X Marks the Spot

Dear Monsieur Dion,

In politics, being right is very rarely a prerequisite for being liked.

Anyone who reads past the first couple of paragraphs of a news story knows that cutting the GST is not the best way to cut taxes.

Unfortunately for you, people like that Harper is cutting the GST because there is an emotional component to the GST.

I think there are two reasons for this.

First, GST is something we see nearly every day. Along with PST, GST inflates the prices of goods and service at the moment of purchase.

Second, it is a tax that has come in during our lifetimes, in 1991. We were here before it, and through the many arguments over it.

Here's an excerpt from My Years as Prime Minister, written by the last successful Liberal Prime Minister, Jean Chretien:

"'A Liberal government will replace the GST,' the Red Book read, 'with a system that generates equivalent revenues' [...] What we were promising to do was clear enough in my own mind - replace, not abolish, the GST - but I made a mistake by trying to be too clever with the nuanced argument."

As I'm sure you'll remember, JC never promised to abolish the GST, he promised to replace it. The only problem with the promise is that he didn't replace it either. He kept it exactly as it was.

So, you see, we've had some problems with politicians and the GST ever since Brian Mulroney introduced it. Now, Harper comes along, says he's going to cut 2 percent from the GST, and he does it. He actually does it. Amazing. It's a complete shift. Who would have thought a politician that promised to abolish, replace, or reduce the GST would actually do it?

Finally, some progress for the people of Canada and their most-hated tax.

It's a great move by Harper, but remember why Harper's in a position to cut taxes. It's because the Liberals fought the deficit like knights saving distressed damsels. Feel free to remind people of that. (Just be careful to not remind people that Pierre Trudeau was one of the reasons it was so high in the first place.)

So, everything's great. Until, that is, you begin musing about raising the GST back up to where it was pre-Harper. I know you didn't say you'd do it, just that you would consider it, but, still, what were you thinking? Even if you promise to give it back to us in income tax breaks, it's a bad move.

You're speaking to Canadians as if we're all intellectuals who are willing to contemplate theories of fair taxation. We're not.

So, drop the GST musings, because it's winning you no votes and keeping plenty away.

Here are things you can talk about instead, in the hopes of solidifying your base, winning over NDPers, and getting people who might not otherwise vote to vote: start talking about how you'll pave the streets of our major cities with gold (metaphorically speaking), legalize and tax marijuana and send the proceeds to health care, support the arts as they've never been supported before, pump money into higher education, and do something to make raising children cheaper (I don't know why kids cost so much, but I'm sure you could speak to parents and they'll tell you).

You might say that being liked isn't your top priority, but it should be, because you don't get to become prime minister if everyone thinks you're weak and foolish, unless you're running against a guy who's weaker and more foolish. You're not, though, so quit acting weak and foolish.

Sincerely,
Craig MacBride
Self-appointed know-it-all

This website is great, and long overdue.

It tells you what is happening in the House of Commons.

Lord knows why they didn't create this sooner.

PHOTO: Justin Trudeau in Mississauga!

Justin Trudeau was here!

Women swooned, or nodded off, and handsome Hammerson Hall, which seats about 1,300 people, was nearly full. It was so close. There must have been roughly 1,000 people there. So close. If Justin Trudeau, the second coming of grace and attitude to Canadian politics, can't fill that place, who can? I am now convinced it would take a public hanging or a visit from God himself to get those last-row seats on the third level properly christened by Mississauga backsides.

Trudeau was joined by Larry Beasley, former Director of Planning for Vancouver and a professor of planning at the University of British Columbia.

Beasley, it turned out, was the interesting one.

***

As former Winnipeg mayor Glen Murray said while he was on the stage a few weeks ago, "Beauty pays," so we'll start our coverage with Trudeau.

So, he got up on the stage, looking clean and glamourous in a perfectly-tailored grey suit, and he told a story that immediately endeared him to the crowd.

