Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Tim Harper reminds us why Brad Wall is thoroughly off base in claiming that it's the duty of every Canadian politician to demonstrate constant fealty to his resource-sector puppet-masters:

The Conservatives, of course, would like the entire country to come together behind their view of resource extraction, but the nice thing about democracy is it accommodates dissonant voices.

Keystone faces credible and determined opposition in both countries.

There is a longstanding protocol in the U.S. that politicians do not criticize the government while abroad, but if that ever was the convention in Canada, it flew out the window after Harper took aim at successive Liberal leaders while representing this country abroad during his minority years.

Mulcair owes Canadians consistency. Without that, he cannot ask them to make him prime minister.
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If U.S. President Barack Obama eventually kills the Keystone extension in a decision expected this summer, expect the Conservatives to blame Mulcair for “talking down” Canada while abroad, just as they tried to blame then-opposition leader Michael Ignatieff’s comments for costing them a seat on the United Nations Security Council in 2010.

The UN blame-game generally drew laughter. Blaming an opposition leader who carried a consistent message south of the border for a Keystone failure should similarly be met with guffaws.

- Meanwhile, Clare Demerse tries to fact-check the Cons' attempt at greenwashing their atrocious track record - only to conclude that there are few facts to be found in their spin.

- Don Lenihan writes about the problem with a pay-wall model for online media - as many people seeking to read news online have rightly come to value the ability to respond and comment without others being excluded.

- Emma Burnell highlights the importance of "critical loyalty" in ensuring that political parties can build close connections while still evolving and growing. I'm pretty sure this isn't what she has in mind, but from my own set of loyalties I'll happily ask someone to pass the popcorn.

- Finally, Pat Atkinson and Scott Stelmaschuk both offer their end-of-campaign analysis at the end of the Saskatchewan NDP's leadership race.

On poison pills

I've already pointed out the absurdity of Gordon Campbell anti-NDP acolyte Joyce Murray pretending to run as a pan-progressive candidate in the Libs' leadership race. But if we needed any more indication that she can't be taken seriously, Tim Harper provides it by looking at the fine print of her "cooperation" plan:

Under the Murray plan, seats held by the Conservatives in which the governing party received less than 50 per cent of the vote would be targeted for co-operation.

She would blend the 2008 and 2011 results, to eliminate any onetime anomalies. One such anomaly, she said, was the Jack Layton-led 2011 NDP conquest of Quebec.

Now, one of the main criticisms of strategic voting schemes has been their inevitable reliance on re-fighting the last war - with results ranging from ineffective to downright counterproductive.

But Murray apparently isn't satisfied with even that well-established level of failure. Instead, she's going a step further into the past, seeking to incorporate yet another layer of past (and outdated) data from the 2008 election in order to try to make her proposal palatable among supporters who apparently want to live in denial that the most recent federal election actually happened.

Moreover, she's explicitly declaring that a plan nominally aimed at expanding the number of progressive seats in Parliament will operate on the assumption that the largest actual grouping of such seats is an irrelevant "anomaly". (Not that the NDP's success in winning Quebec ridings from the Cons and Bloc would be subject to her cooperation plan in the first place - as in another familiar failing of strategic voting schemes, Murray doesn't seem to recognize that a viable coalition needs to hold and build on the seats it actually holds rather than simply assuming the rest of the election will proceed exactly like the previous one.)

Again, I normally wouldn't wade into another party's leadership campaign. But a candidate trying to run on cross-party cooperation can't expect to avoid questions as to whether her plan represents a slap in the face rather than an outstretched hand. And Murray's desire to dismiss the 2011 election and the enduring growth of the NDP falls squarely into the former category - meaning that anybody seeking a standard-bearer for a progressive coalition needs to look elsewhere.

Sunday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Ian Lovett reports on the use of "capital appreciation bonds" in California to ensure that future generations pay an inflated price to private-sector developers for infrastructure today.

- Justin Ling's review of Joyce Murray's message about electoral non-competition pacts is well worth a read - but I'll particularly highlight this part:

Do you want Stephen Harper to be defeated in the next federal election?

Alright, we’re already off to a rocky start.

Politics of negation is dangerous, ugly, and unfortunately rears its ugly head very often in leadership campaigns.

“Elect me and I’ll stop [gay marriage/abortion/separatists/Toronto elitists]” has long between a rhetorical sledgehammer that’s good at getting gut reaction from ignorant people. Nothing more.

So when Joyce Murray asks me if I want Stephen Harper to be defeated, my immediate answer is ‘no’ — I want a government that, if possible, is more competent than our current one. Everyone should want that. Murray, like Trudeau or Garneau, should be making a case that she can do that. Not offering an Ocean’s Eleven caper on how to dupe the prime minister.

