In Praise of Bob Rae. A Goodbye to a Good Man

On the day that he announces his political retirement, I come not to bury Bob Rae, but to praise him.

Not only did I vote against Rae twice when he was leader of the Ontario NDP, I actually enjoyed doing it. But I don't vote for someone as much as I vote against everybody else. Indeed, the proudest ballot I ever cast was for a transvestite to be mayor or Toronto, so convinced was I that he/she would be less embarrassing than Mel Lastman.

Having said that, there's much to respect and even admire about Rae.

He's easily one of the smartest people in Canadian elective office in my lifetime. Even those that disagree with him, as I repeatedly did, acknowledge that he's a heavyweight. And that's something that's profoundly lacking in public life today, where stupidity is too often considered a virtue.

Rae also engaged in the single greatest act of political bravery in my lifetime. For all intents and purposes, he pulled the plug on his time at Queens Park because he thought it was necessary.

Shithead conservative bloggers and dishonest Sun Media hacks, like Brian Lilley, enjoy pummelling Rae for Rae Days, all the while heaping praise on Republicans like Scott Walker for doing essentially the same thing.

Rae Days requires absolutely no courage for conservatives, since that's what their base vocally wants, anyway. However, the public sector unions were Rae's political base, and he knew it. And he still immolated himself doing what was right. If that's not bravery, I have no idea what is. Moreover, it speaks to the bald hypocrisy of his critics.

Speaking of hacks like Lilley,  (who, full disclosure, is apparently a friend of my ex-girlfriend) He joyously posted this retarded and fundamentally dishonest chart from Sun News on his Facebook page this evening.

Did Premier Rae spend a literal shit-ton of money in the face of what was then considered a brutal recession? He sure did. And that's the primary reason I voted against his government in 1995.

What is nicely left out is the fact that there was a worldwide recession during Rae's tenure at Queens Park. What those lying fucks at the Sun neglect to point out are the federal and U.S employment and deficit figures at the time.

Why is that? I suspect that it's because the prime minister of Canada during the worst of it was Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney and the president of the United States was Republican George H.W Bush, who to varying degrees, did pretty much exactly what Rae did as premier of Ontario. All three raised taxes, all three had high unemployment, and all three had massive deficits.

But Rae is studied not only in isolation from the context of the time, the figures also leave out what his conservative peers were doing at the time.

By the way, why does Sun poster boy Stephen Harper get a pass? Unlike Rae, Harper started out with a $13 billion surplus, which he immediately pissed away on electioneering hucksterism. Then, in the guise of his Keynesian "Action Plan," he created tens of billions of dollars in new deficits, which he spends millions more advertising on television, five years after the fact. And none of that happened twenty years ago, when Keynesian economics were the the accepted wisdom, Harper's doing it now.

I point that out not to defend Rae, but to highlight the intellectual dishonesty and gullibility of what passes for the Right these days. Not only can we not win on our merits when we engage in nonsense like this, we don't deserve to.

I made no secret of my opinion that Bob Rae was the Liberal party's last, best chance of surviving, if not actually winning power. He was uniquely qualified to call the Harper government on its own bullshit. Rae was not only smarter than the rest than the rest of the federal leaders, he was more politically experienced and intimately familiar with the pitfalls of having headed a party and a government before.

If Rae compared his record in Toronto to Harper's in Ottawa, I believe it would have been devastating ... for Harper. And I think the Tories knew that, too.

But the Liberals insisted on being the Liberals. They continue to hate one another more than they hate Harper, and they refuse to renounce their addiction to stunt leaders, like Michael Ignatieff and Justin Trudeau. And that's precisely why "Canada's Natural Governing Party" is going to cease to exist by the end of the decade. By forcing Rae out of the permanent leadership race last year, I think they signed their own death warrant.

Although I opposed almost everything that he did in public life, I never doubted Rae's sincerity. I believe him to be someone who actually got into politics to serve what he thought was the greater good, rather than personal enrichment or self-aggrandizement.

Unlike most of the ward-heelers out there, I'm of the opinion that Bob Rae will better off without politics. Sadly, politics will be worse without Bob Rae.

I never voted for him and I never would, but I wish the man well in private life.

Scott Reid States the Obvious, Is Still Wrong

Here I go again, saying something utterly uncontroversial to anyone that isn't three years old, a partisan fuck, or an abject idiot.

People in politics, as a general rule, don't enter the life to serve you. And they really haven't for about thirty years.

Politics has become a laboratory for mediocrities to see how rich they can make themselves off of the public teat.

There's no greater example of that than the revolving door between politics and lobbying. This is nothing more than a legal version of influence peddling and trading in on public service. I actually have more respect for those that actually have the balls to steal taxpayer money without the pretence of serving anyone other than themselves. Were it up to me, politicians, their appointees, and the senior civil service would be banned from lobbying for life.

Actually, that's not true. The only reason I wouldn't advocate stuffing the lot of them in a bag and drowning them like cats is that it would be impossible to find a big enough bag. So a lobbying ban will have to do.

The more mediocre a staffer you are, the more likely you are to moonlight in opinion journalism, especially in Canada. You almost never see the real kingmakers on TV or writing columns that even third-graders know are horseshit. Instead, you get the worst sycophants imaginable pretending to know "how it really works."

Which brings me to Scott Reid, the former Paul Martin consigliere. In 2005, Reid said the single most balls-out stupid thing I've heard in thirty years of studying politics.

You see, then-Opposition leader Stephen Harper was hoping to steal the Liberal issue of a national daycare credit from out from the Grits. So he offered a $1,200 a year tax credit to families as a way of ward-heeling himself into office.

Now, if you opposed the Tories, there were any number of ways to attack the proposal. For example, you do what I did: call it an unaffordable welfare program for the middle class and an example of hucksterism at its worst. The left is always going to oppose Harper's programs. If you want to beat him, you need to turn fiscal conservatives around from voting for him. I thought everybody knew that.

Apparently, Scotty didn't. That's why he said this ...




The "beer and popcorn" debacle reinforced the long held and richly deserved Liberal reputation for unbridled arrogance. Even when its true, you never tell the public that the government can spend their money better than they can. And, unsurprisingly, Harper made the Liberal Party wear that remark for years.

That's why I'm amazed that anyone listens to anything Reid has to say about politics. On the other hand, a lot of people are very fucking stupid.

On Friday, he published this in the Ottawa Citizen, and it stands as an example of how you can be right, while still being completely ignorant of a history that you yourself lived through. It really is a remarkable read.

Stephen Harper is gradually turning into Jean Chrétien.

From Teflon to tinpot, from insuperable to insurrection, the two leaders appear to be travelling remarkably similar paths in the second half of their time as prime minister.

That's demonstrably not true. Harper was Chretien from as far back as 2005, well before he moved into 24 Sussex drive.

This is because Harper heads a party populated mostly with lunatics and fetus fetishists. Hyper-religious "Big Government Conservatives" are not only fewer in number in Canada than in the United States, they also tend to be more geographically isolated and don't carry as many seats as they do in the U.S Congress. Majority governments do not rely on these people's support.

But they can fuck up the chance of winning one, as we saw in 2004. The Conservatives were enjoying a 10 point lead over the majority Liberals, when their candidates started spouting off about abortion, gay marriage, and other shit that sane people don't give a shit about. The Tory hopes of a majority evaporated and Liberals were only reduced to a minority, instead of being physically destroyed.

When the Martin minority government was defeated in the fall of '05, Harper knew that he had to muzzle those psychopaths, lest he be humiliated again. Not only did he vow not to legislate on those issues, he imposed brutal message discipline on his candidates. Since nothing succeeds like success, it shouldn't surprise anyone that he carried that discipline into government.

Chretien's experience was different. As a minister in the Trudeau government, he was routinely humiliated by the Prime Minister's Office. The Sun King once went so far as to rewrite one Chretien's budgets and release it to the public without consulting him first.

Then there's the nature of the Liberal Party itself, which is based almost entirely on regicide. Since about 1975, every Grit leader has had a powerful leader plotting behind the scenes to relieve him of his job. And Chretien knew that Paul Martin (who Scott Reid worked for, remember?) would do to him exactly what he did to John Turner, as he in fact later did.

Similarities in the personal styles of the two leaders have long been noted — and many of the qualities they share are admirable. They are both good at winning elections. They each lack any shred of indecision. And they both hold their ground stoutly. Perhaps most important of all, they understand who they are, what they stand for, and the importance of communicating consistency.

Each of those points are demonstrably false.

Both Chretien and Harper won their elections as a result of hopelessly divided governments. The Progressive Conservative coalition built by Brian Mulroney was destroyed by 1993, and Harper beat (albeit, only barely) a Liberal Party in a state of open civil war. Neither was a fantastic political accomplishment.

