Worth the Fee to Read It

One of the things to like about the Conservative Party of Canada is its broad, shallow, “retail” donor base. One of the things to dislike about the CPC is exactly that same means of raising prodigious sums of money. Before you call me schizophrenic, stay with me for a moment and see why it is both a blessing and a curse.

“Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” It’s not, of course, that money plays any different a role in politics than it plays in any other field of human endeavour. Athletes need money to be free of working for any purpose other than their training, and to be able to afford to compete at the levels required for world competitiveness. Non-profits, in doing their work, need the funds to carry out their missions. Policy influence study groups need to be funded so as to pay the costs of researching and publishing their papers. Entrepreneurs need investors so as to be able to handle the start up period, when costs far outrun revenues and the newborn business is nurtured to health and potential prosperity. In all these cases, how the money comes in matters.

Have just a few funders, each of whom writes a large cheque, and you have an oligarchy (even if its members do not know the others) that, by virtue of its financial support and the weight of worry if it were lost in the future, have a significant voice in the direction of affairs in the endeavour they are funding. Have thousands of small funders, on the other hand, and those voices are stilled: the loss of a few dollars is not something that keeps the leadership of an organisation up at night, but the potential loss of hundreds of thousands all at once can cause a ready loss not only of sleep, but rationality, with worry.

What’s to Like: I said in the beginning that the broad donor base of the CPC was something to like. If I’m a donor to anything — a subscriber to start-up capital, a charitable subvention, or a political campaign — I want to know that my money will be used for the things I expect it to be used for. A broad donor base helps ensure this: the party can reasonably conclude that the record of accomplishments and policy options for the future that it puts “on the table” are what is being subscribed to with the donations. As a result, there is little reason not to stay the course, as it is the ebbs and flows of funds in their thousands of droplets that gives an indication of what the “political market” wants, as opposed to just a few voices with the undertone of “be reasonable, do it my way … or else”.

It can — and has been, many times — be objected that this reduces political participation to “consumer” behaviour rather than the involved interactions of being a citizen. Does it surprise you that we act as consumers? For most people of voting age, their entire life has been spent barraged and assaulted by the presumption that they ought to be consumers. That this message should have been internalised ought not to be a surprise. Nor should, in such a world, we be surprised that a political party “gets it” — and treats their donors in precisely the right way to trigger the “consumer” response mechanism.

What’s Not to Like: Alas, every upside does come with a downside. The downside of mass political donation rather than élite accommodation (lubricated by funds) is that there is no easy mechanism to say “hold on, guys, you’re on the wrong track”. The power brokers of old, after all, were steeped in the on-going conversation (both via the media and directly over lunches, drinks and social encounters) of other influencers in the land. High names in one sphere of endeavour — a Jeffrey Simpson, say, in print media — have their calls taken by another high name in another sphere — a Paul Demerais, say. Influence could thus be brought to bear on political parties to adjust their policy vectors — in ways “appropriate” to the large influencers, of course, but there was a path to make this happen.

This is the pattern that operates the Liberal Party, and operated the historical Progressive Conservative Party. Our New Democrats are less so, even despite the long-standing “union connections”. Greens, the Bloc and Reform/CA, on the other hand, were and are all resolutely “grassroots” driven — and it is this strain that influences the CPC today.

”Grassroots” Is a Mixed Blessing: Alas, a permanent policy “conversation” does not occur within parties. It is considered by one and all to be a source of “off message diversions”. Today the Greens, in public, do the best job, with their many Green bloggers linked via their party website, but even there’s a lot of self-policing going on. As a result, the “grassroots” becomes a means of taking over an EDA (riding association) or forcing a candidate upon a riding by weight of temporary numbers — and a source of funds. That’s it, tout court.

