Wow, way to put words in my mouth. Inferiority complex much?
You asked what big city perspective can you NOT get from not having Toronto in Cabinet. I answered, and clearly said that Montreal is different from both Vancouver and Toronto and vice versa and vice cersa of that as well. Yet from that you get that I am Torontocentric? Good job.
FYI, if there had only been 1 move, and it was to get Toronto represented, I still would have been pissed. This has nothing to do with where I live, and I don’t even live in Toronto and never have. Thanks for trying to turn this into a regional thing though. :rolleyes:
Nobody is saying Toronto is “special,” they’re saying it’s different. If I told you that having somneone in Cabinet who knew Toronto’s issues was good enoguh to understand Montreal’s issues, you would think I was a complete idiot. Well, anyone who thinks the reverse is equally idiotic.
Now, that said, this “oooh, the cities, oooh the cities” thing in general is becoming tiresome. Being near Toronto I mostly hear it from the Toronto Star (“Official Paper of the Martin Wing of the Liberal Party”) and you’d think Toronto was the first city to ever have a budget crisis. I’m inclined to suggest that maybe Toronto should correct its longstanding practice of inept, criminal and stupid governance before begging for federal handouts. Maybe they’d have more spare money if they stopped giving it to Tie Domi’s relatives.
Imagine you voted for a Democrat for Congress, and he ended up winning. Then, mere days after being elected, he switches his allegiance to the Republicans in exchange for being made chairman of a committee. Wouldn’t the bait-and-switch(or, if you prefer, crass political opportunism) bother you? Especially if the Republicans had excoriated the Democrats for making the exact same deal with a Republican-turned-Democrat a year earlier?
As to the Fortier thing, there’s a long standing tradition that cabinet ministers are accountable to Parliament. Part of that is having them be MPs, so that they must answer questions from the opposition during Question Period. Having an unelected cabinet minister is just bad optics for a guy who has campaigned on ending the “democratic deficit.”
I have no problems with Harper appointing Senators before he can implement any reform to the Senate. What I have a problem with is making him a cabinet minister. Yes, legally anybody can be a minister, but I have a real problem with someone who wasn’t even up for election becoming a minister. Canada’s government is based on traditions more than it is on laws, and breaking those traditions sets a bad precedent.
RickJay, my flippant comment was simply to point out that Toronto representation is not the critical element needed if a Federal cabinet must have a “Big City” MP. Toronto’s needs, from a Federal perspective, are not sufficiently distinct to mandate a member from the GTA.
For the Federal government to be involved with municipal affairs the issues had better damn well be broad enough that the superficial differences aren’t relevant. Look at the quick list I threw together for Montreal and Vancouver.
Organized crime
Infrastructure issues
Language tension
Immigration
Drug issues
Environnemental
Those could all be applied to any large city in Canada, except language perhaps.
All this is a tangent from my replying to the OP that since people wanted the cities to have a cabinet minister the options to do so were limited. Then I tried to explain my train of thought as to why Vancouver and Montreal were selected over Toronto.
I would’ve preferred that Harper had skipped the whole thing.
There is no way Harper could have assembled a cabinet that didn’t piss someone off. While he expressed a general aversion to floor-crossing MPs, he didn’t say it’s never acceptible. The Senate appointment, while it does fly in the face of the Albertan preference for elected Senators, is nothing like a scandal. It’s a legal move he has available to him. It’s like the former Reformers saying if they get elected they’ll never ride the taxpaid limos - and yet they did. So what? You expect idealism to yield to pragmatism - in fact I’d be worried if it never did.
Harper, almost certainly, balanced these optics (and that’s all it is) with the real objectives of forming a lean, mean, cross-Canada, urban-included cabinet machine. With the Liberal defection, if the speaker of the house will be a Liberal then the NDP will hold the true balance of power - something that will serve to make this Parliament a bit more stable (a good thing, yes?)
It’s not perfect, but it’s not the pudding that needs proving. That dish will be served once Parliament is in session and we hear the throne speech, the budget, and the substantive actions of this gov’t.
The structure of cabinet, however, is a “tradition” that rarely lasts longer than a single mandate; the type and number of portfolios changes, usually expanding until now. I don’t think Sir John A. ever appointed a Minister of State for Multiculturalism. Realistically, our Cabinet is a pretty fluid thing.
If Fortier was going to stay in the Senate I’d have a problem with it. Allegedly, he’s not, so I don’t.
Appointing Emerson is the real problem here, though. Emerson is not just any old defection; he’s basically screwed his own constituents in circumstances of the stinkiest nature. Stronach at least tried being a Conservative, and there’s ample evidence that she was not made terribly welcome by Stephen Harper. Emerson appears to have been using the Liberal banner dishonestly. Harper, by rewarding that, looks really terrible.
Other than that it’s hard to burn Harpe’s cabinet, though. He had to piss someone off, so he wisely just took all his lumps when he’s got the most political capital.
While I agree with this, it doesn’t do anything to stop the utter bafflement I have over this. Here we have the Public Works ministry, the centre of the firestorm over the Sponsorship scandal, and who gets it? An unelected crony of the PM, who, incidentally, is from Quebec. It just boggles my mind that Harper would do this given the way it appears. Why? What is it about Fortier that’s so special? Quebec already has other cabinet ministers, and there are other Tory MPs from Quebec that didn’t get tapped. Plus there are several extremely notable long-time Reform/Alliance/Conservative members that got passed over. I just don’t get this pick at all. I don’t particularly care one way or the other about someone being appointed to the Senate to be in cabinet. Certainly doesn’t get my panties all in a knot. But one only has to look at the reactions of the Tory caucus to think that it wasn’t the brightest thing Harper could have done.
