South of the border, the presidential election is about to roll past the party conventions and into high gear.  Now that Obama’s given the nod to Biden and with McCain poised to name his veep in the coming days, the American election cycle is about to reach fever pitch.

Here in BC, the municipal elections are coming up as well with a real race in the City of Vancouver.  Then right around the corner, Mr. Campbell’s government is committed to a May 2009 provincial election.

Three elections in the next 10 months?  What is a political geek to do? It’s almost too much to handle.

But that’s not all.  Our parliament in Ottawa has had the chattering classes in a kind of semi-permanent election speculation almost since Harper took office.  Now it seems that a fall election is likely.  Wells @ Macleans is convinced.  So is Warren Kinsella.  Between the two of them, they’ve changed my mind.

Here are some quotes from the pair:

The journalist first (Part 1 / Part 2):

The prime minister has concluded that governing in the current environment is “like swimming in molasses,” I’m told…Stephen Harper has decided there’s no way the opposition parties will allow the government to stay there until October, 2009. So he figures he might as well cut all this short…To make sure his perception is accurate he is seeking meetings with the opposition leaders soon. (link)

If Harper doesn’t get an assurance from one opposition leader — he needs only one — that his legislative agenda will receive support through the fall session, he’ll call an election. We were left with the impression that this will happen very soon after the meetings with opposition leaders.

The mechanism for kicking off an election would, we were told, be a visit to the Governor General, not a contrived defeat in the Commons on a confidence motion. (link)

And some thoughts from the Political Consultant:

If Stephen Harper decides to pull the plug - I think he will, and I certainly hope he does - the campaign will determine everything. After more than two years of political parries and thrusts - carbon taxes and tax cuts, scandals and scandalmongering, resignations and abstentions - Canadian politics is pretty much where it was in January 2006, with both parties more or less tied. The only thing that will end the deadlock, end the phoney war, is a well-run campaign. (link)

So it looks like I might be hoisting my shoulder to the wheel of democracy and heaving-to with all the electioneering I can muster this fall.  Also, there’ll likely be more politics than there has been on this blog the last year or so.

It’s going to be a good time.

So last September when Christina and I were married I was about 5 months into my new job at Altus Group, and was completing an introductory course in Real Estate Appraisal which let me qualify for my professional practice insurance. Completing the course as quickly as possible was pretty important. Unfortunately, that meant I ended up scheduled to take the final exam on Thursday September 6th, 2007 - Two days before my wedding.

Most grooms spend the week before their wedding running around doing last minute wedding things. Either things they were asked to do long ago and forgot, or things that no one else has time to do. I on the other hand spent that week furiously studying for an exam in a course that I could not afford to fail.

To finish the story, the exam went really well. Then a couple of weeks ago a copy of “Canadian Property Valuation” landed on my desk and on one of the last pages, it announced the 2007-2008 bursuries and awards given by the Appraisal Institute of Canada.

Turns out that exam I wrote two days before my wedding went even better than I thought. I got the highest mark in the course of anyone in the country who completed it last year.

Who woulda thunk?

from sacredspace.ie:

In any job you should be able to point out who is your deputy and who is your successor - or at least how they will be appointed. Many men and women find that an uncomfortable notion. We easily imagine we are indispensable. It is the ultimate illusion, which the Lord finally cures when he calls us to himself. He did not put us in this world to help him out of a jam. He put us here because he loves us.

Some friends gave me a hard time this weekend about my post on Friday about the affection I have for the Catholic Church. Talking with them, I thought of this post, by a former Episcopal priest who joined the Catholic Church. His name is Taylor Marshall. It’s his answer to the kind of questions that my friends asked me this weekend.

He was recently asked the following question by a reader of his blog:

Why is it that the majority “Catholic Christians” hate church, have no idea what the bible teaches, and believe being a good person gets you into heaven?

I’ve copied a portion of Taylor’s response as he’s in a better position to answer the question than I am.

I know literally hundreds of Catholics. They love the Church. Many go to Holy Mass every day. They read the Bible every day. They go to Bible studies or other regular small group meetings. They go on mission trips. I graduated from a Reformed seminary (Westminster Theological Seminary, Philly) and let me say that the best Bible scholars that I’ve known were Catholics. Reformed guys study, but your top-notch Catholics study more.

Also, every Catholic I know would tell you that they trust in Christ for salvation and believe that it is only by the grace and divine mercy of God that they will enter into Heaven. It’s true that we reject “justification by faith alone” and believe that works are the fruit of grace in our hearts, but that doesn’t mean that we think “being good alone” gets you to Heaven.

