Tag: Canadian Politics 2008

Friday Bullets For Canada Day And The Fourth

I have been waiting for this arrangement of holidays for years. We are off today so I got up at the crack of 10:15 am. The authorities have noticed. I should mow the lawn, too, but it is stinking hot. I haven’t even been out yet and I know that. Then we roam. Looking forward to the Rochester branch of Dino BBQ as well as the Museum of Play.

  • • On the one hand, there should not be a political penalty for being a practicing Christian. On the other, lying is a sin.
  • • Ben found it! My post with the goofy pictures of Harper that the Grits tried to use against him in the last election. Gold!!!
  • • I know nothing about YouTube channels but was really interested to find that the UK’s Open University has adopted the tool.
  • • No one – and I mean noooooooo one – told me that in 2008 an asteroid slammed into Sudan lighting up the night sky.
  • • I heard an amazing stat this week – that 10% of all CD sales in 2011 so far were Adele’s. Which means, yes, there are taxes to be paid.
  • • I need to make my own skittles. The neighbour gave me a whack of apple tree logs last year which I was going to use for smoking meat but now I am making massive skittles out of them instead. I will only need a cheese to fling at them.

Off I go. Maybe to mow. I have a red t-short on that says “Maryland.” I hope that counts.

None

A Very Special Friday Bullets For Christmas

Why so special? Because I took the day off, of course. We have stuff to get in, stuff to put up and stuff to eat. We have a snow storm coming a guests tonight. Ball cap wearing guests, fortunately. But there is that eternal question – how much booze to buy in anticipation of a party that may be one-third of the expected if the snow storm hits hard? Last weekend I kad the kids note down all the species we may consume in one form or another as part of Yule and it was quite impressive: scallops, lobster, crab, oysters, haddock, cod, salmon, chicken, duck, turkey, beef, lamb, pork, buffalo. Surely there are more. T’is the season to eat nature.

  • Mr Orange Togue heads to Afghanistan. I showed Darcey’s pal MOT a good time around Ottawa a year and a half ago. Our thoughts are with MOT and his companions. Christmassy. Definitely Christmassy.
  • Evil web hacker jerks help destroy nature. Not Christmassy at all.
  • The New York Times has vital cookie batter information for you just when you need it. Massively Christmassy.
  • Can the definition of individual liberty posed here actually stand? Seems like wishery to me. Christmassiness neutral.
  • Please tell him to be quiet. Interesting to see how many of the At Issue panel considered Stephen Harper overrated. Very Christmassy or not at all depending on your position. I saw Iggy on The Hour last night. He can actually string two sentences together, something foreign to Canadian politics. Harper is toast. But thanks for the extra seats at this special time of year.
  • Ben pointed out the 1793 legislation (within maybe a year of Ontario’s creation) barring slavery’s expansion. Anti-slavery is very Christmas.

There you go. Off to buy cleaning products and liquor. Happy happy everyone and if your happy is a holiday, whoops up and woots a plenty for that, too.

None

How To Govern Canada When You Have No Ideas

Has anyone else noticed that the days-long coalition of the opposition (COTO) has somehow become a source of conservative party economic theory? The mere existence COTO, which seems to have had a life span of six days, has caused Ontario to gain of 20% in its seats in Parliament (thus alienating the west even more), has caused Finance Minister Flaherty to go from “we’ll look at this again in March” to “would you like more money with that?”, has caused the Prime Minister to (again) blurt about this all moving to depression and even how he’ll never write a memoir…like we are waiting for one like we are waiting for that “hockey book” of his, which was all the news when we thought he was all burly-man rat-jacketed, pick-up truck and maply syrup in his veins.

Sure these are wacky times but do you have any idea what the policies of the Government of Canada will be, you know, next week? Is there any way to suggest that they are not simply a poorer version, a chippier example of the Liberal Party of Paul Martin, flopping around for any straw to grasp that can fit the day’s needs even to the point of asking us to use this 1998 web survey (h/t David) to tell him what to do? Maybe it’s the times. Maybe anyone would be having to do this given the economic news and the political reality. But one word keeps popping up that is absent from the Reform Party master plan for social engineering that has been gathering dust on the shelf for some time now: weak. Is anyone not surprised that this one characteristic – indecisive rudderless weakness – you would never have applied to the man now seems be at the heart of Stephen Harper’s political nature? I wish better for him…because if he can’t pull it together we are not going to be doing too well.

