September 22, 2008 Election News Clips Edmonton
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SEPTEMBER 22, 2008 ELECTION NEWS CLIPS EDMONTON JOURNAL 1. Pragmatic politicking vs. ambitious policy-making 2. Dion's green plan would shift dollars to East 3. Father's criminal record shadows NDP hopeful 4. Layton gets tough 5. Tories hope to gain in ridings with a military presence 6. Tory candidate drops out after blog uncovered 7. Parties take stock of campaign Week 2, set up strategy for next phase EDMONTON SUN 8. An election about nothing, every time CALGARY HERALD 9. Alberta Liberal candidates' ideas clash with party 10. Opposition parties making push to lure Alberta away from Tories 11. Dion's deficit flip-flop GLOBE AND MAIL 12. Liberal platform leaves cash to spare 13. NDP will repeal corporate tax cuts 14. Do not fear a Tory majority EDMONTON JOURNAL 1. Pragmatic politicking vs. ambitious policy-making Parties adopt radically different election strategies Andrew Mayeda, Canwest News Service Published: Saturday, September 20 OTTAWA - The 2008 election is shaping up as a clash between Stephen Harper's cautious pragmatism and Stephane Dion's ambitious gamble. When not dealing with the distracting gaffes by members of his party, Harper has demonstrated during this campaign that he is willing to take baby steps toward a Conservative majority government -- if not in this election, then the next one. Meanwhile, the Liberal leader has thrown the political equivalent of a Hail Mary pass with his Green Shift plan, which is being interpreted by many voters as nothing more than a new carbon tax. The NDP's strategy is also bold. It centres around the hope that Canadians will turn to Jack Layton as a strong leader who best reflects the values of mainstreet Canada. The approaches by the two opposition parties seeking to unseat the Tories aren't terribly surprising. They reflect the traditional attempt to secure the support of a broad base of the electorate. Harper's approach, on the other hand, is much more incremental. It seeks victory by identifying niche voters throughout the country and persuading them -- vote by vote by vote -- to support the Conservatives. Those looking for the secret to Harper's campaign strategy need look no farther than a book by one of his closest former advisers, University of Calgary professor Tom Flanagan. In the final chapter of Harper's Team, which offers a behind-the-scenes account of how the Tories rose to power, Flanagan sets forth the "Ten Commandments of Conservative Campaigning." "Canada is not yet a conservative or Conservative country; neither the philosophy of conservatism nor the party brand comes close to commanding majority support," writes Flanagan, who managed the 2004 Conservative campaign and worked in the war room during the 2006 election. It is a premise Harper himself has acknowledged. At a campaign stop in Fredericton last weekend, the prime minister argued that Canadians have become more conservative in the past two decades, especially in their acceptance of balanced budgets and free trade. Nevertheless, they have not moved so far to the right that his party can assume their support. In the face of this political reality, Flanagan recommends that Conservatives adopt a strategy of "incrementalism." Instead of "sweeping visions," the Conservatives should propose moderate policy reforms that gradually recruit more supporters into the fold. Before the 2004 election, the Conservatives built a database, called the Constituency Information Management System, that stores a staggering amount of information about Canadian voters. The heart of the database is the national list of voters produced each year by Elections Canada. When candidates go door to door, or party pollsters call individual homes, voters are assigned a score that measures their support for the party. By cross-referencing these data with widely available information on income, age and ethnicity, the Conservatives can build remarkably precise voter profiles. In a sense, the difference between the Conservative and Liberal strategies is the difference between bottom-up politicking and top-down policy-making. Dion's Green Shift would impose a tax on greenhouse gas emissions, while partially offsetting the extra burden on consumers with income tax cuts. The risk is that Canadians are simply not ready to embrace sweeping change at a time of economic certainly. Perhaps recognizing this, the Liberals have recently sought to downplay the importance of their carbon tax proposal, in favour of a strategy emphasizing the party's economic credentials and the strong team of candidates surrounding Dion. The NDP's strategy, meanwhile, is in some ways the left-wing mirror image of the Conservatives'. The NDP have taken dead aim at middle-class families worried about the slumping economy -- a group that the Conservatives are also