The Great Canadian Wish List

There is a new phenomenon out and about in the land. The Great Canadian Wish List is the brain child of my friend Taylor Gunn. He is the push behind the StudentVote movement in Canada as well.


Launched today in cooperation with Facebook and the CBC it is an innovation to get us thinking and sharing, as citizens, our ideas about the state and status of our country. The Great Canadian Wish List is using the power of old time television, thank you CBC. Then it is married to the new social networking power of Facebook. This produces a way that we can all participate and actually watch the viral nature of this mass connectivity unfold before us.


The idea is to make a birthday wish for Canada and share it with others. I was invited to be an early participant and "tester" of the fool proof system. Well I proved to be a better fool than the programmers were capable of proofing against. I am as intuitive as the next guy and being a guy I feel instructions are always to be used as a last resort.


This idea is absolutely terrific and one in which I encourage you to participate. Get involved. Just reflect for a moment on your hopes and aspirations for Canada? What are our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats as you see them? Share your thoughts and wishes for Canada with the rest of Canada. It is fun, creative and even a bit confounding to someone my age.


This idea of Taylor’s may be just the ticket to banishing the collective bronze medal mentality of us Canadians. It may be the way we discover and disclose our true selves as we share our collective wisdom for the future of our nation. It is going to be an enormous contribution to our collective and cumulative sense of self as a nation. Nothing more! Nothing less!


Thanks for getting this going Taylor. Who knows? With your experiment in collective consciousness you may come to be seen as the midwife in a rebirthing of this nation. BTW here is the link to my birthday wish for Canada. I hope you will support it!

Are Charest and Harper Both Past Their "Best Before" Dates Already?

The volatility of the political scene all over the country is fascinating to watch and I would like focus on two examples. We have the spectacle of Jean Charest playing chicken with oppositions on his budget and the infamous "tax break for the middle class” that may (or not) trigger an election. The myth of the “so-called” fiscal imbalance in Quebec is now proven to be a myth if equalization money from Canada can be used for a tax reduction when it is supposed to provide for equivalent public service levels.

The ADQ and PQ parties are both on record as opposed to his cynical budget ploy by Charest. They say the tax break Charest wants would be better public policy if it were provided in the form of a debt repayment. That way the interest saved could be added to operating budgets through enhanced general revenues and that way serve the needs of Quebecers for generations. Charest is now being framed as a guy who can’t count akin to Joe Clark’s budget folly that brought down his minority federal government decades ago.

Next week will be most interesting in Quebec politics. I just hope the new Lt. Gov. in Quebec avoids an election and asks Mario Dumont to take a stab at forming a government with the PQ under a newly anointed leader in the form of Pauline Marois.

Another unfolding, or unraveling, drama, depending on your POV, is the aimless wanderings and wanings of the Harper Cons. The Base is angry at the lack of alignment of Harper’s actions to Reform/Alliance principles and the Quebec gambit of buying Charest’s victory with Ottawa tax money is backfiring too. The personal power agenda of the Prime Minister has alienated and aggravated just about anyone who he needs and wants within his sphere of influence.

He is now determined to devalue his political stock in Ontario with his legislative agenda to add and redistribute new House of Commons seats. It is god for the west but it is also more pandering to Quebec. That is now perturbing Ontarians even more as Harper moves to realign the seat distribution in a way that undermine their power and influence and short changes the largest voter group in the country.

With all the levers of power at his disposal for over 16 months and with no real threat of an election, unless he wants one, Harper has not been able to move beyond his political support ranking of the last election. Loyalty to his leadership from the Reform/Alliance side of the CPC is eroding and his personal trustworthiness and political integrity is in decline as well.

He is about to shut down Parliament and do an “Elvis” and “leave the building” in the next few weeks. more than a tad prematurely. He will leave a load of unfinished business and most of his critical policy Bills are now in limbo. This retreat from governing will enable his opponents, Dion in particular, to regroup and revive. He also forfeits the ability to control and set the political agenda in the media while wandering about the land on the BBQ circuit talking to his "choir" about yesterday's victories and avoiding discussions about today's realities.

Given that the big issue is going to be the environment and the fact it will continue to grow in importance this summer, Harper will become increasingly less relevant given his lack of traction, trust and tenacity on those issues. I am sensing the Harper era, such as is has been, is about to fade to black. The sound track will change and be full of whimpering and whining, with more vengeance and vanquishing to come from his partisans. That sentiment will show up with surprising results in many of the pending constituency nominations.

