Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Cats with stuffed friends.

So much to look forward to

In case anybody thought any substantial lessons had been learned from the big-money, zero-rights G20 debacle in Toronto, the McGuinty government's response to a scathing ombudsman's report about says it all:

In his report, Mr. Marin finds the province shouldn't have passed the regulation in the first place - that it was, in his opinion, illegal and unconstitutional to do so. But he adds that even had it been valid, “the government should have handled its passage better. ... It gave police powers that are unfamiliar in a free and democratic society. Steps should have been taken to ensure that the Toronto Police Service understood what they were getting.

“More importantly, the passage of the regulation should have been aggressively publicized.”

Premier Dalton McGuinty declined to comment on the report Tuesday, saying he hasn't yet read it. In a letter, Community Safety Minister Jim Bradley said he appreciates the concerns Mr. Marin identified.

“The ministry could have, and should have, handled the enactment of Regulation 233/10 better,” he wrote. “In future, we will take greater care to ensure that the Ontario public is given more adequate notice of regulation changes of this nature.”

So the McGuinty government has interpreted the issue to be solely one of publicity - not one of whether massive civil rights violations were justified in the first place. Which presumably means that we can look forward to a nice, glossy Rabble Suppression Action Plan (TM) next time Canada is supposedly showcased to the world.

[Edit: corrected Marin's title.]

Lose-lose

Having dealt somewhat with the theory behind leader/caucus relations yesterday, I won't spend too much more time discussing Carole James' resignation as an unfortunate example from both the leadership and MLA standpoints.

But it's certainly unfortunate that a B.C. NDP which looked set to win a commanding victory in the next provincial election as recently as a couple of months ago is now being judged as vulnerable to a snap election call. And while recent events should offer compelling evidence that a party's fortunes can always turn around in a hurry (especially when it's fighting internally as well as against its outside foes), it's hard to see what anybody within the NDP stands to gain from James' removal - including the MLAs who will now face a far more difficult re-election battle for having challenged her leadership.

We're #24 (and sinking!)

But I suppose we shouldn't worry about trifling matters like infant mortality rates until we know whether they materially affect our GDP.

Your money, their offices

It's well worth noting that several federal ministerial offices are spending far beyond their budgeted allotment of money. But the bigger story looks to be exactly how they're getting away with it:

Flaherty breached Treasury Board guidelines by overspending by more than $430,000 last year, according to government documents.

Flaherty spent $2,868,222 on his ministerial office in 2009-10, while Treasury Board rules cap spending for ministers with extra regional responsibility and a parliamentary secretary at $2,437,370.
...
Flaherty's spokeswoman, Annette Robertson, said the minister did not overspend.

Flaherty was granted additional funds to design and co-ordinate the federal government's Economic Action Plan, Robertson said, refusing to say how much he received.

"We neither breached nor overspent our budget, in light of the additional resources granted by (the Treasury Board). We did not exceed the additional amount," she said.
...
Ministers of State Lynn Yelich, Steven Fletcher and Gary Goodyear also spent between $21,993 and $25,311 over their budget limits.

Staff for Yelich and Goodyear, however, said their ministers were in compliance with Treasury Board allotments.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney appeared to have also overspent, but spokesman Alykhan Velshi said his office received $401,680 in additional funds to support the minister’s multiculturalism portfolio.

"We came more than $300,000 under budget," he said, of the $2,592,046 Kenny spent last year.
...
Jay Denney, spokesman for Treasury Board President Stockwell Day, said occasionally, the Treasury Board cabinet committee grants ministers extra funds, but he would not confirm which ministers had received additional payments.

Yes, that would be the same Treasury Board which has been engaged in regular attacks on the civil service in a supposed effort to rein in spending.

But when it comes to Con ministerial offices seeking free money, any interest in restraint apparently disappears. And when that willingness to provide handouts is combined with the Treasury Board's refusal to name the recipients of its largesse, it becomes glaringly clear that Day and the Cons see themselves as entitled to hand out publicly-funded goodies in secret - which looks like a far more serious danger than the type of mere mismanagement we've come to expect from Harper's government.

On priority lists

For the most part, the latest Nanos polling looks to fall more under the category of "drift within the usual party positioning" rather than "radical change in course". But perhaps the most interesting part of the poll is the fact that even in a relatively good sample for the Cons in terms of vote share, Harper and company look to face some serious problems with the issues considered important by voters:

The Nanos poll looked, too, at the top issues concerning Canadians. It found that voters continue to be worried about jobs, the economy and health care.

“What is interesting is the potential forward impact these issues will have on the public mind,” Mr. Nanos said. “As the Conservatives wind down their stimulus program, it will be more difficult for them to portray themselves as being pro-active on the economic front.”

The Prime Minister announced last week he would extend stimulus the deadline for infrastructure projects to be completed by another seven months. Until that point, the program had been intended to wind up in March.

