Christopher Flavelle thinks so:
If the last week is any indication, that polarization is only getting worse. On Sunday morning, Prime Minister Harper began the race by predicting “a very nasty kind of personal-attack campaign.” Two days later, his party briefly released an ad that showed a bird defecating on the leader of the Liberal Party. So much for Canadians being nice.
Update on Liberal Party “unrest” from today’s Globe and Mail.
He points to a possible budget deficit, shrinking foreign aid, and sagging support for the environment, and pins the blame-growing political polarization.
Frankly, I don’t see it: Canada retains a high level of social cohesion, a still functioning social welfare system, has thus far avoided anything remotely like the financial meltdown in the U.S., and from where I sit remains a fairly civil place. Americans are obsessed with partisan politics and the blue-red divide – most Canadians laugh at, or ignore, puffin-pooping.
But my reference point is that of an American and I’m still only a year into the honeymoon. Your thoughts?
September 16th, 2008 at 10:24 am
If an ad like that were shown in the U.S. concerning one of the presidential candidates, people would be up in arms, perhaps even the animal rights activists.
September 16th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
The election is still early. Although I don’t expect it to get as bad as the US (some of the campaign commercials for congressional positions seem like outright lying), I do suspect the level of civility will decline.
September 16th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Flavelle is out to lunch. His knowledge of Canada is clearly not first hand and seems to be derived from left-leaning Canadian media sources, with the Conservatives his main target.
Some of Flavelle’s information is even incorrect. For example, the puffin item was not an ad, but a flash movie on a web site. Admittedly, it was rather juvenile and in poor taste, but it was not mean per se.
I’d say Flavelle has let his dislike of the what he thinks the Conservatives are colour his thinking. It strains credulity to describe the Harper Conservatives as “an anti-government, socially conservative party in the mold of Reagan-Bush Republicans.”
Flavelle’s central thesis about increasing polarization, though, is not completely off the mark. However, his case would be much stronger if he also pointed to Liberal ads in the last election about soldiers in our cities, or the latest ads from the NDP as supporting examples.
September 22nd, 2008 at 7:16 am
I agree with Steve, in so far as there were some factual errors about Puffin-gate. And I’d dispute that Canadians are getting meaner. So here’s what I, as a real live Canadian think.
So are the Conservatives an “anti-government, socially conservative party.” Yes. But in the mold of the “Reagan-Bush Republicans.” No.
While Stephen Harper recently claimed Canadians were becoming more conservative, this is highly debatable as I’ll expand upon later. There was an article out in our version of the New York Times/Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, which claimed Canadians are becoming more non-partisan and non-ideological but I think that’s a bit misleading as well. I’d say we’ve become more economically right-wing and more (in the sense of “moral values”) left-wing.
Like most in the western world, we’ve become more economically right-wing, and “anti-government”, which I suppose you can call conservative over the last thirty years. Globalization, de-regulation, privitization, etc etc hasn’t escaped Canada. So in that sense, yes Reagan-Bush etc have had an effect on Canada.
But, the second part of the quote the “Reagan-Bush” Republicanism, is misleading. And trying to impose American culture-war concerns onto Canada is of questionable use. Especially seeing as demographically Canada doesn’t have a socially-conservative evangelical, or particularly religious base at all. Some 60% of Americans are practising Christians, only 30% of Canadians are, and of those 30% of Canadians only 1/3 are evangelical Christians. This is not enough of a base for an enduring Conservative majority. While McCain can remain competitive by pandering to his base, inspite of all the substantive problems he faces, Harper has to seriously reach out to non-base voters to even have a shot at forming a minority government.
Socially, Canadians are not becoming more conservative. Abortion, and the political battles around it, are for the most part a non-issue amongst the vast majority of Canadians – ie. choice is a right that isn’t going away and anyone who wants to take it away will pay a price. The far-left worries the Conservatives have a secret agenda, and the far-right is angry that the Conservatives aren’t pandering to them but either way if the Conservatives want to win re-election (and they do) they won’t touch (and haven’t) this issue with a ten-foot pole.
The same is essentially true with same-sex marriage. It is now a right. The government introduced a motion to re-vote on the issue (as it was enacted by the previous Liberal government), soon after Harper was elected to mollify the Conservative base. But it was defeated and they’ve promised not to return to it. Heck, some Conservative MP’s even voted against it. But even if they do try to re-introduce it, they can’t since it would be considered unconstitutional (the basis on which the Supreme Court allowed same-sex marriage in the first place). There would be no political upside to re-introducing such legislation, and in any case any new Conservative MP’s from suburban Vancouver and Toronto or from anywhere in Quebec really would probably vote against it. The only way they could overturn it would be by using the “not withstanding clause”, which would raise a whole new can of worms related to Canadian-unity (which is another topic altogether, but let’s just say changing the constitution leads down this road in Canada) and would drive middle-class swing voters away from the Conservative Party and most likely to the Liberals, or the NDP.
So, perhaps Stephen Harper and his cohorts would like to be as right-wing as the Republican Party, economically and socially. But they’d never have a chance at being re-elected. Pragmatism is a Canadian value, and though Harper has been restrained by having a minority he’ll want to win re-election if he’s given a majority. So I fully expect a “mean” government if Harper is re-elected, in so far as they’ll be more tax cuts for the rich, and programme cuts for everyone else – I don’t think we’ll be seeing a Canadian version of Dubya anytime soon.
September 22nd, 2008 at 7:23 am
To picture Harper think of a Guliani in New York, or Romney in Mass. style of government, before either had to try to convince social conservatives they wern’t so (well, for Republicans anyways) liberal when they tried to run for the Republican National nomination.