[Mark Steyn] One Mo' Time!

"Wow!" said Bono, the elderly rock star turned Zelig-like emissary to prime ministers and potentates. He was standing next to Paul Martin at the time, which made the "Wow!" all the more remarkable. "A politician who doesn't break his promises. This is real leadership."

Paul looked pleased. It wasn't quite as fulsome an endorsement as the night U2 played Stockholm, when Benny and Bjorn from Abba joined them on stage for a rendition of "Dancing Queen" and Bono bowed before the two legendary Swedes and declared, "We are not worthy."

On the other hand, it was a lot better than the night U2 played Oslo, and they came on stage in a 40-foot high lemon-shaped mirror ball, which was supposed to open like a flower, but instead jammed and left Bono and co trapped inside as the lasers and dry ice whirled around them, a frenzy of visual accompaniments lacking anything to accompany.

Bono may say "Wow!" but, to those who've been following him rather more closely, Paul Martin has spent the last six months giving an excellent impression of a man trapped inside a giant lemon - ie, the Liberal Party of Canada. He was ushered on with a spectacular light show and lots of sound and fury and then the unwieldy Liberal lemon promptly ground to a halt leaving Paul with his face pressed up to the window mouthing that he could still be a lively, dynamic, charismatic leader of the band if we'd just give him a chance.

Well, maybe. But Bono at least has a message (end Aids in Africa). Paul seems to be singing, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For".

The Liberal lemon is a classic example of what I call rock'n'roll government. Like an over-the-hill supergroup that won't stop touring, it staggers on - bloated, decadent, ever more dependent on special effects, the roadies and equipment out of all proportion to the small amount of talent it once had, wracked by impenetrable "artistic differences" and personnel changes that make no discernible difference to the tired refrains of the same old song.

Possibly this is not the message Paul Martin was endeavouring to communicate by his appearance with Bono, but it seeped through anyway. The Liberal lemons, like other elderly rockers, are relaxed about sex, drugs and full of hooey on the environment and other do-goody causes. They commend the virtues of community and social progressivism. "Imagine no possessions. It's easy if you try," as John Lennon advised his fans from his possessions-filled pad on Central Park West. "Imagine all the people/Living life in peace."

You may say he's a dreamer, but he's not the only one. Our rock'n'roll government feels the same. "Imagine fewer possessions, a smaller older car than your cousin in Florida, no affordable vacations except to Cuba. It's easy if you try," sing the Liberal lemons. "Imagine all the people living life in peace, holding hands together as they sit in emergency at the Royal Victoria for 48 hours."

Members of the aristorockracyprofess boundless compassion for the little man at public appearances to which they're ferried by private plane and limousine. Or rather, if you're Bono and U2, the planes and cars are "private". If you're John Ralston Saul with a yen to commune with the northern wilderness or a minor Grit apparatchik en route to a meeting to deny benefits to veterans' widows, the planes and cars are taxpayer-funded. But, given that most Canadian rock stars move south and take out US citizenship, getting on the Liberal payroll is the closest you can get this side of the 49th parallel to the rock'n'roll high-life. It's not U2, but Me-Too, a vast web of the mutually connected giving themselves government jobs and government contracts back and forth for all eternity. A one-party state where the party never stops.

Will they pull it off one mo' time? You'd have to bet on them. I said in this space a few weeks ago that the Liberals had adopted the slogan of the last French Presidential election: "Vote for the crooks, not the Fascists." The demonisation strategy is already under way: Mr Martin talks about the "scorched earth" policies of the "Alliance-Conservatives". This is presumably a reference to Stephen Harper's extreme right-wing agenda of, er, universal prescription drugs coverage. But never mind that. He's under the control of a sinister fringe group known as "Christians".

