You Had An Option, Sir - Fear and loathing on Parliament Hill

This article first appeared in the McGill Tribune on October 16, 2007.

Last year during the federal election, the Liberals put out a now-infamous campaign ad. Behind a backdrop of thundering drums, a soothing female voice intoned that Stephen Harper wants to put soldiers in our cities. The ad caused a national uproar and even spurred a few Liberals to come forward and declare that the negative ad had gone too far. The video was soon pulled, but it illustrates one of the most effective tactics that the Left has used against the Conservative Party. Leftist fear-mongers from coast to coast denounced the party and Stephen Harper for having a frightening and secret social agenda. Nearly 20 months later, can anyone claim that these accusations still carry any weight?

The reputation that Conservatives have concerning social policy is driven largely by the state of conservatism south of the 49th parallel. Indeed, Republicans in the United States are largely associated with social conservatism due to the support they receive from powerful Christian fundamentalist groups. What many Canadians don't understand is that the political climate in Canada is completely different from that in the U.S. In fact, the current state of political discourse in Canada indicates that traditional social conservatism is, for the most part, dead.

Now, I've heard some crazy accusations about Prime Minister Harper in my time, including a rant asserting as fact that Mr. Harper was a priest before entering politics (he was not). But anyone who thinks that Mr. Harper is a social-conservative has fallen prey to partisan spin. Stephen Harper biographer William Johnson indicates in his book that it is clear Harper was always much more of an economic conservative than a social conservative. Further, Harper has long held the position that moral issues are issues of individual choice and conscience, and should not be prescribed by a party line. That doesn't seem very frightening to me.

In fact, the argument could be made that Stephen Harper has actually neutralized social conservatism in our country. Over the last two years or so, Harper has diluted the strength of social conservatism in his party by addressing two of the most fundamental issues for social conservatives: abortion and same-sex marriage. In 2005, the first policy convention of the Conservative Party of Canada resulted in a decision to set official party policy against any type of legislation regulating abortion. Last summer, in line with his idea that 'the moral is personal', Harper held a free-vote on whether the issue of same-sex marriage should be re-opened in the House of Commons. The fact that this vote was defeated by a margin of over 50 MPs is less important than the fact that Harper knew it would be defeated in advance and held the vote despite this knowledge.

The incremental dilution of social conservative influence in the Conservative Party is noticeable. While there are still annual protests condemning abortion on Parliament Hill, legislation regulating or criminalizing abortion is now seen almost as a fringe idea, particularly among younger conservatives. The issue of same-sex marriage, once a hotbed of contention in conservative circles, has been quelled in a democratic manner by the House of Commons vote, and is no longer subject to frequent debate. The recent lack of a socially conservative voice in Ottawa led Rick Mercer to quip recently that Harper had managed to "successfully spay and neuter" every last social conservative in the party, comparing them to an endangered species that David Suzuki would have to create a roundtable to protect.

During their time in power, Harper and his team have shown a willingness to adopt moderate social polices that Canadians can agree with. The Left will continue to use scare tactics in order to extort votes from citizens, but it is clear that this strategy is quickly losing both its attractiveness and efficacy. A sober look at the facts indicates that the Conservatives have taken a temperate approach to social issues and shown an unwillingness to infringe on the views of an MP's conscience, an attitude that no one should fear.

Liberal Red-Light Committees - You Had An Option, Sir

This article first appeared in the McGill Tribune on October 3, 2007.

During the Liberal leadership race in 2006, Liberal leadership candidate Stéphane Dion announced that he had a plan for bringing gender parity to the House of Commons. The first step towards gender parity, he argued, was to ensure that 1/3 of all Liberal candidates running in the next election will be women. Dion’s plan included ‘green-light’ committees that have been empowered to take extraordinary measures in order to make sure that the 1/3 women quota is met. Let me tell you why this policy of reverse-discrimination is wrong for Canada.

When considering the appointment of female Liberal candidate, it is important to look at the opportunity cost. In appointing female candidates, the Liberal Party will be barring male candidates from a chance for the candidacy. In essence, this policy spits in the face of all the male candidates that want to run in the ridings that women will be appointed. In a free and democratic society, both women and men should be allowed the opportunity to put themselves forward as a prospective candidate and allow for the Party’s members in the riding to elect them in a legitimate candidate nomination process. But the Liberal Party doesn’t see it like that. In the Liberal Party’s view of Canada, ordinary citizens are not to be trusted with decisions like who should represent their party locally as a candidate. This is just another example of an overarching Liberal party concept that permeates many of their policy stances – individuals aren’t to be trusted with what must be the overwhelming burden of personal choice. In the Liberal Party’s ideal world, top-down and centralized decisions are the best ones, and God help you if you should disagree with the red-light committee.

