Alberta, yes you can elect a new Government

Those who’ll decide who wins Alberta’s election next week will be holding their noses for change or holding their noses to keep the status quo. Political change, as well as corruption, always smells. But you should try it now. Long ago, it was good for Alberta and, if any place can afford it today, Alberta can.

Danielle Smith isn’t the least bit concerned and she knows a thing or two about political experimentation. Your credit is fantastic, your wealth-generating capacity is enviable and resilient, you have built up a superior public service, and your divisions are not bitter.

Admittedly, Ontario isn’t a popular place from which to dare Albertans to take the plunge. We’ve been a pain for decades about Alberta’s “advantage” and fiscal choices. Also, as eastern cosmopolitans, our competence now is to advise on a fee-for-service basis, in private. Nevertheless, Ontario has clearly led you on one thing: our relatively recent experience at throwing out an ancient regime should steel your nerves and challenge your pride.

Ontario Progressive Conservatives won 12 elections and then were eased out in 1985. Alberta Progressive Conservatives won their 12th election in 2012, and are still in power. Stopping them now won’t be the end for the PCs, our Alberta’s brand.

Alberta incumbents are acting the way the Ontario ones did 30 years ago. Ridiculously long-serving regimes don’t simply use scare tactics in elections—they are scared. They actually believe that their lovely government can’t carry on successfully without them.

Call it patriotic hysteria, if you wish.

Ontario has experienced three changes in government over these last 30 years. Certainly that’s plenty. The times have not been as easy for Ontario as they were in, say, the '50s and '60s. It has been riding the business cycles of an open, diversified, mid-continent jurisdiction. However, the provincial governments since the days of the Big Blue Machine haven’t irrevocably altered Ontario’s underlying characteristics, one way or another. We’ve discovered that our brand remains appealing and is not the property of any one party.

Winning in the midst of a resource recession, of course, isn’t ideal. However, Alberta politics and government would be refreshed by either a Wildrose or a New Democratic minority government.

Either would have to pass a budget and avoid making big mistakes. So, they’ll have to listen intelligently to professional public servants and voters who voted, hopefully, for positive change.

First, Wildrose ministers wouldn’t owe the Alberta public service any thanks and that would be scary—for public servants. However, each Wildrose minister would fight to keep all program dollars and staff resources that they would discover were necessary to provide popular public services.

Second, as a national contender in this fall’s federal election, a win for the New Democrats in Alberta could have greater political significance.

An indisputably left-of-center government would finally have to manage and champion a great, troubled resource economy.

Representing almost exclusively consumer-oriented voters in political opposition for decades has rusted thinking in the NDP and the credibility of the left across Canada. They have found it too easy to be green. If they win power next week, they’ll have to figure out how to be credible taxers of Alberta resources, competent environmental regulators, and champions of oil and gas investment and transportation. If they’re reluctant and fail at these tasks, they’ll be quickly thrown out.

The NDP wouldn’t get to wreck Alberta, but they could make or break Thomas Mulcair this fall.

There are plenty of incentives for a new Alberta government to behave and launch successful reforms. This would be good for Alberta’s democracy: it would give the PCs a nice pause to think outside of briefing sessions in government; and it would challenge briefers in government service to do their very best for a strange new crowd sent to them by the people.

A ‘Democratic Party’ in Canada will make perfect sense--after it’s done.

The Canadian right is united in Parliament and in elections; to its left are three national parties that are divided in Parliament and in elections. Left politicians complain that this is unfair; only a handful wants to do something about it.

Canada, it seems, must carry on as a multiparty democracy alongside 315 million Americans who organize their public affairs within two big tents. Canadian reformers believe Americans are too impatient. They’d rather spend their intelligence struggling to be in a good place, when sometime in the future, things change.

The latest half-measure on the way to party unification—electoral co-operation—is not making much progress. Professional Liberals and professional New Democrats would rather try once again to beat Stephen Harper—and each other—in the next election. Co-operation’s governing logic—parliamentary coalition—is played down. 

