Political Stockholm Syndrome
May 7, 2005 · By kaqchikel
Alberta is not going to separate from Canada. Not this year, anyway. But the heated rhetoric about a potential Ontario-led return of Liberals to Ottawa has got some people thinking ahead of the possibility here and here. Albertans have seen this movie before. Already under a cloud of suspicion following Sheila Fraser’s report to Parliament, Ontario and Atlantic Canada still voted soundly Liberal in the last election, and succumbed to the politics of hatred under Paul Martin just as much as they had under Jean Chrétien.
Westerners have longer memory when it comes to these things. They remember Chrétien declaring in Nova Scotia that he did not like people in the west. Calgarians remember that Chrétien did not once set foot in Calgary during the 2000 election. Westerners remember the gratuitous racist accusations from Crown ministers in the Liberal Party. Albertans remember their popular premier villified for supporting clinics just like the one Paul Martin attends in Montreal. The politics of division, an expedient short-term Liberal tool, has done nearly irreparable damage to the fabric of this country. It’s not just about the NEP any more.
No longer under a cloud of corruption but now that Liberals are very much in it, very much the cloud itself, many people in the Prairies are wondering what it would take for Ontario to let go of the Liberal Party. This is no mere rhetorical musing. The question goes to the core of the experience of being co-citizens with Ontarians; it goes to the experience of realising that something is seriously wrong in this country the closer one gets to the centre. The question about the corrupt nature of the Liberal Party has been settled in the minds of many westerners, and in most Albertans. There is a second and more crucial question: How does one react to the moral turpitude of one’s neighbours or co-citizens?
The rumblings about a renewal of separatist sentiments in Alberta are, for now, just that, rumblings. But politics is a game of experience, and westerners, Albertans in particular, have experienced themselves as separate from the culture of corruption that has for long been running the country. Moral turpitude is never quite an appealing friend of the morally able. It is not that Albertans are puritans. Prairie common sense understands that, as David Hume said, there is always room for corrupt individuals in political institutions. But political wisdom rests in knowing how much of it to tolerate.
And it is not as though westerners and Albertans have snubbed urban Ontarians for their lack of political wisdom. Western Canadians offered the country clear alternatives in 1997 and in 2000. But Ontario would rather stay with Chrétien’s Liberal gangsters. I wonder to what extent the continued support that urban Ontario still bestow on Liberals is a “second reality” in which they are hiding from the admission that they, by and large, are responsible for the political strength of the criminal machine in Ottawa. To turn away from them now would amount to an admission of guilt. And guilt requires humility as well as a properly ordered conscience.
David Taras may call it blackmail, but he just doesn’t get it. From the western perspective, most urban Ontario and Atlantic support for Chrétien was vastly shrugged as ignorance. Ignorance can be ignored, even tolerated. But support for a new Liberal government can no longer be deemed ignorance; it would amount to outright complicity.
National unity is important for westerners. But how does one keep to unity when the Liberals have done much to smear the west as unCanadian; how does one keep to unity when they have captivated urban Ontario and Atlantic Canada and driven a wedge between the west and the rest of the country? How does one keep to unity when the crooks have taken over and peddle their crimes as “unity;” how does one keep to unity when the captives are suffering from Stockholm syndrome? Westerners have tried to unseat the captors and to liberate the captives, but to no avail. It has become impossible to accept the captors; it is becoming harder and harder to sympathise with the captives.
Cross posted from Civitatensis
If you want a new partership, the first thing to do is to break up the old one. The most likely way to do so is to encourage Quebec to be free.
If Quebec were to separate, the West could negotiate a new deal with Ontaria, the fat spoiled child of confederation. They’ll be so frightened and disheartened, the West (under the right leadership) could negotiate any deal it wants.
[...] objection really highlights the faults in Canada as a nation. The West and Quebec clearly reject government by Ontario in principle, and Ontario similarly rejects Western and Quebecois [...]
I see someone else also coined “political Stockholm Syndrome”. I used it back in October 2003 to describe a US Senator (Zell Miller)of Georgia who must mugged by the GOP back in 1994 and became conservative afterward.