Tag Archives: harper

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 →

United States

How the US government shutdown looks to the rest of the world

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The People’s Republic of China doesn’t do government shutdowns. USflag

Neither does India, the world’s largest democracy.  Neither does Russia nor Japan nor the European Union.

The crisis that the United States faces over the next month — the nearly certain federal government shutdown set to begin on Tuesday and the US government’s potential sovereign default if the US Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling — is almost completely foreign to the rest of the world.

The vocabulary of the government budget crises that have sprung from divided government during the presidential administration of Barack Obama — from ‘sequester’ to ‘fiscal cliff’ to ‘supercommittee’ — is not only new to American politics, it’s a vocabulary that exists solely to describe phenomena exclusive to American politics.  As the Republican Party seems ready to force a budgetary crisis over the landmark health care reform law that was passed by Congress in 2010 and arguably endorsed by the American electorate when they reelected Obama last November over Republican candidate Mitt Romney, the rest of world has been left scrambling to understand the crisis, mostly because the concept of a government shutdown (or a debt ceiling — more on that below) is such an alien affair.

If, for example, British prime minister David Cameron loses a vote on the United Kingdom’s budget, it’s considered the defeat of a ‘supply bill’ (i.e., one that involves government spending), and a loss of supply would precipitate his government’s resignation.  If Italian prime minister Enrico Letta loses a vote of no confidence in the Italian parliament later this week, his government would also most likely resign.  In some cases, if cooler heads prevail, their governments might form anew (such as the Portuguese government’s reformation earlier this summer following its own crisis over budget austerity).  Otherwise, the country would hold new elections, as will happen later this month in Luxembourg after the government of longtime prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker fell over a secret service scandal.

So to the extent that a government falls, in most parliamentary systems, the voters then elect a government, or a group of parties that then must form a government, and that government must pass a budget and, well, govern.  Often, in European and other parliamentary systems, the typically ceremonial head of state plays a real role in pushing parties together to stable government.  Think of the role that Italian president Giorgio Napolitano played in bringing together both Letta’s government and the prior technocratic government headed by Mario Monti.  Or perhaps the role that the Dutch monarch played in appointing an informateur and a formateur in the Dutch cabinet formation process until the Dutch parliament stripped the monarchy of that role a few years ago.

But wait! Belgium went 535 days without a government a few years ago, you say!

That’s right — but even in the middle of that standoff, when leaders of the relatively more leftist, poorer Walloon north and the relatively conservative, richer Flemish south couldn’t pull together a governing coalition, Flemish Christian Democrat Yves Leterme stayed on as prime minister to lead a caretaker government.  The Leterme government had ministers and policies and budgets, though Leterme ultimately pushed through budgets that reduced Belgium’s budget deficit.  No government workers were furloughed, as will happen starting Tuesday if congressional members don’t pass a continuing resolution to fund the US government.

To the north of the United States, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper caused a bit of a constitutional brouhaha when he prorogued the Canadian parliament in both 2008 and 2009 on the basis of potentially political considerations.  In Canadian parliamentary procedure, prorogation is something between a temporary recess and the dissolution of parliament — it’s the end of a parliamentary session, and the prime minister can prorogue parliament with the consent of Canada’s governor-general.  Harper raised eyebrows among constitutional scholars when he hastily prorogued the parliament in December 2008 after the center-left Liberal Party and the progressive New Democratic Party formed a coalition with the separatist Bloc Québécois in what turned out to be a failed attempt to enact a vote of no confidence against Harper’s then-minority government.

The governor-general at the time, Michaëlle Jean, took two hours to grant the prorogation — in part to send a message that the governor-general need not rubber-stamp any prime ministerial requests for proroguing parliament in the future.

Harper again advised to prorogue the parliament from the end of December 2009 through February 2010, ostensibly to keep parliament in recess through the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, though critics argued he did so to avoid investigation into his government’s knowledge of abusive treatment of detainees in Afghanistan.  Again, however, proroguing parliament didn’t shutter Canadian government offices like the US government shutdown threatens to do.

