A message from daughter to each one of you

We are not a country.

That is the only conclusion that can be reasonably reached, when what is happening in Attawapiskat is happening again. Suicides, and suicide attempts, in numbers that leave you without words.  Or should.

When the Attawapiskat stories started to break over the weekend – with their bleak, black, grinding sameness – I came to the conclusion that there are now only two things that will truly change all this. One, the police start investigating it, and some people – the ones responsible, as well as the ones who have been irresponsible – get thrown in jail. Or legislatures get shut down, literally, until a cabinet minister or two is forced to resign.

I have written about this subject before, more than once. And, yes, I am biased, because I am so proud to be a father to a citizen of the Carcross-Tagish First Nation. But I am so fucking fed up with these serial horrors, and nothing ever changing.

My daughter, meanwhile (and typically) is much more gentle than me. I encourage you to read what she says, and the Boyden too.

And then I encourage you to push, once and all, for real and meaningful change.  Because, until we do, we will never be a real country.

We will only be complicit.

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Going neg works

From YouTube:

From the New York Times:

But despite claims that campaign advertising has lost its potency, there is growing evidence that negative ads still work — and that they are beginning to take their toll on Mr. Trump.

Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco who tracks campaign advertising, pointed to Wisconsin as a place where the ads, paired with a focused message, a smaller field and a persuadable electorate, had an effect.

“Negative ads are never a silver bullet,” Mr. Goldstein said. “What negative ads in particular do is allow people to introduce or amplify messages that are out there with movable people.”

From one of my books on the subject:

…just because someone tells you something is negative campaigning doesn’t mean that it is. Negative ads and negative campaigns have been defined in so many different ways that no one is quite sure what “negative” means anymore. What too many people seem to accept, however, is that negative politics is bad for democracy. It isn’t.

One of the better studies in this area is by the Annenberg Campaign Mapping Project (ACMP). ACMP divided campaign discourse into three types: advocacy, which are arguments in favour of a politician’s position; contrast, which are arguments contrasting two or more political choices; and attack, which are arguments critical of an opponent or the opponent’s position on something. Only the last type can be fairly seen as negative, but all three are often lumped together as just that. It is worth remembering that the Annenberg study found that attack ads actually contain a far greater percentage of “policy words” and more issue content than contrast or advocacy ads. And a 1998 national U.S. poll, also by Annenberg, concluded that voters regard contrast ads as “responsible” and “useful.”

So what’s negative about any of that? Nothing. Reporters (who are more negative in a day than you will be in a lifetime) like to call tough campaign messages negative because they prefer to report on conflict not agreement. Political opponents like to call the other side’s ads negative because they know voters believe they don’t like negative ads, and they hope to win support by condemning the opposition’s use of them. Don’t believe the hype. Most of the time, when you hear a politician is being negative, it’s not true. They’re merely being political.

As I wrote in this space some time ago, going neg on Trump (and anybody, really) would work. And it has worked.

Oh, and any Liberal who has persuaded themselves that Justin Trudeau wasn’t brutal with his two opponents in all of the televised leaders’ debates in the 2015 federal election? You’re dreaming in technicolour. Trudeau kicked the living Hell out of Messrs. Harper and Mulcair, over and over.

And they’re now gone, and he isn’t.


In this week’s Hill Times: the NDP gives the rest of us a lesson in brutality and betrayal

Spare a thought, this morning, for Tom Mulcair.

Before Sunday, no one – not even the NDP leader – knew his fate. Before Sunday, before New Democrats brutally passed judgment on Mulcair’s leadership at their weekend gathering in Edmonton, no one knew what to expect.

But 52 per cent? And here I thought Liberals were vicious.

The assembled Dippers having summarily dismissed Mulcair, they now collectively face the prospect of a leadership race that will be divisive (at a time when they clearly need to unite) and expensive (at a time when the bottom has fully fallen out of their fundraising efforts). They are leaderless, and they have no obvious successor to Mulcair.

But they probably had no choice. If the NDP had decided to keep Mulcair around, he would have no longer been Angry Tom: he would have become Wounded Tom, bleeding all over the place, like in Polanski’s Macbeth. The mutineers would have continued their mutiny, meanwhile, and the media would have continued to delightedly document the ongoing rebellion – because, as is well-known, those of us in the media see our role as coming down from the hills to shoot the wounded.

Either way, it was going to be messy. Flush him, and end up leaderless, penniless and directionless. Keep him around, and it’s Mulcair as Julius Caesar – with Peggy Nash, the Canadian Labour Congress and some young Quebec New Democrats swapping the role of Brutus.

Having been through a decade or so of Liberal Party leadership wars, with myriad scars to show for it, let me offer my socialist pals three sage pieces of advice. As they sit and contemplate their future, this cold April morn, they need to reflect on certain hard truths. Here goes.

One, Tom Mulcair made some mistakes, sure. He embraced the losing electoral strategy of Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath and Toronto mayoral candidate Olivia Chow: he moved to the ideological Right. On deficits, on defence, on virtually any issue, the New Democrat leader didn’t sound like a traditional New Democrat. In his mad dash to get to the centre, he left behind his bewildered NDP voters, who accordingly wandered over to the more-progressive Trudeau Liberals.

