Dion to West: Don't expect any favours
Westerners better off pursuing reform at provincial level, Minister advises
Paul Wells --National Post--Jan.19, 2001
The Liberal party is not about to throw out its platform in order to woo voters west of Ontario, says Stéphane Dion, federal Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs.
"Those who tell us that to persuade the people in the West, we should implement something other than Liberal policies -- well, we can't," he said in an interview with the National Post.
Mr. Dion said Western Canadians who want the Liberals to implement Canadian Alliance policies should shop closer to home by demanding reform from their provincial governments.
"We were elected on a program, Red Book Three. And one voter in four in the West supported that program. We must respect them. We can't tell them, you know, 'We'll imitate the Alliance to please the other three-quarters.'"
Mr. Dion said he is well aware that some observers are urging the Liberals to make sweeping policy changes if they want to improve their consistently miserable electoral performance in the four Western provinces, where the party has not won a majority of seats since 1904, the year before Alberta and Saskatchewan joined Confederation.
Mr. Dion further said one of the biggest obstacles to doing what the West wants is that residents in the four Western provinces usually disagree. Alberta and Saskatchewan farmers tend to disagree about the wisdom of the Canadian Wheat Board, he said, and Ralph Klein's neighbouring premiers from British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba all opposed his Bill 11 on health care.
"So what's the West? Bill 11? Or the movement against Bill 11?" Mr. Dion asked.
He acknowledged the party's Western critics often call for massive decentralization of power to the provinces; direct-democracy measures such as citizen-initiated referendums and "recall," or the ability to fire elected politicians by petition; free votes in the House of Commons; and proportional representation instead of the winner-take-all, riding-by-riding method of election.
But he said those are not the policies the Liberals were re-elected on. Nor is he convinced they command overwhelming support in the West. And he said that if Westerners do want to be governed like that, they should ask their provincial governments, not the federal Liberals.
"I notice that Mr. Klein is very popular in Alberta. But he seems very comfortable with the British [winner-take-all] electoral system. Party discipline is far more rigid in Alberta's legislative assembly than in the House of Commons. I notice that he never submitted Bill 11 to a referendum. And he's still popular.
"So it seems to me that weakens the thesis" that such policies are what Albertans or other Westerners want, he said.
Mr. Dion's comments were his first detailed remarks since the election on the challenges facing the Liberal government in the West. He insisted the government has no "point man" or "lead minister" for the West or any other region. But as Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, he is responsible for co-ordinating Ottawa's work with that of other governments across the country.
Mr. Dion said he does not see the Liberals' consistent failure to perform better west of Ontario as a blanket rejection of Liberal policies. "Between elections, we are generally strong in the polls. In the months before [the election campaign began] we were ahead in all the polls, except in Alberta where we were a strong second."
That strong performance melts away because of "a phenomenon of identification," he argued. "There are people who --even if they find that we haven't done bad things -- identify less with us because they see us as less Western" than parties created in the region and led by people who grew up there.
But he rejected any idea that, as Quebecers, he and Jean Chrétien are ill-equipped to understand Western concerns.
" 'You do such and such, so you don't understand the West?' I'm used to that. I've had plenty of problems with the Quebec constitutional industry [which claims] I don't understand Quebec. I have convictions, I have values, and I know they are shared by plenty of my fellow citizens in Alberta." |
