The Maple Three

"Life Affirming Weed": How not to distance oneself

2012-02-02T00:21:00.002-08:00

There are ways of distancing oneself from the live affirming weed crowd. For example, some within the pro legalization movement haved tried to strike a more serious note right off the bat by conceding that marijuana can dangerous, but argue that it is only by legalizing the drug that many of negative effects of marijuana can be minimized. This seems to be the tone the former Vancouver majors struck in their letter.

I do not find such an approach terribly helpful. First of all, it is associated with a rather dubious argument. The proponents of such an approach almost always argue that marijuana's illegal status make it easy for teenagers to get a hold of pot and if marijuana was legalized "young people" would only have limited access to the drug. The problem is this. Yes there are far more strangers willing to sell "young people" marijuana than there are strangers willing to sell them alcohol and no doubt legalizing marijuana would close that gap. However, far more "young people" drink than smoke marijuana for one very good reason. They know people who have legally bought the former and they get it off them. They steal alcohol from their parents' liquor cabinet. They ask their older brother to pick up a 6 pack for them etc etc. There are simply not that many teenagers brave enough to go buy illegal drugs. This fact limits the number of teens trying marijuana and it certainly limits the amounts consumed. If marijuana was legalized, they might find it harder to obtain on the street, but it is bound to be more readily available at home.

A more fruitful line of attack would be to say that legalization of marijuana could reduce the use of hard drugs among "young people". As researchers have long noted, people who have try marijuana are statistically more likely try other illicit drugs. This gave raise to the theory that there was something about marijuana that encouraged drug experimentation. Marijuana, it was alleged, is a gateway drug. This, in turn, was given as one more reason to keep the drug illegal. However, the gateway drug theory has until recently fallen on hard times for lack of an intelligible mechanism. The problem was that there was no coherent explanation for why marijuana would lead people to experiment with other drugs. Without this explanation doubt was cast relationship being more than mere correlation. That said, in recent years researchers have breathed new life into the theory, albeit with a sociological twist. According to the new version, it is not marijuana's pharmacological properties that serve as a gateway, but rather marijuana's illegal status. Specifically in the process of illegally procuring marijuana, users are introduced to the criminal elements with access to other illicit drugs and hence it is the forged black market relationship between dealer and buyer that serves as gateway. In this context it should be noted that when the Dutch partially legalized the sale of marijuana, heroin and cocaine use went down despite an initial increase in marijuana use. Dutch use of hard drugs remains well below the European average.

Reduced to bite sized talking point the above reads as follows: Every time someone goes to buy marijuana they come into contact with criminal elements with access to other hard drugs. This is your gateway. When Holland legalized consumption and made it available in stores, heroin and cocaine use went down.

Another problem with such an approach is that it concedes far too much ground. Marijuana when stacked up against alochol is simply not that dangerous. To remain silent on the main refer madness myths is to lend them a legitimacy that they simply do not have. They will also remain an elephant in the living room until they addressed. The debate about the dangerous of marijuana have been raging for decades. One can not hope to restart the debate a new. The notion that marijuana causes schizophrenia must be attacked head on. Same hold true for supposed dangerous of potent pot.

This is actually easy enough. After all, epidemiological studies have consistently failed to show a positive correlation between marijuana use and schizophrenia and there is no causation without correlation. Specifically, should there be a causal link between marijuana and schizophrenia, there should be a positive correlation between marijuana consumption and schizophrenia, but such a correlation is conspicuous by its absence. Despite a massive increase in the number of Australians consuming the drug since the 1960s, Wayne Hall of the University of Queensland found no increase in the number of cases of schizophrenia in Australia. Mitch Earleywine of the University of Southern California similarly found the same with regard to the US population and Oxford's Leslie Iversen found the same regard to the population in the UK. According to Dr. Alan Brown, a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at Columbia University, "If anything, the studies seem to show a possible decline in schizophrenia from the '40s and the ‘ 50".

As for potent pot, saying that potent pot is reason for keeping marijuana illegal is akin to saying that alcohol should be banned because gin has higher alcohol content than beer. It makes no sense. The pharmacological affects of consuming 1 "chemically supercharged" joint, as Bush administration liked to say, versus x number of "dad's joints" would be no different if the amount of THC consumed is the same. As for consumption, just as people do not drink the same volume of gin as beer, the higher the THC level in pot the less people consume. Hence, ironically more potent pot may be a welcome development. After all, one of the most prominent health effect related to marijuana, if not the most, is that it is usually smoked. The more potent the pot, the less people have to smoke to achieve the same high.

The attempt to scare parents that have grown up on marijuana by distinguishing between potent pot and “your dad's marijuana” is also too clever by half. After all, it begs the following question. If today's marijuana is truly different in kind from "dads marijuana", would it be ok to legalize "dad's marijuana", i.e., low potency pot?

Both can be reduced nicely to bit sized talking points too. To wit:

1) There is no causation without correlation. There has been an astronomical increase in the number of pot smokers since the 1950s and no increase in the rate of schizophrenia whatsoever.

2 a) Saying that potent pot is reason for keeping marijuana illegal is akin to saying that alcohol should be banned because gin has higher alcohol content than beer. It makes no sense.

2 b) If today's marijuana is truly different in kind from "dads marijuana", would it be ok to legalize "dad's marijuana", i.e., low potency pot?

Are Stoners a barrier to Marijuana Legalization?

2012-02-02T00:11:00.001-08:00

For many, the biggest political barrier to legalization is not the Americans. Ironically, it is some of the most ardent proponents of pot legalization. Stoners are a political liability. The narrated video of Dana Larson's driving a car while on LSD arguably set the legalization movement back some years and it certainly scared the bejesus out of legalization proponents inside the NDP.

The problem, however, is not as intractable as it might first seem. The SSM debate offers a way of rethinking the issue. Not that any one would dry admit, but it was not so long ago that prospect of same sex marriage being put on the political agenda was weighed down by concerns about how images of drag queens, dikes on bikes and even images of same sex couples kissing might weigh down a political party. However, once SSM was put on the political agenda the ability of opposition groups to use such images effectively quickly evaporated. Now, granted there was a human element to same sex marriage that is simply lacking with regard to pot. Nevertheless the same thing is likely to happen. The moment marijuana legalization is put on the political agenda all the voices that have held their powder for a lack of a proper forum are all of sudden going to have an opportunity to speak and I can assure you that the public will have far more interest in what they have to say than they will in hearing about another stoner.

Charlottetown Bob spewing Nonsense Again

2012-01-31T17:10:00.003-08:00

It amazes me just how often Bob Rae favorably references the Charlottetown Accord. Senate Reform: well, Charlottetown Reform dealt with it and John Turner and I supported it. Native Self government: the Charlottetown dealt with that too. (Just an aside, whenever Bob Rae speaks about Native issues he turns off his brain and lets his heart bleed. Saturday was fine example of such a blood letting.)

The reason I find it surprising is that Charlottetown Accord was rejected by the Canadian people, was hugely unpopular in the western most provinces, it ruined the Progressive Conservative party, and, above all else, it was breathtaking in its stupidity. The document would have enshrined some of the very worst ideas in Canadian politics into law. One such idea, senate reform, I have spoken about before. http://themaplethree.blogspot.com/2012/01/fantastically-stupid-idea-of-senate.html What I have not mentioned before is some of the clauses dealing with Native Self government and Native rights.

Perhaps the most outrageous clause also concerned the senate. According to section 9 a number of Senate seats be set aside for Aboriginals. Aboriginal Senate seats would have been additional to provincial and territorial seats and not drawn from any province or territory's allocation of Senate seats. Implicit was the notion that -- as in New Zealand -- only aboriginal peoples would be able to vote for those standing for aboriginal Senate seats. In other words, aboriginal peoples would be able to vote for senators standing for election in the province or territory in which they lived and they would be able to vote for aboriginal senators standing for aboriginal senate seats. This would have meant that aboriginal Canadians living in one of the Territories, for example, would have at least three times as many Senate votes as their non aboriginal territorial brethren!

Canada works: it can work for Native Canadians too

2012-01-31T00:09:00.006-08:00

Imagine if the government happened to, oh, legally define what it means to be Chinese, created a department of Chinese affairs, created Chinese rights, reserved land for Chinese so defined and exempted Chinese living on reserve land from paying property taxes and sales taxes and in some cases taxes of any kind. No one would doubt that this a recipe for disastrous social relations. It also goes without saying that no one would believe that allowing individual groups of Chinese to govern themselves would in anyway remedy the situation. So, why would anyone doubt the same about Native Affairs, native rights, native reserves and native self government?

Yes current laws have helped foster a strong Native identity (legally defining a group as other always does), but on a human level, and surely that is what counts, they have produced nothing but misery. The reserve system, premised as it is on the notion of native rights, is a bureaucratic, fiscal, jurisdictional, legal, intellectual and sociological abortion that does nothing save waste mountains of money, breed corruption, black marketeering and poverty, encourage tax evasion (e.g., cigarettes), instill in the native community a vile sense of identity based on “blood” and breed racism in the Canadian society at large.

The solution to third world property seen on many reserves is staring everyone in the face. Canada works for every other ethnic group and there have been plenty of other minority groups that have overcome racism and economic disadvantage. Canada needs to do the following.

1) Abolish native rights

2) Abolish the Indian Act

3) Divide reserve land equally among status Indians. Give individual Status Indians fee simple title to the land. (Do this and 10s of thousands would suddenly be worth millions.)

4) Turn Band councils into municipal governments.

5) Make the provinces responsible for services that fall under provincial jurisdiction.

Of course, thanks to the idiocy of the 1982, none of this is ever going to happen.

Fantastically stupid idea of Senate reform just will not die

2012-01-28T02:19:00.000-08:00

Many Liberals, like many Canadians, are of the view that either the Senate should be abolished or it should be elected. This only goes to show that many Liberals have not given the matter much thought. It also shows just how abysmally bad the media coverage of the issue has been and that the media have focused almost entirely on the feasibility of changing the senate.

Canada is already a de facto unicameral state -- just ask the supporters of a Triple E senate. After all, one can not argue on the one hand that the current senate is undemocratic and so contributes to the "democratic deficit" and on the other hand argue that the senate is “ineffective”. A body that adds nothing to the genuinely "effective" process can not take away anything either.

Constitutionally senators have all kinds of power and every once in a blue moon the Senate has stalled major pieces of legislation (e.g., free trade and the GST). However the aforementioned instances of stalling are so rare they are the exceptions that prove just how "ineffective" the senate truly is. Moreover, no senate I can think of has pursued a legislative agenda of its own accord; opposing legislation is one thing; purposing legislation is quite another. The reason the senate is not an "effective" body is that senators are not elected and as such lack legitimacy. Furthermore, senators are members of legitimate federal political parties and the parties that they belong to are loath to have their unelected members exercise real authority least their actions undermine the party. Finally, the fact that it is the ruling federal party and not, say, provincial governments that appoint senators defines a clear pecking order, with the Senate answerable to the House.

The difference between electing senators and abolishing the senate is thus huge. It is the difference between abolishing an expensive debating society and transforming that debating society into a intellectual and democratic abortion.

The problem with an elected senate starts with implementation. Being unable to reform the Senate in one fell swoop, Harper has proposed electing Senators piece meal. Under the Conservative plan, new senators would be elected and would be limited to serving out a 8 year term. The elephant in the living room is that if the senate's lack of effective powers flows from the senate's lack of legitimacy, then electing senators might provide the senate with a degree of legitimacy it currently does not hold. One problem with proceeding thusly is that current senators are free to serve until the age of 75. As a result, Harper's actions could either transform an unelected political body with no real power into a largely unelected political body with real political power or commit Canadians to the farcical and expensive act of electing people to office who hold no real power. Always content to play the Tin Man and Lion to Conservatives scarecrow, the Liberals, with the notable exception of Stephane Dion, remain largely mum on the subject.

Of course the problems with an elected senate go far beyond problems with how to implement it.

First arguments for regional representation rests on a false contrast; seats in the House of Commons are supposed to be assigned on basis of population, but in actuality that is not the case. Consider the 905. There are currently 4 plus million living in the 905 and there are currently 32 seats for an average of just over 127,000 people per riding. There are 6 ridings with over a 140,000 people in the 905, Bramalea - Gore - Malton (152,698) Brampton West (170,422) Halton (151,943), Mississauga - Erindale (143,361) Oak Ridges - Markham (169,642) and Vaughan (154,206). By contrast there are 4.5 million people in Sask, Man, NWT, Nuv, Yuk, PEI, NS, NFLD, and NB and there are 62 seats for an average of 72,000 people per riding. Moreover, there is but one riding in the 9, Selkirk Interlake (90,807), with over 90,000 people. Given current growth trends, the 2011 census might show there to be more people in the 905 than the aforementioned provinces and territories. Given population growth, Harper would have to give Ontario alone another 70 seats to make things half way equal. Of course, the problems do not stop there. Not only are the smaller provinces grossely overrepresented so too are rural areas in most provinces. For example, the riding of has Labrador has 26,364 people as compared to the riding of St John's East which has 88,002, Kenora has 64,291 and suburban riding of Oak Ridges - Markham 169,642, Miramichi has 53,844 and Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe 89,334, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing 77,961 and Vanughn 154,206.

Second, simply by virtue of having provincial jurisdiction and provincial representation people living in Canada’s less populated provinces already have a means of leveraging far more attention and support from the Federal government than their numbers warrant. Danny Williams had the government's attention in ways that the mayors of Surrey, Red Deer, Brant, Fredericton and Churchill did not even though we are talking about equal number of seats in both cases. There is more. There is also the asinine Canadian tradition of handing out cabinet posts based not on talent but region.

The third reason is that while one person one vote is bedrock principle of any democracy, one province one senate vote is something else entirely. People, not provinces, deserve equal representation. A province is no more or less than the people that make up that province. Giving the 135,851 in PEI the power to determine everything under provincial jurisdiction, provincial representation and 4 MPs well all the while giving the 170, 422 residents of Brampton West one MP is bad enough as it is. Piling on and giving the 135,851 people in PEI the same number of “effective” senators, as per the American Triple E Senate model, as 12,160,282 Ontarians is beyond stupid and grossly undemocratic. Equally silly is having one "effective" Senator for every 72,997 New Brunswick residents (10 senators in total) versus one Senator for every 685, 581 BC residents (6 senators in total). And that is what the current configuration gives us.

Four, as Benjamin Franklin put it, having two equally matched houses makes as much sense as tying two equally matched horses to either end of a buggy and having them both pull. Having two houses is not only a lobbyist's dream, it is a recipe for political gridlock and pork barrel politics. The only thing that would be worse is if one needed 60% of the votes in the senate to overcome a filibuster.

Flaherty guilty of more than just chutzpah

2012-01-27T17:27:00.000-08:00

The notion that Harper has put the Canadian economy on a stronger footing is so laughable one hopes that the people supporting the idea or either Tory Toadies or just grossly uninformed. In other words, one hopes that they are not that stupid.

Whether it be Bloomberg, the Economist, the IMF, Paul Krugman and Mark Carney, many are worried that Canada's housing market is headed for a crash and potential for such a crash is by far the biggest threat Canada's economic health.

Of course the main reason the cost of housing gone through the roof since 2006 is the Conservative government decided pour fuel on an already red hot real estate market. The Conservatives extended the mortgage amortization period from 25 years to 30 years in February 2006, extended it to 35 years in July of 2006 and extended it yet again to 40 years in November 2006. During this period they also reduced the needed down payment on second properties from 20% to 5% and allowed for 0 down on one's primary residence. Ever since the down turn, Jim Flaherty has been scrabbling to undo the damage his past actions have done. Flaherty first reduced amortization period from 40 years to 35 and again mandated a 20% down payment on secondary properties and 5% on primary properties in October 2008 and on March 18th 2011 he reduced the maximum amortization period to 30 years. Never once acknowledging that it was he who raised the amortization period to begin with, Jim Flaherty has repeatedly said that reducing the amortization and increasing the minimum down payment was the right thing to do. "In 2008 and again in 2010, our government acted to protect and strengthen the Canadian housing market,". It too bad for all of us that Flaherty is guilty of more than chutzpah. For one thing, since 2006 Canadian mortgage and housing corporations liabilities have gone from 100 billion to 500 hundred billion. If the housing bubble bursts and Canadians start defaulting on their mortgages, the Canadian tax payer will be picking up the tab. The Canadian government guarantees all that debt.

Some Marijuana talking points the Liberals need to adopt

2012-01-27T16:58:00.000-08:00

It is easy to blow massive holes in the main refer myths in a line or two.

Potent Point

1) Saying that potent pot is reason for keeping marijuana illegal is akin to saying that alcohol should be banned because gin has higher alcohol content than beer. It makes no sense.

2) If today's marijuana is truly different in kind from "dads marijuana", would it be ok to legalize "dad's marijuana", i.e., low potency pot?

Schizophrenia

There is no causation without correlation. There has been an astronomical increase in the number of pot smokers since the 1950s and no increase in the rate of schizophrenia whatsoever.

Gateway drug

Every time someone goes to buy marijuana they come into contact with criminal elements with access to other hard drugs. This is your gateway. When Holland legalized consumption and made it available in stores, heroin and cocaine use went down.

The Americans will not like it

1) I am not going to send people to jail for breaking a law Canadians do not think is just. I not going to do it.

2) It is one thing to remain silent, for example, on American foreign policy for fear of damaging trade relations. It is quite another to send someone to jail in order to placate the US.

It is time to Call a Spade a Spade: Native Rights need to abolished and Reserves Privatized

2012-01-27T16:42:00.002-08:00

The long and troubled relationship between First Nation peoples and the Crown has blinded many to patent absurdity of the current situation. It has blinded them to the fact that Attawapiskat is a natural consequence of an economic and legal relationship built around Native rights, the reserve system, the Indian Act and Native Self government. In any other context this would be self evident. Indeed, imagine if the government happened to, oh, legally define what it means to be Chinese, created a department of Chinese affairs, created Chinese rights, reserved land for Chinese so defined and exempted Chinese living on reserve land from paying property taxes and sales taxes and in some cases taxes of any kind. No one would doubt that is a recipe for disastrous social relations. So, why would anyone doubt the same about Native Affairs, native rights and native reserves?

Of course the situation is even worse than just described. Not only has Canada set up hundreds of tax havens for Status Indians to take advantage of, it also provides incentives for Status Indians to stay on them or move to them. Specifically, the feds hold out the promise of free housing, a promise to pay for upkeep and the promise of never imposing not only no property tax or sales tax, but also in some cases no income tax. The federal government will pay for any needed infrastructure. Realizing, the patent absurdity of its ironclad guarantee, the government drags its feet, provides the bare minimum level of funding for housing, upkeep and infrastructure and to, add insult to injury, proceeds in less than timely matter. In other words, the government has every reason to create living conditions that repel even as its moronic promises attract.

In practice government foot dragging does not always work so well. Some of these tax havens are so isolated and so utterly economically unviable that the government is dammed no matter what it does. If it builds up these communities too much it runs the risk of attracting more people to them. However if it does too little, the very scarcity of jobs in these places ties people living there to land all the more. The less assets, work experience and education a person has the more attractive the prospect of obtaining free housing, however squalid, becomes. There is a long waiting list of people wanting housing in Attawapiskat. A bird in the hand is better than two in bush as it were; a dilapidated house in the hand is better than the dim prospects of a better house elsewhere.

The only possible way out this mess, viz., abolishing native rights, abolishing the Indian Act and privatizing reserve lands, has been forever blocked by section 35 of the Constitution -- a decision, by the way, that renders Trudeau's time in office an abject failure. The best the government can do is to amend the Indian Act to allow for the creation of fee simple lands, thereby switching the financial burden of maintaining and upgrading housing from the federal government to individual home owners, and empowering bands to impose property taxes. This will give the people living in Attawapiskat and like communities additional economic incentives to leave. Namely, either property taxes and the cost of upkeep will drive people away in the absence of a job, or the prospect of using the capital from the sale of one's house and land will.

That said, introducing fee simple opens a whole host of other problems. For example, as the idiocy of native self government is maintained in all cases, non natives purchasing native lands would have no right to take part in band elections. There would be taxation but no representation. Such a situation would greatly depress real estate values on reserves -- especially on remote reserves. Band councils must be transformed into municipal councils. The notion of a government built around a legally defined race is not only economically problematic, it is ideologically putrid. Moving to a fee simple model also does not eliminate such lands as tax havens.

The reserve system, premised as it is on the notion of native rights, is a bureaucratic, fiscal, jurisdictional, legal, intellectual and sociological abortion that does nothing save waste mountains of money, breed corruption, black marketeering and poverty, encourage tax evasion (e.g., cigarettes), instill in the native community a vile sense of identity based on “blood” and breed racism in the Canadian society at large. If politicians and the media want to accept this as Canada's historical cross to bear, so be it. However, it is high time both acknowledge that the problem is intractable so long as the only possible solution, viz., the abolition of native rights and the Indian Act and privatization of reserve lands, remains legally untenable.

American opposition to Marijuana legalization; What needs to be said

2012-01-20T15:36:00.000-08:00

It is time a major Canadian politician said this about marijuana legalization and US opposition to it.

"It is one thing to remain silent, for example, on American foreign policy for fear of damaging trade relations. It is quite another to send someone to jail for violating a law I do not believe is just in order to placate the US."

Liberal leaders have always joked about consuming marijuana. The problem is if the act of consumption is not deemed overly ruinous then the whole punitive rationale for trafficking comes crashing down. Past Liberal policy amounts to Chretien having said this. “I will have my money for my fine and a joint in my other hand. Having paid my fine I would hope the cops find the person who sold it to me in put him in jail for a very long time.”

Henry Aubin and Marijuana

2012-01-17T00:17:00.002-08:00

Henry Aubin of the Montreal Gazette does not like the Liberals voting in Favour of legalizing Marijuana.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Liberals+smoking/6005806/story.html

"It declares the ban has "exhausted countless billions of dollars spent" on ineffectual enforcement. This is the familiar argument that, because drugs remain so common in society, the war on them is a waste of money. But the war on cancer, the war on illiteracy and the war on terror are also falling far short of victory. Yet no one ever calls for ending those campaigns."

First of all, there have been plenty of people who have called for end to War on Terrorism, but I digress. It is just odd to lump "the war on cancer and war on illiteracy" in with the war on drugs. No one has ever argued that the first two do more harm than good. That is in marked constrast to the latter. What the Liberals should have noted in their motion is the war on weed does more harm than good and it cost a mint too.

"The resolution says that once a Liberal government legalizes marijuana it will tax it. Wow: Government, not traffickers, would rake in the billions.

Yet if government were to slap a high tax on marijuana, it would create a market for private dealers who'd sell it for less. (Think of the black market for cheap cigarettes.)"

Reading this you would think because of the existence of black market cigarettes provincial governments do not rack in billions from the sale of cigarettes, but, of course, they do just that. You are also forgetting something. The main reason black market cigarettes are problem is that they are cheaper in the US. The situation is only angalgous if the US also legalized marijuana and it was cheaper here than there. (For various reasons I think that if Canada were to proceed with legalization the US would also go ahead with same, but that is for another time.)

After all, it is not like illegal US producers are going to undercut legal Canadian ones. Indeed, it is one thing to illegally sell a legally produced product and make a profit, e.g., black market cigarettes. It is quite another thing to illegally produce and sell a product (e.g., moonshine) in market where there is legal competitors. The reason is simple. The illegality of the product means that your production and distribution costs are significantly higher. Also demand for your product is always going to be less. People want to know that what they buying and consuming. So when given the choice of buying an illegally produced product versus a legally produced product they are going to go with the later. (There is one notable exception and that is when an illegally produced product is successfully passed off as a legal one, e.g., fake brand name goods). That is why no matter how much Canadians drank during the time of American prohibition, I am sure that it never crossed the RCMP’s mind that American moonshine might become a competitor of Molson’s.

"However, in addition to the golden opportunity that a high tax would give them, illegal dealers would also find a ready market for superior strains of marijuana."

Like I said, an illegal competitor is just not going to be able to compete with a legal one.

"Note, too, that the illegal drug industry as a whole would stay strong: The market for cocaine, heroin, crack, crystal meth, etc., would remain. The idea that legalization of pot would significantly shrink the role of gangs, and thus save taxpayers billions in law-enforcement costs, is magical thinking."

The market for marijuana positively dwarfs the market for all other drugs combined. So while profit margins on these other drugs are higher, marijuana is the gangs' biggest money maker by far. Moreover, marijuana profits and sometimes even marijuana itself are providing the seed capital the gangs need to diversify operations (e.g., cocaine, heroin, human trafficking and guns) and to expand those other operations. It is not like the gangs have access to capital markets. This is one of the main reasons why we need to nip this in the bud.

Legalization of marijuana may also rob gangs of would be customers for these other drugs. As researchers have long noted, people who have try marijuana are statistically more likely try other illicit drugs. This gave raise to the theory that there was something about marijuana that encouraged drug experimentation. Marijuana, it was alleged, is a gateway drug. This, in turn, was given as one more reason to keep the drug illegal. However, the gateway drug theory has until recently fallen on hard times for lack of an intelligible mechanism. The problem was that there was no coherent explanation for why marijuana would lead people to experiment with other drugs. Without this explanation doubt was cast relationship being more than mere correlation. That said, in recent years researchers have breathed new life into the theory, albeit with a sociological twist. According to the new version, it is not marijuana's pharmacological properties that serve as a gateway, but rather marijuana's illegal status. Specifically in the process of illegally procuring marijuana, users are introduced to the criminal elements with access to other illicit drugs and hence it is the forged blackmarket relationship between dealer and buyer that serves as gateway. Ironically the gateway drug theory has been turned on its head and used as reason for legalizing the drug. The Canadian Senate employed the new and improved version of the gateway argument as a reason for legalizing the drug in its 2002 report.

In this context it should be noted that when the Dutch partially legalized the sale of marijuana, heroin and cocaine use went down despite an initial increase in marijuana use. Dutch use of hard drugs remains well below the European average.

"If the Liberals want to be a positive force, they could return to the stance they had a decade ago. They then wanted the justice system to cease clobbering citizens with criminal charges for possessing 15 grams or less of marijuana (and instead to simply fine them, as for parking offences)."

Yes the Liberals long maintained that Canadians should not be saddled with a criminal record for consuming something that is, after all, less harmful than alcohol. It is this light that Chrétien famously joked about having a joint in one hand and the money to pay for the fine of having it in the other. “I will have my money for my fine and a joint in my other hand.” On the other hand, just as they long downplayed the affects of smoking marijuana they have long stressed the importance of stiff penalties for trafficking. Both positions are popular with the public, but run the two positions together and it is as if Chrétien said this instead. “I will have my money for my fine and a joint in my other hand. Having paid my fine I would hope the cops find the person who sold it to me in put him in jail for a very long time.” If the act of consumption is not deemed overly ruinous then the whole punitive rationale for trafficking comes crashing down. Add to mix an acknowledgment that marijuana can serve a medical purpose and you have a conceptual train wreck as a policy.

Marijuana, Politics and the Liberal Party

2012-01-16T00:03:00.002-08:00

The US will never legalize Pot

Proposition 19 failed, but the issue will likely be revisited in 2012 and this time it stands a very good chance of passing. Voter turn for mid term elections is always significantly less than when the presidency is up for grabs. For proposition 19 to have stood any chance of winning Democrats, and the young needed to be energized. They were not and stayed away in droves. Even with everything stacked against them, though, the yes campaign still garnered 46% of vote.

A yes vote would kick start a debate stateside that would wipe out any legitimacy prohibition has left in vast swaths of the country. So, while it is likely that a yes vote would likely be contested by whomever is president in 2013, the response is likely to be muted. This will be especially so if Obama wins. Obama is not going to go to war with the biggest State in the Union and one that is heavily Democratic to boot.

Obama's ability to push back would be limited for other reasons as well. He freely admits to having marijuana in the past ("I inhaled frequently. That was the point") and his marijuana use is not a part of some redemption narrative, a la George Bush. It was a path he choice not to continue going down. Drug use was never presented as a demon he had to overcome yet alone one he still struggles with the way an alcoholic does with drink. This would leave him open to the charge of hypocrisy. Far more importantly though, the war and drugs, especially with regard to marijuana, has had a profound impact on the African American community in the States. If Obama was to toe the standard line in the face of California promising to end the war on drugs, he would be in a world of hurt politically. The African American community would not, of course, abandon him, but they would be unhappy and their unhappiness would have the potential to throw his whole relection campaign out of whack politically. His whole message of being the candidate of change would be called into question.

Finally, it was Obama that set the wheels of legalization in motion in the first place by declaring that he would not crack down on medical marijuana. For you see, unlike in Canada, in California, for example, one does not have to be afflicted with a particular aliment to be eligible for medical marijuana. A doctor can proscribe marijuana for whatever they see fit. Needless to say, such a system is ripe for abuse and the Bush administration was right to see medical marijuana program as a potential Trojan horse. But Obama let the wooden horse to be wheeled into California and other States anyway. In so doing, Obama has allowed the medical marijuana industry in California and elsewhere to grow to the point there is no saving prohibition from Odysseus. There are more medical marijuana dispensaries in LA than Starbucks. It is not a question of if marijuana will be legalized in the US it is matter of when.

The US will Never Let it happen

Canadians understand that the US, despite prohibition's crumbling foundation there, would not be pleased about legalization. As such, Harper's musings about legalizing marijuana causing trouble at the border seem reasonable enough. The problem is this does not make marijuana prohibition any more legitimate; it just means that Canada is tailoring its own laws to meet the demands of Americans considered so illegitimate that popular cultural considers them a symptom of madness “refer madness”. This can not stand. Any perception that Canada is enforcing laws to met with illegitimate demands of a bullying third party, whoever that may be, is simply poisonous to the health of a functioning democracy.

Moreover, the notion that American prohibition would stand if Canada were to charge ahead with marijuana legalization is wrong. Not only would Canadian boldness create a tidal wave of domestic debate State side, but should Canada have the guts to go through with such a move various European countries (e.g., Spain, Portugal, Italy and the Netherlands) Australia and Latin America, Mexico in particular, would soon follow Canada's led. The international dominos would start falling one by one. This in turn would further embolden domestic proponents, especially those in California.

Potent Pot

Potent pot is more myth than reality.

However, even if one assumes that potent pot is a reality it is certainly nothing to be concerned about. Indeed, saying that potent pot is reason for keeping marijuana illegal is akin to saying that alcohol should be banned because gin has higher alcohol content than beer. It makes no sense. The pharmacological affects of consuming 1 "chemically supercharged" joint, as various US attorneys like to say, versus x number of "dad's joints" would be no different if the amount of THC consumed is the same. As for consumption, just as people do not drink the same volume of gin as beer, the higher the THC level in pot the less people consume. Hence, ironically more potent pot may be a welcome development. After all, one of the most prominent health effect related to marijuana, if not the most, is that it is usually smoked. The more potent the pot, the less people have to smoke to achieve the same high. Lester Grinspoon of Harvard Medical School concurs, so does Mitch Earleywine of the University of Southern California and so does UCLA's Mark Kleiman.

That said, if potency is the concern, then it should be legalized. After all, the only way to regulate the potency of pot is to legalize it. Moreover, so long as the drug is illegal, producers will seek to increase potency. The higher the potency the smaller the package the smaller the package the less likely they will get caught.

Finally, the attempt to scare parents that have grown up on marijuana by distinguishing between potent pot and “your dad's marijuana” is too clever by half. After all, it begs the following question. If today's marijuana is truly different in kind from "dads marijuana", would it be ok to legalize "dad's marijuana", i.e., low potency pot?

