Being in politics
without power used to drive good men to drink. Today they settle for storytelling.
They feed and write narratives. Because they live in the capital of the One Big
Country that decided to nestle beside, and not inside, the center of its own
civilization, they read Globe and Mail
stories about personalities and their chemistry in Ottawa.
Today’s
front-pager “The U.S. ambassador who got left out in the cold” by Campbell
Clark reports darkly that Ambassador Bruce Heyman is not being entertained as a
valued friend by the amateurish Harper government. Unfortunately, he buries a
wonderful observation, demonstrating how more sophisticated governments used
to work on U.S. ambassadors:
“Former deputy
prime minister John Manley noted the Chrétien government figured only one
person in the U.S. administration woke up every day thinking about Canada, so
they’d better get close.”
Ambassadors from Washington exist in Ottawa to
permit men and women in elected positions of power in Washington to concentrate on anything but Canada. They service
networks within Ottawa; they deliver messages and bits of gossip.
If we need
powerful American politicians to wake up thinking about Canada, we’ll have to
send them to work in Washington as our representatives.
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