Monday Afternoon Links

An extra helping of content to start your week...

- Tom Ford nicely contrasts a couple of Tommy Douglas' more notable (and valuable) governing philosophies against those we've come to expect from right-wing parties:

Managers are supposed to get work done through others. But Harper gets work done through his own efforts or those of confidants a few offices away. Initiatives come from the Prime Minister's Office. Communications are closely controlled. There's an emphasis on scoring political points.
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In short, Harper, "a control freak," is a lousy manager.

Douglas, on the other hand, ran a more open administration. In their book Tommy's Team: The People Behind the Douglas Years, Stuart Houston, a Douglas expert, and Bill Waiser, a historian, say Douglas had an "uncanny knack" for choosing the right person for the task at hand.

And he ranged the world to find the right people including a member of one of the UK's wealthiest families and a world expert on rural health. The diminutive premier had socialist leanings, but he was "both realistic and practical."

He made clear to his experts what he wanted and when -- particularly in the case of health care -- but he rarely told them how to do their jobs. Douglas delegated responsibility, but he did not abdicate.

As a general manager in the federal public service for 20 years, the Douglas accomplishment I most admire is this: When they stormed into office in 1944, most of his followers had never been in government before, but because of Douglas's management skill they were able to clean up the leftovers of the Great Depression and the Second World War; to start a complex health care program, North America's first, and to deliver 16 consecutive balanced budgets -- all without the help of massive oil, gas and potash revenues.

- I'll join the many bloggers pointing to iPolitics as an intriguing new source of political information. (Though I'd be more impressed if it wasn't imposing registration requirements simply to read its basic content.)

- What thwap said. X2. And see more from Murray Dobbin.

- All of which leads nicely to Alice's post on what can be done to try to cultivate more fertile territory for progressive politics:

Progressive groups must learn from the strategies adopted by the conservative movement in Canada, and spend less time being “think tanks” and more “do tanks” if they want to fight the erosion of democracy in Canada, delegates to the Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives’ 30th Anniversary conference were told Thursday.

“Yes, research is important, but it can’t be such a large focus,” University of Ottawa professor Paul Saurette urged the audience, arguing that their opponents in the conservative movement, such as the Fraser Institute and more recently the Manning Centre, “understand that they’re in the persuasion business, not the research business,” and that progressive groups will need to develop new ways to advocate.

Prof. Saurette, whose academic work has studied the development of conservative think tanks and organizations in both Canada and the United States, said that unlike the think tanks of 30 years ago, which used to follow a “tree-tops strategy” of influencing policy, there has been a massive growth in the conservative “ideological persuasion industry,” which funds a variety of narrative tools targeted at the grassroots.

The past 30 years has also seen enormous change in the media landscape, Prof. Saurette argued, citing Tony Blair’s observation that after the war in Iraq, he had to spend the next biggest amount of time responding to the media. Not only has the media adopted a “highly pro-market fundamentalist orientation,” he said, but they “have very limited content capacity now, and journalists are scared of being labelled as biased, which is the result of a campaign by right-wing bloggers, making them even more susceptible.”
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“The problem is that political parties can’t create these narratives alone, or create the intellectual property behind them. Preston Manning’s idea of ‘surfing the wave’ has been important to building the Conservative Party, but happened outside of it,” said Prof. Saurette.

“The progressive movement has to help recreate a narrative that allows politicians to tap into that.”

- Finally, it may not be news that the Cons' choice to gut the long-form census will have real consequences in ensuring that decision-making is less well-informed. But a reminder can never hurt.