Worth the Fee to Read It

Green Shift, Green Shaft, Red Shift: there are as many names emerging as there are writers. The vitriol is rising: those who don’t offer carte blanche sign-on to the notion of adding a carbon taxation element to the tax scheme (regardless of whether the new tax is “revenue neutral” or not) are climate change deniers, antediluvian cretins and a whole series of other epithetical labels. It’s enough to make one want to climb under the comforter, pull it up and block the world out — except, of course, for the nonce it’s far too hot for that, being summer and all.

So, let’s look at why neither the BC carbon scheme that settles its hooks into my meagre income tomorrow morning nor the Stéphane Dion “we must do this or the world will end” Green Shift promised as policy should the Canadian people be conned into electing a Liberal Government the next time around is deserving of support.

Frankly, both schemes are hung on several petards where these political “leaders” could hoist themselves, thence to flap in the breeze, for neither BC nor the Federal Liberals offer a true programme aimed at the environment (despite the mounds of lying statistics, promised carbon savings, threats and jeremiads unleashed by their hangers on in the corporatist “environmental axis” of academe, foundations and pressure groups). For neither is dealing in reality.

That this sort of idiocy continues to dominate the pages and airwaves of the pabulum-pushing media, of course, is due to the equally inept and ridiculous approach the Harper Government, the BC NDP, etc. are taking to the issue. They’re not dealing in reality, either. In a clash of “ideas” (hah!) between these forces it is Canadians that are the losers.

Reality: Suburbia is a Dead Duck: The notion of a car-centred plot of land with a McMansion on it that requires two parents to be pressed into permanent roles as drivers, to get to work, to get the groceries, to ferry the children everywhere, has run its course. Those who live there, for the most part, are stuck there. House prices will crash decline rapidly to reflect the cost of filling the tank and operating the vehicles. This will be accentuated by the collapse of credit, which is already unfolding around us (and is a correlate to the loss of growth potential as cheap energy fades from the scene, coupled with the blow-off strategies that have ruined balance sheets all through the 1990s and 2000s to date).

Reality: Oil Production is Already in Decline: New finds? Practically none for fifteen years now; what’s been found is extremely expensive to recover, and a small field (by comparison) to boot. World production for the last two years has not exceeded 84 million barrels/day (Mbbl/d), down from its peak of 85.7 Mbbl/d in 2005, despite many new wells, extensive growth in non-traditional oil recovery, etc. Cantarell (formerly the world’s third largest field) is collapsing at over 15% per year; Ghawar (the world’s largest) likewise. Meanwhile world demand is well over 87 Mbbl/d. While there will be price ups-and-downs (as there are with any commodity) the trend is up — and up on an accelerating curve.

What’s more important is that no oil will be saved through carbon taxation. With demand greater than supply, savings in Canada translate into product available for immediate purchase and use elsewhere. In other words, it’s not as though we would be acting to either reduce emissions or save oil for future years, when it will be even harder to come by. (Canada has less than 10 years left of conventional light crude and natural gas. The United States has less than four. Mexico has less than five.) No, it will just be burnt and add to that devil of the twenty-first century, global warming, elsewhere. A true reduction is worth some disruption; taxing ourselves to death to allow the Chinese, the Indians, etc. to drive themselves (and us) to the breaking point of civilisation as we know it just as rapidly makes no sense at all. (Note that Stephen Harper’s objections to Kyoto have centred, in good measure, on its exclusion of these countries: apparently “blue” is greener than “red”, “orange”, “teal” or “green” itself, not that any of that army of environmental “experts” nor zeitgeist-setting tub-thumpers like Lawrence Martin, Jeffrey Simpson, Carol Goar, etc. will acknowledge it.)

Reality: Trucking is for the “last mile”, not for distance: So shipping goods by truck, if fuel will be hard to come by, is a pretty dumb idea, right? Not according to the BC Government, nor the Green Shift. BC wants to build new perimeter roads, new bridges, etc., all to make shipping by truck even easier. Billions to be spent — ahead of the investments in alternative transport, either as public transit, interurban rail or heavy rail infrastructure for commerce (and nothing for water-borne transport) — to make it possible to build ever more suburbs on the country’s prime agricultural land. Stunned? You bet! Meanwhile the Dion Green Shaft makes Western Canadians and Atlantic Canadians pay so that the same sprawl lifestyle in Ontario and Québec can be maintained and extended. (Sprawl in the West and in the East isn’t sustainable either, of course, but sucking the productive parts of the country dry to keep the unproductive parts — such as Dalton McGuinty’s “same old transfer mind-set” province — carrying on just as before ends up reducing us all to penury (and makes the inevitable changes we must make that much harder for the waste of the resources we have today).

But, hey, it’s about votes, right? Not about the environment, not about changing us to live in the real twenty-first century: it’s all about just getting elected (or in Campbell’s case in BC, re-elected yet again). À l’enfer avec vous politiciens libéraux perfides — especially those who have the knowledge to know better, like Garth Turner. Comment about Garth Turner removed.

Reality: We need a better infrastructure: We need a massive investment in rail, and an electrification of many of the lines. We need to restore the interurban (lighter rail, regional services) systems we once had and ripped up to accommodate the automobile. We need electrically-run public transit: trolley buses or streetcars or light rail trams. We need the nuclear and hydro plants to power these — or a minimal number of carbon sequestration coal plants. We need to restore water-borne transport systems, using our rivers and canals. We need local agriculture. We need local manufacturing (no more McCrap from China at the “Great Wall” Mart). We need to restore communities of human scale. There is a long list of jobs, in other words, and it will be expensive.

