Canadians woke up this morning to the sound of a verb they had never heard before – to prorogue – which in parliamentary lingo means to stop parliament from meeting for awhile and in street talk means to screw the electorate. The Queen of England’s representative in Canada, Governor-General Michelle Jean, an excellent woman with great experience in the entertainment industry and none in parliamentary procedures, returned early from a tour of somewhere or other to agree to Prime Minister Harper’s request to close down parliament for almost two months so that he could avoid a vote of non-confidence on Monday. That certainly would have occurred only 6 weeks after his party set up a minority government after having won only 33% of the vote in a federal election.
Canadians do not elect a Prime Minister, as Amurcans do a President, but rather members of parliament, who in turn elect party leaders, the strongest of which becomes Prime Minister, either by leading a party holding a majority of the seats or by getting together a group of parties which agree to work together under his or her leadership. This is the case, for instance, in Germany today, where a very close race for seats between the two largest parties led to a coalition government, in which the Prime Minister position belongs to the leader of the party with the most seats, and the next most important ministry – foreign affairs – belongs to the leader of the second ranked party. In the current Canadian situation, the leader of the party with the most seats, who never considered seeking such a German solution – a coalition government with another party – asked the Queen of England’s representative to stop the vote from happening so that the other parties could not coalesce with enough votes to run the government. But this vote will still have to happen, but now not until February, leaving the country without a functioning government until then. This will certainly be terrible for the economy in perilous time and give the separatistes in Quebec good reason to press their cause all the more confidently.
Parliamentary democracy in action – the return of Michael Ignatieff
A couple of years ago, my brother Doug and I predicted that the next Prime Minister of Canada could be a very high level intellectual and genetic aristocrat, (his grandfather was the last minister of education in tsarist Russia) Harvard guru, BBC talk show star and prize-winning author (for both fiction and non-fiction) Michael Ignatieff, returning from years of voluntary exile to show Canada how to do it. We were wrong in the short run. Ignatieff ran into too much resistance in his own party because he had been away for too long, and failed to win the party leadership position. Instead he settled for second place behind compromise candidate Stephane Dion, who then went on to fail miserably in the election that followed only one month ago. But Ignatieff did win a seat in parliament, became deputy leader and put in his time in the trenches. And now it seems that we will be right in the slightly longer run as a singularly uncanadian (unprecedented in great white north history) event seems destined to take place within a week.
Prime Minister Steven Harper, having set up a minority government with only about 1/3 of the vote, amazingly failed to note that he was not in a strong position of power and had to rule with the opposition in mind. With breathless arrogance he announced a political programme in his first act of power in the new session, that failed to address the economic crisis but did include a number of issues that were unacceptable to the socialist, liberal and separatist opposition parties. The result was the seemingly impossible agreement of the 3 opposition parties to vote against the ruling conservatives in the vote of confidence that goes with such a government bill, and thus bring down the government and state that the opposition parties were ready to rule in coalition. Such a coup d’état by parliamentary means may be familiar to Italians, Austrians and others but it is unheard of in supposedly stable Canada, and has many flocks of geese flapping around wildly. But it does seem now that it will happen within two weeks, and either Stephan Dion, who has already said he will step down as party leader in May, or heir-apparent Michael Ignatieff will be catapulted into power. Ignatieff and Obama would be an interesting pair as Ignatief sometimes pops up to the right of Obama on key issues, such as the invasion of Iraq that Ignatief as head of the appropriate Harvard Institute showed sympathy for because of the Iraqi government’s history of war crimes against the Kurds.
A tale of two elections – Part 2
Among the many interesting but not earthshaking side effects of the Obama election is an overdue tempering of a kind of understood superiority that had taken over the Canadian view of their way of governing when compared to that of the US for the last decade. After all about ten years ago, US politics was completely dominated by a grotesquely overblown miserable little sex scandal of the old kind that ruined the final years of an otherwise apparently more than capable president, only to be followed by a most curious piece of vote counting that brought to power an obviously incapable president who was even re-elected. During the same period Canada was governed by a series of mediocre leaders who made everyone wish for just a touch of the intelligence, charm and cold determination of Pierre Elliot Trudeau. But when the same people looked south, it was clear that Ottawa was a centre of charisma and excellence when compared to whoever was sitting in the White House.