We don’t worship Mary. We don’t think the Pope is sinless or infallible about history, weather, or sports.

We love Jesus, and teach our children to love Jesus Christ as their Savior. We drive them to Church every week for CCD. They sit and kneel next to us in the pews every week. We go to confession - some weekly, most monthly, some less than that.

If you’re interested, Taylor has written in some detail of his road to Catholicism at his blog.

This is very sad. No one wins when another politician’s integrity erodes, whether it is public or not. From the article:

It took nearly a year for the tabloid accusations, which Edwards was quick to dismiss and his supporters were quick to ignore, for the former North Carolina senator to finally admit Friday to having an affair in 2006 with a woman who produced a handful of videos for his campaign.

In doing so, Edwards admitted he was seduced by his own success and the lavish attention and praise that came with his meteoric rise from his roots in Raleigh as a successful but relatively unknown personal injury lawyer.

Finally, the affair is sure to be seen as a particularly painful blow to his wife, Elizabeth, who continued to campaign during his second run for the White House after she was diagnosed with an incurable recurrence of cancer. Few would argue that his wife is as beloved, if not more so, than Edwards himself.

Rod Dreher doesn’t let him off very easy. nor should he.

My friend Matthew and I were roommates for a number of years as I was finishing my degree at UBC. As far as roommates go, Matthew was exceptional. At the time, he was studying law at UBC and we spent more hours than I can count, late into the evening, discussing every subject under the sun. Our most interesting discussions were about Matthew’s Catholicism. He had not been raised in the Catholic Church. Rather, he had converted to the Catholic faith wholeheartedly and in the process had spent unbelievable time and energy in learning all he could about what the Church teaches.

Matthew was the first sincerely practicing Catholic I had known and through talking with him - learning from him, I came to realize that most of what I thought I knew about the Catholic Church was completely false. Early on in our friendship I even bought myself a copy of second edition of the Cathechism of the Catholic Church. After reading pages upon pages of that book, I’d be hard pressed to show you something in it that I don’t believe to be true about God, Jesus, the Gospel or His Church. I’m confident that I could not find a sentence in that book which isn’t supported by scripture.

As a result of my friendship with Matthew and his patience in sharing with me his experience, I’ve become a kind of apologist for Catholicism with my friends and within my church. My own Christian faith, I’ve realized recently, has very much been shaped by my friendship with Matthew and the opportunity I had as his roommate to watch his faithful witness of faith and his genuine commitment to the Church.

I’m afraid that I am still a Protestant in my bones and there is no danger of my becoming a “Papist” (as the pejorative term once was). However, I no longer view Catholicism with skepticism or fear. I’m grateful to acknowledge that my brothers and sisters in the Catholic Church belong to the same faith that I do. I am a much stronger Christian, so much more richly shaped by my faith, now that I draw on the strength in Catholicism’s history and depth to buttress the walls of my own tradition where they have lost their strength.

Christina and I had Matthew over for dinner tonight and I was reminded of the fruitfulness of our friendship these past few years. This post is a thank you to a good friend.

I am confident that God has good things ahead for you Matthew,
I can’t wait to see them unfold.

In Christo et pro Christo

On Friday, I suggested that one of the bigger and least discussed issues in the Canadian Political system is the modern tendency toward conflict between politicians and civil servants.  I thought it might be worth exploring what I meant in a little more detail.

I suggest that the problem has to do with who has what resources in our political system.

Realistically, the various departments of the federal government operate as autonomous fiefdoms with enourmous resources (both operational and research resources). It is also important that the civil servants in these departments often have agendas. By agenda, I don’t mean a self-interested or nefarious plot to do something terrible; rather, I mean that within a given department there is usually a broadly based, well-researched, professional consensus on what appropriate policy objectives are and how best to achieve them. These agendas were the goald when we created a permanent professional civil service.

However, the problem shows up in the cases where the agenda of the government department and the agenda of the cabinet don’t line up. One minister against the considered opinion of several thousand civil servants is not really a fair fight. This causes two problems:

1. When Cabinet wants to get something done, they don’t feel they can trust their department staff so every government initiative gets located outside of departments and in places like the PCO or the PMO. 
2. As a result of (1), civil servants feel that they are “under siege” and so become more resistant to the government objectives, less willing to be persuaded that the government’s objectives are valid. This reinforces (1) above.

