IVLP AND THE BIG YES SESSION

Folks who read this blog over the next three weeks may notice a certain enthusiasm for things I'm observing in the United States that may seem uncharacteristic for me. The nerdy enthusiasm for policy in general, yes, that is undeniably me. But some have occasionally told me I can seem stubborn and naturally skeptical of ideas, and here I will be advancing new ideas to consider with the bubbly enthusiasm of an actor in one of those Cialis commercials. 

So, let me explain.

An exchange trip is a different type of experience. When I travelled as a minister, I had a number of goals to advance that required me to focus only on New Brunswick's immediate interests. If that meant making a speech which stuck to our perspectives at a roundtable, or if it meant quietly pouring shots of bai-Jo into a potted plant so a smart senior official in China couldn't toast me into submission, well, that was the job. 

Here, I have the gift of seeing something new for three weeks and considering it with no interest. I love to share the strengths of Canada, but I also love to hear what others are proud of, how they see the good in their country.  This is how we learn from each other. 

When the creators of Bugs Bunny were developing cartoons, they insisted on a Big Yes Session. That was just a time when no idea could be dismissed.  No one was allowed to say "no" or "for heaven's sake, Jim!"  You had to first think about how to make it work. 

Like Canada, the U.S. has challenges. As with us, their public service is full of decent but human people who struggle with the scope of some challenges. Yet, also like us, they have solved some problems with good will, hard work and creativity. So, on this trip, I want to see the good through their eyes and think first about how to make it work at home.

I'm trying to apply the Big Yes Session to the trip as well, so new experiences are getting embraced. My first afternoon here, a beer at a local sports bar led to chatting with folks next to me and soon, five of us from three different cities were enjoying Indian food on a rooftop patio (I also have an invite to Louisville, Kentucky). A Canadian pilgrimage to Adams-Morgan led to some brave Canucks entering a reggae club because the bouncer called out to us -- and we found a $5 all-you-can-drink bounty inside. (Yes, restraint was shown). Crystal City microbrews are great. 

Anyway, this leftie Canadian is looking for everything to say yes to in America. I haven't lost my talent for healthy skepticism. But maybe, somewhere amidst the monuments of the National Mall and the obvious, unspoiled emotion they evoke in our American neighbours, I've also been reminded that both our nations were founded upon a hearty dose of optimism as well.

Immigration -- The Math and Moral Courage

The Center For Immigration Law is a few blocks from the action on Capitol Hill, although it is calm even as their signature issue heats up.  The Center works for common sense immigration reform, and right now the legislative calendar is offering them their close-up. So folks there are busy trying to inject facts and reason into an intensely political issue. 

Where facts and logic take them is to the inescapable conclusion that more immigration is a good thing. And the facts are on their side. For companies seeking a place to locate, workplace skills are a site selector and immigrants are representing as much as 80% of the growth in some hard-to-find skills in the STEM sector. (Note that STEM refers to a grouping of science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills and is a preoccupation American policymakers hold with considerable passion)

As well, immigrants are considerably more likely than average to start a business and to succeed to the point that they are job creators. Far from taking jobs from established citizens, immigrants tend to both create and attract more jobs for their new neighbours and countrymen. 

If you're thinking that more people and more jobs would sound pretty good at home in New Brunswick, you're right. Our population has declined for all but a handful of the last twenty years (Shawn Graham, so frequently maligned, was the most successful premier by the numbers).  Yet lacking large urban centers, existing support communities and autonomy over immigration policy doesn't always allow New Brunswick to work with the urgency our declining population demands. 

Trying to take some opportunity for learning away from each of our sessions, one set of numbers keeps nagging at me. If you listed the Top 100 American cities in population, and then listed the 100 cities with the fastest immigration growth, you would notice 29 cities that may contain the answer for New Brunswick. Twenty-nine cities are not among the biggest, but are punching above their weight when it comes to immigration. The folks at the Center, understandably busy with government relations, have noted this group but haven't yet done work to identify what these 29 overachievers have in common. Sure, some may have a unique industry that rains jobs down like manna from heaven, but others may just be enacting policies and attitudes that work. This would be a great job for a keen researcher at our policy centers in New Brunswick.

