Out of the mouths of innocents

Last night I had dinner with two colleagues from Germany. The first one--let's call her Confused--is an immigrant who has been here for a couple of years now, but who is still trying to figure out the Canadian political system. The other one--let's call her Bewildered--has only been here a couple of months and is still stumbling over the basics. And I'm the closest thing they've got to a political expert who can explain things to them. (Yeah, yeah, I know. Poor souls.) Anyway, here's an approximate reconstruction of last night's conversation:

Confused: So, explain this to me. There's a minority government, right?

IP: Right.

Confused: And that means that if the Conservatives want to get their environment legislation passed, they need to work with one of the other parties and make compromises.

IP: Well, actually there's a special committee working on the legislation, so all of the parties are supposed to get a say. But yeah, they have to make compromises.

Confused: So why are people so mad?

IP: What do you mean?

Confused: I mean, people voted for a minority government, right? So they wanted the parties to work together, right? But every time they try, the politicians don't like it!

IP: *laughing* Well, the Liberals don't like it. The Conservatives probably don't like it, either, but they have to pretend they do. Canadian politicians aren't used to minority governments.

Bewildered: What do you mean by 'minority government'?

IP: Well, the Conservatives don't have 50% of the seats on their own, and there's no coalition--

Bewildered: There's no coalition? Why is there no coalition?

IP: Well, um...because...*laughing*...I guess because Canadian politicians aren't used to that. The two big parties both want to think they can get majority governments all on their own. And so--

Bewildered: All on their own? But isn't that a lot of power for one political party to have?

IP: *laughing* Yes. Yes it is. It's not very likely to happen, though, because there are three so-called "smaller" parties that aren't very small anymore. But as long as we don't have proportional representation, the big parties will still think there's at least a chance of getting majority governments on their own. So the Liberals don't want there to be any good legislation that comes out while the Conservatives are in power, because they want their majority, and the Conservatives don't want the Liberals to have anything to do with their accomplishments, because they want their majority. And the NDP has to try to help something reasonable get accomplished without actually making either of the big parties look good, and the Bloc has to make sure people keep hating the both the Conservatives and the Liberals.

Confused: So the politicians are all standing around yelling at each other and not doing anything productive.

IP: Kind of, yeah.

Confused: Are they all stupid?!

IP: *laughing very hard now* Kind of, yeah.

Bewildered: Wait, I still don't understand why there isn't a coalition. Doesn't there have to be a coalition? I mean, how do they get anything done at all?

IP: Well...that's why we don't know whether there's going to be an election this spring or not.

Bewildered: *dumbfounded look*

IP: *cracking up completely* Yeah, I really can't defend this. Sorry.

Blogging partisans and partisan blogs

Last November, James Bow wrote a post about who he thought should win the various Canadian Blog Awards, and among other things, he said that I ran "the best NDP blog." Now, don't get me wrong, it was delightful to get an endorsement from someone I respect as much as I do James. But I had never thought of myself as writing an "NDP blog," and the characterization brought me up short.

I tried to tell myself that I was just splitting hairs--that I'm a New Democrat and I blog, so of course I have an NDP blog. Heck, I even belong to the "Blogging Dippers" blog aggregator. But something just didn't sit right about the label, and the more I steeped in it, the more it felt like a description that just didn't fit what I was trying to do with my blog. It reminded me of why I hadn't taken Greg Staples up on his offer to appear on his Bloggers' Hotstove podcast after the first time: I told him that if I could be sure it'd just be about shooting the breeze with a bunch of bloggers of different political stripes, that would be one thing, but if the extreme partisanship of a couple of his panelists was going to box me into the corner of Speaking For The NDP, I didn't want to play.

But still, I couldn't quite put my finger on why the idea bothered me so much until two posts came along: one that discussed the difference between blogging partisans and partisan blogs, and one that exemplified it. The first post, written by James Bow about the Wajid Khan floor-crossing, talked about how Conservative blogger Stephen Taylor had broken the story because sources inside the party had leaked it to him. The post then went on to muse about the pros and cons of partisanship in blogging, likening Taylor to Liberal blogger Jason Cherniak:

Just as Jason Cherniak has been co-chair of Stephane Dion’s blog campaign, and a reliable partisan blogger for both the Ontario and federal Liberals, Stephen Taylor’s work in organizing the Blogging Tories and his apparent relationship with insiders within the Conservative Party make him as much of a mouthpiece for the Conservatives as Jason is for the Liberals. And, indeed, I envy Stephen. He has himself a considerable plum to put on his resume, not to mention a possible future as an official within the Conservative Party — up to and including political candidacy. Like Jason, you’re looking at one of the future movers and shakers in this country.

Which should be fine, so long as, from this point forward, Stephen knows that he will be seen progressively more as a mouthpiece of the Conservative Party, and less his own man.

The second post, written by the aforementioned Jason Cherniak on his blogging anniversary, talked about the way Jason saw the direction of his blog in the upcoming year, and laid right out on the table the fact that he viewed his blog as a force to do good things for his party:

In the coming year, I look forward to a provincial election in Ontario. There may also be a federal election, but I'm not holding my breath. It will really depend on whether Harper wants to force one by putting forward a budget that no other party can support. Whatever happens, I will continue to do my best to help the Liberal Party because I believe that we Liberals offer the best option for Canadians.

