P.M. P M's P M*

* Prime Minister Paul Martin's Post Mortem

My first thought upon seeing the electoral results: boy, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver got exactly the government they deserve.
Not a single Conservative from any of Canada's three largest urban areas. I just know Stephen's thinking something he can't say out loud: Good. Now you people might understand what it's like to be Alberta.
Seriously, the red tide in the Greater Toronto Area distressed me. I've tried to get into the head of your average Liberal-voting Torontonian, only to find the atmosphere dark, brown, and smelly. Many writers more erudite than I have suggested Toronto is the wife of an abusive husband, and last night, she covered up for him yet again.

Fellow blogger Peter Dodson suggests that "this result speaks not to the fact that Canadians [his unfortunate phrase for those who voted Liberal] forgive corruption, but that they don't want a socially conservative agenda." But Harper wasn't running on a socially conservative platform...not even close. The Conservative agenda would fit neatly into the center of the American Democratic Party. Remember them? The Americans we liked?

No, the only possible answer is that Torontonians (and Vancouverites, and Montrealers) fell once again for the promises of the abusive husband. I'll change. I'll clean myself up. Subtext: you're weak. You need me.

Well, Toronto, standing by your man got you squat this time.

I almost caught myself feeling sorry for Paul Martin last night. I'm sure his daddy used to read bedtime stories in which little Paulie grew up to be the Prime Minister of Canada. Little Paulie used every weapon at his disposal, and disposed of many potential weapons, trying to climb the tree of power. And once he got to the top, he found out there was nowhere to go but down, and that right quick.
I have to admit his resignation surprised me. I fully expected him to stay on: men who have plotted for power all these years don't generally give it up of their own accord. In stepping down, Martin restored a little dignity to himself and his party.

As my readers know, I run the dairy department at a grocery store. My two largest yogurt suppliers are Danone and Yoplait. Danone has been the world #1 in yogurt for as long as anybody can remember. Yoplait, by contrast, was a brash upstart, treading water, until they introduced something called Source: a sugarless, aspartame-less, but far from tasteless yogurt that people have taken to in droves. If you listen to the legions of Source consumers, aspartame supposedly causes everything from bald spots to body odour. (Which makes me wonder how diet soft drinks ever got to market, but anyway...)
Danone's response in the battle of bacterial cultures was to sit back and do nothing for more than three years. Then they suddenly reformulated their Silhouette brand so it had no aspartame....
My rep has been throughly indoctrinated in the Danone Way. She said to me, in tones of great import, that Danone was going to recapture all those people who had been buying Source for the last three years. "They're just displaced Danone customers", she said.
It was all I could do to keep from laughing.

The Liberals think last night was nothing more than a time-out in the corner: that soon they'll come back with a new leader who has no aspartame and reclaim all those displaced Liberal voters. That arrogance is no small part of what cost them this election in the first place. People who disagreed with them on anything were branded un-Canadian, and they got sick of it.

Where does Harper go from here? He has a real juggling act on his hands forming a cabinet. Assuming he can get through that process unscathed, he will act quickly on his five priorities:

--Clean up government by passing the Federal Accountability Act;
--Cut the GST by one point (with another point to be shaved off sometime before his mandate's up);
--Crack down on crime;
--Implement his child care program, consisting of money to parents and tax breaks to companies that create daycare spaces; and
--Work with the provinces to establish a Patient Wait Times Guarantee.

You'll note that most of these priorities almost seem designed for a minority government. Clean up Parliament? Who would dare vote against that, post-Gomery? Cut the GST? Only the NDP believes in higher taxation...even the Liberals repeatedly pledged to scrap the GST! As for cracking down on crime, all three major parties had similar platforms on this; nobody wants to be seen as being on the side of the crooks. Health care waiting times? Anybody voting that initiative down will find themselves in the political ER, stat.
It's only that fourth priority, child care, where the Tories are, sorry to say it, vulnerable. The three parties in Opposition are all for some version of what I've taken to calling a "child registry": a national child-care program where, in effect, the government raises your kids for you. The Tories, in contrast, believe in a quaint old thing called 'parental choice'. It will be a dogfight to get that notion through Parliament, believe me. What? Let the PARENTS decide how to raise their kids? You're kidding, right? Why...why...they might raise them with values that are un-Canadian!

Stephen Harper's going to have to govern exactly the way he ran his campaign: from dead-center. In doing so, he's bound to alienate a few of the more socially conservative members of his party. Trust me, Steve-o: that's a small price to pay. If you can walk this tightrope for eighteen months to two years (about as long as it's going to take the Liberals to find a new leader, find some money, and find some trumped-up reason to bring you down), Canadians will reward you with a majority next time out.

As for Toronto? Maybe it should separate.

That was a joke.

Sort of.

No, really. That was a joke.