Articles Tagged ‘Election 41’

ELECTION CHATTER: The Verdict

The Verdict: In which Ottawa Magazine contributing editor Mark Bourrie calls out Stephen Harper for winning a majority by crafting an unwieldy coalition that will pose huge challenges in the months ahead

One of the great regrets of my life is that I have no artistic talent.

If I did, there would be a cartoon here instead of a blog. It would show Stephen Harper and Jack Layton riding side-by-side on tigers. There’d be some kind of witty caption, but right now I’m too tired to come up with one.

It’s funny that Harper used fear of a coalition to scare people into giving him a majority. All governments are won by cobbling together coalitions. So are all national parties.

Harper has crafted a coalition that poses huge challenges for him.

It consists of a core of western seats run by the old Reform party that tapped into Alberta anger over the National Energy Program, the Canadian Wheat Board, and being shut out of the federal bureaucracy by bilingualism rules.

It was, like most western populist movements, anti-urban. Its natural enemies were educated, young, white-collar downtown urbanites. The Reformers and Harper Tories ran against Kitsilano Beach, the Beaches, the Glebe, and the Plateau.

That was not enough to win government. The minority Harper government set out to win the votes of new Canadians. That took considerable audacity. The party that shelters people who seek to tear down equity rules and human rights commissions sought to convince people from Asia that they were not racist.

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  |  May 3, 2011 at 1:18 pm

ELECTION CHATTER (DAY 35): How the game has changed

Day 35: In which contributing editor Mark Bourrie tells it like it is — and urges you to give some serious thought to Monday’s vote.

So, it’s all over but the tears and balloons.

And my days as an election blogger have come to an end.

This election went from being a tedious gambit by Stephen Harper to make a bid for a majority government to become the most important election since 1917. In that election, English Canadians supported the military draft while Québécois opposed it. The Union Government, primarily Conservative, of Sir Robert Borden, was elected, and Conservatives were subsequently shut out of Quebec for 40 years.

Some people might argue this election has been even more of an earth-mover. No matter whether the NDP support in the polls translates into real votes and House of Commons seats on election day, the people of Canada have made it very clear that they are not happy.

They’re not thrilled with the Harper Government and its contempt for Parliament, the media, and other institutions that act as the eyes and ears, and sometimes the voices, of Canadians.

Nor are they happy with packaged politicians who pitch “Family Packs” of vacuous promises that sound like deals at fast food restaurants — probably because the same wizards who do the ads for chicken joints also sell politicians as commodities.

In Quebec, people seem to like their social programs, but are sick of sending 50 obstructionists to Ottawa in every election. While it’s fun at first, throwing rocks at windows turns into work after a while.

So a lot of people — not a majority, probably not even a parliamentary minority — have settled on Jack Layton and the NDP.

I could tell people dozens of reasons why this is a bad idea. Unfortunately, I can’t give them any reasons why they should vote for Stephen Harper or Michael Ignatieff.

Harper is a strange man, and not in the “fun at parties” kind of way. He’s a narcissist, someone with not the slightest bit of embarrassment for rebranding the government after himself or hanging walls of photographs of himself in the Government lobby of the House of Commons.

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  |  April 29, 2011 at 3:35 pm

ELECTION CHATTER (DAY 34): Putting it all into context

Day 34: In which Ottawa Magazine contributing editor Mark Bourrie puts this election into context, explaining why it went from being a sleeper to the most important election in more than 100

On March 25, the three opposition parties in Canada’s House of Commons voted no-confidence in the government of Stephen Harper, and Canada was plunged into its fourth federal election in seven years.

All of the national parties — the Conservatives, the New Democrats, and the Liberals — went into the campaign hoping to break a deadlock in Canadian politics that began in 2004, when support for the Liberals collapsed in the wake of the Sponsorship Scandal.

We’ve had seven years of minority government. Usually, that means fairly good government. For people like Stephen Harper, who don’t respect the views or intelligence of their political rivals, this has meant frustration.

For more than a century, the Liberals had been Canada’s “natural governing party”. The Liberals are, in fact, one of the most successful political parties in the world. From 1887 until 2004, every leader of the federal Liberal Party had served at least one term as Prime Minister.

The Conservatives have been Canada’s minority party since they imposed the military draft in World War I. The New Democratic Party, a social democratic movement that was loosely based on the British Labour Party, never placed better than third. In recent years, all it could hope for was to play “kingmaker” in a hung parliament.

When this campaign began, little change was expected. The Conservatives hoped to win a majority the House of Commons. The Liberals believed they had a serious chance to win the most seats and form a minority government. Another scenario saw them combining with the opposition parties to form a coalition government — either a formal one, with cabinet ministers from both the Liberal and New Democratic parties, or an informal one in which all of the ministries were in Liberal hands but the party kept NDP support by adopting some of their policies.

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  |  April 28, 2011 at 3:30 pm

ELECTION CHATTER (DAY 33): What the election campaign really should be about

Day 33: In which Ottawa Magazine contributing editor Mark Bourrie wonders why a whole generation of Cree kids goes to schools that would embarrass any non-Native school board and provoke the wrath of parents

You’d think a town with a diamond mine would have a school.

A real school, with solid walls, lots of books, and a school community that encourages learning and success.

But not Attawapiskat. There, in an isolated community near the shore of James Bay, the kids go to school in portables. Their old school was contaminated with diesel fuel that leaked from a storage tank in 2000. In a developed country, the mess would have been cleaned up or, at worst, a new school would have been built.

Bureaucrats in Ottawa who send their kids to some of the best public schools in the country, “administer” Attawapiskat. Political leadership is absent. The kids of Attawapiskat have been made to pay for someone else’s carelessness — and for a government that has not cared at all.

Indian-bashers would likely blame the people of Attawapiskat, saying they should fix the problem.

Well, let’s have a look at the place. Attawapiskat has about 1,300 people. They’re James Bay Cree who settled in that area a century ago to fish the Attawapiskat River and work in the fur trade. But the river cannot come close to supporting 1,300 people year-round. Nor can hunting.

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  |  April 27, 2011 at 4:30 pm

ELECTION CHATTER (DAY 32): Jack Layton plays with fire in Quebec — and the whole country could get burned

Day 32: In which Ottawa Magazine contributing editor Mark Bourrie takes Jack Layton to task for messing with the Quebec nationalism

Bring on the ducks.

I’m ready. I’ll take off my glasses and let them get to work. Because I would rather have my eyes pecked out by ducks than live through another round of constitutional bickering.

Yet that’s what Happy Jack Layton is promising. Anything to get votes in Quebec. We’ve already seen lots of talk from Layton and his candidates of “Quebec and Canada.” That’s the way the Bloc talks, yet NDP candidate Nycole Turmel, former head of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, used that loaded phrase last weekend at a Dipper rally in Gatineau.

What is an NDP breakthrough in Quebec worth? Mind-numbing rounds of constitutional debates, discussions, and referenda, with all of the uncertainty they’d bring? The badly-handled Meech Lake-Charlottetown negotiations directly engendered the Bloc Québécois and a referendum that almost cost us the country. Yeah, Jack, let’s do that again.

Jack may be popular with the press and with voters who don’t know him, but with Layton, it’s always about Jack. Even when he’s celebrating the Canadian men’s hockey team’s Olympic gold.

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  |  April 26, 2011 at 2:15 pm

ELECTION CHATTER (DAY 31): On the campaign trail with the living dead

Day 31: In which Ottawa Magazine contributing editor Mark Bourrie paints a disturbing picture of the federal party leaders as various incarnations of the living dead

I know I am the first member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery to raise the issue of the living dead being a potent force in the campaign. Now, it seems, the political parties have latched on to the problem, but in ways I have never expected.

Take Stephen Harper. The Prime Minister is a known Cyborg, composed of spare parts from various autopsies gone terribly wrong, some 1990s-era nanotechnology, and programming by the Republican National Committee. The hairpiece should have been a give-away, yet Canadians refuse to believe.

Then there’s John Baird. Mr. Baird is a known werewolf. The press downplays this fact, calling him an “attack dog,” when, in fact, it is quite obvious that Mike Harris went back to North Bay with Baird’s soul.

Now, I do not suggest anyone go after Baird with a silver bullet. Simply waving a cross in Baird’s face should cause an immediate and very obvious flinch. You should be able to back him into a corner and keep him cowering harmlessly until the small children make their escape. (Leaving raw meat nearby will not provoke a serious reaction. Baird caught on to that trick in his Queen’s Park days. Back then, he lived in the tunnel that connects the legislature building to the University Avenue subway line, and people used to amuse themselves tossing him pieces of hot dog.)

As far as I know, there are no other undead minions of Satan campaigning for the Tories, although Krista Erickson of the new Sun News Network looks rather unearthly. Strange moonlight rites could not revive Brian Mulroney, and poor Joe Clark had a stake driven through his heart some 31 years ago, and is thus unavailable.

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  |  April 25, 2011 at 1:15 pm

ELECTION CHATTER (DAY 27): Comparing the election campaign to quality television (in this case, an episode of Jerry Springer

Day 27: In which Ottawa Magazine contributing editor Mark Bourrie compares the election campaign to quality television (in this case, an episode of Jerry Springer)

Well, it’s Easter. The buds are on the trees, the tulips are bursting forth, the potholes beckon.

It is the time of celebrating the raising of a dead man. To those who believe, enjoy the weekend, and thanks for sharing it with hockey fans, golfers, and trilobite collectors.

This election has generated much talk of the Living Dead, especially from me. Time for a break.

Meanwhile, in the real world, life goes on. Today on Springer, we have the story of some poor fella in Louisiana, minding his own business, just cooking some alligator in his shack, when a neighbour woman came over to say that the guy’s girlfriend was stepping out.

Alligator boy promptly put his crockpot on simmer and proceeded to breed with the messenger. But it turned out that Gator Guy was conned, leading to tears, brawling, and remorse.

Life imitates quality television. Many of us feel screwed under false pretences. There we are, just cookin’ up some cold-blooded wildlife when the phone rings and a computer imitating a politician tells us to vote.

We usually end up feeling like we should have just stayed with the gator meat until it was ready. I have eaten alligator and, while it’s more tender than snake, not as stringy as beaver, and not as dry as moose, I doubt it will ever catch on in Quebec. But then, I would have bet against French fries, canned gravy, and cheese curds, so there ya go.

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  |  April 21, 2011 at 4:40 pm

ELECTION CHATTER (DAY 26): Is the national media lying to you?

Day 26: In which Ottawa Magazine contributing editor Mark Bourrie despairs for democracy — and accuses the national media of playing partisan games

I just survived a virus called System Tool.

It’s a nasty thing. I had it at Christmas, too. System Tool infects your computer’s hard drive. It pretends to be something useful, a virus scan software. But instead of sweeping your computer for viruses, it hijacks your computer and ruins it.

You can try to buy off the software by sending your credit card info to the Russian mafia or the Hong Kong triads or whoever created System Tool. But you won’t get your computer back. That’s why, for the past 10 maddening days, I’ve been using the kids’ laptop.

System Tool is not the only thing around that looks like something useful but is, in fact, evil. We’re in the middle of the most dishonest and dirty election campaign I’ve seen, and there are so many system tools infecting democracy that I don’t think we’ll be able to wipe our hard drives and get rid of them.

Take the pollsters. I don’t care about their results. Lazy journalists rely on these system tools to drive news coverage. Pollsters are cheap, much less expensive than journalistic boots on the ground. We don’t need them. This isn’t a racetrack, and a vote is not a bet on a winner. We need honest, detailed examination and discussion of the people seeking office and insightful examinations of their policies.

“War rooms” are also system tools. Ever since the movie The War Room came out after Bill Clinton’s first win in 1992, every politically-inclined dweeb who couldn’t get a date without the help of a $100 bill fancies himself a James Carville.

By their very nature, war rooms are filled with liars and manipulators. Yet the media treat these people like great political play-yahhhs, gurus of spin. The most outrageous liars and political saboteurs are praised for their cleverness. Richard Nixon’s Dirty Tricksters ended up in jail. Ours get regular spots on TV and radio political panels.

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  |  April 20, 2011 at 4:30 pm

ELECTION CHATTER (DAY 25): Will Sun News have any real influence on the election?

Day 25: In which Ottawa Magazine contributing editor Mark Bourrie spends a thrilling day watching Krista Erickson and Ezra Levant

Well, this is the new media landscape. Teeth, tits, and talk. No fat chicks and no lefties. It’s Sun News, the just-launched talk and news network.

Sun News would not be the subject of an election blog except for the fact that Quebecor launched it right in the middle of the campaign. (And, despite the paranoia surrounding Sun News, the election collided with the long-decided network launch date, not vice versa).

A few conflict declarations: I was offered a job by Sun News but didn’t pursue it. I enjoyed a nice lunch with Sun boss Kory Teneycke but things didn’t go much farther. I am far too fat, old, ugly, and nasal to be on TV, but I would have done big investigations and fed the Sun goat.

I had a bunch of reasons for not joining Sun. One – probably the most important – was my bad memories of working for the Toronto Sun in my early 20s. I remember how hard it was to explain my choice of employer to family and friends. It was bad enough starting my career with the Sun outfit, without ending it there.

But some of my friends signed on. Brian Lilley and Daniel Proussalidis are two guys I like a lot. They are true-believer conservatives and their ideals are honest and open. They do not pretend to be objective.

I followed Ezra Levant’s human rights commission fights, since they fit into my academic work on media censorship. And I interviewed Theo Caldwell a couple of times a few years back when he was kicking the tires on Frank magazine.

So there we go. Now, about Sun News and the election.

Is it any good? Good enough to sway undecided voters and win converts?

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  |  April 19, 2011 at 4:54 pm

ELECTION CHATTER (DAY 24): Disgruntled cats, zombies, loonies, bogeymen — and the threat of Quebec separation

Day 24: In which Ottawa Magazine contributing editor Mark Bourrie gets into a lather about the spectre of Quebec separation.

My cat says he’s packing his stuff and is outta here.

He says we don’t speak the same language. He says he is tired of being humiliated, of being reminded of his inferiority, and wants to be master in his own home.

Meh. He might as well go. I’m tired of his bad attitude, his constant howling and complaining, day and night. I have to worry about the bills while he wastes his time pretending to catch mice.

Were it not for me, I tell him, he’d have been dog bait years ago. He claims that, without his input on these blogs, I’d be a worse writer than Warren Kinsella and would be whoring myself to the tabloids.

But I know that cat’s not going anywhere as long as that food bowl is full.

A lot of Canadians can relate to my relationship with my feline freeloader.

The ugly head of Quebec separatism has risen from its too-shallow grave. And, like any other zombie that cries wolf, we’re getting tired of it.

It’s like an abusive relationship, except that the tiresome husband insists on living next door and splitting the welfare cheque. Plus he comes in during the day to watch Springer and drinks all the milk. And leaves the empty carton in the fridge. And the seat up. When he lifts it.

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  |  April 18, 2011 at 4:15 pm

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