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.

Rob Ford Made a Sexy Time

I'm not sure I've been clear enough enough about this. If given the choice between voting my incumbent mayor, Rob Ford, and Phil Spector, I'd have to go with Spector. Even with the goofy fucking wigs and demonstrated ability to blow a b-movie actresses' goddamed noggin off, Phil still causes less embarrassment to himself and everyone around him than Ford does in the first 20 minutes of a given day. The only advantage Ford has over Spector is a slightly better track record in court.

Look, everyone knows that nothing raises the pheromones quite like an evening with the Canadian Jewish Public Affairs Committee. There can be no denying the almost palpable sexual tension that overwhelms any and all of their functions. I personally blame them for the teen pregnancy crisis of the 1980s.

Thursday was an exciting day for everybody. The weather started not sucking so bad and it was the great and good Dr. Reverend's birthday. It was CJPAC. Former mayoral rival Sarah Thomson was there in her newly dreadlocked and fine-assed glory and, y'know, things happen.

She joined people queuing to meet and have photos taken with Ford, whom she frequently debated as rival candidate during the 2010 civic election, and then chided him for not attending her recent transit forum.

“He told me he was in Florida and I should have been with him because his wife wasn’t there,” Thomson told the Star on Friday. “I didn’t expect that. Rob doesn’t normally act that way towards women, so I was a little bit shocked, and then we posed to get our picture taken and he grabbed my ass during the pose.”

As I said, these things happen. There are times in our lives when passion rules and when it causes us to dare, we dare greatly. It might not always play out the way we'd prefer, but when passion rewards us, it rewards us greatly. That's just the way love works, people.

Far be it from me to criminalize romance, like the Goddamned Liberal Media continually insists on doing, but hasn't Etobicoke Slim caused himself enough trouble?

That's not to say that the oafish shithead is admitting anything. That's fucking crazy talk. Nope, within hours of the story breaking, Boy Rob reached deep into his Nixonian soul and denied everything.

“Last night I had the pleasure of attending a wonderful event to support the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee.

“This is an event that is attended by numerous political leaders and where I have been a guest in the past.

“Early this morning, false allegations were made regarding a number of disgusting actions. I am shocked, dismayed and surprised. I can say without hesitation that they are absolutely, completely false.

“What is more surprising is that a woman who has aspired to be a civic leader would cry wolf on a day where we should be celebrating women across the globe.

“This is a day we should all take the time to reflect upon the women in our lives and in our society. It is a day when we can envision the changes we want to make in our communities to ensure that all people are equal and that violence and discrimination against women comes to an end.”

In my opinion, everyone would've been better off if he just said something like this ...

Lookee, bitches, don't you know who I am? I have a literal shit-ton of money and a cool job. Those are the kind of things that broads go for. Oh sure, they'll say they don't, but they're just as shallow as the fucking voters. Talk sternly and promise them enough cool shit, and both are yours.

By the way, just look at me, will ya? What skirt in her right mind could say no to a doughy, entitled dope that sweats from the sternum? Dykes, that's fucking who! Did I mention that I coach football for would-be thugs and serial rapists? I'm not saying that I'm a great guy, I'm saying that I'm the best guy ever!

Listen to the socialists moan about how I tried to get my pecker wet the night before International Women's Day, fer chrissakes! Well, I was celebrating, too. Just a few hours early. More importantly, I'm of the considered opinion that every day is a day worth celebrating poontang! Especially when my crazy fucking wife isn't around.

Goddamn, I need a drink! And can we get some R. Kelly up in this motherfucker? Mayor Daddy needs to dance!

Anyone who peruses my archives knows that I endorsed Sarah Thomson in 2010 and voted for her, even when she dropped out and endorsed George Smitherman. My loathing for Hizzoner is also nothing short of legendary. Some of my best recent writing has detailed that hatred at length. Not only am I better writer for hating Rob Ford, I'm a better man.

But neither of things colour my opinion all that much. The real question is: "Why would Sarah Thomson lie?"

Thomson is enough of a big shot in this town that she can get media attention pretty much whenever she wants it. And even though I voted for her, I'm not exactly hearing a Moby Dick-like drum chorus for a repeat performance.

Even if she is laying the groundwork for another run, this is the kind of allegation you drop two days before an election, not two years. Who's even going to remember this story in the fall of 2014, especially given Hizzoner's legion of other fuck-ups; past, present and future?

