Column for April 30, 2006
The problem with deciding to throw out a governing party that truly deserves to be defeated, as we did with Paul Martin’s Liberals earlier this year, is that we must inevitably, if only by default, choose another group of power-hungry wannabes to take their place.
The bigger problem, of course, is that, too often, this new, collateral-damage government — the current Conservative administration will serve nicely as our Exhibit A for this morning — will decide we really did mean to elect it, and then proceed to act as if we’ve somehow magically, mystically, mysteriously conferred on it a “mandate for change.”
But the biggest problem of all comes when this accidental government with its self-conferred people’s mandate is run by a man — cue Stephen Harper — who convinces himself we not only intended to elect Him to rule over us but also that He, and He alone, knows what’s best for us.
We have seen it coming. Everything that Stephen Harper has done since the federal election — appointing to his cabinet floor-crossing and unelected supporters who owe their loyalty to him rather than the party or the voters; firing communications advisors who don’t tell him what he wants to hear; muzzling cabinet ministers who just might possibly stray from his self-selected message track; slapping down MPs who forget they really are, in Pierre Trudeau’s famous description, “nobodies;” ignoring, avoiding or, if necessary, barring reporters who have the temerity to question his decisions — fits with a career-long pattern of behaviour.
Stephen Harper has always been an arrogant, hypocritical, blinkered, paranoid bully. The problem is that Stephen Harper is now an arrogant, hypocritical blinkered, paranoid bully… with power.
Consider, for just one arrogant, hypocritical, blinkered and paranoid example, Harper’s recent choice of former EnCana president Gwyn Morgan to head a new Public Appointments Commission, a key part of the prime minister’s much-ballyhooed accountability plan, which was one of the reasons many Canadians voted for him and which is supposed to put an end to political partisanship in the appointment of public officials.
The man Harper chose to put an end to cronyism, it turns out, is an Alberta-based a crony of the new prime minister not to mention a fundraiser for and donor to the Canadian Alliance/Conservative party.
In a recent speech at that august Toronto businessmen’s luncheonette, the Empire Club, Morgan went out of his way to attack the by-then-out-of-office Liberals for having been “embroiled in behaviour that is comparable to that of countries at the bottom of the world corruption index,” while praising his good friend Stephen Harper as a man “whose integrity is beyond reproach.”
Why wouldn’t you choose a man who said such nice things about you?
Leaving aside the perhaps deserved fate of bottom-feeding, bottom-of-the-world Liberal job seekers for the moment, just how even-handed can we expect Morgan to be in his dealings with non-Liberals and non-fellow corporate executives? Well, in the same speech, Morgan attacked immigrants from some black and Asian countries for importing violence to Canada, and argued that multiculturalism “has created ‘subcultures’ bearing little relation to the mainstream culture and values of the country.”
Oh… right.
Harper’s response to criticism of his choice? In his own recent speech to the Empire Club — are we sensing a pattern here? — Harper insisted “no one is better qualified” than Morgan, and argued that the very idea of Liberals daring to question his accountability plans was “intolerable.” He urged his big business audience to instruct their politicians to “get with the program” — which is to say His program.
His program is not even to be confused with the Conservative party’s program.
If Harper’s appointment of Morgan reveals him to be no less arrogant or hypocritical or partisan than his Liberal predecessors, his decision this past week to pretend that Canadian soldiers are not dying in Afghanistan shows he has little more regard for the views even of his own political constituency when it comes to his my-way-or-the-highway policies.
Harper’s decisions to not only end the recent but widely accepted tradition of lowering Canadian flags to half mast as a mark of respect when our soldiers are killed in war but also impose a ban on media presence at the solemn ceremonies when their bodies are returned home were made for the most crass of political reasons. Harper wants to keep Canadians from noticing that more and more of our soldiers will be dying in the war in Afghanistan and keep a lid on any public policy debate about whether theirs is an acceptable, justifiable sacrifice.
While a majority of Conservatives probably do support sending our troops to Afghanistan, many are outraged at what Harper is doing.
Conservative politicians from Nova Scotia’s Ron Russell, himself a military veteran, to gadfly MP Garth Turner, who claims his emails are running 30 to one against the prime minister, to former Mulroney chief of staff Norman Spector, to former federal candidate and journalist Peter Kent have spoken out against the new policies.
