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[ 07-06-2004 ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/jackson.html
'Gritlock' defined'
Chances of any party beating the Liberals continue to wither
By PAUL JACKSON -- Calgary Sun
January 17, 2002
Political insider Peter G. White delivered the bleak news to a packed luncheon meeting of the Canadian Club in Calgary, a city, he says whimsically, that has much to answer for in his assessment.
White's news: Our federal political system has become completely dysfunctional and we no longer have a traditional two-party system with its checks and balances.
The Liberals are now the only national party and with a scattered opposition they can do anything they want with immunity, and chances are they are unassailable.
Things may remain that way forever.
Yes, a depressing thought, by any assessment.
Actually, that is also the thesis his book Gritlock: Are the Liberals in Power Forever? ($19.95, Canadian Political Bookshelf. ISBN O-9689374-0-3).
Friends, this is the most perceptive work on Canadian politics I've read in a decade. It's absorbing. Pick it up, and if you're a political junkie you really won't be able to put it down. Politicians from Preston Manning to John Crosbie to Gary Filmon, and historians and political scientists from Michael Bliss to Tom Flanagan to Hugh Segal are raging about it.
It's a hot number, for sure.
White assesses the cataclysmic event that occurred in 1993 when Manning's Reform party came out of nowhere to win 52 seats in Western Canada and slash away the federal Progressive Conservatives' traditional base in the region, with Lucien Bouchard's Parti Quebecois doing the same in his province, thereby killing the traditional two-party system.
The Liberals have had a free ride since then -- even the once-stalwart New Democrat base in Ontario has been in continuing decline since Ed Broadbent quit as leader -- and the chances of any party beating the Liberals continue to wither.
The Grits are now not only the most successful party in the history of the democratic world, but in any world. They have even outlived the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico, and the Communist party in the Soviet Union!
While White's work is jammed with election statistics and trends, it is not by any means a book of statistics. The author, together with his researcher Adam Daifallah, uncover the "dirty tricks" techniques Jean Chretien's election strategists used in the 2000 campaign, particularly to undermine a naive Stockwell Day, and explain how the Liberals managed to manipulate the news media in that campaign.
The stunning success of the Chretien Liberals in three straight elections is all the more remarkable, explains White, because since 1993 Canada has been in continuing decline, suffering from economic mediocrity, administrative incompetence and complacency -- and international irrelevance.
White's bottom line: "The Liberals are both morally and intellectually bankrupt."
Yet, though the writing is on the wall for all of us to see -- a dollar that is 62% lower than the U.S. dollar and still falling, unemployment one-third higher than in the U.S., and our living standards now about 20% below those of the U.S. and falling, voters keep giving the architects of these calamities huge majorities.
Why?
Because there currently is no national conservative party.
The Canadian Alliance is a western regional rump and the federal PCs an Atlantic Canada regional rump.
Day and Clark despise each other, and put their own egos and their own job ambitions ahead of the nation's interests.
They have to go.
He contends, too, that Stephen Harper is too narrow in his views to make a breakthrough in Ontario.
Only moderates such as Diane Ablonczy and Grant Hill can unite the two conservative parties.
White's whimsical crack about Calgary?
Well, aside from Manning, who orchestrated the Reform party's staggering rise from nowhere in just six years and undermined the two-party system, all the current serious Alliance candidates are Albertans: Both Harper and Ablonczy are from Calgary, Grant Hill is from Okotoks, which isn't that far away, and Day is from Red Deer.
And the man who, White charges, has been most responsible for halting any deal between the two parties, and thus allowed the Liberals to snatch away the 2000 election and to appear invincible in the future, is Clark, also now a Calgary MP.
"So, one way or another, Calgary has a lot to answer for."
Well, on that one, Peter, we can't fault you.
Jackson, associate editor of the Sun, can be reached at paul.jackson@calgarysun.com. Letters to the editor should be sent to callet@sunpub.com.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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