The Loonie versus the U.S. dollar

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Though Canadian retail prices are starting to reflect the impact of our stronger dollar, many economists think they will always remain higher than their American counterparts.

Why? It's due to the higher cost of doing business in this country. Our different tax structures, tariffs, higher wages, more regulations, plus some minor costs, such as bilingual packaging requirements, all make goods here more expensive.

Also, Canadian retailers pay more because the market is one-tenth the size of the United States, according to Diane Brisebois, president of the Retail Council of Canada.

"We don't suspect that the price differentiation will disappear ever, and that is simply based on economies of scale," she said recently. "If you buy a dozen doughnuts you get a better price than if you're buying a single."

Therefore, identical items are often priced at least 20 per cent higher in Canada than in the U.S. - and in many cases, a lot more than that.

So, ironically, our high-flying loonie, now trading at over US$1.03, can buy more in the U.S. than here, and Canadians have to cross the border to get a better price on the same products that are available at home.

That's because a Canadian dollar cannot buy as much in real goods and services in Canada as a U.S. dollar can in the United States. As opposed to the exchange rate, where the two currencies are now about equal, in terms of what is known as purchasing power parity (PPP), the loonie probably will buy only the equivalent of about 85 American cents.

In other words, we need to spend one Canadian dollar here to buy the same bundle of goods that cost Americans 85 cents in their country.

(By the way, when our dollar was in the low 70 cents US range, it was undervalued, because then, too, the two currencies were much closer in terms of PPP than was true of the exchange rate at that time.)

Also, not only are prices lower in the United States, but the typical Canadian does not earn as much income as the typical American, and gives more of it away in taxes. Canadian governments collect C$17,300 per capita from us, while American ones collect US$13,500 from theirs.

So why is the loonie 'punching above its weight'? The dramatic rise of the currency is due mainly to world commodity prices, in particular oil; our resource sector accounts for more than one-third of Canada's exports.

But the standard of living of average Canadians remains lower than that of our neighbours. Perhaps a new definition of a Canadian is someone who spends $10,000 more on a car than does an American, so they can wait two years for a hip replacement.

A strong dollar, but where are the savings?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Now that the loonie has reached virtual parity with the American dollar, isn't it time for prices in Canada to reflect that fact? After all, it's been gaining ground for a few years now.

A recent study conducted by Douglas Porter, deputy chief economist at BMO Capital Markets, indicated that Canadian-dollar prices are on average 24 per cent higher than U.S.-dollar prices on the same items.

The biggest gaps are in electronics, books, and cars.

Said Porter to the Globe and Mail, "It may be only a matter of time before the cross-border shopping dam bursts again. It may already be happening on-line."

Indeed, there has been an 11.08 per cent growth in items bought in U.S. dollars by Canadian on-line shoppers over the past year.

Ian Donker, general manager of Book City, in Toronto, told the Globe and Mail that most prices of books in his store are set in the United States. "But someone who last year was paying $19 for a book, this year doesn't want to pay $19 for a book," when the U.S. price listed alongside the Canadian one is much less. "And it is difficult for the book seller and the Canadian publisher to do much about it." And smaller items, such as books, are easiest to purchase via internet shopping.

Why, asked one Toronto businessman who bought a Subaru Tribeca for US $32,122.50 in Buffalo, NY, should the same car cost Cdn $41,995 in this country? Such price differentials are ridiculous.

"Some people are making a fortune out of this and they're reluctant to give up this very lucrative windfall," declared Bruce Cran, president of the Consumers' Association of Canada, in the Calgary Herald.

So Canadian retailers will face increased pressure to lower their prices accordingly. Already shopping malls in American border towns are packed with Canadians buying products that sell for no more than two thirds of what they cost in Canada.

Yet Diane J. Brisebois, the president of the Retail Council of Canada, has suggested that Canadian shoppers should be patient. Economies of scale, different tax and cost structures, and exchange rates with third countries all play a role.

"For Canadians to believe that our prices will be at par with American prices under any circumstances is not realistic," she remarked in a New York Times article. "Americans have 10 times the purchasing power. That's the reality."

But that's also the problem. It is clear that we all pay too much for goods, and all the various excuses made by retailers won't cut it anymore -- after all, we don't make 24 per cent more in wages and salaries than Americans do.

Despite the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Canada sometimes seems little more than a protection racket for those who control our economy. Unless prices come down more quickly, the U.S. will become the equivalent of a "black market," especially for high-ticket items.

The Endless American Vote

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian:

Here we are, a full fourteen months before Americans cast their ballots for their next president, and already the race is in full swing. Why?

It’s the result of the law of unintended consequences.

In the “bad old days,” candidates were selected by party delegates at their respective national conventions, held during the summer preceding the November election.

Rarely did one aspirant have the necessary 50 per cent needed to win coming into the convention, and so there was drama and uncertainty, politicking and horsetrading.

But the American primary system has changed all that.

A primary election allows each party’s supporters in a state to select delegates committed to one or another candidate running for the nomination of their party. These delegates must vote, on the first ballot, for that candidate at the party’s convention.

Primary elections were introduced by political reformers as a way to lessen the influence of political “bosses” making deals in “smoke-filled back rooms.” In 1910, Oregon became the first state to establish a presidential primary in which delegates were required to support the winner of the primary at their convention. By 1920 there were 20 states with primaries.

Today, all 50 states hold primaries (or, in a few cases such as Iowa, caucuses, which are similar). If no candidate wins a majority of delegates during the primary season, the nominee is chosen by the convention. But this has not occurred since the Republican convention of 1976, when incumbent president Gerald Ford narrowly defeated Ronald Reagan.

States now vie for earlier primaries in order to claim greater influence in the nomination process, since candidates can ignore primaries which fall after the nomination has already been effectively won. So most primaries now take place in a compressed time frame.

As states continue to compete with each other to see who can hold their presidential primary first, by next February 5 – called “Tsunami Tuesday” because 19 states will be holding primaries that day – probably more than half the delegates to both major parties’ conventions will have been chosen. (In fact, six states will have held primaries or caucuses even before that date.)

This compressed calendar obviously favours front-runners with financial backing. It limits the ability of lesser-known candidates to raise money for advertising to increase their visibility among voters.

It also means that no last-minute entrants can join the race – unless they decide to run as third-party candidates, an onerous and fruitless task. No third party candidate has won a presidential election since 1912.

The Democrats and Republicans having to all intents and purposes picked their candidates by early February, the actual conventions will be little more than exercises in public relations and advertising on behalf of each party’s selection.

So the Democratic and Republican parties will in effect be running nine-month presidential campaigns. How absurd is that?

Instead of “front-loading” the primaries, states should consider moving them back to, say, May and June. Isn’t a five or six month campaign long enough?

August 25, 2007

Israel only state to be singled out

Henry Srebrnik, The Calgary Herald

Back in the 1970s, China, then a Maoist state, trumpeted a revolutionary slogan, "Unite the Many, Defeat the Few."

Since at that time they were also vehement supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was committed to the destruction of Israel, I joked that what they were really saying was, "Unite the Many, Defeat the Jews."

China's attitude towards Israel today is much more nuanced. However, there is now an increasing tendency, in some western academic and intellectual circles, to question Israel's very right to exist.

For these critics, the right of national self-determination for Jews in a state of their own is morally reprehensible, its very foundation a crime, an "original sin."

In 2003, New York University history professor Tony Judt wrote an article for the influential New York Review of Books entitled "Israel: The Alternative," in which he suggested that Israel was an anachronism that had historically "arrived too late."

Judt defined Israel as "a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded."

Wrote Judt: "To convert Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one would not be easy, though not quite as impossible as it sounds: the process has already begun de facto. But it would cause far less disruption to most Jews and Arabs than its religious and nationalist foes will claim."

The British academic Jacqueline Rose, a professor of English at Queen Mary College, University of London, considers the Zionist movement of national liberation a betrayal of Jewish history and the Jewish heritage.

