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"Protecting Canada's eggs in the US basket" by Allan Gotlieb About one-third of Canada’s entire output, 85 percent of our exports, goes to the United States. With all those eggs in one basket, protecting them and promoting Canada’s interests in the US must be a top priority, says Allan Gotlieb, former Canadian ambassador in Washington. Once an advocate of incrementalism in managing Canada-US relations, Gotlieb suggests that Canada does better when it advances a big picture agenda, as it did in the 1980s with the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement. In a major address to the Montreal Economic Institute, Gotlieb suggests the US might be receptive to another big idea, provided it’s in their interest as well as ours. "Les uns et les autres" by Alain Noël [summary not available] "Issues and answers - the perils of forecasting presidential elections" by David T. Jones From Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush, the foreign policy path following US presidential elections is seldom the one promised by the winning candidate. More often, history intervenes to suggest other choices, another road, profoundly affecting the United States and allies such as Canada. Wilson ran on a promise to “keep us out of war,” only to enter the First World War. George W. Bush ran against “nationbuilding” in 2000, but that was before the transformational events of September 11, 2001. Moreover, suggests former US diplomat David Jones, the outcome of presidential elections often makes far less difference than outsiders might think, or hope, on the shaping of US foreign policy or the conduct of international trade. Does it make that much difference, to Canada, among other countries closely watching the November 2 election, whether George W. Bush or John Kerry is in the White House? Jones concludes it makes far less difference than we might think. "Choosing an American president: Canadians can't be indifferent but may not like the outcome" by John Parisella The November 2 US presidential election is the first since the events of September 11, 2001, and the outcome is likely to turn on which candidate, George W. Bush or John Kerry, makes the better case for keeping America safe and managing the war in Iraq. While Kerry cruised to the Democratic nomination last winter and spring, that was against a lesser opponent, Howard Dean. The summer and fall have seen a resurgent Bush take a strong lead, while Kerry has had difficulty defining his message and allowed himself to be defined by his opponents. For voters wanting to know what the candidates will do for them in the future, it is frustrating to watch the campaign degenerate into nasty accusations over who did what in the Vietnam War, 35 years ago. With our interests so closely aligned with the US, Canadians cannot be indifferent to the outcome, and aren’t — 61 percent in a Leger Marketing poll in August would support Kerry as against only 16 percent for Bush. Canadians, then, risk being disappointed by the outcome. Political stategist John Parisella, a former chief of staff to Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa, attended both the Democratic and Republican conventions over the summer and was embedded in the Kerry campaign during the primaries. Here is his close-up take on the presidential campaign. "Why are the Democrats such losers?" by Robin V. Sears Political strategist Robin Sears, who knows something about losing from chairing several NDP national campaigns, attended the Democratic convention in Boston and watched the Republican convention in New York. As occasions entirely scripted for television, US conventions offer little in the way of excitement, but they sure draw a crowd — thousands of delegates and their families, thousands of lobbyists and many thousand more journalists, not to mention demonstrators, who descend upon the convention cities. There’s no shortage of celebrities and no shortage of parties. But while Bush got a big convention bounce and moved out to a double-digit lead in September, the Kerry convention bounce was measured in decimal points. On reflection, Sears believes the Democrats have deeper, longer-term problems than the struggling candidacy of John Kerry. Only once since 1936 (with Bill Clinton in 1996) have they successfully re-elected a Democratic president. And many of those firstterm wins have been largely accidents of history. The last governing Democratic coalition was the one built by Franklin Roosevelt, “one with an appeal to ordinary middle-class Americans that FDR’s vision had three generations ago,” writes Sears. "La partie est-elle jouée d'avance ? Les prévisionnistes et certaines tendances Lourdes annoncent une victoire de Bush" by Pierre Martin and Richard Nadeau In Canada and elsewhere, opposition to the incumbent president of the US is widespread — this reality is reflected in a recently published poll conducted in some 35 countries. Given the forecasts that were made public by election experts at last September’s American Political Science Association conference, a rude awakening seems to be in the making. All but one expert attributes a majority of the popular vote to George W. Bush with the dissenting opinion conferring a virtual tie to the two main protagonists. Are these predictions reliable? As Pierre Martin and Richard Nadeau note, a similar exercise had predicted a win for democratic presidential candidate Al Gore in 2000. The authors present the main predictive models used to foretell George W. Bush’s victory. They then proceed to review the main elements that help explain this surprising level of support in lieu of the incumbent’s poor economic performance and his unpopularity with a large segment of the US electorate. "Whose divergence? Canada-US relations in a period of Jacksonian ascendancy" by David G. Haglund Walter Russell Mead names four schools of American foreign policy: Hamiltonian, Wilsonian, Jeffersonian and Jacksonian. The Hamiltonians, a dominant school that included the first President Bush, believe in alliances and a world order based on rules-based institutions. The Wilsonians believe in a an ideal world order where other democracies might emulate the US experience. The Jeffersonians believe that the best foreign policy is the least foreign policy, and would perfect democracy at home rather than exporting it. The second George Bush started out as Jeffersonian in the 2000 campaign when he said America should avoid nation-building, but the events of September 11, 2001, transformed his presidency into a Jacksonian model that, writes David Haglund, “rises easily to challenge whenever American interests, institutions or communities are exposed to attack.” They are America’s “warrior caste,” he writes, “and when they make war, they believe in completing the job, and hence do not shrink from total war.” Since 9/11, the Canada-US relationship must be viewed through the Jacksonian lens. "Letter from America" by Jeffrey Stacey [summary not available] "Bridging the democratic divide - creating a sense of civic engagement" by Wayne Hunt Nothing is more urgent than bridging the democratic divide between those who vote and those who don't. “What is most troubling about this,” writes Wayne Hunt, “is that people who are in the under-25 cohort are the fastest-growing demographic, and they increasingly comprise the largest portion of the non-voting contingent.” A sense of civic engagement, beyond merely voting every four years, is required to create more meaningful participation in the affairs of the post-modern world. “A cohort of Gen-Xers has come of age,” he writes, “fluent in computer technology” and the mediating institutions that come between them and social action. In this post-modern age, politics has to do away with middlemen. The Canada Corps, proposed in the Martin government's February Throne Speech, is a worthy proposal for engaging the energies and idealism of Canadians of all ages. "Expanding the federal democratic reform agenda" by F. Leslie Seidle Paul Martin, as a candidate for the Liberal leadership, put democratic reform on the public policy agenda when he spoke of “the democratic deficit” and the need to make the role of parliamentarians more important and meaningful. Paul Martin, as the leader of a minority government in the House of Commons, finds himself in a position where he is unable to elect, much less appoint, chairs of House committees, now controlled by the opposition. A wide range of other democratic reform issues have become more delicate in the minority Parliament, from the question of when to allow free votes to how to enable parliamentary review of appointments to the Supreme Court. And then there’s Senate reform, to say nothing of the movement, led by certain provinces, to mixed proportional representation and fixed election dates. IRPP Senior Research Associate F. Leslie Seidle reviews the bidding on democratic reform. "Proportional representation is likely to create more problems than it would solve; the single transferable vote offers a better choice" by Daniel Pellerin and Patrick Thomson Canada’s new minority Parliament, rewarding the major parties with more seats than their percentage of votes, has again called into question the first-past-the-post electoral system and renewed calls for some form of proportional representation (PR) in the House of Commons. But PR presents problems of its own, suggest Daniel Pellerin and Patrick Thomson. One immediate result would likely be the emergence of a Liberal-NDP coalition as “the new baseline of Canadian politics.” Splinter parties “not yet in existence might well spring up like mushrooms” to claim seats in the House of Commons. While countries such as New Zealand have hardly been plunged into chaos under mixed-member proportional representation, there is inherent instability and stagnation in some PR-based systems. One alternative, widely used in Ireland and Australia, is the use of the single transferable vote (STV) in multi-member constituencies. "Canada needs a law and an independent commissioner to protect whistleblowers" by Donald C. Rowat Canada lags seriously behind the United States and other leading democracies such as the UK and Australia in the adoption of legislation and offices to protect whistleblowers. In the light of the Radwanski affair and the sponsorship scandal, Ottawa presented a bill last March to establish an integrity commissioner, who would have reported to a minister rather than operating independently as an officer of Parliament. The legislation died on the order paper with the call of the June 28 election, and it remains to be seen what the minority Martin government will do about reviving, and strengthening, it. Donald C. Rowat, an eminent authority on ombudsmen and whistleblowers, offers some pertinent, and pointed, advice to the prime minister. "Putting accountability and responsibility back into the system of government" by C.E.S. Franks The Public Accounts Committee may have unwittingly stumbled over the origins of the sponsorship scandal, in the lack of accountability and responsibility, simply by virtue of no one coming forward and admitting it happened on their watch. The doctrine of ministerial responsibility is ambiguous in Canada in that only the minister may be held answerable for program spending while actually serving in that office or department, and deputy ministers are responsible only to the minister and not to Parliament. C.E.S. Franks, a leading authority in the field, suggests Canada look at the real Westminster model, where either the minister or deputy is responsible and the “responsibility of the accounting officers is personal and remains with them even when they change office or retire.” "An American secession" by Joseph Heath [summary not available] "Getting used to Bush" by William Watson [summary not available] |