EDAs, in turn, are focused on getting their candidate elected at the next opportunity. A free-ranging policy discussion unfolding over months would “tear the association apart” (in the words of one EDA president) or “lose our focus on getting [the candidate] elected” (in the words of another). Yet, without these links back to the party itself, the money comes without its voice. There is the illusion of participation, but not the reality of it. “Turn out your troops for the ground war, keep us flush with cash … and otherwise know your place.” This seems to be the anthesis to the thesis of élite accommodation.

The “Chrétien Revolution”: The closing days of the Chrétien government, as we know, changed election financing in this country to make the micro-funder supreme. This is, on the whole, a good thing (although its impact on leadership selection and other aspects of party management has yet to be fully figured out): more of us can decide, month by month, who to reward and who to punish with our dollars. (The parties, on the other hand, will be working to get the vast majority of Canadians to stick a crowbar in their wallets in the first place. As with any other “consumer” situation, the by-far-largest share of the market is held by “not interested in what you’re offering”.)

Now, as the Liberals try to ramp up their micro-donor base with their Victory Fund, and the Conservative Fund keeps on massing its monies, and the New Democrats turn in substantial-enough performances at the cashbox, the second half of this revolution must be undertaken. In this, the burden will be on the donor. Part of this comes by demanding that gag laws and other anti-democratic initiatives be put to rest: parties no longer need protection, nor an exclusive field. Issues, indeed, are far closer to the future of politics than parties in a stream of minority governments! — and far more likely to engage that growing body of Canadians who can, but won’t, take part. The other part is that we must engage with EDAs and other structures and bring democratic discussion to them.

These considerations apply regardless of party — and just as much to issue-oriented groups as to classic political venues. To only give money — and not to bring your voice into the fray, somewhere — is to essentially allow those in charge to do as they please. After all, these days, there isn’t the restraint traditionally offered by the élites.

It’s our money: our voice comes with it. Only then will the synthesis of the new power arrangements be complete.

“Surely you’re not saying that anyone should be able to use their fortune to buy so much advertising that they can force us to do what they want?”, said an interlocutor earlier this week, when I suggested that the public sector unions in BC were absolutely right to be fighting the Campbell Government’s gag laws on public expression in the half year leading up to the next provincial election.

Yes, I am. In fact, I’m insisting on it.

In this, of course, I find myself championing the same sort of freedom of expression once championed — no longer, apparently — by our Prime Minister in his days at the National Citizens’ Coalition. A free people need the ability to communicate their views to others. In this era of the Internet, where anyone can open a blog or build a web page and attempt to get people to view it by using Adwords or some other matching program, what election “communication restriction” regulations and laws do is essentially say “your stated and historic rights to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly (it is often illegal to even advertise a meeting on a political issue near an election), or freedom of the press (if I’m paying for the publication, such as in blogging, I “own” a press) aren’t worth the paper we wrote them on.”

Canadians may not have had a revolution and subsequent period of Constitution-writing to enshrine the principle that Government is the servant of the People and not the other way around as did the Americans, but from Magna Carta onward that is the thrust and summation of our own history. By calling, in the 1840s, for responsible government, Baldwin and LaFontaine set Canada on a course where we people would determine the form and content of our government, not accept what was given by “our betters”, the Crown or the Family Compact. By passing the Canadian Bill of Rights in 1960, then Prime Minister John Diefenbaker encoded this into Canadian law. Section 2 of the Charter further encoded these rights, by making them Constitutional Law rather than Statute Law.

Our bureaucratic masters and political betters — as they most assuredly do think of themselves (the 2006 election’s outburst by Scott Read, the infamous “beer and popcorn” dismissal of the individual Canadian’s ability to make a decision on their own, was bad politics, and no accident: it reflects perfectly this type of thinking) — of course point to Section 1 of the Charter and say “these are reasonable limits”. But are they?

