Andrew Coyne at the National Post was being hard (i.e., accurate) on Paul (“we lead the world”) Martin over the weekend. He used lots of un-Canadian words and phraseology, which is to say he isn’t praising our benevolent liberal leader.
[…] But we were too quick to settle upon a new image of him: as an indecisive bumbler, well-meaning but ineffectual, a genial policy wonk who was incapable of setting priorities, long on high ideals and short on low cunning, all talk and no action. When, in one set of negotiations after another, he won agreement only by yielding to every one of his adversaries’ demands, we said it was because he was too weak. His harshest critics damned him as a ditherer; others, gentler, said he was just too darned nice for politics. Some of us said this as late as last week.
I think we can set all that aside now. I think we were far too kind. After the events of the past week, after the past year, there is no longer any room for such illusions. The current prime minister of Canada, we have to conclude, is very much like the last. He is not a ditherer, but a ruthless man of action; not an earnest incompetent, but an unprincipled demagogue; not a high-minded patrician, but a snarling partisan; not a man of ideas, but a collector of them.
That the result looks like waffling and weakness should not mislead us. For that is to concede that he cares—that it matters to him a whit whether the Canada Health Act is enforced or not, whether the federal budget adds up or not, whether he keeps his word, whether his word ever meant anything to begin with. A weak man regrets his weakness, bemoans his failures. A waffler is tormented by the choices he must make. Even a liar is at least aware of his contradictions. The Prime Minister, I am convinced, is unconscious of them. Truth, consistency, coherence, it just doesn’t matter to him.
So he’s not exactly sure how he’ll vote next time, meaning that he’ll vote Liberal I guess. Oh—no sorry—that’s the average Canadian voter. I’m pretty sure Andrew Coyne will not vote Liberal because Andrew Coyne seems, umm… oh what’s the word…. in…in…. oh yeah informed.
But Coyne seems to enjoy Martin’s “consistency”:
We had too many inklings of this during last year’s election campaign. The man who was famously cool to Kyoto now campaigned on it; who favoured Canadian involvement in Iraq now denounced it; who brought in tax cuts now rejected them; who himself used a private clinic now posed as their exterminator. Having promised to repair relations with the Americans and redress western alienation, his campaign consisted in equal parts of crude anti-Americanism and crude anti-Albertanism.
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PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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