Archive for May, 2011

What do we mean when we say reform?

May 17th, 2011

Since the election on 2 May, there has been no end of calls to reform, rebuild and/or renew the Liberal Party of Canada, often with associated references to better fundraising and more engagement of the grassroots. Unfortunately, most of these articles and blogs suffer from a severe case of vagueness. What exactly are we talking about when we talk about reform?

It is worth reading the Change Commission report (and other important party documents). The Change Commission has already identified a number of things that we need to improve. While we have made some progress on some of these issues, more work remains to be done.

The party is a complex organization, so an outline will help clarify what we are try to talk about.

Within the extra-parliamentary organization:

  • There are roughly 60,000 members (or 195 per riding association)
  • There are 308 volunteer-driven electoral district associations with varying levels of human and financial resources.
  • There are ten provincial organizations, plus the territorial organizations (PTAs). In the larger provinces, there are layers of volunteer area directors, regional presidents, etc. And of course there are permanent, paid staff in the provincial organizations.
  • There is the national party, governed by the national board of directors, and its various commissions (Aboriginal, Women, Youth, Seniors) plus the full-time staff in the national office, starting with the national director (Ian McKay).
  • There are four major committees (composition described from pages 22-29 of the Constitution):
    • The National Management Committee
    • The National Revenue Committee
    • The National Election Readiness Committee
    • The National Policy and Platform Committee
  • The National Liberal Fund, the fundraising organization for the party (created just last year) under the management of Adam Smith

Within the parliamentary organization:

  • 34 Members of the House of Commons, plus their full-time staff (3-4 people per MP or roughly 120 people) in Ottawa and the local ridings.
  • 54 Senators, plus their full-time staff

And then there is the Leader's Office:

  • The Leader plus a bunch of full-time staff

And then there is the campaign organization, which springs into being for each election.

  • 308 candidates, nominated by local riding associations or appointed by the Leader, plus their volunteer campaign teams
  • Various co-chairs, policy/platform people, etc, many of whom are appointed by the Leader

There are organizational improvements that we should make, and I am in favour of many of the Change Commission recommendations. We certainly do need to improve at the local riding level, especially in areas where we have lost many elections. We need to do these things but we can't stop there.

The Leader, the caucus and especially the actions of Members of Parliament between elections, the resources we have at our disposal to wage the campaign, the platform, and the candidates we have nominated in the ridings are very important electoral factors that are under our control.

We need to reconsider conventional wisdom on some of these things:

  • Conventional wisdom: we should announce the platform during the election and no sooner than necessary in order to prevent our opponents from 1) stealing the ideas they like and implementing them and 2) launching attacks against ideas they aren't inclined to implement.
  • Unconventional: as soon as we come up with a policy that would benefit Canadians, let's advocate for that policy. If our opponents adopt the idea, great! If they attack and resist it, let's use those attacks to refine and sharpen the idea for presentation during the election campaign.
  • Conventional wisdom: we should wait (12, 18, 24 months) to select a Leader because a leadership race would distract from the rebuilding we need to do (a nearly unanimous sentiment, according to Alf Apps).
  • Unconventional?: we need the Leader engaged in the process of rebuilding and the more time he or she has to do so, the better. More time as Leader also means more time for Canadians to get to know him or her. Both Dion and Ignatieff had been leader for roughly two years when the election was called. Why repeat that scenario again against Harper and Layton, both of whom will have been leader for at least 11 years by then?
  • Conventional wisdom: we should use Question Period to embarrass and draw media attention government misdeeds or mistakes in order to erode support for the government, and these questions should be formulated according to recent events in order to maximize negative media coverage of the government. We should respond in kind to heckling, non-answers, etc, in the House of Commons.
  • Unconventional: we should use Question Period to ask legitimate, fair questions of the government. We should formulate a coherent, medium-term strategy that focuses on policy areas that matter to Canadians. For example, we could focus for a week or two on health and fiscal policy, then defence and foreign affairs, then immigration and human resources, then agriculture and fisheries, etc. We should not let events of the day dictate our questions. We can let the media cover the bad news while we advance our policy agenda.
  • Conventional wisdom: we should wait a few years before nominating candidates for 42nd General Election.
  • Unconventional: we should nominate candidates as soon as possible and local ridings should keep engaging with citizens throughout the four years leading up to the election. It's a permanent campaign, not once every four years.
  • Conventional wisdom: we must advocate for the per vote subsidy to maintain our existing party infrastructure and ability to contest the next election.
  • Unconventional: we should agree to get rid of the per vote subsidy as long as the limits on donations are increased to $5,000 per person per year from $1,100. There are already substantial public supports for political parties through the spending rebates (60% of local campaign spending during elections) and generous tax credits for donors (up to 75%). The per vote subsidy is a crutch that impedes the development of successful party fundraising.