"I have never understood why the historic, biblical claim of the Jewish people, even when seared by the horror of the Holocaust, should usurp the rights of the Arabs who had lived there for hundreds of years," she wrote in an article in The Observer in 2002.

In her book, The Question of Zion, published in 2005, she declared that the formation of Israel in 1948 had not only brought "injustice" to the Palestinians, but put at risk the Jewish nation's own "safety and sanity." Israel, she decided, was "bad for the Jewish people" as well as its neighbours.

Rose concluded that only a renunciation of Zionism could alleviate the "terrible consequences" that had flowed from the creation of a state for the Jews.

Michael Neumann, a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, is the author of The Case Against Israel, released in 2006. Zionism was the attempt to establish exclusive Jewish sovereignty over Palestine and therefore "Israel is the illegitimate child of ethnic nationalism," he asserted.

For him, not even the sufferings of Jews in the Nazi era could serve to justify it.

An even harsher tone was provided by Joel Kovel, a professor of social studies at Bard College, Annandale, N.Y. His book, Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, published this year, sees nationalism as evil, and Zionism as a particularly bad kind of nationalism. Israel is, for him, a "monstrous venture" of "state-structured racism."

Kovel argues that the inner contradictions of Zionism have led Israel down a path fully as wicked as that of apartheid South Africa and deserving of the same resolution.

Only a single-state secular democracy can provide the justice essential to healing the wounds of the Middle East.

These are four examples of academics, in the United States, Britain and Canada, who question the right of Israel to exist and prefer a "one-state solution"-- in other words, a Palestine that is "a state of all its citizens," Arabs, Jews and others. There are many others, and the list is growing.

Rarely, however, do Israel's detractors also demand that the many states that are officially, not merely demographically, Buddhist, Christian and Islamic also become "states of all their citizens."

After all, if Jews have no right to a state, then why do some 100 other ethnic groups have proprietary rights to theirs? Their countries too are the products of conquest at some stage in their formation, and they also include minority groups.

And there are many others, including Chechens, Kosovar Albanians, Tibetans and Palestinians themselves, demanding their own national independence.

Are they also not "privileged" within their own countries? Are not their symbols and laws reflective of their religious and cultural systems, past and present?

Do their flags not display crosses and crescents? Even if the critics of Israel have a point, to fixate on just one country is clearly a case of a double standard.

August 16, 2007

Does Israel Have a Right to Exist?

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

The future of the state of Israel is politically and ideologically now more uncertain than at any time since its inception in 1948.

I speak not of the threat of attack from Iran, or the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, but rather of the increasing tendency, in some western academic and intellectual circles, to question Israel’s very right to exist.

For these critics, the right of national self-determination for Jews in a state of their own is morally reprehensible, its very foundation a crime, an “original sin.”

They demand that this illegitimate state be dismantled, or at the very least “de-Judaized,” in terms of its laws and symbols, in order for it to become “a state of all its citizens” -- by which they refer to the 1.5 million people, about 20 per cent of Israel’s population, who are Arabs and Druze.

In fact, this Arab population has full citizenship, with legal protections and political rights: currently, 12 of the 120 members of the Israeli Knesset (parliament) are Israeli Arabs, most representing Arab political parties. One of Israel’s Supreme Court judges is an Israeli Arab.

But this is not good enough for Israel’s opponents. They want to eliminate the “Zionist” (read: Jewish) nature of the state altogether.

One bone of contention is Israel’s “Law of Return,” which allows speedy immigration to the country by Jews, but not by others. (Israel was founded, after all, in order to be a Jewish state.) But rarely do these detractors of the state acknowledge that many other countries have similar policies.

Germany, for instance, allows ethnic Germans from elsewhere, even if they have no family connection with the country, to “return” to Germany.

But others do not have a similar right. Turks from Turkey cannot simply come to Germany under such arrangements, even if they have relatives among the large population of ethnic Turks in the country.

An Israel that became a “state of all its citizens” in terms of its public face would simply revert to being pre-1948 Palestine. The national flag and anthem, both Jewish, would need replacement. Extra-national bodies such as the Jewish Agency would disappear. The country would no longer be Jewish, so why would Jews have bothered creating it at all?

As well, in a non-Jewish Israel (or, to give it its proper name, Palestine), Jews would quickly become a minority, since we can assume that former Arab Palestinian refugees and their descendants would be allowed back under their own “law of return.” They would quickly assume the reins of power, and Jews would live under their governance.

In that case, Jews might just as well live in California or South Africa; Los Angeles or Capetown are just as pleasant as Tel Aviv. And they are in better neighborhoods!

Do Israel’s detractors also demand that the many states that are officially, not merely demographically, Islamic – Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and many more – also become “states of all their citizens?” Not that I’ve noticed.

Of course most of those countries have very few or no non-Muslim citizens, not even second class ones, since, unlike in Israel, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu and Jewish minorities are, to put it mildly, made to feel less than welcome.

If there are Jews who can only conceive of Israel as a state in which they are inherently superior, legally and socially, they have only themselves to blame if people regard that kind of Israel as a state that has no right to exist in its current form, warns one writer.

Really? No right to exist? But why then do the Albanians, the Bulgarians, the Croats, the Czechs, the Finns, the Greeks, the Latvians, the Japanese, the Swedes, the Ukrainians, the Vietnamese, and some 100 other ethnic groups have proprietary rights to their own states? And there are many others, including Chechens, Kosovar Albanians, Tibetans, and Palestinians themselves, demanding their own national independence.

Are they also not “privileged” within their own countries? Are not their symbols and laws reflective of their religious and cultural systems, past and present? Do their flags not display crosses and crescents?

Finally, what about all the artificial countries, the relics of colonialism – the Congos and Nigerias and Sudans? I see few people calling for the elimination of these polities.

Given the amount of ink spilled in attacks on Israel, a recently landed Martian might assume this nation to be the hub of a huge empire, comparable to some of the giants of the past, states that ruled over hundreds of millions of subjects.

The visitor might think Israel comparable to ancient Rome; 16th century Spain; the Ottoman and Mughal empires; Napoleonic France; the Victorian British Empire, with its worldwide reach; the Chinese empires, imperial and Communist; and for that matter the old Soviet Union, that “prison house of nationalities,” together with its east European satellites states.

But Israel is in fact tiny: fewer than seven million people in an area (pre-1967) of 22,072 square kilometres, or 8,522 square miles. This is not even twice the size, and with about half the population, of Greater Los Angeles!

The occupied West Bank (and Gaza) add another 6,335 square kilometres (2,446 square miles), with a population of 3.8 million.

And Israel is surrounded by states, far larger than itself, which have been less than pleased to see it come into existence. Some empire.

So how to account for the fixation on, and obsession with, this little Jewish country? I leave it to the readers’ imaginations – or better yet, their reading of history. I think we know the answer.

August 4, 2007

A strong dollar, and short memory

Henry Srebrnik, The Calgary Herald

Canada has to be the country with the shortest collective memory in the world. As we know, the loonie is now worth about 95 cents US – fuelled, to a large extent, by the economic boom in Alberta. Some economists think it may even reach parity with the American dollar soon. Five years ago, it hovered at around 65 cents US.

Statistics Canada now says the surging currency is giving consumers purchasing power far greater than simple economic growth figures suggest.

Between 2002 and 2005, Canada’s economic output expanded by 8.3 per cent in real terms. But the purchasing power of the country's earnings increased by 13.4 per cent. Why? Because while the volume of exports rose, the price paid for those exports rose even more.

John Baldwin, director of microeconomic analysis at Statscan, explained that the large increase in the value of the Canadian dollar “is benefitting everyone across Canada.” And it has also led, he added, to an employment boom that has pushed Canada's jobless rate down to lows not seen since the 1960s.

