Category: Chairman’s Desk

This article first appeared in the Toronto Star on November 17, 2019.

On Wednesday, the first public hearings began in an impeachment process that seems to have been crafted for our era of reality television.

Watching the testimonies of Bill Taylor, George Kent and Marie Yovanovitch, I was struck by the soap-opera nature of the hearings.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her House Democrats have, it seems, learned important lessons from the Mueller hearing.

The criticisms of that process were many: it was too lengthy, too convoluted and, in the end, too boring to convince Americans of the president’s wrongdoing.

And so the war over optics has shifted.

First, the wise decision to act swiftly. Rather than a drawn-out, process-obsessed approach, the Intelligence Committee has moved, in a matter of weeks, to bring the matter onto television.

Second, Democrats have changed the cast of characters. The unfortunate reality of the Mueller hearings was that their main witness, the special counsel, was unconvincing, overly cautious and boring.

Over the coming weeks, Mueller will be replaced by diplomats, civil servants and security officials. Some more colourful than others. Some more persuasive. But there will be enough of them, with enough years of service and individual and collective credibility to dispense with the trope of a “deep state” determined to overthrow Trump.

Ambassador Yovanovitch spoke vividly of gunfire and attacks endured during placements in Mogadishu and Tashkent. Her words remind us that if soldiers are “diplomats in armour,” diplomats are often “soldiers in suits.”

The arrival of decorated military officials like Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman will further complicate Republicans’ efforts. If Vindman arrives in uniform, Purple Heart medal and all, it will surely not be lost on the reality TV president.

And, third, there is another substantive shift, one designed to tightly control the narrative. Watch for the democrats to avoid secondary characters like Rudy Giuliani in order to focus on the star of the show, Donald Trump.

Finally, another clever tactic. No more Latin.

After months of “quid pro quo,” Democrats have swapped the phrase for “extortion” and “bribery.” Simple, clear and perhaps most importantly, eye-catching as a chyron on CNN or MSNBC.

Donald Trump has caught wise to the Democrats’ strategy and has, in turn, worked to emphasize that the hearings are simply too dull to deserve Americans’ attention, going so far as to say he has not watched one minute of the hearings.

Republicans, including the president’s son and leading members of Congress, have piled on and roundly described the first hearing as “boring,” uninteresting and a “#Snoozefest.”

Journalists and media networks have taken the bait, publishing headlines that focus on process rather than the substance of the testimony.

“Consequential, but dull: Trump impeachment hearings begin without a bang,” announced Reuters, while NBC News declared, “Plenty of substance but little drama on first day of impeachment hearings.”

True, most of the testimony had already been divulged in closed sessions. And, to be sure, there were fewer fireworks than we saw in the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh or even the 40-day Benghazi hearings. But of all things to say about the opening sessions of only the fourth presidential impeachment proceedings in U.S. history, is “boring” really a newsworthy one?

To be sure, it’s important for the proceedings to draw Americans’ interest. Otherwise, what effect will they have outside the D.C. Beltway?

But it is not the job of Adam Schiff or anyone else in Congress for that matter, to entertain. Impeachment, as much as it may feel like one, is not a reality show. It is a crucial, albeit often tedious, process of gathering, evaluating and sharing evidence.

Of course 24-hour television and social media have brought greater spectacle to politics. Some commentators pilloried Reuters and NBC for their flippant headlines, arguing that “journalists wanting more entertainment in politics, is what gave us Donald Trump.”

But the fact remains that spectacle should be the by-product, not the purpose of this most solemn and consequential of political acts. Otherwise, our democracies face the same fate as the declining Roman republic, in which voters were placated not with serious governance, but panem et circenses — bread and circuses.

In the era of reality television, streamed to your mobile 24 hours a day, that is the most frightening reality of all.

This article first appeared in the Toronto Star on November 11, 2019.

Since the launch of the federal election, which feels like an eternity ago, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer has been dogged by variations on the same question:

Will you attend a Pride parade?

Do you believe homosexuality is a sin?

Why did you compare equal marriage to a dog’s tail?

Never mind, some would say, that the questions themselves can seem unfair. Until Global’s David Aiken pressed the other leaders this week with the same question, Justin Trudeau, who professes to be a Catholic, the same as Scheer, and Jagmeet Singh were not asked their views about what’s sinful; adjudicating sin not generally being within a prime minister’s job description.

