Political highs and lows on Parliament Hill

OTTAWA—In Stephen Harper’s capital, prime ministerial press conferences are few and far between. More often than not, the prime minister’s exchanges with the media take place on the fly, in the context of an international trip. Those pro forma encounters rarely give Canadians much insight into Harper’s policy thinking.

Judging from his performance on the occasion of the Nexen-CNOOC announcement last Friday, that may be as great a loss — or greater — to his government than to the parliamentary media.

It is not necessary to agree with the policy to note that its delivery by the prime minister was designed to engage a large audience rather than drive a wedge into it.

Canadians caught a rare glimpse of Harper in action on the domestic front sounding more like a prime minister than a Conservative leader.

It was, by far, his most effective 2012 moment.

Harper’s announcement also deflected some attention from his government’s worst blunder: the F-35 fiasco.

There have been other occasions to question the government’s managerial competence over the past year. Public Safety minister Vic Toews’ dead-on-arrival Internet surveillance bill and Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz’s handling of the beef crisis readily come to mind. But those were missteps that could be blamed on weaker links in the second tier of the cabinet.

By comparison, the F-35 file is a central one on which the prime minister expended significant political capital in the pursuit — as it turns out — of a bad cause and for the wrong reasons. The buck for the collective mindset that presided over this sorry saga cannot stop anywhere except at Harper’s office.

On Oct. 24 — his 58th birthday — Thomas Mulcair delivered the most authoritative House of Commons speech of his tenure as NDP leader. His 70-minute response to the presentation of a second omnibus budget bill was as comprehensive as the legislation he was dissecting. It was also rigorous and to the point.

Possibly because the line between anger and passion is one that this NDP leader is apt to cross easily, the House has seen little of Mulcair’s passionate side so far. But there is also a fine line between the steady hand he is trying to project and the relatively soulless performance that often results from the effort. It could be that Harper has the Canadian market for cold fish already cornered.

With a caretaker team in charge of the Liberals in the Commons, the spotlight shifted to the party’s leadership campaign and to Justin Trudeau. Among the Liberal front-runner’ s many pronouncements, his brain trust would probably like his pro-investment approach to China and the Nexen-CNOOC deal to stand out.

But Trudeau really came across as most solid when he argued on Quebec television last weekend that there is no need to reopen the Constitution to accommodate the province’s long-standing grievances.

In contrast, a previous pronouncement on the divisiveness of the gun registry only succeeded in bolstering suspicions that he is prone to shoot from the mouth. Leadership rival Marc Garneau managed to take the same distance from future efforts to recreate a registry without looking like he was twisting in the wind of public opinion. As a bonus, Garneau probably did not need a gaggle of advisers to come up with a coherent statement.

A word finally on the substance of each of those defining moments: Future governments will likely take inspiration from Harper’s foreign takeover mantra rather than rewrite it from scratch and preserve the built-in political discretion that many of its critics lament.

Every past opposition leader has championed the rights of Parliament versus the actions of a controlling executive branch ... until becoming prime minister. It remains to be seen whether a Mulcair-led NDP government would preside over a restoration of parliamentary debate — especially if it was in a minority position in the Commons.

As for Trudeau’s hands-off approach to the Constitution, it ultimately falls into the fighting-the-last-war category, as no party is seriously entertaining a return to the constitutional table anytime soon.

Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Chantal Hébert