Brian Speaks Out

An Open Letter to New Democrat Voters

Fellow New Democrats,

Last May, four and a half million of us marked our ballots for Jack Layton's New Democrats. We voted for real change. And while we fell short of government, many of us felt that just maybe, a new dawn was breaking.

Jack Layton showed us that a new type of politics is possible. Not the same old scandals, entitlements and tired debates, but an optimistic politics with the concerns of everyday people at its core.

It was a tremendous moment we shared together. And it turns out not one we can take for granted.

The cynics argue that with Jack Layton's passing, it’s time to return to the tired old politics of the past. The moment we shared was a temporary spark. The change on the horizon a fleeting dream.

We heard that argument just yesterday from a floor crossing Member of Parliament. When asked what about the plurality of voters in your riding who voted for real change, she simply shrugged: “They voted for Jack Layton. Jack Layton is dead.”

The cynics have the right to believe what they want. And they're probably better off in the Liberal Party.

But it's not what I believe. And I know you don't either.

No one can replace Jack. But I believe that Jack Layton left Canada a lasting legacy that is worth fighting for – every single day.

I believe by working together, not against each other, a better Canada is possible.

I believe that a hopeful, optimistic politics is not just a flash in the pan. It is the only way we can unite this country and start to move Canada forward.

Jack Layton knew that bringing change was never easy. But like Jack Layton, I believe we can't stop until the job's done.

And so whether you live in my home province of Quebec – where I will run for Parliament – or in one of our many great communities across Canada, I'm writing you to simply say this:

Don't listen to the cynics. Together, let's get the job done.

You and I know we can put the priorities of people first. Better healthcare. Pensions you can count on. A clean environment and a country that's a leader in the world.

We can ensure everyone does their fair share and no one is left behind.

We can build a strong, united Canada – one where we tackle our challenges together.

Jack Layton showed us the way. And he left us an incredible team that's ready to get the job done. I look at our team and I know that the change this country needs is possible. I see in each of their eyes the same dream for a stronger, greener, fairer Canada. That's why I'm running to be leader of Canada's New Democrats.

And that's why I want you on board. Let the other parties have their cynics. Let's you and I bring real change to this country - starting now.

-Brian Topp

In early 2008, I invited Jack Layton and his core team of advisers to my home for dinner, and a talk about politics.

Specifically, I hoped we would make a decision about a proposal we had been kicking around in the party for some months.

The proposal: build out from “representational politics” and explicitly run a campaign on the idea that Jack Layton wanted to be prime minister. We wanted a mandate to form a government; and we had a set of prudent, responsible, progressive and much-needed proposals we wanted to implement. In other words, directly challenge the blue and red teams for their franchises as governing parties.

The implications were not small, in a number of ways. There was much to say on both sides of this matter, and much of it was said over that dinner.

Jack Layton listened to the advice politely, and then spoke up.

“I'm not quite sure why we're debating this,” he said. “I've always run to be prime minister, I've always believed our goal was to form a government, and I've always thought we should frame our proposals so that we'd have a mandate to implement them if we had the numbers in the House.”

He then turned to my then 10-year-old son, listening to all of this with wide eyes.

“Hey, do you play the piano?”

Not yet, but he'd like to, my son answered.

“Let's go take a look at your piano.”

So Jack Layton and my son left the dinner table for our living room. And a few minutes later our home was filled with lively piano music and the voices of a federal party leader and a 10-year-old boy singing a duet, fairly loudly.

This was two things.

It was just one small example of how Jack Layton reached out to people – including very young people – to give them moments they would never forget. This is our favourite memory of Jack, my wife and I agreed Monday morning after learning that he had passed away.

And it was the nicest possible way for Jack Layton to let his campaign team know that their meeting was over and that a decision had been made.

We are living in a market economy, but that doesn't mean there aren't choices to be made.

We could be living in a smart market economy. One that invests in education and training, in innovation, in new ideas. That competes at the high end. That makes sure, in many ways, that it leaves no one behind. One that shares its benefits more equally – much more equally. There is much to say about that. We'll get to it.

