This is the sort of scandal you get in an age when government does less for people, and politics, as a result, becomes largely symbolic.

Take cynicism among youth. I don’t think it comes from minor outrages like the sponsorship scam. You see it when you suggest that governments might do anything useful for them. Their eyebrows lift, they shrug or snicker. It is sheer empiricism. Many have large loans; they know that if a family member enters hospital, an advocate must go along. Their school years were probably strike-filled, with after-school activities cancelled. The public sector has not seemed to care. They are products of the Mulroney-Chrétien-Martin era, a 20-year public retreat.

During that time, politics became an arena from which people ceased to expect much. It still existed. The human political impulse will not go away. But it survived, under the cutback scenarios that prevailed, mainly as drama or entertainment. It turned symbolic. You cared about what happened, as you do watching a movie. You felt involved, but not directly touched. The main satisfactions government could provide were essentially psychic: the thrill, say, of voting out the villains, as you saw them.

That fits the reaction to the sponsorship scandal. I agree with Allan Gregg, who noted that the amounts are piddling (relatively) and the problem is being addressed. A hundred-million dollars does not amount to much, even if it were well spent, measured against our societal needs. So it is symbolic. But symbols can be potent. They can lead to national conniptions and to media people gagging on air.

You saw it on TV on Sunday, the preoccupation with drama over real effects. Rex Murphy hosted a Paul Martin phone-in (which was televised by Newsworld) and Evan Solomon interviewed Auditor-General Sheila Fraser. Both CBC hosts mugged in mock shock, exaggerating their facial expressions and language like pro wrestlers projecting to the cheap seats. “Do you mean to say . . .?” “Are you shocked?”

I never saw Peter Mansbridge distort his features that way in his year-end interview with Prime Minister Paul Martin over the way, as finance minister, he chose to spend $100-billion on tax cuts, mainly for the rich, and similar amounts to pay off bankers rather than to seriously lower class sizes or hospital waiting times, as he could have done with the surpluses available. That wouldn’t have been symbolic, but it would have improved people’s lives.

Could a government fall because of outrage over a symbol? Of course it could. But only if there is little substantive at stake for voters. So this week, the Martin Liberals began saying they must get back to their ambitious agenda. What ambitious agenda? Doing more program-review cutbacks, adding new private-public partnerships? Their ambitious agenda amounts to saying they have one. Would Paul Martin have emoted as much this week about his anger if he had some real policies with which to divert us?

People keep saying Jean Chrétien handled these scandals better because he stonewalled. I think that’s true, but not because he stonewalled. By doing so, he implied his government had better, more constructive things to do than agonize over symbolic moral catastrophes. In truth, he, too, cut much and added little during his tenure, but he at least implied (symbolically) that his heart was there. Jean Chrétien always had a political instinct in the sense of knowing what people yearn for, even when they aren’t sure themselves. Paul Martin has so far shown an instinct only for power.

In fact, I’d say the whole sponsorship uproar is a device people are using to begin expressing doubts about Paul Martin. They are skeptical of what he knew, and his corporate past — the foreign flags, the public money his company got that was misreported by about 150 per cent more than that famed $100-million, etc. But nobody wants to call him a liar outright. He doesn’t really look like one, more like a sincere self-deceiver, and if you did call him a liar, he might cry, which no one wants to deal with.

But those appealing personal traits, like his stumbliness and earnestness, start to lose their lustre when he seems to use them deliberately to manipulate voters, as in his ludicrous statement this week that every single Liberal in Canada is “horrified” by the disclosures. Jean Chrétien would never have insulted us quite that blatantly.

Let me close with some terminological housecleaning.

I do not mean to say governments of the past 20 years have been inactive. They have been hyperactive, limiting and destroying programs most people had come to think of as rights: education, health, the environment, etc. It took energy. Paul Martin has shown zeal and pride in shrinking the public sector.

I do not mean to limit the term political to governments. It includes many others: non-profits, co-ops, NGOs, unions, other associations. A healthy democracy requires at least as much of the latter as of the former.

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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.