The most significant political event of post-Second World War Canada may be the enactment of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It has transformed a country obsessed with the federal-provincial division of powers and enabled it to address its diversity in a substantive, principled way. This was not inevitable. Credit is due in large part to the quality of the judicial branch of governance and, obviously, to the legal profession.

It often takes less foresight than good luck to succeed. The Charter of Rights could have gone the path of its disappointing predecessor, the Canadian Bill of Rights – a modest instrument of guidance to courts reluctant to challenge elected officials.

Many things contributed to the Charter’s central role in our constitutional democracy. At least three were counterintuitive.

The notwithstanding clause: This allowed legislators to override protected rights. Offensive to legal purists, it proved to be the perfect political compromise – designed to preserve the supremacy of elected officials, it, in fact, allowed the courts to avoid undue deference to them.

The three-year moratorium on equality rights: Conceived to give Parliament and the provincial legislatures an opportunity to make laws compliant with the Charter, it had the effect of ensuring that the first cases to come to the courts were familiar ones. It was a small step for the courts to strike down writs of assistance and enforce the right to counsel, a modest increase in the exercise of their common law powers. Had they been confronted at the outset with issues such as mandatory retirement or even women’s rights, they may have been much more hesitant to strike down offensive legislation, thereby creating a different, narrower scope for judicial review.

The Court Challenges Program: This was an admirable companion to the Charter. It expressed the government’s faith and commitment to rights enforcement, by equipping litigants and civil-society organizations with the ability to access the courts. This, in turn, provided the courts with high-quality Charter litigation without which the remarkable early Charter jurisprudence might have taken much longer to develop.

Many will deplore so-called judicial activism and the legalization of politics. They are wrong. Fundamental rights enforced by independent courts enrich a democracy that has set constitutional limits on itself. Charter litigation has provided a high-quality intellectual forum in which to debate issues that are not best left to majority diktat. Led by the Supreme Court, the Canadian judiciary has defined its proper place in constitutional governance. First assertive and willing to undertake substantive review of legislation, it has set a predictable framework for acceptable limitations on rights and avoided an adversarial relationship with Parliament, preferring dialogue to confrontation.

Unlike the U.S. judiciary, Canadian courts have, for the most part, avoided the taint of partisan political allegiances that erodes confidence in the judicial process. My own career would be unimaginable in the United States. I had three federal judicial appointments: to the Ontario High Court, to the Court of Appeal and then to the Supreme Court of Canada – the first two by a Conservative government, the last one under a Liberal one. Canadian judicial writing is accessible, often consensual, and dissent always respectful. It has set the tone for the peaceful resolution of some of the most divisive issues in any society.

Unfortunately, political parties have been impoverished by the rise of judicial prominence, or perhaps simply in parallel to it. The disenchantment with political life is currently widespread in mature democracies. But in terms of substance, the calendar of the Supreme Court of Canada compares very favourably with the platform of political parties.

From a global perspective, Canada now stands in an envious position in terms of quality of institutional governance. As democracy spreads over the world, it doesn’t always reach far beyond the setting of relatively free and fair elections. This often leads to stronger executive power and, at times, to a reasonably efficient legislative branch. Rarely is any attention given to the role of a professional, independent judiciary. It takes decades to construct, but in the resolution of conflicts, inevitable in any country, the rule of law is the best investment.

Louise Arbour is president and CEO of the International Crisis Group.

< http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/how-the-charter-helped-define-canada/article2401331/ >

In a photograph from 1968, Bob Rae sits near the end of a long conference table, with shaggy hair and tweed jacket, holding a pipe in his mouth with a stem as long as a stiletto. The Vietnam War has polarized the academic community and the university is in upheaval. Mr. Rae is 20 and a member of the newly instituted university commission on governance, a radical experiment in opening the upper echelons of the ivory tower to the lowliest members of the academy.

He has been invited there, as a rising student activist, to voice his views to Claude Bissell, then president of the University of Toronto, a man old enough to be his father – indeed, Mr. Bissell went to school with Mr. Rae’s diplomat father, Saul, in the 1930s.

Four decades later, that table has turned: Mr. Rae is now 63, and his hair is snow white (although there’s lots of it) and his skin is ruddy and wrinkled, and he has just presided over a Liberal Party policy convention where more than a third of the delegates are under 30. Like Mr. Rae in his youth, they have a voice (now amplified by social media) and they intend to use it. One signal was a new set of rules for choosing leaders that should put an end to old boys in backrooms deciding whom to anoint.

“The whole top-down politics is changing,” says Mr. Rae’s erstwhile rival and recent ally, former Ontario Liberal premier David Peterson. “There’s an Arab Spring taking over politics everywhere and you are going to have younger, media-savvy different ways of communicating. It won’t just be the same old baloney you and I know from watching politics.”

You might argue that’s just what the Liberals need. The party of Wilfrid Laurier and Pierre Trudeau, the one that likes to dub itself the natural governing party of Canada, is in rough shape. The last time it won a majority in the House of Commons was in 2000, when Jean Chrétien was prime minister. Since he stepped down in 2003, the Liberals have turnstiled through three leaders: Paul Martin, Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, each more improbable than the last. They didn’t just lose the federal election on May 2 – they were walloped, losing their status as the Official Opposition and limping into third place behind the governing Conservatives. It was the party’s worst showing in its history.

Mr. Rae is no longer the young prophet in the academic temple, the Rhodes Scholar, the NDP finance critic who toppled Joe Clark’s government on a budget motion in 1979 or the surprise winner of the 1990 Ontario election, the first NDP premier ever elected east of Manitoba. He carries the burdens of what happened after that: the infamous “Rae Days,” crossing the floor from the NDP to the Liberals, and perhaps flip-flopping on his promise not to seek the party leadership again.

For now, he is caught in limbo, allowed to be interim leader so long as he doesn’t admit publicly that he wants the job for real. But he also was voted parliamentarian of the year by Maclean’s magazine in November, delivered three barn-burner speeches at the policy convention two weeks ago – without a Teleprompter – and has soared to 35 per cent in the approval ratings, according to an Angus Reid poll released this week.

“If the election were today, we would be begging Bob to run, because there’s nobody else,” Mr. Peterson says. “He’s a smarter guy than he was. He’s had more experience, he’s learned the game and he’s battle-ready.”

The one flaw Mr. Rae can’t bat away is his age. “You have to think ahead in this business,” Mr. Peterson says. “Is he the right guy to lead the party in four years’ time, in the only race that matters?”

That’s the rub: This could have been Mr. Rae’s moment, but there isn’t going to be an election any time soon. It’s unlikely Prime Minister Stephen Harper will visit the Governor-General to ask for a dissolution of his parliamentary majority until 2015. Mr. Rae will be 67 by then, and probably 70 before he, or his party, could realistically expect to move into 24 Sussex. Will it be his fate to have been the right man at the wrong time?

The Liberals invited communications guru Don Tapscott to be their keynote speaker at the convention in part because of his reputation for understanding the Millennial generation. He isn’t counting Mr. Rae out. “It would be reasonable to conclude that anybody of Mr. Rae’s age is yesterday’s man,” he says. But, in fact, Mr. Rae is one of the people “driving this vision” of the party as an engaged, open network that reaches out across all kinds of channels to build community and draw young people into a real discussion about ideas.

“The party needs a leader who understands this generation, their culture, their modus operandi, and embraces it,” Mr. Tapscott says, “and I don’t care if that person is 20 or Methuselah.”

Is that the new Bob Rae? Mr. Rae certainly thinks so, although he insists he hasn’t decided whether he wants to be permanent leader. Listening and patience are the biggest differences in him, he says. Being the smartest person in the room doesn’t cut it any more. The key is “learning how to make sure you get people working for you who are even smarter than you, and that you aren’t afraid of them. … That’s something you’ve got to figure out.”

And some of the younger Liberals agree: “My opinion of Bob Rae has changed since he has become interim leader,” says Ryan Barber, 31, president of the Liberal riding association in Simcoe North. “He’s had 20 years to toughen up and articulate why his critics are wrong and he is right. Our last two leaders got blindsided because they were relatively inexperienced in being in a leadership role and they didn’t see it coming. … I think Bob has shown in a lot of interviews that he isn’t knocked off course by a tough comment or an attack. Bob’s personality strikes you as the person who beats up the bully in the schoolyard.”

That may just be enough to make him leader. But is it enough to get time back on Mr. Rae’s side?

The two Bobs

After the party convention, the Liberals are pumped, and nobody more so than Mr. Rae. He hits the ground running, using the lag time between the convention and the reopening of the House of Commons on Monday to cross the country visiting community colleges on a skills-and-trades tour. I catch up with him on Tuesday morning at the Centre for Hospitality & Culinary Arts at George Brown College in Toronto. Wearing a white chef’s jacket and toque, he tours the various prep rooms shaking hands, asking questions.

For most of his career, there have been two Bob Raes: the public performer who comes alive in the spotlight and the socially awkward, distant guy who seems preoccupied at a dinner party. The first Mr. Rae was in full tilt at the convention, exhorting delegates to “go forth and, for heaven’s sake, multiply!” But the other Mr. Rae, the distracted, self-absorbed one, seems to have vanished. At the culinary institute, he seems goofy in his outfit but genuinely interested in meeting the students and watching them knead dough, roll pretzels or fashion delicate roses to decorate wedding cakes, skills they will use to seek jobs in an economy about as tough as the one Mr. Rae faced as premier of Ontario in the 1990s.