Gateway Drug

Researchers have rightly noted that people who have try marijuana are statistically more likely try other illicit drugs. This gave raise to the theory that there was something about marijuana that encouraged drug experimentation. Marijuana, it was alleged, is a gateway drug. This, in turn, was given as one more reason to keep the drug illegal.However, the gateway drug theory has until recently fallen on hard times for lack of an intelligible mechanism. The problem was that there was no coherent explanation for why marijuana would lead people to experiment with other drugs. Without this explanation doubt was cast relationship being more than mere correlation. That said, in recent years researchers have breathed new life into the theory, albeit with a sociological twist. According to the new version, it is not marijuana's pharmacological properties that serve as a gateway, but rather marijuana's illegal status. Specifically in the process of illegally procuring marijuana, users are introduced to the criminal elements with access to other illicit drugs and hence it is the forged blackmarket relationship between dealer and buyer that serves as gateway. Ironically the gateway drug theory has been turned on its head and used as reason for legalizing the drug. The Canadian Senate employed the new and improved version of the gateway argument as a reason for legalizing the drug.

In this context it should be noted that when the Dutch partially legalized the sale of marijuana, heroin and cocaine use went down despite an initial increase in marijuana use. Dutch use of hard drugs remains well below the European average.

Schizophrenia Marijuana

Epidemiological studies have consistently failed to show a positive correlation between marijuana use and schizophrenia and there is no causation without correlation. Specifically, should there be a causal link between marijuana and schizophrenia, there should be a positive correlation between marijuana consumption and schizophrenia, but such a correlation is conspicuous by its absence. Despite a massive increase in the number of Australians consuming the drug since the 1960s, Wayne Hall of the University of Queensland found no increase in the number of cases of schizophrenia in Australia. Mitch Earleywine of the University of Southern California similarly found the same with regard to the US population and Oxford's Leslie Iversen found the same regard to the population in the UK. According to Dr. Alan Brown, a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at Columbia University,

"If anything, the studies seem to show a possible decline in schizophrenia from the '40s and the ‘ 50,"

Much of the evidence linking marijuana to schizophrenia suggests not that it causes schizophrenia but rather that it may cause the earlier onset of symptoms in people who would sooner or later develop schizophrenia. Much to Gordan Brown's dismay, this was the opinion of Dr Iddon.

Dr Iddon, the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on drugs misuse [Britain], said the study did not convince him it was time to return cannabis to class B. "I don't think the causal link has been proved. I think cannabis might - possibly for genetic reasons - trigger psychosis at an earlier age." The MP, who is also a member of the science and technology select committee, said there was a danger of criminalising "hundreds of thousands of young people" if the status of the drug was changed. "If Gordon Brown changes the class of the drug, it won't be evidence-based but for political reasons," he said.

The Black Market will live on

It is one thing to illegally sell a legally produced product and make a profit, e.g., black market cigarettes. It is quite another thing to illegally produce and sell a product (e.g., moonshine) in market where there is legal competitors. The reason is simple. People want to know that what they buying and consuming. So when given the choice of buying an illegally produced product versus a legally produced product they are going to go with the later. (There is one notable exception and that is when an illegally produced product is successfully passed off as a legal one, e.g., fake brand name goods). That is why no matter how much Canadians drank during the time of American prohibition, I am sure that it never crossed the RCMP’s mind that American moonshine might become a competitor of Molson’s.

The gangs can not walk and chew gum at the same time

One of the arguments that I have repeatedly come across recently is that should marijuana be legalized then the gangs will move onto other things. I prefer to call this the gangs can not walk and chew gum at the same time argument.

The problem with this argument is that the gangs are already into other things and it is profits from marijuana that are helping them do that. In the context of Canada, marijuana profits and sometimes even marijuana itself are providing the seed capital the gangs need to expand operations into the States, for example, and to diversify operations (e.g., cocaine, heroin, human trafficking and guns). It is not like the gangs have excess to capital markets. This is one of the main reasons why we need to nip this in the bud.

The Failure of Past Liberal Policy

A promise to legalize marijuana would be a welcome respite from the Liberals shamelessly taking inherently contradictory policies in hopes of capitalizing on both sides of this issue.

Indeed, on the one hand the Liberals have long maintained that Canadians should not be saddled with a criminal record for consuming something that is, after all, less harmful than alcohol. It is this light that Chrétien famously joked about having a joint in one hand and the money to pay for the fine of having it in the other. “I will have my money for my fine and a joint in my other hand.” On the other hand, just as they long downplayed the affects of smoking marijuana they have long stressed the importance of stiff penalties for trafficking. Both positions are popular with the public, but run the two positions together and it is as if Chrétien said this instead. “I will have my money for my fine and a joint in my other hand. Having paid my fine I would hope the cops find the person who sold it to me in put him in jail for a very long time.” If the act of consumption is not deemed overly ruinous then the whole punitive rationale for trafficking comes crashing down. Add to mix an acknowledgment on behalf of the Liberal party that marijuana can serve a medical purpose and you have a conceptual train wreck as a policy.

Far from helping the Liberals such an approach probably harmed them. It angered ardent supporters of both sides of the political divide at the same time and prevented the Liberals from saying anything intelligent about the issue. Moreover, as far the general public is concerned, the Liberals have gained nothing by trying to emulate the Conservative's tough on crime stance. The reason is simple. As Tom Flanagan crowed after the 2006 election that there are certain issues that just favour the Conservatives. The example he gave was the economy. No matter how successful the Liberals were in balancing the books and creating jobs, Conservative research suggested that when it came to economics people trusted the Conservatives more than they did the Liberals. It does not much of leap to suggest the same is true for crime. After all, to presume that the public has a working knowledge of each party's justice policies is giving the public way too much credit; the public trades in stereotypes and they are always going to believe that Conservatives are tougher on crime. This is especially so now. The Conservatives are in power and for this reason alone what they say with regard to crime garners headlines. By contrast, past Liberal support for some those Conservative tough on crime measures has drawn almost no attention at all. Of course, even if the Liberals were able to convince Canadians did support this or that Conservative measure, the Conservatives have a fail safe. They have claimed and will continue to claim that the Liberals had ability to introduce such policies when they were in power and failed to do so. No one likes a Johnny come lately.

Of course, Liberal bad faith goes much deeper than playing both sides against the middle. Despite a long term commitment to decriminalize marijuana the Liberals have failed to act for fear of angering the Americans. The Marc Emery case is a great example of Liberal cowardness. For years Marc Emery had been paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in Federal taxes on money he made “selling marijuana seeds”. Yet in 2005, at the behest of the American government, Canada arrested Emery so that he could face charges in the US. Emery pleaded guilty to the US charges and was sent the US to serve a 5 year prison term for crime that had not been prosecuted in Canada for 7 years and had only ever warranted a $200 fine. It gets worse. Under the terms of the extradition treaty, one can not be extradited if one is facing the same charge in one’s country of residence and one was arrested there. So, a BC marijuana activist tried to save Emery from being sent to the States by having Emery charged under Canadian law. His efforts were unsuccessful. Despite a mountain of evidence against him, Canadian authorities were unwilling to charge Emery under Canadian law.

So long as the debate is centered around sentencing, the Conservatives win. The Liberals need to shift the focus from punishment to the legitimacy of various laws. This is the only way of Liberals will be able to starve the Conservatives' populist tough on crime agenda of oxygen.

Nicholson needs to clarify his clarification

2012-01-14T02:14:00.007-08:00

Nicholson: "I want to make it very clear that, in our government's view, these marriages should be valid," Nicholson said.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/Canada+will+change+solve+problem/5994940/story.html

There is a difference between should be valid and are valid.

This is especially so in light of what else he said.

Nicholson: "We will change the Civil Marriage Act so that any marriages performed in Canada that aren't recognized in the couple's home jurisdiction will be recognized in Canada."

If the marriages are already valid, there is no need to change the law. These marriages are already recognized. At best, the Minister has contradicted himself. At worst, the government's position really is that these marriages are not valid. That being the case, is it the position of the government that these "marriages" are retroactively legitimized upon the law changing, or will the couples in question have to officially marry --again -- to be married.

Update

It looks like the Minister did contradict himself. Good.

Nicholson: "I want to make it clear that in our government's view, these marriages are valid,"

http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/Same+marriage+revised/5995294/story.html

To sum up then, the Conservative position is as follows.

The marriages are valid.

The law will be changed so that marriages that we just said are valid are valid.

The gap in the law was, like every thing else that goes wrong, is the Liberals fault. The Liberals are the reason why we have to change the law to make sure that these marriages that are valid are valid.

In other words, we are going to pretend that there is a gap in the law and pretend to fix that nonexistent gap in the law because we once pretended that these marriages never happened.

Clear?

Conservatives Proclaim the Buck stops here

2012-01-13T19:36:00.000-08:00

Conservatives are full of it: "legal Option" was crap

2012-01-13T18:01:00.001-08:00

Thank god the Conservatives seem to have done the right and said that all SSM conducted here are valid.

However, I see the Conservatives are still pretending that the “Legal option” put forth by the justice Department was somehow valid and that the fault all lies with the Liberals. Indeed, they are going so far as to suggest that it is only because of them that these marriages are valid today. This is chutzpah on a gigantic scale.

The legal option was

1) Unconstitutional on its face

2) Means that the government was guilty of fraud

3) That Canada does not recognize marriages of interracial couples that violated any Anti-miscegenation laws in their country of residence.

4) Did not recognize marriages that took place here and that other jurisdictions recognized.

5) Pretended that the law of domicile is a hard and fast rule even though they are fully aware that there are plenty of jurisdictions that do not recognize legally wed same sex couples as anything more than room mates.

The utter Stupidity of the SSM "legal option"

2012-01-13T00:15:00.000-08:00

1) The impacted same sex couples paid real money to have have to their marriages supposedly officially sanctioned by Federal government. By denying the validity of these marriages, the government is essentially saying that it perpetrated a fraud against these people.

2) Saying that Canada can shore up its residency requirement by denying that x number of SSM are not in fact marriages is, obviously, not going to work. After all, same sex couples, from places without SSM, are not the only foreign couples getting married in Canada.

3) The government position is that because "marriages" conflicted with the domicile laws in the country of residence these marriages never happened. As such, the decision could also impact other groups. For example, any inter racial couples from States with Anti-miscegenation laws, who married in Canada, were never, in fact, ever married under Canadian law. Remember the Anti-miscegenation laws in some US states existed up until 1967. South Africa's law existed until 1985.

4) The "legal option" is manifestly unconstitutional. SSM is legal in Canada and their is no residential requirement. There is not a hope in hell that the courts are going to let domicile comity trump equality under the law.

SSM "legal Option" and Anti-miscegenation laws

2012-01-12T14:49:00.000-08:00

"in order for a marriage to be legally valid under Canadian law, the parties to the marriage must satisfy both the requirements of the place where the marriage is celebrated... and the requirements of the law of domicile of the couple with regard to their legal capacity to marry one another."

Let us take this line of reasoning back a generation. It would also mean that inter racial couples from States with Anti-miscegenation laws, who married in Canada, are not, in fact, married under Canadian law. Remember the Anti-miscegenation laws in some US states existed up until 1967.

Conservative position on foreign SSM hopelessly muddled

2012-01-12T12:48:00.000-08:00

Thousands of SSM American couples got married in Canada. At the time many of them got married, the state they resided in did not recognize their marriage, but later did. Is Harper and friends really going to insist that these marriages, and there could be thousands of them, never happened even though they have since been they legally recognized Stateside?

The Liberals need to rethink their Messaging

2012-01-10T00:13:00.000-08:00

Political parties conduct polling to find out what issues favour them and what do not, develop their talking points accordingly, focus group these talking points and then repeat these tried and tested talking points every chance they get. Whether, such talking points make much sense does not matter a lick. What matters is soccer moms and Nascar dads or what have you like them.

However, such an approach has two main shortcomings, one minor, one major. The minor shortcoming is this. Just because a talking point tests well does not mean that people will never see behind the facade. Some talking points are like fruit. They spoil. Others are like Twinkies and stay fresh forever. It is hard to guess what kind of expiration date a particular talking point will have coming out of the gate. It could go rotten rather quickly. Moreover, the growing prominence of social media is surly going to mean that such talking points have shorter expiration dates in the future. All that being said, all a political party needs to do overcome this problem is to remain vigilant, restock the shelves when needed and throw the rotten talking points in the garbage.

The second shortcoming is not so easily overcome. Specifically, such an approach presupposes that these talking points will reach the public unfiltered and that is just not realistic. Trying to use the media as a vehicle for getting your message out is like trying to pass a message to someone across a large room by having a series of people whisper in the ear of the person next to them. What message is eventually received is seldom the same as the message given. Some people will hear about such talking points though an unsympathetic columnist or pundit, others will discover it buried in a lengthily article and so on and so on. None of these scenarios has been focused grouped for. People in focus groups are exposed to the talking point and only the talking point.

Liberals in particular would be fatally ill advised to ignore the latter problem. Being the third party they will be given less opportunity by the media to speak directly to Canadians and there is now an overwhelming body of evidence that 1) the bulk pundits are conservative and 2) the vast majority of articles about the Liberals are negative. The former goes a long way in explaining why the Conservatives have garnered so many more endorsements than other major political parties. In 2006 22 newspapers endorsed the Conservatives and 1 paper endorsed the Liberals 1 endorsed the Green Party and 1 the Bloc. In 2008 20 papers endorsed the Conservatives 3 the Liberals 1 the Bloc and 1 the NDP. In 20011 28 papers endorsed the Conservatives 2 the NDP, 1 the Bloc. As for the later, the last 4 McGill media election studies are a great place to start. I do not care how well a particular talking point focused grouped if it is buried in a negative piece or hammered by a pundit it is probably not going to be worth much.

In order to combat such a short coming the Liberal party is going to have to assume the role of a liberal pundit class that simply does not exist in this country and that means the Liberal party will actually have develop some academically respectable arguments. Board based talking points will not do the trick. They are easy fodder for any well informed person. The party needs to challenge the legions of conservative columnists least various Conservative positions become received wisdom. Factual errors need to be pointed out, non sequiturs need to be mocked and detailed arguments provided. The party needs to be vicious. Ignatieff talked about wanting to the be the party that bases its decisions on sound reasoning and science. A good way of establishing such a reputation is take a conservative pundit out to the wood shed on occasion. When a conservative columnist retires the Liberals should share Trudeau's lament: "I'm sorry I won't have you to kick around any more." Special attention needs to be given to the following papers: The Globe and Mail, Vancouver Sun, Winnipeg Free Press, Ottawa Citizen and the Montreal Gazette.

Of course for such a strategy to be effective the Liberals actually need take stand on issues. A lot of the success Conservatives have enjoyed stems from the fact that however, stupid their policies, they have been only ones willing to put forward consistent set of policies (e.g., senate reform). When pundits talk about policy more often than not it is Conservative policies they are dealing with. Outside of the policies announced in Chretien's last year in power and Dion's disastrously ill defined Green Shift, the Liberals have not given the media much to talk about. Indeed, since 2006 the Liberals have almost abandoned the field altogether; they do not put forward polices; they do not put forward arguments; they do not refute arguments. They might tut tut and promise to "compromise", but this only hurts them. The former makes them appear to be the effeminate wimps the Conservatives claim them to be and the later makes it appear that the various Conservative polices have some validity when in actuality they have none. At best, the Liberals will sometimes take a stand in defense of the status quo. The gun registry is a case in point. However, do not expect them to say much of anything when they do take a stand. They might note that the experts support them, but they will not repeat the expert's arguments least someone take offense to what the experts are saying and want to shoot the messenger.

Beware of those selling "pragmatism"

2012-01-09T00:31:00.002-08:00

Politics can not be reduced to bad technocratic approaches and good ones. There are real philosophical differences as to what is good and what is bad. Without such agreement you are not going to have the common ground necessary to compare different approaches. Perhaps the level of ideological agreement is such that many people of lost site of this fact. If so, it is sad commentary on the state of Canadian politics.

Why should Liberals care? Well, the Liberals can not win by continuing to try to be all things to all people and they certainly have no hope of raising money that way. Moreover, in an ironic twist of fate the Liberals have to present themselves as an alternative to both the NDP and Conservatives. The Liberals have long maintained that there was only ever two real choices. It is increasingly looking like the Canadian public agrees; either one votes NDP or one votes Conservative. In large chucks of the country the Liberals are fighting it out with the Greens for 4th spot.

So, how should the Liberals philosophically differentiate themselves from the NDP? Well, the Liberals need to return to the roots and abandon asymmetrical federalism once and far all. Liberal embrace of such a philosophy damaged the Liberal brand, always gave lie to any attempt to draw a straight line between now and glory years of the 1960s and it paid no divides in Quebec whatsoever. Besides, by rejecting asymmetrical federalism the Liberals will be in solid position to sow divisions between NDP's nationalist Quebec base and its BC base -- which is opening hostel to such an approach. Of course, asymmetrical federalism is only one reason why the Liberal party has unraveled and became philosophically untenable. The other reason is the failed generation's support for collective rights and equity. The Liberal party was not alone in this regard. The NDP's support for these principles have long rankled many traditional working class voters. Most moved to the Reform party in 1990s and stayed on with the Conservatives, but others have slowly started to migrate back to the NDP. The Liberals need to rip open those scabs. Support for equity sows division and if successful succeeds only in shuffling the deck. The Liberals could greatly improve and simplify their messaging by promising to improve the lot of all by promising board based social programs built around the principle of universality.

With regard to the Conservatives, the Liberals need to drive a wedge between libertarians and theo cons by championing social liberalism in way that the Liberal party has not done since Trudeau introduced his omnibus bill. Doing so is also the only hope the Liberals have of making inroads into Quebec.

No Way to Bob Rae as Leader

2012-01-09T00:19:00.000-08:00

A common lament is that if not for his record as premier of Ontario, Bob Rae would make a great leader. It is said in this regard that he a good debater, charismatic, well spoken, and funny. He is all that and his decision to focus on the big issues rather than minor scandals is a freshening change and one that the Liberals urgently needed to make. But Rae is also emblematic of everything that is wrong with the Liberal party.

Rae has always been an enthusiastic backer of a asymmetrical federalism, collective rights, and equity, i.e., affirmative action. His support for all three shape his ideas about what the Liberal party is and should continue to be.

The first two are wholly inconsistent with Pearson Trudeau tradition and make a mockery of the Liberal's attempt to draw a line from them to present times. Worse, support for both has real political consequences that the Liberals are blissfully unaware of.

Indeed, the Liberals have never fully absorbed what happened to Liberal level of support in Western Canada following the 1974 election. Some blamed the NEP and others have even claimed the gun registry played a part. The latter claim is ridiculous. The gun registry had no impact on the Liberals share of the popular vote or their seat totals in Western Canada. Most important of all it was passed 16 years after the Liberals first showed a significant decline in their level of support. As for the former, the chronology is also wrong. It was the fact that the Liberal vote collapsed in Western Canada in 1979 that paved the way for the NEP politically and not the other way around. The NEP was introduced after the 1980 election. The Liberals took 1 seat in the three most western provinces in 1979 election and 0 in 1980.

The source of the collapse was the more emphasis Trudeau placed on individual rights and a commitment to linguistic equality the more the rest of the country, particularly the West, resented the Liberals' inability to put a stop to bill 178 and and 101 and its willingness to make special accommodations for Quebec. Quebec's Official Language Act spelled doom for the Liberals in Western Canada from the mid 70s until collapse of the Progressive Conservatives in 1993. Ironically, it was the Mulroney's willingness to go even further in pandering to Quebec, particularly the Charlottetown Accord, that gave the Liberals some life again. 60.2% Albertans voted against the Charlottetown Accord, and 68.3% of British Colombians did. The later figure was by far the highest in country and the voter turn out in BC was second only to Quebec. It should be noted, in passing, that Rae still stands by the Charlottetown Accord.

Let the "coalition" be a warning to the Liberals; these feelings are still deeply felt in "Western" Canada. The Liberals need to learn from history. They need to vigorously oppose the NDP's flirtation with extending bill 101 to federal intuitions in Quebec and their suggestion that Quebec's share of the House of Commons be fixed at 25%. Instead, Rae seems to lend support to such clap trap.

As for the third, it is terrible policy -- albeit not nearly as stupid or destructive as the asinine concept of "collective rights". As it does nothing to address underlying causes of inequality, equity does little to advance equality. A National daycare care system, for example, would do far more in a year for women's wage equality than 25 years of the putrid Employment Equity Act has. The former addresses the underlying causes of the wage gap, the later hurts the cause of young white males because 50 something white males earn more than than their 50 something female colleges. Equity sows division within Canadian society and is an anachronism given Canada's rapidly changing demographic profile. Worst of all, the focus on equity has meant that instead of trying to move the case of all workers forward, something that is desperately needed, liberals have instead devoted virtually all their energies to shuffling the deck. Calls for a bigger share of the pie have been abandoned for sake of each of the ever smaller pieces having an equal amount of fruit.

Equity is also bad politics. Whether it be the funding for religious schools in Ontario, or special treatment of Quebec many Canadians are deeply offended by the very suggestion that government monies and policy should be used to protect and or foster minority interests. Furthermore, whether employment equity, for example, actually makes the government less efficient is beside the point. A commitment to equity is incompatible with the liberal notion of a government built around merit. Hiring the "best" person for the job is a far cry from using the government as a counterpoint to perceived or actual deficiencies in the private sector employment. Government can not be seen or indeed be an affirmative action program. So long as the philosophy of equity rules, Canadians will not have any faith that government is fully committed to furthering the public good. Meanwhile, conservatives will have an easy time claiming that government is in certain respects a make work project for disadvantaged groups and as such, government hurts more than it helps.

Liberals should Promise to Legalize Marijuana

2012-01-07T15:31:00.000-08:00

The US will never legalize Pot

Proposition 19 failed, but the issue will likely be revisited in 2012 and this time it stands a very good chance of passing. Voter turn for mid term elections is always significantly less than when the presidency is up for grabs. For proposition 19 to have stood any chance of winning Democrats, and the young needed to be energized. They were not and stayed away in droves. Even with everything stacked against them, though, the yes campaign still garnered 46% of vote.

A yes vote would kick start a debate stateside that would wipe out any legitimacy prohibition has left in vast swaths of the country. So, while it is likely that a yes vote would likely be contested by whomever is president in 2013, the response is likely to be muted. This will be especially so if Obama wins. Obama is not going to go to war with the biggest State in the Union and one that is heavily Democratic to boot.

Obama's ability to push back would be for other reasons as well. He freely admits to having marijuana in the past ("I inhaled frequently. That was the point") and his marijuana use is not a part of some redemption narrative, a la George Bush. It was a path he choice not to continue going down. Drug use was never presented as a demon he had to overcome yet alone one he still struggles with the way an alcoholic does with drink. This would leave him open to the charge of hypocrisy. Far more importantly though, the war and drugs, especially with regard to marijuana, has had a profound impact on the African American community in the States. If Obama was to toe the standard line in the face of California promising to end the war on drugs, he would be in a world of hurt politically. The African American community would not, of course, abandon him, but they would be unhappy and their unhappiness would have the potential to throw his whole re election campaign out of whack politically. His whole message of being the candidate of change would be called into question.

Finally, it was Obama that set the wheels of legalization in motion in the first place by declaring that he would not crack down on medical marijuana. For you see, unlike in Canada, in California, for example, one does not have to be afflicted with a particular aliment to be eligible for medical marijuana. A doctor can proscribe marijuana for whatever they see fit. Needless to say, such a system is ripe for abuse and the Bush administration was right to see medical marijuana program as a potential Trojan horse. But Obama let wooden horse to be wheeled into California and other States anyway. In so doing, Obama has allowed the medical marijuana industry in California and elsewhere to grow to the point there is no saving prohibition from Odysseus. There are more medical marijuana dispensaries in LA than Starbucks. It is not a question of if marijuana will be legalized in the US it is matter of when.

The US will Never Let it happen

Canadians understand that the US, despite prohibition's crumbling foundation there, would not be pleased about legalization. As such, Harper's musings about legalizing marijuana causing trouble at the border seem reasonable enough. The problem is this does not make marijuana prohibition any more legitimate; it just means that Canada is tailoring its own laws to meet the demands of Americans considered so illegitimate that popular cultural considers them a symptom of madness “refer madness”. This can not stand. Any perception that Canada is enforcing laws to met with illegitimate demands of a bullying third party, whoever that may be, is simply poisonous to the health of a functioning democracy.

Moreover, the notion that American prohibition would stand if Canada were to charge ahead with marijuana legalization is wrong. Not only would Canadian boldness create a tidal wave of domestic debate State side, but should Canada have the guts to go through with such a move various European countries (e.g., Spain, Portugal, Italy and the Netherlands) Australia and Latin America, Mexico in particular, would soon follow Canada's led. The international dominos would start falling one by one. This in turn would further embolden domestic proponents, especially those in California.

Potent Pot

Potent pot is more myth than reality.

However, even if one assumes that potent pot is a reality it is certainly nothing to be concerned about. Indeed, saying that potent pot is reason for keeping marijuana illegal is akin to saying that alcohol should be banned because gin has higher alcohol content than beer. It makes no sense. The pharmacological affects of consuming 1 "chemically supercharged" joint, as various US attorneys like to say, versus x number of "dad's joints" would be no different if the amount of THC consumed is the same. As for consumption, just as people do not drink the same volume of gin as beer, the higher the THC level in pot the less people consume. Hence, ironically more potent pot may be a welcome development. After all, one of the most prominent health effect related to marijuana, if not the most, is that it is usually smoked. The more potent the pot, the less people have to smoke to achieve the same high. Lester Grinspoon of Harvard Medical School concurs, so does Mitch Earleywine of the University of Southern California and so does UCLA's Mark Kleiman.

That said, if potency is the concern, then it should be legalized. After all, the only way to regulate the potency of pot is to legalize it. Moreover, so long as the drug is illegal, producers will seek to increase potency. The higher the potency the smaller the package the smaller the package the less likely they will get caught.

Finally, the attempt to scare parents that have grown up on marijuana by distinguishing between potent pot and “your dad's marijuana” is too clever by half. After all, it begs the following question. If today's marijuana is truly different in kind from "dads marijuana", would it be ok to legalize "dad's marijuana", i.e., low potency pot?

The Black Market will live on

It is one thing to illegally sell a legally produced product and make a profit, e.g., black market cigarettes. It is quite another thing to illegally produce and sell a product (e.g., moonshine) in market where there is legal competitors. The reason is simple. People want to know that what they buying and consuming. So when given the choice of buying an illegally produced product versus a legally produced product they are going to go with the later. (There is one notable exception and that is when an illegally produced product is successfully passed off as a legal one, e.g., fake brand name goods). That is why no matter how much Canadians drank during the time of American prohibition, I am sure that it never crossed the RCMP’s mind that American moonshine might become a competitor of Molson’s.

The gangs can not walk and chew gum at the same time

One of the arguments that I have repeatedly come across recently is that should marijuana be legalized then the gangs will move onto other things. I prefer to call this the gangs can not walk and chew gum at the same time argument.

The problem with this argument is that the gangs are already into other things and it is profits from marijuana that are helping them do that. In the context of Canada, marijuana profits and sometimes even marijuana itself are providing the seed capital the gangs need to expand operations into the States, for example, and to diversify operations (e.g., cocaine, heroin, human trafficking and guns). It is not like the gangs have excess to capital markets. This is one of the main reasons why we need to nip this in the bud.

Gateway Drug

Researchers have rightly noted that people who have try marijuana are statistically more likely try other illicit drugs. This gave raise to the theory that there was something about marijuana that encouraged drug experimentation. Marijuana, it was alleged, is a gateway drug. This, in turn, was given as one more reason to keep the drug illegal.However, the gateway drug theory has until recently fallen on hard times for lack of an intelligible mechanism. The problem was that there was no coherent explanation for why marijuana would lead people to experiment with other drugs. Without this explanation doubt was cast relationship being more than mere correlation. That said, in recent years researchers have breathed new life into the theory, albeit with a sociological twist. According to the new version, it is not marijuana's pharmacological properties that serve as a gateway, but rather marijuana's illegal status. Specifically in the process of illegally procuring marijuana, users are introduced to the criminal elements with access to other illicit drugs and hence it is the forged blackmarket relationship between dealer and buyer that serves as gateway. Ironically the gateway drug theory has been turned on its head and used as reason for legalizing the drug. The Canadian Senate employed the new and improved version of the gateway argument as a reason for legalizing the drug.

In this context it should be noted that when the Dutch partially legalized the sale of marijuana, heroin and cocaine use went down despite an initial increase in marijuana use. Dutch use of hard drugs remains well below the European average.

Schizophrenia Marijuana

Epidemiological studies have consistently failed to show a positive correlation between marijuana use and schizophrenia and there is no causation without correlation. Specifically, should there be a causal link between marijuana and schizophrenia, there should be a positive correlation between marijuana consumption and schizophrenia, but such a correlation is conspicuous by its absence. Despite a massive increase in the number of Australians consuming the drug since the 1960s, Wayne Hall of the University of Queensland found no increase in the number of cases of schizophrenia in Australia. Mitch Earleywine of the University of Southern California similarly found the same with regard to the US population and Oxford's Leslie Iversen found the same regard to the population in the UK. According to Dr. Alan Brown, a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at Columbia University,

"If anything, the studies seem to show a possible decline in schizophrenia from the '40s and the ‘ 50,"

Dr Iddon, the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on drugs misuse [Britain], said the study did not convince him it was time to return cannabis to class B. "I don't think the causal link has been proved. I think cannabis might - possibly for genetic reasons - trigger psychosis at an earlier age." The MP, who is also a member of the science and technology select committee, said there was a danger of criminalising "hundreds of thousands of young people" if the status of the drug was changed. "If Gordon Brown changes the class of the drug, it won't be evidence-based but for political reasons," he said.

The Failure of Current Liberal Policy

A promise to legalize marijuana would be a welcome respite from the Liberals shamelessly taking inherently contradictory policies in hopes of capitalizing on both sides of this issue.

Indeed, on the one hand the Liberals have long maintained that Canadians should not be saddled with a criminal record for consuming something that is, after all, less harmful than alcohol. It is this light that Chrétien famously joked about having a joint in one hand and the money to pay for the fine of having it in the other. “I will have my money for my fine and a joint in my other hand.” On the other hand, just as they long downplayed the affects of smoking marijuana they have long stressed the importance of stiff penalties for trafficking. Both positions are popular with the public, but run the two positions together and it is as if Chrétien said this instead. “I will have my money for my fine and a joint in my other hand. Having paid my fine I would hope the cops find the person who sold it to me in put him in jail for a very long time.” If the act of consumption is not deemed overly ruinous then the whole punitive rationale for trafficking comes crashing down. Add to mix an acknowledgment on behalf of the Liberal party that marijuana can serve a medical purpose and you have a conceptual train wreck as a policy.

Far from helping the Liberals such an approach probably harmed them. It angered ardent supporters of both sides of the political divide at the same time and prevented the Liberals from saying anything intelligent about the issue. Moreover, as far the general public is concerned, the Liberals have gained nothing by trying to emulate the Conservative's tough on crime stance. The reason is simple. As Tom Flanagan crowed after the 2006 election that there are certain issues that just favour the Conservatives. The example he gave was the economy. No matter how successful the Liberals were in balancing the books and creating jobs, Conservative research suggested that when it came to economics people trusted the Conservatives more than they did the Liberals. It does not much of leap to suggest the same is true for crime. After all, to presume that the public has a working knowledge of each party's justice policies is giving the public way too much credit; the public trades in stereotypes and they are always going to believe that Conservatives are tougher on crime. This is especially so now. The Conservatives are in power and for this reason alone what they say with regard to crime garners headlines. By contrast, past Liberal support for some those Conservative tough on crime measures has drawn almost no attention at all. Of course, even if the Liberals were able to convince Canadians did support this or that Conservative measure, the Conservatives have a fail safe. They have claimed and will continue to claim that the Liberals had ability to introduce such policies when they were in power and failed to do so. No one likes a Johnny come lately.

