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COMMENTARY
May 11, 2005
Them
The Liberals' strategy to remain in power is now as clear as it is unspoken. The government is trying to exploit the extremely low expectations we now have of our politicians. On the assumption that Canadians themselves have low moral standards, the Liberals will continue to make open bribery their central pitch. And on the assumption that we are not very intelligent, they will continue to offer it in the form of spending programmes that were promised in election Red Books as far back as 1993.So far, approximately $15 billion of our tax money has been promised towards this general buy-out of every vested interest that comes into view. We can only guess what the total will be by the end of an election campaign, as those who have not yet detected the monsoon of money come out to dance in the rain. Not all, and possibly very little of this will be spent, however. The Liberals long ago discovered that the media cover promises, but do not cover deliveries. There was, for instance, huge Canadian coverage when Paul Martin and entourage swept into Sri Lanka to promise millions of emergency tsunami aid; but there is interest only in Sri Lanka today, that not one cent of this money has arrived. And I expect it will be the same in most other areas -- the non-delivery happening after the issue of the moment has faded from public view. The beauty of these reckless promises, from the Liberals' view, is that if they lose the next election, the vested interests which they have aroused will clamour for satisfaction from the incoming Conservatives. The Tories, in turn, will be compelled to disavow the Liberal promises, with full media coverage. Whereas if the Liberals manage to win, they need only defer action from year to year. Or to put this more simply, the Liberals have established that the barefaced lie works wonders on the Canadian electorate, and that the same promises can be repeated election after election without loss of support. It would be almost invidious for me to complain, for it was by means of such deceits that they balanced the federal budget. Some of that wild spending must be done, however -- especially the programmes co-signed with provincial governments -- and that fraction is being funded in advance, with more caution than may be readily apparent, by deferring $5 billion or more of promised tax cuts. It is assumed that, because these are mostly corporate taxes, "average Canadians" won't know any better. The economic damage done, by penalizing Canadian businesses against U.S. competition, is thus also deferred. Canadians will lose their jobs and their mortgages further down the road, and suffer price increases, but they will never really know what hit them, or why. Better yet, the Liberals' anti-American rhetoric can be amplified, to muffle sucker punches the Liberals themselves deliver to the Canadian economy. And they can count on fairly broad support from plausible businessmen whose own economic welfare depends on the Liberals' nationalist regulatory regimes, if not on direct party fundraising connexions. So even if most of the Liberal spending promises are lies, the few that are true, and the taxes to pay for them, are out of all proportion to the mere millions of dollars the Liberals are alleged to have redirected into their own pockets -- by one witness after another before the Gomery Inquiry. Since the polls indicate Canadians are easily pleased with spending promises alone, and do not mind high taxes, Liberal spin-control is left to explain only the muck emanating from that Inquiry -- or so much of it as Mr. Justice John Gomery agrees to release under sliding publication bans. Our media are remarkably incurious about other, potentially richer fields of scandal. For instance, Maurice Strong, the prime minister's close friend, "mentor", and life-long business partner, has been exposed to numerous charges in the United Nations' oil-for-food probe, including Iraqi investments in a company in which the prime minister himself holds a stake (Cordex Petroleum Co.), and manipulations of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. You'd hardly know this from reading the Canadian papers. Nor has any heat arisen from the Auditor-General's public suspicions that Gomery-style corruption could be happening on a vastly larger scale, in innumerable federal programmes that were designed so that she could not audit, nor Parliament review them. We simply assume that where the Liberals are most opaque, they are most honest. The tactical interpretation of the Liberal survival strategy is to allow the focus to remain on the Gomery revelations, and delay an election until people are bored with those. Whether by constitutional or other means, they would delay the election until midsummer, to assure the lowest possible turnout. But if media and public continue as docile as we have been, I wouldn't put it beneath them to prorogue Parliament, the moment they get their budget through. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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