Election 2011

[a_majoor]

I'm not a great fan of the Conservative Government due to their vast increases in program spending (even before the economic crisis and threat of a coalition unleashed $50 billion in porkulus and additional debt). OTOH, they have stood closer to their principles in foreign affairs, the military, justice and taxation.

One argument which has been trotted out many times is the really controversial issues like Parliamentary reform could not be touched because we have a minority government. The PM and cabinet select issues that they "should" get consensus from one or the other parties to assemble the votes to pass pieces of legislation.

The other argument is Prime Minister Harper is actually after a fundamental realignment in the political landscape, so the destruction of the Liberal Party and the shuffling of the wreckage into a new left or center left party that also encompasses most opf the NDP and Greens is the true goal, and reform has to wait until this is achieved.

There may be grains of truth in these arguments, or maybe something else is in play. WRT my vote, so far the CPC is demonstrating a more consistent approach to things, and are not seemingly running to grab political and economic power at any cost like the three amigos. The Liberals have never offered any platform except trotting out the 1993 Red Book every election since; I'm much more inclined to listen to Jack Layton simply because he will at least present an internally consistent platform of some sort (even if I believe it will be based on false premises and faulty logic, I must still give it informed consideration to understand what I will vote for and against).

One thing seems clear to me is the current situation of perpetual minority governments is paralyzing our society; lets get out the vote for someone so we can end this mess and have a stable four years.

 

[Donaill]

Everyone forgets that the Concervatives also tried bringing down minority houses in the not too distant past. Coalitions are not foreign to Canada and perhaps work better than most since it requires compromise.

 

[Infanteer]

Agreed Thucydides - the Conservatives seem to offer the best of the worst at this point.  But democracy itself is the best of the worst, so I guess we can be live with that....

 

[Dennis Ruhl]

Local Edmonton CTV pegged it tonight - The Seinfeld Election - the election about nothing.

 

[ModlrMike]

Everyone forgets that the Concervatives also tried bringing down minority houses in the not too distant past. Coalitions are not foreign to Canada and perhaps work better than most since it requires compromise.

So you have no problem with Gilles Duceppe sitting in Cabinet?

 

[HavokFour]

Can't wait to vote for the second time in my life. ;D

Here's to a Conservative Majority and Iggy shutting his yap and actually helping to improve our Great Country for once.

 

[OldSolduer]

Everyone forgets that the Concervatives also tried bringing down minority houses in the not too distant past. Coalitions are not foreign to Canada and perhaps work better than most since it requires compromise.

And use the spell check.

 

[Brad Sallows]

I do not begrudge the Conservatives their "high spending" prior to the recession.  Much if not most of it seems to have restored the transfer payment cuts made by prior governments.  In my view, having made the cuts when it was felt necessary to balance the budget, it was fair to restore the funds when the budget was balanced and surpluses allowed.

The danger of the coalition is not separatism.  The danger is that all three potential member parties like to spend money, and the easiest "compromise" to make to agree to continue governing together is to spend someone else's (taxpayers') money on their respective wish lists.

 

[Edward Campbell]

I think that ThreeHundredEight.com provides a useful - and I hope fairly reliable - aggregation of polling data. Their 28 Mar 11 projections are:

Source: http://www.threehundredeight.blogspot.com/


This shows that while the projected seat distribution is unchanged (the Conservatives are just two seats shy of majority territory) the voting intentions have changed a bit:

Source: http://www.threehundredeight.blogspot.com/


My guess (maybe it's just a hope) is that:

1. The NDP are making slight gains in QC;

2. Everywhere else, the NDP are gaining at the Liberals expense; and

3. Conservative support is firming up in Atlantic Canada and ON.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Ray Sturgeon was a very, very well connected soldier, senior public servant connected and lobbyist – almost the ultimate Ottawa insider.

This story, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail, is a bit of a hatchet job, focused almost exclusively on his third career as a lobbyist for CFN* and ignoring his many and varied career accomplishments:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/tory-candidate-lobbied-ottawa-for-us-fighter-jet-manufacturer/article1959650/

Tory candidate lobbied Ottawa for U.S. fighter-jet manufacturer

TU THANH HA

Globe and Mail Update
Published Monday, Mar. 28, 2011

One of the Conservative candidates in the federal election was until last December one of the lobbyists for the maker of the controversial F-35 jet the Harper government picked to be Canada’s next generation of fighter planes, records show.

As senior partner at CFN Consultants, an Ottawa firm specializing in defence issues, Raymond Sturgeon lobbied the government on behalf of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, the U.S. manufacturer of the F-35 Lightning II, the jet whose multi-billion sole-sourced price tag has been heavily criticized.