Who is protected by limiting my ability to speak out on issues in the lead-up to an election? Fundamentally, it’s not even the politicians themselves who are protected: it is their parties and the campaigns they run. This is hardly in the class of a “reasonable limit” — unless you live in the courtier society where senior bureaucrats and senior party figures intermingle, and where campaign tactics are worked out. There, anything that disturbs the planned schedule of sound bites, photo ops and “messaging moments” and the smooth working of the spin machine needs to be pushed aside. Imagine, having to actually have an unplanned, unscheduled “reaction” to events! (As for the bureaucrats, the sine qua non of civil service life, born out of the mantra “never have the Minister have to answer a question about us in the House”, is that no information should be shared, no thinking aloud is tolerated, and nothing that hasn’t come through the policy development process, i.e. through approved channels or via a co-operative quango or think tank, should ever enter the public’s consciousness.)

Sorry. In the wonderful words given to the fictional and immoral British politician, Sir Francis Urquhart in Michael Dobbs’ series House of Cards—To Play the King—The Final Cut, “you might think that; I couldn’t possibly comment”. Your gag laws, of course, are designed to make that so: by force, you overblown champions of self-importance and confusers of personal, party and national interest will ensure that the second part of that statement is made true.

But it isn’t so: the onus is on those who would restrict our freedom of speech, of publication, of assembly to demonstrate the reasonableness of their limits prior to implementation, not by imposing the regulations and forcing us to — “when allowed” — fight them at our own expense (You worry about the monied buying up advertising? Have you priced the cost — in money, time and emotional toil, not to mention “collateral damage” to business interests and personal reputation — of spending years fighting the near-infinite resources of “the Government”? Few of us can afford it, no matter how many hours of pro bono legal help we receive!). Or, of course, defy them and engage in a Gandhi-like struggle with civil authority through deliberate civil disobedience.

I’ve no particular message I want to champion throughout the upcoming BC election period, or during the next Federal election period. But I am a blogger. However many or few readers my written thoughts might reach, entertain and influence, what both the regulations of Elections Canada and the new gag regulations in British Columbia say is that, for the relevant period, I must censor myself. I must avoid topics I might want to write about, that are “my right” on one day and “illegal” on the next.

(No doubt the next response to that little anomaly will be to further restrict what can be discussed all the time. There is already a chill that has settled in around aspects of public security — how many of us who fly from time to time on business are willing to risk arguing that the practices of CATSA or the US TSA are ineffective, idiotic, often at odds with our fundamental rights, etc. knowing that the “No Fly” list is arbitrarily established and changed and that the functionary who puts you on it, or who forbids you to travel, need not justify their decision. That is but one example of how restrictions multiply — and rapidly — to the point where people yield their rights and become the Servant to the Master.)

What’s interesting about this whole “gag” situation is that it will be absolutely all right to comment on events — “at yesterday’s bus tour stop in front of the closed plant in Ontario, So-and-So gave a speech that was completely off topic” will be acceptable comment — but not to discuss the issue brought up in that speech if it strays beyond reporting. Analysis, for instance, of a taxation proposal could veer over a line (set only after publication by a faceless bureaucrat, no doubt acting on a complaint from a party campaign official) and be deemed to be in the banned zone, being (in their bureaucratic estimation) “the equivalent of campaign advertising without being associated with a duly authorised campaign”. The expression “gag me with a spoon” is, alas, far too close to the truth here to be comfortable; the thinking, of course, is vintage 20th century Fascist or Marxist at the core (the two ends of the spectrum do nicely wrap together, differing only on details of how the people are to be disposed of for the benefit of the rulers of the state, but agreeing entirely on basic principles).

So, too, a philosophical examination of the purpose of government, the restrictions that should be placed on lawmakers, etc., could all be seen — easily, too: witness the legal battles of the aforementioned National Citizens’ Coalition — as “equivalent to campaigning”. These are all things I have published on here and on previous blogs I have had that are legal today, and illegal tomorrow, for no reason other than political comfort. Of course, actually writing — during the “blackout” period — something along the line of one of my prior pieces on why it may be more appropriate to spoil your ballot, or to formally abstain from voting, is already banned.

