Mark Carney Sounds Good to Me

Chantal Hebert writes that "Liberal insiders" are looking at Mark Carney to replace Justin Trudeau.

Carney is due to finish his current gig as governor of the Bank of England at the end of this year. There has long been speculation that he could one day land in the Canadian political arena and that if he did, he would cast his lot with the Liberals.

As the party’s fortunes have declined in the pre-election polls, that speculation has turned into active interest — if not on Carney’s part, at least on that of some of his many fans inside the party. 

On a recent conference call, a group of them discussed how Trudeau’s diminished prospects could result in an early opportunity for Carney to succeed him. 

According to one participant, the group is working on the assumption that Trudeau will be hard-pressed to win more than 140 seats in October.

After a string of duds, including the current leader, Carney sounds like the breath of fresh air the Liberal Party so desperately needs.

Why do I like Carney? Where to start? The governor of the Bank of England knows there's no future in bitumen. Like his predecessor, he's been warning everyone who'll listen that the world economy is resting on a giant IED, also known as the Carbon Bubble. That's a reality no Liberal leader has been able to accept.

Carney knows that climate change is an economy killer, something the current Liberal regime doesn't want to think about.  In a 2018 address, Carney showed that he understands the hurdles to clean energy  and the risks if we botch the effort.

Carney has earned high praise from climate activists. He's been dubbed "the unlikely climate champion."

Carney understands climate change in all its dimensions, especially the fossil energy sector and the risks of "stranded assets" a term for coal and bitumen. He would be a breath of fresh air after the endless litany of carbon stooges in our Parliament and provincial legislatures.

Put simply, Mark Carney has everything that Trudeau lacks and then some. It's time the Liberals ditched Justin, son of Margaret, and got a real leader.

At a moment when Canada, and the world, are at risk from threats unparalleled in the history of human civilization, this country could use somebody clear-headed.

The Bill for Thawing Permafrost? Try 70 Trillion Dollars (USD)

This is one we're not going to be able to duck. We can't kick this can down the road. It's already underway, one of the knock-on effects of existing global warming. It is the thawing of the permafrost across the far north. And it's going to cost us dearly.

Dmitry Yumashev and a team of researchers at Lancaster University have studied the effects of melting ice sheets in the Arctic and concluded that an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide and methane from melting permafrost, coupled with added absorption of heat from the sun due to a lack of sea ice reflecting sunlight away from the surface of the Earth, will lead to an increase in the cost of global warming by a staggering $70 trillion. That is ten times the amount of economic benefit that might be derived by easier access to mineral resources in the Arctic and lower shipping costs across the top of the world.

The study, entitled “Climate policy implications of nonlinear decline of Arctic land permafrost and other cryosphere elements,” was published on April 23 in the journal Nature Communications.

...“It’s disheartening that we have this in front of us,” says Yumashev. “Even at 1.5 C to 2 C, there are impacts and costs due to thawing permafrost. But they are considerably lower for these scenarios compared to business as usual. We have the technology and policy instruments to limit the warming but we are not moving fast enough.” That lack of urgency is precisely what the Extinction Rebellion protesters, Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders are talking about.

...The studies continue to pile up, but most countries are still pursuing a business as usual path, risking the very existence of the human race and every living thing on Earth to preserve the hegemony of fossil fuel companies. If there is any record of humanity’s all too brief time on Earth left after we die off, perhaps whatever species comes to inhabit the Earth in a few million years from now will shrug and look to William Shakespeare to explain the insanity that lead to our demise. “Lord, what fools these mortals be,” wrote the bard.

Coincidentally, Captain Pipeline was discussing climate change today and yesterday. One was on Twitter where the prime minister observed, quite righteously, that, without a healthy environment, there would not be a healthy environment. I think he stole that line from David Suzuki who later called JT a 'twerp.'  Then there was this epiphany from yesterday.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned that cities across Canada will experience more frequent flooding because of climate change and governments need to adapt to this new reality. 

"We're going to see more and more of these extreme weather events more regularly," he said during a visit to an evacuation centre in the city of Gatineau. 

"It means we have to think about adaptation, mitigation and how we are going to move forward together."

What he has to think about is how we are going to cut our greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030. Everything else is bullshit.

We know that little Canada with just 0.5 per cent of the world's population is in the top 10 nations for total greenhouse gas emissions and in the top three for per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Top ten, top three. Despite that we've got a Liberal prime minister and his would-be Conservative successor both hellbent on ramming through a mega-pipeline to flood world markets with high-cost, high-carbon, low-value bitumen.

He's dead wrong when he preaches we must think about adaptation and mitigation when we need to be thinking about how a succession of political leaders, Libs and Tories, have betrayed us on climate change and the cost future generations will have to pay for their cowardice and neglect.

A Call for Scientists to Rally Behind the Youth Climate Strike

Scientific American magazine is urging scientists everywhere to come out in support of the youth climate strike.

We, the March for Science, an international community of scientists, science advocates, teachers, and parents, emphatically support the Global Youth Climate Strike.

We commit to doing whatever we can to lift up the voices of young people and encourage their leadership. Their generation will be greatly impacted by the effects of climate change. It is critical that their voices are heard.

They are striking because our world leaders have yet to acknowledge, prioritize, or properly address the climate crisis. They are striking because marginalized communities across the world—especially communities of color, disabled communities, and low-income communities— are already disproportionately impacted by climate change. They are striking because their futures are at stake.

