Remember the days when the press was gleefully brimming with anticipation over how Stephen Harper's crack team of character assassins would choose to "define" Thomas Muclair? Would he target the new NDP leader's temper? Or maybe his party-swapping? His French citizenship? His beard?
Well, it seems at some point the punditocracy got so sick of waiting they decided to do the PM's work for him. Thus, in this week's editorial pages we got to meet Thomas Muclair, SCARY ENEMY OF NATIONAL UNITY.
This brand was first forged two weeks ago, when Mulcair was a guest on the Evan Solomon Show with Evan Solomon and railed against the Alberta oil industry, which he claimed was inflating the Canadian dollar to dangerous heights and crippling the nation's eastern manufacturing sector in the process. As Solomon noted, Mulcair wrote a whole 2,000-word thesis about this correlation for Policy Options magazine back when he was just a lowly MP. And he still stands by it!
"It's by definition the Dutch disease," said Mulcair, in that machine-gun delivery of his. "The Canadian dollar is being held artificially high which is fine if you're going to Walt Disney World but not so good if you want to sell your manufactured products because the American client -- most of the time -- can no longer afford to buy it." This hurts "not only Ontario," he declared, but Quebec and New Brunswick too, not to mention "other places."
Well, the oily provinces weren't having any of that. All the western premiers (sans whoever's running Manitoba these days) quickly fired back, calling Mulcair's grasp of economics "tenuous" and "goofy," which in turn prompted the man himself to dismiss this conservative triumvirate as nothing more than a bunch of Hermes-style "messengers" for Harper, Canada's jealous Zeus.
So. Civil war inevitable?
Maybe, says Jon Ibbitson at the Globe. Making it clear where his allegiances lie, Ibbitson says you can't pit "the natural-resources sector against the manufacturing sector, the growing, flourishing New Canada against the troubled older economy," without courting "polarization and paralysis and maybe even the breakup of the country." Not that he's completely without sympathy for the NDP boss, however. In Canadian politics, "invariably, success involves pitting group against group," after all. So what makes Mulcair's politically opportunistic exploitation of East-West tension that different from Stephen Harper's strategically brilliant manipulation of West-East anxiety?
Susan Riley at the Ottawa Citizen is super into this. Rather than going on about "Dutch disease," which no one really understands anyway, she says we should be more concerned with "Canadian disease, a tendency to endlessly replay wrenching national unity feuds while real problems fester."Â
Both she and Ibbitson agree that there's actually a great deal of polite consensus on the future of the oilsands among people who actually matter -- particularly the need to balance economic development with environmental sustainability -- but the politicians are doing their best to mask this "growing common ground" in favour of reviving petty geographic feuds from the Max Headroom era. The Calgary Herald editorial board is equally cute and snippy, with their diagnosis being a fatal case of "Mulcair disease," whose symptoms include being a big lying liar about just how much Eastern Canada is actually suffering from the "production of Alberta crude" -- 65,520 oilsands-related jobs by 2035, by their count.
But maybe Thomas Mulcair is diseased like a fox! Michael Den Tandt in the National Post, no great NDP fan at the best of times, respectfully concedes that Muclair is being pretty damn "clever" in rejecting one of the dominant pieces of conventional wisdom in post-Harper Canadian politics: that you need the West to win.
For all their much-vaunted growth, after all, in the updated House of Commons "the three Prairie provinces combined will hold just 62 seats -- less than half Ontario's tally," meaning that so long as the NDP leader "keeps his stronghold in Quebec, and establishes a solid beachhead in Ontario, dominated by Toronto, Mulcair can put together a winning formula -- just as Stephen Harper did by uniting Alberta, rural and suburban Ontario."
In such a regionally polarized universe, the premier of Alberta may seem like an unlikely figure to serve as peacemaker, but that's just what Tim Harper at the Toronto Star expects Allison Redford to do, dubbing her the right woman to "lead the way in bringing down the rhetoric."
She's been playing the game longer than anyone else, after all, traveling all over the country and planet spouting carefully focus-grouped facts, figures and talking points designed to portray Canada's oil sector in the most flattering light, and depict her province as a happy team player at the centre of a wealth-sharing national energy policy -- er, plan.Â
In the Muclair pile-on, press accounts have made much of the fact that her insults were "far milder" than those of the other premiers -- or even members of her own cabinet -- which is basically the closest you get to a compliment when provincial egos are on the line. Some right-wingers are in a tizzy as a result, but that's a typical Tuesday in Alberta.
