Reality Check

By John Gray

When the federal election campaign was launched in the early days of September, there was a feeling in the air that the Bloc Québécois was fading fast as a force in Quebec politics, and that Quebec would be Conservative Leader Stephen Harper’s stepping stone to a majority government.

The conclusion was not brain science. In the last election and in recent polls, the Bloc has been on a steady decline and showing signs of internal friction, prompting some to wonder whether its days as the voice of Quebec nationalism in Ottawa might be over.

It did not help the Bloc that veteran sovereigntists like Jacques Brassard were leading the public speculation about the Bloc’s performance and its very existence.

The mood of the Bloc was clearly not much helped by Quebec newspapers speculating that the party’s electoral prospects were a disaster and that the party was “heading to the slaughterhouse.”

Projections thrown out the window

As the Bloc was declining, the Conservative party was rising. In the 2006 election, it jumped from no seats at all to 10, with the obvious prospect of reclaiming the old bleu areas that were once held by the old Union Nationale and then by the Ralliement des Creditistes.

By Mark Gollom

According to New Democratic Leader Jack Layton, lowering Canada’s corporate tax rates hasn’t done much good for the economy, so there’s no need to lower them any further.

In fact, by reversing the Conservatives' proposal for lower federal rates over the next four years, billions of dollars will be added to government coffers, big surpluses can be achieved and a $50-billion tax giveaway to Conservative Leader Stephen Harper’s “corporate pals” can be stopped, the NDP leader says.

As he unveiled his party’s platform on Sunday, Layton said that the rate paid by larger businesses has gone down throughout the decade, but Canada’s economy has little to show for it. John Deere was given a corporate tax break and now has 800 fewer jobs to show for it, Layton said.

Layton also added that while the rates have gone down, so, too, has productivity.

Could higher corporate taxes hurt growth?

But there’s more to the corporate tax rate picture than what Layton suggests.

The tax rate for 2008 stands at 19.5 per cent. The Tories want to bring that down to 15 per cent by the fiscal year of 2012/13.

By Ira Basen

Here's a word you haven't heard much along the campaign trail — Afghanistan.

Our biggest military deployment in nearly half a century has barely made a ripple in this election. There's not been much talk about the nearly 100 Canadian soldiers who have been killed there, or the hundreds more who have been wounded, or the estimated $22 billion dollars the mission will cost Canadian taxpayers by the time it ends in 2011.

The reasons for the silence are not hard to understand. It was a Liberal government that began the mission and a Conservative government that embraced it and made it the centerpiece of its foreign policy.

Both parties agreed earlier this year to extend the mission until 2011, and the only possible point of dispute between them — what would happen after 2011 — was taken off the table early in the campaign when the Stephen Harper declared categorically that there would be no more extensions.

Of the national parties, only the NDP has marched to a different drummer on Afghanistan, although not initially.

The party platform for the January 2006 election made no reference at all to the Canadian deployment in Afghanistan. But at its national convention in September of that year, the NDP declared its opposition to the mission and demanded that Canadian troops be pulled out of Afghanistan by February 2007.

Now, in the election platform released on Sunday, the NDP claims that an early withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan will yield a "peace dividend" of $600 million in 2009-10, and that this will grow to $1.1 billion in each of the next two years, for a total of $2.8 billion over the next three years, which can be diverted to other priorities.

It raises a question: are these savings really feasible?

By Ira Basen

Ensure that the United Nations, not NATO or the U.S. becomes the lead organization in the provision of security and development assistance in Afghanistan. — NDP platform pg. 43

Should the United Nations, rather than NATO and the U.S. Pentagon, be in charge of the situation in Afghanistan?

In a speech at the University of Ottawa last January, Jack Layton spelled out his plan to replace the current NATO-led mission in Afghanistan with one headed by the United Nations.

"Unlike NATO", Layton declared, "the UN's explicit mandate is to preserve and promote international peace and security."