Now, here’s my point: for years, under the Jean Chretien/Paul Martin regime, we were constantly being told that our low dollar was good for Canada. It allowed us to export cheaply, despite the fact that, as a corollary, our imported goods were expensive and Canadians had little purchasing power when abroad.

I remember being in Montana in July 2001 and seeing almost no Canadian license plates as soon as we crossed into the state from Alberta. We were the “east Germans” of North America, economically locked in behind our borders.

Now we can actually travel to the U.S. or Europe without going bankrupt. And retirees can again afford to buy sunbelt condos in places like Arizona and Florida.

Cross-border shopping is again, as it was in the early 1990s, all the rage. People are even buying cars in the U.S. and shipping them home. After all, such items typically cost a good 30 percent more in Canada – but if our loonie is worth close to a greenback, clearly they are cheaper in border towns anywhere between Bellingham and Buffalo.

Of course, since prices, like water, seek their own level, this will have the effect of eventually lowering the cost of goods in Canada – and so giving all of us more purchasing power.

But it turns out that the Chretien trade-off – a cheap currency that benefitted our exporters at the expense of higher priced goods at home – wasn’t even necessary. According to economist Stephen Poloz of Export Development Canada, the belief that a strong dollar hurts exporters is a myth. He asserted last year that Canadian exports actually declined during that period.

So why don’t we “call” the Liberals on this? Clearly they all flunked Economics 101 when at university. Does being our “natural governing party” mean never having to say you’re sorry – or wrong?

Here’s a suggestion: the next time our two former prime ministers visit the U.S., they should ask the bank to give them 65 cents US for every one of their loonies.

August 3, 2007

Barack Obama: Trailblazer for Black Americans

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

There are many reasons why it would be nice to see the junior senator from Illinois in the United States Senate, Barack Hussein Obama, become the Democratic Party’s nominee for the U.S. presidency in 2008 and go on to win the general election.

But here’s a particularly good one for those of us here in Canada tired of the constant America-bashing we have to put up with from the liberal and left wing of our political spectrum:

Not only is Obama black, he is the son of an African Muslim from Kenya who came to the United States as a student, and he has a decidedly non-Anglo-Saxon name. (His mother is a white American from Kansas.)

Yet he is being taken more seriously than any previous black candidates, including Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

Our Canadian leftists harp incessantly about American racism and xenophobia. But with all of our vaunted multicultural policies, I haven’t noticed anyone like Obama leading any of our political parties.

Born in Honolulu, with its culturally heterogeneous mix of indigenous Hawaiians, other Pacific Islanders, Asians, and whites, for much of his youth Obama lived outside the U.S.

His parents divorced when he was a child and his father, a member of Kenya’s second-largest ethnic group, the Luo, returned to Kenya and remarried. Obama has a number of half-siblings there.

Obama’s mother later married an Indonesian student and the family moved to the world’s largest Muslim country, where Obama attended school in Jakarta for four years. Obama is today a member of the United Church of Christ.

Barack Obama represents the new diversity among black Americans, who now number about 37 million people.

Traditionally, African-American identity was built on an ancestral connection to slavery. American blacks were, by definition, people whose ancestors had arrived in America prior to the abolition of the slave trade in the nineteenth century.

They had lost their African cultures and languages – most native-born blacks don’t know their specific ethnic heritage. They were, in that sense, despite the legacy of slavery, racism and segregation, quintessential Americans.

After all, given racist American immigration laws, their numbers were not augmented by new waves of immigration from Africa. Until the twentieth century, most lived in rural areas of the old slave states of the U.S. South. They were a very homogeneous group.

In 1965, however, the U.S. liberalized its immigration laws, and removed quotas based on national origin. The Immigration and Naturalization Act now allowed more non-Europeans to enter the country and this has led to profound demographic changes in America.

In the past 30 years, one million people have come from Africa to the United States, from countries as different as Ghana and Nigeria, Senegal and Somalia.

Another 1.5 million blacks claim Caribbean ancestry; they have arrived from Haiti, Jamaica, and many other islands in the West Indies.

Nearly 25 percent of the growth in the black population between 1990 and 2000 was due to immigration and this pattern is accelerating. There is now a large African and Afro-Caribbean diaspora population in the United States.

All these new black immigrants have brought their own cultures with them, and they have remained distinct from the native African-American population. Many are Muslims, whereas most of the historic black community in the U.S. has been devoutly Protestant.

Like other recent newcomers, they settle in the large cities, mainly in the north and west. Many have become successful entrepreneurs and their children have attained high educational levels.

A disproportionate percentage of black students at elite universities are African or the children of African immigrants. (Obama’s father obtained a PhD from Harvard University and Obama attended Harvard Law School.)

Some African-Americans complain that Obama is “not black enough” because of his heritage. But many others realize that the old criteria by which they identify themselves don’t fit this new reality, which Barack Obama personifies.

April 28, 2007

Gov. Gen. Has Power to Thwart an Election

Henry Srebrnik, The Calgary Herald

Most Canadians are less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a third federal election in under four years.

But what if the following were to happen in the near future: the opposition parties gang up on the ruling Conservatives and defeat them, resulting in the fall of Stephen Harper's government?

However, rather than dissolve Parliament and force Canadians into another trip to the ballot box, Governor-General Michaelle Jean asks someone else – presumably Stephane Dion – to try to form another minority government, with support from other opposition parties.

After all, this kind of thing happens often in multi-party states such as Israel or Italy. One coalition government succeeds another, and parliamentary life goes on.

Though it is within her constitutional prerogative, could our governor-general get away with this in Canada? How much political, as opposed to symbolic, credibility does Jean really have? She was just a TV personality before being selected in 2005, almost on a whim, by then prime minister Paul Martin, to replace Adrienne Clarkson.

There was no oversight, consultation, confirmation by a legislature, or election by an electoral college or by the public at large, as is the case in most countries which have a ceremonial head of state above partisan politics.

Unlike many a monarch or president, Jean had no constitutional or political experience when selected. If she were to designate Dion as prime minister, it would amount to Martin strangling Harper from the political grave.

This whole scenario highlights the ridiculous constitutional limbo Canada finds itself in. Our recent governors-general have basically been patronage appointments made by the prime minister of the day.

Where else does a political leader get to choose his constitutional boss? Certainly not in Britain, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Norway, Sweden or numerous other nations with political systems similar to ours.

As a consequence, our governors-general no longer have the kind of political legitimacy afforded the monarchs and presidents of the aforementioned countries.

We should either go the whole way and become a republic with a formal head of state who is not picked out of a back pocket by a head of government or, at the least, institute a proper procedure, including input from a wide variety of sources, for selecting our “stand-in” for our British-domiciled head of state, Queen Elizabeth II.

Yet when I called attention to this issue at a panel discussing Canadian politics at the annual convention of the Western Social Science Association, which met in Calgary last week, none of the political scientists seemed particularly perturbed. They feared the consequences of “opening up the constitution,” which would be the only way to solve the problem.

Has Canada become such a frail creature that no one wants to disturb it unduly, lest it expire altogether?

April 6, 2007

Greens must keep focused on cause

Henry Srebrnik, The Calgary Herald

The Green party clearly is riding the crest of the environmentalist wave in Canada. The debate about global warming, the arguments over the controversial Kyoto accord and the various proposals to reduce the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – these have been front row center in Canadian politics for the past year.

Even Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, derided by many as “climate change deniers,” have been playing catch-up on these issues.

But for obvious reasons, no party is better positioned to take advantage of the anxiety Canadians feel about our climate than Elizabeth May’s Green party – the Liberals and the New Democratic Party notwithstanding.

Some recent opinion polls show the Greens at close to 10 per cent of the national vote.

Still, the party must be careful to differentiate its policies from the Liberals and NDP, lest voters choose one of the latter two when going to the polls. After all, why bother with a “minor, one-issue” group, when Stephane Dion or Jack Layton can also deliver on climate change – along with many other matters of concern to the electorate?

So the Greens may be making a tactical error by focusing their fire mainly on Harper, even though he is ideologically the one furthest from their views.

