Category Archives: Canada

Canada, Quebec

LIVE-BLOG: Québec leaders debate tonight

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Check in at Suffragio tonight at 8 pm ET for a live-blog of tonight’s leaders debate, the first such debate in Québec’s election campaign. Québec’s voters go to the polls on April 7.Canada Flag IconQuebec Flag Iconpng

(You can read previous coverage of the current Québec election, the Marois government and the 2012 election here).

Update, 8:00 pm: Here we go! The live-blog continues below the jump.

Update, 10:00 pm:  So who won? Who lost?

Liberal leader Philippe Couillard more than held his own in this debate — it’s hard to believe it was his first leadership debate.  He was calm, he was cool, he looked like a premier.  He didn’t refrain from engaging premier Pauline Marois, and he certainly scrapped over several issues, including the PQ’s proposed Charter of Values, Marois’s record on job creation and on Marois’s leadership.

Marois played defense all night long, and not only because she’s defending her existing government.  Her attempts to blame the previous Liberal government of Jean Charest, I think, fell flat — those attacks could have been more effective.  But just about everyone ganged up on Marois tonight, and she was alternatively aggressive and defensively brittle — and that’s even before the debate turned to the sovereignty issue.  It wasn’t her best night.

François Legault obviously believes he has more votes to win from the PQ than from the Liberals — and it showed in the way he went after Marois.  Legault took plenty of shots at Couillard too, especially in trying to defend his image as the clear champion of the private sector in the election.

Françoise David of Québec solidaire was perhaps even more calm and collected than Couillard, and a thoughtful presence on the stage tonight — it’s the same tactic she used in 2012 during the debates, and it largely worked tonight, too.  But she has the luxury of being able to float above the fray because her party’s in fourth place.  Like Legault, she targeted Marois much more than Couillard.  She was particularly effective with her deliberate answers on religious freedom and the Charter, and her attempt to reclaim the sovereignty issue from the PQ.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the night is how little revolved around the question of sovereignty and Québec independence.  About half of the sovereignty section, which itself ran about 30 to 40 minutes, was devoted to the issue of the Charter.  Also missing from the debate was any mention of Marois’s early attempts to rewrite Bill 101 on the use of French language, which have now fallen by the wayside with the debate over the Charter.

Nothing in tonight’s debate will reverse the growing trend toward the Liberals and away from the PQ.  That doesn’t mean Couillard will certainly be Québec’s premier, but he did nothing tonight to disqualify himself.  Marois’s aggressive defensiveness played poorly to me, and she did nothing to help her cause along undecided voters. David, especially, may have pulled a few voters away from the PQ tonight.  It will be interesting to see if she and Legault, in particular, will focus their aim on Couillard if the Liberals’ polling lead grows even further over the next week or two.

Continue reading LIVE-BLOG: Québec leaders debate tonight →

Alberta, Canada

Redford steps down as Alberta premier amid crisis for governing PCs

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Despite the last-minute surge in support for the Progressive Conservative Party that led premier Alison Redford to an improbable landslide victory in April 2012, her resignation as premier this week is the latest sign that the party’s four-decade run governing Alberta may soon come to an end.Alberta Flag IconCanada Flag Icon

Redford, who took office in October 2011, will resign effective Sunday, creating a scramble for the PC government to find a new leader and a new premier in Canada’s wealthiest and fourth-most populous province — also the home province of Canada’s Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper.

Deputy premier Dave Hancock will serve as interim premier for the next four to six months until the party chooses a new leader.

Redford stepped down after facing a revolt within her own caucus, most notably over a decision to attend the funeral late last year of former South African president Nelson Mandela:

The embattled premier has been facing down critics since early this year, when she expensed about $45,000 for a trip overseas for Nelson Mandela’s funeral.  For weeks, Redford ignored calls to refund the money, which many called an extravagant and unnecessary use of public funds.

In mid-March, Redford apologized and repaid the costs associated with the trip, but it appeared the damage was already done.  Critics lambasted Redford for what they called a sense of entitlement as more revelations of questionable spending were brought to light, including allegations that Redford had flown on her own government plane while Progressive Conservative MLAs took half-empty flights to the same destinations.

Redford’s decision also follows a Leger poll earlier this month that showed her party trailing the even more socially and economically conservative Wildrose Party by a margin of 38% to 25% (the provincial Liberal Party would win 16% and the provincial New Democratic Party would win 15%).  More ominously, the poll gave Redford a 20% approval rating, compared to a 64% disapproval rating.  Other polls show the PCs trailing by an even wider margin — a March 19 ThinkHQ poll gave Wildrose a 46%-to-19% advantage.

MLA Len Webber broke from the PC caucus last week to stand as an independent, and Donna Kennedy-Glans did the same on Monday, with other PC legislators promising to follow.

The Wildrose leader, Danielle Smith, remains controversial, even within Alberta, a province with some of Canada’s most conservative voters.  But the uproar over Redford’s spending decisions plays right into the message of fiscal restraint that Smith has hammered since becoming the Wildrose leader in 2009. Continue reading Redford steps down as Alberta premier amid crisis for governing PCs →

Canada, Personal, United States

An enjoyable panel at the Wilson Center on US-Canada relations

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Screen Shot 2014-03-19 at 12.13.14 PM

I had the pleasure of joining a panel discussion earlier today at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on Diane Francis’s new book, Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country.Canada Flag IconUSflag

I’ve already written about the book, which has made quite a splash on both sides of the border.  It was a pleasure to meet Francis, an American-Canadian who’s been writing and thinking about Canadian policy for years.  With a Canadian federal election approaching in 2015, the US presidential election in 2016, and ongoing negotiations between the United States and the European Union over a free-trade agreement, it’s a particularly opportune time for both Canadian and US policymakers to be thinking about many of the policy ideas for greater bilateral cooperation that the book outlines.