Notice, too, that in British Columbia it is the public sector unions who stand essentially alone in this fight. Politically, a fair distance along the spectrum of options from the National Citizens’ Coalition in its national fights on the subject, but in both cases organizations that feel silenced by these regulations to gag them. Note, too, that the one everyone fears — “big business” — is absolutely silent. Why not? Their access already exists. A wag once defined a “business politician” as “one who stays bought”. You don’t need to spend a cent on advertising your position if you’ve already sold your case — and your opponents are barred from speaking out against it. This, at the end of the day, is further evidence in favour of the notion that election gag laws are not about money at all, but about silencing those who would upset totally-planned campaigns.

After the US Constitutional Convention closed in 1787, Benjamin Franklin is reported to have said that the attendees had given Americans “a Republic, if you can keep it”. Peace, order and good government — our Canadian framing statement — likewise requires us to keep it: governments that gag us are not giving us good government. It’s up to us to keep it.

Bring down the gag laws. Refuse to be silent in the face of them. Refuse to bend your neck to those who would be your master. They serve you, not the other way around.

We are only the True North Strong and Free until we fail to Stand on Guard to make it so.

There are many in society who now hold to the idea that the world we have built is too complex to be “taken apart” and redesigned. They hold, as a result, that the best we can do is to make many small changes — small, so that if we make a poor choice, we can change away from it, and many, so that collectively these “add up” to redesigning the whole.

Add to this the concept that society can be perfected — or that the people in society can be perfected — and you get classical liberalism. Add to that the notion that experts know better than the common man or woman what needs to be done and how to do it, and you get modern liberalism, in its range of orientations from the socialist utopians through social democrats, through the power-and-influence band, to the social moulders and corporatists. In other words, today’s Republicans and Democrats in the USA, today’s Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in the UK, and today’s five parties in Canada…

Some of us disagree with the very notions of liberalism. As with Hippocrates, we begin with the principle “Above all, do no harm”: change should therefore be slow and careful (yet not wholly forestalled). Yet we stand with the people, believing them capable of understanding complex issues and making good choices about them if they are treated as competent adults rather than children to be babied by the nanny state mentality. Experts thus advise, they do not control. From the span of social order and justice (the original CCF) to the indigenous Canadian Tory, this span is currently but a fragment found (almost exclusively) in two of our parties. But it is there.

With that, let’s turn to the question of the purpose of government.

Those of us who are not liberal generally agree that the purpose of government is the provisioning of peace and order, and clarity around the rules of engagement — this is the element of justice expressed not as equality (the liberal idea) but as fairness (the same rules for all) — and the capitalisation of infrastructure needed but not yet a viable commercial investment. We may disagree on the span of items requiring infrastructure investment, and on the number of rules of engagement that may be required, but, unlike the liberals in our midst, we do not try to invoke change beyond these limits.

At the moment, for instance, it is necessary to rethink the fundamental piece of infrastructure that is our socio-economic model. This is based in (a) the uninterrupted flow of cheap energy (underlying the expectation of endless growth), (b) a disregard for locality of origin of products and services — communities, in other words, should not be encouraged to be sufficient unto themselves (globalisation), (c) a notion that despite obvious regional differences around a continental scale country one’s location should not matter (equalisation) and (d) a redistribution model for taxation expressed through the funding of many “programs” providing services (the nanny state model of extensive welfare provisioning). On these principles we have built sprawling suburbs with no attention to transportation infrastructure beyond roads, which are provided at a market discount relative to all other forms for people and goods movement, to take but one consequence.

When the environmentalists in our midst start to talk about global warming, carbon reduction, etc., it is the consequences of these fundamentals that they point to. Thus, whether we are dealing with the Gordon Campbell Government’s decision that British Columbia will have a carbon tax (to change usage patterns) and a carbon trading scheme, or the potential for their national equivalents being bruited about by various people supposedly in the know about Liberal Party policy plans, the solutions on offer are all designed to attack the consequences of the fundamental infrastructure of society that we have built.

