The Conservative government has introduced its omnibus anti-crime bill. Anybody who ever read my previous blog will have guessed that I - soft on crime and proud of it - am no great fan of certain provisions of the bill, chief among them the appalling reverse onus on violent criminals to demonstrate that they shouldn't be locked away indefinitely as dangerous offenders. I don't object fundamentally to the increase in the age of consent to sixteen, given the inclusion of a two year window (i.e. a fourteen year old would still be able to consent to sex with a fifteen year old, but not with a seventeen year old). I'd probably have preferred that the two year window be replaced by an under eighteen window, but these things are necessarily arbitrary, and there's some discretion inherent in their enforcement. In any event, this bill at least misses the point less completely than does the government's drug strategy.
But woe to the Liberals. They haven't even let the throne speech pass yet, and they're already being told that the vote on this bill will be a confidence vote (and not the last one this session, either). This leaves Stéphane Dion with a two choices:
1. He can oppose the bill, and risk bringing down the government - which makes his refusal to do so on the throne speech look pretty stupid. On the other hand, there's some chance that one of the other opposition parties would agree to support the bill, thereby propping up the government (I can't imagine that the Bloc is eager for an election right now), since nobody's soft on crime anymore except me.
2. He can let the bill through, by voting in favour or abstaining. This wouldn't cause too great a hit to his credibility (nowhere near the hit that will be caused if he lets the Conservative environmental plan, which I imagine will also be a confidence vote, through), but it will signal that he's essentially willing to let the Conservatives have their way in the interests of avoiding an election. That won't help the Liberals at all once there finally is one.
Those are basically his choices: provoke an election, thereby nullifying whatever small advantage there was in letting the throne speech get through and making him look pretty stupid in the process, or capitulate indefinitely in the interests of avoiding an election. Both options will do the Liberals less good than opposing the throne speech would have.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Dion and the Speech from the Throne
Liberal sources said Dion wanted to force an election, fearing his reputation as a champion of the environment and progress he's made wooing Green and left-wing voters will be seriously hurt if Liberals don't vote against Harper's anti-Kyoto message.
- The Canadian Press
You're goddamned right it will be. And it's not going to be helped by the fact that one of the amendments the Liberals plan to move to the throne speech is to reduce corporate taxes.
In Westminster-style democracies, throne speeches matter. Governments are granted an incredible amount of control over Parliament - too much if you ask me, which you didn't - and the one concession they have to give in exchange for this power is setting out their priorities at the beginning of each sitting, that it might be subjected to a vote. Voting in favour of a throne speech does not indicate, as Stephen Harper has suggested, that an MP is then bereft of authority to vote against any government bill alluded to in the speech, but it does mean that the MP is consenting to give the government the power to push ahead with its agenda. And it's pretty difficult to keep up the kind of rhetoric in which Stéphane Dion's been engaging about Harper if you're de facto consenting to this.
But forget substance (n.b. please don't actually forget substance) - let's talk about strategy. Stéphane Dion has, thus far, been a catastrophe as Liberal leader (full disclosure: I donated to his campaign, but this was in the belief that he'd make a good Prime Minister, not in the belief that he'd be a good party leader). But what do the election naysayers expect to change between now and some unspecified future time which will be more opportune for an election? It's a lesson of Canadian political history that leaders redeem themselves at election time: Turner 1988 (sort of), Trudeau 1980 (sort of), Stanfield 1972 (sort of)...if Dion is going to be successful as Liberal leader, it's going to be because he outperformed expectations in an election campaign. Therefore, he needs an election campaign. Moreover, Liberals who think Dion is doomed to remain a failure need an election campaign: either they're right, the Liberals perform badly, and Dion is swiftly replaced by whoever happens to be The Next Pierre Trudeau that week, or they're wrong, Dion kicks ass, and the Liberals are the only place they're comfortable being - in power.
Instead of getting the election they so sorely need, the Liberals have opted to give themselves at least a few more months of imploding in the opposition benches. Maybe Stéphane Dion really isn't a leader.
