We need to focus on unity and purpose -- not personalities!

Personalities have hurt the Liberal Party before, and may do again, which is why unity is so important. Under our new Leader, united, we are strong. It is interesting to see the problem may hurt the Conservatives... .


Keeping it in the Tory family

The Karlheinz Schreiber-Airbus-Brian Mulroney saga rolls through another of its near endless permutations. Were there a present-day Charles Dickens, he would have a modern version of Bleak House, the great fable of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the interminable Chancery suit around which the original and indefatigable Dickens wound his greatest novel.

However, this latest round of the modern saga, in the way of such things, has had already a peculiar result. It is not so much that Mr. Schreiber's elaborate and inconsistent unfoldings have captured the public's attention this time. Rather it is the - shall we call it background - drama of the inquiry that has seized people's interest: not the past mischiefs, alleged or real, of a former prime minister, but the both odd and awkward workings of the current one, Stephen Harper, to quarantine himself from his predecessor.

It began with the "outing" of the highly contestable fact that Mr. Mulroney was "no longer a member" of the Conservative Party. It was, we are told, high-cost advisers of the Prime Minister's own office who tendered that political delicacy to select members of the Ottawa punditocracy.

At the first hint of this Mr. Mulroney reacted, as he is wont to do, with a jet of that theatrical flare that has always been part of his equipment as a politician, and is not unassociated with the thick streak of Irish in him. No one fulgurates more gloriously than an injured Irishman: "I remain a member of the Conservative Party and I will remain so until the day I die," he said.

Doubtless the fulminations behind closed doors were even more ripe. Mr. Mulroney, and I mean this as a small compliment, is as precocious as the most hardcore rapper when it comes to straight-down invective.

Strangely enough, this decision of the austere Harperites to work the excommunication of Mr. Mulroney from the "Conservative family" may turn out of be a strategic masterpiece on a par with that earlier brilliance of trying to cut off public funding for political parties. Which almost lost Mr. Harper the government. But that move was at least over a matter of real substance. So the consequence, however unanticipated and singular - we shall not easily forget the two-day wonder of the three-headed coalition - was understandable.

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