If you love political history as much as I do, you have an odd love for the old-timey corruption of New York City's Tammany Hall. Tammany was so powerful that it controlled Democratic presidential nominations for the better part of a century.Those devious bastards would actually invent new ways to fuck you if you crossed them. But if you played ball with them, there was a realistic chance that you could hold high political office, reward your friends, and screw your enemies directly into hell.
If you want to learn more about the Tammany Society, but are allergic to reading or lack a time machine, there's a simple solution - follow the federal Liberals in Quebec. Together, the Grits and La Belle Province embody everything that is wrong with the human spirit. They are the perfect storm of total corruption and spiritual decay.
You don't get political stories better than the Sponsorship Scandal, so I'll devote some time to giving my diminishing non-Canadian readership some background.
After the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum, Prime Minister Jean Chretien decided that he was going to save the country from the traitors. He also credited that mission as the reason the God saved him from that guy who broke into his house in the middle of the night. In fact, his wife clobbered the intruder with a handy piece of Inuit soapstone art as the RCMP slept blissfully outside of 24 Sussex Drive, but that's neither here nor there.
Any reasonable Canadian will tell you that the country cannot be saved unless the federal Liberals are flush with dirty money. The country has actually been saved over and over that way. If you don't believe me, just find a federal Liberal and ask.
So the Chretien government did what you or I would do when the country's future was at risk; it paid Quebec advertising agencies hundreds of millions of dollars for work that wasn't done and a significant percentage of it was ... "donated" to the federal Liberals. "Donations" are what polite society called these transactions. The more barbaric of us refer to them as "kickbacks."
The ballsiness of it all was admirable. Nothing like that had been attempted on that scale since everybody had a mustache like Fred Goldman's. Somewhere in heaven Boss Tweed felt a twitching in his pants when he heard about it.
Chretien, safely out of office by the time the scandal became public, had the perfect excuse. He was just the prime minister of Canada. How was he supposed to know how the mission that had been ordained by God to carry out was being accomplished? And he showed the Royal Commission investigating the entire mess some golf balls that "the president of the United States, Al Gore" gave him and no one really bothered him about it any more. Mostly because Chretien actually strangles people that annoy him.
That fucker's obviously nuts. How many other heads of government grab the citizenry by the throat instead of having the CIA do it for them? And no, Dick Cheney was never a head of government. Besides, Cheney will shoot you in the face. He's not all that "hands-on."
The point is, never ask Jean Chretien annoying questions.
Paul Martin - prime minister when Adscam was revealed, but finance minister when the "donations" were ongoing, had a harder time of it. He just couldn't explain how hundreds of millions of dollars went "poof" when he was charged with minding the till. And that's how Paul Martin died for Jean Chretien's sins and The Most Successful Political Party in the History of Western Democracy was ultimately ruined.
That's where Michael Ignatieff comes in. Being only barely Canadian in the first place, Count Iggy of Cambridge was as far removed from Quebec politics - and by extension, Adscam - as one can get. That was the whole point of Ian Davey's bringing Mickey home after 34 years in the first place.
Small problem. Being firmly grounded in Quebec politics is now a prerequisite for running the country. The last English Canadian with no connection to Quebec to win a majority government was John Diefenbaker. That was 51 years ago. And the only way Dief the Chief pulled it off was by using the mesmerizingly criminal political machine of Maurice Duplessis.
John Turner, Kim Campbell and Paul Martin all inherited majorities that they shortly thereafter pissed away. Lester Pearson, Joe Clark and Stephen Harper were only capable of winning minorities with virtually no Quebec representation. It is exceedingly difficult to win 155 out of 308 seats without at least some of Quebec's 75.
Since the end of World War II and the death of William Lyon Mackenzie King, only Quebec politicians like Louis St. Laurent, Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien have managed to win majorities and govern for any length of time. Diefenbaker was the exception that proved the rule, and his majority lasted only a single term because Diefenbaker was crazy.