On the other hand, she might be nuts. This is, after all, a woman in mid-40s with dreadlocks and isn't known to have sired children with Bob Marley, or even Peter Tosh. It seems unlikely, but the possibility can't be entirely ruled out.

But what does Ford have going for him? Even the Mayor's staunchest defenders aren't stupid enough to seriously suggest that he's actually innocent of anything anymore. Instead, they just argue that he isn't scuzzy enough to be thrown out of office because of it.

I'm personally inclined to believe Thomson's story, if only because it perfectly fits a narrative that Ford's own conduct over twelve years has assiduously built. It's almost impossible to imagine a level of assholerly that this idiot won't stoop to. If you told me that he wanted to buy that park next to his house because he had run out burial space for freshly murdered whores on his own property, I wouldn't dismiss it as quickly as you might think I would.

That's the problem with Ford. Each and every negative story about him has been true enough to make the next one at least plausible. The only question that arises now is, "Is this worth forcing a new election over?"

And you know what? It's well past time that conservatives stop defending this asshole. While it helps him mightily, it only destroys conservatism in this city.

There's pretty much no saving Ontario Provincial Conservative leader, Tim Hudak, who is going to face his second almost fetishized humiliation this spring. But Stephen Harper faces the very real possibility of having his Toronto seats divided up between the NDP and Liberals in 2015, a possibility that's more likely if a self-destructive Rob Ford is still in office.

The Ford phenomenon isn't unlike what's happening with the Republicans in the United States. Their loonier candidates discourses on the merits of rape babies makes it difficult for well-meaning voters to elect rational conservatives who could give a shit about such nonsense. So the left wins by default.

Because of the way that the left works, I'd say that Ford is still the favourite to win in 2014. But that isn't going to help Tim Hudak, who has maybe a dozen chromosomes too many, and it will almost certainly hurt Harper in area code 416, and possibly 905.

Don't forget, Toronto is still a fundamentally liberal city. We only elect conservatives when the left implodes on itself. But we're still, far and away, the biggest and most important city in the country. We carried Jean Chretien to victory three times in a row. Harper only won his majority when he started carrying seats in the Greater Toronto Area.

Want an even more liberal Harper government? Keep Ford in office and let the Liberals and the NDP run against him, instead of Harper. If you think that Harper won the GTA seats that he did last time for any reason other than the Liberals were in a state of national collapse, you're fucking kidding yourselves.

Even if he's re-elected, Ford will be the last "conservative" mayor of Toronto in a good long time. At some point, you have to count on the left getting their all their shit in one sock. If Olivia Chow loses in 2014, she'll have a virtually lock on 2018. And who will we have?

Ford has to be stopped from running again, and only conservatives can do that. His amen choir in the media and the stupid fucking blogosphere has to understanding that this is about something bigger than Rob Ford. I understand the urge to protect him from removal during his elective term, but anything after that is an act of self-mutilation.

When Ford becomes shorthand for conservative in this city, conservatives are fucked, both municipally and provincially. And we're going to be handicapped more than we have to be federally.

Worse than that, we destroy ourselves on the one thing that's supposed to matter - principle. It's bad enough that Conservatives have rallied around Harper's spending spree and pretended that it's something other than what it is. Defending Ford's continued self-destructive behaviour instead of calling him on it is an open invitation for no self-respecting person to take our calls for personal responsibility seriously ever again.

If nothing is ever Ford's fault, why is anything anyone else's fault?

At that point, what conservatism even mean?


The worst part of the Sarah Tompson allegations is that they buried this story, which should horrify anyone that knows anything about anything. If you want to truly estroy the conceptof good government, turn they keys over to the fucking lobbyists. I can't think of a faster way to do it.

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.

On Senator Joyce Fairbairn

Anyone who has seen Alzheimer’s up close (and, at this point, I would imagine that almost everybody has) knows just what a cruel disease it is. It effectively kills a person years before they physically die and causes the patient's family untold anguish. Alzheimer’s is among the very ugliest things that can befall a human being and anyone who suffers from it, and especially their families, has my deepest and most sincere sympathy.

The date of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis is almost wholly irrelevant. A diagnosis merely creates an opportunity for treatment that might slow the destructive progress of the disease. But the decline of patient's facilities is apparent for months, and often years, before that dreaded diagnosis comes. As Monica Crowley recounted in her book Nixon Off the Record: His Candid Commentary on People and Politics, Richard Nixon commented on Ronald Reagan's apparent befuddlement more than a year before Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. As a matter of fact, President Nixon died almost six months before President Reagan's final letter to the American people was written.

