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!