Now, Justin, Repair the Damage Harper Inflicted on Our Coast. That Much You Owe Us.

If British Columbians returned as many Liberals on Monday as they did in 2011, Justin Trudeau would have fallen just short of his majority. We elected just two Libs back then, 17-this year, enough to endow the Libs with their 14-seat majority margin.

What happened? The coast happened or, more to the point, the depredations and threats Harper posed to it happened.

Three out of four British Columbians wanted Stephen Harper out of Canadian politics as they cast ballots in the federal election, according to an exit poll done by Insights West.

“Harper has alienated a lot of people over issues like the environment and multiculturalism,” said Insights West pollster Mario Canseco. “There’s this magnitude of hatred towards him.”

Not dislike. Not dissatisfaction. Hatred - deep, abiding hatred and it was well earned which should offer a cautionary note to Justin and whoever follows him.

Harper never got to the point of provoking large-scale public unrest from coastal British Columbians. The hammer was cocked but he never got far enough to pull the trigger. I know a lot of people for whom the coast, in particular an armada of bitumen laden supertankers, was our line in the sand. Lifelong law-abiding people who were prepared to see the inside of a jail for the first time if that's what it took to stop this assault.

There's a big divide in this province. There's the hydrocarbon redneck interior, where Harper still claimed 10-seats. Then there's the coast where Harper lost 18-seats and the Libs garnered 17.

The island, the bastion of the Green Party? Well, it went NDP, the party best poised to eliminate Tory candidates. The Greens took a big hit, no doubt about it.

Only 34 per cent of British Columbians said they voted strategically — a strategy generally used to vote for the candidate best able to defeat someone, which in Monday’s case was typically Harper. The highest rate of strategic voting took place on Vancouver Island, where 38 per cent voted that way.

A strong majority of those polled, including a significant percentage of Tories, want Harper to take that long walk into the forest. Mulcair's numbers were 44% go, 46% stay, 15% undecided.  Elizabeth May? A very strong majority, 66%, want her to stay right where she is.

But this is about Justin Trudeau and recognizing the support he received from coastal British Columbia. Please, please. Do the easy stuff first. Reinstate our navigation regulations. Restore our fisheries and waterways protections. Then see if you can find those Fisheries and Oceans scientists who Harper fired. Get them back to work monitoring and securing our coastal habitat. And, finally, re-open those Coast Guard stations that Harper shuttered. All too often those are our first responders and that translates into lives.

Benjamin Netanyahu - Holocaust Denier

Isn't it time we gave Hitler a break?

According to Benjamin Netanyahu, the whole holocaust thing wasn't even Adolph's idea. No, that was a scheme hatched by some damned, dirty Arab.

"Mr. Netanyahu said in a speech to the Zionist Congress on Tuesday night that, 'Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at that time, he wanted to expel the Jews,' according to a transcript released by his office. The prime minister said that the Mufti, Haj amin al Husseini, protested to Hitler that 'they'll all come here,' referring to Palestine.

"'So what should I do with them?'" Mr. Netanyahu quoted Hitler as asking Mr. Husseini. "'He said, burn them.'"

Okay, this is our supposed best ally in the Middle East, Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel. This is the guy whose murderous fantasies we keep embracing, tightly closing our eyes and our minds to the facts.

Israeli academics were quick to denounce Netanyahu's vile ploy. One of them, Professor Moshe Zimmermann, an expert in German studies at Hebrew University, said, "With this, Netanyahu joins a long line of people we would call Holocaust Deniers."

Sorry, New Dems, But Losing Was a Choice and It Was Your Choice

Michael Laxer wasted no time conducting a powerful, incisive post mortem on the lifeless corpse of today's New Democratic Party. He concludes the wounds were both mortal and self-inflicted.

The good thing is that Laxer shows how, like Lazarus, the NDP can rise from the dead.

After being aggressively told that the “left” needed a leader like Tom Mulcair to shed its “radical” and “left” image, the party has been delivered to its worst defeat in its history. While it is true that the party will have a final number of seats that a generation ago would have seemed a victory, yesterday’s results are a terrible setback.

An almost existential defeat.

