Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Alison chronicles how the definition of "accountability" has changed since the Cons' own actions started to come under the microscope, while Paul Wells writes about the three different interests at play in the Cons' scandal. And Tonda MacCharles explores how the Senate bribery scandal developed - though her willingness to take Con talking points at face value seems questionable given how consistently they've crumbled when compared to actual evidence, particularly when the likes of Chantal Hebert and Don Martin are eviscerating the Cons' ever-more-farcical spin.

- Meanwhile, Don Lenihan discusses why gratuitous secrecy does nothing but damage to the legitimacy of political decisions:

There’s an old saying that information is power. If I have it and you don’t, I’ve got a leg up on you, right? Well, actually, no. As politicians and bureaucrats are learning—often the hard way—the reverse is at least as likely to be true: real power calls for openness and transparency, not secrecy.

The Senate scandal leaps to mind. Everyone now agrees that if the PMO had just let the Senate enquiry take its course, it would all be behind them.

But my topic here is on how ministers conduct regular business. At the moment, secrecy reigns, even though it often benefits no one—least of all, ministers.
...
A minister that learns to trust these processes, rather than trying to manage them, will find that his/her decisions get far more traction. Making them even more open and transparent will only further strengthen and legitimate the results.

So there is a lesson here for all governments: when strategy is allowed to trump process—say, by hiding critical information from those with a genuine stake in the issue—the risk of failure rises exponentially. Secrecy, in other words, is a shoddy way to make policy.

- Linda McQuaig comments on Justin Trudeau's unwillingness to distinguish between genuine debate and personal attacks. And Dan Tan highlights the enormous gap between Trudeau's recent attempt to claim Layton's legacy, and his effort at the time to deny Layton's principled politics any place on the federal scene.

- Althia Raj reports on Michael Chong's bill to limit the authority of party leaders, while Andrew Coyne rushes to support the proposal. But I'd think it's important to distinguish between correcting the unintended effects of past legislation (particularly the power held by party leaders to control nomination processes) and imposing new requirements which might produce similarly undesirable outcomes - which looks like a real risk in making caucus management and leadership reviews a matter of legislation.

- Finally, David McGrane discusses the place of marketing in Canada's political system - though his view of how a marketing culture can better target political appeals seems to describe some future ideal state rather than the current culture of ad saturation, robocalls and constant mailouts.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Michael Harris follows up on the previous activism to save the Experimental Lakes Area by noting that efforts to work with the Harper Cons are providing both divisive and disastrous:

(J)ust a few months after the Death of Evidence rally, another event is playing out behind the scenes that is partly the way of the world and partly full-blown tragedy.  If those same scientists held a rally today, they would have to call it by another name. Judging from what is happening in that penumbral zone where idealism and power politics collide, a good title might be the Death of Innocence.

In a sad act of political naiveté and myopic thinking, of cowardice posing as pragmatism, the movement to save the ELA has been strategically sidelined. In its place, there is a fevered attempt to reduce the momentous public policy issues involved to one, short-term, panic-stricken objective  – finding a new operator for this unique scientific program at all costs.

The scientists who just a few short months ago asked the public to support their cause against oppressive politicians are now shunning the media, hopping in bed with the government, and fighting amongst themselves. The PhD student who gave up her studies to single-handedly run the movement to save the ELA, has been asked to “go silent” by her colleagues and mentors. The people who asked her to do that are the same people who encouraged her to fight the good fight for ELA, her fellow scientists at the top levels of this betrayed national treasure.

Why? Politics. The senior scientists have decided not to antagonize the Harper government with embarrassing reminders of the harsh facts: ELA was not shuttered to save $2 million, or because it no longer fit the agenda of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, or because recent scientific studies there had been disappointing. It was cancelled because the science being produced at ELA was a potential obstacle to the untrammeled development of projects like the oil sands. It provided the one thing an ideology-driven government can’t abide; independent, verifiable, and impartial facts.

- Meanwhile, Jeffrey Simpson theorizes that the continued movement questioning the Northern Gateway pipeline will win out in the end.

- Trish Hennessy storifies a noteworthy debate between Armine Yalnizyan and Andrew Coyne on income inequality.

- David Climenhaga calls out the media for thoughtlessly repeating Fraser-fabricated "facts" with no basis in reality.

- Duncan Cameron discusses why the Harper Cons have no interest in engaging with the rest of the world through the UN:

In another view, the UN is a coherent international organization with a mandate to promote its charter, and live up to the expectations of its founders that what unites the people's of the world is greater than what divides them. This second conception of an activist UN was what motivated Lester Pearson, Dag Hammarskjöld, and generations of idealists who believed that many issues do not bear passports, and that the world needs action from a world scale organization on issues as diverse as AIDS, social statistics, child nutrition, tourism, arms control, control of nuclear energy, and protection of heritage sites.

In its preamble, the UN charter defines its first purpose as "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which ... has brought untold sorrow to mankind."

Serious differences loom between those like the Harper government who believe political problems can be dealt with by military action, and those who are convinced that means exist to resolve the most serious differences without resort to violence.

Those in the second camp still support the UN despite its own participation in wars because, as the Swedish ambassador to Norway said in accepting the posthumous award of the Nobel Peace Prize to  Dag Hammarskjöld, quoting  Hammarskjöld'ss last article: "... set-backs in efforts to implement an ideal do not prove that the ideal is wrong." 

- Finally, regular reader and commenter Dan Tan has started a blog of his own - with the first post featuring his take on Justin Trudeau and empty-vessel politics.