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Tuesday, February 9, 2010 3:08 PM EST

The Giambrone precedent

I was going to play off today's column on why it was a bad idea to abolish Ontario MPPs' pensions, which I'd argue is a useful lesson for government in other provinces and at other levels. But I suspect there may be a little more interest today in a different topic.

In all honesty, I'm not totally sure what to make of the Adam Giambrone sex scandal - four words I really never thought I'd be typing. (My main reaction is that "I knew a long, long time ago about the fare hike" is pretty much the least sexy quote I've ever heard in a sex scandal that didn't involve Prince Charles.)

It's fair to say Giambrone set himself up for this. If he'd kept his personal life personal - beyond refuting published inaccuracies - it's doubtful this story would have seen the light of day. Because he instead trotted out his girlfriend as part of his image construction, the fact that he was simultaneously dismissing her as "someone political" - to a 19-year-old love interest, no less - can be judged a relevant story.

What remains to be seen is what kind of precedent this sets. If it's a very narrow one - candidates who give their partners a high profile, then belittle them to other partners in writing, will be exposed - that's defensible. But if it's instead taken to legitimize or even necessitate prying into other candidates' personal lives, in Toronto's mayoral race or elsewhere, that's a different matter.

If you cover politics, you regularly hear rumours - some of them quite salacious - about what politicians are doing on their own time. A not insignificant number of them could probably be verified if anyone made it a personal mission. But in this country, journalists generally don’t. In fact, as Andrew Coyne somewhat ambiguously pointed out last week, we step very carefully to avoid even some revelations that aren't really very scandalous at all.

Personally, I'm just fine with that. It's difficult enough to attract good people to run for office. (Hey, that reminds me - check out today's column!) To submit them to the level of scrutiny faced in the U.S. and elsewhere - whether it's about their sex lives or their health records or anything else that doesn't pertain to job performance - isn't going to do much to improve our level of representation.

All this is a long way of saying that if Giambrone invited scrutiny of his own personal life, so be it. But here's hoping it's not taken as an open invitation to give everyone else the tabloid treatment.

(Photo: Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail)

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Wednesday, February 3, 2010 6:10 PM EST

The 'Fantino matter'

To my slight surprise, this press release just landed in my inbox:

CHUDLEIGH CALLS FOR MCGUINTY TO EXPLAIN FANTINO MATTER

(Queen’s Park) – Today Ted Chudleigh, MPP (Halton) and PC Critic to the Attorney General, questioning how the Crown handled the charge against OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino and noting the failure of the Attorney General to assign an independent Crown Attorney, called on Dalton McGuinty to explain to Ontarians why the charge against Fantino was withdrawn.

Chudleigh would not comment on the allegations against Fantino; however, he noted, “The PC Party called on the Attorney General to assign a Crown Attorney from outside the Province to this case. This would have been consistent with the Attorney General’s decision with Michael Bryant’s file. It would have helped to ensure public trust in our justice system.”

With allegations concerning a conflict of interest within the Ministry of the Attorney General and in light of the Crown’s handling of this matter public confidence in, and respect for, our justice system has been threatened.

“Eyebrows are being raised as a result of the Crown’s handling of this matter. The law must be applied equally to all and it must be applied in a fair and transparent manner. The Attorney General’s failure to assign an independent Crown Attorney to this file has threatened these fundamental principles of justice,” added Chudleigh.

“Dalton McGuinty and the Attorney General owe the people of Ontario an explanation. The rumour mill must be put to a stop and confidence in our justice system reinforced.”

I say that it was to my slight surprise not because it's wrong for the provincial Tories to be asking questions about the Fantino case, but because it's something they haven't previously seemed overly inclined to do.

To date, Fantino has lived a rather charmed political existence. He's clearly developed a mutually agreeable working relationship with Dalton McGuinty's Liberals, who made him OPP commissioner and don't seem disturbed by his rather heavy-handed way of doing that job. But he's also seen by many Conservatives to be one of their own - there's often been speculation about him running for provincial office under their banner - and they've seemingly preferred to focus their attention on other things.

Of course, there's nothing directly critical of Fantino in today's release, nor should there be when it's a Crown decision that's in question. But the implicit criticism of the charge against the commissioner being withdrawn - and the reference in the headline to the "Fantino matter" - suggests that the Tories are no longer afraid of getting on his bad side.

That has to be considered a good thing, since this is exactly the sort of release you expect an opposition party to put out today. There may well be absolutely nothing more to this story than meets the eye, but it's better for the Tories to be asking questions than shying away from them.

(File photo: Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press)

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Thursday, January 21, 2010 3:29 PM EST

McGuinty keeps it simple

In retrospect, it seems like George Smitherman got hung out to dry a bit.

