David Akin’s On The Hill

My friend J.D. Bellavance tells readers of La Presse this morning that Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe is getting ready to depart the federal stage.

Bellavance wryly notes that, after spending 17 years in the House of Commons working for the breakup of Canada, Duceppe will be eligible to collect a pension from Canada's taxpayers of about $150,000   $115,000 a year:

Le chef du Bloc québécois, Gilles Duceppe, prépare son retrait de la politique. M. Duceppe a confié à certains proches collaborateurs qu’il dirigera les troupes bloquistes pour la dernière fois aux prochaines élections fédérales.

Élu pour la première fois à la Chambre des communes en 1990 à la faveur d’une élection partielle dans Laurier–Sainte-Marie, M. Duceppe a aussi confirmé son intention de quitter la barre du Bloc québécois après les prochaines élections fédérales à la chef du PQ, Pauline Marois, son alliée souverainiste à Québec, a appris La Presse. [Read the rest of the story]

Hmm. This ought to stir things up.

Radiohead, the internationally renowned band, has taken the unusual step of telling fans that they can pay as much or as little as they like for the band's new album, In Rainbows.
In a break from industry tradition the UK band… has told fans “it's up to you” what they pay to digitally download the album.
This isn't the first time that an artist has opted to charge nothing for an album, but the move is significant because Radiohead remains one of the biggest bands in the world.

Radiohead is free to sell its album directly from its official website because it is no longer tied to a record label. Guitarist Jonny Greenwood tells fans on the website that the album is only available to pre-order from the website, where it can be downloaded on release on October 10. [Read the whole story]

Gordon O'Connor may be gone but a key document he worked on for most of his tenure as Canada's Defence Minister comes before cabinet tomorrow, my defence industry sources tell me.
O'Connor, while he as an opposition MP, pretty much wrote up his party's first principles for a “Canada First” defence strategy and then went out and made sure the grassroots of his party adopted them at the party's first-ever policy convention in Montreal in 2005.

Peter MacKay is now defence minister so it'll be up to him to make the case for the “Canada First” defence strategy — an important 'master plan' of sorts that sets out the kinds of threats and dangers Canada's civilian leaders expect their military leaders to guard us against over the next 20 years or so. O'Connor, the former general is who is now our Minister of National Revenue, will get a chance to have his say just like everyone else around the cabinet table.
This document becomes the guide for recruitment, procurement, and training for Canada's Armed Forces.
The Conservatives call this document “Canada First”. The Liberals called their last such document, approved by cabinet in 2005 when Bill Graham was defence minister, the “Defence Policy Statement“. This document has made it to some committees of cabinet a few times but has been sent back for review and revision each time. Tomorrow, it looks like it might make it through full cabinet.
What's in it? Don't know but would love to.
The Ruxted Group — a kind of ad hoc group of current and former CF members with an interest in defence policy — believes that the Canada First strategy should come with a steep price tag — and that it should not be simply an exercise in shuffling the deck chairs:

We need to worry less and less about how headquarters are structured, and even whether or not we have too many underemployed admirals and generals, and focus on building, staffing and sustaining enough (many more than we have now) ships, and army and air force units – combat units and support units alike. Ruxted has posited that we will need much more than $20 billion by 2010 for the defence budget. It will have to grow by tens of billions and we will have to find that money year after year for decades to come if we are to pay a lead role in the long, arduous war which we face.
This needs to be presented to Canadians in a Throne Speech. A responsible Canadian government needs to be elected on a promise to make Canada a leader in the world and to give Canada the armed forces which will make that possible. Then it needs to keep that promise. Canada is a modern, sophisticated and, above all, a rich country. We can help the less fortunate in the world; we can lead the other middle powers in the quest to “do the right thing.” It takes will and it takes money.

