Ritz Cracker

"Please stay and enjoy yourselves, but I have to warn you, the 10 o'clock show can get pretty blue. Oh, and try the veal."

Just when I think that Canadians might be wary of giving a majority to Harper, along comes the Canada's latest stand-up comedy sensation, Llyodminster's own Gerry Ritz, Minister of Food Humour. This listeriosis thing at the Maple Leaf plant that's killed a dozen or so people? Well, when you really think about it, it really is very funny, isn't it? Ritz riffed that the failure in the food safety system was causing the government a death of a thousand cuts "or should I say the death of a thousand cold cuts."

After the guffaws died down, when told that one death was in Prince Edward Island, the Ritzster hit it out of the park: “please tell me it's [Liberal agriculture critic] Wayne Easter" (who represents one of the ridings in Canada's toy province).

Ba-dum!

Last week, Harper moved swiftly to bring the hammer down on the guanofacient puffin and the wise-ass tiny Tory who dissed the father of a soldier killed in Afghanistan. With Ritz, he's decided to let it pass, saying that the remarks were part of a private conversation. But since when is a conference call with members of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency deemed private?

What this shows is exactly why Harper has garnered such a reputation as a controlling tightass. It has occurred to more than one person that he needs to be Minister of Everything because his caucus, generally speaking, lives in the shallow end of the talent pool. In one sense, this is not surprising. Just as Americans are awakening to the realization that if you elect people who tell you that government is useless, you end up with useless people in government, so too the Tories are short on people who actually want government to work. Thus we get a cabinet with such noteworthy lightweights as Gordon O'Connor, Bev Oda, Gary Lunn, Rona Ambrose, and of course, matinee meat puppet Maxime "my gal's rack is bigger than yours" Bernier. Even the unlucky-in-love Peter MacKay looks positively Prime Ministerial compared to these mopes. (MacKay enjoys the unique distinction of being one of the only men to have been dumped by his girlfriend not for another man, but for another political party.) Even jet-skier and rollerblader extraordinaire Stockwell Day, who thought the Niagara River runs from north to south and (to steal a line from Warren Kinsella) that the Flintstones was a documentary, has become a model of gravitas in comparison. So threadbare is the Team Tory bench that the only person Harper could find to replace Bernier as foreign affairs minister was David Emerson, who won his seat in the last election running as a Liberal, and is, sensibly, not running again. As for Gerry Ritz, here's a poli sci pop quiz for you. Until he made a name for himself in comedy yesterday, how many of you could say you knew who Gerry Ritz was? Enough said.

The Bernier mess illustrated one of Harper's big challenges: to find enough Quebec names to add to his cabinet. Hence the concerted effort by Harper to make nice with Quebec's soft and hard nationalists. To hear Harper speak now to them, you'd think that an Alberta firewaller and a Pequiste from the Saguenay were two peas in a pod. Unfortunately, this is, as it was when Joe Clark and then Brian Mulroney pursued it as a strategy, a marriage of political convenience rather than any real sharing of core values, a classic case of the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend.

I am old enough to remember back to a time when Conservatives were widely regarded in Quebec as largely unsympathetic to French Canada, if not outright anti-French. When the Liberals dominated Quebec federally under Trudeau, there was little room for a federal conservative party in Quebec. Small-c conservative opinion in French Canada did not gravitate to the Tories, and was largely consigned to rural Quebec and largely represented by the Union Nationale provincially (or should I say "nationally"?) and the Creditistes federally. It was only after these parties disappeared that the Tories were able to make inroads in Quebec, culminating in Mulroney's strong showing in Quebec in the 80s, when the PCs (as they were then) had the help of sovereignist PQ pavement pounders and door knockers. Then there was the Meech Lake fiasco, followed not long afterward by the splintering of the Tories. The Quebec-Alberta marriage under Mulroney ended in bitter divorce.

One of the animating impulses for the Reform party was outrage at what was seen as catering to the whining of Quebec for special status. Think back to the referendum campaign when Preston Manning persistently pressed Chretien to accept that a 50%+1 vote for sovereignty was enough of a threshold to permit Quebec to leave Canada. If one didn't know any better, one might have thought that Manning was just as happy to see the back of Quebec, and that if a yes vote in the referendum came along, well, then, sunrise, sunset. Quebec's more statist model and less-than-fundamentalist social tolerance were always anathema to the likes of Manning and Harper. If, as Harper once said, "Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term," Quebec would certainly have seemed even more so.

So it was amusing to see Harper taking advantage of every opportunity to kiss Quebec's wet spot, reminding them that it was he who stood up in the Commons and passed a resolution that recognizes them as a "nation," something mistakenly thought by a lot of nervous federalists to be the third rail of politics involving Quebec. Given the vitriolic response that the phrase "distinct society" evoked in the Rest of Canada in the time of Meech, this must make Conservative hair stand on end in certain quarters of Not-Quebec. However, as Chantal Hebert of the Star notes, Harper has come to realize that by simply uttering the sentiment that Quebec is a nation (a far more loaded term than distinct society, imho), he has sucked most of the oxygen out of the sovereignist project. Support for PQ-style sovereignty-association or independence in Quebec is at its lowest in recent memory, which means that the Bloc Quebecois stands increasingly exposed as clapped out. Bloc head Gilles Duceppe, I suspect, has nightmares starring Stephen Harper speaking in French and drawing cheers. It must gall him to see an Albertan come into town and pick off disaffected nationalists. Maybe he should try something bold, like propose that Canada is a nation. After all, he has a tidy Canadian MP's pension to worry about.

Some indication of how eager Harper is to stroke Quebec is his recent bizarre announcement that he will enshrine the practice of alternating French and English-speaking chairs of the CRTC. However, since the creation of the CRTC, the chairs have alternated between English and French speakers with one exception, when Konrad von Finkelstein (I'm betting he's not a francophone) succeeded English-speaking Charles Dalfen. Who was the nefarious PM who snubbed French Canada when its turn came? Hint: His name rhymes with Bleeven Darker.

Interesting political appeal: "Elect me: it's the only way to stop me from screwing you again."