A pervasive storyline, coming out of provincial Liberal circles last fall, was that the former energy minister had overstepped by locking Ontario into a green energy deal with Samsung. The complaint was that Smitherman had undermined the open competition that he himself had set up for green energy development - the so-called feed-in-tariff - by giving a big foreign company preferential rates and exclusive access to transmission capacity.

It may have been a convenient way for some of his cabinet colleagues to convey their general fatigue with Smitherman's heavy-handed manner, and their growing impatience with his dual role as a senior cabinet minister and a prospective mayoral candidate. But coming out of today's announcement, it's pretty clear that Samsung was as much Dalton McGuinty's baby as it was Smitherman's.

Even if there would have been a penalty for backing out of the agreement, which is unclear, McGuinty could have done so and implicitly hung the blame on his former minister. Instead, he pushed ahead with it over the objections of several cabinet members - including, by most accounts, interim energy minister Gerry Phillips. And when Brad Duguid was named this week as Smitherman's proper replacement in that post, he was clearly informed in no uncertain terms that signing off on the deal would be his first major order of business.

What's intriguing is why exactly McGuinty was so keen on it.

In Smitherman's case, there might have been a desire to get a big green announcement out the door before he left Queen's Park. But why wouldn't the Premier, not exactly known as the impatient sort, prefer to let the feed-in-tariff play itself out?

It more or less boils down to something more often associated with opposition leader Tim Hudak: faith in a simple message.

There are all kinds of legitimate concerns with this deal, mostly centred around its unfairness to domestic companies. But to understand those, you have to wrap your head around the complexities of the energy market - something that requires more time and interest than most Ontarians probably have.

In stark contrast, the case for the deal can be summarized in a single sentence, and it's likely to lead most coverage. Here, for example, is the lede from the report on the Star's website:

"Premier Dalton McGuinty has signed a landmark agreement with a South Korean consortium that will see $7 billion invested in Ontario to create 16,000 new jobs over six years."

For a premier who desperately needs to convince Ontarians that he's bringing jobs and investment to their economically ravaged province, that's exactly the kind of message he needs to get out.

Is the Samsung deal creating many more jobs than would otherwise be the case under the feed-in-tariff? That's debatable, since most of the 16,000 cited today are spin-offs from its investment, not people who will be directly employed by the company.

But to create the impression that Ontario is taking the lead in the competition for green energy investment, one big announcement is much more useful than a whole bunch of little ones, spread out over an extended period.

Smitherman was no doubt aware of that equation. But he clearly wasn't alone.

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Wednesday, January 20, 2010 11:53 AM EST

Ministers for life

The complaints about Stephen Harper declining to shrink his cabinet were a little facile. But I was still struck by one of his responses during Tuesday's press conference, which boiled down to every one of his cabinet ministers deserving to stay.

I have a hard time believing that there's not one person in that cabinet who's proven to be completely replaceable. Or more to the point, to be less deserving of a seat on the front bench than someone or other on the backbenches.

Often, cabinet shuffles are a way for government leaders to remind MPs toiling in relative obscurity that they haven't been totally forgotten. By promoting a few of them, it gives hope to others and helps avoid the sense that the government is being run by an insulated clique.

But of course, you can't bring in many new ministers if you don't clear out old ones. That's not Harper's style - demotions tend to be only to lesser cabinet posts, as with Lisa Raitt this time, or Gordon O'Connor previously. So this time around, he managed only to squeeze in only a single new junior minister, Rob Moore.

Unless you think he's not setting a high enough standard for remaining in his government's senior ranks, this is really not of huge concern to the broader public. But I wonder how it goes over among fellow Conservatives.

(If you're looking for my take on the shuffle that happened this week at Queen's Park, by the way, it's here and here.)

Photo: Fred Chartrand/The Canadian Press

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Thursday, January 14, 2010 11:08 PM EST

Greg Sorbara just says no

I try to avoid speculating on the specifics of cabinet shuffles (as opposed to the big-picture issues around them). As a general rule, the very few people who know what's going to happen in a shuffle - a couple of very senior officials - don't tell anyone else about it until the hours before. So most of what you hear is idle chatter.

That said, the rumour of Greg Sorbara going back into the Ontario cabinet has gotten strong enough that it's probably worth putting it out of its misery.

Although he has his detractors, mostly those who found his management style too impulsive or thought he leaned too far to the left, Sorbara is a giant within his party. Partly it's because he's considered a big ideas guy and a real small-l liberal; it also has to do with the role he played between Dalton McGuinty's losing 1999 campaign and his winning one in 2003.

It's no secret that many senior Liberals, including McGuinty, would like him back in cabinet. It wouldn't be as finance minister, the position he held for most of McGuinty's first term, but he could certainly have his pick from a bunch of other postings.