Furthermore, neither stands for anything at all. Chretien ran on the tired platform of "free shit for everyone," opposing the GST and NAFTA, only to head the most fiscally conservative, globalist government in Canadian history. Chretien successfully carried out Mulroney's legacy.

Harper, on the other hand, ran as a manager and a fiscal conservative. Once in office, however, he blew up the deficit faster and bigger than anyone since Trudeau himself, mostly on ward-heeling nonsense that the Liberals invented.

Neither communicated consistency, and only a moron would suggest they did. Both transparently lied to the public and dared them to vote for someone else, knowing that realistic alternatives didn't exist.

Increasingly, it is not just character but circumstance that begs the comparison of Harper with Chrétien.

The most top-of-mind parallel is caucus unrest. Brent Rathgeber, until his recent resignation, was as unknown to Canadians as the whereabouts of Mike Duffy’s dignity. Suddenly, we are to believe his departure heralds the evaporation of Harper’s control over his own backbench. That would be a gross overstatement.

But it is plain that a number of government MPs are no longer content to suffer in silence. Their personal ambitions are stagnating. Their ideological itch is going unscratched.

And they’re sick of taking orders from the hired help while getting the high hand from the prime minister.

Christ, Reid can't really believe that nonsense, can he? The facts are very different, and they go to the fundamental differences between the Liberal and Conservative parties.

The Tories are generally more disciplined when it comes to caucus and messaging generally. They are also much better team players until things become intolerable, as they did in the latter Mulroney years.

The Conservatives also never have a very deep bench. There's rarely a clear successor to power that everyone knows can win an election, which is why they've never enjoyed party dynasties, like the Liberals used to.

The Grits, on the other hand, tend to have very deep benches of talent. The problem is that they all think that they should be prime minister right away. Since Lester Pearson died, they've devoted themselves to stabbing one another in the back more than they have to actually governing. Whenever the the Tories have shown even a modicum of discipline, they've kicked the shit out of the Grits.

And if Reid is right, there's a Paul Martin in the Tory benches ready to take over when Harper is done in by his own hubris. If there is, I don't see one. Harper's most likely successor is Jason Kenney, and I can't think of anyone who wouldn't be able to beat the snot out of that greasy prick.

I will say one thing about Scott Reid's column. It has the worst people in the world publicly furious, and demonstrates as clearly as anything can that the Liberal civil war is far from over. Those crazed bastards are going to continue to going into elections devoting more time and energy hobbling each other than they do the Conservatives. And they're going to keep doing it until they cease to exist at all.

If there's anything at all the Conservative government can take comfort in during these dark days, it's that.

Wynne Win? The Establishment and Media Got It Wrong

Last October, Ontario's Liberal premier, Dalton McGuinty finally saw the writing on the wall. The gas plant and ORNGE scandals could no longer be swept under the rug. It was clear that McGuinty's minority government was going to be defeated on a confidence motion and and election was going to be forced. And that was an election that ol' Dalton almost certainly was going to lose.

My Liberal friends like to tell me what a gifted politician McGuinty is, but that's always been nonsense. Like Stephen Harper and Barack Obama, McGuinty has been gifted with the opponents he had. He's never actually beaten anybody that impressive. Ernie Eves was discredited after a decade of Conservative rule. John Tory is a great man, but an impressively bad politician. And Tim Hudak, as I've long said, is the Dumbest Motherfucker on Earth. It seemed that as long as the Ontario Progressive Conservatives insisted on being the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, Dalton McGuinty would keep winning.

But something changed in the last 18 months. The NDP under Andrea Horwath began an improbable rise in public opinion. In my opinion, there was a very real chance that Horwath could have replaced McGuinty's minority with one of her own.

So the premier exercised the only option left to him. He quit. But he went further than that. He also prorogued the legislature until a replacement as Liberal leader could be elected. And the very same people who were outraged by Harper's prorogations couldn't stop congratulating McGuinty for his, mostly because they're shameless hypocrites and assholes. I condemned both, and rightly so.

Anyhow, the second McGuinty's resignation was announced, Liberal Party insiders started lining up to get former MPP Sandra Pupatello in the race. Then the media got on board. That everybody could be so spectacularly wrong was striking to me. That so many "experts" could misread the atmosphere out there was nothing less than amazing.

First, Pupatello is from the more conservative wing of the party, and that just isn't where the next election is going to be fought. The only way that Tim Hudak is ever going to elected premier of this province is by accident. He polls incredibly well when there's no chance of anyone voting for him, but as soon as he opens his stupid fucking mouth, he drops fifteen points.

My feeling is that the Ontario Tories are barely going to be a factor in the next election. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they dropped to third place at Queen's Park, although that's not an official prediction. The battle over who forms the next government is going to be between the Liberals and the NDP, and the Grits weren't going to pull that off with someone like Pupatello staking out positions to McGuinty's right.

Second, as the media and the party machinery began lining up behind her, Pupatello grew arrogant. She said that she wouldn't bring the legislature back into session until she won a seat, which could have taken months. As it is, Queen's Park has been shuttered for four months now and the public is only getting angrier.

The Liberal brand has been so badly damaged over the last couple of years that it would have probably been better for the party to have a leader outside of Queen's Park. They're going to need a ton of money and a superior effort to convince people that they're no longer the McGuinty Liberals. The chances of pulling either off while taking shots in Question Period over the remaining McGuinty scandals are not good. And that assumes that the legislature sits for any length of time. My guess is that the Grits get taken out in a confidence vote on their Throne Speech.

I thought that Gerard Kennedy was probably the best leader the Liberals had. He's personally very popular and he could do battle with the NDP and probably win. He also has the added benefit of not having been associated with McGuinty for years. The last thing the Grits need is ads morphing their new leader into McGuinty and, having been in federal politics since 2006,  Kennedy makes those hard to produce.

For reasons that I still don't understand, Kennedy never gained any traction and the left wing candidate became Kathleen Wynne. And that's where everybody got a bad case of the stupids.

Wynne's opponents, mostly from the Pupatello camp, couldn't really go after her for the most obvious reason: her long tenure in the McGuinty cabinet. So they hit her on being from Toronto, which was a bad idea. If the Grits want to stay in power, they can't afford to lose any Toronto area seats. I don't see how they do it without picking up Peter Shurman's Thornhill riding.

And then there were dark mutterings about Wynne's lesbianism. I had no idea that she was gay until a Pupatello spinner went on the Internet to condemn a whisper campaign that no one else had heard of. Here's how cynical politics is, folks. If you want to draw attention to someone's homosexuality, you pre-emptively highlight non-existent efforts to make it an issue by saying how ugly they are.

It worked, too. When the Toronto Star endorsed Pupatello last week, they made Wynne's sexuality part of the column in a way that managed to insult pretty much everybody.

The convention delegates weren't buying it and Wynne won on the third ballot tonight. Sandra Pupatello managed to piss away what was increasingly looking like a sure thing. As the other candidates dropped out after the first two ballots, the majority of them went to Wynne and took their delegates with them. When Pupatello didn't win on the first ballot, she fell apart rapidly, which is pretty much what I expected to happen.

Does it make any difference in the coming election? I don't think so. Wynne has the right politics to fight the NDP, but she lacks Kennedy's charisma and popularity. Worse, for all intents and purposes, she is Dalton McGuinty, or she may as well be when the NDP and Tories get through with her. As someone who was so senior in cabinet for so long, she can't just walk away from the McGuinty scandals.

Because she has a seat, Wynne has no credible way of avoiding calling Queen's Park back. I expect that we'll start hearing calls for that by Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest. If she doesn't have a throne speech ready to go by the second or third week of February, she isn't going to have a honeymoon as premier and the public could very well start agitating for an election, which the NDP will be more than happy to give them.

While she won't get crushed as badly as Sandra Pupatello would have, I still think that she'll lose. Not having given this a great deal of thought, we'll start talking about the next Liberal leadership race by the first of April.

The only way that can be avoided is through a Liberal coalition with the NDP. Not an accord, which the Dippers have been burned by before - an actual coalition complete with seats at the cabinet table. The problem with that scenario is that most Liberals are too arrogant to share power with anybody and it could very well start a civil war.

The ultimate responsibility for the coming decline and fall of the Ontario Liberal Party rests with Dalton McGuinty. He could have lost an election and resigned, giving the party time to rebuild under a new leader. Instead, he's ending two careers at once: his and that of his successor.

It's hard to see how Wynne survives as leader after losing to the NDP. What's likely to happen is that there'll be an endless stream of Liberal leaders, not unlike what we're seeing with the federal party. And you just can't win government under those circumstances.

