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.

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.

Tim Hudak Finally Has Good Idea, But Figures Out a Way to Fuck You With It

I haven't written about politics here in Ontario in months, and I really should have. In fairness, I've been preoccupied with an utterly predictable presidential election in the United States and the flash and bullshit surrounding the end of Toronto mayor Rob Ford's career. I'm also dating again, which keeps me awfully busy.

But the shenanigans at Queen's Park have been endlessly fascinating. Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, who is among the most unpopular people in the English-speaking world, saw his majority government reduced to a minority in October 2011. Why only a minority? Because the opposition leader, Progressive Conservative Tim Hudak, is the dumbest motherfucker on earth, and managed to antagonize everybody who might have voted for him. That's a pretty impressive accomplishment.

As I've mentioned before, the rest of the world isn't like the United States. When given the choice between evil and stupid, Canadians will usually embrace evil. If nothing else, evil is at least predictable and not infrequently rather clever. Americans, on the other hand, have a fabled history of taking stupidity to their collective bosom, which explains the state of the U.S economy.

That isn't to say that we like evil. We try to punish it to the extent that we can without stupidity winning. In a nutshell, that's how McGuinty was reelected, albeit only with a minority.

However, a minority situation was less than ideal for ol' Dalton. The corruption and politicized, wasteful nonsense that defined his two majority mandates were about to catch up with him. It was only a matter of time before the opposition PCs and NDP combined to drive his government out in a confidence vote and force an election that McGuinty would almost certainly lose, probably to the NDP.

So McGuinty did the only thing left to him: he resigned and prorogued the legislature. Of course, this put Liberals - who howled with self-righteous indignation when Stephen Harper prorogued the federal Parliament - in a position where they found themselves cheering McGuinty's tactical genius and personal grace.

(For the record, I oppose prorogument in all but the most extreme circumstances. Were it up to me, shutting down the government on a political basis would mean exactly that. The government would stop dead. The civil service wouldn't be paid, nor would government benefits to the citizenry. Contracts would immediately be in breach and the government would be liable for it. That way, the government would be too scared to prorogue without accompanying legislation that a minority couldn't pass. A bare minimum, prorogument should be introduced as a confidence motion in the legislature.)

When you get down to it, all McGuinty will have accomplished in the end is his face being out front when the Liberals are finally defeated. As soon as the Liberals have a new sacrificial lamb and the legislature resumes sitting, I expect that the government will be vaporized on the first available confidence vote.

That means that Ontario is already in an unofficial campaign, which puts the Grits at a decided disadvantage, since they don't have a leader who can issue policy proposals. And whoever wins the Liberal leadership (and I expect it will be Gerard Kennedy, if they're smart) will only be premier for about 15 seconds, so he or she won't have time to put together a platform.

Tim Hudak, being Tim Hudak, took an obviously good idea and watered it down with his trademark stupidity.

The sale of beer, wine and spirits in corner stores and supermarkets would give Ontarians more freedom of choice, but not necessarily lower prices, says Tory Leader Tim Hudak.

Hudak told reporters Tuesday a Progressive Conservative government would “end the LCBO and Beer Store monopolies” without forgoing the revenue from hefty provincial taxes.

“Let’s let the private sector into the alcohol business, let’s have some more competition,” he told reporters outside an LCBO outlet in Toronto’s Liberty Village that refused to let him hold his news conference inside.

Hudak said it’s time Ontario opened up its liquor retailing, like Alberta and other jurisdictions.

“A lot of states and provinces have moved out of the public control of alcohol and they actually found they increased choice and increased revenue for the government at the same time,” he said.

There is absolutely no reason for a government monopoly on alcohol sales that isn't statist, stupid, or both.

The "public safety" argument is easily the most specious and the most dangerous.

If a product is as dangerous as statist shitheads suggest it is, government should be banning it instead of profiting from it. What kind of government knowingly finances itself through the ruination of the citizenry? What kind of a fuckheaded moral example is that? And that goes for alcohol, cigarettes, and lotteries and casinos. By the way, why are marijuana, cocaine, heroin and prostitution left out of the mix?

The idea that high taxes will discourage the use of a good or service is economically boneheaded. Government rather rapidly becomes dependent on the revenue and a downturn in sales only hurts government revenues, which will have to be recouped elsewhere. The entire argument for "sin taxes" is idiotic and self-defeating when you think of what happens if those taxes accomplish their objective of eliminating the sin. At some point, the law of diminishing returns kicks in.

I'm not against taxes and recognize that they are the cost of a somewhat civil society. If it were up to me, we'd be taxing income or consumption, but that's another argument for another day. Having said that, I'm against using the tax code as a means of behaviour modification. After all, we already have the criminal law for that.

It's also singularly ineffective. Look at cigarette taxes as a prime example. When tobacco taxes got to high in the early 90s, everybody bought cigarettes that were smuggled in from the United States. Then the Chretien government cut the taxes by about two-thirds without a dramatic increase in smoking. After the individual American states jacked up taxes and sued the tobacco companies, Canadian smokers started buying untaxed tobacco from Native reservations, which are protected by treaty.

One of the great truths in life is that when you raise taxes beyond a certain point, you essentially incentivize tax avoidance. Liberals and statist social conservatives don't get that and they never fucking will, mostly because neither recognizes economic reality.

Misfits across the ideological spectrum offer three other cases for strict government controls on booze. These are health care, drunk driving and the fucking children. I'll address each now.

I smoke and drink, and I'm taxed disproportionately for both. Not only am I paying for my heath care, I'm paying for yours, too. There's virtually no chance that I'll see my 50th birthday, so I wind up saving the system a shit-ton of money.

People who have fun and die young are always cheaper than those that live clean and take decades to finally die. Just think of all cash you'll save from my not consuming government retirement benefits. Also, I've read that 85% of the health care you consume will be in the last 18 months of your life, assuming you meet ordinary life expectancy.

More likely than not, I'll either drop dead of a coronary or actually explode with cancer over the course of about three weeks. When the taxpayer is providing endless goodies to old people, it only makes economic sense that they should want to limit the number of old people around to collect. I'm doing my part. Are you?

