extended family in this race. See point 7.) 
10. The Liberals don't need another coronation. But they can't stop themselves. 
 11. The Conservatives are dying to run negative ads against Justin.  
 12. Has anyone mentioned his hair? Or the boxing match? Or the lightweight thing? 

Liable for damages

It's standard practice, when renting a car, an apartment or a party venue, to leave a damage deposit.

    I'm starting to think that Canadians should be insisting on the same condition when a new  government takes power: if it breaks the institutions of office, or leaves them  in worse condition than it found them, someone (not us) should pay. 

    Question Period has been on a downward descent for a while, so it's hard to  backtrack  and pinpoint who started trashing the place.  Maybe it was the Liberal "rat pack" of the 1980s, or maybe it was the arrival of television in the 1970s. But Question Period  is now utterly and completely broken. It's the basement rec room of Canadian politics, filled with rollicking feats of ever-more-sophomoric behaviour and language. This week has been a true low. 

     I keep imagining the janitors walking in every night after everyone has gone home and surveying the wreckage: "Oh no, look at this,  all those pants on fire have scorched the chairs, even on the front bench." or "Aww, look at those walls. What on earth were they throwing at each other?" 

    The committee rooms are a disaster too, though they're in marginally better condition than the Question Period venue. This week, the Conservatives moved to shut down an inquiry into the Auditor General's report on $10-billion cost overruns in the price of F-35 fighter jets. Again, the clean-up crew must be sighing: "Hey, somebody smashed all the lights in here. It's totally dark." 

    As for the Senate, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has reportedly given up on his attempts to clean up the place, wedging ever more appointees into the chamber, and considering  calling in a haz-mat team (the Supreme Court) to help turn it into a properly functioning institution. One tiny  thing: Five years ago, the Senate itself recommended that the Supreme Court was necessary for this cleanup duty, and the Conservatives steadfastly refused to consider it. Provinces also argued that their help was needed. Now the rot has  had an extra half-decade to set in, simply because Harper was convinced that fixing the place was a do-it-yourself job.

Imaginary janitor: "Darn it, somebody tried to use a staple gun and duct tape here. Look at the mess." 

    A lot of the parliamentary rule books have been taking a battering too over the past few years; their pages tattered, torn or ripped right out all together.  There was the infamous manual on how to disrupt the work of committees. There was the massive PR effort of late 2008, to convince Canadians that a "coup" was under way, when what was really happening was an old-fashioned, legitimate loss of confidence in  the Prime Minister, by a majority of duly elected MPs in the chamber. There was the subsequent shutdown of Parliament in late 2008, and another one in 2009 -- prorogation used as it had rarely been used before, to help the government escape from tight situtations in Parliament.

Imaginary janitor: "Hey look over here. Someone's busted the latches on these windows and doors." 

At some point, we're going to have to confront all this wreckage and either fix it or have the whole place condemned.

Former cabinet minister Bev Oda was (rightly) forced to pay when she smoked in a hotel room. Who's going to pay for the damage currently being inflicted on our Parliamentary institutions? Not us, the citizens, I hope. 

Carbon tax: The Musical

It's been only two days since Parliament resumed in Ottawa, and the ridiculousness has reached operatic proportions. 

 

Watch this space: Liberal leadership on Twitter

Who says you can't learn anything on Twitter? This afternoon, during Question Period, some Liberal-leadership merriment. 

It started with this cryptic tweet from Canada's first man in space, Marc Garneau, who told me at Montebello he wants to run for leadership, but he's not yet sure he's going to take the plunge. 

What could this mean? Sure enough, another prospective candidate waded in, with his own cryptic tweet. 

The indefatigable Kady O'Malley noticed: 

And yes, I had to wade in with my own smart remark, throwing in that oft-cited caveat on Twitter: 

Not so fast, said Mr. Trudeau. 

What's this? Trudeau endorses Garneau? For what it's worth (for the humourless out there) I believe this was all in fun. And in case you were wondering about the tweet that started it all, Mr. Garneau had an explanation, straight from outer space. 

 

 

 

 

 

Going negative

Once again, the Conservatives have fired up their attack machine to drive down an Opposition leader -- this time, NDP leader Tom Mulcair and his alleged support for a "carbon tax." Though the tactic has been called out as a blatant lie and an insult to Canadians'  intelligence, so too were the attacks against Liberal leaders -- and they worked. 

Note the  interesting difference here, though, between the attacks on Mulcair and the attacks on Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff. While the insults to the Liberals were on personal traits ("not a leader" or "just visiting"), the Conservatives are attacking the NDP leader on a matter of policy. 

What can we learn from this? Anyone have any theories on the difference in tactics?

One possible motive:  the polarized  policy  world works better for Conservatives. Anything they can do to portray the next election as a stark choice between left and right is presumably in their interests. 

Oh and  here's a cheery thought: the next election is 37 months from tomorrow. So we have three years and 31 days to enjoy all these  antics.