Most critics focus on emotions and messaging problems. Old wounds and professional jealousies are more keenly felt, and expressed, than hope. Furthermore, electoral co-operation requires mutually acceptable messaging and public declarations that any three opposition leaders would better lead the country than Stephen Harper.

The idea is weak tactically. Its only virtue is that it’s more democratic than the left’s 2008 parliamentary attempt to persuade the Governor General to form a coalition government without the bother of a national election.

The most attractive case against the idea was expressed by Adam Goldenberg in an op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen. He actually wants more genuine debate and differing ideas in our public discourse and sees no national emergency to justify splitting up the “center.” He prefers to see the two main opposition parties as distinct standard-bearers.

“Liberals are, or should be, committed first and last to equality of opportunity and to individual freedom — freedom from unreasonable government interference, freedom from fear and discrimination, from the indignity of poverty and the financial burden of disease.

“Social democrats are, or should be, more concerned with equality of outcomes, achieved by imposing confiscatory taxes on high incomes and inherited wealth and by championing the cause of labour against capital.”

That said, Goldenberg asserts accurately that Liberalism is not a “left-wing” ideology. Fair enough. The Greens, for that matter, needn’t cluster exclusively on the left. Socialism, in practices, has hardly been great for the environment. 

He goes on, however, to assert inaccurately that the Liberals are not a “left-wing” party. He implies that they are the “center” and, at the same time, rejects putting ideologies on a left-right spectrum.

This is unpersuasive. Ideas are always roughly treated in power politics and never permanently housed in partisan organizations. Classic liberalism and socialism do not guide either the New Democrats or the Liberals and hardly keep them apart.

Indeed, the center of the new Conservative Party thought they elected a classic liberal last time and probably will replace him with a classic liberal next time.

Socialism is as much a conceit in the NDP as Toryism is in the Conservative Party. Both ideas, of course, are kept alive and refreshed. The former is sheltered in university campuses and the latter in cottage country in Eastern Canada. Partisans who still call themselves "socialists" have a night reserved at each national convention to honor the past—and the "Tories" get to see the word "royal" on military uniforms.

Once you set aside the romantics and bigots, Canada is rather evenly and loosely divided on a number of persistent national questions: need the federal government inspire or just keep the country open and secure? Must the federal government drive reform in health and other public services? Should we invest more in creative government or ambitious individuals? Should we be closer to the US or polish our own brand?

On these questions, today’s so-called “left”—Greens, Liberals, and New Democrats—say almost exactly the same thing.

With heating and operating subsidies shrinking, they’d be wise to get into one tent and do politics pretty much the way their sister factions play politics in America’s Democratic Party.  

Your turn Green Party?

“Third parties are like bees,” the intellectual historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1955. “Once they have stung, they die.” It’s an aphorism that aptly describes the anti-slavery and anti-immigrant parties of the mid-nineteenth century, the Populists and Progressives who ushered out the Gilded Age, as well as more recent third-party standard bearers, from George Wallace to Ross Perot. All of these movements and figures influenced American politics dramatically, before fading away and leaving the basic two-party duopoly intact.”

—Ross Douthat in the New York Times, May 15, 2012

Click on: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/the-third-party-fantasy/  

With the collapse of minority government and a minority government’s future guarantor—proportional representation—the national Green Party of Canada has lost any credible prospect of becoming a significant ongoing influence in Canadian politics. It can’t intimidate a majority government. Furthermore, whenever the public is aroused, the Green’s priority concern—the environment—can be easily taken up as a priority by existing political parties, on both the left and the right.

However, it still has a working stinger. And it should use it now. The configuration and leadership of Canada’s opposition forces—the alternative Canadian government—will be resolved over the next year.

Presently, with 3% of the vote, meaningful support in British Columbia, one excellent communicator in the House of Commons, and a nice middle-class brand, it can make a strategic difference: either by joining Thomas Muclair and the New Democrats or by joining the Liberal life-raft in the center.

The Green Party would be a prize for either potential suitor. Mulcair’s prospects in BC and his image as a centrist builder would be enhanced. Joining the Liberals could literally keep them alive long enough for further room in the center to open up.

