June 2000
by Barry Stagg
Brian Tobin, Newfoundland Premier and leader in pursuit of any self-promoting cause was in Toronto recently to speak to one of his favourite groups, the National Symposium on Aging. The Premier's preference for getting in front of the pending fight over how much of the medicare system the baby-boomer generation will commandeer is well known. Tobin's rather bald-faced offer to turn over Newfoundland's medicare system to Ottawa was a recent illustration of how anxious the Premier is to be innovative in his efforts to curry favour with the most demographically plentiful generation in this country.
The Premier, as usual, was full of his soft-centre leftist cant about how the national health care system must be saved, not so much from the neglect of his fellow federal Liberals but from the supposed attacks by prosperous, conservative provinces such as Mike Harris' Ontario. The Newfoundland premier seemed a lot more interested in setting up a prosperous province like Ontario as a straw enemy than he did in solving any real health problems. Any fool, not being a Liberal of course, would be able to see that the real problem with the national medicare system is Ottawa's attempts to starve the provinces with drastic funding cuts over the last decade. A corollary to this is that the provinces are set upon by the medical industry which insists on being paid at private sector rates while extracting all of its revenue from the pockets of taxpayers. There is no more formidable lobby in this country then that represented by doctors and hospital administrators anxious to preserve their socialist turf. These days, penthouse socialism is alive in Canada only in the national health care system.
In any event, Premier Tobin must be setting himself up as the populist champion of upper class government spending. That means the particular government class of employees and professionals who make a very wealthy living from white collar jobs paid 100% by the taxpayer. The premier knows too well that many of these white collar drones will be retiring soon and their pensions and their massive RRSP reservoirs will be a drain on the federal treasury. Brian Tobin, as a potential Liberal prime minister, must embrace the interests and the plain, old, greedy self-promotion of this government class. He has no difficulty associating with this government class since he epitomizes the type of insider who rises through the ranks by anticipating the popularity and flavour of government handouts and thus positioning himself immediately to the left of the particular civic faucet that spews out the cash.
It seems quite ironic that federal Liberal cabinet ministers, like the hapless Jane Stewart, have to take the flack for the ridiculous, wasteful and, in some cases, fraudulent handout of government money by the federal Liberals. The irony is in the fact that Brian Tobin was a master of this type of pork-barrelling. He built his political career on doing that in his federal riding and certainly would not have risen far in the estimation of the present prime minister if he had not wholeheartedly embraced this type of wasteful patronage when Chretien came to power. It is ridiculous and the height of Liberal fantasy to expect Brian Tobin to be anything other than a pure pork-barrel politician if he somehow becomes leader of the federal Liberals.
The federal Liberal hold on power in Ottawa may be running out a lot sooner than many of the comfortable sycophants in the Liberal caucus thought possible. When left leaning political columnists, day after day, whistle in the dark about the ideological perils of Canadian Alliance candidates Tom Long and Stockwell Day, it is obvious that the comfortable left sees the return of healthy conservative politics in Ottawa.
People are anxious to elect a government that will do away with the foolishness, waste and contemptuous abuse of the taxpayer that is exemplified by the Chretien government. Brian Tobin may find that he is trying to climb on the back of a losing nag in the pending horse race to the bastions of power in Ottawa. The grey power lobby should be wary of any gifts emanating from this ambitious Liberal.