I used to spend a lot of time in California. I was shocked to learn that you could buy beer and wine there, not only in corner and grocery stores, but at fucking gas stations! If anything is going to "encourage" drunk driving, you would think it would be that. But I'm not aware of California having a greater incidence of drunk driving, per-capita than Ontario. This very probably has a lot to do with California putting drunk drivers in jail more often (and for longer) than we do.

It appears then that the criminal law is much more effective at dealing with drunk driving than government monopolies on distribution of alcohol are. And I don't know how to break this to this shitheads at MADD, but driving under the influence is already against the law.

That brings me to the motherfucking children. The argument goes that only the government is clever and responsible enough to prevent kids from getting booze. Sadly, that's belied by the anecdotal evidence.

If you live in Ontario, look around. Are you really seeing a shortage of drunken teenagers out there?

Even if the current system is working ideally, which it isn't. you've created a perfect situation where it's easier for kids to get illegal drugs from a criminal market than it is for them to get a fucking drink. Ever notice how countries with looser alcohol laws, like France, Spain and Italy, have far lower instances of teen drunkenness and all around fuck-uppery than we do in North America? I sure as shit have.

That's because parents are actually interested in their maggot children there. They allow kids to drink, but they monitor it and acclimate them to the experience. We want the goddamned government to do it for us, ignoring entirely how well the government does things like deliver mail, which has your address on it and everything! According to this philosophy, a government that demonstrably can't balance a fucking checkbook is supposed to take care of your kids for you. Good luck with that.

But, as Jan Wong explains,  there is one really good idea for keeping a government monopoly on booze.

Today, the LCBO downplays the control aspect while struggling to satisfy its dual mandate of turning a profit without turning people into drunkards. The subliminal message of Food and Drink, the LCBO’s free magazine, remains paternalistic: don’t drink on an empty stomach. The hypocrisy is astounding. The LCBO goes further than most stores in trying to persuade you to buy its product for every social occasion short of a toddler’s birthday party. What other retailer has dreamed up 300 styles of gift bags, boxes and bottle-friendly containers in the past five years? Chris Layton, an LCBO spokesman, says the gift bags earn $3.5 million a year—although consumer interest is now shifting to gift cards.

According to Layton, Food and Drink is the LCBO’s single most popular marketing initiative. Six times a year, the LCBO prints 500,000 English copies and 20,000 French copies on glossy 60-pound stock. It turns a comfortable annual profit of $350,000 to $400,000 after expenses. Here’s one of the secrets to its success: wineries must submit marketing plans—including how much they will spend on advertising in Food and Drink—before they can obtain coveted shelf space at the LCBO. Food and Drink competes for scarce advertising dollars against private-sector magazines that aren’t bankrolled by government monopolies.

Truth be told, Torontonians would buy alcohol without any encouragement from fancy stores or glossy magazines. If we could save money, I’m fairly certain we’d shop at a no-frills warehouse with fluorescent lights. To get an idea of how monolithic the LCBO is, I checked out another monolithic retailer, but one that offers the warehouse shopping experience: Costco. First, consider that Ontario’s population is a tiny fraction of that of the U.S.—4.1 per cent. Then note that while Costco is one of the biggest wine retailers in the U.S., it must compete with thousands of private liquor stores. Now check out these numbers: last year Costco grossed $1.3 billion (U.S.) in wine sales; the LCBO’s wine sales grossed $1.58 billion, according to its most recent annual report. Despite its much smaller territory and consumer base, the LCBO actually eclipses that other monolith to the south, Costco.

In fiscal 2010–2011, the monopoly paid a dividend of $1.55 billion to the Ontario government. It was the 17th consecutive record annual dividend, and it does not include the various taxes levied (a total of $749 million). The annual report also lays bare the secret behind the LCBO’s profit margins: we’re paying double. At Costco, a bottle of Woodbridge sauvignon blanc costs $6.99; at the LCBO it’s $11.95. Costco sells Veuve Clicquot for $38.99 a bottle; the LCBO charges $66.30. When I asked for pricing examples for table wine, some markups were 137 per cent. For a wine that retails for $10.45 (the LCBO didn’t provide actual product names), it pays wholesalers $3.77 if it’s a U.S. or non-Ontario Canadian wine; $3.72 if it’s another imported wine; and $4.10 if it’s Ontario wine. And these wholesale prices may be inflated.

It isn't so much that Ontarians are in imminent danger of alcoholism as the government of Ontario is already in the throes of it. They're addicted to the money. That's why David Peterson,. Mike Harris and Dalton McGuinty himself all made the promise of privatization, but never followed through.

And Tim Hudak, being Tim Hudak, is doing nothing at all to change that.

Hudak addressed social concerns that some — like MADD Canada — might have with easier accessibility to booze, by noting there aren’t “riots in the streets” in other more liberal jurisdictions.

The Beer Store’s Jeff Newton said while consumers assume such changes would mean lower prices, Ontario’s high tax rates on alcohol prevent that.

“Their assumption is automatically that means prices are going down based on their experience from shopping in the corner store … in Florida or Buffalo,” he said.

But Newton said the Ontario tax on a case of 24 cans of beer in Ontario is $9.80, compared to 32 cents in New York or $1.08 in Florida.

With the existing tax structure, he said the cost of distributing beer to thousands of stores — and markups — mean consumers would pay more.

Sobeys, which operates 112 stores in Ontario and supplies 213 franchises, welcomed the initiative, saying what “Tim Hudak is proposing is of great interest to us.”

“We’re supportive of anything that provides our customers with greater choice and convenience,” said Sobeys’ Andrew Walker.

In a perverse way, the Ontario government's monopoly is actually subsidizing drinking by limiting the distribution costs of the product, while making tons of money in taxes.

Hudak isn't talking about lowering the alcohol tax in Ontario, he's talking about actually expanding it. If you increase the distribution chain to the private sector, the HST and provincial income and business taxes apply each step of the way. One assumes that individual corner stores and groceries would still need to be licensed to sell booze, so there would be fees in that. Plus, a Hudak government could generate billions more in selling off or franchising existing LCBO retail locations, who would also be licensed and taxed.