An interesting side plot is Garth Turner's vote on the throne speech. He has been an unabashedly public advocate of two things recently:
1. The Liberals should bring down the government at the first opportunity, and
2. MPs should vote as they see fit.
Combine this with the fact that he recently told me that he doesn't think Joe Comuzzi would have been kicked out of the Liberal caucus if he'd told Dion in advance and in private of his intentions to vote in favour of the Conservative budget, and I can't see how he could justify anything but a vote against the speech. My hunch is that he abstains, though.
- The Canadian Press
You're goddamned right it will be. And it's not going to be helped by the fact that one of the amendments the Liberals plan to move to the throne speech is to reduce corporate taxes.
In Westminster-style democracies, throne speeches matter. Governments are granted an incredible amount of control over Parliament - too much if you ask me, which you didn't - and the one concession they have to give in exchange for this power is setting out their priorities at the beginning of each sitting, that it might be subjected to a vote. Voting in favour of a throne speech does not indicate, as Stephen Harper has suggested, that an MP is then bereft of authority to vote against any government bill alluded to in the speech, but it does mean that the MP is consenting to give the government the power to push ahead with its agenda. And it's pretty difficult to keep up the kind of rhetoric in which Stéphane Dion's been engaging about Harper if you're de facto consenting to this.
But forget substance (n.b. please don't actually forget substance) - let's talk about strategy. Stéphane Dion has, thus far, been a catastrophe as Liberal leader (full disclosure: I donated to his campaign, but this was in the belief that he'd make a good Prime Minister, not in the belief that he'd be a good party leader). But what do the election naysayers expect to change between now and some unspecified future time which will be more opportune for an election? It's a lesson of Canadian political history that leaders redeem themselves at election time: Turner 1988 (sort of), Trudeau 1980 (sort of), Stanfield 1972 (sort of)...if Dion is going to be successful as Liberal leader, it's going to be because he outperformed expectations in an election campaign. Therefore, he needs an election campaign. Moreover, Liberals who think Dion is doomed to remain a failure need an election campaign: either they're right, the Liberals perform badly, and Dion is swiftly replaced by whoever happens to be The Next Pierre Trudeau that week, or they're wrong, Dion kicks ass, and the Liberals are the only place they're comfortable being - in power.
Instead of getting the election they so sorely need, the Liberals have opted to give themselves at least a few more months of imploding in the opposition benches. Maybe Stéphane Dion really isn't a leader.
An interesting side plot is Garth Turner's vote on the throne speech. He has been an unabashedly public advocate of two things recently:
1. The Liberals should bring down the government at the first opportunity, and
2. MPs should vote as they see fit.
Combine this with the fact that he recently told me that he doesn't think Joe Comuzzi would have been kicked out of the Liberal caucus if he'd told Dion in advance and in private of his intentions to vote in favour of the Conservative budget, and I can't see how he could justify anything but a vote against the speech. My hunch is that he abstains, though.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Here we are now / Entertain us / Read my damned blog
"I've made a decision about your life," remarked my girlfriend to me today as we watched a 590 pound pumpkin crush a van, "you're going to blog again."
It's not a bad decision for a number of reasons. For one thing, I'm not writing as much as I should be. I like writing. When I'm on my game, I think I'm quite good at it (although this certainly doesn't preclude my churning out thousands of words of hackneyed drivel the rest of the time - welcome to my blog!). I have some ambition to eventually get myself published in some meaningful form (no disrespect intended to the St. Albert Gazette, the Alberta Teachers' Association News, or the Gateway). To attain this ambition I'm going to have to write, and I'm not doing nearly enough of it.
Besides that, I'm experiencing a very mild third-of-life crisis. It's mostly the standard stuff: what am I doing with my life, can I ever give myself the self-discipline to match my ambitions and abilities, at what age will I be able to grow facial hair of the sort possessed by actual adult males, blah, blah, blah, etc., etc., etc. But it's exacerbated by the accomplishments I see by my peers. My predecessor as Business Manager of the Gateway Student Journalism Society, Don Iveson, recently became the first candidate in twelve years to knock off a sitting Edmonton city councillor. I'm thrilled; I volunteered for his campaign, and I think he's going to be an exceptional councillor. That he turfed Mike Nickel is just gravy. But I look at Don, and I can't help but to notice that I'm lazier, less articulate, and shorter (I'm also a worse business manager, but this is praise by faint damnation - I can't take any more offense to this than could Jimmy Carter when his mother ranked him as the sixth best President in American history). Don's three years older than me; will I have done anything comparable to what he's done three years hence? Of course, the accomplishment wasn't all Don's. The media has taken great care, when talking about his victory, to highlight his near-flawless campaign. It was run by my roommate.
