The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Power to the People

He's the Topp:

“Responsible government — the principle that a clear chain of accountability must run from citizens to the core of our Parliament — has been frayed to the breaking point,” Topp, 51, wrote in a policy paper posted to his campaign website Tuesday morning.

The former party president and perceived front-runner in the race to replace the late Jack Layton argues the solution lies partly in removing the right of the prime minister to ask the governor general for a prorogation in face of a confidence vote.

A policy that will no doubt set the nation ablaze! Did not Robert Baldwin demand of Lord Elgin: "Give me non-prorogation or give me Death!" OK. He wouldn't have said that. Not really a Canadian thing to do. A bit flashy. One thing is certain, Mr Baldwin had a better grasp of responsible government than Mr Topp.

One of the key elements of responsible government is that the Governor-General must follow the advice of his, or her, ministers. The constitutional ground is a bit iffy on Parliament telling a minister what sort of advice they can, or cannot, give to a GG. There is also the small matter of this law being essentially pointless outside of the rare occurrence of a minority government.

Prorogation is a parliamentary procedure where a legislative session is brought to an end. Pending legislation is dropped from the agenda, committees are suspended and the house does not sit until recalled by the GG. It is a routine part of life in a parliamentary system.  Mr Topp's ire comes from the failed attempt by Stephane Dion, Jack Layton and Giles Duceppe to overthrow the Harper government in December of 2008. In order to stall for time Stephen Harper requested a prorogation of a few weeks, during which the Grand Coalition melted like the Christmas pudding.

Had this parliamentary coup succeeded Brian Topp, one of its key architects, would have benefited considerably. Sour grapes do not make good constitutional precedents. The argument that Harper's quick dash to Rideau Hall thwarted responsible government is rather absurd. A prorogation can only delay, it cannot stop anything. Had the Grand Coalition held together into January of 2009 the Harper government would have been thrown out.

The second great example of alleged prorogation abuse came in early 2010, when the PM shut down parliament in the run-up to the Vancouver Olympic Games. The opposition, bereft of substantive policies beyond handing out more money, cried that this was a plot to avoid awkward questions into treatment of Afghan detainees. OK. So why not simply raise the issue again after the recall of Parliament? And then keep raising it. Using prorogation as a stall tactic is perhaps not the "nice" thing to do, yet it is perfectly in keeping with parliamentary government.

The proposal to curb the PM's prerogative powers, which had been previously argued for by Jack Layton and Michael Ignatieff, gives us a glimpse into the mind of Brian Topp. It suggests that he's still bitter three years after having been denied power. A Liberal-NDP-Bloc government would have been a disaster for all concerned. Had it lasted into the Spring of 2009, a doubtful prospect, it would have become enormously unpopular in the country. Come the next election, which likely would have been sooner rather than later, the Tories would have ridden a populist backlash into government.

Beyond holding grudges, which Mr Topp seems to excel at, there is also the pedantry of the whole issue. Even Bob Rae, ever watchful for a club to be used against the government, has largely dropped the premature prorogation issue. It's the last parliament's big story. It's also inside the ball park politics. Most voters care not a whit about such legislative arcana. The protests that occurred over the prorogation were manned by the usual suspects who, given placards and a little time, will eagerly protest anything a Conservative government might do.

After the NDP blow out in Quebec, and the Liberal decimation elsewhere, many of us were predicting the emergence of a two-party system in Canada. Tories to the Right and Dippers to the Left. Few of us foresaw the quick death of Jack Layton. Even fewer understood just how much Jack was the party. The NDP talent vacuum is astonishing in a major political organization. When Canadians are most worried about Europe and America imploding, taking us with them, the front-runner for the leadership is talking about parliamentary procedures.

Perhaps Bob Rae isn't such a vain fool after all. The Liberals might just come back. Not out of any genius, just from the appalling incompetence of the NDP.

 

"violent agreement"

NDP leadership candidates sing from the same hymnal:

The general absence of substantial differences among them was best expressed in Nathan Cullen's quip that he was "in violent agreement with his colleagues."

The only aggressiveness among candidates was shown early in the English debate, when Brian Topp turned on Paul Dewar over funding of Dewar's program, which suggests that Topp, the perceived front-runner, considers Dewar a serious challenger.

Whether Dewar deserves such consideration depends upon how much importance voting NDP members will place on fluency in French.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you heard that right. The next leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition will be chosen, in large part, due to their facility with French, the world's 15th most spoken language. In an increasing globalized world the NDP is focused on pandering to a shrinking ethnic minority. 

