Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

Canada

where you want to live

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The Economist has just published its annual ranking of 140 major cities for their livability. It’s no surprise that Vancouver, Canada’s urban showpiece on the Pacific with a matchless setting, is once again ranked first as a place to live, but it is the absence of cities – and countries – that would have been favourites not long ago which says something about how the judgment of quality of urban life has changed. Three of the first six cities are in Canada (#1 Vancouver, #4 Toronto, #6 Calgary) and 6 of the first ten are in Australia (Sidney, Melbourne and Perth) and Canada. The other four in the first ten are capital cities of middle-size European powers (#2 Vienna, Zurich, Helsinki) plus UN-centre Geneva.

Former stars like Paris (#17), Berlin (#22) or Rome (#51) no longer cut the mustard for quality of life. Countries without a history of military colonialization trump countries who came to prominence by invading neighbours and even far-off lands, and now have to live with the consequences. Countries with a current atmosphere of tolerance and with middle-power armed forces run a steadier, friendlier ship in the modern world than those with atomic weapons and nervously-guarded borders.

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The Coronation of Csar Michael

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As predicted two years ago by my brother, Canada’s prodigal son, Michael Ignatieff, has returned from half a lifetime of exile in London (where he taught at Cambridge and Oxford) and Boston (where he headed an institute at Harvard) to become a politician in Toronto (where he taught at the University of Toronto) and is about to be crowned leader of the Liberal Party of Canada this weekend in Vancouver, (where he taught at the University of British Columbia).

The location of the coronation is yet another stroke of luck for the neophyte politician, as he will be far from his centre of power in still wintry Ontario, where he is already showing he can win back voters lost to Conservatives in the last election – a miserable loss for the Liberals – and instead can bask in the splendid atmosphere of the world’s most beautiful city, particularly in May as it suns itself before splendid deeply snow-covered mountains and ignores its social problems of homelessness and drug-addiction as its hockey team continues its march towards a potential Stanley Cup. My brother and I, driving home from Leonard Cohen’s recent towering performance at the hockey stadium, were stopped by a chap pushing a shopping cart full of assembled collected goods, who had no intention of drawing attention to his sad economic state compared to ours, as we assumed he had, but rather just wanted to give us the thumbs up sign as he noted the same Canuck flag hanging from our window as he had flapping from his cart. Here in Vancouver hockey is the great equalizer and when that’s going well and the weather has lost its winter bluster, then everything seems better.

And so it will be with the man who will be Prime Minister within a year. Many Canadians hope he will have the international clout to finally allow Canada to punch at or above its weight in crucial global matters, like water, energy, economics and also military interventions, where it has played a far bigger role than has been demonstrated under its long string of boring, anti-charismatic prime ministers since Pierre Trudeau. Armed with his 17 books – one deals with his father’s line, that included the last minister of education of csarist Russia, and the most recent with his mother’s, that included the man who plotted the trans-Canada railway – and with extensive experience and publications (and films) on conflicts like the war in ex-Yugoslavia, Ignatieff cannot be dismissed as yet another career politician of no particular note. He has strong opinions that even turn off some of his admirers, but there is no question that figures like Presidents Obama and Medvedev will have a different reaction when they meet the next Prime Minister of Canada than they did when they met any other since Trudeau.

Interview with The Homeland Security Secretary

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As if poor President Obama doesn’t have enough to worry about, as he considers whether it is the chaps who ordered torture in the name of homeland security or the chaps who carried out the orders – or neither or both – who should be brought to trial. And then, as a side show, his choice for protector of that same border gives an interview on Canadian national television outlining her concerns. Coming as it did upon the conclusion of a Canuck hockey game and first round sweep, the talk with an unknown woman appeared to be a perhaps somewhat heavy-handed satire about the former guardians of the US side of the Canadian border. Here was a comedienne portraying a US diplomat who was announcing that the US-Canada border must be made more impenetrable – just like the Mexican one – because the 9/11 terrorists had entered the US that way and that the currently informal border controls would have to be made much more stringent so it didn’t happen again. Well, you could walk down the street and ask almost anyone and they would know that no 9/11 terrorists entered from Canada, so this part of this routine was too nutty to really be cutting satire. The four-hour waits at the border on the last long weekend also made the second part too obvious since it was just meant to show the supposed US diplomat hadn’t crossed that border in years, if ever.

