It comes to this: 2 parties, 1 platform
COMMENT You would be hard pressed to wedge a credit card between the Tories and Liberals
It
was the characteristic sound of late
September in the nation’s capital with political leaders dusting off their platitudes in preparation for the opening of Parliament next week.
Yesterday, Ottawa’s mandarins paid the price for their job security and great benefits when they were rounded up, shepherded into the Museum of Civilization and forced to listen to the Prime Minister sum up his grand plan to prepare Canada for a changing world.
In a long but surprisingly coherent speech, Martin outlined the principal challenges facing Canada — changing demographics and the rise of China and India — and then detailed his government’s proposed reaction.
Halfway through reading the speech I felt the overwhelming urge for caffeine, and upon returning, inadvertently picked up the Conservative Party’s Policy Declaration. Reading the two side by side was enlightening and revealed how similar the two main parties are on the bulk of the issues.
While couched with typical boy scout earnestness, Martin’s speech laid out policy positions on health care, aboriginals, immigration, national security, defence, fiscal management, softwood lumber and even child care — on which the Tories have committed themselves to honouring a plan of which they fundamentally disapprove that the Conservatives could live with comfortably.
You would be hard-pressed to wedge a credit card between the respective stances of the two parties on many of these issues, which perhaps says more about the Conservatives and their great trek toward the centre in the last year. The Conservatives’ main criticism of the speech yesterday was that “Martin is all vision and no action,” not that his policies are inherently wrong-headed.
It’s true that since he appointed his best friends to the Senate we haven’t heard too much from the Prime Minister on his calls to address the “democratic deficit” — a major focus for the Conservatives — and there some fundamental differences in areas like the environment, where the Tories promise to review the Kyoto Accord. Yet, in essence, we are talking about a new consensus on policy, if not values.
Even in health care, where it could be pointed out that the Conservatives took the fairly heretical step last March of endorsing private delivery of publicly funded services, the recent Supreme Court decision in the Chaoulli case — which, in Quebec at least, sets the stage for private delivery of privately funded services — has moved the debate on so far that Martin didn’t even bother with his usual “ barbarians at the gate” scare- mongering.
In large measure, the next election will be about managerial competence and, in this regard, it will aid the Conservatives to no end if they can engineer a general election when Justice John Gomery’s first report on the sponsorship scandal is still fresh in the minds of voters.
To guarantee a fall election, and avoid a repeat of the unseemly daily count of ailing politicians’ white blood cells, Stephen Harper needs the support of the NDP’s Jack Layton.
Layton was also speaking in Ottawa yesterday and, unfortunately for Harper, showed no signs of tiring of his time in the sun.
While he talked of “failed leadership” and a “sense the country’s slipping away,” he also indicated that too much energy is being spent on asking when the election will occur. Without collusion between these two, we are looking at a spring election.
One point Layton made did resonate though. “Even in Ottawa, Ottawa is silent,” he said. Not for much longer, unfortunately. National Post