Politics in Ontario took a turn for the deathly a couple of weeks ago, then it went away. I’m thinking first of the role of Premier Mike Harris in the deaths from poisoned water in Walkerton. For months, pundits said he had avoided any “taint” – poignant language in this case – which fell at the feet of local incompetents. But a series of memos showed his own officials had warned of the danger, and Ontario’s chief medical officer testified that the Premier literally turned his back on the issue at a meeting. Here was the smoking gun, wrote The Globe‘s John Ibbitson.

When he appeared before the Walkerton inquiry, Harris evaded, denied and, as they say, stayed on message. He accepted something he called accountability, a term that I guess is supposed to sound big boyish while involving no responsibility, guilt or apology. The National Post‘s Terence Corcoran wrote admiringly, “Ontario Premier Mike Harris survived his appearance yesterday … More than survived: He triumphed.” The stress on “survived” is mine. I mean to point out that, when death is around, you often end up mentioning the very subjects you’re trying to avoid.

Around eerily the same time, information emerged about another death in which the Premier may be implicated. Dudley George was killed in a clash with provincial police during a native protest at Ipperwash Park in 1995. There’s been a low buzz of queries on any Harris role, which he’s denied, ever since. Believe me, if a white lawyer had been shot by the Ontario Provincial Police, things would have moved faster. At any rate, a government memo from the time reads, “The Premier’s views are quite hawkish on this” and “he would like action to be taken asap to remove the occupiers.” An opposition member called it the smoking gun.

This language, too, is macabre. The smoking gun became a cliché during Watergate, when Richard Nixon was found to own one. But it was metaphor. The Nixon smoking gun exposed a mere burglary. Richard Nixon had deaths to account for – from bombing Hanoi and Cambodia to ordering mass assassination in Vietnam – but no smoking gun was even mentioned in those cases. In Walkerton and Ipperwash, Mike Harris may have real blood on his hands. Then it all went away …

Think of what has pervaded public discourse since then: Alliance antics so trivial, even political reporters are starting to wonder aloud why they bother; and Olympic non-events such as the Toronto bid and Dick Pound’s candidacy. Well, at least they weren’t about death. This is what often happens when you get close to death: There’s no real transition back to the mundane, just a sudden shift. It tends to leave mourners wondering where all the intensity that surrounded them has evaporated. What must the people of Walkerton have thought when they saw Mike Harris on TV at a party event this week, looking like the host of a back-yard barbecue?

(Even here, in the garden of the trivial, language tends to betray what is being avoided: Stockwell Day as a “dead man walking”; debates between The Globe and the Post over whether he more resembles the dead parrot sketch or the decapitated knight scene from Monty Python.)

It’s notable, given how seriously politics is taken in this society, how rarely it seems to deal directly with matters of life and death. That wasn’t always so. In the first half of the last century, political leaders in the West were preoccupied with two huge wars (“politics by other means”), a depression and a Cold War. They seem to have been genuinely perturbed about putting youth “in harm’s way,” which they nevertheless felt was inevitable. By the century’s end, though, politics was, ostensibly, about anything but life and death: ideas and theories on markets, free trade, liberating individual initiative from the burden of government. Economics, basically. Late-twentieth-century leaders couldn’t even send troops into war in Iraq or Yugoslavia unless they could virtually guarantee there would be no deaths (on “our” side, of course).

So it is all the more striking when Mike Harris ends up having sent the people of his province into harm’s way, as it were, or not even as it were, in the name of a war against – red tape! Nor is he unique. At the same time, in the U.K., “unprecedented charges of corporate manslaughter” were being considered over thirty-one deaths and 400 injuries in the Paddington train crash, in the wake of privatization and deregulation there. Life and death aren’t easily disentangled from the socio-political web, no matter how commonsensical and business-minded you’re determined to be.

To be honest, I’m writing these thoughts about death and politics in the week after burying my mother, Freda, who died in her sleep two weeks ago tomorrow at 87. But I was thinking them before I got the news in an early morning call from a thoughtful nurse at Toronto’s Baycrest Centre. It’s hard, as I say, to make a connection between the finality of death and ongoing life. Maybe this is part of the transition.

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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.