The Voice of the University of Toronto at Mississauga
MEDIUM THE
MONDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2008
VOLUME 35, ISSUE 6
www.mediumonline.ca
Nuit Blanche lights up
Student spotlight: Dimitri Tcherbadji
Ball tournament for a cause
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Third-year UTM student deported
Photo/Fariah Chowdhury
Saad Alam, a Bangladeshi UTM student, was deported last Friday despite protest from the University community. “Literally hundreds of people have contacted minister Diane Finley, asking for the decision to be overturned,” said Fariah Chowdhury, an organizer with No One Is Illegal. Chowdhury and others hope to meet with University of Toronto president David Naylor. “We would like Naylor to articulate that non-status students have a right to post-secondary education, and to make it clear that immigration enforcement is not welcomed on campus.”
Andrew Coyne and Paul Wells weigh-in on election MEREDITH LILLY NEWS EDITOR The School of Public Policy & Government at the University of Toronto hosted Andrew Coyne and Paul Wells Wednesday in a discussion on the upcoming federal election. Moderated by Director and Professor Mark Stabile, the two-hour discussion shed light on Canadian politics. Coyne, the national editor of Macleans magazine, and Wells, author and senior columnist at Maclean’s, presented a short address and fielded questions. “The story of this election is that there is no story. The election polls that generated so many headlines over the past weeks have spanned all of a percentage point. We’re right back where we started,” said Coyne. “Harper had no particular reason to
call this election, their record in power is one of random chance. The opposition has been constantly caught off guard. In that sense, governing inconsistently does give one enormous tactical advantage,” he added. The increasing clout of Alberta’s economy in the confederation was identified as one of the contributing factors to the resurgence of conservatism in Canada. “The Liberals thought that Harper would be easy to beat. It was urban futurism versus Canada’s decrepit rural past,” said Wells. “They forgot that there is another Canada, one that is difficult to see from the steps of the Munk Centre.” According to Coyne, sceptical Canadians found Harper to be considerably more staid than expected. “Incrementalism is really too strong a word for it. Harper has no agenda, hidden or otherwise,” Coyne noted.
Some of Harper’s restraint has been credited to his minority government, but the commentators did not foresee any significant changes if he were to win a majority. A majority for Harper may be in tension with his tightly controlled style of governance. “What a leader like Harper wants is the smallest possible coalition to ensure victory,” said Wells. “He would prefer to have a smaller caucus than one that gets too big for its britches.” The Liberal ticket looked less than promising to Coyne and Wells. “Stephan Dion has a tough job for anyone, let alone Dion,” said Wells. “Dion had a shaky start with his own party. On the first ballot for Liberal leadership he ranked fourth with only eighteen per cent of the vote. He has a huge challenge in this election; he’s fighting without an army behind him.” Having the Liberal party in power “ain’t so natural anymore,” said
Coyne. “The Liberal empire has been slowly falling apart. Their base has been narrowing. Their stronghold going into this election consists essentially of Toronto and Montreal.” The Liberals under Dion tried to redefine their base by moving left. “The green shift was intended to win the left of centre vote, but those voters scattered,” said Coyne. “The green shift had a few problems, the salesman was poor and there were some flaws in the program.” Coyne and Wells agreed that the primary problem with the Green Shift was that it lacked substance. “It was just radical enough to really annoy everyone,” said Coyne. The green movement in general has a difficult political mandate, especially when advocating radical change. “Voters perceive that Canada alone is not going to save the planet. We in Canada will come along with this
when the rest of the world does,” said Wells. “The Liberals need a blue collar candidate. Not a professor, not a business elite, not the son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. They should beat the bushes to find someone more personable.” “Hopefully not from Alaska,” added Stabile. Coyne criticized Canada’s first past the post system that has cultivated “risk-averse” parties. “Canadian parties don’t present substantial policy, but rather trade in sudden bursts of leveraged bets and shiny little wedge issues to tie the vital two per cent,” said Coyne. “What we need is a long-term plan to get our productivity up. It’s difficult to pull together when every politician’s slogan is ‘in the long run, we’ll all be out of office.’” Continued on page 2