Month: November 2011

This is the plane — an Airbus A-310 given military gear to become a CC-150 Polaris — that carries Canada's prime minister (or other VIPs), staff, bureaucrats and (usually) journalists (at their own expense) to international events. I've spent lots of time on this plane, most recently travelling back and forth to Perth, Australia and the Commonwealth summit and to Cannes, France for the G20 summit.

Here's a picture of the plane that the CC-150 replaced, the Boeing 707 (CC-137):

 

You'll notice the two planes are painted differently. The Polaris has what the air force calls “low-visibility livery”.  Now, the PMO is believed to be interested in returning to something that says “Canada” with a bit more flair, perhaps painting the Polaris with the kind of colour scheme that the Boeing had. Althia Raj, writing in the Huffington Post, had a good little scoop on that today. That, in turn, produced this exchange in the House of Commons today:

Ms. Joyce Murray (Vancouver Quadra, Lib.) Ms. Joyce Murray (Vancouver Quadra, Lib.): Madam Speaker, lots of smug talk about fiscal balance, but we have just learned that the Prime Minister has overruled his own Minister of National Defence and is forcing National Defence to repaint a VIP government aircraft because he does not like its colour. The current fleet of aircraft are painted military grey because they are used in critical military operations. The Prime Minister's vanity paint job will make the plane unsafe for those very military operations. Why is the Prime Minister putting his own vanity above the needs of the military?

Mr. Chris Alexander (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence, CPC) Mr. Chris Alexander (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence, CPC): Madam Speaker, apart from being a complete non-sequitur with the member's first question, the accusation made is completely unfounded. These changes would only happen in accordance with the regular maintenance cycle of National Defence and if they are cost neutral. These aircraft are repainted every six years and there is no current plan to change the paint scheme for any Airbus aircraft.

Alexander subsequently rose on a point-of-order to clarify his response to say that, in fact, no decision had been made about re-painting the Airbus/Polaris but he wanted to be clear that, whatever decision would be made, it would be done, as he said in the House, on a “cost-neutral” basis. So what you do think? Should the Canadian prime minister — whether he or she is a Conservative, Liberal, New Democrat, or Greenie — ride around in a plane that says “Canada” a little more proudly and boldly? Lord knows, the leaders of many other countries do. (I've been to international summits where the Japanese PM arrived in beautifully painted 747 with an identical second 747 carrying his delegation behind him. The Leaders of India and the US also have pretty fancy easily identified 747s.) For what it's worth, if the painting is done on its regularly scheduled maintenance cycle, why not jazz it up a bit?

 

The New Democratic Party of Canada announced this week that it will be staging six debates for its party's leadership candidates, with the first set for Dec. 4 in Ottawa. Each debate will have a theme:

• Ottawa DEC 4: Towards an Inclusive Economy
• Halifax January TBD: Families
• Quebec City February TBD: Canada on the world stage
• Winnipeg February TBD: Connecting people and regions
• Montreal March TBD: Building a strong, united Canada
• Vancouver March TBD: Opportunities for young and new Canadians

The vote itself will take place on the weekend of March 23-24 in Toronto.

Leadership candidate Paul Dewar, though, thinks that six debates is not enough. He wants 10: “Over the next 4 months our New Democratic Party has an opportunity to reach out and connect with Canadians from coast-to-coast-to-coast,” said Dewar. “We owe it to our members, and Canadians at large, to speak to as many of them as possible”.

Nathan Cullen and Niki Ashton are with Dewar on this one. “I've not been impressed with the schedule and we pushed for many more as well,” Cullen told me in an e-mail. “In particular we've been asking members to advocate for more and will encourage folks to organize their own if the party won't budge. Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario in particular are left out in the cold here.” Ashton, who represents the northern Manitoba riding of Churchill, wants more for northern Canada: “I believe we should have more debates. We should have debates in Saskatchwan, Alberta and there should be one in Canada's North,” she said in an e-mail. “It's good to see the two debates in Quebec. But there should be a tour throughout Quebec.”

Brian Topp is largely agnostic on the issue, saying he's happy to participate in whatever debates the party decides to hold and adds, “If the party decides to expand the schedule, I'd encourage them to find a way to keep the current balance between French and English-language debates. This given the very high premium party members are placing on bilingualism in the next leader, and the strategic importance of our breakthrough in Quebec — source of more than half of our current caucus.”

Robert Chisholm, the Nova Scotian in the race, says: “I look forward to the debates. The party made a decision on the number and location and I will comply with their schedule. I understand there will be many other opportunities for debates and I will certainly try to be part of those as well.”

