Must-reads: James Travers and Don MacPherson on veiled voting; Margaret Wente on John Tory; Richard Gwyn on dismounting the Iraqi tiger.

Woe is John Tory
As the Ontario election campaign officially gets underway, Ontario-based pundits file their post-mortems for the Progressive Conservatives.

The National Post's Jonathan Kay is pretty much ready to write off Tory's campaign, based on the Liberal war room's deft capitalization on the religious schools fiasco. His bet is that Tory hatched the plan at some ethnic fundraising dinner or another, "sometime between the chicken and the dessert," where parents he mistook for representative samples told him they'd like the government to fund their children's faith-based educations. Tory needs to be "finding a populist wedge issue and torquing it hard," says Kay, but the candidate won't do it "because he's a risk-averse politician who instinctively embraces the elite consensus." (And that's where we lose the plot a little - faith-based education's looking pretty risky to us.)

"Ironists will note that Mr. Tory managed [Kim Campbell's] campaign," Margaret Wente writes in The Globe and Mail, pointing to the former Prime Minister's "no issues, please" statement as a gaffe of similar magnitude to Tory's. In both cases the outrage isn't entirely fair, Wente believes, but in Tory's case it's all the more bizarre since even his staunchest supporters can't figure out whether this is "a cynical appeal to the ethnic vote (meaning, he's not all that principled) or whether he had no idea it would be such a hornet's nest (meaning, he's not all that smart)." Either way, Wente says, he needs to change the channel, but quick.

It's not as though McGuinty's bulletproof, says the Globe's Murray Campbell. "[T]here is only tepid support for what his Liberal government has done since 2003," he writes, and there is the matter of all those broken promises - traditionally the bread and butter of pretenders to the throne. Polling numbers favour Tory over McGuinty as Premier, Campbell notes, but "Mr. McGuinty's salvation, oddly enough, may be that he does not excite voters and is neither loved nor feared in the same way that former premier Mike Harris was."

The Ottawa Citizen's David Reevely examines the various environmental contradictions in the McGuinty campaign, arguing that the government's "certifiably green acts" while in power are compromised by a sense of inertia in the current campaign and by massive ongoing subsidies to the auto industry. "[T]his is the same government that's proud of the $17.5 billion it's spending on transit 'to reduce gridlock and air pollution,'" says Reevely. "Left Hand, have you heard from Right Hand lately?"

The (stupid, meaningless) dance of the veils

Cheers to the Montreal Gazette's Don MacPherson, who understands this unfathomably bizarre "veiled voter" controversy more than our four party leaders put together. Far from deserving censure for violating the will of the Elections Act, he says, "[Chief Electoral Officer Marc] Mayrand appears to be the only one in Ottawa who still is respecting it." Bear in mind these are amendments that all four leaders signed off on just months ago; that Mayrand explicitly warned this issue might arise; and that no one seems to have found a veiled Muslim woman who would object to lifting their veil. If only Mayrand's Quebec equivalent had the same courage to follow the law as written, MacPherson laments, instead of pandering to intolerant elements.

Cheers also to Sun Media's Greg Weston, who points a finger at "some truly lamentable journalism" for allowing the story to get completely out of hand. (Indeed, the briefest reading of the Canada Elections Act breaks the tie between Harper's and Mayrand's positions.) We'd have preferred if Weston had emphasized that non-photo ID requirements apply to everyone, not just overly modest Muslim women, but it's always nice to see a level head in the Suns' op-ed pages.

And cheers a third time to the Toronto Star's James Travers, who argues that both the veiled voting "debate" and the religious schools "debate" are symptomatic of Canada's hopelessly distracted political culture, "No Ontario politician facing voters is courageous - or foolhardy - enough to suggest the remedy for anomalous funding for one sectarian school board is funding none," he writes. And "[n]o prime minister trying to build Quebec support is about to confront the xenophobia fuelling the controversy over Muslim voters." This points to all sorts of "limits on national aspirations," Travers argues.

But jeers go to the Post's John Ivison, who basically parrots the PMO's line - that C-31 "was intended to head in precisely the opposite direction to the one being charted by Elections Canada" and that Mr. Mayrand is "flout[ing] the will of Parliament." Intentions and will are all very nice, but that's not what the law says! If Mayrand had interpreted the Act any other way than he is now, surely he would be doing exactly what Messrs. Harper and Ivison now accuse him of - re-writing the law. All of which is very unfortunate, since some of Ivison's other arguments - that the list of acceptable non-photo documents is too long and loose, and that Mayrand might have done Muslim women a better service by just keeping mum on the whole issue - get lost in this weirdly pervasive fog.

Leaving Iraq

General David Petraeus' and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker's testimony before a special house Committee on Monday constituted a very good day for the GOP, John Ibbitson writes in the Globe. "[T]heir workmanlike assessment of the potential and difficulties facing that tormented country carried a weight of credibility that will hearten Republicans and other supporters of the war," he argues, which leaves the Democrats in a bit of a pickle. If they pursue troop pullouts too stridently they risk alienating those emboldened by the troop surge's ostensible success, but to "vow to stay the course" would be "politically intolerable." And compromise routes, Ibbitson argues, "can be the hardest to navigate."

Doesn't make a difference, Richard Gwyn opines in the Star, since anyone riding a tiger eventually has to get off - and it's never pretty. "Once the Americans leave, they will leave behind a human desert of hatred, fear, ethnic cleansing and of an abiding vengefulness by all those who have lost fathers, sons, entire families, kin, to killers on the other side," he predicts. "Also, massive physical destruction" and thousands of terrorists ready and willing to relocate.

Duly noted

Robert Fulford isn't buying the idea that Brian Mulroney risked his resurgent reputation by publishing his splenetic memoirs. "[T]here's no noticeable movement of public opinion in his direction," he writes in the Post. "Long ago, the Liberals stole his free-trade policy and his GST … And it might be hard to find anyone, of any party, who disliked him in 1993 but admires him now." The memoirs aren't going to change any minds, if Fulford's reading thereof is any indication. "[H]e comes across as something of a whiner, a politician who loses his poise when dealing with failure or betrayal," we are told. "His anger is too overt, his neediness too obvious." When he writes glowingly about Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, Fulford opines, Mulroney's shortcomings only become more obvious.

Writing from Berlin for the Citizen, Andrew Cohen looks at the reactions of ordinary Germans to recent terrorism-related arrests in Frankfurt, characterizing it as a late-breaking leap into lockstep with the general state of worry in countries like Britain and Canada. The difference, he notes, is Germany's "burden of the past, which has inhibited the use of the military abroad and the use of surveillance at home."

The Globe's Jeffrey Simpson finally itemizes the enormous collection of similarities Canada has been said to share with Australia in recent days and, we admit, it's a fairly impressive list - from the Aussie Supreme Court's referencing its Canadian equivalent on Aboriginal rights to uranium production and an almost identical voting record at the UN. Our suspicions remain undaunted, however. Did you know they drive on the left side of the road? It's just not right.