Of course, Liberal bad faith goes much deeper than playing both sides against the middle. Despite a long term commitment to decriminalize marijuana the Liberals have failed to act for fear of angering the Americans. The Marc Emery case is a great example of Liberal cowardness. For years Marc Emery had been paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in Federal taxes on money he made “selling marijuana seeds”. Yet in 2005, at the behest of the American government, Canada arrested Emery so that he could face charges in the US. Emery pleaded guilty to the US charges and was sent the US to serve a 5 year prison term for crime that had not been prosecuted in Canada for 7 years and had only ever warranted a $200 fine. It gets worse. Under the terms of the extradition treaty, one can not be extradited if one is facing the same charge in one’s country of residence and one was arrested there. So, a BC marijuana activists tried to save Emery from being sent to the States by having Emery charged under Canadian law. His efforts were unsuccessful. Despite a mountain of evidence against him, Canadian authorities were unwilling to charge Emery under Canadian law.

So long as the debate is centered around sentencing, the Conservatives win. The Liberals need to shift the focus from punishment to the legitimacy of various laws. This is the only way of Liberals will be able to starve the Conservatives' populist tough on crime agenda of oxygen.

Reforming the Senate is a Stupid Idea: Abolish It

2012-01-06T23:58:00.000-08:00

Many Liberals like many Canadians of the view that either the Senate should be abolished or it should be elected. This only goes to show that many Liberals have not given the matter much thought.

Canada is already a de facto unicameral state -- just ask the supporters of a Triple E senate. After all, one can not argue on the one hand that the current senate is undemocratic and so contributes to the "democratic deficit" and on the other hand argue that the senate is “ineffective”. A body that adds nothing to the genuinely "effective" process can not take away anything either.

Constitutionally senators have all kinds of power and every once in a blue moon the Senate has stalled major pieces of legislation (e.g., free trade and the GST). However the aforementioned instances of stalling are so rare they are the exceptions that prove just how "ineffective" the senate truly is. Moreover, no senate I can think of has pursued a legislative agenda of its own accord; opposing legislation is one thing; purposing legislation is quite another. The reason the senate is not an "effective" body is that senators are not elected and as such lack legitimacy. Furthermore, senators are members of legitimate federal political parties and the parties that they belong to are loath to have their unelected members exercise real authority least their actions undermine the party. Finally, the fact that it is the ruling federal party and not, say, provincial governments that appoint senators defines a clear pecking order, with the Senate answerable to the House.

The difference between electing senators and abolishing the senate is thus huge. It is the difference between abolishing an expensive debating society and transforming that debating society into a intellectual and democratic abortion.

The problem with an elected senate starts with implementation. Being unable to reform the Senate in one fell swoop, Harper has proposed electing Senators piece meal. Under the Conservative plan, new senators would be elected and would be limited to serving out a 8 year term. The elephant in the living room is that if the senate's lack of effective powers flows from the senate's lack of legitimacy, then electing senators might provide the senate with a degree of legitimacy it currently does not hold. One problem with proceeding thusly is that current senators are free to serve until the age of 75. As a result, Harper's actions could either transform an unelected political body with no real power into a largely unelected political body with real political power or commit Canadians to the farcical and expensive act of electing people to office who hold no real power. Always content to play the Tin Man and Lion to Conservatives scarecrow, the Liberals, with the notable exception of Stephane Dion, remain largely mum on the subject.

Of course the problems with an elected senate go far beyond problems with how to implement it.

First arguments for regional representation rests on a false contrast; seats in the House of Commons are supposed to be assigned on basis of population, but in actuality that is not the case. Consider the 905. There are currently 4 plus million living in the 905 and there are currently 32 seats for an average of just over 127,000 people per riding. There are 6 ridings with over a 140,000 people in the 905, Bramalea - Gore - Malton (152,698) Brampton West (170,422) Halton (151,943), Mississauga - Erindale (143,361) Oak Ridges - Markham (169,642) and Vaughan (154,206). By contrast there are 4.5 million people in Sask, Man, NWT, Nuv, Yuk, PEI, NS, NFLD, and NB and there are 62 seats for an average of 72,000 people per riding. Moreover, there is but one riding in the 9, Selkirk Interlake (90,807), with over 90,000 people. Given current growth trends, the 2011 census might show there to be more people in the 905 than the aforementioned provinces and territories. Given population growth, Harper would have to give Ontario alone another 70 seats to make things half way equal. Of course, the problems do not stop there. Not only are the smaller provinces grossely overrepresented so too are rural areas in most provinces. For example, the riding of has Labrador has 26,364 people as compared to the riding of St John's East which has 88,002, Kenora has 64,291 and suburban riding of Oak Ridges - Markham 169,642, Miramichi has 53,844 and Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe 89,334, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing 77,961 and Vanughn 154,206.

Second, simply by virtue of having provincial jurisdiction and provincial representation people living in Canada’s less populated provinces already have a means of leveraging far more attention and support from the Federal government than their numbers warrant. Danny Williams had the government's attention in ways that the mayors of Surrey, Red Deer, Brant, Fredericton and Churchill did not even though we are talking about equal number of seats in both cases. There is more. There is also the asinine Canadian tradition of handing out cabinet posts based not on talent but region.

The third reason is that while one person one vote is bedrock principle of any democracy, one province one senate vote is something else entirely. People, not provinces, deserve equal representation. A province is no more or less than the people that make up that province. Giving the 135,851 in PEI the power to determine everything under provincial jurisdiction, provincial representation and 4 MPs well all the while giving the 170, 422 residents of Brampton West one MP is bad enough as it is. Piling on and giving the 135,851 people in PEI the same number of “effective” senators, as per the American Triple E Senate model, as 12,160,282 Ontarians is beyond stupid and grossly undemocratic. Equally silly is having one "effective" Senator for every 72,997 New Brunswick residents (10 senators in total) versus one Senator for every 685, 581 BC residents (6 senators in total). And that is what the current configuration gives us.

Four, as Benjamin Franklin put it, having two equally matched houses makes as much sense as tying two equally matched horses to either end of a buggy and having them both pull. Having two houses is not only a lobbyist's dream, it is a recipe for political gridlock and pork barrel politics. The only thing that would be worse is if one needed 60% of the votes in the senate to overcome a filibuster.

Thank god for the Young Liberals

2012-01-05T00:09:00.005-08:00

If the Liberals were to get rid of Aboriginal people's commission, the women's commission and the Seniors commission, I would be delighted. However, I admit to having a soft spot for the Young Liberals. They are the only branch of the Liberal party purposing anything remotely liberal. They are a welcome respite from the stifling temperamental conservatism that is draining the Liberal party of all life. Without the Young Liberals, most Liberal conventions would be completely devoid of any policy worth discussing.

This time around the Young Liberals are calling for the Monarchy to be abolished and marijuana to be legalized.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/canada/Liberals+ponder+cutting+ties+with+monarchy/5941989/story.html

Call a Spade a Spade: Native Rights and Native Reserves make the situation intractable

2011-12-16T16:20:00.001-08:00

When the grave situation in this or that remote reserve hits the news, moral outrage is the order of the day. Liberals always demand that more money be thrown the situation and invariably throw in some reference to the Third World. Conservatives, on the other hand, always question whether current monies are being wisely spent.

Neither side seems to have noticed the guy in the gorilla suit. The long and troubled relationship between First Nation peoples and the Crown has blinded them to patent absurdity of the current situation. It has blinded them to the fact that Attawapiskat is a natural consequence of an economic and legal relationship built around Native rights, the reserve system, the Indian Act and Native Self government. In any other context this would be self evident. Indeed, imagine if the government happened to, oh, legally define what it means to be Chinese, created a department of Chinese affairs, created Chinese rights, reserved land for Chinese so defined and exempted Chinese living on reserve land from paying taxes of any kind. No one would doubt that is a recipe for disastrous social relations. So, why would anyone doubt the same about Native Affairs, native rights and native reserves?

Of course the situation is even worse than just described. Not only has Canada set up hundreds of tax havens for Status Indians to take advantage of, it also provides incentives for Status Indians to stay on them or move to them. Specifically, the feds hold out the promise of free housing, a promise to pay for upkeep and the promise of never imposing not only no income tax or sales tax, but also no property tax. The federal government will pay for any needed infrastructure. Realizing, the patent absurdity of its ironclad guarantee, the government drags its feet, provides the bare minimum level of funding for housing, upkeep and infrastructure and to, add insult to injury, proceeds in less than timely matter. In other words, the government has every reason to create living conditions that repel even as its moronic promises attract.

In practice government foot dragging does not always work so well. Some of these tax havens are so isolated and so utterly economically unviable that the government is dammed no matter what it does. If it builds up these communities too much it runs the risk of attracting more people to them. However if it does too little, the very scarcity of jobs in these places ties people living there to land all the more. The less assets, work experience and education a person has the more attractive the prospect of obtaining free housing, however squalid, becomes. There is a long waiting list of people wanting housing in Attawapiskat. A bird in the hand is better than two in bush as it were; a dilapidated house in the hand is better than the dim prospects of a better house elsewhere.

The only possible way out this mess, viz., abolishing native rights, abolishing the Indian Act and privatizing reserve lands, has been forever blocked by section 35 of the Constitution -- a decision, by the way, that renders Trudeau's time in office an abject failure. The best the government can do is to amend the Indian Act to allow for the creation of fee simple lands, thereby switching the financial burden of maintaining and upgrading housing from the federal government to individual home owners, and empowering bands to impose property taxes. This will give the people living in Attawapiskat and like communities additional economic incentives to leave. Namely, either property taxes and the cost of upkeep will drive people away in the absence of a job, or the prospect of using the capital from the sale of one's house and land will.

That said, introducing fee simple opens a whole host of other problems. For example, as the idiocy of native self government is maintained in all cases, non natives purchasing native lands would have no right to take part in band elections. There would be taxation but no representation. Such a situation would greatly depress real estate values on reserves -- especially on remote reserves. Band councils must be transformed into municipal councils. The notion of a government built around a legally defined race is not only economically problematic, it is ideologically putrid. Moving to a fee simple model also does not eliminate such lands as tax havens.

The reserve system, premised as it is on the notion of native rights, is a bureaucratic, fiscal, jurisdictional, legal, intellectual and sociological abortion that does nothing save waste mountains of money, breed corruption, black marketeering and poverty, encourage tax evasion (e.g., cigarettes), instill in the native community a vile sense of identity based on “blood” and breed racism in the Canadian society at large. If politicians and the media want to accept this as Canada's historical cross to bear, so be it. However, it is high time both acknowledge that the problem is intractable so long as the only possible solution, viz., the abolition of native rights and the Indian Act and privatization of reserve lands, remains legally untenable.

Abolish the Senate Already

2011-12-15T00:58:00.002-08:00

Constitutionally senators have all kinds of power and every once in a blue moon the Senate has stalled major pieces of legislation (e.g., free trade and the GST). However the aforementioned instances of stalling are so rare they are the exceptions that prove just how "ineffective" the senate truly is. Moreover, no senate I can think of has pursued a legislative agenda of its own accord; opposing legislation is one thing; purposing legislation is quite another. The reason the senate is not an "effective" body is that senators are not elected and as such lack legitimacy. Furthermore, senators are members of legitimate federal political parties and the parties that they belong to are loath to have their unelected members exercise real authority least their actions undermine the party. Finally, the fact that it is the ruling federal party and not, say, provincial governments that appoint senators defines a clear pecking order, with the Senate answerable to the House.

Harper, of course, wants to reform the Senate. Being unable to reform the Senate in one fell swoop, Harper has proposed electing Senators piece meal. Under the Conservative plan, new senators would be elected and would be limited to serving out a 8 year term. The elephant in the living room is that if the senate's lack of effective powers flows from the senate's lack of legitimacy, then electing senators might provide the senate with a degree of legitimacy it currently does not hold. One problem with proceeding thusly is that current senators are free to serve until the age of 75. As a result, Harper's actions could either transform an unelected political body with no real power into a largely unelected political body with real political power or commit Canadians to the farcical and expensive act of electing people to office who hold no real power. Always content to play the Tin Man and Lion to Conservatives scarecrow, the Liberals remain largely mum on the subject.

Setting aside problems associated with implementation, is the cause of democracy even served by reforming the Senate? Well, the Reformers always held that the regions needed more say and an “equal” “effective” and “elected” senate is the best way of achieving a balance between population centers in Eastern Canada and the rest of us. Of course, Reformers also lamented that "the West's" growing population was not translating into more political clout. Such was movement's internal inconstancy and intellectual shallowness. The Reform party aside, such a conception, and for that matter an "effective" version of the current senate, does not stand up to scrutiny. The problem is fivefold.

First such an argument rests on a false contrast; seats in the House of Commons are supposed to be assigned on basis of population, but in actuality that is not the case. Consider the 905. There are currently 4 plus million living in the 905 and there are currently 32 seats for an average of just over 127,000 people per riding. There are 6 ridings with over a 140,000 people in the 905, Bramalea - Gore - Malton (152,698) Brampton West (170,422) Halton (151,943), Mississauga - Erindale (143,361) Oak Ridges - Markham (169,642) and Vaughan (154,206). By contrast there are 4.5 million people in Sask, Man, NWT, Nuv, Yuk, PEI, NS, NFLD, and NB and there are 62 seats for an average of 72,000 people per riding. Moreover, there is but one riding in the 9, Selkirk Interlake (90,807), with over 90,000 people. Given current growth trends, the 2011 census might show there to be more people in the 905 than the aforementioned provinces and territories. Given population growth, Harper would have to give Ontario alone another 70 seats to make things half way equal. Of course, the problems do not stop there. Not only are the smaller provinces grossely overrepresented so too are rural areas in most provinces. For example, the riding of has Labrador has 26,364 people as compared to the riding of St John's East which has 88,002, Kenora has 64,291 and suburban riding of Oak Ridges - Markham 169,642, Miramichi has 53,844 and Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe 89,334, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing 77,961 and Vanughn 154,206.

Second, simply by virtue of having provincial jurisdiction and provincial representation people living in Canada’s less populated provinces already have a means of leveraging far more attention and support from the Federal government than their numbers warrant. Danny Williams had the government's attention in ways that the mayors of Surrey, Red Deer, Brant, Fredericton and Churchill did not even though we are talking about equal number of seats in both cases. There is more. There is also the asinine Canadian tradition of handing out cabinet posts based not on talent but region.

The third reason is that while one person one vote is bedrock principle of any democracy, one province one senate vote is something else entirely. People, not provinces, deserve equal representation. A province is no more or less than the people that make up that province. Giving the 135,851 in PEI the power to determine everything under provincial jurisdiction, provincial representation and 4 MPs well all the while giving the 170, 422 residents of Brampton West one MP is bad enough as it is. Piling on and giving the 135,851 people in PEI the same number of “effective” senators, as per the American Triple E Senate model, as 12,160,282 Ontarians is beyond stupid and grossly undemocratic. Equally silly is having one "effective" Senator for every 72,997 New Brunswick residents (10 senators in total) versus one Senator for every 685, 581 BC residents (6 senators in total). And that is what the current configuration gives us.

Four, as Benjamin Franklin put it, having two equally matched houses makes as much sense as tying two equally matched horses to either end of a buggy and having them both pull. Having two houses is not only a lobbyist's dream, it is a recipe for political gridlock and pork barrel politics. The only thing that would be worse is if one needed 60% of the votes in the senate to overcome a filibuster.

Five, leaving aside the fact that no province has a second chamber, most having abolished them long ago, and that there are numerous examples of unicameral nation states (e.g., New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Israel, Sweden, Iceland, Liechtenstein, South Korea and Portugal), we already have a de facto unicameral state as it is -- just ask the supporters of a Triple E senate. After all, one can not argue on the one hand that the current senate is undemocratic and so contributes to the "democratic deficit" and on the other hand argue that the senate is “ineffective”. A body that adds nothing to the genuinely "effective" process can not take away anything either.

Canadians drowning in Debt: further Decreases in Amortization called for

2011-12-15T00:44:00.004-08:00

The cost of housing gone through the roof since 2006 and the main reason for that is the Conservative government decided pour fuel on an already red hot real estate market. The Conservatives extended the mortgage amortization period from 25 years to 30 years in February 2006, extended it to 35 years in July of 2006 and extended it yet again to 40 years in November 2006. During this period they also reduced the needed down payment on second properties from 20% to 5% and allowed for 0 down on one's primary residence. Ever since the down turn, Jim Flaherty has been scrabbling to undo the damage his past actions have done. Flaherty first reduced amortization period from 40 years to 35 and again mandated a 20% down payment on secondary properties and 5% on primary properties in October 2008 and on March 18th he reduced the maximum amortization period to 30 years. Never once acknowledging that it was he who raised the amortization period to begin with, Jim Flaherty has repeatedly over the course of the last 2 and half years claimed that reducing the amortization and increasing the minimum downplayment was the right thing to do. "In 2008 and again in 2010, our government acted to protect and strengthen the Canadian housing market,".

With Canadians drowning in debt, Ed Clark, the chief executive officer of Toronto-Dominion Bank has said Flaherty should go back to where he started. That is, amortization should be capped at 25 years.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/mortgage-rules-should-be-stricter-td-chief-says/article2271588/

The problem is that it would be tricky to do this without creating a downturn in the housing market and this would not reverse the damage that has already been done by Conservative stupidity. Whether it be Bloomberg, the Economist, the IMF, Paul Krugman and, if you read between the lines, Mark Carney many are worried that Canada's housing market is headed for a crash and that such a crash would have dire implications for Canada. For one thing, since 2006 Canadian mortgage and housing corporations liabilities have gone from 100 billion to 500 hundred billion. If the housing bubble bursts and Canadians start defaulting on their mortgages, the Canadian tax payer will be picking up the tab. The Canadian government guarantees all that debt.

So long as Native Rights and Reserves exist so will Attawapiskats

2011-12-15T00:36:00.003-08:00

A guide on handling Conservative Marijuana legalization talking points and Liberal reluctance

2011-12-06T17:04:00.000-08:00

The US will never legalize Pot

Proposition 19 failed, but the issue will likely be revisited in 2012 and this time it stands a very good chance of passing. Voter turn for mid term elections is always significantly less than when the presidency is up for grabs. For proposition 19 to have stood any chance of winning Democrats, and the young needed to be energized. They were not and stayed away in droves. Even with everything stacked against them, though, the yes campaign still garnered 46% of vote.

A yes vote would kick start a debate stateside that would wipe out any legitimacy prohibition has left in vast swaths of the country. So, while it is likely that a yes vote would likely be contested by whomever is president in 2013, the response is likely to be muted. This will be especially so if Obama wins. Obama is not going to go to war with the biggest State in the Union and one that is heavily Democratic to boot.

Obama's ability to push back would be for other reasons as well. He freely admits to having marijuana in the past ("I inhaled frequently. That was the point") and his marijuana use is not a part of some redemption narrative, a la George Bush. It was a path he choice not to continue going down. Drug use was never presented as a demon he had to overcome yet alone one he still struggles with the way an alcoholic does with drink. This would leave him open to the charge of hypocrisy. Far more importantly though, the war and drugs, especially with regard to marijuana, has had a profound impact on the African American community in the States. If Obama was to toe the standard line in the face of California promising to end the war on drugs, he would be in a world of hurt politically. The African American community would not, of course, abandon him, but they would be unhappy and their unhappiness would have the potential to throw his whole re election campaign out of whack politically. His whole message of being the candidate of change would be called into question.

Finally, it was Obama that set the wheels of legalization in motion in the first place by declaring that he would not crack down on medical marijuana. For you see, unlike in Canada, in California, for example, one does not have to be afflicted with a particular aliment to be eligible for medical marijuana. A doctor can proscribe marijuana for whatever they see fit. Needless to say, such a system is ripe for abuse and the Bush administration was right to see medical marijuana program as a potential Trojan horse. But Obama let wooden horse to be wheeled into California and other States anyway. In so doing, Obama has allowed the medical marijuana industry in California and elsewhere to grow to the point there is no saving prohibition from Odysseus. There are more medical marijuana dispensaries in LA than Starbucks. It is not a question of if marijuana will be legalized in the US it is matter of when.

The US will Never Let it happen

Canadians understand that the US, despite prohibition's crumbling foundation there, would not be pleased about legalization. As such, Harper's musings about legalizing marijuana causing trouble at the border seem reasonable enough. The problem is this does not make marijuana prohibition any more legitimate; it just means that Canada is tailoring its own laws to meet the demands of Americans considered so illegitimate that popular cultural considers them a symptom of madness “refer madness”. This can not stand. Any perception that Canada is enforcing laws to met with illegitimate demands of a bullying third party, whoever that may be, is simply poisonous to the health of a functioning democracy.

Moreover, the notion that American prohibition would stand if Canada were to charge ahead with marijuana legalization is wrong. Not only would Canadian boldness create a tidal wave of domestic debate State side, but should Canada have the guts to go through with such a move various European countries (e.g., Spain, Portugal, Italy and the Netherlands) Australia and Latin America, Mexico in particular, would soon follow Canada's led. The international dominos would start falling one by one. This in turn would further embolden domestic proponents, especially those in California.

Potent Pot

Potent pot is more myth than reality.

However, even if one assumes that potent pot is a reality it is certainly nothing to be concerned about. Indeed, saying that potent pot is reason for keeping marijuana illegal is akin to saying that alcohol should be banned because gin has higher alcohol content than beer. It makes no sense. The pharmacological affects of consuming 1 "chemically supercharged" joint, as various US attorneys like to say, versus x number of "dad's joints" would be no different if the amount of THC consumed is the same. As for consumption, just as people do not drink the same volume of gin as beer, the higher the THC level in pot the less people consume. Hence, ironically more potent pot may be a welcome development. After all, one of the most prominent health effect related to marijuana, if not the most, is that it is usually smoked. The more potent the pot, the less people have to smoke to achieve the same high. Lester Grinspoon of Harvard Medical School concurs, so does Mitch Earleywine of the University of Southern California and so does UCLA's Mark Kleiman.

That said, if potency is the concern, then it should be legalized. After all, the only way to regulate the potency of pot is to legalize it. Moreover, so long as the drug is illegal, producers will seek to increase potency. The higher the potency the smaller the package the smaller the package the less likely they will get caught.

Finally, the attempt to scare parents that have grown up on marijuana by distinguishing between potent pot and “your dad's marijuana” is too clever by half. After all, it begs the following question. If today's marijuana is truly different in kind from "dads marijuana", would it be ok to legalize "dad's marijuana", i.e., low potency pot?

The Black Market will live on

It is one thing to illegally sell a legally produced product and make a profit, e.g., black market cigarettes. It is quite another thing to illegally produce and sell a product (e.g., moonshine) in market where there is legal competitors. The reason is simple. People want to know that what they buying and consuming. So when given the choice of buying an illegally produced product versus a legally produced product they are going to go with the later. (There is one notable exception and that is when an illegally produced product is successfully passed off as a legal one, e.g., fake brand name goods). That is why no matter how much Canadians drank during the time of American prohibition, I am sure that it never crossed the RCMP’s mind that American moonshine might become a competitor of Molson’s.

The gangs can not walk and chew gum at the same time

One of the arguments that I have repeatedly come across recently is that should marijuana be legalized then the gangs will move onto other things. I prefer to call this the gangs can not walk and chew gum at the same time argument.

The problem with this argument is that the gangs are already into other things and it is profits from marijuana that are helping them do that. In the context of Canada, marijuana profits and sometimes even marijuana itself are providing the seed capital the gangs need to expand operations into the States, for example, and to diversify operations (e.g., cocaine, heroin, human trafficking and guns). It is not like the gangs have excess to capital markets. This is one of the main reasons why we need to nip this in the bud.

Gateway Drug

Researchers have rightly noted that people who have try marijuana are statistically more likely try other illicit drugs. This gave raise to the theory that there was something about marijuana that encouraged drug experimentation. Marijuana, it was alleged, is a gateway drug. This, in turn, was given as one more reason to keep the drug illegal.However, the gateway drug theory has until recently fallen on hard times for lack of an intelligible mechanism. The problem was that there was no coherent explanation for why marijuana would lead people to experiment with other drugs. Without this explanation doubt was cast relationship being more than mere correlation. That said, in recent years researchers have breathed new life into the theory, albeit with a sociological twist. According to the new version, it is not marijuana's pharmacological properties that serve as a gateway, but rather marijuana's illegal status. Specifically in the process of illegally procuring marijuana, users are introduced to the criminal elements with access to other illicit drugs and hence it is the forged blackmarket relationship between dealer and buyer that serves as gateway. Ironically the gateway drug theory has been turned on its head and used as reason for legalizing the drug. The Canadian Senate employed the new and improved version of the gateway argument as a reason for legalizing the drug.

In this context it should be noted that when the Dutch partially legalized the sale of marijuana, heroin and cocaine use went down despite an initial increase in marijuana use. Dutch use of hard drugs remains well below the European average.

Schizophrenia Marijuana

Epidemiological studies have consistently failed to show a positive correlation between marijuana use and schizophrenia and there is no causation without correlation. Specifically, should there be a causal link between marijuana and schizophrenia, there should be a positive correlation between marijuana consumption and schizophrenia, but such a correlation is conspicuous by its absence. Despite a massive increase in the number of Australians consuming the drug since the 1960s, Wayne Hall of the University of Queensland found no increase in the number of cases of schizophrenia in Australia. Mitch Earleywine of the University of Southern California similarly found the same with regard to the US population and Oxford's Leslie Iversen found the same regard to the population in the UK. According to Dr. Alan Brown, a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at Columbia University,

"If anything, the studies seem to show a possible decline in schizophrenia from the '40s and the ‘ 50,"

Dr Iddon, the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on drugs misuse [Britain], said the study did not convince him it was time to return cannabis to class B. "I don't think the causal link has been proved. I think cannabis might - possibly for genetic reasons - trigger psychosis at an earlier age." The MP, who is also a member of the science and technology select committee, said there was a danger of criminalising "hundreds of thousands of young people" if the status of the drug was changed. "If Gordon Brown changes the class of the drug, it won't be evidence-based but for political reasons," he said.

The Failure of Current Liberal Policy

A promise to legalize marijuana would be a welcome respite from the Liberals shamelessly taking inherently contradictory policies in hopes of capitalizing on both sides of this issue.

Indeed, on the one hand the Liberals have long maintained that Canadians should not be saddled with a criminal record for consuming something that is, after all, less harmful than alcohol. It is this light that Chrétien famously joked about having a joint in one hand and the money to pay for the fine of having it in the other. “I will have my money for my fine and a joint in my other hand.” On the other hand, just as they long downplayed the affects of smoking marijuana they have long stressed the importance of stiff penalties for trafficking. Both positions are popular with the public, but run the two positions together and it is as if Chrétien said this instead. “I will have my money for my fine and a joint in my other hand. Having paid my fine I would hope the cops find the person who sold it to me in put him in jail for a very long time.” If the act of consumption is not deemed overly ruinous then the whole punitive rationale for trafficking comes crashing down. Add to mix an acknowledgment on behalf of the Liberal party that marijuana can serve a medical purpose and you have a conceptual train wreck as a policy.

Far from helping the Liberals such an approach probably harmed them. It angered ardent supporters of both sides of the political divide at the same time and prevented the Liberals from saying anything intelligent about the issue. Moreover, as far the general public is concerned, the Liberals have gained nothing by trying to emulate the Conservative's tough on crime stance. The reason is simple. As Tom Flanagan crowed after the 2006 election that there are certain issues that just favour the Conservatives. The example he gave was the economy. No matter how successful the Liberals were in balancing the books and creating jobs, Conservative research suggested that when it came to economics people trusted the Conservatives more than they did the Liberals. It does not much of leap to suggest the same is true for crime. After all, to presume that the public has a working knowledge of each party's justice policies is giving the public way too much credit; the public trades in stereotypes and they are always going to believe that Conservatives are tougher on crime. This is especially so now. The Conservatives are in power and for this reason alone what they say with regard to crime garners headlines. By contrast, past Liberal support for some those Conservative tough on crime measures has drawn almost no attention at all. Of course, even if the Liberals were able to convince Canadians did support this or that Conservative measure, the Conservatives have a fail safe. They have claimed and will continue to claim that the Liberals had ability to introduce such policies when they were in power and failed to do so. No one likes a Johnny come lately.

Of course, Liberal bad faith goes much deeper than playing both sides against the middle. Despite a long term commitment to decriminalize marijuana the Liberals have failed to act for fear of angering the Americans. The Marc Emery case is a great example Liberal cowardness. For years Marc Emery had been paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in Federal taxes on money he made “selling marijuana seeds”. Yet in 2005, at the behest of the American government, Canada arrested Emery so that he could face charges in the US. Emery pleaded guilty to the US charges and was sent the US to serve a 5 year prison term for crime that had not been prosecuted in Canada for 7 years and had only ever warranted a $200 fine. It gets worse. Under the terms of the extradition treaty, one can not be extradited if one is facing the same charge in one’s country of residence and one was arrested there. So, a BC marijuana activists tried to save Emery from being sent to the States by having Emery charged under Canadian law. His efforts were unsuccessful. Despite a mountain of evidence against him, Canadian authorities were unwilling to charge Emery under Canadian law.

So long as the debate is centered around sentencing, the Conservatives win. The Liberals need to shift the focus from punishment to the legitimacy of various laws. This is the only way of Liberals will be able to starve the Conservatives' populist tough on crime agenda of oxygen.

Time to Abolish the Reserve system

2011-12-03T13:06:00.000-08:00

Imagine if the government happened to, oh, legally define what it means Chinese, create a department of Chinese affairs, create Chinese rights, reserve land for Chinese so defined and exempt Chinese living on reserve land from paying taxes of any kind. No one would doubt that is a recipe for disastrous social relations. So, why would anyone doubt the same about Native Affairs, native rights and native reserves? Abolish the reserve system and native rights and comments about "drunken Indians" will become as rare and archaic sounding as "drunken" whatever.

Not to sound too much like a historical materialist, but a culture ceases to form a coherent whole once the dominant mode of production completely changes. This is not controversial. Everyone realizes that recreating the culture of feudal France or Ancient Athens is impossible. Such a task would mean recreating the economic basis upon which fostered these cultures. However, many people it seems have the hair brained notion that it is possible to create a close facsimile of traditional native culture. They have not noticed that what underpins native culture today is not subsistence hunting carried out with modern rifles with scopes in place of traditional hunting tools, but rather Canadian law and past Canadian attempts of social exclusion. The dichotomy between “their” culture and “our” culture is hence false. Canada is the authors of both. The Indian Act and the reserve system is the basis by which status Indians reproduce themselves.

The insistence of many that the communal tenor of Native culture be maintained no matter what amounts to call to save native culture screw the natives. Yes these collection of idiotic laws have helped foster a strong Native identity (legally defining a group as other always does), but on a human level they produced nothing but misery. Why this does not bother more people I do not know. It is time the Canadian government shut down this ant farm. All it has done is produce levels of poverty that could only be described as third world, substance abuse levels that rival countries undergoing serve economic dislocation, suicide rates as high as gay males and American soldiers serving in Iraq and rapid criminality.

An Attawapiskat will show up every 3 years in perpetuity.

