November 10th, 2009 Andrew Cash
By Andrew Cash
Well, we knew there had to be a hitch when Stephen Harper got up at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa to sing a Beatles song. Setting the bar sufficiently low – it was a song Ringo sang, after all – is a Harper specialty.
But as the country woke up to the image of our wooden PM at the piano, many Canadian recording artists were twigging to yet another arts cut – one they say will hobble Canada’s specialized music community.
And like Harper’s arts misstep in the last election, this one – the chopping of the Canada Music Fund’s Canadian Musical Diversity component – has once again engaged and enraged a grassroots arts revolt. Read the rest of this entry »
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November 3rd, 2009 Andrew Cash
OK, this bit of news is about time. The Conservative government in Ottawa has just announced measures to extend Employment Insurance benefits to the growing ranks of the self employed. Of course the devil, as usual with this crew, is in the details but this is a big step in the right direction–that direction being out of the past and into the future.
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October 27th, 2009 Andrew Cash
By Andrew Cash
A flash of deja vu hits me as i sit in the beautiful Victoria College Chapel at U of T on October 20 last week listening to the Council of Canadians’ Maude Barlow talk about free trade.
My first awareness of this human rights champion was during the great debate in the 80s over Canada’s free trade deal with the U.S. I can’t help feeling a little nostalgic for that simple time when the story was a bit clearer: you were either for or against closer ties with our huge neighbour to the south.
But Barlow and fellow panelist Sid Ryan tell the almost 200 people in attendance that while 20 years ago there were very few bilateral trade deals, there are now 2,600 around the world. Read the rest of this entry »
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October 22nd, 2009 Andrew Cash
Tories favouring Tory ridings with stimulus money! Should we be shocked? We should but alas we’re not. We should at least be able to trust that our government is disbursing our money in an even handed way across the country and directed where it’s needed most. Shouldn’t we…at the very least?
Reminds me of the black cats/ white cats Tommy Douglas riff.
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October 21st, 2009 Andrew Cash
The legacy of Reaganomics: historic deficits and mounting debt in the U.S.
Our Mulroney: the last year of the Mulroney reign Canada posted, a record deficit for its day of $42 billion
George W. Bush–stratospheric debt and deficits
Harper–debt and deficits as far as the eye can see.
But that doesn’t seem to worry the Reform/Conservatives who never see a tax dollar they don’t think can be used for partisan purposes. To wit, this piece which surfaced in the dailies at the top of the week. Seems those tight fisted fiscal fighters don’t bat an eye when they can drop 100k on a photo op though they could have announced their fiscal update for free in the House of Commons.
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September 23rd, 2009 Andrew Cash
T.O.’s got one of the highest urban jobless rates in the country — but guess what? We’re copping fewer EI benefits.
By Andrew Cash
I started the day Monday (September 21) sitting at the back of a banquet hall at the downtown Hilton watching 1,000 T-dot business folks give a lukewarm welcome to what had been billed as a major speech by Michael Ignatieff outlining his economic vision.
Maybe they were just eager to dig into their lunch.
By the end of the day, I was at the back of another room, this one a town hall meeting organized by the Good Jobs for All Coalition at Ryerson, listening along with about 75 others to some hair-raising stories of big-city unemployment.
The two events seem to encapsulate the disconnect I’ve been feeling over Ottawa’s hot potato: Employment Insurance. At the beginning of the summer, the Liberals stepped up to the plate demanding EI changes – or else.
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May 6th, 2009 Andrew Cash
Lib’s new king might grant you an audience, but you won’t change his manifesto
By Andrew Cash
While Michael Ignatieff has certainly given the Libs a bump in the polls and the party bank account, his coronation last weekend in Vancouver underlines some sad facts about the state of political participation these days.
If the grassroots of the party showed some pluck in voting for Stéphane Dion in 2006, they have caved since Dion’s flameout, as if to say with relief, “Please, oh powerful ones in the Liberal executive, don’t invest us with this awesome power. Look what we did with it last time.”
And who better than Ignatieff, who can trace his roots to the court of the last czar of Russia, to save a neutered rank and file that would rather be told than tell?
Only about 2,000 delegates of an eligible 8,000 showed up in Vancouver, well over 600 of them party officials, MPs, etc, points out U of T prof Nelson Wiseman. “Add all that up and the convention was a real comment on how little importance Canadians place on political parties.”
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December 10th, 2008 Andrew Cash
Taking Canada Back
By Andrew Cash
How quickly old boys douse the flames of party change
Yikes. What a snafu.
With Bob Rae stepping out of the Liberal race, the Libs can now do what they do best, power-broke their way to a new leadership.
Way back an eternity ago, in 2006, when Stéphane Dion was chosen Liberal leader, I wrote that the grassroots was giving the finger to the Liberal elite. Looks like the backroom boys are about to return the favour.
Problem is, the appointment of Michael Ignatieff doesn’t settle the democratic deficit of the Liberal party on any level. And what about all that talk at the last Grit convention about renewal in the party, new ways of doing things, more bottom-up participation?
And where are all those young conventioneers wearing Dion green and believing they’d transformed a cynical, top-heavy party ragged from internal warring?
Don’t Liberals get it that we’re in the Obama era, when party building is supposed to turn supporters into engaged participants?
But more to the point, handing over the party to Ignatieff doesn’t settle the broader democratic deficit either, where the majority of voters didn’t vote for but still got Tory rule. A broke and tired centre-right party has chosen the leadership candidate least jazzed about taking power in a coalition with the NDP.
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December 3rd, 2008 Andrew Cash
“The Governor General will be extremely reluctant to refuse the advice of the prime minister”
By Andrew Cash
It’s the tone, stupid. Sure, staving off economic devastation across the land is the sole focus of the new Liberal-NDP coalition hatched this week on the overheated carcass of the Harper Conservatives.
But it was Stephen Harper’s tone that pushed the Libs and the NDP into bed together, and it will be the tone of the coalition that will determine whether, as Jack Layton put it at the end of Monday’s surreal press conference, we can “do politics differently” in Canada.
I say, stick to that positive tone, Jack, especially as the Tory propaganda shitstorm builds. It resonates in either official language, because Canadians want to do politics differently.
So even if Governor General Michaëlle Jean decides to listen to her first minister and prorogue Parliament until the new year or dissolve it and trigger an election, nothing will be the same again in federal politics. That’s because we now know political opponents can sit down and work together to get things done.
But will this new moment be just that – a moment? Don’t doubt Harperites for a second when they say they will do anything within the law (and, as evidenced by the tape recording handed out Sunday by the PMO of a private conference call between NDP leader Jack Layton and his MPs, perhaps slightly outside it) to stay in power.
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October 21st, 2008 Andrew Cash
NDP brain trust needs a rethink – its working families pitch thrilled in the north but flamed out in T.O.
By Andrew Cash
Hey, it’s not just the Harper Tories who have a Toronto problem.
If Jack Layton had snagged the PM’s job after last week’s election, he’d face a similar problem to Stephen Harper: the Tory leader has no Toronto MP to sit at the cabinet table, Layton only has one (other than himself).
While progressives pined for an NDP breakthrough in a city where local politics are dominated by the Dippers, the federal party arguably ran its best campaign in a couple of decades, except for one hitch: it all but ignored the biggest city in the country.
Okay, sure, the voter turnout was pukey, but while the NDP rejoices over its additional seats, fewer Canadians voted for the party last week than in the 2006 campaign.
In Toronto, the Conservatives more than doubled the NDP vote, and the Libs almost tripled it. In all, the NDP was able to capture only 15.1 per cent of the popular vote in the city.
Considering Layton is the most urban-?focused leader (as the former pres of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities), these results should ring alarm bells within the NDP brain trust. They are and they’re not.
In the past, the NDP has forgone surer bets in Ontario’s north for quixotic bids in the GTA. This time, they reversed course and bagged four extra seats in the northern Ontario, where Jack’s “Kitchen Table, Working Families” shtick resonates.
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