Her Excellency the Governor General is off to Edmonton today to visit the ihuman Youth Society Studio Arts Centre for disenfranchised youth in the heart of the city, as well as host a hip hop Youth Dialogue on violence prevention and solidarity.

Now, I will be the first to admit that hip hop has never been my thing, or really the voice of my particular generation, especially because it often carries particular misogynistic and homophobic undertones. That said, it is the voice of the current youth generation, despite my best efforts to understand it.

But I have to give snaps to Her Excellency for this kind of youth engagement, precisely because I don’t see any other political leaders doing it. I mean, can you honestly imagine any of the party leaders in this country engaging in this kind of youth dialogue? Because I can’t. Harper has built for himself this giant faux pretence of Tim Hortons, and suburban middle-class living when the reality is that he has been anything but. Michael Ignatieff, with his Harvard education and reputation as a global public intellectual doesn’t seem the type to get hip hop when he would rather be at the orchestra. If Jack Layton went in, he’d look as strained in his trying to be cool as he is any other time he tries to fit in but never quite manages. And Elizabeth May, gods love her, would simply talk about how their pimped-out rides are going to cause the destruction of the Earth.

But Her Excellency, for all the trappings of her vice-regal position, is someone who has demonstrated the ability to transcend it in order to connect with these kinds of audiences, time and again. She’s a black woman who came from Haitian poverty as a refugee to this country, and lived in a province that has challenged the right of immigrants to exist within its borders for fear that it would destroy the Québec culture. (Yes, things are different now, but it wasn’t always the case, and she has been the subject of documentaries about the difficulties of black people in Québec).

Our political life is richer for having someone like Michaëlle Jean in it. It’s the same for the makeup of the Senate – we have a far more diverse, representative slice of Canadian society in the Upper Chamber because of its particular makeup than we do in the Commons because as it stands, our electoral politics still self-selects toward the model of the authoritative straight white middle-aged man. But rather than denigrate it like many Canadians do, we need to embrace it for what it offers us, and the way that it can help us to connect to our political culture.

Elsewhere, if you’re trying to work out the election timing calculus, consider these three factors:

1- The Liberals have quadrupled their fundraising totals over last year, and the second quarter totals have only just been announced. All those stories about the Liberals being too cash-strapped to fight another election are no longer true.
2- Word from the EI “Working Group” continues to show a deteriorating situation, with Diane Finley saying the Liberals are holding firm to their 360 hour standard and that they’re in a “fantasyland” because of it – even though they’ve given no public indication that they were holding fast t this position, but rather that they had publicly said they were willing to be flexible on it. Are they trying to sabotage things even more than the Liberals unlikely ever genuine about ever achieving an actual result? It’s a very likely possibility.
3- Harper’s new message is that an election anytime soon would derail all of the good things happening in our economic recovery from the so-called Great Recession. But one has to ask – what good is a government whose response to said recession been to ignore most of the global economic consensus, and wrap up nakedly partisan attacks under the guise of “belt tightening” (as they did with the fall economic update)?

There were a flurry of releases from the Liberals yesterday, most of them should have begun with the words “A ha!”  The point of them was to call the Conservatives out for their hypocritical positions.

The first was an open letter from Liberal finance critic John McCallum to the Finance Minister, which pointed out that while Flaherty has said that the recession is not over, Stockwell Day just wrote an op-ed in his local paper that indeed it is. Which version is correct, McCallum asked. At a scrum after their caucus meeting in Ottawa, Day wouldn’t repeat the comments, just saying that there were still challenges ahead. So was that a retraction? Or just a non-retraction retraction?

Next up was an “In their own words” release, stuffed full of past quotes from the Conservatives that are deemed offensive to aboriginal Canadians. Why is this important? Because the Conservatives spent the day before patting themselves on the back for setting up an “Aboriginal caucus” within the party – despite their usual avoidance of these kinds of niche groupings. (After all, there is a whole battle going on within the party right now over the creation of a Youth Wing, which the brass doesn’t want precisely so they don’t have to cater to every other group, like women or seniors).

