A Call for a Red Rose Party

Please don't read on me, eh?

The Harper Conservative government has really fouled up on the question of landing rights for Emirates Airlines.

Of course, the decision to refuse those rights has cost the taxpayers lots of money, and hindered the work of our soldiers in Afghanistan—something unpardonable in any government to begin with.

It is also an obvious betrayal of Conservative principles. They're supposed to be the party of free markets and less government.

But the government's justification for refusing landing rights is wrong in the first place, and obviously wrong. The government claims that Emirates is subsidized, and therefore represents unfair competition for Air Canada.

First, the charge that Emirates is government subsidized is false. The Economist magazine, a neutral source, says so. It is run at a profit, and does not even get government backing for loans. Second, restricting landing rights is, in fact, a government subsidy to Air Canada. Not to mention that, until not so long ago, Air Canada was government-owned. Could there be, therefore, a more hypocritical claim?

The government goes on to claim that letting in Emirates would “cost tens of thousands of jobs.”

It wopuld not. If Emirates really can, as ther government claims, mop the floor with Air Canada, that means the cost of international travel will soon be much lower. That means there will be more international travel. That means there will be a lot more jobs: in airlines, in airports, in travel agencies, in the hospitality industry, and, not least, in any and all individuals or businesses trading between Canada and the UAE.

In the meantime, cheaper international travel boosts the real living standard of all Canadians.

If, indeed, this were due to the government of the UAE susidizing Emirates airlines, the proper response would be to thank them for the foreign aid, not to complain about it.

Wouldn't it also seem to be a worthy foreign policy objective to want to increase our influence in the booming oil patch of the Gulf—as opposed to alienating its people and governments?

So, let's see: the Harper desision violates his claimed principles, costs jobs, costs taxpayer money, hurts the economy, and hurts Canada's reputation overseas. Is there an upside?

Only for the unions representing Air Canada employees, and the shareholders of Air Canada. A small, already privileged minority.

But a group that, no doubt, has money to spend in Canadian election campaigns; possibly even nice jobs on the board for retired Prime Ministers.

What this shows most clearly is that we need a Canadian Tea Party. Maybe we can call it the Red Rose Party. As it stands, every government seems to soon become corrupt once in power. Turner's Liberals lost on a patronage scandal; indeed, one could reach back further to scandals in Pearson's and Diefenbaker's cabinets. Mulroney came in vowing to clean things up. By the time Kim Campbell took over, the Mulroney conservatives were smelling well past due; but the Liberals under Chretien and Martin in their turn ended up looking entirely corrupt.

It has happened so regularly that we must conclude that something is wrong with the Canadian system. I suspect it may be because Canadian politics are not ideological. Since nobody can get in wanting to change things or get anything in particular done, the one reason to try for and to hold onto power in Canada ends up being to feather one's own and one's buddies' nests.

In addition, the Canadian upper class is and has always been, since the days of the Family Compact and the Chateau Clique, extremely close-knit and interconnected. They tend to work together, by gentlemen's rules, to keep the unwashed rabble from actually having a say. This is intrinsically corrupt, and leads to all else in time.

The Reform Party sought to be the solution; it made things worse, by splitting the opposition vote. The NDP is an earlier failed experiment, on the other end of the spectrum.

Something like the Tea Party might work better. The idea would be not to form a new party or run a separate slate of candidates, but, as in the US, to organize on specific issues and to participate in nomination meetings to ensure that the most honest, most principled, least baggage-encumbered local candidate won.

Only in America?

Pity.