By Mark Bourrie 

We all make mistakes. That first cigarette. Wearing Speedos when we’re overweight and over 40. Sending 50,000 smutty e-mails from military laptops to married women whose computers are being monitored by the FBI and hoping our wives don’t find out.

But when the world powers make a mistake, it can be a dandy. Take, for instance, the decision by Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan in 1976 to cave into American and French pressure to accept Canada as a member of what was then the G-6 group of economic powers. (It took another 21 years for the Russians to join the club and make it the G-8.)

Since then, the idea that Canadian prime ministers somehow rank with the president of the United States, the chancellor of Germany and the president of France has become a real problem in Ottawa.

We should face a few facts about Canada. It’s a great country to live in, mainly because we’re a small number of people sitting on a whole lot of gold, oil, natural gas, diamonds, silver, copper, trees and fresh water. Most of our country is rocks, swamps and arctic desert, but we still have enough farm land to pretty much support ourselves.

You’d have to be pretty thick not to be able to make a go as a nation with just 33 million people and half of a continent, even if it’s not the best half.

Our politicians like to take credit for our prosperity. The rest of us can live with that as long as they don’t screw things up too badly or get an over-developed sense of their own importance.

That’s where this G-8 silliness comes in.

Stephen Harper relishes the whole “G-8 world leader” nonsense. It was used as an excuse for his security detail to transport an armoured Cadillac to India earlier this month, as though there are no safe limos in the subcontinent, or that anyone would recognize him if he walked down the street.

In Ottawa, Harper has adopted a style that can only be termed lordly. He travels to work in a motorcade of black limos and SUVs with tinted windows. (Lester Pearson used to walk.) A limo takes him across Wellington Street from his Langevin Block office to the main parliament building. (Pierre Trudeau used to walk, even though he was a G-7 leader, too.)

Crash-proof barriers have been installed at 24 Sussex Drive, and the chef’s quarters have been turned into an RCMP security detail command centre. (The Harpers and chefs have never really worked out. A previous chef sued, saying it was not part of his job to bury the Harper family’s dead cat.)

A few weeks ago, when the PM took his teenage son to the Centre Block’s very informal 5th-floor cafeteria for a burger, they were accompanied by at least four skittish, bulky men with wires in their ears and a photographer. Much eye-rolling ensued.

Call me old fashioned, but I think it’s still pretty safe on the streets of Ottawa, even for prime ministers. Ottawans are pretty good at giving space to politicians. As for terrorists, they’re really unlikely to make a move on any PM. There’s only been one serious assassination attempt against a Canadian prime minister, and the would-be killer blew himself up in a House of Commons washroom. Real terrorists aren’t deterred by motorcades.

The clincher came on Hallowe’en, when kids trick-or-treated at 24 Sussex. This year, they had to go through a metal detector. (That’s similar to the House of Commons visitors security system, where rent-a-cops relieved a friend of mine of a bass hook in his cap. Another one took my wife’s tweezers.)

Anyway, it seems terrorists come in all sizes and disguises. And, as Gulliver found out, even the little people can make your life miserable. Our G-8 country world-class leader was kept safe from witches, pirates, Darth Vaders, and other sketchy small people, who arrived at his doorstep disarmed.

If you think this kind of nonsense is the brainchild of the security staff, and that the PM has no say in how it works, think again. The PM is the boss, and if he really thought the head of his RCMP security team was pushing him around, that cop would, within a few weeks, be showing store clerks in Iqaluit how to spot fake toonies.

He likes this. He likes this too much.

As for the rest of us, well, it says something sad about Ottawans that parents were lining up to put their kids through the metal detector.

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The Spitting Image puppet of Margaret Thatcher was used to satirize both her personality and her policies

Contributing editor Mark Bourrie takes bets on what Stephen Harper has planned for his “legacy” move.

