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Election canvassers face nudity, lame jokes and offers of alcohol-CBC – OCT 16,15-YAHOONEWS
Canvassing door-to-door for a political candidate can be difficult at the best of times."Sometimes it can be discouraging, as obviously not everyone agrees with your viewpoint and sometimes you'll have days where you just want to throw in the towel," says Kayla Tiller, 19, a canvasser for the Conservatives and a resident of London, Ont.Depending on location, a canvasser is likely to interact with 200 to 300 people per shift. And the more doors knocked on, the more likely a canvasser is to encounter something or someone unusual."I've had friends who have had people answer doors entirely in the nude. I personally haven't had that yet, but I've had many people in their underwear," says Tiller. "It's always interesting seeing people in their home environments."Jason Goncalves, 30, also a resident of London and a canvasser for the Liberals, has dealt with his fair share of unexpected situations."I remember an elderly women in North London. She was lukewarm on talking to us at first, until we brought up policy. She asked several questions about marijuana. Then she invited me and some other canvassers into her house for beers on a Saturday afternoon. We declined."Allison Sparling, 25, a native of Halifax who is canvassing for the NDP in the downtown Toronto riding of Spadina-Fort York, has faced similar situations."Quite a few people have come to the door stoned. Sometimes they ask me about my hair, which is red. They're like, 'Did you do it for the federal election?'"For the record, Sparling's hair is "naturally red.""Once a woman leaped out of her apartment and started canvassing with us. We made it to three or four apartments before she realized she was in her pyjamas."Sparling has also faced her fair share of sexism and lame jokes. "'Who ordered strippers?' Yeah, I've got that more than once."A canvasser is never daunted-Despite the bizarre and sometimes unsettling encounters, all three canvassers interviewed by CBC News remain upbeat and energetic."I canvass because I want to see a better Canada," says Goncalves. "You only really get an odd situation every three or four times out of a hundred or so," he adds, laughing.Sparling echoes the sentiment."I love connecting with people," she says. "It's a great way to better know your community." Tiller feels the same way. "There's almost always someone at the end of a canvassing session that lifts your spirits when they tell you you're doing something that's very important," she says."I have a great respect for political canvassers now, regardless of if they share the same views as me or not. It's not an easy task."
Parties target each others' ridings as election campaign nears an end-The Canadian PressBy The Canadian Press | The Canadian Press – OCT 16,15-YAHOONEWS
OTTAWA –€” With only a handful of campaigning days left in the election, the three major party leaders are largely spending the day targeting their opponents' ridings.NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said Thursday that "the only way to defeat or replace Stephen Harper next Monday is to win the Conservative ridings."That's why Conservative ridings were his focus Thursday and that's why they will continue to be today, he said.Mulcair starts his day in Lac-Megantic, where he will likely attack the Conservatives' record on rail safety. The town was the site of explosions in 2013 that killed 47 people when a train carrying crude oil derailed and caught fire.The NDP leader then takes his campaign to Edmonton Centre, which the Conservatives have held since 2006, for an evening rally. He'll also meet with Alberta Premier Rachel Notley.Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau spends his day in the so-called 905 region that surrounds Toronto. The suburbs are an important battle ground, largely between the Conservatives and Liberals, as they are home to many swing ridings. In the 2011 election the Conservatives took many of those seats away from the Liberals, who are hoping to win them back.Trudeau hits Mississauga East-Cooksville, Brampton North and Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill, which are all new ridings but ones in which a Conservative incumbent is running.He finishes his day in the riding of Markham-Unionville, which has been held for years by Liberal John McCallum, but he is running this time in the new riding of Markham-Thornhill.Conservative Leader Stephen Harper heads into NDP territory in Quebec City. The Conservatives hold four ridings south of the provincial capital, but are aiming to win back some more support in the region. In 2008, the Conservatives took almost all the seats in and around Quebec City.Though raising their seat count in Quebec has been a goal for the part since the start of the campaign, some say it's been given new life specifically because of the issue of niqabs at citizenship ceremonies — both the NDP and Liberals oppose the Tories on this front, but the Conservative position has proven popular in Quebec.Harper will also visit Fredericton, N.B., in the early evening to deliver campaign remarks.Green party Leader Elizabeth May will kick off the final weekend of the campaign with a three-day bus tour of Vancouver Island. The tour begins today in Sidney and will end at the Victoria Conference Centre on Sunday afternoon.Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe will make campaign stops today in Gatineau, Ville-Marie and Roberval.
