According to an unsolicited email from Fred DeLorey, the deputy director of the Conservative Party, Tory MP Candice Hoeppner, who was curiously absent this week to defend her bill to scrap the federal long gun registry, is in fact on Parliamentary business in Taiwan (funny they didn’t tell Shelly glover that).
Mr. DeLorey said her availability is very limited due to the time difference and her packed schedule, although he assures us she will be back in a few days.
Perhaps then we will hear what she has to say about a recently completed RCMP report that concludes the controversial registry is cost effective and an important tool for law enforcement.
Candice Hoeppner, the Manitoba Conservative MP who has made a name for herself for her one-woman crusade to scrap the federal long gun registry, is missing in action this week, just as the gun registry issue is heating up again.
The telegenic first-term MP has become a rising star in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s caucus for her private member’s bill to abolish the gun registry, an issue that divides urban and rural Canada, as well as the NDP and Liberal caucuses. This week the issue was thrust back into the headlines when the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police endorsed the registry, striking a blow to the government’s case that the registry is useless and a waste of taxpayer dollars.
Ms. Hoeppner recently launched a website to bolster support for her initiative, and announced a tour of opposition MPs’ ridings that voted in favour of her bill at second-reading. But instead of taking to the airwaves to defend her bill against this latest blow by the police chiefs, Ms. Hoeppner’s office says she is simply “away” and not available for interviews, even as she continues to put out press releases on the issue.
Media are being redirected to Conservative MP Shelly Glover, a former police officer. Here’s what she had to say about Ms. Hoeppner’s absence:
“My understanding is that Candice Hoeppner isn’t available because she is away.”
Where is she?
“I have no clue.”
It seems odd she’s not available to do interviews on her own bill on the very week the issue is heating up.
“She has always been available for media interviews since she put her bill forward,” said Ms. Glover. “The woman is away. She is human. I don’t know where she is, you’d have to ask her office. I’m told she’s away.”
Does the government trust her to speak on the issue?
“Absolutely! In fact, she does a fantastic job of speaking up about this issue. Unfortunately, she is not here. She is away.”
There are no cell phones where she is?
“There’s no hidden agenda here. I don’t know where she is.”
It seems like an odd time to take a vacation.
“I don’t know if she’s on vacation even. I don’t know if she’s on Parliamentary business. I don’t know.”
Canada’s chief statistician, Munir Sheikh, has sent a memo to Stats Can employees announcing he will hold an internal departmental town hall to answer questions about the Harper government’s decision to make the mandatory long form census voluntary.
“Since the announcement, this new format has received widespread coverage in the news media,” he said in the email. “I am aware that this situation has generated questions. Given this, I have decided to hold a town hall on Wednesday, July 21, 2010 in the Simon A.Goldberg Conference Room from 2p.m. to 3p.m (Ottawa time).”
The government’s decision to make the long form census voluntary has incited widespread opposition from a range of organizations who say they need the data collected by the survey to inform policy decisions. Up until now, however, Mr. Sheikh has been invisible on the issue.
Canada’s former Chief Statistician, Ivan Fellegi, was one of the earliest and most vocal opponents of the government’s decision to no longer make the long form census mandatory, telling the media he would have resigned in protest had such a change been brought while he was still the head of Stats Can. He said information about certain vulnerable demographic groups who tend not to fill out surveys unless they have to would be lost, and that comparisons with older data would be made impossible by the change in format.
The Conservative government has said the mandatory long form census, which asks respondents about such things as ethnicity, and the size and value of their dwellings, is invasive and amounts to “state coercion.” Industry Minister Tony Clement said MPs had received complaints from Canadians about the census, although the Privacy Commissioner, and Mr. Fellegi have said the complaints they received over the years were very small in number.
Because of size constraints of the conference room where the town hall is being held, it will also be broadcast internally over the internet. Stats Can employees are being asked to submit questions via email before 12pm Tuesday, July 20.
It angered many Liberals when it was tried here in Canada, but in the recently called election in Australia the ruling Labor Party led by rookie Prime Minister Julia Gillard has entered into a non-aggression pact with the Greens that would see the two left-of-centre parties cede ground to one another in marginal seats.
Former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion and Green Party Leader Elizabeth May agreed not to run candidates in each other’s ridings in the last federal election. While largely symbolic for Mr. Dion’s Montreal seat, which is solidly Liberal, the move freed up a number of non-Tory votes for Ms. May, although ultimately it was not enough for her to defeat Defence Minister Peter MacKay in his Nova Scotia riding.
Current Grit Leader Michael Ignatieff, who has not done much to show that climate change is a big priority of his, announced that no such pact would stand for the next election, when Ms. May squares off against Tory MP Gary Lunn in his B.C. riding.
