After 34 years abroad, Canadians might find it hard to believe Ignatieff would have a problem with leaving the country for heart surgery.

Click here to listen.

There has often been occasion in these columns and elsewhere for me to express my admiration for the federal Liberal Party. Having governed for 80 of the 114 years since the first election of Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1896, it is the most successful political party in the democratic world.

Particularly impressive, as constructive political chicanery, was its ability for 90 years to represent itself successfully in Quebec as the party that would make federalism work for Quebec, and outside Quebec as the party that would keep Quebec in Canada, whether, depending on the audience, by bonne entente conciliation or by suppression of French Quebec fractiousness.

I have long thought, though I have no proof of it, that this tour de force of political virtuosity, developed by Laurier and refined by W.L.M. King and Ernest Lapointe after the conscription crisis of 1917, was modelled on the U.S. Democratic Party’s dominance from 1801 to 1861 (13 presidential elections out of 15). It was the champion of the slave-holding South and assured the western spread of slavery, while holding itself out in the North as the party that would keep the South in the Union.

This arrangement was made explicit by president Andrew Jackson in 1832, when he made it clear that he would guarantee slavery south of the Mason-Dixon Line, but would not tolerate the secession of South Carolina (or any other state). To this end, he effectively threatened to hang his vice-president, John C. Calhoun, tore up ratified treaties with the Indian tribes and rebuffed the Supreme Court’s invalidation of those treaty repudiations with the assertion, “The chief justice (John Marshall) has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

He forcibly transferred 250,000 Indians beyond the Mississippi, with great loss of life, to open up cotton-planting areas for a comparable number of new slaves in the South. It was an odious policy, but it probably preserved the Union for 30 years, during which the North so outpaced the South in economic and population growth that when the Civil War came, the North, by a narrow margin, was able to suppress the insurrection. Abraham Lincoln split the Democratic Party, and in a mighty triumph of statesmanship transformed a war to preserve the Union into a war also for the emancipation of the slaves. (And his Republicans were rewarded with victory in 14 of the next 18 presidential elections.)

The lesson here is that the Liberals should not imagine that they can easily go back to taking 90% of the Quebec MPs and winning four out of five elections, nor that they can get away with the bunk about Conservatives being “harsh” and frightening. The two-party system has returned after an absence of 85 years.

Of course, everything is to scale. Lapointe and King weren’t Jefferson and Jackson; Maurice Duplessis and Brian Mulroney and Rene Levesque weren’t Henry Clay, Lincoln and Calhoun either. French Canadians weren’t slaves or slaveholders, and Pierre Laporte and a couple of other victims of the FLQ and its antecedents are hardly comparable to the 700,000 people who died in the terrible War Between the States.

But the Canadian Liberals, whatever their pretensions, inanities and compromises, had only seven leaders in the 115 years from 1887 to 2002, and got the country through some terrible crises. Eventually, with the tangible and cultural appeasement of French Canada and the rise of the Western provinces, Quebec’s ability and desire to disrupt the country declined (as did the comparative strength of the American South from 1830 to 1860).

In the same time, the Liberals’ Conservative opponents had 24 leaders, including three from Reform and the Canadian Alliance, and counting Arthur Meighen and Joe Clark twice each. Between Sir John A. Macdonald, who died in office in 1891, and Brian Mulroney, who was elected in 1984, they were essentially a disparate group of Nova Scotian moderates, Prairie grumblers and Toronto fat cats who didn’t particularly care for each other, but didn’t happen to be Liberals.

The purpose of this laborious prologue is to establish my bona fides for my reluctant but unavoidable condemnation of the Liberals’ latest policy flourish: the insistence on aid to ensure generally available abortion in foreign aid-beneficiary countries, along with “other methods of birth control.” This is an outrage.

To be clear, my own views are similar to what I believe to be the opinions of successive leaders of both major parties: that abortions are distasteful, but they occur and must be sanitary and unstigmatizing; and that the state does not have and should not aspire to have the right to inflict childbirth on a woman who does not wish to have a child. But it is not the place of Canada to require and to subsidize the universally accessible termination of pregnancies in foreign countries, nor is it the province of the leader of the opposition so to affront the roughly 25% of Canadians who regard abortion as manslaughter or worse.

Abortion is not another “method of birth control”; it is a controversial subject of moral implications where heartfelt conflicting views must be respected; and it is fatuously arrogant and insensitive for the Liberal Party of Canada to demand the availability in foreign countries of abortion on demand at the expense of Canadian taxpayers, including the millions of them who are opponents of abortion, on pain of curtailment of foreign assistance to non-complying recipients. And it is very objectionable that all of this is without an apparent thought for the cultural or religious practices of the countries we are supposedly assisting. This, though I am sure Mr. Ignatieff did not intend it to be so, is the ultimate degradation of the “white man’s burden” — thoughtless, overbearing meddling in another country’s civilization and values.

