Quote...

This quote is from Tom Flanagan's recent book:

"Even though there is a cap on national campaign spending, it is easy and legal to exceed it by transferring expenditures to local campaigns that are not able to spend up to their own legal limits."

Just to let you know, Tom Flanagan is Harper's ideological guru and former campaign manager.

Charest

A en croire le dernier sondage Léger Marketing – Le Devoir sur les intentions de vote des Québécois, la résurrection est chose possible. Jean Charest, le chef Libéral que tout le monde croyait mort, a réussi l’exploit de regagner la confiance des électeurs dans son second mandat moins d’un an après avoir fracassé les records d’impopularité.

Personne n’arrive vraiment à y croire. Rattraper un retard de quelques points, c’est déjà assez difficile, mais réussir en neuf mois à hisser son parti à la tête des intentions de vote après avoir touché le fond, c’est un miracle.

Mais comment?

Bien sûr, il y a un élément de chance. L’expérience adéquiste ne semble pas avoir plû aux Québecois et Charest a repris une partie importante des votes perdus à Mario Dumont. C’etait prévisible, l’ADQ n’est tout simplement pas un parti d’opposition crédible.

Mais ce qui a vraiment donné aux libaraux leur avance, c’est tout simplement la compatence. Charest est à l’aise à la barre, ses ministres connaissent leurs dossiers, l’économie se porte relativement bien, et le gouvernement dont le premier mandat avait été marqué par une inabilité à gérer des petites crises comme Hérouxville ou le Mt. Orford peut enfin offrir aux électeurs un message positif et cohérent. Il n’y a pas de coups d’éclats, pas de grands projets pour l’avenir, mais une réelle maîtrise des enjeux d’aujourd’hui.

Stephen Harper devrait prendre note : la compétence paye bien. S’il fait tout simplement du bon travail, en tachant de guider le pays vers l’avenir tout en évitant les scandales et grandes polémiques, il sera récompensé. Mais on peut penser qu’ à l’inverse, s’il débute la prochaine élection sans bilan sérieux, il connaîtra de sacrés problèmes.

Elections Canada

As much as the politics of last week’s Elections Canada raid on Tory headquarters are proving to be absorbing, there is something much more important at stake: the credibility of the independent body in charge of monitoring elections.

In a nutshell, the Conservative Party is currently accusing Elections Canada of bias. They are calling the organisation “unfair to Conservatives”, and insisting that “other parties are allowed to transfer money without any problems.”

Elections Canada, in case you hadn’t quite realised, isn’t some kind of Liberal lobby group or anti-conservative think-tank. Elections Canada is the independent body in charge of monitoring federal elections in our country. It’s the organisation which makes sure that all of our ballots are counted, that the candidates and their parties obey election laws, and that the democratic process is fully respected on voting day. They are the ones, who, after polling stations have closed, decide whether the next government will be Liberal or Conservative.

This isn’t just any job. It is a role that requires full impartiality, respect for the democratic process, and, well… competence.
Until last week, none of this was ever in question. Actually, Canadians were so confident in Elections Canada that they sent members abroad to teach other countries how elections should be run. Elections Canada was like Statistics Canada: always right.

Now though, the governing party is calling Elections Canada biased and refusing to abide to its interpretation of the law. Actually, the Conservatives are suing the Elections Canada. It’s almost like disagreeing with the results of the latest Census and suing StatsCan to prove your point. Simply put, this is unacceptable. We need to know before the next election whether Elections Canada is incompetent, with all the implications this would entail, or whether the Conservative Party simply lied.

Drama, Drama!

This thing is serious. In an unprecedented move, senior Conservative Party officials staged a secret meeting on Sunday afternoon with hand-picked reporters to unveil the content of the search warrant that led the RCMP to raid Party headquarters for most of last week. You can watch the drama unfold here.

As everyone expected, the warrant alleged that the Conservative Party used an elaborate accounting scheme known as the “in and out method” to exceed the national election spending limit by over a million dollars. These allegations have actually been around for a long time, but their level of complexity prevented them from having much of an impact of the government’s numbers.

What Elections Canada is now claiming though, is far more damaging: apparently, the Party would have deliberately filed “false and misleading statements” on its financial returns.

It’s going to be very interesting to watch this issue develop over the next week. It may be a disaster for the Conservatives, or it may just disappear off the radar, but the fact that Elections Canada and the RCMP are involved leads me to suspect that it will stick around for some time yet.

We’ll have to wait until Monday afternoon at the earliest before the full set of documents pertaining to the search warrant are unveiled. The Tories can count themselves lucky that the House isn’t currently sitting, but I can still guarantee that this will be a crazy week.

Bad Strategy

The Tories are in full damage control mode. Two days after the RCMP turned up at their party headquarters to execute a search warrant on behalf of Elections Canada, the party is scrambling to find a coherent and credible line to justify their situation to the public.

This may prove to be mission impossible. After all, it’s not every day that the RCMP turns up with a search warrant in hand at the headquarters of a national political party, and if the warrant and accompanying affidavit contain truly serious allegations against the party, they may simply have to brace themselves and take the heat.