You can watch the entire panel below the jump:

Continue reading An enjoyable panel at the Wilson Center on US-Canada relations →

Canada, Quebec

Péladeau candidacy transforms Québec provincial elections

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When Québec premier Pauline Marois called a snap election earlier this month, the conventional wisdom was virtually certain on two points: that Marois’s sovereigntist Parti québécois (PQ) would win a majority government and that the election would turn on the Marois government’s introduction of the Charte de la laïcité (Quebec Charter of Values). Quebec Flag IconpngCanada Flag Icon

Less than two weeks later, one poll today shows that the PQ is actually trailing the more centrist, federalist Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ).  The CROP/La Presse poll finds that the PLQ would win 39% of the vote, the PQ would win 36%, and François Legault’s struggling, center-right, ‘soft’ sovereigntist Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) would win just 13%.  Québec solidaire, the more leftist, sovereigntist alternative, wins 10%.  The PQ still leads among Francophones by a margin of 43% to 30%, though the Liberals win 71% of Anglophones.  Far from winning a majority government, Marois could actually lose her minority government if the Liberals keep gaining strength.

What’s more, the emergence of former Quebecor CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau (pictured above, left, with Marois) as a PQ candidate fundamentally transformed the election’s focus away from the cultural issues surrounding the religious freedom debate and the Charter of Values — and toward the issue of Québécois independence.  Right now, that’s working to the benefit of Liberals, because a majority of Québec voters today oppose independence.

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RELATED: Marois calls snap election with eye on Québécois separatist majority

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Péladeau, when he announced his candidacy last Sunday for the PQ, surprised everyone by declaring his strong support for Québec’s independence.  That took the focus off Marois’s Charter of Values and put it squarely on whether Marois will call a referendum if the PQ wins a majority government on April 7.  Marois herself spent last week musing about an independent Québec,  including post-succession monetary policy and retaining the Canadian dollar.

That made it look as if Péladeau is more in control of the PQ campaign than Marois, thereby undermining Québec’s sitting premier. This week, with the PQ’s poll numbers declining, Marois is now trying to avoid talking about the sovereignty issue and limit the damage from her star candidate’s outspoken entry into provincial politics.

The idea was that Péladeau, as a well-known businessman, would give the PQ more credibility on economic policy, thereby peeling away some of the more economically conservative voters that previously supported Legault and the CAQ in the last election — and maybe even some Liberals.

Instead, all the talk about sovereignty and independence has given Liberal Party leader Philippe Coulliard an opportunity to frame himself as the candidate talking about ‘real issues,’ including his plans to cut taxes while also cutting spending in order to balance the province’s budget.  Polling data from the past week suggests that former CAQ voters are moving to the Liberals instead of to the PQ.  What’s more, the conservatism of Péladeau as the PQ’s top candidate seems to be pushing some PQ voters toward supporting Québec solidaire instead.  Continue reading Péladeau candidacy transforms Québec provincial elections →

Canada, Ontario, Toronto

Chow’s entrance settles October Toronto mayoral race

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The initial view today is that with Olivia Chow’s resignation as an MP in the federal Canadian House of Commons and her announcement on Thursday that she will launch a candidate for Toronto’s October 27 mayoral election, the race is now Chow’s to lose.Canada Flag Iconontariotoronto

At first glance, there are a lot of good reasons to believe that Chow is really the frontrunner, and her announcement closes the effective field for Toronto’s 2014 mayoral aspirants.

In a race otherwise dominated by at least two or three high-profile conservative candidates, Chow is the only left-leaning candidate, and she’ll be able to easily consolidate the left-leaning support within the Toronto metropolitan area.

But Chow is not the frontrunner — and her fate depends almost entirely on how the pool of center-right Toronto voters divides up. Continue reading Chow’s entrance settles October Toronto mayoral race →

Canada, Quebec

Marois calls snap election with eye on Québécois separatist majority

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Despite polls that generally show a slim but steady lead for Québec premier Pauline Marois’s government, her decision to call snap elections after just 17 months in office leaves her party, the sovereignist Parti québécois (PQ) is hardly a lock to return to power, let alone to win a majority government.Canada Flag IconQuebec Flag Iconpng

That makes the April 7 race to elect all 125 members of the Assemblée nationale (National Assembly) an incredibly high-stakes moment in Québécois politics — and, by extension, Canadian politics.

In contrast to the September 2012 election, essentially a referendum on a decade of rule by the Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ) and premier Jean Charest, the upcoming spring election will instead be a referendum on Marois (pictured above) and whether the province is willing to entrust a majority government to Marois’s separatist, leftist party.  If Marois loses, it will take the wind out of the sails of the sovereignist movement in Québec, especially just a year before federal elections in Canada in which the Bloc Québécois, a PQ-affiliated party meant to represent the province’s interest in Ottawa.  If Marois wins, it might be the last opportunity for the Meech Lake/Charlottetown generation of Québécois politicians to push forward with a third (and possibly final) referendum on Québec’s independence.

If Québec held its provincial election tomorrow, Marois would win a majority government, according to polls.  But that’s hardly much comfort — there are at least five reasons to doubt whether Marois can truly pull it off: Continue reading Marois calls snap election with eye on Québécois separatist majority →

Canada

The narrative of federal spending in Canada ignores provincial debt

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flaherty

I don’t mean to single out any particular post at any particular think tank, but a post from Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute today gets to the heart of why I am so distrustful of think tanks that lean so clearly either to the right or to the left.Canada Flag IconUSflag

The Cato post comes after Conservative finance minister Jim Flaherty (pictured above) unveiled a budget on Tuesday that outlines further spending cuts designed to lower Canadian public debt more deeply, largely keeping to the same fiscal path that prime minister Stephen Harper’s government has set for years.  The post, however, argues that the gap between federal spending in Canada as a percentage of GDP, which is lower, and federal spending in the United States, which is higher, is growing:

In Canada, federal spending fell to just 15.1 percent of GDP in 2013 and the government projects that the ratio will decline steadily to 14.0 percent by 2019 (p. 268). Federal debt as a share of GDP fell to just 33 percent this year.

Then follows some fairly massive generalizations about the state of Canadian and US federal spending over the past two decades and contemporary politics in both countries:

On federal fiscal policy, Canada has had pragmatic centrist leadership for the last two decades, with voters keeping the loony left out of power. In the United States, we’ve had power divided between centrist Republicans and loony left Democrats in recent years….

