The Liberal View
A Rather Irate Conservative
I just love this! I spoke with two gay Canadian friends of mine tonight who live in Alberta. They are besides themselves. Such a stunt they said. Still they feared that this may play to Harper’s advantage.
President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden met in Philadelphia this past Tuesday with a bipartisan delegation of governors from around the country hosted by the National Governors Association. The Vice-President-elect was to make a few opening remarks.
This is what he was to suppose to say:
And Governor Palin, your being here today sends a powerful message that when campaigns end, we are all partners in progress. Thank you.”
But he actually said:
“And Governor Palin, I want to thank you particularly. I might point out, as I told you, we walked in. Since the race is over, no one pays attention to me at all. So I’m — maybe you will walk outside with me or something later and say hello to me.”
A perfect foil for a question that I have been pondering. Now that Obama has assembled the A-Team of foreign policy, just what is Biden’s role in an Obama Administration? Obviously, he is part of that A-Team but is there a bigger role for Biden or is the garrulous one with the rhetorical flourishes destined for the political purgatory that a Vice Presidency has often been. Granted the office has evolved recently beginning with Carter-Mondale and of course no Vice President has ever amassed the power and influence that Dick Cheney has. Still historically, the position has been a one-way ticket into political oblivion despite the one heart beat away.
There have been 46 Vice Presidents in the nation’s history. Here are their profiles. In 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush became the first sitting Vice President to be elected President since Martin Van Buren in 1836. In between the only former Vice President who managed to get elected President would be Richard Nixon who was elected in 1968, eight years after serving as Eisenhower’s Vice President. The two others who became President after serving as Vice Presidents are John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. More former Governors have won the White House than former Vice Presidents. I suspect the Vice Presidency is the end of the line for Joe Biden.
Finally test your knowledge of Vice Presidential Trivia Quiz One and Vice Presidential Trivia Quiz Two.
The Senegalese (wolof) word talibés come from the Arabic tâlib for “one who seeks or asks” and in the Islamic parts of West Africa, children are often sent by their parents to live in religious schools called daaras under the care of marabouts, or Koranic teachers, in urban areas far from their parents’ homes. However, the talibIés come from mostly poor rural families who can’t provide for their children and thus the marabouts push the children into the streets to beg. In Senegal, many street children are nominally talibés of disreputable marabouts and the word has become synonymous groups of children who ply the streets begging for money. Because of a lack of financial resources and state support, the marabouts, rely on talibé beggars to support them and their schools. Over time, this practice has turned into a form of child exploitation if not slavery.
Tostan’s Talibé Program aims to help these children. From their website:
he long term goal of Tostan’s Talibé Program is to eliminate the practice of begging by talibé children; in the short term, it aims to improve their educational experience and living conditions.
Tostan’s primary strategies to achieve the short-term objectives are: 1) providing health care and essential items such as soap and shoes for talibés; 2) mobilizing communities and marabouts to assume responsibility for the welfare of these children and; 3) raising awareness among parents, the public, and the government about the legal requirement to protect the human rights of talibés.
Current activities include the distribution of mosquito nets, first-aid kits, basic medicines, clothing, soap, bleach, sleeping mats, and clean water storage containers to daaras. Tostan also commissions the building of roofs over the areas where talibé children learn and sleep to protect them from rain and sun exposure. We facilitate seminars on human rights, basic hygiene, and health care for marabouts, older talibés, and community members.
We also provide microfinance funds and management-skills training to marabouts so they are able to launch small-scale income-generating projects to support their schools instead of relying on talibé begging. Additionally, Tostan broadcasts radio shows in order to spread information on talibé-related issues such as children’s rights, health and hygiene, and constructive citizen involvement with neighborhood daaras. The radio show is also a platform for influential marabouts to express their opposition to begging, arguing that it is not a recommendation in Islamic texts.
Al Jazeera speaks to Mikheil Saakashvili, the Georgian president.
