Now in the latest Dundurn catalogue! Read all about it here.

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Now in HuffPo.

(Civil) comments  welcome. 

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From CP via CTV:

“I am very happy to see members of the press this evening,” Trudeau said early in his remarks, which drew subdued applause from the roughly 300-person crowd.

“We are very happy to see (journalists) among us and thank you very much for being here,” he said, looking at reporters and raising his hands to give a conspicuous, single clap.

The new system involves holding fundraisers featuring Trudeau or ministers only in public places, announcing them in advance, allowing the media to attend and disclosing the guest list within the following 45 days…

Liberal party spokesman Braeden Caley said there was “a pause” on national fundraising events throughout the first quarter while the new standards for open and transparent fundraising events were being prepared.

Some Liberals are pointing to that as one reason for lacklustre fundraising figures in the first three months of this year, when the Conservatives raised nearly twice as much money from a larger pool of contributors, even though they are in the midst of a leadership race that ought to be siphoning would-be donations to the party.

I must say that I found the single-clap thing – and drawing the media’s presence to everyone’s attention – to be a bit Trump/Harper-esque. It was unnecessary.  The media are doing their job, and their presence is a good thing.

Brendan Caley’s remarks also help to explain the fundraising gap I wrote about a couple days ago.  (The same thing has happened in Ontario: the governing Liberals hit “pause” on fundraising, to respect the new rules, while the two opposition parties did not.)

As I’ve written many times before: until the media give political parties free ad space – and until the taxpayer is willing to pay for everything that parties need to do during election campaigns – fundraising is obviously required.

The new rules ensure that it is all done out in the open, and without the possibility of undue influence.  That’s good, and deserving of more than a single hand-clap.

 

 

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When you take health care away from 24 million people, it means people are going to die. Donald Trump is an asshole: sing it.

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Star Trek: still better. 

NOW PLAYING: TAX WARS #BCNDP Debt Star™ ft. Darth Horgan. #MayThe4thBeWithYou. @jjhorgan #bcelxn17 #bcpoli pic.twitter.com/ZPDGzgFiJc

— Today's BC Liberals (@bcliberals) May 4, 2017

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…really well done. 

But Star Trek is still way better than Star Wars.

Stephen Harper’s apprentices? These are not the leaders you are looking for. #Maythe4thBeWithYou #cpcldr #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/rX84SicXS1

— Liberal Party (@liberal_party) May 4, 2017

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Column, now on HuffPo.  Got a lot of comments about this one.  Sample: “You’re mean, but I like it.”

Snippet:

You weren’t going to ever, ever beat Justin Trudeau. He was going to put you — a bloviating blowhard, a misanthropic misogynist, a down-market Donald — through the political Cuisinart. He was going to shred you to pieces, and make soup out of you, Sharky.

So you packed up your toothbrush, waved over your shoulder in the direction of Mad Max, and started jogging back to Gate 11.

You always planned to. You won’t be missed.

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Dear Team BC NDP: a hashtag, and a lot of fake Twitter outrage, does not a winning campaign make.  Check this out – the Globe and Mail is calling you out on your (typical, usual) tendency to get outraged about every frigging thing, the absurd #IAmLinda included:

Of all the interactions ever to occur between a voter and a campaigning politician, the one last week between BC Liberal Party Leader Christy Clark and a woman in a North Vancouver market has got to be among the most anodyne.

Except, of course, that this one was caught on camera and went viral on Twitter, where it is being used against Ms. Clark.

We’re not buying it. Anyone who wants to can see the incident online and judge for themselves. But what we saw was this:

Ms. Clark is walking through the market and greeting voters. A woman introduces herself and gets a warm greeting in return, complete with a friendly handshake.

Then the woman says, “I would never vote for you because of what…” Ms. Clark cuts her off with a smile. “You don’t have to. That’s why we live in a democracy,” she says, and walks on.

And that was that. Except for the Twitter outrage, and the embarrassing #IamLinda hashtag that went with it.