I’d suggest that a solution to this problem might be found not in going to war with the civil service but rather in providing resources to the political actors in the equation. A version of this has taken place over the past few decades in the growth of what David Savioe calls the “centre” of the Canadian government (the politicized bureaucracy).  This includes agencies such as the Privy Council Office, the Prime Minister’s Office and to a certain extent institutions such as the auditor-general or public inquiries such as the Gomery Commission.

What these institutions hold in common is that they are outside of any constitutional accountability structure.  They serve the mandates they are given by the government of the day (usually the Prime Minister acting alone) and are accountable to the government and not the people either through elections or through the parliament.  This is a caricature of parliamentary democracy and not a system envisaged by our constitution or our democratic tradition.

Donald Savoie calls this “court government” by which he means government “by which a political leader with the help of a handful of courtiers shapes and reshapes instruments of power at will.” He suggests that “We need to define, preferably in law, the role of the prime minister, cabinet and the public service and give public servants an administrative space of their own to manage government operations, while recognizing that the prime minister and ministers must always have the authority to override public servants in all matters not covered by statutes.”

This last point is what I refer to when I say that we need to provide resources to the political actors in the equation.  In our current scenario, almost all power is held within the direct influence of the Prime Minister and his “court.”  Parliament, in the form of individual MPs, opposition parties, or even committees does not have the resources needed to effectively hold the government to account.  Even worse, individual Ministers do not have the necessary tools to override the “agenda” of their particular ministry’s civil servants.  Finally, the growth of the Prime Minister’s “court” over the past 40 years has moved the real governing decisions outside of parliament and even outside the cabinet room to an extraordinary degree. 

The solution to all three of these problems lies in giving the necessary resources to parliamentarians who are held to account through the public scrutiny of their debates and the occasional testing of their decisions by the electorate.  Yet there are two failures at work in the decline of the Parliament:

1. “Those with the power to introduce change for the better are reluctant to do so because they enjoy being able to wield tremendous power.”
2. “Parliamentarians, it seems, have turned over much of their accountability responsibilities to officers of Parliament and to the media.”

These issues lie at the heart of what became known as the “sponsorship scandal”.  At every step of the way, whether it was the initial disclosure of the allegations by the auditor-general, the failure of the government of the day to defend itself in parliament and instead appoint a commission of inquiry, or the unwillingness of the opposition parties to address the issues through the parliamentary apparatus, we see a gross failure of our current political class to respect parliament and the constitution of the country.

Again, to borrow from Donald Savoie, “Parliament is the one institution that truly should matter to Canadians, the only one that constitutes the democratic link between citizens and their government and connects citizens from British Columbia to Newfoundland and Labrador.” 

And so it is in Parliament we must address the current weaknesses of our common political life.  The answer is not in more rules, a different electoral system or a better education campaign of citizens.  Rather, the situation can only be improved through a recognition and restoration of the strengths of genuine, Westminster style, parliamentary democracy.

I call this line of thought “constitutional optimism.”  It’s a view that more and more considered experts seem to be advancing.  I’d recommend the following people as “constitutional optimists.”  Here are a couple of links on each including some recommended reading on the subjects of this post.

Donald Savoie - Canada Research Chair in Public Administration and Governance at the University of Moncton. 

Must Read: The Broken Chain of Answerability ; Court Government and the Collapse of Accountability in Canada and the United Kinddom ; Governing from the Centre: The Concentration of Power in Canadian Politics

Andrew Potter - Institutional Columnist for Macleans and a lecturer at UQAM in Montreal.

Must Read: Blog @ Macleans.ca ; The Rebel Sell.

Joseph Heath - Associate Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.

Must Read: The Rebel Sell ; The Myth of Shared Values in Canada ; The Democracy Deficit in Canada

Tom Axworthy -Chair of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Queen’s University.  

Must Reads: Everything Old is New Again: Observations on Parliamentary Reform ; The Responsibility Crisis in Canada.

I read this today in an old devotional I picked up off the shelf.

The constant risk for all of us is that we overcrowd out lives. Pushed by inner compulsions, self-imposed demands, and the pressures of our busy schedules, we fail to create spaces for silence and reflection. Consequently, we are often devoid of inner resources, fresh ideas and creativity. We manage as best we can, sustained by our past experiences and expertise.

Anyone who knows me doesn’t need to be told that this is my cardinal sin.

