Harper's hour to shine

It is challenging to follow Canadian politics from central Florida. But one does what one can, and I have found it is well worth the effort.

As is often happily the case, I must begin with an exuberant wave of the Maple Leaf flag. Canada is coming through the recession as well as any country in the world, and the principal way for Stephen Harper to extract the country's money's worth out of next week's G8/G20 summit meetings is to turn them into a tutorial for his visitors on prudent fiscal management and the avoidance of unfledged trendiness.

In this last regard, Mr. Harper especially deserves credit, as I mentioned here last week, for not being manoeuvred into paying misdirected conscience money for Canada's non-role in the current non-threat of global warming, (unlike Europe and the U.S., which tried hard to be euchred out of their thermal underwear), and for not being a witless dupe of Middle East terrorist groups such as Hamas. On these issues, Mr. Harper would do the whole world a favour if he took advantage of the sojourn at Huntsville to give President Obama and Turkey's Premier Erdogan some gentle, thought-reformative, leisurely resort-style water-boarding.

Stephen Harper also has recognized that a successful conservative party must be the responsible nationalist party, one of the lessons of the careers of Disraeli, Churchill, Thatcher, Adenauer, de Gaulle, Nixon and Reagan. And with the emergence of the golden hour of the resource economy (based largely on the economic growth of China and India), the collapse of Quebec separatism, the end of the Cold War and the mismanagement that has afflicted the United States and the United Kingdom in the last 15 years, Canada is able, and even has some duty, to assert itself as a country of world significance.

The facts that Canada is weathering the economic storm well (and previous able fiscal management by Liberals Paul Martin and Ralph Goodale is a large part of the reason), and that it is strong in the world, are making the Liberal adjustment to no longer being the natural party of government especially difficult.

The one-and-a-half party federal system, which gave the Liberals 80 years of government out of the 110 years between the rise of Laurier in 1896 and the departure of Paul Martin in 2006, was based on their ability to sell themselves in Quebec as the party that could make federalism work for that province, and in Ontario as the party that would keep Quebec in Canada. There was some truth to that at times, but Brian Mulroney broke that mould, and even though Quebec has supported a separatist federal party since 1992, the Liberals no longer have any Quebec advantage on the Conservatives.

In their frustration, the Liberals recently were (briefly) reported to be contemplating a merger with the NDP, to unite the "progressive parties." Depending on how the party leaders manage it tactically, Liberal nuptials with the no longer New (after 50 years) Democrats could lose as many votes to the Conservatives as it could add to the current number of reliable Liberals. But it would be another large step to a two-party system, and would give the NDPers their first and only possible exposure to government in Ottawa.

The other desirable event is the end of the irritating levitation of the Bloc Québécois. It is a useless relic, like an appendix, from the days when the separatists in Quebec had to be taken seriously. And its leader, Gilles Duceppe, has become politically hallucinated from drinking excessive quantities of his own bathwater. He apparently takes himself for a Quebec nationalist leader of the calibre and stature of Papineau, Mercier, Henri Bourassa, Groulx, Duplessis, Lesage, Johnson, Lévesque and Bouchard. He has recently warned 1,600 government officials and legislators around the world, (using his Parliamentary postal frank and House of Commons stationery), that Quebec is about to secede from Canada. And he has attacked the Roman Catholic Church as if it were a rogue branch of the Elks or Kiwanis engaged in an anti-abortion cabal, and not the 2,000-year-old faith of 1.2 billion adherents, including still at least a quarter of Quebecers, to which French-Canadians owe their cultural survival for the two centuries following the Seven Years War.

This brings me back to events in the country's largest city, sweltering under the security blanket spread out for, inter alia, the terrorist-supporting Premier of Turkey, the pension-stealing President of Argentina, the bribe-laden polygamist President of South Africa and the Jihad-sponsoring leader of the government of Saudi Arabia.

A couple of months have gone by since I expressed in these pages my preference as mayoral candidate for Sarah Thomson. Despite the fact that the chief municipal reporter for this newspaper declines to cover her campaign, apparently because his concentration was shaken when she donned a pink construction hard hat in the middle of an all-candidates' debate, I deduce that she is the only candidate with a real program and the background to incite confidence that she has the ability to implement it.

By my reckoning from distant reading, she proposes to sell some of the city's $18-billion in assets in order to retire its debt; to outsource to private sector bids some municipal services to reduce the $469-million operating deficit and the large pension shortfall, as a third of municipal employees are approaching retirement age. And she thinks we have enough traffic-congesting street cars and bicycle lanes, and has a plan for subway construction that includes special bonds, rush hour tolls on the major expressways and joint-venturing station construction with the private sector. She is a feisty and original candidate not steeped to the eyeballs in the fondue of local political compromise — and she would avoid the toe-curling malapropisms and platitudes of some of the other candidates.
National Post
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