Look out for a multitude of maverick CPC bumper stickers on pick up trucks all over rural Alberta this summer saying: “Come Back Preston Manning. All is Forgiven!”

Tobacco Control Legislation Will Show Stelmach as a New Leader of a Different Government.

The policy development effort of Dave Hancock, Alberta's Minister of Health and Wellness to restrict tobacco in Alberta is entering its final stages.

It has passed the Stelmach government’s Agenda and Priorities Committee and was accepted by the Cabinet Policy Committee. Now it is ready for the full Cabinet and the Caucus consideration and indications are that is happening very soon, as early as next week.

I have followed with interest the Alberta evolution of this initiative for new tobacco control legislation both personally and professionally. It has taken the political process a number of years and a number of tries to get enough politicians to see tobacco control as a health, wellness and a cost saving issue and not only as a personal freedom or choice matter.

The debate around this still persists with some people but there is more mythology than fact. The media likes to play up the personal freedom issue but there are fewer and fewer people who are there to articulate it these days. They are people who are usually characterized as rural and unsophisticated and the interviews are done in bars and pool halls or coffees shops or restaurants.

This framing perpetuates the myth of a rural – urban split in Alberta. It sets up rural people as opposed to tobacco control and city people in support. There is an effort to use the issues as a way to define a different value set as between rural and urban Albertans too. This is totally untrue based on numerous polling results the latest being from Ipsos Reid that showed no significant difference between Albertans in Edmonton and Calgary and the rest of the province.

According to that poll a full 80% of Albertans understand the issues and support a province wide smoking ban. The majority of Alberta politicians know that and also understand Alberta has been lagging behind other provinces on this issue for far too long.

There are 18 Alberta municipalities who have already passed smoking bans. To underscore the myth of a rural-urban split on this, the towns of Stettler, Cardston and Whitecourt adopted bans before the City of Calgary did…and Calgary has the highest education levels of any city in the country. Go figure.

Health is not a rural or an urban issue. Nor is workplace safety in terms of second hand smoke. The diminishing numbers of provincial MLAs who oppose the smoking ban are rural but they are not aligned with the core beliefs and values of the main stream of Albertans – especially on this issue. The majority of Alberta's politicians know this is an idea whose time has come.

Klein as Premier would never let this idea of a province wide smoking ban see the light of day. Stelmach’s new government should ensure this new tobacco control initiative becomes law. It is the right thing to do but it gives him another opportunity as well. This new legislation adds a new health care focus on wellness but it also busts two persistent myths. Firstly, that there is a myth about a rural – urban split in the province on fundamental values. There is not. Secondly, that the Stelmach government is just the same and an extension of the Klein regime. It is not. Tobacco control legislation will go along way to proving both myths to be untrue.

Canadian Politics Turns to Farce and the World Wonders Why We are Becoming Global Underachievers

Here is our LaPresse column that was published on May 20, 2007. It was inspired by Satya Das, my business partner, and his recent excursion to Hong Kong and India for one of our projects. It has caused a flurry of emails out of Quebec since it was published. Many of them are angry over how we framed Duceppe and others agreeing that Canada is punching well below its weight in the global reality of today.


Satya Das and Ken Chapman
After a frenetic week of business in Asia, it is a joy to step into the chilled cabin of a plane bound for home, take a long drink of clean water, and catch up with the SRC news.

The joy quickly fades. There on the miniature screen is the anguished face of Gilles Duceppe, explaining himself with all the conviction of a boy caught raiding the liquor cabinet. After the intense, concentrated, high-energy atmosphere of Delhi and Hong Kong, this farcical slice of Canadian politics is just too much to bear, especially when you’re flying 11 kilometres above the South China Sea.

In Delhi, people of serious intent asked about the status of India’s pursuit of a free trade agreement with Canada – they wanted to know how the idea was being received in Canada, and did the politicians and the public approve?

One had to reply, with considerable embarrassment, that India-Canada Free Trade really wasn’t on our political radar screen in Canada. We were too preoccupied with the minutiae of minority governments, with the junior high-school antics of sniping party leaders. Indeed, our national media has not even taken notice of the Indian overture. Why bother with the long-term sustainability of our economy and our society, when it’s so much easier to obsess about Duceppe’s bizarre psychodrama?

Already the world’s third largest economy by purchasing power, India wants to negotiate free access to its huge range of economic opportunities. "We believe that it is mutually rewarding for India and Canada to work towards a strategic partnership," Indian High Commissioner to Canada R.L . Narayan explained to a Toronto business audience at the end of April.

