Dear God, will the Tories’ lust to stamp all of Canada with their logo never be sated?!

This brazen example of the Conservatives' ruthless campaign to rebrand Liberal Canada was spotted in a shop window on Toronto's Yonge Street. Unbelievable.



I suspect the handcuffs are okay, but someone is going to be in deep s*** for that red sneaker.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Settle down, National Post

Like I'd ever get the Globe or Star.

Come on down Jean, your toaster oven awaits!

Will Chrétien take the credit for CIBC having 15th highest losses worldwide?

With my Thursday Financial Post came news that the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce has posted the 15th highest losses worldwide for 2008. “CIBC has been heavily involved in capital markets in the U.S., which are high risk,” said Colin Cieszynski, an analyst with CMC Markets.

What is more deserving of a beating than the CIBC’s bottom line, however, is Jean Chrétien’s attitude of smug self-congratulation about refusing to allow bank mergers, an attitude that he paraded before the media like Adam Lambert in a silk suit more than once in the past year.

At the height of US bank failures and bailouts a few months ago, Chrétien reached out to CTV’s Bob Fife and granted a rare interview across his paper-free desk. The purpose of the interview? For Chrétien to once again crown himself the saviour of Canada’s banking system (sorry, could not find a clip or link). This echoed Chrétien’s braggadocio to the Globe and Mail last October:

“While everybody’s in turmoil, Canada is not in turmoil,” Mr. Chrétien explained in a brief interview.

“And the two big reasons are that we balanced the books in ‘95, and we said no to the merger of the banks.”
--Globe and Mail, October 8, 2008

Neither reporter noted that at the time, the Liberal government’s rationale for refusing the mergers was to ostensibly protect consumers, not to protect the banks themselves. In fact, the terms that then finance minister Paul Martin set out for allowing mergers betrayed no concern for the banks’ ongoing health, Instead, they were:

• A guarantee there will be no jobs lost.
• A reduction in consumer charges.
• An assurance that smaller businesses and towns will benefit from the merger.

Now I won’t hold my breath that Chrétien is going to summon Bob Fife, Joan Bryden or any of his other favourite reporters to his office for an explanation of how CIBC’s losses could have happened after he heroically stopped the bank mergers. Neither will I hold my breath for any reporter to hold him to account for CIBC’s losses after he was so eager to take credit for the entire industry’s health.

Implied by both Chrétien and Fife was the assumption that Canada’s newly-merged banks would have abandoned a century or so of business practices to risk their entire institutions on sub-prime mortgages and other high-risk ventures: an assumption that is not only dubious but entirely hypothetical. Not surprisingly, the former head of TD Bank did not share this assumption:

“If we had been allowed to merge, we might have thought that we were big characters and played more aggressively,” he said. “But I think it’s more likely we would have played by the same lending standards we have now.”
--Charles Baillie, Globe and Mail, October 8, 2008

Of course, Chrétien’s credit-taking is further undermined by the obvious fact that Canadian banks did not need to be merged to invest in risky US financial instruments, because that is exactly what the un-merged CIBC did. And it is what the un-merged Royal Bank did not do, having ranked number 10 of the 25 most-profitable banks in 2008.

Once Fife had entered the realm of the hypothetical, it would have been only fair to list other plausible hypotheticals that could have followed any bank mergers, such as this one: Canada might have had one or two huge, globally-competitive banks with the capacity to participate in huge deals, bringing that business and all its spinoffs to Toronto, Montreal and/or Vancouver.

But we will never know, because Jean Chrétien was steadfast in his determination that Canada’s banking industry remain a moss-covered rock in the rapids of globalization, to preserve the illusion of competition in storefront banking. No doubt Toronto’s underemployed lawyers and accountants regularly raise a glass to Chrétien for that service.

Chrétien’s crowing over stopping bank mergers points to a theme in his political career. As with his decision not to participate in the Iraq invasion, and refusal to allow a succession of disgraced ministers to resign, Jean Chrétien was at his most steadfast when his decision was to do nothing.

I suspect that CIBC will recover from 2008 and continue to be a strong bank (though of course this is hypothetical). And Canadian politicians will continue to learn from Jean Chrétien’s example: in politics it is usually better for one’s own career to be a caretaker than a risk taker. That’s how you keep your desk nice and clean.

Take back our public services

With public workers on strike in Toronto, it’s that time again. Time to re-post my award-winning (from the Western Standard) column about why we need to taking back control of our public services by getting unions out of the public sector.

Allowing monopoly services to be arbitrarily shut down is an early 20th-century concept that needs to be left back there.

Take back our public services
first posted November 2005

In Toronto, police cruisers sit parked outside a downtown police station, the police union having decided to stop patrolling. In British Columbia, teachers continue their illegal strike into its second week, idling 600,000 students and precipitating countless child care crises.

