There were not one, but two summer press conferences taking place yesterday. The first was the Liberal press conference of the day, once again starring Scott Brison, and the topic was Conservatives cutting the funding to summer festivals, such as Caribana, Toronto Pride and FrancoFollies in Montreal. Brison said that with $12 million still unspent in the Marquee Tourism Event Program, he’d like to see those groups get their funding retroactively restored – and that’s a figure that would eliminate Toronto Pride’s deficit.

Jack Layton held a press conference a short while later, where he called for compromise on the census issue and extended an invitation to Harper to meet with him, so they can do wonderful things like amend Section 31 of the Census Act and eliminate the threat of jail time while keeping the long-form mandatory. Yeah, good luck with that, considering that this scrapping is apparently one of Harper’s personal pet projects.

During the Q&A portion, the topic of vandalism to the Wikipedia page regarding the F-35 fighters being traced back to a DND computer was brought up. Layton said that such action was akin to a totalitarian regime rewriting history – really? Isn’t that pretty much like invoking Godwin’s Law and calling your opponents Nazis? The party then issued a strongly worded press release on the subject.

Layton also covered the issues of the problems at the RCMP – confusing the issue of just what constitutes civilian oversight in the process – as well as the Enbridge pipeline spill and wondering why Alberta wants to ship its raw bitumen to the States when jobs would be created in Canada by upgrading it here – even though that would also increase our carbon emissions, not that it was a consideration I’m sure.

Poor Tilly O’Neill-Gordon, Conservative MP for Miramichi. All those dastardly Liberal MLAs want to claim credit for plans to expand the local prison, rather than let her claim it. The nerve!

A Quebec asbestos company is trying to lay the blame on Michael Ignatieff for the decision by Chinese investors to pull out of a deal to try to reopen one of two asbestos mines left in the country. It’s largely being called a far-fetched theory.

The Conference Board of Canada says that we might come out of deficit a year earlier than expected. Provided, of course, that commodity prices stay high and there isn’t a second global economic downturn, and all those various and sundry other caveats.

This weekend – the Liberal Express heads out to Atlantic Canada. Should Tilly O’Neill-Gordon be nervous about that too?

PS – I’m not usually a big election prognosticator – mostly because I suck at it – but during Power & Politics last night, Kady O’Malley reminded me of something that got me wondering. The auditor general is due to come out with a report on stimulus spending this autumn. It seems to me that the government would probably like to engineer an election before that comes out. Why? So if it shows that it was nothing but one giant gong show – and let’s face it, it’s almost certainly going to show that – then they have either the cover of no longer being in charge, and letting the Liberals (or whoever might form an alternative government) wear it; or if the Conservatives are returned to office, well, nobody will be in any shape to fight another election over it, and they can let it quietly die while other stories come up to take its place. It’s almost genius, if it were true.

Does anyone remember the board game Balderdash, where a player had to make up a definition for a word, and the other players would have to guess which was the correct definition of those supplied? Listening to the Conservatives explaining policy has become something akin to Balderdash.

A couple of months ago, one squirmed as they tried to invent a definition for “ministerial accountability” that did not actually fit the correct definition as it was historically known in the history of a Westminster-style democracy. Yesterday, they added “civilian oversight” to that same list of red herrings.

The subject was the crisis at the RCMP. Liberal Scott Brison suggested at the daily press conference that Harper’s decision to appoint William Elliott, a civilian, into the RCMP, was sure to cause problems, and that Vic Toews has been aware of the situation for some time, and has only done something now that the problems have been made public.

But a few hours later came Power & Politics (and let me once again thank all the gods on Olympus that it was Rosemary Barton hosting), where the Conservatives decided to put Senator Mike Duffy in the window to deliver their talking points, and Duffy tried to imply that the Liberals didn’t believe in civilian oversight of the RCMP. In common internet parlance, this particular red herring would be termed a “total fail.”

