Mark Steyn: Politics Is So Divisive

By time-honoured tradition, the first official ritual of a Canadian election campaign is the dissolution of Parliament by proclamation of the Governor-General. The second official ritual of a Canadian election campaign is the ceremonial disowning by the Reform/Alliance/Conservative leader of whichever member of his caucus has been foolish enough to bring up some unmentionable subject.

Most of the subjects those of us on the right enjoy talking about — from health care to immigration - are unmentionable during an election campaign, so there’s no shortage of candidates for the ceremonial “distancing” (for a backbencher) or enforced resignation (for a frontbench critic). Even so, this time round the two ceremonies all but overlapped. Her viceregal eminence had barely finished dropping the writ before Scott Reid was being stripped of his portfolio by Stephen Harper and cast into outer darkness.

Mr Reid had committed the “gaffe” of musing to The Moncton Times And Transcript on the merits of bilingualism — or, rather, on the merits of Federally mandated and funded bilingualism, which isn’t quite the same thing, though for the purposes of hustings huffery-puffery we’re obliged to pretend that it is.

“Stephen Harper’s careful effort to assure voters his Conservative party would not take Canada in radical new directions was shaken Thursday,” pretended excitable Steve Lambert of the Canadian Press, “when one of his influential MPs resigned his portfolio after suggesting an overhaul of the Official Languages Act.”

POLITICS IS SO DIVISIVE

By time-honoured tradition, the first official ritual of a Canadian election campaign is the dissolution of Parliament by proclamation of the Governor-General. The second official ritual of a Canadian election campaign is the ceremonial disowning by the Reform/Alliance/Conservative leader of whichever member of his caucus has been foolish enough to bring up some unmentionable subject.

Most of the subjects those of us on the right enjoy talking about – from health care to immigration - are unmentionable during an election campaign, so there’s no shortage of candidates for the ceremonial “distancing” (for a backbencher) or enforced resignation (for a frontbench critic). Even so, this time round the two ceremonies all but overlapped. Her viceregal eminence had barely finished dropping the writ before Scott Reid was being stripped of his portfolio by Stephen Harper and cast into outer darkness.

Mr Reid had committed the “gaffe” of musing to The Moncton Times And Transcript on the merits of bilingualism – or, rather, on the merits of Federally mandated and funded bilingualism, which isn’t quite the same thing, though for the purposes of hustings huffery-puffery we’re obliged to pretend that it is.

“Stephen Harper’s careful effort to assure voters his Conservative party would not take Canada in radical new directions was shaken Thursday,” pretended excitable Steve Lambert of the Canadian Press, “when one of his influential MPs resigned his portfolio after suggesting an overhaul of the Official Languages Act.”

“If anybody has to ask is there a difference of opinion as to the kind of Canada that we want and the kind of Canada Mr. Harper wants, I think that this is an indication of what that’s all about,” pretended Paul Martin, pretending to be highly indignant. “I find it quite disappointing that Mr. Harper was unable to express himself on what I really do think is an essential foundation of the way in which we look at the country.”

I don’t care about official bilingualism one way or the other. In the great Niagara of waste and corruption cascading out of Ottawa, it’s a mere droplet. And, if a landlord has 15 male tenants and five female tenants and wants to declare his apartment house is therefore officially 100% hermaphrodite, where’s the harm? But, likewise, if Mr Reid wants to share a few thoughts on the subject, where’s the harm?

It’s “divisive,” says Paul Martin. Like Jack Layton bringing up the Clarity Act. That’s also “divisive”, says the Prime Minister. And Heaven forbid that competitive electoral politics should get divisive.

It’s not like that south of the border. Say what you like about America’s two-year election campaigns, but you can’t complain that the big issues don’t get an airing. On the biggest issue of all, of course, our election campaign has nothing to say: unlike the other great anglosphere democracies, we are irrelevant to the war on terror – and that inevitably makes our hustings the dull provincial bus-&-truck tour to their glittering Broadway production. On the great question of the age, we have chosen to be, as David Warren put it, “spectators in our own fate”.

