Last week’s miniature cabinet shuffle might not seem to be making momentous waves in the canals of power in Ottawa--but perhaps it should.
This move, along with the vaulting of backbencher B.C. MP John Duncan into the role of Minister of Indian Affairs, has secured five top-level federal cabinet positions for B.C. This makes for some pretty heavy representation in cabinet for a province that only makes up some 13.3 per cent of the nation’s population, a distant third in terms of the most populous provinces behind Ontario and Quebec.
One might have thought that the bouncing boy from Calgary, that indomitable doughboy Stephen Harper, might have chosen to stack the cabinet ranks with like-minded denizens of Wild Rose Country. But that would be too obvious for Harper--he’s no fool when it comes to negotiating the minefield of Canadian minority government politics. In fact he’s proven himself to be quite the Slippery Pete when it comes to dodging opposition salvos, adept at slipping into Rideau Hall for high tea with the governor-general (with a side of prorogue), and acting ruthlessly with party dissension and private faux-pas. And all the while still managing to find time to enrage the Opposition into paroxysms of ineffectual bluster, sparking a barrage of fetid wind to buffet the government side of the House with more hot air than a chili cook-off.
Still, Alberta isn’t really getting the short end of the political stick. At roughly 10.9 per cent of the national population, four cabinet ministers--one of which is the prime minister--isn’t half bad. Just look at Saskatchewan, who only rings the cabinet bell with the Minister of Agriculture, Gerry Ritz. And Manitoba isn’t about to start being accused of hogging up cabinet either, with one minister. And forget about the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, although Nunavut has managed to slip one past. As for the rest, well-- they’re in what we collectively refer to out here as “the East” as though it conjures up images of some mysterious Marco Polo-like fantasy land where silks and spices abound. All the same, it has long been the complaint of “the West” that “the East” tends to understand us about as well as a dog would understand Latin.
Which goes a long way towards explaining why the current incarnation of the Conservative Party has had such trouble winning the hearts of the people of “the East”. The Conservative Party has morphed into the western party, and traditionally that is something that “the East” has always been uneasy about, as though giving them free reign might usher in an era of unsophisticated hillbilly-ism, pick-up trucks, rifle ranges and tractor-pulls, as well as a passion for foam-fronted, mesh-backed caps and overalls. It is a sentiment that has seen many of the western protest parties fail to soften the steely posterior of eastern political domination.
Trying to straddle the cabinet gap in this country is a lot like trying to walk a tight-rope across Niagara Falls--fraught with dangerous pitfalls  and crowds of oohing and aahhing provincials making noise at every misstep.
We’re a lot like Hugh Maclennan’s classic Canadian novel Two Solitudes--only today the solitudes are the West and the East, not Quebec and Ontario. It has much to do with what the Australians used to call the “tyranny of distance”. We are a vast country, with widely different backgrounds, and often only limited cultural contact between respective geographical areas. It is something that can often breed prejudice and elitism,  The contrasts are sometimes exaggerated, and sometimes they are not. The truth is, in many fundamental ways, we are not very much different from each other. It is how we view each other, with all of the stereotypes and the false assumptions, that exists to bar the way towards progress, even reconciliation. Especially political progress.
Which brings us back to our five cabinet ministers in British Columbia--one newly minted. A word of warning to Stephen Harper: Although not padding the pockets of his cabinet with another Albertan might have him coming out in hives at his own cleverness, just handing it off to another Westerner doesn’t really obscure this touchy bid of ballyhoo from the average gerrymandering-conscious Easterner. For them, it’s just another western riding, just like to us their isn’t much difference in our mind politically from the Gaspe Peninsula or Gander, Newfoundland. And lets not forget that many of the high-profile cabinet positions are in the hands of western MPs, with the exceptions of Jim Prentice, Peter Mackay and a handful of others.
If a quiet move towards a more West-centred cabinet is on the prime minister’s mind, he needs to rethink his strategy. And he needs to do it now. Recent polls have dropped the Conservatives to an on par defensive with the floundering Liberals, and this in the lead up to a possible rumoured/conjectured fall election. Harper hitting the so-called summer “bbq circuit” in B.C. this past week might be an early indication that the Conservatives are quietly gearing up for an election campaign--as Ignatieff and the Liberals clearly are. Better try and reach more than the party faithful this time, Stephen-- and adding more western cabinet ministers isn’t going to be the answer to that equation.