Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Election 2006: A Tragedy in Two Parts and 1300 Words
There are two tragedies surrounding the results of Monday’s election, and, contrary to the beliefs of thousands of New Democratic supporters who voted Liberal, Stephen Harper’s ascendancy to the Prime Ministry isn’t either one of them.
The first tragedy is in the corruption of the Conservative Party, which as recently as the 2004 election stood for something more than electoral success. Now, I’m no fan of the Conservative Party, which I continue to believe was born of deception and opportunism, but it had some things going for it. The Progressive Conservative Party, when it achieved electoral success, had what was commonly called a “big tent” strategy, but could be more accurately likened to a series of little tents encompassing anybody unhappy with the Liberal establishment. Québec nationalist? Park yourself with the P.C.s. Think taxes and social spending are stifling economic growth? The P.C.s’ll show those big government Liberal bastards. Think Ottawa ignores the Alberta? With the P.C.s, the West already is in.
Brian Mulroney was the best the old Tories ever had at this. He solidified Progressive Conservative support among all of the above-mentioned groups and more, which led him to win the largest majority in Canadian history in 1984. Unfortunately for him, it didn’t last: Québec nationalists found that Mulroney failed to lead his fellow English Canadians to accept their aspirations, and many of them went on to found the Bloc Québecois. But another, very different, group had a different set of objections entirely.
Members of this group saw a lot of the things that they hated about Liberal governments embodied in Mulroney’s nominally conservative government. They didn’t like the way that such attempts as it made to control the deficit involved raising taxes instead of just cutting excess spending. They didn’t like the way that it was unwilling to take serious action on crime by stiffening sentences and possibly re-introducing the death penalty. They didn’t like the way that it was abandoning the Judeo-Christian principles on which Canada had been founded and with which it had existed for more than a century. And, most of all, they didn’t like how the Mulroney government did politics: favouring one region over another for political purposes, engaging in rampant patronage, and continuing to see to it that politicians lived, in general, better than the people they represented. This group became the Reform Party.
The Reform Party took clear, unambiguous positions on bringing in substantial change. It made no attempt to moderate its policies to make them more palatable to the electorate. And it tapped into a sentiment, especially in Alberta, that, to the extent that it was represented in Parliament, was relegated to Mulroney’s backbenches. The Reform Party achieved electoral success unparalleled among any non-brokerage party in Canadian history. And, once in Parliament, it raised hell – or as much hell as could be raised by the third party in a majority Parliament.
Over the course of the Reform Party’s time in Parliament, its MPs began slowly to sell out: Preston Manning moved in to Stornoway, and most of them decided to accept the MP pension. The policies that distinguished it – the so-called “socially conservative” policies – began to occupy less and less prominence, as its questions in question period began to be focused almost exclusively on government waste and corruption. But even at the time that it became, for no apparent reason, the Canadian Alliance, it distinguished itself by its positions on issues more than did any other federalist party.
Stockwell Day began to undo this. His beliefs were perceived to be so much of a liability, that he had to suppress many of them. From suppressing beliefs, it’s a short step to substituting non-beliefs for them. Additionally, he had won the leadership largely on the strength of being more charismatic than Manning, and he felt he had to deliver. Instead of Preston Manning’s complex, if nasally-expressed, positions, Day acquiesced with publicity stunts combined with sound bytes. Canadians, on the whole, were unimpressed, and a partial caucus mutiny eventually led to the Harper years.
It bears repeating at this point that the Reform Party/Canadian Alliance was founded out of disgust with the failure of the Progressive Conservative Party to fulfill the aspirations of people holding certain sets of beliefs and, more generally, of Westerners. As such, what could be more logical than to merge the Canadian Alliance with the Progressive Conservative Party? This is exactly what Stephen Harper proceeded to do (in fairness, Preston Manning and Stockwell Day had long advocated exactly the same thing, but were stymied by a succession of P.C. leaders who had never sexually contracted Belinda Stronach’s adherence to principle). Stephen Harper then spent most of the 2004 election campaign adamantly denying that he held many of the beliefs on which the Reform Party had been founded – he assured Canadians that he had no intention of bringing in the death penalty or abolishing parole, of recriminalizing abortion, or of scaling back gay rights. But, at least on questions of federal structure, of public finances, and of honesty in government, he remained true to his, and the party’s roots.