Their actions are backed by the best available science which shows that we need to rapidly decarbonize our economy and deeply transform society in order to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. They are treating the issue of climate change with the urgency that science and justice demand.

We ourselves, as a movement of science advocates, have taken to the streets in our millions over the last two years to fight for our communities and our planet. We offer everyone else who does the same our unreserved support and solidarity.

To adults—particularly political leaders—who are criticizing students for skipping school, please stand down. Our generations have failed to act. It is time to get behind the courageous actions of our young people.

Our youth have done their homework on climate change—it’s about time that our leaders behave like they have done theirs.

I'm pretty sure that Tory supporters will dismiss this out of hand as nonsense. I do, however, hope it makes some of you Liberals, especially the Justin Trudeau fan club, wince. The government, your government, is on the wrong side of this existential threat. By supporting the Liberal government, you've also chosen to put yourself on the wrong side of this. Don't compound that by being hypocritical enough to praise these kids at the same time. You're not on their side.

Liberal Democracy Cannot Survive Undefended.

Since the advent of the neoliberal era, the reign of Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney, liberal democracy has been left to its own devices. The warning sign, the red flag, was the extinction of any meaningful vestige of progressivism from the body politic.

The last defender of liberal democracy we knew in Canada was Pierre Trudeau who bequeathed to us the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that, coupled with a courageous Supreme Court, thwarted the worst undemocratic instincts of subsequent prime ministers notably Stephen Harper and even Justin Trudeau.

The decline of neoliberalism was marked by the evolution of a corporate media cartel, a wholesale shift in the balance between labour and capital, and the development of the corporate state whose leaders preferred to operate in the boardrooms rather than the livingrooms of the nation.

Harper may have dragged Canada's political centre far to the right but both the Liberals and the New Democrats followed complacently in his wake. The Liberals became 'conservative-lite' while the New Dems positioned themselves as 'latter-day liberals.' What Harper had wrought they chose not to undo. In the process the Liberal Party of Ignatieff and Justin Trudeau became untethered from the party of Laurier, St. Laurent, Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. The New Democrats of Layton and Mulcair strayed from the party of Douglas, Lewis and Broadbent. In so doing all three parties pulled the rug out from under liberal democracy.

Across the political spectrum, liberal democracy flourishes in a smallish band located at the centre, neither hard right nor hard left. Picture in your mind a circle. At the very top you have totalitarianism. At the very bottom you have liberal democracy. As you move from the bottom, whether to the right or left, liberal democracy is gradually displaced by authoritarianism of the sort we're seeing in today's emerging nationalist/populist movements. Today we're heading mainly to the right, a path that sees democracy steadily displaced by plutocracy and then oligarchy. Beyond that, well, we'll just have to wait and see.

Andrew Sullivan recently wrote of this movement in Europe and the United States. The article was titled, "Is the World Done with Liberal Democracy?" He makes the case that it is.

At the risk of inviting howls of scorn and derision, I mention today's column in The Globe by John Ibbitson, "Ontario has lost its political centre."

The political centre is collapsing in Ontario, polarizing between social democrats and populist conservatives. We thought it couldn’t happen here. It’s happening here. And it poses a grave threat to the Liberal Party, both provincially and federally.

No party has plans to balance the provincial budget, align new spending with available resources, seek practical, incremental change. For both parties, the centre is the enemy. 

Such a polarization between well-to-the-left and populist right challenges the electoral base of the federal Liberals. While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may be able to work with an NDP government, the PC’s plans to eliminate the carbon tax flies in the face of a core federal commitment to fight climate change.

Maybe a year and a half of Doug Ford would make Mr. Trudeau look good to Ontario voters. Or maybe things would become so toxic that polarization infects federal politics as well. 

Is the social democratic/populist conservative schism in Ontario permanent? That’s impossible to say. Had the PCs chosen a more conventional conservative as leader, had Ms. Wynne stepped aside when there was still a chance for the Liberals to renew the party, we might not be talking about schisms.

It seems odd to read Ibbitson lamenting developments that he and his kind have done so much to nurture and empower.

Here’s the big question: Would a Ford government enable the haters, even though he espouses no such hatred himself? Would the alt-right interpret a Premier Ford as carte blanche to demand an end to immigration, to target visible minorities, to proclaim that Ontario is Christian and white?

We’ll find out the answer if Mr. Ford wins. Ms. Horwath is determined to stop him. All we know for sure is that, at least in Ontario, at least for now, the centre no longer holds.

Ibbitson is beginning to sound much like the NYT's David Brooks' day-late laments about Donald Trump soiling of the Republican Party. A pox on them both.

Yet more disturbing is the notion of Justin Trudeau as the essential gatekeeper of liberal democracy in Canada. There's a huge difference between setting out to destroy liberal democracy and doing anything meaningful to defend it. Trudeau is no Stephen Harper but that doesn't mean that liberal democracy is safe in his hands.

My father planted in his young son's mind the reality that we didn't have a right or freedom that hadn't been paid for, often more than once, in blood. Over the years I came to understand that every right and freedom we hold has a greater value to those who might deprive us of it than we ever perceive it to be worth. Here we are.

They've Already Shown You Their True Colours. And You'll Vote for Them, Why?

My party has only one voice in Parliament but it's a voice against which all the rest are to be measured and, when you do that, you get to see them clearly for what they are, their true colours.

