Canadian Cincinnatus

The scandal involving NBA owner Donald Sterling is Political Correctness run amuck

Not being a basketball fan, I have never heard of Donald Sterling before, but from what I have seen, he seems to be a slimeball. Having said that, he is a private citizen and what he has been recorded as saying, he said entirely in private concerning a private matter between him and his girlfriend. The proper response to hearing this illegally recorded conversation (unlike Canada, recording somebody’s conversation without their knowledge is against the law in California) is to say that it is none of our business.

But in the land of the free and the home of the brave, it seems every private utterance an American citizen makes is a public matter that needs to be adjudicated and, if necessary, punished. 

I might be able to see the justice of that if he were, say, a public official, or a candidate for office. In that case, it would provide a window for the voting public on what the pol really thinks. As a result, what Reverend Wright said in his public sermons to his parishioners was of interest to American citizens in 2008 because one of them - who had publically praised his teachings - was running for President. Also, the fact that Jay Carney has commie propaganda posters on his living room walls provides important perspective on the man who speaks for the President.

But Donald Sterling is not a public official. He is a private individual with private interests that are none of our business. On CNN Monday evening (I know, I know, it was on TV at my gym and I couldn’t help overhearing) various black basketball players took turns denouncing him and demanding that he be stripped of his team. I believe it was Charles Barkley who said that Sterling stepped over the line because the NBA is 80% black and Sterling has power over those players. First, black NBA basketball players of 2014 are not illiterate sharecroppers, exploited by a cruel system that stacks the deck against them to keep them in the depths of poverty so as to better control them. They are multimillionaire celebrities with options galore. But OK, it is still wrong when a racist team owner conspires to keep a player’s salary down at $1 million per year when it might be $2 million in a fair world. So, got any proof that that is actually going on? And if it were, wouldn’t the disenfranchised player be able to move to another team whose owner just wants to win and isn’t animated by racial politics? Unless of course, all the NBA owners are in some kind of anti-black cabal. Any proof of that? (Spike Lee, I’m looking at you.)

In their zeal to burn the witch, Sterling’s accusers also play down the context of his infamous conservation: he was in the midst of a dispute with his much younger girlfriend, who was posting pictures of herself (without him) on the internet with black athletes. In other words, the dispute was not over black people in the abstract but on specific black men who he had reason to believe where having affairs with the young lady who he had been lavishing his money on. The conversation also sounds like she may have been coached by her lawyer to steer his pronouncements to politically incorrect conclusions. None of this turns Sterling into the reincarnation of Mahatma Gandhi, but a man’s guilt or innocence cannot be properly judged without considering such mitigating details. 

That is, if he actually did something that is our business to judge him for.

 

Kelly McParland is dead wrong about the Reform Party

The often-wrong National Post columnist, Kelly McParland, receives his fair share of ridicule from these pages. His latest column is no exception. With the news that only six of the original Reform MP’s are still in Parliament, McParland decided to take stock. This is his conclusion:

There’s not much evidence of the original Reform platform having changed Ottawa, outside a few organic alternations that might have happened anyway. 

This is so off the mark that it defies belief. From closely observing the Reform Party since its inception, I come to the inescapable conclusion that its arrival was one of the great inflection points in Canadian history, when it suddenly became possible to change the trajectory of the country. And thanks to the Reform Party, Canada did change course, and for the better.

In terms of the governance issues that the Reform Party championed in its early years – Senate reform, MP independence and parliamentary pension reform – it clearly failed, and McParland is right to point this out.

Nevertheless, what the Reform Party did accomplish was much more significant. It introduced an entire class of Canadians into the political process who had previously been apathetic. Ever since the first idealists blazed the trail, a steady stream of conservative activists has followed them into politics. While many today are too young to have been card-carrying Reformers, they are cut from the same cloth and would, today, have no place to go if Preston Manning hadn't built them a home. If their birthdays had cooperated, they would have been Reformers in the 90’s.

This is why the following claim by McParland is wildly so off the mark:

“More than 60 years after that first NDP campaign, the three main federal parties remain the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP.”