A month before winning the nomination as Tory candidate for the Ontario riding of Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing in January, Mr. Sturgeon stopped representing Lockheed Martin and a dozen other high-tech, aerospace and weapons firms, according to records with the Federal Registry of Lobbyists.

The government has said the F-35 contract will cost $16 billion – $9-billion to buy a fleet of 65 jets and the rest for maintenance – but critics predict it will be more expensive.

On the lobbyists’ registry, Mr. Sturgeon described his work on behalf Lockheed as “(assisting) in marketing strategy for the sale of aircraft and aircraft components to the department of national defence.”

He reported that he had contacted National Defence, the Foreign Affairs department and Industry Canada on behalf of Lockheed Martin.

Also, in a reflection of the economic benefits that proponents of the F-35 tout, Mr. Sturgeon also communicated with three federal regional development agencies – Western Economic Diversification Canada, the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and the Federal Office of Regional Development for Quebec.

The riding where Mr. Sturgeon is running, Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing, is a vast Northern Ontario district that the Conservatives last captured in 1930.

After his nomination as a candidate, Mr. Sturgeon attacked the incumbent MP, Carol Hughes of the NDP, as representing “big city” voters because she had failed to vote for the abolition of the long-gun registry.

Until Dec. 15, Mr. Sturgeon was lobbying for Colt Canada Corp. of Kitchener, Ont., a subsidiary of Colt Defense LLC, is the U.S. manufacturer of the Colt .45 pistol and the M4 assault rifle.

One purpose of his work for Colt was “providing assistance in procurement of small arms to the government of Canada,” he listed in his lobbyist filing.

Another, he reported, was “resolving issues” with the Automatic Firearm Country Control List, which outlines the countries where Canadian automatic weapons can be legally exported.

The RCMP, National Defence, Public Works, Treasury Board, Foreign Affairs and Industry Canada were among the departments Mr. Sturgeon contacted on behalf of Colt.

Other firms Mr. Sturgeon listed as clients included Rheinmetall Canada, formerly known as Oerlikon, BAE Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries and General Dynamics Ordnance & Tactical Systems Canada Inc.

The Conservatives have sold the F-35 contract as a major source of future maintenance and supply jobs for Canadian companies.

I had, some 25 or so years ago, the opportunity to work with Mr. Sturgeon a few times: after every meeting I carefully checked my pockets and wallet – he was a skilled bureaucratic infighter and I don’t know many people who ever bested him at NDHQ politics, a "game" which usually involved billions of dollars. He is, also, a pleasant and personable fellow; he can tell you to go to hell and make you look forward to the trip! So: connected, smart, pleasant and personable, plugged in, very knowledgeable about Ottawa – the voters of Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing could do a lot worse.

                       

Ray Sturgeon – Conservative candidate    Carol Hughes, MP – NDP incumbent
Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing                  Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing

The early  polling has Ms. Hughes out in front 46.1% to 32.2% for Mr. Sturgeon.


_________
* CFN is the ultimate DND lobby. CFN stands for Crutchlow, Friedel, Nixon who were, respectively: ADM(Mat), Associate ADM(Mat) and DM of DND many, many years ago.

 

[Nemo888]

40.5 billion deficit this year. That is my big election issue. About 1300$ per person. We were already in debt at 36,000$ per person last year. How I wish voters could do math and be responsible. Not that voting for any of the corrupt opportunists out there will make much difference.

 

[OldSolduer]

It has long been my contention that government should only be involved in the following areas:

Public Safety - Police/Fire/Military
Health Care - Hospitals/ Ambulance etc
Education
Infrastructure - Roads/Bridges etc

Funding for third rate film makers/musicians/poets/etc....... >

 

[aesop081]

That is my big election issue.

So you will vote Conservative then ?

Or did you already forget what parties demanded that $50B be sent on economic stimulus ?

 

[Edward Campbell]

Notwithstanding what appears, to me, to be an anti-Harper bias in the Globe and Mail news and politics departments, their business section seems less biased. This, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail, is from their informative “Economy Lab” series and it explains why Prince Michael Ignatieff’s nose grows a bit every time he talks about corporate tax cuts:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/economy-lab/stephen-gordon/liberal-corporate-tax-plan-just-election-bumph/article1959392/
(Hyperlinks from the original.)

Liberal corporate tax plan just election bumph

STEPHEN GORDON
Globe and Mail Blog

Posted on Monday, March 28, 2011

Here is a quote from Michael Ignatieff on the first day of the campaign:

“We stick [the corporate tax rate] at 18 per cent, you save $6-billion, you pay down the deficit and you make the specific targeted investments in our platform.”

There are many, many things wrong with that sentence.

