Posted on 01/03/2006 10:27:23 AM PST by NorthOf45
Does a dark bird croak 'Nevermore' in Liberal ears?
Globe and Mail
By Rex Murphy
December 31, 2005
The campaign gods are not smiling on the Liberals.
The week of the Christmas break may turn out to be, for the Martin team, the bleakest week of the entire campaign.
The day after Christmas was marked by the astonishing and outrageous spectacle of pure mayhem in broad daylight on Toronto's Yonge Street. Six people were injured, and one sweet young 15-year-old, in the company of her sister, was killed, as they went innocently about doing nothing more provocative than a little Boxing Day shopping.
It was the climax of a grisly and anguished year in Toronto. The thugs have made their mark here in 2005.
In the summer, a 4-year-old was hit in the foot, shin and buttocks by stray bullets. People have been shot on city buses; a young man was murdered on the church steps at his friend's funeral. It would be nice -- and, what is more, it would be decent, too -- if the families and friends of those who have been personally caught up in these urban atrocities could be left to mourn in peace, and if their personal tragedies could be left out of the swirl of an election campaign.
But it can't be so. If normal law-abiding people can't venture downtown in Canada's largest city the day after Christmas to buy a couple of discounted CDs or just to take in the crowds on Yonge Street during the semi-festival of Boxing Day without the risk of mayhem, then it is a very public issue. And when that mayhem takes on a face, as it so emphatically has, with the killing of a 15-year-old girl who was crossing the street, public outrage will naturally crescendo, and the politicians must, however awkwardly, respond.
In that light, the Liberals' recent announcement of a ban on all handguns will be seen as a meaningless reflex. Shooting on public streets is already illegal. Conducting revenge murders outside of shopping centres is too. Shooting into crowds because someone has "disrespected" you very likely has provisions in the Criminal Code that already frown on that behaviour. The Liberal ban will be seen as pure "gesture" politics, all of a piece with the bloated gun registry -- which was another piece of gesture politics, another "caring" policy that nodded toward an issue but did nothing to either prevent crime or aid in its solution.
Toronto and the areas immediately outside it will, in large measure, determine whether Paul Martin can hang on to his minority. That outcome has become more parlous since Boxing Day.
Politically, however, the bigger storm is the announcement by the Mounties that they are to investigate a possible leak of Finance Minister Ralph Goodale's Nov. 23 financial statement on corporate dividends and income trusts.
The RCMP spokesman was very careful to insist that the force had as yet "no evidence of wrongdoing" and made particular mention that there was no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Goodale himself. But, at the very middle of an election campaign, it is never good news to be mentioned by the RCMP in any capacity. And it is emphatically not good news for the Liberal Party, near to mortally wounded by one scandal, that there is now an investigation into a second.
The sponsorship scandal may, as a political fact, have been exhausted by two years of media coverage, and the deliberations and report by Mr. Justice John Gomery. There were only so many times the Conservatives, and the other opposition parties, could go to that well.
The RCMP announcement, however, changes that dynamic. There are calls for the minister's resignation, and those calls will continue for the life of the campaign. But most damaging from an electoral prospect is that these events license the opposition parties to reintroduce the theme of scandal into the campaign.
So far, Stephen Harper and his Conservatives have avoided the trap of appearing fixated on the Liberals' faults. Mr. Harper, with his "issue a day" appearances, has wisely strayed from the proposition that the only good reason to vote Conservative is that people really shouldn't vote Liberal after sponsorship. One party's defects should never be the sum of another party's virtues.
That's changed now. The news of the investigation returns the theme of scandal to the evening news and the morning headlines. These two stories represent a mortal challenge to the Liberal campaign.
For the Liberals to keep their campaign alive will require all the resources of their fabled backroom, and all the wit of their increasingly blunder-prone advisers and consultants. The next debates are now cardinal. The Prime Minister must show more energy, decisiveness and command, by far, than he has shown up to now.
"Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December . . ." The brooding opening from Poe's The Raven may turn out to be curiously apt, when some future scribbler inscribes the Liberals' fortunes in The Christmas Campaign of 2005.
Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.
Rex Murphy ping
A question about the Boxing Day shooting..I've followed the many stories about this on FR, though not line for lne, but I don't believe I've read anything about twho the suspected thugs are. Usually, in NYC for example...whenever we have a similar type event, we usually have within ahours a pretty good idea of who the perps were. Why the difference?
Canada Ping!
Please FReepmail me to get on or off this Canada ping list.
The identities are not being discussed in the press because it is not PC to reveal that the third world immigrants who make up these gangs are committing more than their share of crimes.
Similarly, it wasn't for months that we learned that the synagogue bombers in Montreal were Muslim. In each case the group identity of the perpetrators has been obvious to all but the willfully blind, deaf and dumb.
So why are the identities (and especially the ethnicity) of the perps willfully kept quiet?
Canadian media go to excruciating lengths to keep from portaying any minority in an unfavorable light, no matter how heinous the crime. Just as in the days of the Soviet Union, you have to learn to read between the lines.
Here's how to interpret the TV news:
-ccm
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