Martin’s own private moral high ground

We live in a country where one political party, the Liberal Party, has come to understand itself as having a historical mandate to run the joint. So it is interesting to see Liberals’ reaction when an election campaign doesn’t go the party’s way.

With the present national election campaign now around the half-pole, it has become fairly plain that Prime Minister Paul Martin’s Liberal Party is in trouble. The Liberals have, for three elections in a row, depended on solid support from Ontario and Quebec; at dissolution 132 of its 168 sitting members were from those two provinces. Now polls say that in Ontario the Conservatives have pulled even with the Liberals, and in Quebec 50% of voters support the Bloc Qubecois. The governing party could lose its main base of support, and with it, its majority in the House of Commons.

In a rational polity, if a party’s fortunes fell in the polls, its candidates would reflect on policy, on the party’s record in government or its effectiveness in opposition, and on its own understanding of the voters. Then, just maybe, that party would go to the people with a point of view that, without necessarily sacrificing its principles, put a program in front of the voters that the voters might be willing to support.

Not so the Liberals: they have lived so long inside the mythology of the Liberal Party that they know only one way — start manipulating. Thus we see the first attack advertisements; thus we see two Toronto-area Liberal cabinet ministers (Judy Sgro and John McCallum) dropping by to heckle Conservative leader Stephen Harper in public, in what seems to have been a bizarre attempt to force some kind of on-camera gaffe from him. Thus we see government client groups weighing in — all of them beholden to the Liberal Party for largesse, but quoted by much of the mainstream press as though they were independent observers and concerned citizens.

Municipal mayors, who were bought off by the Liberals’ sudden discovery of Canadian cities, have come in swinging for Martin; the Mtis National Council, and provincial Mtis organizations, fresh from a promise of funding from the Martin government, denounced the Conservatives’ “secret policy agenda” that would lead to “denial, assimilation and a non-recognition of our constitutional rights.” The film and television business — recipients of heavy direct subsidy as well as tax preferences — warn of the “devastation of the industry” should the Conservatives come to power. Maude Barlow, last seen vilifying Conrad Black and defending Saddam Hussein, says a vote for Harper is a vote for George Bush; Peggy Atwood, in the same paper, cribs Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers to argue that the Conservatives are ready to “mow [cultural industries] flat.”

Why have the Liberals been prodding their clientele to make these kinds of statements? Maybe it has something to do with their own limited success peddling the Liberal message. It started out with variations on 1972’s “the land is strong” theme, in which Liberals tell the country how wonderful Liberal government has been. The variation this time was Finance Minister Ralph Goodale’s refreshingly veil-free threat that Western Canada should make a point of sending Liberals to Ottawa so as not to be shut out of government.

When that got the digital salute, Martin — perhaps aping Kim Campbell’s troglodyte remark that the 1993 election campaign wasn’t the time to discuss policy — said we shouldn’t be talking about the scandal surrounding the government’s advertising and sponsorship budget; instead, “it’s the time to talk about our values as a country.”

Whether clean government counts as a national value is a question you’ll never get a Liberal to answer. After all, the right not to incriminate oneself is there in the Charter of Rights. Speaking of which, as any Liberal will remind you, the Charter is a gift of the Liberal Party — a gift that the knuckle-dragging extremist Conservatives will take away. Hence Martin’s lob that Harper would consider using the fiendish Notwithstanding Clause to destroy minority rights. (For those keeping score, that’s section 33 of the self-same Charter.)

Values? On democracy, the Liberals have spent the past seventy years trying to undermine Parliament, from King’s attempt to subvert a vote of censure, through the pipeline debate, to the limitation of parliamentary supremacy that came with the Charter. On clean government, Adscam traces its lineage back through the Auberge Grande-Mre and Trudeau’s jet-setting cabinet ministers back to the Beauharnois scandal of the 1930s. On Canada’s place in the world, Liberal governments and their “soft power” fictions have robbed us of it. On our “caring” society, ask someone who works for a living how much his government cares.

Values? They’d better hope not.