 

Farewell, Jean Charest

This afternoon, I took some time away from watching federal Liberals at Montebello, Que., to turn on the TV and watch Jean Charest resign from public life. He's had a heck of a 28-year ride in Canadian public life and, thanks to this crazy job I've had, my paths have crossed with him many many times. So I thought I'd just tap out some random, not necessarily profound  recollections here, to maybe give you some glimpses of the guy I saw  beyond the headlines or the TV pictures. 

* I first met him in 1988, a few months after I'd arrived in Ottawa to report for the Globe and Mail. I had done a huge access-to-information story on how the government was spending/wasting  money on student job grants and he asked me to come and see him in his office. 

I was wandering down the Sparks Street Mall, on my way there, and ran into the journalistic legend, Marjorie Nichols, who was acting as a mentor to many of the young women in their 20s who had arrived to cover politics in Ottawa in that era. I told her where I was heading and she said: "Get to know that man. He's going to be prime minister of Canada some day." Marjorie, sadly, died of cancer in 1991, and Charest -- at least so far -- has not reached her expectations. But Marjorie, as she could be, was pretty adamant. 

* Many of us on the constitutional beat in those years got to know him best when he headed up the committee trying to find a resolution to the Meech Lake accord impasse in the spring of 1990. After a day of committee meetings on the road, it wouldn't be unusual for the journalistic pack to be invited to Charest's room, to sit back and reflect on what we've heard that day and political/constitutional talk in general. He was always funny, and often wise. The project was at the initiative of New Brunswick Premier Frank McKenna, by the way.

Of course, the compromise efforts exploded in May-June 1990, thanks in part  to the explosive departure of Lucien Bouchard from Mulroney's cabinet as well as staunch opposition from Newfoundland Premier Clyde Wells.  Meech died in late June. I always thought there was some uncanny parallelism there -- the work of one moderate Quebec Tory is blown out of the water by one with more uncompromising views, one Atlantic Premier is similarly felled by another Atlantic Premier.  But McKenna and Charest rose above and beyond that failure to make a huge impact in Canadian political life. 

*****

In 1993, we all got to know Charest an awful lot better when he was left as the leader of a two-MP Progressive Conservative caucus. I think it was his sense of humour, as much as his sense of hard work, that helped keep that party afloat in those years.  Since I covered the PCs back in those days, those are where many of my fondest memories lie. 

Some of them: 

* In the "this-really-happened" category:  In Quebec City somewhere around 1994-95, Charest  was due to give a lengthy speech to Conservatives gathered in the basement (I think of the Chateau Frontenac).  We all had text of the dozen-or-so pages of speech, and we followed along as usual, marking where he'd strayed from the official version. (Not very much.) After the speech was over, he wandered over to where his communications assistant was standing with a few reporters. He said, with a smile, "Did you forget something?" Suddenly, her face dropped and she looked down at the folder in her hand. She'd been holding his copy of the speech all along and forgot to put it on the podium. Yes, he delivered that speech from memory. I'd heard about that photographic memory of his, but there I saw it in action and have never seen another politician do anything like that since. 

* Charest was fond of asking total strangers to vote for Conservatives in those dark years for his party. He'd be walking along the street and see someone talking on a cell phone. "Who are you talking to?" he'd ask. The puzzled bystander would answer "my mom" or "my boyfriend" or "my boss" or something, and Charest would grab the phone and say "Hi. It's Jean Charest, leader of the Progressive Conservative party. Please vote for me. Thanks. Goodbye." 

* In that same vein, during the 1997 election, the Conservative campaign bus was overnighting in my hometown of Milton. Rather than stay in a hotel, of course I went to stay with my parents. We were sitting watching the news when suddenly we saw huge headlights through the living room window. Charest thought it might be funny to pull the campaign bus on to my parents' front lawn, knock at the door and introduce himself to my parents. He said he was just there to assure them I was behaving on the bus, not causing my family any embarrassment. They were completely charmed. (They may well have voted for him, for all I know.) 

And here is my most vivid memory from those years, which I've shared with others from time to time. 

Late in 1994, Charest and his wife Michelle were due to come to dinner at my house, along with some other journalistic and political colleagues. (The then-correspondent in Canada for the L.A. Times, as well as Chantal Hebert were among the guests.)

Late in the day, as guests were arriving, we got news that Lucien Bouchard was in hospital, hovering between life and death because of necrotizing fasciitis.  Now, Bouchard and Charest had been the closest of friends, up until that Meech drama (mentioned above), but they hadn't spoken since.  This was four years later, in other words, and that's a lifetime in grudge politics. As the night went on, rumours flying, we abandoned the dinner table and just watched TV. There were a few breaks in the sombre mood. One was when Charest opined that all "experts" on TV have funny hair. One wag couldn't resist: "What are you an expert in?"  

At one point, things looked very bad. Rumours were that Bouchard had died. The phone started to ring with requests to the journalists for obits, etc.

Charest just left the room, and stood  in the dining area, gently banging the back of his head against the wall. I asked him what he was thinking. He said he couldn't put it into words. That was one of the few times I saw him without a ready answer. 

Of course, what we didn't know then was that both men would be fine, and both would go on to become premier of Quebec. And now both are gone from public life, at least for now. Hard for me to believe we've seen the last of Jean Charest after this many years.