The last release was possibly the hardest hitting – pointing to John Baird’s apparent reversal of his position on just how accountable the minister is for infrastructure spending. After all, Baird told The Canadian Press yesterday that it wasn’t the federal government’s job to closely monitor how the money intended for infrastructure was actually spent. Contrast this to previous statements when he was Treasury Board President about how it was his job to ensure that taxpayer dollars were being spent properly, and so on. When the contradiction was pointed out, Baird’s spokesperson said they did their due diligence up front. Really? That’s not the story that’s been told, with the one-page forms that are being rushed through. It seems to me that this is but one more example of the party that was going to be whiter-than-white, more-accountable-than-thou, and all of that, is having a great deal of difficultly living up to that promise.

But that wasn’t even the most damning revelation of the day. No, that came at the end from Maclean’s intrepid liveblogger Kady O’Malley, who cast her eye to the home renovation tax credit that the Conservatives are pushing. Pushing with Harper making a photo op at a home renovation centre, and with a bombardment of taxpayer-funded advertising. It turns out that the tax credit hasn’t actually been passed into law yet – they weren’t even planning on introducing the bill until autumn. You know, when we’re likely to have an election (especially with the antagonism around the EI “working group” getting even more ratcheted up).

O’Malley’s point:

Isn’t there actually a House of Commons rule about spending public money to promote legislation that hasn’t yet been passed as though it’s a done deal, since it’s sort of abrogate-y of the role of Parliament? Didn’t the Mulroney government have its knuckles rapped by the Speaker for doing pretty much exactly the same thing by running ads before the GST had actually gone through?

And once again, Harper behaves as though the rules don’t apply to him. Yes, we know that it’s for the purpose of blatant electioneering, and that Harper will rattle his sabre, telling Canadians that those evil Liberals want to take away their tax credits (forcing Ignatieff to either guarantee that he’ll honour it, thus opening up accusations that he’s just like the Conservatives on policy, or he’ll back down from his election threat, thus opening him up to more Stéphane Dion comparisons). But for the love of Cher, it’s called the Rule of Law! You’d think that the freaking Prime Minister could actually, oh, respect it? Maybe, just possibly? I know it’s a lot to ask, but we spent all those centuries stripping power away from absolute monarchs for a reason, and that reason wasn’t just to hand it all to a Prime Minister.

There’s a story in this week’s Hill Times that got me thinking. It was about the ways in which Senators are being pressured to become more partisan, in a chamber that is far more known for its cooperative and less-partisan nature than the Other Place. Not that any of it surprises me.

While the Conservative senators, by and large, seem keen to earn favour with Harper by toeing the party lines (and I’ve been told by more than one Senator that the new batch that came in at the New Year have been partisan in the extreme). The Liberals, meanwhile, have been often told to hurry legislation through without giving it proper study so as to avoid the usual criticisms of it being stalled by the so-called “Liberal Senate.” Liberal senators haven't been happy about it, but they have gone along with it.

It’s troubling, but like I said, it’s not unexpected. Hell, the Conservatives have lately turned the Senate into a de-facto confidence chamber by threatening to treat their votes as confidence measures in a bid to bully legislation through.

The article itself goes on to talk about how the UK has established a nomination committee to appoint “independent” peers to the House of Lords, and perhaps Canada should do the same. Of the many suggestions out there for reforming our Senate, it’s one of the sanest options, as it won’t change the character of Parliament in any meaningful way, like an elected Senate would. (Seriously – in the grand scheme of things, an elected Senate is probably one of the worst things we could do).

It also quoted one of the coolest Senators currently up there, being Senator Elaine McCoy, who hails from my home province of Alberta (not Manitoba as the Hill Times article suggested. I mean seriously – can you not use the internet to do some basic fact checking?). She sits as one of the few remaining independent Progressive Conservatives in the Upper Chamber, having refused to join the Conservatives. She values her independence, and she was also one of the first Senators to establish a significant web presence. Her site is definitely worth checking out, and if you look under the  “Savvy Senate” link, you’ll find an interview with Senator Nancy Ruth.

A lot of what troubles me goes back to the basic fact that the vast majority of Canadians have no idea about how their Parliament works, and that applies most especially to the Senate and the role it plays. For Harper and the Conservatives to continue to try and tinker with its functioning to appease a populist voter base that lacks the understanding of its mechanics is playing with fire. Trying to make it a much more partisan chamber strikes me as a means to introduce even more instability and paralysis into the system – which, mind you, could be his ultimate goal for whatever nefarious purposes he may have in mind. But this is why Canadians need to get informed about these kinds of matters - so that people like Harper can't continue to manipulate them with their own ignorance (just like he did over the prorogation issue). This feels like just one more warning sign that most people are going to shrug and ignore, and that bothers me most of all.

