Oui? Non? How about "Neither of the Above"?

"Vote for the crook, not the Fascist." In 2002, that was the cheery slogan of French electors offered a choice between Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen. Two years on, as part of the remorseless Francisation of Canada's political culture, it's now the strategy of Ottawa's Paulitburo.

Yes, this Adscam business is a bit hard to explain, and it would be helpful if the statistically inevitable immolation of Yvon Duhaime's next federally subsidized Shawinigan enterprise could be postponed for a year or two, and maybe we need a two-billion dollar federal registry of single mums so that when Crown Corporation bosses trash their employees they could at least verify their marital status.

But in the end - so the Liberals bet - Canadians will vote for the crooks, not the Fascists.

I hasten to add, lest you think Belinda Stronach and Stephen Harper make somewhat unconvincing gauleiters, that I use "Fascist" in the same sense as Denis Coderre does. As the Immigration Minister observed of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition two years ago, "Maybe now Le Pen has a franchise in Canada." Maybe he has - though given that Le Pen is fiercely anti-American, pro-Saddam and in favour of lavish subsidies for failing French industries, his obvious franchise in Canada is not on the Opposition benches.

But we all know what M Coderre means: If not (yet) explicitly Fascist, the Reform/Alliance/Conservative side can never be quite respectable by "Canadian" - ie, Liberal - standards. And come election day Central Canadians will remember what it says on our Coat of Arms: "A mari usque ad mare desiderantes meliorem patriam", which is Latin for "Celebrate diversity through one-party rule".

In between surveying their remarkably resilient poll numbers and marveling at David Asper's latest sympathetic editorials, they must occasionally feel like the eponymous impresarios in Mel Brooks' hit, The Producers. After sparing no effort to produce the biggest flop of all time, Max Bialystock finds to his horror that the public love it. As he sits in the bar trying to drown out the cheers of the customers, he wonders: "Where did I go right?"

The gun registry: It "sends the right message", which is that we're proud to spend more money registering a few rusty old farmers' shotguns than on supplying arms and ammunition for our troops.

Flags: And if you think registering a gun is expensive try arranging for the display of a federally-funded flag at a Quebec arts festival.

Crown Corporation chairmanships: They're excellent on-the-job training for running a biker gang in Quebec, which, if they aren't already Crown Corporations, might as well be.

The Gay Games: We were awarded them, but then they were taken away because the Montreal organizers weren't up to scratch. How's that for humiliating? Even our gay events-planners are third-rate. So now the Gay Games have gone to Chicago. But what's the betting that when the dust has settled it'll be revealed that the Feds had some half-billion boondoggle for displaying federal flags at the Gay Games, but unfortunately they were all left in a storage shed at the Auberge Grand-Mere and it burnt to the ground while the single-mum janitor was waiting three days in emergency after her legs were broken in the parking lot by a crowbar-wielding Privy Councillor...

As Trudeaupia decays into the G7's leading Third World kleptocracy, its chief characteristic is contempt for its own pieties. If you're not a member of the Crony-Canadian community - the folks in the corporate boxes and hospitality suites gladhanding the Liberal bagmen - you glimpse it only very rarely.

But that's the meaning of M Pelletier's dismissal of Myriam Bedard as a "pitiful" single mother: He's supposed to be on the side that cares about single mums; it's yours truly and other hard-hearted bastards on the right who are supposed to enjoy kicking 'em in the teeth. And, after a fashion, M Pelletier and his buddies do care about them: shrewdly deployed, single mums can be very effective in campaign ads. But, if they work for M Pelletier at VIA Rail, they shouldn't get ideas above their station, especially if their station's on the express line for the Ottawa-Quebec gravy train. In Canada, a railway company doesn't need any whistle-blowers, just a guy who knows how to cover his tracks.