As much as some people would like to pretend differently, the story of Senator Joyce Fairbairn isn't about Alzheimer’s. It isn't even so much about Senator Fairbairn herself, despite the wishes of certain partisans to make it so. More precisely, it is about how politics is often crueller than even Alzheimer’s.

Canadians were told last week that Senator Fairbairn was declared legally incompetent in April, and a declaration to that effect was signed by her party's leader in the Senate, James Cowan. Such a declaration would prevent Joyce Fairbairn from buying or selling a home or stock, or testifying in a trial. I can't imagine that she would be legally allowed to drive a car. It did not, however, prevent her from voting in the Senate.

By the point that someone is declared legally incompetent from dementia - something that doctors and judges decidedly do not do frivolously - they often don't know where they are or why they're there. People that they've known their entire lifetimes are strangers to them. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, my grandmother spent several years thinking that I was my grandfather, who died about six months before I was born.

Being taken to the Senate chamber every day and sitting there must be a terrifying ritual for the Ms. Fairbairn. God only knows what air travel to and from Alberta must out her through, Remember, this is a woman that requires 24-hour-a-day constant care. And in her moments of clarity, she is very likely tortured by what's happening to her by being reminded of the honourable office that she holds to this day and her inability to carry out its duties. I cannot possibily imagine what this must be doing to her, despite having seen it in close proximity myself.

When I first heard the story, I wondered to myself why the Senator was still in office. If her disease progressed so rapidly that the declaration of legal incompetence was a shock to her and the Liberal Party, that would be one thing. It would also be highly unusual, since Alzheimer's - a slowly degenerative disease - almost never works that way. I suspected that something deeper, and more darkly political was afoot.

In this morning's National Post, Jonathan Kay confirms my suspicions.

“Jim Cowan [is] a serious guy who was appointed to the Senate Liberal leadership by Paul Martin,” he told me. “He has no control over the Senate Liberals, because the most active are Chrétien appointees who have nothing but contempt for the Martin gang. So even if Jim wanted to do the right thing, my bet is the Chrétienites … insisted that [Joyce Fairbairn] be kept in the Chamber despite her illness. They are [allegedly unprincipled individuals] who sent a member of Joyce’s staff to her house every day; to bring her to work when they knew she was ill. All this not to help her, but to delay [Stephen Harper] from appointing another elected Alberta senator to replace her. Watch what happens next. They will try to claim she is on ‘sick leave’ for the next two years. Just another way to [delay] the pick, and use her office budget to hire staff to work on party politics.”

“Their game now,” he added, will be to “attack the nasty Tories” for making an issue of Fairbairn. “These guys have no shame.”

He also added that “the PMO is urging us to keep quiet, because they fear the Liberals will find some way to blame us.” Thus his refusal to let me use his name.

According to this veteran Conservative Senator, Fairbairn’s saga has been going on at least since 2009. Since then, he says, “we [Senators] have been quietly asked not to challenge Joyce in Committee or the Chamber, because she wasn’t well. This game of being ‘nice’ has been going on for too long.”

Kay's source, it should be noted, is "a veteran Conservative Senator," so his motives might be less than pure. But it certainly conforms to how politics works. And I include in this the allusion to "being 'nice.'"

This isn't, according to the Conservative Senator, a matter of party politics, at least not entirely. It's a continuation, in the most inhumane way imaginable, of the Chrétien-Martin civil war within the Liberal Party of Canada itself. That makes this story even more repugnant than it otherwise would be. And it would otherwise be plenty repugnant.

It seems logical to conclude that Senator Fairbairn is being kept in office for no other reason than that the Liberals want to hold her seat for as long as possible. My foreign readers should know that the Canadian Senate is an body appointed by the Prime Minister, in this case the Conservative Stephen Harper.

Of course, that only delays the inevitable. Under Canadian law, Senators are required to retire at 75, which Senator Fairbairn does in the fall of 2014, well before the next federal election. Harper will name her replacement, sooner or later. Until then, her staff is literally dragging her across Ottawa and sometimes across the country. And at any given time she might not know who those people are, where she's being taken, or why.