CEO cold sweats: election suspense leaves some business leaders jittery-The Canadian PressBy Alexandra Posadzki and Lauren Krugel, The Canadian Press | The Canadian Press – Thu, 15 Oct, 2015
The prospect of a change in government has at least one oilpatch CEO spooked.Grant Fagerheim, the chief executive of Calgary-based oil and gas producer Whitecap Resources Inc. (TSX:WCP), told an energy conference in Calgary this week that he's "very concerned" about the possibility that Canadians will elect another Prime Minister Trudeau in Monday's election.The oilpatch has already had to adjust to higher corporate taxes following the NDP's historic win in Alberta in May, and may have to cope with more changes following the provincial government's review of royalty rates and climate change policy."A federal government change would be another adaptation that we would have to make," Fagerheim said during the Energy Roundtable on Wednesday.The national energy program introduced in 1980 by the late former prime minister Pierre Trudeau — the Liberal leader's father — is still a sore spot in some quarters of Alberta.At an event in Calgary three years ago — a day after announcing his bid for the Liberal leadership — Trudeau made a point of disavowing that policy, which has been derided as a federal grab of Alberta's resource wealth."I think that Justin, if he were to get into power, hopefully will have learned from what took place in the '80s in Canada, but we'll have to see," Fagerheim said, later telling reporters that it took 15 years for the oilpatch to recover from the program.Fagerheim's comments reflect some of the nail-biting among members of Canada's business community heading into the election.Earlier this month, Blackberry (TSX:BB) CEO John Chen said the current government has been "very helpful" to the tech company and that he would prefer the "status quo.""Stephen Harper, (International Trade) Minister (Ed) Fast, (Industry) Minister (James) Moore — especially those two ministers — have just been tremendously helpful to try and re-establish our brand," said Chen, who himself is an American and not eligible to vote."I wouldn't want to change it now that I have all these relationships."Despite these concerns, portfolio managers say stock markets are unlikely to be affected by the outcome of the election.Gareth Watson, vice-president of investment management and research at Richardson GMP Ltd., says his historical analysis yielded virtually no relationship between the federal election and movements in the Toronto stock market and the loonie over the past three-and-a-half decades. That's in contrast to Quebec's referendums in 1980 and 1995, which were both followed by a "relief rally" on the markets, said Watson."Markets care if you want to break up the country," said Watson. "They don't really care who leads the country."However, Watson added one caveat: the historical data only shows market reaction to Liberal and Conservative leadership."We don't know what the response would be to an NDP government, namely because it's never happened before," said Watson."And my take on that is that the response would likely be negative," he said, calling the party's promise to hike corporate taxes and its opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership "not necessarily market-friendly."Colin Cieszynski, chief market strategist at CMC Markets Canada, said market reaction is likely to be muted for a number of reasons, including the fact that the differences between the parties on various issues are not that large.There is also the likelihood of a minority government."If you elected a minority government by any party, they're only going to be able to do so much — and the industry would recognize that fairly quickly," Cieszynski said."I think the biggest impact would be if the Liberals or the NDP somehow managed to win a majority, then you could see a bit of an impact to the market while people are waiting to see what policy directions they might take."Follow @alexposadzki and @LaurenKrugel on Twitter.
Is it the economy, stupid? Canadians think so as they head to polls-Canada holds a tightly contested national election on Monday in which recent economic woes threaten to oust the longstanding Conservative government.Christian Science MonitorBy Dylan C. Robertson | OCT 16,15-YAHOONEWS
André Larose had a somber birthday party this week, as the laid-off truck driver pondered the future of Canada just ahead of Monday's national election.“I'm worried about the economy, about our future,” Mr. Larose says, glancing at his grandchildren as they ate birthday cake.After entering a mild recession earlier this year, uncertainty pervades Canada, including here in Nepean, a middle-class suburb west of Ottawa's Parliament Hill.Recommended: How about this Canada quiz, eh? It's a significant shift for a country that deftly weathered the 2008 global financial crisis but has seen its confidence rattled by falling oil prices and weak exports. For nearly a decade, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has positioned himself as a steady economic hand, but his Conservative party's recent message of restraint has even his supporters considering a reorientation of national fiscal priorities – and has contributed to one of Canada's most tightly contested races in recent history."There's been a great deal of economic anxiety that's shaped the perspective of voters in this campaign," says Shachi Kurl, senior vice-president with the Angus Reid Institute, a non-partisan polling firm.A SUDDEN CRASH-Canada's heavily regulated banking sector emerged from the 2008 global crash relatively unscathed, but its export-based economy has struggled with lower demand abroad.The economy pivoted from manufacturing toward Alberta's oil sands, where high commodity prices bankrolled infrastructure projects from Quebec to British Columbia. For years, thousands of Canadians from poorer provinces flew in for lucrative three-week shifts. The area grew so fast that understaffed fast-food restaurants were offering salaries that outpaced office jobs in Toronto.But it all crashed last year, when an oversupply saw the global price of oil plunge, sending shockwaves throughout the Canadian economy.In July, the Bank of Canada cut its benchmark interest rate for the second time this year, after finding the economy had contracted in the first two quarters of 2015. The Canadian dollar's US exchange rate has fallen from parity a year ago to just 75.8 cents in August. But exports haven't picked up, and manufacturers are hesitant to stake out large projects.That's helped to create the country's first three-horse race in recent memory.DISTINCT CHOICES-Larose, like many others, has thrown his support to the socialist New Democrats, who emerged from decades of being a distant third-place choice to leading the polls until last month. He says he's tired of reading headlines in which another big-box store has laid off hundreds of workers, including some at the shopping plaza around the corner.“The rich keep getting richer, while nobody can find a job anymore,” Larose says. “The government's made it worse.”But on the street behind Larose's house, landscaping entrepreneur John Poirier says Harper's Conservative government is the best choice to deal with a global downturn. He's not optimistic about the economy, but he blames external forces.“Taxes are too high, especially for business owners,” says Mr. Poirier, a former soldier whose lawn sports a big blue sign supporting the Conservatives.He argues that the government needs to cut civil service jobs, so the private sector can hire talented workers who currently toil in unnecessary social programs.Many Conservative supporters in Nepean say they're impressed with Harper's balanced budget. They like the prime minister's tax breaks for parents and seniors, while some mention income-splitting, which allows individuals to attribute half their income to their spouse, lowering their overall tax bill.LIBERALS PLEDGE TO HEAD FOR THE RED-But those tax breaks annoy Monica Peck, whose front lawn features a red Liberal sign.“Harper has cut outreach to veterans, Aboriginal programs. This is spending we need. He did these things to balance the budget, when we need a plan to stimulate the economy,” she says.The centrist Liberal party's polling numbers had dipped to third place since the August election call. But the party pushed ahead of its two rivals last month when it pledged to run three years of deficits to stimulate the economy. The Conservatives and even the left-wing New Democrats have both pledged balanced budgets, and both are starting to slide in the polls.The Liberals now lead, with 36.5 percent support, while the Conservatives net 30.6 percent and the New Democrats trail with 23.5 percent, according to Nanos Research.Ms. Kurl says the Liberals' rise is likely not a coincidence. Last month, her firm found that 73 percent of Canadians preferred the government go into deficit instead of balancing the books.“This was a bit of a surprise to me because Canadians have been, at least in the last two decades, on such … a mantra of 'We have to balance the budget,'” she says. “What's remarkable is even the Conservative base on this issue is split.”AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE-Kurl says polls show significant generational divides on the economy. At the top is an older, secure generation that wants low taxes to live off their savings. At the bottom is a low-wage younger generation living paycheck to paycheck. In between are comfortable middle-class families, who nonetheless lack confidence about the future."They're incredibly worried about job security," she says. "You see people assessing how they're feeling about things based on, 'Am I able to make ends meet? Am I feeling optimistic or pessimistic about my future?'"For Larose and his family, those are more than just feelings."We need a change," he says. "Things just aren't working."
