The Globe and Mail

Monday, May 7, 2012 8:25 AM EDT

With Hollande’s defeat of Sarkozy, France dodges a bullet

On election day in Paris, Place de la Bastille (home of the left) was full and Place de la Concorde (home of the right) was empty. As sure a sign as any that the Socialist Party was about to win the presidency, as it went on to do. François Hollande is the new president of France.

Why did Nicolas Sarkozy lose? He started remarkably well only five short years ago. Sarkozy's 2007 campaign captured a mood in France for a “rupture” from its own economic and social model. France was bored with itself, worried about its economy, tired of riots and debates about accommodating immigrants, and wanted to get on board the global economic bubble then roaring. Sarkozy offered a “hyper-presidency” that would deal with all of those issues and many more.

Elected, Sarkozy showed himself to be a canny political card player. There was, for example, “l'ouverture” – Sarkozy's carefully-targeted effort to dismantle the Socialist Party by recruiting some of its brightest lights into Sarkozy's new right-wing government as ministers and senior officials. This cut the Socialist Party's leadership off at the knees, demoralized its membership, appropriated some of its best talent, reframed Sarkozy as a big-tent president who would govern for all the French – and left him perfectly free to pursue his policies exactly as he intended to do, validated by some of his most dangerous opponents. Demonstrating, as has occurred many times in politics in many countries before and since (in Britain, in the fate of the Liberal Democrats, for example), that weaving opponents into your team is an excellent way to defeat them.

However, the collapse of the world financial bubble and then the socialization of its losses (one of the greatest transfers of wealth from the poor to the rich in world history) removed the raison d’être of the Sarkozy presidency. In this, it can be said that France dodged a bullet. The country was lucky that it elected Sarkozy relatively late in the era of the madness of the rentiers. He didn't have time to turn France into, say, Ireland or Iceland. And so France was spared the worst. Sarkozy then attempted to reframe himself as the opposite of himself, but it never rang true. He was never a credible “social market” builder.

Meanwhile France's social tensions remain unaddressed, as the rise of the National Front demonstrates. And meanwhile, the currently fashionable European response to recession – deflationary fiscal policies that make recessions worse – failed to inspire the French.

All of this being so, it is a testament to Sarkozy's political skills that he clawed back in the last days of this campaign as well as he did.

France has now given itself a “normal” president who is much better equipped to deal with the economic and social realities facing the country. François Hollande has a mandate to end the idea in France that the poor are fed by feeding the wealthy. He has a mandate to look for answers to Europe's economic crisis that don't simply repeat the errors of the 1930s. And he has a mandate to work for social peace – with a big warning about what lies ahead for France if he fails. The populist right will be making its own play to replace Sarkozyism in the French parliamentary elections later this spring.

One last note about this election. As QMI's Francois Bugingo recently reported, the French Socialist Party has a historical relationship with the Parti Québécois. In April 2011, François Hollande's campaign manager, Pierre Moscovici, led a delegation to a PQ convention to re-affirm what Mr. Bugingo refers to in his article as “the traditional relations with Quebec.” On the other hand there is, to understate, not much in common between this new French president and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

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Sunday, April 29, 2012 9:56 AM EDT

Liberals across Canada are being hoist with their own petard

“For 'tis the sport to have the enginer hoist with his owne petar, an't shall go hard. But I will delve one yard below their mines, and blow them to the moon.” – Hamlet, Act 3

“Hoist with your own petard.” Meaning: “Injured by the device that you intended to use to injure others.” – The Phrase Finder

For many years, Liberals have been eager advocates of “strategic voting” – the idea that it makes sense to vote for a party you don't support in order to avoid the election of a party you don't support even more.

A pitch to this effect has been part of the closing argument of every federal Liberal campaign since at least 1993.

Arguably, it was all that Michael Ignatieff had to say (that anyone heard) during the 2011 election. In as many words, his pitch was that only the Liberals can stop the Tories; you don't want the Tories; so you must vote Liberal. There was a red door and a blue door, and those were your only choices.

