WHERE has the government gone? Just seven weeks ago, Liberal leader Paul Martin was pleading with Canadians to re-elect his party because it had a country to strengthen and build, Canadian interests to defend and visions to implement.
The Conservative hordes, negative Nellies with their small dreams and corrosive American values, must be stopped. Nothing less than the future of the nation hung in the balance.
IT WAS URGENT!
On June 28, enough Canadians mastered the art of holding their noses with one hand while marking X beside a Liberal name with the other that Martin’s forces limped back into power with a minority.
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Almost three weeks later when he visited the Calgary Stampede, Martin still seemed to be in the “I have a dream” mode.
“I am totally dedicated to governing for this whole country, for every region, for every province, for every Canadian,” he said.
And of course, defending Canada’s cattle industry in the throes of the BSE crisis was very, very important.
“I am going to continue to stand up for our feedlot operators, our ranchers, our cattle producers,” said Martin, a millionaire businessman who owns a small farm in Quebec’s eastern townships. “Quite simply, the United States must reopen their border and the time to do so is now. What the Americans are doing is wrong and it has to stop. The border should be open now.”
Then the lights went out in Ottawa. The government went underground unless forced to come out of its hidey-hole (say, for example, to go to Geneva to sign a World Trade Organization deal that promises to put the Canadian Wheat Board marketing monopoly on the bargaining table.)
Martin and most of his ministers have been all-but-invisible this summer despite the fact that their government governs by a thread. There has been little attempt to convince skeptical Canadians that the Liberals have new plans, that an activist government is in charge, that an agenda is unfolding.
It is true that Martin and the provincial premiers have a mid-September date to talk about medicare and the prime minister will outline his visions for legislative action in a Throne Speech Oct. 5, the day after Parliament reconvenes.
Still, that parliamentary session starts more than three months after his re-election, hardly a sign that the man who worked for more than a decade to overthrow his leader really sees urgency in his plans to reshape and strengthen Canada.
And Martin’s team does not need Parliament to try to win back Canadians’ respect, or at least support. In 1973, after a near-death political experience Oct. 30, 1972, Pierre Trudeau’s handlers had the minority prime minister on the hustings promoting the Liberal brand and promising to be better.
Voters rewarded him 18 months later with a majority.
Twenty-five years ago, Tory Joe Clark won a minority, acted as though he had won a majority, spent little time branding himself with voters as a prime minister with plans, left Parliament empty for months and quickly was assigned by voters to the status of a Canadian political asterisk when he lost government at voters’ first opportunity.
Undoubtedly Martin’s brain trust know their history and don’t plan to repeat it.
Don’t they?