This is an enormous tax grab from a supposedly "conservative" candidate. It's also retarded if you know anything about economics.

Hudak is essentially proposing to expand on a liberal economic tax model in ways that hurt consumers even more. Business will make out like bandits with increased sales and the tax base on those sales increase dramatically. But because of increased distribution and (presumed) increased compliance costs, prices go up at the retail level.

Everybody wins but you and me. Businesses that sell alcohol aren't going to swallow those taxes, fees and compliance costs. They're going to pass them along to you, which is exactly what happened in Alberta.

Even if Hudak cut the tax down by 90% to match Florida's, the expanded base would more than make up the revenue. The deeper market penetration should expand sales, which should drive the price down. Unless, of course, the hidden hand of government actually drives them up for no reason at all.

If Tim Hudak is going to run on this, conservatives are going to have to pin the stupid cocksucker down on his plans before anyone votes for him. Because my guess is that he's going to follow up this populist (meaning stupid) nugget of an idea with a dramatic cut in corporate taxes. That'll mean that you're further subsidizing, say, the auto companies - and their unions - every time you have wine with dinner.

Forget the nonsense you hear about other Canadian provinces. In one way or another (with the possible exception of Quebec,) they've expanded the market while keeping taxes high and continued monopolized distribution. Alberta, in a particular, doesn't have a provincial sales tax, which tends to drive "sin taxes" higher, so there's no offset in retail price.

Unless Hudak is willing to commit to an American model of lower taxes and greater distribution, conservatives and libertarians should kill the dumb fucker dead on this.

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.

Let's get the Catholic Church off of welfare

I've explained my history with the Catholic Church before. I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic schools for eleven years. However, when it came time for my confirmation, I realized that there wasn't a single major issue that I agreed with the Church on, so I declined formal membership into "the club."

I generally support the death penalty (except in Canada, for constitutional reasons involving double jeopardy and the government's ability to appeal a jury acquittal) and I think that abortion is adorable. I don't oppose war for it's own sake, even some aggressive wars. Any number of folks like to tell me that the Church doesn't necessarily stand against all war, but they can't cite one that the Holy See hasn't opposed in the last seventy years. I think that charity is a marvelous thing, but when it becomes a duty, it stops being charity. I also believe that government should be awfully careful when committing itself to the charity business.

I disagreed with the Church up and down the line, so I stopped being a Catholic when I was twelve years old. In my mind, that makes me more intellectually honest than the vast majority of Catholics, conservative and liberal alike, both of whom feel that the Church is "misguided" about 50% of its agenda at any given time.

That attitude is as sanctimonious as hell. You know what? They can't be misguided, you assholes! It's their fucking club. If you don't like their rules, get out of their treehouse. Sometimes life really can be as simple as that.

I'm of the mind that the Church is way too stingy about excommunicating fairweather Catholics. If it were my treehouse, Catholic law would be exactly that. Therefore, if you use birth control, get a divorce or an abortion, sit on jury that hands down a capital sentence, or volunteer for an "unjust war" (which, according to Church dogma, is most of them), out you'd go. Religion, after all, is the least democratic construct imaginable. No one has ever suggested that you get to outvote the Word of God.

But because the Church is way down on my list of things that I give a shit about, I'm generally supportive of their right to be wrong about everything. Even the tax exemption for the Church and its subsidiary institutions and charities doesn't bother me that much, even though I think that neither should exist. The Church obviously wants to play politics, so they can pay the entrance fee. I'm also of the belief that charity isn't charity when it is subsidized by the rest of society through the tax code. For that reason, I have never deducted charitable giving through on my taxes. The gifts that I give, however small, are 100% mine.

All things being equal, I try really hard not to think of my former church all that much.

Having said that, the Church has gone out of my way over the last few months to get my attention, both in the United States and here in Ontario, and that's what I'd like to discuss with you today.

Because of a constitutional quirk in the British North America Act of 1867, Catholic schools that want it receive public funding. Prior to 1984 that funding only went through grade 10 in Ontario. Afterwards the system was fully funded through what was then grade 13. The Catholic system is alone among religious schools in receiving public funds here. You'll see why that's important in a minute.

The genetically wrong and quite likely corrupt Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty recently decided that Catholic schools must be forced to accept something called "Gay-Straight Alliances," irrespective of their religious beliefs.

First, the Church's teachings awfully selective. You find almost no references to homosexuality in the New Testament. What you find about them is almost exclusively in the Old Testament, right alongside demented prohibitions against shellfish and tattoos (which immediately follows the queer stuff in Leviticus) and some truly fascinating divorce procedures. If and when religious folks ban their adherents from tattoo parlors and Red Lobster, I'll start taking their feelings about gay people seriously.

On the other hand, schools have sucked for years and are only getting worse. Each new generation is more awesomely fucking stupid than the last. If schools start focusing more on "the three r's" and less on social engineering (on both ends of the political spectrum,) they might finally stop being little more than retard factories. And that's especially true of sex education. The only people I trust less to teach anyone about fucking than the government is an institution that has an antiquated vow of chastity.

As much as I might personally sympathize with the motivations behind the gay-straight alliances, I'm not sure that schools are the proper forum for them, particularly by government diktat. As soon as those little bastards can read Dickens, show me where Pakistan is on an unmarked map or do my goddamned taxes without my winding up in prison, I might feel differently.

So far as "anti-bullying" measures go, most of the things that constitute bullying are already against the law or are in clear violation of existing school policies and definately actionable in civil courts. The question is - as it usually is - one of enforcement. I'm always suspicious when government takes further measures against things that are already criminal or creates drastic civil exposure. Usually, it constitutes nothing more than grandstanding by scumbag politicians of every stripe. For that reason, I rarely credit political types with good faith. And I'm never disappointed as a result.

