Was this intended to be a whack at Michael Ignatieff? Or Canadians?
Any politician who actually stood up and said this in public -- especially with such evident disgust -- would have my vote and a monetary contribution as big as the law allows. Hell, I'd even put his sign in my front yard.
One of this week's subjects is inaugural addresses. From Havel we learn three things:
My dear fellow citizens,
For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us.I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.
The rest is here.
From a long column on Barack Obama, which for our purposes you can mostly ignore:
"He had drawn 175,000 people to two events in Missouri that day, larger crowds than I'd ever seen at a campaign event."
We were talking about this thing only this morning at the sprawling Maclean's Ottawa bureau nerve centre: Why are there never big rallies in Canadian campaigns?
This question was actually put to me by a German diplomat a few weeks ago, while we were having lunch and chatting about the super-top-secret Canada-EU trade negotiations that nobody ever writes about. Buddy said to me, "Why are there no big rallies in Canadian campaigns?" I have to admit the thought hadn't occurred, but it's an obvious question once it's raised. Almost every day this month, McCain and Obama and Biden and sometimes Palin are in different cities, addressing crowds of 10,000 or 15,000 on a slow day, and 75,000 or more on big days. In Paris, it was common to see handbills posted around town inviting everyone to see Sarkozy or Royal or one of the lesser presidential candidates on a few days' notice, in venues that would look culpably empty if 5,000 people didn't turn out. Germany, apparently the same thing.
Of course, Canadian politics isn't utterly devoid of large rallies. There was one at Place du Canada before the 1995 referendum, which you may have heard about. There were a few thunderstick affairs during the recent unpleasantness that featured Dion or Harper addressing perhaps 1,000 people. But by the standards of some countries whose politics is in other respects quite similar to Canada's, 1,000 people at a rally is a joke.
I've heard a few possible explanations for the decline of the big rally in Canadian politics. In the 1997 campaign, an old Liberal hand told me these sorts of big rallies were no longer useful to Canadian campaigns, for two reasons. One, they're essentially parlour tricks: any half-decent organizer, given two weeks to get his act together, can get 40 busloads of supporters into any hall anywhere. They don't show real support. Two, these rallies usually happen in the evening, at the end of a day's news cycle, and so they don't do much to advance a party's message-of-the-day. Not worth the hassle.
But surely all that would be true in Little Rock or Nashua or wherever Barack Obama will meet his next 40,000 supporters/ spectators tomorrow, as well as in Lyon and Munich and Leeds and any number of other places where mass demonstrations of support for a leader are still, today, seen as a basic element of election campaigning. So why there, but not here? One of life's little mysteries.
If the Prime Minister is to be discouraged from dumping major policy documents onto the Internet in the middle of the night at the end of the session six weeks after they should have been ready, the only thing that will do the trick is the knowledge that such clandestine behaviour will not spare him the journalistic scrutiny he is clearly trying to avoid. My own poor effort was not going to do do it. And I am sad to say that after a spate of early stories simply recording the fact of the late-night document dump, Harper's instinct has been confirmed by a near-total lack of journalistic scrutiny. (The Ottawa Citizen's David Pugliese, as is almost always the case, remains the honourable exception. Here is his blog post on the defence plan. I suspect more is on the way.)
So I was really grateful to get an email this morning from Inkless comment-board regular MikeG, who — puttering in his spare time on a sunny weekend — has produced the most detailed analysis of the Harper defence plan's spending projections that I have seen. He even made charts and graphs. And what they show is curious: while $490 billion sure looks like a heck of a number, it amounts to a gentle budgeted decline in Canada's defence effort, compared against major allies, over time.
I'll close by pointing out that a defence policy isn't only a policy for spending. It's a set of choices about what that money will buy. Since we're all planning to snooze on that set of choices in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, perhaps Inkless readers will care to read the policy themselves and discuss the choices the Harper government has made.
Democracy: not only can you do it yourself, I'm afraid you're pretty much going to have to. Thanks once again to MikeG.
I normally disregard these "Are you better off now than you were X years/months/minutes/seconds ago"? surveys. They are usually selective, small sample, tough to generalize, etc.
But that said, this Pew summary of 40 years of such surveys among the middle-class in America is remarkable:
We are at a 40-year low, with most of the emotional carnage having happened in the last six months. That is the sharpest decline in the poll's history.
So, are you better off than five years ago? Worse? Other? Indifferent? Bemused? Do tell.