We were fed the line that the sacrifices of principle were necessary. It was claimed they would produce electoral results.

...Canadians were offered two versions of “progressive” liberalism. Unsurprisingly, the more “inspiring” one won.

This was not due to the NDP running a “principled” campaign as some claim. It did not. It was not due, as some are conveniently suggesting, to the “niqab” issue either. If it were why did the NDP slide in the polls begin in Ontario after the “balanced budget” pledge the NDP made and why did Trudeau do so well in Quebec despite taking just as strong a stand on the issue?

The fact is, despite all the insults, Justin Trudeau proved a capable and even a remarkable leader. It turned out he had the very characteristics that over the course of a campaign the people wanted and that the pundits and the “strategists” running the NDP campaign misunderstood and lacked.

...Like moths to the flame they began from seeming positions of advantage and used those to justify right wing narratives as a path to power.

As if this was the UK in 1997 without any notion that Tony Blair was, in the end, a disaster.

...At what point do we acknowledge that the NDP’s strategy has failed? At what point do we acknowledge that “winning” will neither happen this way nor be worth it if it did?

At what point do we acknowledge the “Third Way” is a bankrupt place to campaign from?

Could the NDP have won? Yes. It could, had it had a better brand and set of strategists, have supplanted the Liberals once and for all as the new flavour of bourgeois opposition.

Given that it has not, maybe it is time to turn back to where the NDP came from. Back before Tom Mulcair and Jack Layton.

At this point it would seem there would be little to lose.

The Harper years were tough on all of us. He set out to permanently shift Canada's political centre well to the Right and, as he did, the Liberals and New Democrats followed complacently behind.

Give Trudeau his due. He seems to be interested in righting the country's political keel. We'll know soon enough if this is mere posturing.

The media fed us a self-serving narrative that the nation has moved to the Right and we bought that ignoring poll after poll showing the Canadian people remained mildly left of centre. For Odin's sake, think about it.  Do you believe Harper's personna, his sociopathic psyche, would ever win over the public's hearts and minds? Most Canadians went along because they had no other choice. What, Ignatieff? Are you kidding?

We need to re-inflate our collapsed political spectrum. Breathe life back into it - create space for a new Left, Centre and Right.  That air is what enables vision and debate and the evolution of ideas.  Harper, quite deliberately, sucked out all that air and it suited his interests for almost a decade.

Progressives have an opportunity to resurrect the Left. A New Democratic restoration would, if anything, pressure Trudeau to live up to his promises, to right our political keel.  As Laxer says, we've got nothing to lose.

Try to Look on the Bright Side

Think of it as one of those "glass half full" thingees.

I found this over at WikiPedia. Maybe it'll lift the sagging spirits of some of you New Dem party faithful.

Sure, Tom Mulcair led your party to the loss of 51-seats in the election yesterday.  But still the Mulcair NDP won 44-seats.

Now, do you realize that makes Mr. Mulcair the second most successful NDP leader in its history? 44-seats is one more than Ed Broadbent managed to win in the 1988 runoff.

So it's Layton in first place, Mulcair in second and Broadbent a very close third. Not so bad after all now is it?

The New Republic Celebrates the Political Passing of Stephen Harper

Stephen Harper's fall from power has been greeted with obvious delight by the folks at The New Republic.  Coupled with the coup that recently toppled Aussie climate change bad boy, Tony Abbott, a significant obstacle to the December climate summit in Paris may have been cleared.

