So the Liberal minority government on a death-watch survived a no-confidence vote, with the Commons Speaker breaking the tie.
It was a reprieve bought by a sordid deal sold as an honourable act to save the country from the depredations of separatists in Quebec.
Twenty-five years ago this month, another Liberal prime minister secured the country from a referendum mounted by Quebec separatists, when their dreams were still fresh and youthful. Pierre Trudeau won the day for Canada by the sheer magnitude of his personality, and the compelling force of his argument, passion and promise of constitutionally renewing the country.
Twenty-five years later—and nearly two-thirds of that time under Liberal rule—the country seems depleted of goodwill, ridden with scandals and corruption at the highest levels of government and deeply fragmented regionally. And the separatists in Quebec are more renewed in consummating their nationalist dreams than when the last referendum took place a decade ago.
A reprieve is not a commutation of justice, and the country must yet decide on how it views the conduct of a prime minister and his party as revelations pour forth at the Gomery sponsorship scandal inquiry.
But recent events in the nation’s capital cannot be divorced from the sensibility of the people.
In a democracy such as ours, government is the business of the people, and Parliament is a mirror the country holds up to itself.
What is done in the name of the people must be sanctioned by the people, and if the people concede to the sort of conduct witnessed of late in Ottawa, then the country deserves what it receives.
A democracy is not more noble, more virtuous, nor more wise than the people who own the country, and whose consent sustains the workings of state and government.
History is filled with examples of how undeserving people despoiled their inheritance, ruined their fortunes and lost their freedom.
The slide to such ignominy begins when people take for granted what has been earned by judicious actions, thrift, courage and sacrifice of their predecessors and then—in abandoning their responsibility to hold accountable those whom they elect—are willing to be bribed by the fruits of their labour.
We know the story of the Roman emperor who contemptuously appointed a horse to the senate. The people applauded as they were fed a diet of bread and circus, and before long the empire deservingly crumbled.
The Liberal party got its reprieve, and might well spin this into an electoral victory of some sort or other.
That would not be surprising, for the Liberal Party of Canada is not merely a party, as are its opposite numbers. It is an institution that has become more or less indistinguishable from the state, its personnel and influence deeply embedded within society, its self-image inseparable from how the country increasingly views itself as a people gifted by nature to innovate new relationships of sex, wealth and power, unbidden by any traditional constraints of faith and family.
Hence, if the Liberal party is returned to government, however contrite it pretends to be in public, the electorate will be passing judgment less on a party without scruples than on themselves as a people content with their own reflections in the country’s mirror.
A one-party state, democratic or otherwise, eventually becomes a closed system, with its ruling elite increasingly convinced of its own worth.
But a closed system has a finite life, as Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the former Soviet Union, can testify. Canada is not quite a closed system, but it is well advanced, under the direction of its ruling elite, into becoming one.
Then the system will inevitably reach a point of being one crisis or referendum removed from the inescapable breakdown of the country.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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