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"Canada: 'A light to the world'" by James D. Wolfensohn In a keynote address to La Conférence de Montréal, World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn suggested Canada as a cultural and multicultural model “in terms of living together.” Canada, “a country without baggage,” he said, could play an important role in aid to the developing world — which will account for more than seven-eighths of the world’s population by the mid-21st century — both in terms of economics and governance. "Fear and loathing in 2004" by Patrick Gossage [summary not available] "Reading the entrails of the two elections - the Liberals were first punished, then elected" by Richard Gwyn In an election nowhere near as close as indicated by the polls, Canadians returned the Liberals with a viable minority, and a strong Conservative opposition as a potential government in waiting. With collective wisdom, Canadians obtained the result they wanted, leaving the Liberals chastened while restoring competitive democracy. Did the pollsters and pundits get it wrong, even as the voters were getting it right? Richard Gwyn, columnist of the Toronto Star, suggests there were two campaigns, the first in which the voters vented their anger at the Liberals, and the second, following the leadership debates, when they focused on their real choices. They decided that, all things considered, the Liberals deserved to be reelected though not given a free pass, while the Conservatives weren’t quite ready for government, and the voters weren’t quite ready for the Conservatives. "Making minority government work: the politics of purpose" by Tom Kent As different as they were, the Diefenbaker minority of 1957-58 and the Pearson minorities of 1963-68 “both illustrate how a prime minister with a public purpose can succeed without a parliamentary majority,” writes Tom Kent, who was senior policy adviser to Prime Minister Pearson. While Diefenbaker used his minority as a springboard to majority, Pearson used his two minorities to legislate a social policy framework that endures to this day. What kind of minority prime minister will Paul Martin turn out to be? That depends on which Paul Martin shows up, writes Kent, the one who was driven to attain power before the election, or the one who shifted sharply to the Left in order to keep power after the election. Martin’s early focus on health care and child care are a commendable beginning. But Martin’s talk of addressing the democratic deficit will be tested in a minority house. If he’s serious about it, Kent suggests Martin consider proportional representation as well as deeper campaign finance reform that shares the parties’ newfound wealth with their riding associations at the grass roots of democracy. "Is there an angel to ride the Ottawa whirlwind?" by Thomas S. Axworthy Minority parliaments have lives of their own, writes Tom Axworthy, who lived through five of them in the 1960s and 1970s, and has experienced both the propping up and the toppling of minority governments. Power moves from the executive to the legislature, and MPs become more important than deputy ministers. The House leader becomes a closer confidant of the prime minister than the finance minister. Reading the mood of the House, and counting heads, becomes critical to the survival of the government. As Paul Martin returns at the head of a minority government, he faces a reinvigorated and united Conservative Party. After the splintered oppositions that produced three easy Liberal majorities in the Chrétien era, “this de-alignment era is clearly passed and re-alignment is on the horizon” with the election of 2004. Can Paul Martin ride the whirlwind of minority Parliament, or is he heading out into a perfect storm? "Back to the future - it's 1963 all over again" by John English There are many similarities between the election results of 2004 and 1963, both of which produced Liberal minorities. In both elections, the Liberals won the cities and Ontario, while the Conservatives won small-town Canada and the west, and the NDP did not do as well as hoped under a new leader, Tommy Douglas. In Quebec, the Creditistes were a force to be reckoned with, though nothing as compared with the Bloc in 2004. In the House of Commons, Prime Minister Pearson focused on big picture files such as health care, reinforcing his support from the NDP on the Left, while creating discomfort for the Conservatives on the Right. He also understood that the Liberals had to make gains in Quebec if they were to recover a majority. “A minority government,” writes Pearson’s biographer, John English, “must always remember that defeat is always near. To protect itself against the fall, a minority government must protect its base, and the Liberal base in 2004 as in 1963 was urban and central Canadian.” "Remembering the fun of minority government?" by Desmond Morton Historian Desmond Morton looks back on Canada’s previous minority governments, and the prospects for the new minority in the 38th Parliament. Some minority prime ministers, John Diefenbaker in 1962-63 and Joe Clark in 1979-80, “managed minority status so badly that they soon lost their jobs.” One minority PM, Pierre Trudeau, in 1974 arranged his own defeat over a budget that plunged the nation into decades of deficits, but returned with a renewed majority. Only the Pearson minorities of 1963-65 and 1965-68 are remembered with fondness for their legislative legacy. What will the Martin minority be like? That depends a lot on the Bloc, and on the NDP. "The Liberal minority and the prospect of an early dissolution of Parliament" by Brian M. Doody Of the six minority Parliaments since 1957, three have been dissolved in the first session of the House after the election. In every case, in 1958, 1963 and 1979, the governor general heeded the advice of the prime minister to issue the writs for an