And then there's the dumb market economy we're living in instead … increasingly, courtesy of the Harper government. Exhibit A: the Keystone XL pipeline.

If you haven't heard of this project, you should. It is, in many ways, the keystone to Stephen Harper's approach to the Canadian economy, and to what passes for environmental policy in this government.

The pipeline's purpose is to export essentially unprocessed bitumen, in the largest possible quantities, out of Canada and to the petrochemical complex in Texas. Where it will be processed into finished fuel, plastics and chemicals in a myriad of forms for sale around the world, including back into Canada.

We could say that this is just taking advantage of an opportunity. The Americans are running out of domestic oil. They are looking for a substitute. By plugging Canada into Texas, we are fulfilling our franchise as America's largest energy provider. “Ethically,” as the project's mummers and barkers would have it.

But what is really going to go down that pipeline are Canadian jobs. And forgone capital that belongs to our children and grandchildren. And then, there's the small matter of the environment.

Let's start with Canadian jobs. In promoting and facilitating this project, the Harper government is, once again, scripting Canada in the world economy to be a source of raw, unprocessed resources. Tommy Douglas used to rail against this in the 1940s. Then: Why are we exporting raw logs when we could be exporting furniture? Now: Why we are exporting raw bitumen when we could be exporting the hundreds of products that are derived from our own petrochemicals?

The answer is that Mr. Harper – and his friends in the industry – are, as neo-cons and the interests they serve always do, going for the quick buck. The easy solution. The road where everybody gets their bonus and their new car right now. Everyone except the people of Canada – who get to live with the consequences of an over-valued petrocurrency, without benefiting from the value-added economic activity our own resources generate.

Dumb.

So then there is the question of foregone capital – the theft from our children and grandchildren. The quick-buck boys behind this pipeline project seek to mine the maximum amount of bitumen, as quickly as possible, at the lowest possible royalty rates (note the debate on this issue in Alberta when Premier Ed Stelmack tried to address it), sold for the lowest possible price – all immediately to be spent in a supposedly “low-tax” environment.

Imagine instead developing our petroleum resources more deliberately; charging appropriately for those resources; ensuring they build a job-rich industrial, value-added economy here in Canada – and that most of the treasure derived from these one-time, never-to-be renewed fossil resources were preserved in an investment fund. Then our children and grandchildren would inherit both a high-job, developed economy, and an pool of capital to build a future economy with. Mr. Harper has turned his back on this better alternative.

Dumb.

Then there are the environmental issues, which are not small. There is the immediate issue of hyper-development of Canada's tar sands in the service of another country's industrial economy. We not only pay the opportunity costs discussed above. We also get to pay the full environmental price. A brutally scarred landscape. Numerous other direct and indirect environmental insults. And a vast emission of carbon at every stage.

And then there is the perversion of Canadian policy in the service of this development. Canada has not only become one of the world's great sources of carbon – and thus of climate change. Our Conservative government has become one of the principal obstacles to co-ordinated global action to address climate change.

Dumb, on a global scale.

So what is to be done? Let's begin with what is not to be done: That pipeline should not be built.

And then we need to have a very large conversation with our energy industry in this country – in the first instance, with the goal of reminding them that they are in this country.

Brian Topp is running for leader of the federal New Democratic Party

Yitzhak Rabin was one of history's great generals, in Israel and in the long history of the Western way of war. And like many such soldiers, he was a man a peace. He knew, as a master of war, that war would not solve the problems facing his country.

He said that Israel did not need to make peace with Belgium. It needed to make peace with her enemies. And so, as prime minister of Israel, he set out to do so.

He was, I think, a realist about what kind of peace is available. He was therefore an advocate, and an architect, of a hard border between Israel and Palestine. Because he understood that there would be irredentists on the Arab side indefinitely (as there were and are in many new states), and his first priority was always the safety and security of his own people.

But he also understood there would be a Palestine.

To that end he ended Israel's policy of non-recognition of the voices of liberation among the Palestinian people – although some among them had blood on their hands. And he called them to a dialog about peace, and about a two-state solution.

Yigal Amir did not just murder Mr. Rabin in King of Israel Square on Nov. 4, 1995. As subsequent events have shown, he may have put a bullet in Israel's best hope for peace.