2011-12-02T14:53:00.002-08:00

Thanks to the idiocy of the 1982, aka section 35, the only way forward, viz., abolishing native rights, abolishing the Indian Act and privatizing reserve lands, has been forever blocked. An Attawapiskat like situation will show up every 3 years or so in perpetuity. The incentives built into the system are perverse.

Indeed, most governments try to limit their citizens ability to take advantage of tax havens. But not Canada. The Canadian federal government provides incentives for Status Indians to stay or move to various tax havens and it backs up its promises with an ironclad guarantee. Specifically, the feds hold out the promise of free housing, a promise pay for upkeep and the promise of never imposing not only no income tax or sales tax, but also no property tax. The federal government will pay for any needed infrastructure. Of course, the reality is less rosy than the brochure makes it seem. Realizing the patent absurdity of its ironclad guarantee, the government drags its feet, provides the bare minimum level of funding for housing, upkeep and infrastructure and to, add insult to injury, proceeds in less than timely matter. In other words, the government has every reason to create living conditions that repel even as its moronic promises attract.

Now, some of these tax havens are isolated and economically unviable. Perversely, the very scarcity of jobs in these places ties people to land all the more. The less assets, work experience and education a person has the more attractive the prospect of obtaining free housing, however squalid, becomes. There is long waiting list of people wanting housing in Attawapiskat. This is doubly so if one already owns a home there. A bird in the hand is better than two in bush as it were; a dilapidated house in the hand is better than the dim prospects of a better house elsewhere.

So, should residents of Attawapiskat be moved to more southerly location? No, Attawapiskat must be allowed to sink or swim and above all else people living there must be given additional economic incentives to leave. That means at least points two and three of the following have to happen. 1) All reserve lands and homes need to be privatized with home owners given the right to sell their homes on the open market. 2) The financial burden of maintaining and upgrading housing must switch from the band -- in reality federal government -- to the individual home owners. 3) Band councils must gain the ability to impose property taxes. Either property taxes and the cost of upkeep will drive people away in the absence of a job, or the prospect of using the capital from the sale of one's house and land will. The later is obviously preferable, but thanks to the idiocy of 1982 nearly politically impossible.

Native Housing: Perverse Incentives

2011-12-02T00:05:00.000-08:00

Most government's try to limit their citizens ability to take advantage of tax havens. Not, Canada. The Canadian federal government provides incentives for a certain class of citizens to stay or move to various tax havens and it backs up its promises with an ironclad guarantee. Specifically, the feds hold out the promise of free housing, a promise pay for upkeep and the promise of never imposing not only no income tax or sales tax, but also no property tax. The federal government will pay for any needed infrastructure. Of course, the reality is less rosy than the brochure makes it seem. Realizing the patent absurdity of its ironclad guarantee, the government drags its feet, provides the bare minimum level of funding for housing, upkeep and infrastructure and to, add insult to injury, proceeds in less than timely matter. In other words, the government has every reason to create living conditions that repel even as its promises attract.

Trudeau's unforgivable Sin

2011-12-01T01:07:00.000-08:00

Prior to 1970, whatever group rights that existed were granted out of political necessity and certainly not any kind of ideological attraction. In the 1970s that changed. Various groups championed group rights both as means of correcting historical inequalities and as a manifestation of the concept of nation build around the idea of blood. Pearson and later Trudeau recognized these inequalities, but felt that such inequalities could be better addressed by means that did not elevate the poisonous and divisive concept of a blood nation. So far so good. The only problem is Trudeau sold out. Such was Trudeau's desire to repatriate the Constitution that he was willing to enshrine in it the intelluctual abortion that is collective rights as a guiding legal principle. His actions are unforgivable. The country has suffered as a result, but nearly as much as the Liberals. The bi polar nature of today's Liberal party can be traced back to Trudeau's Faustine gambit. The Liberals are now a party that celebrates Trudeau's principled Federalism well all the while practicing an unprincipled and opportunistic form of asymmetrical federalism. They are a party that celebrates, on the one hand, a famously inclusive, albeit nebulous Canadian identity that the party helped foster, while all the well paying homage to exotic level of government whose membership is exclusive to one legally defined race.

Attawapiskat is Economically Unviable

2011-11-30T17:48:00.000-08:00

There is no economic reason for Attawapiskat to exist. In this sense it is like many abandoned Newfoundland outposts. However, unlike those abandoned outposts the modern incarnation of Attawapiskat, which dates back to the 1960s, has never been tied to the world economy. It has never had an economic reason to exist. Outside of contracting and user fees, which amount to next to nothing, the band has no internally driven soure of revenue. Thus, the welfare of its inhabits depends on two things. 1) Federal and Provincial government funding. 2) The effective distribution of those funds. The NDP and Liberals have focused on the first of these, the Conservatives on the second.

Both miss the point. Namely, the community is economically unviable and people living there do not have the means to leave nor the incentive to leave. The two work in tandem. The less assets, work experience and education a person has the more attractive the prospect of obtaining housing, however squalid, becomes. This is doubly so if one already owns a home there. A bird in the hand is better than two in bush as it were; a dilapidated house in the hand is better than the dim prospects of a better house elsewhere.

Now, the prospects for Attawapiskat are dim no matter how you slice it. However, one thing that needs to be done with Attawapiskat and reserves around the country is this. 1) All reserve lands and homes need to be privatized with home owners given the right to sell their homes on the open market. 2) The financial burden of maintaining and upgrading housing must switch from the band to the individual home owners. 3) Band councils must gain the ability to impose property taxes.

Attawapiskat must be allowed to sink or swim and above all else people living there must be given additional economic incentives to leave. Either property taxes and the cost of upkeep will drive people away in the absense of a job, or prospect of using the capital from the sale one's house and land will. The later is obviously preferable. It means that the prospect future economic activity has given these homes, the land on which they built anyway, some value.

Vancouver Mayor and 4 former Vancouver Mayors call for the Legalization of Pot: Liberals should do the Same

2011-11-26T12:39:00.000-08:00

Sam Sullivan, Mayor of Vancouver, 2005-2008

Larry Campbell, Mayor of Vancouver, 2002-2005

Philip Owen, Mayor of Vancouver, 1993-2002

Mike Harcourt, Mayor of Vancouver, 1980-1986

Have called for marijuana to be legalized.

http://stoptheviolencebc.org/2011/11/22/letter-from-former-mayors/

Current mayor Gregor Robertson calls for the same.

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Politics/2011/11/25/19020711.html

The Liberals should follow suit.

Legalizing marijuana would be good policy and for that reason alone the Liberals should consider it. However, beyond that legalizing marijuana would be good politics. The reason it is good politics has no more to do with the untapped stoner vote then same sex marriage had to do with the untapped gay and lesbian vote. I can assure you there is not there is no drug vote to grab. The reason it is good politics is there is significant ground swell of public support for the issue. Since 2004 polls put support between 50 to 55%. More importantly, opponent's arguments are a house of cards. See below. Just as with gay marriage the Liberals would benefit from having the Conservatives trout out stupid arguments for extended period of time. Just as with SSM the Conservatives are on the wrong side of history on this one. Let history steamroll them.

Potent Pot

Potent pot is more myth than reality.

However, even if one assumes that potent pot is a reality it is certainly nothing to be concerned about. Indeed, saying that potent pot is reason for keeping marijuana illegal is akin to saying that alcohol should be banned because gin has higher alcohol content than beer. It makes no sense. The pharmacological affects of consuming 1 "chemically supercharged" joint, as various US attorneys like to say, versus x number of "dad's joints" would be no different if the amount of THC consumed is the same. As for consumption, just as people do not drink the same volume of gin as beer, the higher the THC level in pot the less people consume. Hence, ironically more potent pot may be a welcome development. After all, one of the most prominent health effect related to marijuana, if not the most, is that it is usually smoked. The more potent the pot, the less people have to smoke to achieve the same high. Lester Grinspoon of Harvard Medical School concurs, so does Mitch Earleywine of the University of Southern California and so does UCLA's Mark Kleiman.

That said, if potency is the concern, then it should be legalized. After all, the only way to regulate the potency of pot is to legalize it. Moreover, so long as the drug is illegal, producers will seek to increase potency. The higher the potency the smaller the package the smaller the package the less likely they will get caught.

Finally, the attempt to scare parents that have grown up on marijuana by distinguishing between potent pot and “your dad's marijuana” is too clever by half. After all, it begs the following question. If today's marijuana is truly different in kind from "dads marijuana", would it be ok to legalize "dad's marijuana", i.e., low potency pot?

The US will Never Let it happen

Proposition 19 failed, but the issue will likely be revisited in 2012 and this time it stands a very good chance of passing. Voter turn for mid term elections is always significantly less than when the presidency is up for grabs. For proposition 19 to have stood any chance of winning Democrats, and the young needed to be energized. They were not and stayed away in droves. Even with everything stacked against them, though, the yes campaign still garnered 46% of vote.

Legal production of marijuana in California will make the legislation of marijuana elsewhere in the US all but inevitable and extension in Canada as well. Obama is not going to go to war with California in order to maintain a federal prohibition. Indeed, it was Obama that set the wheels of legalization in motion by declaring that he would not crack down on medical marijuana. For you see, unlike in Canada, in California, for example, one does not have to be afflicted with a particular aliment to be eligible for medical marijuana. A doctor can proscribe marijuana for whatever they see fit. Needless to say, such a system is ripe for abuse and the Bush administration was right to see medical marijuana program as a potential Trojan horse. But Obama let wooden horse to be wheeled into California and other States anyway. In so doing, Obama has allowed the medical marijuana industry in California and elsewhere to grow to the point there is no saving prohibition from Odysseus. There are more medical marijuana dispensaries in LA than Starbucks.

The Black Market will live on

It is one thing to illegally sell a legally produced product and make a profit, e.g., black market cigarettes. It is quite another thing to illegally produce and sell a product (e.g., moonshine) in market where there is legal competitors. The reason is simple. People want to know that what they buying and consuming. So when given the choice of buying an illegally produced product versus a legally produced product they are going to go with the later. (There is one notable exception and that is when an illegally produced product is successfully passed off as a legal one, e.g., fake brand name goods). That is why no matter how much Canadians drank during the time of American prohibition, I am sure that it never crossed the RCMP’s mind that American moonshine might become a competitor of Molson’s.

The gangs can not walk and chew gum at the same time

One of the arguments that I have repeatedly come across recently is that should marijuana be legalized then the gangs will move onto other things. I prefer to call this the gangs can not walk and chew gum at the same time argument.

The problem with this argument is that the gangs are already into other things and it is profits from marijuana that are helping them do that. In the context of Canada, marijuana profits and sometimes even marijuana itself are providing the seed capital the gangs need to expand operations into the States, for example, and to diversify operations (e.g., cocaine, heroin, human trafficking and guns). This is one of the main reasons why we need to nip this in the bud.

Gateway Drug

Researchers have rightly noted that people who have try marijuana are statistically more likely try other illicit drugs. This gave raise to the theory that there was something about marijuana that encouraged drug experimentation. Marijuana, it was alleged, is a gateway drug. This, in turn, was given as one more reason to keep the drug illegal.However, the gateway drug theory has until recently fallen on hard times for lack of an intelligible mechanism. The problem was that there was no coherent explanation for why marijuana would lead people to experiment with other drugs. Without this explanation doubt was cast relationship being more than mere correlation. That said, in recent years researchers have breathed new life into the theory, albeit with a sociological twist. According to the new version, it is not marijuana's pharmacological properties that serve as a gateway, but rather marijuana's illegal status. Specifically in the process of illegally procuring marijuana, users are introduced to the criminal elements with access to other illicit drugs and hence it is the forged blackmarket relationship between dealer and buyer that serves as gateway. Ironically the gateway drug theory has been turned on its head and used as reason for legalizing the drug. The Canadian Senate employed the new and improved version of the gateway argument as a reason for legalizing the drug.

In this context it should be noted that when the Dutch partially legalized the sale of marijuana, heroin and cocaine use went down despite an initial increase in marijuana use. Dutch use of hard drugs remains well below the European average.

Schizophrenia Marijuana

Epidemiological studies have consistently failed to show a positive correlation between marijuana use and schizophrenia and there is no causation without correlation. Specifically, should there be a causal link between marijuana and schizophrenia, there should be a positive correlation between marijuana consumption and schizophrenia, but such a correlation is conspicuous by its absence. Despite a massive increase in the number of Australians consuming the drug since the 1960s, Wayne Hall of the University of Queensland found no increase in the number of cases of schizophrenia in Australia. Mitch Earleywine of the University of Southern California similarly found the same with regard to the US population and Oxford's Leslie Iversen found the same regard to the population in the UK. According to Dr. Alan Brown, a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at Columbia University,

"If anything, the studies seem to show a possible decline in schizophrenia from the '40s and the ‘ 50,"

Dr Iddon, the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on drugs misuse [Britain], said the study did not convince him it was time to return cannabis to class B. "I don't think the causal link has been proved. I think cannabis might - possibly for genetic reasons - trigger psychosis at an earlier age." The MP, who is also a member of the science and technology select committee, said there was a danger of criminalising "hundreds of thousands of young people" if the status of the drug was changed. "If Gordon Brown changes the class of the drug, it won't be evidence-based but for political reasons," he said.

The Failure of Current Liberal Policy

A promise to legalize marijuana would be a welcome respite from the Liberals shamelessly taking inherently contradictory policies in hopes of capitalizing on both sides of this issue.

Indeed, on the one hand the Liberals have long maintained that Canadians should not be saddled with a criminal record for consuming something that is, after all, less harmful than alcohol. It is this light that Chrétien famously joked about having a joint in one hand and the money to pay for the fine of having it in the other. “I will have my money for my fine and a joint in my other hand.” On the other hand, just as they long downplayed the affects of smoking marijuana they have long stressed the importance of stiff penalties for trafficking. Both positions are popular with the public, but run the two positions together and it is as if Chrétien said this instead. “I will have my money for my fine and a joint in my other hand. Having paid my fine I would hope the cops find the person who sold it to me in put him in jail for a very long time.” If the act of consumption is not deemed overly ruinous then the whole punitive rationale for trafficking comes crashing down. Add to mix an acknowledgment on behalf of the Liberal party that marijuana can serve a medical purpose and you have a conceptual train wreck as a policy.

Far from helping the Liberals such an approach probably harmed them. It angered ardent supporters of both sides of the political divide at the same time and prevented the Liberals from saying anything intelligent about the issue. Moreover, as far the general public is concerned, the Liberals have gained nothing by trying to emulate the Conservative's tough on crime stance. The reason is simple. As Tom Flanagan crowed after the 2006 election that there are certain issues that just favour the Conservatives. The example he gave was the economy. No matter how successful the Liberals were in balancing the books and creating jobs, Conservative research suggested that when it came to economics people trusted the Conservatives more than they did the Liberals. It does not much of leap to suggest the same is true for crime. After all, to presume that the public has a working knowledge of each party's justice policies is giving the public way too much credit; the public trades in stereotypes and they are always going to believe that Conservatives are tougher on crime. This is especially so now. The Conservatives are in power and for this reason alone what they say with regard to crime garners headlines. By contrast, past Liberal support for some those Conservative tough on crime measures has drawn almost no attention at all. Of course, even if the Liberals were able to convince Canadians did support this or that Conservative measure, the Conservatives have a fail safe. They have claimed and will continue to claim that the Liberals had ability to introduce such policies when they were in power and failed to do so. No one likes a Johnny come lately.

So long as the debate is centered around sentencing, the Conservatives win. The Liberals need to shift the focus from punishment to the legitmacy of various laws. This is the only way of Liberals will be able to strave the Conservatives' populist tough on crime agenda of oxegen.

Liberals are waiting for Godot

2011-11-24T18:26:00.002-08:00

The biggest hurdle facing the Liberals is relevance. They finished with less than 20% in two thirds of the seats. Outside of a few urban and suburban seats in Winnipeg and Vancouver and Goodale's seat the Liberals were neck and neck with the Green's west of Ontario. Outside of Montreal, the situation is even worse in Quebec.

The Liberals are not going to be able to build from the grassroots up for the simple reason that in great swaths of the country there is no grassroots from which foster a rebirth.

If the Liberals are going to make a comeback, it will have to be orchestrated from the top not from the bottom. Furthermore, such a rebirth is only possible within the next couple of years. The Canadian population feels no loyalty to the "natural governing party" whatsoever. The Liberals have for so long stood for nothing that no body stands with them now. If the Liberals do not reinvent themselves and quick, they will loose what urban seats they have left to the NDP and what suburban seats they have to the Conservatives.

So, what can be done? The Liberals need to take advantage of the only thing they have going for them, viz., a residual interest in them from the nation's media. They must pursue policies that draw headlines and fuel editorials. That means support for legalizing marijuana and euthanasia. That means supporting mandatory voting. That means abandoning support for equity, asymmetrical federalism and collective rights. That means calls to abolish the senate, the monarchy and a call for much more representative House. The Liberals can not longer afford be the party that defends the status quo. They have to be the one challenging it.

Of course, such a strategy will can only work if the Liberals abandon the notion that they can use the media to reach Canadians. The bulk of the silly, insubstantive, unoffensive, small ball talking points that Liberals trotted out in opposition interested no one least of all the media. Very few ever reached your average Canadian accept maybe as the objects of ridicule in various editorial columns. As the third party, things will be even worse. No, the Liberals have to develop coherent positions and arguments and serve as the liberal columnists and opinion makers that Canada simply does not have. Their goal should be to dominate the national discussion for long as possible.

Marijuana legalization has more potential politically than legalizing Euthanasia

2011-11-24T13:43:00.002-08:00

Euthanasia has more support, but legalizing marijuana has far more potential politically for three reasons.

1) Other countries already have euthanasia policies in place. This is not the case for marijuana. No one has legalized pot. If Canada were to legalize pot, the amount of international attention would be enormous. The Conservative tough on crime agenda would be starved for oxygen.

2) Not only does this have the support of huge numbers of people internationally, the issue is pregnant in ways that euthanasia is not. The huge cost of the war on drugs is straining budgets. Marijuana prohibition is quickly loosing legitimacy in the Western world, is quickly being rendered untenable by emergence of loose medical marijuana laws (e.g., California) and is feeding corruption and drug related violence elsewhere, most notably Mexico.

3) Euthanasia like a abortion rises extremely complicated philosophical issues in ways that marijuana legalization does not. Deeply complex issues relating to personhood and viability abound. Marijuana is much more like SSM in that opposition arguments are so bad that that it mocked as a form of madness, reefer madness. This matters a lot. The Liberals will benefit from having the Conservatives trout out the same dumb arguments months on end.

An elected Senate is inconsistent with notion of Rep by pop and is an all around terrible Idea

2011-11-23T14:32:00.001-08:00

Constitutionally senators have all kinds of power and every once in a blue moon the Senate has stalled major pieces of legislation (e.g., free trade and the GST). However the aforementioned instances of stalling are so rare they are the exceptions that prove just how "ineffective" the senate truly is. Moreover, no senate I can think of has pursued a legislative agenda of its own accord; opposing legislation is one thing; purposing legislation is quite another. The reason the senate is not an "effective" body is that senators are not elected and as such lack legitimacy. Furthermore, senators are members of legitimate federal political parties and the parties that they belong to are loath to have their unelected members exercise real authority least their actions undermine the party. Finally, the fact that it is the ruling federal party and not, say, provincial governments that appoint senators defines a clear pecking order, with the Senate answerable to the House.

Harper, of course, wants to reform the Senate. Being unable to reform the Senate in one fell swoop, Harper has proposed electing Senators piece meal. Under the Conservative plan, new senators would be elected and would be limited to serving out a 8 year term. The elephant in the living room is that if the senate's lack of effective powers flows from the senate's lack of legitimacy, then electing senators might provide the senate with a degree of legitimacy it currently does not hold. One problem with proceeding thusly is that current senators are free to serve until the age of 75. As a result, Harper's actions could either transform an unelected political body with no real power into a largely unelected political body with real political power or commit Canadians to the farcical and expensive act of electing people to office who hold no real power. Always content to play the Tin Man and Lion to Conservatives scarecrow, the Liberals remain largely mum on the subject.

Setting aside problems associated with implementation, is the cause of democracy even served by reforming the Senate? Well, the Reformers always held that the regions needed more say and an “equal” “effective” and “elected” senate is the best way of achieving a balance between population centers in Eastern Canada and the rest of us. Of course, Reformers also lamented that "the West's" growing population was not translating into more political clout. Such was movement's internal inconstancy and intellectual shallowness. The Reform party aside, such a conception, and for that matter an "effective" version of the current senate, does not stand up to scrutiny. The problem is fivefold.

First such an argument rests on a false contrast; seats in the House of Commons are supposed to be assigned on basis of population, but in actuality that is not the case. Consider the 905. There are currently 4 plus million living in the 905 and there are currently 32 seats for an average of just over 127,000 people per riding. There are 6 ridings with over a 140,000 people in the 905, Bramalea - Gore - Malton (152,698) Brampton West (170,422) Halton (151,943), Mississauga - Erindale (143,361) Oak Ridges - Markham (169,642) and Vaughan (154,206). By contrast there are 4.5 million people in Sask, Man, NWT, Nuv, Yuk, PEI, NS, NFLD, and NB and there are 62 seats for an average of 72,000 people per riding. Moreover, there is but one riding in the 9, Selkirk Interlake (90,807), with over 90,000 people. Given current growth trends, the 2011 census might show there to be more people in the 905 than the aforementioned provinces and territories. Given population growth, Harper would have to give Ontario alone another 70 seats to make things half way equal. Of course, the problems do not stop there. Not only are the smaller provinces grossely overrepresented so too are rural areas in most provinces. For example, the riding of has Labrador has 26,364 and the riding of St John's East 88,002, Kenora 64,291 and Oak Ridges - Markham 169,642, Miramichi 53,844
Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe 89,334, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing 77,961 and Vanughn 154,206.

Second, simply by virtue of having provincial jurisdiction and provincial representation people living in Canada’s less populated provinces already have a means of leveraging far more attention and support from the Federal government than their numbers warrant. Danny Williams had the government's attention in ways that the mayors of Surrey, Red Deer, Brant, Fredericton and Churchill did not even though we are talking about equal number of seats in both cases. There is more. There is also the asinine Canadian tradition of handing out cabinet posts based not on talent but region.

The third reason is that while one person one vote is bedrock principle of any democracy, one province one senate vote is something else entirely. People, not provinces, deserve equal representation. A province is no more or less than the people that make up that province. Giving the 135,851 in PEI the power to determine everything under provincial jurisdiction, provincial representation and 4 MPs well all the while giving the 170, 422 residents of Brampton West one MP is bad enough as it is. Piling on and giving the 135,851 people in PEI the same number of “effective” senators, as per the American Triple E Senate model, as 12,160,282 Ontarians is beyond stupid and grossly undemocratic. Equally silly is having one "effective" Senator for every 72,997 New Brunswick residents (10 senators in total) versus one Senator for every 685, 581 BC residents (6 senators in total). And that is what the current configuration gives us.

Four, as Benjamin Franklin put it, having two equally matched houses makes as much sense as tying two equally matched horses to either end of a buggy and having them both pull. Having two houses is not only a lobbyist's dream, it is a recipe for political gridlock and pork barrel politics. The only thing that would be worse is if one needed 60% of the votes in the senate to overcome a filibuster.

Five, leaving aside the fact that no province has a second chamber, most having abolished them long ago, and that there are numerous examples of unicameral nation states (e.g., New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Israel, Sweden, Iceland, Liechtenstein, South Korea and Portugal), we already have a de facto unicameral state as it is -- just ask the supporters of a Triple E senate. After all, one can not argue on the one hand that the current senate is undemocratic and so contributes to the "democratic deficit" and on the other hand argue that the senate is “ineffective”. A body that adds nothing to the genuinely "effective" process can not take away anything either.

ECB Needs to start Printing.

2011-11-23T13:35:00.000-08:00

The printing press is the only way Europe can stave off an Italian default and a catastrophic credit crisis.

All available evidence suggests that even a major intervention by ECB would not lead to stampeding inflation. As Krugman noted with regard to Japan, "printing money is only inflationary if people spend it, and if that spending exceeds the economy's capacity to produce." http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/nikkei.html The reason Europeans are not likely to go on a extended spending spree is that no one fears that the Eurozone countries are going to use the ECB to monetize their debt. Given this belief, personal debt levels in countries where there were real estate bubbles, Europe's shrinking and rapidly aging population, and the massive excess capacity in Europe and indeed the whole Western world, spending is likely going to be quite subdued and certainly nothing that would strain current productive capacity.

Finally, if there is any inflation at all it will be Europe's core economies, principally Germany, and far from being a bad thing, inflation there is precisely the kind of relief the periphery needs right now. The higher the rate of inflation in Europe's core the less Europe's periphery will need to rely on deflation to become competitive.

liquidity trap readings

http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2011/11/buy-ben-bernanke-marijuana-pipe-and.html

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/macro-policy-in-a-liquidity-trap-wonkish/

Germany is going to Bankrupt the Eurozone

2011-11-22T16:55:00.000-08:00

The German Foreign minister is wrong on almost every point.

http://www.ft.com/cms/275bc334-3063-11dc-9a81-0000779fd2ac.html?segid=70000

"the decade-long accumulation of public debt"

For most of the last decade, Italy, Spain and Ireland have run surpluses and have seen their yields skyrocket. Germany, meanwhile, has run deficits the entire time and has seen its yields drop significantly.

"we need a clear-cut strategy for competitiveness and growth."

Start putting holes in condoms and sub in sugar pills for birth control pills. The reason Europe's growth prospects look so dim is that Europe is aging rapidly. Indeed, the European population is about to shrink at a rate not seen since the Black Death. Couple that with the ten of millions of Europeans retiring on reduced pensions and you have the makings of Japan style liquidity trap. Of course, the economic downturn is likely to make the situation even worse. People tend to have less kids in economic hard times. Europe is a highly competitive rapidly shrinking market, with high labour costs and last but not least frigid credit markets. All that being said, if you are a maker of adult diapers, then Europe is where you want to be.

"Putting the European Central Bank’s printing presses to work might at best bring some short-term relief. But it would have dire consequences, both raising inflation and dissipating vitally important incentives for reform."

The UK and US have been doing what Japan has done for years and there is no evidence, notwithstanding the UK's increase in the VAT, that such measures have led a high rate of inflation. Indeed, with regard to interest rates, Bernanke has looked further and further out in order to stimulate moderate inflation and still the specter of deflation hangs over the US economy. The US economy's long term growth prospects are much better than Europe's. The US adds more and more people every year. Europe looses more and more people every year.

The printing press is the only way Europe can stave off an Italian default and a catastrophic credit crisis. Moreover, all available evidence suggests that even a major intervention by ECB would not lead to stampeding inflation. As Krugman noted with regard to Japan, "printing money is only inflationary if people spend it, and if that spending exceeds the economy's capacity to produce." http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/nikkei.html Given personal debt levels in countries where there were real estate bubbles, Europe's aforementioned shrinking and rapidly aging population, and the massive excess capacity in Europe and indeed the whole Western world, spending is likely going to be quite subdued and certainly nothing that would strain current productive capacity.

Finally, if there is any inflation it will be Europe's core economies, principally Germany, and far from being a bad thing, inflation there is precisely the kind of relief the periphery needs right now. The higher the rate of inflation in Europe's core the less Europe's periphery will need to rely on deflation to become competitive.

"depreciated currency"

Is the foreign minister of one of the most successful export lead economies in the Western world seriously bemoaning the prospect of a drop in his country's currency? Just checking.

"Greece's government must without further delay adopt and implement the necessary reforms."

Forcing a country, that is in immediate danger of default, to enact policies that lead to skyrocketing unemployment and downward pressure on wages is not going to forestall Greece from defaulting. No, it makes it all but certain that Greece will default and leave the Euro. Deflationary austerity might make Greece more competitive in the long term, but the debt crisis is now. Deflation considerably increases Greece's debt burden.

"states and banks need protection from contagion."

I agree. Signal that the ECB will keep Italian and Spanish yields below 6 and have them stop sterilizing those bond purchases.

The Liberal redistribution plan is a political loser

2011-11-19T00:52:00.001-08:00

The Liberal plan is marginally better than the Conservative plan, but it is still nowhere near good enough. A hybrid of both the Conservative and Liberal plans would be best. The largest provinces should gain seats from the smallest provinces and because of the limitations placed on us by the constitution, they should should gain more on top of that

That said, politically the Liberal plan is stupid. If the Liberals believe that the public is going to get behind their plan in order to save a paltry 15 million dollars they are delusional. There is no political upside to the Liberal plan and potentially a lot of downside. Not only will it not ingratiate themselves to those provinces who would loose seats under such a plan, such a position could easily be construed as self serving --- which it no doubt is. The Liberals do not want to see the number of seats increase because they feel it will make it that more difficult for them to win government. The we can not afford it fig leaf does not obscure this fact.

Anyway, given the Conservatives have a majority and will proceed with this no matter what the Liberals say, the Liberals need to do four things.

1) In order to make political hay, the Liberals have to develop a coherent approach to the issue of representation. That means hammering at the inequities of the system. Cities are underrepresented and hinterlands grossly over represented. The largest provinces are grossly underrepresented and the provinces with the smallest populations overrepresented. An empowered senate is incompatible with the notion of representation by population.

2) They need to diminish the political value of giving that many extra seats to Ontario, BC and Alberta by saying that the government did not go far enough and that Conservative government's push for an "effective" senate would make any such gains mute. Making the House more representative means nothing if the Conservatives plan to empower a second House that is not representative at all.

3) Forget about Quebec's wining; the Conservatives won a majority without Quebec this last time and with 27 seats being added outside Quebec its value will be even less next time around. "Western" Canada is little more than firm opposition to special treatment of Quebec by those living west of Manitoba. It is pretty much the sole thread that unites west coast hippies with Calgary oil men. If the Liberals have not recognized this after 40 years they deserve to collapse as political identity. Never ever ever mention Quebec's "special situation".

4) As Canada's third party, the Liberals do not need to be bounded by what is politically possible. In this case the Liberals should be calling for even more to be done to make the HOC more representative and the senate abolished to pay for it.

"I am not the 99%"

2011-10-20T00:11:00.014-07:00

http://imgur.com/hufUC

Not put to fine a point on it, but unless this dolt is a more extreme version of Mark Zuckerberg he is most certainly part of the 99%. As for the notion that all it takes to be part of the top 1% is a little elbow grease, it is so patently absurd it is not worth discussing. Yes talent and hard work matter. However, neither is a guarantee of success. There are a whole host of factors at play. There are plenty of talented hard working poor people and I am not talking just about self righteous libertarian university students.

As for his implication that the source of America's private debt woes is ever increasing discretionary spending, he should have given the numbers a look before spouting off about "bad decisions". Americans are spending ever less on discretionary items and not more. Indeed, compare the spending habits of a 1970 family of 4 to a the spending habits of a 2003 American family of 4.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A&noredirect=1

The 2003 family spent

32% less on clothes

18% less on food and eating out

52% less on appliances

24% less on a car

76% more for a mortgage on a 6.1 room house than the 1970 family paid for mortgage on a 5.8 room house.

74% more percent for employer sponsored health care

52% more for transportation (more cars and more travel time)

100% more for childcare

25% more for taxes (more two income families meant more taxable income.)

The 2003 family kept cars two years longer, took 33% less vacations and was significantly more likely to live in a home older than 25 years old. The 2003 family devoted 75% of their income to housing, taxes, health care and child care and transportation. The 1970 family devoted 50%. Despite a large increase in family income between 1970 and 2003 (there was a huge increase in the number of two income families) the 1970 family had more money for discretionary spending and savings. Sky rocketing college tuition should also be factored in. Not only has tuition costs gone up 231% since 1970, college education is deemed necessary in ways it was not before. As Elizabeth Warren points out, more people believe the moon landing was fake than believe a university education is not needed for entrance into the middle class.