This raises a related question: What is this great party doing making day-care its chief domestic policy initiative? Of course this is an important issue, but the federal government’s primary task is to build and lead Canada to greatness, within itself and in the world. These platform documents should lead with imagination and boldness, as Walter Gordon did (though I often, but very amiably, disagreed with him).

Canada should tax provincial transactions and elective energy sales, the sale-of non-essential goods, and reduce income taxes and abolish capital gains taxes on sales by Canadians of Canadian securities. We should reintroduce private medicine alongside the public health system, as most advanced countries have done. Our health-care system should not be a model for the United States of what not to do, as it now is. We should be proposing drastic reforms to the UN, NATO and the IMF, and building our defence capacity. An army of 19,000 is a scandal for a country as important as Canada. We should assist the private sector in making Canadians owners of a serious automobile manufacturer, and in the fair and advantageous repatriation of more of our industry. And the stocks, if not the lash, should be restored to deal with Dalton McGuinty and Jean Charest for fouling our nest by criticizing the Alberta oil sands at the most futile international conference, Copenhagen, since the Defenestration of Prague.

Instead of originality and vision and uplift, or even thoroughness, what was for over a century Canada’s natural party of government is preoccupied with disposing of the foreign unborn, and the regimentation of our own new-born. It won’t do at all.

Are those crocodile tears, or did you get some salt in your eye Iggy?

Here’s the scoop on the Nanos Leadership Index:

Best PM: As you may know, [Rotate] Michael Ignatieff is the leader of the federal Liberal Party, Stephen Harper is the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Jack Layton is the leader of the federal NDP, Gilles Duceppe is leader of the Bloc Quebecois and Elizabeth May is the leader of the federal Green Party. Of the following individuals, who do you think would make the best Prime Minister?

The numbers in parenthesis denote the change from the Nanos National Omnibus survey completed between December 10th and December 13th 2009.

National (n=1,001)

The Best PM
Stephen Harper: 32.0% (-2.8)
Jack Layton: 18.1% (+3.2)
Michael Ignatieff: 16.1% (-1.6)
Elizabeth May: 6.9% (+2.4)
Gilles Duceppe: 5.8% (-0.7)
None of them: 11.7% (-2.7)
Unsure:9.4% (-3.2)

Leadership Index Questions: As you may know, [Rotate] Michael Ignatieff is the leader of the federal Liberal Party, Stephen Harper is the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Jack Layton is the leader of the federal NDP, Gilles Duceppe is leader of the Bloc Quebecois and Elizabeth May is the leader of the federal Green Party. Which of the federal leaders would you best describe as:

The numbers in parenthesis denote the change from the Nanos National Omnibus survey completed between December 10th and December 13th 2009.

National (n=1,001)

The most trustworthy leader Stephen Harper: 25.0% (-4.3)
Jack Layton: 20.8% (+4.4)
Michael Ignatieff: 10.4% (-0.5)
Elizabeth May: 9.8% (+5.2)
Gilles Duceppe: 7.8% (+1.5)
None of them/Undecided: 26.2% (-6.4)

The most competent leader Stephen Harper: 33.6% (-1.7)
Jack Layton: 14.2% (+3.4)
Michael Ignatieff: 13.9% (+0.6)
Gilles Duceppe: 6.5% (+0.8)
Elizabeth May: 3.4% (+1.1)
None of them/Undecided: 28.4% (-4.2)

The leader with the best vision for Canada’s future Stephen Harper: 26.8% (-3.2)
Jack Layton: 17.2% (+3.2)
Michael Ignatieff: 16.0% (+1.2)
Elizabeth May: 6.4% (+3.6)
Gilles Duceppe: 2.9% (-0.5)
None of them/Undecided: 30.7% (-4.2)

Leadership Index Score Stephen Harper: 85.4 (-9.2)
Jack Layton: 52.2 (+11.0)
Michael Ignatieff: 40.3 (+1.3)
Elizabeth May: 19.6 (+9.9)
Gilles Duceppe: 17.2 (+1.8)

Tuesday, November 10, 2009 7:43 AM

Altered landscape in Quebec

Daniel Leblanc

1. The surprise. Yesterday’s four by-elections gave us the Rivière-du-Loup shocker, while confirming the Liberal slumber.

By beating the Bloc Québécois in eastern Quebec, the Conservatives got the result they had hoped to achieve in the last general election. Had victory come a year ago in Montmagny—L’Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, Stephen Harper might have gotten an overall majority, as the riding was exactly the type of place where he was planning on making gains in Quebec. Instead, the Conservatives got bogged down in a debate on culture cuts and stagnated in the province, allowing the Bloc to hold on.

