A year or so ago, I was talking provincial politics with a friend in the Saskatchewan government. She made what I thought was a strange statement – that women in Saskatchewan didn’t “trust” the conservative SaskParty leader Elwin Hermanson. There was no further attempt to explain what this meant – just a blanket statement that he wasn’t “trusted”.
I wondered, trust as in “trust to do”? Trust not to do? Trust with your wallet? Trust in a dark alley? I didn’t ask at the time, and I should have – how do you even know this? Polling? And what prompted the governing NDP to ask such a undefined question in the first place?
The NDP had been push polling, of course – seeding a meme into the voting public, to draw upon later during a campaign. When the election was called, the local media fell in line, making the never defined “trust” question part of their own coverage of the election.
Well, the trust meme has already surfaced in the federal election, and on cue, it’s being pushed by the media.
It’s astonishingly counterintuitive – in view of the arrests and premature shutdown of the ADSCAM hearings, the biggest scandal in Canadian government history. Yet it doesn’t stop CTV’s Lloyd Roberston and Tom Clark from raising the “do Canadians trust” question when referring to Conservative Stephen Harper, in the guise of political analysis.
Harper is going to have to find a way to respond to this without defensiveness, that throws attention back on the question itself – to draw a white hot circle around the bigotry of a media and Liberal default position that suggests that “Western Canadians can’t be trusted”.
He went part way yesterday with his response to the media questions after the election call, and is being widely quoted;
“You know, in this country, you can be a Canadian without being a Liberal. The government seems to forget that. That’s why they need to be defeated. “It’s that kind of arrogance that leads to the waste, mismanagement and corruption we’ve seen.”
Not a bad start. We’ll need more of this.
One thing that the conservatives seem to forget is that it is possible to be a Canadian without being a white catholic…
Really, Danny?
Can you provide examples? Or are you just drawing on the Cheap Shot Handbook of the left?
Interestingly, Harper’s comment came in response to a reporter’s question on whether he wanted to make Canada more like the US, which is itself another Liberal talking point. The first part of his answer, which the papers haven’t been quoting, was that his platform would be as Canadian as anyone else’s. A nice response.
I talked about that at the Shotgun yesterday.
http://westernstandard.blogs.com/shotgun/2004/05/its_already_beg.html