Meditations on Things Political
This is a long and winding piece about the political situation resulting from our recent election. Consider yourself forewarned.
Quite a lot of this is about the Liberal Party and the impossible situation in which they find themselves, because that’s what most of the chattering classes are discussing, and therefore what I am mostly taking issue with. I trust that this trend will abate over time, as the process of government resumes and the Conservatives and the NDP monopolize the discussion between themselves, and the new marginality of the Liberals becomes increasingly a fact of life, as Stephen Harper has always intended.
Why This Is Important
The Conservatives have a majority that does not include Quebec. That is not a small thing; it represents a fundamental new truth of the Canadian political system. The centre of gravity of our polity lies west of the Ottawa River. The party which will be successful will be the one which can weld together the West and Ontario. That is true now, and will become more inescapable when the process of electoral redistricting adds 30 more seats to this area.
But it’s easy to talk about what the Conservatives have done. It’s self-evident. A decade and more of planning and patient work are now bearing fruit, the opposition is broken and lost, and the field is theirs.
So let’s talk about the losers.
Proportional Representation and Other Loads of Horse Shit
Lots of people have been reacting to this election result with the predictable refrain of “only 40% of people chose Harper! 60% of Canadians don’t want him!” Or, even better, they factor in the 40% of Canadians who didn’t vote at all, to push the Conservative tally down into the 25% range.
Let’s discuss this position.
Immediately, the calculation of non-voters can be discounted. People who do not bother to vote are opting out of the system. Most charitably, they can be said to be endorsing the will of the majority who do vote; less charitably, they can be ignored as people who did not exercise their civic duty and can therefore take what they get. Assuming that people in this category have sentiments of any significance regarding the electoral outcome is nothing more than a desparate attempt to stuff more hay into one’s strawman.
One could just as easily credit those 40% of non-voters into the winning government’s column, vaulting them into absolute majority range and ending the discussion.
The remaining argument -- that the 39.6% of people who voted Conservative should not be able to impose their will upon the 49.5% who voted Liberal and NDP -- betrays a number of assumptions which are rarely critically analyzed by those espousing it, assumptions I believe to be profoundly naive and generally untrue.
The first such assumption is that the NDP and the Liberals are essentially similar. This point of view is generally presented by Liberals who assume that, as a left-leaning party, they share much with the leftist NDP. This position is generally not something you hear from fervent NDP supporters, who (probably correctly) see the Liberals and Conservatives, centrist brokerage parties of Bay Street and the establishment, as being much closer to one another than either is to the NDP, a party which maintains its pretensions to a grassroots, socialists and unions core.
As discussed in the section regarding a merger of these parties, they are not as similar as you might expect were you to analyze them armed only with a left-right political axis, and it is a stretch of logic to claim that the Liberals are a leftist party at all.
The second such assumption is that all people voting for the NDP and/or the Liberals are opposed to, and unrepresented by, the Conservatives. This is clearly untrue. In Ontario, haunted by memories of Bob Rae, Liberal voters swung hard Conservative to stop Jack Layton. In the west, votes migrate between the Conservatives and the NDP freely. Voter polls querying second choices find reasonably strong representation of voters for all three parties who could see one of the others as a viable alternative. I will not go so far as to postulate what exact figure these voters represent, but it is clear that, for some percentage of Liberal and NDP voters, the Conservatives are not a hated and feared armageddon but a viable alternative which, for local reasons, they did not vote for this time around.
Saying that anybody who voted NDP or Liberal is, therefore, ideologically opposed to the Conservatives and all they stand for, is an argument stretched too far.
All that having been said, my principal reason for opposing proportional representation arguments is the simple and unavoidable fact that PR doesn’t deliver effective government. Were we to grant the logically confused assertion that the present electoral results are unfair, and somehow overcome the Canadian voter’s established reluctance to vote in favour of electoral reform (as evidenced in BC and Ontario, the latter of whom’s 40% of the vote should kill the idea outright), the result would be a perpetual state of electoral disarray, much like the past five years. If all Canadian elections had been held under PR we would have had one majority government in our history. We would live in an era of perpetual campaigning, shifting alliances, unstable coalitions and government impotence.
