Separatists make strange bedfellows. They take all your money, show you no respect, and when they threaten to leave they almost always mean it. In fact, the only thing worse than going to bed with a separatist is waking up with a separatist on one side of you and a socialist on the other; and that’s exactly what Stephane Dion did this week.
You can’t blame Jack Layton – after all, he always knew that the only way to beat a united Conservative government would be to team up with the Liberals in some way. And, you can’t blame Gilles Duceppe; signing onto this coalition means getting his party back to where it was during the Chrétien years. Further, really; in 1993 the Bloc was the official opposition and now they are about to form part of the government. Don’t be surprised when you wake up one day and read a quote in the paper from Gilles Duceppe, Minister of Canadian Heritage. And even that fiction is not nearly as strange as the reality that we seem to be facing.
Prime Minister Stephane Dion? Somehow, the guy who’s not leader enough to lead his own party is apparently leader enough to the lead the whole country. It seems the more prudent idea would be for the Liberal party to choose a real leader before signing onto an 18-month coalition that would include three completely ideologically opposed visions for the country. Or, rather I should say two because, while we know that the Bloc Quebecois is the party of separatists and the New Democratic Party is the party of socialists, no one has yet been able to effectively communicate what exactly the Liberal Party is the party of.
But they don’t really need an ideology because the ideology of the Liberal Party can simply be entitlement. They deserve to be in control and it doesn’t matter with whom they make a deal to get there. But the problem with getting into power is that it makes you want to stay in power. So, what happens when the PQ or the NDP factions want more money? Will Prime Minister Dion risk giving up his room at 24 Sussex drive out of principle? Hardly. The one good thing for the Liberals about selling out is that they don’t really have a voter base anymore to lose.
Dion excuses his coalition by arguing that the current Prime Minister tried to orchestrate a coalition with the NDP while Paul Martin was in power; the coalition never did happen of course. In any event, then-opposition leader Stephen Harper wanted to govern the country. Stephane Dion, however, doesn’t plan to stay around for very long. He’s already said that he will hand the keys to whatever office he holds on May 2 to the winner of the Liberal leadership race. In other words, Dion simply likes the idea of having “the Right Honourable” next to his name. Honourable, indeed.
If it must be a New-Liberal-Bloc coalition, better that it would have happened before we spent $350 million on an election less than two months ago. Odds are now that we’ll all be paying $350 million in another two months, if the three stooges at the top of the bill can keep their coalition even that long. Ironically, the reason for the coalition, according to those involved, is that they don’t think that the Conservatives are doing a good enough job managing the country’s money.
The pact is foolish even if it does survive beyond winter because it depends upon the new Liberal leader holding Dion’s signature in the pact as though it were his own. No doubt, at the first chance he gets, Rae, Ignatieff, or LeBlanc will call an election with the intention to carve his own place in history, and we will be right back to where we started: with a minority Conservative government.