Harper, the outgoing leader of the Conservative Party, may not have been as vocally opposed to climate action as, say, U.S. Republicans, but he’s repeatedly tried to undermine international progress in more subtle ways. He was one-half of the world’s most powerful anti-climate duo, which broke apart only last month when his partner—ex-Australia prime minister Tony Abbott—lost his job in the Liberals' party leadership elections. He withdrew Canada from the Kyoto Treaty in 2011, just as major polluters (including the U.S. and China) began to rethink their approach to fossil fuels. He and Abbott planned to complicate negotiations on limiting global greenhouse gas emissions, and Harper congratulated his peer on his progress in scuttling domestic climate initiatives. “You’ve used this international platform to encourage our counterparts in the major economies and beyond to boost economic growth, to lower taxes when possible and to eliminate harmful ones, most notably the job-killing carbon tax,” Harper told Abbott when the latter visited Canada in summer of 2014. In the last year, he's snubbed United Nations climate summits and his officials reportedly tried to weaken language from an official G7 text that pledged serious long-term cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
...Trudeau has both the opportunity and challenge to repair Canada’s outcast status after nine years of conservative power. Trudeau will be better on the environment, but far from an environmentalist's dream PM: He supports the Keystone XL pipeline, and has not made clear how he plans to reconcile the tar sands industry’s growth and the need to cut Canada’s emissions—two priorities that are at odds with each other. Trudeau has said, "I am committed to showing up with all premiers to take on the target we need which is to prevent the two degrees of warming that scientists across the world are looking at as catastrophic," but has offered few specifics. During the election, his campaign was full of contradictions, like accusing Harper of turning “the oil sands into a scapegoat around the world for climate change and he’s put a big target on our oil sands.”

There are still a number of reasons to be encouraged that the Liberals can turn around Canada’s climate policy. Paris will be just the start of it. Within90 days of Paris, Trudeau has promised to call on the provinces' leaders to help come up with a plan for climate action, to begin to undo some of Harper’s damage. These reforms could include ending fossil fuel subsidies, putting a price on carbon, and evaluating the environmental footprintbefore signing off on pipeline proposals. And expect more details from Trudeau himself soon: His first appearance on the global stage will likely be in Paris later this year.

Next

One thing sure to follow any big upset election is a flood tide of speculation. The big question, naturally, is who will fill the shoes of the Prince of Darkness?

The gossip always includes Jason Kenny and, recently, Peter MacKay. Former Mulroney cabinet minister and ex-Liberal premier of Quebec, Jean Charest, had an machine testing the waters until recently.

The next big name supposedly looking to get in the running is - wait for it - Maxime Bernier who has a solid footing in his Beauce riding.

You might remember frisky Max from his days courting the well upholstered Julie Couillard. That led to a scandal when it was discovered that Bernier left classified NATO briefing documents at Couillard's apartment well after the couple broke up. It didn't help when Couillard was exposed as having recent romantic connections with a member of the Hell's Angels. That mess led to Bernier's resignation as minister of foreign affairs.

It Wasn't Just Harper Who Went Down in Flames Last Night.

Damn! I forgot to unload my Enbridge stock. I expect the market for pipelines is a tad wobbly this morning. The Northern Gateway (we're told) is dead, dead, dead. The north coast is saved.

Face it, Enbridge/Harper never succeeded in establishing 'social licence' for the Northern Gateway, especially not with our stalwart First Nations. The rest of us owe them an immense debt of gratitude.

That said, had Harper prevailed last night it's probable that he would have used his next term in power to steamroller the pipeline operation and get dilbit to "tide water."

We still have to fight Kinder Morgan's southern pipeline expansion. At least we won't be campaigning on two fronts.

Oh, yeah, what's that other outfit? Of course, Lockheed. Junior has already nixed their F-35, something that may have knock on effects on Lockheed's other, already wobbly international clientele.  We still need something to replace our aging CF-18s. Remember, they were bought by Junior's dad back when he was prime minister. Hmm, something strangely poignant to that. Maybe the new Trudeau Liberals can find something better suited to guarding Canada's vast northern expanse.

Infrastructure. That's pushing on an open door. From coast to coast the country's infrastructure is at risk. It's old, often dilapidated and, in any case, never engineered to meet the demands of today's harsher environment. It's going to be enormously costly to repair and replace it. It'll be far costlier if we don't. That's exactly the sort of stimulus spending Canada so badly needs.

I've got a couple of ideas. How about we get our Coast Guard stations opened again? Wouldn't it be great if we got those regulations that protect our lakes, our rivers and coasts reinstated? Let's get those marine guardians at Fisheries and Oceans back on the job. We could also ratchet up our navigation regulations that were gutted by Harper. It's the least we can do.

It's time.

