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COMMENTARY
April 13, 2011
Pain before pleasure
It was with some pride, as Canadians, that we watched the French leaders' debate get bumped forward to this free evening, so that it wouldn't conflict with a playoff hockey game on television. We have our priorities - pleasure trumps duty - and sometimes the political class realizes that it is wise to accommodate them. Hockey is exciting, unpredictable, and fun. Leaders' debates are the opposite. Or as the schedule worked out, with the debates preceding: pain before pleasure.This column was filed before the English-language debate of last night. On Saturday I will review the state of the campaign in light of both debates -which mark formally the moment when the campaign abandons touch-football rules, and becomes a competitive blood sport. I do this wantonly, in defiance of current quick-response media cycles: for instant analysis, live blogging, Facebook, and online polls, all contribute to reducing the leaders' debates to a very shallow spectacle, in which we are only looking for one of the contestants to slip up. It is politics for the Age of Neurosis. But this was so even before the superaddition of the Internet. I am old enough to recall the first such encounter, in 1968: Pierre Trudeau, Robert Stanfield, Tommy Douglas, and (for the last few minutes) Réal Caouette, from Confederation Hall in the West Block. They are all dead now but, more to the point, they all appeared to be dead at the time. Trudeau won, though he'd been even stiffer than Stanfield -but only by commenting afterwards that he "wouldn't want to impose another one on the Canadian people, quite frankly." And, sure enough, the next wasn't until 1979, when Joe Clark won just by turning up, and thereby improving his name recognition. In the time since, I recall only the one iconic moment, back in 1984, when Brian Mulroney and his right index finger told John Turner he did have a choice, in appointing a couple hundred Trudeau cronies to lush public jobs. That, as almost everyone not a card-carrying Liberal discerned, was what we call in boxing a knockout blow, and perhaps the only genuine entertainment the debates ever offered. For a cautiously defensive series of statements and responses delivered within stopwatch timing across a field of more than two, is not a debate; it is pure preening. It makes the ghoulish search for slips inevitable. And it serves the interest of our political and media elites by actually distracting the voting audience from matters of moral or fiscal substance, since any attempt to address them can be presented immediately as a faux pas. That "governing class" is "liberal" with a small "l" -- and in the postmodern sense. To them, important questions should be decided by the courts. Parliament is a rubber stamp, and housekeeper. Its most important function is to watch out for "rednecks" trying to reopen the "cans of worms" that past court decisions have sealed away. "The people" are the sort of people who overwhelmingly support stuff like capital punishment, whenever directly polled. The less we hear from them the better. The replacement of substance with drivel is never clearer than in the French-language "debate," on view tonight, wherein the Bloc Québécois separatist will attempt to moan in monologue, while the native English-speaking national leaders vie to demonstrate that they can speak French, too. This makes for very dull television, especially in French. If you are Francophonic, and live outside Quebec, you may feel morbidly bored and lonely. I think we passed the point, more than a decade ago, when the Quebec audience itself truly cared what special goodies the leaders would offer to purchase their votes. Only their "cultural elite" cares, and only because the reduction of such payoffs, or the offer of bribes to anyone else (for which Quebec will require "compensation") -- gives them an opportunity to strut and grandstand. One thinks, for instance, of the howl that went up in Quebec when the Harper government attempted to put limits upon some utterly corrupt arts subsidies. (All arts funding is corrupt: it is all doled out through mutual back-scratching networks.) Our English media said, "Quebec is outraged," but really, only the recipients of this largesse could care. If it weren't for Radio-Canada, no one would know who they were. Bribe offers must anyway be confined to Quebec province, for administrative convenience. We have long passed the brief heroic days in which the later Pearson and earliest Trudeau governments presented a "vision" of a nation "bilingual and bicultural," on the level above provincial jurisdiction (reflected in the bilingual format of the first leaders' debate). That was quickly diluted, then drowned, by "multiculturalism," leaving a legacy only of irritatingly bilingual bureaucratic forms and ephemera, that chew through twice as much paper. It is symbolic. It is "richly symbolic." David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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