Pundits often claim that the Republicans are controlled by radical Tea Party elements. I wish that were true, but in terms of policy results there is no evidence of it. Republican and Democratic leaders are apparently satisfied with federal spending, deficits, and debt far larger than acceptable to the centrists in Canada.

And there’s a chart that proves it! See!? Canada good, US bad.

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But there’s no indication that these numbers include spending at the provincial level, which is much more robust in Canada than corresponding spending at the US state and municipal level.  It’s trend that has accelerated in the past two decades, as well, following Canada’s narrow brush with Québec’s independence referendum in 1995.  That makes the chart essentially useless — it’s an apples-to-maple-leafs comparison.   Continue reading The narrative of federal spending in Canada ignores provincial debt →

Canada, United States

Could the United States and Canada effect a national merger?

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I spent an impromptu weekend in Ottawa and Montréal, which marked my first visit to Canada’s capital city — and its fourth-most populous (after Toronto, Montréal and Calgary).USflagCanada Flag Icon

Though Ottawa is a bilingual city that sits on the Ontario-Québec borders, there’s no doubting that this was a city founded by English Canadians (and, in fact, New Englanders founded the first colonial-era settlement) — which may explain why it’s impossible to find a decent meal other than poutine on a Sunday night after 10 p.m.).  But the trip gave me good reason to read the new book from National Post columnist Diane Francis, Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country. 

OK, so let that sink in for a moment.  Merging the United States and Canada into one mega-country.  Impossible, right?  A national political space with room for both Jacques Parizeau and Haley Barbour? Come on.

But it’s not an unhinged read — it’s a page-turner, and Francis has a command of the data that motivates her argument.  It also meets the ‘learn something on every page’ test.  Did you know that Canada’s First Nations residents also have US citizenship?  Or that the US defense department, if it were a nation, would have an economy the size of Turkey’s?

The political hurdles are immense 

Let’s start with the obvious — in a world where the US Congress can’t even agree for three weeks on whether to fund the government, the appetite for a merger with Canada is probably less than zero, and Francis certainly knows this.  The politics of a US-Canada merger are impossibly difficult, and the weakest part of the book is that Francis glides over the political hurdles — the Québec question and the issue of Southern intransigence in the United States are dealt with in just over three pages.  I like to think that’s because Francis knows the political obstacles are insurmountable and prefers to spend more time making her very able case for the economic synergies that a merger would bring.

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It’s tempting to believe that Canada’s relatively more statist and socially and economically liberal population would give the US Democratic Party an almost immediate lock on elections for the foreseeable future (and Francis hints as much), but that’s not necessarily the case.  It’s Canada that has a three-term Conservative prime minister in Stephen Harper and the United States that has a two-term Democratic president in Barack Obama (pictured above with Harper).  As John Ibbiston and Darrell Bricker argue in their own big-think volume from last year, The Big Shift: The Seismic Change In Canadian Politics, Business, And Culture And What It Means For Our Future, there’s a growing majoritarian coalition of immigrants, Westerners and Ontario suburbanites that could make Harper’s Tories the natural party of government in Canada in the 21st century — just as much as the Liberal Party of Wilfrid Laurier, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien dominated the 20th.

It’s hard to imagine that Québec premier Pauline Marois and Texas governor Rick Perry would have much in common.  Still, there are common trends in the politics of the left and right on both sides of the border, and Toronto mayor Rob Ford proves that Canada has as many colorful characters in politics as the United States.

On the right, the rise of the ‘tea party’ movement on the US political right matches the rise of a new fiscal and social conservatism captured by the rise of Alberta’s new Wildrose Party (as an alternative to the long-dominant Progressive Conservative Party).  Harper’s own rise, and the merger of the western-based Canadian Alliance with the dwindling eastern-based Progressive Conservatives, is the story of the rise of a more anti-government, pro-Christian, social and economic conservatism in Canada.  That mirrors the rightward shift of US conservatism under the influence of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and others.

On the left, the late Jack Layton led the New Democratic Party to a historic breakthrough in the 2011 federal election in a way that mirrors the new progressive coalition of minorities, moderates and young voters that powered Obama in 2008 — first to win the Democratic Party nomination over Hillary Clinton, then to win the presidency.  The difference between the pragmatic, business-friendly Liberals and the social democratic NDP in Canada is the difference between, say, US senator Chuck Schumer of New York and US senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

Nonetheless, with all due respect to Paul Cellucci, the former US ambassador to Canada, the difference between Québec and Alberta is not the same as the difference between Massachusetts and Mississippi (despite the heritage of French Americans from Maine to Louisiana).  The cultural gulf between the United States and Canada is the gulf between revolution and evolution, fixed in place by 200 years of path dependence.

If I were Canadian, I would worry that the best aspects of Canadian culture and politics would be totally subsumed by US culture and politics — it was Trudeau, after all, who said that having the United States for a neighbor was like being a mouse sleeping next to an elephant.  For all the valid criticisms of the US military-industrial complex, it’s hard to believe that the Canadian influence would slow the militarism of US policy (though, frankly, deploying US troops to patrol the Arctic north or to fortify and develop new northern settlements seems a more productive endeavor than invading Iraq).  

As the United States has increasingly retreated behind a wall of homeland security in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Canada has increasingly opened its borders to immigrants.  One out of every two residents of Toronto, Canada’s largest city, is foreign-born, and nearly seven million of Canada’s 35 million people are foreign-born.  In the 21st century, Canada is becoming the melting-pot society that the United States once was in the 20th century.  That would be endangered if Canada became merely the northern-most region within a greater North American superstate.

Francis also betrays a protectionist edge that view Chinese, Russian and Arab malevolence at every turn.  If I were Canadian, I’d be happy to know that China, Russia and other countries are willing to compete with US and Canadian investors to most efficiently develop the resources of Canada’s far north.  It seems to me that the kind of knee-jerk nationalism that led to the 2006 Dubai Ports World kerfuffle in the United States is something that’s more dangerous to democratic and economic institutions in North America than an investment here or there by China.