How, for instance, retirement savings and provisioning is to be handled in a society that no longer grows at a rate sufficient to afford endless growth in nanny state activities is apparently left to the typical answer: “Oh, you’ll do it somehow”. Ayn Rand, in her novel Atlas Shrugged, showed how this was the underlying expectation of every initiative to throw sand in the gears to achieve “social purposes”. (What she failed to examine was the question of whether we needed a new fundamental infrastructure in the first place.)

Endless growth, you see, leads to endless demand. Only in a society which is fundamentally conceived of as as allowing initiative to flourish but which may not grow will our innovations overcome our limitations without setting off year-after-year redistribution of resources.

Take government paperwork. I spend, depending on the quarter, six to eight times the time and energy handling regulations and reporting requirements for my tiny company as I do on managing that company. That is utterly ridiculous: were I to have the money to retire today, I would shut the company’s doors immediately. Why contribute one more minute of my life to bureaucracy, practically none of which benefits me? Yet the real losers from that decision would be other productive people who today can engage me on solving their problems — and to whom I would be unavailable at any price. Stagnation would replace change. Multiply that attitude, and whole communities lose their spark and die to subsist on the dole of government programs, all of which suck more life out of them than initiative would do, and which demand more money and more bureaucratic “feeding” as time goes on. The weeds take over the garden and starve the plants of life.

That is what a carbon tax would do. Forget the rhetoric of “revenue neutrality”: how can it be? Who pays, and when, changes from today — the burden is shifted. Worse, it is shifted into places we have consciously and deliberately disadvantaged by limiting their options already — and there is, despite the speechifying of politicians and experts, no real set of choices for the automobile and truck dependent far-flung villages and towns, and suburbs, of the Canadian landscape. We at one time had alternatives which we systematically starved into extinction. They no longer exist. Nor — under our current laws — will they easily come back.

Meanwhile, since no existing taxes are outright discontinued — all proponents of the social engineering that is carbon taxation merely diddle rates rather than make it impossible to collect further taxes of other types — these will soon become revenue accretive (to pay for more programs demanded to “relieve the suffering” brought about by the destruction of value in motor-dependent communities by this tax). This isn’t just sand in the gears of the economy, as one writer has put it: these are a means to outright stop innovation that isn’t part of an “approved path”. “Grind to a stop, we will.”

You can kiss your savings for retirement good-bye, then.

Let’s stop diddling around the edges. The disease is liberalism and the infrastructure it built of an economic model requiring endless growth. To “do no harm” these days we must detox our society, so to speak: we must wean it from dependency back to self-sufficiency, and wipe out taxes and programmes left, right and centre rather than add to the pile.

The end of cheap energy will take care of most of the issues with carbon emission. Going beyond that into changing what we tax to influence behaviour must start with what we stop doing and stop demanding those of us who create economic results must do. Otherwise we will starve ourselves — and, two decades hence, see if that wasn’t a highly accurate statement of our impoverishment under the weight of a state we can’t afford without the endless growth model cheap energy provided — instead of free up the initiative space and resources needed to change our fundamentals.

Sometimes the Tory advances basic change with many follow-on effects to correct a path that has gone fundamentally wrong. This is one of those times. For without such a diagnosis, this patient won’t make it.

First, detox the junkie (don’t give him or her a place to shoot the drugs into their body “under supervision”). All three Insite studies show that that medical principle holds despite the promotion of “harm mitigation”. So, too, we must detox the junkie that is the body public, whose answer to all questions is “what’s the Government doing?”

Don’t expect me to support you, Mr. Campbell, in next year’s election, unless you get cracking on what should have come with your carbon tax. As for M. Dion, I’d expect you to get the picture, too — except you’ve spent your entire working life with your lips firmly coupled to the public teat. Take your carbon tax proposal and go away.

I have taken a few days off to watch the latest tempest in a teacup bring itself to a boil. That, of course, would be the swirl of controversy surrounding Maxime Bérnier, our Foreign Affairs Minister.

