Right turn, wrong way

I wouldn't have expected to end up concurring with Rob Silver's analysis of the NDP leadership race. But there's an awful lot of truth to Silver's take on Thomas Mulcair's strategy - particularly based on some of what Mulcair had to say in the lead up to his leadership campaign debut.

Which isn't to say that I'd see Mulcair's campaign as entirely running against the NDP's existing legacy. But he's certainly making statements which seem far more likely to serve as fodder for future Con ads than as reasonable descriptions of where the NDP stands at the moment:

"If we continue to say what we should spend money on without saying where we will get money from, then I think that the public might look at us and say, 'Well, we don't think that you are going to be able to do this job.'

"So the trick for us is to convince Canadians that we can and do have a team of men and women who can manage the public purse in the public interest and keep things on target with regard to budget and administration."

Of course, one could see the issue as simply a divergence of interests between Mulcair and the broader party if the effect of such a message was to help his cause in the leadership race. But the more important problem for Mulcair is that he looks to have opened up about the widest possible pathway for Brian Topp to claim the leadership.

It was one thing for Topp to have the advantage of being the establishment candidate, which to my mind only countered his disadvantage in not yet being an elected MP. But if Topp can position himself as both the choice of the NDP's operational core assembled by Jack Layton and the defender of left-wing values within the leadership campaign (which a few weeks ago would have seemed highly implausible for a candidate known in large part for his association with Roy Romanow's government), then it's hard to see a path to victory for any other candidate that doesn't involve bringing in tens upon tens of thousands of new members from outside the party.

Naturally, the calculus could change if another candidate does move into the ample room on the left. But it's far from clear who might be able to mount a challenge on that front. Of the candidates currently in the race, Romeo Saganash is the only one who hasn't positioned himself primarily as a centrist - meaning that his odds of joining the perceived top tier of candidates may soar if the field remains as it stands. Or alternatively, it could be that a Peggy Nash or Niki Ashton will jump into the race with a more progressive message than that being delivered by the candidates so far.

Moreover, while the development of a third top-tier candidate to push the race leftward might reduce the likelihood of a first-ballot romp for Topp, it wouldn't figure to do a lot of good for Mulcair if he spends the leadership race alienating the more progressive voters who get drawn into the race by that campaign - at least barring a complete reversal of fortune for Topp that forces his supporters to split off between Mulcair and the new challenger on a final ballot.

As Silver notes, then, it's curious to see Mulcair so eagerly cut himself off from much of the NDP's existing base at the outset of the leadership campaign. And the result may be to make Topp much more of a favourite than seemed possible not long ago.

Sunday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your long weekend.

- Sixth Estate's evisceration of the Fraser Institute continues, this time with a response in substance to the claim that private-sector rent-seekers will somehow make prescription drugs more affordable:

(T)he real problem is that provincial drug review, unlike federal drug review, is based solely on political and economic questions of cost: in short, is the drug high-profile enough that the government should devote money to funding it? In today’s political culture, the answer is usually “no.” In any case, both problems are easily solved with exactly the same method: we need more funding for Health Canada if we’re going to approve drugs more quickly, and we need more funding for hospitals and provincial drug plans if we’re going to use them to dispense more new drugs.

The Fraser Institute, however, chooses Option B: a nifty bit of sleight-of-hand which is so unrelated to the actual problems as to be classified (by me, anyways) openly deceitful. The Fraser Institute says that we should eliminate drug safety and cost reviews and hand all drug coverage over to the private sector. The Fraser Institute points out that private extended health insurance plans available to Canadians who can afford them tend to approve more drugs, more quickly, than the provincial health plans that dispense drugs to hospitals and to lower-income people. So, the Fraser Institute says, Canadians will get the best access to the best drugs if they all use private insurance plans.

