You and me are on the edge of a knife.
-Kaiser Chiefs, "Saturday Night"
Have you ever been to Ottawa?
Ottawa's an interesting town. It's a factory town to be certain, more in common with Sudbury than any of the glistening Canadian metropolises. It even has its equivalent of the Inco Superstack - a tower on Parliament Hill attached to the main factory itself.
It would be cliché to throw in a comment about the emissions from Ottawa being worse than those from Sudbury, but it won't stop me from doing so. For starters, they probably are - Ottawa's a big town. But even when employed as a tired metaphor, there's an undeniable truth to the statement. Ottawa puts out a lot of waste.
Everybody in Ottawa either works for the government, works the government, or aspires to do one of those two tasks. I'm sure some of them dream of a simpler life in the wilderness of Northern Alberta, turning sand into gold, but very few of those aren't just Maritimers who ran out of gas money between Montréal and Arnprior.
There's staffers who work on the hill, there's the hacks that work for the party offices. Both lead terrible, scavenger like existences where they harbour secret dreams of sitting in the green seats themselves someday, and go through bouts of depression when they realize most of the people who do had real jobs and didn't waste their time as assistants in Ottawa. Many of them will eventually be chewed up by the 20 hour days and return to their hometowns to make eight times as much as they did in Ottawa at government relations jobs for companies that would never buy influence, but would happily buy somebody who already had it.
Some of them return to Ottawa as lobbyists but very few return to Ottawa as decision makers. They learn a valuable lesson about the nature of hard work, and can retroactively claim they were doing it all for their long since abandoned ideals, but do many of them get out of Ottawa what they hoped?
There's one man who certainly did. Stephen Harper. We have in Mr. Harper the first real political hack Prime Minister. The consequences are fascinating, and from either a distance or from this very wasteland, worth observation. All Canadians would do well to take note of our Prime Minister's path to power, and to remember his roots.
Separated from Mr. Harper by three meters of green carpet and an antique mace is a man who came to Ottawa by a very different course. Stéphane Dion once famously told Jean Chrétien he felt that professors had more influence than cabinet ministers. Naive? Almost definitely, but here's a guy who came to Ottawa for a very different reason than Stephen Harper: For his country and province, because his Prime Minister asked him to. One man came to politics as a public service, the other came looking for a career.
Mr. Harper described his employment in Ottawa as "deeply disillusioning". His second trip has been equally so for the country. Political strategists divide. They talk about wedge issues, and they see campaigning not as a means, but an end. Prime Ministers are supposed to unite. They campaign to govern.
Stephen Harper is the Prime Minister of the Conservative Party of Canada. Every decision is measured in a zero-sum fashion. If the Liberals look good, he will feel that he looks bad. Today, a policy is judged by it's political capital, not its national merit. Politics and government will always be blurred. But it used to be that politics was a tool of government, and subservient to its needs. Now government advances politics. The interests of Canada come second to the interests of the Conservative Party.
Canada is at a crossroads. The Liberal Party and Conservative Party have seldomly been as polarized as today. In terms of style, in terms of substance, in terms of outlook and in terms of insight we have rarely had such contrast.
I know where I stand for the next election, I encourage all Liberals to stand with me as we work for a richer, fairer, greener Canada.