Why debate on defence policy has been AWOL in this federal election campaign-By Steve Mertl | Canada Politics – OCT 16,15-YAHOONEWS
Kim Campbell, destined to lead the Progressive Conservatives to oblivion in 1993, famously said a 47-day election campaign was not the time to discuss complex issues.Despite outraged reaction at the time, she was right. And even with the current campaign stretched to 78 days, strategies built around sound bites and 140-character tweets don’t lend themselves to deep examinations of party policy.As the long campaign reaches its climax Monday, it’s clear important issues got short shrift; for instance poverty, especially in aboriginal communities, or criminal justice, which Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have remade during their tenure.Defence has also been AWOL on the stump. That’s surprising, considering security has been a major campaign theme for the Harper Tories and Canada is involved in a war in the Middle East while bolstering allies in Europe against Russian expansionism.“I’m not really surprised because even with the monster election writ period that we’ve had, there’s a lot of ground that parties need to cover,” Charles Davies, a research fellow at the Conference of Defence Associations Institute, said in an interview with Yahoo Canada. “Defence is a high-investment, low-return thing for them to try and go after in an election campaign.”To be fair, defence rarely gets a substantial airing. In the sixties, Tory John Diefenbaker and Liberal Lester Pearson debated Canada’s role in stationing troops in Europe to help forestall a Soviet invasion. The 1984 campaign that put Brian Mulroney’s PCs in power also looked at Canada’s defence stance in relation to the Cold War.The faltering Liberals tried to sideswipe Harper during their losing 2006 campaign with an attack ad suggesting the Conservatives’ promise to increase the military’s presence in Canadian cities meant their would be “soldiers with guns” in the streets. It backfired.The parties’ platforms do of course contain specific proposals affecting defence strategy and procurement.But it remains largely absent from public discussion except for scoring points on issues such as delays in replacing the CF-18 Hornet fighter and an ambitious program to build new navy and coast guard ships.The Conservatives, not surprisingly, have stood on their record, claiming to have strengthened the military and promising to spend more if re-elected, including a boost to Canada’s special forces to counter threats such as Islamist terrorism.After stiff reductions following the 2008-09 financial crisis, the current budget stands at more than $20 billion. It’s rising at a rate of two per cent a year and the Conservatives have promised to increase that to three per cent by 2017-18, a little higher than the projected inflation rate.Related content:NDP defence policy pledges stable funding, return to No. 1 peacekeeping status-Canada Liberal leader Trudeau says would scrap F-35 program-Canada set to scale back big plan for navy ships, go over budget-Spending is still only about half of NATO’s preferred standard of two per cent of gross domestic product, though only a handful of alliance members meet that standard.The Liberals pledge, among other things, to continue the Tories’ promised funding increases, return Canada to a more prominent UN peacekeeping role and to clean up the military procurement process.NDP promise to make Canada top peacekeeperThe New Democrats, who until fairly recently were committed to pulling Canada out of NATO, promise to make Canada the No. 1 peacekeeper while modernizing the armed forces and making them more “agile,” a word the Liberals use, too. The NDP’s NATO withdrawal fell off the table under late leader Jack Layton.All three parties have pledged to maintain the government’s existing defence budget allocations. The Liberals and New Democrats are promising major defence policy reviews – the NDP a full-blown white paper, the last of which came out in 1994 to help set policy after the collapse of the Soviet Union.Governments have done reviews on specific aspects of policy, such as procurement, which resulted in changes. The Conservatives also produced a blueprint in 2013 known as the Canada First Defence Strategy (CFDS) that purports to chart the evolution of the Canadian Armed Forces’ mission and capabilities.The Conference of Defence Associations, an advocacy group that supports the CDA Institute, put a number of issues to the parties before the election call, including a need to reset the CFDS and for a long-term approach to defence and security that transcends the normal election cycle.“We’ve engaged all political parties to at least put their positions forward with regards to a new defence policy,” CDA executive director Tony Battista told Yahoo Canada.Last month, the CDA Institute posted a detailed analysis by Davies advising all parties to take long-term approach to defence planning.The challenge is that defence policy is not conducive to the four-year cyclical focus of democratic societies. Defence policy is something that you’re looking at a minimum of two decades to plan it properly.—KCDA executive director Tony Battista-“The time horizons involved in defence policy and defence capability management are such that, unlike most other policy areas, the ministers of any given government are their stewards, not their owners,” Davies wrote.“The decisions they make typically have little strategic impact today but major impact on future governments.”“The challenge is that defence policy is not conducive to the four-year cyclical focus of democratic societies,” Battista explained. “Defence policy is something that you’re looking at a minimum of two decades to plan it properly.”But it’s all too tempting to take a short-term approach when you can use things like problems with the proposed F-35 purchase to paint the incumbents as incompetent, said David McDonough, the CDA Institute’s research manager and senior editor.Election platforms are about what your party plans to do if elected and, McDonough said, all three major contenders have provided a mixture of short- and long-term proposals.The Tories pledge to carry on with their program, whatever its merits, while the challengers promise comprehensive reviews.Policy goals may skew objective defence review-The problem is the Liberals and NDP have set specific policy goals that will make an objective review difficult because they essentially prejudge the result, McDonough said.The Liberals, for instance, might find their defence review hamstrung if they’ve already decided an improved version of the CF-18, known as the Super Hornet, is preferable to the increasingly costly, stealth-capable F-35, which is better suited to expeditionary tasks abroad than to home air defence.