This November 18 telegram looks like a pretty good diplomatic report to me.  This excerpt is mildly amusing in view of current politics:

…
Martin’s Minority Government Stable, but Weak
———————————————

4. (C) After governing in majority for ten years, the Liberal
Party called elections June 28 to gain a mandate for PM
Martin, who succeeded Jean Chretien in December 2003. The
Liberals were hurt by a scandal involving the disbursement of
public monies in Quebec, and the Martin government was
reduced to minority status, the first in Canada since 1979.
In the first week of Parliament, Martin was able to loosely
win over the New Democratic Party, putting him neck-and-neck
with the Conservatives and the separatist Bloc Quebecois. Both
the Liberal-NDP and the Conservative-Bloc alignments
[emphasis added] are very tentative, however, and different
issue-driven coalitions are likely to emerge on an ad hoc basis…

Via Denise. As for current politics: “La coalition has already won one victory…”.

Mark
Ottawa

Further to this post,

NATO close to missile defence agreement (including Canada?)

It stikes me as odd that a govenment that will not consider participating in North American ballistic missile defence may now agree to a European system (maybe it’s just that no-one in this country has bothered to notice)…

the government is actually giving its support–though still Eurocentric only–and the usual suspects have noticed and are howling (via Spotlight on Military News and International Affairs):

Canada backs European missile defence program

The Conservative government says it supports a European ballistic missile defence system proposed for approval by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the other NATO leaders at a summit in Portugal next month.

That means Canadians may have to help pay for a European missile defence system just a few years after Canada rejected participation with the United States in a North American missile defence system when the Liberals were in power under Paul Martin…

The New Democratic Party and the Rideau Institute, an independent defence think-tank [our major media lie again: actually a pacifist advocacy group, home of a horde of usual suspects], object to Canada supporting the system financially or otherwise, partly on grounds it diverts attention and resources from disarmament efforts.

“We’re concerned this is Canada’s involvement in missile defence through the back door,” said Steve Staples, head of the institute [see Update at this post for more on St. Steve and his pacifist web love-child]…

NDP defence critic Jack Harris said his party regards Canada’s endorsement as an expensive and ineffective way to go, no different from when Martin opposed the North American plan proposed by former U.S. president George Bush.

“We don’t see any difference here for Canada to support this type of missile defence,” Harris said. A big push for disarmament would be “the best way to protect the citizens of the world, rather than engaging in this, which essentially leads to arms-race-type activity.”

I’d like to see the NDP plan for getting Iran to disarm and denuke.

Mark
Ottawa

Two guys who make some cash on the sly. Photo: MacLeans Magazine

Members of Canadian Parliament are apparently struggling to make ends meet. Almost half of them “moonlight” on the side — I told you these guys weren’t as busy as we’re told they are — to supplement their $157,731 Parliamentary base compensation.

A review of recently released financial statements shows that 151 of Canada’s 308 MPs receive outside income, with 103 of those being business owners or part owners. 99 MPs received a minimum of $10,000 or more from those outside sources.

Some even find creative ways to reduce their expenses. Liberal MP Judy Sgro, who also earns $157,731 a year, paid $138,000 for an Ottawa condo in 2001, and then transferred the condo ownership to her children in 2006. That entitled her to collect $10,530 a year from Parliament to pay “rent” to her children.

More statistics:

Forty-eight MPs collect pensions — most of them from governments. Another 51 listed income ranging from speaking and consulting fees to rental and farm income.

Fifty-one MPs listed both outside income and outside business interests.

Even two of four party leaders in the House of Commons list outside interests.

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff collects rent from a property he co-owns in France, as well as fees from public speaking, freelance journalism and book writing — all on top of his annual $233,247 salary.

NDP Leader Jack Layton is the owner of the Green Catalyst Group Inc., has a 25 per cent interest in Layton Holdings Ltd., is a joint owner of an investment property in Toronto and collects a municipal pension.

Jack Layton, you sly capitalist dog, you!

Of course, none of this really comes as any surprise. Former Prime Minister Paul Martin took great pains to avoid the taxman looking into his extra income as owner of Canada’s largest shipping company, Canada Steamship Lines. Mr.Martin used his inside knowledge of Canadian tax loopholes for firms like his own to do business with Barbados. The Caribbean island is a tax haven for foreign companies.

I think this is prototypical of the separation of idealism and realism. Leftwing Politicians are always ready to donate our tax dollars in the name of some collectivist cause of some nature, but are extremely careful about how much of their own tax dollars go toward that purpose.

The British news today has almost unanimously taken part in heralding the Liberal Party of the mid-nineties as the deficit slayers to which the current coalition government aspires. David Cameron is warning that Great Britain is about to radically change in the way that public spending is administered, and is calling for citizens to expect drastic cuts to bring the nation back to balanced deficits.

The “radical plan” will involve importing a “Canadian-style star chamber” in which members of the cabinet will be forced to justify their budgets in front of their own colleagues. This, the British news is reporting, intends to follow the Canadian example of former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who turned around a fiscal deficit of 9.1% of GDP in the mid-1990s and brought in staggering surpluses.

The idea of a star chamber is actually an old English court of law that sat at the royal Palace of Westminster until the year 1641. It consisted of Privy Counsellors and common-law judges, and supplemented the activities of the common-law and equity courts in both civil and criminal matters. Over time it evolved into a political symbol of the misuse and abuse of power. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government revived the star chamber for private ministerial meetings to resolve disputes between the Treasury and out-of-control spending departments.

