[Cross-posted at the Leiter Reports]
... I just can't seem to shake these damn tories!
As you may have heard by now, the Conservative Party just "won" the national election in Canada. In more concrete terms, the CP now holds 124 of the seats in Canada's 308-seat House of Commons, up from 99. The old plurality party, the Liberals, dropped from 135 to 103. The balance of the seats are held by the Bloc Quebecois (51, down from 54), and the New Democratic Party (up from 19 to 29).
Conrad Black's soft right-wing national newspaper National Post -- which published on the op-ed page a few months back (sorry, no link) a big excerpt from a book arguing that Canada is well-behind the US in its spawning of a vast right-wing noise machine, and needs to get on the stick in following Lewis Powell's sage advice (yeah great idea guys) -- is gloating that the victory is "historic", and results from Conservative leader Stephen Harper's "coherent vision for the country" (so far as I can tell, this coherent vision consists of a very large number of policies, some less nannyish, others more nannyish than those favored by the Libs -- track road congestion anyone? how about a 16% tax credit for using transit, or investigate the decline in sockeye salmon, or preserve the National Film Board, or donate $140M to amateur sport? The picture is rapidly coming into focus, and the Post is right, it has the coherence of a photograph of the Parthenon). They also threaten us with the following: "Under the Liberals, it seemed the dream of smaller government grew more distant with every passing year. Thanks to Mr. Harper, it has returned."
Even more terrifying is this:
It's possible, though not likely, that the Conservatives will win an outright majority in Parliament. But even if they don't, and need to form a coalition government, they will have more of a chance to move an agenda than one would expect. As a political consultant explained to me in Washington a few months ago before heading north to work for the Conservatives, the leaders of the Tories' prospective coalition partner, the separatist Bloc Quebecois, are willing to give Harper several years of rule (but expect lots of Tory reforms to exempt Quebec). The Conservative victory will be a real one, and not just for Harper and his party but for Canada, for North America, and for the world.
Stephen Harper has American political consultants working for him? Eeek! Is Canada becoming "America junior", as warned of by a Liberal canvasser trolling for votes in my building's cafeteria, and darkly predicted by Leiter?
There is reason for concern. The Conservatives seem tax-revoltish, and seem to be interested in weakening the national health system by increasing the role of the private sector, and Harper has been exploitatively support-our-troopish about the 650 Canadians "keeping us safe" in Afghanistan.
Still, I'm not ready to freak out yet, for several reasons.
1. Canada has great election laws: TV stations are compelled to give out a designated number of minutes to political parties large and small (including the Marijuana Party, the Christian Heritage Party, the Marxist Leninist Party, the Absolutely Absurd Party, and the Ontario Party of Canada); campaign cash is limited by how much candidates and arties can spend in an election cycle, the number once again designated by a board of impartial wise old sages; a similar board draws electoral boundaries; paper ballots are individually hand-counted in a single, uniform fashion in every precinct of every election (sigh); and big decisions are made by a just machine programmed by fellas with compassion and vision.
2. As the National Post ruefully acknowledges, Harper's is "not a majority mandate, and Mr. Harper will consequently not be entirely his own master. He will need to build a rolling coalition, finding support from different opposition parties for different pieces of legislation." 135 seats is evidently far short of the 154 needed to pass any laws. The Xinhua Daily points out the ramifications of this in stark terms: "Unlike the Liberals, the Conservatives have no traditional allies in the parliament and will have to seek support from political rivals on an issue-by-issue basis". The NDP is a heavily social-democratic party (run by Jack Layton, the member from our "riding" or district -- yay Jack!), so no way will they participate in the dismantling of the social welfare state, and the Libs are furious at the Conservatives for allying with the NDP to undermine their government after a bare two years. So the only hope for the Conservatives is to ally with the Bloc Quebecois. How much can they get away with there? As I understand it, Quebec's strategy, put bluntly, is to threaten to secede unless the federal govt pays them off. So Quebec gets lots of federal money. This comes from oil-rich Alberta, the Conservative Party's stronghold. Albertans want to hold on to "their" money, and want a weaker federal government. Clearly a delicate balancing act will be required. This might be impossible, confirming Steve Gilliard's prediction:
Brian Mulroney served two terms, but other recent Tory PM's have served months. To wit, Joe Clark served nine months and Kim Campbell six months. When she was turned out, she even lost her riding.
If Harper is interested in pushing a conservative agenda and growing closer to the deeply unpopular Bush, with a minority government, he could count the months as well.
3. There may be a good case to be made that the NDP were the real winners of this election. The Conservatives got a mere 36% of the vote, for a mere 40% of the seats (the House of Commons is elected like the US House of Reps rather than proportionally). Leftish parties by contrast got 51% of the vote and hold 42% of the parliament (the BQ making up the remaining seats). The NDP helped to bring down the Libs by allying with the Conservatives over a no-confidence vote -- my sense is that the NDP are a genuine social democratic party, and were successful in moving the Libs to the left over the last two years of Lib minority government; they've had it with a governing party that's a bit too centrist and pro-business for most Canadians, and are eager to take the reins and fight it out with the Libs for control as soon as the Conservatives collapse (for more detail, read this).The NDP picked up 10 seats this election, taking all their additional five seats in BC from the Conservatives, and their additional five seats in Ontario from the Libs (the free weekly I read indicated a big priority was to force the feds to stop ignoring Toronto; my guess is this made the difference here, though I haven't seen detailed results.
4. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Canada does not seem (impressionistically, anyway) to be succumbing to the same sick cultural pathology as the US, as discovered here, analyzed here, and manifested here. So any attempt to engage in the sort of caudillo-style, elites-my-base politics familiar in the US is liable to be met with a powerful shockwave of revulsion.
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