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| Paul's not the man for me - Wednesday, December 10, 2003 at 12:23 |
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PUBLICATION: National Post ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SASKATOON - Am I the only one bummed out by all the talk of how inevitable another Liberal sweep is under Paul Martin? I mean, damn, roughly 100% of the punditariat keeps going on about how the Liberals under Paul will be a shoo-in to take the country. All you hear is, Oh yeah, Paul's the ticket. Paul's got it in the bag. He da man. Columnist Gordon Gibson holds that the new Conservative party will be tidal-waved by the Martin Liberals and have to wait at least one term while Canadians get past their Martin-mania. Don Martin suggests that -- if history repeats the path of the 1942-merged Progressive Conservative Party -- the 2003 Conservative party may well have to wait for five elections before gaining power! To date, no one has suggested that we may as well forgo even having the next election. But I won't be overly surprised if someone does. Of course, the Liberal party is a mighty force to reckon with. But shouldn't its recent record of waste, opportunism, cronyism, unaccountability, etc., be prompting some commentators to suggest that a change of government might be a good idea? I grant that Mr. Martin has not been the prime perpetrator of these political scandals. But sometimes those merely associated with such sleaze must be part of the political chastening. Certainly there's no shortage of commentators who state that Stephen Harper is carrying Stockwell Day's baggage and must therefore pay the price. Besides, what evidence is there that Mr. Martin frowns on Jean Chretien's big bag of tricks? For example, has Mr. Martin expressed shame that 70% of the Liberals' so-called budgetary surplus comes from inflated Employment Insurance premiums totalling about $45-billion in recent years? No he hasn't. Has Mr. Martin made it "perfectly clear," as he likes to say, that he's going to stop the practice of channeling into general revenues all but 2.4% of the $5-billion the feds rake in on the gas tax, instead of building highways with it, as intended? No, he hasn't. Will he stop the obscene waste that is the gun registry? Or ease the criterion of bilingualism for civil service positions in the West? Or stop over-taxing us by several billion dollars a year, then speaking of that as government "surplus"? Or move to limit judge-made laws in this country? Probably not. Yet everyone agrees that Paul's the man for us. In recent weeks, some pundits have noted that Mr. Martin is not the messianic wunderkind that many expected. William Watson noted that Mr. Martin has produced no fewer than 34 motherhoody goals and policies. But anyone poring through these goals, Mr. Watson suggested, will be none the wiser as to "what stars he will steer by." Link Byfield mocks Martin's inane belief in meaningless buzz phrases, such as "transformative policy" and "politics of achievement" and "the status quo is not an option." But despite such substantive negatives, most commentators speak only of a Liberal cakewalk in the next election. So I repeat: Why should the imperfect Paul Martin be virtually coronated prime minister so far before the election? Why should a Liberal victory be served up as on a silver platter? Would it be so outlandish to suggest that Canadians would be as well, or better, served by the new political blood of a Harper team than by the tired old Liberals? Hidden in all this inevitableness talk is the assumption that Westerners will again be good little patient Canadians quite willing to await the near-certain passage of the Martin honeymoon. Will we be such suckers? Does anyone really think that 100 years of Liberal out-manoeuvring and exploiting the West will come to an end under Martin? We Westerners like to think that rugged individualism is the prevailing creed out here. We take pride in being gritty, independent-minded, self-reliant. Yet we're proving to have an unlimited capacity to absorb political insult and marginalization while remaining stupidly loyal to the system that does the insulting and marginalizing. It's now time that we in the West start questioning the received wisdom that Paul Martin will be the obvious, inevitable, ordained choice for PM in 2004. If the editorialists and commentators were to start noting that Mr. Harper is brainy, capable, experienced, moderate and principled and reminding the electorate that the Liberals' winning planks have been borrowed from Reform/Alliance, maybe a real race would present itself when we head to the polls next spring. |