Moreover, in parliamentary systems, it’s not uncommon for a government to survive a difficult vote with the support of the loyal opposition.  But in the United States, House speaker John Boehner has typically (though not always) applied the ‘majority of the majority’ rule — or the ‘Hastert’ rule, named after the Bush-era House speaker Denny Hastert.  In essence, the rule provides that Boehner will bring for a vote only legislation that’s supported by a majority of the 233 Republicans in the 435-member House of Representatives, the lower congressional house (Democrats hold just 200 seats).  So while there may be a majority within the House willing to avoid a shutdown, it can’t materialize without the support of a majority of the Republican caucus.  That means that 117 Republicans may be able to hold the House hostage, even if 116 Republicans and all 200 Democrats want to avoid a shutdown.

Realistically, that means that anything that Boehner can pass in the House is dead on arrival in the US Senate, the upper congressional house, where Democrats hold a 54-46 advantage.

There’s simply no real analog in the world of comparative politics.  Even the concept of a debt ceiling is a bit head-scratching to foreign observers — US treasury officials say that the government will face difficulties borrowing enough money to achieve the government’s obligations if it fails to lift the debt ceiling of $16.7 trillion on or before October 17.

Denmark stands virtually alone alongside the United States in having a statutory debt ceiling that requires parliamentary assent to raise the total cumulative amount of borrowing, but it hasn’t played a significant role in Danish budget politics since its enactment in 1993:

The Danish fixed nominal debt limit—legislatively outside the annual budget process—was created solely in response to an administrative reorganization among the institutions of government in Denmark and the requirements of the Danish Constitution. It was never intended to play any role in day-to-day politics.

So far, at least, raising Denmark’s debt ceiling has always been a parliamentary formality, and it was lifted from 950 billion Danish kroner to 2 trillion Danish kroner in 2010 with support from all of Denmark’s major political parties.

Contrast that to the United States, where a fight over raising the debt ceiling in summer 2011 caused a major political crisis and major economic turmoil, leading Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the US credit rating from ‘AAA’ to ‘AA+.’  The Budget Control Act, passed in early August 2011, provided that the United States would raise its debt ceiling, but institute a congressional ‘supercommittee’ to search out budget cuts.  When the supercommittee failed to identify budget savings before January 2013, it triggered $1.2 trillion in ‘sequestration’ — harsh across-the-board budget cuts to both Democratic and Republican priorities that took effect earlier this year, though they were originally designed to be so severe so that they would serve as an incentive for more targeted budget adjustments.

Despite the fact of the dual crises facing the US government in October, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note has actually declined in recent weeks, indicating that while US political turmoil may spook global investors, they still (ironically) invest in Treasury notes as a safe haven:

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Continue reading How the US government shutdown looks to the rest of the world →

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

Video of the day: Mulcair knows the money’s in the banana stand

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It’s been a tough few weeks for the New Democratic Party in Canada, what with the surge of newly elected Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau pushing his once dominant party back into third place in polls.Canada Flag Icon

But NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, who as the head of the second-largest party in the House of Commons, is also the leader of the opposition, pulled out a reference to the television series Arrested Development today while questioning what happened to government funding under Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper:

[Mulcair] was wondering where $3.1 billion in unaccounted anti-terrorism spending went when he uttered this gem:

“So the question is, is the money just in the wrong filing cabinet, is it hidden in the minister’s gazebo, is the money in the banana stand?”

Thanks to Giancarlo Di Pietro for the tip.

