Wednesday Morning Links

Assorted content for your midweek reading.

- It's tough to disagree with Jamey Heath's view that a united Canadian left is a long way off. But perhaps more important than his recognition that it will take awhile to reach that end goal is his rightful identification of the process most likely to get there:

Many left-leaning Liberals are Liberals for no reason other than it used to be a viable alternative to Conservatives. They would find a happy home in the NDP if they accepted its invitation.

But they are leery. They fret the party's success may prove shortlived and worry it has not taken on board enough lessons from successful Prairie cousins, or the not-sosuccessful Bob Rae experience in Ontario.

Convincing them the NDP can form the base of something new -able to work with Quebecers -will take more than a welcome mat. It also depends on more introspection from Liberals who mistake being in the middle with avoiding the polarized politics their party long fed.

- Alice's latest chart comparing the riding-level two-party races in 2008 and 2011 is definitely worth a look. But it's particularly worth noting that the two largest blocks of ridings involve races where the NDP seems well positioned to take over Con territory - including the 50 where the NDP came second to the Cons in both 2008 and 2011, and the 43 where the NDP eclipsed the Libs as the second-place party. And indeed, an even split of the 148 ridings where the NDP and the Cons were the top two contenders would result in the NDP ranking at the top of the federal party standings.

- Thomas Walkom points out what the Conference Board of Canada's report on health care really says - contrary to the media spin about it somehow serving to justify further privatization:

(The report) makes the obvious point that health involves more than doctors, hospitals and drugs. It suggests that Japan’s high life expectancy is related more to diet than anything else (the Japanese are far less obese than Americans).

And it points out that the countries with some of the worst health outcomes are often those with the most poverty.

That Canada has the second-highest level of infant mortality among advanced nations may have little to do with our health care system and much to do with the fact that our poverty rate is almost as high as America’s.

The second question the Conference Board looks at is why U.S. medical costs are so high.

Its findings here won’t give much solace to the National Post.

The study attributes much of this extra spending to America’s reliance on private medical insurance. Administration costs in the United States are twice those of its nearest competitor, France.

Incidentally, Canada already has the third-highest rate of private health spending among the countries surveyed, a fact that should give pause to those who claim that privatization leads to lower costs.

The study also fingers another panacea of the right: market incentives. It notes that outpatient surgery and diagnostic testing in the U.S. are skyrocketing — in part because pricey tests (such as MRI scans) are needlessly duplicated and in part because fee-for-service billing encourages specialists to schedule more operations.

- Shorter Charles Moore: Better to redefine "democracy" as meaning something other than government supported by voters than to acknowledge that a distorted first-past-the-post system doesn't live up to the standard.

- Finally, pogge notes that at least some of the lessons from Maher Arar's abduction seem to have been wilfully ignored by CSIS in identifying Canadians as "suspected of terrorist-related activity" based on nothing more than distant association.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Stretching cats.

Tuesday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your afternoon reading.

- Trish Hennessy's election discussion continues with a review of how the NDP managed to counter the Cons' fear campaign:

Fear can be paralyzing, but fear is usually looking for someplace to go, and sometimes the antidote to fear is hope. It certainly helped some Canadians view Jack Layton differently in this election. Jack, with his warm smile. Jack, with his Canadien hockey shirt, hoisting a beer. Jack, risen from his sick bed to do what we all hope in the face of health adversity: fight the beast down with grace, with pride, with the fortitude it took to become an electoral David to Harper’s Goliath. In Quebec, le bon Jack.

Jack Layton had captured, if for a brief moment in time, the aspiration that resides alongside the slow simmering worry in Canada: the hope that we can overcome adversity and thrive. That cane he hoisted above his head at rallies became a symbol of strength; of defiance against long odds.

And, for a few days, Canadians sat on the edge of their seat wondering whether a phenomenon no pundit or pollster had predicted, this NDP tide of support dubbed ‘the orange wave’, would crescendo into an ‘orange crush’.
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Election campaigns are designed to tap into emotion. In the 2011 federal election, worry was a strong undercurrent – and the politics of fear drove some new voters toward Stephen Harper, in search of economic stability. But it also drove some new voters toward Jack Layton, in search of a counterpoint to the politics of fear.

They voted based on deep Canadian values: pragmatism, fairness, caring. For some voters, Harper tapped into the first value. Layton tapped into the second two.

- Greg points out how eager the Cons and their surrogates seem to be to try to erase Quebec from Canada's map.

- Thomas Axworthy notes that one of the easiest ways to balance the federal budget may be to stop the trend toward hiring temporary and contract workers to do permanent jobs:

The length of time and number of hoops a manager has to go through to make a hire has led to an explosion in the number of temporary workers and consultants. The Public Service Commission in a 2010 report found that temporary help services "were improperly used to address long-term resourcing needs." Instead of coming in to temporarily fill jobs left vacant by a serious illness, for example, nearly 20% of the "temporary" hires were for durations exceeding 52 weeks, with the longest being 165 weeks.

The use of temporary workers to get around complex human resources system is also expensive. I have interviewed several "temporary" consultants, whose daily rates are consistently higher than the normal cost of the job. Expenditures for temporary help tripled in the past 10 years, rising to an annual cost of over $300-million in 2008-2009. Harassed managers needing to fill key spots are judged on the speed and quality of the people they find, not rising costs to the taxpayer. With a budget gap of $28-billion, such perverse incentives for the public service human resource systems are all wrong.

- Murray Mandryk rightly questions the Sask Party's interference with union decisions:

Lost on the government MLA is that union dues and how the union conducts its affairs is none of her business. After all, would Heppner dare tell a businessman how much he should pay his employees or that his social club fees are too high?
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it's the absolutely height of hypocrisy for government MLAs to be criticizing anyone for taking the wages of others "to pay for a political agenda they don't support" when the Sask. Party does the exact same thing with taxpayers' money to pay for caucus political ads. Hell, the very political press release in which Heppner registered her complaints against the SGEU comes courtesy of ever-increasing tax dollars going to caucus staff to produce political propaganda.

- Finally, Dan Gardner points out the consistent test the Harper Cons seem to apply to drug policy:

(H)eaps of evidence suggests Insite saves lives, while the federal government has acknowledged before the Supreme Court of Canada that it hasn’t evidence to the contrary.

From the moment the Conservatives came to power in 2006, they insisted that the decision on Insite’s future would not be guided by politics or ideology. The evidence would settle it. But as the evidence of Insite’s effectiveness steadily mounted, the Conservatives’ hostility to the facility never wavered. They wanted to close it then. They want to close it now.

And so what we witnessed last week at the Supreme Court was nothing less than a naked admission that Stephen Harper’s government doesn’t give a damn about evidence.
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In a paper published a few years ago, Peter Reuter, one of the world’s leading experts on drug policy, summarized the evidence: “Research has almost uniformly failed to show that intensified policing or sanctions have reduced either drug prevalence or drug-related harm.”

No matter. Every year, huge sums are spent trying to deal with illicit drugs and the vast majority of that money goes to law enforcement.

And Stephen Harper is fine with that. In fact, he wants more of the same. But that modest, inexpensive, rigorously studied, scientifically validated, life-saving program in Vancouver? He wants it closed.

Which says so much about Stephen Harper.

Double standards

Last December, two Con cabinet ministers called a press conference to invent an "iPod tax" - going out of their way to cite numbers fabricated by their party which to this day haven't been traced to any reputable source. Jane Taber's review:

It was the perfect pre-Christmas shopping announcement designed to put a smile of the face of consumers and a frown on those of songwriters. A little opposition-bashing was even thrown in for good measure.

Today, the NDP called a press conference, introducing its new arts caucus and proposing increased support for the arts without delving into specifics. And based on the lack of invented numbers, here's Taber's contrasting review:

When you’re no longer the third party but the government-in-waiting and you hold a news conference about nothing, you will be criticized. And the NDP was on Tuesday.

