When elections are fought by the numbers most of us don’t count
And they’re off… to another election in which most of us won’t count.
No one will admit it, of course, but take it from me.
This won’t be an election about ideas. Ideas don’t win elections. Can you say carbon tax? Or Kim Campbell? Forget meaningful debate about corporate tax cuts, budget deficits, debt, wars in Afghanistan and Libya, environment, globalization, poverty—except, of course, as those issues nudge numbers.
Like all recent elections in our first-past-the-post system, this one will be all about numbers—a small number of numbers in 50, give or take, of the 308 federal ridings in which one party or another believes, for one reason or another, it can wrest a particular seat from its rivals.
Start with the standard-issue 40 ridings in which the margin of victory last time was miniscule enough that the losing party hopes a leader-kissed baby here or a strategically timed announcement there will change the outcome. They’ll count.
But the only ever-shifting-winds-of-change riding in Nova Scotia is West Nova where the difference between a Tory or Liberal MP is traditionally a few popular-vote percentage points. West Nova voters will matter.
Each party also maintains its own additional list of ridings in which, for whatever reasons—its own star candidate, the stumbles of an incumbent, a particular policy—it hopes to make a gain.
The NDP is targeting one such Nova Scotia riding—Dartmouth Cole-Harbour—where they believe former provincial leader Robert Chisholm can knock off Liberal Michael Savage.
The Tories thought they had their own star candidate to take down another Liberal—Geoff Regan in Halifax West—but, for some reason, they’ve stopped talking about that particular “star:” Halifax Mayor Peter Kelly.
Conservatives say they’re also targeting rural Liberals and New Democrats like Peter Stoffer, who voted for the federal gun registry. But even they aren’t dumb enough to think they can actually defeat the popular MP, who gobbled up more than 60 per cent of the votes last time.
Which means…
In most Nova Scotia ridings, our numbers don’t add up. Our votes won’t matter.
We will once again be spectators at our own democracy. Welcome to Election 2011.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Entitled to their entitlements, aboriginal edition
The Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation is right. There, I’ve said it. And it only hurt a little.
While I can—and do, and will—dispute the larger goals of this never-met-a-public-expenditure-it-can-stomach crowd, the CTF did discover real slime under its latest freedom-of-information rock.
Though there are only a million aboriginals in Canada, 82 reserve politicians “earned” more than the prime minister’s $315,462 salary last yea
r, 222 pocketed more than their provincial-premier counterparts and 70
4 raked in the tax-free equivalent of $100,000-plus.
One Nova Scotia councilor—on a reserve with 304 members—took home $978,468 tax free.
Some First Nations leaders argue these CTF remuneration numbers are ripped from their context—that the packages lump together salaries, honoraria, travel expenses and contracts for native businesses, and that native political leaders don’t get plush pensions like their non-native colleagues.
Some complain darkly that singling out native leaders smacks of racism.
Mi’kmaq elder Daniel Paul blames the Department of Indian Affairs, which he says has been “well aware of what’s going on and have chosen not to do a thing about it.”
There is plenty of blame to go around.
Traditional government paternalism coupled with a more recent laissez-faire fear of appearing to question First Nations’ autonomy created fertile ground for nefarious native leaders who choose to take advantage.
Whenever politicians operate in secret and are unaccountable to the people who elect them, entitled-to-their-entitlements corruption is sure to follow. (See Nova Scotia MLA expense scandal, federal sponsorship scandal, David Dingwall, et al, ad nauseum.)
What makes this scandal more difficult to digest is the stark reality of non-leader aboriginal life in Canada.
Consider the third-world conditions that exist on many Canadian reserves. Consider that aboriginal young people are seven times more likely to commit suicide than the national average. Consider that the unemployment rate for aboriginals in Nova Scotia last year was 17.4 per cent compared with nine percent for non-aboriginals, and that employed aboriginals earned just 77 per cent of hourly waged non-aboriginals.
Now consider again those CTF numbers.
It is past time for transparency and accountability. It’s time to put power in the hands of native communities, not native leaders.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Our new governor general and the greasy Airbus affair
David Lloyd Johnston, our soon-to-be governor general of all we survey, is, I’m sure, a fine fellow. Even if he does fit—right up to his blue button-down—every stereotype known to boring, old white guy governors general of the pre-Adrienne Clarkson, pre-Michaelle Jean era.
But hey, I’m a boring old white guy too, and it’s nice to be represented once again in the corridors of ceremonial powerlessness.
Johnston is, of course, a lawyer. Better yet, a legal scholar. A specialist in securities law, something happily impenetrable to the rest of us.