Mr. Rabin's successors have failed to carry out his vision, perhaps because they lacked and continue to lack his strength. Perhaps because they have not yet had their fill of war, as he had. Or so some of their conduct would suggest – mirrored, tragically for the Palestinian people, by some on the other side.

So what to make of this? And what can Canada do?

We can be friends of the friends of peace, on both sides. In stark contrast to the policy of the Harper government, which currently aims in the opposite direction. Which brings us to the question of the recognition of Palestine in some form by the United Nations.

The details will matter. Perhaps the Palestinians will overplay their hand at the United Nations in coming weeks or months, and make it impossible to help them – not for the first time.

But on the fundamental issue of recognition of a Palestinian state, as a step towards a peace in which both it and Israel live free from terror and violence, in recognized borders and at peace with all of their neighbors, it would be right for Canada to stand with most of the world. And to recognize Palestine.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is wrong on this issue. A good day for him to acknowledge this, and to lead Canada back to a position of principle, would be this coming Nov. 4.

In memory of a brilliant general, a brave soldier for peace. A man who makes our current Prime Minister look, today, very small.

But Mr. Rabin believed that people on the wrong side of these issues could be persuaded to change their minds. We should all keep believing that.

Brian Topp is running for leader of the federal New Democratic Party

A spectre is haunting Europe – and the United States. And soon, I submit, it will be here in Canada. That spectre: the proposition that the time has come to stop borrowing billions of dollars every year in order to give it to rich people.

President Barack Obama put this modest proposal into the heart of his fiscal and economic policy last week. He threatened to veto future budget bills that fail to ensure that the wealthiest taxpayers pay at least as high a rate of income tax as their own domestic servants. In this, Mr. Obama is echoing a policy reversal that is gathering steam.

For example, one of the better measures the former British Labour government implemented in its last days was a high-income surtax. The current Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government hasn't touched it – and the British Liberals made it clear at their conference last week (or at least, as clear as that party can ever make things) that they will not permit it to be touched in the years to come.

The time has come to have this debate in Canada. The details of tax policy can be mind-numbing. But the key issues are straightforward and face all industrial democracies in one form or another. To wit:

The recklessly, fecklessly irresponsible Reagan administration set off a round of competitive high-income tax cuts all around the world in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan's own budget director, David Stockman, cheerfully admitted in a candid memoir that the arguments used to justify this policy were baseless.

As indeed they proved to be. Instead of increasing revenues by cutting high income taxes, as promised, American conservatives tipped the United States into a permanent structural deficit – briefly mitigated by Bill Clinton’s administration, and then made worse by George Bush.

The harvest is a multi-trillion dollar public debt, accumulated even during periods of economic growth. Sapping the ability of the American government to respond to recession and economic shock – like the shocks facing the world economy today. In the process, as intended, we have witnessed on of the greatest transfers of wealth from the poor to the rich in world history.

Not in Canada? Like all other industrial economies, Canada foolishly mirrored American tax policy and has paid many of the same prices. The Conference Board of Canada recently reported that the gap between low and high-income earners is every bit as striking in Canada as in the United States. In our modest Canadian way, we too run structural deficits to pay for annual tax giveaways to those among us who need help the least.

Mr. Reagan's tax policies belong in his museum. If these times call for belt-tightening – a highly debatable proposition, to say the least – then let's start among those with the largest belts. A good place would be with a new top-tier income tax bracket, and a careful look at loopholes and giveaways that embarrass even American billionaires – some of whom are now leading the growing chorus for change.

Trial balloons are the stuff of politics. And Stephen Harper's government floated a pretty big one in recent days – a suggestion that the government is contemplating a 10 per cent budget cut to the CBC.

They flirt outrageously, those two. A funny sort of relationship, in which the public network bends over backward to be fair to the government, including Tory-friendly voices in all of its work. And Mr. Harper's team thanks the CBC through a steady stream of fundraising letters to core Conservative voters, asking for donations to fight back against our public broadcaster and – possibly – to do it harm.