- But of course, there's loads of room for improvement on the government we're currently stuck with. And on that front, Steven Shrybman points out just the latest example in commenting on Harper's dubious assertion that his party's misleading robocalls weren't in breach of CRTC regulations, while Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault laments the fact that the Cons are trampling on access to information more and more as their stay in office drags on.

- Herbert Gans discusses how the U.S. media can contribute to genuine democratic debate far better than it currently does. And Rick Salutin laments the state of the CBC in having fallen into the same infotainment format as other broadcasters:

The gold standard for anchors was the U.S.’s Walter Cronkite. He was ready to stand up against the state and the flow and was solid as the bronze statue of the American revolutionary minuteman who stood “by the rude bridge that spanned the flood/ His flag to April’s breeze unfurled.” He had rhetoric and a voice to accompany it: “All things are as they were then except — You Are There.” When president Lyndon Johnson heard Cronkite turn against the Vietnam War, he said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.” Compared to Cronkite, Mansbridge isn’t an icon, he’s a barometer.

He’s happily gone with the flow — and the pressure. CBC has become numero uno for crime stories, weather coverage (today’s snow), product launches, celebrities and awards gossip. None of this is new, or news, and CBC itself doesn’t contest the point. The penny story was another example but the one that probably propelled me into this anchor obit was their infinite overkill on the new BlackBerry. (To give CBC radio its due, Carol Off did an item about that on As It Happens.) Also, to be clear, the Z10 drowned in pseudo-journalism everywhere. That’s my point: why have a public broadcaster if it duplicates everybody else’s obsessions? Nor do I want to romanticize the old CBC news. It was pompous and often misleading. But at least it distorted stories I cared about.

- Finally, Murray Mandryk rightly recognizes the significance of Jack Mintz' report on Saskatchewan's incoherent potash royalty structure.

On dubious partners

I've mostly avoided commenting on the federal Libs' leadership race based on the need for the party's own membership (and supportership in this case) to decide on a future direction for itself. But with one of the candidates explicitly running on a platform of cross-party dealings, I'd think there's some room to analyze whether she has much prospect of reaching out to other parties.

Which brings us to this:

With one lonely exception, the top tier of contenders for the Liberal helm has veered sharply to the right, much to the private consternation of some of the stalwarts of the party's once-influential left wing.

"All I'm hearing is we're going down the Reagan/Thatcher slipstream," despairs one prominent veteran Liberal.

"I don't believe that the way you're going to offer an alternative (to the Harper Conservatives) is to be a pseudo-Tory."
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Among the top tier contenders, so far only Vancouver MP Joyce Murray has staked out turf on the left. She's an ardent environmentalist, favours a carbon tax, opposes pipelines through B.C. and supports full legalization of marijuana. She also advocates co-operation with the NDP and Greens in the next election in ridings where a united progressive front could defeat the Conservatives.

So what's wrong with this picture? Well, I'll point out a couple of obvious concerns with Murray as a standard-bearer for left-leaning and pro-cooperation Lib supporters.

Murray's first political involvement came at the provincial level in British Columbia - where she was apparently perfectly comfortable teaming up with federal Conservatives in Gordon Campbell's "free enterprise coalition" for the purpose of defeating the NDP. Which means any claim that she's now committed to joining with the NDP to defeat Conservatives would represent a complete turnaround from her values when she first entered politics.

And before she was elected as an MP in Vancouver Quadra, Murray first took a run at New Westminster-Coquitlam - a riding where the Libs stood in third place even as they clung to power nationally, and where a slightly more successful attempt to pursue progressive votes on her part might well have allowed Con MP Paul Forseth to hold onto the seat against an ultimately successful challenge from the NDP's Dawn Black.

Moreover, during her stint in B.C.'s cabinet, Murray formed part of the Campbell government which  passed multiple unconstitutional laws to attack workers and slashed the public sector, while at the same time running up the provincial debt in order to hand tax goodies to high-income individuals and the corporate sector based on the false promise that economic benefits would result. So she doesn't have much basis to claim principled disagreement with the Harper Cons on the economic policy front. And her own record as the minister who was happy to eliminate "environment" from her own title doesn't exactly serve as a source of confidence either.

In summary, one could hardly design a candidate with less claim to have practiced what Murray is now preaching: her past political choices are utterly antithetical to the theme of cooperation to defeat the right, and her stint in provincial government makes for a better fit with the Tea Party than a progressive party. And Lib leadership voters wanting to see cross-party cooperation may want to look for an alternative candidate who won't be quite so toxic to potential progressive allies.