The Nanos survey found that 22.3 per cent of respondents were concerned about jobs and the economy compared to 20.7 per cent who were worried about health care. The environment was the third issue of most concern although only 8 per cent of respondents mentioned it; high taxes came in fourth with 4.4 per cent of respondents saying they were worried about it.

Of course, the economy has been seen as a Con-friendly issue to date. But as Nanos notes, there's reason to think that message is evaporating as any pretense of an "action plan" winds down, to be replaced by declarations that the Cons are focused on the economy in place of any discernible action.

And yet, that's the least of the Cons' worries in the issues still at the top of mind for Canadians.

After all, the available evidence suggests that five years of "tough on crime" messaging has done absolutely nothing to convince Canadians that there's any serious issue to be dealt with. Instead, the #2 and #3 policy priorities are areas where only regular acting lessons and/or aversion therapy can allow the Cons to pretend to be remotely engaged without bursting into laughter. And while the Cons are presumably glad to see high taxes make the list, they can't draw much reassurance from the fact that they're seen as a top priority for under 5% of respondents.

So while the Cons may be riding high for now, that looks to be based more on their success in decoupling policy priorities from voting intentions than any reason to believe that they've managed to bring Canadians around to their way of thinking. And that gap offers an obvious opportunity for the opposition parties to start shifting votes by claiming the top issues for themselves.

Monday Afternoon Links

Content goes here.

- Brian Topp muses about what lessons we can draw from the B.C. NDP's internal debates. But I have to wonder whether Topp's proposed solution of giving elected MLAs more ability to choose and dump leaders goes in exactly the wrong direction: can't we find more scope for representatives to act on behalf of their constituents (i.e. loosening the perceived top-down authority of the leader who's actually in place) without giving a small group of people the power to override the will of the broader party as to their choice of leader?

- Chantal Hebert is right to criticize the bite-size news model. And Chris Selley is equally right to encourage Hebert to take the lead in delivering more substantive commentary.

- In case the Cons' choice to gut Canada's census hadn't done enough damage already, it'll also bite into university budgets by forcing researchers to pay for information that was otherwise available as part of Statistics Canada's public service role:

Researchers say they will no longer be able to reliably use data from the long-form census once it becomes voluntary in 2011. As a result, they will need more money from the federal government to buy substitute data from private organizations.
...
Much of professors' funding comes from organizations like the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Institute of Health Research — agencies funded by the federal government.

“A lot of our researchers are now going to have to use their federal grant money to purchase private data, so in a sense it is not really saving the federal government a lot of money that way, it's adding more costs to universities and colleges,” said David Robinson, the associate executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers.

Of course, for the Cons that end result is probably seen as a feature rather than a bug.

- Finally, a report on the federal Learning Bond program manages to figure out the blindingly obvious (at least assuming the goal is to offer opportunities to "children from low-income families" rather than merely "children from low-income families whose parents happen to speak the right language and be among the lucky few to hear about the program"):

Through the learning bond, Ottawa contributes a maximum of $2,000 to a low-income child’s tax-sheltered Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP).

As long as a family has an after-tax household income under $40,970 a year, it can open an RESP account for a child born in 2004 or after, apply and get the money, with no strings attached. Unclaimed money goes back to Ottawa’s coffers.

Yet as of 2009, more than 880,000 children, including 60,000 in Toronto, had not claimed the bond they were entitled to.

“The federal program is benefiting the high-income families, when the low-income families can benefit from it most,” said May Wong, Omega’s executive director and a report co-author. “The money can make a big difference in their children’s academic aspirations.”

According to a 2008 EKOS survey, 83 per cent of low-income families had heard of the RESP program, but only half knew what it was. Worse, only one in 10 said they had heard of the free learning bond.

The report attributes this gap, especially among immigrants, to the lack of multilingual information, and to the ignorance of community workers about the RESP. It says parents are often misinformed or misled.
...
The report recommends developing a simpler application process for RESPs and an automatic enrolment process for the Canada Learning Bond, as is done with a similar program in the United Kingdom.

Monday Morning 'Rider Blogging

In the 2009-2010 offseason for the Saskatchewan Roughriders, GM Brendan Taman's staffing strategy seemed to be based largely on flipping through old league guides looking for former head coaches who were out of work. "Doug Berry? He can run an offence, right?" "I've always thought Jim Daley was special." "We need a substitute Gainer. What's Don Matthews up to these days?"

That can have its downside when it means that opponents have seen a team's schemes before. But it also sets a franchise up nicely when it's time to pick a successor to its head coach - and with former CFL head coaches leading all three phases of the game for the 'Riders, there would seem to be ample opportunity to replace Ken Miller internally.

But for some reason, the strongest candidate of the bunch based on last season's results is apparently well back of two other choices, and is still being mentioned only as an afterthought.

