In the Conservative handguide to winning friends and influencing journalists, the government will no longer be offering free coffee for the media in the national press gallery:

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is underlining his claim that he is determined to put Ottawa’s finances back in order by doing away with free coffee for the national press gallery during the six-hour sneak peak at the March 22 federal budget.

The move will save the federal government $4,000, officials said.

Well, you’ve got to start cutting somewhere, right? Oh, dear…

The Conservative government is planning a $100-million national celebration to mark the bicentennial of the War of 1812 next year.

$100,000,000
$4,000
You do the math.

Photograph by: Reuters, Canwest News Service

According to the Canadian Press, Conservatives MPs have been asked to consult their constituents for advice on stimulus spending going forward. In an open letter to the Conservative caucus, Stephen Harper has asked each of his fellow 142 MPs to find ideas for the next phase of the “economic action plan.”

The concept behind the letter is to solicit low-cost ways to create jobs and eliminate government waste. He also warned that no “massive new spending programs” are on the way.

Well, thank God for that.

I’m also pleased to hear that the government is looking for ways to eliminate waste in its spending, though I can’t see how they’ve been very successful on that front to date.

I think the best economic action plan for the government to take would be the simplest. None. It need not do anything other than manage the financial affairs of the country in a responsible manner, maintain low corporate income taxes and allow for the private sector to do what it does best. Create jobs.

It isn’t, or certainly shouldn’t, be the responsibility of the government of a nation to “create jobs”. I don’t know when or where this concept took hold in our society, but the fundamental purpose of a government is to free the restrictions, obstacles and interference that keep the economy from moving along in an efficient manner of organic growth.

If I’ve railed against Finance Minister Jim Flaherty before — and I have — it’s because I never agreed with the concept behind the stimulus program, otherwise known as the economic action plan. Nor do I think much of the stimulus spending was allocated to projects that provided much in the way of economic stimulus.

The Fraser Institute, for instance, panned the impacts of the stimulus by arguing government spending and infrastructure investment accounted for just 0.2 per cent of growth between the second and third quarters of fiscal 2009. At the time it said permanent tax relief would have been a far better method of economic stimulus than increased spending.

But early into 2011, it’s probably to safe to say that while the economic action plan wasn’t the magic bullet it’s been advertised to be, the Conservative Finance Minister has had a hand in the economic rebound. How? Well, by doing precisely what the Fraser Institute advised him to do.

The Conservatives have cut federal corporate income taxes 4.5 per cent since taking the reigns from the Liberals in 2006. What’s remarkable about this statistic is that they’ve managed to do it despite a pervasive political climate of anti-tax relief advocates in opposition.

Indeed, the Liberals and NDP have been quoted frequently as saying they oppose the final cut to the corporate rate to 15 per cent in 2012, believing it will further harm Canada’s deficit projections. That’s not entirely untrue in the short-term. Corporate tax cuts have an immediate negative impact on the collection of tax receipts and therefore revenue for the treasury.

But the longer term benefits are considerable. By cutting corporate taxes, it frees the companies to hire more workers, invest in more materials and begin larger projects that all generate bigger dividends for taxpayers in the end. It is more likely that the economic rebound in Canada is due to committed tax cuts, than any strategic economic action plan.

As others have already pointed out, it was Chretien’s fiscally conservative Finance Minister, Paul Martin, who set the example for generating stimulus when he lowered corporate taxes seven per cent over four years. And now, with the continued work of the Conservative government, that rate has fallen 11.5 per cent in the past decade.

At 16.5 per cent and falling, Canada is slated to have the lowest corporate tax rate in the G7. The advantages to such a competitive tax market cannot be overstated.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaks at a Conservative rally at Royal Roads University in Victoria. (Geoff Howe/Canadian Press)

I’m not a regular reader of Maclean’s Aaron Wherry, but thanks to the advent of Twitter I often come across his blog entries. Today’s was quite interesting, actually, as it pertains to Stephen Harper’s Prime Ministerial tenure approaching the top 10 longest-serving PMs.

On Sunday, Jan. 9, Harper will surpass Alexander Mackenzie for 12th spot on the list at four years, 337 days in power. On Feb. 6, he’ll slip into 11th spot, surpassing the esteemed Lester B. Pearson at precisely five years in power.

Whether you like him or not, Stephen Harper is rapidly approaching a list of very distinguished members found in Canada’s political history books. Those who have made significant impacts in the direction of our country, its policies and its reputation.