Why would Mr. Harper want to end this seemingly-profitable relationship, through a lethal attack on the CBC's funding? The Conservatives lost their chance at a majority in 2006 over cuts to the arts (and have remained almost Liberal-like in their irrelevance in Quebec ever since).

I think the answer is a philosophic one. The Conservatives just plain disdain Canada's arts and its culture. They are, it would seem, therefore spoiling to return to the file and to pick up where they left off in 2006.

A curious priority for a Heritage Minister who, very commendably, throws Canadian film nights in Ottawa. And for a Prime Minister who loves Canadian television shows (like Murdoch Mysteries, in which he has appeared).

But perhaps the need to get the base angry trumps this. It seems the Conservatives have Canadian culture on their minds as an excellent hot button to press with people of their sort. Thus the big target painted on the CBC (founded, lest we forget, by a Conservative government).

Canada is a cultural exercise of will. A decision by a sugar cube not to dissolve into the cup of hot coffee it finds itself in. Buried under billions of dollars of television, film, books and music dumped into our market for pennies by our best friend to the south, Canadians still find ways to talk to each other about ourselves. To tell our own stories. To read our own books. To sing our own songs. To see our own films on a handful of screens. To marvel at our own stars and poets and dreamers.

In the circumstances we find ourselves in, this will always require acts of collective will. Including, for all its faults, our public broadcaster. In fact, much more needs to be done.

In the meantime, I'm betting Mr. Harper will be surprised – once again – by how strongly Canadians feel about this, should that Queen Mary of a trial balloon turn into a budget measure.

Brian Topp is running for leader of the federal New Democratic Party

Wall Street is “occupied.” What do the occupiers want? Where to begin? How about here: The top 1 per cent income-earners in North America have appropriated most of the wealth created in the past thirty years. But what do they want, those protesters and their sympathizers?

Here's another fact on their minds. Politicians in North America engineered the good fortune of the wealthy through a systematic assault on the family incomes of everyone else. And simultaneously encouraged access to an ocean of cheap and easy credit.

So, while average families haven't seen a real pay raise in more than a generation, they have drifted into a disastrous dependence on debt (higher in Canada than in the United States). Which helped fuel housing bubbles. Followed by a financial services crisis. Followed by a sovereign debt crisis that now threatens the foundations of the world economy.

But why are they interfering with the lineups in front of the latte counters, those protesters? In Spain, unemployment teeters around 25 per cent. Catastrophically higher for young people. That is depression-level unemployment. The number of people living in poverty in the United States has reached record levels.

But why are those people waving those rude signs at our nice banks and brokerage firms? In Israel, the “occupiers” are talking to the right-wing Netanyahu government about the intolerable cost of housing, of food, of utilities, of health care, of everything else needed to live a normal life. But what do they want, those people? It is blindly obvious what the Wall Street occupiers and ordinary people all around the world want.

They want an end to reckless, heedless bingo parlour economics. In which wealth is concentrated into far too few hands. In which people's savings and pensions are funnelled into unproductive financial game-playing instead of into the real economy. In which the Masters of the Universe, there on Wall Street, keep all the winnings on a good day and slip their losses into the public debt on a bad day.

We like to tell ourselves that Canada has avoided the worst of it, despite the best efforts of our governments in recent years. But the income gap between rich and poor is every bit as depressing in Canada as it is in our friend to the south (see here and here).

After a long sleep, the public interest is waking up in North America and around the world.

There are false roads open – like the fantasist right-wing populism of the American Tea Partiers. And there are better roads open – like modern, prudent, determined and fearless social democracy, of the kind Jack Layton was talking about.

Perhaps we will go down that first road, brought to us in Canada in our mild Canadian way by Stephen Harper and his team. Hopefully we will go down the other, on offer in Canada through Mr. Layton's team.

But the Wall Street occupiers are there to let the Wall Street revellers and bonus-hunters know that their own particular party – and the whole approach to government that made it possible in the United States and here in Canada – has just about had its day.

Brian Topp is running for leader of the federal New Democratic Party

In an important article, Globe journalist Kim Mackrael recently called attention to a little-discussed amendment in the Conservative government's omnibus crime legislation. The amendment would eliminate the principle that prison guards must use the “least restrictive measures” required to control inmates.

