David Akin’s On The Hill

Many in Ottawa — media types, lobbyists, and opposition politicians — thought that Calgary MP Diane Ablonczy (right) would easily make it to cabinet on Stephen Harper's first go-around with this in February of 2006. But it was only last week – three shuffles later — that Ablonczy made it in, albeit as a junior minister. Ablonczy had been Parliamentary Secretary to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and did some good work in that role, some caucus and other sources tell me.
Today, on CTV's Question Period, my colleague Graham Richardson talked to Ablonczy about her elevation and her new job:

GRAHAM RICHARDSON: A long-time Conservative, all the way back to the early days of reform, a supporter of Preston Manning in the leadership for the Canadian Alliance, always thought to be cabinet material, but Diane Ablonczy must have wondered whether that would ever happen. Well, it has. The New Secretary of State for Small Business and Tourism joins us. Congratulations, good afternoon.

DIANE ABLONCZY (Secretary of State Small Business and Tourism): Well,
it's good to be here.

RICHARDSON: Did you think it was going to happen? Why now, do you think?

ABLONCZY: Oh, I had actually given up on thinking that I would actually get an appointment like this because there are so many of us in Calgary, and Alberta, of course, because that's where a lot of the longest serving MPs have been, so I was pretty much resigned to maybe playing a different role, and that was okay. But I was really pleased to be asked to do this.

RICHARDSON: Was it honestly just geography or, from your perspective or
was the history of supporting Preston Manning a factor in you not being brought into cabinet?

ABLONCZY: No, I don't believe that was a bit of a factor, and I say that genuinely because the Prime Minister is not like that at all, and you know that there are delicate balances in cabinet-making. I think the Prime Minister is a very decisive manager, and he's now I think really fitting people into positions where he feels that they can make the best contribution, although regional balance will still be a factor, I think maybe less so as time goes on.

RICHARDSON: And there has been talk about gender balance. You're not a full minister. There are no women in senior, senior posts in this cabinet. Why? Is there an issue?

ABLONCZY: I don't believe there's an issue. We have some very capable women in all parties, and they are working flat out in the positions they've been given. So I don't think we should look at that. I think we should look at the fact that we've got the right people in the right places throughout parliament making it work well for Canadians.

RICHARDSON: But as a voter, women voters in Edmonton look at Anne McLellan's record and appreciate the proportion the Liberals had, is not that far from what you have in terms of, but in terms of the positions, I mean Anne McLellan was a big force in the Chretien cabinet. So the question is why isn't there someone like yourself in a similar position
in the Harper cabinet?

ABLONCZY: Well I don't know about that. You know, it may be, I think Anne was very capable. It may be that she was promoted because she won by such small margins. I mean, who knows, there's always political considerations, but I do know the Prime Minister's style is to fit the right people in the right places, and I just don't think it's very useful to look at gender and either promote or apply people in a place where they might not be best suited just because of gender or any other characteristic.

RICHARDSON: From your perspective, what is the challenge for this government this fall?

ABLONCZY: I think the challenge is to continue on the agenda that brought us into office, that Canadians gave us a mandate on. We've made good progress on all of the five priorities that we've had, but there are still some things to do. Our justice agenda, you know a lot of our bills are still stuck either in the house or the senate. In making sure that we have progress on patient wait times, now we have commitments on all the provinces to address wait times, but there's more to do. And we want to, of course, continue to democratize and bring accountability to the operation, so all of those things will be continuing on.

RICHARDSON: And you're surprised to be here I bet. Some people are surprised that there's still a government. Is that part of the exercise, you've got to figure out the story that you need to tell because you only thought you'd have to tell an 18 month story.

ABLONCZY: Well it's true. I mean I think everyone felt an 18 month minority government would be as long as it would go. Now it looks like we might go until the legislated next election date which will be October of 2009. It's really up to the opposition, isn't it? Because
they're the ones with the votes to bring down the government, to force an election earlier if they decide to do that. The government itself has to really address their mind to governing because that's what we have to, we're here to do.

RICHARDSON: I know it's only been a few days, but I want to ask you something on your portfolio. The Canadian dollar has hit tourism very, very hard, whether it's Waterton Lakes National Park or Niagara-on-the-Lake, a lot of border communities are hurting, the Americans aren't coming. How do you fix that?

ABLONCZY: I think the important thing is to show tourism, both internationally and from the US, the advantages of being in Canada because we have so much to offer. I mean you that you and I were just talking, you lived out west for a brief period of time. I just visited the east coast for the caucus meetings. You can do no better in tourism than Canada.

RICHARDSON: But they are looking at the bottom line…

ABLONCZY: We have to get that message out.