Again, my math is little better than Aaron Wherry’s, but Harper can reach the top 10 by surviving to late April (surpassing R. B. Bennett), which is a strong possibility, should no election be forced. He would have to also survive a possible fall election to pass John Diefenbaker for 9th spot.

After that, his chances fall off precipitously without a real shift in Canadian politics that brings stable, majority Conservative governments:

1. William Lyon Mackenzie King: 21 years, 154 days
2. Sir John A. Macdonald: 18 years, 359 days
3. Pierre Trudeau: 15 years, 164 days
4. Sir Wilfrid Laurier: 15 years, 86 days
5. Jean Chrétien: 10 years, 38 days
6. Brian Mulroney: 8 years, 281 days
7. Sir Robert Borden: 8 years, 274 days
8. Louis St. Laurent: 8 years, 218 days
…
13. Stephen Harper (incumbent): 4 years, 335 days

A third mandate would also put him into an exclusive list of just six other men who won that many elections.

Almost a century after the fact and long after everybody associated with the incident is dead, the federal government is throwing some money at a project in lieu of an official apology.

The infamous 1914 Komagata Maru incident, in which 376 passengers from India were turned away from Canada after spending months at sea, prompted an unofficial apology by Prime Minister Stephen Harper while visiting a Vancouver suburb back in August of 2008.

At the time the Sikh community in Surrey wasn’t satisfied with the apology one bit. You see, the Chinese had gotten their apology in the House of Commons for the Head Tax Act, and Sikhs wanted the same.

No further apology was issued in Parliament, but the federal Conservatives have made sudden and unexpected restitution by funding two Vancouver projects that will commemorate the incident. Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney made the announcement in a written statement on Sunday.

“Prime Minister Harper was the first prime minister in Canadian history to recognize the tragic nature of the Komagata Maru incident. He is also the first prime minister to apologize to the Indo-Canadian community for it.”

The government will give $82,500 and $104,000 to Vancouver’s Khalsa Diwan Society to create a monument and a museum dedicated to the Komagata Maru.

But why now?

This is one of those government moves I just don’t understand. Nobody in the Sikh community was asking for a museum and a monument. They wanted an apology in the House of Commons, which was refused.

The problem I have with the Komagata Maru incident being commemorated is that I’m not sure it’s the black mark in Canadian history we’re constantly told it is.

Certainly the historical record shows that racism was prevalent in 1914 and even the local newspapers warned of the coming peril of undesirable tides of immigrants arriving on the shores of British Columbia. Attitudes were vastly different a century ago and we’ve acknowledged that immigration decisions were often made based on race.

But Canada has never surrendered its sovereign right to chose whom it allows inside its borders. A decision was made to disallow the Komagata Maru ship in 1914 based on the laws of the country of the day.

The Canadian government was within its legal rights — even if the policy is deemed racist by today’s standards — to turn aside the ship based on the passage of an order-in-council restriction of immigrants who “in the opinion of the Minister of the Interior” did not “come from the country of their birth or citizenship by a continuous journey and or through tickets purchased before leaving their country of their birth or nationality.”

A similar agreement now exists between the United States and Canada in which refugees cannot claim status in one country if he or she has already passed through the other.

The Komagata Maru incident was hardly the fault of Canada alone. It was a test of Gurdit Singh Sandhu, a wealthy fisherman in Singapore who was fully aware of exclusion laws in Canada prohibiting Punjabis (and other groups). The Komagata Maru, not unlike the flotilla to Gaza, was a means of challenging the laws of Canada. This was therefore a political, rather than a humanitarian, mission from the outset.

Canada faced a nearly identical challenge this year when the unseaworthy Thai freighter MV Sun Sea took 490 Tamils from Thailand to Vancouver, circumventing several legitimate other asylum destinations along the way. Canada was chosen, it has since been said by Canada’s former high commissioner to Sri Lanka Martin Collacott, because we’re “an easy mark.”

It is fortunate that we allowed these 490 Tamils into Canada on compassionate grounds, lest our great-grandchildren erect monuments with taxpayer dollars proclaiming our inhumanity.

But it does raise an important question. How much more must Canada prostrate itself before all former injustices have been restored?