But, guess what, NDP caucus, and NDP candidates and NDP core? You enthusiastically applauded all that, every step of the way. You didn’t say a word – not a single word – objecting to any of it when you could have. You, like Mulcair, had witnessed Rachel Notley’s rush to the centre, and her resulting historic victory. And you figured you could do the same thing federally. You figured wrong.

So, did Tom Mulcair snatch defeat from the proverbial jaws of victory? For sure. But so did you, Team Orange. So did you. Your fingerprints are all over the crime scene, too.

Second piece of advice: as Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us, when you strike at the King, you must kill him. On Sunday, the NDP did that.

To succeed, half-measures won’t ever do. You can’t do what Nash, the CLC et al. were doing, which was try and nibble their beleaguered leader to death, like a gaggle of geese. If you decide to execute the monarch, get everyone onside, then swiftly march the King out to the village square and straight to the gallows. Don’t hesitate or prevaricate.

And, per Emerson, make sure you do the job right the first time. In Edmonton – to everyone’s shock – the peace-loving New Democrats did that.

Jean Chretien, who I proudly served (and arguably still do), is one tough SOB. Get in his way, and you’ll get the Shawinigan Handshake. Way back when the Martin mutineers were gathering out at shabby hotels near Toronto’s airport, secretly plotting to overturn the election result and replace the man who millions of Canadians had just handed a big majority, they forgot one key fact: Jean Chretien doesn’t respond well to threats.

If the Martinettes had been respectful, and given my boss the time he deserved to make an exit on his own terms, he would have departed sooner than later. But, instead, they disrespected him – and he gave them the Shawinigan Handshake. Their leadership reviews and Gomery Commissions and anonymous leaks came to the naught. Chretien took much longer to leave than he’d planned, and the Martin-led Liberal Party would promptly commence a decade in the wilderness.

And therein lies the third piece of advice, Dipper friends: when you start down this path – with the recriminations, and the bitterness and the finger-pointing and blame-shifting – you usually end up with a plateful of cold ashes and bad memories. Generally, all this infighting leaves voters asking one simple and salient question: if they can’t manage their own affairs, how can I trust them to manage the country?

As he contemplates retirement this morning, spare a thought, then, for Tom Mulcair.

With the outcome of the vote in Edmonton, he has obviously lost.

But the New Democrat mutineers have lost, too.  They just don’t know it yet.


And here I thought Liberals were vicious

Fifty-two per cent. Wow.

Quick reactions, stream of unconsciousness:

  • Justin Trudeau probably wanted to keep Thomas Mulcair around. The next guy/gal may steal back what Trudeau took from the NDP in 2015. 
  • The Conservatives need the Dippers to have a stronger leader. Maybe they’ll get one, now. 
  • By staying on a bit longer, Mulcair gets his six best years for his pension, no? 
  • So much for that orange breakthrough in Quebec. That’s over. The Bloc will be smiling. 
  • Et tu, Stephen Lewis?
  • The Leap Manifesto is a lengthy suicide note. 
  • Knifed by the very people who defended his every word six months ago. 
  • Wow. 

What do you think, folks?


Tomorrow’s Boston Globe, foretelling the future

It’s to match their anti-Trump editorial inside.

Could it ever happen? Of course it could. Trump has shown us all that many, many Americans are in a decidedly conservative mood. They will never vote for a guy from Vermonet who calls himself a socialist. Sorry, but they won’t. 

Want this front page to be real, America? Pick Sanders as the Democratic nominee. 

  


Catholic church becoming more, well, catholic

“Catholic,” as I am sure you know, means “universal.” That is, it is supposed to embrace everyone, everywhere – in every circumstance. Universal.

My Pope – I feel safe, for the first time in my life, using a possessive in that way – apparently agrees:

ROME — In a broad proclamation on family life, Pope Francis on Friday called for the Roman Catholic Church to be more welcoming and less judgmental, and he seemingly signaled a pastoral path for divorced and remarried Catholics to receive holy communion.

The 256-page document — known as an apostolic exhortation and titled “Amoris Laetitia,” Latin for “The Joy of Love” — calls for priests to welcome single parents, gay people and unmarried straight couples who are living together.

“A pastor cannot feel that it is enough to simply apply moral laws to those living in ‘irregular’ situations, as if they were stones to throw at people’s lives,” he wrote.

I don’t think the document is as positive as the Times report suggests it is, in respect of LGBT people – but give this Pope some more time, he will get there.  After all: he has moved the Church further in the three years of his papcy than it had moved in the 300 years that preceded his arrival.

As a divorced Catholic, I’m happy to see a Pope who finally gets it.  In effect, he is encouraging some creative priest-shopping: find one who will listen to you, and who will act.  (Can such priests be found? Well, yes: I was married by a gay priest who assisted young women with unwanted pregnancies.  And he later died of AIDS. So, yes.)

The Church, as noted, is supposed to be universal.  Pope Francis is making that word finally mean something to those of us who have been waiting.  Thank God, as they say.