Where's Canada's John McCain?
Jonathan Kay
National Post
July 30, 2005
Parliament has been adjourned for a month now. You are forgiven for not noticing. Citizens become engaged in politics when they are drawn in by charismatic leaders with original ideas: Pierre Trudeau, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Mike Harris, Rene Levesque. But Canada is led by Paul Martin -- an ideological nullity, robotically disposed toward whatever policy happens to be endorsed by a bare majority of survey respondents. Canada has effectively become a nation governed by algorithm.
This explains why so many Canadians continue to be captivated by U.S. politics -- even as they profess to detest George W. Bush and the people surrounding him. It is not just that America is bigger, richer and more powerful than we are. It is that leaders there aren't afraid to go to the wall over big, bold, controversial ideas like social security privatization, abortion and democratizing the Arab world. (In Canada, by contrast, we can't even get a leader on either side of the aisle to break the ancient taboo on private health care -- even now that the Supreme Court has given them the green light.)
Our leadership deficit is on my mind this week, thanks to an hour spent listening to a rebroadcast NPR interview with Republican Senator John McCain -- a Vietnam vet and former navy pilot whose outlook is so different from that of Canadian politicians, he might as well come from another planet.
In 2000, McCain made a strong run for the Republican presidential nomination before being sunk by a smear campaign. But his stock remains high: Having bucked the Republican establishment by championing campaign finance reform and railing against pork-barrel spending, he's earned a reputation as a principled maverick. Many see him as a serious contender for the 2008 GOP Presidential nomination.
If you have the time, listen to the interview. (at www.theconnection.org/shows/2005/07/20050727_a_main.asp.) You will hear McCain wax, not about partisan politics, but about the historical and literary figures who have inspired him. Top of the list is Robert Jordan, the dutiful protagonist of Ernest Hemingway's Spanish Civil War epic For Whom The Bell Tolls.
"Jordan had a mission, and that mission had to be accomplished," says McCain of the Loyalist guerrilla fighter. "And he did it stoically. At the end, he's sitting there with his machine gun, with his crushed leg, and he says, 'The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.' To me, that means everything. Maximize your time. Be associated with a cause greater than your self-interest. Care about the world, not just about your own part of it -- which is the opportunity the United States has today."
From most politicians' mouths, such high-flown words would induce eye-rolling. But McCain has lived the Robert Jordan code. In 1967, he was flying a mission over North Vietnam when a surface-to-air missile took the right wing off his A-4 Skyhawk. He ejected, and spent the next 5 1/2 years enduring torture and solitary confinement in a Hanoi jail cell.
McCain's ordeal might have been briefer: When the North Vietnamese learned he was the son of a navy admiral (and the grandson of another), they offered to send him home. But McCain refused, because that would have meant turning his back on fellow inmates. "I knew that Robert Jordan, if he were in the next cell to mine, he would be heroic," he says. "He would be stoic, he wouldn't give up -- and Robert would expect me to do the same thing."
I tried to remember the last time I'd heard an interview with a Canadian leader that I'd found half as inspiring -- and came up blank. Public debate and oratory in this country consists of uttering bromides about multiculturalism, bilingualism and the other half-dozen or so topics that have been approved for ritualized adulation. If any Liberal started talking about Hemingway or old-fashioned martial stoicism on the CBC, he'd be smacked down as a sexist and a warmonger.
McCain isn't representative: American politics has more than its share of uninspiring figures -- career politicians who follow the money-greased route from law school to local office, to the House of Representatives, to the Senate or governor's mansion and beyond. But among the duds can be found a healthy crop of independent-minded entrepreneurs, celebrities, jocks, war heroes and even astronauts. These specimens can survive American politics with their integrity intact because its republican system of government permits legislators to speak their mind, and vote against their own party. In a country with a proud and ongoing military tradition, bold individualists like McCain, who have proven themselves in war-time, are especially welcome.
In Parliament, on the other hand, almost every vote is effectively whipped, which means that even those few free-thinkers who enter public life end up burying their convictions and mumbling the party line. (Hello, Irwin Cotler.) That's why Question Period resembles nothing more than a quacking contest between two opposing sets of trained ducks. (The only reason the last Parliament generated any excitement is that both sides happened to have the same number of quackers.)
When Parliament comes back in September, Liberals and Conservatives alike will look for an inspiring successor to take over from their respective parties' colourless incumbents. A quick scan of the backbenches suggests slim pickings. As now, Canadians seeking inspiration from politics will have to tune into a U.S. radio station.
© National Post 2005
.... As for his other major accomplishment, campaign finance reform, it spawned the noxious 527 groups, such as MOVEON, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars spewing toxic attack ads (and violating the spirit and letter of the law by sharing staff with the Democrats and coordinating their ads with DNC policy shifts), perhaps the largest example of the law of unintended consequences ever.
