PARTIES LEAVE VOTERS WITH LITTLE CHOICE
Our leaders taunt each other, but there are few big issues and less real debate
The Conservative Party of Canada isn’t in the business of selling ideology, or of leading the country in a particular direction. Like the Liberal party of yesteryear, it’s a vehicle created entirely for the purpose of winning elections, with blue paint on the hood rather than red. It offers Canadians, not what we should want, nor what we tell ourselves we want, but what a plurality of us actually do want, and it does so scientifically.
That, in a nutshell, is why the party of Prime Minister Stephen J. Harper is entering the tail end of 2014 with the wind at its back, and continues to poll competitively, even after a decade in power, with a less than warmand-fuzzy leader at the helm, and a reputation marred by bun fights, mudslinging and a series of colossal screw-ups — Senate appointments and the procurement and veterans’ files come to mind — that would have put a less methodically framed party into single digits.
This is arguably Harper’s most important legacy, though he merely inherited the approach from Jean Chretien (19932003) and refined it: Cautious, incremental, pragmatic policy generation from the rear, sold with populist slogans and always driven by the economic interests of the broadest measure of the middle class, or, as they were described in the past, “people who work hard and play by the rules.”
Harper’s policies and techniques of governing will certainly outlast him: They are not materially different from Chretien’s policies and techniques, which outlasted him. The demarcation point, the shift from the older mode of leadership to the new, was the end of the Brian Mulroney era (1984-93). Though leaders such as Mulroney and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, John Turner, Joe Clark and Ed Broadbent were quite different, one from the other, they were alike in that they had sharp philosophical differences, even within the same party in a couple of cases, and fought over them fiercely, because that’s what our politics was, back then. No longer.
The evidence is in the degree to which the Conservative, Liberal and New Democratic parties have converged in this pre-election period, more than ever before, into a policy monoculture. Setting aside the battling mythologies of leadership personas, and looking past trumped-up contrasts between left and right, there is nothing of any consequence up for debate between Canada’s major political parties now, beyond what to do with the federal budget surplus. In the past that would have been the subject of a long debate in the House of Commons, not an election campaign.
Even within the narrow rubric of the surplus, the discussion is contained to the minutiae of giving money back to taxpayers, or consumers, or the middle class, with each party vying to find a formula that yields it maximum bang for the buck. Will there be a tax credit for families, or a benefit? Should subsidized daycare be private and decentralized, as Conservatives prefer, or centrally planned, as New Democrats would like, or something in between, as Liberals are wont to suggest?
The big questions that used to perplex us have been settled, as far as federal politics goes; abortion, capital punishment, public health care, bilingualism, free trade, the fate of Quebec within Confederation, the Senate, take your pick — leaving the leaders counting beans and taunting one another. What’s curious is that, while new important quandaries continue to emerge, they haven’t found expression in the Commons. Why, if not because the system no longer lends itself to that?
The Indian Act, for example, remains the most insidious moral blight on this country. The Paul Martin government (2003-06) made its attempt at reform, with the Kelowna Accord; the Harper government made its attempts with the apology for residential schools, and the failed First Nations Education Act. But don’t expect this subject to consume any oxygen come the campaign. There are just one million aboriginal Canadians. Therefore, the political capital that can be applied is limited. The data doesn’t square.
The same goes for debates over assisted suicide and sex-selective abortion. The mono-party, which is guided by majoritarian sentiment that’s known through polling, not guessed at or intuited, has deemed these subjects too fraught to be broached. Likewise military spending and climate change. No political party will advocate for Canada to spend anything close to the NATO goal, two per cent of GDP, on its military, or impose a greenhouse gas surcharge on sport utility vehicles, because the majority would object to paying the resulting cost. There is no need for a referendum. The parties know.
The implications for the 2015 election, if the pattern holds, are profound. Partisanship, the tropical plumage of politics, is bound to grow more colourful, as the parties grow closer in their essentials. And Liberal and NDP supporters should rethink any hopes for big policy changes, even should their side win. Imagine a classical democracy ruled via a series of referendums, taken instantaneously, and in which nothing is ventured until at least 35 per cent agree. That’s what we have, now.