The Bruce Report

As we slip inexorably into election season, see how fast and hot the political windbags of summer blow with nothing so mundane as real leadership to restrain them.

 

Canada’s peripatetic Prime Minister, just back from his East Coast safari, announces to a breathless nation that the federal government is broken beyond repair. Ottawa’s solemn business is being fatally compromised by hordes of unruly opposition members determined to dismantle the apparatus of Conservative democracy. And so, he insists, we must go to the polls if only to restore peace, order and good government.

 

“We did establish a fixed date for the next election [October, 2009],” Harper explains. “That said, in this minority Parliament, two of the parties, the Bloc and the NDP, have indicated for some months now that they want an election immediately. [Liberal leader] Dion has indicated that the government has to be defeated, but he’s not sure when he’ll do that because he doesn’t have good enough [electoral support]. I don’t think that’s a particularly responsible position.”

 

Meanwhile, the genteel and thoughtful Grit honcho – who may be too calculating for his own good – does not rule out provoking a confidence motion in the upcoming session. Still, he remains defiantly uncommitted. “It’s not my job to go into an election because the Prime Minister asks me to go into an election,” Dion says. “My job is to replace him, and timing is important.”

 

No less so, perhaps, than his obsession with selling his “Green Shift” policies to sceptical voters disinclined to embrace another consumption tax – this one, on carbon – masquerading as a palliative for global warming. On this score, even the Liberal leader must agree, he has his work cut out for him. And the timing may not be right for another trip to the polling station, just yet.

 

So it goes; the politics of manufactured issues dressed up and trotted about to persuade a general public – which both Liberal and Conservative officials evidently believe is broadly stupid – that Canada is in trouble. On the one hand, only an election will dissolve the gridlock at Parliament Hill, and reward the Tories with a majority. On the other, only a concerted effort to save the planet will bolster the electoral chances of the now languishing Grits, and restore them, one fine day, to their place of prominence.

 

But though these feuding parties claim irreconcilable differences on largely illegitimate grounds (there is no gridlock that Harper, himself, did not create; and there is nothing in Dion’s environmental plan that’s likely to reduce greenhouse gas emissions) there is, at least, one crisis that both are complicit in generating.

 

Earlier this year, the federal government announced a $500-million deficit for the first time in years. That compared with a $2.8 billion surplus just 12 months before. Since assuming office, the Conservative minority has spent tens of billions of dollars through two of the richest, pork-filled budgets in the nation’s history. Much of this largess has been destined for “strategic initiatives” in oil-rich Alberta and swing-vote Quebec.

 

In contrast, Ontario’s manufacturing sector has been allowed to wither; per capita spending in the Atlantic provinces has actually dropped; and investment in municipal infrastructure across the country as all but evaporated, as has support for innovative, university-based research and development, and private-sector productivity initiatives.

 

Indeed, the wrecking ball continues to swing: As much as $45 million in planned cuts to arts funding, despite the fact that the cultural sector in this country generates some $50 billion in cold, hard cash; and bizarrely irrational resistance to raising the federal portion of the HST by an insignificant one percentage point, a move which would, overnight, put the nation’s finances back in the black.

 

The conclusion is as plain as the smirk on Harper’s face: This Prime Minister has bungled the economy. And Dion, otherwise occupied with his assortment of inconvenient truths, has let him get away with it.

 

The leadership vacuum in Ottawa is awe-inspiring. And should there be an election this fall, the political windbags of summer may well discover legions of Canadians shutting their windows and plotting their revenge for the long, hard winter of their discontent.

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