All that McParland seems to be able to see is that the Progressive Conservative Party has lost a modifier in its name. What he cannot admit to is that this name change signifies an attitudinal sea change. The last meaningful leader of the Progressive Conservative Party was Brian Mulroney (I don’t count the cipher Kim Campbell). His government introduced a value-added tax, treated Canadians to budget-busting deficits every year and brought in the most draconian gun control laws in Canadian history. (Don’t believe me? Compare Kim Campbell’s Bill C-17 with Alan Rock’s Bill C-68.) And what he was prevented from doing, but wanted to do, was even worse. The Meech Lake Accord and the Charlottetown Accord would have enshrined left-wing labour law, multiculturalism and aboriginal apartheid into the Canadian Constitution. The populist uprising that stopped these misconceived measures was inextricably tied to the Reform Party's birth and therefore is a part of its heritage. 

While there were PC Members of Parliament who were against all of this, they were powerless backbenchers from out West who were derided as dinosaurs - leftovers from a dying era, and, it was hoped, soon to be gone for good. These days, the principled conservative descendants of these ‘dinosaurs’ form the dominant and most dynamic part of the new Conservative Party. The High-Church, I-need-a-tax-break-for-my-country-club-membership Red Tories are still there, but they are in the minority and nobody – except for perhaps Kelly McParland – considers them the future of anything. As a result, gun control and environmental regulatory excesses have been being rolled back; multiculturalism is quietly being replaced by a renewed emphasis on Canada’s traditions and heritage; our immigration program is being transformed from a Liberal-voter-importation scheme into one more concerned with Canada’s well-being; and structural changes have been affected to reduce Canada’s unfunded liabilities (raising the CPP retirement age, raising the retirement age of Federal civil servants, etc.). The fruits of some of these measures will not be felt for some time, but they will leave Canada on a much firmer fiscal footing. They are also things politicians, not from a Reform background, would have attempted.

Furthermore, the rise of the Reform Party is being repeated on the provincial level today in Alberta with the Wildrose Party. Interestingly, McParland highlights this in his article, but the confusion and internal disarray of the ruling Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta is not held up an object lesson on the fate of those who abandon principle for power, but rather as a lesson on why such governing philosophies are the way of the future! 

What McParland seems unaware of - or chooses to ignore - is that many of the most significant accomplishments precipitated by the Reform Party’s birth were not carried out by it or its successors but by political parties hostile to it. For instance, since the glory days of Trudeapia, the federal government had not lived within its means. While Brian Mulroney preached the evils of the federal deficit, he never seriously did anything about it. The arrival of the Reform Party on the scene scared the Ottawa establishment so much that the Chretien government was forced to balance the budget. This wasn’t something he wanted to do. It went against the very grain of what the Liberal Party stood for. Indeed, in the 1993 election, Chrétien smeared Preston Manning as an extremist for suggesting something was fiscally wrong. But thanks to Reform’s rise, Chrétien’s hand was forced. Jean Chrétien may have rode in the back of the PM’s limo, but Preston Manning was in the driver’s seat.

Today, after being knocked out of whack by the Great Recession of 2008, the federal budget is coming back into line: proof that balanced budgets remain the new normal. 

Furthermore, thanks to the Reform Party, Ottawa is no longer dominated by federalist Quebec lawyers, the benefit of which can be seen in the recent Quebec election. In the referendum of 1995, the Rest of Canada grovelled at the feet of Quebec in an unseemly manner, begging them to stay. Today, the reaction was: Meh, you want to separate, go ahead. A consensus has developed in English Canada that there will be no more bribery. If you want to stay in Canada, it must be because you want to remain Canadians. If not, then you are free to go. Altogether a healthier and more dignified attitude.

Preston Manning was never Prime Minister of Canada, nor was he ever close, but in terms of influence, he has been the most influential Canadian since Pierre Trudeau.

 

Time for Harper to take the gloves off when dealing with President Obama

The recent decision by the US government to delay a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline for yet another year only ratifies what has already become obvious: President Obama is not going to OK the pipeline, not now, not ever. Keystone XL makes too much sense (for both countries) for him to come right out and say this, but that is his intent. Partly it is to appease the environmentalist left but partly because of his own convictions: he is an extreme faculty-lounge leftist at heart. By now, this should be obvious. 