Also quoted in the Hill Times piece is Senator Céline Hervieux-Payette, who talked about why Harper’s plans for the Senate are fundamentally bad. But today, she put out a release in her continuing crusade to save the seal hunt, but as much as I love her diva-ness, sometimes I think she can go off the deep end a bit. Yes, financial compensation for the sealing industry is one thing, but trying to get the Parliamentary Restaurant to serve seal meat as a gesture? May be a bit much. (But granted, possibly more harmless than trying to get our Olympic athletes to have seal products included in their uniforms. That unanimous Commons motion seems way more insane).

Elsewhere, Canada’s refugee board unveiled a report that shows how the Roma in the Czech Republic have been suffering at the hands of Neo-Nazi violence. These are the same refugee claimants who were causing such a flood to our system that the Minister felt it necessary to slap visa restrictions on people coming from the Czech Republic, intimating that their claims were largely bogus. So people suffering at the hands of Neo-Nazi violence are now bogus claims? I’d hate to see what then has to qualify as a legitimate claim.

On the topic of immigration, that Canadian woman trapped in Kenya has now given her DNA samples to prove that she is who she says she is. I continue to be troubled by this story, especially when the Canadian government declared her to be an impostor without examining the stacks of photo ID she had with her, and summarily rejecting half a dozen affidavits from family and friends. WTF? It’ll be a couple of weeks for this to be cleared by DNA, but I have a feeling we’ll be hearing renewed calls for a full public inquiry on this matter soon enough.

And in a case of fortuitous timing, I managed to catch the arrival of the Liberal Party’s National Director as he pulled into the Ottawa Locks after completing his kayaking fundraiser trip from Kingston, and was greeted by Michael Ignatieff. (Yes, it is a good thing I keep my camera in my bag).


Up today: the Conservatives hold the second day of their summer caucus session here in Ottawa. Meanwhile, their communications director has just resigned to “spend more time with his family,” so we’ll soon see who his replacement will be. 

It was announced over the weekend that the Liberal Caucus Summer Retreat of 2009 will be in Sudbury. Even better, it’s at the local Holiday Inn. Because I guess there’s nothing like demonstrating your frugality as you give a nod to the regions. But every time I hear that someone is heading to Sudbury, I can’t help but think about this:


The Conservatives had their own training sessions in Ottawa yesterday to help get campaign volunteers and staff prepared in the (likely) event of an autumn election. “Just in case,” they say. And that may be even more likely, considering we’ve just heard more about the inauspicious beginnings to the EI “working group.” Apparently Pierre Poilievre came in announcing that the government would never agree to reducing the number of qualifying hours for EI benefits. Well then – perhaps everyone should start ordering their lawn signs now, then?

Elsewhere, Canwest’s David Akin tries to unravel whether the Conservatives really are spending more on culture than their predecessors, as they so often proclaim. The problem is that the Conservatives seem to define culture far more broadly than the Liberals ever did, and their definition seems to include things like sports and funding Olympic athletes, rather than the more traditional arts and culture – museums, Telefilm, the CBC, and so on. These numbers were picked over in the past, and the consensus does tend to be that sure, the Conservatives are technically funding at higher numbers, but their definitions are far looser than one could traditionally call spending on culture, and with very different priorities at that.

There was a very interesting post on the Maclean’s blog roster about an Access-to-Information request by one of their reporters that only took eight-and-a-half months to get a partial answer to, and the answer there isn’t all that pretty – that there was a concerted effort to say as little as possible. Meanwhile, the issue that he was asking after – the inquiry into the death of Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi in Iran – seems to be going nowhere despite government assurances that they’re taking it seriously, and even with people who have information on her death coming forward. It was pointed out elsewhere that this paralysis of communication by the government does predate the Conservatives’ time in office, but it has become far worse in that time. It’s especially concerning, given that if you will recall, this was the government of “openness” and “accountability,” and that was going to be whiter than white about just how transparent they were going to be. But as has been demonstrated time and again, they’re far more opaque and closed than any government before them, and I fear that it just sets a precedent that makes it harder for future governments to back away from.