It seems that the Catholic school boards object to the term "gay-straight alliance" more than anything else, but McGuinty is forcing them to accept it. Amazingly, no one is objecting all that strongly to the school boards' restrictions on the speech rights of their students. But again, it's hard to justify school time and resources being dedicated to non-academic activities (which I would extend to sports, clubs and other purely social functions, like dances and whatnot.) If students feel strongly enough about the issue, they can organize on their own time and call themselves whatever they want without the interference of the Church or the state.

Then there's the outrage and litigation against the Obama administration's insurance mandate for contraception. The Church itself is exempt, but their subsidiary institutions (schools, charities and hospitals) are not. So of course Catholics and sycophantic Republican shitheads are howling about "a war on religious liberty and the First Amendment."

Their argument is problematic in that most of the institutions at issue receive public funding in one way or another, either through direct subsidies, tax exemptions, grants or student loan programs. They're all on the dole to varying degrees and none of them have suggested that their faith is so strong that they're willing to forgo that funding to uphold it. They'd rather keep the money, sue, and become Republicans or members of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario.

I'm amazed that the people who can't contain their outrage about gay-straight alliances and contraception mandates are almost always the very people who support drug testing welfare recipients. Those tests are in violation of the Fourth Amendment and individual privacy rights but, as Republicans and Conservative Party members will tell you, you sacrifice certain rights the second you take government money. They aren't wrong either. Private businesses accept all manner of restrictions and mandates when they receive public contracts.

As a matter of simple intellectual consistency, you can't support one government intrusion on liberty when public funding is involved and oppose the other. As a matter of constitutional theory, all rights are created equal. One person's right to the free exercise of religion is no more special than another's right to be free of unreasonable searches, except upon issuance of a warrant. And the reverse is also true. Liberty rights are liberty rights. You can't logically or realistically demand that the state infringe one one, yet insist that another is off-limits.

Of course, forgoing public subsidies probably wouldn't be the end of the matter. The government has the legal right to be involved in educational curriculum, even of home schooled children. And regardless of which party controls the White House and Congress next year, the American government is going to be a whole lot more involved in the health insurance industry.

However, Catholics would have a much stronger argument if they didn't insist on being paid pipers who play their own tune.

The rise of Andrea Horwath, Ontario's new most powerful politician

It took a decade longer than I thought it would, but everyone in Ontario finally hates Premier Dalton McGuinty as much as I do. I never suggested that we were especially quick on the uptake.

My province has a quirky relationship with the Liberal Party. Until very recently, we would regularly give them a sizable chunk of the vote federally, but rebuked the provincial party at every possible opportunity. As a matter of fact, the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario governed uninterrupted from 1943 until 1985, which I believe is a record in a democracy.

Of course, the PCs started a nice little civil war that has consumed then ever since. Mike Harris won two elections against nobodies, but antagonized virtually everyone else during his years in power. With the exception of Harris, the right-center battles within the provincial Tories have killed the party's chances of forming a government. The Ontario Progressive Conservatives have basically become the federal Liberals; stupid, consumed with a thirst for fratricide and unelectable.

Then they elected Tim Hudak, perhaps the dumbest motherfucker ever, as leader. Just last fall he managed to blow a huge polling lead and, in the process, piss off every faction of the party. The only reason that he wasn't immediately shitcanned as leader is that McGuinty's Liberals had been reduced to a minority at Queen's Park and the party is broke, managing to get the party in deeper debt than the Grits and the NDP combined.

This proves that the entire party has a bad case of the stupids. If they sent Hudak directly into hell, the Tory caucus could have supported McGuinty without shame for a year or so until they could beg Christine Elliott or Frank Klees to be a real leader. After too many years and too many lies, there's no real possibility that McGuinty will rebound in popular esteem. It would have been a perfect shot at rebuilding and living to fight another day, so the PCs had no other choice but to fuck it up.

No sooner did the legislature resume than Hudak announced his intention to defeat the government at the easliest opportunity, thereby destroying himself and his party in an election that both are almost genetically incapable of winning. If an election were called tomorrow, within five weeks, the Tories would fall behind NAMBLA in the seat count.

So hungry was Hudak to be publicly humiliated for the second time in less than a year, he pissed a perfectly good opportunity to look like a serious adult, and maybe even further what passes for his agenda.

You see, Dalton McGuinty introduced a giant nothingburger of a budget a couple of weeks ago that looks like austerity if you squint really hard and punch yourself in the nose really hard, but actually only slows the rate of growth somewhat. Just like Stephen Harper's federal budget of the same week, it was make-believe fiscal responsibility.

Ontario voters (like voters everywhere) are self-interested, demented fuckheads who like the idea of reducing deficits more than they do its actuality. They love calling the tune, but head to the bathroom the minute the piper comes around to get paid. Balanced budgets, I'm told, are a top priority, so long as taxes aren't raised or program spending cut in any meaningful way. Roughly translated, that means that no one really cares about balancing the budget, except in theory.

That's why I despise the people a whole lot more than I do the politicians. The only exceptions to that are politicians like Toronto mayor Rob Ford, Dalton McGuinty, Stephen Harper and almost every Republican since 1992. They tell you that you can have it all without anyone getting hurt, which is a monstrous fucking lie. And because assholes like that get elected, we get the governments we deserve.

Tim Hudak's strategy was to go out there and say that McGuinty's imaginary (and pretty unpopular) cuts weren't deep enough, but also not too deep for the Tories to promise more tax cuts that would baloon the deficit before any possible growth could occur. This would compete with McGuinty's platform that his imaginary (and pretty unpopular) cuts were just right.

In a general election campaign, that would create a scenario where the pro-imaginary austerity vote is split two ways, allowing the only party that opposes austerity to benefit in highly unpredictable ways.

And that brings me to Andrea Horwath and the provincial NDP.

Horwath has turned out to be a much better politician than either McGuinty or Hudak. She listened to the government's presentation and basically said, "Nice minority government you have there. It'd be a shame if anything happened to it." She then laid out demands for a 2% tax increase on individual incomes over $500,000 and selected increases in program spending. Otherwise, we'd all be going back to the polls again, just seven months after the last election.