Since most of the Dippers are in "violent agreement" with each other, united in the firm conviction that your money belongs to the loudest whiner, this leaves little actual room for a debate. How many ways can you say "eat the rich" before it become tedious? Even by NDP standards? This is likely to be an excruciatingly dull leadership campaign. 

For most of the party's history it has been regarded as well meaning and irrelevant, the party of idealists too young or unemployable to understand that utopia is impossible. From time to time they could hold the balance of power, as did in the mid 1960s and again a decade later, causing real harm.

That Canada has a one-tier style health care system is in no small part because Lester Pearson needed Tommy Douglas' support to stay in power. In his early years as PM Trudeau was somewhat responsible in his fiscal policies, the spend-a-thon largely began when he was being propped up by the David Lewis led NDP. Once the habit of fiscal restraint had been broken it took another twenty years to regain.

Kept a safe distance from the levers of power the Dippers have been something between a nuisance and a menace. Often styled as the "conscience of the nation," the party has a fairly good track record of guilt tripping governments into funnelling more money into the welfare state. Never having had to run anything, and therefore take responsibility for the consequences, the federal NDP still retain a starry eyed quality.

The future, however, looks less encouraging than the past. The Dippers have successfully displaced the Liberal Party as the opposition. So long as the ever fickle voters of Quebec don't change their mind, they'll be sitting across the aisle from the PM for years to come. Beyond the Parliamentary bubble there is an increasingly harsh fiscal reality. Eating the rich stops being a workable policy when you run out of rich people.

Rich, of course, is a relative term. The rich rich are mobile and armed with the finest accountants and lawyers money can buy. The actual soaking tends to be of the relatively immobile middle class. Thanks to bleak demographics, we'll be running out of middle class soon enough. Spending your way to utopia isn't an option when there is no money left to borrow, beg or steal. The welfare state is hitting a brick wall in Europe and America. Our slightly younger demographics have bought us a few years.

What about the immigrants? Can't they redress the boomer imbalance? Well, it's got to be an awfully large number of immigrants. They also have to be immigrants willing to hand over a substantial chunk of their salaries to pay for the hip replacements of the Canadians already here. When Canada, America and Australia were pretty much the only game in town for the world's upwardly mobile, that might have worked. Not so much today. A well educated Indian or Chinese has plenty of opportunities right at home, or pretty close to home.

The federal Dippers are, theoretically, within an election's distance of forming a government. It's a very scary thought. For sensible members of the party it should be a terrifying prospect. Their more "compassionate" world view will quickly run afoul of the bond market vigilantes. A Dipper with a notion of fiscal prudence looks a lot like a Chretien-era Liberal. The Conservatives have become Liberals, perhaps the NDP will become Liberals too. As for the actual Liberals, they're been squished into irrelevance.

 

Never Enough

The Quebecois are different from you and me. They're French:

The NDP is demanding Stephen Harper respect his own 2006 motion that recognized Quebeckers as a nation within a united Canada by changing its new bill to give the province more than three seats in an expanded Commons.

“That motion meant something. It was meant to mean something to the people of Quebec,” Opposition democratic-reform critic David Christopherson told The Globe recently. “But it will only mean something if they see that the House is respecting the spirit of what that was.”

For years we have complained that the NDP were just shrills for the unions. Times have changed. Now they are also shills for the province of Quebec too. No mystery as to the change of direction. With 58 Quebec seats in the NDP's 103 member caucus the electoral math is easy enough to do. You pander to your base and for the moment the party's base is in la belle province.

The Tories are not above this sort of special pleading, happily shoveling biofuel subsidies to burnish their Green credentials, entice corporate backers and funnel money to rural voters. Such is the game of politics. With the Tories it's just old fashioned pork barrelling. The few using their political influence to fleece the many. In pandering to Quebec's demands for entrenched over-representation something even less palatable is at work.

At the moment Quebec is actually slightly under-represented in the House of Commons. The electoral short-changing of the West and Ontario is mostly due to the gross over-representation of the Maritimes. Looking into the future we see little population growth in Quebec and the Maritime, while areas to the west of the Ottawa River will see between steady and strong growth. Should future governments keep to the ideal of rep-by-pop, then further seat allocations will be to the relative disadvantage of Quebec.

Quebec's demographic and economic weight in Confederation is being eclipsed by the West. In the decades ahead the major decisions in Canada will likely be taken by Ontario and the lead Western province, either British Columbia or Alberta. The winning of a majority government by the Harper Tories represents a watershed in Canadian history. For the first time a peacetime majority government has been formed without more than a token representation from Quebec. 

