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Hugh MacDonald with your blogger at the Sept. 10 Liberal leadership vote. Everything is exactly as it appears.

With wild-eyed Alberta Liberal party officials about to launch an unexpected search for a candidate in Edmonton-Goldbar, about the last safe Grit riding on the planet, it’s a safe bet that blogger Daveberta got it right last week when he suggested Hugh MacDonald is about to pull the plug on his long political career.

As for Mr. MacDonald, the dogged MLA who was one of the hardest working members in the Legislature and surely the most loyal to the tattered and fading Liberal banner, so far he is saying nothing at all. But expect an announcement of his retirement from politics within a few days.

The four-term MLA is a trade unionist and a genuinely progressive guy, but raised as he was in the Liberal red soil of Prince Edward Island there was no way he could contemplate changing colours to NDP orange or the Alberta Party rainbow.

Faced with his decisive loss to the mercurial and impetuous former Tory Raj Sherman in the party’s weird leadership campaign on Sept. 10 – a race in which anyone was allowed to vote, whether or not they were a party member – Mr. MacDonald didn’t really have any choices other than quitting or knuckling under.

He’ll do the sensible and honourable thing and make a dignified withdrawal with best wishes all round to what’s left of the party. He is said to be contemplating a swift return to the oilpatch, or possibly to a role with his old union, the Boilermakers.

Mr. MacDonald could be gloomy, and he often disagreed with his own party’s leadership, but he always stuck fast to the colours, true Grit that he was. His voice, raised in genuine outrage and evocative of his Island upbringing, will be missed by Albertans, whether they know it or not.

Mr. MacDonald was the type of politician who was always sincerely offended by dishonesty and self-interest in government. What’s more, unlike most MLAs on either side of the Legislature, he was willing to do the hard work necessary to winkle out the government’s shenanigans, and to hold them up to the light of day. In this province, that meant he was a busy MLA, and one who doubtless found the job distressing at times.

For the governing Tories – in whose arrogant side he was a constant thorn – he’ll be missed like a toothache.

Truth be told, the new Liberal leader will probably not be that unhappy to see him go either, and will doubtless be quite untroubled by the suggestion his departure represents the beginning of the disintegration of the Alberta Liberals suggested in these pages and elsewhere.

For their part, what’s left of the Liberals may find a candidate to replace him, but whoever it is will have trouble filling his shoes, not to mention getting elected.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

NOTE: This report was confirmed at 11:43 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 27, by CBC Edmonton.

Gone campin’ … NOT!

Alberta Diary is CLOSED FOR THE HOLIDAYS.

No, really! I promise not to post about the CFIB’s attempt to bring “right to work” legislation to Alberta and ensure even less money is available for the “entrepreneurs” it pretends to represent.

And I promise not to blog about how Toronto’s odious Ford Bothers are trying to privatize animal shelters, ensuring that puppies will die to make their neo-Con dreams come true.

And I promise not to attempt to make up for the amazing dearth of stories in the mainstream media about how the Arab Spring has now spread to Israel, or the complete media silence on how the U.K. riots are a natural outcome of the re-Thatcherization of Britain.

Read my lips: No. New. Posts. For. (Almost.) Two. Weeks.

I really mean it! If I break down and post … Someone stop me before I blog again!

However, I promise to return to blogging here at AlbertaDiary.ca and on Rabble.ca on Aug. 22, or thereabouts…

But no posts until then, even if Gary Mar endorses Alison Redford for Tory leader! Even if Janet Brown publishes a new poll that shows the Wildrose in majority territory! Even if they start offering secular public education in Morinville! (Now there’s a wild one … there’s no word yet, by the way, nada, nothing, on whether anything came of that much touted Aug. 4 meeting in Morinville that was supposed to fix the problem … again.)

Not even if it turns out a big shot federal Tory minister was a member of the Bloc Quebecois! Oh, wait, that was last night’s story!

It’s not my fault! Have you got that? It’s not my fault! Now, welcome me to Canada! Where’s my growing army of supporters who never believed I was guilty? Kenney! Fetch me a gin fizz! Bring Lady Babs her slippers!

