A movie called The Red Tent (1971), which dealt with a tragic mission to the high Arctic, “was considered a costly box office failure,” but it “did win a Golden Globe for Best English Language Foreign Film.”

“Well, it’s a long, long time from May to December. But the days grow short when you reach September.”

The Canadian House of Commons does not return from its leisurely summer vacation until Monday, September 20 (also the day when “Dancing With the Stars” starts its new season in the USA). But already the leading figures of  federal politics in our time are trying to frame the fall 2010 wilderness narrative — or whatever else you may more wisely want to call it.

PM Harper, eg, “intent on shaping the ballot box question for the next election, is adopting a strategy to gradually persuade voters they have a ‘stark choice’ in the next campaign: a ‘stable’ majority Conservative government, or a ‘coalition’ government of Liberals, New Democrats and Quebec separatists.”

Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff is not buying this stark choice. He himself is “out to earn a majority government in the next election and is pitching his party — the big red tent — as the clear alternative to Stephen Harper’s ‘politics of meanness.’” In Mr. Ignatieff’s own words: “I grew up under that big red tent and I want the whole country to shelter under it again … We are the coalition. We are the big, broad inclusive tent that wants to get all Canadians in, who want progressive responsible government and that’s the Canadian approach.”

Big red Liberal leader on the streets of Vancouver, June 2010.

Some may be impressed by these words — and the Liberal leader looked quite healthy speaking them on TV. But they can only disappoint those who believe that the most realistic hope for “progressive responsible government” in Ottawa over the next few years probably does lie in some form of emerging Liberal-New Democrat accord (perhaps supported by a not directly involved Bloc Québécois, if that’s what the next democratic election in Quebec requires).

Moreover, as the universe looks right now, when Parliament does return a few weeks hence the first big conflict is not going to be between the united forces of progress on the one side, and the reactionary conservative rear guard on the other. It’s just going to pit the Liberals against the New Democrats — and make it that much harder for the light at the end of the tunnel to keep burning brightly (or even just flicker gently, to keep hope alive).

* * * *

Delving just somewhat into the details, the specific issue of the moment here “is a third-reading vote in three weeks on a Conservative bill to abolish the long-gun registry, established 15 years ago by the Liberal government of the day. On second reading last fall, a dozen New Democrats and eight Liberals voted with the Conservatives to approve Bill C-391 in principle. Since then, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has announced that he will require his caucus to vote against the bill on third reading on Sept. 22. But the bill can still pass, barely, if the same 12 New Democrats side with 144 Conservative MPs in support of it.”

“Forget everything you’ve ever heard about heroes. Forget everything you’ve ever dreamed about love. Now there is ‘The Red Tent’.”

NDP leader Jack Layton is apparently not going to require his members to support the long-gun registry. And, as Joan Bryden at The Canadian Press reports: “Forget all that talk about federal Liberals merging or forming a coalition with the NDP … The Liberals now aim to co-opt NDP support and they’re using debate over the long-gun registry to do it.” (And there is some evidence this may work, to some degree at least?)

The big elephant still in the room is that there is nothing in any recent polling numbers (take, eg, Harris-Decima for The Canadian Press or even the Liberals’ own Michael Marzolini — and for today’s latest EKOS results see below)  to suggest that the Ignatieff Liberals have even a remote prospect of forming a majority government all by themselves. Even worse,  as the often astute Don Martin has just explained: “King Iggy starts to live up to the title — but Harper unlikely to be dethroned any time soon.”

The current “big red tent” strategy itself is arguably a bold and gutsy attempt to move the numbers, big time.  And at this juncture in the real world of politics it may still be wrong to dismiss the attempt altogether out of hand.

MuslimFest 2010 volunteer gives Mr. Ignatieff a big hug, Mississauga, Ontario, July 2010.

But there will have to be some quite vast sea change in the polling numbers over the next several months to convince those who believe that, even in the mean and attenuated version of a  “next Canada” Mr. Harper has managed to insinuate over the past four years, it is no longer possible for the whole country to even seem to shelter under the same big red tent that sheltered Michael Ignatieff in his Upper Canada College youth.

The Harper Conservatives do appear off their best game lately. Today’s EKOS poll gives them a mere 29.4% to the Liberals 29.1%. Such recent mild trends toward the Ignatieff Liberals may continue? And on the argument that anything is possible in Canadian federal politics nowadays, maybe the old Grit polling numbers can just keep going up and up and up, all by themselves?

The Red Tent is also “a novel by Anita Diamant, published in 1997 ... It is a first-person narrative which tells the biblical story of Dinah, daughter of Jacob and sister of Joseph, a talented midwife and proto-feminist.”

Or maybe not.  Meanwhile, Stephen Harper must be happy enough about how the Liberals and New Democrats are going for each others’ throats again. As matters stand, it still seems to us that you have to be considerably more politically partisan and self-interested than most Canadians are to see much realistic hope for “progressive responsible government” in that!

Our best guess remains that the federal Liberals and New Democrats finally need each other, for either party — to say nothing of  Canada, from coast to coast to coast — to move ahead. (And if you want some statistics here, check out the regional numbers for BC in the latest EKOS poll: Liberals 22.2%, Conservatives 25.6%, NDP 31.1%.) This is no longer the same kind of country it was when Mr. Ignatieff’s mother — as he told us somewhat slyly on TV yesterday —  was so pleased with a school report card that said: “Michael plays well with the other children.” (Or was this just an unusually subtle and Mackenzie-King-like way of saying that if Iggy absolutely has to play especially well with Jack and Gilles, always allowing that Gilles has to go home early, that is what he will do?)

Ms. Hilton and her current “nightclub-entrepreneur boyfriend” Cy Watts, “at the launch of her fragrance Tease at MyStudio in Hollywood on Aug. 10, 2010. Credit: Donald Traill, Associated Press.”