So let's ask the question: why wouldn't Gary Etcheverry be at the top of the 'Riders' list of potential head coaches?

After all, Berry's offence stumbled regularly following a hot start last season. And by all accounts it's still considered a work in progress - which would seem to offer reason to leave Berry in the coordinator position if the 'Riders think that Darian Durant and his receiving corps can be substantially tuned up for seasons to come.

In contrast, Etcheverry's defence struggled out of the gate due to the 'Riders' two most devastating player losses. But by the end of the season, he'd completely rebuilt his pressure schemes around a new set of players - to the point where the defence managed to hold the CFL's top two offences to 21 points or less in the two most important games of the year.

So if the main selling point for a head coach is his recent track record in maximizing the results from the talent at his disposal, Etcheverry would easily seem to be the better internal candidate. And it's hard to see what two mediocre seasons in Edmonton would have done to make Richie Hall a better choice now than he was when he was passed over in favour of Miller.

Of course, there may be good reasons to think that while Etcheverry's scheming is ideal in designing a defence, the broader responsibilities of a head coach might not be the right fit for him. But after his success last season, I'd at least think he'd be at the front of the queue unless there was some overriding reason not to consider him head coaching material. Which makes it surprising that at least based on the press' coverage of the decision, he hardly seems to be in the conversation at all.

Deep thought

I'm pretty sure that the next time the Cons lose power after an election, that too will be spun as part of Six-Dimensional Chess Master Stephen Harper's Grand Master Plan (TM).

On conflicting signals

Today's report on hospitality expenses approved personally by Stephen Harper doesn't say much in terms of the amounts actually authorized. But the more important story looks to me to lie in the Cons' seemingly pathological inability to accept that the same standards should be applied to them in government as to the Libs who they continue to criticize - to the point where they're firmly defending larger expense amounts than they're actively pointing to as evidence of abuse when spent by the Libs:

Asked at a news conference to provide an example of improper hospitality spending, Day cited the example of federal government reception that cost $31,500 for several hundred people. "We're saying ... that's not a good signal to be sending."

An aide later explained that Day was referring to a May 9, 2005, reception hosted by Statistics Canada — during the term of the previous Liberal government — that cost taxpayers $31,674 for about 400 people.

The Statistics Canada event, in fact, was similar in scale to the $47,158 budgeted by the Privy Council Office for the Sept. 13 town hall, intended for some 600 public servants.

A spokesman for the Privy Council Office said the town hall came in under budget, at $42,077, partly because hospitality costs amounted to only $6,520 for "coffee, tea, bottled juice and pastries."

Raymond Rivet was not immediately able to say how many public servants attended the event. But if all 600 showed up for the three-and-a-half hour session, total costs were about $70 for each participant — not far off from the $79 for each person who attended the 2005 Statistics Canada event that Stockwell Day said was "not a good signal to be sending."

Rivet said the Privy Council Office town hall "provides a venue for interactive discussion on the priorities and challenges for the upcoming year."

Now, any reasonable evaluation should suggest that the respective events of the Libs and Cons would be seen as fairly similar in scope, cost and justifiable outrage. But there's absolutely no rational basis for trying to label one as "improper" and the other as utterly above reproach - and the fact that the Cons are once again willing to go to such ridiculous lengths in trying to play opposition while holding the reins of power should provide yet more evidence that they're not up for the task of governing responsibly.

Sunday Afternoon Links

An assortment of content to close out your weekend...

- In case the example of climate change left any doubt that the Cons will never admit that they're choosing not to act on an issue even when it's glaringly obvious, their latest stalling tactics on gun labelling should serve as conclusive proof.

- Angelo Persichilli is thoroughly frustrated with the federal money and effort that's gone into not procuring helicopters over the last 25 years. But the most important cautionary tale looks to involve the cost of a rash decision as to requirements combined with the usual realities of cost escalation and delivery delays:

The procurement process for 28 Cyclone CH-148 helicopters started in 2004 and the helicopters were supposed to be delivered in 2005 for the initial price of $1.8 billion. Delivery was delayed to 2008 and now, again, to 2012. The price has gone from $1.8 billion to $5.7 billion!

The defence department also started the process to buy 15 Chinooks for $1.2 billion plus another $2.2 for maintenance, for a total of $3.4 billion. We are now already up to $4.9 billion and “the first fully capable helicopter is scheduled for delivery in 2013, five years later than planned,” writes Fraser.
...
Writes Fraser: “After lengthy delays and significant cost increases, National Defence still has not completely estimated what it will cost to operate these helicopters” and “National Defence underestimated and understated the complexity and developmental nature of the helicopters that it intended to buy.”

In each case, writes Fraser, “significant modifications were made to the basic models. For the maritime helicopter, this will result in an aircraft that never existed before.” Basically, they bought something that didn’t exist!

