Van Loan makes a splash in Question Period

I'm still at a loss to understand why the Conservatives want Government House Leader Peter Van Loan to be doing all the answering (I use the term loosely) in Question Period. It can't be popular demand, surely.

Today, Van Loan was hauling out his now-predictable barbs against Bob Rae, reaching back into Rae's time as Ontario premier for something or other. (Memo to Van Loan: You might want to check with Bob about whether he's seen your anti-Rae talking points, in booklet form. Remember that Conservative candidate you didn't want? The one who was supposed to be delivering those lines? The one who supported Rae in the Toronto Centre by-election?)

Today, Rae responded to Van Loan this way: "For all I know, Mr. Speaker, at that time the minister who just responded was in high school pulling the wings off butterflies."

Van Loan, meanwhile, managed to knock over his water glass amid all this hilarity — drenching Prime Minister Stephen Harper beside him.  I didn't see this with my own eyes, but CBC folks did, and they've blogged on it here.

Party season in Ottawa

It's party week at the official Opposition leader's residence of Stornoway. Last night, Stéphane Dion and his wife, Janine Krieber, hosted a reception for MPs and journalists. Tonight and tomorrow night, members of the  "Laurier Club" (those donating over $1,000 annually) and Liberal staffers will descending on the place.

Last night's spread was impressive -- a heavy emphasis on local food and merchants, served on real china, under a marquee tent filled with fresh flowers. For entertainment -- as if we reporters aren't diverting enough -- they had wandering fortune tellers and costumed performers doing rope and card tricks. The fortune teller's puppet was a bit scary, actually. Former health minister and B.C. premier Ujjal Dosanjh tried to get his palm read too late -- the fortune teller was leaving for the night. He wanted to see if he could get an update on a prediction given to him years and years ago, which forecast that he would be famous by 50 and dead at 51. (He's 62 now.)

Dion mingled with the guests, but warned all he was sick. And indeed, the Liberal leader didn't look all that well, and sounded worse. He said he's been suffering a cold for two weeks. On the upside, Dion said, one of the advantages of travelling around the country while ill is that he gets all kinds of homespun advice on cold remedies. He's tried special soups and elixirs almost everywhere he's gone.

Meanwhile, there's also the big Speaker's barbecue tonight, at the farm out in the Gatineau Hills. Parliament Hill denizens are brought out there by the busload and often stay until the wee hours.

 

It could be a long, long summer

Last night, the Liberals helped the Conservatives pass the budget bill that contains controversial reforms to Canada's immigration system - specifically, changes that put more power in the hands of the immigration minister to say yea or nay to potential newcomers.

At least one Liberal out there isn't happy. Blogger James Curran is castigating his party for sitting on its hands on this one.

 

"I'd like to see how the Members of Parliament for the Liberal Party of Canada are going to explain to their constituents why we didn't stand up for new Canadians," Curran writes.

Dion more or less acknowledged yesterday that more and more Liberals are looking for an election sooner rather than later and there are reports that the mood is getting more tense within caucus. If it's true that Conservatives may stretch the summer break all the way until November or even December, then that means five or six long months back in the ridings. That's plenty of time to explain the still-not-fully-formed proposal for a carbon tax, Dion might argue.

It's also a long, hot summer (and fall) if you have constituents asking hard questions about why the Liberals are constantly propping up the Conservatives - hotter still if the Tories use the time to flood the airwaves with more anti-Dion attack ads.

Information explosion

The blockbuster news of the evening -- Maxime Bernier is out of cabinet.

Top-of-mind speculation:

• For a government seen as the most secretive and locked-down in recent memory, how strange is it that the biggest controversies revolve around carelessness with information? Wasn't it just last week that we heard how the Prime Minister's chief of staff, Ian Brodie, was the originator of the cross-border kerfuffle about Barack Obama and what he was saying about NAFTA?

And now, here we have Bernier and Brodie gone. 

Idle speculation:

• Wouldn't it be neat  and tidy if the classified documents -- the one with which Bernier was so careless -- turned out to be the ones that went astray in the NAFTA-bama business?