Organized labour has some clever slogans about all the good it has done for society, such as “Unions: the people who brought you the weekend.” But what have they done for us lately?

Think of the state of our roads, the quality of our education and health care, the cleanliness of our streets. The overall tax burden has grown, but this has hardly been matched by an increase in the quality of government services. Yet the wages and benefits of public sector workers continue to rise. Of course they do: by their very nature, public sector unions tend to drive up the costs and size of government. Union dues – themselves a cost driver – go to employ officials whose full-time work consists of filing grievances, lobbying the government for more workers, coordinating with other unions and supporting sympathetic candidates.

Much of the impetus for contracting out the delivery of public services stems from roadblocks faced by politicians attempting to meet the demands of taxpayers or deliver on good-faith election promises. Since public servants began to unionize, the people have gradually lost control of their public services.

Some have argued for outlawing strikes by teachers and other public sector workers, but this would be mere tinkering. The only way for the public to take back control of the services it owns is by decertifying public sector unions and restoring a direct employment relationship between government workers and democratically elected governments. Here’s why it makes sense:

Once the public has decided that a particular service is to be provided by the government, then that service is, by definition, essential. Many try to make a distinction between services that relate to safety and other government services. But public schools, transit and most other public services are legally or effectively monopolies, in that most citizens have no practical alternative when those services are not available.

Public sector collective agreements take away the public’s democratic right to decide what public services are to be delivered and what terms of employment are to be offered, provided those terms accord with employment standards laws and the common law. The wages, benefits and working conditions of public sector workers should be open to the democratic process as are all other aspects of government. They should not be decided in backrooms in negotiations from which the public is barred and on which the public’s elected representatives are forbidden to comment.

It is not the role of government to engage in unfair labour competition with the private sector. Some people think it is noble for the government to “set an example” for the private sector through higher wages and benefits. Such people don’t understand economics. The increasing taxes that those business will have to pay to support the government’s “example” mean that they will be hard-pressed to pay the employees they already have, let alone pay them more.

Thousands of private firms have policies and procedures for dealing fairly with employees; so would a union-free public sector. If the public through their elected government provides wages, benefits and working conditions that can’t compare with private employers’, then it will find itself with fewer and less capable employees.

Let’s put the “public” back into the public sector, by putting citizens and their elected representatives back in charge of our public services.

What Conservatives could never get away with – and the truth Ignatieff can never admit

Though I wish it were not necessary for the Conservative party to spend its money drawing to the public’s attention that which is most glaring about Michael Ignatieff, Lorne Gunter’s column in the National Post today makes a good case for why it is not only necessary, but just:

Now here’s where the Liberals are their most hypocritical about the Tories’ ads: Imagine their reaction if it were Mr. Harper who had spent 34 years outside the country, moved back only to take a shot at being PM, said the only thing he missed while away was a provincial park and referred to himself as an American many times.

Well, with greatest respect to Mr. Gunter, I don’t have to imagine. Because Conservatives would never elect someone with Ignatieff’s personal history. Oh, not because the Liberals would pummel him or her with ads – because the media would pummel him or her first, with their much greater and unanswerable firepower.

(While I’m at it, a Conservative leader would never ask for two do-overs in an election TV interview. Because he would know damn well that those outtakes would be aired. The Liberals’ desire to screw us is honed through continual competition with the mainstream media’s desire to screw us. But the Liberals have no difficulty demanding indulgences and Mulligans from the media, and are outraged when they are denied.)

As we well know, Conservatives start any political contest with one hand tied behind our backs and our shoelaces tied together. When we attempt to at least untie our shoelaces by telling voters things about our opponents that (1) our opponents would rather the voters not know and (2) the media are strangely uncurious about, we get called mean.

True to form, the Liberals have retreated to their favoured tactic: calling us racists. (I’ve long said that a Liberal is never happier than when he’s calling someone else a racist.) Ignatieff may never become much of a Canadian, but he has become enough of a Liberal to know when to throw the race card at Conservatives. I’m guessing, however, that this charge will fizzle with most persons not employed by Jim Karygiannis or Warren Kinsella.

Immigrants are people who were born somewhere else and chose to come to Canada because it was better than where they were. Ignatieff was born here and went elsewhere early in his career because Canada wasn’t big enough for what he wanted to achieve. So his lame diversions about immigrants, students and professionals are just that.

As Gunter notes, some rather prominent Liberals have drawn attention to Ignatieff’s weak attachment to the country of his birth:

Other Liberals were saying the same things the Tories are of Mr. Ignatieff just two-and-a-half years ago. While running against him for the Liberal leadership, Joe Volpe said no one who had been away for more than three decades could be an expert about his party or this country. Bob Rae complained "there are things about a country that you don’t learn from a book," that can only be learned by being here and being at the centre of tough constitutional or economic debates. In other words, someone should only seek to lead this country if he has "Canada in his bones."

