Mulroney in Vancouver

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.

Canada's loyal opposition stabs the world in the back

Canada's parliament has narrowly voted down a Liberal proposal to set a firm date for a pullout from Afghanistan, only because the NDP thinks that two years from now isn't soon enough.

Canada's opposition parties are in a hurry to get our troops out of harms way and replaced by forces from other NATO nations. It's fair enough to reject an open-ended commitment to Afghanistan with no strings attached.

But one wonders whether they would really feel all that terrible if no other NATO ally stepped up to the plate and Afghanistan descended into the same kind of chaos that birthed the Taliban regime in the first place.

Instead of arbitrary deadlines, the opposition might instead at least propose benchmarks for Canadians and our NATO allies to measure success and logically determine the prospects for a continuing mission. But for now, all we can see from Stephane Dion's Liberals is unrealistic and cynical foreign policy on the fly and from the NDP, the appeasement of civilization's enemies.

Stephen Harper's brain taken over by Liberal mind-control scientists

The Conservative government is so panicked it's copying Liberal ideas and policies, according to Liberal leader Stephane Dion.

Wait a minute - Liberals are accusing the governing party of co-opting the more reasonable platform planks of the opposition to make Canadians happy and help the country run better, without regard to blind partisan politics... and this is a bad thing?

It is the duty of the opposition to oppose. But the party that is actually running the country has a duty to consider ideas from Canadians of all political stripes when forming policy and legislation. That isn't a political ploy - that's democracy in action.

Time to put up or shut up about Kyoto

Canada's House of Commons has voted to force the Conservative minority government to create a plan over the next 60 days for Canada to meet it's commitments to Kyoto.

This isn't a bad thing. The Conservatives have been reluctant to embrace the new environmental dogma of Kyoto for fear of putting Canadians out of work with Soviet-style economic management.

But now they can - and should.

The Conservatives ought to include in the plan draconian measures like shutting down the Albertan oil sand projects without delay and closing any factories in Ontario that don't meet newly-drafted environmental standards.

Such a plan will of course have no chance of actually being made into legislation. But it will force Canadians and our elected representatives to think about what kinds of sacrifices they truly are prepared to make. When Conservatives force Liberals and NDP partisans on to the defensive, it might just swing public policy back into realism.

It's time to get past the rhetoric and partisanship. Per capita, Canadians are the worst offenders to Mother Nature on the planet. It's time to turn ideas into action.