Canada

Despite Trudeaumania, Joyce Murray personifies the future of Canada’s center-left

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It’s a safe prediction that Joyce Murray will not be the next leader of the Liberal Party.Canada Flag Icon

When the Liberal Party’s membership finishes voting and the winner is announced this Sunday, the winner is certainly going to be Justin Trudeau — and likely by a landslide margin.  His anticipated election is already pushing the Grits ahead in polls, and not only against the official opposition, the New Democratic Party under Thomas Mulcair, but into contention for first place against the Conservatives under Stephen Harper.

It seems equally likely that the Liberals will get an even larger boost in the polls in the ‘Trudeau honeymoon,’ as the presumptive Liberal leader ascends to lead a party that governed Canada during 69 years of the 20th century — and which has seen its share of the vote fall in each of the past five elections.

Murray, who served as minister of water, land and air protection in the Liberal government of British Columbia premier Gordon Campbell in the early 2000s, lost her provincial seat in 2005 and reemerged as a Liberal MP from Vancouver in the House of Commons in the 2008 election.  Since the withdrawal of MP Marc Garneau from the leadership race, however, Murray has been locked in a battle for second place with former Ontario MP Martha Hall Findlay.

The late momentum, however, lies with Murray, whose main campaign strategy has been a unite-the-left platform aimed at pulling together the Liberals, the New Democrats and the Greens together in an alliance for the next general election.  Murray certainly has raised more money than any of the non-Trudeau hopefuls.

The fundamental fact of Canadian politics is that the broad left — from the most moderate business-friendly Liberals to the most ardently progressive New Democrats — remains split between two credible alternatives to the Conservatives.  In many ways, it parallels the split between the old-guard Progressive Conservative Party and the upstart Reform Party / Canadian Alliance in the 1990s and early 2000s, which allowed Liberal prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin to govern without much of an opposition from 1993 to 2004.

In the same way, the logic that propelled the conservative merger in 2003 augurs for a similar center-left alliance in 2013.

And the logic is tantalizing — in a country where MPs are determined in 308 first-past-the-post single member ridings, the Tories won a majority government in 2011 with less than 40% of the vote.  A recent Léger poll shows the Conservatives with 31%, the Liberals ascending to 30%, the NDP with 24% and the Greens with 7%.  Taken together, Murray’s dream coalition would trounce the Tories on a vote of 61% to 31%.

The problem is that unlike the PCs, which never won more than 15 seats in the House of Commons after their decimation following the 1980s governments of Brian Mulroney, and unlike Reform/Alliance, which never managed to extend its reach beyond western Canada, both the NDP and the Trudeau-era Liberals are national parties with long, proud histories in Canada that stretch back far into the prior century.

Trudeau himself has argued to the incompatibility of the Liberal and NDP traditions:

But this debate is less about electoral calculations than about Trudeau’s assessment of congenital incompatibilities on the left of the Canadian political spectrum. In an interview last year with Maclean’s, he contrasted the unification of the right, as accomplished by Harper in 2003, and the notion of symmetrical coming together of Canadian progressives.

“The right didn’t unite so much as reunite,” Trudeau said. “I mean, Reform was very much a western movement breaking away from Brian Mulroney. But they broke away, then they came back together. The NDP and the Liberals come from very, very, very different traditions.”

But that overstates the case — keep in mind that the most successful leader the Liberals have had in the past decade, the current interim leader Bob Rae, is the former NDP premier of Ontario.  Mulcair, the current NDP leader, was a member of the Québec Liberal Party during his career in provincial politics.  Though it’s important to keep in mind that provincial parties aren’t affiliated with national parties, it’s fair to say that there’s a significant amount of cross-pollination between the two traditions.

Even beyond her controversial support for a broad center-left alliance, however, the center of gravity in Canada is moving in two directions — both westward in the geographic sense and toward a more globalized, diverse, immigrant-rich Canada in a demographic sense — and British Columbia (and Vancouver) is obviously at the heart of both of those trends.  Continue reading Despite Trudeaumania, Joyce Murray personifies the future of Canada’s center-left →

Alberta, Canada

Longtime conservative Albertan premier Ralph Klein has died

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No one symbolized the conservatism of western Canada more than Ralph Klein, who died today at age 70.