Is it possible that after 25 years, the defence department still doesn’t know what kind of helicopter it needs?

- Now, you can generate your own U.S. political action committee - or at least name it. And all without the millions of dollars that go into propping up the real thing!

- I won't say that Bernie Sanders' message on the priorities of the U.S. Senate is exactly on point, since it seems to get bogged down in numbers somewhat before getting to the more important realities as to whose interests are being served. But it's still well worth a view:



- And closer to home, LRT's first-ever podcast interview featuring Palliser NDP candidate Noah Evanchuk is well worth a watch as well.

On joyless positions

Most of the time, Colby Cosh stands out as one of the prominent Canadian commentators most willing to be skeptical of questionable conventional wisdom. But his post on new efforts to measure happiness reveals one obvious bit of unquestioning belief in a highly dubious assumption. And it's worth pointing out how that unduly narrow focus figures to lead to the wrong policy prescriptions.

Here's Cosh:

There is a great deal of excitement nowadays, among the gormless, about “happiness” research of this nature. I’ve mentioned before that I think “food miles”/”locavorism” represents one trendy, naïve attempt to create a modern-day alterna-Marxism and establish a quasi-religious standard of value not founded in economic exchange. “Gross national happiness”, which is popular with greens and Europeans looking for alternatives to odious “Anglo-Saxon” neoliberalism, is surely an analogous phenomenon. The correct public policies, you see, are really the ones that create the most net happiness, as opposed to necessarily being those that create GDP growth; so isn’t it the most natural thing in the world to just ask people how happy they are and use regression techniques to sniff out the underlying factors?
...
Money won’t make you happy, they say—but they’re not really referring to the whole package of benefits of having money; they’re talking about an artificially isolated, Unca-Scrooge’s-vault kind of enjoyment of money for its own sake. And guess what: money actually still turns out to be pretty damn good at making people happier, even when you do your best to reduce it to nothing but the sight of chains of zeroes in a bankbook or the ability to purchase a nice stereo.

If you don’t think money really makes people happier, try offering five-dollar bills on the street, and see whether your wallet runs out before folks stop taking the cash. The gross-national-happiness proponents will be tempted to reply that the results of such an “experiment” may reflect a delusional, unhealthy, socially cultivated preoccupation with money; in other words, they’re willing to accept self-reports of people saying “I feel about a 2 today”, but totally unwilling to accept the gold standard of revealed preference.

As far as I can tell, Cosh's attempt to dismiss all measures other than GDP as a standard for policy outcomes gives rise to two major questions - and Cosh lands on the wrong side of both.

First, is money indeed the "gold standard of revealed preference"? And even if one takes GDP to be the current "gold standard", does that mean we should deliberately dismiss any attempt to develop better measures?

Since I understand Cosh to be somewhat of a hockey fan, let's consider both questions by analogy to a general manager who makes a comparable assumption in running a team.

Hockey is ultimately about scoring more goals than one's opponent. And while most other measures of player value are based on some element of subjective assessment which is tracked unevenly and only minimally traceable to the outcome of a particular game, information about who has scored the most goals is readily available to assess any particular player or team.

So why not bypass the uncertainty of scouting reports, player projections and advanced metrics, and simply run a team on the basis of the simplest measure which has some theoretical link to the desired outcome - i.e. acquiring players who have the best track record of scoring goals?

Of course, the answer is fairly obvious: the fact that goals are reliably tracked and have some link to winning doesn't make them the be-all and end-all in team development. A general manager would probably find willing trading partners if he decided to build a forward unit around Ilya Kovalchuk, Alexandre Burrows, Matt Moulson and Jussi Jokinen, with Marc-Andre Bergeron and Ian White as his key defencemen and Ron Hextall lured out of retirement to cover all the goal-scoring angles. But that effort might - and only might - succeed even on the one measure being considered. (After all, context does matter in developing a player's track record even for goal-scoring - and that's no less true in analyzing the factors underlying GDP changes than in figuring out why a hockey player has scored goals.)

But it's a virtual certainty that using goal-scoring as a proxy for overall player talent simply because it offers an easy way to evaluate players would result in utter disaster for the team's won-loss record. So any general manager who did decide to convert his team to a form of Borschevskevism wouldn't figure to last in the job for long.

Mind you, that's largely the case in hockey because there are obviously other factors which play a role in the game (i.e. goal prevention), and a broader indicator of success that's widely accepted in the form of wins and losses. But is it accurate to say that both aren't also present in the case of the GDP vs. "other measures of happiness" argument?

Well, let's go back to our first two questions. Does anybody honestly believe that wealth maximization is the goal of such a substantial proportion of human behaviour as to serve as a remotely reasonable substitute for "that which we seek in policy development"? There may not be any easy answer as to how to weight the relative priorities, but I don't see much room for dispute that family, friends, leisure time, positive impact on one's community, and other factors are all part of a balanced life which most people tend to seek.

