So it should be clear at this point that my focus for the next little bit is going to be trained fairly exclusively on the Canadian Afghan detainee transfer debate ongoing north of the border. The latest twist(s) to the story is that today some heavy hitting witnesses are set to testify in front of the House of Commons committee, including former Chief of Defence Rick Hillier, who has claimed from the get go that “no smoking gun” around Colvin’s allegations ever caught his attention, and current Canadian Ambassador to China and former   Director of the Canadian Afghanitan Task Force David Mulroney, who was specifically named by Colvin as someone who told him to tamp down on his memos.

Both testimonies will be valuable in the process regardless of whether one believes that a public inquiry is necessary or not. At the end of the day what is needed in this situation is more information and as much of it as possible. So while I understand the Opposition parties’ reluctance to cross-examine Mulroney without any of the documentation they’ve requested, I think they are making a strategic mistake by trying to delay his testimony. As a panelist on my new favourite Canadian politics show, Power and Politics with Evan Solomon, noted (sorry, can’t remember which one) if Mulroney is allowed to testify, so much the better for the information received. If, upon reviewing documents released by the government, the Committee is forced to call him back based on a discrepancy, well the Opposition wins there too.

The whole issue around the release of documents pertaining to the issue in question is another area on it’s own, though, that I find the Harper government’s tactics troubling. As reported by Aaron Wherry at MacLeans, Harper and Defence Minister Peter McKay keep saying that they will provide the Committee with all documents they are legally required to submit. That word, legally, has been sticking in a lot of craws and mine is no different.

Technically speaking, that is the correct answer. But what would have been a better answer would have been to say we will provide whatever information it is within our power to provide to clear up any allegations or misunderstandings of wrong doing. The way I read Harper and McKay’s (and by extension, the government’s) response is to say basically: we will do the bare minimum that is required of us to deal with this issue and only because we are legally required to do so. If anyone is wondering why I’ve personally been moved to the belief that a public inquiry is necessary, well, there it is. [Read more →]

Freddie, Mark, and I got together on Skype tonight to grapple with the following question offered by reader/commenter BC Chase,

As an optimist and a cynic, I hold out hope the government can get better without any real evidence it can. I would like to see more conversations about how the institutional problems of our democracy can realistically be changed, or how we’re all boned.

Thanks for keeping it small, BC. Sheesh! But, as Mark recently said in the comments, this is the League, we loves us some big questions.

Check out the conversation after the jump… [Read more →]

So last week I posted a piece saying that Republicans and conservatives were missing a golden opportunity to engage in a full-throated  reconstruction dialogue under the Obama administration and noted that to date Republicans seemed to be presenting themselves as nothing more than the Party of No. The presentation of what is by all accounts an extremely flimsy budget alternative seems to indicate that not much has changed. In that post, I said that conservatives and Republicans needed to put themselves to the formulation of a conservative movement for the twenty-first century, particularly given the tide of demographics working against them. “Old-timer” Bob rightly asked for some details on what I meant by twenty-first century conservatism and while I’m a bit late in getting back to him, I’ve been tossing the idea around in my head. Below is what I’ve come up with (in no particular order or ranking):

Go populist without going populist: I’ve spent some time warning against the dangers of populism in regards to the AIG scandal and generally, but the fact of the matter is that there is smoldering populist sentiment out there that is not completely off-base in terms of its raison d’etre. People rightly believe that their government has gotten away from them and increasingly has little to do with their everyday lives and addressing the issues present in those lives in a positive fashion and a movement/party that can present a believable narrative about how they care about the challenges facing Americans and are interested in focusing on those issues in a collaborative fashion stands a decent chance of capturing a sizable proportion of the national imagination.

