Stephen Harper's Spinach Salad

In the upcoming election, Harper has said, he expects the Liberals to attack "my region, my religion, my language, my family." That's pretty rich. Harper's political antecedents are all those Western political evangelists who built their careers condemning the French language, the welfare state and the blood-sucking East.

They meant, of course, Ontario and Quebec. But they actually don't like any other part of Canada very much, including the Maritimes. Harper himself recently attributed the problems of Atlantic Canada to the character of Atlantic Canadians, declaring that we have a culture of dependency and a defeatist attitude. Now he says he didn't really mean it. Sure.

This is not the party which created national institutions like the CNR, the CBC and the Atlantic Development Board, the first federal agency to focus on the problems of this region. This is Republican Party North, George W. Bush in a parka - pro-prayer, anti-abortion, appalled by unisex unions, eager to cut taxes, go to war and "experiment" with medicare.

The new party, opines David Orchard, is "an illegitimate creation conceived in deception and born in betrayal." He's talking about Peter MacKay, who won the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives by promising runner-up Orchard (in writing) that he would not lead the party into a merger with the Alliance, and promptly did so. The Alliance quickly closed its doors to new members, while MacKay's party kept signing up members until the eve of the merger vote - thus opening the corral not just to a single Trojan horse, but to a whole t'undering herd of them.

The merger detached "Progressive" from "Conservative," driving former PC leadership candidate Scott Brison into the arms of the Liberals. (Peter MacKay called Brison "cynical" and "manipulative," which was also pretty rich.) Even a former Tory prime minister calls the new party a "masquerade."

"I am concerned with the imprint of Stephen Harper, not only what he stood for in the past, but the way he has led this party," says Joe Clark. While the PC party offered Canadians a "broad, national alternative," Clark says he sees "nothing in the Stephen Harper-led party that on issues of human rights, issues like the environment, issues like bilingualism, issues like the nature of the country, is anything like the governments Mulroney or I led."

Clark, of course, was promptly denounced by MP John Reynolds (an Alliance graduate) as a "bitter old man" and a "traitor" - unlike Brian Mulroney, the wrecker of the old Tory party, who tottered forth from some political mausoleum, adorned with cobwebs, to endorse the new one. Being endorsed by Mulroney is probably better than being endorsed by the Hell's Angels, but not much.

Clark, however, may sometimes be clumsy, but he has never been vicious or petty. He had nothing to gain from his frankness, and though he described Harper as "dangerous" and admitted that he would prefer Paul Martin as "the devil we know," he clearly saw both major parties as deeply flawed.

A recent Maclean's article by John Geddes revealed Harper's plans to counter the vigorous negative campaign he expects. Canadians plainly distrust the Conservatives on medicare, so they will have to "hug the Liberals" on that. And so on. But the spectre haunting the Tory back-rooms is "that their best-laid election campaigns could be blown up by dumb comments from their own candidates during the campaign."

This is richest of all, an open concession that if Canadians ever find out what Conservative candidates actually think, the campaign will instantly implode. It could, too. Remember Larry Spencer, the former Alliance "family values" critic who opined that homosexuality should be outlawed. Harper promptly turfed him. But there are plenty more slack-jawed, beetle-browed back-benchers where Spencer came from.

You can dress the knuckle-draggers in suits and put their air-brushed faces on the billboards. But you have to keep them muzzled and gagged until you win the election. That's the alternative which the new party offers to the nation. To call it a masquerade seems gracious and generous indeed. It's a pile of spinach. To hell with it.