Thursday, September 2, 2010 3:11 PM EDT
Who's afraid of Rob Ford?
I have to admit, I was puzzled when I saw this story in the Star over the weekend.
I don't doubt that many provincial Liberals are aghast at the idea of Rob Ford as mayor of Toronto. And I know that a good number of those Liberals are, to varying degrees, helping out George Smitherman.
But the notion that they're panicking about the impact a Ford win would have on their own chances in next year's provincial election is a bit dubious.
Sure, a few Liberals might worry about a Conservative "beachhead" in Toronto, as one unnamed source told the Star. But most strategists, Liberal and Conservative alike, would tell you that a Ford win would hardly be a "disaster" for Dalton McGuinty.
From the Premier's perspective, it might well be preferable to a win by Smitherman.
The important thing to remember here is that there will be nearly a year between this year's municipal election and next year's provincial one - more than enough time for the next mayor's honeymoon to wear off.
That seems an excellent prospect with Ford in particular, whose track record suggests there'd be all kinds of foibles during his first months in office. At best, it would be obvious by October 2011 that he couldn't do all the things he said he would do, at least not as painlessly as he said he would do them.
It's possible that Ford would get the public back on his side later in his mandate. But I'd be shocked if there wasn't some degree of backlash early on - a backlash that could make people in the Toronto area more wary of change, not more inclined to embrace it.
Conversely, if Smitherman is elected, there's a good chance that the change dynamic - which already seems to be pretty strong - will grow stronger.
For one thing, it won't have been sated by Ford. Meanwhile, Smitherman will be seen as a McGuinty proxy. And when he doesn't have all the answers for the city's problems, let alone has foibles of his own, there will be an even stronger sense of Liberal fatigue.
Again, none of this will dissuade many provincial Liberals from working against Ford. But that decision will have more to do with their antipathy toward him, or in some cases their loyalty to Smitherman, than with any broader strategic goal.
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Wednesday, August 18, 2010 11:51 PM EDT
Making sense of McGuinty's cabinet tweaks
I'm away from Queen's Park – because provincial politics does occasionally happen elsewhere in the province, too – so haven't been directly covering Dalton McGuinty's cabinet shuffle. But I do have a few quick thoughts on it:
» The most substantive change is probably the splitting of Energy and Infrastructure, and frankly it should have happened a long time ago. MEI was a super-ministry created to keep George Smitherman occupied, and by most accounts it was too much juggling even for him. The infrastructure side has badly suffered, impeding the government's ability to move forward with capital projects.
The Liberals' mistake, aside from creating MEI in the first place, was not splitting it last winter when they named Brad Duguid as Smitherman's long-term replacement. Now it looks like Duguid is being punished by losing a chunk of his responsibilities, when that doesn't actually seem to be the intention. Although the Liberals have all kinds of energy problems, very few of them are of Duguid's making. But at least as he tries to sort them out, he won't also be distracted by a whole other file.
» As for those who really are being demoted, John Gerretsen is the most obvious. That's getting a mixed reaction from Liberals, some of whom think he's just been left holding the bag for the eco-fees fiasco after an otherwise solid if unspectacular stint as environment minister. But McGuinty evidently felt it necessary to show that "bad mistakes have consquences," as one senior Liberal put it to me on Tuesday night, and moving Gerretsen was the easiest way to prove that.
Less obvious, but as far as I can tell not much less of a demotion, is Jim Bradley going from Municipal Affairs and Housing down to Community Safety. The reasons for this one are less clear, but there have been rumblings around Queen's Park that Bradley – despite his reputation as a Liberal stalwart – hasn't been a team player. One way or another, he seems to have gotten on the wrong people's nerves.
» Glen Murray's early months as a cabinet minister will be interesting to watch. Research and Innovation is not as senior a posting as some had expected, and as he may have hoped for, but it seems a decent enough fit. Murray is nothing if not an ideas guy, and he'll get to push forward various knowledge-economy schemes here.
The open question is what he'll be like around the cabinet table. Murray has never served in a cabinet before, and his background is as a municipal politician – where, as mayor of Winnipeg, his voice was the most important one. That won't be the case as a fairly junior minister. So while he's a very interesting guy to have a conversation with, he has the potential to get on his colleagues' nerves if he does more talking than listening.
