Author: Stephen Taylor

Late last week I made a mistake denying that Carol Jamieson was a member of the Conservative Party of Canada. However, there was no mistake that the Globe and Mail was intellectually dishonest for labeling Ms. Jamieson as a “party organizer” implying that she had the consent of the Conservative Party to organize.

Specifically, it seems that Globe scribe Gloria Galloway has been depending on a certain type of CPC “party organizer” for a while now. Funny, whenever Ms. Galloway writes a story about Stephen Harper, the knives comes out along with the anonymous “party organizer”.

First, remember how the Jamieson quote was framed by Galloway in the “shakeup” story last week (Sept. 7):

Those who have been fired “are either people who are dissenting about what Harper is doing or they are former Progressive Conservatives,” said Carol Jamieson, a party organizer in Toronto.

“It looks to me right now that within four weeks, the entire structure will be Canadian Alliance.”

Now, let’s look at some other stories that Galloway has been printing. This one even depends on the anonymous tipster for the headline “Tory insiders upset with party leadership”

“There is a lot of discontent with the turn of things. People are saying it’s time to replace the leader,” said one key Conservative organizer in Toronto who, like many others, asked not to be named because it could hurt his status in the party.

Dissatisfaction with Mr. Harper’s leadership “started expanding with the Belinda [Stronach] defection and then it continued to expand when we didn’t get our [confidence] vote passed [on May 19] and a lot of people in the party are tired of waiting,” said one organizer, who also asked to remain anonymous.

Now consider this quote from an article from Galloway on May 7, 2005:

“What I see is that the general electorate does not like Harper. And they look for things for him to do or say that justify their gut feeling that they have about him,” one high-placed Tory organizer says.

“This is a guy whose entire life in politics has been based on negativity so far,” the organizer says. He’s “cold, cold, cold, cold, cold. He doesn’t seem to like people, he doesn’t seem to like to go out and talk to people. He’s so weird how he approaches things.”

We have already established that Carol Jamieson is not a “party organizer” as Gloria Galloway portrays her in the September 7th article. However, whenever Ms. Galloway writes an article questioning the leadership of Stephen Harper, she bases her entire argument upon anonymous quotes from (one or more) “party organizers” sometimes labeled “from Toronto” (like Ms. Jamieson).

I wonder how many times Galloway has used Ms. Jamieson in the past (labeling her an anonymous party organizer from Toronto).

At worst, Galloway is using the same non-credible (as a party organizer) source to make a continuous argument to millions of non-decided voters against the leadership of Stephen Harper.

At best, Galloway bases party criticism of Stephen Harper on a number of anonymous sources, the validities of which are called into question because a) they are anonymous and b) Galloway lists Jamieson as a “party organizer”.

I’m watching the Notre Dame / Michigan game right now on ABC. It’s a good matchup so far (except that Big Blue just scored a TD). I’ll probably always be a fan of the Fighting Irish because they had quite a season when I did one of my 8 month undergrad co-ops at the fabled school. South Bend was a great city to live in and it must have doubled in size every Saturday during the football season. Football rivals Catholicism as a religion when ND is on a run (and it most definately was in 2002). I’ll always remember my time there fondly.

Hopefully the Irish will pull this one off (they’re currently leading 17-10). I attended every homegame in 2002, including their annual Michigan matchup. The game that year was even tighter then and was only decided during the closing minutes of fourth quarter. Notre Dame pulled it off and then my fellow students clad in green, and fueled by the hours of tailgating before kickoff, stormed the field and rallied around their team (which made the cover of Sports Illustrated that year as true comeback story).

The Irish just won! In today’s game, Notre Dame (ranked 20) held off the Wolverines (ranked 3) and upset Big Blue in the Big House in front of 110,000 now somber fans in Ann Arbor.

Pictures of the ND/Michigan game that I attended in 2002 are in the extended entry. (Be sure to click on the link below)

Continue reading Lazy Saturday

Brett Skinner is the Director of Pharmaceutical & Heath Policy Research from the Fraser Institute. He spoke at Peter Jaworski’s Liberty Summer Seminar and gave an interesting talk on a current issue that should contain a lot more facts in the place of a failed ideology.

Healthcare is a perennial issue in Canadian elections and while the Liberal Party merely points to another party and says “not like them”, they do not propose any fresh ideas for providing service to Canadians.

As Brett muses, the opponents of liberty in healthcare (the Liberals) do not care about the viability of the public system. They instead care about equalitarian socialism. For Canadians living under this government however, this has little to do with the delivery of a high quality service to Canadians.

Now, to be fair, at an earlier speech to the Fraser Institute, Stephen Harper surprised some by declaring that the Conservative Party of Canada would not be changing the current overall system to include a private tier. Harper attributed this decision to an overwhelming Canadian aversion to changing healthcare in such a way.

However, this came before the Chaoulli SCC decision, and perhaps some experimentation by a few provincial governments will begin to turn the tide.

Did you know that the average age of a hospital in Canada is 40 years while the average age of an American hospital is 9 years?

Did you know that Canada delays the approval of certain drugs by about six months in order to wait for the price of a newly released drug to fall to a comfortable level for the Canadian government?

The healthcare debate in this country is a contentious one and the talking points often fall along ideological lines. If we are to fix an unsustainable system however, we need to measure the benefit of an egalitarian socialism where we pay more and get less against another system of delivery.

The Fraser Institute asks important questions and answers many of them in a way that goes against the grain of the current stagnant mindset. If you ever wanted to understand the private side of the healthcare debate beyond the superficial and demonizing Liberal talking points, I’d encourage you to listen to Brett Skinner (even if you are a public system proponent) and try to keep an open mind to the facts.

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