At first the news that Toronto City Council has just endorsed the “Vienna Declaration” (which “advocates harm reduction over the law enforcement-driven war on drugs”) — set beside the news that “Paris Hilton was arrested late Friday night on suspicion of possession of cocaine after police noticed the smell of marijuana coming from the SUV she was in on the Las Vegas Strip” —  seems rich in ironic juxtaposition (and maybe even “oxymoronism”?).

But then you start to wonder why a smart heiress like Ms. Hilton can’t find some way of doing drugs without getting caught so often throughout the global village. And then you think it must be that she wants to get caught, for the publicity.

Three weeks ago, eg, she attended the launch of her fragrance Tease at MyStudio in Hollywood. And then you read: “If convicted of the low-grade felony, Hilton would [only] get probation.” (Even though, theoretically: “Any violation of probation would be punishable by one to four years in Nevada state prison.”)

Ms. Hilton again — making a point at a hotel chain board meeting?

Reading Anna Mehler Paperny’s nice Globe and Mail piece, “Toronto formally endorses harm reduction on drug use … City becomes the first in the world to do so,” can also make you think that walking away from the “war-on-drugs” policy paradigm, as palpably absurd as it has become, is going to take some care, talent, and probably more time than some of us would like.

Even after City Council’s formal endorsement of the Vienna Declaration: “Toronto’s still mulling the possibility of a supervised consumption site … The city’s mayoral candidates are leery when it comes to committing to a supervised consumption site. George Smitherman, Sarah Thomson and Joe Pantalone said while they support harm-reduction strategies already in place in Toronto, they have their doubts the city needs a safe-injection site. Rocco Rossi’s campaign declined to comment … And front-runner Rob Ford was one of the few councillors who voted against the Vienna Declaration endorsement altogether.”

Ms. Hilton on her way to Lynwood Women's Correctional Facility in Southern California, a few years ago. Publicity can be a hard business sometimes?

But the Globe and Mail’s subsequent editorial, “The rising trend against the war on drugs … Evidence is mounting in favour of the decriminalization of drugs such as marijuana,” presents some compelling arguments and ends on a  strong and immediately practical note.

Despite the “mounting evidence” against war-on-drugs policies, Stephen Harper’s government in Ottawa “has made it clear that it will not support the Vienna Declaration and will countenance no change to this country’s hard-line National Anti-Drug Strategy and current federal drug policy.” The Globe and Mail argues instead that the “record suggests current federal government policy will not succeed in achieving any reduction of use, crime or harm. Canada, consequently, should resurrect the legislation to decriminalize marijuana and embark on a broader national discussion about policy on harder drugs, and the need for harm reduction in Canada.”

I certainly do not agree with Globe and Mail editorialists about everything myself. But I am as close to certain as I ever get that they are on to something eminently sensible here.

What would things be like for Paris Hilton, under a more rational drug regulatory regime of the sort the Globe and Mail appears to have in mind?  At first she might not like it so much. She would  have fewer opportunities for cheap publicity, through increasingly silly and tiresome (but hardly “criminal”) behaviour. If I were her, however, I would finally be a bit concerned about the prospect that some judge in Nevada (or wherever) just might be crazy enough to prescribe four years in jail for privileged young ladies who absent-mindedly violate probation, etc, etc, etc.

Rob Ford may not be a communist, but it seems that he is at least as much of a criminal as Paris Hilton.

(Even the right-wing Toronto mayoral candidate Rob Ford, who would seem to agree with Stephen Harper’s current federal minority government on drug policy, and other issues, was apparently once caught by the Florida police, driving under the influence — and with a joint in his pocket. He’s lucky he’s not running for mayor in … oh, say … some town in Alaska?)

Jodie Emery, wife of Canada’s Prince of Pot (now unhappily in jail in the USA), has almost nothing to do with Canada’s new Cannabis Car. But she is a lot cuter than most of those more directly involved. Photo: Nick Procaylo, Vancouver Province.

Assuming it’s real, the recent CBC news story “Cannabis electric car to be made in Canada” offers various varieties of food for thought. In fact the story is so intriguing that it’s all too easy to think it’s too good to be true. This is just the CBC trying to get back at Stephen Harper, etc.

But if it is a hoax a lot of people have already fallen for it — including the deadly serious  businessmen, Nathan Armstrong in Calgary and Steve Dallas in Toronto.  And there are more than a dozen other recent reports on the net, to complement the bubbly rhetoric of the CBC.

The San Francisco Chronicle may have the most succinct account, headlined  “Dude, where’s my cannabis car?” It reports: “Here’s one way to get college students to go to class: Assign them to build things with cannabis. Several Canadian companies are teaming up with polytechnic schools in Alberta, Quebec and Toronto to make an electric vehicle out of hemp. The cars will hold up to three passengers, reach 55 miles an hour and go for up to 100 miles without having to be recharged. The car, dubbed the Kestrel, is part of Canada’s push for EVs, called Project EVE.”

The Hindustan Times from India adds a few helpful further details. A protoype of the Kestrel “will be unveiled at the Electric Mobility Show in Vancouver next month. A consortium of 15 Canadian companies” is involved.  The vehicle will have a “bio-composite body made of hemp” (the un-smokable or un-stone-able form of cannabis, as it were: so no Virginia, cannabis users will not really be able to smoke their new electric vehicles). And: “The first 20 cars will be delivered next year.”

If you crave still more details, try: “The Kestrel: Hemp Electric Car Being Developed By Motive Industries Inc.” ; “The Marijuana Car, ‘The Kestrel’ A Hemp Car, By Motive Industries” ; “Hemp drives green vehicle prototype” ; “Calgary driven to make hemp car” ; “Hippie’s dream car: EV made from hemp” ; “Canada’s Cannabis Car” ; “Canadians constructing cars from cannabis” ; “Canadian firms plan to try to make car from hemp” ; “Canadians build car from cannabis” ; and “Motive Industries’ Cannabis Composite EV Satisfies Your Need for Speed, Weed.”