Now, this is akin to saying that people shouldn’t complain about traffic jams because, if they really cared about it that much, they would just use their private helicopters to fly to work. The reason that private health insurance more readily funds expensive drugs is because the people who can afford to buy such plans (or whose employers can afford to do so) invariably spend more money doing it. Bizarrely, I can find in this report no comparison of the cost of comparative programs, which the Fraser Institute is usually obsessed with. Ironically, just one month ago, the authors of this study published an op-ed claiming that only relative cost was a useful comparison when discussing different healthcare systems.

- Erin provides part of the answer to Robert Silver's overwrought complaint about how the NDP might deal with labour issues while in government. But it's worth completing the picture with a familiar theme when it comes to a party's general view of government.

For a right-wing Con government which at base doesn't believe that the public sector can perform any useful function in the first place, it should come as no surprise that we'd see attacks on unions regardless of their effect on public institutions as workplaces. But a party like the NDP which sees the government having an important role to play also has every incentive to make sure that public resources are used effectively - meaning that there's far more reason to expect public interests and unions' collective bargaining goals involved in a labour relations dispute to be appropriately taken into consideration by the NDP than by a party which sees either or both as being inapplicable.

- Murray Mandryk rightly criticizes Rob Norris and the Sask Party for offering false answers to entirely accurate questions about the St. Peter's College/Carlton Trail Regional College merger scandal:

(NDP MLA Cam) Broten first raised some of these very concerns in a May 2010 legislative committee meeting. Norris responded then by calling the allegations "illinformed", "inaccurate" and "completely false."

Sure, such political forums can be partisan and some of the things Broten was raising were coming from members of the Saskatchewan Government and General Employees Union (SGEU) that was accusing the government of privatization by stealth. But nasty, condescending partisanship (Norris lectured Broten on the meaning of the word "merger") overtook any commitment to transparency and accountability.

Asked Thursday if he had anything to say about those specific words he used 13 months ago, Norris repeated that this was a lesson in humility. That he couldn't muster the words "I'm sorry" to those he had berated for telling him the truth was rather telling.

In fact, what Norris mostly offered Thursday was a lot of justification why he shouldn't be responsible for ignoring the warnings offered to him months in advance. He cited everything from the "culture of trust" in post-secondary institutes to the time it took for the reports to be written as the problems.

This not accountability. And waiting until the final day before a summer long weekend to release the report doesn't feel like transparency.

Accountability and transparency aren't just words.

- Finally, on the positive side, it's worth setting aside some time in this fall's calendar for Linda McQuaig's appearances in Regina and Saskatoon.

On self-defeating strategies

I've made the point when it comes to other issues. But apparently there's a need to make a more general statement for the benefit of the Libs. So here goes:

You won't find an inch of viable political ground by proposing right-wing policies that Stephen Harper would be perfectly happy to pursue if he dared, but has avoided so far because he doesn't think he can afford the backlash. Instead, all you'll accomplish is to make sure he can get away with them.

Monday Evening Links

Content goes here.

- Andrew Jackson notes that there's more than one way to eliminate a budget deficit - and that the NDP is on the right track in its choice of ways to get there:

As Mike McCracken says in a short note included in the NDP platform, major changes in the mix of spending compared to the current fiscal plan would likely give a boost to job creation. The big items in terms of job creation are significant tax credits to business for job creation and real investment in place of no strings attached tax breaks; the major green jobs package; and modest funds allocated to child care and other services which would create new jobs while meeting caring needs.

While it is fiscally cautious, the New Democrat platform does point to a better way to bring down the deficit, through job creation rather than through spending cuts.

- Robert Silver nicely sums up the reality surrounding the Cons' attempts to pretend that some undisclosed and inaccessible auditor general's report will rebut the thoroughly damning draft released today:

Stephen Harper’s spokesman, Dimitri Soudas, among other Conservatives, alleges that the final report tells a very different story.