Emancipation Syndrome

Harper is out. Trudeau is in, big time.

I didn't vote for either of those guys or Mulcair, yet I'm enormously relieved that Stephen Harper didn't return for the final term he needed to complete his transformation of Canada and, especially, the west.

It's a weird feeling, almost as if it was laced with just a touch of emancipation. You're free to go. Speak your mind. Dispute, argue, debate. Organize.  Get busy, get to it.

Only this whole emancipation things is no simple matter.  What do you do? How do you engage this freedom? What are the pitfalls ahead and where can you go wrong?

Dismantling the Canada that Harper inflicted on us isn't going to be easy. It has to be brought out into the open, explored and understood - not as Harper proclaimed it to be but as it is.  Some of it might be like defusing unexploded ordinance.

Ah, the Good Fight fought, and won.  Canada won, we won.

My Greens didn't win but the pressures to vote strategically were powerful and persuasive. The election plainly cost the party votes but I'd be surprised if, this morning, it has cost the party many supporters.

Then there's the NDP, whatever that is any more.  They began the campaign soaring high but then, like Icarus, the wings melted and they fell 'plop' into the sea. As usual, they spent too much effort attacking the Liberals when they ought to have been slamming Harper but, in the end, they got their just rewards. Brace yourselves for the classic grousing so familiar in the wake of NDP failures. The public was too stupid, the opponents were dishonest, their guy was maligned, yada, yada, yada.

That leaves us with the Liberals. What to make of them? How do you make sense of a party that began yesterday with 34 seats and ended the day with 184? It's going to take a few days just to make up name tags for the caucus meet'n greet. The good part is that there's a fair bit of veteran talent in the party that's evenly split between under and over 50s.

I'm not sure what to make of the strong majority. I had thought some minority coalition might be preferable if only to compel the Libs and New Dems to stop the constant back-biting and make them cooperate. I'm not sure that would have worked with Mulcair having spent much of the campaign attacking Trudeau even as Trudeau focused his efforts on the real target, Harper.

Trudeau has a lot of change to deliver but that includes dismantling the detritus of Harperland and tons of scaffolding to build something new that works for Canada not just one sector, one region.

Anyway, get prepared for the emancipation syndrome. Enjoy the freedom, the chance to breathe, the warmth of the sun. It won't last. The challenges haven't gone away and, try as he might, the Liberals will stumble, they will make mistakes and, sometimes, they'll choose the wrong path.

Here's the thing. During the Harper years a lot of us attacked policies and advocated for change, sometimes fundamental change. Under Harper we didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting through. Maybe, just maybe, we now have a government that will at least hear us out.

A New Record!

If it was a rodeo they'd have to award me one of those big, shiny belt buckles for this.

Ladies and gentlemen, I broke 2:30!

From the front door of the polling station, through the pre-clearance line, to my individual poll for check-in, to receiving, marking and casting my ballot, and then back out through the front door - well under 2-minutes, 30-seconds. Bing, bang, boom.

Ah, the kid's still got it.

The Moral Authority to Govern

As I recoiled from one lockstep Harper endorsement to the other in our nation's newspapers over the weekend, I repeatedly had to ask, "how could you?"

Then Benjamin Perrin, law professor and former counsel to Harper and his PMO, on Sunday issued a statement denouncing his once boss as having "lost the moral authority to govern."

With those few words Perrin did a great service to the Canadian people. A survivor of the bunker, he experienced Stephen Harper's skullduggery first hand and was uniquely positioned to pass judgment on the man he had seen in action. Not fit to govern. That is a powerful indictment coming from a professional who watched the great man up close, face to face.

Yet Perrin did more, much more and it will be Canada's loss and our own if we don't heed his deeper message. That's the veiled warning about Canada's corporate media cartel, just whose side they're on and whose side they're plainly not on. It's a message of how the corporate media has betrayed the Canadian people.

Did these CEOs and editors in chief not read their own news reports over the past several years? Did they not understand the critical role that moral authority plays in any liberal democracy?

I knew Harper had lost all moral authority. So did you. That's been apparent for years. Apparent, obvious, blatant.