The press conference was convened to talk about arts and culture – no announcements, no numbers – but it was really aimed at showing off the party’s impressive new strength from the arts community. Unimpressed, reporters asked NDP MPs why they were even holding a news conference and accused them of being ill-prepared – a taste of what may be in store for the party in its new role as Official Opposition.

Which leaves one of two lessons to be learned by the NDP now that it's in the spotlight. Either back up points with fabricated numbers, and stick with the conjured-up figures no matter how many times they're debunked. Or, expect once again to be held to standards which don't apply to the party which actually holds power.

On value judgments

One last note from yesterday's Angus Reid post-election polling, as an election which changed so much in terms of Canada's party standings doesn't seem to have done anything to diminish the gap between Canadians and their governing party:

The polling company's survey also revealed that Canadians generally hold liberal values, except when it comes to serious crime.

Almost four out of five Canadians, but slightly fewer British Columbians, say the courts "need to give much tougher sentences to all those convicted of criminal acts."

However, most Canadians balked at jailing people for minor offences such as breaking and entering, saying: "It does more harm than good."

The live-and-let-live views of Canadians came out strongly on sexual morality, with 83 per cent of Canadians agreeing "the lifestyles of gay and lesbian people are just as valid as those of heterosexual people."

However, Canadians aren't opposed to government intervention on non-bedroomrelated (sic) issues. Three-quarters of Canadians want stricter environmental regulations, saying they're "worth the cost."

Another 68 per cent of Canadians believe governments need to provide more financial aid to the poor, suggesting most Canadians don't oppose political action for the common good.

Finally, even though a majority of Canadians supported various tax cuts, only one out of five agreed that "government debt should be reduced, even if it means cuts in health care."

Of course, the latter three points all reflect areas where the Cons tried to at least feign interest during the course of the election campaign, so they may not serve as evidence of future party preferences. But they surely figure to limit how far even a majority government can go in then opposite direction.

Meanwhile, the one issue where public opinion seems to clash meaningfully with that of our political class is that of criminal sentencing - where even with little partisan pushback against five years of Con posturing, a majority of Canadians don't buy the claim that the proper response to any criminal offence is to lock up the offender and throw away the key. And with that many respondents recognizing the problems with mandatory minimums on their own, there would seem to be ample room for the NDP to give a stronger political voice to that position.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Arash Azizi argues that the NDP's youthful caucus should be seen as a plus in better representing a wider range of voices:

That the New Democratic Party has fought to challenge (the) status quo should come as no surprise. After all, when Tommy Douglas founded its predecessor, the CCF, the political fable of “Mouseland” was his guiding principle. He thought mice should stop electing “a government made up of big, fat cats” and fight for a government of themselves, by themselves, for themselves. His was to be the party of “mice,” the party of the common folk.

The battle Douglas began has just reached a whole new stage. For the first time, the party of common folk has emerged as the official opposition. Why then should it come as a surprise that a large part of its new caucus is comprised not of political players but of youth, students, waitresses and single parents?
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The mainstream media have raised a hue and cry in targeting the humble origins of all these new NDP Members of Parliament. After all the earlier fuss about low voter turnout, especially among youth, pundits now seem unhappy that young people actually have been elected to Parliament.

Our new MPs in Quebec are under attack every day because of their age, their “inexperience” and their humble origins. Often the $157,731 salary of a MP is mentioned in a condescending way as if they were not talking about our elected representatives but some kid who has just hit the jackpot in a casino!

Young New Democrats in Ontario and around the country welcome this new swath of MPs who are much more of an “exact portrait” of us and the working people of this country.

It is our fervent hope that after the hours of bureaucratic “preparation” they are currently undergoing they will not forget the sense of purpose and guiding principles that led them to join the NDP.

- Yes, Greg Weston's story about the Chretien Libs' duplicity on Iraq calls into doubt what had been one of the few examples of his government supposedly paying heed to progressive Canadians. But there's another side of the story that's even more significant in defining where we should go from here:

(A)fter all the fuss, the Americans didn't seem to care whether Canada contributed a lot of military might to the Iraq mission.

A former senior Canadian bureaucrat said: "The Americans knew we were stretched to the limit on the military side, and they really just wanted a political endorsement of their plan to go into Iraq."

Former U.S. ambassador Cellucci concurred: "We were looking for moral support. That's all we were looking for.… We were looking for 'we support the Americans.'"

Which raises an obvious question: after five years where Canada has been an obstacle to action on climate change and a surrogate for Republican Party messaging, would anybody value Canada's moral support on any international issue as much as the Bush administration did back then? (Here's one strong hint.)

- Barrie McKenna tears into the Cons' politically-motivated tax giveaways:

In the case of the Conservatives’ proposed family tax cut, the benefits would flow mainly to wealthier Canadians. A family headed by someone in the top 2011 income bracket ($128,800) would save more than $6,000. Working families in which the top earner makes less than $41,544 wouldn’t get anything. Nor would single people, including divorced parents.

The plan would also tilt the tax system in favour of single-income families, including childless ones, which are typically better off than other Canadians.

The families most in need are headed by single parents with children. But there’s no break coming for them.

- Finally, Richard Wolff points out the necessary alternatives to having an economy based on meeting the every whim of the corporate sector:

there are always two possible responses to any and all threats. One is to cave in, to be intimidated. That has often been the dominant "policy choice" of the US government. That's why so many corporate tax loopholes exist, why the government does so little to limit price increases, why government does not constrain corporate relocation decisions, etc. No surprise there, since corporations have spent lavishly to support the political careers of so many current leaders. They expect those politicians to do what their corporate sponsors want. Just as important, they also expect those politicians to persuade people that its "best for us all" to cave in when corporations threaten us.

What about the other possible response to threats? Government could make a different policy choice, define differently what is "best for us all". In other words, it could persevere in the face of business threats, and to do so, it could counter-threaten the corporations. When major corporations threaten to cut or relocate production abroad in response to changes in their taxes and subsidies, or demands to cut their prices or serious enforcement of environmental protection rules, the US government could promise retaliation. Here's a brief and partial list of how it might do that (with illustrative examples for the energy and pharmaceutical industries):

• Inform such threatening businesses that the US government will shift its purchases to other enterprises.
• Inform them that top officials will tour the US to urge citizens to follow the government's example and shift their purchases as well.
• Inform them that the government will proceed to finance and organise state-operated companies to compete directly with threatening businesses.
• Immediately and strictly enforce all applicable rules governing health and safety conditions for workers, environmental protection laws, equal employment and advancement opportunity, etc.
• Present and promote passage of new laws governing enterprise relocation (giving local, regional and national authorities power of veto over corporate relocation decisions).
• Purchase energy and pharmaceutical outputs in bulk for mass resale to the US public, passing on all the savings from bulk purchases.
• Seize assets of enterprises that seek to evade or frustrate increased taxes or reduced subsidies.
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Of course, a much better basis than threat and counter-threat is available for sharing the costs of government between individuals and businesses.
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Corporations have used repeated threats (to cut or move production) as means to prevent tax increases and to secure tax reductions. Likewise, they have made the same threats to secure desired spending from the federal government (military expenditures, federal road and port building projects, subsidies, financial supports and so on). In effect, corporate boards of directors and major shareholders seek to shift tax burdens onto employees. Their success over the last half-century is clear. Tax receipts of the US government have increasingly come, first, from individual rather than corporate income taxes and, second, from middle and lower individual income groups rather than from the rich.

In worker-directed enterprises, the incentive for such shifts would vanish – because the people who would be paying enterprise taxes are the same people who would be paying individual income taxes. Taxation would finally become genuinely democratic. The people would collectively decide how to distribute taxes on what would genuinely be their own businesses and their own individual incomes.

On mandates

Following up on this post, here's another interesting tidbit from Angus Reid's post-election polling:

In addition, almost two out of three Canadians (and British Columbians) favour "mandatory voting" like in Australia.

