EDMONTON — What does the June 28 Canadian election mean for
Americans? I’ll give you one obvious answer: It’s the easiest
Canadian election for Americans to understand, from their vantage
point, in the last 20 years.
Writing about Canadian politics for an American audience is
often a near-impossible exercise. When you’re done enumerating the
various grievances, constitutional squabbles, parliamentary
niceties, and changing party identities, you’ve gone past your
word-count limit twice over. But this time out, things are a little
clearer, though maybe only a little.
The ruling Liberals, who held a majority in the House of Commons
at the dissolution of Parliament, are fighting for their lives and
losing. Shortly after shipping magnate Paul Martin Jr. succeeded
Jean Chretien as Liberal leader and prime minister late in 2003,
the party was smacked with a devastating scandal involving federal
advertising contracts given to Liberal-connected consultancies in
Quebec. The contracts were awarded in violation of civil-service
guidelines, no work seems to have been done for much of the cash,
and some of the money may have flowed back into Liberal Party
coffers.
In many regards this was a replay of other long-standing
“scandals” only too familiar to Canadian voters, but it was a
tipping point — the final horrible signal, for some, that the
Liberals had steered Canada into a banana-monarchy swamp of
amorality.
Martin, as is his privilege as Prime Minister, called a quick
election, hoping to renew his term before more damaging disclosures
could become public. But the door was left wide open to his
opponents. Canada’s conservatives, fractured into two parties by 15
years of regional quarreling, had just reunited. The new
Conservatives, under Albertan economist Stephen Harper, are leading
in most polls and will almost certainly end up with the most seats
— somewhere between 130 and 160 in the new 308-seat Commons.
Depending on whether the Conservatives reach 155 seats, and on
how many the other parties get, there are a half-dozen credible
constitutional possibilities for the aftermath of June 28. Many of
the paths, perhaps most, lead to Stephen Harper becoming prime
minister of Canada sooner or later, whether as a footnote to
history or the head of a strong Conservative government.
HARPER, 45, MOVED TO Canada’s conservative West as a young man and
received a master’s degree in economics at the University of
Calgary, home to many or most of Canada’s respected and “radical”
right wing scholars. He probably has a more thorough
grounding in Hayek, Friedman, and classical liberalism than any
comparably famous figure on the national scene down south.
Harper was present at the founding of the West’s schismatic
Reform Party — an authenticist alternative to the centralizing,
big-government, phony “conservatism” of the Progressive
Conservatives — and was first elected as an MP in 1993. He became
known as the brains of Reform, a low-profile but influential
generator of innovative proposals. He quit the Commons in 1998, but
when Reform’s successor (the Canadian Alliance) needed a new
chieftain in 2001, Harper was convinced to return to a party always
short on eloquent bilinguals.
No one expected too much, but in late 2003, Harper joined with
PC leader Peter MacKay to re-merge the two conservative parties by
force majeure. He won a crushing victory in the runoff for
mastery of the unified party. He renovated his style so
fundamentally that some people are now calling the simpering policy
wonk “Kennedyesque.” And he is, so far, beating the Liberals in an
election campaign that, in the U.S., would barely cover the time
between the New Hampshire primaries and Super Tuesday.
In essence, the Liberals are liberals, and the Conservatives are
Conservatives — which is not to say that Harper hasn’t been
“triangulating” madly, Clinton-fashion. Just as Democratic
politicians always have an uphill battle in proving their patriotic
credentials, Conservative ones here have to work twice as hard to
convince Eastern voters of their “Canadian” orientation. Harper has
thus been obliged, or has found it convenient, to promise that the
Cuban-style healthcare system will be protected and given lavish
new infusions of cash; he has incessantly disavowed the intention
of acting on Canada’s absence of any law regulating abortion; he
has stuffed Canada’s immigration issues into the back corner of the
closet; and he has speculated openly about extending universal
healthcare to cover drugs.
Harper will, when pressed, defend heterosexual exceptionalism in
matrimonial law. But mostly he prefers to fight on the ground of
Liberal scandals, and to argue the big point on which libertarians
and social conservatives can agree — namely, that the mad
expansion of the Canadian federal state at twice the rate of the
economy must be checked.
A HARPER VICTORY WOULD MEAN a return in foreign policy to a
pro-American stance and an end to the vaguely Gallic, religiously
pro-UN tendencies exhibited over the past ten years. This is one of
the big wedge issues in the campaign, and it overlaps onto both
defense policy and “border issues”; in a sense it’s a replay of
Aznar vs. the Spanish socialists, or Tony Blair vs. his own party.
To put things in a way that summarizes the dialectic neatly,
Michael Moore has stopped by to urge Canadians
not to vote Conservative.
The Liberals under Jean Chretien specialized in sly insults against the U.S., handling the
relationship so awkwardly that the Canadian embassy in Washington
has had to create its own promotional website to
counteract American opprobrium. The Bush administration, for its
part, has done little to promote cross-border amity. The President
has gone rhetorically wobbly on free trade at times; the border has
remained closed to Canadian beef exports, on account of a
single mad cow; and a tariff war over British
Columbia’s softwood lumber has stumbled along in NAFTA tribunals at
a snail’s pace.
Stephen Harper argues that acknowledging the United States’
overwhelming importance to Canada, and accepting its basic decency,
will enable him to rebuild something like the influence
Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney had during the Reagan
years. But the overselling of the war in Iraq has created an
embarrassment for Harper, who felt that Canada ought to have
participated more actively.
The Canadian Forces provided logistical support in Iraq, and
allowed troops previously seconded to American units to fight
there, but the Canadian government had too many other international
commitments to designate new troops for the conflict, and formally
opposed American “unilateralism.” One of those other commitments,
it should be noted, is the war in Afghanistan, where Canadians have distinguished themselves in combat.
Even some right-wing Canadians may be uncomfortable electing a
government that would have plunged more eagerly into Iraq. But they
are also frustrated with a regime that has balanced the budget on
the back of the Canadian Forces while protecting dirigiste
economic-development programs, generous pork for culture and
multiculture, and expensive regulation of all sorts. The basic
foreign-policy question in the election is whether our “Kyoto
commitments” are more important than our NATO commitments.
The active complement of the Canadian Forces is hovering near
50,000, Canadian sovereignty over its northern borders is violated
with impunity, and the soldiers we do have are fighting with
embarrassingly outdated equipment. For his part, Mr. Martin
pledges to reinvest in “peacekeeping,” which is to say he intends
to keep letting the Canadian military degrade into a lightly armed
mobile police department in the employ of the UN.
PRIME MINISTER STEPHEN HARPER wouldn’t be able to reverse this
trend right away. Nor would there be too many other radical
changes, from a southern perspective. American military planners
would find that they had gained a continental partner comfortable
with the concept of joint missile defense. America’s flak-vested
drug warriors would be pleased at Harper’s dislike for Canada’s
immense marijuana industry, and his willingness to keep it illegal
under federal law, for all the effect it would have. Canada’s cruel
federal monopoly on the export of Western wheat, which jails
farmers for “smuggling” their own grain across the 49th parallel,
might be abandoned or relaxed, as American wheat growers have long
desired.
Mostly, what you’ll notice — if things go Harper’s way in the
end — is that Canada will have gained a leader who talks the
shared Anglo-Saxon language of trade, individual liberty, and
military might. You will, I think, find him to be someone who “gets
it.” His election would bring Canada back from the fringes of the
“Anglosphere” to somewhere near its heart.
