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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
June 13, 2004
Throw them out
There is an election happening in Canada -- my reader may have heard -- or more to the point a little miracle seems to be happening up here in the far north of the continent. The miracle is the Liberal government's new leader Paul Martin who stepped into the capaciously dirty shoes of Prime Minister Jean Chr?tien at the ideal moment when one of his least defensible scandals was maturing. Now Mr. Chr?tien could manage a government scandal (he had a great deal of experience) with feckless art and rat cunning. Inarticulate and probably illiterate in both national languages he could bluster his way through questions in Parliament and shamelessly use the long arms of the state to settle scores with anyone outside. He had a genius for pure malicious incoherence. He had the ability to make you not want to deal with or think about him even for a moment and thus to make his enemies go away. As I have long argued Mr. Martin is by contrast among the very few politicians whose intelligence is actually overestimated. It is not that he is na?vely honest -- he couldn't help being more honest than his predecessor and it's not impossible to be both honest and smart. Rather he is lost in any game in which he does not have control over all the pieces. Winning the leadership of the Liberal Party was child's play. As finance minister over nearly a decade he had wired the whole machine. But suddenly an election presents him with freely-moving objects that do not respond to the buttons on his remote. He has put in a positively disastrous performance. (Can you feel my schadenfreude?) He looks old sweaty scared desperate. He is trying to pump himself for the old Liberal ploy -- an all-channels attack on the person and supposed "secret agenda" of one Stephen Harper prime minister in waiting -- but dimly realizes there are two things wrong. First Mr. Harper has fully anticipated the ploy and has already shown himself fairly adept at deflecting the tomatoes. Second a wild attack is only going to make Mr. Martin himself look older sweatier and even more desperate than he does now. The attempts to tar Mr. Harper by presenting him as a man with a secret agenda to stop abortions and gay marriages is already failing. For one thing as a "social conservative" myself who has met the guy I can tell you Mr. Harper is no social conservative. He is a decent man as men go these days with a moral outlook that is remarkably not topsy-turvy. But he knows perfectly well you can't take a political position from disenfranchisement to victory in one political term -- not without the fall of some Berlin Wall. And for another thing a very large number of Canadians though obliged by our media and political class to shut up on these issues would actually like to stop abortions and gay marriages. In the meantime they would be content with a government that was merely uncomfortable with the radical feminist and gay agendas. Is the election therefore in the bag for the Conservative Party? A fortnight is a long time in politics: patience mes amis. My gut feeling is that Ontario has already mostly decided to deep-six the Liberals and this seems to correspond to the gut feelings of most of the province's Liberal MPs. The West looks fairly solid for Mr. Harper and Atlantic Canada is beginning to catch Ontario's bug. But the Conservatives are shut out of Quebec and therefore almost certainly shut out of a majority. Even if they win they will face three leftoid parties across the Commons floor eager to bring them down quickly: the Liberals from lust for perks and power; the Bloc because they need the Liberals to validate them as their sparring partner the NDP because under Jack Layton they have renewed their commitment to the ideological equivalent of Tourette's syndrome. In polls people claim they would like a minority government. But that's like the polls before this election was called -- the people haven't really thought about that yet and they may think again after the possibility swims entirely into view. I don't know how much can be hoped from my countrymen given the degree of demoralization entailed in having placidly accepted three successive terms of utterly corrupt incompetent and morally vicious Liberal rule. But I'm hoping for a Conservative landslide to put it properly behind us. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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