storyimage: 

To hear the Liberals tell it, we should be quaking in our gumboots, our Birkenstocks, or our whirly girly flip-flops.

A very scary thing is in our midst.

The scary thing is not a shipping magnate with a scallywag’s reputation for business. It is not that the office of a former finance minister reportedly attempted to influence the awarding of federal research grants. It is not federal surpluses created on account of an Employment Insurance surplus engineered by disqualifying tens of thousands of workers from EI benefits. It is not the undermining of Ottawa’s role as keeper of national standards that occurred when the Canada Assistance Plan was dismantled. It isn’t the largest corporate tax cuts in history brought in under Liberal finance minister Paul Martin.

You would be wrong, too, to think that global warming is the scary thing —although you would be getting warmer. The Prime Minister has not introduced a plan to meet Canada’s Kyoto target, but that doesn’t mean the Liberals have not released a hot air policy in time for a federal election.

The scary thing is not Paul Martin’s past, but Stephen Harper ’s future.

It is a brilliant strategy. Until he found an external enemy, Martin’s only visible plan to cement power was to diss Jean Chretien’s legacy and ditch Chretien loyalists. Now that Liberal organizers are busy demonizing Stephen Harper’s right-wing beliefs, voters may be less inclined to notice that the Liberal party has veered to the right. Witness both an increase in former Conservative and Alliance MPs drifting to the Liberals, while left Liberals like Sheila Copps, Jane Stewart, Elinor Caplan, John Manley and Alan Rock are on the move. Even Joe Clark appears to be a Liberal now, calling Martin “the lesser of two evils.”

The other evil of course, is Stephen Harper. Dubbed a ‘mergers and acquisitions specialist,’ he was one of the Firewall Six who wrote a 2001 manifesto urging Alberta to repudiate the Canada Health Act and boycott the Canada Pension Plan. He first battled with Preston Manning over whether the Reform Party should be driven by the party’s grassroots or by its leadership (Harper favoured a top-down approach).

The son of an Imperial Oil executive, Harper went on to wrestle control of the Alliance Party from Mr Jet Ski and to engineer an amalgam of the Alliance with a weakened Tory party under by Peter McKay. Still, the anti-choice Harper has done Martin a huge favour: allowing him to lay claim to the middle ground.

In the Winnipeg granola belt riding where I live, scary Stephen stories are being served up at dinner parties and in coffee shops. Even some of my NDP friends have taken the bait.

“Reform, Conservative, whatever —Stephen Harper is pretty scary,” said an NDP friend recently… “I think I might vote Liberal.”

“What?” I said, “Your vote only counts in the riding you live in. Who is your member of parliament?”

“Pat Martin,” she said. An outspoken critic of the Liberals’ shift to the right, Martin is the NDP MP who, when targeted by fundamentalists for supporting gay marriage, replied, “Jesus was very firm in his condemnation of the Pharisees, and I answer to a higher power than these assholes.”

I wanted to know, “why you would vote out an NDP MP to give more power to Paul Martin?”

“Well, voting NDP seems kind of risky,” she replied.

With polls indicating Liberal party support anywhere from 32-40 percent, there is but little doubt that the Liberals will form at least a minority government. With fewer and fewer moderates left in that party, however, the new Liberals are indistinguishable —at least economically —from the old conservatives. Now that’s scary. But invoking the fear of a Harper takeover in order to oust leftist MPs who provide a critical balance in Parliament strikes me as downright diabolical.

FYI: After the 2002 federal election, the Liberals held 172 of the 301 seats in the Commons; the Canadian Alliance and Conservatives combined had 88; the Bloc Québécois 38; and the NDP 13.