Trudeau's first impression of the city was formed when he was a 13-year-old son of the prime minister. He was living in Ottawa, and his father decided young Justin should go to camp in Algonquin Park. Justin went to camp. He met other boys and girls from Toronto and Montreal, and he met a girl named Natalie and he kissed her with his first kiss. "She was from the exotic sounding place of Mississauga." That was his first impression. The kiss, I assume, was better than the city is. It's hard to imagine a kiss being worse than Mississauga.

Trudeau's second impression was when a friend from Toronto took him paddling down the Credit River. Trudeau had nothing but good to say about the experience. Then he asked the 1,000-odd people how many of them had taken advantage of this natural wonder in our midst. About 10 people raised their hands.

***

"There's a little bit of defensiveness to Mississauga," Trudeau said. "It's as if (you think) everyone automatically has a negative impression of Mississauga. That's not entirely true."

For the rest of the night, Trudeau's local content was lacking. Throwing in something about Mississauga in his talk appeared to be an afterthought, a line tacked on to a well-practised monologue.

Points raised by J.T.:

Riding one's bike is both good for the environment and good for one's body.

Climate change is coming, and we shouldn't wait to fight it: "In this closed system, every action has consequences, everything we take from the ground, everything we discard, comes back to us.... If every action counts, every good action counts, too. We can make a difference in the world."

Young people are good. We should all quit undervaluing them: If they're apathetic, "It's because they care so much they're deeply frustrated.... There's a future that's wide open that they don't feel locked into."

I agree, young people do care, but I don't think they disconnect because they're frustrated. I'm pretty sure they disconnect because they're lazy, don't know what they're talking about, and are entirely self-absorbed. I know; I was there less than a decade ago.

In the end, J.T. did say something interesting, not new, but something we often forget: "The Canadian identity is built into the fabric of our land...two irreconcilable identities - English and French... - which require the first Canadians to accept that though they were Canadian, another person with a different religion, background, language, was also a Canadian."

***

Now, Larry Beasley.

He spoke quickly, and had a lot of interesting things about city building to say, nothing as interesting as this: "None of this will happen by accident."

He also said this: "You don't want to continue as you have in the past, and you probably can't afford to continue on as you have in the past."

He was saying what everyone has said on that stage, all in different and vague ways. He was saying what everyone knows, that Mississauga was built poorly. It's ugly, it's stupid, and we're going to have to pretty much start from scratch if we want to make it a real liveable city with an identity.

The inspiring part came next, as he showed a visual that illustrated how the Vancouver skyline changed between 1983 and 2003. In 20 years, it became a completely different city. That could happen to Mississauga.

Beasley then went into a list of friends of the city. I led with this in my story in today's paper because it was the most provocative thing said last night.

"Congestion is our friend," Beasley said, echoing Glen Murray, who said the same thing when he was speaking a few weeks ago.

This was Murray: "I think congestion is a great thing in a downtown.... All great cities have terrible transportation systems in their cores."

It makes people walk, and ride bikes, and it adds excitement to the street.

"Density is our friend," Beasley said, though Mayor Hazel McCallion pointed out, as she took the stage to say her thank-yous, that Port Credit was rebuilt and beautified without the use of high-rises. So, if Hazel has her way, there will be no high-rises on the water. That will make a lot of people happy, though I've never really understood the objection to high rises on the lake.

***

"Put parking, as much as you possibly can, underground, except for short-term parking so people can get in and out."

***

"I hope you see your city can be a work of art."

***

Hazel ended the evening by telling J.T. that his father, PET, was at one of Streetsville's first Bread and Honey festivals. "Boy, was he popular, just as popular as you might be one day."

***

Other observations:

No cell phones went off this time. Amazing.

Crowd questions were better than usual last night, though still entirely unnecessary.

***

In other news, the audience was told last night that the "Visioning Symposium" to be held Feb. 1-3 requires registration.

Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any way to register. There's no link on the website, and the people answering phones at the number provided don't know anything about the Visioning Symposium.

It is three months away, so you'll just have to remember to check back to get the 411, when it's eventually posted.

I can't say I was paying particularly close attention, but there has been an election campaign going on in Saskatchewan, which, I believe, is a province, or perhaps a hamlet, somewhere between here and British Columbia.

Last night the people of Saskatchewan went to the polls, and they elected the Saskatchewan Party. That political party also recently won an award for 'least creative party name,' so they're kind of on a role right now.

The Saskatchewan Party, a collection of disaffected Liberals and Tories led by Swift Current-er Brad Wall, won 37 of the legislature's 58 seats, giving Wall a nice majority.

The NDP, under long-time Premier Lorne Calvert, was reduced to 21 seats.

The Liberals, who received 9.5 per cent of the vote, won zero seats. Another argument for proportional representation.

The Senate sounds like a dumb, anachronistic idea when someone explains it to you, but it actually does a lot of great work.

The problem with the Senate is that the senators are appointed by prime ministers, and they serve as senators until they either die or reach 75 years of age.

That doesn't sound fair. It sounds like senators are unaccountable pigs at the trough. They never need to stand for election. They never have to worry about the wishes of their constituents. They get to do whatever they want, whether the people agree with them or not.

But there's much more to it.

Chantal Hebert, the brilliant Toronto Star columnist, wrote about the red chamber in her book French Kiss: Stephen Harper's Blind Date with Quebec.

"In the past decade, the Senate has been a beehive of policy activity. Much of its work has been at the leading edge of the national policy debate. It has waded in where MPs feared to tread; and on some of the key issues it has been well ahead of the Commons."

Hebert then listed some of the work that came from our senators: they looked into assisted suicide, they produced a comprehensive report that recommended the legalization of marijuana, they took the lead on investigating the federal role in medicare, they studied media convergence, and they studied in more depth than the Commons the policy adjustments that will need to be made in light of the demographic shock of the near future, when nearly everyone will be old.

Hebert writes: "The real question is why the bulk of leading-edge strategic policy-thinking being done by politicians on Parliament Hill is done at the initiative of the non-elected Senate, rather than the House of Commons.

"The answer is depressingly simple. Even though MPs would like to be more than legislative short-order cooks, they and their parties, especially when they are in government, often fear the heat of the kitchen so desperately that observers wonder why they went into public life in the first place."

As if Hebert's observations weren't enough to make one question the wisdom of electing the Senate, last week I came across this in Chretien's memoirs, My Years as Prime Minister:

"At first blush...an elected Senate might seem like a desirable improvement over a Senate whose members are appointed by the prime minister and remain in office until the age of seventy-five. But suppose the House of Commons has a Liberal majority and the Senate has a Conservative majority, both elected by the voters of Canada. Which one is the legitimate representative of the will of the people? Which one should prevail in a dispute? Should the senators be elected at the same time as the MPs, and for how long? What powers should they have? Should the existing composition of the Senate be altered by a constitutional amendment?"

Those are all great questions, and they should probably all be considered, in detail, before anyone starts throwing around ideas about what the future holds. Oh, right, it's too late for that.

Supplementary reading:

Vancouver Sun: The only way to fix the Red Chamber is to shut it down

Calgary Sun columnist Licia Corbella: Senate balancing act

CTV: Layton calls for referendum on abolishing Senate

National Post editorial board: The future of Canada's Senate

How come banks and governments treat Nov. 11 as a statutory holiday while everyone else has to go to work?

If you know why, please email me at cmacbride@mississauga.net.

You know what this country needs?

A constitutional amendment. And maybe a referendum.

More in a bit.

PHOTO: This is a chair, a.k.a. a seat. Though not the same make or design, there will be more of these in the House of Commons soon.

Umm...wow.

Is it just me, or is this Conservative government much more active than recent Liberal governments?