Intrigued by a garish sculpture of three swans, including a black one floating on an inky pool of caramelized sugar, he stops for a closer look. “Could you make a loon?” he asks wistfully. This is a glimpse of a more private Rae, the son of a peripatetic diplomat’s family who got his sense of home from the one-acre island that the family bought at Big Rideau Lake in the fall of 1956, where Mr. Rae has spent nearly every summer since.

“We watch the loons by day and listen to their primeval cries at night,” he wrote in his 1996 memoir, From Protest to Power. The lake is where the family spread his younger brother David’s ashes after he died of complications of leukemia in 1989, and where “I know the same will be done one day for me.”

Mr. Rae was born Aug. 2, 1948, in Ottawa, the third of four children of Saul Rae and his wife, Lois. His maternal grandmother, Nell, the daughter of a Clyde shipyard draftsman, was born near Glasgow, where she met and married Willy Cohen, a tailor and the son of Jewish refugees from Lithuania. They eventually immigrated to Canada, settling first in Winnipeg and then Toronto, where the Cohens became the Raes (a circumstance Mr. Rae didn’t know until he was an adult).

Nell Rae took in boarders to put food on the table, and turned her offspring into a vaudeville musical act called the Three Little Raes of Sunshine. Grace, the eldest, eventually became a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall; Jackie, the youngest, earned a Distinguished Flying Cross as a Spitfire pilot in the Second World War, and became a singer-songwriter and a producer of TV variety shows; Saul, the middle child, was the brainiest, so his mother wrangled him a scholarship to the University of Toronto.

It was there that Saul met George Ignatieff, with whom he also went on to Oxford and then into the External Affair Department in the diplomatic swirl around Lester Pearson in the 1940s and 1950s. He met and married a British, Cambridge-trained historian named Lois George and together they raised their four children in diplomatic postings in Washington, Ottawa and Geneva.

Bob Rae inherited the intellect, the fateful connection to the Ignatieff family and the love of song and dance, though he mainly keeps that last one under wraps these days.

Party man

Mr. Rae had his first brush with the Liberal Party as a student, working for Pierre Trudeau at the leadership convention in 1968 – by then, his older brother, John, was a staffer for Jean Chrétien and his sister, Jennifer, was working on Mr. Trudeau’s media team. But Mr. Rae didn’t think of himself as a Liberal. He sensed a smugness in the party, and he was wary of what he saw as a conservative streak in Mr. Trudeau. As he described himself in From Protest to Power, “I was a thoroughgoing democrat, whose socialism was never Marxist and always pragmatic.”There are some people, NDP stalwart Stephen Lewis among them, who think Mr. Rae persuaded himself that he was something he wasn’t – a social democrat.

After university, Mr. Rae won the Rhodes Scholarship that had eluded his father and went off to Balliol College at Oxford in 1969. He flourished in the intellectual stimulation of tutors such as Isaiah Berlin, but socially he was out of place in tradition and class-ridden England.Unable to see his future, he fell into a lengthy depression.

Friends like Michael Ignatieff, who was doing a doctorate at Harvard, helped, as did extensive therapy. But he was energized by working on behalf of poor tenants in a legal-aid clinic in North London. Fixing things – institutions, people, political parties – became a lifelong preoccupation: It led to his return to Canada, a law degree, a practice as a labour lawyer and his decision to run for the NDP in a federal by-election in 1978, when Ed Broadbent was leader of the party and Mr. Trudeau was prime minister.

Within the year, Mr. Trudeau had called and lost an election, Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark had become prime minister, and Mr. Broadbent had appointed the eager, media-savvy Mr. Rae – the only NDPer elected in Toronto – as finance critic. From this perch, he successfully presented an amendment to Mr. Clark’s budget bill and brought down the government. It was Dec. 12, 1979. Mr. Rae was 31.

Another election, in February, 1980, saw Mr. Trudeau emerge from the shadows to win a majority government. Mr. Rae held on to his seat. Five days later, he married Arlene Perly, his political soulmate and now the mother of his three grown daughters. Meanwhile, the Ontario NDP came calling.

Nurtured by Donald C. Macdonald over the decades, the party had flourished under Stephen Lewis in the early 1970s, forming the official opposition in 1975. Now, though, it was floundering and Michael Cassidy had decided to step down as leader after the party’s disappointing results in the 1981 election. Who better to come to the fore than Mr. Rae, the Tory-government slayer and repository of quick barbs in Question Period?

A private dinner was arranged with Mr. Rae, Mr. Lewis and their wives at the home of a mutual friend in Toronto, and Mr. Lewis was “very cheered” by Mr. Rae’s interest.

But, while driving home afterward, Mr. Lewis’s wife, journalist and feminist Michele Landsberg, turned to him, the way that wives often do at the end of an evening, and said: “Did you not understand that he is not one of us? His basic convictions are not ours.”

Mr. Lewis replied, as husbands often do: “Are you crazy?”

As history unfolded – with the NDP’s move to the centre, the Liberal-NDP accord after the 1985 election, the NDP’s surprising victory in 1990 and Mr. Rae’s desperate attempts to cope with the deep recession of the early 1990s and the loss of more than 300,000 manufacturing jobs in the cataclysmic adjustment to free trade – Mr. Lewis says he came to see that his wife “was entirely and totally right.”

He cheerfully admits that “she’s never let him forget it,” especially when Mr. Rae instituted the Social Contract, in which public-sector employees kept their jobs but were forced to take two or three unpaid holidays a week – the notorious Rae Days, which lost him support on the left even as he was being pummelled over deficits and affirmative-action policies by the right, and led to the landslide election of Mike Harris’s Tories in 1995.

Mr. Rae resigned his own seat in 1996 and quit the party in 1998, but it wasn’t until 2002 that he published an opinion piece in the press announcing a definitive break with the NDP, saying its economic policies (as well as its position on Israel) had become out-of-touch. And it was only in 2006 that he joined the Liberals and made his first run for the leadership, losing to Mr. Dion. He returned to Parliament as the Liberal member for Toronto Centre in 2008, then lost a second leadership contest to Mr. Ignatieff that summer.

Mr. Rae says he always knew that he wasn’t an ideologue. But, as premier, he had to confront rhetoric with pragmatism and, for somebody who had always excelled at politics, the failure of his own ambitions.

For his part, Mr. Lewis believes that Mr. Rae has “an extraordinary and uncanny political ability” and is “one of the most able politicians in the country,” but “he seems a thousand times more comfortable as a Liberal than he ever did a New Democrat.”

There was more going on in Mr. Rae’s rocky performance as premier than lousy economic times, Mr. Lewis says: “He was a Liberal acting as a New Democratic premier and he didn’t know how to integrate the two into his performance,” he said. “And now he is a Liberal acting as a Liberal and he is totally comfortable.”

The best defence . . .

“What Bob Rae has to worry about are the attack ads,” a pal proclaimed at a Toronto dinner party just after Christmas, alluding to the Conservative tradition of ad-hominem assaults, dating back to Kim Campbell and the television images ridiculing Jean Chrétien’s facial deformity in the 1993 election campaign, but especially the way the Conservatives lacerated both Mr. Dion and Mr. Ignatieff – the latter with the much-repeated slogan “He didn’t come back for you.”

On the eve of the Liberal policy convention, the Conservatives tipped their hand that they considered Mr. Rae a leadership threat by issuing a statement ridiculing the Liberals for being like “lemmings,” ready to follow him off the edge of a political cliff.

Mr. Rae came out swinging in a blistering defence of his tenure as premier of Ontario before the caucus, saying, “I was a piker compared to Jim Flaherty and Stephen Harper. Better a Rae Day than a Harper lifetime.” He was still at it the following week in an interview with GeorgeStroumboulopoulos, delivering a “just watch me” diatribe worthy of Mr. Trudeau during the October Crisis.

In conversation, Mr. Rae, who has always said politics is more like “hockey than ballet,” is less heated but equally insistent that he can and will defend his record. But he has a few other arrows in his quiver aside from toughness. He credits his experiences as a mediator and as an international representative with improving his “basic ability to interconnect.”

He says he is also “a lot more relaxed than I used to be. I genuinely enjoy meeting people and going on tours, and I think that has allowed me to put things in perspective.”

As well, unlike Mr. Dion or Mr. Ignatieff, Mr. Rae is a known quantity. His record as premier has been minutely documented, beginning with Thomas Walkom’s excoriating condemnation, Rae Days: The Rise and Follies of the NDP, in 1994. Can there possibly be any more skeletons in that Queen’s Park broom closet?

No, says Ms. Perly Rae, a fervent supporter of her husband’s record and abilities. “He’s got the wisdom and the learning, but there is nothing else to reveal,” she says. “There is a slightly brash confidence that comes when you are young, but suddenly to be hurled into the premiership was a big job. He’s more relaxed now. He’s more fun.”

An entire generation has grown up since Mr. Rae’s government was defeated in 1995. In the meantime, as a self-defined “recovering politician,” he developed a reputation for taking on difficult issues: the Air India bombing, the restructuring of the Red Cross, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the crisis at Burnt Church and nation-building in the Forum of Federations.

That’s the way Mr. Rae sees the interim leadership – as a challenge to fix the Liberal Party. “This is more complicated because it is a political party and everything is done in public.”

