Thoughts on the (first) French debate
1. The news of the night was Harper's firm declaration that he would "never" invoke the notwithstanding clause in the matter of gay marriage. This effectively puts the issue to rest. A free vote on restoring the "traditional" (ie discriminatory) definition of marriage was never going to pass anyway: the numbers just aren't there. And if it did, it would run straight into a Supreme Court challenge, which would almost certainly overturn the law - which judgment Harper has now said he would accept. (On top of which, Harper has promised to grandfather existing gay marriages.)
Opponents of gay marriage are therefore left with one last, slim hope: that they could somehow persuade a majority of MPs in a minority Parliament to reverse what the previous minority Parliament had done, and that the Court would then defer to the legislature, upholding the same definition of marriage in statutory form that lower courts had thrown out at common law. Not going to happen.
So Harper has left these voters high and dry -- but where are they going to go? None of the other parties would even give them the satisfaction of a free vote. On the other hand, he reassures social moderates, and takes away an issue from the Liberals. All in all, a good night's work.
2. The howler of the night was Martin's assertion that a GST cut favours the rich. Even the CBC saw through that one. Readers will know that I have been critical of the GST cut, on efficiency grounds. But there isn't even a debate about which kind of tax is more regressive, consumption or income. The poor consume almost all of their income. The rich consume only a fraction of theirs. So a flat 7% tax on consumption like the GST confiscates a larger share of a poor person's income than rich person's. Which means a cut in the same tax must return a larger share of income to a poor person than a rich person.
The surest way to prove this is to run the experiment in reverse. If Harper were proposing to raise the GST by two percentage points, do you suppose the Grits would claim that this would cost the rich more?
(Does my support for consumption taxes therefore mean an indifference to distributional fairness? Not a bit of it: the extra costs of the tax can be rebated back to the poor, as indeed they were when the GST was introduced. In fact, the GST credit pays out more to those on low incomes than the GST takes away, meaning the poor are actually better off than they were before it was introduced: among the old Manufacturers' Sales Tax's many deficiencies, it had no such rebate.)
3. Overall, the folly of holding these debates on segregated linguistic lines, all-English and all-French, was once again on display. The French debate is invariably almost entirely about Quebec -- with less than a quarter of the population, the province gets half the debates. Worse, it allows the leaders to pander to Quebec in relative safety, since hardly anyone in the rest of Canada is watching.
There is no reason these debates could not be held in both official languages, perhaps switching up each half hour. That way we could have four debates with the whole country tuned in, rather than two debates for each solitude.
4. The media are already grousing about how "boring" the debate was, meaning the absence of fireworks. But the purpose of these things is not to keep the media entertained. It's to inform the voters. On that score, I do think the format was overly constraining: it ought to be possible to prevent the leaders from talking over each other, as in past debates, without also eliminating any chance to engage each other in, you know, debate -- 'though with four participants, the opportunities for one-on-one set-tos are admittedly limited. It was just possible when you had three combatants, but with four the mathematics are against you.
Someone ought to say it, and it might as well be me: we need a debate between the two frontrunners, the only two leaders who have any chance of becoming Prime Minister. Perhaps Harper should take it upon himself at some point to challenge Martin to a one-on-one.
5. Even within the current format, the leaders could have taken more opportunity to challenge each other's points. That they chose not to is in the main explained by point 3 above: why use up your best zingers when only a fraction of the population is watching -- and, in the case of the Tories and NDP, they are a fraction whose votes you have no hope of winning?
Still, it's remarkable that Martin did so little damage to Duceppe. For the most part, his performance was entirely forgettable. When it was not, it was because it was shrill, as in his claims that the Bloc was bent on destabilizing Parliament. I thought Harper had the more effective critique: that the only way to punish the Liberals for their misdeeds was to replace them in government, and that only the Tories could do this.
6. The use of regular folks as questioners was on the whole effective. They were alarmingly articulate, almost media-trained, and ably voiced the concerns of at least a segment of the population. But why were all the questions framed from the left? There were all sorts of questions whose premise was that the government should do x or y, usually to do with Quebec. There were none that asked why the government did not stop doing something. No one asked about productivity, or defence, or foreign policy.
Worse, none of the candidates did anything to challenge the implicitly statist premises of the questions. Harper simply side-stepped them, as he has throughout this campaign, preferring to stress all the tax goodies he had to distribute. (The Grits do it on the spending side, the Tories via tax credits, but it amounts to the same thing.) He's running a good campaign, everybody says, and I suppose that's true: it's just that it's a good NDP or Liberal campaign.
Two large gaps have thus been left in the political spectrum. One, there is no longer anyone defending a robust or even coherent vision of federalism: the Martin Liberals have embraced "asymmetry," while Harper has lately embraced Quebec's ambitions to carve out its own foreign policy, to go with his earlier pandering on the so-called "fiscal imbalance." And two, no one is proposing any serious reductions in the size and role of government.
