What to build before 2050?

Charles Wilkins reviews Building Canada: People and Projects that Shaped the Nation in Saturday’s Globe and Mail which is

“historian Jonathan Vance’s account of the construction of, among other things, our telephone and electrical lines; our highways, bridges and air strips; our railway hotels and beaux-art and neoclassical legislative buildings. It is the story of the people who did the planning, of those who did the painting and plastering, and of how the resulting structures and installations affected the lives and perspectives of Canadians . . . The underlying theme of the book is that the construction of all of the above (plus air strips, highways, bridges and performing-arts centres) served to unite the country and enhance its evolving self-awareness. “

Wilkins’ final point in the review is a provocative one:

“…it is perhaps telling that fully half of the projects depicted in Building Canada have fallen on shadowy, if not evil, days. Our grain elevators are but a memory; our arts facilities are begging; our biggest electricity company is swamped by debt. Our war memorials say as much about skepticism as heroism.

On the positive side, not all of our legislative buildings are madhouses, and a couple of our great railway hotels have managed to remain solvent.

Meanwhile, it is instructive to try to imagine what a sequel to Building Canada might look like, featuring nation-building projects from the past 20 or 30 years. Is there even a remote equivalency between the building of the information highway, or at least Canada's piece of it, and the building of the literal highway that stretches across the Prairies and through the mountains? Or between the bridges of cyberspace and those that span the St. Lawrence River or Burrard Inlet?”

 

 

Liberals name their critics

Opposition Leader Bill Graham has named his caucus critics. There’s a lot of them: 41 critics and 38 associate critics to watch a cabinet of 26 people. On top of that, there are seven Liberal MPs with caucus officer positions, like Whip or Deputy House Leader. So, in a caucus 101 MPs, 86 Liberals are critics, associate critics or caucus officers.

The full list has some other highlights:

  • Michael Ignatieff is not a critic. He is the associate critic for Human Resources and Skills Development. (Minister is Diane Finley). The critic is Geoff Regan.
  • Ignatieff is the only MP whose name has been bandied about as a possible leadership contender without a critic’s job. Other posssible leadership contenders with a critic’s job (which gives them a higher profile during Question Period) include: Scott Brison, Belinda Stronach, Maurizio Bevilicqua, Denis Coderre, Stephane Dion, John Godfrey and Joe Volpe.
  • Former Prime Minister Paul Martin is not a critic — a move that was widely expected.
  • Ujjal Dossanjh is National Defence Critic (Minister is Gordon O’Connor)
  • Couple of interesting Quebec matchups: Jean Lapierre is critic to Industry Minister Maxime Bernier and Coderre is critic to Minister of Labour Jean-Pierre Blackburn
  • Sue Barnes, who was Irwin Cotler’s parliamentary secretary in the last Parliament, is the Justice Critic (Minister is Vic Toews).
  • Brison will be the critic to Rona Ambrose in Environment.
  • John McCallum is the Finance Critic (Finance Minister is Jim Flaherty)

 

More polls: This time the Conservatives get a bump

The Strategic Counsel is the pollster for CTV News and The Globe and Mail. I’m subbing in today as host for Mike Duffy on his show Mike Duffy Live (CTV Newsnet at 5 pm Eastern/2 pm Pacific) and I’ll be talking to Strategic Counsel chairman Allan Gregg about his latest numbers which show that, despite some stumbles in their first few weeks in office, the Conservatives actually saw an increase in their national support.

Here’s the numbers:

  • Conservatives: 39 per cent (up from 36 per cent on election day Jan. 23)
  • Liberals: 28 per cent (down from 30 per cent on Jan. 23)
  • NDP: 19 per cent (up from 18 per cent)
  • Bloc Quebecois:  9 per cent (down from 11 per cent)

The poll was done Feb. 16 to Feb. 19. It was a survey of 1,000 people across the country and the margin of error is 3.1 percentage points 19 times out of 20.

 

Conservative advantage evaporates

(Here's a release from pollster Nik Nanos)

The recent national survey of Canadians conducted by SES Research found that the federal Liberals and Conservatives were statistically tied (Liberals 34%, Conservative 33%) on the national ballot.