I blame Chrétien, that wily old Canuck,
For forcing me to leave my natal land.
The moment of my triumph’s when he struck,
That Third World bum, the flames of envy fanned.
I blame Canadians, clangorous and weak,
Jealous of my grandiose success.
Medicare! High taxes! Oh, how bleak!
Addicted to their socialistic mess.
I blame Dave Radler, oily little snake;
That judge, self-righteous, pusillanimous;
The state DA, a pious little fake;
Revengeful journos, kicking up a fuss.
In short, though they all found me in default,
It all comes down to this: it’s not my fault!

This, er, post also appears on rabble.ca.

St. Albert readers will be interested in tomorrow’s evening of theatre and music at the Arden Theatre, presented by the Friends of the St. Alberta Public Library.

The fund-raising event at 7 p.m. tomorrow features the Roland Majeau Band and its rock, jazz and folk sounds, plus Hats and Gloves, Hard Work and Dreams, a one-act play about the lives of six women who helped shape St. Albert, written and performed by Maureen Rooney.

Tickets are $30, available at the Arden Theatre. Funds raised go the St. Albert Public Library. Be there or be … uh, square!

Unidentified Medicine Hat resident scans the floodwaters for some sign of Premier Ed Stelmach, pictured below. Stelmach is smiling because he’s thinking of his Portuguese vacation. Note, Albertans portrayed may not be exactly as illustrated. Below Stelmach, U.S. President Barack Obama fills sandbags in Iowa.

It has been axiomatic since the days of Noah that if you want to survive in politics, and the waters are rising anywhere in your jurisdiction, you get your ass to the riverside and start filling sandbags. Politicians who ignore this universal law of politics do so at their own peril.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt if you make sure there’s a photographer in the vicinity when you wade in to the top of your hip-waders. But the important thing is that you’re there, and that you’re seen to be there.

So if you’re on the beach in Florida when the floodwaters start rising back home, or you’re hiking through the backwoods of Patagonia, you get yourself to the nearest airport and get the heck back to the flood zone as fast as an Air Canada Airbus can carry you. Before you’re within a kilometre of the airport departure gate, you need to have your media-relations flunky issue a press release saying you’re on your way.

This is a universal law that applies equally to the leaders of democracies and dictatorships, in big countries and little provinces. It doesn’t matter if there’s nothing useful you can do. It doesn’t matter if you’ve created the greatest emergency response system in the world on your watch. It sure doesn’t matter if you’ve dispatched whole platoons of ministers and deputy ministers, or even your deputy premier. It doesn’t matter how quickly you’ve rolled out the biggest flood-relief package in your province’s history.

If you are not there, you are done like dinner.

As Alberta blogger Dave Cournoyer observed, “there are significant symbolic reasons why political leaders show up at disaster areas.”

So, pretty clearly, Premier Ed Stelmach’s non-appearance when the floodwaters rose in southeastern Alberta at the end of June was a powerful symbol of how long the Alberta Conservatives have had it far too easy politically – and how tone deaf Mr. Stelmach is to the fundamental verities of politics, even in Alberta.

Instead of showing up in the flood zone, Premier Stelmach … went to Portugal!

Bookmark this Web page: Come the next provincial election, this astoundingly wrong-footed decision will come back to haunt Mr. Stelmach and his Conservatives more than any of the premier’s much more substantial policy blunders from trying to close Edmonton’s psychiatric hospital, to flip-flopping on oil and gas royalties, to over-paying health care executives.

It sure as heck doesn’t matter if you’ve bought a ticket for a short holiday in Portugal at a charity fundraiser auction and as a result were flying out that day! And explaining self-righteously that “that’s why we had all our ministers there” just isn’t going to wash. For heaven’s sake! As if the highest paid premier in Canada couldn’t afford to pay for a later flight to Portugal!

But that’s what Premier Stelmach told a local radio reporter in Medicine Hat, down in the flood zone where they’ve always voted Tory, no matter what, but nowadays are batting their eyes and flirting with the far-right Wildrose Alliance. And he told it in a way that suggests he just doesn’t get it about why that’s not the right thing to do.