The next couple of months are going to be fun to watch.

Their Own Worst Enemies

When the Liberal Party of Canada was stomped almost to death in May of last year, the smarter of their partisans started making noises that indicated that they were at least self-aware enough to know what their continued survival would require. At the top of their list were two self-evident items: "stop the civil war" and "no more stunt leaders."

It is my considered opinion that the Grits made a fatal mistake when they essentially browbeat Bob Rae from seeking the permanent leadership. He is easily the most formidable figure in the party today. He has more and more varied political experience than all of the other federal leaders combined.  Not only has he run two political parties, he's been an opposition leader, he's headed a majority government and, most importantly, he negotiated an accord to unseat a minority Conservative government, which is something that could come in handy at some point in the near future.

Most Tory partisans around the country suggested that Rae would be the easiest Liberal to beat. This is because most Tory partisans never think things through and always think that their guy is going to win. This is utterly academic at this point, but I think that if Rae won the permanent leadership (and it's hard to imagine that he wouldn't have,) Stephen Harper would have declined to run for another term. And Harper is the Conservative Party of Canada. There is no groomed or natural successor, just a machine hack, like Jason Kenney.

As I've said before, Rae's perceived greatest weakness - his term as the NDP premier of Ontario - is actually his greatest strength. Yes, Rae ran staggeringly high deficits at Queen's Park, but they barely compare to the deficits that Harper himself created after blowing his way through a $13 billion dollar surplus with political stunts.

Imagine Harper bringing Rae's deficits in a televised debate. All Rae would have to do is turn to Harper and say, "I was a socialist back then, and socialism tends to create deficits. What's your excuse?" I've gamed such an exchange out for years now, and I can't think of a way that Harper could reply to that without looking foolish.

Stephen Harper is not an idiot. If I can envision that exchange, chances are that he can, too. And it would be the most devastating moment in a debate since the "You had an option, sir" debacle in the 1984 debates.

After Rae was effectively forced out of contention, the LPC immediately did what they always do, and what is partially responsible for putting them where they are now, they started looking for a stunt leader-messiah figure. Luckily, they didn't have to look very far. After all, they have Justin Trudeau.

If I were a Conservative strategist (and it's important to remember that Harper was a strategist before he was a candidate,) I'd be licking my chops for the opportunity to run against Trudeau the Younger.

Trudeau has run nothing larger than a classroom, teaching teenagers the one thing they require absolutely no help with, drama. Even though he has served in Parliament longer than his late father did when he won the leadership, Pierre was also a high-level Cabinet minister when he won the prize. So far as I know, young Justin hasn't sponsored or introduced any legislation. His father introduced revolutionary changes to the Criminal Code of Canada before assuming the leadership.

More importantly, Pierre was cool where Justin is hot. The elder Trudeau was unflappable, especially on television, whereas the son is a hothead with a pretty formidable temper. When Justin gets angry, he says and does remarkably stupid things.

Aside from being pretty, his genealogy and his ability to beat the tits off of an Indian senator that smokes more than even I do, Justin is known for exactly two things; an interview where he suggested that Stephen Harper might force him to become a Quebec separatist, and screaming that Environment Minister Peter Kent is a "piece of shit" in the House of Commons.

We're only now learning the depth of the opposition research that the Tories have on Trudeau and their skill in deploying it.

The riding of Calgary Centre is the, well, center of the Conservative universe. There's a surprisingly close by-election there tomorrow. Last week, Trudeau supporter (and the brother of Ontario's disgraced soon-to-be ex-premier) David McGuinty said that Alberta Conservatives should "go back to Alberta," causing an immediate appearance problem in a riding that the Grits might actually win for the first time in nearly 40 years.

The very next day, remarks by Trudeau from a 2010 interview were put out by Sun Media, almost certainly leaked to them by the Tory war room.

“Canada isn’t doing well right now because it’s Albertans who control our community and socio-democratic agenda. It doesn’t work,” Trudeau said.

When Lagace asked whether Trudeau believed Canada was better off “when there are more Quebecers in charge than Albertans,” Trudeau replied in the affirmative.

“I’m a Liberal, so of course I think so, yes. Certainly when we look at the great prime ministers of the 20th century, those that really stood the test of time, they were MPs from Quebec ... This country — Canada — it belongs to us.”

Oh. That can't be good for the party's prospects in Alberta, and therefore the country, can it?

Look, I don't know why any right-thinking person would run for the Liberal leadership. The party is broke, demoralized and without their traditional place in Canadian politics. Anyone that has read Peter Newman's When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada knows that rebuilding the party is going to be a near impossible task. The next Liberal leader is very probably going to be the last.

Please don't tell me about polls that show a Trudeau majority government restoration for the Grits. Polling about hypothetical elections with hypothetical leaders are nothing more than, well, hypothetical. And that's doubly true when you're talking about a candidate that the public knows little more about than that's hawt and has a cool last name.

As I mentioned earlier, whenever Justin opens his mouth, there's a really good chance that something crazy and stupid is going to pop out. The odds of it happening grow exponentially when he's pissed off.

Yet even with a party whose wheels have fallen off to the point that they've lost over a 100 seats in three elections, some of their more flamboyant commentators are trying to impose a litmus test. Specifically, contenders are being told that if you've lost a previous election or even your seat in Parliament, you needn't apply for the leadership. Unsurprisingly, that excludes every candidate but Trudeau and the still undeclared Marc Garneau.

That thinking goes beyond stupid and veers into the insane.

I should note that I'm not a Liberal supporter. I'm on the record as saying that the party's physical existence sickens me and that the world will finally be a better place when they're finally buried.

But, as you would assume by his nom de plume, Calgary Grit doesn't share my views. In fact, he's on the record as saying that this "only sitting members need apply" standard is wildly silly.

John Diefenbaker: This guy could put together losing campaigns more consistently than the Toronto Maple Leafs. Before being elected, he lost twice federally, twice provincially, and once for Mayor. Despite being a five-time loser, the Tories went with Dief in ’56, and he rewarded them with the largest majority in Canadian history.

Mackenzie King: Even though he lost his seat in both the 1911 and 1917 elections, the Liberals put their faith in King at Canada’s first leadership convention in 1919. King would go on to become the longest serving PM in Commonwealth history…losing his own seat twice more along the way.

Jack Layton: Jack beat out three candidates with seats at the 2003 NDP leadership convention, even though he’d never been elected to any position higher than Councillor. He’d lost in his bid for Mayor, finished fourth in the 1993 federal election, and lost by over 7,000 votes in the 1997 federal election. Despite this track record of defeat, the Dippers went with Jack and he rewarded them by becoming the NDP’s most successful leader ever.

Brian Mulroney: Brian hadn’t even won a City Council election when he became PC leader, and had lost in his previous leadership bid. In his first ever election, he won over 200 seats.

Jean Chretien, Paul Martin, John Turner: Although they had perfect records in their own ridings, all three lost a leadership race before becoming Liberal leader. Losers.

Stephen Harper: Harper did not hold a seat when he ran for Canadian Alliance leadership in 2002. At that time, he had a rather uninspiring “1 win and 1 loss” record when it came to local elections – and remember, that’s a .500 record from a Calgary conservative. 

If you love history the way I do, you might start to see a pattern developing here.

The fact is that Liberals, being Liberals, haven't asked themselves what happens if Trudeau doesn't win the leadership, which is entirely possible. We're still a long way from April 14, 2013. And who can say what landmine statements are in Trudeau's past and future, waiting to go off? If Justin manages to blow his own legs off, who takes over? If he assumes the leadership mortally wounded, what happens to the party before the 2015 election puts it out of Canada's misery forever?

All things being equal, it would probably be better if the next leader wasn't a sitting MP. The biggest tasks that the next leader is going to have are raising a boatload of money and recruiting candidates that aren't laughingstocks, which often happens to third parties. Just ask the NDP.

The single most devastating attack on Micheal Ignatieff didn't come from Stephen Harper. It was launched by then-NDP leader Jack Layton, who tagged Iggy for almost never being in the House. Do they really want to face that in the next leader's debate?

Moreover, who exactly going to pay attention to the third party leader in Parliament? It's not like the NDP's Audrey McLaughlin and Alexa McDonough set the world on fire with their parliamentary performances. Progressive Conservative Joe Clark was a former prime minister who managed to remain "Joe Who?" and Peter MacKay abolished the party entirely without anyone noticing. Ed Broadbent and the aforementioned Mr. Layton were only paid attention when they were significant risks to displace the Liberals.