targeting. The NDP has also tried to keep the spotlight on leader Jack Layton, who, in most polls, scores second only to Harper in terms of who Canadians think would make the best prime minister. "There's a battle between Harper's campaign and Layton's campaign for a very similar demographic," said NDP spokesman Brad Lavigne. "One is a very individualistic approach based on giving one person a tax credit, whereas our approach is about working together to invest in social infrastructure to help the middle class make ends meet." © The Edmonton Journal 2008 2. Dion's green plan would shift dollars to East Alberta, as nation's largest carbon producer, would contribute billions more than it receives David Staples, The Edmonton Journal Published: Sunday, September 21 Albertans would pay far more than other Canadians if the federal government enacts Liberal Leader Stephane Dion's Green Shift, economic and environmental experts say. Concerns have been raised that the Green Shift would bring about a massive transfer of wealth out of Alberta. But Liberal politicians downplay these fears and argue that the tax could help Alberta solve many of its environmental and image problems related to the oilsands, while still treating Albertans in a fair manner. "Our purpose here is not to punish any one part of the country," says David McGuinty, the federal Liberal environment critic. "It's not to play Robin Hood. It is to deal with the climate change situation." But at least one Ontario Liberal MP, Ken Boschcoff, has plainly stated that the Green Shift is a way to transfer money out of Alberta into the rest of Canada, with roughly $9 billion of the $15.3 billion collected each year returned to Canadians with annual incomes of less than $40,000. Boschcoff called it "the most aggressive anti-poverty program in 40 years. The 'shift' will transfer wealth from rich to poor, from the oil patch to the rest of the country, and from the coffers of big business to the pockets of low-income Canadians." The Liberal plan would: - Cut the lowest income-tax rate by 1.5 per cent, and middle-class taxes by one per cent. These tax cuts will cost $6.7 billion a year. - Introduce a new, child-tax benefit worth $350 per child and increase the employment credit by $250 per working Canadian. The cost, coupled with a few other new programs, will be $3.7 billion a year. - Give rural taxpayers a $150 green credit, a total cost of $800 million a year. - Cut corporate taxes by one per cent, with an additional one-per-cent cut for small business, a total cost of $3.8 billion a year. Alberta produces roughly 33 per cent of carbon emissions in the country, says Mark Jaccard, a professor of resource and environmental management at Simon Fraser University. But Albertans make up less than 13 per cent of the Canadian population. If the money from a carbon tax is paid back to Canadians through income-tax cuts and credits, Alberta companies and consumers could pay more than 33 per cent of the many billions collected in a carbon tax, but Albertans could be returned just a fraction of that in rebates. However, if a carbon tax program is properly constructed, every dollar taken out of Alberta could be returned, Jaccard says. "You might be able to design this so that Alberta and Saskatchewan are getting back almost the same amount of money as they are paying in tax." University of Calgary professor David Keith, who consulted with Dion's experts who designed the Green Shift policy, says there's no magic bullet to fix the issue of money draining from Alberta, but everyone agrees it wouldn't be politically possible to have a huge wealth transfer out of Alberta. "The reality is that if a (Liberal) government is elected, we will just have to start negotiating." McGuinty says if elected, his government would be willing to negotiate with the various provinces to come up with a fair plan. "We really don't want to divide and conquer. We don't want to pit group against group or region against region. We want to deal with the climate change problem." McGuinty accepts that Albertans might well have doubts about the Green Shift. "We also believe that there may be 10 provinces and three territories, but there aren't 13 atmospheres over Canada, there is just one." The Green Shift has provisions for using carbon tax revenues to fund the research and development of technology that cuts down on carbon emissions. Alberta would get much of that research money, McGuinty says. Alberta is under increasing international pressure to clean up its so-called "dirty oil" from the oilsands, and the Green Shift will help accomplish that, says University of Alberta economist Rick Szostak, the Liberal candidate in Sherwood Park. It's also important to remember that just because Alberta businesses will pay the carbon tax for their massive emissions, they won't bear the brunt of the cost of the program, Szostak says.