Environmentalists I spoke to today were “pleasantly surprised” that Corporate Canada, including titans of the oil patch like Suncor's Rick George, endorsed a call for an “aggressive” plan to reduce the greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, that cause global warming.
What really seemed to raise some eyebrows was the assertion by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) that Canada must commit itself to an absolute reduction of greenhouse gases. In other words, the total amount of greenhouse gases produced in Canada must, at some point in the future, be smaller in one year than in the previous year — even if economic output were to jump, say, 50 per cent from one year to the next.
That's quite a change from the Conservative government's widely criticized “intensity” targets in which the amount of greenhouse gases per unit of economic output must decrease. With intensity targets it is possible that greenhouse gases could rise if economic output continues to rise from year to year.
Now, mind you, Environment Minister John Baird asserts that his government's intensity targets are so severe that they essentially amount to an absolute target. You won't be surprised to hear, though, that climate change scientists, including some of who have, at times been seen as sympathetic to the government's view, generally disagree with him.
So here's the CCCE today:
“While intensity targets make sense as a means of encouraging Canadian firms to become more efficient without being penalized for growing, the ultimate goal must be to achieve a substantial absolute reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases, in Canada and globally.”
This statement is part of a document, one should add, that is not produced by a policy wonk in some industry association — this is a document signed by the chief executive officers of 33 of Canada's largest companies, including Rick George, the chief executive of the Suncor, the biggest producer in Alberta's oil sands.
Environmentalists were also encouraged by the chief executives reference to the fact that carbon needs to have a fair and appropriate price attached to it. The thinking there is that if carbon has a price on it, it will show up on a firm's balance sheet as an asset or a liability — just like a factory or a loan to be paid — and that means firms will make rational decisions that should tend, over time, to reduce their liabilities, i.e. reduce their creation of carbon. Here's what the CEOs said:
“The price signal is an important means to ensure that energy use reflects its environmental costs, and these signals can be strengthened through market-based mechanisms such as emissions trading and environmental taxation. However, any such tools must be designed so that industries and consumers are not merely penalized, but have positive reasons to act. Policies aimed at changing behaviour through price signals must deliver positive environmental outcomes in ways that foster an innovative economy and strengthen Canada's competitive advantage.”

I don't think we have anything like this in Canada but, of course, I'm in the The Media so no one would be allowed to tell me anyway. We're talking about the Council for National Policy, which is meeting this weekend in Utah. Our very own Stephen Harper was a speaker at a 1997 meeting of this “ultra-secret conservative” group. You remember that speech, don't you? The one where our Harper would describe the country he would one day lead as “a northern welfare state in the worst sense of the term”. I wonder what the Harper of 1997 would think of Harper the Prime Minister whose government has let program expenditures jump 7.5 per cent in fiscal 2007 compared to fiscal 2006, the last year the Liberals spent any money out of the public purse. Conservatives have let government spending rise another 7.6 per cent between April and June compared with the same period last year. But I digress…
Anyhow, it looks like U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney is the featured guest this weekend. Do tell if you know of any Canadians heading down to this event. Come to think of it, has anyone seen Stockwell Day this weekend?

An ultra-secret conservative group — so secret that members don't even use the group's name in communications — will feature Vice President Dick Cheney as a speaker at a meeting in Utah today.
“Cheney will address the fall meeting of the Council for National Policy, a group whose self-described mission is to promote 'a free-enterprise system, a strong national defense and support for traditional Western values,” according to the Salt Lake City Tribune.
Founded in 1981 by Tim LaHaye, the co-author of the popular post-apocalyptic Christian-themed Left Behind books, the group holds confidential meetings three times a year attended by a small but powerful cadre of top conservatives.
“The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before of after a meeting,” one of the group's rules reads, according to a New York Times profile of the organization in 2004… [Read the rest of the story]

Artist Ken Danby, as you may have heard, died this past week of an apparent heart attack while canoeing in Algonquin Park. As soon as I learned of his death, I thought of his son, Sean.
The Danbys, at the time, lived just outside of Guelph, Ont., where I grew up, on a rural property near Rockwood. Sean and I — I think he's a year, maybe two, younger than me — went to the same high school in Guelph, John F. Ross CVI. He was, if I remember, an enthusiastic musician and a pretty good football player. It's been years since I've seen him but I hope he finds some strength knowing that the thoughts of long-ago friends are with him.