In my view, in the long term, the political drug that is “strategic voting” has had almost as much to do with the destruction of the federal Liberal brand as the Paul Martin’s 1995 budget and the sponsorship scandal. It reduced one of Canada's great historical legacy parties to a tactic: Tick this box to avoid that box. The federal Liberals had more than that to say about their history, their tradition, their values, and their odd elite interests-brokerage approach to public affairs. But they didn't, which leaves them where they are now. In a poor mathematical position to make federal strategic voting pitches in the future. And with much work to do to reassemble a case for themselves based on anything else.

But there is, possibly, something even more interesting to say about strategic voting. And that is this: Liberal voters seem to be uniquely vulnerable to it.

In 2011, Stephen Harper won his majority in large part by making a direct strategic voting appeal to formerly Liberal voters in suburban Toronto (what another politician likes to think of as “Ford nation”). You only have to look at the map to see how that worked out – an awful lot of suburban Toronto red doors became blue doors.

In 2012, Alison Redford make another direct strategic voting appeal to formerly Liberal voters, centered in Calgary and Edmonton. The Alberta Liberals got 26.4 per cent of the vote in the last election – and only 9.9 per cent last week. There is no doubt this is what saved Premier Redford (the NDP vote under Alberta NDP Leader Brian Mason, on the other hand, improved nicely: 8.5 per cent last time, 9.8 per cent this time).

Meanwhile, the car-crash-that-never-ends that is the premiership of British Columbia’s Christy Clark is now apparently thrashing around to the view that it needs to scrub the Liberal brand off itself, to fight off both a principled and a strategic voting pitch aimed at its voters from both the left (the B.C. NDP) and the right (the B.C. Conservatives).

Conservatives and New Democrats at both the federal and provincial levels have an interesting opportunity to pay the Liberals back in more of their own coin in future elections. The challenge is to do so without being consumed by this tactic. To delve one yard below it, as Shakespeare put it so elegantly, without a fatal over-investment in it.

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Wednesday, April 25, 2012 3:16 PM EDT

The lesson Wildrose’s fate in Alberta teaches us all

Thunder Bay MP Bruce Hyer resigned from the NDP caucus this week for an interesting mix of reasons. He was disappointed he didn’t get appointed to the NDP shadow cabinet. He is concerned the party will reintroduce a long-gun registry. And he rejects, in principle, the idea that the political party whose colours he carried in the last election can tell him what to think, what to say, or how to vote.

Now let’s look at the Alberta election – a true “Dewey beats Truman” fiasco for Canada’s political commentariat, which predicted victory for Wildrose on the basis of the latest crop of junk polls, and then got to cover an impressive (as measured by seats) landslide for the Alberta Progressive Conservatives.

Why did Wildrose lose so convincingly?

An anonymous member of the Wildrose campaign team offered the view, widely quoted, that several “bozo moments” did them in. “Bozo moment” being the kind of disrespectful and divisive shorthand an angry political strategist might use to describe a duly nominated candidate for office who has chosen to think what they want, say what they want, and (presumably) later vote as they want. In the case of Wildrose, that meant a candidate wishing to promote the idea that gay people will burn in lakes of fire, and another who advocated the idea that it is a political advantage to be a Caucasian – statements that, Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith seemed to suggest, sunk her campaign in its last days and thus prevented her team from getting to implement any of their proposals.

And so, in one week, we see played out a – perhaps the – fundamental tension of the Westminster parliamentary system.

Our political system tends towards hyper-centralization, and imposes a discipline on elected representatives that, at least some of them sometimes believe, disrespects and disempowers them. A “crisis of surplus consciousness” can result, in which the few at the top end up with too much to do (and therefore cannot do it well), which the vast majority of other team members end up with too little to do (and aren’t happy about it). This, to be precise, used to be said with reference to the hyper-centralized system in place in the Soviet Union. It could also be said of a number of poorly-led, hyper-centralized private corporations. It may be what parliamentary systems inherently drift into.

But as the Alberta election testifies, our political system also brutally punishes political teams who fail to maintain the tightest possible order in their ranks – at least as far as anyone can see – at every stage of proceedings including elections. “Bozo moments,” policy disagreements, strategy debated in public: Any chink of light is seized on as evidence of unfitness for office.

Team Harper learned this the hard way during the 2004 election and imposed a seamless discipline on their team, which has been widely condemned as another step toward the gutting of our democracy. They were also rewarded with victory in the following election.

