Month: January 2007

For those of you who just can’t get enough of the whole equalization debate, you’ll be pleased to hear that the editors at the Institute for Research on Public Policy have helpfully pointed us to a few papers they’ve published over the last few years on this topic, all of them written by federal-provincial relationship guru Tom Courchene:

Energy prices, equalization and federalism

Resource Revenues and Equalization: Five-Province vs. National-Average Standards, Alternatives to the Representative Tax System, and Revenue-Sharing Pools

Vertical and Horizontal Fiscal Imbalances: An Ontario Perspective

Have fun!

The provincial government in Saskatchewan continues its public relations battle with the federal government over the issue of equalization payments. NDP Premier Lorne Calvert does not want resource revenue used in the formula to calculate how much money Ottawa sends a province. Prime Minister Paul Martin set such a precedent with his so-called asymetric federalism approach of one-off deals with Nova Scotia and Newfoundland that excluded or partially excluded resource revenue.

Calvert has been asking for the same thing and he says Prime Minister Harper has indicated to him that he shouldn’t necessarily count on a similar deal. (Adding in resource revenue to a province’s financial situation makes a province look wealthier and, generally speaking, transfer payments to a province shrink as they get wealthier. It is in a province’s best interest to make itself look as poor as possible in order to maximize transfer payments from Ottawa). The Prime Minister has been asked about this here in Ottawa but has been rather equivocal on the subject.

Today, the finance minister of Saskatchewan, Andrew Thomson, releases a letter he received today from his federal counterpart Jim Flaherty. In the letter, Flaherty provides “for budget certainty” the amount of “equalization floor payments” provinces can expect in 2007–08. In other words, Flaherty is setting out the minimum he expects each province to receive. Saskatchewan joins B.C., Alberta and Ontario as the only provinces for which there is no guaranteed funding. Alberta, Ontario and B.C. will almost certainly get nothing because they are the ‘have’ provinces in Confederation. Calvert would like to argue that Saskatchewan is still a ‘have-not’ province and needs federal transfer money. In fact, Saskatchewan’s government was counting on $800–million from Ottawa. Today, it learned that it shouldn’t count on anything from Ottawa.

“[Ottawa is] guaranteeing $11.7 billion in total, including $1.7 billion to Manitoba,” said Saskatchewan Finance Minister Andrew Thomson in a press release. “They are honouring the Atlantic Accords for Newfoundland Labrador and Nova Scotia, yet they will not guarantee that they will meet their commitment for $800 million to Saskatchewan.”

Payments to the various provinces range from $291 million to Prince Edward Island up to $6.5 billion to Quebec.

“There is no certainty for Saskatchewan here,” Thomson said. “Following our meeting in Vancouver last month, I asked Minister Flaherty to honour his government's commitment to Saskatchewan. As recently as this morning, we heard members of his government reassure us that they would do just that. Yet the letter today has left the people of this province without any guarantee of retaining our natural resource revenues.”

And to make matters more interesting, 12 of the 14 federal ridings in Saskatchewan are held by Conservatives — some of whom have been privately worried that this issue could come back to bite them at the next election.

The federal government wants to break up the ‘single-desk’ system for the marketing of wheat and barley that Western Canadians must use. Agriculture Minister Chuck Strahl  announced last week that Western Canadian farmers will vote on the issue so far as barley goes in a vote that will take place from Jan. 31 to March 6. The question that will be put to farmers in that vote has not yet been made public but will be sometime before Jan. 31, a spokesman for Strahl’s office told me tonight.

Late today, Strahl also announced that Ottawa will conduct a plebiscite on the marketing of wheat but that vote will happen “at an appropriate time.” Strahl affirmed that “Western Canadian farmers have the Government’s commitment that no changes will be made in the Canadian Wheat Board’s role in the marketing of wheat until after that vote is held.”

This latest announcement from Strahl follows on the heels of an announcement earlier in the day by the government of Manitoba  that reported the result’s of Manitoba’s own plebiscite.:

“Independent accounting firm Meyers Norris Penny today released the final results of the provincially- administered vote on the wheat board’s single desk. Wheat and barley producers voted 61.8 per cent in favour of retaining the single desk for barley, while 69.5 per cent voted in favour of retaining the single desk for wheat. Sixty-five per cent of eligible voters participated.”

The spokesman for Strahl’s office tonight pointed out that the question Manitoba put to farmers was an “all-or-nothing” proposal, in which farmers were essentially asked if they favoured the elimination of the Canadian Wheat Board. The spokesman, Conrad Bellehumeur, noted that the federal government does not wish to eliminate the wheat board but wishes to offer farmers the choice of finding their own organization to market their grains or use the Wheat Board.

“Our vision is to have the Wheat Board as a viable option,” Bellehumeur told me. “We don’t want to eliminate the Wheat Board.”

Bellehumeur also notes that Manitoba is home to about 10 per cent of all Western Canadian barley farmers and 14 per cent of wheat farmers.

