Conservatives have no credibility in regards to the Senate

Conservatives, especially of the populist Western variety, have argued that democratic reforms are needed in order to 'shed the elitist and corrupt character' of the Canadian Senate.  Since the 1980s there have been two 'elected' Senators nominated to the Senate; Stanley Waters, nominated to the Senate in 1990 and Bert Brown in 2007.  Both of them were nominated from Alberta.  Since then the Tories under Harper since 2006 have completed ignored the idea of promoting an elected Senate in Canada by nominating 38 Conservatives to the Senate in total, including three more today.

In a gift to Layton, Harper decided to nominate defeated House of Commons candidates Larry Smith, Fabian Manning and Josee Verner to the Senate.  The optics of the Conservatives' press release are terrible.  It states that the "government will continue to push for a more democratic, accountable and effective Senate".  To which Layton and the NDP predictably replied that "there's nothing democratic about appointing three people who were rejected by voters three weeks ago."  How does one compute those statements in a way that accepts the Conservative perspective?  Conservatives in the past could rightfully point at the Liberals and correctly argue that they also indulged in such abuses of the Senate, muddying the waters as they did during the 'in-and-out' scandal; they can't make such defenses with the NDP in opposition.

Adam Radwanski over at The Globe and Mail thinks that this issue of nominating failed Senate candidates is potentially a pretty nasty narrative running against the Conservatives out in Western Canada.  Possibly, but I've been cynical about conservatives' vision for the Senate for a while.  In particular I think that they view the Senate as a mechanism for the institutionalization of conservatism in Canadian federal governance; in particular through creating a new veto point for left-wing legislation.  There's certainly a 'western' element to Canadian conservatives' view of the Senate's role as well.  Western conservatives feel that an elected Senate could yield a solid voting block of Senators who can prevent the sort of 'abuses' that Central Canada has 'inflicted' on the West.  The visceral loathing of Pierre Trudeau and his National Energy Policy comes to mind in this regard.

The example of the United States is the best way of analyzing the effects of 'balancing' representation by provinces in the upper house and making it 'effective' and 'equal'.  Small states tend to yield particularist Senators who are easily bought and paid for by capital eager to make a massive 'return' on its 'investments' in political elections.  These Senators thus act as a conservative bloc that denies liberal Democrats the capacity to bring sweeping changes to the country through the legislative process by blocking or watering down bills.  The best tool in the US Senate at the moment is the abuse of the filibuster; forcing all legislation to obtain 60 votes in order to pass a cloture motion has been a godsend for conservatives who feared that the election of Barack Obama would yield another round of sweeping liberal legislation.  Considering the challenges, it's a bit of a miracle that the Obama Administration was able at all to pass any sort of health care reform that didn't act as a buck-naked give away to the private health care industry.

Fiscal Conservatism

Via the Toronto Star:

OTTAWA—As Conservatives prepare to recall Parliament, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is setting the stage for a clampdown on federal government spending under the newly elected government, that would include cutting the public service by 80,000 — or one-third.

The Conservatives now have the power to cut spending to bring down the deficit, says Flaherty, a message that could foreshadow a round of deep cuts to services and programs in coming years.

I've made my own opinions clear on the causes of Canada's current fiscal deficit; a combination of tax cuts and the recession has pushed Canada into a sea of red ink.  Not surprising the Tories' solution to fixing this rather fixable problem is to choose austerity by axing a third of the entire civil service.  The Tories are arguing that they want to concentrate on the economy by focusing specifically on the deficit; yet spending reductions, especially the kind of hardcore austerity that results from hacking apart a third of the civil service, are only going to add further downward pressure on the Canadian economy.  Precisely as the British Conservatives have done and experienced across the pond.  This increases the likelihood of a double dip recession and will only serve to depress revenues and increase outlays through social spending programs such as EI, widening the deficit in the process.

The Conservatives aren't stupid, they know that this is the case.  Which leads us to another matter, which is the intentional underfunding of the public sector with the purpose of undermining the welfare state.  If you can't simply destroy the Canadian Pension Plan, Medicare or Employment Insurance through direct legislation (this would be political suicide), then why not underfund and under-staff them so they are indirectly denied the ability to preform the services to which they are intended?

Quoting Mrs. Ducharme, national executive vice-president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada:

“If we went back to the 1990s, the federal government cut around 45,000 jobs, and they realized pretty quickly that they didn’t have the people to actually do the work that Canadians expect.”

She said the people who suffer in this scenario are those most dependent on government services such as immigrants, the unemployed, pensioners and military veterans.

“I think this government really needs to stop and think through some of their ideas before they, quite honestly, destroy the public service and services that are expected, needed and delivered as part of everyone’s day-to-day lives,” Ducharme said.

 They did think it through, which is why they're doing what they're doing.

Progressives Better Prepare for Disappointment in 2015

Seems that since the New Democrats have eclipsed the Liberals to become the Official Opposition that nobody is interested in the Layton camp to attempt to work with the third party to attempt any sort of united progressive opposition to the Conservatives.  I figured that this would occur, given how eager the New Democrats and their earlier incarnation the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation were in replacing the Liberals on the left-wing side of the spectrum.

I think this is still a mistake if progressives intend on attempting to remove Stephen Harper and the Tories from government at the ballot box in 2015.  I believe that the New Democrats will in fact solidify their hold over the progressive vote in the country and further relegate the Liberals to a more marginal third party status, but that process will not be quick enough to produce a change of government in four-years time.  New Democrats may think that the re-alignment on the left will eventually be beneficial to the country, and that's possible, some will argue probable, but you may regret not making the tactical decision to work with the Liberals in the short-term if the Tories are able to institutionalize the full wrath of neoliberalism and all of its social woes into the Canadian federal government.  If you're victorious in a theoretical 2019 federal election, you may find it extremely difficult to reverse the decisions made by the Conservatives and especially the effects of those decisions.

Right on Cue...

A week ago I made these comments on RedTory's blog,

Originally I had a feeling that the ‘Quebec gambit’ that the Tories put together to rebuild the ‘Quebec-West’ coalition of the Mulroney years was just a ploy to win a majority. Now that Quebec has swung to the NDP and the Tories won a majority using rural and suburban Ontario, I imagine that nobody in the Conservative Party will give a rat’s ass about ‘whatever Quebec wants’.

And right on cue, "Harper faces golden opportunity, For the first time in half a century, Quebec agenda will not dominate".  This isn't the Tories per say, but the point I figure still stands.  Regardless, you can sense the ridiculousness of this argument in light of how dominated by Western interests the modern Conservative Party is?  Surely you could write this same article back in 1993 when Chretien won a majority with Ontario, exchanging Quebec in the article for 'the West'.  The main point is thus; Quebec has been 'annoying' for federal politics in Canada, especially since it's always in 'need of attention' and therefore the formation of a majority without the need for significant representation from Quebec is 'good for the country'.  Guess the Tories' 'French kiss with Quebec' was for the most part limited to cynical majority mongering, which wouldn't surprise me.

Update: It strikes me that there's an underlying point here.  Notably that Quebec has been a bastion of progressivism in Canada; since the Tories no longer need to 'placate' it, they can now conceivably get to the business of chipping away at the welfare state.