That’s a long time ago!
She wears original fabrics: brands that are now fetish. She recalls with some nostalgia the Scottish-British, New England-American and Italian origin of the wears. Her spouse anecdotes that she enjoys the classics: George Eliot, George Sand and Colette. He enjoys William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace: reads vintage 50 years and over. Eclectics and dandies are all classics by now. Classic types form a perfect mélange. I never asked her why she wore no Canadian fabrics.
I was asked to read her final manuscript. When publishers ask for my ‘feelings’. I usually insinuate that the texts no longer feel like Pauline Kael, George Woodcock or James Wood.
In this author's case, the impression is different. In her introduction, our distinguished historian cites Santayana: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Thereto, she narrates by metaphor and analogy. As such, the story of the 41st Parliament is an assemblage of brilliant minds, like the Solvay Conference of 1927, wherein participated the best and the brightest (who quilled that?) minds of the time to declare the 'correct version' of quantum theory. That’s a long time ago! Almost one hundred twenty-five years ago, and as an aside, although there was some compromise over the 'better version', not the definitive version, physicists still don’t understand the theory. To some extent, Parliament is also about versions of national interest and national solutions to problems in dealing with that reality, wherein hopefully, the better solution will be found and implemented.
The author will reconstruct the ‘road taken’ that led to that monumental rhetorical theatre that marked the beginning of an epochal political assembly. She will narrate the rise of a lone-gun, Mr. Stephen Harper, the devolution of a Liberal tradition with Messrs. Martin and Ignatieff, la Grande Seduction of Mr. Layton and the parsimonious and successful campaigns of both talented Mrs. May and Mr. Mulcair. Mostly, she commends the Return of the Natural: sine qua non-Mr. Robert Rae. It would have been a great assembly without Mr. Rae; it became a monumental Parliament with Mr. Rae. All Halberstam's best came to town for this High Noon.
She further emphasizes in her Introduction that ‘No Commons had auspiced such eloquence as the 41st Commons. No assembly of able voices had delivered their prescriptions and denouncements with such thunder, abandon and conviction within the walls of the Commons since the Golden Ages of Canadian Oratory which had witnessed the towering elocutions of Diefenbaker, Douglas, Pearson, Trudeau, and then the riveting interlocutions between Trudeau, Stanfield, Caouette and Broadbent. In fact, no Parliament in recent memory could evince so much controversy, vibrato, passion vexation and admiration as the 41st Parliament’
The author singles out the personas: the audacity and confidence of Mr. Harper, the compassion and incisiveness of Mr. Layton, the passion and insight of Mr. Rae, and the trenchant pindarisms of Messrs. Dion, Mulcair, Coderre, May, Goodale, Cotler-all versing and reversing History; all and more deciding and non-deciding the future of the Criminal Code; disclaiming visions and claiming revisions of the Electoral Map-all embattled veterans and inspired novices denouncing injustices towards seniors, workers, families, inadequate pensions, inappropriate working conditions, climate change, first nations, minorities, regional development and on...all glazed by the revel of high rhetoric.
As enlightened a critic and competent an author, she will focus on the semiotics that embellish and legitimate the oral bravados and bravuras of great Parliamentarians. She will highlight that Mr. Harper, alone, won a majority Government without Quebec; that Mr. Layton became the first federal NDP leader to assemble a Loyal Opposition and carry the Quebec majority, that Mrs. May was the first leader of the Green Party to bench as sole representative of her Party and finally, our distinguished scholar will underline that Mr. Rae-after a self-imposed political exile, as some say, returned to lead a liberal opposition, attempt to rebuild a tradition whose ways and means were fragmented and scattered in places so unknown as to be forgotten. It was a session where Messrs. Harper and Rae traveled the country more than any Leaders of previous decades-the former redefining charisma and the ‘average Canadian’, the latter constructing an appropriate organization and redefine the Liberal tradition. Mr. Harper, according to our author, will have succeeded; Mr. Rae will have encountered too many politically illiterate obstructions that should have been shelved up front.
On the strategic plane, Mr. Harper will have adjudicated his Government’s fiscal and industrial policy in the midst a strong Canadian dollar, of rising unemployment, growing income disparity and regional disparities, depleting housing and health services, increasing federal, provincial and municipal deficits and overall increases in debt-servicing. Notwithstanding, our distinguished historian will point out the institutional cautions of the Bank of Canada, the IMF and the World Bank in face of a resurgence of Keynes, circuit theory, and chartalism which signaled the oncoming of another major seismic rupture in the classical economic model- the same undetected symptom that had preceded and perpetrated the financial collapse of 2007 and the ensuing recessions, and had pervaded the ineffectiveness and undermined the economic policy efforts of Mr. Harper's minority governments. She identifies Mr. Harper's success notwithstanding this global pandemonium, resulting from his intelligent rendition of Canada’s performance in contrast to the declining growth rates and higher unemployment rates of the European and the American economies, but avoiding comparisons with evident economic prosperity in industrial Asia. In fairness, she counterpoints the passionate interventions of Messrs. Layton and Rae, in that order, who remind the Government of the continuous depletion of natural resources and public infrastructure, the increasing costs of education, health and transportation, the commensurately decreasing quality of services in those sectors, and the insidious threat of privatization of critical public assets as well as the significant decline of per capita net disposable income. In a vein similar to her opposition colleagues, Mrs. May's ire will raise subtle bickers when she exposes the disinvestment of the government towards the environment and voice her concern that Canada's position in securing the contracted compliance in that sector is no longer credible, as is its foreign policy with respect to the Arctic no longer credible. Mr. Rae and Mr. Layton will remind Government of the heightening tensions in federal-provincial relations, impoverished conditions of Canadian fresh water supplies, fisheries and the timber industry and will raise the stakes of the deliberation pointing out the demise of Canada's manufacturing industry, the burden of taxation on a shrinking middle-class and the global snicker that Canada is returning to a primary sector economy with an underlying dependency matrix. All, from the Ottawa Assembly, at High Noon.
Our author will conclude her introduction by citing the indomitable M. Marcel Trudel, vindicated by Quebec after generations of neglect by political clerics that either couldn’t read the great rogue mind and/or had no clue how to decode meanings from facts and data. She will then rhetorically challenge the readership to find another modern-era Canadian Parliament whose participants had displayed more intensity, more imagination and more passion deliberating the State of our Union.
She will acknowledge in an epilogue the long and fruitful discussions she cherished with another renowned historian, credit the best of the script to him and the worst to herself while
somewhere in Alberta, the credited historian, renowned through his own efforts, student of the implacable ironist and tyrant of the word, will be editing his Master's wits, dating the latter's dantesque memoirs, proofreading speeches, articles, and resetting the correspondence for his second volume on The Fall and Rise of Canadian Polity: The Orators. He will outline Speaker Milliken’s era which preceded the Harper Moment and highlight the selection of young Mr. Sheer as Speaker for the 41st Parliament of Canada….and after a slight distraction, refocused his thoughts and selecting a HB 2, Mirado classic pencil from his leather pouch, will jot down in his three-holed Hilroy Canada Exercise book from his own childhood “By ascribing a Moment to the Harper term, my most distinguished colleague lavishes enormous notoriety upon Mr. Harper in anticipation of Clio's verdict.”
...and then returning to his own work, footnotes besides a circle of names ‘Ambition…the glorious fault of angel and gods’ [Alexander Pope].
[Part 2 to be continued]