The voter in question, Linda Higgins, is an innocent party in all of this. There’s no evidence she was looking to make news, or that she was an NDP plant. She deserves no condemnation.

But neither did Ms. Clark do anything wrong. In fact, in the hurly-burly of a closely fought election campaign, she handled it well. Voters love to tell politicians they are not going to vote for them; it’s a fact of life for campaigners. As long as a politician is respectful, he or she can move on without having to listen to every prepared lecture about their failings.

Voters who start a conversation with “I would never vote for you” shouldn’t be shocked when the conversation is brief. The assumption in the #IamLinda hashtag is that Linda Higgins is a victim. But of what? Of not being an exception to the facts of life?

If there is a larger sense among some B.C. voters that the Liberal Party has grown arrogant after so many years in power, that’s fair. But the fact that a garden-variety exchange between a voter and a politician has become a distracting political incident on Twitter speaks more about a social medium that feeds on easy outrage than it does about the real issues in this election.

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We just had a Daisy staff lunch – in part, to welcome the newest member of the team, Madi Fuller – and talked a lot about this shocker, from CP:

OTTAWA — The federal Conservatives showed off their fundraising prowess during the first three months of the year, raking in almost twice as much as the governing Liberals despite being in the midst of a leadership contest that could be siphoning off potential donations to the party.

When the leadership contestants’ money haul is added in, the Conservatives raised more than three times the Liberal take.

According to financial returns filed with Elections Canada for the first quarter of 2017, the Conservative party pulled in $5.3 million from almost 42,500 donors, compared to just $2.8 million from 31,812 donors who gave to the Liberals.

The Conservative Party has always done well at fundraising. But to take in three times as much as the governing party? Huh? What is going on?

In any other leadership race, candidates siphon off dough, leaving their party with much less. That hasn’t happened here, as my former colleague Joan Bryden notes.

How can this be happening, when the CPC is:

• leaderless
• powerless
• hopeless

(Okay, maybe they’re not “hopeless,” but I had a little recurring refrain going there, and I wanted to keep it alive.)

I don’t have a theory about any of this, and so I welcome yours.  But if I were advising the governing party, I would be concerned, to put it mildly.  During the years I was privileged to work for Jean Chretien, nothing like this ever happened to us – we topped the polls, and we did great at fundraising.

So what the heck?  Comment are open.

 

 

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I’ve gotten a few emails from folks who are genuinely puzzled as to why I support Christy Clark’s BC Liberals. So, here’s ten reasons.

