Eminem Touches in Falcon’s Mouth

For those of you not in BC, the title of this post is likely enigmatic. For those of you in BC, it’s likely still enigmatic — but in a different way. So, to the decoding:

Kevin Falcon is the Transport Minister in the BC Liberal Government. He is also generally Gordon Campbell’s designated “mouth”. If any BC Liberal is likely to go too far in public trashing someone else, it’ll be Falcon. Some say he only opens his mouth to change feet, but I disagree: he merely suffers from a nasty mixture of athlete’s tongue and vitriol breath.

After the by-elections last Wednesday, the BC Liberal Party held its regular get-together, this year in the large and blossoming town of V0N1V0 (to use the title of a book about the place), or Whistler. There, Falcon went on — and on — about the deficiencies of the BC NDP and its leader, Carole James. The woman, in his mind, has no claim to any experience at anything, as he dismissed out of hand her prior tenure on the Victoria School Board of Trustees, and leading the provincial Trustees’ organization. Therefore — he carries on — she has no right to hold opinions contrary to those of the BC Liberal Party, i.e. his own.

Now there is a certain amount of such miserable rhetoric that is a part of what passes in place of political discourse today, especially when the job of the speaker is to throw raw red meat at the howling lions in attendance. What prompted me to write about this, actually, is the way he carried on into this week, trashing the Governor of our neighbouring state, Alaska.

(Goodness knows, Governor Sarah Palin’s “performance” over the past two months as John McCain’s running mate didn’t exactly strike a chord of confidence in her on my part, but she does run a government of some interest to this province’s government, of which he is a part. Qui est le stupide ici? In general, it is considered bad form to want things from someone and to negotiate by insulting them, their capabilities, their intelligence, their … well, you get the idea.)

None of this, of course, is new to Falcon. And so (did you think I’d forgotten the Eminem reference?) to him I say, “Would Minister Falcon please shut up! Please shut up! Please shut up!” Slim Shady didn’t hold a candle to this liability, and Gordon Campbell should realize that sending the Mouth that Roared out there isn’t doing his Government — or his party, which faces the electors next May — any favours.

Ultimately, the BC Liberals are running on the same sort of “empty” that the Federal Liberals are. The Federal Liberals, as you may remember, have now run three elections on the meme “Stephen Harper has a hidden agenda … Stephen Harper is George Bush … Stephen Harper is dangerous”. In 2004 it worked just well enough to allow them to eke out a minority; in 2006 they lost government, and in 2008 their decline continued. The Campbell BC Liberal mantra — ably carried forward by the likes of Falcon — is “The NDP have a hidden agenda … The NDP will ruin everything … The NDP are dangerous”. But when an NDP party leader uses the Government’s own financial numbers to put forward spending alternatives, the last thing you can say is that the numbers were made up. Nevertheless, the charge has been tried, even as the Finance Minister moves the goalposts on the revenue estimates.

Yesterday — and when CKNW takes over the schedule to run six-plus hours of live US election results, complete with reporters in the field it seems clear to me at least that they believed their BC audience was paying attention to the US election — the election of Obama charted, if only for a moment, the promise of hope. That does not meld well with a negative, churlish spitting out of the same old phrases hoping to stretch yet another win out of old news. Earlier this year I wrote on the subject of respect.

If the BC Liberals want to form another government — not, mind you, that I’m saying they either should or shouldn’t at this point — they had better shape up and put a muzzle on the childishness of a Kevin Falcon (and others like him, including the Premier from time to time). Otherwise, the same dumpster that contains the Dion campaign of 2008 will need to make room for the ex-Government of BC in 2009.

When the System is Past its Best Before Date

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.