Month: October 2008

Here's a few pics I snapped in between taking notes while covering the Harper's post-debate trip to Atlantic Canada.

And here's some stuff I wrote about it:

MONCTON, N.B. – Conservative Leader Stephen Harper reminded enthusiastic supporters here of his family's New Brunswick roots and cheered the region's “confidence” and “vibrant entrepreneurial economy” hours after Liberal Leader Stephane Dion, also campaigning near here, reminded Atlantic Canada voters that Harper once characterized the region as having “a culture of defeat.”

“It is always very emotional when I come back to New Brunswick,” Harper said at the end of a 25-minute stump speech to about 450 supporters in a local high school. Though Harper was born in Toronto, his father was born in New Brunswick and he can trace his family roots back to the 1700s in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

“This area, this economy – you may not see it living here every day – but this has come so far from the times when I was a boy. This place has developed a strong economy, (and) a vibrant entrepreneurial economy,” Harper said. “There is confidence. There is energy.”

In a speech in 2002, shortly after he became leader of the official Opposition, Harper said Atlantic Canada was trapped in “a culture of defeat”, a result of federal government policies. Harper refused to apologize then even though the Legislature of Nova Scotia unanimously condemned the comment and former New Brunswick premier Bernard Lord also criticized Harper for the remark.

Lord, now the co-chair of the Conservative campaign, delivered a fiery speech at the rally, in a riding held by Liberal MP Brian Murphy.

“It's not a coincidence that after the prime minister won the debates, that he has decided to come to New Brunswick two days in a row and only to visit Liberal ridings,” Lord said. “At the same time, we have Stephane Dion fighting for his job as leader of the Opposition who was also visiting Liberal ridings. I think that tells you something very important.”

Earlier in the day, speaking in Yarmouth, N.S., Harper said his party was optimistic about its electoral chances in the four eastern provinces.

“There's probably no part of the country where people are more sensitive about the costs of energy,” Harper said. In most parts of Atlantic Canada, the primary source of energy for home heating is fuel, whereas it is electricity in Quebec and natural gas and electricity in the rest of the country. “When the opposition party's major plank is they're going to deal with economic uncertainty by imposing a carbon tax, I think that shakes up a lot of people, even a lot of people who have been pretty traditional Liberal voters.”

While in the region, the Conservatives announced that if re-elected, they would increase the budgets of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, the Department of Western Economic Diversification, and the Economic Development Agency of Canada for Quebec Regions by $300 million over four years. Harper said he would also divert $10 million of that funding to rural and low-employment communities in southern Ontario.

“The regions of Canada are unique, unique in their needs, their potential and their aspirations,” Harper said at a news conference in a maritime museum here. “Therefore we have made investments accordingly.”

Earlier in his career, Harper and others in the Reform Party movement sometimes criticized regional development agencies – which spend nearly a $1 billion a year – because they appeared to be sources of funds politicians could dip into for projects that might win them political support.

The Conservatives themselves have made questionable investments with regional development money, say Liberals say.

A few days before the election, for example, Defence Minister Peter MacKay, who is the minister responsible for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, announced ACOA would provide $50,000 for a three-day curling tournament to be held next month in his riding in New Glasgow, N.S., where he is now facing Green Party Leader Elizabeth May. Mackay said at the time, the funding is “a marketing effort (that) will also promote this area as a tourism destination and a good place to do business.”

Technorati Tags: conservatives, elections, protestors, bernard lord, Stephen Harper