The only problem is, he appears to have absolutely no interest in any of them.

That's not just what Sorbara is telling the media. Friends and associates in Toronto - where he has a rather large social circle - say he's been adamant that he's extremely happy with his life outside cabinet, and wants to keep it that way.

The latest rumour has Sorbara coming in as deputy premier, which would allow him to sit at the cabinet table and have a high public profile, but avoid having to actually run a ministry. The catch, one friend of his pointed out, is that he hates meetings and isn't particularly interested in having to stand up in the legislature every day that the Premier is away to defend the government's record.

Nor does Sorbara need to rejoin cabinet to have influence. He has an open line to McGuinty, and to many members of his cabinet. He still has a seat in the Legislature, when he wants an excuse to be there. But he basically gets to involve himself in what he finds interesting, and skip the dreary stuff.

Senior Liberals say it took some convincing just to get him to commit to co-chairing the party's 2011 campaign, which was just confirmed. Nobody seems to think they'll convince him to do much more.

Although Sorbara is a pretty open book as far as politicians go, it's conceivable that he's just keeping his cards extremely close to his chest. If so, I'll have learned my lesson not to speculate on even the most seemingly obvious cabinet developments - or non-developments, as the case may be. But I'm pretty confident that I'm safe on this one.

(Photo: With his wife Kate by his side, Greg Sorbara announces his resignation as Ontario finance minister in 2007. Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail)

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Thursday, January 14, 2010 11:26 PM EST

All according to plan?

It apparently wasn't just a rogue poll by the Strategic Counsel earlier this week. With Ekos reporting similar finding - albeit with some peculiarities in the regional breakdown - it seems the Conservatives have taken a public opinion hit from prorogation.

Whether they were expecting to take that hit is a different question, and the answer would tell us a lot about how much trouble they're really in.

It's not at all uncommon for parties to accept the probability of a negative short-term response to something they think will help them in the long-run. To use one of my inevitable Ontario examples, the McGuinty Liberals did exactly that with the HST. They didn't expect an initial outpouring of voter affection - and they certainly haven't gotten one - but they calculated that down the road it would help convince Ontarians they were willing to make tough decisions in tough times. (Whether that calculation will prove correct is a different discussion for a different day.)

Stephen Harper has certainly gone the short-term pain, long-term gain route before. (The attack ads against successive Liberal leaders, for which the Tories were initially pilloried but from which they subsequently profited, are an obvious example.) But it's not readily apparent that was the strategy with prorogation.

It may be that this is all going roughly according to plan. It might, as has been speculated, have to do with gaining control of the Senate. If we buy into some of the (less-frequent than-they-used-to-be) accounts of Harper's ruthless genius, perhaps he's somehow contrived a scenario in which this will ultimately force the Liberals' to overplay their hand. It could be that the Tories had reason to believe that the detainees controversy, despite not having resonated much with the broader public, was set to blow up in a way that was going to hurt them more than the prorogation outcry is hurting them.

Or maybe - and from occasional glimpses of panic, this is starting to seem like a good bet - prorogation is a short-term strategy that's backfired miserably.

Maybe the weakness of the Liberals, and Canadians' general disinterest in what goes on in Parliament, led the Conservatives to think they could score a little tactical victory - sparing themselves the detainees headache with very little backlash. Maybe they even thought it would win them support, since Harper and his ministers are better able to communicate with the public when they're not stuck in Ottawa, answering opposition questions.

In other words, maybe they just misread the public's mood, and overestimated its patience. Conservative supporters should be hoping there's something more to it - if not because this will necessarily matter in the next election, then because of what it says about the instincts and the foresight of the party's decision-makers.

(Photo: Mathieu Belanger/Reuters)

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Monday, January 4, 2010 9:57 AM EST

Clever or clumsy?

The most common analysis of the decision to prorogue Parliament seems to be that it's yet more proof of Stephen Harper's evil genius. Sure, it's horribly cynical, particularly since the government very obviously tried to bury it. And yes, it undermines the credibility of a Parliament that had very little credibility to begin with. But hey...it sure was a clever way to make all the Prime Minister's troubles go away, at very little political cost.

I'm not so sure I buy it. If anything, I'd say the latest prorogation is evidence of Harper's weird tendency to needlessly make his own life more difficult.

The Conservatives ended the year in as good shape as they could have hoped for. That's largely because Michael Ignatieff had such a disastrous summer and fall, but it's also because the government did a good job of recasting itself after its near-death experience at the end of 2008. Even if it was more perception than reality, Harper seemed to have become a little more mature, a little less gratuitously confrontational, and a little more focused on governing than on playing stupid partisan games. As a result, he had begun to project a certain gravitas; more so than previously, he looked prime ministerial.