Ms. Mackrael quoted a number of experts in corrections speaking politely about what a bad idea this would be.

To be specific, the Tories want to amend article 4(d) of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act (1992). The relevant clause establishes the principle “that the service use the least restrictive measures consistent with the protection of the public, staff members and offenders.”

Why do the Tories want to remove this principle? They have been talking to themselves about it for some time. For example, in 2007 a review panel presented a detailed report to then-minister Stockwell Day on corrections issues. Entitled A Roadmap to Strengthening Public Safety, it takes direct aim at the clause in question:

“The panel believes that this principle has been emphasized too much by staff and management of CSC, and even by the courts in everyday decision-making about offenders. As a result an imbalance has been created that places the onus on SCS to justify why the least restrictive measures shouldn't be used, rather than on offenders to justify why they should have access to privileges based on their performance under their correctional plans.”

This past weekend I was out canvassing in Saskatoon. One of the good citizens I encountered on the doorstep was a former senior official at Corrections Canada. Ms. Mackrael's article was on his mind.

“I've spent more time in federal prisons than anyone I know,” he told me. “I've had meetings with prison administrators, and then I've explored ever corner of our prisons right down into the hole. I know what's going to happen if they take that clause out of the Act. What's going to happen is that guards are going to feel free to use more force, a lot more force, to control inmates. There's going to be an enormous rise in violence in our prison system.”

Is this what the Tories want? Is this what Canadians want happening in our prisons? Hard to say, because the Tories don't think they owe Parliament an explanation or a debate on this or any other issue. Instead they are using time allocation to ram a bloated omnibus bill through it without accountability.

Critics have highlighted some of the other issues with the Tory crime package. Some of the proposed minimum sentences are disproportionate and perverse compared to others in the legal system. All evidence from the United States shows that increasing prison populations – the basic goal the Tories are pursuing – leads to more crime. And the federal government is cheerfully creating more prisoners for provincial corrections systems, without providing any funds to house or rehabilitate them. All of this while willfully ignoring the evidence that crime in Canada is already steadily declining.

In all of this, the Conservatives are demonstrating the real character of their government. This is rule by angry old uncle. A character in many families, not without his charm and soft side, who shouts his angry views for the hundredth time, demanding firm measures and an end to many abuses, even if the facts all point the other way.

Unfortunately, the angry old uncles are now in charge of the government of Canada, and our justice system. Much work will be required when they have been defeated to rescind and unwind the damage they are doing. Including, alas, this effort to make some of the worst places you can be in Canada much worse.

Brian Topp is running for leader of the New Democratic Party

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty somewhat undiplomatically tore a strip off the United States last week after the Obama administration decided to put the Keystone pipeline into the deep freeze. And then he made a direct geo-political threat aimed at America, his party's political model. The Keystone pipeline delay, Mr. Flaherty said, “may mean we may have to move quickly to ensure we can sell our oil to Asia through British Columbia.”

In other words, if you won't buy our raw bitumen, we'll sell it to China.

It is a little odd, this business of a Canadian neo-con minister, at the heart of the Harper government, threatening the United States with a closer economic relationship with Communist China. There's going to be a little splainin’ to do at the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. But it does give us the flavour of “oil disease” – of how the vast revenues associated with this resource can pervert even the geopolitical principles of conservative ideologues. There are people in that industry (and their poodles in government) who will do anything to infinitely expand their sales and their profits. Including, apparently, threatening Uncle Sam with a tighter embrace of Mao's heirs.

There is an alternative approach available, one that turns on four words: pacing; value-added; price; and transition.

Pacing: The Keystone pipeline only made sense as a business proposition – it never made sense as an environmental one – if production in the oil sands were to be substantially increased. Keystone wasn't necessary to transport current or even somewhat increased oil-sands production. When filled, it would have doubled bitumen exports to the United States. The pipeline's cancellation is an opportunity to reconsider the pacing of development in the oil sands. And, specifically, to move to a much more considered, deliberate, and unsubsidized pace.