NDP support is at 18% followed by the Bloc Quebecois at 9% and the Green Party at 7%.

Polling indicates that the Conservative government's honeymoon was short-lived. The Conservative six-point lead on Election Day is now a tighter race. We can expect a period of voter volatility as Canadians assess the new Harper-led federal government.

Methodology: Polling between February 4th and February 9th, 2006 (Random Telephone Survey of 1,000 eligible Canadians, MoE ± 3.1%, 19 times out of 20). Percentages may not add up to 100 due to rounding.

Any consequences from this drop in support? Perhaps one.

PMO fires and hires top communications aide

William Stairs, the subject of a nice profile in his hometown paper just yesterday, has departed the Prime Minister's Office as its Director of Communications. He is to be replaced — immediately — by Sandra Buckler, who, until yesterday, worked one floor down from CTV's Ottawa bureau at GPC Public Affairs (where, incidentally, one of her colleagues was Duncan Fulton, the tall gangly fellow who was once press secretary to former prime minister Jean Chretien), which recently became a business unit of multinational PR and communications firm Fleishman-Hillard.
“I think what this means is obviously that the prime minister is recognizing that they have had some communication problems in the first couple of weeks of his mandate, and that's why they are making a big change at the top of their communications staff,” my colleague Rosemary Thompson reported last night.
Several Conservative MPs and many communications professionals in Ottawa who worked on the campaign have complained that the PMO's communications strategy so far as the Emerson and Fortier appointments go were a disaster. Just to emphasize: These are complaints coming from MPs — and I'm not including Garth Turner among them — and Conservative strategists, not from disgruntled press gallery types.
Ms. Buckler will be a familiar face to political junkies. She was a designated Conservative spokesperson for the party on the various talking head shows, such as Mike Duffy Live, during the recent election.
Turner says the move is a reminder of how tough life can be working in the top political office in the land: “This is a surprise, of course, coming just two weeks to the day after the Harper administration was sworn in, and after Stairs came to wear a lot of the credit for the Conservative election win.”
Buckler, who grew up in Hamilton, Ont., was a registered lobbyist for several years acting on behalf of firms like Coca Cola, the Canadian National Railway, Rogers Wireless Inc., ConocoPhillips, and Power Financial Corp. She de-registered and ended her federal lobbying activities on Nov. 25, a few days before election began.
I cannot find the release — distributed after 9 pm last night — from the Prime Minister's Office. It is not yet posted under the news release section of the PMO's Web site but I reproduce it below:

PRIME MINISTER'S OFFICE IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE NEW DIRECTOR OF
COMMUNICATIONS
The Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister, Ian Brodie, is pleased to announce
that Sandra Buckler will be joining the Prime Minister's Office as Director
of Communications effective Tuesday, February 21.
“Sandra brings a wealth of communications experience to her new post. She
has advised national and international companies and agencies on
communications matters for several years. Before that, she worked as a
communications advisors to several cabinet ministers,” said Mr. Brodie.
“During the recent election campaign she worked as a spokesperson for the
Prime Minister.”
Mr. Brodie also took the opportunity to thank William Stairs for his
excellent work and personal dedication to the Prime Minister. “William
played an important role in the creation of the Conservative Party and the
recent campaign.”
Mr. Brodie looks forward to continuing to work with William as he moves on
to new opportunities.
-30-

Michael Ignatieff

“…what has succeeded the last age of empire is a new age of violence. The key narrative of the new world order is the disintegration of nation states into ethnic civil war; the key architects of that order are warlords; and the key language of our age is ethnic nationalism.”

Blood and Belonging (Toronto: Viking, 1993), p. 2

“Nationalists are supremely sentimental. Kitcsch is the natural aesthetic of an ethnic ‘cleanser’. Ther eis no killer on either side of the checkpoints who will not pause, between firing at his enemies, to sing a nostalgic song or even recite a few lines of some ethnic epic. The latent purpose of such sentimentality is to imply that one is in the grip of a love greater than reason, stronger than the will, a love akin to fate and destiny. Such a love assists the belief that it is fate, however tragic, which obliges you to kill.”

ibid., p. 6