Of course, a huge increase in the above mentioned areas only tells part of the story. American families are much more vulnerable today for other reasons as well. Not only has the savings rate declined from 11% in 1970 to below zero in 2001, the number of families that depend upon two incomes in order to make ends meat has skyrocketed. These familers are vulnerable if either partner looses gainful employment. There is no one there to step into the void if one of partner goes down. To make matters worse the social safety net is not as wide as it once was. This is especially so when it comes to health care. Whereas the average uninsured person in 1970 was a 23 year old male with no children (in other words someone who choose not to have health insurance), the average uninsured person in 2003 was 35 year old married parent of two. It is not just the poor that vulnerable either. In 2001 1.4 million lost their health insurance. Of those, 800,000 earned more than $75,000 a year.

It is no wonder the bankruptcy rates have skyrocketed. Since the late 1990s an American married couple with children is more likely to declare bankruptcy than to file for divorce. 90% of those filing for bankruptcy do so for 1 of 3 reasons, viz., an illness in the family, family breakup or job loss.

Finally, for someone who derides handouts of any kind it is odd that he belittles the protesters rather than joining them. After all, one of the main complaints of the protesters is that huge sums of of public money have gone into bailing out private banks and the public has gained no guarantees that such bailouts will not be needed again. The Dodd Frank bill never addressed all the issues and to add insult to injury it has been gutted by congress.

The economic crisis in a nut shell

2011-10-18T15:03:00.004-07:00

1) Real estate markets begin to overheat

2) Various Western governments, at their banks urging, pour fuel on the fire

3) Debt to income ratios skyrocket throughout most of the Western world.

4) People start defaulting, especialy in the US, and or radically start to reduce spending.

5) Banks saddled with huge looses. Capital that had been invested in Europe's peripheral countries goes back to the core.

6) Governments bail out banks in what is surely the biggest transfer of public monies to private companies in history.

7) Bankers say it is high time the public stop living so high on the hog and that services need to be cut and or taxes raised to pay for, drum roll please, bank bailouts.

8) Governments cut services and or raise taxes.

9) GDP tanks and unemployment skyrockets in those countries making the biggest cuts. Banks wonder about the ability of those making the biggest cuts to pay. EU employs a carrot and stick approach. It promises private banks bailouts; that is the carrot. At the same time it promises dire consequences if the PIIGS do not make bigger cuts and rise taxes even more; that is the stick.

10) As the main reason the PIIGS minus Italy have been hit so hard is because of the massive amount of capital leaving those countries in wake of the 2008 downturn, more cuts will make things even worse? The first round of cuts and tax increases in Greece increased the deficit by 8%.

11) Faced with a terrible economy, tax hikes and service cuts, people in the PIIGS start defaulting in ever larger numbers?

12) The rise of the Swiss Franc leads to increasing number of defaults in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic? 53 percent of outstanding mortgages in Poland and about 60 percent of those in Hungary are denominated in Francs!

Frum's Trudeau was a disaster column

2011-10-05T16:26:00.001-07:00

Frum's September 28th column in the Ottawa Citizen is littered with factual errors and non-sequiturs. http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/Trudeau%2Bdisaster/5470488/story.html It is an embarrassingly bad piece of journalism.

Frum

His spending spree did not include the military. He cut air and naval capabilities, pulled troops home from Europe, and embarked on morale-destroying reorganizations of the military services. In 1968, Canada was a serious second-tier non-nuclear military power, like Sweden or Israel. By 1984, Canada had lost its war-fighting capability: a loss made vivid when Canada had to opt out of ground combat operations in the first Gulf War of 1990-’91.

Pierre Trudeau took office at a moment when commodity prices were rising worldwide. Good policy-makers recognize that commodity prices fall as well as rise. Yet between 1969 and 1979 — through two majority governments and one minority — Trudeau tripled federal spending.

When I first read Frum's article I assumed he was saying that Trudeau's decision to increase spending was premised on commodity prices remaining low. Given that commodity prices had begun to rise just as he took office he should have foreseen the spike in commodity prices in 1973 and what that would mean for the Canadian economy and Canada's bottom line. Having watched the following debate between Frum and Lawrence Martin I now realize that I had things backwards and that I was giving Frum far too much credit.

Frum contends that when Trudeau took over commodity prices were riding high and that Canada took it on the chin -- and here I guessing -- when the commodity boom ended just as he was leaving office in the 1984. Whatever the case, Frum's argument is bizarre. There is no other way of putting it. Yes when Trudeau was first elected as a MP inflation had started to rise. However, when Trudeau was elected PM, inflation was falling and continued fall. It dropped to a low of 1% in December 1970. Moreover the cause of the mid sixties rise in inflation was not due to a commodity boom. Indeed, Frum's very line of reason is wrong. He is guilty of trying to paint the Bretton Woods era with a post Bretton Woods brush. The level of instability in commodity markets that has existed after 1973 simply did not exist during that time. Most notably, the price of oil had remained remarkably stable for almost a 100 years. With that goes the motivation Frum assigns Trudeau. Worse for Frum, according to Frum's reasoning Canada should have boomed right along with commodity prices, but, of course, Canada suffered from stagflation the way other Western economies did. Whatever revenue gains were made in 1974 and 1975 were more than matched by a rise in costs and revenues in real terms plummeted as the economy worsened. For 14 straight years Canada's debt to GDP ratio had sank, but in 1976 that ended. Expenditures as a percentage of GDP had fallen sharply after having spiked in 1974, but revenues despite no commensurate drop in commodity prices nose dived. By 1979 expenditures as a percentage of GDP had fallen by 3%, but revenues as a percentage of GDP had declined by 4% of GDP and sat some 2 points lower than the 30 year medium.

The problems for Frum do not stop there. Yes, spending did triple between 1969 and 1979, but the figure Frum cites is not adjusted for a decade of record inflation, indexed to population or GDP growth. In other words, it is meaningless. No one, except an utter armature or someone wishing to advance a political agenda irrespective of the truth, would make, for example, a meal out of the fact that federal expenditures were 10 times higher in 2000 than in 1970. What counts is how much federal spending increased as percentage of GDP. And when you factor out the amount of money devoted to debt servicing -- which went up three fold between 1975 and 1995 -- the amount of Federal spending as percentage of GDP remained virtually unchanged between 1959 and 1989. Where there was a marked increase in spending during this time was at the provincial level.

Frum

"Do Canadians understand how many of their difficulties of the 1990s originated in the 1970s? They should. To repay Trudeau’s debt, federal governments reduced transfers to provinces."

The notion that Trudeau era spending in the 1970s was responsible for the debt crisis in the 1990s is so patently absurd it hardly worth discussing. Leaving aside the fact that two thirds of Canada's debt accumulated under Brian Mulroney, when the Liberals were defeated in 1979 the debt to GDP ratio was 16% and the debt in inflation adjusted dollars was the same as what it was 1961!

Oh by the way, Frum makes it seem that subsequent governments cut transfer payments to the provinces to make up for some of his overspending. However, transfer payments to provinces went up under Mulroney. It was Martin that cut them.

Frum

"Brian Mulroney, balanced Canada’s operating budget after 1984. But to squeeze out Trudeau-era inflation, the Bank of Canada had raised real interest rates very high. Mulroney could not keep up with the debt payments. The debt compounded, the deficits grew, the Bank hiked rates again — and Canada toppled into an even worse recession in 1992."

Yes the main reason that the debt exploded under Mulroney was that the Bank of Canada was trying to "wrestle inflation to the ground". However, Frum makes it sound that such a policy was first pursued under Mulroney. This is simply not true. Ever since the the disbanding of Bretton Woods and the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, stagflation had plagued every Western economy. At the beginning of the 1980s, the US Fed chairperson Paul Vocker, with prospect of another energy Crisis looming over the economy, decided to do something about it. He declared a war on inflation. The Bank of Canada followed suit. Both the BOC and the Fed purposely drove the economy into a deep recession by greatly increasing interest rates. An example should put things into perspective. In July 25th 1980 interest rates stood at already high 11%; on December 16th 1980 the US Fed had raised them to 21.5%. US policy coupled with surging oil prices brought about by the Iran Iraq war resulted in a spike in inflation in Canada and so the BOC responded in kind. In Canada interest rates reached a high of 23%! Interest rates were no where near as high under Mulroney.

The war on inflation was won, but it came at a terrible cost. Sky rocketing interest rates meant that the amount of money used to finance the debt went through the roof, the spike in unemployment greatly reduced government revenues and unemployment insurance claims put further stress on government coffers. Furthermore, the quick success of the BOC's efforts meant that Canada's debt to GDP ratio went up at much faster rate than it would have had inflation remained high for a longer period of time. By the time Mulroney took over in Sept 1984 inflation had sank to 3.7% from a high 12.9% in May 1981, but interest rates, remained sky high for considerably longer. As a result, Canada was not able to inflate away some of the value of that debt as it had after World War 2 and for part of the 1970s.

Frum

"Other Western governments recovered from the stagflation of the 1970s by turning toward freer markets. Under the National Energy Program, Canada was up-regulating as the U.S., Britain, and West Germany deregulated. All of these mistakes together contributed to the extreme severity of the 1982 recession. Every one of them was Pierre Trudeau’s fault."

The notion that the recession of 1981 1982 was brought on by Trudeau's fiscal policies is even more absurd than the notion that Trudeau's 1970s era spending was behind the debt crisis in the 1990s. The recession in the US and Canada was in partially a self inflicted wound yes. However, the cause was monetary policy and not fiscal policy. A 10 point hike in interest rates was designed to slow down growth and worked like a charm.

Furthermore, the implication that the US did not go into recession too is simply wrong. Unemployment, for example, in the US nearly doubled and stayed at 10% for much of 1981 and 1982. As for West Germany and Britain, unemployment doubled in W. Germany in 1981 and unemployment in Britain was above what it was in Canada and remained above 10% until 1988.

Frum:

When Pierre Trudeau was elected prime minister in 1968, Canada faced a small but militant separatist challenge in Quebec. In 1970, that challenge erupted in terrorist violence: two kidnappings and a murder of one of the kidnapped hostages, Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte.

Trudeau responded with overwhelming force, declaring martial law in Quebec, arresting dozens of people, almost none of whom had any remote connection to the terrorist outrages. The arrests radicalized them, transforming many from cultural nationalists into outright independentists. As he did throughout his career, Trudeau polarized the situation — multiplying enemies for himself and, unfortunately, also for Canada.

Violence did not "erupt" in 1970. It errupted in 1963. Between 1963 and 1970 the FLQ had carried out some 200 bombings, kidnappings, and robberies. They had also killed 7 people prior to killing Laporte. Furthermore far from "radicalizing" anyone, Trudeau's actions undermined those advocating further violence in two important ways. 1) The bold actions drew attention to the issue of political violence like never before and forced the public to pass a verdict the legitimacy of actions that had been carried out for 7 years. Quebecers overwhelming rejected such tactics and this greatly undermined FLQ base of support within Quebec society. As a former Bush speech writer, I find it odd that Frum would decry such actions but enthusiastically endorse the Bush maximum that "you're either with us, or against us". But I digress. 2) The sheer popularity of the Trudeau's actions helped convince even some members of the FLQ, most notably Pierre Vallières, that violence was counterproductive. The October crisis turned out to be the FLQ's swan song.

Frum:

Would it really have been so impossible to achieve a Charter of Rights without plunging Canada into two recessions, without wrecking the national finances, without triggering two referendums, without nationalizing the oil industry, without driving not only Quebec, but also Alberta to the verge of separation?

Frum notes in his debate with Lawrence Martin that demographic change in Quebec society has dampened separatism's appeal and indeed it has. The notion of Quebec nation based on the archaic notion of "blood" has been undermined by high rates of immigration and most important of all the huge income and social disparities between Francophones and Anglophones in Quebec are gone. Despite this Frum seems incapable of following his own reasoning back. Namely, not only has demographic and social forces muted separatism appeal, but it was precisely these forces that gave birth to separatism in the first place. Instead, Frum contends that Trudeau's actions during the October crisis, which were wildly popular both inside and outside Quebec, "radicalized" Quebec nationalists setting in motion the 1980 referendum. Frum gives no credit Trudeau for helping the no side win the 1980 referendum despite his obvious popularity in Quebec. This is quite the oversight. The Liberals took 68.2% of popular vote in Quebec and 74 of 75 seats just three months before the referendum took place.

As for the second referendum, unlike the first, at least there is a sequence of events started by Trudeau that leads up to it. That said, Frum's accusation that everything can be traced back Trudeau having pulled the old bait and switch is simply wrong. There was no bait and switch. No, Trudeau's failing was that he believed that a government headed by René Lévesque and dedicated to the break up of the country would ever negotiate in good faith to secure Quebec's place within Canada.

Now despite the absurdity of Frum's claim that Alberta was ever on the verge of separation, Frum is right in saying that Trudeau alienated "the West". However, the West's displeasure with Trudeau went far beyond Trudeau lavishing goodies on Quebec. Indeed, the main source of the collapse in Western Canada was the more emphasis Trudeau placed on individual rights and a commitment to linguistic equality the more the rest of the country, particularly the West, resented the Liberals' inability to put a stop to bill 178 and and 101 and its willingness to make special accommodations for Quebec. Quebec's Official Language Act spelled doom for the Liberals in Western Canada from the mid 70s until collapse of the Progressive Conservatives in 1993.

Of course, whatever faults Trudeau had in this regard they paled into insignificance when staked up against Mulroney's pathetic pandering to Quebec nationalists. Mulroney wrongly believed that he could satisfy the demands of Quebec nationalists and Western Canada would happily go along with any proposals he might make. He was wrong on both accounts. Not only did Quebecers reject the Charlottetown Accord but the Accord was soundly rejected in Western Canada. 68.3% of British Colombians, for example, rejected the deal. It was Mulroney's idiocy that lead to the emergence of not one regional party by two (i.e., the Reform party and the Bloc). It is also what lead to the collapse of his own party. Forgetting that 1968 was a high water mark for the Liberals and only in BC had the Liberals had any kind of success in Canada's 3 most western provinces since 1953, Frum makes a big deal out of the fact that Liberals went from 27 seats West of Ontario in 1968 to down to 2 in 1980. He says that it good indication that Trudeau alienated the West and it is, but a much more telling figure is the fact that the Torries went from 54 seats West of Ontario, Western Canada being their traditional base of support, in 1984 to 0 in 1993.

Finally, as for nationalizing the oil industry, it is really too bad that never came about. Norway did and it has used its oil revenues to fund the most generous social programs in the world and still has money to burn. An oil fund started in 1990 now sits at $600 billion and is the largest sovereign oil fund in the world.

David Frum Embarrasses Himself Yet Again: His Attack on Trudeau: Part 2

2011-10-04T00:12:00.003-07:00

Frum:

Pierre Trudeau took office at a moment when commodity prices were rising worldwide.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/Trudeau%2Bdisaster/5470488/story.html

When Trudeau was first elected as a MP inflation had started to rise. However, after Trudeau was elected PM, inflation actually dipped and dropped to a low of 1% in December 1970. More to the point, commodity prices were not on the rise when Trudeau took over and had been stable for some time. Frum is flat wrong. Most notably, the price of oil had remained remarkably stable for almost a 100 years.

However, by 1971 everything had started to change. The world had lost faith in the US's "ability to pay" that is to exchange dollars for gold at a fixed rate. As a result, the Bretton woods system of fixed exchange rates began to implode and by 1973 was gone entirely.

The collapse of the Bretton Woods system helped spure on a spike in commodity prices at the start of 1973. And things were made all the worse, of course, by the oil embargo at the end of the year. The price of oil went up 4 fold and overall commodity prices doubled that year.

Frum:

Good policy-makers recognize that commodity prices fall as well as rise. Yet between 1969 and 1979 — through two majority governments and one minority — Trudeau tripled federal spending.

After 1973 commodity markets have seen huge up swings and dips, but Frum is wrong in trying to paint the Bretton Woods era with a post Bretton Woods brush. The level of instability in commodity markets that has existed after 1973 simply did not exist during that time. Furthermore, to imply that the "Nixon Shock", the subsequent collapse of Bretton Woods and the OPEC oil embargo were immediately foreseeable and somehow par for the course is ridiculous.

The problems for Frum do not stop there. Yes, spending did triple between 1969 and 1979, but the figure Frum cites is not adjusted for a decade of record inflation, indexed to population or GDP growth. In other words, it is meaningless. No one, except an utter armature or someone wishing to advance a political agenda irrespective of the truth, would make, for example, a meal out of the fact that federal expenditures were 10 times higher in 2000 than in 1970. What counts is how much federal spending increased as percentage of GDP. And when you factor out the amount of money devoted to debt servicing -- which went up three fold between 1975 and 1995 -- the amount of Federal spending as percentage of GDP remained virtually unchanged between 1959 and 1989. Where there was a marked increase in spending during this time was at the provincial level.

In order to appreciate the scope of Frum's intellectual dishonesty it worth pointing out that in Trudeau's first 7 years in office, Canada's debt to GDP ratio shrank and so did Canada's debt in inflation adjusted dollars. Contrary to popular wisdom, you do not need to run surpluses to shrink the debt in real dollars. If depreciation of the debt outstrips deficits, then a real reduction in the debt will be achieved and that is precisely what happened.

Frum:

His spending spree did not include the military. He cut air and naval capabilities, pulled troops home from Europe, and embarked on morale-destroying reorganizations of the military services. In 1968, Canada was a serious second-tier non-nuclear military power, like Sweden or Israel. By 1984, Canada had lost its war-fighting capability: a loss made vivid when Canada had to opt out of ground combat operations in the first Gulf War of 1990-’91.

At the height of the Korean war military spending was 8% of GDP. That figure slowly fell year after year until it sat at 2% in 1968. Trudeau let it dip slightly in the mid 1970s and then raised it in the first part of the 1980s to correspond with the Reagan built up. When Trudeau left office in 1984, the amount Canada spent on the military as percentage of GDP was virtually what it was in 1968. Now, given that military spending does not need to be tied to population growth the way that spending on services needs to be in order to remain as effective, it is likely that the Canadian army was better equipped in 1984 than it was in 1968. The demands placed on the military were pretty much the same and in absolute terms, the amount of money Canada was spending was significantly more. The economy was bigger.

Update

When I first read Frum's article I assumed he was saying that Trudeau's decision to increase spending was premised on commodity prices remaining low. Given that commodity prices had begun to rise just as he took office he should have foreseen the spike in commodity prices in 1973 and what that would mean for the Canadian economy and Canada's bottom line. Having watched the following debate between Frum and Lawrence Martin I now realize that I had things backwards and that I was giving Frum far too much credit. http://www.cpac.ca/forms/index.asp?dsp=template&act=view3&pagetype=vod&hl=e&clipID=6030
Frum contends that when Trudeau took over commodity prices were riding high and that Canada took it on the chin -- and here I guessing -- when the commodity boom ended just as he was leaving office in the 1984. Frum's argument is bizarre. There is no other way of putting it. As I have already pointed out, there was no commodity boom when Trudeau took over nor was there reason to believe that commodity prices would double in single year. There goes Trudeau's motivation. Worse for Frum, according to Frum's logic Canada should have boomed right along with commodity prices, but, of course, Canada suffered from stagflation the way other Western economies did. Whatever revenue gains were made in 1974 and 1975 were more than matched by a rise in costs and revenues in real terms plummeted as the economy worsened. For 14 straight years Canada's debt to GDP ratio had sank, but in 1976 that ended. Expenditures as percentage of GDP had fallen sharply after having spiked in 1974, but revenues despite no commensurate drop in commodity prices nose dived. By 1979 expenditures as a percentage of GDP had fallen by 3%, but revenues as a percentage of GDP had declined by 4% of GDP and sat some 2 points lower than the 30 year medium.

David Frum Embarrasses Himself Yet Again: His Attack on Trudeau: Part 1

2011-10-01T02:38:00.004-07:00

Frum:

"Do Canadians understand how many of their difficulties of the 1990s originated in the 1970s? They should. To repay Trudeau’s debt, federal governments reduced transfers to provinces."

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/Trudeau%2Bdisaster/5470488/story.html

The notion that Trudeau era spending in the 1970s was responsible for the debt crisis in the 1990s is so patently absurd it hardly worth discussing. Leaving aside the fact that two thirds of Canada's debt accumulated under Brian Mulroney, when the Liberals were defeated in 1979 the debt to GDP ratio was 16% and the debt in inflation adjusted dollars was the same as what it was 1961!

Moreover, it was only in Trudeau's last term in office that deficits to GDP, for reasons I will explain in a second, consistently reached troubling levels. (a high of 6% of GDP in 1984) Even then, when Trudeau left office Canada's debt to GDP ratio was less than it was under Diefenbaker and lower than it is now.

Oh by the way, Frum makes it seem that subsequent governments cut transfer payments to the provinces to make up for some of his overspending. However, transfer payments to provinces went up under Mulroney. It was Martin that cut them.

Frum:

"Brian Mulroney, balanced Canada’s operating budget after 1984. But to squeeze out Trudeau-era inflation, the Bank of Canada had raised real interest rates very high. Mulroney could not keep up with the debt payments. The debt compounded, the deficits grew, the Bank hiked rates again — and Canada toppled into an even worse recession in 1992."

Yes the main reason that the debt exploded under Mulroney was that the Bank of Canada was trying to "wrestle inflation to the ground". However, Frum makes it sound that such a policy was first pursued under Mulroney. This is simply not true. Ever since the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, stagflation had plagued every Western economy. At the beginning of the 1980s, the US Fed chairperson Paul Vocker decided to do something about it. He declared a war on inflation. The Bank of Canada followed suit. Both the BOC and the Fed purposely drove the economy into a deep recession by greatly increasing interest rates. An example should put things into perspective. In July 25th 1980 interest rates stood at already ridiculously high 11%; on December 16th 1980 the US Fed had raised them to 21.5%. US policy resulted in a spike in inflation in Canada and BOC raised interest rates in response. In Canada interest rates reached a high of 23%! Interest rates were no where near as high under Mulroney. (By the way, the dolts who claim that the NEP somehow sunk Alberta real estate in the early 1980s would do better to blame BOC policy. Mortgage rates went through the roof and the oil industry, as capital intensive as any, faced massive burrowing costs.)

The war on inflation was won, but it came at a terrible cost. Sky rocketing interest rates meant that the amount of money used to finance the debt went through the roof, the spike in unemployment greatly reduced government revenues and unemployment insurance claims put further stress on government coffers. Furthermore, the quick success of the BOC's efforts meant that Canada's debt to GDP ratio went up at much faster rate than it would have had inflation remained high for a longer period of time. By the time Mulroney took over in Sept 1984 inflation had sank to 3.7% from a high 12.9% in May 1981, but interest rates, remained sky high for considerably longer. As a result, Canada was not able to inflate away some of the value of that debt as it had after World War 2.

Frum:

"Pierre Trudeau was a spending fool. He believed in a state-led economy, and the longer he lasted in office, the more statist he became. The Foreign Investment Review Agency was succeeded by Petro-Canada. Petro-Canada was succeeded by wage and price controls."

And wage and price controls were copied from Progressive Conservative leader Robert Stanfield -- "zap your frozen" -- and Republican Richard Nixon. Jesus.

Frum:

"Other Western governments recovered from the stagflation of the 1970s by turning toward freer markets. Under the National Energy Program, Canada was up-regulating as the U.S., Britain, and West Germany deregulated. All of these mistakes together contributed to the extreme severity of the 1982 recession. Every one of them was Pierre Trudeau’s fault."

What utter nonsense. The notion that the recession of 1981 1982 was brought on by Trudeau's fiscal policies is even more absurd than the notion that Trudeau's 1970s era spending was behind the debt crisis in the 1990s. The recession in the US and Canada was in large measure self inflicted yes. However, the cause was monetary policy and not fiscal policy. A 10 point hike in interest rates was designed to slow down growth and worked like a charm.

Furthermore, the implication that the US did not go into recession too is simply wrong. Unemployment, for example, in the US nearly doubled and stayed at 10% for much of 1981 and 1982. As for West Germany and Britain, unemployment doubled in W. Germany in 1981 and unemployment in Britain was above what it was in Canada and remained above 10% until 1988.

Trost and Vellacott should be calling for end to abstinence only sex education

2011-09-30T12:01:00.000-07:00

There are about 50 million abortions performed every year. The highest rates are in the former Eastern Bloc countries. The developing world is next followed by the developed world. As a general rule of numb, the higher the number of pregnancies the greater the abortion rate. This holds for the developing world as well as developed world as well. Access to legal abortion is not a very good predictor of the abortion rate. Abortion in Brazil, for example, is illegal, but the abortion rate there is several times higher than the abortion rate in Canada.

A recent UN report noted that "meeting the world's needs for modern birth control would reduce maternal deaths by 70 per cent, family planning would eliminate two-thirds of unintended pregnancies and three-quarters of unsafe abortions." However, until such time as women in developing countries have access to education and contraception, abortion is an issue aid agencies will have to deal with on a daily basis. Talk to any aid agency and you will get the same response. The Harper government's policy will mean worse health outcomes and will not result in any cost savings. It is far more cost effective to provide a woman with a safe legal abortion than it is helping her recover from a backstreet one.

Changing subjects, the delicious irony of the abstinence only sex education programs in the States is that not only do they contribute to teen pregnancy rates that dwarf anything found in Europe, the percentage of US teens having abortions is several times greater than the rate at which European teens are getting pregnant. For example, whereas the rate of US teenage girls getting pregnant is 79.8 and the abortion rate 27.5 per thousand, the rate at which teenage girls are getting pregnant in Holland is 8. 7 and abortion rate is 4.2. Just once I want to hear a anti abortion activist call for robust sex education programs in the States so as to cut down on the number of abortions.

Liberals should Promise to Legalize Marijuana: Robert Silver is Right

2011-09-21T16:17:00.000-07:00

Silver has suggested that the Liberals should promise to legalize marijuana. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/second-reading/silver-powers/how-liberals-should-reframe-crime-bills/article2173190/comments/ Damn skippy. I have been calling for this for as long as I have been blogging.

Legalizing marijuana would be good policy and for that reason alone the Liberals should consider it. However, beyond that legalizing marijuana would be good politics. The reason it is good politics has no more to do with the untapped stoner vote then same sex marriage had to do with the untapped gay and lesbian vote. I can assure you there is not there is no drug vote to grab. The reason it is good politics is there is significant ground swell of public support for the issue. Since 2004 polls put support between 50 to 55%. More importantly, opponent's arguments are a house of cards. See below. Just as with gay marriage the Liberals would benefit from having the Conservatives trout out stupid arguments for extended period of time. Just as with SSM the Conservatives are on the wrong side of history on this one. Let history steamroll them.

Potent Pot

Potent pot is more myth than reality.

However, even if one assumes that potent pot is a reality it is certainly nothing to be concerned about. Indeed, saying that potent pot is reason for keeping marijuana illegal is akin to saying that alcohol should be banned because gin has higher alcohol content than beer. It makes no sense. The pharmacological affects of consuming 1 "chemically supercharged" joint, as various US attorneys like to say, versus x number of "dad's joints" would be no different if the amount of THC consumed is the same. As for consumption, just as people do not drink the same volume of gin as beer, the higher the THC level in pot the less people consume. Hence, ironically more potent pot may be a welcome development. After all, one of the most prominent health effect related to marijuana, if not the most, is that it is usually smoked. The more potent the pot, the less people have to smoke to achieve the same high. Lester Grinspoon of Harvard Medical School concurs, so does Mitch Earleywine of the University of Southern California and so does UCLA's Mark Kleiman.

That said, if potency is the concern, then it should be legalized. After all, the only way to regulate the potency of pot is to legalize it. Moreover, so long as the drug is illegal, producers will seek to increase potency. The higher the potency the smaller the package the smaller the package the less likely they will get caught.

Finally, the attempt to scare parents that have grown up on marijuana by distinguishing between potent pot and “your dad's marijuana” is too clever by half. After all, it begs the following question. If today's marijuana is truly different in kind from "dads marijuana", would it be ok to legalize "dad's marijuana", i.e., low potency pot?

The US will Never Let it happen

Proposition 19 failed, but the issue will likely be revisited in 2012 and this time it stands a very good chance of passing. Voter turn for mid term elections is always significantly less than when the presidency is up for grabs. For proposition 19 to have stood any chance of winning Democrats, and the young needed to be energized. They were not and stayed away in droves. Even with everything stacked against them, though, the yes campaign still garnered 46% of vote.

Legal production of marijuana in California will make the legislation of marijuana elsewhere in the US all but inevitable and extension in Canada as well. Obama is not going to go to war with California in order to maintain a federal prohibition. Indeed, it was Obama that set the wheels of legalization in motion by declaring that he would not crack down on medical marijuana. For you see, unlike in Canada, in California, for example, one does not have to be afflicted with a particular aliment to be eligible for medical marijuana. A doctor can proscribe marijuana for whatever they see fit. Needless to say, such a system is ripe for abuse and the Bush administration was right to see medical marijuana program as a potential Trojan horse. But Obama let wooden horse to be wheeled into California and other States anyway. In so doing, Obama has allowed the medical marijuana industry in California and elsewhere to grow to the point there is no saving prohibition from Odysseus. There are more medical marijuana dispensaries in LA than Starbucks.

The Black Market will live on

It is one thing to illegally sell a legally produced product and make a profit, e.g., black market cigarettes. It is quite another thing to illegally produce and sell a product (e.g., moonshine) in market where there is legal competitors. The reason is simple. People want to know that what they buying and consuming. So when given the choice of buying an illegally produced product versus a legally produced product they are going to go with the later. (There is one notable exception and that is when an illegally produced product is successfully passed off as a legal one, e.g., fake brand name goods). That is why no matter how much Canadians drank during the time of American prohibition, I am sure that it never crossed the RCMP’s mind that American moonshine might become a competitor of Molson’s.

The gangs can not walk and chew gum at the same time

One of the arguments that I have repeatedly come across recently is that should marijuana be legalized then the gangs will move onto other things. I prefer to call this the gangs can not walk and chew gum at the same time argument.

The problem with this argument is that the gangs are already into other things and it is profits from marijuana that are helping them do that. In the context of Canada, marijuana profits and sometimes even marijuana itself are providing the seed capital the gangs need to expand operations into the States, for example, and to diversify operations (e.g., cocaine, heroin, human trafficking and guns). This is one of the main reasons why we need to nip this in the bud.

Gateway Drug

Researchers have rightly noted that people who have try marijuana are statistically more likely try other illicit drugs. This gave raise to the theory that there was something about marijuana that encouraged drug experimentation. Marijuana, it was alleged, is a gateway drug. This, in turn, was given as one more reason to keep the drug illegal.However, the gateway drug theory has until recently fallen on hard times for lack of an intelligible mechanism. The problem was that there was no coherent explanation for why marijuana would lead people to experiment with other drugs. Without this explanation doubt was cast relationship being more than mere correlation.That said, in recent years researchers have breathed new life into the theory, albeit with a sociological twist. According to the new version, it is not marijuana's pharmacological properties that serve as a gateway, but rather marijuana's illegal status. Specifically in the process of illegally procuring marijuana, users are introduced to the criminal elements with access to other illicit drugs and hence it is the forged blackmarket relationship between dealer and buyer that serves as gateway. Ironically the gateway drug theory has been turned on its head and used as reason for legalizing the drug. The Canadian Senate employed the new and improved version of the gateway argument as a reason for legalizing the drug.

