Dome Ball

This Sunday the National Football League will feature two championship games played indoors for the first time in its history.  Yecccchhhhh!

In Indianapolis, the Colts will host the New York Jets; a few hours later the Saints of New Orleans will welcome the Minnesota Vikings. Both stadiums are antiseptic, over sized monstrosities better suited for truck rallies than football.

The spectacle of playing outdoors on actual grass (or ‘frozen tundra’), no matter what the weather has been sacrificed to a high-speed, pass dominated arena ball that, to my eye, looks false. In addition, as a filmmaker, I find the lighting of indoors football on television very unattractive. I know I am no doubt out of step with the times – in the era of video games, the NFL’s new indoor look might not dismay many fans. However, I wonder if the NFL does not risk diluting its product by limiting the range of tactical options that dealing with unpredictable nature demands.

There was a moment in the only good playoff game last week (played outdoors in San Diego) where you could see the wind move a shock of a hair on the head of a concerned Chargers’ coach Norv Turner.  Having just watched parts of a dreadful game from the Garbage Bag Dome of Minneapolis, it took me a moment to even realize it was the wind!  Perhaps the elements might have contributed to San Diego’s kicker missing three field goals that sealed his team’s fate at the hands of the surprising Jets.

btw The Colts will decisively terminate the Jets’ dreams and rattle the amazing rookie quarterback Mark Sanchez. And dog willing, the Saints will end the season of the anti-Packer Favre.

Haiti - It's All About Us

CANADA RIDES TO THE RESCUE That was the headline on yesterday’sToronto Star.  This morning’s on-line edition features more front-page news about the efforts of Canadian rescue teams. Trust The Star to look for the Metro angle anywhere, all the time.

Readers in the Greater Toronto Area are not alone. Flipping the dial through the Am-nets for the last week, I see repeated images of various Clintons, Anderson Cooper, Katie Couric and other stars of American news/entertainment/politics.  I see, or hear precious little from the mouths of ordinary Haitians, let alone the surviving political, military or intellectual leadership of the country. The wise heads of English language television in many parts of North America clearly feel their audience is incapable of hearing lengthy translations from Creole or French. It’s classic, pervasive pandering that underestimates the intelligence and humanity of those audiences.

At home, we are besieged  for requests to help by non-governmental organizations of all kinds. Believe me I hope the world combined gives the Haitians all the assistance they need, but like some of the media content, I often find the tone of some appeals unsettling. Frankly, a lot of it would make Rudyard Kipling blush. It’s ‘the white man’s burden’ all over again; classic ‘underdeveloped world’ as home to permanent victims stuff. As some academic wag noted: there is nothing “post” in “post-colonial”.

I appeal to the media to continue covering the relief effort even when the news agenda is temporarily bushwhacked by items such as the Democrats’ own Massachusetts disaster. It’s wonderful that relief teams and soldiers from Canada, the United States and elsewhere are getting through, but please – they are not the centre of the story! The BBC is one of the few news organizations that seems committed to seeing the disaster and the recovery through the eyes of those who experienced it directly – the people of Haiti.

Finally in a domestic political aside: Team Harper is drawing deserved praise for its quick response. The early pictures of Steve alongside the understandably grieving Haitian born GG Michaelle Jean humanized him.  Next Monday’s quick international conference, held appropriately enough in Montreal, home to a 100,000 strong Haitian expatriate contingent, could reflect well on the Harper government and perhaps help it recover somewhat from his self-inflicted wound of that ill-advised early prorogation of Parliament.

In the land of Paul Revere

Watch Massachusetts!  On Tuesday, a Republican may win the Senate seat up for grabs following the death of Ted Kennedy. Such an outcome will not only be a shock to Barack Obama’s Democratic Party, it might deal a fatal blow to health care ‘reform’.

Obama and the Dems are scrambling to get the troops out after a sudden post New Year’s tilt to Republican Scott Brown. It seems that many citizens even in ‘the state of consciousness’ are alarmed about the byzantine health care dance in Congress and concerned about America’s security under Obama after the near disaster over Detroit on December 25.