All things being equal, I'm surprised that Howath bothered bargaining with McGuinty at all. Her proposals turned out to be shocking popular in a province that pretends that it wants balanced budgets, some of them edging over 70% approval, which is unheard of for platforms that dosen't include "free ice cream without getting fat!" She might not have won a majority government in such a campaign, but she might very well have won a minority. I'd bet that she would have taken a significant number of seats from both the Liberals and the Tories if an election were forced.

But there's no thirst for an election out there. These things have been known to backfire, you know. Instead, Horwath decided to negotiate.

It turns out that she won. The chronically evil McGuinty Liberals and their shithead spin doctors are going to pretend that they gave a little to get a little, which is true, until you consider that Andrea Horwath got about 85% of what she wanted and 100% of what she could have realistically could have expected. The Liberals basically decided to live to lose another day. And they will.

Dalton McGuinty isn't in the position that Paul Martin was with his minority. If nothing else, Martin had on his resume the elimination of a huge deficit and the creation of a surplus, which gave him the latitude to deal with deal with the Jack Layton's federal NDP. The McGuinty Liberals, like Stephen Harper, just spent a shitload of money for the sake of spending a shitload of money and have nothing to show for it.

There's almost no way that McGuinty's numbers rebound enough from their current child molestor levels for him to face the people on his own merits. That means that the NDP are going to drag him further and further to the left that there's no meaningful difference. And when there's no meaningful difference between the Liberals and the NDP, there's no reason to not replace a stale, decade old government headed by someone that everybody loathes.

From this day forward, McGuinty is premier in name only. Andrea Horwath is effectively calling the shots now. Every time a confidence motion comes up, she's gonna want more (and reversing corporate tax cuts is very popular right now.) And I guarantee you that the Liberals are going to give it to her for as long as McGuinty leads them.

In no time at all, Horwath is going to be led into the legislature by a naked and leashed Dalton McGuinty, the strap-on dildo with which she made him her pretty little bitch jutting proudly from her loins.

And because he's a pituitary retard who missed the opportunity to cut a deal that would have furthered his agenda, Tim Hudak is going to be left in shadows jacking off like the political peep-show pervert and fantasizing about what could have been if he was more of a man. But don't hate him for it. Hudak was, as Lady Gaga teaches is, born that way.

Her silly economic ideas aside, I'd like to congratulate Andrea Horwath on becoming the effective Premier of Ontario today. More impressively, she did it without making the rest of us do anything silly, like vote on it.

Rae's Day: How He Can Win and Why He Won't

A lot of LIberals are speaking out against Bob Rae's apparent move to secure the permanent leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. Of course, it goes without saying that a lot of Liberals are very stupid, which is why they're Liberals in the first place.

Those people are also the reason that the LPC is on its deathbed today. Unlike most political observers, I'm willing to state the obvious and say that it's incredibly unlikely that the Grits will ever hold government again. I think it far more likely that they'll be swallowed whole by the New Democratic Party in five years. And I believe it likely that the Liberals will destroy that party as well.

This is because Liberals love nothing more than going to war with one another. At this point, they love it more than winning elections. The party has been fighting their retarded leadership wars since 1975 and is divided into two factions: the Trudeau-Chretien-Rae wing and the Turner-Martin-Ignatieff wing. And each faction has acted as suicide bombers against the other for almost the entire time.

Granted, this didn't stop them from running the country. But that's only because conservatives were such an unmitigated goddamned mess most of the time. And when even a semi-competent Conservative leader appeared, the Liberals lost to him every time. They were beaten by three very different Conservatives; Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper. The numbers show that it was only a divided conservative movement that allowed Jean Chretien to become prime minister at all. When the movement unified under Harper, the Grits were first reduced to a minority, removed from power altogether, and finally robbed even of their Official Opposition status.

The LPC is the most overrated political force anywhere in my lifetime. For at least forty years, they've only won when their opponents are so disorganized and dumb that they can't be trusted to run a profitable rub and tug, let alone a major industrial nation. And even under ideal circumstances, their own infighting does them in, as we've seen over the last decade.

Here's the thing. If I was a Conservative Party supporter (which I'm not. I last voted for the federal Progressive Conservatives in 2000, after voting Reform in '93 and '97), I'd be afraid of facing Bob Rae in a federal election.

Rae is easily the smartest and most experienced viable candidate in the party today. In a party of lifetime politicos, academics and bureaucrats, Rae is also the only person in the LPC who has ever run anything before.

Which brings us to Rae's time as Ontario's NDP premier, which the anti-Rae forces feel is disqualifying. That's a record that can and should be examined, if only because times have changed so much that it might actually work in Rae's favour during a campaign.

(For the record, I voted against Rae twice in Ontario, casting ballots for Progressive Conservative Mike Harris in 1990 and '95. After the 1999 campaign, I've voted exclusively for minor parties and independents provincially.)

Rae, as even he will tell you, was an accidental premier. He was elected because David Peterson's almost awesome arrogance - fighting no fewer than three elections in a single five-year mandate - finally blew him up, and the fact that Mike Harris had been leader for less than a year and no one knew who he was.

He was a socialist who was elected at the beginning of a worldwide recession, so he governed predictably, trying to spend his way out bad economic times. In the process, he created what was then record deficits.

But then Rae did something very unpredictable. He attacked those deficits and in the process destroyed his own political base. Instead of passing massive tax increases, which you would expect from an NDP government, he instituted austerity on the heavily unionized provincial civil service. That, you might have noticed, is conservative orthodoxy today. Indeed, the widely-hated Rae Days remain well to the right of what Republican governors like Scott Walker and John Kasich have attempted in the United States over the last two years. Walker and Kasich, like Paul Ryan in Washington, are trying things that won't produce savings for a minimum of fifteen years. Rae Days inflicted immediate pain on the bureaucracy and went a fair way in reducing the deficit. That's problematic because Canadian Conservatives tend to look at U.S Republicans for spiritual guidance, and Rae Days undercuts that.