The Kestrel plans are not unprecedented. This version of the Lotus Eco Elise, shown at the British International Motor Show in London, England, July 23, 2008, has hemp or industrial cannabis composite body panels. Photo: Cate Gillon, Getty Images.

(This last item also notes, with some easy humour of the sort beloved by the great white hunter Dick Cheney: “In a move that will only strengthen the association between potheads and environmentalism, Motive Industries recently announced that it is working on Canada’s first biocomposite electric vehicle. The biocomposite in question? Hemp.” Oh, and btw, the counterweights editors have asked me to welcome the new Google ads to the site here — and to urge everyone to “patronize our advertisers.” The ads are nicely keyed to the site content. And every time you click on, oh say ten of them, you are helping to send an intern to Tim Horton’s for a small iced cappuccino.)

* * * *

Several other features of the CBC’s “Cannabis electric car to be made in Canada” are worth noting quickly, for those interested in pursuing the story at slightly greater length.

Nathan James Armstrong, Director and President of Motive Industries in Calgary — pioneers of the Kestrel prototype: “Canada’s First Bio-Composite Electric Vehicle.”

As Nathan Armstrong of Motive Industries in Calgary notes, eg: as open as it clearly is to easy humour nowadays, using lightweight hemp or industrial cannabis to build car bodies is “not an original idea.” Henry Ford experimented with the concept for a time in the 1940s. And much more recently, in the summer of 2008, Lotus in the UK unveiled “an environmentally-friendly version of its sporty roadster called Eco Elise” with “hemp (industrial cannabis) … on the car’s composite body panels.”

There are nonetheless two particular wrinkles about the use of industrial cannabis for the  Kestrel — as planned by Project EVE, “an automotive industry collaboration founded by Motive and Toronto Electric, an Ontario material handling and electric motor company, to boost the production of electric vehicles and electric vehicle components in Canada.”

“Motive Kestrel teaser image” — whatever that may mean!

In the first place (and as explained by the Alberta provincial government): “ Effective March 12, 1998, the commercial production (including cultivation) of industrial hemp is now permitted in Canada, under licenses and authorization, issued by Health Canada.” Meanwhile: “hemp and marijuana are different varieties of Cannabis sativa, which is [still] classified as a controlled substance in the United States.”

So, for the time being at any rate, it is legal to make cannabis cars in Canada but not in the United States — despite the Harper minority government’s reactionary hostility towards the plight of “Canada’s Prince of Pot” Marc Emery, and the decriminalization of smokable marijuana, that can actually make you … well, feel alright?

Steve Dallas, president, Toronto Electric — “working out an arrangement with Nathan Armstrong of Motive Industries in Calgary to see if Canada has the capacity, financially and technically, to participate in the electrification of the automotive industry that is now under way.”

It gets even a little better than this — from the standpoint of ironic juxtaposition in Stephen Harper’s current home province of Alberta (sometimes imagined to be also a home of the  unfettered free market and manly government non-intervention).

As the CBC news website explains: “The car’s body will be made of an impact-resistant composite material produced from mats of hemp, a plant from the cannabis family. The material is being supplied by Alberta Innovates – Technology Futures, a provincial Crown corporation that provides technical services and funding to help commercialize new technologies. The hemp is being grown in Vegreville, Alta.”

Kestrel produced by UK firm BMC in the 1960s, as part of its Riley marque.

Yet another wrinkle involves the name of the new Cannabis electric car to be made in Canada, “the Kestrel.” A UK website has noted that it isn’t exactly an original idea either. This is Canada after all, where at least half the geographic place names nowadays are not original, etc, etc. The province of Alberta itself, eg, “was named after Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, the fourth daughter of Queen Victoria” in the United Kingdom.

So, it has been argued by some allegedly wiser heads across the seas in the old mother country, Canada’s new “ Cannabis Car, built from hemp … should really be called the Kestrel II.”  As it happens the “UK car firm BMC had a Kestrel … In 1965 ‘BMC added a Riley badged version to its ever expanding 1100/1300 range,’ says the motorbase.com, adding: ‘Available in 1100 Kestrel and later 1300 forms the new cars were little more than badge-engineered versions of the rest of the 1100/1300 family, being closely related to the MG variants [sic, or something like that]  … Production disappeared along with the rest of the Riley marque in 1969.’”

There are still a few Bricklins extant today, and they are intriguing. But the Kestrel is a lot more interesting and innovative — and has much deeper local business and technological roots.

Students of Canadian automotive history so far will want to note a very final wrinkle here as well. Whether the current plans for the Cannabis electric car to be made in Canada will finally succeed in an increasingly cruel and competitive global marketplace of course remains an open question. And the sad mid 1970s story of the Bricklin in New Brunswick sounds an inevitable cautionary note.

(And, to hear the note better, in the summer of 2010 interested inidividuals have been able to take in “The Bricklin: An Automobile Fantasy … A Musical by Allen Cole and Paul Ledoux, Directed by Alisa Palmer,” at the Fredericton Playhouse.)

Harvesting hemp in Vegreville, Alberta — cleaner than the oil sands in any case.

To quote an apt enough summary from Wikipedia: “The Bricklin SV-1 was a gull-wing door sports car assembled in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. The body panels were manufactured in a separate plant in Minto, New Brunswick. Manufactured from 1974 until early 1976 for the US market, the car was the creation of Malcolm Bricklin, an American millionaire …  Due to Bricklin’s lack of experience in the auto industry …  the Bricklin factory was not able to produce vehicles fast enough to make a profit. As a result, only 2,854 cars were built before the company went into receivership, owing the New Brunswick government $23 million.”

There seems little doubt that the Kestrel in the 2010s will face at least as many challenges as the Bricklin in the 1970s. And of course who knows if it can ever be any kind of success?

