Government as theatre
There’s an old children’s nursery song that few children probably hear any more. It’s about the Grand Old Duke of York. He had 10,000 men. He marched them up to the top of the hill and he marched them down again.
Like many of the nursery rhymes that survive through to today, this little song was originally about politics. There really was a grand old Duke of York, back in the days of the interminable wars between England and France, and he was being called out for showing cowardice in battle.
In the days when soldiers lined up with muskets to shoot at each other, generals needed to arrange their troops in various formations to get some kind of tactical advantage. Then, seeing what the other generals did in response, the more cowardly and less confident military leaders would change their formations, back and forth, hardly ever firing a shot — or being exposed to one — until the sun went down or somebody else decided the battle.
That sounds a lot like our federal government today. Prime Minister Stephen Harper marches his backbenchers up to the top of Parliament Hill, has them rattle their muskets and give a battle cry about fiscal responsibility, and then go down again without so much as firing a shot.
His lieutenant, Stockwell Day, is ordered to conduct a blitzkrieg attack on the deficit, but every day when the sun goes down there’s scarcely a paper cut made, much less any bloodshed.
Freezing wages and pension benefits of the civil service? Come on. Who among us in our workplaces has not seen wage freezes, layoffs, cuts in hours to be worked, or vacant positions left unfilled? What’s being advertised as a battle cry on Parliament Hill looks a whole lot like business as usual, to the rest of us.
And there’s no reduction in the federal deficit as a result.
Likewise, the announcement of cutting Internet access to small town libraries.
Get real. Is that the best you can do? The move would save the government, what, $13 million a year?
That’s less than the rounding off that’s made to MPs’ travel allowances to bring the total up to the next hundred million, so you can add the budget categories together in nice round 10ths of a billion.
Never mind that they changed their minds in less than 48 hours on that one, marching right back down to the bottom of the hill again.
As for Day, in his new position heading the federal treasury department, he’s not so much Dr. No as Dr. Doolittle.
Our leader of the opposition, Michael Ignatieff, is by no means a nursery rhyme character. Instead, think Gilbert and Sullivan: he is the very model of the modern major general, with information vegetable, animal and mineral.
Well acquainted with matters mathematical, he knows he can’t win an election. So he marches only enough soldiers to vote against the government as not to cause an election.
While everyone plots and plans, the federal deficit continues unabated. Instead of telling Canadians why our forces in Afghanistan were ordered to commit war crimes and hand prisoners over to be tortured, we debate the merits of “thou dost in us command” in the national anthem.
One could feel sorry for the foot soldiers in all of this, except that not one of them is placed seriously in the line of fire, and they are all still getting paid.
The grand old Duke of York lived to a ripe old age, as dukes generally do, amidst unassailable wealth and unchallenged privilege.
The Pirates of Penzance ran for a century, so there’s no fear the players will lose a job.
This isn’t government, it’s theatre. And you thought the feds had no love for the arts.
Greg Neiman is an Advocate editor.
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