Why Harper is finished
This election is over.
Its details, such as the counting of the votes and the official declarations of the winners in each riding have of course still to be completed.
The election’s essence, though, is already part of our history. And this is that as soon as the election is held, Stephen Harper will cease to be Canada’s prime minister.
The task still ahead of Canadians will be to determine whether Harper’s successor should be New Democrat Leader Thomas Mulcair or Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau.
For a great many voters, though, the challenge of making a choice between these two contenders matters incomparably less.
In actual fact, the challenge that has already been met and decided upon by most Canadians is not exactly that of defeating Harper, no matter that this will be the practical consequence of a decision that’s already been taken.
Instead, what’s happened is that for many Canadians this election has now become a way to return this country back to its character of old or to the national character that many of us think Canada once possessed no matter that sometimes our memory of this golden past exaggerates our supposed condition of high-mindedness.
Certainly there really once was a Canada of Nobel Prize-winner Lester Pearson, and of peacekeeping, and that, even if only middlesized, could have played a part in creating the United Nations and an international ban on landmines. Indeed a country — one for which Harper in fact can claim a share of the credit — that takes in more outsiders of all kinds than does any other country on the globe. For some time now many amongst us have feared that this country — in essence, a kinder, gentler one — has been vanishing inexorably.
The first person to say this out loud (myself then as unhearing as anyone else) was former prime minister Joe Clark.
In 2013, in a remarkable book, How We Lead: Canada in a Century of Change, Clark warned that “this outward-reaching country” was “turning inward” and giving up on ideals such as of peacekeeping and of using foreign aid to benefit the global poor rather than our own exports.
The most recent commentator was another former prime minister. He — Jean Chrétien — this weekend delivered an attack on Harper’s foreign policy with a degree of anger and scorn that has seldom been equalled in our political history.
Harper’s slowness to respond to the refugee crisis in the Middle East, declared Chrétien, had “shamed Canada’, and made its citizens seem “cold-hearted”. The “peace-seeking, progressive country that Canada once was”, no longer existed.
Chretien’s closing cry was: “Let’s take our place back in the world.”
Uttered two weeks ago, these same words spoken by the same person might have been dismissed as just partisanship. Today, they explain why the election is already over.
One incident has changed everything, not just in Canada but among huge numbers of people in many countries around the world.
The agent of transformational rage and disgust and so the rise of a determination that things could be done differently was as small as any such catalyst has ever been. The agent was a 3-year-old. He was Alan Kurdi, the asylum-seeking boy who drowned near Turkey and whose body then floated ashore there to be photographed looking as peaceable as if he were taking a brief rest on the sand.
Almost instantly huge numbers of Canadians understood that everything had changed. They now are doing all they can to ensure that as many as possible asylum seekers escape death by coming to this country, this despite all the practical difficulties, even the risks, of doing this.
Harper didn’t understand what was happening. Belatedly, he’s going to make some changes. Some may well be good ones. But they’re far too late. He wasn’t listening; instead, he was listening too much to himself.
This is why this election is no longer about who should be prime minister. It’s about the kind of country we should have. Richard Gwyn’s column usually appears every other Tuesday. Email gwynr@sympatico.ca