At the same time, just on the most superficial surface of things, there are some vast differences between the Bricklin then and the Kestrel now. The New Brunswick government was just throwing too much good money after bad to an American playboy-grillionaire, in the hope of gaining some quick-fix local assembly jobs. The Alberta government is helping some aggressively entrepreneurial local businesses in Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec, in a more modest and sensible way.

Jodie Emery again — a “successful rerbel” who will apparently be running for the Green Party in Vancouver South, in the next Canadian federal election.

Whatever else, the Kestrel project shows that a lot has changed in Canada since the 1970s. Some things at least are clearly better now than they were then. Even if the Kestrel project never meets its highest aspirations, it will make some more things better still. With the Electric Mobility Show in Vancouver now only a matter of weeks away, I would like to raise several big tumblers of “Bottled-in-British-Columbia” Baby Canadian Champagne to Nathan Armstrong and Steve Dallas and everyone else involved. And if some politicians and bureaucrats in Ottawa today are not too happy about all this, well that’s just the icing on the accompanying cake.

Current flag of Australia ... somewhat reminiscent of the old Canadian red ensign, but still with considerable support, even among Australian republicans.

Canadian political junkies following the still uncertain results of this past Saturday’s Australian federal election are entitled to feelings of amazement at the snowballing complexities of what is going down down under at the moment.

In some ways Australia, as a fellow former self-governing dominion of the now fallen British empire, has a parliamentary democratic political system much more like Canada’s than that of the neighbouring USA. But its local variation on the common “Westminster” theme also displays certain exotic features, which may or may not have something to do with an exotic deep southern geography of  billabongs, coolabah trees, kangaroos, koala bears, etc, etc, etc.

So … to start with, to form the barest of majority governments you need at least 76 seats in what the Ozzies call their House of Representatives (following the American rather than the British nomenclature). The verdict of the voters this past Saturday was so close that the final word on all the seats is still not in — and may not be for a while yet.

As of the afternoon of Tuesday, August 24 (and here is yet another wrinkle: today is already tomorrow down under!): “On the latest counting for the House of Representatives, Labor and the Coalition appeared to have secured 72 seats each, with three independents, one Green and two seats in doubt.”

On some accounts there may actually be more than two seats still in doubt. But assume there are only two, and that they ultimately divide evenly between Labor and the Coalition (where “the Coalition” is a longstanding arrangement between the right-wing Liberal and National parties). Then each of two main party groupings must negotiate for support from the three independents and one Green, to see who can reach the magic number of 76 seats and form some stable minority (or “coalition”) government — Labor’s Julia Gillard or the “Coalition’s” Tony Abbott.

“Aboriginal/Australian flag” — with “symbol of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people” replacing union jack in top left corner.

As matters stand: the “Greens member for Melbourne, Adam Bandt, looks likely to support Labor, leaving the parties to woo the three remaining [‘rural’] independents.” As it happens all three independents are “ex-Nationals.” So you might think that they will support the Liberal-National Coalition led by Tony Abbott. But this is apparently far from a sure thing. They are, it seems, “ex-Nationals” for a reason. And: “The Nationals leader, Warren Truss, has been shut out of the negotiations because of the hostility between the Nationals and the rural independents.”

* * * *

The outcome of all the negotiations may not be known until next week — or even beyond? Meanwhile, two further thickenings of the plot have some particular intrigue for Canadians.

Torah Bright carries the Australian flag at the opening ceronmines of the Winter 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver, BC. Photo: David J. Phillip/Associated Press.

In the first place, unlike Canada Australia has a more or less functional elected Senate, that represents the states in the federation and actually plays a serious role in the political process. (In this respect, again, it has followed American rather than British examples — perhaps partly because the Australian federation came together a generation later than modern Canada?).

The functional Senate in the Land of Oz has its own potential implications for sorting out the challenging verdict of the sovereign people on August 21, 2010. According to Labor leader Julia Gillard, her party is “better-placed than the Coalition to form a stable government after Saturday’s election … She believes Labor is more likely to win Greens support for its policies in the Senate … Her comments were designed to suggest that the Greens, who will assume a stranglehold over the balance of power in the Senate from July 1, are likely to block many of a Coalition government’s policies and spending cuts … The Greens declined to comment last night.”

“All Australian Flag” — a proposed “national symbol that can represent all Australians for the generations to come.”

A second wrinkle here concerns the office of Governor General that both Australia and Canada share — and that (as we in Canada are coming to appreciate ourselves) can assume some significant power when no party (or “Coalition” or “coalition”) wins a clear majority of seats in a parliamentary election.

As Australian constitutional law expert George Williams has explained: “If everything runs as it should [with the various party negotiations, over the next number of days], no conflict issue can even arise because it will be Parliament that will make a decision and that will be the end of the matter … But, if things do go awry and extraordinary things happen,” then Governor General Quentin Bryce could find herself in a position where she has to decide whether to ask Labor leader Julia Gillard or Coalition leader Tony Abbott to try to form a government.

If this does happen Ms. Bryce herself has already started to wonder about the suitability of her particular background.  She has even “sought legal advice on whether her family link to Labor powerbroker Bill Shorten creates a conflict of interest with her role in appointing the next Australian government.” Ms. Bryce was appointed by former Labor leader Kevin Rudd (before he was succeeded by Julia Gillard, before the 2010 election, in an effort to get around the political troubles Mr. Rudd had run into with, among other things, his new mining tax). In fact Mr. Shorten, who is “one of the architects of former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s demise and a potential Labor leadership candidate” in his own right, should Ms. Gillard somehow stumble, is married to Governor General Bryce’s daughter, Chloe — and is the father of the governor general’s granddaughter, Clementine.

A proposed “New Flag for the Republic of Australia.”

Hopefully the elected politicians will be able to resolve the current “hung parliament” by themselves, without resorting to the reserve powers of Governor General Bryce. The situation, however, does raise some of the problems about the current method of selecting governor generals in both Australia and Canada — as recently discussed, eg, in “PM Harper’s new governor general shows office continues to evolve?” on our own website here.