In today's Toronto Star, columnist Tom Walkom calls out Mulcair and Trudeau for what they are - spineless opportunists for whom serving themselves will always trump serving Canada.


So far, the only opposition MP with enough guts to critique the content of the Conservative government’s new anti-terror bill is Green Party Leader Elizabeth May.

She said Monday in the Commons that it would turn CSIS into a “secret police force.”

She also asked if the bill’s remarkably broad definition of crimes against the security of Canada included anti-pipeline protests (and got no answer).

Now that experts have had a chance to plow through the omnibus bill, other critics are surfacing.

In a statement released Monday, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association asked the most trenchant question: Why are these extraordinary new security powers needed?

“There are still no answers as to why our existing laws and powers didn’t work — or if they didn’t work,” CCLA executive director Sukanya Pillay wrote.

She also pointed out that criminalizing something as vague as the advocacy of terrorism could have a chilling effect on academics and journalists.

The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association has gone even further, saying that Bill C-51 would create “an unprecedented expansion of powers that will harm innocent Canadians and not increase public safety.”

In a release, it said it is alarmed by proposals that would expand the amount of time a terror suspect can be jailed without charge and that would allow judges to impose stringent conditions — including house arrest — on people who have not been convicted of any crime.

Stripping a person’s liberty where no crime is committed or suspected runs counter to our “most basic principles of fundamental justice,” the B.C. association wrote.

But none of this stopped the Liberals or New Democrats from supporting Harper's odious bill.  Walkom cuts to the chase.

Why are Canada’s usually obstreperous opposition parties so meek? Alas, they are afraid — afraid that if they criticize the substance of Bill C-51, Harper will paint them as soft on terror.

Yes, they're afraid.  Mulcair and Trudeau had to choose whether to stand up for Canada and oppose this egregious assault on our democratic freedom or buckle to Harper's will out of fear.  If they're this spineless in opposition you can be certain they'll be worms if they ever get power.

It was precisely this political malignancy that The Guardian's George Monbiot wrote of just a few days ago.


We are told at every election to hold our noses, forget the deficiencies and betrayals and vote Labour yet again, for fear of something worse. And there will, of course, always be something worse. So at what point should we vote for what we want rather than keep choosing between two versions of market fundamentalism? Sometime this century? Or in the next?

Perhaps there was a time when this counsel of despair made sense. No longer. The lamps are coming on all over Europe. As in South America, political shifts that seemed impossible a few years earlier are now shaking the continent. We knew that another world was possible. Now, it seems, another world is here: the sudden death of the neoliberal consensus. Any party that claims to belong to the left but does not grasp this is finished.

Trudeau and Mulcair just wiped their boots on you.  This country has no need of their kind or their parties.

h/t Lorne, Politics and its Discontents

Restoring the Vox Populi

Some thoughts for this, Labour Day.

The voice of the people.  Oh, how long has it been since that really meant anything?  In Canada and many other advanced countries, polls show that people are being governed without much if any regard to their views, their concerns.

It's sort of like standing, waiting at the civic bus stop for a bus that just keeps passing you by.

Canadians want action on climate change.  Are they going to get it?  No. Canadians want action on inequality.  Are they going to get it?  Don't be ridiculous.

The American people utterly loathe their federal government, their Congress. Does it matter?  Hell no!  The vox populi has been discounted to the point of near total irrelevance.

Governments don't do what we want them to do.  Governments don't deal with things we want dealt with, the things that cause us worry and insecurity.

There used to be a notion that at the heart of democracy lay the consent of the people to be governed.  To the extent that ever meant something it has been superceded by the ascent of neoliberalism and the corporatist state.

You get to vote and that's about all you get.  There is no longer much of a role for the vox populi.  There's still a vox, a voice alright and it is reaching the ear of the political or ruling classes only it's not your voice.  It's the voice of energy and commerce and high finance that has the ear of those you supposedly elect to office.

Think I'm kidding?  Go back four years to the reign of Ignatieff.  Do you remember when he summoned a "thinkers' conference" to map out a new strategy for a Liberal Canada?  The speakers list spoke volumes for it was massively dominated with CEOs and "management consultants."  Ignatieff wasn't there to formulate policies that would resonate with the voting public, solutions to their needs and concerns.  His focus was Bay Street, not Main Street.  As the Ignatieff Liberals turned their backs on ordinary Canadians, so did ordinary Canadians turn their backs in the next election sending the Liberals from Sussex Drive to Stornoway to Motel 6 out on the Gloucester highway.

The simple fact is that you can't consent to be governed without a reasonable understanding of how you're to be governed.  Without that understanding, there's no informed consent to be governed. You're simply consenting to be ruled.  And even that hollow consent is being coerced out of you through the application of misinformation, outright deceit and fear-mongering.

Your vote used to mean something back when parties offered up a real spectrum of vision and policy.  You knew what made one party distinct from the others and they worked to champion policies that might suit the voting public.

Today our body politic lies on the life support of neoliberalism.  Iron lungs all around.  Even the NDP has embraced neoliberalism.  There's a term for what's happening.  It's called "depoliticization."  Politics is being shut down, its place taken over by grey suits stuffed with wet cardboard.  Administrators, not leaders. Mere technocrats, doing sums.  The public, quite conveniently for the corporate state, is disengaging, tuning out. Why bother if no one will speak to your concerns?  Why bother if no one hears your voice?  Even before you begin to tune out you're already out of the loop.