I think there’s something to this line of thought. Pretty much all recent floor-crossers of note - Stronach, Kilgour, Brison, and heck we could go back to Bouchard and his merry band - had issues with their parties that grew after they were elected. They could all say something to the effect that when elected they had been foursquare behind their party, but time and events had changed that in fairly substantial ways. But Emerson? Just two weeks ago he was loudly proclaiming that he intended to be “Harper’s worst nightmare” (which he may yet be, but not in the fashion he meant at the time).
Well, there were two appointments I really, really didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to see Stockwell Day get foreign affairs, and I didn’t want to see Vic Toews get justice. I got half of this, but not the half I wanted most. I really don’t think that a man who is eager to invoke the Notwithstanding Clause to restrict minority rights should be the head of the Ministry of Justice. Even if he won’t ever get a chance to do that.
I am not of fan of Clement in Health, and Flaherty in Finance. I thought they did a terrible job in Ontario in those same positions under Harris. I think the situation in Ontario, with the long ER waits, the terrible condition of our healthcare and the debt that is carried, is a result of the jobs these 2 men did. Its not all their fault, but they didn’t make things any better, IMO they made it worse.
However I see why Harper would select them. They have experience. That is something not a lot of his MPs have. I can see why he did it, I don’t have to like it, but this doesn’t get my panties in a bunch. I think we can tell what does.
I also think the idea that it is somehow legitimatized by Fortier saying “Oh, I just didn’t want to run this time, I will next time, honest” is complete poppycock.
On debt it’s fair to say the PC government in Ontario did poorly.
On wait times and the health care system, how is Ontario’s worse than the other provinces?
I like your point about experience, though. Still. There was a scene in “Taxi” where the drivers elect Tony Danza to be a sort of union rep to deal with Danny DeVito. DeVito completely schools Danza, confusing him with bafflegab and sending him back to the drivers with less than they stated with. So they go to elect a new rep, and Jim votes for Tony Danza again. Alex turns to him and says, “Why did you vote for Tony again??” Says Jim, “There’s no substitute for experience!”
It’s worse than you think: Stockwell Day is Minister of Public Safety; Peter McKay is foreign affairs. (From Wikipedia)
Seems old Stockwell’s middle name is Burt. giggle
A friend of mine suggested that McKay and Rona Ambrose (Environment) are Harper’s sacrificial lambs: they are in the portfolios that will have to take the heat when he tries to get out of Kyoto.
Stockwell is reasonably safe as Minister of Public Safety (for some reason “emergency preparedness” has been dropped from the title), but if an influenza pandemic (or any other serious emergency, for which he will clearly not be preparing) hits, he will likely go the way of Michael Brown.
Oh, I know Stock is in there. He was pretty much guaranteed a portfolio. I just think Public Safety is one where his loony views can’t do much damage. The effectiveness of a department like that is largely the consequence of the competence of the upper ranks of civil servants within it.
I was extropolating that since the debt was handled so badly, it must have meant the government had less money. Less money would equal service failures. Since I can’t find any information in a quick google search (I think I need to find a new google-fu sensei), I am retracting the statement regarding wait times.
I still think putting those 2 in such important portfolios is not going to be good for Canada.
As to the appointment of Stockwell Day to Minister of Public Saftey, I think that is as good as any for the character. I can’t see him doing much harm there.
Interesting theory cowgirl about the sacrificial lambs though. Why would Harper do that? Because they are old PC people?
Yeah, it looks to me like Harper put Stockwell Day somewhere were he couldn’t do any damage.
The positive spin on all these choices is simple: Harper is trying to do what he promised to do, which is to run a centrist government that is answerable to all of Canada. His controversial appointments can be seen as attempts to improve the geographic and demographic balance of representation in his cabinet. He seems to have gone out of his way to pick people with experience, rather than just ‘yes men’ and party hacks that will do what he says. So from that standpoint, it’s not bad.
As for Kyoto: I wish everyone would take a step back and listen to what Conservatives and other Kyoto opponents are saying before having a knee-jerk reaction that pulling out of it is bad. For one thing, it certainly hasn’t done any good - Canada’s CO2 emissions have gone up faster since they signed Kyoto than the U.S.'s have. The Kyoto treaty is one of those ‘feel good’ pieces of international regulation that simply doesn’t do any real good. The only countries that are abiding by it are the ones who get to do so essentially for free.
A lot of people who believe global warming is a problem are now realizing that the answer isn’t in restricting emissions and having global treaties that expect countries to sacrifice their own economic well-being for ‘the greater good’. Kyoto was just the barest baby-steps towards the kind of reductions that would actually be required to halt the problem, and even it has failed miserably so far.
So a lot of people, including Tony Blair and other Kyoto supporters, are coming to realize that the only real answers are going to come from technoloy and mitigation. And I believe that’s where the Canadian Conservative party is. We should at least listen to their proposals before dismissing anything anti-Kyoto.
At least Harper didn’t appoint the lobbiest for BAE Systems, General Dynamics, Atlas Elektronik GmbH, and Airbus Military to Cabinet as Minister of Defence.
