The Great Communicator

After a long hiatus, Bob Rae is back to blogging - in the voice of Stephen Harper. Seriously. This morning, deadpan, Rae posted a letter he says he got through Access to Information - from the PM to the president of Tim Horton's.

The letter praises the decision to fire an employee for giving away a Timbit, because "it's really just the beginning of the end."

It also contains some communication advice for any negative fallout: "Stick by your original plan. The bad publicity will come and go. Don't answer questions. Attack the questioner. Challenge their credibility. Smear Coffee Time."

UPDATE: The blog entry has been "disappeared." Apparently Rae's sense of humour isn't universally shared and he voluntarily took it down after someone didn't find his fake letter funny. It's one thing, I guess, to call Tim Horton's cruel and heartless for firing an employee, but it's just going too far to compare the doughnut empire to the Harper regime.

Backlash on gas tax holiday

A debate is raging in the U.S.  -- one with strong echoes of the debate we didn't seem to have here in Canada over cutting the GST by two percentage points.

In the U.S., it's something called the "gas tax holiday" -- a proposal to suspend the federal tax on gas this summer; an idea first floated by Republican presidential candidate John McCain, but also endorsed by Democratic contender Senator Hillary Clinton.

The general view on this idea, just like the GST cut in Canada, seems to be: good retail politics, bad policy.

Unlike Canada, however, the economists are getting vocal with their opposition. Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution has found 150 of them to sign this letter.

Political novel wins Leacock award

As reported a while back on this blog, politics can be funny and a political book has indeed won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.

The winner is Terry Fallis, for his book, The Best Laid Plans.

The announcement came at the awards lunch today in Orillia.

(MICHAEL STUPARYK PHOTO/TORONTO STAR)

Does Gordon Brown's plight sound familiar?

Well, here's a bit of history repeating itself.

Gordon Brown and Paul Martin spent years as their parties' dauphins. They even talked from time to time about their parallel political existences, in charge of their nations' finances, heirs-apparent to their respective prime ministers, Tony Blair and Jean Chretien.

And now, Brown seems to be finding, as Martin did, that power is not an easy thing to keep.

Take a look at this bit of a Telegraph article from yesterday:

There is not a single thing that has taken a sledgehammer to party unity - as the war in Iraq did during Mr Blair's time in charge - but there are lots of small pebbles popping on to the political windscreen and no over-arching message to prevent the glass shattering.

In private, ministers who were once in awe of Mr. Brown have started complaining about their boss. "It's dither, dither, dither," sighs one. An aide claims, blithely: "It's like a Shakespearean tragedy. Gordon's not up to the job."

 

Action man

And now, for your viewing pleasure, Defence Minister Peter MacKay - as an action figure (From 22 Minutes, via YouTube).

The adventures of a rookie MP

For those who still have elections on their mind, either the by-elections just passed, or the potential spring election, it's worth checking out the newest issue of Walrus magazine, which has the second instalment in Barry Campbell's series on becoming a politician.

Campbell was the MP for the Toronto riding of St. Paul's - the riding now held by Carolyn Bennett. In the last issue, he told us of what it was like to run for office. Now, in this new issue, he tells the story of what it was like to be a rookie MP with no hopes of getting into cabinet.

The pieces are well written in raw, funny, self-deprecating detail, but with the perspective of 11 years away from this place. Walrus should offer a prize for anyone who can name all the characters that Campbell has only thinly (and tactfully) disguised with anonymity.

A couple of examples:

Describing the wacky makeup of the Liberal caucus, circa 1993, Campbell writes:

"There were single mothers and divorced fathers, and a young woman so unreconciled to modernity that she had fought a running battle with the Catholic Church for the right to say Mass in Latin on her knees (and been arrested for disturbing religious worship)."

And there's this hilarious paragraph, still on the subject of the wacky caucus and the wild variety of communication skills Campbell saw on display:

Some MPs spoke the King’s English. (Indeed, a dashing older gent from British Columbia, a former military man and college professor, looked like he could be the King of England.) Others couldn’t string a sentence together without malapropisms and scrambled syntax.

One MP expressed grave concerns about the lack of “supervision of dirigibles.” Financial derivatives, he meant, I believe.

Another went on and on about government “stewardess-ship.” A Toronto MP (who would become a minister and leadership candidate) was certain that some event “has given a lie to the deception that . . . ”

Another colleague wanted to “suck it to the Opposition,” and another insisted that we be “quick out of the shoe” on something.

When asked why an expected witness had failed to appear, a committee chair said, “I bumped him off.”

I assume the witness was rescheduled, not eliminated.

One MP took me aside to “prick my ear.”