None

Group Project: Remember Ruling From The Centre?

Ja ‘member? That was good.

Apparently that thing called “the West” that stretches from the BC’s eastern border to the far western reaches of Saskatchwan is up in arms about the rest of Canada getting in bed with the separatists. They are so mad they are planning to separate. Jay seems to be going that way and Darcey is well past that point and even uses some sweary Mary language to describe his feelings. So a few questions:

  • Will you feel better or worse if PM Harper manages to hold on to power?
  • Would the Tories have a better chance of maintaining power if Harper quits and they reverse policies to return to the center?
  • What the heck is the coalition actually going to do? Do you want them to rule from the center?
  • Why isn’t the Bloc legitimate? I mean I support Scottish separatism or a degree of useful autonomy if the people want it.
  • And isn’t “the West” threatening to separate as a group of Albertans suggest because the Liberals have made a pact with the Quebec separatists just a teensie-weensie bit odd? Who stands for the nation?

For me, it started with Mulroney and the cutting of national programs like the train and the post office. Maybe even further back and the changes to the military’s uniforms and structure. It continued for another two decades with more and more removing and cutting and denigration of the land as a whole in favour of local interests and a do nothing attitude. The Government of Canada is for disassembling. It’s not so much as these programs and institutions were sacred but they were not replaced by anything that made the federation stronger.

Recently, I had the honour to go to a US village council on official business and witnessed the pledge of allegiance being recited before the meeting began. It was a casual, competent and fully aware moment of commonality by everyone of all persuasions in the room that could have been played out anywhere in the nation. Not jingoism. They just love their country. We have nothing like that. Maybe we did once.

None

Make Sure You Chew Your Food Thirty Times, Too

In what can only be seen as a decision not to decide, our nation’s Prime Minister has proudly proclaimed that he will think about the impending recession after the whole deep dark Canadian winter has passed:

Canadians will have to wait until the next federal budget before Ottawa delivers what Prime Minister Stephen Harper said could be an “unprecedented” fiscal stimulus package – a delay economists say the country can ill afford. A spokesman for the Prime Minister’s Office said yesterday the government is still trying to determine what would be appropriate and is looking at 2009 budget measures rather than action outside of that.

Whoa, there big fella! Don’t get any whiplash or anything. Make sure you get a good season in before you react to fast moving events. I suppose it is funny because the infrastructure work that would likely be at the heart of a recovery plan is screaming to be done. Highway bridges in Quebec need renewal as do municipal sewer systems as do rural broadband as do water systems on remote First Nations. We have been sitting on our hands for a few decades and, now that we are facing the need to get work going, there is actually work needing done. And be honest – market intervention is not “yikes socialism!!!” when the government just plays the role of goods and services buyer. Puts money in the pockets of people who know how to use a shovel, always a good thing for the economy.

So, unless dong nothing turns out to be the wisest form of intervention – right after dairy production goes lunar – how will Mr. Harper look after Obama goes BAM! and gets the next generation of needed US infrastructure projects moving? Is this an Iggy-tastic moment?

None

Friday Bullets For Your Mid-November

I am finally getting used to the clocks changing. I suppose I am getting used to the Obama victory and maybe even the Harper one, too. Maybe even getting used to not being half my age now that I think of it. Is autumn the season of acceptance? Do we rage or go quietly into these dark nights and mornings? Quietly I think. Placated by the promise of Christmas buffets to come. Visions of heaping plates with both ham and turkey with, yes please, gravy over both. Finding the brussles sprouts with bacon amongst the covered trays.