In the midst of an election campaign, this is what we call all-in poker. If Mr. Soudas et al.’s version of events is accurate and the report exonerates entirely the Conservative government, there is zero chance that the report will not be leaked by the Harper camp today. What, is Stephen Harper suddenly paralyzed by Parliament and its rules? Really? “Oh, I would really, really like to release a report that I have a copy of that exonerates me and saves my now-floundering election campaign; but damn, those rules of procedure won’t let me.” Yes, this sounds like the Stephen Harper that we all know and love.

Or – and it is kind of binary with these Conservatives – the final report is bad news for Mr. Harper just like the draft report is. It doesn’t exonerate the Tory Leader at all. If that’s the case, then not only does Mr. Harper have the substance of the report to deal with but the subsequent spin that will make it so much worse for him.

- It never hurts to give voters a low-effort way to participate in the election campaign. And the NDP's Spot a Senator project should nicely serve to harness the power of public interest to call attention to unelected nonrepresentatives using our money to boost their parties.

- Jesse Brown asks whether any Canadian political party is appealing to the tech-savvy voter. Cory Doctorow provides the answer.

- And finally, Murray Dobbin discusses how the Harper Cons' brand of consumer-based and cynical politics builds on decades of efforts to distance citizens from the governments who are supposed to respond to their interests.

On advance preparation

Robert Silver offers the radical argument that a party isn't particularly well served to keep its policy platform hidden:

(W)ith every policy announcement, your best case scenario is you get an hour or two of coverage, worst case scenario, you’re (sic) policy is completely ignored.

If the point of a platform is to:

1. Give voters a sense of what precisely you would do if elected (crazy, crazy thought);

2. Frame your values/ideology/approach to government;

3. Brand your party and leader; and

4. Differentiate you on all of the above from your opponent.

I would argue that the ONLY chance you have of that being successful is to release it well in advance of an election, work like hell to defend it from attack from your opponents and hope that some of it seeps in with Canadians by the time election day comes around. Without taking a shot at anyone, the only reason I can think of in 2011 to hold a platform back until the middle of the campaign (which I know is the conventional way of doing things) is if you are trying to bury your own platform.

But while Silver avoids taking any shots or offering any plaudits, it can hardly escape notice that one of Canada's opposition parties has made a huge chunk of its possible election platform into a staple of this year's budget coverage. And of course it's the Libs who have once again chosen to stay mum as to what they actually hope to accomplish.

That gap looks particularly significant with the NDP already well-trusted when it comes to handling specific issues. And its work in building up a strong platform in advance of a campaign means that an election centred on policy may offer just as much room for growth as one based on leadership.

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.

The source of the vacuum

Apparently Rob Ford's mayoral victory has led to plenty of questions about broader populism in Canada, with both Alex Himelfarb and Robert Silver writing noteworthy posts on the subject. I'll deal later with the state of left-wing populism, but let's start with the answer as to why national movements haven't yet popped up on the right.

There, I'd think the answer is a fairly simple one. It's been well documented that one of Stephen Harper's main management strategies within the Cons has been to tear down any internal structures which could allow anybody else to build a power base which might challenge his leadership. And there has been little if any resistance from right-affiliated groups outside the party to Harper's actions either, as the likes of the Fraser Institute and Canadian Taxpayers Federation have been eager to take up the Cons' party line rather than risking any gap between their theoretical values and the party in power (e.g. by applauding the Cons for spending more money to get less results out of the census).

And I'd go a step further in hypothesizing that the country's leading supposedly-independent Con may actually be the best example yet of how Harper has managed to channel right-wing anger toward his party rather than toward outside movements.

While Maxime Bernier has nominally challenged the direction of the Cons' government at times, he's never done so in a way that Harper himself would figure to disagree with - meaning that he's served primarily as a useful ideological counterweight to the opposition parties in trying to frame the Cons' actions. And rather than seeming to assemble any movement behind himself, Bernier has instead made himself available to pitch the Cons' party line on request.

So the simple answer to why there's no popular movement on the right is that Harper has gone to great lengths to prevent one from developing, setting up a magnet for populist frustration within his own party (and in the person of an MP still under his control) rather than risking the formation of any outside groups. And that task has been facilitated by the fact that right-wing groups who might otherwise have figure to lead the charge have instead gone out of their way to avoid harming the interests of a small-c conservative government.