And finally, sombre news for Liberals on the Hill in that Jerry Yanover, one of their strategic gurus, passed away. It was said that, “Yanover is to Liberalism what Yoda is to the Jedi Council.” And while the party had been training a successor to Yanover when it comes to strategy and knowledge of all the rules and lore of the Hill, said successor has since been sidelined by a terminal illness. I am forced to wonder if this perhaps won't also have an impact on the timing of a fall election – with their strategic guru gone, will they feel as emboldened? There does seem to be a sense on the Hill that an old guard is moving on – especially up in the Press Gallery – but considering the calibre of party workers coming in to replace them, Kool-Aid drinkers who have little thought about civility and working together with other parties, but would rather score cheap points at every available opportunity – I’m not sure that it bodes well for the future.

There has been an awful lot of talk about immigration policy in this country lately, especially in the wake of the visa restrictions slapped onto visitors coming from Mexico and the Czech Republic. And slowly but surely, patterns have been forming.

Remember first of all that the Conservatives, whether by incompetence or by design, made our current refugee determination system completely dysfunctional by allowing the positions on the IRB to remain unfilled, and by reforming the appointment process in 2007, in such a way to make it easier for the Minister to have control over appointments (prompting the then-chair to resign in protest). That created a backlog of crisis proportions.

Then comes proof of what some critics – the NDP’s Olivia Chow among them – that under the Conservatives, the number of permanent residents has declined in favour of temporary workers. By permanent residents, we’re also talking about skilled migrants who have a lot to add to this country at a time when a demographic shift means we’ll need to rely more on immigrants to fill job markets and to pay taxes.

The government says that it allows these workers to hit the ground running with jobs, and it can tempt them to want to stay. Never mind that filling short-term gaps in labour is not looking ahead to future needs, let along adequately filling current ones by the time the bureaucratic process works its way through. They’ve also downloaded much of the responsibilities onto the provinces, which hasn’t helped us to articulate a national vision of where we want them to take this country. (Incidentally, one recent immigration report recommends 15 fixes to the system).

But now Jason Kenney is saying that he’ll go along with the Bloc and NDP demands for the implementation of the Refugee Appeals Division (finally) – but if they’re willing to help him reform the system, and his vision has a lot more to do putting in a badly flawed system like the UK’s then actually fixing the problems we have.

If you picked up this week’s Maclean’s, you’ll also see a reminder of some of Kenney’s former calls for a hard-line refugee system that includes detention facilities – much like the UK’s, back from his Canadian Alliance days. (The article isn’t online yet, unfortunately). But all of these pieces are starting to add up to a vision of Canada where immigration is much more tightly controlled, and it because a much more exclusive club, with a rotating door of temporary foreign workers to do the jobs that people born in Canada don’t want to do, but not allowing them to stay once the job is done.

The Maclean’s article speculates that the Conservatives are positioning to make this an election issue, pitting “good immigrants” from the ethno-cultural communities they’re trying to court, against the “bad” ones who often come to this country because of need, facing persecution in their countries of origin. It’s a dangerous game, and a very fine line to walk (and if you’ve seen Kenney, I wouldn’t exactly call him the most nimble of characters either).  Suffice to say, it’s not exactly a vision of Canada that maintains our image as a haven for justice and human rights.

Elsewhere, the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt takes a look at some of the challenges getting rural women to run as candidates for public office, but one person she spoke to says it’s not enough to just say that it’s not enough to blame it on hidebound male-dominated rural cultures. As someone who largely grew up in rural and small-town Alberta, I’d say that one can’t underestimate that effect – hell, even when I worked in the corporate sector in Calgary, there was still a fairly strict segregation of what was considered “men’s” and “women’s work” in those environments. I do think the parties need to be more aggressive with promoting and supporting female candidates – especially in rural ridings – because it’s not going to change if we don’t face those ingrained cultural biases head-on.

And finally, a group of British economists has written a letter to the Queen, apologising for the financial meltdown. This in a response to a visit Her Majesty paid to the London School of Economics, during which she asked why nobody saw it coming. I’ve heard it said that it’s almost scary how informed and up-to-date the Queen keeps on top of current events – and as well she should, being as she gets government briefings on all matters of importance – but I think this kind of apology is perhaps something more people should be doing.

In fact, I’d like to see an apology from Stephen Harper to the Queen for the way he’s been running this country, and its international reputation, into the ground…