Du sens, de la mémoire, s.v.p.! / Make sense, remember, please!


Nonsense, amnesia and other conventional wisdom are the targets here:
A critical look at media-political discourse in Canadian federal politics, notably but not only regarding the Quebec-Canada relationship. Also of interest: the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and Canada, and Canada's place in the world. In early days, this blog will be tiny. We'll see if it may grow.

La sottise, l'amnésie et autre sens commun sont mes cibles: un regard critique sur le discours politico-médiatique en politique fédérale canadienne, notamment en ce qui concerne la relation Québec-Canada. Aussi: la relation entre les peuples autochtones et le Canada, et la place du Canada dans le monde. Ce blog commence tout petit. On verra s'il peut bien grandir.

mercredi 31 août 2011

Poll update: life after Jack

Yesterday's Huffington Post Canada made a big deal of an obsolete opinion poll that indicated that the NDP might be weaker without Jack Layton (see my previous posting). Today, it's making a smaller deal (but still) of stronger NDP numbers in a poll done during the week of mourning after Layton's death. Who knows how robust these numbers are and how long they will hold but, as of now at least, they're not obsolete. Today's HPC article is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/08/31/ndp-support-surges-jack-layton-death_n_943377.html.

mardi 30 août 2011

Harper in Quebec: the non-story

For sheer insignificance, it's hard to beat the notion that Stephen Harper's popularity "jump(ed)" in Quebec after Nycole Turmel became the NDP's interim leader in July. And yet, this is what the Huffington Post's Canadian homepage is trumpetting today, backed by an Eric Grenier article that "analyzes" the latest CROP opinion poll (at http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/08/30/layton-harper-quebec-leadership-crop-poll-numbers_n_940562.html).
The poll was taken August 17 to 22, just before Layton's death. If you were CROP and were contracted to do a poll during that week (by Montreal's La Presse - whose own website is silent today on that poll,) you would do your job and ask your usual questions - which they did. In a June poll, Layton had scored 48% among Quebecers to Harper's 16% on the leadership question, as who would be "the best person to be Canada's prime minister." In mid-August, with the very sick Layton replaced by Turmel, Harper's leadership numbers were an underwhelming +5, to 21%. Turmel scored 11% and Bob Rae 10% (+6 vs June). Most of the change, in fact, went to a huge increase in "none of the above" and "don't know," which together went up by 23%.
On the basis of the difference between the two polls, Grenier writes that "it is clear that the NDP's position in the province could be fragile." It's tempting to answer "Duh!" Since the very night of the election, commentators have harped on the possibility that the party's Quebec gains could be a one-hit wonder, tied to Layton's personal popularity. In any case, with little tradition in the province, heavy responsibilities in Ottawa, and complicated internal dynamics, the road ahead was bound to be difficult for the NDP. With Layton gone, things will be exponentially more challenging.
But there are two key points against Grenier's article and (even more so) against the HPC frontpage. First, the numbers racked up by an interim leader, whether Turmel or Rae, against Harper are pretty much meaningless: it is when a new, "permanent" leader is chosen that we will need to pay attention to "the best person to be Canada's prime minister" numbers. It makes no sense to assess the NDP's prospects in Quebec, or anywhere else in the country, on the basis of a Turmel vs Harper confrontation.
Second, even more importantly, this particular mid-August poll was rendered severely obsolete within hours of being completed, as a result of Layton's death. It's a cliché (!) to say that a poll is a snapshot of the electorate's feelings, but the usefulness of polls is that, on most days, the political world is not turned upside down. On most days, what was true on Monday remains the case on Tuesday; and may well remain true for a number of weeks or even months. But once in a while, something happens suddenly that changes the whole landscape. "Jack"'s death on August 22 was one such event.
You can't blame CROP for having done its job, but you have to wonder what in the world is going on at Huffington Post Canada. There has been a steady stream of media stories ever since May 2nd, that attempt to plant in our heads the notion that the NDP is not up to the job, that it's a flash-in-the-pan, and now that it may not even survive Layton. But these have tended to come from conservative sources such as The National Post, Sun Media outlets, and The Globe and Mail. But Huffington Post is supposed to be left-leaning. So, what's up with them?