Stephen Harper? He advised interim Liberal leader Bill Graham, who’d called on Harper “to reverse this unfortunate decision so that all Canadians can participate and pay their respects to our soldiers in a military ceremony” that “politicizing these funerals is entirely unbecoming his office.”
Unbecoming is a good description of Stephen Harper’s latest unilateral decisions.
Is this really why we got rid of Paul Martin?
Copyright 2006 Stephen Kimber
Column for April 23, 2006
Not asking the $300,000 question
Google, the Internet search engine, was almost puppy-eager to be helpful after it had returned from its first global source scouring with not a single, solitary news story in response to my query.
So it offered suggestions.
“Make sure all words are spelled correctly.” Check.
“Try different keywords.” No luck.
“Try more general keywords.” Nada.
“Try fewer keywords.” OK, now we’re finally getting somewhere. And nowhere.
On Friday morning, I began my search of Google Canada’s database of more than 4,500 news sources in pursuit of the story I was certain must be there somewhere.
“Mulroney,” I typed. Then “Schreiber.”
I knew Brian Mulroney had been in Ottawa the day before to be feted as the greenest prime minister Canada ever had. That “green,” of course, had to do with his sterling commitment to the environment, and did not — as I’d once wistfully imagined — have something to do with the green of that mysterious $300,000 in cash that a palm-greasing German-Canadian lobbyist-businessman named Karlheinz Schreiber had furtively handed him in $100,000 bunches soon after he left office.
I also knew that the Ottawa press gallery had plenty of time on its hands these days, what with Stephen Harper having duct-taped shut the lips of his cabinet ministers, and then refusing to answer any questions himself that weren’t questions he’d already addressed without answering. Thank you very much.
The boys on the bus must be bored by now.
Surely, they’d use the occasion of Mulroney’s presence in their nation’s capital to finally get around to asking him about the $300,000. And about a CBC Fifth Estate
documentary that aired in February. The hour-long story featured an interview with Schreiber, in which he had not only neatly connected some of the missing dots between our former prime minister and his Swiss bank accounts, but also made mock of Mulroney’s insistence those cash payments were intended to cover his consulting work on a new pasta business Schreiber was starting. Schreiber’s on-camera laugh lasted at least 10 seconds. “What had he done for the money?” Schreiber then repeated host Linden MacIntyre’s question. “Well, I learned to my great surprise that he worked with me on spaghetti.”
Surely, that’s worth asking about?
I guess not.
Nothing on Mulroney, Schreiber.
Different keywords? I tried “Mulroney” and “scandal.” This led me to the weekly cable listings at Texas’ Fort Worth Star-Telegram
newspaper, where I discovered that the 2003 movie The Flower of Evil
, was about a politician who must deal with a “scandal,” while, a few listings below, that actor Dermot “Mulroney” was starring in the 1998 Goodbye Lover
in which “murder arises when a femme fatale’s hot affair cools down.” Nothing about Brian, or Schreiber or the $300,000.
Using more general keywords — “prime minister” and “pasta” — generated nine hits but they were mostly about the ongoing controversy over the Italian election results.
It wasn’t until I reduced the number of keywords to one — “Mulroney” — that I got some serious returns: 396 hits, ranging from the Toronto Star’s
“Green Thumbs Up for Mulroney” to the London Free Press’s
“Mulroney Enjoys Accolades.”
The Globe and Mail’s
Jane Taber gushed that Mulroney had “joked, laughed, and told old war stories, then delivered a thoughtful speech on his environmental legacy… By the end, he had the crowd eating out of his hand.”
And the press too, no doubt. Who would want to bite the hand that feeds them so well?
Certainly not the Ottawa press gallery.
Quote of the Week
: This week’s quote of the week is “Rodney MacDonald.” Oops, sorry, I meant the source
of this week’s (and of almost every week since he was sworn in) most quotable quote is our new premier.
In his short time in office, MacDonald has proved himself a master of the maladroit.
Consider his response to a reporter’s question about whether he planned to consult with the opposition parties about his government’s plans for the spring session of the legislature. “We’re open to any suggestion the opposition would provide,” he began well enough, but then quickly careened off into his own neverland. “But, at the end of the day,,” he said, “we’ve been given a mandate to govern, and we will govern.”
Uh, Rodney… who gave you a mandate to govern? Surely not the people of Nova Scotia.