Which makes for a striking finding, considering that somewhat less than two-thirds of Canadians actually voted in the absence of an obligation to do so. But it also suggests that the mandatory debate happening elsewhere may have some resonance with the general public - and also suggests that despite the Cons' efforts to paint even minimal compulsory contributions like the long-form census as being beyond the pale, the current public mood may in fact support greater government action to ensure public involvement in shaping our country's direction.

On hopeful signs

There are a few noteworthy developments in Angus Reid's post-election polling. But let's start with what looks like the most significant theme, as a large number of voters look to have rejected any attempt to diminish either the election or the political system in favour of a far more positive outlook than they held just weeks earlier:

Vancouver-based Angus Reid pollsters have discovered Canadians became more hopeful about politics as the decisive election campaign raged on.

Canadians' revved-up regard for the democratic process held firm even after Stephen Harper's Conservatives won their first majority and the New Democrats for the first time became the official Opposition.

More than 61 per cent of the population told Angus Reid pollsters after the election they were "proud to be Canadian."

"The respect for politicians actually went up during the election campaign. People got engaged," Angus Reid pollster Andrew Grenville said.

Almost half the population agreed a "Conservative majority will be good for Canada," with a solid 64 per cent applauding the NDP's Jack Layton moving into Stornoway, the Opposition leader's official residence.

Soon after the May 2 election, more than seven out of 10 people agreed that "federal politicians are working very hard to help create a better Canada."

Of course, the question for the NDP now is how to tap into that positive sentiment - both toward it in particular, and the political system in general - to build its movement going into 2015. But a more optimistic populace looks to be a great place to start, particularly when the main opposing message is one that looks to devalue both government and democratic participation at every turn.

Monday Morning Links

Assorted content to start your week.

- Trish Hennessy calls out the Cons' fear campaign - while hinting at the reality that their insistence on gambling more and more of our prosperity on faith-based market schemes only serves to reinforce their message that we can hope for nothing better than a state of constant panic:

In the lead-up to the 2008 recession, during the best of economic times, Canadians were taking on epic levels of household debt.

Research from Statistics Canada, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and elsewhere documents a disturbing rise in income inequality over the past generation, reversing what, post-World War II, had become a more egalitarian, compassionate Canada (though not a perfect Canada).

Research also showed that Canadian households were working longer hours, toggling multiple jobs and relying on multiple income earners in the household just to keep afloat.

A concentrated number of elite Canadians were getting so rich from economic growth that it was starting to look like the 1920s all over again — for the lucky few.

But a growing number of Canadians were admitting to pollsters they were one or two paycheques away from financial disaster. In essence: They were one piece of bad news away from having the dream of a middle class lifestyle fall to pieces.
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The thing about insecurity is that it breeds fear – fear of change, fear of chaos, fear of decline.

The politics of fear exploits, rather than protects. It distracts at a time when we need focus. It divides when what we need is unity.

What we saw in Canada during the 2011 federal election was a master at the politics of fear – Stephen Harper – playing the game like his life depended on it. And he won.

- But at least when it comes to workers' rights, the Star for one isn't buying the line that we should immunize businesses from all laws and obligations in hope that they'll reward us with a few more jobs:

Workers at the bottom of the pay scale have long been among the most exploited. Their desperation to keep a job they can’t afford to lose makes them easy targets for unscrupulous employers.

But the extent to which vulnerable workers in Ontario are being ripped off by some employers, as outlined in a new study, is startling.

One in three low-wage workers has had wages unfairly withheld or outright stolen by employers, according to the Workers’ Action Centre report. For some, it’s paycheques that are short hours, for others it’s being denied vacation pay or forced to work copious overtime hours for no pay at all.

This amounts to “wage theft” and an indictment of the government’s ability to enforce its labour laws and regulations on behalf of those who need the protections the most.
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When a substantial complaint of wage theft is verified, that should trigger a broader labour investigation into the company involved. And the ministry needn’t wait for complaints to roll in. Inspectors should more proactively target employers in high-violation industries.

On paper, Ontario has strong laws. But they need to be enforced in a way that offers real protection for the poorest and most vulnerable workers.

- Harvey Oberfeld describes the real tradeoff at play in British Columbia's HST referendum:

(The HST) may be smart, from a corporate point of view, but how fair is it really for a company, let’s say, that measures revenues in millions to enjoy an EXTRA tax break at the cost of single parent families, young couples struggling to buy their first home, single people unable to even afford an unshared apartment or seniors struggling to make ends meet?

What the Tax Alliance doesn’t seem to realize is that the HST was not a tax break: it was tax SHIFT … from business to individuals.

Over the next few weeks, the public will see and hear Smart Tax Alliance ads, featuring “financial professionals” saying the HST helps business re-invest and acts as the “engine for economic growth”, cutting administrative costs and headaches.

We get it.

But all this is accomplished … not by getting rid of the costs and headaches … but by passing them on to the rest of us … many, many people with much less money than the companies that now get the savings. How is that justifiable, especially in a province that was already boasting BEFORE the addiitonal HST savings, that BC had some of the lowest corporate taxes in North America?

- Finally, now that the initial media rush to scrutinize and criticize Ruth Ellen Brosseau seems to be winding down, the media is starting to cover a few more of the NDP's new MPs. And Daniel Leblanc's profile of Mathieu Ravignat paints exactly the picture the NDP figures be looking to develop among all of its elected members:

Mr. Ravignat is focusing on local issues for now, such as economic development and protecting the pensions of workers, including those in the forestry industry in the Pontiac region. But he says he entered politics on behalf of Sophia and Gabriella, his two daughters,

“I’ve long been politically active, but running as a candidate was something else,” he says. “That decision was made for my kids. There is a future to build for them. They are so precious, and I want to make sure they still have access to education and health care.”

Change for the better

In case there was any doubt whether the NDP was looking to improve on the performance of past opposition parties, Mitchel Raphael's overview of the party's strategy looks to confirm that it's ready to take on the Cons on all fronts.

To start with, after years of the Cons setting and manipulating the rules (all too often abetted by other parties willing to see how their changes played out), the NDP is ready to fight back:

Since they have always been an opposition party (though now with a huge increase in resources), NDPers have fine-tuned every trick in the book to force delays and fight procedural wars on issues dear to them. Toronto NDP MP Olivia Chow says her party, over the last four years, helped delay the free trade deal with Colombia and a transportation bill. However, NDP deputy leader Libby Davies says watch for the Conservatives to work hard to erode their ability to challenge bills within the current system.

And more importantly, the NDP looks to recognize that its place in the spotlight can best be used to challenge the Cons on values rather than merely looking to prod them about the scandal du jour:

NDPers also say to watch for a different kind of question period. After the G20 in Toronto, the Liberals hammered the government over items such as the infamous “fake lake,” while the NDP went after the Conservatives on the trampling of civil rights. Re-elected NDP MP Don Davies, who was his party’s public safety critic last session, says he expects there will be more focus on substantive issues in QP rather than simply a bunch of scandal questions, a strategy the Liberals had turned into an art form. Former Liberal MPs told Capital Diary in the past they were literally harassed by their own party to help when mud throwing was needed.

Of course, it remains to be seen how well those principles get applied in practice. But for now, the plan looks to be exactly what's needed both to establish the NDP as the leading alternative to the Cons in the longer term, and to help define the territory where future elections will be fought.

On permanent brands

Perhaps the most telling part of today's story on permanent self-promotion for the Cons is the source of the request for a program to administer the strategy:

Those temporary Economic Action Plan signs promoting federal stimulus projects have proved so popular with Conservative cabinet ministers that some want to make them permanent.

Documents obtained by The Canadian Press reveal that a formal recommendation for a "permanent signage" program went to Prime Minister Stephen Harper last Dec. 17 — at the request of his ministers.

"Interest has been expressed by Ministers in the placement of permanent signage at selected, completed Economic Action Plan (EAP) project sites," says the opening line of a 12-page memo to the prime minister dated Dec. 17, 2010.

"If you agree, we will work with departments and your Office to ensure implementation of the guidelines."