Now, James talks about how he envies people like Stephen Taylor and Jason Cherniak their positions as bloggy conduits for their respective parties, but here's the thing: I don't, not at all. If the NDP were to come to me and offer me a similar deal, I wouldn't even have to think about it before turning them down. I find the very idea a little distasteful, in fact--for me, political blogging is about an individual or, in the case of a group blog, a group of individuals, writing up opinion pieces about whatever occurs to them. If I disagree with the NDP about something, I will do so respectfully, but I'm still going to write about it--reams and reams, if it's something I care about. If somebody from one of the other parties does something that makes the NDP look good, I'm not going to strain to find something to say about it just to spread the word. And most of the time, I'm going to be writing about things that aren't partisan ideas at all--things like electoral reform and election speculation and campaign strategy--because those are the kinds of things I actually have something unique to say about.

Don't get me wrong: I really am a partisan New Democrat. Like Jason and Stephen, I, too, want to help my party, and in fact I spend a lot of my free time doing just that. I'm just not interested in doing that with my blog. So if what you're here for are well-argued treatises on NDP policy or debunkings of all the ridiculous things that get said about the NDP by bloggers and the mainstream media alike, you're definitely in the wrong place. (For that, you actually want Accidental Deliberations, who writes the real "best NDP blog.")

I'll end by illustrating my point with a list of some of my favourite contrarian posts from partisan bloggers whose blogs are nonetheless not partisan. These are people who admit their biases upfront, but still aren't ashamed to call their parties out when they deserve it:

Tories
Political Staples
Bound By Gravity

Liberals
Calgary Grit
Gauntlet

New Democrats
Thought, Interrupted by Typos
Rational Reasons

Postscript to the echo chamber post

If I had an "IP's greatest hits" sidebar, one post I'd put there is "Blogging, feminism, and critical thinking." I wrote it way back in November of 2005, in response to the last uproar over Canadian women bloggers.

If you've joined me since then (likely), and you're inclined to go back and read bloggers' old posts when they've been dubbed particularly good (somewhat less likely), it might interest you.

The cancer cure Big Pharma won't let you have? Maybe not.

The story's long gone cold by now, but I was very interested to read the posts from a little over a week ago about a potential cheap cure for cancer that Big American Pharma was ostensibly going to keep from us. "Very interested" because my very own partner is a cancer vaccine researcher at the National Cancer Institute in Washington D.C. (as well as a lefty Canadian who has no great love for Big Pharma), and she hadn't mentioned word one of this to me.

We had a bit of a back-and-forth about it, but in the end I decided that it would be better to let her guest-blog what she had to say than try to come up with a coherent post about something about as far from my area of expertise as, say, zero-gravity hockey for gerbils. So without any further ado, it's over to my girl. You can call her Christie. Oh, and I've told her you guys don't bite, so please don't make a liar out of me!

---

There's been a lot of discussion over the past few days about the cheap, readily available, putatively safe, potential cancer treatment, dichloroacetate (DCA). Never having heard of the compound, I did the first thing I always do when word of a new cancer 'cure' hits my Inbox and headed straight for my beloved Google Scholar.

DCA did shrink some tumours in mice. It did not, however, eradicate those tumours and its mechanism of action is such that it will frequently leave behind cancer cells to cause recurrences. In addition, the mechanism of action makes DCA largely ineffective against small metastases and it's the metastases that kill the majority of cancer patients.

The safety profile of DCA also requires more study. Peripheral neuropathy is extremely painful and is only a minor side effect if the alternative is death. I'd far rather lose my hair, vomit on multiple occasions, and deal with decreased blood cell counts--side effects of currently used cancer treatments--than experience peripheral neuropathy. In addition, DCA exposure is linked to both kidney and liver damage, the latter potentially leading to liver cancer, so patients might end up right back in the oncologist's office.

Leaving aside for the moment whether or not this is actually a viable cancer 'cure', it seems that some people are up in arms over their belief that Big Pharma will refuse to work towards getting DCA into the clinic because it's off-patent and they can't get even richer off of it. If that's what they end up deciding to do, it's a perfectly reasonable choice for those companies to make.

It costs a not insignificant amount of money to get a drug approved for use in the U.S., even when the drug is already being used for another condition or being used elsewhere in the world, and why should any company spend the money when every other company will start selling the drug as soon as it's approved, without making the same kind of investment?

Business owners, would you be willing to make a large financial outlay that all of your competitors will profit from, to the detriment of your bottom line? Would any of you be willing to pay to build a house and then let all your neighbours move in and live rent-free while you and your family camp out in one room? If so, you're a better person than I am.

It's also not automatically true that Big Pharma will stay clear of DCA. For one thing, the PR value of 'curing cancer' cannot be underestimated. Being able to claim to be the company that 'cured cancer' is worth money in the bank, even if everyone else will eventually be selling the same product.

Furthermore, if there is one thing drug companies excel at, it's finding ways to redesign drugs in order to extend a patent or to get a new one.

Most importantly for cancer patients and the people who love them, if there is any value at all to DCA in the treatment of cancer, the drug companies will go right to work creating new chemical compounds that work on the same pathways, only more effectively and with fewer side effects. Any one of those new compounds could prove to be a real cure for cancer and I trust that very few people who have been raising a fuss about DCA and the pharmaceutical companies will refuse the cure if they have need of it.