 

Crosses we all have to bear

Overheard on an Ottawa bus:
Two bureaucrats, loudly bemoaning their fates as great minds forced to bear the burden of intellectually inferior underlings.
Fortunately, they agreed, they were on the job today, very busy keeping Canada safe from dummies.
The bureaucrat woman, aggrieved, moaned that a new hire was simply not up to the job. This new employee is apparently a former beauty queen who oversold her qualifications for the public service.
"I'll tell you what I say about her," the boss lady said. "I say she writes like a 'journalist.' She's shallow and has opinions no serious person would have."
Her bus companion sadly tut-tutted his sympathy.
Fear not, readers, Canada's civil service and government are safe in the hands of the anti-journalists.

Election expenses battle heats up

And so it starts.

Within the next couple of weeks, all the former Liberal leadership candidates have to submit an updated accounting of their campaign debts — most importantly, how they're going to pay off the big loans they received. The Star reported on this over the past week.

The rough tally of that combined debt, as of March (the last time we received publicly available numbers), is about $2.8-million — an estimated $800,000 of that belongs to leader Stéphane Dion.

Any leadership candidate who doesn't have a rigorous plan to pay off those loans will then find that they are deemed as "contributions" and thus in violation of Elections Canada law, limiting each donation to $1,100 per person in a leadership contest. (And by the way, that extends over years; someone who gave $1,100 to Dion in 2006 can't give him $1,100 in 2008 to help pay off his loans.)

The Conservatives, bank on it, will be saying that Elections Canada (or public enemy number one) is showing favouritism to the Liberals if they don't make the loans payable immediately. In fact, however, the law does not just allow the extension — it provides for it.

Today in the House of Commons, the Conservatives used the 15  minutes before Question Period to bash Dion and the Liberals as usual. And they started the drumbeat — Liberals should be paying their loans by June 3, not asking for any extensions.

Here's Conservative MP Joe Preston:

Mr. Joe Preston (Elgin—Middlesex—London, CPC): Mr. Speaker, when financing their leadership campaigns the Liberal leader and his opponents received millions of dollars from wealthy and powerful individuals.

The Canada Elections Act clearly stated that loans taken out during the leadership race must be paid back within 18 months or they become legal donations over the donation limit.

The June 3 deadline is fast approaching. Some have speculated Elections Canada may extend the period to repay the loans.

According to Duff Conacher, “Elections Canada will be acting unethically and undemocratically if it lets any of the Liberal leadership candidates extend their loans past the 18 month deadline”.

Will the Liberal leadership contestants skirt contribution limits, thus breaking the law, through massive personal loans from wealthy, powerful individuals by not repaying their loans on time?

Will Elections Canada give special treatment to the Liberal Party by extending the deadline?

 

Dipping into the campaign goodie bag

Prime Minister Stephen Harper unveiled a defence strategy this week that seems to exist only in audio format, while Liberal leader Stéphane Dion  has been talking up a carbon-tax plan that also seems a little incomplete.

The coincidence would seem to suggest that the leaders of Canada's two main political parties have decided that half-baked  proposals  are better than no ideas at all.  Or maybe all their big thinkers are on vacation, or at some conference somewhere for policy wonks.

But there's a better explanation — the spring election, or lack of it.

A Conservative strategist confided a few weeks ago that the longer the Harper government has to wait for an election, the more it has to raid the ever-evolving campaign platform. Announcements that Harper had been planning to make on the campaign trail are now being rolled out as government proposals — that's probably why they look a little sketchier than a full-fledged policy. Election announcements are expected to have a shelf life of one or two news cycles, not 20 years.

Dion, meanwhile, is believed to be rushing out the carbon-tax idea before it's ready simply because he's impatient to talk about the environment and policy, in a way that he might have been talking on the campaign trail. Liberals will  freely admit that the carbon-tax idea isn't fully formed or ready for prime time yet.

That's something that Harper and Dion have in common right now — both leaders would probably rather be fighting an election this month. Harper's hands are tied by his fixed-date election legislation. Dion's hands are tied because neither he nor his party are ready.

