Open issues

The Globe and Mail's coverage of the latest shift in Strategic Counsel's poll of public concerns focuses on the problems caused for the Libs by the fact that the environment has dropped to #3 on the list of the most pressing issues facing Canada. But it's worth noting that the three main concerns seem to offer three different issues of roughly equal concern - each of which can easily be linked primarily to one of the national parties:

As the cost of filling the tank hits uncharted heights – and is predicted to go even higher – a wide-ranging survey conducted by the Strategic Counsel for The Globe and Mail and CTV suggests energy prices are on par with the sagging economy when it comes to Canadians' worries.

The environment, last year's top issue, has been pushed to No. 3, with just 16 per cent of Canadians surveyed saying they now consider it their primary concern...

In Canada, 18 per cent of respondents said the rising cost of gas was the most important issue. That was equal to the percentage in this country who named the economy as their No. 1 concern. In the past three years, gas prices have rarely been mentioned by people surveyed by the Strategic Counsel; the highest number was 4 per cent in July of 2006.

The article doesn't discuss the effect of gas prices and the economy taking over the top two spots. But the difference between respondents more concerned with one rather than the other might also track potential voter pools for the NDP and the Cons.

After all, the Harper government's declaration that it isn't interested in dealing with fuel prices and other increasing costs of living to the extent they're cause by "market forces" would seem to leave the field wide open for the NDP to win over voters who rank gas prices as the primary concern. And given that a similar focus seems to already be working for the B.C. NDP, there's every reason for the federal party to figure it's best served keeping up the same focus.

Meanwhile, all concerns about plausibility aside, the Cons have tried to turn economic management into an area of strength, particularly based on their choice of attacks on the Libs' carbon tax scheme.

All of which suggests that the current parity in the top three issues may be matched by a similar level of opportunity for each of the parties to grab hold of the issue which favours it most. And if we're indeed headed for a fall election, it wouldn't be surprising to see the party which most effectively carries out that task winning the most support as a result.

Mind you, none of the party links will go without at least some challenge. The NDP will of course point its comparative track record on the environment, the "Tory times are tough times" line figures to be a difficult one for Harper to answer in trying to run on economic management, and the Cons have tried at least somewhat to take on the NDP's concern with gas prices.

But there's little indication so far that any of the parties have managed to prevent the others from branding themselves based on the three top issues of concern. And from here on in, the smart play looks to be for each party to push its own issue to the forefront, rather than getting caught up trying to challenge opponents' credibility on the others.

Never enough now

Shorter Macleans response to the Canadian Human Rights Commission's dismissal of a complaint against it:
Sure, it's well and good that we were found to be on the right side of the law. But is it really too much to ask that someone declare us to be above the law altogether?

On secrets and lies

Shorter Maxime Bernier, trying to explain how a minister responsible for some of Canada's most sensitive information could possibly be ignorant of Julie Couillard's past:
Infiltrator? Why, I hardly even knew 'er!

On notice

Talking Points Memo's David Kurtz points out the latest sign of the Bush administration's habit of running the U.S. government like a small-time scam operation. This time, the White House decided to avoid an analysis which the Supreme Court ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to provide by refusing to open the e-mail which enclosed it - leaving the message in "e-mail limbo, without official status".

What I have to wonder is just how much further Bushco will travel down that path by the beginning of next year. Will attempts to serve habeas corpus applications on behalf of Guantanamo detainees be met with "We're sorry, the United States of America moved and didn't leave a forwarding address"? Or will Bushco decide that its "inherent jurisdiction" includes the ability to refuse to receive news that it's time to leave office in 2009?

A well-defined role

As part of her entertaining live-blogging of the Cons' latest Cabinet shuffle, Kady O'Malley wonders whether James Moore's promotion to a Secretary of State position means that he'll no longer be the Cons' attack dog on the Cadscam file. But I'd think that his new responsibility for Official Languages is entirely in keeping with his Cadscam role. After all, what position could possibly give Moore a better platform to continue his longstanding push to drain the words "financial considerations" of their normal English meaning?

On soft support

For all the discussion that the Harris-Decima poll on Canadian attitudes toward a carbon tax has spawned, I'm surprised one point seems to have slipped through the cracks. Based on the poll's party breakdown, the second-lowest support for a carbon tax was found...among Green Party voters, with under half indicating their approval.

This after the Greens have been flogging the carbon tax issue for years, and with Elizabeth May calling for three times the level of tax being pushed by the Libs.

Now, I'm not aware of any particular groundswell among the Greens' candidates or supporters to reverse course on the carbon tax itself. So the issue doesn't figure to be one which will actually tear apart what party structure May may have cobbled together.

But it's still striking that the Greens' current "supporters" aren't any more likely than voters in general to agree with its signature policy. And that has to offer reason to think that the Greens' current support levels are based more on vote parking than on any agreement with (or even awareness of) the party's direction.

Worth debating

In the wake of Stephane Dion's challenge to Stephen Harper to a debate over the Libs' carbon tax proposal, it's worth wondering whether the same thing will happen as did last time a similar one-on-one challenge was issued - and if the NDP is developing its reponse accordingly.

Remember that in the 2006 election campaign, Gilles Duceppe demanded a debate with Paul Martin over Quebec sovereignty. But when Martin refused, Harper offered to debate Duceppe instead...which sapped much of the momentum which Duceppe figured to have won from his initial challenge, and likely formed at least some of the basis for the Cons' eventual gains in Quebec.

In that case, I criticized Harper for fanning the flames of separatism - and that assessment holds true even though the greatest downsides of the offer didn't materialize. But on an issue which doesn't carry the same danger of blowing the country apart, there's every reason for Jack Layton to look to take his role in the discussion by offering to speak on behalf of Canadians who don't support the carbon tax in a debate against its leading proponent.

Of course, Harper hasn't yet provided a direct response to Dion's challenge. But Harper hasn't shown any interest in the concept of "adult" debate in any event, and there isn't much reason to think he'll want to take on a debate where he - like Martin during the election campaign - would have virtually nothing to gain and everything to lose by accepting the offer. Which means that the hints that Harper isn't interested figure to accurately reflect the likely response.

In contrast, if Layton were to offer a debate with Dion, both parties would obviously have plenty to gain. The Libs would win public exposure for their policy centrepiece, and indeed be able to do so in a debate against an opponent which wouldn't tend toward the Cons' strategy of distortions and distractions. And Dion would also receive sorely-needed training for election debates to come.

Meanwhile, the NDP would both get to defend its own environmental bona fides against the current wave of Red Green attacks, and receive an ideal opportunity to contrast itself against the Libs as the main opposition to Harper. And of course the media attention surrounding the debate wouldn't hurt either.

But what if the Red Greens tried to turn the tables on Layton? Even if the Libs declined and the Greens were to try to take the same process a step further by offering up their own challenge, that could well be something the NDP will be willing to accept to win some media coverage for its policies which don't often receive the attention they deserve.

Of course, there are risks involved in any debate. But for the NDP, this looks to be an example where the upside would far outweigh the dangers...making this one challenge that Layton should be eager to present.

Update: As Cameron points out, Dion has pre-emptively declared that he isn't interested in debating anybody other than Harper. While Cameron describes it as a sign of arrogance, I'll suggest it's more a matter of weakness: apparently Dion doesn't think his green credentials can stand up to a challenge from anybody but a party where climate change denial is still probably the majority view.

On dangerous mining

The CP reports that as part of their effort to challenge a salary increase for federal judges, Rob Nicholson's Justice Department required the Canada Revenue Agency to provide tax return information about judges appointed since 1995. But while today's story is disturbing enough on its own, I have to wonder whether this is anything but the tip of the iceberg in what information the Cons have squeezed out of the CRA to further their political agenda.

The CP describes the Cons' rationale for demanding the information as follows:

To buttress its position that salaries for federal judges are generally higher than the income they earned as lawyers in private and public practice, the Justice Department took the unprecedented step of giving the Canada Revenue Agency a list of the names of 627 judges the federal cabinet appointed to the bench between 1995 and 2007.

The agency was able to match 567 of those judges to their tax records as lawyers, and provided the Justice Department with an aggregated version of the information, with no names attached. A consultant used the data to calculate what the department claimed was an indication of the average increases in salaries and benefits lawyers received after they became judges.

Darren Eke, a spokesman for Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, issued a brief statement Sunday insisting the government had done nothing wrong.

"Our government respected the independence of the commission in its work and surely did not interfere at any point," said Eke. "To imply otherwise is simply false."

