The offenders are consigned to the kids’ table.
Here’s how Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty explained it last December, after hearing that his brother, Ottawa South MP David McGuinty, was floating his name as a possible candidate for the federal Liberal leadership.
“He’s going to have to sit at the little card table at the Christmas dinner. He’s not gonna sit at the dining room table with the rest of us,” the premier said.
Whether this actually happened or not, it’s a great image, and it gives us a way to separate the adults from the juveniles in our political culture these days — especially all those noisy insults coming from people who should know better.
Politics is for the kids’ table. Government is for grown-ups.
Name-calling, petty squabbles, the occasional hurled objects — that’s fair game when you’re sitting with the children in the midst of the political fray. At the government dining table, however, a higher standard of behaviour is required.
Lately, though, there have been signs that the kids have infiltrated the table where the adults are supposed to be governing. How else to explain these bizarre outbursts we’ve been hearing from members and spokespersons for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government these past few months?
Political children, for instance, might be expected to get all thin-skinned when a United Nations representative arrives in the country and levels some criticism about how hunger and obesity is being handled at the official realm.
One doesn’t expect a senior government member to level a sneering character attack, as Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq did after she met this week with Olivier De Schutter, the UN’s rapporteur on food policy.
“He’s ill-informed. I found it a bit patronizing and (just) another academic studying us from afar,” Aglukkaq said, not once, but several times on Wednesday. Her slurs were echoed by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird.
The Conservatives, as we’ll remember from attack ads past, don’t like academics, especially of the “just visiting” sort. But the United Nations isn’t a political opponent, and De Schutter was in Canada to talk to the government at the big people’s table, not the kids at the rickety card table.
The most egregious name-calling recently has come in the realm of the environment, where some charities have been repeatedly slammed as “radical” and singled out for alleged offences such as “money laundering.”
This isn’t coming from the Conservative party, but from Environment Minister Peter Kent and Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver. None other than the Prime Minister’s Office, moreover, has been inserting the word “radical” into emails about environmental groups, as though it is common for the PMO to issue bulletins about Canadians it likes and dislikes.
More disturbingly, there have been suggestions that one of these environmental organizations, Tides Canada, is being audited by the Revenue department because it’s on the wrong side of the government. Really? This can happen in Canada now? Did you remember to send affectionate greetings to the governing party when you filed your taxes a few weeks ago?
In the same vein, Baird also let slip this week that the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy was dismantled in this year’s budget cuts because it had given unwelcome advice.
Vengeful tax audits and budget-cuts-by-grudge are what happen when governments get hyper-political and decide to make enemies out of citizens they are supposed to be representing without fear or favour.
It’s worth noting that the prime minister felt he needed to step in and speak as an adult the day after Baird’s comment about the roundtable — to stress that the reasons for its dismantling were administrative, not political.
“We are making sure that we find administrative savings. Obviously, where expertise is already available within departments or outside departments, we do not need to duplicate that work,” Harper said.
Similarly, it seems to be Conservative Senator Hugh Segal who is sounding the more mature voice recently about tax audits and environmental groups.
“We should establish the principle that CRA audits be based on an impartial application of the law. They are done at random, they are done for a series of purposes to verify the nature of filings and they should never be driven by the politics of any issue, any government, any opposition party or, for that matter, any budget,” Segal said in the Senate this month.
Neither Harper nor Segal will make many headlines with those comments, but nor will they be consigned to the kids’ table. It may look like more fun in the political fray, but Canadian citizens deserve adult-table government.
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Susan Delacourt
No comments:
Post a Comment