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Elected Alberta’s premier in 1992, Klein served until 2006, championing the ‘Alberta Advantage,’ and presiding over what became Canada’s wealthiest province, the heartland of today’s Conservative Party.

Tory leader Stephen Harper has represented a Calgary riding in the House of Commons since 1993, and the Reform Party, later the Canadian Alliance, got its start among Calgarian conservatives like Harper and Preston Manning.  Harper engineered a merger with the then-decimated Progressive Conservative Party at the national level, resulting in the united center-right government he leads today.

Klein, who remained firmly planted in Albertan provincial politics, nonetheless became the ideological godfather of the more fiscally conservative, more Western, and more aggressive conservatism that came to Canadian federal politics in the early 2000s under Harper.

Despite his resignation (with a push from his Progressive Conservative colleagues) as premier in 2006, Klein’s legacy may also be one of the reasons that Albertan premier Alison Redford, despite slumping polls, held on to win a full term as premier in the April 2012 Albertan provincial election in the face of a more stridently populist and socially conservative challenge from the newer Wildrose Party.  The win continued a Progressive Conservative run of power that’s been uninterrupted since 1971.

As Don Braid of The Calgary Herald writes, much of Klein’s legacy is in his campaign to eliminate Alberta’s debt:

It’s deeply ironic that at the moment of his death, Ralph Klein’s legacy has been formally overturned, as a new wave of Alberta politicians revert to debt, borrowing and deficit as the chief tools of government. Klein banned those things. He paid off debt and then made it illegal. A man who knew how to squeeze a penny, he was the perfect leader to throw off the crushing debt Alberta faced when he took office in late 1992.

Read it all, but there’s much more from The Calgary Herald here, including this video and this timeline of his life.

Colby Cosh at MacLean’s notes his legacy on debt, but also on federalism and the assertion of Alberta’s growing regional power, despite Klein’s prickly attitude toward eastern Canada — he once termed eastern migrants to his province ‘creeps and bums’:

The ways in which Ralph Klein is misunderstood outside Alberta seem to mirror the ways in which Alberta itself is misunderstood; although attachment to religion is actually lower in Alberta than in Ontario and the Atlantic Provinces, it is Alberta that is thought of as an atavistic, “socially conservative” hate factory. The real difference between Alberta and other provinces is more structural than ideological or religious. Alberta has a strong lingering streak of laissez-faire utilitarianism because most of its citizens are no more than a generation removed from those who came here for jobs.

The Globe and Mail gathers some of Klein’s more memorable quotes here, including this quintessential quote from when he was Calgary’s mayor from 1980 to 1989:

“Everyone knows I have sins. I eat too much. I still drink. I gamble and, God forbid, I still see some of my old friends.” – In April, 1982, explaining how he hadn’t let being mayor completely alter his lifestyle.

The Toronto Star‘s Petti Fong considers Klein’s relationship with the Chinese community here, and Don Martin’s take at The National Post here.

Photo credit to John Ulan of the Canadian Press.

Canada

Trudeau now all but certain to become Liberal leader in Canada

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While everyone was watching to the Vatican City on Wednesday, another potential world leader took a step toward his own elevation — Justin Trudeau, whose chief rival for the Liberal Party leadership in Canada dropped out and endorsed him in advance of what’s now likely to be a mere formality on April 14. Canada Flag Icon

Like the new Pope Francis, Trudeau will assume control of a once-powerful organization that has had difficulty finding its purpose in a vastly changing world — the world of 21st century Canadian governance.  He’ll do so having risen to the leadership as the son of a beloved former prime minister on a campaign that’s little more substantive than rewarmed platitudes of what’s been orthodox Liberal policy of the past two decades and his airy good looks.

