David Akin’s On The Hill

“… Canada's generals and admirals tend to be more concerned about their relationships with their American counterparts than they are with their own political masters in Ottawa, a preoccupation that would play out over the next few years on a variety of issues”

“One example illustrates the point. Defence Minister John McCallum tried urgently to reach a senior admiral at NDHQ and was put on hold and told to call back later, as the admiral in question was on the line with the Pentagon.”

-Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang, The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar, Toronto: Viking Canada, 2007. P. 14

“I remember standing outside Centre Block one steamy afternoon when Prime Minister Diefenbaker emerged, on crutches. Along with senators Bill Brunt and Davey Walker, he stepped carefully into a Blue Line cab and headed off to 24 Sussex for lunch. No security, no limo.”

-Brian Mulroney, Memoirs: 1939-1993, Toronto: McLelland and Stewart Ltd., p. 85

As the federal government prepares to overhaul a key tool to protect intellectual property (IP) — Canada's copyright legislation — new research prepared the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) suggests that decision makers in Canada's business community have a poor understanding of what intellectual property is or what agencies in Canada are responsible for protecting IP. But they don't care that they don't know that: It seems none of the 2,016 respondents to the survey, done by The Strategic Counsel, ranked 'Intellectual Property' issues as one of the top issues for their company.

The data is in a study called Canadian Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs): Baseline Awareness of Intellectual Property, and was given to CIPO in March.

Here's some other highlights from the study:

• When asked to name any formal methods or types of intellectual property protection, more than three-in-five senior decision makers (62%) were unable to do so
• Four-out-of-five senior decision makers (81%) could not name an organization in Canada that is responsible for granting and/or registering IP protection.
• And yet … One-third (32%) of senior business decision makers surveyed considered their company to have IP assets. One-quarter (26%) of companies with IP assets choose not to protect them.

Canada’s second Boeing C-17 Globemaster will arrive for the first time at its home base of CFB Trenton on Thursday this week, the air force says. Exact arrival time is not yet clear but it will be on the tarmac there eventually where it will become CC-177.

 

Giving a Throne Speech in prime time was a first for any government. The Conservatives, I am told, got the idea from the Australian conservative party which, as it turns out, is called The Liberal Party of Australia. The Canadian Conservatives have long adopted some of the tactics that has helped Australian PM John Howard win four elections.

The Aussies also held a Throne Speech in prime time — and found it an effective way to bypass media commentators and reach a wider audiece of voters. Howard also did his last budget speech in prime time and Flaherty's office has already been asked what it thinks of doing that event in prime time.

Meanwhile, in Australia, Howard is campaigning for re-election. Polls there show him far behind his Labor rival.

Because of other established connections between the Aussie Liberals and the Canadian Conservatives, many here in Ottawa are watching Australian politics with unusual interest.

So here’s something that some in Ottawa took notice of: On the first day on the campaign trail Howard announced a whopper of a tax cut. My bet is the boys in Harper's PMO are watching this very closely. (Australia, like Canada, by the way, has a surplus of about $14-billion.) Here’s an article in the Australian press on that tax cut announcement.

Team Howard in $34bn income tax cut splurge

October 16, 2007

THE Coalition has seized the initiative on the first full day of election campaigning, unveiling a $34 billion tax package and putting Labor on the spot.

Under the plan announced jointly by Prime Minister John Howard and Treasurer Peter Costello, all taxpayers would get a tax cut — about $20 a week for those currently on average weekly earnings from July, rising to about $35 in 2010.

The announcement caught Labor off guard. Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd said tax cuts were needed but they had to be made in a financially responsible fashion, while shadow treasurer Wayne Swan said Labor would not be rushed in its response.

Last night ALP economic spokesmen were discussing the party's next step.
Business immediately backed the Coalition tax plan, but the union movement was scathing.
The five-year plan is in two parts. The $34 billion cuts are a solid promise, to be delivered over three years. Further “goals” for the following two years include reducing the top marginal tax rate to 40 per cent.

Revised economic figures also released by Mr Costello show Australia's economic growth rate this financial year is now expected to be 4.25 per cent, up from the budget's forecast of 3.75 per cent. The forecast for employment has also been revised upwards.

After allowing for the new tax plan…[read the rest of the story]

 

Jonathan Freedland, who writes for the left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian, has a fascinating look at Gordon Brown, who succeeded Tony Blair earlier this year as the Prime Minister of Great Britain. It would see, in Freedland’s estimation, that Brown may not, after all, be Paul Martin to Blair’s Jean Chretien:

Born the son of a Presbyterian minister in 1951, Gordon Brown was exposed daily to the human cost of industrial decline. The poor appeared at the door of the Kirkcaldy manse, asking for help. From the pulpit, his father urged on both his community and his sons the duty of hard work and service to others, railing against inequality and the transience of riches. The young Brown was writing political commentaries for his brother's hand-produced newsletter when he was barely a teenager and was so accomplished a student that he enrolled at Edinburgh University when he was sixteen. However a rugby injury, which detached the retinas of both his eyes, meant that he spent six months of his freshman year in the hospital, bedridden and in complete darkness. The experience left him with a sentimental faith in the NHS that had nursed him to recovery, while confronting the fear of permanent blindness seems to have sealed Brown's identification with the vulnerable. He emerged blind in his left eye, his right damaged but functioning—though he still needs to print his speeches in large type and to rest them on a bulked-up dispatch box in the House of Commons in order to see them. An ancillary effect was on his face. Not only did the dead left eye alter his appearance, but one of the four operations was botched, so that a smile no longer triggered the appropriate facial muscles. The result is the dour countenance which has become so central to the popular conception of Brown. It means that one of the many shifts of June 27 was the transition from a prime minister who smiled all the time to a prime minister who cannot smile naturally at all.