Civilian oversight, as Brison was quick to inform Duffy, means that the organization in question, whether it is the military or the paramilitary RMCP, are responsible to a minister of the Crown, who is in turn responsible to Parliament and the electorate. That does not mean placing a civilian at the head of the organization (as the Conservatives did with the RCMP) – only that the head of the organization reports to the minister. That’s why the chief of the defence staff is a general (or an admiral, if it’s the navy’s turn in charge). He still reports to the minister, but he heads the military from within. The same applies to the RCMP. Too bad this particular red herring was too difficult for the Conservatives and their spokespeople to understand.

(Incidentally, I was reminded of Duffy’s last episode of his own show).

Oh, and the point of Brison’s press conference yesterday morning? Was actually to talk about home care, and the fact that the Conservatives are eliminating the question on the census that tracked how many hours Canadians spent providing unpaid care to their own elders or those in their family with a chronic or long-term illness. Brison’s point was that this information is crucial, because we are facing a demographic time bomb, and it’s much cheaper and easier to rely on home care than to put people in hospitals or institutions, and governments should find solutions to make home care easier and more affordable for families. And yet, the government has eliminated this consideration from the “National Household Survey,” even though the question was in the 2006 long-form census. Because it’s not like governments need data to help them with tough decisions facing them in the future.

Also on the Statistics Canada chopping block – the survey of the civil service that happens every three years, because it costs $1 million a year. Because we don’t need statistics on things like workplace harassment or discrimination, apparently.

Elsewhere on the census front, Maclean’s satirist Scott Feschuck returns from vacation and ruminates about ways to rescue Tony Clement’s credibility.

Up today – press conferences from Brison (again) about cuts to summer festivals, and Jack Layton, on Harper’s silence on the census issue (which Brison covered Tuesday, but who’s counting?).

I’m sure that by now, everyone is going over the entrails of just what went down in yesterday’s committee hearing on the long-form census. But if there’s one bit of analysis that you should read, it’s Susan Delacourt’s.

Delacourt points to former chief statistician Munir Sheikh’s testimony, where he said it was media reports that Tony Clement had said Statistics Canada recommended the voluntary survey in place of the long-form, which prompted his resignation. It was an honourable out, which didn’t betray his oaths or confidences, but pretty much called Clement out as a liar.

What Delacourt finds most significant is the way the government felt it could hide behind the civil service’s traditional reserved silence to mount a whisper campaign against the department. This is especially important because we all know perception is usually more important than reality, and if the government can shape perception to its purposes – just as they did with the coalition crisis of late 2008 – then they can get away with a lot more than they should. The Governor General was caught in a similar whisper campaign at that point:  if she refused Harper’s request for a prorogation, he would mount a public campaign against her legitimacy and the legitimacy of her office. They’re using similar tactics here, and it’s disturbing to watch.

The doors were opened a tiny crack, however, to a possible compromise on the issue, where enough testimony was gathered to suggest that if the threat of jail time was removed for non-compliance with the census, then it should remain mandatory. As well, seeing that the government has control over which questions are asked, they can remove any they find overly intrusive. Mind you, Clement is now getting bogged down in the internal logical disconnect of saying that all of these questions are intrusive and unnecessary – and yet he’s leaving them on the voluntary national survey and spending $30 million to encourage people to fill it out. No, it really doesn’t make any sense, but that’s part of the problem.

Meanwhile, the only other political story is the complaints levelled against RCMP Commissioner William Elliott by senior Mounties. They say he’s verbally abusive, closed-minded, arrogant and insulting, and has reduced others in the senior ranks to tears. The clerk of the Privy Council has ordered a “workplace assessment,” but remember that Harper brought Elliott, a civilian, into the RCMP to clean them up. By all accounts, that isn’t happening.

Liberal MP Scott Brison is in Ottawa this week as the face of the party, holding daily press conferences on issues that they feel Canadians should be discussing. Today, Brison called out Stephen Harper for not addressing the media in over three weeks, while important policy decisions were being announced without Parliamentary consultation – things like the census and the sole-source contract purchase of those F-35 fighter jets.