Comeback kid

Mr. Rae is far from being the first politician to come out of the wilderness and back into the fray. The list includes Robert Bourassa in Quebec, Mr. Chrétien and even Richard Nixon in the U.S.

But is he too old? “Bullshit,” he says.

At the convention, I heard him use an even stronger expletive, after pointing out that his grandmother, Nell, had lived to be 107 and that his mother was doing just fine at 97. “My generation are going to want to stay active, and frankly they are going to have to, in many cases,” he says. Rather than age, he wants to talk about experience and vision.

Mr. Barber, the delegate from Simcoe North, who is also a teacher at a correctional centre in Penetanguishene, Ont., agrees, citing Jean Chrétien as an example. He was dubbed “yesterday’s man” when he became Liberal leader in 1990, but went on to win three majority governments.

“People re-elected Jean Chrétien consistently because he had a good sense of what the Canadian public wanted,” Mr. Barber says. “And that is something we have lost. Bob, for all of his history, is very forward-looking.”

Mr. Barber thinks that the party needs to absorb the lesson of the current NDP, which is dropping in the polls after the death of Jack Layton. “You need a really good organization and a strong leader. If you are missing one or the other, your success isn’t going to last.”

The only way to have both is to open up the institution – as Mr. Bissell, the University of Toronto president, did when Mr. Rae was a student – and let a younger generation participate in rebuilding for a new, more democratic age.

That process, led by Mr. Rae, will draw in more leadership candidates, Mr. Barber is betting, and that’s a good thing – for the party and Mr. Rae. He has “made the job look attractive again.”

Sandra Martin is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.

< http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/the-liberals-need-a-new-leader-what-about-bob/article2318206/singlepage/#articlecontent >

Where will you be and what will you be doing when the first giant oil tanker (there will be two every three days), carrying over 200,000 gallons of tar sands goop diluted with solvent, spills its load into the pristine waters of the northern B.C. coast?

We often remember catastrophic events by recalling exactly what we were doing and where we were when we first heard the news, I guess because they were so unthinkable they brought us to a halt, emotionally and psychologically — time stopped. I was driving down a street in Waterloo, Ontario when I heard the news of the Montreal Massacre, and I can still vividly recall my stomach turning as disbelief turned to revulsion. I will never forget that moment. And you will never forget the oil spill moment, if we let it happen.

When global oil companies run your country — when they own your government — economic and environmental catastrophes are guaranteed. In Canada, the oil companies and the Harper government know that an oil spill catastrophe is coming. The precautionary principle, rooted in the notion of the common good and established on a foundation of science, has no place in the calculations of global capital. It is replaced by risk assessment, cost/benefit analysis. But the assessment isn’t aimed at ensuring something bad won’t happen as it seems to imply. It is based on a cost/benefit analysis. How much will the oil spill cost? That it will happen is actually part of the calculation. Remember the Ford Pinto?

Stephen Harper muses about the evil being practiced by environmental and “other radical groups” as they engage in the democratic process provided to them (the hearings on the Enbridge pipeline) by his government. It’s as if by doing exactly what they are called upon to do, they are endangering the nation. This follows Harper’s repeated talk about the pipeline being necessary for the good of the country and the economy — and his declaration that anyone who criticizes the tar sands or the pipeline is sabotaging the economy. He calls them “ideological.” But ideology is meaning in the service of power — and all of it to date is coming from Harper and Big Oil.

This spinning is part of the preparation his government needs as it plans to first denigrate, and second ignore, the environmental panel set to spend 18 months examining the pipeline and its impacts. He needs to undermine the panel’s work, because we already know the project’s impact. The opposition will be backed by science and popular opposition. Any panel decision that gives the go-ahead for Gateway will be one that ignores virtually all the evidence. To maintain its credibility, the panel may well rule against it and force Harper to reject its findings. And without a massive public campaign that can actually threaten Conservative-held ridings in B.C., that is what will happen.

PM’s oil patch blind spot?

Harper’s dogged dedication to the oil patch could be his undoing as it privileges one sector of the economy at the expense of virtually all the others (except the financial sector which, with government borrowing and the CMHC ensuring mortgages, never loses). This puts the Harper government in a different category than previous neo-liberal governments of Mulroney, Chretien and Martin. All of these governments and their leaders developed most policy positions at the behest of the Business Council on National Issues, now the Canadian Council of Chief Executives.

By delivering on the list of priorities (Paul Martin was presented with an even 10 in 1994 and delivered on them all), Canadian governments pre-Harper actually balanced their promotion of corporate interests. This was, said the 150 CEOs, good for the economy — that is, their economy. The BCNI/CCCE represented the biggest players in all the key sectors and their policy interests were balanced by the time the package of preferences (demands?) were presented to the sitting finance minister.

That practice, where no budget was ever presented to Parliament before being vetted by the most powerful CEOs in the country, effectively ended when Stephen Harper became prime minister. The smartest man in the room does not take kindly to being told what to do, even by the most powerful. It might have something to do with the fact that they can’t buy favours anymore, with the new election financing rules.

But actually, it goes back 20 years to the formation of the Reform Party where Stephen Harper, as Preston Manning’s policy director, blended neo-liberal policies with culturally conservative policies to create a wholly new phenomenon: a right-wing libertarian party posing as populist to ensure a loyal and generous base. Of course, it was Manning who led the party. He had carefully chosen the timing (having got it wrong once before) to coincide with a growing populist discontent amongst prairie and Alberta Conservatives who felt betrayed by Mulroney.

But he and his party needed a kick start. And fortunately for him, the oil companies were eager to find someone who could put together just such a party — one that would never mess with them again. The national energy policy of Pierre Trudeau still traumatized them and they wanted insurance that no one would ever get their hands on their oil. One renegade oil man told me, laughing, that people in the oil industry really, really believe that because they found it, it belongs to them — any tax paid or royalty extracted is simply theft.

The oil men knew Manning, having researched him, and believed he might just fit the bill. But seeing as they were paying the tab to get the party off the ground (an expensive proposition), they wanted Manning close by where they could keep an eye on him, and they wanted him to immerse himself in oil industry political culture to make it the dominant driver of the party. So they insisted that he move from Edmonton to Calgary. Manning obliged. And that was the beginning of the Big Oil Party, brilliantly peddled as a party of the little man, all the while planning policies that would impoverish him.

And by declaring themselves a Western party — the slogan was ”The West wants in” — Manning and Harper reinforced the importance of Alberta, its American-inspired sense of hyper-independence and, of course, its oil. Indeed, this sense of profound difference that dominates the ruling political elite — reflected in the “firewall letter” penned by Harper and others — contributes to the privileging of the oil industry in Canada. Not only was Alberta the most “free market” province of all, it was the one that resisted most vigorously the social democratic state that evolved in the 1960s.

Three fronts to the pipeline battle

Many people from all sides of the political divide, including former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed, have pointed out that the rapid expansion of the tar sands is just really bad economic and energy policy. It is also extremely bad national security policy.

Most of Quebec and the Maritime provinces rely exclusively for their oil on the Middle East producers — the so-called “unethical oil” of Harper’s spinmeisters. Sending oil to China that could otherwise make the whole country self-sufficient is not just an absence of a national energy policy, it is a declaration the Harper government simply isn’t national and has no intention of becoming so.

But for all Harper’s touted strategic genius, he sometimes seems perversely stuck to a policy that will actually hurt him. He couldn’t resist bashing culture in the middle of the 2008 election and infuriated Quebec, probably losing a majority. This time he is tying his political future in a high-stakes fight (it will dwarf anything seen before) for a pipeline which the majority of oiligarchs thinks is not even needed. Maybe he likes fighting with one hand tied behind his back.

There seem to be three fronts in this battle, each of them distinct and each playing a key and overlapping role with the others. The first comprises the scores of NGOs, First Nations, community groups and individuals who will bury the assessment committee in first rate evidence of the madness of the project and its looming, serial disasters. Then comes the provincial government of B.C. which, under the Liberals, is schizophrenic on the issue but may yet come out against the project. But under the NDP, who I predict will win handily in 2013 around the time the panel reports, the provincial government must be persuaded to use every power at its disposal to halt this monstrosity. And lastly, folks in the formal political arena (with the help of the NGOs) have as their task identifying 10 or 12 or more Conservative MPs for defeat on this issue.

All of this is ongoing at different levels and speeds. And if you are not a part of any of these political fronts, you need to take out your cheque books or credit cards and ask yourself how much it is worth to not experience that horrible moment you will never forget. Not sure who to give to? Here are five groups which my sources suggests are using their resources and strategic intelligence most effectively: West Coast Environmental Law, Headwaters Initiative, Dogwood Initiative, Friends of Wild Salmon and the Wilderness Committee. They — though not just them — are your voice. Make it powerful.

< http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2012/01/16/Big-Oil-Party-of-Canada/?utm_source=mondayheadlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=160112 >

Germany’s case is buttressed by Canada’s experience

The night of the Quebec referendum on October 30th, 1995 portrayed Canada at its worst. The palpable fear in the markets was keyed off deep intertwined concerns about the country’s fiscal, economic and political circumstances. Recall this was a period when a respected US financial daily slammed Canada as a ‘banana republic’, yet curiously such references to its home country are absent today. I’m paraphrasing from memory, but it was also a period when the nation’s political leaders dismissed capital markets critics as “armchair observers who wouldn’t know how to run a country.” Such a market-unfriendly back drop understandably drew the ire of rating agencies through multiple downgrades, as well as bond markets as the country faced the threat of break up and dissolution of monetary union. Simply put, Canada then was Europe today.