Finally, there's one very important point that I feel is being left out of this discussion: telling medical researchers what they must research can be as bad as telling them what they must not research. (*cough* stem cells *cough*) Perhaps I'm just taking this too personally, though. I'll tell you what I'll do: you can come over to my lab and tell me what to research next, if I can come over to your place of work and tell you how to do your job.

That echo chamber challenge again

I quit reading him back when his blog became All Gomery Bitterness All the Time, but apparently Warren Kinsella made a list of "the top ten bloggers", adding as part of the intro that "WE NEED MORE SMART FEMALE BLOGGERS NOW!" In response, then, complaints promptly rang out across the Liberalsphere that he just wasn't looking hard enough.

Big ol' smooches to all the Liberals who crossed party lines to mention me. But speaking of that, while I agree wholeheartedly with the objection--especially since Mr. Kinsella seems to have implied that the existing female bloggers aren't really all that smart--I'd be even more inclined to take note of the fact that almost all of the "top ten bloggers" according to Mr. Kinsella are Liberals. We really haven't even made a dent in that echo chamber, have we? How disappointing.

So assuming that we're not all actually interested in hearing our own opinions repeated back to us tenfold, here's the new, revamped challenge: If your blogroll contains only fellow partisans of your own personal stripe, find someone with different opinions and see if you can't at least find something in their writing to respect. If your blogroll contains only fellow Canadians, try picking up a British or Australian or American blog and look at the world from another direction. If your blogroll contains only (or even mostly) men, have a look at the above posts, or page through BlogHer, and see if you can't find a woman or two to add to it.

Come on, it'd be good for you. (And not just in that lima bean sort of way, either.)

Fundamentally different paths? Prove it.

Over at pogge, Ian Welsh points us at a Thomas Walkom column in the Toronto Star about the Maher Arar fiasco. Walkom's thesis is this:

Ottawa's decision to compensate Canadian Maher Arar for its role in his unlawful imprisonment and torture contains a warning and a lesson.

The warning is that Canada and the U.S. are on fundamentally different paths when it comes to matters of terrorism and human rights. The lesson is that until Ottawa gets more aggressive with our friends in the war on terror, a Canadian passport won't mean much.

While I agree wholeheartedly with Walkom's criticism of the U.S.'s actions, I think he gives Canada way too much credit. Yes, it was a good thing that the Canadian government officially apologized to Arar, and compensated him financially. But we can never let ourselves become self-congratulatory about that simply because the U.S. is still treating Arar even more despicably than Canada treated him.

We can't forget that there was a reason an official apology and several million dollars in compensation were necessary. We can't forget that the very Canadian who issued that apology, when he was leader of the Conservative opposition, was one of the people who helped sow suspicion against Arar once upon a time, and that several people below him directly accused Arar. And most of all, we can't forget that being one step better than the U.S. in matters of terrorism and human rights is hardly something to pat ourselves on the backs about, but a terrifically unambitious goal.

An apology for contributing to the deportation and torture of a Canadian citizen is what needed to happen, but it doesn't come close to proving that "Canada and the U.S. are on fundamentally different paths." We only get that honour once we prove that we'll be willing to stand up to the U.S. and assure that nothing like this can ever happen again. And as far as I'm concerned, the jury's still out on that one.

How not to write polling questions

Like at least one other blogger, I have been participating in the Innovative Research Group's Canada 20/20 online political surveys for over a year. Their most recent survey, which I filled out a few weeks back, focused on Kyoto and the environment.

I often find their questions somewhat difficult to answer, but there was one on the last survey that took the proverbial cake: choosing between "Canada must do its part to fight global warming, and implementing the Kyoto accord is the best way to do it" and "Canada must do its part, but implementing the Kyoto accord is just one way we can do it". If you believe, as I and many others do, that Kyoto is important but not nearly enough, what do you check?

After some deliberation, I finally checked the second unsatisfactory option. And what do we find today? A headline in the Ottawa Citizen (hat-tip to Political Staples) declaring that "Voters will forgive PM for ignoring Kyoto" (!) because "59 percent" say that Kyoto is "only one possible way to go."

*throws up hands*

From the "disgruntled westerner" file

Hear this, central Canadian readers: Alberta had a good three-week bout of -30 in November. The prairies had a blizzard last week. B.C. has seen so many out-of-season storms that they don't know from one day to the next whether they will have power.

Why am I telling you all this? To give you context for my annoyance at Canada's "national" Weather Network for declaring that WINTER FINALLY COMES TO CANADA because there's finally been a bit of snow in Ontario.

Bully for them that their country is so small. Mine is rather larger.

"The most opaque nation in the world"

In many ways, my "blogfather" Ian Welsh is the classic U.S.-bashing Canadian that people like Larry Zolf mean when they bring up the stereotype about Canadians hating Americans. The difference between Ian and the guy who blindly recites smug platitudes about "melting pots and cultural mosaics," though, is that Ian not only thinks for himself, but he also lays out his arguments so convincingly that he makes it awfully difficult to disagree with him.

I have long thought that with a bit of editing, his posts should be required reading in U.S. high schools. He'd provoke people, sure, but he'd also get them thinking critically about their country and its ideologies, which could arguably help undermine the very characteristics he criticizes. And his comments section is pretty good, too.

(Hat-tip to Declan.)

