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Showing posts with label political policies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label political policies. Show all posts
Monday, 28 March 2011
Remember the concern about Harper's Hidden Agenda that has kept Canadians in three elections from giving Harper a majority in Parliament?
Well, It's back!
And with a vengeance, because it is true.
"Abuse of Fiscal Capacity". Remember those words. Abuse of Fiscal Capacity.
They will be heard again and again in this campaign, because they are at the heart of the ferocious Liberal attack on Stephen Harper's mismanagement of Canada's economy.
His Coalition is Evil theme has exploded in his face, with reporters pushing each other to ask him questions about his own attempts to grab power in 2004 even though his Tory party gained 38% fewer seats than Martin's Liberals did (Harper was one of the Losers in that election, according to his own definition).
And his second theme – that he is the best person to manage Canada's economy - is starting to wobble alarmingly, because the Liberals are attacking this Big Lie head on.
And they are doing it by giving the facts about yet another Harper abuse – this time it's Harper's Abuse of our Fiscal Capacity.
Here's Harper's Old Mother Hubbard 2.0 fiscal policy in a nutshell:
It's all about reducing the government's capacity to take care of it's citizens. If they can spend the cupboard bare, they can use that as an excuse to cut programs.
"Starving the beast" is a fiscal-political strategy of some American conservatives to create or increase existing budget deficits via tax cuts to force future reductions in the size of government...
A well-known proponent of the strategy is activist Grover Norquist who famously said "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
Ralph Goodale fingered the Harper Abuse of Fiscal Capacity policy when he explained why the Liberals were opposed to the Harper budget:
Goodale said the Liberal Opposition drew its line in the sand with the Harper government's plans to spend billions of dollars on jets, jails and corporate tax cuts."The budget is premised on a $65-billion or $70-billion black hole and that consists of $30 million for the jets, somewhere around $10 billion or $15 billion for the jails and, over five years, a total of $30 billion for the extra tax cuts."Goodale, a former finance minister, said spending "totally absorbs every ounce of fiscal capacity that the government of Canada has and there is no explanation in this budget of how they're going to fill that hole."
We can see that Harper's Old Mother Hubbard 2.0 policy has even hurt his ability to try and buy votes from mini-segments of Canadian voters. Take his very first policy announcement this morning, targeted at working parents.
It fizzled, like a damp squib, and has gone out in an embarrassingly short time.
Stephen Harper is kicking off the 2011 campaign battle for the middle class vote with a $2.5-billion tax break pledge aimed at parents of children under 18.But there's a huge catch to this: It wouldn't take effect until the deficit is eliminated – a date that could be four years in the future.
Michael Ignatieff jumped on the Harper proposal and knocked it out of the park:
“It’s like you come to a family and say, ‘I’ve got good news. First, I’m going to cut taxes for the biggest and most profitable corporations in the country and then maybe in five years, if you take a ticket and you’re patient and you vote for us a couple of times, and we’ll do something really great for you,’” Mr. Ignatieff said in Toronto.“Is that credible? It’s just not credible.”
Poor Old Mother Hubbard's starving dog, if Harper forms the next government.
Poor us, then, too.
Why don't we just have Canadian policies, made in Canada, for Canadians, for a change?
Saturday, 5 March 2011
If (as is unlikely right now) the Harper government's March 22 budget does not gain the confidence of the House and the government falls, there is a policy that the Liberals can announce once the writ is dropped that might leverage it into a strong minority government in the election.
Check the standing of the parties over the past 2 ½ years (2008 – 2011).
The national polls show the Tories with around 35%, with room to grow to around 40%. The Liberals gather between 27% and 32%.
Now the key: the Greens cluster around 10%, and the NDP seems to have settled in around the 15 – 17% mark.
Now consider just two battlefield provinces – BC and Ontario.
The Tories gather around 32% to 38% in BC, with the NDP in the 19% - 25% range and the Greens in the 10% - 16% range. The LPC is in the 20 – 25% range.
In Ontario the Tories polled in the 35% to 45% range, with the NDP garnering around 15% and the Greens between 7% and 10%. The LPC is in the 30 – 35% range.
Now consider a policy of the Liberals that could draw at least half the Green vote and one-third of the NDP vote to this party. This would boost the Liberal votes by around 10% to between 37% and 42% nationally, to between 32% to 47% in BC, and between 40% and 45% in Ontario.
The policy that could do this is one that offers voters who would normally vote Green or NDP a chance to change the rules of our elections in such a way that in all subsequent elections their votes would count for much more. It would help change the democratic deficit in our country that has lead to a Tory government that represents around a third of the votes cast, and yet has managed to disregard the wishes of the other two-thirds and govern in a right wing way.
What is this policy?
