New Media

Lots of people love to hate Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

I’m not one of them, though I used to be.

He’s in Vancouver this week, promoting his new book. Evidently, the reviews coming out of Toronto for Mulroney’s memoirs have been less than generous.

Rightly or not, Mulroney’s administration became synonymous with corruption and pork-barrel politics. The Meech Lake constitutional mess nearly tore the country apart, and the GST made my comic books and chocolate bars more expensive (yes, well, I was still in high school at the time).

The first time I voted in a Canadian federal election, I enthusiastically marked my ballot for Jean Chretien. That Kim Campbell wasn’t Mulroney made no difference. I was voting for change.

The country did change, but not the way I thought it would. Thanks to Mulroney’s GST, the Liberals that took office were able to boast billion-dollar surplus budgets (after they reneged on an election pledge to kill the tax). The FTA (which the Liberals also forgot to tear up after they took power) which later morphed into NAFTA sent US dollars flowing north. The Quebec sovereignty issue is still a mess, but more thanks to Chretien’s negligence and bungling than Mulroney’s active intervention. And in the end, the Liberals showed Canadians who the true masters of pork-barrel politics were.

I hope you sell lots of books, Mr. Mulroney.

A hefty majority of English-speaking Canadians want to be more fluent in French, according to a new poll from Angus Reid.

Hardly surprising, really. Who wouldn’t want to have a second language?

But Canada is a trading nation within a globalized economy, and French is just one of several international languages that will help our nation thrive. Here in Vancouver, we’ve already got a bit of a head start on the rest of the country.

We ought to be promoting bilingualism anyway. Making an intermediate level of fluency in a second language (not just French, but Mandarin, Cantonese and a bunch of other Asian and European languages) a requirement of getting a university degree might be a good start.

Let’s get the word out.

Everybody and his blog is shouting from the rooftops about the Canadian dollar’s rise to parity with the US greenback.

Frankly, I’m not all that convinced that this is a good thing, particularly for people like me that rely on foreign clients for part of my income. If our currency goes much higher, our international friends are going to go elsewhere.

But I’ve also been hearing a lot from people who are concerned that Canadians are going to undergo the same housing slump that has hit the US. I don’t see it happening, though. In particular, the housing market right here in Vancouver seems set for even more insane prices.

Oh, the housing cycle will eventually take us down. But international investors looking to park their money somewhere are probably going to keep propping up our local housing prices for a little while longer. They won’t want to put their money into the radioactive market to our south, at least until the worst of the fallout subsides. Besides, the Olympics aren’t even here yet.

Patience, first-time home buyers. The time is not yet ripe. But soon…

So says Green Party candidate Jack Etkin. Is it any wonder that so few people take the Green Party seriously, resulting in a 1.2 per cent share of funding amongst the federal parties?

Not getting that many votes doesn’t necessarily mean our democracy is broken. It just means your particular message hasn’t caught on with the electorate. Same goes for freedom of the press.

When your biggest media coverage of the year comes from a candidate who gets exiled from the Green Party for seeming to admire the work of the 9/11 terrorists, a lack of press freedom might not be the underlying cause of your difficulties.

It’s a joke, and a not very funny one at that. On the west coast, in the birthplace of Greenpeace, the Greens ought to be a major political contender, or at the very least, a kingmaker. Climate change and environmental issues are now top of the agenda in many voters’ minds, as they should be.

The Greens need to find a way to become relevant to the average voter without whining that the rules are stacked against them.

I’m sure I’m not the only one asking the question.

While I’m pretty insulated from the effects of the strike (city managers have even managed to set aside time to spoon-feed me data for an upcoming magazine feature article), countless City residents are certainly losing their patience.

I’m not anti-union. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind belonging to one that managed to get me the kind of benefits that City workers had even before the strike started.

But on the whole, some of CUPE’s demands just seem greedy.

The City’s offer of a 17.5 per cent raise over five years seems decent enough, and pretty much in line with the private sector for outdoor work not involving oil rigs in Alberta.

Meanwhile, why is CUPE asking for a no-layoffs policy? The government is not an employer of last resort. If there’s no work, there’s no work.

Besides, it seems to be a red herring, given that over the past ten years, the City has laid off just 10 workers of a workforce of 3,500. How much more job security could one possibly need?

CUPE also wants all auxiliary work only assigned on the basis of seniority. Why shouldn’t merit be at least a factor, even if not the primary one?

Perhaps Vancouverites are already aware of these kinds of examples, though. It may explain why I have yet to hear a single commuter honking their horn in support for the strikers outside City Hall.