Politics: Canada: Paul Martin's Coming Campaign of Demonization

Resorting to an old cliché to structure this inro, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that the first wave of results to the Gomery Report, which whitewashes Martin and blackfaces Chrétien, is that Martin has fallen to 31% support from 38%, a fall obviously of 7 points. Where did the support go? Well, Stephen Harper rose 4 points, from 26% tp 30%. Ahow!, that means Martin's Liberals are in a virtual dead heat, only 1 point ahead, with Harper's Conservatives. As the Bloc Québecois is expected to retain its margin of anger against everything federally Liberal, Martin will have to campaign hard in la belle province just to get a third of the seats from Québec in the House of Commons.

What's crucial therefore in any serious effort to oust the Liberals from government by denying them the largest party representation in the Commons, is the way Harper's 30% is distributed in Ontario. And, there again, is a factoid of good news from the polls. In Ontario, after the Gomery Report's release and the first wave of public response, the Tories and the Libs are tied at 38% of popular support each.

Ipsos-Reid said the Liberals and Conservatives were tied at 38 percent in Ontario, which indicates Harper stood a chance of taking power in the next election.

"At 38 percent in the province of Ontario they pick up an extra 20 seats and as long as they have that they can form a minority government," Ipsos-Reid pollster John Wright told Global. The Conservatives currently have 98 seats, mostly in Western Canada.

An addition of 20 from Ontario, very ruffly gives us the figure 118 Conservative MPs in the new Commons in our emerging scenario, while at present the Libs have 133 out of a total of 308 Commons seats. So, the first wave of response to the Gomery Report suggests the possiblity of a minority Conservative government of an even smaller plurality than the Liberals have at present (when this poll makes them look very much like a lame-duck government, a cul de hac.

Global TV's evening news just flashed a stats visual for the comparative standings of three of the four leaders (why do the English-language media always cut the Bloc and its leaders out of the spectrum?, as separatism is as Canadian as maple syrup): Harper leads with 25%, while Martin and Layton each have 21%. That's the first time I've ever seen Harper out ahead of anything - and even tho the Bloc's Duceppe was not even mentioned, Harper leads him too.

This brings us to the bad news. The Conservatives, even if they win enuff seats to form the next government as a minority, will have three other minority parties lined up and competing with one another to fang, claw, humiliate the new government which would be headed by Harper and supported only by his Tories. Harper's Tories can expect no coalition partners, and no majority in their own rite. The Libs, NDP, Bloc, CBC and the rest of the news and opinion media will almost universally oppose a Tory government on a daily basis. The only factor restraining these forces from promptly dumping him would be the fear of the voting public were they too be called to the polls yet again in so short a time.

The campaign, judging by Martin's conduct previously, will be a vicious one. Martin will have to campaign to win, even if he despairs of doing so. He will have to go after Harper by way of a threefold strategy:

• First, Martin will have to feint to an anti-Bloc campaigin, whereas Harper will be his focal enemy. It's very important that Martin vilify the Bloc and cast them as anti-Canadian, yet sound saccarine sweet in Québec itself where attacks on the Bloc in French could backfire and ensure a Bloc sweep there. Yet the attack on the Bloc is also necessary because in English-speaking any arrangements Harper would make while governing, any Bloc cooperativeness would be paraded by the Libs as Harper's complicity with the damned separatists! - Martin speaking here.

• Second, Martin will have to demonize Harper and everything Tory. He will have to paint Harper as inexperienced, stupid, and most of all, an extremist, a far-out ritewinger. To make this scare tactic work (again), Martin will have to take the next strategic move.

• Third, Martin will have to get down and dirty in a specific demonization of the slowly-emerging socon element in the Conservative Party. This third strategic move would have the following elements:

• Third-A: Demonize the Conservatives by attacking the ideas of the All-Party Pro-Life Caucus in the Commons, and make it look like a Conservative and Harper front, only (there are some Liberals in it too, maybe a stray Bloquiste or two, perhaps even a neo-socialist). Martin cannot acknowledge that times have changed, and that the lack of legislation in Canada (either way) on abortion, is historically regressive. We have a legislative vacuum on this whole area of concern, we have only Court decisions throwing out laws outlawing or regulating abortion in the past. But times have changed.

Nowadays, society thru Parliament must take up the question of partial-birth abortions in which the baby is so developed in the womb and so large that she/he must undergo a beheading (as Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant famously pointed out) and then limb-hacking, until piece by piece the child is totally dismembered and removed from womb part by part.

Also, nowadays, when babies in the womb are mature enuff, sometimes abortions are successful in vacuuming out the fully-functioning child who ends up alive on the abortion table (called a "live abortion").