I caught up with Brison later in the afternoon, where we discussed the rest of his summer.

Q: How was Halifax Pride?
A: Halifax Pride seems to grow every year – it’s always terrific. It’s become a lot bigger than an LGBT event – it’s become an event celebrated by the whole city, and more of a celebration of diversity, and of freedom, and of rights. It’s amazing the number of families you see out every year. I see every year more people – straight, gay, single, married, children, families – everyone’s there. It’s wonderful. It’s just a really special celebration for the community, and of Halifax, and of Canada. It’s the only Pride parade I’m participating in this year, so it was really great. Maxime and I, and Simba [their dog] were happy to return to it this year.

Q: Tell me about your trip to China.
A: We had a very productive trip. We met with very senior leaders of government, including the minister of foreign affairs. We met with one of the nine members of the of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China, which in many ways is one of the most powerful decision-making bodies in China. We met with the president and chief investment officer of the China Investment Corporation, which is the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. What was interesting was how open the Chinese officials were about some of the challenges they face, some of the fears they have for the future, and their enthusiasm for the future at the same time. A lot of common challenges we face together – they’re very concerned about the demographic shift in China, which their situation ought to be more challenging than ours because of the One Child policy, so it has real implications in terms of labour issues, in terms of pension issues. They’re very concerned about the gap between rich and poor, about the growing gap between rural and urban, and these are issues that all countries face but they are genuinely focused on trying to deal with these issues. We made the point that when it comes to pension issues, that we have Canadian financial institutions and Canadian experience on the pension side that could be very helpful, and that we can deepen our commercial relationship in terms of the financial services sector as an example – deepen our sharing of information and expertise on dealing with some of those issues together. We also identified, in meeting with Canadian businesses over there including some Canadian banks, that there are some unnecessary barriers to entry and in some cases barriers to growth for Canadian banks and Canadian life insurance companies in China, and when we met with Chinese officials, we made the case that if you want our expertise, if you want our partnership on some of these issues, you have to break down some of those barriers.

We raised human rights issues – Michael Ignatieff was very strong on human rights issues when he met with the officials, and we had a very respectful, constructive and serious discussion. I was very impressed with the support that exists at very senior levels of the Chinese decision makers for the Liberal Party of Canada. There’s tremendous respect for the Liberal Party. We didn’t have to talk about Pierre Trudeau opening up China – they raised it. We didn’t have to talk about Jean Chrétien making six official visits to China when he was Prime Minister – they raised it, and in a very positive way. The Chinese officials were actually more direct than I had expected in terms of their desire to see a Michael Ignatieff-led Liberal government in Canada, and their frustration with the Harper government’s isolationism.

The other thing too is every time I go to China, and I’m going back in September, is you see changes. You see a lot of progress – Shanghai seems more and more like Hong Kong, and the growth and development there is remarkable. Over 30 million Chinese a year move from the country to the cities, so the Chinese are developing world-class design, architecture, green building systems. We met with Canadian architects who are doing a lot of the new buildings in China – the new and most modern buildings. We met with representatives of the Canadian forestry products industry, and with the burgeoning middle class, and with wood home construction not being mainstream yet in China, the opportunity that affords us is really quite remarkable. With the rise of the middle class, there’s going to be a lot more demand for residential housing construction, multi-unit primarily, and if we market effectively Canadian forestry products, Canadian forestry can have a big part of that business. I think there’s just great opportunity for us, whether it’s in the Canadian financial services sector, Canadian forestry products, or Canadian clean energy systems or clean energy technology, so I’m actually very excited about it.

Q: You mentioned that you’re heading back to Colombia shortly. You were instrumental in getting that free trade agreement passed, and it’s signed into law now. Is this the victory lap?
A: To the contrary – it’s jam-packed with meetings with Luis Plata, the Minister of Trade, and Jaime Bermudez, their minister of foreign affairs; I’m meeting with President Uribe as well, and we’ll be meeting with some of their successors while I’m down there. I’m also going to be setting up some meetings with human rights organisations, labour groups, and Canadian business representatives. I’m giving a speech to about 400 business people on Canada-Colombia trade opportunities. I’m going to be talking about the strengths that Canada offers as an economic partner, and I’m also going to speak about the importance of genuine and legitimate human rights engagement, and why that’s important to Colombia socially and economically. I’m looking forward to the trip.

