Coup d'etat watch: the tide starts to turn

A few more quick thoughts on the Liberal-NDP-Bloc coup d’etat:

• Western premiers are understandably upset by the undemocratic shift of power from Western, Conservative voters to Quebec separatist voters – and the money that will follow the same route. But Danny Williams? He should be delighted, shouldn’t he? He campaigned for “Anything But Conservatives” in the election. Now he has Everything But Conservatives – everything including radical Quebec chauvinists. Politically, that always works out for Newfoundland, right?
• Pierre Bourque is reporting that Michael Ignatieff is having cold feet about the putsch. I don’t doubt it – I bet a lot more MPs than just Ignatieff are. Bourque lists some other names, and on CTV I saw Sarkis Assadourian, a recently retired Liberal MP from Toronto, tell Mike Duffy that the coalition is very unpopular in his party circles – and something that Pierre Trudeau would have opposed. Question: how many more Liberals will bolt the coalition once Jacques Parizeau, the former Parti Quebecois premier and poster boy for irritating separatists, heartily endorses it tomorrow?
• But Parizeau is being honest. This deal is obviously good for the Bloc – most obviously in that it gets to choose Canada’s prime minister. If you were a Quebec separatist, would you rather have Stephane Dion – a weak, unpopular, lame-duck prime minister, despised by his own party, and unable to get any serious electoral purchase outside of Montreal proper? Or Stephen Harper, a tough cookie who is the only serious competitor for Francophone votes in Quebec? Even if the Bloc didn’t also secure Senate seats, billions of dollars of payola and countless yet-to-be-revealed prizes, they’re still winners. Parizeau is simply being candid.
• It’s the Liberal MPs who will panic in the wake of Parizeau’s endorsement who are dishonest. They know that the Bloc’s allegiance (ha!) was purchased dearly, with power and treasure purloined from the rest of Canada. They don’t need to read Parizeau’s comments tomorrow to know that. All that’s happening is that, like Ignatieff, they’re starting to realize that their deal with the devil might sell well to a dejected, bankrupt praetorian guard of the Liberal party and caucus, but it’s poisonous in the rest of the country – even in traditionally Liberal places like downtown Toronto. But mark this: it’s not the Bloc’s pay-off that will cause Liberals to panic. It’s that Canadians are finding out about that pay-off, about a week before they’re supposed to.
• Some Liberals aren't panicking -- they're just shaking their heads at the bluff and bravado that's been packed up by Dion's desperadoes. I point to John Manley, one of the most respected party elders around, who was touted by the Liberals as one of the "wise men" who will advise the coalition. Manley denied the report to the Globe and Mail today, hardly hiding his contempt for the deal, and the hucksterism behind it.
• The Liberal-NDP-Bloc coup is being covered in one of two ways by the media. The Parliamentary Press Gallery, in the main, is utterly supportive of it, trying desperately to shift attention away from the coup to purported “rifts” within the Conservative party, or trying to draw a parallel between Dion’s formal, written, binding contract with the Bloc – including secret pay-offs that we are now learning about – with Harper’s publicly-made, ad hoc cooperation with the Bloc on specific pieces of legislation, where no pay-offs were made or offered. (My favourite technique of this species of journalism is to call the coalition a “Liberal-NDP” coalition, instead of the “Liberal-NDP-Bloc” coalition. Of course, if it were just a Liberal-NDP coalition, it would only have 114 seats, not enough to dislodge Harper’s 143-seat Conservatives.)
• The other species of journalism, in the main, is that written by reporters who with sufficient distance from Parliament Hill that they can see things with some perspective – and they can listen to “severely normal” Canadians, not just others in the chattering class. These media reports show an overwhelming national disapproval of the coalition, for two obvious reasons: it’s a slap in the face to voters in the recent election, and it’s a treacherous allegiance with separatists. It really is that simple – it takes political experts to tell us the “nuances” of this story in a way that makes Harper the devil here, and Dion, Layton and Duceppe the nation-building angels.