The LPC is so damaged that the new leader can't be in the House of Commons if he or she wants a halfway credible election machine. But a leader who is also an MP will be savaged for not being there.

Any reasonable analysis suggests that it's better for them to not have a leader sitting in the House, who everyone will ignore, anyway. If nothing else, a sitting Liberal leader will get all kinds of local news coverage when he or she visits, which is the kind that an upstart should want! When exactly was the last time the Parliamentary Press Gallery elected a prime minister, anyway? Oh, right ...

There's an (albeit outside) chance that Teenage Jesus won't win his stunt leadership bid. And if he wins, I don't see a scenario where a murderous cyborg like Stephen Harper doesn't annihilate him in an election. And who builds the party if Trudeau wins and is chained to Parliament Hill?

The LPC's guru-making consultant class is not just wrong, but stunningly so. And that shouldn't surprise anyone. They've been the driving forces behind the Grit's Forty Years Civil War and the party's steadily diminishing electoral returns over the last decade.

Keep listening to them, and you won't exist at all in 2016.

Book Review - "How We Almost Gave the Tories the Boot: The Inside Story Behind the Coalition" by Brian Topp

The fall of 2008 was magical time, if by "magical" you mean "the world was ending."

Lehman Brothers collapsed into bankruptcy on September 15 and the year-old recession metastasized into a full-bore, balls-out financial panic. More than anything else, this was responsible for electing Barack Obama president of the United States. From that moment on, John McCain made to many stupid unforced errors for him to ever be taken seriously again.

Oh, and Canada was enjoying it's 42nd federal election in 20 minutes. Nobody does democracy like Canadians have over the last decade. I vote almost as often as I masturbate, and I masturbate plenty! It's actually pretty annoying.

Because of spectacularly bad political decisions on his part, Stephen Harper's minority Conservative government was reelected, but didn't yet win his long lusted-after majority.

How We Almost Gave the Tories the Boot is what happened in the aftermath of the 2008, during what Canadians call "The Winter of Our Discontent." The author, Brian Topp, was the New Democratic Party's campaign director and a key player in what subsequently happened.

After a campaign riddled with incredibly dumb mistakes, Harper consciously chose to begin his second mandate with even dumber ones. When the House of Commons resumed sitting in late November, Harper's jerk-off finance minister, Jim Flaherty, introduced an economic statement that basically said "Everything's fine" just as the ruins of the world economy were smouldering around him.

But then it got worse. Harper and Flaherty decided that they were going to be Scott Walker, two years before Scott Walker was invented by the Koch brothers. Among other things, the Conservatives announced that federal workers would lose their right to strike and pay equity for women would be rolled back. Then they set off a political hydrogen bomb: the public subsidy to the parties would be immediately ended.

This requires some explaining for my foreign readers. In 2003, Prime Minister Jean Chretien decided that he very much wanted to cripple his successor as prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party, Paul Martin. He did this by banning corporate and union donations to the parties, replacing them with a per-vote public subsidy. The Liberals, being a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Bay Street banks, took the biggest hit of all in this scheme and it had the effect of electing Harper, who had mastered grassroots fund-raising.

Under the public subsidy, the parties that weren't the Conservatives took out loans to pay for election campaigns and repaid them with the public subsidy. The immediate end of the subsidy would have bankrupted. And there was no way that the opposition parties were going to tolerate that.

As much as he now likes to pretend otherwise, Harper is no stranger to the idea of a coalition replacing a "democratically elected" government. During the dark days of Paul Martin's short-lived minority, he had proposed doing just that with the New Democrats and the separatist Bloc Quebecois. Now the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc proposed doing it to Harper.

The whole idea was apparently Topp's and Jack Layton appointed him as one of the negotiators to approach the Grits.

Small problem, Stephane Dion, the leader of the Liberals, ran an even more disastrous campaign than the Tories did and had already announced his resignation. Everyone believed (as later happened) that Michael Ignatieff was going to replace him. Ignatieff was far more conservative, arrogant, opportunistic and unprincipled than was Dion and a coalition would likely have been a dead letter under him. Time was of the essence.

Even while Dion was still leader, the Liberals couldn't stop being the Liberals and nearly sank the deal. As they have been for most of my life, they were in the midst of a vicious civil war and, all available evidence to the contrary, still believed that they could win an election on their own. Those assholes honestly suggested that the NDP just give them power with nothing in return. Breaking the Grits of that illusion took days.

The greater problem was the NDP and the Liberals did not by themselves have enough votes to defeat the Conservatives on a confidence vote in the House or pass anything as a coalition. For that they would need the Bloc.

One of the great lies of the "Coalition Crisis of Ought-Eight" was that the treasonous Bloc would actually be partners in it. They weren't. They wouldn't be part of the government or hold any Cabinet seats. All the Bloc would do was pledge to support the NDP-Liberal coalition on confidence measures for roughly 18 months.

But Layton and Dion made a magnificently stupidly optical error: They publicly had the Bloc's leader, Gilles Ducceppe, join them in signing the coalition document and for the press conference announcing it. More than anything else, as Brian Topp himself concedes, killed the very idea of a coalition in the minds of English Canada.

The Harper Tories engaged in almost Herculean levels in lying in response to the coalition proposal. It was an unconstitutional power-grab against the wishes of the people, we were told, despite the fact the Westminster parliamentary system specifically allows for it.

The presence of Ducceppe and the Bloc only made matters worse. This, Harper screamed from the rooftops, was Stephane Dion "getting into bed with separatists," which was a shot well below the belt. As Mr. Topp points out in his book, the only person that Quebec separatists despise as fulsomely as Pierre Trudeau is Dion. More importantly, Harper wanted to do exactly the same thing only three years earlier.

Because Canadians aren't very bright, the whole thing was public relations clusterfuck of immense proportions. And it was going to get worse. Oh, it would get so much worse.

On the evening of December 3, both Harper and Dion delivered pre-taped addresses to the country. The Prime Minister surrounded himself with flags and lied his ass off. The Leader of the Opposition, who on top of being only barely functional in English, looked as though he was starring in a Hezbollah hostage video. And Dion could barely even get his hostage tape to the networks on time.



It was nothing less than the single greatest political disaster I had ever seen. Dion, who in many ways was a stronger champion of federalism than Harper, was so thoroughly discredited and humiliated that he immediately resigned the next day.

Ignatieff was named interim Liberal leader and the Grits' already formidable arrogance and stupidity went into hyperdrive. He fucked around, using the coalition as a meaningless threat before ultimately supporting Harper in Parliament for nine months.

In a way, it's actually too bad that How We Almost Gave the Tories the Boot ends in the fall of 2009 because that's where the real fun started. What followed in the two years after the book was the complete disintegration of the Liberals, the almost forced deportation of Michael Ignatieff and the rise of the NDP as a genuine political force in Canada. Brian Topp's analysis of everything that happened after September of 2009 would have been fascinating to read.

Whether you agree with the NDP on policy (and I don't,) How We Almost Gave the Tories the Boot is a much better than average contemporary political history. You see, in real time through Blackberry messages, how the negotiations built and how everything ultimately fell apart.

If you like your political books to grab you by the crotch before head-butting you, I can't recommend Brian Topp's book enough. How We almost Gave the Tories the Boot is instructive in the fine art of what Richard Nixon called nut-cutting and shows you not only where the bodies are buried, but almost lets you hold the shovel.

If you can, I suggest you pick it up.

An Open Letter to the Liberal Party of Canada

Hey Grits,

Maybe you know me. I've been writing your obituary for several years now. When I first started doing so, I thought that the process would take ten to twenty years, but you've managed to surpass even my expectations. Uh, congratulations?

I finally finished reading Peter Newman's When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada last night and I was shocked to learn that my predictions of your demise were altogether too conservative. After having read that book, I'm shocked that you're not an actual corpse, as opposed to just being in a political oxygen tent.

To read Mr. Newman, one would have thought that your terminal stupidity would have ended you years ago. My educated guess is that your national brand is the only thing that's kept you even partially alive thus far. However, this is where things get difficult for you. Being branded as "The Natural Governing Party" is only worth anything as long as you were at least in Opposition. Now you're not. As a matter of fact, you only have 36 more seats than the Greens do.

I don't know why I'm writing this, other than I really enjoy showing off how smart I am. It's not one of my more attractive qualities, I know, but it remains one of my favourite ones. But I have a few suggestions as to how you people might resurrect yourselves.

Do I think they'll work? Probably not. In my opinion, you're too far gone and still entirely too arrogant, given your station. Do I think you'll even listen? No. No, I don't. You folks honestly believe that you got where you were by being smarter than everyone else, ignoring entirely that's also what got you where you are.