Right now, notwithstanding the fact no opposition leader had the wit to travel to the flood zone either, some clever boots Wildrose Alliance strategist is cooking up a TV ad about how when the rains came and the waters rose and Albertans really needed him, Premier Stelmach went missing in action. This is why we have recently seen both Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall and U.S. President Barack Obama, sleeves rolled up, on the scene at serious floods within their jurisdictions.

This isn’t quite on a par with former U.S. president George Bush remaining on holiday while New Orleans foundered, then telling Brownie he was doin’ a heckuva job, but it has the same kind of lousy optics.

Is the premier of Alberta so out of touch with the most basic political conventions that he can’t figure this out? Is there no one among his political advisors that has the courage to tell him such an obvious political truth?

So it would seem. That’s why there’s rain in the political forecast!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Above, the Liberal ad. Below, Liberal Leader David Swann; below him, NDP Leader Brian Mason.

Another shoe must drop before the new campaign by provincial Liberal Leader David Swann to “unite the left” in Alberta has any hope of success.

Unfortunately for Dr. Swann – since he can expect no immediate reciprocal gesture from the province’s New Democrats – it is his Liberals who will have to make the next necessary concession too.

Now that the Liberals have called on other parties (and by implication those parties’ supporters) to come to Papa, or at least to find some way to co-operate, they need to commit themselves to the very hard decision not to run strong candidates in the few Edmonton-area ridings where the Alberta New Democrats have a chance.

This will be extremely difficult for the Calgary physician’s own Liberal supporters to swallow. But risking even more than he has already is the only way to prove that this is not just a halfhearted gesture required by the Liberal convention resolution that was narrowly passed last May.

Oddly enough, as Dr. Swann seems to be an unusually sincere politician whose personal beliefs are far more progressive than those of Liberals in other provinces, it is likely he really meant his entreaty to the supporters of “progressive political parties” to find a way to make common cause at a historic moment when the usually monolithic right-wing vote in Alberta is split.

Dr. Swann’s plea appeared as a half-page advertisement in Alberta’s two largest newspapers on July 7. Under the heading “Let’s Talk,” it argued that working together is the way to “build a progressive alternative” to endless right-wing rule, whether under the pragmatic Conservatives of Premier Ed Stelmach or the market fundamentalist Wildrose Alliance of Danielle Smith. Indeed, one senses that Dr. Swann has picked this issue as his hill worth dying on.

The advertisements – signed by Dr. Swann and party President Tony Sansotta – beseeched other political parties and their supporters to work with the Liberals toward the goal of achieving “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to unseat the Conservatives.”

Of course, placing the ads was the easy part. Now Dr. Swann’s Liberals have to show that they mean it. To do that, they will have to fight both die-hard New Democrats and their own fiercest partisans, and perhaps the kitchen kaffeeklatschers of the nascent Alberta Party as well.

At least the leader of the Alberta Party, which has no MLAs and which for months has been holding meetings in homes across the province supposedly to find out what Albertans think, did not slam the door on the idea. He did suggest the AP would really prefer just to go on chitchatting and drinking coffee.

The New Democrats under Brian Mason said hell no: “We believe that this ad by the Alberta Liberal Party is an act of desperation by a party that is clearly floundering and worried about holding onto the seats it does have,” Mr. Mason sniffed at a news conference called in response to media interest in the ads.

In a long commentary posted on Facebook, influential Lethbridge-based NDP activist Shannon Phillips provided a distilled version of the official New Democrat theme: “People who think the ‘left’ or ‘progressives’ should unite are interested in power. Full stop. That’s all they want. They don’t care about how they get it, and they have no plan for once they’ve got it,” she wrote. “…If the Liberals pull their heads out and leave the NDP alone on the left, the NDP increases their vote, and the Liberals actually get a shot at power.”

Ms. Phillips and many others in the NDP argue there is no guarantee Liberal or New Democratic voters in ridings where their party has pulled back would vote for the other partner in this effort. They suggest the Liberals would be smarter to go after Red Tories than coalition minded New Democrats. This argument could turn out to be true, of course, but to many progressive Albertans it smacks of a call to leave us Knee-Dips to our 9 per cent, where we’re happy, secure and in no danger of ever having to make the hard choices required to govern.

Given such objections by the potential allies to whom Dr. Swann was reaching out, the chances of his effort succeeding seem slim.

