Republish: Biting the Maestro of Divisive Politics

Originally published in the Halifax Chronicle Herald.

Biting the Maestro of Divisive Politics
RALPH SURETTE

WE’RE SMALL, but we do bite.

Remember 1997, when Atlantic Canada rose in anger, amazed the country by electing a half-dozen New Democrats, knocked off its big political godfathers and crippled the Liberals?
The Liberals had romanced us with big promises in ’93, only to turn around and bald-facedly hack at everything in the first Martin budget.

It wasn’t so much the cutting that got to us. It was the lying.

It’s the lying again.

Here’s some advice for Premier Rodney MacDonald, thrown into a tizzy by the federal budget’s double-cross, as it dismissed signed agreements to the effect that the Atlantic accord on offshore petroleum resources wouldn’t be touched by changes in the equalization system: get mad, stay mad and, like Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams, don’t let them forget the lying.

Be ready to snap back when they tell you that you’re just whining because your welfare got cut off.

Remember that? The right-wing think tanks, the pontificating Globe and Mail editorials, the Reform party – we were just irate, they said, because our unemployment insurance got cut.
The boy wonder of all this? One Stephen Harper, the "culture of defeat" guy. He’s still at it.
There is something different this time, though. Harper, with the Republican party’s dirty tricks manual in his back pocket, is a different breed from previous prime ministerial slickers.

He’s already divided Atlantic Canada, which puts us at a disadvantage.

The dirty cut comes to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, signatories of the Atlantic accord. New Brunswick and P.E.I. are pacified – apparently a calculated effect.

He’s an expert in the politics of division.

Having Alberta in hand, he’s after the middle class of Ontario and Quebec and a sprinkling of "winners" elsewhere; and if that delivers his majority, everybody else can go hang.

That means we’re not alone in our exasperation.

Danny Williams let go a remarkable mouthful: "This is the same prime minister who basically reneged on money for women, for literacy groups, for volunteers, students, minority rights, aboriginal people, and has not lived up to the Kyoto accord."

Williams is a Tory, don’t forget, and is admonishing Newfoundlanders to not vote Tory next time. Surely a first in Canada.

The fact that Harper’s non-progressive Conservatives can shut out their own kind, some of whom are rebelling after only a year of power, indicates the depth of his divisiveness.
I got another whiff of this while researching those fisheries columns I did recently.

Phil Eidnik, head of the B.C. Fisheries Survival Coalition, was a Conservative candidate in the last election. The Tories have "pushed almost an entire industry away from the Conservatives" with their misguided Fishery Act reform, he said. "And we had campaigned against the Liberals for a decade! I will be staying home on election day."

Here’s the question, then: Will Harper succeed in his plan for a majority?

The first post-budget poll indicates that it’s working – Ontario has taken the bait. Perhaps, but actually the scheme may already be unravelling elsewhere, specifically on the very field where other prime ministers have been undone – Quebec.

All that cash to Quebec was to buy another term for Jean Charest. Charest, however, has promised to put the new money into tax cuts instead of public services, making a joke of the "fiscal imbalance" argument.

Harper has compounded it by saying he won’t be talking to separatists if they win.

Charest will take a major drubbing Monday night, and Harper will too. It could be a donnybrook.
If you add the growing signs of incompetence (the minister of national defence apologizing for not knowing what’s going on in Afghanistan, the botched Fishery Act) and the fact that climate change is still shortchanged, it may all be in the process of blowing up, and soon.

And so, for the growing coalition of anti-Harperites, of which even Nova Scotia and Newfoundland’s Conservative governments are suddenly a part, the question is: Is the solution here to get rid of Harper?

If it’s Harper’s intent to make political hay by having the "winners" and "losers" at war with each other, the losers will have no choice but to pick up their spears and go at it.

If so, let’s bite again. Harper may be more vulnerable than he thinks.