Before the Brits get too excited about copying the example set by the Chrétien-Martin Liberal Party, however, they should be apprised of a few facts. It’s true that the Liberal Party used a majority mandate to push through reforms of the public service, including some much needed spending cuts of 20% to some departments. There is little doubt that this helped in the expenditures, and reduced the overall outgoing waste.

A huge part of balancing the federal budget was by downloading the costs onto the provinces, who in turn downloaded them onto the municipalities. This led to the massive “fiscal imbalance” between the province of Ontario [primarily with taxes from the city of Toronto] and the federal services received in return.

Paul Martin violated the Canada Health Act, which promises the Federal government shares half of health care costs with the provinces, by changing that commitment to 25%. Since then, the provinces have struggled to balance the needs of their citizens with the burgeoning costs of health care. In British Columbia the costs of health care have risen so sharply that income from the “revenue neutral” HST will be diverted into Health Care for the first year of the tax.

Then there was the gutting of the Canadian military. Despite the fact that as a NATO member nation in the alliance it is recommended that we spend a minimum of 2% on defence, the Liberals reduced this to a mere 1.1%. When they took power in 1993, spending was at 1.82%.

In 1999 the Liberal government “stole” a $30 billion surplus from the federal employee pension fund [including the military], and funneled it into general revenues. And if that weren’t bad enough, Employment Insurance reached a $57 billion surplus by the end of fiscal 2008. But that, too, is empty, because the Liberal Party used it as a slush fund to pay down the public debt.

So if David Cameron truly wants to mimic Canada’s deficit slaying Liberals, he’ll have to cut the public sector, starve the military, “retire” the public sector surplus, and redirect all social security funding to paying down the debt. Simple, right?

Photo: Master Corporal Angela Abbey, Canadian Forces Combat Camera

Matthew Fisher, Afghan war journalist for Canwest, writes that one of the primary reasons that Canada ended up in the situation it’s in is because the Paul Martin government “dithered” [a very unsubtle reference to his monicker] for so long about what to do. By the time 2005 rolled around, all the “soft” spots in the North and West were grabbed by European allies who have no trouble staying the course. Canada, meanwhile, wound up in Kandahar, the heartland of the Taliban, and because of that they incurred much higher casualties.

Because of more dithering, as Terry Glavin explains in an article that must be read to truly understand the Afghan situation properly, Canada faces the same pending problem with our future role in the country. As we are bogged down in a pointless debate about the ancient history of Afghan detainees from 2006-07, European allies are quietly volunteering for relatively safe, non-combat positions in the mentoring program that will allow them to carry on a role after the 2011 Afghan Compact.

Thanks in part to an opposition that only brings up Afghanistan in conjunction with the words “war crimes”, and thanks to the lack of planning by the Harper government, Canada’s future commitments to the country look rather barren. Whereas we could have eased into a non-combat role that would have rotated out our military from the hot zone, and into a greater participation in the things we’ve already done fairly well – reconstruction, engineering, mentoring, and humanitarian aid – instead it looks like we’ll be on the outside looking in.

The saddest part of Canada’s mission is that it’s been bogged down in the extraneous noise of the treatment of prisoner’s of war and the lack of progress in the fight against the Taliban. And because the war against the Taliban seemed to stagnate for so long, with the numbers of NATO casualties increasing even as they waned in Iraq, many critics of Canada’s participation have pointed to the fruitless results. But they stopped paying attention.

The recent Afghan surge that brought the total of U.S. troops in the country to 48,000, has had the effect of pushing the Taliban back from territories they controlled, while the new operational protocol of “clear, hold, build” has kept newly captured towns from being retaken by the Taliban as they sweep toward the long Pakistani border. On the other sider of the border, meanwhile, Pakistan has been highly successful in rounding up the Taliban all of a sudden, and high-value prisoner Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar has been, according to reports, “singing like a male canary” on his fellow insurgents. While the west can’t guarantee that Mullah Baradar has been treated to the standards expected of those transferred from Canadian custody to the Afghans, there’s not really any way that critics can pin the blame on them either.

Perhaps most frustrating for Canada’s noble legacy in Afghanistan, is that so much could be lost by our awkward retreat. Because the Paul Martin government – sent into Afghanistan in the first place by the Liberals under Jean Chretien – failed to put Canada in a zone of conflict that would have been more amenable to the weak stomachs of the Canadian electorate, we face levels of opposition to Canada’s participation in the war usually only seen in Quebec. And because the same Paul Martin government, with the same level of lazy oversight, signed a detainee agreement with the Afghan government in December of 2005, just before the Liberals were finally and unceremoniously booted from the halls of power they had roved in for 13 years, we now face daily scandal-watch pieces in the Canadian newspapers.

We sleepwalked into Afghanistan, and for that we can blame the Martin government. But now we’re sleepwalking out, and although the current Liberal version is busy wasting time in the House of Commons, instead of working on Canada’s future, or final role in Afghanistan, we can hardly pin all the blame on the Liberals. The fact is that the “Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan” was established to make recommendations on the conduct of our soldiers and the progress in the field. It was supposed to travel the country and make recommendations and reports on our future role. Instead it has become little more than a sounding board for the opposition to look into allegations of torture, and the media has since rebranded it the “Afghan detainee abuse committee”.

Perhaps that is appropriate. It is, after all, the only place for the country’s attention right now.