More than a few additional intriguing wrinkles might be discussed. But this report “In Brief” is already too long. Two very final observations must suffice for the time being.

First, our very inexpert and quite wild guess right now is that Julia Gillard’s Labor party will finally form a minority government with enough Green and rural independent support to last until at least some point in 2011. This, we freely confess, could prove quite wrong. It is just a vague and not very well informed instinct, from very far away. The only not-very-solid evidence so far is a Sydney Morning Herald online (and quite unscientific) poll, answered by more than 167,000 readers at the time of writing. It asks the question: “Which side deserves the support of the independent and Green MPs who will decide the balance of power?” And the results as of August 23, 9:45 PM ET in Canada are: Labor  53%, Coalition 47%.

Muslim girls wearing hijabs with the Australian flag on them walk in Melbourne (AAP).

Finally, whatever else may or may not prove true in the very end, no one in Canada will be able to blame the current failure of the Australian people to elect a majority government on the Bloc Québécois. As matters stand, in fact, the most recent elections in all of Australia, Canada, and the old mother country of the United Kingdom itself have failed to produce majority governments. There may be some food for thought here on our current minority government syndrome in northern North America — that has nothing at all to do with the francophone majority in Quebec?

Canadian population distribution in the 2006 census: the darker shade of red/pink an area on the map is, the more people live there. Less than 1% of Canada’s population lives in the completely white areas. SOURCE: The Atlas of Canada/Statistics Canada.

I sometimes think stiffening Canadian sovereignty in those parts of the Arctic north customarily marked as Canadian territory on Canadian maps is one of the three almost impressive things that Stephen’s Harper’s Conservative minority government has done, since it first came to office on February 6, 2006.

The other two are the parliamentary recognition of the Québécois as a nation within a united Canada, and a few failed attempts at so-called step-by-step Senate reform. In both these two cases Mr. Harper might be said to have gone soft, after an initial hard thrust in promising directions. Now I’m wondering whether something similar is happening on the Canadian Arctic sovereignty front too.

I was impressed by some “new rules regulating Arctic shipping” in what Canada sees as Canadian waters, introduced this past Canada Day, July 1, 2010. But a Harper government Foreign Affairs paper released this past Friday makes me wonder if I’ve let myself be impressed  too soon? John Ibbitson writes in the Globe and Mail that this “report does signal to other northern nations that this country wants to advance a shared agenda for the Far North rather than simply to assert territorial claims.” And this no doubt makes sense. Yet a Toronto Star editorial also sensibly worries about how the same “statement openly hails the US as ‘our premier partner’ in the North … Harper seems to envisage Canada and the US collaborating … to advance a North American agenda on the resource-rich continental shelf, waterways and other issues.”

In a hopeful new age of far northern development, Canada has to cooperate rather intimately with the Unites States in Arctic management on the non-Russian side of the North Pole. (And with Denmark — which can presumably be a kind of safety valve in of-course-never-exactly-equal Canada-US dealings as well.) But Mr. Harper’s frequently voiced affection for the last Canadian vestiges of the British monarchy can raise some fresh concerns about how he ultimately sees  Arctic-sovereign relations with the former British subject of the USA today.

* * * *

The United States Coast Guard icecutter Healy on a voyage in the Arctic Circle. Photo: United States Coast Guard.

After more than four years in office, it has become increasingly clear that “PM Harper” too often seems most comfortable with old colonial and imperial conceptions of Canadian development, that (properly inspired by American examples) many of us have long been hoping the country has finally grown out of.

He is aptly up-to-date about these conceptions, and does not doubt that the old great imperial metropolis of the global anglosphere has moved from London to Washington (or Washington/New York/Los Angeles/Chicago.etc). Yet — again as in the cases of both the emerging recognition of a Québécois nation and Senate reform — as Stephen Harper’s real, down-on-the-ground approach to Canadian Arctic sovereignty begins to take more substantial shape, it is starting to seem that we really may have to start wondering about just how serious it all is. Just how ready is PM Harper to “stand up for Canada,” in, eg, longstanding Canada-US disagreements over the Northwest Passage and the Beaufort Sea?

Pierre Trudeau and Barbara Streisand. He was a new kind of Canadian patriot. But it would be wrong to call him anti-American. And he finally made the present-day Canadian Constitution more like that of the United States.

John Ibbitson notes that (like last year etc, some will recall) Mr. Harper “leaves on Monday for a five-day northern tour … Politically, the Conservatives are hoping to profit from increasing interest over Arctic sovereignty, which is perhaps another manifestation of an emerging noisier patriotism among many Canadians.”  Yet, for this kind of plot to work among the cunning masses of Canadian voters you have to want to do more than just profit electorally from the  emerging noisier patriotism. You actually have to join it.

Pierre Trudeau was Canadian federal prime minster, minority and majority, for some 15 years, partly because, whatever else you thought about him, it was absolutely clear that he was some new kind of Canadian patriot. It is still apparently not quite clear just what Stephen Harper is in this respect. You sometimes wonder whether he knows himself?

Now We Are Six by A.A. Milne — the “ third book in the Winnie-the-Pooh series” — was first published in 1927. It is still very much in print today.

Our very first counterweights article, “John Ibbitson’s next Canada,” appeared on August 19, 2004 — exactly six years ago today. Since then the “next Canada” Mr. Ibbitson was talking about has actually arrived, with the accession of the Stephen Harper minority government in Ottawa, in February 2006.

Our own assessment in August 2010 (like that of more than a few others) is that the new Harper Conservative Party’s next Canada has proved a rather dull journey back to the future of the 1950s. Whatever else, it lacks any ultimate potential to move the country ahead, despite a few half-hearted gestures (a parliamentary resolution on the Québécois nation in a united Canada, a few failed proposals for step-by-step Senate reform, and what else?).