The conclusions reached by the federally hired consultant who analysed the tax information were vociferously challenged by Bienvenu and the judges' data expert.

In letters and submissions during the final stages of the salary deliberations, prominent lawyers the Justice Department retained to settle the conflict argued it was impossible to link the aggregated version of the tax data with the identities of judges whose income was scrutinized.

"The government, outside of CRA itself, and in particular the Department of Justice for purposes of this commission, had no access to the underlying data (the income tax returns)," wrote Neil Finkelstein and Catherine Began Flood.

They acknowledged access that could identify taxpayers is "prohibited by law." The two lawyers, and assistant deputy attorney general Donald Rennie, argued CRA routinely provides anonymous information about professional groups or occupations of taxpayers on an aggregated basis.

From the story, it seems clear by implication that the Cons don't see any problem at all with ordering the CRA to provide them with aggregate information. But let's consider how that kind of information could be misused.

Even to the extent that any request is limited by profession, it's not hard to see how the Cons could use information about income levels to their advantage by similarly demanding aggregated data. Think how useful it might be for the Cons' political operatives to target their fund-raising drives with insider information about which professions are seeing increased income, or a drop in average political donations which might signal room to donate more money.

And the problem only gets worse if the Cons see themselves as entitled to submit any list of names to the CRA for a similar aggregate report, rather than being limited to professions. Want to know whether patronage in a riding is hitting the mark? A simple printout of aggregate income information for all party members within that riding would answer that question in a second. Or aggregate reports could work wonders in further refining a set of demographic classifications - while again providing far more relevant information about who has money available, and who's most likely to be interested in contributing to a political party.

What's worse, it's worth being at least somewhat skeptical as to whether personal information in general - or particularly the type of information being dealt with in this case - is necessarily as anonymous as it seems. While the CRA's data wouldn't itself disclose names or even individual data, it's not at all unlikely that the information can be linked to other data to identify the individuals involved.

For an obvious example in this case, consider what would could be done with aggregated information about how much money the judges in question donated to political parties. The Cons would be able to cross-check the donations by those same judges which have been publicly disclosed against the total amount reported by the CRA to figure out with at least some certainty which ones were - and weren't - included in the report. And enough linked requests using some or all of the same pool of names could theoretically enable a party to reverse-engineer the full tax returns involved without ever technically receiving "identifiable" information in a single report.

Of course, it's not clear that the Cons have indeed crossed the line between information being used for governmental purposes and that which is made available for their partisan use. But in light of their efforts to get there in the past, it's awfully difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt. Which means that both the affected judges in particular and Canadians in general may have yet another reason to worry about how the Cons are using the trappings of power.

On national interests

Shorter John Ibbitson:
As far as I'm concerned, Canadians should see a third Bush term as the best hope of reducing the border paranoia stoked by Bush and his party during the previous two.

Timing is everything

The Citizen reports on what exactly the Cons managed to accomplish by filibustering the Ethics Committee in its attempts to investigate Conadscam. And the timing of the hearings figures to offer a strong example of why the Cons' style of obstructionism can easily come back to haunt a party:

A Commons committee plans to hold rare summer hearings into alleged violations of Canada's election laws by the Conservatives after a months-long Tory filibuster of the plan ended before Parliament shut down yesterday.

Opposition MPs, who form a majority on the ethics committee, voted late yesterday to open hearings into a scheme under which the Conservatives allegedly transferred money for advertising in and out of local ridings in the final days of the 2006 election in a bid to get around national campaign spending limits.

New Democrat MP Pat Martin said he expects the hearings to begin in late July with Elections Canada officials as the first witnesses. The committee also wants to hear testimony from ministers and others who are alleged to have been part of the scheme, he said.

"We really can't allow another election to take place until this action is either clarified or stopped because clearly it's a recipe for exceeding the spending limits if it's allowed to continue," said Mr. Martin, a member of the committee.

Now, if the Cons had simply allowed the committee to do its work this spring, it's likely that the hearings would already be done with. And in light of the other activity in Ottawa - including the Libs' capitulations in the House of Commons, the usual flow of legislation, and the news coming from other committees - it seems relatively likely that the hearings could have been lost in the shuffle, or at least subject to relatively limited exposure.

But now, the hearings will take place at a time when the political scene is otherwise silent. By the time the committee starts sitting again in late July, stories about the leaders' time on the barbecue circuit will be growing old, meaning that the Conadscam hearings should be timed just right to become the dominant political story of the summer. And it's hard to see what the Cons could have in their back pocket to deflect attention for more than a day or so at a time.

Mind you, there's always the option of proroguing Parliament before the hearings start. But especially given that any speculation about prorogation has focused on the Cons' desire to hold off on a fall sitting until after their November policy convention, that course of action could leave the Cons and the country in serious trouble if any crisis demands Parliamentary intervention in the meantime - not to mention undercutting the claims of Parliamentary privilege which Con MPs are currently using to avoid having to avoid the courts. And there could hardly be a more sure signal that the Cons are scared to death of Conadscam than for them to put Parliament as a whole on hold solely to avoid having to answer for their actions.

As a result, the Cons' attempt to suppress any talk about Conadscam seems only to have resulted in committee hearings taking place when they'll raise the profile of the scandal the most. And by the time the hearings are done, the Cons may very well end up wishing they hadn't stonewalled when they still had the chance to cooperate.

On high-risk maneuvers

When word first came out about the Libs' planned carbon tax, my comment was that the Libs would be best served to make it clear that their plan wouldn't in fact claim to somehow benefit everybody (and particularly those who are most affected by increased fuel prices). The strategy with the best chance of dividing and conquering the Cons' territory would have seen the Libs recognize who's likely to gain and lose under their plan, looking to push a large class of clear winners - particularly urban voters who already live a lower-emission lifestyle - into the Libs' column, while setting up the Cons to also lose ground to the NDP by ensuring that those who lose out would be no more pleased with the Cons' stance on current fuel prices than with the carbon tax.

Unfortunately, the Libs are instead pretending to be all things to all people. And the result doesn't look to be a good one for either the Libs as a party, or for the likelihood of taking down the Harper government:

Dion will claim most Canadians – particularly low-income earners, the elderly and rural residents – would get back more in tax savings than they would be paying in higher energy costs under his "green" economic blueprint, sources say...

Sources said the plan will provide special assistance for rural residents, the elderly, natives and others who might feel the impact of higher energy prices disproportionately. To help protect low-income earners from the rising costs of fuel and food, a Liberal government would bring in more "refundable" tax credits, which produce payments for those who don't have enough income to pay taxes.

It's fair enough to say that the plan might have to attempt to account for disproportionately affected Canadians to at least some extent. But the Libs' attempt to claim that Canadians already hard hit by high fuel prices will actually benefit from their plan looks awfully dangerous.

After all, a simpler plan which didn't claim to overcompensate for its own aim at reducing emissions would have led to a far easier sales pitch. Rather than having to deliver what are bound to be contradictory messages to the effect that disparate and contrasting types of voters would all magically benefit from their plan, they'd instead be able to take a consistent stance about what their plan would do.

And it's not as if the Libs couldn't have defended that type of move on principle. Given that the entire carbon tax scheme is based on the premise that greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced, surely the argument could be made that that it's fair to reward those who have made efforts to avoid greenhouse gas emissions at some cost to those who haven't.

Instead, the Libs are going out of their way to avoid admitting that anybody stands to lose out. And if they're not willing to acknowledge who's going to draw the short end of the stick under what's supposed to be a significant societal shift, then it'll be far easier for Harper to sow doubt that anybody will actually benefit from the plan either - which means that the Libs will have to work harder just to defend their current turf.

Mind you, it's not hard to see what the perceived upside of the strategy might be. After all, any clear dividing line between winners and losers under the plan would likely create enough of the latter to effectively rule out a Lib majority. In contrast, the groups singled out as beneficiaries of largesse under the shifting scheme are ones where the Libs probably do have room to gain enough votes to get near a majority if all else breaks in their favour - and if they're able to deliver a spectacularly effective campaign to avoid the contradictions in their own message.

But there's the rub. There's no apparent reason to think that Dion personally is anywhere near up to the game of political whack-a-mole which he's being asked to play: so far he's had trouble selling even simple messages, which makes it highly doubtful that he can manage to convince contrasting groups of voters that they're all on the right side of the carbon tax scheme. And any failed attempt to do so figures only to test the limits of whether his public perception can fall even further, as his list of faults would expand to include blatantly dishonest pandering.

