Canada and Other Matters of Opinion
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In a passage of exquisite piety, Mr. Duffy recalled that, in his days as a journalist, he “learned one cannot be a successful leader without sound political judgment and the courage to make tough decisions despite determined opposition.” This was followed by a sublime moment of sycophancy dressing itself up as candour: “I am here to tell honourable Senators today—this is where the hard part begins—Stephen Harper has both that judgment and that courage.”
So that was the hard part. Praising the prime minister who put him there. We have the coalition and its tormented aftermath to thank for that fresh page in Canadian political folklore.
The most immense transformation that grew out of the doomed coalition, however, was the complete conversion of Mr. Harper as a fiscal conservative. The budget just brought down is a great scattershot of huge spending, put together we may safely assume in the panic-laden days following the threat to Mr. Harper’s staying in power. It embraces deficit financing during a recession with a fever that has Bob Rae chuckling in the op-ed pages. Chuckle he should and may.
Were Mr. Harper in opposition facing a Liberal government bringing down this budget, he would be on it like Savonarola rounding up heretics. This is a budget that would have made Jean Chrétien proud.
The coalition as a tactic was a massive failure. The coalition as an event has precipitated radical changes, pushed a dogmatic Conservative prime minister squarely into Liberal territory, and finessed the arrival of Michael Ignatieff into the leadership of the Liberal Party. And, of course, elevated Mr. Duffy.
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN | February 21, 2009
John Greenleaf Whittier—it’s a great name for a poet. Love the Greenleaf. With that as a middle name, were he around today, it’s hard to think he wouldn’t be flogging his Muse in the great cause of global warming, penning odes to windmills or versicles for Al Gore. If he’s known at all any more, it’s for a mournful little couplet that earned almost proverbial status in years long gone by. I thought of it this week during the visit of His Obamaness:
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!”
The rueful maxim popped into mind during Barack Obama’s session with Stephen Harper. Were it not for the wisdom—as I see it—of Governor General Michaëlle Jean’s decision to give the prime minister the prorogation he so desperately needed during the coalition crisis, Mr. Harper might not have been standing there Thursday with the gloriously popular Mr. Obama. Instead, Canada would have been “turning its lonely eyes” toward Prime Minister Stéphane Dion and coalition partner Jack Layton doing the diplomatic equivalent of a fist bump on centre stage with the world’s most popular leader.
And Mr. Harper, glowering as only he knows how to glower, would have been ferrying himself as opposition leader out to Ottawa airport for a more rationed tête-à-tête at the tail end of the presidential visit.
But it was mainly Jack and Stéphane that summoned J. Greenleaf’s fortune-cookie melancholy. They could have been basking in the starlit moment, sharing the wave to the crowd, having the private lunch with the Western world’s newest hero. Alas, “it might have been.”
Aside from these purely fanciful speculations, I was taken by another, purely subsidiary, aspect of this week’s visit. This was the question, which got considerable grinding in the press, of how many minutes Michael Ignatieff was to receive for his “face time” (odious phrase) with Mr. Obama.
Depending on the day or the press release, it was to be thirty minutes, or fifteen minutes, then back up to twenty minutes; at one (surely ominous) point, it was only ten minutes.
The Ignatieff camp was plainly determined to have its due, reaching back to Mr. Harper’s time as opposition leader during the 2004 visit of George Bush. That, said Mr. Ignatieff, was a “good and extended meeting.” He continued, and the tone was almost Churchillian: “I will expect no less, and I’m sure I will receive no less.” There’s a lot of Harvard in that sentence.
In any event, it all turned out sweetly for him. He not only got as much of the clock as could be hoped for—a full 30 minutes—but was able to include Bob Rae in the picnic. Outside of the extempore visit by Mr. Obama to the beaver tail hut in the ByWard Market (that’s one shop that will survive the recession), I consider the resolution of the face-time-minutes crisis the human-interest highlight of the trip.
Mr. Ignatieff’s real coup in the last little while, however, is far beyond the hyped and specious drama of how much time he was going to get with the new president. The Liberal leader has been making speeches in the western provinces that, in their tone and substance, signal he does not intend to simply accept what has been one of the iron laws of Canadian politics for a generation or more: that the Liberal Party hasn’t a hope in hell of winning any real support out West.
Mr. Ignatieff has been speaking up for Alberta as the economic dynamo of the country, he has moderate words for the oil sands and he talks about the Liberal Party’s past sneakiness (that’s my paraphrase) of “running against the West”—all in all, he gives every evidence of trying to put the Liberals into serious play in the deepest Harper territory.
This is a good thing, a very good thing. No parts, regions or provinces should be “owned” by any one party. The result is complacency and stagnation. Mr. Ignatieff is right to reject the lazy cliché that “the West” will never go Liberal.
His timing is opportune as well. Mr. Harper injured himself in the coalition crisis, and hasn’t helped himself greatly since with the budget, in the minds of very ardent Conservatives. Mr. Ignatieff’s pitch to a presumed monolith of Conservative support—and give him his due, the clarity of that pitch—comes at a near perfect moment.
A few more visits, a few more speeches and perhaps by the time Canadians face another election, Mr. Ignatieff may have removed some of the tired and regressive predictability from how Canadians vote. By that time, who got to wave with Barack Obama or how long they chatted will be one with the memory of John Greenleaf Whittier’s other verses.
There were others.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to:
Tim Rostron, editor at Doubleday Canada, for his diligence, cheer, patience and intelligence, who has been the shepherd of this enterprise, and who summons this slightly antique tribute to mind: A Man of Taste, to great applause, he read the daily news/ And kept a close acquaintance with the Muse.
Mark Harrison of CBC’s The National, a man of rare even-temper and fine judgment.
Alexandra Tomescu of The National, a woman of judicious mind and dauntless industry, who produced many of the Points of View included in this volume and gave very necessary assistance in the early trawl of columns and POVs.
The great mix of other people who, over the years at The National, have been involved in the various stages of producing Point of View.
Natasha Hassan of the Globe and Mail Comments section, another person of great cheer and intelligence, whose oversight of the weekly column is a model of discernment and benign scrutiny.
Bruce Westwood, my genial and efficacious agent.
Erin Cooper, the very able caricaturist, for the book’s cover and title page horror (it is, I acknowledge, kinder than a photograph), which has brought much amusement to coworkers and friends.
And my brother Tyrone, whose reserves of scorn and dudgeon so far superior, in volume and variety, to my own—a whole Alpine range of unslaked indignatio—leave me feeble with wonder and breathless from vain emulation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rex Murphy was born in Carbonear, Newfoundland, moved at an early age to Freshwater, Placentia Bay, and grew up in the province during the tenure of its greatest political impressario, Joseph R. Smallwood. During his university days, an early collision with the formidable Joey happily confirmed an innate disposition to look upon politics and politicians as an unacknowledged branch of entertainment, a perspective that has served well to the present day.
He drifted into the world of near-
journalism (commentary and opinion) first at VOCM, St. John’s, and then for various stretches at CBC, initially at Here and Now in St. John’s. He is the weekly commentator on CBC TV’s The National, host of CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup and writes a Saturday column at the Globe and Mail.
Copyright © 2009 Rex Murphy
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