This is what a real environmental programme would look like. Note that none of this depends on changing the behaviour of any other nation: just our own. We (barely) have the time and resources to do this now, but we (unlike our southern neighbours) can do it — our cracking of deficit financing last decade by first Chrétien and then provincial premiers, building on the removal of operating deficits under the Mulroney years, has given the country the fiscal capacity needed.

Separately, once in a generation you can uproot and restructure the tax system in a big way. If there is a complaint I have about the BC carbon tax regime and the proposed Green Shift it is that it misses that opportunity. Wipe out income tax entirely and replace it with consumption taxation (carbon and/or value added tax). Wipe out all other taxes (excise, gasoline, etc.) and just have a pump-based carbon tax. This was a time for big opportunities. Unfortunately, what we’re getting are the ideas of little men afraid of their shadows.

The Conservatives have yet to be heard from: It is time for the Conservatives to stop whingeing, fear-mongering and lashing out. Will they provide what no other party has (or probably can): a set of policy proposals that actually deal in the reality we are experiencing and that will unfold over the next few years? Or will they, too, miss the chance by playing it safe?

The time for a real leader is now.

It has been a long time between blog posts: a period in my life where my periodic depression once again got the better of me. Perhaps, however, this is a good thing: it has allowed the past few weeks, with the whole Bernier-Couillard nonsense, yet another abdication of responsibility in the voting on the final bills before the House this spring, and now the introduction of the Green Shift by the Liberals to pass without comment.

For none of them really required it, although all have received reams of commentary, and, indeed, when it comes to the Green Shift, I will enter the fray myself.

So, let’s begin at the beginning. Is the Green Shift necessary?

A societal change certainly is. It takes a particular kind of fool not to notice that, however measured, world oil production (supply) and world oil consumption (demand) teeter at a balancing point. Some believe that we have passed the point and are demanding more than the available supply, thus forcing weaker hands away from the purchasing table already. Others believe there is capacity waiting in the wings — that the Saudis can turn up the valves; that Iraq can be brought on stream quickly; etc. It’s important to note that oil isn’t a single commodity: sludge-filled oils such as Venezuela’s, the tar sands, or even what the Saudis put on the table last week require different kinds of refineries and more expense in converting them into useful products. A refinery meant for light sweet crude isn’t even given these feedstocks. Certainly the production balance is shifting to the residual sludge rather than the high quality, easy to refine product: a permanent shift, indeed, given what we know about residual deposits.

As the price rises, individual decision are made. Gas guzzlers are no longer used for daily driving; econoboxes are, instead. Or, where available and practical, transit becomes a daily option. Food choices change; so do vacation choices. In effect, the price mechanism alone is sufficient; it need not be “goosed into action” by governments.

Still, of course, there are still all those emissions. I have always supported the notion that air and water “consumption” needs to have a price: it is how pollution of the common asset is reduced (perhaps, with the appropriate incentives, nearly eliminated). Similarly, such prices — rather than treating our environment as a free good — act to create “market space” for new experiments in fuel production — something better than “food for ethanol”, which makes no sense either on a energy budget (energy in to energy potential created) or a food supply basis, one would hope. In other words, there is a reason to consider certain price mechanisms at work (and for the common assets these will probably take the form of taxes or regulations), whether one believes in the global warming theory as advanced by its supporters or not.

At this point, it becomes appropriate to ask what kind of strategy might make the most sense.

On this file the Conservative Government has been lamentably silent. Their original environmental focus on pollution was applaudable, but not followed up and that follow up communicated for understanding and acceptance. Oily the splotch and “screwing all Canadians” make for free media coverage but do nothing to advance an agenda. Here the Government is deficient; end of subject. (One could charitably hold, based on other actions, that the real position is that different provinces or regions will form their own styles of solution, suited to their own needs, in this regard, and certainly I do not think it makes sense to have both provincial and federal rules, regulations and taxes in this area, but the Prime Minister has not said this in so many words, either.)

Then there is the NDP approach, centred on cap-and-trade. Effectively, cap-and-trade systems propose to regulate the size of the market created by assigning a price to a “pollutant” — and then allow that market to arbitrate the price mechanism. (If you ever needed evidence that this issue does not turn on the old “left”/”right” categories used in the media still, this is a powerful inducement to change your mind.) The nice part of cap-and-trade is that the decision can be made in a rational fashion: to continue without a reinvestment to reduce emissions, you must ensure you have the capacity — which means paying for what was once free to you, and damaged goods to everyone. Or, you can reinvest, reduce your emissions, and benefit by the capacity you don’t have to purchase. (As an example at a personal level — and the proposed system is not a consumer-level system — for average driving distances each year, it takes more than five years to “pay for” the benefits of a hybrid vehicle in reduced fuel consumption (and emissions). If you drive less than the average, you might buy emission credits; if you drive more, the investment in the hybrid makes economic sense (since the emission credits required are reduced from the time of purchase and thus offset the higher cost of the hybrid).)

