Breaking up the logjam of Canadian politics
July 29, 2009
Jeffrey Simpson’s column in today’s Globe speaks of the four blocks in Canadian federal politics, and how they consign Canadians to minority governments for the forseeable future. The Conservatives hold the west and rural Ontario. The Liberals hold urban centres in Ontario, English-speaking Quebec, and the maritimes. The NDP pulls 15%. The Bloc controls Quebec. Simpson does not mention the Green Party in his analysis.
When speaking to veteran political observer and Leeds and Grenville Liberal nomination candidate Marjory Loveys this week I formed the impression that she is well aware of this logjam, but an interesting impression emerged from the discussion:
The philosophical differences between the NDP and the Liberals are certainly no wider than those of the Reform party and the Progressive Conservatives. When’s the last time the NDP tried to nationalize a bank? Oh wait: the Republicans did that. And Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party of Canada has practically nationalized the auto industry. Uh… so what’s keeping the Liberals and the NDP from forming a coalition of the left to balance the CPC? And the Green Party doesn’t fit anywhere on the political spectrum. It’s a trend, a fashionable place to park a protest vote. If the Liberal/NDP get a platform together and involve the Green trendites, a majority may well be within reach.
Don’t count the Left wing out just yet.
A response to Neil Reynolds
July 22, 2009
Neil Reynolds’ review of Michael Ignatieff’s speech last week in his column (The Globe and Mail, July 22, 2009) demanded a comment. While I greatly admired Mr. Reynolds during his days as editor of The Kingston Whig Standard and even later as the founder of the Libertarian Party of Canada, I fear this review showed a careless reading of the subject and sloppy thought.
Mr. Reynolds: You seem to be reviewing the speech you wish he had given, rather than the one he did. I’m wondering how carefully you read the thing, frankly, for while bashing away for what the Liberal leader failed to say or said badly, you seem inadvertently to end up supporting Ignatieff’s main point in this carefully-veiled jab at his chief opponent: within the traditions of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, Michael Ignatieff is a better conservative than Stephen Harper.
Zeke, again
July 21, 2009
Tony and I were standing in the yard today looking down over the field where Bill Barrett was raking hay. Hovering high above the tractor and poised to strike was a large, brown hawk. The only bird I know that can hover like that is Zeke, the red-tailed hawk who grew up in the woodlot. For some reason Zeke’s favourite method of hunting involves following a vehicle moving around a field.
Zeke’s back for his third haying season and he seems less bothered by blackbirds than before. Today he pretty much ignored the redwing which was swooping around him. I guess he had mice on his mind.
Later in the day I spoke to Bill’s wife, Lynn, and she mentioned that Bill had reported at lunch that he “had help in the field today”: Zeke was keeping a close eye on things.
Fight or flight: a note from the old house
July 21, 2009
The new “Conservative”
July 21, 2009
James Travers’s column in today’s Toronto Star bemoans the loss of civility in parliament, laying the blame squarely at the feet of Stephen Harper and the CPC. I keep thinking of Swift’s Liliputians when I watch Harper at work. Here’s a rope-balancer who isn’t very good at it. He keeps letting someone else have the centre and then has to squawk and flap his arms like crazy to keep from falling, first to the left and then to the right. Ignatieff has planted himself more or less in the centre, so the increasingly strident Harper has to struggle on the margins.
Then Stephen Chase of the Globe and Mail has an article on Harper’s announcement that the deficit will continue if growth does not eliminate it, even if it takes ten years, as most economists predict, to get over the current $17 billion/year drain (July 21, Ottawa likely stuck with deficits for a decade: economist).
Funny, when Bob Rae ran a deficit like that in Ontario back in the nineties, he became a pariah, labelled variously a communist, an idiot, a fool, a traitor to his class. Most tellingly, public employees revised the calendar to include the Rae-day, an ironic tribute to his leadership, and the NDP has never recovered.
So when a man leading a party which attempts to call itself “Conservative” adopts the same strategy, do these labels no longer apply? To be a “Conservative” do you have to act like George Bush and ignore the facts, using reckless spending and relentless tax cuts to shore up personal popularity until the country is bankrupt?
Where I grew up a conservative spent what he earned and saved a bit for tomorrow. He shared with his neighbours and cared for the needy. He had no thought of helping a few friends get rich so he could eat at their tables later. Not everybody agreed with the conservative, but they respected him.
Moving Day!
July 18, 2009
We just finished the first meal in or new/old home. We hauled furniture all day and set it up. Charlie and Roz and Mom joined us.
As soon as Charlie hooked up the living room T.V. the bickerring started over the satelite t.v. feed. Oh, well. The floors are nice and the old furniture looks pretty good in the new rooms.