Point-counterpoint

Robert Silver displays his depth of understanding of the foreign investment review process associated with BHP Billiton's potash takeover bid:

This is just the latest example of the one-way street that is now Canadian federalism. If a Canadian prime minister has anything to say about what any province is doing in provincial jurisdiction, he is a centralizer who doesn’t understand the Constitution and is jeopardizing national unity – all really bad things. A Canadian premier interferes in federal jurisdiction – and I have never heard an argument that approving foreign investment is anything other than federal responsibility – and said premier is just standing up for his province.

The Investment Canada Act, in sections not revised since 1995, begs to differ with the assertion that provinces shouldn't have any say in a foreign investment review:

19. The Director shall refer to the Minister, for the purposes of section 21, any of the following material received by the Director in the course of the review of an investment under this Part:
...
(d) any representations submitted to the Director by a province that is likely to be significantly affected by the investment.
...
20. For the purposes of section 21, the factors to be taken into account, where relevant, are
...
(e) the compatibility of the investment with national industrial, economic and cultural policies, taking into consideration industrial, economic and cultural policy objectives enunciated by the government or legislature of any province likely to be significantly affected by the investment;

On coalition building

Rob Silver suggests that the Libs have three options in talking about the possibilities for a post-election coalition: ruling it out, saying nothing about it, or offering "clarity" defined as a relatively detailed statement of principles. But I'd argue that there's another option which is more likely to produce positive results than any of those.

Off the top, I'll agree with Silver that ruling out a coalition would be entirely counterproductive, and that the Libs won't be able to avoid talking about it. But why would the Libs want to offer the juicy target of a "five-point statement of principles", knowing that any detailed principles are bound to be both attacked directly, and ignored by the Cons when there's a stronger attack to be launched by pretending they've never been mentioned?

Simply put, the Cons' attack is going to be based on the idea that all possible coalitions are evil. That may be a tougher sell than the Cons might think, but it means that it doesn't matter how well a single possible form of coalition is framed: the Harper narrative will involve slamming the worst aspects of any possible coalition imaginable, and refusing to listen to any pleas that a set of principles will actually limit what the Libs will agree to.

So the only sensible countermeasure looks to me to be to take the opposite position on the broad principles of coalition politics. Rather than implicitly accepting any of the Cons' arbitrary factors which supposedly make a coalition illegitimate (and allowing that type of language to dominate the discussion), any party interested in participating in or supporting a coalition to take down the Cons should be talking up the value of cooperative politics: pointing to the many examples of coalitions which the Cons themselves seem perfectly happy to accept, highlighting areas where the Cons are isolated both in Canadian politics and around the world, and creating an underlying narrative that everybody in Ottawa agrees that it's possible for parties to work together to produce better results for Canadians - except for Stephen Harper and his insular, secretive Con government.

With that type of message, there's actually some positive content for all potential coalition parties to rally behind, while Harper will be forced on the defensive as the lone defender of the partisan buffoonery pushed by his government. And that looks like the best hope for a result that satisfies both the Libs' internal concerns, and the desire of many Canadians of multiple partisan stripes to remove the Cons from office.

An obvious solution

Robert Silver and Scott Tribe want the Libs to embrace open nominations rather than insulating MPs from democratic accountability. But there's no indication that the Libs' hierarchy will stand for such a loss of control.

Scott Reid thinks the Libs should start paying more attention to the deteriorating well-being of working Canadians. But there doesn't seem to be much interest in actually confronting the Lib power structure's role in exacerbating the problem.

So let's ask the question: if everybody who reasonably wishes the Libs were more like the NDP actually made the jump themselves, wouldn't we have a far better chance of actually overcoming the Lib institutions which are holding back progress?

Oh, the scandal

Rob Silver strikes with what he's sure is a damaging revelation about Jack Layton: apparently Layton has cared about social responsibility for upwards of two decades.