Electoral reform: what's likely and what's possible

I'm still catching up (it's amazing how out of the loop you feel after almost a month of complete radio silence!), but there has been some interesting speculation about the NDP demanding legislation on proportional representation in exchange for propping up the Conservatives' budget:

Scott Tribe says that the NDP is "in as good a position as at anytime during Martin’s minority tenure to demand it."

Green blogger Kevin asks "is the time now right for pro-rep, Mr. Layton?" and reminds us that Layton promised to make the issue "a big part of any discussion."

The Jurist points out that the Conservatives have "put forward a shorter process to evaluate PR and other democratic reforms - but also shown signs of rigging it against PR as an outcome."

Sinister Greg reminds us that while "the Tories are going to spend $900,000 to study electoral reform," there was actually already a study done by the federal government's Law Commission several years ago. (Aside: Fair Vote Canada took on a lot of copies of that study when Harper scrapped the Law Commission entirely a few months back, so if you're curious to look at it, you might want to contact them.)

My own thoughts about this run along three tracks:

First, I'm still not convinced that there's any one thing Harper can offer the NDP that will get them to support a budget that contains so many things they oppose. If, rather than offering a single full concession on one issue, the Conservatives were willing to compromise just enough on all of their positions enough for it to result in the kind of piecemeal centrism that tends to come from Liberal governments, I could see them having more success (albeit grudgingly from all sides).

Second, if we suppose that there is one single thing the NDP is going to be willing to bend on and damn the rest, that single thing is going to be serious climate change legislation, not electoral reform. This is both for policy reasons and for political ones. After all, as important as we poligeeks know electoral reform to be, it's still not as important as helping to save the planet, and even if it were, the public certainly wouldn't see it that way.

Third, if we enter the realm of full-fledged fantasy and suppose that the NDP would be willing to sacrifice everything else for electoral reform, any Conservative-NDP cooperation on making proportional representation happen would still get hung up on the form that reform should take. See, proportional representation is an issue on which it's easy to know the basics while still having a lot of misconceptions about the minutiae. And as long as the Conservatives persist in believing that a Mixed-Member Proportional system would necessarily allow party hacks to gain unprecedented amounts of power (not true), and as long as the NDP persist in believing that a Single Transferable Vote system would require large ridings (not true) or isn't really proportional representation (not only not true, but ludicrous), they're kind of at an impasse. Both the Conservatives and the NDP have a couple of MPs who know enough about the geeky details on the subject, but they're not the heavyweights, and the heavyweights don't seem to be listening to them. It's depressing to have the entire issue turn on misinformation, but it's the main reason why I don't see any real NDP-Conservative cooperation on electoral reform at any point in the future.

And a Happy New Year to you, too. Bah, humbug.

Reporting for duty

*peeks out from under rock*

*picks self up, dusts self off*

So. Anybody want to give me a rundown of what's been happening while I've been hibernating?

We interrupt your regularly scheduled longwinded blog to bring you this bit of silliness

Everybody remember U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Director Michael Brown? The guy who was chastised by...oh, just about everyone...for his handling of Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005? Well, according to Senate testimony that he gave earlier this year, the reason for his gross incompetence turns out to be that he was, erm, otherwise occupied during the crisis. With his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

Admiral Allen was then given the wherewithal to leave, to go do things, to go -- if he needed to be in New Orleans, to go to New Orleans, to be able to go to Jackson, Mississippi, to be able to go wherever he needed to go. I was literally constrained by Secretary Chertoff and told to stay in Baton Rouge after my first trip to Jackson, Mississippi. My hands were tied by him.

A few days later, he also elaborated on these twisted and prurient sources of his negligence in a CNN interview (you might want to cover the kids' eyes for this one):

It was balls to the wall. I was literally constrained by Secretary Chertoff. And I was certainly screaming and cussing at people.

While I does occur to me to wonder why the man would voluntarily make such *cough* private matters so very public, I nevertheless commend him for finally explaining the reasons behind his tragic mishandling of the situation.

(Ahem. All of which is to say that IP is--for the next two weeks or so, at least--on holiday. Every junkie needs to detox occasionally, and that goes for us political ones, too. See you in January.)

Dual citizenship: "loyalty," "convenience," or an acknowledgement of facts?

You may not have noticed if you're not an immigrant yourself, but the big national discussion about dual citizenship that has culminated with Stéphane Dion has actually been going on for over a year now. It began with Michaëlle Jean's appointment to Governor-General, continued with the evacuation of Lebanese Canadians from Lebanon over the summer, and raised its ugly head once again this fall when Stephen Harper's Tories floated the idea of doing away with it. In each of those discussions, people who are uncomfortable with dual citizenship have brought up two words that have puzzled and frustrated me: loyalty and convenience. But it wasn't until this week that it gelled for me why those sentiments feel like such a betrayal of Canadian values.

See, for me--and, I suspect, for many other immigrant Canadians--citizenship is neither a matter of loyalty nor a matter of convenience. My Canadian citizenship is an acknowledgement both of the steps I've taken to become a part of this culture and the way that culture has rubbed off on me and gotten under my skin. My American citizenship is an acknowledgement that because I was born and raised in the United States, the idealistic pragmatist you see before you today spent most of her formative years being influenced by that culture. And while it may be true that those citizenships come with certain rights and certain responsibilities, those rights and responsibilities are not what citizenship is. Citizenship is no more and no less than an acknowledgement of the fact that one is an X.

