 STEPHEN HARPER'S BEST FRIEND: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE JEAN CHRETIEN'S MEMOIRS
It's been an unusually interesting cuople of weeks in the normally dull world of Canadian politics. The Liberal Party of Canada is engaging in what increasingly looks like a civil war with its Quebec wing, Stephen Harper is setting the stage for an almost inevitable election that is impossible for him to lose, and former prime minister Jean Chretien is returning from the shadows to complicate life as much as he humanly can.
If you're Prime Minister Harper, life is very good indeed. If you happen to be a Liberal .... not so much. As a matter of fact, life can't be much worse for the federal Liberals than it is right now.
Last month, the Liberals lost the Montreal-area riding of Outremont which they have held almost uninterupted since the Great Depression. Quebec Liberals rightly point out that if the party's leader, Stephane Dion can't win Outremont, they are very few places in Quebec that he can win. Then Dion's personally picked party president managed to make a stupid comment that offended both Quebeckers and Chinese people.
The Liberal civil war that has taken place over most of the decade continues. Only the names have changed.
In this, Harper sees a magnificent opportunity. On Tuesday evening, his government will open the new session of Parliament with the Speech from the Throne. For my foreign readers, the Throne Speech outlines the government's agenda for the new session. The Throne Speech must also be voted on by the House of Commons, and that vote is a vote of confidence. Should the Throne Speech be defeated, the government falls and a general election is called.
The New Democratic Party and the Bloc Quebecois have already stated that they vote against the Throne Speech. If even a minority of Liberal MPs join them in opposing the speech, Harper's minority government is finished.
And that my friends, is precisely what the Prime Minister wants. With both the Liberals and BQ evaporating in Quebec, Harper isn't likely to have a better time to go the polls. While public polling doesn't yet reflect it, this is the Conservatives' best shot at actually winning a majority.
 For that reason, Harper is getting exceptionally clever and exceptionally sneaky. In a rare press conference, the Prime Minister has stated that not only will be the Throne Speech be a confidence vote, so will any legislation stemming from it. Reports indicate that the speech will include large personal and business tax cuts, an extension of Canada's military mission in Afghanistan, and a declaration that Kyoto targets are unacheivable. In short, there's very little on the government's agenda that the Liberals can support.
Conventional wisdom has it that the Liberal front bench will vote against the Speech from the Throne, but all other members will abstain, letting the Conservatives keep a minority and survive. But if they do that for the entire session of Parliament, people will start to wonder why the Liberals are there at all. Sooner or later, the Liberals will have to pull the plug on the government or campaign in the next election as the most irrelevant collection of MPs in Canadian history.
This is the worst case scenario for Dion as Leader of the Official Opposition. His party is at war with itself and is incapable of raising sufficent money to fight an election. If he props up the government for any length of time, he renounces everything that he and his party claim to believe in, but if he forces an election, he gets annhiliated, particularly in Quebec. This is what the space between a rock and a hard place looks like, folks.
I've spent the last few weeks thinking that things couldn't possibly get worse for Dion and the Liberals. Then Jean Chretien returned from the political grave to show me just how wrong I can sometimes be.
 On Tuesday, Chretien's memoir, My Years as Prime Minister will be released. Excerpts of the book were leaked yesterday, and it appears to be less of a memoir than an act of vengence against his mininster of finance and successor as Liberal leader and prime minister, Paul Martin.
Chretien and Martin's hatred for one another was the worst kept secret in Ottawa and it stretches back to 1990, when they both ran for the Liberal leadership. Almost from the moment he took over the finance portfolio under Chretien in 1993, Martin began positioning himself as the heir apparent for the leadership. As Chretien won majority government after majority government (in all, three between 1993 and 2000), Martin began to actively undermine Chretien's leadership and made very little secret of the fact that he was doing so. That Chretien had done precisely the same thing to his predecessor as leader, John Turner, seems to have escaped his notice.
Finally, things came to a head in June of 2002 and Chretien fired Martin from the cabinet. Seeing the writing on the wall, he also announced that he would resign as Liberal leader and prime minister in early 2004.
Martin became prime minister in December of 2003. In the spring of 2004, Chretien's final majority was reduced to a Martin minority. In November of 2005, Martin's government lost a confidence vote and was defeated by Harper's Conservatives in January of 2006. At the time, there were dark whisperings that Chretien operatives were organizing for the hated Tories in several Quebec ridings, of which they won an unexpected ten.
Several things have been said about Chretien's people and very few of them are complimentary. But no one disputes how disciplined and intensely loyal they are. It is unimaginable that they would do anything that the boss didn't know about and personally approve. That being the case, one can only conclude that Chretien's hatred for Martin was so intense that he preferred seeing a Conservative Harper government to seeing Martin continue in office.
