Mission accomplished! Since Liberal
leadership candidate Joe Volpe has been neutralized, I’d like to take you on
a triumphal march towards Montreal where the Grits will elect the new leader
of the Liberal Party.
Or, not too fast. I have some housekeeping
to take care of first.
What happened in the last six months is not
new, but the Liberal leadership race has been very useful in bringing to the
surface what the present state of the Liberal Party is all about.
The housekeeping is not about Volpe,
instead it is about a rotten system, it’s about the media, it’s about the
role of minorities in the political system and it’s about fairness.
There are many reasons why Volpe is now out
of the race (and, if he’s not, he should get out of a game in which the team
owns the referee, the judges and the TV commentators). However, before
elaborating on that, I would like to talk about the environment surrounding
the Liberal leadership race.
First, the system.
The New Democrats and the Conservatives
have moved towards the one-person-one-vote system and have taken advantage
of new technology to strengthen democracy within their parties by giving
more power to the rank-and-file. It’s a process still with some glitches,
but it’s simpler, reduces the role of manipulators, and, most importantly,
reduces the costs, meaning that there’s more democracy and less dependency
on corporations.
In fact, the New Democrats and
Conservatives have also radically changed their systems to finance
themselves. They use the internet more and more to collect money directly
from rank-and-file members and supporters.
On the other side, the Liberals are the
only ones who have decided to stick with the old system.
Here’s how it worked: the usual known
Liberal bagmen (most of them ending up into the Senate) invited 10 to 15
rich friends for a private chat with a Cabinet minister or a Prime Minister
for a bargain price of $5,000 to $10,000 each. So, while eating some salmon
and bocconcini, they talked about the need of to help the disadvantaged, the
way to reduce unemployment and pollution, and how to make life for all
Canadians better, especially for the owners of the companies paying for the
pricey bocconcini.
So, why change a system that served the
Liberals and their rich friends so well for decades? It allowed the top
players to control the process; in fact, by controlling the money they could
get rid of unwanted candidates, and, by using activists and manipulators,
they could control the party’s apparatus.
That was the general idea the party’s
establishment had in mind at the beginning of the race. The members of the
establishment had, or they thought they had a candidate, Frank McKenna. The
money was already committed, and the party machine was almost solid behind
the project.
Unfortunately, the world did not unfold as
it was supposed to according to the “Trombones”. The “star” candidates
dropped out and the Trombones were left with no ‘spartito’ to play. They
were stranded without a candidate while the organization came unglued and
the money vanished.
The party routine just fell apart and the
“Trombones” had to start from scratch: so first they needed a candidate.
They did not like what they had on hand, so
they started recruiting outside the party and outside the country. They
thought about having a “new Trudeau,” Michael Ignatieff, and, with the help
of some mouthpieces in the national media, they thought everything was in
place for the parade to Montreal.
Well, again, the world did not unfold as it
should.
Why? First of all, the people who helped
the top players to gather support among the rank-and-file in the past, had
learned the trade and decided to work for themselves.
Make no mistake: what’s happening in this
Liberal leadership race is a replay of what happened when the Liberals
elected John Turner, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin; and, for that matter,
even in the other political organizations before they changed the systems.
Recall the fight between Brian Mulroney and Joe Clark.
One of the people, of course, among many
others, who mastered the Liberal machine was Joe Volpe. His presence in the
leadership race was a glitch in the old, oiled Liberal machine and he had to
be promptly eliminated.
So for the whole summer Liberal players
parked the would-be-Trudeau in the shade of some holiday resort and, with
the help of some in the media, worked on the elimination of “the glitch,”
a.k.a. Joe Volpe.
The second problem the Liberal players had
was financing because financing was, and is, a tougher nut to crack due to
Bill C-24.
Former prime minister Jean Chrétien decided
to approve a new set of rules (Stephen LeDrew, the same person who asked for
Joe Volpe’s resignation, described the rules “as dumb as a bag of hammers”)
that ban the major source of income for the Liberal machine: the
corporations.
So, because of the eagerness of the former
and new “Trombones” of the Liberal Party to get rid of “the glitch” in their
organization, they were forced to expose the holes in their obsolete
financial system as well as the archaic organization that favours the “smart
people,” not the intelligent and honest ones.
The proof that the system is broken is
evident, it only takes a look at the website of the Liberal Party (www.liberal.ca):
after almost two weeks from the so-called “Super Weekend,” they still don’t
have the final results of the vote (as of last Friday they had posted the
results of 441 meetings out of 471!).
So, now that they have used the holes in
their old system to get rid of someone who learned the trade better than the
masters, they want to put a lid on all of it and get back to the normal
business. In other words they’re trying to put the toothpaste into the tube.
Is it impossible? Not if you have a friendly and lazy media.
And this brings me back to Volpe.
He has been ridiculed for accepting a
cheque from 11-year-olds and he was fined for $20,000 because some of his
volunteers signed a dead Liberal and paid the fees for three others.
The Toronto Star, of course, broke
the story on the fact that some membership fees were paid by some volunteers
of Volpe’s organization and one new member of the Liberal Party was dead.
Wow, can you imagine! What a scoop!
The Toronto Star splashed the story
on Volpe’s campaign on the front page of a Saturday edition, the day after
they had another front page with another “scoop”. Guess the topic: Mafia.
It’s not all: the day after they had another mafia story, a feature un a
mafia boss killed over 20 years ago. The name? Paul Volpe! His relationship
with Joe Volpe is the same relationship Adam Smith has with David Smith.
Now back to the money from 11-years-old.
We’re talking about legal money and a legal cheque. Of course, it all can be
interpreted as a way to circumvent Bill-24, but what about the big loans to
the other leadership contenders? Do you think that money was handed to other
candidates from people on welfare or from workers on the assembly line from
GM?
No investigations pieces there.
Moreover, where were the front-page massive
splashes, with big play, about Bob Rae’s campaign chair in British Columbia
resigning because of fake signatures on the new memberships? It didn’t
happen.
What about the dead person who was signed
up as a supporter in Ignatieff’s riding? According to the party, the fault
is of the dead person who forgot to notify Ignatieff about his departure.
The present organization of the Liberal
Party is a joke. And the fact that so many dead people turn up in the lists
of a dead party, makes all the sense in the world.
What surprises me instead is the unbalanced
coverage from some national media, in particular The Toronto Star and
CTV-NewsNet; one of the few that has covered the events in a more balanced
and professional way, is Don Newman on CBC Newsworld.
