April 2011 Archives

Muguette Paille is a hero in Quebec — at least according to the consensus media.

During the French-language election debate last week, the unemployed 53-year-old asked the party leaders what they would do to help her find a job. After all, her Employment Insurance is about to run out. Somebody’s got to help her find a job, and she thinks it ought to be the government.

The question made Paille a hero to the chattering classes; she was swamped with interview requests from reporters. Which is handy, given that Paille’s question to the party leaders was chosen by reporters in the first place, pre-taped and edited, and played during the debate. They created the “news” of her question, and then reported it afterwards.

Paille gave the media exactly what they wanted. Asked by reporters about Stephen Harper’s response, she said, “I didn’t like him at all.” But what about the opposition leaders? “I liked Mr. Layton and Mr. Ignatieff, who answered well,” she said.

Give this woman an honorary membership to the Parliamentary Press Gallery!

Some pundits actually compared Paille with Joe Wurzelbacher, nicknamed “Joe the Plumber” in the last U.S. presidential election. Back in 2008, Barack Obama was campaigning in Wurzelbacher’s neighbourhood in Ohio, and stopped to talk with him in his front yard.

Instead of swooning in Obama’s presence, Wurzelbacher said he wanted to buy a small plumbing company, and asked if Obama was going to raise his taxes because he’d be “rich” by Obama’s definition. Obama’s stammered answer became a PR disaster. “It’s not that I want to punish your success,” Obama told him, TV cameras running. “I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance at success, too.”

Translation: Yes, your taxes are going up, and you’re a greedy capitalist if you make a fuss about it.

The mainstream media – which was then at the absolute depths of their crush on Obama — immediately went to war against Wurzelbacher for his high crime of interfering with Obama’s photo op.

They revealed shocking details about him, including that Joe was actually his middle name, not his first name. A government official in Ohio, who happened to be a Democrat, outdid that, by illegally searching government computers for embarrassing information about Wurzelbacher, incuding police computers and family services databases.

Wurzelbacher’s question was a real political moment. He wasn’t scripted. He wasn’t chosen by the press. He just happened to be playing with his son when Obama came by. And he asked a question the media didn’t want to have asked.

Wurzelbacher is severely normal in every way — a middle class guy trying to make a better life for himself. He was the American dream in action.

Canada’s journalists — monolithically liberal — want to propose Paille as our answer to the American dream. Instead of Paille making a job for herself, let alone creating a company to hire others too, she wants politicians to help her find a job. Not a drop of entrepreneurialism, but a double helping of entitlement.

Is that really the Canadian way? Judging from the reactions to her by the party leaders, it certainly is. Layton and Ignatieff salivated over her, outbidding each other in terms of putting government to work for Paille. Stephen Harper didn’t quite join the frenzy, but neither did he disagree with the central premise that it is the role of the government to help Paille find her job.

If Harper had tried to dissent — if he had told her that there are already too many people riding in the wagon, and not enough people pulling the wagon — it would have been counter to the entire spirit of the French-language debate, which has become an auction in which the party leaders demonstrate how much money and special concessions they were willing to spend to placate Quebec voters.

Canada’s Joe the Plumber? Hardly. Try Muguette the Mooch.

Michael Ignatieff once called himself Rip Van Winkle, because he had been away from Canada since 1969. Ignatieff was referring to the short story about a man who fell asleep for 20 years and didn’t realize the world had changed when he woke up.

Except that’s not quite fair, because Ignatieff was away from Canada for 34 years, and Van Winkle only slept for 20.

On Sunday, Ignatieff released the Liberal election platform, and it felt like it could have been written back when Ignatieff last lived here.

Every fashionable leftist idea from the ’60s and ’70s is in there — except for the fun stuff, like disco music and bell-bottom jeans.

Ignatieff wants to build big, showy government projects, like they did in the ’70s. He wants a high-speed train between Windsor and Quebec City, wasting money and interfering with private bus companies and airlines. At least he’s not planning to re-nationalize Air Canada again. That we know of.

Ignatieff wants to bring back Trudeau-style taxation policies, too, promising to raise taxes on business, with a special vengeance for Canada’s oilsands companies. Not only does he want to change tax accounting rules to squeeze money out of the oilsands faster — a half-billion-dollar bullseye drawn on jobs from Fort McMurray to St. John’s — he also wants to bring in a Stephane Dion-style carbon tax, called cap-and-trade.

In short, Canadian ethical oil producers would be punished, but oil imports from OPEC countries like Saudi Arabia wouldn’t.

Ignatieff’s carbon tax is pretty clearly an Alberta tax. It would not apply to energy producers in other provinces, like Ontario’s nuclear industry or Quebec’s hydroelectricity. So it’s just like Trudeau’s National Energy Program.

Ignatieff punishes the North, too. He calls for a halt to oil and gas exploration in the Arctic. So much for Inuit employment — they can go hunt seals for a living. If Ignatieff hasn’t banned that, too.

Ignatieff also came out against tanker ships taking oilsands oil from B.C. to Asia. So much for increased trade with that continent. But Canadian workers might be asking why Ignatieff hates tankers picking up oilsands oil, but is silent about the steady flotilla of tankers taking Alaska crude to the lower 48 U.S. states, by sailing right down the B.C. coast.

And then there’s new but unspecified “regulations” Ignatieff would impose on the oilsands. It’s already one of Canada’s most regulated industries. But Ignatieff has more red tape in mind. He won’t say what, until after the election.

Increased corporate taxes, increased oilsands taxes, oilsands tanker bans, more oilsands regulations and a complete halt to Arctic exploration. But billions for Liberal megaprojects.

It’s the worst of Trudeau. It’s the old Liberal motto: Screw the West, and we’ll take the rest.

That anti-Alberta bigotry was coined by Trudeau’s advisor, Keith Davey. His son, Ian Davey, is the man who recuited Ignatieff from Harvard. No surprise.

The CBC-Liberal pollster Frank Graves has a unifying theory for all this. Last year, Graves advised Ignatieff to “invoke a culture war.” He encouraged Ignatieff to label the west as racist, homophobic and small-minded.

“If the cranky old men in Alberta don’t like it, too bad,” he said. “Go south and vote for Palin.” The CBC has taken the Graves Strategy to heart. Now Ignatieff has too.

I apologize to Michael Ignatieff.

Last week I compared his election platform to Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program and said he would devastate Canada’s oilsands and thousands of jobs.

I basically called him Alberta’s No. 1 enemy.

I would like to retract that.

Because Ignatieff isn’t even close to being Alberta’s worst enemy.

Ed Stelmach, Alberta’s own premier, deserves that title, not Ignatieff.

Last week, Stelmach ambushed the oil industry by rolling out proposed regulations to halt oilsands production on two million hectares — including land that had already been leased to two dozen different oil and mining companies.

Those companies had followed all the rules. They went through the necessary hearings, complied with all the regulations, paid their fees and were approved.

That’s a contract. And based on that contract, those companies spent money and hired workers.

And then Stelmach just announced he wants to rip up those contracts and demolish what the companies are doing on that land.

These aren’t little companies. They’re some of the biggest names in the business — Nexen, Suncor, Canadian Natural and Imperial Oil.

So that would be like the Ontario government telling GM, Ford and Chrysler they’ve cooked up new regulations and their existing car assembly lines will have to be shut down.

All Ignatieff wants to do is raise taxes on the oilsands, ban Arctic oil exploration and oppose oil pipelines. That’s nuts. But at least he’s never called for actual oilsands work to be stopped.

Which is why I’m apologizing to him.

Because, next to Stelmach, Ignatieff looks like an honorary member of Calgary’s Petroleum Club.

It takes a special kind of stupidity, the kind only politicians are capable of, to call for the shut down of companies and the layoff of jobs, just as the economy is emerging from recession.

Only a politician would propose shutting down Canadian ethical oil production while world prices zoom over $110 a barrel and OPEC countries teeter on civil war. Only a politician would suggest expropriating potentially billions of dollars worth of projects when Alberta has incurred a string of record deficits.

Ron Liepert, Alberta’s energy minister, had the good sense to be on holiday in California when the news came out. Sipping pina coladas by the pool in Cali is a pretty sweet way to announce thousands of Canadian job losses, and expropriations.

“We should have been doing this 50 years ago, not today,” he told a reporter by phone. Well, if Alberta had made these kind of rules 50 years ago, there would be no oil industry. It would have been like back in Liepert’s native Saskatchewan, where brutal, anti-industry regulations under the NDP ensured that province’s resources went untouched for decades.

Four years ago, Stelmach pulled a similar move. In a fit of pique, he ripped up contracts and jacked up royalty rates on oil companies, and called them “bullies” for complaining. He engaged in NDP-style rhetoric, demanding they pay their “fair share.”

When oil companies complained, the government said they could “leave it in the damn ground.”

They did — killing thousands of jobs in Alberta, stalling huge projects and moving a lot of work to B.C. and Saskatchewan.

Stelmach finally recanted on royalties last year, but the damage to Alberta’s reputation as a reliable place to do business remained. What kind of banana republic rips up written contracts in a flourish of anti-oil insults?

Stelmach’s costly and erratic war on the oil industry is one of the reasons he was forced out of his own party earlier this year — a stunning development for someone who won the last election in a landslide. So he’s a lame duck, a placeholder premier while the party selects a new leader.

This last, worst attack on the oil patch is Stelmach’s revenge — him flipping the bird to the industry he hated, and the province that hated him back.

Peter Loewen, the number-cruncher behind the CBC’s VoteCompass website, called me up to say I was wrong.

I had called him a Liberal partisan. And I said the CBC’s VoteCompass pushes Canadians to the Liberals — hardly a neutral survey.

I was glad Loewen called, but now I’m even more shocked at how the CBC’s push poll works.

Loewen didn’t deny he was a policy adviser to Michael Ignatieff when he ran for the Liberal leadership. He claims that’s offset by some number-crunching he did for Tom Flanagan in 2004 — though Flanagan didn’t remember it.

Let’s give Loewen the benefit of the doubt that he’s neutral — something the CBC would never do with a former Conservative partisan.

But what about the VoteCompass formula pushing people towards the Liberal box on the ballot? Loewen was kind enough to walk me through the algorithm.

What I saw showed me it’s not a survey.

It’s propaganda. It’s junk statistics. It’s politics pretending to be polling.

Take the survey’s question about a carbon tax. According to the CBC formula, if you “strongly disagree” with a carbon tax, you are a fit with either the Tories or Liberals, since both parties “strongly disagree” with a carbon tax, too!

Huh? Ignatieff’s leadership campaign — the one Loewen worked on — called for a carbon tax. And the new Liberal platform includes a carbon tax called “cap and trade.”

To justify this formula, the CBC cites an old Ignatieff speech. But even that speech says “this cap-and-trade system will put a price on carbon. You pollute, you pay.”

How about Medicare? If you want less private health care, you’re told to vote Liberal, according to VoteCompass. Their justification is a slogan from the Liberals affirming their commitment to universal health care. Which is almost word for word what the Tory position is, too.

So Medicare-loving Canadians are steered to the Liberals despite their massive cuts in transfers to the provinces under the Liberals in the 1990s.

On moral issues, CBC’s VoteCompass acknowledges the Tories “will not initiate nor support any legislation to regulate abortion.” Likewise, the Liberals “believe in a woman’s right to choose.”

Harper is identical to the preceding Liberal PMs on the issue. Yet CBC VoteCompass tells pro-choice Canadians to vote Liberal.

Same on gay marriage, despite Harper presiding over that law without comment for five years. But the CBC’s VoteCompass “strongly” say gays should not vote Tory.

Perhaps the craziest part of the formula deals with immigration. The Conservatives let in 280,000 immigrants last year, the highest number since the 1950s. Yet because they oppose human smuggling — like the Tamil stowaways — the CBC steers pro-immigration voters to the Liberals.

The boss of VoteCompass, Clifton van der Linden, wrote to me, too. He acknowledged that, despite their affiliation with the University of Toronto, VoteCompass has not submitted their project to the university’s ethics board. It’s not an academic project.

I asked him if there’s any restrictions on what the CBC can do with his work. Van der Linden confirmed the CBC has no limits on what they can do with the VoteCompass analysis, but CBC doesn’t receive the raw data.

I like Loewen and van der Linden. They’re more honest than the CBC. They confirmed this isn’t an academic exercise.

It’s the CBC waging politics, campaign style.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is not behaving like an independent media company in this election campaign.

They're not even acting like a left-wing state broadcaster anymore.

No: They are looking like a partisan advocacy group, determined to shape the outcome of the election campaign, not just report it.

That is unacceptable.

The CBC has sponsored a website they claim will tell you what party you best fit into. On Wednesday night, the CBC's Peter Mansbridge went further, telling viewers the website is how to "find out where you stand" in the election.

So now the CBC is in the business of telling Canadians what party they stand for. Thanks, but that's called campaigning, not reporting.

The CBC scheme uses a website, www.votecompass.ca that asks questions about your views, and then a magic formula pigeonholes you into a party.

And -- surprise, surprise -- the Liberal Party is the default setting if you are at all wishy-washy about anything. So, Vote Compass helps you out.

By telling you to vote Liberal.

Not exactly shocking, coming from the CBC that gorges on a billion tax dollars a year.

Try it out yourself. If you answer neutrally or "no opinion" to every question, it tells you you're for Michael Ignatieff.

Not surprisingly, the CBC has stonewalled requests to release their formula.

Why the secrecy? CBC spokesman Jeff Keay said there is no bias, "as far as we know." What does that mean? Has Keay even seen the formula? Whose word is he taking that it's fair?

Perhaps he's taking the word of Peter Loewen, the "director of analytics" for the Vote Compass. Loewen just happens to have been a policy adviser for Michael Ignatieff's 2006 Liberal leadership campaign.

No bias?

Or maybe Keay is taking the word of Richard Johnston, on Vote Compass's advisory board. Last month Johnston savaged Stephen Harper in the press, claiming he was destroying the "integrity" of government.

No bias?

It's possible that cadre of diehard Liberals can be neutral. But there's only one way to be sure: The formula that Vote Compass uses must be disclosed publicly.

But that's not all the CBC must disclose.

The website also asks Canadians for detailed demographic information, such as the riding they live in, their postal code, their age, their voting intentions and other personal details. All of which is very valuable to political parties.

Who gets that voter data? Loewen does. Has he shared it with his former boss, Ignatieff? Does the CBC even know? Or care?

Vote Compass is no different than a push poll. It pretends to be neutral, but it is designed to convince you of "where you stand".

It's grotesque that our tax dollars are going to such a campaign trick.

If Vote Compass is really a pro-Liberal website, run by a former Liberal insider like Loewen, it must be registered with Elections Canada as a third party advocacy group. Their revenues and expenditures must be disclosed. And their spending is limited -- in this case, to $150,000.

The CBC can't blow its nose without spending $150,000, let alone sponsor a website and advertise it night after night.

The CBC is acting like the Liberal Party. Fine. Let it survive on partisan donations, not tax dollars.