You could object: This isn’t America! Okay, but don’t try to say that we’re more complicated, that we’re too prickly to express ourselves within two national political parties. There is no compelling evidence that Canadian voters or their political elites want or need a multiparty political system to articulate changing national values and challenges. 

Regional parties do have a legitimate, if temporary, place in the political market place. That’s why, now and then, we have minority governments. Regional grievances, however, are hardly the core business of the Green Party.

Unless a decent majority of Greens soon decides whom they want to support, the Green Party will fade away without ever being a serious nuisance, let alone a game-changer. That would be a sad fate for an institution founded on the principals of sustainable development.

Taxing the worst of the One Percenters

The far right’s brain eventually produced the idea that America’s biggest problem is a Kenyan-born Hawaiian racist. That message was eventually replaced by a more subtle notion: the Hawaiian is destroying job creators.  

The political divide now may be less personal and more about the idea of having ideas. However, the suggestions in circulation are not much better than the crudest slogans of the Occupy Movement and the Tea Partiers.

Conservatives now are not only political optimists—an historical perversion—they believe you can bake into the US constitution a no-tax increase amendment and still finance the greatest country, with the biggest government, with the biggest military in the world, for decades into a tumultuous future.

Social democrats, who lead in the polls in France, hold the balance of power in Ontario and are pushing Obama in the Democrat Party and are convinced the ticket to power is to raise new taxes on millionaires.

They reminisce about the tax rates of the 1950s. Social democrats and liberals—the champions of the mandatory social safety net and the students on the Freedom Buses who knew that fellow white Americans were itching to beat them up at the next stop—now see America’s problems in the vaults of the worst of the One Percent.

A 75% levy on millionaires in France and a 2% surcharge on those making incomes over half a million in Ontario will not violate Charter rights on either continent, immediately enrich real estate markets in London and New York, or kill human ingenuity.

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/commentary/barrie-mckenna/taxing-the-rich-akin-to-ethnic-cleansing-seriously/article2402977/

However, along with risking economic growth, these proposals also trivialize the message of social democracy in society as a whole. Relations below the one percent—between public and private workers, pensioners and young people, the poor and the middle classes, union workers and service workers, interns and permanent employees, for instance—are not perfect. The just society isn’t waiting just one further grand bargain with the rich.

Of course, the more affluent can pay a little more, including those affluent who benefit most from public services. That perspective is central to Obama’s proposals thus far and will be articulated in any deal he reaches with the Republicans after the November elections.

However, it’s escapist pandering to suggest that tax reform is only about the rich or that the vast lobby industry of the 20th century didn’t carve out privileges for groups across society that society as a whole not now afford.

You’d have thought the slogan “We’re the 99Percenters” was too smug to be taken seriously. Yet, it seems to be excusing equally smug policy.

Nevertheless, it is a slogan nice people could have waved in the 1930s, people with leaders selling the idea that others—in some other sinful city—were the source of their misfortune and salvation.

Two bullies building a two-party democracy for Canada?

Never has Canadian politics been so strangely and portentously aligned. Together, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Official Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair are truly unique.

Canada has witnessed pragmatists and intellectuals, party men and outsiders, free men and bought men, face off across the House of Commons. Never before, at one time, however, has Canadian politics been lead by two exceptionally intelligent loners, with a common vision of leadership and confidence that Canada isn’t too big to be lead by two national parties—one center right and one center left.

The right has already united and crushed the little flowers of traditional conservatism. Now, with Harper’s co-operation, Thomas Mulcair, is out to do the same on the left, over the next three or eight years.

This enterprise will unearth indignant and amusing opposition.

Core “social-democrats” will worry about sounding like Liberals, while campaigning on Barack Obama’s tax themes. They’ll argue that it’s safe to trade votes with Liberals in Ottawa backrooms but it's dangerous to campaign on the ground with other progressives in the suburbs of Toronto.

