It’s a bit of Kremlinology admittedly, and therefore an inexact science. But that photo of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Toronto Mayor Rob Ford? It’s a shocker.

To some of us, it was astonishing. Not because they have differing ideologies, of course. Both men are hardcore Conservatives. Not because there is a personal animus between the pair. Harper has previously attended Ford family barbecues to sing the mayor’s praises — and the mayor, for his part, hero-worships Harper.

Not because Harper was in Toronto to pledge dollars for Ford’s much-trumpeted subway extension to East Toronto. Harper has long enabled Ford’s subway fixation.

Not because Ford looks — as always — like a man out of place and time, flushed and staring off into space while Harper spoke.

No, the Harper-Ford photo was surprising because it happened at all.

Toronto’s mayor, as the entire planet knows by now, has been in a spot of trouble for the past few months. A Toronto newspaper and a U.S. website alleged, as fact, that they had seen a video of Ford smoking crack cocaine.

Lots of things happened after that shocker, but one thing — tellingly — didn’t happen: Ford suing the news organizations in question.

Falsely alleging a crime is the most serious form of libel. But Ford didn’t sue.

If he’d done so and won, he’d capture one of the biggest libel judgments in Canadian history. But he didn’t.

That fact, alone among many facts in the sad Rob Ford saga, said plenty.

It suggested the allegations about a crack video would remain, dogging Ford at every turn. Politicians — even fellow Conservatives — therefore did all they could to avoid being photographed with Ford.

That all ended with the Harper-Ford get-together.

There is no way on God’s green earth — none — the RCMP, and/or the Canadian law enforcement/intelligence community, would have let Harper get that close to Ford if the latter was facing an imminent criminal charge, or proof of involvement in a serious crime.

The RCMP’s Protective Policing Service is sworn to protect the prime minister in every way.

Under Harper, the Prime Minister Protection Detail has ballooned in size. New weapons, big armoured-plated vehicles and many more gun-toting Mounties are a presidential-style hallmark of the Harper era.

Most significantly, however, its mandate has remained protecting the prime minister “at all times,” in public and private. And, “the RCMP continuously assesses the security requirements, and as a matter of practice makes recommendations to the prime minister with respect to the effective delivery of security measures.”

The RCMP aren’t perfect. They have, in the past, let Harper get too close to some bad apples — most notoriously accused fraudster Arthur Porter and guilty-pleading money launderer, Nathan Jacobson.

But, since the debacle surrounding an assassination attempt on Jean Chretien in 1995, they have done a pretty good job.

So why would the Mounties allow Stephen Harper anywhere near Rob Ford?

Because they have formed the opinion that, lawsuits or not, the infamous crack video is — as its owner later told that same Toronto newspaper and U.S. website — “gone.”

Pictures say more than words. The Harper-Ford picture says plenty.

Namely, the video is gone, baby, gone.

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As an enthusiastic Kremlinologist, I devote my entire column to it in tomorrow’s Sun papers.

What’s your take?  Vote now, vote often!

 

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We kid you not: The unveiling of a policy is more challenging than actually coming up with one.

Writing up a political party’s policy manual is uncomplicated. Simply lock up a few of the party’s brightest folks in a room, and don’t let them out until they come up with something good.

The leader will look it over, and so will his or her advisers. A few members of caucus will peek at it. Occasionally, the political party will get the policy costed, and then it’s off to the printers. Easy-peasy.

Deciding when to release it, and how to release it? Not so easy. Hard, even.

The most successful policy document in the history of the world was the Liberal Party’s Red Book.

During the 1993 federal election campaign, the entirety of the governing Conservative party’s strategy was this: Call Jean Chretien a big dummy. Oh, and looks funny. That too.

Those of us who worked for Chretien knew he was smarter than all of us put together. But putting him out on the hustings to claim he spoke fluent Russian, or insist that he was a world-famous academic? Well, that was what the Conservatives were already saying about their leader, Kim Campbell. (Both untrue.)

So we put out the Red Book. It was 112 pages long, it was bursting at the seams with ideas, and it provided an effective rebuttal to the Conservatives’ nasty insinuations.

“I’ve got the team, I’ve got the plan,” Chretien would say, over and over, at every whistle-stop along the way to a massive parliamentary majority.

The debate about when to release the thing went on almost as long as the writing of it. All at once? In pieces? Before the election? In week one? In Ottawa, or elsewhere?

Chretien made the final decision, appropriately. It was released 20 years ago this week, and 11 days after the campaign began.

We printed up thousands of copies, and they were all gone by lunchtime. Bureaucrats figured we were going to win, and they wanted to get a head start on their homework.

Back when he was a Reform Party guy, meanwhile, Stephen Harper was persuaded to write the party’s now-infamous Blue Book. (Blue Book? Red Book? Not very imaginative, eh?)

