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NORTHERN DISCLOSURE
Woe, Canada
BY ADAM REILLY
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Canada is raging! Quietly, but still. With Liberal prime minister Paul Martin’s government felled by a no-confidence vote on Monday, our neighbors in the Great White North can look forward to some down-and-dirty politicking between now and January 23, when the next parliamentary elections are slated to take place. Thus far, there seems to be no connection between Canada’s shake-up and the troubling slogan — "Providing emotions since 1534" — that Quebec, that hotbed of Francophone separatism, has used to market itself lately. Instead, the troubles in Ottawa stem from the Liberal Party’s immersion in the fetid muck of scandal. In the 1990s, under different leadership, a Liberal government paid almost $90 million to government-friendly advertising agencies in Quebec, which had almost voted to secede in 1995. The ostensible purpose was to drum up favorable PR for the government in Ottawa. As it turned out, though, little work was actually done — but scads of cash were kicked back into the Liberal Party’s coffers. Revelations of these questionable payments have been damaging enough. But Stephen Harper, the leader of Canada’s conservatives, recently upped the ante by linking Quebec’s Liberals to organized crime — a charge that was promptly denied, complete with threats of litigation, from the Liberal camp. Since Canada has a parliamentary system, the current campaign season should be a doozy. The Liberals still top the polls, garnering support from 36 percent of voters. (How many of these are Bush-hating Americans who fled north after Election Day 2004 is unclear.) But the Conservatives are a close second, with 31 percent. And while the separatist Bloc Quebecois and far-left New Democrats have considerably less support, they could make or break any newly assembled coalition. Judging from Martin’s statement on the fall of his government — "Ambition overwhelmed common sense," he said — things stand to get nasty indeed. (By Canadian standards, that’s some seriously overheated rhetoric.) It’s been widely noted that this is the first time a Canadian government has been brought down by a no-confidence vote. But readers inclined to jingoism and schadenfreude should go easy on the gloating. After all, turnout in Canada’s last federal election was 60.9 percent — an all-time low for the Canucks, but still higher than the 2004 US total of 60.7 percent, which represented a 36-year high.
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