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Blog of Adam Daifallah -- author, journalist, law student. Lover of politics, writing, golf, curling, fitness, fashion, bacon and maple products -- not necessarily (but probably) in that order. Partisan of the Anglosphere. Contact me via email at adam@daifallah.com. This summer I am joined by Keir Wilmut and Omar Soliman.
Thursday, October 21, 2004
More on Harper's Belgium proposal
I expressed surprise last Saturday at how little attention the English press was paying to Stephen Harper's trial balloon about federalism. Harper proposed borrowing some ideas from Belgium, involving the devolution of some federal authority in areas like communications to linguistic groups.
Turns out the Anglo media were just a little slow: the National Post fronted the story Tuesday morning, with the somewhat misleading headline "HARPER'S CANADA: BELGIUM." Since then, a mountain of opeds and commentators have unloaded on the idea.
The Canadian media is frustrating, especially their herd mentality. Harper has only said a few words about this idea to date. He has not described his plan in any detail whatsoever. Yet, before any meat is put on the bones, all of the country's pundits, commentators and editorial boards dismiss it out of hand, in almost total unanimity. No one will even say "at least he had an idea."
I don't understand why this is (other than it seems that the English media is almost uniformly Trudeauvian on federalism issues), especially given that we know virtually nothing about what the proposals are or what they mean. At first glance, I don't think I'm too big on this idea. It seems a bit far-fetched. But I'm still going to wait to learn more first, and I wish others would too.
Maybe it's just that I live in Quebec now, and that I'm seeing first-hand the need for some kind of reform of the federation. But I really do think the jury's still out on this whole thing. In fact, the jury hasn't even convened, because the case hasn't yet been made.
Here's Harper speech from last Friday where he briefly mentioned this idea. Instead of taking cues from the nattering nabobs in the comment pages, I suggest folks read this as a starting point, and then wait to hear more later.
# posted by Adam Daifallah : 11:25 AM
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