NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
April 16, 2011
Vote Abbott
Sir John A. Macdonald was not my favourite Canadian prime minister. A brilliant, multifaceted man was our Canadian Disraeli; a pungent wit; a spirit of broad sympathetic understanding, and real generosity; a magnificent drunkard, and gift to anecdotalists; the true and singular Father of our Confederation. Yes, there are reasons to love Sir John A. ... But he was not my favourite.Laurier I admire, stiffly. I liked Borden more. Mackenzie King I detested: a private nutjob and unprincipled weasel, with sharp little teeth. (Though an ingeniously dirty political craftsman.) Bennett is underappreciated. Meighen is among my positive heroes: a gentleman, the one honest man. (His little lecturebook on Shakespeare is a prize.) Louis St. Laurent made an endearing grandpa. Diefenbaker, love and hate; mostly hate. From Pearson to Trudeau is the descent into Hell. But no, my favourite Canadian prime minister was Sir John Joseph Caldwell Abbott, PC, KCMG, QC -our third, installed briefly after Sir John A.'s demise, in 1891. Gentle reader may never have heard of him. That will be my first reason. Second. Prior to becoming prime minister, he was famous mostly for one thing: being the addressee of an intercepted begging telegram, from the great Sir John A. It wasn't his fault he was very rich, and Macdonald was very desperate. As we would say today, "the optics on that were not good." Ah well. Third. He didn't want to be prime minister. He wanted John Thompson to take the job. But the Orangemen wouldn't have it, because Thompson was a Cath-olick. Thompson didn't want the job either, and forced Abbott to take it. But even after he took it, Abbott kept trying to turn it over to Thompson. Those were the days! Fourth. He ran the government from the Senate. Said he was too old to run for an elected seat. Finally got out of it entirely, by pleading ill, whereupon his friend Thompson was stuck, and the Orangemen had no choice but to accept him. (Thompson then promptly dropped dead.) Fifth. While he was in office, Abbott accomplished absolutely nothing. This is important. Had he not been there, someone else might have accomplished something. We don't know what, but it couldn't have been anything good. Sixth. He is best known, among connoisseurs of Canadian political history, for one scintillating quotation. It was a cri-de-coeur: "I hate politics!" In my favourite version, he is shouting through a door: "I hate notoriety, I hate public meetings, I hate public speeches, caucuses, I just HATE all of it." He didn't even want to be in Parliament. He kept winding up there, out of some sort of noblesse oblige, or alternatively in order to defend some urgent business interest. Either excuse is acceptable. And I am told, on poor authority, that he once challenged the result of an election he had won, on grounds that the ballots couldn't possibly have been counted properly. This would be the clincher. So far as I can see, Stephen Harper cleaned up in the televised debates this week. He did this by calmly addressing the viewers, while the opposition leaders nattered among themselves. He perfectly exploited the format of the "debates," in which too many men are vying for attention. Harper is no Abbott. While he is probably acceptable to the dozen surviving Orangemen, he is a man of ambition, who wants to keep his job. But he is a man of limited ambition, which is the next best thing. So far as I can make out, the chief purpose of his ministry has been to keep the Liberal Party out of power for as long as possible. He has no "visions," praise the Lord. His seeks no one's love. Instead, he concentrates on not being viscerally hated, by the power-brokers of the political and media class. This is not an easy task, for they want to hate him. He must go out of his way to appear harmless, and boring; it doesn't always work. He is the anti-Diefenbaker, from the West: a man who thinks, probably correctly, that the basic structure of Canadian politics cannot be changed; that the vested interests engendered by the Nanny State will not melt away at the touch of charisma. He is an economist, not a lawyer like most politicians. He can add and subtract, unlike them. He has his little beady eyes on an overall economic picture, and he will not be distracted from it, except by political necessities. He does not waste time responding to opposition and media allegations of scandals that the public will not care about, but instead broadcasts this thought wave on all his channels: "I will be careful with your money." Like him or not, he is a man for the times: this decade of rather belated bean-counting. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top