• One obvious reason for this dichotomy in press coverage is that the Parliamentary Press Gallery has had a three-year war against Harper, which actually involved a sort of “strike” by journalists against covering him, and the ethically odd approach of journalists issuing public condemnations of Harper one day, and then “reporting” on him neutrally the next. Another reason is less conspiratorial: Parliamentary Press Gallery reporters are numb to the shocking nature of the Bloc Quebecois. After eighteen years of dealing with separatist MPs everyday, dining with them, talking with them, and even befriending them on a personal basis, I believe that many old Ottawa hands simply don’t see the problem with doing a deal with the Bloc, even such a formal, written contract as was done on Monday. That nonchalance is not shared by Canadians. And not just conservative Canadians who have a partisan sympathy for Harper and aversion to the opposition. The central principle – if there is one – of Liberals is that of national unity and federalism. In liberal enclaves like downtown Toronto (and Montreal!) the prospect of a separatist veto over Ottawa is repulsive – as much as in downtown Calgary or Vancouver.
• I have read a lot of interesting commentary on this matter, but my favourite has to be Andrew Coyne’s piece, here. He puts the whole political party subsidy into proper perspective, and Andrew – a federalist’s federalist – asks the right questions about the nature of this coalition.
• I note with dismay that the TSX stock exchange fell another 1% today, on top of yesterday’s staggering loss. That’s nearly 1,000 points in two days – we know what businessmen think of the prospect of Carbon Tax Stephane and Employers Tax Jack going into partnership with the Bloc – time to sell. Oh, and don’t tell me it was a global phenomenon; New York’s stock exchange climbed today. We might be suffering from a Made in the U.S.A. economic slowdown, but this is clearly a Made in Canada political crisis.
• Seriously: can you imagine what would happen financially if this coup succeeded? If Jim Flaherty, our delegate at the G8 and G20 financial stability meetings, was replaced on a political whim; if Layton’s $50 billion tax was implemented; if the risk of a carbon tax was revived? But that’s just the start. What do you think the entire country’s risk – not just the economic risk, but the risk of the country itself failing – would be if the separatists were given a veto over all significant affairs? I don’t know how such things are measured; perhaps it’s just some sort of holistic guess or sense of things, like the Doomsday Clock which measured the risk of nuclear war in terms of “minutes until midnight”. Other than the Parti Quebecois winning the election in Quebec, can you think of anything that would move that clock forward more towards secession than making Gilles Duceppe the senior partner of government?
• Enough about the Liberal and NDP support for Quebec separatism. What about Western separatism? Preston Manning arrested the nascent Western separatist movement twenty years ago with his alternative vision: “The West wants in”. Stephen Harper finally accomplished that vision, if barely, through a minority government. But a win is a win; and Harper certainly beat Dion, Layton and Duceppe.
• It’s one thing for the West to be disenfranchised fair and square – that could be borne, as it was by the West under the Reform Party when it lost in 1993, 1997 and even in 2000. But it’s quite a different thing to win – under rules that the other guys wrote – and then to have the win snatched away undemocratically, and through a deal with anti-Canada separatists. That’s not a sense of disappointment, which any party (or even region) feels when losing a game fairly. But when the game itself is rigged, when the rules are changed after the game is won, that’s a whole different matter. If the Liberal-NDP-Bloc putsch succeeds – and by succeeds, I mean succeed for more than a few months before a restoration of the Conservatives – then I believe that you will see a Western alienation that will rival that of the NEP. Well, that would suit the Bloc to a tee, wouldn’t it?
• I am optimistic today. I see the divide between the Parliamentary “community” – the Liberals and their base in the media on the one hand – and real Canadians on the other. The Liberals and their chorus in the media are just tickled pink with this coup. It’s their way of having a do-over of the last election; it’s their way of venting their pent-up distaste for Harper, Conservatives, and for some, even the West. But that’s not what normal Canadians think. And – thank goodness – it’s not even what normal Canadian Liberal voters think. They’re shocked that the party that once gored Jacques Parizeau is now in league with him.
• I’m not a betting man, but I’d bet this thing is going to fail. I didn’t feel that way on Saturday night; I’m still not certain – like sharks smelling blood in the water, when Liberals smell power, they get a little crazy. Stephane Dion still thinks he can be prime minister. But others are starting to get worried. I predict that MPs start to bail out – first privately; then publicly. And I predict that, soon, Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff manufacture reasons to back down, too. Maybe not publicly – maybe they just ensure that enough of their supporters are absent on Monday’s non-confidence vote to let the Tories survive. Because I think that if we had the kind of daily tracking polls now that we had during the federal election, we’d be seeing the Liberals lose a point a day as their ignoble marriage to the Bloc sinks in with Canadians.