If we can figure that our, we should be demanding that Ottawa give us the power needed to try something different. Our shrinking numbers, down in the skills companies demand, the incomes our social safety net requires, the middle-class that makes communities click-- these numbers are an emergency that demands action. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has called for a policy of stapling a green card on to every university and college degree earned by foreign students. Frankly, we could do a lot worse. 

That brings me to the moral challenge for our political and business leaders. Too many people still cling to a simple, easy-to-understand, wrong belief that if we have unemployed people here, more immigration means more people "taking" scarce jobs. This is built upon a wrong assumption, the assumption that jobs are a static good unaffected by the arrival of people with skills and drive and entrepreneurial spirit. But it is a powerful belief. 

Something dangerous has entered our political bloodstream; the belief that it is a leader's lob to poll and discover popular misconceptions and repeat them back to us rather than challenge us. In this political theory, those who attempt to challenge conventional wisdom are "arrogant", those who accept existing beliefs are humble purveyors of a new approach. But the moment calls for leaders with a different humility -- the humility to take risks in the service of the greater good of ideas and evidence-driven policy. 

In the end, we learned that places which attract immigrants are places who want immigrants and make that a civic goal. And each one of us who love New Brunswick need to be willing apostles for the benefits of immigration, convincing our neighbours that greater opportunity awaits all our kids if we have the courage to think differently, globally and openly about opening our doors to those who want to join our communities. 

It was nice to meet people who are passionate about following the evidence and opening their shores up to others. I hope to bring the evidence and the passion home with me. 

DAY ONE IN WASHINGTON: HANDS UP WITHOUT HANDS OUT

 The debate on government's role in economic development is a hot one back home. We have a nagging feeling that all these grants to business aren't doing much, and when something clearly goes south like ATCON, Atlantic Yarns et al, we can even get pretty mad.  Yet the counter argument, asking if we are ready to accept that government does nothing but trust the market, always seems a bit too optimistic for a have-not province.

Well, today I met leaders at two economic development agencies that might help us find a third way on the topic. Directors at the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) and the Small Business Administration (SBA) took the time to give us in-depth briefings on what they do.

The MBNA focuses on marginalized groups who may struggle to be fully included in a market economy -- immigrants, African-Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics and others are statutorily presumed to be marginalized and others can be added based upon objective criteria.  Newcomers used to thinking of the U.S. policy landscape as dominated by laissez-faire economists will be surprised to learn that there is bipartisan support for the notion that lack of connections to investors, mentors and capital holds some groups back. As long as the solution is to lower barriers to free market businesses and not redistributive social programs, there has been support for programs whichever party holds sway in D.C.

The MBNA does not give grants or loan guarantees to businesses that have minority ownership.  Rather, they work with potential and actual entrepreneurs to reduce the impact of lower social capital and mentorship by creating opportunities to access the competitive bidding process for government contracts, and leveraging those successes to increase the business's ties to larger private sector companies. 

The federal government here is very big on "set-asides" -- legal mandates to reserve a certain percentage of government work for small and medium enterprises, or SME's. These set-asides don't weight the scales in favour of some businesses over others the way anti-free traders suggest, but they limit some competitions to small or minority players. They then use these competitions to allow companies to register for ongoing assistance learning how to compete in this arena. 

One advantage of this over weighted criteria is that companies excluded by the criteria don't bid and lose to government-chosen competitors, but instead have an economic incentive to include eligible companies in their supply chain. A small minority-owned business may not be big enough to have a contract to build tanks, but it might make specialized parts that will then encourage a big company to make them part of their team. This also creates an incubator effect where companies begin to grow less dependent upon their government advisors and starts to benefit from connections with major industry players, which is pretty much the point.