Now, the fact that the ministers involved aren't apparently named in the recommendation should make for a rather interesting set of follow-up questions as to who exactly put the idea forward - and whether anybody among the Cons disagrees with it.

But either way, it seems fairly clear that as thoroughly as Harper has clamped down on his party, he's been far from the only one looking to wring the maximum possible political advantage from every public dollar supposedly intended to stimulate Canada's economy. And even if the centrally-controlled signage was only temporary, the blight on the Cons from their politically-motivated stimulus distribution and promotion looks to be permanent.

Sunday Afternoon Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- Will Falk points out how the right's calls for health-care privatization are both aimed at largely fictitious problems, and likely to make any genuine concerns far worse:

What the authors of (Fraser Institute and C.D. Howe Institute studies) don’t say is that the decade before last had a much lower rate of spending and from 1991-96 averaged just 0.9 per cent growth. We actually had real spending declines on a percentage-of-GDP basis for most of the 1990s.

Yes, we have had spending growth over the past 10 years, but what did we expect when we guaranteed the provinces 6 per cent more a year? Privatizing health financing would just add more fuel to the fire. The Fraser Institute does Canadians a disservice when it produces a political conclusion based on such nonsensical projections. C.D. Howe’s authors did a better job over a longer time frame. Their projections were age-adjusted with a variety of important variable factors around technology, relative price and GDP growth. However, their projection is at heart another neo-Malthusian straight line.

The political elites are engaged in a game of self-fulfilling prophecy. Straight-line cost projections and guaranteed federal revenue increases will ensure the cost increases they project.
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(O)ur challenge this decade is different. Then it was about fixing hospital care; now, we must harvest productivity gains from new technologies and virtualization of care. From a human point of view, this time will be easier. We have very low nursing unemployment — a third of new nurses come from abroad. It is a difficult task but not so challenging we shouldn’t try.

Let’s stop talking about how we finance 6 per-cent-plus increases or privatize health care and instead tackle improving the system to preserve it for the next generation.

- While the Wall government is no longer quite so eager to portray itself as following in the footsteps of the collapsed Irish economy, there isn't much doubt that it's still sticking to the same direction regardless of what lessons we should be learning from Ireland's financial meltdown. Which means that we too can all too likely look forward to being next in line to have our pensions raided in an effort to spare the corporate sector any of the cost of rebuilding from its destruction.

- Which leads nicely into the Mound of Sound's observations as to how it is we're considered powerless to shape our own destiny:

The question becomes how did major corporations gain the power to threaten our governments, our societies - the power to write our legislation? The answer is simple. We gave it to them.
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Yes, corporations threaten us when we want to do something they don't like but that's only because we've loaned them the knife. Why don't we take that knife back? Why aren't we the ones able to threaten corporations? Why don't we reclaim our sovereignty so foolishly surrendered by people of the ilk of Reagan and Mulroney? All we have to do is call their bluff. There will be "repercussions" initially but, then again, haven't we been living with the horrible repercussions of Free Trade for decades?

- And the likelihood that we'll end up bearing the cost of blindly following corporate wishes is all the more reason to want to make sure our policy choices are based on real evidence and logical assessments as to how to develop our economy, rather than faith-based appeals to the market gods.

On track records

It apparently took the NDP's sudden ascent to Official Opposition status for Haroon Siddiqui to notice its history (or at least consider it worth discussing). But his discovery is well worth highlighting since it nicely mirrors the message the NDP should be looking to establish for a wider audience over the next four years:

It was Tommy Douglas’s NDP government in Saskatchewan that pioneered medicare. It was the NDP that put pensions and unemployment benefits on the national agenda. It was the NDP in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia that ushered in affordable public auto insurance, which we could use in Ontario.

The NDP also has had a solid track record of fiscal prudence.

Allan Blakeney in Saskatchewan (1971-82) produced 12 balanced budgets. When his successor, Tory Grant Devine, left a huge deficit and a $14 billion debt, the NDP’s Roy (Romanow) (1991-2001) balanced the books. In Manitoba, Ed Schreyer (1969-77) produced surpluses in eight of his nine budgets. When his successor, the Conservative Sterling Lyon, racked up a deficit of $200 million within four years, his NDP successor Howard Pawley cleared it and created a surplus. (Pawley’s memoir, Keep True: A Life in Politics, published by the University of Manitoba Press, has just been released).

Only Bob Rae in Ontario (1990-95) left a big deficit, a legacy of a debilitating recession as well as poor management.

By contrast, look at the conservatives’ record — the deficits and debts created by Ronald Reagan, Brian Mulroney, Stephen Harper and Mike Harris.

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- About the only caveat I'll add to Jesse McLaren's election analysis is that the NDP's almost universally-improved position benefitted at least somewhat from the party starting behind the Cons who turned out to be the ultimate competition. But it's otherwise hard to disagree with McLaren's take:

The electoral map represents Parliamentary elections, but the main source of change happens between elections, driven by what happens outside Parliament. So to truly understand what has happened to people's consciousness between the past two elections we need to look at the shift in vote. From 2008-2011 the NDP gained votes in 293 of 308 ridings, had the same vote in 10 ridings, and only lost votes in five ridings (one in Newfoundland & Labrador, three in Nova Scotia and one in Ontario). This is better than any other party, and shows that the "orange wave" was truly pan-Canadian.
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(T)he Harper majority is not based on a surge to the right, but a Liberal collapse. The corporate vote became concentrated in the Tories (who were endorsed by nearly every mainstream newspaper), while the real surge across the country was towards the NDP. This is an important step forward in quality as well as quantity. The aspirations of Quebec previously rooted in the corporate Bloc Quebecois, the "strategic voting" for the corporate Liberals to stop the corporate Tories, and the isolated "neither left nor right" politics of the Green Party have shifted to a pan-Canadian labour party with links to the antiwar and other social movements.

- Niki Ashton offers some good advice to the NDP MPs who have taken her place as the youngest representatives in Parliament:

Ashton said the NDP caucus is a welcoming place for young people, with colleagues often asking her what she thinks on a given issue — if she has not already told them. That is not always the case for the broader political sphere, especially Question Period, so Ashton advises her new caucus colleagues to stand their ground. “Absolutely you’re going to come up against a wall of discrimination or condescension or paternalism and you’ve got to push back,” said Ashton, who hopes the influx of youth to politics changes the tone. “You’ve got to call it for what it is and you’ve got to raise your voice a little louder and make sure they don’t silence you.”

- It shouldn't come as much surprise that the B.C. Liberals are once again looking to pull a fast one on their province when it comes to the HST. But it's much more shocking that this time they gave some advance warning - and I'd fully expect the latest bait and switch to ensure that an issue which has animated B.C. voters for the past two years remains live whenever the next provincial election takes place.

- Finally, Matt Taibbi has a must-read article on how the complete lack of accountability for Goldman Sachs' financial manipulations looks to be a test case as to whether or not the U.S. can be said to be even slightly governed by the rule of law as opposed to the rule of the wealthy.

On losing proposals

Jeffrey Simpson's latest column rightly recognizes the need for political parties to seek out voices beyond their elected MPs. But he seems to completely miss the point in his argument as to where that input can best be generated.

The problem is most visible in Simpson's oddly rhetorical question:

Every election, especially one with big voter swings, brings to Parliament dud MPs (and good ones, too) and sweeps out some excellent ones. It wasn’t the fault of many of the losing Liberal MPs that they were defeated; the political tides just ran strongly against them. With the best organized effort in the world, they were toast.

It wasn’t the fault of New Democrats that they didn’t win in New Brunswick or rural Western Canada, because the party is very weak in those parts. But the party needs input from those regions if it hopes to become a more national institution. Who better to provide it than former candidates?

Let's answer that question by asking one in return: aren't a party's weakest regions also bound to be the ones where it's most likely to have nominated paper candidates, or candidates who have relatively limited connections to the riding on the ground? In effect, while a forum for consulting defeated candidates might create an additional link to ridings with enough of an ongoing presence to already have a strong local candidate, it might serve only to further isolate the regions where there's actually the most need for input.