Needless to say, I strongly encourage the Libs to make this their primary line of criticism against Layton.

Update: And I suppose it's also worth pointing out that in retrospect, Layton's concern about federal and provincial commitments was entirely prescient. After all, by the time 1996 rolled around, both Libs in Ottawa and Cons in Toronto had taken a chainsaw to what those levels of government had been spending even without an additional Olympic tab to pay.

On cases in point

Shorter Robert Silver:

Speaking as somebody who's regularly used a major media platform to try to undermine Adam Giambrone's mayoral campaign, it's preposterous to suggest anybody has used a major media platform to actually undermine Adam Giambrone's mayoral campaign.

A radical proposal

Shorter Robert Silver:

Some may think it's crazy for governments to encourage the perverse bonus structures and warped incentives that helped push the world into a global financial crisis just over a year ago. But as far as I'm concerned, Canada would be crazy not to.

Update: Greg weighs in as well.

Update II: What Paul Krugman said:

(T)he point needs to be repeated again and again: at this point, there is no reason to take it on faith that cleverness in the financial industry is a net social good. Unless you can provide some clear evidence of productive innovations since regulation began to unravel — and ATMs don’t count — the balance of the evidence suggests that smart people have been devising ingenious ways to concentrate risk and direct capital to the wrong uses.

On slanted perspectives

If Simon's post on the Globe and Mail's Silver/Powers blog goes off course at all, it's in his apparent view that Tim Powers' relentless stream of Con talking points would suggest somebody one would want to "have a beer with". But he nicely hints at a point that I'd been thinking about myself as well.

On paper, the structure of Silver/Powers would seem to make sense as an attempt to facilitate a clash of points between the Libs and Cons. Of course that itself presents an unduly limited picture of the political scene, but in theory it at least offers some prospect of "balance" as defined by conventional corporate-media wisdom.

But with increasingly rare exceptions, the result has proven to be something else entirely. Both Powers and Silver seem to be spending most of their time launching attacks to their left: Silver has made a hobby out of bashing unions, David Miller and any policy which might be anything other than big business' first choice (secure in the knowledge that none of his targets enjoys a similar platform to respond), while Powers is able to rest assured that Silver is more interested in attacking anybody with NDP leanings than in addressing any but the most inflammatory of Harper-style cheap shots directed his way.

As a result, rather than even meeting the already-modest goal of presenting a clash over an artificial "centre", the Globe and Mail's excuse for a back-and-forth discussion is instead working consistently to move the boundaries of Canadian political discussion further to the right. But I suppose those of us who see politics as more than an argument about what colour should accompany a corporatist agenda should be taking solace in the fact that a blogger who "has at one time or another canvassed door to door for all parties save the Marxist Leninists" has meekly suggested that Michael Ignatieff should pretend to be progressive.

Within reach

Robert Silver is looking to lower expectations for the Libs for the next federal election campaign by throwing out daunting-sounding numbers about what it would take to remove the Cons from office. But let's take a closer look at whether he's right in saying that change is out of reach.

Let's note off the top that even in Silver's minimal scenario of an 8-point change, the total Lib+NDP seat count would exceed the Cons', meeting one of the artificial conditions which coalition bashers have sought to impose in the current Parliament. So if Ignatieff can overcome the distrust he's built up with the other opposition parties, even that minimal movement could result in a change in government.

But what about the higher numbers required to push the Libs alone ahead of the Cons? A 10- or 12-point swing sounds like a lot on its face. But in reality, it's well within the range of possible outcomes.

After all, it was as recently as 2006 that the total swing involving the Libs and Cons was over 13 points based on 6.5-point moves for both parties.

In 2004, the combined NDP (+7)/Lib (-4) swing was over 11 points. (I'll ignore the Cons' numbers from that year since they reflect a party merger - but looking at only raw numbers the NDP/Con swing would be even bigger at 15 points.) And in 2001, the Alliance/PC swing was just under 13 points. So in fact, the 2008 results are unique among recent elections in their lack of a significant swing among the parties.