There's always something new.

The Senate, or Mulroney, and now this, from a CP story: "The federal government is set to introduce a bill that would give Alberta, B.C., and Ontario extra seats in the House of Commons."

According to this story, there would be 22 new seats, and Ontario would get 10 of those. They will be installed in the House in 2011, after the next census, the story says.

So, in total, there would be 330 seats in the House of Commons and Ontario would have 117 of them.

That means Ontario would have 35 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons. Not too far from the 39 per cent of the population we have. In other words, our percentage of seats in the House would stay about the same. The only difference is that with B.C., Alberta, and Ontario getting more seats, while everyone else stays the same, the eastern and Prairie provinces will have a smaller percentage of the seats than they currently have. They've been over-represented in the House for a long time, so this appears to be a step in the right direction.

PHOTO: Jan Gehl wishes the city luck in re-inventing itself. "When the Australians can do it, surely you can, too," he said.

Last night, Hammerson Hall was host to the final instalment of the Our Future Mississauga Speaker Series, featuring Jan Gehl, an architect and expert on public space, and Ken Greenberg, an urban designer.

Both men delivered fascinating speeches. In fact, it was the best of the four nights of the speaker series. Sadly, it was also, with about 500 people, the smallest audience. The only reason the audience was that large was because there were a lot of urban design students from GTA universities.

***

First up was Jan Gehl, the affable Danish architect with a charming accent.

He graduated from architecture school in 1960, when liveability wasn't the primary concern of designers. He then married a psychologist, and spent time with her psychologist friends, and they asked, "Why are you architects not interested in people? Why are you only interested in composition and monuments? Architecture is about people."

In 1971, Gehl's first book, Life Between Buildings, was published. The book was about how people use cities, and about how they want to use them.

The book is, in the world of urban designers, a classic.

***

"We are slow, we are linear, we are horizontal, we can move, at a maximum, five kilometres per hour, and our senses are made for five kilometres per hour."

He later added, "All the answers to planning are in the human body."

Gehl separated urban design into two categories: five-kilometre-per-hour architecture, made for pedestrians, and sixty-kilometre-per-hour architecture, made for cars.

Re: five-kilometre-per-hour architecture - "We see it in all the old cities. It's the architecture of small spaces."

Re: sixty-kilometre-per-hour architecture - "There are no details because you're too far away from them anyway...There's nothing much to being a human being in this environment."

***

Public spaces are split into three zones: market space, meeting space, and connection space.

Connection space is made up of areas used to get from one space to another, and those spaces have taken over the urban landscape in places like Mississauga. Most of our infrastructure is there to facilitate moving from point A to point B.

"The market space has been pushed into Square One, and the meeting space has moved I don't know where."

***

"The greatest interest of human beings is other human beings."

***

To make the city better, and to cover all the themes the City is studying in this project, the best approach is a small, street-level one.

"The way to hit all these birds with one stone is to plan for pedestrians and bicycles," Gehl said.

***

He also, like several other speakers who took the stage at Hammerson Hall, warned the City that building new roads is a terrible idea.

"There hasn't been a place in the world where they've built more roads and they haven't had more traffic."

Gehl's statement took me back to my time as a reporter for the Oakville Beaver. Oakville Town Council was taking a look at their plans for development north of Hwy. 5. Andres Duany, an arrogant and brilliant American, was called on to give a series of public talks.

I went to the library and took out one of Duany's books, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream.

This is from that book:

"The mechanism at work behind induced traffic is elegantly explained by an aphorism gaining popularity among traffic engineers: 'Trying to cure traffic congestion by adding more capacity is like trying to cure obesity by loosening your belt.'"

***

Ken Greenberg, former director of urban design and architecture for the City of Toronto, spoke second.

He said, "Every city and every town is marked by the period in which it was born. You're largely a post-second world war city."

So, really, Mississauga was just unlucky, born at the same time as sprawl.