Shall the government apologize for every ethnic minority that has felt in the least mistreated since arriving on these most coveted of shores? Is there not a means of simply apologizing for everything all at once and getting the whole thing over with? Surely we can’t continue to go about finding ancient grievances in order to throw modern tax dollars at them in self-righteous rectification?

If we do continue, however, perhaps we could take a few moments in remembrance to the suffering of our European forebears, not all of whom were given free dental, health and welfare upon arrival in the new world. Acknowledging the struggle of immigrants — wherever their origin on the planet — would seem to me to be a more legitimate form of restitution than the cherrypicking taking place with the announcement of this memorial pay off.

What do you do when a story that purports to say something actually says nothing? If you’re like me, you choose not to run the story and toss it in the dumpster where it belongs. Unfortunately the Winnipeg Free Press (via the Canadian Press) didn’t make that decision:

MONTREAL – The Harper government says it will introduce a plan this week to ensure a tragedy like the 1985 Air India bombing never happens again.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney made the announcement today at a ceremony in Montreal, where ground was broken on a memorial dedicated to the victims of the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history.

An inquiry report released this summer catalogued a litany of federal failures before and after the attack, which killed 329 people, most of them Canadians.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has apologized on behalf of the federal government but hasn’t acted on other recommendations made in the report.

The recommendations include a one-time payment to family members of victims.

Kenney said the memorial will serve as a place for quiet contemplation to remember the victims.

Let’s break this story down into a single focal point. What is it saying? Well, if we’re believe the text, it’s saying that the government will introduce a plan to ensure that airplanes can’t be blown up ever again. And how does the government plan to accomplish this goal?

No idea. The story won’t tell us. Or it doesn’t know. It’s likely both.

I’m also struggling to figure out how the headline, which screams “Harper government to introduce plan that would prevent another Air India bombing”, is related to the story. All the story has is two sentences related to the headline, the substance of which is based entirely on something the immigration minister said at an Air India memorial. The rest of the story could be found on Wikipedia.

Preposterous claims in a headline deserve some factual evidence in the story. ‘Nuff said.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaks at a Conservative rally at Royal Roads University in Victoria on Wednesday. (Geoff Howe/Canadian Press)

There’s an article in the Vancouver Island Oceanside Star, written by Brad Bird, that alleges the media was barred from questioning the Prime Minister in a recent visit. In truth, the media were apprised of the rules before the Prime Minister even arrived, in a memo delivered by the PMO. Although a visit to the Nanaimo Port Authority at 3pm, and Hatley Castle at Royal Roads University in Victoria at 6pm, were open invites to the media, the memo clearly states that the Shellfish Research station at 1pm was a “photo opportunity only.”

Mr.Bird’s commentary regarding Stephen Harper’s inaccessibility, which he compares unfavourably with former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, isn’t exactly telling the whole story. After all, reporters were invited for the photo-op at Vancouver Island University knowing full well they wouldn’t be allowed to ask any questions. So there isn’t much to get upset about, unless those reporters didn’t know that there were opportunities to question Stephen Harper in Nanaimo or Victoria later that day.

Why the media go to photo-ops are beyond me anyway. The whole name, “photo opportunity”, is an insider marketing term that has somehow become an acceptable mainstream description of photojournalists accepting the terms and conditions of a carefully orchestrated event meant to favour the politician or celebrity at hand. So in a sense, Mr.Bird’s acceptance of the assignment, though it may have been handed down by his superiors, is lazy journalism to begin with.

I do not, however, think one can discount the underlying frustration expressed in his article. After all, it’s no secret that the PMO controls dissemination of information from government to media like none that has gone before. It’s true that the Conservative Prime Minister likes to carefully control the message, and that’s partly because of the rampant yellow journalism stemming from incidents like “Wafergate” and speculation about how much he really loves his kids.

But at the same time, the anti-conservative media bias angle doesn’t entirely wash. Brian Mulroney was a very affable conservative Prime Minister, who enjoyed speaking to the press very much, filling the corridors of the House of Commons with his rich baritone, as he used the media to measure his own relative popularity.

It isn’t surprising that the media tends to be unfriendly with Stephen Harper. Reporters are used to the idea of accessibility to people beyond the reach of the common folk. The very idea of a journalist is to have a representative of society who is able to go out and ask questions from leaders who would otherwise never communicate with the people, and bring back a message of some sort. To relegate journalists to the scheduling whims of the PMO is certain to frustrate the spirit of the occupation.

The conundrum for the press is that it has never faced such a level of control from the senior corridors of power. They are invited to prearranged events designed by the public relations architects of the Conservative Party. It’s obvious that you are not likely to be able to perform the tasks of journalism by attending something of this nature. Nobody ever won a journalism award by attending a Richard Nixon ship dedication.

So what are journalists to do when they are restricted by the amount of accessibility they have to Stephen Harper and the ability to ask him questions? Well, the answer is that they either dig deeper with more investigative research, or focus on interviewing the people close to the Prime Minister.

Or, and I suspect this is the case for many reporters who also serve as columnists, they turn to their pens and craft a negative article that demonstrates the frustrated underpinnings of a job made more difficult than they would like it to be.

Far be it from me to invite being labelled a Harper government cheerleader by Paul Wells, but I don’t see what the big deal about this article is.

The Ottawa Citizen reports that, contrary to earlier reports by the Harper government that it would absolutely not support abortion as part of their G8 maternal health program, International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda has said the government will fund “family planning”, generally considered a euphemism for abortion.

International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda seems to have returned from Africa with a more nuanced vision of how Canada can help reduce hundreds of thousands of maternal deaths every year than the one originally offered by her government.

Oda posted daily blogs on the Canadian International Development Agency website during part of her trip to Mozambique. In one she wrote about seeing a young pregnant woman at a rural clinic who had a severely malnourished one-year-old child. The mother had stopped breastfeeding the child, who Oda described as “only skin and bones,” when she became pregnant.

“With the interventions they were receiving, mother and child had a positive prognosis, but one realizes very quickly that, in addition to facilities and equipment, maternal nutrition and family planning education programs are also crucial.”

Citizen writer Elizabeth Payne, in a moment of “Aha!”, says that this is what maternal health advocates were saying all along. Which is further proof, extrapolates Mr.Wells, that the Conservative Party has been playing social conservatives “like a cheap fiddle.”

Maybe. Maybe not. As Conservative Senator Nancy Ruth sagely advised at the time, shut the f*** up on the issue. None of the prior controversy surrounding the G8 maternal health plan had anything whatsoever to do with maternal health.

It was a Liberal party wedge issue, as I argued at the time, intended to put the Conservative government between a rock and a hard place. The last thing that the Conservative government wanted to do was get into some polarizing argument between the polemics on both sides of the abortion debate.

If the Conservatives had agreed to play the Liberal gambit back in February, they would have been forced on record to either support or deny the concept of universal access to abortion. But I think if you look at the Conservative record over the past several years, it’s fairly clear where the government stands on the issue. Which means that “Family planning” was never in jeopardy after all.

So maybe everybody thinks Harper was playing Canadians like a “cheap fiddle”, but in the end it appears to have all been much rancor about nothing. Just like the detainees. Just like the census. Just like this whole minority government media watch.

I’ll have a longer article on this in the National Post online tomorrow, but for now let’s compare notes:

September 2, 2010

“HST benefits will take some time”

Finance Minister Colin Hansen is playing down a study that suggests the HST will take five to ten years to benefit BC’s economy, with a negative effect on jobs and take-home-pay in the meantime.

The study by the CD Howe Institute was published in 2008, and Hansen says “flexibility” on the part of Ottawa has reduced the negative impacts of the tax, “The seven percent Provincial portion does not apply to motor fuels, it does not apply to home energy costs. The fact that we’ve been able to carve out those exemptions are important. And also, I think the fact that the Province is going to be 1.6 billion dollars better off because of the transition dollars.”

July 1, 2010

“HST, THE RIGHT MOVE AT THE RIGHT TIME”

DELTA – The Harmonized Sales Tax will improve British Columbia’s economy, build productivity and competitiveness and provide the foundation for more jobs, Finance Minister Colin Hansen announced today.

“A strong economy is necessary to create the jobs we need to provide revenue for essential public services like health and education. The vast majority of businesses can recover the HST they pay and remove the hidden taxes that get passed on to and paid by consumers. These savings will keep prices competitive, spur investment, create new jobs and boost our province’s economy” said Hansen.

The right move at the right time to create jobs coming out of a recession? Or the wrong move at the wrong time to create tax breaks for business associates?

Photo: MP Helena Guergis is questioned by reporters, September 17, 2009. Pawel Dwulit / The Canadian Press.

