Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Thanks Rafe
Rafe Mair, a former provincial cabinet minister and now British Columbia’s preeminent broadcaster, has much to say about Canada. With his permission, I’m posting the text of one of his recent and most important, no-nonsense commentaries. Rafe’s editorial aired first on Vancouver’s Radio 600am on 14 October.
If you’re in or near British Columbia, you can hear Rafe weekdays from 0830-1030hrs. He can also be heard on the web at http://www.600am.com/ and his writings can be found at http://www.rafeonline.com/
“A few days ago I said, jokingly, one of the things British Columbians are angry at is that none of the Federal slush comes into our hands. For example, how come our ad executives don’t get payola as they do in Quebec? Maybe it’s no joke!
There can surely be no better argument for proportional representation – something Jean Chretien promised in the 1991 election, and was never heard of again – that the central Canada thievery of public funds that is a chronic epidemic. We know now, as if we didn’t know all along, that Chretien himself got Sponsorship money and it now appears that the truth will be soon out that Paul Martin knew full well about the scandal despite his plaintive wails to the contrary. It’s not just the Liberals of course. Stevie Cameron’s book on the Mulroney years, On The Take, still makes good reading and it is worthy of note that notwithstanding the hard accusations, no one sued. No one sued over the Last Amigo which all but directly accused Brian Mulroney of taking bribes from Karl Heinz Schreiber. We now know that Mulroney, just after leaving office, got $300 thousand from Schreiber, tried to get the story spiked and, except for a few lines in the Toronto Globe and Mail and the National Post, succeeded.
What would it take to shed some light on the filth in Ottawa? No one suggests that it can be stopped but it can at least be exposed.
Exposure will never prevail as long as the Liberals and Tories exchange governments with the Liberals having most of them. It won’t change with the NDP, remote as their election is, as we learned last week from Jack Layton’s reluctance to accept that equalization to Quebec was little short of bribery to keep the separatists at bay.
What PR, or some variation of it, will provide is minority governments most of the time. This will ease off party discipline so that Western Canadian MPs will be able to ask questions that have hitherto been shut down by Party whips.
It’s true that coalitions could provide governments that are also whipped because they want to stay in government but coalitions have not been a Canadian tradition and I suspect that any coalition that inflicted hard line party discipline would be harshly dealt with by the electorate.
I’m going to talk more about this as days pass because a pretty good guess is that the Electoral Commission will recommend some form of PR so that we’ll be voting on it next May.
What this country needs is strong regional representation, something it’s never had. We must break up the prime ministerial dictatorship, the power of which is wielded by faceless, unelected political hacks in the Prime Minister’s office. It’s from the PMO that the corruption comes, or, to put the best face on it, the PMO is where information about government slush is stopped.
PR will develop a very different parliamentary culture … especially if while PR is implemented a proper, democratic system of selecting party lists is also introduced.
I don’t think that most Canadians realize just how entrenched the Liberals are in Ottawa. It is so deeply entrenched that many of the terrible goings-on never see the light of day, often because the Opposition, hoping to be in government themselves, doesn’t want to give the Liberals ammunition whilst in opposition.
What this country must have is a giant enema. We must go back to zero and start from scratch. There is nothing worth preserving in our system whether it be appointment of judges, appointment of directors of Federal Boards, commissions and Crown Corporations, appointment of Senators, power in the PMO, and it goes … it’s a very long list indeed.
There must be a federal electoral commission much like the one our premier had the guts to implement. The danger, of course, is that federal parties will so inhibit the free wheeling debate that must take place within that commission, that they will pull their punches.
I believe the Canadian public is ready for reform … and I close today with a warning I have issued many times before – don’t expect perfection or anything like it. The closest to a perfect constitution you will find in this world is that of the United States and because it is run by greedy people, it has been subverted by bribery.
We cannot permit perfection to be the enemy of improvement … and it’s improvement, and plenty of it, that this country needs.”
-Rafe Mair [editorial broadcast 14 October 2004].