In sum, faced with a choice between a consistent plan which would present the best opportunity to take down the Cons, and an all-or-nothing gambit which gives Harper a far better chance of both maintaining power and winning a majority, the Libs seem to have decided on the latter. And if that decision proves as dangerous as it looks now, then the Libs' willingness to prop up the Cons over the past year may be the least of the gifts they ultimately wind up giving to Harper's conservative crusade.

On costly generation

It's truly stunning how media coverage of the Wall government's plan to pour its efforts into a nuclear reactor in Saskatchewan has utterly failed to note the likelihood that nuclear energy will actually be far more expensive than alternatives. (A rare exception, though without a clear discussion of the costs involved, is Murray Mandryk's column today.)

With that in mind, let's take a look at how the respective costs look to line up at the moment.

Here's the Globe and Mail's discussion of the expected costs associated with Ontario's next wave of nuclear reactors:

When the government first received advice in 2005 about its power-supply system, the Ontario Power Authority was assuming nuclear construction costs of $2,600 per kilowatt or $2.6-billion for a 1,000-megawatt reactor. It is to dream. Now, a U.S. industry group, the Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute, is saying that the figure is at least $3,500 per kilowatt and this might even be a low ball.

Last fall, for example, Moody's Investors Service said new reactors could cost as much as $6,000 per kilowatt. The company said this was "only marginally better than a guess," but this spring, Florida Light and Power proposed building new units at a cost of up to $8,000 per kilowatt or $12-billion per reactor.

Likewise, here's Salon's coverage of new nuclear power generation in the U.S.:

(B)y mid-2007, a Keystone report, funded in part by the nuclear industry and NEI, estimated overnight (construction) costs at $3,000 per kilowatt, which, with interest, equals $3,600 to $4,000 per kilowatt. The report notes, "The power isn't cheap: 8.3 to 11.1 cents per kilowatt hour." That's not cheap, when you consider that in December 2007, retail prices in this country averaged 8.9 cents per kilowatt-hour.

By way of comparison, let's take a look at Natural Resources Canada's estimates for the cost of wind power production:

Modern wind turbine generators cost between $1500 and $2000 per kilowatt for wind farms that use multiple-unit arrays of large machines. Smaller individual units cost up to $3000 per kilowatt. In good wind areas, the costs of generating electricity range between five and ten cents per kilowatt hour. That cost is somewhat higher than the costs associated with an electrical facility, but wind energy costs are decreasing every year, whereas most conventional generation costs continue to increase.

So even if the Sask Party's ultimate goal were merely to pour its money into as much electrical generation as possible either for export or as a basis for future development, there's little reason to believe that nuclear power would actually be the best way of accomplishing that.

So what else is at play? Well, Mandryk's column also catches another point which seems to have been largely missed elsewhere:

Cheveldayoff announced his government was calling for proposals on private-sector electrical generation because "We believe not every dollar risked in power generation in Saskatchewan should be a government dollar."

While such a statement is misleading in that it ignores co-generation that's already taking place, it likely does reflect the Sask Party's intentions. Rather than making decisions about Saskatchewan's energy future based on cost efficiency, environmental merits, or any other factor which actually should matter, Wall's government is simply looking to turn as much generation over to the private sector as it possibly can. And nuclear reactors figure to be the largest of the possible privately-funded megaprojects.

Needless to say, Bruce Power has to be happy with that direction. But for Saskatchewan residents in general - particularly those who took Wall at face value in his assurances that the Crowns would at least be permitted to keep carrying out their core functions - this is the clearest indication yet that the Sask Party's goals couldn't be further from their own.

On rough landings

Another prime example of Conservative economic philosophy at work: if you just ignore the law in order to give big business everything it wants, it's sure to reward you with good news in return.

1 Tips on a Better Writing

Pop quiz: choose the best explanation for how the Libs' 50 Tips on a Greener Living was written (yes, that's the actual title):
(a) For lack of original ideas, consists entirely of tips taken from other sources, then translated to and from several other languages using Babel Fish
(b) Written by the four-year-old younger brother of the six-year-old who wrote the Cons' Oily the Splot attack ads
(c) By coincidence, the 11 caucus members capable of proofreading were the same MPs allowed to vote the day it was put together
(d) Editing budget blown on beer and popcorn
(e) Entire document transcribed verbatim from Stephane Dion

Not even trying

It seems so long ago that Stephen Harper's Cons could be bothered to come up with relatively creative (if implausible) excuses when they were caught doing something wrong. But it looks like they've now given up the attempt in favour of simple form responses.

Here's two separate ministerial responses to the Star's investigation into Con travel expenses:

Late Friday, (Gary Lunn's) spokesperson Bernadette Murphy issued this response: "Minister Lunn travels for government business, and taxpayers did not and do not pay for him to attend political events."...

"Minister Hearn travels for government business, and taxpayers did not pay for him to attend political events," Outhouse said.

Which only makes this part all the more comical:

Prentice's staff were asked about several of his trips and said Friday they are working on their response.

Who wants to wager as to what Prentice travels for, and whether taxpayers paid for him to attend political events?

Meanwhile, lest anybody think that's the only example of stock responses being provided to the exclusion of any useful information, let's note that the Cons are once again pulling out the "clerical error" excuse for reports which showed public money being improperly spent.

While the Cons may once again be refusing to actually answer for what they've done, though, neither that fact nor the use of public money for partisan purposes deserves to go unchallenged. And based on their track record so far, no amount of scripted messaging should be able to prevent the Cons from facing the consequences of their actions.

On promising choices

The Pundits' Guide is back up and running with updates on candidate nominations. And the NDP's latest nomination - that of Richard Marois in Saint Lambert - looks like a positive sign for a few reasons.

First, as Pundits' Guide notes, Marois is merely the latest addition to a group of NDP candidates with extremely impressive environmental credentials. While it's enough of a plus just to have another strong voice on the issue, though, the timing is particularly significant.

After all, the Red Greens have spent the bulk of the past couple of weeks pretending that the NDP's recognition that a carbon tax isn't the only way to combat greenhouse gas emissions should affect its standing among environmentally-inclined voters. And there's little indication that they'll stop the mantra anytime soon. But Marois' addition to an already-strong slate of candidates offers a clear signal that those most concerned with the environment recognize that the NDP not only a viable option, but still the best choice to get their message out.

Second, the linked article from Point Sud notes that Marois was approached by "other political parties", but rejected both those advances and his own past involvement with the Bloc in order to run for the NDP.

From the wording of the article, it's not clear whether the Bloc itself was one of the parties which approached Marois. (That would make for a particularly striking choice, as Marois would then have chosen the NDP over a party which won the seat by over 20% in 2006.)

However, it does seem beyond doubt that multiple other parties tried to recruit Marois as well. And the NDP's success in bringing another sought-after figure into the fold can only bode well for its efforts in persuading both other star candidates, and ultimately voters.

Finally, there's Marois' own statement of why he chose the NDP over the competing parties:

(I)l a affirmé avoir fait son choix et considère que le seul moyen pour le Québec d'affaiblir les Conservateurs est de voter pour un parti qui peut aspirer au pouvoir.

While the message of needing to oppose the Cons is obviously one which the NDP will be looking to push in the province, it's especially interesting that Marois mentions the NDP's aspirations to form government as a specific reason to prefer it over other alternatives. And the more candidates decide that the NDP's potential to win power in the future is in fact a point in its favour, the more difficult it will be for other parties and the media alike to pretend Canadians don't have any choice beyond Harper's Cons and the party which has propped them up.

Of course, there's only so much that an individual candidate can do beyond a party's base level of support and degree of organization at the riding level. And while the NDP has obviously made strides in those areas as well, it remains to be seen whether it will be enough to win significantly more seats. But Marois' addition to the slate of candidates offers yet another indication that the NDP is gaining momentum.

Questionable motivations

Impolitical points out another interesting aspect of today's Bernier spin, as Con sources have tried to at least hint that Julie Couillard could have deliberately taken the documents which she later returned. But it's worth noting that any truth to that allegation would seem to invite an extensive investigation into the precise questions which the Cons have tried to label as irrelevant so far.

After all, that scenario would provide an obvious answer to the question of why Canadians should be concerned about Couillard's past. If Couillard's connections raised any possibility that she would have been interested in doing what the Cons seem to be alleging, then there's every need for answers about what the Cons knew about her background and why they chose to disregard any risks.