But whatever they do, they should put an end to their current strategy: it’s all the fault of Election-Canada. For the past two days, they’ve basically been telling Canadians that the party was victim of an Elections Canada vendetta; they even and sent out a few of their pit-bulls, Peter Van Loan leading the pack, to spread conspiracy theories of Liberal moles trying to obtain documents pertaining to election strategy.

This defense is as worrying as it is counter-productive.

It’s worrying because it further undermines the position of Elections Canada, a national institution and the body responsible for overseeing our democratic process. If Elections-Canada can’t be trusted, who can be?

It’s counter productive because it makes no sense, and because Elections Canada is still generally trusted across the country.

So as far as I’m concerned, if the Conservatives, really want to put this issue to rest, they should start by humbly acknowledging a miscommunication between them and Elections Canada and follow up with a big piece of distracting news, such as an apology for the treating of aboriginals in the infamous residential schools. When Gilles Duceppe ran off to Quebec for a day to be a PQ leadership candidate, only to concede defeat and return to Ottawa the next morning, he got away with it by a apologising immediately. The conservatives should do the same.

Deux articles

Je viens de terminer la plupart de mes concerts de violon et je pourrais donc maintenant recommencer à publier régulièrement sur mon blog!

Je commence donc par vous montrer le dernier article que j'ai écrit pour le journal étudiant de mon conseil scolaire et qui porte sur la réforme Sénat:

Dans son livre « The Unreformed Senate of Canada, » Robert A. MacKay écrivait en 1922 qu’ « il est probable qu’aucune question d’ordre publique n’ait autant fait l’unanimité que celle de la réforme du Sénat. » C’était, je le répète, en 1922.

La réforme du Sénat est donc à l’ordre du jour depuis des lustres. Déjà aux élections générales de 1896, le chef libéral Wilfrid Laurier promettait de démocratiser la Chambre haute. Son successeur Makenzie King, fidèle à sa réputation, fit lui aussi quelques vagues promesses à cet égard, sans bien sûr chercher à les tenir. Lester Pearson eut plus de succès et parvint à fixer un âge de retraite obligatoire de 75 ans. Quant au malheureux Brian Mulroney, peut-être le plus fervent défenseur d’un Sénat élu, il vit tous ses espoirs anéantis par la défaite de l’accord du Lac Meech.

Stephen Harper est le plus récent chef d’état à promettre une démocratisation du Sénat. Il en a fait un cheval de bataille pendant la dernière campagne électorale et vient maintenant d’introduire un projet de loi limitant à huit ans la durée de mandat des sénateurs. Tout ceci, bien sûr, n’est qu’une illusion d’optique car notre honorable Machiavel s’est arrangé pour faire dérailler lui-même son projet de loi, mais même ratifié par la Chambre, il n’aurait sans doute eu aucun effet.

Parce que, voyez-vous, notre Sénat est impossible à réformer. Sa structure est définie dans la Constitution et il faudrait donc un amendement constitutionnel pour y apporter des modifications significatives. Or comme nous l’avons trop souvent constaté au cours des vingt dernières années, notre constitution est « inamendable » et le Sénat est donc impossible à réformer. Mais au fond, meme si c’était possible, vaudrait-il vraiment la peine d’y toucher? A mon avis, il n’en est rien. Nos sénateurs ne font de mal à personne et accomplissent en fait souvent un excellent travail. Laissons-les donc tranquilles et passons au prochain sujet.

NATO

I’m terribly sorry for not posting anything new this past week. I’ve been extremely busy and I haven’t been able to find time to sit down at the computer and produce a half-decent post. This coming week will also be packed, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to update the blog, but I promise to be back writing every second day after Sunday April 13^th!

But before I go, I’d like to say a quick word about this week’s NATO summit which saw France commit 800 troops to Eastern Afghanistan, making it possible for the U.S. to move a thousand into Kandahar and meet Canada’s requirement for staying until 2011.

The first thing we should all understand is that this was all planned in advance. There was never any doubt that Canada would get its 1000 reinforcements, and most people correctly suspected that they would come from the States. There isn’t any surprise either with France sending some more soldiers: the French already had a detachment in Kabul (though soldiers were banned from fighting after dusk!) and it was widely known that President Sarkozy, very pro-american, was ready to increase his country’s commitment to Afghanistan.

So to all those –including many respected political commentators- who saw in this meeting a revival of NATO and an important step for Afghanistan: you’re dreaming in Technicolor. In fact, this meeting accomplished nothing, and makes the future of the alliance look even more bleak.

Let’s put it this way: NATO currently has 26 member countries, all of which have supported the decision to invade Afghanistan. Of these 26 member countries, four are actually participating in military operations: the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands and Canada. It now appears that France will also be playing a role, albeit very limited.

Simply put, that’s it! No other NATO member countries are doing anything significant, including large players such as Germany, Italy and Spain.

So where do we go from here? Well if you’re Canada, you stay in Afghanistan until 2011… unless of course the NDP is elected. But if you’re NATO, it’s time that you start asking yourself some pretty serious existential questions. For, as everyone knows, NATO isn’t an alliance any more; it’s a two tiered group of countries that are prepared to follow U.S. foreign policy and countries that are just along for the ride.