Team Wildrose experimented with a little open democracy – and were politically eviscerated, blowing a remarkable opportunity to win office only a few years after their foundation.

It is, I believe, possible to have a respectful, deliberative, democratic political team that then presents a united front – the compromise that seems to work in both opposition and government. It is a balance, Danielle Smith learned this week, that seems to make or break political teams.

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Monday, April 23, 2012 7:58 AM EDT

Why François Hollande won the first round against Nicolas Sarkozy

A party apparatchik, who spent most of his career toiling in obscurity, building his party. A tool of the labour movement and other suspect players who, some argue, must not be allowed near the public purse. A not-entirely-successful dieter and exerciser, as of yet. An instinctive consensus-builder and team-leader, who drew criticism for being too quick to compromise to keep his party united in its darkest moments. A relative unknown who sounds like his predecessor, who he served as a senior adviser.

All of these things have been said about French Socialist Party presidential candidate François Hollande. Which makes him my kind of guy. But notwithstanding all of this (be they flaws or points in favour, depending on your point of view), Hollande has taken a major step toward unseating his populist/conservative rival, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Hollande beat Sarkozy in the first round of the French presidential election Sunday, 28.6 per cent to 27.1 per cent according to the BBC. That makes Sarkozy the Fifth Republic's first sitting president to have failed to poll first when running for re-election.

Hollande and Sarkozy will now duke it one-on-one in a second round, including in a critical nationally televised debate. Anything can still happen. National Front candidate Marine Le Pen did surprisingly strongly in the first round and farther left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon performed less well than expected. It remains to be seen what this means for the second round, which the Socialists have lost after winning first ones before.

But still, Hollande has done very well indeed. His campaign therefore merits careful study. In these times, any social democrat who succeeds in making good progress ridding the world of yet another populist/conservative government merits our respectful attention.

So what did Hollande do?

First, Hollande campaigned on a relatively gutsy platform. It offers a fairly clear choice, within the mainstream of a western industrial democracy, with some impressively clear commitments.

For example, much media coverage has focused on Hollande's proposal to restore fair taxes on high incomes. The details are less important than the victory Hollande scored in how this proposal was debated. It was widely discussed in terms of whether or not to dispense with cadeaux fiscales – fiscal gifts, to the wealthiest of the French – rather than the populist right-wing “smaller government, lower taxes, more freedom” slogans that have delivered none of these things, while building grotesque income inequality here in North America. In short, Hollande found a way to win both the frame and the debate over economic equality.

There is a lot more to like about Hollande's platform. He lays out a detailed job creation program, a commitment to better regulate France’s poorly-supervised banks, and a more balanced approach to trade. He commits to a stronger public pension plan. He promises to end further privatization of hospitals, and to promote better access to health care. He proposes a 20-to-1 cap on the salaries of CEOs in publicly-owned corporations. He makes an unambiguous commitment to withdraw all French troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2012. Clear, focused, unambiguous commitments, that seem to be working for him.

Second, Hollande got lucky.

Politics run on unpredictable clock-spins – economic, political, social, and cultural gears that intersect in different ways at different times. Sometimes they align to the benefit of incumbent governments, as they did in Canada in the spring of 2011. And sometimes not, as in much of Europe at the moment. The European Union is struggling with the consequences of its half-formed currency, over-dependence on bankers and bond dealers to fund public services, and failed experiments with what people on that side of the ocean call “liberalism” (of the 19th century variety).

A good time to be in opposition, going into an election.

Third, Hollande converted his opponent's principal strengths into his principal weaknesses.

Like right-wing populists around the world, President Sarkozy succeeded, for a time, in distracting voters from the core of his economic and social agenda by playing up populist tropes – the police baton for the unruly teenagers in France's hopeless high-rise suburban ghettos; tough laws to order millions of muslim citizens to become more French; well-crafted insults to persuade the French to enjoy life less and to work harder for less income; and a promise of new energy and new vitality, delivered by a new president with all the push and swagger of the nouveaux riche.

So far, Hollande has succeeded in turning both Sarkozy's populism and his style into liabilities. The French seem to be tired of their president's hyper-activity, histrionics and poshness. They may be about to conclude they want a more normal president, who will do what he can to create employment, improve services, make things more fair, and better align what France does overseas with the views of its citizens at home. We'll see if this carries Hollande into the Élysée Palace on May 6. What we can say today is that he is off to an excellent start.

* * * * * * * * * *

I've been away from this column in recent months, busy with a run for the leadership of my own party. I didn't win. But I had a lot of fun, made it to the last ballot, learned a lot, and met an awful lot of nice people. Whatever else we can say about conservatives, the founding one (John A. Macdonald) imagined a remarkable country – an inheritance that all of us in all of Canada's parties and political traditions do well to carry forward. That we are all in our own ways trying to make a wonderful country better is, if you will, an underlying point of unity between all of the partisan political voices you get to read here on the Second Reading blog.

Many thanks to readers who wrote in recent months to encourage me and to offer me your views and your advice. Please stay in touch. I'm also grateful to my ever-patient editors at The Globe and Mail for inviting me to resume these notes.

Brian Topp is a past president and leadership candidate for the New Democratic Party of Canada. He served a stint as national campaign director with NDP leader Jack Layton, and was a senior official in the government of Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow. He was born and raised in Montreal,Quebec.

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Sunday, December 11, 2011 12:11 PM EST

A modest proposal for Harper: Why not ethical landmines?

Arguably, the single worst thing the Harper government has done during its feckless term in office is to walk away from Canada's global responsibility to address climate change.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Liberal predecessors weren't fundamentally better. The Liberals signed the Kyoto treaty with no intention of implementing it.

But Mr. Harper's team is worse, because not only are we continuing to fail to meet our responsibilities, and not only has the government of Canada become a huckster for some of the most carbon-intensive products on sale in the global marketplace, but Mr. Harper and his ministers want us to think this is a principled thing to do – something to celebrate.

The case, wittily concocted by a Sun News television comedian, is that our government's determination to produce ever more carbon and to profit from it is “ethical,” because Canada is a good country. Not like bad countries, like Iran or Saudi Arabia. We're a nice democracy. So any product we produce is “ethical.”

This being so, perhaps when he returns from disgracing our country in Durban, the Environment Minister can be given a new mandate. In addition to being a global salesman for carbon, Peter Kent can take on a new ethical sales job: Let's get into ethical landmines.

Consistent with their vision, the Harper team can next withdraw from the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, also known as the Ottawa Treaty.

After all, if the world’s depots and paramilitaries can’t buy ethical landmines from Canada, they’ll have to buy them from countries like Iran, Burma and China. To the Harper government’s mind, it’s not ethical for a child to be killed by a landmine produced by prison labour, or in a country where women are not allowed to vote. Not when they could be killed by a landmine produced ethically right here in Mr. Harper's Canada.

So then, to perfectly fit the template, the Harper government will need to contrive to send just the basic components of landmines to, say, Texas, for our friends there to assemble into landmines, which can then be resold to us at a handsome profit. The Harper government doesn't believe in processing our resources in Canada. So the ethical thing to do is sell the components overseas and south of the border, to be resold to us as finished products. Which we can then market to the world.

Landmines – the next ethical export of the future. Get to it, Mr. Kent. And then, surely, there's more Mr. Harper and his salesman can do, ethically, with asbestos...

Brian Topp is running for leader of the New Democratic Party

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Monday, November 14, 2011 7:54 AM EST

The Harper government's new best friends: Mao's heirs

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty somewhat undiplomatically tore a strip off the United States last week after the Obama administration decided to put the Keystone pipeline into the deep freeze. And then he made a direct geo-political threat aimed at America, his party's political model. The Keystone pipeline delay, Mr. Flaherty said, “may mean we may have to move quickly to ensure we can sell our oil to Asia through British Columbia.”

In other words, if you won't buy our raw bitumen, we'll sell it to China.

It is a little odd, this business of a Canadian neo-con minister, at the heart of the Harper government, threatening the United States with a closer economic relationship with Communist China. There's going to be a little splainin’ to do at the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. But it does give us the flavour of “oil disease” – of how the vast revenues associated with this resource can pervert even the geopolitical principles of conservative ideologues. There are people in that industry (and their poodles in government) who will do anything to infinitely expand their sales and their profits. Including, apparently, threatening Uncle Sam with a tighter embrace of Mao's heirs.