Guess who else knew that? Every corporate operative pulling the strings at all of these media outlets, they knew. They knew full well but it didn't matter to them. Harper is good for the economy, they chimed, meaning he was good for their bottom line, the safe bet. Sure he was a snake, a man bereft of respect for the constitution and the Rule of Law and a bully morally unfit to govern but who cares? The plebs don't matter. The country doesn't matter. And so they threw away their own moral authority to back the man who threw his away so many years ago.

I hope that Ben Perrin has made out the case that I've been arguing for years. We have to break up Canada's corporate media cartel if we're to have any hope of restoring real democracy to our country.  Democracy dies a slow death without an informed electorate able to vote freely.  An informed electorate depends on the people having access to the greatest number of voices expressing the broadest possible range of opinion from the reaches of the Right to the reaches of the Left and everything in between.

Boardroom Journalism is what was on glaring display this weekend. It serves to manipulate, even defeat informed public thought. It is a low thing and, make no mistake, it's septic, utterly toxic.

We've done this before and it's time to do it again. Smash the corporate media cartel. Force divestiture of media outlets wherever the malignant tumours of media concentration (concentration of ownership and cross-ownership) are found and, by that, I mean coast to coast to coast for it has metastasized.

We know how to do this. We just have to reinstate the rules. And there's no time better than now to get this underway.

Just a word of caution. As I am not supporting either of the main opposition parties, the danger you have is from the party you are supporting. Your democratic freedom is under attack. Canada's liberal democracy is in peril. What is your party, be it Liberal or New Democrat, doing about it? I know the answer and so do you. Now you need to ask yourself why?

Unless they act, and soon, the 'moral authority to govern' will become just another quaint notion.

Update:

As you may have heard Andrew Coyne's election piece was spiked by PostMedia because he wouldn't toe the corporate media line. That led Coyne to resign his position as editor of editorials and comment at National Post.

The one political leader, whose party openly opposes the corporate media cartel, the Green Party's Elizabeth May, applauded Coyne for his integrity with this tweet:

Thanks for maintaining your principles in an increasingly controlled corporate media. As ever, much respect.

Thank you, Elizabeth, for reminding me why I just voted for the right party.

A Parting Gift for Shifty Steve, Made to Measure

Odin willing, Shifty Steve Harper will be toast by tomorrow's end. It will probably take some time and a lot of therapy to straighten out his clutchy fingers that have held Canada in a death grip for the past decade but, even for Steve, we must live in hope.

It's Shifty's emotional transition that will be the toughest nut to crack. What does the ultimate control freak do without something to ultimately control? What to do, what to do? What can we offer to keep his mind engaged, something that appeals to his basest instincts?

Voila! How about this new video game that's right up Steve's alley or at least his back passage? Allow me to introduce you to Prison Architect.

It's the latest thing from game developers Mark Morris and Chris Delay of Introversion.

By 2010, the team was in a slump, and Delay took off on a vacation to San Francisco. During a tour of Alcatraz with his wife, the idea hit him: Why not design a game around a prison? Not an action-packed first-person shooter, but one where you play the CEO of a private prison company, tasked with designing, building, and managing your own lockup? Delay didn't know much about prisons, but the more he researched—interviewing guards and former inmates—the more he realized they were ripe for the most complex of Sim City-style games.

Introversion, now with a staff of nine, spent the next five years designing Prison Architect. They released a beta version in 2012 and attracted more than 1 million players. It was their biggest hit, and they released the full version this month.

Like most simulations, the game has no real end point. The purpose is to delve ever deeper into a system you create, to wrestle with your own beliefs and morality in a fictional world whose mechanics bear a striking resemblance to real-life prisons.

Prison Architect is not an easy game. Newcomers go through a "campaign mode" tutorial where they are thrown into a succession of five prisons and tasked with fixing various problems. The learning curve is steep—I probably spent 20 hours working through it—but subplots about mob assassinations, an execution, and a prison CEO burning documents during a riot create tensions to string you along.