  • Sometimes I am amazed by the detail and effort given to high school sports coverage in small town America.
  • Speaking of the near and international, who knew about Galloo? You can now own it.
  • One thing I would buy if I could.
  • Remember when the choice was between green shift and the call to be square and prudent? Given the circumstances being foisted, I am not all that uncomfortable with square and prudent. You? But isn’t selling and leasing back a shell game?
  • Iggy. Let us consider Iggy. The Ig-meister. The Iggy-tron. Is there enough new or even known to make him compelling? He certainly wears the clever clogs but wasn’t the last guy a professor, too?
  • Now we know where the aliens who one day will destroy us live.
  • Jay has had enough. He has invented his own right-of-right party and I have to say I approve. The more splintering schizmists the better. Sure I wouldn’t vote for 66% of it but that is not the point. Conservatives have been duped out of the 1980s Preston Manning vision in the wilderness – even now by Preston Manning as far as I can tell – and they have every right to feel ripped off even if the drive to the right proposed will place them exactly back where Preston sat – nowhere’sville.
  • On a related note, isn’t it somewhat comforting that Chretien had the decency not to create a think tank in his name given how little Manning’s is actually being listened to by the new breed of moderat-o-conservatives?
  • Has Ian got a point?

I offered to make lunch for a meeting tomorrow that had been set for 18-20 but which is looking like 45 now. I am a church lady. I dream of failing to fill sandwich trays. I email myself webpages with sandwich making hints. Then I am going to see Dylan tomorrow night. A very odd day is in the works. I need to find ear plugs.

None

Canada Votes Day 12: A Minister Jokes

This poses an important question: given we are all incredible stupid at exactly the wrong moments, should we hold public figures more accountable for being dopes? Consider the humour employed by Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz leveraging the listeria crisis, a crisis which has occurred under his watch:

…The remarks were made in a conference call at the height of the crisis, between Mr. Ritz and members of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Mr. Ritz joked that the crisis was causing the government a death of a thousand cuts “or should I say the death of a thousand cold cuts.” When informed that one fatality had taken place in Prince Edward Island, Mr. Ritz is reported to have said, “please tell me it’s Wayne Easter.”

That last bit’s just a plain dumb political crack…Gerry’s a regular Ritz cracker. [Ed.: Rimshot!] I have had the pleasure of briefly knowing with Wayne Easter and talked with him a bunch of times back around 2000-2002. I can tell you that you’ll never meet a brighter politician who has his feet firmly on the ground and who works hard for the community…even if he used to call his US counterpart the “Sekkytary of Aggykulchur”. He’d take the joke just fine but still do the political duty of making a fuss…if the joke was just about Wayne.

But this is not about Wayne. It’s that other line: the “death of a thousand cold cuts.” On last count, 16 or 17 people are dead. This man is the Minister in charge of making sure meat plants produce listeria free food. He made fun of it. With his subordinates, the inspectors. A great leader. A sensitive public servant. Or is this a real human being, under great pressure – for the first time likely – blurting as we would all blurt in one way or another? Maybe his jokes are terrible whatever the situation and no one had the heart to tell him? A man with a foible like every one of us.

My verdict: time to go Gerry.

Other News for Day 12:

None

Canada Votes Day 11: Fighting With One Arm Tied

It has officially begun. The long knives are out. Warren Kinsella was on CBC Radio’s Ontario Morning explaining what Hans and Sean, both Liberal card carriers¹ if you don’t have a program, were going on about yesterday. Dion’s people are Martin‘s people and they don’t want Chretien‘s people back in. Yessh-ka-bible! So it is, in fact, better to lose in a squabble that should have ended five years ago and then watch the country follow Harper than to get together and move on, say, in 2007. This contains a certain script:

  • Chretienites are needed for victory.
  • Martinites are losers
  • Martinites are sore-heads.
  • A Harper victory isn’t a real victory.
  • Dion is really not supported by half the party.
  • Dion can’t even reach out to half the party.

No wonder Bob Rae is jumping up on the campaign podium – having nothing to do with any of this stuff (as a defector) he must be stupified with the stupidity of the stupid people around him.

¹[Ed.: but apparently more in the sense of “latent host / incubator of the disorder” “carrier” than actual wallet filler going by the comments.]

Other news for Day 11:

  • Is this really the campaign to blog about exclusively for 37 days?
  • In the US election, McCain goes all Rousseau: “There is a social contract between capitalism and the citizen. That has been broken by these Wall Street executives.”

