Trade Luongo

I know that it would seem crazy to trade the Canucks best player and probably the best goalie in the league, but can we win with this team? I think that the answer is no. The Canucks clearly do not have the offensive firepower to be serious contenders. Granted we would be next to nowhere without Luongo saving the game virtually every night, but we would be able to get something very serious in return for Luongo.

Lots of Canucks fans, including myself, think that next year will be a better year. This year we have $9.2 million in cap space tied up with Markus Naslund and Brendan Morrison. If there were someone out there this summer to throw $9.2 million a year at then we might have a real cup contender for the 08/09 season. The only top notch unrestricted free agent this summer will be Marian Hossa. In my view Hossa is not worth $9 million a year. He is not even the kind of player that I would pay $6 million. If the Canucks are going to throw top of the league type money at someone it had better be a big dominant centre, not another flimy European player.  There are also no impending restricted free agents that the Canucks could throw a huge contract at.  That pretty much just leaves the trade route to improve the team.

Luongo is the biggest assets that the Canucks have.  He is there only franchise type of player, he is the only guy they have that they could trade and get a real bona fide star back in return.  I am not sure if we would have the goaltending to go it without Luongo, but Schneider will have get his shot at some point.  There is another problem of finding a team that has assets to move for someone like Luongo.  Tampa Bay seems like an obvious candidate, someone like Lecavalier would be a fare straight up trade.  With Richards gone now I think that Tampa might have to hold on to Lecavalier and hope that Mike Smith solves their goaltending troubles.

If the Canucks hold on to Luongo, and I think that they will, he would definitely be a prime candidate to trade in the 09 offseason.  Luongo has two more years on his deal after this year.  It seems almost certain to me that Luongo will not resign with the Canucks unless they are defending cup champions at the time, or perhaps were in the finals the year his contract was up.  Luongo’s wife still lives in Florida.  They have a young family.  It seems like Luongo would like to at least play on the East Coast so that he could be closer to his wife and young child.

I like the fact that Nonis went out and made the big deal to get Luongo.  I do not like the fact that since we have had such a great goalie we have completely lost our ability to play an exciting style of hockey.  I like to see the Canucks win, but watching them grind out one goal victories night after night gets very frustrating.  Even in games where the Canucks get a lot of chances they can never really finish teams off.  They need a scoring forward with the killer instinct to put away the good chances that they get.

Bill C-10, is it a veiled attempt at censorship?

Tax credits for Canadian film and television productions supposedly serve both a financial and cultural purpose.  The tax credits help keep Canadian production going, keeping people working in the industry with all the positive economic spin-offs that come from that.  Tax credits by helping to keep the industry alive also serve a cultural purpose in that there continues to be Canadian film and television product out there on the market for Canadians and the world to consume should they so desire.  I think that the real purpose of tax credits is a cultural one more than anything.  Tax credits could be given to all sorts of different industries out there, or corporate tax rates could be cut, or direct subsidies could be given to certain industries.  The tax credits are more like an easy way to subsidize a major part of Canada’s cultural industry.  I think that it is culturally important to have Canadians films and television programs, in fact we probably do not have enough of them as it is.

The changes proposed by the Conservatives to the tax credit system would allow Heritage Canada to deny tax credits to productions that it deems are contrary to public policy.  What exactly, or even imprecisely, “contrary to public policy” means is unknown.  I think that it is very dangerous to start picking and choosing what productions get tax breaks and which do not.  The worry that violent or exploitative productions may benefit from government programs is one that is not warranted in my view.  What is too violent?  What is exploitative?  If the worry is funding films that promote violence or hatred that sort of thing will already be caught with provisions in the Criminal Code.  Productions the exploit children would be caught by employment standards legislation, and productions that go even further and potentially sexually exploit children would be caught by the Criminal Code.  We already have laws in place to prevent unlawful things from being recorded and passed off as art.  If the images and storyline being depicted fall within the law then it should not be the role of government to decide which films get tax credits and which do not.

Being a gay male I am always wary of the potential to censor.  The past 20 years has shown that when government employees are given the ability to censor gay and lesbian material they tend to go way overboard (the ongoing battles of Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium have proven that).  Queer people are clearly not the most popular with this government either.  If given the chance I am sure that many in the Conservative party would undue all the legal and legislative victories that queer people have achieved over the decades.

Bill C-10 is currently being reviewed by the Senate Baking Committee.  Now that the potential censorship issues have been brought to light I think that it is incumbent upon the Liberal dominated Senate to amend the bill and send it back to the Commons for more review and discussion.  If the Conservatives are determined to allow Heritage Canada to deny tax credits to certain film and television productions there should at the very least be a set of guidelines developed so that bureaucrats are not able to make arbitrary decisions, and even worse to prevent Conservative politicians from giving orders about what films/television programs pass muster and which do not.

Liberals look bad on Afghanistan

Tonight the House passed the Conservative/Liberal compromise on the mission in Afghanistan, agreeing to extend the mission until at least 2011, in all likelihood continuing the dangerous assignment in the Kandahar region during that time.  While the motion has some wording about putting more emphasis on development and assistance the mission appears to be set to continue along the same lines that it has for the past 5 years plus.  I like the extension to the mission, I think that Canada is playing an important role in Afghanistan, and I think that our input there strengthens our voice in international affairs and we are actually fighting to make a difference for millions of Afghani citizens.

Even though I support the mission and the extension I think that the Liberals have made a big political mistake on the issue.  Up until very recently the Liberals, and Dion in particular were calling for an end to the combat mission by the current deadline of February 2009.  The Conservatives did a good job of getting John Manley on board for the Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan.  With Manley’s voice behind the recommendations it suddenly became very difficult for the Liberals to continue to call for an end to the combat mission by early 2009.  What makes the Liberal move to support the extension of the combat mission is how vocal they had been about bringing it to an end in February 2009.  If the Liberals were not willing to make Afghanistan a major campaign issue they should not have been talking about it so much in the lead up and aftermath of the Manley Report.

The Liberals need to adopt some strategy out of the Conservative playbook.  Pick some key issues, something clearly Liberal, and something also small ‘l’ liberal and stick to those issues.  Granted they have to respond to whatever the government brings forth, but they can avoid taking unequivocal positions and then backing down when it actually comes time to back up their rhetoric by voting in the House.