For example, Vancouver environmentalist Briony Penn has taken Elizabeth May’s message that the Conservatives must be beaten to its logical conclusion. She recently left the Green party to become a Liberal.

May ran second to the Liberal candidate in a by-election in the Ontario riding of London North Centre last November, beating both the Conservatives and NDP and garnering more than a quarter of the vote.

But now she has decided to challenge Peter MacKay, the MP for the Central Nova riding and the last leader of the old Progressive Conservative party, in the next federal election. This smacks of political symbolism: Does she feel MacKay’s decision to merge the PCs with Stephen Harper's Canadian Alliance in 2003 was a form of ideological treason?

It is interesting to note that in the London by-election, May was endorsed by Mort Glanville, a former president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, and by Halton MP Garth Turner, a former Progressive Conservative who had been expelled from Harper’s Conservative caucus a month earlier, and now sits as a Liberal.

All of this indicates to me that the Green party, perhaps not consciously, is filling the niche in Canadian politics left by the demise of the PCs, a party that was by the 1990s, following the exit of those who moved over to the Reform party in the West and the Bloc Quebecois in Quebec, a vague “feel good” place for people who found the Liberals too power-hungry and ambitious, and the NDP too left-of-centre and union-dominated. Have many of the old “Red Tories,” the followers of Joe Clark, now turned Green?

We once again have three parties that share, in a large sense, a similar vision of Canada, as a “kinder, gentler” country that cares for the environment and practices “soft power” abroad. Indeed, May hopes that the Liberals and NDP might stay out of the Central Nova race.

This informal Liberal/NDP/Green “coalition” will face the Conservatives and the Bloc Quebecois, two parties with very different visions of the country, in the next election.

Will this result in vote splitting among environmentalists, allowing the Conservatives to win many ridings with small pluralities? If so, will the Greens and NDP eventually merge, as the parties on the right finally did? Or might many Greens even join the Liberals? We definitely live in interesting times.

March 29, 2007

What of Quebec’s Anglophones?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The big story in the Quebec election of 2007 was, of course, the amazing showing by Mario Dumont’s Action Démocratique du Québec and the dismal performance of the incumbent Liberals, whose leader, premier Jean Charest, barely held on to his own seat. The Parti Québécois also fared badly, suffering its worse defeat since the early 1970s.

The Liberals won 48 seats in the National Assembly, mostly in and around Montreal, while the ADQ took 41 and the PQ 36. Quebec will have its first minority government since 1878.

The ADQ’s platform in many ways mirrors that of the federal Conservative Party, and already many observers predict that Stephen Harper may strike while the iron is hot in Quebec, and call a federal election this spring.

Overlooked by most observers, though, will be the continued marginalization of Quebec’s dwindling anglophone minority, who find themselves with fewer options in every election.

Here’s an indicator of how far apart the anglophones of Montreal are from the majority of Quebec voters (and of Quebec political culture in general):

In most of Quebec’s 125 constituencies, the race was between the Liberals, the ADQ, and the PQ. But in three predominantly “English” constituencies in the west end of Montreal -- D’Arcy-McGee, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce and Westmount-Saint-Louis -- not only did the Liberal candidates win their seats by overwhelming majorities (as usual), but in each of these ridings the Green Party ran second.

Two decades ago, many of these same voters elected members of the anglo-rights Equality Party, led by Robert Libman, to the National Assembly.

It was formed after Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa in 1988 used the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian constitution to override a Supreme Court of Canada decision that upheld a challenge to Bill 101, the law that had made French the sole official language of Quebec and imposed restrictions on the use of English on public signs.

Bourassa’s Liberals quickly passed Bill 178, which continued to ban English from all outdoor signs in Quebec. In reaction, the new Equality Party won four seats in west end Montreal in the 1989 provincial election.

But that four-member caucus fell apart due to internal bickering and its inability to do much on behalf of its constituents. As well, Bourassa in 1993 introduced Bill 86, which allowed English on outdoor commercial signs, if the French lettering was at least twice as large as the English.

So all of the Equality Party’s candidates were defeated in the 1994 election, as voters returned, reluctantly, to the Liberals.

Pity the poor anglophones – in the 2007 election, those voters who found the Liberal Party unpalatable, for whatever reason, could only deliver a protest by voting for a group that barely registered on the electoral radar elsewhere in the province.

December 20, 2006

Harper’s motion poses the question: Who is a Québécois?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian, p. A7

The House of Commons recently passed a motion, by a vote of 266-16, declaring the Québécois to be a nation within the Canadian federation. Not surprisingly, Quebec’s National Assembly unanimously adopted its own motion acknowledging Ottawa’s recognition.QBut public opinion across the country is far more divided. An Ipsos Reid poll indicated a majority of Canadians outside Quebec opposed to the resolution, while 63 per cent of all people in Quebec agreed.

The candidates for the Liberal Party leadership, too, were split. Gerard Kennedy was opposed, Michael Ignatieff in favour, and the eventual winner, Stéphane Dion, though a passionate federalist, also voted for it.

Even the terminology that was used by parliament is in dispute. The motion, introduced by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, referred, in both its English and French versions, to a Québécois people.

While the use of the word Québécois in French generally applies to any and all people living within the boundaries of the province of Quebec, regardless of ancestry, ethnicity, or language spoken, in English that term is usually restricted to francophones, and sometimes only to old-stock people of French descent, the so-called “pure laine” French Canadians of Quebec. Others in the province are commonly called Quebecers.

So the English text seems to suggest the recognition of a narrow, ethnic nationalism, while the French version is territorial, and denotes a civic and more inclusive nation. This implies that all citizens of the province can regard themselves as, and be considered, Québécois.

The odd thing, though, is that it is the sovereignists in Quebec who insist that theirs is the more open and pluralistic form of nationhood, rather than the old exclusionary variety. In fact the Bloc Québécois’ Gilles Duceppe wanted the English text to refer to Quebecers, rather than Québécois. Yet the MPs from the three federalist parties -- Conservative, Liberal, and New Democratic -- almost all voted for Harper’s English version (as, in the end, did the Bloc).

Was this intentionally meant to suggest to the rest of Canada that the Québécois nation is one of “blood ties” united by a common past – the way in which we refer to aboriginal peoples as “First Nations?” Are we to consider Québécois a “tribe” unable to accommodate or integrate others into its body politic rather than the inhabitants of a modern society?

If so, this is a retrograde step, since that archaic form of French Canadian nationalism died in the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. It would indeed be the height of irony if federalists, rather than separatists, defined Québécois in this manner.

I guess Governor General Michaëlle Jean got it wrong when, at her official installation in September 2005, she asserted that “The time of the ‘two solitudes’ that for too long described the character of this country is past.” I doubt this is quite what she had in mind.

November 22, 2006

Is Quebec really a nation?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Liberal leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff has been chided by various columnists, in the Guardian and elsewhere, for applying the word “nation” to the people of Quebec.

One might think that Ignatieff, out of the blue, had suddenly begun a campaign to convince Québécois they were a self-defined national group.

But in fact the place of Quebec within Canada has been “the elephant in the room” for decades, and though people in the rest of Canada may not wish to hear it, this is an issue that will not go away.

It is precisely because the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords failed that we must, yet again, determine what kind of country Canada will be – lest it cease being one altogether.

It is true that Ignatieff’s call to recognize Quebec as a nation – though, oddly, while precluding any “special status” for the province within the framework of the Canadian constitution – has set off a firestorm within the Liberal Party’s ranks. None of the other contenders for the leadership, including Bob Rae, support his position.

But the Quebec wing of the federal Liberal Party has itself adopted a resolution asserting that Quebec constitutes “a nation within Canada” and has asked that the entire party “officialize” this status at its forthcoming convention.