But when you get to the heart of Francis’s argument about the reasons for and benefits from a US-Canadian merger, it’s as thoughtful, radical and brilliant as you’ll find in any of the top books published last year.

Even the most outlandish ideas should win points for creative thinking.  A payout of $492,529 to each Canadian citizen at a total cost of around $17 trillion to the US treasury?  A bifurcated health care system that would include greater rights and freedoms for Canadians?  The concept that the US deep south, which chose segregation over industrialization and economic modernization for nearly a century, would sign up to a merger because it might mean more Canadians would migrate to the Sun Belt?  That Quebeckers would willingly give up what amounts to a veto on national policymaking for  irrelevance in a super-country whose First Amendment freedoms would make most of the province’s language regulations unconstitutional on Day One?  That the staid Bay Street approach to banking regulation would easily graft itself onto the creatively destructive mentality of Wall Street? None of these are politically feasible.

How to capture the benefits of greater cooperation

The good news is that the United States and Canada don’t actually have to become one nation-state in order to effect a lot of the benefits that Francis outlines, which is where her book really shines.  That’s especially true in a globalized world where national borders are conceivably less important than at any time in the post-Westphalia era.  A handful of efforts could bring much of Francis’s dream to reality without a supranational acquis communautaire or admitting Canada’s provinces and territories as the next 13 American states:

Continue reading Could the United States and Canada effect a national merger? →

14 in 14, Algeria, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Canada, Catalonia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, France, Lebanon, Namibia, New Zealand, Paris, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand

14 in 2014: Fourteen *more* elections to watch in 2014

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2014

As if that weren’t enough!

If you’ve managed to stick with Suffragio through 14 world elections to watch in 2014, here are 14 more honorable mentions that you should probably also keep an eye on:

Thailand general election, February 2.thailand

Popular Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra called snap elections for February after the latest round of protests over a proposed (and ultimately tabled) amnesty bill.  The fights threaten to reopen a decade of polarization and political violence between the ‘red shirts’ that support Yingluck and her self-exiled brother Thaksin Shinawatra and the ‘yellow shirts’ who oppose them.  Popular support in Thailand’s north among rural voters meant that Yingluck and the Pheu Thai Party (PTP, ‘For Thais’ Party, พรรคเพื่อไทย) were headed for near-certain victory.  The decision by the opposition Phak Prachathipat (Democrat Party, พรรคประชาธิปัตย์) to boycott the election is a barely disguised plea for military intervention for an unelected ‘governing council’ instead.

El Salvador presidential election, February 2 (with March 9 runoff).el salvador

El Salvador, with 6.3 million residents, may be small, but it’s the third-most populous country in Central America.  As in neighboring Honduras, which went to the polls in November 2013, a preponderance of drug violence and a corresponding collapse in public safety is at the heart of the Salvadoran presidential campaign.  None of the three major candidates is expected to win an outright majority on February 2, but the learning candidate is vice president Salvador Sánchez Cerén of the governing Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front), a one-time guerrilla movement-that transformed itself into the country’s top center-left political party following the 1980s civil war.  Sánchez Cerén is hoping to succeed former journalist Mauricio Funes, who has served as president since 2009 and is limited to a single five-year term.

Though Sánchez Cerén leads polls with between 29% and 31%, two candidates are competing fiercely for second place with between 25% and 28% each — longtime San Salvador mayor Norman Quijano of the center-right Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA, Nationalist Republican Alliance), which governed El Salvador between 1989 and 2009, and former president Antonio ‘Tony’ Saca, who left ARENA to run for a second, non-consecutive term for an alliance anchored by Saca’s new populist, right-wing party, the Gran Alianza por la Unidad Nacional (GANA, Grand Alliance for National Unity).  The bottom line is that Sánchez Cerén will face a tough fight against the ultimate center-right candidate that emerges in the second round.

Costa Rica general election, February 2 (with April 16 presidential runoff).costa_rica_flag

Costa Rica is perhaps the most developed country in Central America. It is likely to open accession talks to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2015, making it the first Central American member of the OECD.  Its GDP per capita is nearly $10,000, which makes it virtually equivalent to Panamá’s, and Costa Rica doesn’t have the massive canal revenues that Panamá enjoys.  That is one of the reasons why the center-left Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN, National Liberation Party) seemed so likely to coast to a third consecutive term to the Costa Rican presidency, despite the massive unpopularity and corruption allegations against outgoing president Laura Chinchilla.  The longtime mayor of San José, Costa Rica’s capital, Johnny Araya, held a wide lead in polls throughout much of 2013.  But that’s changed as Araya’s missteps on the campaign trail have led to the impression that he’s aloof and out of touch.  José María Villalta, the sole lawmaker for the social democratic Frente Amplio (Broad Front) is now virtually tied with Araya in polls. Continue reading 14 in 2014: Fourteen *more* elections to watch in 2014 →

Canada, Ontario

Meet Kathleen Wynne — Ontario’s premier and the 180-degree opposite of Rob Ford

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wynneantiford

Though it’s been five months since the first reports emerged that Toronto mayor Rob Ford smoked crack cocaine, it’s only been within the last week that the controversy surrounding Ford has reached truly staggering attention.toronto ontarioCanada Flag Icon

When the embattled mayor earlier this month admitted that he used crack cocaine in a drunken stupor, he only opened the floodgates to more questions — and more allegations, which have certainly followed in short order.  It’s been a truly catastrophic week for Ford, who made his problems even worse with some misogynist comments about a former female aide, his refusal to step down as mayor, further admissions that he’d purchased illegal drugs in the last two years, and that he’s operated a vehicle while drunk.

But this week also marks the first time that anyone’s suggested that the province of Ontario should step in — and that’s putting Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne in the spotlight, who is the absolute opposite of everything Ford represents.  Wynne is not only the first female premier of Ontario and the highest-ranking openly gay official in Canadian politics, Wynne exemplifies the polite, dignified consensus-driven leadership for which Canada has become so well-known.

