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February 8, 2006

Et tu, Brute?

Paul Wells asks whether David Emerson is Harper's Harriet Miers. Well I guess superficially all the furious conservatives may seem the same, but no, it's not the same thing, because:

• Harriet Miers might've voted for Al Gore, but I doubt she was still a registered Democrat when Bush asked her to join the Supremes. For all that I know, there's a Liberal membership card in Emerson's back pocket when the above picture was taken.

• Bush's second term ends in January 2009, whether he appoints Harriet Miers, Sam Alito, or Barney the Scottish Terrier. Stephen Harper's government might fall before the year is out or two years from now, and every single seat counts.

• It took a day or two before conservatives realized the deep inherent problems of appointing the White House Counsel to the Supremes (they were too busy trying to figure out who the heck was Harriet Miers). It tooks less than a minute for our conservatives to see something wrong with the above picture.

• Harriet Miers' appointment got pulled out and replaced by Sam Alito, a bona fide originalist whose ass would've been thoroughly filibustered in the Senate had he gone in there first. Canadian cabinet ministers don't get filibustered.

• Stephen Harper really should've known better.

As I've mentioned before, the primary motivation for this is likely to put the Cities of Montreal and Vancouver into Cabinet. But as Andrew Coyne points out, the whole idea of regional representation in Cabinet is wrong. The whole idea of using the Cabinet to appease all the regions was based on the fact that the Senate was doing such a crappy job of it. Senate reform would rectify this abomination, which makes the Fortier appointment doubly detrimental.

BTW this is why I'm not harping on the fact that the City of Toronto's still not in Cabinet, because it's a dumb idea to insist that it's in it. And, may I add, that Vancouver is in: the City of Vancouver is not an amalgamated city and there's plenty of Tories in the whole GVRD (which is a much more appropriate comparison).

And it turns out I was wrong in my initial assumption: it was us that went over looking to flip him, not the other way around. This might not be such a bad thing, since one can certainly make the case that the government was just looking for the most experienced person, as opposed to the defector whoring himself out (although that's what he ended up doing anyways). I'm not actually opposed to appointing people outside your caucus as ministers, just that you don't have to sell your soul to do it, as New Zealand figured out last year (although I admit that I thought back then that the whole idea was pretty f*cked up, I certainly think it's better than this mess).

And may I add that this doesn't even help the Tories that much in their House situation: they now can secure a majority of votes with the help of the NDP. La dee freakin' da. Seriously, that's even worse than trying to get some of the economic agenda passed with Liberal support (which, I should add, will now be a lot harder to come by).

What's most depressing is that there's no good way out of this mess. The ammo has already been delivered to the enemy and they're locked and loaded.

And to those who are arguing that this needs to be done: if this was Caesar's honeymoon, this would be like sleeping with Cleopatra on the first night. Sure, in the long run your wife might forgive you and you certainly have thrown a bone into the Ptolemy camp, but you're just as likely to look a little too hungry for power and get stabbed in front of the Senate. (Please ignore the fact that the above analogy not high on the historical accuracy front.)

Posted by Kelvin at February 8, 2006 12:58 AM

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