Contempt is also the meaning of grubby fixer Alphonso Gagliano's strikingly proprietorial formulation: "my Crowns". Again, he's supposed to be on the side that believes in public ownership. If I were Prime Minister, there wouldn't be Crown Corporations. But, if you happen to be an enforcer for da boss, why wouldn't you look at them like that? They're certainly "your" Crowns more than they are "the people's". So, when Michel Vennat and Jean Carle have got things set up nice and cosy at the BDC, you can imagine how taken aback they must have been to find out that Francois Beaudoin was planning to call in the loan. The Grand-Mere loan to M Duhaime. I mean, what's with Beaudoin? Doesn't he get it? Doesn't he know how things work? So they fired him, cancelled his pension, accused him of fraud, and sicced the RCMP on him.

And even though M Beaudoin fought back, and won in court, and the judge ruled that his smearers had "no credibility", it took five years. Alain Richard, a former Vice-President of Groupaction who also asked too many questions, was accosted by two fellows who told him he was talking too much and has felt the need to buy guard dogs. Not a lot of folks have the energy for these kinds of battles. And where does it get you? The smearer Vennat is still at his post. Jean Carle went laughing all the way from the bank to a new gig at Montreal's Juste Pour Rires festival, which immediately saw a dramatic uptick in government grants.

That's how it goes in the diseased Dominion: even a comedy festival can always use a guy with the inside track. Did you hear the one about the Crown Corporation boss and the single mother? No, M Carle cut it in rehearsal.

This is the reality of Trudeaupia. And yes, you can say it's not as bad as Haiti, but to be honest I'd be more reassured if we could compare ourselves to New Zealand. Yet no matter how ugly the reality, with the broader public the myth of Trudeaupia endures. Just as the gun registry "sends the right message" no matter how many billions it costs, so the health care system sends the right message, no matter how many unfortunate Labrador ladies go in for a pap smear and emerge with Chlamydia because no one's got time to run the thing under the faucet between appointments.

And, even if Papa Khadr did turn out to be a big A-list al-Qaeda guy, M Chretien personally intervening to get him sprung from jail in Pakistan so he could resume his, ah, "charity work" still "sends the right message" about what a multicultural society we are. We're so multicultural we'll let you choose which side of the war you want to be on. And, when M Chretien told Mr Khadr's son that "once I was a son of a farmer, and I became Prime Minister. Maybe one day you will become one", that too "sent the right message" - that in Canada anyone can grow up to be Prime Minister, as long as they're from Quebec. (In fairness to Papa Jean, it's unclear whether this was a serious offer: even M Chretien might balk at taking his antipathy to Mr Martin that far. And young Master Khadr decided instead to join al-Qaeda, on the grounds that, say what you like about them but, unlike Carolyn Parrish and co, when it comes to anti-Americanism those guys at least walk the walk.)

What do almost all these "controversies" have in common? From Adscam to Conan O'Brien, Beaudoin to Cherry. Answer: Starts with a "Q" and ends with a ... well, it never ends, does it? Even my old pal, Paul Wells of Maclean's, frets that his main concern over the flagging-federalism boondoggle is that it risks enflaming the prejudices of "redneck Francophobes" - which is, surely, a tad Anglophobic itself, is it not? Or, at any rate, Albertophobic. In his preference for hypothetical crises over actual ones, Paul reminds me of that European Union report on the Continent's outbreak of Jew-hatred that they decided to shelve because its findings could provoke an outbreak of Islamophobia. In this instance, the "francophobia" of rednecks - I'm defining below-nape erubescence as loosely as Paul here - is justified. It's the central fact of the Trudeaupian state.

Let me come at it from another direction, courtesy of a recent book, The Size Of Nations by Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore. The authors note that, of the ten richest countries in the world only four have populations above 1 million: the United States (260 million people), Switzerland (7 million), Norway (4 million) and Singapore (3 million). All the rest are small jurisdictions with few people. This is an age of small countries: the big ones - the USSR - and not so big ones - Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia - have gone belly up, and in their wake have bloomed Latvia, Slovakia, Macedonia. Small nations are more cohesive and have less need for buying off ethnic and regional factions.