Gentlemen and ladies, of course, do not gossip about the private lives of others. I have nothing to say about M. Bérnier’s choice of former girl-friend. That, of course, is what ought to have been the norm.

But there is little to no danger of finding gentlemen and ladies of principle on the Opposition benches, or in the trenches of the MSM, in Canada, in 2008. To quote the last election’s Liberal tagline, “Choose your Canada”. They have — and a rather sickly and unappetising place it is, indeed, filled with cynicism from the Office of the Leader of the Official Opposition to the lowliest of hangers-on in the blogosphere (a certain group of people writing under the brand of “Canadian Cynic” comes immediately to mind).

Here’s the funny thing. At the moment, I’m not happy with the state of our nation’s Government. I’d be hard pressed to vote for its return at this juncture: I dislike the very notion of “the best out of a bad lot”. That, unfortunately, is what the Harper Government has become. It’s not enough reason to support it.

On the other hand, the behaviour of the Opposition since last fall has absolutely destroyed any chance at all that I would support the Liberals in the next election. This is not a matter of the leader of that party at all. All Liberals wear the badge of shame they themselves have earned by threatening elections and then abstaining on votes, up to and probably including today’s NDP non-confidence motion (the last Opposition-led one before the House rises for the summer session). Meanwhile the Nation’s business, which could have been discussing matters of substance, has been hijacked for a steady diet of innuendo, slime, reputation-destroying perilously close to either libel or slander most of the time: in other words, a complete and utter failure to attend to their purpose in being MPs. “A Government in Waiting”? That is what an Opposition is supposed to be.

These Liberal MPs — along with their cousins dans la dépravation in the Bloc — are anything but. I am utterly and completely ashamed that my own riding’s MP, the now dishonourable Joyce Murray, has done nothing since scratching out her by-election win in March, but add to the chorus of braying asses.

A strange day, indeed, when one looks to see Parliamentarians and finds them in the New Democrat benches, but there you are.

I do not excuse the Conservatives. Almost every Canadian with a Conservative MP has been as ill-served as those with a Liberal MP. Where are the matters of substance from the Government benches? Oh, yes … message controlled out of existence.

I look at the Harper Government’s record and am generally in favour of it. (I neither expect perfection — my views are just one amongst many and the Governing party is a big tent with many strains of political opinion — nor demand it. Show me a party closer to my views and I’ll give it a good hard look. Until then, I’m satisfied with the one that comes closest, most of the time.)

I look at the behaviour of the Government and consider them little better than Liberals, when it comes to being quality MPs. Committee chairs who undo meetings, repetition of the same point day after day instead of a quiet “that has already been asked and answered, Mr. Speaker” — for heaven’s sake, you can defend your position without descending to their vitriolic and bombastic level! — local voices stilled.

The Prime Minister’s Cabinet might well have been filled in 2006 with Ministers who lacked experience in Government — by 2008 they ought to be competent. Centralisation in the PMO has ensured they are not. Failing to build a viable bench of both party and policy leadership is a severe failing of this Prime Minister.

Yet the indignation continues, on both sides. It is strongly rumoured, for instance, that Stéphane Dion will make a carbon tax similar in intent to the Gordon Campbell carbon tax in BC a lynch-pin of his policy platform. (I shall save, for another day, my views on the whole carbon tax issue.) Nevertheless the attack guns are trained on this, with hyperbolic (and thus unbelievable claims) even before the policy statement is made.

This simply destroys Conservative credibility — what little was left, that is, after a do-nothing record laid down by Baird even on matters championed by this Government itself — even further. There are good reasons to question a carbon tax as a vehicle in a northern climate, especially one with a surfeit of geography to be traversed, and an urban planning model best described as “let’s sprawl, baby, ’cause energy will be cheap forever!”. When Garth Turner, for instance, realises that the problem with the housing bubble in his riding of Halton is as much driven by Halton’s need to drive everywhere — and thus house prices in Halton will collapse as energy costs rise, carbon tax or not — and that there is little to be done other than recognise the malinvestment and to salvage what can be salvaged from it, instead of crying out for “relief” on his blog, we’ll actually see some reality enter the situation.