As an old Progressive Conservative, I am always on the lookout for any party speaking to those Red Tory values that are my core. The Greens come closest to this: they demonstrate, in general, quite good economic sense. Their Green Plan also has internal logic — and far less gerrymandering of the results. It is what it purports to be, and no more. I could probably extend myself to support it.

This brings us to the Liberal plan, which is, prima facie, unsupportable. It is a mish-mash of spending programmes masquerading as an environmental imperative. There is no revenue neutrality in diverting streams of funds coming in via the price put on carbon via taxation to new federal programmes, or expansions of same. Child care, for instance, has nothing to do with carbon reduction — in fact, it leads to more emissions, in that it helps maintain the two-income, two-car, suburban lifestyle a little longer.

Stéphane Dion’s plan is smoke and mirrors, one more turn of the big government crank. It is less effective than the Greens’ offering, less market-sensitive than the NDP’s. It slams itself down on provincial jurisdiction and proposes taxes on taxes every time the GST is collected. No thank you!

That this well-praised piece of tripe — loved by academics and media personalities alike — doesn’t even have any idea of what reduction targets might be expected for something that slams itself down as a permanent addition to the Canadian body politic, rides roughshod over our sovereign treaty commitments (China cannot easily be assessed for special carbon tariffs under the WTO regime, which we are both signatories to, for instance) and is, in effect, another wealth transfer scheme from the West to the East (this may be harsh, but it needs to be said), speaks volumes. It betrays the Liberal Party’s continuing view of what this country is, and their expectation that we will all just sit still and let “Big Daddy” tell us what to do.

I am no fan of the Campbell Government’s ill-thought-through carbon plans, but they are incremental in nature and can be changed. Dion’s plan is national social engineering, grandiose in conception, a blatant attempt to buy votes and a permanent degradation of the prospects of Canadians. No sensible person should give it — or the Liberals — the time of day, unless, of course, they do secretly want to be (in the words of Stephen Harper), “screwed”.

One final note: while heading out this morning I heard Bill Good’s rapid-fire phone-in on CKNW asking “if a federal election was held today, who would you vote for and why?”. (He asked this question last week for provincial politics, and got a decent split between the BC Liberals, BC NDP and BC Greens.) In the first 15 minutes of the call-in there were 20 callers — and 20 votes for “Conservative”. Not one caller mentioned the Green Shift; many mentioned their expectation that the Liberals, back in power, would steal (à la “sponsorship”) again. The first caller to offer a different opinion supported the NDP. Finally, as I was turning the car off, the first Liberal supporter showed up — and she didn’t mention the Green Shift, either. This is, of course, nowhere near scientific — but I find it interesting as a quick touchstone, given that the callers are all from the “ecotopian” Wet Coast, where greenish thinking is concentrated. Make of it what you will.

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.

We all know the used car salesman joke, right? “You can tell he’s lying: his lips are moving.” Those of us who have experienced what passes for legal life in a courtroom or at a deposition also know that the same joke can, far too often, be attached to barristers, although in their case it is more often a combination of questions akin to “have you stopped beating your wife: answer yes or no” and a focus on the twig to the exclusion of the tree, much less the forest.

Our politicians, too, are easily tarred with this brush, since on the one hand much of the huckstering of the run up to and actual campaigns for election is filled with the silky promises of the salesperson, and much of their interactions post election are those of lawyers taking each other on. In other words, “he must be lying: his lips are moving” easily gets attached to politicians as well.

Except here some of us experience a bifurcation most of the time. All those other politicians are so obviously “lyin’, cheatin’, slimy bahstids” that their entire prattling talk track isn’t worth even paying attention to; the ones from the party we support, on the other hand, are just doing their job under trying circumstances. No? Just read your way through any of the blog aggregators organised by party affiliation…

As someone who actually chooses to read what the better writers from all camps have to say, I’ve gotten used to filtering this bifurcated stream. Every camp has people who write well, argue well, make me think. That doesn’t easily change my own inclinations — my preference for one of the parties over the others doesn’t waver in the breeze that easily — but it does give me food for thought.

I, you might say, am someone who, were I ever to be nominated and elected, would not take the whip well. Annoying, a tendency to think for oneself, but there you are. For my primary loyalties lie with my political philosophy and not with a party line at all times, and any affiliation I might hold (I have held several over the years on both the so-called ‘right’ and the so-called ‘left’) is much more a matter of “common cause” than of ideological fervour, or even “my party right or wrong”.

All of this is rumbling through my head today in large measure as a result of the noise being raised about “In-and-Out”, the RCMP raid on Conservative Party headquarters, and Sunday’s ridiculous attempt at media management by the Conservative brain trust, who managed to create a new ostensive definition in the dictionary of image-driven words for the phrase it takes 40,000 inklings to make a clue, and they’re still working on their first inkling. As Sandy at Crux-of-the-Matter noted, it’s hardly rocket science to have a viable communications strategy, and it is, after all, supposed to be a core competency found in a political organisation.

Thanks to these “one brain cell” idiots, the hills are alive with the sound of thrust and counter-thrust. Already, under all the rhetoric and opining, any chance that the average citizen can ferret out the truth of matters and form a sound, reasoned judgement about what the actions of the Conservatives might mean, and whether this means that, despite wanting to vote Conservative, one should not. (There may also be those who prize chicanery above all else who would be deterred by all the smoke and flame from finding out that “here’s where I should reward such behaviour”, but I suspect their primary allegiances will remain with the thieves and liars they know: it’s a line of work where many years of success at successful manipulation to trade favours is not easily overcome.)