And indeed, unless Cosh himself has put together a thorough economic analysis as to how he can expect to make the most possible money in his current job (and by his own account obtain more satisfaction by the "gold standard of revealed preference"), I'd be inclined to see his own choice of career paths - involving an apparent tradeoff of money for public influence as compared to, say, investment banking - as a counterargument to his view that wealth maximization should be seen as the lone and central priority for decision-making at either the individual or the societal level.

So it's fairly easy to demonstrate that judging policy based on its GDP impacts alone presents a distorted picture of our ultimate desired results, just like judging hockey players on their goal total alone. But that leaves the second question to be asked: could it be that we should still ignore other possible types of measurement based on the chosen indicator coming closer to the mark?

Here, there's somewhat of a divergence between the two scenarios since hockey involves a built-in greater end result, in the form of team wins and losses.

But I presume Cosh is aware that hockey, like other sports, has undergone more and more analysis in recent years which has given rise to new and better ways of evaluating players than traditional statistics. And a crucial part of finding better indicators is a willingness to research different ideas. Some of those may not prove more accurate than comfortable traditional statistics, but can still both add context to the existing numbers, and point in the right direction toward the development of new ways of evaluating outcomes which come far closer to the mark.

That means that in at least this one case, Cosh is the one making the absurd argument that we should deride and close our eyes to research which may - or may not - result in better ways of thinking about what we're actually seeking to accomplish in developing public policy, simply because he prefers focusing on the more easily-measured GDP instead. Which seems like a sure way to prioritize that measurable indicator over the results that people actually want - and to ensure that in the longer term, we fall far behind those who put some effort into figuring out how best to define and measure success.

(Edit: fixed typos.)

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted reading material for your weekend.

- Alice has all the background you could need to the much-discussed bill on seat redistribution.

- Apparently it's time for a reminder which party to the contracts surrounding the G20 is actually in charge of running the country:

Anne White, Deerhurst communications director, says it is against company policy to make public how much the resort was paid by the federal government to run the central venue for the G8 meeting.

Which, last I checked, wouldn't seem to trump the law of the land. But I suppose we can never rule out the possibility that the Access to Information Act passed by Parliament setting out a right to information about how Canada's government works has quietly been made subordinate to corporate policy.

- Thomas Walkom follows up on Kevin Page's report showing that the Cons' stimulus didn't actually do anything much to create jobs:

u(U)employment remains persistently high. Even Friday’s announcement that the official jobless rate fell to 7.6 per cent must be seen in the context of a labour market where thousands have simply given up looking for work.

So perhaps the economists — and the government — should pay more attention to Page on this. Granted, those he interviewed may not have taken into account the spin-offs from stimulus spending (as, for instance, when a construction worker laying sewer-pipe buys a submarine sandwich).

Granted also that recipients of federal cash may not have considered the jobs that stimulus spending saved from being lost.

But if one-fifth of those at the sharp end found that the government money they spent reduced employment in their communities, alarm bells should ring.

- Finally, Scott Feschuk's compilation of Julian Fantino's childhood correspondence nicely skewers his post-election diatribe.

Public Sector Accounting Principle #1

As long as somebody in the private sector makes money performing public services, the cost doesn't count as a government expense. As Ottawa well knows.

Well said

Allen Gregg's review of Lawrence Martin's Harperland is well worth a read in general. But it's worth highlighting the impact that Martin's compilation of Harper micromanagement had even on a Con supporter who's paid close attention to the events as they happened:

Even though it has become a cliché to refer to Stephen Harper as a control freak, the power of Martin’s argument hits you like a jackhammer. Those of us who follow these things quite closely remember a number of occasions when the Conservatives have found themselves in hot water because of allegations of abuse of power, but we tend to forget just how frequently this has occurred and the myriad forms this malfeasance has taken over the last four and a half years. Crammed into a compact 301 pages, Martin’s book itemizes an endless series of occasions where Harper exercises his “Control Fixation”—obsessive secrecy often around inconsequential matters (like black bear mating habits), “clampdown strategies” aimed at squelching unwanted announcements (including a failed attempt to muzzle the auditor general), a “permanent campaign” of pre-writ advertising and ad hominem attacks on “enemies everywhere,” ignoring his own election laws and disregarding judicial and court rulings, dumping or refusing to appoint numerous heads of arm’s-length agencies and commissions who fail to "toe the government line,” defending policies and record not with facts or reason but by a constant refrain of “attack and obstruct,” and the imperious proroguing of Parliament—not once, but twice—for no reason greater than a desire to save his own political skin.

In total, Martin cites some 70-odd cases of these types of abuse and the combined effect is almost dizzying.

Musical interlude

Menno de Jong & Leon Bolier - Last Light Tonight

Friday Afternoon Links

Content goes here.

