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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April 14th, 2009 Andrew Cash
Electric shock
Those dreams of the e-car refuelling our economy? Not if they’re China-made.
By Andrew Cash
I admit I’m not really a car guy. When I rent a car, the conversation at the rental desk goes like this: Clerk: “We’ve got a blah blah or a blah blah..,” to which I reply, “Oh, just give me the cheapest one.”
But this time, for a trip to Pennsylvania to visit relatives, I’m handed the keys – well, there are no keys really – to a Prius, Toyota’s smash hit hybrid. Wow, this car I know about, since it’s the kind of vehicle that’s carrying the hopes of the folks who make cars, the environment that chokes on them and the taxpayer who seems increasingly on the hook for producing them.
But are all those billions we’re lending Big Auto really going to produce enough of the pollution-?free wheels greens are dreaming of?
In Pennsylvania, in the belly of car culture, green cars, electric or otherwise, seem so far way. Still, at one point, our 80-year-old uncle saunters around behind the rental. I’m thinking, “Okay, I’m going to get it for renting an import.”
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April 2nd, 2009 Andrew Cash
Saving Ontario’s backbone means more than bailing out cars
By Andrew Cash
The hate-on for artists and cultural workers as whining pigs at the public trough is alive and well across Tory land.
The latest round of this particular blood sport occurred in the last few weeks, when the feds forced a crisis on the CBC by withholding bridge funding, necessitating the cutting of 800 broadcasting jobs.
The provincial Liberals, it’s true, have a more civilized take on the creative class, but they weren’t exactly going all out for culture in last week’s budget either. McGuintyites handed over 20 mil to the Ontario Media Development Corp, $77 mil to film and TV in tax credits and $17 mil per year in tax support for interactive digital media products.
Still, compared to the gnashing of teeth over the decline of manufacturing, forestry and steel and the consequent $26 bil increase in new provincial infrastructure spending, arts and culture seem like bit players. Building cars, making steel, chopping trees – now, that’s where the big boys play; that’s the economic backbone of the country, isn’t it?
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February 11th, 2009 Andrew Cash
Okay, I’ll say it: this is a boring party, the place you’d be if you’d drawn the short straw
By Andrew Cash
The Ontario NDP is the Toronto Maple Leafs of politics. Like the hapless hockey crew, the ONDP has spent most of the last four decades near the bottom of the standings but dining out regularly on past glories.
Most NHL teams, when mired in the basement, take the time to rebuild, rediscover a sense of purpose, nurture their fan base and a crop of young keeners, and while no one is looking, start getting competitive.
The Leafs, over the last 40 years never did this. Alas, the ONDP over the last decade and a half hasn’t either. With what may be the largest reordering of the capitalist economy since the 30s underway, these should be heady times for provincial Dippers who next month pick a new leader to replace Howard Hampton.
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December 17th, 2008 Andrew Cash
NDP bill makes a beeline for heavy-handed developers chilling citizen dissent with pricey lawsuits
By Andrew Cash
While all eyes have been glued to the wild ride our parliamentary democracy has been taking of late, a real threat to citizens’ power is playing out in near obscurity on the 16th floor of the Bay Street hearing room of the Ontario Municipal Board.
Here, final arguments wrap up on whether a Lake Simcoe residents group should pay the legal costs of a large land developer.
Shortly after winning a several-? year fight at the OMB a year ago to plunk a resort and marina smack dab in the middle of the bucolic Lake Simcoe community of Big Bay Point, Markham-?based developer Geranium Corporation quickly turned around and asked the OMB to make those opposed to the project pay its legal costs.
On the hook for $3.2 million in costs are the Innisfil District Association, some individual members of the group and, surprisingly, their lawyer, David Donnelly.
Though the OMB rarely awards costs and rarely for this amount, the case is being watched carefully by countless residents groups across the province, as well as by Hamilton Centre NDP MPP Andrea Horwath. Last week she introduced a private member’s bill to give residents’ groups protection against what are known as SLAPPs, or strategic lawsuits against public participation.
Horwath says she first came face to face with the problem as a Hamilton city councillor working with a residents group opposing a development. “The threat of a SLAPP action makes it harder for regular people to participate if they are concerned about a project,” she says.
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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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November 25th, 2008 Andrew Cash
Sure, turbines are great, but eco-bullies could tone down the sermon
By Andrew Cash
Ah, there’s nothing quite like a public meeting in Scarborough to make me feel nostalgic for my childhood home – and for the merits of good old-fashioned political education.
The wind energy showdown, Monday, November 24, at Laurier Collegiate in Scarborough’s Guildwood Village seems, at first glance, like a classic NIMBY battle pitting local residents against downtown greenies and Toronto Hydro bureaucrats.
But it doesn’t really look that way to me, despite the fact that I’m blown away (excuse the pun) by the idea that wind fanning off the Bluffs could power the city’s first turbine operation.
I guess the problem here is that this isn’t an Ontario Municipal Board hearing where folks have to pack the hall because the process is unfair and rich lawyers are trying to take over neighbourhoods for rich developers.
This is a Q&A – one already cancelled once for lack of space – where residents have their sole chance to get Toronto Hydro to address their concerns.
Enviros, hyped and over-organized, don’t seem to get that this is their big opportunity to meet the community, find common ground and ultimately win them over.
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November 12th, 2008 Andrew Cash
If new prez backs the eco sector, our green entrepreneurs will be left out of the loop
By Andrew Cash
Why, when those dudes in the Wall Street suits start losing coin, do governments magically seem to find consensus, time for hastily called meetings and, oh yeah, trillions of dollars to bolster the financial system using money no one could previously locate, to, well, save the planet?
What a mess. But there is a new guy at the helm to the south – and he actually did promise to reduce carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 and create 5 million new green jobs. The problem for us here, though, is if Barack Obama actually does use the financial crisis to sink cash into eco industries, Canada will have squandered a golden opportunity to share the gains.
Shit, didn’t some geeky professor who once led the Liberals go on and on about this stuff recently?
Graham Saul of Climate Action Network Canada says it neatly: “If the Americans invest big time in the green economy, Canada is out of the game.” You can understand the magnitude of this, he says, if you imagine what it would have been like if Canada had decided to take a pass on the information technology sector.
That’s actually what our feds’ eco foot-dragging is costing us, he says. “There is no indication this government connects the dots between green jobs and economic stimulus.”
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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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