Rick's Rant: About Those Conservative Newspaper Endorsements

Redoubtable Rick is relentless in his excoriation of both The Globe and Mail and The National Post for their corporate-driven endorsements of the Harper regime during our recent election:

He Is Either Supremely Arrogant Or Extremely Delusional

"He" would be the outgoing but hardly lamented Minister of Immigration and Citizenship, Chris Alexander, who allowed his transfixation with power to corrupt and ruin him. The damage may indeed be permanent.

As you will see in the following video report, his inability to purge himself of the Conservative Kool-Aid means he accepts no responsibility for the party's recent fall from power but blames everything on outside perfidious forces such as the Liberals debasing and poisoning the campaign culture and liberal media distorting the truth. This is hardly an encouraging augury of his potential for rehabilitation:

Potential And Reality

I remember when I first started teaching, everything seemed so clear, so obvious: students, for example, were no longer writing very well because they weren't taught grammar; a rigourous and systematic approach would fix that. I soon learned, however, that such a prescription was unspeakably naive. Like everything else, it did not exist in a vacuum, but rather was tied to so many other factors over which I had little or no control, such as family environment, motivation to read voluminously, etc., etc.

In some ways, and I really hope I am wrong, I wonder if Justin Trudeau's winning approach to electoral victory may partly mirror the naiveté I had so many years ago. After years of exposure to Stephen Harper's toxicity, expectations are very high among Canadians for a new political culture, and Trudeau's potential to disappoint is great. If he succeeds, his impact on the health of our democracy could be quite substantial.

Lawrence Martin writes that there is much to change:

If Canadians thought the operation run by Stephen Harper was ugly before, look at what we’re hearing now. Not from Mr. Harper’s opponents, but Conservatives themselves.

“They had almost a Stalinistic way of looking at things,” Philippe Gervais, a former Tory campaign co-director, told iPolitics . “You were either on-side, or you were dead.”

Here’s Geoff Norquay, the long-time Harper defender on TV panels. In the next edition of Policy magazine, he writes what the political operation was really like under Harper favourite Jenni Byrne: “They ran a closed circle, they humiliated staff, they berated candidates, they pushed every reasonable argument far beyond its logical limit, they shut out others with a different view.”

One of Trudeau's strongest suits is his style:

Style doesn’t make the man, but as Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy illustrated, it can change the morale, bring a new spirit to a country. Mr. Trudeau is no Reagan and he is no Kennedy but he has some of their charismatic attributes. If he doesn’t settle for half-measures, he could bring a new spirit.

That infusion of our waning spirits was clearly evident in the increasingly large crowds Trudeau attracted as the campaign wore on, and in the enthusiasm with which many greeted his majority government.

In more substantive matters, a test for the incoming prime minister will be how he handles dissent:

The wise leader doesn’t demand agreement from everyone in his party. If the news media gets all excited about an MP going offside on some issue, he should take it in stride, as in, “So what? That’s what a democracy is all about. The freedom to speak your mind.”

Lawrence Martin has several suggestions for Trudeau as his time in office draws near, but I'll end with one that I think all of us would agree upon:

To restore civility to our politics, Mr. Trudeau should ban personal attack ads. To restore sanity to Question Period, the Speaker needs to be empowered so that questions are answered.

Now wouldn't that be something to truly behold?

It Seems All The Rats Haven't Deserted The Ship

I was catching up on my reading today, enjoying a brief break from blogging, when I came upon this; it seemed too good not to share:


H/t Globe and Mail

The Virtues Of Civility

Probably one of the most obviously distressing aspects of the last ten years has been the precipitous drop in political civility, earmarked by fractious and factious exchanges in the House of Commons. No longer a chamber for informed debate, under the Harper reign it became a vehicle by which the government denigrated all opponents and thumbed its nose at the concept of transparency and accountability, thereby alienating the general population and discouraging people from any form of participation in the democratic process.

We live now with high hopes that will all change.

There is an encouraging story told by Susan Delacourt suggesting that our hopes have a chance of being realized:

I asked Trudeau: what was the big difference in his two lives on the Hill — as the son of a prime minister in the 1970s and 1980s and as a backbench MP in 2010?

Trudeau said he had two answers to that question: one he was accustomed to answering publicly, one he kept to himself.

First, the oft-repeated answer: he was surprised to realize how much he liked constituency work, helping people in his Montreal riding of Papineau. He had never seen that aspect of MPs’ work through his father, who had staff to handle issues in the riding.

As for the other answer, Trudeau looked around to see who might overhear him. Careful to keep his voice down, he said he was stunned to see how some MPs treated their staff, and the air of entitlement around them. He was truly surprised to learn that many staffers had to endure temper tantrums from their bosses. “Who do they think they are?” he said, glancing in the direction of an MP or two dining nearby.

Apparently, Justin learned a valuable lesson from his father when he was a child:

Trudeau then told me about how when he and his brothers were young, the only times they got in serious trouble with Pierre was when they showed disrespect to their RCMP protection officers. Overhearing the boys call one of the officers “Baldy,” Trudeau gathered them together and furiously scolded them, telling them that these men had families and lives they were putting on the line to watch over them.

This is not a prime minister who is going to rule with fear, it seems.

Basic decency and empathy are qualities I think most of us try to practise in our daily lives. To see them applied in the public arena would, without question, mark a radical and highly desirable shift in our political culture.

Meanwhile, Beyond Our Borders

The world of U.S. politics is proving to be consistent in its insanity. Watch the following video in which Republican hopeful Ben Carson says, at about the 3:20 mark, what he would use the Department of Education for:



Can a holographic resurrection of Joseph McCarthy be far behind?

On The Post-Election Employment Prospects Of The Harper Fallen

In Power Play's Don Martin's considered opinion, they are decidedly dim: