NDP And Free Trade

Even though it never gets that many votes, there’s no question in my mind that the NDP has been a major bonus to the Canadian political scene. The amount of positive ideas that this party has presented and defended is just staggering. Medicare, women’s rights, social safety, affordable housing, and the list goes on.

But unfortunately, their views are sometimes overly simplistic and ignorant of economic reality. That is the case in one of their most recent fights: killing the negotiations for a free-trade agreement with South-Korea.

Free-trade isn’t always a good thing; we’ve had plenty of examples of that with NAFTA. As is normally the case with commercial agreements, there are winners and losers. But a trade barrier is a trade barrier, and in a globalizing world, there’s increasing evidence that they’re bad for the economy. The more countries there are competing (globalization means that number will increase rapidly), the more a small edge becomes important. And if Canadian firms lose their edge in Korea to other countries with free-trade agreements, such as the US, the economy will ultimately be hurt. This may be a gross simplification, but it’s what the economists are saying.

The NDP just doesn’t understand. The mere thought of auto jobs being lost to the Koreans is too much to handle, even though free trade would be good for the economy. That’s the trouble with having your heart in the right place: it sometimes makes you irrational.

New Plan?

When I first heard about the Conservative government’s plan to cut GHG emissions by 18 percent by 2020, I was actually quite impressed. It was astounding to see a party go from global warming denial to a real plan, especially when that plan seemed better than anything the Liberals had ever proposed.

But those were simply first impressions. As I started reading about this "new deal", I grew increasingly uneasy about the way the whole issue was being handled by the Conservatives. A few things made me especially mad, and have now convinced me once and for all that this government is simply not up to the task when it comes to the Environment.

The first problem is a purely practical one, which put back into question the actual validity of the plan, and which was raised by Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson in this morning’s paper. Namely: carbon emissions don’t have a price.

Putting a price tag on carbon emissions is absolutely essential for a long term solution, because otherwise, the plan needs to rely on successive governments to enforce it, which is highly unlikely to happen once the environment hype dies down. It is also a key to integrating the environment into the economy, which should be one of the government's top priorities.

But to be frank, the Conservative government actually seems committed to doing just the opposite. This is because it's whole ideology and policy is based upon a natural opposition between the environment and the economy, an opposition which even in the short term, doesn’t necessarily exist. But by spreading that impression, it can hope to be able to get away with minimal reductions by simply invoking an economic slowdown as an excuse.

Anyway, I’ll finish by pointing out that Germany is now planning a 40 percent GHG reduction by 2015. You can choose to make excuses, but the truth of the matter is, this new plan doesn’t have much new in it, and it makes Canada look just as dismal on the world stage.

Credibility

The Conservative attack ads have been mildly successful. They had a clear increase in the polls, but one could argue that the volatility of public opinion makes it meaningless.

But I think it they could have been extremely effective. What saved the Liberals was Dion. His apparent sincerity and principle allowed him to “rise above” the ads. Let’s be clear: Ignatieff wouldn’t have had a hope.

Well Dion seems keen on falling back down to those ads’ level.

On CTV’s Question Period he told his audience that he was considering running “contrast ads” attacking Harper on his broken income trust decisions. So basically, after telling Canada he “didn’t want to go that low”, he’s thinking of running attack ads.

Hardly a way of keeping your credibility.

Présidentielle 1

Ok, c’est terminé, les Français ont voté. Plus que trois autres élections (2 tours de législatives et 1 autre de présidentielle), et leur sort sera de nouveau fixé pendant cinq longues années.

Comme l’a si bien dit Jamel Debouze, ils ont maintenant le choix entre « Cendrillon et Joe Dalton ». L’un est un petit homme malhonnète et avide de pouvoir, l’autre est une jolie femme qui ne sait que faire sauf sourire. Les deux semblent avoir suivi les cours d’économie du Schtroumpf Financier.