How then do we reverse this?  How do we get their ear?  How are we to get our voices heard by those we elect, those who are duty bound to serve us?  How do we make them responsive to our concerns, our needs?

How indeed?  I don't know.  I do know that we need to get these people we elect to listen to us and that means they need to stop listening like attentive lap dogs to those who do not elect them.  We need to drum into their heads the prescient words spoken by Teddy Roosevelt more than a century ago.  These words:

...our government, national and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests.  Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit.  We must drive the special interests out of politics.

...every special interest is entitled to justice but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office.  The Constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make that promise good, but it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation.

...The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being.

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. 

We no longer "effectively control the mighty commercial forces that we have called into being."  Those mighty commercial forces too often have the ear of those we elect to represent us.

Wresting political control away from these commercial forces may be the key to reclaiming our democratic freedoms.  The thing is I just cannot see that happening under either Trudeau or Mulcair or any other Liberal or New Democrat.  Like others I'm coming to accept that if we cannot rehabilitate the Liberal and New Democratic parties, we need to stop wasting our efforts and put them into building a new party, a genuinely political party, one that speaks for Canadians and speaks to their concerns.  It's pointless to seek solutions in neoliberalism.

While We're Focused on Chemical Warfare

It's interesting how selective the United States can be about weapons of mass destruction given that the U.S. continues to be responsible for widespread and ongoing death and destruction from its own chemical and nuclear weapons.

The gas that Obama-Kerry are blaming on Assad appears to have killed somewhere between a few hundred and a thousand or more Syrians.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the locals are left to live with the radiation hazard created by American depleted uranium (DU) shells and bullets.  D.U. is known to cause cancers, birth defects and stillbirths and D.U. contamination is believed to persist for decades, if not generations.  D.U. dust particles can be inhaled and then embed in the lungs.

And American chemical weapons are still killing in Vietnam and could be for centuries to come.   Agent Orange, generously air delivered as a defoliant, is estimated to remain lethally effective for up to six centuries.  It gets in the soil and in the ground water.  It too causes cancers, birth defects and stillbirths.  Hang in there, Vietnam, only 500 years to go.

Where was our righteous indignation and call to arms when Israel blasted Gazans with white phosphorus rounds and bombs?  The Liberal leader of the day absolved Israel for that and one of his former aides now demands that Syria be attacked.

How do we explain our indifference to the cluster bomblets that litter southern Lebanon, taking lives almost daily, that were fired into that area by Israel in the hours prior to ceasefire?

This is not an apology for Assad.  He's a brutal, murderous shit in a region full of brutal, murderous shits, among them a number we consider friends.  This is about us and it's about our hypocrisy that undermines any credibility we have in denouncing Assad and calling for strikes against Syria.

When do the Vietnamese, the Iraqis or the Afghans get to retaliate against the Americans for the use of WMDs against them in their homelands?

Not Green, For Now

I had to resign my membership in the Green Party to do it, but now I'm a Liberal Supporter.   I didn't join the Liberal Party and I won't unless something radical happens but I registered as a Liberal Supporter in order to vote for Joyce Murray as party leader.

Murray is the only candidate who is remotely progressive.  She's the only one who isn't a bitumen booster.  She's the only candidate who has garnered the support of two people I truly respect - Lloyd Axworthy and David Suzuki.  She's a fellow British Columbian.

That said, I expect Trudeau will win and carry on the Liberals' moribund politics that saw the party go from Sussex Drive to Stornoway to Motel 6 out on the Gloucester Highway.   That's not to say that he won't be able to take down an already weakened Harper in 2015.  He might, but that wouldn't hold much promise for Canada.

Of the rest, the Space Cadet is probably my second choice with the Pipeline Queen, Hall Findlay, dead last.  The Sad Sacks in between?  Nah, I don't think so.

So, I'll keep my fingers crossed for Joyce Murray.   Stranger things have happened.

A Sensible Liberal When the Party Most Needs One

The Liberals are lucky.   They have a leadership candidate that could actually help them and the country.    No, it's not Trudeau and it's not Hall-Findlay or Garneau.  It's Joyce Murray of Vancouver.

Murray, unlike her rivals, wants to restore progressivism to the Liberal Party, something that has been consigned to obscurity since Ignatieff opened shop.   Unfortunately the wanna-be Latter Day Ignatieffs that fill the leadership ranks remain decidedly centre-right.

Here's a Murray idea that deserves consideration.   The Libs could join forces with those of us from the Green Party.   Our leader, Elizabeth May, is for it.

Had Liberals and Greens united behind a single candidate in last November's byelection in Calgary Centre, Murray says they could have prevented Tory Joan Crockatt from eking out a narrow victory with just under 37 per cent of the vote.

The Green Party actually has a robust policy platform that Liberals and uncommitted voters alike could embrace.   They're actually the very sorts of things you might have heard from Liberals of twenty or thirty years ago.  If the Libs insist on hitching their wagon to sub-prime fossil fuels and what even Allison Redford calls the "bitumen bubble" they're heading down a dead end road.  It's time for them to wake up, do themselves and the country a favour, and go Green.
 

You Can't Open the Door If You Won't Pick Up the Key

The keys to a Liberal comeback are at their feet.  What remains doubtful is that they'll ever pick them up.

Canada is facing a few enormous challenges.   Let's call them, in the political context, "issues."