The deal between the Australian Labor Party (a rough equivalent to Canada’s Liberals) and the Greens is somewhat more ambitious than that of Mr. Dion and Ms. May. Under Australia’s preferential voting system, whereby voters rank candidates according to preference, Labor and Green Party operatives will distribute “how to vote cards” (HVCs) to supporters instructing them to preference Labor candidates in up to 50 marginal seats for the country’s lower house, while recommending Green candidates in contests for Australia’s elected Senate.
Former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd, who abruptly resigned a few weeks ago when faced with an internal revolt, was seen to have wavered in his commitment to fighting climate change, which contributed to his downfall. Ms. Gillard is using the pact with the Greens to try and prove to voters that the Labor government is still committed to the environment.
For all his fancy cosmopolitanism, the consensus among Parliament Hill fashionistas is that the art of the dress is not exactly Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff’s strong suit. When Mr. Ignatieff first arrived on the Canadian political scene, back in 2006, his looks were frequently cited as a political strength that might endear him to women voters in the same way Pierre Trudeau’s sex appeal made Canuck girls swoon.
Fast forward a few years, and just as he and his party have been unable to capitalize on the government’s many shortcomings, Iggy’s hotty-potential has been drowned out by frumpy suits and gimmicky red ties. In fairness, unlike the Prime Minister who has a full-time stylist and a bevy of advance staff to manage his image, spray his hair, and pick out his ties (which are actually really nice), the leader of the opposition has far fewer resources and apparently mainly relies on his wife, Zsuzsanna Zsohar, to dress him. Ms. Zsohar radiates a quirky warmth and is popular with Grit staffers and the media, but Anna Wintour she ain’t.
But, lo and behold, as the Liberal leader tries to relaunch himself with an ambitious summer-long bus tour across Canada, he may just be upping his style game, as evidenced above in his smart cowboy shirt and dark-wash Levis that fit him like a glove. Right now NDP Leader Jack Layton is consistently named the best-dressed of the four federal leaders, but one astute political observer thinks this is one area where Mr. Ignatieff could steal the show.
“Forget all this suit and tie crap, he looks shrunken and stand-offish in suits and ties,” said the style-minded politico. “Jeans, cool shirts, maybe a bit of a ruffled hair. I think he could pull off fashionista #1.”
Lately there’s been much talk about what ails the Liberal Party, and what it can do to restore itself to its former glory. The Canada at 150 conference, while widely derided by the media, was a step in the right direction, as are the series of regional policy conferences the party is putting on this summer. And while Leader Michael Ignatieff’s overtures to the West can easily be written off as futile, a less cynical observer might say it plays against the very deserved criticism that the Grits are all about shortcuts back to power.
Less talked about is the need for the party to recruit new blood, which former deputy prime minister John Manley pointed out recently. I would hypothesize that one of the reasons this point gets less play is because bringing in some fresh new faces to run for the party means some of the less fresh faces need to move on.
With a weak leader and lackluster poll numbers it is difficult to get talented people to undertake the huge commitment necessary to run for Parliament in seats where their victory is far from assured. Currently, the Liberal Party’s safest seats in the country, where no matter how low they sink in the polls people still vote red, are in Toronto and Montreal. And many, dare I say most, of those safe seats are occupied by baby boomers you’ve never heard of.
Although the Liberal Party’s chances of forming the next government look more remote by the day, after four years in power Stephen Harper’s Conservatives are still not able to recruit any star candidates beyond small-town former mayors. This is partially due to the fact that politics has become a nastier and less reputable profession, but it’s also because of the government’s hostility to evidence-based policy making and anti-intellectual culture.
Despite finishing with one of their worst results ever in the 2008 election, the Grits still managed to pull in a few great catches. MPs like Nobel prize winner Kirsty Duncan, former United Church minister Rob Oliphant, who beat out seven people to win the nomination in his Toronto riding, and Newfoundland MP Siobhan Coady, who ran three times before finally getting to Parliament Hill where in a short time she’s become a rising star. All three have the air of people who haven’t been in Ottawa too long and are in touch with what’s really important to people outside the bubble, and the Liberal Party needs more people like them if it really wants to rejuvenate itself and become more relevant.
This is not about ageism, and MPs shouldn’t necessarily have to give up their seats just because they’ve been on Parliament Hill for a while. For example, Liberal health critic Carolyn Bennett, a 60-year-old former physician who was elected in 1997, is an active constituency MP and is ahead of the curve in her thinking on the future of medicare. She’s an asset to the Liberal Party and would make a fabulous health minister, if she ever gets the chance.
Many Liberal MPs who have been on Parliament Hill for over a decade are great people and have made substantial contributions to their party, and to the country. But too many are hanging on simply because they yearn for the days when they had Cabinet limos, and they need to ask themselves if it isn’t time to give someone else a chance.