What makes a rejection of dual citizenship so offensive to me, then, is that it tells me that I can't be both X and Y--I have to choose. But this is not a simple matter, because the fact is, I am both. In every sense of the word, I am Canadian and American. Giving up my dual citizenship wouldn't change that; it would only force me to pretend it wasn't the case for the sake of appearances. And that forced pretense would go against everything Canada claims to stand for as a multicultural country.

For years, Canadians have been telling me, proudly, that while the U.S. is a "melting pot," Canada is a "cultural mosaic"--a patchwork of cultures that all work together to form a cohesive whole. But how on earth does that ideology stand up when the supposed "melting pot" thinks dual citizenships are just fine, and the supposed "cultural mosaic" is telling immigrants that they have to pretend they're nothing but Canadian or else be branded as disloyal? It doesn't--it collapses like a house of cards. And if this country is going to start telling people they have to choose between being an X and a Y in order to be truly Canadian, we're going to have to accept the consequences of that line of reasoning and be willing to change our policies and our ideologies to go along with it.

As for loyalty, well, that’s a far more complicated matter that--at least for me--has little to nothing to do with which country's or countries' passport(s) I hold. I am fully loyal to Canadian ideals--that's why I came here in the first place. I am thrilled to have an opportunity to help realize them more fully. But here's the rub: if those ideals changed--if Canada rejected the things that brought me here and became someplace I didn't want to live--I would want to leave Canada just as I left the United States. My loyalty isn't to the passports I hold, and it's not to the land mass encompassed by the political boundaries of the place I live, either. It's to the things this country--this place that I chose--says it wants to be. And quite frankly, this big national discussion about dual citizenship has been the first thing since I came here almost ten years ago that's shaken my faith in that.

The local and the not-so-local

Two political things that are making me happy this week:

1. Edmonton-Strathcona environmental lawyer Linda Duncan has decided that she's going to throw her hat into the ring for a second time and run again for the NDP. Remember Duncan, the star candidate who even the national media took note of in the last election? Some people laugh off the thought of an NDP MP in Alberta, but with Duncan running it could actually happen--not only has the NDP shown remarkable growth over the past three or four elections, but Duncan took 33% of the vote last time. It wasn't quite enough to overcome the riding's notorious vote-splitting, but that 33% presents Edmonton-Strathcona's left-wing majority with a clear choice for the first time since...well, certainly since before I came to Canada. Especially with Duncan's new name recognition and celebrity status. And on the hipster cred front, local bloggers were invited to her announcement as members of the "citizen media." How cool is that?

2. More and more bloggers are starting to talk about the possibility of coalition governments for Canada. (In fact, it's become enough of a buzzword that I'm wishing I'd given the explanation for how coalitions work in a separate post rather than embedding it in a post about proportional representation that's harder to point back to.) Come on, mainstream media--first one out of the gate on that story gets a big smooch from me. After all, even with that very tidy little post-convention bounce that the Liberals can be very pleased with (with only two percentage points of their seven-point surge coming from the NDP and a full five percent coming from the Tories, delightfully enough), they're still not anywhere near majority government territory. And while proportional representation would be the one thing that would make coalitions inevitable, you can certainly have them without it.

A response to Terry Glavin

Over at The Tyee, Terry Glavin has written an editorial asking for reasons to vote NDP in the next election. After all, he says, if the Stéphane Dion Liberals' policies are at least fairly decent, and they're still more likely than the NDP to form the next government, why should anyone vote NDP?

Of course, "why should anyone vote NDP" doesn't quite cut it as a realistic question. There is, after all, a large chunk of NDP voters who cast their votes based solely on...gasp!...an affinity for the NDP's policy proposals. For these people, the Liberals are simply never going to be an option, just as there is a large chunk of the Liberal Party who would never vote NDP even if someone held a gun to their heads. Instead, Glavin's real question is about why Liberal-NDP swing voters wouldn't want to flock to the Liberals in droves in order to defeat Harper. And rephrased as such, it's a provocative, pragmatic question, and it deserves an equally provocative and pragmatic response.

Let me give it a shot:

When Liberals get majority governments, they don't keep their promises.

You've all heard New Democrats saying that Liberals "run from the left and govern from the right," but this is more than just partisan spin; it's demonstrably true. When the Chrétien Liberals had a majority, they promised to implement a national child care program, but didn't actually take action until years later when Martin had a minority and it looked like their government was about to fall. They promised to protect public health care, but weren't willing to put the brakes on privatization. They promised to reform our electoral system, but refused to take action on the issue when the NDP came knocking on their door with a proposal. They promised student tuition relief, but didn't act on that until the NDP forced them to do so as part of the 2005 minority parliament budget deal.

Do the Liberals keep doing this because being a big fat liar is a requirement to join their party? Of course not--they do it because they're susceptible to the pressures of governing. An elected Liberal caucus is made up of centrists, and when centrists are given a nice, safe majority, they're free to give in to the pressures from large corporations. This is why Liberal majority governments have consistently been centre-right, not centre-left, governments. And for all of you swing voters who are so convinced that a Dion-led Liberal majority would be different on this front, there's actually not a whole lot of evidence for that. When he was Canada's environment minister, after all, the policies he proposed were very different from the ones he's proposing now, when he's looking to win your votes.