Chretien won three majorities with only a third of Quebec's seats only because there was no other party contesting Ontario and Atlantic Canada in a halfway serious way. And Ontario is where one in every three Canadians happen to live. Ontario could have produced a minority government for Chretien all by itself.
The only reason that the Grits were able to carry off the charade of their being "the only national party" during the 90s was that they could play off their having tiny scattering of seats west of Manitoba against the Reform/Alliance Party and NDP having virtually none in Ontario or the Maritimes and zero in Quebec. But make no mistake, Chretien was Ontario's prime minister.
Since Ignatieff knows nothing about Quebec politics and seems to rely on Torontonian hacks who don't know anything about anything for advice, he appointed a powerful "Quebec lieutenant" to run the party there. That would be Denis Coderre.
Unfortunately, among the things that Iggy doesn't know about the Quebec wing of his own party is that its politics aren't unlike those of Afghanistan: very tribal, very stupid, and more enthusiastic about killing each other than their own electoral enemies. That's part of the reason the separatist Bloc Quebecois holds two-thirds of Quebec's seats in Parliament.
The two factions of the Quebec Liberals are the Trudeau-Chretien-Dion Hatfields and the Turner-Martin-Ignatieff McCoys. They've been in a state of open war with one another since I was in kindergarden, which was a pretty goddamn long time ago. Back then, Disco was considered the cutting edge of music. And that was about when Ignatieff left Canada to pursue other opportunities.
Coderre is unsurprisingly of the Turner-Martin-Ignarieff tribe. And that's where the trouble starts. All Denis ever managed to do with his life is annoy hockey players by calling them racist, even though the French aren't technically a race. But he hated Stephane Dion, and that's all that matters to Iggy.
Martin Cauchon was Jean Chretien's last justice minister and represented the Montreal riding of Outremont for 11 years. When Martin won the Liberal leadership, Cauchon got out of politics entirely at the earliest possible opportunity. His seat is currently held by the NDP, their only representation in Quebec.
If the Liberals are almost guaranteed to pick up a Quebec seat in the next election, that seat will be Outremont. Cauchon can be reasonably expected to win it without breaking a sweat or diverting money or attention from the federal campaign. Jean Chretien would also like to see Cauchon get the riding back and is said to have told Ignatieff so personally.
So what does Iggy do? He appoints some broad that no one has ever heard of before and points out that she's had titty cancer, which would be a lot like Barack Obama's giving the vice-presidential nomination to Elizabeth Edwards because hey, why not? The democratic process of actually being nominated for an office be damned! If Iggy wants an anonymous chick with sickly jugs to be his candidate, then an anonymous chick with sickly jugs he will have.
The Liberals, as it happens, aren't particularly liberal when it comes to their nominating process. Ask my MP, Martha Hall Findlay, what happened to her in Newmarket-Aurora when the Conservative she almost beat decided that she wanted to be a Liberal after all. Although, to be fair, Belinda Stronach was way hotter than Martha and turned out to have sickly jugs. Of course, Dion rewarded Findlay by appointing her to my riding without a nomination contest.
But Ignatieff, knowing virtually nothing about Canadian politics generally, and Quebec politics in particular, is missing a very important point. Both Coderre and Couchon are angling to replace Iggy when he inevitably implodes in the next six to twelve months.
You see, the Liberals have a truly bizarre tradition in choosing their leaders. They alternate between French and English Canadians. They will choose the absolutely best man for the job (and they've all been men, which is something else the Liberals aren't very liberal about. The NDP have have had two female leaders and the Conservatives have had one) so long as that man speaks the right language at the right time. Since Ignateff is either English Canadian, British or American, depending on his mood; the next federal leader is almost certainly going to be a Francophone.
All things being equal, you had to admire Harvard Boy's balls, standing up to the Chretien Machine the way he did and insisting that the anonymous cancer girl was going to be his candidate in Outremont.
And you have to admire that that courage lasted almost an entire week until Mickey changed his mind.
Former Liberal justice minister Martin Cauchon will get the chance to make a political comeback in his old riding after all.Strong. Decisive. Leadership. Not at all like Dion.