Q: There as, a couple of months ago, a report that came out that talked about gay and lesbian human rights groups in Colombia being targeted a few years ago. I was wondering if you’d come across that as well?
A: Colombia has one of the most vibrant gay and lesbian communities in Latin America. Anyone who doubts that should Google gay and Bogota, and it’s really clear that there’s a vibrant and active gay community. In terms of gay life, Colombia has one of the more active gay communities in Latin America in fact. There are always examples of prejudice and discrimination, but they exist in every country. It’s something we always have to fight wherever it is. If anything, the human rights reporting mechanism in the treaty that we helped negotiate directly with the Colombian government will help provide us with better clarity on these types of issues as we move forward.

Q: Aside from the trip to Colombia, is there anything else going on this summer?
A: I spent some time with the leader, not just in China, but also on tour in Ontario last week. I’m going to be spending some time with him in Quebec in a couple of weeks. We’ve got our national caucus in Baddeck, Nova Scotia at the end of August, and I’m going back to China in September. We’re working very hard, and a team only goes as fast as the guy in front, and Michael Ignatieff’s running very fast, and his team is working very hard as well. There are no short cuts in this business – we’re doing real work in making ourselves ready for when Canadians want a change. I think that’s going to be the next election.

The Commons industry committee comes back today to hold a full day of hearings into the census issue, and Tony Clement is supposed to be first up to testify. Will he actually show up? I guess we’ll see. But like I said – it’s going to be a full day, which is going to be very exhausting for all involved.

Meanwhile, the National Statistics Council has weighed in and given their ideas for changing the mandatory long-form census to make it more palatable to some. Of course, the minister isn’t returning their calls. Nevertheless, the warning cry is going out about the unintended consequences of this government disparaging the census and the data that it collects.

Apparently Harper has been planning this census push since December, and it stems from some apparent deep-seated libertarian views – even if he did use census data for his master’s thesis.

There has been other musing about investigating the census alternatives employed in some Northern European countries. I can tell you right now – not feasible AT ALL. Part of their data mining comes in the form of municipal population registers, which we certainly don’t have in Canada. These registers link into all kinds of other databases, which is not going to happen in Canada for a very, very long time. Why? Because we have no centralized record-keeping structure in this country. In fact, we haven’t even got the building blocks for such a concept, and as someone who spent a few years in a previous life working in government records departments, I can speak with a bit of authority on this. We can’t even get electronic health records off the ground here – how the hell are we going to get anything resembling a municipal population register when we’ve got such wildly divergent levels of government, and robust privacy legislation on top of that? That’s one of the comforts that many of us should have – Big Brother isn’t watching us in this country, because nobody between departments talks to each other and certainly can’t pass your records back and forth. A Scandinavian model would be that much more intrusive, which goes against the argument that Tony Clement, et al, have been putting in the window.

The other big story of the day was the WikiLeaks revelation of all those Afghan documents, which had some Canadian connections in there as well. Some of it has to do with diplomatic concerns over countries that may be offering support to the Taliban, and the relationship with Pakistan in the region. Meanwhile, DND and families of fallen soldiers are unimpressed with talk that four of our casualties may have been due to friendly fire (which the Americans are known for having an appallingly high rate of). Jack Layton, meanwhile, says this is proof that the war cannot be won by military means alone.

It looks like the Conservatives killed an environment committee report on the tar sands in order to hide the fact that the government isn’t doing its job enforcing regulations. Not that this should come as a surprise to anyone.

Also, we’ve levelled new sanctions against Iran. Totally not a distraction from the Afghan document leaks.

Up today – Liberal MP Scott Brison is holding a press conference on “the Harper government’s secrecy and disrespect for democratic institutions.” Could be fun.