More

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Monday, December 21, 2009 1:17 PM EST

It's if, not when

Today's column on privatization is generating a lot of feedback, in my inbox if not in the online comment thread. (At last check, the lone comment there was from someone who's of the view that it's "partisan" to explain an argument being made by some Liberals to other Liberals about what they should privatize; I'll let you decide that one for yourself.)

There's one thing I should probably make clear. If I were laying down money on whether or not the government will sell any of its assets - well, I'd probably be at a really lame casino.

But for the record, I'd probably bet against anything big being privatized this year. It's just that, if the government is going to sell something, there are a variety of reasons to bet on Hydro One.

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Monday, December 14, 2009 2:00 PM EST

Deep into the murk

One hears a lot about the murkiness of the pharmaceuticals industry. But until you take a close look for yourself, it's hard to get a sense of just how murky it is.

Today's column hopefully provides a decent set-up of what's likely to be a pretty bitter fight between Ontario's government and the province's pharmacies over generic drugs. But because the issue is so complex, and I had a limited number of words to work with, it may still be a little confusing for those unfamiliar with the industry.

The obvious question - and you'll need to read the column before you read this, or else you'll be really confused - is why the government thinks it could save hundreds of millions of dollars by regulating sales of generic drugs to private plans. If pharmacies responded to the limit on rebates for sales to the Ontario Drug Benefit by putting the squeeze on everyone else, what does that have to do with the government's bottom line?

The answer, at least as some officials would have it, is that - with the rebates on private sales often exceeding 80 per cent of the drugs' price - they're by far manufacturers' biggest cost of doing business. As a result, they wind up driving up the cost of their products for everyone, even the government.

The other consideration is the degree to which lines between public and private sales become blurred. Are pharmacies really buying two different sets of pills, for the public and private plans, and meticulously distinguishing between the two when they ask for rebates? If not, then it's awfully difficult to consistently enforce the 20 per cent cap on rebates for the public sales.

The government's argument, more or less, is that greater transparency would allow it to know that its dollars are being well spent - and the only way to achieve full transparency is by doing away with the rebates altogether.

All of this is very much up for debate. If the 20 per cent cap really is being enforced properly, then you could argue government is actually getting a decent deal, considering that it hasn't increased dispensing fees in an awfully long time.

What seems less up for dispute, and from a public policy perspective might justify new regulations even if there isn't any budgetary upside for the government, is that people who aren't on the public plan - i.e. those who are under 65 and aren't on social assistance - are getting a raw deal.

Because pharmacies now make most of their money off the rebates on private sales, stories abound of heavy-handedness in demanding them. There are complaints that in at least one instance, a big chain refused to honour the cards of customers whose private plans had switched to a brand-name drug that was actually being offered cheaper than the generic.

Like I said, it's all pretty murky. It's a topic I hope to return to shortly, and keep an eye on as the battle plays out in 2010.

(Photo: An Ottawa pharmacist helps a customer with her prescription last year. Sean Kilpatrick for The Globe and Mail)

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Thursday, December 10, 2009 9:04 AM EST

Loose lips and former premiers

Steve Paikin does a pretty good job of tackling the rumours that have suddenly started swirling about Dalton McGuinty's political future.

I'm even more skeptical than Steve about those rumours, for a variety of reasons - not least that only a very, very small number of people would know if the Premier was actually planning on stepping down, and they're not the kind of people who would leak it beforehand. (For what it's worth, Don Guy - who's part of that very small group - tells me that he's left his day job at Pollara to get McGuinty's 2011 campaign ready.)

More interesting than the rumours themselves, perhaps, is where they're coming from.

In Steve's post, McGuinty's communications director suggests the rumour is being spread by "prominent Conservatives."

In fact, it seems as though it might have started with just about the most prominent Conservative in Ontario - Mike Harris. Multiple people today, including non-partisans, have identified the former premier as the source of the chatter.

It's worth pointing out that most of those people haven't actually spoken to Harris himself; rather, it was passed on to them second-hand by someone he had spoken to. Through his office, he's denied being the source of the rumours. ("He has no idea what you're talking about," his assistant told my colleague, Karen Howlett.)

Even if he was the source - which, from what I've heard, seems very likely to me - it's entirely possible that Harris simply offered a bit of idle speculation that got blown out of proportion. He may have had no idea it would go any further.

It's also possible, particularly given that he's not known as a big gossip, that Harris knew exactly what he was doing. Other Conservatives have been predicting for months that McGuinty won't run again, and not gotten a whole lot of traction; someone or other might have decided it would have a little more weight coming from someone of the Harris's stature.

In any event, assuming that the whole thing isn't a complete fiction, it's rather a strange episode. It's not every day you get former premiers spreading rumours about current ones.

(And in case you're wondering - no, Ruby Dhalla was not present at the dinner in question.)

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