The Sixth Estate

When the Parti Quebecois announced that one of their strategies as a new government — if they ever form one — would be to provoke a fight with the federal government over who runs the Employment Insurance system, I don’t mind telling you, it worried me. Not because of anything related to the PQ, but more because of Stephen Harper himself. During his days as an Albertan anti-nationalist, you see, Harper also argued that federal programs like EI (and CPP, and the police, and healthcare, and income tax, etc., etc.) should be dismantled and handed off to the provinces to run as they chose:

The time has come for Albertans to take greater charge of our own future. This means remusing control of the powers that we possess… but that we have allowed the federal government to exercise… It is imperative to take the initiative, to build firewalls around Alberta, to limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach upon legitimate provincial jurisdiction.

This letter could have been lifted virtually verbatim from the pages of the PQ manifesto, just swapping out the names of the two provinces. It demonstrates why Harper is exactly the wrong Prime Minister to defend Canada against the demands of the separatist PQ — because at least on this issue, he actually agrees with them. I have warned for a long time now that electing a man who is basically an anti-nationalist would have dire consequences if there was ever another sovereignty battle with Quebec, and, if the PQ win the next election, those dire consequences will arrive.

What I’m suggesting here isn’t merely that Harper will “throw” the match, so to speak, but that he will see the PQ’s demands as an opportunity to press forward on some of the more controversial elements of his own agenda, and then “blame the separatists” to avoid taking responsibility for his own actions. This spring’s comparatively minor EI reforms provoked howls of protest, especially in Atlantic Canada. Imagine the political fallout if the federal EI system gets dismantled altogether. Politically unpopular? Absolutely! And yet the Prime Minister’s personal political beliefs are that the federal EI system should be dismantled. It’s just a question of how to convince the unwashed masses that it’s a good idea. Letting the separatists take the blame for it would be a good distraction, if he can find a way to swing it.

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After recently promising that Sixth Estate was back, I disappeared for a few days after all, which was terribly rude of me, I know. My feeble excuse is that getting back into the saddle, so to speak, hasn’t been as easy as I expected it to be, plus, I’m working on a couple of lengthy posts which will be up soon, including the latest installment in the Pork Barrel series.

In the meantime, I encourage you to check out the high-quality professional journalism in this country’s newspapers of record which, of course, makes the anonymous scribblings of bloggers like myself entirely redundant and unnecessary. Today John Ibbitson, the Canadian pundit class’s chief dunce, argues that Canadians should support Mitt Romney for President of the United States for the following reasons (I kid you not):

• Romney’s family owned a summer cottage in Ontario when he was growing up, and he also visited Windsor as a teenager.
• He spent two years as a Mormon missionary in France.
• His investment company has some shares in Canadian companies.
• Both Romney and Obama are “widely expected” to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, but Romney might do it sooner.
• Romney has a “stupid” plan for balancing the budget, but “any plan is better than no plan.”

After regaling us with all the most idiotic and pathetic reasons Ibbitson can muster for why Romney would be a good President, all of a sudden, in his last three paragraphs, he switches gears and says that Canadians should oppose the Romney Presidency because he supports tax cuts for the rich, increasing funding for the military, would blocks gay rights and healthcare reform, and wants to put “religion in everything.”

So, after spending most of his column explaining why we “should hope Mitt Romney becomes president,” in the end Ibbitson says that “maybe there isn’t” a reason Canadians should hope for it, “after all.”

Good column, John!

Many years ago now, a young Stephen Harper angrily threw out his Liberal Party membership and, after a few years of wandering in the western wilderness, emerged as a leading light of the newly established Reform Party under Preston Manning. The singular reason for his crossing the floor, we are told, is that he was devastated by the Trudeau government’s National Energy Program. Harper wasn’t the only resident of Alberta who vowed that he would never vote for the Liberals and their NEP ever again. And that decision had momentous consequences. It spun Harper off into Albertan separatism as he argued that the federal government should never again be allowed to interfere with a province’s chosen path of economic development simply “for the good of the nation.”

Wind the clock forward 30 years, and there’s been an important sea change in the Reform-Conservative movement that very few people seem willing to recognize. All of a sudden, “the good of the nation” is paramount again. British Columbia doesn’t want to build a pipeline to carry dangerous crude from Alberta to its fragile coastline? Tough luck, British Columbians! For the good of the nation, the pipeline must go through!

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