Old Liberals will argue that Canada has outgrown even the Liberal Party’s grand old big tent and that it’s pure vanity that any other tent can ever be built in its place.

That the party of Trudeau, Chretien, King, Laurier, World War Two, and the War Measures Act doesn’t really feel comfortable anymore about the prospect of strong majority governments. They call Harper an autocrat and see Canada inevitably returning to a five-party state.

As in any free country, there should be air time for a true socialist voice in Canada. That voice, however, isn’t loud enough in the New Democratic Party today to prevent the NDP from simply becoming Canada’s Democratic Party.

Mulcair should conduct himself in the North American progressive tradition and challenge all the romancing about European models of coalition democracy. 

Thomas Mulcair isn’t spinach, he’s appealing

The most popular pundit advice to New Democrats in today’s leadership balloting is: vote for Thomas Mulcair because he’s so mean he won’t even feel it when those mean Harper Conservatives launch their awesome negative ads in the next election.

This theory is borne of the gentle notion that the Liberal Party’s laughable performance in the last election was really not their fault. Rather, that they and their implicitly electable leader Michael Ignatieff were savaged by devastating negative ads by Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.

New Democrats would be well wise to vote for Mulcair for better reasons than that.

Harper and his team may or may not be their competition in three years, but we do know that there is absolutely no evidence that Canadians rely on advertising to decide what they think of Liberal and NDP leaders or that negative advertising now decides Canadian elections.

Here’s what was historic about last year’s Canadian election: the Liberal leader had the shortest public service résumé and obviously had less political talent than the leader of the New Democrats. For the first time, the Liberal leader ranked third in public approval polls and, on election day, the Liberals came in third.

Being as mean as Harper isn’t the task for New Democrats today. To New Democrats who are tempted to pick someone a little less overwhelming as Mulcair, think about Bob Rae’s ambition and the ego and savvy of the Liberal Party of Canada.

The first job of the fortunate new leader of the New Democrats is to stay ahead and offer leadership to other forces naturally growing in opposition to the government of the day.

Thomas Mulcair, above all the others, has demonstrated the initiative, confidence, and the ruthlessness to not let that work fall back into the hands of the Liberals or anyone else.

Thomas Mulcair: putting “new” back in the word “renewal”

Ed Broadbent was an important leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party. He was the first to take over from the socialist giants of the Great Depression and he was the first to have to accept that private enterprise and activist government, in country after country, was producing better results than textbook socialism.

Ed Broadbent could believe in “democratic socialism or social democracy” and that Pierre Trudeau was not a “progressive.” No one suggested he was either confused or confusing.

He gave extremely long, Bill Clinton–busy speeches on industrial policy, unemployment, inflation, and Canadian economic nationalism. In 1988, he peaked politically with 43 seats in English-Speaking Canada. After 23 years of “steady progress,” last year the NDP under Jack Layton’s leadership won a whopping 44 seats in English-speaking Canada.

That’s the anemic pace of progressive renewal that Ed Broadbent believes the NDP must respectfully maintain.

Ed Broadbent is alarmed by the casual approach of leadership frontrunner Thomas Mulcair. Mulcair seems to believe that renewal actually means fundamental change—that the Broadbent-Layton leadership formula isn’t leading to political office or to a winning union of progressives in Canada.

Click on: http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/03/17/ed-broadbent-defends-criticism-of-ndp-frontrunner-thomas-mulcairs-credentials/

Ed Broadbent worries that with Mulcair in charge, the NDP will get “too close to the center” and, then, will disappear.

He doesn’t draw any picture in policy terms. But that’s beside the point. “The center” for a New Democrat hardliner is one ugly constant: the Liberal Party of Canada. Not being a Liberal is the litmus test of a true Canadian progress. There’s something about medicine, childcare, taxing big business, growing wheat, growing old, and peace-keeping that Liberals just don’t get—at least, when they're in power.

Yet, if the Democratic Party in the United States can continue to hold together the interests and egos of the American left, then, surely, Canada’s moderate left can come together and give Canada’s Conservatives a straightforward challenge in the next election.