The Liberals should commit that if they become the government, they will immediately launch a Citizens Panel to examine the best type of proportional representation for federal elections, and that the Liberal government would table legislation for the change recommended by such a Citizens Panel.
This will attract voters who prefer the Green and NDP parties because such a change would give their votes in all future elections a much fairer weight.
The Greens would see Green MPs in Parliament in the following elections. The NDP would see a fairer representation of MPs than it currently gets.
And we would then have a system of governments which are forced to consider the wishes of a much broader spectrum of voters.
And the Harper Tories will be toast until they undergo their own revolution and purge the Reformer element which took over the old Progressive Conservative Party, and revert to a more representative set of policies that are much closer to the ones that party used to have.
All of Canada would gain.
Monday, 24 January 2011
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| Pavlov and his barking dog |
Those who think the Harper attack ads are (1) simply a repeat of the past and therefore boring and ineffective, (2) muddled and a bit confusing, and therefore ineffective, (3) vicious and unprincipled but their viciousness has made them ineffective, or (4) a little bit of all of these points, and therefore ineffective, are just plain wrong.
Harper's ads are brilliantly conceived, tightly focused, and are proving very effective in forcing Ignatieff to fight on ground Harper has chosen, and to enter that fight with one hand tied behind his back.
The Tory ads are highly effective in framing the issues, and Ignatieff's response is proof of this: he is ignoring all the lessons of political framing and falling – yet again – into the trap set by Stephen Harper.
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Saturday, 15 January 2011
By now it should be clear to most people that our democratic rights are under attack from this prime minister and his authoritarian ways.
And it is time for our MPs, representing the three opposition parties, to stand up for our democracy. Instead of wringing our hands over this man's continual chipping away at our rights and freedoms, we need our MPs to become proactive.
It is time for them to take the initiative, and table - and vote into force - active steps to remedy the reductions in our rights this minority government has foisted upon us, and to positively enhance our democracy's functioning by a deliberate system of
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Monday, 27 December 2010
The False Choice: Voters should choose only the Liberals or the Tories
0 comments Posted by 2011 at 17:21
Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff says that if an election is called in the coming months, his party is the only true alternative to the Conservatives.
In an interview with CTV's Question Period, Ignatieff says that a vote for Jack Layton's NDP or Gilles Duceppes' Bloc Quebecois is essentially a vote for another Conservative government.
"What I'm saying is, it's time for Canadians to make a choice between two governing parties," Ignatieff said.
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Friday, 24 December 2010
Today, as 2010 draws to its end, I was fortunate to pick up a book my wife had just finished; I read it in two sittings, spellbound by the dramatic events and memorable people between its covers.
John Ralston Saul deserves the salute of all Canadians for his significant work, Louis-Hippolyite LaFontaine & Robert Baldwin.
One of The Extraordinary Canadians series, it was published this year by Penguin Group (Canada); the series is described in this site.
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| Baldwin and LaFontaine on Parliament Hill, Ottawa |
Saul writes about these two gifted men who – more than any other Canadians – laid the foundations for the remarkable political and social entity that is modern Canada, during turbulent times, when success was not at all sure.
He summarizes their influence thus:
Over the past century and a half we have thought of LaFontaine and Baldwin as colonial figures in a distant past very unlike today, men who won out over the local compacts, a handful of uncooperative British governors and some distracted British cabinet ministers. Apart from the narrowly defined concept of government responsibility, no other ideas are thought to have been at play. And the responsibility in question is always presented as little more than a tried-and-true British idea.
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Wednesday, 15 December 2010
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| Chantal Hebert |
Mutually assured destruction (M.A.D.) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two opposing sides would effectively result in the destruction of both the attacker and the defender, becoming thus a war that has no victory nor any armistice but only total destruction.
We can ask whether Jack Layton and Michael are also 'mad' and wedded to such a MAD strategy.
Chantal Herbert thinks so, and The Cat shares her view:
If NDP and Liberal leaders Jack Layton and Michael Ignatieff had taken the advice of their elder statesmen and looked for a way to pool forces earlier this year, the result of their joint efforts would likely be doing better in the polls than their separate parties.
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Friday, 10 December 2010
George Lakoff's Untellable Truths for Obama and Canadian Liberals
0 comments Posted by 2011 at 16:53 |
| George Lakoff telling some Untellable Truths |
In an article named Untellable Truths in the Huffington Post, George Lakoff deals with a few topics which Liberals could benefit from reading. He uses the current fight amongst Democrats over President Obama's tax deal with the Republicans to explain why the Republicans are kicking ass down south. Many of the points he makes apply equally to Canada, and the conservative-progressive duel:
The differences between Democratic progressives and the president over the tax deal the president has made with Republicans is being argued from a materialist perspective.
That perspective is real. It matters who gets how much money and how our money is spent.
