Canadian politics has had more than its share of angry men and women.
Back in 1962, Saskatchewan Liberal leader (and later two-term Premier) Ross Thatcher attempted to kick in the door of the provincial legislature, which had been locked by the NDP government at the height of the medicare crisis. The door was unharmed and remained barred but Thatcher spent the next several days limping around on a badly bruised foot.
In 1997, Reform MP Darrell Stinson offered to roll up his sleeves and trade punches with a backbench Liberal on the floor of the House of Commons. The bout was forestalled by the Speaker in the first instance, and by cooler Reform Party heads in the second.
Occasionally, the angry men have animated their observations with humour. Drummond Clancy, a Tory MP from 1958 to 1968, was infuriated by the criticism of an opposition member and so rose somewhat unsteadily from his Commons seat to put the following inquiry:
“Mr. Speaker, would it be out of order to describe the honourable member opposite as a son of a bitch?”
The Speaker advised such language would indeed be out of order and unparliamentary.
“I thought so,” said Clancy, and sat down.
There was the Liberal ratpack of the 1980s and 90s: Sheila Copps, who once tried to climb over a table to get at a government committee member: Don Boudrias, Brian Tobin, John Nunziata.
Across the aisle we had Brian Mulroney, whose anger over the collapse of both the Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional accords found expression in raving monologues about the imminent foundering of the country. (Mulroney remained prone to outbursts even after leaving office. He appeared on videotape at the annual Parliamentary Press Gallery Dinner a couple or three years ago, and with his stentorian delivery at full volume, instructed author and critic Peter C. Newman to “go f___ yourself.” The expletive was undeleted, and Mulroney evidently considered his counsel to be wildly funny. The room was enveloped in embarassed silence).
The angriest of them all, though, is the tiresome little popinjay named Jack Layton, who’s in charge of the increasingly irrelevant New Democratic Party of Canada. Layton is running around Parliament Hill these days braying about the disintegration of that putative opposition coalition which would have relied on the seditionist Bloc Quebecois for sustenance and survival. Not incidentally, it would also have provided Layton and five of his NDP colleagues with seats at the cabinet table.
The proposed coalition, now mercifully extinct, was the only opportunity Layton has had to acquire real political influence in Canada. But the new Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, pulled the rug from under Layton’s busy little ambitions and left the NDP exactly where it belongs: an inconsequential rump, which is what it’s always been and always will be.
Layton visibly seethes, scowls, pouts and barks, and he’ll doubtless rail on about the “new coalition” between Ignatieff and Prime Minister Harper. He’ll nag and hector about how the Liberals, and the Conservatives too cannot be trusted. (The NDP has already launched a series of radio advertisements denouncing Ignatieff and the Grits). Layton is like a blunderbuss, scattering political grapeshot all over the Hill and hitting nothing. He’ll drive us all to the verge of nausea with the weary shibboleths so beloved for so long by the NDP (ordinary Canadians, working Canadians, kitchen table Canadians), all the while ignoring incontestable political data which tells us the people of Canada have almost no interest in the gloomy mists of left wing mantra.
We need only look at the NDP numbers, which reveal 48 years of electoral mediocrity. Since its formation in 1961, the party has contested 16 federal elections and managed in only one of them to attract 20 percent of the popular vote. One ballot in five. That was in 1988 when the rational and scholarly Ed Broadbent was leader, but since then New Democratic vote percentages have descended to customary levels, generally hovering in the mid to high teens.
It follows, then, that results have been no different for the rash and ill-tempered Layton, whose three campaigns have returned sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen percent of popular support. Not even the one ballot in five, and yet Layton rackets on about the millions of Canadians who voted NDP and by God his party will attend to their interests and concerns by opposing everything in sight. Including, one notes, the federal budget of three days ago: Layton declared his steadfast opposition to the document without even having seen it.
That tells you something about this man. It tells you he’s wholly without perspective, if he indeed had any to begin with; he’s stubborn, selfish, laden with hubris, and as a politician who would embrace the Bloc Quebecois as coalition seatmates, he’s altogether unprincipled.
Bernard Levin, the splendid correspondent with the Times of London, was moved to observe in 1963 that the British prime minister of the day, Harold Macmillan, was in all respects “the stag at bay, with the mentality of the fox at large.”
That’s close to a good fit, but not quite. Jack Layton is the stag, to be sure, bellowing and foaming, but he’s not so cunning and sly as the fox.
More like an annoying gnat, whose greatest public service now would be to go away and stop bothering the nation.