The As It Happens Files (20 page)

And the other kind of political party is what makes our day—so to speak. The Quebec judge reference, by the way, had to do with Stockwell Day’s having criticized a judge in the Shawinigate case, thus leaving himself open to either another lawsuit or a contempt of court charge.

Ah, Shawinigate! Another juicy story about shenanigans in politics, but too complicated to go into here. Enough to say that the story is set in a hotel next to a golf course in
Shawinigan, Quebec, Jean Chrétien’s old riding, and the characters include a Prime Minister, a bank President and a convicted felon from Belgium.

Canadian politics boring? Pshaw.

There was, in time, another leadership race in Stockwell Day’s party, which Day lost to Stephen Harper, causing the DRC to break away from the PC-DRC coalition and rejoin the Alliance. Shortly afterwards, the PCs replaced
their
Leader, Joe Clark, with Peter MacKay, who won a hotly contested leadership race by promising never, ever, ever to join up with the Canadian Alliance—and promptly did just that. They jettisoned the word “progressive,” and the newly reunited Tories became known simply as the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC—or is that the Communist Party of Canada?). And that’s the story so far except that a rump of the old Progressive Conservative Party, consisting of members who didn’t want anything to do with the merger, went to court to try to have it declared null and void. They lost.

Another thing that’s fun to watch in Canadian politics is all the switching of partners. Not talking about sexual partnerships here—though, goodness knows, there’s enough of that to keep the rumour mills grinding—but about the individuals who for reasons high and low and sometimes rather obscure decide to leave the Liberals and join the Conservatives, or leave the Conservatives and join the Liberals. By sheer coincidence, the switcher often lands a plum job in his new party—a Cabinet post, say—but he makes it clear to everyone that his switch was a matter of conscience.

Switching allegiance is nothing new, of course. People throughout history have found it expedient at some point—or rather a matter of conscience—to change party affiliations,
Winston Churchill being a notable example. And the practice was not unknown in Canada before now. Pierre Trudeau’s politics were closer to the NDP’s than to the Liberals’ before he joined the Liberal Cabinet of Lester Pearson and then became, himself, the Liberal PM. Lucien Bouchard was sympathetic to Quebec’s separation before he was appointed Canada’s Ambassador to Paris by Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Then Mr. Bouchard became a Conservative Cabinet Minister, which was just before he became Leader of the separatist Bloc Québécois, which he co-founded. Jean Charest was the PC Leader in Ottawa before becoming Liberal Premier in Quebec.

But hard as it was to keep track before, the practice seems to be gaining momentum. There were several Alliance MPs who switched to the Liberals when Stephen Harper beat them in the leadership race. Stephen Harper himself once worked for a Progressive Conservative MP, and before that he belonged to a Liberal student club. In the 2006 election, a Liberal candidate in British Columbia who romped to victory while portraying the Conservatives as scurrilous rats more or less found soon afterwards that he’d been sadly mistaken and what he’d meant was that the Conservatives were fine people and he’d be honoured to join them and fill a Cabinet position in the new Conservative government.

Much of the fun seems to have gone out of federal politics for the moment, in part because Prime Minister Harper is a rather humourless and careful man and keeps his ministers on a short leash lest they do or say something embarrassing. There was a funny moment, though, when Gilles Duceppe, Leader of the separatist Bloc Québécois (the party that sits in the Parliament of the country it’s sworn to break up), announced that he was stepping down as BQ Leader so as to run for the leadership of the PQ, or Parti Québécois (that’s
the Quebec
provincial
separatist party for those of you from away), but changed his mind before the print was dry on the newspaper headlines. I can’t remember what reason he gave, but the pundits said that when Duceppe realized he wasn’t a shoo-in as PQ Leader, he decided to keep the job he had, along with its very handsome salary and pension, rather than risk getting the old heave-ho from Quebec voters. The man he’d thought to replace, by the way, was a young gay guy who had openly admitted to sniffing coke in his youth, which in his case, happened to be while he was already in government—none of which deterred the Parti Québécois from choosing him as their Leader. But when he lost an election, the party decided to turf him.

So it’s not as though there’s no more humour to be found in the halls of power, and we all know it’s just a matter of time before Tory lips start flapping again on the Hill, whether the PM likes it or not. But I think the main reason we are not so amused these days by our Honourable Members is that Canada today is a country at war. The shadow of Afghanistan—Canadian lives lost, our young men and women maimed, the agony of the Afghans themselves—means that we cannot view the political scene with an altogether light heart. Now the stakes
are
high, it
is
a matter of life and death and we really must hope and pray that our government and public servants—and all of us—are up to the new challenges we face. The war has its roots, as far as Canada’s concerned anyway, in that second day that will live in infamy—the day we usually refer to simply as 9/11. And what a hell of a shock that was.

Radio that asks, Why 2K?

D
oes anyone remember how the world was going to end when the calendar turned over to January 1, 2000? “Y2K” was the term we adopted for the problem, which had to do with computers and how they weren’t programmed, many of them, to recognize any date past 1999 and so would probably go into a big snit, the way computers do, and crash all over the place, ending Western civilization as we knew it. That didn’t happen, whether because we put about a million IT guys on the case and updated all the critical software or because it didn’t pose that much of a threat in the first place. At any rate, we got past the witching hour of midnight without a catastrophe, and lots of people had a grand party to usher in the new millennium.