» This is admittedly a pet peeve. But it baffles me why – if the government was in the mood to split up ministers' portfolios – aboriginal affairs remains under Chris Bentley's watch. The Attorney-General can talk all he wants about his commitment to the file, and he may well be sincere. But there's no way he can give it the attention a full-time minister would.
» It's easy to second-guess cabinet compositions, when you don't have to worry about all the dynamics at play – from regional representation to hurt feelings. But the one big mistake, it seems to me, was not finding a way to get Yasir Naqvi in there.
Most everyone in Liberal circles thinks Naqvi has a bright future. But if the Liberals lose next year's election, he'll go into the long slog of opposition with zero cabinet experience. McGuinty may not want to consider that possibility, but he's doing his party a disservice by not helping ensure there are people well-positioned to rebuild it if and when the time comes.
Monday, July 26, 2010 6:15 PM EDT
Three cheers for a hidden agenda!
Among some commentators, a recent Economist article is being taken as evidence that the federal government's census changes are nothing to get excited about, because they're not a unique phenomenon.
For various reasons, a bunch of European countries stopped doing the census a while ago. And if the moderately libertarian Economist recognizes that censuses are inefficient, and have become too sweeping in their questions, then why shouldn't Ottawa reach the same conclusion?
That would be a great argument, but for one small problem: It only makes sense if one assumes that Stephen Harper's Conservatives are going about a census scale-back in a roundabout and rather duplicituous fashion - and that this is somehow a good thing.
As of right now, the government hasn't announced that it will either eliminate the census or reduce the scope of its questions. Really, all the Tories are ostensibly planning to do is to make it a much bigger waste of time, energy and resources, by leaving it up to Canadians whether or not they want to complete its longer section.
Any parts of a census that are voluntary are worse than useless, because they're certain to be skewed. Nobody involved in public policy, private business or most anything else is going to mistake a self-selecting sample for being representative of the entire population. But a government agency will nevertheless go through the pointless exercise of mailing long-census forms to fully a third of households (more than have received them previously), then pore over the meaningless data that it creates and release some misleading information.
The only way this makes any sense, at least from a small-c conservative perspective, is if the government is deliberately turning the census into a joke as a precursor to ending it entirely.
Even if you think the census is an antiquated method of collecting data, you'd have to concede that would be a pretty dubious way of getting rid of it - particularly on the part of a governing party that's invested so much effort in discrediting the notion of a "hidden agenda."
I don't use that term lightly, because it's been thrown around so much over the years that it's become a bit of a joke. But it would be easier to brush it off if Stephen Taylor - who tends to have his ear to the ground in Conservative circles, and is not exactly a renegade - weren't popping up on the National Post's website arguing that making the long-form voluntary represents "the initial stages of dealing a huge blow to the welfare state."
Now, you may agree with Taylor that Canada should be more committed to "individual initiative," and that the best way to have less "collective dependence" is to stop collecting data that allows governments to target their spending. But that's a far cry from changing the census solely to avoid Canadians being forced to answer questions about their lives, which is how the government has sold it. For that matter, it's also a far cry from what The Economist is advocating, which is that data be collected through more modern methods - not that we avoid collecting it altogether.
Maybe Taylor is freelancing his views, and maybe other commentators are giving the Tories too much credit for having a long-term plan to move away from the census. Maybe it really is just a goofy decision with no real value, small-c conservative or otherwise. But either way, it shouldn't be mistaken for the far more straightforward decisions that have been made in other countries.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010 12:18 PM EDT
'Thugs and hooligans,' the sequel
I won't belabour the point. But having lamented the juvenile way that Tim Hudak approached the concerns over security measures during the G20, I'd be remiss if I didn't note that his federal cousins aren't coming off a whole lot more sophisticated. (Dalton McGuinty's provincial Liberals, incidentally, aren't much better - though their lack of seriousness is reflected more in an unwillingness to engage on the issues, rather than a kneejerk attack on anyone who dares question the police.)
Admittedly, the federal Conservatives are responding to an opposition that's perfectly capable of oversimplifying matters itself, as opposed to taking unprompted swipes at any and all civil liberties advocates. But as Kady O'Malley noted in a committee live-blog that really is a must-read - that is, unless you want to avoid getting thoroughly depressed about the state of our democracy - Stephen Harper's MPs seemed to be reading from the same talking points as Hudak.