Look, John McCain and Sarah Palin were on to something with their decision to go hyper-local in how they addressed supporters and finished in what was a respectable place given that this election was the Democrats’ to lose and they did very little to actually lose it. The problem is that Palin and McCain practiced actual, base-line populism that appealed to people’s lowest common denominator inclinations. Such traditional populism generally winds up looking pretty ugly as a result and will get you a certain segment of support, but doesn’t offer the means for developing a broad base of support. But if conservatives can find a way of walking the walk of populism without necessarily talking the talk of populism, they might have a recipe for success sooner than we all tend to think. Walking the walk but not talking the talk to me means eschewing notions of appealing to peoples’ lowest common denominators and meeting people where they are but challenging them to bring the angels of their better nature to the game. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s arguments around Sam’s Club Republicans come to mind in this regard, as does the kind of localism/regionalism/integrity of living articulated by the likes of Daniel Larison, John Schwenkler, and particularly Rod Dreher (though Rod runs in to his troubles in other areas). [Read more →]

In many senses I couldn’t agree more with commenter gregniak when he/she (no assumptions) says,

there is a point in this kind of conversation where the topic (big gov vs. small gov) is so general as to become useless. most people Con’s included want some big gov. big or small just doesn’t say much unless you know what is the purpose: are there C and B, how does it work, who has power, etc….you need to know at least some specifics. national health care is a very different kind of “big gov” then warentless wiretapping, or the drug war or high military spending. each may have there own justifications and problems. the big vs small debate is more about vague posturing and grand pronouncements without actual policy knowledge.

In my mind, the debate on size of government is essentially a convenient but dead horse for partisan rangling. A country the size of America with the kinds of expectations around quality of life of its citizens requires for its effective governance an inherently large government. As has been noted a great deal lately in the wake of the Obama stimulus bill, conservatives of a variety of stripes have tried to shrink the size of government, to little effect. At some point you bump up against the reality of what people expect government to do if they are to remain invested in it and the limitations around how small you can actually make government without undermining that investment.

It seems to me that the much more useful debate is around the scope of government, as I heard articulated by Mickey Edwards in this Bill Moyers interview with Ross Douthat (ostensibly Edwards argues the same thing in his book, but I haven’t read it). My sense of at least interim finality around the size debate does not relfect a corresponding lack of concern around the issues of government intrusion into peoples’ lives and a need for checks and balances, as commenters Bob and Cascadian have been back and forthing about in the comments of the same post. Government may be a large beast, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t look for ways to latch its feet to stakes in the ground in order to impose limitations to its ability to roam freely.

I say all of this with the issue of health care in mind. Today there is a summit happening at the behest of the Obama administration on how to get the costs of health care under control. Coming from a Canadian perspective, I don’t entirely buy the conservatives being adamant about not expanding government’s role in health care so that every citizen has basic coverage. There is no doubt that the Canadian health care system is fraught with problems of its own and those problems, in many cases, require the dynamic thinking of the private world to overcome. But the whole argument that expanding government’s role means an unacceptable intrusion into people’s lives simply doesn’t do justice in my mind to actually asking the question of what elements of peoples’ lives government ought to have some kind of role and what element it ought not to. It just seems too knee-jerk: expansion is bad, always (in the same way that some have pilloried liberals for assuming that regulation in economic affairs is good, always)!

Part of my belief around that being a knee-jerk reaction is that the burden of providing health care coverage in the US seems to be falling predominantly on businesses and if it seems foreign that government should have a role in peoples’ health care, then the idea that said healthcare is the responsibility of business seems like a martian concept to me. There are many ways in which businesses have obligations to their employees due to both the contractual and non-contractual relationship that exists between the two, but providing for something like health care when the primary goal of businesses is to generate revenue and wealth for itself and, ideally, its employees, seems tertiary, if not down right antithetical. That argument goes double-time for me when the burden of providing health care coverage is fundamentally hampering the ability for those businesses to maintain even revenue streams, particularly small businesses.

Given that the conservative/Republican line I’ve heard a lot of lately is that they are the movement/Party committed to small businesses as the driver of success in the country, it strikes me as one of the glaring examples of dogmatic rigidness inherent in the kind of ideological empire building to which I am so averse when this dilemma gets such short shrift in policy formulation.

Now, I’m no health care policy wonk and I know this is a hyper-charged issue in American politics, so I’m sure there are nuances I’ve overlooked. But this is an issue that has vexed me lately, especially given my own perception that the Canadian system, while not perfect, isn’t the armpit of all proposals. I look forward to getting some constructive feedback and having a useful discussion in the comments.