TriumphAnt

I’ve been hard pressed to come up with an original thought or two to summarize how I feel about Monday night’s election results. Not that I am absent original thoughts, but rather because I kept encountering other people in my morning-after-the-election reading who were saying – and usually much more efficiently and accurately – exactly what resonated with me.

For example, here’s a comment that was included in an e-mailed note from a friend:

“And last night went much better than I had dared to hope. Really, a best-case scenario: blue hands tied, reds remake themselves fast, orange gets a victory that isn't just a moral one, and hey! Olivia! Thank you, powers that be.”

(Translation for any non-Canadian-or-several-steps-removed-and-probably-gratefully-so-from-the-election-just-past readers: “blue” is Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who did not win enough of a majority to take complete command of the government; “red” is Paul Martin’s Liberals, who ran what is, bar none, the single worst campaign in the history of Canadian politics and yet still managed to finish with an astonishing head count of 103 seats in the 308-seat House of Commons; “orange” is Jack Layton’s NDP Party, who also made significant gains last night to capture 29 seats; and “Olivia” is Mrs Jack Layton, Olivia Chow, who also ran and who also won. She is passionate about social issues and has built her political life around many such goals including housing the homeless and the elimination of child poverty. Just take a look at her “Past member of…” list here)

And this from a comment that appeared in an election-related blog post:

“If one looks over the totals, one almost gets the impression that the Canadian public stood the four leaders up against the wall and read them all the riot act. ‘Harper, we’ll let you try things out but we don’t trust you and if you get out of line, you’re toast. Martin, go stand in the corner and get your shit in order. Duceppe, don’t be getting any ideas about trying for independence because we’re not in the mood. And Layton, you still don’t have enough votes to be a power broker so shut the hell up and rein in your ego.’”

(Actually I confess I made a minor spell edit in that paragraph. In the original, the writer in fact had directed Mr Layton to “reign in your ego”. But given the tone of the rest of his comment, that would have been just too clever by half… even though it certainly would have made the Layton observation mesh more with my own – see below.)

And this from a brief blog comment by Maclean’s Magazine columnist Paul Wells that was written very late on election night itself:

“It is appropriate that Martin go; he has led the Liberal Party to its second-lowest share of the popular vote since Confederation. Harper continues to advance without triumphing. He does not get to rest just yet. Do not doubt that he has a plan, but he will need a plan and lots of luck. We made our democracy more functional tonight. The mixed result matches the uncertain moment, but there's progress. There's more to come.”

Any one of those remarks fits all or part of my own thinking, but somehow sending y’all a Baby Duck update that just says “Me too” ain’t enough either.

So… if you’re statistically inclined (or even if you’re not – as someone once said, 90% of Canadian high school graduates are competent in math; the other 18% still have some work to do), barring any recounts that overturn riding results, here’s how they crossed the finish line:

Conservative: 124
Liberal: 103
NDP: 29
Bloc Québécois: 51
Independent: 1

(And why I have sent a note to the International Brotherhood of Fortunetellers asking them to cancel my membership application? Well, I had predicted – using the same order above – 141, 93, 10, 62 and 2.)

A couple days after the fact, I still find myself mightily surprised by the strong final Liberal numbers. When one considers that the pre-election shadow of the Gomery Inquiry into Party corruption was actually lengthened by a campaign that was a textbook case of how not to run a campaign (off-message gaffes, being blindsided by a mid-campaign RCMP announcement that they were launching yet another investigation, releasing negative ads that were so over-the-top they have already become the stuff of legendary satirical knock-offs), their power-brokers must truly be shaking their heads at just how easily they likely could have won at least another minority had they been better organized.

I also find myself mightily surprised at the strong NDP showing. Before the vote, I was genuinely convinced that this country, having seen the power into which the Party parleyed its few seats won in the last election by agreeing to prop up the Liberals, would abandon the NDP in droves in the belief that they simply did not want to put that much power into their hands again. Well surprise! The next election date is now pretty well Jack Layton’s to determine. And contrary to the above commenter’s belief that Mr Layton lacks power-broking strength, I think that is precisely what he has managed to achieve. Again. “Reigning in his ego”, as it were.