We stick it at 18 per cent, … The rate as of January 1, 2011 is 16.5 per cent. Going back to 18 per cent is an increase, not a pause. The scheduled decrease to 15 per cent in 2012 has been law for a couple of years now, and since major investment projects involve lead times measured in years, stopping now has almost the same effect as an increase. We cannot ‘stick’ at 18 per cent; we have long since moved past that point.

you save $6-billion, … The Liberals seem determined to repeat this number, so it’s important to remember that it means approximately nothing. As far as anyone can tell, its source is the Department of Finance’s October 2007 fiscal update. In Table 3.5, the projected tax relief of the reduction from 18 per cent to 15 per cent for the fiscal year 2012-13 is around $6-billion. There are several problems with this estimate:

• It is based on a 2007 projection for 2012-13. In 2007, corporate income tax (CIT) revenues per CIT rate percentage point were in the stratosphere and still rising; projections for the future were correspondingly optimistic. Using the same approach using more recent data, the PBO puts the sacrificed revenue on the order of $4.6-billion.

• It is based on static analysis, in which it is assumed that there are no behavioural responses to the policy change. As noted here, this is an extremely odd assumption to make in this context. The most important reason for cutting corporate income taxes is to induce those responses: higher productivity, wages and income. Higher incomes will produce higher tax revenues that will partially offset those lost to the CIT cuts.

• It ignores the potential for tax shifting. Multinational firms may choose to book revenues in Canada in order to take advantage of the lower rates, thus increasing the size of the corporate income tax base and therefore revenues. (To my mind, this is the weakest of the arguments in favour of cutting the CIT rate, since it amounts to playing a zero-sum game with other tax jurisdictions. But as long as other countries don’t respond, it’s still an important point to remember.)

My own rough guesstimate for the size of the effect of reducing the CIT rate from 18 per cent to 16.5 per ceny on the federal budget balance is something on the order of $1-billion:

• In a Department of Finance simulation exercise (pdf), the long-run effects of CIT cuts on the budget balance are roughly half of the short-term costs, or $2.3-billion.

• The results of a University of Calgary study (pdf) suggests that the gains from a cut of 3 percentage points in the CIT rate are on the order of 1.4 per cent (see also here). In an economy with a GDP on the order of $1.6-trillion, that works out to an increase in income of about $22-billion. Multiply that by the federal government’s share or GDP (roughly 15 per cent) - and a reasonable ball-park number for the offsetting revenues is $3-billion. The net effect of on the budget balance is around $1.6-billion. Divide that $1.6-billion-$2.3-billion range by two – only half of the 3 per cent cut has been implemented – and you get approximately $1-billion.

you pay down the deficit… There is no possible way that this measure will reduce the deficit. Firstly, the reduction to 16.5 per cent has only recently gone into effect; the structural deficit identified by the PBO existed well before January of 2011. And its scale is an order of magnitude less than the deficit problem we’re facing. At best, it will prevent the current gap – which is of the order of $12-billion-$14-billion – from increasing by an extra $1-billion or so, and only if there were no new spending. But that’s not the case, either.

and you make the specific targeted investments in our platform. The arithmetic involved in using a cancelled tax cut to finance higher spending only makes sense if we’re running a budgetary surplus. It doesn’t make sense in the context of large and persistent deficits.

In terms of communications strategy, that sentence may be effective. But in terms of economic policy, it’s simply wrong.

In other words, as recceguy suggests: Liberals lie,

 

[Redeye]

I don't think the Greens will ever get a seat unless they change the voting system to assign seats based on % of the popular vote. Their platform is too far left for even NDP supporters.

Have you ever actually read their platform?  I ask because I thought that way too, until someone asked me that question.

And I was surprised.  It's pretty interesting.

It's not particularly "left".  Parts are, perhaps, but I'd say probably less so than the NDP, but most of it is about some significant restructuring of the economy, especially the parts that tax dollars prop up.  The reality is they don't fit on the conventional left-right one dimensional spectrum.  It's got objectives that sound much more to the right as well.

I'm pretty okay with reworking the tax system to encourage sustainability.  I also like their plan to expand income splitting for income tax purposes.  I'm fine with not giving subsidies to oil & gas companies, too.  Or most industries, really.  I'm good with the idea of supporting a reorientation of what manufacturing base we have towards things we can do competitively, because we can't just export all those jobs.

I voted for them in the last two federal elections, not because I'm an ardent supporter, but because I think they have ideas worth discussing, and every vote they get helps them become a stronger voice.  So far, from what I've seen of the "major" parties, I've got no compelling reason to vote for any of them, and unless that changes, I'll probably vote for them again.

 

[Redeye]

So you will vote Conservative then ?

Or did you already forget what parties demanded that $50B be sent on economic stimulus ?

What would the deficit be if they hadn't made those two rather short-sighted and foolhardy GST cuts?