Women should be insulted by the patronizing attitude that is illustrated in the quota policy. Surely women are not so fundamentally inferior as to be unable to contest a nomination and win it in a fashion that would allow for actual competition. Women do not need the Liberal Party to appoint them, and the Liberal Party members in the ridings where women will be appointed don’t need the Liberal Party to tell them who to support locally. Better representation of women is not necessarily achieved by increasing the number of women in the House. Instead, a way to allow for personal choice to continue while simultaneously increasing the \quality\ of the representation of women is to train them and get them engaged in politics at an early age. The McGill Political Science Students’ Association’s Women in House program (womeninhouse@gmail.com) is a channel through which this can be accomplished. In this program, women are sent on an all-inclusive trip to Ottawa to shadow a female Senator or MP for a day, allowing them an exciting opportunity to improve their understanding of the Canadian political system.

It is frustrating to hear others calling for such disparate categories of people to be made the exact same in every way. Though equal before the law, men and women are different, and as such will choose to make different decisions that lead to different outcomes. If the margins between these outcomes are not particularly egregious, then intervention is unnecessary, especially if the proposed intervention infringes on the right of others to be qualified for membership in the House of Commons. I am not suggesting that women cannot make excellent politicians (indeed, Thatcher is one of my favourite), but rather that if women go through a candidate nomination process and do not emerge victorious, it has more to do with a lack of political training than some inherent weakness that comes with being a woman. This being said, this whole argument may be a moot point come election time. With the way things are looking for Stéphane Dion, I don’t see him bringing many MPs to the House – male or female.

You Had an Option, Sir - The Little Red Riding/Hood

This article first appeared in the McGill Tribune on September 26, 2007.

The Liberal fortress has fallen. Last week, in arguably their safest riding in Montreal, Liberal candidate Jocelyn Coulon took less than thirty percent of the vote on his way to a second place finish behind NDP candidate and former provincial cabinet minister Thomas Mulcair in Outremont. This is a riding that has, with one exception, voted Liberal in every election since its creation in 1935. In 1968, the Liberal candidate received a unfathomable 78.7% of the vote. During the Trudeau era, it was rare for the Liberals to get less than 60%. As political strategists across the country conduct their post-mortems of last week’s by-elections, the most pressing question will be whether blame rests with Liberal leader Stephane Dion.

Despite the ten months that have passed since he was elected leader, Mr. Dion has not been able to unify the clashing factions of his party. Rumours are abound as to the role Michael Ignatieff or his supporters might have played in purposely ensuring that Dion’s hand-picked candidate would lose. Further, Dion has failed to implement a cohesive organization framework that would help him win elections. The campaign was sloppy, with candidate signs and campaign literature taking far too long to hit the streets, which means leaving potential voters wide open to being influenced by every other party. Having been reached first by everyone else, voters were left to wonder why they should vote for a party that doesn’t even have the capacity to distribute pamphlets to them.

But what truly clinched the win for the NDP was the /La Presse/ poll released four days before the by-election showing that they were leading by six points. At this point, it was pretty much over. I live in the Plateau, but I swear I could hear the air being sucked out of the Liberal campaign office on the other side of Mount Royal. Viral pessimism infected every volunteer who came into the campaign thinking they were backing a bona fide winner. Desperate to salvage the campaign, Liberal staffers from Ottawa were scrambled to help out the struggling candidate. The last minute actions were in vain, however, because the negative publicity from the poll grew exponentially as political commentators all over the country mused loudly about why the Liberal were in jeopardy of losing such a safe riding and why Stephane Dion couldn’t get his act together. Liberal volunteers lost faith in their candidate and his ability to win, while the NDP were reinvigorated by the possibility of their first election victory in Quebec since 1990. The poll deflated any enthusiasm left in Liberal camp and drove the NDP to what would eventually become a twenty point margin of victory.