A PR system produces innumerable small parties who negotiate their platform and policy after the votes have been collected and invariably settle on the lowest common denominator. Such countries are incapable of bold action where bold action is required. If you need good examples of this look no farther than Germany, timid and hesitant on the international stage, and condemned to acts of terrible populist foolishness at home -- witness their failure to the anti-nuclear lobby, with the clear and inevitable result of an increase of coal-fuelled power generation.
Our current electoral system produces effective governments. The compromises that we make in our electoral system are not between representative and non-representative government; it is a sacrifice of effective government in the interests of slightly greater representativeness. This is not a reasonable sacrifice, and most Canadians would agree given the general reaction to the past period of instability and incivility, which PR would make endemnic.
The Liberal Party’s Range of Bad Options
The Liberal Party has lost 30+ seats in each of its last four elections. It was only really successful under Chretien because of the deeply divided right, and the fact that Ontario was routinely delivering 100+ seats. Neither of these elements are likely to occur any time in the future.
But, as has been well documented, the Liberals problems are systemic and date from about the end of Trudeau’s government. What is significant now is that these problems can no longer be ignored.
To understand the depth of the Liberal problem, it is important to understand one important fact about it: it is not a party of the left. It is not, in fact, a party with any firmly established ideological foundation, and has not been so for at least 30 years, and probably more. The Liberal party is a centralist brokerage party. Its role in Canadian politics has been to campaign towards the middle of Canadian popular opinion, secure power, coalesce power towards the government and Ottawa, and then use that power to buy the support of Canada’s various regions, minorities, lobbies and special interest groups. By centralizing power and redistributing wealth it created a space for itself at the center of things and forced its opposition, the NDP and the Conservatives principally, away from the center and thus away from the levers of power that it used to broker its continuing relevance.
This is not a unique model. The usual examples of similar parties elsewhere are the old British Liberal party and India’s Congress party. The only unusual thing about Canada’s Liberal party is that it has endured this long.
Gradually eroding this model has been one of the principal achievements of Harper’s period of minority government. His intention has been to remove the Liberals from the ability to broker power; to align the center of Canadian politics with the Conservative Party, by moving the party gradually left and (moreso) by shifting the center to the right; and to destroy the ability of the central government to broker with other elements of the Canadian polity, by reducing its revenue base and committing what revenue remains in predictable ways which are difficult to change. All of these things he has done, and the fact that his intentions could be so well defined and clearly visible and yet completely overlooked by his opponents is a feat with few parallels in political history.
So the Liberal party. The problems they face are manifold, and some of them are obvious: they no longer have the funding or resources of the Official Opposition; the political realignment with the Conservatives and the NDP as the clear dual options of viable government leaves them marginalized from the media and the political discourse; their funding has been abysmal and is about to be further sharply reduced with the abolition of the per vote subsidy. But the biggest problem they face is the fact that their traditional role in Canadian politics is no longer viable, forcing them to become a party of ideology and principle; but they have not had either in living memory and their opponents have left precious little ground available for them to claim.
So How About a Merger?
The logic of a merger with the NDP depends on two assumptions: one, that the Liberals and the NDP are both parties of the left, with a broadly compatible ideology; and two, that this sort of merger will lead to electoral success.
I will now discuss why both of the assumptions are wrong.
First, the Liberal party is not a party of the left. It has no coherent ideology that can be expressed in any terms other than the most abstract (“Social Justice”, “Inclusiveness”, etc) or by comparison with other parties (“We’re not the Conservatives”). They are not even a party of the center; they are a brokerage party which is dedicated to accumulating power in Ottawa and using it to keep themselves in power (or more charitably, to keeping the various disparate elements of the Canadian polity together). This has no place on a traditional ideological axis. The Liberals, when successful, have freely roamed across the ideological spectrum, harvesting ideas from the NDP, PC, and Reform as needed. Since losing power they have drifted from Martin's faux-Trudeau big-picture dreaming to Dion's leftish environmentalism to the present mushy centre-right. As a brokerage party they have espoused whatever views were necessary to gain power. They have been defined by their lack of ideology.