And Jean Charest’s provincial Liberal government insists that recognizing Quebec as a nation is necessary, and that constitutional talks on the issue are inevitable. Why? “Because a country’s Constitution is a mirror and it is crucial that in that mirror, in the Constitution, Quebecers must fully recognize themselves,” stated Quebec Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Benoît Pelletier.

Does Quebec in fact satisfy the basic criteria of nationhood? A glance at the scholarly literature on the subject suggests that it does.

According to academic specialists in the field such as Walker Connor and Anthony D. Smith, there are both objective and subjective elements to national identity.

A nation must possess a well-defined geographic territory, a civic culture, and, usually, a common language. It must also form a legal-political community, with institutions that enable its citizens to express their political will.

On a more intangible level, a nation includes a set of common historical memories, customs, myths, symbols and traditions. This provides it with a psychological bond that joins its people together and differentiates it, in the subconscious conviction of its members, from other national groups – including those with which it may share a common state.

Whether other Canadians like it or not, Quebec fulfils all of these conditions. And francophones agree: A recent poll conducted by Léger Marketing showed 78 per cent of them consider Quebec a nation.

Not all Quebecers are descended from the original French settlement, of course, and any form of nationalism has the potential to become ethnocentric, discriminatory and xenophobic. But newer immigrants are now being successfully acculturated into the body politic. Quebec’s nationalism is now more state oriented and less ethnic than it used to be.

Should Rae, or another candidate, beat Ignatieff at the Liberal Party convention later this month, and assuming that the Conservatives, too, will continue to refuse to endorse Quebec nationhood, the main beneficiaries of this rejection in the next federal election will be the Bloc Québécois.

That is not a good situation for the country to find itself in. It may yet be avoided if we recognize Quebec’s national rights within the Canadian federation.

November 2, 2006

A changing political landscape?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Liberal Party leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff’s recent comment referring to the Israeli bombing of the Lebanese village of Qana during the war against Hezbollah as a war crime prompted Liberal MP Susan Kadis, who represents the Thornhill riding in suburban Toronto, with its very large Jewish population, to step down as co-chair of his Toronto-area campaign.

It also caused Ariela Cotler, wife of the former justice minister in Paul Martin’s Liberal government, Montreal-area MP Irwin Cotler, to quit the party altogether. Cotler’s riding, Mount Royal, is home to the majority of Montreal’s Jews.

Earlier this year, a number of high-profile Canadian Jews announced their support for Stephen Harper. And when the prime minister spoke to a large audience at a dinner sponsored by the Jewish service organization B’nai Brith in Toronto recently, he was treated, in the words of one commentator, “like a rock star.”

The Liberal Party has traditionally been the “default” party of Canada’s Jewish community, but this may be changing. Many are clearly unhappy with the party’s Middle East positions, and are being swayed by Harper’s more uncompromising – some would call it principled – stance. The year 2006 may have ushered in one of those watershed periods when a group of voters moves en masse from support of one party to another.

“The Liberal Party has lost significant support from one of its traditional strong bases over the last few months, over this Lebanese conflict,” admitted Steven Pinkus, a vice-president of the party’s Quebec wing.

The various ethnic constituencies that the Liberal party has managed to keep onside as part of its political coalition all these many decades now seems to be falling apart. The contradictions can no longer be papered over by bromides about multiculturalism and diversity. Of course, when it comes to defining war crimes, some of the fault lies not with Ignatieff or others in the Liberal Party, but stems from confusion regarding the right of states to defend their populations and territorial integrity.

We saw this back in the spring of 1999, when Canada joined in the NATO campaign against Serbia when it tried to suppress the Kosovo Liberation Army’s attempt to wrest that province away from Belgrade.

For people such as Ignatieff, who avidly supported the war against Serbia, Israel too has been culpable, though it has made far greater efforts to minimize death and injury to civilians than did the Serbs in Kosovo.

Yet, as noted Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz remarked recently, “Democracies simply cannot protect their citizens against terrorist attacks of the kind launched by Hezbollah without some foreseeable risk to civilians. There cannot be any absolute prohibition against such self-defensive military actions so long as they are proportional to the dangers and reasonable efforts are made to minimize civilian casualties.”

In this age of “asymmetrical” conflicts, when the rules of warfare, such as they are, become increasingly meaningless, and international law is flouted completely by non-state actors, we have to confront grim new realities. And this may be changing the domestic political landscape as well.

October 19, 2006

Are Quebec’s political elites too sensitive to criticism? A personal recollection

Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

Journalist Jan Wong of the Globe and Mail recently felt the wrath of Quebec’s media and political elites for her suggestion that the marginalization of ethnic minorities in Quebec might have contributed to the shootings at Montreal’s Dawson College in September.

The gunman was a young Montreal-born son of Indo-Canadian immigrants and his rampage resulted in the death of one student and the perpetrator himself. Many others were injured.

Wong, herself also originally a Montreal “allophone” (someone of neither English nor French background), saw the roots of this tragedy in Quebec’s politics of polarization.

“What many outsiders don't realize is how alienating the decades-long linguistic struggle has been in the once-cosmopolitan city. It hasn't just taken a toll on long-time anglophones, it's affected immigrants, too,” she wrote in “Get Under the Desk,” published in the September 16, 2006 Globe and Mail.

The response was immediate and apoplectic: denunciations from all directions. A vast number of journalists, both federalist and sovereigntist, attacked Wong’s article, in the pages of the Journal de Québec, Journal de Montréal, La Presse, Le Devoir, and Le Soleil, among other periodicals.

There was even a rebuke from Quebec premier Jean Charest himself, who called her analysis “narrow-minded” and disgraceful. Her article “betrays an ignorance of Canadian values and a profound misunderstanding of Quebec,” he asserted in a letter to the Globe and Mail published September 20. That same day, incredibly, the Canadian House of Commons unanimously passed a motion requesting an apology “to the Quebec people” for the column.

Wong’s analysis was controversial. It may also have been exaggerated, offensive or, for that matter, incorrect. That is certainly open to debate.

But one thing is certain: she is the most recent in a long line of commentators, including the late novelist Mordecai Richler, academic Esther Delisle, and former columnist Bill Johnson, who have been subjected to the same form of vilification and “mobbing” for having dared to question various political sacred cows in Quebec.

Might I, without seeming too presumptuous, add my own name to the list?

On January 22, 1982, a colleague and I published an article, “Signs of the Times,” in the Jerusalem Post. It summarized the anxiety then being experienced by the Montreal Jewish community as a result of the various political and social developments in the province following the election in November 1976 of the Parti Québécois.

Of especial concern was the passage of Bill 101, the Charter of the French Language. That law declared, at the time, that French was to be the only language allowed on commercial signs in the province. With few exceptions, the use of English was banned. For many, this smacked of a narrow, triumphalist form of nationalism.

On February 17, the newspaper Le Devoir attacked our Post article, under the sensationalist headline “La diaspora de Montréal est menacée par l’anti-sémitisme.” Our own article was reproduced on the op-ed page in a French translation that changed many verbs from past to present tense, inserted new words, and otherwise transformed the tone and sense of the original.

A day later a vitriolic editorial, “Le Québec discrédité en Israël,” appeared in the paper, suggesting that we had defamed Quebec and had “run off” to publish the story in Israel. The editorial also called on Jewish community leaders to refute our views – which some, shamefully, did.

In the weeks that followed, numerous letters appeared in the media, attacking us personally. We were also denounced on radio and television talk shows. Even our member of the Quebec National Assembly, though a Liberal, joined in the condemnation.

The whole story was picked up by other newspapers across Canada. We became, as one newspaper put it, “the eye of a storm.”

As Le Devoir refused to apologize for having defamed us, we engaged the services of the noted civil liberties lawyer Julius Grey, and filed a suit in Quebec Superior Court, charging that we had been the victims of a hate campaign. Le Devoir finally settled out of court and printed an apology on its op-ed page on December 17, 1985.

