David Akin’s On The Hill

Andrew O'Hagan — whose books I keep meaning to read … has a delightful (and short!) essay in the London Review of Books:

My name’s Andrew, and I’m a reachaholic . . .
Nowadays, being unavailable is understood to be an act of aggression equal to driving tanks through the walls of the Danzig Post Office. To fail to answer your mobile phone, or to turn it off completely, is merely to announce that you are deep in the throes of a secret life. You don’t care, you’re not reliable, you’ve got something to hide, you’re screening. There are few modern crimes so remarked on as the crime of unavailability. Answer or you’re evil. Answer or you’re dead.
Everybody who really understands the Blackberry calls it a Crackberry, which underestimates its addictive properties. At least with crack you get to tilt your head back between puffs, or so my mother tells me. In any event, it’s the night-time that is really difficult: to turn it off is to accept that sleep is a sort of death, and to leave it on is to wonder all night what that crucial stuff must be (Australian gossip? American film rights? Adverts for Xanax?) that keeps the thing buzzing in the next room like there’s no tomorrow….
[Read the whole thing…]

Substitute “PMO” for “White House” and “Prime Minister Harper” for “President Bush” and you have, in Dan Froomkin's Washington Post column, a pretty interesting column for Canadian readers:

How much control should the White House have over who gets to interview President Bush? Specifically, should Bush be able to dictate which journalists at which outlets he talks to? [Read the rest]

Just because I'm one of those geeks that likes to fool around with a spreadsheet, here's some more data on job creation in Canada during the last five years, a period in which the loonie's value has soared compared to the currency of our biggest trading partner, the U.S.

• The average value of the loonie in January 2003 was 64.88 cents. Now, of course, we're at par, a rise of more than 54 per cent. In August of this year — the most recent month for which Statistics Canada has provided employment data — the average value of loonie was 94.5 cents, a rise of 45.7 per cent. In January of 2003, there were 15.2 million full- and part-time jobs in the country. In August of this year, there were 17.2 million jobs, a net gain of 1.97 million new jobs.
• For the year 2003, the loonie appreciated in value by about 17.42 per cent. The Canadian economy created 554,000 new jobs.
• For 2004, the loonie rose just over six per cent. The economy continued to create new jobs — 501,700 for 2004.
• In 2005, the loonie was up 5.4 per cent and another 550,000 jobs were created.
• In 2006, the loonie started and ended the year at about the same — just 0.38 per cent increase (I'm comparing average monthly value to average monthly value rather than opening trade to closing trade). Economy created a whopping 625,000 jobs.
• By August of 2007, the loonie was on a tear, up more than 11 per cent and, lo and behold, we're on a pace for the best year yet of job creation — with more than 808,000 new jobs in the first eight months of the year.
  

Hot on the heels of his new book, Harper's Team, the former chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper says that not only are the courts and the bureaucracy stacked with Liberals who would work against an aggressive Conservative agenda, but the Queen's representative in Canada is also not to be trusted! Here's Tom Flanagan (right), the University of Calgary political scientist, writing in the online journal C2C:

The Governor-General, Michaëlle Jean, is a politically inexperienced CBC broadcaster chosen by Mr. Harper’s predecessor, Paul Martin; her French-born husband is, or at least used to be, sympathetic to Quebec separatism. Could Mr. Harper count on fair treatment from this Governor-General in a constitutional crisis? Suppose he was defeated in the House and asked for a dissolution of Parliament and a new election? Would she comply with his request, or would she accept his resignation and then invite the Liberal leader to form a government? It’s probably more prudent not to put that question to the test.
With thirteen years of appointments by Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, the courts are heavily stacked with Liberal appointments. For example, one review of the Saskatchewan situation found that 16 out of 20 judges appointed to the bench by Mr. Chrétien and Mr. Martin had made personal contributions to the Liberal Party (not counting donations by spouses or law firms). With that kind of roster sitting on the bench, constitutionally adventurous Conservative legislation is likely to get a rough ride.

The staff of NDP MP Dawn Black are among the most creative and skilled when it comes to using federal access to information (ATI) laws to learn important details about the Conservative government's plans, policies, and initiatives. The latest ATI nugget from Black, who is her party's national defence critic, are some documents that show that officials at Canada's Department of National Defence prepared the speech that Afghanistan President Hamid Kharzai gave when he addressed Parliament on Sept. 22, 2006.
“…Karzai’s address to Parliament was an elaborately staged political stunt,” said Black, in a statement. “What Canadians heard was not the voice of the Afghan people, but the talking points of the Department of National Defence.”
When Parliament resumes next month, Black wants an emergency debate on this issue and will ask the House of Commons Standing Committee on National Defence to investigate DND's military communications strategy.

As the Canadian dollar hit parity with the U.S. dollar, some suggested this was hardly cause for celebration as the rapid rise of the dollar has meant massive job losses in Canada's manufacturing sector and in Canada's forestry and paper manufacturing sector.
A look at the data, however, suggests the correlation between the dollar's rise and job losses is weaker or stronger depending on when the measurement end points.

Here's the data checkpoints:

• For the month of January 2003, the Canadian loonie's average value was 64.88 cents US. By August, 2007, the monthly average was 94.5 cents, a rise in nearly five years of 45.7 per cent. In the same period, Canada lost nearly one in ten forestry and paper manufacturing jobs. For all manufacturing sectors, there were 129,000 or 5.8 per cent fewer in August, 2007 than there were in January, 2003. So that sounds bad but …
• Just comparing August 2007 to the beginning of 2007, the loonie and employment levels are all up. For the first eight months of the year, the loonie climbed more than 11 per cent; there are 30,200 or 23 per cent more people working in forestry; and there are nearly 60,000 or 2.9 per cent more manufacturing jobs.
• Things look less cheery, though, if we compare August of 2007 to August of 2006. In that twelve-month period, the loonie climbed 5.7 per cent; there are 7,700 or 4.5 per cent fewer forestry jobs; and there are 51,300 or 2.4 per cent fewer manufacturing jobs.

