September 24, 2005
No matter what, Canadians think Liberal rule is just fine

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The Liberal government approaches the fall session of parliament, which reconvenes on Sept. 26, in good spirits.

Prime Minister Paul Martin has reiterated his promise to call a federal election within 30 days of the final report by Justice John Gomery into the sponsorship scandal, due next February. Martin's chief strategist and pollster, David Herle, in August assured Liberal MPs they can win a majority government by adding seats in the West and Ontario, with or without gains in Quebec.

And why not? Despite an endless series of scandals, and the evidence of corruption at the highest levels of government uncovered by the Gomery Commission, polls show that the opposition parties seem to be making little headway against the Liberals, who have now won four elections in a row since 1993.

Perhaps it is due to the fact that the federal Liberal Party, that most wonderful of political machines, has cleverly managed to remain the "default mode" of Canadian politics.

Other parties, such as the Bloc Québécois, the Conservatives, and the New Democrats, are "niche" parties that appeal to a narrow class, ethnic, geographic or ideological base. But the Liberals are the ultimate "big tent" party. Though there have always been internal differences and individual rivalries within it, the pragmatic desire by Liberals to win and retain power has always ensured a tendency towards the political centre--after all, that's where the votes are.

In most other places, if you try to be all things to all people, you end up pleasing nobody. (Marxist used to call this "exposing the contradictions.") But in Canada the Liberal Party is at one and the same time able to accommodate anti-American leftists and pacifists who periodically condemn the United States and its policies, sometimes in very uncomplimentary terms, while at the same time doing all in its power to keep the Americans sweet by cooperating with Washington on issues of trade, defence, and counter-terrorism.

So, while rejecting American requests to participate in continental missile defence or the war in Iraq, the Liberal government still manages to sustain a fairly decent level of military collaboration with the U.S. armed forces, both in North America and abroad, especially in Afghanistan.

The Liberals seem able to articulate and aggregate the views and interests of both workers and businesspeople, men and women, immigrants and the native born. They even manage to appeal to English Canadian nationalists while also retaining the allegiance of many "soft" Québécois nationalists.

When Canadians demand more spending on social programs, the Liberals borrow ideas--liberally!-- from the NDP. When it becomes necessary to battle deficits, they steer to the right and govern like Conservatives. Their flexibility is legendary.

Indeed, as the "fulcrum" party along the political spectrum, they attract high-profile people from both their left and right. Two of Martin's cabinet members, Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh and Human Resources Minister Belinda Stronach, were previously members of the NDP and Conservative Party, respectively.

The party also renews itself every few decades by selecting as its leader a prominent public intellectual rather than a professional politician. In 1968, it chose Montreal law professor Pierre Trudeau to succeed Lester Pearson, and Paul Martin may, according to some, be followed by the internationally-renowned academic Michael Ignatieff, who has taught at Harvard.

And the electorate, perhaps appreciative of this wonderful sleight of hand, rewards the Liberals by ensconcing them as our permanent governing party. The opposition parties, green with envy, remain relegated to the sidelines, their status reduced to being either critics (the Bloc and Tories) or accomplices (NDP) of the government. Such is political life in Canada today.

September 7, 2005

Is it fair to criticize the new occupants of Rideau Hall?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Ever since questions began to arise regarding governor-general designate Michaëlle Jean's commitment to a united Canada, her support among Canadians has dropped precipitously. Paul Martin's choice of this Haitian-born Québécois broadcaster to be the Queen's representative unleashed a flood of complaints.

A Decima Research poll conducted in mid-August found that those who were unsure about her appointment climbed to 39 per cent from 25 per cent, while those who were decidedly unfavourable went to 22 per cent from 16 per cent. To already alienated western Canadians, in particular, she feels-ironically--like a colonial governor imposed on them by far-off Ottawa.

Her defenders have accused those who questioned her previous political connections to Québec separatists of "McCarthyism." The prime minister's own spin doctors called it a "smear campaign."

Apparently it is simply not the polite thing to do to wonder about her past--though I think these same people would be the first to protest if it turned out that an appointee to the highest post in the land had once been involved in, say, far-right or pro-fascist politics.

Such people might recall that a Québec lieutenant-governor, Jean-Louis Roux, was forced to resign his office in 1996 when it was discovered that as a youth during World War II he had worn a swastika and had taken part in an anti-Jewish and anti-war demonstration whose stated purpose was to wreck the offices of the Montreal Gazette, which strongly supported Canada's war effort.

In her statement of August 17 Jean denied that she and her spouse Jean-Daniel Lafond had supported the Québec independence cause. "Let me be clear: we have never belonged to a political party or the separatist movement." But is this not a matter of parsing words? Many people throughout history have supported and worked for a cause without being "card-carrying members" of a specific party or organization.

After all, in the film La Manière Nègre, a 1991 documentary produced by Mr. Lafond which examined independence struggles in Québec and Caribbean entities such as Martinique and Haiti, she is shown apparently toasting the prospect of Québec independence.

But the issue here is not simply whether Ms. Jean was in the past sympathetic to the idea of a sovereign Québec. Many Québécois have been and continue to be. I consider this to be a legitimate political option. The citizens of that province may indeed someday, in a peaceful and democratic referendum, choose to leave the Canadian federation.

However, in the film Ms. Jean is sitting with, among others, Pierre Vallières, a founding member of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). This group of ultra-left terrorists created havoc in Québec for years and in October 1970 murdered a Québec cabinet minister. Surely Pierre Trudeau, who sent the Canadian army into the province to stop further FLQ activity, must be rolling over in his grave! Indeed, the founder of the Parti Québécois, René Lévesque, himself refused to share a platform with former FLQ members.

Mr. Lafond is himself a trendy French intellectual, a political child of the 1968 student uprising in Paris and a devotee of the radical French philosopher Michel Foucault. He fits in perfectly with the café society of the Quartier Latin in Montreal.

In his films and writings, he has denounced the shortcomings of Western society, and in his discourse has made use of all the politically correct left-wing clichés about colonialism, American imperialism, and so on. In 1994, regarding Québec, he was quoted in L'Humanité, the newspaper founded by the French Communist Party, as stating that "the situation in this country is more and more intolerable and, while no one today uses the violent means of the FLQ, we need to find the ways to overcome this."

Yet he is now about to become the "vice-regal consort" of the governor-general, a British colonial vestige of an office if ever there was one! Isn't our political system wonderful? It can absorb, neutralize and co-opt any "critical opposition."

Perhaps Ms. Jean and Mr. Lafond now regret having moved in circles that included former "theorists of liberation" such as Mr. Vallières. All of us, I am sure, once knew people we would no longer befriend. And it's clear most Canadians just want this whole controversy to go away, the sooner the better.