The fact is, if you're a Liberal-NDP swing voter who likes the Dion Liberals' policies and wants them to be implemented, you don't actually want a Liberal majority government. What you want is a Liberal minority government with the NDP holding the balance of power--or, if you're as sick of minority governments as I am and crave some more stability, an actual government coalition. In a coalition, government policy is a synthesis of the policies of the larger party and the smaller party--a little of this, a little of that, a handful of cabinet ministers for the NDP and many more for the winning Liberals. Try to tell me that's not precisely the ideal outcome for the swing voters we're talking about.

The partisan Liberals reading this, of course, will say that they actually wouldn't be satisfied if they won a minority with the NDP holding the balance of power--they want a majority government of their very own. But wishing it doesn't make it so. Even with their rather sizeable post-convention bounce, the Liberals still fall well short of majority government territory. And those who are thinking that the bounce is only the beginning and the Liberals have nowhere to go but up are deluding themselves--parties always come down from post-convention bounces. The fact is, the NDP and the Bloc are entrenched enough by now that no matter how much the Liberals would like to claim we have a two-party system, we just don't. And with the Greens bursting onto the scene, there's even less of a chance of a majority...for any party.

So let's have a little more of that much-lauded pragmatism from the Liberals, shall we? Of course they will try for a majority--they have to--but they will fail. Realistically, unless two of the parties get it together and manage to form a long-term, stable majority coalition after the next election, the next Canadian government will be another minority. The only open question is what colour it's going to be. Which is where my next point comes in.

When centre-left progressives indiscriminately vote Liberal "strategically," they elect Tories.

There's a fascinating and maddening thing that happens again and again in Canada, partway through every federal election: Liberal-NDP swing voters who have decided to vote NDP look at the nationwide polls, see that there's a threat that the Tories could win, and decide to vote Liberal instead. The problem with this, of course, is that those nationwide percentages have precisely diddlysquat to do with who can win in each individual swing voter's riding. (That's what we call proportional representation, after all, and while it would be awfully nice if it worked that way, wishing doesn't make it so for me, either.) People like to refer to this practice as "strategic voting," but since real strategic voting would require some actual, you know, strategy, it makes a lot more sense to call it "stupid voting."

Let's take British Columbia as an example. In the middle of the 2004 federal election, the B.C. riding of New Westminster-Coquitlam was a three-way race with the NDP in front, the Conservatives nipping at their heels, and the Liberals also within striking distance. But then Prime Minister Paul Martin campaigned in the riding, waving the national polling numbers and telling voters that they needed to vote Liberal to stop Harper. The result? The NDP vote collapsed, and the Conservative candidate won by only a few votes, with the Liberals well behind. In 2006, however, Liberal-NDP swing voters across the province learned their lesson and managed to go from stupid voting to strategic voting in a single bound. The percentage of the vote didn't change much at all--the Conservatives increased by 1%, the NDP increased by 2%, and the Liberals fell by just under 1%. But real riding-by-riding strategic voting among swing voters gained seats for not only the NDP, but also for the Liberals. Only the Tories lost seats.

So to answer Glavin's question about why Liberal-NDP swing voters should vote NDP in the next election, my provocative answer that will piss everybody off boils down to this: maybe they should, and maybe they shouldn't. Since the outcome that these voters really want is one where the Liberals win but are forced to actually keep their promises, whether or not they should vote NDP depends on the makeup of their specific ridings. If they live in ridings where the NDP candidate can beat the Tory, they should vote NDP, and if they live in ridings where the Liberal candidate can beat the Tory, they should vote Liberal.

If the swing voters we're talking about manage to use informed, riding-specific strategy next time around, they have an excellent shot at getting exactly the outcome they want--a government that will actually implement the progressive policies that they like. If, however, they instead just vote indiscriminately Liberal out of fear--even in ridings where the Liberal has little chance--then they will hurt the NDP, fail to give the Liberals all the votes they need where they really need them, and probably elect another Tory minority government in the process. It's that simple.

[Update: I'm not sure Québec-based blogger Michel Fortin is a Liberal-NDP swing voter as described in this post--given where he lives, I'd guess not--but he sure sounds like he wants the same things they want. En français.]

[Upperdate: Terry Glavin responds...and agrees. Score! *grin*]

Priorities

When I interviewed Stéphane Dion back in September, he had this to say about whipping the vote on Harper's renewal of the Afghanistan mission:

One mistake we made was to be divided about the shameful motion that Mr. Harper decided to have about the two-years' extension to the motion in Afghanistan. We should have had a whipped vote for everyone to vote against this motion. [...] We should have voted against that as a party and as the official opposition. I'm very disappointed that this was not done.

Dion clearly believes in whipping the vote when it's necessary--i.e., when it's important to show party unity so that your opponents can't use your party's dividedness against you in a leadership race. When that leadership race is over, though, and minority rights may be riding on whether or not the same-sex marriage issue gets reopened, apparently it's not nearly so important.

Free advice for the NDP's Ottawa set

This hasn't been the federal NDP's best week. I'm hardly the sort to tell the NDP to give the Liberals a free ride when they really deserve a good slap upside the head, but right now it's the NDP strategists I want to slap. In the hopes for a change in course, then, here's some free advice for any of that group who happen to be reading:

• Yes, the Liberals got a post-convention bounce. So what? Did you really think that wouldn't happen? Just remember that all bounces are fleeting, take it in stride, and keep doing what you've been doing all along, hammering away at Harper and the Conservatives. You were doing such a good job, and it's not as if they haven't given you any fodder lately.