vendredi 26 août 2011

When Jack became bigger than politics

It is beyond remarkable how Canadians are reacting to Jack Layton's death. The state funeral, the orange CN Tower, the orange Niagara Falls... These are the most visible, institutional expressions of a country-wide explosion of grief and affection, the scale of which could hardly have been expected. There is a way in which the outpouring of emotion is feeding on itself: the more people see what a big deal Layton's passing is for their friends and neighbours, and especially for the every-wo/man shown on T.V., the more they pay attention to the story, and to the media's portrayal of the man who wrote them this farewell letter - "... My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world." (The letter is reproduced in full at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/laytons-last-words-love-is-better-than-anger-hope-is-better-than-fear/article2137381/. This last paragraph is circling the world on social media, and is finding its way on t-shirts.)
Jack Layton used to be well-liked, but for most of his political life he was only a minority's favorite. He had, after all, been the NDP's leader since 2003, and was making moderate, incremental progress from one election to the next. But he was not seen as fundamentally different from other politicians. Then, this year's electoral campaign happened and Layton caught fire. The man himself did not change for the occasion, really. Rather, people responded differently to "Jack." They started seeing "le bon Jack." What they started seeing, by the way, is beautifully rendered by Susan Riley in an Ottawa Citizen column at http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/canada-in-afghanistan/Layton+left+army+political+orphans/5309953/story.html. But Jack Layton, the good man, happy, optimistic, caring, sensible, thoughtful, etc. had been there all along - or at least for quite a while. But why didn't people see it? What happened now to make them see?
I want to suggest that, broadly, two factors were at play: political circumstances and the way in which Layton was seen to handle his prostate cancer and repaired hip. But we must first remember that the NDP's performance in 2011 was bifurcated: in English-speaking Canada, incremental improvements continued, as the party went from 36 seats to 44, its percentage of the vote rising strongly from 20.3% to 28.2%; and in Quebec, where Layton led something of a revolution, all but eliminating the Bloc Québécois, going from 1 to 59 seats, from 12.2% to 42.9% of the vote. In other words, Quebecers saw "Jack" during the campaign and responded. Other Canadians started to take notice as a result of Layton's Quebec performance and then, in quick succession, they were shocked to see and hear a desperately sick Jack in late July, followed less than a month later by news of his passing, and then hours after that, the letter. The response to Layton's death that we are seeing now was built out of that series of shocks.
The question needs to be rephrased: how is it that Quebecers started to see "Jack" during the electoral campaign? So, two factors. Let's deal first, quickly, with political circumstances, two components of which can be distinguished. First, what political scientists refer to the "political opportunity structure;" in other words, what the alternatives were to Layton and the NDP. In Quebec, the landscape was dismal: the Conservatives were not an option, Ignatieff disappointed while the Liberal brand remained damaged, and the Bloc Québécois ran a terrible campaign. Ducepped seemed grumpy, Harper was his usual sourpuss, Ignatieff failed to connect - and there was happy, positive, optimistic Layton. A second political component was also important, that added substance to Layton's sunny disposition: over the previous few years, the NDP had made a concerted effort to attract Quebecers by emphasizing its Quebec-friendly policies, and Layton never backtracked from those. As a result, if Quebecers could only start to pay attention, Layton and the NDP had something attractive to offer while pretty much no-one else did.
Ironically, and in the end tragically, it is Layton's failing health that made people sit up. Or, rather, it is the way he handled himself in relation to both his prostate cancer and to his repaired hip that transformed - indeed, transfigured - his public image.
Layton had always been a happy politician, "on" at all times; he liked politics, a lot. And for a long time, this wasn't helping him a whole lot: many people felt that he liked politics just too much. I happened to be his (and Olivia Chow's) neighbour across the hall in a housing co-op, around 1986-1988. Layton was a municipal councillor and Chow was beginning her career as school councillor. He was already a local NDP star, and very much the same happy Jack that he remained to the end. He was popular, his supporters loved him, but he was also seen by many as too much the politician, power-hungry, ready for any stunt that would help his career. He softened a number of edges over time, but Layton was always Layton. And after all, if politics is the dirty business that many people believe it to be, how can you trust someone who likes it so much? Layton was in politics, and was perceived through the distaste that so many people have for that career and enterprise. While he was likeable enough, the problem was that he was a politician.
But then Jack came through cancer, the iconic killer of our death-denying times, universally feared, indifferent to privilege. His (unrelated?) hip surgery then left him with the cane that became the visual marker of his health issues. It is the combination of his smile, energy, optimism and the cane that, in the circumstances, transfigured Jack Layton - first in the eyes of Quebecers, and then for people across Canada. Layton was no longer merely a politician: here was someone who had just fought for his life, was still weakened, and who was carrying a message of hope, love and optimism. "Jack" transcended politics. Canadians now love him, evidently. They love him for all those things in his character, but also for somehow being bigger than that nasty game that so few people have a taste for. Jack became bigger than politics.


vendredi 19 août 2011

Pandering and democracy when "numbers are implacable"