Moreover, while the new line seems aimed at shifting some blame away from Bernier by making Couillard out to be the villain, it's hard to see how the scenario looks any better for him. To date, the Cons' line has been that the lone reason for Bernier's resignation was his carelessness in leaving documents at Couillard's home on one occasion. And regardless of any nefarious motivations involved, Bernier's document management looks to be in issue: it would seemingly be a serious problem whether he left the documents behind himself, or merely didn't notice they were missing after they were taken.

But the latest allegations would also call into question Bernier's personal judgment throughout his involvement with Couillard. And that would lead directly into questions about how the relationship between the two developed, why Bernier didn't notice anything amiss, and whether any other documents were compromised.

My guess is that the Cons will have little choice but to shift back to their original line in order to minimize the type of investigation needed. But if they really plan to try to discredit Couillard by insinuating that she may have been out to manipulate Bernier all along, then they'll have to face plenty of questions about why they didn't show any of the same suspicion when Couillard actually had access to sensitive information.

An incredible witness

Shorter David Frum:
I can't believe a congressional subcommittee was anything less than bowled over by my attempts to minimize the harm Bushco has done to the U.S.' international reputation. Why, I nearly brought myself to tears.

Untrustworthy

This time last month, Maxime Bernier was Stephen Harper's hand-picked emissary to represent Canada's interests to the world. Now, the Cons apparently don't even trust him to say for himself that he has no useful information about the circumstances of his ouster from cabinet:

Conservative MP Maxime Bernier did not know he left classified documents at the home of former girlfriend Julie Couillard in April and has no memory of the mistake that cost him his job as foreign affairs minister, Conservative sources said yesterday.

The sources said Mr. Bernier will have little information to provide the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade review of the security breach.

“He doesn't remember forgetting them, that's the question,” one source said. “He doesn't know if he forgot them or if it's her who would have taken them. That's why he doesn't want to say anything and he's waiting for the review to do its work.”

Of course, given Bernier's track record it's easy to understand why the Cons would fear that he'll embarrass himself even in merely stating what he did and didn't know. But surely that obvious reason for concern only makes it all the more appalling that the Cons didn't see any problem having Bernier speak for Canada as a whole - nor anybody in their party more competent to do so.

Unbalanced

I won't go into detail about the Cons' copyright legislation for now, as Michael Geist and others are thoroughly eviscerating it already. But I'll take a moment to point out what strikes me as the most obvious sign of the bill's complete lack of balance between consumers and copyright owners.

The excuse for a personal-use exemption within C-61 is found in section 17, which provides for an extensive laundry list of factors which a consumer has to prove in order to be entitled to transfer a work to a different medium for their own use. Among those is a requirement that no "technological measures" be circumvented to enable the copying to take place.

Now, one could make the case that consumers have a choice as to what works to buy, such that anybody concerned about being able to make use of the personal use exemption in order to copy works to a different medium can simply make sure not to buy protected works.

But that depends on some information being available as to what technological measures are - and aren't - included on a given work. And glaringly lacking from the bill is any obligation on distributors of copyrighted works to actually give notice of any technological measures before a consumer buys the work to begin with. (Indeed, the only part of the bill which discusses notice to consumers is with respect to media which collect a consumer's personal information - and even then the consumer's only remedy is statutory permission to try to find an otherwise-banned means of circumventing the technology involved to stop the data from being collected.)

As a result, consumers don't figure to have any opportunity to make an informed choice. Instead, distributors can put copy protection on a product without any warning, and then rely on the hidden restrictions to prevent the consumer from legally making even personal use of the work in another medium.

Now, that particular imbalance is far from the biggest issue with C-61: merely requiring some notice of any technological measures on a work would be a relatively small fix compared to the size of the general problems with the bill. But from what I can tell, it offers a perfect symbol for the mindset behind the bill: while consumers are faced with onerous obligations to avoid doing anything which could possibly infringe on copyright, the beneficiaries of those obligations aren't required to even let consumers know which of the restrictions apply before taking their money. Which is why C-61 shouldn't be headed anywhere other than back to the drawing board.

One of our least precious resources

Sure, any reasonable observer of yesterday's residential school apology would recognize that the driving force behind our national shame was a bigoted view that some cultures should be suppressed or outright eradicated in order to preserve what was then perceived as mainstream. But count on Blogging Tory Hunter to somehow respond to the apology by declaring that Canada ought to value its First Nations people primarily as an excuse to keep out immigrants.

Our continued national disgrace

Shorter Pierre Poilievre:
I can assure everybody that the Con government is just as sincere about today's statement on residential schools as it was about its last high-profile public apology.

Update: More from the CP. And lest the Cons try to distance themselves from Poilievre's comments, now might be a good time to remember their own description of Poilievre as "known to stick strictly and strongly to the party line".

Weakness in numbers

Blogging Horse lists the Lib MPs who were nowhere to be found when the Libs had an opportunity to put a stop to the Cons' immigration changes. But while it's worth pointing out the names involved, it's more important to remember which party it was that instructed them to avoid doing their jobs.

In that respect, it may be worth pointing out that for the budget vote - as for many of the other votes where the Libs have allowed the Cons to have their way - Dion seems to have left plenty of room for error. While only a dozen Libs were allowed to participate, the bill passed by a margin of 30 votes.

Which leads me to wonder why Dion has instructed dozens more MPs to stand down than would have been required based on the actual number of members in the House. Was it a matter of concern that the Cons would take a dive on the vote to bring themselves down? Or was it based on the risk that given a vote close enough to count, some of his own MPs who are agitating for an election might break ranks and topple Harper?

Foul polling

It's bad enough when pollsters limit Canadians' perceived choices by omission - for example, by only collecting full leadership data about Harper and Dion. But Decima Harris's latest poll for the CP not only does the same with questions about the parties involved, but manages to take a couple more steps in the wrong direction by actively pushing for results which would exclude the NDP, Greens and Bloc in favour of the false dichotomy - then spinning those results to say something they don't:

A polarized electorate may be tilting toward the federal Liberals at the expense of Stephen Harper's Conservative government, a new poll suggested Monday.

The Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey compared attitudes toward the Tories and Liberals in a head-to-head, two-party format. The telephone poll of just over 1,000 Canadians found that 44 per cent of respondents said they'd prefer a Liberal government after the next election, compared with 37 per cent who preferred the Conservatives...

Since the 2006 election, the Conservatives "have not been able to enlarge their tent," said Harris-Decima president Bruce Anderson - notwithstanding a generally strong economy, fat government coffers and the incumbent's opportunity to control the agenda.

"If anything, the leaning and the second-choice support profile of Canadians is disproportionately headed in the direction of the Liberals right now," said Anderson.

He said the poll, conducted Thursday through Sunday, was premised on the idea of a sharply polarized election campaign in which the ballot question becomes a stark choice between the incumbent Tories and the only practical alternative.

Now, it's bizarre enough that the poll would be premised on limiting what "practical alternatives" voters have.

But the analysis manages to get even worse than the poll itself. After all, the numbers don't deal at all with actual "leaning" or "second choice" support (which would be exactly where the parties other than the Cons and Libs would have a chance to make up ground). And the poll didn't ask whether respondents were actually willing to vote for either the Libs or Cons - merely which would be the least distasteful of the two if no other options existed.

Having already limited respondents' choices for no apparent reason, though, Anderson then manages to pretend that a question where the Libs (or Cons) could be labeled as the preferred option based on being a respondent's fourth choice out of five says anything about their actual potential to win votes.

Fortunately, there's no indication that voters are in fact prepared to accept the assumption that their only choices are Harper and the non-opposition which has propped him up. And with the Cons and Libs thoroughly botching their respective government and opposition roles, there should be plenty of reason for Canadians to decide that the only practical option is to demand better than both.

On creative ideas

Following up on yesterday's post about what the NDP can do to challenge the Cons on gas prices, I should note that the concept of a contest is hardly a new idea for the party. But the most recent similar effort looks to have left only a small amount of room for creativity. And as a party which is looking to take on the mantle of leading a united opposition against the Cons, the NDP should be looking for all kinds of different messages and ways of expressing them, rather than limiting the scope of its contests to a single, party-designed catchphrase and concept.

Of media and messages

Robert offers his suggestion as to what the NDP could do to stake out their own territory in reply to the Cons' carbon tax attacks on the Libs. And I agree entirely that the NDP should be pointing out at every opportunity that it's the Cons who have repeatedly declared their refusal to do anything about the same high gas prices which they now want to use a a weapon against the Libs.

