The National Post had an interesting feature looking at the construction of Justin Trudeau’s image over the course of this election, with his carefully chosen images like the boxing, or the canoeing, and so on. Of course, Trudeau had this set out since he began the leadership contest, with an official photographer who has followed him around everywhere since. And yes, there is a deliberate crafting of the image he has been putting forward – vital, positive, authentic, all chosen to look natural and not artificial. This is nothing new, and what the piece didn’t mention was that Stephen Harper has been busy doing the same thing for the past number of years. Harper has a team of photographers and videographers on staff who have similarly been engaged in crafting an image of Harper that he has been trying to build, albeit it’s one of him being leaderly but not glamorous or robust. Where the divergence has been is the way in which Harper has crafted this image to such a controlling extent that he has gradually been shutting out legitimate news media and photojournalists and then distributes handout photos from his own photographers instead. Which, as we know, is not journalism but stenopgraphy. It’s gotten to the point where he has been self-generating “news” videos (the 24/Seven series) in order to bypass the press. Trudeau, to his credit, has not yet begun engaging in this kind of behaviour, and has been far more open to media availabilities and photojournalism, where media cameras are at the same events where his photographer is. That remains an important distinction – sure, he may have some great shots as part of his campaign media, but the real media is still there too, and that’s an important distinction.
Tag Archives: Stephen Harper
Roundup: A new member of the Canadian Family
Zunera Ishaq, the woman who challenged the niqab ban at citizenship ceremonies, took her oath yesterday with her face veiled, and the sky did not fall. And while Muslim immigrants question their faith in Canada, Ishaq is now free to cast her ballot to exercise her rights as a Canadian citizen.
The woman at heart of niqab controversy gets citizenship pic.twitter.com/lOEV0S5Z8f
— Susan Ormiston (@OrmistonOnline) October 9, 2015
Zunera Ishaq cried and said, "Thank you so much for honouring me here today." http://t.co/8EGwcELRLu pic.twitter.com/5w2TQGVbww
— CBC Politics (@CBCPolitics) October 9, 2015
Roundup: The problem with paper candidates
Yesterday, the quixotic Jean-François Party released a rare bilingual statement to decry the use of “paper candidates,” citing a case of a Green candidate from BC who had never visited the riding he or she is contesting in Quebec. If there was to be a cautionary tale around the use of paper candidates, it should have been with both the NDP in the 2011 federal election, and more recently in the Alberta provincial election. In both cases, paper candidates accidentally got elected in popular “waves” where it was clear that the voters of Quebec and Alberta were motivated to vote for the party for their particular reasons (affection for Layton in 2011, anger with the Progressive Conservatives in Alberta this year). In both cases, some less than stellar MPs/MLAs were accidentally elected – one of them, incidentally, joined the Jean-François Party. While Jean-François Party co-founder (and now party president and candidate) Jean-François Larose was one of those NDP MPs who was part of the sweep, then-fellow NDP MP Manon Perreault was an example of how a paper candidate turns out to be trouble. Over the course of the 41st parliament, Perreault was charged and convicted of criminal mischief when she falsely accused an assistant of theft, and was also later investigated by the RCMP for problems with travel claims expenses (though I’m not sure we heard the outcome of said investigation). Nevertheless, she was turfed from the NDP caucus during her trial, and after the writ dropped, she joined the Jean-François Party. So really, that the party is now coming out against paper candidates when their very existence is dependent on the victory of such candidates is curious. The problem, however, is that the parties have an incentive to create these candidates, and that incentive is that running full slates, regardless if those candidates have ever been to those ridings or not, allows them to claim the maximum spending cap. Hence, as especially in Quebec in 2011, ridings which barely had NDP riding associations all accepted the “nominations” of those paper candidates which included Ruth Ellen Brosseau and the McGill Four, because the NDP wanted their spending cap. So what to do about it? It’s a sticky situation because it would seem the answer is to remove the incentive of the spending cap, but how does one enforce that the candidates have actually been to the riding, or are actually campaigning? Do we really want Elections Canada to become an intrusive body to not only poke their heads into the party nomination process and to check up on those candidates in the ridings? It’s hard to say. I do think that paper candidates are an affront to our democratic system, but without turning Elections Canada into Big Brother, I’m at a loss as to a workable solution.