In 1985, Margaret Thatcher broke the coal miners’ union in the U.K. For years, the National Union of Mineworkers had been the country’s most powerful trade union. It had toppled Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath’s government in 1974. Now was time for payback. Thatcher had already won the Falklands War. She had beaten a foreign enemy, she said, and now she would “destroy the enemy within”. Six strikers died in the 1984-1985 coal strike. Many more were tear-gassed and beaten with truncheons. Thatcher used mounted police, armed strike-breakers, and turned M15 against the union’s leaders.

When the coal miners’ union collapsed, the rest of Britain’s trade union movement fell apart. Breaking the strike was Thatcher’s greatest domestic success, one that has re-made the British workplace into the delightful place it is today.

My friends and I have a pool going about Stephen Harper’s coal mine strike moment. To get into the $5 pool, you have to come up with something batshit crazy that the Harper government will do this year. Corporate tax reductions aren’t crazy enough to meet that threshold, but prediction of a flat tax does. With the level of paranoia in Ottawa, some of the predictions have been, um, somewhat extreme.

• Bring back the Red Ensign flag? That’s one bet, but it’s not mine.

• I chose to predict the government will eliminate at least two out of three of these federal departments: Transport, Canadian Heritage, and the National Capital Commission.

• One of my co-workers suggested the Harper regime will grab the Civic Holiday in August and rename it Freedom Day. (I’d make a side bet that they’d rename Labour Day.)

• Then there’s the possibility of bringing back capital punishment. Or the return of the lash in prisons to maintain discipline. The latter would probably be knocked down by the courts, though there are supporters of the idea among the old Reformers.

None of those, however, would be a real Margaret Thatcher moment that would show Canada and the world what a tough guy Harper is. He needs something at least as photogenic as the 1970 October Crisis, when Pierre Trudeau deployed troops with guns onto the streets of Montreal and Ottawa. (Trudeau jailed nearly 200 journalists. During the Second World War, Mackenzie King detained none.)

Forcing the Gateway Pipeline through would not make the cut. Nor would killing the CBC, although that one’s close to the threshold.

One of our pool entrants came up with something that would really do the trick: “Right to Work” legislation for the public service. That would give federal public servants the right to refuse to pay union dues and join the Public Service Alliance or one of the smaller professional unions that represent federal employees. I’d bet that very few government employees would actually choose to opt out of union membership, but that doesn’t matter. PSAC and the other unions would be forced to strike to defend themselves.

It’s pretty much a no-loser for Harper, for the same reason that Thatcher couldn’t lose with the coal miners. Like Britain in 1984, Canada’s in an economic slump. There’s a widening gap in wages between union and non-union workers. For some perverse reason, many workers would rather see the union wages ground down, rather than fight for higher pay and benefits.

And, for years, and with some reason, federal public servants have been portrayed as inefficient featherbedders who are “takers” not “makers.”

Break the federal public sector unions, and you’ve pretty much gutted what remains of the labour movement, since offshoring destroyed private sector industrial unions years ago. The Caterpillar strike in London, Ontario, shows just how much labour’s back is to the wall.

I wish I had made that bet. But maybe there will be no Margaret Thatcher moment for Stephen Harper. Perhaps he will govern like Bill Davis and Leslie Frost, and even Dalton McGuinty, as a sort of caretaker who makes change incrementally, if at all.

But in this town, very few people are willing to make that bet.

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POLITICS CHATTER: Contributing editor Mark Bourrie reports that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has decided to declare war on the press. Will the party faithful buy in?

When you’re short of enemies, there’s always the press to kick around.

On August 13, 1941, Canada’s chief press censor sat down at his desk and typed a memo to the head of military intelligence.

The two men had just come from a rancorous meeting. The military wanted a tougher censorship system. The censors, backed by the federal government of William Lyon Mackenzie King, were opposed.

This was a time of total war.

France had fallen. The Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece were under the Nazi jackboot. Most of the rest of mainland Europe was in the hands of Nazi puppet rulers. The Panzers were fighting on the plains of the Ukraine, encircling entire Soviet armies.

The United States was still sitting out the war, smug in its isolation.

Any betting person would have put their money on the Nazis.

So it was important to make sure the media in this country wasn’t a useful source of information for the Nazis about troop movements and convoy sailings. And there was a dire need to maintain morale in this country in the face of more than a year of defeat laid upon defeat.

But Wilfrid Eggleston, the head of English censorship, dug in his heals. The people needed to know what was happening in the country. Giving them pap, happy talk, and lies could make life easier for the government and the military — until the day came that Canada was under attack. It would not help Canada win the war.

Eggleston wrote in his memo that the press plays a vital role in any democracy, including Canada. It provides truthful feedback to governments, the kind of information that bureaucracies are loathe to tell their masters.

Eggleston pulled out some paragraphs from the latest issue of Fortune magazine: “The press in a democracy is still the fourth estate; it is almost a fourth branch of government. It is not, as in Germany or the U.S.S.R., a branch of the government, but a part of our constitutional system.

“There is the legislative, the executive, and the judicial branch — and there is the press. It is impossible to imagine governmental processes in the U.S. without a press. Its first function is to inform, its second to criticize. Censorship is a direct threat to both functions and hence a direct threat to effective democracy. Without information there is no basis for criticism and without criticism there is, as the saying goes, tyranny.”

The struggle that Eggleston so eloquently outline continues to play out today.

Last week, the Tories sent out a fundraising letter saying the party needs cash to fight its real opposition — the Parliamentary Press Gallery.

And at a speech during last weekend’s Conservative convention, former Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day went after the national press corps.

Day said the media engages in too many personal attacks.

“Oh, listen, we made mistakes absolutely that we should be and should have been taken to task for. But for some of these personal things, for which the attacks were so incredible, I hope that just as there is a maturing in the process in the House of Commons, I say at some risk, to my dear friends in the media, that there could possibly be a maturing of that process also,” Day told the Tory faithful.

Day did get a rough ride from the media over the years. His arrival on a jet ski at a Lake Okanagan press conference was truly mock-worthy. On the other side, a Liberal operative’s use of a Barney doll to mock Day’s religious faith was a sleazy low blow, which was broadcast on national TV.

But attacking the media is as ill-advised now as it was in the worst days of the Second World War. The media, despite its faults — and people make entire academic and legal careers pointing those out — is as much part of our system of democracy as it was 60 years ago.

Stephen Harper has worked hard in the past eight years to de-legitimize the role of the media in the political system. He deliberately worked to create bad feeling with the Parliamentary Press Gallery, then hammed up the role of victim when the press fought back.

And the press didn’t fight hard. Very quickly, they rolled over and allowed Harper’s flacks to decide who asks questions. They didn’t complain much when the cabinet began meeting at secret times and in hidden places so the press would not buttonhole ministers. Very few complained when the bureaucracy was gagged.

And, except for the Toronto Star, every major newspaper in Canada endorsed Harper in the election campaign.

Some victims.

But the press makes a good whipping boy. Public support and understanding of the media has shriveled as neo-cons continue to smear the media as elitists, a charge that rings true as some major media, like the CBC and the Globe and Mail, become ever-more unbearably smug.

The U.S. press gets more access to the President of the United States than the Parliamentary Press Gallery gets to Harper. Being premier of Canada is a nice job, but, really, the entire country has about the same population and GDP as California. Time to deflate a few egos around here.

But that won’t happen. The Tories have made their plan quite clear. Parliament is no longer important, now that Harper has his majority. The public service is gagged. The courts are being filled with Tory appointees, as are any boards and commissions that might have tried to act off-script.

The press still has the potential to be a loose cannon. It looks like we’re going to get the full blast of the smear machine, once the Tories are finished passing the hat.

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POLITICS CHATTER: Ottawa Magazine contributing editor Mark Bourrie takes a historical approach to predicting the Liberals’ future fortunes. (And history would suggest that they’re not quite dead yet.)

During the recent election campaign, this blog led the way in identifying and trying to rectify this country’s burgeoning zombie problem.