Still, the ad was a significant development. For one thing, it was a rare acknowledgement that the Alberta Liberals recognize what they’ve been doing isn’t working.

More significantly, the fact the Liberals ran the ads – and the New Democrats’ defensive response – suggest the leaders of all centrist parties in Alberta are starting to hear from their supporters that they would welcome some form of co-operation that could finally topple the Tories and stave off the Wildrose Alliance.

There is no polling yet to prove this supposition, but informal Internet polls like one on the CBC seem to indicate that ordinary Albertans are warmer to the idea than their political leaders. Likewise, letters to the editor of Alberta papers have so far been mainly positive.

Count on it that the New Democrats have heard the same things from many of their supporters as the Liberals are hearing from theirs.

New Democrat leaders will resist the idea of co-operation just as many Liberals activists did last May. But if Dr. Swann dares to go further and drop the other shoe, rank and file members may just take up the idea and push their leaders to a level of co-operation that could actually bring positive change to Alberta.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

As things should be, as seen by the prime minister of Canada: HRH Prince Phillip, HM Elizabeth II and, at right, HE Canada’s governor general. You guess which one is the PM’s idea of a perfect GG. Below left, David Lloyd Johnston; below right, Conrad Black in his previous uniform, that of the Governor General’s Foot Guards. Really!

OK, so he doesn’t quite have the marquee appeal of a Preston Manning or a Conrad Black, neither of whom appears to be available just now for some reason, but David Lloyd Johnston is pretty much what we would have expected our prime minister to pick for a governor general.

Stephen Harper called Mr. Johnston someone who “represents the best of Canada,” and one supposes that from the prime minister’s perspective that is an accurate statement. Mr. Johnston is, after all, an old white guy with money, influence and lots of corporate board memberships who has proved capable of making the sort of nice legal distinctions needed to keep a Conservative government afloat.

The case in point being the time the Ontario university president and law professor was given the job of drawing up the terms of reference for the commission of inquiry into the sleazy cash-only business dealings of former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney and his oily German pal, Karlheinz Schreiber.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Johnston ensured that taking a look into the questionable business of the sale of Airbus jetliners to Air Canada – surely the key to the entire squalid affair – was not going to be part of the job of what came to be known as the Oliphant Inquiry.

Notwithstanding the endless squalling of the mainstream media about how Mr. Johnston is a fine fellow, a servant of both Liberal and Conservative governments who doesn’t have a partisan bone in his body, we can take it for granted that if called upon to prorogue Parliament again, establish a rump Parliament or engage in some similar undemocratic maneuver, Mr. Johnston would prove to be up to the task. Otherwise, obviously, he wouldn’t have gotten the job.

Our prime minister, pretty clearly, does not have much fondness for our Constitution, especially its inconvenient requirements for regular elections and democratic rights. Who better, then, than a “legal scholar” like Mr. Johnston – a trained slicer and dicer of fine legal points – to find the necessary justification for whatever it is this government has in mind next.

At any rate, the Harperista cheerleaders in the gutter press repeat claims about Mr. Johnston’s lack of partisanship so assiduously that one cannot avoid the thought the media doth protest too much. After all, these are the same people who shout huzzahs to the prime minister’s frequent calls for an elected Senate – then smile benignly as he packs that august body with grubby Tory pork-barrelers.

Mind you, departing Governor General Michaëlle Jean was up to carrying the can for the PM’s undemocratic impulses as well. However, it seems unlikely that her future reliability could be guaranteed by the prime minister. Anyway, alas, there was the matter of her vice-regal spouse. Thankfully, the media assures us, Mr. Johnson’s loyal helpmeet will behave herself as the Conservative scriptures require.

In the end, of course, any hope Ms. Jean might have entertained of holding a second five-year term must have abruptly ended back in December 2008 when she made Mr. Harper wait longer than he wanted to before allowing him to circumvent the will of a newly elected Parliament.

Anyway, a popular and appealing GG like Ms. Jean doesn’t send quite the right symbolic message from the Conservative Party perspective – to wit, that the rich old white guys are in charge, and they’re going to stay that way, no matter what you might think about it!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Amalgamation with Edmonton is the elephant in St. Albert’s political parlour.