But no, there are points to be made, and that takes precedence over sound policy, honest debate about contentious approaches, respect for the other party even in disagreement — all required elements to approach the truth of hard matters and gain a consensus that supports the course of action taken.

There was a time, not long ago, when the House would be raucous, and then members would cross over the lines to meet up and head off for a drink and dinner together. They were Parliamentarians first, and partisans second.

There was a time, not long ago, when policies were debated and a national consensus allowed to build. The citizens were respected first and not treated (are you listening, purveyors of Victory Funds and “oh, we’re under threat” letters such as Dr. Gerstein’s) as simply cash cows to be milked and X-markers once in a while.

The modern Conservative Party has given up on speaking to the electorate as adults. Paradoxically, it is the NDP and Green parties that hold onto a small vestige of that. (The Liberals, of course, adopted a permanent sneer toward the House and the citizens with Trudeau, never to lose it again.) Now we have — as I have oftimes said — two Liberal parties, for neo-cons are simply neo-liberals in disguise.

The indignation in the House and in the news is manufactured. The indignation of the electorate, on the other hand, will be real. It is as yet small. It threatens an earthquake if you keep going this way.

Whether that earthquake tears this Dominion apart, in a righteous anger at the very idea of Ottawa, or whether it simply leads to the sudden promotion, to Government, of one of the perennial also-rans, remains to be seen.

“An election if necessary, but not necessarily an election” seems to be off the table. St-Stéphane, le Dauphin Dion, has apparently reached a decision: Liberal MPs are to spend the summer communicating new Liberal policies (to be revealed shortly) to the electorate and then the fall session will “be allowed to begin”.

It is not my place today to throw wood and camp stove fuel, along with a lighted match, on the fire of controversy about the various Conservative bills and Liberal Puffery placed against them that occasionally manages to leak out around the edges of the drool and theatre surrounding Liberal indignation over “In-and-Out” and the rebuttals thereunto that pass for the nation’s business these days. Talk radio, at least here in Vancouver, is ignoring the whole sordid mess of Ottawa: none of it matters. This echoes what I was highlighting last month during the lead-up to the Vancouver-Quadra by-election: the irrelevance of the whole Ottawa thrust and counter-thrust. My guess (and, to be fair, my hope) is that when Stéphane’s Liberal MPs — the underwhelming Don Bell in North Vancouver, the indescribable Dr. Hedy Fry in Vancouver-Centre, the party-switching Ujjal Dosanjh in Vancouver-South, the lunch-bag-let-down Joyce Murray in Vancouver-Quadra, the seldom-seen Raymond Chan in Richmond and the generally-forgettable Sukh Dhaliwal in Newton-North Delta — come to hit the hustings in what on all the available history and evidence ought to be fertile ground for their party they discover that not one — not a single one — of the “policy issues” they want to talk about get any traction, or, indeed, any interest, other than the local party ground troops from the EDAs there to clap on command.

I’m not being hard, by the way, on the Liberals — the NDP MPs and the Conservative MPs are just as likely to meet quiet indifference to their presence in their ridings, and to require equal levels of support from their EDA members out to make it look good — because, frankly, if the Lower Mainland of BC is anything to go by there’s little going on in Ottawa that’s seen as mattering to people here, and even less that anyone here can do to influence what goes on in Ottawa. (Do you suppose there’s a correlation between BC’s “worst compliance record in Canada” with the Canada Revenue Agency and that sense that that happens over the mountains, across the Prairies, and through the endless lakes and forests that lie between here and the Nation’s Capital really happens on another planet?)