While a by-election is just that, the upset suggests Quebec will be the scene of interesting races in the next general election, and that even the safest Bloc seat can be in play. For Gilles Duceppe, the result provides the biggest challenge since he briefly quit as Bloc Leader to run for the leadership of the Parti Québécois in 2007.

Yesterday’s Conservative victory is made even more significant because the party was deemed to be toast in Quebec last winter, after Mr. Harper’s near-death experience in Parliament and the short-lived plans for a Liberal-NDP coalition supported by the Bloc. At the time, a number of long-time Tory supporters said that “something snapped” in Quebec and that the party was hopeless as long as Mr. Harper was at the helm. Things have changed.

The Conservatives benefited from running a former mayor in the riding, while the Bloc, which had held the riding for 16 years, once again relied on a former riding assistant. In times of crisis, the Conservative message on the economy obviously resonated, and the Bloc needs to rethink its strategy. Rivière-du-Loup brings back memories of the by-election in Roberval two years ago, when the Conservatives managed to takeover a Bloc stronghold by running former mayor Denis Lebel. He held on to the seat in the general election, and he is now a minister and regularly doles out cheques all over the province.

The three other by-elections all worked out according to plans, with the NDP winning in New Westminster—Coquitlam in British Columbian, the Conservatives taking Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley in Nova Scotia, and the Bloc holding on to Hochelaga.

Contrary to what the results suggest, the Liberals did run candidates in all four ridings. It’s just that they finished a distant third in all of them. While victories were not expected, it’s obviously not the type of defeat that a “government-in-waiting” and an Official Opposition can take lightly. At least the new chief of staff Peter Donolo knows exactly where things stand as he attempts to relaunch Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff’s political career.

2. The numbers. Overall, voters in the four ridings cast a total of 94,630 ballots, which went like this:

Bloc Québécois – 19,709

Conservative – 33,856

Green Party – 2,896

Liberal Party – 13,985

NDP – 23,180

Other – 1,004

The value of the mathematical exercise is debatable, but with 14.7-per cent of the vote, the Liberals collected almost 10,000 fewer votes than the NDP (24.5-per cent), and more than 20,000 fewer votes than the Conservative Party (35.8-per cent). It’s not all bad news for the Liberals: The Green Party also ran candidates in all four ridings, and got only 3 per cent of the votes.

3. The spin. I don’t know why, but the NDP and Conservative spinners were the first to respond to my request for their take on the by-elections. Maybe it has something to do with meeting or exceeding expectations. So here are their takes, with the Bloc and Liberal spins to come:

Brad Lavigne, NDP national director: “Jack Layton has increased his support in every region tonight. In B.C., the NDP has increased its hold over the Conservatives with its greatest level of support ever in the lower mainland. New Democrats are now the alternative to the Bloc in Montreal and to the Tories in rural Nova Scotia. The initial seeds of an electoral breakthrough for the NDP have been planted tonight. “

Fred DeLorey, Conservative spokesman: “Governments rarely win by-elections, so we are pleased we were able to win seats in Nova Scotia and Quebec. Placing this strong in the other ridings bodes well for our future. The Harper government has provided a steady hand on the economy, we are continuing to implement our Economic Action Plan and it’s clear that Canadians approve of the job we’re doing.

“I understand the Liberals are trying to spin their poor results – but the truth is these are by-elections during a global economic downturn, this is when the Official Opposition is supposed to do well. What kind of Official Opposition party hoping to win government does not do well in by-elections in the midst of a global economic downturn? The answer: one that’s in trouble.

“I think it’s very significant that they finished out of contention in all of these four by-elections after Michael Ignatieff personally visited and campaigned in all of them.

“Everyone was saying the Nova Scotia seat was a three-way race, the Liberals won this seat before, and they finished third tonight. Same story in British Columbia, they’ve won parts of this riding not long ago, out of contention tonight. In the Montreal riding of Hochelaga they were always coming in second with a decent percentage of the vote – yet tonight they finish behind the NDP at third.”

Friday, November 6, 2009 7:09 PM

Follow the leader? Not these Liberals

Jane Taber

Michael Ignatieff needs to get a grip – on his caucus, on his party and on his staff. Too many of his Liberals are going rogue.

Eight of his MPs voted with the Tories this week to kill the long-gun registry. The Chrétien Liberals created the registry, spilling political blood to frame it into law. Privately, in the closed-door caucus meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Ignatieff urged his MPs to stand together and vote against the government. His pleas fell on deaf ears. However, Mr. Ignatieff reminded reporters that he was allowing his MPs to vote freely, and that it was a private member’s bill, not government legislation.

This week, too, Liberal president Alf Apps sent a note to colleagues and party supporters comparing the H1N1 vaccine crisis to the Bush government’s handling of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. More than a few Liberals were upset with the Apps hyperbole.