But while I largely agree with the substance, I'd argue that there's also an important opportunity to criticize the Cons' method of delivering their ads. After all, the Cons' campaign seems to be based on the assumption that it's worth trying to repeat their attack on the Libs a few more times at the expense of further irritating Canadians who are already annoyed with the prices at the pumps.

Rather than choosing the same route, I'd think the NDP is probably best served aiming its message through less-intrusive media which attack not only the current high gas prices, but also the Cons' decision to nag consumers:

"It was bad enough when Stephen Harper told you he wouldn't do anything about high gas prices. But just when you thought filling up your car couldn't get any more painful, Harper's Conservatives started lecturing you as well.

We say you've suffered enough punishment at the pumps. Join Canada's NDP."

Of course, even better would be to focus less on top-down messaging and more on creative, individual involvement - or at least add a separate, grassroots-driven component to get people thinking and talking. Maybe a photo/video contest for individuals' ideas as to how to tell the Harper government that prices are too high?

Update: Meanwhile, Stageleft's suggestion as to how consumers can respond to the Cons' ads is definitely worth a look.

On pushback

It didn't receive the attention it probably deserved when first announced. But in another sign of just how politically toxic the federal Cons are at the moment, one of the provincial governments which had previously been seen as relatively friendly to Harper's regime is now organizing opposition to a corporate giveaway which the Cons would presumably prefer to keep away from the public eye:

New Brunswick is calling for a united front of provinces and territories to oppose Ottawa’s plan to extend the patent life on a number of popular and costly prescription medications.

Health Minister Mike Murphy said Thursday that generic drugs save provincial drug programs millions and he accused the federal Conservative government of bowing to the "greed" of the brand-name drug industry.

"There is only so much greed that can be supported with regard to this industry," he said in a statement in the New Brunswick legislature.

Murphy also described the move as "a cash grab" by big drug companies...

Murphy said New Brunswick spent $14.5 million last year on just three brand-name drugs for which generic versions may be delayed.

He said Ottawa’s new regulations, which would postpone some generics by at least two years, would cost the province an additional $4 million per year.

Murphy's current push looks to be aimed at building a united front at the provincial and territorial level. But there shouldn't be much doubt that there will be at least one national voice also working to keep prescription drug costs affordable - not just by pushing back against the latest attempt to hand out freebies to brand-name pharmaceutical manufacturers, but also by leading the charge for the universal access to prescription drugs which the provinces have already agreed to pursue.

While the NDP looks to have another opportunity to build connections at the provincial and territorial level, the effect for the Cons is just the opposite. Instead, the evergreening issue also offers yet another example of how the Cons' corporate giveaways are damaging the interests of Canada's provinces. And the less shy the provinces are about making that case, the more likely they'll be able to look forward to a federal government whose goals better match their own.

(H/t to contratianna at Babble.)

On alien concepts

Introducing the Libs' next generation of star candidate: not just a space cadet, but also wrong in law (warning: PDF).

Go figure

While it's always tempting the Cons' constant partisanship in kind, the most sure way to embarrass a government which is focused entirely on its opponents is to highlight its corresponding lack of basic knowledge about its own responsibilities. And as Aaron Wherry points out, Paul Dewar's request for information about the cost of the Afghanistan mission looks to have done just that when picked up by reporters:

Reporter: So can you give us a figure? How much is it costing us, say per month?
MacKay: Well, I’m not going to get into the specifics because we have added, as you know, additional equipment and there are additional procurements happening now in response to the recommendations of the Manley Committee that were endorsed by the House of Commons.
Moderator: One more question, folks.
Reporter: They’re saying you don’t have a cost, you don’t have a figure.
MacKay: Well, we do. Of course we do.
Reporter: Well what is it?
MacKay: Well, we have all kinds of figures.

And so they surely do - with different ones brought out at different times depending on whether their partisan goal for the moment is claim credit for pouring money into the military, or to minimize the cost of the war in an effort to reduce opposition to continued combat.

But what the Cons plainly lack - in assessing the cost of Afghanistan, as in far too many other files - is any basis in reality for their partisan puffery. And that's why when asked for a simple, accurate figure about the cost of their main foreign policy priority, the Cons can't even begin to answer the question.

Of course, the Cons are sure to strategize over the weekend about what number will reflect best on them, and put that forward that in an effort to defuse the immediate issue. But the even more fundamental problem is a government which doesn't see any value in basic, objective knowledge. And that can only be solved by removing the Cons from office at the earliest opportunity.

(Edit: fixed label.)

Choosing the messenger

Following up on yesterday's post about some of the more important remaining questions in Cadscam, I'll briefly take issue with one of Scott's underlying assumptions. While James Moore may be the talking head currently assigned to the file, there's no reason why he should be expected to deliver any of the relevant answers; instead, it's Stephen Harper alone who can actually provide any useful information if he chooses to do so.

After all, Moore isn't the plaintiff who's seeking to suppress Tom Zytaruk's recording of his conversation with Harper, and thus making the strategic choices Scott wonders about.

Moore wasn't privy to the conversation between Harper and Zytaruk, such as to be able to provide any explanation as to what context could possibly provide any justification for Harper's recorded words.

And Moore isn't the party leader who has apparently chosen to close ranks rather than ordering any investigation into his own candidate's sworn statement that two party representatives tried to bribe her husband.

Aside from anybody who can shed light as to who actually made the million-dollar insurance policy offer on May 17, 2005 that Dona Cadman has sworn to hearing about, nobody from the Cons other than Harper himself can possibly pretend to have anything relevant to say about the matter. And the more the Cons choose to present people who obviously have nothing useful to say as their public voices on the topic, the more reason there'll be to wonder what those in the know are hiding.

Open questions

While Scott has listed a few questions worth asking in light of Stephen Harper's injunction motion, the area I find particularly interesting arises from Dona Cadman's affidavit:

Prior to my meeting with Mr. Harper on September 9, 2005, I told Mr. Zytaruk that on May 17, 2005 my husband told me earlier that day two Conservative Party representatives had offered him a $1 million insurance policy. My husband never revealed the identities of these two people to me...It is my clear recollection that the date that my husband told me that he had received the offer of a $1 million insurance policy was May 17, 2005 and not May 19, 2005.

With that paragraph, Harper himself has put before a court sworn testimony to the effect that Chuck Cadman was offered an insurance policy by two Con representatives on May 17, 2005, and informed Dona Cadman of the offer that same day.

Now, it strikes me as highly doubtful that two Con representatives acting in concert would have approached Cadman without at least somebody else having some idea what was going on. But even if that's the case, Harper would be in the best position to encourage his party's operatives to speak up as to who offered what when. And he'd seemingly have a strong incentive to do so - lest his party otherwise continue to be represented by individuals who had in fact tried to bribe Cadman.

So who was it that made the visit on the 17th at which an insurance policy actually was offered (which Cadman so clearly remembers hearing about at the time)? Who else, if anybody, has known about the visit and said nothing about it? And why doesn't Harper seem the least bit concerned with figuring out who it was that made the offer on behalf of his party?

(Edit: fixed typos.)

Definitely one to watch

So let's get this straight: the single minister now being hyped as the Cons' last hope for competence in a major portfolio like Finance or Foreign Affairs...is the same one currently accomplishing so little in Industry that his department has nothing better to do than to repeatedly turn his personal Wikipedia page into fan fiction.

I suppose that might play well to Stephen Harper's obsession with image over substance. But for those of us who don't see Con self-promotion as the lone goal worth pursuing, is there any possible conclusion other than that the Cons would be in over their heads trying to run a lemonade stand?

On timing

So much for my theory that Stephen Harper might have wanted to get his injunction application out of the way quickly to ensure any damage was done with long before a possible election campaign, as the motion documents (posted by Stephen Taylor) indicate that the motion won't be argued until September. But if the motion wasn't enough of a long shot already, the delay figures to make it even less likely to succeed: how can Harper try to argue that an injunction is needed to prevent irreparable harm three months from now if the lack of one isn't a problem in the meantime?

On scofflaws

Taking yet another cue from their Bushco mentors, the Cons have announced that they believe themselves to be entitled to ignore laws which they don't like. In this case, it's Jack Layton's climate change bill, which has passed in the House of Commons, and looks set to become the law of the land soon:

The Conservative government says it will not be bound by a new climate change bill passed Wednesday afternoon by the House of Commons.

The private members legislation by NDP leader Jack Layton calls on Canada to set greenhouse gas reduction targets that are considerably deeper than what the Conservatives have proposed. Wednesday's vote came as Canada is engaged in international negotiations toward new global climate change targets that will kick in when the current Kyoto Protocol expires less than four years from now...

Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn said his government's 2020 target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent below 2006 levels is an aggressive yet realistic goal that will not change because of today's vote...

Mr. Layton's bill calls on Canada to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 and more than 80 per cent by 2050. It also calls on Ottawa to spell out interim targets for every five years between 2015 and 2050.

The bill passed the final House of Commons vote Wednesday afternoon 148 to 116. Mr. Layton signalled his thanks to the Bloc and Liberals afterward for sending the bill to the senate.

Now, it would be one thing if the Cons had tried to argue that the bill should be considered a confidence matter in its challenge to their weak reduction plans. And it's safe to say C-377 would never become law in that case - not just because the Libs would likely back down, but because in any event the resulting non-confidence vote in the House would presumably provoke an election before the Senate could pass the bill.

But rather than trying to use dubious-but-legal parliamentary tactics to determine whether or not the bill passes, the Cons have instead declared that they believe they're entitled to simply pretend it doesn't exist even when it's been passed democratically. Which offers yet another indication that the Cons' dedication to law and order stops when the law would be applied to them.

Risk and reward

While others are understandably scratching their heads as to what the Cons could possibly have been thinking in reigniting Cadscam, my impression is that there's a relatively obvious explanation. But that doesn't mean for a second that the move speaks anything but poorly to the Cons' motives.

In essence, the Cons' application for an injunction against any use of the tape looks like little more than buying a political lottery ticket. The cost of the effort falling on its face is likely relatively low: by choosing their timing in applying for the injunction, the Cons are betting that even if they take a momentary PR hit, the application will be long forgotten by the time any election rolls around.

(Note that the Cons' perception of safety may be just one more side effect of the Libs' telegraphing their political strategies, as a credible threat of a summer election might have made the risk far higher.)

In contrast, the Cons obviously recognize how powerful a message they might face based on Harper's words being used against him. And if the Cons were to hit the jackpot in their application, then they'd be able to go into the next election campaign without any fear of the Libs being able to make use of the recording.

Moreover, if Harper were able to successfully argue in the injunction application that the tape should be seen as unreliable, that would likely help to strengthen his position if he keeps up his lawsuit against the Libs. Indeed, strong enough language in an injunction decision might make it extremely difficult for the Libs to make use of the tape within the litigation - which could remove what otherwise looks to be a virtually inescapable need for Harper to personally testify as to the contents of the tape to have any hope of succeeding.

In sum, it seems relatively reasonable for the Cons to conclude that the chance to bolster their position when it counts made the application worth trying now. But what about the Cons' decision to call a press conference about it?

Well, that's entirely consistent with Harper's obsessive need to manage public appearances. The injunction application would almost surely be reported either way, and with the Cons making the first public announcement, they at least briefly placed the focus on alleged "doctoring" of the tape rather than either their attempt to stifle opposition, or the plain truth of what Harper was recorded saying.

Of course, it's in those two factors that the Cons' action - even if explicable based on the political risks and rewards involved - is itself a serious problem. If Harper genuinely sees himself as entitled to edit out of existence even his own words when those prove politically damaging, then it's hard to imagine what limit there could be to his willingness to suppress reality in the name of his political interests. And even in the face of the Cons' parade of scandals and gaffes, that may make for the single most important reason why a change in government is long overdue.

On market adjustments

Having already declared that they wouldn't be bothered to do anything about high fuel prices caused by "market forces", the Cons are now using the same excuse to deflect responsibility for yet another round of manufacturing job losses.

Now, it's not hard to see how the message might seem like a relatively easy way to escape a dangerous issue, particularly for a party which likely assumes that nobody will think to question the answer. But it's worth wondering whether the Cons may only encourage a stronger progressive counterbalance in the long run: if Canadians hear often enough that "market forces" are eroding their standard of living, won't there be all the more reason for them to conclude that they're best off challenging the all-too-common conventional wisdom that the market should trump all else?

On contempt

David Akin reports that the Cons are apparently refusing to allow any of their MPs to testify about the circumstances of Maxime Bernier's departure. But while the Cons are going to ever-more-comical lengths in trying to stonewall against investigation into what they've done wrong, this particular refusal to answer questions to looks to do far more harm than good for the Cons unless there's significantly more to the story than has gone public so far.

After all, however unlikely the Cons would be to offer any full account of what happened from their perspective, any appearance would at least allow them to try to repeat their own spin a few more times. But rather than taking the opportunity to rag the puck, the Cons are instead avoiding the whole process - meaning that the entire focus for now will be on the testimony of Julie Couillard, who's presumably not the first person they want put in the public eye.

And it's worth seeing as well whether the committee will seek to fill out its witness list with others who can provide insight into what happened without being under the Cons' partisan control. Presumably civil servants who don't hold the MP privilege being claimed by the Cons would be in at least as good a position as the cabinet ministers to describe both what's supposed to happen, and what actually did happen both during Bernier's tenure and at the time of his departure. And the more the opposition is able to get that story in front of the public, the more the Cons may end up wishing they'd taken the committee's invitation to appear.

On budget busters

Since its announcement in 2007, the Cons' auto feebate program has served as a monument to the Harper government's incompetence and warped sense of priorities. Ignoring both public and internal advice that the program was a woefully inefficient means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the Cons not only pushed ahead with the program but loaded it up with pork for maximum inefficiency.

Then, when it came time to actually pay out the promised rebates, Canadians found out that the Cons hadn't actually bothered to put their announcement into practice. Which means that when the Cons axed the program for years after 2008, it might have been tempting to breathe a sigh of relief that the damage was at least done with.

Unfortunately, though, the Cons can always find some way to make things even worse than they may have appeared. And the CP reports that the bad news is still rolling in, as the program managed to go far over budget for 2007:

Internal estimates from Transport Canada forecasted the federal eco-rebate program would go over budget by at least $37 million – and by as much as $65 million – in its first year alone.

The Conservative government's 2007 budget earmarked a total of $160 million over two years for the program.

The estimates show the department expected to spend between $117 million and $145 million in the first year of the two-year scheme.

It remains to be seen just how much worse matters get. But it speaks volumes about just how ludicrous the Cons' management of the feebate program has been that the best-case scenario may be if their earlier bungling (particularly in failing to pay out the rebates in 2007) pushes consumers to avoid making use of the rebate such as to limit the damage to the 2008 budget.

Irresponsible

Following hot on the heels of John Baird's attack on any attempt to actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the Cons are apparently confirming that their theme this week is "Screw The Environment". Shorter Con proposal to excuse companies for killing or maiming migratory birds:
The real tragedy in incidents like the death of 500 birds in a Syncrude tailings pond this spring is that somebody might be held responsible. But we're doing everything in our power to prevent that from happening.

On hot air

If the Cons were looking to draw fire for their neglect of the environment, they could hardly have done better than John Baird's message today. As the rest of Canada debates the relative merits of cap and trade systems and carbon taxes, the Cons have apparently decided to signal their distaste for either means of actually reducing emissions, instead picking a fight with both Ontario and Quebec over their efforts to put the former together.

Of course, the problems with the Cons needlessly attacking Ontario in particular have already been well documented - and adding Quebec into the picture can only help to lose the Cons votes in the two provinces where they most need to try to pick up seats to have any hope of a majority. But Baird seems to have taken the image of bashing central Canada several steps further by coupling his unwarranted criticisms of cap-and-trade with inexplicable praise for Alberta's no-cap, no-trade, no-tax, no-meaningful reduction excuse for a greenhouse gas emissions strategy.

As a result, Baird's position not only shows just how far the Cons are from the real debate over Canada's choices in dealing with climate change, but also reinforces the image of Harper's government as firmly in the pocket of the oilpatch rather than willing to even look at national interests. And the opposition parties will be happy to have that example to point out as an indication of why it's long past time to end the Cons' stay in power.

What we have here is a failure to communicate

Leftdog and Steve V, among others, have taken the time to point out that Lukiwski didn't even bother to respond to an invitation to this year's gay pride parade. But if we take a closer look at who Lukiwski may really have been apologizing to, his refusal to do anything to engage with the gay and lesbian community makes a lot more sense:

Let me conclude by saying that there is absolutely nothing I could say inside or outside of this assembly that would be an adequate apology to those people whom I have hurt. I deeply regret and I have deep remorse for my words of 17 years ago. I can assure you, Mr. Speaker, and all of my colleagues in this House that I will spend the rest of my career and my life trying to make up for those shameful comments.

