Canadian voters prefer corruption to change (National Post, June 30)

MONTREAL - On Monday night, I went to bed stunned and depressed. I really thought this time we would throw the bums out. Pundits and pollsters fed my rosy illusions, and I'm sure their professional pride has them suffering at a level beyond the disappointment felt by their hopeful readers.

I am angry as well. Canadians say they are disgusted with Liberal arrogance and corruption. How much punishment does it take to make them -- especially Ontarians, most of whom apparently lost their nerve on the way to the ballot box -- put their votes where their indignation is?

I know intelligent and savvy people who voted Liberal for the-devil-you-know reasons, so I realize this isn't about ignorance. Even voters suffering under an abusive regime become fearful of change. Ironically, the syndrome springs from the inner conservatism of order-loving liberals; they equate change with potential disorder, while political conservatives are ready for the adventure of more personal autonomy.

Paul Martin is hardly the first Canadian politician to profit from this inborne love of stasis. When I saw the results come in, even as my heart was sinking, I experienced a Quebec flashback. Suddenly it was 1980 all over again. The ruling party had grown hubristic in office. Their leader was a dictator drunk on power and obsessed with his personal agenda, no matter what the cost. Billions of wasted dollars, through corruption in high office, had just been tallied by an independent investigator. The electorate was up in arms. An election was called. And the leader responsible for the damage was ... re-elected.

Like the federal Liberals, Montreal's Jean Drapeau held power for so long he came to believe the mayoralty was his by divine right. In 1960 he founded the Parti Civique on an anti-corruption platform, got elected and ran Montreal for the next 26 years. His goal was to put the city on the international map and he did so, through development in the arts, public infrastructure and grand international projects, notably Expo 67 and the 1976 Olympics.

Like the Liberals, Drapeau's passion for control, his tendency to throw money at poorly conceived and crisis-plagued projects and his arrogance in power eventually suffocated whatever integrity he had brought to public office. The Olympic stadium was his folie de grandeur and is easily the equivalent of Adscam for senseless wastage on a, well, Olympian scale.

The total deficit for the 1976 Olympic Games was $1.5-billion even though Mayor Drapeau boasted: "The Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby." At this point, think gun registry.

Judge Albert Malouf was appointed to chair an inquiry into the astronomical cost overruns. After three years and $3-million worth of comprehensive investigation, he established that responsibility for the enormous deficit rested squarely with Drapeau. In his obsession to push through a project he deemed critical to Montreal's future -- think Quebec separatism and Adscam -- Drapeau presided over scandalous corruption. The deficit is still being paid off by Quebecers.

Montrealers' reaction approximated that of Canadians to the Auditor-General's February Adscam report. Drapeau promised to write a self-exonerating rebuttal. He never did. I assumed he would be thrown out of office in the next election. To my utter stupefaction, he was returned handily to office, and was never defeated again, leaving office for health reasons in 1986.

Over the years of his long tenure, Jean Drapeau convinced Montrealers he was the mother and father of Montreal's renaissance, and that without him at the helm, chaos or dysfunction would follow. The same syndrome held sway in this election -- and permeated every Liberal ad and scaremongering campaign. To abandon the Liberals, we were told, was to embrace a Canada that Canadians "don't recognize," that looks like the United States.

Because they've been in power for so long, the Liberals feel they are only stating a fact in warning us that the nation's stability rests with them alone, and most anglo-Canadians were afraid to test this specious mantra's truth.

Long political reigns confer a false, but self-fulfilling aura of indispensability. Some say voters are like sheep, but they are more like horses. You can try to rescue them from a burning barn, but in spite of the danger, their instinct is still to run back to the safety of their stalls.

© National Post 2004