The former Minister of Curry in a Hurry should Worry
…because his prospects are blurry.
Jason Kenney, who I genially detest, is apparently heading back to Alberta, because he knows his flavour of conservativism – socially, fiscally and politically antediluvian conservativism – is dead as a proverbial doornail in Ottawa.
He apparently thinks that his political future is found in Alberta. I think he’s wrong about that. Reasons:
- Pretty much everyone – even political adversaries – agree Rachel Notely is doing a good job with a bad hand. Her performance during the Fort Mac fire, in particular, shows that only a fool (cf. Kenney, above) would underestimate her.
- Stephen Harper – and, later, Justin Trudeau – have moved Alberta into the mainstream of Canadian politics. My home province is far, far more diverse and progressive than it was when I was growing up there. Kenney’s style of politics is retrograde everywhere – and in urban Alberta, too.
- The yawning chasm on Alberta’s Right shows no sign of repairing itself anytime soon. The PCs and Wildrose detest each other. How will Jason Kenney bridge that gap that in one election cycle? More to the point, which party does he intend to run? The corrupt, discredited one? Or the one with lumbering dinosaurs in it?
- He’s been in politics a long, long time. People – and people in Alberta in particular – now know who he is in his essence. The defeat of the Conservative Party in 2015 wasn’t Stephen Harper’s alone – it was also a defeat for Kenney and his ilk. Canadians, in Alberta and everywhere, wanted no more of Jason Kenney-style politics.
Will he run anyway? Of course he will. He’s never held a job in the real world, and he thinks he’s a genius.
I therefore look forward to his humiliation in the next Alberta provincial election.
Impressed
I’m not naming names. But I can tell you one ministerial office in Ottawa received one ticket to Obama’s speech.
And you know who they gave it to? Not the Chief of Staff. Not the head of comms or the LA.
They gave it to the Summer intern.
I cannot tell you how great that is. It says plenty about that Minister’s staff – all of it good.
Impressed.
Obama who?
Here are the top online stories for the major media outlets right now:
- Globe: Real estate industry in BC
- Star: billing by doctors
- Post: mass murder in Texas
- Sun: Mississauga house explosion
- Times: Boris Johnson exits
- Any other US media: something stupid Donald Trump said
Rule of thumb: if Ottawa decides something is important, it probably isn’t.
Dumber than a sack of hockey pucks
This Subban trade is the dumbest decision since Harper decided to have a 100-day campaign about a veil worn by two women.
— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) June 29, 2016
We get letters: a fan writes
When Barack comes to town: a highly-scientific poll™
Barack Obama is coming to Canada today. Did you even know that? I had actually forgotten about it, to be honest.
If you were advising Justin Trudeau – or, if you were Justin Trudeau – what would you tell the soon-to-be-departing U.S. president? Vote early, vote often!
[polldaddy poll=9458045]
Canadian comic caption contest!
In this week’s Hill Times: Stephen Harper – with a whimper, not a bang
And so it ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
Late last week, in a secluded part of Centre Block, staff were seen packing up Stephen Harper’s Parliamentary office. Anyone wandering by could see the moving boxes and the packing tape, in plain view. Harper, the twenty-second Prime Minister of Canada, had cast his last vote in the Commons. He was heading home to Calgary.
Harper hadn’t said a word in the Commons since being defeated by Justin Trudeau in the Fall. But he had shown up to vote, plenty of times – more than the NDP’s Tom Mulcair, reportedly. Even after that night when Trudeau had strong-armed the Conservative whip – even when the Liberal Prime Minister had elbowed a female NDP MP in the chest, no less – Harper had kept silent. You can’t picture Brian Mulroney ever exercising that kind of restraint.
And so, he’s going, and will soon to be gone. Harper will resign his Calgary seat over the Summer, and head off to do what former Prime Ministers and Presidents usually do – write memoirs, sit on some boards, give some speeches, play golf together. Sleep in.
Unlike some folks, and certainly unlike many Liberals, I did not detest Stephen Harper. There are ten reasons for this, all of them much more personal than political.
1. When my Dad was dying, he phoned me and my Mom to talk about fathers. He did this despite the fact that Yours Truly had ripped him, on TV and radio and in newspapers, for years. He was kind to my grieving Mom, and I never forgot that.
2. On the aforementioned TV and newspaper and radio and newspaper platforms, I predicted – as did many others – that, with a Parliamentary majority, he would make abortion and gay marriage illegal, he would constitutionalize property rights, and so on. He did none of those things.
3. I, and others, thought he was an admirer of Republican-style manifest destiny – and that he would therefore lead us into illegal wars to curry favour with the likes of George W. Bush. He didn’t do that, either.
4. Unlike some former and present Liberals I will not name, he was always immensely respectful towards my political father, Jean Chrétien, even when Chrétien ran him down in the papers. He told me admired Chrétien’s commitment to Canada, and his discipline, and his fiscal probity. And it showed.