Value-added: The cancellation of the keystone pipeline is an opportunity to ask fundamental questions about its purpose. As in: Why exactly are we proposing to ship raw bitumen to a Texas refinery complex for it to be processed there? As many credible voices have been arguing with increasing force and conviction, Canada is throwing away its economic future when we anchor our economy, our currency and our public revenues on the export of raw unprocessed resources that can be processed here.

Pricing: The cancellation of the Keystone pipeline is an opportunity to revisit an important issue the Government of Alberta attempted to tackle a few years ago, until defeated by “oil disease” – the price at which we are selling this resource. A decision to proceed at a much more deliberate pace creates an opportunity to price our resources, through royalties, at their real value.

Transition: And finally, doing all of this gives us an opportunity to reconsider what we are doing with one-time fossil fuel revenues. For geopolitical, environmental and economic purposes, we would do well to flow a lot more one-time royalty revenue into transition funds, to invest in a new Western Canadian economy that is not dependent on the mining of raw bitumen. One way or another, the world will soon act to dramatically reduce carbon emissions, and so will Canada. If the best hockey players play where the puck is going to be, then the Western Canadian energy industry – and our economy as a whole – need to do the same.

Mr. Flaherty may counter that “transition funds” (on, for example, the Norwegian model) smack of socialism. But given his statements this week, he shouldn't have a problem with that.

A final note. Threats aren't generally a good tool in diplomacy, but if you're going to make one, it needs to be credible. Mr. Flaherty's route to bring bitumen to China is itself – how shall we put this – likely a pipe dream. The proposed “Northern Gateway” pipeline, which would bring bitumen across the Rockies to Kitimat, would have to cross the territories of dozens of first nations, many of whom have never signed a treaty and most of whom are dead set against the project. Over 4,000 Canadians have signed up to testify during hearings about the “Northern Gateway” scheduled for next year, apparently the largest number to ask to speak at such a hearing in our history. There will be no oil sands bitumen flowing to China any time soon. I bet the U.S. government took note of that when its ambassador cabled Mr. Flaherty's comments home, as we'll eventually read in WikiLeaks or one of its successors.

Brian Topp is running for leader of the New Democratic Party

Arguably, the single worst thing the Harper government has done during its feckless term in office is to walk away from Canada's global responsibility to address climate change.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Liberal predecessors weren't fundamentally better. The Liberals signed the Kyoto treaty with no intention of implementing it.

But Mr. Harper's team is worse, because not only are we continuing to fail to meet our responsibilities, and not only has the government of Canada become a huckster for some of the most carbon-intensive products on sale in the global marketplace, but Mr. Harper and his ministers want us to think this is a principled thing to do – something to celebrate.

The case, wittily concocted by a Sun News television comedian, is that our government's determination to produce ever more carbon and to profit from it is “ethical,” because Canada is a good country. Not like bad countries, like Iran or Saudi Arabia. We're a nice democracy. So any product we produce is “ethical.”

This being so, perhaps when he returns from disgracing our country in Durban, the Environment Minister can be given a new mandate. In addition to being a global salesman for carbon, Peter Kent can take on a new ethical sales job: Let's get into ethical landmines.

Consistent with their vision, the Harper team can next withdraw from the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, also known as the Ottawa Treaty.

After all, if the world’s depots and paramilitaries can’t buy ethical landmines from Canada, they’ll have to buy them from countries like Iran, Burma and China. To the Harper government’s mind, it’s not ethical for a child to be killed by a landmine produced by prison labour, or in a country where women are not allowed to vote. Not when they could be killed by a landmine produced ethically right here in Mr. Harper's Canada.

So then, to perfectly fit the template, the Harper government will need to contrive to send just the basic components of landmines to, say, Texas, for our friends there to assemble into landmines, which can then be resold to us at a handsome profit. The Harper government doesn't believe in processing our resources in Canada. So the ethical thing to do is sell the components overseas and south of the border, to be resold to us as finished products. Which we can then market to the world.

Landmines – the next ethical export of the future. Get to it, Mr. Kent. And then, surely, there's more Mr. Harper and his salesman can do, ethically, with asbestos...

Brian Topp is running for leader of the New Democratic Party