And what's worse, to the extent input might be based on the conditions as of the previous election date, a council dedicated to defeated candidates would only figure to exacerbate the tendency for parties to seek to re-fight the last campaign rather than getting prepared for the next one.

Which isn't to say that parties can't do more to get all kinds of people involved. And indeed, strengthened roles for locally-based riding associations would provide a forum for former candidates and other party supporters alike. But the answer surely isn't to give defeated candidates a privileged position over the rest of a party's activists and supporters - and I'd fully expect that a party which took up Simpson's suggestion would have plenty more defeated candidates to add to its list in future elections.

The strategic analysis

Earlier this week I put together a brief look at the effects (and failings) of strategic voting sites in the marginal seats from this month's election. But Alice has provided the definitive analysis of the sites' effect, with duly scathing critiques of both the effect of strategic voting generally...

I'm being told that the groups view their efforts as being a success, and that they're planning to repeat them all over ahead next time. Oh brother. I think we need to be really clear on their record in that case.

The problem with the strategic voting websites is that their electoral analysis was incompetent and utterly wrong in most of the ridings where it could be said to have mattered — leading to incorrect recommendations in many cases where it would have made a difference, and no recommendations in others that were overlooked.
...
The maddening thing about the seat projection sites and strategic voting campaigns, from the perspective of party riding campaigns, is that it was nearly all they wound up hearing about at the doorstep if they were one of the targeted seats, and the strategic voting canvasses also sucked up a lot of volunteer resources for fool's errands, taking them away from the actual candidates' campaigns.
...
The strategic voting campaigns also printed material that was distributed in the ridings (shown is an example from Edmonton Centre), leafleted people on their way into the subway (seen here), and conducted phone blasts in the days leading up to Election Day urging people to vote for the endorsed candidate as "the only way to stop Harper" (this happened in Brant), which detracted from the campaigns' ability to get their own vote out, as they parried numerous calls from confused voters.

...and particularly the one site which is trying to claim credit for some great accomplishment even in the face of its obvious failures in both assessing and converting opportunities to defeat Con candidates:

So, Project Democracy proved unable to rally sufficient voters to prevent 19 Conservative gains, completely missed the opportunity to even recommend strategic votes in 10 other cases where the Conservatives gained a seat, and got the recommendation right in just 8 cases where Conservatives were actually defeated, leaving 33 targeted Conservative MPs in place.

And the Conservatives were reelected with a majority government. No wonder they loved Project Democracy.

Musical interlude

Blue Rodeo - Better Off As We Are

Friday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material to end your week.

- Yes, this is the right response to the inexplicable claim that the NDP's complement of new Quebec MPs will somehow affect its ability to represent constituents and interests from across Canada:

(Said Jack Layton,) "(i)n our last caucus, two-thirds of our caucus were from Ontario. And yet we worked as a national party across the board on the issues. And I think people respected that. Our view is that we are all Canadians and the goal here is to work together."

He said he will continue that approach now that he is leader of the official Opposition.

"Each region and aspect of the country has grievances sometimes with the centre, with Ottawa. We'll take those grievances up but we will also work in a spirit together to try to build a better country."

But it's also worth noting that the NDP's caucus boasts better geographic balance than, say, the Cons' 2004 equivalent - in which 61 of the party's 99 MPs came from B.C., Alberta or Saskatchewan (which collectively held 78 seats in the House of Commons). Which makes this just one more example of the NDP being held to standards never applied to any of its competitors.

- Sixth Estate points out that having been deceased for several years is no obstacle to serving as an editor for the Fraser Institute.

- While it's still outrageous that the details of a brand-new oil spill were hidden until after there was no risk that they'd affect the federal election, the previous few thousand oil spills from Alberta pipelines pointed out by Emma Pullman would seem to have offered more than enough reason to be wary of the environmental effects of the tar sands.

- Finally, in case Canada's asbestos industry (supported by the Harper Cons) wasn't enough of an international embarrassment already, the Daily Show picks up on the absurdity of promoting a product deemed unfit by the developed world.

Spot the pattern

Yes, the individual stories have been covered by plenty of others. But it's well worth taking a step back and noting the consistent theme coming out of Wikileaks' revelations about the Harper Cons as seen through the eyes of our closest international ally.

When it came to Copenhagen, Harper and company claimed both that the outcome was a major step in addressing climate change, and that they'd had some significant role in its coming to pass. But behind closed doors, Harper didn't want to be there at all (and didn't do much while he was).

When it came to Afghanistan, Harper continued to pretend through most of 2010 that he planned to stick to the promised 2011 pullout date. But behind closed doors, he promised NATO that his Canadian positioning was a lie - and indeed committed to a training extension as soon as the Libs gave him an opening. [Update: And at other times, even an extension to a combat mission was on the table even as Harper pretended otherwise.]

And when it came to Arctic relations, Harper has constantly pointed to Canadian sovereignty as an excuse for all kinds of military spending and posturing, particularly his government's stubborn insistence on buying F-35s no matter how implausible their price promises look. But behind closed doors, Harper made clear that he doesn't see defending our sovereignty as a serious issue.

So Harper has spent the better part of his time in office providing one message to Canadians in public, and another one to the international community in private. And all indications are that we're the ones getting played for fools when the truth comes out.

On issue identification

For all the talk about the NDP's surge to Official Opposition status being based primarily on Jack Layton's popularity, the reality is that there's much more to the upswing - including strong party-based issue identification that significantly predates any improvement in voting intentions. And in keeping with the lessons learned in 1988 about focusing too much on personality in a "big issue" election campaign, one of the challenges for the next four years will be to take ownership of as many issues as possible in building toward 2015.

And on that front, the first post-election push on pensions has been followed up by a concerted effort on ethics and accountability, featuring both a proposal to protect whistleblowers and an appeal for the Cons to follow through on releasing Afghan detainee documents.

Of course, there's no longer any ability to even theoretically compel the Cons to respond as long as they're prepared to stonewall. But the answer to "or else what?" is that if we don't see any action in the wake of a persistent opposition message, then the NDP to be able to take the upper ground in areas which have served the Cons well in the past. And if the party can build a strong enough connection to the issues where it's already managed to build a positive image, that will figure to benefit the NDP for a long time to come.

On splits

Ken Boessenkool and Brian Topp offer their own take on vote splits in the recent federal election. And they're absolutely right to note that the Libs appear to have been the main beneficiary in last week's election: in fact, the full list of ridings where a party won 50% or more of the vote includes only two Lib seats (both in Newfoundland).

That said, though, I'm not sure that the observation speaks to much more than the inherent relationship between a party's baseline support and its top riding results.

By way of comparison, the same list from 2008 includes only seven NDP seats to a handful more Lib ridings, while the list of ridings with the lowest winning share included numerous NDP seats - suggesting that there isn't a huge structural difference between the two parties in how many vote splits they rely on when their party support is in a similar range. And it stands to reason that as a party's national support level drops, it will have a more difficult time compiling massive margins of victory in any given seat - not to mention little incentive to fight for them if it's possible to win a plurality with less.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your midweek reading.

- There's one more addition to the list of growing influences on the political scene which seem to have responded positively to the NDP:

“That’s just the sheer reality of minority politics – people may not do these other activities that are worthwhile,” (Con MP Rod) Bruinooge said. “Perhaps we’ve found peace in our time and maybe it will make a difference in getting in touch with more aboriginal youth.”

They need to do more than that, Assembly of First Nations National Chief Shawn Atleo said. He called the rival NDP’s aboriginal policies “pretty progressive,” and urged MPs to come to the aid of 75,000 aboriginal Canadians with unsafe drinking water, commit to a gathering of first nations and Crown leaders, and back a summit on aboriginal energy and mining development.

- deBeauxOs points out the development in the recent election which should be seen as truly outrageous:

the critical story is the increasing use of US-style political dirty tricks exploited before and during election campaigns...