The NDP do have an ideology, one which is redistributive and socialist. Their model, at its most fundamental, is about taking from those who have and giving to those who don’t. To a certain extent this is well and good; those who have wealth have benefited from Canada’s stability and opportunities and a certain amount of equalization in this regard is good for society as a whole. Where they fall down is in a stunning tone-deafness on economic issues; you can’t redistribute wealth if you aren’t producing wealth in the first place and they seem incapable of understanding how and why that happens. But that’s a different rant.
Could the Liberals become a left-of-center party, as the NDP have gradually become, and adopt the NDP’s ideology? Possibly. But if this is all the Liberal party is going to do, why not just vote NDP? What do the Liberals bring to the conversation?
Of even greater concern is whether the common voting block which kept the Liberals in power for so long was voting for the Liberals because they were a left leaning party. This assumption is even more tenuous. When the Liberals did well, it was because they represented stability, prudence and good management. Those are not values which fall into any particular point in a Nolan chart. Surely it is no coincidence that, as these attributes have increasingly come to be associated with the Conservatives rather than the Liberals, votes have moved with them.
Second, the assumption that a Liberal-NDP merger will lead to electoral success. The case for this is very shaky and has been examined in depth elsewhere, but in essence it breaks down to a few simple facts. As has recently been witnessed, the Liberal party has a red-tory faction which will vote Conservative if the alternative is the NDP. In the event of a merger, this significant voting block will leave the Liberal party permanently and align with the Conservatives.
The NDP, in turn, has a significant element which views the Liberal party (quite rightly) as an establishment big-business party which they want no part of. Anyone doubting this is encouraged to spend some time reading the forums on sites like rabble.ca. In the event of a merger these people will, at best, stay home and not vote for the merged party. More likely, they will either vote Green, or cleave off to form a new, radical left party, which will continue, albeit in a lessened fashion, to bleed votes to the left.
Can the Liberal Party Survive?
Possibly. Doing so will require a prompt and accurate identification of the party’s existential dilemna (it is a party without an ideology that now needs to find one) and steps being taken to remedy that problem.
So far this does not appear to be happening. The conversation within the Liberal party is mostly proceeding along the lines of blaming Michael Ignatieff (and you’ll note that I’ve written something like 1500 words about what’s wrong with the Liberal party without mentioning his name) and determining who is going to be the new leader, with a fringe movement agitating about merger, and a fringe of a fringe arguing in favour of electoral reform.
Most heartening, to Conservatives, is the common Liberal insistence that four years of Harper government will sour the Canadian people’s taste for him and his party. This approach has failed spectacularly for the past five years, as Harper’s share of the vote has continually moved upwards, and Canada west of Quebec has come to vote for him in ever greater numbers. 30-ish new seats are about to be distributed in the areas of greatest Conservative strength and the list of politicians whose careers have been ended by Harper continues to grow. Surely even the Liberals should be able to see that waiting for Harper to self-destruct is a plan which will be nine years out of date by the time they next need to face him.
If things proceed the way that they have been since the election, the Liberal party is doomed.
What Do I Want, Evil Vindictive Fascist That I Am?
I want to see the Liberals and NDP merge. Although I am slightly to the right of Atilla the Hun, I am more comfortable with the NDP in opposition than the Liberals, as the NDP at least can be said to have a coherent ideology which they honestly believe in, however wrong-headed it may be. And it is undeniable that their platform has become increasingly centrist as they have moved closer to the levers of power. (Their current platform has a commitment not to reduce spending on defense! Who could have imagined such a thing?)
The dissolution and absorption of the Liberal party (for that is what a merger with the NDP would mean at this point) would mean an increased vote share for the Conservatives and, more importantly, the removal of the NDP’s radical left from the merged party, leaving only the more centrist and left-of-center elements which I am more comfortable having in power, as they inevitably would be at least some of the time in the new political order. But most importantly this would realize Harper’s objective of establishing, for the foreseeable future, the Conservative Party of Canada as the natural governing party of this country.
If the Liberal Party of Canada has no future then obviously I would prefer that they meet their demise in a fashion most helpful to my own ends.
