Canada’s conservatives should ease up on Harper - The Globe and Mail

By Neil Reynolds - from the Globe and Mail

Throughout his two minority governments, Prime Minister Stephen Harper endured incessant carping from the right: especially from conservatives who wanted more ideological purity. Mr. Harper wisely ignored them. The purer the ideology, the more problematic the politics. Mr. Harper diligently pursued the political centre (with right-ward forays: for example, unequivocal support for Israel). It all worked out fine. The Conservatives took the centre, held it and won a transformative majority in Election 2011. But conservatives now need, once again, to relax a bit. Nothing extraordinary is about to happen.

Mr. Harper made this clear in his election-night comments. He would govern, he said, for the whole country – not (he implied) for hard-core conservatives or soft-core libertarians. These people have their own work to do, in moving the political centre, but this philosophical task is fundamentally different than governing. In Canada’s democracy, social and economic change will inevitably be incremental and erratic. After all, if the more than 14 million Canadians who voted wanted more radical change, they could have voted Libertarian – as 6,017 of them did.

This isn’t to say that Mr. Harper won’t make fundamental reforms: especially toward freer trade with Europe (and other countries) and closer economic integration with the U.S. It is merely to observe that Canadians themselves – and not the federal government – will determine how far and how fast the political centre pivots.

The political centre in Canada has been drifting to the right for almost 30 years – since the last Liberal government (1984) of prime minister Pierre Trudeau, whose excesses pushed the country toward conservatism. Every federal government since has governed to the right – with the single, ironic exception of Paul Martin (who had done so much for the country as finance minister). Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney (free trade with the U.S.), Liberal Jean Chrétien (fiscal restraint) and Conservative Stephen Harper (tax cuts): all remained firmly centred even as the country itself rotated, slowly, to the right.

Mr. Harper is the most impressive politician among all these small-c conservative prime ministers.

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Canada’s conservatives should ease up on Harper - The Globe and Mail

Does NDP pose more of a threat to national unity than the Bloc? - The Globe and Mail

by Adam Radwanski - from the Globe and Mail

The obvious, instinctive reaction is to cheer for Jack Layton – if not nationally, then in the province where he’s most caught fire.

Quebeckers have long parked their votes with the Bloc Québécois – a party that by its nature has no interest in building a better country. Mr. Layton’s NDP, which has seemingly come out of nowhere to lead the Bloc in popular support, offers the prospect of more constructive representation and more thoughtful consideration of Quebec’s role within Canada.

But before getting out the pompoms, Mr. Layton’s message in recent days raises an uncomfortable question: Could the federalist party pose more of a threat to national unity than the sovereigntist one?

To create the “winning conditions” that sovereigntists have long been seeking, and that will be in demand if the Parti Québécois defeats Jean Charest’s Liberals in the next provincial election, requires a strong sense of grievance. The oui side came so close to victory in the 1995 referendum largely because of the perception that Quebec’s interests had been rejected by the rest of Canada, through the defeats of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords. But as of now, there’s nothing nearly so galvanizing in play.

For sovereigntists, it’s difficult to change that on their own. The PQ plans to try, with a stridently nationalist agenda aimed at provoking Ottawa. But Bloc MPs can make no serious claim to wanting to make federalism work, so it’s hard for them to help convey and spread a sense of disillusionment. Nor can they easily entice the federal government to launch into constitutional talks, of the sort that have previously ended in heartbreak, because no prime minister would be under any illusion that he or she could make them happy.

History suggests, however, that self-identified federalists are a different story. In the 1980s, Brian Mulroney built a coalition with soft nationalists, then tried to appease them. His reward was a chunk of his caucus breaking off to form the Bloc, a gesture with much more impact than anything the party they formed could do today. Their revolt, along with the frustration of the federalist provincial government of the day, helped set in motion the near-miss in 1995.