The real game, however, is a blank slate. You are given a piece of land, $30,000, eight construction workers, and 24 hours (24 minutes in game time) before your first eight prisoners arrive. You can adjust how many you take in each day, but as with real private prisons, inmates equal revenue. And even if profit isn't your motive, you need money to operate.

It's once you master the basics that things get interesting—do you want to build a Scandanavian-style model of reform or a totalitarian hellhole? Do you want to take a stab at remedying the challenges of the US prison system, figuring out how to manage maximum-security prisoners without solitary confinement?

I'd guess that the 'totalitarian hellhole' option would have a certain allure for Shifty Steve.  He could put the Ford boys in charge of the rehabilitative services and contraband. He might even set up one wing for Liberals, one wing for New Democrats and a very special wing for those goddamned Progressive Conservatives.

The Editorial the Globe Would Have Run Back When...

William Thorsell was editor-in-chief of the Globe & Mail from 1989 to 2000 back in the days of legitimate journalism. That's way back before it fell into the clutches of today's corporate shills.

The Globe's endorsement of the Conservatives in this election speaks volumes for the paper and its decline. That's manifest when you consider what Thorsell would have written if he was still running the place:

Not in recent times have Canadian voters had an opportunity to “throw the bastards out” in the classic phrase. Elected officials generally leave office before such public urges get to them.

Brian Mulroney stepped down five months before an election was required in 1993. (Kim Campbell launched that campaign in September running high in the polls.) Voters rather gently rebuked Pierre Trudeau with his close defeat in 1979, but his resurrection in 1980 set the stage anew. Mr. Trudeau stepped down in 1984, nine months before an election was required. (John Turner called an election that July, also running well in the polls.)

This time however, Stephen Harper is sticking his head up above the parapets after nine years in office — nine years generally seen as the Best Before Due Date in politics, as it is for leadership in the private sector. Knowing when to leave is among the more elegant qualities of any CEO, but then Mr. Harper has never laid claim to elegance.

An accumulation of baggage eventually weighs the owner down to the point of stumbling and falling. Mr. Harper is quite overweight in that department. In recessionary times, he is running a primary budget surplus (revenues over program spending) of some 1.4 per cent of GDP — an elementary error in Economics 101, less a matter of ideology than incompetence. Governments should not pull money out of an economy facing strong economic headwinds: We might refer to Stephen “Hoover” in this context, after the hapless U.S. president in the 1930s.

You do not cut the national sales tax in favour of targeted tax goodies in your party’s political interest. Nor do you do so to reduce Ottawa’s capacity to fund grievously inadequate infrastructure, undermining productivity and aggravating social divides. You do not claim success in energy policy having seen no new significant pipelines approved or built on your watch, either domestically or in our interest in the United States. Nor do you sit out the global conversation on climate change in words and action.

You do not exacerbate income inequality by providing significant new tax breaks for the wealthy in tax-free savings and investment accounts.

You do not fan cultural conflict in Canada in the face of unprecedented cultural diversity and high rates of immigration. Canada’s generally successful experience in accommodating diversity needs nurturing attention, not a matador’s incendiary skills.

You do not acquiesce to deteriorating relations with Canada’s First Peoples. You do not evince contempt for science or, for that matter, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the courts mandated to interpret and uphold it. You do not tendentiously attack the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada as cover for your own incompetence in making laws and appointments.

You do not turn your backside to the federal nature of Canada, refusing to meet the premiers and other leaders in congress to explore and debate issues of common national concern.

On your watch, Canada’s relations with the United States appear as cool as they became in Pierre Trudeau’s latter years — a fundamental failure in a critical arena. And you have reduced Canada’s stature in the world at large through excessively partisan positions on matters of great complexity in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, for example.

Barely concealed hostility to China and the United Nations, ineffective diplomacy regarding the Arctic and a general downgrading of Canada’s foreign service personnel and facilities add yet more weight to the baggage. Only apparent enthusiasm in military matters indicates much appetite for engagement in foreign affairs.

New trade agreements may hold promise, though there has been no public consultation and we have seen no details on the large ones.

