People don’t like it when they find out someone
they know, or thought they knew, is not whom they thought they
were. They feel betrayed or stupid. Additionally, people don’t like
it when other people steal their money. As I sit down with a
trans-fatty acid disguised as an Oreo and a cup of tea to
contemplate the recent ups and downs of our prime minister, I find
myself surprised about how predictable he really has been.
Here’s what I wrote a year ago in January
2003:
Paul Martin without question has things wrapped
up as we speak, but his halo is going to be so damaged by the time
the leadership contest is over a majority government for the
Liberals will be very iffy. His problem is that he has peaked too
soon, and his many weaknesses have been forgotten and unchallenged.
The media will get to him soon and feel it is their obligation to
cut him down to size. It will not be pretty. Worse still, Stephen
Harper will start to look reasonable and take more seats in Ontario
than anyone thinks possible. The Liberals will take more seats in
Quebec.
I think the thing about Paul is that he wants to
be good. He wants to make his daddy proud, but there is a darker
side. There is a massive gap between his overblown rhetoric of the
politics of achievement and the democratic deficit and what he
actually does. He doesn’t walk the talk.
Transparency? The Canadian government reported a
year ago that the amount of business it has done with Martin’s
shipping company was a few hundred thousand dollars. When the
opposition dug a little deeper the government came clean and told
us it was more like $160 million.
Demonstrating his commitment to a new kind of
politics, the PM quite successfully buried the story by announcing,
among many other things, an inquiry into the Maher Arar incident to
deflect attention away from this inconvenient truth. It turned out
the new kind of politics looked a lot like old politics of
obfuscation.
Paul Martin has been collecting taxes from us for
more than 10 years. What is he doing when we write our annual tax
return check? Nothing. He’s avoiding his. He’s hiding his company
in a tax haven. It stretches the notion of hypocrisy to the
breaking point to discover the chief tax collector in the land is
not paying taxes.
When this whole advertising fraud case was
unmasked Martin started out downplaying it. Then he started
pointing fingers, and then he decided to be horrified by it and
called an inquiry. His current communications adviser headed part
of the spin team to minimize the public fallout from this matter
some years ago under prime minister Jean Chrétien.
The prime minister is hanging by a thread of his
own stitching. He has been clear about what should happen to
politicians who knew about this and looked the other way. They
should resign or be removed he believes.
This boy loves the high-wire act. It is going to
take extraordinary creativity to cover his tracks. Nothing of
course is impossible in Ottawa, but this is going to be
tough.
Listen, there are few saints in politics, but a
minimal requirement, it seems to me, is that if you want to be
prime minister you should pay your taxes or sell your business to
someone other than your sons. If you want to talk transparency,
then tell us how much business you did with the government, don’t
hide it. And if you want to be horrified about corruption that took
place right under your nose, let us hear that sentiment before you
are backed into a corner.
The tragedy is this. I take one look at the
scintillating debate between Stephen, Tony and Belinda, all of whom
would like us to be dying in Iraq with that ill-fated policy of
America, and who knows what else, as the party they want to lead
has no policy, and I want to call Paul and say all is
forgiven.
Just lie to me so I don’t have to take
responsibility for my actions. But lie well. Make me believe.
Then I think what would I do if my daughter came
home from a mock student parliament and told me she had just been
elected student prime minister for a year, and that she had done it
by hiding the amount of money she had received from the government,
downplaying the fact she had moved her company to a tax haven
because all shipping companies do it, and that she had overcome her
obvious complicity or incompetence in the worst fraud in federal
history by blaming others and pretending to be outraged. I would
know I had failed.
