This is no time for an election

Colby Cosh takes issue with my latest column's call for the election to be put off for six months to a year, arguing that tradition demands Paul Martin seek a mandate as the new Prime Minister. This puts him in agreement with the Toronto Star. I'm tempted to end the argument right there, except the same point has also been made by m'learned friend Michael Bliss in the National Post, given extra force in his case by the Adscam mess. ("A government of honourable men and women would realize that its only recourse now is to go to the people in a general election to see if it can regain their confidence." Well, see, there's your problem right there....) This seems to me to have it exactly backwards. An election now, in advance of a full public inquiry, would leave the public completely in the dark as to how far Liberal complicity in the scandal extends. I hate to disagree with Michael, but we don't already know everything we need to know about Liberal corruption: we know a great deal, but there's every possibility that we haven't begun to guess how bad it is. Do we know enough, at least, to condemn them to the opposition benches right now? Maybe. But if the Cosh/Star "mandate" argument has any weight, it rests upon the supposition that this is in fact a "new" government, needing a "new" mandate, just three years and a tick into its existing one. But if it is a new government, then it arguably deserves a chance to show it, and Adscam is just the place to start. If the election were to be held today, we would have no way of knowing. Certainly Martin's performance to date gives us little reason to hope, and having been so tendentious about his own knowledge of the affair, he could not reasonably ask the public to "trust me" to fix things after the election. Indeed, the rush to a quickie election � the fourth in a little over 10 years � would be the surest sign that he should not be trusted. Not only would it leave a great many important questions hanging (Ted Byfield anticipates Stephen Harper's attack lines already: "What is Martin saying? Elect me first, and then we'll find out whether I'm a crook?") but it would make a mockery of his many professions of love for democratic reform. We all know that if the election is called in the spring, the one and only principle that will guide the ruling party is partisan political advantage: namely, a new opposition leader, at the helm of a shaky contraption of a party, whom they can define in their preferred image before he has a chance to define himself. It's an exact replica of the 2000 election, right down to the scorching Auditor General's report. On the other hand, if he were to wait, and if he were to back his fine words of remorse with real, vast, comprehensive reform, then and only then might he deserve his mandate. Put it this way: which is the more grotesque affront to democracy -- for a new Prime Minister to govern an extra six months past the first available opportunity for an election, or for a gang of crooks (as the case may be) to sneak back into power for another five years, calling the election in advance of a public inquiry and, for all we know, shutting it down afterwards? One last point. However badly the Liberals may have behaved, they cannot be judged in isolation. When we're choosing a government, we always have to weigh one choice against another. I've said we need time to assess whether Martin is a genuine reformer (he deserves a chance to prove he is, but the onus is on him). We also need time to figure out what the Conservatives are, whether they're capable of governing, whether there is any unifying principle that binds them together, what their new leader is made of, and so on. For that matter, Jack Layton is showing signs of wanting to take the NDP in a new direction. I doubt he'll be able to sell me, but wouldn't we all be much more informed about all these matters in a year's time than we are today?