But I'm doing this more for me than I am for you. I like feeding my own ego and who knows, it might even get me laid.

My suggestions are as follows;

1) Lobbyists: Get rid of them. All of them!

More than any of the other parties, the LPoC has been dominated by scumbag lobbyists (or worse, scumbags who want to become lobbyists,) for decades now. Much of your nearly four-decade civil war can be traced back to staffers and mandarins that have placed their own careers over the future of the party.

While the Grits were the default choice of most Canadians, despite the careerist sleaziness inherent in your infrastructure, that was only true when there were no other plausible governing choices.

But even that overlooks some important history. Whenever the Tories have had a halfway competent leader, the Grits lost. John Diefenbaker and Brian Mulroney nearly crushed you into dust and it's entirely likely that Stephen Harper (who I heartily dislike) is going to do it once and for all. Since the days of Louis St. Laurent, the Liberals only won when the Conservatives went out of their way to lose. Remember that even the Sun King nearly lost to Bob Stanfield and actually did lose to Joe Clark.

People voted for you largely despite your party culture, not because of it. When the Tories lost, they went to you because there was nowhere else to go. That's no longer true. People like the NDP opposition far more than anyone thought they would.

That means that you're going to have to fundamentally reform your culture. No one is going to vote for a party controlled by people that use their position as a sinecure to a comfy life as a Yorkville or Bay Street asshole. And that supposes that Yorkville and Bay Street will even take to their bosom the assholes from the third-place party in Parliament anymore. After all, why would they?

The Harper government has already had two fairly significant lobbying-related scandals. My guess is that there's going to be a huge one at some point before they're finally defeated, whenever that might be.

You're going to want to be able to exploit that, which you can't do while your party remains a wholly-owned subsidiary of registered lobbyists. At least not while the purer-than-thou NDP is the national alternative.

You need to send the message, early and often, that the Liberal Party is no longer going to be the personal preserve of lobbyists. They won't be welcome in your campaigns and governments and, when your Members and operatives leave to lobby, they won't be welcome back. The New Democrats are populated with true believers. If you're not, you're dead.

I'm sure that there's no polling to support that, so you're just going to have to trust me, which you won't.

2) Start Acting More Like a Modern Party and Less Like a Cult: One of the most shocking revelations of When the Gods Changed was that the LPoC actually had $25 million on hand to refute the Tory "Just Visiting" campaign against Michael Ignatieff, which was itself only a $10 million buy. And here I was thinking that you were too broke, too lazy or too stupid to respond.

I was shocked to learn from Peter Newman that the money was there, but was earmarked for regional and constituent interest groups. For the love of Christ, your leader was turned into a goddamn pinata for two years because the Ukrainian Lesbian Liberal Alliance of Kapuskasing just had to get their tithing for the quarter.

Who in the fuck does that? The NDP doesn't, and the Conservatives sure as shit don't. Their interest groups pay them, not the other way around.

Lookee, you no longer have the filthy lucre of open-ended public financing to support you and your meaningless little interest sectors. If you don't start being grown-ups with your own money, nobody in the country is going to trust you with theirs. Unless I'm wildly mistaken, the Ukrainian Lesbian Liberal Alliance of Kapuskasing hasn't elected a goddamned soul to Parliament ever! If they want a seat at the table, they should be paying you.

Why would anyone vote for a party that has to use valuable time and money to bribe their own natural constituents?

3) Quit the Stunt Platforms: One of the things that killed Ignatieff was his wholesale repudiation of everything that Stephane Dion stood for. In turn, Dion repudiated everything Paul Martin stood for. And so on and so on.

All that accomplished was to confuse the part of the electorate that wasn't convinced that you're desperate. In the last four elections, you've managed to create the same messaging nightmare that Mitt Romney is suffering from today.

The "Family Pack" and "Green Shift" were stunt platforms that came out of nowhere and ultimately meant nothing. It was obvious to anyone that was paying attention that no one was going to vote for either.

The Liberal Party of Canada needs one issue - and only one - to break through. Luckily, you have only have one.

Stephen Harper has talked like the Tea Party while spending like George W. Bush. By all rights, you should own deficit reduction as an issue, given the Chretien-Martin legacy. Except you don't, because you've had two leaders in row trying to compete with Harper and the NDP on who can spend the most money on the most useless shit.

You Grits have one thing that you've done in the last thirty years that you can actually be proud of, and that's deficit reduction. Start acting on it. If you think that you're ever going to out-promise the NDP, you're kidding yourselves. If you think that you're going to out-demagogue Harper, there isn't a lot I can tell you other than that you deserve to be doomed.

The Dippers and the Tories are replacing you in the mushy-middle. And by the time that you finally get a permanent leader and (if) you get some cash in the bank, they'll have succeeded. There's only one issue that you have national credibility on that they don't. Use it.

4) Quit the Stunt Leaders: By the time you finally get around to electing your next leader, almost two years after your last one was humiliated, you will have had six leaders (counting Bill Graham and Bob Rae) in a decade. There have only been seventeen leaders since 1867, six of them between 2004 and 2013.

Here's where this gets serious. As Peter Newman points out, you've lost an average of thirty seats in each of the last four elections. If that trend continues, you'll be left with about four seats after 2015. Part of the problem is that you've gone into the last three elections with different leaders, whereas the Tories, Dippers and Bloc were constant in all of them.

I'll grant you that Dion was an accidental leader, elected entirely because he wasn't Rae or Ignatieff.

But Paul Martin was sold as the messiah, infused with everything that right about Chretien while lacking everything wrong. And he was dumped over the side, setting up a leadership race that no one in your party was prepared for, which is how you ended up with Dion. And then you dumped Dion over the side.

Then you went with Ignatieff, who was sold as The Smartest Guy in the World Who Wrote Books that Very Smart People Read. Except his only political experience was that Liberals didn't like him very much, as evidenced by the 2006 leadership race. Then the party let him twist in the winds of the "Just Visiting" ads.

I happen to think that you made an enormous mistake in basically excommunicating Bob Rae, who I think was uniquely qualified to run against Harper. Not only is the the smartest and most experienced politician in the Liberal Party, he's one of the smartest and most experienced politicians in the country.

But it looks like you're determined to anoint another "saviour" in the person of Justin Trudeau.

If you buy the lobbyist-spin doctor nonsense that the Tories are afraid of Trudeau, you're delusional! If you take away his last name, you find that he's about as qualified to be an MP as the "bartenders and college students" that you Grits can't stop mocking the NDP for electing. His professional life consists entirely of teaching drama to teenagers, who are rather expert in that without professional coaching.

Justin is the Conservative war room's wet dream. Not only do they have video of him screaming profanities in the House of Commons, they have him openly musing about supporting Quebec separatism. If you thought the "Not a Leader" and "Just Visiting" ads were a nightmare to contend with, just wait. It's gonna get a LOT worse.

If Team Harper is even halfway smart, they'll just refer to him as "Justin," except in Francophone Quebec, where his surname is probably lethal. And if the Conservatives don't go after the Trudeau name in La Belle Province, the NDP will. Their platform against the Clarity Act was practically designed to target someone with Justin's name. And if Trudeau is seen as going nowhere in Quebec, he's dead everywhere else.

You, in your infinite suicidal genius, have crafted leadership party rules that make it almost impossible for anyone to seriously challenge Trudeau. That means that he's going to cruise into a Martin-Ignatieff-style coronation, completely unprepared for the pain that the well-funded and popular Tories are going to lay into him. And where Harper doesn't hit Trudeau, Muclair will.

Given the stupid rules that your leadership has put in place, it's hard to see any serious challenger preventing another stunt coronation. Don't get me wrong, it'll be a huge news story, too. Most likely, it'll stretch out for six months and might even rake in a few bucks for you.

And I sincerely hope that you enjoy it. It'll probably be your last.

Too Late, Dumb and Dead: More Thoughts on the NDP-Liberal "Merger"

I've been saying for years that the Liberal Party of Canada is on a rapid slide into obsolescence. However, even I didn't think it would happen as rapidly as it did. I thought it would take the Grits a decade to wind up where they are, although I did say that their ending up as the third party in Parliament was well within the realm of possibility during last year's campaign. I was still kind of shocked when it actually happened.

To understand how the Liberals got to the depths they're in now, one should understand how they reached the heights they enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century. Unsurprisingly, I've found Peter C. Newman's When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada a remarkable resource in this regard. Newman is also the author of one of my all-time favorite hate-screeds, The Secret Mulroney Tapes: The Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister. I'm seriously considering having all of my future lovers read The Secret Mulroney Tapes before I embed myself within them, so beautifully angry is that book. It's almost as balls-out pissed off as Mulroney's own memoirs, but only a quarter the length!