Wynne gently waded into Toronto’s growing crisis earlier this week, urging Ford to take heed of the Toronto city council’s call to step down:

“The concern for me is that city council can function and it seems today that that’s exactly what’s happening,” she said, referring to two overwhelming council votes to politically emasculate the mayor by stripping him of some powers.  “I see that city council is making decisions and they are determined . . . to find a way to make that work,” the premier said at a Council of the Federation meeting in Toronto.

There’s not much that the Ontario premier can actually do to remove Ford, though Wynne opened the door to legislative action earlier this week — but only at the request of the Toronto city council and only with the support of the leaders of both the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, Tim Hudak, and the Ontario New Democratic Party, Andrea Horwath.

Ironically, it’s the ‘amalgamation’ plan that former Progressive Conservative prime minister Mike Harris pushed through the Ontario legislative assembly in 1998, over the protest of many Toronto residents, that made Rob Ford’s 2010 election possible.  Under amalgamation, the city of Toronto merged with the surrounding communities of East York, Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough, and York — Ford himself comes from Etobicoke, a suburb to the west of Toronto’s urban core.

Meanwhile, the Toronto city council is likewise limited in its ability to remove Ford from office, though it voted to strip Ford of many of his powers on Friday — on a vote of 39-3, councillors removed Ford’s ability to hire or to fire the city’s standing committee chairs and the deputy mayor, and on a vote of 41-2, councillors voted that Ford’s powers should be delegated to the deputy mayor in the event of an emergency situation.  Despite the council’s limitations, it’s important to keep in mind that the office of mayor in Toronto is relatively circumscribed — in many ways, Ford is more like the council chief than a true chief executive with the broad executive powers of, say, the New York City mayor.

Ford has become an international punchline, to the horror of many Toronto residents, who are proud of a city long known as Canada’s financial capital, a magnet for immigration, and a quiet showcase of North American prosperity and safety.

Far less well-known is Wynne, who is the anti-Ford of Ontario politics.  In her remarks on the Toronto mayoral situation earlier this week, she stressed that Ford’s antics do not characterize Ontario and do not characterize Toronto — Wynne herself represents Toronto in Ontario’s legislative assembly:

“I believe Toronto is not defined by one person, by one politician. We have to be very careful that we not allow ourselves to be defined by this,” she said.

Still, the premier expressed sympathy for Ford and his family, given the mayor’s drinking and admitted illegal drug use.  “I’m very concerned about the human element of this. A person who is struggling in his life, as far as I can tell, and so I hope that he will look after himself.”

Wynne became the province’s first female premier in February.  But that’s not exactly a surprising feat in Canada, where Kim Campbell served as the first female prime minister (however briefly) for just over four months in 1993, and where the premiers of Québec, Alberta and British Columbia are all women.  What makes Wynne more remarkable is that she’s the first openly gay premier of any Canadian province. Continue reading Meet Kathleen Wynne — Ontario’s premier and the 180-degree opposite of Rob Ford →

Canada

Despite CETA signing, Harper’s 2014 agenda remains unambitious

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barrosoharper

Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper today celebrated the signing of a landmark free-trade deal between Canada and the European Union, bringing to fruition one of the top accomplishments that Harper can claim since taking office with a minority government in 2006 and a majority government in 2011. Canada Flag Icon

Although the pact won’t be ratified until 2015, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) removes tariffs between Canada’s economy and the $17 trillion economy of the European Union, which comprises 28 countries and over 500 million people.  Together with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it will give Canada exclusive access to more than half of the global economy.  CETA will allow Canadian automakers to export 12 times as many automobiles to Europe, and it will fully open the EU market to Canadian fruits, vegetables, wheat, grains and dairy, while removing tariffs on European wine and spirits, all seafood, metals and minerals (including steel and iron) and up to 29,000 tonnes of European cheese.  Furthermore, Harper is considering granting compensation to Canada’s dairy producers, especially in Québec, if they lose revenue in the wake of the agreement.

What’s more, Harper (pictured above with European Commission president José Manuel Barroso) will be able to brag that his vision for a Canadian-European free trade agreement served as a precedent for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) still being negotiated between the United States and the European Union.

At a time when the Liberal Party has emerged from the brink of political oblivion with the selection of its popular, telegenic leader Justin Trudeau, to lead polls in advance of the 2015 election — an iPolitics/EKOS poll earlier this week gave the Liberals 36% support to just 26% support for Harper’s Conservative Party and 25% for the social progressive New Democratic Party — the completion of CETA and its ratification gives Harper three domestic policy wins.

First, it’s perhaps his most significant policy accomplishment in seven years.  Second, not only does it give him a substantive accomplishment, it gives him one that bolsters the case that he’s dedicated to creating jobs and strengthening Canada’s economy, and it provides a contrast to Trudeau’s often wishy-washy blather.  Third, it hoists a difficult choice on the NDP — support the CETA and anger labor unions, especially within its new Québécois stronghold; or oppose to CETA to draw a stronger contrast to Trudeau’s newly invigorated Liberals.

But don’t expect much more in the way of ambition from Harper’s government this year.

The agreement comes after the reading of Harper’s 2013 Throne Speech, much of which constituted a victory lap detailing Canada’s superior employment and economic record compared to its developed-world peers, such as the United States and the European Union, where political instability, stagnant GDP growth and joblessness have been more acute.  While Harper hopes to pass a law requiring balanced budgets in the future, it’s unclear whether he can actually pass a bill through Canada’s parliament or that future governments would keep it in place.

The rest of Harper’s agenda amounted to an odd mix of populist consumer protection schemes:

The government promised to “take steps to reduce roaming costs” for cellphone users. It says it will take action so that cable and satellite customers can “choose the combination of television channels they want” by “unbundling” channel packages. And it promised to move on “hidden fees,” including making it so that “customers won’t pay extra to receive paper bills.” If this part of the agenda reads like it was pilfered from the NDP, that’s because to some extent it was.

