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Politics : Canadian Political Free-for-All -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck who wrote (4119)	5/27/2004 12:10:54 PM
From: SofaSpud	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 37552

The debt we owe to Stephen Harper Barbara Kay National Post Wednesday, May 26, 2004 I went to the Omni Hotel Monday night to see Stephen Harper kick off his Quebec campaign. The room was packed with hundreds of happy people, and if you were gauging Harper's prospects from the excitement level, you'd think he was set to sweep the province. Harper doesn't have the slightest hope of making a dent in Quebec in this election. But then polls suggest neither does Paul Martin. Ironies abound these days. The supposedly moribund Bloc Quebecois is miraculously back in vigorous health, which nobody (least of all the Bloc) credits to its sovereigntist mandate. They know their sudden popularity rather symbolizes punishment for Liberal corruption. Seeing him here in Montreal, where so much anguish and despair reigned a scant 10 years ago, when federalist Quebecers ate, slept and breathed secession panic, brought back memories of the Stephen Harper I came to know during the horribly tense final months leading up to the October, 1995, referendum. You had to have lived through it to understand how impotent and leaderless federalists here felt at that time. It was as though a raging forest fire were creeping steadily toward our homes. The alarm bells were ringing, but where was the federal Fire Department? Where were Jean Chretien and Paul Martin? As the flames leapt higher, they stood on the sidelines watching, glassy-eyed with shock, praying for rain. The field was left entirely to the separatists to make their irresponsible, manipulative case. Jacques Parizeau spoke openly of "lobster traps," Lucien Bouchard whipped crowds into frenzies of race-based emotion, money streamed out of Quebec, and Anglophone pensioners timorously inquired if they would still be allowed to speak English in hospitals. The strain was near-intolerable and there were precious few rational voices raised on federalists' behalf. Jean Chretien's was not one of them. Paul Martin's was not one of them. Stephen Harper's was. Since Trudeau, the Liberals' policy had been to appease separatists. Jean Chretien was particularly complacent in supposing that the 1995 referendum would fail with no constitutional challenge to Quebec's unilaterally imposed rules or to the complex and misleading wording of the question. He sat back and waited for the lacklustre Parizeau-led campaign to fail. By the time Lucien Bouchard entered the fray as campaign leader, it was too late to seize the initiative. Within weeks of his demagogic whirlwind tour of the province, ecstatic women were actually kissing Bouchard's hands and all semblance of reason was in full retreat before the tsunami of nationalistic fervour he whipped up. Ottawa, paralyzed, maintained its inscrutable silence, the "strategy" being to maintain a distance from anything resembling confrontation. Into this void, this complete dereliction of leadership, Stephen Harper, Reform's intergovernmental affairs critic (1993-1997), pressured Jean Chretien to compose federal rules for shaping the Quebec debate. Harper took the lead in drawing up 20 reasonable questions that were to dispel the myth of an easy secession, and they were sent to the prime minister on June 8, 1994, in a letter by Preston Manning: How would the government respond to a formal demand from secession? What principles would the government apply to boundary disputes? How would dissenting groups within the seceding province be protected? What would happen to the federal debt? What were the government's contingency plans for public order emergencies? How would the government deal with a seceding province's request to enter into an economic union? What about NAFTA? Every single question reflected critical concerns that the government should have been dealing with, but hadn't. Harper's 20-point program was so reasonable, practical, fair and lucid that the Liberals eventually usurped it as their own Plan B creation. Quebec affairs commentator Chantal Hebert says, "If one were to trace the federal clarity law on Quebec secession back to its true origins, the exercise would lead straight to Stephen Harper." Thanks to Harper, Quebec -- or any other secession-bound province -- is forever blocked from holding a knife to the throat of Canadians. Quebecers know that the rest of Canada has a crisis-only relationship with us. Amnesia settles in pretty quickly once the crisis is resolved and we each go back to our solitudes. Quebec referendums have been Canada's only life-threatening events in modern history. The 1995 referendum was rejected by a hair's breadth. It could have failed by a country mile. Voters should remember who showed leadership and vision at that time and who didn't. If Stephen Harper had been prime minister then, the whole affair would have been a non-starter and Canada would have been spared a bitter, divisive, costly, energy-draining battle entailing years of recuperation on both sides. At the very least we would certainly have been spared the waste of many millions of dollars worth of sponsorship payout. If for nothing else, Paul Martin should pay in lost votes for his party's cowardice and complicity in virtually ignoring an existential national crisis. I decided in 1995 that if Stephen Harper ever went on to higher things, he would have my support. It was a genuine pleasure to see him Monday looking relaxed, happy and confident. I reminisced about Harper's role in 1995 with some placard-waving supporters from Montreal's West Island. They too vividly remember the near-death experience of the referendum. Like me, they know Harper's chances in Quebec are scant, but they're voting Conservative anyway. We're voting for integrity and accountability and leadership. You should too.