Harper’s slender manual had a problem, right from the get-go: It provided concrete proof that the fledgling party was — if not bigoted — pretty darn close.

It opposed gay rights. It opposed bilingualism. It opposed multiculturalism. It opposed everything!

Most famously, Harper’s little book declared that the Reformers opposed anything that would “alter the ethnic makeup of Canada.”

Hmm. That gem was widely, and accurately, interpreted to mean that the Reformers wanted to keep Canada as white as possible. Not good.

The content of the Blue Book was problematic enough, of course. But the timing of its release was just as bad: It came out in mid-1991, and we Grits had a field day with it for two full years before the election.

It gave us plenty of time to spook moderate conservatives into voting for us — which they did, faithfully, for a decade.

Justin Trudeau, the guy who hopes to one day replicate Chretien’s success — you know, a majority Liberal government (or two, or three) — has the same sort of dilemma.

Release a bunch of ideas before the election, and become a human pinata, like Harper did? Or wait until the election, like Chretien did?

The Conservatives, who have been warily eyeing the new Liberal leader’s popularity, want everyone to believe that Trudeau is an idiot. Aided and abetted the Parliamentary Press Gallery, they are pushing for Trudeau to release every single one of his policies right now.

The Cons won’t, however. Nor will NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair. So Trudeau shouldn’t either.

Our advice: Wait until voters are paying attention. Right now, they ain’t.

We kid you not.

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…would you announce you are going to make available your one remaining asset for free?

Boy, those big corporate bosses sure are smart. Capitalism is in great hands.

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Nice story, nicely done. Good on the PCs, NDP and Libs.

The MPP who got this ball rolling, however, has not gotten any credit, and he deserves it.  He’s Steve del Duca, and he was drawing people’s attention to the Parti Quebecois’ racist “Charter” many weeks ago, pretty much before anyone else in English Canada.

I’m glad that Monte is getting lots of press about it.  But it was Steve who saw this problem first, and I plan to write a column about him (and other like-minded folks) soon.

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Here.

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He’s a Jesuit, natch.  I was taught by Jesuits.

A quote to the gladden the heart of any modern Catholic:

“Pope Francis is warning that the Catholic Church’s moral edifice might “fall like a house of cards” if it doesn’t balance its divisive rules about abortion, gays and contraception with the greater need to make the church a merciful, more welcoming place for all.

Six months into his papacy, Francis set out his vision for the church and his priorities as Pope in a remarkably candid and lengthy interview with La Civilta Cattolica, the Italian Jesuit magazine. It was published simultaneously Thursday in other Jesuit journals, including America magazine in the U.S.

In the 12,000-word article, Francis expands on his ground-breaking comments over the summer about gays and acknowledges some of his own faults. He sheds light on his favourite composers, artists, authors and films (Mozart, Caravaggio, Dostoevsky and Fellini’s La Strada) and says he prays even while at the dentist’s office.

But his vision of what the church should be stands out, primarily because it contrasts so sharply with many of the priorities of his immediate predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI. They were both intellectuals for whom doctrine was paramount, an orientation that guided the selection of generations of bishops and cardinals around the globe.

Francis said the dogmatic and the moral teachings of the church were not all equivalent.

“The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently,” Francis said. “We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.”

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It’s brilliant.

I love the use of funny graphics (although not the crypto-racist “gypsy” designation, dating one of the Romani people, as I do).

Personally, I acknowledge that I had totally amazing parents, and was given plenty of opportunity.  But I still was required to work at McDonald’s at age 15 if I wanted spending money, and I still had to take out lots of student loans to get through university.

My Dad also gave me great career advice, free of charge, which I heeded.  If you are deciding on a career for yourself – and I was, eyeballing law and/or journalism at the time – do your best to make sure they aren’t career paths leading to a dead end, he said.  So, after putting in some time at the Calgary Herald and Ottawa Citizen (and not because I foresaw the Internet or whatever), I figured the traditional media was an industry going down, not up.  Same with law: the law schools were handing out way too many diplomas, and – from my perch at the Toronto and Ottawa law firms where I toiled – lawyers weren’t heeding the complaints clients were making, increasingly, about huge fees.  Too many lawyers, not enough clients: not good.

Generation Y, here’s my advice to you, gratis: you are indeed special, but that does not relieve you of the obligation to work your ass off.  Nor should you ignore the warning signs all around you: that is, if something seems like it’s too easy, that’s because it probably is.

Do what makes you happy, and do what you’re good at.  That way, you’ll be happy to come into work, and you’ll frankly be amazed that someone wants to pay you to do something you love.

Oh, and get your head out of your ass, too.  It’s a tough old world, and it doesn’t take prisoners.

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Quote:

“…Described by publisher Harper Collins as a “candid memoir,” the book is just one part of a carefully planned year-long strategy developed by Chow and her advisers to win the next mayor’s race and oust Rob Ford from office.

 

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