Ottawa Sun
Published: Saturday, April 2, 2005

Liberals looking west for chance to buy votes

If you think the loss of 80 plus jobs due to the federal government's boneheaded plan to move the Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC) to Vancouver is an isolated incident then you probably believe that Elvis is still alive and living in a trailer on the outskirts of Thunder Bay.

The relocation of the CTC to Vancouver for purely political reasons (that is, buying Western votes for the next go around) is surely the start of a new and consistent exodus of federal public service jobs from the National Capital Region. This inexorable pace will quicken over the coming 12 to 18 months leading into a spring or fall election in 2006.

Yes, you may dismiss me as a paranoid and sulking Conservative, fair enough and mostly true, but watch as the proposals for ServiceCanada take shape. Recall in the lead-up to the federal budget back in February there was considerable angst among union leaders that as many as 20,000 Ottawa-based public service jobs could be relocated to regions around the country.

Surely enough the Grits shelved these plans from public view. But rest assured (or rest uneasy) they are still percolating away in the bowels of the bureaucracy given their tenuous hold on power and their flat-lined fortunes in Central and Eastern Canada.

The Gomery inquiry and its odious revelations of corruption and rot in the sponsorship program have doomed the Liberals to 20-seat status in Quebec for the next decade. And there isn't much room to grow in Atlantic Canada either. In Ontario, the Liberals may pick up a few seats in 2006 but they could just as easily slip by a dozen or more if the Tories can stay disciplined enough to run a full 36-day focused campaign and ensure that the tour buses finish in Ontario this time (Note to the brain trust around Mr. Harper: You fish where the fish are!).

This leaves the West as the only hope for Liberal growth. To do this, relocating 10,000 to 20,000 Ottawa jobs to city cores in Winnipeg, Regina, Edmonton and Vancouver may just do the trick. So Western Canadians can find a degree of back-handed solace: After over a decade of federal neglect, the natural governing party now wants to buy your votes too!

The cold and cynical political calculations have likely already been made in the Liberal backrooms and they go as follows: Okay we start by moving the CTC to Vancouver, it's small enough and nobody will really notice, it will be a one-day media story, tops. We couch the move in terms of the needs of the 2010 Winter Games, sharing federal agencies around the country and local Ottawa Liberal MPs will be told (Belanger, Catterall, Godbout, and McGuinty) to stay quiet.

Then in the dead of summer we quickly move on the ServiceCanada file and ensure that we find a way to relocate those who want to go and accommodate, through interdepartmental transfers and reassignments, those who wish to remain in Ottawa, as best we can. I'll take friendly wagers now that one of Paul Martin's pitches to Western Canadians in 2006 will be: "Look at the jobs we moved out of Ottawa to your backyard to bring government closer to the people."

Meanwhile back here in Ottawa Liberal MPs running for re-election who promised stability for public servants during the 2004 campaign will say it would have been much worse under the Tories (meaning they'll lie) and that they fought as best they could to keep as many jobs here as possible.

Sadly, most people will buy it and the prospects for Tory growth in Ottawa and Eastern Ontario will remain non-existent. This is another calculation -- about your intelligence -- they've already made in the backrooms.