Image via People’s Party of Canada.

All the political parties in Parliament at dissolution could see 2021 as the Groundhog Day election, from the movie in which Bill Murray is fated to relive the same day over and over. The Prime Minister called an election that nobody wanted, in which everyone lost and all the parties ended up pretty well where they started.

Easy to miss in this static situation were signs of ground shifting on the Right. Erin O’Toole led the Conservatives to two fewer seats than in 2019, but a more significant development was his effort to move his party toward the more moderate centre-right, especially by embracing carbon pricing to combat climate change (anathema in 2019) and hinting at a more egalitarian postpandemic economic recovery. Intelligent Conservatives are well aware that his strategy of tacking toward the centre is the only viable way forward if Conservatives are to have a future in a country where two thirds or so of voters do not share or identify with enough core conservative values to make the party consistently competitive. The problem for O’Toole was that the hard right continually pulled him back from moving far enough to the centre. On gun control and the vaccination mandate, O’Toole was forced into flip-flopping and evasion. This added to the aura of inauthenticity that already attached to his image stemming from his cultivation of the right wing to win the leadership followed by his policy volte face after taking over.

In the postelection period, the recalcitrant and unrepentant Right poses a continuing threat to O’Toole’s leadership and to the centre-right strategy. Stephen Harper built a rock-solid core base for the Conservative Party – united, it could outperform a much larger centre-left that was split four ways. In the face of Justin Trudeau’s quasi-unification of the centre-left under the Liberal banner in 2015, the Conservatives doubled down on their base and its peculiar obsessions, which served only to drive centre-left voters further into the arms of the Liberals.

The Conservative base survived intact through Andrew Scheer’s term as leader. However, under stress following the 2021 election, the possibility of its splintering rightward can no longer be ruled out. This leads to the one new development coming out of an election in which little changed at all.

The weirdest thing of all about the 2021 election is that if the five parties with seats in Parliament were all marginal losers or at best at a standstill, the one party that failed to elect anyone might be seen as a kind of winner. Maxime (Mad Max) Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada (PPC) put up a slate of candidates across the country, and despite being excluded from the leaders’ debates broke through to near 5 per cent of the national vote, while managing to assert its presence at the centre of political controversy. The PPC represents the only new element in the 2021 mix. Its initial run in 2019 yielded little sign of sustainability, but two years on it has demonstrated at least the potential to become a permanent fixture, as opposed to a brief spark soon to fizzle out.

The future of Bernier’s party is an important question, given the unprecedented infusion of Trumpian-style far-right populism into a Canadian political scene that has been exceptional for the relative absence of illiberal and authoritarian movements. Take for instance the virulently racist anti-immigrant thinking introduced by the rise of neofascist parties in Europe or by the premptive conversion of existing conservative parties like the Republicans to aggressive anti-immigrant policies. Neither has occurred in Canada, yet. Now we have the PPC seizing the opportunity. If it becomes a permanent presence in our politics, Canadian exceptionalism will have ceased.

When do third parties survive?

Looking at the history of the rise and persistence of third parties in Canada offers some clues as to the PPC’s staying power. We now have a full century of third parties challenging the Liberal-Conservative duopoly at the federal level. In 1921 the Progressive Party displaced the Conservatives as the second largest grouping in the House, but it disappeared by the end of the decade. In the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, a number of new parties appeared, two of which were to survive: the social democratic CCF, which lives on today as the NDP; and the right-wing populist Social Credit, which carried on for decades, disappeared, and was then reborn in the Reform / Canadian Alliance, which subsequently took over the Progressive Conservative remnants and transformed itself into one of the two dominant parties. At the same time that Reform was rising in the west, the Bloc Québécois arose in Quebec, where its core base continues down to today. More recently yet, the Greens have appeared as a fringe party.

Over the past century, there were other new parties that tried and failed to catch hold. Will the PPC be enduring or ephemeral? One way of answering this question is to examine what the relatively successful third parties have had in common.

First, each of them has presented at its inception a more programmatic, ideological vision than the pragmatic brokerage catch-all duopoly parties. Crucially, the ideological program these parties wished to represent was inadequately represented by the duopoly parties – there was an underexploited political space open. Over time the new party’s ideological distinctiveness may fade but the party persists even on a reduced difference scale or finds more mundane grounds for survival. The BQ has morphed from the aggressively sovereigntist party of 1993 to the parochial pork-barrel Quebec First party of today, while still offering a home to the dwindling band of true believers in sovereignty. The NDP has become much more a political party than the social movement the CCF once was, but it is also home to recurrent attempts at radicalization, from the Waffle of the 1970s to the Leap Manifesto of today. The important point is that at their inception these parties caught a strong enough wave of public discontent to build a lasting presence.

