A little surprise in Canadian politics... and other stuff.
Just when I think that Canada is a bleak field of endlessly boring events, something like this happens to perk my interest.
Like many Canadians, I got duped and depressed by the Liberal leadership race, watching what was being presented constantly in the media as a race between two utterly unprincipled candidates who would have ran against the Harper party by trying to out-Harper Harper. I know enough about Michael "Empire Lite" Ignatieff to know that he would have done that. I don't know whether Rae would have done that, but then Rae really seems to do whatever is expedient for his career. And watching "debates" between the two of them, not to mention the prospect of watching them "debate" Harper, was enough to make me, like many Canadians, act as if all this stuff is boring and irrelevant and pay attention to things going on in other places.
Yesterday I was with a friend of mine who had some "Toronto Star" newspapers in his house from the past few days. All of them presented the frame as "now it comes down to Ignatieff and Rae". In one piece, they showed the numbers as they made that claim - 29% Ignatieff, 20% Rae, 17% Dion, 17% Kennedy. My friend pointed out that such numbers did NOT indicate a 2-way race. I had been fooled by the frame.
I don't actually know very much about Dion - what can I say, I was a dupe and believed I didn't need to look - and so I don't know how different Dion is from Haper/Ignatieff/Rae (you can guess my inclination on this question). But the fact that this thing was being framed as it was framed and it came out the way it came out is a very good thing. It means that the media's chosen winner (Ignatieff) and chosen backup (Rae) didn't win. That can't be bad. Whatever Dion says or does, this result offers the possibility of a bit more political diversity, and might slow Canada's slide towards increasingly overt support for violence and racism. I'm certainly going to spend some time thinking about how big or small the implications.
In other news, my friend Tarek is back in West Asia for a little while and blogging from there. I've heard some reports about the demonstrations in Lebanon, where an interesting situation appears to be developing...
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Many Canadians outside of
By Loss, Weight at Mar 02, 2007 20:06 PM
Many Canadians outside of Quebec are indeed very happy about this as they tend to reduce this issue to ethnic nationalism. In so doing however, they are themselves guilty of intolerence in that they refuse to recognise the existence of a distinct Quebec society that is just as open, tolerent and pluralistic as is the rest of Canada.
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More Clowns in Canadian politics.
By Kissenger, Clark at Dec 04, 2006 18:53 PM
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Dion
By Clennett, Bill at Dec 04, 2006 11:37 AM
Dion has definitely a more interesting position than Ignatieff with regards to international policy and has been qualified by some as a progressive liberal. This being said, in his own province of Quebec, Dion is not particularly perceived in a positive manner, particularly in regards to the Clarity Bill for which he was the prime mover as Minister of Intergovernemental Affairs in the previous Chretien governement. This piece of legislation imposed on the people of Quebec a less than democratic standard regarding any future referendum on sovereignty.
Many Canadians outside of Quebec are indeed very happy about this as they tend to reduce this issue to ethnic nationalism. In so doing however, they are themselves guilty of intolerence in that they refuse to recognise the existence of a distinct Quebec society that is just as open, tolerent and pluralistic as is the rest of Canada.
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Politician vs. Policy
By Kissenger, Clark at Dec 03, 2006 17:11 PM
It really is amazing how little we knew about ANY of the candidates, except for Ignatieff, who for some reason gave the editorial staff of the Globe and Mail a permanent hard-on and had published material on foreign policy issues.
Rae had a pretty high profile because of his ill-fated premiership in Ontario (while a member of the NDP) and his recent report on education. But as you say, we don't have a very good idea of what kind of flavour his policy would have since it seems to change according to the winds of fortune.
Dion and Kennedy were ciphers. Ken Dryden was a hockey player - besides that I had no idea what he was about. I can't even remember the names of the others. Some supported the "Quebecers as a nation" motion, some did not, which I interpreted as a function of political calculation rather than reliable index of their future policies in this area. In fact, that goes for almost everything they say.
I'm inclined to ignore any information about individual politicians and instead focus on policy itself. Party culture, electoral support, and most of all the economic, social and political landscape are better predictive factors of policy than the individual candidate, who will always appear to us in whatever way his or her minders tell her is the most expedient. This is especially true of federal politics and provincial politics (municipal elections are too bush league to hire expensive ad agencies and slick campaign teams.) Policy is the substance, politicians are the style.
Take bill 107, which is "reforming" the human rights commission in Ontario. McGuinty, the current Ontario premier, is gutting the commission and privatizing the human rights complaints process because the existing system is underfunded and hopelessly backlogged. It's more accurate, however, to say the "Liberals" are doing it. Even more accurate to say that the "Ontario government" is doing it, since the policy is the product of circumstances that have been engineered through decades of willful neglect under all three major parties.
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