ChuckerCanuck 2.0

At this point in summer, Liberals gone to sleep or France (or maybe a line-up at a temporary dump in Toronto), we find ourselves alone in conversation.

It is a mind-boggling mistake of the Liberals to have allowed Michael Ignatieff his
2nd departure from Canada within a single economic quarter. Not so much that; rather that the last portrait of Michael Ignatieff is his stumbling across a line in the sand of his own drawing. Not the sort of thing that marries well to "mess with me and I'll mess with you until I'm done." It kind of makes charges that Iggy's a diletantte juuuuuuuusssssttttttt flyyyyyyyyyy. (Yes, I did collapse onto my chesterfield after typing that.)

The result, this summer can be very helpful in cementing the contrast in confidence that the Conservative party presents with the Liberals. The last year has been one in which Liberals, under Dion and Ignatieff, panic-mongered the year long to the detriment of Canada's economic confidence. Dion claimed a hearing impairment prevented him from telling us what he'd have done differently. Ignatieff offered an alternative - actually insisted to the point of an election - and then threw his idea out like plastic-wrap when asked to substantiate the threat. Conservatives own the confidence of Canadians like no other party in the supposed fall election to come.

And we own the confidence issue long term too. Conservatives are the only federal party to have utter confidence in Canada. Each other party thinks some or all of Canada is weak and vulnerable to assimilation by the United States or balkanization. They have to "pull off" confidence, we don't have to fake anything.

Let me steal from the Great Satan of Satans himself:

Only Stephen Harper can say, "Its morning in Canada."

Labels: Fall 2009 campaign

Professor Arthur Haberman has a piece today on the homeless problem of Red Tories (or, as he calls them "progressive conservatives"). Its a topic near to my heart as my thesis is pretty simple: there ain't no such thing as a Red Tory; or, at least, the only people who call themselves Red Tories are members of the Joe Clark fan club. So when Professor Emeritus Haberman decides to weigh in on the issue, I gets all a'ssited, thunkin': "I's gonna do some lurnin from this here book nerd."

Alas, it wasn't so. In short, Professor Haberman confirms that the only people who call themselves Progressive Conservatives and disdain the CPC are Joe Clark loyalists. Let's inspect the pablum proferred by the good professor:

Progressive Conservatism "supports a social safety net and believes in helping people better themselves." Well, so does everyone. If a core belief of a particular ideology is a core belief of every ideology, then it is not a core belief of that ideology. The difference across the Canadian political spectrum boils down to: what ultimately helps people to better themselves?

Progressive Conservatism believes "in acknowledging the importance of tradition in organizing politics and society". So while all conservatives believe in the importance of tradition, only progressive conservatives believe in acknowledging the importance of tradition? All men know a babe when they see her, but only progressive conservatives believe in acknowledging the babeness when they see her. Compelling stuff.

Progressive Conservatism "recognize the complexity of society" and "...like to make a series of small adjustments that over time turn out to be large but do not create chaos." The latter bit sounds so identifcal to Tom Flanagan's articulation of "incrementalism" that Professor Haberman fails here too.

So, having been about as clear and precise as Michael Ignatieff, Professor Haberman fails to identify anything particularly unique about progressive conservatism. Not a single positive quality can be attributed to that strain of political thought. Sensing the shoddiness of his work, Professor Haberman moves on to some negatives. That is, what makes the CPC so repugnant:

Conservatives are "driven hard by ideology." Yes, this is what Stephen Harper's government has looked like to me. Ideological, non-pragmatic, well, let's just call a spade a spade: Calgarian.

Conservatives like Canada to "fight wars instead of keeping the peace." Again, spot on. It was a Conservative government that sent us into a war in Afghanistan. It was Conservatives, only those war-mongering Conservatives, who extended the mission to 2011. And, its damned true: we are against peace and peace keeping.

Oh wait, Professor Haberman has a catch: Peter MacKay and Stephen Harper supported the Iraq invasion. So did David Pratt. A Liberal. A Liberal helping Iraq mature as a democracy. Other Liberals supported the Iraq invasion too. And guess what: in 20 years, you'll be hardpressed to find a politician who won't claim they were for the Iraq invasion either.

Point is, supporting the Iraq invasion wasn't particularly Conservative. Not supporting the Iraq invasion wasn't particularly non-Conservative either.

So we're left with one thing: progressive conservatism is a strain of political thought that rests on two pillars. One, a sick obsession with Joe Clark. Two, a manic hatred of the United States. (In the column, the Professor makes 2 derogatory remarks about the United States). To say you are homeless is a fistful of poppycock: follow David Orchard's lead and join the comfy fur of the Liberal party.

Labels: The myth of the Red Tory

In many ways, Sarah Palin is an outsider from Alaska storming the American mainland.

