PING!
Posted on 02/07/2007 5:20:47 AM PST by GMMAC
For Garth, it's always about Garth
Lorne Gunter, National Post
Published: Wednesday, February 07, 2007
There's no mystery about why Garth Turner, the ousted Tory MP, has joined the Liberals. He wants to remain an MP after the next election, pure and simple. And the Liberals offer him his best chance--his only chance--of being re-elected.
Mr. Turner will no doubt explain away his decision to join Stephane Dion's caucus as a tough choice, made after the most profound consideration of all the options, and only after wide consultation with his constituents. But that's because Mr. Turner -- a shameless self-promoter and limelight hog, who nevertheless fancies himself a humble servant of the common man -- casts all his decisions as agonizing moral quandaries.
"I was unsure whether to have the white or orange cheddar on my ham sandwich. However, after carefully contemplating all the options (havarti, Swiss, edam), and speaking with the working people of my riding, I made the choice to have Brick."
On his Web site, garth.ca, Mr. Turner boasts of providing "leadership through principle and independence." By joining the Liberals he is giving up both of those.
The Liberals perfected rigid party discipline. If Mr. Turner thinks the Grit caucus will be less constraining than the Tory one from which he was booted last fall, he has already forgotten what happened to Wajid Khan. Mr. Khan, the Mississauga- Streetsville, Ont. MP, refused to give up his independent stand on the Middle East. So last month, Mr. Dion bluntly told him either to follow the party line or leave. Mr. Khan left for the Tories.
As for matters of principle, there is not a single issue on which Mr. Turner agrees with Liberal doctrine, except perhaps the environment.
Mr. Turner has sounded like a Greenpeace activist since he began shopping himself around to interested opposition parties in January. (Last week, he charged the Conservatives are "selling out our environment to junk science and the oilsands.") Still, even on this issue, Mr. Turner is ideologically closer to Green Party Leader Elizabeth May than to the Liberals. In fact, he had been openly flirting with the idea of becoming her party's first sitting MP, even making a grand show of meeting with her in the foyer of the House of Commons this past Monday.
Still, in his suburban-rural riding of Halton, Ont., which takes in parts of Oakville, Burlington and Milton, west of Toronto, no Green candidate is ever going to be elected. And since the Conservatives wouldn't let the maverick MP seek renomination for them, that leaves the Liberals as Mr. Turner's only political lifeline.
Going Grit will be a huge stretch for him. To his credit, he has been the Commons' No. 1 champion of income-splitting for married couples. Not only do the Liberals oppose this move (which would save middle-class families $3,000 to $6,000 a year in income taxes), they banned it explicitly in their 1999 budget; and last fall they voted against a Conservative motion to permit seniors to income-split more of their pensions.
Mr. Turner has passionately defended the Tories GST cut, their elimination of the national daycare strategy in favour of child care payments directly to families, boosting the basic personal tax exemption to $10,000 a year, cuts to corporate tax rates, elimination of the corporate surtax and the rearming of our military, of which he said "hallelujah!" On all of these issues, he stands four-square against the Liberals. Crass, political self-interest is the only reason Mr. Turner signed up to join the Liberals -- no matter what the official line.
Lgunter@shaw.ca
© National Post 2007
PING!
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I think of him as Canada’s Lincoln Chafee.
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