The natural governing party.

From the moment that Belinda leaned across the pillow and whispered to Peter McKay that the dashing P.M. had stolen, well, perhaps not her heart but her ambition, commentators have portrayed Peter McKay as victim of la belle dame sans merci. It hardly seems fair.

After all, Peter scorned his sometime inamorato, David Orchard, and Belinda's act of treachery could be seen simply as proof that what goes around comes around. In any case there is no appeal; a broken heart is the last wrong for which the Charter of Rights provides no remedy; as a wise English judge once said: "to affairs of the heart, the king's writ does not run." In playing the betrayer, Belinda cast herself in a drama as old as Eve in the Garden.

Yet recent events in Canadian politics have taken an astounding turn.

The Liberals are up to their greasy chops in scandal from the Gomery Inquiry. The Prime Minister's right hand man, Tim Murphy, and Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh, are caught on tape trying to bribe a Tory backbencher.

Yet the party under siege is not the Liberal Party but the Conservative Party; the leader on trial is Stephen Harper.

Harper is said to be too cold, too unemotional, too much the angry white male. He is not Bill Clinton; he does not "feel our pain." Consequently, the latest polls show the Conservatives so far behind as to guarantee a Liberal majority next time out.

Chretien biographer Lawrence Martin recently suggested that Stephen Harper step aside in favour of Peter McKay. "With a switch to Prince Charming, [the Conservatives] could run the tables," he predicts.

So, forget the fact that Harper was elected to his position by delegates themselves elected; ignore the fact that McKay chose not to run against Harper. McKay's heart is bruised, Belinda did the dirty on him, and Canadian women feel sorry for him. That is enough, apparently, to make someone Prime Minister.

If Stephen Harper is vulnerable to criticism it is not that he is a cold fish; rather it is that, on his watch, the Conservative Party has become an almost indistinguishable clone of the Liberal Party. It has shed those distinctive policies that made the old Reform Party at least exciting, if not electable. Why Canadians should want to elect an imitation Liberal Party, promoting the same tried and failed policies, stumps me.

Of course, the pundits chant over and over that the Conservatives are too "right wing"; that people fear a "hidden agenda"; that Ontarians will never support anything but mush. Well, perhaps they are right; certainly recent polls suggest that. But I hope that Stephen Harper does have a secret agenda; a continuation of Liberal politics of corruption and compromise is what frightens me.

Years ago Malcolm Muggeridge interviewed a man who had spent much of his life in an insane asylum and, having been finally released, had a certificate attesting his sanity. After a lifetime of voting for candidates--municipal, provincial and federal--of dubious sanity, that is the man for me. My candidate must carry a certificate of sanity.

Or there is another, perhaps more radical, alternative: given that Canadian politics has been reduced to an episode of Desperate Housewives; given that the electorate apparently detests elections anyway; and given that voters invariably re-elect the same poltroons, why not acknowledge reality and abolish elections?

It would save time and money. And as far as one can tell, it would make no discernible difference to life in Canada.

Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at Western University in London Ontario.