Yet the questions could not have come to Scheer — or his advisers — as a surprise. Every conservative leader before Scheer has also faced this line of questioning, and every one has been able to rebut it more effectively.

That Scheer has been unable to muster a good enough answer has become a primary criticism from those who would rather see someone different lead the party into the next federal election.

I am personally sympathetic to Scheer. As a gay man of my generation, I have known many friends and colleagues, and especially many conservatives, whose own opinions have evolved and progressed over time.

For many, it has been a prolonged journey, which I have found personally painful to witness. But for most, the destination has been one that has come to transcend acceptance to become one of inclusion.

That’s why it is so difficult to understand how Scheer can profess respect for all Canadians but be unable to categorically state that homosexuality is not a sin.

All that said, it is not too late for him to have his own come-to-Judy moment.

Premier Doug Ford staged a quiet evolution of his own this past summer. After a lifetime spent skipping Pride parades in favour of the family cottage, the premier made a low-key appearance at the York Pride Parade. He was enthusiastically welcomed; marching in parades has come to be in the job description of every politician at every level.

Whether Ford’s decision represents a change of heart or a political calculation in a province where 1-in-15 residents participate in Toronto’s Pride Parade, the gesture meant the same thing: Ford is prepared to be the premier for all Ontarians, regardless of his views about their sexual orientation.

Conversely, that Scheer cannot bring himself to make the same token gesture sends a different message to not only each and every LGTBQ Canadian, but to their family and friends as well: his religious beliefs are so deeply held, they outweigh even his desire, as a career politician, to win the most important race of his life.

To many Canadians, this decision reads not as pious adherence to devout religious belief, but an irrational prejudice so overwhelming he puts it before good optics, good politics, even basic common sense.

Even if by now, Scheer’s pride about Pride prevents him from backing down from his position, there are concrete policies that would have assuaged these concerns. The Conservatives could have vowed to end the blood ban; they could have outflanked the Liberals on the matter of LGBTQ refugees — in 2009, then-immigration minister Jason Kenney introduced special measures to admit gay Iranians as refugees; the list goes on.

Adopting any one of these would have been smart politics. It would have allowed Scheer to say that while Trudeau is about shallow optics, he is about real action.

No doubt the party will continue to litigate the matter internally. If Scheer survives the April leadership review, he will need to find a way to answer those nagging questions.

In doing so, he may find it worthwhile to engage with Eric Duncan, the newly elected 31-year-old MP for Stormont — Dundas — South Glengarry. Duncan is openly gay and has never been to a Pride parade. But in a deeply rural riding, he won more votes than nearly any other Ontario Conservative, very nearly eclipsing veteran MP Peter Kent.

Duncan is living proof: There is a path to victory that runs through honesty, sincerity and genuine inclusion. What’s more, we have decided, as a country, that it is a Canadian path.

This article first appeared in the Toronto Star on November 3, 2019.

This week saw Toronto City Council endorse, by a wide margin, a new transit plan proposed by the Ford government. Federal support is expected soon to follow. This is good news for the residents of Toronto — but also for the Premier’s Office, a vindication of its newly adopted, collegial tone and a sterling example of the fruits that might be borne of it.

A recap for those who no longer follow the twists and turns of transit-building in Toronto: last spring, then-Transportation Minister Jeff Yurek proposed the Ontario Line, a 15-station stretch of subway that broadly followed the contours of the much-needed Downtown Relief Line, as well as two additional stops along the Scarborough subway.

Because the announcement came on the heels of a simultaneous plan to upload control of the subway from the TTC to the province, and because it proposed to use an unspecified, new technology that did not accord with the rest of the subway system, the Ontario Line was greeted with derision. It was a “finger painting,” drawn on the back of a napkin and most of city council was adamantly opposed to the proposed subway upload, even though they had no real say in the matter.

As it happens, all this derision toward the transit lines themselves was never justified. The Ontario Line plan was conceived by experts at Metrolinx, and the route is sensible, even preferable to the Downtown Relief Line, whose only advantage was that it was marginally more advanced in the early planning stages.