• By all means, hammer away at the Liberals, too, when they do something arrogant or misguided. But why not wait until there's actually something to criticize before you join the Conservatives in their Dion-bashing? Trust me, there will be plenty of opportunities--Dion will have a tough time selling himself as the custodian of the environment when his record as environment minister was nothing to write home about. But kicking the guy when he first steps up to the plate just makes you look power-hungry and mean. Stick with "I am looking forward to debating with him and getting to work on the issues that are important to today’s families" until Dion gives you something concrete to work with.


• Speaking of power-hungry and mean, what was with that insane email about Dion that the backroom strategists sent to NDP members shortly after he was made leader? Referring to him as an "out-of-touch academic" without telling us a thing about the ways in which he's supposedly out-of-touch is nothing but anti-intellectual crap. Am I "out of touch" because I have a Ph.D.? Is Dr. Jack Layton? Not to mention that it's hardly credible for the backroom people to try to malign Dion in this way when Layton himself has praised him.


• Finally, Pat Martin questioning Dion's loyalty to Canada because of his dual citizenship doesn't exactly make him look like a defender of multiculturalism. As an immigrant Canadian who holds dual citizenship with my country of origin, I am appalled by the precedent this sets. People with dual citizenships aren't any less Canadian than those of you without any direct immigrant taint, and if somebody like me decided to run for the leader of a major party, my dual citizenship wouldn't make me any less deserving.

You're not just losing the soft NDP support with this strategy, you've got party members pissed off, too. We know you've got a great alternative vision, but right now we can't wait until you go back to presenting it so that we can stop cringing. You look like you're flailing. Quit it already.

[Update: My fellow oxymoron from Accidental Deliberations is much more measured, but no less right.]

What is with our party leaders and their asses?

When I heard about Layton's Question Period slip of the tongue today--described rather succinctly over at CBC online as "The House of Commons broke into cheers and laughter Monday after NDP Leader Jack Layton dropped the first letter from the word gas"--I had to laugh and laugh. I admit it, I've got exactly the juvenile sort of humour that finds this sort of thing freaking hilarious.

What made it all the funnier, though, is the fact that during the 2006 election, Harper had his own 'ass' slip. It went largely unnoticed other than in the (now sadly defunct) CTV election blog because so much else was going on at the time, but the text of the post has been preserved over here:

The howler of the campaign so far came tonight in St. Catharines where more than 1,200 people (that's right -- 1,200 in St. Catharines!) heard Harper lead off a section of his standard stump speech with this line ...

"As you listen to the misquotes and misinformation that will spew out of Mr. Martin's office and out of his ass ..."

Or at least that's what everyone heard. It brought the house down. Even Harper's wife Laureen, standing on stage beside him, started giggling.

Now if you listen closely to the tape, he actually said:

"As you listen to the misquotes and misinformation that will spew out of Mr. Martin's offce and out of his ads."

He seemed, though, to drop the 'd' in "ads" and it came out "ats."

Harper himself didn't seem to realize what he almost said and after a brief pause where he seemed a little confused at the reaction the line got, continued on hammering away at Paul Martin -- and his ads.

The post came complete with an .mp3, which seems to have disappeared along with the post, but your trusty neighbourhood idealistic pragmatist saved a copy and has put it up for download here. It's highly recommended for the crowd reaction alone!

How does Dion stack up?

I haven't been blogging about my preferences in the Liberal leadership race, but that doesn't mean I haven't had them. The main problem has been that my preferences were really too complicated to turn them into a nice tidy little post. Yes, I'm a partisan New Democrat, but I'm also a concerned Canadian who wants what's best for the country, and a strong believer in a diverse spectrum of partisan choices led by public servants who care about more than just their own careers. So this has meant balancing three major factors, in the following order:

What's best for the country. Like it or not, choosing a Liberal leader is about choosing somebody who has a pretty good chance of becoming the next prime minister. This means that someone whose favoured policies aren't appalling would certainly be a plus, as would someone who's more interested in serving the country than in personal gain.

What's best for the NDP. The ideal scenario would, of course, be a Liberal leader who could take a whole slew of votes away from the Conservatives without taking any from the NDP. I don't think that candidate existed--at least not in this race--but someone who had a good shot at eating into soft Conservative support and who at least wouldn't seriously damage the NDP would also be acceptable.

What's best for the Liberals. It sounds strange coming from a partisan New Democrat, but I really do care about the renewal of the Liberal party. I believe in true voter choice above all else, and the "ill health" of one of the three major parties has seriously limited voter choice for those on the centre of the spectrum, sending an awful lot of them into Stephen Harper's waiting arms. Also, if the Liberals don't fix some of the things that ail them, and they get into power anyway, that's not good for any of us.

So now that we know it's going to be Dion going up against Harper and Layton in the next election, I'd like to evaluate how he stacks up on those three factors.

Dion's strengths:

I have thought for some time that, of all the major Liberal leadership candidates, Dion would be the clear choice in terms of what was best for Canada. He has enough integrity that Harper was comfortable consulting with him before bringing forward his Quebec as a nation motion, and Layton, too, referred to him as "a man of principle and conviction" in the middle of a partisan convention. His policy preferences, as well, while not ideal, would be a welcome change from the direction Harper is taking us in.