The fact that India is coming to us is hugely significant. It underlines once again the attraction and value of Canada’s abundance of natural resources, human talent, and our ability to craft a civil society from many streams of the human experience. India isn’t alone. Also on the horizon is a Free Trade proposal with the European Union. The pursuit of these opportunities demands significant political focus.

At this stage in history, Canada has an obligation of positive global engagement, indeed of global leadership. Yet our political class seems entirely incapable of even recognising the opportunity, let alone seizing it.

Our combination of political stability and huge energy reserves set us apart in a world addicted to the hydrocarbon economy. This puts an enormous responsibility on us to develop these resources in an environmentally sustainable manner, ensuring that we sharply reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases. Our stability is going to make us the energy supplier of choice for the world. There is a real opportunity for Alberta and Canada is to sell carbon capture and clean coal technology to China and India before they embark on a huge expansion of coal-fuelled power generation.

Yet by benign neglect, we are losing our way in the broader world. Our politicians are reacting instead of leading when it comes to our global engagement. This is a shame, because we have an obligation to share what is best in us. We can set an example for the world in showing how we use our wealth to advance the common good. This will distinguish us from the many resource economies where the bounty ends up in the hands of the few. We have a global obligation to show that investing in the potential of one's people -- mass access to education, health, a clean environment -- is a better application of the enormous resource wealth that fuels war and instability elsewhere.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper intends to meet with Canada’s First Ministers shortly before he leaves for the G-8 summit in Germany, to discuss Canada’s international trade policy and positions. It would be extremely helpful to use this meeting for a full consideration of Canada’s global leadership.



.

Give Me Prentice Over Harper and Hill Any Day

I was struck by the juxtaposition of CPC stories in today’s Globe and Mail. Off the top, let me disclose I was a Jim Prentice supporter for the leadership of the CPC and still hold out a hope that one day it will happen. I have known him for a number of years, as a PC Party member and a fellow lawyer. We were on opposite sides over the environmental and expropriation issues surrounding the building of Old Man River Dam by the government of Alberta in southern Alberta. He was a young lawyer and second counsel on the matter but his compassion, wisdom and sound judgment was very self evident even in his “younger” days.

So in the Globe and Mail today we see Jim Prentice adding fairness and equity in a proposal to “shake up” the process for aboriginal land claims settlements. The issues are the back log of claims and a means to dispense with the stacked deck our aboriginal people face in pursuing settlements. When the “government of Canada acts as defendant, judge, jury and research body” in such matters, it is had to seen the balance and fairness and equity of such “negotiations.” Talk about conflicting roles!

Prentice sees the Indian Clams Commission, an independent body where he once served as a co-commissioner in the Mulroney days, as the means to his ends. The ICC under Prentice’s idea will be delegated the power to actually settle treaty and land claims itself, not the conflicted government of Canada. According the G&M front page story, this approach “marks a “seismic shift in the way land-claims treaties have been negotiated in the past 60 years.” I agree!

Then, by way of contrast, we have the page A4 story and picture of the co-conspirators of Stephen Harper and Jay Hill (CPC Whip) presumably mulling over their latest masterpiece a “manual on disrupting committee meetings.” We have the Keystone Kons shifting their share of the blame many times before in a masterful display of “Bush-league” tactics. They justify this travesty again blaming the opposition by Hill claiming all they are doing is “to push back when we see the opposition parties basically getting together and trying to put together a coalition government between the three of them.”

HELLO! What do you expect in a minority government? The Kons and the “other parties” did the very same thing in order to bring down the Martin Liberal minority government when it pleased…save and except the dearly departed (in more ways than one) Belinda Stronach. The reaction to disrupt and abdicate the responsibility to govern is not an acceptable response Mr. Hill!

The CPC is a minority government selected by Canadians with expectations that they would work towards finding compromises and actually actively govern, perhaps with a tad of integrity and alacrity from time to time. We see delay tactics from both sides but especially from the Cons. Worse yet we see our “government” engaged in cheap tactical gamesmanship designed to “push back!” Again we see the character flaws of the current PM shining through. He seems always to be more intent on winning skirmishes in Question Period and now at Commons Committee instead to showing a capacity for meaningful leadership.

I can’t help thinking that if Jim Prentice were the CPC leader today we would have a socially progressive and a fiscally conservative government with enlightened and compassionate leadership that respects people as citizens and taxpayers. We could trust our leader as a person of integrity and character with new approaches and new ideas and a personal capacity to govern.

But alas my desire for change is not much more than thinking and hoping. Unfortunately thinking doesn’t make it so and hope is not a method to achieve meaningful change.