It may well turn out that Barack Obama will not be able to fulfill the great hopes that have inevitably been placed on him (probably nobody could), but he’s already done a great deal just by winning this election. Now the world can stop dumping on the Americans for not even being able to run their own fair elections while telling every one else to become democratic, and Canadian commentators can stop preaching to them about their lack of benevolence towards the downtrodden, while ignoring the often scandalous state of their own aboriginal communities. Because while the Americans, against all odds, voted for someone named Barack Obama to be their leader, a smaller percentage of eligible Canadian voters confirmed, in the most boring election in memory, the re-election of a prime minister whose name they could scarcely remember after his first term in office.
Snowbound trip to the Polls
Canucks got out of their igloos yesterday, rounded up the sled dogs and snow shoes and headed off to the polls to make sure that they got their money’s worth out of the $300,000,000 spent on what most thought was an unnecessary election. Well, less than 60% actually did that, an all-time low turnout that proved that the skeptics were right. At the end of the day very little had changed. As predicted, the Conservatives will once again lead a minority government with 1 per cent more of the popular vote and 17 new seats, mostly at the expense of the opposition Liberals, but still well short of the majority it was looking for. But while the Tories swept rural BC and Alberta, where a rubber duck would have easily carried most ridings, they failed to make any gains in Quebec, despite endless aggressive courting, and had no seats at all in Newfoundland or the three major cities Vancouver, Montreál and Toronto. It also could be a victory, that they may soon come to regret as the liberal kings-in-waiting, Michael Ignatief, Bob Rae, and yes young Justin Trudeau, expectantly observe Prime Minister Harper making hash of the economic crisis.
About the only thing the election did prove was how spectacularly stupid the British first past the post vote-counting system is. In Canada there is no reward for getting 49% of the vote in your riding if someone else gets 51%, which makes voting a useless gesture in vast areas of the country where it is clear from the start who will get the most votes in a particular riding. The result is mocking disinterest from the young folks (among others) as they see their green party get 7% of the vote and no seats while the Bloc Quebecois, running only in Quebec, gets 10% of the national vote and 50 seats. What the hell is the point of rounding up the dogs for the long cold trip to the polling booth? Only true satirists could come up with a system like that.
A Tale of Two Elections
The Canadian election was called 6 weeks before the vote on Oct. 14. the day after Thanksgiving, and has provided journalists and media types with plenty of largely vacuous material to keep them employed for the period. Among the specialties of the Canadian six-weeks are the two debates among the now 5 major party leaders, one of whose parties has never had anyone elected, first in French and one night later in English. The spectacle of 3 native English-speakers attempting to use their various levels of high-school French (from pretty primitive to B plus) to outargue two very smart native French speakers provides a certain amount of sadistic humour, but wears thin after 15 grueling minutes. And then vice versa on the next evening, since amazingly none of these five leaders is as bilingual as thousands of kids attending French schools in Vancouver, not to mention many scores of thousand bilingual Chinese speakers. In the long run, it seems clear that this election, despite all its energy and windbag rhetoric, will not change the makeup of parliament very much at all, and there will be another minority government.
The US election with a set date, on the other hand, has gone on seemingly forever and cost scores (hundreds?) of millions of dollars, something which does not seem to have been mentioned in the current financial crisis, where that money might have been used for something more useful, like hiring more inspectors and controllers of financial institutions. But for all its own brand of windbagging rhetoric, a huckstering media performance, and sideshow shenanigans like a vice-presidential debate, the US system does allow the main candidates to give some indication of what they are really made of, something hard to argue for the Canadian system. It is an exhausting process and a youngster like Obama should have a real advantage over an old warrior like McCain, but the old soldier seems to be hanging in there quite admirably and ultimately the vote should come down to which of the two convinces more people of the superiority of their view of the world, assuming they put functioning ballot boxes in states like Ohio and Florida, and that the Palin fiasco doesn’t lead to comicall voting patterns. You’d have to be gambler to bet against Obama but at least the game seems to have been played on a level field.
What do economists do, anyway?