In this context, the PPC case is ambiguous. There is no doubt about its ideology: neoliberal economics (echoing the libertarian lines that Bernier as a Tory minister often invoked); anti-elitist cultural resentment of perceived favouring of immigrants, ethnic and racial minorities, feminists and LGTBQ persons; authoritarian ordering and the invocation of violence and intimidation against opponents as legitimate weapons to restore the rule of the “People” defined in an exclusionary manner. In short, very much a Canadian version of Trumpism. As such it might be seen as having roots in an underexploited political space that has only sporadically and hesitantly attracted the attention of the Conservative Party in the past.

This space existed in the 2019 election, yet the PPC went nowhere. Why did it ignite a small conflagration on the far right of the spectrum in 2021? The very specific conditions of the late pandemic period certainly played a role. The nerves and patience of ordinary people have been stretched further than ever before by state regulation of their behaviour and the imposition of strict rules like mask mandates, quarantine periods and limitations on public gatherings, with promise of victory over the virus and a return to normality receding in the face of the Fourth Wave. The anti-vaccination movement, already well established prior to the pandemic, has now joined forces with the libertarian fringe, the climate change deniers, the enemies of science and the Q-Anon-type conspiracy theorists to form a virulent rabble of dissidents ready to be mobilized for mischief.

Cue Maxime Bernier who, Trump-like, dropped all pretence of civility and respect for the rule of law and turned to inflammatory incitement of the hotheads. The kind of publicity generated by PPCers throwing gravel at the Prime Minister, while others held posters depicting Trudeau being strung up for execution, might disgust mainstream opinion. But this publicity was pure gold for a new party seeking to bring attention to itself among the angry, violence-prone mobs it was seeking to mobilize politically.

Even this might not have been enough to push its national vote to 5 per cent except for another fortuitous factor: Erin O’Toole’s decision to try to move the Conservative Party back to the centre-right once occupied by the old Progressive Conservative Party but abandoned by Harper and his harder-line Reform faction. Resentment at this ideological moderation may well have hived off enough fringe Conservative supporters to actually defeat a few Conservative candidates in close contests, although it did not add up to any actual PPC wins.

The key question is whether this volatile brew whipped up in 2021 is a lasting part of the political culture, in which case the PPC might well have a longer shelf life than most observers have accorded it, or a momentary one-off reaction to the current crisis configuration, in which case it will be quickly forgotten.

The voting system dimension

There is another condition for successfully launching a third party in Canada that cuts across these other variables. The first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system imposes one stringent survival demand on hopeful new parties. Every new party that has outlived its inception has done so on the basis of establishing a regional base or bases of concentrated support where popular votes can actually be translated into seats, as opposed to being lost by being diffused across the country. Social Credit and its Reform successor were rooted in Alberta (and briefly and weirdly in rural Quebec in the early 1960s), the CCF in Saskatchewan, the BQ in Quebec. The Greens, with support a mile wide and an inch deep, would have struggled to gain a foothold were it not for their success in establishing a small base on Vancouver Island, generating a handful of MPs and MLAs in British Columbia.

The PPC has no real regional base but looks like a model of a party with a small number of votes diffused across too many constituencies to add up to a single elected member. Twice it has failed to elect its would-be charismatic leader in his former constituency, where he once had a formidable personal following as a Conservative. If the PPC is to survive, it has to find an effective regional base, but it’s not obvious what that might be. Even a deeply alienated Alberta and Saskatchewan could turn instead to a western separatist party.

The rise of Donald Trump shows an alternative path to success for an insurgent force, although less suited to the Canadian than to the American situation in which the two-party system is more porous and absorptive and more embedded than the Canadian duopoly. Third parties have never become a permanent part of the national political system in the United States. Donald Trump, instead of running as a third-party disrupter, fastened parasite-like onto the Republican Party as host, and used it to gain national office while seizing control of the party apparatus, a control outlasting his defeat in 2020.

The takeover of the Progressive Conservatives by the Reform / Canadian Alliance followed this path, but it was only possible after Reform had far surpassed the PCs in House seats, winning 52 seats in the 1993 election while the PCs were reduced to a derisory two MPs, and retaining its advantage in subsequent elections. The PPC is hardly in a comparable position relative to today’s Conservatives. The only real possibility here would be if O’Toole were to be ejected as Conservative leader by the party’s right wing, which would then invite the PPC into a more extreme hard-line Conservative Party. But this would constitute the absorption of the PPC by the Conservatives rather than a PPC takeover. It might also signal serious trouble for the Conservative Party, as O’Toole’s “leftward” tack was no more than a recognition that the hard right was out of touch with the mainstream. The inclusion of the unruly rabble-rousing PPCers would only add to the extremist odium.

On the other hand, if O’Toole survives internal challenges to his leadership and is able to steer the Conservative ship to the centre-right while successfully discouraging enough CPC breakaways to avoid serious vote-splitting on the right, then the PPC’s sudden rise in 2021 may be bookended by its equally quick demise by the time of the next election.

If a PPC takeover of the Conservative Party lacks plausibility, so do PPC prospects for life as a permanent third-party presence in the Canadian system. Only in the event of an unending pandemic crisis, with all the chaos and upheaval that implies, can one discern a likely afterlife for Bernier’s dissidents.

These prognostications on the PPC’s future have all been based on the existing FPTP voting system. The production of yet another minority Parliament in 2021 – the fifth minority in the past seven elections and the 11th in the 22 elections since 1957 – has once again stirred critical voices calling for a more proportional system of representation. The steadily declining proportion of the total vote captured by the old-party duopoly offers further evidence that a traditional justification of FPTP – that it produces viable majority governments – has clearly failed. Worse, the parliamentary process is structured around the idea that governments will normally command a single-party majority, making minority Parliaments volatile and unstable. They rarely last more than two years before a government suffers defeat or Parliament is dissolved by a prime minister seeking – and often failing, as Justin Trudeau failed this time – to secure a majority.

Interestingly, while Trudeau notoriously broke his promise that 2015 would be last election carried out under FPTP, he threw out the possibility of a renewed vote reform effort on the 2021 campaign trail. While this was rightly received with much cynicism, Trudeau may have been alluding to a possible precondition for gaining NDP support in another minority.

If PR supporters have been reinvigorated, supporters of the FPTP status quo have pounced on the rise of the PPC as yet another argument against any voting innovation. PR backers are being warned, or scolded, that they would be opening the door to extremist parties. The rise of the far-right AfD in Germany is cited, as well as the parliamentary presence of other extremist parties in European PR systems.

It is a valid question for PR proponents. Extreme radical parties are more likely to find a foothold in PR systems, even when cutoff thresholds like the German threshold of 5 per cent of the national vote are imposed (the PPC might have passed this threshold if PR had been in effect in 2021). Is it a good or bad thing to allow a parliamentary platform for parties that spread racial hatred and democratic distrust, and have little or no respect for constitutional norms? Is it more democratic to allow representation of even repugnant views than to exacerbate feelings among marginalized voters that they are are being silenced and ignored, which may only inflame their potentially violent alienation? This is worth a debate in itself, and there is no time to enter it here. But if electoral reform is raised again, the PPC question will loom large.

There is a final irony in the 2021 electoral debacle. Just when a consensus seemed to be forming across party lines around the central issue that divided parties in 2019 – the carbon tax and climate policy – and with it a common front on the most serious issue facing the country postpandemic, the prospect of a reckless new radical party directly challenging civility, trust and respect for due process and the rule of law might seriously disrupt the entire system. as Trump did to such devastating and apparently lasting effect in the United States. We are by no means there yet and hopefully never will be. But even a small dark cloud on the horizon that will not dissipate is worrying enough.

For more on the 2021 Canadian election, click to read The East is (Still Mostly) Red, by Patrick Webber. And for the rest of our Inroads 50 elections coverage, check out Elections Bring Change (Except in Canada).

Photo by Adam Jones/Global Photo Archive CC-BY-SA 2.0

In late September, the Liberal government delivered a throne speech outlining plans for economic recovery from the pandemic. Predictably, the official opposition decried the inadequacies of the government’s plans and signalled its intention to vote against the speech at its first opportunity. The Conservatives were joined by their provincial partisan counterparts in Alberta and Saskatchewan, all three pointing to shameful neglect of the oil and gas industry as the main failing of the federal government’s recovery plan.

A minority government could fall over a defeated throne speech, so attention shifted to the NDP. Although in broad agreement, the New Democrats discerned two major drawbacks in the Liberal plan: less money per week ($400) in the successor to the Canada Emergency Response Benefit than in the original ($500), and inadequate federal assistance for sick pay. They hinted they might even vote against the speech.

No worries: the very next day the Liberals announced they were accommodating the two NDP demands. The NDP indicated support for the throne speech, but reiterated that Liberals never do anything progressive without being pushed by the NDP.