In many ways, Michael Ignatieff is an outsider from outside storming the Canadian mainland.

Sarah Palin can't survive a basic interview on the issues of the day, like say with Katie Couric.

Michael Ignatieff can't survive a basic interview on the issues of the day, like say with Peter Mansbridge.

Sarah Palin can sound almost ridiculous when she works too many numbers into her argument.

Michael Ignatieff can sound almost ridiculous when he works too many numbers into his argument.

Sarah Palin doesn't go big on policies or details preferring blunt emotional appeals.

Michael Ignatieff doesn't go big on policies or details preferring blunt emotional appeals.

Sarah Palin appeals only to core Republican voters who are so fanatically devoted to her they are blind to her significant weak points.

Michael Ignatieff appeals only to core Liberal voters who are so fanatically devoted to him and the Liberal cause, they are blind to his significant weak points.

Sarah Palin quit being Alaska's governor.

Michael Ignatieff is just MIA. (Oops, sorry, I mean build his campaign machine for his coming fall election from rural France.) And like Sarah Palin, we hope he comes back soon.

Labels: And people say both are babes

Following up on Michael Ignatieff's prescient comment about the city of Calgary being a den of rabid right-wing dogmatists, I thought he might be interested to know that evil lurks in quite a few cities across our fair country.

1. Halifax. Don't be fooled, Iggy, by the delicious seafood and beautiful harbor. In Halifax, they banned smells. That's right, if a human being is caught smelling like something in Halifax, they throw that person into jail until you unsmell. And, for your troubles, they slap a $5,000 fine on you.

2. Montreal. Sure, sure, my home town, so I'm supposed to say good things about it. Bullshit! Montreal makes Satan look nice. The city is run not by a mayor but by squeegee kids. You cannot drive through an intersection without first being harassed by a kid with all sorts of flesh falling out of the rips and tears in his and/or her clothing. Even if you throw a loonie at them from a distance, they will still force you to glimpse some larval white crack of skin that we long ago decided, as a civilization, to cover up.

3. Victoria. Do you even know what they put in that Empress tea? The water has valium pumped into it to keep everyone in a state of activity one notch above comatose. Even though the speed limit is a normal 50 klicks through the city, try finding a car doing more than 15! Try getting a meal served in less than sixty minutes at any Victoria restaurant. The official animal of Victoria is the sloth and there ain't an actual, un-zooed sloth within a 1000 miles of the place.

4. Prince George. Hedy Fry can fill you in on that hotbed of hate; as I type this, crosses are burning across the front lawns of Prince George.

5. Drummondville. Sure, this tiny town between Montreal and Quebec looks normal and Fromage Lemaire off highway 20 serves the nation's second best poutine (yes, Chez Morasse in Noranda, I am still loyal to you). But the Raelians have basically taken over the city. That means there's only two things that ever happen in Drummondville at night: alien worship and group sex. Okay, a Liberal might not understand why that's evil, but surely the rest of us do!

6. Kitchener. Sure, some might argue, like me, that Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge-Guelph is a future collosus of Canada. But Kitchener has an Oktoberfest. Oktoberfest is a German thing. Germans started two world wars. Nuff said.

7. Asbestos, Quebec. Need I explain its evil, Iggy?

8. Sarnia. Iggy, these rubes couldn't tell ballet from contemporary dance. And if you look at Dante's Inferno, his 7th ring rings awfully true to that city.

9. Gimli, Manitoba. Actually, this city is not evil but I had to squeeze in something from Manitoba and have 10 cities on my list.

10. Your hometown, Iggy, Toronto. In Toronto, city workers would see people die in order to fight for their privelege of 117 sick days per year. Maybe Toronto is in the grips of an ideology far more virulent than one finds over in Cow-town.

That's my list Iggy. But I guess it don't matter much since you're spending the summer drumming up support for the Liberal party. In France.

Labels: Next: Canada's 10 most evil tourist destinations

Thirty-four years absent from the country, but Michael Ignatieff has us all nailed! He knows us better than we know ourselves, except perhaps why we haven't rushed to his arms wailing, "you had us at 'hello'". A good example of his masterpiece etch-o-sketch of Canada comes with his recent description of Stephen Harper as:

"a politician formed and shaped in the radical conservative ideological world of Calgary and Calgary think tanks."

Yes, Calgary, you are a seething cauldron of radical conservative ideologues. Trust Iggy, he knows.

I married a Calgarian. She is a nutball. The other day, I caught her tossing an aluminum can into the garbage bin. "Fuck the planet," she sneered at me and then scurried under a couch where I could not reach her. She, like all Calgarians, hates queers and science. She loves the military and frequently prays that the military will take over the country to put a real leader in charge.

