by Rex Murphy
That frame of mind will prostitute anything—the life of Christ, other people’s religion—for a stale press conference and a fresh buck. It’s that simple. It also explains Al Gore’s Oscar. Having toppled one messiah, Hollywood wanted a shallow facsimile in the wings.
THE PATH TO POWER
DION BURIED ALIVE | October 18, 2008
It is an ancient and sage observation that politics is mean and harsh. Consider the cruel and enlightening example of Stéphane Dion.
Hold the grief counsellors, cue the vultures. The body is not yet cold—good grief, it hasn’t even hit the floor—before the dissection begins and the post-mortems offer up their verdicts.
In Mr. Dion’s case, the anonymous voices of the backroom, the “high-placed insiders” of the Liberal Party, hymned an instant chorus of his failings, an instant call for his ouster. And not to avoid what cannot be denied, we in the press are equally eager to spur and participate in the instant demolition. Personality always trumps politics—the human drama of a leader undone is worth a thousand panels on Afghanistan.
The latest word is he’ll announce his resignation on Monday.
Dion wears his party’s loss. After all, he would have been showered with hosannas had he won. At the leadership level, politics is an all-or-nothing game. Leaders have been bathed in praises to make a pharaoh blush for presiding over electoral victories for which they, the leaders, had as little to do as the fall of a leaf.
They were just there when it happened, when the public turned like an angry beast on the party that was in, and would have elected a party with a sick and ugly dog for a leader to send a measure of their disgust. Be the leader in one of those moments, and prepare to be extolled as a genius, a Napoleon of the ballot box. The sycophants and camp followers will crowd the throne room and every tongue will chirp his greatness.
Mr. Dion is on the underside of this phenomenon. It was the centrepiece of his platform—the Green Shift—that, more than any other item, obstructed the Liberal Party’s performance. His personality, likewise, was a poor match for uncertain and anxious times. And he was the least able communicator of the very team he headed. Yet, for all that, there is still something unseemly, bordering on cruel, about the speed with which he is being marked as rubbish and consigned to the bin.
He failed. Bury him quickly. Disregard or ignore the sensibility of the individual caught in a moment of awful transition.
A decent interval to let him gather himself might have been a signal that politics has a heart, that party politics can permit a moment of composure to one of its leading figures and thereby indicate the game isn’t always everything. In other words, that it could, however briefly, allow some respect for a particular human being and his human circumstance.
That is, of course, a hope far too large for politics as we have come to know it, and I fear being regarded as hopelessly sentimental—or, what’s worse, antiquated—for merely introducing the thought.
The other personality at play is Stephen Harper’s. He won—not the majority he hoped for, but still, he won. He remains prime minister—that is the crucial, the essential, consideration. Those disappointed that some of his performance was less than it should have been, that he misjudged the issues in Quebec, that he offered “stock tips” during a time of plant closings and financial anxiety, will muffle their criticisms. The well-oiled knees of those hoping for favour will genuflect at the rumour of his presence.
Which is too bad—for him. Mr. Harper needs to listen to those who would judge him coldly. Not the “Harper is Bush” mob, who think a slogan is a thought. But those who are willing to hazard a frown from their master in the cause of delivering some delayed truths to his attention. Among those truths, perhaps the most startling one is that he needs some of the very qualities of the man his party mocked and brought down. An occasional gust of charm, for starters. He needn’t make it a habit. A more frequent willingness to speak without a prompt sheet from the polls. To speak in the voice of who he really is. To give some glimpse of his real feeling—outside those dreadful TV ads—about the arts, how he sees the country, what he thinks of the times we’re in.
There’s a hard truth in the consideration that many Canadians don’t trust Mr. Harper, and I think it’s because they see he doesn’t trust them. His guard is always up. The brain locks in gear before the mouth stirs.
That’s where, surprisingly, he could learn from Mr. Dion. He should note that, though Mr. Dion lost the election, there is still so wide a feeling at some level of Canadian appraisal that it was too bad he did. He was not the leader Canadians wanted, but his openness and “exposure” implied a trust, a faith in the people whose support he sought. Loss notwithstanding, that was admirable.
