When We’re Here, We’re not Out Here, We’re Just Here

Norman Spector, former Chief of Staff to Brian Mulroney and former Canadian Ambassador to Israel, is correct in predicting that we are about to see the dirtiest election campaign in Canada. But a portion of his latest column in the G&M just rubbed me the wrong way. Here is the disturbing part:

Out West, where I live, one disturbingly often hears talk emanating from our near-Eastern neighbours that if Ontarians continue to vote for continued Liberal corruption, Canada will not be the kind of country they want to belong to. Deciding for whom to vote is a complex matter, and I would hope that Mr. Harper abstains from that argument personally and, even better, spikes it in Alberta at the first opportunity.

I live in the West, but not out of anywhere. Out West is an expression that Eastern and Central Canadians are likely to use. But to use it when you are sitting right on Vancouver Island is a little peculiar; it is indicative that Spector writes from the West but with an apparent nostalgia from the centralising perspective. That, I’d suggest, might explain his freight of his Near-eastern neighbours. He may be closer to Alberta, but he does not understand it.

Dramatic effect about disturbing talk emanating from Alberta aside, one has to ask: disturbing to whom? The argument that if the Liberals win the next election, this country will be a lesser place in which to live is not disturbing, among others, to those who did not profit from the stolen monies and the Liberal corruption. Some of the reasons seem very clear: Paul Martin sat in Chretien’s Cabinet, where according to BC’s David Anderson, the Liberal slush fund was discussed. Martin was Minister of Finance and vice-president of the Treasury Board. In addition, Martin’s riding is in Quebec –right on the Island of Montreal, where Liberals freely circulated with brown paper bags and/or envelops lining their coat pockets full of cash just diverted from the government Paul Martin had a crucial role in administering. What is more, Martin was then in full control of the Liberal party machine in Quebec. Since AdScam was an operation that overlapped party and state, Martin had front row seats to most of it, and every opportunity to know.

It may be a big IF for Spector to tell whether Martin knew of AdScam. But it does not dissolve the argument, even if Spector believes Martin, that if a man in the middle of all that did not know any of it, the man would have to be deaf and dumb. And is that the kind of man that should be running the country? What else did he miss on all those years? Either of those alternative is what Albertan near-easterners find truly disturbing. And, more disturbing still things will be if Ontarians send him back to Ottawa with a majority. True to the provincial motto, Fortis et Liber, no one is going to tell Albertans what to do or think, when to do it or think it, whether it’s one of our own or not. Albertans don’t operate that way.

If we were to turn Spector’s logic around, disturbing are also those who would choose a government mired in corruption no matter what; who would blindly ignore the lessons of the immediate past for the sake of what is now cuddly familiar to them. They are the ones in need of spiking, rather than those in Alberta and in Quebec who hope not to live in a country where their countrymen are so out of it, and so easily distracted from the real issue.

Crossposted from Civitatensis.ca