Mulcair - thread # 10

Jeesus. Anyone see Rex Murphy tonight? I wanted to put my foot through the TV. Are the Cons paying him to take down Mulcair?

Boom Boom wrote:

Jeesus. Anyone see Rex Murphy tonight? I wanted to put my foot through the TV. Are the Cons paying him to take down Mulcair?

Heh...I was watching Hockey instead. Go kings go! Actually, make that lose coyotes lose! 

Mulcair goes for the jugular, just like Pierre Trudeau used to. Calling Brad Wall "Harper's Messenger" was a brilliant putdown, and just endeared Mulcair more to me. I'm starting to believe Mulcair might actually have what it takes to bring the NDP to government. The royal jelly.

6079_Smith_W wrote:

Boom Boom wrote:

Jeesus. Anyone see Rex Murphy tonight? I wanted to put my foot through the TV. Are the Cons paying him to take down Mulcair?

Actually, aside from Murphy's assessment of the tar sands and the economy (which was boneheaded) I thought he offered Mulcair some very good advice. 

Mulcair's comment about the western premiers being Harper's messengers was absolutely ignorant, and hurt no one but himself. It doesn't matter that he is right to take on the issue of the tar sands. That response was stupid, and something I would expect from Harper. 

I don't often agree with Rex Murphy, but if one can park the ego and ignore his scorn, and just listen to his points, he is right on this one, IMO. Mulcair would do well to pay attention.

 

Except that Christy Clark is Harper's messenger. Her whole positioning on every issue is to echo Harper, simply to curry favor with small c conservatives and save the deck chairs on the titanic that is her government. I say this as a British Columbian who sees her promoting Alberta's interests ahead of the province she is allegedly Premier of. The fact that the Quebecois Mulcair said it far more politely than I would is hardly a crime, but then again we westerners are masters at false outrages and being offended at just about anything, thus undermining just offences.

@ Vansterdam Kid

Perhaps your premier is; you would know better than me. But by the same token,  although Brad Wall shares a lot of Harper's politics he does not think and act the same way in all things, and he certainly doesn't take marching orders from him. 

And you can probably parse the results of the Alberta election as well as I can. 

So although I think Mulcair is doing quite well - certainly better than the media paints him - on the tar sands issue, he clearly did not do his homework before he made that pointless cheap shot. And I think he undid some of the efforts he had made to not make this a regional issue.

(edit)

And I agree with you about just offenses. Thing is, there are quite enough of Brad Wall's actions to criticize Brad Wall for. Acting like the PM is the puppet master over what is to a great degree a matter of provincial jurisdictions, where the provincial leaders have made most of the bad decisions is just overreaching and stupid.

Jim Stanford on the dutch disease...

Quote:

More recently, NDP leader Tom Mulcair was targeted with a similar firestorm — including by the Canada West Foundation’s Roger Gibbins this week in the Citizen (“Mulcair’s bad economic prescription,” May 8). In media interviews last week, Mulcair made two obvious and empirically defensible statements: Canada’s currency has been driven upward by the oil boom, and that escalation entails significant regional and sectoral side effects. For this he was targeted as divisive and destructive, advocating (in Gibbins’ overheated language) economic “mayhem.”

The stridency of these attacks is disturbing. By cranking up the rhetoric instead of examining real arguments, it is these defenders of the bitumen boom who throw gasoline on regionalist fires — not McGuinty or Mulcair. The Conservative government already paints opponents of new bitumen pipelines as foreign-financed subversives. Now it seems that questioning the broader economic impacts of unlimited bitumen exports is equally seditious.

There is no doubting the statistical correlation between oil prices and the loonie. Econometric analysis indicates that since the turn of the century, oil prices explain 86 per cent of the dollar’s rise. The precise reasons for this correlation are unclear. It certainly is not due to a strong trade balance. In fact, Canada has experienced a deepening international payments deficit in recent years, because non-petroleum exports are falling faster than our energy exports surge (see graph). My own research suggests it is foreign takeovers of petroleum companies and reserves, not current production and export of the stuff, that is driving the loonie up.

...