But don’t you get the vague feeling that we’re “spectators in our own fate” on a whole bunch of non-war issues, too? If you read your morning paper this election season, there are two parallel universes. In the non-“divisive” political world, the permitted parameters of debate on most topics range from throwing more money at it (the Liberal position) to throwing lots more money at it (the NDP position) to admitting the very tentative possibility of a little bit of light tinkering (the Conservative position). In the real world, it’s frighteningly clear that none of these is remotely up to the scale of the problem.

Take health care, where political viability requires the Conservatives to try to avoid saying anything “divisive”. The other day, as I was reading about the Liberals’ exciting $9 billion “plan”, my eye fell on a small story in a side column at the foot of the page about two twin boys born at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton. That’s in Alberta. Their mother, Debrah Cornthwaite, had begun the day by going to her local maternity ward at Langley Memorial Hospital. That’s in British Columbia.

They told her, yes, your contractions are coming every four minutes, but sorry, we don’t have any beds. And, after they’d checked with “BC Bedline”, they brought her the further good news that there was not a hospital anywhere in the province in which she could deliver her babies. There followed seven hours of red tape. Then, late in the evening, she was driven to Abbotsford Airport and put on a chartered twin-prop to Edmonton, in the course of which flight the contractions increased to every two-and-a-half minutes.

Would you want to do that on your delivery day? They don’t teach it in Lamaze class. Instead of being grateful to the greatest health care system on the planet, Mrs Cornthwaite’s husband Brandon has been deplorably “divisive” and compared it to that of a Third World country. He has a point. There are circumstances in which citizens of developed nations occasionally find themselves having to be airlifted to hospital – if they live, say, deep in the Australian bush or the interior of Alaska. But the Cornthwaites are a stone’s throw from the province’s biggest city.

Sorry, no beds. Try the neighbouring jurisdiction.

With Canadian healthcare sliding toward its logical conclusion – a ten-month waiting list for the maternity ward – here’s a question to ask your Liberal chums: Do you seriously think your $9 billion “plan” will make two cents’ worth of difference? Anymore than did your $21 billion “plan” to save heath care back in 2000? And, whether it’s $9 billion or $21 billion or a hundred billion trillion gazillion, won’t most of it just get sucked up in the maw of bureaucracy? And the rest will go to miscellaneous expenses like chartering Cessnas for pregnant moms? (I’ll bet the Cornthwaites are glad those twin-props aren’t run by a government transit commission. Otherwise, there’d be a two-week waiting list for that, too.)

A Canadian health care system would have been less of a mess in the Middle Ages, when your basic cure for everything was to slap on the old leech. Though even then I’ll bet the papers would have been full of stories about a Langley couple going to ye olde King Ethelred the Unready Memorial Hospital and being told they were out of leeches until the next delivery in October. But today the problem with health care is that its costs grow faster than anything else in society. And an unaccountable government-run bureaucracy-heavy unionized monopoly is the least equipped model to control those costs. Indeed, it’s barely under any requirement to keep meaningful ledgers. In other words, the gap between the demands on the system and its ability to satisfy them will only widen, and widen, with every passing year. That’s not a partisan political observation, just a fact of life - as long as we cling to a 1960s system that, like Trudeaupian bilingualism, is apparently inviolable. In Montreal, for example, our right to receive medical services in the language of our choice has dwindled down to the right not to receive medical services in the language of our choice.

I wouldn’t mind if this banishing of the big issues was a temporary suspension for the duration of the election. But most of them will remain off-limits whoever forms the government. Certain aspects of the Trudeaupian state are like Frankenpierre’s monster – they’ve escaped the care of their nominal master and seem set to stagger about the landscape causing mayhem indefinitely. Indeed, the defining characteristic of Canadian public policy is the obstacles it erects to any kind of fresh thinking. The main reason for that is the Trudeaupian preference for identikit policies coast-to-coast, whether harmlessly fraudulent like bilingualism or more damagingly so like health care. And in a highly centralized body politic how do you get any new ideas into the bloodstream?

“Think Globally, Act Locally” is a favourite slogan of the left. Unfortunately, thanks to them, it’s all but impossible to act locally. I don’t expect a Conservative government to solve health care, but I do expect them to liberate the provinces in the hope that one or two might experiment a little creatively. If we have to fly over the mountains when the contractions are coming, it ought to be because they’ve got a great new system on the other side.

The Western Standard, June 14th 2004

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