“You basically constrain what sort of policy you have,” said McDonough.The same goes for the NDP’s promise to make Canada the world’s top peacekeeper, which will influence the direction of any white paper, Davies said.“They also have a very unrealistic interest in peacekeeping operations as a global security solution for the future,” he added.The Pearsonian model of peacekeeping, with blue berets policing a ceasefire line, that the NDP and Liberals cherish may be defunct. It’s been abandoned for a more muscular peacemaking approach seen in recent African conflicts, not always under UN auspices.“There aren’t too many places in the world where there are two or three belligerents who have agreed to a peace and therefore you introduce a peacekeeping force,” Battista said.David Perry, senior analyst with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, said it’s unrealistic to expect the parties not to set out some policy goal and simply promise a review.“As part of their platforms they’re going to stake out some positions,” he said. “To greater or lesser degrees by putting it down specifically in your platform before you do that, you’re either excluding some options or you’re shaping the review in some way or another.“That’s inevitable but at the same time I don’t think that detracts from the overall value and the point of doing the review to try and more clearly map out the full set of activities.”Davies said he sees little in the NDP’s platform that suggests they understand the link between defence and foreign and security policies. Any defence review needs to start with a document that thinks through Canada’s security environment, either prepared by experts within National Defence or those from the academic community or think tanks.Party platforms necessarily can’t reach that level of detail but should reflect that those who prepared the platform have given it that kind of thought, Davies said.“I don’t see any evidence of that level of thinking,” he said, referring to the NDP.Defence policy development requires two things: First decide what the nation wants to do, then look at the capabilities needed to do it. That leads into procurement policies, which is where governments often stumble.Bolstering defence costs money. Campaigning parties are unwilling try to sell voters on policies that won’t bear fruit for 20 years. And in times of austerity defence is an easy target for spending cuts in a comparatively safe country like Canada because there’s almost no voter backlash.Parties need to balance commitments with capabilitiesThe parties have also not done a good job of balancing capabilities with commitments, the analysts said.They may agree on the current defence-funding envelope, said Perry, but “their appetite exceeds the capacity of that envelope to sustain [it], especially with the machinery of government we have, which is hugely inefficient at turning bucks into bang.”Another key element of Davies’ September analysis was the value of a consensus on long-term defence policy that crosses the political divide. It’s not impossible for the three main parties to reach such a consensus, he said.“If you look at Australia, they have parties of the left and parties of the right who see Australia differently,” he said. “Now they live in a really nasty neighbourhood so with the attitude we either hang together or hang separately much more than we do. So that has concentrated their minds a lot more than we would be.”Canada may have been spared that level of immediacy because its security is largely guaranteed by its powerful neighbour to the south. Still, Canadians can benefit from finding common ground.Perry argued that there already is some level of consensus.“There’s actually a fair amount of agreement about the kind of broad brush of defence policy,” he said.Witness the parties’ agreement on increasing defence spending over the next four years, said Perry. The Conservatives’ opponents also appear to support the incumbents’ naval ship-building program, he said. And while they challenge the F-35 program, the Liberals and Conservatives differ little on the overall mission for a new fighter – the ability to execute overseas missions that require stealth capability is the big sticking point.“There’s not a total disagreement, at least at face value, about how they view how that particular defence asset should be used,” he said.Then there’s the Canada First Defence Strategy. The CDA’s proposals to the parties included the need for a reset of the CFDS, Battista said.Defence strategy broad enough to sustain revisions-However, Perry said policy document is so broad – the world is a dangerous place; Canada will do something to defend Canada, North America and enhance international security – that revisions will be fairly general.“If you want to stay at that level of abstraction there’s not that much needs to change,” he said.Davies agreed its themes will likely crop up in different guises.“The Liberal and NDP platforms imply quite a different type of defence policy document,” he said. “But the strategic imperatives they face will undoubtedly force them to the same fundamental priorities as the CFDS states, which in turn are the same priorities most Canadian defence policy statements have identified for decades.”The Conservatives apparently had a revised CFDS on the cabinet table for approval when the election was called, said Perry. It’s not clear what changes were proposed but a new Tory government might not feel compelled to follow through.What does need to be tweaked, he said, is the capability aspect. Some programs are no longer considered affordable and planned acquisitions such as a close-combat vehicle and the multi-mission fighter have been either postponed or cancelled.Some significant revisions will be needed if future defence policy aspires to be “an honest matching of ends and means,” said Perry.No matter who emerges with the reins of power on Monday night, no substantive changes in defence policy should be expected for at least a year.The Liberals, who’ve been out of power for almost a decade, and the NDP, who’ve never formed government, would need some time to find their feet, adapting to new rules on accountability and administration and reviewing the classified reports and financial material integral to any substantive defence review.Even a re-elected Conservative government will need time to get its bearings, Perry pointed out. Of Harper’s cabinet, there are four members of his foreign affairs and defence committee, five from the key planning and priorities committee and four who sit on the operations committee who are either not running or in danger of losing their seats.“There will be a new government regardless of which party wins the election ,” said Perry. “Even if it is the Conservatives re-elected it will be a very different cabinet.”