Has the Pierre-Trudeau-inspired counterweights itself done any better? Of course not. But we have tried — which is the luxury you can afford when you have no power or influence. Or a great many readers. On that front counterweights started as a drinking project in the Southern Ontario cottage country in the summer of 2004. The thought was to try it for a while, and see if it could attract enough readers to carry on.  It seems that it still hasn’t attracted enough readers. But what we lack in quantity on this front, we clearly make up in quality. And so we’ve carried on.

Jennifer Aniston arrives at the premiere of “The Switch” on August 16, 2010 in Los Angeles. She has not in fact sent her best wishes for the 6th anniversary of counterweights three days later. But we wish she had.

Some readers have shrewdly guessed that some contributors operate under various nommes de guerre or pseudonyms. And some of these have even inquired about which contributors are real, and which just pseudononymous, etc. To pursue all this further would be to rush in where angels fear to tread, with our hearts above our heads. Or, as the near-great Canadian historian Harold Innis once said, the “social scientist in Canada must have a sense of humour.”

It is yet another irony of our first six years that although counterweights aspires to be a chiefly political blog and e-magazine, with special reference to Ontario, Canada, and the related wider global village, its most popular articles have tended to focus on crime or sex. Crime and sex are often related to politics, of course, but there is usually a difference in principle. Our excuse for continuing to concentrate on politics is that we are not JUST interested in popularity. (Which is a good thing, no doubt, since even our articles on crime and sex are not all that popular.)

The great Zoot Sims in his youth. He painted houses for a time as a day job. And among various other memorable things he once said he liked Las Vegas best when the mob ran it, because “it was more human.”

It has finally been suggested that in celebrating our sixth anniversary, we should turn to the British author A. A. Milne’s 1920s children’s book, Now We Are Six. A number of us are familiar with this volume from our anglophone Canadian childhoods. And we almost thought this reflected the historic British (as well as French and aboriginal Canadian and other) influence on Canada, until we discovered that the excellent Massachusetts-born saxophone player Phil Woods has written a “‘Children’s Suite,’ which was carefully crafted when he discovered that the words in his kids’ A.A. Milne books would make splendid songs.” (At the same time, Massachusetts is at least part of New England, etc.)

In any event, something about the title verse from Mr. Milne’s book of 1927 seems to summarize how we feel about counterweights’ anniversary on August 19, 2010: “When I was One, / I had just begun. / When I was Two, / I was nearly new. / When I was Three / I was hardly me. /  When I was Four, / I was not much more. / When I was Five, / I was just alive. / But now I am Six, / I’m as clever as clever, / So I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever.”

Halle Berry and her Canadian ex-husband (and father of her young daughter) Gabriel Aubry. Who said Canadians never do anything interesting?

Two other quotations round out our meditations on this commemorative day. We bumped into the first on Phil Woods’s website: “As tenor sax giant Zoot Sims said as he watched the astronauts land on the moon, ‘Look at that! Wow! And I’m still playing Indiana!’ … That is how I feel about the new technology. (I still play Indiana, but to quote Zoot’s partner, Al Cohn, I am using my own changes.)” Our second quotation apparently came quite recently from the lips of the unsurpassable North American beauty of our time, Halle Berry (who was briefly married to a French Canadian): “If the world wouldn’t persecute me, I’d take nude pictures every day of the week.” (And note that our latest most popular article, according to Google Analytics, is the globalization study: “June in Jakarta 2010 .. or Edison Chen’s naughty pictures part deux, with Ariel, Luna Maya, and Cut Tari, on the world wide web.”)

In a recent poll just under 28% of first-choice Bloc Québécois voters picked the New Democratic Party as their second choice.

This past Friday marked the 20th anniversary of Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe’s August 13, 1990 by-election victory in the eastern downtown Montreal riding of  Laurier—Sainte-Marie.

Even with a maternal grandfather from the United Kingdom, M. Duceppe was, so to speak, the first Canadian federal MP to be elected as an ostensibly “sovereigntist” BQ partisan. (The original BQ MPs were Progressive Conservative and Liberal apostates. Duceppe himself was initially elected as an independent: the Bloc was not officially registered as a federal political party until September 11, 1993, not long before the October 25, 1993 federal election.)

Gilles Duceppe subsequently replaced Lucien Bouchard as interim Bloc Québécois leader, for a month or so in early 1996. Then he succeeded Michel Gauthier as full-time leader on March 15, 1997. As Chantal Hébert has pointed out in the Toronto Star: “Today, he is the federal leader with the most seniority and one of only eight MPs to have sat in the House for 20 years or more.”

Ms. Hébert has also aptly urged: “Over his 13 years as leader, Duceppe has put his own social democrat stamp on the Bloc and never more so than since Harper has come to power. Sovereignty is still on the Bloc masthead but since the first Conservative victory in 2006, the BQ’s raison d’être is less emphatically rooted in the constitutional file … in Parliament Duceppe has put much of his heart in a larger battle … After an initial flirt with the Conservative minority government in 2006, he set out to cast the Bloc as a defender of the progressive values he feels Harper is out to trample.”

Gilles Duceppe speaks to journalists in his Ottawa office, March 25, 2010. Blair Gable for The Globe and Mail.

There are still those who worry that, even with Gilles Duceppe’s broader social democratic priorities, the Bloc Québécois remains “such a negative force in Canadian politics … As long as Quebecers park their votes with the Bloc, there is little chance any party can win a majority …  Quebecers haven’t always played this role. In the Trudeau years, they voted massively for the Liberals. In 1984 and 1988, they strongly supported the Mulroney-led Conservatives … But now, most are sticking with the Bloc. It cannot win, but it can ensure that no other party speaks for all Canadians.”

My own view here is yes and no — and mostly no. Ultimately I don’t think the most serious blame for our current minority government syndrome in Ottawa can be laid at the door of either the  Bloc Québécois or the francophone democratic majority in Quebec. In pondering the deepest truth on this issue, the anglophone democratic majority in the rest of the country would be better off looking in the mirror.