While many of my fellow Tory partisans have declared that the Outremont by-election results were desirable, I look at it with a bit of caution. I’m not worried about the NDP in Quebec – they will have to poach a lot of famous provincial cabinet ministers to make any sort of a dent here. What I am worried about is the excessive destabilization of Dion’s leadership. While this may seem like it would benefit the Conservatives, consider the long term gains of having Dion stick around; he is not a strong leader, nor is he someone that has a lot of potential for growth. Let the man flounder, I say. I want him around for a long time to come.

You Had An Option, Sir - The Rebellious Right

On campus, Conservatives enjoy about the same amount of support as anarchists, and I have long wondered why this is the case. Certainly the political trends of the world outside the Canadian campus don’t reflect the trends within. Maybe, as Churchill once suggested, students prefer not to be seen as heartless. Alternatively, perhaps students haven’t yet recognized the truth of Thatcher’s declaration that “the facts of life are conservative”. But possibly the most common answer to this question is that students tend to be more rebellious and that time will moderate once radical people. However, this explanation ignores the fact that the modern conservative movement on student campuses is probably just as rebellious as the socialist movement, if not more. What could be more rebellious than fighting against the expansion of government and promoting the cause of liberty?

In terms of membership numbers, Conservatives are an almost insignificant minority on campus. If paucity is an indication of rebelliousness, then Conservatives at McGill are amongst the most rebellious group on campus. For every thousand Che shirts you see on campus, you’d be lucky to see one reference to an idea or figure in the conservative movement. One of the few times you’ll see a reference of this kind is when I wear my ‘Stephen Harper – Number One’ shirt, and I don’t wear that too often for fear of being stoned (though I’m making an earnest effort to gather up the courage to actually start wearing that shirt more often). The question raised in this article will continue to bother me, but I am unconcerned. Having recently participated in Management frosh, I can’t help but jest by slightly modifying one of the faculty’s chants and proclaiming that “it’s alright, it’s OK, you’ll all think like us one day”.

This year, I’ll be writing a column on Canadian Conservative politics titled ‘You Had An Option, Sir’. It will be a highly biased and controversial opinion column, I promise. At McGill, the right is the real world’s left. But what conservatives lack in numbers we make up for in ideas formed from reason and empirical evidence. Maybe conservatives just haven’t articulated their ideas well enough yet. The image of a heartless conservative melts away upon the realization of what conservatives seek to gain – the betterment of all of society rather than only that of particular interest groups. This column will attempt to articulate conservative ideas more clearly.

To understand the title of the column, one would have to be familiar with a relatively obscure event in Canadian politics. During the English television debates of the federal election in 1984, Liberal leader John Turner sought to criticize future Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney by accusing him of having a vast patronage network that would bring cronyism to the federal political scene. Somehow, Turner had forgotten that he had just made a bunch of last-second Liberal appointments on behalf of Pierre Trudeau. When Mulroney brought this up, Turner had said that he had no option but to make the appointments. Mulroney’s response is now known as one of the biggest knock-out punches in Canadian political history. He replied: “You had an option, sir. You could have said, 'I am not going to do it. This is wrong for Canada, and I am not going to ask Canadians to pay the price.' You had an option, sir - to say 'no', and you chose to say 'yes' to the old attitudes and the old stories of the Liberal Party. That sir, if I may say respectfully, that is not good enough for Canadians”. Though I recognize that this column will not score punches on the scale of Mulroney’s devastating uppercut in 1984, it will reflect its spirit and purport to throw a few punches on behalf of the conservative movement. Perhaps this year campus conservatives will become just a bit less rebellious.

This column first appeared in the McGill Tribune on September 11, 2007.

Doing the Shuffle - Live!

So I’m sitting here at my desk at the Fraser Institute, and it happens to be lunch hour just as the Cabinet shuffle is occurring. So I’m blogging live from my cubicle, where I’m sharing a headset with fellow intern Candice Malcolm. The earphone wire is not very long, and I’m leaning down just to get it into my ears. Anyhow, with that said, here we go.

Time – New Position – Name (Old Position)

12:54 - Minister of Indian Affairs - Chuck Strahl (Minister of Agriculture)
I guess to put this into context it’s good to get Strahl into Indian Affairs. It allows Gerry Ritz to be the fresh face to put renewed effort into abolishing the Canadian Wheat Board. It doesn’t seem like this is much of a demotion – it appears at this point that this is a lateral move.