Le pire, c’est qu’il y avait un candidat crédible, François Bayrou, qui semblait vouloir s’attaquer de façon responsable au piètre état de l’économie. Un candidat qui ne proposait pas de combattre le chômage en allongeant la journée de travail ou la dette en augmentant les dépenses. Mais pour le Français moyen qui vote (car les jeunes des banlieues ne votent pas), 9% de chômage et une dette de 1200 milliards d’euros, c’est moins important qu’une retraite à 55 ans et un emploi à vie.

C’est malheureux, mais il faut le dire : « Français, vous n’avez rien compris ».

Sack O’Connor NOW

I’m not saying that the mission in Afganistan is wrong, but if Harper wants to have any chance of selling it to Canadians, he better get rid of his incompetent Defence Minister: General O’Connor.

Once you’re finished reading these quotes, you’ll agree.

Mr. Speaker, our soldiers are the best equipped in NATO. Other nations come to see our equipment and they admire the equipment we have. We have provided the very best equipment to our soldiers.

Great, we are best equipped country in NATO. Even the US Army can't match our firepower!

…or not: “we are committed to rebuilding the armed forces and providing our soldiers, sailors and airmen in Afghanistan with all the equipment they need to survive and to be safe.”

"The president of the Red Cross also said that basically our procedures are absolutely spotless. He's quite pleased with what we do with prisoners."

Oooops, the Red Cross has a well known policy of not telling governments anything about the prisoners it treats. Michael Ignatieff even wrote a chapter about it in one of his books! The Liberals will obviously guess that this was a lie.

Sure enough, a few weeks later: "I fully and without reservation apologize to the House for providing inaccurate information for members."

Get the message Mr. Harper? Sack him. Even your personal taxpayer funded stylist wouldn’t be able to make you look that good!

Infrastructure

So our country’s little darling, RIM, has just had a screw up. Ah well, given the state of the company’s infrastructure, it was bound to happen at some point in time. It really was negligent to channel almost all of the Western hemisphere’s messaging traffic through a single center in Waterloo. One would have though that a firm as wise and business-savvy as RIM would have avoided this kind of a crisis by giving proper infrastructure the investment if deserves. I guess even the best of us make mistakes.

Though the share prices seem to have withstood the storm (for now), short-term Blackberry sales will obviously be affected and the trust of current users in RIM may be hurt.

This leads me to think of another story.

Last September, the Viaduc de la Concorde in Laval collapsed, killing 5 people and injuring 6 others. The media was quick to follow up on the tragedy by revealing that a large number of other viaducts and bridges all through Quebec were danger of collapsing, all because of underinvestment in infrastructure on the part of the Quebec Liberal government. This contributed strongly to its poor showing in the recent provincial elections.

So here’s the message: infrastructure might not win you votes or new customers, but it could easily cost you them.

Foreign Consulates

My family and I have been spending a wonderful year in Paris. The city is beautiful, the weather is good and I’M ON HOLIDAY!!! I really find it scary to think that had we not already committed ourselves to Paris by last July, this experience might never have happened.

To settle in France for the year, we all had to obtain a visa from the French consulate of Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, which was located in Toronto. As is the custom in that country, the consulate’s website was totally inadequate and my father had to spend hours on the computer to establish whether or not my brother and I had to be present in the consulate for our visa attribution.

To cut a long story involving typically difficult French bureaucracy and bad information short, he ended up making the five hour trip to Toronto on his own, only to discover that my brother and I had indeed needed to be present.

You can imagine his fury: he called up my mom to tell her that he simply couldn’t face a year in this crazy country and that the family was better off spending its sabbatical somewhere else! I’ll say it again, had we not already committed, we might never have gone.

This whole story would have been a minor issue if there had been a consulate office in Ottawa, but the French government had decided to shut it down a few years earlier, cutting the total number down to five. But I can’t help to think that with time, the number of individuals and small businesses which will have gotten so fed up with the consulates that they will have given up on their plans of traveling or doing business in France will end up costing the French economy more than a few consulates.

Anyway, all of this to say that Canada’s Conservative government should not make the same mistake by closing 19 consulates across the world, including two in Japan and one in Milan.