 

[Edward Campbell]

It’s not like he needs it, but this opinion piece, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail, provides even more bleak news for Prince Michael Ignatieff:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/second-reading/brian-topp/ignatieff-hoisted-on-his-own-petard-in-quebec/article1959492/

Ignatieff hoisted on his own petard in Quebec

BRIAN TOPP

Globe and Mail Update
Posted on Monday, March 28, 2011

Michael Ignatieff chose to demonstrate his commitment to defeating the Conservative government by starting his campaign in the riding of Outremont – held by the NDP. Waiting for him there was news of an important new public opinion poll, conducted by the respected Quebec polling firm CROP (1,000 respondents, conducted between March 16th and 21st, reported in La Presse here.) Let’s take a look:

Best Prime Minister among national party leaders: Jack Layton 22% – Stephen Harper 17% – Michael Ignatieff 5%

Voting intensions in Quebec, all respondents: Bloc Quebecois 38% –Conservatives 23% – NDP 20% – Liberals 11%

Among Francophone voters: Bloc Quebecois 44% – NDP 21% –Conservatives 21% – Liberals 7%

Quebec City area: Bloc Quebecois 36% – Conservatives 33% – NDP 22% – Liberals 8%

There are no typos here: that’s 11% (eleven per cent) for the Liberals province-wide in Quebec, a bit more than half the level of NDP support. That’s 7% (seven per cent) among francophones (one-third the support for the New Democrats). That’s 8% (“eight”) in Quebec City (a bit more than one-third of the NDP vote).

And that’s 5% – five percent, many fewer than believe Elvis is still alive – of Quebeckers who would rate Mr. Ignatieff as best prime minister. Less than one-quarter of the number of Quebecers who rate Jack Layton that way.

These abysmal numbers help explain the notably low overall Liberal polling numbers going into this campaign. This CROP poll suggests that Mr. Ignatieff and his party have collapsed into single digits in Quebec – dragging down his national numbers.

A poll is just a snapshot, just one data point. The trends are what matter (and, in many ways, the most interesting thing about this poll is that the Bloc is lower than in many other recent samples). But if Mr. Ignatieff and his advisers really believe their rhetoric that all anti-Conservative voters (at least, the federalist ones) are obliged to vote for the party best positioned against Stephen Harper, then his next campaign stop in Tom Mulcair’s riding should be to endorse him – along with 74 other NDP candidates in Quebec.

But, do not despair Liberal supporters, and do not get complacent Conservative stalwarts, Harold Wilson’s old adage that “a week is a long time in politics” still holds; and an election campaign is an eternity; Liberal fortunes will get better and the Tories will decline in public support – the questions are: when, by how much and will those (inevitable) turnabouts be, in their turn, reversed before election day?

 

[Rifleman62]

Since the election was called, the media has been lining up taking any and every shot at (Mr.) Harper at every opportunity, or taking the opportunity to take shots.

Listening to Susan D (brother is a Liberal mover), early on Saturday, even then saying that the story of the three losers (not her words) getting together to form a government, would be dead in a couple of days. Since then, others have joined the choir, stated the same.

The body language of Jane T at the mere mention of the CPC or Harper. The way Harper's name is spoken, is like it is spit out. Always Harper, seldom Mr. Harper.   

Listening to McGuinty on CFRA this am who, would not, deny whatever word the host utilized to describe a coalition.

"Not necessarily a coalition, but a coalition if necessary" comes to mind.

This election may be won by the liberal media, a scary thought that this bunch could influence so many. Gullible Canadians.

 

[Nemo888]

So you will vote Conservative then ?

Or did you already forget what parties demanded that $50B be sent on economic stimulus ?

'

My riding is filled with opportunistic demagogues. It's a wasteland. They will promise anything to win. One riding over is a very nice Provincial Conservative, Lisa Macleod, who spoke out publicly against corruption in her own party. She would be worth knocking on some doors for. She outed John Baird's scheme to give Terry Kilrea a plum parole board job if he dropped out of the Mayoral race. Odd to see a politician who still feels moral outrage. She still has a moral compass.

The Party system the biggest flaw in Canadian politics. It is institutionalized corruption IMO. I want an MP who is answerable to their constituency for both FUNDING and votes.

 

[Edward Campbell]

... I want an MP who is answerable to their constituency for both FUNDING and votes.

Good! Then support whichever party promises to get rid of our current campaign financing scheme: make candidates and parties earn their own money by proposing policies and values that will convince "ordinary Canadians,' folks like you and me, to give them a few dollars - but not too many, say $2,500.00 per household, maximum, and none at all, not one red cent, from corporations, trade unions or special interest groups. Donations should come from "ordinary," tax paying, individual Canadian citizens, only. And, above all, no (or, at least, damned little - maybe $0.05/vote) public financing and no "donated" services like PR support from companies.