In this context it should be noted that when the Dutch partially legalized the sale of marijuana, heroin and cocaine use went down despite an initial increase in marijuana use. Dutch use of hard drugs remains well below the European average.

Schizophrenia Marijuana

Epidemiological studies have consistently failed to show a positive correlation between marijuana use and schizophrenia and there is no causation without correlation. Specifically, should there be a causal link between marijuana and schizophrenia, there should be a positive correlation between marijuana consumption and schizophrenia, but such a correlation is conspicuous by its absence. Despite a massive increase in the number of Australians consuming the drug since the 1960s, Wayne Hall of the University of Queensland found no increase in the number of cases of schizophrenia in Australia. Mitch Earleywine of the University of Southern California similarly found the same with regard to the US population and Oxford's Leslie Iversen found the same regard to the population in the UK. According to Dr. Alan Brown, a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at Columbia University,

"If anything, the studies seem to show a possible decline in schizophrenia from the '40s and the ‘ 50,"

Dr Iddon, the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on drugs misuse [Britain], said the study did not convince him it was time to return cannabis to class B. "I don't think the causal link has been proved. I think cannabis might - possibly for genetic reasons - trigger psychosis at an earlier age." The MP, who is also a member of the science and technology select committee, said there was a danger of criminalising "hundreds of thousands of young people" if the status of the drug was changed. "If Gordon Brown changes the class of the drug, it won't be evidence-based but for political reasons," he said.

Lastly, it would be a welcome respite from the Liberals shamelessly taking inherently contradictory policies in hopes of capitalizing on both sides of this issue.

Indeed, on the one hand the Liberals have long maintained that Canadians should not be saddled with a criminal record for consuming something that is, after all, less harmful than alcohol. It is this light that Chrétien famously joked about having a joint in one hand and the money to pay for the fine of having it in the other. “I will have my money for my fine and a joint in my other hand.” On the other hand, just as they long downplayed the affects of smoking marijuana they have long stressed the importance of stiff penalties for trafficking. Both positions are popular with the public, but run the two positions together and it is as if Chrétien said this instead. “I will have my money for my fine and a joint in my other hand. Having paid my fine I would hope the cops find the person who sold it to me in put him in jail for a very long time.” If the act of consumption is not deemed overly ruinous then the whole punitive rationale for trafficking comes crashing down. Add to mix an acknowledgment on behalf of the Liberal party that marijuana can serve a medical purpose and you have a conceptual train wreck as a policy.

Far from helping the Liberals such an approach probably harmed them. It pissed off the ardent supporters of both sides of the political divide at the same time and prevented them from saying anything intelligent about the issue.

Household debt Government Debt Analogy is Stupid

2011-09-21T00:07:00.000-07:00

It is often said that just as households must live within their means so too do governments; spending must not exceed income or there will be trouble. The problem is that analogy is stupid. It leaves out everything relating to monetary policy and over looks the simple fact that governments control the money supply. Households can not print money to cover their debts, but central banks can and sometimes do. Households can not print money in the hopes of inflating away some of their debt, but central banks can and sometimes do. On the flip side of things, no one in their right mind is going to purposely seek out higher interest rates to pay, but that is precisely what governments do when they try to cool off inflation. A great case in point is Canadian and American attempts to quell inflation during the 1980s.

Abolish the Senate do not Reform it

2011-09-20T14:52:00.000-07:00

Constitutionally senators have all kinds of power and every once in a blue moon the Senate has stalled major pieces of legislation (e.g., free trade and the GST). However the aforementioned instances of stalling are so rare they are the exceptions that prove just how "ineffective" the senate truly is. Moreover, no senate I can think of has pursued a legislative agenda of its own accord; opposing legislation is one thing; purposing legislation is quite another. The reason the senate is not an "effective" body is that senators are not elected and as such lack legitimacy. Furthermore, senators are members of legitimate federal political parties and the parties that they belong to are loath to have their unelected members exercise real authority least their actions undermine the party. Finally, the fact that it is the ruling federal party and not, say, provincial governments that appoint senators defines a clear pecking order, with the Senate answerable to the House.

Harper, of course, wants to reform the Senate. Being unable to reform the Senate in one fell swoop, Harper has proposed electing Senators piece meal. Under the Conservative plan, new senators would be elected and would be limited to serving out a 8 year term. The elephant in the living room is that if the senate's lack of effective powers flows from the senate's lack of legitimacy, then electing senators might provide the senate with a degree of legitimacy it currently does not hold. One problem with proceeding thusly is that current senators are free to serve until the age of 75. As a result, Harper's actions could either transform an unelected political body with no real power into a largely unelected political body with real political power or commit Canadians to the farcical and expensive act of electing people to office who hold no real power. Always content to play the Tin Man and Lion to Conservatives scarecrow, the Liberals remain largely mum on the subject.

Setting aside problems associated with implementation, is the cause of democracy even served by reforming the Senate? Well, the Reformers always held that the regions needed more say and an “equal” “effective” and “elected” senate is the best way of achieving a balance between population centers in Eastern Canada and the rest of us. However, such a conception, and for that matter an "effective" version of the current senate, does not stand up to scrutiny. The problem is fivefold.

First such an argument rests on a false contrast; seats in the House of Commons are supposed to be assigned on basis of population, but in actuality that is not the case. Consider the 905. There are currently 4 plus million living in the 905 and there are currently 32 seats for an average of just over 127,000 people per riding. There are 6 ridings with over a 140,000 people in the 905, Bramalea - Gore - Malton (152,698) Brampton West (170,422) Halton (151,943), Mississauga - Erindale (143,361) Oak Ridges - Markham (169,642) and Vaughan (154,206). By contrast there are 4.5 million people in Sask, Man, NWT, Nuv, Yuk, PEI, NS, NFLD, and NB and there are 62 seats for an average of 72,000 people per riding. Moreover, there is but one riding in the 9, Selkirk Interlake (90,807), with over 90,000 people. Given current growth trends, the 2011 census might show there to be more people in the 905 than the aforementioned provinces and territories. Given population growth, Harper would have to give Ontario alone another 70 seats to make things half way equal.

Second, simply by virtue of having provincial jurisdiction and provincial representation people living in Canada’s less populated provinces already have a means of leveraging far more attention and support from the Federal government than their numbers warrant. Danny Williams had the government's attention in ways that the mayors of Surrey, Red Deer, Brant, Fredericton and Churchill did not even though we are talking about equal number of seats in both cases. There is more. There is also the typically asinine Canadian tradition of handing out cabinet posts based not on talent but region.

The third reason is that while one person one vote is bedrock principle of any democracy, one province one senate vote is something else entirely. People, not provinces, deserve equal representation. A province is no more or less than the people that make up that province. Giving the 135,851 in PEI the power to determine everything under provincial jurisdiction, provincial representation and 4 MPs well all the while giving the 170, 422 residents of Brampton West one MP is bad enough as it is. Piling on and giving the 135,851 people in PEI the same number of “effective” senators, as per the American Triple E Senate model, as 12,160,282 Ontarians is beyond stupid and grossly undemocratic. Equally silly is having one "effective" Senator for every 72,997 New Brunswick residents (10 senators in total) versus one Senator for every 685, 581 BC residents (6 senators in total). And that is what the current configuration gives us.

Four, as Benjamin Franklin put it, having two equally matched houses makes as much sense as tying two equally matched horses to either end of a buggy and having them both pull. Having two houses is not only a lobbyists dream, it is a recipe for political gridlock and pork barrel politics. The only thing that would be worse is if one needed 60% of the votes in the senate to overcome a filibuster.

Five, leaving aside the fact that no province has a second chamber, most having abolished them long ago, and that there are numerous examples of unicameral nation states (e.g., New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Israel, Sweden, Iceland, Liechtenstein, South Korea and Portugal), we already have a de facto unicameral state as it is -- just ask the supporters of a Triple E senate. After all, one can not argue on the one hand that the current senate is undemocratic and so contributes to the "democratic deficit" and on the other hand argue that the senate is “ineffective”. A body that adds nothing to the genuinely "effective" process can not take away anything either.

Bob Rae is emblematic of what is wrong with the Liberal Party

2011-09-20T00:15:00.003-07:00

A common lament is that if not for his record as premier of Ontario, Bob Rae would make a great leader. It is said in this regard that he a good debater, charismatic, well spoken, and funny. He is all that and his decision to focus on the big issues rather than minor scandals is a freshening change and one that the Liberals urgently needed to make. But Rae is also emblematic of everything that is wrong with the Liberal party.

Rae has always been an enthusiastic backer of a asymmetrical federalism, collective rights, and equity, i.e., affirmative action. His support for all three shape his ideas about what the Liberal party is and should continue to be.

The first two are wholly inconsistent with Pearson Trudeau tradition and make a mockery of the Liberal's attempt to draw a line from them to present times. Worse, support for both has real political consequences that the Liberals are blissfully unaware of.

Indeed, the Liberals have never fully absorbed what happened to Liberal level of support in Western Canada following the 1974 election. Some blamed the NEP and others have even claimed the gun registry played a part. The latter claim is ridiculous. The gun registry had no impact on the Liberals share of the popular vote or their seat totals. Most important of all it was passed 16 years after the Liberals first showed a significant decline in their level of support. As for the former, the chronology is also wrong. It was the fact that the Liberal vote collapsed in Western Canada in 1979 that paved the way for the NEP politically and not the other way around. The NEP was introduced after the 1980 election. The Liberals took 1 seat in the three most western provinces in 1979 election and 0 in 1980.

The source of the collapse was the more emphasis Trudeau placed on individual rights and a commitment to linguistic equality the more the rest of the country, particularly the West, resented the Liberals' inability to put a stop to bill 178 and and 101 and its willingness to make special accommodations for Quebec. Quebec's Official Language Act spelled doom for the Liberals in Western Canada from the mid 70s until collapse of the Progressive Conservatives in 1993. Ironically, it was the Mulroney's willingness to go even further in pandering to Quebec, particularly the Charlottetown Accord, that gave the Liberals some life again. 60.2% Albertans voted against the Charlottetown Accord, and 68.3% of British Colombians did. The later figure was by far the highest in country and the voter turn out in BC was second only to Quebec.

Let the "coalition" be a warning to the Liberals; these feelings are still deeply felt in "Western" Canada. The Liberals need to learn from history. They need to vigorously oppose the NDP's flirtation with extending bill 101 to federal intuitions in Quebec and their suggestion that Quebec's share of the House of Commons be fixed at 25%.

As for the third, it is terrible policy -- albeit not nearly as stupid or destructive as the asinine concept of "collective rights". As it does nothing to address underlying causes of inequality, equity does little to advance equality. A National daycare care system, for example, would do far more in a year for women's wage equality than 25 years of the putrid Employment Equity Act has. The former addresses the underlying causes of the wage gap, the later hurts the cause of young white males because 50 something white males earn more than than their 50 something female colleges. Equity sows division within Canadian society and is an anachronism given Canada's rapidly changing demographic profile. Worst of all, the focus on equity has meant that instead of trying to move the case of all workers forward, something that is desperately needed, liberals have instead devoted virtually all their energies to shuffling the deck. Calls for a bigger share of the pie has been abandoned for sake of each of the ever smaller pieces having an equal amount of fruit.

Equity is also bad politics. Whether it be the funding for religious schools in Ontario, or special treatment of Quebec many Canadians are deeply offended by the very suggestion that government monies and policy should be used to protect and or foster minority interests. Furthermore, whether employment equity, for example, actually makes the government less efficient is beside the point. A commitment to equity is incompatible with the liberal notion of a government built around merit. Hiring the "best" person for the job is a far cry from using the government as a counterpoint to perceived or actual deficiencies in the private sector employment. Government can not be seen or indeed be an affirmative action program. Government exists to further the public good and it furthers the public good not by who it hires but by what functions it carries out. So long as the philosophy of equity rules, Canadians will not have any faith that government is actually committed to that end and conservatives will have an easy time claiming that government hurts, as little more than a make work project for disadvantaged groups, more than it helps.

The most lopsided 7 game series in NHL finals History

2011-06-17T14:10:00.000-07:00

Usually there is silver lining to be found in 7 game series lose, but not this time. The Canucks were badly outplayed and badly out coached. The Canucks were miserable at even strength and abysmal on the power play. As for the penalty killing, the Canucks managed to do something no one else has done, viz., make a Bruins power play that was poor during the regular season and terrible during the first 3 rounds look pretty good.
The Canucks forwards and defense played equally badly and Luongo melted down yet again. It was 7 game series that felt like a 4 game sweep.

Statistically this was the most one sided 7 game series in NHL history by a large margin. The Canucks scored the fewest goals in a 7 game NHL
final and the -15 goal differential was worst mark for any series in NHL history. I am also willing to bet that this is the first time
that a team has surrendered more shorthanded goals in a 7 game final (3) than they scored power play goals (2).

The 2011 Canucks an lost an amazing 6 games by 3 or more goals. Only once did they beat a team by more than 3 goals. By comparison, the 1994 team was only beaten by more than 3 goals once and won by 3 or more goals 5 times. 1994 team scored 15 more goals than they allowed. The 2011 allowed an incredible 13 more goals than they scored. Since the NHL went to 4 rounds, no team making the finals had allowed more goals than they had scored. The Canucks are the first. That said, the 1975 Buffalo Sabers (3 rounds) allowed -5 more goals than they scored and the 1968 Blues (3 rounds) allowed 8 more goals than they scored, and needless to say lots of finalists in pre 1967 era had allowed more goals than the scored. However, -13 mark is the worst in NHL playoff history.

All that being said, had the Canucks won game 7, they would not have been the least deserving champion of all of sport. That title goes to the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates. The Yankees outscored the Pirates 55-27, but Pirates won the series on the final at bat.

The Yankees won game two 16-3, game three 10-0 and game six 12-0.

I would not have minded in the least being in such company, but alas it was not to be. The Canucks were as pathetic in game 7 as they were in games 3,4 and 6.

Liberals need to differentiate themselves philosophically

2011-06-02T18:27:00.003-07:00

Liberals can not win by trying to be all things to all people and certainly have no hope of raising money that way. Moreover, in an ironic twist of fate the Liberals have to present themselves as an alternative to both the NDP and Conservatives. The Liberals have long maintained that there was only ever two real choices. It is increasingly looking like the Canadian public agrees; either one votes NDP or one votes Conservative. In large chucks of the country the Liberals are fighting it out with the Greens for 4th spot.

The Liberals need to first differentiate themselves from the other parties philosophically and then develop policies that flow from those principles. In so doing, they need to aim to sow divisions between their opponents. With regard to the Conservatives, the Liberals need to drive a wedge between libertarians and theo cons by championing social liberalism in way that the Liberal party has not done since Trudeau introduced his omnibus bill. Doing so is also the only hope the Liberals have of making inroads into Quebec. With regard to the NDP, the Liberals need to sow divisions between NDP's Quebec base and its base outside of Quebec by firmly rejecting asymmetrical federalism. There seems to be some agreement among bloggers and pundits alike that the Liberals should do so. However, the Liberals need to go further -- much further. Asymmetrical federalism is only one reason why the Liberal party has unraveled and became philosophically untenable. The other reasons is the failed generation's support for collective rights and equity. Of course, the Liberal party was not the only party hurt by the adoption of such principles. The NDP's support for these principles have long rankled many traditional working class voters. Most moved to the Reform party in 1990s and stayed on with the Conservatives, but others have slowly started to migrate back to the NDP. The Liberals need to rip open those scabs. Support for equity sows division and if successful succeeds only in shuffling the deck. The Liberals could greatly improve and simplify their messaging by promising to improve the lot of all by promising board based social programs built around the principle of universality.

Harper's support for Israeli hardliners is stupid.

2011-06-01T13:50:00.001-07:00

I have said before I will say it again. Conservatives support for Israeli hardliners is stupid.

Israel is an anachronism. It is a country based on the antiquated notion of "blood" and a democracy of 7 and half million who lords over a population of 4 million. For these reasons alone it is odd that Harper would place Israel at the center of Canadian foreign policy. However, the strangeness does not stop there. The US's strong support for Israel makes sense in the context of its larger regional policy viz., insuring the continued flow of oil out of Gulf. The US has helped build Israel into the dominate military power in the region so as to prevent an Arab country or Iran from threatening the flow of oil out of the Gulf. The US has forged alliances between Israel and its neighbours, most notably Jordan and Egypt least conflict between Israel and its neighbors hamper the flow of oil out of the region. Remember it was the Yom Kippur War that led to the creation of OPEC. Of course, the US also made sure that the oil producing countries are dependent on the US for protection from external threats and indeed from their own resistive populations least the flow of oil out of the Gulf be hampered. Saudi Arabia being the prime example.

The Harper government has no larger regional strategy. Indeed, Harper's spat with UAE speaks volumes about Canada's compete lack of back channels in the region.

Now what has happened in Egypt forms the backdrop to Obama's speech. The ability of the Israel to hem in Gaza was dependent on Egyptian cooperation and that is no longer forthcoming. Egypt will no longer close its borders with Gaza and with elections coming soon it will soon be politically impossible for the Egyptian government to remain on friendly terms with Israel so long as the Palestine issue goes unresolved. This threatens stability in the region and instability threatens the flow of oil out of the Gulf.

Name the Winnipeg team

2011-05-31T13:50:00.000-07:00

Winnipeg is getting an NHL team. They might go with Jets, but I hope they go with something that better reflects life in Winnipeg. The following are my three favorites.

1) The Winnipeg Wind Chill,
2) The Winnipeg Mosquitoes,
3) The Winnipeg Sandbaggers

Abolish the Senate

2011-05-31T13:42:00.000-07:00

Reformers held that the regions needed more say and an "equal" “effective” and “elected” senate was the best way of achieving a balance between population centers in Eastern Canada and the rest of us. However, such a conception, and for that matter an "effective" version of the current senate, does not stand up to scrutiny. The problem is fivefold.

First such an argument rests on a false contrast; seats in the House of Commons are supposed to be assigned on basis of population, but that is not the case. Consider the 905. There are currently 4 plus million living in the 905 and there are currently 32 seats for an average of just over 127,000 people per riding. There are 6 ridings with over a 140,000 people in the 905, Bramalea - Gore - Malton (152,698) Brampton West (170,422) Halton (151,943), Mississauga - Erindale (143,361) Oak Ridges - Markham (169,642) and Vaughan (154,206). By contrast there are 4.5 million people in Sask, Man, NWT, Nuv, Yuk, PEI, NS, NFLD, and NB and there are 62 seats for an average of 72,000 people per riding. Moreover, there is but one riding in the 9, Selkirk Interlake (90,807), with over 90,000 people.

Second, the people living in Canada’s less populated provinces have a mechanism to assure that regional concerns are addressed; it is called provincial jurisdiction and provincial representation. By the very nature of living in a province with a small population, the 135,851 people in PEI have plenty of ways of addressing regional concerns that are not available to, for example, the 136 470 people living in Mississauga - Brampton South.

The third reason is a province is no more or less than the people that make up that province. Giving the 135,851 in PEI the power to determine everything under provincial jurisdiction, provincial representation and 4 MPs well all the while giving the 170, 422 residents of Brampton West one MP is bad enough as it is. Having one "effective" Senator for every 72,997 New Brunswick residents (10 senators in total) versus one Senator for every 685, 581 BC residents (6 senators in total) is just piling on.

Four, as Benjamin Franklin put it, having two equally matched houses makes as much sense as tying two equally matched horses to either end of a buggy and having them both pull. Having two houses is a recipe for political gridlock and pork barrel politics.

Five, leaving aside the fact that no province has a second chamber, most having abolished them long ago, and that there are numerous examples of unicameral nation states (e.g., New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Israel, Sweden, Iceland, Liechtenstein, South Korea and Portugal), we already have a de facto unicameral state as it is -- just ask the supporters of a Triple E senate. After all, one can not argue on the one hand that the current senate is undemocratic and so contributes to the "democratic deficit" and on the other hand argue that the senate is “ineffective”. A body that adds nothing to the genuinely "effective" process can not take away anything either.

The Liberal Fundraising and the Per Vote Subsidy

2011-05-23T14:09:00.000-07:00

Some Liberal bloggers have made the argument that the per vote subsidy allowed the Liberals to put fundraising reform on the back burner and Harper's decision to end the per vote subsidy will push the Liberals into at last changing the way the Liberals go about fundraising. Thus, Harper's decision may turn out to be a good thing. I find argument akin to someone saying that if they blind themselves, their sense of hearing will become more acute and thus they will be better off. It is a bad argument. It is also based on two false premises.

One, there is no magic fundraising formal. The Conservatives are better at fundraising than the Liberals are not because they are better at pestering their base for donations but because more people believe in the Conservatives than do the Liberals. It is that simple and that complex. Two, the notion that the Liberals were ignoring the fundraising issue because they were getting enough money from the per vote subsidy to compete is absurd. The Conservatives ran anti Ignatieff and Dion ads outside of the writ time and the Liberals were not able to respond in kind.

Finally, regardless of what is good for the Liberal party the decision to end the per vote subsidy is bad policy. There are two reasons defending the per vote subsidy. The first is obvious. Making the political parties more beholden to those with money is a bad idea. However the Conservatives have partially neutralized this argument by limiting the amount any individual can contribute and by forbidding corporations and unions from making contributions. The second is less obvious and needs to be repeatedly explained to the public and to pundits alike. The more emphasis placed on fundraising, the less time politicians have to spend dealing with issues and serving the community. The extreme case is what is happening in the US. Bill Clinton lamented that an ever increasing amount of time was occupied by fundraising and by the end of second term it occupied most of his time and the time of most senators. That was more than 10 years ago. Things are 100 times worse now. We want our politicians believing that politically it is more advantageous for them to spend time representing their ridings and hearing the concerns of their constituents than it is giving speeches at series of $100 dollar a plate fundraising dinners.

We also want to see people be nominated by virtue of what talents they have and not by virtue of what kind of wealthy friends are in their Rolodex.

In order to insure that the politicians are spending more time serving the community and less time fundraising their is another subsidy that should end. Indeed, Canada has long subsidized political parties by making political contributions tax deductible and the amount of money being subsidized by the Canadian tax payer is equal to the amount given out to the political party as part of the per vote subsidy. If we are going to eliminate a subsidy, it should be this one.

An Elected and Effective Senate is a Terrible Idea

2011-05-19T10:20:00.000-07:00

Constitutionally senators have all kinds of power and every once in a blue moon the Senate has stalled major pieces of legislation (e.g., free trade and the GST). However the aforementioned instances of stalling are so rare they are the exceptions that prove just how "ineffective" the senate truly is. Moreover, no senate I can think of has pursued a legislative agenda of its own accord; opposing legislation is one thing; purposing legislation is quite another. The reason the senate is not an "effective" body is that senators are not elected and as such lack legitimacy. Furthermore, senators are members of legitimate federal political parties and the parties that they belong to are loath to have their unelected members exercise real authority least their actions undermine the party. Finally, the fact that it is the ruling federal party and not, say, provincial governments that appoint senators defines a clear pecking order, with the Senate answerable to the House.

Harper, of course, wants to reform the Senate. Being unable to reform the Senate in one fell swoop, Harper has proposed electing Senators piece meal. Under the Conservative plan, new senators would be elected and would be limited to serving out a 8 year term. The elephant in the living room is that if the senate's lack of effective powers flows from the senate's lack of legitimacy, then electing senators might provide the senate with a degree of legitimacy it currently does not hold. One problem with proceeding thusly is that current senators are free to serve until the age of 75. As a result, Harper's actions could either transform an unelected political body with no real power into a largely unelected political body with real political power or commit Canadians to the farcical and expensive act of electing people to office who hold no real power. Always content to play the Tin Man and Lion to Conservatives scarecrow, the Liberals remain largely mum on the subject.

Setting aside problems associated with implementation, is the cause of democracy even served by reforming the Senate? Well, the Reformers always held that the regions needed more say and an “equal” “effective” and “elected” senate is the best way of achieving a balance between population centers in Eastern Canada and the rest of us. However, such a conception, and for that matter an "effective" version of the current senate, does not stand up to scrutiny. The problem is fivefold.

First such an argument rests on a false contrast; seats in the House of Commons are supposed to be assigned on basis of population, but in actuality that is not the case. Consider the 905. There are currently 4 plus million living in the 905 and there are currently 32 seats for an average of just over 127,000 people per riding. There are 6 ridings with over a 140,000 people in the 905, Bramalea - Gore - Malton (152,698) Brampton West (170,422) Halton (151,943), Mississauga - Erindale (143,361) Oak Ridges - Markham (169,642) and Vaughan (154,206). By contrast there are 4.5 million people in Sask, Man, NWT, Nuv, Yuk, PEI, NS, NFLD, and NB and there are 62 seats for an average of 72,000 people per riding. Moreover, there is but one riding in the 9, Selkirk Interlake (90,807), with over 90,000 people. Given current growth trends, the 2011 census might show there to be more people in the 905 than the aforementioned provinces and territories. Given population growth, Harper would have to give Ontario alone another 70 seats to make things half way equal.

Second, the people living in Canada’s less populated provinces have a mechanism to assure that regional concerns are addressed; it is called provincial jurisdiction and provincial representation. By the very nature of living in a province with a small population, the 135,851 people in PEI have plenty of ways of addressing regional concerns that are not available to, for example, the 136 470 people living in Mississauga - Brampton South.

The third reason is that while one person one vote is bedrock principle of any democracy, one province one senate vote is something else entirely. People, not provinces, deserve equal representation. A province is no more or less than the people that make up that province. Giving the 135,851 in PEI the power to determine everything under provincial jurisdiction, provincial representation and 4 MPs well all the while giving the 170, 422 residents of Brampton West one MP is bad enough as it is. Piling on and giving the 135,851 people in PEI the same number of “effective” senators, as per the American Triple E Senate model, as 12,160,282 Ontarians is beyond stupid and grossly undemocratic. Equally silly is having one "effective" Senator for every 72,997 New Brunswick residents (10 senators in total) versus one Senator for every 685, 581 BC residents (6 senators in total). And that is what the current configuration gives us.

Four, as Benjamin Franklin put it, having two equally matched houses makes as much sense as tying two equally matched horses to either end of a buggy and having them both pull. Having two houses is not only a lobbyists dream, it is a recipe for political gridlock and pork barrel politics. The only thing that would be worse is if one needed 60% of the votes in the senate to overcome a filibuster.

Five, leaving aside the fact that no province has a second chamber, most having abolished them long ago, and that there are numerous examples of unicameral nation states (e.g., New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Israel, Sweden, Iceland, Liechtenstein, South Korea and Portugal), we already have a de facto unicameral state as it is -- just ask the supporters of a Triple E senate. After all, one can not argue on the one hand that the current senate is undemocratic and so contributes to the "democratic deficit" and on the other hand argue that the senate is “ineffective”. A body that adds nothing to the genuinely "effective" process can not take away anything either.

Pragmatic versus Ideological.

2011-05-17T18:00:00.000-07:00

The Liberals need to be bold and Consistent

2011-05-17T17:39:00.000-07:00

The Liberals need to more than bold. They also need to be consistent. In the past the Liberals have shamelessly held inherently contradictory policies in hopes of capitalizing on both sides of a particular issue. Take Marijuana. On the one hand the Liberals have long maintained that Canadians should not be saddled with a criminal record for consuming something that is, after all, less harmful than alcohol. It is this light that Chrétien famously joked about having a joint in one hand and the money to pay for the fine of having it in the other. “I will have my money for my fine and a joint in my other hand.” On the other hand, just as they long downplayed the affects of smoking marijuana they have long stressed the importance of stiff penalties for trafficking. Both positions are popular with the public, but run the two positions together and it is as if Chrétien said this instead. “I will have my money for my fine and a joint in my other hand. Having paid my fine I would hope the cops find the person who sold it to me in put him in jail for a very long time.” If the act of consumption is not deemed overly ruinous then the whole punitive rationale for trafficking comes crashing down. Add to mix an acknowledgment on behalf of the Liberal party that marijuana can serve a medical purpose and you have a conceptual train wreck as a policy.

Far from helping the Liberals such an approach probably harmed them. It pissed off the ardent supporters of both sides of the political divide at the same time and prevented them from saying anything intelligent about various issues.

The Liberals need to Abandon Asymmetrical Federalism once and for all

2011-05-10T16:37:00.000-07:00

While the Liberals are hatching a plan to draw out the leadership race as long as possible and in the process make the Liberal party even more of an amorphous irrelevant mess than it is now, the other parties are moving forward.

Jack Layton and Thomas Mulcair are busy playing to the soft nationalist vote in Quebec and Harper is busy cementing his domination of everything west of Quebec by taking note of everything the NDP is promising Quebec nationalists as ammunition to use against them in Ontario and the West.
When the Liberals finally come to in 2 years time or so, the party will probably plan to spilt the difference between the two major parties and in the process get wiped off the map.

The Liberals need a plan and that starts with abandoning asymmetrical federalism once and for all. The Liberals need to differentiate themselves from the other parties by being willing to propose national programs and national standards. So long as the NDP are going to play to the soft nationalist vote in Quebec they will be unwilling to play that role. Everything they will propose will come with the following proviso and so will amount to nothing. "We will work with the provinces to" The Conservatives on the other hand are philosophically opposed to such programs and so will never offer them.

Yes Quebec will squawk and so will Alberta. However, that will work in the Liberals favour. Remember, Harper's plan is divide a wedge between Francophone Quebec and everything west of Quebec. Decoupling Alberta from Ontario and pairing Quebec and Alberta is exactly what the Liberals need to do to stand any chance of making a comeback in 2015. Meanwhile, the Liberals can challenge the NDP's hold on Quebec by promising policies that are popular with the NDP's socially democratic base in Quebec but which can only be implemented federally.

Liberals and the Right Wing Media

2011-05-10T15:11:00.001-07:00

Trying to use the media as a vehicle for getting your message out is like trying to pass a message to someone across a large room by having a series of people whisper in the ear of the person next to them. What message is eventually received is seldom the same as the message given. Some people will hear about such talking points though an unsystematic columnist or pundit, others will discover it buried in a lengthily article and so on and so on. None of these scenarios has been focused grouped for. People in focus groups are exposed to the talking point and only the talking point.

Liberals in particular would be fatally ill advised to ignore this problem. Being the third party they will be given less opportunity by the media to speak directly to Canadians and there is now an overwhelming body of evidence that 1) the bulk of pundits are conservative and 2) the vast majority of articles about the Liberals are negative. The former goes a long way in explaining why the Conservatives have garnered so many more endorsements than other major political parties. In 2006 22 newspapers endorsed the Conservatives and 1 paper endorsed the Liberals 1 endorsed the Green Party and 1 the Bloc. In 2008 20 papers endorsed the Conservatives 3 the Liberals 1 the Bloc and 1 the NDP. In 20011 28 papers endorsed the Conservatives 2 the NDP, 1 the Bloc. As for the later, the last 4 McGill media election studies are a great place to start. I do not care how well a particular talking point focused grouped if it is buried in a negative piece or hammered by a pundit it is probably not going to be worth much.

In order to combat such a short coming the Liberal party is going to have to assume the role of a liberal pundit class that simply does not exist in this country and that means the Liberal party will actually have develop some academically respectable arguments. Board based talking points will not do the trick. They are easy fodder for any well informed person. The party needs to challenge the legions of conservative columnists least various Conservative positions become received wisdom. Factual errors need to be pointed out, non sequiturs need to be mocked and detailed arguments provided. The party needs to be vicious. Ignatieff talked about wanting to the be the party that bases its decisions on sound reasoning and science. A good way of establishing such a reputation is take a conservative pundit out to the wood shed on occasion. When a conservative columnist retires the Liberals should share Trudeau's lament: "I'm sorry I won't have you to kick around any more." Special attention needs to be given to the following papers: The Globe and Mail, Vancouver Sun, Winnipeg Free Press, Ottawa Citizen and the Montreal Gazette.