Political parties either take up issues or treat them as non-issues.  It's a matter of priority and political will and, sometimes, it's a matter of political courage and vision.

There are several "red flag" issues that are ready-made for a Liberal champion and could put the party back on the path to power if only it stops treating them as non-issues.   Among them are dismantling Canada's corporatist media cartel; the multi-dimensional environmental challenge; and the growing threat posed by inequality.  1, 2, 3.

As written so often in the past, the corporatist media cartel is a direct threat to Canadian democracy.   Instead of having access to the broadest range of opinion, the cornerstone of an informed electorate, we have allowed the evolution of a Wal-Mart media.  The cartel, as these blocs do, has amassed unhealthy political influence and, in the process, transformed Canada's media from watchdog of government to government's lap dog.   That must be broken up.  We need a government that will dismantle the cartel and reverse concentration of ownership and media cross-ownership.

On the environmental issue, we need a Canadian government that will put the interests and well-being of the Canadian people, including the very young and future generations, first.   That means placing the public interest well ahead of corporate interests and the interests of foreign countries.   We have tried the "balancing" approach for decades and that inevitably results in indifference to the public interest.   Government is supposed to serve all the people, not just the few people who inhabit corporate boardrooms.

On the inequality issue, we need a Canadian government with the courage to act independently of the United States in rehabilitating Canada's middle class.   While inequality is not as bad in Canada as in America, if we continue to accept lockstep measures to match the US, it will worsen and turn as corrosive as it has south of the border.

We need to recognize that only a limited portion of inequality results from natural market forces.   We need to accept that the greatest part is the result of government policy.   Our governments legislate inequality in a variety of ways.  See Stiglitz, "The Price of Inequality."

This century is already turning difficult and it's bound to become more challenging, more dangerous.    For Canada to meet these challenges, we need our own New Deal to restore the real "beating heart" of our economy and our society, our middle class.   Bitumen won't solve our problems.   The only thing that can work is to rebuild the broadest, most robust and cohesive middle class possible... even if the Americans won't.

There was another Trudeau, this was many years ago.   He  captivated a nation with his vision of a "just society" and he connected us to our country in a way we had not previously experienced.   What I wouldn't give to have that guy back.

I Will Never Vote Liberal Again, Until...

I vow to never vote for a Liberal candidate again until the party puts forward meaningful policies to reverse the growing inequality in Canada and to deal with global warming, in all its aspects.

Inequality - of wealth, of income, of opportunity - is a malignancy that metastasizes the longer it goes untreated.  It undermines democracy and destroys the middle class.   Any party that ignores that reality and does not give it a top priority for real action tacitly supports the wasting of our democracy, our economy and our society.

As Joe Stiglitz writes, when the major parties dodge the issue of inequality, democracy becomes "one dollar, one vote" instead of "one citizen, one vote."   The Liberal Party has been shamefully reluctant to champion this cause.

Of equal priority must be global warming - anthropogenic climate change.   We now know that just 2% of Canadians, just one in fifty, continue to deny the reality of man-made climate change.   If Canadians so overwhelmingly "get" climate change they also get the role that CO2 emissions play in endangering our planet.  They get the link between our emissions and the increasing threat that results.   At this point, what they need is leadership from a party with genuine policies on adaptation and remediation.

We need a party that is prepared to decarbonize our economy, our society; a party that will decouple Canada from its dependence on fossil fuel energy.   Canadian municipalities are engaging the realities of what confronts their communities.   Some of the provinces are stirring to life on climate change.   Yet the Liberal Party lags far behind when it has no excuse for not leading.

If the Liberal Party cannot embrace these as top priorities, they're not fit to govern and they certainly don't deserve my vote - or yours.    They earned their way from Sussex Drive to Stornoway to Motel 6 and they damned well deserve to stay there until they earn their way back.

Standing In a Policy Desert

I was born into a politically useless family.

When voting day rolled around the only thing certain was that my mother and my father would always vote.  They'd get in the car, drive to the poll and cast their ballots.   They made a point of never discussing who they planned to support.  On the way home, however, it seemed they talked about little else.   Often my mother would break the news saying, "well we canceled each other out - again."  See, politically useless.

My Dad more often than not voted Tory.  Mom tended to vote Liberal.  But neither of them was married to either party and every once in a while something happened where they both changed sides.  One thing this led to was discussion, debate, focused on policy instead of parties.   Their understanding of policies and underlying circumstances might be rudimentary, perhaps even incomplete, but they tried to make sense of what these policies were and what they meant and whether they were good or awful for themselves, their family or their country.   And it was by being involved in these discussions that their children became politically aware, engaged.

For what is politics absent policy?  Surely it must be as pointless as trying to breath in a vacuum.   Stripped of policy, politics becomes about as relevant as hitting the three-dollar window at the horse track.   Yet, today, I think policy has become something of a spent force and, increasingly, we're left simply voting for the home team.

Paul Martin, bless him, had too many policies and a number of them were brilliant.   Focusing federal health care spending on serious conditions such as cancer and heart disease - terrific.   Responsibility to Protect - great.   The Kelowna Accords - long overdue.  Decriminalizing marijuana - a breakthrough in common sense.   All of those would have truly improved Canada had it not been for that damned, Chretien-era Sponsorship Scandal.