Anyhow, without actually coming right and saying so, Newman makes the case that the Liberals became the "Natural Government Party" through good timing and breath-taking corruption. Fantastically, I was unaware of this theorem before reading When the Gods Changed because no Liberal actually contested it. There was no shortage of material in Newman's book that various and sundry Grits protested, but that wasn't among them.

The LPoC had the good fortune of governing during the Second World War, when Canada finally became a fully industrialized society. As was true in the United States later, Ottawa was besieged with "dollar a year men," business leaders who worked for the government to further the war effort. In Canada, they answered to Prime Minister King's "Minister of Everything," C.D Howe.

Besides being mostly responsible for the war effort, Howe was also the Liberal party's chief fundraiser. However, he never bothered building any kind of a wall being his two functions. When a business wanted a lucrative "cost-plus" war contract, Howe's functionaries reminded them that a political donation would grease the wheels somewhat. That this also essentially froze money from going to the Conservatives or the CCF (which is now the NDP) was likely something that didn't escape ol' C.D's notice.

Often times, a company would overbid for a contract and then kick back as much as 10% of it to the party. Most modern observers believe that Jean Chretien's sponsorship scandal came out of nowhere, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Peter Newman spends the better part of three chapters describing how corruption is part of the Liberal DNA, again, without actually saying so. But it is impossible to read the history in When the Gods Changed without coming to that conclusion.

The Grits also mightily relied on the federal civil service to build it's infrastructure and as a training ground for their candidates, particularly during the King, St. Laurent and Pearson years. What was created was an unstoppable marriage between politics, business and the public service that was unparalleled in most of the democratic world. Indeed, it was a phenomenon more more common to totalitarian societies.

But the Liberals were often brought down by their own unparalleled arrogance. At various points(specifically, 1957, '84 and 2006) the public would grow disgusted with their hubris and throw them out, giving the Conservatives the odd chance at government, which they would promptly fuck up.

But after '57 - with the very notable exception of Pierre Trudeau's win in 1968 - the Liberals only won because the Conservatives were so bad at politics. Trudeau never won back-to-back majority governments and Jean Chretien only won at all because the Conservative party fractured three ways during the latter Mulroney years.

When the Tories reunified in 2003, the Grits were first reduced to a bare minority, then thrown out of government altogether, probably never to return. In the 2006, '08 and '11 elections, the Liberal seats from Paul Martn's last government have been cut by more than two-thirds.  Only three Liberal leaders since 1867 have never been prime minister. Two of them were leader in the last six years.

Of course the Liberals should have reached some accommodation with the NDP. In fact, even Jean Chretien now recognizes that he should have done it years ago, when he was prime minister. The Dippers were almost as thoroughly wiped out as the Conservatives were in 1993. Had Chretien absorbed the New Democratic Party under the most generous terms possible back then, I believe that they'd still be in power today. There would have been an almost unstoppable left-wing party in a centre-left-leaning country, which even the unified Conservatives probably wouldn't have defeated.

But the Liberals couldn't stop being Liberals for 20 minutes and think about their electoral future. They had their strength in Quebec cut in half after 1984 and spent the better part of the 70s guaranteeing that they'd never again win significant numbers of seats in Western Canada. They thought that the Tory fracture was forever and that they could continue to win majorities with all of the seats in Ontario, slightly less than half of Quebec's and a plurality in Atlantic Canada until they end of time.

The only problem was that they didn't see the end of time coming until it was too late to stop it, which was in 2010, if you believe some commentators. It was only then that some Grit functionaries - very probably without telling their leader, Micheal Ignatieff - started "negotiating" a merger with the NDP under Jack Layton.

Even at that incredibly late date, the overwhelming hubris of the Liberals was on full display. The "deal" was essentially this: "Stop being the NDP and we'll let you become Liberals. But before you get too excited, we're not going to give you commie assholes any Cabinet seats that have anything to do with money. How's that grab you?"

Within a year, the Grits would have fewer seats than the Dippers did when those "negotiations" were ongoing.

Now comes the new book by  Paul Adams, an associate professor of journalism at Ottawa’s Carleton University, Power Trap: How fear and loathing between New Democrats and Liberals keep Stephen Harper in power--and what can be done about it.

I haven't yet read Power Trap, but Professor Adams' thesis is, to put it lightly, silly.

A new book that advocates a Liberal-NDP merger blames partisan pettiness and personal rivalries for the two parties’ refusal to play footsie.

“New Democrats and Liberals are caught in a power trap in which they seek to reach government, not by defeating the Conservatives, but by destroying their progressive rival,” writes Paul Adams, an associate professor of journalism at Ottawa’s Carleton University.

In Power Trap: How Fear and Loathing Between the Liberals and NDP Keep Harper in Power, he predicts the two parties will keep duelling for at least another three elections before one or the other establishes supremacy.

In other words, opposition stubbornness will enable Stephen Harper to join the five-member club of Canadian prime ministers who’ve each ruled for a decade or more.

This, argues the veteran journalist, will be disastrous for Canada.

(...)

He believes a victory by co-operating progressives would be fairly certain, noting the three parties won 53 per cent of the vote in 2011.

And that was with a no-show from a large chunk of a voting constituency — youth — that the progressive parties potentially are best positioned to win over. If the three parties were to undertake a campaign of outreach, using social media as Barack Obama did in his 2008 “Yes We Can” presidential campaign, young people who previously haven’t voted could help put a merged Opposition force over the top in a vote expected in 2015.

While it’s true some right-leaning Liberals likely go over to the Conservatives in such a scenario, “blue Liberals” probably already have left the party, Adams writes.

At the moment, however, so-called progressives have “no agreed-upon platform or unifying vision, no leader who can claim undisputed primacy in the fight to dislodge the Conservatives.”

There's absolutely no evidence to support Adams' assertions.

The Liberals have already spent the better part of four decades narrowing their geographic and political appeal to the point that it barely exists at all. If the Conservatives were even halfway smart, John Turner would have been the Last Liberal Prime Minister instead of Paul Martin.

The NDP has already established "supremacy" over the Liberals, as any fair reading of the last twenty years of elections results amply demonstrates.

In 1993, the Dippers were reduced to 9 seats from 44, losing party status along with the Progressive Conservatives. The Liberals went from 88 to 177, and Chretien likely wouldn't have won half that many were it not for vote-splitting in Ontario and Quebec, where over half of Parliament's seats are.

But in four of the five subsequent elections, 1997, 2004, '06 and '08, the New Democrats slowly gained seats as the Liberals lost them. The Grits started the 2004 election with 168 seats and ended it with 135. In 2008, they dropped to 77. Between '93 and '08, the Dippers more than quadrupled their seat count to 37.

2011 was the terminal point. The Liberals were reduced to an all-time low of 34 seats, while the NDP exploded to 103, over half of which was in Quebec.

Simply put, the Liberals have had the floor drop out of their vote in the last two elections, losing 50% of their seats in each of them. Meanwhile, the Dippers have been increasingly expanding the scope and reach of their vote in ways that no one could have anticipated.

Unless the Grits can magically start doubling and tripling their seats counts overnight, reversing a trend two decades in the making, they're done. And given the narrowing of the geographic reach of the vote that started under Trudeau, that ain't at all likely. At this point, they barely hold the majority of seats in their former stronghold of Toronto.

Liberal fortunes are further complicated by their continued reliance on fucking gimmicks. Their coming leadership race seems to be a contest for who their next "guru" is going to be; Teenage Jesus, who hasn't done anything in government, or a retired astronaut who hasn't done anything in government. Both are about as notable for their governing vision of Canada as the former goalie who previously ran for the leadership was. The Liberals haven't thought of having a serious parliamentarian as their leader since Martin.

Say what you will about Jack Layton and Thomas Muclair, but they had spent decades in municipal and provincial government between them. They both knew how the game of politics is played and how the machinery worked, as well as having a vision as to how broaden the chessboard of the electorate. The Liberals are still relying on stunts that they think will make the country fall to their knees before them. I could be very wrong about this, but I think they're insulting the public with that nonsense. I haven't hidden the fact that I think that the voting public is stupid, but I don't think we're that stupid.

Professor Adams also makes much too much about how "right-wing" the Harper Conservatives are. They responded to the 2008 financial panic by spending even more in stimulus money than Barack Obama did. Every single proposal they've ever made since 2004 has been poll-tested to the tits and is utterly bereft of anything that is recognizable as "conservative principle." let alone being "right-wing." In his six years in power, Harper has come close to surpassing even Trudeau's insane spending.

