Vancouver Province

November 24, 2000

As the song says, "somewhere, somehow, sometime, something’s got to give." How long can this country stay together not as two solitudes, as Hugh MacLennan called it (referring to Quebec and the "Rest of Canada") but as several.

Atlantic Canada, for decades supplicants with begging bowls, is slowly finding its economic feet but always has been a solitude of its own, albeit a broke one. We know about Quebec. Ontario sees its role as appeasing Quebec sufficiently to keep her from leaving. Manitoba, which is more Central Canada than "The West" nowadays and Saskatchewan remain the beggars from the west. Then there is Alberta and British Columbia, so different from one another in so many ways yet so close politically. The "Far West" seems to describe them best.

Left by the British with a system which has become a "soft" dictatorship with a four year term, Canada is ruled by a minority that gets its political majority not by the will of the people but the system – and is perceived to rule, at least in the "Far West", as a foreign power. It won’t get any better next Monday – the country will be split down its major fault lines.

This split shows no signs of going away. We in British Columbia will send back a handful of government members who will mainly represent ethnic minorities and who will pretend to be strong voices for B.C. "behind closed doors." (You can be sure that I’ll catch hell for saying just whom these MPs represent but it’s true.)

But it doesn’t end here. With the concentration of power in the hands of the Prime Minister, we even have corruption concentrated in the central regions of the nation. That may be the hardest burden the Far West bears. We don’t have any crooked, financially insecure hotelkeepers who because of cronyship with the Prime Minister get bank loans thrust upon them. It’s just no fun having a modern day "Boss" Tweed running things unless you share some of the lolly.

We used to do OK back in ancient times. There was the famous case back in the fifties when the new Vancouver Post Office was built and the land for it was bought, at a handsome profit, from a company whose name was COMO Investments, which letters just happened to be those of a law firm whose senior partner, "C", was a powerful cabinet minister. Those were the good old days when the Liberals corrupted everybody. Unhappily for us, Pierre Trudeau, under the careful guidance of Senator Keith "The Rainmaker" Davey and Jim Coutts discovered that the Liberals only needed a decent showing in Quebec and Ontario to win the nation and we became cleansed whether we liked it or not.