RICHARDSON: They are looking at the bottom line.

ABLONCZY: There really is no bottom line. I mean if you go to Europe, it costs you three times what it costs in Canada, and you don't see the kind of natural beauty that we have. The US visitors still have a discount on the dollar, it's not as big as it was, but it is an
advantage. So I just think it's a communications issue, and we have the product. We've just got to get really, really good at selling it.

RICHARDSON: Diane Ablonczy, thanks so much for being here and congratulations. Appreciate it.

ABLONCZY: Well it was a pleasure. Thank you.

Last week’s cabinet shuffle generated plenty of orders-in-council, including an OIC designating who-does-what in case the Prime Minister or other cabinet ministers are in a coma or otherwise incapacitated.

As it has been since this government was sworn in back in the late winter of 2006, Quebec MP Lawrence Cannon (Pontiac) continues to be the man who becomes the Prime Minster if Stephen Harper cannot perform the duties of the office. Harper has not formally designated anyone in his cabinet as deputy Prime Minister but Cannon, who holds the Transport and Infrastructure and Communities portfolio, is in charge when the boss cannot be.

As for the portfolios that switched around as a result of the shuffle, here’s the list of backups:

• Gerry Ritz is the new Agriculture Minister. Chuck Strahl, the former Ag Minister, is first backup; Environment Minister John Baird is backup number two.
• Josee Verner is the new Heritage Minister. Former Heritage Minister Bev Oda is on deck and Immigration Minister Diane Finley is in the hole.
• Foreign Affairs now reports to Maxime Bernier but if he’s conked out, International Trade Minister David Emerson is the boss and if he’s comatose, Bev Oda is in charge.
• At Indian Affairs, Strahl is now the man, but the former chief (if you’ll pardon the pun) Jim Prentice is first backup and Monte Solberg, the Human Resources Minister is second backup.
• Prentice — many continue to believe he is the de facto deputy Prime Minister — is number one now at Industry. Number two is the Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and number three is Cannon.
• At International Co-operation, it’s Oda who is minister backed up by Bernier and Emerson.
• Defence lost Gordon O’Connor as Minister but he gets his job back if Peter MacKay is captured by the Taliban. Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day would be in charge if the Taliban capture MacKay and O’Connor.
• Meanwhile at National Revenue, where O’Connor is now in charge, his backups are Veterans Affairs Minister Greg Thompson and Labour Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn.

By now, of course, everyone’s heard that Peter Mackay is running National Defence, Maxime Bernier is at Foreign Affairs and so on. But there were some other important shuffles happening as well — a re-jigging of the membership of cabinet’s seven committees.

Let me repeat something I wrote last January:

Committees of cabinet are important institutions. It is at committee, for example, that legislation or new initatiatives is hashed around. The new secretaries of state do not normally attend meetings of the full cabinet but they will attend meetings of a cabinet committee.

Prime Minister Martin had a relatively large number of cabinet committees, a function partly of the fact that he had a large cabinet. Prime Minister Harper had a slimmed down cabinet and a slimmed down committee structure with just six cabinet committees. Today, though, with five more ministers, he has added a new cabinet committee, “Environment and Energy Security”, and changed some of the leadership positions on other cabinet committees

Looking back to 2007, I identified Jim Prentice and Tony Clement as taking some big steps in terms of consolidating their influence with cabinet.

Now, two days ago, Prentice was a member of five cabinet committees and chaired two of them. Now he’s on just two committees and chairs only one. I think the most likely reading of that move is that his previous workload was crazy and this new workload, combined with the heavy-duty Industry portfolio, is still plenty busy. And, after all, Prentice is still on the all-powerful Priorities and Planning Committee (the only one Harper chairs) and chairs the second most powerful committee, Operations. (Only one other cabinet minister sits on both of those committees.  Read on to find out who.) 

Clement, though, continues to ascend, if you ask me. Clement — who was not shuffled and remains Health Minister and Minister for FEDNOR— loses his chairmanship of the Social Affairs committee but picks up chairmanship of the Environment and Energy Security Committee. EES is a new committee established at the last shuffle that could be increasingly important to the government’s agenda. I’m not so sure Social Affairs was the committee where it’s at.