Paul Wells has cleverly called this Ignatieff’s “pronoun problem.”

In the long term, it is probably to the Liberals’ disadvantage that they rose to the bait in response to the ads. That engagement has transformed the ads from a mean, unprovoked attack on a weakling, into the starting point of a conversation that Canadians otherwise would not have had.

Ignatieff knows the fact that he thought Canada too small a pond in which to make his name is a weakness and hence a political threat. That is why he rushed into print with True Patriot Love. I have not read the book, but based on reviews and excerpts it seems fair to say that the nub of it is “I never had much time for Canada, but some of my ancestors did (So vote for me!)”

And Ignatieff had never given any thought to returning to Canada permanently. Why would he, having been a success in the UK and then ensconced at Harvard? Not until emissaries from the Liberal party – concerned with maintaining their grip on this country’s rule after Paul Martin’s “jugger-not” delivered considerably fewer than 200 seats in the 2004 election -- visited him at Harvard with entreaties to come back and run in the next election. And after Martin was gone, well, who knows? Wink, wink.

This is Ignatieff’s other – and arguably bigger – problem. Ignatieff had little thought of coming back to Canada permanently, until a delegation of Liberal poobahs journeyed to Cambridge with the prospect – however distant – of the PMO in hand The Canadian professionals whom he speaks of typically intend to get some experience and make contacts in other countries, then employ that experience and network once back home.

Others, like Ignatieff, try to get out of Canada as soon as they can because the prestige, money, funding and/or action in their chosen fields are somewhere else. Most reasonable people understand that, and can deduce for themselves – based on the bare facts of Ignatieff’s history – that that is exactly what he did. Why won’t he just admit it?

Because he can’t. Because to admit that Canada wasn’t big enough for him would be to say that everything the Liberal party has been claiming and trying to prove about Canada for the last four decades is a lie.

The Liberals have put forward a prodigal as the inheritor of Trudeau’s cape. But that mantle is, at the same time, too big and too small for Ignatieff.

Pierre Trudeau did a pirouette behind the Queen’s back. Brian Mulroney stood up to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan on apartheid. Jean Chrétien announced Canada’s non-support of the Iraq invasion in the House of Commons – without even a heads-up courtesy call to George W. Bush (how they must have cheered for that in the Liberal caucus!).

Michael Ignatieff gave seminars to the US military, and published apologias for the Bush administration’s terrorism policies.

If Canada is an independent, confident country that is the equal of any first-tier nation – as the Liberals like to say we are (thanks to them, natch) – why would it want as its leader a man whose life story screams that we are a backwater?

The Liberals have no good answers to that question. And they know it.

Let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!*

For those of you not lucky enough to live in the Greater Toronto Area, Dave Devall is the local CTV station’s longtime weatherman. His chief talents are: (1) writing backwards on a glass wall and (2) possessing more varieties of plaid than a used car lot full of Pintos and Chevettes.

Nearly two months ago it was announced that Devall is passing the umbrella and retiring after 48 years. Since then, CTV viewers have been subjected to an endless procession of pale, death-tinged figures reminiscent of the banquet scene in “Macbeth,” just not as funny.

More promos than for “American Idol.” Tribute videos from the likes of Peter Mansbridge. Mystery weathermen such as actor Eric Peterson (“Corner Gas”) and Argos’ CEO Pinball Clemons. A “60 Days of Dave” (why does it seem longer?) webpage at CTV Toronto’s website.

All to remind us – so we will never, ever forget – of Devall’s prowess and endurance in doing basically the same !@#$ story every day.

Yeah, I said it. The guy read the weather report, for God’s sake. From indoors.

Devall’s departure has turned into a triumphalist marathon of self-congratulation that makes the multi-continent Chinese Olympic torch relay look like a day care graduation ceremony.

Parenthetically, if there is one area in which we will never have to worry about being surpassed by the Chinese, it is subtlety. The relay, like the Beijing Olympics that followed, perspired more desperation than Paris Hilton, virtually screaming: “Look how rich and important we are! (And stop blaming us for SARS and the bird flu!”)

The International Olympic Committee recently announced that these extra-national relays will hence be banned (though Vancouver 2010 and London 2012 had already planned to keep their torch relays to within their own nation’s borders).

Sadly, this rare display of good taste and restraint from the IOC came too late for CTV to take the hint.

The Dave-alcade contrasts poorly with the manner in which longtime CFRB morning man (and now Toronto Sun columnist) Ted Woloshyn handled his departure from the airwaves a few years ago. Woloshyn announced he was leaving and left the same day (usually when that happens in radio, it’s because the host got fired – and someone else makes the "retirement" announcement while said host is being escorted out of the building by security).