Dion had a policy, the Green Shift.  It was a sound idea and even today it's the one idea that's expected to prevail throughout the developed world.  But Dion was much too politically clumsy to handle his signature policy.   He wasn't the prime minister, merely opposition leader.  That meant he lacked the resources of government without which it was impossible to sell the Green Shift.  He was weak in appearance, slightly arrogant and less than fluent in English.  Before Dion was prepared to unveil his Green Shift policy, Harper pounced pre-emptively.   Harper, not Dion, framed the narrative of the Green Shift and Jack Layton was right there with his own shovel helping Harper dig Dion's grave.

And then along came the second train wreck, Ignatieff.    If there was ever a guy who ought to have been able to sell bold policy, it was the Harvard professor.   Yet he was an utter, contemptible failure.   If he had any success it was limited to stabbing Dion in the back.

The global meltdown of 2008 fell straight into Ignatieff's hands like political manna from heaven and dropped right through his fingers.   Harper was so overwhelmed, so out of control, he prorogued Parliament.   He called "time out."

With Canada facing the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression and Parliament sent home for an extended recess, one would have thought the leader of the opposition would use that opportunity to help the country and his party.   He could have and he should have used it to gather the best and the brightest he could attract to take the measure of the problem and come up with a Liberal stimulus/recovery budget proposal, something that made sense to Canadians.

Ignatieff and his handlers should have known they were looking at an opportunity in which Harper was truly vulnerable, at his worst.  This was a moment demanding vision, something Harper has never had.  It was a moment requiring the government to massively borrow and wisely spend, truly Herculean challenges for someone as ideologically strangled as the Born Again Buffoon.

Let Harper put up an inept budget.   Throw a really well thought out, viable alternative in his face and then bring down the government.   If there was ever something to fight an election on, something in which Harper was vulnerable, that was it.

So what did Ignatieff and his handlers do?  Sweet Fanny Adams, that's what.   He took the opportunity as paid leave and used it to finish a book on his maternal ancestors.  HE DID WHAT?  Yes he did.   And when Parliament returned, Iggy hadn't done his homework.   He had nothing to offer, nothing to hold over Harper's head, nothing for the country or his party.  He was so totally unprepared to bring down the government that he had no choice but to support the godawful Harper budget and then embarrass himself and the Liberal party by boasting he was putting Harper "on probation."

And that was the moment when Harper completed his mission of moving the Liberals from Sussex Drive to Stornoway to Motel 6.  Iggy, having been transformed from a bull into a steer, meandered along whiling away the time with cross-country bus trips and barbeques and a ridiculous "thinkers' conference", setting himself and the party up for Harper to turn the next election into a referendum on this lazy, useless ass of an opposition leader.   All Layton had to do was wait for someone to yell, "next."

It's been a succession of bad and weak policy that has consigned the Liberal party to a roach motel out on the highway.   And they won't be coming back until they've got something to offer Canadians.  And now here's the thing.

Earlier this week, the global consulting giant, KPMG, released a study identifying 10 "megaforces" that will be confronting business over the next twenty years.   The report stresses that these are interconnected - they all have to be effectively dealt with starting with the most powerful megaforce, climate change.   So if business is going to have to deal with these challenges, who can possibly believe Canada and our fellow Canadians won't be confronted with similar megaforces over the next twenty years?   There are huge challenges, some of them threats, looming but you would never know it from the leadership of the Conservatives, Liberals or NDP.  It's all "out of sight, out of mind" to them.

I don't much care who leads the Liberal party.   If they can't even acknowledge the problems that are beginning to impact not only the world but also Canada and if they can't come up with clear policies to respond to these challenges, it doesn't make a damned bit of difference who supposedly leads the party.   Because that person in reality won't be leading the Liberal party.   He or she will merely be babysitting it hoping that everybody else explodes.

Just Say "No"

The Liberals seem to be scraping the barrel trying to build their membership numbers.   There's a sense of desperation to it.  E-mails from the national, provincial and riding offices in a steady stream over the past few weeks inviting, beseeching the wayward son to return to the fold.

Missing from all of these pleas, every one, is any reason why someone who has grudgingly decided to leave should go back.  For old times sake?  Because they're other than Harper conservatives?  Is that it?

Here's the key thing that's keeping me out of the Liberal tent.   They're not fit to govern my country.  I am not going to let Harper's quality of government set the bar for the Liberal Party.   Slightly better than bloody awful isn't enough.

There are a great many serious challenges facing Canadians.   Not so much my generation, but certainly the under-40s and the generations to follow them.   The only path to meeting those challenges - and threats - is a progressive path.   The priorities surely are inequality and climate change.   Inequality of wealth, income and opportunity.  Climate change adaption and remediation.

Inequality and climate change are inseparably linked.   Inequality is by its very nature divisive and corrosive to society.  It is the path to oligarchy and puts the interests of the powerful few above society itself.

Climate change is actually a basket of changes and threats that require adaptation and remediation strategies and solutions.   The most essential tool to meet these challenges is a cohesive society that will pull together and sacrifice together.  Inequality undermines social cohesion and sharply narrows our options.   Hence, inequality and climate change are inseparable.

Canadian political leadership is failing on both these fronts.   The Liberals, like the Tories, have become a  solidly corporatist party.  Even the NDP is in trail.   Look back to Ignatieff's "thinkers' conference."  What thinkers?  The speakers' list was stacked to the gunwales with management consultants and CEOs each opining on the way ahead for their Canada.  Their Canada, not yours and certainly not your grandkids'.