***

Re: the environmental component of planning a city: "This is not a frill. This is actually fundamental for our survival."

***

Greenberg told us to steer away from big projects. Big projects do not make a city. Instead, Mississauga should focus on small, five-kilometre-per-hour projects. Go to the nodes, the areas that are meant to be community focus points, and build main streets properly.

"This could turn into Dubai, which is just a collection of buildings, or it could start to take on the intimacy of some of these other cities we've seen."

***

After doing a day-long tour of Mississauga with staff: "I was looking for cyclists all day, and I think I saw three."

***

So, to recap. Think small. Dream about details. Build for people.

Now, we move on to phase two. That takes place in February with the weekend Visioning Symposium, in which citizens, community leaders, and planners will all get together and spend the weekend talking about how to rebuild Mississauga. Seriously, if you sign up for this thing, you have to spend the entire weekend there. I am told there will be good food available for participants, as well as the chance to tell friends and relatives for decades to come, "I helped design Mississauga." Is that worth a weekend of your life? Probably.

You register for the Visioning Symposium online at www.conversation21.ca. Not yet, though. The registration option will be up later this week, or month, or maybe early next year. Keep checking back.

If you want to learn the details of the federal bill to increase the number of seats in the House of Commons, read this.

I've "gone fishin'" for the next week with Joe Pesci and Danny Glover, a great comedy duo if ever there was one. Remember when they were teamed up in Lethal Weapon 249? They could make movies with only those two actors for decades and never run out of great ideas like Gone Fishin'.

Paul Wells over at Macleans.ca provides a fascinating link to the user stats of Conservapedia, which is a user-generated encyclopedia for conservatives who don't trust Wikipedia.

Anyway, the page gives a fascinating rundown of what the visitors to the site are interested in learning about.

(Now back to my vacation, already in progress.)

PHOTO: My work computer, which I am back in front of today, after spending a week arguing with salesmen and napping like a senior citizen.

I'm back at my desk, in front of my radiation-emanating, pedal-powered, certified antique computer.

It is actually nice to be back. I spent my vacation buying a new car, arguing with people who wanted to make me pay more for my insurance than I was paying for the car, and packing for my move this weekend.

I also had to watch the news passively, which was a change. I sat in front of the television and learned that Paul Szabo was called a "son of a b**ch" at the ethics committee, which he's chairing during this Mulroney envelopes-of-money thing. Then I learned that our friend Wajid Khan was booted from...sorry, is "stepping aside" from the Conservatives after coming under investigation for spending too much on his election campaigns.

Was I allowed to call these people? I was on vacation, and I knew someone at the office was covering it. It would be strange for me to call just to chat.

But now I'm back, and my first order, after going through my 200 emails, and after calling members of the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board and laughing at them for removing The Golden Compass, will be to call Wajid to see what's on his mind.

PHOTO: I don't know who this is that's hugging Mississauga South MP Paul Szabo, but she should go up to Ottawa. I'm pretty sure the big man could use a hug right about now.

Our favourite federal blogger, Kady O'Malley, has the scoop on our Mississauga South MP Paul Szabo, the hardest working MP in Canada, and the dramatics at the ethics committee he chairs.

O'Malley is lucky enough to be able to sit in on the committee meetings that could possibly have Brian Mulroney and his accuser, Karlheinz Schreiber, show up to answer some rather interesting questions.

PHOTO: The many faces of our future prime minister

Justin Trudeau was across the border in Brampton today, but he was talking to Mississauga students, so I was up there to cover it.

After seeing him speak this morning, I like him much more than I did after the empty-though-charming speech he gave last month at Hammerson Hall for the Our Future Mississauga Speaker Series.

This morning, unlike earlier this month, Trudeau said things that were interesting.

In fact, not only were they interesting, they were revolutionary. It's sad that his words were revolutionary, because that simply means so many other political leaders in Canada aren't thinking.