These are just a few suggestions. What do you mean when you say let's reform the Liberal Party?

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Posted in Liberal Party of Canada, Politics

Liberal leadership

May 9th, 2011

In my previous reflection on the Liberal Party, I just briefly touched on the issue of the next leader. First, a couple of items from the Liberal Party of Canada's constitution:

  1. Section 54.3 requires that the national board of directors, in consultation with caucus, select an interim leader within 27 days of Michael Ignatieff's announcement that he intends to resign. It says nothing about whether that interim leader is allowed to run for leader.
  2. The national board of directors also has to set a date for a leadership vote within five months (plus as many as 27 days from the day the leader announced his intention to resign) and fix the amount of the deposit each contestant needs to put forward in order to run for leader ($50K in 2006, $90K in 2008).
  3. Although the constitution provides for an earlier vote, it does not provide for a later vote.

So, that would mean we are looking at a leadership vote around 30 October 2011. This would put the leadership vote immediately after the provincial election in Ontario.

So who's in the running, especially with so many MPs losing their seats?

Interim leader

I'd like to see someone with experience who can be neutral in the actual leadership race as interim leader. Perhaps Ralph Goodale? Or Irwin Cotler? I don't think anyone who is running for leader should be selected as the interim leader. I think it would rude to ask Dion to serve as interim leader.

Leader

Also-rans and recent aspirants to the leadership:

  • Not many previous aspirants to the leadership are left standing: Martha Hall Findlay, Ken Dryden, Gerard Kennedy, and Joe Volpe all lost their seats. Hedy Fry and Carolyn Bennett (both of whom withdrew in 2006) remain but John Godfrey and Maurizio Bevilacqua are gone.
  • The following people still have leadership contest debts outstanding: Volpe, Dryden, Kennedy, Hall Findlay, Dion, Fry, and Bevilacqua.
  • Bob Rae (age 62), Dominic Leblanc (age 43) and Scott Brison (age 43) were re-elected, but Brison has said that he isn't interested in running. I would like to see Brison run for leader, as I think we need to move in the direction of being fiscally conservative and socially liberal.

Considering the tight timeline of a six-month leadership race, I would expect both Rae and Leblanc to run.

Other contenders

  • Frank McKenna (age 63), I'm sure, is very comfortable as deputy chairman of TD Bank. He would be 71 years old eight years from now -- like Manley, I think his opportunity has passed.
  • Allan Rock (age 63) is President of uOttawa. Having done that for three years, is he looking for another challenge?
  • John Manley (age 62) would provide a centre-right alternative to Bob Rae. Not sure if he could muster the organization required on short notice or that he wants to leave his job as CEO of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (he has only been in the role for just over a year). The opportunity has probably passed him by.
  • John McCallum (age 61) would provide a similar centre-right alternative to Bob Rae. Not sure he has the charisma or the desire to serve as leader for the next eight years, however.
  • Carolyn Bennett (age 60). Supported Bob Rae after she withdrew in 2006. Doubt she would run now.
  • Jane Stewart (age 56). Former minister under Chrétien and former MP for Brant. [added on 10 May after Twitter discussion]
  • Joyce Murray (age 56), has experience as a minister in the BC government and is an environmentalist and entrepreneur.
  • Jim Karygiannis (age 55) is one of the more socially conservative members of the Liberal Party. If he were ever going to run, it might be now.
  • David McGunity (age 51). I can't see him running for the leadership at the same time as his brother, Dalton, is running for re-election as Premier, but stranger things have happened.
  • Denis Coderre (age 47). I hope he runs and loses. I dislike his policy and his approach to politics.
  • George Smitherman (age 47) lost to Rob Ford in the Toronto mayoral race. Not sure that he could muster a national campaign, but he's available and ambitious.
  • Kirsty Duncan (age 44) might run and I could see Bennett supporting her.
  • Mario Silva (age 44) might have been in the running, but he lost his seat in Davenport and received fewer than 11,000 votes. Maybe he can make a comeback, but not right now.
  • Desirée McGraw (age 42) might run. She hasn't served as an MP, but she's very involved in policy and Liberal politics. She was mentioned as a contender back in 2007. [updated on 23 June 2011]
  • Scott Simms (age 41), who, despite his relative youth, has been an MP for almost seven years and won his riding handily with 57% of the vote in 2011 (70% in 2008!).
  • Justin Trudeau (age 39). I hope he does not run. Unfortunately for him, his lineage is a handicap and clouds judgements of his own merit as a politician.
  • Robert Ghiz (age 37) is the Premier of Prince Edward Island. He might run but he would have to resign as Premier to do so -- seems a bit unlikely.

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Posted in Liberal Party of Canada, Politics

Reforming the Liberal Party

May 5th, 2011

A few days after we lost to Ed Holder in London West, here are some reflections on the election and the Liberal Party of Canada.