- No, it shouldn't come as any surprise that the choice to gut the long form census was "the prime minister's decision". But what's more striking in today's news is that the "decision" was made - and presented as being that, rather than a proposal - long before anybody bothered to examine the resulting negative effects.

- Since making a patronage appointment to the Senate to fill a cabinet space and try to position the beneficiary for a subsequent run for the House of Commons worked so well for the Cons last time they tried it, they're apparently giving it another shot.

- Robert Silver is on target with his take on the only way to ensure journalists can expect anything approaching honesty from their anonymous sources:

I have lost count of how many stories in Canada over just the last 12 months have been mirror images of this case. Writer puts forward juicy story based on unnamed sources, PMO denies any truth to the story, life goes on as if the story was never filed. It is certainly not confined to The Globe as pretty much every paper has been “burned” this way.

There are two solutions – and only two solutions – to this problem. Either papers should stop relying on unnamed sources and given the impossibility that this will happen, the other option is this: When a source burns a paper – when they put something out that turns out to be patently false – the affected paper should immediately refile the story with the names of the sources relied on included.

I have a feeling sources would stop making up nonexistent facts pretty quickly after a few of their colleagues get outed.

- And finally, Chris MacDonald's take on why we should all be concerned about corporate governance (no matter how remote it may seem from our daily lives) is well worth a read.

A request worth heeding

Norman Spector notes one passage from the recent Wikileaks document dump which nicely highlights just how little use Canadian troops are serving from the perspective of the government they're supposed to be propping up:

“Non-US troops can stay home” is the headline in a cable recording a meeting Hamid Karzai had with the U.S. ambassador and Mike Mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, at the end of 2009. Showing his strong preference for U.S. soldiers, in the Afghan president’s view the 7,000 extra troops promised by NATO allies as part of the troop surge in 2010 were more trouble than they were worth.

On misplaced outrage

Before the rapidly-spreading outrage over John Ibbitson's article on seat redistribution goes too far, let's pause and check whether the headline and lede actually match the facts. And I'd think there's ample reason to think that most of the controversy is entirely manufactured.

Here's the area of apparent agreement, along with the parties' substantive positions:

Conservative, Liberal and New Democratic MPs and party strategists, speaking on condition that they not be named, stated this week that the bill has no chance of passage. Although all three national parties remain committed to the principle of equal representation for all Canadians in the House of Commons, in practice, the legislation that would advance that cause has virtually no hope of becoming law.
...
Minister of State for Democratic Reform Steven Fletcher’s office said the minister was not available to be interviewed. However “our government is moving forward with the Democratic Representation Act,” said spokesperson Jessica Georgakopoulos. She added that “it is anticipated” that the bill will be brought forward for debate next year.

That supposition, however, is contradicted by higher officials within the government.

Liberal Democratic Reform critic Carolyn Bennett, from Toronto, said her party was not ready to support the bill “without robust consultation with the provinces.”

“This is no way to run a federation,” she said. “Where is the consultation? Where is the first ministers’ meeting? Where is any understanding of how this country is supposed to work?”

When asked whether she was concerned about the underrepresentation of visible minorities, Dr. Bennett said it is equally important to “make the rest of Canada more inclusive for people choosing to come to Canada.”

Although NDP sources said the party was split over the bill, David Christopherson, critic for Democratic Reform, predicted his party would ultimately have voted for it.

“We were prepared to support C-12,” he said in an interview. “And if [the Conservatives] are not going to move on C-12, they should bloody well bring forward something that deals with this.” Mr. Christopherson’s seat is in Hamilton, another underrepresented Ontario city.

Now, it's first worth drawing a distinction between predictions and party intentions. It's entirely possible that all parties could rationally believe a bill would go nowhere even while planning to support it themselves: e.g. if the Cons assumed that the opposition parties would unite against it and the opposition parties didn't think the Cons would actually move it forward, it's possible for all parties to predict a bill's failure while nonetheless supporting it.

Of course, that's not exactly the case here. But the main point of dispute looks to be the Cons' claim to want to advance the bill.

After all, if Fletcher isn't merely blowing smoke about the Cons advancing the bill and putting their weight behind it, then all evidence is that it would have the votes to pass. Even a split in the NDP would seem likely to produce enough support to move the bill ahead, and the Libs' process concerns sound like they can be dealt with relatively easily.

Which means that if C-12 doesn't move forward, the obvious explanation is that the Cons have chosen not to act on it even while knowing that it's likely to pass.

In sum, then, there's absolutely no evidence of agreement that the bill shouldn't pass. And any agreement that the bill won't pass looks to be based on the likelihood that the party in power will choose not to make it a priority, rather than some grand multiparty conspiracy to undermine it.