Instead, one more reason not to vote has been created. Rather than worry the issue through, I suspect far too many will just say “they’re all up to it”, throw up their hands and decide politics just doesn’t matter, because “no vote I cast will change anything”.

That, I am coming to believe, is the real purpose of all of this. If more and more casual electors can be driven from the field — “casual”, in this case, meaning “not obsessed by politics between elections and thus only pay attention when asked to vote” — the electoral battles come down to the faithful core.

Canada may, for instance, be easily seen as leaning more to the “activist” side of the ledger than the “libertarian” side — our belief in the efficacy of government to “solve things” as opposed to the uncertainly of individual initiative is strong — but when we overlay the traditional party map from “left” to “right” on this it is quite possible that “right activists” could win the day in many ridings if the “left activists” just stayed home, even though far more of this country’s “activism” is expressed “left of centre” than “right of centre”. Those who want what they see as “progress” can more easily be disheartened by the sense of “nothing making a difference” than those who want to implement one or another “turning back of the clock” moves.

Yes, I am left to wonder if all the apparent stupidity on display — from being quite so obvious about the money moves, to battling and taunting Elections Canada, to Sunday’s “selective press briefing”, to anything Peter van Loan has uttered in the past forty-eight hours — isn’t all very crafty, indeed.

Gerry Nichols lamented, this week, how the Conservative Party of Canada had failed “right libertarians” like himself. I, who am an old Red Tory and thus some sort of “centre-left libertarian nation-builder”, feel precisely the same way, but for different reasons.

But both of us ought to fit comfortably into the Conservative Party’s 17 principles. Would that a little fidelity to them would trump the endless tactical manoeuvring and the fine slicing and dicing of the ridings that passes for strategy these days.

For when one doesn’t want to associate with the practised liars and thieves, and one doesn’t believe in the “left activism” of the minor parties, and one finds oneself not at home in a “right activist” Reform II Conservative Party, and one doesn’t want to just fold up and ignore the nation’s future, where does one go?

Thank goodness for blogging. Perhaps posts such as these will give comfort to others who find themselves betrayed by the practice of barrister-trained used-car salesmen.

For I never forget that the plurality vote in this country remains for none of the above.

George Carlin, on his immortal Class Clown album from the 1970s, talks of the experience of being an adolescent boy having to go to Confession, and hoping to get the “right Father”: one would give you ages’-worth of pennance (”the four First Fridays, the five First Saturdays, a trip to Lourdes…”) and the other would understand (”that’s okay, man, tres Santa-Marias“). Five minutes later, the penitent would be back on the street ready for another week of fun and frolic.

Apparently the Conservative Party of Canada was hoping to draw Carlin’s “Father Rivera” yesterday with their “selective confession” to various members of the media.

Let me be clear about my own views on election spending. I like the current restrictions on contributions. They equalise the playing field somewhat — even minor parties ought to be able to find supporters who can kick in sufficient funds to play. At the same time, I’d lift the lid on spending. If you can out-raise all the other parties, you ought to be able to use the money. Finally, other people who wish to communicate on issues ought to be able to do so, with limits on how much spending they can do. (So this is hardly libertarian enough to suit, let’s say, a Gerry Nichols, but much more free than the current Canada Elections Act and related regulations allow for. In particular, if I want to spend money to support campaign messaging on how to spoil your ballot, I ought to be able to do so.)

So if the Conservative Party spent $19 million rather than $18 million in the 2006 election I am not particularly chuffed at the thought. In-and-out, after all, is a time-honoured practice used by all of the parties at one time or another. (I can’t stand the supercilious types who pretend they’re simon-pure on this, although, mind you, there’s no shortage of them. Needless to say, the Conservatives weren’t spending monies redirected to their party from Federal Sponsorship and Advertising contracts, either: their supporters contributed that money to be used to win an election fair and square.

Still, yesterday’s shenanigans — selective invitations, a semi-secret location, ducking into the fire stairs to escape questions — sent all the wrong images to the country. “If you act guilty, you must have something to feel guilty about.”

So, thanks to this ineptitude and stupidity (and I always recall that Robert A. Heinlein once said a number of different things that add up to stupidity is the only natural capital crime — even if you get to escape natural retribution for the first offence, not learning from your errors certainly qualifies for the aphorism’s intent!) the Conservative Party may well have given itself a serious, perhaps fatal wound, something none of the imagined bluff and bluster seen in Parliament from the Liberals has been able to do.

If this is evidence of Stephen Harper’s superior tactical political skills — Gerry Nichols, in a web-only column for the Globe & Mail this morning certainly seemed to hint that these exist — then yesterday represents the moral equivalent of slipping in public on a cow pattie at the Stampede ready to be trampled by a raging bull or three.

Everything now turns on just how turned off we have all become. Will Canadians become incensed and feel retribution is required, or have they heard so much dung being flung in the past few years that this gets chalked up as “just another gros enmerdement“? If it’s the second, the Harper Government gets its equivalent of Father Rivera’s Three Hail Marys and it’s back on the street ready to fight for the right to continue to govern, perhaps even with a majority. Or, if we get angry, does this mean we get to experience Stéphane Dion’s sterling leadership qualities?