Martin will have toat attempt, at all costs, to prevent these realities from becoming public knowledge in the campaign, but will instead turn his large capacity for contempt and smear on all those who would "take away a woman's right to choose" - so that abortion on demand paid for by the state at the taxpayers' expense, will remain the order of the day. It is entirely possible that Pro-Life Conservatives will sail right into this snare, whereby the framework of the debate is not partial-birth abortion by dismemberment, nor live abortions where the child is left to die on its own on the abortion table, and instead of facing these new realities of the abortion industry, simply parrot the misleading cant of "a woman's rite to choose."

Rather, the question should be: when must the choosing woman make up her mind, make her choice, and otherwise see the baby to term, resulting in a birth. After which she could be supported in keeping and accepting her child, or supported in putting the child up for adoption. The philosophical background of "a woman's rite to choose" is one of a total freedom that has no bounds, even the bare bounds of timing - to take the child's life, if she must, in a timely way. But, even that small demand for responsiblity by the aborting woman is brushed away, hidden, repressed by the incantation of a "woman's rite to choose "

Of course, we can't count on the Pro-Life forces as a leading element of the Tories' socon tendency to open a political space for the party to take a position that would allow a woman to choose at all. I think a woman should be able to choose to give life or have an abortion of a child born of a rape. I also think a woman should be able to choose to have an abortion in those cases where she must choose between her own life and the probability of losing it in the very act of giving birth to her child. I think because of the dominance of the Roman Catholic Magisterium's "Consistent Ethic of Life," the Tory Pro-Lifers will not permit the party to fite fiercely against some abortion phenomena common today; and, on the other hand, go on to acknowlege and support a certain latitude in the latter two cases I just mentioned. But, if the Pro-Lifers (Catholics, Protestant fundamentalists and evangelicals, Jewish fundamentalists, Muslim fundamentalists, etc - but not all of them, as I too am some kind of evangelical) can't nuance their position effectively and in solidarity, then Martin will set the terms of the debate to pursue sucessfully his program of demonization in the upcoming election. He wants the Women's Vote, and he thinks painting Harper as coddling socon Pro-Lifers in the Conservative Party is a way to get that vote. But he miscalculates just how radical, frivolous, and hedonist an approach to abortion most Canadian women today are ready to tolerate.

Third-B: Likewise, Martin will try to demonize Harper and the Conservatives for their effort to retain the traditional definition of marriage as between one woman and one man, even tho Harper steered the Tories into accepting an alternative proposal to grant intimate-couple benefits equal to those of marriage, also to "same-sex" partners, while leaving the traditional definition of marriage intact and honoured with a certain priority ("first among equals"?). Yet, Martin wrapped himself in the rhetoric of "fundamental rites," violated the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, and raised an inner-Catholic debate on whether he should be denied the Sacrament (I'm no Catholic, but I think he should be booted forthwith; he shouldn't be able to call himself a Catholic when he is a public violator of such a major Church teaching and exhibits his violation while a holder of the hi-est public office in the land). But, no one will call him on this issue, and he will work his verbal hocus-pocus on "fundamental rites" (which are not in the Charter) in order to solidfy the support of the Gay Vote and that of those who join that interest group in support of the shabby half-backed philosophy of law and tendentious shallow rhetoric employed on its behalf.

Third-C: More subtly but integrally to his campaign of demonization Martin will support Christianophobia by trying to make religious political discourse out of bounds in the public square. He will support secularism, hence practical atheism. I hope the Tories have the wits to out him on this effectively, but we should not expect that. I don't think those who have identified Christianophobia as an issue within the party really have a good coherent analysis, don't know how to articulate pluralism in a way that doesn't end in neutralism, and don't know how to beef-up the Conservative Party's commitment to an inner-party pluralism as part of a wider program of deeper democratization. The cultural trend toward driving Christian discourse from the public square - in the universities, in science, in the ethical concerns of business and government, in politics - undermines the Canadian tradition of Christian schools, Christian hospitals, Christian children's aid societies receiving equal public funding so as to ensure diversity in the institutional arrangements of what was once a unique society - Martin will not lead the way in bringing a renewed consciousness of these cultural riches for our day, rather he will accomodate the drift toward secualarist atheist hegemony in public discourse, and he will demonize those who come out of the closet to insist on going another direction thru the political channels that are available.

Martin will probably succeed in his task, partly because Harper's Tories are not philosophically well-enuff grounded and their best, like MP Cheryl Gallant, can't nuance their position sufficiently to embrace a working majority of Canadian voters. And it must be added in clsoing, we are just now hearing the polls in the aftermath of the initial release of the Gomery Report. It's unlikely the three opposition parties will solidify their collective majority to bring the government down. The second augmented report won't be released until February, but Martin has already been exonerated. By the time the final Report is publsihed and Martin himself calls an election, the public will probably have forgotten what the upset with Martin was all about. He's a most canny politician, and he has his demons. - Owlb