This column appeared in today’s edition of the Saint City News.

With municipal elections in October, look for plenty of sound and fury about St. Albert’s residential taxes. But don’t expect much talk about one idea that could lower taxes: amalgamation with Edmonton.

Amalgamation with the big smoke is the elephant in St. Albert’s political parlour. There’s a constituency here that supports it. But since no candidate for an independent city’s council is likely to say, “Hey, maybe we ought to be part of another city,” it never gets the airing it deserves.

This is a pity, because it lingers on the sidelines as if it might be a good idea. Making it part of the general debate about St. Albert taxes would cast some light on it, plus put our taxes in perspective.

On their own, St. Albert’s municipal taxes are among the highest in Alberta – currently second after Grande Prairie’s. With annual taxes for a modest home in older neighbourhoods like Lacombe Park or Akinsdale approaching $3,000 per year, this generates real bitterness in some quarters.

City council has worked pretty hard over the past three years to moderate property tax increases, but some candidates are sure to lambaste council anyway, and claim to have a formula to put the lid on future increases.

Alas, most solutions proposed are pipedreams. Do you really think any future council will cut funding to public art, sports facilities or business incubators when each comes with a well-oiled interest group that lobbies effectively and gets its supporters out to vote?

Do you imagine that if we could achieve an 80-20 split between residential and business taxes, all would be well? Encouraging more tax-paying businesses in St. Albert is a laudable goal, but among the things St. Albertans love about this community is its verdant ambience. Swift and heavy business development will not foster that.

But if these ideas won’t work, what will?

We could go for radical surgery, of course – the favoured remedy of cherry picking anti-tax groups everywhere. If we dropped public transit, like other municipalities in the region, we could become the low-tax jurisdiction overnight. But who would be stranded?

Which gets us back to the notion of joining Edmonton.

Figures published by the city of Edmonton showed a $638 difference in 2008 between combined municipal property tax and utility charges for a typical single detached house in St. Albert, estimated at $3,957, versus Edmonton, at $3,319.

So let’s estimate that with amalgamation our residential taxes would now fall by about 20 per cent – say, about $600 on a modest house. Combined taxes and utilities would probably be about $1,000 less. (Don’t forget that in Edmonton, we could be dinged by special levies for sidewalk or alley repairs in our block, something we don’t face now.)

So we need to ask ourselves if a potential saving of $1,000 per year would justify giving up what we value about St. Albert – especially when our council is moving in the right direction on taxes. Remember, this includes things we might not notice until they were gone.

For example, how many Edmonton police officers would replace our 51 RCMP constables? A dozen? Maybe 20? How many council representatives would we have? One? How frequently would our residential streets be cleared of snow? The answer to that is known: never.

Not discussing amalgamation fuels the false and cynical belief our municipal politicians are in it for themselves, that they don’t give a tinker’s dam about ordinary taxpayers. It creates cynicism among voters who believe promises about “magic bullets” to cure our tax ills, which never work. It gives credence to claims of groups who would cut every worthwhile service except the ones they benefit from.

Fear of amalgamation also keeps us from discussing ideas that could save money and improve service – say, working with Edmonton on public transit.

In 2010, the idea of amalgamation should be part of the debate – if only so we can examine it and toss it out!

Wildrose Alliance Leader Danielle Smith surrounded by beefy white males at the party’s recent policy convention in Red Deer.

The prevailing wisdom in Alberta journalistic circles is that Danielle Smith and the far-right Wildrose Alliance achieved the three things they needed at their June 24-25 policy convention in Red Deer to successfully challenge Premier Ed Stelmach’s Conservatives in the next general election.

In reality, it ain’t necessarily so.

Certainly, Ms. Smith, well known to be a polished performer, turned in a polished performance. It would have only been news if she hadn’t. As expected, she read an excellent speech – although it remains a speech that deserves serious fact checking.

Also as expected, the Wildrose Alliance proved it could successfully put on a big glitzy meeting in a big hotel – just for comparative purposes, the very same big hotel at which Mr. Stelmach received a 77.4-per-cent endorsement from his Tories at their last big meeting in November 2009.

However, it is not at all clear that the Wildrose Alliance succeeded in its third necessary goal of getting its delegates to endorse a policy platform moderate enough to soothe skittish Alberta voters.