Needless to say, Prime Minister Harper comes from an entirely different ideological direction than Obama, but at least until now, he has chosen the diplomatic approach when dealing with Obama. The trouble is, at least as far as Keystone is concerned, it is not working.

What should he do now?

As I have said before, he needs to shift gears, radically. He needs to attack Obama publically and loudly. He needs to play the anti-American card. As I have said before, anti-Americanism has domestic advantages, it will make it hard for the Liberals to portray Conservatives as US lackeys, a familiar trope of the Liberal Party in election campaigns. 

And, I think it will bring real pressure to bear on Obama. Right now he is a profoundly unpopular lame duck. He has lost control of one house of congress and is about to lose the other in November. One charge against him already is that his foreign policy has been feckless and foolish. With Harper’s attacks, his opponents will be able to press this point home even further: Obama even alienated Canada! Our closest ally! How could he screw things up even more?

It sounds dangerous to antagonize the US but it isn’t. In the twilight of the Jean Chretien era, Chretien openly mocked and insulted George W Bush. He didn’t suffer for it at the polls in Canada, and Canada’s relationship with the US wasn’t much disturbed. Bush’s domestic opponents were pleased and the Bush Administration was patient and tolerant. And even if Obama does not prove to be as understanding as Bush, what is he going to do about it? With his Keystone decision effectively made, he has already used his one effective thumb screw.

What are you waiting for Stephen? You have nothing to lose but your environmental restrictions. 

Happy Lenin’s Birthday... er, I mean Earth Day

Once again, its that time of year. Every year on this day, I take the time out to remind everyone that April 22 - Earth Day - is Vladimir Lenin’s birthday.

Lest you think this is just a 1 in 365 coincidence exploited by right-wing hate-mongers such as myself, consider the fact that the first Earth Day - April 22, 1970 – was the one hundredth anniversary of Lenin’s birth.

To be fair, Earth Day is increasingly being celebrated on the spring equinox. This is a positive development that helps distance the environmentalist movement from the ideals of a bloodthirsty killer.

Reihan Salam: “Tax the Childless”

According to conservative pundit, Reihan Salam:

“When my mother was my age, she was working full time while raising three small children, and she spent every spare moment studying to finish a graduate degree. My father was working extremely hard as well. Between the two of them, they were able to provide their kids with a solidly middle-class life. But it wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t always fun. 

So now, as a childless professional in my mid-30s, I often reflect on the sacrifices working parents make to better the lives of their children. And I have come to the reluctant conclusion that I ought to pay much higher taxes so that working parents can pay much lower taxes. I believe this even though I also believe a not inconsiderable share of my tax dollars are essentially being set on fire by our frighteningly incompetent government.”

As a childless professional myself, I agree.

“We all benefit from the work of parents. Each new generation reinvigorates our society with its youthful vim and vigor.”

This is exactly right. Raising children is what economists call a public good. And it is taken on, voluntarily, at great cost, by private individuals. Everybody in our society benefits from well-raised children – including the aging gay couple - who will be tended to in their twilight years by the children of heterosexual couples. 

A common feature of most modern western countries is low fertility rate. This is because, thanks to pension programs (both private and public), raising children is no longer economically rational. Childrearing and retirement have become uncoupled. Taxing childlessness is how you make it rational again.

“Even when we compare a nonparent and a parent who are working exactly the same hours and earning exactly the same income, the nonparent has a clear leg up. Most obviously, the nonparent has far more disposable income to play with, which she can save, to become much richer than her parent counterpart over time, or spend, to travel to exotic locales, to eat out constantly, to wear awesome clothes, or to live as I do in a conveniently located shoebox in a great American metropolis. Raising taxes on nonparents could even the score a bit, tilting the balance ever so slightly in favor of those who toil on behalf of America’s future workforce by wiping their butts and painstakingly removing their head lice.”