And then her name flashed on screen – Janet Napolitano, apparently a Canadian comedienne my brother and I had never heard of, though we have great connections in that field. And then her title popped up – Homeland Security Secretary of the USA. Well, that was a good one, if a bit of a cheap shot, until it turned out to be true. This birdbrain – apparently the former governor of Arizona – is in charge of US border security, and is going to cost both countries billions of dollars in lost trade, more if she builds a wall like the one on the Mexican border in the tunnel between Detroit and Windsor, and she doesn’t know what country the guys came from who attacked New York. Sometimes satire just doesn’t pay.

The Song of Leonard Cohen

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The ice has been scraped off the floor of the building, where just yesterday my brother and I witnessed (tickets from friends in high places) the relentless march of the Canucks to the inevitable series with Detroit for the real Stanley Cup (everyone picks the winner of the western division to roll over whoever wins in the anemic eastern division), and the stage is set for tonight’s performance by the most remarkable performer/author of the last half century. Fifty years ago, the young Leonard Cohen won Canada’s highest literary prize for the second of his only two novels, Beautiful Losers, which sold 3,000 copies, thus convincing Leonard to try another field, like poetry and singing.

And what a career that has been. He has also won the GG for poetry – Flowers for Hitler – and made (and lost) a fortune by setting many of his lyrics to music. The quality of his writing and his musical transcriptions is so high that a pure poet of the highest order, Germany’s greatest and most difficult contemporary writer and youngest winner of its highest literary prize, Durs Grünbein, once confided to my brother and me that Cohen was at the top of his list of colleagues worth admiring (and the only Canadian on it), a troubadour who had lived off the public performance of poetry for a lifetime. Durs wanted only one souvenir of his Canadian visit, not maple syrup or Yukon air, but Donald Brittain’s National Film Board documentary about the very young Leonard Cohen before he had even started to sing, not the easiest document to get ahold of at the time, though we managed to eventually get it delivered to Berlin. And now, at 74, Cohen is well into the most triumphant tour of his life, in March playing the 99th concert on the tour in his first performance in the United States (in New York) in 15 years. Though he’s from Montréal, he’ll be on home turf in Vancouver, just like the Canucks in the same building, and the long sold-out house is expecting a similar triumph.

The Sad Song of the South

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On Wednesday and Friday nights, the Vancouver Canucks begin their playoff run for the Stanley Cup, and every seat has been sold out from the moment tickets went on sale, with lowest prices in the mid $100 range, no surprise since since the Canucks have sold out every game for the last 200 plus. You also are lucky to get tickets for Ottawa and Edmonton regular season games, you can’t get a ticket for the Calgary and Montreal playoff games, and Toronto tickets of any kind are passed on in wills, and the Maple Leafs only rarely even make the playoffs. Not so in many US venues, most dramatically in Detroit, home of the defending champions and one of the favourites once again (they have most of the Swedish national team, that may well win the Olympic tournament next year in Vancouver) where the crash of the auto industry has put much of the fan base out of pocket.

But Detroit, New York or Boston will survive bad times with good teams while many US expansion teams seem doomed – read all those south of St. Louis, maybe including St. Louis, the Canucks’ first round opponent. In Canada there is a sense of Schadenfreude in all this as sporting greed forced flourishing franchises out of Quebec City and Winnipeg, which were deemed to be too small for big sports money, and put in places like Phoenix, Atlanta, Columbus, Nashville and Florida, where some will certainly soon go belly-up, and kept out of places like Hamilton and London, where their success is virtually guaranteed. So up here everybody is hunkering down for the beginning of six weeks of matchless sports entertainment, knowing that the annoying phone calls from down south for the latest information will soon be pouring in from a sporting public stuck with nothing but steroid baseball to look at.

The Russians are flying, are the Russians thinking of landing?

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On Feb. 18, the day before President Obama’s visit to Ottawa last week, two Russian Tupalov bombers entered a zone of international airspace over the Canadian Arctic that is in the NORAD air defence identification zone under Canadian control and penetrated to the very edge of Canadian air space itself. Canadian fighter jets were sent from Cold Lake in northern Alberta to intercept them and when they did so over Canadian Arctic islands, the Russians retreated. Prime Minister Harper denounced this incident as an encroachment on Canadian territory, a serious charge considering the visit of President Obama, and denounced “aggressive Russian actions around the globe and Russian intrusions into our air space.”