It’s puzzling for a market-oriented party like the Tories to prioritize these kind of measures — services like Netflix and Hulu are already, in part, helped to unbundle television packages through market forces.  Roaming costs for Canadian users are already coming down due to market pressures.  So many of the consumer goals Harper listed are likely to come about through the market without the need for government interference.

It’s equally baffling to know how Harper will reduce ‘geographic price discrimination,’ his term for the price differential between consumer goods sold in Canada and the United States. Presumably, if the price difference is enough, Canadians (90% of whom live within 100 miles of the US border) will make a trip down south to buy them at cheaper prices, or enterprising entrepreneurs will find a way to undercut them — especially in the world of e-commerce.

But even more, it’s small ball.  It’s the Canadian equivalent of former US president Bill Clinton’s much-derided 1995 agenda of school uniforms and ‘v-chips.’  Though consumer protection initiatives aren’t nothing, it’s hardly the kind of bold, conservative agenda that you might have expected Harper to champion upon coming to power seven years ago, and surely not what you’d expect from a government just two years after finally capturing a majority government.

John Ivison, writing in The National Post, likened the Throne Speech to ‘a botox treatment gone bad’:

The Throne Speech is littered with examples of the government wading into sectors of the economy to “fix” problems that should be left to either the market or the existing regulators — all to the detriment of millions of Canadian shareholders.  It’s all so transparent and light as tinsel.

But it’s not just this year’s Throne Speech.

Aside from CETA, it’s hard to point to any truly groundbreaking, signature legislative acts in the Harper era.  Sure, the government reduced the rate of the Goods and Services Tax from 7% to 5% by January 2008, and it will likely balance Canada’s budget by 2015.  But those accomplishments, significant as they are, won’t be remembered in 50 or 100 years in the same way that CETA could be remembered.  Continue reading Despite CETA signing, Harper’s 2014 agenda remains unambitious →

Canada, Nova Scotia

Nova Scotia Liberal landslide an omen for federal Canadian politics?

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No one will say it’s exactly the blockbuster story of the year, but it’s worth taking note of the landslide victory of the Nova Scotia Liberal Party last night in Atlantic Canada’s most populous province.

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Take all the usual caveats — provincial politics is very different from federal politics, and the federal Liberal Party is not the same as the Nova Scotia Liberal Party.  The federal Conservative Party is certainly not the same as the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative Party.  And the federal New Democratic Party remains in the opposition, while the NDP in Nova Scotia was defending a provincial government.

But the general landscape still mirrors the federal political scene in a way that makes Nova Scotia a better bellwether than other provinces, unlike in Québec, where provincial politics really does revolve around a different axis of policy issues.  Or in the Canadian west, where the Progressive Conservative party in Alberta is the more center-left of the province’s two main parties, the Liberal Party in British Columbia is the center-right option, and where the conservative provincial party is simply the Saskatchewan Party.  The NDP’s 2009 landslide in Nova Scotia in many ways presaged the ‘orange wave’ in the federal 2011 election, wherein the federal NDP far surpassed the Liberals to become Canada’s second-largest political party and the official opposition.

Under leader Stephen McNeil, the Liberals won more support (45.52%) than any party in a Nova Scotian provincial election since 1993, and the Liberals will hold 33 seats in the 51-member Nova Scotia House of Assembly.  That’s even more than the New Democrats, under outgoing premier Darrell Dexter, won (31) in the 2009 election.

Dexter lost his own seat by a slim margin, and the NDP’s caucus will be reduced to just seven seats on 26.90% of the vote.  The Progressive Conservatives, who controlled the provincial government between 1999 and 2009, won just 11 seats on 26.39% of the vote.

But it’s really hard not to see Stephen McNeil’s win as the first electoral evidence that the Liberals are back — and running strong.

McNeil and the Liberals were leading polls to return to government in Nova Scotia long before Justin Trudeau was anointed as the federal Liberal leader and all but prime minister-in-waiting.  But McNeil (pictured above, right, with Trudeau, left) looks like he could be Trudeau’s older brother.

There were other lessons from Halifax for federal Canadian politics, too.  It was somewhat of a relief for pollsters to have forecasted the results more or less accurately after virtually no one foresaw two high-profile recent upset victories — in Alberta in April 2012 and in British Columbia in May 2013.

It’s also a harbinger for Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper.  In Alberta, where voters gave the benefit of the doubt to the Progressive Conservatives and reelected premier Alison Redford, the unemployment rate is 5%.  In British Columbia, voters reelected premier Christy Clark and gave the Liberals a fourth consecutive term of government, the unemployment rate is 6.7%.  Nova Scotia, without the rich mineral wealth that has resulted in a boom for western Canada, unemployment is running at 9%.  That’s not a fact that will be lost on Harper, whose Tories have now fallen behind the Trudeau-era Grits in national polls.

The national unemployment rate (7.2%) lies somewhere in between the two extremes.  The Canadian economy is marking equivalent or slightly higher GDP growth than the United States and in 2011, Canadian voters rewarded Stephen Harper for steering Canada through the global financial crisis without the staggering bank failures, the ragged political strife or the soaring unemployment that the United States suffered.  For Harper to win in 2015, he’ll need more voters who feel like Albertans and British Columbians than Nova Scotians.

Canada, Nova Scotia

Three lessons that Nova Scotia’s provincial election can teach us about Canadian politics

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Voters in the heart of Atlantic Canada will go to the polls tomorrow to determine the fate of the first New Democratic provincial government in the history of the Maritimes. nova scotiaCanada Flag Icon

Polls show that, under the weight of a patchy economy and low job creation, Nova Scotians will reject premier Darrell Dexter’s historic NDP government in favor of a Liberal Party government under Stephen McNeil — the Liberals hold a lead of between 15% and 20% in advance of the October 8 election, and voters prefer McNeil as Nova Scotia’s next premier by a slightly smaller margin.

