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Prime Minister Harper just added the Toronto riding of Don Valley West to the three others which will hold by-elections on September 22. I live in Don Valley West, so I will be blogging about what I see and hear.

Let’s start with the big strategic picture. Three of the four ridings (Don Valley West, Guelph, and Westmount) were held by the Liberals and one, Saint-Lambert, by the Bloc Quebecois. The Conservatives will be testing their strategy of attacking Stephane Dion, particularly on his green shift. One or more wins would put the Liberals in check: unwilling to force an election, portrayed as Harper’s reluctant supporters, and in internal disarray. At the other end of the spectrum, the rivalry between the Greens and the NDP for third place will be spirited.

I had a quick look at the candidate websites. Conservative John Carmichael’s and the Green Party’s Georgina Wilcock’s are the most highly developed. Carmichael’s site has an opening video, lots of endorsements, a list of the government’s achievements, positions on key issues incorporating critiques of the opposition, and translation into eight languages, which makes sense in this ethnically diverse constituency. Georgina Wilcock’s site has very nicely integrated biographical information about her and details of local events with the Green Party’s site, with its emphasis on environmental policy.

Liberal Rob Oliphant’s site contains a detailed bio, information about Stephane Dion’s visit later this week, but little about policy. NDP candidate David Sparrow’s site has a personal message about why he’s running, a link to the NDP home page, and little else.

Two of the candidates already have an online presence in their professional lives. David Sparrow is an actor-writer, and his professional home page is more detailed than his political home page. Georgina Wilcock is a doctor, and Google lists her entry on www.ratemds.com before her candidacy. She has four highly complimentary ratings, which average out to 5, the top of the scale. While being a good doctor is not the same thing as a good politician, low ratings as a doctor would not have inspired confidence, and would have been circulated by her opponents.
Here are two other tidbits from the early days of the campaign.

Conservative John Carmichael has already gone negative, running radio ads attacking the Liberals, along the lines of “Stephane Dion wants to increase gasoline prices even more. Is he crazy?”
A walk in the neighbourhood revealed a street with eight Green Party signs and no others. Lawn signs are a notoriously misleading predictor of election outcomes, but this at least shows that the Greens have hit the ground running.

I’ll be away next week, but back to the by-election after Labour Day.

The economic and military crisis the United States is undergoing today brings to mind Canada’s experience in 1994 and 1995. The second Quebec referendum presented Canada with a threat to its national survival, and its public debt burden - which had soared to equal its GDP and was second-worst in the G8, after Italy - was a threat to its economic viability. Looking back almost fifteen years, it is clear that Canadians made some tough policy choices, and the outcome was a much stronger country. Perhaps Americans can learn from Canada’s experience.

The federal government’s activist response to the referendum, in which an ambiguous version of sovereignty-association was rejected by the narrowest of margins, was to seek the Supreme Court’s opinion about what would constitute a valid secession process, in response to enact the Clarity Act, and to raise the federal government’s profile in Quebec (the latter encompassing the ill-fated sponsorship program).

The public debt load, which had been growing for a long time, ultimately came to be perceived as a crisis because global capital markets lost their confidence in the “full faith and credit” of the Canadian government and began referring to the currency as the Northern Peso. The federal government’s response was dramatic: increases in taxation combined with sharp cuts in spending to restore fiscal balance within three years.

The conditions for bold measures to tackle both these problems were favorable. Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s government had a large parliamentary majority and a weak and divided opposition. There was strong public support for action on both sovereignty and public finance. The economic program was consistent with conservative ideology so, enacted by a Liberal government (like Nixon reestablishing diplomatic relations with China), it faced little opposition from conservatives. Robust economic growth compensated for the deflationary impact of both tax increases and cuts in government spending.
The current situation in the US is both comparable to and different from to what Canada faced fifteen years ago. The war in Iraq, while not a threat to national survival, is expensive, unpopular, and a distraction from the country’s primary security objectives. The ongoing housing crisis, the disarray in the financial sector, stagflation, and the rapidly accumulating national debt pose a more daunting set of economic problems than Canada faced in 1994.

America’s dichotomy between low taxes rates and an increasingly activist government — militarily by choice and economically by necessity - can be accommodated only if overseas sources, particularly sovereign investment funds, are willing to hold ever more of its public debt and corporate equity. American politicians have not been candid with the public about the precariousness of the current situation, and the external world has not sounded warnings comparable to those Canada received. Compared with Canada in 1994, the US now faces a more severe economic situation; while there is certainly public malaise, there is less sense of crisis or widespread resolve to support bold changes.

The Bush administration is being pushed by public opinion and economic necessity to embrace policies it does not prefer. So it is defining a withdrawal date to the Iraq; spending billions to support the housing industry, the financial sector, and consumer demand; and reluctantly acquiescing to action on climate change. It is exhausted, marking time until a new administration takes office.