For, in Canadians’ response, that is also part of the equation. Dumping the Liberals in 2006 wasn’t a matter of “paying any price” for a change: there were many who may not have liked what Harper’s positions were, but accepted that he had proven, in Opposition and in bringing his party together, that he was viable if given Government. Dumping the Conservatives in 2008 (or 2009) doesn’t come with quite so much surety.

It will be dreadfully noisy for the next few days. It might even cause the Opposition parties to suffer a collective spinal injection rather than spinal tap, and we’d be off to settle the matter in an election. Or this will be an on-going gut-rumble in Question Period until the summer recess, at which point quiet will resume.

I suspect the Canadian people are turned off, tuned out and hoping for quiet. We shall see what happens.

Once upon a time, almost all of our family lines weren’t here in North America. Of course, going back far enough — and anthropologists, climatologists and geologists believe we don’t need more than 12,000-14,000 years (17,000 at the outside and only for Alaska) to be able to say none of us were here. Human settlement of the Americas is just not that old.

So we are immigrants, and, granting the First Nations their pride of place (I’m not sure how many years of continued residence are required to make someone autochthonous, but the majority of us are measured in decades to a few centuries, not in millennia, so let’s just call the First Nations “here long enough” and be done with it) as the original peoples of this continent, only the oldest of European lines and settlements have been here long enough to possibly be verging on the “native” by historical terms — a St. John’s, say, or a Québec, or an Annapolis Royal, or, south of the border, a St-Augustine or Jamestown (the only two settlements approaching the same age as the Canadian ones). [Please leave L'Anse-aux-Meadows and Roanoke Island out of the discussion: continuity matters.]

Those of us born here — especially those of us of blood lines that go back a few generations in this land — have nowhere else to call home, of course. This shows up the dreadful ambiguity of the whole “immigrant” versus “native” discussion: it all depends on timescale. To my mind, one key question is the culture which is built. The Québec profond of the pur laine is certainly an indigenous culture now — but when precisely did it become so, as opposed to just a settler colony? So, too, the original culture of Southern Ontario — still seen in its Clear Grit southwestern and hardscrabble Tory eastern forms (alas, as George Grant noted, the Golden Horseshoe in the middle gave that culture up in the 1950s) — once American settlers with a Celtic overlay from UK & Irish immigration, but now a culture (and an accent) found nowhere else. Add the Acadians, the Newfoundlanders, and a host of others to the list … this is the Canada we know.

Since 1966 Canadian immigration policy first changed to be open to the whole world, and not just Europeans, Americans and other British settler colonies, and then, starting first with the Mulroney Government and as extended and modified through the Chrétien, Martin and now Harper years, a means of doing two radically dissimilar things: extended family reunification, and attracting skilled people to this country using a points-based system that is being increasingly copied around the world today. This has changed the face, and culture, of Canada in its major urban centres.

Having grown up in Toronto while it changed from being a pseudo-Victorian outpost of the Orange Order to what UNESCO called “the world’s most multi-cultural city”, and now living in Vancouver, which has cities in its regional fabric that are majority immigrant communities, I must say that I am not only used to the glorious mosaic that this can create, but find places without it a tad on the boring side. (Perhaps this is why, in the United States, I prefer New York, and why in Europe I prefer London, and found Sydney in Australia quite congenial: they “felt like home”.) We are richer for this mix, added to the mosaic of indigenous cultures that were Canada already.

The Harper Government’s latest Immigration changes come with the good and the bad. The good part is that the Ministerial discretion being sought is designed to allow us to capture the specific types of skilled people currently in demand in Canada and accelerate their applications up the queue and into the country. This is a good thing. We do not want to become, as the United States with its Homeland Security attitudes and anti-skilled worker (consider the restrictions on H-1B visas [and the mandated H-4 status for spouses that exclude them from even unpaid volunteer work] currently in effect) approaches has, a country headed into (in the words of The Economist) an “Idiotocracy”. Nor do we want to lose the best available immigrants to other countries: these are a key part of our future prosperity. If you want a comfortable retirement, you should be pro-immigrant.

Which, when it comes to skilled immigrants and immediate family members, I am. I am less so in the other part of the category: extended family reunification. Here’s why.

In the nineteenth century, when immigrants came to this country, landing in either Halifax or Montréal and riding the Intercolonial, the Grand Trunk or the Canadian Pacific to their new homes, it was effectively a one-way trip. Almost none of them would ever go back to their ancestral homes. Other family members — brothers, sisters, parents, cousins, etc. — were accessible by slow and infrequent mailings at best. (In my own grandfather’s case, an infant immigrant in 1912, it was the last time he would have contact with his own elder brother or father or any other extended family member until World War II took him to the UK and he was able to use a leave to go to Scotland and research lost relatives.) The decision to emigrate was the decision to start a new life.

Today, of course, cheap air travel has made the world much smaller. (I have one friend, himself a childhood immigrant to Canada, whose parents make an annual trip back to their ancestral community to visit “the other part of the family”. We are fortunate to live in this brief period when the remaining cheap energy makes it easy to travel in this way.) One needn’t make a one-way trip: it is possible to return for weddings, funerals, even births, and still live in a new land. (As I learned myself last fall, travelling across this country — 4,492 km by road, or a little farther than the distance overland from London, England to Baghdad, Iraq — we can go for the dying and funeral of a family member and think nothing of the distances involved when travelling domestically: Vancouver to Toronto is nothing; London to Baghdad would be a great journey, indeed.)

