Small men in big britches

Phil Burpee, Comment

     What are we to make of our Prime Minister? He seems to be forever in a helmet-haired tanty over some perceived affront to his antediluvian worldview. Or perhaps if he is not so much pining for those happy times before the Flood, then maybe he is just ticked that, Noah-like, he has brought us safely to the metaphorical Ararat of the New Canadian Conservatism, and we seem somehow ungrateful – forever agitating for such debauched remnants of the Old Ways as ethical modulation, empiricism, considered opinion, egalitarianism, representational governance, philosophical nuance, historical context, acquiescence to wisdom, forbearance, selflessness, and any recognizable articulation of our national place within a roiling global cosmos. The master if this wallowing vessel has sent out a clucking chicken on reconnaissance over the troubled waters and it has returned clutching a piece of wilted lettuce in its beak. Behold! – and Rejoice! The New McKingdom is at hand!


     Any and all political administrations suffer the same ultimate and predictable fate. After a certain period of tenure, they inevitably begin to show the unsettling effects of the wriggling spirochetes of power madness – a horrible and queasy-making affliction typically presenting as an outbreak of suppurating eruptions on the skin of the body politic, an increasingly agitated application of dogma and hollow rhetoric, and finally a descent into a gibbering spiral of frothing insanity from which there is no return, and prior to which, no diagnosis is either bidden nor anyway recognized. It is an ugly spectacle, best shielded from the eyes of children, and any others of weakened comprehension. One has only to cast a furtive glance up towards Edmonton, for instance, to see this type of dreadful bedlam at play – a once handsome and competent PC Party of Alberta now grovelling in rags and soiled gaunchies before the pristine feet of the semi-divine Jim Prentice, a man for whom unearned wealth and political inaction are badges of honour, to lead them out of the Wilderness and back towards that shining city on the hill which, in their fevered delirium, remains their just and rightful place. “Oh, thank you, thank you, Lord Jim!” Whew! – a nasty business – oh ye of desperate faith.

     But back to Ottawa and the Man with the Plan. It is, I would say, increasingly obvious that the ship of state that is the government of Stephen Harper, far, far from the scriptural ark, is behaving instead not unlike that Russian cruise-liner tub that the Canadian Coast Guard rather blithely dumped into the sluicing currents of the North Atlantic a few months ago – a wandering ghost-ship teeming, by all accounts, with huge carnivorous rats, beset with wailing phantoms, and threatening to come looming out of the fog into the path of some hapless Irish fisher-folk. No lights are to be seen on the bridge – no ‘heave to me hearties’ to be heard from the rail – no comforting clanging of the ship’s bell, nor hailing of the bosun’s call – merely a forlorn hulk awash in the chop of history, its bilges all a-slosh with the various leaking fluids of a collapsed ethos. If ever there was a time to ready the torpedoes, this is surely it. Scupper the brute and toss a card of thanks to Davy Jones onto the rising, fetid bubbles that follow it down, down, down.

     For if it weren’t enough to have set the stern and preternaturally dour Vic Toews upon us like some great sabre-toothed, moustachioed cat of righteousness amongst the pigeons, or irresponsibly give the keys to Dad’s car to the serially-inept Tony Clement, or set the magnificently-coiffed Rona Ambrose off on various ministerial missions with no perceivable or intended outcome other than checking another one off the bucket list of ‘been-there/done-that’, or dispatching the terminally-fatigued-looking Peter Kent off to Copenhagen to remind everybody that we don’t really give a fiddler’s fig about all that climate change fooferah, or task the unfortunate and utterly incompetent Peter McKay with just about any portfolio more complex than chewing gum, or loose the unpleasant and shallow Joe Oliver to remind us that the government of Canada will do ‘whatever it takes’ to see that recalcitrant ‘concerned citizens’ are summarily swept aside in our national headlong rush to become the purveyor of bitumen sludge to the commies in China, even as we dispatch a fearsome flight of a half-dozen ageing CF-18s to eastern Europe to put the fear into Mr. Putin, or the sorry business of stuffing the Red Chamber with morally-challenged dweebs like Duffy/Wallin/Brazeau – no, if all this were not enough, we now see the diabolical vision of Prime Minister Harper upbraiding none other than the Supreme Court of Canada, in the estimable person of Chief Justice Madame Beverly McLachlin, over the sordid business of the PM trying to similarly stuff some inappropriately-qualified hack onto the bench. She has said no. Mr. Harper enters another tanty. It is all too much.

     There is perhaps no other single tendency of the political right that so gives rise to deep-founded concern amongst lovers of democracy as that of the ongoing attack on the judiciary. The liberal democracies of Western civilization owe their ongoing existence to certain contingencies – chief amongst these are the rule of law, rights of free assembly and free expression, representational government, rights of property, access to a free market, separation of church and state, and perhaps most fundamentally, an independent judiciary, free of the fetters of partisanship or governmental collusion. You can always tell when a right-leaning administration is on the ropes by their almost-guaranteed knee-jerk reaction to any perceived push-back from the courts – they attack those same courts, and would, if given the opportunity to do so, seek to exert some enhanced legislative control over their deliberations. This is dangerous beyond measure, and is indicative of the flailing end-game of the current federal government. It is not enough to tinker with and seek to compromise our very electoral processes, as is being attempted under the so-called Fair Elections Act, but to engage in a public spat with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada is a sign of a wretched last-minute despair beyond saving. It is time for this man to go – and take his raggle-taggle band of nattering monkeys with him.

     We are, quite rightly, inclined to feel a sense of honour towards out national institutions – especially the parliament that is tasked with manifesting our collective wishes. But when small men in big britches strut around cockily and sully the name of our democracy, it is a call to action. Prepare for battle – there is some dirty work to be done in the Halls of Power.

Phil Burpee
May 4, 2014