Categories for Musings

Maybe I’ll do a do-over. Hmmm. 

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A woman I know well used to work with Kevin O’Leary. She and her female colleagues called him “The Octopus.”

So maybe he’s like Trump, after all. 

Anyway. My column from last year about this bilious blowhard, here.

What a joke the Conservative Party has become. It’s like Harper never existed. 

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The Mosaic Institute just let me know that tomorrow night’s event is sold out. For those who got tickets, see you there!

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Here’s three links. Draw your own conclusions. 

• “Jean Chrétien may not have considered the sponsorship program.“
• “Prime Minister’s Office Director of Appointments, Prime Minister’s Office, November 1993 – December 1997 (4 years 2 months).” 
• “The sponsorship program ran from 1996 until 2004, when broad corruption was discovered in its operations and the program was discontinued.“

You know, some people should acquaint themselves with this Internet thing. It never forgets. 

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Life's short. The world is 4.54 billion years old. But when you are down, remember you can always say: "I lived in the same time as Warren."

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) January 17, 2017

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Anyone seen the Conservative Party of Canada?

 They were here just a minute ago. Remember? Had just about half the seats in the House of Commons? Forty per cent of the vote, give or take? Seats in every province but one? Fundraising behemoth? Remember them?

They were led by a guy who wasn’t particularly warm and cuddly, true. But he was a guy with a size twelve brain, and he’d humiliated a string of Liberal leaders – the one who was supposed to be a juggernaut, the intellectual one who carried around the book bag all the time, the one who popped up from Harvard to run things. Remember them? The Conservatives massacred all of them, one after another.

At the time – and for a good long time – the pundits and prognosticators would opine that the Conservative Party was unbeatable, and that Liberal liberalism was truly toast. They’d destroyed the once-great Liberal Party, for good. It was in all the papers. Peter C. Newman wrote a book about it, subtly subtitled “The Death of the Liberal Party.” A couple other pretty smart guys wrote another book about the big shift that had supposedly taken place, declaring that “the dusty liberal elite” had been “replaced by a new, powerful coalition.” A conservative one.

Remember all that stuff? Everyone agreed with it, at the time. The Conservative Party were heroes, Liberals were zeroes. The Left should all just get together and form one political party – and, in 2009, they even tried to do so. The Conservative Party of Canada was unbeatable, went the popular consensus, and everyone just needed to get used to it.

This is the part in the opinion column where we get to declare “that was then, this is now.” Or, “times change.” Or, “boy, those supposedly-smart people in Ottawa sure aren’t very smart.”

Now, now, we know what the Conservative faithful are going to say. They’re going to say we should cancel the search party. They’re going to say that they’ve had a setback, true, but that Canadian conservatism – or its oxymoronic twin, “progressive conservatism” – ain’t dead. We still raise tons of dough, they’ll say, and we have just about 100 seats in the House of Commons, and we are holding the Shiny Pony guy to account. Don’t write our obituary yet, they’ll say.

And they’re right, sort of. On paper, the Conservative Party seems to be doing…okay. They’ve got MPs, they’ve got money, they frequently get journalists to point microphones in their direction.

But, still. 

The Conservative Party seems to be a shadow of its former self, now. The Liberal Party isn’t “dead,” quote unquote – last we checked, it was running things again. There’s been no “big shift” either: the so-called Laurentian Elites are back, vacationing with the Aga Khan and blathering on about books and science and “evidence-based policy” and stuff.

Conservatives, meanwhile, are back to being mean and miserly. They’re nasty and brutish and short-sighted. Again.

Back when Big Brain ran things, knuckle-draggers and crypto-racists were summarily tossed overboard. Conservatives, not Liberals, were the party of the “new Canada,” and they enjoyed the support of plenty of folks with black and brown and yellow skin hues. Not for them, the anti-abortionists and homophobes: those kooks were all drummed out, or ruthlessly silenced. And money? They put the proverbial drunken sailors to shame, the Conservatives did, spending untold billions during the last great global recession.