Defence Minister Peter MacKay indicated that he felt it could not be a coincidence that this happened as Obama was preparing to visit. And the question remains, just why are the Russians returning to tactics not seen since the fall of the Soviet Union? About the only thing they could really accomplish by forcing the Canadians to confront them militarily in the Arctic would be to bring the Canadian and US military commands into closer co-operation than would have been conceivable during the Bush years, something that many think is a necessity if the North American Arctic is considered to have become vulnerable to intrusions from its north.

Canada, Obama and the Northwest Passage

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Things have started out well with regard to relations between the new Obama regime in Washington and the old Harper one in Ottawa. It has been announced that Obama will make his first foreign visit to Ottawa – apparently it is his first visit to Canada – as had long been the tradition before George Bush decided to go to Mexico City first. This first apparently trivial but symbolically weighty step led to 8 years of poor relations between the supposedly friendly neighbours when Bush failed to mention Canada in his public thanks to many countries for aid after the attack on New York. He later went on to explain that he sort of considered Canada to be part of the US so it didn’t need any special mention. That hardly helped matters and nothing he did later did, either, although his views on such an important matter as free trade seem to be closer to Canada’s than Obama’s have been at times.

Now Hilary Clinton, who had much experience in Canada as first lady, went out of her way to point out to the Senate committee considering her nomination as Secretary of State that she intended to work hard on improving relations with Canada which happened to be the US’ leading trade partner and one of the very few countries that was punching way above its weight in Afghanistan, while most US allies preferred watching from the bleachers.
That is all promising particularly since the new secretary of state is so much better informed than her clueless predecessor. But Bush threw out one more mine into troubled waters just as he was abandoning ship. In his last week in office he proclaimed the US position on sovereignty in the Arctic in such a way that no Canadian government can accept it, saying that the US had the right and even the obligation to extend military control over Arctic waters, including the northwest passage, that Canada considers to be internal Canadian waters between Canadian islands. Harper has announced plans to increase the presence of the Canadian Armed Forces on northern islands exponentially along with the strength of icebreakers and arctic warships. The two proposals do not mesh and the topic will inevitably come up during the upcoming meetings in Ottawa. It is clear what Canada’s position will be, and that will likely be even more forceful if Michael Ignatief, who has many former Harvard colleagues among Obama’s closest advisors, becomes Prime Minister, so it will be up to Obama to comment on Bush’s view of the north. It is an areas where Obama has little or no experience and his response could be an interesting clue on how he will attempt to guide his ship of state through troubled waters where he has never sailed before.

Politics and Sport – Part 5

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There is one area – and maybe only one – in which Canada comes together as a whole. French and English, Inuit and Nu-cha-nulth, maybe even Newfoundlanders – all stop bickering long enough to agree that as far as the national sport is concerned Canada stands in nobody’s shadow, particularly not that of our rambunctious southern neighbour. That area is, of course, hockeyworld, and nothing drags the national interest together – certainly not another sideshow of an election – more than an international tournament, in particular when it takes place in Canada. When that happens, the bragging rights that used to be ritualistically fought over by the largest and second-largest country on earth have been irritatingly disturbed in recent years by bellowing from the third-largest country .
And so it is that a country being bombarded from coast to coast to coast with the most wintry winter in memory – 50 cm on the ground in usually tropical Vancouver as the snow continues into its fourth week and the new year arrives – focusses its attention on the World Junior (Under 20) championship that annually begins on Boxing Day and ends two weeks later. This year it is in Ottawa and more then 400,000 tickets have been sold to a sporting event that will undoubtedly receive no mention in the US sporting bible, Sports Illustrated. But the US boys arrived full of confidence and swagger, only to lose to Canada in a spirited affair, and then collapse and be eliminated by little Slovakia. Meanwhile super power Russia lost decisively to Sweden, but was very much prepared for a semi-final meeting with Canada, which almost matches it in size but not in power, except in hockey. It was a match that made Canucks forget the blizzards outside. Having gained and lost a lead 4 times only to find themselves trailing with two minutes left, Canada got a goal with five seconds to go and went on to win in a shoot-out. When was the last time you saw tough Russian guys actually crying as somebody else’s national anthem played?
There is one more hurdle, however. On Monday, Canada meets Sweden in the final, and lots of people think that Sweden has the strongest national and junior team in the world at the moment – just wait for the Olympic Game matches in Vancouver a year from now, though it will cost you a couple of thousand bucks to get a ticket to the final – and that it will not be the first second or third largest nation in the world that hears its anthem played, but the twenty-fifth. In any case don’t miss the game.

Prorogue – what the hell does that mean?

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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

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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.