When a left-wing party finally beats the Tories, it won't be because that party is so made of awesome. It'll be because conservatives have abandoned the Conservatives.

Can we also quit comparing anything in Canadian politics to President Obama's 2008 victory? More than anything else, doing that demonstrates that people like Paul Adams don't know anything about Canadian or American politics.

There are two reasons that Barack Obama is president today, their names are George W. Bush and John McCain.

Bush had poisoned the well on all the issues that Republicans had previously been strong on, most importantly, national security and the economy. It's important to remember that the financial panic began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008 but the recession started in the spring of 2007. Iraq was a huge mess and Afghanistan was even worse without anyone noticing. Also, McCain ran a spectacularly bad campaign and thought that a semi-literate piece of ass would save him. He thought wrong.

I probably shouldn't overlook the fact that Obama wasn't even the favourite to win the Democratic nomination: Hillary Clinton was, but her campaign was  overwhelmed by stupidity, hubris and infighting, making her the ideal frontrunner to run the Liberal Party of Canada.

You can actually look at the Obama presidency and adorably say that "He didn't build that!" The GOP did it for him, and are continuing to. But there is, as yet, no evidence at all that Stephen Harper is creating similar conditions for a future

Finally, I have seen no indication at all that the Liberals have gotten over themselves enough to even think about reconsidering their previously stated terms of a merger, specifically that the NDP stop being the NDP. Even though they have well under half of the seats that the Dippers do, the Grits are still delusional enough to think that they can dictate the terms of a merger.

The Liberal Party of Canada is basically the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. They've had a limb cut off in each of the last four elections, but they insist that "it's just a flesh wound" and that they remain strong enough to dictate the terms under which the New Democrats cross the bridge.

It would be hilarious if it wasn't so pathetic. Okay, that's not true, It's still hilarious.

I'll probably still read  Power Trap, but that's only because I like feeling smarter than my supposed intellectual betters. Whether you buy it or not, I'll leave to you, but I can't imagine that Tories or Dippers will find a single useful thing in it.



I could go into some depth about Quebec and how the dynamics there are likely to play into the coming power shift, but I'm bored and this post is already long enough. If you want to argue, let's go to the comments. In all probability, somebody's going to bring up the Clarity Act and that'll necessitate a part two to this post.

Let's get it on.

Bring Me the Head of Tim Hudak

Last night was quite eventful. Barack Obama gave a fantastically dull acceptance speech, proving that the Democratic National Convention could be as boring as its Republican counterpart was stupid.

Each and every night of the DNC put me to sleep between the 8 and 9 o'clock hours. On Wednesday, I was brutally awakened by Sandra Fluke screaming at me about her ham-purse. If I could say anything to Ms. Fluke, it would be that it's difficult to maintain that you're a "private citizen" when you're addressing the nation on prime-time TV, okay SugarTits?

Then there were the Ontario by-elections in Vaughan and Kitchener-Waterloo. Lookee, I know that over have of you aren't Canadian, let alone from Ontario, so I apologize to you for all of the local stories I've done of late. I just couldn't bring myself to write about the conventions while they were ongoing. Just watching them was bad enough. I might do a couple of posts about them over the weekend though.

Last night's by-elections were important in that they would decide if Premier Dalton McGuinty would get the majority that was denied him last October. As I mentioned here, McGuinty's Liberal government has been wildly unpopular for years now. Those Ontarians not suffering from a head injury, advanced syphilis, or both suffer near-fatal douche chills at the thought of being governed by them another day.

The only problem is that there currently isn't a suitable leader to replace McGuinty with. The Leader of the Opposition, Progressive Conservative Tim Hudak can only be described in polite company as the Dumbest Motherfucker on Earth. Unlike our American cousins, Canadians will vote for bush-league corruption and general ineptitude when the alternative is abject stupidity. For example, Rick Perry couldn't get elected to shit here, but Bernie Maddoff very well could. For that reason - and that reason alone - we decided last fall to only reduce McGuinty to a minority instead of stomping him death like he had rabies.

Timmy, being Timmy decided last night to yet again prove every nasty thing I've ever said about him.

Some background is necessary before I go any further. You see there's a rich tradition in parliamentary democracies where there is a minority government. That involves bribing members of other parties into either resigning or crossing the floor. Bribery is a strong word, mostly because it's a crime, but it happens all the time in Canadian politics.

Last fall, Conservative Elizabeth Witmer (who is thought to hate Hudak every bit as much as a right-thinking person should) resigned the seat that she held for 22 years in Kitchener-Waterloo. I'm sure that it was entirely coincidental that ol' Dalton had a job as the head of WSIB waiting for her. And wouldn't you know it, the Liberals were just one seat shy of an effective majority! The serendipity was never ending.

Sure, the Tories had held the seat since 1990, but McGuinty knows as well as I do that Hudak is the Dumbest Motherfucker on Earth. It was as good a shot as the Grits were going to get at a majority without a general election. And the Premier was actually half-right, which is a fairly accurate description of his entire governing style.

Hudak lost the seat, but McGuinty didn't win it. Instead, it went to the NDP, who last held it when they were the CCF, back before the dawn of time itself. More galling to McGuinty was the fact that the winner, Catherine Fife, is the president of the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association, with whom the provincial Liberals have been having a rather impressive pissing match of late. Oh, and it's rumoured that McGuinty wanted Fife to run for him, so there's that.

However humiliating this turn of events was for Dalton, it was worse for Timmy. His party had, after all, held Kitchener-Waterloo for over half of my lifetime. Moreover, they first won it in the same election that the Tories were driven into third party status for the first and only time in Ontario history.

But, being Timmy, he had to make the situation even worse for himself. It's a well-known reflex of his.

Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak is blaming his defeat in a key by-election on a “tsunami” of public sector union bosses who bought votes in a riding held by his party for two decades.

Mr. Hudak attributed the New Democratic Party’s historic win in the Southern Ontario riding of Kitchener-Waterloo to its ability to draw upon its traditional roots in the labour movement. Union leaders were out in force in the riding on Thursday, persuading teachers and other public sector workers to defect to the NDP from the Liberals.

“I think it’s dangerous and ominous for the province to see that power on display,” an embittered sounding Mr. Hudak said at a news conference Friday morning. “We were up against a tsunami of public union bosses.”

Look. politicians buy votes all the time. Conservatives do it with poorly thought out tax cuts that ruin everything, Liberals do it with program spending that ruins everything. Increasingly third-party groups are doing it with organizational skill and money, which drives politicians crazy when it doesn't benefit them.
But a smart politician never actually comes out and accuses the electorate of being bought. Voters are every bit as craven and greedy as our representatives are, but we get pissy about that kind of talk.

And, to be fair, no one has ever accused Tim Hudak of being smart. Shit, I've spent the last three years saying in public that he should be stripped of his citizenship, deported to Uganda and eaten alive by whatever remains of Idi Amin's family. I've have quite a bit of fun saying it, too!

But now figures within the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario are starting to sound a lot like me, albeit less colourful and adorable about it.

The results leave the legislature in minority limbo and raise yet more questions about Hudak’s leadership after his party squandered a double-digit lead in the polls before last October’s provincial election.

While he survived a February leadership review with 78.7 per cent approval, Hudak, who holds a press conference Friday morning at Queen’s Park after spending the evening huddled at home, faces some internal dissent.

In a statement, he complained public sector unions “bought Kitchener—Waterloo and now we can expect the rest of Ontario taxpayers to pay for it as the NDP cut more budget deals to keep the Liberals in power.”

Some Tories, however, weren’t buying his excuses.

“This is hard for Tim to explain,” confided one unhappy Conservative, noting the leader has had “two and a quarter years of a free pass and that is over for him now.”

If the Tories were smart, they wouldn't be talking about the end Hudak's "free pass," they'd be talking about the end of Old Yeller and looking for a barn to take him to the back of. This isn't the first of Timmy's magnificent fuck-ups, or even the most spectacular. It's just the latest.
To be fair, some Liberals are giving background interviews about icing McGuinty, as well. The only difference is that as long as McGuinty has Hudak, his job is safe. As I right this, Hudak is the only thing stopping the Grits from an endless slide to third place at Queen's Park, and anyone with any brains knows it.

Today is September 7, 2012. I can almost guarantee you that within 6 months - by March 7, 2013 - McGuinty will pull the plug on his government and flush Timmy down the drain of politics forever. That won't be smart, because there's no guarantee that he'll win a majority, but there's a really good chance that the Tories will replace Hudak with someone who can crush the already monstrously unpopular Liberals.

And there's the horrifying third option, which my great friend The Tiger on Politics and I discussed back in April: Andrea Horwath's NDP coming up the midle to win. All things being equal, I've been more than a little impressed with Horwath's political skills of late.

