Da Proof is Da Proof is Da Proof

Said a cunning old man whose name escapes me at the moment.  Savour this my friends, twelve long years of Liberal rule look as if they may be coming to an end.  Yes, perhaps the new revelations of the Gomery Inquiry, now leaked to the Internet (it took less than twenty-four hours) will not change the voters' minds.  Perhaps the Conservatives will be denied the opportunity to form the next government, something which our nation so desperately needs.  Perhaps the revelations posted over at Captain's Quarters will turn out to be false, but they fit quite neatly into the pattern already apparent from the Gomery Inquiry so far. 

What these revelations will almost certainly do is prevent Paul Martin from ever winning a majority government.  His career looks over.  A Mackenzie King or a Trudeau could save himself from this situation, perhaps, but we know the Prime Minister is not made from that kind of timber.  Quebec, which to its great credit has reacted most strongly against the Liberals over Adscam may become off bounds to the Grits for another few years.  Enough time for the Conservatives to make inroads. 

Every twenty years or so Quebec comes into play leaving, ever so briefly, the grip the Liberals have had on that province since Laurier.  When it has in the past we got Diefenbaker, Clark and Mulroney.  It was Mulroney who grasped that for the Conservatives to become a viable second party of government, rather than the official protest party of the one party state, they would have to secure Quebec.  He gambled to do this with Meech Lake and the Charlottetown Accords (and yes a whole lotta patronage too).  He lost, and lost big as we all know.  The Bloc will make any Conservative advance into the province difficult, but the modest success of Mario Dumont and the ADQ shows that there are many in Quebec who are exhausted by the unity struggles of the past forty years. 

Time to move on, and hopefully move over to the Tories.  There is no reason in the first decade of the twenty-first century that a Quebec federalist should feel compelled to vote Liberal. As the demographics of Quebec change, and the Allophones and Anglophones become the majority over the next thirty years, the unity issue will start to fade, as it already has begun to do so.  The dream of Laurier, King, St. Laurent, Diefenbaker and Trudeau may at last be at hand.  Quebec will start playing by the same rules as the rest of the country now that the issue of survival has become moot.  Demographic suicide is not how any of us would have wished for the Quebec problem to be solved, yet that is how it will probably end.  We will lose something about Canada when Francophone Quebec fades, if never away, at least to a point of far less relevance than today.

My worry now is that the public will be too bored by the inquiry to grasp the difference between the allegations against Chretien and Martin and the actual evidence that has now come to light.  The blogsphere is of course buzzing with this and here I was spending a nice Sunday reading, ironically enough John Duffy's Fight of Our Lives, and this blows up.  That it reached the net so quickly is not surprising but my attitude was why bother, most of what is already online now will be broadcast on CPAC tomorrow at around 12:00 p.m. as Question Period begins.  Still, as Mike Brock points out, a publication ban, however appropriate in some circumstances, is essentially useless in in the modern age.  Either an issue has total security and control, as some military matters do in the States, or near total transparency is necessary.  The middle way seems  gone.

Still, let us savour.

NOTICE

In the remote possibility that members of the RCMP or some other Canadian police force, will actually give a damn about my linking to Captain's Quarters let me just say that I publish this post entirely at my own discretion and that this blog legally belongs only to me.  Also, this blog is published in the good ol' United States of America, where the First Amendment still stands.  Put that in your pipe. Again, if you even give a damn.