Pity the plight, just for a moment and in the kindly spirit of a new year, of federal cabinet ministers from the Maritimes. As a group, they are forever exposed. Despite the Three P's of high office: power, prestige and patronage, they walk around every day with Kick Me signs taped to their backsides.
Take Gail Shea. She's the only Tory MP from P.E.I. She increased her majority between the 2008 and 2011 elections and her political and government experience made her a cabinet shoo-in. That was the easy part. Promoting a government's unpopular policies is where the kick-me signs come in.
As 2012 closes, Shea seems notably uncomfortable defending her government's changes to employment insurance. You know she's getting tough mail from her constituents when she has had to repeat, frequently if not convincingly, that the system is still viable.
"I think people need to know that EI will be there," she told TC Media. "It's not going to be taken away from them."
Some Maritimers who have already been cut off or denied EI benefits might not agree, but that's her story. And that's not even the interesting part, which is actually to be found in her reasoning.
Shea defends the Harper government's changes to EI as if we lived in some kind of full-employment bubble that needs deflation, as if we needed somehow to force more people into all those available jobs.
"We have an aging population, a shrinking workforce and there's a real concern of who's going to do the jobs in the future when we just don't have the people," she said.
But wait a minute. Right now, Shea's home province of P.E.I. is carrying an unemployment rate of 11.4 per cent, well above the national average and the highest of the three Maritime Provinces. The jobless rate stayed stubbornly over 11 per cent for all of 2012. That makes P.E.I. one of the hardest places in Canada to find a job with about nine workers for every opening.
Statistics Canada figures suggest that more Islanders actually joined the labour force in 2012, a fact that runs counter to Shea's argument about a shortage of workers.
P.E.I. is also one of the provinces most dependent on seasonal work and it's the seasonal workers getting hit hardest by the EI changes.
Shea obviously has been hearing from some angry people. She says she "passed on all of the concerns," presumably to more senior cabinet colleagues. It didn't make a whit of difference.
This is a dicey position for the minister. Shea has to stick up for unemployed Islanders to a government elected by voters in high-employment parts of the west and suburban Ontario. That government, mindful of its voting base, doesn't seem sympathetic.
Then Shea has to turn around and translate those rough-edged policy reforms to voters back home who are feeling a tangible pinch from the changes every day. That's no fun.
Things aren't a lot better across the Northumberland Strait for Peter MacKay. In contrast to Shea, MacKay runs a sprawling department with interests across Canada and around the world. He is one of the princes of the Conservative party and a politician with a personal power base.
But the burgeoning scandal over the costs of the F-35 fighter program has put him squarely in the opposition's crosshairs. His dogged support for the F-35 left him dangling when the Harper cabinet decided to "hit the reset button" on the program in December.
But the real problem is that somebody lied about how much the jets would cost and we're not sure yet who that was. MacKay and other ministers insisted the planes would cost $16 billion before an independent audit put the more likely costs at $45 billion.
It's possible that senior military brass purposely under-estimated the F-35's costs and hung the minister out to dry on inaccurate numbers. Or MacKay and the Tories might have purposely misled Canadians with lowball estimates.
The Tories call the F-35 an accounting issue. If it is, then 2013 might be the year they're held accountable.
Original Article
Source: theguardian.pe.ca
Author: Dan Leger
Take Gail Shea. She's the only Tory MP from P.E.I. She increased her majority between the 2008 and 2011 elections and her political and government experience made her a cabinet shoo-in. That was the easy part. Promoting a government's unpopular policies is where the kick-me signs come in.
As 2012 closes, Shea seems notably uncomfortable defending her government's changes to employment insurance. You know she's getting tough mail from her constituents when she has had to repeat, frequently if not convincingly, that the system is still viable.
"I think people need to know that EI will be there," she told TC Media. "It's not going to be taken away from them."
Some Maritimers who have already been cut off or denied EI benefits might not agree, but that's her story. And that's not even the interesting part, which is actually to be found in her reasoning.
Shea defends the Harper government's changes to EI as if we lived in some kind of full-employment bubble that needs deflation, as if we needed somehow to force more people into all those available jobs.
"We have an aging population, a shrinking workforce and there's a real concern of who's going to do the jobs in the future when we just don't have the people," she said.
But wait a minute. Right now, Shea's home province of P.E.I. is carrying an unemployment rate of 11.4 per cent, well above the national average and the highest of the three Maritime Provinces. The jobless rate stayed stubbornly over 11 per cent for all of 2012. That makes P.E.I. one of the hardest places in Canada to find a job with about nine workers for every opening.
Statistics Canada figures suggest that more Islanders actually joined the labour force in 2012, a fact that runs counter to Shea's argument about a shortage of workers.
P.E.I. is also one of the provinces most dependent on seasonal work and it's the seasonal workers getting hit hardest by the EI changes.
Shea obviously has been hearing from some angry people. She says she "passed on all of the concerns," presumably to more senior cabinet colleagues. It didn't make a whit of difference.
This is a dicey position for the minister. Shea has to stick up for unemployed Islanders to a government elected by voters in high-employment parts of the west and suburban Ontario. That government, mindful of its voting base, doesn't seem sympathetic.
Then Shea has to turn around and translate those rough-edged policy reforms to voters back home who are feeling a tangible pinch from the changes every day. That's no fun.
Things aren't a lot better across the Northumberland Strait for Peter MacKay. In contrast to Shea, MacKay runs a sprawling department with interests across Canada and around the world. He is one of the princes of the Conservative party and a politician with a personal power base.
But the burgeoning scandal over the costs of the F-35 fighter program has put him squarely in the opposition's crosshairs. His dogged support for the F-35 left him dangling when the Harper cabinet decided to "hit the reset button" on the program in December.
But the real problem is that somebody lied about how much the jets would cost and we're not sure yet who that was. MacKay and other ministers insisted the planes would cost $16 billion before an independent audit put the more likely costs at $45 billion.
It's possible that senior military brass purposely under-estimated the F-35's costs and hung the minister out to dry on inaccurate numbers. Or MacKay and the Tories might have purposely misled Canadians with lowball estimates.
The Tories call the F-35 an accounting issue. If it is, then 2013 might be the year they're held accountable.
Original Article
Source: theguardian.pe.ca
Author: Dan Leger
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