* * * *

In the first place, as already noted the BQ itself was created by Progressive Conservative and Liberal apostates, in the wake of the failure of the Meech Lake Accord in late June 1990 (just before Gilles Duceppe’s first election to the federal parliament). If we in the rest of the country really do want to pull the rug out from under the BQ, we have to revive the project of entrenching  Quebec’s crucial French fact in our post-colonial Canadian constitution.

Gilles Duceppe with Bloc MP couple Maka Kotto and Caroline St-Hilaire, at BQ Christmas Party on Parliament Hill, December 2007. Photo: macleans.ca.

Still more importantly, the current minority government syndrome in Ottawa is finally rooted in anglophone Canadian regional conflicts outside Quebec. Cleavages on the conservative side of the ideological spectrum masked these conflicts for a time, and let Pierre Trudeau’s successor Jean Chrétien win three majority governments he did not quite deserve, from the standpoint of the Canada-wide popular vote.

Stephen Harper’s eventual success in uniting the conservative community in anglophone Canada bears the most blame (or praise?) for our current minority government dilemma in Ottawa. And like others I think myself (at the moment at any rate) that our only workable way ahead right now probably lies in some parallel degree of at least co-operation among the diverse Canadian progressive community, in all regions of the country — anglophone and francophone, western and eastern, northern and southern, rural and urban, and inside and outside Quebec.

In the fall of 2008 Gilles Duceppe visited Ontario’s capital city, “to urge voters here not to let Stephen Harper get his majority.” He told “about 200 members of the Economic Club of Toronto ... that a vote for the Conservatives at a time of such economic fragility in North America is a vote for financial chaos.”

And to this end I think we in the rest of the country, outside Quebec, should be paying more attention to such hard evidence as the second-choice voting preferences in the latest EKOS poll on Canadian federal politics (as already urged on this website a week or so ago).

In this survey, eg, just over 30% of first-choice BQ voters declared “no second choice.” This is understandably somewhat higher than the 24% of Liberals or almost 27% of New Democrats who claim no second choice. But it is much lower than the more than 46% of first-choice Conservative voters who say they have no second choice. Or, more generally if you like, whatever their truest feelings about “Quebec sovereignty” may be,  Bloc Québécois supporters in the year 2010 are at least more willing to co-operate with other (and all so-called “federalist”) political parties than Conservative supporters — and by quite a wide margin.

Meanwhile, among the almost 70% of first-choice BQ voters who are prepared to entertain a second choice, 28% choose the NDP (another sign of M. Duceppe’s “social democrat” tilt), 19% the Green Party, 13% the Liberals, and 10% the Conservatives.

Moreover, as noted on this website a week or so ago: “That almost 70% of Bloc Québécois voters are prepared to entertain second choices among so-called federalist parties also suggests something about the never-ending sovereigntist debate in la belle province today — and about the extent to which leaning on BQ support in the Canadian House of Commons does not logically entail any serious deficiency in Canadian patriotism.”

Gilles Duceppe greets his wife, Yolande Brunelle, at the Hyatt Hotel in Montreal, during the 2008 election campaign.

Any party whose supporters show this kind of profile is clearly interested in the future of the Canadian confederation. And it is up to those of us in the rest of the country to show the early 21st century  Québécois (aka the first people to call themselves Canadians) that we are ready, able, and willing to guarantee Quebec’s francophone-majority persona,  in the post-colonial Canadian confederation whose ultimate practical sovereign power is the anglophone democratic majority of the modern Canadian people (and not the British colonial office across the seas). Maybe once we’ve finally done that, more than a few Bloc Québécois voters actually will start thinking about voting for their second choices among the “federalist” parties in Ottawa.

Elvis Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough in RUSSH magazione, 2009. Riley plays Jack in ‘Jack and Diane’.

It may just be the summer heat that does not seem to be going away this year — or my all too advancing age.  But the news that “Riley Keough, the 21-year-old granddaughter of Elvis Presley” has “replaced Olivia Thirlby as Jack in ‘Jack and Diane,’ a lesbian-themed werewolf romance … due to be released next year” has come very close to blowing my mind.

I used to think I was hip. But in my youth (say 45–50 years ago, ouch) “a lesbian-themed werewolf romance” would be something some brilliant young alcoholic invented just before last call in your local draft hall (remember those Canada?), in imitation of Lenny Bruce. The idea that a mainstream entertainment article datelined “LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter)” would use such terminology would have been … well, inconceivable at best.

That of course was long before such mainstream vampire entertainments as ‘Twilight’ and ‘True Blood’ (to say nothing of ‘An American Werewolf in London’). Elvis was not even married until after my 22nd birthday. But even now I wonder what he himself (75 this year, if he really is still alive) would think about having a granddaughter in “a lesbian-themed werewolf romance .”

Juno Temple at the Toronto International Film Festival, 2009. Juno plays Diane in ‘Jack and Diane’.

Whatever, I suppose I also have to admit that the “LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter)” article has caught my attention — and even made me a bit eager to actually see ‘Jack and Diane’ when it is released next year. The thing must have some kind of strange energy. I note from another source that Riley Keough’s co-star Juno Temple “replaced Alison Pill (who first replaced Ellen Page) in the lead role for ‘Jack & Diane.’”

And here is a plot summary: “Jack and Diane, two teenage girls, meet in New York City and spend the night kissing ferociously. Diane’s charming innocence quickly begins to open Jack’s tough skinned heart. But, when Jack discovers that Diane is leaving the country in a week she tries to push her away. Diane must struggle to keep their love alive while hiding the secret that her newly awakened sexual desire is giving her werewolf-like visions.”