Now, to hear the uncritical mainstream media and the usual academic suspects tell it, the Alliance struck exactly the right policy note to win the hearts of Albertans and achieve a big victory whenever Mr. Stelmach decides to call an election. According to this version of events, the platform chosen by the delegates was just right-wing enough to appeal to conservative Albertans, and not a bit more.

In other words, the media will get the entertaining horserace it is praying for between the Wildrose Alliance and the Conservatives.

Indeed, according to this interpretation, about the only people said to be dissatisfied with the outcome are the party’s old-line true believers – the gun nuts, western separatists and the most virulent anti-abortionists. These are, of course, the very people a successful conservative Canadian politician nowadays wants to be seen to be disappointing!

But this line of reasoning – which we are destined to hear over and over again in the media for the next year or more – is far from a given.

In fact, a strong case can be made that Ms. Smith and the Alliance blundered in their supposedly moderate policy prescriptions. First, it is by no means clear the public has been persuaded that the party means what it says when it tries to sound moderate. Second, despite its effort to portray itself in the middle of the ideological road, it inexplicably stuck with radical policies on labour, health and education that will alienate many potential supporters.

Even Alberta’s tame media could hardly avoid noting the strict discipline enforced at the Wildrose Convention, most famously on the party’s many gun nuts. This group had put forward a resolution supporting the “right” of Albertans to bear arms. “Basically I support … what’s written here,” the Edmonton Journal quoted one hapless member undiplomatically stating during the public debate. “I’m just worried about how this may be received in the public and portrayed the media, so I’m voting no.”

To many Albertans this remark graphically illustrated the party’s apparent willingness to soft-pedal its own core beliefs to appear to be moderate, raising the spectre of a “hidden agenda.” It also showed the iron control over members exercised by the Alliance’s supposedly libertarian leadership.

“This is no shift to the centre,” commented former Conservative and influential blogger Ken Chapman. “It is merely a cynical calculating crusade to take political power and move Alberta society to the far right as fast as possible.”

Meanwhile, given its efforts to appear moderate on other issues, it is hard to understand why the Wildrose Alliance stuck with its commitment to charter schools, sure to alienate politically active teachers province-wide, more private sector health care, certain to frighten many nervous voters, and “right-to-work” laws associated with the most economically backward U.S. states, designed to kill unions by crippling their ability to bargain effectively.

They also stuck with a policy supporting “conscience rights” for health care workers – code for allowing health workers to refuse to provide abortion- and birth-control-related services.

The explanation for most of the health and education policies is likely Ms. Smith’s sincere ideological commitment to the supposed benefits of privatization of public services. Neither is likely to play well with the general public, and both will be fodder for attacks by other parties, particularly the Conservatives.

As for “right-to-work” legislation, a vocal minority in Alberta despises unions and supports such free-rider laws. What’s more, unions are rightly perceived to be weak in this province. Nevertheless, sticking with this policy poses a significant political risk to the Alliance because of the concentration of well-organized public service union members in the Edmonton region. What’s more, it is a pointless gesture, certain to be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada.

It is true that Alberta unions have a poor record of persuading their members not to vote Conservative. It is also likely that significant numbers of Alberta union members had been thinking about voting for the Wildrose Alliance against their own interests.

But there is little chance such voters, especially those associated with the large public sector unions, will gore their own ox by voting for a party that not only promises to break their power at the bargaining table, but vows to extract “concessions from the civil service at all levels that receive provincial funding.”

It was provincial civil servants, after all, fed up with the Social Credit government of Premier Harry Strom and voting in a bloc, who played a significant role in electing Conservative Peter Lougheed as premier in September 1971. But if they were thinking about doing the same thing for Ms. Smith in 2011 or 2012, they are unlikely to do so now.

Given all this, as of today, the Alberta political forecast is darkly uncertain for all parties – including Ms. Smith’s Wildrose Alliance.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale are back again. Below: Igor Gouzenko, winner of the Governor General’s Award for his autobiography. No kidding! Below Igor, post-Commie Commie spy vixen femme fatale unnatural redhead Anna Chapman tries to corrupt the purity of an American icon. At the bottom (where it belongs): the New York Post.