The new administration faces enormous challenges. Its first challenge will be the same as the Canadian government faced in 1994, talking straight to the public about the magnitude of the challenges and the severity of the remedies that will be needed. To quote the American economist Paul Romer, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” The Canadian government, assisted by the global capital markets, leveled with the Canadian people in 1994, and Canada’s economic crisis was not wasted. We can only hope the next American administration will do likewise.

In this presidential election year, I revisited the PBS series on the American presidency originally broadcast in 2000. One reason was personal. The commentator on the series was one of my mentors, Harvard professor and dean of scholars of the American presidency of a previous generation, Richard Neustadt. Neustadt passed away in 2003. Watching the series reminded me of Neustadt’s way of delivering penetrating insights with his characteristic smile and his great enthusiasm.

The series was constructed thematically, rather than chronologically. Each of the ten episodes discussed several presidents who illustrated a common theme, for example military heroes (Washington, Grant, Eisenhower), scions of prominent families (John Quincy Adams, FDR, JFK), or professional politicians (Lincoln, LBJ). The choice of a thematic construction provided unexpected juxtapositions and insights. It posed the question of what was required for a certain type of person, or a person assuming power under certain circumstances, to succeed in the presidency.

The one downside of this presentation was that every episode’s concluding one-paragraph summary of the lessons learned from the presidents discussed sounded like something a student would memorize for an impending examination. This was accentuated by the musical accompaniment, which of course swelled during the concluding lines.

In his commentary, Neustadt often focused on formative experiences and how they determined whether or not the president the boy ultimately became was comfortable in his own skin when in office. For example, FDR’s cheerfulness and optimism as a child characterized his presidency; in contrast, LBJ’s youthful insecurity contributed to his self-defeating tendency as president to push people too hard and to be too much in their faces. And Neustadt expressing his amazement that Richard Nixon, a classic introvert who always hated dealing with people, sought a career in politics. What was he trying to prove? What insecurities was he trying to overcome?

Looking back over the last seventy years, it is clear that from the thirties to the sixties, Americans elected four superb leaders in FDR, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John Kennedy, while their successors - LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush - have, on average, been considerably less impressive.

Neustadt, in discussing the impeachment of Bill Clinton, commented that, since Nixon, American politics has become more partisan, so that there is always an opposition, together with at least some of the media, that is intent on unmaking the president. In a parliamentary democracy such as Canada, this is nothing new, but in a republic that fuses the identity of the head of state and head of government in one person, this is problematic.

Out of Neustadt’s commentary emerge a number of characteristics necessary for success, possibly even greatness, in the presidency. I pose these as questions.

• Does he have a vision for the country?
• Can she concentrate on a small set of key priorities, rather than attempting to implement a laundry-list?
• Does he display integrity, by keeping the public’s trust, upholding the law, and refusing to abuse power for personal gain?
• Is she at ease in her own skin and does she enjoy exercising power to achieve her vision?
• Is he comfortable as a politician, in the sense of accepting the necessity of building coalitions and convincing powerful people, both in the US and, increasingly, overseas to join?

These questions seem to me to be the essential ones. It is, of course, harder to pose them looking forward to predict how someone will perform than it is to ask them retrospectively. But voters should be posing them, both in the US presidential election later this year, and in the Canadian elections that will be held, at the latest, in October 2009.

One downside of the convenience of working online is the multiple varieties of online piracy. This post reports on two I’ve recently experienced.

My email provider, the University of Toronto Scarborough, for some reason decided that messages from the Canadian Internet Registration Agency reminding me to renew the domain name www.digitalstate.ca were junk, and didn’t transmit them to me. The one message that did get through told me that the deadline had passed and I had lost the domain name. And indeed the website, which had been used to promote my book Digital State at the Leading Edge, went dead. As soon as it became available, the domain name was acquired by a gang of pirates at www.dompro.com, which traffics in domain names. If you go to the site now, a similar gang called Name Drive is offering it for sale. I refused to play that game and acquired a new domain name for the book, which is www.digitalstate.org. The moral of the story is to work with your email provider to make sure that messages from CIRA aren’t considered junk.

The second story concerns an online conference call provider that I’ve been using, primarily for conference calls among the six authors of Digital State. The service is automated, so that all you do to arrange a conference call is dial their number at the prearranged time and enter the access code. Somehow someone got the moderator’s access code, which I had divulged to no one. They ran up a bill of $ 400 US on conference calls, most made in the early hours of a Sunday morning. The bill was automatically charged to my credit card. When the conference call provider’s invoice arrived in my email, I protested, and after a number of calls with customer service and accounting, the provider agreed to refund the charges, though due to exchange rate fluctuations and credit card transactions fees for currency changes, I received $30 (Canadian) less than I paid. No longer working on a multi-author collaboration, I cancelled my account with the online provider. The moral of this story is that if I ever do need a conference call provider in the future, I’ll avoid online options, and choose one that goes through an actual person.

And the moral of both stories is that there are lots of pirates out there in cyberspace, and you can’t be too careful about either your intellectual property, like a clever domain name, or your private information, like access codes or passwords.