Toronto's public transportation fare hike

All you really need to know about our society’s actual commitment to the environment is contained in two recent measures:

1. It now costs $3.00 for a single fare on the Toronto Transit Commission. That would be $121 a month for a pass.  Such prices make public transportation almost an elite service. In Mexico City, it costs about $0.25CDN to ride a subway that is vastly superior and much cleaner than Toronto’s.

2. The “Liberal” government of the premier who looks like Norman Bates recommends fiddling car insurance rates to lower some premiums.  As ever, dear Dalton is privileging the car industry and automobile drivers over others.

Public transportation is prohibitively expensive, but you might get a break if you buy a car. As the world learned in Copenhagen, Ontario and Canada are not environmentally responsible jurisdictions.

Lhasa de Sela

It’s taken me almost a week to process news of the all-too-recent death of one of the greatest artists who inhabited this country called Canada.  Lhasa de Sela died at her home in Montreal. She impressed as much as any new artist in any medium that I’ve encountered in the past decade. Her music was transfiguring; her voice an incandescent message from some unlikely sphere that only she seemed to know well.

Unfortunately, I never saw Lhasa perform live; but I did screen a number of concerts on television.  Her taped performance at Quebec’s Summer Festival from a few years back smokes with intensity. As an artist who worked simultaneously in Spanish, French and English, Lhasa represented much of what’s laudatory about Quebec and Canada. She was a twenty-first century powerhouse. It’s a crying shame that she died at age 37. Her first album in particular will long, long, long survive her.

Thanks for the tunes and that beautiful voice, Lhasa.  Travel safely.

The (bent) Hockey News

No Vincent? It says here that Team Canada will rue the exclusion of Vincent Lecavalier from its Olympic squad. Five years ago, the still young Lecavalier was clearly the best player on the ice when his Tampa Bay team beat Calgary for the Stanley Cup in a very tough series. He may be having an off year in the pathetic, fight polluted NHL, but my bet is that he’d still rock in international competition. If Steve Yzerman really believes that Patrice Bergeron is a better player, Canada’s hopes for the Olympics may be still-born. Oh, and if you think Quebec is under represented on the basis of merit on this Olympic team, you won’t get an argument from me.

Loaf Nation update: The team still bites. ‘Nuff said. But how weird is it that Toronto ‘sports journalists’ are barely noticing that the NBA Raptors are steadily becoming a competent basketball team? Oceans of ink and otherwise sensible people’s airtime is still wasted on the Loafs. In fact, the Loafs seem more popular the worse they get. Go figure. Toronto as North America’s official Loser-ville, anyone?

Finally, I am so glad I don’t have to hear another word about “our” junior team for about eleven and a half months. The pom-pom waving in The Globe And Mail and on TSN really became unbearable.

 

Best Flicks of 2009

In an entirely selective, non-scientific way, here are the best films I saw in 2009. There are many films I would like to see that I haven’t gotten to yet – top of the list would be Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Capitalism: A Love Story, The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds. Based on what I did see, here goes…

An Education dir. Lone Scherfig – an engrossing look at a sad slice of family life in 60s swinging London. Nick Hornby shows he’s an accomplished screenwriter as well as novelist in his adaptation of the source material, British journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir of an ill-advised first tryst. My only quibble, the lead actress Carey Mulligan who will deservedly garner an Oscar nomination, seemed simply too old to be cast as a precocious, intellectual, sexually curious 16 year old. To my mind, this film could have been one for the ages had the producers cast more convincingly.

Bright Star dir. Jane Campion – Campion is a great veteran filmmaker at the top of her game in this bio film about the poet John Keats and his doomed platonic relationship with a female admirer. A gorgeous, erotic film evocation of art and ideas. My favourite film of 2009.

Un transport en commun (English title: St. Louis Blues) dir. Dyana Gaye – Gaye is Senegalese, based in Paris. This mid-length musical features original songs, some African and some charmingly of the French variete tradition, sung by a driver and his passengers traveling Senegal by taxi. Fun, fun, fun with uncanny performances from a largely amateur cast. A musical that’s the  most intelligent portrait of twenty-first century hybridity (cultural theorists love that word) that I saw on screen last year. Try to catch it at a festival or perhaps on a TV network that takes culture seriously (most likely only BRAVO in Canada alas), you’ll be glad you did.