Liberals and Western Canada

2011-05-10T15:05:00.001-07:00

The Liberals have never fully absorbed what happened to Liberal level of support in Western Canada following the 1974 election. Some blamed the NEP and others have even claimed the gun registry played a part. The latter claim is ridiculous. The gun registry had no impact on the Liberals share of the popular vote or their seat totals. Most important of all it was passed 16 years after the Liberals first showed a significant decline in their level of support. As for the former, the chronology is also wrong. It was the fact that the Liberal vote collapsed in Western Canada in 1979 that paved the way for the NEP politically and not the other way around. The NEP was introduced after the 1980 election. The Liberals took 1 seat in the three most western provinces in 1979 election and 0 in 1980.

The source of the collapse was the more emphasis Trudeau placed on individual rights and a commitment to linguistic equality the more the rest of the country, particularly the West, resented the Liberals' inability to put a stop to bill 178 and and 101 and its willingness to make special accommodations for Quebec. Quebec's Official Language Act spelled doom for the Liberals in Western Canada from the mid 70s until collapse of the Progressive Conservatives in 1993. Ironically, it was the Mulroney's willingness to go even further in pandering to Quebec, particularly the Charlottetown Accord, that gave the Liberals some life again. 60.2% Albertians voted against the Charlottetown Accord, and 68.3% of British Columbians did. The later figure was by far the highest in country and the voter turn out in BC was second only to Quebec.

Let the "coalition" be a warning to the Liberals; these feelings are still deeply felt in "Western" Canada. The Liberals need to learn from history. They need to vigorously oppose the NDP's flirtation with extending bill 101 to federal intuitions in Quebec and their suggestion that Quebec's share of the House of Commons be fixed at 25%. The Liberals should welcome the addition of 30 new seats for Ontario, Alberta, and BC and be strong advocates of rep by pop. .

In a strange twist of fate the Liberals also need to oppose an elected Senate and propose abolishing it -- supporting the status quo is an untenable position and has been for over 30 years. I say strange because an elected and "effective" senate was historically sold to Westerners as counterpoint to Quebec securing 25% of the seats in the House of Commons in perpetuity. The Liberals need to point out they 1) do not support the NDP's position to fix Quebec's seat total at 25% 2) under any model of senate reform electoral clout of the Western provinces will be diluted and violate the principle of rep by pop. People not provinces deserve equal representation. Also, an elected senate, particularly and "effective" one, is terrible idea for so many reasons it hard to count.

It would be Insane for the Liberals to bring back Dion as Leader

2011-05-09T16:22:00.001-07:00

Dion's shortcomings are too numerous to count. I will limit my comments to three.

One, his English sucks.

Two, outside of Quebec this loss has a lot to do with Dion. The Liberals were never able to shake off talk of 2008 "coalition" that Dion put together. The Liberals were the party of national unity until Dion decided to form a non aggression pack with the Bloc! Stupid stupid stupid.

Three, while the Liberals actually did a nice job boiling down what the Green shift was ("Less on what you earn more on what you burn"), the Liberals were never going to be able to explain to the public just what is "burnt" and as a result how such a shift would effect the cost of any number of goods and services. The Conservatives gave them an answer. It would be a "tax on everything". Naturally some Canadians were convinced that this was simply a tax increase in disguise. But the kicker was this. I do not care what Canadians told polling companies about climate change. No one I mean no is ever going to be excited over a tax shift. Making the central plank of his platform something that did not offer a single tangible benefit Canadians just went to show how hopeless Dion was as a politician and why he needed to be ushered out the door as soon as possible.

Liberals should dump Weighted one member one vote

2011-05-09T16:16:00.000-07:00

Fiscal necessity will likely compel the Liberals to do something that they should have done long ago, viz., get rid of their youth, seniors, women's and aboriginal peoples commissions. However, it will not end the Liberals mania for affirmative action. Indeed, although it is never I good idea to marginalize what is left of the base, finances will not compel the Liberals to dump the daft weighted one member one vote and move to one member one vote. Apparently it is not enough that urban and suburban ridings are grossly underrepresented in Parliament. The Liberals feel that they Liberal urbanites and suburbanites should also be short changed when it comes to electing a leader. I do not have access to the membership numbers, but I assume they roughly correlated with how many people voted for the Liberals in each riding . That being said, it should be stated that 260,000 people voted for the Liberals in the 13 ridings they won in BC and Ontario as compared to the 23,000 people who voted for the Liberals in the 13 ridings they lost in Saskatchewan.

In Battlefords-Lloydminster 944 people voted Liberal; the Liberal share of the vote was 3.32%

In Blackstrap 2710 people voted Liberal: the Liberal share of the vote was 6.32%

In Desnethé-Missinippi-Churchill River 1144 people voted Liberal; the Liberal share of the vote was 5.22%

In Cypress Hills-Grasslands 1870 people voted Liberal; the Liberal share of the vote was 6.35%

In Palliser 1897 people voted Liberal: the Liberal share of the vote was 5.61%

In Prince Albert 1070 people voted Liberal: the Liberal share of the vote was 3.46%

In Regina-Lumsden-Lake Centre 2555 voted Liberal: the Liberal share of the vote was 7.52%

In Regina-Qu'Appelle 1400 people voted Liberal: the Liberal share of the vote was 4.71%

In Saskatoon-Humboldt 3021 people voted Liberal: the Liberal share of the vote was 7.98%

In Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar 697 people voted Liberal; The Liberal share of the vote was 2.32%

In Saskatoon-Wanuskewin 2428 people voted Liberal: the Liberal share of the vote was 6.7%

In Souris-Moose Mountain 1236 people voted Liberal: the Liberal share of the vote was 4.23%

In Yorkton-Melville 2167 people voted Liberal: the Liberal share of the vote was 6.82%

In Ottawa South 25,991 people voted Liberal: the Liberal share of the vote was 44.05%

The Right Wing media: What the Liberals need to do

2011-05-09T00:08:00.006-07:00

Political parties conduct polling to find out what issues favour them and what do not, develop their talking points accordingly, focus group these talking points and then repeat these tried and tested talking points every chance they get. Whether, such talking points make much sense does not matter a lick. What matters is soccer moms and Nascar dads or what have you like them.

However, such an approach has two main shortcomings, one minor, one major. The minor shortcoming is this. Just because a talking point tests well does not mean that people will never see behind the facade. Some talking points are like fruit. They spoil. Others are like Twinkies and stay fresh forever. It is hard to guess what kind of expiration date a particular talking point will have coming out of the gate. It could go rotten rather quickly. Moreover, the growing prominence of social media is surly going to mean that such talking points have shorter expiration dates in the future. All that being said, all a political party needs to do overcome this problem is to remain vigilant, restock the shelves when needed and throw the rotten talking points in the garbage.

The second shortcoming is not so easily overcome. Specifically, such an approach presupposes that these talking points will reach the public unfiltered and that is just not realistic. Trying to use the media as a vehicle for getting your message out is like trying to pass a message to someone across a large room by having a series of people whisper in the ear of the person next to them. What message is eventually received is seldom the same as the message given. Some people will hear about such talking points though an unsystematic columnist or pundit, others will discover it buried in a lengthily article and so on and so on. None of these scenarios has been focused grouped for. People in focus groups are exposed to the talking point and only the talking point.

Liberals in particular would be fatally ill advised to ignore the latter problem. Being the third party they will be given less opportunity by the media to speak directly to Canadians and there is now an overwhelming body of evidence that 1) the bulk pundits are conservative and 2) the vast majority of articles about the Liberals are negative. The former goes a long way in explaining why the Conservatives have garnered so many more endorsements than other major political parties. In 2006 22 newspapers endorsed the Conservatives and 1 paper endorsed the Liberals 1 endorsed the Green Party and 1 the Bloc. In 2008 20 papers endorsed the Conservatives 3 the Liberals 1 the Bloc and 1 the NDP. In 20011 28 papers endorsed the Conservatives 2 the NDP, 1 the Bloc. As for the later, the last 4 McGill media election studies are a great place to start. I do not care how well a particular talking point focused grouped if it is buried in a negative piece or hammered by a pundit it is probably not going to be worth much.

In order to combat such a short coming the Liberal party is going to have to assume the role of a liberal pundit class that simply does not exist in this country and that means the Liberal party will actually have develop some academically respectable arguments. Board based talking points will not do the trick. They are easy fodder for any well informed person. The party needs to challenge the legions of conservative columnists least various Conservative positions become received wisdom. Factual errors need to be pointed out, non sequiturs need to be mocked and detailed arguments provided. The party needs to be vicious. Ignatieff talked about wanting to the be the party that bases its decisions on sound reasoning and science. A good way of establishing such a reputation is take a conservative pundit out to the wood shed on occasion. When a conservative columnist retires the Liberals should share Trudeau's lament: "I'm sorry I won't have you to kick around any more." Special attention needs to be given to the following papers: The Globe and Mail, Vancouver Sun, Winnipeg Free Press, Ottawa Citizen and the Montreal Gazette.

Of course for such a strategy to be effective the Liberals actually need take stand on issues. A lot of the success Conservatives have enjoyed stems from the fact that however, stupid their policies, they have been only ones willing to put forward consistent set of policies (e.g., senate reform). When pundits talk about policy more often than not it is Conservative policies they are dealing with. Outside of the policies announced in Chretien's last year in power and Dion's disastrously ill defined Green Shift, the Liberals have not given the media much to talk about. Indeed, since 2006 the Liberals have almost abandoned the field altogether; they do not put forward polices; they do not put forward arguments; they do not refute arguments. They might tut tut and promise to "compromise", but this only hurts them. The former makes them appear to be the effeminate wimps the Conservatives claim them to be and the later makes it appear that the various Conservative polices have some validity when in actuality they have none. At best, the Liberals will sometimes take a stand in defense of the status quo. The gun registry is a case in point. However, do not expect them to say much of anything when they do take a stand. They might note that the experts support them, but they will not repeat the expert's arguments least someone take offense to what the experts are saying and want to shoot the messenger.

Mandatory Voting in Canada is Needed

2011-05-06T14:24:00.001-07:00

Seniors vote in much greater numbers than young people and so politicians pay them more attention. The lack of attention paid to younger voters leads the youth to pay even less attention to politics and on it goes in a vicious circle. The only way out of this vicious circle is mandatory voting.

Getting young people to the polls is vital for the future health of Canadian democracy. Many Canadians in their 20s will move into their 30s never having voted and it remains to be seen just how many will start voting.

Of course, what can be said about young and old voting patterns can also be said about other groups as well. Politicians pander to groups who show up to the vote in disproportionately large numbers to the detriment of everyone else.

Mandatory voting will also make elections more about issues. Indeed, anyone who has ever worked on a campaign knows that most of the focus is not spent convincing people to vote this way or that, but rather identifying party supporters and then to pestering them to show up on voting day. Make voting and mandatory and parties would spend more time focusing in on the issues and lot less time and expense tracking down supporters.

Per Vote Subsidy

2011-05-06T14:19:00.000-07:00

The Conservatives want to eliminate the political subsidy and so force political parties to raise their "own money". As usual, Harper is only thinking of what political advantage could be gained and not at all about what is good for the country. He is also being dishonest. Canada has long subsidized political parties by making political contributions tax deductible and the amount of money being subsidized by the Canadian tax payer is equal to the amount given out to the political party as part of the per vote subsidy. If we are going to eliminate a subsidy, it should be this one.

There are two reasons defending the per vote subsidy. The first is obvious. Making the political parties more beholden to those with money is a bad idea. However the Conservatives have partially neutralized this argument by limiting the amount any individual can contribute and by forbidding corporations and unions from making contributions. The second is less obvious and needs to be repeatedly explained to the public and to pundits alike. The more emphasis placed on fundraising, the less time politicians have to spend dealing with issues and serving the community. The extreme case is what is happening in the US. Bill Clinton lamented that an ever increasing amount of time was occupied by fundraising and by the end of second term it occupied most of his time and the time of most senators. That was more than 10 years ago. Things are 100 times worse now. We want our politicians believing that politically it is more advantageous for them to spend time representing their ridings and hearing the concerns of their constituents than it is giving speeches at series of $100 dollar a plate fundraising dinners.

We also want to see people be nominated by virtue of what talents they have and not by virtue of what kind of wealthy friends are in their Rolodex.

It is time to redraw various electoral boundaries

2011-05-05T00:06:00.000-07:00

It is high time that some electoral boundaries were redrawn

Miramichi 53,844
Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe 89,334

Labrador 26,364
St John's East 88,002

Kootenay—Columbia 86,811
West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country 129,241

Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing 77,961
Kenora 64,291
Oak Ridges—Markham 169,645
Vanughn 154,206

Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik 80,894
Montcalm 122,825

What needs to done: the Liberals need an agenda

2011-05-04T16:34:00.002-07:00

Philosophy

1) Liberals need to offer National programs

So long as the NDP are going to play to the soft nationalist vote in Quebec they will be unwilling to propose any national programs.
Everything they will propose will come with the following proviso and so will amount to nothing. "We will work with the provinces to" The Conservatives on the other hand are philosophically opposed to such programs and so will never offer them. The Liberals need to be the party that is willing to propose national programs and national standards. They need to abandon asymmetrical federalism once and for all and become a truly national party with a truly national vision.

2) The Liberals need withdraw their support for collective rights and equity.

The Liberals seem blind to the fact that some of their core philosophy, viz., a commitment to equity and collective rights, is deeply unpopular with large segments of Canadian society. Weather it be the funding for religious schools in Ontario, or special treatment of Quebec many Canadians are deeply offended by the very suggestion that government monies and policy should be used to protect and or foster minority interests. Furthermore, weather one believes that employment equity, for example, actually makes the government less efficient is beside the point, a commitment to equity is incompatible with the liberal notion of a government built around merit. Hiring the best person for the job is a far cry from using the government as a counterpoint to perceived or actual deficiencies in the private sector employment. Government can not be seen or indeed be an affirmative action program. Government exists to further the public good and it furthers the public good not by who it hires but by what functions it carries out. So long as the philosophy of equity rules, conservatives will have an easy time claiming that government is the problem.

Democratic Reforms

1) The Liberals need to defend bilingualism, the notion of rep by population, and abolishing the senate.

The Liberals have never fully absorbed what happened to Liberal level of support in Western Canada following the 1974 election. Some blamed the NEP and others have even claimed the gun registry played a part. The latter claim is ridiculous. The gun registry had no impact on the Liberals share of the popular vote or their seat totals. Most important of all it was passed 16 years after the Liberals first showed a significant decline in their level of support. As for the former, the chronology is also wrong. It was the fact that the Liberal vote collapsed in Western Canada in 1979 that paved the way for the NEP politically and not the other way around. The NEP was introduced after the 1980 election. The Liberals took 1 seat in the three most western provinces in 1979 election and 0 in 1980.

The source of the collapse was the more emphasis Trudeau placed on individual rights and a commitment to linguistic equality the more the rest of the country, particularly the West, resented the Liberals' inability to put a stop to bill 178 and and 101 and its willingness to make special accommodations for Quebec. Quebec's Official Language Act spelled doom for the Liberals in Western Canada from the mid 70s until collapse of the Progressive Conservatives in 1993. Ironically, it was the Mulroney's willingness to go even further in pandering to Quebec, particularly the Charlottetown Accord, that gave the Liberals some life again.

Let the "coalition" be a warning to the Liberals; these feelings are still deeply felt in "Western" Canada. The Liberals need to learn from history. They need to vigorously oppose the NDP's flirtation with extending bill 101 to federal intuitions in Quebec and their suggestion that Quebec's share of the House of Commons be fixed at 25%.

In a strange twist of fate the Liberals also need oppose an elected Senate and propose abolishing it -- supporting the status quo is an untenable position and has been for over 30 years. I say strange because an elected and "effective" senate was historically sold to Westerners as counterpoint to Quebec securing 25% of the seats in the House of Commons in perpetuity. The Liberals need to point out they 1) do not support the NDP's position 2) under any model of senate reform electoral clout of the Western provinces will be diluted. Also, an elected senate, particularly and "effective" one, is terrible idea for so many reasons it hard to count.

2) The Liberals need to support Mandatory voting:

So long as younger people vote in far few numbers than seniors the Liberal party is doomed. The Conservatives own the over 65% crowd.
The problem has proven intractable. Seniors vote in much greater numbers than young people and so politicians pay them more attention. The lack of attention paid to younger voters leads the youth to pay even less attention to politics and on it goes in a vicious circle. The only way out of this viscous circle is mandatory voting and the Liberals need to scream it from the roof tops.

Getting young people to the polls is not only vital for the Liberal party but for the future health of Canadian democracy. Many Canadians in their 20s will move into their 30s never having voted and it remains to be seen just how many will start voting.

Of course, what can be said about young and old voting patterns can also be said about other groups as well. Politicians pander to groups who show up to the vote in disproportionately large numbers to the detriment of everyone else.

Mandatory voting will also make elections more about issues. Indeed, anyone who has ever worked on a campaign knows that most of the focus is not spent convincing people to vote this way or that, but rather identifying party supporters and then to pestering them to show up on voting day. Make voting and mandatory and parties would spend more time focusing in on the issues and lot less time and expense tracking down supporters.

3) The Liberals need to support the per vote subsidy.

The Conservatives want to eliminate the political subsidy and so force political parties to raise their "own money". As usual, Harper is only thinking of what political advantage could be gained and not at all about what is good for the country. He is also being dishonest. Canada has long subsidized political parties by making political contributions tax deductible and the amount of money being subsidized by the Canadian tax payer is equal to the amount given out to the political party as part of the per vote subsidy. If we are going to eliminate a subsidy, it should be this one.

There are two reasons defending the per vote subsidy. The first is obvious. Making the political parties more beholden to those with money is a bad idea. However the Conservatives have partially neutralized this argument by limiting the amount any individual can contribute and by forbidding corporations and unions from making contributions. The second is less obvious and needs to be repeatedly explained to the public and to pundits alike. The more emphasis placed on fundraising, the less time politicians have to spend dealing with issues and serving the community. The extreme case is what is happening in the US. Bill Clinton lamented that an ever increasing amount of time was occupied by fundraising and by the end of second term it occupied most of his time and the time of most senators. That was more than 10 years ago. Things are 100 times worse now. We want our politicians believing that politically it is more advantageous for them to spend time representing their ridings and hearing the concerns of their constituents than it is giving speeches at series of $100 dollar a plate fundraising dinners.

We also want to see people be nominated by virtue of what talents they have and not by virtue of what kind of wealthy friends are in their Rolodex.

4) The Liberals need to support a Ban on political advertising outside of election time

Spending limits are designed to level the playing field and to lessen corporate influence and in process make campaigns more about issues than money. However, the effectiveness of such measures is undermined if parties are allowed to spend whatever they want outside of election time. It also makes the election cycle, particularly during minority governments, all but permanent.

Wipe Out: Some 2011 Election Numbers

2011-05-04T00:28:00.002-07:00

850,010 fewer people voted Liberal than in 2008

2, 783, 175 people voted Liberal. That is the Liberals lowest vote total since 1958. The population in 1958 was less than half of what it is now.

The Liberals finished below 10% in 84 ridings and two of those were in Ontario. In one riding they were below 2%.

They were above 20% in 106.

The Liberal vote was below 10% in both Alberta and Sask.

The Liberals lost a riding, Scarborough-Rouge River, that they had won by 36% in 2008. They lost 31% of the popular vote in that riding and finished 3rd!

The Liberals picked up no seats and lost 43. That said, they did hold Winnipeg North, a seat they won in a bye election in 2010.

38, 981 people voted for the Liberals in Sask., 15, 842 of them for Ralph Goodale

The Liberal knew this was coming and tried in the last week to throw the media off the trail by having Ignatieff visit Brant among others. They lost Brant by 30%.

Ignatieff had a Terrible Campaign

2011-05-03T15:58:00.001-07:00

If the Liberals decide to solider on, they need to be frank with themselves. The Liberals and pundits often said that the Liberals ran a good campaign. This is laughable. They ran a terrible campaign. For starters there was no evidence whatsoever that the causa belli the Liberals gave for bringing down the government, viz., Harper's contempt for democracy, would be bought by the public. The public is hopelessly ignorant of parliamentary minutia and always will be. Try to explain to them the ins and outs of the In and Out scandal or Karios and their eyes will glaze over. Such issues are of interest to only a tiny fraction of the public. Still Ignatieff, and from all accounts he was the main driver of such a ill fated policy, raised the issue to the campaign's dying days. In this sense, Ignatieff was worse than Dion. At least Liberals had the good sense to move past the Green Shift in later half of the 2008 campaign. The only hope of getting any payoff from such a strategy was to introduce substantive democratic reforms. However, what the Liberals gave us was gimmicky and fluff. Finally, and to add insult to injury, the NDP used a completely insubstantial talk about voting attendance to turn the issue of respect for democracy against the Liberals.

Equally inexplicable was the Liberals inability to deal with the Conservatives coalition talking point and here again Ignateiff deserves a lot of the blame. Apparently two years is not enough time for a Harvard professor and an experienced communications staff to come up with a strategy for shutting down such talk. Ignatieff's mealy mouth response to Peter Mansbridge sealed the Liberals fate.

Now I have already written about Liberals daft debate strategy and I will absolve him for much of the blame for that. One thing Ignatieff does not like to do is repeat himself. On the campaign trail he was all over the map and he was rightly blasted for this. Endlessly repeating the same highly refined talking points on the campaign trail is a must. It is thus ironic that the one time Ignatieff should have tossed aside such advice and talked intelligently about the issues he instead he decided to endlessly repeat talking points he had neither mastered nor refined.

Of course, it was in the last two weeks that Liberals, and Ignatieff in particular, really fell apart. Carrying on like a half mad preacher, Ignatieff counseled Canadians to "rise up" and stupidly Liberals decided to make such revivalism the vocal point of the rest of their campaign.

They should have played the national unity card instead. The Liberals needed to talk about the Clarity Act and its importance. They needed to characterize Stephen Harper as once having been an Alberta separatist for having written the Firewall letter and "Separation Alberta Style" and they needed to blast Jack Layton for abandoning the Clarity Act and supporting the extension of bill 101. Chrétien covered some of these topics in his address to the party faithful, but Ignatieff has always been more of Lapierre Liberal and so did not take heed. Instead he blathered on about democracy until he and his party were finished.

Ignateiff will join Paul Martin and Stephane Dion as the Liberal leaders who killed the Liberal party.

National Unity: the Liberals failed to bring it up

2011-05-03T13:52:00.000-07:00

"From a personal perspective, there were two low-points of the Liberal campaign. The first was when the issue of national unity was raised. For at least 40 years, this has been the Liberal Party’s bread-and-butter, our raison d’etre. We are the party of national unity. When the issue was brought up, Harper quickly wrapped himself in the flag and took on the role of Captain Canada. He intentionally decided he would own the issue and try to turn it into a strength for him and his party. We said we don’t want to discuss national unity. Pass. We wouldn’t speak out against extending Bill 101 to federally regulated industries, we wouldn’t defend the Clarity Act, wouldn’t speak out against NDP nonsense on the Constitution – that was literally verbatim from Brian Mulroney’s misguided constitutional adventures. We didn’t want to go there, had nothing to say in response. My anger over this decision was not great for my blood pressure."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/second-reading/silver-powers/the-liberal-party-what-went-wrong-and-where-to-next/article2008011/page2/

Rob Silver and I are of one mind here. The Liberals needed to raise the national unity issue. This what I had said about the same two weeks ago.

English Canada: "Talk about the Clarity Act and its importance. Characterize Stephen Harper as once having been an Alberta separatist for having written the Firewall letter and Separation Alberta Style and blast Jack Layton as having abandoning the Clarity Act and supporting the extension of bill 101."

Liberals Needed to challenge Harper's attempt to cast himself as Captain Canada

2011-05-03T13:38:00.000-07:00

At the very minimum the Liberals needed to challenge Harper's attempt to cast himself as captain Canada. This should have been a relatively easy task. Harper once wrote a paper called "Separation, Alberta-style: It is time to seek a new relationship with Canada", said that whether Quebec separates is of "secondary" importance to him and was serial Canada basher. To wit:

1)"Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status"

2)"Any country with Canada’s insecure smugness and resentment can be dangerous"

3) "Whether Canada ends up as one national government or two national governments or several national governments, or some other kind of arrangement is, quite frankly, secondary in my opinion"

4)"Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it"

5) "After sober reflection, Albertans should decide that it is time to seek a new relationship with Canada."

6) "Having hit a wall, the next logical step is not to bang our heads against it. It is to take the bricks and begin building another home – a stronger and much more autonomous Alberta. It is time to look at Quebec and to learn. What Albertans should take from this example is to become “maitres chez nous."

However, instead of portraying Harper as an Alberta Separatist and continually referring to the above as evidence, they did what they always did, viz., sprayed old quotes around aimlessly hoping something would stick.

Liberals ran a Terrible Campaign

2011-05-03T01:10:00.008-07:00

Soon after Quebec went crazy for Jack Layton, the Liberals fell apart. Suburban Liberal voters in the 905 moved to the Conservatives to block the NDP's rise and urban Liberal voters in 416 moved to the NDP. The Liberal party in Ontario was ripped in two. To make matters worse more and more Liberal voters on the Island of Montreal moved to the NDP as Liberal numbers in Ontario dropped.

It is hard to imagine the Liberals ever recovering from such destruction. The Liberal party has suffered major defeats before. However, 1958 and 1984 came after long periods of the Liberals being in power and never before has Liberal support been at less than 5% or below in a 3rd of the seats. West of Ontario the Liberals are no stronger than the Green party in the vast majority of the ridings. They are bit party. The situation is much the same in most of Quebec. Only in Maritimes and Ontario do the Liberals have anything to build upon. That said, what is true of the rest of Canada looks like it will soon be true for large parts of Ontario.

If the Liberals decide to solider on, they need to be frank with themselves. The Liberals and pundits often said that the Liberals ran a good campaign. This is laughable. They ran a terrible campaign. For starters there was no evidence whatsoever that the causa belli the Liberals gave for bringing down the government, viz., Harper's contempt for democracy, would be bought by the public. The public is hopelessly ignorant of parliamentary minutia and always will be. Try to explain to them the ins and outs of the In and Out scandal or Karios and their eyes will glaze over. Such issues are of interest to only a tiny fraction of the public. Still Ignatieff raised the issue to the campaign's dying days. In this sense, Ignatieff was worse than Dion. At least Liberals had the good sense to move past the Green Shift in later half of the 2008 campaign. The only hope of getting any payoff from such a strategy was to introduce substantive democratic reforms. However, what the Liberals gave us was gimmicky and fluff. Finally, and to add insult to injury, the NDP used a completely insubstantial talk about voting attendance to turn the issue of respect for democracy against the Liberals.

Equally inexplicable was the Liberals inability to deal with the Conservatives coalition talking point. Apparently two years is not enough time for Harvard professors to come up with a strategy for shutting down such talk. Ignatieff's mealy mouth response to Peter Mansbridge sealed the Liberals fate.

At the very minimum the Liberals needed to challenge Harper's attempt to cast himself as captain Canada. This should have been a relatively easy task. Harper once wrote a paper called "Separation, Alberta-style: It is time to seek a new relationship with Canada", said that whether Quebec separates is of "secondary" importance to him and was serial Canada basher. To wit:

1)"Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status"

2)"Any country with Canada’s insecure smugness and resentment can be dangerous"

3) "Whether Canada ends up as one national government or two national governments or several national governments, or some other kind of arrangement is, quite frankly, secondary in my opinion"

4)"Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it"

5) "After sober reflection, Albertans should decide that it is time to seek a new relationship with Canada."

6) "Having hit a wall, the next logical step is not to bang our heads against it. It is to take the bricks and begin building another home – a stronger and much more autonomous Alberta. It is time to look at Quebec and to learn. What Albertans should take from this example is to become “maitres chez nous."

However, instead of portraying Harper as an Alberta Separatist and continually referring to the above as evidence, they did what they always did, viz., sprayed old quotes around aimlessly hoping something would stick.

At least with health care ad, the Liberals categorized the quotes, but the lack of an over arching narrative and attributing to Harper something he did not say neutralized the effectiveness of such ads. The Liberals needed to drive home the fact that Harper headed up an organization "obsessed" with destroying public health care for three years and was VP for two more. So ill conceived was the Liberal health care messaging that the party decided to have Paul Martin of all people talk up the difference between the Liberals and Conservatives on the issue. People remember Paul Martin for the cuts he made to health care in 1990s and not for what he did in 2004. As with the democracy issue, the NDP took a Liberal point of attack and used it against them. All indications point to the NDP owning the health care issue.

The one thing the Liberals did do well in terms of messaging was to contrast themselves with Conservatives in terms of priorities. However, it is hard to believe that the Liberals had any much credibility with the public. Indeed, while the public may not have been aware the Liberals supported the Conservative tough on crime initiatives that necessitated building "mega prisons" or that the Liberals acknowledged the need for new jets, 10 plus years of Liberal support for corporate tax cuts was easy pickings for Jack Layton.

Finally, I have been saying for 5 years now that the Liberals needed to do two things. One, the needed to neutralize the Conservative's crime advantage by turning the public's attention away from sentencing issues to the legitimacy of various laws (e.g. legalizing marijuana). Two, the Liberals only hope of winning an election was make a break through in Quebec and the only way making a breakthrough in Quebec was to pursue a socially liberal agenda, e.g., euthanasia. Instead, Ignateiff abandoned social issues altogether and trotted out a hopelessly safe platform which afforded the Liberals no hope of a breakout. Ignatieff was going to make it on personality alone.

My predictions: how I did

2011-05-02T22:44:00.002-07:00

Right now I have 258 out of 308. 83.77% right

Ontario 91 out of 106
Quebec 52 out of 75
Man 12 out of 14
Sask 13 out of 14
BC 32 out of 36
NB 10 out of 10
NFLD 5 out of 7
PEI 3 out of 4
NS 10 out of 11
Alberta 28 out of 28
North 2 out of 3

The Liberal Party is Dead

2011-05-02T19:55:00.000-07:00

I wrote this the day the writ was dropped. "With the later looking more likely and Ignatieff looking set to join Dion, John Turner and Paul Martin as the fourth rider of the Liberal apocalypse, North Vancouver Liberal candidate Taleeb Normohamed could fair rather badly indeed."

Alas I was right. Iggy was the fourth rider. The party is dead.

Many said that the Liberals ran a good campaign. I thought that they ran a horrible campaign, but I let such talk blinker my expectations somewhat. Iggy and the Liberal brain trust will be savaged in the months to come and rightly so. All that be said in his favour is that he ran a better campaign than Dion.

Stephen Harper headed an organization dedicated to the Destruction of Political Health Care

2011-05-02T11:47:00.000-07:00

Whether it was Harper who said “It’s past time the feds scrapped the Canada Health Act,” or his boss David Somerville, the position of the National Citizens Coalition is clear. The National Citizens Coalition wants public Health Care scrapped. Harper headed the National Citizens Coalition for three years and was vice president for two more.

Oh yeah even after he left the NCC he made it clear that he wanted the Canada Health Act Scrapped.

Canadian Press "Harper also said co-payments by patients, USER FEES and DELISTING OF SOME MEDICAL SERVICES would help repair the Health System"

Stephen Harper "[The Canada Health Act]rules out private, public-delivery options, It rules out co-payment, pre-payment and all kinds of options that are frankly going to have to be looked at if we're going to deal with the challenges that the system faces.”