Right now, Canadians love him, though — they say that they would overwhelmingly support the Trudeau-led Liberals in the next election.  Today, however, with his election as leader all but certain, the Liberals remain mired in third place behind the Conservative Party and the New Democratic Party.  So it’s worth taking caution in reading polls that seem to show a Trudeau landslide in the next election — those polls suggest to me the upper limit of what Trudeau might achieve in a best-case scenario in 2015, when the next federal election is likely to be held.

As the leadership race approaches, though, the central question of Canadian politics has now become whether, on the one hand, Trudeau’s rock-star quality and popularity will wear thin after his coronation (dooming the Liberals to what must certainly be oblivion) or, on the other hand, Trudeau will rise to the occasion by navigating the top echelons of federal politics sufficient to bring the Liberals back into power by following in the footsteps of his father.

The future of Canadian politics — and Canadian policy in the next decade — rests on the answer to that question.

His chief rival Marc Garneau exited the race on Wednesday after releasing a survey that showed he would win just 15% of Liberal voter support to 72% for Trudeau, who he also endorsed.

As the first Canadian in outer space, Garneau is somewhat the John Glenn of Canada — he served as the president of the Canadian Space Agency from 2001 to 2006, and then moved into electoral politics, winning a seat in the 2008 election in the Québécois riding of Westmount in the Montréal area.  He’s thoughtful, articulate, and he hasn’t been unwilling to take on Trudeau — taking advantage of several debates to challenge Trudeau directly for running a campaign of ’empty words’ as an untested rookie.

Garneau, ironically, would have been a better candidate than any of the past three Liberal Party leaders — former prime minister Paul Martin, who lost the 2006 federal election to Stephen Harper’s ascendant Conservative Party; former environment minister Stéphane Dion, who won just 26% in the 2008 federal election; and former author and academic Michael Ignatieff, who won just 19% and 34 seats in the 2011 federal election, well behind the more progressive NDP that’s now Canada’s official opposition. He may well have even been a better Liberal leader than Bob Rae, who ruled out a run himself last year, despite receiving high marks for his performance as interim leader.

If Trudeau becomes prime minister in 2015, Garneau will obviously be at the top of the list to fill an important ministry.

But Trudeau fils has always been the frontrunner in the race, and it was never likely that anyone would be able to dislodge what the Liberals believe is their last shot at returning to electoral viability.  Sure, six additional candidate remain in the race — including former justice minister Martin Cauchon, former leadership contender Martha Hall Findlay and British Columbia MP Joyce Murray, who has called for center-left unity with both the NDP and Canada’s Green Party.

Nonetheless, it seems ever more likely that Trudeau will now overwhelmingly win the Liberal leadership and, sure, he probably seems like the best chance that Liberals have to retake power, even if they would need to quintuple their current 35 seats in the House of Ridings in order to win a majority.  We still don’t know if Trudeau’s breezy success in politics to date will continue after he wins the Liberal leadership, though even former prime minister Jean Chrétien, the last Liberal to have widespread electoral success, agrees that the race — and, implicitly, Trudeau’s energetic campaign — has boosted Liberal fortunes.

Either way, the Liberal Party in 2013 is a far cry from the Liberal Party that governed Canada for 69 years in the 20th century — a party dominated by elites from Montréal, Toronto and Ottawa — and personified by Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, prime minister in the 1970s and 1980s.  Continue reading Trudeau now all but certain to become Liberal leader in Canada →

Canada

Trudeau will seek leadership of Canada’s Liberal Party

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For better or worse, Justin Trudeau is expected to announce next Tuesday that he will seek the leadership of the beleaguered Liberal Party in Canada.

Trudeau, the son of beloved former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, is the last, perhaps best, hope of an endangered party.  As John Ibbitson noted in The Globe and Mail yesterday, Trudeau’s assets make him an almost prohibitive favorite.

At age 40, however, the Montréal-area MP has been a member of the House of Commons since just 2008, and he will face doubts that he’s seasoned enough to become prime minister.