The Americans are the exception that proves the rule: they're decentralized and they practice scrupulously symmetrical federalism. If they had instead contrived a situation where, for example, some states were allocated seats in the House of Representatives on the basis of population and others were guaranteed a fixed number regardless, or if for 34 of the last 36 years, they'd been ruled by Presidents from, say, California, with representatives of the other 49 states confined to brief interregnums, it's unlikely that the United States would hold together. These are admittedly extreme and preposterous hypotheses of my own. Messrs Alesina and Spolaore content themselves with a more measured comparison: if America were as centrally governed as France, it would break up. China, I'll predict, will not advance to the First World with its present borders.

Of course, there are two necessary conditions for a viable small state: international trade and a generally peaceful environment. You can't be an independent principality if you happen to be sandwiched between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires and you're smack dab in the middle of their commute when they set off to invade each other. So the most powerful rationale for big state entities is that they're more likely to be able to afford a strong, credible military.

Canada, in other words, is less an exception to every rule than a guy who's holding the rule-book upside down. It's a big country in an age of ever smaller states. It's a big country with a querulous regional minority not on the distant horizon - as the Basques are to Madrid or Northern Irish nationalists are to London - but a querulous regional minority the subvention of whom is the governing principle of the state.

It's a big country in an age of global trade: NAFTA, say the authors of The Size Of Nations, makes it more likely Quebec will secede. Don't hold your breath, boys.

It's a big country with the military of a smaller country: if Quebec declared independence tomorrow, that's it; there would be no latter-day Wolfe to re-take the Plains of Abraham, no detachment of Lord Strathcona's Horse fighting street to street in the East End of Montreal, no RCAF bombers taking out the Champlain Bridge. Quebec could win their country by issuing a press release.

But they won't, because it's all one almighty bluff. When a so-called "nationalist" movement proposes that President Parizeau travel on a passport declaring him to be a subject of Her Majesty, you know they're not serious. Quebec nationalists already have a nation: it's called Canada. At least some of us who've voted in a Quebec referendum understand that it's no choice at all - "Non" to Trudeaupian federalism (government health care, over-unionised, post offices that deliver at two in the afternoon and are closed on Saturdays), "Oui" to faux separatism (government health care, over-unionised, post offices that deliver at three in the afternoon and are closed on Saturdays). What's the difference? Where's the "Neither of the above" box?

This new magazine is for the neither-of-the-above crowd. It has a proudly regional, not to say "redneck" title. And the question for "westerners" is whether they're prepared to fund Adscam, the Grand-Mere, the gun registry et al indefinitely or whether they're savvy enough to develop, at the very minimum, a Quebec-style strategy: not just a "firewall", but a bluff that Ottawa never dares quite call.

Still, as a respite from the gloom, after a gazillion years of state subsidy, our movie business finally notched up a Best Film Oscar (well, Best Foreign-Language Film): Les Invasions Barbares won an Academy Award for its exquisite federally and provincially funded portrayal of the decrepitude of the Quebec health-care system.

That's the diseased Dominion in a nutshell: our Liberal impresarios give us a riveting portrait of decay and decline, and come the big day, in late spring or whenever, they'll still scoop up all the Oscars. And they'll be back next year with more lame sequels, in Shawinigan, at Groupaction, and at your expense. These aren't flaws in the system. They are the system.

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3 posted on 04/02/2004 4:54:00 PM PST by Support Free Republic (If Woody had gone straight to the police, this would never have happened!)

In Canada, a railway company doesn't need any whistle-blowers, just a guy who knows how to cover his tracks.

LOL. What a wonderful and inventive writer Steyn is!

You can't be an independent principality if you happen to be sandwiched between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires and you're smack dab in the middle of their commute when they set off to invade each other.

What a turn of phrase. Boy, I wish I could write like Steyn.

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