Winning Quebec has been the basis of majority governments since 1867. Mulroney's insistence on a strong Quebec strategy was essential to the Tory victories in 1984 and 1988. No matter the party or period la belle province has always been the arbiter of power in Canada. Now this is no longer the case. Having spent the last two decades engaged in futile protest voting for the Bloc, the Quebecois have now discovered they are simply no longer necessary to running Canada. They stayed out so long that everyone kind of moved on.

A weak economy, cratering demographics and limited ability to assimilate immigrants have possibly doomed Quebec. The Quiet Revolution, the defining moment of modern provincial history, was less a moment of cultural liberation and more one of cultural suicide. Caught in what is likely irreversible decline the leadership of the province is pressuring the NDP, their new agents in Ottawa, to do whatever they can to entrench Quebec's roughly 25% of the seats in the Commons.

With every Census comes bleak news for the Quebecois. More than just petulance and greed is at play here, the fight to maintain Quebec's "fair share' in the House is an act of desperation. Should it succeed the result will be the formal constitutional establishment of Quebec as a "special" province within Canada. A distinct society with far greater powers than were ever offered through Meech. Certainly far more than the vague sentimentality of "nation within a united Canada."

Should Quebec and its nominally federalist allies in the NDP succeed the fault will rest squarely with Stephen Harper. He has his majority, with little thanks to Quebec, why should he keep pandering? There is no electoral benefit, the new seats in the West and Ontario are likely to swing blue in most cases. At worst the Tories would lose their 5 seats in Quebec. There is no political, constitutional or public policy reason to entrench Quebec, de facto or de jure, with 25% of the seats in the Commons.

It's time the PM learns a new word in French: non

Eat the Rich

Scratch a Dipper and you'll find:

Brian Topp is boldly going where most Canadian politicians fear to tread: promising to make the wealthy pay more in taxes.The perceived frontrunner in the NDP leadership race wants his party to make higher income taxes for high-income earners a key plank in its next election campaign platform.

He told The Canadian Press he intends to unveil a detailed proposal in the weeks to come."I will be talking about income taxes and I think it's time for our party to step up to that plate and to be pretty clear about that because then we'll have a mandate to act if we're elected," Topp said in a wide-ranging interview.

He also called for a hike in corporate taxes and did not rule out a sales tax increase "at some point," once the fragile economy is on surer footing.

If Jack Layton was the smiling face of Canadian socialism, Brian Topp is it's grim reaper. It's been decades since politicians openly declared they would raise taxes to fund government operations. That doesn't mean they haven't actually raised taxes, they just call them something else. Recall Dalton McGuinty's Health Care "premium," an Orwellian abuse of the language. No subterfuge for Mr Topp. He'll have his statism straight rather than on the rocks.

Over taxing the rich is part and parcel of the politics of envy. If the Conservatives can be critized for pandering to the law and order instincts of their base, so the same can be said of the NDP's soak the rich approach. As public policy it makes little sense. There are never enough "rich" to finance the welfare state, so the definition quickly starts to drift down the income ladder into the plusher regions of the middle class. The income tax, once upon a time, was paid only by the highest income earners. 

The angle here is that the NDP are positioning themselves as good fiscal stewards, in the line of Roy Romanow's government in Saskatchewan back in the early and mid-1990s. While the prairie Dippers were able to balance the budget, they didn't do much to stimulate the province's economy. Hiking taxes is almost never a good idea, at a time when the overall burden of government floats at about 40% of GDP, it is a sure fire prosperity killer.

Balancing the budget is a very good thing but it's not the most important thing. President Reagan, with no small thanks from the Democratic dominated Congress of the day, racket up deficits through out the 1980s. Why didn't America go bust some time about 1990? Because the American economy grew faster than the growth of the deficit. You might be maxing out your credit cards every month, but if every month you're getting a big raise it sort of works out.

I'm not arguing for a spendthrift approach to the nation's finances. Had the Newt Gingrich helmed Republicans not balanced the budget in the late 1990s America's fiscal house would be in even worse order today. Yet it was the post-Gingrich Republicans who began the great spending spree of the last ten years, which President Obama has happily built upon. What helped bring to heel government spending in the 1990s, on both sides of the 49th, was the bond market. 

In about a year or so, hopefully just in time for the 2012 President election, the bond market vigilantes are going to strike again. With climbing debt levels and no coherent plan to handle the fiscal crisis, they will begin to seriously question the solvency of the United States. Once the yields on US bonds and T-Bills start to climb the Bush-Obama spend-a-thon will come to an abrupt halt. Hiking taxes will not be an option. Either debts and deficits will be inflated away, something that is arguably already happening under two rounds of Quantitative Easing, or spending will be cut severely.