Many people in the mainstream media tried to ignore the problem of the walking undead. This, even though at least one party leader, a self-admitted eastern European count, was literally coming apart before our eyes.

The leader of what was then the third party was a cyborg, a man who had received at least one mechanical joint. This piece of hardware was so powerful that it overwhelmed Jack Layton’s natural method of mobility, thus forcing him to walk with a cane to compensate for the extra power.

And the Prime Minister was, and is, an obvious robot devised by Boeing engineers and manufactured in a Right-to-Work state.

And yet I find myself defending the Liberal Party against rumours that it’s dead. The same gut that told me Stephen Harper was a good bet in 2006 now says to go long on the Grits.

I can paper my walls with the prematurely-issued death certificates of Canadian political parties written over the years by newspaper columnists, talking heads, and tenured political scientists (although politics is an art, not a science). From 1867 until 1896, the Liberals were dead in Ottawa. They held office for just one term, after Sir John A. Macdonald was caught shaking down the president of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The rest of the time, the father of our country could easily keep an eye on them through the bottom of a gin glass.

From the end of the First World War to the election of John Diefenbaker in 1957, the Tories were supposed to be dead. They held office for just one full term during those years, in the first five full years of the Great Depression. The rest of the time, they staggered from one poor leader to another, with no hope of gaining power until Mackenzie King finally quit.

The Liberals were supposed to be dead after Dief’s 1958 landslide. The Tories were supposed to be dead after Dief self-destructed five years later. In the Trudeau years, the Liberal hegemony was supposed to last forever. And in the summer of 1979, there wasn’t a Liberal government anywhere in Canada.

But the Tories were supposed to be dead after 1980 because Joe Clark could not win Quebec. When Brian Mulroney swept Quebec and the rest of the country in 1984, the Liberals were supposed to be dead, the world having embraced Ronald Reagan’s neo-conservatism.

By 1993, the Progressive Conservatives were shattered into three pieces — the western Reformers, the Bloc Québécois, and the two-member Tory caucus that survived the Kim Campbell wipe-out. All the political class expected the Liberals to be in power forever. People actually argued, 15 years ago, that Canada was effectively a one-party state because it was mathematically impossible for the Chrétien Liberals to be defeated. This was seen as a terrible threat to democracy.

And everyone knew that the able and ambitious Paul Martin would keep rolling up those big majorities against the western Tories, who would always be led by hicks like Stockwell Day.

Then Stephen Harper got in, but it was just a matter of time before the Liberals assumed their role as Canada’s Natural Governing Party. The NDP would always be a third party because it could never win seats in Quebec.

The election of Thomas Mulcair was a fluke. The Bloc owned at least 50 of Quebec’s 75 seats. And, since Quebeckers either voted for separatists or for parties that could dispense patronage, the NDP did not have a hope.

Now the Liberals are dead. They’re the third party in the House of Commons. They have no money. Harper has sucked up the votes of Blue Liberals.

All of those predictions, all of that conventional wisdom, is based on the same logical flaw: that the reality of today is the reality of tomorrow. But politics is a fluid thing. Governments get old. New leaders — think of David Peterson and Mike Harris in Ontario, Lucien Bouchard in Quebec, Stephen Harper in Ottawa — move from the edge of the stage to the centre and change the entire show.

The Liberals will be back, just as, someday, the Tories will be written off again and will make their own comeback.

There are a few little foundation stones being laid now for the next upheaval. The cancellation of party subsidies will require the Liberals to rebuild a grassroots movement to raise money or die. As well, the Liberals now have time to finish cleaning out the people involved in Adscam. And, finally, Stephen Harper, with his majority, must wear the next economic downturn and the collapse of the Canadian housing bubble, which will certainly occur during this mandate. He will no longer be able to blame minority government for his troubles.

Until then, we’ll keep seeing obits for the living. And the list of premature “always” and “nevers” will continue to grow.

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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.