Meanwhile, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty appears to be in the PM’s doghouse. Last week, before the shuffle, I asked University of Calgary political scientist Tom Flanagan what he thought Harper would be trying to accomplish with the shuffle. Flanagan, who taught Harper and was once Harper’s chief of staff, said that he expected Harper and his advisors would want to do something about “the needless political damage” done to the governnment by Finance. Flanagan was articulating what some other government insiders had been saying privately: Harper blames Flaherty for mishandling some taxation files, one reason why there was speculation last week that Flaherty might be shuffled off to Industry. Instead, Flaherty loses the influential leadership positions of chairman of the Economic Affairs committee and is no longer vice-chairman of Treasury Board, though he still a member of those committees. He continues to be a member of Priorities and Planning, as well. Some sources close to Flaherty, both here in Ottawa and from back in his Queen’s Park days, have said he is disappointed with the PMO’s moves.

Flaherty’s move has not gone unnoticed by the Opposition, either.  Here’s what one senior Liberal MP told me:

What we have is 2 1/2 demotions. Clearly O'Connor and Oda, but also it's a major slap in the face for the finance minister to be deprived of chairing the cabinet's key economic committee. It's bad for Canada when the PM sends this clear message of diminished faith in his CFO, while allowing him to soldier on wounded.

There are plenty of other leadership changes within the cabinet committees:

• Harper, as I mentioned, remains chair of P&P and is vice-chair continues to be Lawrence Cannon, the Transport Minister. International Trade Minister David Emerson is the only new member of that committee. Justice Minister Rob Nicholson and Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl are dropped from P&P.
• Prentice leads Ops and Government House Leader continues to be his vice-chair. New members of Operations include Nicholson, Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz, Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl and new Secretary of State Diane Ablonczy. Out at Ops is Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Rona Ambrose, Labour Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn, Cannon, Emerson, Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn, National Revenue Minister Gordon O’Connor, and Human Resources Minister Monte Solberg.
• So who sits on both P&P and Ops and therefore has more juice? Prentice and Treasury Board President Vic Toews. Who used to sit but doesn’t anymore? Cannon.
• Peter MacKay is the new chair of the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee, replacing Justice Minister Rob Nicholson who becomes vice-chair. Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day was vice-chair; now he’s just a member of that committee.
• Toews, by dint of his job, was and is Treasury Board president.  Ambrose is now vice-chair of Treasury Board but, as noted,  no longer sits on Ops and, as a result no longer sits on at least one of the two “power” committees of Cabinet. She is also dropped from Economic Growth but remains on Environment and Energy Security (EES).
• On Social  Affairs, Senator Marjory LeBreton assumes the chairmanship, replacing Clement. Strahl becomes vice-chair, replacing Immigration Minister Diane Finley, who is now just a committee member.
• Finley moves over to become vice-chair of Economic Affairs while the previous vice-chair, Emerson, moves up to chair that committee, replacing Flaherty. That’s a shift many business lobbyists in Ottawa have taken note of.

More Canadians than ever believe Liberal leader Stephane Dion would make the best prime minister among the leaders of federal political leaders, polling company SES Research says in its latest survey. Dion’s personal popularity has surged, particularly in eastern Canada, says SES,  though he still trails Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

SES also found that support for the federal NDP is at its lowest level.

The poll comes out as Harper gets set to shuffle his cabinet this afternoon.

“Today's federal cabinet shuffle is another attempt by the Harper Tories to break away from what has been a neck-and-neck race with the Liberals over the past year,” said Nik Nanos, president of SES Research.

SES says that 23 per cent of respondents to its most recent poll now say that Dion would make the best prime minister. That’s a big jump from just 15 per cent who responded that way back in May.

Still, the man who is Prime Minister — Stephen Harper — was named by 31 per cent of survey respondents as the leader who would be the best prime minister.  That’s a slight drop from 33 per cent in the May poll.

When asked who they would vote for, SES found the two leading parties — the Conservatives and Liberals — in a statistical tie, with 36 per cent saying they would vote Conservative and 33 per cent saying they would vote Liberal.

The poll of 1,000 Canadians, conducted between July 28 and August 4, is accurate to within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, the pollster says.

Conservative support is up four percentage points since the last SES poll in May. Liberal support remains unchanged.

NDP support has dropped 4 percentage points and now sits at 13 per cent. The Green Party is at 8 per cent, down 2 percentage points from May.