That's the world our American friends living in. Despite the smugness of some of our commentators our fiscal strength is only relative. In a neighbourhood of spendthrifts we are the least reckless. Over the long-term that only means we will hit the wall later. Brian Topp's solution to that crisis, should he ever get anywhere near the levers of power, is to cripple the economy's ability to grow by punishing its most productive workers, investors and entrepreneur.

How does such logic persist into the modern age? It is based on a mythology of how wealth is generated and distributed. To advocates of free markets wealth is generated by individuals and groups voluntarily trading things of value. The exceptionally successful generators of wealth are the rich. While someone might be a billionaire, that does not mean they spent their days swimming like Scrooge McDuck in a vast bin filled with gold coins.  

Only a small fraction of the wealth of a rich man is actually spent on themselves. The overwhelmingly majority of the wealth of the top 1% is invested in productive capital. To tax wealth is really to tax capital. Increasing the income tax provides a disincentive to generate wealth, while providing a very strong incentive to avoid or evade taxation.

If the goal is to generate prosperity then eating the rich is a poor strategy. If your goal, however, is power then taxation is certainly the way to go. He who has the gold makes the rules. Mr Topp wants more money, and consequently more power, within Ottawa's grasp. 

Cry the Beloved Dipper

Where do they find these people?

On Nov. 3, 2010, [NDP candidate Helmi] Charif posted a YouTube video of children starving to death in Uganda, accompanied with a comment.

"I feel sorry for these innocent kids who are victims of Capitalism and Imperialism," he wrote. "I am afraid this will happen to us as canadians if we keep the conservatives and liberals in power."

My first reaction was to laugh. The second was to see if he was available for parties. Sadly, no. He's a candidate in the riding of Windsor West. If he's really interested in seeing socialism in action perhaps he should take a trip over the river to Detroit, a city where private business activity is increasingly scarce.

When asked to explain why he believed that African style famine was about to hit Ontario, should either of the two main parties win on October 6th, Mr. Charif was left to sputter: 

"I'm a poverty activist . . . and I'm very passionate about these issues," Charif said Friday. "I work with families in our community who are impacted by hunger and poverty. When I watched this video, it's so disturbing, I cried. I became very emotional. I overstated myself."

Let's do a bit of role reversal. A Tory candidate puts up a graphic You Tube video of a partial birth abortion with the comment: "This will continue to happen if the Liberals stay in power." The wrath of the Red Star, the CBC, the G & M and the Tory high command would descend on that hapless anti-abortion candidate within minutes. For implying that Mr Hudak and Mr McGuinty will bring famine in their wake, NDP Andrea Horwath provided the mildest of rebukes for her wayward candidate:

"It's really quite clear that Mr. Charif has said that the idea of increasing poverty and things getting worse for children in Ontario is something down the horizon that he doesn't want to see."

Huh. One of your candidates calls your political rivals baby killers and you actually try to "clarify" their opinion. Mr Charif is not an isolated nut, he is but one nut in the mixed beer nut bowl that is the New Democratic Party. While many supporters of the NDP are well meaning but gullible fools, the party activists have long ago left anything resembling hum drum reality. They exist in a parallel universe where capitalism and imperialism run amok.

The video in question is from Uganda, a country with an at best nodding acquaintance with capitalism. The British buggered off in 1962. The country was run for most of the 1970s by the exceptionally psychopathic Idi Amin, who trashed his economy and drove away many of its most skilled workers. It has been governed since 1986 by Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, a run of the mill African despot who occassionally holds shame elections. Much of the economy is in his hands or that of his cronies.

Now to most dispassionate observers this is not capitalism. It is also hardly imperialism. The European powers left decades ago and the country is not stragetically important enough for the Americans or Chinese to much bother with. What about the legacy of nasty British imperialism? Well, Canada was ruled by Britain for far longer than Uganda. South Korea was brutallized by Japan for half-a-century and then bombed to bits in the early 1950s. Both countries are doing pretty well now.

It need not be added that you'll find more capitalism in South Korea, albeit of the mixed economy kind, than in Uganda. These are facts that are easily accessible to anyone wanting to look them up. They should be known by anyone with a passing knowledge of recent history and current events. Another bit of history Mr Charif should know, but seems to have forgotten, is that Conservative and Liberal parties have been running Ontario almost uninterupted since 1867. Living standards have risen somewhat since the time of John Sandfield Macdonald.