Julien Newman, a spokesman for the Thomas Mulcair, said his candidate was happy to have more debates but noted that all campaigns were consulted ahead of time about the number and nature of the debates. “We're happy with the process,” Newman said.

Daniel Wilson of the Romeo Saganash campaign, said: “The schedule was set by the party and agreed to by most campaigns. The party believes that it meets the need for regional exposure and linguistic balance, considering limits on timing, funds and logistics. Some may have different views about that, but we would not support any criticism of the debate schedule as agreed. We note that there may be informal debates in other cities in which we would consider participating, depending on the quality of preparations, fairness of procedures and completeness of candidate participation.”

And here's Wally Stephen, campaign director for Martin Singh's campaign: “Regarding the number of debates, we are fine with the six scheduled debates. That being said, we would welcome any additional opportunities which may come about, as long as all of the candidates are available.”

Meanwhile, Alice Funke breaks down the latest NDP membership numbers. The next NDP leader will be chosen in in a one-vote per member system. And, right now, the New Democratic Party is still very much a party of the west with a total of 59,773 or 63% of its members/voters living west of the Ontario/Manitoba border. This, of course, despite the fact that more than half of its caucus in the House of Commons come from Quebec.

But, as Alice notes, the growth in party memberships has, so far, come from east of the Manitoba border. Membership in the Ontario NDP is up 15.7 % over the last month to 25,772. Ontario New Democrats are the second largest provincial block behind the 31,456 card-carrying New Democrats in British Columbia. Quebec membership is still pitiable, compared to the party's electoral strength there, at 5,558 voters. Still, Quebec membership has more than tripled over the last month. The number of card-carrying New Democrats has doubled and the number in Newfoundland and Labrador is up nearly six-fold. Oddly: About 700 New Democrats have ripped up their cards let the memberships expire so there are fewer NDPers in that province now than there were a month ago. Again: Check out Alice's post for all the stats.

Rory Medcalf writing in Foreign Policy:

Obama remains more popular in Australia than in most countries, if only for the reason that he is not George W. Bush. The current hand-wringing angst on the Australian left about the prospect of a U.S. military presence here is nothing next to their public displays of outrage during the last presidential visit in 2003, when the leader of the Greens party, Bob Brown, heckled until he was ejected from parliament. This time, Brown and all his Greens were on their best behavior, even while they sat through a speech extolling an alliance they can barely abide.

The Irish Times reports that, yesterday in Beijing, China welcomed Zimbabwe madman Robert Mugabe with open arms. Mugabe ranked right at the top of this list of The World's 10 Worst Dictators. Xi Jinping, the heir apparent to Chinese president Hu Jintao, called Mugabe an “old friend” and a “trustworthy friend” of China. Here's the Times Beijing correspondent Clifford Coonan:

Mr Xi described the 87-year-old Mr Mugabe, who has been marginalised by most of the international community for human rights abuses, as “a famed leader of the national liberation movement in Africa and also an old friend whom the Chinese people know well”.

A paragraph later comes what one normally refers to as an understatement:

China is often criticised for its “values-free” approach to dealing with some of the countries in Africa and elsewhere that the international community shuns.

Canada, of course, is warming up its relations with China. At this point, Canada can only aspire to Zimbabwe's lofty status! The last time a Canadian leader was in Beijing — that would be Prime Minister Stephen Harper — Canada got a dressing-down from the Chinese premier for not showing up enough. (I reacted badly to watching Wen dis Harper)

 

Christian Fuchs is a professor in media and communications studies at Uppsala University in Sweden. In a recent paper, he concludes that Google is, has been, and always will be evil:

“…Google permanently surveils the online behaviour of the users of Google services and thereby economically exploits them. In Google’s moral universe, prosumer exploitation does not seem to be evil, but rather a moral virtue. Google thinks that advertising is evil when it displays irrelevant information, when it is flashy and if it is not recognizable as such. It ignores that the problem is that for organizing and targeting advertising, Google engages in the surveillance and exploitation of users and the commodification of personal data and usage behaviour data. Advertising is furthermore a mechanism that advances the monopolization of business, the manipulation of needs and the commercialization and commodification of culture and life. Advertising and exploitation are always “evil”, therefore Google is just like all capitalist advertising companies “evil”. In capitalism, evil is not a moral misconduct of individuals, who are blinded and could also act in more positive ways, exploitation is rather a structural and necessary feature of capital accumulation, which makes evil a generic feature of all forms of capitalism and of all capitalist organizations.