The House of Commons Speaker’s office and the Conservative vice-chair of the House committee inquiry into former Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer’s lobbying have put into question a key claim in Mr. Jaffer’s apology letter.
Mr. Jaffer denies he used the office of his wife, MP Helena Guergis, and her House Blackberry and email for his lobbying business. “Helena decided that I would keep my old MP’s Blackberry, transfer it to her account, enable it from her system, and assign it as one of the four on her operating budget,” Mr. Jaffer says in his letter to the Government Operations Committee.
In the letter, he apologizes for misleading the committee two months ago, but does not say he will comply with a summons to appear today.
When The Hill Times asked Heather Bradley, Speaker Peter Milliken’s communications director, whether former MPs, defeated or retired, are required to hand in their personal/parliamentary use equipment, including Blackberries, Ms. Bradley replied: “They are.”
Conservative MP Chris Warkentin, a vice-chair of the committee, said of Mr. Jaffer’s claim he transferred the Blackberry to his wife: “That’s absurd.”
In an interview in this week’s Hill Times, outgoing Global National anchor Kevin Newman said the biggest political news story right now is, “The disconnect between the people who are leading and the people who are ruled.” Mr. Newman said there is a growing sense among Canadians that Ottawa is “somewhere over there,” a phenomenon he says is fairly new, and that he attributes to the fact that the political parties still communicate with voters the way they did in the 1980s, using old-fashioned methods like sending out flyers.
“There are so many brilliant new ways of communicating with constituents to reach them, and to reach young Canadians, that just don’t seem to be part of the milieu here yet, so I think that’s the biggest story. We need to find ways to give Canadians the feeling that the government is theirs,” he said.
The dismal voter turnout in the last election, part of a pattern of declining interest particularly among young people, reflects this. As a young person working on Parliament Hill for the last two years I’ve come to the opinion that this country’s political elite, with a few notable and occasionally inspiring exceptions, consists of a bunch of elderly professional politicians who rule with the benign consent of a disinterested and disempowered electorate. And a lot of the people calling the shots like it that way.
A symptom of this is that the buzz in political Ottawa right now is about the launch of a Fox News-style network, Sun TV News, which providing it gets regulatory approval will be on the air next year. I’m not exactly part of this new venture’s target audience (I don’t even own a TV). I am still somewhat representative of my generation, however, and a news station that is more vitriolic (they say it will be less “boring”), with a greater focus on issues such as the fictitiously burgeoning crime wave in Canada (take a look at the headlines on their website), is not something I want to be watching.
In fact, there’s research that suggests I am not alone, and that this kind of programming mainly appeals to an older, lower income (read: less educated) crowd. The type who toss and turn at night at the thought of high-flying welfare recipients living it up on their tax dollars, and who add yet another dead-bolt to the front door in case some pot-crazed teenager tries to break in, which they believe is on the rise.
It’s easy to mock these people, but the sad truth of the matter is that many in this country feel so disconnected from the political class that only the angry and the old bother to get involved. It is they who make Sun TV News a viable venture, and they’re also the reason why this country’s public policy landscape currently revolves around crime and taxes, while Canada has no climate change policy to speak of.
President Barack Obama, hoping to use the horrific BP oil spill as an opportunity, has used his groundbreaking online campaign apparatus to reach out to citizens through an online petition so that concerned Americans can tell their Senators that they want to pass climate change legislation and transition to renewable energy sources.
“The next generation will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century. The American people are ready for clean energy,” wrote Mr. Obama in his appeal to citizens.
Canadian political parties need to start recruiting new blood that young people can identify with, and they need to start using new tools to reach them. Otherwise, the next generation will continue to be held hostage.
The prospect of an NDP-Liberal coalition is the hot topic in political Ottawa this week, but people are using the term “coalition” to mean many different things. Today Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella commissioned an informal poll on his blog, inviting Grits to vote on what sort of scenario they would most like to see happen.
The options Mr. Kinsella lays out range from entering into dicussions with the New Democrats to, on the other end, “I’m against all of that, and think being reduced to 40 seats is character-building”. Mr. Kinsella, until recently, was supposed to head-up Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff’s war room in the next election campaign, and therefore it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence that he thinks losing nearly half the Grit caucus is a possible outcome of an Ignatieff-led campaign.
Interestingly, yesterday when the head of the Young Liberals came out in favour of some sort of cooperation on the left, Mr. Ignatieff’s office quickly reiterated the leader’s opposition. A glance at Mr. Ignatieff’s leadership numbers, including a poll this week that asked respondents how they would vote with various figures heading up a Liberal-NDP coalition, would easily lead one to conclude that a big reason why he doesn’t like this idea is because no one is interested in him being the prime minister in any kind of government.