5. One time, I can now reveal, Harper rang me up to talk about ways to prevent some grossly homophobic Jamaican rappers from getting into Canada. His officials had told him there was nothing he could do, and he was unhappy about that. He said I knew something about both popular music and bigotry, and wanted to talk to work on ways to keep these gay-bashers out.
6. Similarly, when I was Chrétien’s Special Assistant in Opposition – and when the neo-Nazi Heritage Front was infiltrating Reform Party riding associations in Toronto – Harper actually told Tom Flanagan to send me their relevant membership lists, so I could tell them who was a suspected Nazi. With Chretien’s approval, I did that. They kicked out the ones I spotted. It impressed both Chrétien and me.
7. As a charter member of the Alberta diaspora, that unkillable Central Canadian insinuation that all Albertans were followers of Jim Keegstra and the Ku Klux Klan always pissed me off. It clearly pissed off Harper, too. But, unlike me, he did something about it: he dragged Alberta into the centrist Canadian political mainstream – paving the way, paradoxically, for the likes of Rachel Notley and Justin Trudeau to later win lots of seats there.
8. Even though I was a dirty rotten Liberal, he twice hired me to be a Ministerial Special Representative on aboriginal issues, which are pretty important to me. (He did likewise with Chretien’s nephew Raymond, too.) Under his watch, spending on aboriginal programs grew, significantly. I discovered Harper wasn’t what some of his detractors said he was, at least in respect of those things.
9. As a war room guy, I always admire a worthy adversary. Stephen Harper was always a worthy adversary. Me and my fellow Grits grossly underestimated him for a decade. We paid the price: in 2006 and 2008 and 2011, he kicked our ass.
10. Finally, I thought he might wreck the place. He didn’t wreck the place. This is still the best country in the world, and I think – if those of us who opposed him are honest with ourselves – he clearly thought so, too.
Per T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men,’ above, the world did not end with Stephen Harper. And, per Eliot’s ‘Prufrock,’ nor was he “full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse,” ever.
Stephen Harper wasn’t obtuse. He was many things, but never that.
Brexit boneheads begrudge bigotry blaming
I love alliterations. So shoot me.
A twat.
…and some people really want to. They – the ones who voted to make Great Britain Not-So-Great anymore – are shocked and appalled, Mr. Speaker, that anyone would ever, ever suggest that (a) they used dog-whistles to win or (b) they have a disproportionately-large number of knuckle-draggers on their side.
So, let’s look at the evidence, shall we?
- When Shahesta Shaitly asked a cabbie in the Midlands at the weekend: “Why did you vote leave?” she was told: “To get you lot out of here.”Her case is unfortunately not unique. It is one of more than 100 reports of racist incidents since the EU referendum that I have collated for the Muslim Council of Britain. The result seems to have unleashed a Pandora’s box of bigotry and Islamophobia – one that will require strong collective action to close.
- Last May UKIP member Ken Chapman, hoping to be elected to Amber Valley Borough Council in Derbyshire, wrote the following post:“islam is a cancer that needs eradicating multiculturism does not work in this country clear them all off to the desert with their camals that’s their way of life.”
- Police believe there has been an increase in hate crimes and community tensions since last week’s referendum. Initial figures show an increase of 57% in reported incidents between Thursday and Sunday compared with the same days four weeks earlier, the National Police Chiefs’ Council said.
- Last year UKIP was forced to distance itself from local council candidate James Elgar after the discovery of tweets like this: #ThingsAsianBoysDo groom and rape underage white girls, stab and rob innocent old white people, bomb innocent white people #EctEctEct [sic]”
- According to reports from the Cambridge News, a number of cards saying “Leave the EU/No more Polish vermin” in both English and Polish were found outside St Peter’s school by teaching assistants and students, including an 11-year-old Polish child, who reported they made him feel “really sad”.Cards bearing the same message were posted around a number of properties, police confirmed.
- More than a hundred incidents of racial abuse and hate crime have been reported since the UK voted to leave the European Union. Many of the alleged perpetrators cited the decision to leave the EU explicitly. One video, purportedly filmed in Hackney on the morning after the referendum, shows a man arguing with someone in a car before yelling: “Go back to your country.”
- Reports of racial abuse on Britain’s streets have spiked following the country’s bitterly fought Brexit referendum, campaigners say. More than 100 alleged hate crimes have been brought to the attention of the Muslim Council of Britain since Friday’s result. Immigration was among the chief concerns of “Leave” voters, according to pollsters, and the “Remain” campaign accused some of its opponents of encouraging racist and xenophobic attitudes. In the wake of the “Leave” victory — 17.4 million votes to 16.1 million — dozens of people posted on social media that they had suffered or witnessed racial abuse by people apparently using the result to legitimize their views.
And so on. There’s plenty more, for those with a stomach for it.
So, to those Brexit types who say that they didn’t make implicit/explicit appeals to bigotry to win – to those who say they weren’t anti-immigrant – I say:
Go tell Ms. Le Pen, and Mr. Trump, and Mr. Putin, and the assorted European neo-Nazis and white supremacists who rallied to your cause because it was anti-immigrant, anti-refugee and pro-racist.
They’ll laugh at you, too.