There will soon be a new site called Wikileaks where, according to the site's creators, you'll be able to 'leak' documents without worrying that the leak can get traced back to anyone. The anonymous mathematicians and programmers behind Wikileaks believe that this site “.. combines the protection and anonymity of cutting-edge cryptographic technologies with the transparency and simplicity of a wiki interface .. Wikileaks opens leaked documents up to a much more exacting scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency could provide: the scrutiny of a worldwide community of informed wiki editors.”
Well, good luck. Professionally speaking, I rely on the quiet word, the unnamed source, the leaked document, and the anonymous e-mail as an essential source of good news items. So I'll be visiting Wikileaks when it gets up and running which, according to the site creators, will be in as little as three our four weeks.
But — as someone who is often offered confidential information — let me pass on this advice: Those who have confidential information want to know who they're giving it to. They want to know the character of the reporter who will tell the world about this confidential information. And they want to know for a few reasons — mostly because they need to trust that person. Wikileaks says it has some great cryptography, etc. which it says will protect its sources. And they say they've got 2 million leaked documents ready to go. Ok. Great. That's cool. But the cryptographers behind the site — so far as I can tell — are anonymous. That's not right. Heck, these folks could be the secret police from [fill-in-evil-country's-name-here] for all you and I know!
Those who are courageous enough to leak information need to leak to partners who are courageous enough to put their own name on the line and who have the fortitude to defend the anonymity of those who asked for that cloak.

Technorati Tags: journalism

News item:

OTTAWA — The Conservative party has been ordered to pay up to $50,000 to a former candidate who agreed to step aside for a star recruit in the last election.
A judge has ruled that the party had no right to renege on agreement struck with Alan Riddell, who stepped aside as the candidate in Ottawa South so that Allan Cutler, the bureaucrat who blew the whistle on the sponsorship scandal, could carry the party banner in the riding . . .

“Agreement struck with Alan Riddell”? What agreement struck with Alan Riddell? Why I remember clear as if it was yesterday standing in a scrum with Stephen Harper on Dec. 4, 2005 — in the middle of the election campaign Harper would eventually win — asking him if the party had agreed to pay Riddell off as part of a backroom deal — a confidential agreement — to clear the way for Riddell.
“In fact there is no agreement and he hasn't been paid anything,” Harper told reporters on Dec. 4, 2005.
“The party does not have an agreement to pay Mr. Riddell these expenses, and Mr. Riddell has not been paid anything to date, ,” Harper told us said when asked again on the same day.
But a judge of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice disagrees. In a ruling he issued today — Riddell had sued the party to enforce the agreement denied by Harper — Mr. Justice Denis Power writes: “There is now no dispute between the parties concerning the fact that an agreement between Mr. Riddell and the CPC [Conservative Party of Canada] was concluded, [and] that the agreement is dated November 25, 2005 …”
Among those who negotiated directly with Riddell or his representatives in late 2005 were Ian Brodie, who was then and is now Harper's Chief of Staff; Mike Donison, then and now the executive director of the Conservative Party; and Don Plett, who was, then and now, the president of party. Brodie and Donison had, like Harper, rejected the idea that there was any backroom deal with Riddell when asked about this in late 2005.
And yet, if you read through the judge's finding [caution: it's a 13 MB PDF], you will find e-mails and testimony that clearly show how concerned Donison and others were that any whiff of this deal not be made public.
Harper was not available to answer questions today about this. Donison, reached by phone late this afternoon, referred questions to the terse two-line statement he issued today: “This is part of ongoing court proceedings surrounding various disputes between Mr. Riddell and the Conservative Party. The Party continues to be willing to attempt to resolve these issues if at all possible.” That statement, incidentally, is not anywere I can find on the press release section of the party's Web site as of 10 pm Ottawa time.
Riddell — who Donison refers to as “an idiot”, in an e-mail cited by the judge in his ruling – is not yet done with the Tories. He is suing Plett and Harper in separate actions, alleging that both men defamed him in their public comments and actions in the early part of the last election campaign.
And if you do download the ruling and leaf through it, you may run into names that you don't see everyday — like Ray Novak or Jenni Byrne. If you find such a name, trying running it through GEDS, the online government employee directory. The odds are you'll find that person working in the Prime MInister's Office.
Oh — and Allan Cutler — the candidate who represented a new way of doing politics for the Conservatives — was thumped by David McGuinty.

John Nichols, writing in The Nation, gets this about right, in my view, and I’d suggest his thinking extends to Canada.

For all the talk about television's dominant role in campaigns (less and less because of its importance as a source of news for most Americans, more and more because of campaign commercials) and all the new attention to the Internet, newspapers for the most part continue to establish the parameters of what gets covered and how. Moreover, neither broadcast nor digital media have developed the reporting infrastructure or the level of credibility that newspapers enjoy. So candidates for the House, the Senate and even the White House still troop into old gray buildings in Denver and Omaha, Louisville and Boston, Concord and Des Moines in search of a forum where they can talk with reporters and editors about issues and where those conversations will, they hope, be distilled into articles and editorials that set so much of the agenda for the political debate at the local, state and national levels. [Read the rest of the story: Newspapers…and After?. ]

I posted a new photo to Broll.