I was struck last week by a remark Noam Chomsky made while addressing Occupy Boston.  He spoke of politics "dissolving" in his country, the distinctions between the Republicans and Democrats steadily narrowing.  Chomsky might as well have been talking about Canada.  The once clear divide between the PCs and the Liberals is pretty well dissolved even as the former PCs have transformed into Harper's far right Conservatives.  Is it any wonder that so many are disengaging from politics all together instead of merely changing parties?  A pox on all their houses.

It's not over for the Liberals.   They have a chance to re-invent themselves as something that cleaves more closely to their historic path.  But that means largely clearing out those who have steered the party so poorly over the past decade or two.  The current iteration of the LPC can't even address the challenges of the day much less propose effective policies to deal with them.  Nothing short of a reformation can again make the Liberal Party fit to govern Canada.   Until then, I'll just say "no."

Here - Leader, Leader Here - Leader, Leader

No More Schoolboys

When you look through the ranks of successful Canadian prime ministers, there's a common thread.

What do these leaders have in common - Martin, Chretien, Campbell, Mulroney, Turner, Trudeau, Diefenbaker, St. Laurent, MacKenzie King, Bennett, Meighen, Borden, Laurier, Thompson, Abbott and Macdonald?

They were all lawyers.   Admittedly a few of them were controversial and a few weren't great but most of them did pretty well for the country.   The telling fact is that all the really great Canadian prime ministers save for Pearson were lawyers.   That's not coincidence.

So my Liberal friends.   When you're casting about for your next leader, forget about the university schoolboys.   You've tried that twice.   Find yourself a really good lawyer, someone who comes to the job trained to fight.   In fact I've got just the one for you - Louise Arbour.  If you can get her aboard, she'll be dandy.

When Leaders Lose Touch with Reality

It's becoming a recurring theme - top political leaders seriously out of touch with reality. They simply lack the courage to go beyond their established comfort zones and that translates into the enormous disaffection of the voting public with their political leadership.

What party able to wield political clout (sorry Greens) has anything remotely approaching an effective policy to combat global warming? Here's a hint: if they support the expansion of the Athabasca Tar Sands, their eco-chants are just so much greenwash. Imagine our own Canada refusing to become a leader in the fight to save mankind, our civilization and our planet from environmental catastrophe. It's positively mind boggling.

Across the pond, Britain's former chief scientist, Sir David King, has attacked politicians and industry experts for having "their heads in the sand" over the reality of declining oil supplies. From The Guardian:

...King said governments, including the UK's, were too eager to believe the optimistic predictions of economists who tell them that "oil will be squeezed out of the ground pretty much forever".

King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, is now director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford.

He said: "That's what governments want to hear and that's what they do hear, and I think the British government as much as many others."

...He said oil demand would overtake production capacity as soon as 2015, which would drive up the price further.

...While transport is seen as the most difficult sector to decarbonise, action needs to be taken immediately to keep people and goods moving while reducing reliance on fossil fuels, he said.

"I can't overemphasise the importance of persuading governments to focus attention on what's going to be a very significant issue as we move into the next decade.

"It is down to government to steer us towards a defossilised economy using the regulatory and financial incentives available.

If you're not convinced Canada's political leadership is out of touch with reality, read Marsden's book, "Stupid to The Last Drop." It's a telling look at Alberta's looming environmental catastrophe at the hands of Big Oil and an indictment of the political leadership, provincial and federal, doing Big Oil's bidding. Once read, you'll be under no illusions about those who proclaim themselves fit to guide our country. Canada, like every other industrialized nation, needs to be working toward decarbonizing our economy and our society even as our political leadership reveal themselves to be devout Fossil Fuellers.

I Know, I Know - Harper's a Shit!

Yeah, yeah, Harper's a shit - got it. Yeah, yeah, Harper's cabinet are all shits - check. Yeah, yeah, the entire Conservative caucus are shits - ditto.

How many times can we rail at Harper's craven ambition? How many times can we 'expose' the hypocricy, manipulation, abuse and mean-spirited partisanship that are the hallmarks of the Tories? How many times can we bemoan their cultural shallowness and pathetically narrow vision?

Enough.

You see, all that bitching is meaningless, unsustaining, absent clear and convincing policy laying out how we would do better. You just can't say "We can do better." Even if that comes from Michael Ignatieff hisself, that's crap and nothing more. If there's one thing the Liberal Party has had in abundance, it's crap from Michael Ignatieff. We've had enough hollow rhetoric, empty threats. No one believes Mikey's dire pronouncements any more because, time and again, they've proven to be crap. He stands up, makes loud noises and then slinks away into a corner as soon as Harper calls his bluff.

There was a time when Steve Harper was actually worried about Michael Ignatieff. That didn't last long - only until Steve got the measure of Mike. Steve, with the extremely fortuitous aid of the Governor-General, managed to see his way through Michael Ignatieff and it's been pretty much clear sailing for the Tory leader ever since.

When Parliament reconvened, Mike's end-of-prorogue gift to Steve was an opposition not simply divided but utterly fractured. Mikey puffed himself up and made loud noises about putting the Harper government "on probation" (how juvenile was that?) but Steve knew that, with the Left and Centre-Left at each other's throats, he'd been given something similar to the old Tory-Reform fiasco only on the other side.