Some people pointed out that January 1, 2000, wasn’t actually the beginning of the new millennium, only the beginning of the last year of the
old
millennium, and we should wait a year to ring in the new era, but numbers have a magic all their own, and that fresh-looking 2000 was not to be denied recognition. The way I think of the change is that the old millennium ended with one of the best stories I’ve ever covered, and the new one started with the worst story—both of them in the U.S. I’m referring to the presidential election of November 2000 and the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001.

It so happened that I was in Washington on election day—November 7, 2000—having been sent there to anchor a news special for CBC Radio. The U.S. being the only superpower left standing after the Cold War and an economic behemoth to boot, elections there are watched with great interest all over the world—but especially in Canada, on the other side of what was at the time “the longest undefended border in the world.” Canada is to the United States as a mouse is to an elephant, our geographic expanse notwithstanding: 90 percent of our trade is with the U.S, and as the old adage goes, if someone sneezes in Washington, we get pneumonia, and so on. That’s why the CBC decided to mount a radio news special on election night.

Since it was November, however (not the end of the fiscal year, when funds flow like Niagara for a few weeks), they didn’t want to spend any money, so the special would consist of me and a couple of guests in our Washington studio and would last just one half-hour, from 9:30 to 10:00 p.m.

“What if the outcome isn’t decided by ten o’clock?” I wanted to know.

“Doesn’t matter,” they said. “We can report later developments in the regular hourly newscasts.”

To be honest, with my unerring political instincts, I was more concerned about the possibility of the election results being known well
before
we got to air, thus depriving us of any element of suspense—a ridiculous worry as it turned out.

Shortly after the polls closed on the west coast, the Amnets (American TV networks) projected that George W. Bush would have enough votes to become the next president of the United States, and they declared him the winner. A few minutes later, though, they
un-declared
him, as their computers took Florida
out
of the “Bush” column and put it back under “Undecided,” the reason being that George Bush and Al Gore
were virtually tied in Florida. In the rest of the country, they had already racked up an equal number of electoral votes, so Florida’s votes were critical.

Lack of suspense was not going to be a problem. With Florida “back in play,” we now found ourselves smack dab in the middle of the most interesting U.S. election night since Dewey didn’t beat Truman. Unfortunately, on CBC Radio, our half-hour was up. I signed off and then hung around the National Press Building for a few more hours, watching late results trickle in and fetching coffee for my colleague Henry Champ, who remained on the air for CBC Newsworld. I was itching to be back on air, but we’d made no provision for a tie vote and there was no more “special” for radio that night. When I finally went to bed the next morning, most people still thought that Bush would prevail, including Al Gore, who phoned Bush to concede. Then Gore, too, did an about-face. When the Washington
papers
went to bed, all they could report was that they had a cliff hanger on their hands.

And what a cliff hanger it turned out to be. My friend Laura Parker, a Washington-based print reporter, was in Seattle for a family funeral the day before the election; the day after the election, her boss called and told her to get herself to Florida—
stat!
She wound up not getting home again for seven weeks, barely finding a moment to buy clean underwear and a cotton shirt during that time.

I went back to Toronto to follow the story from the
As It Happens
studio, where clean shirts were not a problem, although the pace of events sometimes had us sweating more than usual. No one seemed to know how to fix the “Florida problem.” Bush’s small margin of victory there made a recount in Florida inevitable, but when people started complaining that the voting machines hadn’t worked properly, that the process was too complicated for some voters, that
ballots had been properly marked but not properly counted, that they’d been counted twice, or not at all, it was clear that a simple re-count wasn’t going to settle it. Batteries of lawyers descended on the Sunshine State. Legal challenges, court rulings, hourly press conferences and shifting poll results succeeded one another with dizzying speed. Water-cooler conversation everywhere was of dimpled ballots and hanging chad and pregnant chad. (Chad was what they called the bits of confetti-sized paper that got punched out of a ballot when you voted by machine; if it wasn’t completely punched out, it might be hanging or pregnant.)

Some scenarios put Gore ahead by a few votes, others Bush. The story went from Broward County to Dade County, from Miami to Tallahassee, and from Florida to Washington and back. You couldn’t take your eyes off CNN or the wires for a second or you’d miss a new turn in the story.

At
As It Happens,
we were having the time of our lives—especially Senior Producer Mark Ulster, who was a close observer of the American zeitgeist. Every night, just as we went to air, or just afterwards, a new judgment would come down from somewhere—
Count! Don’t count!
—and a new appeal launched somewhere else. We had to work overtime to keep the show from being dated as it moved across the country to B.C., but it was terrific fun.

This excerpt from a conversation I had with Jeff Greenfield on November 22, 2000, may help you remember what it was like. Jeff was, and is, a political analyst for CNN, and that day he’d used the words “constitutional train wreck” to describe what awaited his country as George Bush appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to shut down all hand re-counts in Florida, while the Florida Legislature threatened to make hand re-counts irrelevant by naming their own slate to the electoral college.