In 2005-2006, most of this went out the window. Instead of the income tax cut favoured most of the economists on whose writings the party’s earlier positions were based, Harper promised a gimmicky 2% cut in the GST. Decentralization was heavily de-emphasized. He publicly mused about a Meech-esque constitutional arrangement which, the last time it was attempted, let to the creation of the Reform Party in the first place. As if to drive the point home, he recently named Mulroney’s former chief of staff as his transition manager. It is now scarcely an exaggeration to say that the difference between the Harper Conservatives and the Martin Liberals is thirteen years in power.
(The semi-irony is that it was precisely the abandonment of its earlier beliefs, most of which I found repugnant, that led me to prefer a Conservative government to a Liberal one. It’s still sad.)
It’s a truism that power corrupts, but the adage is often misunderstood: it’s not merely having too much power that has the effect, but wanting it too much when you lack it. Stephen Harper has become as much a personification of the slogan as Paul Martin.
Which leads us to the second tragedy of the 2006 election. Paul Martin’s political career is over, No, I haven’t taken leave of my senses and decided that that’s a tragedy; what is a tragedy is that he is going to go to his death believing that this was the result of a sponsorship scandal that was not of his own making. He might even buy into the opinion of some scribes (Hello, Warren Kinsella) that his real mistake was ordering the commission in the first place, and that if he’d buried it his remaining time as Prime Minister would number in the years rather than the days. In fact, he was defeated because he was corrupted, in the same way that Harper was corrupted. Canadians sensed (it wasn’t hard) that he adhered to the principle that he should be Prime Minister more than he adhered to any other, and they opted for the devil they didn’t know. If Paul Martin had been able to come into office with a clear agenda, and if he had managed to make progress on that agenda when he had a majority (or even when he had a minority – that Parliament was not nearly as unworkable as Martin made it look), I am confident that he would still by Prime Minister today.
It wasn’t the financial corruption of the Jean Chrétien Liberal Party that did Paul Martin in, it was the intellectual corruption of Paul Martin.
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There are two tragedies surrounding the results of Monday’s election, and, contrary to the beliefs of thousands of New Democratic supporters who voted Liberal, Stephen Harper’s ascendancy to the Prime Ministry isn’t either one of them.
The first tragedy is in the corruption of the Conservative Party, which as recently as the 2004 election stood for something more than electoral success. Now, I’m no fan of the Conservative Party, which I continue to believe was born of deception and opportunism, but it had some things going for it. The Progressive Conservative Party, when it achieved electoral success, had what was commonly called a “big tent” strategy, but could be more accurately likened to a series of little tents encompassing anybody unhappy with the Liberal establishment. Québec nationalist? Park yourself with the P.C.s. Think taxes and social spending are stifling economic growth? The P.C.s’ll show those big government Liberal bastards. Think Ottawa ignores the Alberta? With the P.C.s, the West already is in.
Brian Mulroney was the best the old Tories ever had at this. He solidified Progressive Conservative support among all of the above-mentioned groups and more, which led him to win the largest majority in Canadian history in 1984. Unfortunately for him, it didn’t last: Québec nationalists found that Mulroney failed to lead his fellow English Canadians to accept their aspirations, and many of them went on to found the Bloc Québecois. But another, very different, group had a different set of objections entirely.
Members of this group saw a lot of the things that they hated about Liberal governments embodied in Mulroney’s nominally conservative government. They didn’t like the way that such attempts as it made to control the deficit involved raising taxes instead of just cutting excess spending. They didn’t like the way that it was unwilling to take serious action on crime by stiffening sentences and possibly re-introducing the death penalty. They didn’t like the way that it was abandoning the Judeo-Christian principles on which Canada had been founded and with which it had existed for more than a century. And, most of all, they didn’t like how the Mulroney government did politics: favouring one region over another for political purposes, engaging in rampant patronage, and continuing to see to it that politicians lived, in general, better than the people they represented. This group became the Reform Party.