These set-asides are combined with local Centers Of Excellence. These are local community institutions that commit to mentor and aid entrepreneurs in regions with specialized economic opportunities and growth industries. Post-secondary institutions and community agencies bid to get funding and must agree to deliver content and be measured on outcomes to keep their funding year-to-year. The more bottom-up process allows for local priorities to drive the establishment of these Centers in a way that gives more sway to local trends than a centralized plan of establishment might do. These Centres are the program delivery mechanism that identifies companies that will benefit most from help, evaluates proposals and trains entrepreneurs in contracting processes.

The SBA oversees set-asides across a variety of targeted areas -- minority-run businesses, economically-depressed zones, and under-capitalized entrepreneurs. In addition to ensuring compliance from all government departments in meeting the 23% set-aside target for contract competitions, they also oversee loan guarantees and small business advocacy within the political structure.

The neat thing here is that these agencies are targeting businesses in a different way than we do in New Brunswick.  Our Strategic Assistance Fund often aids existing businesses that are failing or mobile companies that demand incentives to choose New Brunswick.  Recognizing that small business creates a disproportionate number of new jobs and is the least likely business to leave its home region, the US programs actually target businesses at the point where accelerator funds have the greatest impact on new jobs -- companies still growing and at around $1million annual sales. These are called "Gazelles", and it may be telling that I never heard that word used in economic aid decisions in all four years I spent in government.

Even the loan guarantees that exist through the SBA have a more bottom-up process. There is no political involvement in the decisions. (The agencies, in all things,  may make decisions and simply report to political masters on overall results but no executive authority is involved in particular decisions to aid particular companies).   Lending institutions must bid to partner with government and put some money up themselves to help the growing business, so that the government guarantee never fully replaces the judgement of the lender as it did in some of New Brunswick's debacles.

In short, government aid to companies in these federal programmes is marked by these differences:

It is completely depoliticized at the granting level.

It targets only growing, never failing, companies.

There is an embedded advisory role for government in helping companies.

The use of set-asides in tendering preserves unweighted competitions but limits eligibility.

There is a finite time period in a company's life for help.

There is an advocacy, or ombudsman-like, role for agencies defending small business interests within the political process.

Could some of these ideas offer New Brunswick a third way between the failed process of political bailouts and a complete reliance on the vagaries of markets and Upper Canadian bankers?  I will confess that some of these lessons seem worthy of debate among our policymakers, business leaders and academics.

HAVE IDEAS, WILL TRAVEL -- My IVLP Trip

For the next three weeks, the blog is going to be more active and quite a bit different.  In case you missed my news, I've had the honour of being selected to join the International Visiting Leaders programme through the U.S.State Department. The IVLP is designed to let emerging foreign leaders visit a variety of regions in the U.S. and exchange ideas and perspectives with American policy leaders. Among the alumni of the programme you'll find Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Hamid Karzai, as well as many less famous folks who still went home with some new ideas and made their communities a bit better. I'll settle for making it into that second group.

My group is unusual in the IVLP -- instead of a mix of nations, we are five Canadians from a variety of backgrounds and regions in our own home and native land. We have a central theme as well, with our trip looking specifically at economic development and creation of entrepreneurial cultures in struggling economic zones. We start in Washington to learn about the policy instruments, but then head to cities around the U.S. to see how people actually make those policies real through community agencies and local programmes.  We will soon be heading to, in order, Charleston, Albuquerque, Seattle and Detroit. 

You'll meet my four travelling companions as we get to know each other, but I can already give you one spoiler alert.   They are all impressive people, with a creative entrepreneurial bent. They are also clearly fun to travel with, and we've already decided that we are going to enjoy our three weeks together.

After a tour of Washington's landmarks and a briefing on comparative federalism, the policy part of our tour began today with visits to some key government departments. (the federalism part can be summed up quickly once one accepts that Canadians' greatest policy fear is that government will fail to act when needed, and Americans' greatest fear is that government will act when it isn't needed at all.)

Through the next three weeks, I'm going to share some thoughts on how some lessons, axioms, and anecdotes might apply to tackling our challenges in New Brunswick. And if three weeks of travel inevitably lends to some funny or amazing moments, I will share that, too.  After all, I already stopped a few times and wished more New Brunswickers could be here for this. Maybe in some ways you can. 

