Category: Politics

This winter, for the first time in a decade, Sheri Doornekamp (left, with husband Hank) had to lay people off from her Kingston, Ont., construction company.

She was thrilled, then, to be able to call up six of those laid-off employees last week and tell them they were going to back to work — fixing a bridge — thanks to some federal government infrastructure spending.

“When you can get a job in our business in the middle of winter, you are keeping guys employed. Absolutely,” said Doornekamp.

For the federal government, that's six down and 189,994 to go.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, in the 2009 federal budget, said it was Ottawa's intention to “create or maintain close to 190,000 jobs.”

But how does a federal government actually go about creating a job? How does one measure a government's job-creation success or lack of it?

These are not academic questions. In the first place, between November and January alone, more than 234,000 Canadians have lost their jobs and many of those will be looking to the federal government for help. Economic forecasters believe another 250,000 could be out of work before year's end … [Read the rest of the story]

Technorati Tags: economic stimulus, economy, jim flaherty, budget 2009

Conservative blogger and activist Stephen Taylor tweets that Elizabeth May is ready to run again in Central Nova, the riding currently held by Defence Minister Peter MacKay. Taylor thinks that is the very definitation of insane.

The Toronto Star sent Ottawa-based reporter Joanna Smith to Pictou, N.S. where the Greens had their annual meeting and Joanna reports that while May is indeed committed to running against MacKay again, she is willing to be persuaded to run elsewhere if someone's got some decent numbers:

May placed second with 32 per cent of the vote, but party analysis showed about 6,000 of those ballots – just under half her result – came from Liberal voters, because she struck a deal with former party leader Stéphane Dion not to run candidates in each other's ridings.

Would new Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff repeat the favour?

“Not a chance,” May says when asked if Ignatieff would repeat the favour in a general election.

Ignatieff left no doubt of that at a speech in Halifax last night, where he said the Liberals will run candidates in every riding, including Central Nova.

May insists she is committed to running in Central Nova again, but she also promises to listen when organizers come back with the numbers they are currently crunching.

“I've told them I am willing to look at the case they might make for me to run somewhere else,” May says after admitting that she did not view winning her riding as a priority in the last election, at least no more than other Green candidates winning theirs.

“They know that I'm really reluctant to look anywhere else but here, because I love living here and I don't want to go anywhere. But I have to be a good team player about getting the Greens into the House.”

National campaign chair Greg Morrow welcomes the flexibility.

“The commitment that we've made is that we will run our best candidate in our best possible riding,” he says. “It's really just being driven by what the data is telling us and where we can make the strongest case that Green issues matter,” Morrow adds.

May has been on an election ballot twice now — once in a byelection in London, Ont. and once in a general election. For most parties, a leader that loses two elections is a former leader. But, in my experience, the Greens, for better or worse, hold themselves and May apparently to a completely different standard, one that's difficult for political parties, political journalists and, perhaps, mainstream voters to grasp. The essence of the Canadian Green Party's standard is this: You will NOT be judged by electoral success. Getting MPs elected or winning more votes than the last time is not the objective. The objective is to change things. And if Green Party activism forces change, it matters not which party gets the credit for the change so long as there is change.

Like I said, it's a weird concept to get your head around if you're used to measuring political success by votes and seats. The trick for the Green Party is that as it grows, it's going to start attracting disillusioned voters from those old mainline parties – and, from talking to many of them, I get the sense that they're kind of partial to success measured in votes and seats.

Whenever he’s pressed, as he was last week in the House of Commons, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty loves to thunder at Opposition politicians that the top priority for the federal government is to make sure Canada’s financial system is working.

“We will deal with the most important problem facing Canadians today, which is access to credit,” Flaherty said, in response to Opposition attacks last week in the House of Commons.

Rick Abbott, the owner and operator of a log-hauling rig in Thunder Bay, Ont. would surely agree with Flaherty’s diagnosis of the problem but he doesn’t see much evidence that Ottawa is, in fact, dealing with his credit problem.

Abbott is on the verge of losing his truck trailer because, though he’s paid off four years of a five-year government-backed small business loan, his bank says the federal government won’t let him refinance the loan to help tide him over a layoff of a few months this spring.

“I didn’t ask for a handout. I’m not asking to get out of my next 10 payments or anything like that,” Abbott said. “It’s just, if I’m not working can I just pay the interest? And the answer is no.”

Abbott is facing the kind of problems facing thousands of business owners across the country. His story illustrates how the collapse of banks in other countries and the global financial crisis those failures caused is hurting ordinary Canadians far from the epicentre of the crisis on Wall Street. [Read the rest . . .]

Now this is weird. Award-winning, all-star reporter MIchelle Shephard reports that Omar Khadr's legal team is, all of a sudden, in turmoil. Shephard, who literally wrote the book on Khadr, has a file in The Star on this. I've been to Guantanamo all of once for a Khadr trial event but, even then, it was clear there was a weird vibe among Khadr's legal team. Having had the chance to chat informally with MIchelle about the Khadr trial, I very much get the sense reading this report that there is much more to this than she is able to report at this point. I'd say, stay tuned:

U.S. Navy Lt.-Cmdr. Bill Kuebler, one of Khadr's military-appointed lawyers, said Tuesday that his supervisor had now barred him from visiting Khadr. In an emailed press release to reporters, Kuebler accused Guantanamo's Chief Defence lawyer, Col. Peter Masciola, of “ethical” violations.

