- Nine lucky partisans people are exiting private life to serve in Canada’s Upper Chamber and Stephen Harper may have just overplayed the partisan card. While there were a few pleasant surprises among the appointments (Stanley Cup-winning hockey coach Jacques Demers, former Acadia University president Kelvin Ogilvy), three of the new senators are former Conservative Party staffers and 1 (Claude Carignan) ran and lost for the party in the last election. Especially curious is the new Senator from New Brunswick, Carolyn Stewart-Olsen, Harper’s former press secretary. While she was an ER nurse in Moncton, she’s been working for the Reform, Alliance, and Conservative Parties since 1993 and, running with what scant information I can find on her, she has much less recent history with the province than its other 9 senators. However, given her frosty (to be generous) relationship with the media, she may be in the Red Chamber just to keep Mike Duffy in check.
- Jack Layton’s not-unjustified posturing aside, the chances of a federal election this fall took a bit of a blow today when the Liberal Party said they were neither going to force an election on the issue of Employment Insurance nor bring down the government at its first chance in October. This is smart for several reasons, chief among them the fact that EI isn’t something people usually talk about at coffee shops. Also, the Liberals still aren’t ready physically or financially for a vote this fall and the party still needs to better define how it would run this country. The Conservatives have handed them tons of ammo this summer (the Suaad Hagi Mohamud case, rising unemployment, continuing debates about health care), but the Official Opposition has been mostly silent this summer.
- Speaking of Jack Layton, the federal NDP should be doing everything it can to persuade Gary Doer to lead it- even if it has to throw its current leader under the canola-powered bus. The Manitoba premier announced today that he would be stepping down this fall after ten years as premier and 21 as leader of the provincial New Democrats. He is, in my mind, the finest Canadian premier of this generation, not just because he leaves Manitoba in a better state than when he found it (socially and financially), but because he did it by listening to the people, hearing what their priorities were, and putting them into action. He is a left-wing populist whose efforts are reflected in his good work, rather than a left wing ideologue who preaches from a pulpit of self-righteousness. If the NDP is serious, not only about making a run for government, but about living up to the “New” moniker, they should embrace Doer, or at least someone like him. Otherwise, the party risks looking like it’s backward, anachronistic, and stuck in the 1960s.
- The Political Animal raises a bottle of Sam Adams to honour Ted Kennedy, the legendary Massachusetts senator, who died this week of brain cancer. Ironically, considering his reputation as the “Liberal Lion,” Kennedy’s biggest legacy will his record of bipartisanship, as details in this Time magazine story from May. He would very often compromise with Republicans on his bills before they passed, reasoning that if the bill still made things better, they could always be further improved upon later. “Never let the perfect get in the way of the good,” he said. If only more politicians thought that way.
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