The Ontario Line makes more liberal use of above-ground tracks, a far cry from the underground-subways-only mantra from Ford of yore. By extending further north and further west, it will provide greater relief to the congestion epicentre that is Bloor-Yonge, funnelling riders from a wider area. As for Scarborough, a single-stop subway never made sense to begin with.

How, then, did this so-called finger painting go on to win an overwhelming majority of votes in city council?

The simplest explanation is to follow the money. Under the terms of the new agreement, Toronto won’t be on the hook for the Conservative government’s $28-billion transit plan. That means subways north to Richmond Hill and the Eglinton West LRT, at no cost to the city and political advantage to PC MPPs from those ridings. Relief-line diehards should have been pleased with reimbursement for sunk costs, though three such councillors still voted against the plan. The agreement also frees up substantial amounts of city cash to spend instead on more pressing matters, like repairs and upkeep of the existing subway system.

But money alone does not account for this victory. Historians of this government will recognize it emerged at the beginning of a new era — AD, or After Dean. The deal’s origins can be pinpointed approximately to the cabinet shuffle that saw Yurek moved to the Ministry of the Environment, with Caroline Mulroney inheriting the transit file.

Though some viewed it at the time as a demotion, Mulroney has evidently delivered within her first few months on the job. During that time, she has worked quietly and assiduously, negotiating in good faith with City of Toronto staff.

Whether the subway upload was proposed as a shrewd negotiating tactic, always intended to be disposed of at the right moment to seal the deal, or another ingenious way to stick it to Toronto City Council, by all accounts the turning point in negotiations came when the province agreed to drop the idea.

Compromise, conciliation — these are novel ideas to a government that has relied up to this point on aggressive negotiation. Mulroney herself deserves credit. She personifies the softer touch and collegial approach to governing that the Premier’s Office now hopes to adopt on all fronts.

In the meantime, the residents of Toronto should applaud the fact that provincial and municipal governments have learned to play nice. If all goes according to plan, the Ontario Line will be completed by 2027. That may be optimistic, but it was optimistic also to expect that these two levels of government would ever learn to get along in the name of progress. Yet here we are.

This editorial first appeared in the Toronto Star on October 27, 2019.

So, just what happened on Monday night and how did we end up with the most divided and regionalized Parliament we have seen in recent memory?

In my view, it was the utterly predictable outcome of the campaign our leaders chose to run.

The result? For some Canadians, this was the “Seinfeld” campaign — a campaign about nothing. To others, it was a campaign about everything, except what mattered. And for still others, it was a campaign about micro items designed to help you get ahead or to allow you to have your turn.

What it wasn’t was a campaign around big ideas for a better future, for a more cohesive union or a more prosperous, just and responsible society.

And so, Canadians listened to what was put on offer by their leaders and voted accordingly. When they did, they voted in their narrow, parochial and regional interests rather than in the interests of the country as a whole or, aspirationally, for what Canada could be.

In short, they voted for what was best for them; not what was best for us. The consequence? A map of virtually irreconcilable differences. At the same time, by handing Justin Trudeau a minority government, voters took away many of the tools a government could have used to heal these divisions.

The prime minister’s first order of business — a tax cut for the middle class — is unlikely to face serious resistance in the house but from there on out, things will only get more complicated.

Consider other Liberal priorities. An assault weapons ban, higher carbon reduction goals and a potential increase in immigration. Each will enrage a different part of Canada where tensions are already reaching a breaking point.

The complications will only continue to worsen. The Liberals will need to rely on the support of the NDP caucus to govern, the very MPs who are staunchly opposed to the steps needed to effect Western reconciliation. Even beyond pipeline politics, that informal partnership will frustrate the government’s outreach to Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Faced with a minority house, the temptation will be for each party leader to bring a laundry list of asks and for the horse trading to begin. This will simply result in more of what we have now: small, incremental policies that are the result of back room dealing and electoral trade-offs.

What’s more, their continued focus on regional issues will only serve to exacerbate the divisions that were revealed on Monday. And even worse, as Canadians see their politicians delivering for the narrow interests of other constituencies, they will expect the same.

Then there is the increasingly urgent need to deal with the growing issue of “Wexit.” The anger and anxiety that propels those feelings is not going away anytime soon, and it is up to Trudeau to show Albertans their place in his vision for Canada.

At the same time, he will need to deal with the priorities of a newly resurgent Bloc Québécois and all that means. Not to mention the economic development challenges of Atlantic Canada and the increasingly high priority of matters green in B.C.