“Kuebler has raised concerns about a potential conflict of interest driving Col. Masciola's management decisions on several occasions over the past few weeks, prompting Col. Masciola to express concerns about Lt-Cmdr. Kuebler's 'management' of the Khadr defence team last week,” Kuebler wrote. [Read the whole story]

I'm in 253-D in the Centre Block watching the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance debate the budget bill, C-10. Today's session is clause-by-clause review of the budget bill. There are 500-+ clauses to the bill and the lone NDP MP on the 12-person commitee — Deputy Leader Thomas Mulcair — got the day off to a rollicking start by insisting on a roll-call vote on each and all of those clauses. That was later modified but the Mulcair has, for the last 90 minutes, Mulcair has largely dominated the debate and has been ridiculing both Liberal and Conservative MPs.

The NDP has voted against the budget at every step, saying that, first of all, it is not an effective cure for Canada's economic ills and second of all, is being used to advance ideological goals of the Conservatives, namely rolling back pay equity rights, short-circuiting environmental assessments, and cutting back on union and social justice rights.

So Mulcair is doing everything he can to goad the Liberals into doing something — anything! — to vote for his party's amendments and against the Conservatives.

So, this morning, he has called all the Ontario MPs on this committee — that includes Liberals John McCallum and John McKay and Conservatives Bob Dechert, Mike Wallace and Darryl Kramp — “spineless, unprincipled MPs”

Some other scattered comments from Mulcair this morning:

• ” We think it's scandalous that the Liberals are supporting the Conservatives by taking away women's rights …”
• “The Liberal Party of Canada has completely caved.”
• He accused the Liberals — who, last December, were set to join the NDP in a coalition government that would have replaced the governing Conservatives — of backing the Conservatives once the Conservatives abandoned plans to cut federal funding of political parties, a move that would have disproportinately hurt the Liberals because that party's difficulty raising money. “Now that they've gotten what they want for their own purposes, they're abandoning women, they're abandoning the environment, and they're abandoning social and union rights.”
• He ridiculed the use by MPs of funding “shovel-ready” projects. “None of these guys has ever even held a shovel!”
• He accused the Tories of playing a “shell game” with the budget because much of the federal spending will only happen if other levels of government chip in. He said that, for that reason, the budget is “an intellectual fraud.”
• Argued that Infrastructure Minister John Baird is such a partisan that he will only direct infrastructure funding to those ridings that elected Conservative MPs.

And what do the Liberals and Conservatives say to all this? Nothing. MPs from those two parties want the budget passed as soon as possible. So they sit quietly and vote down Mulcair's amendments one after the other without responding to any of his attacks. “He'll only be encouraged to go longer if we respond,” one MP said to me privately.

I write, today, from Room 253-D of the Centre Block of the House of Commons, where the House of Commons Standing Committee began hearings on the budget legislation at 10 a.m. this morning and now, at 0940 pm, is 20 minutes away from wrapping up. The highlight was the hour Finance Minister Jim Flaherty spent in front of the committee this afternoon:

As stock markets in the U.S. drooped to levels not seen in a decade and Canadian markets hit another low, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty pressed MPs to quickly pass his budget legislation which will spring billions of dollars in tax relief and spending aimed at helping Canada's economy.

But after delivering that message to the House of Commons finance committee, Flaherty told reporters that the most urgent problem for the world's governments is the global financial crisis, a crisis which Canada can do little about . . .

“Everybody on this side of the House wants these (budget) measures to be passed rapidly,” Ignatieff said. “The question is whether the situation is changing in such a way that the minister already has additional measures in view.”

The NDP, however, continues to object to the budget, saying it sets back progress on pay equity and contains insufficient help for the unemployed.

The Commons finance committee heard from several witnesses who urged MPs to vote against passing the budget.

“I think this budget should be voted down,” said Ken Georgetti, president of the Canadian Labour Congress, saying it contains inadequate economic stimulus and does nothing to help those losing jobs. “The victims of this crisis are being ignored. Women and the unemployed are being ignored in favour of fancy tax cuts that are going to do nothing in the short term.”

Barb Byers, a vice-president with the CLC, also attacked government plans to tinker with pay equity rules in the name of efficiency and belt-tightening.

“It's a huge attack on women's economic equality,” Byers told MPs, “and, I'll tell you, we feel the discrimination every time we take a paycheque home.”

The Bloc Quebecois also objects to the budget saying that while there are billions for the largely Ontario-based auto sector, there is not enough help for the forestry sector, a major employer in Quebec's rural regions . . . [Read the whole story]

Under the title of “Working With Canada”, some of the pics taken by the official White House photographer of President Barack Obama's visit to Canada are online. Just like Prime Minister Harper's official photographers, Jason and Deb Ransom, White House photog Pete Souza will get the best angles and the best access. But there's more to getting a great shot than being in the right place at the right time. You have to have an eye for framing; for the energy of the moment; and for drama. Pete (like Jason and Deb) has that. Of course, as these are pics snapped by a guy on Obama's team, they also tend to make Obama look pretty good. That's the prez on the left just after buying a Beavertail in Ottawa's Byward Market.

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