Up In The Air dir. Jason Reitman – a big surprise here. A dark, yet bitingly funny social satire of American decay featuring one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars, George Clooney who simply shoots the lights out. Fabulously entertaining with a sad, sad centre, this film establishes the young Reitman as the best Canadian director producing intelligent mainstream Hollywood fare since Norman Jewison.

A Bad Week for Barry

Scary stuff that xMAS day incident over Detroit Airport.  Equally unsettling for many was the unsteady response of the Obama administration. To begin with, Homeland Security Secretary Jane Napolitano bizarrely seemed to suggest that the incident showed the system worked!  I guess citizens wrestling with would be terrorists on commercial flights in mid-air was part of the plan all along. Then three days after the event, President Obama appeared sans cravate near his Hawaiian holiday getaway very, very calmly expressing his regret. The next day, still without a tie, Obama assumed Commander in Chief mode and angrily denounced the entire bungling homeland security apparatus.  It was a strangely disconnected performance undermined further by a loss of video transmission during its initial live broadcast. Obama seemed to be assigning blame without accepting responsibility.  Uh, Dude, these people work for you, right!?

Obama’s performance raised the hackles of the usual suspects, including former VP/pit bull Dick Cheney. No surpise there.  But some of the folk who’ve been largely admiring were almost as scathing.  Check out Maureen Dowd’s column, “As The Nation’s Pulse Races, Obama Can’t Seem to Find His” in NYT 29.12.09.  Dowd is not exactly of the Fox News tribe, but she’s deeply freaked by “Barry’s” under performance.

As 2009 comes to an end, the Obama honeymoon is most decidedly over. The current flap over national security may even jeopardize passage of his most prized domestic goal – health care reform – if his stewardship of the past week begins to gnaw on the minds of wavering congress members.B

The Vindication of Thompson & McCarthy

So I was wrong. Again.

Slightly less than two months ago (on this very site), I wrote off my beloved Green Bay Packers after an inexplicable loss to the execrable Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Since then, the Pack has been quite arguably the best team in the National Football League posting six victories against one last-play-of-the-game loss to last year’s World Champions. Yesterday, with a game remaining on the regular schedule, Green Bay clinched a playoff berth.

Many commentators (including this one) had argued that Green Bay VP Ted Thompson and Coach Mike McCarthy were mistaken in trading Brett Favre last year. In early November, with Favre leading the Minnesota Vikings to the NFC North lead and the Packers languishing in mediocrity, it appeared that 2008’s gamble on young quarterback Aaron Rodgers had backfired. Now…not so much. Yesterday, in addition to clinching a playoff spot, young Mr. Rodgers became the first quarterback in NFL history to throw for more than 4,000 yards in each of his first two seasons as a starter. The kid is a legitimate superstar.

Meanwhile Brett Favre was last seen arguing with his coach on the sidelines and the Vikings have lost two of their last three games. Stay tuned. Green Bay fans could be in for a very special post-season.

OH-TAH-WAH (Land of Giants)

I recently spent a few days in Ottawa. I was primarily ensconsed in the Library and Archives of Canada conducting research. A few obserations:

Ottawa has winter! It’s a welcome relief from Toronto where the mere thought of snow is greeted by media and many citizens with a fright that approximates the coming of the apocalypse. In Ottawa, people actually dress for winter; some of them, stunningly, appear to enjoy walking in the snow; and of course, soon, quite fabulously, the Rideau Canal will open for skating as it does each winter.

A few less savoury notes:

Traffic along Wellington in front of Parliament Hill is a deplorable  national disgrace. It’s a great pity that six lanes of tangled traffic should mar what could be one of the finest walkways in Canada. As Richard Gwyn has noted, Canada’s Parliament buildings represent a triumph of visionary art over calculated, cold ‘reason’. In the middle of the nineteenth century,  a country that did not yet exist deemed fit to nearly bankrupt itself to celebrate refreshingly non-fascistic architecture. Sadly, the pedestrian can no longer appreciate the vista. The air along Wellington is foul; and the cacophony of cars and buses inescapable. Where trees and a broad pedestrian walkway might exist, an ugly snarl of dinosaur technology prevails. Sigh. It seems fitting that Canada would dedicate what could be its primary boulevard to the automobile. After all, I was in Ottawa at the very moment the Canadian Prime Minister was a leader among those ensuring that climate change talks then ongoing in Copenhagen would lead to nothing more than its vacuous result.

