The best friends money can buy

“Ottawa, Ontario hail $1.9B child-care deal,” blared the headline on the CBC website yesterday. The story explained how someone named “Ottawa” had agreed to “invest” that amount in the province’s daycare system over the next five years. What Ontario had agreed to do in return for this lolly was left unstated, unless it was to hail it.

Now, what is the significance of this story? That the federal Liberals, after running for four straight elections on the promise of a national daycare system, have finally made good, just in time for a fifth? That parents who do not put their children into daycare will be required to pay for those who do? That, to benefit from this program, parents will be obliged to send their children, not to the daycare providers of their choice, but those of the province’s choice (since the money goes, not to parents, but to the province, and thence to providers)? That this is but the latest of dozens of similar spending announcements the Liberals have made in the last two weeks, since the prime minister went on TV to plead that the election be put off for 10 months?

No, the significance of this announcement, according to virtually every media account (though not, to be fair, the CBC’s), was that if the budget bill were defeated and an election were called, there would be no daycare for Ontario’s children. And the significance of that is not that it is true -- the Conservatives have promised to honour any agreement struck by the Liberals, and in any case have their own daycare program to match -- but what it says about the state of Canadian politics, and the structures of Liberal hegemony.

There are many ways in which the Grits have set about barricading themselves in power over the years -- we are about to see this taken to its almost literal extreme, with the party declaring it will refuse to recognize a non-confidence motion as a motion of non-confidence -- but what is common to all is a strategy known as clientism: the cultivation of a vast array of dependent client groups, who in exchange for regular infusions of federal cash can be counted on to tout the party’s cause at critical moments. Like, say, an election.

Sure enough, they have delivered. Not only Ontario has “hailed” the generosity and wisdom of the far-sighted Prime Minister and his dedicated Social Development minister, Ken Dryden, in recent days. The governments of Saskatchewan and Manitoba have been no less anxious that you should know about the many wonders they will be able to perform with their own shares of the same funding, each one separately announced and each given the same lavish attention by the media -- each with the warning that all this could be lost if, well, you know.

City governments, for their part, have lately been added to the Liberals’ client list, thanks to the Liberals’ promise of $5-billion in cash -- to be delivered, irrelevantly, in the form of a share of the federal gas tax. Again, dire warnings are issued of what would happen to this funding should an election intervene, though again, the Conservatives have promised much the same. But the beauty of this system is that the Liberals don’t even have to be the ones to say it -- they can let their surrogates do the talking, including such unimpeachable non-partisans as the mayor of Vancouver, Larry Campbell, or the mayor of Toronto, David Miller.

Both men, as it happens, are New Democrats. Or perhaps that’s not a coincidence. Having bought the NDP’s affections with $4.6-billion of your money, the Liberals now have even the opposition as a client -- surely the highest stage of clientism. And not only the NDP: when Belinda Stronach, Member of Parliament for Magna International and prospective purchaser of the Conservative Party, publicly undermined her leader’s call for an election this week, what reason did she give? That the election would prevent federal dollars promised in the budget from flowing to her riding. I’m thinking it’s possible this might show up in Liberal campaign literature, but I can’t be sure.

That’s just the start. During the last election, we heard from a flotilla of corporations warning that this or that federal grant or loan would be imperilled if the Liberals were to be defeated. (Bombardier, for example, has just secured another massive federal loan: think we’ll hear about that during the campaign? In Quebec, perhaps?) Arts groups, social advocacy organizations, magazine publishers: the list of those with a stake in Liberal clientage -- well, it’s not endless, but it does fill hundreds of pages every year in the Public Accounts, thousands and thousands and thousands of little sponsorship programs, with much the same intent and, broadly speaking, the same result: if not in kickbacks to Liberal fundraisers, then in acquiescence to Liberal rule.

The system of clientism has been built up over many decades. Its fingers now reach into every corner of the country, securing loyalties, creating dependents, buying silence. I do not know if they can ever be removed.