There is an alternative approach available, one that turns on four words: pacing; value-added; price; and transition.

Pacing: The Keystone pipeline only made sense as a business proposition – it never made sense as an environmental one – if production in the oil sands were to be substantially increased. Keystone wasn't necessary to transport current or even somewhat increased oil-sands production. When filled, it would have doubled bitumen exports to the United States. The pipeline's cancellation is an opportunity to reconsider the pacing of development in the oil sands. And, specifically, to move to a much more considered, deliberate, and unsubsidized pace.

Value-added: The cancellation of the keystone pipeline is an opportunity to ask fundamental questions about its purpose. As in: Why exactly are we proposing to ship raw bitumen to a Texas refinery complex for it to be processed there? As many credible voices have been arguing with increasing force and conviction, Canada is throwing away its economic future when we anchor our economy, our currency and our public revenues on the export of raw unprocessed resources that can be processed here.

Pricing: The cancellation of the Keystone pipeline is an opportunity to revisit an important issue the Government of Alberta attempted to tackle a few years ago, until defeated by “oil disease” – the price at which we are selling this resource. A decision to proceed at a much more deliberate pace creates an opportunity to price our resources, through royalties, at their real value.

Transition: And finally, doing all of this gives us an opportunity to reconsider what we are doing with one-time fossil fuel revenues. For geopolitical, environmental and economic purposes, we would do well to flow a lot more one-time royalty revenue into transition funds, to invest in a new Western Canadian economy that is not dependent on the mining of raw bitumen. One way or another, the world will soon act to dramatically reduce carbon emissions, and so will Canada. If the best hockey players play where the puck is going to be, then the Western Canadian energy industry – and our economy as a whole – need to do the same.

Mr. Flaherty may counter that “transition funds” (on, for example, the Norwegian model) smack of socialism. But given his statements this week, he shouldn't have a problem with that.

A final note. Threats aren't generally a good tool in diplomacy, but if you're going to make one, it needs to be credible. Mr. Flaherty's route to bring bitumen to China is itself – how shall we put this – likely a pipe dream. The proposed “Northern Gateway” pipeline, which would bring bitumen across the Rockies to Kitimat, would have to cross the territories of dozens of first nations, many of whom have never signed a treaty and most of whom are dead set against the project. Over 4,000 Canadians have signed up to testify during hearings about the “Northern Gateway” scheduled for next year, apparently the largest number to ask to speak at such a hearing in our history. There will be no oil sands bitumen flowing to China any time soon. I bet the U.S. government took note of that when its ambassador cabled Mr. Flaherty's comments home, as we'll eventually read in WikiLeaks or one of its successors.

Brian Topp is running for leader of the New Democratic Party

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Monday, November 7, 2011 8:11 AM EST

Harper’s crime bill is government by angry old uncle

In an important article, Globe journalist Kim Mackrael recently called attention to a little-discussed amendment in the Conservative government's omnibus crime legislation. The amendment would eliminate the principle that prison guards must use the “least restrictive measures” required to control inmates.

Ms. Mackrael quoted a number of experts in corrections speaking politely about what a bad idea this would be.

To be specific, the Tories want to amend article 4(d) of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act (1992). The relevant clause establishes the principle “that the service use the least restrictive measures consistent with the protection of the public, staff members and offenders.”

Why do the Tories want to remove this principle? They have been talking to themselves about it for some time. For example, in 2007 a review panel presented a detailed report to then-minister Stockwell Day on corrections issues. Entitled A Roadmap to Strengthening Public Safety, it takes direct aim at the clause in question:

“The panel believes that this principle has been emphasized too much by staff and management of CSC, and even by the courts in everyday decision-making about offenders. As a result an imbalance has been created that places the onus on SCS to justify why the least restrictive measures shouldn't be used, rather than on offenders to justify why they should have access to privileges based on their performance under their correctional plans.”

This past weekend I was out canvassing in Saskatoon. One of the good citizens I encountered on the doorstep was a former senior official at Corrections Canada. Ms. Mackrael's article was on his mind.