In Quebec, the Bloc Quebecois leads all  parties with 41 per cent support of declared voters, up from 35 per cent in May. Conservative fortunes in Quebec are up since May to 22 per cent, from 17 per cent. Liberals are the favourites of 23 per cent of voters, down from 27 per cent. The pollster says the Quebec-only polling numbers have a higher margin of error. SES says they are correct to within 6.7 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

The New York Times takes note of Prime Minister Harper's northern trip last week:

On Aug. 2, a couple of Moscow legislators in a small submersible vessel deposited a Russian flag on the seabed two miles under the polar ice cap — backing up Russia’s claim to close to half the floor of the Arctic Ocean. Canada’s foreign minister, Peter McKay, dismissed the move, sniffing that “this isn’t the 15th century.” But just in case, Canada dispatched no less a personage than Stephen Harper, its prime minister, on a three-day tour of the region and announced plans to build two new military bases to reinforce the country’s territorial claims.

and urges the U.S. to adopt the Law of the Sea:

Under international law, nations have rights to resources that lie up to 200 miles off their shores. The rest is regarded as international waters, subject to negotiation under the Law of the Sea. A nation can claim territory beyond the 200-mile limit, but only if it can prove that the seabed is a physical extension of its continental shelf . . .
The United States does not find itself in a strong position. Misplaced fears among right-wing senators about losing “sovereignty” has kept the Senate from ratifying the Law of the Sea even though the United Nations approved it 25 years ago. This, in turn, means that the United States, with 1,000 miles of coastline in the Arctic, has no seat at the negotiating table.
President Bush and moderate Republicans like Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, will try to remedy this blunder when Congress reconvenes. This would at least enable Washington to stake its claims to the continental shelf extending northward from Alaska. We may never need a share of that oil, but it seems foolish not to keep it in reserve.

One of the reasons reporters like to be reporters is that they get to do neat things, like ride in the cockpit of a brand new $400-million military super-jet. The Canadian Air Force took possession of its first Boeing C-17 this weekend. It first touched down on Canadian soil in Abbotsford, B.C. on Saturday, where Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor and Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier reviewed it and then it flew — with 90,000 pounds of cargo and a few passengers — to its new base at CFB Trenton, Ont.
That's where I caught up with it on Sunday. The Air Force held a party for the new plane to mark its arrival.
Lucky media types got a 45-minute ride in this military marvel and they let us up into the cockpit while we were airborne.
Now this is a plane that can carry a tank and then some so you can imagine the thrust on takeoff from its four giant Pratt and Whitney engines when it takes off, as it did today, with just a handful of reporters in its cargo bay. Wow.
I've put up a handful of photos from today's event and will post a few more tomorrow.

There will now be three by-elections in the province of Quebec on September 17.

The Prime Minister just announced that voters in Roberval-Lac St. Jean will join voters in the ridings of Outremont and Saint-Hyacinthe-Bagot.

Roberval-Lac St. Jean was the riding of former Bloc Quebecois leader Michel Gauthier. Gauthier, after a long career in Ottawa, announced his retirement earlier this year, citing the stress the weekly trips back and forth to his riding. He had recently had some back surgery and found it increasingly difficult.

The latest publication from the RAND Corporation looks like an interesting read. It’s called Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation:

Business marketing practices provide a useful framework for improving U.S. military efforts to shape the attitudes and behaviors of local populations in a theater of operations as well as those of a broader, international audience. Enlisting Madison Avenue extracts lessons from these business practices and adapts them to U.S. military efforts, developing a unique approach to shaping that has the potential to improve military-civilian relations, the accuracy of media coverage of operations, communication of U.S. and coalition objectives, and the reputation of U.S. forces in theater and internationally.

In an accompanying press release, the lead author of that study, Todd Helmus says, ““The central feature of consumer marketing is: know your target audience so you can satisfy their needs. The U.S. armed forces need to know who the civilian populations of Iraq and Afghanistan are, apply that knowledge through day-to-day operations, and monitor how those civilian populations perceive U.S. operations in their countries. Then the military can adjust operations to get more civilian support.”

Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian Member of Parliament who very nearly became the leader of the Canadian Liberal Party, wants to explain how he may have been on the wrong side of this whole Iraq business.
Who, you might wonder, would care about Ignatieff's intellectual turnabout? I, too, thought it might be his Canadian voters, fellow citizens, etc. but we both must be wrong for Ignatieff chose to publish his thoughts on this Iraq stuff via a long essay in the magazine that is handed out free as part of the Sunday edition of the New York Times. New York is not in Canada — for those who don't have an atlas handy — but is, in fact, part of another country called the United States.
For foreign visitors to this blog, I feel compelled to point out that there are, in fact, several print outlets in Canada whose editors would likely have been more than pleased to consider publishing Ignatieff's essay.

Why just the other day, Canada's weekly newsmagazine, Maclean's, did 30-plus pages, on the Conrad Black verdict! Such excess, it seemed to me, was plainly a desperate cry from the editors of that magazine that they had lots of room to publish anything — anything! — if only people like Ignatieff would (please, pretty please!) send their submissions in.

