Mark Steyn: Want to Live Like a Liberal? Then Vote Conservative

I've met Stephen Harper just the once, and nothing he said on that occasion was memorable. It hardly ever is. In fact, the only thing I remember about it is that he broke off the conversation because he wanted to telephone his kids and say goodnight to them. We were both far from home. "Maybe I should phone my kids," I thought as he wandered off. "If they still remember who I am... And if I can find the bit of paper with their names on..."

In his victory speech, as is now traditional, Harper also said nothing memorable, except for a bit toward the end where he said that the worst thing about the campaign trail was that he'd missed his children. I've no doubt that many of the press corps in the room rolled their eyes and cynically sneered at what they took for faux Hallmark boilerplate. Jean Chretien, after all, passed himself off as "da liddle guy" for 40 years and never was. It was always about connections, working the Rolodex, calling in favours … . In The Toronto Star in 1997, James Travers shared with readers a telling vignette of a day in the life of Jean Chretien. He's in an elevator at the National Gallery of Canada with Bill Clinton, Jim Blanchard (US Ambassador in Ottawa) and Andre Desmarais, husband of Chretien's daughter France and heir to Quebec's PowerCorp, the largest shareholder in TotalFinaElf, Saddam's favourite oil company.

Well, I'm sure those crazy kids love each other, but there's something faintly creepy about this exchange — it sounds like dialogue from some BBC costume drama in which a bunch of crowned heads stand around congratulating themselves on the adroitness of their arranged marriages.

Want to live like a Liberal? Then vote Conservative

Monday, 29 March 2004

Mark Steyn

I've met Stephen Harper just the once, and nothing he said on that occasion was memorable. It hardly ever is. In fact, the only thing I remember about it is that he broke off the conversation because he wanted to telephone his kids and say goodnight to them. We were both far from home. "Maybe I should phone my kids," I thought as he wandered off. "If they still remember who I am... And if I can find the bit of paper with their names on..."

In his victory speech, as is now traditional, Harper also said nothing memorable, except for a bit toward the end where he said that the worst thing about the campaign trail was that he'd missed his children. I've no doubt that many of the press corps in the room rolled their eyes and cynically sneered at what they took for faux Hallmark boilerplate. Jean Chretien, after all, passed himself off as "da liddle guy" for 40 years and never was. It was always about connections, working the Rolodex, calling in favours... In The Toronto Star in 1997, James Travers shared with readers a telling vignette of a day in the life of Jean Chretien. He's in an elevator at the National Gallery of Canada with Bill Clinton, Jim Blanchard (US Ambassador in Ottawa) and Andre Desmarais, husband of Chretien's daughter France and heir to Quebec's PowerCorp, the largest shareholder in TotalFinaElf, Saddam's favourite oil company.

"France certainly married well," says Blanchard.

"Andre married well," says Chretien.

Well, I'm sure those crazy kids love each other, but there's something faintly creepy about this exchange--it sounds like dialogue from some BBC costume drama in which a bunch of crowned heads stand around congratulating themselves on the adroitness of their arranged marriages.

So when political columnists bemoan Harper's lack of star quality, they're mistaking a great asset for a defect. "Star quality" in showbiz means you can do something--sing, dance, look great in the nude scenes. Star quality in politics usually indicates nothing other than a weird obsession with one's own indispensability--think of Brian Tobin's farewell press conference. For a true conservative, politics should never be all consuming. The purpose of conservative politics is to free the citizen to get on with the more important stuff--family, home, fishing, stamp-collecting. Harper's sense of proportion is the best thing about him, and not just when compared to Paul Martin, a man whose entire life has been dedicated to making himself Prime Minister apparently without giving a single thought to what he'd do once he got the job.

But what makes Harper remarkable is the way this unassuming public personality goes hand in hand with what's either unbelievable political luck or a strategic genius. So what if he never says anything memorable? It's what a guy does when he stops talking that counts, and by that measure Harper is an amazing man. In the most understated unobtrusive way, he's accomplished all that the flashier, noisier types set out to do and failed. He's united Canada's nonleftist opposition parties, and under his command. To do this, he defeated an incumbent Alliance leader, out-maneuvered a PC leader, and saw off a glamorous challenger. Even more impressively, as a concession to the Albertophobes of the old Tory rump he allowed the leadership contest to be rigged so that 25% of the vote went to Quebec, where there are only 127 Conservative Party members, 83 of them cadavers from the Gasp‚ and the remainder under-gardeners at the Mulroney mansion signed up en masse by Belinda's minders. That's a 007-level card-player: Harper lets them stack the deck and he still wins, and wins big.

The result is that Harper and his caucus look like the Canada the Liberals are supposed to stand for: young and "diverse." The Liberals, meanwhile, look like groggy old hacks who've fallen in their own vomit: Adscam, Flagscam, Crownscam, Gunscam, Coppscam, Softwood lumbscam, Adrienne Clarkscam, Alphonso Scammiano, Canada Scamships, Earnscam, Shawiniscam, Auberge Grandscam, Viascam, the Royal Scamadian Mounted Police, and a few others I may have forgotten. O Scamada, we scam on guard for thee. As Popeye would say, swabbing the deck of a Bermuda-flagged Paul Martin container, "I scam what I scam!"

Having embarked on an ill-advised Stalinist purge, Paul Martin now finds himself in the insane position of running against the last 11 years of Paul Martin government, which he characterizes as "cronyism," "waste and management." After blithely signing the cheques for a regime where it's Scamadan all year round, he's now insisting he's the new broom and he's going to sweep clean. Pay no attention to the fact that he was in charge of the broom cupboard for the last ten years. As deputy janitor, he was far too important to know what was going on, no matter that much of it involved his aides, his associates, and companies to which he had close ties. It's makeover time, and he's the Clear Eye for the Grit Guy. He'll clear up but he won't clear out.

Even the Liberals may have difficulty selling this one. If the party loses seats in both Quebec (which seems highly likely) and Ontario (which seems possible), they're looking at minority government or worse. The trick for Harper is to make the battle one of competence rather than ideology. For example, it's hard for the Liberals to argue that there's nothing wrong with Canadian healthcare that can't be solved by throwing more money at it. The response to that is: Return the money paid out for PR work that was never done, for flags that were never made, for Aline Chretien lunches expensed to the Development Bank of Canada, for vexatious RCMP investigations into Chretien's political enemies. The Liberals have had money to burn--literally so, in the case of the Auberge Grand-Mere. And when we've allocated all that to MRI scammers--sorry, scanners - then we'll see whether we need any more. The Conservatives might usefully commission one of those dot-matrix displays of whirring numbers the American debt-fetishists used to put up in the Eighties: How many billions of dollars have the Liberals wasted on their various boondoggles? Even if you believe in the Liberal Party state (as distressingly large numbers of Canadians do), it's clear the Liberal Party can't be entrusted to run it.

And why should the big shots care? What all these scams have in common is the way Canada's ruling class--i.e., the Liberal Party--is not bound by Liberal policies. You have to give up half your earnings to the government; Paul Martin is able to arrange things so that Canada Steamships doesn't have to. Your standard of living has been so reduced that you can no longer afford to travel abroad and are thus obliged to take the Liberals at their word when they say Canada is "the greatest country in the world." But you have to pay for John Ralston Saul to maintain his lead as the most traveled vice regal consort in the Commonwealth.

Harry Truman used to say, "If you want to live like a Republican, vote for a Democrat." Stephen Harper could do worse than re-tool the line for Canada: If you want to live like a Liberal, vote for a Conservative.

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