Picking Scabs

Being a centrist party has its advantages when you're in power. Jean Chretien's ability to ride waves of public opinion -- a little deficit reduction here, a little health care spending there -- was as much due to his own skill as it was to the nature of his party. As an ideologically-diverse coalition united, at times, only by their desire to hold power, theirs was a fairly easy caucus to control. Chretien's grip on his party was built on the same foundations as his grip on parliament -- what he said, went. You don't recall him ever issuing a three-line whip, do you?

Oh, how a few months can change things. Only now, after moving across the aisle, do we out now just how divided the Liberal Party is. The party is split over Anti-Terror legislation, and will soon divide over Afghanistan and the CN Rail dispute. A "united" Liberal Party passed the ATA less than two years ago. Are we to believe that half of them have suddenly had a change of heart -- that they've just recently become Charterphiles? No. The divisions were there under Martin and Chretien; they were simply papered over by power.

No amount of whipping will help Dion out of this situation. And he knows it. You need some source of authority if you are going to keep your caucus from falling apart, let alone drive it to reverse its own position. Withholding nomination papers is the last-ditch act of a desparate leader -- a threat that has little hope of working anyway, considering many Liberals are seriously re-considering their re-election bids.

It's plain to see: Without Chretien-like control of cabinet postions, election timing or the budget -- and without popular support both inside and outside the party -- Stephane Dion has lost control of his fragile coalition.

Actually... let's be truthful: He never had control of his party. Anyone who watched the Grits' convention in Montreal could see the divisions in the party. New versus old. Old versus young. Corrupt versus fresh. Left versus right. West versus East. French versus English. It didn't take placard signs or fake smiles to see the cleavages within the Liberal ranks.

Not that these emerged, magically, during the convention. Chretien's long goodbye left over a year for these wounds to fester. Martin's 'victory' only added salt. The convention-night: a massive exercise in scab-picking.

Not that the Liberal Party is unique in this regard. Masochism has become synonomous with Conservative Parties when they're out of power, particularly when polls show little hope for a return to office. It's just a little satisfying to learn that the "Tory Syndrome" isn't uniquely Tory after all.

Red Pumps and the BC Budget

Just when you thought that society was moving past traditional gender roles.... Open up the pages of the Vancouver Province.

In a disgusting and ridiculous story about the upcoming BC provincial budget, a writer suggested that Liberal Finance Minister Carole Taylor had learned her lesson from her last budget speech. No, the lesson had nothing to do with the balance between debt repayment, tax relief and social spending. (Heaven forbid we should spill policy ink on the pages of the Province.) No, the lesson had nothing to do with her delivery of the speech, either. It had everything to do with... wait for it.... HER CHOICE OF FOOTWEAR. (?!?)

In the opening lines of the article, Michael Smyth -- a knuckle-dragging man who could only be described as such in the most generous terms -- wrote,

"Trying to guess what's in the budget is always a dangerous game, but there's one budget-day prediction that's been a rock-solid, take-it-the-bank lock for a year now: There was no way Carole Taylor was going to wear those $600 Gucci pumps again. Taylor's choice of footwear last year was one of her few gaffes in an otherwise polished performance as B.C. finance minister. Selecting gold-buckle pumps from the Ivana Trump collection for her traditional budget-day shoes wasn't exactly a stroke of populist genius. No surprise, then, that she's adopted the oh-so-fashionable environmental theme this year to avoid another political bad-shoe day. She'll table the 2007 budget this afternoon while standing in the same pair of 16-year-old 'recycled' high-heels she wore back in 2005."

When's the last time you heard anyone comment about the cost and style of Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's thousand-dollar suit? (They're actually quite nicely tailored, by the way. Check it out.) I wonder why no one suggests he should 'dress down' when making a budget speech on cuts to welfare programs.

You study this type of gender-framing in the media -- mostly in the abstract. You tend to shrug off studies that suggest women are treated differently by journalists and editors. (It's easy to write them off as 'feminist' -- a term which, somehow, has been tainted as meaning 'less than scientific'.) Guess what: those studies are right. Check out Linda Trimble's award winning paper on "Who Framed Belinda Stronach".

When you teach about gender-framing, you hear students remark -- "Yeah, but that only happened in the old days of news reporting. We've come a long way since then." Guess what: we haven't.

Congratulations Mike Smyth and the Vancouver Province: you've just assured yourself of a permanent place in the required reading lists of every gender-politics course in the country. And you've earned the shame of every man who deserves to call himself one. Even someone from the Calgary School has to appreciate that.

State of the NB PC Party

I know that the New Brunswick PC's have been synonymous with Bernard Lord, but this is ridiculous. Lord stepped down in late-December, and they still haven't relaunched their website. Get it together.