As much as Canada’s federal election delivered historic consequences for every political party, Monday night’s future significance turns more on changes within the electorate than within parties.
There’s a strong, though barely visible, possibility that voters’ swerve to openness and equity will become the real driver during the next years of Conservative majority rule.
A major political realignment is in the works. With any luck, this will be more telling than the unprecedented breakthroughs achieved by the NDP (winning Official Opposition) and Greens (winning a first seat) or the temporary setbacks suffered by the Bloc and Liberals.
The starting point is recognition that the forces that produced a Conservative majority do not represent trends of either today or tomorrow. Rather, the Conservative triumph is historical in the deepest sense: the outcome has been imposed by yesterday’s electoral accounting rules, which register only individual candidates with the largest minority vote in their oft-gerrymandered riding.
Conservatives won almost entirely by virtue of vote splits among the 60 per cent of the population strongly opposed to the direction in which they will try to take the country.
The Harper regime has only deepened a political tendency that has been working its way through government since the late 1980s.
From 1919 through to the 1970s, politics adapted to tectonic changes such as the rise of women’s suffrage, massive unionization, urbanization, industrialization, bilingualism, multiculturalism and feminism.
In those times, the political centre of gravity lurched to the left, and the only debate was how quickly various political parties would respond to demands for egalitarian reform.
New Democrats were known as “Liberals in a hurry,” though the truth is that Progressive Conservative regimes of that era (think of Bill Davis in Ontario) sometimes delivered more egalitarian changes than any Liberal or NDP governments.
Almost every progressive change appreciated by Canadians dates from this five-decade span: medicare, old-age pensions, public broadcasting, accessible public high schools, colleges and universities, as well as advanced civil rights legislation and human rights mechanisms.
Since the watershed of the free trade deal of the late 1980s, the steering wheel of the entire political spectrum turned hard to the right, and the only debate has been how quickly various parties would respond to “the new world order” of deregulated trade and finance.
The realities of the era were masked by the common-man rhetoric of Jean Chretien’s and Paul Martin’s Liberals, who ruled the Ottawa roost during the 1990s, introducing many of tohe fundamentals of neo-conservative structural change. The reunited Conservatives were therefore able to refashion themselves as “Liberals in a hurry” to cut taxes, since most of the heavy lifting of restructuring and embedding market-ruled economics had been done by the Liberals, as it was by president Bill Clinton south of the border.
Harper’s major political insight was to understand that tax cuts were the main vehicle of further change, and that this agenda didn’t need to be confounded with theo-conservatism or brazen Sun-style redneckism.
By contrast, the voters opposed to Conservatives were divided among at least four camps, each vying for the same mainstream demographic. Social liberals, many of whom – Toronto’s Carolyn Bennett comes to mind – are among the boldest visionaries in the country, worked for the Liberal camp.
Union types and supporters of big government work for the NDP, despite a leader, Jack Layton, who’s a champion of green businesses, social entrepreneurs and a vibrant “third sector.” Environmentalists who believe it’s possible to construct governments on the basis of one set of policy issues work for the Green camp. In Quebec, the most innovative and popularly supported social egalitarians in the country backed the Bloc Quebecois.
It is ludicrous that a clear majority of people would rather remain divided into four camps than defeat one party with diametrically opposing views on social, economic and political policies. This election gives us more confirmation that voters are loose in their allegiances and non-partisan, meaning the next realignment – of justice-minded Liberals, left Greens, the NDP and the Bloc – is in our sights.
Talk of coalitions and strategic voting is way behind the curve. It is time for a political refiguring. It ain’t over till that’s started.
news@nowtoronto.com