“I've spent more time in federal prisons than anyone I know,” he told me. “I've had meetings with prison administrators, and then I've explored ever corner of our prisons right down into the hole. I know what's going to happen if they take that clause out of the Act. What's going to happen is that guards are going to feel free to use more force, a lot more force, to control inmates. There's going to be an enormous rise in violence in our prison system.”

Is this what the Tories want? Is this what Canadians want happening in our prisons? Hard to say, because the Tories don't think they owe Parliament an explanation or a debate on this or any other issue. Instead they are using time allocation to ram a bloated omnibus bill through it without accountability.

Critics have highlighted some of the other issues with the Tory crime package. Some of the proposed minimum sentences are disproportionate and perverse compared to others in the legal system. All evidence from the United States shows that increasing prison populations – the basic goal the Tories are pursuing – leads to more crime. And the federal government is cheerfully creating more prisoners for provincial corrections systems, without providing any funds to house or rehabilitate them. All of this while willfully ignoring the evidence that crime in Canada is already steadily declining.

In all of this, the Conservatives are demonstrating the real character of their government. This is rule by angry old uncle. A character in many families, not without his charm and soft side, who shouts his angry views for the hundredth time, demanding firm measures and an end to many abuses, even if the facts all point the other way.

Unfortunately, the angry old uncles are now in charge of the government of Canada, and our justice system. Much work will be required when they have been defeated to rescind and unwind the damage they are doing. Including, alas, this effort to make some of the worst places you can be in Canada much worse.

Brian Topp is running for leader of the New Democratic Party

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Tuesday, October 11, 2011 8:02 AM EDT

Occupy protests herald a party that’s almost over

Wall Street is “occupied.” What do the occupiers want? Where to begin? How about here: The top 1 per cent income-earners in North America have appropriated most of the wealth created in the past thirty years. But what do they want, those protesters and their sympathizers?

Here's another fact on their minds. Politicians in North America engineered the good fortune of the wealthy through a systematic assault on the family incomes of everyone else. And simultaneously encouraged access to an ocean of cheap and easy credit.

So, while average families haven't seen a real pay raise in more than a generation, they have drifted into a disastrous dependence on debt (higher in Canada than in the United States). Which helped fuel housing bubbles. Followed by a financial services crisis. Followed by a sovereign debt crisis that now threatens the foundations of the world economy.

But why are they interfering with the lineups in front of the latte counters, those protesters? In Spain, unemployment teeters around 25 per cent. Catastrophically higher for young people. That is depression-level unemployment. The number of people living in poverty in the United States has reached record levels.

But why are those people waving those rude signs at our nice banks and brokerage firms? In Israel, the “occupiers” are talking to the right-wing Netanyahu government about the intolerable cost of housing, of food, of utilities, of health care, of everything else needed to live a normal life. But what do they want, those people? It is blindly obvious what the Wall Street occupiers and ordinary people all around the world want.

They want an end to reckless, heedless bingo parlour economics. In which wealth is concentrated into far too few hands. In which people's savings and pensions are funnelled into unproductive financial game-playing instead of into the real economy. In which the Masters of the Universe, there on Wall Street, keep all the winnings on a good day and slip their losses into the public debt on a bad day.

We like to tell ourselves that Canada has avoided the worst of it, despite the best efforts of our governments in recent years. But the income gap between rich and poor is every bit as depressing in Canada as it is in our friend to the south (see here and here).

After a long sleep, the public interest is waking up in North America and around the world.

There are false roads open – like the fantasist right-wing populism of the American Tea Partiers. And there are better roads open – like modern, prudent, determined and fearless social democracy, of the kind Jack Layton was talking about.

Perhaps we will go down that first road, brought to us in Canada in our mild Canadian way by Stephen Harper and his team. Hopefully we will go down the other, on offer in Canada through Mr. Layton's team.

But the Wall Street occupiers are there to let the Wall Street revellers and bonus-hunters know that their own particular party – and the whole approach to government that made it possible in the United States and here in Canada – has just about had its day.

Brian Topp is running for leader of the federal New Democratic Party

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Monday, October 3, 2011 7:56 AM EDT

Canada’s a fit place for art, artists – and the CBC

Trial balloons are the stuff of politics. And Stephen Harper's government floated a pretty big one in recent days – a suggestion that the government is contemplating a 10 per cent budget cut to the CBC.