“The opposition criticism is that we have to focus on the economy immediately. Today’s decision will give us an opportunity . . . to focus on the economy and to work together.”– Prime Minister Stephen Harper
“A prime minister cannot request that the Parliament be prorogued to avoid a confidence vote. It would be an abuse of power on the part of the executive branch without precedent in the history of Parliament.” — Stéphane Dion, the Liberal Party leader and head of the opposition
Canada today finds itself in the midst of a political crisis after Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper chose to prorogue Canada’s Parliament. A prorogue is a manuever that that stops all actions on bills and the body’s other business, and thus goes well beyond an adjournment. In effect, Harper has suspended the deliberations of Canada’s Parliament until January 26th, 2009. This is the first time anyone here can recall the maneuver being used in the midst of a political crisis and it is setting off political fireworks across Canada.
The backdrop to all this is that PM Harper leads a minority government. Canada’s most recent round of elections this past October failed to deliver a majority to Harper’s Tories though they did gain seats. Canada’s Fortieth Parliament is composed of 143 Conservatives, 77 Liberals, 49 Bloc Québécois, 37 New Democrats and 2 Independents in a 308 member body. A majoirty is 155 votes. Thus to pass legislation, the Conservatives require either the votes of others or their absention.
The current turmoil was touched off last week when PM Harper presented an economic plan that outraged the opposition by calling for nothing in the way of a stimulus for Canada’s sagging economy. Instead, it recommended cutbacks, including a threat to cut off public financing for political parties, something his Conservative Party could weather more easily than his opponents. The threat to cut off public financing brought the disparate forces of the Canadian centre-left together to form a loose political coalition between primarily the Liberals and the New Democrats with the Liberal leader Stéphane Dion becoming interim Prime Minister pending the selection of a new Liberal leader and with 18 ministers to be appointed from within the Liberal caucus and six ministers to be appointed from within the NDP caucus. Importantly, the Finance Ministry was to be headed by a Liberal. The Bloc Québécois agreed that it would not move nor would it support any motions of non-confidence in the Liberal NDP coalition Government during the term of its support for this agreement, and would vote in favour of the Government’s position with respect to all matters covered in the agreement.
This nascent coalition had planned to introduce a motion of no-confidence in Parliament on Monday and thus bring down the Harper Government. To forestall this, PM Harper acted after receiving the approval of Governor General Michaëlle Jean, Queen Elizabeth II’s representative in Ottawa, for a prorogue. Harper’s prorogue is a play for time during which he hopes to rally Canadian public opinion behind him.
From the Ottawa Citizen:
Prime Minister Stephen Harper did his best Thursday to douse a political fire that threatened to consume his young government, inviting his opponents to give him advice on a new federal budget minutes after he won a request to have Parliament suspended until Jan. 26.
“The opposition criticism is that we have to focus on the economy immediately,” Harper said. “Today’s decision will give us an opportunity . . . to focus on the economy and to work together.”
Harper’s best, though, may not be good enough. The Liberals and NDP vowed to push ahead with their plans to form a coalition government even as some Liberals voiced doubts about the wisdom of their strategy or the abilities of the man who would lead that coalition, Liberal Leader Stephane Dion.
Harper’s ace-in-the-hole, so far, may be public opinion.
A new poll done this week exclusively for Canwest News Service and Global National shows that not only do most Canadians reject a Liberal-NDP coalition, many would punish the opposition parties by voting Conservative. Indeed, pollster Ipsos Reid found that the Conservatives enjoy the support this week of 46 per cent of voters, an improvement of 10 percentage points from the general election results, and enough to give them a whopping majority should the country go to the polls.
The Conservative party has been doing its own polling over the past few nights and has been getting similar results, said a party official speaking on condition of anonymity.
“Last Friday, I asked Canadians to give us their opinions on the parliamentary situation. That feedback has been overwhelming and very clear. They want Canada’s government to continue to work on the agenda that Canadians voted for – our plan to strengthen the economy,” Harper said.
Still, Harper’s aggressive and unprecedented steps to defend his government may leave some long-term scars. Quebec nationalism is on the rise in the wake of Harper’s fierce attacks on the notion of “separatist” Bloc Quebecois MPs propping up a coalition.