Evening Star

In terms of the policies they implemented, how different were Romanow and Harris? This is a sincere question because I don't know the details of Romanow's government but anything I've read has suggested that he brought in similar severe cuts and neoliberal reforms. Some of Janice McKinnon's stated views sound further right than those of Ontario PCs: http://www.fcpp.org/publication.php/585

This part of Pilieci's piece especially struck me: If Internet access is crucial to so many of us and we don't think it should be left up to the corporations who own the lines, perhaps it's time to genuinely treat it like a public resource.

The Saskatchewan CCF implemented the first medicare system in the country. The Liberals implemented medicare as national policy, yes, with some pressure and support from the NDP. Seems simple enough. All three parties deserve credit for their parts but it does make sense to give the primary credit for the national policy to the government that actually had to implement it.

Aw, they probably are the most progressive govt the country's seen in a decade or two and still they haven't strayed too far from neoliberal orthodoxy with corporate tax cuts and corporate contracts. You'd prefer an all-around hard-neoliberal consensus?

What do you guys think of this piece? I don't have a clear opinion about the issue yet but he seems to make some reasonable points: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/CRTC+good+guys+Really/4182037/story.html

Sorry, I thought that's what you were implying by this: But now I see you were probably implying the opposite of what I thought.

OK, we're on the same page about this then. I'm a huge Pearson admirer btw.

This was the part I did read. Thanks for filling in the rest. I didn't think/know that that was the centrepiece of Diefenbaker's campaign though. xpost Punked's history is closer to my understanding of this. (So, obviously, it did interest the CCF!)

Come on, everyone knows that universal health care and a pension plan were of interest to the CCF/NDP.

Sure, but at least they have clear criteria that can be evaluated. I haven't seen any stats using any criteria to show that the Nordic social democracies are struggling at the moment, compared to other Western countries, or that they are unlikely to last for another couple of decades.

Topp article seems to be on the money, btw.

I read it, admittedly quickly. I didn't see anything that suggested how health care policy was responsible for Diefenbaker winning the 1957 or 1958 elections, allowing him to cancel the Avro Arrow project in 1959.

I don't get this at all. Diefenbaker was PM from 1957-1963, Pearson from 1963-1968. The Avro Arrow project was cancelled in 1959. Universal health care was implemented as national policy in 1965 by a minority Pearson government that was supported by Douglas' NDP and that was responding at least in part to the NDP's demands. The following election in 1968 was a landslide for Trudeau's Liberals, who were certainly riding Trudeau's own charisma and vision but also the successful and popular record of the previous Liberal government. In what sense did health care policy 'bring Diefenbaker to power'?

In what way?? The Nordic countries are performing extremely well by most yardsticks: http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita http://www.prosperity.com/rankings.aspx I could understand if you argued that their successful economic model might not transfer well to other countries like our own or that it comes at the cost of diversity but it seems hard to accept the assertions that they are in especially bad shape now and are guaranteed not to last another 20 years.

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/10/billionaires-2010_Stefan-Persson_XM99.html

Ha, actually, I had no idea that H&M is Swedish. Their chair, Stefan Persson, is the 13th richest person in the world.

Surely you are also familiar with Propellerhead ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propellerhead_Software ) if you share my interest in digital recording! The list I posted earlier of Sweden's major companies is pretty impressive, actually. (Although it seems that Kamprad is now #11 in the world.)

They've had more than a couple of years already though. Sweden was ruled pretty consistently by social democrats from 1932 onwards ( http://www.pitt.edu/~heinisch/ca_swed.html ), to the point that the policies of right-wing parties would still probably be more social democratic than some of the NDP's policies. Norway also introduced social democratic policies by no later than the 40s. Both countries have been enjoying strong levels of productivity and employment for a long time. They have been used as models since the 1970s at least. Norway is ranked as having the third highest PPP and the world's strongest currency ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway#Economy ). The Legatum Prosperity Index also ranks the Nordic countries highly: http://www.prosperity.com/rankings.aspx . There's no comparison with Stalinist Russia. The article was from an American business magazine, by the way.

Tbh, it seems a bit ironic that the Liberals could be accused of both alienating half the country (to the point of separatism in one case) and of "feel-good policies". (And the Chretien/Martin budgets weren't exactly "feel-good" either.)

See, going by the per-capita GDP, unemployment rates, and public finances of Nordic countries, this seems like it must be blatantly false. As it is, I find Bonam's contention a little more believable. This list isn't so bad for a small country though: http://www.transnationale.org/countries/swes.php

I think the point is that no one could say that. Even people who seem like major supporters of him seem to agree with me, who have never voted for him, that he is a fairly mediocre leader.

Still, he managed to do it, while keeping his party and base together. I mean, I'm grading on a scale where a C means basic technical competence, comprehension of the assignment, and acceptable effort. An F would require something like the Watergate scandal. Bush's second term might get a D-. I'm also grading him relative to his peers. I don't entirely disagree but deficit spending during a recession is not unjustifiable in itself. I'm sceptical of the way it was done, and we'll have to see how it plays out in the long run, but it's not an obviously failed economic policy so far.

Also oppose: Cutting CIDA funding for initiatives that include access to safe and legal abortions, increased public funding for Bible colleges. xpost So maybe this is a C?

Are we supposed to grade how effectively he has achieved what he set out to do or how good his policies are, according to our own ideological perspectives? If I were actually grading a paper, I would approach it from the former angle. I'm guessing, though, that you want a mix? So I'm leaning towards a B-, maybe a C+. It's a challenge to keep a minority government together and maintain popular support and the government has been successful with these things. They have, on balance, governed moderately and pragmatically and avoided significantly antagonizing any regions. I'm not sure how much credit they deserve for our economic strength but they have at least not done anything to damage it in the short term and have managed it reasonably. However, I do not favour cutting taxes any lower and I tend to feel that they have already been cut too deeply to maintain public services and institutions in the long term. On the downside imo: proroguing Parliament twice for seemingly crass reasons, keeping Canadians in an imo quixotic mission in Afghanistan where we have been complicit in Afghan war crimes, showing open contempt for Parliament and the Constitution when it came to releasing documents about the Afghan detainee issue, lack of leadership on climate change, demonstrating contempt for empiricism by scrapping the long-form census, placing unreasonable restrictions on what public-sector scientists can tell the media, earmarking SSHRC funding for business-related degrees, making it harder for people to protect their Charter Rights by cutting the Court Challenges Program.

That quote wasn't really evidence though. And I'm sure that even the most extreme free-marketeer would agree that it's not that fair to compare access to toilet paper (made from dirt-cheap materials, does not require highly skilled labour, can be found for a couple bucks at the nearest corner store in any market economy) to access to radiation therapy (requires high-tech equipment and specialized experts, not instantly and cheaply available to everybody in any system afaik).