From Chantal Hebert's column, Oct 8, 2004

Via Toronto Star:

Liberals blind to new realities

CHANTAL HÉBERT

It has only taken four days but all the glib summer assumptions about the House of Commons going about its business mostly as usual under a slightly reconfigured makeup have been replaced by a strikingly different set of certainties.

Here are some of them:

• The Liberals, who avoided the closest of calls in the House last night, are their own worst enemies. The disunity and the lack of discipline of the caucus will make it hard for the Prime Minister to focus on the survival of his government and on securing a majority in the next election.

• Conservative leader Stephen Harper is willing and ready to step into Martin's shoes and try to make this Parliament work despite its perilous fractures.

• The Bloc Québécois has a better grasp of the limits of its recent election victory in Quebec than the Liberals have of theirs across Canada.

• There are reasons why the NDP has become increasingly irrelevant over the past decade and they were very much in evidence this week.

Let's take them in order.

If minority governments have any silver linings, it is in offering those who run them an excuse to reinvent themselves and, in the case of returning governments, to get out of the inevitable groove that results from too many consecutive years in power.

That's what both Ontario premier Bill Davis and prime minister Pierre Trudeau did when they ran minority governments in the 1970s.

To succeed, Davis and Trudeau made some of the better ideas of their opponents their own, co-opting essential opposition allies in the process but also making their own tent larger in time for a subsequent election.

None of that was in evidence this week as Martin served up his recent Liberal platform under the guise of a throne speech.

During the campaign, the platform was a one-day wonder. Translated into a throne speech, it outlived its usefulness as a consensual mechanism within minutes.

Not only was there precious little fresh material for the opposition to like, but the government also missed a golden opportunity to revamp its tired image at the expense of the other parties.

Moreover, Martin eliminated all references to one of the few acts in office that distinguished him from his predecessor.

To appease his restless Ontario caucus, he cut out his recent decision to embrace asymmetrical federalism from the throne speech, sacrificing in the process his best hope that the Bloc would be under enough pressure from Quebec — where Martin's approach to the health accord was popular — to support the government's agenda rather than risk an election on it.

The notion that the Liberal caucus is recklessly unaware of the new realities the government is operating under was further reinforced when its first post-throne speech meeting featured pointed complaints from some MPs about the Prime Minister's decision to cancel a 10 per cent pay raise for parliamentarians.

Meanwhile, if Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson needed another signal that Harper is eager to pick up where Martin would leave off if his government died an early death, the substance of the amendments the official opposition brought forward on Wednesday provided it.

The Conservative package of amendments gives every party, including the NDP, more solid reasons to buy into it than the Liberal throne speech itself.

Each of Harper's proposals could have been in the Liberal speech, a signal that the Conservative leader has been doing the kind of homework Martin has avoided all summer.

For its part, the Bloc amendment removed doubts that Duceppe might have missed the main point of his Quebec victory last June; that is, that Quebecers want him to look beyond sovereignty in the Commons.

Far from reflecting the sovereignist credo of the party, the Bloc amendment that passed last night could have been drafted by the federalist premier of Quebec (until it was amended to secure all-party support, it actually included Jean Charest's name).

Finally, Tommy Douglas and David Lewis must have turned over in their graves when NDP leader Jack Layton claimed that they inspired his decision to support the Liberal throne speech. This in the face of a Conservative amendment that clearly does more to advance his party's objectives on proportional representation, unemployment insurance and the U.S.-sponsored anti-ballistic missile project.

While the NDP has a history of propping up Liberal minority governments, its past leaders won significant concessions in exchange: medicare in Douglas' case and a made-in-Canada energy policy in the case of Lewis.

But this week, a miserly line in the throne speech on democratic reform and the promise of a debate, but not a vote and certainly not a commitment, on missile defence were enough to keep Layton's NDP on side.

Of the four parties, the NDP is clearly the most spooked by the prospect of a snap election.

At this rate, by the time an election does come, voters may have a hard time telling the difference between the New Democrats and the Liberals.