Now, it's fair to say that if Lukiwski intended to make amends toward the gay and lesbian community, then he'd reasonably be expected to go out of his way to attend events like the gay pride parade - to say nothing of showing the common courtesy of responding to invitations or otherwise making the effort to talk to some of the groups who have reached out to him.

But note how careful Lukiwski was to avoid naming "those whom I have hurt", or saying what exactly he'd do to make up for the offence. If one looks at the "hurt" as referring instead to the political damage caused to the Cons by having part of their party's real mindset revealed, then Lukiwski has been a model of remorse - indeed, what better way to show one's penitence for allowing careless honesty to surface on tape than to hide away and keep one's mouth shut?

On detachment

Based on the abominable fiscal track records of right-wing governments in Canada, the claim that the Cons or other similar parties should be trusted as economic managers tends to be a laughable one at best. But if we needed any more reason to doubt the Cons' competence in even evaluating the country's economic conditions (let alone acting on them), it can be found in this week's headlines.

After all, reports this week indicated that economic perception and reality are both at low points. Yet rather than even recognizing the potential for a problem, the minister charged by the Cons to handle federal finances could only brush off the possibility that there's even a problem with addressing.

Of course, it's entirely possible that Flaherty has been isolated from economic reality by a party determined to believe in its own infallibility. But the larger the gap grows between what the Cons claim to see happening in the economy and what Canadians can observe for themselves, the more reason voters will have to want to replace Harper and company with somebody more attuned to what's actually happening around them.

No surprises

I, for one, couldn't be much less surprised to find out that one of the newest star American political analysts is also one of the leading figures in baseball's sabermetric movement. But is it too much to hope that the minds behind Hockey Analytics or Behind the Net could end up similarly revolutionizing the kind of information available in analyzing Canadian politics?

Contrasting strategies

The Guardian reports that in an effort to boost his image as a leader willing to listen, Gordon Brown has started responding to critical letters from the general public by calling up random writers to address their concerns. In related news, the Harper government is considering answering critical letters from the Canadian general public by calling up random writers to denounce them as Taliban-loving Communist sympathizers who hate Canada.

Properly classified

It's noteworthy enough that the Harper government's public perceptions are in a well-deserved free-fall - with satisfaction levels dropping 13 points over the last 6 months, and two-thirds of respondents recognizing that the Cons have done a bad job when it comes to accountability. But what does it say when even Sun Media can only classify news about the Cons under its "Crime" section?

On fabrications

The Star reports that the Cons continue to have just as much disdain for facts when it comes to relatively small issues the as they do with respect to their current scandals. This time, it's expense records that look to have been altered without any reasonable explanation to avoid the Star's criticism:

The Conservative government has twice altered expense records for international trips after the Star questioned their high cost.

The records in a publicly available website were changed – thousands of dollars removed in one case and a lengthy journey shortened in another – for trips by then-foreign affairs minister Maxime Bernier and Brian Jean, parliamentary secretary to the minister of transport...

In Bernier's case, the Star raised questions about a report on the Foreign Affairs website showing he spent $22,573 on airfare for a trip to Laos via Paris to attend a two-day conference last fall. The Star found he could have travelled there comfortably for $7,000.

Within a few days of the story's publication on May 16, the expense report on the website was changed. The airfare now reads $13,919. It's unclear why it was changed.

Bernier's former spokesperson, Neil Hrab, suggested a previous office manager in the minister's office had made a clerical error. Hrab would not release any documents and said the Star could make a request under the federal access-to-information legislation.

While Bernier's airfare mysteriously dropped, the $18,500 airfares of his "policy adviser" and "senior policy adviser" did not. Bernier resigned from cabinet this week.

Another series of expense reports questioned by the Star involved Jean, the Tory MP from Alberta, who is the parliamentary secretary to Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon. The Star raised Jean's 15-day trip to Paris last September for a five-day conference, the 23rd World Road Association Congress. Jean's flight was listed at $7,515, his accommodation at $4,969 and his meals at $1,412. Jean's assistant travelled with him on a much cheaper flight – $1,848 – and stayed for only eight days. Her expense report was not altered.

Several weeks ago, the Star asked the transport department why Jean took 15 days to attend a five-day conference in Paris. It took a while, but spokesperson Karine White said the "finance department" had made a clerical error. She said four days had inadvertently been added – on paper – to Jean's trip. It was 11 days and one involved an overnight flight.

The records on the website were changed immediately. The airfare remains the same; the dollar value of meals went up slightly; but the main change was that with fewer days on the trip, the per-night hotel cost for Jean rose from $355 to about $500 (hotel rates for Canadian government officials are typically discounted by about 25 per cent).

The most charitable possible interpretation is that the Cons were careless in reporting the listed expenses to the point where it took the Star's attention for them to actually set matters right. Which would itself offer plenty of reason for concern that the Cons' public disclosures are less than accurate at the best of times.

But particularly based on the Cons' refusal to provide any documentation to support either the original numbers or the altered ones, it looks equally possible that they simply revised the reports to include numbers which they figured would appear more acceptable. And if so, then a seemingly systematic policy of throwing poor explanations at the wall in hopes that something will stick would seem to offer ample reason to doubt anything the Cons have to say.

Grounds for dismissal

One of the most interesting questions surrounding Maxime Bernier's resignation is that of just what it takes to get booted out of the cabinet of a PM who seems utterly incapable of acknowledging error. Today, Jane Taber provides the answer - and not surprisingly, there doesn't appear to be any level of ministerial incompetence that the Cons won't accept if they can avoid paying too high a political price for it:

Mr. Bernier submitted his resignation Monday morning, after learning that his ex, Julie Couillard, had given a potentially damaging interview to the French-language TVA network stating that he was careless with confidential documents.

He was told to wait it out. Still, he was pulled out of meetings throughout the day and was absent from a meeting of the cabinet's priority and planning committee, the cabinet's most important and powerful committee.

The powers-that-be wanted to assess just how bad the interview by Ms. Couillard would be. The waiting game was all about media strategy.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper was to leave Monday night on a trip to Europe. A Bernier friend said the government didn't want its foreign affairs minister to be forced to step down just before the Prime Minister was about to set out on the world stage. Nor, however, did it want the whole thing to blow up while the Prime Minister was in the air.

"They [senior officials in the Prime Minister's Office] had anticipated that this was coming [the Couillard interview] and Bernier had said, 'Listen, I am ready to resign,' " the friend said. "And they had said to him, 'Don't do it yet. Let's just confirm that this is what is going to happen because we don't want this to blow up before Harper gets on a plane and goes to Europe.' "

In other words, the Cons weren't prepared to view any combination of Bernier's incompetence, his carelessness with classified documents (which Taber discusses in more detail), and the scandal surrounding Julie Couillard as providing sufficient reason to remove Bernier from the cabinet. Instead, it was only the calculation that firing Bernier would serve as better political damage control than continuing to lie in his defence that finally forced Harper to pull the trigger.

If there's any good news, it's that the combination of Bernier's departure and the reemergence of the NAFTA leak scandal looks to be serious enough to make any efforts at damage control ineffective. But the Bernier timeline offers ever more evidence that Harper isn't interested in assessing his cabinet on any basis other than his party's political benefit - which raises reason for suspicion that the scandals which have already gone public may only be the tip of the iceberg.

Update: More from Paul Wells.

On private decisions

Via Rabble, CUPE comments on both the problems with P3s in general, and the National Post's refusal to allow anybody who supports public ownership of public goods to balance out its own pro-P3 stance:

The subject of P3s has garnered increasing media attention in the past few years as more and more projects are pursued and as various concerns mount from all sides. All the while, CUPE has been identified as the country’s most prominent and credible opponent of P3s, by any standard. Yet our voice – and those of countless other P3 critics – is absent from the discourse currently perpetuated by the National Post.

The new justification for P3s is that they transfer risk from the public to the private sector which is the better risk manager, they say. P3 promoters use even more financial chicanery to justify this argument, but downplay the need for public bailouts when P3s fail. The UK government's $4 billion bailout after the Metronet P3 failure should be cause for alarm, but has been all but ignored here in Canada, like so many homegrown P3 failures. Besides, the recent sub-prime financial meltdown and the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper scandal demonstrate just how little faith we should have in the superiority of the private sector’s risk management.

P3s pose a threat to public services – no wonder the private sector is all over them.

But never mind that for now. Mind that any challenge of P3s was curiously kept from the National Post’s ‘report’ – perhaps because when we come after P3s, we come with the very facts the privatization lobby prefers to ignore.