election. But what if the GG, following the King-Byng precedent in 1926, declined the PM’s advice and invited the leader of the Opposition to form a government and ascertain whether he could win the confidence of a majority in the House, at least until the end of the first session of the 38th Parliament? Brian Doody examines the history of minority parliaments and the prospects of the Liberal minority government for survival. He concludes, intriguingly, that while the Liberals may be propped up by the NDP and the Bloc on a case-by-case basis — even through a budget next February — the very success of a minority parliament might tempt their fair-weather allies to desert them. A motion of censure on an issue such as the sponsorship scandal, which might be interpreted as a vote of confidence in the present rather than the previous government, might prove particularly dangerous to the health of the Martin minority. "From Greens to Red Tories, and all the colours in between - reflections on the 2004 election" by James Allan Evans From a summer’s perch on the Gulf Islands off the West Coast, classics professor James Allan Evans reflects on the outcome of the 2004 election, from the relatively strong showing of the Green Party, to the election of former Conservative Bob Cadman in Vancouver as the only Independent, one who may in some circumstances hold the balance of power in a closely divided House. Why did an election that looked like a dead heat until the final days turn into a seven-point Liberal win over the Conservatives? “Was it the feral onslaught of the Liberals in the final days that turned around the campaign?” he asks. More likely, he suggests “it was probably the Conservatives themselves who gave the Liberal campaign its much needed boost” through statements of their candidates validating the exaggerated claims of Liberal attack ads, and the Conservative failure to counterattack “within the rules of rhetoric.” Next time, he concludes, Stephen Harper “must regain the confidence of the old Progressive Conservatives who heeded Joe Clark’s warning that Harper is a dangerous right-winger.” "The genius of the Canadian electorate - everybody lost" by Stanley H. Hartt In the June 28 election, Canadians humbled the Liberals without defeating them, reducing them to minority status and restoring competitive democracy in this country. By a razor’s edge, voters denied the balance of power to both the NDP and the Bloc Québécois, meaning neither a socialist nor a sovereignist agenda holds sway in the new Parliament. Voters also returned a strong Conservative deputation of nearly 100 MPs, while denying them the opportunity to form a government, largely because the Liberals effectively demonized them as “barbarians at the gate.” Stanley Hartt looks ahead to a “deliciously fractured Parliament” where the Liberal government will have to obtain a majority on “a case by case basis,” on everything from health care to missile defence. "A message of hope -Harper's best defence against a Liberal strategy of fear" by Graham Fox The Canadian political landscape has shifted remarkably with the emergence of the united Conservative Party as a competitive force. Yet for their strong showing of 99 seats, the Tories fell short of mid-campaign expectations that they would form a minority government, and saw voters move away from them in droves in the final days of the campaign. Equally damaging as the radical right-wing statements of some Conservatives was the failure of their war room to quickly repudiate them. Stephen Harper also allowed the Liberals to brand him as an extremist in their advertising campaigns, which makes the 2005 Conservative policy convention allimportant in the positioning of the party, and its leader, as a broad, modern and mainstream political force. “What are Harper’s priorities?” asks Graham Fox, a former chief of staff to Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark. “What is his vision for the country? The Conservatives’ best defence against the Liberals’ strategy of fear is a message of hope.” Both Harper and Paul Martin were chastened by the voters on June 28. Whoever figures out why, and solves it first, is likely to emerge the winner of the coming runoff election. "Message to the Conservatives: go mainstream or go home" by Rick Peterson The voters sent Conservatives a clear message on June 28 — go mainstream or go home. Urban voters, women, youth and Quebecers all rejected the Conserv a t i v e s as being too far to the Right on social issues, and insufficiently supportive of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. From a combined Alliance-PC score of 37 perc e n t in the 2000 election, the new Conservatives won less than 30 percent, while losing most of the cities, falling short of expectations in Ontario, and being shut out in Quebec. The good news, writes the chair of the Red To ry Council from Va n c o u v e r, is that Conservatives now form a competitive opposition and can use that platform to position themselves as a government in waiting. But they must continue moving to the centre on social issues, while maintaining classic conservative values on fiscal issues. Red Tories and Blue Tories need to strike these compromises, beginning with their 2005 policy convention. Rick Peterson concludes this is the first step on the path to power. "What should the Conservatives do next?" by William Watson How close was the election on June 28? If only 1 in 29 voters had voted Conservative rather than Liberal, the election would have been a dead heat in the popular vote, producing a minority Conservative government rather than a Liberal one. “What should the Conservatives do now?” asks economist William Watson. The leadership question is moot, Stephen Harper having decided to stay on, and having earned a second kick at the can. But his second chance is likely to be his last, and the Conservatives need to do a better job of explaining their policies to key swing voters in the centre and centre-right of the political spectrum. This doesn’t mean they need to abandon their convictions or purge outspoken dissidents on the Right. “Over time,” Watson writes, “especially after the new party’s policy convention, Stephen Harper may be able to make clear that dissident members within the party are just that and do not determine policy.” In the end, he concludes, the Conservatives lost because not enough voters trusted them, and for the next election they must either “adopt politically expedient policies or hold fast to policies they believe will work and try to persuade more Canadians they should believe in these policies, too.” "The unbearable rightness of voters by Robin V. Sears Once again the NDP’s hopes for a breakthrough were dashed, and its expectation of holding the balance of power denied, in the June 28 election which gave them only 19 seats to show for their 16 percent of the vote. While Jack Layton campaigned well, he became the latest in a line of NDP leaders to fall into the trap of appeasing Quebec, with his promise to repeal the Clarity Act. And the party, like social democratic movements in other countries, remains “trapped in a time warp,” writes its former campaign chair Robin Sears. In a scathing appraisal of what went wrong and a brutally frank assessment of what must be done if the NDP is to become a competitive force in Canadian politics, first, he says, it must lose the wish lists of fiscal irresponsibility. Then it must adopt a pragmatic foreign policy that reflects the realities of the post-Cold War world and Canada’s place in it. Finally, it must modernize and rejuvenate the party and its structures, which have become as ossified as Tammany Hall. "Polls, projections, pundits and prestidigitation" by Barry Kay Only once in 14 elections since 1962 has a party leading in the polls prior to an election call actually increased its popularity on election day — that exception being Pierre Trudeau’s 1974 “Zap! You’re frozen” campaign against wage and price controls. The 2004 campaign was no exception to the rule, but the Liberals’ decline of two points between the dropping of the writs on May 23 and the June 28 vote does not reflect the roller-coaster ride of the campaign. The Conservatives were leading and trending up in the week ending June 18, but were hurt by Stephen Harper’s unwise musings about a majority government, as well a series of “backbench bimbo eruptions” that validated the distorted claims of Liberal attack ads. Barry Kay, whose “poll of polls” and seat projections have become a regular feature of Canadian campaigns, takes a morning-after look at the polls and the projections. He notably examines “the deleterious impact of the Green Party upon the NDP” and suggests that the “parallel to Ralph Nader’s influence on the Florida result during the 2000 US presidential election is difficult to miss.” "Did the pollsters get it wrong? It depends on the regional numbers" by Geoffrey Hale By virtue of not being in the field over the last three days of the campaign, the polls neither detected nor reflected the swing to the Liberals over the final weekend before the election on June 28. What was supposed to have been a dead heat, an election too close to call, instead produced what Paul Martin termed “a stable minority” Liberal government with 135 seats, to 99 for the Conservatives, 54 for the Bloc Québécois and 19 for the NDP, a higher Liberal result than any seat range projected from pre-election polls. Did the pollsters get it wrong? Geoffrey Hale of the University of Lethbridge looks at the numbers on a regional basis and concludes that while the polls obviously weren’t predictive of voter movement in the final days of the campaign, they did detect a swing back to the Liberals following the leadership debates, and most still finished “well within national margins of error.” However, some lessons are in order. Canada is a highly regionalized political market, which makes national polling figures “functionally irrelevant” to seat projections. A shifting campaign dynamic between the dominant Conservative emotion of anger and the dominant Liberal emotion of fear meant that as many as 25 percent of voters polled in the final week indicated they might change their mind at the last moment. Moreover, polling is becoming more difficult in a telemarketing age which features high “rejection rates” by voters refusing to be polled. "The election night surprise" by Maurice Pinard McGill University political-sociologist Maurice Pinard examines the gap between late polls forecasting a dead heat in the election and the June 28 results, which gave the Liberals a relatively comfortable seven-point victory and a plurality of 135 seats to the Conservatives’ 99. What happened? “The answer is astonishingly simple,” writes Pinard. “Voting intentions changed at the very end of the campaign.” Not in the West or the Atlantic so much as in Ontario and Quebec, where the election was determined. In Ontario, the voters’ irritation over tax hikes in the provincial Liberal government budget eventually wore off and at the end of the campaign voting intention returned to where it had been in the beginning. In Quebec, where the federalist vote is always underpolled, enough federalists returned to the Liberal fold in the final days that they exceeded polling expectations by a solid five points. "The role of the media: a campaign saved by a horserace" by Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, Antonia Maioni and Stuart Soroka Beginning a week before the election call, a McGill University team tracked campaign coverage in seven daily newspapers on a daily basis through June 28. Newspaper articles were coded as either issue-oriented or part of the “horserace,” and divided into reporting and opinion. The tone and bias of coverage was also measured, as were the “first mentions” of each of the leaders in the daily coverage, whether their coverage weights were positive, neutral or negative. After the first week, there was hardly any coverage of real issues such as health care, while the papers focused almost exclusively on the closeness of the race and the possibility of minority government of one stripe or another. The conclusions: “There are few shifts in coverage over the campaign that were not clearly precipitated by campaign events or public opinion. The predominant role of media in the 2004 campaign, accordingly, seems to have been reflecting rather than leading the campaign...The 2004 campaign was dominated by horserace over issue coverage focused on increasingly partisan attacks over substantive policy proposals.” "Television attack ads: planting the seeds of doubt" by Jonathan Rose US-style attacks came to Canada with a vengeance in the June election. Not only were the Liberal attack ads savage, their claims were also reinforced by their victims, the Conservatives, whose undisciplined remarks on social policy issues validated Liberal claims the Tories threatened health care, a woman’s right to choose, and would have gone to war in Iraq. In one Liberal spot, Canadians were staring down the barrel of a gun, in and being told that Stephen Harper would end gun control, when his actual pledge was to abolish the $1 billion gun registry. Until this campaign, as Jonathan Rose observes, Canadians “argued smugly that our politics was different.” After the Liberal campaign, Canadians have much less reason to be smug, and every reason to fear that attack ads of such ferocious intensity, in which all pretense of decency is abandoned, may become a permanent and negative feature of our political culture. As for this campaign, in the words of a triumphant Liberal creative advertising director: “Fear of the alternative trumped anger at the status quo.” "Beaucoup plus que les commandites" by Michel C. Auger Although the sponsorship scandal had great symbolic significance, it is not the key to understanding the results of the federal election in Quebec, says Michel C. Auger. More important is the frustration of the voters, who feel that Ottawa was not listening when it came to decisive issues like fiscal imbalance and young offenders. In fact, the capacity of representatives elected from Quebec — some of whom have strong links with the provincial Liberals — to promote dossiers that are dear to Quebecers will be a determining factor in how things evolve in the next months. Says Auger, “if, three years from now, Liberal governments and federalists in Ottawa, as well as in Quebec, have not succeeded in getting together and making progress on certain big files, they will be opening up a large door for the sovereignists.” "La demande devant l'offre" by Alain Noël [summary not available] "In praise of Ontario" by Joseph Heath [summary not available] "Why competition is essential in the delivery of publicly funded health care services" by Michael Kirby and Wilbert Keon In this excerpt from a Policy Matters released this month by the IRPP, Senators Michael Kirby and Wilbert Keon argue forcefully that Canada's publicly funded health care system needs competition if it is to achieve efficiencies and productivity gains that are essential “to make Canada's publicly funded, single-payer health care system more productive and financially sustainable over the long term.” The current fix of throwing billions of dollars at the problem “neither works nor is financially sustainable.” "L'arithmétique de la santé" by Janice MacKinnon Despite additional investment over the years, the performance of our health system still lags behind those of many Western countries, and the costs continue to rise more rapidly than government revenues. The result is a crisis situation reminiscent of the budgetary deadlock of the 1990s. According to former Saskatchewan finance minister Janice MacKinnon, reform is necessary not only to preserve the objectives of medicare and ensure its survival but also to free up the funds necessary to adequately finance government’s other missions, which have been squeezed as a result of the pressure of health care costs on the public purse. New sources of funding are needed, and to be effective these will have to take into consideration each individual’s ability to pay as well as its actual use of the system. These changes, argue MacKinnon, are a matter of intergenerational equity. They are also a condition for Canada to remain competititve in the race to attract qualified workers in a knowledge-based economy and aging society. "A fix for a generation?" by France St-Hilaire and Harvey Lazar Far from being “a fix for a generation,” as Paul Martin suggested during the recent federal election campaign, the federal government’s proposals for this month’s health care summit with the provinces fall far short of creating conditions for renewing the federal-provincial partnership, write France St-Hilaire and Harvey Lazar. “As things stand now, a disproportionate share of the financial and political risk inherent in the public health care enterprise is borne by the provinces.” The reason recent health accords have not put an end to federal-provincial squabbling over money or helped the reform process is that they failed to provide lasting solutions to this problem. “What is called for is some kind of peace treaty rather than just another temporary and ineffective ceasefire.” A new fiscal pact needs to be negotiated based on four key principles: transparency, risk sharing, predictability and collaboration. It must also include a firm commitment by all parties to then keep fiscal arrangements off the table for an extended period, 10 years or longer. "La médecine imaginaire du Dr Diafoirus" by Jean Paré [summary not available] "More balanced debate needed on North American integration" by David M. Dyment [summary not available] |