Copyright 2006 Stephen Kimber
Column for April 16, 2006
Is it just me or can you, too, hear the distant melodic strains of John Buchanan singing “Out on the Mira,” or catch the faint whirr and whiff of an untendered, unwanted electric toilet seat off in the distance?
It is perhaps too early to consign our new premier to the dustbins of provincial political history, heaped in with the unsavoury likes of the soon-to-be-retired as senator but never quite forgotten as premier, John Buchanan — a Tory who blithely managed to send our public debt into the stratosphere while taking care of his political friends — or our already forgotten but never forgiven premier-for-an-hour, Russell MacLellan — a Liberal who cheerily managed in a few short months to undo most of the hard-won political patronage reforms his predecessor had implemented at the cost of his own leadership.
Still, it is probably worth reminding ourselves, and sooner rather than later, of the well-travelled patronage path Rodney MacDonald is now taking us back down.
In the past few weeks, MacDonald has been roaming the province, gripping and grinning for all we’re worth: a million bucks for the province’s libraries here, another million so the Abilities Foundation can recycle children’s wheelchairs there. “Everybody wants to be able to get around,” MacDonald cheerily explained between photo ops. And get around he did, offering up $1.8 million for hog farmers, $200,000 for a roof for the Black Cultural Centre, $250,000 for a fibre optic network for Kentville, even $5,000 for the Dartmouth Business Commission so it could scatter outdoor ashtrays around downtown.
All this in just a few weeks, and all the while, of course, protesting with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink straight face that he isn’t just pork-greasing our wheels for a provincial election campaign.
“I’m not worried about that aspect of it,” MacDonald blithely declared after handing out that freshly minted cheque at the Black Cultural Centre. MacDonald’s cash — to cover the costs of a new roof — was a commitment his own officials had refused to make less than a month before.
The spending binge isn’t over yet, and won’t be until MacDonald finds the last lonely stretch of highway somewhere in Nova Scotia that’s still in need of a premierly promise of asphalt, or we go to the polls — whichever comes first.
And so it goes.
All of this might seem like little more than the usual pre-election politics in a province where cheque-writing still passes for political discourse.
But there is also the more substantive matter of the Industrial Expansion Fund — the Tory friends-and-family slush fund the government recently topped up with another $50 million of our money in order to help their friends and buy our votes — that is turning out to be as blatantly sleazy as anything Buchanan or MacLellan could have dreamed up.
Credit (or blame) where it is due, however. The fund, in fact, was created by the sainted John Hamm, MacDonald’s predecessor. A little over five years ago, Hamm set up Nova Scotia Business Inc., an arm’s length agency that was designed — and bragged about — as a way to put government investment in business on a sound financial footing. Since it might actually have done that, Hamm also established the expansion fund, a politically controlled cash dispenser, to sidestep his public commitment to take the politics out of economic development.
The benignly named Industrial Expansion Fund, as one government bumph document delicately explains it, “has considerable flexibility in the amount and type of funding it can provide. Consequently, it is frequently employed to assist the development initiatives … when the solution to a potential opportunity falls outside the financing mechanisms of those entities.”
Ahem… You can read between the lines.
The fund, in fact, has become the underwriter of first resort for those Tory-friendly ventures that couldn’t pass Business Financing 101. Like the $350,000 it handed out to the already unable-to-pay-its-last loan Magic Valley amusement park, which just happened to be owned by good friends of our former premier. Or S&J Potato Farms, which leased land from the province’s development minister who — oops — had to resign after Daily News reporter Brian Flinn exposed his conflict of interest.
Those “investments” came after a pre-election, pre-leadership convention order-in-council quietly topped up the fund with $50 million. That had the one-fell-swoop effect of not only doubling the budget of the Office of Economic Development — without our elected representatives having any say in the matter — but also of providing the new premier with a convenient slush fund for pre-election vote-buying.
While he may not have been responsible for setting up the fund, MacDonald is very clearly responsible for what happens now — and for the obfuscation, stonewalling and obstruction his government is engaging in to prevent the all-party public accounts committee from getting to the bottom of this scandal.
Last week, the committee had to resort to issuing subpoenas after the government whited-out even the most basic information in documents about “the objective and financial impact of the top-up… to preserve cabinet confidentiality.” According to Brian Flinn’s account in the Daily News, “the government even suppressed a paragraph showing how the measure would help the Progressive Conservatives keep their 2003 election promises.”
Ah, yes, we have been down this road before. Too many times. Anyone for another chorus of “Out on the Mira”?
Copyright 2006 Stephen Kimber
Column for April 9, 2006
The truth is it’s fiction… but true
and actual events or persons, living or deceased, are purely coincidental.”
The most interesting revelation of my first full, official week as a published novelist is the number of people who seem to believe my fiction is actually nonfiction, and are convinced that this or that character in Reparations must be this or that real person, living or deceased. (Which is an interesting twist on the number of people over the years who have dismissed my actual nonfiction as nothing more than a figment of my imagination… but that’s another column for another day.)
In his review of the book in the Halifax Herald last weekend, for example, Robert Martin noted that the novel is peopled with a cast of sometimes sleazy local lawyers, politicians and journalists. “Current members of all these groups,” he suggested, “will think they recognize colleagues in these pages, often in unflattering and sometimes illegal poses. I certainly recognized some of those booze-fueled reprobates of old.”
I’m flattered… I think.
At first blush, there may seem to be reasonable and probable grounds for a reader to make those sort of assumptions.
The novel’s story is set against the backdrop of real-life Nova Scotia in the sixties and seventies, as well as today. It includes fictionalized depictions of the all-too-real destruction of Africville during the sixties. There’s a passing reference to Donald Marshall, Jr.’s wrongful murder conviction, even a modern-day scene set in the Economy Shoe Shop bar.
The arc of the Seamus O’Sullivan provincial government of the novel — elected in 1970, re-elected in 1974, defeated in 1978 — neatly tracks the real-life Liberal administration of Gerald Regan, including vague references to some of the issues (electricity rates) and scandals (the Mercator cruise ship fiasco) that ultimately brought it down.
And truth to tell — I always do, except when I don’t — I’ve created many of the characters that inhabit the novel by borrowing, plucking and occasionally stealing outright characteristics, tics, quirks, events and mannerisms from a whole bunch of different real people I’ve encountered over my lifetime.
But then, of course, I mixed, tossed, scrambled, stirred and shook all that with other stuff, and stuff from my imagination, and stuff from who-knows-where-or-how-it-got-there, and the end result is… well, fiction.
This is definitely new turf for me. I’ve been a journalist for more than 35 years, I’ve taught it for close to 25 and I’ve spent a good chunk of that time defending myself and other journalists against accusations that we make stuff up just to sell papers or attract viewers.
When I decided I wanted to write this story as a novel, in fact, I had to unlearn a lot of what I’d spent a career figuring out. For starters, facts… the real ones, I realized, don’t matter nearly as much as they do to a journalist. In the beginning, I spent way too much time trying to shape my story to fit the facts, for example, rather than letting the facts fit my story. And I fretted way too much over the reality that the court case that is at the heart of the novel simply wouldn’t, in real life, unfold as I described it.
Somewhere along the line, it finally dawned on me — I can be a little slow sometimes — that it didn’t have to be true to life in order to be true to the story. That’s why they call it fiction, stupid. For me as a writer, this was a liberating revelation.
So the fact is it’s fiction.
But, I hope, true too.
I remember interviewing the late Canadian writer W. O. Mitchell at a time when I was way too young to understand what he was really saying. “The novel,” he explained to me, “is made up of a whole lot of little truths that go to make up the Big Lie that is fiction.
“But,” he added after I had a chance to digest that, “the real goal of the fiction writer is to write this Big Lie so that it conveys a Larger Truth.”
I won’t pretend I’ve accomplished that with Reparations. But my goal — aside from simply trying to tell an interesting story in a readable way, of course — was to assemble all those little truths of quirks and events into bigger lies of fiction in order to covey a larger truth about an important, transforming time and place in our recent history… a fiction that’s as true as I can make it.
Stephen Kimber will be reading from his novel Reparations at the Lord Nelson Hotel today at 2:30 p.m. as part of the Halifax International Writers’ Festival.
Stephen.Kimber@ukings.ns.ca
More text goes here.
Copyright 2006 Stephen Kimber
Column for April 2
Hypocrisy, thy name is Harper
What should a poor Palestinian make of the latest news out of Ottawa?
On the very day last week that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was standing in the phone line queue to be among the first to congratulate Ehud Olmert, Israel’s new prime minister, on his election victory, Harper’s foreign affairs minister, Peter MacKay, was standing in front of the cameras to announce Canada will become the first country after Israel to cut off all contact with Hamas, the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people.
Hypocrisy?
In a speech shortly after his own election, Harper made the case that “Canada may not be a superpower, but we stand for higher values to which all peoples aspire,” citing freedom, democracy, the rule of law, human rights and compassion for the less fortunate as among our core values. “And it is important that our actions as Canadians promote these values in all corners of the Earth."
Freedom? In January, 73 per cent of eligible Palestinian voters cast their ballots in an election one European Union monitor called an example to the Arab world. It was not easy. The month before, Israeli officials threatened not to allow Palestinians in East Jerusalem to vote because they feared Hamas might win. In the end, the Israelis agreed to let Palestinian candidates campaign but only if they got permission from the police. “Anyone who is a supporter of Hamas will not receive permission,” explained a spokesperson.
Democracy? Hamas’ “Change and Reform” party won the election with 44.5 per cent of the vote, which, if you’re counting, is a full 8.2 per cent more than Stephen Harper’s Conservatives got in our election. Not to forget that voter turnout in dangerous Palestine was eight per cent higher than in Canada.
Rule of law? Israel responded to Hamas’ victory by announcing it would refuse to transfer $50 million a month it collects in tax receipts for the Palestinian Authority. Under the 1993 Oslo Accords, signed by Israel, these are, in the words of an Israeli journalist, “tax revenues that are due to the [Palestinian] people in the territories where the goods are headed, and the Israelis have no right to hold them up.” (Ironically, one of the reasons cited for cutting off aid to the Palestinian Authority is its failure to “express clear support for the Middle East peace process, as outlined in the Oslo Accords...” Oh, right, those Oslo Accords.)
Rule of whose law? Israel is now threatening to unilaterally determine new borders between Israel and Palestine, and impose them by 2010, regardless of Palestinian objections.
Has our government protested these clear violations of the rule of law or threatened sanctions against the Israeli government?
How about human rights? Here is what Amnesty International had to say recently: “Over 8,000 Palestinians, most of whom are nonviolent prisoners of conscience and few if any of whom have received trials that meet international standards, are being held as political prisoners. Over the past five years, close to 20,000 Palestinians have been made homeless and thousands of others have lost their livelihood as the Israeli army has destroyed over 4,000 homes, vast areas of agricultural land and hundreds of other properties.”
Which leads us to “compassion for the less fortunate.”
According to a report in the Globe and Mail last week, Canada’s decision to cut off aid to the Palestinian authority will mean an end to support for a number of significant humanitarian projects, including replacing houses destroyed by the Israelis and providing literacy and sex education classes to young Palestinian women.
None of this is to suggest Hamas is a paragon of virtue. Hamas, which stands for Islamic Resistance Movement, has been responsible for many of the suicide bombings that have killed innocent Israeli civilians. And one of its key 1988 founding principles is the obliteration of the state of Israel.
But for most of its existence, Israel has refused to recognize the Palestinians’ right to a state too. “There was no such thing as Palestinians,” summed up the late Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. “They did not exist.”
Up until recently, the Israelis even continued to build their own settlements in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, effectively undermining the possibility of a Palestinian state. And the then-ruling Likud Party voted against allowing the Palestinians their own state.
If the Israelis can change, can Hamas?
Hamas’s new — and duly elected — leaders are certainly saying the right things. Prime Minister Ismail Hanlyeh, for example, says his government is willing to sit down with international mediators and called on Israel to let the peace process go forward so there can be “stability, calm and a complete, just and lasting peace.”
“We are not war seekers nor are we war initiators,” Hanlyeh told the Washington Post. “We are not lovers of blood. We are not interested in a vicious cycle of violence. We are oppressed people with rights. If peace brings us our rights, then this is good.”
Does he mean it?
It’s impossible to know, but our decision to cut off contact with the new and democratically elected government is no way to find out. It will only lead to a greater sense of isolation among Palestinians and confirmation of the belief among too many that there is no way but violence.
stephenkimber.com
Copyright 2006 Stephen Kimber
Subscribe
About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and seven non-fiction books.
Buy his books at Amazon.