There's some nostalgia in this decision, too: once upon a time I had a blog. It got pretty respectable readership. Sometimes it got me mentioned by semi-prominent people, like Toronto Star columnists and anonymous bloggers. Combined with my time in student politics, it provided me with a certain level of glory that's been missing lately. here's an example of what I mean. Life's good, but I have an ego to satiate, and my current activities aren't doing the trick; worship me, readers.
That left the question of where to blog. My old blog was the most obvious option, but since I abandoned it for the first time I've made plenty of attempts to come back to it; rarely did these attempts last longer than a few posts. I now realize that that blog and I had good times, but it's time to move on. I hope we can still be friends.
Then there's Points of Information, to which I used to be a sometime contributor, before it fell on hard times. There are plenty of reasons that I might have considered using it as my venue: in its day, it had a good reputation. It's well-designed, something that no blog to which I'm the sole contributor will ever be. It allowed for some interplay between me and some very intelligent co-contributors. But I think I need to go it alone, for now. Besides that, it doesn't allow commenting, and it's hard to receive sufficient adulation through trackback.
Here we are, then, at my new blog. I've been pretty stagnant lately: this is my notice that I'm about to get back in motion.
It's not a bad decision for a number of reasons. For one thing, I'm not writing as much as I should be. I like writing. When I'm on my game, I think I'm quite good at it (although this certainly doesn't preclude my churning out thousands of words of hackneyed drivel the rest of the time - welcome to my blog!). I have some ambition to eventually get myself published in some meaningful form (no disrespect intended to the St. Albert Gazette, the Alberta Teachers' Association News, or the Gateway). To attain this ambition I'm going to have to write, and I'm not doing nearly enough of it.
Besides that, I'm experiencing a very mild third-of-life crisis. It's mostly the standard stuff: what am I doing with my life, can I ever give myself the self-discipline to match my ambitions and abilities, at what age will I be able to grow facial hair of the sort possessed by actual adult males, blah, blah, blah, etc., etc., etc. But it's exacerbated by the accomplishments I see by my peers. My predecessor as Business Manager of the Gateway Student Journalism Society, Don Iveson, recently became the first candidate in twelve years to knock off a sitting Edmonton city councillor. I'm thrilled; I volunteered for his campaign, and I think he's going to be an exceptional councillor. That he turfed Mike Nickel is just gravy. But I look at Don, and I can't help but to notice that I'm lazier, less articulate, and shorter (I'm also a worse business manager, but this is praise by faint damnation - I can't take any more offense to this than could Jimmy Carter when his mother ranked him as the sixth best President in American history). Don's three years older than me; will I have done anything comparable to what he's done three years hence? Of course, the accomplishment wasn't all Don's. The media has taken great care, when talking about his victory, to highlight his near-flawless campaign. It was run by my roommate.
There's some nostalgia in this decision, too: once upon a time I had a blog. It got pretty respectable readership. Sometimes it got me mentioned by semi-prominent people, like Toronto Star columnists and anonymous bloggers. Combined with my time in student politics, it provided me with a certain level of glory that's been missing lately. here's an example of what I mean. Life's good, but I have an ego to satiate, and my current activities aren't doing the trick; worship me, readers.
That left the question of where to blog. My old blog was the most obvious option, but since I abandoned it for the first time I've made plenty of attempts to come back to it; rarely did these attempts last longer than a few posts. I now realize that that blog and I had good times, but it's time to move on. I hope we can still be friends.
Then there's Points of Information, to which I used to be a sometime contributor, before it fell on hard times. There are plenty of reasons that I might have considered using it as my venue: in its day, it had a good reputation. It's well-designed, something that no blog to which I'm the sole contributor will ever be. It allowed for some interplay between me and some very intelligent co-contributors. But I think I need to go it alone, for now. Besides that, it doesn't allow commenting, and it's hard to receive sufficient adulation through trackback.
Here we are, then, at my new blog. I've been pretty stagnant lately: this is my notice that I'm about to get back in motion.
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