Facts might be stubborn things yet they can provide only a glancing blow to the conceits of the Left. Note Mr Charif's excuse for his comments: "I'm very passionate about these issues." In the comment made on the You Tube site he stated: "I feel sorry for these innocent kids." Mr Charif seems to "feel" quite a lot and think rather less. There is an enormous amount of scholarly material on developing world economics, most of it leans toward creating functioning market economies in what used to be called the Third World. Any bets on how much of that material Mr Charif is familiar with? 

I have met many people over the years like Mr Charif. They tend to congregate at university campuses rather than in workplaces. This is because in those place they are surrounded by a captive and ignorant audience. It is very easy to show disturbing pictures of children starving and make lots of middle class teenagers feel guilty. These middle class undegrads could take a course in international economics, or read the work of intellectuals like Hernando de Soto, but that would require thought and effort. It is much easier to feel than think. 

Should a cold heartless bastard, like Old Publius, point out that aid harms more than helps, and that markets and trade are the only practical means of raising living standards, he will be denounced and ignored. Because he has tried to get people think rather than feel about an issue. It is unsettling to have your sense of moral righteousness attacked. It also feels very catharic to rant against the evils of the world without having to think too deeply about them. Mr Charif has not a clue what the words capitalism or imperialism mean, yet they are words whose utterance make him feel uplifted and noble.

There is nothing more dangerous to the well being of the poor than the sentimentality of the middle class.

 

Bob and the Talkers

Please make it stop. 

The immediate solution to the leadership vacuum on the Canadian left is blindingly obvious: Bob Rae either rejoins his former party, or leads an NDP-Liberal coalition to victory over Stephen Harper.

It makes perfect sense. The Liberals are a tired, waning party led by one of the most articulate, engaging and experienced politicians in Ottawa. The New Democrats are bursting with new recruits and renewed vigour, but in desperate need of a seasoned, bilingual, likable leader.

It is well known that Bob "Super Elite" Rae has many friends in the MSM. Unique among former Ontario Premiers he even has groupies of a sort. In the aftermath of Jack Layton's death both MSMers and the groupies are working very hard to remove the "interim" from the Bob's current job title. Partly this is driven by desperation. There are very few plausible figures on the Left who can challenged the Harper Colossus. 

The Trudeaumaniacs, who are endemic to downtown Toronto, still whisper about young Justin making a bid, despite him approaching the ugly shores of middle age with a mediocre resume and a historonic speaking style. The son of Pierre seems to know that being an MP in a safe riding is pretty steady work. Why risk it with a leadership bid that will just demonstrate he's a lightweight?

Rae is an attractive figure on the Left because he embodies all that they hold dear. He went to the best schools (U of T, Oxford), advocates for the best causes (water downed socialism) and speaks eloquently in both official languages (bafflegaffe mostly but it sounds nice). The Bob is a smart and savvy talker for people who think of themselves as smart and savvy talkers. He's one of us and who doesn't want to be ruled by one of us?

The choir invisible of the MSM should not get their hopes up too much. Here is the Canadian Napoleon plotting the overthrow of the Harper Regime:

His strategy, he told the Liberal gathering, is to challenge Conservatives on their chosen turf, the economy, calling for a focus on growth instead of Harper's "forced march to austerity." Rae would counter Conservative calls for "cuts, cuts, cuts" - particularly dangerous at a time when global economies are contracting - with "jobs, jobs, jobs", he said.

Ah. Well then. I guess poor Angelo has got his work cut out for him spinning that away. Saying "jobs" repeatedly is about as original a political strategy as kissing babies and shaking hands. Boilerplate stuff like beginning a stump speech with "it's great to be here in Hicktown with all your fine folk." It's also not true. The Harper version of austerity has seen government spending increase at its fastest pace in a generation. With parsimony like that what's the Bob's idea of spendthrift?

Yet it sounds nice. People like jobs, or more precisely they fear not having one. Bob Rae sounds intelligent, well informed and amiable when speaking. After more than three decades in politics the Bob has nailed the tonal aspects of the game perfectly. He could be reading names out of a phone book and the Press Gallery hacks would still be swooning.

Tone matters in politics. Stephen Harper has been able to carry the CPC's base this far down the road to serfdom because he sounds and looks conservative. You can always trust a man in a fluffy blue sweater. Meanwhile on the opposite side of the aisle there is the Bob in his argyle sweater. Yet both men, satorial differences aside, are saying much the same thing. Here is the Prime Minister talking about "jobs":

In his Parliament Hill speech, Mr. Harper acknowledged his government must be “flexible” – meaning further Canadian stimulus measures may also be required if the economy worsens. That’s a clear change in tone from earlier this year, when erasing the deficit was the dominant Conservative priority after two years of stimulus spending.