While it may not be as populous as Ontario, Québec or British Columbia, Nova Scotia — with just under 3% of Canada’s population — is still the largest province in Atlantic Canada, which historically has a different cultural, political and economic orientation from the rest of Canada.  With an economy that once roared in the 19th century (on the basis of shipbuilding and transatlantic trade), Atlantic Canada now features some of the most stagnant economies within Canada, and regional unemployment runs highest in the Maritimes.  Despite some economic growth in Halifax, Nova Scotia’s capital and the largest metropolitan area in Atlantic Canada, the province’s 8.7% unemployment rate is still higher than Canada’s national 7.1% average.

Atlantic Canada, notably New Brunswick, was the last refuge of the old Progressive Conservative Party before it merged with Stephen Harper’s western-based Canadian Alliance in 2003 to form the Conservative Party that governs Canada today.  In the 2001 federal Canadian election, the PCs won nine of their 12 seats in the House of Commons from within Atlantic Canada.  Even today, Atlantic Canada remains home to a certain kind of Conservative politics — more moderate and less ideological — and the local center-right provincial party still calls itself the Progressive Conservative Party (remember that in Canada, there’s a brighter line between national and provincial political parties).  Before Harper came to power in 2005, Tories placed their hope to retake national power in former New Brunswick premier Bernard Lord; Nova Scotia MP Peter MacKay led the PCs into their merger with the Alliance a decade ago, and he served as Harper’s defense minister for six years before a promotion this summer to justice minister.

The fate of the old Progressive Conservatives might have been foreboding to the national Liberal Party as well.  In the most recent 2011 Canadian election, in which the once-mighty Liberals lost all but 34 of their seats in the House of Commons, the Liberals won 12 of them from Atlantic Canada — again, a party struggling for relevance nationally found refuge in the Maritimes.  But while the Progressive Conservatives ultimately faded into Harper’s wider conservative movement, the election of Justin Trudeau as the party’s national leader earlier this transformed the Liberals from a spent, third-place political force into something like a government-in-waiting.

So even though Nova Scotia is small, it can also be a bellwether for larger trends.

While Trudeau’s leadership has breathed new life into the Liberal brand (even at the provincial level), McNeil and the Nova Scotia Liberals held a wide lead over the NDP in the province long before Trudeau’s national ascent.  It’s a remarkable turnaround from the June 2009 provincial elections when the NDP swept to power with 45.24% of the vote, winning 31 out of the 52 seats in the Nova Scotia House of Assembly and ending a decade of Tory rule in the province — a victory that presaged the NDP’s 2011 federal breakthrough under its late leader Jack Layton.

Keeping all of that in mind, here are three areas to keep an eye on in the wake of tomorrow’s election that could presage trends over the next two years of Canadian politics more generally: Continue reading Three lessons that Nova Scotia’s provincial election can teach us about Canadian politics →

Canada, Quebec

The problem with Pauline Marois’s sovereignist minority government in Québec

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One year into the minority government of Québec premier Pauline Marois, the province is again at the center of controversy with a new attempt to legislate a ‘charter of Québec values’ that’s drawing ire from the rest of Canada. Quebec Flag IconpngCanada Flag Icon

That chart above isn’t a joke — it was released yesterday by Québec’s government, and it purports to demonstrate examples of ‘non-ostentatious’ signs that state employees are permitted to wear.

You’ll note that two-thirds of ‘approved’ examples are Judeo-Christian religions and three-fifths of the ‘banned’ examples are not.  The ‘secular charter’ (la charte de la laïcité) would ban public sector workers from wearing kippas, turbans, burkas, hijabs or ‘large’ crucifixes.  Remember that in Québec, the public sector is quite expansive, so the charter would capture not only folks like teachers, police and civil servants, but employees in Québec’s universities and health care sector as well.

For good measure, the proposed charter would also tweak Québec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms to limit religious exemptions, though it wouldn’t eliminate subsidies to religious private schools in Québec that are largely Catholic and largely funded by the state and it wouldn’t eliminate property tax exemptions for churches and other religious buildings.

In short, the charter looks less like a secular bill of rights than a sop to French Canadians to perpetuate preferred legal and cultural benefits at the expense of other ethnic and religious groups — tellingly, the crucifix hanging in Québec’s provincial assembly would be exempt from the law.  A charter that, at face value, purports to secularize Québec’s society, would actually enshrine the dominant Catholic French Canadian culture and exclude Canada’s growing global immigrant population from many of the religious freedoms typically associated with a liberal democracy.  If passed into law, it would conflict with the religious freedom guaranteed in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms (essentially, Canada’s bill of rights) — Québec did not sign the federal Charter, nor did it approve of the 1982 constitutional settlement, but remains subject to the federal Charter.  That means the ‘secular charter’ could once again put Québec on a collision course with the rest of Canada.

It’s also the latest salvo in a series of only-in-Québec culture-war misfires that have plagued the Marois government since it took power last year, and it goes a long way to explaining why Marois and the sovereignist Parti québécois (PQ) are in danger of losing the next election.

Over the past year, it would have been enough for Marois to declare victory on the issue of student fees and largely pacifying student protests, to declare that her government would largely continue Charest’s Plan Nord, a push to develop Québec’s far north in pursuit of resources over the coming decades, and to focus on bringing investment and jobs to Québec.  Marois’s government has also pushed to end support for Québec’s notorious asbestos industry, winning plaudits from environmentalists.

But if you want to know why Marois’s minority government isn’t in a more commanding position, it’s because it has pursued language and culture legislation as a time when Québec, which wasn’t exactly Canada’s most growth-oriented province to begin with (its per-capita GDP of around CAD$43,400 is CAD$5,500 less than neighboring Ontario’s and a staggering CAD$35,000 less than resource-rich Alberta), is falling behind the rest of Canada.

Between August 2012 and August 2013, Canada’s unemployment rate has dropped from 7.8% to 7.6%, but in Québec, the unemployment rate rose from 7.8% to 8.1%.

Instead, her government has plunged Québec back into the language wars, drawing ridiculous global headlines — a great example is the crackdown of the Office québécois de la langue française against a Montréal Italian restaurant’s use of the word ‘pasta’ and other Italian words on its menu and demanding the restaurant print their French equivalents more prominently. (Though we all know that apéritif or hors-d’œuvre is not the same thing as antipasto are not the same thing).