These words should not be revolutionary: "We need to become the country we think of ourselves as."

Of course we do. We should become a peacekeeping nation helping around the world. We should become a generous country. We should become the country of sober second thought. We should become the environmentally-conscious country. We should be leaders, which is what the students Trudeau was speaking to were at the Leadership Now! conference to become. Canada needs to get back to being Canada. (NOTE: My speechwriting services are available to any politician willing to pay me more than I make here and give me season tickets to the Raptors.)

"We need to become the country we think of ourselves as."

Why opposition leaders haven't been saying that for the past 20 years, I'm not sure. Maybe the focus groups don't want Canada to be the country we think of ourselves as.

Maybe we Canadians don't want to be so Canadian anymore.

I don't think that's true, though. I think Trudeau's onto something, and, unless Dion is smart enough to pick up on the theme, Trudeau could ride that message as a slow wave to the top.

He also said that Canada should work to fulfil the Millennium Development Goals set out by former Liberal Prime Minister Lester Pearson.

The main goal was to spend 0.7 per cent of the GDP on foreign aid. All rich countries were meant to reach for that.

Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden have met the goal.

Canada, which was up to 0.53 per cent of GDP in 1975, now gives a whopping 0.28 per cent of our GDP to countries in need.

"It sounds like an easy thing, something that's ripe to reach, but we're nowhere near it," said Trudeau. "If we increased our aid 10 per cent every year, we'd be there in eight to 10 years."

Turns out this guy in the velvet jacket might be onto something after all.

No surprises. That's what we're going to get from today's Ontario throne speech, which will take place at 2 p.m.

No surprises. It's boring, true, but it's a lot better than the first year of McGuinty's last term, when the surprise was that we would all be taxed a little more.

Will be writing more about this later.

Everyone's favourite incarcerated (though free-for-a-day) German-Canadian businessman, Karlheinz Schreiber, will be on TV today, chillaxing with Mississauga South MP Paul Szabo. You can watch it online here.

Sometimes political speeches make me want to stab at my eardrums with chopsticks:

"Your government shares that optimism.

"And it understands that, over the next four years, you want to move forward the Ontario way: by working and building and dreaming, together."

Unlike in, say, Saskatchewan, where the way they move forward is by idling and destroying without imagination.

And what's with the "moving forward" nonsense?

As I noted in this posting, the Grits used the phrase 19 times in 43 pages of their election platform.

Are we really going to have to listen to it, and try to figure out what it actually means, for the next four years?

PHOTO: John Tory talking, very possibly rambling.

I like John Tory. I think he's a great guy, and I think he'll make a good Premier one day, if McGuinty screws up enough to give him a chance in the 2011 election.

Tory does ramble, though. A lot.

He was in Mississauga today, and he called to talk about the Throne Speech. I didn't really care much for the Throne Speech. There were, as was reported, no surprises.

But Tory wanted to talk about it. I let him. Then I asked him about what I wanted to talk about.

Among other things, I was curious about his take on the horrible response to his plan to fund faith-based schools. He had already told the media he wouldn't revisit it in the next election because the voters had made their decision on it.

Here's what I asked: "Is that disappointing? You're trying to make fair something that is so obviously discriminatory and the people are saying they're fine with it."

Here's his 45-second response:
"Look, the results of the election overall were disappointing, but you can be disappointed but it doesn't do you any good to say you're disappointed or to complain about it because the voters, I've always said, the voters are never wrong in rendering their verdict because they're given the chance once every four years to do that, and while you might be disappointed, you might disagree with the verdict they rendered, they rendered the verdict they did, and I accept it because in politics you have no choice but to do that, and there can be many disappointments that come with accepting that verdict, but that doesn't change that you accept that verdict because the voters are never wrong, they choose what they choose to do, and they've made a choice, and I guess what's most important for me and for them to know is that I understand the verdict they rendered and will deal with it accordingly."

Reading that makes my brain hurts.