He played hockey at Harvard. Of course Harvard. Better yet, he captained its hockey team. At 69, if you believe his gushing friends, he still possesses the speed and finesse of a young Yvan Cournoyer.
He is a former principal and vice-chancellor of McGill University, one of Canada’s most venerable institutions of higher learning, and now a soon-to-be former president of the University of Waterloo, one of Canada’s most leading edge—can you say particle physics?—groves of academe.
Of course—of course—he is an excellent family man. Married to the same woman forever. The same woman, it should—and will—be said, who is accomplished in her own right, but will not seek her own limelight like… well, no need to mention John Ralston Saul or Jean-Daniel Lafond.
And the kids? Five of them. All girls. All grown. All overachievers. Did we forget the seven grandkids?
Lovely.
Uh… but there is this one nagging footnote to his resumé that’s hard to forget—or forgive.
David Johnston is the person most responsible for the fact we wasted $14 million on a public inquiry to discover what we already knew about Brian Mulroney—that he is a pathological prevaricator of the first order—but not what we actually wanted to know—which is who really got how much of that $20-million in Airbus grease money?
That Prime Minister Stephen Harper chose Johnston—among all the boring old white guy academic overachievers available—to set the sharpened pencil-point-narrow terms of reference for the inquiry into the Mulroney-Schreiber affair says much about Stephen Harper’s prescience.
And perhaps too much about David Johnston’s willingness to go along.
Which is why he will make an ideal governor general... for Stephen Harper.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Much truth in “The Truth…”
Our All The President's Men
Part page-turning thriller, part indictment of contemporary pack journalism, part thoughtful meditation on the human cost of the passion for truth, Journalist Harvey Cashore's The Truth Shows Up: A Reporter's Fifteen-Year Odyssey Tracking Down the Truth About Mulroney, Schreiber and the Airbus Scandal is essential (and entertaining) reading for anyone who wants to understand not only the shocking and still under-reported details of the biggest Canadian political scandal of the twentieth century but also the painful truth about how badly our political system too often really works.
The book is full of larger-than-life characters—from the wily, always-looking-out-for-number-one Karlheinz Schreiber, to the bullying, always-looking-out-for-his boss Luc Lavoie, to the mysterious but plugged-in insider “Tower,” who knows the Airbus deal doesn’t pass “the smell test” and points Cashore in directions that will ultimately help him prove it.
But it is Cashore himself—and his often frustrating, career-making-and-breaking, personally-costly 15-year-odyssey to discover the Truth—who is the real central figure in this compelling drama.
If “Tower” is Canada’s “Deep Throat,” then Harvey Cashore is our Woodward and Bernstein. And The Truth Shows Up is our All The President’s Men.
High praise indeed—but deserved.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Mike Duffy… you’re no Mike Duffy
To paraphrase a famous American: I knew Mike Duffy, Senator, and you’re no Mike Duffy…
I couldn’t help thinking that as I read Halifax Metro’s account this week of Duffy’s inane, ill-tempered and spectacularly ill-informed rant about the King’s College Journalism School. Full disclosure: I teach at King’s.
“Kids who go to King’s, or the other (journalism) schools across the country, are taught from two main texts,” Duffy huffed to a gathering of 60 Cumberland County Conservatives. Those texts are Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and some other unnamed tome on the “theory of critical thinking,” which, to Duffy, appears to stand for subversive.
“When you put critical thinking together with Noam Chomsky,” Duffy puffed, “what you’ve got is a group of people who are taught from the ages of 18, 19 and 20 that what we stand for, private enterprise… is bad.”
Uh… Earth to Mike: Noam’s not on the curriculum at King’s. And critical thinking? What were you thinking? What were you drinking?
“When I went to the school of hard knocks,” Duffy explained, taking refuge in the last refuge of any guy who is long past his best-before date, “we were told to be fair and balanced. That school doesn’t exist any more.”
Yes it does, Mike. It’s called journalism school. We still teach that fair-and-balanced mantra your soft Senate sinecure has long since hard-knocked out of whatever was left of your own critical thinking. Only we do it far better now.
Trust me on that. I may teach in what you consider an effete journalism school, but I learned my trade in the same hit-and-miss school of hard knocks you did.
The irony—worth remembering if only for the sake of nostalgia—is that Mike Duffy was once a very good reporter. When I was a junior journalist at CJCH Radio in Halifax in the early seventies, Duffy was a star at CHNS, our bitter cross-town rival. He was energetic, driven. His skepticism about everyone and everything—call it critical thinking—made him an equal-opportunity skewerer of all he encountered. Fair and balanced?
Somewhere along the line, however, Duffy gave up thinking, let alone critically. He even used his last journalistic bully pulpit at CTV to brazenly audition for the ultra-soft-knock job of Tory Senator. By the time he’d officially become a wind-up toy for Stephen Harper, he’d long since become a parody of the journalist he once was.
Pity.
I knew Mike Duffy, and you, Senator, are no Mike Duffy.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Mulroney-Schreiber (Dec 20, 2007)
Why we still need an inquiry
According to the most recent public opinion poll, most Canadians don’t want a public inquiry into the strange, fact-is-fantasy, fantasy-is-reality, no-really, tall tale of Lyin’ Brian Mulroney, Sleazy Karlheinz Schreiber, the incredibly shrinking $300,000, the sadly bloating $2.1 million, the globe-trotting lobbying effort on behalf of world peace, light tanks and the dietary benefits of pasta in fighting obesity to a who’s who of conveniently dearly departed world leaders, and… oh yes, the Airbus affair and that $20 million in grease money Schreiber once spread around political Canada like jam on toast on behalf of his corporate clients.
Oh that…
The Globe and Mail’s resident contrarian, Margaret Wente, wrote this week that we should all just move on. William Kaplan, the lawyer-journalist who once wrote a book proclaiming Mulroney’s innocence, discovered he’d accepted $300,000 in cash payments and then turned around and wrote a second book criticizing him, agrees. “We should probably call it a day,” writes the obviously weary Mr. Kaplan.
Brian Mulroney, perhaps not surprisingly, now shares that view.
Prior to last week, Mulroney had loudly proclaimed he wanted a full-scale public inquiry to clear his name (almost as loudly, it should be noted, as his chief spoke-spinner had once insisted our former prime minister never took money from Schreiber).
But then Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised Mulroney his public inquiry, and Mulroney got called to testify before the Commons Ethics Committee, and… oops.
Mulroney may have belatedly realized a public inquiry with a judge, lawyers and testimony-under-oath might not turn out to be another fawning memoir-promotion in high-definition, low-content, full colour with the likes of Lloyd Robertson. Or even another talk-until-they-drop partisan parliamentary committee appearance.
A real public inquiry could subpoena Mulroney’s bank and tax records. It could follow the Schreiber money trail to that secret Swiss account code-named “Briton,” then trace it back to Canada and on to The Pierre hotel in New York, even into that secret New York safety deposit box where Mulroney says he kept the cash. Records there could show exactly when the box was opened, how many times it was visited, etc. The inquiry could tell us how and when what was left of the cash came back to Canada, even whether the man who gifted us the GST actually paid it on what he now says he belatedly claimed as income.
A real public inquiry might compare Mulroney’s claims about his meetings on behalf of Schreiber with all those late and/or unidentified world leaders with any records — transcripts, notes, recollections of others present — that still exist in order to determine whether Mulroney was telling the truth about what he did to earn his $300,000… er, $225,000 retainer.
A real public inquiry would force Mulroney’s many friends and enablers — including key friends-of-both like lobbyist Fred Doucet — to testify under oath about Mulroney’s relationship with Karlheinz Schreiber.
No wonder Mulroney doesn’t want a real public inquiry.
And no wonder his many media apologists don’t want one either.
But what about the rest of us?
According to a recent Harris-Decima poll, only 32 per cent of Canadians now want Harper to call the public inquiry he promised.
That’s not to suggest they think Mulroney is telling the truth. The same poll showed only 21 per cent believed Mulroney was telling the truth when he testified last week.
Perhaps they believe they already know all they really need to — or will ever find out — about what actually happened. Perhaps they think an inquiry will cost too much and change too little.
Which is true — and not. The process of reform in politics is slow and inevitably stuttering. But it does happen. Stephen Harper’s Conservative swept into office on a promise to clean up after the sponsorship scandal. Their Public Accountability Act doesn’t go nearly far enough, but it is a step.
Beyond better legislation, the key to discouraging political bad behaviour is the knowledge there is no statute of limitations on misdeeds. The sponsorship inquiry took us back a decade; this inquiry could answer the still largely unasked questions about which politicians got what and why from Schreiber’s $20-million “grease money” accounts.
Politicians and their media apologists have been quick to say there’s no need for a public inquiry, no need to dredge up the past because it’s in the past and could never happen again.
Don’t buy it. There are only two pauses between a politician and scandal — legislation and the fear of getting caught.
Bring on the public inquiry.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
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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.