Within this context, the point to this note is to reject a popular argument from those who say Canada faced an easier time at restructuring its finances (chart 1) than either the US or Europe would today.

< chart1.jpg >

Their argument is historical revisionism at best, and shameful affirmation of today’s global fiscal malfeasance at worst. In what follows below, we argue that the US and core Eurozone economies face arguably easier conditions within which to pursue necessary fiscal and political reforms today than Canada faced back then – and yet Canada never resorted to the monetary printing presses back before the western world went mad in seeing this as the solution to decades of fiscal profligacy. We do so through eight then-and-now comparisons, and our broad argument is that Canada’s past experience lends support to Germany’s current opposition to non-sterilized bond buying by the ECB and other short-term solutions in favour of accelerated fiscal austerity and reforms. The only long-run viable policy solution for the ultimate survival of the Eurozone is through reining in the purse strings, as other policy options would only build upon imbalances and further intensify the odds that the eurozone experiment ultimately fails.

1. Unstable Politics

The US, France, and Germany are among the significant global economies facing elections over 2012-13. A common argument is that this makes it harder for these countries to pursue fiscal austerity today. Political instability in Canada during the 1990s, however, occurred as a backdrop to aggressively pursuing fiscal austerity. The Quebec referendum was the culmination of years of political acrimony particularly accentuated by the Meech Lake constitutional discord—all set against the back drop of rating downgrades and an enormous debt burden. Canada also faced tumultuous federal election campaigns throughout its efforts toward fiscal repair including 1993 and 1997. The Liberals who led the effort toward fiscal repair were rewarded with a third consecutive majority government in 2000.

A second proposition within a comparison of political regimes is that the very possibility of a break up of the eurozone makes this crisis different than what Canada experienced. This, however, was at least as great of a threat facing Canada in 1995. Great fear existed at the time over how the debts would be split if Quebec pulled out of Confederation, and whether Quebec would abandon Canadian monetary union with the separatists sometimes advocating joining the USD, or creating another currency. The very survival of Confederation was at stake, including through the perceived alienation of the western provinces in particular. Massive divisions existed across federal and provincial levels of government that almost ripped the country apart. The mountain of debt and the controversial push by the Federal government toward solving it in part on the backs of the provinces almost broke up Canada. Eventually federalism won in Canada simultaneous to achieving fiscal repair and it is this twin battle that Europe must fight now with the same stakes in play.

2. World Growth

It’s a fallacy that it was easier for Canada to right its fiscal ship because the world economy was growing much faster during the period in which it brought its debt-to-gdp ratio lower starting from the 102% peak in 1996 through to the 80% range by the early 2000s and the 66.5% trough in 2007. For a commodity producer and trading nation like Canada, it is world GDP that matters, and the country’s fiscal progress was achieved despite the Asian financial crisis, Russia’s technical default and eurozone debt market turmoil that contributed toward the collapse of a major hedge fund, and the dot-com bubble’s popping. Achieving fiscal repair in the context of severe strains on the world economy is something that Canada experienced long before the present day. World GDP growth was only in the 2-3 percent range from 1990 through 1995, only accelerated to about 4% growth in 1996-97, and then abruptly slowed again to the 2 1/2% – 3 1/2% mark over 1998-99 when the Asian financial crisis hit. The dot com bubble period lifted world growth to 4.8% in 2000 and then it crashed again to a two-handled pace in 2001-02 at about the same time that 9/11 hit, yet it was just after this point that much of Canada’s fiscal repair had been achieved. This contrasts to the ease with which Europe and the US could have achieved fiscal consolidation during the 2004-07 period when global growth soared to the 5% range in each year. That would have been a far more hospitable back drop to world growth for US and European fiscal austerity than anything Canada experienced in the 1990s. After collapsing in 2009, world GDP growth was 5.1% in 2010 and we are projecting it to slow to 3.8% this year, 3.7% in 2012 and 4.0% in 2012. That is still not outside of the bounds of world growth experienced by Canada in the 1990s.

3. U.S. Growth

A further fallacy is that Canada could achieve fiscal repair only thanks to the back drop of decent US economic growth. This argument is heard more from foreign sources than from those who recall the experiences from within the Canadian market at the time. There are two key arguments against this.

First, most of Canada’s fiscal improvement in the 1990s was achieved through domestic program expenditure reduction—not through revenue gains keyed in part off of US growth influences on Canada (chart 2).

< chart2.jpg >

Federal government program spending as a share of GDP dropped from 17.4% in FY1992-93 to about 12% by FY2000-01. This five full percentage point reduction in program spending swamped any changes in revenues, as revenues were largely flat at about 18% as a share of GDP. Of this reduction in program spending, major transfers to other levels of government only accounted for a relatively small portion of the cut backs as they went from about 3.8% in FY92-93 to 2.3% by FY2000-01. Thus, the federal government largely imposed heavy austerity on itself in a drive back to balance.

Second, we now turn to arguing that any advantage stemming from a decent US growth back drop for Canada’s trade account was more than negated by other severe disadvantages facing the country versus Europe and the US today.

4. Interest Expense

It must also be noted that Canada achieved virtuous fiscal rectitude within the context of a crushing interest expense burden that neither the US nor most of Europe presently face. In the 1990s, total federal public debt charges as a share of GDP soared to about 6.6% by 1990-91 and remained over 5% until the 1997-98 fiscal year in stark contrast to how low interest rates are keeping the US interest expense burden at rock bottom levels today (chart 3).

< chart3.jpg >

In order to achieve fiscal balance, Canada had to pursue the draconian cuts to program spending noted above as a high interest burden made achieving fiscal balance vastly more difficult. That day may come for the US and core Europe, but current bond markets afford enormous flexibility to global governments outside of peripheral European states which is not being adequately capitalized upon particularly in the United States.

5. CAD and Monetary Policy

US monetary policy is exceptionally easy right now, in stark contrast to the back drop against which Canada pursued fiscal repair in the 1990s. Indeed, Canadian financial markets were far from offering a hospitable back drop against which to pursue fiscal repair. Canada’s floating currency was pummeled in the 1990s and went from 1.12 against the USD early in the decade to about the 1.40 range by 1995 before cruising around such depths until a renewed round of depreciation took it to the 1.50 mark by decade’s end. This is too simplistically offered as an explanation of how Canada must have been able to achieve fiscal balance by relying upon currency depreciation through a floating exchange rate. What’s missing here is what monetary policy was doing partly in response to such currency weakness which occurred despite the fact that the BoC pushed rates skyward with the overnight rate rising by about four full percentage points to about 8% by 1995 in a failed attempt to defend the currency and during the earlier days of targeting low and stable inflation including the fear that CAD depreciation would prompt a surge in import prices. This failed attempt at defending the currency – including through outright intervention – is one of the reasons why the BoC has not attempted intervention since. Thus, Canada achieved fiscal repair against the back drop of tighter monetary policy that didn’t allow the mixed benefits of currency depreciation to flow through whereas the US and more of the eurozone should be pursuing fiscal austerity against the back drop of exceptionally easy monetary policy and forgiving bond markets which makes the task far easier. Indeed, the whole term structure of Canadian rates in the 1990s made the path back to fiscal balance far more difficult as Canada 10s peaked hit about 9½% in early 1995 before hitting a low of about 5% in late 1998. By contrast, US and German 10s today are yielding about 2% while short US rates are near zero. While bond yields may rise appreciably in future, that only strengthens the case for why the US and Europe should pursue more aggressive fiscal repair now versus kicking the can down the road and it merits repeating that Canada never had the glorious starting opportunity presented by an exceptionally low interest burden. The challenge of US and European fiscal austerity will be as intense as it was in Canada if they wait to face the same interest burden that Canada grappled with in the 1990s.

6. Housing Bubble

If one thinks the US and parts of Europe cannot pursue fiscal austerity today in the context of a popped housing bubble, then one doesn’t recall Toronto’s housing market experiences in the late 1980s through the 1990s. Like the house price collapse in the US today – and its sharply differing regional magnitudes – Canada and specifically its biggest province of Ontario was going through the popping of a housing bubble in the early 1990s. Toronto house prices had peaked by 1989 and didn’t hit a trough until 1995 when they had fallen by almost 30% in value. Toronto house prices on average did not regain their 1989 peaks until 2002. While other regional housing markets performed better than Ontario’s during this period, average nationwide house prices were flat in nominal terms and fell in real terms throughout the 1989-1999 period. The depressed state of the country’s housing market was also reflected in housing start volumes that collapsed from the 200-280k range of the latter half of the 1980s down to the 100k-160k range from the mid-1990s throughout the rest of the decade. Against this miserable back drop for the country’s largest regional economy and its national housing market, Canada nevertheless pursued fiscal austerity.

7. Labour Markets

It’s an understatement to say that labour markets are stressed in the US and parts of Europe, but Canada was no better in the 1990s.

< chart4.jpg >

As chart 4 depicts, Canada’s unemployment rate was double digits even after taking account of modest measurement differences. In fact, upon including discouraged workers, Canada’s truer measure of unemployment stood at about one in five back then after including discouraged workers who simply dropped out of the labour force. US pressures are comparable today, but the European experience is mixed from peripheral pressures all the way down to Germany’s 7% unemployment rate.

