IN AN earlier, gentler political time, former Liberal agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief said he manoeuvered his way through the twists and turns of farming and political life by asking three questions at each turn in the road.
What? So what? Now what?
Current agriculture minister Gerry Ritz also has a three-part mantra but it is a far harsher version.
Last week, he offered his mantra in a tense speech to the Canadian Federation of Agriculture that many in the CFA interpreted to mean Ritz listens to only those who agree with his policies.
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“Barley marketing freedom is coming and it’s time to lead, follow or get out of the way,” the minister said, a message he repeated the next day at a rally on the steps of the Saskatchewan Legislature when he said those are everyone’s life choices. The message is clear. Life and politics are not about reconciliation but about winning.
Politics, at least on this issue dear to the hearts of prairie Conservatives, has nothing to do with the art of the possible, the obligation to try to bridge gaps between divided voter views in the interests of the greater good.
Opponents are not citizens with different views. They are the enemy to be ignored, thwarted and demonized if necessary.
The minister’s increasingly harsh language about the Canadian Wheat Board reflects this take-no-prisoners approach.
Since an attempt to end the barley monopoly through regulation was thwarted twice by the courts and the CWB board refused his demand to ignore the law and act as if there was no legislated monopoly, Ritz is correctly playing his legislative card, daring the Liberals to provoke an election by opposing it and launching a barrage of mocking vindictive against his CWB enemies.
It started on a lighter note Feb. 14 when he told St. Boniface, Man., Liberal Raymond Simard after a wheat board question in the House of Commons: “The member opposite should be careful because that high horse he is riding on is not leading a parade, it is headed to the glue factory.”
By Feb. 27 after another court defeat, Ritz escalated the ridicule. “The wheat board is going to fold its tent and blow away like a bad dream.”
And by the next day at the CFA, the CWB was “so focused on their own survival they won’t see the avalanche about to hit them.”
It’s amazing he did not respond to the court rulings by quipping: “What would you expect from a bunch of Liberal hacks?”
It certainly is the style of this government to pound opponents with harsh accusatory words.
The fired head of a nuclear safety review commission was a “Liberal appointee,” said prime minister Stephen Harper, and opposition critics of treatment of Afghanistan prisoners were Taliban apologists, according to House leader Peter Van Loan. So ridiculing outbursts from Ritz fit the style of this government.
And to be fair, opposition MPs also have used harsh rhetoric on the issue, comparing Conservatives to fascists and describing “jack boots at the corner of Portage and Main.”
But it surely makes Canadian politics nastier and less engaging as a winner-take-all attitude replaces the more idealistic view that politics can be the art of finding ways to reconcile opposing views into a common cause.