Stéphane Dion, for the most part, let Canadians see him. Stephen Harper should study that example.
COALITION FOR A DAY | December 13, 2008
Just twelve days ago, on Monday of the past week, there stumbled into life what all of us now remember as the coalition.
Three men—two leaders of national parties, one leader of a Quebec separatist party—held an official “signing ceremony.” The coalition was all ready to become the government. Stéphane Dion would be its prime minister; Jack Layton’s NDP would have six of its cabinet ministers; the Bloc was guaranteed something called a “formal consulting mechanism” during the promised eighteen months of the agreement. Only the delay of an imminent confidence vote, and the subsequent prorogation of Parliament, stayed the coalition’s swift and lofty ascent to power.
I’m summarizing what everyone already knows, because in the hectic, stormy politics of the last two weeks, events of twelve whole days ago feel like something you might catch only on the History Channel. It really does seem like years have passed since those two or three days when Mr. Dion really looked like he was going to become prime minister after all. But it was only just last week. As T.S. Eliot once sagely observed, “History has many cunning corridors,” and as if by way of illustration of this maxim, last week’s PM-to-be is this week’s backbencher. The governor general had barely finished sipping tea with an imploring Stephen Harper before the Liberals jettisoned Mr. Dion and placed Michael Ignatieff in his job.
Where are we now? Last week, the coalition had everyone in the country mesmerized. There was talk of nothing else. Open-line shows, comments on web pages, editorials—there was a wave of popular and media response of a volume unseen since the wrangles of Meech Lake and the Charlottetown Accord.
And where is this coalition now? What is it? Does it even still exist? Mr. Ignatieff hems and haws about “a coalition if necessary, but not necessarily a coalition,” which is what a really fancy mind comes up with when it wants to say yes and no to the same question. Equivocation in a tuxedo, but pure equivocation nonetheless.
One would think the brand new leader of the Liberals could give a direct answer on something as plain as whether his party still has an agreement with the NDP and the Bloc; that all three are, like the fabled musketeers, all for one and one for all. That, as per the agreement between them and the signing ceremony that announced it, come January 27, when Parliament returns, it’s out with the Harper imperium. But on the few occasions that Mr. Ignatieff has been pushed to clarify the most central question in all of Canadian politics—Is the agreement to bring down Stephen Harper still in force?—the most erudite washing machine in Canadian politics goes into full spin cycle.
And out tumbles yes, no and maybe as if they were synonyms.
Even the NDP, which I think has the first claim to pride of authorship in this matter of a coalition, seems more than a little hazy on its current status. Its most dulcet-toned deputy leader, Thomas Mulcair, reminds Mr. Ignatieff that he was “one of 161 MPs who signed a letter to the Governor General asking to form an alternative government with the NDP.”
But when pressed on the matter of whether his party and the Liberals are still in concert, still determined to do what that coalition was set up to do—form that al
ternative government—out comes the tepid “I have every reason to believe in his sincerity and in the sincerity of his Liberal colleagues.”
Let’s try that again: “I have every reason to believe in his sincerity and in the sincerity of his Liberal colleagues.” There’s a trumpet blast. More “let’s do lunch” than “give me liberty or give me death.”
Are the Bloc still in this thing? No idea. Do they still have that wonder, detailed in the signing ceremony, of a “formal consultation mechanism?” Is Michael consulting with them? Is Jack mechanizing? Haven’t heard.
This is all very strange. Just twelve days ago, we had the boldest, most dramatic parliamentary manoeuvre in a generation, a formal alliance between three opposition parties, a signing ceremony of their leaders giving birth to a new entity and an “alternative government.” This week, the once-explosive notion of a coalition is a shimmer in some phantom zone of yesterday’s politics. No one who had anything to do with it wants to admit it’s dead. They want it to fade away all on its own. If it weren’t for that signing ceremony and the wonderfully retentive powers of videotape, I’d almost bet some of its backers would deny it ever existed.