Speaking of the Prime Minister…his party has left its own cultural mark on ‘our Nation’s Capital’. I take you now to the early evening hours in the bar at the Chateau Laurier. The place is littered with the new Tory elite. Twenty-somethings that would not look out of place at the Yuppie bar at a Republican convention. The ‘girls’ with garish scarves that tastelessly affect a garish misunderstanding of Parisian couture; the young men with quasi-military haircuts, ill-fitting suits and very shiny shoes; and for that unisex look, the ubiquitous Blackberry in paw. It would appear that among this crowd in Oh-Tah-Wah, no one is actually listening to the person they’re with. To be someone means that you must always be simultaneously looking at an electronic device while pretending to listen to the person in front of you. Virtual social conservatism meets sheer rudeness. How sweet! In this way, Bytown is almost as annoying as Bay Street.

Finally, back to the theme of fascist architecture.  The American Embassy on Sussex Drive is, as the saying goes, butt ugly. Fortunately its position below Parliament Hill obscures it from many sight lines. As the lads on that NFL show would bellow, ‘C’mon man!’ Couldn’t someone have designed something attractive?!

An Open Letter to Obama Supporters

Since January 2008 I have maintained that Barack Obama is nothing more and nothing less than a classic Chicago Democrat: a hard nosed, sophisticated politico with a Hallmark Card gift of the gab. Peel away the prettiness and what’s revealed is a slightly softer (and browner) face on American imperialism. With a total of 50,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, Obama is following in the footsteps of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and both Bushes in his determination that America must set the tone in world affairs…by force of arms when necessary. With historically crippling debt; high levels of unemployment; an unresolved Iraq;  Guantanamo still open; Mexican migrants outrageously victimized at the border; health care hanging precariously in congress (btw it’s hard not to see this foreign ploy as a means to rally right-centre support for health care), Barack Obama has chosen to play the classic American foreign policy card: more war.

Following his election I was stunned to find so many otherwise intelligent people who were blissfully unaware of his plans for Afghanistan. If you believe ratcheting up the war there is good policy, Obama’s your man. If you expected a legitimate alternative to Bush-ism, I hope you will reconsider your hitherto unconditional support for America’s latest risky adventure. If the British and Soviet experience is anything to go on, America has just guaranteed itself  a world of pain even with a planned pull-out of 2011.

Truculence & Head Shots

Brian Burke is enough to bring a smile to my face on the grayest of November days. His “truculent” Loafs are once again the worst team in the NHL. His coach Ron Wilson is showing signs of serious brain wear. But that’s not ‘Burkie’s’ greatest achievement these days. No, it’s his response to the truculence of others that gives pause.

Burke’s acolytes among Toronto sports “journalists” are now commending him for taking charge in a recent NHL General Managers’ meeting. The panelists and scribes now assure us that there will be action against dangerous “head shots” because of the efforts of Burke and like-minded NHL hockey brainsters.  Puh-leez!

Perhaps taking a blind-side run with an elbow or cross check at an unaware opponent might merit a tougher penalty in future. How much does that really matter in a league that encourages fighting? Would any neurologist suggest that allowing, indeed inciting,  a 220 pound man to grab his opponent by the sweater and punch him in the face does not constitute a dangerous head shot? The blindness of the sports “journalists” in this regard is mind boggling.

The networks, with public broadcaster the CBC in the lead with Don Cherry basically waving pom-poms every time he sniffs a fight, are all complicit.  I shudder to think of the hypocritical sanctimony the CBC, TSN, The Score and Rogers Sportsnet will affect the first time an NHL player lapses into a coma or worse after a fight. In the meantime, the GMs and the broadcasters are equally hypocritical in feigning concern over head shots unless they’re delivered with a fist.  Ask Steve Moore whether he thought Todd Bertuzzi delivered legal fist shots to his head.