IN PRAISE OF ANDY SCOTT

One time, when my pride had led me into a tough political situation, my friend Andy Scott came to see me.  "You're ready to hear this now", he began, "so I'm going to give you some advice."

"You've had the option of running people over in a debate. I never had that option, so I learned to convince them. Now, you've reached a job where you're going to have to learn that, too."

It was brilliant advice. I probably could have used it years before, but Andy knew when I was ready to hear it.  It was one more reason I, like many in Fredericton, considered Andy Scott my mentor. I make no claim I learned well, but he was one hell of a teacher.

Andy kept convincing people, his whole life. If you disagreed with him, if you attacked him, he just kept talking and listening and engaging with you until he squeezed the opposition right out of you.  When I was in student politics, Andy was a legend. If we organized a demonstration when the Prime Minister visited, Andy made sure leaders got to meet him and tell him what we were worried about. If we proposed ideas, Andy made sure we got to present them.  We all were recipients of the 11pm call from Ottawa where Andy made sure we knew that what we were saying got heard.

Over the years, you could see that this wasn't an isolated case. You saw the folks who handed out leaflets attacking Andy in one election campaigning for him the next. I remember a lot of Bernard Lord cabinet ministers telling me they hoped Andy would be re-elected because they knew he would work with them. Few dared to have town hall meetings on the emotional issues like gun control and same sex marriage, but Andy's ended with both sides applauding, if not agreeing.

You might think this would make those late night policy phone calls seem less special, but Andy in his every word and deed made it clear that he saw any citizen willing to engage as special --even if they never voted for him.  As a result, many eventually did. 

Sometimes, politicians who make everyone feel listened to succeed because their views are elastic and vague, but that isn't the case here. Even insider accounts of the Chrétien government's early days cite Andy as an acknowledged leader of the MP's fighting to protect the social safety net. He engaged everyone, but he supported marriage equality when it wasn't clearly politically safe to do so, and faced physical threats for his stand. His advocacy for people with disabilities, expressed through a committee report notable for its passion and clarity, is still nationally known.  He was a leading voice in achieving the Kelowna Accord.

Andy's political success was never built on negative attacks or flashy appeals, but on the facts that he spent the time needed to learn the issues and stayed up a little later educating others. That these things stand out might tell us something worrisome about the state of politics, but it tells us more that was good about Andy Scott.

Friends from away were amazed that Andy's margin of victory grew after the unfortunate incident with Dick Proctor, but no one here was. Andy often treated citizens like they deserved to hear what was really going on in Ottawa, and even if he went over the line with the best of intentions, the snark and nastiness that followed told us more about the system than it did about the honest, forthright, humble guy from Barker's Point we had sent into that morass on our behalf.

That Andy kept going after that incident and thrived is a testament to the man. It also illuminates what so many people found loveable about Andy. In a cynical age, he never lost faith that government could be a force for good, that hard work and good intentions would win out and that good ideas would eventually get heard. Perhaps, when the social media spats and scandals of the day dominate our public debate, we could all keep a little of the same faith in the power of citizens. 

I think Andy would really like that. And if there's a way to call you at 11:00pm where he is, you can bet the house that he'll find it.

NO RESIGNATION REQUIRED

New Brunswick's Legislature has seen a bevy of Question Periods dedicated to breaches of privacy law in recent years. As Bart Simpson once said, I can't help but feel partly responsible.

As Opposition House Leader some years ago, I was the lead interrogator when Minister Brenda Fowlie resigned over breaking privacy laws. Just so everyone remembers what was at stake in that case, I'm going to recap the facts here.

Liberal MLA Stuart Jamieson asked legitimate questions about a company getting permits despite not following local zoning laws, which Minister Fowlie oversaw as Local Government Minister. The next day, when he returned to the topic, she had clearly reviewed a new file --Jamieson's own. She released private information on his own home zoning applications which she thought might embarrass Jamieson, both in the House and in interviews after with media.

