At the risk of giving short shrift to the juicy themes of betrayal andtreachery in the great Ottawa morality play, I’ll deal first with thesubstance.
By crossing the floor, Belinda Stronach — hero or political whore, dependingon your perspective — allowed the budget to survive.
With the extra $4.6 billion in social spending insisted on by the NDP, thisis the most progressive federal budget in 30 years. So this is a very goodthing — even if it turns out that Stronach defected because she couldn’tthink of a gentler way to dump Peter MacKay.
The mad rush to denounce Stronach was striking. When she decided ayear-and-a-half ago to take a run at the Conservative leadership, it didn’tseem to matter that she was an inexperienced little rich girl impulsivelygrabbing at the brass ring.
She had the wind at her back, the media at her feet.
Those good old Alberta boys were happy to have the handsome blonde head touse as a battering ram against Liberal strongholds in Ontario.
But when that same inexperienced little rich girl impulsively grabbed at abrass ring last week, no scornful epithet was spared — sell-out, whore,dipstick, political slattern, blonde ambition, Judas.
Suddenly her wealth became an issue.
The same crowd who never condemn the unfairness of inherited wealth,abruptly began disparaging Stronach for her inherited wealth.
It was fine when all that money was being used to finance her run at theConservative party leadership, so she could champion more tax cuts for therich.
But now that she was helping NDP leader Jack Layton deliver more than abillion dollars in affordable housing for the poor, her wealth apparentlybecame annoying.
“I will not be lectured to by some poor little rich girl,” snarled ChristieBlatchford in The Globe and Mail. After interviewing Stronach, a CBC radioprogram played the song “She’s a rich girl and she’s gone too far …”
She was also denounced as ambitious.
Yet, for years the media encouraged a nakedly ambitious Paul Martin as heplotted against Jean Chrétien.
Nor did pundits accuse Martin of betraying his principles for abandoning thesocial spending promises he made in the 1993 Liberal Red Book.
As long as politicians veer to the right, pundits seem satisfied they’reacting on principle.
I suspect Stronach was motivated by a number of things: a deep dislike ofStephen Harper (imagine not warming to that guy!), a growing alienation fromher party, a sense that she had no future there. It’s even possible she wasmotivated, in part, by what she feels is good for the country.
If she had simply quit the party and sat in obscurity as an independent, shewould have eventually been forgiven.
But to grab a job on the Liberal front bench, and to do it so dramatically,when so much was at stake — why that’s downright cocky.
No right-wing pundit is going to let some smart-ass little rich girl getaway with all that.
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