But there's money involved. Even if Joyce Fairbairn is on medical leave, the Grits will continue to be allowed to exploit her office budget to the party's political ends. And that's truly despicable. A political party that can't get along with one another is using a desperately ill woman for money and politics. This might be one of the more personally awful things that I've heard about in politics. And if Jonathan Kay and his Conservative source are correct, this has been ongoing since sometime in  2009, not this past April.

But it gets worse. Because Liberals are Liberals, they're hiding their own conduct behind the shield of Senator Fairbairn's savage suffering. Their more rabid partisans are threatening to exploit the frailties of Conservative MPs and Senators should anyone treat l'affaire Fairbairn with anything other than complete silence.

To that I say, "Good."

I haven't voted for the Conservatives in well over a decade, and everything about Harper's governance has affirmed the correctness of that decision. I carry no water for them whatsoever. If anything, the Tory insistence on becoming the Liberals causes me to hold them in even greater contempt than I hold the Grits. And I wasn't sure that I was capable of that.

More importantly, the people need to know if their constitutional representatives, whether elected or appointed, are in any way impaired from carrying out their duties, either physically, ethically or morally. An uninformed democracy isn't a democracy at all, and we're plenty uninformed without some insider code of silence that prevents us from knowing everything we should.

You might recall that I didn't share the conservative (large or small "C") outrage when Public Safety Minister Vic Towes' divorce pleadings were leaked by a Liberal staffer. That's exactly the kind of thing the people should know about those at the very top of the legal establishment of the nation, especially when they consciously compare their political opponents to child pornographers.

As a Manitoba Cabinet minister, Towes was responsible for naming judges to the bench and he presumes to become a Court of Appeal judge himself. And the Conservatives who were outraged by the Towes story are themselves hypocrites, given the fun they had with the story of Jack Layton's massage parlour arrest in the 90's, which was almost certainly leaked by the Liberals.

I'm of the opinion that Adam Carroll (aka Vikileaks) and Anonymous performed a valuable public service. If the Liberals want to seek "vengeance" by exposing lawmakers in situations similar to Senator Fairbairn's, I'm actually okay with that.

But I know they won't. They'll report seeing a Member drunk in a bar or doing something that in no way impairs their legislative duties. The Liberals (and in fairness, the Conservatives increasingly) are masters of false equivilience.

I have yet to see anyone, anyone at all, treat Senator Joyce Fairbairn unfairly except the Liberal Party of Canada. To keep her in Ottawa when she's been legally declared unable to fulfill her constitutional duties is nothing short of a national disgrace. And to do it for reasons of political advantage and money should tell you everything you need to know about the people doing it. This has nothing to do with Senator Fairbairn and everything to do with the political apparatus that surrounds her.

At this point, I would normally go on a 300-plus word, wildly entertaining rant about why the Liberals no longer deserve to exist. Today, I don't have to. Their actions make my argument far better than I ever could.


Update - 4:19 PM: Ah, I see it's already begun. I do hope that this column names names, gives dates and cites specifics, allowing those involved to defend their reputations in a court of law against its author and the media conglomerate that publishes him. If the column doesn't do that, then you again know everything you need to about the author and publisher.

It's very probably yet another chickenshit attempt to defend the indefensible without having the courage to do it honestly, instead relying on blackmail.

Of course, the coulmn could cite dead politicians, cleverly protecting himself and his publisher from libel action. I wouldn't expect anything less.

Jason Kenney's Unintended Consequences

One of the most beautiful things you'll ever see is idiots demonstrating what good people they are. It's usually a source of constant amusement for me. Then they get elected to something and it's no longer quite as funny.

For the longest time, this was the domain of liberals. But conservatives increasingly have decided that they can be just as empty-headed, largely because they've seen how effectively liberals have been at ward-heeling like that.

Politicking this way is effective because voters are simpletons and singularly incapable of independent thinking. As everything goes to shit in the world, I can't really blame the politicians all that much. After all, in a democracy, we're supposed to be calling the shots and we couldn't be more obstinate in our refusal to use our fucking heads once in awhile.

A good example of this is the issue of "sex trafficking." As properly defined - the employment of women as prostitutes by force or coercion - is something that all right-thinking people are against. The law, the conventional thinking goes, should absolutely do more to stop it.

It's only when you start thinking about it that a very different picture starts to emerge. Here's how.