Then, Mr. Ignatieff’s hand-picked national party director, Rocco Rossi, was on Twitter, joking about swine flu and party patronage, saying “pork before swine.” A veteran Tory strategist called the Rossi joke “offensive.” Mr. Ignatieff didn’t offer any comment on the Apps/Rossi controversies.

It doesn’t end there: Ignatieff senior staffer Mark Sakamoto appeared on national television as an “ordinary citizen” complaining about the supply of the H1N1 vaccine. His cover was blown; the incident was embarrassing.

Mr. Sakamoto denied he was a plant. As parents of a newborn, he and his wife are on the priority list for the vaccine, and were waiting in line at a clinic when the interviewer approached. However, some believe the Ignatieff adviser should have known better.

Clearly, this behaviour is unnerving the Grits, with one Liberal describing the unwinding of the Ignatieff Liberals as being of “biblical proportions.”

Perhaps a slight exaggeration. But it is still instructive as it is happening when no one is in charge.

Mr. Ignatieff’s new chief of staff is Peter Donolo. His ETA on the Hill is Nov. 17. Mr. Donolo’s predecessor, Ian Davey, a close friend and adviser to Mr. Ignatieff, is on a beach in Florida with his girlfriend, Jill Fairbrother, the very capable director of communications to Mr. Ignatieff.

The two are mulling over their future. It is not clear whether they will return, and if they do, in what capacity.

Amid all this uncertainty is an undercurrent of restiveness in the caucus about Mr. Davey’s treatment. His imminent departure was leaked to the media before he even had a chance to speak to Mr. Ignatieff, and while Ms. Fairbrother was still denying it. Some MPs wonder where is the loyalty of the leader, who has been silent about the situation.

This rogue behaviour, meanwhile, is providing great fodder for the government, which is accusing the Ignatieff Liberals of being so base as to exploit the flu pandemic.

“It is very sad and unfortunate that the Ignatieff Liberals are desperately attempting to politicize the H1N1 preparedness efforts of the federal and provincial governments,” the PMO said in its “Alert” response to the Sakamoto television appearance. And in Question Period this week, Tory cabinet ministers repeated that same “politicization” refrain.

Have the Liberals lost their way?

EKOS national pollster Frank Graves says not yet. But they need to walk a fine line. Handled properly, the flu issue gives the Liberals an opportunity to show their stuff by keeping the government’s feet to the fire. He cautions them not to “wheel out the heavy artillery” until they are sure the government has grossly mishandled the situation. So far that does not appear to be the case.

“To do that at this stage you may end up looking basically disingenuous,” he said.

Mr. Graves has some sympathy for the Grits. “They are having a bad time in the polls, and they see a lob ball coming in and they just take a wild swing at it. … You kind of feel a little sorry for them.”

He believes that with Mr. Donolo’s experience, Mr. Ignatieff can rein in the Liberal outliers:

“Certainly a guy like Peter will be able to sort through what’s a real opportunity and a real exposed flank versus what’s just a story of the day.”

We’ll see in a couple of weeks.

This is a shameful new low. Thanks Michael Ignatieff.

Conservatives keep lead in poll

Last Updated: Thursday, October 29, 2009 | 7:55 AM ET

Support for the Conservative Party continued to hold last week, according to the latest poll results from EKOS.

Among decided respondents, the Conservatives drew 38.4 per cent support, followed by the Liberals at 26.8 per cent and the New Democratic Party at 16.7 per cent.

The Green Party had the support of 9.9 per cent of decided respondents, while the Bloc Québécois had 8.2 per cent support, according to the EKOS poll, which was released exclusively to CBC.

Last week, the Conservatives stood at 38.3 per cent support, followed by the Liberals at 27.1 per cent, the NDP at 14.5 per cent, the Green Party at 11 per cent, and the BQ at nine per cent.

Respondents in the automated telephone survey are asked: “If an election were held tomorrow, which party would you vote for?” The poll reached 3,220 respondents between Oct. 21 and Oct. 27. The results carry a margin of error of plus or minus 1.7 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

EKOS also asked Canadians their thoughts on the leadership of Stephen Harper, Michael Ignatieff and Jack Layton, asking if any of the three should be removed immediately as leader of their respective party.

On Jack Layton, 51 per cent of respondents indicated they thought Layton should remain at the helm of the NDP, while 25 per cent said he should be replaced.

Layton had the high-water mark of support among the three leaders. On Harper, 45 per cent said he should stay, while 40 per cent said he should be replaced.

Michael Ignatieff’s support was the weakest: 31 per cent of respondents said he should stay, while 46 per cent said he should go.

Ignatieff made changes in his inner circle this week. Late Tuesday, Ignatieff announced that Peter Donolo was taking over as the Liberal leader’s chief of staff. Donolo left his post at the Strategic Counsel, a Toronto polling firm, to replace Ian Davey, a longtime Ignatieff supporter.

Donolo was a communications director for former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien.