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Pointing the political compass at New Canada

Edward Campbell

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Here is an interesting piece by Lawrence Martin from today’s (2 Dec 06) Globe And Mail, reproduced, as always, under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061201.comartin02/BNStory/specialComment/home
Once again, the Liberal compass fails to point west

LAWRENCE MARTIN

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Leadership races give political parties a grand opportunity to recast their image, modernize themselves and grab the future. The Liberals just had that opportunity — and let it slip away.

The country is moving west. The party remained east. It did nothing to change its image as a Central Canadian beast.

It had no leadership candidates born west of Manitoba. Western issues were largely overlooked. Quebec, as is customary, dominated the Liberal agenda.

No matter who wins the leadership crown today, he will be ill-equipped to make new geographic inroads. The Liberals are stuck on their old stereotype.

The party, former Grit cabinet minister John Manley said in an interview yesterday, has restricted itself to its base in the campaign. “And if you restrict yourself to your base, at some point your base will erode.”

What happened is dispiriting, observed Winnipeg's Lloyd Axworthy, a long-time Liberal pillar of strength west of Ontario. “The party's powerbrokers still reside in Toronto and Montreal and do their things in those two cities.”

In the United States, when the tides of power moved south and west, it changed the political dynamic, leaving the Democrats behind the times. The power and population shift in Canada could well do the same to the Liberals.

“I just finished doing speeches in Red Deer and Victoria,” Mr. Axworthy continued. “And people there were just sort of shaking their heads in dismay and saying we thought it [the Quebec obsession] was over. We wanted to get on with the economic drivers here in the West, where the country is moving. But no.”

At the convention, he said, “look who is speaking at the plenaries. There's a dearth of westerners. They are just not there.”

A backward way of thinking infuses the party. Liberals still seem to think Quebec is a big political prize — as it was in the Mulroney and Trudeau eras and before. In fact, it isn't. The Bloc Québécois has a base in Quebec that, as Mr. Manley was noting, guarantees the separatist party about half of the province's 75 seats. The Liberals and Conservatives divvy up the rest.

That means that British Columbia has about as much as Quebec to offer the Grits, as does Alberta, as does a combination of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The West, effectively, has three times as many winnable seats, and that number will grow with the next census.

“There are still many in Quebec and Ontario who don't get it,” said Alberta's Anne McLellan, the former deputy prime minister, as she strolled the convention halls. “There are still too many resentful of the fact that power is moving west.”

If you want to get Albertans talking about an issue that matters to them, she said, “talk about water and whether you would ever think of moving water from the northern basin to the southern basin. In fact, in this campaign, it hasn't been talked about much at all.”

Ms. McLellan contemplated entering the leadership race as a western voice but backed away because of her insufficient capacities in French. While understanding the importance of bilingualism, she was surprised at how big a role it played in the campaign, especially in regard to Gerard Kennedy. “It's gotten in the way of Gerard being able to get his ideas out. It was always about, ‘Well, you know, how come you're not fluently bilingual?' ”

In fact, Mr. Kennedy's French was not much worse than Stephan Harper's two or three years ago. With time, he could polish his skills to an efficient level. But many Liberals showed little inclination to give him that chance. The former Ontario cabinet minister is from Manitoba. He was unable to focus his campaign on the West, though he did well in the delegate count there because of continuing publicity arising out of the language issue.

After that language debate subsided, Liberals, being Liberals, then preoccupied themselves with nomenclature for la belle province, this time with the Quebec-as-nation debate.

The Prairies yawned. Issues more pertinent to them — infrastructure, guns and water — were set aside.

In his speech earlier in the week to the convention, Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told of his party campaigning hard in all 50 states instead of just concentrating on its strongholds. This is a message, said Mr. Manley, that the Liberals have to do a better job of applying to Canada.

Mr. Manley is correct. As confirmed by this leadership campaign, the Grits dwell too much in the Canada of old. They are geographically dated.

lmartin@globeandmail.com

Here is an excerpt from Jeffrey Simpson’s column (same paper and date):

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061202.wsimpson02/BNStory/National/home
… Whoever wins today's Liberal leadership must confront an alarming political fact: The party has been in slow, long-term decline.

Three consecutive wins by Jean Chrétien masked that reality. Since the early 1980s, however, the country's so-called natural governing party has struggled.
Liberals lost three times to the Conservatives, in 1984, 1988 and 2006. Even when winning, disturbing trends emerged.

Liberals ceased being the natural choice of Quebeckers, whose province had kept the party alive through good times and bad. They remained weak in most of Western Canada. Liberals dominated Ontario largely courtesy of the split on the political right.

Under Mr. Chrétien, the Liberals never captured more than 40 per cent of the national vote while winning their three majorities. They could not dislodge the Bloc Québécois from being Quebec's preferred federal party. Liberals were fortunate that the NDP remained weak under Audrey McLaughlin and Alexa McDonough.

Tomorrow morning, one of Michael Ignatieff, Bob Rae or Stéphane Dion will awake as leader to contemplate that decline. The Conservatives are in power. They are better financed and extremely motivated. The NDP is much better led under Jack Layton. The Bloc remains Quebec's preferred party. (In the Montreal-area by-election, the Liberal candidate finished fourth, even behind the NDP.) The arrival of the Greens on the national scene raises questions for every party.



New Democrats dream about the disappearance of the Liberal Party. Canada's Liberals must decline to marginality, they reason, just as Britain's Liberals did after the First World War. Then Canada will have a true two-party, left-right, system.

The NDP is wrong. The Liberals, in an essentially middle-class country where most issues do not revolve around traditional left-right cleavages, will not disappear. They are too strong to vanish but too weak to recover past glories.

The Martin Liberals were transfixed by winning votes from the NDP. They never believed that Canadians would elect a party led by Stephen Harper, whom they considered dour and ideological. They figured to grab three or four points from the NDP by big spending programs and large dollops of anti-American posturing …

The important thing to notice is the demographics driven political calculus.  So long a Québec remains a province in decline, as it is relative to all but a very few North American states, provinces and regions, and remains unwilling or unable to look inwards at the true cause of its failures then it will give the Bloc Québecois at least 35 seats – as a form of self denial.  That means, as Martin points out, that Québec is only ‘worth’ 40 seats, often fewer.  Both the Liberals and Conservatives need to understand this.  Mulroney was the last leader to sweep Québec – he may be the last ever.

The real seat distribution is, therefore:

• Atlantic Canada: 32 and remaining steady after redistribution resulting from the latest census

• Québec: 40 and remaining steady after redistribution resulting from the latest census

• Ontario: 106 and growing after redistribution resulting from the latest census

• Prairies + Terrs: 31 and remaining steady after redistribution resulting from the latest census

• Alberta: 28 and growing after redistribution resulting from the latest census

• BC: 36 and growing after redistribution resulting from the latest census

By 2025 Michael Bliss ”Old Canada/New Canada” model, based on a divide at the Ottawa River will have come true.  Political power will gravitate to those who understand and work with, not against, reality.  The new reality will be that Canada West (of the Ottawa River) will account for ¾ of the seats in a bigger (400 seat) parliament .  It will be possible, indeed fairly easy, to form a majority government without any Québec seats at all!  One will need to get just slightly more than  ½ of Atlantic Canada’s 30 seats and of Ontario’s 150 seats and ¾ of the 145 seats (31+50+64, at an unscientific guesstimate) West of Ontario.

Stevens also pointed out that ”Quebec is moving increasingly into a kind of associate status within Canada.”  This trend will, I hope and assume be accelerated, and not just for Québec, by Prime Minister Harper’s oft stated belief in further decentralization.  The cultural divide which pits Central Canada and, to a lesser degree, Urban Canada against rural and small town Canada and, especially Western Canada  will, likely, also diminish as provinces become more and more powerful and, consequently, more and more focused on their local politics and policies.  The institutional anti-Americanism which has served both the NDP and, especially, the Liberal so well for 40 years will be less and less relevant and, also consequentially, less and less of a vote getter

John Manley is right, as he so often is: The Liberal focus on Old Canada is wrong.  It will hurt the Party and, because the Liberal Party of Canada IS a vital national institution, it will hurt Canada – a 15 year stretch of Tory government is likely to be as bad as 15 year stretches of Liberal governments were.
 
The Liberal party did not seem at all interested in renewal during this convention, and while I respect Stephan Dion as a very smart person and accomplished politician, how much of this analysis is being taken in by him and his brain trust? The themes of the Liberal convention were all very old and well worn; Dion made little or no reference to any of the points noted in the above articles.

For that matter, unless I am very mistaken, this convention may mark the emergence of Justin Trudeau on the political scene. Despite the man's lack of accomplishment, he was treated by both the convention and MSM as royalty. If Dion is unable to secure a good showing in the next Federal election, look for Trudeau to be anointed in the next convention. While this might make the Liberals feel better, his lack of accomplishment would make him either a dangerous liability (the Michael Ignatieff factor) or a sock puppet for whoever or whatever runs the Liberal Party behind the curtain.

The Greens are probably the real wild card in all this. They combine the usual left wing ideology with the current fad of environmentalism, which given the results in London North Centre may be a potent combination against the Liberals and NDP. How the Greens factore into the shift in Canada's demographic and economic base is hard to fathom, they may do well in BC, but certainly not in Alberta. Ontario will be the big battleground for the Greens, but is BC + Ontario enough to form a government?
 
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.  My impression of this convention was of the elite getting together to decide how to dupe the unwashed masses.  The cost of attending alone negated the involvement of the grass roots.  The Liberals do not willing to grasp the discontent that is brewing over the power that certain interest groups wield in Ottawa, even though the success of the Reform party should have been a wake up call.  Mr Campbell is right when he points out that it is becoming a battle between urban and rural, at least here in Ontario.  Many of us who live in rural SW Ontario are sick of watching all the money flowing into urban centres while the small towns are economically strangled by government policies.
 
I'm realy looking forward to seeing how the new seats will be distributed in the HoC.  Gerrymandering will not help the Libs, the West is largely sky blue, through and through.

Lawrence Martin is bang on in his assessment.  The Liberals are fighting for Old Canada and will be out flanked and out gunned by the New Canada.
 
rmacqueen said:
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.  My impression of this convention was of the elite getting together to decide how to dupe the unwashed masses. 

Well it looked more to me like the grassroots of the party actually took the day. The vast majority of the old political whores were lined up solidly behind Rae and Iggy, Dion came up the middle with nothing more then a couple of thousand "average" people.
 
spud said:
Well it looked more to me like the grassroots of the party actually took the day. The vast majority of the old political whores were lined up solidly behind Rae and Iggy, Dion came up the middle with nothing more then a couple of thousand "average" people.
Average people who could afford to spend over $8000/person to attend.  To me, that is an elite
 
rmacqueen said:
Average people who could afford to spend over $8000/person to attend.  To me, that is an elite

You actually think it cost $8,000 per person to attend? That number is way off.
 
spud said:
You actually think it cost $8,000 per person to attend? That number is way off.
My apologies, it was a number I heard on the radio but after researching it I realized it is more like $3000, still more than your average person can afford to drop
 
It says alot about a party when they talk about the disadvantaged [poor people, aboriginals, women] yet I find that I couldn't even afford to take part in their convention based on my pay as a private.
 
Most of that money was spent on "special effects", vitually none of the delegates attended any of the policy sessions, while Liberal condoms and thongs were doing a brisk trade in the hall.

Maybe I am in the wrong political movement  ;D ;D ;D
 
I have to ask, were the 8 candidates that the Liberals brought forward the best they had to offer; I would suggest not. As an average Canadian I viewed the top four candidates as a failed former NDP premier, a self proclaimed american who hadn't lived in Canada for most of his adult life, a guy form Ontario I'd never heard of and a former cabinet minister (and french citizen) who served a corrupt and failed prime minister.  One would think that after nearly a year of party "renewal", the Liberals would at least be able to produce someone with some credibility, new ideas, broad appeal and who wasn't burdened by their past. Way to waste an opportunity losers...

 
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