In Maclean’s, Paul Wells gets in a small dig at Stephen Harper before unloading on Thomas Mulcair:
Before I make a bit more fun of Mulcair, and then try to take some of his arguments seriously, I should first stipulate that the Harper government is fully capable of childish absurdity on the energy/environment front. Indeed I think the confrontation between resource exports and environmental activism is turning into less of a slam-dunk political winner for Harper than he seemed to think in the New Year.
But we see two longstanding Mulcair traits in his remarks. First, a kind of Byzantine certainty. Not just that he knows what’s going on, but inevitably that what’s going on is so complex that only a fellow such as he can grasp its intricacy. Journalists have known for a long time that Mulcair was their go-to guy for some cockamamie wheels-within-wheels theory about his opponents’ motives and actions. It cannot possibly be that Alison Redford, Christy Clark and Brad Wall simply disagree with Mulcair, or even that they don’t care whether he’s right but are playing to different electorates. No, they say what they say because they are in league with Harper against him. Mulcair surely knows Christy Clark’s chief of staff, Ken Boessenkool, helped script Harper’s winning 2006 campaign. If he didn’t know that Brad Wall’s former environment minister, Nancy Heppner, worked in Harper’s PMO for a year after that campaign, he knows it now and will take great satisfaction in tucking it away for future use. See? She’s the go-between. I knew it.
The notion that Alison Redford is Harper’s preferred Alberta premier, or that she scans the skies at night for the light from the Harpsignal, is harder to square with the available data, but whatever. On to the second Mulcair characteristic: the belief that disagreement is synonymous with illegitimate attack against him. You will tell me that’s hardly unique. You’ll be right. Just look at the prime minister. But now we know Mulcair is no more immune from the garden-variety political martyr complex. Wells would write crap like “martyr complex.” He’s from Maclean’s. They hate me.
