January 25, 2006

An analysis of why the Liberals lost.

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Why did Paul Martin’s Liberals lose the election? There are so many reasons. As the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning might have said, “let me count the ways...”

From Liberal strategist Scott Reid’s dismissal of the Conservative child care plan as “beer and popcorn money,” to pro-Martin labour leader Buzz Hargrove’s bizarre description of Stephen Harper as a “separatist” while at the same time encouraging Quebecers to vote for the Bloc Québécois rather than the Tories, it was just one misstep after another.

It shows the bedrock strength of our “natural governing party” that, even after running such a lacklustre campaign, they still won over 100 seats and have held Stephen Harper’s Conservatives to a fairly slim minority government.

The Bloc also lost seats and must rethink its strategy in Quebec, now that it faces a significant federalist alternative in the Conservatives.

In relative terms, Jack Layton’s New Democrats probably have the most to cheer about, having gained seats in both Ontario and British Columbia.

Here were two of the most serious Liberals gaffes:

Martin dropped a bombshell in one of the leaders debates, announcing that if he won re-election, he would eliminate the federal government’s power to use the “notwithstanding” clause in the Charter of Rights.

While most of the subsequent debate around this issue centered on whether this was in fact a good idea, and whether Martin could in fact unilaterally amend the constitution without the consent of the provinces, what initially went unnoticed, until Jack Layton mentioned it, was Martin’s unstated premise that no federal government should ever want to override a Charter ruling by the Supreme Court--because the justices would always be chosen by Liberal governments.

Yet, as Layton pointed out, what if some future court rulings resulted in reducing rights to, say, public health care, abortion or same-sex marriage? The Liberals had clearly never considered the possibility that the “scary” Stephen Harper might win an election and then have the power to select judges who would implement his “hidden agenda.”

When this prospect became more likely, Martin declared that Harper would “stack” the Supreme Court with conservative judges. Apparently, the current members of the Court, all but one appointed by the Liberals, did not, in his view, hold any political opinions. To voters, this was yet another sign of Liberal arrogance.

The prime minister also blundered in his use of the “America card.” His shrill and gratuitous denunciation of the Bush administration for not ratifying the Kyoto Accord, made at an international conference on climate change held in Montreal in December, was particularly silly, given that Canada’s environmental record is worse than that of the U.S. Canadian greenhouse gas emissions have risen about 24 per cent since 1990, as compared to 13 per cent south of the border.

Then, as the campaign entered its final phase, the Liberals unleashed a barrage of attack ads against the Conservatives.

The ads, in which Stephen Harper was all but accused of being an American agent “very popular with right-wingers in the U.S.,” and speaking to “a secret, ultra right-wing American think tank,” implied that those intending to vote Conservative were, at the very least, dupes, and at worst, little more than pro-American fifth columnists seeking to destroy Canada.

The producers of the Liberal attack ads made a big mistake: they referred to Stephen Harper consorting with his “American pals” and “American friends.” Note: not “Republicans,” nor even “right-wing Americans,” but simply “Americans.”

In other words, the ads mocked the U.S. itself, the country on which we to a large extent depend for our very defence and economic livelihood.

This did not go unnoticed south of the border: Both the New York Times and Washington Post, the two most influential American newspapers, ran stories about the anti-American ads, as did the Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times and USA Today. PEI’s favourite journalistic son, Mike Duffy, was interviewed on CNN about the ads.

Paul Martin now had the ear of the American administration, all right, but not in ways that would do Canada much good.

I think even those Canadians not enamoured of George W. Bush, or of the United States in general, were ashamed of these “over the top” attacks.

Harper will not have an easy time of it: He has no natural allies in the next parliament and probably the best thing going for him right now is the political exhaustion of all Canadians. No one wants yet another election in the near future. But he will be given little quarter by the other parties. None of them will demonstrate a particularly generous attitude towards the Conservatives.

Still, here are five reasons why, even if you disapproved of the Conservative Party’s program, its narrow victory on Jan. 23 might not be a bad thing for Canada:

It would bode ill for democracy if a party that had been in power for as long as the ruling Liberals had been, could not be defeated in an election, especially following the sponsorship scandal and other revelations--because the other major party was deemed too “scary.”

Nor would we have a healthy political system if voters believed that only the two left-centre political parties, the Liberals and New Democrats, were legitimate, and agreed to assign to the Conservatives the same status of “nation wreckers”as they did to the Bloc Québécois.

And in Quebec, a Liberal victory would have been manna from heaven for the separatists, and would provide the ammunition for them to maintain that anglophone Canadians cared little about the way they had been treated, and that federalism was a force for corruption.

Had the Liberals won, the country would have been run out of three “city-states,” since the vast majority of Liberal seats are in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Finally, our country would not remain united in the long run if the citizens of its richest province, Alberta, and its most dynamic city, Calgary, were forever kept away from the levers of power.

So, even for those Canadians who support the Liberals and New Democrats, things are not as dire as they seem for the country!

January 17, 2006

When did ‘Canadian Values’ become such an issue?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

A lot of things have changed in the world of Canadian politics since I was a university student four decades ago.

Back then, for instance, our professors told us that our British-derived Westminster form of “responsible government” was superior to the American separation of powers model, with its rigid divisions between executive, legislative and judicial branches.

Our system, in which Parliament was supreme, was more flexible and adaptable. We did not have a constitution “cast in stone.” And we did not have to worry about unelected judges with lifetime tenure having the final say on how we would be governed, by exercising the awesome power of judicial review through reference to that constitution.

