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Posted on 04/14/2007 5:33:53 PM PDT by GMMAC
Stephane Dion, meet Kevin Potvin
National Post: Editorial
Published: Saturday, April 14, 2007
It is hard to know which party has made the bigger blunder in the electoral deal officially announced yesterday between Liberal leader Stephane Dion and Green leader Elizabeth May. Ms. May was elected leader by Green members last year in good faith, and we feel sure not all of them are happy that she has essentially decided to endorse Mr. Dion for prime minister (again), earning for herself an extremely slim chance of unseating Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay in Central Nova. The Green Party was founded to give Canadian voters an alternative to old-line parties and failed environmental policies; now Ms. May has made it a sub-annex of one of those parties, promoting a style of strategic voting that amounts to urging the public not to vote for any other Green candidates at all. (Message received, ma'am!) Some of her party's nominees are already in open revolt.
But Mr. Dion has a lot more at stake -- the stewardship of what was, not so long ago, still Canada's most efficient machine for winning elections. In his case, the deal seems likely to be remembered as the point of no return on the road to disaster. His espousal of the Kyoto Protocol as the only possible framework for response to climate change is looking less wise and more retrograde each day; other environmentalists are moving on, while a Conservative prime minister, for better or worse, makes more new policy on the file in a year than the Liberals did in ten. Even now, Mr. Harper's Environment Minister is in the United States using the government's new pull with Washington to try moving American policy "beyond Kyoto."
In other words, Mr. Dion is being fought to a draw, at best, on the only plank in his platform. Giving Elizabeth May a red scarf to go with her green outfit looks like a cheap attempt to borrow environmental credibility. And whatever gains he expects to make come at the cost of sacrificing the party's commitment to running candidates in every riding, an ordinarily non-negotiable rule of which Mr. Dion and his predecessors have been boasting incessantly since the Mulroney years.
At the very least, Mr. Dion has certainly put himself in the position of tacitly endorsing Ms. May's own political worldview as preferable to that of the Conservatives. On Feb. 20, Ms. May, asked about rumours that she was negotiating with other parties to clear the way in Central Nova, said "I think it would be great to have a progressive alliance where the NDP, the Liberals and the Bloc, basically all the pro- Kyoto parties, say, 'What do we have to do to make sure that what occurred in 2006 doesn't happen again?' " Does the Liberal leader think, like Ms. May, that a Quebec separatist party would be a welcome partner in a "progressive alliance"? He has, after all, just taken the first step toward building one on the model proposed. Liberal women might also like to ask him why he will refuse to sign nomination papers for a Liberal candidate (one that probably would have been female) in order to smooth the way to Parliament for Ms. May, a politician who is on record as saying, "I'm against abortion because there is a right to life and the fetus is sacred ? I don't think a woman has a frivolous right to choose."
Meanwhile, whether Mr. Dion likes it or not, every lunatic statement ever made by some Green candidate is going to reflect on him from now until the next election. Even as he was holding a joint press conference with the leader of the Green party, word was reaching newsstands of the editorial written after 9/11 by the Greens' man in Vancouver- Kingsway, Kevin Potvin, who "felt an urge to pump [his] fist into the air" as terrorists flew a passenger aircraft with 64 people aboard into the Pentagon. Mr. Potvin is also an advocate of conspiracy theories about 9/11 (which raises the confusing question of how one could both celebrate a terrorist mass murder as a legitimate act of war and then go on to decide it was an obvious black-op by sinister neoconservative/big oil/Bush administration/Zionist interests). Oh, and those 2005 bombings in London? According to Mr. Potvin, "[the] subway bombings were not cowardly, despicable and unspeakable acts; they were acts of war, and civilians for a century have been regarded as legitimate targets in war, even if our own warriors won't admit it ? Terrorists ? are defending themselves from cultural genocide. We would do no less, and in fact, we do no less."
We bring up Mr. Potvin not because we believe Mr. Dion personally shares any of his notions about 9/11, but because Mr. Dion has painted himself into a corner while he waits for the official reaction to them from the Greens' leader. How will his lovey-dovey rhetorical cuddling with Ms. May look to voters if she decides that Mr. Potvin deserves to run as a Green candidate and that his "bold," "alternative" ideas, true or not, are exactly what Canada needs to hear? Go ahead, Stephane -- lie down with losers; and just watch how long it takes you to wash the stink off.
© National Post 2007
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