The fall of 2008 was magical time, if by "magical" you mean "the world was ending." Lehman Brothers collapsed into bankruptcy on September 15 and the year-old recession metastasized into a full-bore, balls-out financial panic. More than anything else, this was responsible for electing Barack Obama president of the United States. From that moment on, John McCain made to many stupid unforced errors for him to ever be taken seriously again.
Oh, and Canada was enjoying it's 42nd federal election in 20 minutes. Nobody does democracy like Canadians have over the last decade. I vote almost as often as I masturbate, and I masturbate plenty! It's actually pretty annoying.
Because of spectacularly bad political decisions on his part, Stephen Harper's minority Conservative government was reelected, but didn't yet win his long lusted-after majority.
How We Almost Gave the Tories the Boot is what happened in the aftermath of the 2008, during what Canadians call "The Winter of Our Discontent." The author, Brian Topp, was the New Democratic Party's campaign director and a key player in what subsequently happened.
After a campaign riddled with incredibly dumb mistakes, Harper consciously chose to begin his second mandate with even dumber ones. When the House of Commons resumed sitting in late November, Harper's jerk-off finance minister, Jim Flaherty, introduced an economic statement that basically said "Everything's fine" just as the ruins of the world economy were smouldering around him.
But then it got worse. Harper and Flaherty decided that they were going to be Scott Walker, two years before Scott Walker was invented by the Koch brothers. Among other things, the Conservatives announced that federal workers would lose their right to strike and pay equity for women would be rolled back. Then they set off a political hydrogen bomb: the public subsidy to the parties would be immediately ended.
This requires some explaining for my foreign readers. In 2003, Prime Minister Jean Chretien decided that he very much wanted to cripple his successor as prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party, Paul Martin. He did this by banning corporate and union donations to the parties, replacing them with a per-vote public subsidy. The Liberals, being a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Bay Street banks, took the biggest hit of all in this scheme and it had the effect of electing Harper, who had mastered grassroots fund-raising.
Under the public subsidy, the parties that weren't the Conservatives took out loans to pay for election campaigns and repaid them with the public subsidy. The immediate end of the subsidy would have bankrupted. And there was no way that the opposition parties were going to tolerate that.
As much as he now likes to pretend otherwise, Harper is no stranger to the idea of a coalition replacing a "democratically elected" government. During the dark days of Paul Martin's short-lived minority, he had proposed doing just that with the New Democrats and the separatist Bloc Quebecois. Now the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc proposed doing it to Harper.
The whole idea was apparently Topp's and Jack Layton appointed him as one of the negotiators to approach the Grits.
Small problem, Stephane Dion, the leader of the Liberals, ran an even more disastrous campaign than the Tories did and had already announced his resignation. Everyone believed (as later happened) that Michael Ignatieff was going to replace him. Ignatieff was far more conservative, arrogant, opportunistic and unprincipled than was Dion and a coalition would likely have been a dead letter under him. Time was of the essence.
Even while Dion was still leader, the Liberals couldn't stop being the Liberals and nearly sank the deal. As they have been for most of my life, they were in the midst of a vicious civil war and, all available evidence to the contrary, still believed that they could win an election on their own. Those assholes honestly suggested that the NDP just give them power with nothing in return. Breaking the Grits of that illusion took days.
The greater problem was the NDP and the Liberals did not by themselves have enough votes to defeat the Conservatives on a confidence vote in the House or pass anything as a coalition. For that they would need the Bloc.
One of the great lies of the "Coalition Crisis of Ought-Eight" was that the treasonous Bloc would actually be partners in it. They weren't. They wouldn't be part of the government or hold any Cabinet seats. All the Bloc would do was pledge to support the NDP-Liberal coalition on confidence measures for roughly 18 months.
The Harper Tories engaged in almost Herculean levels in lying in response to the coalition proposal. It was an unconstitutional power-grab against the wishes of the people, we were told, despite the fact the Westminster parliamentary system specifically allows for it.
The presence of Ducceppe and the Bloc only made matters worse. This, Harper screamed from the rooftops, was Stephane Dion "getting into bed with separatists," which was a shot well below the belt. As Mr. Topp points out in his book, the only person that Quebec separatists despise as fulsomely as Pierre Trudeau is Dion. More importantly, Harper wanted to do exactly the same thing only three years earlier.
Because Canadians aren't very bright, the whole thing was public relations clusterfuck of immense proportions. And it was going to get worse. Oh, it would get so much worse.
On the evening of December 3, both Harper and Dion delivered pre-taped addresses to the country. The Prime Minister surrounded himself with flags and lied his ass off. The Leader of the Opposition, who on top of being only barely functional in English, looked as though he was starring in a Hezbollah hostage video. And Dion could barely even get his hostage tape to the networks on time.
It was nothing less than the single greatest political disaster I had ever seen. Dion, who in many ways was a stronger champion of federalism than Harper, was so thoroughly discredited and humiliated that he immediately resigned the next day.
Ignatieff was named interim Liberal leader and the Grits' already formidable arrogance and stupidity went into hyperdrive. He fucked around, using the coalition as a meaningless threat before ultimately supporting Harper in Parliament for nine months.
In a way, it's actually too bad that How We Almost Gave the Tories the Boot ends in the fall of 2009 because that's where the real fun started. What followed in the two years after the book was the complete disintegration of the Liberals, the almost forced deportation of Michael Ignatieff and the rise of the NDP as a genuine political force in Canada. Brian Topp's analysis of everything that happened after September of 2009 would have been fascinating to read.
Whether you agree with the NDP on policy (and I don't,) How We Almost Gave the Tories the Boot is a much better than average contemporary political history. You see, in real time through Blackberry messages, how the negotiations built and how everything ultimately fell apart.
If you like your political books to grab you by the crotch before head-butting you, I can't recommend Brian Topp's book enough. How We almost Gave the Tories the Boot is instructive in the fine art of what Richard Nixon called nut-cutting and shows you not only where the bodies are buried, but almost lets you hold the shovel.
If you can, I suggest you pick it up.
0 comments:
Post a Comment