The Fowlie case was one of the more serious breaches of privacy law. The Minister was personally responsible for the breach, the information released was not trivial, and the intention was deliberate and malicious. Nor was there any mitigation, as she denied the actions were wrong and only resigned after an inquiry found that she was wrong. That is why, carefully and soberly, we insisted she resign.

A few weeks later, Social Development Minister Tony Huntjens blurted out the name of a patient in care during an interview. His intentions were entirely pure, but he had personally made the mistake and the information was again not trivial. He never faced a Question Period. He resigned immediately and was rightly praised for his honour and accountability.

There are good reasons for privacy breaches to require resignations. Ministers have access to a lot of sensitive information, and any of us given that power need an ongoing reminder of how great the responsibility must be. However, if we start demanding resignations over trivial or accidental breaches, soon we risk having people tune out when really serious breaches occur.

Oppositions seeking Question Period fodder need to remember this. The Tories, once in opposition, seemed to want to avenge their wounds on the issue of privacy law. First, when a bureaucrat lost data files at the Department of Health, they spent three days of Legislative time demanding the resignation of Health Minister Mike Murphy. The demand didn't pass the smell test. Murphy had no personal connection to the breach. He never would have even known the data file's whereabouts or existence. By the time Donald Savoie called the Tory charges "silly", the matter was closed.

The concept of ministerial accountability is important. In a policy sense, ministers are the final voice for their departments and must bear the burdens of office when policies, procedures and regulations (or the lack thereof) go awry. On matters of execution, however, the principle has evolved. There was a time where every mistake was deemed to be a minister's mistake. There was also a time when the whole bureaucracy fit inside the Government Members' Building at the Legislature. In today's large bureaucracies, this hardly makes sense. It strikes the public as foolish to insist that a minister must be lost if, say, one employee of thousands makes a mistake. Unless the mistake flows from the act or omission of the minister, it is now sufficient to competently take responsibility for addressing the matter and minimizing the chance of a second mistake.

Which brings us to Education Minister Jody Carr. Carr faces Liberal demands for his resignation because a member of his staff disclosed the test mark of a student. With all due respect to my former colleagues, to demand Carr's resignation over this cheapens the principle of privacy law and detracts from the ability of future legislators to punish truly serious and malicious breaches.

Jody Carr never had control of the information, had no means by which he could have known of or prevented the breach, and certainly has no malicious or political goal in the release. After a brief hyperpartisan stumble, he has acted appropriately in turning the matter over to an independent Commissioner so that the facts and his response can be scrutinized.

The Education Minister is no doubt paying the price for his own active role in prosecuting Bernard Leblanc, who resigned as Justice Minister when his own email account was used by a staffer to send communications that contained personal information about a third party.

Even in that case, Leblanc's decision to allow the staffer access to his account did create a vital link to the minister that doesn't exist in Carr's case. That said, Leblanc's voluntary resignation may not have been strictly necessary had he dug in. That he chose to accept a brief time out from cabinet speaks to the honour and dignity with which he served.

It is perhaps understandable that Liberals want Carr to answer for (in their eyes) overreaching sanctimony in opposition. But that is still unwise, for they are now promoting a standard of ministerial resignations that they surely should not apply if in government. Even if they think Carr overreached in Opposition, it follows that he must also be a cautionary tale for the perils of repeating the error.

Besides that, a huge reason for the loss of public trust in politicians is that MLAs get carried away in opposition and make demands of others they don't live up to in government. There are many legitimate issues in the Education portfolio -- underfunding, the lack of an Education plan, and micromanagement spring to mind --that with a little work, Liberal MLAs could marshall to keep the Minister hopping. One of those ways should not be demanding a resignation over this matter, as it cheapens the important vigilance of privacy law for the sake of a cheap headline.

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM CHECK -Leadership Bounces

As both federal opposition parties head toward convention weekends, pundits are rightly discussing the significant bounce that Justin Trudeau's looming victory has given the Liberal Party of Canada. By any measure, his impact has been impressive. The Liberals, previously in third place and surrounded by carrion eaters in the eyes of some observers, have rebounded to take the lead in most credible surveys.