The Jean-François Party wants to do away with paper candidates. So far their MPs are all cast-offs from NDP/BQ. pic.twitter.com/nU2EtrQdMy
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) October 6, 2015
Roundup: About that “costed” plan
The NDP released their “costed” fiscal plan yesterday, which was not in fact the full costing that they had promised, but rather a broad-strokes framework, full of vague line item names like “Helping Families Get Ahead” and “Help Where It’s Needed Most” rather than actually talking about their childcare plan, and their promises around the healthcare escalator. (That escalator, incidentally, has confused a lot of reporters in the room). It’s kind of ironic that after a week spent baiting the Liberals on releasing their costed platform, the NDP didn’t actually deliver theirs. Suffice to say, the analysis to date seems to be that the NDP platform relies on the Budget 2015 numbers – numbers which are no longer relevant as the price of oil has crashed even further, and GDP growth is nowhere near what was projected and likely won’t be anytime soon, which blows a hole of several billion dollars into the assumptions. It also relies on the same austerity that the Conservative budget is built upon, despite what the NDP insists. The Conservatives and Liberals immediately panned the document, but that’s not a surprise. Being as I’m not an economist, I’ll leave the comments for those who are, and they have plenty to say (with some background on how to read these kinds of documents from Kevin Milligan here):
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/644266217994215424
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/644266726171869184
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/644267141714149376
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/644267656929918976
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/644268654381563904
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/644269099938283520
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/644269679876288512
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/644270215551848448
It’s the quality of the jobs that’s affected: at higher tax rates, less investment, less capital/worker, lower productivity, lower wages.
— Andrew Coyne 🇺🇦🇮🇱🇬🇪🇲🇩 (@acoyne) September 16, 2015
@acoyne If full employment wages fall with CIT increase. My estimate based on disequilibrium GE model with bigger job impact.
— Dr. Jack Mintz (@jackmintz) September 16, 2015
https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/644306950700724224
Anyone looking at that list of NDP revenue measures is almost certainly going to say "No skin off my nose"
— Stephen Gordon (@stephenfgordon) September 17, 2015
NDP program is not a rebellion against anti-tax sentiment; it's buying into it.
— Stephen Gordon (@stephenfgordon) September 17, 2015
No-one is going to vote NDP saying to themselves, "Okay, I'll pay more in taxes, but I'm willing to pay the price"
— Stephen Gordon (@stephenfgordon) September 17, 2015
The NDP is selling a free lunch: We will raise taxes you don't have to pay, and we'll use them to buy you these goodies
— Stephen Gordon (@stephenfgordon) September 17, 2015
So any narrative that sells support for the NDP as a rejection of the CPC has got it wrong. NDP is appealing to the same anti-tax sentiment
— Stephen Gordon (@stephenfgordon) September 17, 2015
https://twitter.com/rolandparis/status/644332078855815168
NDP detail on daycare? @RosieBarton asks @thomson_ndp for the numbers (with @MichelleRempel & @JohnMcCallumLPC too) http://t.co/OszzPVZqs4
— Leslie Stojsic (@LeslieStojsic) September 16, 2015
Note to self: memorize all line by line expenditures before next @PnPCBC. FYI # is $595M in Y1 rising to $2.5B in Y4 @LeslieCBC @RosieBarton
— Andrew Thomson (@Thomson416) September 17, 2015
Roundup: Harper’s Westminster mistake
It was a fairly combative interview, as Stephen Harper sat down with the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge, but there was a fairly important point to make, which is that the understanding of the Westminster parliamentary system that he espoused was totally wrong. Harper stated that he wouldn’t try to form government if his party didn’t win the most seats, which is an interesting political commitment, but his assertion that it’s the way the convention works in a Westminster system is wrong and has nothing to do with the actual way that governments are formed. What I will say is that this certainly seems to answer all of the paranoid delusions of the Harper Derangement Syndrome-types out there who insist that he’s going to try to hold onto power at all costs, and that even if he can’t win a majority that he’s going to still test the confidence of the Chamber and call a snap election immediately if he doesn’t get it, etcetera, etcetera. That’s certainly not the message that he’s been giving, and really, he’s not a Bond villain. Making him out to be such is counterproductive and simply wrong. Here’s Mansbridge’s behind-the-scenes look at the leader interview series, the biting satirical Twitter account Canadian Median Voter weighing in on Harper’s understanding, plus a reminder that Thomas Mulcair has said pretty much the very same incorrect things, and a reminder of how things actually operate.
