One Professor’s Political and Academic Journey

by Henry Srebrnik, [UPEI] Cadre

Because I lived, on and off, in Alberta between 1990 and 2007, and taught from 1990 to 1993 in the Political Science Department at the University of Calgary – the “brains trust” of the country’s conservative movement – I got to know people like Preston Manning (Reform Party founder), Ted Morton (Finance minister, and possibly the next Premier, of Alberta), Stephen Harper (Prime Minister of Canada), Ezra Levant (activist and founder of the Western Standard), Tom Flanagan (former Harper advisor), Rainer Knopff (constitutional expert), and others. I attended the Harper-Levant Christmas/Chanukah parties and Ted Morton’s events at his house; I was at David Frum’s Unite the Right conference in 1995. I saw these people numerous other times, at the university or at parties. (As they say on the street, full disclosure: Morton and Knopff wrote two of my letters of recommendation when I was hired at UPEI. The hiring committee here obviously cared more about ability than political slant.)

During this period, I did research on the Reform Party, and published (apart from many newspaper articles) “Is the Past Prologue?: The Old-New Discourse of the Reform Party of Canada,” International Social Science Review 72, 1-2, 1997; “Quebec Separatism, the 1995 Referendum, and the Future of Confederation: The Alberta Right Responds,” Prairie Forum: Journal of the Canadian Plains Research Centre 21, 2, 1996; “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Ethnicity: Jews and the Charlottetown Accord,” in John H. Simpson and Howard Adelman, eds., Multiculturalism, Jews and Identities in Canada (Jerusalem: Magnes Press of the Hebrew University, 1996); and “The Reform Party: A Rising Tide in Canada?” Viewpoints: The Canadian Jewish Periodical 20, 4, 1992. (That last piece, published a year before the 1993 extinction of the unholy Mulroney coalition, would today no longer need a question mark!) I knew the Reform tidal wave was coming before many others, including even some Calgary political science professors, realized it.

Prince Edward Island is about as far removed from Alberta as possible, in terms of political culture, certainly within the Canadian framework. The federal Conservatives here are really “Red Tory” Progressive Conservatives. Alberta was politically exciting; PEI feels like a quiet, isolated place. And so my research interests, too, became somewhat more esoteric: the study of ethnicity and nationalism in small island states and de facto states; and the role of Jewish Communists in the politics of Britain, Canada, and the United States. In terms of research, it’s been a very enjoyable experience working here.

I don’t consider myself “right wing” (or any other “wing”); I’m skeptical of all rigid political creeds. Parties and politicians, in Canada and elsewhere, should be judged on their character, membership, and program, not on preconceived ideas about whether they are “good” or “bad.” I am a populist; excessive regard for those who have power and perks should always be avoided, and indeed, nomenklaturas should be mocked. Political idolatry – the worship of human “saviours” – invariably leads to disaster. “The emperor (most often) has no clothes” is the beginning of all wisdom.

Where is Canada heading? Two decades after the Meech Lake/Charlottetown Accord disasters, the country is slowly becoming another Belgium, a country on “paper” only. We have a constitution that we are unable, politically, to amend, so important matters – such as having no real head of state and being stuck with an unelected Senate which does not represent the constituent parts of the federation -- cannot be addressed. Quebec (except for non-francophone parts of Montreal) is under the ideological hegemony of the Bloc Québécois /Parti Québécois, and the parts of English Canada that really count increasingly will vote for the “Reform” Conservatives. The Liberal “glue” that held the two parts together is drying up. Canada is basically a nation on “life support.” If the country finally dissolves, it will have been done in so “slow motion” a form that many – especially in Quebec -- will hardly notice.