This whole episode has been documented in a number of articles and books, including Michael Brown’s Jew or Juif?: Jews, French Canadians, and Anglo-Canadians, 1759-1914, published in 1987. So, as we approach the 30th anniversary of the PQ election victory in Quebec, might I say about l’affaire Wong, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose?”

October 18, 2006

The Liberals, Israel and the issue of war crimes.

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has enraged many in the Liberal Party by referring to some of the party’s leadership candidates as having “anti-Israel” tendencies.

This followed upon Michael Ignatieff’s remark that Israel had committed a war crime in bombing the southern Lebanese village of Qana during the war against Hezbollah last summer.

Ironically, the man who levelled that charge against Israel is often described as a “neocon” by his opponents, and is probably a better friend of Israel than are most of the other Liberal hopefuls. But Harper is on to something: the Liberal Party has a significant number of rank-and-file members who, at best, find Israel distasteful.

It is now reflected in party policies, which have become “NDP lite” when it comes to the Middle East. Indeed, it may be the reason Ignatieff, despite his attempt to woo this anti-Israel constituency, might fail in his attempt to win the party’s leadership.

Ignatieff’s remarks prompted Liberal MP Susan Kadis, who represents the Thornhill riding in suburban Toronto, with its very large Jewish population, to step down as co-chair of his Toronto-area campaign.

It also caused Ariela Cotler, wife of the former justice minister in Paul Martin’s Liberal government, Montreal-area MP Irwin Cotler, to quit the party altogether. Cotler’s riding, Mount Royal, is home to the majority of Montreal’s Jews.

The various ethnic constituencies that the Liberal party has managed to keep onside as part of its political coalition all these many decades now seems to be falling apart. The contradictions can no longer be papered over by bromides about multiculturalism and diversity.

Of course some of the confusion over what constitutes a war crime lies with our own political class, whose views on the right of states to defend their territorial integrity have come back to “bite” them.

Back in the spring of 1999, the Chrétien government joined the NATO campaign against Serbia when Slobodan Milosevic tried to suppress the Kosovo Liberation Army’s attempt to wrest that province away from rule by Belgrade. Many prominent Liberals, including Irwin Cotler, gave it their wholehearted support.

There were exaggerated stories of Serbian atrocities in Kosovo and, as we know, the Serbian president was eventually arrested and charged with war crimes. He would no doubt have been convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague had he not died earlier this year.

A few months after the Kosovo war, I published an article in which I noted that under the new international regime of human rights it is conceivable that some international tribunal might some day indict an Israeli leader for war crimes.

“The newly expanded definition of what constitutes war crimes and human rights violations puts the leader of any country defending itself in the same category as an Idi Amin or Augusto Pinochet,” I wrote. “Could people who avidly supported the war against Serbia, for instance, suddenly develop a double standard when it came to Israel?”

In Ignatieff’s case, the answer is no, even though Israel has made far greater efforts to minimize death and injury to civilians than did the Serbs in Kosovo. The chickens are coming home to roost.

.

August 31, 2006

Hezbollah's Strength

Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

Thankfully, the war between Israel and the Lebanese “Party of God,” Hezbollah, has ended – at least temporarily. But this was no victory for the Jewish state. A majority of Israelis think that few of the war’s aims were achieved.

All that was accomplished was the installation of an unreliable UN force in southern Lebanon to act as a buffer between Israel and Hezbollah and the deployment there of an inept Lebanese army that is afraid to challenge terrorists, in return for the withdrawal of Israeli troops.

The UN-brokered cease-fire resolution mandated a reinforced United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), to eventually comprise 15,000 troops. Supplemented by a 15,000-man Lebanese army, they now take up positions south of the Litani River and guard the so-called Blue Line, the UN-demarcated border between Lebanon and Israel. It marks the first presence of Lebanese troops in the south in decades.

But Hezbollah has stated that it will not disarm – their fighters will simply hide their weapons and melt into the general population. The Lebanese government seems to approve: “There will be no confrontation between the army and our brothers in Hezbollah,” Lebanese Information Minister Ghazi Aridi said in mid-August. “That is not the army's mission.”

Added Lebanon’s Defense Minister, Elias Murr, “The army is not going to the south to strip the Hezbollah of its weapons and do the work that Israel did not.” Indeed, for Hezbollah, the army provides a convenient cover for their work.

As Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote recently, “In the south, the Lebanese army will be taking orders from Hezbollah. Hezbollah is not just returning to being a ‘state within a state.’ It is becoming the state.” The Lebanese government has been reduced to acting as its front.

So what is to prevent Hezbollah from firing rockets from north of the Litani into Israel at some future date? Also, given that the multinational UN force will probably include soldiers from Muslim states such as Bangladesh, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia and Turkey, will Israel even be able to bypass these troops in order to again move into Lebanon to stop Hezbollah, if it becomes necessary?

This might itself be a moot point, as Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has stated that he does not want countries that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel to participate in the force. None of these states except Turkey recognize Israel.

The war proved to be an almost cost-free way for Iran and Syria, Hezbollah’s sponsors, to damage Israel economically and militarily while flexing their own political muscles in the Middle East.

The two countries lost not a single soldier, while 119 Israeli troops were killed. During the conflict, almost 4,000 rockets rained down on Israel, tens of thousands of civilians were forced to evacuate their homes in the northern part of the country, and places such as Nahariya and Kiryat Shmona became virtual ghost towns. At least 40 Israeli civilians died during the war.

Israel’s massive air strikes reduced entire south Lebanese villages to rubble and made for bad optics worldwide, but, it seems, did little to damage Hezbollah’s capacity to strike at northern Israeli cities and towns.

In the six years since Israel left southern Lebanon, Hezbollah was able to build bunkers and tunnels and amass an enormous cache of missiles, rockets and sophisticated weaponry for the purpose of attacking Israel. During the war, it was able to move its rocket launchers rapidly and demonstrated striking battlefield agility and flexibility. The guerrilla group impeded the advance of Israel’s army for almost five weeks.

As well, Hezbollah’s popularity throughout the region grew by leaps and bounds during this war, even among non-Shi’ite Muslims. They managed to cross a deep sectarian divide, and this has also benefitted Iran, whom they serve as a surrogate against Israel.

There were disquieting features about this war closer to home as well. Demonstrations against Israel and in support of terrorists became commonplace in our major cities, particularly in Quebec. It showed a depth of anger against Israel among Canadians that is quite unprecedented in our history.

This hostility is a product of Liberal spinelessness over the past decade, plus, perhaps, the arrival of millions of new Canadians with little understanding of the Middle East. In more than a few cases, they were people already predisposed against Israel.

We Jews need to wake up and realize that the real Canada, not the one of our Jewish leaders’ dreams, is far less hospitable than we had thought. Telling us that Canadians and Israelis share the same “values” will not impress us anymore.

Ironically, this gap between fantasy and reality was masked while the Liberals were in government, because they managed to pretend to support Israel while in actuality being “even-handed” or even pro-Arab when it came to the Middle East. This enabled both Jewish and other Canadians to act as though they were generally satisfied with Canada’s policies.

But when Prime Minister Stephen Harper demonstrated actual support for Israel, that contradiction was exposed for what it really was. Some polls published during the fighting indicated less than one third of Canadians approved of Harper’s stance.

Unlike many analysts, I was not surprised at how tough Hezbollah proved to be. Regular Arab armies, in the Arab-Israeli wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, were composed of conscripts indifferent to the dictatorships under which they lived. Hezbollah is a sophisticated and fanatical volunteer force, well-trained, and believes in what it is doing. It remains a determined foe and is far from vanquished.

August 4, 2006

Pondering What Will Happen Next for Lebanon

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Wracked by internal tensions that periodically erupt into all-out civil wars between its religious communities, Lebanon has always been, in effect, a failed state.

It was artificially created by the French in 1943 in order to provide a sovereign entity for the country’s then Christian majority. But for the intervention of 14,000 American troops in 1958, the country would have fallen apart long ago. President Dwight Eisenhower sent them over to quell an insurrection by pan-Arab nationalists, who wanted Lebanon to become part of Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser’s new United Arab Republic.

