Seeing double in Ottawa

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

If you stick around long enough, the differences between governments seem to fade.

Is it the eyes failing? Or are the differences not quite as stark as the parties paint them?

Of course, the Conservatives pretend that the difference is like night and day -- and so do the Liberals. Their government: the devil's work! Our government: manna from heaven! There's no resemblance!

But it's hard to see the diff when you're seeing double.

That's what happened when the cannons roared anew over the alleged wickedness of the CBC. As the Conservative government launched another broadside at the supposed Liberal bias of the Mother Corp, the Globe and Mail found itself in need of a picture for its story. How to illustrate a boring press release and grab some eyeballs for the Globe website?

A cunning editor found the solution: Brian Gable's deft cartoon of a Darth Vader figure in a CBC News studio, stamping scripts as "defensible" or "indefensible" while telling the anchorman, "Please, just carry on as if I weren't here."

That cartoon was so good, they used it twice. And they didn't have to change a thing. But greybeards at the CBC recognized it.

First published on Nov. 13, 1998, the cartoon originally lampooned the Chrétien government's attacks on the Liberals' supposed enemies at, yes, the CBC. Reduce, re-use, recycle: the Globe goes green!

This kind of flashback makes it easier to remember, now that the CBC is being damned as a Liberal propaganda machine, that the Liberals in their day were equally incensed that it was, apparently, an anti-Liberal propaganda machine. We were "biassed," the Chretien PMO alleged, in an unfortunate piece of spelling, and we were "conspiring" against the Liberal government.

Such were the heated claims made by Jean Chrétien's Press Secretary, Peter Donolo, as CBC News peppered his boss with a fusillade of leaks about the 1997 APEC "pepper-spray" summit in Vancouver. The angry reaction of the government reverberated through the Liberals' remaining years in power and the Conservatives sided resolutely with the poor, abused CBC. Five years later, in June of 2002, Opposition Leader Stephen Harper was still railing about it in question period, accusing Chrétien of "the silencing of a CBC reporter" -- meaning yours truly. How he loved us when the other guys were taking the heat!

Now, it seems, the shoe's on the other foot. Today, Peter Donolo is Chief of Staff to the leader of a Liberal Party that is shocked, shocked at the Conservatives' assault on the CBC.

But you have to wonder: if the cartoon works no matter who's in power, and if the parties take turns at damning the CBC ... isn't that more or less the way it should be?