FORMER Canadian Alliance leader Preston Manning once joked that the definition of a Canadian optimist is someone who always knows things could be worse.
The line recalled an evening in a Saint John, N.B., newsroom many years ago. It was a morning newspaper with a midnight deadline for the front page and it had been a turbulent night in the newsroom and in the world of news.
New stories kept breaking across Canada and around the globe and the harassed front page editor already had redesigned the page at least three times as the clock ticked toward midnight when the paper would be put to bed.
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“All we need now is for the mayor to get run over by a bus,” a desker grimly joked.
A few minutes later and almost on deadline, bells rang on the Canadian Press wire machine to indicate an urgent story was moving. The mayor of Saint John, in Toronto to deliver a speech, had collapsed at the podium and died.
Things can always get worse.
The Liberal strategists planning the party’s campaign in Western Canada this year must be feeling the same way.
The party had high hopes for the West, dreaming of a breakthrough the size of Pierre Trudeau’s in 1968 or maybe even the kind of western majorities Wilfrid Laurier, William Lyon Mackenzie King and Louis St. Laurent routinely realized.
Across the West, the scent of power drew high profile candidates – business leaders, union luminaries, farm leaders and provincial politicians.
Prime minister Paul Martin dined out for months on a pledge that a Martin government that failed to ease western alienation would be a failed government.
Then, in February, the wheels began to fall off the election bus.
Westerners reacted angrily to stories about a sponsorship scandal that saw tax dollars funneled to Liberal-friendly Quebec companies that appeared to do little for their millions. The poll numbers began to fall.
Then the new Conservative party rose from the ashes of the Tories and the Canadian Alliance, led by westerner Stephen Harper, who defeated two Ontario candidates. Western voters now had a united conservative party that was led by a red meat former Alberta Reformer and not one of those mushy central Canadian Tories.
The polls fell a bit more for the Liberals.
Still, high profile candidates like former New Democrat Glen Murray, mayor of Winnipeg, and former Saskatchewan NDP MP and provincial cabinet minister Chris Axworthy continued to join the team and Liberal planners may have started to think the worst was over and approval ratings would begin to creep up. A May 8 poll showed a bit of the trend.
Then came May 10. Things can always get worse.
The sponsorship scandal that had soured the nascent western romance with the Martin Liberals suddenly became attached to the unpopular gun registration program.
A senior civil servant and a Quebec advertising executive were charged with fraudulently siphoning off almost half a million dollars in bogus contracts for work connected to selling the gun registry.
If there is a more toxic mix for westerners and Liberal fortunes – graft to Quebec in return for registering western farm rifles – it is difficult to imagine.