And now? Well, now they are having a leadership race to replace the venti-sized brain guy. The candidate that has attracted the most attention – and the one who may very well win – has built a campaign entirely on fecklessly aping the Human Cheeto to the South, and bashing refugees and immigrants wherever and whenever possible. In this, a country of refugees and immigrants.

A couple of their leadership aspirants have started grousing about abortion. One has run ads saying marriage can only happen between a man and woman, common sense and Supreme Court rulings notwithstanding. “Politicians should have the courage to debate these issues in an open and respectful way,” said one of these leadership contestants, apparently unaware that denying citizens fundamental human rights is neither “courageous” nor “respectful.”

And so, yes, the Conservative Party has lots of money, still. It has bums filling seats in the House of Commons. It has a pulse. It is alive.

But its brain? Its heart? The things it did for a decade, to ensure that all Canadians were treated fairly and equitably? The efforts it made to make itself into a modern, diverse, tolerant political party?

That party is dead. 

And – if not dead – it has gone missing, maybe for good.

 

 

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.@realDonaldTrump-haters pre-inauguration self-deception list:

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) January 17, 2017

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I’ll be hosting, and these fine folks will be on the panel:

• Desmond Cole, Activist, Author, Journalist
• Bernie M. Farber, ED the Mosaic Institute
• Ihsaan Gardee, National Counicl of Canadian Muslims
• Dr. Karen Mock, Human Rights Consultant, President JSpaceCanada

Tickets are just $10, and $5 for students with ID.  There’s reserved seating, too.

What’s it all about? Well, basically, it’s a recognition that the world has changed (for the worse) since the start of November – as seen here and here and here and here and here and here, in Canada, too – and that we need to start talking about it, and doing something about it.

I think it’s going to be an important discussion.  And I think you should come if you’re in or near the GTA that night.

 

 

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So, The Lobby Monitor asked me about the Aga Khan, helicopter, lobbying, blah blah blah. 

Here’s my response. 

The sponsor is almost always a lobbyist. CIJA, for example, sponsors a great deal of air travel – with MPs from all parties – every year. That never raises any concerns. 

This case shouldn’t either. The Opposition – and some bored pundits – are attempting to manufacture hysteria because they are frustrated by Trudeau’s ongoing popularity. 

There was no other practical and expeditious way to get where he was going. The helicopter belonged to a man who had known Trudeau since infancy, and was not a registered lobbyist. 

Trudeau did nothing wrong, in my opinion. 

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Ironically, I’m at CBC right now. And that’s where I read this.

Other pundits are all but writing Wynne off.

“She has lost that credibility with voters and once it’s gone it’s almost impossible to get back,” said Quito Maggi, CEO of Mainstreet Research.

His firm’s polling in the latter half of 2016 suggested the Liberals would do far better without Wynne as leader.

“It’s not the message, it’s the messenger,” said Maggi in an interview. “Even some of the positives that this government has tried to announce the last six, eight, 12 months have been completely drowned out immediately by the negatives.”

Polls by three different firms in the final months of 2016 put Kathleen Wynne’s approval rating in the range of 13 to 16 per cent. She faces an election in June 2018.

“There comes a point with governments when there may be little they can do to change circumstances, particularly after a party has been in power for a long time,” said Shachi Kurl, executive director of the Angus Reid Institute.

But the team around Wynne is not pressing the panic button — yet.

When your numbers are mired at Mulroney-1992 levels – the lowest one firm has ever recorded for a sitting Premier – it’s time for a big rethink and some big changes. Obviously. This situation has been going on for many months, and it needs to be fixed now if the Ontario Liberals are to avoid many years in opposition.

Wynne has some amazing staff, from Andrew Bevan on down. But I do not feel that she has been well served by her campaign team. At all.

She has some positives – but those well-compensated operatives haven’t been telling people about those positives. She has an impressive policy brain – but they needed to be showing folks more of her impressive heart, too. She is the Premier, and she is supposed to be talking about the big picture – not being hauled out to announce beer sales in every frigging grocery store.

What will Kathleen Wynne do? Will she do as Quito says, and resign to make way for another leader? Beats me. But one thing is certain: what they are doing now isn’t working.

At all.

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