There won’t be any more rallies for the coalition. It was the fevered product of a moment’s opportunism, a political house of cards. Five years from now, it’ll be a good question for Trivial Pursuit.
The idea that a coalition underwritten by an agreement with the Bloc Québécois had a legitimate claim to form a “national” government was an offensive contradiction from the moment of its opportunistic conception.
The coalition was almost instantly reviled by a majority of Canadians, in large part because a majority of Canadians simply could not digest the notion of a federal government owing its existence to the one party in the House of Commons that rejects the idea of a federal government. I don’t know if Canada is the only country in the world that funds its own separatist party, but I am fairly certain it is the only country in the world that contemplated (as in the coalition) asking a separatist party to be the guarantor of its national government.
GRIT MIRACLE | December 20, 2008
Michael Ignatieff is good news for the Liberal Party.
It was good news when they didn’t pick him at the leadership convention two years ago. He was then too fresh to the party and too fresh to Canada. He needed some time to wash the scent of the Harvard common room off himself. Needed time to establish some bona fides with the country he hadn’t lived in for most of his adult life. Needed time for that big brain of his to wrap itself around the issues and rhythms, both subtle and complex, of Canadian politics.
Well, wrap itself it has, and the odour of Harvard has been duly subdued by the more manly fragrances of Question Period and the Liberal caucus room.
He stayed on after that first loss. That, of course, was critical. He stayed on and played the good soldier during the torments of Stéphane Dion’s (let us be Christmas kind) uneven stay as Opposition leader. Two years ago, he was a resumé. Today, he’s a politician, almost “one of the boys.”
And here he is, leader of the Liberals. Precisely how he managed this during the political convulsions of the past few weeks is almost mystically perplexing. If Mr. Dion had been in focus on the night of December 3 (I’m referring here to the infamous late video), Mr. Ignatieff might not be leader today. Let’s just say that chance and tumult co-operated.
Now that he’s leader, he has restored morale. He generates interest. People, non-politicians, find him interesting. No, he’s not our Barack Obama or Pierre Trudeau redux, but he looks good opposite Stephen Harper and he clearly outshines both Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe. Check out the Liberal front bench these days. They’re smiling again, and it isn’t the forced rictus of the past two years.
There’s already talk that Mr. Ignatieff is visiting Quebec early, hoping to pick up where Mr. Harper clearly struck out in the last election. And where many say Mr. Harper has further damaged himself by the vigour of his attack on the participation of the Bloc Québécois in the horror the country came to know as the coalition. Wooing Quebec under these circumstances is no less smart for being the obvious thing to do. Mr. Ignatieff will do fine there. A high brow and a patrician manner, a little flavour of the cosmopolitan, is not an unfamiliar combination to Quebecers.
All this, I’m sure, cheers the Liberal Party. But the best news for the Liberals comes in what some may have seen as throwaway lines at his early press conference as leader. Mr. Ignatieff—no Horace Greeley fan, I’m sure—spoke of going west.
The Liberal Party has long treated western Canada as some kind of political Ultima Thule, or, if I may maul a familiar phrase from Hamlet, an “undiscovered country from whose bourn no Liberal MP returns.” The smartest thing Mr. Ignatieff did at that first press conference was to pay tribute to the West as the “beating economic heart of our country’s future.”
Westerners have become all too familiar with eastern politicians ignoring them or treating them as afterthoughts, or less. There has been a mighty strain of condescension built into this country’s politics toward the West, and it has infected the Liberal Party in particular.
There’s no need to bring up yet again the great nightmare of the National Energy Program to illustrate this point. That policy burned the house of Liberalism in the West to the ground. Mr. Ignatieff is the first Liberal leader I’ve heard since the dread days of the NEP to make clear acknowledgment of the resentments and mischiefs it inspired. These were the words he used: “I want us to reach out and hope that western Canadians forgive and forget, to be very blunt, some of the errors the party has made in the past.”