Fairness is a cause with wide appeal. Gay marriage proponents won because they appealed to the inherent fairness of their cause, and the defenders of traditional marriage lost because they didn’t. Championing the cause of parents who selfless raise children for the greater good of society is a way of turning the tables. Childless gay couples can then be effectively portrayed as selfish hedonists who don’t care if the society around them burns to the ground, just as long as their existence on this mortal coil is serene and pleasant.

(As an aside, when did lice become a problem for North American children? It certainly wasn’t when I was growing up. My parents talked about lice, but only in context of their experiences in World War II. In Canada of the 1960’s and 70’s, lice were an entirely abstract problem for kids.)

“These millions of nonparents are not good political enemies to have. But does this mean those of us who favor a more parent-friendly tax code should give up? Not quite. Tax reform along these lines could awaken a sleeping giant in American politics, namely the 36 percent of American voters who have a child under 18 in their household.”

In addition to those 36%, there are many more voters who used to have a child under 18, and others who are planning to join the group. Add in childless people like myself, who see the inherent justice of their cause, and you have a rock-solid base for victory. 

Often, conservative businessmen disparage socially conservatives for holding back the cause of conservatism with their repellent views. Personally, I think championing the cause of people with children is one of those breakthrough issues that may effectively counter the negative impressions that conservative support of big business has on the average voter.

Dalton McGuinty goes to Harvard

Among all the sturm und drang going around these days over the gas plant cancellations and all the other various incompetencies of the Ontario Liberal Party, one little tidbit of information caught my ear: following his departure from the Premier’s office, Dalton McGuinty has gone to work at Harvard University. 

So what’s Premier Deadbeat Dad doing down there? Here is a brief synopsis from Harvard’s web site:

“Research interests: The re-emergence of manufacturing in Ontario and the Great Lake states post-recession.” 

Unfortunately, it doesn’t say if Anthony Perkins’ interest lies more in encouraging this development or strangling it in the cradle.

Kathleen Wynne and the Streisand Effect

In 2003, Barbara Streisand loudly complained that her privacy had been violated because her Malibu oceanfront estate had been photographed from the air and that this photograph had been posted on the internet for anybody to download. Upon closer investigation, it turned out that the picture was part of the California Coastal Records Project where the entire coastline of California was photographed. The effect named after Babs concerns the fact that the offending photograph (labelled only as Image 3850 on the website) was downloaded 6 times prior to Streisand’s complaint but was downloaded a half a million times in the month afterwards. These days, her estate is all over the internet. Barbara and her big mouth!

For some reason, Ontario Premier Wynne’s libel lawsuit against conservative party leader Tim Hudak - for making accusations against her concerning the destruction of documents related to the Liberal gas plant fiasco - reminds me of this phenomenon.

Discovery anyone?

A Code of Conduct for John Tory

John Tory issued a code of conduct that the future mayor of Toronto should follow. Here is my code of conduct for him:

In the future, you will not manage an election campaign so badly that the party you are managing goes from 156 seats in the legislature down to 2.

In the future, if you become a leader of a right-of-center party again, you will not condescendingly dismiss members of your party for holding socially conservative views that you do not hold, particularly if those members have a better electoral track record than you have.

In the future, if you are in an election campaign, and all of your candidates are of one voice in telling you that one of your policies is enormously unpopular with the public, especially with core conservative voters, you will not cavalierly dismiss their concerns because your campaign manager ‘doesn’t  see that in the polling numbers yet.’ 

In the future, if you are in an election campaign and all the polls overwhelmingly indicate that one of your policies is enormously unpopular, especially with core conservative voters, you will defend this policy with the careful strategies that the people who crafted the policy laid out for you to use. You will not simply repeat the mantra that it is a ‘matter of deep conviction’ for you, without bothering to explain to the voters why you consider the matter so pressing and important.

In the future, you will not abandon deeply held principles just to win an election. 

In the future, if you had to jettison a deeply held principle in an election campaign for reasons of expediency, you will resume championing that principle as soon as the election is over, because failure to do so speaks poorly of your integrity and lowers your credibility. At all costs, you will not simply forget about the matter and never speak of it again. 