1. Friendship.  From 1990 to 1993, I was Jean Chretien’s special assistant, and very involved in tormenting the Mulroney/Campbell Liberals in the House.  In 1993, I oversaw the Liberal Party’s election war room.  We did okay. After we won, Gord Campbell ask me to come out to Whistler and give the BC Liberals some tips about being an effective Opposition.  I did. I became very good friends with many of the people I met, and we stayed in touch.
2. Ottawa.  In 1996, I’d had enough of the Martinite machinations, the disloyalty to Chretien – and how some in PMO (Hey, Peter! Hey, Eddie!) were looking the other way.  I got job offers in Toronto, Calgary and Ottawa – but Vancouver was the most promising, and the furthest point in Canada from the slow-motion mutiny going on in Ottawa.  Also, there was an election to run – and the BC Libs had a real shot at winning it, despite having come into existence just a few years before.
3. Election ’96.  Along with Greg Lyle, Stew Braddick, the Unsinkable May Brown, and a few others, I helped run the 1996 B.C. Liberal campaign.  It was an amazing, fun, insurgent effort – and a success.  Sure, we lost narrowly.  But we actually got 40,000 more votes than the Glen Clark BC NDP, and – just like Hillary – we won the popular vote, big time.  The NDP won because they had gerrymandered the province while in power. Period.
4. Thugs.  The BC NDP were the sleaziest, dirtiest, scummiest opponents I’d ever encountered in a campaign.  They’d threaten young Liberals with violence at our events.  They’d send in big union guys to dissemble our events minutes before announcements, citing non-existent bylaws.  They’d drop leaflets containing dirty, filthy attacks on our people.  I asked Greg about the hate.  Said he: “These are the best jobs they’ve ever had.  They will say and do anything to keep them.”
5. Aftermath.  I went back to work at the comms firm where I was a Vice-President.  I got a call from Gord Campbell, who offered me the position of his Chief of Staff.  I thought about it, but (a) we didn’t want to move to Victoria, having just bought a place in North Van, and (b) I had unfinished business – I’d had my microphone cut off by the local Reform MP when I asked him about his association with a local Holocaust denier.  So I wanted to run against him.  I declined Gord’s offer.
6. Election ’97.  Twenty years ago right about now, then, I had won the contested nomination for the Liberal Party of Canada in North Vancouver, where we indeed lived and indeed had a big (big) mortgage.  I was honoured and privileged, truly, to have a campaign team made up of the hundreds of BC Liberals with whom I’d become friends.  I lost, mainly, because the folks in Ottawa (Hey, Peter! Hey, Eddie!) had decided to go after the PCs in BC – and I (and others) needed the PCs to be enough of a factor to split the Right-wing vote with Reform. I raised more money than any other BC LPC candidate, I had a shot at cabinet, and I had the best team.  But I lost to a twerp the Canadian Press described as “elfin.” C’est la guerre.
7. Scandal.  As we BC Libs had predicted, the Glen Clark NDP turned out to be the most corrupt provincial government in modern Canadian history.  They stole from charities (Google “Bingogate”). They were linked to bribes (Google “Hydro-gate”).  And, of course, there was the deck that killed off an NDP Premier (Google “Glen Clark,” “deck” and “act of folly”).  The BC NDP treated the provincial treasury like it was their personal piggybank.  Their name was synonymous with scandal.  They were massacred by Gord in the election in 2001.  He won all but two of the seats in the 79-seat Legislature.
8. Time passes. I got headhunted for a job in Toronto, where I never, ever thought I’d live.  We move.  Gord governs.  Time goes by, everyone gets older and wiser (sort of).  Not the BC NDP, however.  They come up with a succession of bad leaders, and a litany of dumb policies, and they blow elections in 2005 and 2009.  Gord leaves, Christy – on whose CKNW radio show I’d been a semi-regular, and with whom I’d worked in the aforementioned 1993 federal Liberal campaign – takes over.  She is just what the BC Liberals need: she is a positive, unflappable force of nature.
9. Toronto mayoralty.  I’d helped John Tory’s mayoral campaign in 2003.  He lost to a Dipper. In 2009, me and a small group of others spent months, gratis, getting ready for 2010; Tory decided not to run.  Rob Ford won, and proceeded to (a) wreck the City and (b) render us an international laughingstock.  I urgently believed we needed a candidate who could defeat Ford in 2014, and I wasn’t going to wait for John, who still wasn’t sure if he’d run.  Olivia Chow approached me, she said (a) she wouldn’t run as a Dipper and (b) she’d restore integrity to the Mayor’s Office.  Well, she didn’t do either of those things.  She (and her campaign manager) were a disaster.  She lied about my role.  She favoured the New Democrats over any of the non-Dippers helping her out. When she deservedly finished third, I was long gone, and vowed to never again support a New Democrat.  (I didn’t despise Adrian Dix, by the by, but he too was a terrible candidate.)
10. John Horgan.  John Horgan has made leering, inappropriate remarks about Christy – during the campaign, no less.  He has been a bully and a shouter.  He has been incoherent, policy-wise.  He has no self-control, and he has no understanding of even basic economics – and how to keep the strongest economy in Canada strong.  He would be an unmitigated disaster for British Columbia.

That’s why I don’t support the BC NDP.  That’s why I want Christy Clark’s BC Liberals to win.

And, you know? She just might!

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