If this goes like recent elections, one can rely on the demonisation approach being successful enough to throw the opposition off course - in 1997, Jean Charest, who was supposed to be at least pretending to be conservative, drifted so far that he ended the campaign to the left of the NDP; in 2000, Stockwell Day spent the first three weeks saying nothing on the grounds that he wanted to run a "positive" campaign and, when it turned out that he was positive mainly in the sense of someone who's tested positive for the ebola virus, he spent the last three weeks proclaiming his allegiance to Liberal orthodoxy. The absolute nadir of his performance was reached in that leadership performance in which he held up a hand-written placard saying "NO TWO-TIER HEALTH CARE". Joe Clark, ever the wag, reached over and crossed out the "NO", though crossing out the "TWO" would have been a more accurate characterization of our present no-tier health care system.

Conservatives won't win by singing lame cover versions of the Liberal lemons. Nor will they win by advocating private health care, a flat tax and a massive increase in defence expenditure, all of which I'm in favour of, as are maybe three or four other Canadians within a hundred-mile radius. For the Liberals to lose their majority depends on two things: the Bloc whumping them in Quebec, and the Conservatives doing just well enough in Ontario. Right now, the former looks a better bet than the latter. But the Conservatives can pull it off by making the issue one of competence - that the Liberals are simply too inept, wasteful, corrupt and/or just plain clapped out to govern. How far voters want to travel along that adjectival chain is up to them, but the theme of Harper's election platform has potential appeal to all: "Demand Better."

What we have in Canada is a crisis of the state. We have the outward appearance of an established Westminster constitutional monarchy, but the checks and balances, formal and informal, have ceased to function. In Commonwealth terms, we're less like Australia and New Zealand, and closer to Malta in the Seventies under Dom Mintoff. Malta had a Governor-General and a Speaker and all the outward symbols, but it was no longer quite a respectable democracy. That's us now. For our own self-respect, we should demand better.

No doubt Mr Martin was schmoozing a rock star because he thought it would signal youth and vigor. "We are such a young country," as Lucienne Robillard always says when I catch her at Canada Day ceremonies in Montreal. Which is a funny way to describe such an old country, with half a millennium of political evolution to look back on. But in the Trudeaupian state it's always Year Zero. As Mr Martin says, "When you look at our agenda, what we are about is very, very different from the previous government. So that's complete renewal." In other words, we've already had the change of government. The election is mere retrospective ratification.

Demand better. Don't let him get away with it. Don't reward the failed, exhausted greasers of Free-Lunch Liberalism with another five years. In the end, we're the ones stuck in the malfunctioning lemon and they're squeezing us till the pips squeak. Enough.

lol....Lennon/Lenin bump!

What Steyn alludes to, but doesn't quite come out and say, is that most Canadians don't give a rat's rear-end about democracy. As long as they get free health care, no matter how crummy, all is well.

Well, we're heading that way too.

Shades of Spinal Tap. Just play the music.

ANother good Steyn article. One point of contention: Bono's only in his mid forties. Given the longevity of guys like Robert Plant and Roger Daltrey, I hardly think that qualifies Bono as 'elderly'.

I really don't think the Canadians are going to change their government. They like being taken. They have had chance after chance after chance but they continue to go the same way. They are actually living under the dictatorship of Quebec.

I think the result of this will be that the west will leave the Commonwealth.

Demand Better isn't the pure conservatism Mark Steyn and quite a few Canadians favor. But it has the virtue of having cross-over appeal. Basically, get government spending under control and institute checks and balances on Canada's government. Its not remaking Canada in the U.S image and thanks to decades of Liberal fear-mongering, most Canadians are not ready to accept a more free society in one fell swoop. Indeed in some respects, Stephen Harper and his Conservatives are to the left of many U.S RINOs. But they're still a major improvement over the corrupt tax and spend kleptocracy Paul Martin and his Liberals have presided over the past decade. Even Ronald Reagan didn't the U.S to where it is today in his own lifetime. Any successful conservative enterprise is going to take more than a generation of work to secure the blessings of liberty for all.

Reading Steyn's Rock 'n' Roll politics while, in the background, watching/listening to Janis Joplin on A&E Biography as it segues into the life of Jimi Hendrix is tres cool. Tres.

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