CAMPAIGN 2004
Worthwhile Canadian Election
Conservatives just might win.
Canada will vote tomorrow, and for the first time since the Free Trade election of 1988 there is a possibility of a party other than the Liberals winning the election. Polls indicate Prime Minister Paul Martin's Liberals and his Conservative opponents running closely, with neither likely to have a majority in Parliament. In the 20th century, the Canadian Liberal Party was the most successful of any party in any important democratic country with continuous parties. It governed for 70 years in that century (against 57 years for the British Conservatives and 53 for the U.S. Republicans).
Ever since the Conservatives imposed conscription on a reluctant Quebec in World War I, the Liberal formula has been to be the major party more favorable to Quebec and more heavily influenced by Quebec leaders, earning comparative popularity in that province and convincing moderate English-speaking Canadians that it was better equipped to prevent the disaffection of Quebec with Canada. The Liberals have generally placed themselves in economic and social policy between the Conservatives and the socialist party, called the New Democrats for the last 43 years (though their novelty has long since worn off).
For most of their history, the Canadian Conservatives have been an uneasy coalition of prairie populists and Toronto Tories, and generally an aggregation of people united by the fact that, for differing reasons, they weren't Liberals. Brian Mulroney, the prime minister from 1984 through 1993, managed briefly to broaden the party to include Quebec autonomists. When this came unstuck, the Conservatives splintered into three parties, one for western Canadian radicals, one for French Quebec nationalists (the Bloc Quebecois) and one for continuing, as they used to be called, Progressive Conservatives.
The present election is interesting because two of those fragments have reunited in the reorganized Conservative Party. And in a piquant irony, the balance of power in the next parliament will likely be held by the third, the Bloc Quebecois. Separatism has been decisively rejected by the voters of Quebec, and this party exists at the federal level at all only because the former separatist leader happened to be a federal member of Parliament when he defected from the Mulroney government to set up his party.
The federalists narrowly won the 1995 referendum on Quebec independence. After their victory, the federal government then spent scores of millions of dollars promoting the Canadian flag and other evidences of the federal system in Quebec, to the great benefit of the vacuum cleaners of Liberal Party patronage in that province.
For this reason the members of Bloc Quebecois, who champion the discredited separatist option in the federal Parliament where they have no logical place, are now reaping the benefit of public outrage at Liberal corruption. They appear likely to have three times as many MPs as the New Democrats.
Under the previous Liberal prime minister, Jean Chrétien (1993-2003), the opposition was divided between the three former components of the Conservative Party and the New Democrats. With the opposition so fragmented, Liberal victory was inevitable. Politics became an internecine Liberal matter, and Mr. Chrétien is the only Canadian prime minister ever to have been elected to the office and ejected from it in midterm by his own party, as his talented finance minister, Paul Martin, relentlessly undermined his position. In a masterpiece of Machiavellian vengeance, Mr. Chrétien adjourned Parliament two days before the auditor-general was to report on the extravagance and skullduggery of the postreferendum Liberal orgy in Quebec, and retired three weeks later. Mr. Martin reconvened Parliament, accepted the poisoned chalice, and has borne the onslaught unleashed by the auditor-general's subsequent exposé of the scandalous excess of the former regime.
In the 2000 federal election, none of the party leaders were very prepossessing: Mr. Chrétien (who is barely comprehensible in either official language), the leftish Conservative journeyman Joe Clark, and a couple of even more forgettable people. The party leaders this year are much more substantial. Paul Martin is a serious leader who deserves much credit for Canada's strong economic performance over the past decade. The Conservatives' Stephen Harper is a well-spoken and moderate, but not malleable, contemporary conservative. The NDP and Bloc leaders (the latter was previously best known for being photographed in a woman's bathing cap while visiting a cheese factory, like Michael Dukakis snapped in a tank), are at least rather pleasant and articulate, whatever their policy limitations.
Canada remains, as it has been for nearly 40 years, well to the left of the United States. By American standards, the Liberals are center-left Democrats, and the New Democrats and Bloc Quebecois are Ralph Nader socialists. The New Democrats receive a little less than 20% of the vote, scattered ineffectually across the country, with fewer than 20 members of a 308-seat parliament. The Bloc receives about 10% of the total, all in Quebec, where it will elect about 50 MPs, as Quebec voters punish the scandal-ridden Liberals. The New Democrats are the standard soak-the-rich, antagonize-America, union-dominated socialist party, and their official platform is replete with such gripping tocsins as "Building Respect for Canada's Biodiversity" and "Respecting What Makes Us Canadian."
What makes them Canadian are their generous social programs, relatively (to the U.S.) high taxes to pay for them, and the endless repetition of the mantra that Canadians are not Americans, despite being practically indistinguishable from Americans from Northern states. Canada is inundated with American popular culture, large numbers of talented Canadians steadily emigrate to larger opportunities and lower taxes in the U.S., and more than 85% of Canada's foreign trade, about 43% of gross domestic product, is trade with the U.S.
Canada is probably more closely integrated with the American economy than is the state of California. None of this inhibits the independent fantasies of most Canadians, but they distinguish themselves from the U.S. in relatively gentle terms compared to what Americans are used to hearing from most other countries.
The Bloc Quebecois platform, struggling unsuccessfully with the conundrum of being a Canadian federal party that wishes to dissolve the federal state, is a robust version of the usual Quebec shopping list of even greater deluges of money in transfer payments from the rest of Canada than the Danegeld that the country has been pouring into Quebec for decades. The threat of Quebec's separation was so serious for the last third of the 20th century that English-speaking Canada turned its pockets inside out for Quebec and Canada has had a prime minister from Quebec for all but a few months since 1968. But now there is no plausible threat of secession if Quebec's demands are not met.
The Liberals are a center-left party that straddles the socialist parties and the Conservatives. The Conservatives are a moderate right-center party, advocating tax reductions, increased defense spending, scaling back of the country's draconian gun-control measures--which even ensnare farmers protecting their animals and authentic antique-gun collectors--and consecrating the savings to anticrime measures.
There is a real possibility of a Conservative government, despite even though the Conservatives are unlikely to gain much more than about 35% of the total vote and are outnumbered ideologically by the parties of the left and the center-left by almost 2 to 1. The Liberals have tried to rebut the electorate's natural temptation for change by portraying the Conservatives as primitive, antiabortionist, antigay and anti-gun-control. They have also attacked the Conservatives as Americophiles who favored participating in the Iraq war and would damage the universal medical-care system Canadians consider one of the main distinctions between Canada and the U.S.
The Bloc is unlikely to cooperate with the Liberals after the election because the Liberals led the rout of the separatists and Liberal scandals are the source of most of the Bloc's current support. This means that the Liberals may need 20 or 30 more MPs than the Conservatives to remain the government with the help of the New Democrats, unless they can placate or suborn the Bloc. A Liberal-New Democratic arrangement would be the most left-wing government Canada has ever had. The Conservatives, even sustained by the Bloc, would be the furthest to the right of any Canadian government in more than 40 years.
After 11 aberrant years, either major party could win. And whichever does win, Canada will have a prime minister of appropriate stature for such a distinct policy choice.
Lord Black is the author of "Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Champion of Freedom" (PublicAffairs, 2003).
