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COMMENTARY
February 21, 2004
A meal
Canada is in the news for some reason. Because I write mostly about "international security" (a subject which Canadians try hard to ignore) and because there is now an Internet I tend to find a disproportionate number of my readers abroad. And my inbox has been loading with all these foreigners -- especially Americans of course -- asking for my "take" on what is going on up here. From me and from other Canadians in the aether (Mark Steyn David Frum Andrew Coyne's new blog) they had the general impression that our country is a one-party state run until recently by a rather thuggish back-street operator from Shawinigan Quebec. We have two "national communities" an English-speaking one that thinks in something like the categories of Americans Britons and Australians; and a French-speaking one with its own categories. Or in Mr. Steyn's excellent phrase in yesterday's Wall Street Journal we are "a semi-detached member of the Anglosphere". He further reminds that in polls at the time about 60 per cent of the Anglos were willing to follow the Americans into Iraq though as usual the Francos made the call. The question from abroad is thus most frequently expressed this way: "Has the basic political situation in Canada been altered by the Adscam scandal? ... And supposing it has What effect will it have on Canada's role in the world? To answer this in the short space available one must begin with the quickest possible analysis of what has happened. It is something big and strange. The Auditor-General's report which appears to have hulled the Good Ship Liberal was not different in kind from its annual predecessors. For years now Canadians have been at least murkily aware of huge corruption boondoggles and mindless waste at the top. Only a quarter-billion is at issue in the present scandal; billions are known to have burned like autumn leaves in previous fiascos such as the Human Resources Dept. payouts and the gun registry; and affairs such as that of L'Auberge Grand-M?re directly implicated the former prime minister himself. So why now such a hue and cry? The only new thing is that the spillage is being mopped by the new Liberal prime minister Paul Martin instead of Jean Chr?tien. And he is mopping without his predecessor's incomprehensible bluster. For many reasons my own view has long been that while there might be nothing to choose morally between Mr. Martin and Mr. Chr?tien the former is not very smart. Perhaps the clearest way to put this would be vulgarly. Mr. Chr?tien had rat cunning and Canadians respect that. A rat with cunning gets pretty much whatever he wants up here. In Mr. Martin we detect a rat that we can eat. The very outcry has changed the political landscape most spectacularly in Quebec. The province rightly feels humiliated by the successful depiction of it as a bottomless cesspool of political corruption. This has two effects in the next election: 1. Quebeckers themselves will take their frustrations out on the Liberals for presenting them in such a light. 2. Ontario will join most of the rest of Canada in leaving the appeasement of Quebec out of its political calculations. This neatly amputates both the Liberal Party's legs. Foreigners may be aware that the only (semi-) plausible opposition party now called the Conservatives and recently reassembled after more than a decade of schism has a leadership race on. They weren't expecting to win the next election -- they never are -- and so have a weak field of candidates. Indeed one of the three contenders is Belinda Stronach the inheritor of a taxpayer-promoted auto-parts fortune -- a Bill Clinton golfing buddy who is Canada's answer not to Margaret Thatcher but more to Paula Jones. Stephen Harper is an intelligent backroom strategist with no stage presence. Tony Clement is a failed provincial politician. One of them may well become our next prime minister. On the other hand we wouldn't have nearly-perpetual Liberal government were Canadians not an obedient people across ethnic lines -- or as Jonathan Swift once said of the Irish A servile race in folly nursed, / Who truckle most when treated worst. (We seldom complain except when they threaten to reduce our taxes.) But we have the other side of the Irish in us too and we like to make a meal of the occasional politician (ask Brian Mulroney). And having made a meal of this Mr. Martin I expect we will emerge more Anglophonic in our attitude to the world. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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