Where have all the parties gone?

OTTAWA — Obscured in the fog and tin-can thunder surrounding Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird’s “controversial” championing of gay rights abroad, was this increasingly obvious fact: Canada no longer has three major political parties. It has one, comprised of several feuding clans, each flying its own variant of the same essential flag. There is no left or right or even a middle, per se, any longer: What remains is tone — or, at the end of the exercise, personality. Extreme polarization? Um, no.

Let’s set aside, first, the notion that the government of Canada’s criticisms of government-sponsored anti-gay bigotry — whether in Russia, Uganda or elsewhere — constitute any kind of unity threat to the Conservative party, which might eventually cause it to fracture into socialconservative and libertarian wings. If that were the case it would have occurred already, over the far more contentious issue of sex-selective abortion. It hasn’t. It won’t.

Abortion remains a question of complexity and difficulty for millions of Canadians. Yet members of the Conservative evangelical base understand that whatever compromises the Harper Tories have made to a secular humanist social ethic are nothing next to what the Liberals or NDP would do, given their druthers.

Conservatives who are not REAL Women, tottering about in Victorian hoops and gasping about that terrible man Mr. Oscar Wilde, understand that Canada is a pluralistic society in which bigotry is punished at the polls by all voting blocks. In the most recent Ontario and Alberta provincial general elections, the small-c-conservative standard-bearers in each case suffered because of perceived bigotry in their campaigns — in Ontario anti-immigrant, in Alberta anti-gay. Candidates who muse about eternal damnation and hellfire are written off, as they should be, as loons. More importantly, they take their parties down with them.

Beyond that, there’s a long tradition within the Canadian Conservative movement of foreign policy serving as the conscience of the government. Brian Mulroney’s better angel was articulated internationally in his opposition to South African apartheid. For Harper and Baird, it’s the fight for human rights in Iran and gay rights overseas. Such postures put a compassionate face on a government overweight in cynicism and chronically underweight in idealism.

As such, the so-con “attack” on Baird may as well have been scripted by Conservative HQ. It can only help the party electorally, for the obvious reason that elections are exercises in mass opinion. Strident anti-gay views, of the kind expressed last week by REAL Women’s Gwendolyn Landolt, are so far outside the mainstream as to make the Tories look heroic by comparison.

Which leads us back to this: Be it resolved, there is now a single homogeneous Canadian political culture, expressed via the three main party shadings. How long until platforms themselves become irrelevant? Partisans will argue their own beloved expression of Canadian liberal democracy is not only best, but distinct — as the Tories, Grits and NDP were a generation or two ago, when they disagreed about country-changing issues such as North American free trade, in 1988, or membership in NATO, in 1968.

But tick through the list of assumptions at the heart of the state today — from socialized health care to capital punishment, abortion or free trade, deficits or tax rates — and you find unanimity. The Conservatives must be for gay rights, or be written off as reactionary by the majority. The New Democrats must be for industry and thrift, or be written off as loopy dreamers by that same majority.

This convergence can create a mash-up, as political parties struggle to create differentiation amid their essential drab sameness. Thus, John Baird’s defence of gay rights in Russia doesn’t go far enough, the NDP’s Paul Dewar says.

The Liberals, meantime, are beginning a two-year effort to implant the idea, by every means other than saying it, that they can be more conservative than the Conservatives when it comes to economics, and more new and democratic than the New Democrats. “Tough on crime” is still exclusive Conservative territory — but only because it’s one of the few old planks they haven’t ditched in the hunt for centrist votes. And, to be frank, it’s not popular enough for the other parties to bother to steal.

Taken together, this stillunfolding spectrum collapse sets up a contest of almost pure personality in 2015. Harper will seek to recast himself as more constructive; Mulcair, happier; and Trudeau, more solid. The ad war will be personal as never before, culminating in televised debates understood by all to be winner-take-all. And the pollsters, perhaps as never before, will be flying blind. Interesting times.