Methinks the bitumen boosters doth protest too much, with their loud attempt to suppress any debate over the potential downsides of Canada’s current energy strategy — which consists of scraping as much bitumen, as quickly as possible, and exporting it raw. Are there important national spinoff benefits generated by the petroleum boom in Alberta? Absolutely. But are there also important costs and risks associated with this economic strategy based on the unregulated extraction and export of a non-renewable resource? Certainly. Could we do a better job of managing those costs and risks? Undoubtedly … unless we continue pretending they don’t exist.

Sensible policy analysis considers both the costs and the benefits of any policy choice. Where bitumen is concerned, however, even acknowledging that a coin has two sides is now denounced as unpatriotic and divisive. It’s time to end this energy McCarthyism, and have a genuine discussion about our future national energy strategy. Our goal should be to maximize the benefits, and minimize the costs, of this precious endowment of a non-renewable resource — and it’s not at all clear that the current Klondike-style approach is the best way to do that.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/op-ed/Look+other+side+petrodollar+c...

He was on CBC the other day debating this. He was great. On the same page as Mulcair and defended him.

Speaking of BC and Christy Clark.

Yes, she's weak.

And objectively, knocking the Canadian dollar down a peg by cooling the tar sands boom is not going to hurt BC, if anything, it might help.

So, if this is all so good, we should be seeing the BC NDP stepping onto this bandwagon with Mulcair.

Don't hold your breath.

socialdemocraticmiddle wrote:

The key to winning this argument IS to avoid the regional framing. This wasn't a regional attack, but Conservatives will want to make it one, to make Mulcair seem "divisive" and "unfit to lead". This HAS to be framed from east-vs-west to oil companies vs everyone else. And a big part of that, IMO, is pointing to the fact that it's foreign companies who are benefiting the most.

CanadaApple wrote:

Those are my thoughts as well. The Conservatives and their allies are trying to frame this as Mulcair trying to divide the country. I think he has to make it clear that isn't what he's trying to do, but I don't think he has yet. I don't know how he can do that, but we've got three and a half years. We have time I hope...

There is the possibility that what Mulcair said is just the first step in some planned larger roll out. It is increasinly looking less likely: we're now days into being heavily on the defensive, with no end in sight. This has even managed to displace the NDP fighting the Budget Omnibus Bill [brilliant side effect there]. So it seems unlikey they would still be waiting on rolling out the rest.

And I really doubt it was in the plans to have this trun into a big deal that displaces the omnibus bill fight.

Mulcair's silence on the Quebec crisis must end.

Hunky_Monkey wrote:

Jim Stanford on the dutch disease...  He was on CBC the other day debating this. He was great. On the same page as Mulcair and defended him.

Yeah, saw that on P&P. He was debating that idiot from Carleton University who always parrots Harper's talking points. Stanford is great.

Imagine yourself as a random tester on the street- delving into how this is playing with people.

You have some questions to eliminate the people whose opinions would never be shifted by any of this [Cons bas, NDP base, self-defined environmentalists, etc.]

Then you referr to the whole thing in some neutral non-leading way, and ask what is it about.

You log and count all the people that give some version of what is playing out in the mainstream media.

And you count how many people mention- even very garbled versions- something that talks about Mulcair's intended message: that the overheating of the dollar that is not benefitting most of is intimately linked to the tar sands not being sufficiently regulated and therefore not being compelled to pay the true costs of its activities.

The number of people you can place in the latter group of people is pretty small. We are not winning anything, and will be paying a net price, until the group of people who get that is of some substantial proportion.

Caissa wrote:

Mulcair's silence on the Quebec crisis must end.

1.] He's busy putting out those fires he started.

2.] You'll find the number of issues on which he is counted as bold around here, is somewhat limited.

On this one, like many others, he'll be carefully calculating the potential blowback.

He's bold where he thinks he knows what he is doing. We shall soon enough see if he is right, or it was hubris. [And if it does turn out to be the latter, he and we will make the best of it.]

Who is the NDP education critic - if there is one? That person should be raising the issue of the Quebec struggle in the House.

ETA: On the other thread I posted a link where Mulcair made himself the intergovernmental critic so the Quebec student's file is his.

That sounds depressing, Ken, but I guess it's reality.

Mulcair's statement linking the Premiers to Harper is just dumb.

They are all equally carry the can for the oil industry.  Clark, Redford and Wall don't listen to Harper although they do take their direction from others who live in Calgary.  Tom needs to attack the tar sands and the politicians that support it but with the real truths not inaccurate rhetoric.