CKNW Editorial
for May 5, 2000

You know that wonderful TV ad about the elephant in the house that everyone ignores? It's of course alcoholism. And everybody tries to ignore it even though it's such a huge threat to the family. Well the Tories have an elephant in their house too ... and it's called two founding nations. And it's a very big problem all the more for like the elephant in the ad, it's hard to ignore.

The Tory elephant is called Two Founding Nations - we'll call him TFN for short. Now the Tories are sure that since TFN is not the big topic of conversation down at the pub or in Starbucks that it really doesn't exist. And how could it be there, wouldn't the party backroom boys be talking about it too? But the fact is it does exist - big time. It's just that people who look at the Tory rogue elephant they don't call it TFN but something else which is often loosely translated into what the pundits call "western Alienation. Except its more Alberta and British Columbia alienation than western.

The backroom boys in the Tories know about this but they don't understand it because they don't come from the far west of the country. And they have a lot of trouble remembering that it was good old TFN that brought them to the stage of near extinction they find themselves in ... for TFN had it's biggest back in 1992 and 3 day when the Tories forgot about how much he is loathed. Because it was TFN, our friend Two Founding Nations' that brought nearly 70% of British Columbians to the polls to reject Joe Calrk and his Tories resoundingly in the Charlottetown Accord of 1992 and, because the Tories still hadn't noticed him, the public really jammed it to him in the following year's election - indeed, British Columbia tossed all of them including a sitting Prime Minister out on their collective duffs.

The problem the Tories have is that they are committed to the Two Founding Nations theory because Joe Clark believes in it and the rest of their caucus is from Atlantic Canada which can't afford to be against it. This has meant that the Tories haven't a prayer of getting a seat west of the Lakehead. Now the Canadian Alliance has it's own form of TFN ... a little different from the Tories only because they know he's there and try to cover him up.

But that's not easy to do. Their answer is to divert attention by calling for more devolution of powers to the provinces on the theory that this will remove the perceived need of Ottawa to bribe Quebec. They also play the "give a dog a bone" routine by throwing away some oneliners like let's have more free votes in the House of Commons.

The question isn't whether or not the Alliance has the right answer for far western voters but, because politics is a comparative thing ... the question is whether they have a better answer than any of the other parties. The answer to that question is a clear yes.

Joe Clark, whom I like as a person, is the very last person the Tories need to be leading them at this time though, in fairness, when your choice was Clark, a proved political failure, or a backroom boy from Bay Street, A socialist farmer from Saskatchewan or a Manitoba cabinet minister that even his colleagues didn't know I suppose one can understand how Joe won.

It's Mair's axion II ... you don't have to be a 10 in politics, you can be a 3 if everyone else is a 2. Joe was a two in a sea of ones.

Joe Clark is the most certified abject failure in Canadian history. Unable to take advantage of a towering rage against the Liberals and Pierre Trudeau in 1979 he got a minority government only which he quickly blew by eithernot being able to count, or make peace with the Creditistes or both ... so he was tossed out of office nine months later. He was so pathetic as opposition leader that by 1983 he had to have a leadership review which he won but the support was somehow not high enough for him so they had a leadership contest where the man who had been stalking him since 1976, Brian Mulroney, stabbed the stiletto into his ribs. Joe Clark became, after the defeat of Meech Lake, the man Mulroney entrusted to get the next deal running and that became the Charlottetown Accord which was trounced in the referendum that followed. But Clark remains a Two Founding Nation man as only Joe Clark could. He calls it asymmetrical federalism - which in plain English means lots of special deals for Quebec. He is against the Clarity Bill while his caucus is for it. In short, Joe Clark not only sees the elephant in the tent, he feeds it.

All this means is that right of center British Columbians will vote for the Canadian Alliance next time out. And if they have any brains they will put the blocks to whoever the new leader turns out to be and insist that he throw their version of the elephant out of the tent and while they're at it, come up with proposals for real reform of how our country works. In the meantime Joe Clark has become more than just irrelevant - he's being laughed at. And no politician can survive that