My parents — and me, too — liked Sean's dad's work a lot and they've purchased some of his prints over the years.
One of the reasons that I like Danby's art is simple enough: He saw and painted the same landscapes in Puslinch Township and Eramosa Township, near the tiny hamlets of Rockwood, Eden Mills, Arkell, and Hillsburgh that I loved exploring as a teenager who hiked and biked from our home on Guelph's eastern edge south towards Milton and east towards Georgetown. Whatever it was I felt as I biked over those rolling hills or came upon as I hiked the Arkell Trail, he seemed to capture it in his work.
One of the prints my parents bought was his classic At The Crease (left). They gave it to me a few years ago and it now hangs in my basement.
Like those paintings set in Eramosa Township, I, like millions of Canadians I suppose, felt a deep personal connection with At The Crease because, again, like millions of others, I grew up playing hockey and dreaming of an NHL career and that painting smelled of the rink, a smell I might add — a cold odd mixture of Zamboni diesel fumes, tobacco smoke, popcorn and sweat — that was a good and comforting smell. Now, as it turns out, I've learned there's another reason I feel connected to that particular work: It's a painting of a goalie I used to watch play and he's guarding a net whose hemp I've actually bulged, to paraphrase some of the broadcaster poets who used to work Hockey Night in Canada.
Ottawa Citizen writer Randy Boswell writes today that, according to Wayne Gretzky, the model for that painting is Dennis Kemp, who plied his trade for, among others, the Guelph Biltmore Mad Hatters, the junior B team that my dad used to take me to watch on Friday nights every now and again at the old Guelph Memorial Gardens. Kemp also played hockey for Wayne's dad in Brantford, near Guelph.
In Guelph, I remember watching future NHLers like Doug Riseborough, John Van Boxmeer, Brian McLellan, and George McPhee play for the Junior B Mad Hatters and others in Guelph. The Biltmore Mad Hatters, named that way for their sponsor, hat manufacturer Biltmore, would become the Guelph CMCs and then later the Holody Platers. A local hockey fan named Joe Holody owned an electro-plating business in Guelph and, thus, the “Platers”, whose franchise subsequently moved to Owen Sound, was born.
The jersey colours for the Biltmores, the CMCs or the Platers, as I remember them, were kind of reminiscent of the Chicago Black Hawks at the time — mostly black and white with some red accents. I would see, them, of course, at the Gardens in their home whites and, it is that jersey, if you look at At The Crease closely, that the goalie is was wearing for Danby's painting.
Now, though I wished hard for it, I never played in front of a sell-out crowd at Guelph Memorial Gardens, but the rep teams I played for — double-A and triple-A — played at the Gardens from time to time, skating and shooting through the same crease Danby immortalized in 1972. In fact, now that I know I'm looking at one of the creases at the Gardens, I'll bet I can tell which end Kemp was painted in. If you look over the goalie's glove hand, behind the glass, you'll see what is actually a greyish-brown divider moving diagonally up towards the top of the painting. That divider part of the “Zamboni tunnel” at the Garden's west end and would have been the end of the rink that the home team Biltmore's would have defended in the first and third periods. There were no such dividers at the other end, just rows of brightly painted yellow seats behind that net.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced today that his government is using the giant-sized fiscal surplus to pay down the national debt. In turn, Canada will not need as much money from taxpayers to pay the interest on the debt that's being retired. And, as his Finance Minister promised last fall, the Prime Minister says he will lower taxes by the amount that is now not needed to pay that interest.

But, for those who say taxes are too high — there's no gettin' around the fact that taxes would have been much lower – much, much, much lower — under the previous Liberal government.
The Martin government, in its last days, promised that if there was a giant-sized surplus at the end of each fiscal year, it would divvy it up into three pieces and apportion it this way:

• Set aside $3-billion in a 'contingency fund' reserve.
• Use one-third of the remainder to pay down the national debt.
• Use one-third to lower personal income taxes
• Use one-third for new program spending.

Update: Now mind you, Dan Miles, who is Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's Director of Communications, called to say I'm being unfair when I say the Liberal tax plan would have been “much, much, much lower” than the Conservative plan. He says the “tax back guarantee” — the government's guarantee that interest saved from debt reduction will go to income tax cuts — is just one part of his government's plan to cut taxes and that, if one looks at the “global” picture since the Tories took office 19 months ago, their package of $41-billion worth of tax cuts of all kinds compares more than favourably to what the Liberals have done or were planning to do.

OK, fair enough but, on the issue of surpluses, I still think that policy differences between Liberals and Conservatives are significant enough. Here, again, is what the Tories are doing:

• All of it will be used to pay down the national debt
• The interest savings will be used to lower personal income taxes.
• There is no new money for program spending.

.
The federal surplus at March 31, 2007 stood at $14.7-billion.

The resulting tax cut from the Conservatives will be about $725-million.

The resulting tax cut from a $14.7-billion surplus with the Liberals in power would have been nearly $4-billion or more than six times as much as the Conservatives are offering.

There would have been another $4-billion for increased program spending — things like more equipment for the military or more daycare spaces.