…Google is a sorcerer of capitalism”

[Read the whole paper]

 

From Conservative Senator Hugh Segal's The Right Balance: Canada's Conservative Tradition (published this summer but I've just had the chance to finish it):

When Ottawa is top of the news all the time, in part because the Ottawa media presence has no other choice (regardless of whether what is happening in Ottawa is newsworthy or not), and in part because the government of the day is pushing, advocating, changing, risking, reorganizing, negotiating and campaigning on one issue or another of high intensity or contrived controversy, voters tire and turn away. (p 164)…

In reflecting on my own disconnnection from any understanding of the Reform “The West Wants In” option and how much more positive that was than “The West Wants Out” alternative, the paralytic and destructive haze of the Ottawa bubble has emerged over the years as an important factor. Extreme partisanship on all sides produces its own distorting “fog of war” Intensive media coverage of trivial divisions or partisan excess combines with those excesses themselves and unites with the endless and often trivial (but no less intense) anxieties and micro-manoeuvres of the civil service to produce a deeply unreal world quite disconnected from life beyond the bubble, where people go about their day-to-day activities. The amount of time MPs now spend in Ottawa and the ever-increasing number of conflict-of-interest strictures cut them off even more from reali life on the ground. The days when citizen farmers, teachers, haberdashers, small business owners and the rest went to Ottawa for only a few weeks of the year to represent their communities are long gone. This focus on Ottawa always makes it easier for insurgent political movements to gain momentum, while those in the bubble fight their own internal pettifogging partisan engagements. Many political capital cities have this problem, and one of its impacts is that those near the centre of the fray do no see, sense or hear what matters in the ral world as they get consumed by the skirmishes that have no meaning outside of their own tiny universe of partisan to and fro. That the national media covers most of this activity in Ottawa as competitive news of objective value only magnifies the distortion. I have been no less susceptible than others caught in the bubble and no doubt I’ve done my share to contribute to the distortion on more than one occasion. Having, along with many others, passionately campagned for the “yes” side on the Charlottetown Accord, my focus on the Quebec threat had clearly dulled my understanding of the western dynamic around a similar axis of inclusion and exclusion. (pp 166-167)

Some interesting observations on Twitter this morning from Dave Stubbs, a columnist and feature writer for The Montreal Gazette whose main preoccupation is covering the Montreal Canadiens. He tweets under the handle habsinsideout1. As you'll see below, he thought about turning these observations into column, then discarded the idea. (Been there, done that, about every 20 minutes) But I think they're interesting enough observations for all those interested in journalism and the practice of the craft to package them up for posterity here. Twitter, for all that I like about it, tends to be a lousy service when it comes to search and archiving. Blogs, like this, do a better job on that score.

So here's Stubbs/habsinsideout1 at about 10 am this morning, with the tweets in sequence:

• Storytelling in sportswriting is a rapidly fading art. Now it's mostly about providing multimedia content before the next guy
• Shooting video in #Habs room totally undermines establishing rapport w/ players for good conversation
• Can't make eye contact, observe body language or subtleties if you're worried about framing/lighting interview subject
• Video clips have their place in multimedia world. But camera stays in my knapsack when I'm interviewing for a feature or column
• Multimedia horse has left barn & he's not coming back. But it's a tightrope between creative work & content in bulk…
• And I've learned web is very much like me: needs to be fed 24 hours a day. Too much junk food in us both
• This rant might have been a decent column. But I've knocked it out on Twitter instead. Typical…
• Used to go to #Habs morning skate/practice for stories. Now: tweeting water-bottle #s to determine who's practising. My fault, yes…
• Readers/viewers' “need” to know everything 10 mins ago has put boots to much storytelling in shrinking newsrooms

 

Statscan this morning reported that Canada shed 54,000 jobs in October, mostly full-time, the biggest single-month job loss outside of a recession since 1996.

But for Scotiabank economists Derek Holt and Karen Cordes Wood, the “body count” is less important than data about hours worked and wage gains:

“Wage gains slowed again to 1.3% y/y. We maintain that this matters more than volatility in the headline body count. Swings of tens of thousands in the monthly job count matter far less than the fact that the millions of employed Canadians are just not making wage gains that are keeping up with the cost of filling their grocery carts, fueling their cars and what they're spending on other staples. This is imposing real wage reductions upon the Canadian consumer and is cause for a defensive bias toward the outlook for consumer spending particularly given structural peaks on most forms of activity in the household sector.

* The key in this report is that hours worked fell for the second consecutive month. Barring a strong gain in labour productivity in September and again in October, this points to the risk of negative prints for GDP growth for two consecutive months. Recall that GDP equals labour productivity times hours worked.