....for the full posting, FRiend! :-)
A CONSTITUTIONAL COUP
When Cole Porter married Linda Lee Thomas, Walter Winchell wrote it up under the headline: "Boy With One Million Weds Girl With Two Million." Add a few zeroes and that pretty much sums up Canadian politics' latest whirlwind romance. The pictures on the front pages today capture the reality of our country: a “Liberal” billionaire and a “Conservative” billionaire beaming as they announce their deal to carry on wasting the money of Canadians who earn $30,000 a year - all in the interests of “national unity”. For, as Belinda Stronach said (and with a straight face!), “I feel that the interests of individuals or parties are being placed above the national interest. The country must come first.”
And for the country to come first the Liberal Party must come first, now and always. And happily the interest of this particular party coincides with the interest of this particular individual – and all in the national interest! After all, when you’re a government accused of widespread fraud, bribery and corruption, the easiest way to get off the hook is to offer someone a cabinet post in exchange for a little cooperation. Miss Stronach, the former future Mrs Peter MacKay, seemed unlikely to settle for life as the Ottawa version of the old Hollywood joke about the starlet so dumb she slept with the writer. She’s stopped sleeping with the writer and traded up to the studio chief, and a new gig as Minister for Human Resources and Skills Development. Who knew that’s all it would take? To quote Sir Thomas More from Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons : “Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales?”
But for Human Resources and Skills Development? Whoa, hold up. For her first political job, Miss Stronach won’t be just any old Minister of the Crown. For, as the Prime Minister announced (and also with a straight face!), Belinda “will assume responsibilities for democratic renewal and will help guide the implementation of the recommendations that flow from the Gomery Commission’s final report.” And did you notice somewhere in that characteristically sly formulation that his promise of a post-Gomery election now seems to be non-operative?
The Liberal government should be gone by now. Its series of defeats last week should have ended with an instant confidence vote. But it didn’t. Mr Martin, taking the view that possession is nine-tenths of the law, simply decided that centuries of constitutional precedent were as nothing weighed against “da Canadian values” and his indestructible sense of his own indispensability. So he refused to acknowledge that he’d lost the confidence of the House. Instead, he announced a confidence vote in, oh, a week or so’s time. In last Saturday’s Globe & Mail , William Christian, professor of political science at the University of Guelph, solemnly assured us that this wasn’t worth making a big deal about: “An extra week’s delay, whether it benefits the incumbent or not, does not justify the Crown’s intervention.”
How the folks drafting the Martin/Stronach deal must have roared at that one! My old comrade Andrew Coyne puts it very well in today’s National Post: “The bottom has fallen out of Canadian politics. There are, quite literally, no rules any more.” In the forthcoming Western Standard , I make the point that “the big flaw at the heart of the Westminster system is that in order to function as intended – by codes and conventions – it depends on a certain modesty and circumspection from the political class.” Perhaps it was always a long shot to expect a man as hollow as Paul Martin to understand that. When a fellow’s spent his entire adult life wanting to be Prime Minister without giving a single thought to what he wants to do in the job, it’s hardly likely he’d go quietly into the dignified losers’ club with Clark, Turner and Campbell. But the fact remains: by any understanding of our system of government, if the effect of “an extra week’s delay” is to maintain themselves in power by one vote they otherwise would not have had, it’s hard to see this as anything other than a constitutional coup. Like Robert Mugabe, Paul Martin has simply declared that the constitution is whatever he says it is.
Will he get away with it? What do you think? One of Paul Wells’ readers at Maclean’s , Jerry in Saskatchewan, e-mailed Inkless with his take:
She’s done a great service for Canada.
Harper only wants power, and if he destroys Canada, to bad!
Now smarten up, pass the budget, and let Paul Martin show us what he can do!
Ah, yes. It’s Harper who “only wants power”, not the guys who've had the power for over a decade. Roll out the other talking points! To attack Belinda is sexist! To attack Gagliano is racist! To attack Liberals is "extremist" and "angry", and we need to restore "civility" to our politics. I don’t know whether the power-crazed Harper will “destroy Canada”. I do know that the Martin regime is chipping away at it day by day, and Canadians who don’t take Jerry’s view have few good options. Unlike King/Byng or Sir John Kerr firing Gough Whitlam, what makes this a constitutional crisis is that there’s no crisis: Parliament votes, and Martin shrugs; Martin fiddles the math, and Canada shrugs. And the chaps at The Ottawa Citizen think the big question now is: “Is there room for moderate, urban conservatives in the new Conservative Party?”
Miss Stronach may be urban, but she was never conservative and there was nothing moderate about what she did yesterday. The Mulroneyite suckers who greased her path learned that the hard way. “The political crisis affecting Canada is too risky and dangerous for blind partisanship,” she declared, and of course the antidote to “blind partisanship” is one-party rule, now and forever. Belinda is certainly demonstrating her quick mastery of her new brief of “Skills Development”, Liberal-style.
Today our head of state lands in, appropriately, Regina. This is still, technically, “Her Majesty’s Government”. But it is not mine.
STEYNONLINE, May 18th 2005
Quintessentially Canadian. I feel sure this one establishes our candidacy for the EU. Only a matter of time before we house the UN, too.
Doesn't that sound just like something Chancellor Palpatine would say as he bends the senate to his evil will?
too canadian: I didn't understand most of the references.
Strong words.
And, coming from Steyn, I've no doubt they were well chosen...
BumpuuThanks for posting the whole a piece quickly.