If he wins the leadership, he’ll first face the task of winning back supporters from the New Democratic Party, who made such incredible inroads in the 2011 election under the late Jack Layton that they far eclipsed the Liberals to become the Official Opposition and the main alternative to prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party.

Currently, polls show the NDP, under new leader Thomas Mulcair, within striking distance of the Tories and Liberals trailing in distant third place.  But a National Post poll today shows that the Trudeau-led Liberals would win 39% to just 32% for Harper and 20% for the NDP.  Those numbers, I believe, represent a best-case scenario for Trudeau — when he really represents nothing more than nostalgia for his father and before he’s had to contend through a long leadership fight and go head-to-head against not only Harper, but Mulcair as well.  Trudeau will have to sideline the NDP (or otherwise engineer a merger or alliance with the NDP) and then win not only a sizeable number of ridings in Quebéc, but also in Ontario and elsewhere in Canada.

There will be much more to say in the months leading up to the leadership race — it doesn’t start until November 14 and it won’t end until April 14, 2013.  Since the 2011 election that saw the Liberals reduced to just 34 seats, former (NDP) Ontario premier Bob Rae has served as interim leader.

There will a lot of rebuilding for whomever wins the leadership — and since Rae himself ruled out running for the leadership in a permanent capacity earlier in June, it’s seemed like the leadership is Trudeau’s for the taking, despite a number of candidates also expected to run — the most serious potential challengers to Trudeau include Dominic LeBlanc, a New Brunswick MP since 2000 and currently the party’s foreign affairs critic and, perhaps more intriguingly, Marc Garneau, a retired astronaut and former president of the Canadian Space Agency from 2001 to 2006, who has served as an MP since 2008, also from Montréal, and is the current Liberal House Leader.  Each candidate will pay a $75,000 entry fee — it’s thought the steep price will limit the number of contenders to just serious challengers, and campaign spending will be capped at $950,000.

It’s difficult to fathom just how far the Liberals have fallen in just little over a decade.

Continue reading Trudeau will seek leadership of Canada’s Liberal Party →

Canada, Quebec

Newly-formed third party CAQ rises in Québec

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A new poll out in Québec Friday from Leger Marketing shows an increasingly three-way race in advance of the snap September 4 election.

The two longstanding parties in Québec are essentially tied.  The sovereigntist (and more leftist) Parti québécois (PQ) wins 32% of Québécois voters, while the federalist (and more centrist) Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ) of premier Jean Charest wins 31%.  Charest, who has led Québec since 2003, is seeking his fourth consecutive mandate.

But the real surprise is the newly-formed Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ), which got 27% — although the CAQ led polls briefly when it was formed in January 2012, it had steadily lost support.

And, perhaps, for good reason — it’s a relatively aimless group that has been vague about its position on key issues, such as a proposed hike in student tuition fees.  It’s been just as cagey on more fundamental stands: whether its economic program is right or left, or whether it is more sovereigntist or federalist.

Founded by François Legault (pictured above, left), a longtime minister in the PQ governments of the 1990s and a leader of the pro-independence movement in the 1995 sovereignty referendum, the CAQ incorporates some other PQ stragglers and much of the old Action démocratique du Québec, the party led by Mario Dumont that made significant gains in the 2007 Québec election (only to watch those gains evaporate in the subsequent 2008 election).

Yet there’s precedent from recent Québécois elections to indicate that voters are weary of both the Liberals and the PQ:

  • As noted, in 2007, Mario Dumont’s ADQ won 41 seats to Québec’s 125-seat Assemblée nationale, leaving Charest’s Liberals with a 48-seat minority government and pushing the PQ (with just 36 seats) out as the official opposition.
  • In the 2011 general election, the progressive New Democratic Party won 59 of Québec’s 75 ridings for seats in the House of Commons.  The NDP, led by the late Jack Layton, had previously not been a factor in Québec’s federal elections; in 2011, it reduced the PQ’s federal counterpart, the Bloc québécois to just four seats, despite its domination of Québec’s federal delegation since 1993.