[quote="rob in angus"] Another airport in Toronto area is somewhat needed.Are there any neutral studies showing this? The GTAA master proposal is based on forecasted passenger levels from 1999. Given that's pre-9.11, I imagine things have changed (see here).
[quote]would reduce congestion around Pearson. Congestion means increased CO2 emmisions1) Presumably opening a new airport would shift the traffic volume to the new airport.from idling traffic[/quote]
[quote]If not Pickering then where? Is there a better spot to build?[/quote]How about improving trains? That might move a high % of the short-haul flights to a different mode of transport, which concomitant environmental benefits. One of the most striking parts of Monbiot's book Heat was on the impact of flying. His blog has some analysis on it here, here and the UK government's Royal Commission here. Short recap for the 99% of people who don't wish to read all of that - aviation is a remarkably awful contributor to global warming, not just from the physics of flying (burning a lot of extremely high octane gas to keep aloft) but also from impact of contrails, etc.
"However, Ms Merkel views Poland, rather than Britain, as the main opponent of a deal and the hardest nut to crack. Such perceptions were confirmed when Warsaw raised old grievances about Germany to try to bolster its case for a "fairer" voting system in running the EU. Under current arrangements dating from 2000, Germany has 29 votes to Poland's 27 in EU councils. The new system, based on population sizes, will give Germany more than double the Polish vote. The Poles are demanding a new way of calculating votes that would diminish German "hegemony."Well. Seeing as the founding principle of the EU is "Don't Mention The War!" it seems to me that the only possible response would be repeated viewings of this classic Fawlty Towers sketch. However, the Poles had a different response - thinking out of the box as it were and I have to say, I didn't see this coming:
Under the nationalist Kaczynski brothers, prime minister and president of Poland, it seemed Poland was bent on refighting the second world war against Germany in the bunkers of Brussels.
"If Poland had not had to live through the years 1939-45, Poland would be today looking at the demographics of a country of 66 million", rather than 38 million, and would warrant a much higher quota of votes in the EU, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the prime minister, told Polish radio.
Nearly 100 Americans are dying every month. The United States is spending $2 billion a week."And the total?
Ouch. But there you go J-Mac.The United States has made a massive commitment to the future of Iraq in both blood and treasure. As of December 2006, nearly 2,900 Americans have lost their lives serving in Iraq. Another 21,000 Americans have been wounded, many severely.
To date, the United States has spent roughly $400 billion on the Iraq War, and costs are running about $8 billion per month. In addition, the United States must expect significant "tail costs" to come. Caring for veterans and replacing lost equipment will run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Estimates run as high as $2 trillion for the final cost of the U.S. involvement in Iraq.
"Some people think that we should be willing to swallow any kind of nonsense in order to 'preserve the unity of Canada.' I am not interested in a Canada that would be just a splash on the map, with a six-letter word scrawled across it. The only Canada I want to preserve is a Canada that can do something: for its own people, for the hungry two-thirds of the world, for the survival of the planet; not a phantom that can only watch helplessly as we all tumble down a steep place to destruction."
The hollowing out of the national idea -- of a vision of Canada as a coherent national entity, capable of acting with a single national purpose -- is now complete. We are well on our way to Belgiumhood, and that suits our political class just fine.
On this, as on so many other questions, the “Quebec consensus” is a fraud.But fine: some Quebecers think they are. People are entitled to believe what they want to believe. Quebec nationalists are entitled to argue that Quebec is a nation all they want. But somewhere, sometime, somebody has to put the other proposition: that Canada is a nation; that Quebecers are a part of that nation; that they have as much or more in common with other Canadians as they do with each other. Ordinarily, I would expect my prime minister, at least, to do that.
But my prime minister did not do that. My prime minister could discourse at length on his profound conviction, never voiced until now, that Quebecers are a nation, but never once could he say that Canadians are -- only bark out meaningless applause lines like “Canada is the greatest country in the world.”
..."this can only fan the flames it claims to extinguish. The message the Parliament of Canada is about to send to Quebecers is this: that, as a nation, they have more in common with each other than they do with other Canadians, whom they will increasingly see as another nation altogether; that their relationship with that other nation must, accordingly, be as that they maintain with other nations -- cordial, businesslike, to be sure, but distant; and that, like any self-respecting nation, they can on no account submit to be governed by another nation -- as represented, for example, by the majority of the Parliament of Canada.
So, in short, everyone ends up looking like an imbécile. And, as a consequence, Michael Ignatieff looks less ridiculous in comparison. So he and Jean Charest are probably the only winners in this sorry, sorry spectacle we should not have had to go through.