Today, of course, we have become worshipers of the Charter of Rights and are saddled with a constitution that is virtually impossible to amend.

Another example of Canada’s more enlightened political culture, we were taught, was our tolerance for ideological diversity.

Canada had no foundational myth nor was it formed around some great political vision. While the American idealists who had fought for independence and founded the United States were larger-than-life heroes, bold political theorists, revolutionaries with transcendental goals, Canada’s “Fathers of Confederation” were neither great thinkers nor orators, but simply colonial politicians.

The 1867 British North America Act united four British colonies into a Dominion of Canada. It was a compact of provinces and/or “founding nations,” not a new American-style social contract inspired by, in the words of the United States Constitution, “we, the people.”

The U.S. developed what Abraham Lincoln called a “political religion.” The various written documents--the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, among others--are still revered, and serve as a canon of political literature.

Indeed, the followers of political scientist Leo Strauss at times sound as though the U.S. Constitution is, if not actually a revelation from God, then at least semi-sacred and divinely inspired.

The historian Richard Hofstadter once said of his country that “it has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.” And “Americanism” has indeed at times been moralistic, rigid and doctrinaire.

But since Canada was formed by a union, at the time, of British and French colonial subjects, with their differences of language and religion, it was more comfortable with ideological diversity and could deal with it in a more rational manner. There was no overarching definition of what it meant to be a “Canadian.”

No one had a monopoly on the “spirit” of the nation. Television ads for soap and cars did not wave Canadian flags in viewers’ faces. There was no “Canadian way of life.” Nationality was related to community, not ideological commitment.

The U.S. House of Representatives actually included the notorious “Committee on Un-American Activities” (HUAC), to investigate “subversive activities.” It was a vehicle for unscrupulous politicians to impugn the patriotism and smear the reputations of those whom they deemed ideologically suspect. It was finally abolished in 1975.

But a “House Un-Canadian Activities Committee” would have been an oxymoron. So we could argue that the U.S. was a more politically intolerant nation that repressed minority opinion with recurring waves of McCarthyist demagoguery and witch-hunting, whereas a non-populist, non-ideological society like ours allowed more freedom because there was less need to enforce ideological conformity.

As the philosopher George Grant wrote in his 1965 Lament for a Nation, “To be a Canadian was to build a more ordered and stable society than the liberal experiment in the United States.”

Yet today, as the fractures between east and west, anglophone and francophone, multicultural big city and “old stock” rural region, continue to widen, our most prominent political leaders, Liberals in particular, prattle on endlessly about so-called “Canadian values,” which mostly boil down to feel-good platitudes.

They wrap themselves in the Maple Leaf while delivering speeches full of empty bombast and self-congratulatory rhetoric, boasting about what wonderful patriots they are.

When did we become just a second-rate version of America?

January 5, 2006

Who is responsible for Canada’s slide towards national disintegration?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The election campaign has now passed the half-way mark. Following the Christmas-New Year’s time out, the politicians are again bombarding us with their messages in advance of the second round of leaders’ debates.

Along with child care, gun violence, insider trading on the stock market, and relations with the United States, the very future of the country has emerged as an election issue.

As we paused for the holidays, the Bloc Québécois had an astounding lead of 60% to 20% over the Liberals in Quebec, according to a poll conducted between Dec. 17 and 19 by the Strategic Counsel. The Conservatives and New Democrats were nowhere, at 8% each, in the province.

Even in Montreal, the poll found the Bloc was almost twice as popular as the Liberals. Such are the continuing fruits of the sponsorship scandal.

Yet Paul Martin has continued to attack the Conservatives as being less able, or even willing, than the Liberals to preserve Canada as a united country. Indeed, a few weeks ago the prime minister accused Stephen Harper and Gilles Duceppe, “if they get enough seats,” of “working together to dismantle this country that all of us are so proud of.”

This is all a bit odd, coming from a man who seemed unhappy with the Clarity Act and who appointed a founder of the Bloc, Jean Lapierre, who has called the act “useless,” as his Quebec lieutenant when Martin took over the party.

Steven MacKinnon, the national director of the Liberal Party, also spoke of a “Conservative-Bloc partnership,” while Liberal strategist John Duffy wrote about Harper’s “record of parliamentary co-operation with the Bloc.”

It goes without saying that Mr. Harper is no friend of Quebec’s sovereigntists. But there is no doubt that, should the Conservatives form a minority government (which I think they will), the Bloc Québécois will want to keep Stephen Harper in power for as long as possible. Why?

The House of Commons after Jan. 23 will likely have more than 60 “Quebec” MPs, as the Bloquistes like to think of themselves, while the remaining House members, be they Liberals, Tories or New Democrats, will all be from “Canada” (including the handful of Liberals elected in anglophone and allophone ridings of Quebec).

As the Conservatives will probably not win a single seat in Quebec, the Bloc will able to portray Mr. Harper as an “English Canadian” prime minister and the Conservatives as a party “foreign” to Quebecers. That will help the Bloc carry the message to people in that province that a Yes vote on separation in a future provincial referendum will be the only way to safeguard their interests as a people.

Indeed, the composition of the next parliament will make many Québécois feel as though the province has already, in all but name, split off from the rest of the country.

But don’t blame Stephen Harper or even Gilles Duceppe for this state of affairs. Just remember that those great defenders of Canada, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, have been in power these past 12 years.