Prime ministers do not have to be eminently likeable if they are sufficiently competent and inspiring. But to demonstrate qualities of meanness with a scent of pouting in the air makes the wheels on the luggage squeak. Who but the deeply petulant would forbid his entire parliamentary caucus from speaking to the former Progressive Conservative prime minister of Canada on ethereal grounds?

Indeed, who is allowed to speak to Canadian voters themselves in Stephen Harper’s caucus — you know, the voters who hired them? Empty chairs at public forums, gag orders on ministers of the crown, refusals to respond to media enquiries evince deep contempt for the democratic process at its most intensive phase.

All this is consistent with unprecedented contempt for Parliament in the use of closure and reliance on Brodingnagian omnibus bills — not to mention a promise to un-man the Senate, which remains an essential player under the Canadian constitution.

Yes, an unusual opportunity to “throw the bastards out” lies just a few days away, and there are reasons and a chance it may well happen.

Is Harper Already Sanitizing the PMO?

What's going on at Harper's PMO? BuzzFeed Canada reports that moving trucks have appeared delivering pallets of flat-packed cardboard boxes to the Langevin Block offices.




Look on the bright side. At least he's not torching the place.

Update:  It looks like BuzzFeed was right on the money. The Tories had to have known at least this far before the vote that it was all over. They knew they had stuff they had to get out, loads of it apparently. It must have been a somber experience for the staffers who knew they would have to find another job to pay the rent.

The First Thing They Must Do.

If, as the polls suggest, Stephen Harper will be toppled tomorrow, the first thing the next prime minister must do is to free our government's scientists. Release them from the shackles and the gags that silenced them throughout the Harper era.

Take them outside. Show them the sun. Let them mingle with the people, reunite with their colleagues across Canada and around the world. Help them get caught up and back to their posts.

Above all else, let them be heard. Let us hear from them about what this past decade has been like for them. Let them shed light what they wanted to tell us and warn us about but couldn't. Let them tell us how they were gagged, intimidated.

We have a lot to learn from those scientists and, from them, we'll see the true face of Stephen Harper.

A Victory, To Be Sure, But the Fight Isn't Over.

They're a people we've taken for granted for, well, forever. To the extent most Canadians thought of First Nations it was generally in the context of stereotypes and pejoratives. They said they were all about nature but we knew they were just in it for the easy bucks of federal handouts and the life of ease on their reserves. We had to tell ourselves those lies to make the whole thing keep ticking over.

If the Harper years have taught us anything, it should be how fulsomely our First Nations deserve our respect and our immense appreciation. They have been the frontline holding Harper and his petro-thugs at bay. They've been the spine that has never quite materialized in the non-aboriginal ranks.

The thing is, though, that the fight won't end with the ouster of our venally undemocratic prime minister and his dutiful minions. The iron fist will still threaten even if it now wears a velvet glove. The approach will change. There'll be more consultation, perhaps less outright bribery, but Parliament will remain full of petro-pols on both sides of the aisle of the House of Commons.

But this isn't about the relative merits of Trudeau, Mulcair or Harper. It's about the people who will stand in their way next month, next year, and, with any luck, forever.

The Debasement of Stephen Joseph Harper

The teaser at the CBC web site gave me pause: "Harper fires up supporters at rally promoted by Ford brothers."

I found myself asking, Is that how this ends? Really?  Like the little boy whose mom had to tie a porkchop around his neck just to get the dog to play with him, has Shifty's brand become so degraded that appearing with the Fords is a campaign boost? Or is this how Steve returns to some primordial ooze, an acknowledgement that, for him, there'll be no more riding roughshod over the country?

Jesus, Steve, you even made NatPo's Chris Selley cringe at this blatant display of desperation and debasement.

And then, there was Saturday night — a brand new low for a conservative party that has abandoned so very many of its conservative principles. Drugs or no drugs, the Fords’ politics is a flailing, nihilist mashup of spite, fantasy and delusion masquerading as “Respect for Taxpayers.” The Tories wear that now. If they lose on Monday, they will have utterly debased themselves doing so. And if they don’t lose — if embracing the Fords motivates the GTA voters they so desperately need, or if they conclude that it did — then one can only wonder what further debasements might await them, and us, down the line. They’ve come a long way, baby.