Sure, another Dipper government would be a fiscal disaster for a province tits-deep in debt from McGuinty's mismanagement. But watching her flush both Dalton McGuinty and Tim Hudak down the toliet of history might just be worth it. Neither would survive a leadership review in light of such an electoral apocalypse and they'd both likely end their concession speeches with their R. Budd Dwyer impressions.

I wouldn't bet on it happening, but I wouldn't bet against it, either.

What else happened last night. Oh, apparently the MTV Movie Awards brought us this delight ...



The one thing I paid no attention to whatsoever turned out to be the sexiest thing of all. I just can't win.


Enticing and adorable Rihanna-Katy Perry suggestively lesbo gif sexily stolen from Antiquiet.

The Slow Death of the Liberal Party of Canada Continues

I 've learned over the years to view Quebec Premier Jean Charest as being not unlike cancer. He might seem to go into remission from time to time, but you're a fool if you think that he's ever been fully destroyed. I have yet to see a politician any where with the number of lives that Charest has had over the last quarter century.

In the 80s, he was Brian Mulroney's favorite Cabinet minister until it was discovered that he had improper contact with a judge. That should have ended his career, but within a few years he was running for the federal Progressive Conservative leadership, a race where he was butchered like a hog by Kim Campbell.

Charest finally did become PC leader, but that was only because the 1993 federal election reduced the 156 member Tory caucus was reduced to just himself and Elsie Wayne. And Elsie didn't want the leadership. For years I regarded Charest as History's Biggest Loser.

Then came the 1995 Quebec referendum. Jean Chretien's governing Liberal Party - along with his Quebec counterpart, Daniel Johnson -  had so badly mismanaged the federalist "Non" campaign that there was a very real possibility that the separatists were going to win. Charest effectively took over and the country was saved by the narrowest imaginable margin, just one half of a percent.

After the referendum, it was only a matter of time when Charest would make the move to Quebec City as Liberal leader (there is no Conservative Party in Quebec to this day,) which he did in 1998. He was elected premier in 2003. Since then he's had more political near-death experiences than the Internet has bandwidth for me to properly recount. But he's always lived to fight another day. It's been a rather remarkable thing to watch.

On Tuesday it's very likely that his luck is finally going to run out. I learned through hard experience never to write Jean Charest off completely, but observers far more knowledgeable about Quebec politics than I consider it a sure thing. For the first time, the Liberal Party of Quebec is likely going to be the third party in the National Assembly. I consider Chantal Hebert Canada's single smartest political columnist. She makes very few arguments that I can easily discount.

Then there's Christy Clark, the Liberal premier of British Columbia. Her party is scheduled for complete annihilation sometime in the next year. And no one is suggesting anything other than that.

Ontario should be one of the few bright spots for the Liberal Party. Although Dalton McGuinty was reduced to a slim minority in last fall's provincial election, he also became the first Ontario Liberal to win a third government in more than a century. When he won his second majority in 2007, he was the first Liberal to pull that off in 70 years. There's gotta be some hope there, right?

Not exactly. McGuinty is monstrously unpopular in Canada's largest province and has been for years. He is, however, exceptionally gifted in who his opponents are. The Ontario Progressive Conservative Party has been beset by incredibly stupid (and possibly diagnostically schizophrenic) infighting since Mike Harris resigned as leader a decade ago. As has been the case since 1985, various factions have alternated in the leadership, making a consistent political message almost impossible.

Harris was succeeded by Ernie Eves, a good man who was fighting for a third mandate while the more populist faction of the party sat on it's hands. Eves was replaced as leader by the great and good John Tory. Tory is the hero of almost everybody in the province, but he's a spectacularly bad politician. In every single one of his races, everybody loved him but ultimately found a reason not to vote for him.

That brings me to the current leader, Tim Hudak, who I frequently refer to as "the Dumbest Motherfucker on Earth." In last year's campaign, Hudak pissed away a 15-point lead and managed to get infuriate every faction of the party, which I previously thought was impossible. The fact that Hudak won his subsequent leadership review is, more than anything else, a testament to the suicidal impulses of the Ontario Tories.

But that's hardly an endorsement of the Liberals. There's no shortage of polls out there that show that if the Tories had a leader with any brains at all, the Grits would be driven to third-party status at Queens Park, behind even the NDP. McGuinty has survived as long as he has only because the prospect of a genetic fool like Hudak drives smart PC and soft NDP votes into the arms of the Liberals, who everyone considers chronically evil, but at least marginally competent. If and when that comes to pass, a third-place showing for the Ontario Liberals would be yet another first.

So the Liberal Party is on the verge of getting wiped out completely in Quebec and British Columbia, and they would be in Ontario if the provincial Tories stopped advertising their own death wish.

Canada's population is roughly 35 million people. 25.5 million of us live in Ontario, Quebec or British Columbia. If you live anywhere else, you don't politically matter very much. That might sound cold, but in country governed by the principle of representation by population, it's simply a fact.

What happens to the federal Liberals - themselves recently placed for the first time in history as the third party in Parliament - when their provincial parties are so thoroughly repudiated in the only parts of the country where anybody lives?  I keep hearing about how the Grits are going to rebuild, but in the very near future they're not going to have a political base to rebuild from.

The seemingly ruined federal party has, if nothing else, members of the provincial parties that they can rely on for support. But what happens when the provincial parties are irreversibly broken? Where does the money, political machinery and, most importantly, the votes come from then?

I think that's why Justin Trudeau (who Big City Lib hilariously describes as "Teenage Jesus") hasn't declared his intentions for the federal leadership yet. If Jean Charest gets blasted into hell as thoroughly as the polls and smart folks think he will on Tuesday, the Quebec Liberal machine is going to be destroyed. It's not impossible to think that federalist Quebecers would swarm to the federal NDP and build a new provincial machine for them, which Thomas Muclair has indicated that he wants to do.

This is problematic for Trudeau in that it leaves him without a base. It's bad enough that his last name automatically disqualifies him in most of francophone Quebec, what's he going to do without the money, political minds and volunteers from the Quebec party? My guess is that if Tuesday is as bad as it's expected to be, Justin doesn't run.

Of course, Teenage Jesus might not be as smart as everyone keeps telling me he is. Stockwell Day certainly believes that he's going to run, and win, the leadership.

On the other hand, having Stockwell Day tell me that something's going to happen is perhaps the single greatest indicator that it won't. When Day won the Reform/Canadian Alliance leadership, I immediately stopped voting for them and started supporting minor parties and independents. And I was right to do so. It took him just 18 months to drive the CA directly into the ground. Within three years of his taking the helm, the party ceased to exist altogether, merging with the federal Progressive Conservatives.

But Stock's column is riddled with factual and analytical errors. For example, he doesn't seem to understand what quantitative easing is, or that it isn't controlled by the Obama White House. Given his experience, it's easy to see why the Honourable Mr. Day thinks that the Goddamned Liberal Media can win or lose an election for a candidate, but history doesn't bear that out. Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and both Bushes won with the majority of the press actively against them. So too did Stephen Harper, come to think of it.

The federal Liberals that want Trudeau to run do so because they want to preside over a coronation, ignoring entirely how well that worked out for Paul Martin and Michael Ignatieff. If Canadian leadership campaigns and American primaries are good for anything - and they're not good for much - it's that they let candidates work out their flaws when most of the non-geek public isn't paying attention.

Teenage Jesus has a pretty impressive temper and that leads him to do and say spectacularly stupid things when he's riled. If he wins a mostly uncontested leadership campaign, that'll just serve to reinforce his own worst qualities, just as it did for Martin and Ignatieff. And a murderous cyborg like Stephen Harper will exploit that to devastating effect. If I was Harper, there'd be no one I'd rather run against than Justin Trudeau. In three of the last four elections, Canadians have soundly repudiated the personality cults that the Liberals have built around their coronated leders.

In my opinion, the Liberals lost their last best chance when they stabbed Bob Rae in the back. Rae was alone among the Grits in having run a party and a government before. He had more political experience than all of the other federal party leaders combined. And even the negatives from his Ontario government are dwarfed by the fiscal mismanagement of the the federal Tories. I think that if Bob Rae won the leadership, Harper wouldn't have run again. But I can guarantee you that Harper is dying to run against Justin Trudeau.

But all of that is utterly inconsequential. In province after province, the Liberal Party is facing Armageddon. And without the provincial parties, it's hard to see how the federal party rebuilds. It doesn't really matter who the next leader is.

Those idiots are dead and too stupid to know it. But I suspect that they will in the fall of 2015.