They flirt outrageously, those two. A funny sort of relationship, in which the public network bends over backward to be fair to the government, including Tory-friendly voices in all of its work. And Mr. Harper's team thanks the CBC through a steady stream of fundraising letters to core Conservative voters, asking for donations to fight back against our public broadcaster and – possibly – to do it harm.

Why would Mr. Harper want to end this seemingly-profitable relationship, through a lethal attack on the CBC's funding? The Conservatives lost their chance at a majority in 2006 over cuts to the arts (and have remained almost Liberal-like in their irrelevance in Quebec ever since).

I think the answer is a philosophic one. The Conservatives just plain disdain Canada's arts and its culture. They are, it would seem, therefore spoiling to return to the file and to pick up where they left off in 2006.

A curious priority for a Heritage Minister who, very commendably, throws Canadian film nights in Ottawa. And for a Prime Minister who loves Canadian television shows (like Murdoch Mysteries, in which he has appeared).

But perhaps the need to get the base angry trumps this. It seems the Conservatives have Canadian culture on their minds as an excellent hot button to press with people of their sort. Thus the big target painted on the CBC (founded, lest we forget, by a Conservative government).

Canada is a cultural exercise of will. A decision by a sugar cube not to dissolve into the cup of hot coffee it finds itself in. Buried under billions of dollars of television, film, books and music dumped into our market for pennies by our best friend to the south, Canadians still find ways to talk to each other about ourselves. To tell our own stories. To read our own books. To sing our own songs. To see our own films on a handful of screens. To marvel at our own stars and poets and dreamers.

In the circumstances we find ourselves in, this will always require acts of collective will. Including, for all its faults, our public broadcaster. In fact, much more needs to be done.

In the meantime, I'm betting Mr. Harper will be surprised – once again – by how strongly Canadians feel about this, should that Queen Mary of a trial balloon turn into a budget measure.

Brian Topp is running for leader of the federal New Democratic Party

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Wednesday, September 28, 2011 3:20 PM EDT

Canada must ensure it tightens the right belts

A spectre is haunting Europe – and the United States. And soon, I submit, it will be here in Canada. That spectre: the proposition that the time has come to stop borrowing billions of dollars every year in order to give it to rich people.

President Barack Obama put this modest proposal into the heart of his fiscal and economic policy last week. He threatened to veto future budget bills that fail to ensure that the wealthiest taxpayers pay at least as high a rate of income tax as their own domestic servants. In this, Mr. Obama is echoing a policy reversal that is gathering steam.

For example, one of the better measures the former British Labour government implemented in its last days was a high-income surtax. The current Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government hasn't touched it – and the British Liberals made it clear at their conference last week (or at least, as clear as that party can ever make things) that they will not permit it to be touched in the years to come.

The time has come to have this debate in Canada. The details of tax policy can be mind-numbing. But the key issues are straightforward and face all industrial democracies in one form or another. To wit:

The recklessly, fecklessly irresponsible Reagan administration set off a round of competitive high-income tax cuts all around the world in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan's own budget director, David Stockman, cheerfully admitted in a candid memoir that the arguments used to justify this policy were baseless.

As indeed they proved to be. Instead of increasing revenues by cutting high income taxes, as promised, American conservatives tipped the United States into a permanent structural deficit – briefly mitigated by Bill Clinton’s administration, and then made worse by George Bush.

The harvest is a multi-trillion dollar public debt, accumulated even during periods of economic growth. Sapping the ability of the American government to respond to recession and economic shock – like the shocks facing the world economy today. In the process, as intended, we have witnessed on of the greatest transfers of wealth from the poor to the rich in world history.

Not in Canada? Like all other industrial economies, Canada foolishly mirrored American tax policy and has paid many of the same prices. The Conference Board of Canada recently reported that the gap between low and high-income earners is every bit as striking in Canada as in the United States. In our modest Canadian way, we too run structural deficits to pay for annual tax giveaways to those among us who need help the least.

Mr. Reagan's tax policies belong in his museum. If these times call for belt-tightening – a highly debatable proposition, to say the least – then let's start among those with the largest belts. A good place would be with a new top-tier income tax bracket, and a careful look at loopholes and giveaways that embarrass even American billionaires – some of whom are now leading the growing chorus for change.

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