Party insiders say Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has decided to allow an open nomination contest in the prized Montreal riding of Outremont.
Earlier this week, Mr. Ignatieff declared that the riding had been reserved for businesswoman Nathalie Le Prohon.
Not only does Ignatieff come out of this sad little episode looking pathetic, he now looks pathetic, weak, and utterly without a fucking clue what he's doing. He not only managed to reignite the Liberal civil war in Quebec, he also looked even weaker in reversing himself on his decision.
Quebec plays hardball politics in ways that no one else in North America has understood since the 19th century. Once you display an inch of cowardice there, you're finished. You think Boston, New York City or Louisiana politics is tough? Shit, Quebec gets ugly in ways that most people who aren't from there can't even spell. And Micheal Ignatieff just showed up for the game without his athletic cup.
But don't worry about Nathalie Le Prohon. Her story has a happy ending, after all.
But insiders say Mr. Ignatieff relented in the face of a fierce party backlash and decided to give Ms. Le Prohon another Montreal riding – Jeanne-Le Ber.Isn't it nice that somebody who never went through the fuss and muss of winning an actual contested leadership race gets to decide the party nominees of given ridings without any input from the local part members whatsoever?
How thoroughly Liberal.
Even worse is the way that Coderre is going out of his way to fuck Stephane Dion and Ignatieff's unwillingness to stop it.
Look, I haven't agreed with Dion on anything. But I never thought he was a bad man, just dangerously wrong. I said any number of ugly things about the man, and I stand by all of them. However, I was always of the opinion that he thought he was doing what was best for the country, often to the detriment of his own party. I can't help but respect that.
The guy was a former leader of the party, for Christ's sake. He won a contested leadership and everything. If that isn't worth something in the Liberal Party, I don't know what is.
John Diefenbaker was a giant pain in the ass for the Progressive Conservatives after he had the leadership wrested away from him, but his status as a former leader assured him a seat in Parliament for as long as he wanted it. Even the Liberals and NDP didn't throw up serious challengers for his riding until after Dief died.
Should Dion have resigned his seat last December? Probably. But the man was elected to the leadership by a majority of his party's members not all that long ago and that should mean something. Whether he stays or goes should be his decision and his alone.
That's why I'm formally endorsing Stephane Dion to be elected in the riding of St. Laurent in the next election if he chooses to run. I don't give a shit who the other parties run. Because of his service to this country Dion deserves that seat for as long as he wants it. Despite every nasty thing I said about his leadership, if his own party won't be loyal to him, I will.
Even though he suffered the worst Liberal defeat in a generation, millions of people still voted for Stephane Dion. How many people outside of the Liberal caucus has even heard of Denis Coderre? How does a fat bastard like that get the right to shiv a former leader?
If any of his political people are reading this, produce a donation button to your riding assocation's contribution fund and I'll put it up until after the election is over ... if Dion is your candidate. I won't do that for any other candidate in this cycle. As a matter of fact, I've never done it before. I can be reached at skippystalinATgmail.com.
Whether you voted for him or not, Stephane was loyal to his party and to his country. And loyalty used to actually mean something in this fucking country. It might not in a party where you can be actively suing former leaders and still be a "senior strategist," but it should mean something to the public.
In large part because of his own political ineptitude, Dion was humiliated in almost every way a Canadian politician can be. But he isn't a bad man and he's in no position to hurt anyone's petty ambitions any longer. At least give him the dignity of continuing to serve the people of St. Laurent if he chooses to. I would also encourage the Tories and the Bloc not to run anything other than token candidates against him.
If Monsieur Dion runs and loses, well, politicians have lost for much baser reasons than wanting to continue serving the people after their own dreams have died.
Not only do I agree with this morning's editorial in The Montreal Gazette, I don't think it went far enough. Continuing to kick Dion when he's down and no longer much of a threat to anyone says much more about the people doing the kicking than it ever will about him.
If that's the way the Liberals are going to treat their own defeated leaders, why would anybody but the very worst examples of humanity want to lead that party at all?
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