Like the ADQ in 2007, the CAQ is leading polls in and around Québec City.  But also like in 2007, anglophone Quebeckers are still overwhelmingly in favor of the Liberals, the PQ has a steady lead among francophone voters, and the CAQ lags behind both parties in and around Montréal.  That result would lead to three-way deadlock that favors a minority Liberal government — unless the CAQ can somehow break through to the core supporters of either the PQ or the Liberals.

Two recent developments indicate that the CAQ could pull off that kind of upset.

Legault has emphasized the recruitment of high-profile candidates, which paid off last week when popular anti-corruption figure and former Montréal police chief Jacques Duchesneau (pictured above, right) announced last week that he would stand as a candidate for the CAQ.  That put Charest on the defensive — his government is under investigation for corruption charges related to tying government construction contracts to political cash.  Meanwhile, prominent anglophone Quebecker Robert Libman gave his support to the CAQ and trashed Charest for using scare tactics against the CAQ.

But the election remains three weeks away and it’s unclear if the CAQ may be surging too soon — to say nothing of whether voters trust Legault and his slippery platform enough to make him premier.

Continue reading Newly-formed third party CAQ rises in Québec →

Canada, Quebec

Charest makes it official: Québec goes to the polls September 4

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Jean Charest, Québec’s premier since 2003 (pictured above), has dissolved his province’s Assemblée nationale and called a snap election for September 4 — just 33 days away.

His Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ) will be seeking its fourth consecutive mandate and Charest will be leading the PLQ for the fifth consecutive time since 1998, when he first left Canadian federal politics for Québecois provincial politics.  He’s been a decade-long fixture of the province’s government, and he starts out the race with even odds at best.

His main opposition is the sovereigntist (and leftist) Parti québécois (PQ), who leader, Pauline Marois, makes Charest look like a star campaigner.

But further to the right is former PQ minister François Legault, whose Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), a new center-right party formed only earlier this year, will attempt to pull votes from both the PQ and the PLQ.  Further to the left, Québec solidaire will also attempt to pull seats from the PQ and, to a lesser extent, the PLQ.

So what are the starting positions for the parties? Continue reading Charest makes it official: Québec goes to the polls September 4 →

Canada, Quebec

As snap election looms in Québec, what accounts for the charmless success of Jean Charest?

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Almost every commentary on Canadian politics seems certain that Québec premier Jean Charest is set to launch a snap election in La belle province in the early autumn — with an announcement as soon as August 1.

Charest, whose Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ) has controlled the Québec provincial government since 2003, must call an election before December 2013.  But with Québec’s education minister, Michelle Courchesne and its international relations minister Monique Gagnon-Tremblay both announcing that they will step down at the end of the current term of the Assemblée nationale du Québec, and with a politically-charged Charbonneau Commission set to resume hearings on whether Charest’s government awarded government construction contracts in exchange for political financing, speculation is electric that Charest will call an election for early September.

The predominantly French-speaking Québec is Canada’s second-largest province with almost one-quarter of its population, so an election could well have national consequences.

An autumn election would follow a particularly polarizing spring, when student protesters rocked Montréal over a proposed hike in university tuition fees.  The tumultuous protests, which hit a crescendo back in May, have already resulted in the resignation of a previous education minister, Line Beauchamp.  Although Quebeckers seemed divided fairly equally in sympathy between the government and the student protestors, the battle has essentially cooled off as students depart for the summer.  Nonetheless, the government’s decision to enact Bill 78 — which provides that any gathering of over 50 people is illegal unless reported to police in advance — was less popular, leading many voters (not to mention national and international human rights advocates) to decry Charest.