The remaining hours of Ted’s final show made clear why: it was around three hours of weepy listeners and local celebrities calling in, begging him not to go, saying how much they would miss him, yadda yadda. The thought of weeks or months of “remember whens” and crying women to which he was not related, must have made Woloshyn cringe, and he knew it would be bad radio.

Ted Woloshyn is a man. And not just because he once referred to Dalton McGuinty as “a tool” on the air.

The Devall celebration is doubly unseemly, in light of the media layoffs and shutdowns that continue to explode like forgotten World War II ordnance.

CanWest is supposedly whiskers away from invoking creditor protection. Reporters at media outlets across the country are losing their jobs. Staff at CTV Toronto – who must not only feign excitement at the woefully drug-free Daveapalooza, but help package and promote it – are probably thinking that they may soon be vying for a job at the Weather Channel, while Dave is scratching his nether regions on a 19th hole somewhere.

Thankfully, this Splenda-soaked spectacle will be over Friday. Then it would be nice if Devall could get arrested soliciting a hooker, and give us at least one genuine laugh.

* Oliver Cromwell to the Rump Parliament in 1653

P.S. Serendipity! The movie "Cromwell" starring Richard Harris started on Turner Classic Movies minutes after I posted this.

Noblesse Oblige, R.I.P.

John Tory departs the political scene, taking a vestige of old politics with him

As the official PC blogger on TVO’s “election battle blog” during the last provincial campaign, I would be remiss in allowing John Tory’s departure from the leadership of the Ontario PC party to go unremarked.

Needless to say, my opinion of Tory is higher than that of many Blogging Tories. Fair enough: people are entitled to their opinions, and I would rather be on a blog roll with people who speak their mind, however cruelly, than with careerists spouting party talking points.

Frankly, my regard for Tory is relatively fresh. Prior to his run for Toronto mayor in 2003, John Tory was not among the party figures I looked up to, though I was certainly aware of him. I counted him among the Bill Davis/Red Tory guard that seemed little acquainted with conservative principles.

But that changed with the 2003 Toronto mayoral election. I have never seen anyone go so smoothly and confidently from backroom advisor to candidate, as did Tory during that campaign (well, anyone since Tom Long when he ran for CA leader in 2000). As I recall, there were approximately 50 all-candidates’ debates, with Tory performing impressively at all of them. (His proposals to hire more cops and clean up Toronto’s filthy streets have since been adopted by David Miller.) So I happily volunteered, even venturing out on a dark and rainy night to drop flyers with two other friends, and then helping get out the vote on Election Day.

As PC leader, Tory brought an energy, work ethic, and – particularly after losing the 2007 election – commitment to listening that surpassed that of many leaders.

But his bids for public office struck me more as exercises in noblesse oblige, than the logical offshoot of a burning desire to fix particular problems or implement specific policies. As both mayoral candidate and PC leader, Tory had long lists of policy proposals and an impressive ability to speak authoritatively about every single one of them – plus any other issue that happened to come up. But other than the faith schools proposal, what policy could the average person identify with John Tory?

Even his plan to bring independent faith schools under the aegis of school boards came out of a sense of duty, not ideological fervour. The policy is probably not something that Tory would have proposed on his own. But the fact is that the Harris government’s independent schools tax credit addressed a genuine inequity in education. And the McGuinty government’s ugly and thuggish demonization (and reversal in the middle of school year) of a half-measure of fairness extended to fewer than 1 in 20 children could not be ignored, though a more ruthless leader might have done just that.

Tory put a lot of sincere effort into initiatives that the media are perpetually exhorting politicians to do: elect more women, appeal to ethnic communities, and raise the level of conduct in the Legislature. Fat lot of good it did him: the media were just Lucy Van Pelt to Tory’s Charlie Brown, yanking the football away as he came running to kick it. Perhaps the fact that the Queen’s Park Press Gallery has morphed into an internship program for government communications staff has something to do with it.

Noblesse oblige is an admirable impulse, and it can make for good premiers and prime ministers. But in this era of consumerist democracy and aggressively positioning one’s opponents, it makes for less-than-effective politicians. What possessed Tory to help David Miller retire his campaign debt – after Miller did everything he could during the mayoral campaign to tie Tory to the record of the Harris government (which Tory had less to do with than I did) – I will never understand. No surprise, Miller continues to milk the Harris scapegoat to this day.

In politics, noblesse oblige is the equivalent of sock garters. Oddballs like me find them attractive, but among most people, they evoke furtive sniggers. And they slow a man down.

So John Tory goes on to his next challenge with my respect and thanks. He also leaves conservatives with fresh reminders that (1) what the media say politicians should do, and the behaviour they reward, are two different things, and (2) leaders must be prepared to do what it takes to win. In 2011, Dalton McGuinty – or whoever is Liberal leader then – may wish that last week’s by-election had a different outcome.