¶ 1:22 PM
Rafe Mair, a former provincial cabinet minister and now British Columbia’s preeminent broadcaster, has much to say about Canada. With his permission, I’m posting the text of one of his recent and most important, no-nonsense commentaries. Rafe’s editorial aired first on Vancouver’s Radio 600am on 14 October.
If you’re in or near British Columbia, you can hear Rafe weekdays from 0830-1030hrs. He can also be heard on the web at http://www.600am.com/ and his writings can be found at http://www.rafeonline.com/
“A few days ago I said, jokingly, one of the things British Columbians are angry at is that none of the Federal slush comes into our hands. For example, how come our ad executives don’t get payola as they do in Quebec? Maybe it’s no joke!
There can surely be no better argument for proportional representation – something Jean Chretien promised in the 1991 election, and was never heard of again – that the central Canada thievery of public funds that is a chronic epidemic. We know now, as if we didn’t know all along, that Chretien himself got Sponsorship money and it now appears that the truth will be soon out that Paul Martin knew full well about the scandal despite his plaintive wails to the contrary. It’s not just the Liberals of course. Stevie Cameron’s book on the Mulroney years, On The Take, still makes good reading and it is worthy of note that notwithstanding the hard accusations, no one sued. No one sued over the Last Amigo which all but directly accused Brian Mulroney of taking bribes from Karl Heinz Schreiber. We now know that Mulroney, just after leaving office, got $300 thousand from Schreiber, tried to get the story spiked and, except for a few lines in the Toronto Globe and Mail and the National Post, succeeded.
What would it take to shed some light on the filth in Ottawa? No one suggests that it can be stopped but it can at least be exposed.
Exposure will never prevail as long as the Liberals and Tories exchange governments with the Liberals having most of them. It won’t change with the NDP, remote as their election is, as we learned last week from Jack Layton’s reluctance to accept that equalization to Quebec was little short of bribery to keep the separatists at bay.
What PR, or some variation of it, will provide is minority governments most of the time. This will ease off party discipline so that Western Canadian MPs will be able to ask questions that have hitherto been shut down by Party whips.
It’s true that coalitions could provide governments that are also whipped because they want to stay in government but coalitions have not been a Canadian tradition and I suspect that any coalition that inflicted hard line party discipline would be harshly dealt with by the electorate.
I’m going to talk more about this as days pass because a pretty good guess is that the Electoral Commission will recommend some form of PR so that we’ll be voting on it next May.
What this country needs is strong regional representation, something it’s never had. We must break up the prime ministerial dictatorship, the power of which is wielded by faceless, unelected political hacks in the Prime Minister’s office. It’s from the PMO that the corruption comes, or, to put the best face on it, the PMO is where information about government slush is stopped.
PR will develop a very different parliamentary culture … especially if while PR is implemented a proper, democratic system of selecting party lists is also introduced.
I don’t think that most Canadians realize just how entrenched the Liberals are in Ottawa. It is so deeply entrenched that many of the terrible goings-on never see the light of day, often because the Opposition, hoping to be in government themselves, doesn’t want to give the Liberals ammunition whilst in opposition.
What this country must have is a giant enema. We must go back to zero and start from scratch. There is nothing worth preserving in our system whether it be appointment of judges, appointment of directors of Federal Boards, commissions and Crown Corporations, appointment of Senators, power in the PMO, and it goes … it’s a very long list indeed.
There must be a federal electoral commission much like the one our premier had the guts to implement. The danger, of course, is that federal parties will so inhibit the free wheeling debate that must take place within that commission, that they will pull their punches.
I believe the Canadian public is ready for reform … and I close today with a warning I have issued many times before – don’t expect perfection or anything like it. The closest to a perfect constitution you will find in this world is that of the United States and because it is run by greedy people, it has been subverted by bribery.
We cannot permit perfection to be the enemy of improvement … and it’s improvement, and plenty of it, that this country needs.”
-Rafe Mair [editorial broadcast 14 October 2004].
¶ 1:22 PM