….

[Brown] had been in Number Ten for about thirty-six hours when a car bomb was discovered in London's West End, followed by a failed attack on Glasgow airport. There was no sign of panic. Brown did not rush before the cameras insisting that he was taking personal charge or proclaiming a struggle for civilization, as his predecessor might have done. Instead he had his home secretary, Jacqui Smith, report to the public, making good on his promise to replace the presidentialism of Blair with a return to cabinet government.

When he did comment, following the Glasgow attack, he did so plainly and soberly as if discussing a serious crime rather than an act of war. This fitted Brown's disavowal of the phrase “war on terror,” which he believes grants too much status, even dignity, to the murderers of al-Qaeda. The new approach, which instantly took the heat out of the moment, spreading calm rather than panic, won universal plaudits, including from Britain's Muslim communities. A full-page advertisement appeared in several national newspapers a few days later, signed by leading British Muslim organizations, welcoming Brown's efforts and pledging their cooperation in bringing the guilty to justice. Nothing like that had happened under Blair.

There was a similar absence of grandstanding in Brown's handling of midsummer flooding in northern and central England, of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle, and of a financial panic in mid-September which saw a run on one of Britain's largest lenders, the Northern Rock bank (though in that last case Brown's initial invisibility brought criticism that his Macavity-like habit was resurfacing.) Brown felt able to rely on his ministers in part because he had appointed good ones. Even the usually hostile newspapers had to applaud a team which simultaneously conveyed the arrival of a new government— bringing in six ministers under the age of forty—and seemed to fit the right people into the right jobs.

I think it impossible for a Canadian journalist not consider the contrast to what one might describe as Prime Minister Harper’s ‘presidentialism’, although, to be fair, Harper’s party had not been in power for nearly ages prior to his ascension.

And finally, Brown, it seems to me, is the only leader in the Western World,  who refuses to acknolwedge that there is any such thing as a “war on terror.”

Brown gave notice as well that he planned to continue the ongoing “drawdown” of British troops from Iraq. Accordingly, September saw the British withdraw 550 men from Basra city, so that Britain's entire presence in Iraq is now confined to Basra airport. More deeply, Brown conveyed an entirely different understanding of what he didn't call the war on terror.

 

Rory Stewart is a bright young Scotsman now engaged with rebuilding Afghanistan. But though he is not yet 40, he also lists on his resume a term as a coalition governor in the Iraqi provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar. In the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, Stewart reviews a series of books about Gertrude Bell, a British administrator in the 1920s in what was then called Mesopotamia but would later, of course, become Iraq.

Stewart sees in Bell's experience much of what he himself experienced while serving in Iraq. He quotes from Bell's own letters, written in 1920, in which she speaks about the attempts to establish a modern, secular Iraqi state. Again — this is from 1920:

No one knows exactly what they do want, least of all themselves, except that they don't want us.

…We are largely suffering from circumstances over which we couldn't have had any control. The wild drive of discontented nationalism … and of discontented Islam .. might have proved too much for us however far-seeing we had been; but that doesn't excuse us for being blind.

Later in his review essay, Stewart writes:

In 1920, Sunni nationalists, Shia ayatollahs, and tribal sheikhs rose against the British. Their revolution, although suppressed, revealed to the British public as much as to Iraqis that there could be no sustainable British colony in Iraq. T.E. Lawrence was typically the first to acknowledge this:

We say we are in [Iraq] to develop it for the benefit of the world…. How long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of imperial troops and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of a form of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but the administrators?

And he closes his essay with this passage:

Bell is thus both the model of a policymaker and an example of the inescapable frailty and ineptitude on the part of Western powers in the face of all that is chaotic and uncertain in the fashion for “nation-building.” Despite the prejudices of her culture and the contortions of her bureaucratic environment, she was highly intelligent, articulate, and courageous. Her colleagues were talented, creative, well informed, and determined to succeed. They had an imperial confidence. They were not unduly constrained by the press or by their own bureaucracies. They were dealing with a simpler Iraq: a smaller, more rural population at a time when Arab national-ism and political Islam were yet to develop their modern strength and appeal.

But their task was still impossible. Iraqis refused to permit foreign political officers to play at founding their new nation. T.E. Lawrence was right to demand the withdrawal of every British soldier and no stronger link between Britain and Iraq than existed between Britain and Canada. For the same reason, more language training and contact with the tribes, more troops and better counterinsurgency tactics—in short a more considered imperial approach—are equally unlikely to allow the US today to build a state in Iraq, in southern Afghanistan, or Iran. If Bell is a heroine, it is not as a visionary but as a witness to the absurdity and horror of building nations for peoples with other loyalties, models, and priorities.