(I)t puzzles me that nobody in the purported *liberal* media has produced a thorough investigation of the MASSIVE amount of robo-calls deployed in specific ridings to deliberately irritate electors and to present false information.

It's been determined by tracing some of them to their source that most if not all originated with one US-based company. It is critical to establish who produced this carefully-crafted harassment campaign and how it was paid for.

Did #Contempt Party political operatives encourage supporters to fund this initiative and did they tell them to direct their financial contributions to a US-based company in order to evade the purview of Elections Canada?

- And Aaron Wherry rightly questions the tedious whining about on the NDP's new Quebec MPs compared to far broader issues in our political system:

Ms. Brousseau willingly put her name forward as the NDP candidate in a riding the NDP has never won. Her predecessor in Berthier-Maskinonge finished fourth—19,000 votes behind the winner—and spent just $1,358 on his campaign. Ms. Brosseau had, at the outset, almost no reasonable prospect of winning and, as noted, did nothing to improve her chances. One imagines that if the NDP had seen some reasonable expectation of victory in the riding, it would have found a more obviously qualified and committed candidate. And there seems to be some agreement that all parties allocate their candidates and resources depending on their chances of victory in particular ridings—ie. the major parties do not mount full (or at least equal) campaigns in all 308 ridings, but focus instead on the ridings they think they have the best chances of winning. Whether or not there are any candidates who failed even to visit their respective ridings, there are surely more than a few who mounted half-hearted or inadequate campaigns. The only difference is that Ms. Brosseau, quite inadvertently, won.

Is that better or worse than the various candidates who, counting on a riding’s traditional support for a particular party, avoided public forums and the like, comfortable in the knowledge that they would likely win anyway? Which is preferable: not bothering because you expect to lose or not bothering because you expect to win? Which more offensively mocks our democratic process?
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(C)onsider Ms. Brosseau’s story from one more angle: What is the difference between a placeholder candidate who inadvertently wins office and a conscious candidate who campaigns to become a placeholder MP? Is Ms. Brosseau really that much different from the other names that appear on the ballot or is she just the most glaring manifestation of a system that has rendered the actual individuals running for office almost entirely irrelevant?

- Finally, the terms "reasonable", "Saskatchewan Party" and "labour relations" haven't often appeared anywhere near each other. But the Star Phoenix rightly notes how the Wall government has taken on a responsibility to ensure fair bargaining (which it's menifestly failing to meet):

After passing a far-reaching essential services law that requires, in some cases, for 100 per cent of employees to refrain from taking job action, the government is in essence asking that union members take a cut in their real wages.

And to drive its position home, the government has denied requests for binding arbitration, and provided out-of-scope employees with pay increases as high as 37 per cent along with additional benefits.
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It makes eminent sense to enact legislation that prohibits the withdrawal of services by workers whose absence endangers the lives of Saskatchewan citizens. But in putting in place such a law the government then has a moral responsibility to act reasonably.
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The government has the responsibility to strive for a fair contract, not leave the impression that it's at war with public servants. Ultimately, it will be the patients and taxpayers who are caught in the middle - and that is the most unSaskatchewan-like outcome imaginable.

The future coalition

In figuring out the likelihood that the NDP can keep up the momentum that's propelled it to official opposition status, one of the major questions figures to be whether votes last week will translate into additional support in the future. And there's more great news on that front: in addition to winning the support of 41% of recent immigrants, the NDP also nearly doubled its opponents when it came to attracting the youth vote (after a period of years where support had generally been split four ways among Canada's national parties).

Of course, there's plenty of work to be done from that starting point - both to turn one-time support into a long-term habit among voters in both groups, and to try to boost turnout among younger voters. But one would be hard-pressed to identify two sources of support which bode better for the NDP's chances of building on its 2011 success in the longer term.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Cats in cahoots.

By the skin of their teeth

As disastrous as the recent election results were for the Bloc, it's worth noting that they were nearly much worse. Here's the list of the closest races in the country - and it can't escape notice that three of the Bloc's four seats were won by less than 3% of the popular vote, with Richmond–Arthabaska ranking as the 12th-closest race in the country, Ahuntsic 15th, and Bas-Richelieu–Nicolet–Bécancour 31st. (In contrast, only two of the Bloc's losses were by 5 points or less, with the closest of those ranking 25th.)

Of course, we can fully expect matters to change in one direction or another by 2015. But it's surely worth noting that the Bloc's loss in seats didn't in fact reflect their losing a lot of close races - and in fact the party wasn't far from being reduced to a single seat in the House of Commons.

On strategic failures

Following up on this post, let's take a closer look at how the recommendations of the strategic voting sites which claimed to offer the only chance to stop Stephen Harper matched up with the list of ridings being pointed to as having given the Harper Cons their majority - looking both at whether the riding was correctly identified as one likely to affect the election outcome, and whether the strategic voting sites actually recommended that voters support the party with the best chance to defeat the Cons.

Riding	Identified	Correct Opponent
Labrador	0	0
Nipissing-Timiskaming	1 (PD)	1 (PD)
Bramalea-Gore-Malton	2 (CAW, PD)	0
Etobicoke Centre	0	0
Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar	3	3
Elmwood-Transcona	1 (C22)	1 (C22)
Montmagny-L'islet-Kamouraska-Riveire-du-Loup	2 (C22, PD)	0
Lotbiniere-Chutes-de-la-Chaudiere	1 (PD)	1 (PD)
Don Valley West	3	3
Mississauga East-Cooksville	0	0
Winnipeg South Centre	2 (CAW, PD)	2 (CAW, PD)
Yukon	0	0
Desnethe-Missinippi-Churchill River	0	0
Palliser	3	3
Total	18	14

So what can we tell from the chart?

To start with, strategic voting sites did an absolutely woeful job of identifying the ridings which proved decisive. Given free rein to identify as many seats as they saw as justifying an endorsement, the sites had 40 total chances to identify which ridings could actually stop a Harper majority (allowing for the fact that the CAW seems to have avoided endorsing candidates in Quebec). And their success rate in doing so was less than 50%.

What's more, the fact that the sites recognized that a riding mattered didn't guarantee that they'd get it right, as two ridings saw the NDP emerge as the leading challenger to the Cons contrary to "strategic" recommendations. Which leaves the strategic voting sites with a total success rate of a measly 35% in making the correct recommendation for a riding which proved decisive (to go with an epic fail rate of 10% where they actually endorsed the wrong party).

In fact, as the election turned out, a simple "vote NDP" strategy would have resulted in the correct vote in more of the ultimate swing ridings than following the advice of strategic voting sites. (And indeed the same would have applied to a simple "vote Lib" strategy.)

Now, none of the above is to doubt the sincerity of those who put together the recommendations in the first place. But there should be less doubt than ever that the more important work is to be done in building a broader electoral movement, not in trying to game the electoral system.

[Edit: fixed wording.]

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- PLG rightly questions the sudden rush of stories proclaiming that since the NDP achieved unprecedented electoral success, it must have moved to the centre to do so (even while promoting many of the same policies it's backed for decades):

Just recently, I've seen a lot in the media about how Jack Layton has taken the NDP to the centre. But this is a narrative that accompanies his success. He made massive electoral gains, they conceive the votes as being at the centre, therefore if he's been successful he must have moved to the centre. They're certainly not going to say "Jack Layton successfully persuaded a large percentage of Canadian voters of the truth of more left wing ideas," or, "Many Canadian voters, disillusioned with the failure of the business approach to governance in the wake of major economic crises caused by that approach, looked to the left and Jack Layton for solutions". So, "Jack Layton moved to the centre" is the narrative they are left with. This is not all bad--if the meme is "Jack moved to the centre," then presumably the policies he led with are now officially respectable, centrist policies (even if a few months ago they definitely were not).