This is a long and winding piece about the political situation resulting from our recent election. Consider yourself forewarned.
Quite a lot of this is about the Liberal Party and the impossible situation in which they find themselves, because that’s what most of the chattering classes are discussing, and therefore what I am mostly taking issue with. I trust that this trend will abate over time, as the process of government resumes and the Conservatives and the NDP monopolize the discussion between themselves, and the new marginality of the Liberals becomes increasingly a fact of life, as Stephen Harper has always intended.
Why This Is Important
The Conservatives have a majority that does not include Quebec. That is not a small thing; it represents a fundamental new truth of the Canadian political system. The centre of gravity of our polity lies west of the Ottawa River. The party which will be successful will be the one which can weld together the West and Ontario. That is true now, and will become more inescapable when the process of electoral redistricting adds 30 more seats to this area.
But it’s easy to talk about what the Conservatives have done. It’s self-evident. A decade and more of planning and patient work are now bearing fruit, the opposition is broken and lost, and the field is theirs.
So let’s talk about the losers.
Proportional Representation and Other Loads of Horse Shit
Lots of people have been reacting to this election result with the predictable refrain of “only 40% of people chose Harper! 60% of Canadians don’t want him!” Or, even better, they factor in the 40% of Canadians who didn’t vote at all, to push the Conservative tally down into the 25% range.
Let’s discuss this position.
Immediately, the calculation of non-voters can be discounted. People who do not bother to vote are opting out of the system. Most charitably, they can be said to be endorsing the will of the majority who do vote; less charitably, they can be ignored as people who did not exercise their civic duty and can therefore take what they get. Assuming that people in this category have sentiments of any significance regarding the electoral outcome is nothing more than a desparate attempt to stuff more hay into one’s strawman.
One could just as easily credit those 40% of non-voters into the winning government’s column, vaulting them into absolute majority range and ending the discussion.
The remaining argument -- that the 39.6% of people who voted Conservative should not be able to impose their will upon the 49.5% who voted Liberal and NDP -- betrays a number of assumptions which are rarely critically analyzed by those espousing it, assumptions I believe to be profoundly naive and generally untrue.
The first such assumption is that the NDP and the Liberals are essentially similar. This point of view is generally presented by Liberals who assume that, as a left-leaning party, they share much with the leftist NDP. This position is generally not something you hear from fervent NDP supporters, who (probably correctly) see the Liberals and Conservatives, centrist brokerage parties of Bay Street and the establishment, as being much closer to one another than either is to the NDP, a party which maintains its pretensions to a grassroots, socialists and unions core.
As discussed in the section regarding a merger of these parties, they are not as similar as you might expect were you to analyze them armed only with a left-right political axis, and it is a stretch of logic to claim that the Liberals are a leftist party at all.
The second such assumption is that all people voting for the NDP and/or the Liberals are opposed to, and unrepresented by, the Conservatives. This is clearly untrue. In Ontario, haunted by memories of Bob Rae, Liberal voters swung hard Conservative to stop Jack Layton. In the west, votes migrate between the Conservatives and the NDP freely. Voter polls querying second choices find reasonably strong representation of voters for all three parties who could see one of the others as a viable alternative. I will not go so far as to postulate what exact figure these voters represent, but it is clear that, for some percentage of Liberal and NDP voters, the Conservatives are not a hated and feared armageddon but a viable alternative which, for local reasons, they did not vote for this time around.
Saying that anybody who voted NDP or Liberal is, therefore, ideologically opposed to the Conservatives and all they stand for, is an argument stretched too far.
All that having been said, my principal reason for opposing proportional representation arguments is the simple and unavoidable fact that PR doesn’t deliver effective government. Were we to grant the logically confused assertion that the present electoral results are unfair, and somehow overcome the Canadian voter’s established reluctance to vote in favour of electoral reform (as evidenced in BC and Ontario, the latter of whom’s 40% of the vote should kill the idea outright), the result would be a perpetual state of electoral disarray, much like the past five years. If all Canadian elections had been held under PR we would have had one majority government in our history. We would live in an era of perpetual campaigning, shifting alliances, unstable coalitions and government impotence.