As a result, extended family reunification ought to be a very secondary goal of our immigration policy, indeed. Often, these extended family members do not end up contributing much to Canada relatively speaking: we end up (a mutual pact of ignorance) putting them in a language and cultural ghetto of compatriots “from the old country”. Yet often this has been the implicit priority of our immigration system. The Harper Government is right to try and change it.

What is just plain awful about the proposed changes, of course, is the further concentration of power in the centre that it brings with it. I can accept that this time for a while, I believe, but I am not happy about it. (I’d much rather an honest accounting of what we need to do on the immigration file.)

Finally, there’s the missing element. The professional and learned societies, and the provincial licensing boards, need to be informed in no uncertain terms that if they are unprepared to move speedily and expeditiously to (a) recognise the credentials an immigrant brings, (b) handle such upgrading in as minimal a manner as is required [i.e. individual requirements, not wholesale credential re-acquisition], (c) license these immigrants to practice their professions, and (d) accept them into the field of practice [i.e. hospital privileges, join the firm, recognise tenure, etc.] then the Government will modify the terms of their Charters to “make it so”. It is perverse in the extreme that we work to acquire the best possible new Canadians only to introduce them to the joys of late night taxi driving and other forms of work that do not allow them to use the credentials and skills that gave them the points to come to Canada in the first place.

We need our immigrants: we need them to augment our own workforce, and to continue to build Canadian prosperity. We should want them to add to the tapestry that is Canadian culture, joining in and enriching it. We don’t need to turn the immigrant into a pauper. We also don’t need to eat into our own social services by creating an immigrant underclass through poor prospects and poor subsequent selections.

Perhaps if the Liberals were talking like that I’d be more inclined to see their huffery and puffery about the Immigration provisions as real, as opposed to simple posturing for votes.

The saliva drools on page after page written by media personalities and bloggers alike. Regardless of faction, the motif is the same: let’s go to the polls, now!

Well, yes, let’s do. But be careful what you wish for. You might get it.

All sides, of course, see an advantage in going now. The Conservatives believe the most recent set of charges laid by the RCMP in the ever-dragging sponsorship matter will remind everyone that the Liberals are not to be trusted — and they’re happy (as the Prime Minister himself noted in a speech) to go to the polls over their planned changes to our Immigration practices. The Liberals believe that this week’s raid by the RCMP on behalf of Elections Canada at Conservative Party headquarters shows the Conservatives to be at least equally corrupt, and that they will have the better of the Immigration issue in any event.

Ah, but is a vote in the NDP’s interest? Or the Bloc’s? For the Conservatives tied their own hands — I do think it would be a suicidal move to plead the need for an election given their legislation mandating a fixed election date (are you regretting this now, Mr. Harper?, because you ought to be) — and the Liberals need support. Despite both the posturing of Stéphane Dion and other Liberal consigiliere of both front bench and back room whisper, the Liberals cannot, on their own, do anything. They will need to bring the other Opposition parties along with them — at least one if the Government fails to whip itself for the vote, and both of them, in force, if the three-line whip is in place.

For the Bloc, of course, the issue is simple. Are they ready to take enough seats? If they are, they can vote as they please; if they are not, they will keep this Parliament running. (Note, please, that I did not say they would topple the Government if they’re ready: they will determine which outcome — maintain current practices or make the proposed changes — better serves their interests (which are expressed as les intérêts du Québec, naturellement. It may well be that they find the proposed changes as something they can make show as “another victory”.)

So ignore the Her Majesty’s Prime Minister and the Leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition. Instead, cast your gaze firmly upon the Hon. Jack Layton, leader of the New Democrats. What is in his interest here?

Recent polling data suggested, for instance, that the Liberals were making gains in two places the NDP needs to have strong three-way races to win seats: British Columbia and Ontario. Going into electoral battle against such a surge (were it to be maintained to voting day) would not serve the NDP well. On the other hand, voting with the Government means the NDP would also be aiding and abetting the implementation of the budget, something they voted against. A difficult situation, indeed!

Frankly, if there’s a party that needs the economy to weaken further, it is probably the NDP. A downturn would take some of the heat off any environmentalist trends — work and money concerns usually override more abstract causes (as any student of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs would know) — and given the lack of clear Liberal policy the NDP would have the opportunity to stake out a “citizens’ economic platform” in contradistinction to both of the larger parties. Just as the Conservatives would like to go into an election now — before tougher and more turbulent times come — even if it meant another minority as the outcome, so, too, the NDP are probably better served by waiting, both on the Green flank and on the “green” flank, so to speak.

Then, too, with both the Conservatives and the Liberals flinging mud and splattered head to toe with it, there will be those voters who are ready to say “a pox on both your houses” and take their custom elsewhere. On the other hand, given the House schedule, there will be few additional opportunities to vote non-confidence in the Spring session. That puts the Government in control of the agenda over the summer, and a gear-up period in the Fall sitting before confidence motions are again on the order paper. So do you go now, or hope you can build momentum quickly come late September?