I can hardly wait …

Jane Taber on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

“We know,” PM Harper told his Conservative summer caucus last week: “there are some in the opposition coalition again threatening an election, but colleagues, that is not what Canadians want.” And just today the sweetheart of Sparks Street Jane Taber is reporting that “Michael Ignatieff is under attack from Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who are accusing the Liberal leader of once again ‘scheming to impose an unwanted coalition.’”

Meanwhile, this past Monday night, Michael Ignatief himself told a Tory heckler in the Ottawa exurbs that “he has no plans to form a coalition because he already leads a coalition party … ‘We are the coalition, the Liberal Party of Canada is the coalition,’ he said. ‘I’m not running to make coalition with anybody else, I am running to win a Liberal government.’”

Sparks Street mall in Ottawa. Does Jane Taber ever hang out there? Who knows? As they say in the Byward market, maybe, maybe not.

Yet as Ms. Taber’s latest notebook jottings also suggest, “running to win a Liberal government” still looks like a quixotic quest. Moreover, “coalition” is not such a strange term of abuse and unhappiness in Canada’s fellow former self-governing dominion of the now fallen British empire down under. This past Monday Australian Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott was announcing that: “The Coalition is considering taxing all but a fraction of Australians at one simple flat rate, exempting from tax the first $25,000 each Australian earns.”

For any Canadians who may have forgotten, the mainstream of the Australian Liberal Party is quite conservative — and has been an inspiration for Stephen Harper’s new Conservative Party of Canada. And, as explained by no less a source than Wikipedia: “The Coalition in Australian politics refers to a group of centre-right parties that has existed in the form of a coalition agreement since 1922. The Coalition partners are the Liberal Party of Australia (or its predecessors before 1945) and the National Party of Australia (known as the Australian Country Party from 1921-1975 and the National Country Party of Australia from 1975-1982.”

Australian Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott on the campaign trail. Canadians might find the first part of the slogan here vaguely familiar?

There may still be more than a few Canadians as well who have forgotten that there is an Australian federal election this coming Saturday, August 21, 2010.

(August is a strange month for an election in Canada. Apart from the first federal election in 1867, which trundled on for almost six-and-a-half weeks, from Wednesday, August 7 to Friday, September 20, there has been only one Canadian federal election in August — on Monday, August 10, 1953. But, weather-wise, August in Australia is more or less the opposite of what it is in Canada, since the seasons down under are, so to speak, backwards from up here.)

“Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott share a moment before hostilities begin / Picture: Ray Strange.”

This year’s August 21 federal election in Australia also seems to have its fair share of exotic  undertones.  To start with, the governing Australian Labour Party (ALP) just recently switched leaders, when it seemed that Mandarin-speaking Kevin Rudd had become too unpopular to win another election. In the process Australia acquired its first female prime minister in Ms. Julia Gillard, who has been described as “a Fabian socialist and member of Emily’s list, a very feminist, pro-abortion group in the Labor Party.”

Ms. Gillard’s accession to the office of Australian prime minister is in its own right interesting food for thought for those Canadian politicians who argue that, under our shared kind of British-born “Westminister parliamentary democracy,” you have to have an election to change prime ministers. Yet, sensitive to complaints that the people of Australia had not really chosen her, Prime Minister Gillard did call the August 21 election, bolstered by the thought that her party was doing not too badly in the opinion polls.

Julia Gillard and the man she finally replaced as prime minister, Kevin Rudd, confer in Australian House of Representatives in an earlier era.

Then the opinion polls suddenly changed, in favour of Tony Abbott and his Liberal-National Coalition. Now the mood in the Land of Oz suddenly seems to have changed again. (See “What a difference 48 hours has made … Has Tony peaked? Suddenly, Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s stocks appear much better.”)

Australia may be even less influential internationally than Canada. But serious political junkies in all parts of the anglosphere will be paying some attention to the results of the thunder down under on August 21. A victory for Mr. Abbott and his Coalition will encourage the conservative right in the US mid-term elections this coming November — and perhaps the Harper Conservatives at some point this fall in Canada too?  If Ms. Gillard and the ALP manage to hang on, both President Obama’s party and the so-called terrible left-wing “opposition coalition” up here in the true north will be at least somewhat happier.

Julia Gillard in her kitchen at home, where she is “the first to admit she's not a culinary whiz.” Photo: Ken Irwin.

One good place to follow things from now until a week this coming Saturday is the “Decision 2010” page on the web site of The Age from Melbourne. For more irreverent reportage and commentary, check out the free sections of crikey.

(And on the question of whether we the people of Canada will be having our own opportunity to cast judgment on our current federal political leadership soon enough, according to the Toronto Sun Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, this past Monday, “said it depends entirely on Prime Minister Stephen Harper whether Canadians head to the polls this fall … ‘It depends on him. It depends on his government. If he acts with wisdom, we can make Parliament work. But if not, I have my duty as leader of the Opposition,’ Ignatieff told reporters.” And, some will say, appointing John Baird as new Conservative house leader does not seem like an act of very great wisdom in this regard?)

Premier Dalton McGuinty visits with kindergarten children at Victor Lauriston Public School in Chatham, January 12, 2009. Aaron Hall Photo.

Guess who has just commandeered our new “Ontario tonight” feature (see bar at top of page), and turned what is supposed to be a home for “brief intermittent reports on comings and goings in Canada’s most populous province” into accommodation for yet another extended tirade on Ontario’s “founding Liberal Premier of the later 19th century, Oliver Mowat,” and what may or may not prove his great-spirit echoes in the present career of Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty?

Whatever your guess, if you haven’t yet checked out “Ontario tonight” you may want to quickly look into “Monday 9 August 2010 — Premier Dad today as direct descendant of Christian Statesman and Elder Brother Mowat, 1872–1896.” The point of departure for the extended ramblings in this case is Robert Benzie’s piece in today’s Toronto Star on Dalton McGuinty —  “The upside and downside of being Premier Dad.”  (And we promise: the next entry in “Ontario tonight,” whenever the spirit moves it, will be much shorter.)