Of course, it's also worth noting that a slight reallocation of voting influence looks to be far from the most important issue in a system that's seen massive executive power grabs and abuse of unelected authority at the expense of our elected officials - not to mention far greater distortions in the value of votes based on the preservation of a first-past-the-post electoral system. But even to the extent seat reallocation is going to be seen as a litmus test for a party's commitment to democracy, there's no reason to take a "throw them all out" line in response to a misleading bit of media spin.

Update: And having expressed skepticism about the balance of the article, I'll also note that Susan Delacourt's post on "higher" officials overruling Fletcher similarly seems to be unsubstantiated in the article. Though I'd certainly be interested to know who claims the title.

[Edit: fixed wording.]

How indeed

I've already provided a partial answer. But it's still worth highlighting Dan Gardner's pointed questions on the disturbing turn taken by politicians on both sides of the border over the past decade:

How is it possible that in this most civilized of nations, in 2010, a member of Parliament felt the need to raise (the question of murder as a matter of policy)? And while we’re asking rhetorical questions that would not need to be asked in a sane world, how is it possible that the Republican party has so completely embraced aggression and brutality that almost all its leading figures feel the near-drowning of suspects is a valid interrogation technique and imprisonment without charge or trial is a legitimate practice that should be expanded? Why is it that most people in the United States and elsewhere are not disturbed in the slightest that, despite abundant evidence, American officials who apparently committed heinous crimes in the war on terror will not be investigated and held to account, while Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who apparently did nothing illegal this week, is hunted to the ends of the Earth? And how in hell is it possible that when a former president of the United States of America admits he authorized the commission of torture — which is to say, he admits he committed a major crime — the international media and political classes express not a fraction of the anger they are now directing at the man who leaked the secrets of that president’s administration?

I marvel at that paragraph. It would have been inconceivable even 10 years ago. Murder treated as a legitimate option in political discourse? Torture as acceptable government policy? No, impossible. A decade ago, it would have been satire too crude to be funny.

And yet, here we are.

Deep thought

Yes, that sound you heard was the opening of a spring election window.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading...

- The most remarkable part of Kevin Page's latest report isn't so much the fact that it suggests doubt that the Cons' claims to creating jobs were utter nonsense, but rather the group of stakeholders who actually hold that viewpoint:

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s department has issued numerous progress reports on federal stimulus spending, but his department has not tied job numbers to specific projects. The budget watchdog sought to answer that question by surveying 1,143 organizations that were eligible to receive grants under the program; it received 644 responses.

And if even the exact organizations who were eligible to benefit directly from the stimulus were generally skeptical that it accomplished anything, the number would figure to be far lower when one takes into account those who weren't.

- Meanwhile, the Cons' latest bit of fiscal genius is their strategy for dealing with the inflated cost of the F-35s they've ordered. Which consists of...hoping that in what would have to be a global first, the price for military procurement will somehow go down:

Canadians can't be told precisely what the top criteria are that made only Lockheed's plane eligible, said Dave Burt, Canada's director for air requirements, because they are "highly classified," and "a question of national security."

Burt conceded the $70-million to $78-million price tag per plane is not guaranteed. It could rise or fall, he said, depending on the timing of the delivery. Lockheed Martin has only recently started the F-35's mass-production process. The earlier the slot in which an aircraft is produced, the more costly it is.

Burt added that commodities prices and other factors could also drive up prices. "But they could also drive prices down," he noted.

Your responsible economic managers at work.

- Dan Gardner slams Michael Ignatieff (and others) for choosing poor spin over remotely realistic analysis of the issues facing Parliament in dealing with the striking down of prostitution laws. But leaving aside the obviously flawed "not my job" line, does that make for any difference from how the Libs (and indeed Cons) handle most issues?

- Finally, Gary Mason criticizes the idea that politics can be taken out of health care decision-making. But isn't the bigger problem that plenty of processes that were supposed to produce non-partisan advice - such as, say, the Romanow commission - have been utterly ignored by the governments who claimed they wanted some better ideas to strengthen our health care system?

Well said

I'll offer one caveat to Susan Delacourt's brilliant post this morning, which is that I'm not sure I'd want to rule out the possibility that some "fight" is entirely necessary in discussing politics (even if it would far better to see the clash involve more ideas and less personal shots). But otherwise, it looks to be a great conversation-starter as to why women are underrepresented in the media as well as in politics.

So go read, and ask whether a bit more "womanly" counterbalance to the Cons' brand of kabuki machismo might make for a huge improvement.

Burning question

So how long after the next change in Canada's federal government will it take for Stephen Harper's Senate minions to give us our own version of this headline?

And this is why the debate is deteriorating

Does anybody doubt that if any person remotely affiliated with an opposition party had said anything anywhere near as offensive or inflammatory as Tom Flanagan's declaration that Julian Assange should be summarily executed, a harsh spin on the quote would have been a staple in Con press releases, members' statements and retorts for months (if not years) afterward?