As of now the house in Smiths Falls becomes a construction zone until we list it for sale. Plumbing and wiring to do.
Can Ignatieff use George Grant to gain Tory cred?
July 14, 2009
George Grant still carries some weight with my generation of Canadians. His pessimism ignited our nationalism; his acceptance of the inevitability of American domination left us determined to prove the prophet wrong. But the stimulus and the passion came from Lament For a Nation.
In True Patriot Love Michael Ignatieff uses Grant to establish his Conservative chops. Last week in London he served notice in the Berlin Lecture that the CPC is no legitimate heir to the support of Progressive Conservative voters. He stated in his lecture that Progressive Conservative leaders subscribed to a liberal-democratic tradition very like that of the Liberal Party of Canada. He’s not wrong in this.
Then Tom Flanagan wrote the think-piece in the Globe accusing Liberals of squealing like little girls over a few attack ads, and Harper found himself inadvertently tarred with the Republican brush. All of the sudden Uncle George starts to look pretty good to us wannabe Canadian nationalists, and Harper’s made-in-America politics doesn’t look Conservative at all.
Book Review: True Patriot Love. Michael Ignatieff
July 13, 2009
This week I ran into an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail by Tom Flanagan, expatriate American, University of Calgary professor and former Conservative campaign manager. Flanagan’s thesis in the article is that “Liberals are whining like sissy girls” over CPC attack ads when the ads in question are no worse than some of their own. This is what passes in Canada today for political discourse: our campaign is no more disgusting than yours, and the only reason you whine is because Obama got away with it when he conned the media and muzzled McCain.
What I find distressing about Flanagan’s argument is the way he assumes that this is the only way that politics and government can operate. He likens an election to a game of football, all tactics and force.
Whatever happened to ideas? To pride in one’s country? Is there no place for optimism in politics today?
In desperation I turned to True Patriot Love: Four Generations in Search of Canada. Michael Ignatieff builds his narrative of the Grant family around a few vivid mental pictures. The first is of his great-grandfather George Monro Grant galloping across the prairie with Sanford Fleming to chart a route for the new railroad. The account pieced together from Grant’s own journals is an entertaining read and an interesting look at a Victorian adventure.
The next most vivid picture is one of thousands of Canadian high school students, their teachers and veterans swarming over Vimy Ridge at the 90th anniversary of the Battle in April of 2007. William Grant’s myth of Canada as a community of sacrifice came to fruition with the hordes of young Canadians who came to the shrine to learn about and celebrate the heroic young men and women who with their lives enabled Canada to emerge as a nation.
A sadder image is that of the bombed-out shelter in London where a young Rhodes scholar, George Grant, lost his optimism and turned forever against the war machine which could view the bombing of Hiroshima as a reasonable tactic.
A final, poignant image shows Ignatieff and his wife retracing his great-grandfather’s path and finding the railway spike George and Sanford Fleming drove into a giant pine along a river bank just outside Jasper, 128 years before.
The Grant dynasty wrote the myths which have made Canada.
George Monro Grant set out with Sanford Fleming to map the new railway line across the continent, but his real impact was through his lectures and publications in which he sold Canadians on how the railroad would extend the British Empire to the Pacific and elevate Canada far above lowly colonial status before King and Empire.
For King and country, William Lawson Grant led a generation of young men to war in 1914 with his pamphlets, his recruiting efforts, and his personal leadership in training camps and at the Somme. Later in his career he shaped the study of Canadian history with his textbooks, his educational leadership, and his unending devotion to the memory of those who gave their lives that Canada might emerge as a nation.
Seared by his experiences as an air raid warden during the Battle of Britain in London, George Grant revolted against the prospect of American nuclear weapons on Canadian soil with the pamphlet Lament for a Nation. Grant created the myth of the inevitable colonization of Canada by American economic and cultural interests. Inflamed by his defeatism, my generation mobilized against it, and over the ensuing fifty years we have proven the prophet wrong.
And now it is up to Michael Ignatieff, the fourth in the Grant line, to forge a new myth of Canada, a myth which gives purpose and connection to the many diverse points of view of Canadians. For the need is immediate. As Ignatieff says in the first chapter, “The lives we live alone do not make sense to us unless we share some public dimension with others. We need a public life in common, some set of reference points and allegiances to give us a way to relate to the strangers among whom we live. Without this feeling of belonging, if only imagined, we would live in fear and dread of each other.”
What we need to take Canada into the future is a new and better myth to give us hope and meaning, and to galvanize Canadians into patriotic action on behalf of our country. If Stephen Harper wants to compete with Michael Ignatieff in the next election, let him find his own myth to inspire Canadians, not look to the divisive and mechanical tactics of the Republican Party to the south.
the Walnut Diary 