My in-laws, Calgarians all, make her look like a Quebec communist by comparison. They don't pay taxes and shoot at any tax collector who comes knocking. They started up a Museum of Intelligent Design in their garage and carbon-dated a dinosaur fossil that turned out to be - so they claim - only 5,000 years old. When they couldn't afford to support my wife's grandma, they put her in a crate and shipped her to "socialist Toronto where they give a crap about the old and infirm."

Things you take for granted in the rest of Canada simply don't exist in Calgary. Like traffic lights. Who the hell is a light to tell you whether to stop or proceed. Organic products are banned from city stores: you cannot purchase food unless that food has been genetically modified. Also, children are forced to take steroids in hopes of creating a master race that will one day take over the world.

Lastly:

Calgarians, as we all know, are the biggest proponents of targeted assasinations in Canada. Oh wait, targeted assasinations is a Michael Ignatieff policy, not a radically conservative idea! Scrub that.

Labels: Iggy would be a fine PM, Oh yes

The Prime Minister makes a fairly strong charge. I mean, if you take levelling those charges seriously. Like Michael Ignatieff. Michael Ignatieff says Tories want to drive wedges between Canadians in every speech he gives. Even at the international opposition leaders pow-wow he went to in London.

So let's pretend Michael Ignatieff is serious about wedge-politics as a scourge. Not "worthy of certain targeted assasinations" scourge, but really, really bad. Then its strange that his war room would have been so active in scandalizing Romeo Leblanc's funeral.

Not strange that his war room would do it. If you recall, the same war room won Dalton McGinty a re-election largely on the idea of Roman Catholic exceptionalism in Ontario's education system. Apparently, drivng a wedge between Catholics and everyone else is good politics there.

This actually makes a lot of sense since traditionally, Catholics vote as a block for the Liberal party. The portion of Catholic Tories has grown over time and one way to shore up Ontario Liberal numbers would be to scare (wedge) Catholics back into Liberal arms.

So, provincially, that means protecting the unique Catholic school system. Federally, it looks like, you alienate Catholics from the Prime Minister.

I understand why Iggy's war room would be working hard to drive wedges (as it also did recently when the war room asked how a gay person could sleep at night voting Conservative). I can't understand why Iggy would accept wedge-driving when he is so emphatically against it.

Labels: Go back to the last Ontario election

Joanne is asking today about what shape the Liberal platform will take under Michael Ignatieff, given his incredible reluctance to utter a single, solid position on a single issue facing Canada today.

I was thinking of doing something about that issue and the general disappearance of Iggy from the Canadian landscape. It was going to be a press conference with one of Michael Ignatieff's suits. The suit would provide more substance to Liberal policy in the single press conference than Iggy has in the half-year he usurped the helm of the Grit machine.

But sometimes, actually, almost always in Iggy's case, the truth is so much funnier than fiction. Thanks to the grassroots coalition of Republicans for Ignatieff, here's a terrific idea that is sure to squeeze its way into the Liberal platform:

"We might even have to engage in certain forms of targeted assassination."

Its terrific policy that Liberals will sell like umbrellas on a rainy day and satisfies the two key conditions required for an idea to make it to the Liberal platform:

1) They might assasinate people. Like all good Liberal ideas, the promise is only that something "might" get implemented. They might scrap the GST. They might scrap free trade. They might provide universal daycare and outlaw housewives. They might engage in assasinations.

2) Its has bucketfuls of nuance. Liberals wouldn't be condoning all forms of targeted assasination. Only certain forms of assasination. That puts the debate on Liberal preferred battleground: it won't be about assasination as good public policy, but which types of targeted assasinations are acceptable and which aren't. Dippers will be against everything. Tories will be demonized as wanting to assasinate everyone. Liberals are the only ones who can find that right balance.

I can't wait for the campaign to begin! Have a troop of Joe Volpe supporters follow Iggy around asking, "who do you want to assasinate, Iggy?"

Labels: Iggy Pagliacci

I realise that Jeffrey Simpson is more prune than plum; few of us ever take note of whatever blather be shoves in our face. But he does occupy prime real estate in pundit-land and so, from time to time, cannot be ignored. Like today.

Here's the recap. The Prime Minister says, "I don't believe any taxes are good taxes." And from that, Jeffrey Simpson conjures a Hobbesian world of crazed cannibals scouring the country to feed off an ever-shrinking pool of weaklings.

Me, I read the Prime Minister's statement quite simply: taxes are a necessary evil. Like all necessary evil, you want to draw what's necessary and not a drop more. Jeffrey Simpson, for some reason I'll end off with, decides that the Prime Minister couldn't possibly mean they are a "necessary evil" because the word "bad", for some reason, precludes "necessary" in a way that the word "evil" does not. Simply put, that is either absurdly stupid or insincere.