With the Turmel affair behind us, for now at least, the first substantive Quebec-Canada clash in our new post-Bloc Québécois dispensation is set to begin: the Harper government will add House of Commons seats for Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, while maintaining the number of Quebec seats constant. As Susan Riley writes in The Ottawa Citizen"This overdue rebalancing will lessen Quebec's clout, not as a hostile strategy, but as the byproduct of simple math. Quebec now has 24 per cent of the seats in the 308-member Commons, and 23 per cent of the population. Because its population has not been growing as quickly as that of other provinces, its influence should, inevitably, wane. Numbers are implacable." (http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Scratching+wounds+Quebec/5276019/story.html#ixzz1VUQhuutX) But the NDP is resisting this rebalancing, which leads The National Post's Lorne Gunter (among others) to denounce the New Democrats as - you guessed it - "pandering" to Quebec and undermining democracy (http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/Putting%2Bpandering%2BQuebec%2Bahead%2Bdemocracy/5275650/story.html).
There is a real issue here, which won't go away by ignoring it or by calling it "old-style thinking" (a reader comment on The Toronto Star website, about my article on the Turmel affair). The House of Commons is an institution that is supposed to obey "Representation by population" criteria, and so it makes sense to reduce Quebec's relative weight as its population becomes relatively smaller. But if Quebec is a nation (or, as the House of Commons put it a few years ago, Quebecers form a nation) within Canada, it would also make sense for this characteristic to find its institutional expression(s) in the country's political-constitutional system. Canadian democracy as we know it is a complex multi-institutional construct, in which the federal government, the House and the Senate, the Supreme Court, and provincial institutions interact according to their own logics. (On top of this, civil society organizations and citizen involvement do much to breathe life in the institutions.)
The question is this: as the House of Commons rebalances Quebec downwards, how is Quebec's distinctiveness as a the national home of Quebecers to be expressed and protected in the system as a whole? This is essentially the question that the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords tried to answer a generation ago. Their failure, combined with the result of the 1995 referendum, put the question in abeyance. And it could stay there as long as no-one fiddled too much with the existing balance within and among the institutions. But, as Riley writes, "numbers are implacable:" the House eventually has to be rebalanced.
(Ironically, Paul Martin's prime-ministership was destroyed in its infancy by the sponsorship scandal because he felt it necessary to recall Parliament in early 2006 in order to pass re-districting legislation that had been put in limbo by Prime Minister Chrétien's unexpected prorogation in late 2005. Chrétien wanted to pre-empt the release of the Auditor General's report to Parliament until after he retired. Martin thought that, for the sake of democracy, re-districting was necessary before an election - in which he was hugely favorite to win a majority - and so he re-opened Parliament. This allowed the presentation of the AG's report, and the rest is history.)
Quebecers will not accept that their province's "influence should, inevitably, wane" (Riley). "Influence," however, is the wrong word: Quebecers don't care very much how Manitoba or British Columbia are governed, they don't seek to influence that. What they will not accept is that the representation of their interests, in federal institutions, be eroded. Hence, in the short term, the NDP's attempt to forestall the change in the House. But this cannot be a long-term solution. The House is properly a "rep-by-pop" institution, and therefore the continuing expression of Quebec's distinctiveness must be found elsewhere. This means some sort of constitutional change. And if Canadians outside Quebec cannot countenance this, if they - largely through their politicians and media pundits - can only denounce "pandering," they will guarantee the return of the sovereigntist movement, with a vengeance.
I know that many people hear this kind of talk as a threat: do what we want, or else... And I understand how it can sound like this. But it is a fundamental misunderstanding of Quebec's perspective. Quebecers know, as a basic fact of their political life, that they want to have the means to express, protect, and enhance their nationhood. And they are open to a variety of means to achieve this goal. So far, the majority believes that it can be accomplished within Canada. But if it comes to believe that it cannot, well, all bets are off. This is not a threat to Canada. It is, in fact, a remarkably open way of dealing with something that can become an existential threat: how do we ensure our continued existence as a people (a nation, dixit the House of Commons), given our small population - a population that is getting proportionately smaller every day?