The UAR, a union between Egypt and Syria, itself only lasted three years. Meanwhile, Lebanon was preserved as a Christian-dominated country.

Today, however, following the effective defeat of the Maronite Catholics and other Christians in the 1975-1991 civil war, and the decades-long occupation by Syria, even that rationale for keeping this fractured country together may no longer hold.

The Shi’ite Muslim Hezbollah (Party of God), formed in 1982, and backed by Iran and Syria, has carte blanche over much of Lebanon’s territory and pays little attention to pronouncements by the authorities in Beirut.

The poorest community in Lebanon, the Shi’ites were in the past also the most underprivileged. But they now comprise, according to some estimates, some 40% of the population. As their numbers have increased, so has Hezbollah’s power.

Now an entrenched part of the Lebanese political system, Hezbollah is treated as a legitimate political entity, not as a terrorist group. The movement runs hospitals, clinics, schools and agricultural centres and sustains a large social welfare net.

Hezbollah won 14 seats in the 128-member Lebanese parliament in the spring 2005 elections, and is part of the Resistance and Development Bloc, a joint ticket by the two main Shi’ite parties Amal and Hezbollah. They altogether control 35 seats, and Hezbollah even has two ministers in the Lebanese government.

Indeed, the president of Lebanon, Emile Lahoud, has declared his full support for Hezbollah. Though a Maronite Christian (as mandated by the constitution), he is considered by many as little more than a puppet of Syria.

The prime minister of Lebanon must, also by law, come from the Sunni Muslim community, and the present incumbent, Fouad Siniora, is a member of the Current for the Future (Tayyar Al Mustaqbal) movement.

This is the party that was led by Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister who was assassinated in February 2005. Many Lebanese suspect Syria of involvement in his death.

So Siniora, unlike Lahoud, is no friend of Hezbollah. But he seems powerless to control their activities. Israel is exasperated with the fact that Lebanon has done nothing to enforce Security Council Resolution 1559, passed in 2004, which called for “the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias” and for the Beirut government to extend its control over the border region with Israel.

It is therefore rather disingenuous of the Lebanese to now wail that Israel has attacked their country – after thousands of missiles have been imported by Hezbollah, under their very eyes, to be used against their southern neighbours and launched from Lebanese soil.

Many commentators have expressed surprise that Israel seems to be engaged in an all-out attack in Lebanon and is indifferent to the fate of the Lebanese state itself. Is it possible that the Israelis have simply grown tired of all this, and perhaps concluded that this sort of state may not be worth preserving?

Could it be that they might prefer an “official” Shi’ite mini-state in the south – even if under Iranian and Syrian suzerainty – while the rest of the country becomes a truncated but, once again, Christian-dominated entity less antagonistic to Israel?

That way there would be no “good guy” (today’s Lebanese state) trying to gain the international community’s sympathy while the “bad guy” (the non-state actor Hezbollah) kept firing missiles into Israel and provoking border clashes. It would certainly clarify matters.

Meanwhile, what role should the international community – a fictional notion, in any case – play in all of this? Who can be trusted to be tough enough to control the Israeli-Lebanese frontier?

Last week George W. Bush and Tony Blair met in Washington and called for an international peacekeeping force. Certainly a NATO force would be preferable to one sent in by the hapless UN.

But should its mandate emanate from the UN Security Council, NATO would have to negotiate a tough set of conditions, to ensure that members such as Russia and China not be able to hamstring its operations, once the troops were deployed.

Would a land-based army along the border be enough to stop the fighting? Couldn’t Hezbollah retreat further north and still pound Israel with missiles? Then what? Would NATO be forced to occupy much of the country – as it has done in Kosovo and, to some extent, Afghanistan? There are no easy answers.

May 16, 2006

A few brickbats.

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Many years ago, I used to read a newspaper that handed out bouquets and brickbats on its editorial page – the flowers for positive items, the criticisms for negative ones.

It doesn’t take much to come up with the latter, unfortunately. All you need to do is read a few days’ worth of news items in The Guardian or elsewhere. Here are my “three picks” this week:

First item: One of the founders of Canadian Parents for French, Patterson Webster, told the graduating class at the University of Prince Edward Island convocation last week that French immersion programs in Canada have been an amazing success story.

But it turns out that of the candidates vying for the leadership of the federal Liberal Party, fewer than half can function adequately in French. A recent news story declared that only five of the 11 hopefuls are truly bilingual.

Remember – these are Liberals, not redneck Reformers! They’re almost all from Ontario, not Alberta! And they are all the ideological disciples of Pierre Trudeau, the father of official bilingualism.

Clearly, despite French immersion programs, something is amiss with our language policies. This is something the Bloc Québécois will no doubt make certain Quebecers won’t fail to notice.

My next brickbat: When the Canadian dollar languished below 65 cents a few years ago, then prime minister Jean Chrétien insisted that a cheap currency was actually of benefit to Canada – it helped exporters, he claimed, even if it did mean that the rest of us were left with reduced purchasing power, or less money with which to travel in the United States or Europe.

Now, however, it turns out that trade-off wasn’t even necessary.

According to economist Stephen Poloz of Export Development Canada, the belief that a strong dollar hurts exporters is a myth. He told the Greater Charlottetown Area Chamber of Commerce recently that Canadian exports actually declined during that period.

So much for Chrétien’s words of wisdom; I guess he missed the Economics 101 lecture on currencies while at university. Let’s hope that the next time he visits the U.S., he asks the bank to give him 65 cents U.S. for every one of his loonies.

Finally, we have the case of our Governor General, the representative of our head of state, Queen Elizabeth II, lecturing Haitians on democracy while representing this country at the inauguration of Haitian president René Préval last week. Michaëlle Jean returned to her country of birth for the first time since being appointed in September 2005.

Préval won a disputed election last February, replacing a U.S.-backed interim administration appointed after the radical Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled the country in February 2004 in the face of a bloody armed rebellion. He had been elected president of Haiti in November 2000.

Aristide’s opponents charged him with corruption and of having created a climate of murder and terror. He claimed he was forced out because he had been trying to alleviate the condition of Haiti’s destitute and hungry masses.

Aristide, currently living in exile in South Africa, still has many supporters in Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, with annual per-capita income of about $400.

Though independent since 1804, when a successful slave rebellion ended French rule, Haiti has rarely been a politically or economically happy place. Throughout its turbulent history, it has usually been ruled by rapacious dictators. From 1915 to 1934, it was even occupied by U.S. Marines.

To Haiti’s impoverished majority, Préval is little more than an American (and Canadian) puppet, kept in power on the bayonets of the foreign troops serving with the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti.

Indeed, 4,500 UN troops and Haitian police in armoured personnel carriers and on foot cordoned off the areas where the ceremony was held.

There is little doubt that political violence and lawlessness will remain a feature of the country’s landscape. The struggle between Aristide’s followers and the Haitian elite is total, a reflection of the chasm between radically opposed sectors of Haitian society.

One side is Black, Creole-speaking, illiterate, disenfranchised; the other a privileged French-speaking Mulatto elite, often educated abroad. They don’t speak the same language and don’t have the same shared culture or history.

For poorer Haitians, Jean is representative of this latter group and they will not be as favourably impressed by her comments as we in Canada have been.

In any case, hers is a ceremonial, not elective, position, and therefore not a pulpit from which to dispense advice to the rulers and citizens of foreign countries. Aren’t many Canadians angry when George W. Bush does the same? Jean is not Peter MacKay, our foreign minister. And she should in any case not sound like like a colonial official.

Brickbats, brickbats, everywhere.

May 5, 2006

As Fijians go to the polls.

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Another election, yet more ethnic animosity. Such has been the sad story of the South Pacific island state of Fiji ever since it gained its independence from Britain in 1970.

