Sympathy For The Devil?

With tongue firmly ensconced in his cheek, Andrew Coyne writes that we are being too hard on Stephen Harper, a prime minister who has been cruelly betrayed by all those in whom he placed an absolute trust:

You will be familiar with the picture we have created of him: suspicious, paranoid, controlling, a leader who trusts no one, leaves nothing to others, insists on taking a hand in even the smallest matter. Well, you’d be suspicious, paranoid and controlling, too, if everyone around you was lying to you all the time.

Such deception would be enough to break the spirit of even the strongest person:

Consider what we have learned about the Duffy affair. More to the point, consider what he has learned. Wholly without his knowledge, several of his closest advisers, including his chief of staff, his principal secretary, and his legal counsel, together with his Senate house leader, the chairman of the Conservative party fundraising arm and the party lawyer, conspired over a period of several months to pay Duffy for his improperly claimed living expenses, then to pretend to the public that he had repaid them out of his own pocket, then to attempt to block, shut down, or rewrite a confidential audit, then finally to rewrite a Senate committee report so as to absolve Duffy of any fault.

To have the foundations of his world so shaken must have exacted an enourmous toll on Mr. Harper:

Imagine the sense of betrayal he must have felt — the vertigo, the nausea — as it slowly dawned on him that everything he had been led to believe about the whole affair was a lie: that in fact, everyone knew. Everyone, that is, but him. Imagine the humiliation, to have been played for a patsy in this way — him, Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada — and what is more, for the whole world to know it. He is a proud man, but not immune to feelings of self-doubt. Would anyone respect him now? Could he carry on as leader, if he were not master even of his own office?

And yet, while others might have lashed out in fury at the byzantine machinations of subordinates, the true character of the prime minister became apparent as he chose the road less travelled:

And yet, this good man, deceived, humiliated, betrayed on all sides, found it in his heart to forgive them. You or I, had we found ourselves in the same position, might have taken the most foul sort of revenge: fired the lot, paraded them in front of the media, forced them to answer for what they had done. But that is not, we can see now, Harper’s way: this supposedly ruthless autocrat, this cold, vindictive brute of caricature, responded to this monumental breach of trust with comprehensive mercy. No one was fired, though some were allowed to leave. Some are even travelling with him on his campaign. He was even going to forgive Wright, and would have, had it tested better.

"These are the times that try men's souls," wrote Thomas Paine. Out of this current political crisis confronting the prime minister, all Canadians have been presented the opportunity to see the stuff that Stephen Harper's soul is really made of.

He Won't Be Missed

H/t Michael de Adder

Anyone who regularly reads this blog will know that I (along with guest posters The Salamander and The Mound of Sound) regard Peter MacKay as just one of far too many blights on the political landscape, perhaps distinguished only by his less-than-pedestrian intellect and very public absence of integrity. The most egregious example of the latter occurred during a very public soul-selling transaction (most such deals, I assume, go on behind closed political doors). After promising David Orchard during what turned out to be the final leadership convention of the federal Progressive Conservatives that he would never merge the party with Alliance/Reform if he backed him for the leadership, a scant few weeks later MacKay showed the stuff of which he is made and did just that.

And with no apparent shame.

Undoubtedly, as occurs when a politician leaves the stage, a certain hagiography will develop around the departing MacKay. Happily, Andrew Coyne has no intention of joining in such an disingenuous charade. The title of his National Post piece says it all:

Peter MacKay was a politician of many titles, but little achievement

Harper made him his first foreign affairs minister, an appointment that caused great puzzlement in Ottawa, though not nearly as much as in other capitals, where the notion that the foreign minister should be something other than a placeholder for the prime minister still holds.

After 18 unmemorable months at Foreign Affairs, he replaced Gordon O’Connor at National Defence, where he oversaw a string of procurement bungles culminating in the F-35, whose costs the government understated by a factor of five, staving off Parliament’s demands for the real figures just long enough to win re-election.

Yet McKay's incompetence seemed to propel him to even greater heights of imeptitude within the Harper cabinet:

Then it was off to Justice, where he was responsible for shepherding a number of bills through Parliament that seemed almost designed to be found unconstitutional, even as Justice department lawyers were losing case after case at the Supreme Court.

Other than that, he is best remembered for his commandeering a military helicopter as personal transportation back from a fishing lodge, plus his broken romance with Belinda Stronach, after which he posed in a photo-op with with a borrowed dog as he 'licked' his romantic wounds.