For all of the stability he may have brought to Canadian federalism in the last decade, on the face of it, it would seem a rather difficult time for Charest to win a fourth consecutive mandate.  Charest’s Parti libéral recently lost a by-election in June in the riding of Argenteuil in southern Québec, a Liberal stronghold since 1966.

And yet — through all of this — Charest and his Parti libéral are, at worst, even odds to win a fourth term, an electoral achievement unprecedented since the era of Maurice Duplessis and his Union Nationale in the 1940s and 1950s.

Say what you will about Duplessis, his presence is unrivaled in 20th century Québec — he is synonymous with the province’s internal development, a staunch anti-Communist, French Catholic conservative whose rule over Québec was nearly unchallenged for two decades.

Which is to say: Jean Charest is no Maurice Duplessis.

Yet the always-impressive ThreeHundredEight blog’s latest forecast shows Charest’s PLQ with 60 seats to just 55 seats for the more leftist and separatist Parti québécois (PQ).  The newly-formed center-right, vaguely sovereigntist Coalition Avenir Québec, meanwhile, would win just 8 seats, and the radical leftist Québec solidaire would win 2 seats.

What can explain Charest’s staying power?

To understand Charest’s career is to understand that his political saga is an “only in Canada” story. Continue reading As snap election looms in Québec, what accounts for the charmless success of Jean Charest? →

Canada

Rae won’t seek Liberal leadership in Canada

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Bob Rae, the interim leader of the beleaguered Liberal Party in Canada and one-time premier of Ontario, will not seek the Liberal Party’s leadership.

It is an unexpected announcement — Rae had received better marks for his performance as interim leader than his predecessors Michael Ignatieff (who defeated Rae in 2009 for the leadership) and Stéphane Dion (who defeated Rae in 2006), and was seen to be the frontrunner in the race.

Attention has already shifted to Justin Trudeau, son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau and the party’s most popular potential leader.

The 40-year-old Trudeau has represented Papineau, a Montreal district, since 2008.  Trudeau had previously ruled out a run at the leadership, but pressure is already mounting on Trudeau as the last hope for the once-great party of Canada’s center-left — and he is already ‘listening’ to that pressure in the wake of Rae’s decision.

Even as the party gears up for the leadership contest expected in early 2013, polls show the Conservative Party and the New Democratic Party currently tied for the lead in national polls, with the Liberals still trailing far behind — ThreeHundredEight‘s May 2012 federal poll average showed the NDP with 35%, the Tories with 34% and the Liberals with just 19%.

Rae’s strong performance since 2011 as interim leader had made him a frontrunner alongside Trudeau for the permanent leadership.  Indeed, he’s seen as a stronger adversary for Harper than even the official opposition leader — Quebec MP Thomas Mulcair, who was elected as the NDP’s new leader only in March 2012.

But a full-fledged Rae leadership candidacy would have been problematic on several levels:

  • In stepping down as interim leader to run in his own right, Rae would have destabilized the Liberals in Parliament at a time when the party can least afford it, with Mulcair now consolidating his position as opposition leader.
  • His interim leadership has not done anything to help the Liberals’ poll numbers, which remain as low as the party’s depressed support in the 2011 general election.
  • It is unclear that Rae, a twice-failed leadership candidate in his mid-60s, would be able to lead the party through the two or three election cycles that it is likely to take for the party to move up from 34 seats to Official Opposition and then back into government.
  • A leadership campaign would have undoubtedly dredged up his controversial record as the NDP premier of Ontario in the 1990s (he failed to win reelection in 1995), and it would also have subjected him to suspicions that he’s keen on engineering a merger with the NDP (which, for what it’s worth, might not be the worst idea for the Liberal Party).

All things considered, his decision seems sound, and it allows Rae to play the elder statesman in the near future as a new generation of Liberals emerge — a generation that seems to begin and end with Trudeau, but includes nearly a dozen of potential leaders: Continue reading Rae won’t seek Liberal leadership in Canada →