Posted by Barry Cooper on 5/19/2004, 8:07 pm, in reply to "Will McGuinty make Martin pay?" To date, in the undeclared election campaign, journalists are the only people who have had a direct experience of Paul Martin. They have shed some light on his personality and on his policies but, inevitably, this information is filtered by their own personalities and policy preferences. The transcript of the interview by Linda Frum published in the May 8 National Post was different. There we could read Martin's own words at length and come to our own conclusions. The premise of the interview was established at the outset: the Liberal Party of Canada today is much, much different from the party led by Jean Chretien. "One of the great things about the Liberal party," Martin boasted, "has been its ability to renew itself. The example of Pierre Trudeau succeeding Lester Pearson, Pearson succeeding St. Laurent." Unspoken was the corollary: and Martin succeeding Chretien. He then claimed to have made major changes on health care, on cities, on foreign policy and on aboriginal policy. The truth is that Martin has talked and announced that he would change things. He has actually done nothing, because for the past five months he has refused to introduce significant legislation. To start with the last item, Martin has no aboriginal policy. His predecessor The only foreign policy matter that counts is restoring the Canadian Forces to a capability where they can make a military difference, especially alongside the United States. Martin has promised to spend money and issued lots of press releases saying he would do so someday; in fact, he could have spent money already -- on maritime helicopters, for example. His policy on cities amounts to further intrusion on exclusively provincial And what about health care? By a happy coincidence, Martin had his own public encounter with the bizarre symbolism of "two-tiered health care" recently when the word got out that he was a patient of Sheldon Elman. Now, Dr. Elman is not just your ordinary family doc but the founder, president and CEO of a very successful multi-city and multi-million-dollar private health-care provider, called the Medisys Health Group. His board is blue ribbon and his clients are big and successful. This is just the sort of innovative and entrepreneurial operation that could do wonders, once the Canada Health Act is history. Instead of championing Medisys, Martin said he never used his own money to pay for Elman's services. And then came his reflections on the famous democratic deficit. According to Martin, "we have totally changed the controls on government." Frum then got specific: What about appointments to the Supreme Court? Martin said he was "prepared to have substantial parliamentary input" and "substantial provincial input." But such details really don't matter because "ultimately the government, the prime minister, has to make the decision." Then, when queried about the difference between the government and the prime minister, Martin uttered an aphorism more worthy of Chretien than of the great democratic deficit-fighter: "It's the same thing." He explained, in case anyone didn't get the message, that cabinet operates by consensus and "the prime minister calls the consensus." Like Chretien, Martin is "da boss." Most interesting of all was his discussion of Adscam, on shutting down the public accounts committee investigation of it, and on postponing any serious analysis until the judicial investigation begins 18 months of work next fall. Here, Martin spoke of the need to "balance" the need for information on Adscam and for a new mandate. In his mind, the two are connected. Can it be that more information on Adscam might result in his being denied a mandate? This would make sense if Martin had information on his own involvement that the rest of us lacked. As for testimony linking him to Adscam through his chief of staff at Finance, he took a leaf from Chretien's Shawinigate playbook: deny, deny, deny. Besides, he added, "nobody ever brought through proof," and anyhow his favourite PR company, Earnscliffe, "got a whole pile of contracts under the Conservatives." These are not the remarks of a man bent on renewal of anything. His views on taxes, on the military, on Israel, on abortion, on gay marriage and on "western alienation" were equivocal, evasive, ambivalent and non-responsive. A few more interviews like this and we will have the true measure of the man. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040519/IBBI19/National/Idx
Martin's own words damn him
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
was considering changes to the Indian Act, which was at least the start of a policy, but Martin scrapped them.
constitutional responsibility, as has already taken place with health care. By putting a federal finger into that pie, he is bound to make as big a mess of Canadian cities as Ottawa bureaucrats have done with health care.
Message Thread:
« Back to thread