And I was surprised by the swiftness of Paul Martin’s announcement that he will not lead the Liberal Party into the next election. I think everyone knew that just such an announcement would only be a matter of time following last night’s result, especially given how far the Liberal Party has managed to tank under his watch, but I don’t think anyone expected him to work it into his election night thanks to his campaign workers and his national roster of candidates. I suspect he doesn’t want to let the grass grow under his feet and can already see the sharpened knives poking out from the many darkened closets in the nether corners of his bedroom. No doubt he’s soon to be off to the drydocks in Liberia to paint Canadian flags on his Canada Steamship Lines lakers while he spends his evenings writing his memoirs and blaming Jean Chrétien for all his woes.

But all was not a total surprise. I had hopefully predicted that Pierre Pettigrew, Tony Valeri and Anne McClellan would all succumb. (But to offset that, I was also convinced that parachute intellectual Michael Ignatieff and pair o’ somethings Belinda Stronach would lose their respective ridings. And yet somehow both managed to convince enough of their local voters that sending them to Ottawa is a good thing.)

There are two predominate schools of thought about a minority government. One teaches the belief that it is a good thing, because its programs are much more likely to reflect the will of a larger population – their own voters, plus those loyal to the Party propping them up. The other teaches that it is a bad thing because “innovation” and “bold initiative” simply vanish from the language of the government’s agenda. While generally perceived as positives, innovative policies are also lightning rods for opposition and media criticism. Expect to see a wave of bland program launches backed up by news releases containing countless repetitions of “Canadians from coast to coast to coast have told us that they want…”

From the perspective of a public servant, however, in a minority government situation the “bad” is what usually dominates. Entire departments slide into developing programs and positions so unfailingly “motherhood” that their enactment, however much fanfare surrounds their announcement, usually occasions all the ripple of a teaspoon stroke in Lake Superior. Because no one, after all, wants to be the metal pole sitting on the roof while a thunderstorm builds up around you.

That means all of your department’s announcements are as safe as the “It’s a Small World After All” ride at Disney World and boring as hell. And if your job just happens to be media related, it means a struggle to find anything meaningful about your department in any medium. The media, you see, for some peculiar reason don’t see “boring as hell” as a sufficient grabber to lead any government-related coverage they might have been planning.

= = =

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sewer.

I have just seen where everything goes when you pull the commode’s flush handle. And that, surprisingly, is not as disgusting as it might at first sound.

Several years ago, we had a minor back up from a floor drain in our basement that indicated a problem in the main sewer line. In a matter of hours, a rooter company had been and gone and confirmed that the sewer line between our house and the street had been almost fully “intruded” by fibrous tree roots.

Recently, we experienced a mild olfactory caution from our floor drain to suggest that everything perhaps was not going as far as it should. This time, when we called a rooter company, the plumber who showed up brought in a massive spool of very stiff wire about the diameter of a thick pencil. (That’s a relative term, I know. If you’re a dust mite, a human hair is “about the diameter of a thick pencil”. And if you’re Polyphemus, the Cyclops into whose eye Odysseus and several of his crew rammed a sharpened tree trunk, then a log that it takes four men to lift is potentially “about the diameter of a thick pencil”. So let’s say the cable was about a half inch thick, 1.3 cm if you’re metric-minded. But I digress.)

But what was really interesting was that the business end of the cable was a tiny video camera ringed by a tremendously bright light. When he was done, he invited me to view the results. With a gulp, I thought, “Oh… OK.”

What unfolded onscreen was a film that recalls one of those National Geographic health films where you travel, via a catheter camera, through the esophagus into the stomach. The “esophagus”, in this case, was our sewage drain and I discovered that when such a pipeline is constructed, it is one diameter while still in the house; changes to a larger diameter after it exists the foundation and then becomes a veritable subway tunnel after it connects to the main sewer under the street on which we live.