12:55 - Peter MacKay - Minister of National Defence/Minister of Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (Minister of Foreign Affairs)

Not really much of a change, except it makes his agenda more focused on Afghanistan specifically. He was already dealing with it in Foreign Affairs, and now he has to buckle down and focus solely on Afghanistan. Lateral move.

12:57 - Minister of National Revenue - Gordon O'Connor (Defence)
Definite demotion. Who knew much about Carol Skelton? Not most Canadians. You won’t be hearing about Mr. O’Connor very much from now on.

12:58 - Minister of International Cooperation (CIDA) - Bev Oda (Heritage)

What can I say about Bev Oda? I don’t have any particular problem with her, except to say that we’ve strengthened the Heritage portfolio by bringing in someone who can speak French in Josee Verner. On the flip-side, Verner’s English doesn’t seem too great. I could be wrong, though. It’s just when I went to Quebec City to hear her speak earlier this year, her English was not impressive.

12:59 - Nothing funny has happened yet. I guess this is pretty serious.

12:59 - Minister of Industry - Jim Prentice (Indian Affairs)

Promotion! Although I thought Bernier should have been kept here or promoted (gasp!) to Finance. Bernier was a true small-c conservative, as far as I know, and we need to have more people trying to reduce the size and scope of government into cabinet. Prentice deserves a promotion though, and the more positions are announced, the more it is clear that Harper is getting his best performers forward for a potential election.

1:01 - Minister of Foreign Affars - Maxime Bernier (Industry)

Would have liked to see him continue in some way in which he could implement small-c conservative ideas. As Minister of Foreign Affairs, he’s not going to be on point for reducing corporate welfare or pressuring for program spending to decrease or pushing for tax cuts. However, he will be extremely useful in talking to Quebeckers about the Afghan conflict when an election is called, whenever that may be. I suppose this indicates the truth behind the Globe and Mail article titled 'Cutting taxes not the priority: Harper'

1:02 - Josee Verner - Minister of Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages (International Cooperation)

See my comments under Bev Oda.

1:05 - Gerry Ritz - Minister of Agriculture (Sec. of State – Small Business and Tourism)

As someone from a farming family, Gerry brings a fresh perspective and a new face to continue pushing for reforms in the Canadian Wheat Board.

1:06 - Diane Ablonczy - Sec. of State - Small Business and Tourism (Back-Bencher)
Finally, a surprise. Chatter all around had been saying there would be no back-bench promotions, but here we see a deserving back-bencher being promoted. Even CPAC wasn’t expecting it – they didn’t get their captions up for a long time after she was called forward. Definitely a good choice. She's been waiting a long time (first elected in 1993), and would have made the top of most lists that ranked which backbencher deserved to be brought into Cabinet.

1:11 - Everyone sings O Canada. It’s over!

No huge surprises. Diane Ablonczy was nice to see, but there were no re-dos of Cabinet entirely. Colby Cosh writes an insightful editorial in the National Post. I enjoyed it quite a bit. You can find it here.

Gilles Duguay to Run in Outremont

In an interesting turn of events for all the students who took POLI 342 last year, CTV reports that Prof. Gilles Duguay will be running in Outremont in the upcoming by-elections.

"A Conservative party official said Tuesday that the party will run former diplomat Gilles Duguay in the Montreal riding.

Duguay, a lawyer by trade who has served Canada in various capacities across the globe, is to be formally introduced at a news conference at Universite de Montreal on Wednesday morning.

Duguay will challenge Jocelyn Coulon, a former journalist and currently a professor at Universite de Montreal, who is a regular on Quebec television as a commentator on international events.

Former Quebec Liberal environment minister Thomas Mulcair will run for the New Democratic Party. The Bloc Quebecois will be represented by Jean-Pierre Gilson."

This morning I thought the Conservatives didn't have a shot at making much of an impact in this riding. Now, they have a decent shot at picking up quite a few votes, particularly if they can capitalize on B'nai Brith's objections to Liberal Jocelyn Coulon's opinions on the Middle East.

On Lord Black

I'm reminded of a scene in 'Lion in the Winter' that's mentioned in a West Wing Episode. Richard and Geoffrey are about to be executed by Henry II, and Richard tells his friends not to cower, that they should not allow Henry any satisfaction. At this, Geoffrey shouts, "you chivalric fool! As if it matters how a man falls down!" And Richard responds, "when the fall is all that's left, it matters a great deal."

Black found guilty on four of thirteen charges, including obstruction of justice.