Ms. Wynne is not as well-known nationally as is Ms. Marois. But she is steeped to the eyeballs in the brackish water of the McGuinty regime, whose outgoing leader claims to have got “the important things” right, but has conducted Ontario to a position of dependence on hand-outs from Ottawa, and has nearly doubled the provincial debt; squandered billions on hare-brained eco-fadishness and other nostrums, and is, by Canada’s prudish standards, scandal-tainted.
It took an unconscionable time for Western democracies to get into the habit of elevating women to the highest political offices, and Israel, Great Britain and France had female prime ministers well before the cameo occupation of that position by Kim Campbell in this country. Canada, pulling up its pant-suit cuffs and bustling forward to the vanguard on sensible rubber-soled flat shoes, seems to be doing its best to catch up. Unfortunately, Ontario may have substituted trendiness for merit as it has become the largest Western jurisdiction to confer its chief office on a self-identified lesbian.
I emphasize that I have no problem with a lesbian in almost any secular position if she is the best qualified candidate. But in this instance, I am not convinced that the choice is motivated by anything more than political fashion.
I think Sandra Pupatello would have been a better choice for Ontario premier, the more so because of her less prolonged implication in the general, though not unrelieved, failure of the McGuinty regime. Ms. Pupatello was not above the obligatory Liberal leftist posturing, including her unsuccessful intervention in the 2006 Parkdale by-election, but she was a rather imaginative and peppy minister who had the good taste to retire from politics in 2011, and has had some useful private-sector experience.
In any event, one can only wish Ms. Wynne well and hope that she surprises us pleasantly. Cleaning up after McGuinty, as she has more or less acknowledged, will be no day at the beach.
This leads back to the doleful contemplation of Pauline Marois trudging down the Royal Mile of Edinburgh and claiming solidarity with the bekilted standard-bearers of the utterly ludicrous cause of Scottish separatism.
Scotland has been even more over-indulged by the central treasury of the United Kingdom than Quebec has by Canada’s. At least the majority of Quebecers speak a different language to most Canadians in other provinces; and that claim cannot be made for the Scots, no matter how far you ascend into the Highlands. And secession in Scotland lags even behind a serious poll of that option in Quebec (about 17% of Scots to about 20% of Quebecers if the question is put clearly, and not just an open door to more preferments from the other regions of the country).
The Scottish Nationalist leader, Alex Salmond, took his distance from Ms. Marois, and would not be seen in public with her. Much to its chagrin, Quebec is no more seen as a model for other regional nationalists than Canada is seen as the way forward in universal health care. With only 31% of the vote in last year’s provincial election, Ms. Marois has little mandate to govern, and none to secede. Her fallback tactic is to agitate the problems between Ottawa and Quebec to try to polarize the voters.
This is clearly the mandate of many of her subordinates. The Quebec labour minister, Agnes Maltais, might sometimes be confused for a recruiter and organizer for the gonzo Quebec labour union federations. Diane De Courcy, Minister of Immigration and Cultural Communities, and the Charter of the French Language, is the former chair of the Montreal School Board, and has been tasked with rewriting the law so as to force all students to go to French-only junior colleges, and to reduce the threshold (from 50 employees, down to 10) at which the suppression of other languages in the Quebec workplace will apply.
This is, as I have written here and elsewhere before, a tokenistic measure of irritation designed to console Quebec nationalists for their inability seriously to imagine gaining a majority to secede. It is what psychologists call a displacement: The joy of the son et lumière of applying more rods to the cultural back of the non-French to alleviate their own national frustrations.
Moving on, Jean-François Lisée, Minister of International Relations, La Francophonie and External Trade (none of these being any real business of a provincial government, but that is completely beside the point) is also responsible for dealing with Quebec’s English-speaking community, as if they were foreigners. Maka Koto is Minister of Culture and Communications, and has been charged with harassing the federal government to vacate the field passively and turn its budget in this area over to the Quebec unilingualists. He and Marois must be under no doubts about the unlikely success of this initiative, but the goal is to stir up ill will and provoke disdainful reflections from Ottawa on Quebec’s self-important, state-bought parochial cultural elite. The whole provincial government is simply dedicated to promoting friction with Ottawa and a yearning in the other provinces to be done with Quebec.
Of course, this gambit won’t work. Nonetheless, the dubious leadership in Quebec City — and in what is now debt-ridden, have-not Ontario — could have negative repercussions nationwide. Historically, in such times as this, when the official opposition in Ottawa is not strong (as I wrote in this place last week, Opposition leader Thomas Mulcair has both feet planted on banana peels in his slavish support of the Marois language and referendum agenda), the opposition largely has come from strong premiers in Ontario and Quebec.
James Whitney and Lomer Gouin spoke effectively for provincial rights in Laurier’s time, as did Mitch Hepburn, George Drew, Leslie Frost, John Robarts and Bill Davis; and as did Alexandre Taschereau, Maurice Duplessis, Jean Lesage, Daniel Johnson, René Lévesque and Lucien Bouchard opposite Mackenzie King, Louis St. Laurent, Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. Stephen Harper’s government, on the other hand, is unlikely to face any such competition for the voters’ affections in the two largest provinces from the current incumbents.
Say what one will about Toronto’s Mayor, Rob Ford, and he isn’t the most decorous holder that office has had, he is not all wrong when he calls himself “300 pounds of fun,” (and the recent legal challenge to him was nonsense). Premiers Marois and Wynne could no more make that claim in regard to their personalities than they could about their avoirdupois.
Original Article
Source: nationalpost.com
Author: Conrad Black
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