Oh yes, according to Coyne, he also likes to play rugby.

What does MacKay's 'peter principle' rise ultimately tell us? Here is Coyne's uncompromising take:

His career at the top of Canadian politics tells us more about the state of Canadian politics than anything else. That such a palpable cipher could have remained in high office for nearly a decade is a testament to many things: the thinness of the Tory front bench, the decline of cabinet, the prime minister’s cynicism, the media’s readiness to go along with the joke. The one thing it does not signify is his importance. He had all of the titles, but little influence, and less achievement.

For me a cathartic article and post and a very welcome but overdue political departure.

A Failed Puppet Master?

In a withering assessment of Stephen Harper, that is the conclusion Andrew Coyne seems to draw in his National Post column:

We are so heavily invested, we media types, in the notion of Harper as master strategist, able to see around corners and think seven moves ahead and what not, that we tend not to notice how many times he has been screwing up of late. The sudden and more or less complete rewriting, on the same day as the Supreme Court decision, of the colossally misjudged Fair Elections Act, after weeks of waving off any and all criticism as self-interested or partisan or both? Merely a prudent bid to cut their losses. The unusual public goading of Barack Obama (“a no brainer … won’t take no for an answer… etc”) into making a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline project, six years after it was first proposed? Either a play to the base or a wink to the Republicans or a deliberate raising of the diplomatic stakes, anything but what it looks like: a catastrophic fumbling of a key file.

Indeed, perhaps this is all evidence of a very tired government, running only on the fumes of the hatred, dissension, and division it has sewn since 2006:

Observes Coyne:

It is reckless, not in the style of governments that overread their mandate, but in an aimless, scattershot way. It is partisan, but for no purpose other than stubbornness and tribalism. It will take every fight to the limit, pick fights if none present themselves, with no thought to the consequences of either victory or defeat but seemingly out of sheer bloodlust. Like the proverbial dog chasing the car, it has no idea what it will do when it catches it.

All but the most inveterate ideologues would likely agree that it is well past time for a change.

Back To Earth

I had planned this to be my first piece post-holiday, but Nelson Mandela's passing yesterday prompted my post about that giant who walked among us. I purposely kept it brief, since thousands upon thousands of words will be written about him in the days to come, a testament not only to his stature throughout the world but also, I suspect, to the rarity of such dignity, integrity, and moral greatness.

On to other matters.

One of the advantages to a week-long sojourn in Cuba, from which we returned late Wednesday night, is the fact that the Internet there is both slow and expensive; although I compulsively check my email at home several times a day, I feel no such urge when on the island nation. Consequently, I tend to catch up on the reading that I never seem to have enough time for while in Canada - retirement seems to impose its own disciplines, demands, and routines.

I always make sure to bring with me The Walrus magazine, a publication that does not shy away from longer forms of journalism. An article from a few months back made for some interesting reading. Entitled Repairing the House, now available online, its author, Andrew Coyne, offers an overview of the dysfunctional and essentially impotent Parliament we are all familiar with, a Parliament where backbenchers are little more than the proverbial trained seals doing the bidding of the party leader. Never has this been more evident than in the Harper administration, where all utterances are tightly scripted, predictable ('The Prime Minister has been very clear...') and limited. One has only to watch the incessant parroting that poses as answers both in Question Period or on shows such as Power and Politics to see this sad truth.

Yet Coyne suggests it needn't be this way.

Here are his observations and ideas for reform:

Prior to the 1919 Liberal national convention that elected Mackenzie King as its leader, party leaders in Canada had been chosen as they are in the classic Westminster model, still in force in Australia, for instance: by a vote of the caucus. It is this model, Coyne observes, that keeps the power of leaders from being overwhelming. It is what enabled, for example, the removal of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Kevin Rudd and his successor, Julia Gillard, in Australia. If practised in Canada it would, in Coyne's view, make party leaders more attentive to the concerns of ordinary MPs.

A related reform, lest a potentially rebellious member be subdued, is to the nomination of party candidates. In Canada, as a matter of law, no candidate may run for Parliament under a party banner without the signature of the leader on his or her nomination papers. It is therefore very easy for the leader to veto a nomination by withholding his/her signature. Coyne suggests leaving this process to the riding association.

