Why the Liberals lost in Canada

How does a man like Stephen Harper get to be prime minister of Canada? When the leader of the official opposition, Stéphane Dion, is equally as colourless but backs an unpopular agenda. Dion wants to raise taxes in some form or another.

Canada is not in a green mood: Canadians want tax cuts, not a "green tax". As I write, BC is being clear-cut for lumber to sell to the States, and Hydroéléctrique du Québec is about to dam up 16 rivers near the Québec-Labrador border in order to sell the electricity to New York State (that is, if Québec has any leftover hydro to sell). As well, both Stephen Harper and George Bush are oil men and evangelical Christians: I don't think either one of those guys believe in global warming, unlike Elizabeth May and Stéphane Dion.

Really, Stéphane Dion should resign as leader of the Liberals, but who do the Liberals have as an alternative? Michael Ignatieff? Bob Rae? If Ignatieff or Rae had been suitable alternatives, I think one of them would have been able to head off Dion when the leadership position of the Liberal party opened up after Paul Martin retired from politics.

Do you want to know why the Liberals lost last Tuesday's election? Because they are out of touch. Yes, Stéphane Dion was right when he said to Stephen Harper, "It's the economy, Stephen."

However, the average Canadian voter understands that you can't blame the prime minister for things over which he has no control. The problem with blaming any Canadian prime minister for the economy in Canada is that politicians in every country of the world have lost control of their economies: the meltdown on Wall Street has spilled over into every country in the world, whether they like it or not.

The Dow Jones in New York and the TSX in Toronto have been doing a Texas Two-Step for nearly a fortnight now as they both crash to the dance floor together, and the Dow has been leading the dance.

Now let's look at the New Democrats. With Jack Layton daring to be photographed in suits that look like they would cost the average Canadian worker a week's salary, the NDP have shown that they know to handle spin as well as anybody in Canada, be it in politics or the entertainment industry. The problem is that Diamond Jack and his crowd are just as out of touch as the Liberals. The NDP government of Dalton McGuinty in Ontario has just announced that the province is $5 million Canadian in the red. (Wall Street is to blame, of course.) But don't worry: they say they're still going to hire all those nurses and teachers like they promised. They just don't know when they're going to be able to do it.

Socialism New Democrat-style is sort of like the Euro-Communist movement before the fall of the Berlin Wall. They behave as though they still think that socialism is the cause célèbre of the intellectual. They would like a dictatorship of the proletariat, but without any dictator; they want East Berlin without the Berlin Wall or the Stasi.

If there is any other politician in Canada as vainglorious as Diamond Jack Layton, that would be Gilles Duseppe in Québec. The BQ leader seems to think that he can still lead Québec out of the confederation, and he thinks that the way to do it is to court the gays and the lesbians by supporting gay marriage.

Of course, the working mums will still want their crèches to drop off the kiddies, but one of the by-products of the Quiet Revolution has been the emergence of a French-speaking bourgeoisie that hates taxes like the rest of the Canadian middle class. The Tories have risen from l'affaire Maxime Vernier smelling like a fleur-de-lis: they won about 30 per cent of the ridings in la belle province, whereas about 10 or 15 years ago, they didn't hold any seats.

Back in the 1990s, when Jean Chrétien was prime minister, the Canadian right was just as fragmented as the left. You had the Progressive Conservative Party, led by Joe Clark; the National Alliance, led by Stockwell Day; and the Reform Party, led by Preston Manning. Then, presto! The right-wing parties united to form the Conservative Party of Canada, with former Alliance member Stephen Harper as their leader. Canadian politics is never going to be the same again.

Now you would think that the left-wing parties would think that what's good enough for the goose could be good enough for the gander. Unfortunately, a merger is the farthest thing from the minds of Stéphane Dion and Jack Layton. The rank and file of the NDP (the steel workers and the auto workers, for example) would see a merger with the Grits as a hostile takeover by bourgeois French liberals from Québec. Why, Diamond Jack and all the other faux socialistes of the NDP would have to temper their socialism, and they're not about to do that when the Liberals have long ago written off western Canada in order to court the separatists in Québec. (By "western Canada", I mean "Canada west of the Ottawa River".)

As for Gilles Duseppe, the real aim of his party is to pull Québec out of Canada, and destroy the Liberals in Québec in the process. Maurice DuPlessis and his Union Nationale all but did that to the Conservatives in Québec in the 1940s and 1950s by providing conservative francophones with an alternative: a separatist but conservative party. (Of course, Brian Mulroney and Kim Campbell all but completed what DuPlessis had started, what with NAFTA and all.)

That's why Québec premier Jean Charest bolted from the Conservatives during the 1980s and joined the Liberals: you don't hitch your wagon to a horse that can't pull it. However, the Conservative resurgence has even reached Québec.

Since the Liberals and the New Democrats won't unite, all that observers of Canadian politics can do is wait and see which party will become irrelevant first. In the meantime, Stephen Harper and the Conservatives win.