So in the meantime,  presumably, we're  only going to be getting shapes and suggestions of policies. It's weird, but what isn't weird in Ottawa these days?

 

24 Sussex crumbling

Canada's Auditor-General confirmed today that 24 Sussex Drive, the prime minister's official residence, is, well, a dump.

That's not news, though, to participants in the annual Doors Open Ottawa tour, or viewers of Rick Mercer's comedy show.

When Paul Martin occupied 24 Sussex a few years ago, his wife, Sheila, decided to include 24 Sussex among the grand old residences that annually open their doors to give architectural and heritage enthusiasts a closer look at the properties.

The Ottawa Citizen sent a columnist to do a bit of reconnaissance on the house, and she reported that the house was turning into a drafty old relic.

That prompted Mercer to stage this hilarious bit, in which he and the then-prime-minister headed to Canadian Tire and weather-sealed the windows themselves.

That Mercer/Martin repair may have to do for now. Apparently, though the Auditor General says that the house should be vacant for a year to get the proper renovations. But the Harper family has no intention of vacating in the near future, they said through a spokesperson.

 

 

Taking out the trash talk

Over the past weekend, CBC Radio's The House performed a bold experiment. It featured a panel of MPs, talking on the economy, but set ground rules: no using the airwaves to trash your opponents. The House host Kathleen Petty warned participants that producers would simply edit out any negative remarks directed at other parties.

You can listen to the result here.

The show is inviting the audience to call/write and say whether these new rules of engagement are welcome.

This may be an idea whose time has come. Anecdotally, you hear a lot of fed-up talk around Ottawa these days about the state of these panel discussions. When MPs or strategists simply come on the air to recite a list of "talking points" generated by central party command, the result seems to be simply noise.

For fun, I took the transcript of a panel discussion yesterday on CTV's Question Period (see below) and did a similar type of editing. By my rough count, you lose about half the number of words in this discussion if you get rid of the snipes against others.

CTV Question Period Transcript for Sunday, May 4, 2008 – MPs panel

OLIVER: The Prime Minister says the economy's in good shape, don't worry. However, the Governor of the Bank of Canada says we could be into a slowdown for a whole year. Which is it, and what are the plans of our political parties to do anything about it? Well we're joined from Calgary by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance Ted Menzies who's standing by in Toronto, John McCallum a former banker who's now the Liberal finance critic, and Peggy Nash who is the industry critic for the NDP. Mr. Menzies, let me get to you first. Which is it? Is the economy in pretty good shape or are we heading into a recession?

TED MENZIES (Parliamentary Secretary – Finance): Well certainly the economy is in good shape and I would agree with the prime minister, but we can't help but look across the border and see the difficult challenges that the Americans are facing. And we're very dependent on trade with the Americans so we need to be cautious. And that's why in the fall economic statement, the Finance Minister addressed those issues and put in $60 billion worth of tax cuts to stimulate the economy, and businesses reacted. We heard positive comment from all across this country, from industry groups and from private individuals, that those tax breaks stimulated new business, stimulated new jobs. We're looking at, since this government has taken power, nearly three-quarters of a million, over three-quarters of a million net new jobs. And yes people are, jobs are being rationalized. There's people that are losing their jobs, but there's over three-quarters of a million net new jobs in all regions all across this country.

OLIVER: Alright, Mr. Menzies has brought us straight to tax cuts, Mr. McCallum. In a slowdown, are tax cuts the answer, and then I'm going to get you to answer the same question Ms Nash.

JOHN MCCALLUM (Liberal Finance Critic): Well I think Ted has a bit of a Pollyanna view. And I would argue that the basic problem is that this government spent like crazy over the last couple of years when the economy was strong, and now when we're looking at a weak economy the fiscal cupboard is bare and some are even saying we're in deficit, and so there's very little fiscal room now thanks to their overspending during good times. And the other point I would make is it's extremely unhelpful when Ontario, which is bearing the brunt of this storm, the government keeps attacking Ontario calling, saying that it's the last place to invest or that Dalton McGuinty is the small man of confederation. I think Canadians want their governments to work together, especially in Ontario when times are difficult, and this government should work with Ontario and stop trashing the business climate of Ontario.