- Anthony eviscerates Denis Coderre's attempt to attack Ruth Ellen Brosseau's by pointing out that applying the same standard, Coderre himself would have been equally ineligible to have his name on the ballot. And if a court challenge goes ahead against Brosseau (particularly at the Libs' behest), hopefully the same will happen to Coderre.

But the ridiculous spin from other parties who collected their nomination signatures in exactly the same way also serves as a prime example of another phenomenon that matches the recent stories about paper candidates and discussions of monetary policy. Simply put, the regular practices of every political party in Canada are now being pointed to daily as reasons to criticize the NDP alone - which signals both that opponents have absolutely nothing reasonable basis to attack the party, but also that we can expect to be subjected to a far higher standard than mere historical governing parties.

- One would think that for all the talk about how the ability of businesses to operate globally as a major factor in economic policy, that same reality would be recognized in monitoring their activities. But when it comes to regulating what's routinely pointed to as Canada's most important industry, one would be wrong.

- Finally, Alice nicely sums up how the strategic voting sites set up for the past few Canadian elections have relied on obviously flawed assumptions.

Oh dear

The Cons describe what they're looking for in an Auditor General to replace Sheila Fraser (whose term ends this month):

Auditor General Sheila Fraser's term expires May 30, and sources say the Conservative government will announce her replacement by that date.
...
Last October, the government provided a clue of what it was seeking when it published a job notice for the position. It said the next auditor general must have "integrity, tact, and sound judgment", and be a "team player."

Moreover, it said the person must "possess a constructive approach" and have the capacity to anticipate the "implications" of their actions.

So the Cons want to make sure that the next Auditor General cares more about not making waves and fitting into the Harper messaging plan than actually holding anybody to account. We know where this is going, don't we?

On hiring practices

It's probably not surprising to see the NDP taking a look at staffers from defeated Bloc and Lib MPs to ensure that constituency offices have at least some experienced hands (while also allowing for some new blood). But it's a bit more noteworthy that at least one Lib MP is actively supporting that process:

NDP Whip Yvon Godin (Acadie-Bathurst, N.B.) said he sees nothing wrong with the recruits from Quebec, many with no experience in politics, hiring assistants from either Bloc Québécois, or Liberal ranks.

"It could happen that you take one of the other team, they have experience, and they work together with some other people," Mr. Godin told The Hill Times. "It's always a possibility, but it's not up to us to make that decision, the Members that hire the person, they have to live with that person."

The prospect of the NDP recruiting experienced Bloc Québécois staff in the vast majority of ridings the party swept in the province, rural and Québec City ridings outside Montreal and even within the city, could add to the difficulties the Liberal party faces as it attempts to rebuild with a base of only 34 seats in the House of Commons.
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With the NDP in need of roughly 220 new political staffers to support its...Quebec caucus, Mr. Godin said the new MPs may turn to experienced Bloc Québécois staff, and, to an extent, Liberals looking for work in the Montreal area, as the NDP beefs up rapidly for the 41st Parliament. The first session could begin as early as May 30.
...
One of the seven Liberals in Quebec who survived the May 2 vote massacre, Mount Royal MP Irwin Cotler, told The Hill Times the NDP should also reach out to Liberal assistants who will soon be out of work.

"I would like to think that they might look to some of the people from the Liberal party," Mr. Cotler said. "For example, Marlene Jennings [defeated by the NDP in Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine] had a great executive assistant, why wouldn't the NDP say, 'Look, here's a good person, he could help out.'"

Mr. Cotler went further, saying he intends to contact Mr. Godin to make the case for the young Liberals now helping their former MPs pack up their offices, and offered his own assistance to the flood of New Democrats coming in.

Of course, it's natural that Cotler and other Libs would be concerned with making sure that the staffers they've come to know over the past few years would find another opportunity in the wake of a change in political winds. And Cotler deserves credit for making a public appeal to ease them into new positions.

But it surely can't escape notice that the recruitment of staffers from other parties may have a couple of other consequences: not only will they end up contributing their talents to the NDP's efforts leading up to the next federal election, but their arrival will also figure to build links between the parts of federal parties which have been under different umbrellas in the past. And both of those results would figure to strengthen the NDP's hand as it builds its Quebec presence over the next four years.

Monday Morning Links

Assorted content to start your week.

- Alice posts her scorecard for the 2011 election. And the NDP's overall results serve as a classic example of big changes overwhelming narrow-casting, as the party managed to make roughly equal gains in seats, 2nd-place finishes and rebate-eligible ridings despite the limited to non-existent overlap between the three measures of progress.

- It doesn't look to me like the numbers add up entirely. But Ipsos Reid's exit poll notes the striking breakdown of the NDP's support:

The New Democratic Party, which won 30.6 per cent of the popular vote, scored highest among recent immigrants, taking 41 per cent of the vote of newcomers who have been in Canada less than a decade.

But the Conservatives, who seized 39.6 per cent of the overall vote, won 43 per cent of immigrants who have been in the country longer than a decade.
...
In general, the Conservatives did slightly better among those born outside Canada (42 per cent) than those born in Canada (37 per cent).

The NDP was the only one of the three major parties to score higher than their popular vote among those born in Canada, winning 36 per cent of their ballots.

The left-leaning party captured 29 per cent among those born in another country.

The Liberals -who obtained 18.9 per cent of the national vote -did slightly better among foreign-born voters (22 per cent) and slightly poorer among the Canadian-born (15 per cent).

Which looks to me to signal that for all the talk about the Cons' ethnic outreach, it's the NDP which has actually built the strongest connections to communities of new immigrants. And at the same time, it also managed to both change the minds of many people who had voted for other parties (particularly the Libs) in the past to more than double their count among Canadian-born voters. All of which would seem to leave ample room for growth in 2015, particularly to the extent the NDP can follow the Cons' efforts in reaching out to longer-established immigrants through multi-language media and community development.

- Murray Dobbin asks whether the NDP needs to become the Liberals in order to match their past electoral success - which seems to me to be something less than clear given its second-choice support at its current ideological positioning. But I'll certainly endorse part of Dobbin's take on what civil society will need to do over the next four years (based on the real lesson to be learned from Bob Rae's tenure in Ontario):

Should those outside the party focus on keeping the pressure on the NDP to be true to its philosophy and Canadian values – doing what we can to counter the inevitable fire-storm of criticism the party as the official opposition, will face from the media? This is not really an option – it is a necessity. When Bob Rae won unexpectedly in Ontario, the left there – inexperienced with NDP governments – decided to implement a sort of honeymoon period during which time they did not criticize the government.

It was a fatal mistake. The media and business groups launched a merciless attack. What Bob Rae needed was thousands of unionists, anti-poverty activists, women and youth in the streets demanding progressive change – a force he could point to, to justify keeping his promises. But there was no one. While not wishing to give Rae a pass on his policy failures (backing away from public auto insurance being the biggest), the left helped drive him to the right by failing to demand he keep to the left.

- Don't worry pogge, I'm sure a Con majority will end the problem of reports showing the idiocy of their crime policies being suppressed by declining to have them written in the first place.

- Finally, Armine Yalnizyan talks about inequality and democracy:

Good problems to have

Paul Wells' latest chapter on the 2011 election includes an observation about the NDP's Quebec breakthrough which looks equally applicable to the road ahead:

Cédric Williams, a young researcher for the NDP in Ottawa, openly admitted the wave of popularity caught the party off guard. “We didn’t expect this. We’re not running full campaigns in all the ridings in Quebec. More and more people are calling to volunteer. The challenge is to organize it.”

The big screen behind the stage showed the NDP’s Quebec slogan: “Travaillons ensemble,” work together, precisely the message the Angus Reid dial groups sent during the debates. Marc-André Viau, an NDP media spokesman, echoed the concern about the speed of the party’s rise. “It’s a challenge to put resources on the ground in the ridings where we have the best chance,” Viau said.

Fortunately, the NDP now has four years to work on organizing its new wave of Quebec support into the type of infrastructure which can win elections on the ground for years to come. And that greater capacity to channel public support into electoral results should work wonders in preserving and building on the gains which were made primarily through leadership appeal.