Layton’s challenge, of course, is the usual one: gaining attention. This is a double-edged sword: to get attention, he generally must be somewhat outrageous (the joys of sound-bite media), yet that makes him seem to be reacting rather than offering a well-thought-out alternative (or just shouting to be heard at worst). It’s why, for instance, you seldom see him in the newspaper or on the news: the bully-bites offered up from both the Conservative and Liberal benches, and the presumption that Dion is master of the House’s fate (something he, alone, is no more capable of controlling than is the Prime Minister) means that Dion’s threats to topple are taken seriously instead of being challenged as reason suggests they should be.

There’s little question but that we are not being well-served by our current Parliament. It is well past its best-before date, and should be, as with Fortunado in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado, bricked up in the dungeon and seen no more. But here is the question, will Layton take up Montressor’s bricks, mortar and trowel and do the deed?

It may serve the NDP better to wait, but the dangers in that course of action say to me that Jack Layton’s moment to risk all has come. When the carnival comes and the vote is pressed, it is time to press the brick home and lead us to the polls.

That is, of course, if the Liberals deign to even show up to vote (in numbers more than a handful).

The odour of decay wafts gently on the spring breezes these days from the manure mound that Parliament has become. Yet another week of “will they or won’t they?” politics, as the Liberals hem and haw, posture and pose, stamp their feet and consider whether now is the optimal time for them. Buttressed by the latest Nanos poll (which everyone trusts because, after all, it is Nanos who got the last two elections right), we may see the government fall. Or not, as the case may be.

I have been thinking about what it would all mean to go to the polls now. Who, pray tell, is there to vote for?

Politics in a Parliamentary system depends on mutual respect. The players may and will disagree as to policy. They may even huff and puff in feigned indignation from time to time. (It was a horrible move, to put cameras and microphones into the Commons; it converted debate into theatre, and sacrificed the calm and the constructive to the farce of playing up. Good-bye reasoning; hello sound bite.) But Members should respect each other. They should see each other as the head-and-tails of the same coin.

This they no longer do. We are all impoverished for it.

Afraid of “eruptions”, Stephen Harper centralised and controlled his Conservative benches, and remained on an election footing even before accepting the Queen’s Mandate in 2006. Since then the difference between reality and electioneering has been lost (I shudder to think he might mean the words that his Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries utter in the house; that he might well believe the rhetoric as reality). With it, no new platform, no new directions have been taken on.

What the Harper legacy leaves me with is the conviction that a Conservative Government will squander this country just as the Liberals have done and would do again. How else does one see a failure to clean up the cesspool of programmes left from the “something-for-everyone” Chrétien-Martin years? How else does one see the sloshing of money at potential votes? How else does one see the loud rhetoric and the timid actions?

I cringe every time I see someone refer to the Harper Conservatives as Tories, for they are anything but.

But the Liberals do not comfort, either. Picturing Stéphane Dion in power is akin to picturing Joe Clark’s worst day in office as the best we will see. Behind the scenes, it will be as when the Don is dying, and the subordinates are carving out their own turf, preparing for the internecine war to come and grabbing as much as they can on the way. Is it cruel to compare the Liberal Party’s grandees to pseudo-Mafiosi? It is, and yet there is truth in it. For buying the Dion party means buying the Dion team: who on earth wants a rerun of Goodale, Coderre, and the like? Who wants to see a Cabinet riven by the Ignatieff-Rae manoeuvring? None of that lot should be allowed near the levers of power.

There is no reason to desire (nor expect) a Layton/NDP breakthrough or a May/Green arrival. Once again this election will come down to the main two parties. Perhaps, had either minor party leader actually been a Parliamentarian and a calm public debater we would see them differently, but shrill and loud is just more of the same. I can get crud from Harper and Dion; I don’t need more of it assaulting me from the others.

(The Bloc does not, of course, run outside Québec. The maggots run over the decayed corpse of that party. It has gone from raison d’être to raison de pension. As with the rest of the country, it has its voters who now vote for it reflexively, from habit, and without care.)

We used to have the ability to consciously vote “none of the above” in this country, and that is what the system needs: formal abstentions at the ballot box. Alas, party interests wiped out this option, and legislation made promoting it when it matters — during a campaign — illegal. Now our option is to simply not vote, or to go and spoil the ballot.

I do hope we are at least offered a decent and honourable candidate in my riding, someone I can vote for as an individual. Goodness knows, from her first day in the House, my new MP, Joyce Murray, demonstrated she’s not it, as she joined the cackle and disparage brigade in her maiden appearance. But on a party basis, a pox on all their houses; let them be anathema!

The long dying of the country’s politics will continue.

The past week has been a feast, if one prefers to feast on putrefaction in its many forms. We are faced with a veritable cornucopia these days of scandale du jour, where no ancient videotape from a party, no innuendo on the order of the pseudo-Marxian “have you stopped beating your wife — answer yes or no” can be passed up. I almost expect to actually see the Opposition in their seats in the House of Commons, shoes off, ready to bang them on the desks to the tune of one or another of the Liberal Party’s chefs dans l’attente chanting “We will bury you”, in direct appreciation of Ники́та Серге́евич Хрущёв, a historically accurate symbol of an institution in terminal decline, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing more or less than the emptiness at their own core.