And the public debt would still have been sliced by $4-billion.

I'm not yet sure what's motivated the Conservatives to be so aggressive on the debt. On the campaign trail and at the 2005 Conservative policy convention, I heard a great deal about the need to lower taxes but I heard next to nothing about the urgent need to lower the debt. When I speak to Conservative MPs about what their constituents are telling them about national priorities, I hear that lowering taxes is a constant refrain but no MP has ever said they're worried about being voted out because they didn't lower the debt enough.

Moreover, you could make a good case that the debt is not a problem but taxation is.

Our national debt, as a ratio of our gross national product, is already among the lowest in the world. We are the only G8 country without a budget deficit, which means we are the only one of our international peers not adding to the debt every year. So we are already in a good position vis-a-vis the debt.

And yet, there is no shortage of groups in Canada who say that, compared to our international peers, our taxation levels are too high.
Today, the government is doing something about the debt — which doesn't appear to be much of a problem — and in doing so, will use up all the money it could have spent cutting taxes — which, to some, does appear to be a problem.

Statscan this morning published the latest population estimates for the country. The agency believes that, at July 1 of this year, Canada could count 32,967,000 citizens, which is about one per cent more than the same point last year.
Alberta's population is growing fastest at 3.1 per cent year-over-year while the annual growth in Ontario's population was the slowest since 1980-81.
The populations of Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and Yukon were smaller this year than last.
Fewer immigrants arrived in the Great White North for the year ending July 1, 2007. Statscan says Canada received 238,100 immigrants, a decrease of 16,300 compared to the previous year.

News item: Microsoft take a stake in Facebook. Microsoft's rumoured investment — the companies aren't talking — would value the social networking site at $10-billion US. (Or, come to think of it, $10-billion Canadian … hey, I'm takin' the loonie out for a walk while I can! But I digress…)
Reaction: From David Bradshaw, principal analyst at UK-based consultancy Ovum:

We don't normally take rumours seriously, but there's so much smoke here that there has to be some fire. And at up to $10bn, that could be a very large fire! Indeed, it is such a large amount that it makes me suspect that we're in the run-up to another bubble in internet company values.
There are some problems with Facebook, for instance the current legal action between the founder and his former room-mates over the alleged theft of intellectual property, the increasing concerns over protecting children against 'grooming' by paedophiles (though Myspace with its younger audience seems more at risk here), and the increasing hostility in corporations to employees using social networking in work time – to the extent that some are now blocking access. Longer term, we believe that social networking sites have to evolve further. Users need much better privacy controls, for example to protect against identity theft and stalking.
However, it seems that social networking via the web is here to stay. Web 2.0 is a widely hyped term, but if it means anything it is greater collaboration between users mediated by the web. Social networking is one element of this but only one – but other sites are more centred on collaboration. Indeed, two of the largest successes of Web 1.0 – Amazon and EBay – were successful because they mediated collaboration between buyers and sellers.
It's therefore my view that Facebook is no more than a step along the way and that there's something further to come. Maybe we need bubble 2.0 to burst before we can get to that – but let's hope not.”

Gosh, don't these yokels in B.C. know they're liable to bankrupt themselves???!!

B.C. COMMUNITIES COMMIT TO CARBON NEUTRALITY BY 2012
VANCOUVER – Local governments from across B.C. signed a Climate Action Charter with the Province and the Union of BC Municipalities today, committing to a goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2012.
“Our government is committed to taking action on climate change and, by working in partnership with local governments, we will be more effective in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions,” Premier Gordon Campbell said today, as he joined with UBCM president Brenda Binnie to sign a memorandum of understanding with the goal of local governments becoming carbon neutral over the next five years. “By signing the BC Climate Action Charter today, we are taking a key step toward improving the quality of life for our residents and communities tomorrow.”
Sixty-two communities signed the Charter during Wednesday’s UBCM session in Vancouver. In addition to a goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2012, local governments pledged to measure and report on their community’s greenhouse gas emissions profile and work to create compact, more energy efficient communities . . .
…Carbon neutrality involves measuring the greenhouse gas emissions that come from government operations such as buildings and fleet vehicles and then reducing those emissions to net zero. Governments achieve carbon neutrality by reducing emissions where possible, by purchasing carbon offsets to compensate for its greenhouse gas emissions or by developing projects to offset emissions. Such projects may include converting to energy efficient buildings and replacing old fleet vehicles and buses with hybrids.