8. Corporate Balance Sheets

Europe and the US have the enormous advantage of having excellent corporate balance sheets as the back drop against which to pursue fiscal austerity today. Canada also has excellent corporate balance sheet strengths today. That wasn’t at all the case for Canada back in the early 1990s, however, when the country’s corporate debt-to-equity, interest coverage, and profit margin ratios were severely strained before which painful corporate deleveraging put Canada on a path toward today’s corporate strengths. The fact that Canada achieve fiscal deleveraging simultaneous to both household and corporate deleveraging made its achievements far more impressive.

9. Negative Feedback Effects

A Keynesian – assuming a particular interpretation of the school of thought – might argue that now is not the time to pursue fiscal austerity because the global economy is weak. One might quip that it’s apparently never a good time to do so. Regardless, had that been the prevailing wisdom for Canada in the 1990s, the country would have never achieved long run fiscal repair and planted the seeds for the benefits it began to reap in the 2000s. Had Canada not taken a big bath in the 1990s against a weak domestic growth back drop fraught with problems like poor corporate balance sheets and popping house prices, it would have never been in a position to reap the benefits of the fiscal dividend that emerged in the past decade. Instead, Canada leveraged its general government debt to GDP ratio down from a peak of 102% in 1996 steadily lower throughout the rest of the decade and to 66.5% by 2007 before accelerated pre-crisis spending and the crisis response pushed this ratio back upward to about 84% now. While this ratio has trended higher of late, it remains superior to the 100+% US ratio today and Canada’s financial asset position results in a net government debt to GDP ratio of just under one-third.

10. Printing Presses

A further key distinction is that Canada achieved this track record without resorting to the monetary printing presses in contrast to the United States and some proposals for Europe. The fact that it is accepted as common wisdom in widening circles that printing money is a necessary solution to fiscal largesse is nothing short of a shocking failure of modern economics. Before priming the printing presses to fund governments became the convention across western economies, Canada achieved fiscal progress the old fashioned way: through austerity that followed an over two-decade long debt binge and by paying its bills. The country took its very hard knocks to growth and financial markets versus the unwillingness to do so across much of today’s western world, and the path toward enhanced Federalism and fiscal repair was littered with doubters and critics.

It may well be that stopping the printing presses and halting increasingly accommodative monetary policy by instead allowing bond markets and rating agencies to speak more aggressively would be more in the interests of the US and European economies over the long run – as was the case for Canada. In this regard, Germany’s insistence that fiscal austerity is the only long run sustainable solution for Europe’s – and one might say the U.S.’s – troubles may be leveraging off of the ultimately successful Canadian experience and so might Germany’s reticence to have monetary policy cross the line toward creating moral hazard issues in the financing of imprudent fiscal policy.

In fact, it’s important to rectify a false impression that quantitative easing amounts to cheap insurance in a low inflation world against global sovereign debt shocks. Contrary to this view, the full consequences to Germany and the ECB to caving in to pressures to monetize debt are that fiscal profligacy never gets cured AND long-run inflation results. For one thing, the moral hazard associated with a central bank bailing out politicians could well amplify future fiscal pressures. For another, it is wistful thinking to hope that central banks will know when to turn off the taps at the right time given their historical track record, particularly the Fed’s over the decades. Should such a printing scenario come to fruition, then one has seen nothing yet by way of a future crisis that would only further raise the odds of the longer run collapse of the eurozone. It is in this respect that the eurozone must pick its poison: risk a greater crisis now toward the possibility of expedited fiscal austerity and effective oversight, or cement the long run failure of the eurozone project at a later date. Against this back drop, the ECB should be much firmer in clearly stating it has no policy desire to rescue politicians in the short term.

Conclusion

As a consequence to its earlier sacrifices, Canada is today part of a dying breed of AAA rated markets. Its status as the 8th largest global bond market at face value somewhat hides the additional fact that fewer yet are AAA rated among the world’s deepest bond markets. Against the myth that this was easier for Canada to achieve during different times, what’s amazing about the Canadian experience is that it was achieved during at least as trying if not more troublesome times after taking account of the full global and domestic picture at the time. The country therefore offers an important lesson to nations like the United States and large parts of Europe that are delaying fiscal repair, and punting the problem down the road toward a more ruinous crisis later.

All that said, our message is not one of arrogant neglect toward the present Canadian situation. The country has done well through the crisis, but resting on its laurels and pointing to past painful achievements is no way of ensuring that the country retains its advantages. Today’s large Canadian trade deficits, still sizeable fiscal deficits at Federal and some provincial governments, the increase in the general government debt to gdp ratio from a trough of 66.5% in 2007 to about 84% today following pre-crisis accelerated spending and the crisis stimulus response, high refinancing amounts on short-dated debt at combined levels of government, record high house prices by any measure, and record high household leverage are sources of concern. They are, however, mitigated by a strong financial system, little external debt relative to GDP in contrast to Europe, excellent corporate balance sheets, resource riches, and a strong government financial asset position that translates into a net debt to gdp ratio of just over one-third. This mixed assessment of the nation’s finances for a trade-reliant country that is a price taker across most industries makes it prudent to continue to pursue measures that extend its relative success.

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< http://business.financialpost.com/2011/12/14/compared-to-canada-europe-has-it-easy/ >

The Reform Party is dead; long live the Reform Party.

Almost a quarter of a century after its birth, Reform still animates Canadian politics. Yes, it changed its name to the Canadian Alliance, and the Alliance died in the merger with the Progressive Conservatives to create today’s Conservative Party. But Reform’s ideas remain alive and kicking inside the Conservative Party – see the Harper government’s use of a majority to push through legislation eliminating the Canadian Wheat Board, toughening the criminal justice system and abolishing the long-gun registry.

These policies were vintage Reform, popular in the rural Prairies and in many parts of B.C. outside the Lower Mainland, and among those who sharply differentiated Reformers from Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives.

Mr. Mulroney’s party, enjoying two huge majorities, never moved on these fronts. The PCs had a minister of state for the Wheat Board who was committed to the institution’s proper functioning. They tweaked the criminal justice system but they never dreamed of an all-fronts “tough on crime” approach in the face of overwhelming evidence that such an approach wouldn’t work. And, if anything, they wanted to toughen gun-control legislation, not weaken it, although, in fairness, the long-gun registry came after Mr. Mulroney left office.

Stephen Harper, himself an early Reform MP, always supported these policies, whether in opposition or as Prime Minister in minority Parliaments. The policies were “present at the creation” when Reform took shape, and they remained tenets of the Alliance and the Harper Conservatives.

Eliminating the Wheat Board has been a controversial promise since it was first made. It reflected Reform’s ideological aversion to big government and monopolies, and its preference for market-based solutions. The promise also reflected changing realities in the grain-growing Prairies. Farms were getting bigger through consolidation, corporate agriculture was growing and the old collectivist instincts of the Prairies were weakening. From government as helper, more and more farmers apparently adopted the view of government as obstacle.

Minority governments blocked any move against the Wheat Board. So, presumably, did political caution. Whereas the Conservatives had promised a referendum among wheat farmers on the board’s fate, none was ever held, probably because there was no guarantee it could be won. Re-elected with a majority, the Harper government interpreted its victory in Western Canada as a green light to proceed with the Wheat Board’s demise (a strained interpretation of the election result, since voters seldom decide en masse around one issue).

In any event, the Wheat Board is done for, as is the long-gun registry, which Reform opposed from the first suggestion that Canada needed one. It didn’t matter that the country’s chiefs of police favoured the registry. In rural Canada, Reform’s original heartland, the registry was an affront to personal freedom, a useless and costly bureaucracy, a city slickers’ invention with no applicability to rural realities. Now, with a Conservative majority government, Reform’s original opposition will be vindicated.

As for the crime legislation, toughening the law was always a mainstay of Reform. Its early rhetoric was full of criticism about mollycoddling criminals, protecting “law-abiding Canadians,” victims’ rights, more punishment and less rehabilitation, stricter parole laws and more vigilant application of those laws.

This was quite different from the attitude of the old Progressive Conservatives, who could hardly be accused of having been soft on crime but who never attempted anything like today’s changes. Indeed, current Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, while in opposition, was widely thought of as a moderate critic of the Liberals. But he gets his marching orders from the old Reformers, starting with Mr. Harper.

In these three measures – the Wheat Board, the long-gun registry and criminal justice – Canadians can see that, although the Reform Party is long dead, it still lives.

< http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/jeffrey-simpson/remember-the-reformers-theyre-still-here/article2254120/ >

Tom Kent, who passed away in Kingston on Tuesday at age 89, was Canada’s foremost activist-intellectual. To some, the combination of the words is an oxymoron: intellectuals think conceptually, debate vociferously the arcane implications of theory, and are happiest in the library. Activists, on the other hand, while motivated by ideas, battle for their values in the public policy arena, by mobilizing supporters, outmanoeuvring opponents, creating organizations and winning elections.

Tom Kent dedicated his life to both strands of activity; he thought superbly and acted vigorously. The result is programs like medicare and the Canada Pension Plan, which help millions of Canadians every day.