This blog post will be a bit different than many of the ones on this site. Exercising some measure of discipline, I will offer no comments on whether Trudeau's support is a good or bad thing. Instead, I am going to indulge my inner academic geek and try to offer a statistical look at the durability of leadership bounces. I've always been taken by Paul Wells' advice on assessing conventional wisdom -- that when everyone in Ottawa knows something it is usually wrong. Something I'm going to start doing in this space is taking some of these easily-accepted truisms and seeing if they hold up under the numbers. I don't fancy myself a Nate Silver, of course, but just as I can enjoy playing basketball and not be Kevin Garnett, this may prove fun for my fellow geeks.

What I've done is take a look at the polling bounce for leaders chosen after Pierre Trudeau beat Joe Clark in 1980. Happily, Environics has a polling archive housed at Queen's University that allowed me to take the polls immediately preceding and following a new leader's convention win.

Here, in descending order, are the new leader bounces:

John Turner, Liberal (1984) +7.7%
Stéphane Dion, Liberal (2006) +6.7%
Michael Ignatieff, Liberal (2008*) +6.4%
Stockwell Day, Canadian Alliance (2000) +4.7%
Paul Martin, Liberal (2003) +2.8%
Audrey McLaughlin, NDP (1989) +2.4%
Kim Campbell, Progressive Conservative (1993) +2.1%
Brian Mulroney, Progressive Conservative (1983) +2.1%
Alexa McDonough, NDP (1995) 0%
Stephen Harper, Conservative (2004) -0.4%
Jack Layton, NDP (2003) -1.0%
Peter McKay, Progressive Conservative (2003) -1.9%
Jean Chrétien, Liberal (1990) -1.9%

First, a few notes on the data. The bounces here likely seem small. Because Environics provided the best archive where I could actually compare the same polling firm and method, I've accepted some of their constraints. One of them is that these are numbers without the undecided and leaning factored in. The reason polls generally add up to 100% is because the top line numbers involve some polling science of reallocating those who don't answer. Environics numbers in this archive are their raw percentages of who actually gave a party preference, so the numbers are smaller. These bounces likely got reported as larger ones on the top lines.

As well, using a consistent "closest to the date" rule may understate some of the bounces. If I used a less controlled method of searching for the largest reported polling bounce, both Campbell and Martin would do better, as would Day to some degree. Both Campbell and Martin had some polls show a Trudeauesque bounce of 15 points or more. As well, because they were both inevitable and ubiquitous front runners for a while, their bounce built even bigger over a few polls. However, this would be a less consistent comparison, and moving those two leaders up wouldn't change what you likely saw as most notable about these numbers. But if you want to anecdotally recall Campbell and Martin as even more successful than this, go ahead.

Finally, a couple of technical points. I had a choice for Ignatieff, whether to use the date Bob Rae and Dominic Leblanc withdrew and he became interim leader, or the date where a convention ratified this choice. I chose the former, since that was when he moved into the Opposition Leader's chair and was publicly seen as starting his leadership. Also, I could not fix a date for Jean Charest's more organic ascension to head of the shell-shocked, two-person PC rump (he likely was seen as leader by the public the next day), and thus excluded him.

So, what do we notice here?

Obviously, the most striking thing is that the size of the convention bump provides us with a list where the most successful leaders seem clustered at the bottom, and some of the great cautionary tales of politics seem to be at the top. Chrétien, Mulroney and Harper are the only guys who have kept winning, and Layton had a historic breakthrough. Even McDonough saw a modest improvement in NDP fortunes, and we never got to evaluate McKay. The guys at the top imploded.

I recall that at the New Brunswick Liberal convention one disappointed onlooker, given the consolation that people wanted a new, untainted face, replied "yes, because heaven knows the Liberal Party has never done well with an older, experienced guy who was in the cabinet of an unpopular government". And, indeed, Jean Chrétien was all those things and paid for it in his post-convention bounce. Yet his admonition to the "Nervous Nellies" in the party fretting about the lack of instant gratification paid off quite nicely with three straight majorities. It does seem clear that the standing of a leader right after the convention is a poor predictor of electoral success.