Unable to sleep after Thursday's English-language debates, Prime Minister Stephen Harper got up at 3 a.m. and tried to unwind by watching the U.S. vice-presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin.
He would not say if it helped him sleep.
In an informal chat with reporters Saturday at the back of his campaign plane, Harper touched on that and several topics.
It was the fourth time in this campaign that he's wandered down the aisle from his seat in the front of the Air Canada Airbus 360 to the back rows of the plane where the media sit.
Tonight, he said he liked the debate format, particularly the in-the-round seating. He said he has no plans to become a political pundit once he leaves politics. And, as he and his staff shut their campaign down Sunday, he spoke about the value of rest and pacing in a long campaign.
At the end of his fourth week, a week which included two two-hour debates, Harper seemed to enjoy getting back on the campaign trail.
“It's been more enjoyable having you than having those four guys yelling at me for four hours,” Harper told the gaggle of reporters who had just finished eating a seafood medley or grilled chicken that had been served for dinner on the Conservative campaign plane.
Harper flew east right after the debates, spending time campaigning in Liberal ridings in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
Harper said he enjoyed the format of the debates, particularly compared to previous years when the leaders would stand in a semi-circle behind podiums.
“It wasn't as close as it looked,” Harper said. “I preferred the seating. I think it was our [campaign's] suggestion. It wasn't quite the discussion we hoped but it still pulls it back a bit to a discussion which I think is impossible in the other format.
“I know on TV it sometimes seemed very heated. In fact, compared to the previous leaders' debates, the voices were not raised much at all,” Harper said.
He also said his campaign is unfolding, by and large, according to the broad outline he and his strategists mapped out ahead of time.
“We're doing what we wanted to do more or less,” Harper said. “What I've learned in both elections is that all wisdom about the election will emerge after it's over. And I've tried to avoid that. You can slip into a pattern that, if you lose, everything you did was wrong. And likewise, if you won, everything you did was right. And it gets interpreted in that way and sometimes factually inaccurately.”
When asked to cite an example of inaccurate reporting of those earlier campaigns, Harper cited a line, common among pundits, that in 2004, he wasted the last two days campaigning in Alberta, an area of the country where he already had support. Some suggested he ought to have spent those last few hours in the campaign pushing harder for votes in, for example, Ontario.
“Factual inaccuracies become an entrenched myth so you have to be careful. The 'two days' I spent in Alberta at the end of the campaign was half-a-day.”
What about 2006?
“The biggest myth about '06 was that we did everything right. We did some things wrong but if you guys haven't figured them out, I'm not going to share them with you.”
He was also asked how he was holding up after four weeks of campaigning.
“I'm feeling good. We've got better at pacing ourselves, I've got better and better at pacing myself, better and better at managing stress personally” he said.
Harper said he learned a valuable lesson about campaign pacing by looking at the 1980 federal election. In that campaign, Harper said, Joe Clark made a point of trying to do more campaign events than anyone else. His opponent, Pierre Trudeau did one message event a day, which is exactly what Harper does.
“And Trudeau won day in and day out. It's still instructive. It's not quantity [that wins a campaign]. Quantity helps but it's not about quantity.”
Personally, he says he's kept up his energy by finding time to rest. Unlike the other leaders, Harper has taken every Sunday on this campaign off in Ottawa with his family.
“There have been only two nights on this campaign I haven't had a good nights sleep — the two nights after the debate,” Harper said. “This was how I was in school. I always slept before exams. I could never sleep after exams because I always got so keyed up. I can't get back down again.”
And that's what led to his late-night viewing of the vice-presidential debate.
“I actually got of bed and watched it at 3 a.m.”
But he wouldn't name any winners or losers of that debate.
“I didn't watch it all. I don't want to express too many opinions. It was interesting, that's all.”
After spending a day with his family at 24 Sussex Drive, Harper will get back on his campaign plane Monday afternoon and will criss-cross the country, ending up in Calgary for election night on Oct. 14.
And he said that, unlike some politicians, such as former Liberal cabinet ministers Jean Lapierre, Sheila Copps, or Brian Tobin who have shown up on political talk shows as pundits, he has no such desire once he leaves politics.
“I've always said privately, I'm going to enjoy all this time, make the best of it, but when it's over, it's over.”

Technorati Tags:
conservatives, sarah palin, stephen harper, elections, joe biden

Julie Couillard's book My Story will be published and in bookstores on Oct. 6, just before Canadians go to the polls on Oct. 14.

Having written about the Couillard-Bernier affair several times for the Canwest chain of papers and then watched with interest how each paper played the whole affair, I can tell you that there is substantial, often maniacal, interest in this sordid saga in various regions of Québec. There is moderate interest in Ontario. But I found that our papers in the West, after publishing one or two items when the revelations about her past first broke, got pretty bored with the whole thing. And their readers didn't seem to mind that it was time to move away from M. Couillard.

So I suspect that some of the things she has to say about Bernier, Harper, et al. in her book will be of great interest to the chattering classes in Ottawa and Quebec but not of much interest everywhere else.

So, if you are, in fact, a member of that very same chattering class, you will definitely want to check out today's edition of La Presse for Denis Lessard's summary of the first chapters that have been leaked.

I am told that other papers, including some of our ours, have been given advance copies of the book and are ready to flood the weekend editions with more juicy details.

Technorati Tags:
conservatives, julie couillard, maxime bernier, scandals