Just wondering, since the first apparent response to Flanagan's eliminationist rhetoric from a prominent Lib is...to validate it as being entirely innocent.

[Edit: fixed wording, added labels.]

On minimal influence

There's plenty to agree with in the Ottawa Citizen's criticism of the Cons' crime policies. But I have serious doubts about the assertion that Julian Fantino will push the Cons even further toward the side of fearmongering on crime ahead of libertarian principles of justice.

After all, the expectation that Fantino's arrival will change anything would seem to imply that there was actually room for the Cons toward the "tough on crime" posturing end of the spectrum. But can anybody name a point when the Fantino-free Harper government hasn't chosen the most extreme possible posture on a crime issue (rather than an issue unrelated to actual criminal justice like the census)?

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your morning reading.

- Linda McQuaig weighs in on the choice between public and private pension savings:

The notion that we can’t afford strong public programs — that we’re better off buying services or benefits on our own — is one of the central falsehoods blocking meaningful progress toward improving Canadian well-being.

An excellent example is the looming battle over public pensions, an issue that will be the focus of a meeting of Canada’s finance ministers in December.
...
According to Jonathan Kesselman, professor of public finance at Simon Fraser University, management costs at Canadian mutual funds eat up nearly 2 per cent of assets — the highest rate in 20 countries surveyed. By comparison, CPP management costs were just 0.17 per cent last year.

This enables the CPP to pay out more in pension benefits. Kesselman argues that significantly extending the CPP would be “by far the best of all savings vehicles.” In fact, expanding the CPP would ultimately save governments money, by making future retirees less financially dependent.

But this eminently sensible, cost-effective public solution has been resisted by some on the right, who argue that the mandatory CPP deprives Canadians of the choice not to invest in their retirement.
...
Of course, those making such arguments are usually well-off financially, with little risk in their own lives. Still, they fiercely defend the right of the poor to experience the risky pleasures of life without a safety net.

- And the CCPA helpfully points out that the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of Canada's population continues to grow:

The higher up the income scale, the more dramatic the gains. For the richest one per cent, the share of all Canadian incomes almost doubled between the late 1970s and 2007. For the richest 0.1 per cent of tax files, their total share almost tripled during those 20 years.

And for the creme-de-la-creme — the richest 0.01 per cent making more than $640,000 a year — their share of total incomes more than quintupled.

The trends shown in the tax data are undeniable, analysts say.

- Jason Kenney's apparent epiphany that relationships matter shouldn't make for anything particularly surprising. But the relationships-vs-policies question is worth linking back to this fall's discussion about brokerage politics.

After all, it would make sense that relationships and soft perceptions are likely to play a far larger role in political outcomes where there's less discussion about differences in policy. Which seems to me to explain in part why the Cons have continued to pay lip service to issues like climate change even while doing everything in their power to prevent any action - and to present both a need and an opportunity for the opposition parties to sharpen their policy distinctions against the Cons so that the relationships developed by Kenney and the rest of his party on the public dime play less of a role in shaping electoral outcomes.

- And a focus on a broader view of public policy goals might not be a terrible place to start.

The reviews are in

When the Harper Cons have lost Sun Media, you know they're in trouble. And their Senate abuses have lost Sun Media:

November’s vote killing a climate-change bill that had been passed by the House of Commons was the most noticeable foray in the Tories’ guerrilla war.

The Senate’s historic function of giving legislation a thorough once-over and public airing before it becomes law is on hold.
...
As a politician who hasn’t been able to break through and gain majority-inducing public support — somewhere north of 40% — Harper has to be careful about taking any path that alienates large numbers of voters.

But election concerns aside, he should not be undermining the purpose of one of the branches of Parliament.

Canadians are partial to consensus. Helping forge consensus is one of the Senate’s strengths, maybe its only one. Turning it into a Conservative bully boy might be legal, but it is wrong.

And even Senator James Cowan is less than pleased that his chamber is overriding the will of elected representatives with nothing but a single snap vote:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, refusing to recognize the limitations inherent in our parliamentary system of government, particularly in a minority Parliament, is turning the chamber of sober second thought into his personal back-stop by using it to defeat measures passed by the elected members of the House of Commons he does not agree with.
...
Bill C-311 arrived in the Senate on May 10, 2010, but for more than six months not a single Conservative senator rose to debate it. In response to a request by Liberals to either speak on this important initiative to help deal with climate change, or allow it to go to committee so that Canadians could have a chance to express their views before the Senate made a final decision about its fate, Conservative senators decided to simply kill it outright, and to do so immediately.

History was made that afternoon. Until that vote on Bill C-311, there had been an understanding spanning generations that there exist self-imposed limitations on a powerful appointed chamber in our parliamentary system of democratic government. Those limitations and that understanding have been erased by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who once again has shown little respect for Parliament or for Canadians who wish to be heard on the important issues of the day — in this instance, climate change.