Saturday Morning Links

Assorted material for your weekend reading.

- James Travers offers his take on how the Cons' attacks on the Bloc may have long-term ramifications:

Lost in all that noise is a counter-intuitive truth. There is no bigger bargain than chanelling rogue and destructive forces into legitimate and constructive political practices.

Canada has been redirecing that negative energy since the 1970 October crisis. Stunned by bombs and murder, Canadians, led by Quebecers, rejected violence as an acceptable expression of political will.

Such collective wisdom is rare and priceless. Blessed among nations, Canada has skirted the civil unrest and war that divides families and ruins economies.

By any measure, what’s happened over the past 40 years has been extraodinary. In Quebec, the Parti Quebecois has won majorities four times, often providing good government and never achieving its indepence goal. In Ottawa, the Bloc Quebecois became Her Majesty’s Loyal Oppostion in 1993 - a remarkable development requiring a nationalist movement to swear allegiance to the conquering Crown - and since then has earned a reputation for working respectfully and well within a structure it wants to change.

- Which isn't to say that there aren't some serious problems with the Bloc as it stands. But as Gerald Caplan notes, the larger problem is that a party which once prided itself in standing on principle (anybody remember the strains of "if only the Bloc ran candidates outside Quebec" from elections past?) has engaged in numerous embarrassing sell-outs:

On a series of issues both important in themselves and emblematic of the worrisome direction Canada and Quebec are taking, the Bloc and PQ have stooped to embracing retrograde positions based on flagrant opportunism.

Take the government’s F-35 stealth-fighter plane deal. It will cost a vast fortune and yet no persuasive case for this choice has ever been spelled out, except for the powerful lobbying of both the United States and retired officers from the senior ranks of the Canadian military now enriching themselves in the private sector. Given the Bloc’s usual response to public policy issues, a thoughtful, well-articulated opposition to this feckless deal was expected. In fact, however, the Bloc is an enthusiastic cheerleader for the F-35s, for no known reason beyond the number of aerospace companies located in Quebec.
...
(A) remarkable campaign has been going on in Quebec with the entire provincial medical and public-health establishment calling for an end to asbestos mining and exports. A recent poll showed the public has been moved: 76 per cent of Quebeckers opposed financing the mine with only 14 per cent in favour. Who this tiny minority includes may come as a shock. The strongest pressure on Mr. Charest to support the mine comes, incredibly enough, from the Quebec trade-union movement, in as great a betrayal of working people as can be imagined. The former president of the Quebec Federation of Labour was actually hired as the president of the registered lobby group for the Quebec asbestos industry, the Chrysotile Institute, which, as it happens, the Harper government funds. Solely because of the unions’ position, the PQ and the Bloc, despite knowing full well the lethal consequences, support the continued export of asbestos. International solidarity with poor working people around the world, non! Solidarity with Stephen Harper, oui!

Then there’s the disappointing Bloc position on attempts to streamline the Canadian Access to Medicine Regime (CAMR). This was once a well-meaning attempt to encourage generic drug manufacturers to supply low-cost AIDS drugs to Africa. But thanks to the pressure from the giant brand-name drug companies, it was rendered virtually useless. Yet CAMR can easily be made more viable, and when the House reconvenes next week, one of the first items of business will be an NDP motion to make it so. Another no-brainer for a Bloc that explicitly trumpets its concern for social justice for poor countries, n’est-ce pas?

But look again at the F-35 issue and how easily special interests in Quebec trump both social justice and commonsense. Besides aerospace, Quebec happens also to be rich in Big Pharma companies. Very Big Pharma. So big in fact that it’s got the Bloc playing deadly political games on the AIDS drug issue. As of now, the Bloc intends to offer an amendment to the proposed NDP bill, a sly sunset clause whose effect will be to deter generic drug manufacturers from using the bill at all. Caving in to Big Pharma pressure, the Bloc may actually be prepared to undermine a reformed CAMR, with all that implies for those dying from AIDS in Africa.

- Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne's take on what Canadians can know about a Con government that's been in power for five years is almost entirely on target:

There is no tension in Canadian politics, no shape or boundaries to it. Other governments, at other times and in other countries, have made decisions for political reasons, sometimes base ones. But they were constrained in this regard by other imperatives: the need to hold their cabinet together, or their caucus, or their base, or at any rate their dignity. There were consequences, in other words, and as such there were limits. But such is the insouciance, not to say eagerness, with which the Harper government has shrugged off its previous positions, and such is the leeway granted it by a Conservative party desperate for the spoils of undivided power, that all such reference points have vanished.

Five years after it took office, it is literally impossible to predict with any certainty what this government will do on any given issue. That, I suppose, is its record.

But I'd add the caveat that while the Cons' initial decision may be difficult to predict, their subsequent actions once a position has been declared are rather easy to see coming. And there's no reason why the predictable cycle of refusal to admit to error or even the existence of other perspectives shouldn't have come back to bite the Cons by now.

- And finally, Susan Delacourt responds to Coyne by noting what the Cons themselves fear most (as well as how we can tell they're running scared):

It's good to see a couple of columnists stepping out from behind the wall of assumptions/talking points in federal politics, which blithely assert that whenever the current government is doing something -- negative ads, spending wildly -- it's doing it from a position of strength. Those silly ads this week, in violation of every private-sector advertising standard (and now pulled), told me something different. Strong, confident political parties don't go on the attack for the sheer joy of it. (Well, maybe political parties composed of 14-year-olds in their basements do, but presumably there are adults in the room somewhere in Conservative Ottawa.)

Every party has attack ads -- true. Liberals had some nasty ones held in reserve always through the campaigns of the 1990s and up to this day. But I think we're forgetting a cardinal rule of politicking -- attack ads are desperate measures, used when absolutely necessary to chip away at an opponent's advantage. If they're being released now, what exactly is the Conservative party seeing to fear out there? And that takes us back to Coyne's column: if your government is all about keeping power, then your biggest fear must revolve around losing it.