Martin continues West-bashing tradition
Like his Liberal predecessors, prime minister also plays scary westerner card

Lorne Gunter
The Edmonton Journal

March 7, 2004

It's bred in their bones: Liberals' prejudice against the West that is.

Even new Prime Minister Paul Martin suffers from it.

Martin may claim devotion to including the West in national decisions. He may insist (as he did last year) that his tenure at 24 Sussex will have been a failure if Western alienation is as strong when leaves office as when he arrived.

But the widely anticipated spring election hasn't even been called yet and our new West-friendly PM is already playing the same "scary westerner" card Jean Chretien played with such disdain (and success) during the 2000 vote.

Martin made his first unofficial campaign swing this week, through eastern Ontario. He stopped in Smith Falls, Cornwall, Peterborough and Lindsay.

Each stop had some official function -- meeting with community leaders, speaking to high school students, touring a hospital -- so it could be paid for by taxpayers. Each was an official visit by the Prime Minister of Canada, not the leader of the Liberal party.

But at each event the local MP was there and Prime Minister Paul Martin always managed to work in a political plug from Liberal Leader Paul Martin.

And what was the central message of this first campaign tour? What did Martin foreshadow about the Liberals' upcoming strategy for the general election? That the new Conservative Party of Canada cannot be trusted because it is really just the old Canadian Alliance with a Queer Eye for the Political Guy makeover.

And just how is that anti-Western? Because the Liberals have spent the past three elections smearing the Alliance, and before it the Reform Party as too regional, too Western, and thus too extreme to be trusted to run the country.

"It's incredibly evident that what's happened is the Alliance has simply taken over the (old) Conservative party," Martin claimed after visiting Lindsay's Ross Memorial Hospital. "The choice of voting for what was the traditional Conservative party is no longer open to people."

Your Conservative party no longer exists, he was telling Eastern Ontarians. Only that Western Conservative party exits. Don't be fooled.

Martin has to keep voters in places like Lindsay and Cornwall and Smith Falls and Perth and Brockville away from the new Conservatives. For a century or more before the creation of the Reform party, such communities were typically part of bedrock Tory seats. Without the vote-splitting on the right that has handed them to the Grits for the past three elections, there is a strong chance such ridings will revert to form in the coming campaign and return to their tradition of electing Conservatives instead of Liberals.

What caused the vote-splitting that helped elect so many Grits was the mistrust many traditional Conservatives had of Reform's and then the Alliance's ability to govern at all, or at least to govern moderately. Most didn't switch to the Liberals, instead they just kept voting Progressive Conservative, which kept Reform/Alliance from making any advances and kept handing these once True Blue ridings to the Liberals.

Strategically for his Liberals (in Ontario at least) it is wise for Martin to sow doubts about the Conservatives -- false or not -- to maintain the new merged CPC is really nothing more than the old Alliance, which was nothing more than the old Reform party, etc. etc.

If such doubt-sowing can't drive suspicious voters into the Liberal camp, the Grits calculate it will at least keep them home on election day and give Liberal candidates a better chance to win close ridings. But it still means the Liberals intend to demonize the West in the coming campaign.

So on his very first unofficial day of campaigning, Martin was already playing the "scary Westerners" card. That's not what he'll call it. To Martin and his new band of Liberal spin doctors, it will be technically the "scary Alliance" card.

Same thing.

It's the same thing as when Liberal strategist extraordinaire Keith Davey boasted during the 1980 election -- "Screw the West, we'll take the rest." -- which returned Pierre Trudeau to power and brought about the NEP. It's the same thing as when Chretien confessed he preferred to "do politics with people from the East," and sneered that Albertans were "a different type" of Canadian (and not a good type).

It's a more well-heeled version of former Immigration minister Elinor Caplan's insistence that the Alliance and by extension, the West was "a haven for Holocaust deniers, prominent bigots and racists."

Martin's anti-Western slanders won't be as crass as Trudeau's, Chretien's, Caplan's or Hedy Fry's (she even took to lying about the West, claiming that racist cross-burnings were endemic here). They won't have to be.

Martin's predecessors at Liberal campaign headquarters have been so successful at equating the scary Reform/Alliance with the West that Martin now need only speak in code. No longer will he have to say "the West." He merely needs to insult Reform/Alliance, and everyone in central Canada will get the message.

That Martin should do this so easily and so early is proof positive of just how instinctive West-bashing comes to Liberals.