‘If he just serves out the term he has won, he will have been longer in office than all his predecessors except King, Macdonald, Trudeau and Laurier’
The two most evident consequences of last Monday’s federal election are the giant step toward a two-party system and the entry of Stephen Harper into the ranks of the important federal leaders of Canadian history.
Despite all the conventional wisdom in the media that he was not popular and could not get to the majority threshold, Mr. Harper’s party not only benefited from the fragmentation of the opposition; his Conservatives gained 632,000 votes from the previous election (admittedly just a third of the gain of the NDP), while the Liberals lost 850,000, the Bloc lost 490,000, and the Greens, although they elected their leader, lost 360,000, all in an electorate 886,000 larger than in 2008.
It is easy to forget, and most people who comment on these matters do, that just eight years ago, Stephen Harper was sitting somewhat forlornly as the head of what called itself the Canadian Alliance, ineffectually crooning “Wherefore art thou, Joe Clark?” to the immoveable recycled leader of the diminutive rump of the Progressive Conservatives. That party, a never-easy amalgam of its constituent names, had only governed for 15 years of its 60-year life to that time. The logic of a reunited centre-right opposition prevailed, and Stephen Harper managed to maintain party discipline on the old Reformers, push the Liberals into a minority, and then, exploiting the Adscam controversy, and the Chrétien-Martin division in the Liberals generally, won a minority mandate. He returned to the people before the economic strain of the 2008-2009 recession was far-advanced and gained an enhanced minority.
This year, he endured a contempt-of-Parliament vote against one of his ministers for disingenuous answers she gave to a Parliamentary committee on an issue that, to the extent anyone cared about it at all, redounded to the benefit of the government (stopping aid to KAIROS, an overseas development organization that had been outspokenly anti-Israeli). The Liberals and Bloc eagerly voted with the NDP to humble the government, carried the can for an election nobody except Harper really wanted, opened the trap-doors beneath them, oblivious to the nooses around their necks, and were hanged by their necks until they were politically dead.
Let no one doubt that the federal Liberal Party as we have known it, is dead. (The Bloc has already been cremated.) The Liberals had long since ceased to have any raison d’être except the detritus of the assumption that it was the natural party of government, as it had been from 1896 to 1984 (the rise of Laurier to the retirement of Trudeau). Under King and St. Laurent and even Pearson, it had been a creative party in policy terms, as well as the party that could make federalism work for Quebec and convince Ontario that it could keep Quebec in Canada. This vocation reached its apogee with Trudeau, the first independence referendum, and constitutional patriation. Mulroney shattered the Liberals in Quebec and Chrétien mishandled and almost lost the second independence referendum, (though his Clarity Act was a useful, if belated, initiative to frustrate the separatists’ penchant for trick referendum questions).
Without the tribal vote from Quebec, and the mystique of indispensability, and with no interesting policy ideas, it was a movement waiting to die, as redundant as the separatist Bloc in a federal Parliament. It is inconceivable that Harper did not detect at least some of this opportunity. The Liberals now have no purpose at all, and unless the NDP goes off the charts to the left, Harper will be too agile to leave them any policy or ideological space to make a comeback up the centre of Canadian politics that they long occupied.
Stephen Harper now faces an opposition almost as splintered as that which enabled Chrétien to remain 10 years in office, set unchallengeably at the head of his party (unlike Chrétien, who had the distinction of being the only elected prime minister in Canadian history to be flung out of that office by his own party), a party Harper constructed himself (another accomplishment unprecedented in the country’s history). He has steered his party to an improved showing in four consecutive elections, and has put in doubt the ancient truism since the Pearson years, that Canada is a left-of-centre country. He has made comparative fiscal responsibility and staged tax reductions good politics, and has reaped the reward for rapid economic growth. As I suggested in the early days of this column, Harper is as cunning a tactician as the ineffable Mackenzie King, and a much bolder (and more telegenic) leader.
If he just serves out the term he has won, he will have been longer in office than all his predecessors except King, Macdonald, Trudeau and Laurier. Those who now see the NDP as the wave of the future, inevitably seizing the commanding heights of the nation’s polity, should look again. Jack Layton deserves huge credit for increasing his party’s vote by 1.9-million, but there is no evidence of a real groundswell in English-speaking Canada, nor of his new avalanche of Quebec support being more than reaction to the tedium of the Bloc and the old parties and appreciation of le bon Jack.
This convivial man is now head of a majority French Quebec caucus, having pledged to reopen the Constitution and apply Quebec’s oppressive language laws in federal government workplaces in Quebec. Again, Stephen Harper, who successfully tore down the reasonably estimable Michael Ignatieff (whose unfortunate exhortation, “Rise up, Canada!” made it sound as if he were Lenin in 1917) with imputations of elitism, snobbery, and opportunism, will not give the unfeasible NDP a free ride on its appeasement of Quebec nationalists, nor on such vintage pearls as the formal pledge of “the extension of the principle of social ownership,” especially in pursuit of “social justice” and a healthier environment. If those and similar time-bombs are not defused, they will blow the official opposition to shards.
It is not going to be like falling off a log for Jack Layton to protect the NDP base, reach out to the Liberals, and keep the ex-Blocistes happy, without being successfully portrayed by Stephen Harper, Canada’s greatest political hard-baller since Maurice Duplessis, as a schizophrenic charlatan. He will have to muzzle an unruly caucus (his deputy leader, the relatively experienced Thomas Mulcair, celebrated the election gains with vapid pontifications about Osama bin Laden).
The Liberals and New Democrats will have to merge eventually. Until they do, Harper is safer than Chrétien was in the days of four sizeable opposition parties. And when they do, Stephen Harper will certainly have enticements for many of the disconsolate Liberals, especially the backbone of that party that is only really interested in being in office, where Stephen Harper seems to have installed himself, sine die. On his record, the country is in for an extended period of what the British call “the snap of firm government.”
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Note: Thanks to reader Mark Goetz, who pointed out to me that most of Brian Mulroney’s Quebec caucus did not defect to the Bloc Québécois, as I appeared to suggest last week, but were replaced in the 1992 election by Bloc candidates.
National Post
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