What if one limits the swings to the top two parties from the previous Parliament - both to mimic the Con/Lib dynamic, and to avoid picking only the greatest jumps and drops from each cycle? Even there, the types of changes which Silver paints as being unrealistic are well within the range of what's happened in the past in plenty of other elections beyond 2006. In 1993, the Lib/PC swing was 36 points; in 1988, just under 11; in 1984, roughly 34; in 1972, just under 11; in 1962, 20 points and in 1958, 22 points.

And those numbers reflect all kinds of political circumstances - including minorities (1958 and 2006) and majorities alike, as well as featuring sharp changes in direction (1984 and 1993) alongside elections which preserved the current party in power (1972 and 1988).

Of course, those numbers also hint at the second part of the equation which Silver would presumably like to avoid. If a swing of 20+ points is recognized to be a plausible outcome, then there's no way around the fact that the NDP has joined the Libs within striking distance of the Cons.

But I'd have to think that Silver and others are best off playing up rather than minimizing the potential for change. After all, the more the Libs' mouthpieces try to answer the suggestion that Canadians can replace the current Con government with a pessimistic "no we can't", the more likely voters will be to look for a party which offers a more hopeful answer.

Edit: fixed typos.

On private interests

There's not much doubt that the financial meltdown has led to proposed solutions based largely on ideological lines. But for those thinking that the lone danger to the public sector is coming from Ton Flanagan's musings about an all-out assault on existing institutions, one of the Libs' more prominent strategists is presenting another extremely worrisome position:

If Harper (or any government) decided today to accelerate infrastructure spending, it would be at least 3-6 months at the earliest before specific projects were lined up. At that point, the projects would (if they're of any significant size) start going through an environmental assessment process and receiving other regulatory approvals - a process that can take anywhere from 6 months to many years (in the case of an east-west transmission line, for example, you are likely looking at a 3-5 year regulatory approvals process, and that may be optimistic). If the project is a public-private partnership, which most of these projects should be, you also need to line up a private-sector partner through some form of competitive process and close-financing.

Now, I'm no fan of P3s in most cases, as the assumed benefits seem to be entirely illusory in practice. But to the extent there's any sensible argument to be made for them, it's normally based on an excess of capital available in private markets compared to a relative lack of available money from governments, such that there's at least a case to be made for using private funding in the short term in exchange for publicly-funded profits down the road.

But that "excess of capital" point is an important one. The reality seems to be to the opposite effect: instead of there being a surplus of investors and private capital looking for projects to fund, we're currently facing a combination of evaporating credit markets and investor reticence. And that's exactly why government stimulus is needed to try to turn around the downturn in the first place.

Moreover, the crash in asset values also means that what capital is out there can follow Stephen Harper's advice by pursuing fire-sale bargains, rather than having to pay normal prices for its returns. So much in the same way that any asset sell-off would result in the federal government taking a cut rate for what it now owns, so too would any process of seeking private partners result in a far worse deal for the public purse than would be available at virtually any other time.

And what's worse, the effect could also be more to divert capital rather than to actually improve the current flow of funding. While there might be some incremental increase in the amount of capital made available under P3 projects, it seems to me most likely that investors in a position to put their money behind large-scale infrastructure development would be equally willing and eager to seek bargain capital investments in the private sector without any government stimulus. Which means that a P3 program would all too probably serve only to provide a publicly-guaranteed profit margin to those who are already willing to invest, rather than actually improving the current level of economic activity.

Based on those considerations, the smart public play would seem to be to use the resources of government to build publicly-owned infrastructure. But those eager to funnel public money into private hands are apparently no less eager to use the economic downturn to their advantage than those who are looking to eliminate government entirely. And both pose a significant danger to our prospects of minimizing the damage and emerging with a functional government once it's over.

Update: As pogge points out, Deficit Jim figures to be entirely on board.