Born in 1922, the son of a mining machine mechanist in the English Midlands, Kent went to Oxford on a scholarship. He was part of the famous team at Bletchley Park that broke the “ultra secret” of the German Enigma code during World War II. This led to his recruitment to the editorial board of the famous Manchester Guardian and it was as a journalist that Kent first made his mark.

In 1954, he immigrated to Canada to become editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, at the time one of the leading papers supporting the Liberal party. Kent modernized the Free Press and its pedigree gave him access to leading Liberal figures like Lester Pearson. Kent was a progressive liberal, well acquainted with John Maynard Keynes. At the Free Press he was relentless in calling on the Liberal party to endorse the welfare state and move beyond the business-liberalism dominance of C.D. Howe. Kent never lost his interest in journalism — many years later he chaired the 1981 Royal Commission on Newspapers.

He wrote in his memoirs: “I had not contemplated, before 1957, that I would ever be involved in an active political role.” But in 1958 when Pearson became leader of the Liberal party only to suffer a devastating election defeat, Kent was drawn into the small circle of advisers and activists led by Walter Gordon who were dedicated to making Pearson prime minister. The man of ideas was gradually wooed away from the private sector to become a one-man intellectual blood bank for the Liberal party.

In 1960, Kent wrote Towards a Philosophy of Social Policy for the Kingston thinkers’ conference. It outlined concrete policies that would bring to life his thesis that freedom is not just the absence of constraint, but the equal opportunity to act. For Kent, the state has to promote policies that protect people from hardships that are not of their own making, and provide support to create equality of opportunity. The policy ideas in his paper (medicare, employment training, regional development, student scholarships, social assistance) became part of Pearson’s election platform.

Largely due to the new ideas and candidates resulting from the Kingston conference, Pearson’s Liberals won the 1963 election. As Pearson’s policy secretary, Kent fought to persuade Parliament to pass and government to implement the policy priorities he advanced as party adviser. Allied with ministers like Walter Gordon and Allan MacEachen, Kent drove policies like the Canada Pension Plan and medicare. “It was my job,” Kent writes, “as I saw it to keep plugging away at firming and expounding our policies.” Kent considered “medicare the most important of all the social reforms introduced by the Pearson government.”

Kent left the federal government in 1971 after a decade of intense political service. He became the president of the Cape Breton Development Corp. (having practically invented regional development), of Sydney Steel and was editor of Policy Options. He taught at Dalhousie University and Queen’s.

I was lucky to have known Tom Kent for more than 40 years. As a former Manitoban, he took me in when I began working in Ottawa in the 1960s. Always generous with his time and advice, he was unfailingly polite, but logically rigorous. I never sent him an idea that he didn’t improve.

He never gave up his passion for equity, fairness and reform. In his late 80s he was still writing policy papers on medicare, employment insurance and federalism. His intellectual capital never depleted and his activist side never wavered.

Seeing the Liberal party as weakened today as it was in 1958, he wanted a new reform agenda. Just recently he sent me a note arguing that the Liberal party would be strengthened if local ridings had real power and that real power meant they should keep the money they raise, rather than sending most of it to party headquarters. He never gave up fighting for a fairer Canada or a more democratic Liberal party.

His was a life of public purpose.

Thomas S. Axworthy is Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1088816–tom-kent-a-life-of-purpose >

So, one time in 1935, Mackenzie King was driving home along Daly Avenue in Ottawa when he came across a house that was being torn down. A bay window was still standing. King had his driver stop the car, then got out and examined the sheet of glass. He became so transfixed by the window pane that he purchased it and had it transported to his country estate. After communing with his dead mother on where to situate it, he settled on an appropriate spot on a nearby hill.

The story, one from a multitude of King’s eccentricities, is from a new biography by Allan Levine. It’s one of four biographies of prime ministers appearing this fall in what is a great season for political books, although you wouldn’t know it from the lack of publicity.

If anyone doubted that King spent a lot of time in la-la land, they need only read Mr. Levine’s intriguing account, one that fleshes out new material from his voluminous diaries. It’s a safe bet, though, that not many will read it. Such is the way of the Twitter era, the ever-declining space devoted to books in our media, and the country’s lack of passion for its history that these books won’t get the attention or sales they deserve. Most Canadian youths have barely even heard of Mackenzie King, prime minister for a mere 22 years, much less have an interest in reading about him.

King had an achingly dull public image. Few knew that seances, table-rapping sessions and communing with the likes of William Gladstone, Wilfrid Laurier and other stiffs occupied big stretches of King’s time. In contemplating affairs of state, he ascribed great significance to the formations of his shaving cream. At breakfast, it was the configuration of tea leaves that arrested him. Before heading off to work, he would shoot the breeze with his dog, Pat.

But the paradox is that the weirdo PM governed in a most pragmatic, sane and effective manner. His decision-making wasn’t off the wall at all. Benefiting from a background as a labour negotiator – his mother called him the Official Harmonizer – King was the ultimate compromiser. He defined the centrist politics that shaped the Liberal Party for decades to follow.

We sometimes forget how fascinating and rich in character the leaders who charted our allegedly dull history were. King was by no means the only one.

Also out this fall is Nation Maker, Richard Gwyn’s splendid second half of a two-volume biography of John A. Macdonald. Like King, Macdonald spent much of his time in communication with the spirits. But they were of a terrestrial kind.

In the stores as well is Elusive Destiny, Paul Litt’s biography of John Turner. It’s overly sympathetic but expertly crafted and revealing in its portrayal of Mr. Turner as being too tightly wound for the television age. Then there’s Trudeau Transformed, by Max and Monique Nemni, authors of the groundbreaking study Young Trudeau. Also of note is David A. Wilson’s second volume on Thomas D’Arcy McGee, another captivating character from our history. And soon out is another big work from the eternal Peter C. Newman; it’s called When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada. How timely is that?

As the title implies, King’s Liberal edifice couldn’t last forever. His exemplary displays of centrist brokerage politics, his placing of national unity at the forefront and his securing of Quebec were pillars that endured for decades. But the fracturing began under Mr. Trudeau and was accelerated by Mr. Turner, who clashed with both Mr. Trudeau and Jean Chrétien. The party took sides, dividing into long-lasting Trudeau/Chrétien and Turner/Paul Martin blocs.

Among the lessons King could have given the others was not to allow themselves to be challenged from within. That and much more. King, of course, had a special way of divining the threats. Too bad that, like him, the others couldn’t speak to the dead.

< http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/lawrence-martin/the-weirdo-pm-who-showed-the-way/article2228482/ >

There must always be working men, men to work with their hands, to be poor, to be industrious, to be unfortunate, to suffer; it is the will of God, and the destiny of the race.

— Halifax Evening Express

The country Macdonald presided over in 1867 can be quickly described. It stretched from Cape Breton Island to just beyond the Great Lakes. Its population was 3.5 million, one in three of them French and some 105,000 Aboriginal. The dominion’s only real city was Montreal, with 115,000 inhabitants; Toronto and Quebec City each had about 60,000. The principal exports were lumber and grain. Manufacturing was starting up, but only a few companies had more than a dozen employees; one exception was the agricultural implements manufacturer Massey, which won two awards at the great Paris Exposition of 1867. The new nation’s principal asset was abundant space, except that little arable land now remained to attract new settlers.

Canada’s dominant characteristic was its Britishness: cricket was more popular than baseball, and no social success matched getting an invitation from the titled incumbent at Rideau Hall.

Every bit as important, Canada was outgrowing its pioneer phase, often owdy, raunchy and uninhibitedly bibulous, and becoming a Victorian society — a condition it would retain far longer than its Britishness, right through to the early 1960s.

Four in fi ve Canadians were farmers, many having only a few acres of stony or swampy land. Their working hours were long, their work was brutally hard and their small houses (often just shacks) were dark and chilly. Because they owned their land, though, they were independent and self-sufficient.

Although workers in the towns earned more money in good times, they had it much harder. They had to rent accommodation and had no woodlots to supply fuel for the long winters. Not that the towns, Montreal excepted, were very different from the countryside. In Toronto, local newspapers carried notices such as “Lost, a roan cow, horns inclined inward, last seen on Queen Street east.”

Everywhere, entertainment was limited to hellfi re speeches by itinerant preachers, concerts by military bands, and an occasional show put on by touring actors, usually over-age and drunken. The people themselves staged their own barn-raisings, ploughing competitions and fall fairs. Food often went bad, and water, especially in towns, was frequently befouled. Death, from diseases such as smallpox, typhoid and diphtheria, let alone from the ministrations of doctors who wielded unsterilized instruments with unwashed hands, came early and was a commonplace among young children.

Visits to dentists were sorties into horror. Despite the best efforts of educational reformers such as Egerton Ryerson, who took as his creed, “Education is a public good; ignorance is a public evil,” it was not until 1874 that Ontario made primary education compulsory.

Even then, up to half the children often stayed away to do essential farm work. In Quebec, almost half the population over 20 years of age could not read or write. And as the towns expanded, Canadians faced challenges mostly unknown in the villages they had emigrated from — overcrowded slums, pollution and prostitution. Only if they read Charles Dickens had they even heard of such things.

The principal antidote to all this hardship was drink. Each year, every man, woman and child in the country consumed an average of four gallons of alcohol. Macdonald wasn’t in the least unusual in his habit, although, as society grew ever more Victorian, he became an odd man out in public life, particularly because he never hid his drinking or apologized for it. Canada’s defining attitudes were those of practicality, realism and stoicism; matters theoretical or aesthetical seldom provoked the least interest. Significantly, in 1867, there were just two public libraries in the entire country.