The Alberta and Saskatchewan premiers continued muttering about Ottawa encouraging western separatism. In the National Post, John Ivison discerned a dark secret unfolding: a centre-left Liberal-NDP alliance threatening to take control of Canada. A failed candidate in the recent Conservative leadership contest wrote in the same paper that she had discerned a “socialist coup” underway at Justin Trudeau’s direction, one that relied not on force of arms but on the redistributive tax system.

The Liberals presented the most ambiguous face: were they really socialist zealots out to remake the country? Or were they reactionaries led into captivity by the NDP?

The Liberal Party of the last century was resolutely centrist in an age when catch-all brokerage parties, as opposed to programmatic parties, tended to be dominant. Political marketing in the pre-internet era favoured broad appeals to as wide a group of potential supporters as could be feasibly targeted. The old Liberals were masters at responding to shifts in public opinion from whatever direction. Were they facing the old Liberal Party, the NDP could justifiably fear that their partners in the de facto alliance might bolt to the right at the first opportunity. Now this fear would be misguided, but not because the Liberals have undergone conversion into a principled party of the left. The Liberals have adapted to a new age in political marketing by becoming a different kind of party, one that opportunistically recognizes the left of centre as more attractive than the right of centre for hunting Liberal votes.

The Liberals weren’t the only centrist brokerage party. Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives formed a broad centrist government in the late 1980s. But the PCs were virtually wiped off the electoral map in 1993, losing the West to the hard-right Reform Party and Quebec to the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois – two programmatic parties.

It’s largely a matter of political marketing in the new media age. In the past, party platforms were directed like aerial bombing in World War II: fly over the general area, open the bomb bays, and hope for the best. Broad centrist appeals to be all things to all people seemed the best approach to voters. However, new information technologies have enabled marketing that resembles the computer-guided precision targeting of missiles in contemporary warfare, with party advertising no longer designed to be all things to all people, but instead particular things to particular people.

The dirty secret of this political marketing is that it plays on divisions. When appeals can be calibrated to particular targeted groups, what one group gains, others lose. Successful party brands are as much defined by who are against it as by who are for it. “Our enemies are your enemies” is the implicit message to carefully targeted supporters. One result: across the Western world, what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., long ago dubbed the “Vital Centre” has been eroding. The fierce implacable tribalism of American politics marks the apex, or nadir, of this trend, but similar signs can be found elsewhere.

When the Conservative Party of Canada was born out of a hostile takeover of the remnant of the PCs by the Reform/Canadian Alliance in 2003, the new party staked out a more sharply defined centre-right position. The Harper governments (2006–15) established a near monopoly of the centre-right for the Conservative brand, for the most part displacing inroads the Liberals had made over the years among more conservative voters.

Though partisan divisions have never attained the brutally divisive levels of recent American politics, the rock-hard solidity of centre-right support for the Conservatives since Harper has been remarkable and has formed one of two broad clusters of political opinion. It appears to be diverging, at an accelerating rate, from the other cluster, which is moderately centre-left. The two clusters are not equally balanced. Public opinion research regularly shows the centre-left to represent about two thirds while the centre-right represents about one third of voters.

This imbalance has less political impact than might be expected, since the smaller centre-right is united behind the Conservative Party, yielding it political reach and seats beyond its base. This advantage is magnified by the fact that the centre-left is split among four parties: Liberal, NDP, BQ and Green. On a range of issues and values, supporters of these parties tend to be indistinguishable from one another, even as they maintain fierce partisan rivalry. True, BQ supporters are out of step with the rest of the centre-left on Quebec sovereignty, but differences tend to stop there. One particularly interesting survey compared Quebec sovereigntists to western separatists. The westerners were way to the right of mainstream opinion on a wide range of issues, while the Quebecers, except on the one issue of Quebec sovereignty, were situated squarely in the Canadian mainstream.

The partisan implications of the centre-left/centre-right distribution are further distorted by the regional distribution, starkly evident in the 2019 election results. The centre-right cluster is not only concentrated behind the Conservative Party but is regionally skewed. In Alberta the Conservatives swept 33 of 34 seats with a towering 69 per cent of the popular vote; in Saskatchewan the haul was all 14 seats on the basis of 65 per cent of the vote. This helped produce a Conservative popular vote plurality of 34 per cent in the country but a shortfall in seats, given all their “wasted” votes on the prairies.

