Pacific Scandal is great grandma of SNC-Lavalin : but all “systematic organization of hatreds” is obsolete today
Posted: February 15th, 2019 | No Comments »On Valentine’s Day 2019 it is hard to know just what to make of the first prime minister of the 1867 confederation of British North American Provinces now known as Canada.
(Well … my thoughts here are actually being posted just after Valentine’s Day, but that’s just because I’m a little slower than I used to be.)
John A. Macdonald’s 19th century career nonetheless retains some enduring twisted relevance. And it could help us with the real issue at the bottom of the February 13, 2019 CBC News report : “Commons justice committee to probe SNC-Lavalin affair — but Liberals limit witness list.”
I cite some recent sentences citing still others on what in “the spring of 1873 … burst upon the general public as ‘the Pacific Scandal’ — the ‘first major political scandal in Canada after Confederation,’ which ‘involved the taking of election funds by Prime Minister John A. Macdonald in exchange for the contract to build the Canadian Pacific Railway.’”
As I see it as well, the Pacific Scandal “marked the start of a long and dishonourable but enduring Canadian political tradition of defeating federal governments by mobilizing scandals against them — as revived in the ‘Adscam’ squabble [aka sponsorship scandal] that helped the Harper Conservatives win their first minority government in 2006.”
(And note this February 12, 2019 headline : “Vancouver MP Jody Wilson-Raybould’s resignation revives ‘vivid memories’ of sponsorship scandal.”)
As I ponder the depths of Valentine’s Day 2019, voices from my TV set and computer are growing adamant about what some mainstream media professionals are already calling the SNC-Lavalin Scandal.
I offer this selection of headlines culled from my local Globe and Mail and Toronto Star websites earlier this morning (February 14) : “Wilson-Raybould’s resignation is an off-brand, disastrous narrative for the Liberals” (Lori Turnbull, Globe) ; “Trudeau risks isolating himself over his attacks on Wilson-Raybould” (Chantal Hébert, Star) ; “Wilson-Raybould’s departure is a calamity for Trudeau’s Liberals” (John Ibbitson, Globe) ;“Is the SNC-Lavalin scandal’s biggest victim Trudeau’s relationship with Indigenous people?” (Tanya Talaga, Star).
These strike me as the kind of headlines that brought the embryonic Canadian people of 1873 the Pacific Scandal — and that just might bring yet another descendant, the SNC-Lavalin Scandal of 2019, with similar giddy consequences.
(The Pacific Scandal soon enough brought down John A. Macdonald’s first Conservative government of the 1867 confederation, and replaced it with a less organized group of Liberals led by the penny-pinching stone mason Alexander Mackenzie.)
Back in the northern woods of early 2019, if something very much like this is what is actually going on today, as the leading issue in the Canadian federal politics breaking news, my own unshakeable reaction is just Wake Me When It’s Over.
And I say this as a Canadian citizen who has voted in every federal election since the advent of Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1968.
I am relieved as well that in Canada today I can also hear other voices from my TV set and computer who seem to agree with me, one way or another, more or less. Not everything from the past is worth preserving.
The Age of the Pacific Scandal in Canada ought to have ended long ago. It is just distracting us from the real problems of — in the tidy words of Joe Clark’s preface to Jean Chrétien’s 2018 book of Canadian political stories — “our remarkably diverse country and complicated world.”
Of course, the people of Canada in all their remarkable diversity may finally decide, this coming October 21, that someone and something other than the Justin Trudeau Liberals will be governing Canada 2019–2023.
(And remember : in our present system 40% of the cross-country popular vote can win a governing majority of seats in the House at Ottawa.)
That is at least how our democracy works at the moment. But if at least 40% of the people of Canada do chose Andrew Scheer as prime minister over Justin Trudeau (indirectly), let us at least pretend that this is the result of some wise and measured debate on the key issues before us — from the Trans Mountain pipeline to housing costs for young families to Indigenous reconciliation to jobs, jobs, jobs, and on and on and on.
The Age of the Pacific Scandal, that is to say, was captured in the American historian, journalist, and presidential grandson Henry Adams’s patrician observation of 1907 : “Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
More than a century later we aren’t driving the same kind of automobile that Henry Adams bought in 1902. We shouldn’t be practising his kind of politics as the systematic organization of hatreds either. But that’s what scandals do so well — while pretending to appeal to higher standards that grow increasingly vague and slippery the closer you get to their dead centres.
Finally, for the names and addresses of those whose online and related media voices on this issue I have appreciated and enjoyed the most so far — and a few further thoughts on the later long career of the John A. Macdonald who was chased out of office by the Pacific Scandal in 1873 — click on “Read the rest of this page” and/or scroll below!)