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COMMENTARY
November 2, 2005
Here & there
I invite my fellow Canadians to prove me wrong, but in the heat generated by the release of Mr Justice John Gomery's first report yesterday, I could detect no serious danger to Liberal Party rule in Ottawa.The entire report came pre-spun, with thundering language designed to shower blame on the ex-prime minister, Jean Chrétien, and his cronies. The sitting prime minister, Paul Martin, was given clear indications on whom to sick the RCMP, and is already doing that. The NDP will grandstand a threat to bring the government down, and then be bought off with a fresh round of spending promises on the social engineering schemes that are most dear to them. The core Liberal constituency will remain annoyed at the embarrassment they have suffered, and the more powerful among them continue to privately condemn Mr Martin for having been so weak as to let all this laundry dry in public. In their code-language, they accuse him of lacking "vision". But they realize the sort of corruption revealed by Judge Gomery -- an amount which scratches the surface of how government is now conducted in Canada -- is comforting at another level. It confirms that the Liberal Party pays for its friends. Mr Chrétien is expendable, now, as all reasonable Liberals can agree, and so, after a moment's hestitation, they will rally around their current leader. After a slight dip, the polls will show the Liberals have increased their lead over the Conservatives from what it was before Gomery reported. When an election is finally allowed to occur, the Liberals will recover their majority and -- here is the good news -- break all their promises to the NDP. That is how things are done in Canada, where our ruling class is confident of a phlegmatic population, and of supine media support. They need, anyway, only about 40 per cent of the vote to rule absolutely in our multi-party system, and the safe seats in Ontario alone take them half way home. The geographical recipients of Liberal largesse will normally take them the rest of the way to a Parliamentary majority. The bad news is that this does not reduce to a hundred million misspent here and there. That is merely a financial disorder, tied up through excessive taxation in the progressive limitation of our country's economic prospects. A Thatcherite, Conservative government could turn that around in a year. What it cannot turn around is the moral degeneration that follows not only from the corruption, and other incidentals of a welfare state, but from the social policies that are the natural moral correlative to the fiscal ones. I am referring to things like the destruction of the Canadian family, and the devaluation of human life, that are implicit in projects like same-sex marriage and impending euthanasia legislation. And more profoundly, to the de-moralization that comes when Canadians allow these things to happen, in despite of their own better judgements. By increments, we become slaves. Compare the great fight that is promised in the U.S. Senate over President Bush's replacement nomination for Harriet Miers. Mr. Bush tried a stealth appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, to forego, if possible, an ideological battle when he had real priorities elsewhere (Iraq, Syria, Iran, domestic terror, and so on). It didn't work; Republican senators called him on it. In Samuel Alito he has now appointed a fine, learned, very experienced judge who has -- by those facts -- the track record with which Democrat senators will attempt to crucify him. They will probably fail, but the battle will be played out, in all its ramifications, in the clear sight of the American electorate. Ultimately, those people decide which set of clowns should have the real power. In Canada, we have no right to question our prime minister's choice of justices for the Supreme Court. The shop-window reforms recently proposed will fall far short of allowing Parliament to question the appointees directly. And that has a great deal to do with the fact our entire Supreme Court is now filled with judicial radicals, who believe the courts exist to make law, instead of to enforce it. It is the means by which such hugely consequential social questions as the two I mentioned above, are finally taken out of public hands. The fear being always that if the people got to vote on these things, they might get it wrong. Democracy, as Churchill famously said, is the worst form of government except for all the others. A system in which the general public, with the common sense, decency, and self-interest that governs their reactions when they are left free to debate and choose, will always provide remedies against both the superficial corruption that a Gomery reveals, and the deeper corruption that issues from an entrenched elite that thinks it knows better than the people what is good for them. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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