For Martin And Stronach, It's Lose-lose

A few days before George W. Bush's second inaugural, I received an urgent call from a friend. Belinda Stronach wanted to come to Washington to see the event. Could I get her tickets to the swearing-in and the balls afterward?

We did get the tickets -- and Belinda did the rest. Her progress through Washington was glittering. She hosted a star-spangled dinner at Washington's Palm restaurant the night after the President took the oath. The Solicitor General of the United States was there, and so was Kelly from The Apprentice, Larry King and an editor from Vanity Fair, as well as important figures from the Washington legal and business worlds.

It's difficult to secure top guests on inaugural night, but Belinda did it. They were curious to meet a glamorous and wealthy woman, a close friend of Bill Clinton's who had emerged as an unexpected political star. In politics, where who you are often matters less than where you are seen to be going -- and in January, 2005, Belinda Stronach seemed to be going places.

Not any more. Stronach's decision to cross the floor will be remembered as one of the most spectacular acts of political misjudgment since Joe Clark called down a leadership race upon himself in 1983. Three days ago, she was a powerful figure inside the Conservative party, the runner-up in the last leadership race and a front-runner in any race to come. She was a media darling, as left-wing dissidents in right-of-center parties always are. At the Conservative convention in Montreal, Belinda's reception was the hottest and most glamorous, as she herself was the most glamorous figure on Parliament Hill.

Now instead she sits on the Liberal bench as the head of a second-tier ministry, best known for misplacing $2-billion in taxpayer money in the 1990s. (At least we all hope the money is just misplaced -- post-Gomery, we can't rule out the possibility that its new owners know perfectly well where it is.) Her name will stand for a generation as a byword for opportunism, selfishness, folly and empty vanity.

The former media darling has probably absorbed more criticism in each of the past 48 hours than in all her previous life combined. Her leadership hopes have been cast aside (although her post-switch musings about the need for "renewal" in Canadian politics suggest that she does not know it). Now she goes into the next election branded as the woman who shares the political values of the man 63% of Canadians regard as the worst liar in politics. Given the already Conservative-leaning demographics of her Newmarket-Aurora constituency, you have to figure that she is unlikely to keep her seat in the next election -- and her new Liberal sponsors will have little enough reason to find her a new and more winnable one.

They say on Wall Street that there's always a fool in the marketplace -- and if you don't know who it is, it's you. And so it is in the marketplace that the Liberals have made of the Parliament of Canada. Unlike Jack Layton, who got a good price for what he had to sell, Belinda Stronach traded her reputation and her future for a job that will last only until this government's next crisis.

And what about Paul Martin? What did he get? A few months' time, to be sure, and maybe he was too desperate to think about anything else. But was it worth it? Among Paul Martin's few last dwindling political assets is a vague sense among the Ontario electorate that he is a basically honorable guy who just happened to fall in with a bad crowd. That asset can survive only so many shocks from contradictory reality -- and it just suffered another. How many more can it take?

Now he's got a new identify: As the bouncer at "Le Club Liberal" who tells the working Liberals to wait in line for years and decades -- and then abjectly whisks open the velvet rope to let some heiress in Manolo Blahniks click her way past.

As recently as the beginning of this month, Liberal pollsters were claiming that Paul Martin's personal favorability numbers still exceeded Stephen Harper's. I wonder what they are finding now.

We've been hearing for a month how popular all that new Liberal spending is. We've been hearing too how little the public wanted a new election. If that were true, would not Paul Martin have been smart to let the Conservatives and Bloc force a vote upon him?

This deal suggests that none of those things were true: that Martin's pollsters were warning him that the new spending was not working, that public reluctance to return to the polls would not translate into Liberal votes once they got there. And as members of Martin's own caucus absorb the implications of this unsavory deal, they are bound to wonder: Has Martin been misleading them about anything else?

A number of newspaper columnists have been asking whether Stephen Harper can survive Belinda Stronach's defection. That's a silly question. The Conservative party is more united this morning than it has been at any time in almost two decades. Belinda never had any supporters in the party, only employees. And those Conservatives inclined to agree with her views are the very Conservatives who feel the most outraged by her betrayal: She has made them all look potentially disloyal, and they will rally to Harper in response.

No, the leader whose survival is now in question is Paul Martin. His ruthless party now understands that it is in deadly trouble, trouble that is getting worse every day as Martin moves left, left, left away from the taxpaying Canadian middle. Some of those Liberals in vulnerable seats have to be wondering: Might we not be better off with a leader who doesn't lurch from crisis to crisis? One whom Canadians trust and respect?

They are bound to wonder too: If the editorialists are right that Canadians want Liberal-style policies -- but dislike the all-pervasive corruption of the Liberal leadership -- maybe the solution is to find new leaders, leaders untainted by the fraudulent wheeling and dealing of the past 12 years? Stronach may well be right that her story demonstrates the need for "renewal" in Canadian public life. But I'd bet that the leader who just took a giant step closer to being "renewed" by his own party is not the leader she treacherously deserted -- but the one who just rented her services.