This is too much, even for unabashed partisan Liberals, to handle. Are we now expected to go on a 24-hour Helena Guergis rage watch, just over one incident? It has been 11 days since the Minister for the Status of Women flew into a rage at Prince Edward Island airport. Stay tuned for breaking news and mounting casualties.

I mean, really, what could be more pointless? It has now been 14 years since former Prime Minister Jean Chretien put his mittens around a protesters neck and began choking the life out of him. You don’t see the news reporting stories like this:

“Former Prime Minister Jean Chretien was at a Liberal fundraiser today to give a speech meant to rally the party around Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. Mr.Chretien managed to get through the entire speech without once choking anyone from the audience.”

But if the Ottawa Citizen is guilty of flogging a dead horse, the Liberals are just as ready with the whip. In the CBC today, the Liberal party has announced its intention to call for a “formal investigation” into the temper tantrum thrown by Ms.Guergis on February 19. Sadly, I’m not making this up.

The Liberals are so interested to get to the bottom of the airport rage incident, they have filed an Access to Information request to acquire copies of the security video. For what purpose, or how it pertains to the job of holding the Conservative government to account on its record, is a complete mystery.

The Liberal critic for the Status of Women, Anita Neville, said Ms.Guergis could have violated Canadian aviation regulations with her argumentative and belligerent behaviour that could have put passenger safety at risk.

Boy, if that isn’t stretching the fabric of truth to the physical limitations of science, I don’t know what is.

There’s no question that the minister acted inappropriately, and that she caused embarrassment to herself and to her party. But to say that she violated “aviation regulations” and put passengers at risk is more than just a little over the top. It’s like asking someone to step down from their job because they got angry and argued with a policeman for issuing them a speeding ticket.

You would think with the current Liberal agenda of changing the rules of prorogation and getting the detainee committee back together, that a personal outburst in an airport would rank fairly low on the priority list. But as this party has demonstrated with “Wafergate”, the aboriginal body bag incident, and of course bathroom breaks during G8 photo-ops, there’s nothing too insignificant for the Liberal Party to demand an investigation for.

Now, if Stephen Harper really believes that the incident has damaged the reputation of the office for the Status of Women to the extent that Helena Guergis needs to be removed, I’m sure that will take place in the next cabinet rotation. Or better yet, they could save $25 million and axe the whole ministry in the name of balancing the books. But all a formal investigation is likely to prove is that Helena Guergis is a human being, and like all human beings, not immune to making mistakes.

From a reader who lives in the riding of Okanagan-Shuswap, I received a screen capture which shows the website federal MP Colin Mayes handing out another massive federal stimulus cheque which, again, prominently displays the Conservative logo. This same reader, a registered Conservative voter, said that he received a 10-percenter which uses the Conservative name six times and the displays the logo in four selected pictures.

John Ivison speaks about the hubris the Conservatives are inviting by using “old-fashioned governing party” tactics. As he writes in the National Post today, does anyone remember when “Stephen Harper promised to replace a culture of entitlement with a culture of accountability?”

The Conservatives have been testing the limits of acceptability with their big cheques for some time. Earlier this year, Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan brought the bacon home to his riding in Ontario, in the form of two oversized blue cheques emblazoned with the maple leaf logo of the Government of Canada and an inscribed line: Delivering change for the better.

Mr. Keddy’s photo opportunity – along with another from B.C. Conservative Colin Mayes, that actually featured his face on the cheque – has pushed the flight envelope on entitlement still further.

Now I’m encouraged for the most part by the responses of Conservative supporters, most of whom overwhelmingly disagree with what examples they’ve seen of blurring the line between the government and a party state, but there are still those who trying to make apologies for what’s happened. That really has got to stop.

This could be a nothing story, but only if the party apologizes and promises to make deliveries of future stimulus monies non-partisan. This will blow over, and people may come to respect their mea culpa. Unfortunately that lesson doesn’t seem to be getting through to Dimitri Soudas, a spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s Office, who defended the use of the individual politicians’ names on Wednesday, saying members of Parliament deserve credit for local projects supported by the federal government.

“These are cheques that obviously convey to Canadians that work is being done by the Conservative government implementing the economic action plan.”

I think people are intelligent enough to figure out what party the MP handing out the stimulus cheque belongs to. And we’re also smart enough to figure out when we’re being lied to.

Posted in canada Tagged: Colin Mayes, Gerald Keddy, Okanagan-Shuswap, Stimulus funds