I mentioned the Sponsorship scandal on Monday and a made a couple of points relating to the Gomery Commission and our current Parliament’s heights of acrimony. I also wanted to bring up the sponsorship scandal to make a point only obliquely related to the events recounted on Monday. To make my point, I’ve pasted a column that Warren Kinsella wrote for the Hill Times in April, in which he recounted the history of the sponsorship scandal in a slightly different way than I did on Monday:

Once upon a time, there was a man named Paul. Inexplicably, and despite my best efforts, he became Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Canada. He wasn’t there very long, but long enough to do some serious damage to the Kingdom.

Amongst other things, Paul’s first act as Prime Minister was to launch an inquiry into his own round table. Some of his court jesters went out, and hissed to the playwrights and bards that Paul’s predecessors were “criminals,” quote unquote. They, and Paul, also said that “mechanics” in the Kingdom’s bureaucracy were criminals, too. Paul and his court jesters took a very broad brush, and smeared the reputations of thousands of the Kingdom’s public servants – people who could not easily defend themselves. People who thusly got very, very angry.

They were, however, people who could get even, and they did. Very shortly, Prime Minister Paul’s chief rival, the Blue Rebel Stephen, was hiring new knights to use their broadswords to open all of the brown envelopes coming their way. The kingdom’s public servants – good people doing a good job, for little or no recognition – were determined to get Prime Minister Paul’s arse booted out of power. Soon enough, they and the people of the kingdom did just that. In the land, there was much rejoicing. Paul and his court jesters – who had been promising a “fire of ideas,” and formidable strength of every region, and more than 220 seats in the peoples’ legislature – were clinging to some 100 seats less than that, and looking pretty darned weak. And the only “fire” that was taking place related to them. As in, you’re fired, Paul.

Rebel Stephen, transformed into Prime Minister Stephen, learned this lesson well. He and his court played nice with the public servants for a while. The Kingdom was calm.

Until last week, that is.

Now, the Kingdom’s constabulary, its judiciary, and its election officers are all – according to Prime Minister Stephen’s court jesters – out of control, unaccountable, corrupt, and (my personal favourite) engaged in “publicity stunts.” When, in fact, what they are really doing is enforcing the law of the Kingdom. The law that applies to everyone, rebel or leader alike.

The rebels have started to resemble that which they sought to destroy. Happens every time, in the Kingdom of Canada. Sadly.

Kinsella’s recounting of events includes a piece of the puzzle which is only available to “behind the scenes” types. According to Kinsella (not just him, also a couple of people I knew working in the Martin government) part of the downfall of Paul Martin was his willingness to deflect political casualties onto civil servants. The Canadian civil service includes thousands of hard-working, professional and competent administrators and experts who keep the massive apparatus of the Canadian government safely going in its tracks.

Yet perversely, in the last election both sides felt like the civil service was their problem. Martin’s Liberals felt like they were at war with (at least a portion of) the civil service. Similarly, according to comments he made in the last weeks of the 2006 election, Stephen Harper fully expected that he would have his own war with the Liberal appointed courts and civil service.  A war he has gone on to persecute somewhat forcefully.

It begs the question: how is it that, in a country where the elected parliamentarians who form the government have more constitutional authority than in nearly any other democratic system, the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister in waiting both felt they couldn’t get anything done because of the bureaucrats whose function it is to simply do as they are told.

All this is not to say that the civil service is neccessarily the problem. But rather it is to point out that there we might have a much bigger problem than we think.  There has to be a reason why our last few governments have gone to war with the civil service. I’ll get inot it a bit more specifically in a later post, but for now I mention it because no one seems to talk about it when complaining about the “democratic deficit.”

HBC SOLD TO US-BASED LORD & TAYLOR

HUDSON’S BAY CO. was sold to a new American owner, NRDC EQUITY PARTNERS, the parent of upscale U.S. chain LORD & TAYLOR. HBC’s first American owner was South Carolina businessman Jerry Zucker, who bought the venerable retailer in January 2006 for $1.1 billion. Zucker died of cancer in April. Under the terms of the deal, NRDC — which has 47 Lord & Taylor stores in the United States — would launch 10 to 15 of the stores in Canada. They will be located in existing Bay stores or in other HBC real estate. The companies said they see a gap in the Canadian retail landscape between the Bay and Holt Renfrew, where they believe Lord & Taylor will fit. NRDC also owns Fortunoff, a U.S. jewelry and home furnishings chain of stores, and clothing design firm Creative Design Studios. NRDC will invest $500 million US in new equity in the combined company. Zellers will receive a greater focus on branded apparel, improved customer service and the rollout of new 125,000-square-foot prototype stores.

Links:

• http://www.hbc.com
• http://www.lordandtaylor.com