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Monday March 21, 2005 |
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Should Jean Lapierre Resign?
by Angelo Persichilli
THE HILL TIMES
Should Jean Lapierre, federal minister
of Transportation, resign over the Jetsgo fiasco? This surreptitious
question was asked frequently in the last couple weeks by journalists to
experts, politicians and also to readers through many popular electronics
poll on Internet.
There is no doubt that
there is a problem in the air transportation sector, but there is also not
doubt that the problem has been hardly created by the minister of
Transportation. More importantly, the problem would be hardly solved by the
resignation of Mr. Lapierre.
I'm not trying to defend
Mr. Lapierre; I'm only saying that the role of his ministry is irrelevant;
and, for that matter, the role of all politicians.
With the Charter of Rights
taking over the legislative power of the Parliament and the phenomena of
globalization mapping the economic and financial course of every Country,
the role of the national Parliament is reduced to the role of a train
engineer: it can only slow down or speed up the process, the tracks are
already laid down. As someone said, the national Parliaments are too big for
small things and too small for big things.
Look at our dollar: it
goes up or down for reason that have very little to do with our economy and
a lot with international trade, the war in Iraq, the turmoil in Venezuela.
The Canadian minister of Finance presents the budget and our dollar don't
even flinch in the international markets. The Chairman of the Us Feds
sneezes and our dollar looks like a jo-jo, up and down. Sure, the governor
of Bank of Canada can jack up or reduce the rates to protect us from
inflation, but that's maintenance, like the train engineer driving us on
track build by others. The Bank of Canada is reacting to international
events, not influencing them.
Of course the role of the
federal government has been instrumental in bringing financial order in the
national books. But this is only an illusion. Ottawa has only uploaded the
capacity of collecting money, and downloaded problems on the provincial
governments. They fixed their books, but we have the health care system in
disarray, the infrastructures crumbling and our national forces becoming an
international embarrassment. Not because of the people serving the Country,
but the support behind them.
And the provincial
governments have done exactly the same with municipalities. It all started
in the middle Nineties with the duo Chrétien-Martin in Ottawa and
Harris-Eves in Ontario. They trickled down the problems and now we have
municipalities crumbling.
The cycle is now over and,
like they say, the chicken, sooner or later, comes to roost. Ottawa gives
money back to the Provinces (and to National Defense) and the Provinces try
to do the same to municipalities.
Is it back to normal then?
Not at all.
The problem in all of this
is the role of the federal government: giving the money back is just not
enough. Ottawa has failed to map out a national program for Medicare, a
national system for transportation, a program for infrastructure or for
education. The only ability that the federal government has improved is the
capacity of collecting money. There is no other vision for the future of
this country.
We remember the social
activity of Lester Pearson's government and his Nobel Peace Prize for
mediating the solution of Suez crisis; we remember the intellectual activity
of Pierre Trudeau's government with the repatriation of the Constitution,
the Charter of Rights and the National Energy Program. We had the Brian
Mulroney governments with the fiscal reform and the Free Trade. I do not
necessarily agree with all those initiatives, but definitely they had a
vision for the Country and they were stimulating a national debate.
Balancing the books is a means to an end: it is hardly a vision for the
country.
In the last 10 years we
had a lot of discussions about Medicare, education and municipalities but,
let's face it, all those disputes on such important issues were reduced to a
negotiation of salaries. Now the various level of governments are only
trying to put the money back where they were 10 years ago: with the
difference that now the federal government is weaker. Just look at Medicare:
Ottawa reduced the money and tried to compensate reducing the strings
attached. Now they give the money back, but the strings are much looser.
I'm sure at this point you
are wondering what the question about the resignation of Jean Lapierre has
to do with all of this. Nothing and this is exactly my point. Reimbursing
the money to people searching for cheap tickets for their vacation, will not
solve the problem at all.
In this context, asking
for the resignation of the minister of Transportation over the Jetsgo fiasco
is like asking for the resignation of the minister of Environment because
when it rains too much he doesn’t have a program to buy umbrellas for the
citizens.
The resignation of a
minister seems to be the mantra for everything; instead it is only the
gimmick for some newspapers to sell a few more copies. We know about the
cheap journalism that brought to the resignation of former minister of
Immigration Judy Sgro.
I remember what Michael
Marzolini, Chairman and CEO of the influential polling company Pollara Inc,
did in the late 80ies when he was asked by a group of newspapers to poll
Canadians on a simple question: Should Brian Mulroney resign? "They wished
to dramatize the issue with a poll asking Canadians whether he should
resign, and commissioned us to conduct it." Marzolini wrote in his column
"In you Opinion" on his site (http://www.pollara.ca/new/Library/SURVEYS/retirementPolls.htm).
"I refused – wrote Marzolini - to do such a poll, telling the journalists
that such a question is unfair, unbalanced, and attracts flippant and
non-thoughtful answers, producing results that defy responsible
interpretation." To prove his point, he polled 1,000 Canadians asking this
question: "Do you believe that the Hon. Charles Williamson, Minister of
State for Economic Integration, should resign?" The results were stunning:
73% of Canadians wanted him to resign, Brian Mulroney scored only 6 points
higher.
The interesting point is
that "the Hon. Charles Williamson, Minister of State for Economic
Integration" did not exist. Charles Williamson is "a very likeable
engineer", cousin of Mr. Marzolini.
This means that the real
problem for a Country is not lack of founding for Medicare or Educations; it
is the lethal combination of cheap politics with cheap journalism. |