The party who wins the most seats becomes the government. It is called responsible government.
— The Median Voter (@CanMedianVoter) September 8, 2015
https://twitter.com/inklesspw/status/641069383729741826
https://twitter.com/markdjarvis/status/640289615987929088
Roundup: Defining recession
While I fear this may becoming a quasi-economics blog over the course of the campaign, it’s numbers yet again in the national consciousness as we learn today whether or not we’re in a technical recession, though there’s a bunch of political dispute over what a recession means. Jason Kenney was on Power & Politics on Sunday trying to broaden the definition to say that it would need to be over a number of sectors rather than just the energy sector as we seem to be seeing in Canada, and while that may be a perfectly reasonable explanation if it was anyone else, it was however his own government who put the definition of two quarters of shrinking GDP into their “balanced budget” legislation just a couple of months ago. Oops. To that end, Rosemary Barton writes about deficit and recession politics on the campaign trail, while Mike Moffatt calculates the projected federal deficits for the next few years based on current economic indicators. And Stephen Gordon gives us some food for thought:
.. revenues to increase and/or expenditures to decrease. If so, you'd shift future income to finance current spending. /2
— Stephen Gordon (@stephenfgordon) August 31, 2015
We want to shift current income to finance future spending, not the reverse. 4/4
— Stephen Gordon (@stephenfgordon) August 31, 2015
Roundup: The big infrastructure spend
It all being official that the Liberals are willing to run a small deficit in order to finance infrastructure spending in the hopes of boosting a stalled economy have turned the election into one with some real differences between parties, which incidentally seems to have also energised Harper’s performance at his own stops. The issue for the Liberals would seem to be now not only having to sell the idea of deficits – which they are attempting to do with the line of being the only party that’s being honest about the current state of the nation’s finances – but ensuring that the infrastructure spending they’re doing is going to be actually useful in the longer term. Sure, there is a big infrastructure deficit in this country for which this new funding is but a drop in the bucket, but if he wants to ensure that this is the kind of kick that will grow the economy, it should be in things that will have bigger impact – port infrastructure to get goods to market, ensuring that there is the kind of broadband access in places that need it to grow their business and attract investment, and so on. It shouldn’t be about short-term stimulus, lest the Liberals repeat the mistakes of the Conservatives in 2009-10. Not unsurprisingly, Toronto mayor John Tory and the president of the Canadian Federation of Municipalities both liked the announcement as it means more money for cities. Former PCO Clerk Kevin Lynch talks about the need for fiscal policy rather than just relying on monetary policy to try to grow the economy – and includes infrastructure spending as an example. Kevin Milligan examines the case for infrastructure spending at this time, and finds there is a plausible case for it.
