Saturday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading.

- Gerald Caplan weighs in on Jack Layton's legacy:

It seems to me that Jack Layton’s enduring legacy is twofold. First, he set a standard of doing politics that, if followed by others, would change the entire tone of public life for the country. You could see his influence in the decorum that characterized the leadership contest to choose his successor. The media saw only tedium. The party understood it was Jack’s insistence on civility that was at work.

Jack regarded those he disagreed with as democratic opponents, not as dishonorable, even treasonous enemies to be destroyed. For him politics was not the brutal, no-holds-barred permanent war being waged against all comers by the governing party. He rarely attacked motives or personalities. He treated his opponents with respect and civility. He stuck to the issues, about which he felt passionately and which he pursued forcefully.
...
Until May 2, (2011), I saw the party’s role as being the conscience of the nation, an influencer of those with power, not a government-in-waiting. That’s how I interpreted election results from the 1930s all the way through to the 2008 elections, during which time the CCF/NDP only once polled as high as 20 per cent of the votes; often it was considerably lower. This was even true of the 3 elections Mr. Layton had fought before his last one. The message from the party’s beloved “ordinary Canadians” seemed to me self-evident.

Jack rejected this destiny as the NDP’s permanent fate, and at the last minute he was vindicated.

- Andrew Nikiforuk comments on the Cons' attempts to make Canadian democracy subordinate to the will of Enbridge and other oil interests:

To get a million barrels of bitumen a day to the Gulf of Mexico at Port Arthur, Texas, the Harper government strenuously lobbied politicians in Washington on behalf of the Keystone XL pipeline. When that project became bogged down in public protests and regulatory delays, Harper abandoned a 2008 policy that restricted bitumen shipments to China and became an outspoken cheerleader for Enbridge and Northern Gateway. Putting bitumen on supertankers bound for Asia "will require some significant infrastructure projects to go forward," Harper said recently in Bangkok. "And we’re obviously…looking at taking steps necessary to ensure we can get timely regulatory decisions."

There is nothing subtle about Harper or the "necessary steps" he has taken. His government has been characterized by the Economist as "intolerant of criticism and dissent," with a penchant for rule-breaking. Early in 2012 it branded First Nations and environmental groups opposed to Northern Gateway, including the Canadian office of the U.S.-based nonprofit ForestEthics and the David Suzuki Foundation, as foreign-funded "radicals" opposed to economic prosperity. Environmental groups with charitable status that have challenged bitumen mining have been subjected to federal investigation. And to make sure that Enbridge’s pipeline experiences none of the delays that have beset Keystone XL, the Harper government launched a concerted attack in March and April on most of Canada’s main environmental laws.

"The debate is no longer about a pipeline," says Robyn Allan, an economist and former CEO of the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia. "It’s about an energy strategy designed in the boardrooms of Big Oil that’s being forced on the Canadian public."

- One might hope that the Libs' fine for robocalls in Guelph would help push the Robocon investigation along. But I have to wonder whether the story featuring both full cooperation from the Libs and a political price will simply reinforce the Cons' apparent conclusion that the cost-benefit calculation favours continuing to stonewall against any attempt to figure out who's responsible for their own misleading robocalls.

- Finally, Scott Stelmaschuk and Bruce Johnstone both offer rather more generous interpretations of Brad Wall's talk of royalty revisions than my take. But I'm still inclined to be skeptical until there's some evidence to suggest a Sask Party-led review would actually serve to increase revenue, rather than operating as yet another handout to the corporate sector.

On non-appearances

The Guelph Mercury reports on the Cons' continued strategy of hiding as far away from potential public exposure as possible, as Gloria Kovach is planning on skipping yet another all candidates meeting for reasons which even she can't be bothered to remember:

In Guelph on Tuesday, the Action Read literacy centre will host a public meeting of the byelection candidates.

The Green, NDP, Liberal and Animal Alliance Environment Voters Party candidates will participate but Kovach has a scheduling conflict, Action Read said.

Kovach said she will be campaigning in Guelph before attending the Kitchener rally with Harper that day, but was unaware of which plans would conflict with the candidates' meeting.

Presumably Kovach's staff is hard at work brainstorming and polling what kind of conflict will play best to explain her once again hiding from voters and the media.

But Guelph's voters can't help but to recognize that while every other candidate has done everything possible to participate in a public exchange of ideas, Kovach has done nothing but show contempt for the concept. And that pattern combined with the Cons' track record should make it clear that constituents can only expect similar evasion from Kovach if she were to win the seat.

On electoral calculations

For all the conventional wisdom about what the upcoming by-elections might mean to Stephane Dion's leadership, I'm not sure that any outcome would actually give the Libs much reason to change their apparent push toward a fall election. And what's more, the only outcome which might justify delaying the current conditions for an election would involve the Bloc backing down, rather than the Libs continuing to prop up the Cons.

Let's consider first what the Libs' results in the by-elections might indicate about the party's position. For all the talk about a loss in Westmount-Ville Marie being seen as a disaster, the reality is that the same factors which helped the NDP to win Outremont are still largely in play this time out - meaning that a loss shouldn't be seen as an unprecedented outcome for the Libs so much as the result of a support shift in a relatively distinct type of riding. And that shouldn't be the end of the world for Dion or his party, particularly since the Libs' national polling numbers seem to have bounced back since Outremont.

What about Guelph? It's true that the battle there may be more plausibly seen as a microcosm of what the Libs would face in a fall general election. But with the NDP and Cons both running seemingly strong campaigns and the Libs having fought through a contentious nomination battle, there's still reason to argue that its results wouldn't reflect national conditions. And to the extent those factors might not be in play in a general election, a strong could be made that a loss in next month's by-election wouldn't rule out the prospect that the Libs could Guelph and similar seats if they can run a strong national campaign.

As a result, the most important question for the Libs may not be whether they win any or all of the seats now in play, but whether they manage to drop off the radar entirely in one or more of the ridings. As long as they're within striking distance once the by-election ballots are counted, there may be every incentive for the Libs to figure that a successful national campaign will push these types of seats back into their column.

In contrast, if the Libs come in a distant third in both Guelph and Saint Lambert, then one could plausibly say that the party is in serious trouble. That would suggest that the NDP has managed to position itself as the main contrast to the Cons in parts of Ontario which which formerly served as the Libs' firewall, and that the Cons have fully taken over as the federalist alternative to the Bloc in ridings which were held by the Libs as recently as 2004 and which weren't yet within the Cons' area of strength. And that combination would call into doubt whether the Libs can bring enough ridings into play to have any real chance of winning a general election.

Such a result would thus give the Libs reason to think that the national conditions are such as to make a successful election difficult. But even then, delaying any further could still be seen as doing at least as much harm than good.

After all, any possibility that a scandal might explode in the meantime to improve the Libs' position would be at least counterbalanced by the Cons' certain ability to use their financial advantage to blitz the airwaves in advance of a fixed election date - particularly with the Libs demoralized enough for the financial gap to get even worse than it currently is. And a movement to push Dion out the door resulting from also-ran finishes might well see an immediate election as the best way of removing him.

From my standpoint, then, virtually all roads for the Libs lead to their having ample reason to vote down the Cons.

However, the same may not apply to the Bloc. While the Libs (and indeed all of the national parties) can point to the possibility of potential gains in other types of ridings as reason to minimize any disappointing results in these ones, a party whose focus is inherently limited to a few dozen ridings can't help but to see Saint Lambert as a relatively accurate reflection of the type of challenge it will face in seeking to defend its territory.

As a result, if any of the other parties manages to pull out a surprise win there or even make the seat competitive, then the Bloc - which has seemingly relied more on its ability to exploit the scandal of the moment than on more stable factors for its support - figures to be awfully tempted to roll the dice on the possibility that something might stoke the anger of its historical voters over the next year, rather than walking into an ambush this fall.

Which means that much of the current conventional wisdom may well be off not only in terms of how the Libs might respond to any by-election losses, but also in its assumption that the Libs control the timing of the next federal election. And it'll be interesting to see both how the parties' by-election strategies turn out, and how they react as a result.