Data sources: Statistics Canada and X-Rates

A federal government that gets tough with industry when it comes to cracking down on chemical pollutants would find broad approval from the electorate, according to new public opinion research published by Environment Canada.
Canadians are also broadly in favour of the principle of slapping new taxes on consumer and industrial products that contain chemical substances.
Those are some of the key findings in a report, published in February but just recently made available online by Environment Canada's Public Opinion Research Group.
Here are the key bullet points from the report's executive summary:

• Canadians perceive industry to have the strongest influence on government (38%) when it comes to environmental policies and regulations, followed distantly by the Canadian public (18%). Notably, just 13 per cent of Canadians think environmentalists have the strongest influence on the government's green agenda. Just 10 per cent believe the latest scientific evidence is what drives policy at Environment Canada.
• In instances where Canadian public opinion is at odds with current scientific evidence, Canadians are more likely to prefer that the government base their decisions on scientific evidence.
• When asked to evaluate regulations on the environment, on food products, and on consumer products, in all cases a majority of Canadians feel that current regulations are not strong enough; environmental regulations are seen as particularly weak.
• Most Canadians feel the federal government, as well as companies that manufacture and use chemical substances, are doing only a fair or poor job of preventing or controlling the release of chemicals substances into the environment. The federal government, however, receives marginally higher ratings on this issue.
• The majority of Canadians (58%) are supportive of adopting a new environmental tax added to consumer and industrial products that contain chemical substances.
• Canadians place a high importance on purchasing products that are environmentally friendly.
• Canadian consumers believe that environmentally friendly products perform as well as non eco-friendly brands.
• Although many Canadians believe they cost more, most express a clear willingness to pay more for environmentally friendly products.

The survey was done by Environment Canada with the assistance of private sector polling firm Environics Canada. A total of 2,045 Canadian were surveyed in December, 2006. The report says it is accurate to within 2.2 percentage points 19 times out of 20 for the national sample.

Newfoundlanders go to the polls October 9 to pass judgment on the premiership of Danny Williams. By all accounts, this will be as close a coronation as you are likely to see. King Danny and the Progressive Conservatives of Newfoundland and Labrador may, in fact, sweep every single seat in the provincial legislature, a feat not accomplished since Frank McKenna did it in New Brunswick in 1987.

But those with a some knowledge of island politics say there may be one Liberal standing after the Danny-tsunami sweeps across the Rock and his name is Elvis Loveless (left). That's right — Elvis Loveless, the first-time Liberal candidate in Fortune Bay-Cape La Hune.

Elvis has been around politics for a while, working, for example, in former Premier Brian Tobin's office at one point and has, I am told, the potential to endear himself to voters. In other words, his personal popularity may be enough to overcome Danny's influence.
Now mind you, I'm sitting here in Ottawa and am forced to gossip about Newfoundland politics with expat islanders here who may or may not know what they're talking about. So if you're on the Island and you've got thoughts on Elvis or any other Liberal that might withstand the Danny-tsunami, please let me know!

Update: A friend from the Rock writes:

The federal Conservative Party is suing Elections Canada after Elections Canada ruled that the spending by some Conservative candidates in the last general federal election did not qualify as spending on local advertising but, in fact, was spending on national advertising.
The Elections Canada ruling had two chief implications. First, the local candidates were ineligible for thousands of dollars of rebates. Second, if, in fact, the spending was for “national advertising”, then the Conservatives would be more than a $1-million over their national spending limit — a serious violation of elections law.
The Conservatives, in their court filings, and in comments to reporters on this issue argue that everything they've done on this issue has been above-board, fully reported, and, they say, completely within the law.
In some cases, national party headquarters transferred money to a local candidate's campaign and then had the local campaign buy advertising that was produced and placed by the national campaign. The television ads were often, in many respects, identical to national ads except that, in the fine print at the end, it might say something like “Authorized by the agent for [insert local candidate's name here]'
Tom Flanagan, Harper's former chief of staff, seems to suggest in his new book, Harper's Dream, that this was one of innovations party organizers came across for the 2006 campaign.
“Even though there is a cap on national campaign spending, it is easy and legal to exceed it by transferring expenditures to local campaign that are not able to spend up to their own limits.” (p. 188).

[In the final days of the 2006 election campaign] The door … had been opened for a final wave of attacks. Liberal outrider organizations — feminists, gay-rights activists, law professors, aboriginal leaders, environmentalists — came at us in human waves, claiming that Harper would roll back abortion rights, use the notwithstanding clause to quash gay marriage, and repudiate the Kelowna Agreement and the Kyoto Accord. [David's note: Well,Tom, your guy did, in fact, repudiate the Kelowna Agreement and Kyoto and made a half-hearted attempt at rolling back same-sex marriage!] The Conservative Party simply can't compare with the Liberals in the depth and breadth of these external linkages; Real Women and Campaign Life can't compete with Egale Canada and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women in terms of public funding and media clout. If the Conservatives can stay in power for any length of time, it should be a high priority to de-fund the support groups that the Liberals have cultivated so long with grants, subsidies, and access to the government.

From: Tom Flanagan, Harper's Team: Behind the Scenes in the Conservative Rise to Power, Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007, p. 264

And here's one of those “outrider” groups that shut its doors on Friday.