None

Canada Votes Day 10: Jack Opens The Monetary Sluicegates

One billion! Jack is going to spend one billllllion dollars. And for what? Med students!

Speaking at Dalhousie University’s medical school, Mr. Layton said an NDP government would spend an average of $200-million a year to increase training spaces and help provinces expand their medical schools.

Madness. Seemingly sensible madness. It’s always the way, though. Never a plan for the 45 year old slightly pudgy dreamer, those specialists in small to medium ideas that never get picked up. Why no plan for us, Jack(!)? Hmm? Hmmm???? To be fair, last time I was among Dal Med students back in the day, I did like their frat’s (Phi Chi) bowling – taking a dozen empties and recycling them through firm contact with a wall in the basement. But, really, isn’t what we need something that brings that same sense of fun and innovation into the lives of the dulled and enrutted? Those otherwise known as the backbone of the economy – folks in their forties?

What needs to be done by Jack(!) to fill that need? I say a policy that combines preventative health policy, international development and giving the little guy, that cog in the wheel of industry, a break – and not a tax break…I mean a break. I am talking Federally subsidized Caribbean holiday camps. To create work in our shipyards, we build a fleet of liners to ferry the overworked and under-appreciated to Turks and Caicos after finally finalizing provincial status. There slightly challenging courses on topics such as the history of moustacheo care in the 1970s, the use of orange in everyday fashion, great socialists in winter sports are offered while the kids are taken care of back north through a nationalized teen daycare…err…weekcare program.

Brilliant. By focusing on the demographic that likely won’t vote Jack(!) anyway, lives are changed, happiness is reinvested creating a more productive workforce and binds across the nation. Katimavik for adults…without any real assistance to others…but with drinks and a warm beach. Isn’t that what we really want? What other programs and promises should we see over the next month or so?

Other news for Day 10:

None

Canada Votes Day 8: Do We Need To Reinvent History?

Stephen Harper has an eye for the use of history. It’s a means to illustrate a desired image. But is he concerned enough about actual history? He spoke yesterday about creating the notion that conservatism is something that has an exclusive hold on certain elements of the Canadian identity – yet does so quite openly without firm footing in the facts. How unsatisfactory. Consider this:

He said in the last two decades there’s been a broad embrace of policies once considered the domain of conservatives, from free trade to balanced budgets and spending restraint. “We saw the Liberal Party in the 1990s flip its positions on all these issues and adopt small c-conservative positions,” Mr. Harper said. But there’s also been a revival of pride in ideas and entities that conservatives have traditionally backed, Mr. Harper said, meaning not just policies and organization that Liberals and New Democrats say defines Canada. “Not just [in] things like Medicare and the [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] but [also] in our national military and other institutions,” he said.

So, did you know that fiscal prudence and military honour are “conservative” values? Never mind that a conservative Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, increased the national debt more than any other leader or that provincial Conservative parties from Nova Scotia to Ontario to Saskatchewan led sometimes scandalously mismanaged governments, leaving records of debt and even jail terms. Never mind that Canadians of all stripes both answered the call and Liberals guided Canada’s hand in military affairs in our darkest hours – Chris Taylor has the right read on politicizing the forces. Never mind it was a Tory who brought in the CBC and minimum wage and other socialist programs when they were needed. And it was the Grit MacKenzie King who led the fight against the Nazis and our Conservative Prime Minister Borden who understood the need to have a Unity government of both Liberals and Conservatives in WWI’s toughest times.

Strange to see Stephen Harper take the credit for these things solely for his own kind. The good values of good governance, honouring one’s duty are values all Canadians aspire to and some, regardless of party affiliation, achieve. Any half-way able opposition leader would run up and down him with the facts and leave him nothing but breathless. We do not live in those days, however. Sadder still is the lack of necessity as the Prime Minister could state instead that he seeks to capture the values held dear by all Canadians and to govern guided by those good principles. A missed opportunity to tell actual history and weave it into his own story…and his within it.

Other News For Day 8:

  • Nuttin’ yet.

None