I also learn that builders are occasionally complete idiots.

As we “travelled” along the line, he pointed to a place where a clean-out pipe could clearly be seen branching straight upwards. This, he said, is where he should have been able to start his camera line. Then he pointed roughly to where on the basement floor that clean-out opening should be. The surface of the floor was solid, unbroken concrete. So someone, in a display of utter stupidity in the long ago act of pouring my basement floor, had simply poured the cement right over top of the cleanout line and its cap. Future archaeologists no doubt will have a field day trying to guess the purpose of the “branchline to nowhere”.

Fortunately, in a clean dry crawlspace about 40 feet deeper into our house was a second clean-out entry and it was there he had started his photo run.

Fibrous tree roots are evil things. They find seams in the pipe where the very minutest of entry points exist and work their way into the line. Because the purpose of a tree root, you see, is to itself serve as an entry point for nutrients into the tree.

Nuitrients and water.

So to a tree root, a sewer line is pretty much a Thanksgiving buffet. And the tree spares no effort in probing sewer pipes with the thinnest of its fibrous roots. When it finds an opening, it’s like someone clanged the dinner triangle as the tree beams a “COME AND GET IT!!!” signal to any adjacent roots. And before you know it, you’ve got a thick cluster of hungry and thirsty hair-like tree roots happily bellying up to the table inside your domestic sewer line.

We called the diagnostic rooter first because two of our three front yard trees are officially city trees and the video, as it turns out, does indeed show the intrusion to be far enough along the line that it’s almost certainly a city tree root that has found its way in. And when that happens, not only will the city pay to have your line flushed clean with an unbelievably high pressure water blast, they will even re-imburse the cost of the “Fantastic Voyage” video you had to commission to diagnose the problem. But you have to have paid first for the diagnosis.

(Perversely, if you wait until your basement floods and then call the city, if a city tree is indeed the source of the blockage, they’ll pay the usually enormous repair bill. But if you’re commissioning a pre-disaster preventive diagnosis, paying for it is entirely your responsibility until it is confirmed to be a city tree root. Still with me here?)

Recently, we had two neighbours each experience a major basement flood on which the city had to pay repairs, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars each. I expect they will be an easy sell when it comes to convincing them of the merit of footing the bill for this preventive rooting, before they have to foot the bill for a yet another full basement renovation and repair in yet another home on our little section of the street.

= = =

And finally, with the looming departure of Paul Martin from the Liberal leader’s chair, no doubt his thoughts are more and more given to pondering how he’ll be remembered.

Well, here’s one legacy I recently read about that quite struck me – and certainly there are worse ways to be remembered.

Samuel Pepys is much better known as a diarist, but in circles that deal with British naval history, he is also held by some to be the founder of the modern Royal Navy. And in a book entitled “A Brief History of British Sea Power” (which despite the title’s seeming military focus is also quite thorough in tracking British mastery of the world’s oceans in pursuit of spice and exploration), Pepys’ contribution in the face of a corrupt and often piratical leadership for whom the navy was merely a tool for enhancing personal wealth is summed up:

“Pepys has been called the saviour of the navy. Perhaps that is going a little too far. The navy was suffering rather acutely from the malaise of the times, and no doubt it would have survived and recovered when the standard of honesty in the rest of English society took a turn for the better. But he very much speeded the recovery. With this strange and wonderful little man at the head of affairs, incredibly energetic, humorous, the best of company, yet implacably strict and a source of terror when he was much displeased, the navy had a core of uncomfortable conscience, and was freed of most of the dead weight of thieves and rogues ashore which had crippled it so long… This was the greatest of all his services: in a selfish and cynical age when men did as little as they could, he worked like a beaver for the navy and his master.”

What a great way to say, and what better epitaph could there be than, “He was damned good at what he did.”!

Eat your heart out, Mr Martin.