If there was little that was fancy in the country, a great deal was solid. Loyalty — marriage, family, church, employer, political party, clan or tribe, and to Queen and country — was the supreme national virtue. Belief in the cardinal importance of the rule of law was near universal. Rural areas had neither police nor scarcely any crime, and Canada’s soon-to-be-acquired “Far West” would develop radically differently from the same flatlands below the border because of the presence of Macdonald’s North-West Mounted Police.

Still, Canada was a rough place, and brawls broke out frequently between Green and Orange Irish as well as between French and Irish during labour strikes. But there was none of the general acceptance of violence so widespread in the United States, the lynch mobs and vigilante squads, the gangs of New York and the deliberately provoked Indian wars. While the now-iconic phrase “Peace, Order and Good Government” was never used at this time to describe the state’s founding purpose, Canada from its beginning was an unusually peaceable kingdom.

Religion mattered greatly — more so than to Americans, with their strict constitutional separation of church and state. Canadians attended church regularly and rarely divorced. In the two decades after 1867, there were around 300,000 divorces in the United States, compared with 116 in Canada. And while much about 19th-century Canada shocks today’s sensibilities — such as public executions to which crowds fl ocked, bringing their children — those earlier Canadians would have been as shocked that, a century later, old people are warehoused in institutions rather than living with their children and grandchildren.

There was no democracy in Canada, the vote being limited to those men who owned sufficient property. Canadians regarded the U.S.-style universal male franchise as “mob rule.” As the Ottawa Times put it in 1869, “The besetting sin of democracy is . . . to debase everything to its own level, to pull down, never to elevate.”

There was, though, a rough and ready egalitarianism and a complete absence of any class system, whether based on birth, as in Britain, or on extremes of wealth and poverty, as in the United States. Macdonald understood the distinction. Although he opposed the universal franchise to the end of his days, on the grounds that it amounted to rule by those with no financial stake in the system, he also proclaimed proudly, “Classes and systems have not had time to grow here naturally. We have no aristocracy but of virtue and talent.”

The Victorians have generally had a bad press, being identified most commonly with sexual repression and overstuffed furniture. But a good case can be made that they were the most interesting generation ever. They were hypocritical for sure, but their seriousness, moral steadfastness and sheer sturdiness are beyond question. They needed these heroic qualities, because they had to cope with two revolutions of a magnitude never equalled before.

The initial challenge was the second wave of the Industrial Revolution. The first, in the 18th century, consisted of brilliant inventions in mechanized devices and steam engines concocted by solitary geniuses. The second used advances in financing, corporate organization and the systemization of research to spew out endless new marvels — railways, steamships, steam tractors, electricity, streetcars, the telegraph, telephones, typewriters and sewing machines.

The consequences of these inventions went far beyond effi ciency and convenience: streetcars created suburbs by making it possible for people to live at a distance from their work; railways created national markets, with the print media as the first beneficiary; and typewriters generated jobs for women in previously male-only offices.

The intellectual revolution that burst forth was even more radical in its implications. Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), by questioning man’s divine creation, compelled Victorians to reconsider their unquestioning faith in God and the Bible. Canadians, even if they occupied the rim of the known world, were well aware of this existential challenge.

Principal William Dawson of McGill University warned that the new doctrines “threaten to overthrow the whole fabric of society as at present constituted.”

Victorians reacted to the intellectual and moral threat in one of three ways: by becoming even firmer in their faith (Torontonians, for example, gained the title of “Good” for their city by banning streetcars on Sundays); by exploring alternatives such as spirituality; or by concluding that religion had to refashion itself by helping to make earth more heavenly. This last response became a prime source of the Victorians’ faith in the possibility of endless progress, pursued in Britain by Christian Socialism and in Canada, soon after the century’s turn, by the Social Gospel movement.

Moral earnestness became an integral part of Canadian identity. Soon after Confederation, the first Humane Society for animals was established, followed by the Children’s Aid Society. As a direct consequence of the new public morality, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was established in 1874, representing the initial entry by women into public debate. Canada’s first strong labour movement, the Knights of Labor, imported from the United States, had both a moral and an economic mission.

Things did get better, gradually, in early Canada. Universities, such as Toronto, Queen’s, McGill and Dalhousie, were growing. Sports were organized, with inter-city leagues for lacrosse, baseball, cricket and hockey.

Cities began to acquire some urban niceties. In Toronto in 1869, the first version of Eaton’s department store opened. Henry George, the American radical, attracted huge audiences, particularly in Hamilton, by asking the fundamental, unanswerable question of the age: Why was there “advancing poverty amid advancing wealth”?

All the changes did leave people unsettled. Professor Goldwin Smith, after he moved to Toronto in the 1870s, wrote of the horror of “unsexed female students who go about with their hair cut short and smoking in the streets.”

Macdonald didn’t believe in progress — in this sense he wasn’t a Victorian. As John Willison of the Toronto Globe wrote in his Reminiscences, “For the evangelical school of reconstructionists who would remake the world in their own image and redeem mankind by legislation, he had only a complacent tolerance.” And as Macdonald himself put it in the Commons, “I am satisfied not to have a reputation for indulging in imaginary schemes and harbouring visionary ideas.”

Overwhelmingly, Canadians agreed with him. Everyone hated taxes; few supported government spending (except on their own town). There was no Poor Law, as in Britain; charity was the responsibility of the churches, not the government.

Even public funding of education was criticized: “There is no reason or justice in making one man pay for the education of another man’s children,” complained the Bystander. Those without jobs were not “the unemployed” but the “idle poor” or the “undeserving poor.” The one way 19th-century governments were more interventionist than those of today was in their ample exercise of patronage: It was employed mainly for partisan political purposes, but sometimes as a welfare program for old guys whose legs had given out, or as a kind of affirmative action program to apportion public posts among all the regional, religious and racial groups.

Even if the government had wanted to do more, it would have been hard pressed. The entire federal civil service comprised just 2,660 people. Whether Conservative or Liberal, no government enacted any social legislation in Ottawa until a half-century later, in 1927.

Macdonald believed that human nature did not change; by logical extension, there was therefore no point in trying to make the world a better place.

For Macondald, power was a means to an end — though he enjoyed having it immensely, not least because he was so good at exercising it. He had a clear idea of why he wanted power: to make certain Canada did not become American, either by conquest or by handing itself over to its overpowering neighbour. He also had a clear idea of how this goal must be achieved: by stretching Canada into a continental nation that would be a mirror image of its rival, and by winning enough time for the new dominion to mature into a true nation.

The new prime minister approached this objective warily, recognizing that progress wouldn’t come easily . . . In 1868, he commented to the new governor general, Lord Lisgar, “At present we are all mere politicians, but by and by it may be to the good luck for some of us to rise to the level of national statesmen.”

He was just as cautious in public. At the new Parliament’s first session, he avoided giving the government leader’s usual inspirational opening speech by giving no speech at all. He did so because he was not yet a real prime minister, one elected by the people with a mandate, but only a prime minister whom the governor general had picked to get the show going. So, before the summer of 1867 was over, Macdonald called his first election . . .

The results trickled in through September and October, with individual constituencies still holding elections on different days. Macdonald won comfortably, although not overwhelmingly. Overall, he won 101 seats to the 80 of the various opposition parties . . .

Macdonald was now prime minister by the free choice of the people, or at least of a majority of the 15 per cent of them entitled to vote. He set November 7 for the opening of the first Parliament of the new Confederation of Canada.

Excerpted with permission from Richard Gwyn’s Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times Volume Two: 1867-1891, published by Random House Canada.

< http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/1074350–modest-country-ambitious-leader >

Dalton McGuinty consistently exceeds expectations.

Written off as the fourth place candidate in the 1996 Liberal leadership, McGuinty refashioned himself as the safe second choice, coming up the middle to win. Written off as “not up to the job” in 1999, he rallied his party in the last ten days of the election to record its second highest percentage of support in sixty years.

Written off after raising taxes in 2004, he focused his government on improving health and education services, which produced tangible results and a turn around in the polls. Written off after eHealth, he threw himself at the global recession, luring investment, launching the Green Energy Act and harmonizing the sales taxes.

The opposition and media expected the Liberals to hide the Premier in this election, when he turned out to be the party’s biggest asset. The advertisements were all about McGuinty, warts and all, explaining the record and the next steps. More impressively, he had the courage to introduce a platform that underbid the opposition parties, pledging to spend significantly less than the NDP or PCs.

Watching him on the stump, McGuinty is calm and self-assured. Much of the credit for the Liberals’ success last week belongs to Dalton McGuinty. But more than electoral accomplishments, McGuinty stands as the transformative Premier of the last twenty five years.

The massive extent of McGuinty’s policy reforms is underestimated like the politician. His major changes are comparable or greater than any of the tax cuts or mergers of Mike Harris, the social contract of Bob Rae or constitutional reform attempts of David Peterson. More importantly, they were quickly adopted as consensus with no opponent running against them in the next election.

During the debate about instituting the HST, naysayers said Ontarians would never accept the complex debate of raising consumption taxes while cutting corporate and personal income taxes. Two years later, the HST is here to stay (and Ontario is the most competitive jurisdiction for starting a business in Canada).