Ed Broadbent loathes the “center” but favors parliamentary “coalitions” with Liberals in minority parliaments. That, supposedly, is acceptable because you and your labels don’t disappear and it’s parliamentary. And parliamentary is British and that, at least, is not American.  

However, it’s less democratic, less forceful, and less straightforward than finding a leader with ideas and sufficient will to unite and excite sufficient voters to win directly—for instance, choosing a difficult character like Pierre Trudeau, who turned off many progressives like Ed Broadbent.

Old Labor in Great Britain isn’t being reborn out of the recent election defeat of New Labor. The Progressive Conservative Party of Canada is dead. The Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation is dead. They eventually got the message from the votes they needed: they had no winning future and they died. As was the case with the right, the future of the left in Canada, in the United States, and in Great Britain depends now not on old brands, elder statesmen, public subsidies, and voter loyalties, but above all, it depends on adventurers like Thomas Mulcair.

Fighting over an “ordinary” brand for Canada’s left

It’s too much to ask for the drama of a heresy trial or the Republican primaries. The Canadian left is too old and too conservative for any of that. Nevertheless, the New Democratic Party’s leadership race is finally starting to generate news and a little feeling.

Last Sunday, in Winnipeg, we’re told, the gloves came off.

Click on:  http://m.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ndp-leadership-candidates-take-off-the-gloves/article2350862/?service=mobile

The “wedge” issue was created by front-runner Thomas Mulcair, who suggested that the NDP must refresh its slogans and renew its appeal if it is to win power—they might even, gasp, drop expressions of loyalty to “ordinary Canadians” every time they open their mouths in public.

Stunningly, he declined to withdraw these remarks. Several of his opponents not only committed themselves to stick with the “ordinary” but saw great benefit in plodding along according to the way they do things now.

Peggy Nash, who whispers the word “inspire” in every second sentence and hopes to be everyone’s second ballot choice, insists that the Party has already nicely renewed itself under the infallible leadership of the recently deceased Jack Layton.

Jack Layton occupies the same position of authority in the NDP that Ronald Reagan has among Republicans. While never winning a national election, his name permits most New Democrat politicians to stop thinking.

Unfortunately, for Peggy Nash and the other leadership candidates favoring continuity, Jack’s campaign rhetoric is pretty lame without Jack’s famous cane.

Mulcair deserves careful attention. He actually wants to win the next election against Stephen Harper. He knows that to do that he must keep his 59 seats in Quebec. To do that, he knows he must show Quebecers that he’s on fire in English-speaking Canada. He can’t catch fire in English-speaking Canada without being more interesting than Bob Rae, who’ll likely be a 67-year-old leader of the Liberal Party.

That means dropping stale, deflating slogans like “ordinary Canadians.”

Health Care and the 2012 Election

Economic conditions will heavily influence the campaigns and outcome of next year’s presidential election. However, even the most blinkered followers of Homo economicus know that rational economic arguments cannot long hold people’s imagination, crowd out other issues, or counter the big one—who looks like the right one to lead.

(Otherwise, Canada’s Bob Stanfield would have beaten Pierre Trudeau, Jimmy Carter would have won a second, and Bill Clinton’s eye-popping insight that “It’s the economy, stupid” would just be rattling around safely in Arkansas.)  

Kevin Drum goes one step further and dares to argue that Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act could be the election issue:

“That's really what the 2012 election is about. All the shouting aside, neither party is going to end up doing anything very different about the economy. Nor is there really all that big a difference between the parties on foreign policy these days. No, the single biggest accomplishment of the past decade has been the passage of Obamacare, and the single biggest difference between the parties going forward is whether or not it gets repealed, ending health care reform for another decade or two. In the end, that might not be enough to get the liberal base fired up, but it should be.

Front page image: TalkRadioNews/Flickr

Click on: http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/10/healthcare-and-2012-election

Other than winding down his predecessor’s wars and climbing out of his predecessor’s recession, health is Obama’s defining project. If Obama wins and universal health care survives, he will be judged as a great president, rather than a gracious black footnote.