That's your choice Canada: Bob "Spend Till You Drop" Rae versus Stephen "flexible with your money" Harper. Despite both men being intelligent, well educated and experienced in political affairs, neither of them offers concrete proof that stimulus spending actually works. In fact Stephen Harper, MA candidate, criticized the idea of Keynesian pump priming. Harper 2.0 seems to have different views of Lord Keynes.

There has been nothing in the economic history of the last century that would suggest "stimulus" spending can revive a moribund economy. Rather the opposite. When governments' rack up deficits businessness and consumers prepare for the inevitable tax hikes, or spending cuts, that will come once the bond market forces the Minister of Finance's hand. This leads them to reduce investment and employment, counteracting whatever benefits might be gained from government spending.

Let's be kind to Bob and Stephen and assume that Canadian consumers, employers and investors will swallow the bait. They respond to government spending with their own spending. What happens to all that stimulus spending? There is no such thing as a "shovel ready" project. Moderning zonning, planning and environmental assessment procedures mean that even building, or upgrading, a road can take months or years. By the time you actually get down to the actual stimulating the crisis is over, or you've run out of money.

The "bridges to nowhere" theory of economic development might sucker in the ordinary voter, victimized by decades of government run schooling, but do the men at the top really believe this nonsense? It probably doesn't matter. In politics nonsense sells. People want to hear that their problems will be solved, their freebies kept free and the world made safe for their way of life. Truth is the first casualty of political rhetoric.

Bob Rae is a great talker. Stephen Harper somewhat less so. Yet that is what both have done for almost all of their adult lives, just talk. Neither has ever run a business, think tanks (National Citizens Coalition) and law firms don't count since both are talk shops. Politicians talk but rarely have to do. The sort of people who do in Canada are busy paying everyone else's way. They don't want to waste their time talking to journalists, a class of people who write about other people's talking, or lobbyists whose work is even more ephemeral. The ruling classes are a gigantic echo chamber run at public expense.

 

 

Libby Davies' Plan to Bankrupt Canada

As the Layton Lamentations fade we are reminded of the inherent nuttiness of the NDP:

Possible federal NDP leadership hopeful Libby Davies has revived a highly controversial effort to eliminate the 10-year residency requirement to qualify for old age pension benefits.

The Vancouver MP has introduced a motion calling on the government to open the federal pension to recent immigrants who've made few, if any, contributions into Canada's state pension system.

Like the fella said, you can't make this stuff up. This new "gift" from the taxpayers of Canada, really to all and sundry who manage get past customs at Pearson, might also grant recent immigrants access to the Guaranteed Income Supplement. Perhaps also a free weekend at the Royal York for the 20th lucky caller.

The current requirements for Old Age Pension are:

Scenario 1 - People living in Canada

You must be 65 years of age or older.

You must live in Canada and be a Canadian citizen or a legal resident at the time we approve your pension application.

You must have lived in Canada for at least 10 years after turning 18.

Scenario 2 - People living outside Canada

You must be 65 years of age or older.

You must have been a Canadian citizen or a legal resident of Canada the day before you left Canada.

You must have lived in Canada for at least 20 years after turning 18.

Not the hardest of thresholds to meet. The rules also have a basic common sense about them. If you've spent a decade in Canada you've likely contributed to the tax base, though unlike CPP the Old Age Pension is based on residency not contribution. Getting Old Age pension, while eliminating the ten year residency requirement, is an open invitation to abuse. The above article goes onto note that Libby Davies also advocates a right to welfare. 

The Dippers quickly distanced themselves from this proposal by their own deputy leader. My guess is that this was a trial balloon that got shot down pretty quickly. The question that runs through my mind about proposals like this, aside from wondering who votes for these people, is how on earth are we going to pay for such largess? Whenever I've been able to corner a Leftist on this point they respond, through ways long and tortuous, that we can always eat the rich. There's a big pot of money that brave social activists just need to walk over and take what they want. 

There is no point arguing that this is economic nonsense. There are only so many rich to eat, most of whom have accountants and quick ways of leaving the country. Screw the rich really means looting the relatively immobile middle class. The stark logic of what they are suggesting never sinks in. It's never allowed to. Socialism isn't about helping people, otherwise its advocates would have long ago abandoned their support for Medicare, but about seeking justice.

To a great swath of Canadians it seems rather unjust that people who just showed up, likely sponsored by younger and fitter relatives, should have access to something the rest of us have to work our whole lives to get. There, gentle readers, is where we depart from our friends on the Left. Justice to most people is getting what you deserve. To the Left justice is getting what other people have earned. 