Post-Election Questions: The Greens

Seldom has a political party considered an election a success while posting a result like the Greens'. Elizabeth May's party lost 40% of its votes and vote share, fell by 60% in the number of seats where it ranked among the top two parties, and watched its vote share stay the same or decline in 294 out of 308 ridings - actually performing worse than the Libs by all of those standards.

That said, the Greens did succeed in their primary goal of getting May elected - and by an impressive margin at that, as May finished over 10% ahead of Gary Lunn in Saanich-Gulf Islands. But the election outcome raises a question made all the more difficult by the shifts among the other parties:

Just how much is one seat in Parliament worth?

The good news for the Greens is that the resources available to an MP should indeed make some difference in their ability to connect with Canadians. By earning a place which allows her to participate in Parliament, May has gained plenty of formal ability to play an active role in Canada's governance over the next four years. And the constituency funding available to all MPs will ensure the Greens will no longer need to absorb the cost of building a connection between May and her riding out of their own pocket.

Here's the bad news, though. While the Greens have managed to win at least the basic provisions for a single MP, the odds of their getting any more than that look remote at best.

At the moment, May is making a pitch that she ought to be allowed to sit on committees, take a regular place in question period, and generally hold the privileges of an official party in the House of Commons despite being well short of the number of MPs normally required for that status. And under some circumstances, she might have been able to make those types of arguments successfully.

But the Bloc's drop in seats complicates matters significantly.

After all, we now have a majority government whose recent campaign across most the country included regular declarations that Bloc MPs couldn't legitimately play a full role in governing Canada, and indeed some promises framed around an explicit desire to kill the Bloc as a party. So we most certainly can't expect the Cons to be willing to make any accommodations for a party which ranks ahead of the Greens in the standings.

That being the case, it would come as a major shock if the Cons are any more generous with May. Which means that she'll likely be limited to MP resources rather than winning any of the privileges normally associated with official parties.

And in the meantime, there will be plenty of rebuilding to do in order to push the Greens back toward the 2008 support levels which presented at least fighting chances in multiple seats - particularly now that the NDP seems to have won over at least some portion of the Greens' previous support.

So it's far from clear that the Greens will gain as much as they've been hoping from their first-ever election of an MP. And there's reason to wonder the Greens will be as happy with Monday's election result another cycle down the road.

[Edit: fixed typo.]

Burning question

Postmedia has taken the time to provide a brief biography of the NDP's new MPs. And now that we're seeing the full list rather than the half-dozen most sensational examples, is there any serious doubt that the NDP's Quebec slate boasts a higher level of qualification for public office than, say, the Cons' prairie delegation of 51 MPs?

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Mother's Day reading...

- Orwell's Bastard issues a call to action for the next four years:

Liberal friends, it's time for some tough love. Those of you who want to stay all Bay Street friendly and do what you did for most of the the last four years and not alienate the corporate media, there's a party for you. It's called the Conservative Party. Those of you who want to embrace progressive principles, preserve what's left of the social safety net, and keep people who think like Charles McVety from criminalizing abortion and gay sex might want to work with Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition. Like it or not, for the next four years that's the NDP.

And once again, lest anyone think this little corner's gone all orange, that goes for New Democrats too. I'm willing to cut the rookies in your parliamentary caucus as much slack as reasonably practicable, as long as you remember an overarching strategic principle: effective opposition to the Harper government will have to have extra-parliamentary roots and focus. It's not pleasant, but it's a fact of life. Steve doesn't need your help or your consent. He's got a majority now.
...
We've got a lot of work ahead of us. It's going to be a long four years of engaging our fellow citizens and working to build bridges. We're going to have to reach out to our neighbours, including those who voted Conservative and those who stayed home, and we're going to have to talk to them without being condescending or retreating into truisms or lecturing them about civic duty.

- And it isn't just Canadian bloggers looking for that outcome, as the Guardian describes the role of the NDP in similar terms:

(H)aving conquered Quebec, the NPD is a true national party and Layton's rise is being compared to the journey of Aesop's tortoise. "I'll never forget in 2008 when Mr Layton started talking about applying for the job of prime minister," said his campaign architect, Brad Lavigne. "People said that is not credible, and we didn't care if the media thought it was credible. What we wanted to do was establish among the electorate that you have a leader here that you preferred. And you could vote for him locally to get him to that job."

Layton has an immediate agenda to start making trouble: a deal between the provincial government of Ontario and its public sector workers for a 3% pay rise – to the astonishment of the rest of the country, across which other groups will now demand parity, and probably back their claim with industrial action. As recession bites, Layton can flex his constituency's muscles.

- Meanwhile, Jim Stanford points out that the Cons' reassurances about a majority government somehow resulting in an instant economic boost have proven entirely false so far.

- Finally, Don Braid fleshes out the story of the largest Canadian oil spill in decades which was covered up until after Stephen Harper's PetroParty had been elected as a majority government:

(W)e certainly didn't hear the whole story Friday. The initial release said the leak involved "an undetermined volume of crude oil." It added that the oil was 300 metres from any flowing water or runoff, and that pipeline leaks are very rare in Alberta.

All very reassuring, you'll agree. We didn't learn the rest until 3: 07 p.m. Tuesday, when the ERCB issued another release saying, rather causally, that 28,000 barrels of oil had leaked.

That's the biggest oil spill in Alberta in 35 years. It's larger by nearly 10,000 barrels than the Enbridge pipeline spill in Michigan last July. That spill, you'll recall, was damaging enough to turn hostile American eyes on Alberta just after the mammoth BP Gulf blowout was capped.
...
New Democrat MLA Rachel Notley, who grew up in the area when her late dad, Grant Notley, was a local MLA, says she quickly started getting text messages from natives who were deeply concerned.

"I'm quite suspicious about the timing of all this," she says. "This was something significant enough to have a whole school shuttered Friday. It's really hard to imagine it took them four days to take somebody up there to assess what's going on.

"Either there's an unforgivable level of incompetence among the people responsible for regulation and health, or there were some political considerations about the timing, about when they would come clean about the extent of the breach."

Post-Election Questions: The Bloc

Susan Delacourt's big question about the Libs looks to apply even more strongly to the other party which saw its caucus decimated by the recent federal election. And that leads to my question as to where the Bloc goes from here:

Will sovereigntists see any value in rebuilding the Bloc as a federal party?

At the outset, I'll note that I don't doubt for a second that given enough effort, the Bloc can recover some of its presence in the House of Commons in future elections.

For all the spin about how the end of per-vote financing would be catastrophic for the Bloc, I don't see much indication that it couldn't fund-raise enough to keep going if it perceived the need to do so. And the PQ's election machine doesn't figure to stop being a substantial force anytime soon - meaning that there's a base of volunteers and supporters ready to be tapped into at any time.

But it remains to be seen whether those with the ability to rebuild the Bloc will see the task as anywhere close to a top priority.

After all, the downside of accessing the PQ's base of donors and volunteers is that it might sap energy which is seen as better applied on the provincial scene. And while the Bloc's normal contingent of dozens of MPs and seemingly guaranteed electoral victories has developed a cycle of support based on the self-interest of actual and prospective MPs, the current group of four members lacking party status nearly eliminates that incentive to maintain a federal party apparatus.

Perhaps more importantly, though, the combination of an anticipated PQ government in Quebec and a Harper government whose attempt to sell access for votes was thoroughly repudiated could make for the most combative relationship we've seen between Quebec and the federal government in ages. And that raises the possibility that the PQ's musings about a sovereignty referendum in the not-so-distant future might well come to pass.

That means that the Bloc's electoral wipeout offers an opportunity for serious evaluation of the long-discussed theory that its presence in Ottawa may only have diluted the sovereigntist movement by offering a less drastic outlet for the province's frustrations. And if the Bloc doesn't resurface in future elections, much of the reason figures to be that its supporters have decided their effort is best applied elsewhere.