Midway through his budget speech last week, finance minister Paul Martin changed his clothes. Off went the flashy topcoat of the millionaire friend of the bankers and the investors, lying in a pile on the floor beside words heaped high in praise of social program cuts and making Canada a safe haven for financiers and other friends of the bosses.
Inflation has been tamed, said the pile of topcoat words. Government is smaller. Programs have been cut, subsidies all but vanquished, market forces restored to their proper place as the engine of the economy.
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Then, in a flash, the mood changed.
On went the thread-bare, functional clothing of the lower classes, reinforced against the cold breezes of heartless capitalism by the warm knowledge that the weak shall inherit the earth.
Public institutions and being your brother’s keeper are “as critical to our economic health as are the operations of the free market.”
No level of child poverty is acceptable, said the man who engineered the budget-cutting that threw tens of thousands of government workers into the unemployment lines or onto the dole, led provinces to cut welfare rates and to trim support to poor families.
A “growing gap between the rich and the poor” is never acceptable, said the finance minister who continued the Conservative policies which Statistics Canada says have eroded the middle class, driving many into lower classes while executive salaries and stock market earnings have soared.
Then, in the final minute of an 80-minute speech, came the clincher. “It is time to say that this will not be a good country for any of us until it is a good country for all of us,” said Paul Martin, the man who feels the pain of those who cling to the bottom economic rungs.
Somewhere in the historic House of Commons chamber that afternoon, the ghost of ancient socialist pioneer and firebrand J. S. Woodsworth stirred uneasily.
Through two decades until his death in 1942, the Methodist preacher sat in the Commons, representing north-end Winnipeg and preaching social justice and the social gospel. His creed was captured in a “Grace Before Meat” that he often quoted in speeches: “What we desire for ourselves, we wish for all.”
Now, here was Paul Martin, offering a modern version of that co-operative philosophy. It didn’t work, somehow.
Martin and his Liberals are entitled to brag about their resolute attack on the imbalance in the public finances, left in a shambles by an earlier generation of economically illiterate Liberals and the Tories who followed them.
They even are correct to claim that the party was the author of most of the social programs that Canadians cherish, although in truth, Liberal prime ministers from King through St. Laurent to Pearson had to be dragged reluctantly to them by Woodsworth and his successors.
But for Martin now to try to claim the mantle of “defender of the little guy” when his policies have mainly benefited the big guys and undermined the poor goes well beyond the bounds of political exaggeration. It is shameful, really.