In terms of what was best for the NDP, Dion wouldn't have been the top pick (that would have been Ignatieff), but I've long suspected that he would pose more of a threat to Harper and Duceppe than to Layton, and this poll seems to suggest that as well.

Finally, there are also at least a few advantages to Dion in terms of repairing the damage to a rather broken Liberal party. He's someone who served in both the Chrétien and Martin cabinets, and there was certainly plenty of evidence at the convention today that he can start to smooth over the rifts from their feud.

Dion's weaknesses:

After I interviewed Dion back in September, I expressed a number of concerns about him. The most damning of these was about his inability to account for either the broken Liberal policy promises or the ubiquitous sense of Liberal entitlement:

Given the undeniable fact of the booming oil and gas industry, though, it's all the more essential that we get someone into the prime minister's office who's willing to follow through not just on voluntary targets, but on tough regulation. Dion's proposed plan would go a long way toward that, but all we know is that the last time he had the chance to regulate, he didn't go nearly far enough. What I needed to hear from him during this interview was an acknowledgement that previous Liberal governments should have done things that they didn't do, some explanation for why they didn't do those things, and an outline of why a Dion-led government would be different. His answers fell short on all of those points. [...]

Certainly recovery from the Chrétien-Martin civil war and presenting a positive vision for the future would be two huge steps toward repairing the damage to his party. But I think most of us on the left would tend to agree that it doesn't get at the things that concern us most about the Liberals. The new Liberal leader, whoever he ends up being, is also going to have a tough job repairing the public trust. This violated trust comes not just the sponsorship scandal, but also from the broken promises I addressed in my last point, and perhaps most importantly, from a governing style that made them appear arrogant, complacent, and like they thought they were entitled to a majority government with no real effort. I tried to give Dion every opportunity to address these issues, but he didn't.

My concerns about these issues have only grown since that interview. While he was vaguely cagey and defensive with me in September, at the leadership debate in Montreal a month later, he positioned himself outright as the defender of the Liberal record. If you wanted renewal of the Liberal party--REAL renewal, with all the soul-searching and accounting for mistakes and reforms that would come with that--Dion was never going to be your man. And relatedly, while Ignatieff was willing to step in during that debate and admit that the Liberals "didn't get it done" on the environment, Dion's response was to get visibly angry and counter that Ignatieff "didn't know what he spoke about." This leaves me with little evidence that, when push comes to shove, Dion will actually be willing to implement the policies he's laid out so nicely for us.

My fondest, pie-in-the-sky wishes:

I'll end, though, on a positive, even optimistic note. I have made no secret of the fact that I think coalition governments are Canada's future. In the long run, they're really the only way out of the minority government muddle--they would work in Canada in the same way that they work in most of the world's democracies, providing stability without forcing a diverse political spectrum into two imperfect choices. And being the idealistic pragmatist I am, I have also made no secret of the fact that my preferred coalition government would consist of the NDP and a genuinely renewed Liberal party. While I realize how unlikely this is, given the animosity between the two parties and their extremely varied traditions, I think having Dion as the Liberal leader may well represent the only opportunity to realize that possibility in the near future.

Yes, Layton and Dion have very, very different ideas on policy, but they're also both pragmatic thinkers, and they may well be able to work together well enough to compromise in the case of a Liberal (or for that matter, NDP) minority win in the next election. Layton's official response to Dion's win was to congratulate him and to say that he "looks forward to debating with him and getting to work on the issues that are important to today’s families." That's about as positive a message as he's had for any member of another political party since, well...since he called Dion a "man of principle and conviction." I certainly don't expect either Layton or Dion to pull any punches during the next campaign, and that's as it should be. But when the votes are all counted, it is my great hope they'll be able to put aside their differences and do what's truly best for this country. Our antagonistic political culture may make it unlikely, but it could still happen if the voters and these two leaders wanted to make it happen.

All in all, Canada, the NDP, and the Liberals could all definitely have done a lot worse today. Let me echo Layton's congratulations to Dion, then. It was a fine race, well fought, and while I still hope he will manage to address some of the concerns I have over the coming months, I sincerely wish him well.

All together, now: "stupid oil boom!"

Things that have happened this week:

• Two friends and I ordered a pizza that took almost three hours to arrive, cold, at its destination.


• A major department store finally delivered the washer and dryer of two other friends, after they had waited 3 months for it. Those three months had consisted of five failed delivery attempts, including the store arranging for one of them to come home early from work, and then not showing up.


• My friends and I finally learned how to game the restaurant system: one person has to get there at 5:00 or before, that person has to order as soon as they arrive (i.e., before sitting down), and they have to bring a book to read while they wait for everybody else to arrive at a saner time, because the group's meal is still going to take more than an hour to arrive. (But hey, we got fed!)


• The city let us know that there's simply no way to clear the unexpected dumps of snow we've been getting, and we just have to live with them.


• A whole slew of postal workers quit their jobs to pursue more lucrative careers, leaving suburban Edmonton residents without any mail delivery.


• I realized that what irritates me even more than all these little annoyances is this: I love this city in a way I've loved no other place I've lived, and yet it's now--when living here kind of sucks--that everybody and their brother is moving here. They must hate it so much, and that makes me sad, sad, sad.

Verdict: I am so very ready for my city to start working right again.