My Prediction—Nothing Much Happens —

like to think of myself as a bit of a

contrarian at heart. I tend to be very

distrustful of things “everyone”
supposedly knows. Conventional wisdom
is often wrong, especially in politics. Last
fall, it was the “conventional wisdom”
among many, that George W. Bush would
probably not be re-elected. Years prior,
the “conventional wisdom” predicted his
father would. Premature speculation
about the outcomes of elections based on
little more than gut feelings and media
hype can often turn pundits into asses
faster than you can say “Dewey defeats
Truman.”

Today, the latest bit of conventional
wisdom floating around the world of the
political pundits is that the revelations of
the Gomery Inquiry regarding the high-
Scandal
effectively sealed the fate of the Liberal

profile Sponsorship have
Party of Canada. Many are now talking
about Prime Minister Stephen Harper as
an inevitable outcome that is merely a
matter of “when” and not “if”? While I
would personally like nothing more than
to see Harper become Prime Minister,
finally putting an end to over a decade of
unbroken Liberal rule in Ottawa, I have
yet to see any serious justifications for this

Editorial Cartoon

 

May 11/2005

current era of Conservative euphoria. My
own suspicion is that whatever current
boost in support the Conservative Party is
enjoying is ultimately little more than a
predictable reaction to the most damning
testimonials of the Gomery Inquiry. Far
from representing an increasing trend, the
Conservative popularity has likely already
peaked, and can now only proceed to go
downhill. By this year,
Conservatives will likely be looking back
at the spring of 2005 as the season of

time next

naive optimism.

In a sane world, the Liberals would
suffer an enormous defeat in an emer-
gency election. This is a party, after all,
that has quite blatantly been laundering
money for at least the last half-decade,
funneling huge sums of taxpayer cash to
corporate buddies, who in turn have pro-
ceeded to funnel it into the Liberal Party’s
election warchest. Having stolen tax dol-
lars to strengthen a political party and
ruling regime, the Liberals are now on par
with other historical kleptocrats such as
Ferdinand Marcos and Manuel Noriega.
The main difference, of course, is that
while those two charmers were ultimately
overthrown, Paul Martin and his gang are
likely to remain in office for a long time to

come.

Problem one is the media. Despite
their often-fevered coverage of the spon-
sorship mess and the splashy front pages
of many newspapers, the Canadian media,
by and large, has generally done a poor
job of covering the scandal. When I talk
to friends and neighbours about the issue,
most only have the vaguest notions of
what exactly the papers are going on
about. They'll know there’s some sort of
scandal, and they'll know it involves
money, but not much more than that. I
don’t know why the media is having such
a hard time making the scandal easy to
understand. “The Liberals are stealing tax
dollars to fund their party” seems like a
pretty apt summary to me. Unfortunately,
the contemporary Canadian news media
doesn’t seem to find this angle “sexy”
enough. Instead, we’ve been given page
after page of excruciatingly boring recaps
of public testimony in which people
we've never heard of make statements on
things we don’t understand. No revolu-
tion is ever going to be launched by a
headline like, “Guité alleges pressures
were made during meeting with
Gagliano.” The media’s obsession with
the details has killed what should be the

 

   

| Right Hook ’

\. JJ. McCullough, OP Columnist

 

central simplicity of the story.

Over the last few years, the public has
been fed so much vague, confusing infor-
mation un-sexy Liberal
scandals (remember “Shawinigate”?) that
it will hardly be unsurprising if the Ad-
Scam episode fails to garner much
long-term outrage. Both Liberals and
Conservatives alike have already reached

on various

the point where scandals in the Liberal
Party are simply an inescapable fact of
life. They may prompt moments of brief
anger, but such feelings quickly melt into
traditional Canadian apathy and musings
about “politics as usual.” Right now,
Canadians may be telling pollsters they’re
outraged simply because they feel they
“should be,’ and don’t want to appear
dumb or complacent. As the weeks go
on, however, other issues will begin to
gradually replace the memories of a scan-
dal no one really understood in the first
place.

The inherent contradictions of recent
polls seem to prove this. Last week the
National Post released a poll putting
Conservative support at around 36 per-
cent—the highest level in decades. Yet
the very same poll indicates that 65 per-
cent of Canadians agree with the prime
minister that an election should only be
called once the Gomery Inquiry releases
its final report. Huh? Apparently, many
voters can no longer vote Liberal with a
clear conscience, yet feel so guilty about
voting Conservative that they continue to
cling to the naive belief that if we just
give Judge Gomery “more time,’ some-
how everything will resolve itself. Maybe
some last-minute surprise witness will
claim that the entire sponsorship scandal
was just an elaborate Candid Camera
prank, and then we can all give a big sigh
of relief and forget all this silly business
about wanting to vote for Stephen
Harper. I mean, honestly, either the
inquiry’s present revelations have been
damning and outrageous enough to justi-

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