The Reform Party took clear, unambiguous positions on bringing in substantial change. It made no attempt to moderate its policies to make them more palatable to the electorate. And it tapped into a sentiment, especially in Alberta, that, to the extent that it was represented in Parliament, was relegated to Mulroney’s backbenches. The Reform Party achieved electoral success unparalleled among any non-brokerage party in Canadian history. And, once in Parliament, it raised hell – or as much hell as could be raised by the third party in a majority Parliament.
Over the course of the Reform Party’s time in Parliament, its MPs began slowly to sell out: Preston Manning moved in to Stornoway, and most of them decided to accept the MP pension. The policies that distinguished it – the so-called “socially conservative” policies – began to occupy less and less prominence, as its questions in question period began to be focused almost exclusively on government waste and corruption. But even at the time that it became, for no apparent reason, the Canadian Alliance, it distinguished itself by its positions on issues more than did any other federalist party.
Stockwell Day began to undo this. His beliefs were perceived to be so much of a liability, that he had to suppress many of them. From suppressing beliefs, it’s a short step to substituting non-beliefs for them. Additionally, he had won the leadership largely on the strength of being more charismatic than Manning, and he felt he had to deliver. Instead of Preston Manning’s complex, if nasally-expressed, positions, Day acquiesced with publicity stunts combined with sound bytes. Canadians, on the whole, were unimpressed, and a partial caucus mutiny eventually led to the Harper years.
It bears repeating at this point that the Reform Party/Canadian Alliance was founded out of disgust with the failure of the Progressive Conservative Party to fulfill the aspirations of people holding certain sets of beliefs and, more generally, of Westerners. As such, what could be more logical than to merge the Canadian Alliance with the Progressive Conservative Party? This is exactly what Stephen Harper proceeded to do (in fairness, Preston Manning and Stockwell Day had long advocated exactly the same thing, but were stymied by a succession of P.C. leaders who had never sexually contracted Belinda Stronach’s adherence to principle). Stephen Harper then spent most of the 2004 election campaign adamantly denying that he held many of the beliefs on which the Reform Party had been founded – he assured Canadians that he had no intention of bringing in the death penalty or abolishing parole, of recriminalizing abortion, or of scaling back gay rights. But, at least on questions of federal structure, of public finances, and of honesty in government, he remained true to his, and the party’s roots.
In 2005-2006, most of this went out the window. Instead of the income tax cut favoured most of the economists on whose writings the party’s earlier positions were based, Harper promised a gimmicky 2% cut in the GST. Decentralization was heavily de-emphasized. He publicly mused about a Meech-esque constitutional arrangement which, the last time it was attempted, let to the creation of the Reform Party in the first place. As if to drive the point home, he recently named Mulroney’s former chief of staff as his transition manager. It is now scarcely an exaggeration to say that the difference between the Harper Conservatives and the Martin Liberals is thirteen years in power.
(The semi-irony is that it was precisely the abandonment of its earlier beliefs, most of which I found repugnant, that led me to prefer a Conservative government to a Liberal one. It’s still sad.)
It’s a truism that power corrupts, but the adage is often misunderstood: it’s not merely having too much power that has the effect, but wanting it too much when you lack it. Stephen Harper has become as much a personification of the slogan as Paul Martin.
Which leads us to the second tragedy of the 2006 election. Paul Martin’s political career is over, No, I haven’t taken leave of my senses and decided that that’s a tragedy; what is a tragedy is that he is going to go to his death believing that this was the result of a sponsorship scandal that was not of his own making. He might even buy into the opinion of some scribes (Hello, Warren Kinsella) that his real mistake was ordering the commission in the first place, and that if he’d buried it his remaining time as Prime Minister would number in the years rather than the days. In fact, he was defeated because he was corrupted, in the same way that Harper was corrupted. Canadians sensed (it wasn’t hard) that he adhered to the principle that he should be Prime Minister more than he adhered to any other, and they opted for the devil they didn’t know. If Paul Martin had been able to come into office with a clear agenda, and if he had managed to make progress on that agenda when he had a majority (or even when he had a minority – that Parliament was not nearly as unworkable as Martin made it look), I am confident that he would still by Prime Minister today.
It wasn’t the financial corruption of the Jean Chrétien Liberal Party that did Paul Martin in, it was the intellectual corruption of Paul Martin.