With the head of the New Democratic Party now scheduled to take a walkabout tour of Fort McMurray sometime in the coming weeks, Redford might just be the perfect person to help Tommy with some damage control.
She was supposed to be her province's first NDP premier, after all.
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Diane Francis: What's Bigger: Mulcair's Mansion, his Ego, or Alberta Oilsands?
Dr. Weaver from UVic concluded that the biggest risk to the climate from GHG is from COAL being burnt for electricity. Why are we getting spiking temperatures now? Why have the last 15 years been some of the warmest on record?
Alberta puts more CO2 into the atmosphere from coal power than from the oil sands.
The real reason? China. Don't you think 1+ billion people suddenly going through massive economic change powered by coal has more effect than a couple of million people extracting oil from sand?
This whole section of the Huffington Post does nothing but create division. I did not want to separate from Canada when I woke up this morning... but I think I do now.
While the East currently gets most of its energy from importation, that may well not be the case in the relatively near future.
If the West is truly not needed by the rest of Canada, I'm positive that we (Westerners) would all be just as happy to be our own boss and country--lots of food, energy, and great potential for treaties with China and the USA.
Del Mastro, for example, refused to visit the the program, Sex: A Tell-All Exhibit, at The Museum of Science and Technology and yet, gets all in a fluster about its very existence. Keeps talking about 'danger to children' as if they are being dragged off the street and forced to watch fake penis draped in condoms.
The Harper Conservatives have been flying blind or seemingly so on most things so its laughable that they would harp on Mulcair's absence from the Oil Tar Sands
(this factoid brought you by the Alberta education system - the top system in the English-speaking world)
Problematically, it's still Canadians they are talking to. Having lived through so many referendums, it's kind of lost what shock value it had, and most of us kind of get the fact that Quebec politicians have had to flirt with some aspects of it to stay even marginally viable in la belle province.
While a small percentage of the population is susceptible to such cheap tricks to get them riled over non-issues, most Canadians seem to be fairly calm about the idea that someone might speak differently to a provincial constituency than they would to a national one.
After all, Harper does it every time he sneaks west of Thunder Bay.
What's more, many people in central Canada recognize that we need a Prime Minster for the entire country, and that someone willing to throw a region under the bus for partisan gain is not PM material.
What's even more, many people recognize that the oil sands benefit the entire country. If it were shut down, all of Canada would suffer a major economic blow. Quebec would be waiting for its equalization payments, only to be told that there's no one left to fund it.
2.Mulcair has never suggested shutting down the tar sands, he has suggested that the corporations who are benefiting from the extraction of the resource should be required to pay the environmental costs of the extraction, not the Canadian taxpayers
3. the point about dutch disease is that the oil sands are not benefittng the entire country, but are actually damaging certain segments of the country.
BTW, how many seats in Ontarion would Mulcair have to take away from Harper to become the next Prime Minister?
Specifically. What precise changes does Mulcair have in mind?
There in lies the problem we have economic situation which will receive no constructive debate because it is easier to pretend it doesn't exist, for political gain. Hats off to Mr Mulcair for opening the discussion , he most certainly didn't do it for political reasons, he did it because it needed to done.
People should remember the 70s when we were saying " the west wants in" as the majority of economic and political activity was in the east. Now that the shoe is on the other foot it will be beneficial to Canadians to discuss how we can all benefit from being an energy super power. I would suggest a made in Canada energy price so industries can benefit by lowering production costs.
What does hurt eastern industry is the complete lack of management and planning by all levels of government for existing operations and future development in the east.
Many large corporations are breaking their necks trying to figure out how to make their foreign operations more efficient and profitable so they never have to return to southern Ontario. But the government shrugs off any responsibility for these regions and their development.
As I once said, some people think that only the horse that is running should get premium oats. But anyone who knows anything develops potential in the entire stable because one day that runner will break a leg.
The Harper government doesn't get that, and though Alberta premier Allison Redford just might by now, it won't help the country.
Or, as Bob Dylan once wrote: ''You just want to be on the side that's winning...''
If the mood of the country shifts against Harper, those same pundits will revise both history and their political biases that Linda Blair's head will spin faster than you can say, let alone spell, 'exorcist'.