 Pity and mercy are traits not widely associated with Jean Chretien's name. He is an old-school pol, who believes in not only defeating his enemies, but to destroy them completely, the consequences be damned. He is the kind of man who is incapable of happiness unless he urinating on the bodies of those who have fallen before him. Stockwell Day and Kim Campbell know this well, and so now does Paul Martin, Jr.
It should surprise no one that Chretien is not happy with merely having Martin's political head on a stick, he wants to kick the corpse awhile and this is where his memoir comes in.
"I was damned if I was going to let myself be shoved out the door by a gang of self-serving goons," Chretien writes after describing the hurt and betrayal he felt upon learning in the spring of 2000 about a meeting Martin supporters had held in a Toronto airport hotel. "By trying to force me to go, they aroused my competitive spirit, ignited my anger, and inadvertently gave me the blessing I needed from Aline (his wife) to fight for a third term. For that, ironically, I owed Paul Martin a great deal of thanks." Chretien spent years telling anyone who would listen - including even his wife - that he would not stick around long enough to seek a third mandate. 1997 was supposed to be Chretien's final election as far as anyone was concerned.
Then it wasn't. Most people accepted Chretien's explanation that the 2000 election was fought because the dimwitted Stockwell Day entered the House of Commons as Leader of the Opposition and immediately challenged Chretien to call an election. Now he admits that Day couldn't have been less consequential to his tenure, and that he called the election for no other reason to keep Martin in his place and nip his stupid coup attempt in the bud.
As history, that's a pretty fascinating story. the rest of the excerpts directly impact the future and what will almost certainly be a federal election campaign before Christmas.
Chretien also recounts that after the Taliban government of Afghanistan was overthrown, he carefully engineered things so Canada's soldiers were stationed around the safer area of Kabul, helping to rebuild the Afghan capital. "Later, unfortunately, when my successor took too long to make up his mind about whether Canada should extend our term with the International Security Assistance Force, our soldiers were moved out of Kabul and sent south again to battle the Taliban in the killing fields around Kandahar," Chretien writes.
The Liberals under Dion have joined with the Bloc and the NDP in calling for a Canadian withdrawl from Afghanistan when our mandate expires in February of 2009. Fighting an election on the issue becomes somewhat complicated for Stephane Dion when the Conservatives have the former Liberal prime minister placing the blame for Afghanistan squarely on the shoulders of a Liberal government of which Dion was a minister. Chretien also kicks Dion's feet out from under him in regards to the Kyoto Climate Treaty. Chretien says when he left office, Canada was on track to meet its commitments under the Kyoto accord. "Unfortunately, whether for political or ideological reasons, my successors succumbed to the fears and threats of the anti-Kyoto forces and did serious damage to Canada's progress and our reputation in the process."
The minister of the environment in the Martin government was none other than Stephane Dion. The Liberals very much wanted to make Afghanistan and Kyoto major issues in the coming campaign as their positions on both enjoy broad support in both English and French Canada. Chretien's book undercuts the case for Liberal competence on both. Harper will undoubtedly be carrying My Years As Prime Minister across the country with him and sharing Chretien's wisdom with voters just as liberally as he can. That's a given. Stephen Harper is a lot of things, but dumb isn't one of them.  Jean Chretien is a crazy bastard with a penchant for choking folks and inventing imaginary homeless friends. The guy is almost delusionally psychopathic, but he is one of the most professional politicians in Canadian history. He lies even when he doesn't have to because the truth is so little fun, but he's not a stupid man.
He knows what effect his book will have in any campaign. He also wrote it knowing that Harper only had a minority government and that an election writ could be dropped at any time. Chretien is also completely aware of the damage that his war with Martin did to the Liberal Party of Canada and to its finances and fundraising prospects. While Chretien couldn't have known just how disasterous Dion's leadership was going to be as he wrote, he certainly had to know that this book couldn't help Dion's leadership.
Jean Chretien knew all of these things, but he didn't care. He led the Liberal Party for 13 years and won three majority governments for them. And it appears that he reserves the right to destroy it on a whim. His hatred for Paul Martin is so intense that he seems quite content to keep the party he devoted forty years of his life to in opposition until anyone who even remembers Paul Martin's name is either dead or out of politics entirely.
Jean Chretien's hatred is so intense that he is perfectly willing to become the best friend Stephen Harper ever had. He's given the Conservatives the perfect playbook on which to fight an election that could very well bring them to a majority government before the year is out.
And as someone who has hated the Liberals since childhood, I couldn't be happier. I've already ordered My Years As Prime Minister and I've blocked off enough time to reading it, naked and giggling.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Watch That Man By: David Bowie From: Aladdin SanePermalink Labels: Fun With Politics, O Canada, Retard Cage Match of the Doomed Redux
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