Posted on 04/30/2005 4:43:49 PM PDT by GMMAC
Our disastrous prime minister
Andrew Coyne
National Post
Saturday, April 30, 2005
I think we have misjudged the Prime Minister. I think we were too hasty in our assessment. We had, to be sure, already revised our earlier image of him as a firm and decisive leader, an impression forged on the strength of his successful campaign to eliminate the deficit, a campaign in which he faced no serious opposition.
But we were too quick to settle upon a new image of him: as an indecisive bumbler, well-meaning but ineffectual, a genial policy wonk who was incapable of setting priorities, long on high ideals and short on low cunning, all talk and no action. When, in one set of negotiations after another, he won agreement only by yielding to every one of his adversaries' demands, we said it was because he was too weak. His harshest critics damned him as a ditherer; others, gentler, said he was just too darned nice for politics. Some of us said this as late as last week.
I think we can set all that aside now. I think we were far too kind. After the events of the past week, after the past year, there is no longer any room for such illusions. The current prime minister of Canada, we have to conclude, is very much like the last. He is not a ditherer, but a ruthless man of action; not an earnest incompetent, but an unprincipled demagogue; not a high-minded patrician, but a snarling partisan; not a man of ideas, but a collector of them.
That the result looks like waffling and weakness should not mislead us. For that is to concede that he cares -- that it matters to him a whit whether the Canada Health Act is enforced or not, whether the federal budget adds up or not, whether he keeps his word, whether his word ever meant anything to begin with. A weak man regrets his weakness, bemoans his failures. A waffler is tormented by the choices he must make. Even a liar is at least aware of his contradictions. The Prime Minister, I am convinced, is unconscious of them. Truth, consistency, coherence, it just doesn't matter to him.
We had too many inklings of this during last year's election campaign. The man who was famously cool to Kyoto now campaigned on it; who favoured Canadian involvement in Iraq now denounced it; who brought in tax cuts now rejected them; who himself used a private clinic now posed as their exterminator. Having promised to repair relations with the Americans and redress western alienation, his campaign consisted in equal parts of crude anti-Americanism and crude anti-Albertanism.
The election safely over, we saw how sincere were his promises to end the "democratic deficit," whether the subject was free votes in the Commons, Parliamentary ratification of senior appointments, or an end to cronyism as we know it. The commitment to "get to the bottom" of the sponsorship scandal disappeared in a puff of barracked committee hearings, phony audits and "Dear Claude" letters.
The "health care fix for a generation" devolved into a $41-billion giveaway that entailed no obligations on the provinces in return, and even fewer on Quebec. Indeed, with the sudden commitment to "asymmetric federalism," it ensured the existing provisions of the Canada Health Act would become a dead letter: There is no prospect of their being enforced in Alberta while they are so widely flouted in Quebec.
The equalization program was subsequently emptied of any meaning, with billions more for every province guaranteed regardless of need, and billions more on top of that for Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, regardless even of eligibility. By the time the February budget rolled around, we were informed that the budget the government campaigned on eight months before was now obsolete: Spending had run $10-billion over what was promised.
Sorry: Did I say $10-billion? That's old news. In the two months since then, we have been told that the Kyoto plan that was to have cost $5-billion would in fact cost twice that amount. But that was at least hinted at by the budget's unsettling vagueness on the subject. How could we have known that the budget itself would be discarded in the course of a single night, rewritten at a clandestine meeting in a Toronto hotel room, with Jack Layton giving dictation and Buzz Hargrove barking ultimatums down the phone?
The corporate tax cuts that were an inviolable part of the budget as late as last Monday had disappeared on Tuesday -- only to be revived on Wednesday. (Too bad, Jack: Now you know how Bono felt.) The spending discipline that was promised in February was stuffed in a $4.6-billion envelope and passed to the NDP: $250-million per member, a sponsorship program for each soul. For now, at least: Mr. Layton promises to stay bought only until the budget passes, after which we may safely presume he will be back for more. And if we leave his government in place until then, who can doubt Mr. Martin will pay it?
So I think we have to revise our views of the Prime Minister. His time in office has not been a disappointment. It's been a disaster.
© National Post 2005
Andrew Coyne has distinguished himself as one of Canada's most prominent voices on political and economic issues. Since 1996, he has been a nationally syndicated columnist for Southam Newspapers and has contributed to many of Canada's top publications including Saturday Night magazine, Time, and Cité Libre. His writing has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal and The National Review. Coyne's column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
PING!
Eyup.
We are a third world Kleptocracy. Nothng more.
This obscenely corrupt Martin Liberal Government should be put down like a diseased animal.
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