The economy is the issue, the steadiest strategists say, because it’s bad. As important, the politicians think they know what to say about it, how to be angry or sell good times in 10- to 30-second commercials.

Pollsters ask and the people reply: it’s Obama and Bush’s fault. Mitt Romney once ran a profitable business and, so, he feels that he’s free to claim he knows how a president can create jobs. Yet, there’s more superstition than substance behind these arguments. Democrats and Republicans today are both sloppy Keynesians, and neither can make tax reform politically sexy without pandering to extremes. The presidents who presided over periods of exceptional economic growth had no business experience. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan, and both Roosevelts were exclusively public men.

Health reform is complicated, but so is economics. Furthermore, a bad healthcare system, like a bad economy, gets people’s attention.

The choice between making universal health care work verses relieving the federal government of any responsibility for fixing the problem is as significant, as straightforward, and as truly presidential as anything the contestants will say about economic recovery.

If, by next summer, the Supreme Court rules that Obama’s ACA does have authority to compel Americans to participate in a universal health insurance scheme and Romney wins the Republican nomination, it’s quite possible that healthcare will be a decisive issue.

The Republican must make sense of being for universal compulsory health care for Massachusetts, but not for America; the Democrat must argue that another nation-wide entitlement can work as well as the others—and can be paid for.

Ontario’s election: who do you fear most?

Ontario’s October 6th election will reinforce—or undermine—the impact of the spring Federal election on the future of Canadian politics. Canada’s largest province will confirm whether the Conservatives will hold the upper hand, whether the left will unite, or whether the Liberals will survive  as a viable centrist alternative in English-Speaking Canada.

The stakes are high though the election is boring, even by Ontario standards. 

(It may not be fair that Ontarians have so much political power and can’t talk politics with either the passion or clarity of Quebecers or British Columbians. Nevertheless, big change in Canada doesn’t happen without Ontario’s permission.)

The circumstances are different this fall, but only slightly so. The incumbent Dalton McGuinty is a Liberal. However, from day one, the polls put the Conservative leader Tim Hudak ahead, with New Democrat leader Andrea Horvath in a strong third position. The Ontario economy is every bit as vulnerable to events in the US and Europe and fear of a second recession is widespread. Ontarians voted consciously for a “strong stable” government this spring and are being urged to do so with equal urgency by Dalton McGuinty this fall.

 The economic platforms of all three parties are ridiculously optimistic, but fear is the dominant force behind both front runners. McGuinty insists he can reduce the deficit without hurting anyone. Hudak claims he alone won’t raise taxes. Horvath, the ingénue, is the only serious gambler in the race: she’s unafraid to promise generous tax relief to voters, tax increases for business, and numerous new spending and subsidy programs for health, education and social services, and Ontario job-creation.

Horvath is growing in the polls and could become the election issue. She’s not Jack Layton. Indeed, in Ontario, she could be more successful. There’s something unqualified, homespun, and constructive about her message.

She may be an economic illiterate. However, her opponents haven’t demonstrated over their careers, in their platforms, or in their rhetoric abiding respect for economics or fiscal probity. Nothing in the NDP platform is more extravagant than McGuinty’s green energy subsidies. And her biggest difference with Hudak on tax policy is that she proposes to raise new taxes to help pay for her cuts.

As her polling numbers improve, Tim Hudak will have to make a fateful decision: does he take Stephen Harper’s “strong stable” message away from Dalton McGuinty and talk about the dangers of another Liberal-NDP coalition? Does he set aside his palpable fear of appearing too conservative and make a serious conservative case against both McGuinty and Horvath?

Certainly, if the NDP gains the balance of power there is no likelihood that Ontario will regain control of its finances or be able to back further measures by the federal government to stimulate private investment and restrain public spending.

By the way, on Monday, The Globe and Mail reported that if Ontario was an independent country its accumulated public sector debt-to-GDP ratio would be over 80%, slightly higher than Spain’s and slightly less than Portugal’s.

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investment-ideas/features/at-the-bell/three-charts-to-start-your-week/article2170968/