June 2002
by Barry Stagg
Paul Martin getting fired as Canada's finance minister is the latest Liberal fiasco manufactured by an aging, embattled Prime Minister already set upon by dense clouds of scandal . The federal Liberals start to resemble a cartoon version of a Latin American junta, featuring a coup every Sunday. This is the story line-truth much stranger than fiction- in the late spring of 2002. One wonders whether anyone in the Liberal hierarchy has been spending too much time up at the state cannabis farms somewhere north of Flin Flon.
The final upheaval between Chretien and Martin, resulting in the wondrous schism in the federal Liberals, exemplifies the utter descent of parliamentary party politics into corporatist intrigue and crypto-Kremlinism. This is stoogism, cronyism, Liberal hegemony gone mad and sadly corrupted into something that subsumes democracy with a pasty stew of Apparatchik brinkmanship.
Martin's ouster from the Liberal ruling faction means the concept of a business model Canada is gone by the boards and is displaced with the old Liberal model of mascot politics. The happy faces should be quite visible on the splinter groups/factions who stand to prosper by the retrenchment of the Liberals to privilege politics. Aboriginal feudal chiefs , multicultural mavens, municipal moguls, patronage bagmen: these are all the procurement-entitlement hacks who live a good life at our expense purely by the exercise of non-democracy. Let Jean Chretien run his last few laps as the baton carrier for a disgraceful perversion of our English parliamentary traditions.
A handy precedent for the present Liberal civil war is the attack on conservative leader John Diefenbaker in the sixties led by party guru Dalton Camp. The recently deceased Camp, he of the de facto Liberal sensibilities in his later years, staged a palace coup that led to the Robert Stanfield tenure as Tory leader and convenient Trudeau whipping boy. The Liberals are getting ready to run the same rocky road that the Tories foundered upon in the sixties. The downfall of the Liberals is ultimately good for the country because it portends the disintegration of this fouled and thoroughly debased political machine.
The Lucien Bouchard resignation from the Mulroney government is the closest in time and internal intrigue involving as now, two powerful Quebec colleagues at war with each other. One thing for certain, the blood sport aspect of politics is alive and well with all the atavistic medievalism that the modernists deplore and the rest of us anticipate with glee. Let the crowd with the hubris tag indelibly printed on their patronage passes go through the richly deserved agony of internal warfare over divvying up the spoils of an autocracy operating in the guise of a parliamentary executive. We await their agony in anticipation of the ecstasy of their defeat and thorough discreditation as a political machine. Interesting times, indeed.