Time to clean house

Canada’s national election is in the offing, and if there is no blue wave on the pattern of 1984, there is at least a ripple or two. They’re washing over Liberal hands, which are busy grasping at straws.

The Liberal scare tactics keep coming, though the early attack advertising seems to have been embarrassing enough that the party apparatus learned its lesson. Look scared, if it helps; look desperate, if you must; but don’t look manipulative. Even voters may catch on.

There’s no predicting the result, with the two largest parties neck-and-neck. We had our say about the Liberals last week; and we’ve been having our say about the Conservatives ever since the unite-the-Right people actually did something, instead of holding another conference.

Everybody who found himself aligned with the Conservatives on some issue has had to water down his principles in one way or another. It’s a testimony to the new party’s collective smarts that the knives have never come out. What little steel has been unsheathed — by Joe Clark and a few other disaffected Progressive Conservatives — has amounted to not much more than pinpricks.

The Conservatives have a few openly dumb ideas (the sham “reforms” of fixed election dates and an elected Senate among them), but a readiness to take governing seriously and not to make it a personal grab for power count for much more than any one policy plank. Having remade a broken party, they have shown they have enough upstairs to govern.

It was around about the 1993 election that the New Democrats committed themselves to remaking humanity instead of getting ordinary folks a better deal, and the old alliance of farmers and labour now means nothing to the fern-bar socialists and trendy urbanites who provide the party its last redoubt. For old-line labour NDP supporters, the kind that grew up with T.C. Douglas and David Lewis, the veil had to have been lifted when The Globe and Mail’s “Style” section ran an admiring feature on NDP leader Jack Layton and his wife Olivia Chow — praising their fashion sense. If J.S. Woodsworth didn’t turn in his grave, he should have.

The New Democrats have decided they are no longer the party of the working people; and who can blame them, given the limited patience working stiffs have for the Left’s social engineering and trendy causes. Having decided to cut the masses loose, though, the NDP might have at least taken up a role as the country’s conscience, instead of its nag.

The Bloc Qubecois, shrewdly, for a change, has labelled itself the “parti propre” — the “clean party” — and made big political points over the Liberal Party’s use of taxpayers’ money to front political causes in Quebec. They might be anxious to cripple the national government and hand over every power in the Constitution to Quebec City, but the Bloc can’t be accused of being soft on corruption.

Still, that doesn’t excuse their central aim, and a national government that owes its every sunrise to the forebearance of Quebec nationalists is never good for the country. (How else to explain the mess successive governments have got us in since 1963?)

Thus, the most dangerous thing facing the country is not the Conservatives, or Harper, or the ghost of the old Reform Party, which scareth Liberals with dreams and terrifieth the mainstream media through visions. It’s the prospect of a Conservative government beholden to one of the minor parties, which have agendas either more foolish or more sinister than the Liberals.

That may be why Harper has now started to talk about a Conservative majority. (It also seems to us that these Conservatives wouldn’t risk embarrassing themselves by saying that without some internal poll results backing it up.)

The Conservatives seem now to be confident enough to rule out any formal coalition with the BQ. Harper even ruled out a coalition with the New Democrats, which would (in conventional left-right thinking) have been impossible. But there was a time when it was not merely thinkable but practical politics: consider the alliance between the Conservatives and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation against St. Laurent’s Liberals in the 1950s.

But now that really is impossible. The whole Tory-Socialist tradition — once strong in the NDP, with men like Stanley Knowles and Colin Cameron — was purged years ago. The new NDP would shrink from any deal with, or Parliamentary support for, the Conservatives.

Seen through that prism, it’s clear enough that a Conservative legislative program would find no traction at all with the BQ, who represent the dirigiste and paternalist tradition in Quebec politics — for all that, they may not be as crooked as the Liberals. What has been suggested, though, is that an ad hoc Parliamentary alliance between the Conservatives and the BQ, which had, as its simple object, to clean out the corruption the Liberals always seem to leave behind, might allow the Conservatives to govern for at least a couple of years.

What price would the Conservatives pay for that support in the House? Perhaps if the country elects a Conservative majority, we won’t need to find out. That’s a hint.