Many doubt that balancing all of this will even be possible, but the prime minister certainly has to try. He knows, all too well that the project of Confederation is too fragile, too hard-won and certainly too important to be allowed to fall to the whims of our current politics.

And so, the Liberals have their work cut out for them.

As a returning government, they have much to do to complete initiatives from their first mandate. But as a new government, they will have to acknowledge that Canadians have sent them back to work with both a different set of expectations and a different set of tools.

And that means looking at the map of Canada in a way they have not had to before. And seeking to find those ideas, initiatives and policies that will reach across the divisions that were exposed on Monday night.

The government’s — and the prime minister’s — ability to do just that will be the biggest predictor of their success in the polls next time out and in the history books yet to be written.

This editorial first appeared in the Toronto Star on October 20, 2019.

Given the haze, ambiguity and, crucially, the unpredictability of this election campaign, it is becoming harder to determine how everything will shape up after Canadians head to the polls on Monday. While still unclear, seat distributions seem to signal a return to the minority governments of our not so distant past.

Among all the uncertainty however, one thing is crystal clear: the Bloc Québécois is well and truly back.

When Gilles Duceppe stepped down as leader of the Bloc in 2011, the party was careening toward irrelevance at breakneck speed. Stripped of official party status and struggling with its identity at a time when the notion of sovereignty had become less and less popular with Quebecers, the party was a pale shadow of its former status as a potent third-party in the early Harper years.

While the 2015 election saw the party elect 10 MPs, the ensuing years were marred by defections, infighting and the decline of Pauline Marois’ Parti Québécois — their provincial cousins. All the while, pundits, politicos and partisans continued to raise the same nagging question, “how can a sovereigntist party remain relevant when most Quebecers no longer support sovereignty?”

Over the past few months, party leader Yves-Françoise Blanchet has answered that question and done much, much more. Facing a serious decline in support for separatism in Quebec, Blanchet has responded by transforming the party with a pivot from sovereignty to nationalism.

While only about 30 per cent of Quebecers currently support sovereignty, the Bloc has managed to tap into a rising nationalist sentiment, driven by a feeling that Quebecois culture is under threat. It was this emotional tide that François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec rode to victory in 2018, promising voters that rather than fighting for sovereignty, they would forcefully stand up for the interests of the province, within Canada.

Despite his past as a Parti Quebecois minister, Blanchet has skilfully managed to align with Legault in a way that has eluded the other federal parties. Indeed, Blanchet has explicitly said his decision to run for the leadership of the Bloc was motivated by his desire to ensure there would be Quebec MPs to defend actions taken by the CAQ.

It has started with his ardent defence of Bill 21. Over the course of the election campaign, Blanchet has made the bill a key issue, defending above all the Quebec government’s right to implement legislation as it sees fit.

And it has hurt the Liberals and Conservatives, especially. For weeks, Blanchet has forced other party leaders to speak up on the issue and clarify their stance on the bill, which has become a shorthand of sorts for Quebec’s right to self-governance.

We’ve seen both Scheer and Trudeau squirm on the debate stage as Blanchet accused them of meddling in provincial affairs when it comes to the controversial bill. By doing so, the Bloc leader has shown Quebecers what a vote for the Bloc can deliver. In essence, Blanchet is saying: “this is what it would look like to have an ally in the House pushing the other parties to stand up for you.”

What’s more, Blanchet has done it all with a certain flair. It is no coincidence that the resurgence of the Bloc is being led by a former media commentator and known personality in provincial politics. He is media-savvy and his ability to earn public attention has served the party well throughout the course of the campaign.

Those skills stand him in stark contrast to Gilles Duceppe, whose blunt communication style and stern demeanour reminded Canadians — and Quebecers — of the implied conflict embedded in separatist politics. Blanchet, on the other hand, is a leader of the social media age: calm, sensible and likeable.

Many will say that Blanchet has an inherent advantage because he is not, at the end of the day, running to be prime minister of Canada. Indeed, he is running to be — for all practical purposes — the prime minister of Quebec. But to anyone who witnessed firsthand the decline of the Bloc, that does not make the party’s resurgence any less impressive. And it does not mean that his success will have any less impact on the formation of government, come Tuesday morning.