It's worth remembering that it isn't only in the media that any sense of balance is currently lacking. Indeed, the Harper Cons' 2007 budget included over a billion dollars worth of funding specifically targeted for P3s, along with a requirement that other levels of government pay homage to the P3 concept before receiving a penny of federal infrastructure money.

From that starting point, it figures to be an uphill battle to point out the obvious problems associated with P3s - particularly when major media outlets are actively shutting out one side of the debate. But with the effectiveness of public services at stake, there's still a substantial need to raise awareness of the issue. And with luck, enough public reminders as to the importance of publicly-owned services will force even the likes of CanWest to acknowledge the serious pitfalls associated with a push toward P3s.

On talent pools

Shorter Jonathan Kay:
Maxime Bernier is living proof that our current elected government includes utterly unqualified and incompetent ministers. And as far as I'm concerned, the obvious solution is a wholesale transfer of responsibility to unelected appointees, rather than electing a government which actually considers intelligence and competence to be important.

Scratching the surface

For all the talk about Maxime Bernier's ignominious and long-overdue removal from cabinet, I'm surprised there doesn't seem to have been much comment on what the reason for his departure might have meant at the time:

Maxime Bernier has resigned as foreign affairs minister, after he acknowledged leaving sensitive government documents out in the open -- apparently at his former girlfriend's home.

Sources told CTV News the documents included classified information for last April's NATO summit in Romania. One sensitive document contained details about NATO's military strategy in Afghanistan.

Bernier learned that he had left behind the documents Monday night, but didn't tell Prime Minister Stephen Harper until Tuesday afternoon. He then resigned from his cabinet post...

Couillard told Quebec broadcaster TVA that the sensitive document had been left at her home in mid-April.

"Maxime came to my house and the document in question was left at my house," she said. "For now, what I can tell you is that the document made me feel very uncomfortable. I was referred to a top lawyer in that field, who told me ... what was the proper legal procedure (to return it)."

Now, it's difficult to take Bernier at face value in his claim not to have had any clue that he'd left the documents behind until this weekend. But it's still worth asking the question about what impact his leaving the documents behind would have had at the time.

After all, for Bernier to be telling the truth now, it would have to be true that in at least one major foreign summit, Stephen Harper's choice to represent Canada's interests was so clueless that he didn't manage to notice that he was lacking of what would seem to have been essential background documents. (Next up on the Wheel of Excuses - "When they said to look at the military strategy for Afghanistan, I thought they meant the lunch menu.")

And indeed, that would suggest that nobody else around him would have been observant enough to notice the problem either - since if anybody had noticed the materials were missing and raised the question of where they'd gone, there'd be no excuse for Bernier or anybody else to claim that today's news wasn't known earlier.

Of course, there's another alternative - being that the problem might have been at least suspected for some time but covered up. But even that alternative would involve at least as much incompetence as dishonesty, given that Couillard apparently had to figure out what to do with the documents for herself rather than being contacted by anybody retracing Bernier's steps.

Either way, it seems clear that the problems within the Cons' government go far beyond Bernier's carelessness alone. And Bernier's resignation should only be the beginning of what needs to be done to check on just how much damage he and his party have done.

Update: As Kady O'Malley notes, the story is in fact that the briefing notes were left at Couillard's home weeks after the actual NATO summit. Which would avoid some of the questions above, but raise an even larger one as to how that sequence of events could possibly be explained.

On alternatives

Leftdog highlights a pattern within the Cons where one MP hires a family member of another MP for constituency or ministerial work using parliamentary funds. And it's worth wondering whether the apparent nepotism is based more a desire to provide additional public funds to MPs and their families, or instead on a lack of other qualified members to fill the positions. Either way, though, the part of the story which most deserves to be pointed out is that at least one federal party doesn't allow the same type of practices within its ranks:

The hiring of family members is not a new phenomenon on Parliament Hill. In the early 1990s, two Progressive Conservative MPs were found to have employed each other's daughters, effectively skating around the prohibition of directly hiring children. An RCMP investigation cleared them of wrongdoing. More recently, then-Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien was accused of nepotism when his daughter, a lawyer, was appointed to a federal position on a 2010 Olympics organizing committee - an allegation his office rejected.

In Opposition, the Harper Conservatives railed against patronage and cronyism they claimed was endemic in the Liberal governments.

"They've been touters of public virtues and they do have that burden of having to be purer than Ceasar's wife," said Parliamentary expert Ned Franks, professor emeritus at Queen's University...

Manitoba New Democrat Pat Martin said his own son landed an eight-week summer job for another NDP MP in 1998. Two years later, then-leader Alexa McDonough intervened to stop an MP from hiring a colleague's relative and created a party policy against the practice, Martin said. He says he agrees with the approach.

"Nepotism and patronage are two of the same species," he said. "It's that who-you-know kind of politics that makes Canadians gag." While hiring other MPs' relatives may be allowed under House rules, it "doesn't pass the smell test," he said.

In other words, while the Cons railed against the Libs' cronyism in opposition, they've once again lost any concern for the misuse of the spoils of power now that they stand to enjoy them. And indeed at least a couple of their supporters have tried to draw specious distinctions as to why Con nepotism is entirely appropriate, or even criticize the fact that the story was even reported.

But while anybody hoping the Cons would do better than the Libs in the ethics department may have reason to be bitterly disappointed, that doesn't mean they have to be resigned to that level of politics.

After all, the NDP hasn't only pointed out the problems with funneling money to family members when other parties have done, but has also set the bar for itself at the level which it demands from its competitors. Which means that Canadian voters rightly cynical about the Cons and Libs can take heart that one federal party both stands by its ethical principles, and does more than than the bare minimum to keep its operations clean.

Truth in labelling

I suppose it was inevitable that some Con-friendly media outlets would try to pretend that Stephen Harper's labelling announcement this week would accomplish more than it actually will. Enter the Calgary Herald, which tries to argue that consumers should use country of origin as a proxy for safety in deciding what food to buy:

Imagine a parent who goes to a grocery store, picks up baby food labelled "Made in Canada," only to later discover the bottle was made in Canada, but the contents were provided and processed in a Third World country known for egregious health and safety violations.

Parents would be aghast to find out that the product fed to their child was from a region where food safety was nowhere near the Canadian standard, especially given one main reason they purchased the product was because they thought it was safe.

The reality of vastly different food inspection and safety standards around the world then means it makes perfect sense for the Stephen Harper government to update requirements on what food can be labelled as a product of Canada...

The new standards require that any label claiming a food product is a "Product of Canada" necessarily needs to have all or virtually all of its contents be Canadian. That includes ingredients, the processing and the labour used to make the product; an exception has been made for some foreign content to be included in a Canadian product and labelled as such if minor additives or spices are not available in Canada.

Now, it's worth noting the danger that the exceptions might substantially undermine the rule even on the Herald's own terms. Surely if an additive isn't available precisely because it doesn't past muster in Canada, then the fact that a product can be labeled as a "product of Canada" anyway based on a lack of domestic availability can't lead to any great amount of consumer comfort.

But the problems with the Herald's take go far beyond that. In effect, the Herald seeks to give the Cons a pass on the lack of any meaningful effort to monitor products coming into Canada for inspection or safety standards. Instead, it wants to place the onus on consumers to look for a single designation which on its face has nothing to do with food safety as their lone signal that a product is safe for their consumption.

Yet even that system could only be effective to the extent one assumes the Canadian regulatory system is able to do its job of both inspecting Canadian production effectively, and bringing to light any problems. Which is problematic in light of the Cons' consistent attempts to exercise political control over regulatory agencies: can any Canadian consumer feel entirely assured that an agency facing a government which has eagerly declared war on civil servants who come to inconvenient conclusions, or whose communications are under the thumb of the PMO, is able to ensure that Canada's products are as safe as they should be?

In sum, this week's announcement offers at best a poor attempt by the Cons to be labelled as consumer-friendly. But no reasonable standard could justify applying that label to a government which has worked both to suppress product information, and to undermine Canada's ability to provide the level of regulatory effectiveness that the Herald considers so important.

On target audiences

Shorter BigCityLib:
If one assumes that corporations (a) don't pay taxes, (b) can't effectively be regulated and (c) don't have any greater ability than individuals to make large capital investments, then a carbon tax that hits individual consumers the hardest makes perfect sense. And in the name of winning the crucial Fraser Institute vote, I highly recommend that the NDP accept those assumptions without question.