OLIVER: Go ahead, Ms Nash?

PEGGY NASH (NDP MP): Well, you know, Craig, this week we had three different studies that came out that told us some pretty troubling news on Tuesday. We heard that just so far this year Canada has lost 55,000 manufacturing jobs, and that adds on to the hundreds of thousands we've already lost. On Wednesday we heard that the economy is stalled and in fact is shrinking, and on Thursday we had the StatsCan report that looked at the last generation, the last 25 years, and found that those who are very wealthy are getting wealthier, those at the bottom are falling further and further behind, and those in the middle are working harder, longer just to tread water, just to stay in place. So I don't think that the government's handling the economy well at all. I think Mr. Harper has turned his back on the manufacturing crisis. He's turned his back on Ontario. And he's turned his back on the real pressing needs that certainly people in my community are telling me that they're facing. They've got the lowest savings in their generation, they've got the highest debt in the country's history, and they're really struggling.

OLIVER: I want to get back to Mr. Menzies. There is a real economy and then there's the political economy, Mr. Menzies. Is your government worried about Ontario where you need votes and a third of the ridings in the country are there if you have any chance of getting a majority at all, you're going to get them with the kind of answers you've got about the Ontario economy, because that's what the problem is, isn't it?

MENZIES: Well let's talk about reality, as I stated, and Peggy didn't seem to hear my comment, that we have over three-quarters of a million net new jobs in this country. Jobs are changing.

NASH: But, Mr. Menzies, when you lose your job at General Motors like a thousand people did this week, if you lose a thousand jobs at General Motors, what's a job at Wal-Mart?

MENZIES: Craig, I...

OLIVER: Okay, we better get Mr. Menzies, I want to let Mr. Menzies make his point here.

MENZIES: Thank you. It's very important to realize that no one that graduates from high school today would expect to stay in that same job. Jobs are changing. People are moving. Eighty percent of these over three-quarter of a million new jobs are high paying jobs. People have employment. They're moving to new jobs. They're commuting to better stronger jobs. But to go back to Mr. McCallum's comment about spending, let's take into account what the Liberals have suggested we should do. Just last week, I believe it was on your show, Craig, the leader of the official opposition suggested that we should put a higher tax on gasolines and heating fuels. That's not what's going to help Canadians.

MCCALLUM: Actually he didn't say that.

MENZIES: That's not going to help Canadians survive through this summer and through a winter of cold conditions.

OLIVER: Mr. McCallum, I guess what I'd like to hear you say is a comment on this whole business of tax cuts. Is that what Ontario needs as its economy slips?

MCCALLUM: Well it's in the liberal DNA not to go back into deficit after we got rid of the huge Conservative deficit in the mid-90s, so everything I say is subject to not going back into deficit. But I think manufacturing is hemorrhaging jobs, and it's not much comfort to those losing their jobs to be told that jobs are going elsewhere. And I think we have already announced, subject to money being available, a one billion fund to help support the manufacturing sector. Much of that would be in Ontario.The government is ideologically opposed to measures of that kind. But I think when we have US Governors in the southern states giving huge subsidies to lure our companies and our jobs out of Canada we have to support our manufacturing sector as well, and this is a big difference between what we would do as a government and what this government is refusing to do.

OLIVER: The Bank of Canada Governor says we are into a slowdown, Miss Nash. Who's right here, because the Prime Minister suggests things are in great shape, or is it just Ontario we're talking about and we've got one nation and two economies, Ms Nash?

NASH: Well I think if you're in the commodities sector, you know if you're in the oil and gas sector things are looking pretty rosy. It's not only Ontario that's in manufacturing. If you're in a paper mill in British Columbia, and that mill is closing, you feel the impact the same as someone in Ontario. But because Ontario, and Quebec to a lesser degree, but Ontario especially is the manufacturing heartland, here's where we're really feeling the impact of the manufacturing crisis. And just on the issue of tax cuts, you know, Mr. Dion goaded the Prime Minister to cut taxes further and faster so he did and the Liberals supported that but, you know, it's the wrong way to go. What that has done, it's rewarded those very profitable companies that are already doing very well. Taken money out of the national purse that we ought to be spending to assist the manufacturing sector, but also meet people's needs in housing, social services, health care. That's what we should be doing.