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Thursday, 9 December 2010
Despite being backed by a good majority of her caucus, James was forced out by a palace coup mounted by a small number of NDP members who, according to James, did not like her trying to move the NDP closer to the mainstream of politics:
NDP leader Carole James says she was pushed out by backroom party boys who didn't like her cosying up to business.
James said Tuesday that behind the scenes party brokers such as Bob Williams and Bill Tieleman were actively working to remove her because she was taking the party to the right and extending an olive branch to big business -- the long-sworn enemy of the NDP, the longtime party of unions and workers.
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Monday, 6 December 2010
Surprise! Surprise! Tories pull ahead of policy-less Liberals in latest poll
0 comments Posted by 2011 at 18:05So NANOS puts Harper in majority territory:
Stephen Harper’s Conservatives are headed toward a majority government without the help of Quebec, a new national poll suggests.
The Nanos end-of-year survey is significant, revealing an emerging Tory strategy in which the governing party is concentrating on winning groups of riding with focused issues. And it appears to be bearing fruit for the Prime Minister...
“The current configuration of national support for the Conservatives suggests that numerically a Tory majority government can be formed without significant breakthrough in the province of Quebec,” pollster Nik Nanos told The Globe. “In this paradigm, the Conservatives narrowcast messages to clusters of ridings on a diversity of issues such as crime, the long-gun registry and social issues that align with their base and which divide the opposition.”
The Nanos poll has the Tories seven points ahead of their rivals, Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals – 38.1 per cent support nationally compared to 31.2 per cent.
Nanos believes the traction of the Tories is coming from their focused messages to core voters in the suburbs of the big cities.
And we still find the "experts" in the Liberal Party leadership determined not to give voters any meat to chew on until they unveil a platform after Harper has dropped the writ.
This wonderful strategy – we can call it the Postdated Blank Cheque Strategy – asks voters not to be influenced by the daily drip-drip of Tory promises and PR gimmicks but to reserve judgment about choosing a party to vote for until Harper calls an election.
And then voters will be presented with a detailed policy platform and expected to (1) absorb it, (2) differentiate it from the Tory policies, and (3) choose it over the Tory election messages.
And to do this in the space of 6 weeks!
What genius believes that voters will (1) wait for an election to decide between "More of the Tories" and "Liberals without Policies", and (2) then decide to choose the party which did not trust their judgment enough to actually let them know what its policy was until a week and a half or so before the election?
A bit of an insult to voters, this blank cheque policy strategy, aint it?
The Cat thinks so.
Wednesday, 1 December 2010
We hear the Tory ministers boasting incessantly about the success of their slow-moving, slow-reacting minority government in promoting economic recovery in Canada.
However, it seems that Harper's legacy will be a new normal of higher unemployment, as a recent study indicates:
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Sunday, 31 October 2010
Having dispensed with the only real left wing writer (Rick Salutin), the Globe & Mail is struggling to decipher patterns in the Tea Party phenomenon in the US through the prism of its centre to centre-right columnists.Witness the conflict in yesterday's edition, between the views of Margaret Wente (article headed The masses are revolting, with good reason), and Jeffrey Simpson (article: Hard realtiies, voodoo solutions, GOP gains).
Wente writes that her best friends are shocked by the Toronto election:
The way they see it, the Visigoths have battered down the gates of Rome, and the Vestal Virgins had better scramble for cover. In the aftermath of Toronto’s election rout, their only consolation is that Rob Ford is probably too stupid and incompetent to completely sack the place. If only they lie low for the next four years, sanity will surely return to city politics.
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Saturday, 2 October 2010
So the Globe & Mail has undergone a facelift, and in the process has jettisoned one of the lone voices of reason in Canada – Rick Salutin.
At a time when right wing fanatics rule the airwaves to the south, when political polarization seems to be more and more entrenched than before, and when tolerance for informed and serious debate of weighty issues is more important than ever, the Globe & Mail has decided to go glossy, narrow its size, and simply walk away from one of the strongest voices for democracy our country now has.
And the reasons given by the Globe & Mail spokespeople are painful to read.
Take this comment from one:
"It's a little bit painful for readers who are used to our columnists," says Judith McGill, assistant to Globe editor-in-chief John Stackhouse. "We're bringing in some new voices to the paper."
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Thursday, 20 May 2010
Yet an opinion poll finds that, given a choice, voters would pick almost anyone else, including the target of all your party's scorn, as Prime Minister. Far from making inroads against a government faced with any number of challenges, you place dead last when Canadians are asked to identify their favourite leader.
What do you do?
Indeed.
What do you do, Michael?
Let's digress a little and talk about the ancient Greek hero of the Trojan War, Achilles, who was the best looking, smartest, toughest of all the Greek leaders. In fact, he was invulnerable.
Just like Teflon-coated Stephen Harper seems to be right now.
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