 

Buck Me Frettly

OK . I admit it. The Green Bay Packers made a grave mistake in not welcoming their grand diva Brett Favre back on whatever terms he wanted in August 2008. True confession time – I’ve been a Packer fan since I was a boy. In that point of a previous millennium, ‘The Pack’, under legendary coach Vince Lombardi was defeating the likes of the New York Giants for NFL championships. Last summmer I agreed with Packer management who did not guarantee Favre his starter’s job after a bizarrre five month on-off-on-and off again dalliance with retirement.

Yesterday, Favre sliced and diced his former team on its own turf, Lambeau Field. Combine yesterday’s performance with a game in Minnesota last month and Favre hurled seven touchdown passes in two Viking victories over the Packers. OUCH!!

The Packers’ choice to lead their team, Aaron Rodgers played another terribly   inconsistent, sometimes flashy, but ultimately losing game.  Rodgers, as if haunted by Favre interceptions of the past, repeatedly held on to the ball too long allowing the Vikings to sack him. The fourty year old Favre meanwhile gamboled about like a teenager while showing arm strength and accuracy easily the match of his glory years with the Packers. Burnt out? Finished? Prone to giveaways? Uh…not so much.

The Vikings just may win the NFC championship and head to the Super Bowl under a rejuvenated Favre. Packer GM Ted Thompson and coach Mike McCarthy were one game from The Big Show with Favre as QB in the 2007 season. If Favre was still their starter today, they would have a stronger team. The moral of this story appears to be that sometimes superstars, even when they behave erratically, must be indulged.

A

The Marvels of Testosterone

The worst start in the history of the franchise. That would be ZERO wins in seven games to date. That’s what big Brian Burke’s injection of “pugnacity, testosterone, truculence and belligerence” has wrought for the pathetic Toronto Maple Leafs hockey club. Pugnacity, male hormones and idiotic fighting on skates aside, the ‘Loafs’ just plain bite. Their goalkeeping is sub-standard. They have no scorers. (Woe to them if the next promised saviour Phil Kessel turns out to be another Jason Blake.) They have a defenceman Tomas Kaberle who would star for most teams, but Burke and his coach Ron Wilson spent the best part of a year denigrating Kaberle for his sophisticated approach to the position. Kaberle now appears confused. Last year’s promising rookie Luke Schenn is this year’s dull-witted, slow-footed sophomore. Maybe the startlingly handsome Schenn’s modeling assignments during the off season wore him out.

It has been a rude awakening for The Loaf Nation. The collective boy crush that the ‘sports media’ of Toronto had on Burke during the pre-season led many to predict that the Leafs were playoff bound for the first time in five years. A Toronto daily even ran a feature with admiring photos of Burke  surrounded by the supposed worthies with whom he has filled the executive suites at the ACC. Perhaps that brain trust will produce a win before November.

I’d bet that the likes of Don Cherry is delighted that almost all Leaf games feature a contrived display of fisticuffs at some point. NHL management is no doubt quietly satisfied that such displays often lead the highlight package in what passes for sports broadcast journalism. (Gary Bettman is sufficiently cynical to know that selling fighting is in fact a critical part of marketing the NHL.)

Hey, let the testosterone flow! This hockey fan will eschew the Loafs and the absurdist,  fight-riddled NHL while looking forward to some real hockey when the women’s Olympic tourney begins in February.

Teme Augama Autumn

The beach at Wanapitei stretches for about two kilometers on the north shore of Lake Temagami. The lake, about 350 kilometers north of Toronto,  is the centre of nDaki menan,  the homeland of the Teme Augama Anishinabai, the ‘deep water people’. Most Canadians view Temagami as a canoeists’, anglers’, cottage owners’ , snowmobilers’ paradise…and they’re largely correct about that. Sadly, relatively few of them are aware of the region’s rich indigenous heritage and the highly contested, just, and as yet, still unrecognized constitutional rights of the Teme Augama Anishinabai.

I camped on the beach in mid-September near Wanapitei Wilderness Centre, a kids’ canoeing camp, adult tripping and outdoor education operation. The sun shone for two surprisingly warm days. In the still of a windless evening, I could hear geese pointing south honking overhead…. it was eerily wonderful to hear that cacophony in the gathering darkness as I sat by the fire.