Roundup: An questionable call to the Governor
While I often cringe about the media’s reluctance to refer to Stephen Harper as prime minister during the writ period (as he remains prime minister and will until he offers the Governor General his resignation) out of an exaggerated sense of fairness, there was an incident yesterday where Harper himself blurred that line between being prime minister, and being the Conservative leader campaigning for his own ends. For the first time that I can recall, we got a press release that mentioned that the Prime Minister called up the Governor of the Bank of Canada. While the text was pretty banal, talking about “ongoing developments” in the global economy and the recent declines in the markets, it was still unusual because we never get these kinds of releases. Ever. There is a very clear separation between government fiscal policy and the monetary policy set by the Bank of Canada, and the two should never meet – in fact, there is an issue in Canadian history where the Prime Minister tried to interfere with the Bank of Canada, and the Governor of the day ended up resigning in protest as a result. While the purpose of Harper’s call to Governor Poloz is not mentioned, the fact that it came on the day where Harper’s campaign message was all about how only his party could be trusted to weather this global economic turbulence, well, it’s pretty icky. Harper subtly politicizes Poloz by using him as a campaign prop – look at my economic credentials! I’m talking to the Bank of Canada Governor, like an economic boss! For all we know, Harper and Poloz have a weekly call where they talk trends and forecasts, and so on, but if that’s the case, we never hear about it. This time, Harper made sure that we knew about it. I’m having a hard time trying to see how this is acceptable in any way.
Roundup: Constitutionally untenable declarations
One of those tangential sub-plots in the whole ClusterDuff affair reared its head in the testimony of Ben Perrin yesterday, which is the issue of the test of residency for a senator. Given that the issue had blown up during Perrin’s time in PMO, thanks to Stephen Harper’s panic appointments in 2008 where he named senators to provinces where those individuals did not currently reside but rather had originated from, they found themselves in trouble when a certain Senator Duffy was found to have been treating his long-time Ottawa home as a secondary residence that he could claim per diems with while his summer cottage in PEI was being treated as a primary residence, never mind that he rarely spent any time there, none of it in the winter. Perrin’s advice was to come up with several indicators, but that ultimately it would be up to the Senate to come up with those indicators for themselves. Stephen Harper disagreed, and said that as far as he was concerned, they were resident if they owned $4000 in real property in said province – a position Perrin found to be constitutionally and legally untenable. But the constitutionally untenable has become Harper’s stock in trade, particularly where the Senate is concerned, first with his unconstitutional reform bills, to his present policy of not making any appointments in defiance of his constitutional obligation to do so. (And no, Thomas Mulcair is no better with is own promise not to appoint any senators either). And we also know from the Duffy documents that Harper blocked an attempt by the Senate to strike a committee that would deal with the residency issue once and for all – because Harper wanted to protect those improper appointments he made. The rather sad thing is that if hadn’t made those appointments in haste, he could have ensured that they had their ducks in a row before they got appointed, to show that they had enough proof of residency to pass a smell test. He didn’t, constitution be damned – or at least be subverted on bogus “plain reading” arguments that don’t hold water the moment you think critically about them. And yet We The Media aren’t driving this point home to the voters, that the constitution does and should matter. (Aaron Wherry delves more into the residency issue here).
Roundup: Tolerating Ray Novak’s deception
If there was one exchange on the campaign trail yesterday that speaks volumes for the way the current government is operating, particularly the lying about who knew about the cheque as opposed to Duffy himself repaying, it was between Hannah Thibedeau and Stephen Harper while in Hay River, and it goes thus: “You just mentioned in that answer a vast majority of staff believed that, but there were staff and very high profile staff that knew otherwise. For a few days, you have been evading that question about the deception done by many of your senior staff in the Duffy case including Mr. Ray Novak – he’s your current chief of staff, and he was told about Mr. Wright’s cheque in emails directly with Mr. Wright. So why have you tolerated Mr. Novak’s lying and even promoted him to current chief of staff who’s travelling with you right now?” Harper, predictably, rejected the premise of the question and insisted that only Wright and Duffy were responsible and they were being held accountable, which is clearly not the case. This was the party that rode into government on the white horse of accountability. It’s funny how that horse is nowhere to be seen these days.