Okay so the economy of the world is going to Disneyland because the economists advising the US government on how to regulate the flow of money apparently don’t know their ass from their elbow. Or are they simply in cahoots with the CEOS who got millions of dollars for having bankrupted their firms on their watch? Or could it just be total incompetence, or the display of the emperor’s new economic expertise clothes? Should they be forced to read Hans Christian Andersen stories, instead of economic comic books? After all George Bush has an MBA from Harvard, the same super-elite US university that Canadians, who have regulated their banking system so this can’t happen, call America’s McGill. And he certainly doesn’t know anything about the topic. Why drag down McGill’s reputation? My real question is therefore: What the hell do economists do if they know buggerall about economics? Couldn’t we save a lot of it by just getting rid of this profession?
There’s an election in Canada, too
The US presidential election with its seemingly endless foreplay followed by a curve ball from left field was bound to catch any gambler or sport fan’s attention, and the Canadian one, taking place almost simultaneously, is designed to go unnoticed in the great wide world. But it was announced last week for Oct. 14 by the governing Conservative Party, and its very shortness underlines both the strengths and weaknesses of the parliamentary versus the set-date systems of voting. On the one hand the US system has turned into such an expensive and long campaign as candidates jostle for media attention for the whole year preceding the set early November date that only the super-rich or those with super-rich friends can take a run. On the other hand, the voters do have a chance to find out everything and more that they want to know about the candidates, or at least they would if the press played an intelligent probing role. In this area, the sudden and completely unexpected appearance of a total outsider from Alaska as a vice-presidential candidate who had spent no money was surely a breath of fresh air even for her skeptics.
In the parliamentary system, in which the ruling party gets to announce the election date with only 6 weeks notice, there is by comparison very little money spent, but time does fly and instead of intelligent discussion and probing much of that time is spent by the press chasing down trivial events and meaningless mini-scandals and in the end the public hasn’t learned much about anything except the manipulated public persona of the party leader, who in not who you are voting for. You are voting only for the local representative who belongs to the caucus which will choose that leader. Thus the ruling Conservative Party spends its money on tv ads meant to show that the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is really a warmer and fuzzier man than he seems to be, and the challenging Liberal party does the same in an attempt to show that their leader, Stéphane Dion, is a better communicator than he seems to be. In private, M Dion, who once spent time with my brother and me in Iceland, is a charming, very intelligent man, who would obviously be an excellent Prime Minister. Those who know Mr. Harper well would undoubtedly say the same, but the actual election campaign does very little to actually show any of this.
So take your pick. My brother and i actually prefer the German system, but that’s another story.
West to Alaska – the Globe looks at Gov. Palin
With 100% credit to the Toronto Globe and Mail’s resident poet John Allemang
PALIN COUNTRY
Please call us rednecks, ’cause we’re proud
To be so rough and rude and loud,
And act in ways elitists think
Proves that we’ve had too much to drink
In some dead-end Alaska dive
When, dude, it just shows we’re alive.
We love our church, our kids, our beer,
Can tell you right down to the year
That God put Man upon the Earth,
Know life starts well ahead of birth,
Don’t give a damn about the arts
And stay away from foreign parts
Until the moment that we’re sent
As John McCain’s vice-president
The great thing, when your neck is red?
Nobody cares what’s in your head –
The voters seem to like ’em dumb,
So why not play a hockey mom
Who hunts and prays and procreates
To govern these Unites States?
If you can drive a snowmobile,
The people, bless them, think you’re real,
And in the end who needs a brain?
Just tell your kids they must abstain,
Pretend that when your rule’s ignored
It’s some great gift sent by the Lord,
And prove you’ll go to any length
To make such redneck fault a strength.
The chickens come home to roost in Georgia
It did not take long for the chickens of Kosovo to find a splendid first roosting place in Georgia. When the topic of independence for Kosovo came up only a few short months ago, red warning flags were flying in many quarters from those with knowledge and experience of ethnic conflicts in the powder kegs of the Balkans and the Caucasus Mountains. Many countries, like Canada, took a long time before agreeing to recognize an independent Kosovo fostered by the United States, and a fair number still don’t, because they see the danger to their own national boundaries. A periphery province of a legally established national state with internationally recognized borders was declaring its independence from the much larger state to which it legally belonged. What would happen in France, Spain, Italy or the United States if such a situation arose at home? Not to mention China.
The reason was simple; after long standing violent conflicts between the two ethnic groups of that breakaway state, powerful outside nations took the side of the ethnic group that it felt was under almost genocidal attack by the mother state, which they then bombed unmercifully. This was Serbia in the late 1990s as NATO troops punished it for its atrocities against the Albanian ethic group of Kosovo. But it is also way too close for comfort for the situation in Georgia and its illegal breakaway republics with a large Russian majority, the Georgians having decided it was safer to leave. But this time, it was the US-sponsored Georgian army that took on the role of the Serbian aggressor, as it attacked the breakaway provinces. And who should come rushing to the defence of the poor threatened minority ethnic group but Tsar Putin, who must have thought he was dreaming when he saw that his increasingly dopey rivals had presented him with the opportunity to defend Russians (since he had given most of them Russian passports) under attack while at the same time squashing a tiny annoying tick on the skin of the Russian bear. So that of course is what happened. Poor Condoleeza Rice, sent out on a Don Quixote mission to chastise (and absurdly threaten?) the Russians for doing exactly what the US had done in Serbia less than ten years before, must be wishing her next job involves dealing with fractious faculty clubs, because she has served an extraordinarily foolish master for too long to retain her own dignity. Wasn’t she early on in her diplomatic career supposed to be an expert on Russia? How could anyone mess up the Russian desk in only 8 years as much as she has?
The result is a clear demonstration of renewed Russian power (and threat) along all its borders, a completely crushed and bankrupt exotic ally of the US which somehow misinterpreted US bluster for true support, and a really serious impediment to the free flow of essential Asian natural gas and oil to European consumers. Now we can wait to see if all of those countries who pushed for an independent Kosovo are as quick to recognize the new state of South Ossetia. Wanna bet?
Getting to know you – Dubja style
Despite vociferous criticism of the press recently that is is longer doing its researched investigative job, occasionally a story comes out that shows that some informative journalism still takes place. The Vancouver Sun, for instance, published in its August 6 edition, startling information about US State Department grasp of foreign affairs, when, after a 3 and a half year wait, it received information it had requested under the freedom of information act, about the protocol guide prepared for President Bush and his staff before Bush’s first visit to Canada in Ottawa and Halifax from Nov. 30-Dec 1, 2004. Documents included by the U.S. Office of the Chief of Protocol prepared the president for the culture shock he would experience when travelling far from home.
Under social customs and courtesies, designed to prevent USERS from accidently offending the natives, were the following:
“On being introduced the customary greetings are firm handshake, customary “Hello” or Bonjour” in Quebec.”
“During conversations remove sunglasses.”
“While indoors remove hats.”
“Canadians, for the most part, place importance on education, skill, modesty and politeness”.
Under advice on deciphering a foreign tongue
‘”eh” is pronounced “ay”, is used mostly in rural areas and roughly translates as: “You know?” or “Isn’t it?”‘
While concluding “that most Canadian gestures are the same as those in the US it notes some exceptions:
“To call someone to you, use the entire hand rather than the index figure.”
“In Quebec, the thumbs down sign is considered offensive.”
In a follow-up analysis of the visit, the document also deals with serious political matters such as expected anti-US demonstrations, noting that protesters ranged from anarchists to raging grannies:
but “The Belly Dancers Against Bush were nowhere to be seen… they do tend to be active in the summer, for obvious reasons.”
No we assure you that these are not the fantasies of Rick Moranis, Joe Flaherty, John Candy, Martin Short, Andrea Martin and my brother and me in one of our finest hours. If you don’t believe me, put in your request for freedom of information documents, and in three and one half years, you will see why my brother and I can no longer do satire like we could in the good old days when we blew up things real good. Now it’s done by bureaucrats who should be stand-up comedians. By the way, your president by then will probably be a chap who recently announced that he would like to talk to the president of Canada. If he ever had made the trip 100 kilometers north of his home base (which he hasn’t), he would find out there was no such thing. Oh no, not another one! I wonder if he knows which country is by far the US’s largest trading partner and which country is by far the leading source of its fuel. There must be some documents on the topic in the secret vaults that he could take a look at before it’s too late.