Mike continued to scold Steve even as he continued to prop up Steve's government, allowing Jack to excoriate the Liberal leader until his credibility seeped out of his pores. When Mike decided to stand on the other foot, Jack was there to do the same dance, both of them hopping like puppets at the end of strings being handled by Steve.

What a dark farce.

Here's what Steve knows. He knows that, with today's Liberal and NDP opposition, he's safe. Power is his to lose. The Libs are obsessed with defeating the Conservatives instead of winning the support of the voting public. Instead of speaking to the Canadian people, presenting them policies they can embrace, the IgLibs are yelling at the Canadian people, hounding them to expel the Tories. If the voting public is responding at all, it's to ask "why?"

Why indeed.

If Dion and Ignatieff mark the Liberal Party of the 21st century, it has become a party that is just beginning a long decline.

It's Not Ignatieff's Problem - It's Yours

The problem goes deeper than Michael Ignatieff. The Liberal Party's real problem are the Liberal Party members responsible for putting Ignatieff at the helm. That's Jim Travers' take on the Liberal malaise. The worst part is - he's absolutely right.

From a distance, Ignatieff was easily mistaken for [a] champion. A cosmopolitan public intellectual with patrician bloodlines, the writer and professor blended exotic success with domestic roots.

All that was missing was the discipline of due diligence. Locked on to Ignatieff in much the same way they blindly fastened their fortune to rusty John Turner, Liberals either ignored or dismissed available evidence contradicting the consensus and conventional wisdom. Too lightly weighed was the absence of experience in a craft that mercilessly punishes on-the-job training. Too easily skimmed was the library of awkward Ignatieff musings on the American Empire, the Iraq war and the utility of torture. Too fast forgotten was the revealing use of "we" when talking to southern neighbours wary Canadians know as "them."

Every portrait needs a frame and Liberals had none for Ignatieff. A party that hadn't seriously considered its policies, principles or purpose for nearly 20 years could only wistfully compare him to Pierre Trudeau and consider his candidacy in the context of Liberal prospects in the next election.

The Liberal conclusion, accelerated by the Christmas coalition crisis, was that the more seasoned and campaign ready Rae was too burdened by his NDP resumé and that Ignatieff was the answer. Given a broader choice, Canadians are proving harder to convince.

Travers is right on this one, dead right. It was almost stomach-churning to listen to all the IgLibs swooning over "Michael" and praising the brilliance of the "war room" guys all the while the party stagnated and fumbled and their vaunted Michael slid beneath Harper in public acceptance.

Travers is right that there's an arrogant indifference to the Liberal Party and its members about policy and principles and purpose even liberalism itself. Many Liberal bloggers I've observed are far too preoccupied in their party reclaiming power to discuss what the LPC ought to do if returned to power.

Michael (swoon) will unveil our policy when Harper calls the next election, right? Whose policies? Michael's? Is this guy who unequivocally supported the brutal conquest of Gaza, who can't see beyond the Athabasca Tar Sands, who somehow thinks Canada and the world need a muscular Canadian military presence, who supported the illegal invasion of Iraq, who made so many other questionable calls along the way - he's going to tell the party what its policies will be?

Oh please, spare me.

I, for one, hope there is an early election call and I hope in the wake of that election the LPC membership emerges with an appreciation that the Liberal Party of Canada without liberalism is an empty vessel the Canadian voter will not embrace.

Why Can't Ignatieff Close the Deal With Canadian Voters?

When you do the math, it simply doesn't add up.

Stephen Harper. We don't like the guy and we like him less now than ever.

Quebec. Harper has positively gored his Conservatives in la belle province.

The recession. Harper has screwed that up six ways to Sunday. He's screwed us up. He's screwed up Canada. He was hopelessly screwing this up long before anybody recognized the recession was happening in the United States.

The scandals. Harper is up to his knees (at least) in them. He's broken most of the White Knight promises on which he eeked into office. Arrogance and secrecy where he promised accountability and transparency. A flurry of failed and abandoned litigation. Then there's listeria, Chalk River, Cadman, income trusts, the list goes on.

So why, oh why, is the newly-minted Liberal leader not sitting on a solid, 10-15 point lead in public opinion? It's not that the NDP is nipping at Ignatieff's heels.

Could it be that Ignatieff is simply too far right for center-left Liberal supporters? Has he tried to position that party too closely to the Conservatives for his and the LPC's own good? Is there something about the guy that Canadians just don't like? Could it be that Dion left deeper scars on the Liberal brand than anyone imagined?

I'll admit I don't know what's to blame for the Liberal malaise but I do know that being positioned to possibly win a minority with everything Harper has done for the Liberal Party shows that Liberals don't have much to celebrate.

Now That The Emergency's Over - How About a Leadership Contest?

I don't follow these things as closely as I should so please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding of the reason Michael Ignatieff was anointed interim leader of the LPC was due to the prospect of the Harper goverenment falling. Am I right?

So, now that Ignatieff has taken Harper's outstretched hand and formed a Tory-Grit coalition, that whole emergency thing is over, right?

And as Ignatieff has shown himself devoid of both vision and good judgment, wouldn't this be a good time to find a fitting leader for the Liberal Party of Canada?

I realize that, thanks to GG Jean, Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff, it's a bit late in the day for contenders to step forward but surely there must be somone who can at least make sure that our Imperial leadership doesn't turn into a rank coronation. Of is it too late?