Back in Paul Martin’s days as finance minister, I often found his aura of ethical bumbliness and confusion endearing.
Like the time he told a scowling David Frum in 1995, “People seem to enjoy the blood sport of cutting spending, they forget a country is about people, and a government is about representing people,”at the same time his budgets were pulverizing social programs that his father, along with Lester Pearson and others, had created.
Some say Paul Jr. was just playing the old Liberal game, sounding socially concerned while doing business’s bidding. But it had a truer ring to me, a compulsive, Tourettish quality as if the guy really was troubled by moral qualms.
But I find the ploy has lost its charm, now that he’s dawdling on the verge of power.
Perhaps what was genuine turned into shtick; such things happen. Take his recent views on foreign policy. Multilateralism is “a means not an end. . . . The absence of consensus in the UN should not condemn us to inaction. . . . In appropriate circumstances . . .”
But hey, Paul, no one asked if you can imagine some international good deed that could be done outside the UN context. The question is, do you back actual U.S. policies that, sometimes explicitly, undermine the fragile global order built around the UN for seventy years?
This isn’t the old Martin ambivalence; it’s sheer verbal obfuscation, at a low level. Then he goes on to endorse the U.S. missile defence program, and so do most of his former cabinet colleagues.
Why did he do it? Not to grab an edge in the race for leader, that’s certain.
But the economy has been his realm, and this would helpthe“beleaguered”aerospace sector, plus it’s high tech, and maybe some CEOs he knows put in a word over dinner or on the cell.
He’s never looked like someone who enjoys rebuffing the titans of his class. And perhaps to mollify the U.S., too, after Canada’s gall in declining their war. One should not underestimate the Liberal capacity for terror about the danger of offending the U.S. and incurring its wrath.
Unlike the Alliance, which would never do such a thing, not in its wildest imaginings, Liberals love to relish the prospect, boast about it, maybe even tiptoe up from behind and poke the giant in the bum — but then they panic and run away, terrified and Freudian: We’re sorry we killed the father, can we punish ourselves before you do it to us?
The main leadership appeal of Sheila Copps has always been that she looks like someone whose intestines might not turn to water after standing up to the United States. But who knows? We’ll probably never find out.
I’ve written this as if there can be no rational excuse for the U.S. missile defence program, so perhaps I should briefly say why.
The U.S. is already well-protected from missile attack by its own missiles and its vast deterrent threat. As for attacks from“rogue states”(cf.“pipsqueak mouthoffs”), they’d be automatically obliterated in reply, so they’d have to be crazy; but they’d still be smart enough to switch to a suitcase bomb once an NMD system was in place.
Therefore, the true purpose of NMD is to“weaponize”space. During the Cold War, this was considered a bad thing, as it enlarged the destructive capacity of the two superpowers and made human extinction more likely.
Now there’s only one giant and its stated goal — you can look it up — is to dominate the world, which the military colonization of space would serve.
So the question for Canadian foreign policy is: Do we wish to enlist in a program whose purpose is American global mastery, or do we prefer another overriding concept?
That’s what’s at stake behind the Martin verbiage.
It’s interesting how the issue of Canadian sovereignty, or Canadian nationalism (the term varies slightly), is rarely absent from Canadian politics.
The late NDP leadership race focused, to the candidates’ surprise, on how to acquire an independent foreign policy. The PC contest has anti-free trader David Orchard in second place. The rest of the party is so distressed, they try not to think about it. The Alliance saw its best days when Preston Manning led what he called a rebirth of Canadian nationalism. And among Liberals, John Manley has accused Paul Martin of pandering to the Americans. Pandering is a strong term. I wasn’t expecting it.
Canadian nationalism is also — and I digress — part of the current travails at the National Post.
I’ve never thought the problem there was its extravagant right-wing views; it was the contempt for Canada. How can you create a national newspaper in a nation you loathe? Why would you bother? It’s twisted.
As for the small spate of bailings over the paper’s politics (Patricia Pearson bails from the centre, if you can do that; David Frum bails from the right), my own view has always been that you write for the readers of the paper, not its owners or editors.
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