Ask yourself what the most common elements of sex trafficking are. You'll answer that they are assault, kidnapping, forcible confinement, uttering death threats, rape, sometimes blackmail and extortion and, because more than one person is usually involved, conspiracy. You'll also notice something else. Those things are all already against the law. As a matter of fact, they're among the most serious charges a defendant can face. And they get more serious still when the victim is a minor.

The laws that have been on the books for well over a century are more than adequate to combat sex trafficking. But cops are lazy, politicians want to be seen as "doing something," and the public is too fucking dumb to know the difference. The friggin' media is certainly no help because all too often their determination to be a populist "voice of the underdog" serves to actually enable and reinforce the stupidity of its audience.

This is true of both sides of the political spectrum. The left wants you to know that they "care" and the right wants to demonstrate that they're "tough on crime." The police, off on the sidelines, always want new and ever more intrusive powers. So despite the fact that every single element of sex trafficking is already addressed by multiple criminal statutes, we wind up with new laws.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his slack-jawed ward-heeler of an immigration minister, Jason Kenney, decided that they were going to use Canada's immigration laws to pretend that they're attacking the problem. They did this by refusing to renew the visas of foreign strippers in Canada.

Despite the fact that stripping is not only legal in Canada, but a constitutionally protected form of speech, and despite the fact that there's no evidence that legally admitted foreign strippers are being trafficked, Harper and Kenney are doing something, by God!

Of course, I have a theory why the Tories are doing this. On top of their moronic "tough on crime" image, they're playing to their retard base. The Harper Conservatives are altogether too smart to go after abortion and same-sex marriage, which their social conservative base is enormously pissed at them about. So they'll give them the next best thing, an assault on the legal "sex trade."

There's no evidence that the legally admitted foreign strippers are being trafficked, and even if they were, that a violation of existing immigration law and the other sections of the Criminal Code that I cited earlier. And let's say that they are being trafficked. How is deporting the victims the answer?

What the bill does do is create a giant hole in the perfectly legal adult entertainment industry, which that industry is going to fill one way or another. And this is where the Law of Unintended Consequences takes over in a breathtakingly hilarious way.

Recruiters of teenage strippers may soon be scouring Toronto high schools in search of female students who can be groomed into disrobing part-time as exotic dancers to earn college tuition.

A flyer praising the benefits of the burlesque trade has been put together to target students in high schools, colleges and universities in the Toronto-area, says a group representing dancers and club owners.

The brochure claims working as a dancer pays well, offers flexible hours and makes a “great part-time job to raise college tuition.”

A scramble is underway by the Adult Entertainment Association of Canada to fill a demand for dancers after Ottawa this month stopped issuing visas or extensions for foreign strippers to work here. There are up to 800 foreign strippers in Canada and most vow to go underground and work in the sex trade if they can’t dance legally.

Of course, like almost everything you'll ever see in Sun Media, this is written in a highly misleading way.

Strip joints are holders of Ontario liquor licenses and the drinking age here is 19. The law pretty clearly says that no one under the age of 18 can work in an establishment whose primary product is booze. The Sun makes it sound like you're going to wind up with ninth and tenth graders getting twenties shoved in their cooters, and that just ain't the case.

But nobody does shithead outrage quite like Sun Media. If you've never read their newspapers or watched their version of the Fox News Channel, you really should. Don't get me wrong, you won't learn anything, but I can guarantee that you'll get mad at something. If you're halfway smart, you'll get mad at yourself.

The Tories managed to pass an ineffective law that does nothing to address a serious issue (if you assume that new laws are even needed, which I don't) to what end? Well, younger and younger Canadian girls are going to be drawn into stripping and there isn't a goddamned thing the government can do about it. And this is going to get Harper's social conservative based even more pissed at him if that base chooses to be even halfway honest. Remember, none of this would have happened were it not for Kenney's genius decision not to renew the visas.

This might be the most perfect storm of stupidity out of this government yet. This is fucking brilliant!

Although I've only been to a peeler joint twice in the last ten years, I have very fond memories of foreign strippers. And not just the obvious ones. They do tend to be much nicer people than their native born co-workers, who can be a spectacular pain in the ass. Canadian girls in the business often think that they're above what they're doing for a living, but the immigrants seem to be genuinely grateful for the opportunity to be here.

So what happens to them?

Caroline, 28, and Nicola, 25, have been dancing in a downtown Toronto club for more than a year and have tasted the good life and now don’t want to return to their native Hungary.