This goes back to their understanding of the nature of wealth. To the Left money is something that happens, like rain and sunshine, a climactic force that can be harnessed for nobler ends. That wealth must be generated by people who work and take risks is not really understood. So far as work has anything to do with wealth generation, it is work of the most menial kind. The Left still adheres, consciously or not, to a very crude version of the labour theory of value, something most economists ditched with the coming of the marginalist revolution.

So the money of the rich, always a relative term, doesn't really belong to them. It was either stolen from the poor or is a bounty of nature. Justice means giving money back to those who really earned it, thus boosting the minimum wage and funding various welfare programs, or distributing the bounty of nature to everyone. When the Left speaks of justice this is what they actually mean.

Should anyone be brave enough to question the Left's conception of justice, their medieval economics or brutal indifference to the financiers of their utopia, they are meet with implacable outrage. The slipshod logic of the Leftist project is covered up with sentimental gauze. Point out Medicare's failures and the response is more often than not shrill attacks on your lack of compassion for the sick. Either you believe in their plans or you hate mankind. Not much middle ground.

The transformation of Jack Layton from charismatic pol to national saint, a process that took just a few days, confirms what many of us have suspected: For the Left politics is a substitute for religion. Many of this country early progressives, like JS Wordsworth, were Christian ministers. After the second world war religion seemed horribly dated. Rather than preaching a "social gospel" the Left would drop the gospel bit and just focus on building a secular Kingdom of Heaven.

While the formal religious trappings were removed, the need for elements of religious worship carried forward. This drive leads to the old fashioned denouncing of heretics. Instead of dissenting from a worship of God, the modern heretics of the Right dissent from the central creed of social justice. To this new creed's High Priests facts are less important than belief in the progressive desire for justice. Socialism doesn't work? That because you don't really believe. For such people national bankruptcy is a small enough thing.

 

A Bad Idea Reborn

Orange and Red?

Hard-liners in both parties will no doubt campaign for leadership conventions to be held before too many months, and it will be interesting, indeed, to see whether any in either party will speak up in favour of even preliminary discussion of the possibility of a merger that would be followed by a single leadership convention.

Of course, that raises the hypothetical question of who would be best suited to lead the new party.
As we see it, the person best qualified to take on the job is clearly Bob Rae.

Although currently the interim Liberal leader, Mr. Rae has unique credentials, not only as someone who has worked in both parties but also as the only opposition MP who has experience in running a government.

Yes, running it into the ground. Suggesting Bob Rae as a plausible candidate for 24 Sussex is like saying that the former executive team at Nortel should replace Steve Jobs. The editorial goes on to largely relieve the Bob of any blame for his disastrous reign, the fault lying with the recession of the early 1990s. Hmm. So why did Ontario underperform most of the jurisdictions in North America during Rae Days? Then from 1995 to 2003 we magically outperformed most of the continent. These are strange coincidences. 

Opposition does funny things to the mind. Those Right wingers with long enough memories will recall the dozen years of political wilderness between Kim's collapse and Harper's toe hold. After the 2000 election, in which Papa Jean did not so much defeat as tap dance around Stockwell Day, the Canadian Right slide into near madness. Flush with more recent successes most of these sordid details have since faded from political memory. 

Reform's lack luster finish in 1997 had already provoke conservative introspection. How could people keep voting for an ex-Trudeau cabinet minister with the scruples and manners of a ward heeler? Papa Jean looked and sounded like a stock junior minister from one of Maurice Duplessis later cabinets. Looking at the vote tallies the answer seemed simple: The Right was divided.

In many Ontario ridings the Grits were simply walking up the middle, capturing seats where the combined numbers for PCs and Reform were either a plurality or majority. Unite the Right, so the thinking went, and Papa Jean would have been kept to a minority. A few percentage points swing toward the boys in blue and the Governor General would be calling.

The first attempt at union was the Canadian Alliance, which was really just a repackaging of the Reform Party with more operational strength from Ontario. The goal was not so much to unite the Right as shove the Red Tories over at PC HQ into the shrubbery and move on. No such luck. Voting is often a tribal thing and large swaths of Ontario and the Maritimes would vote for a sack of potatoes painted blue.

Stock's thumping in 2000, plus some maladroit caucus management, provoked a back-bench rebellion the following year, culminating in the short-lived Chuck Strahl led Democratic Representative Caucus. Once Harper had replaced Stock as Canadian Alliance leader the DRC gang mostly returned to the fold. In 2003 Harper at last engineering a successful merger, a complex process that included running - literally - after Peter Mackay. Blessed by Tory grandees such as Bill Davis, Brian Mulroney and Don Mazankowski, the deal stuck and the rest is history.