A PR system produces innumerable small parties who negotiate their platform and policy after the votes have been collected and invariably settle on the lowest common denominator. Such countries are incapable of bold action where bold action is required. If you need good examples of this look no farther than Germany, timid and hesitant on the international stage, and condemned to acts of terrible populist foolishness at home -- witness their failure to the anti-nuclear lobby, with the clear and inevitable result of an increase of coal-fuelled power generation.
Our current electoral system produces effective governments. The compromises that we make in our electoral system are not between representative and non-representative government; it is a sacrifice of effective government in the interests of slightly greater representativeness. This is not a reasonable sacrifice, and most Canadians would agree given the general reaction to the past period of instability and incivility, which PR would make endemnic.
The Liberal Party’s Range of Bad Options
The Liberal Party has lost 30+ seats in each of its last four elections. It was only really successful under Chretien because of the deeply divided right, and the fact that Ontario was routinely delivering 100+ seats. Neither of these elements are likely to occur any time in the future.
But, as has been well documented, the Liberals problems are systemic and date from about the end of Trudeau’s government. What is significant now is that these problems can no longer be ignored.
To understand the depth of the Liberal problem, it is important to understand one important fact about it: it is not a party of the left. It is not, in fact, a party with any firmly established ideological foundation, and has not been so for at least 30 years, and probably more. The Liberal party is a centralist brokerage party. Its role in Canadian politics has been to campaign towards the middle of Canadian popular opinion, secure power, coalesce power towards the government and Ottawa, and then use that power to buy the support of Canada’s various regions, minorities, lobbies and special interest groups. By centralizing power and redistributing wealth it created a space for itself at the center of things and forced its opposition, the NDP and the Conservatives principally, away from the center and thus away from the levers of power that it used to broker its continuing relevance.
This is not a unique model. The usual examples of similar parties elsewhere are the old British Liberal party and India’s Congress party. The only unusual thing about Canada’s Liberal party is that it has endured this long.
Gradually eroding this model has been one of the principal achievements of Harper’s period of minority government. His intention has been to remove the Liberals from the ability to broker power; to align the center of Canadian politics with the Conservative Party, by moving the party gradually left and (moreso) by shifting the center to the right; and to destroy the ability of the central government to broker with other elements of the Canadian polity, by reducing its revenue base and committing what revenue remains in predictable ways which are difficult to change. All of these things he has done, and the fact that his intentions could be so well defined and clearly visible and yet completely overlooked by his opponents is a feat with few parallels in political history.
So the Liberal party. The problems they face are manifold, and some of them are obvious: they no longer have the funding or resources of the Official Opposition; the political realignment with the Conservatives and the NDP as the clear dual options of viable government leaves them marginalized from the media and the political discourse; their funding has been abysmal and is about to be further sharply reduced with the abolition of the per vote subsidy. But the biggest problem they face is the fact that their traditional role in Canadian politics is no longer viable, forcing them to become a party of ideology and principle; but they have not had either in living memory and their opponents have left precious little ground available for them to claim.
So How About a Merger?
The logic of a merger with the NDP depends on two assumptions: one, that the Liberals and the NDP are both parties of the left, with a broadly compatible ideology; and two, that this sort of merger will lead to electoral success.
I will now discuss why both of the assumptions are wrong.
First, the Liberal party is not a party of the left. It has no coherent ideology that can be expressed in any terms other than the most abstract (“Social Justice”, “Inclusiveness”, etc) or by comparison with other parties (“We’re not the Conservatives”). They are not even a party of the center; they are a brokerage party which is dedicated to accumulating power in Ottawa and using it to keep themselves in power (or more charitably, to keeping the various disparate elements of the Canadian polity together). This has no place on a traditional ideological axis. The Liberals, when successful, have freely roamed across the ideological spectrum, harvesting ideas from the NDP, PC, and Reform as needed. Since losing power they have drifted from Martin's faux-Trudeau big-picture dreaming to Dion's leftish environmentalism to the present mushy centre-right. As a brokerage party they have espoused whatever views were necessary to gain power. They have been defined by their lack of ideology.