Ah well …

So: as there is at least another eight or nine Canadian voters, fellow citizens, etc. (I hope) who read this blog, I'm pleased to add to Ignatieff's readership by encouraging all to read his essay, which includes the following:

The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a president. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion. …

I’ve learned that good judgment in politics looks different from good judgment in intellectual life. Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way . . .

So how've you been?
My family and I have just enjoyed a restful month of summer holiday, part of which we spent in Atlantic Canada. I'm afraid I did my bit to contribute to lobster overfishing … and I'm not one bit sorry (although probably a little bit heavier)
I'm getting ready to head back to work tomorrow and have been going through some e-mail that has piled up over the last little while. Here's some exchanges that were posted to a list I subscribe to for journalists who are into using data analysis to dig out new kinds of stories. Most of the journalists on that list are based in the United States and, apparently, there is some discussion that the “Media” somehow contributed to the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis. Here's part of that discussion:

[Some of you] might be interested in today's online chat by Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz (), which pushed my blood pressure into quadruple digits with some discussion of coverage — or lack thereof — on the issue of bridge safety.
An email I just sent to Mr. Kurtz:

From your chat today:

Louisville, Colo.: Hi Howard,
Amid the calls for increasing taxes after the Minnesota bridge collapse, the media has done almost no presentation of what is actually being spent on infrastructure maintenance and new construction.
Is this because it's difficult to research or because editors don't believe that readers are interested in actual numbers?
In general, there is a lot of reporting about new legislation, but very little reporting about how effectively governments actually spend money.
Howard Kurtz: I couldn't agree more with your last point. I do think in the wake of the Minneapolis collapse that there has been a lot of reporting on how many bridges are deemed structurally deficient and how much money is spent on maintenance, especially in local newspapers and on local stations. But where were these stories before? A few outlets did a good job, but journalists, like politicians, prefer to focus on things that are new: A new project, a new program, a new plan. Maintenance of infrastructure is considered boring — until a bridge collapses and people die. You see the same pattern with other federal agencies: How many pieces were written about the dysfunction at FEMA before Katrina?
Dallas: Why so few stories on bridge repair before the accident? Reporters would rather write, and ask questions, about haircuts. …
Howard Kurtz: Apparently the big news in Minnesota was a major appropriation for a new Twins stadium. Now we learn there are about 150,000 bridges across the country that are rated as “structurally deficient.” Would have been a good story for someone. Actually, I'm sure we'll learn that a handful of journalists did point this out, but it hardly received widespread media attention.

This drives me absolutely insane. The problem with bridges is decidedly NOT that the media have failed to pay attention. It's another frustrating example of how pointing out a problem is not the same as solving the problem.
It took me about 30 seconds on the IRE website to find major investigative projects on bridge safety, all from 2001 or later, by The Oregonian, the Oakland Tribune, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Cincy Enquirer, the KC Star, the Boston Globe and a network affiliate in Tampa, Fla., as well as investigations by smaller media outlets in places like Paducah, Ky., and Columbia, Mo. In almost every case, the reports used the National Bridge Inventory, the same federal database that produced all those “how many bridges are structurally deficient?” stories in the wake of the Minnesota collapse.
Those stories all turned up so quickly because every computer-assisted reporter on the planet knows about the bridge inventory. Many have used it or at least have it at their fingertips. The bad-bridge story is, at this point, a staple of computer-assisted and investigative reporting. We all knew immediately where to go for the data.
Of course, few if any of those stories have solved the problem of inadequate spending or maintenance on bridges. When government or the voters fail to pay attention to the warnings reporters sound, that is NOT the same thing as the media ignoring a problem. Any public servant displaying actual brain waves had plenty of information to go on, the vast majority of it provided by the media that your chatters, and you, bashed today.
Gordon Trowbridge
Washington Bureau
The Detroit News

A reporter from USA Today jumps in:

Interesting.
A quick Nexis search turns up hundreds of relevant, mainstream print stories on structurally deficient bridges. Rather than writing them all down, I started looking for states where there HASN'T been a story on bridges. East of the Mississippi I come up with only Maine and Mississippi where there hasn't been coverage, though perhaps someone knows of coverage in those states? Nearly all are lengthy reports in the past two to three years (before August 2007).
West of the Mississippi, there's Hawaii, California, Colorado, Oregon, Oklahoma, Kansas, though I'm sure there are more. Not to mention national stories.

And here's a TV reporter from Baltimore, MD:

These stories aren't “boring” — people really care about their bridges. Baltimore City got cracking right away on three of the top 5 bridges we profiled in a story four years ago. For a city that doesn't get much done, it was remarkable.
Tisha Thompson
Investigative Reporter
WMAR-TV Baltimore