Talk about a mixed blessing: a week’s vacation in New York City combined with an Internet connection too spotty to post blogs and, for news, only Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, kindly provided by the hotel.

Well, the penultimate performance of Hair was brilliant and the restaurants were great, but the odious Post turned out to be almost as entertaining. There was this spy scandal, see, in case you missed it. You know, the one with the “femme fatale,” the “red-hot beauty” with a “Victoria’s Secret body.”

I’m not making this up. Really, you can’t make up stuff like this.

The Post is the U.S. ruling class’s bulletin board for the American hoi polloi, plus the instructional manual for Mr. Murdoch’s broadcast enterprises. As such, it sets the ideological tone for news coverage in the United States, and Canada too. It devoted acres of editorial real estate to this so-called spy scandal – most of which, alas, doesn’t seem to be available on its Website. Never mind, all you really need to know, dear readers, is that even though Communism may be dead and the KGB is a thing of the past, these guys were rotten Commies through and through who “flitted from high-profile parties to top-secret meetings around Manhattan.”
They were moles, for heaven’s sake, sleepers deeply entrenched in American society, with good American names like Cynthia Murphy and Anna Chapman, who, talk about perfidious, turned out not even to be a natural redhead. (How does the Post figure out stuff like this?) Like the Manchurian Candidate, they were just waiting to be awoken and….

And what? What were these guys actually going to do, you ask? Well, you’d have to dig pretty deep in the Post or most anywhere else to find out. But here’s an explanation from a June 29 story in the grey and respectable New York Times: “The assignments, described in secret instructions intercepted by the FBI, were to collect routine political gossip and policy talk that might have been more efficiently gathered by surfing the Web. And none of the 11 people accused in the case face charges of espionage, because in all those years they were never caught sending classified information back to Moscow, American officials said.” The FBI charged them all “with conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign government.”

Say what? They were acting as unregistered agents? They were sending back press clippings? Don’t certain other countries also do this kind of thing routinely? You know, countries like Israel, and, in the case of Canada, the United States?

And speaking of Canada, back here in the True North, we learned (although not from the relentlessly parochial Post) that our very own spymaster, our domestic answer to James Jesus Angleton (I told you you couldn’t make up stuff like this), one Richard Fadden, came in from the cold just long enough to warn us that some Canadian governments actually have cabinet ministers who have “developed quite an attachment to foreign countries.”

Well, holy cow! Agents of influence! This is news? Oh, wait. It is news. You see, it turns out he wasn’t speaking about the two foreign governments most beloved by members of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet. (Which figures, actually, seeing as he would have had to file a Message Event Proposal with the Prime Minister’s Office before he could say anything.) He was speaking about the Chinese! You know, the formerly Communist Chinese!

It’s almost like we were back into the good old, I mean the bad old, days of the Cold War.

Whatever can it mean? Well, usually in such cases the best advice is to follow the money. Could it be that after a decade of terrifying official baloney, terrorism is growing just a little thin as an excuse for illegally suspended civil rights, illegal domestic spying, illegal police beatings of passers-by who make the wrong fashion choices and the astronomical budgets this nonsense requires?

After all, plenty of taxpayers may instinctively back the police when they’ve just heard the news that 1,000 people had to be arrested for wearing dark T-shirts. But lots of them will think twice about it when they realize how many of the troublemakers were officers in anarchist drag and that the terrorist the cops violated the constitution to beat up turned out to be the retired schoolteacher next door.

But even more will reconsider when they think about how much this is going to cost them. Citizens can do the math, and the terror industry is about to go the way of the “war on drugs” as a credible source of money for the organs of state security and their best pals in government.

And so, voila, spies are back in vogue. Mata Hari is hanging out at parties in New York and espionage is all the rage again. The Cold War is suddenly as hot as a Russian spy mistress in a New York Post photo spread.

What’s next? Igor Gouzenko climbing out of his grave, a moldering bag on his head and an unconstitutional libel writ clutched in his paw, to warn us that this time it’s even worse: Boris and Natasha aren’t just planning to steal the plans to our atom bombs. This time they want our routine political gossip and policy talk too!This post also appears on Rabble.ca.