By Lloyd Mackey

THIS week, I hope to focus on some odds and ends from our recent Jordan trip, and take a run down a couple of collaboratively political domestic bunny trails.

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When we registered in each of the three hotels in which we stayed, in Amman, Aqaba and at the Dead Sea, we checked out the channels available on television.

In each case, the lower placed news channels (2 to 6) provided news coverage with most of the contrasting coverage that North American viewers might desire. From the United States came CNN and Fox News. From Europe, there was BBC World and an English-language French network. And, from the Middle East, there was Al Jazeera.

Later, we came across an item in the Jordan Daily Times newspaper that highlighted a plan by one higher-end hotel chain to key their television channel choices to hotel registration data. That would permit, the story suggested, the placing of news channels of interest to, for example, Indonesians and Malaysians -- who visit Jordan in significant numbers.

Whether, as North Americans, we were already keyed in to such a system, I don't know. But it did provide an interesting illustration of Jordan's desire to brand itself in a way that would draw business and tourist interest from both their global eastern and western neighbours.

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We neither heard nor saw any television references to Canada during our stay, but came across an interesting item, again in the JDT. On its business page, on September 27, was a story headlined: 'Every G-20 nation wants to be Canada, insists PM.'

The Reuters story, datelined Pittsburgh, came out of the G-20 end-of-September meeting.

The pull quote (the short quote that an editor pulls out of a story to feature a particular point) read: "We are one of the most stable regimes in history . . . we are unique in that regard."

The first two paragraphs read as follows:

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, appearing to forget that his countrymen are generally known for their modesty, declared on Friday that his nation was the envy of the world.

Harper, usually a fairly wooden performer, seized on a routine question at a news conference and used it to deliver an impassioned defence of his 33 million strong nation and how well it has coped with the global economic crisis.

We . . . have no history of colonialism. So we have all of the things that many people admire about the great powers but none of the things that . . . bother them.

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Canada is big enough to make a difference but not big enough to threaten anybody. And that is a huge asset if it's properly used.With upcoming pivotal trips to China, India and Singapore, it will be interesting to see how the prime minister plays our positional assets -- and modesty.

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Moving closer to home, it has been interesting to watch Conservative federal infrastructure minister John Baird and Liberal provincial Ontario deputy premier George Smitherman push back at federal Liberal opposition attacks on the disposition of infrastructure funding in Ontario.

Ottawa area MP David McGuinty, brother to Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, and Toronto area MP Gerard Kennedy, a former McGuinty cabinet minister who ran unsuccessfully for the federal Liberal leadership, have been leading that attack.

Baird, who is noted both for public bombast against the Liberals and concurrent private collaboration with his colleagues opposite, has been arguing, somewhat convincingly, that the dispensing of infrastructure funds in Ontario has been a joint municipal/provincial/federal exercise.

His debating coup-de-grace came Wednesday afternoon in the House of Commons question period, when he responded to one-two punches from McGuinty and Kennedy with the suggestion that:

The member (Kennedy) cannot even get along with Dalton McGuinty and someone who cannot get along with Dalton McGuinty is certainly no friend of mine.

Perhaps we will see the next test on Monday (November 2). That will be when elected Alberta senator Bert Brown and former Ontario Conservative cabinet minister, Bob Runciman hold an Otttawa press conference to announce a pending provincial private members motion to select, by popular vote, the next Ontario senators. Brown, as the only current senator appointed after winning a provincial vote, has been liaisoning with provincial leaders on Senate election matters, ever since Harper put him into the upper house.

The question is whether there is a will on the part of the Ontario government to support this private member's bill.

There are three senate vacancies coming up in Ontario between November 2009 and April 2010.

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Some readers will protest that this week's piece is pretty implicit, rather than explicit, with respect to the faith-political interface.

I will try to correct the curve next week.

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Lloyd Mackey is a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa and author of Stephen Harper: The Case for Collaborative Governance (ECW Press, 2006), More Faithful Than We Think: Stories and Insights on Canadian Leaders Doing Politics Christianly (BayRidge Books, 2005) and Like Father, Like Son: Ernest Manning and Preston Manning (ECW Press, 1997). Lloyd can be reached at lmackey@canadianchristianity.com.

October 29/2009