It comes after the Marois government has largely given up its year-long fight to pass Bill 14, which would amend Québec’s La charte de la langue française (Charter of the French Language, also known as ‘Bill 101’) by allowing the government to revoke a provincial municipality’s bilingual status if the anglophone population falls below 50%, requiring small businesses (of between 26 and 49 people) to use French as their everyday workplace language, and mandating that all businesses that serve the public use French with customers.

Marois switched gears from the language charter to a new religious charter when it became clear that her minority government would have a hard time pushing Bill 14 through, but also because a ban on religious symbols is relatively popular among the Québécois electorate.  Continue reading The problem with Pauline Marois’s sovereignist minority government in Québec →

Canada

Rob Ford’s crack cocaine scandal, urban politics, and the new face of 21st century Canada

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There’s no city with more people in Canada than Toronto, and in all of North America, there are just three cities that are more populous — México City, New York and Los Angeles.torontoCanada Flag Icon

Their mayors include Miguel Ángel Mancera, the latest in a line of Mexican center-left leaders in a position that’s seen as a stepping stone to the Mexican presidency; Antonio Villaraigosa, a former speaker of the California State Assembly; and billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-independent.  Even the fifth-most populous city in North America, Chicago, has a mayor in Rahm Emanuel who was a previous U.S. congressman and White House chief of staff.

Enter Rob Ford, who was elected mayor of Toronto in October 2010, a former city councillor who’s often taken pride in his anti-urban views over the years.  Canada (and much of North America) has been in a frenzy since Thursday night, when Gawker published a report stating that its reporter had been to Toronto, talked to a man who purportedly filmed Ford smoking crack cocaine and is looking to sell the footage to a news outlet.  Gawker is now trying to raise $200,000 to buy the video and publish it online.  A photo accompanying the Gawker report purports to show Ford in the process of buying and smoking crack cocaine.

As a resident of Washington, DC, it seems doubly insane to me that a major big-city mayor in North America would take such a reckless risk in light of the sensational conviction of our own former mayor Marion Barry for crack cocaine possession in 1990 (for the record, Barry had no advice for his beleaguered Toronto counterpart).  It’s not the first time that Ford’s made headlines, though, since his victory in the October 2010 municipal election — here’s a list of 42 highlights (or lowlights) of the Ford era from The Toronto Star.  It’s not the first time that Ford’s made headlines for substance abuse, and he admitted during the mayoral campaign to having a 1999 conviction for DUI and marijuana possession despite earlier denials.

Josh Barro at Bloomberg View has a great summary of how exactly such a relatively conservative and anti-urban was elected mayor of Canada’s biggest (and decidedly left-of-center) city, and much of it has to do with the 1998 amalgamation of the wider Toronto metropolitan area, including not just what was the older City of Toronto, but the six surrounding municipalities as well.  Barro quotes Canadian political consultant Jim Ross on the reasons Ford won:

From 2003 to 2010 Toronto was governed by a green-left former councillor named David Miller, and a lot of his initiatives were perceived by suburban Torontonians as favouring downtown over suburbs, and specifically favouring bikes over cars. There was also a well justified perception of wasteful spending and personal overindulgence by downtown councillors, a very expensive retirement party for one of them was often cited. Rob Ford was elected as a reaction by the suburbs against what was perceived as a city hall hostile to their lifestyles and careless with their tax dollars.

But the urban-suburban divide is becoming an even more pronounced part of Toronto city politics, and 15 years on, the Ford scandal highlights whether amalgamation is working at all and, more fundamentally, whether Torontonians are empowered to choose a representative municipal government.  It’s made Toronto a case study on the political geography of urban elections and city governance.

The 1998 amalgamation brought together the former core of urban Toronto with five additional surrounding municipalities — East York, Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough, and York.  It was directed not by Toronto but by Ontario’s provincial government, then headed by Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris as a cost-cutting exercise, and it was always unpopular among Toronto residents, who widely opposed it in a February 1997 referendum.

Harris’s government nonetheless pushed forward, and the first mayoral election in November 1997 for the amalgamated Toronto pitted the more conservative incumbent mayor of North York, Mel Lastman, against the incumbent progressive New Democratic Party (NDP) mayor of the former, smaller city of Toronto, Barbara Hall.  Lastman defeated Hall by a decisive margin, due to his support in the more suburban municipalities outside the urban core, where Hall won.  Though Lastman was reelected virtually unopposed in 2000, the same dynamic repeated in November 2003, when Miller defeated conservative John Tory, based again on support that came largely from the downtown Toronto core.

But the urban/suburban divide reemerged in November 2010, when Ford faced a less-than-stellar candidate in George Smitherman, a member of the Ontario provincial government under Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty.  Ford ultimately defeated Smitherman by 47.1% to 35.6%, assisted in part by the fact that Miller’s deputy mayor Joe Pantalone won nearly 12% of the vote, splitting the ‘anti-Ford’ vote, but a ward-by-ward election map shows just how divided downtown Toronto remains from the rest of the greater Toronto municipality:

Toronto_mayoral_election_results_by_ward_2010

Even more than in 1997 and in 2003, the 2010 election played out along geographic lines — the boundary between Smitherman territory and the boundary between Ford territory largely parallels the boundary of the old pre-1998 City of Toronto.

Toronto’s politics are especially interesting because it is a rapidly growing city with a largely immigrant face, given that nearly one out of every two residents in Toronto was born outside Canada.  What’s more is that the immigration wave includes all sorts of ethnicities — while South Asians and Chinese predominate, the Toronto immigration wave certainly also includes Africans, other Asians, Latin Americans and Arabs as well, many of whom have come to Toronto since 1997 and live both within and outside the borders of the pre-1998 city.  In many ways, Toronto is a model city that’s attracted immigrants in a way that points to the future of Canada and even, perhaps, the United States and Europe as well.

Continue reading Rob Ford’s crack cocaine scandal, urban politics, and the new face of 21st century Canada →