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Dec. 13, 2003. 12:00 PM
He may be already past his best-before date
Not PM's age that makes him seem old
THOMAS WALKOM
Paul Martin is lionized as new, as the man whose time has come.
On the surface, this is true. After 13 years of trying, Martin finally became prime minister yesterday.
But at more fundamental level it is false. Martin is not new. He is old — not in chronological years (65 is not an unusual age for a head of government) but in who he is.
As Jean Chrétien's finance minister for nine out of the past 10 years, Martin defined the government he is replacing and personally created many of the problems that he, as prime minister, must now solve.
Even his brand-new cabinet is not quite as advertised. Sixteen of his 38 ministers are holdovers from Chrétien's most recent cabinet.
More tellingly, five of the nine most important portfolios went to ministers who just two days ago were senior figures in Chrétien's cabinet.
Indeed, in crucial ways, Martin's elaborate cabinet swearing-in ceremony yesterday resembled more of a shuffle than a regime change.
More intriguingly, the new prime minister himself seems strangely out of date.
In spite of his energy, his genuine curiosity and his first-class public relations machine, he has the whiff about him of a man whose time has not come but gone.
In an era when the country desperately needs a federal government willing to invest creatively, he preaches a rigid form of fiscal conservatism.
At a time when Canadians feel increasingly alarmed by their unpredictable neighbour to the south, he wants to cozy up to the United States.
At a point in history when corporate excesses are again coming into bad odour, he is the business candidate.
Ten years ago, all of this might have seemed eminently suitable. Today, it is not.
Today, the weaknesses that he helped create are becoming more obvious.
Thanks in large part to Martin, Canada's unemployment insurance system no longer serves those who lose their jobs.
Its federally funded welfare system has been taken apart, making a joke of Parliament's commitment to end child poverty.
Thanks in large part to Martin, the country's health system has been battered — not only by lack of federal money but by the mistrust created among provinces when Ottawa reneged on its funding commitments.
Cities have been complaining that they don't have enough cash to handle the responsibilities dumped on them.
Guess which transfer-cutting Chrétien finance minister contributed to that state of affairs?
Toronto economist Armine Yalnizyan calls Martin's careful demolition of the welfare state during his time as finance minister his "permanent revolution."
But she also points out, in a soon-to-be published essay, that Martin the revolutionary finance minister ended up creating contradictions that promise to bedevil Martin the prime minister.
As she puts it: "An unprecedented string of budgetary surpluses continues side by side with a struggling health system and crumbling infrastructure for water, roads, electricity schools and hospitals."
Yet, Martin's still insists that his primary economic goal is to keep generating those surpluses.
That's the domestic front.
However, the most dramatic development of the past decade, one that Martin speaks to but does not seem to understand, has to do with the United States.
It's not just that post-9/11 Washington focuses on security. It is that America — at least under the current administration — has no interest at all in accommodating other countries.
George W. Bush has made it clear that his country no longer recognizes any rules
Swearing-in ceremony yesterday more of a shuffle than a regime change
None. Zero.
Canadian business, from which Martin seems to be taking his cue, does not understand this. With their talk of continental perimeters, business groups appear to think Washington will bestow economic favours on Canada if it plays the U.S. security game more enthusiastically.
Some argue that the answer to Washington's hard line on, say, cross-border trucking, is further economic integration through a common market.
All of this is predicated on an outdated understanding of the United States, on the theory that if the right rules are formulated, Washington will eventually agree to play by them.
But President George W. Bush has made it clear that his country no longer recognizes any rules. From the invasion of Iraq to the treatment of Canadian Maher Arar, Bush and his officials have been unapologetic.
They say America has the right to do whatever it wants.
When Martin used uncharacteristically tough language to describe U.S. treatment of Arar — the Canadian who was tortured in Syria after being deported there from New York — Washington wasted little time in slapping him down.
"The United States will continue to do what it has to do, and at times act unilaterally if we believe it is in the security of the people of the United States," U.S. ambassador Paul Cellucci said pointedly last week.
Martin's lame response was that he still believes that Washington respects the Canadian passport.
He's wrong, Washington doesn't. Indeed, as demonstrated by the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen imprisoned without charge as a so-called enemy combatant, Washington doesn't even respect the American passport.
America's new screw-you approach to international relations isn't confined to security matters.