The New Ballard? J.P. - It's no contest!

Those familiar with these musings will recall that last month I posed the existential question: ‘who is most likely to qualify as Toronto’s next Harold Ballard – Brian ‘Testosterone’ Burke of the Loafs or J.P. Ricciardi of the Jays ?’

As the Jays limp towards the golf courses of October for which they have been clearly pining since early July, the answer is clear. It’s J.P all the way.

Ricciardi the fellow who managed to finish fourth last year in the A.L. East when Roy Halladay and A.J. Burnett combined for 38 wins, has simply outdone himself in 2009. Alex Rios? Gone..for nothing. That’s NOTHING as in nada, zilch, S.F.A. B.J. Ryan? A  franchise cornerstone who is out of Major League Baseball three years into a multi-year contract. Vernon Wells? Well unfortunately the Jays still have him, but he’s a burnt out husk; the most expensive failure playing everyday in major league baseball. It says here Wells will never again actually amount to more than the fourth outfielder on a good team.

Ricciardi has been kind of circumspect this year. I miss the days when he would come on the radio to routinely insult Jays’ fans for their lack of intelligence. Remember last year when he went off on a caller who wondered why the Jays would not go after Adam Dunn when they were still close enough to compete for the Wild Card? J.P. dismissed that fan and insulted Dunn for “not really liking baseball”. This year to date Dunn has disliked baseball enough to hit 38 home runs. That is 8 home runs more  than the spent Wells and the similarly unproductive Lyle Overbay combined.

You are a terrific judge of talent and character, J.P.!  For all of this and more, I happily reward you the title of Toronto’s Next Ballard. Only you could reduce Blue Jays’ attendance to 11,000; only you could dangle Roy Halladay in July like stale bait when the Jays had the same record as the still competitive Minnesota Twins. Take a bow, Dude. Then get back to Boston on October 4 and never return. Please. Pretty please.

Layton does a Dion

Jack Layton probably assured his electoral doom and may have handed Michael Ignatieff undeserved legitimacy. By propping up the Tories of smilin’ Steve Harper in the Canadian parliament, New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton is following in the footsteps of erstwhile Liberal leader Stephane Dion. Meanwhile Michael Ignatieff, he who replaced Dion, can sit back smugly in opposition to the government even though it’s been his Liberals that have served in a virtual coaltion with the Conservative government for the past year.

Layton insists that he achieved needed employment insurance reform for Canadians. That’s very small beer. In the coming weeks, if Layton and his NDP members are the only thing that stands between Harper and defeat, they have to bring down the government. On Friday, the NDP was joined by the Bloc Quebecois which supported the home renovation tax credit scheme. The next time the Harper government’s life is on the line, the Bloc won’t be so accommodating. If the NDP supports Harper under those conditions, it will have done its best to make Michael Ignatieff the next Prime Minister.  And perhaps that’s the outcome Layton seeks – few Kneedeepers see their party as a prospective government. Perhaps in his heart of hearts Jack just wants to help Iggy out by making him appear to be PM-in-waiting, a lone wolf standing staunchly in opposition to Harper.

Free the Don River

Toronto has a river through it: the Don. Today it ends ingloriously in concrete via an underground channel below an expressway just north of its natural destination at Lake Ontario. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century boaters, fishers and families on picnics would stroll by a river that was flowing and full of fish, including salmon which would travel the Don seasonally. In the 1950s, Torontonians decided the Don’s path would be the site for a 6 lane freeway, the Don Valley Parkway. To the south near the edge of Lake Ontario the hideous Gardiner Expressway bars the Don and effectively blocks the citizens of Toronto from Lake Ontario.

As in many North American cities in the age of automobile tyranny, the construction of these freeways was truly the darkness before the dawn. The Don River was almost killed in the process.

In the past twenty years or so, citizens and governments have planted thousands of trees and pollution into the Don has been abated. There is still a great deal of work to do. The proliferation of grotesque condominiums near the Toronto shoreline in the name of ‘harbourfront renewal’ means it will be difficult to clear the Don’s path to Lake Ontario. All the same. it should be done.