All taxes are bad. You take money away from people who earned that money to spend on priorities that they have no direct input on. Governments are necessary for a happy, efficient civilization. Some services can only be provided by a government in a constitutional democracy, like defense and law&order. Every other service, arguably, could be done by some other group within your civilization. Or, if you decide to have a government provide such a service, other means of generating revenues aside from taxation, like user-fees.

User fees are not taxes. User fees charge the users for the service, not everybody. People can opt not to use the service and therefore avoid the fee. Furthermore, user fees give citizens a chance to understand the cost of the service. Compare that to a system where taxes are collected by some measure of capacity to pay and then tax revenues are spent at the government's discretion. To quote Iggy, you need a phd in economics to figure out where all the money goes! Case in point: when was the last time that a newspaper (or magazine, MacLeans!) gave us anything more than a pie chart of spending by five or six major categories and then some bullet points highlighting new programs put in the budget? I have yet to see budget coverage that could give a citizen the information needed to decide: here's what I like and here's what I don't like about the spending.

So what's up with Jeffrey Simpson. If he really believes that Stephen Harper is "very, very scary" as he states, then he is absurdly stupid. I don't think he is absurdly stupid. Absurd, yes. Stupid? No. So, he's a flaky fake. Desperate to put a few hundred words together, he builds a straw man and burns it down, dancing to the rain gods concurrently. It is the kind of shoddy thinking sinking the SS Canadian Media. Canada is crying out for better... not from politicians.... but from journalists!

Labels: Joanne we should put together our own online newspaper

Often, the standard analysis of the Canadian political scene says that Red Tories were so horrified by the neo-geo-theo-brio con monster that Stephen Harper and Peter MacKay put together, they all scrambled into the comfy fur of a Liberal bear hug. And that Conservative monster never gobbled up any Liberals. So, in light of the honor Jean Chretien is set to receive from the Queen, I thought I would point to a small but significant demographic in Canada: the Chretien-Liberal.

The Chretien-Liberal is not a Liberal. Or maybe they used to be but when they look at the Liberal legacy of the last two decades, it is Chretien and only Chretien that sticks out as someone with whom they can identify. A brief sketch:

A. A Chretien-Liberal is foremost a fiscal conservative who wanted the deficit crushed at any price.

B. A Chretien-Liberal prefers tax cuts to new social programs.

C. A Chretien-Liberal is socially conservative. They differ from other social conservatives in that they do not feel their personal moral choices or judgements should become regulated or enacted. Left to themselves, they prefer the traditional family structure with a parent raising children directly and full-time.

D. A Chretien-Liberal defends, at all costs, Quebeckers who choose Canada from Quebeckers who choose the Chavezification of Quebec.

E. A Chretien-Liberal sees Canada's place in the world defined foremost by our proximity and friendship with the United States and then by its position in the commonwealth and francophonie. Chretien-Liberals would prefer NO BORDER between the United States and Canada.

F. A Chretien-Liberal never goes to sleep at night worrying about Canada's culture.

I was once a Chretien-Liberal (first Chretien election). My family remained Chretien-Liberals until 2006. We all made the switch to what is today the natural home for Chretien-Liberals: the Conservative Party of Canada.

Labels: Go out a invite a Chretien Liberal to join the Tories today

Many of you might think that's a potshot at Michael Ignatieff. Afterall, in the United Kingdom, he was feted as a collosal intellect whereas in Canada, he's a pedestrian politician completely devoid of insight. While I do find Britain's standards for what gets called an "intellectual" interesting, the reason I am asking about their status as an intellectual backwater is for this.

Every three months of so, we get the usual boilerplate about civilizational collapse as a result of climate change. Almost always, that report is produced by a British think-thank, research group or univerisity. Almost always, the report says nothing about the science of climate change but lunges into super-sexy conclusions about pandemics and nuclear wars. (Although this report distinguishes itself with a wacky implication that global warming and organized crime are linked!)

Another aspect of these reports is they make rather bold moral claims, such as:

"Too many greedy and deceitful decisions led to a world recession and demonstrated the international interdependence of economics and ethics."

While I know the 9/11 Truth movement would swallow a sentence like that wholesale and it would be nice if we could say the last recession was merely the work of a cabala of Bernie Madoffs --- but t'ain't so, as we say in Texas. However, over in England, they make statements like that all the time. Every climate change report includes moral condemnation of human freedoms and a prescription for centralized and regulated living.

All this to say, it would be refreshing to see, some day, a report coming out of the UK that didn't draw a direct link between a shorter ski season in the Swiss Alps to cannabalism in Mexico; that didn't leap from an emissions problem to a call for 10 year economic plans and global "cooperation"; that didn't look crammed with hysteria to obscure the absence of real content.

Labels: No I do not read The Guardian