Take the latest instalment of the long-running softwood lumber soap opera.
The whole point of free trade, we were told some 15 years ago, was to establish a set of rules that the Americans would respect.
But that never happened. When the United States found the rules of free trade inconvenient, it ignored them. In the case of lumber, Canada's access to American markets became worse under free trade.
Now American and Canadian negotiators are proposing a lumber settlement that gives the U.S. side everything it wants — no free trade in wood, no permanent settlement and a commitment by provincial governments to rearrange to Washington's satisfaction the way they handle crown timber resources.
Then there is this week's Pentagon decision to deny lucrative Iraq "reconstruction" contracts to companies from those nations deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about the U.S. invasion of that country.
The Germans, French and Russians are angered. Martin is merely puzzled.
"It's very difficult to fathom," he said this week.
It shouldn't be. For Washington, this is the new normal. Past sycophancy is insufficient. To be in the Bush good book, a nation must be all toady all the time.
At the end, even Jean Chrétien understood that there was no point in being agreeable to a U.S. administration that is anything but.
To some it may seem odd, and perhaps even churlish, to criticize the new prime minister. In much of the media, he is lauded as a secular Messiah — a saviour who can stop the drift of the Chrétien years and get Canada moving again.
Even opposition MPs flock to him in the hope that some of the magic will rub off.
Martin himself plays to a mood that at times borders on religious ecstasy.
"We stand on the edge of historic possibility," he told cheering Liberals last month. "We will set high goals for Canada," he told an enthusiastic audience of well-heeled business supporters this week.
"I look forward to the opportunity to rally Canadians toward a new sense of national purpose and around a new agenda of change and achievement," he said in a prepared statement yesterday.
But he never quite says what those possibilities, goals, purposes and new agendas are.
When the stage lights go off and the greasepaint is stripped away, this fresh new face can seem very, very old.
Additional articles by Thomas Walkom
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Legal Notice:- Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Distribution, transmission or republication of any material from www.thestar.com is strictly prohibited without the prior written permission of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. For information please contact us using our webmaster form.
Dec. 13, 2003. 12:00 PM
He may be already past his best-before date
Not PM's age that makes him seem old
THOMAS WALKOM
Paul Martin is lionized as new, as the man whose time has come.
On the surface, this is true. After 13 years of trying, Martin finally became prime minister yesterday.
But at more fundamental level it is false. Martin is not new. He is old — not in chronological years (65 is not an unusual age for a head of government) but in who he is.
As Jean Chrétien's finance minister for nine out of the past 10 years, Martin defined the government he is replacing and personally created many of the problems that he, as prime minister, must now solve.
Even his brand-new cabinet is not quite as advertised. Sixteen of his 38 ministers are holdovers from Chrétien's most recent cabinet.
More tellingly, five of the nine most important portfolios went to ministers who just two days ago were senior figures in Chrétien's cabinet.
Indeed, in crucial ways, Martin's elaborate cabinet swearing-in ceremony yesterday resembled more of a shuffle than a regime change.
More intriguingly, the new prime minister himself seems strangely out of date.
In spite of his energy, his genuine curiosity and his first-class public relations machine, he has the whiff about him of a man whose time has not come but gone.
In an era when the country desperately needs a federal government willing to invest creatively, he preaches a rigid form of fiscal conservatism.
At a time when Canadians feel increasingly alarmed by their unpredictable neighbour to the south, he wants to cozy up to the United States.
At a point in history when corporate excesses are again coming into bad odour, he is the business candidate.
Ten years ago, all of this might have seemed eminently suitable. Today, it is not.
Today, the weaknesses that he helped create are becoming more obvious.
Thanks in large part to Martin, Canada's unemployment insurance system no longer serves those who lose their jobs.
Its federally funded welfare system has been taken apart, making a joke of Parliament's commitment to end child poverty.
Thanks in large part to Martin, the country's health system has been battered — not only by lack of federal money but by the mistrust created among provinces when Ottawa reneged on its funding commitments.
Cities have been complaining that they don't have enough cash to handle the responsibilities dumped on them.
Guess which transfer-cutting Chrétien finance minister contributed to that state of affairs?
Toronto economist Armine Yalnizyan calls Martin's careful demolition of the welfare state during his time as finance minister his "permanent revolution."
