By Barry Stagg
August 1998
STATISM: TOBIN'S ROAD TO THE RIDEAU
Perhaps those who champion Newfoundland Premier Brian Tobin may imagine that there are American parallels to his proposed ascendancy to the Prime Minister's chair. Perhaps they look at the two terms of Arkansas-born Governor Bill Clinton as president of the most powerful nation on earth. Perhaps the premier's Irish roots draw some comparisons, although no doubt in a minor vein, to those of Boston's own John F. Kennedy. Suffice it to say that Tobin has a much greater sense of proportion and common sense then the widely ridiculed Republican vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle. The hubris-encumbered Quayle was devastated by his Democratic counterpart Lloyd Bentsen in the 1988 presidential debates when he had the audacity to compare himself to the late J.F.K. In the memorable words of Lloyd Bentsen, 'Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy'.
Tobin learned the practice of statecraft and the simple, yet insidious, art of controlling the money faucets during his long tenure as a Liberal M.P. and cabinet minister. The black craft of securing and spending government money is truly an art form in the hands of this politician. What remains to be seen is how the Canadian public will react to the ascendancy of a politician whose fields of expertise are the particular public relations process of politics and the practice of statist economics.
It is to the economic and political discredit of Canada that provinces like Newfoundland, with tremendous resource bases, have been reduced to statist economic backwaters by the unwillingness of a central government to release political and economic control of any meaningful sort to provincial governments. In that artificial and profane environment a statist member of the "Nomenklatura" class can prosper. Maybe the models for the career of Premier Brian Tobin are found not in the American mythology of presidential politics but rather in the more drab and pitiful models of the prime time of Soviet Russia.
Soviet leaders like Nikita Khrushchev , Yury Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev and countless other lesser lights of the Soviet system rose to prominence by putting in time in the nether regions of the USSR after learning their original craft in, at or near the Kremlin. Thus the Kremlin concept is worth looking at in the context of the unfolding career path of Brian Tobin and his road back to Canada's Central Committee.
Where Paul Martin represents big government, big business and upper class Canadianism, Tobin represents the rise of the state craft politician. Brian Tobin's political ambitions are inextricably linked to the central committee style of statism that he so necessarily embraces.
Brian Tobin, like Lloyd Axworthy of the previous Liberal generation plays fully in a political minor key. Like the minor poets these politicos take their cues and are defined by systems and methods invented and implemented by others. The statist religion of Canada politics is one for which Pierre Trudeau and his disciples wrote the sacred texts in the profligate 1960's . Part of the essence of the gospels of Pierre was the necessary subjugation of Newfoundland to the fashionable politburo /central committee government of Ottawa. Without such a style of government, then a Premier Brian Tobin could not be invented.
Prosperity from Churchill Falls, Hibernia and a properly managed fishery would have left no space for a political star whose method of governing is to control government money and dole it out to those who are in dire need. Needs are created by the availability of government money and the lack of private cash. Money talks and indeed swears in these situations. Ottawa's dollars offered the profane means to either a white collar career or to pursuit of blue collar lifestyles long after the blue collars had been put away in the closet.
The most intriguing aspect of the Tobin run at the Liberal leadership is whether he may fancy the Mikhail Gorbachev model of revolution from within. Certainly he would earn the gratitude of Newfoundlanders and Canadians alike if a few gobs of Glasnost and Perestroika hit the Nomenklatura of Ottawa square in the chops. Hail restructuring and openness and hire on Noam Chomsky to be Clerk of the Privy Council.