Playing Chess

One of the more overused metaphors out there is for someone to describe something as a 'chess game', or to describe someone in politics or business as 'playing chess'.

You often get this in sports, where the commentator will refer to a showdown involving 2 or 3 options (will the player go left or right?, will the coach put in the checking line or the scoring line?) as a 'chess match.' I suppose it is understandable that they avoid a more accurate assessment, since referring to these showdowns as a 'simplified tic tac toe match' might seem demeaning to the million dollar athletes involved. At least I've yet to hear a commentator suggest that the eternal fastball-curveball dilemma represents a game of Go played between pitcher and batter...

In politics, Canada's right-leaning media spent so much time trying to polish up the years of ineffectiveness from the Stephen Harper government by describing Harper as playing 'chess' rather than 'checkers' that it became a comedy line for blog commentators - with each screw-up, mis-step, boneheaded decision, defeat and failure being greeted by queries as to whether this was really another humiliating setback for the government or just another clever move by Harper the 'chessmaster'.

I bring this up, since we had a recent situation where I think a little insight from the world of chess might actually be helpful. As you may have heard, the United Arab Emirates recently evicted Canada from a military base that Canada had operated on their soil for many years. The UAE had been using the threat of kicking Canada out to try and gain more airspace rights for its domestic airline.

Most of the commentary I've read on the issue has focussed on the question of whether it was better to give up our military base or better to give in to the UAE's airspace demands. In chess terms, this is like debating which of your pawns you should let your opponent take without taking anything in return. Seen from this perspective, the question of which pawn to sacrifice is not the real strategic question. The real question is why did we allow ourselves to get into a situation where we had to sacrifice any pawns? Why were our pawns not supported with other pieces on the board? Why were we not in a position to take one of our opponents pawns, or better, a knight or a bishop, if one of our pawns was taken? But looking at it from this angle makes it obvious that the Conservative government has failed Canada yet again, so I can see why some people might not want to think about it this way.

You know, maybe Harper is playing chess, but he's just not very good at it. It would be nice if Canadian voters sent him packing while we still have some pieces left on the board.

Granite Countertop Watch

Part of our continuing series on things deemed less important than subsidizing home renovations: Research on what causes mental illness in children.

Priorities

Granite countertops, yes.

Science, renewable energy, no.

I know I covered this in my post on the budget already but I remain amazed that any sane, conscious person could decide that paying people to renovate their houses was a higher priority than genetic research or developing renewable energy sources.

Incoherent

Paul Wells has been doing a good job of telling it like it is over the last little while. In his most recent post he takes the Conservative government to task for their failure to appoint someone to head an inquiry into the deaths caused by listeriosis, linking it to a pattern of incompetence and inability to follow through shown by the Conservatives.

The Conservative Coyote gets Hit by Another Anvil

I know, I haven't written much about policy lately but I'll get back to that soon, I promise. In the meantime, I was reading the Star this morning when I broke out laughing after coming across the following quote from Conservative party house leader Jay Hill (referring to late Thursday night when the Bloc, NDP and Liberals all agreed to invoke closure and force a vote on the budget when the Conservatives weren't expecting it and didn't have everyone in the house for a vote),

"It's going to be extremely hard to know whether we can trust anyone after what happened on Thursday night,"

Just in case it isn't clear yet, here's some advice for the Conservative party: you can't trust the NDP, you can't trust the Bloc Quebecois and you definitely can't trust the Liberals. I'm not sure about the independents, but I'm guessing you can't trust them either. Heck, after Stronach crossing the floor and Grewal sabotaging his own party, you can't even trust your own MP's.

Trust has a very important place in our society - but parliament hill is not that place.

I'm thinking this is all part of the top-secret, Acme-inspired, Conservative Coyote Plan to shake their label of being 'scary'. You see, the trouble is that, in an ideal world, the Conservatives would like to have a majority government and (potentially) do some stuff that many Canadians would find scary: signing on to the next U.S. foreign adventure, defying the courts by denying rights to gays, cutting taxes and increasing spending plunging us back into deficit, adopting a 'climate change? you don't believe all those silly scientists do you?' policy, starving or shutting down the CBC, removing Federal support for various programs (scientific research, gas tax money for cities), etc. etc. Continuing with the ideal world, the Conservatives would like to shake their 'scary' label without having to shake their scary policies.

Giving lip service to abandoning their scary plans of old hasn't worked well so far - which brings us to the Coyote plan. Anyone familiar with the roadrunner cartoon will remember that while, in real life, being hunted by a coyote is a pretty scary thing for a roadrunner, in a cartoon, the coyote is so consistently, humourously, pathetically inept, that instead of being scary, the coyote is actually kind of endearing and you almost want it to catch the roadrunner sometime.

Maybe this is the Conservative plan, but I'm no political strategist so don't take my word for it.