He went on to cite the good work that UN agencies like UNESCO have done around the world and the contribution the UN made in bringing peace and democracy to East Timor in the 1990s.

Layton is not alone in calling for an increased UN role in Afghanistan. Norway recently announced a 50 per cent increase in its civilian aid to Afghanistan and, at the same time, also called for a greater UN presence.

But at the same time, Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere announced that Norway, which has about 500 soldiers serving in Afghanistan, continued to support the NATO-led military mission and that Norwegian troops would remain there.

And the U.S. position?

By most accounts, the security situation in Afghanistan is bad and getting worse and many would argue that Stoere is being unrealistic to think that the UN humanitarian agencies could be effective operating in that kind of environment.

By Ira Basen

"Increased civil penalties for false and misleading advertising, and upon criminal conviction, tougher fines and prison terms."

This one was a bit of a head scratcher. Amid a package of consumer-friendly goodies promised by Conservative Leader Stephen Harper in Victoria on Thursday came a commitment to crack down on companies that try to mislead consumers through advertising.

The package also included promises to get tough on internet spammers, identity thieves, price fixers and a whole range of other bad guys who prey on innocent consumers. All of those crimes have been in the news recently and Harper's focus on them makes political sense.

But advertisers? Is there evidence that false advertising is on the rise in Canada?

Have the current safeguards broken down? Is Harper still holding a grudge against the ad industry because of the Liberals' sponsorship scandal? Perhaps he is offended by the amorality on view in the hit TV series Mad Men.

More important, what is the problem that this new policy is attempting to solve?

How it works

To a large extent, Canadian advertising is self-regulating. Advertisers are governed by codes of conduct outlined in the Canadian Code of Advertising Standards, and specific guidelines covering advertising of alcohol, pharmaceuticals and ads directed at children.

By John Gray

When they were challenged to nominate more female parliamentary candidates, Canada's political leaders promised to do better next time, and most of them did.

So, yes, there will probably be more women in the House of Commons after Oct. 14, voting day. But it's a pretty safe bet that the gender balance/imbalance of the next Parliament will be about the same as the last.

That is not to say that the Commons will look as it did when Agnes Macphail was first elected in 1921. She was the only woman MP in Ottawa for the next 14 years.

But in a world in which women are seeking and expecting equality, the sobering realization is that in the ranking set by the Inter-parliamentary Union, Canada is 51st in the world in the number of women elected to the Commons.

The dubious consolation is that the United States is even worse, in 69th place.

Libs in lead for first time

The tally of women nominated to run in the Oct. 14 election was published by Equal Voice, a lobby group dedicated to electing more women in Canada.

For the first time, the highest proportion of women nominated by one of the major parties was in the Liberal party. The 113 Liberal women nominated represent 37 per cent of the party's 307 candidates, surpassing the 34 per cent of nominations by the New Democratic Party.

Women make up 20 per cent of candidates in the Conservative party, 28 per cent of the Bloc's candidates and 29 per cent of Green party candidates.

"Income trust lost all this money. Not true. The income trust index on the Toronto Stock Exchange was up 14.5 per cent with redistributions reinvested, as of early September." —Conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty

"Mr. Flaherty's got his numbers wrong. I checked the index today and it's absolutely not the case that the trust sector has rebounded from the time that Mr. Flaherty cut them off at the knees." —Liberal finance critic John McCallum

By Mark Gollom

So who's right, as both money men spoke on the Don Newman show Politics on CBC Newsworld on Sept. 22?

There are different ways to measure the income trust index. One way is to look at the closing index value, which is the value of all the shares traded on the index for the day.

Or as Gavin Graham, chief investment officer at Guardian Group of Funds, points out, the closing index value looks just at the price.

What was looked at

McCallum's campaign said the finance critic looked just at the price to form his conclusions. According to the TSX, on Oct. 31, 2006, the day Flaherty announced he would tax income trusts, the closing index value was 164.86. That number dove the next day to 144.37.

