There is a word for it.

Canadians who despaired watching the dogfight that was our Leaders Debate now have a term to describe why the pitbull Jack Layton’s pugilism turned them off more than the obtuse self-involvement of Harper that night.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, that pneumatic Teuton we’ve come to know and love, Governor of  “Collyfornia,” declared on Sunday Night’s “60 Minutes” that “the left doesn’t like me . . . and the right doesn’t like me when I tax and spend,” concluding that he “can’t be psyched out” because he is in the service, not of the Republican Party, but of the public.

Arnie is postpartisan, a term we’d have used ourselves—if we’d known of it the night of our Canadian Leaders’ Debate—if merely to simply hurl it at the t.v. screen, along with the popcorn we were throwing at the unpleasant melee before us.  “Why can’t you all just behave like postpartisans,” we’d have shouted.

“Just where is your economic policy, Mr. Harper? In your sweater?” barked Jack (Russell) Layton. Those of us even willing to vote NDP (once it seemed the realistic alternatives were Harper, who once headed an interest group that worked towards the destruction of the Canada Health Act, and Stephan Dion, presenting a Carbon Tax in the year the gas rose to almost double its previous price) found our shoulders sagging in the wake of his comment. Surely Jack Layton seemed less international statesman than an auto-union steward in a pub brawl.

When we dragged our sad derrieres to the polls and received a weak minority Harper government once again, it all felt so useless, so déjà vu, so expensive.

“But maybe,” we reasoned, after November 4th’s great American result, “Harper will see the example of Obama’s high road, throwing bones to enemies, hiring Hilary as Secretary of State, working happily with Robert Gates in the transition, “Maybe Jack, too, will follow the lead from below the border, rejecting vitriol, and party gamesmanship, and ole Jack will, turn back from attack!” And we waited for the economic statement. And . . .  we were disappointed.

Once again Harper’s obtuseness blinded him from the example below the border. In place of a bone was a piece of poisoned gristle: a proposal that public servants, despite the recent surge in NDP power in the House, would be forbidden to strike. The Governor General prorogued Parliament to give Harper more time. More time to reflect on how partisan is his policy-making? Don’t hold your breath.

Recently Colin Powell was asked what he thought of the behaviour of the Republican Party in the American election. He blamed the party’s petty, partisan provincialism in contrast with Obama’s even-handed, gentlemanly high road. He decried the script handed by Republican chieftains to Sarah Palin: repetitious, g-droppin’ ole banter about “small town Alaska.”

“Most people don’t live in small towns,” he said. “I’m from Brooklyn and there’s nothing wrong with my values.”

Many of us recall the gentle intellectual Ignatieff, writing “Blood and Belonging” in a real attempt to understand the raw tribal outrages of a post-cold war Europe. We called him the Thinking Woman’s Crumpet. Some even remember his incisive, engaged, and thoughtful questions when interviewing Martin Amis, and other great world-class intellectuals on his television show, broadcast in Canada on Book T.V.

Could Ignatieff have been the postpartisan missing at the Fall Leaders’ Debate? How does he compare in that department with Dion?

Harper’s badgering and interrupting of Dion in the debate only served to add patience and self-control to the list of good qualities held by Dion but not by Harper. Certainly Dion is as educated and thoughtful as the pedigreed Ignatieff, and with Dion’s parental ties to France, the most  international of any statesman that we could  hope for . . . but without a solid grasp of English in a country with an English-speaking majority…

And then there was Dion’s bad timing on the Carbon Tax in a country where some provinces have already implemented similar measures. Simply put, he worked too hard to sell one specific—and catastrophically-timed—program. We were not in the mood for a Carbon Tax sales presentation. For not cancelling the Carbon Tax proposal, especially right after the markets collapsed, he failed in the Department of Postpartisan.

The hard truth of politics is that you get one hour in the sun and then, if you fail to engage, you are heard no more.

Time will tell whether Ignatieff is the real deal. One good thing is we’ll have four whole years to do something radically new in Canadian politics: to watch a politician, even if he is below the border, engaging in Postpartisanism.

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Tags: harper, ignatieff, leaders debate, postpartisan

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 at 3:49 pm and is filed under Federal Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.