I watched Stephen Harper apologize this week, before the Belinda Crossing and last night’s rebuff to him. You can tell a lot from how a person apologizes. He’d decided, or been told, that his punitive, pouty manner was doing damage so he came to say he was sorry, because his dad told him to be careful not to turn into a monster yourself when you fight monsters. That’s some apology. It’s the way Jacques Parizeau apologized for blaming “money and the ethnic vote” for the loss in the 1995 referendum. (I’m sorry that money and the ethnic vote made us lose.)

The point is, he still called them monsters. It’s the part he can’t shake. He and his guys are essentially good, unlike the other side. There is no human or moral bridge between them. So when Belinda bailed, she joined the bad guys, became a monster, too, with only scuzzy explanations available for it. “There’s no grand principles involved in this switch of position,” he said, “just ambition.” He knows such things, it seems, since if you’re not with him, you’re automatically depraved.

I was recently told that psychoanalyst Melanie Klein called that the “paranoid-schizophrenic position.” Those who disagree with you are inevitably, eternally, the enemy; they are evil and must be destroyed (electorally, with a laser sword, however). We each must choose one side or the other. Anyone who makes the Belinda Crossing has moved, Vader-like, to the Dark Side. (“No, Stephen, I am your frontbencher.”)

The alternative to paranoid schizophrenic, said Melanie Klein, is the “depressive position,” which I don’t actually find depressing but rather a relief. In this view, any of us could wind up on any side. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to figure out which side serves the public best; but almost all of us, with a bit of different luck, might have ended up over there instead of where we are.

Even Stephen. Take Scott Brison, former Tory, now a Liberal minister who fields attacks on sponsorship. Two years ago, he ran for Tory leader as by far the most economically right-wing candidate. Just scrap all public programs, he said — even in Atlantic Canada — and prosperity will automatically flow. He promised. He sounded like someone who got a gift sub to The Economist at 15 and never got over its cocksure formulas for how the world runs. Now he’s minister of public works. Some days, he sounds like Tommy Douglas. I’m not speculating on his motives; I’m saying he’s been plausible in both roles.

Take Belinda. Her dad, Frank, ran as a Liberal in the ’88 free-trade election. He said free trade would be good for his company but bad for the country, so he opposed it; but if it passed, he’d make lots of money off it. Now she funds her campaigns with that money and has entered the Liberal cabinet. Maybe it’s part of Paul Martin’s plan to clean up his party. You only let millionaires into cabinet. Vote for us. We won’t steal any more. We’re already rich. But what does it prove? People are inconsistent and opportunistic. That doesn’t make them monsters. Criticism without dehumanization would be nice.

It’s odd how the paranoid stand seems to play better in the United States than here. There’s even a book by Richard Hofstadter called The Paranoid Style in American Politics. You’d think Canadians would be good paranoiac material, with our harsh climate, barren landscape, our vulnerability to foreign power. Maybe Americans respond more to paranoia because they’re rattled by their long, brutal conquest of the continent, or their ongoing imperial activity (of which they’re in denial). They have so many victims ready to rise up, in their dreams and their reality. “Us against them” seems to fit naturally. So does the simplistic, moralistic, U.S. style in religion.

But we have our versions; you saw it in response to the Belinda Crossing, and not just by Stephen Harper. Here’s Andrew Coyne on the front page of the National Post: “I had thought the feeling of nausea that washed over me at the news was one of disgust. I now realize it was vertigo. The bottom has fallen out of Canadian politics. . . . We are staring into an abyss, where everything is permissible.”

Or, possibly, not. Try taking Gravol, Andrew. Maybe it’s just motion sickness.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.