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Election canvassers face nudity, lame jokes and offers of alcohol-CBC – OCT 16,15-YAHOONEWS
Canvassing door-to-door for a political candidate can be difficult at the best of times."Sometimes it can be discouraging, as obviously not everyone agrees with your viewpoint and sometimes you'll have days where you just want to throw in the towel," says Kayla Tiller, 19, a canvasser for the Conservatives and a resident of London, Ont.Depending on location, a canvasser is likely to interact with 200 to 300 people per shift. And the more doors knocked on, the more likely a canvasser is to encounter something or someone unusual."I've had friends who have had people answer doors entirely in the nude. I personally haven't had that yet, but I've had many people in their underwear," says Tiller. "It's always interesting seeing people in their home environments."Jason Goncalves, 30, also a resident of London and a canvasser for the Liberals, has dealt with his fair share of unexpected situations."I remember an elderly women in North London. She was lukewarm on talking to us at first, until we brought up policy. She asked several questions about marijuana. Then she invited me and some other canvassers into her house for beers on a Saturday afternoon. We declined."Allison Sparling, 25, a native of Halifax who is canvassing for the NDP in the downtown Toronto riding of Spadina-Fort York, has faced similar situations."Quite a few people have come to the door stoned. Sometimes they ask me about my hair, which is red. They're like, 'Did you do it for the federal election?'"For the record, Sparling's hair is "naturally red.""Once a woman leaped out of her apartment and started canvassing with us. We made it to three or four apartments before she realized she was in her pyjamas."Sparling has also faced her fair share of sexism and lame jokes. "'Who ordered strippers?' Yeah, I've got that more than once."A canvasser is never daunted-Despite the bizarre and sometimes unsettling encounters, all three canvassers interviewed by CBC News remain upbeat and energetic."I canvass because I want to see a better Canada," says Goncalves. "You only really get an odd situation every three or four times out of a hundred or so," he adds, laughing.Sparling echoes the sentiment."I love connecting with people," she says. "It's a great way to better know your community." Tiller feels the same way. "There's almost always someone at the end of a canvassing session that lifts your spirits when they tell you you're doing something that's very important," she says."I have a great respect for political canvassers now, regardless of if they share the same views as me or not. It's not an easy task."
Parties target each others' ridings as election campaign nears an end-The Canadian PressBy The Canadian Press | The Canadian Press – OCT 16,15-YAHOONEWS
OTTAWA –€” With only a handful of campaigning days left in the election, the three major party leaders are largely spending the day targeting their opponents' ridings.NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said Thursday that "the only way to defeat or replace Stephen Harper next Monday is to win the Conservative ridings."That's why Conservative ridings were his focus Thursday and that's why they will continue to be today, he said.Mulcair starts his day in Lac-Megantic, where he will likely attack the Conservatives' record on rail safety. The town was the site of explosions in 2013 that killed 47 people when a train carrying crude oil derailed and caught fire.The NDP leader then takes his campaign to Edmonton Centre, which the Conservatives have held since 2006, for an evening rally. He'll also meet with Alberta Premier Rachel Notley.Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau spends his day in the so-called 905 region that surrounds Toronto. The suburbs are an important battle ground, largely between the Conservatives and Liberals, as they are home to many swing ridings. In the 2011 election the Conservatives took many of those seats away from the Liberals, who are hoping to win them back.Trudeau hits Mississauga East-Cooksville, Brampton North and Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill, which are all new ridings but ones in which a Conservative incumbent is running.He finishes his day in the riding of Markham-Unionville, which has been held for years by Liberal John McCallum, but he is running this time in the new riding of Markham-Thornhill.Conservative Leader Stephen Harper heads into NDP territory in Quebec City. The Conservatives hold four ridings south of the provincial capital, but are aiming to win back some more support in the region. In 2008, the Conservatives took almost all the seats in and around Quebec City.Though raising their seat count in Quebec has been a goal for the part since the start of the campaign, some say it's been given new life specifically because of the issue of niqabs at citizenship ceremonies — both the NDP and Liberals oppose the Tories on this front, but the Conservative position has proven popular in Quebec.Harper will also visit Fredericton, N.B., in the early evening to deliver campaign remarks.Green party Leader Elizabeth May will kick off the final weekend of the campaign with a three-day bus tour of Vancouver Island. The tour begins today in Sidney and will end at the Victoria Conference Centre on Sunday afternoon.Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe will make campaign stops today in Gatineau, Ville-Marie and Roberval.
