CIVITATENSIS

Proof positive that Michael Ignatieff is completely disconnnected from the political reality of Quebec is the naming of Austronaut Marc Garneau to be his “Quebec Representative.”  A rose, by any other name….

The position of Quebec Lieutenant is one of a local party boss. It has been so because the political culture of Quebec, with its remnants of an authoritarian past, requires it still.  There is something quasi-tribal about it that no intellectual rationalising can access.  Garneau is a new comer just like Ignatieff: he has not been part of the liberal political clan, he does not have the political experience, the gravitas, or the authority of a political operative that the position requires. It really shows how Michael Ignatieff sees politics as an intellectual exercise, and truly does not understand its rooted experiential fonts.

In an ironic way, naming Garneau to the renamed post, however spun, is fitting for the Harvard professor and as well as for Garneau. As an astronaut, Garneau spent time in orbit, far from the center of the earth and its gravitational pull.  He is as distant from a political boss now as when he was in orbit.  In turn, naming him as Quebec party boss, Ignatieff shows to be–as the French expression describes those who are clueless–”dans la lune” (on the moon).

The country can breathe with some relief now that it has been announced: Stephane Dion will once again run to represent the good citizens of Saint-Laurent-Cartierville.  With Martin Cauchon returning and Dion staying, Michael Ignatieff can convincingly show that he is a leader capable of attracting new and vigorous blood to the Liberal Party.

Considering that Denis Coderre wanted Dion to disappear, this is a victory for the Cauchon Team.

The contest continues: It’s now Cauchon 3, Coderre 4.

Martin Cauchon’s return to politics in Quebec broadsided a female Liberal candidate and plucked a few feathers off of Denis Coderre’s political headship for the Quebec Liberal party.

While Ignatieff got caught in the middle of the titanic egos of the two male Quebec politicians who have leadership ambitions, it was Nathalie Prohon that got pushed to the side to the lesser riding of Jeanne-Le-Ber instead of Outremont.  It’s the new expression of Liberal friendliness toward women in politics.

Coderre’s Facebook status yesterday called for sending Cauchon to the riding of Jeanne-Le-Ber and keeping prestigious Outremont for Prohon (”Sur ma recommandation et celle de notre equipe du Quebec. Michael Ignatieff a offert la circonscription de Jeanne-LeBer a Martin Cauchon. A suivre”).

But Denis Coderre lost the battle to sideline his rival. Coderre has not updated his status since yesterday, no doubt still perplex. As Quebec party chieftain, he expected to prevail but Ignatieff decided otherwise.

The contest has only begun: Cauchon 1, Coderre 0.

Chantale Hebert has seized on what’s going on chez Iggy

In what increasingly looks like a case of Dion redux, Michael Ignatieff was poised to head down the same slippery election slope as his predecessor had the 40th Parliament died a swift death today.

Since the Liberal leader has gone on the election warpath, he and his strategists have largely recreated the dynamics that led to their party’s demise last year. Over the past three weeks, Ignatieff has won skirmishes against the other opposition leaders, but lost the pre-election war to the Conservatives.

Read on here.  You know it’s bad when even the Red Star tends to see Ignatieff as a Dion deux.

In what amounts to be practice for ousting the Conservative government of Stephen Harper come January, the Liberals are poised to install Michael Ignatieff as their new “interim” leader next Wednesday, after Stephan Dion finally steps down today.

While the Liberals constitution allows for the appointment of interim leaders, Michael Ignatieff is also running formally to replace their briefly rehabilitated but disgraced leader Stephane Dion. In effect, Ignatieff becomes the de facto Grit leader, which tramples the chances of the other two leadership hopefuls, including one Bob Rae.

Bob Rae, the Grit most animated to topple Stephen Harper is effectively being ousted himself. The leadership race will still be on, of course, but in reality the party will have robbed Rae of his chances to 1) get his hat trick toppling governments in Canada, and 2) become the leader of the battered Liberal Party.

In essence, a coalition of Liberals other than Bob Rae supporters is colluding behind close doors to take Bob Rae’s democratic chances away and to give the prize to Michael Ignatieff.

What goes around…

The opposition parties are getting all worked up and say they’ll take the government down in Ottawa on account that Tories want to cut off all parties from a state subsidy. I’d like to see an election in January, in which opposition parties whine about no longer being entitled to tax payers’ money at a time when tax payers are scrambling in line ups at Toys R Us to find a present for their little children. That’ll go well.

Then January and the bills show up at the door. How sympathetic will Canadians be that more than one hundred million will be spent in an election so that the opposition parties can keep their 20 million? All the while, they’re having to cope with job losses and credit card bills in the Xmas hang over.

They’ll form a coalition, the opposition folks say! Led by whom? Jack?!!  That will go well for Bob Rae! Duceppe?? Je ne pense pas, but it would be highly amusing.  Dion then? Yes, let’s have Stephane lead the coalition and be the PM. His election slogan could be something like…. Grits don’t want him no more, but you do!

Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe wants to reduce Quebec’s dependence on oil by half within 10 years.

Mr. Duceppe has been saying since the beginning of the [election] campaign that oil impoverishes Quebec while making Alberta rich [Apparently we are the only people in the world --let alone the country-- who sell oil!!!].

“It’s a real drain on the province’s economy,” Mr. Duceppe said Saturday during a news conference in Montreal.

Once again, Quebec separatists are promoting greater animosity toward Alberta and Albertans in order to get votes. Oil makes Alberta rich on the backs of Quebeckers, don’t you know.

Duceppe is welcome to buy his oil exclusively from Hugo Chavez if he wants. But let’s be fair: if wants nothing Albertan, he should also petition the feds to stop sending Alberta’s money to Quebec?

Step aside Listeriosis. Here comes Bob Rae.

Mr. Dion already trailed Stephen Harper by about 2:1 before Mr. Rae’s well-publicized appearance with the Liberal leader in Halifax on Tuesday. Today, following the appearance, Mr. Dion’s index score tumbled 16 points to 32, compared to 51 for Jack Layton and 108 for Mr. Harper.

Could it possibly be that Ontario voters actually remember?

The recently dubbed Liberal campaign aircraft, Profess-Air, may be a fitting metaphore for what a Liberal government headed by Citoyen Dion might be like:

Along with crew costs, the on-board mechanics and catering and its age, it costs between $18,000 and $20,000 an hour to fly. It is about 35 per cent less efficient than the Conservative and NDP planes.

Mr. Dion had expressed concern in a recent interview that the plane is more polluting than he had hoped. But the Liberals are buying credits to offset carbon emissions.

It’d make unscheduled stops for lack of energy! It promises to land even on rocky ground even though it will likely not get to any. While there may be savings in cheaper operating prices flying Profess-Air, it is still more than one third less efficient. Offsetting the guzzling by the purchase of “green” credits does not remove the fact that it’s still polluting. The balance is an appearance of savings cum green posturing, less efficiency, more time wasting, more pollution, higher costs and frequent groundings for lack of power.

We all have heard media pundits and pollsters write and comment about how Stephane Dion is losing traction with the voters in the campaign’s opinion polls.

But there is also clear evidence that Citoyen Dion may also be losing grip with reality:

Stéphane Dion is portraying his Conservative and NDP opponents as a team working together to elect Stephen Harper.

[...]

“Many times Mr. Harper and Mr. Layton are together…” Mr. Dion told reporters in St. John’s.

Traction and grip and too different things, but either way, Citoyen Dion is losing something.

More evidence yet that this politician thinks that the country is Ontario.

The NDP putting priority on family? I’d like for Jack to define that word for me.

Four former Canadian prime minister have joined in a call to arrest climate change or face the end of the world.

These political characters instilled so much fear into Canadian while they were in power that the public tossed out as soon as they a chance. As I heard Dave Ruterford say this morning, collectively (Clark, Turner, Campbell and Martin), the advising four have less time at the PMO than Prime Minister Harper. That’s almost true, but it does drive the point. Not exactly paragons of leadership, they are. When we think of Canadian prime ministers, their names do not readily come to come to mind as examples of sound political judgment.

Does any one really care about what these folks believe?

It may be a shock to Elizabeth May to hear that she is just another Liberal, as Stephen Harper claimed in opposing her participation in the 2008 leaders’ debate. Harper was not the only one. All other party leaders represented in the House opposed her participation, but Liberal Stephane Dion is the only leader that struck an alliance with the Green Party when May ran against Conservative Peter MacKay in Central Nova. One might say that Citoyen Dion has now betrayed his Green ally.

Back then, Dion wanted to appear gentlemanly and open to the Green cause. Privately, he expected to woe Green support to his party. But that did not happen. Opposing May’s presence in the debate now is not hypocritical, however. It makes sense from the political survival point of view. Citoyen Dion has realised that his little gamble backfired at least on one front. He may have appeared more gentlemanly because of his alliance with May (and it may not be just appearances. I am sure the professor is a gentleman) but no Green support bled to the Reds. In fact, the opposite has happened.

Disillisioned Liberals, there is now polling evidence, are now more and more likely to park their vote with the Greens. Presumably, they do so as they expect the professorial gentleman to loose the next election and as they wait for Justin Trudeau to descend from the Outremont political Heavens to rescue the beleaguered natural governing party. May it be so!

Citoyen Dion has no choice but to oppose May and her party. There will be no alliances, the Grits will field a candidate against her and hers, and there will be no more electoral nice guy.

Prime Minister Harper quite obviously has got the direction of the Red-Green influence very wrong. Elizabeth May is not just another Liberal. The way the Liberal support is moving, it is Citoyen Dion who is just another Green.

Update: Turns out that I got this wrong and that Citoyen Dion has not opposed May’s participation in the debates but he should. He is still the one with the most to lose to the Greens.

Citoyen Stephane Dion keeps hoping that time will deliver him to 24 Sussex. But that’s more superstitious than believing that a fairy godmother will do the job. In the meantime, as he waits for time to arrive to where he is, he gives the impression to be moving further and further from where he normally would be. Normally, that is, assuming that Dion could actually stake out some piece of territory along the meandering political road that he is travelling.

The result is that Dion is presenting the Tories plenty of ammunition come the next election; he is piling up big powder kegs on the top of his tiny hybrid vehicle. One of those renegade Conservative smokers will be waiting for the right moment to drive by and flick his cigarette butt right at him. The cigarette-flicker is very likely to be one of his own Liberals first.

If the Liberal Party of Canada was not already a caricature of itself, the sight of the entire Opposition caucus rising in support of the government Wednesday, over a bill that party leader Stéphane Dion said he is “adamantly opposed to,” confirmed that we have moved beyond satire and into travesty.

Paul Martin was Mr. Dithers, making decisions at a slower rate than the glaciers are currently advancing upon the Southern Cone, when he made decisions. Martin’s ship was stuck in neutral. Citoyen Dion does make decisions, even if it is not always easy for him to formulate priorities. But his decisions take him backward. He is Monsieur Recul. He is constantly speaking about travelling forward but moving in reverse. In so far as he may sometimes advance a little, he is rewriting Lenin’s famous aphorism: Dion takes five steps back to make one forward. He’s still moving, to be sure, but he is unable to see the yardage deficit as the world goes by.

As a former political science professor, Citoyen Dion should be familiar with Machiavelli’s Prince. If he is not, some one in his party should send him a copy with the appropriate passages in Chapter 25 well underlined. Waiting for the times to adapt to one’s own temperament never was the best way to obtain and keep a principality.

Meanwhile, the government is having great fun at the Liberals’ expense. James Moore, the parliamentary secretary for Public Works, was biting in his assessment of the Liberal performance during Question Period. “The fact is over the past couple of years … the Liberals, either through abstentions or ineffectiveness, have helped us pass three budgets, two extensions to the Afghan mission, our crime package, our environment plans and probably tonight [will help] pass our immigration reforms, or be on our way to doing it. So I would like to thank my colleague from Beauséjour on behalf of my constituents for sitting down, so we can stand up for Canadians.”

I am wondering about something of a trend. Surfing around blogs yesterday, I found a few “live blogging” entries for the Alberta leaders debate the night before. Joel Krom, Daveberta (the intrepid young cybersquatter who took on the premier) and Calgarygrit, who is not even in the same time zone as the debate, are examples.

The debate was televised on three different networks, it was broadcasted on radio and on the internet. In short, if you had access to a computer, you could listen or watch the debate anywhere in the world. So what is the point of “live blogging” for something that everyone can see or hear at the exact same time?

Is providing one’s seat-of-the-pants, immediate impressions from a screen (not impressions from being present at an event where others can’t be) just plain hubris to have them out there? This debate was even more peculiar because there was no substance to analyse, just quotes and banal remarks that were obvious to anyone. Are we assuming that (their) blog readers are that dumb here? Or is it a lust for spin masked as cute editorialising?

6:45 PM: Kim Trynacity asked a question to Taft about health care. Taft gives a decent answer. Hinman responds, talking about incentives for hospitals? C’est quoi? Innovative ideas… sure. Ed Stelmach is talking about a health care high school…

Why would one want to read the instant, raw and undigested first impressions of someone else, however genius they might be(!), when they have no better vantage point than one does in one’s own living room —and miss the event itself in the process?

Rod Love offers his commentary after the Alberta Leaders Debate last night. It was posted more than two hours after the debate ended.

After reading the entry I am hoping that there is no huge sums of money changing hands between Rod and the Herald. But if there were, I am sure the whole arrangement was verbal.

6:32 Opening statements: Mason, NDP boilerplate. Stelmach, solid Tory stuff. (Needs a smaller knot in his tie. That’s bigger than my dog!). Hinman, bit of a shot at the Preem. Taft, over-coached, but not bad.

6:35 Questions: A question to one person followed by the main answer and three timed rebuttals is ok, but once the free-for-all starts, it doesn’t work. This is the TV stations phony attempt to encourage ‘interaction’. All it really encourages is yelling-at-the-guy-next to-you.

Advertisement break. First ad is about mental illness. Having just watched the first round of question/answers, I have no comment.

6:45 Health Care: Kevin Taft’s mother-in-law spent seven days in a closet in a hospital? He’s still married?

Mason wants more drugs. Amen to that. The Preem has clearly been told not to look at his opponents.

Mason and Taft spar. I sense friction there!

Stelmach: “young babies being treated here” As opposed to old babies?

Hinman has clearly been paid to say “Lethbridge”.

Election insider for sure. Rod was inside the Cabernet bottle.

Read the whole thing in order truly to appreciate political genius at work.

That's right. You don't need to readjust your reading glasses. Today is the first ever Louis Riel Day in Manitoba. It brings us closer to Riel's own dream to found a new religion, of which he would be center. We can look forward to the day when the Manitoba government declares St Vital to be the Third Rome, as Riel wished it.

Happy Louis Riel day one and all!

I do not know enough about the specific accusations against Mr. Levant, Mr. Steyn and Macleans to give an opinion in their individual cases. However, I do know enough about the law to understand that their cases will be tried according to constitutional and legal principles. If they have been wrongly accused, then they will be vindicated and they might even be compensated. That is a matter between them, their lawyers, the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the courts.

I am not in the habit of commenting on other bloggers political opinions –not anymore. But I do make exceptions for professional opinions such as the one above. The person who wrote them is a practicing lawyer. Someone did give Cherniak a law degree so that he could come up with that kind of legal insight! A high school student might do better than that. Wasted tuition: no one ever gets accused wrongly who is convicted, no one ever uses the law to gain personal advantage, contrary to the principle of the rule of law. That’s amazing.

Jason sees himself clearing things up for the legally-illiterate with this post. But I have not seen infantile rhetoric like that outside my children’s room for quite a while –not to mention an inability to articulate the terms of the debate (hate, for example). In addition to the meaningless hot air quoted above, the gist of the post is that “Good liberals” are the ones he agrees with, and all those who disagree with him on Human Rights Commissions and free speech are “ignorant.”

Picture yourself as a judge in front of that Cicero!

h/t: SDA

Good news for Ed Stelmach and not so good for Kevin Taft.

A former Alberta Liberal leader will serve the Conservative government as chairman of its new advisory group dedicated to recommending ways the farm and forestry sectors can improve their environmental practices, the province announced Monday.

Ken Nicol, who led the Official Opposition from 2001 to 2004, said he let his provincial Liberal membership lapse more than a year ago, and doesn’t belong to any party now.

But his new part-time post with the Alberta Institute for Agriculture, Forestry and the Environment has nothing to do with partisan loyalties, he said.

He let his party membership lapse!  How does that happen?

“They kind of stopped calling me, and I stopped calling them,” he said. “I don’t know where it was or when it was, you know, we just kind of went our ways.”

They lost interest in him and he lost interest in them. He’s a former party leader for goodness sake, not some sort of an electronic gameboy that you lose interest in after a few weeks. Yikes!

Is citoyen Stephane Dion saying that NATO will have to intervene in Pakistan? Is this not also the same fellow who wants our troops to pull out of Afghanistan?

The only way for Dion to make this blunder even greater would be to suggest that Indian troops should enter Pakistan on behalf of NATO.

ST has the scoop here.

“We’re a culture that still has a very rigid notion of sexual categories: If you’re not totally gay you must be totally straight,” Dr. Diamond said. “Bisexuality throws that right out the window. So it’s easier to dismiss bisexuality as not being real.”

Of the women who identified as bisexual in 1995, 92 per cent identified as bisexual or unlabelled in 2005. Of the women who identified as lesbian in 1995, 66 per cent identified as lesbian 10 years later, 19 per cent had switched to bisexual and 16 per cent to “unlabelled.” None of the women who identified as lesbians in 1995 switched to the heterosexual label.

But Dr. Diamond found that her subjects’ definition of their own sexuality was quite fluid.

So fluid it is, it might constitute a wave of its own.

Looks like it’s blame Eddy week.

Getting beat up over silly threats made to a cybersquatter has now been topped by a poll, blaming Stelmach for the drop in support for the Prime Minister’s party in the province of Alberta.  Eddy is not just responsible for his own woes. He is now driving the federal misfortunes in popularity in this province.

Darrell Bricker, president of Ipsos-Reid, said it appears that most of the Grits’ jump in support, and the subsequent slump for the Tories, is a result of the Conservatives declining a remarkable 23 points in Alberta.

“It’s the Stelmach effect. We assume people differentiate between the federal and provincial parties even if they have the same name. I think what we see in Alberta is a branding effect because there is no great incentive to be against the Harper government in that province,” said Bricker.

But the troubles Premier Ed Stelmach faces in Alberta due to his government’s decision to charge higher royalties and taxes in the oil and gas sector are hurting the federal Tories polling numbers in that province. Meanwhile, the Liberals have jumped 20 points to 30 per cent in the federal poll.

Stay tuned. Eddy migt be blamed for the dry warm weather next week.

An Alberta Liberal cybersquatter is making media waves and gaining greater notoriety for his own blog, courtesy of the province’s premier. Ed is nothing if he doesn’t help his opponents. Most of the coverage on this will be at the political expense of Premier Stelmach, whose people decided to hit with nothing short of a sledge hammer a political mosquito buzzing by the premier’s ear.

The cybersquatting blogger is talking tough and the real Ed Stelmach will likely back down –as usual. But a squatter is a squatter and the law does not seem to be on the side of the youngster. Nonetheless, Stelmach has been goaded into a fight that though he can legally win, he will lose in the public eye, particularly among the young. At the very least, the premier looks like a heavy-handed politician beating up on a little student, albeit a partisan Liberal one getting a pay cheque from the Grits until very recently.

What is worse, the premier has been rather helpful in being politically outsmarted and somewhat humiliated by a twenty-something student. That’s the one Stelmach will have difficulty living down. In a world where snooty youngsters in cyber space try daily to gain notoriety by nipping at the ankles of the powerful (or apparently powerful), Stelmach has just painted a sign on his forehead. It reads: “pick on me!”

Stelmach should have paid the Grit squatter off, right at the start. A stuffed brown paper bag might have quickly done the job. (;

There are apparently no bounds to the ways in which Canadian media feed this country’s self importance.

A new poll suggests Canadians so massively favour the U.S. Democratic party that they’d back any of its leading candidates in a presidential race against a Republican.

A similar poll in the United States would simply not work because they just don’t care. If Americans started to express wide opinions about our elections, chances are Canadians would feel threatened.  We’re so pathetic.

If the weather forecasts prove true, Toronto will again need soldiers on the streets, with shovels. Also on the forecast, there will be renewed calls for Alberta surpluses to pay for more of their snow plows and for the plants that make them.

Just to add more confusion to the Stelmach government, an election was announced on a government website yesterday:

Several MLAs and political organizers were in a brief panic as the normally colourful “Who is my MLA?” page on the Alberta legislature’s website was mostly blank, and read, “Writ has been dropped.” That’s parliamentary lingo for “an election is underway.”

It turned out to be a hoax of some sort but for about an hour, there was panic among the Tory troops. To assuage the panic, they sent the ever so clueless government spokesman, Tom Olsen.

“When the premier drops the writ, he’ll do it proudly and publicly,” Olsen said.

Er… Actually, the premier doesn’t drop the writ. That’s a job reserved for the Lieutenant Governor, but how would Olsen know about the constitution?

As the Museum Just Pour Rire (Just for Laughs) shows, comedy is a component of our culture. Comedy and satire have been imprinted in Western culture all the way back to the Greeks. But Elections Canada will have none of it in today’s Quebec by-elections.

This [electoral] provision allows women who wear veils for religious reasons to vote without revealing their faces. However, Elections Canada advises those obviously mocking the law by wearing Halloween masks or the like will be turned away.

Can’t mock bureaucrats any more, eh?! Is Rick Mercer about to have his right to vote revoked? Not likely, but the humourless mandarins will need to decide who is funny and who is not: they’ll  probably lobby for a new mandatory federal license to practice comedy.

From the (not) funny file.

It’s summer and media have precious little to report about domestic politics. That’s when the irrelevant suddenly reaches levels of national significance. Warren Kinsella, the Liberal operative and half-blogger, has been forced to delete a “sexist, offending” photo commentary about cookies in reference to Ontario Conservative MPP Lisa MacLeod. Kinsella’s spin has in the service of Dalton McGuinty in the past.

Things have reached the ridiculous stage: Kinsella’s blogging gaffe showed up in the Globe this morning with a reference to a supposed contradiction. Liberals paint themselves as the party forcing itself to include more women in the political process, but they use tactics that ridicule women in the opposing parties. The suggestion is that Liberals only respect Liberal women, but there may be more. The fact that they force themselves to include more women is perhaps a clear indication that there is no contradiction in how Grits like Kinsella perceive females.

There is another humorous aspect to this: Grits have at times made silly comments about the prime minister’s waistline, but they’re typically the ones who get into trouble with snacks.

I was having a pretty good day today. Got up early to a bright sunny and warm southern Alberta day. Got in to work early and then paused for a Stampede Breakfast out in the sunshine. And then, I came back to my desk when I ran into an e-mail that I got a month ago from a Jamie M. Dagg. It reads in its enterity :

The world would be a fantastic place if people of your ilk decided to off themselves. The ignorance presented here is astounding.

I hope you all rot.

JMD

No reference is made as to what prompted Jamie to write. It’s eloquent but devoid of a single argument.

I don’t know what I wrote that sent Jim into such intellectual state, but I was having a pretty good day. Now, I am having a great day. Running into Jim’s e-mail I feel suddenly validated about blogging. (;