I would caution against the logical trap of trying to explain that certain bounces can, in hindsight, be "explained". Yes, Dion had a charming underdog win driving him. Yes, Chrétien had the Meech Lake debate raging when he won and took a beating for his past. Yes, Harper suffered from the post-convention loss of more progressive Stronach supporters. And yes, Martin took the sponsorship fallout right in the proverbial shorts. But this exactly the point -- the standing both at the convention and on Election Day are influenced by events and how the candidate handled them. The cold numbers simply tell us how the early predictive verdict panned out.

What you choose to make of this is an open debate. There are two plausible explanations that I can suggest, and I cannot prove or disprove either by the numbers.

The first suggestion is that electoral bounces are simply unrelated to eventual success. In this explanation, the real predictors of electoral success are more fundamental predictors -- a party's brand popularity, organization, fundraising and policy clarity/appeal all matter. An appealing face probably does help, but if they don't have the fundamentals then they are eventually gong to be weighed down. This explanation would ask you to accept that the larger bumps for unsuccessful leaders are simply because their party's weak fundamentals gave them more room to improve (Campbell and Turner followed very unpopular incumbents, Day took over a new party, etc).

The second plausible explanation would be the more intriguing one. If convention bounces are actually a negative predictor of electoral success, it would suggest that party electors make choices on the wrong factors. In this scenario, you would believe that the things that make leadership candidates appealing in the short-term are actually the wrong criteria.

Advocates of this conclusion might cite that the factors that produce leadership enthusiasm often involve voters and skills that are least helpful to winning elections. The qualities a leader needs to create a bounce must be ones that cause at least a short-term change in how the party is seen. By definition, this will favour "new" faces who will be least associated with the party brand, have the fewest unpopular decisions on their record, and are thus the most "different". This may mean that skills the Chretiens and Harpers and Layton's acquired along with the baggage of unpopular decisions and election losses go unnoticed because they are not different enough to quickly create a change in voters' views of the party. Yet these very skills -- a grasp of policy, an intuitive sense of how to avoid trouble, a knowledge of the election terrain -- serve them well in the long run.

It may also be that polling booms exist because new faces move the most volatile voters. When Colin Powell was flirting with a 1996 presidential run and had a 70% approval rating, one Clinton strategist remarked "I can take him down 20 points in one day. Ask him whether he's pro-choice or pro-life". The point is well-taken. It may be that new faces hold their appeal because they are least like a politician, and this appeal to swing voters moves party elites to chase this appeal. Yet once elected, a new "not-a-politician" will immediately begin doing things that look, well, like a politician. The Harpers and Chretiens may not attract these more volatile voters immediately, but the support they have is more durable because it has been tested by actual decisions and past mistakes. And the swing voters will simply choose the guy who campaigns best when it counts. In this telling, parties were lucky that a cabinet minister in a rejected government, a failed Toronto mayoral candidate, and an uncharismatic former MP had the organization to win as unlovable favourites, because otherwise they may have made the mistake they made chasing fool's gold in more open races.

Now, lest I be accused here of some wish fulfillment, let me make something clear. The numbers don't lie, but they also don't predict with absolute certainty. Just because something hasn't happened before doesn't mean it won't. Teams down three-games-to-zip in the playoffs don't win, unless you're the 2004 Red Sox. Insurgent presidential candidates don't beat establishment favourites, unless you're 2008 Barack Obama. And just because exciting new faces haven't proven to be as solid a bet as veterans grizzled by controversy and defeat doesn't mean they'll never win. It may be that someone out there combines the sizzle of Stock Day with the substance needed to win. And as anyone who ever watched my wife win the weekly football pool by choosing uniform colours knows (yep, she did), sometimes bad bets pay off.

In fact, if I'd had polling data from 1968, I'd have found a leader who had style and who turned out to make a pretty big impact on the country. A fellow called Trudeau. I could compare his readiness to the new guy's, but I'd break my promise at the top of the post to avoid opinion.

Lets just say that maybe, this time, everyone knows something. They just don't know it for the reasons they think they know it.