Globe national affairs columnist Jeffrey Simpson took your questions Tuesday on the new Harper government and on his column about the two controversial new ministers
Different party, same old tricks.
The questions and answers are at the bottom of this page.
Mr. Simpson has won all three of Canada's leading literary prizes — the Governor-General's award for non-fiction book writing, the National Magazine Award for political writing, and the National Newspaper Award for column writing (twice). He has also won the Hyman Solomon Award for excellence in public policy journalism. In January 2000, he became an Officer of the Order of Canada.
He joined The Globe and Mail in 1974. His career with the newspaper began at City Hall in Toronto and with coverage of Quebec politics. In 1977, he became a member of the paper's Ottawa bureau, and eighteen months later he was named The Globe and Mail's Ottawa bureau chief. From 1981-1983, Mr. Simpson served as The Globe's European correspondent based in London, England. He began writing his national affairs column in January, 1984.
Mr. Simpson has published six books — Discipline of Power (1980); Spoils of Power (1988); Faultlines, Struggling for a Canadian Vision (1993); The Anxious Years (1996) and Star-Spangled Canadians (2000). His most recent book, The Friendly Dictatorship: Reflections on Canadian Democracy (2001), was nominated for the Donner Prize as the best book on public policy.
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Editor's Note: The same rules applied to this live discussion as normally apply to the "reader comment" feature. globeandmail.com editors read and approved each comment/question. Not all comments/questions could be answered in the time available. Spelling and grammar errors were not corrected. Comments/questions were checked for content only. Comments/questions that included false or unsubstantiated allegations, personal attacks, vulgar language or libelous content were rejected. Preference was given to readers who asked questions under their full names, rather than pseudonyms.
Jim Sheppard, Executive Editor, globeandmail.com: Good morning, Jeffrey, and thanks for joining us on-line today to answer questions from globeandmail.com readers. In your award-winner book The Discipline of Power, you chronicled how the last Tory minority under Joe Clark self-destructed in nine months. What does Prime Minister Harper have to do in the current minority Parliament to avoid the same fate? Do you see any major similarities or differences between 1979 and 2006?
Jeffrey Simpson: Jim, the Harper Conservatives have to learned how to count, something the Clark Conservatives failed to learn. That's glib actually. The Clark Conservatives misread the election results, believing they had majority support for change even if they didn't have the parliamentary seats. The Harper Conservatives have to know that they got only 36 per cent of the vote (the same share as Clark) and are a long way from a majority — further than Clark was. So that will mean compromises.
Having said that, there being no disposition for an election in the next 18 months, the Harperites should be able to get rather easy passage for their two or three most popular promises, such as the Accountability Act and the GST tax cut — or what I call bribe. Clark, by contrast, bravely but foolishly started with contentious policies such as an 18-cent-a-gallon tax increase on gasoline. The Harper Conservatives won't make that mistake. They're focused on things that they believe are popular, and only those things.
Michael Banner, Calgary: Mr. Simpson, thank you in advance for your time. Since the Big 3 cities (Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal) have no Tory representing them (other than the switch by David Emerson), is it typical protocol to name an unelected political staffer to a cabinet position for representation? If so, then why not appoint someone for P.E.I.? Has this ever happened in the past? I don't remember Trudeau appointing anyone from Alberta to represent their interests.
Jeffrey Simpson: Michael, appointing people to the Senate as cabinet ministers is rare but it has happened. Diefenbaker appointed Toronto businessman Wallace McCutcheon to cabinet as a minister without portfolio in 1959, I believe, because his party lacked representatives from that sector of Canadian life. There have been other instances. I'm going from memory here but Bud Olsen from Alberta was in Trudeau's cabinet as a senator with responsibility for the Wheat Board, I think. What makes this appointment of Fortier unusual and controversial is that Harper had promised only to elect senators, although he had given himself a little wiggle room on that in an answer he gave late in the campaign.