The NDP do have an ideology, one which is redistributive and socialist. Their model, at its most fundamental, is about taking from those who have and giving to those who don’t. To a certain extent this is well and good; those who have wealth have benefited from Canada’s stability and opportunities and a certain amount of equalization in this regard is good for society as a whole. Where they fall down is in a stunning tone-deafness on economic issues; you can’t redistribute wealth if you aren’t producing wealth in the first place and they seem incapable of understanding how and why that happens. But that’s a different rant.
Could the Liberals become a left-of-center party, as the NDP have gradually become, and adopt the NDP’s ideology? Possibly. But if this is all the Liberal party is going to do, why not just vote NDP? What do the Liberals bring to the conversation?
Of even greater concern is whether the common voting block which kept the Liberals in power for so long was voting for the Liberals because they were a left leaning party. This assumption is even more tenuous. When the Liberals did well, it was because they represented stability, prudence and good management. Those are not values which fall into any particular point in a Nolan chart. Surely it is no coincidence that, as these attributes have increasingly come to be associated with the Conservatives rather than the Liberals, votes have moved with them.
Second, the assumption that a Liberal-NDP merger will lead to electoral success. The case for this is very shaky and has been examined in depth elsewhere, but in essence it breaks down to a few simple facts. As has recently been witnessed, the Liberal party has a red-tory faction which will vote Conservative if the alternative is the NDP. In the event of a merger, this significant voting block will leave the Liberal party permanently and align with the Conservatives.
The NDP, in turn, has a significant element which views the Liberal party (quite rightly) as an establishment big-business party which they want no part of. Anyone doubting this is encouraged to spend some time reading the forums on sites like rabble.ca. In the event of a merger these people will, at best, stay home and not vote for the merged party. More likely, they will either vote Green, or cleave off to form a new, radical left party, which will continue, albeit in a lessened fashion, to bleed votes to the left.
Can the Liberal Party Survive?
Possibly. Doing so will require a prompt and accurate identification of the party’s existential dilemna (it is a party without an ideology that now needs to find one) and steps being taken to remedy that problem.
So far this does not appear to be happening. The conversation within the Liberal party is mostly proceeding along the lines of blaming Michael Ignatieff (and you’ll note that I’ve written something like 1500 words about what’s wrong with the Liberal party without mentioning his name) and determining who is going to be the new leader, with a fringe movement agitating about merger, and a fringe of a fringe arguing in favour of electoral reform.
Most heartening, to Conservatives, is the common Liberal insistence that four years of Harper government will sour the Canadian people’s taste for him and his party. This approach has failed spectacularly for the past five years, as Harper’s share of the vote has continually moved upwards, and Canada west of Quebec has come to vote for him in ever greater numbers. 30-ish new seats are about to be distributed in the areas of greatest Conservative strength and the list of politicians whose careers have been ended by Harper continues to grow. Surely even the Liberals should be able to see that waiting for Harper to self-destruct is a plan which will be nine years out of date by the time they next need to face him.
If things proceed the way that they have been since the election, the Liberal party is doomed.
What Do I Want, Evil Vindictive Fascist That I Am?
I want to see the Liberals and NDP merge. Although I am slightly to the right of Atilla the Hun, I am more comfortable with the NDP in opposition than the Liberals, as the NDP at least can be said to have a coherent ideology which they honestly believe in, however wrong-headed it may be. And it is undeniable that their platform has become increasingly centrist as they have moved closer to the levers of power. (Their current platform has a commitment not to reduce spending on defense! Who could have imagined such a thing?)
The dissolution and absorption of the Liberal party (for that is what a merger with the NDP would mean at this point) would mean an increased vote share for the Conservatives and, more importantly, the removal of the NDP’s radical left from the merged party, leaving only the more centrist and left-of-center elements which I am more comfortable having in power, as they inevitably would be at least some of the time in the new political order. But most importantly this would realize Harper’s objective of establishing, for the foreseeable future, the Conservative Party of Canada as the natural governing party of this country.
If the Liberal Party of Canada has no future then obviously I would prefer that they meet their demise in a fashion most helpful to my own ends.
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