“We are not happy that visas are no longer being issued to us,” Caroline said. “I am very disappointed and afraid of what may happen to me in the future.”

The women say they work long hours and send most of their earnings back home to their families.

“We did not do anything wrong in Canada,” she said. “They should not be sending us back home.”

Nicola said she’s stressed out and hasn’t been able to eat since hearing news of the visa revocation.

“My visa is almost expired and I am very scared,” she said. “I am very shattered that I may no longer be able to work and help my family back home.”

(...)

Foreign dancers say they’re willing to get married to a Canadian citizen or file refugee claims to stay here.

Plans are in place to seek Canadian men to marry some of the strippers whose visas are on the verge of expiry, which will force them to go underground and into the hands of organized crime to work in the sex trade.

Did I mention the unintended consequences? Some of them aren't so funny.  Jason Kenney, in his peculiarly Jason Kenney way, may have managed to create a new wave of sex trafficking victims because he's such a magnificent shithead.

Fortunately, the government knows enough about irony to keep Vic Towes as far away from this issue as they can possibly can.

But you know what? I'm a helpful cat and I love nothing more than beautiful girls with cute accents. Those just happen to be a couple of my favorite things.

Perhaps, like a more celebrated Foreigner, you want to know what love is. And maybe, just maybe, you want me to show you.

If you happen to be a foreign dancer in Toronto with an expiring visa, get in touch with me at skippystalinATgmail.com. There's a better than even chance that I'll immediately fall in love with you and propose. I'm really romantic and tend to propose marriage 36 times a day, as my long-time readers will confirm. All you have to do is say yes!

I'm so in love with love that it's actually infectious! You won't be able to help yourself from wanting to join me in holy matrimony. People like Minister Kenney might be skeptical about love at first sight, but I think we can prove them wrong.

Not far enough

It's been said that the Liberal Party enjoys winning elections above all else. That's not exactly true. Their true passion in life is despising and destroying one another, which is has worked out about as well for them as you would expect. For all intents and purposes, they're finished as a political force and we're about an election away from seeing the Conservatives and NDP scavenging their remains.

This is the story of how Jean Chretien single-handedly destroyed what was the most successful political party in the history of democracy.

To this day, federal Liberals can't stop crowing about how Chretien won three consecutive majority governments, the first leader of any party to do this since Sir Wifred Laurier. But like most things that Liberals crow about, it's a heavily qualified truth.

In 1984, Progressive Conservative Leader Brian Mulroney built what was thought to be an unbeatable national coalition and won the largest majority government in Canadian history. By 1993 that coalition was in tatters around his ankles. Western Conservatives founded the Reform Party and Quebec nationalists broke away from Mulroney to become the Bloc Quebecois. His successor as Tory leader, Kim Campbell was reduced to a mere two seats, the single biggest ass-kicking in history that I'm aware of.

Yes, Chretien won three majorities, but his main political opposition had to be broken in three pieces for him to do it. If you combine the popular vote for just Reform and the PC rump and excluded the BQ, Chretien never would have won at all.

Because Liberals don't like one another very much, Chretien had to find an enemy within his own party. His former competitor for the leadership and finance minister, Paul Martin served this purpose excellently. Over the years, Martin's esteem in the party surpassed even Chretien's, and the prime minister soon found himself being pushed out of office by his own party.

The way Jean Chretien reacted to this shocks me to this day, a full decade later. He decided, in 2002, to fundamentally change the way Canadian political parties are funded. As I'll explain, Chretien hobbled his own party's chances of winning government after his ouster.

Because people are very dumb, there's a common misconception among Canadians that the Conservatives were the party of big business. That couldn't be further from the truth. The Liberals were. The Grits were bankrolled almost exclusively by Bay Street (Canada's slightly more elegant and ethical version of Wall Street, for my foreign readers.) If you were an uber-banker, mega-lawyer, a scumbag lobbyist, or just an overall well-heeled motherfucker, chances are that your money was going to the LPOC.

The Reform Party (and the Canadian Alliance that seceded it) was a true expression of populist stupidity, and got very little money from special interests. After the Campbell debacle of '93, the Progressive Conservatives weren't getting much money at all.