To review, Hudak is a provincial opposition leader, and even many supporters of his party will acknowledge that his Toronto Sun op-ed was beneath him. These are the people running the country. And they seem not the slightest bit more interested in taking seriously the fundamental questions that have been raised about the balance between liberties and security.
It would be nice to think that, once the theatre is over, some of these people are at least a little bit troubled by what their jobs involve.
Monday, July 12, 2010 10:51 PM EDT
The Supercorp 'announcement'
If you read the Toronto Star's version of events, you might be under the impression that Dwight Duncan spontaneously called me over the weekend to announce that he'd decided not to go ahead with Supercorp - all because of the massive pressure the Star had been putting on him.
Sorry, but it didn't quite work that way.
Much as I like the idea of ministers calling me up whenever they have something to say, Duncan's call wasn't unsolicited. And what he told me wasn't a shock.
I'd been hearing for a couple of weeks that the asset-sale scheme was more or less dead, but there were too many conflicting accounts to be totally sure. By the end of last week, having gotten confirmation from several reliable sources, I was finally ready to write that story. And before I did so, I contacted the appropriate people in the government to give them a chance to comment.
That was on Saturday. On Sunday, rather than leaving it to anonymous sources to tell the story, Duncan gave me an interview so he could give his version. And hence I wound up scrapping the original version of what I was writing, and doing a more straightforward piece quoting the Finance Minister.
I'm pretty sure this is more sausage-making detail than most readers are especially interested in. But knowing how the story actually played out, I felt compelled to correct the record.
Update: The latest version of the Star's story seems to have dropped the bit about Duncan calling the Globe, which is appreciated.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010 2:37 PM EDT
Tim Hudak cops out
I wouldn't have expected Tim Hudak to put forward a really nuanced post-G20 treatise on the balance between security and civil liberties. That's not the way opposition politics tends to work.
Still, I would have expected something a little more sophisticated than this.
The Conservative Leader’s op-ed in Tuesday’s Toronto Sun came off like something on that paper's letters page, or like a transcript of a kneejerk call to a talk-radio station.
It's not that Hudak thinks violent criminals should be prosecuted, though I'm unclear who he thinks he's debating on that front. It's not even that he manages to work in "hooligans" five times, and "thugs" another three, which offends me as a writer if not a reader.
What bothers me is that those who dare complain about any police conduct whatsoever are dismissed as "usual-suspect special interest groups" engaged in an "orchestrated attempt ... to demonize our police forces."
Those nefarious "special interests," I suppose, would include Western Standard bloggers who complain that they were harassed by police without cause. Not to mention diners who apparently were handcuffed in a cage overnight because they left The Keg at the wrong moment. And photographers from the notoriously left-wing National Post.
Even when Hudak passingly takes aim at the secret law that didn’t exist, he lays all the blame – that is to say, the little bit he bothers ascribing – with the province.
For reasons I’ve explained at considerable length over the past nine or ten days, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals certainly deserve any hit they take on that front. But it’s a little absurd not to lay any responsibility at all with a police force that asked for a law, proceeded to misinterpret and misrepresent it, and then failed to publicly correct the record when it was informed of its mistake.
It would be perfectly reasonable to argue that police should be given some benefit of the doubt on their controversial behaviour over the course of the G20 weekend, and to express sympathy for the very difficult position they were put in. But Hudak went a step further, effectively arguing that if you defend your civil liberties – or even talk about them - you’re no better than the idiots who were smashing up storefronts.
Monday, July 5, 2010 4:43 PM EDT
Why the 'five metres' mattered
Although it got a more positive response than I'd expected, a few people have asked me why I spent so much time last week covering the "five-metre" law that didn't really exist. After all, it wasn't what was used in most of the dubious arrests during the G20, which happened much further away from the security perimeter.
In her Saturday column, Christie Blatchford more or less summed up that line of thinking (though I have no idea if it was even remotely directed at me):
...in Toronto Star lingo, since “the sweeping powers” granted the police via the “secret” law saw them, according to Toronto Chief Bill Blair, arrest exactly one (1) person under the temporary regulation to the Public Works Protection Act, isn’t the angst-ridden, hyperbolic debate rendered, as someone brighter than me remarked recently, nothing but an intellectual exercise?
It would quite one thing if the 1,000 folks who were detained on G20 weekend were detained under the temporary regulation. The discussion would be meaningful.
But when it’s all said and done, it will turn out that most of those detained were arrested for breach of the peace or to prevent a breach of the peace, which is an arrest authority, not a criminal charge.