In the future, in the wake of an ignominious election loss where you even lost your own seat, you will not try to hang on by your fingernails but, rather, you will resign immediately as party leader.

In the future, if you face a leadership review because of an ignominious election loss where you lost your own seat, and where you insisted on staying on as party leader, you will not dismiss the polling results ahead of the leadership review simply because you don’t like the numbers. 

In the future, in the face of an ignominious election loss where you lost your own seat, but where you refused to resign, you will quickly and unambiguously accept the verdict of the resulting leadership view, without 48 hours of waffling on your part, especially if your own internal polling correctly predicted the exact outcome a week prior.

In the future, in the wake of an ignominious electoral defeat where you lost your own seat, you will not bully one of your own backbenchers into resigning from one of the safest seats in the province in a vain attempt at getting back into the legislature.

In the future, in the wake of an ignominious election loss where you even managed to lose your own seat, and you do bully a backbencher into giving up their seat so that you can get back into the legislature, you will not then go out and immediately lose the resulting by-election - in one of the safest conservative seats in the province - to a Liberal.

In the future, if there is a municipal election with a clear conservative candidate who is popular and has a proven electoral track record, you will not enter the race and potentially spoil his chances of winning by incorrectly insinuating to the voters that you are a conservative.

In the future, if you are running in a municipal election and a topical issue of great concern to the residents of the city comes up for a vote in the current city council, you will give a clear and direct answer to the voters as to where you stand on the matter. At all costs, you will not simply avoid the question with business school bafflegab.

In the future, if you are running for office, you will explain clearly and simply where you stand on the issues of the day, making a logical case as to why you are the best candidate. You will not try to turn the election into a referendum on competency and judgement, especially as your entire life until this moment has been a series of blunders and fiascos, and all your private sector jobs came to you via your father’s influence or thanks to the generosity of his best friend, Ted Rogers.

The West should arm the Crimean Tatars

One of the factoids making the rounds is that the Crimea was Russian territory for 200 years, when it was acquired by Katherine the Great, and that it was only amalgamated with the Ukraine in 1954 by Nikita Khrushchev. What this history overlooks is that the Crimean peninsula was the ancestral homeland of the Tatars. Historically, they made up the majority of its population until Josef Stalin deported all of them to Siberia in 1944. Considering that about half of them died along the way, in what way was this act not a genocide?

To make matters worse, after the war, the Tatars were not allowed to return to their homeland. It is only for this reason that the Tatars now make up 12% of the Crimean population. The Russian majority residing there now is composed largely of career Soviet military veterans and their children who were allowed to pick their retirement place, as a perk of choosing a career that required them to be bounced around the Soviet Union. Since Crimea has the nicest weather in the Soviet Union, a lot of them settled there.

As a result, the Tatars really, really don’t like the Russians who occupy their ancestral homeland. If the West were led by somebody competent (i.e. not Obama), the US would be funneling small arms through the Ukraine to the Crimean Tatars, encouraging them to wage guerilla warfare. When Putin’s masked bandits start coming home in body-bags, the seizure of the Crimea will being to look less and less like a good move and more and more like a bleeding sore.

While Putin seems to be taking a break to consolidate his gains, he won’t stop until he is stopped. Sooner or later, somebody must stand up to him with force. 

John Tory’s non-position on the expansion of Toronto’s Island Airport

With regard to Porter Airlines’ bid to expand  Billy Bishop Airport to accommodate jet traffic, Mayor Rob Ford is enthusiastically in favour, extreme left-wing mayoral candidate Olivia Chow is resolutely against it, and ‘Red Tory’ mayoral candidate John Tory is, well… I’ll let him tell you in his own words:

“Mayor Ford and NDP candidate Chow will fall back to their ideological positions of "yes" or "no." But the fact is council cannot proceed with a decision until the critical questions highlighted in the report are answered. 

If somebody brought me a proposal with this many unresolved matters when I was running a business or a charity, it would have been a very brief meeting - I call on the executive committee to be brief.  Executive Committee should not vote, but rather put this important vote off until more information is in hand.”

Got that?

Hamlet for Mayor: vote John Tory!