But she also points out, in a soon-to-be published essay, that Martin the revolutionary finance minister ended up creating contradictions that promise to bedevil Martin the prime minister.
As she puts it: "An unprecedented string of budgetary surpluses continues side by side with a struggling health system and crumbling infrastructure for water, roads, electricity schools and hospitals."
Yet, Martin's still insists that his primary economic goal is to keep generating those surpluses.
That's the domestic front.
However, the most dramatic development of the past decade, one that Martin speaks to but does not seem to understand, has to do with the United States.
It's not just that post-9/11 Washington focuses on security. It is that America — at least under the current administration — has no interest at all in accommodating other countries.
George W. Bush has made it clear that his country no longer recognizes any rules
Swearing-in ceremony yesterday more of a shuffle than a regime change
None. Zero.
Canadian business, from which Martin seems to be taking his cue, does not understand this. With their talk of continental perimeters, business groups appear to think Washington will bestow economic favours on Canada if it plays the U.S. security game more enthusiastically.
Some argue that the answer to Washington's hard line on, say, cross-border trucking, is further economic integration through a common market.
All of this is predicated on an outdated understanding of the United States, on the theory that if the right rules are formulated, Washington will eventually agree to play by them.
But President George W. Bush has made it clear that his country no longer recognizes any rules. From the invasion of Iraq to the treatment of Canadian Maher Arar, Bush and his officials have been unapologetic.
They say America has the right to do whatever it wants.
When Martin used uncharacteristically tough language to describe U.S. treatment of Arar — the Canadian who was tortured in Syria after being deported there from New York — Washington wasted little time in slapping him down.
"The United States will continue to do what it has to do, and at times act unilaterally if we believe it is in the security of the people of the United States," U.S. ambassador Paul Cellucci said pointedly last week.
Martin's lame response was that he still believes that Washington respects the Canadian passport.
He's wrong, Washington doesn't. Indeed, as demonstrated by the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen imprisoned without charge as a so-called enemy combatant, Washington doesn't even respect the American passport.
America's new screw-you approach to international relations isn't confined to security matters.
Take the latest instalment of the long-running softwood lumber soap opera.
The whole point of free trade, we were told some 15 years ago, was to establish a set of rules that the Americans would respect.
But that never happened. When the United States found the rules of free trade inconvenient, it ignored them. In the case of lumber, Canada's access to American markets became worse under free trade.
Now American and Canadian negotiators are proposing a lumber settlement that gives the U.S. side everything it wants — no free trade in wood, no permanent settlement and a commitment by provincial governments to rearrange to Washington's satisfaction the way they handle crown timber resources.
Then there is this week's Pentagon decision to deny lucrative Iraq "reconstruction" contracts to companies from those nations deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about the U.S. invasion of that country.
The Germans, French and Russians are angered. Martin is merely puzzled.
"It's very difficult to fathom," he said this week.
It shouldn't be. For Washington, this is the new normal. Past sycophancy is insufficient. To be in the Bush good book, a nation must be all toady all the time.
At the end, even Jean Chrétien understood that there was no point in being agreeable to a U.S. administration that is anything but.
To some it may seem odd, and perhaps even churlish, to criticize the new prime minister. In much of the media, he is lauded as a secular Messiah — a saviour who can stop the drift of the Chrétien years and get Canada moving again.
Even opposition MPs flock to him in the hope that some of the magic will rub off.
Martin himself plays to a mood that at times borders on religious ecstasy.
"We stand on the edge of historic possibility," he told cheering Liberals last month. "We will set high goals for Canada," he told an enthusiastic audience of well-heeled business supporters this week.
"I look forward to the opportunity to rally Canadians toward a new sense of national purpose and around a new agenda of change and achievement," he said in a prepared statement yesterday.
But he never quite says what those possibilities, goals, purposes and new agendas are.
When the stage lights go off and the greasepaint is stripped away, this fresh new face can seem very, very old.
Additional articles by Thomas Walkom
› Get 50% off home delivery of the Toronto Star.
FAQs| Site Map| Privacy Policy| Webmaster| Subscribe| My Subscription
Home| GTA| Business| Waymoresports| A&E| Life
Legal Notice:- Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Distribution, transmission or republication of any material from www.thestar.com is strictly prohibited without the prior written permission of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. For information please contact us using our webmaster form.