Bob Rae's deficit reduction plan, while not wholly effective, might be the most courageous political effort in my lifetime. He had to know that assaulting his own political base would lead to his ruination, but he did it anyway. As a matter of practicality over politics, it ranks with the first President Bush's budget reconcilation deal of 1990. And for that, Rae has at least my respect for trying to do the right thing against political self-interest. Bob Rae made tough decisions that doomed him, which none of those who oppose him would ever dream of doing, mostly because they're cowards and hacks.

I've spent that last five years trying to figure out exactly how the Harper Conservatives (or Harper's probable successor, Jason Kenney) runs against Rae. And I've got to tell you, I'm fucking stumped.

Bob Rae isn't a political novice, like Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff were. Indeed, he's been running bigger campaigns for longer than anyone currently in the Conservative Party. He also survived the Liberal Armageddon of last May, which few other national party figures managed to. That alone makes makes Rae a formidable opponent in ways that no other Liberal is. He understands what it is to run a major campaign, having done so four times in Canada's largest province.

Then there's his Ontario record, which is heavily mitigated by the way politics has changed over the seventeen years since Rae was ejected from Queen's Park. The Harris-Eves Conservatives left office with a fairly large deficit, and the current Liberal premier, Dalton McGuinty, has racked up deficits that dwarf Rae's. And the Harper Conservatives have pissed away money at a rate that would impress even Pierre Trudeau.

Yes, the Tories will almost certainly dive-bomb Rae with millions of dollars of negative advertising demagouging his record at Queen's Park, which a broke and demoralized Liberal Party will be unable to counter. It worked magnificently against Dion and Ignatieff, so there's no reason that they won't go to that well again.

But at some point, the Tories are going to have to debate him on national television. And that's dangerous for them. Rae is smarter, a more experienced politician and a better speaker than Harper is. And if Harper leaves office before 2015 (which I think is a distinct possibility), Rae will almost certainly face Jason Kenney, who is a ward-heeling retard that only got where he is today by stealing the disgusting concept of identity politics from the fucking Liberals.

One can reasonably expect Harper or Kenney to start a debate by immediately attacking Rae's by then twenty year old deficits. If I was Bob Rae, my first answer would be "Yes, I was socialist who governed during a deep recession in the early 1990s, so I did what socialists are expected to do. Sir, what is your excuse for spending a $13 billion surplus on nothing and creating deficits that made mine look frugal by comparison?" That alone will be devastating because there is no plausible answer to it.

Then one can expect the attack on Rae Days. That's problematic in so far as if the Tories are even halfway serious about their deficit reduction plan - which they say will not include a tax increase - they'll have to do something that looks a lot like Rae Days, if not actually be more draconian. Remember, Harper pledged to reduce spending only down to 2009 levels, when the country was already in deficit and spending was at a high. If the Conservatives bar themselves from raising revenue and continue to use the tax code to buy themselves votes, the civil service is the only place left to save money. As a very smart guy, I expect that Bob will rattle off the facts and figures and look very credible doing it.

Also, by 2015 the Tories will have been in office for nine years, the standard exhaustion point for a government. Both Mulroney and Chretien were done at that point, and Trudeau was doing everything he could to postpone the election that would ultimately lead to his defeat. I think that Stephen Harper knows the history well enough to get the fuck out of Dodge and make some money before the next election, leaving a half-wit like Kenney as a sacrificial lamb that serves only to burnish his his own legacy, much like Mulroney did with Kim Campbell.

If the Liberals could mange to stop being Liberals for three whole years, I think that Bob Rae has an even chance of beating Harper, and could almost sexually humiliate Jason Kenney, even with a bankrupt and demoralized party. If Thomas Muclair wins the NDP leadership and takes Quebec off of the table for the Grits and Tories, I think that Rae could form at least a minority government. If the NDP falls apart, and Rae manages to keep Denis Coderre in line, the Grits could possibly win as many as forty Quebec seats and govern with a majority.

But the Liberals can't stop being Liberals for three whole minutes, let alone three whole years. As you're already seeing, there are factions of anti-Rae chuckleheaded strategists, bloggers and media types that are determined to pound the final nail in the Liberal Party's coffin if they can't have the Liberal Party all to themselves.

They don't care that Bob Rae is probably the only candidate that can work with the party machinery that the Liberals actually have, as opposed to what they wish they had. Instead of showing the kind of political discipline the Conservatives have always had in getting behind their leader, the Grits are flirting with an idiotic American-style primary system that will make getting behind the leader almost impossible, given that party's history.

Bob Rae has the best chance of any Liberal of beating a unified Conservative Party since Trudeau. But he can't do that if he has to spend his time as Opposition leader and a federal election candidate watching his own back.

Rae is alone as a Liberal who can beat the Tories, but the Liberal Party is incapable of unity, which is why the 2015 election will almost certainly be their last. If they give the leadership to another amateur that loses even more seats in the interest of keeping Rae's critics happy, they won't survive it.

Rob Ford and the Power of Math

If there's been one consistent theme here for the last several years it is that the modern conservative movement is either powerfully stupid or achingly dishonest when it comes to economics. I actually think that it's a little of both. I think they actually believe their own nonsense, but they instinctively know that reasonable people everywhere mock their supply-side shitheadery, so they do everything they can to disguise it.

When they are throwing the government into endless debt and creating massive government the nu-conservative mantra is "deficits don't matter." But when they're out of power, deficits seem to matter very much. However, they don't matter enough that they'll propose cutting anything other than taxes in a significant way. Sure, they'll always name a few nickle and dime program cuts, but those are always symbolic and never amount to anything approaching serious money.

That wasn't always the case. Prior to 1980 in the United States (and 1993 in Canada), conservatives were the first people to block extravagant tax cuts because they knew that unpaid for tax cuts were the prime drivers in deficits. There was centuries of evidence that proved that debt was more dangerous to economic growth than high taxes were. Conservatives also knew that there was no cutting domestic program spending once it was in place because that spending tended to be very popular.