A concomitant and necessary reform for this to work is in the riding association's nomination process:

It is beyond strange that in Canada, in the twenty-first century, nominations can still be decided by stacking meetings with instant members, hastily recruited for the occasion. A cleaned-up process for selecting candidates—if not formal voter registration, as in the United States, then at least a requirement that voters must have been party members for some decent interval—would seem therefore to be a third part of the solution.

Because of the reality of craven desire for power and advancement among our politicos, a fourth reform is necessary, argues Coyne - reducing the size of cabinet and changing the appointment process for key parliamentary positions.
Because cabinet is bloated at 39 positions (Coyne contrasts that with the U.S. at 16, about the same as Japan and Germany) it means MPs on the government side, if they keep their noses clean, have about a one in four chance of making it to cabinet (compare that to Britain, where the odds are more like one in twenty).

There is much more to the article, which I hope you will take the opportunity to read when time allows, but Coyne's ideas surely offer hope that things can be much better than they currently are, and would perhaps have the effect of renewing some faith in the democratic process and convincing more people to turn out at the polls, although I doubt that is something Harper and his cabal would like to see happen.

And yet some of these ideas may have the potential to be achieved, given that Michael Chong, conspicuous among Conservatives for his integrity, has introduced a private member's bill called the Reform Act. While limited in scope, it is nonetheless an encouraging sign.

So I am back on the political beat, where, regardless of whether I take a short or a long holiday, little ever seems to change for the better.

At Issue: Harper's Obfuscation

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary offers the following definition of obfuscate: to make obscure; to confuse. As an intransitive verb, it means to be evasive, unclear, or confusing.

I suspect that those engaged citizens following the details of the Senate scandal that continues to dog the Prime Minister and shows no sign of abatement would agree that both forms of the verb apply to the sad Nixonian performance of Stephen Harper and his operatives. During both Parliament's Question Period and TV interviews with the likes of his Parliamentary Secretary, Paul Calandra, the refrain is always the same: "I told Mr. Duffy to repay his inappropriate expenses," and "This was a secret deal between Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy."

As his channeling of Sgt Schultz grows increasingly predictable and tiresome, his credibility (if he really has any) diminishes proportionally. And yet to call the Prime Minister a liar would be unseemly for journalists, so euphemisms abound. Last night's At Issue Panel on The National offers some good examples; the discussion also leaves one with the very real sense of Andrew Coyne's barely contained disgust with the Prime Minister:

At Issue Panel Opines On Harper and the Scandal

I have a bit of a busy morning, so I only have time for a couple of short posts. For reasons I have indicated elsewhere, I rarely watch CBC's The National anymore. However, given yesterday's shameful and feeble refusal by the Prime Minister and his trained seals to address the rot engulfing his administration, I decided to watch a special At Issue Panel last evening.

Below, you can watch Andrew Coyne, Chantal Hebert and Bruce Anderson evaluate Mr. Harper's efforts:

Andrew Coyne On The Decline Of Parliament Under Harper

Despite his right-wing orientation, there has been unmistakable evidence in the work of Andrew Coyne this past year or so that conveys a clear disenchantment with the Harper regime. Using the sad spectacle of David Wilk's public humiliation, today in the National Post Coyne offers the re-education of the Kootenay-Columbia Conservative MP as an object lesson in how debased Parliamentary traditions have become under the nation's autocracy known as Harper Inc.

You Know The Conservatives Are In Trouble When

....they start losing some of their biggest cheerleaders.

Last Night's CBC At Issues Panel

As I do most Thursdays, I watched last night's At Issues Panel on the CBC's National News. As usual the panelists, Allan Gregg, Chantal Hebert, and Andrew Coyne had a lively but respectful discussion, this time on the many issues undermining the credibility of the Harper Government.

Allan Gregg made a disturbing suggestion; even though the issue of Harper's contempt for Parliamentary democracy has been especially manifest this week through House Speaker Miliken's two rulings, plus the fact that the Conservatives tabled demonstrably false cost estimates for the purchase of the F-35 fighter jets, he doubted that such will resonate with the public. He opined that the concept of Parliamentary democracy, so regularly violated by the Harper Government these past few years, may not mean much to the public, since nothing the Government does seems to be reflected in public opinion poll results.

That, plus the George Carlin video posted yesterday, got me thinking about the vital role that critical thinking plays in an informed and vital democracy. In the past I wrote fairly extensively on the topic, and if anyone is interested in either my thoughts or links on the subject, they can be found on my other blog, Education and Its Discontents.