I do note “Leaders in waiting” rather than “Leader”, of course, for it is a common conceit amongst certain circles in the MSM and in and around the Liberal Party that we have not yet seen le vrai Dion emerge. Let us be — what the braying Honourable Members are not — charitable and fair. If he is yet to emerge and be made welcome by Canadians, then surely he is a Leader in waiting, hien? (As for those who surround him, at his seat opposite the Prime Minister, that they remain, in the minds of many, “the next Leader in Waiting” need not be further dissected. It is so, and all know it.)

Unlike other things we do not know about this band of snarling scandal-mongers, worthy of the penny yellow press of over a century ago operating on the premise, attributed to Hearst, of “providing the war”. For this has been the Commons and the state of public political discourse in this fair land from the time leaves began to fall from the trees last fall to today, when we begin at last to hope that winter’s grip is loosened enough for it to begone for another year. They care not, actually, for any of the so-called scandals, be it Schreiber, Lukiwski, Cadman or any of the other trial balloons floated across the aisle on a wave of outrage feigned solely for the eye of the cameras.

For the lesson of 2005 has yet to be learned by these stalwart mouths that roar, these Little Fenwickians, “Little” as they do not have any cause célèbre as grave as the destruction of an ages-old marque, but merely sit, resentful that they are not in power.

2005, of course, was the year that the Liberal Party discovered that the poisoned chalice left it by its ousted leader, former Prime Minister Chrétien, in the form of the sponsorship programme kickbacks and payments were not going to slip quietly into the good night, thence, as with the thing the cat threw up, to be buried, but instead would remain as public evidence of the utter contempt shown for the Canadian people by their more-often-than-not Governing Party. What Jane Stewart in HRDC, Chrétien’s own hand in the remodelling of resort facilities in Shawinigan, the never-ending expenditures of the long gun registry, the ever-growing backlogs in Immigration, the decay of the Canadian Armed Forces, the sheer and utter waste of the Innovation Agenda, and so on, couldn’t do, sponsorship did. It was the scandal that stuck in the public imagination.

Vote buying, influence peddling and funds illegally moved into the hands of a political party from Government coffers — brown manila envelopes stuffed with cash over expensive meals may not quite have the apparent cachet of luxury attaché cases filled with money, but handing money to the party as opposed to for services to be rendered is clear enough for all that — these are things we as citizens understood, and found the purveyors of such behaviour wanting.

Alas, the lesson in the Liberal Party was that scandal can bring down a government, and the Canadian people will reward such behaviour by transferring their vote and allegiance to those who do the deed. Pity that wasn’t the lesson of the Sponsorship issue and subsequent Gomery Report — that lesson was “don’t steal from the taxpayer”. Still, dumbfounded at having had their luck at escaping political justice run out, the party’s MPs sit on the Opposition benches, not to work, but to muckrake.

It is not my place to suggest, even for a minute, that they are working purely from smoke, mirrors and a sense of fantasy. We have seen Karlheinz Schreiber testify, ever attempting to weasel his way along for just one more day. We wonder at former Prime Minister Mulroney’s poor judgement in taking up with the man, and even more at his own lacunae, starting with apparently doing no work for his fees and taking years to report them for tax purposes. We have seen the author of Like A Rock: The Chuck Cadman Story, Tom Zytaruk, bob and weave his way between the Scylla of publicity to promote sales and the Charybdis of softening his initial claims, until little is left but the clouding of a honoured dead MP’s memory.

This is, after all, a set of leather-lunged screamers who are dissatisfied with a to-the-point apology made directly and in detail demonstrating full understanding of what was wrong, not trying to evade by saying “times were different then”, and made to many different audiences. It simply would not do to accept, after all — for then there would be no possibility of a story. That the Prime Minister has stood by Lukiwski after his public abasement shows the measure of the Prime Minister, a measure not seen in this past year across the aisle.

Politics, as it has been noted many times, is a blood sport, and a certain amount of attempted blood-letting by the Opposition upon the Government is to be expected. For this Opposition, however, it is all that is of interest. They have very little else — other than the sound of one hand clapping as their names are called during a Division — to stand on or for, after all.

Not only is their reliance on destructive behaviour a result of their certainty in the lesson of 2005 — the lesson they got wrong — but it is craven twice-over, once for it being the tactics of a bully, and once for the Liberals’ refusal to actually stand for something.

What, pray tell, is the Liberal Agenda? There is no real policy — oh, a few scraps of mindless generalities here and there, but no real policy effort as yet seen in public. Some would, of course, say that it would be “foolish to reveal it too soon”. Perhaps, as a campaign tactic, that might be so. But if they have a policy, and are not revealing it, then couldn’t one say the Liberals are the one with the “hidden agenda”? After all, when he was the Leader of the Opposition, Stephen Harper (who was repeatedly then and to this day accused of “having a hidden agenda”) brought forward policy planks. In effect, even before the Martin Government finally toppled into its long-prepared grave — it had, by that point, been over half a year since Martin’s national television appearance pleading to stay on in the job he felt he was entitled to — Canadians had been repeatedly told what turning to the Conservatives would mean.

Cowards in the bullying tactics, certain that eventually something will stick — if this is leadership, then the Liberals have none. Dion, Ignatieff, Rae (and more, one presumes): these are mere placeholders. A politician who won’t risk saying what he or she stands for and would do in office is, simply, a loser.

Mud, it appears, may not stick on its targets. It does seems to affix itself fully to those who throw it.