Stephen Harper was an Alberta Separatist

2011-05-02T11:35:00.001-07:00

Harper's Separation, Alberta-style: It is time to seek a new relationship with Canada and other gems.

1) "Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status"

2) "Any country with Canada’s insecure smugness and resentment can be dangerous."

3) "We [Alberta] are the only province in Canada keeping pace with the top tier countries in the world. Now we must show that we will not stand for a second-tier country run by a third-world leader with fourth-class values."

4) "It is to take the bricks and begin building another home -- a stronger and much more autonomous Alberta. It is time to look at Quebec and to learn. What Albertans should take from this example is to become "maitres chez nous."

5) "You've got to remember that west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada: people who live in ghettoes and who are not integrated into western Canadian society."

Can not Afford a House: Blame the Conservatives

2011-05-02T11:30:00.000-07:00

The cost of housing gone through the roof since 2006 and the main reason for that is the Conservative government decided pour fuel on an already red hot real estate market. The Conservatives extended the mortgage amortization period from 25 years to 30 years in February 2006, extended it to 35 years in July of 2006 and extended it yet again to 40 years in November 2006 During this period they also reduced the needed down payment on second properties from 20% to 5% and allowed for 0 down on one's primary residence. Ever since the down turn, Jim Flaherty has been scrabbling to undo the damage his past actions have done. Flaherty first reduced amortization period from 40 years to 35 and again mandated a 20% down payment on secondary properties and 5% on primary properties in October 2008 and on March 18th he reduced the maximum amortization period to 30 years. Never once acknowledging that it was he who raised the amortization period to begin with, Jim Flaherty has repeatedly over the course of the last 2 and half years that reducing the amortization and increasing the minimum downplayment was the right thing to do. "In 2008 and again in 2010, our government acted to protect and strengthen the Canadian housing market," The problem is it is too little too late. The best Flaherty and Conservatives can do is prevent further damage. Weather it be Bloomberg, Paul Krugman and, if you read between the lines, Mark Carney many are worried that Canada is headed for a crash that would drive Canada deep into debt. For one thing, since 2006 Canadian mortgage and housing corporations liabilities have gone from 100 billion to 500 hundred billion. If the housing bubble bursts and Canadians start defaulting on their mortgages, the Canadian tax payer will be picking up the tab. The Canadian government guarantees all that debt.

Conservatives Economic Record is Not Great

2011-05-02T11:28:00.000-07:00

1) It was not that Canada performed particularly well; it was that the other G-8 countries were particularly hard it. Compare us against other OCED countries and the picture is not nearly as Rosy. For example, we rank 18th out 30 in terms of unemployment. Umemployment is 25% higher than it was 5 years ago.

2) The Conservatives do not deserve credit for 10% growth in China and more than anything else that is what has kept the Canadian economy strong relative to the other G8 countries. It has kept the price of commodities up.

3) The opposition parties forced the Conservatives into passing The stimulas package. They were able to do that because Michael Igantieff was at 36% in the Spring 2009. Ever since the Conservatives have spent tens of millions of dollars celebrating "Canada's action plan".

4) The Conservatives have shown a similar degree of chutzpah in celebrating a conservative lending culture in Canada that they had begun to undermine prior to the downturn.

5) The cost of housing gone through the roof since 2006 and the main reason for that is the Conservative government decided pour fuel on an already red hot real estate market. The Conservatives extended the mortgage amortization period from 25 years to 30 years in February 2006, extended it to 35 years in July of 2006 and extended it yet again to 40 years in November 2006 During this period they also reduced the needed down payment on second properties from 20% to 5% and allowed for 0 down on one's primary residence. Ever since the down turn, Jim Flaherty has been scrabbling to undo the damage his past actions have done. Flaherty first reduced amortization period from 40 years to 35 and again mandated a 20% down payment on secondary properties and 5% on primary properties in October 2008 and on March 18th he reduced the maximum amortization period to 30 years. Never once acknowledging that it was he who raised the amortization period to begin with, Jim Flaherty has repeatedly over the course of the last 2 and half years that reducing the amortization and increasing the minimum downplayment was the right thing to do. "In 2008 and again in 2010, our government acted to protect and strengthen the Canadian housing market," The problem is it is too little too late. The best Flaherty and Conservatives can do is prevent further damage. Weather it be Bloomberg, Paul Krugman and, if you read between the lines, Mark Carney many are worried that Canada is headed for a crash that would drive Canada deep into debt. For one thing, since 2006 Canadian mortgage and housing corporations liabilities have gone from 100 billion to 500 hundred billion. If the housing bubble bursts and Canadians start defaulting on their mortgages, the Canadian tax payer will be picking up the tab. The Canadian government guarantees all that debt.

6) Stephen Harper inherited a 13 billion surplus and in 4 years turned it into a 56 billion deficit. He also ran a deficit before the down turn.

Stephen Harper's Separation, Alberta-style: It is time to seek a new relationship with Canada

2011-05-02T11:15:00.000-07:00

Stephen Harper's Separation, Alberta-style: It is time to seek a new relationship with Canada is really a must read. It contains some of the following quotes.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/02/09/stephen-harper-and-canada-a-love-story-iv/

1)"Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status"

2)"Any country with Canada’s insecure smugness and resentment can be dangerous"

3) "Whether Canada ends up as one national government or two national governments or several national governments, or some other kind of arrangement is, quite frankly, secondary in my opinion"

4) "You've got to remember that west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada: people who live in ghettoes and who are not integrated into western Canadian society."

5) "I think we're vastly over-invested in universities. Universities should be relatively small"

6)"Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it"

7) "I think there is a dangerous rise in defeatist sentiment in this country. I have said that repeatedly, and I mean it and I believe it."

8) "In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half, I don't feel particularly bad for many of these people"

9) "After sober reflection, Albertans should decide that it is time to seek a new relationship with Canada."

10)"Having hit a wall, the next logical step is not to bang our heads against it. It is to take the bricks and begin building another home – a stronger and much more autonomous Alberta. It is time to look at Quebec and to learn. What Albertans should take from this example is to become “maitres chez nous."

Conservative Minority: a few minute changes

2011-05-02T00:22:00.006-07:00

Conservative pick ups

Kingston and the Islands from the Liberals
Brampton West from the Liberals
Brampton Springdale from the Liberals
Avalon from the Liberals
Madawaska-Restigouche from the Liberals
Vancouver South form the Liberals
Winnipeg South Centre from the Liberals
Eglinton-Lawrence from the Liberals
York Center from the Liberals
Don Valley West from the Liberals
Mississauga South from the Liberals
Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe from the Liberals
Malpeque from the Liberals
Bramalea-Gore-Malton from the Liberals
Ajax-Pickering from the Liberals
Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca from the Liberals
London North Centre from the Liberals

NDP pick ups

Hull Aylmer from Liberals
Brossard-La Prairie from Liberals
Winnipeg North from the Liberals
Saint John's Mount Pearl from the Liberals
Parkdale-High Park from the Liberals
Beaches-East York from the Liberals
Dartmouth-Cole Harbour from the Liberals
LaSalle-Émard from the Liberals
Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine from the Liberals
Newton-North Delta from the Liberals
Davenport from the Liberals
Laval-Les Îles from the Liberals
Papineau from the Liberals
York South-Weston from the Liberals
Honoré-Mercier from the Liberals

Jeanne-Le Ber from the Bloc
Ahuntsic from the Bloc
Compton-Stanstead form the Bloc
Alfred-Pellan from the Bloc
Laval from the Bloc
Brome-Missisquoi from the Bloc
Drummond from the Bloc
Gatineau from the Bloc
Saint-Lambert from the Bloc
Shefford from the Bloc
Louis-Hébert from the Bloc
Vaudreuil-Soulanges from the Bloc
Rivière-des-Milles-Îles from the Bloc
Marc-Aurèle-Fortin from the Bloc
Abitibi-Baie-James-Nunavik-Eeyou from the Bloc
Saint-Maurice-Champlain from the Bloc
Châteauguay-Saint-Constant from the Bloc
Saint-Bruno-Saint-Hubert from the Bloc
Longueuil-Pierre-Boucher from the Bloc
Québec from the Bloc
Argenteuil-Papineau-Mirabel from the Bloc
Gaspésie-Îles-de-la-Madeleine from the Bloc
Saint-Hyacinthe-Bagot from the Bloc
Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie from the Bloc
Hochelaga from the Bloc
Saint-Jean from the Bloc
Rimouski-Neigette-Témiscouata-Les Basques from the Bloc

Vancouver Island North from the Conservatives
Pontiac from the Conservatives
Surrey North from the Conservatives
Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar from the Conservatives
Beauport-Limoilo from the Conservatives
Oshawa from the Conservatives
Charlesbourg-Haute-Saint-Charles from Conservatives
South Shore-St. Margaret's from the Conservatives
Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo from the Conservatives
Jonquière-Alma from the Conservatives

National

Conservatives 152
NDP 88
Liberals 46
Bloc 21
Independent 1

BC

Conservatives 21
Liberals 2
NDP 13

Alberta

Cons 27
NDP 1

Sask

Conservatives 12
Liberals 1
NDP 1

Man

Conservatives 10
NDP 4

Ontario

Conservatives 60
Liberals 25
NDP 21

Quebec

Bloc 21
Liberals 6
Conservatives 7
NDP 40
Independent 1

NB

Conservatives 8
Liberals 1
NDP 1

NS

NDP 4
Liberals 4
Conservtives 3

PEI

Liberals 2
Conservatives 2

NFLD

Liberals 4
NDP 2
Conservatives 1

Yukon

Liberals

NWT

NDP

Nunavut

Conservatives

Corporate Tax Cuts in Canada a Windfall for the US Treasury

2011-05-01T18:12:00.000-07:00

Throughout the election campaign Stephen Harper has claimed the political high ground on the management of the economy. The surprise is that the opposition has pretty much let him get away with this.

During the English language television debate the first question focused on $6-billion tax cuts to corporations. Harper said there were no tax cuts 'right now,' something that was only true for that second.

Corporate taxes were cut from 21 per cent in 2008 to 16.5 per cent now and will be further cut to 15 per cent in 2012.

Jack Layton and Michael Ignatieff more or less abandoned the issue and did not press Harper about the inefficiency of these cuts. However, the week before the debate two credible studies showed that corporations mostly hoard the money they save from the tax cuts and don't reinvest it in the economy or jobs.

Munir Sheikh, former head of Statistics Canada, and former associate deputy minister of finance, has shown that the real winner of Canadian corporate tax cuts is the U.S.

Tax cuts here give corporations bigger profits and because the U.S. corporate tax rate is about twice as high as ours, U.S. corporations in Canada then just pay more American tax on their Canadian profits. This transfer from Canadian to U.S. treasuries amounts to $4-6 billion a year

http://www.theprovince.com/technology/Harper+economic+record/4705705/story.html

Conservative minority

2011-05-01T17:55:00.000-07:00

Conservative pick ups

Kingston and the Islands from the Liberals
Brampton West from the Liberals
Brampton Springdale from the Liberals
Avalon from the Liberals
Madawaska-Restigouche from the Liberals
Vancouver South form the Liberals
Winnipeg South Centre from the Liberals
Eglinton-Lawrence from the Liberals
York Center from the Liberals
Don Valley West from the Liberals
Mississauga South from the Liberals
Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe from the Liberals
Malpeque from the Liberals
Bramalea-Gore-Malton from the Liberals
Mississauga-Streetsville from the Liberals
Ajax-Pickering from the Liberals
Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca from the Liberals
Richmond Hill from the Liberals

NDP pick ups

Hull Aylmer from Liberals
Brossard-La Prairie from Liberals
Winnipeg North from the Liberals
Saint John's Mount Pearl from the Liberals
Parkdale-High Park from the Liberals
Beaches-East York from the Liberals
Dartmouth-Cole Harbour from the Liberals
LaSalle-Émard from the Liberals
Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine from the Liberals
Halifax West from the Liberals
Newton-North Delta from the Liberals
Davenport from the Liberals
Laval-Les Îles from the Liberals
Papineau from the Liberals

Jeanne-Le Ber from the Bloc
Ahuntsic from the Bloc
Compton-Stanstead form the Bloc
Alfred-Pellan from the Bloc
Laval from the Bloc
Brome-Missisquoi from the Bloc
Drummond from the Bloc
Gatineau from the Bloc
Saint-Lambert from the Bloc
Shefford from the Bloc
Louis-Hébert from the Bloc
Vaudreuil-Soulanges from the Bloc
Rivière-des-Milles-Îles from the Bloc
Marc-Aurèle-Fortin from the Bloc
Abitibi-Baie-James-Nunavik-Eeyou from the Bloc
Saint-Maurice-Champlain from the Bloc
Châteauguay-Saint-Constant from the Bloc
Saint-Bruno-Saint-Hubert from the Bloc
Longueuil-Pierre-Boucher from the Bloc
Québec from the Bloc
Argenteuil-Papineau-Mirabel from the Bloc
Gaspésie-Îles-de-la-Madeleine from the Bloc
Saint-Hyacinthe-Bagot from the Bloc
Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie from the Bloc
Hochelaga from the Bloc

Vancouver Island North from the Conservatives
Pontiac from the Conservatives
Surrey North from the Conservatives
Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar from the Conservatives
Beauport-Limoilo from the Conservatives
Oshawa from the Conservatives
Charlesbourg-Haute-Saint-Charles from Conservatives
South Shore-St. Margaret's from the Conservatives
Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo from the Conservatives
Essex from the Conservatives

Green pick ups

Saanich-Gulf Islands from the Conservatives

National

Conservatives 152
NDP 84
Liberals 47
Bloc 23
Greens 1
Independent 1

BC

Conservatives 20
Liberals 2
NDP 13
Greens 1

Alberta

Cons 27
NDP 1

Sask

Conservatives 12
Liberals 1
NDP 1

Man

Conservatives 10
NDP 4

Ontario

Conservatives 60
Liberals 24
NDP 22

Quebec

Bloc 23
Liberals 8
Conservatives 8
NDP 35
Independent 1

NB

Conservatives 8
Liberals 1
NDP 1

NS

NDP 4
Liberals 4
Conservtives 3

PEI

Liberals 2
Conservatives 2

NFLD

Liberals 4
NDP 2
Conservatives 1

Yukon

Liberals

NWT

NDP

Nunavut

Conservatives

Stephen Harper Quotes: Top Ten

2011-04-30T14:41:00.000-07:00

1)"Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status"

2)"Any country with Canada’s insecure smugness and resentment can be dangerous"

3) "Whether Canada ends up as one national government or two national governments or several national governments, or some other kind of arrangement is, quite frankly, secondary in my opinion"

4) "You've got to remember that west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada: people who live in ghettoes and who are not integrated into western Canadian society."

5) "I think we're vastly over-invested in universities. Universities should be relatively small"

6)"Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it"

7) "I think there is a dangerous rise in defeatist sentiment in this country. I have said that repeatedly, and I mean it and I believe it."

8) "In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half, I don't feel particularly bad for many of these people"

9) "After sober reflection, Albertans should decide that it is time to seek a new relationship with Canada."

10)"Having hit a wall, the next logical step is not to bang our heads against it. It is to take the bricks and begin building another home – a stronger and much more autonomous Alberta. It is time to look at Quebec and to learn. What Albertans should take from this example is to become “maitres chez nous."

Stand Up for Canada Stand Up to Stephen Harper

2011-04-29T00:39:00.008-07:00

Rick Mercer:

To get a feel for the Harper campaign you only need a few hours. The differences from one event to the other are minuscule. In English Canada they start each event by singing “O Canada,” and Stephen Harper tells the crowd he’s proud to lead a party that starts every event this way no matter where they are in the country. In Quebec they skip this part and they hide the Canadian flags in the plane. Barring this nationalism of convenience, if you have seen one Harper event you have seen them all. The Harper campaign is far and away the most disciplined, the most professional and the most scripted. Every word is on a teleprompter, it is delivered in exactly the same way, and the Prime Minister does something I have, in a lifetime of watching live performers onstage, never seen before: he actually stops and sips his water in the same spot every time. Nothing is left to chance. Either that or he is a hologram on a loop.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/28/is-stephen-harper-a-hologram/

Given that Stephen Harper begins every event by singing “O Canada,”, you would think that the Liberals would want to drive a wedge between Harper and his audience by pointing to Stephen Harper's serial Canada bashing and the fact that he once wrote a paper called "Separation, Alberta-style: It is time to seek a new relationship with Canada", but you would be wrong.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/02/09/stephen-harper-and-canada-a-love-story-iv/

So many great quotes. Be sure email them to friends and to post them on facebook, the Liberals decided to not bother.

1)"Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status"

2)"Any country with Canada’s insecure smugness and resentment can be dangerous"

3) "We [Alberta] are the only province in Canada keeping pace with the top tier countries in the world. Now we must show that we will not stand for a second-tier country run by a third-world leader with fourth-class values."

4) "Whether Canada ends up as one national government or two national governments or several national governments, or some other kind of arrangement is, quite frankly, secondary in my opinion"

5) On Canada: “I’m starting to wonder what kind of banana republic we’re living in up here.”

6) "I think there is a dangerous rise in defeatist sentiment in this country. I have said that repeatedly, and I mean it and I believe it."

Conservatives Bring in Hundreds of Thousands of Unskilled Guest Workers to drive down Wages

2011-04-29T00:17:00.001-07:00

The number of guest workers allowed in has exploded since the Conservatives came to power and whereas the typical guest worker was once an American transferred to a branch office in Canada, the fastest growing category of guest worker is now the unskilled type with poor language skills. The Conservatives have not done this directly. They have turned over a greater percentage of the immigration file to the provinces and Western provinces in particular have used the program to undercut labour. The Canadian tax payer has paid through the noise to have cheap labour sent in from other countries for the sole purpose of cutting wages of the Canadian tax payer.

"According to Citizenship and Immigration Canada, there were 57,843 temporary foreign workers in Alberta by the end of 2008, a 55 per cent jump from 2007 and more than four times the number residing here five years ago. By contrast, permanent immigration has been relatively stagnant, with fewer than 25,000 immigrants coming to Alberta last year from outside the country, only a few thousand people higher than in 2004.

Alberta is not the only the province to import workers. In raw numbers, Ontario has the highest number at 91,733. B.C. has about the same number as Alberta. Quebec has many fewer at only 26,085."

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/640224

Forget Conservative talk about such provincial programs bringing in much needed skilled workers, this was the kind of positions Alberta was hoping to fill through its guest worker programs: Front desk clerk, short order cook, baker, maid, assembly line worker, server, buser, bellhop, valet, and cafeteria worker, laundry attendant, pet groomer, general labourer, and hair dresser. All that is required of such would be immigrants is that they score 4 or 24 on the language assessment. In other words, they can still be functionally illiterate and still get it in.

It takes a great deal of chutzpah to Kenney to talk about wanting to avoid “the kind of ethnic enclaves or parallel communities that exist in some European countries” and then go about encouraging the very thing that led to the creation of these communities in Europe, viz., importing gobs of unskilled guest labour. Canada is lucky in so far as most Canadians see new immigrants as one of us. The Conservative policy will change this though. If the situation is allowed to continue, an increasing number of Canadians will see new immigrants, and most people are not going to make the distinction between guest worker and permanent resident, as someone brought in by employers to undercut wages.

Do not take my word for it. Take Sheila Fraser's word for it. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/auditor-general-sounds-alarm-on-immigration-policy/article1349837/

The report notes that Ottawa does not impose any minimum standards on workers selected by the provinces, and calls for these programs to be reviewed.

Provincial auditors-general in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island have all warned that the program is failing to track whether workers brought in by a province actually stay there.

The Auditor-General also reviewed the impact of controversial new powers awarded to Canada's immigration minister that were passed as part of the Conservative government's 2008 budget bill.

“We found that the Department [of Citizenship and Immigration] has made a number of key decisions in recent years without properly assessing their costs and benefits, potential risks, and likely impact on programs,” Ms. Fraser said. “Some of these decisions have caused a significant shift in the types of foreign workers being admitted permanently to Canada. There is little evidence that this shift is part of any well-defined strategy to best meet the needs of the Canadian labour market.”

In her first use of these new powers last year, then-immigration minister Diane Finley dropped the list of eligible occupations for the skilled worker program to 38 from 351.

Stephen Harper's less than impressive Economic Record

2011-04-28T17:42:00.001-07:00

Harper Thinks Medical user fees are a great idea and wants some medical services delisted

2011-04-28T00:11:00.003-07:00

Canadian Press. "Harper also said co-payments by patients, user fees and delisting of some Medical services would help repair the Health System"

Research conclusively shows that user fees drive costs up not down. People do go to the doctor less often, but that is the problem. Many small treatable aliments go undiagnosed until they become more serious and much more costly to treat and people with chronic diseases visit the doctor far less than is good for themselves or the health care system.

Of course, there is one thing Canada can do to greatly reduce health care costs and both the NDP and Liberals are least partially receptive to idea, but which Stephen Harper has never had any time for and that is a national pharmacare program.

"For the past 20 years, prescription medications have been the fastest-growing segment of health-care spending: according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), from 1985 to 2007, the share of drugs in the total health expenditure increased from 9.5% to 16.5%; last year the drug bill totalled a whopping $30 billion."

But rather than seek ways to keep costs down, the evidence suggests that government has for years continuously and consciously overpaid. Part of the problem, it seems, is that drug coverage is fragmented — government picks up about 45% of the tab while private insurers and individuals pay the rest — which has acted as a disincentive. Instead of bargaining with pharmaceutical companies for lower prices, says Marc-André Gagnon, an assistant professor at Carleton University's School of Public Policy and Administration, "the whole pricing system is based on the idea that we need to artificially inflate costs to create a more business-friendly environment." (In exchange for higher prices, drug companies pledged to invest at least 10% of Canadians sales on research and development.) But as he argues in a recent paper, this practice has raised prices without prompting significant spinoff investment: Canada now pays up to 40% more for drugs than other industrialized countries. (He estimates that adopting a national pharmacare program would save an estimated $10.7 billion annually."

http://www.canadianbusiness.com/managing/strategy/article.jsp?content=20101025_10022_10022

You would think that a man who spent 3 years heading up an organization dedicated to the destruction of public health care and two more years as VP would know more about health care economics, but I guess we should not expect too much of him given his views about higher education.

Stephen Harper "I think we're vastly over-invested in universities. Universities should be relatively small"

Stepĥen Harper " west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada: people who live in ghettoes and who are not integrated into western Canadian society."

2011-04-27T19:19:00.000-07:00

Stephen Harper courts the ethnic vote

"west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada: people who live in ghettoes and who are not integrated into western Canadian society."

This Election is now all about the Greater Toronto Area

2011-04-27T19:10:00.000-07:00

Brampton West
Brampton Springdale
Eglinton-Lawrence
York Center
Don Valley West
Ajax Pickering
Mississauga South
Richmond Hill
Mississauga-Streetsville
Bramalea-Gore-Malton

Moreover, for the Liberals the very survival of the party depends on them being able to firm up their support in these ridings. If these ridings all go Conservative, there is very good chance the party will no longer exist as a viable political force in Canadian politics. That begs the question. Why are Liberals not attacking the Conservatives like their is no tomorrow -- because really there might not be.

Stephen Harper " "Any country with Canada’s insecure smugness and resentment can be dangerous."

2011-04-27T18:53:00.000-07:00

It is kind of weird having a serial Canada basher as a PM and it is even stranger and troubling having him on the verge of a majority.

1) "Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status"

2) "Any country with Canada’s insecure smugness and resentment can be dangerous."

3) "We [Alberta] are the only province in Canada keeping pace with the top tier countries in the world. Now we must show that we will not stand for a second-tier country run by a third-world leader with fourth-class values."

4) "You've got to remember that west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada: people who live in ghettoes and who are not integrated into western Canadian society."

Stephen Harper was once a Alberta Separstist

2011-04-27T18:48:00.000-07:00

Like Medical User fees and want some Medical Services delisted? Stephen Harper Does

2011-04-27T17:31:00.000-07:00

Canadian Press. "Harper also said co-payments by patients, USER FEES and DELISTING OF SOME MEDICAL SERVICES would help repair the Health System"

Stephen Harper "I think we're vastly over-invested in universities."

2011-04-27T17:27:00.000-07:00

Stephen Harper on the importance of a university education.

"I think we're vastly over-invested in universities. Universities should be relatively small"

Still a Conservative Majority, but NDP on the Move

2011-04-27T17:06:00.000-07:00

Conservative pick ups

Kingston and the Islands from the Liberals
Brampton West from the Liberals
Brampton Springdale from the Liberals
Avalon from the Liberals
Madawaska-Restigouche from the Liberals
Vancouver South form the Liberals
Yukon from the Liberals
Winnipeg South Centre from the Liberals
Eglinton-Lawrence from the Liberals
York Center from the Liberals
Don Valley West from the Liberals
Ajax Pickering from the Liberals
Mississauga South from the Liberals
Richmond Hill from the Liberals
Guelph from the Liberals
London North Center from the Liberals
Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe from the Liberals
Malpeque from the Liberals
Mississauga-Streetsville from Liberals
Bramalea-Gore-Malton from Liberals

NDP pick ups

Hull Aylmer from Liberals
Brossard-La Prairie from Liberals
Winnipeg North from the Liberals
Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca from the Liberals
Saint John's Mount Pearl from the Liberals
Parkdale-High Park from the Liberals
Beaches-East York from the Liberals
Dartmouth-Cole Harbour from the Liberals
LaSalle-Émard from the Liberals
Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine from the Liberals
Halifax West from the Liberals

Jeanne-Le Ber from the Bloc
Ahuntsic from the Bloc
Compton-Stanstead form the Bloc
Alfred-Pellan from the Bloc
Laval from the Bloc
Brome-Missisquoi from the Bloc
Drummond from the Bloc
Gatineau from the Bloc
Saint-Lambert from the Bloc
Shefford from the Bloc
Louis-Hébert from Bloc
Vaudreuil-Soulanges from Bloc
Rivière-des-Milles-Îles from Bloc
Marc-Aurèle-Fortin from Bloc
Abitibi-Baie-James-Nunavik-Eeyou from Bloc
Saint-Maurice-Champlain from Bloc
Châteauguay-Saint-Constant from Bloc

Portneuf-Jacques-Cartier from Independent

Vancouver Island North from the Conservatives
Pontiac from the Conservatives
Surrey North from the Conservatives
Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar from the Conservatives
Beauport-Limoilo from the Conservatives
Oshawa from the Conservatives
Jonquière-Alma from the Conservatives
Charlesbourg-Haute-Saint-Charles from Conservatives
South Shore-St. Margaret's from the Conservatives

Liberal pick ups

Haute-Gaspésie-La Mitis-Matane-Matapédia

Green pick ups

Saanich-Gulf Islands from the Conservatives

National

Conservatives 156
NDP 74
Liberals 47
Bloc 30
Greens 1

BC

Conservatives 20
Liberals 3
NDP 12
Greens 1

Alberta

Cons 27
NDP 1

Sask

Conservatives 12
Liberals 1
NDP 1

Man

Conservatives 10
NDP 4

Ontario

Conservatives 64
Liberals 22
NDP 20

Quebec

Bloc 30
Liberals 11
Conservatives 7
NDP 27

NB

Conservatives 8
Liberals 1
NDP 1

NS

NDP 5
Conservtives 3
Liberals 3

PEI

Liberals 2
Conservatives 2

NFLD

Liberals 4
NDP 2
Conservatives 1

Yukon

Conservatives

NWT

NDP

Nunavut

Conservatives

Liberals need to Focus on the Conservatives

2011-04-27T14:11:00.000-07:00

The Liberals ability to attack the NDP is basically nil. Any attack on Jack Layton fuels the NDP is on the march narrative and that the Liberals are bleeding left and right. The Liberals need to focus their guns on the Conservatives. They stand a far better chance of being successful and the vast majority of their losses will come at hand the hands of the Conservatives. The NDP are nowhere in the 905. Most important of all the Liberals need to paint the Conservatives not themselves as having lost the most support.

The Liberals need to keep up their attacks on the health front. There is no doubt this has hurt the Conservatives. Second the Liberals need to paint Stephen Harper as once having been an Alberta separatist. This could be accomplished by repeatedly referring to Harper's Separation, Alberta-style: It is time to seek a new relationship with Canada and emphasizing the following quotes.

1) "Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status"

2) "Any country with Canada’s insecure smugness and resentment can be dangerous."

3) "We [Alberta] are the only province in Canada keeping pace with the top tier countries in the world. Now we must show that we will not stand for a second-tier country run by a third-world leader with fourth-class values."

4) "It is to take the bricks and begin building another home -- a stronger and much more autonomous Alberta. It is time to look at Quebec and to learn. What Albertans should take from this example is to become "maitres chez nous."

5) "You've got to remember that west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada: people who live in ghettoes and who are not integrated into western Canadian society."

Angus Reid has the Liberals third in Ontario!

2011-04-27T00:08:00.003-07:00

It is going to be near impossible to predict seat by seat switches at this rate. I will have a go on the weekend, but doubt my batting average will be very good. Last election was very easy to predict. I got 94% of seats right. This time I would be happy with 75%.

http://www.angus-reid.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/2011.04.27_Politics_CAN.pdf

Changing topics, I would be remiss if I did not say Canucks win!

Update

False Alarm. SFU election polls had the Liberals at 27% and NDP at 30. However, if you go to Angus Reid site you see that the reverse is true. My bad and their bad. http://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/polls-regional.html#ON

Liberals need to Paint Stephen Harper as having been an Alberta Separatist

2011-04-26T00:48:00.010-07:00

The really good Harper quotes fall into two categories; the ones on Health Care and the ones bashing Canada. The Liberals have started to use the first of these, but they badly need fit the later into some kind of narrative.

I would paint him as once having been an Alberta separatist. This could be accomplished by repeatly refering to Harper's Separation, Alberta-style: It is time to seek a new relationship with Canada and emphasizing the following quotes.

1) "Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status"

2) "Any country with Canada’s insecure smugness and resentment can be dangerous."

3) "We [Alberta] are the only province in Canada keeping pace with the top tier countries in the world. Now we must show that we will not stand for a second-tier country run by a third-world leader with fourth-class values."

4) "It is to take the bricks and begin building another home -- a stronger and much more autonomous Alberta. It is time to look at Quebec and to learn. What Albertans should take from this example is to become "maitres chez nous."

5) "You've got to remember that west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada: people who live in ghettoes and who are not integrated into western Canadian society."

New Harper Quotes

2011-04-26T00:13:00.007-07:00

1) Or his lament, also in 2002, that the Canada Health Act “rules out private, public-delivery options, It rules out co-payment, pre-payment and all kinds of options that are frankly going to have to be looked at if we're going to deal with the challenges that the system faces.”

2) “I'm not ashamed to say that, in caucus, I have more pro-life MPs supporting me than supporting Stockwell Day.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/tories-collected-harper-quotes-that-could-come-back-to-haunt-him/article1998176/print/

3)on an Ipsos poll showing only 15 per cent of Canadians thought Canada should contribute troops to a unilateral attack on Iraq:
"I don't give a damn about the polls."

4) "I think we're vastly over-invested in universities. Universities should be relatively small and provide excellent education and research in a number of specialized areas. I think the vast majority of young people should be going through non-university, post-secondary training."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/inside-politics-blog/2011/04/the-harper-quotes-dossier-a-sample.html

5) Febuary 24 2002 Canadian Press article was also meaty. "Harper also said co-payments by patients, USER FEES and DELISTING OF SOME MEDICAL SERVICES would help repair the Health System"