Since then, federal governments have stepped more carefully. Jean Chrétien’s Liberals went nowhere near constitutional talks, and took the opposite tack by introducing the Clarity Act. (That they also created all kinds of bad will with the sponsorship program is a different matter.) Paul Martin was more ambiguous – making former Bloc MP Jean Lapierre his Quebec lieutenant, and embracing “asymmetrical federalism” in a way Mr. Chrétien didn’t. But after dabbling with soft nationalism – giving the Québécois a “nation within Canada” designation, and engaging in a flirtation with Mario Dumont’s Action Démocratique du Québec – Stephen Harper has shifted back a little closer to where Mr. Chrétien was.

It remains highly unlikely that Mr. Layton will lead the government after May 2, but seat gains in Quebec and elsewhere could give him a big hand in shaping it. So it bears noting that there are a few shades of Mr. Mulroney’s approach in what he’s doing to win over Quebec.

The NDP has long had a commitment to provincial autonomy for Quebec that seems at odds with its interventionist message in the rest of the country. But Mr. Layton isn’t just promising not to impose federal programs. He backs extending Bill 101, Quebec’s controversial language legislation, into federally regulated workplaces. He is non-committal on the Clarity Act. He doesn’t want to add more seats in the House of Commons for underrepresented provinces such as Ontario and Alberta, without also adding more seats for Quebec so that it remains overrepresented. Read more...

Does NDP pose more of a threat to national unity than the Bloc? - The Globe and Mail

Sand in the Shorts: Heath Care Is Not a Federal Issue

This column appeared in the April 16th, 2011 Intelligencer


  During this federal election, a lot of the discussion 'on the street' seems to be focusing on issues like education (with Michael Ignatieff proposing his 'education passport' which will mostly help the upper middle class and wealthy) and health care.

  People are frustrated with what they (rightly) see as a dysfunctional health system, hospitals that provide slow and often mediocre care, and increasing concerns that, with the ageing of Canada's population, the whole system may be approaching overload and collapse.

  So they are turning to the government for answers. Unfortunately, it's the wrong level of government.

  According to the Constitution Act, 1867, these areas are under the exclusive jurisdiction of the provinces: education, and health.

  As such, the federal government has no role in these areas except for what is allowed it by the provinces.

  This means two things.

  First, Mr. Ignatieff is meddling in provincial affairs with his 'education passport', which has already drawn some fire from the provinces.

  Granted, most of it has come from the government of Quebec, which would complain if a drowning resident were thrown a federal life preserver instead of a provincial one.

  But there are legitimate reasons for the separation of responsibilities which make such jurisdictional adventurism troublesome.

  These centre on the matter of confusion. If there is no clear distinction of responsibility, then there is the problem of holding the appropriate authorities responsible, and different levels of government could, and likely will, end up stepping on each other, and wasting tax dollars.

  Second, those who are complaining about health care during the election are barking up the wrong jurisdictional tree.

All the federal government does is fork over tax money to the provinces, who are then responsible for how the money is spent.

  The current funding system is based on the Kelowna Accord, signed by the provinces and (then) Prime Minister Paul Martin. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has already said he will maintain funding based on the accord (which gives a six per cent increase every year to the provinces, an impossible to maintain growth rate over even the medium term) even after it expires, making that issue largely irrelevant in the context of the current election.

  Rather, let's lay the blame for the current health care mess where it belongs — with the provincial Liberal (McGuinty) government.

  This is a government which, rather than focusing on front line care, instead created the Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) — a make-work program for expensive bureaucrats, and probably the most egregious contributor (in terms of lack of bang for the buck) to the Sunshine List (government employees making $100,000 or more).

  When a system has become as bloated and inefficient as Ontario's health system has, the idea of adding another level of pure bureaucracy is idiocy. And that is just what the McGuinty government, including our own MPP and provincial minister, Leona Dombrowsky, did.

  So if you want to complain about defence, foreign relations, or the postal system, complain to the federal government.

  But for health care, lay the blame where it properly belongs: Dalton McGuinty and Leona Dombrowsky.