During the debate on the Ontario Health Premium, naysayers said the benefits of financing shorter wait times would be lost on Ontarians. Seven years later, the Ontario Health Premium is here to say (and Ontario has the shortest wait times in the country).

From phasing out coal plants to the Greenbelt, naysayers said special interests would ensure Ontarians never gain the benefit of clean air, soil and water. Years later, no party openly opposes these new cornerstones of wise stewardship (and Ontario experienced hardly a smog day in the hottest summer in memory).

The Liberals have managed to stay relevant in 2011 solely because they took big risks. Tax reform gave them a compelling storyline about the economy, one that their opponents subliminally reinforced by pledging only tinkers with the HST.

Ontario’s current education system is a beacon to policy wonks, and is such a political strength for the government that the opposition barely discussed it during the election. But we forget the uphill battle of arguing for smaller classes and lowering the dropout rate when McGuinty first proposed them.

Perhaps the best example of a big risk is the Green Energy Act.

After decades of neglect, Ontario’s energy generation fleet was nearing end of life. Seeing the danger in rebuilding of Ontario’s energy grid on fossil fuels in a potentially carbon-taxing global economy, McGuinty chose to instead jump start a local green energy industry.

McGuinty continually doubled down on this strategy. He demanded transmission and distribution companies hook up green power projects. He put arduous domestic content rules on suppliers to force investment. He made a strategic deal with Samsung to make Ontario the home of the global green energy arm.

The plan leaves Ontario with higher than average energy prices… until there is a price on carbon. When climate change forces carbon pricing, Ontario will have the cheapest electricity in the Great Lakes region.

But the Green Energy Act also made perfect sense as political strategy.

The NDP made a significant decision in 2009 when selecting Andrea Horwath as leader over Peter Tabuns. Horwath was offering to continue the Hampton strategy of winning back the urban and industrial seats in Hamilton, Windsor, west Toronto and the North, while Tabuns was offering a more audacious move to go after the Green vote and add it to the NDP base. NDP supporters chose the safer option of being a larger opposition party rather than shooting for government any time soon.

At the same time, the PC Party moved right with Tim Hudak, closing any option of reconciliation with Ontario’s growing Green vote. (I wrote about these decisions and the coalitions of each party extensively here.) The door was open for Dalton McGuinty to go after the 8 per cent of Ontarians who were voting Green while motivating his own base.

Let’s put that 2007 Green vote into context. The Greens got almost half as many votes as the NDP. Their total vote was close to the size of the margin between the PCs and the Liberals. And their voters – knowing they are not going to elect a single MPP – still walked themselves to the polls with very limited Get Out the Vote efforts and next to no television advertising.

That is a vote that is policy-oriented, highly motivated, and worth going after.

By launching the Green Energy Act, championing it so personally, taking the risks of the Samsung deal, and pushing his traditional opponents to take anti-environmentalist positions, McGuinty was making a clear and unequivocal pitch to Green voters to join his coalition. By calling for taking the HST of gasoline and playing footsie with wind energy opponents, Ms. Horwath rejected any rapprochement with Green voters. By pledging to repeal the Green Energy Act and the Far North Act, Mr. Hudak chose to run openly against environmentalism.

This created a dynamic where the election was to some voters a referendum on the environment. And those voters were often the highly-educated, highly-motivated greens of 2007. These are the kind of people who watch debates and respond to passionate championing of the environment (perhaps with a generous dose of hand gestures.)

If you look at the polls, you will see a simple dynamic.

Tim Hudak is basically holding the core of the PC Party, a very similar group to what John Tory or Ernie Eves was left with on election day: rural and suburban conservatives. Andrea Horwath added to the NDP base a portion of the old Liberal coalition that feel marginalized and angry: people living in the de-industrializing segments of Northern and industrial Ontario, in places like Elliot Lake and Hamilton.

Another part of that segment just stayed home, a big driver in why turnout fell so fast.

But the Liberals have held on by partially making up for that segment of the population with half of the former Green voters of 2007. The Green vote fell by half, mainly shifting to the Liberals. And that 4 per cent of the vote was the margin between a major minority and losing.

The lesson of the McGuinty years is that big initiatives succeed. The reverse of this rule is that when the McGuinty government relaxes, it gets into trouble.

Arguably, the least productive period of Mr McGuinty’s tenure was the year after he won reelection in 2007. Exhausted by a turbulent first term, facing a weak opposition with leadership divisions, and aware of the looming global recession, the government chose to hunker down and play defence.

This period saw a drift that put reforming prayer in the legislature and the debate over afro-centric schools at the top of the agenda. It was in this time that the problems of eHealth were born. When the McGuinty government tried to just manage events, that was exactly when events got away from them.

Given the privilege of a third term, the lesson for the McGuinty Liberals is simple: Do big things.

Facing a potential double-dip recession, a stubborn deficit and unrequited demands for better services, the government will need to take on entrenched interests to improve the lives of average Ontarians. Standing still will mean watching the debt skyrocket, leaving the government vulnerable to interest rates and running short of options.

Token changes will sap political capital while distracting them from the key decisions. Now is the time for action.

The reality of the new “major minority” is that standing still will lead to defeat for the Liberals. They will have to take a page from Stephen Harper’s minority era and relentlessly drive the agenda.

A stand-pat budget in 2012 with some cutesy political tokens to buy the support of an opposition party will only guarantee defeat in 2013 in the house and on the hustings. The deficit will only explode if left alone, forcing a bad news budget down the road. The only choice is transformation of public services and finances in 2012 that will put the fiscal situation on the proper track and make later budgets easier, not harder.

Those expecting Dalton McGuinty to slow down and work on his legacy are falling into a familiar routine. They are underestimating him.

< http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/second-reading/andrew-steele/mcguinty-proves-father-knows-best/article2197231/singlepage/#articlecontent >

A few years ago, around the time of another Ontario election, the actor and director Sarah Polley was flying home to Toronto from Los Angeles. She found herself seated beside a nice-looking, pleasant, older fellow who clearly recognized her. They chatted amiably. He seemed especially interested in her political views, which were known to be leftish. He urged her to consider supporting Ontario’s then PC leader John Tory, whose quality the man said he would vouch for.

Polley said she couldn’t even contemplate voting Conservative; when she was 15, she’d had two teeth broken by police as she protested Conservative premier Mike Harris’s harsh policies on welfare and poverty. She said maybe in an earlier time, when Bill Davis was Tory premier, it would have been possible. She’d often heard that he was a fine person. Her seatmate beamed. “You’ve made an old man very happy,” said Bill Davis.

So I tried to watch Tuesday’s election debate through Bill Davis’s eyes. Did he start when his name was invoked in praise by Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty against current Tory Leader Tim Hudak? Probably not. They were a savvy bunch, those old Progressive Conservatives; they knew their party had been swiped from under them. Even the party acronym, PC, gradually became associated with a different term: Politically Correct — a clever piece of rebranding.

I’m thinking of Davis, Joe Clark, Flora McDonald, Lowell Murray and Hugh Segal — still in the Senate — or best-in-show, the late, great Star columnist Dalton Camp. You’d probably have enjoyed sitting beside any of them on a long flight, as Sarah Polley did, and not been tempted to fake snoozing (a test for politicians once proposed by Alexander Cockburn). Never mind whether they should be called “Red Tories.” They sought power in order to do something, not just punish certain demographics by cutting welfare (Harris), building prisons (Harper) or creating chain gangs (Hudak). They didn’t think government was “the problem” like Ronald Reagan, a hero of their right-wing conservative successors, or that society didn’t exist at all, like another such hero, Margaret Thatcher. Labels and ideology mattered little to them.

They had real success provincially: Davis’s PCs in Ontario, Peter Lougheed’s in Alberta. Federally they felt thwarted. At their last PC leadership convention, Peter Mackay was elected on a written pledge not to unite with the Reform party — which he went on to do. Some of them whined, as if they knew it was already over, that they’d never got a break in the media, compared to Liberals.

They probably did deserve better, but who doesn’t? Merit is rarely decisive in real life. And there is such a thing as the zeitgeist, the mood of the age. They shared the ZG of an earlier time, along with the Liberals and the NDP. It involved a sense of the usefulness of government and the importance of some kind of social solidarity, expressed largely through public institutions and programs.

The current ZG is harsher, very individualistic and also shared by all parties. Even the NDP’s Andrea Horwath showed a quick flash of the anti-immigrant card during the debate, calling for jobs, “not just for new Canadians but for young people.” Then it was gone, whoosh. What was that? That was the zeitgeist, folks.

Fortunately the zeitgeist isn’t a godlike, unaffectable entity. It’s partly the result of deliberate human effort and resources (like ideas and money), and it has to somehow reflect underlying realities. These include the reality of human interconnectedness and mutual need, which are hard to reflect without some role for government and society.

I sometimes wonder if the shrillest attacks on Big Government and the Gravy Train mightn’t reflect an awareness of how vulnerable we’d all be without those public and social supports. It can be terrifying to feel that, and tempting to deny it so as not to face it. They don’t want to feel vulnerable, since they do. In that case, the insights of Bill Davis’s era remain useful, even if they’ll surely take a new form as a new zeitgeist unfurls.

I’m glad the conversation with Sarah Polley brought him happiness and I wish him more in the years to come.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1062157–salutin-where-have-all-the-pcs-gone >