They went after the votes of Atlantic Canadians, even though Stephen Harper once accused voters there of engaging in the culture of dependency. It showed no real interest in arresting the economic decline of a region that was truly short-changed by Confederation and has been left behind by the change in world trade patterns and the decline of coal.

Most important, the party went after people like Stephen Harper. In his most telling comment of the campaign, Harper said Canada was one of the few countries of the world in which a truly middle-class person could rise to power. Harper came from a family with just one famous member: Robb Wells, who plays Ricky on Trailer Park Boys.

He was able to win over millions of people with similar middle-class backgrounds — people without friends in big corporate law firms, small business owners, parents who really sweated over where they’d come up with money to pay for their kids’ hockey gear.

This will be a difficult coalition to hold together. Can Harper keep the nutters — the Ezra Levants — from scaring away the New Canadian supporters?  Can he deliver what the Reform people have wanted so long — a humbling of the eastern media, cultural, bureaucratic, urban elite? Can he satisfy the patronage expectations of all of the members of this coalition?

Brian Mulroney came to power via a coalition of angry westerner and angry Québécois, plus a block of Ontario voters who mistakenly believed the Tories would allow Ontario to remain as an honest broker in Confederation. Within nine years, this coalition failed so badly that it went from 208 seats in the House of Commons to two seats.

The NDP have won Official Opposition status with a relatively small breakthrough in downtown Toronto and a big sweep of Quebec. It is now a party made up of those who are utterly despised by the old Reformers: downtown ridings in the big cities and the bulk of seats in Quebec.

The yuppie neigbourhoods of Toronto are in NDP hands — the Beaches, Queen Street West, Parkdale, the Danforth, the Annex. The Glebe is in NDP hands. But so is the Pontiac. And the NDP caucus is a coalition of newbies, people who will be immediately attacked by the conservative media that dominates discourse in Canada.

This is a very bad election for Ottawa. The 20^th century’s centrist consensus fostered a professional, neutral public service. This was supported by technocratic cabinets dominated by lawyers who, for all their faults, understand the rule of law and value expertise. That model is now gone.

The Tories now have a mandate to make big cuts, not only to their cherished bogeymen like the CBC, but to swaths of the bureaucracy. Ottawa’s solid, bourgeois middle class and old elites – the people who read our magazine – has very few friends in the PMO. The NDP can carry the mantle of the public service, but this is a majority government. And John Baird, alumnus of the Mike Harris government and attack dog with no known scruples, is the only Ottawa cabinet minister with any clout.

I haven’t written about the Liberals. I’ll give the space to Michael Ignatieff, who said Tuesday morning: “The surest guarantee of the future of the Liberal party is four years of Conservative government and four years of NDP opposition… hopefully after that, people will realize why we have a party in the centre.”

The Liberals have one election left. This year’s could have been a blip. The election of 2015 will tell us whether Jack Layton and Stephen Harper have built social-economic coalitions that will last.

One last word about Michael Ignatieff. As all 15-year-old girls know, it’s easier to tear down a reputation than to build one. Conservatives — and Canadians — should be ashamed of the attack ad campaign that destroyed a man who, for his faults, is a world-class intellect who could think circles around Stephen Harper and, for that matter, Pierre Trudeau.

It is difficult to understand why anyone who actually buys into concepts like “citizen of the world” or “world class” would ever mess their hands in Canadian politics. Conrad Black once identified envy as one of Canada’s negative traits, and the old felon was right.

Many people will be inspired to come forward to engage in this new political paradigm. Others will wander in shock for at least a while, maybe even for the duration.

For the latter, here’s something to keep you busy for the next four or five years. www.angrybairds.ca

The post ELECTION CHATTER: The Verdict appeared first on Ottawa Magazine.

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.

He has no respect for democracy, which he sees as nothing more than bickering. Anyone who did care about democracy would have taken the House of Common’s contempt motion seriously.

(One of my colleagues in the Press Gallery is a diehard Chinese communist. His views of Parliamentary debate seem to mirror Harper’s.)

He’s an absurdly insecure man, over-confident in his intellect (which, despite the hype, is no great shakes) yet afraid to have his prejudices and shallow thinking challenged by debate or public questioning. He tries to bully people to do his will, and puts no value on intellectual persuasion.

It’s obvious he believes people are stupid and that he’s smart enough to manipulate them.

Ooops, Steve. That didn’t go so well.

Michael Ignatieff never caught on with Canadians for two reasons. One was the vicious, cruel, bullying attack ad campaign that Harper launched against him two years ago. Ignatieff made the fatal error of trying to ignore it, but the crap stuck. The second was the truth of the charge that he had been away for too long. He really did need to earn his spurs in Canadian politics before winning the top job.

He would be smart to stick around. Near the end of the campaign, people began to see just how poorly Ignatieff has been treated.

Conventional wisdom is that Harper will win a minority. In reality, this election night will be full of surprises. We could see anything from a Harper majority to a Layton minority because of vote splitting, strategic voting, and the now-unfathomable “ground game” of volunteers in the country’s 308 ridings.

But even if Harper wins a majority and the Liberals are the main opposition party, the game has changed. No one will ever again say in a leadership debate that an NDP leader has no chance of being elected Prime Minister.

Nor will any party be able to wrap itself in the flag, in Quebec or anywhere else, and be able to own the vote of all regionally patriotic people.

There are now three national parties in Canada. The over-confident neo-conservative movement now has the left breathing down its neck. That will give some pause to Stephen Harper, if he makes the mistake of sticking around, and to people like Tim Hudak in Toronto.

So get some air, enjoy the weekend, and give some thought to voting.

And thanks to the people who read the blog.

The post ELECTION CHATTER (DAY 35): How the game has changed appeared first on Ottawa Magazine.

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.

The spoiler, since 1991, has been the separatist Bloc Québécois, which tended to win about 50 of the 75 seats in Quebec. None of the national parties wanted to court the Bloc’s public support for fear of appearing unpatriotic.

But halfway through the 37-day campaign, the election went from a quiet exercise in political tinkering to a massive change in Canada’s political culture. Polls show the NDP have made a historic breakthrough in Quebec at the expense of the Bloc Québécois. If the public opinion surveys are accurate, the Dippers will crush the separatists and replace the Liberals as the second-largest political party in Canada.

And, while Stephen Harper will likely come away from this campaign as prime minister, his chances of ever winning a majority — or staying in national politics much longer — appear to have been dashed.

Personalities have played an important part in the campaign. Harper has failed to connect with voters and has alienated himself from the media. Canadians grudgingly give him credit as an economic manager but are wary that he would re-make Canada into a neo-conservative state, starving the national health care system of money, ending support for culture, and cutting other public services.

Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has been hobbled by Conservative attack advertisements that began two years before the election campaign actually started. Ignatieff left Canada in the 1970s to study at Harvard University and lived in Britain for nearly two decades, where he worked as a BBC commentator, war correspondent, and author. The Conservatives created a belief in the minds of many Canadians that Ignatieff was an opportunist who returned to Canada to take over the government.

No one had spent much time bothering to attack the NDP. Its leader, Jack Layton, is recovering from prostate cancer and, just before the election call, had surgery on his hip. The country has warmed to a candidate who had to use a cane as he campaigned in every corner of this vast country looking for the votes of its 33 million people.

Layton scored well in the French and English debates. His command of French and his promise to listen to the complaints of Quebeckers began to resonate. Many Quebec voters, frustrated that the separatist Bloc had little power in parliament, began considering the NDP as a real alternative.

In many ways, it was a process of elimination. The Conservatives are seen in Quebec as a western, English party that opposes the aspirations of French Quebec. The Liberals are still distrusted because of the advertising kickback scandal that drove them from office in 2006. Most of the kickbacks involved advertising agencies in Quebec.

Polls now show the NDP poised to win the bulk of the seats in Quebec. In the 60-year history of the party, it had never done better than one seat. That would, for the first time, make the NDP a true contender at the national level.

