One of the most abused
slogans by Canadian politicians is, “We are not like the Americans.” I
never agree with that statement because I don’t like generalizations,
and I believe we have much more in common with the Americans than we
want to believe. This vote-catching mantra is exploited mainly by the
Liberals, but the reality is quite different.
Last month, at the Ontario Provincial Liberal gathering in Toronto, the
guest speaker was James Carville, the guru who engineered the campaign
that brought Bill Clinton to the White House. He said, amongst other
things, that Canadian Liberals and American Democrats have many things
in common. In Montréal, at the end of this month, the guest speaker for
the federal Liberals is going to be Howard Dean, another prominent
American Democrat.Now, can you imagine if the leader of the Progressive
Conservative Party of Ontario had, say, invited Karl Rove, and the
federal Conservative had as a guest speaker Elizabeth Dole? It would
have been a bonanza for the Liberals, who are already accusing prime
minister Stephen Harper of being too close to US President George Bush.
And, of course, it would have been a panacea for most of the national
media, the same media that don’t even blink over the decision of the
Liberals to invite Carville to Toronto and Dean to Montréal.
It also looks like that the Liberal grassroots agree with the decision of
the top executives. Steve MacKinnon, the national director of whatever
is left of the Liberal Party, told the Toronto Star last week
that a very small minority of Liberals oppose the choice of Dean: “Our
emails are running about 50 to 1 in favour, with people saying, ‘Wow,
what a coup.’”
I hope Mr. McKinnon doesn’t count the emails using the same criteria his
party uses to count the votes to elect delegates.
I have a lot of respect for Carville and Dean and we should listen to
whoever can say something meaningful. The point is that we can’t say “we
are different from the Americans,” pretending to make a social
statement, when in reality it is just political posturing.
In fact, our affinities with the Americans go beyond the political
organizations. Look at the Unions: they are so close to the American
that many of their headquarters are actually in Washington.
James Carville said in Toronto that the Liberals have many things in
common with the Democrats, and nobody complains; the Liberals, for their
part, are accusing the Conservatives to be like the American
Republicans, in a country where most of the labour unions take orders
from Washington. Furthermore, and this is not political posturing, nine
out of 10 items we import or export are used or produced by the
Americans.
The last element, the import-export reality, goes well beyond the
mathematics and economic considerations. It means that the Americans, in
their daily lives, use many of the products we manufacture and vice
versa: what we eat, how we dress, the movies we watch, the music we
listen to. Most of the stores we shop at are owned by the
Americans or have their shelves stocked with their merchandise.
Furthermore, at night, when we go home, 70 per cent of what we watch on
US and Canadian television networks, sitting in our living rooms, is
made in America. (The exception to this, of course, is in Quebec, where
there is far less consumption of American culture than in the rest of
Canada.) Still, those are choices that Canadians make freely on a daily
basis.
Yes, most Canadians are against the war in Iraq and, lately, it looks
like that the Americans are too. We also know that Americans did not
sign the Kyoto Protocol and we did. But it is also true that we pollute
the environment just like the Americans; in fact some say we are worse
then them.
If there is a difference between us and the Americans is in the political
blah, blah, blah that makes us scream at Brian Mulroney for fishing with
George Bush, but it is ok for Jean Chrétien to play golf with Bill
Clinton. The Americans remain the same; but our political posturing
changes.
And this political blah, blah, blah brings to my attention Garth Turner.
First, I don’t understand why preachers for higher standards of
democracy in Ottawa are always sitting in the back benches. It might be
a coincidence but I don’t remember a minister leaving a cabinet chair on
a matter of principle. If I am not mistaken, the last one was Joe
Comuzzi two years ago and, I’m sure we have other examples, but the
other one that comes to mind is John Turner in 1974.
In a series of press conferences, Turner said last week that he is
“disturbed” by the lack of democracy in the Conservative Party of
Stephen Harper. I don’t completely agree with former chief of staff of
Jean Chrétien, Eddy Goldenberg, when he writes in his book The Way it
Works, that “the alternative to governing from the centre is not
governing effectively at all.” However, I have some serious reservations
in turning Parliament into a City Hall with 308 councilors, or into a
cabinet with 308 ministers.