In my view, it’s a vile authority too, generally speaking easily misused by police, and it may have been misused here as well.
But the point is, it wasn’t under the new secret sweeping power, which was only partly secret and not very sweeping. It was under long-established common-law police authorities, such as arresting people for breach of the peace or to prevent a breach of the peace that has yet to take place, that most people were picked up.
You want to be angry about something, be angry about that.
Minor quibbles aside (it seems likely to me that at least two people were arrested under the new law), this seems as good an opportunity as any to explain why holding the province to account over the Public Works Protection Act is more than just an "intellectual exercise."
Admittedly, it happens to be the post-G20 angle I'm best-positioned to cover. Provincial politics is my beat, and this - unlike most of the other things that happened both inside and outside the perimeter - is where Dalton McGuinty's government played a role, and deserves to be held to account. That's especially important because, as I explained toward the end of one of my columns last week, the Liberals' lax handling of the police file has not been restricted to the G20.
But beyond that, it seems to me that the abdication of provincial responsibility in announcing and interpreting the temporary law speaks to a broader phenomenon: the choice of governments, through both their actions and inactions, to give police gratuitous leeway in securing these kinds of international summits.
I wrote about this in the week leading up to the summit, and my former colleagues on the editorial board followed up on it last week. I'll spare you a full rehash of those arguments, and leave it at this: When given a chance early last decade to set out parameters for what police can and can't do to ensure the security of events like the G20, the federal government instead wrote legislation that basically told the police to do whatever they want.
So the message from governments to police, even before the saga over the provincial regulation, was that politicians preferred a no-questions-asked approach to security. Then McGuinty's Liberals took it to new extremes - leaving it to the police to announce a temporary law that could lead to arrests, then failing to publicly correct them when they misinterpreted and misrepresented that law.
As it happened, the province got lucky. If more of the action had been closer to the perimeter, the consequences would have been much greater.
But to some degree, the Liberals' blind faith in the police - including the Premier's unqualified support for Chief Bill Blair in the middle of the controversy - had to reinforce the sense that they had free rein to do as they saw fit, whatever part of downtown Toronto they happened to be in.
Was it the most important story out of the G20? Almost certainly not. But these things didn't all happen in isolation. And if there's any hope that our governments will take more responsibility for the liberties/security balance before the next big international event rolls around, it's necessary to underscore how little responsibility they took this time.
Friday, June 25, 2010 1:46 PM EDT
Fence defence tests the definition of 'secret'
"It was not a secret," Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair said today of the rather shocking temporary powers provided to police by a provincial cabinet order nobody had previously heard about.
Funny. When I was researching this piece, I asked two different spokespeople for the integrated G20 police unit — at least one of whom was from the Toronto force — about the legal justification for the measures being taken around the perimeter. Neither breathed a word about anything about the Public Works Protection Act, let alone any recent cabinet decisions that affected it.
I don't blame Blair if the police's powers have been rashly or unreasonably expanded; that's Dalton McGuinty's responsibility. But either the chief's own officers were weirdly ignorant of their own powers, or he's having us on now.
Monday, June 21, 2010 3:07 PM EDT
McGuinty uses 'Tough Medicine' to sell HST
As a general rule, partisan TV ads are usually short and sweet. But a minute is still barely long enough for Dalton McGuinty to get out his message in this new one put out by the Ontario Liberals, which underscores the Premier's challenge in selling the HST.
Thursday, June 17, 2010 9:09 AM EDT
Furious, George?
For George Smitherman, the opinion polls released earlier this week were an indictment of his weirdly uninspired campaign to be Toronto’s next mayor.
They might also have constituted the lucky break he needed to turn that campaign around.
The former deputy premier is at his best when he gets to be a brawler. But in the first half of what’s effectively a year-long race, he lacked anyone to brawl with.
Radwanski Contributors
Adam Radwanski
Adam Radwanski is the Queen's Park columnist for The Globe and Mail. Previously a member of The Globe's editorial board and the Politics Editor for globeandmail.com, he was formerly the managing editor of Macleans.ca. He has worked as an editorial writer and columnist at the National Post and as a columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and The Hill Times, and was the founder of Canada'a first online political magazine. Adam has also written extensively on the arts, doubling as the Post's music critic from 2004-06. He won the 2009 National Newspaper Award for editorial writing, for which he was also a finalist the previous year.