Chretien, in his dying days as Supreme Leader, changed that. He outlawed corporate and union donations, and put the parties on a per-vote subsidy system. In doing so, he denied his own party and the NDP their primary funding sources. That was fine for him, since it was clear that he couldn't run again and he hated Paul Martin anyway. That's why you should be wary of any "reform" that pointedly doesn't effect the politician proposing it.

The merged Reform-Alliance-PC Conservative Party under Stephen Harper were expert in grassroots fundraising, and the NDP defied any sane person's expectations in building a popular and financial base in Quebec. The only people that suffered under the new system were the Liberals, which was sort of the point. Martin was reduced to a minority government in 2004 and defeated outright in '06.

After the Harper Tories violated their own unconstitutional fixed-election date law in 2008, they sought to end the per-vote subsidy entirely,  The opposition parties threatened to defeat the minority Conservative government and, because the Tories don't believe in anything at all, they backed down. God forbid that those jackals be defeated on anything even slightly resembling principle.

After winning his "stable, national, majority government" in May of 2011, Harper started clawing back on the per-vote subsidy, which is something that you think would make me happy, right?

Wrong.

Don't get me wrong, it's a good start, but it doesn't even approach how far I'd go if people were crazy enough to put me in charge.

For some reason, politicians that presume the right to lord over us have rigged the system in such a way that their political machinery is actually a ward of the state, protected by law and exempted from taxes. .

Your political donations are tax-deductible, and there's no logical reason that they should be.

Political parties and their think-tanks, and now the "independent issue advocacy groups" are not only tax-exempt, so are your donations to them. And there's no logical reason that they should be.

I'm currently having this argument with Jay Batman (who, incidentally, has the best last name ever) at his stellar blog Screed of Momus. If you're smart, you'll read Jay regularly. It was Mr. Batman who suggested that I was in favour of a "speech tax," which is contrary to my actual views.

Political parties like to pretend that they're "private organizations" when it suits their purposes, but they'll wildly suck at the public teat whenever they can. Banks do this, too, but they son't write the enabling legislation - at least not overtly. Everything they do is either granted magical tax deductions when it can't be directly subsidized by the government.

They should be forced to make a choice, are they public or private?

It used to be that conservatives frowned on campaign finance reform because it inhibited speech. Transparency, they said, would solve the problem of corruption. But, like most modern conservatives, they've created a moving target. Now they want their donations - not only to politicians, but associated independent and private groups - kept strictly private, lest Barack Obama say something mean about them. Y'know, because Republicans would never have a bad word to say about, I dunno, George Soros and his subsidized political activism.

Make no mistake about it, the political donations that you write off are subsidized by the rest of us. Each and every deduction in the tax code necessitates a higher rate for everybody. Moreover, it is nothing less than social engineering.

As I've said before, I don't claim my charitable deductions (such as they are) from my taxes specifically because I don't feel that giving is actually giving if I expect a percentage of that money back from everybody else. And what I get back is necessarily paid for by someone else in higher rates, which is true of all deductions. My longtime readers will note that I've asked them to give to foreign (usually American) charities that can't be claimed on their taxes. And a lot of you did. More than anything else I've done in my nearly ten years of blogging, that makes me proud.

You can make a solid case for charitable deductions. At least they're helping folks. Political contributions don't even create the appearance of helping people, as the ongoing train wreck that is government clearly demonstrates.

By the way, under American campaign finance law (I'm unsure about Canada's), campaign funds - which are tax deductible - can be rolled over into things like legal defence funds, which are not deductible.

More importantly, the current tax situation only benefits the major parties. Over the last decade, I've voted almost exclusively for minor party or independents that don't qualify for. According to the tax code, not only is my political speech is lesser than everybody else's, I'm treated differently under the tax code for it. There is no equality under the law when you support anyone other than a candidate that meets a certain criteria determined by, you guessed it, the major parties.

Eliminating the tax deduction isn't a "tax on speech" since it just removes a deduction on your income tax that is unevenly applied based on your political persuasion. These people aren't opposing a tax on their speech, they're insisting on a reward for it. And that ain't right.

Because I consider myself a conservative, and because conservative politicians are all in a tizzy about the tax code, I think that we should go first. Where we have the power to do so, we should introduce legislation eliminating the tax benefits of political contributions to our parties and advocacy groups and dare the liberals to join us. If they refuse to, call them on it.

If Stephen Harper was truly "getting public money out of politics," I'd support him all the way. But he isn't. I'm still supporting political parties and activities that I'd never vote for through my tax dollars.