CEO cold sweats: election suspense leaves some business leaders jittery-The Canadian PressBy Alexandra Posadzki and Lauren Krugel, The Canadian Press | The Canadian Press – Thu, 15 Oct, 2015
The prospect of a change in government has at least one oilpatch CEO spooked.Grant Fagerheim, the chief executive of Calgary-based oil and gas producer Whitecap Resources Inc. (TSX:WCP), told an energy conference in Calgary this week that he's "very concerned" about the possibility that Canadians will elect another Prime Minister Trudeau in Monday's election.The oilpatch has already had to adjust to higher corporate taxes following the NDP's historic win in Alberta in May, and may have to cope with more changes following the provincial government's review of royalty rates and climate change policy."A federal government change would be another adaptation that we would have to make," Fagerheim said during the Energy Roundtable on Wednesday.The national energy program introduced in 1980 by the late former prime minister Pierre Trudeau — the Liberal leader's father — is still a sore spot in some quarters of Alberta.At an event in Calgary three years ago — a day after announcing his bid for the Liberal leadership — Trudeau made a point of disavowing that policy, which has been derided as a federal grab of Alberta's resource wealth."I think that Justin, if he were to get into power, hopefully will have learned from what took place in the '80s in Canada, but we'll have to see," Fagerheim said, later telling reporters that it took 15 years for the oilpatch to recover from the program.Fagerheim's comments reflect some of the nail-biting among members of Canada's business community heading into the election.Earlier this month, Blackberry (TSX:BB) CEO John Chen said the current government has been "very helpful" to the tech company and that he would prefer the "status quo.""Stephen Harper, (International Trade) Minister (Ed) Fast, (Industry) Minister (James) Moore — especially those two ministers — have just been tremendously helpful to try and re-establish our brand," said Chen, who himself is an American and not eligible to vote."I wouldn't want to change it now that I have all these relationships."Despite these concerns, portfolio managers say stock markets are unlikely to be affected by the outcome of the election.Gareth Watson, vice-president of investment management and research at Richardson GMP Ltd., says his historical analysis yielded virtually no relationship between the federal election and movements in the Toronto stock market and the loonie over the past three-and-a-half decades. That's in contrast to Quebec's referendums in 1980 and 1995, which were both followed by a "relief rally" on the markets, said Watson."Markets care if you want to break up the country," said Watson. "They don't really care who leads the country."However, Watson added one caveat: the historical data only shows market reaction to Liberal and Conservative leadership."We don't know what the response would be to an NDP government, namely because it's never happened before," said Watson."And my take on that is that the response would likely be negative," he said, calling the party's promise to hike corporate taxes and its opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership "not necessarily market-friendly."Colin Cieszynski, chief market strategist at CMC Markets Canada, said market reaction is likely to be muted for a number of reasons, including the fact that the differences between the parties on various issues are not that large.There is also the likelihood of a minority government."If you elected a minority government by any party, they're only going to be able to do so much — and the industry would recognize that fairly quickly," Cieszynski said."I think the biggest impact would be if the Liberals or the NDP somehow managed to win a majority, then you could see a bit of an impact to the market while people are waiting to see what policy directions they might take."Follow @alexposadzki and @LaurenKrugel on Twitter.
Is it the economy, stupid? Canadians think so as they head to polls-Canada holds a tightly contested national election on Monday in which recent economic woes threaten to oust the longstanding Conservative government.Christian Science MonitorBy Dylan C. Robertson | OCT 16,15-YAHOONEWS
André Larose had a somber birthday party this week, as the laid-off truck driver pondered the future of Canada just ahead of Monday's national election.“I'm worried about the economy, about our future,” Mr. Larose says, glancing at his grandchildren as they ate birthday cake.After entering a mild recession earlier this year, uncertainty pervades Canada, including here in Nepean, a middle-class suburb west of Ottawa's Parliament Hill.Recommended: How about this Canada quiz, eh? It's a significant shift for a country that deftly weathered the 2008 global financial crisis but has seen its confidence rattled by falling oil prices and weak exports. For nearly a decade, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has positioned himself as a steady economic hand, but his Conservative party's recent message of restraint has even his supporters considering a reorientation of national fiscal priorities – and has contributed to one of Canada's most tightly contested races in recent history."There's been a great deal of economic anxiety that's shaped the perspective of voters in this campaign," says Shachi Kurl, senior vice-president with the Angus Reid Institute, a non-partisan polling firm.A SUDDEN CRASH-Canada's heavily regulated banking sector emerged from the 2008 global crash relatively unscathed, but its export-based economy has struggled with lower demand abroad.The economy pivoted from manufacturing toward Alberta's oil sands, where high commodity prices bankrolled infrastructure projects from Quebec to British Columbia. For years, thousands of Canadians from poorer provinces flew in for lucrative three-week shifts. The area grew so fast that understaffed fast-food restaurants were offering salaries that outpaced office jobs in Toronto.But it all crashed last year, when an oversupply saw the global price of oil plunge, sending shockwaves throughout the Canadian economy.In July, the Bank of Canada cut its benchmark interest rate for the second time this year, after finding the economy had contracted in the first two quarters of 2015. The Canadian dollar's US exchange rate has fallen from parity a year ago to just 75.8 cents in August. But exports haven't picked up, and manufacturers are hesitant to stake out large projects.That's helped to create the country's first three-horse race in recent memory.DISTINCT CHOICES-Larose, like many others, has thrown his support to the socialist New Democrats, who emerged from decades of being a distant third-place choice to leading the polls until last month. He says he's tired of reading headlines in which another big-box store has laid off hundreds of workers, including some at the shopping plaza around the corner.“The rich keep getting richer, while nobody can find a job anymore,” Larose says. “The government's made it worse.”But on the street behind Larose's house, landscaping entrepreneur John Poirier says Harper's Conservative government is the best choice to deal with a global downturn. He's not optimistic about the economy, but he blames external forces.“Taxes are too high, especially for business owners,” says Mr. Poirier, a former soldier whose lawn sports a big blue sign supporting the Conservatives.He argues that the government needs to cut civil service jobs, so the private sector can hire talented workers who currently toil in unnecessary social programs.Many Conservative supporters in Nepean say they're impressed with Harper's balanced budget. They like the prime minister's tax breaks for parents and seniors, while some mention income-splitting, which allows individuals to attribute half their income to their spouse, lowering their overall tax bill.LIBERALS PLEDGE TO HEAD FOR THE RED-But those tax breaks annoy Monica Peck, whose front lawn features a red Liberal sign.“Harper has cut outreach to veterans, Aboriginal programs. This is spending we need. He did these things to balance the budget, when we need a plan to stimulate the economy,” she says.The centrist Liberal party's polling numbers had dipped to third place since the August election call. But the party pushed ahead of its two rivals last month when it pledged to run three years of deficits to stimulate the economy. The Conservatives and even the left-wing New Democrats have both pledged balanced budgets, and both are starting to slide in the polls.The Liberals now lead, with 36.5 percent support, while the Conservatives net 30.6 percent and the New Democrats trail with 23.5 percent, according to Nanos Research.Ms. Kurl says the Liberals' rise is likely not a coincidence. Last month, her firm found that 73 percent of Canadians preferred the government go into deficit instead of balancing the books.“This was a bit of a surprise to me because Canadians have been, at least in the last two decades, on such … a mantra of 'We have to balance the budget,'” she says. “What's remarkable is even the Conservative base on this issue is split.”AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE-Kurl says polls show significant generational divides on the economy. At the top is an older, secure generation that wants low taxes to live off their savings. At the bottom is a low-wage younger generation living paycheck to paycheck. In between are comfortable middle-class families, who nonetheless lack confidence about the future."They're incredibly worried about job security," she says. "You see people assessing how they're feeling about things based on, 'Am I able to make ends meet? Am I feeling optimistic or pessimistic about my future?'"For Larose and his family, those are more than just feelings."We need a change," he says. "Things just aren't working."