I rehearse all this because of the light it sheds on the current Orange-Red merger chattering. Desperate politicians do desperate things, like create the DRC which was technically a splinter group from another splinter group. This sort of petty factionalism is best suited to the granola munchers on the far-Left, not the Tim Hortons and C-suite set of the Canadian Right. Still it happened.

Uniting the Right was bringing together two political parties that had once been one. There was an organizational, logistical and electoral logic in uniting the Right. There is very little logic in uniting the Left. While at the margins, the Dipper Right and Liberal Left, support has sometimes been porous, with members of one party jumping to the another out of electoral expediency, they are still two separate parties.

The old Liberal Party was an alliance of Quebec federalists (and some of the mushier nationalists), Ontario Blue Grits (business minded Liberals), Ontario ethnics and Maritime welfare addicts. The old NDP was a labour-farmer grouping that evolved to include urban professionals and ethnic groups not satisfied with the Liberals. These are culturally different amalgamations.

The Blue Grits, who have historically comprised the party's operational core outside of Toronto and Montreal, detest the NDP's water downed socialism. A union with the Dippers would push the Blue Grits over into the Conservative camp. With the Liberal advantage among ethnic voters now largely dissipated, that would  leave the party of Trudeau and Chretien with not much of anything. Putting the Bob at the head of such a motley coalition would guarantee decades of Tory rule.  Whatever that might do for the conservative cause in Canada.

Orange Fight

Gotta love politics. The corpse wasn't even cold and the plotting was already underway:

One of Jack Layton’s closest advisers is emerging as a surprise front-runner to pick up the torch from the fallen NDP leader.

Party president Brian Topp is receiving a lot of encouragement to join the impending race to succeed Layton, who died on Monday, insiders say.

Topp is one of the key architects of Layton’s success and was among the last of Layton’s tight-knit inner circle to speak with him before his death.

Other mooted contenders are Quebec Lieutenant Thomas Mulcair, former Manitoba Premier Gary Doer and Toronto MP Peggy Nash. There has also been talk, if only out of courtesy, for the intensely shrill Libby Davies, one of the party's deputy leaders. The qualifications for being NDP leader are daunting, as befits a party driven by identity politics.

Let's forgot about anyone trying to fill the charisma void left by Jack Layton. Unless the Dippers have a another flashy big city councillor up their sleeve, there isn't anyone on the horizon who could plausibly replace Latyon. Instead we are looking for passable successors. Unfortunately the party has so many litmus tests that a potential leader must pass before being viable, that the list of candidates is winnowed down to a plausible few.

The New Dipper Chief must be fluently bilingual. With MPs from la belle province forming the majority of the caucus, someone who cannot keep up in French simply isn't a viable leader. Support from the unions, who comprise about 20% of the NDP membership, is also vital. Since the party long ago outgrew its farmer-labour roots, an actual card carrying unionist isn't likely. To the granola munchers in Toronto and Vancouver, who comprise a great deal of the party's operational staff, a blue collar stiff isn't acceptable. 

While the majority of the NDP's seats are in Quebec, the majority of its card carrying members are in the ROC. This means that Ontario, with only 22 Dipper MPs, will wield more influence than Quebec, with 59 MPs, in picking a new leader. So the areas of the country where the party is weakest will determine who becomes leader. To some, including yours truly, this simply highlights the nonsense of a leader being picked by the extraparliamentary party rather than the caucus, but that rant is for another time.

Between the French nationalists who parked their vote with Jack on May 2nd, the grizzled unionists wondering what comes next and the birkenstockers along Bloor, the leadership balancing act will be exceptionally tricky. Matching needs with skills, the most likely successor to Jack should be the experienced, presentable and naturally bilingual Thomas Mulcair. There is only one slight problem: No one much seems to like him.

Why does that matter in politics? A profession that has conceptions of loyalty not too removed from those of the Borgias. Finishing off a political rival is just business. Hating someone's guts because they've slighted you before, a major problem in the fragile ego world of Ottawa, is something very personal. Mulcair does not play well with others and has a tendency to speak his mind too plainly, the ultimate sin of the politician. 

There is a great streak within the Dipper soul that is angry. They are angry at the perceived injustices of the world and their traditional political impotence. That anger is direct at many things: Capitalism, traditional culture but for the moment it is directed above all at Stephen Harper. Mention the Prime Minister's name in certain quarters of downtown Toronto and the vitriol will flow as easily as the chianti.

Jack Layton was the sunny mask of socialism. The friendly fellow who was fighting for the little guy. The danger for the NDP is not that they have lost a highly effectively leader, it is that the mask will slip in the time before the next election.  An angry NDP is a doomed NDP.