Why Harper can’t build a ‘natural governing party’
Canadian Liberals used to be the experts at building and maintaining a national electoral coalition. In George Brown’s days, that meant regional partners and deals. To Laurier it was about language and religion and trade. Their transcendent Trudeau years saw the triumph of clientalist politics focusing on new immigrants, hungry local political clans and slices of activist women, youth and professional groups. Often it worked very well, reassembling a vigorously renewed electoral coalition that did not slide into mere vote buying. Sometimes — lest we forget the sponsorship scandal of sainted memory — it did not.
The new Conservative party, rejecting the Macdonald and Mulroney template, has developed a different business model: seduce a political base whose core is the angry, the scared and the threatened traditionalist — more likely to be older, rural, more affluent and less educated. In other words, voters more likely to give money and to vote, if pumped with enough antiestablishment, anti-government and anti-modernity rhetoric regularly. It has worked so well for a decade for one reason only: weak and/or incompetent competitors. The NDP were weak and the Liberal party has not had a competent leader or national campaign for the longest period in Canadian history.
The Tory approach has two fundamental strategic flaws: the elderly die and not many of us are angry for life. To succeed in the face of serious political competition therefore they need to add to their almost static base — Harper has grown his base by just 3 per cent over his career, to one of the lowest numbers for a majority government ever: 39.6 per cent.
Yes, they have employed the usual anti-democratic games, new and old, of many parties in government: tidal waves of public money on partisan events and advertising, public agencies stuffed with pals, votebuying cheques weeks before election day, and spending nearly 50 per cent more infrastructure money in their own ridings over several years. They’ve added new wrinkles: making election laws less fair and transparent and hobbling Elections Canada.
But curiously they have not tried very hard to build their base. Sure, Jason Kenney has spent a decade snacking at various ethnic food fairs, but the Conservative Party is hardly the “new-Canadian” vote machine that the Liberal party was at its height. Trudeau and Mulcair are both very competitive in key communities in that world.
Even stranger, they have appeared to go out of their way to enrage important Canadian communities, groups that a poli-sci prof would tell his students were essential to a Tory base: veterans and big business. Young Canadian Afghan vets have been shabbily treated. They have been loud and effective in their anger in response. Canadian business has been more circumspect about its clashes with this government, but some telecom executives made history when they launched a full-scale assault on the very government that licenses and regulates them.
It is, however, the Harper government’s treatment of the First Nations peoples that is perhaps the most bizarre. The prime minister started out on the right foot with his moving commemoration and apology for residential schools. He appeared close to making it real, in funding and legislation at his summit with First Nations chiefs. But he has gone straight downhill since, ending with the government’s inept and insensitive reaction to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s powerful report.
There are nearly 1.5 million aboriginal Canadians in more than 600 reserves and in every city in Canada today. In Manitoba and Saskatchewan they represent 16 per cent of the entire population. They could decide the next MP in more than 40 ridings. For many years, some First Nations communities have refused to vote, and others vote in small numbers. This year both the Liberals and the NDP have developed strong aboriginal candidates supported by serious organizations on the ground.
An impressive new aboriginal political organization site, IndigPoli (#indigpoli) lists 44 ridings with more than 10 per cent aboriginal residents, 17 of them with greater than 25 per cent. The numbers of aboriginal voters in urban ridings is harder to track, but are large and growing everywhere.
Whether such efforts are successful in motivating many new aboriginal voters directly or not, the politics of this issue cut much more broadly. Many, perhaps by now even most, Canadians are deeply saddened and humiliated by the story of our relationship with indigenous peoples. Some have moved from humiliation to anger as a result of the horror stories of the TRC and others.
This was an easy political win for the Harperites, who deliberately turned their backs.
Many voters from Scarborough to Surrey, B.C., will be moved by a leader who commits to a serious and respectful approach to treaties and to making aboriginal schools, access to health care, and economic development achievements of which we can be proud.
By his own choice, as a product of one of his many self-inflicted wounds, Stephen Harper cannot be that leader.