So Ronald Reagan and those inspired did the only thing they could to further their nonsensical economic agenda, they ignored history entirely and created massive deficits. And that's how old-school liberals like Jean Chretien and Bill Clinton turned out to be the last fiscal conservatives, certainly further to the economic right than Stephen Harper and George W. Bush ever were.

In large part, that's why I never trusted Rob Ford during his successful campaign for mayor. There was no end to the taxes that he said that he cut, but if you asked him what constituted the "gravy train" that he promised to stop, you only heard ridiculous platitudes about the fucking gardening at City Hall. In fact, he promised to maintain Toronto's program spending, particularly as it relates to the poor.

Ford also used the nu-conservative mantra that's guaranteed to make me bug-eyed with fury: "Toronto doesn't have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem."

As is true in the United States, that's horseshit. If you're in chronic deficit, but can't point to any structural program spending cuts that you'd like to make, then you most definitely have a revenue problem. I can't think of what else you'd call an inability to pay for things that you're unwilling or unable to give up. And that's a lot of things, teenagers, but conservative ain't one of them, since you ultimately wind up with the same result as you would with liberal spending policies.

I argued during the summer and fall that Ford would wind up going to Queen's Park for money and that he wouldn't get it because there's absolutely no logical reason for Dalton McGuinty to want to subsidize Mayor Ford's popularity. My local readers might have noticed that the premier is presiding over his own fiscal disaster, a deficit nearly twice as large as the one the socialist Rae government created in 1991.

Well, guess what Rob did this week.

Mayor Rob Ford, who campaigned on the city having a spending — not a revenue — problem, is asking the Ontario government for an injection of more than $150 million in the provincial budget expected in late March, the Star has learned.

In a four-page letter dated Jan. 25 sent by Ford to Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan, and obtained by the Star, the mayor asks for money for road construction and repair, public transit projects, a Fort York visitor centre and the renewal of programs to fund subsidized child care, housing and services for immigrants.

Ford, who last week passed a city budget that freezes taxes primarily by drawing on one-time surpluses and reserve funds, notes the city manages a child-care system that serves 53,402 children, and manages 24,000 child-care fee subsidies and a wait list with another 17,000 names.

The money quote in there is "last week passed a city budget that freezes taxes primarily by drawing on one-time surpluses and reserve funds". If Ford can't cut significantly in his first year, when one can safely assume that his popularity is at its peak, he isn't going to make real spending cuts at all. Whether that's because the cuts aren't there to begin with or because he isn't willing to pay the political capital required to make them is immaterial.

Look at LBJ's Civil Rights Act, Reagan's '81 tax cut, Clinton's first budget or ObamaCare as examples of how this works. If a leader doesn't get his banner issues passed in their first year, they don't get passed at all. That's textbook political history at work.

Hizzoner's not serious about "stopping the gravy train" and he never was. He just wants someone else to pay the fare. Actually, that's not even true. Since one in three Ontarians lives in Toronto, he wants us to pay for it through another level of government, yet still be able to say that he's frozen or cut taxes.

But Dalton - who's so evil that he practically glows in the dark, yet problematically is not retarded - is having none of it.

Premier Dalton McGuinty has essentially crumpled up Mayor Rob Ford’s provincial budget wish-list and thrown it in the garbage, saying: “There’s no more money.”

McGuinty made the comment Monday morning in reaction to a Star story revealing that Ford sent a letter to Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan in late January with a shopping list of funding requests ahead of the provincial budget expected in late March, the Star’s Rob Ferguson reports.

Ford asked for $150 million in specific projects, including roadwork, transit projects and increased funding for subsidies for child care for low-income families.

He also renewed his predecessor David Miller’s call for the province to pay half of the TTC’s $429 million annual operating costs, which boosts Ford’s funding request to more than $365 million.

McGuinty told reporters at a downtown hotel that it’s up to the City of Toronto to chart its own course, and the province’s first priority is reducing a deficit that is currently pegged at about $18.7 billion.

Ford has previously said the City of Toronto needs to get its fiscal house in order before going to other levels of government cap-in-hand. Although Ford is asking for more money, he did not build expectations of the funding into the 2011 city budget, a pressure tactic used by Ford’s predecessor David Miller.

Even if the money existed at Queen's Park, it wouldn't wind up in Ford's pocket because it isn't in McGuinty's political interest for it to be there. The premier is a dishonest hack with a long history of making promises that he can't keep, and he has to face the electorate this October. Luckily, the provincial Tories have a leader that's good for little but mockery, so Tim Hudak can be safely ignored in the general election.

That means that McGuinty can run against Ford. More importantly, Ford seems to be laying the groundwork for him to do just that. It's important to remember that in the "416" ridings that Ford won by over 50%, the Liberals only need to win a little over a third of the votes. All McGuinty has to do is keep the voters that were against Ford last October, and he maintains his ridings in the city. If he runs as being more fiscally conservative than Ford, he holds what he has in the 905 belt, and maybe even takes back Thornhill, which is why Peter Shurman was squealing to the Sun yesterday morning.

In the end, I don't think that the mayor is going to be able to get rid of David Miller's hated property transfer tax because the money won't be there and the province can't or won't subsidize it, and that's going to critically damage him. As my friend, the great Dr. Reverend, has repeatedly told me, "if conservatives can't cut my taxes, what are they good for?"

Ford, like the Republicans down south, has boxed himself in with his own stupid rhetoric. And ultimately, an ideological commitment to supply-side economics leaves you little choice. Liberals were never able to gut it as a practical theory, only the supply-siders themselves could. And they will. Just watch.

Doug Ford is Movin' On Up

Three and a half months.

That's how long it took after Doug Ford's election to Toronto City Council for him to notice that greener pastures might await him. He was elected on October 25th and today is February 10th. And he was on vacation in Florida for some of that time.

To be fair, the mayor's "brain" and brother has announced that he's running for the provincial Progressive Conservatives, but has said that his arm is getting twisted "big time", presumably by Tim Hudak, and that he will "never say never" or rule out a provincial campaign as soon this October.

According to The Toronto Star, the Tories aren't as shy about discussing Doug's future, at least on background.