And even if that support falls back, the Liberals and Conservatives will now have to take the NDP much more seriously than they ever have.

The Conservatives may win Monday’s election. They may even get their majority. But the rise of the NDP and the decline of the Liberals have made this the most interesting election in decades, and one of the most important in the history of the country.

The post ELECTION CHATTER (DAY 34): Putting it all into context appeared first on Ottawa Magazine.

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.

I wrote about the living dead yesterday. Then, my thoughts were focused on human beings that I thought had faded into history — or should have. Bringing back the likes of Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, Jacques Parizeau, and, in Ottawa West-Nepean, Sheila Copps, just seems wrong.

None of these people are on the ballot. The real choices are Stephen Harper, Michael Ignatieff, and Jack Layton.

Maybe it’s the painkilling drugs that make Jack seem so happy these days and inspire him to raise the threat of new constitutional crises. If so, I hope that hip heals really soon, Jack, and, until then, maybe a few weeks on a Cuban beach would help.

Layton’s turn of phrase, as quoted Tuesday by the CBC, is disturbing: ”It’s not a question of appeasing anybody. We have an historic problem. We have a quarter of our population who have never signed the Constitution. That can’t go on forever,” Layton said.

“What we do believe is you start to create those winning conditions by replacing the Harper government, by respecting the people of Quebec and their hopes and their aspirations and starting to take steps in the House of Commons that show to Quebec there is an appreciation of some of their key issues.”

Jack, we don’t have a historic problem. Seems more like you have a problem with history. As the Supreme Court of Canada has affirmed several times, Quebec is part of the Canadian federation. And since René Lévesque raised the bogus “signing the constitution” issue, the federal government has done grotesque contortions to appease any demands of Quebec nationalists, no matter how bogus or outright discriminatory they may be.

And “winning conditions”? Those are words right out of the Bouchard-Parizeau separation playbook. Winning conditions for what? Layton knows exactly what he is playing with, and he doesn’t care if we all get burned.

It would be intriguing to see what the new round of demands would be, and how Prime Minister Layton would satisfy them.

“Distinct society?” Why bother? Harper already stick-handled a parliamentary resolution declaring the (presumably Francophone) Québécois a nation in Canada.

An end to multiculturalism? Quebec’s National Assembly has already pronounced it dead.

Special status that gives Quebec power over taxation, pensions, immigration, manpower, and culture and allows Quebec – unlike any other province – to duplicate federal services ranging from setting immigrants to running blood donor clinics?

So far, the Layton campaign has been fun to watch. There’s lots that’s appealing about a guy fighting cancer and overcoming painful surgery gamely taking his fight across the country and wailing on two rather unappealing opponents.

But if betting the country is Layton’s way to victory, we’re better off with the same-old.

The post ELECTION CHATTER (DAY 32): Jack Layton plays with fire in Quebec — and the whole country could get burned appeared first on Ottawa Magazine.

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.

So is Ed Broadbent. His protégé, Jack Layton, who limps because of “hip surgery” — in reality, difficulties with the embalming equipment — has managed to come across as a man who is actually one of the living. If the campaign lasted three more weeks, he’d risk having his ears turn green and fall off.

Then there’s Count Ignatieff who, as I have so often explained, travels with what staffers call “the sleeping coffin” and reacts poorly to mirrors and sunlight. The Liberals have foisted on us a count with a dubious family background who, supposedly, arrived on these shores from “Harvard.” But, as I have often noted, his accent has a distinct Carpathian Mountains twang to it.

Count Ignatieff no longer travels alone. Two other zombies, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, have joined the Ignatieff campaign in a stratagem that can only be the work of the Prince of Darkness. Neither time nor the prayers of nuns have cleansed the soul of Chrétien, who is laden with the sins of Quebec ad men and sleazy small-town grifters of the Mauricie.

Poor Paul Martin was exhumed from the Eastern Townships to remind us of our former prosperity, but all those years in the same crypt as Chrétien have left him with a taint that no amount of Holy Water can wash away.