The Liberals, for instance, are likely to be here selling Dion’s much-anticipated Carbon Tax. BC residents, of course, will — oh, frabjous joy for Dominion Day! — be paying the BC Liberal Government’s carbon tax come July. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, 2.4¢/litre doesn’t sound like much, and as a percentage of the typical current pump price for 87 octane of $1.31.7/litre perhaps it’s not. But it’s the principle: Excise Tax, Deficit Reduction Tax (for a deficit long gone), GST & GST on the taxes!, Translink Tax … the list is long and here’s another one. The hub of cross-border shopping in Canada is across the Peace Arch/Douglas Point crossing, followed very shortly by a stop at a Washington State filling station, where, at US$3.60/US gallon, the price is still only 96.4/litre in Canadian funds. Selling yet another tax won’t be easy. Selling reversal of the GST cut — every trip to Bellingham is 2% cheaper now when you declare your purchases on a day trip — won’t go far, either.

The Liberals will be pitching their wares against the latest Statistics Canada data, which shows that BC has benefitted the least — wages up a paltry 0.7% over 2001-2006 (and how much is the cost of living up?) with increased bifurcation of the incomes of British Columbians out of the middle class and into the small but increasing-like-mad incomes of the “rich” and the growing numbers of the poor. They’ll be selling against a party with the same name, and many of the same well-known “names” involved, that gave the Premier a 54% pay increase, Cabinet Ministers a 39% increase, established independent “Boards” for BC Ferries and Translink that voted themselves massive (40-60%) increases while raising fares, and which has recently funded playground equipment at well-heeled private schools like St. George’s without a penny going to any school on the East Side of Vancouver, all because St. George’s could write the matching funds cheque and despite all the hard work of the parents and community around the East Side schools they couldn’t raise the sums required in the time available. Blatant mis-steps like these await the Liberal MPs.

It’s not even a matter of being tarred with the same brush because of the similarity of name: it’s that they’re coming back with a “Government Knows Best” approach when a spring of similar arrogance has been laid down by the Province. We get to deal with our MLAs next spring; we get to deal with these MPs now. Expect — just as in talk radio — the average citizen not to give any care as to which level of government did, or proposes, what: you’re here, I’m ticked, you must be responsible.

That lack of knowledge of where and whom to actually target, of course, is yet another indication of the disconnect involved. (The inevitable “that’s not us, that’s them” en riposte, of course, solidifies the inclination to ignore the lot of them.)

As with Chicken Little (or Professeur Puffin) the running about shouting le ciel tombe day after day has now led to the point where tune-out is complete. Vote, don’t vote; topple, don’t topple; threaten, don’t threaten; it’s all just noise now. If Ontarians, for instance, have expressed more favour for the Liberals since In-and-Out that can just as much be because Ontario’s Provincial Government is Liberal, and fighting Ottawa’s Conservatives as it might be for In-and-Out. In other places the shift is not happening, or not profound: evidence of disregard or a belief that, yes, they all do it.

What this means is that when the next election does finally come it will be fought, not on accusations of sleaze (much though a Kinsella-inspired Liberal War Room might salivate at the thought) but on policy. Chatter about global warming has died down and mostly gone away, in the face of tougher economic times (jumping food and fuel prices, slowing pay, increasing taxes and fees, fewer opportunities, knowing people who are now laid off) and a winter spent literally chattering as La Niña worked its oscillatory magic on our weather. No doubt the warming goes on, but it is not the issue it was. Feeding the family, dealing with the member in distress, wondering how to close the gap between income and every two-bit oligolopolist and agency head who thinks they’re the only one shovelling a double-digit increase at you: that’s what matters.

A bevy of MPs who have spent this year sitting on their hands or ducking for cover when the division occurs — we might call it a sit-in, except the last place they wanted to sit was in the House — will come to face a population likewise on sit-down strike. Or most of them at any rate: there will be those who shift their agitation (such as with immigrant community leaders) from the Conservatives for “changing the rules” to the Liberals for “not stopping this” (as has been threatened). For the rest of us, though, we’ll get to yell at any politician who shows their face.

It shall all be a fire storm of sound and fury — signifying nothing.