“He’s made no secret about the fact he’d like to run for us,” said one Tory, who would welcome him into the fold.

In fact, the successful businessman, who donates his city council salary to charity, has confided to associates that one day he would like to lead the Tories.

However, party sources, who stress he is close to Hudak and would never undermine the leader, said any discussions about a move from city hall to Queen’s Park are only at the earliest stages.

Well, apparently not anymore. That tells me that Ford and the Hudak Tories are idiots. Why in the hell would anyone involved in this mess be talking to the Goddamned Liberal Media if the discussions "are only at the earliest stages"? Are these people actually trying to look stupid? Doug Ford isn't going to be able to do or say anything without getting relentlessly questioned about his political future until he makes a decision.

More importantly, Ford's constituents are going to be thrilled by this. It should be remembered that they only just elected the guy to represent him and now he's musing about abandoning ship. If he resigns his council seat to run provincially, the city is going to have to hold an election to replace him, which will cost a fortune. Or maybe Doug's is one of the seats that Hizzoner can eliminate. He has to run out of fucking siblings at some point, right?

The interesting question is how did this get in the press in the first place? The way I see it, there are three possibilities;

1. Doug himself leaked it, which makes him a moron. This can't be anything but embarrassing to the mayor, who campaigned on not wasting money on things like unnecessary elections and has described his brother as virtually indispensable. his leaking the story without having made a decision makes no sense, even in the fabled history of the Ford family saying incomprehensible things.
2. The Hudak people leaked it, which is even dumber than Doug doing it. Given the week that the provincial Tories have been having, I wouldn't be at all surprised by this. It also reinforces my belief that Tim Hudak's election as premier is close to a physical impossibility.
3. The Queen's Park Grits found out about it and leaked it. That tells me that Ford, Hudak or both are incapable of keeping a friggin' secret and should be thrown right of politics.

If nothing else, it turns out that Doug's pledge to donate his municipal salary to charity isn't the financial hit we thought it was.

And I can't wait to see how conservative bloggers and media types, particularly at The Toronto Sun, who have a long history of bitching about City Hall being used as a springboard by NDP types respond to this story. Wanna bet they'll equivocate or otherwise lie?

Resign

As a citizen of the city of Toronto, the province of Ontario, and Canada, I want the immediate resignations of Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair and Premier Dalton McGuinty. If it were up to me, McGuinty's Cabinet would be forced out as well. If Prime Minister Harper weren't so clever as to have avoided direct responsibility for anything in the last five years, I'd want his job, too.

In a perfect world, both McGuinty and Blair would also be prosecuted for conspiracy to violate civil rights, actual civil rights violations, and as accessories both before and after the fact to widespread assaults committed by the Toronto police during the G20 summit.

Back in June, I told you about the outright perversion of the Public Works Protection Act approved by Cabinet, which McGuinty now admits was incandescently fucking dumb. Of course, this only happened after Ontario Ombudsman Andre Marin issued a scathing report that called the PWPA invocation “illegal”, “likely unconstitutional” and “the most massive compromise of civil liberties in Canadian history.” I would disagree with only the last description. Pierre Trudeau's 1970 use of the War Measures Act was a far more massive compromise of civil liberties.

Six months after the fact, new video of the police rampage continues to come out and journalists are testifying under oath about the wanton police brutality that they witnessed. So far as I'm aware, no serious person has ever questioned the credibility or integrity of TVO's Steve Paikin. I'd personally take his word over that of hacks like McGuinty or Blair any day. Mike Brock over at The Volunteer - a blogger as serious as any you're likely to find - has a collection of videos depicting illegal searches and seizures by the cops well outside the "security zone", which expose the lies that the government and the police continue telling.

And the best that the Premier can do in the face of this is to essentially say "Whoops." Blair, who was actually born without a soul and is brazenly incompetent, remains shockingly defiant.

Again, there haven't been very many prominent stories about the Black Bloc anarchists being abused by Toronto police. The cops, however, did beat and otherwise abuse ordinary protesters, journalists, and innocent passers-by. They were temporarily freed of both law and constitutional constraints and they revelled in it. Because of an utter lack of leadership by McGuinty and Blair, downtown Toronto effectively became a police state for one weekend in June.

There is no escaping the conclusion that because of McGuinty, Blair and the Toronto Police, the Black Bloc won the Battle of Toronto. They accomplished their objective of provoking a complete failure of government. But they didn't create the now widespread distrust in the police and the government. The police and the government did that all on their own.

This is not something that should be excused by anyone. The first responsibility of the government and the police is to protect the rights of the people. If they are unequal to that task, everything else is meaningless because you effectively cease to have a democracy. When a government can pervert a law in secret - and the police can step outside of even those unlawful and unconstitutional bounds - without consequence, something profoundly disturbing happens to a free society.

I cannot remember calling for the resignations of anyone on this blog before. However, the events surrounding the G20 summit and its aftermath have demonstrated McGuinty and Blair's fundamental unworthiness of their offices. They both violated the public trust and were complicit in the physical abuse of those that they are sworn to serve. And they should resign.

Of course, they won't. Neither has the sense of personal honour to do that. And because the entire political establishment is lining up behind the police, there's no real alternative to them. Mayor Ford would simply name someone even more brutal and inept than Blair, and Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak probably regrets that McGuinty didn't go far enough.

But the G20 has to be the primary issue in next year's provincial election. McGuinty and Hudak don't want it to be, but the people of Ontario should demand that it is. Any candidate that makes supportive noises about McGuinty, Blair and the G20 debacle is simply unworthy of your vote. If that means an NDP government, so be it.

There now exists a dangerous precedent that civil liberties can be secretly and randomly suspended in Ontario. If that goes unpunished, it can and will happen again. Preventing that is now left to the people. There is nothing more important to a democratic society that civil rights and the fundamental freedoms of speech, assembly and security of the person from unwarranted government interference. Without those things, nothing else matters.

But if we're not willing to stand up and demand those things from bureaucratic thugs like McGuinty and Blair, we never deserved to have them in the first place.

The choice about the kind of society that we're going to live in is ultimately ours.