Currents

Lots of people love to hate Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

I’m not one of them, though I used to be.

He’s in Vancouver this week, promoting his new book. Evidently, the reviews coming out of Toronto for Mulroney’s memoirs have been less than generous.

Rightly or not, Mulroney’s administration became synonymous with corruption and pork-barrel politics. The Meech Lake constitutional mess nearly tore the country apart, and the GST made my comic books and chocolate bars more expensive (yes, well, I was still in high school at the time).

The first time I voted in a Canadian federal election, I enthusiastically marked my ballot for Jean Chretien. That Kim Campbell wasn’t Mulroney made no difference. I was voting for change.

The country did change, but not the way I thought it would. Thanks to Mulroney’s GST, the Liberals that took office were able to boast billion-dollar surplus budgets (after they reneged on an election pledge to kill the tax). The FTA (which the Liberals also forgot to tear up after they took power) which later morphed into NAFTA sent US dollars flowing north. The Quebec sovereignty issue is still a mess, but more thanks to Chretien’s negligence and bungling than Mulroney’s active intervention. And in the end, the Liberals showed Canadians who the true masters of pork-barrel politics were.

I hope you sell lots of books, Mr. Mulroney.

Conservatives just can’t seem to leverage their early successes and lacklustre opposition into political gains.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that Canadians pretty much like what they’ve seen so far from our current political balance and see no reason to change it up. As soon as Conservatives started edging up in the polls, voters smack them back down.

It doesn’t even matter that Conservatives have tried to take over the center by developing an environmental plan far more detailed and visionary than their supposedly green competitors. The media and righteous pundits hoping to score some easy points are having a field day bashing the Tories with their own plan. Clearly, Canadians don’t want to change things up.

That doesn’t mean the opposition parties can start feeling entitled. None of the other parties are getting much love from the voters either. It just means we don’t want an election right when we’re getting ready for summer barbecue season.

Canada’s New Democratic Party continues to fight the good fight against corporate greed in the form of banking fees.

Conservatives may not like it, but hopefully the other political parties will see the light.

Banks saved millions by getting rid of many bank teller positions as ATM machines made those jobs redundant. Next, they started charging clients ATM fees, allegedly to pay for installation and maintenance of those same bank machines… which should have been paid for from the savings in staff payroll.

Banks are trying to have it both ways. Up until now, it’s worked, with billion-dollar profits for the leading financial institutions. It’s just gouging and it should stop.

The Conservative government is so panicked it’s copying Liberal ideas and policies, according to Liberal leader Stephane Dion.

Wait a minute - Liberals are accusing the governing party of co-opting the more reasonable platform planks of the opposition to make Canadians happy and help the country run better, without regard to blind partisan politics… and this is a bad thing?

It is the duty of the opposition to oppose. But the party that is actually running the country has a duty to consider ideas from Canadians of all political stripes when forming policy and legislation. That isn’t a political ploy - that’s democracy in action.

As regular readers of this site will notice, West Side Tory is no more. “Currents” is the new title for this collection of intelligent observations by yours truly.

Why the name change? Mostly, it had to do with alienating readership and clients from the 63 per cent of Canadians who seem to equate uber-Tory Stephen Harper with Faust.

My politics are firmly in the Conservative camp right now and will stay that way as long as I believe that Harper and his ilk are on the side of the good. Indeed, I fully expect to work for my local Conservative candidate in the coming federal election.

But that affiliation isn’t burned into my DNA. I couldn’t in good conscience represent myself as a true-blue partisan when my politics could very well change just a few elections hence.

That said, I think West Side Tory is a fine name for a blogger with a little more partisanship in their heart and a rough geographic proximity to Vancouver Island. I hereby relinquish any connection to the West Side Tory name. Hopefully, someone a little more hard-core Conservative will come along, use it and make a million bucks off website advertising. Cheers.

My other reason for the change? As you can see from the Youtube video above, Max Power was already taken. Damn those TV writers.

Canada’s House of Commons has voted to force the Conservative minority government to create a plan over the next 60 days for Canada to meet it’s commitments to Kyoto.

This isn’t a bad thing. The Conservatives have been reluctant to embrace the new environmental dogma of Kyoto for fear of putting Canadians out of work with Soviet-style economic management.

But now they can - and should.

The Conservatives ought to include in the plan draconian measures like shutting down the Albertan oil sand projects without delay and closing any factories in Ontario that don’t meet newly-drafted environmental standards.

Such a plan will of course have no chance of actually being made into legislation. But it will force Canadians and our elected representatives to think about what kinds of sacrifices they truly are prepared to make. When Conservatives force Liberals and NDP partisans on to the defensive, it might just swing public policy back into realism.

It’s time to get past the rhetoric and partisanship. Per capita, Canadians are the worst offenders to Mother Nature on the planet. It’s time to turn ideas into action.

All the Conservatives, neocons and shills for the oil companies who are denying global warming can go suck on an exhaust pipe.

Frankly, I’m embarassed so many Conservatives in Canada are still shouting from the rooftops (or slightly less noisily on the Blogging Tories forum) that global warming is all just propaganda and junk science. The funny thing is that our Conservative Prime Minister has belatedly signed on to the cause, but far too many of the party membership seems stuck in a 2002-era time warp.

Get with the program, people. We’ve got a planet to save.