Fijians go to the polls Saturday to elect a government, but no matter who wins, political harmony will probably again be the loser.

Ethnic Fijians account for 54 percent of Fiji’s 900,000 people, Indo-Fijians 38 percent, and Chinese, Europeans and Pacific Islanders make up the remainder.

The indigenous Fijians have historically been opposed to sharing power with Indo-Fijians, who came to the islands from India between 1879 and 1916 to work as labourers in the sugar plantations.

From the start, the two communities had little in common. While most native Fijians had been converted to Methodist Christianity, the Indians were Hindus and Muslims. They spoke different languages. And the economic system instituted by the colonial state compartmentalized the two ethnic groups.

The main area of contention between the Indians and the ethnic Fijians has been the land question. In order to preserve the Fijian way of life, the British had reserved 83% of the total land area of Fiji for the native Fijians in perpetuity. It could not be sold but only rented; it belonged to Fijian clan entities known as mataqali, each headed by a tribal chief.

By the 1940s, most Indian sugar-cane workers had come to lease the land they worked from Fijian clans. But this small leasehold system forced Indians into a precarious existence, since they could not own outright the land on which they depended for their livelihood.

From 1970 until 1987, the Alliance Party, led by one of Fiji’s powerful paramount chiefs, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, governed the country. Indians, despite their legal disabilities, had come to dominate commerce and the professions, and were the mainstay of a rural economy which depended on the sugar cane industry, but they took a back seat when it came to exercising power.

All of that changed in 1987, when the newly-formed Labour Party won a general election. Most native Fijians considered it a vehicle for Indian political power and one month later, an army colonel, Sitiveni Rabuka, overthrew the government and installed himself as ruler of Fiji.

Rabuka’s new Fijian Republic would spend the next decade as an economic and political pariah and he finally allowed a return to civilian rule. A new democratic constitution was promulgated in 1997 and in the 1999 general election, the revived Labour Party emerged with an absolute majority. For the first time in their history, Fijians found themselves governed by an Indo-Fijian politician, Mahendra Chaudhry – but not for long.

Once again ethnic Fijian nationalists resorted to violence and in 2000 Chaudhry’s government was overthrown in a coup led by an ethnic Fijian, George Speight. Following a period of political chaos, the powers of government were transferred to an interim administration, with no Indo-Fijian representation, appointed by the military. The new prime minister, Laisenia Qarase, was an ethnic Fijian.

The 1987 and 2000 coups shook Indian confidence and many expressed anger at their treatment by a political class that considered them little better than aliens. Since then, more than 60,000 Indians have left the country, professionals in particular.

New parliamentary elections were held in 2001 and Qarase’s Soqosoqo Duavata ni Lewenivanua (SDL) or United Fiji Party emerged victorious, with 32 of the 71 seats in the House of Representatives, five more than Labour’s 27.

Qarase’s government, not surprisingly, has done little to ameliorate the condition of Indo-Fijian farmers. Their long-term leases, most of which have come up for renewal in recent years, have in many cases not been extended. Planters found themselves evicted from their land, little more than economic refugees.

In the current election Qarase and Chaudhry, who remain bitter enemies, are again leading their respective parties. Indeed, the election process itself, instead of evolving into a mechanism of unity and legitimacy, has become a battleground of inter-ethnic strife.

In its manifesto, the SDL continues to maintain that all agricultural land should be managed by ethnic Fijian bodies, in accordance with the wishes of the landowners, while the Labour Party hopes to improve the position of the Indo-Fijian farmers.

Even now many ethnic Fijians refuse to consider the possibility of an Indo-Fijian leader. Qarase recently stated that Chaudhry “is not a Fijian” and he has also broached the possibility of an amnesty for Speight, who received a life sentence for treason in 2002.

The last two decades have spawned a culture of lawlessness and intimidation in Fiji. And should Qarase’s SDL again triumph, the lot of Indo-Fijians will continue to be an unpleasant one.

April 20, 2006

The federal Liberals should choose Ignatieff as leader.

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The race for the leadership of the federal Liberal Party has begun in earnest. And there are some strong and highly intelligent candidates already in the field or contemplating a run for the job, especially former Ontario premier Bob Rae and former federal environment minister Stéphane Dion.

But it is Michael Ignatieff, who, though elected to Parliament from a Toronto riding only last January, would make the most formidable Liberal Party leader.

There are those who think it is the height of chutzpah for Ignatieff to think he can return to Canada after three decades outside the country and become its prime minister. I disagree.

That Ignatieff has lived abroad and taught at universities such as Cambridge, Harvard and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales is, in my opinion, a plus, rather than a minus.

He comes from the cosmopolitan world of arts, education, and culture, and his world-view is far less parochial than many of his small-minded “Canadian nationalist” political opponents, who after years in the political trenches are unable to think “outside the box.”

And of course he is not tainted by the corruption that was endemic in the Chrètien and Martin years.

Ignatieff would be the Liberal most able to defeat the Harper Conservatives in a federal election. Why? Because this distinguished author and professor is the very thing most Canadians think they don’t like: a “neo-con.”

The word “neo-con” has become a term of abuse, almost an insult, in Canada, in particular among Liberals and New Democrats, thanks to the antipathy that has been generated to it in this country by the Bush administration.

Yet most Canadians have no idea of neo-conservatism’s historical roots. It originated within the Democratic Party in the United States during the Cold War 1970s, in opposition to both the “loony left,” who were prepared to appease the Soviets and co-exist with Communism following the Vietnam defeat, and the isolationist and reactionary Republican right, nowadays referred to as “paleo-cons,” as in paleolithic or ancient.

Most neo-conservative thinkers were former liberals and leftists, even socialists, people like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Senator Henry Jackson, Jean Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Norman Podhoretz.

Canada’s more liberal political culture and lower international profile has made neo-conservatism a less significant factor in our political life and this is why so many of us confuse it with other political doctrines.

The founders of the Reform Party and Canadian Alliance were mainly social conservatives and evangelical Christians — often called theological conservatives or “theo-cons” — rather than neo-conservatives. As for the old Progressive Conservatives, many were simply ideological liberals.

In order to avoid being “tainted” by the term “neo-con,” at least in this country, Ignatieff prefers to define himself as being on the “centre-left” of the political spectrum, and a proponent of “liberal internationalism.”

But, perhaps because he has lived outside Canada for so many years, he fits the neo-conservative profile almost to a T.

Basically, neo-conservatives can be defined as follows:

They are fiscal conservatives, and oppose big government, but allow a role for the state in mitigating those extremes of poverty and wealth inevitable in a free market economy. They do not advocate a laissez-faire "free-for-all" economic system nor are they social Darwinists.

They are social liberals, but without going to the extremes found among some of the politically correct. They tend to be “a-religious”and secular and are agnostic about, or even supportive of, abortion and same-sex marriage. More pragmatic in matters of morality than are social conservatives, they are far less likely to be swayed by religious arguments.

In international affairs, they believe Canada has a national interest and should be prepared to back it up.

They champion a robust, fairly pro-American policy, and are not afraid to assert that sometimes armed force is needed to extend democracy and defeat the enemies of freedom around the world.

So they look askance at the naivete of those who place their faith in “soft power” and who would have our foreign agenda be dictated by the do-gooders at the United Nations or among various “civil society” non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

“I believe in a progressive and compassionate approach to social policy; a moderate, creative and responsible approach to economic policy in order to fuel the growth required to enhance social justice; and a confident and realistic foreign policy that focuses on making a real and positive difference in our troubled world,” Ignatieff recently stated in the Globe and Mail.

This is neo-conservatism in a nutshell — and a far cry from the image painted by those who choose to slander it.

A true “public intellectual,” and fluently bilingual, Ignatieff arguably would be the most articulate and knowledgeable Liberal leader since Confederation (and yes, that includes Pierre Trudeau). He would attract voters from both the left and right.

Conservatives and New Democrats should pray to the political gods that the party chooses someone else.