Personally, I think it would be a mistake for both parties to opt for a full-on merger. While there is more room than not for cooperation on the policy front, the Liberal Party and the NDP are at their roots very different entities. And while the Grits are having a rough go of it, the Liberal brand is still an enduring symbol of Canadianness for many people in this country.
The coalition talk has cropped up on the Canadian political landscape in recent weeks for a few reasons. One is that it’s become thoroughly evident that Iggy-mania is not going to happen; anyone who needs to be convinced of this should take note of the fact that last fall the beleaguered leader fired the small group of people who thought he could be prime minister in the first place.
The other reason is that there is ample evidence to suggest that Canadians don’t really like Stephen Harper, and never really did, and therefore anyone with a halfway decent platform and an iota of charm, and sincerity should be able to give him the boot. For whatever reason the Conservatives have reasoned their big strength is economic management, even though a poll released today reveals that while 39 per cent of Canadians trust the Prime Minister to handle the economy, 49 per cent do not.
Finally, the Canadian chattering class is yaking about a coalition because a mixed-Cabinet centre-right coalition government recently took power in the UK. Our colonial nature leads many of us to think the sophisticated politicos in the mother-country have it all figured out, but that is not the case.
In today’s Guardian newspaper it’s revealed the lesser partner in the coalition government, the Liberal-Democrats, is studying the experience of other coalition governments to figure out how to maintain their brand and their electoral prospects, while cooperating on government initiatives and at the same time opposing on matters where a compromise could not be reached. It’s not easy, and many Lib-Dems are nervous, but the party leadership believes that ultimately it will be best for the party and the country, and they’ve found examples of this model being quite successful in other jurisdictions, particularly Germany.
So while there are many options and uncertainties, and no one said it was going to be easy, it seems many people in the NDP and the Liberal Party want to have a mature discussion about this. And if Michael Ignatieff doesn’t want to, well, I’m not going to tell you what to do.
I was thinking earlier today that I would find Canadian politics really interesting if I was watching from another country. But since I’m not a disinterested observer, but rather quite a patriotic Canuck, the cynicism I’ve seen metastasize over the two-years I’ve worked on Parliament Hill, and the subsequent disengagement of the public has done a number on all that wide-eyed optimism I had when I first arrived on the scene.
The big issues lately have been Rahimelena and MPs expenses, neither of which I care about. Should public office holders be held to high ethical standards in their conduct and the way they spend taxpayer dollars? Of course they should. But how Members of Parliament spend the half-billion dollars that comprise their personal office budgets should be a much smaller story. Unfortunately, the Canadian political and media culture has evolved to a place where the elite rabidly try and trip one another up on what usually amounts to fairly inconsequential matters, while larger issues like climate change, healthcare, education, and the overarching problem that we’re a G8 nation being (poorly) run like a colonial protectorate, are largely ignored.
On Rahim and Helena, Gerald Caplan writes a compelling piece on the folly of opposition party research bureaus wasting their time digging up dirt on those two losers when most of the rest of the Cabinet isn’t fit to run a small town credit union. And finding that out doesn’t require much research.
All this aside, while I’m neither as youthful, nor as optimistic as I was when I first arrived, in 2008, to take up the mantle of youngest member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery (I’ve recently been displaced from that dubious distinction), I still see glimmers of hope.
What made me stop reading international news and start writing this blog post, is hearing on CPAC that NDP MP Olivia Chow has introduced a motion to have gay rights issues included in the citizenship guide for new Canadians. You may recall that many reasonable individuals praised the updated guide when it was revised by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, but then it was later discovered he went out of his way to strike any reference to gay marriage from the guide. He denied this claim, despite evidence to the contrary, which forms part of a truly disheartening Tory pattern whereby they do bigoted things and then halfheartedly, and usually while smirking, pretend that’s not what they were going for.
Ms. Chow deserves praise for what she’s doing, and hearing her speech in the House of Commons it’s clear she has a genuine understanding that gay people were and are one of the persecuted groups in modern society. Liberal MP Navdeep Bains also commands respect for aggressively attacking the government on its refusing to fund gay pride events. Mr. Bains ended up with the issue on his plate because he’s the party’s tourism critic, but the enthusiasm with which he’s taken it up is commendable because he’s in a far more conservative riding than Ms. Chow, and therefore doing the right thing is more politically risky. Also, in the past, Mr. Bains angered some in the Sikh community for voting in favour of same-sex marriage.
And while Ms. Chow and Mr. Bains inspire in small ways, what I’ve found more hopeful recently is the possibility of a coalition of some kind between the Liberals and the NDP emerging as a topic of serious discussion among serious people. Neither party is that great as things stand, and the Liberals in particular have shown few signs they’re about anything other than wanting to be back in power. But, nonetheless, it’s something new and it would represent cooperation over conflict, and maybe parties and policies over leaders and politics.
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