In a sad parody of Easter, the most despised of the Undead has risen and walks among us now. Black Jacques Parizeau is loose in the Quebec countryside, and all the roadside crosses and shrines of the Distinct Society will not bring him to heel. Parizeau is allegedly 80 years old. In fact, he has been around much, much longer. The Huron have an oral tradition of him stalking their cornfields and raiding their villages long before the arrival of the Europeans.

Back then, he sought small children. Today, he settles for support for his apprentice, Gilles Duceppe.

I think this may be the last election where the living dead are a potent political force. It’s fairly safe to assume that Count Ignatieff will depart for “Harvard” if things go poorly. Chrétien will retire to his mausoleum, Martin to his lonely New England-style graveyard near Knowlton, and Parizeau will end up howling in a bell tower in the wine country of France.

If the people of Ottawa West-Nepean have an ounce of Christian virtue, they will shoo John Baird out of their village, although, for the life of me, I can’t imagine where he will get his meat. He should turn up regularly on the Sun News Network, but that’s hardly a living.

We will be left with the Cyborg. Perhaps that’s what we need. Maybe we are not good people, and we’ll become better under the Tory knout. Unless the Rapture interrupts the process, we may learn that we get the leaders who most resemble us.

Canadians yearn for leadership from the land of the living, but, in our dysfunctional political and media systems, a person with an organically-generated pulse and a functioning brain doesn’t stand a chance.

The post ELECTION CHATTER (DAY 31): On the campaign trail with the living dead appeared first on Ottawa Magazine.

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.

Some claim Jack Layton has caught on in Quebec. How ’bout them Hell Icehounds? They’ll win the Cup if they can get past the Canadiens in the semi-finals. Olivia Chow shouldn’t hire a decorator for Stornoway yet.

Stephen Harper is busting his ass to win his majority and keep the abortion zombie buried in the backyard. It will take weeks of facial massage to get rid of his kitty-face election smile, but at least he won’t have to hire a moving truck next month.

Elizabeth May has not been heard from since the debates. Perhaps she has been eaten by a killer whale somewhere off Hornby Island. Those of you who scoffed when I said May peaked in 2008 should start listening now.

As for Gilles Duceppe. Yea, sure, the separatists are dead. Where have I heard that one before?

Michael Ignatieff will probably spend the weekend polishing the coffin and wondering why he ever let those little Liberal hustlers in $200 Moores suits talk him into giving up one of the best jobs in academia for this mess. It’s going to be pretty tough going to faculty parties at Harvard or U of T and explaining away how he got whacked by a handful of geeks from Calgary.

But all those bills can be tallied up later. This is a weekend for eating waxy chocolate and staring forlornly at the sky, hoping to see a sliver of blue.

Like me, most people will try to forget the election for the next four days. I don’t pretend to have much of a grip on the realities of normal life: this daily blog and my other election writing keeps my attention focused on this dreadful race and away from most real human contact.

So I have no idea whether people are caught up in this thing or not. It’s also hard to know what messages are getting through. Like Harry Truman, I believe there is a public wisdom that eventually gets it right. Sometimes it happens right away, sometimes it takes time.

Now, on Springer, we’ve got a guy who got drunk and ended up in the sack with his ex. He’s reading bad poetry to his angry girlfriend, talking of his love and regret. (I can assure him this does not work.)

And here’s a guy who is in love with another guy, and it was all working out until Guy No. 1 decided to use massive doses of estrogen to start a sex change. Guy No.2 doesn’t like women, even transsexuals, so it’s break-up time and more regret.

So now we have one guy who was duped, another who can blame his mistakes on booze, another who messed with drugs and saw his love life go south. In this election, we’ll be lucky if we can get away with such wonderful excuses when regret time rolls around..

The post ELECTION CHATTER (DAY 27): Comparing the election campaign to quality television (in this case, an episode of Jerry Springer appeared first on Ottawa Magazine.