Why debate on defence policy has been AWOL in this federal election campaign-By Steve Mertl | Canada Politics – OCT 16,15-YAHOONEWS
Kim Campbell, destined to lead the Progressive Conservatives to oblivion in 1993, famously said a 47-day election campaign was not the time to discuss complex issues.Despite outraged reaction at the time, she was right. And even with the current campaign stretched to 78 days, strategies built around sound bites and 140-character tweets don’t lend themselves to deep examinations of party policy.As the long campaign reaches its climax Monday, it’s clear important issues got short shrift; for instance poverty, especially in aboriginal communities, or criminal justice, which Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have remade during their tenure.Defence has also been AWOL on the stump. That’s surprising, considering security has been a major campaign theme for the Harper Tories and Canada is involved in a war in the Middle East while bolstering allies in Europe against Russian expansionism.“I’m not really surprised because even with the monster election writ period that we’ve had, there’s a lot of ground that parties need to cover,” Charles Davies, a research fellow at the Conference of Defence Associations Institute, said in an interview with Yahoo Canada. “Defence is a high-investment, low-return thing for them to try and go after in an election campaign.”To be fair, defence rarely gets a substantial airing. In the sixties, Tory John Diefenbaker and Liberal Lester Pearson debated Canada’s role in stationing troops in Europe to help forestall a Soviet invasion. The 1984 campaign that put Brian Mulroney’s PCs in power also looked at Canada’s defence stance in relation to the Cold War.The faltering Liberals tried to sideswipe Harper during their losing 2006 campaign with an attack ad suggesting the Conservatives’ promise to increase the military’s presence in Canadian cities meant their would be “soldiers with guns” in the streets. It backfired.The parties’ platforms do of course contain specific proposals affecting defence strategy and procurement.But it remains largely absent from public discussion except for scoring points on issues such as delays in replacing the CF-18 Hornet fighter and an ambitious program to build new navy and coast guard ships.The Conservatives, not surprisingly, have stood on their record, claiming to have strengthened the military and promising to spend more if re-elected, including a boost to Canada’s special forces to counter threats such as Islamist terrorism.After stiff reductions following the 2008-09 financial crisis, the current budget stands at more than $20 billion. It’s rising at a rate of two per cent a year and the Conservatives have promised to increase that to three per cent by 2017-18, a little higher than the projected inflation rate.Related content:NDP defence policy pledges stable funding, return to No. 1 peacekeeping status-Canada Liberal leader Trudeau says would scrap F-35 program-Canada set to scale back big plan for navy ships, go over budget-Spending is still only about half of NATO’s preferred standard of two per cent of gross domestic product, though only a handful of alliance members meet that standard.The Liberals pledge, among other things, to continue the Tories’ promised funding increases, return Canada to a more prominent UN peacekeeping role and to clean up the military procurement process.NDP promise to make Canada top peacekeeperThe New Democrats, who until fairly recently were committed to pulling Canada out of NATO, promise to make Canada the No. 1 peacekeeper while modernizing the armed forces and making them more “agile,” a word the Liberals use, too. The NDP’s NATO withdrawal fell off the table under late leader Jack Layton.All three parties have pledged to maintain the government’s existing defence budget allocations. The Liberals and New Democrats are promising major defence policy reviews – the NDP a full-blown white paper, the last of which came out in 1994 to help set policy after the collapse of the Soviet Union.Governments have done reviews on specific aspects of policy, such as procurement, which resulted in changes. The Conservatives also produced a blueprint in 2013 known as the Canada First Defence Strategy (CFDS) that purports to chart the evolution of the Canadian Armed Forces’ mission and capabilities.The Conference of Defence Associations, an advocacy group that supports the CDA Institute, put a number of issues to the parties before the election call, including a need to reset the CFDS and for a long-term approach to defence and security that transcends the normal election cycle.“We’ve engaged all political parties to at least put their positions forward with regards to a new defence policy,” CDA executive director Tony Battista told Yahoo Canada.Last month, the CDA Institute posted a detailed analysis by Davies advising all parties to take long-term approach to defence planning.The challenge is that defence policy is not conducive to the four-year cyclical focus of democratic societies. Defence policy is something that you’re looking at a minimum of two decades to plan it properly.—KCDA executive director Tony Battista-“The time horizons involved in defence policy and defence capability management are such that, unlike most other policy areas, the ministers of any given government are their stewards, not their owners,” Davies wrote.“The decisions they make typically have little strategic impact today but major impact on future governments.”“The challenge is that defence policy is not conducive to the four-year cyclical focus of democratic societies,” Battista explained. “Defence policy is something that you’re looking at a minimum of two decades to plan it properly.”But it’s all too tempting to take a short-term approach when you can use things like problems with the proposed F-35 purchase to paint the incumbents as incompetent, said David McDonough, the CDA Institute’s research manager and senior editor.Election platforms are about what your party plans to do if elected and, McDonough said, all three major contenders have provided a mixture of short- and long-term proposals.The Tories pledge to carry on with their program, whatever its merits, while the challengers promise comprehensive reviews.Policy goals may skew objective defence review-The problem is the Liberals and NDP have set specific policy goals that will make an objective review difficult because they essentially prejudge the result, McDonough said.The Liberals, for instance, might find their defence review hamstrung if they’ve already decided an improved version of the CF-18, known as the Super Hornet, is preferable to the increasingly costly, stealth-capable F-35, which is better suited to expeditionary tasks abroad than to home air defence.“You basically constrain what sort of policy you have,” said McDonough.The same goes for the NDP’s promise to make Canada the world’s top peacekeeper, which will influence the direction of any white paper, Davies said.“They also have a very unrealistic interest in peacekeeping operations as a global security solution for the future,” he added.The Pearsonian model of peacekeeping, with blue berets policing a ceasefire line, that the NDP and Liberals cherish may be defunct. It’s been abandoned for a more muscular peacemaking approach seen in recent African conflicts, not always under UN auspices.“There aren’t too many places in the world where there are two or three belligerents who have agreed to a peace and therefore you introduce a peacekeeping force,” Battista said.David Perry, senior analyst with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, said it’s unrealistic to expect the parties not to set out some policy goal and simply promise a review.“As part of their platforms they’re going to stake out some positions,” he said. “To greater or lesser degrees by putting it down specifically in your platform before you do that, you’re either excluding some options or you’re shaping the review in some way or another.“That’s inevitable but at the same time I don’t think that detracts from the overall value and the point of doing the review to try and more clearly map out the full set of activities.”Davies said he sees little in the NDP’s platform that suggests they understand the link between defence and foreign and security policies. Any defence review needs to start with a document that thinks through Canada’s security environment, either prepared by experts within National Defence or those from the academic community or think tanks.Party platforms necessarily can’t reach that level of detail but should reflect that those who prepared the platform have given it that kind of thought, Davies said.“I don’t see any evidence of that level of thinking,” he said, referring to the NDP.Defence policy development requires two things: First decide what the nation wants to do, then look at the capabilities needed to do it. That leads into procurement policies, which is where governments often stumble.Bolstering defence costs money. Campaigning parties are unwilling try to sell voters on policies that won’t bear fruit for 20 years. And in times of austerity defence is an easy target for spending cuts in a comparatively safe country like Canada because there’s almost no voter backlash.Parties need to balance commitments with capabilitiesThe parties have also not done a good job of balancing capabilities with commitments, the analysts said.They may agree on the current defence-funding envelope, said Perry, but “their appetite exceeds the capacity of that envelope to sustain [it], especially with the machinery of government we have, which is hugely inefficient at turning bucks into bang.”Another key element of Davies’ September analysis was the value of a consensus on long-term defence policy that crosses the political divide. It’s not impossible for the three main parties to reach such a consensus, he said.“If you look at Australia, they have parties of the left and parties of the right who see Australia differently,” he said. “Now they live in a really nasty neighbourhood so with the attitude we either hang together or hang separately much more than we do. So that has concentrated their minds a lot more than we would be.”Canada may have been spared that level of immediacy because its security is largely guaranteed by its powerful neighbour to the south. Still, Canadians can benefit from finding common ground.Perry argued that there already is some level of consensus.“There’s actually a fair amount of agreement about the kind of broad brush of defence policy,” he said.Witness the parties’ agreement on increasing defence spending over the next four years, said Perry. The Conservatives’ opponents also appear to support the incumbents’ naval ship-building program, he said. And while they challenge the F-35 program, the Liberals and Conservatives differ little on the overall mission for a new fighter – the ability to execute overseas missions that require stealth capability is the big sticking point.“There’s not a total disagreement, at least at face value, about how they view how that particular defence asset should be used,” he said.Then there’s the Canada First Defence Strategy. The CDA’s proposals to the parties included the need for a reset of the CFDS, Battista said.Defence strategy broad enough to sustain revisions-However, Perry said policy document is so broad – the world is a dangerous place; Canada will do something to defend Canada, North America and enhance international security – that revisions will be fairly general.“If you want to stay at that level of abstraction there’s not that much needs to change,” he said.Davies agreed its themes will likely crop up in different guises.“The Liberal and NDP platforms imply quite a different type of defence policy document,” he said. “But the strategic imperatives they face will undoubtedly force them to the same fundamental priorities as the CFDS states, which in turn are the same priorities most Canadian defence policy statements have identified for decades.”The Conservatives apparently had a revised CFDS on the cabinet table for approval when the election was called, said Perry. It’s not clear what changes were proposed but a new Tory government might not feel compelled to follow through.What does need to be tweaked, he said, is the capability aspect. Some programs are no longer considered affordable and planned acquisitions such as a close-combat vehicle and the multi-mission fighter have been either postponed or cancelled.Some significant revisions will be needed if future defence policy aspires to be “an honest matching of ends and means,” said Perry.No matter who emerges with the reins of power on Monday night, no substantive changes in defence policy should be expected for at least a year.The Liberals, who’ve been out of power for almost a decade, and the NDP, who’ve never formed government, would need some time to find their feet, adapting to new rules on accountability and administration and reviewing the classified reports and financial material integral to any substantive defence review.Even a re-elected Conservative government will need time to get its bearings, Perry pointed out. Of Harper’s cabinet, there are four members of his foreign affairs and defence committee, five from the key planning and priorities committee and four who sit on the operations committee who are either not running or in danger of losing their seats.“There will be a new government regardless of which party wins the election ,” said Perry. “Even if it is the Conservatives re-elected it will be a very different cabinet.”