7. As to the question that the media always asks after these things -- who "won" -- I make it a split decision. Duceppe "won" so far as no one made him break a sweat - a combination of an overly restrictive format and overly cautious debaters. And Layton "won" so far as he came across with the most sincerity and conviction. (It was almost comical the number of issues to which Jack asserted he had a personal connection -- the blind great-grandfather, the homeless person who died a block away from his house, the native reservation he visited, the gay marrieds he had met.) What a pity so few prospective NDP voters were watching.
Opponents of gay marriage are therefore left with one last, slim hope: that they could somehow persuade a majority of MPs in a minority Parliament to reverse what the previous minority Parliament had done, and that the Court would then defer to the legislature, upholding the same definition of marriage in statutory form that lower courts had thrown out at common law. Not going to happen.
So Harper has left these voters high and dry -- but where are they going to go? None of the other parties would even give them the satisfaction of a free vote. On the other hand, he reassures social moderates, and takes away an issue from the Liberals. All in all, a good night's work.
2. The howler of the night was Martin's assertion that a GST cut favours the rich. Even the CBC saw through that one. Readers will know that I have been critical of the GST cut, on efficiency grounds. But there isn't even a debate about which kind of tax is more regressive, consumption or income. The poor consume almost all of their income. The rich consume only a fraction of theirs. So a flat 7% tax on consumption like the GST confiscates a larger share of a poor person's income than rich person's. Which means a cut in the same tax must return a larger share of income to a poor person than a rich person.
The surest way to prove this is to run the experiment in reverse. If Harper were proposing to raise the GST by two percentage points, do you suppose the Grits would claim that this would cost the rich more?
(Does my support for consumption taxes therefore mean an indifference to distributional fairness? Not a bit of it: the extra costs of the tax can be rebated back to the poor, as indeed they were when the GST was introduced. In fact, the GST credit pays out more to those on low incomes than the GST takes away, meaning the poor are actually better off than they were before it was introduced: among the old Manufacturers' Sales Tax's many deficiencies, it had no such rebate.)
3. Overall, the folly of holding these debates on segregated linguistic lines, all-English and all-French, was once again on display. The French debate is invariably almost entirely about Quebec -- with less than a quarter of the population, the province gets half the debates. Worse, it allows the leaders to pander to Quebec in relative safety, since hardly anyone in the rest of Canada is watching.
There is no reason these debates could not be held in both official languages, perhaps switching up each half hour. That way we could have four debates with the whole country tuned in, rather than two debates for each solitude.
4. The media are already grousing about how "boring" the debate was, meaning the absence of fireworks. But the purpose of these things is not to keep the media entertained. It's to inform the voters. On that score, I do think the format was overly constraining: it ought to be possible to prevent the leaders from talking over each other, as in past debates, without also eliminating any chance to engage each other in, you know, debate -- 'though with four participants, the opportunities for one-on-one set-tos are admittedly limited. It was just possible when you had three combatants, but with four the mathematics are against you.
Someone ought to say it, and it might as well be me: we need a debate between the two frontrunners, the only two leaders who have any chance of becoming Prime Minister. Perhaps Harper should take it upon himself at some point to challenge Martin to a one-on-one.
5. Even within the current format, the leaders could have taken more opportunity to challenge each other's points. That they chose not to is in the main explained by point 3 above: why use up your best zingers when only a fraction of the population is watching -- and, in the case of the Tories and NDP, they are a fraction whose votes you have no hope of winning?
Still, it's remarkable that Martin did so little damage to Duceppe. For the most part, his performance was entirely forgettable. When it was not, it was because it was shrill, as in his claims that the Bloc was bent on destabilizing Parliament. I thought Harper had the more effective critique: that the only way to punish the Liberals for their misdeeds was to replace them in government, and that only the Tories could do this.
6. The use of regular folks as questioners was on the whole effective. They were alarmingly articulate, almost media-trained, and ably voiced the concerns of at least a segment of the population. But why were all the questions framed from the left? There were all sorts of questions whose premise was that the government should do x or y, usually to do with Quebec. There were none that asked why the government did not stop doing something. No one asked about productivity, or defence, or foreign policy.
Worse, none of the candidates did anything to challenge the implicitly statist premises of the questions. Harper simply side-stepped them, as he has throughout this campaign, preferring to stress all the tax goodies he had to distribute. (The Grits do it on the spending side, the Tories via tax credits, but it amounts to the same thing.) He's running a good campaign, everybody says, and I suppose that's true: it's just that it's a good NDP or Liberal campaign.
Two large gaps have thus been left in the political spectrum. One, there is no longer anyone defending a robust or even coherent vision of federalism: the Martin Liberals have embraced "asymmetry," while Harper has lately embraced Quebec's ambitions to carve out its own foreign policy, to go with his earlier pandering on the so-called "fiscal imbalance." And two, no one is proposing any serious reductions in the size and role of government.
7. As to the question that the media always asks after these things -- who "won" -- I make it a split decision. Duceppe "won" so far as no one made him break a sweat - a combination of an overly restrictive format and overly cautious debaters. And Layton "won" so far as he came across with the most sincerity and conviction. (It was almost comical the number of issues to which Jack asserted he had a personal connection -- the blind great-grandfather, the homeless person who died a block away from his house, the native reservation he visited, the gay marrieds he had met.) What a pity so few prospective NDP voters were watching.
12/16/2005
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