OLIVER: Mr. Menzies, let me ask you about something I think you said, or I think it's where you're going, if you're out of work in Ontario and the economy of the west is booming move west where there are jobs. Isn't that in effect what you're saying? And I'm not being critical of that.

MENZIES: Well that isn't what I suggested at all. When I'm suggesting that people may travel to a job it's a short distance. But let's look at the facts. There's over 85,000 jobs in the province of Ontario that are producing products for the oil and gas sector in Saskatchewan and Alberta. That's where the jobs are going. They're going into building houses, into building new infrastructure in Ontario. They may not be building cars, but they have jobs. They have good paying jobs that are supporting the Canadian economy.

OLIVER:Quickly now, Mr. McCallum and Ms. Nash, you have to keep it quick, what are the chances that the Conservatives may suffer in Ontario politically, Mr. McCallum?

MCCALLUM: Well I think the fact that they keep insulting Ontario and attacking Dalton McGuinty and saying he's the small man of confederation rather than working with Ontario is one strike against them, and the fact that they have nothing to support the manufacturing sector having used up all the money during good times, they have nothing left to give and they're ideologically opposed to helping manufacturing anyway, and there's no consolation to those manufacturing people losing jobs to tell them there's jobs in Alberta. So I think they have two strikes against them.

OLIVER: Since then, by the way, the Prime Minister did say some nicy nicy things about Dalton McGuinty. But, Ms Nash, finally you?

NASH: Well, you know, we've seen 25 years mostly boom times and I think that boom was squandered. We didn't make the right decisions to invest where we needed to invest, both in infrastructure and in defending our value-added sectors, the manufacturing sector, and those that ignore that today I think do so at their peril. Canada cannot afford to lose its manufacturing sector. We're seeing the impact. It's hurting people very deeply.

OLIVER: That's it. That's got to be it, and I want to thank all three of you for giving us your time this Sunday. We appreciate it very much.

MCCALLUM: Thank you, Craig.

NASH: Thanks, Craig.

MENZIES: Thanks, Craig.

OLIVER: Just ahead, our journalists and our weekly cheers and jeers section.

The view from across the pond

A lively little discussion was going on this week about Canada and its politics at the Guardian newspaper website in the U.K. over an article called The Canadian Nixon.

The authors, Dimitry Anastakis and Jeet Heer, essentially are asserting that there's a larger force here at work in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's war with Elections Canada -- specifically, his campaign to dismantle Canadian institutions. They're not the first to make this point, (see below) but their point in putting this on the Guardian website, presumably, is to get readers from abroad, mostly of a liberal bent, to pay attention to developments here in Harper's Ottawa.

And it has prompted a little wave of discussion about Canada and its politics, not so long ago dubbed “cool” by another British media institution, The Economist. Here, though, it's a mix of Canadians and Canadian-watchers from abroad, talking about whether Canada is really a small-l liberal country. Deputy Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff also dwelled a bit on this question in his speech at the Royal York this week - part of a fundraiser to help settle his leadership-campaign debt. .

And Sinclair Stevens, once a Progressive Conservative cabinet minister, had some of the same things to say in an article he penned for the Star this week.

So what does all this mean, in the larger scheme of things?

Liberals, naturally, want all of this to serve as the groundwork for the next great election debate. They believe it's the narrative that underlies all of the actions of the Harper government -from its battles with the media, the CBC in particular, to its fight against Premier Dalton McGuinty's government.

Meanwhile, Conservatives, especially given the latest poll results from Angus Reid, would like the next election to be framed on leadership.

There's a worrying chance, however, that the next election will be about neither - that it will just be nasty, brutish and personal. CBC Radio and Rex Murphy are due to tackle that question later today on Cross Country Checkup, when listeners are being invited to call in with thoughts on this question: "Are finger-pointing, insults, and scandal-mongering, elbowing out real political discourse?".