On Sept. 22, 2008, the day McCallum said he checked, the number was roughly the same as it was after Flaherty's announcement, coming in at 146.52.

By Ira Basen

On Tuesday, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper began his day by visiting the Saskatoon home of Tyson Weber and his family. Weber showed Harper a basement window where thieves had broken into his home three times between October 2003 and February 2004. Cash and other goods were stolen. The family was not home during any of the break-ins. Harper looked appropriately concerned.

(Jonathan Hayward/Canadian Press

Given that purpose, one might have expected that the visit to the Tyson home would have been a way to reveal what can happen to innocent people when criminals are let loose in the community while serving conditional sentences; a way to put a human face on crime statistics.

But in fact, no one has ever been charged with any of the break-ins at the Tyson home. There was no connection to conditional sentencing. Turns out the point of the photo-op was simply to show the Prime Minister looking appropriately concerned.

By Ira Basen

Stephen Harper does not like conditional sentencing. He campaigned against it in the 2006 election. In office, he tried to impose severe restrictions on it, only to have his plan thwarted by all three opposition parties.

And then on Tuesday, Harper travelled to Saskatoon to once again denounce conditional sentencing. "Unlike the Opposition parties," he declared, "we don't believe house arrest is a suitable punishment for serious crime."

What is conditional sentencing?

Conditional sentencing became part of the Canadian justice system with the passage of Bill C-41 in 1995. Canadian lawmakers were concerned with the overuse of incarceration as a means of addressing crime in Canada, particularly as it applied to aboriginal peoples.

Rather than focusing on incarceration, conditional sentencing is designed to keep some offenders out of jail and in the community. Often this means serving their sentence under "house arrest" in their own homes where they can continue to work or attend school.

Not all offenders are eligible for the program. To be considered, a sentence must be less than two years long, must not be an offence that carries a mandatory minimum sentence, and the judge must be convinced the offender does not pose a danger to community.

Inmates accepted in the program must also meet certain court-imposed conditions. Abstaining from alcohol and drug use and seeking treatment for addiction are the most common conditions, followed by curfews and community service.

In 2003-04, about 13,000 or 12 per cent of adults under correctional supervision, were living in the community under a conditional sentence. The average length of that sentence was about eight months.

By John Gray

For the second election in less than three years Stephen Harper is using the fear of youth crime as one of his Conservative party's sharpest political weapons.

And as he boasts of his own party's steely determination to make the punishment fit the crime, the Conservative leader suggests that his political opponents are soft and squishy on crime, and not tough enough to face the problem.

So, under legislation promised by Harper, offenders as young as 14 could be sent to prison for life. And there could be sentences for as long as 14 years for attempted murder, manslaughter and other violent crimes.

Academic experts on youth crime are skeptical about the use of the changes proposed by Harper and they are cynical about his motives.

As Anthony Doob, a professor of criminology at the University of Toronto, said: "It may get him elected, but it won't do anything to reduce crime."

And Nicholas Bala, a specialist in youth crime at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., shrugs off the proposals as "significantly bad social policy." As for why Harper would bother, Bala laughed: "We're in the middle of an election campaign!"

Bala points to a number of American studies that conclude that harsher adult sentencing of young offenders does not reduce re-offending but may actually increase the likelihood of re-offending.

May increase chance

He said studies show severe sentences "may increase the likelihood of further offending, especially if the youth is placed in an adult facility where there are likely greater negative effects from other inmates."

Harper and the Conservatives are feeding public fears about youth crime in much the way politicians in Florida and other U.S. states fed fears of crime. The result was not a reduction in crime, but voters were pleased. That is cynical politics, Bala said, but it works.

The same kind of judgment came from Doob, who was particularly critical of Harper for leading an anti-crime campaign that is, he said, "an attempt to distract us from doing anything sensible."