That’s smart. And, if he means it, wise as well. There was also considerable wisdom in holding himself somewhat at arm’s length from the coalition. Because, despite conventional wisdom, what ticked off the West about that jerry-rigged fabrication wasn’t so much the Bloc’s inclusion but that it nullified, by backroom deal, the West’s huge representation, by the ballot, in the Harper government. All those western MPs and cabinet ministers were suddenly going to be patrolling the corridors of opposition, just because Messrs. Layton, Duceppe and Dion had cooked up a deal to shunt them there. Many westerners saw themselves once again being dealt out of the power equations by eastern politicians.
So, Mr. Ignatieff is good news for the Liberals. And no more so than that his radar is tuned so early into turning the party’s fortunes around in the one region of the country that most of his recent predecessors barely acknowledged was on the political map.
Mr. Ignatieff will fish in Mr. Harper’s waters. There’s a turnaround. The season of miracles, indeed.
COALITION OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES | February 7, 2009
So much begins with the wonder and farce we came to know as the coalition: the pact, deal, improvisation between Messrs. Dion, Layton and Duceppe, that for a heady moment seemed destined to overturn the Harper minority, install Stéphane Dion as prime minister, and place Jack Layton with five other New Democrats in the federal cabinet. Gilles Duceppe and his Bloc were then, metaphorically, to ride shotgun on this tidy arrangement, by guaranteeing it would be impervious to confidence measures for a year and a half.
Merely saying that it didn’t fly is a serious understatement. But so wonderful a combination was not without its effects. If the coalition had not reared its various and confusing heads, Mr. Dion would still, in his manner, be leading the Liberal Party. Canadians were rightly staggered that a man who had, more or less, already been told by his own party that his days were numbered was, by this piece of artfulness, soon to be their prime minister.
The Liberals were forced to confront a fairly strong objection to this outcome. He had been found wanting, was on his way out in fact, but would do nonetheless as prime minister for a while. Logic of this kind is why the word perplexing was first invented.
Skipping all the glorious details, this is why, without a full convention, Michael Ignatieff is now Leader of Her Majesty’s Official Oppo
sition. The fury that roiled public opinion after the triple signing—Dion, Layton, Duceppe—forced the Liberal Party to confront its own leadership problems. Dominic LeBlanc dropped out first, Bob Rae conceded, and Michael Ignatieff slid ever so gracefully into its leadership.
The always snarky gods of irony turned the coalition from an instrument to unseat Stephen Harper as prime minister into an instrument to install Michael Ignatieff as Liberal leader. “Last to sign on, first to be king” should be the Ignatieff family motto.
The coalition gave cover to Mr. Harper to explode eighteen of his finest loyalists into the Senate. Eighteen senators in a single day. It enabled Mr. Harper, with minimum fuss, to go from ardent Senate reformer to a chartered member of the “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” club. The coalition gave Mr. Harper his very own patronage Christmas.
That’s had its benefits. In the case of Mike Duffy, it put a merciful end to the longest audition in Canadian history. It ferried Mr. Duffy from an interviewer’s stool outside the Commons to a more accommodating perch on the stuffed velvet cushions of appointment paradise, the Red Chamber.
Early on, by the way, Mr. Duffy is showing signs of being Mr. Harper’s most inspired choice. His maiden speech (strange) had elements of pornographic fantasy. The scene called up was all about premiers Danny Williams and Robert Ghiz in bed together, with such flourishes as “when one is in bed with Danny Williams, he will come out on top” and “where that will leave PEI in the end.” Is there a cover charge to listen to Senate debates now? Mike Duffy Live takes on a whole new meaning.
But however much Mr. Harper may be gratified to have Mr. Duffy as an apprentice standup comedian turning riffs on Danny Williams and Robert Ghiz sweating under the sheets, it can be as nothing to his satisfaction on hearing Senator Duffy’s ardent and blush-free tribute to him.