"No one tells you nothing/ Even when you know they know"
Eddie & the Hot Rods, "Do Anything You Wanna Do."
"Goodnight, Canada!"
Tag line of Ben Mulroney, host of Canadian Idol.
"Yeah, I just stayed in and had a big wank."
Tim Canterbury, character in The Office.
The premise is simple enough.
Numerous candidates present themselves and undertake a series of staged performances. They are then scrutinized, questioned and assessed by various experts. Finally, the Canadian public gets to vote, and the most popular candidate is declared the winner.
How, then, given the transparency and Darwinian ruthlessness of this selection process, did we end up with someone like Ryan Malcolm? Malcolm, in case you forgot, triumphed in last year’s Canadian Idol TV music talent program. Since then, he’s cut his own CD, toured across the nation, and been aggressively touted in much of the popular press as the genuine thing. Yet can someone who willingly admits that both the first CD he ever bought and live gig that he attended were by Billy Joel – and Ryan is just 24, remember – seriously be trusted as the future face of Canadian music?
And then there’s Ryan’s own definition of what it takes to be a Canadian Idol. "Someone who never gives up, and through determination achieves excellence and is recognized for it throughout Canada." Hoo boy, that’s the kind of platitude you’d expect from someone who’s… well, someone who’s hoping to be prime minister, for instance.
Which brings me, naturally, to the federal election campaign.
The premise is the same, the process is remarkably similar. And, sad to say, the outcome looks to be not much more promising this time around. Almost certainly, either Paul Martin or Stephen Harper will be the next prime minister of Canada, yet the prospect of victory for either man has kindled little enthusiasm or passion among the electorate at large. And it’s telling surely, that the most memorable sound bite so far – "it’s better to go with the devil you know"– came from former prime minister Joe Clark, exhorting Conservatives to turn their backs on Harper and vote instead for Martin.
The parallel with Canadian Idol is fitting, I suggest. In the case of Malcolm – indeed, of all those contestants who entered the competition – it strikes me that actually making music was at best secondary to becoming famous, rather than vice versa. And so it is with Martin and Harper. For all their carefully scripted policy promises, for all their Ryanesque visions of Canada ("excellence through determination," and so on), and for all their warnings of how a victory by the other side would threaten the fabric of Canada, what really seems to be driving both men is the simple wish to become prime minister, Canada’s "uber-idol." Like Ryan, anything else is purely secondary.
Take Martin first. Even before dropping the writ he claimed that this would be the most important election in Canadian history, but you can pretty much stick a fork anywhere in the 20th century and find an election when more was at stake. As historian Michael Bliss pointed out, Martin’s hyperbolic statement is only true if you are, in fact, Paul Martin. And that’s the point, this election is solely about securing Martin the veneer of a popular mandate. Much like Sally Field at the 1985 Oscars, he’ll then be able to gush, "You like me, you really like me, you really really like me!"
Sure, Martin has dusted off a few old Liberal promises, notably a national day care scheme and a renewed commitment to Canada’s public health care system. But these are from a man who was prominent in the government that pledged to abolish child poverty by 2000 and whose merging of social policy funding into the single Canada Health and Social Transfer in 1996 precipitated much of the system’s present troubles in the first place.
It’s not so much that Martin lies a lot, it’s just that there’s no particular reason to believe anything he says. Even to the innocuous question "who’s your favourite band," his reply – U2 – smacks of political expediency, given Bono’s high-profile support for Martin over the past year. Come on, Paul, show us your CD collection – I have difficulty imagining a 65-year-old man bopping around to Zooropa.
And then there’s Harper. His mantra of lower taxes seems a little outdated now, what with even the Economist recently declaring the death of neo-conservatism. In particular, you’d think the massive failure of the Harris-Eves "common sense" revolution in Ontario – where lower taxes crippled virtually every public service – would have been warning enough against trying the same trick nationally. Moreover, such tax cuts are hard to square with Harper’s promise of more money – a lot more money – to the military and the health care system.
But here’s the real problem with Harper. Like his neo-con predecessors, Harper doesn’t really like government at all. Less government is good government; no government is even better. For some in the new Alliance-Conservative amalgam, I suspect that government is even regarded as a perversion of the natural order. Yet, and by the paradoxical logic of that position, government is too important to be left in the hands of a party like the Liberals. For Harper and Co., then, forming a government is a civic duty in that it keeps the high-taxing, state interventionists at bay.
Where does this leave us? Latest polls show the electorate evenly divided in their support of the Liberals and Conservatives, with roughly 30 per cent favouring either party. On that basis, whoever squeaks to a win will most likely lead a minority government (and that’s a subject for another column), headed by a party which more than two-thirds of voters had opposed.
Even Ryan Malcolm did better than that, I believe. |
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