Toronto likes to think of itself as a ‘world class city. That’s a pathetic conceit. No city of such stature can afford to wall itself off from its primary natural asset as Toronto has done with Lake Ontario, one of North America’s Great Lakes. Rivers like the Don that flow into Lake Ontario must be part of the equation as living centres of greenery and recreation. Anyone from Toronto who has traveled to Chicago in recent years and seen its waterfront might be shocked to see a city that actually embraces its location on Lake Michigan. The continuing recovery of the Don River and the arresting of further plans to devastate Lake Ontario’s Toronto shoreline might suggest a change of heart in what the Canadian cultural theorist Northrop Frye called the “garrison mentality” that Canadians, even the wannabe sophisticates of Toronto, often demonstrate.

What's Iggy thinking?

So… this place called Canada inches ever closer to yet another federal election. Michael Ignatieff, known in these parts as ‘egghead Iggy’, has announced that the Liberals will not support the minority Conservative government when parliament resumes this month. Iggy has grown a spine! This stalwart action after Ignatieff and the erstwhile Grit leader Stephane Dion served in a virtual coalition with the Conservatives since 2006.

But what’s up?  The timing could be iffy for Iggy. Signs abound that Canada is coming out of recession. Under the Tories, no banks failed in the worst of the economic crisis. This cannot be said of governments in the USofA. This may have been blind luck, but it could make Stephen Harper look good in an election campaign. Nothing pleases English Canadian voters more than to think they are different than Americans.

The current polls suggest no one will win a majority government. These polls show that the Liberals are tied with the Conservatives. In fact, the Conservatives have enjoyed a pretty good summer.  Harper’s trip to the Canadian arctic provided some great optics (watch for them in Tory campaign ads) of Steve Standing on Guard for Thee. The Tories’ absolutely brilliant “Just Visiting” attack ads on the the aforementioned Iggy, who did not live in Canada for close to 4 decades before choosing to save us from ourselves, worked like a charm. Surging Liberal fortunes stalled in mid-air. Following Ignatieff’s non- contested coronation at a Liberal convention in May, he had opened up a 3-5 point lead on Harper. That’s gone. Conversely, Iggy’s brand new ads seem oddly soft and, dare I say it, kind of out-of-focus…politically at least.

So it begs the question: why push the country into an election now? It certainly has Jack Layton’s NDP stumped. They, of all people, now seem the most reluctant! While the savviest and most experienced practitioner of Canadian federal politics, the Quebec independantiste Gilles Duceppe says ‘Bring it on, Etienne!’. That’s because Duceppe remains confident of winning at least 40 seats in Quebec. Oh…and in a political afterthought if there ever was one….in the country with arguably the worst environmental record in the developed western world, Green leader  Elizabeth May is still searching for a riding to run in.

So, once again, why go now? My guess is that Ignatieff thinks he can make big gains in Quebec and sweep most of Ontario. That’s dicey, but plausible. I also predict the Liberals will trade on Ignatieff’s Harvard past to make nice with the Obama administration in a visible way. Weirdly, next to thinking we are different than Americans, one of the things that turns the cranks of English Canadian voters most is to feel the love of  a youthful, Democratic President. The newly minted ads play up Ignatieff’s internationalism. Team Liberal will try to contrast Iggy the sophisticate with that hard-hearted Harper and his gang of western rubes. Again, that’s not without risk. In many voters’ minds, Harper is quintessentially Canadian…a hard-working, lumpy guy with a young, attractive family.

Further, the Liberals should be cautious with playing the ‘Democrats love us’ card. I suspect Canadians’ collective honeymoon swoon with Messiah Barack is slowly abating. Discerning voters might cotton on to the increasingly disastrous Obama approach to Afghanistan; and take pause with more news of protectionist “Buy American” campaigns. Given that he must establish his Canadian cred (odd task for a Grit leader) Ignatieff might not want to appear too much like an American Obama Democrat.

If team Harper can make the PM look like the custodian of mainstream English Canadian values; if it can spin matters in a way that make it appear it was the Liberals alone who forced reluctant Canadians to their voting booths, the nerd Steve, in a move worthy of Mackenzie King, might just be in a position to win the majority that’s eluded him to date.

En tout cas, fun time ahead for political junkies! Happy autumn, all.