The election

  1. This was an historic ass-kicking: 18.9% of the popular vote nationally is dreadful (14.2% in Quebec!).
  2. This was a rejection of Michael Ignatieff, in particular: whether he deserved it or not, most Canadians did not like him or want him to be Prime Minister. The leadership index from Nanos Research shows him lower at the end of the campaign than before.
  3. With a few exceptions, I liked our 2011 election platform. I thought it was well-suited to the moment and the leader.
  4. Turnout continues to be awful at 61.7%. I believe low turnout is related to the nature of the issues being discussed and the lack of articulated disagreement between the CPC, LPC and NDP. No one advocated raising the GST to deal with the deficit. No one proposed anything radical or interesting on health care. No one proposed anything significant on national defence. A common security perimeter with the United States was barely discussed. No one proposed anything especially significant to address poverty.
  5. The lack of significant differentiation on policy made the personalities of the leaders even more important than they usually are.
  6. The CPC wilfully misrepresented Liberal policy (iPod tax, hiking taxes in general) and ran a concerted negative campaign against Michael Ignatieff, which succeeded. They will do so again and again with every successive Liberal leader until they lose. I find it disgusting and shameful, but there is no denying that it worked.

The next four years

  1. The CPC continues to lower federal revenue by cutting taxes, in line with their long-term plan to shrink the fiscal capacity of the federal government and relatively strengthen the fiscal capacity of the provincial governments. The GST cut and the cuts to corporate taxes both provide more revenue to the provincial governments (potential, in the case of the GST: only NS and QC took the tax points).
  2. As a result of 1), I doubt we will be back to a balanced federal budget by 2015.
  3. I expect the CPC will continue to govern as they have -- that is, like a mean-spirited Liberal government -- and will continue to cut specific programs and funding for specific organizations that they dislike (long-gun registry, Status of Women, Kairos, Court Challenges, etc). They will not introduce government legislation on major social issues like same-sex marriage and abortion (this is because they are chicken-shit cowards; see also point 5, below). They will introduce some legislation in the form of private members' bills on these issues.
  4. We may see some action on Senate reform with the CPC and NDP holding 87.3% of the seats in the House of Commons, although I think it is unlikely, given the constitutional issues involved.
  5. Stephen Harper will appoint two Justices to the Supreme Court of Canada who are staunch Conservatives. Conservatives know that influence on the Supreme Court of Canada is essential to achieving their long-term social policy goals.
  6. Stephen Harper will have a hard time maintaining his iron grip on his MPs, now that there are more of them and they have a majority government.
  7. The CPC will gleefully oversee the shrinkage of the federal public service by attrition, as veteran public servants retire and are not replaced by new hires.
  8. The CPC will do absolutely nothing about the environment.
  9. The CPC will continue to spend more on the military, as part of its 20-year Canada First defence strategy.
  10. The CPC will introduce and pass a number of crime bills that will result in more people being incarcerated for longer periods of time.
  11. The CPC will cut the per vote subsidy to federal parties, which will negatively impact the NDP, LPC and Bloc.

Reforming the Liberal Party of Canada

  1. I am personally committed to reforming the Liberal Party of Canada. I invite you to join me by becoming a member and a monthly donor through the Victory Fund. Don't sit on the sidelines and complain -- get involved and try your best to improve the party from within.
  2. We should not merge with the NDP, but we should have a discussion about doing so.
  3. The most important quality of our next leader must be integrity. We need someone who a skeptical and cynical electorate can believe in.
  4. Related to 2), our next platform should be focused on a limited number of commitments that we can accomplish in short order. We need to restore faith in politicians and the best way of doing so is to repeatedly do what we say we will do.
  5. Forget "centrist," we need to be the party that is fiscally conservative and socially liberal. This doesn't mean that we need to be the party of the continual tax cut (that isn't necessarily fiscally conservative) but it does mean that we need to have the courage to honestly confront issues like the sustainability of funding for health care. We shouldn't live in a fiscal fantasy land. On the socially liberal front, although we have achieved much already, we can do more. There are many laws and regulations on the books that are no longer relevant or necessary. We should be the party of smart government that respects individual freedom. Right now, I would say that party is the Green Party.
  6. We should be the party of an open Internet, increased competition and less restrictive intellectual property law.
  7. The policy conference we had at Canada @ 150 was good, but avoided the question of national defence. Within the Liberal Party we need to debate the role of the Canadian military in the next 25 years or so. In general, we need to make international policy a priority. Let's not pretend the federal government is just a big provincial government.
  8. We need to develop a serious plan for democratic reform. Electoral reform, limits on the power of the Prime Minister, reform of Question Period, mandatory voting, a three-line whip system -- there are lots of ideas that we should discuss and could be part of an effective democratic reform package. I like the Westminster system, but even within that tradition we can improve things substantially.

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Posted in Politics, Public policy, copyright, defence, fiscal, tax