mercredi 17 août 2011

Truth in "Royal" advertising

Newsflash: Canada is a monarchy! As the Harper government re-establishes the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Canadian Navy and explains the move in terms of celebrating the country's and its military's proud history, it's almost easy to forget that, right now, Canada is under Crown sovereignty. It's not for nothing, after all, that our naval ships have continued to bear the designation "Her Majesty's Canadian Ship" through the past decades of unified Forces and of the "Naval Command." But it's easy to not think about what the letters mean in the HMCS abbreviation.
To the extent that people get excited about the "Royal" change, you would think that the political battle lines would be easy to predict: the broadly republican Canadian Left and the Québécois nationalists would be against, while more conservative sorts would applaud - or at the most not care very much. The change is also bound to be popular within the (now ex-)Forces and among veterans who have been clamoring for this ever since the late 1960s. But then you get Jack Granatstein, of all people, to rail against the return of the RCAF and the RCN as "abject colonialism" (see The Globe and Mail's advertising of his live online discusion of the issue at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/royal-ruckus-is-military-name-change-worthwhile/article2132133/).
Granatstein is conservative, pro-military, and a historian. Given that trifecta, what's not to like about the return to the military's "Royal" past? Ah, but Granatstein is also a Canadian nationalist, who came of professional age precisely in the years of royal erasure, starting in the late 1960s. Canadian nationalism is very good at forgetting inconvenient realities - starting with the unsettled three-way relation between Quebec, indigenous peoples, and Canada. The country's continuing ties to British monarchy are also something that we like to forget about, except when (supposedly) cute young royals come to visit our rugged northern shores. As this summer's visit by William and Catherine showed abundantly, it was just lovely to be able to claim them as, somehow, our own - and we did fly them around on soon-to-be-RCAF-redesignated planes.
So, Granatstein's apparent pique points to a tension in the politics of the Harper government's celebration of our past and its royalist particulars. Yes, it aims to boost  conservative strands of Canadian nationalism, and it might succeed at least to some extent. In this sense, it is oriented not to the past at all, but rather to a particular Canada of the future: the conservative Canada that Harper aims to make, bit by stealthy bit. But, given the diverse origins of contemporary Canada's population, Quebec's continuing indifference (at the least) to Britain's monarchy, and decades of trying to forget our (also) continuing ties to the Crown, there exists the possibility of some republican backlash... even from some unexpected quarters.
Myself, I might be a little bit perverse but I'm all for the "Royal" change - under the heading of truth in advertising. I'm all about looking at the Canada of now: let's face the actually existing facts of "abject colonialism" in our daily and political-constitutional lives, and we'll see what happens.

jeudi 11 août 2011

Canada, giver of financial lessons?

"Been there, done that:" this is how some Canadians - including Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaking from Brazil - reacted to Standard & Poor's downgrading of the United States credit rating from AAA to AA+. Canada's rating was similarly lowered in the early 1990s, which opens the door to the superficial comparison: we were in trouble, we got our house in order, and now that the U.S. and Europe are in similar trouble (witness the rating drop), we are a model.
The quote above is from The Globe and Mail's Barry McKenna at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/commentary/barrie-mckenna/to-follow-canadas-example-us-tax-reform-essential/article2122284/. While McKenna offers a reasoned analysis of why the U.S. government needs to raise taxes in order to attack its deficit, he is also playing to the absurd notion that Canada's experience in the 1990s can teach the world something, at this juncture, about exit strategies and sound public finances.
In the early 1990s, the federal government's accumulated debt and annual budget deficits were high, and its credit rating was indeed downgraded. But the red ink was a result of two decades of slow economic growth outpaced by accumulating commitments of the welfare state. Many other developed countries were in a similar situation, and neo-liberal policy solutions were on the rise. The Canadian government returned to surplus budgets in less than a decade by privatizing (e.g. Air Canada, Petro-Canada, etc.), deregulating, downloading costs to provinces and municipalities, generally shrinking government commitments and payrolls, and profiting from the new Goods and Services Tax (G.S.T.). Canadian public finances were helped hugely by a fast-growing global economy. It was not a coincidence that the U.S. government during the Clinton presidency also came out of deep deficits and posted surplus after surplus.
And what have we now? There is no global economic engine that can pull a mid-size economy such as Canada's along, and most governments' policy preferrences (more neo-liberalism) will depress growth by trying too soon to put a cap on debt. In this depressed global economy, the U.S. and the European Union are struggling as much with their governance as they are with their debt: in very different ways, they are unable to establish the policies needed to stabilize debt while spurring growth. In the U.S. the Republican Party seems hell-bent on destroying the country's economy and, controlling the House of Representatives, it is in a position to carry out its threats. Meanwhile, the E.U. is suffering from a Euro zone that is either integrated too much or not enough, and member governments cannot agree on how to move forward. Canadian lessons, anyone? I think not.

mercredi 10 août 2011

Beginning with the Turmel affair and English-speaking Canadian blindness

So, this is how the blog starts. As a long-time observer of the Canadian political scene, I've often been driven crazy by the nonsense and knee-jerk quality of media-political discourse, and I often want to say: "hold on, and think about this for a moment." But there's not always time to write an op-ed, and few submissions would be accepted anyway.
In the past two weeks, several things happened that got me going. The first was the hysteria in English-speaking Canada about the ties to the sovereigntist movement of Nycole Turmel, the new interim leader of the New Democratic Party. I actually got an op-ed  about that in The Toronto Star, that is getting some interesting attention. It can be seen at: http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1036360--english-speaking-canada-blind-to-turmel-affair.
On the same topic, I will return soon, in French, to an op-ed from last week in Le Devoir by political scientist André Lamoureux.
Thirdly - the topic of my next post - there is the silly notion that Canada faced a debt crisis in the 1990s that can offer lessons to US and European government on how to get out of the world's current crisis. I first heard this howler by commentators, but then Prime Minister Stephen Harper also offered it in comments to the media during his trip to Brasil. This is one that cries out for debunking.