Hell, I think Guy Ritchie might have enough here for a movie.

Mulcair, Trudeau - They're Better than Harper But Not on This

Don't kid yourself. We'll never get back to what we used to think of as Canadian so long as our leaders keep turning a blind eye to this.

Harper's Threat to Canada's High Tech Crown Jewel

Ask most Canadians to name Canada's biggest technology success story and they'll probably be hard pressed to come up with an answer.  Blackberry? No, that's out. Hmmm.

The answer, for the time being at least, is Bombardier, the world's third largest civil aircraft manufacturer.  Sure, when you board WestJet or Air Canada you'll probably be on a Boeing or Airbus but Bombardier has been growing steadily, ambitiously developing its own mid-size C series jetliner.

Like the Big Two - Boeing and Airbus - Bombardier's development of the C series has been anything but smooth. There have been delays and cost issues, the sort of problems routinely absorbed by the competition but harder to manage for the smaller, cash-strapped Bombardier.

Now, according to Aviation Week's Kevin Michaels, the C series threatens Bombardier's survival. Bombardier's options are limited and, as Michaels notes, could hinge on whether Canadians give Stephen Harper the boot.

The first option is to sell assets. The most obvious asset is its $10 billion transportation business. Bombardier previously tried and failed to sell a minority stake of this division. Instead, it could sell the entire business and become a pure aerospace company. This might raise more than $5 billion that could see the manufacturer through the difficult period ahead and help it pay down debt. This would also address the market’s perception that Bombardier’s very survival is at risk. What about another asset—the aerostructures business? This makes sense strategically, but the value of this unit is tied to the C Series, and it won’t bring in enough capital to fund the company’s war chest. Better to sell it after the C Series program is stabilized. Finally, there might still be a buyer for the commercial aircraft business—perhaps Comac or another deep-pocketed Asian aerospace OEM such as Mitsubishi or Avic. This could bring not only capital but also much-needed customers.

Bombardier’s second option is to stop the bleeding and shut down the C Series. This option will not be cheap, as Bombardier would need to pay back suppliers for development costs, adding up to $1 billion or more. It would face customer ire, penalties and severely damaged credibility. And the move would deal an emotional blow to Canada in the wake of other high-technology failures.

Finally, there is a third option: government intervention. The interesting twist here is that that support may be tied to next week’s Canadian federal elections. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has a narrow lead in recent polls, and his base of support is in Ontario and Quebec. If he wins, he may feel compelled to pay back voters, given Bombardier’s footprint in both provinces.

What about Stephen Harper’s Conservatives? If they win a majority government, it could doom federal aid, as Harper’s base of support in western Canada wouldn’t stand for a bailout of eastern interests.

This One Has My Vote

When it comes time for Stephen Harper's portrait to hang alongside those of his prime ministerial betters in Parliament, this one should suffice. It's got my vote.

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

Harper's Wizard, Lynton Crosby, Deserts the Sinking Ship

He was the guy who was supposed to throw Stephen Harper's Hail Mary pass and now it seems he chose to run with the ball instead - right off the field, through the dressing room and to his waiting car in the parking lot.

Lynton Crosby is reported to have fled the Harper campaign.

Australian master strategist Lynton Crosby has reportedly abandoned Stephen Harper's campaign, just four days before Canadians choose their next government, according to a ThinkPol report.

Crosby's apparent departure could not have come at a worse time for Harper, who is falling behind in the polls to Justin Trudeau's Liberals. The prime minister is facing widespread criticism for for speaking at a Toronto rally on Tuesday with scandal-plagued ex-Toronto mayor Rob Ford in attendance, who has previously admitted using illegal drugs including crack.

But Crosby's business partner, Mark Textor, has recently been ramping up efforts to distance his partner from Harper's campaign, a full month after reports that Crosby was hired by the Conservatives.

"Where's Crosby?"

"The bastard has done a runner. Shit, damn! Jenni, Ray - suit up, you're going back in."

Send in the Clowns!

Update -

Here's the tweet sent by Crosby's partner, Mark Textor, claiming that Crosby "is not part of this nonsense."