David Frum piling it deeper [View All]

[Parrcrow]

so much bullshit to pander to the American right wing. I always get the feeling that what he is essentially saying is; "Your country is better than mine, please accept me!"

His piece in the NYT today is a case in point. Take a petty scandal and use it to argue that Canada lacks political sophistication.



I LOVE Canada: It's so clean!" Visiting Americans may be about to lose their favorite cliché about their chilly neighbor. Over the past few weeks, a judicial inquiry in Montreal has heard charges that Canada's governing Liberal Party was running a system of extortion, embezzlement, kickbacks and graft as dirty as anything Americans might expect to find in your run-of-the-mill banana republic.

snip

What they don't see is how precarious political support for this alternative utopia has become among Canadian voters in recent years. From World War II until the 1980's, Liberal power rested on two political facts: its dominance in French-speaking Quebec and its popularity in the immigrant communities of urban Ontario.

snip

Unlike their supposed analogues, the Democrats in the United States or Great Britain's Labor Party, Canada's Liberals are not a party built around certain policies and principles. They are instead what political scientists call a brokerage party, similar to the old Italian Christian Democrats or India's Congress Party: a political entity without fixed principles or policies that exploits the power of the central state to bribe or bully incompatible constituencies to join together to share the spoils of government.

As countries modernize, they tend to leave brokerage parties behind. Very belatedly, that moment of maturity may now be arriving in Canada. Americans may lose their illusions about my native country; Canadians will gain true multiparty democracy and accountability in government. It's an exchange that is long past due.


the full article

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/opinion/19frum.html?th&emc=th