It was also apparent, even before the results were in, that the only way Andrew Scheer could have become prime minister was with an outright majority of seats. None of the other parties could have countenanced supporting a Tory minority, except at the cost of alienating their own voters. The reason for this is the yawning policy divide between the Conservatives and all the other parties over the crucial issue of the environment versus economic development (for the latter, read pipelines and oil sands exports). Analysis of the centre-right/centre-left opinion clusters shows that a dramatic acceleration of differences over the past decade has been over this very issue. Centre-right voters increasingly privilege development of oil and gas and constructing pipelines over protection of the environment, while centre-left voters increasingly place the need to combat climate change ahead of further fossil fuel development. Pro–fossil fuel views are concentrated not only in partisan terms within the ranks of Conservative voters but also regionally in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

When the Conservatives made opposition to a national carbon tax the centrepiece of their 2019 campaign, they set in motion potent symbolic politics that were interpreted in diametrically opposite ways. For Conservatives, it seemed to be a case of saving the Canadian economy from environmental radicals out to tear it down. For the centre-left parties, it looked like saving the environment from climate change deniers. Exaggerations on both sides, no doubt, but the raw psychology of symbolic politics goes a long way toward explaining the predicament of a Tory party shut out of power in Parliament, as well as Alberta and Saskatchewan threatening western separation.

Andrew Scheer has departed but his successor, Erin O’Toole, owes a great deal of his successful leadership campaign to early intervention on his behalf by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney. Nor has O’Toole forgotten this. Since taking over the party reins, he has persistently raised western alienation as the most pressing problem facing the federal government, demanding major concessions from an “anti-western” Liberal government. The Conservatives continue to campaign against the carbon tax, in the courts and on the hustings, as if this were their signature brand.

The federal Conservative alliance with Alberta and Saskatchewan faces greater problems than being temporarily shut out of Ottawa. Not only has the pandemic brought the oil and gas industry close to disaster territory, but the place of fossil fuels in the post-pandemic economy is also in serious question. Major investors, state and private, have begun pulling out of fossil fuels, and oil and gas giants like BP, Shell and Total are joining the flight, shifting to greener alternatives to avoid being left holding stranded assets as the world’s leading economies set net zero-emission standards for the next decades.

The Liberals, in what may well prove their last effort at an old-fashioned centrist compromise, used billions in tax dollars to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline from the Texas owners who were bailing out. If they imagined this would bring any gratitude and political benefit to the Trudeau government, they were badly mistaken. Liberal political standing in Alberta could not be any worse if they had simply left Trans Mountain to die on the market. On the other hand, they have lost serious credit with environmentalists. Yet plans for guiding economic recovery by encouraging Alberta to shift its petro-economy to greener alternatives are angrily rejected as Ottawa interference, as Kenney doubles down on his oil sands cargo cult.

The centre does not hold.

There are a few cracks in the Conservative façade. Under pandemic pressure, Ontario Premier Doug Ford has become an enthusiastic booster for the federal Liberals, and has let it be known that in a future federal election he has no intention of supporting the federal Conservatives. In 2019, the federal Tories shut down Ford, judging him a liability, but invited Jason Kenney to campaign in Ontario for Andrew Scheer, so this may simply be payback time for Ford. For his part, the new Tory leader O’Toole has been quick to criticize Ontario’s handling of the pandemic recovery, contrasting it unfavourably with Kenney’s Alberta. Personal politics aside, Ford’s doubts about a united Conservative front may reflect a dawning recognition that the manufacturing heartland of Ontario has interests that diverge from the western petro-economy. Significantly, two major auto companies, Chrysler-Fiat and Ford, have announced plans to convert Ontario plants to manufacture of electric and hybrid vehicles.

From another direction, the Conservatives face a threat from the far right in the form of the “western” (read Alberta/Saskatchewan) separatist movement, now taking form as a political party under the leadership of former Conservative MP Jay Hill and calling itself the Maverick Party. If Kenney fails to gain major concessions from Ottawa or, less likely, if he compromises what separatists consider core western interests, the Mavericks just might cut into the Tory support base enough to render serious damage.

Over on the government side in Ottawa, it does seem most likely that the Liberals will continue to tack to the left on purely practical, opportunistic grounds if nothing else. Some may advocate further grand compromises with the petro-economy along the lines of the pipeline purchase, although with the forced departure of Bill Morneau, those Bay Street voices may have grown fainter. Smart hunters go where the ducks are, and there are precious few ducks for the Liberals on the right. On the other hand, the Liberals face the daily challenge of competition from their left in a fractured left-centre. The dangers are exacerbated by the first-past-the-post system. The more ground the Liberals concede to the NDP, BQ and Greens, the more likely it becomes that a regionally based Tory minority, if it can seal the cracks in its own base, might just slip back into majority government.

The political landscape for the post-pandemic recovery is daunting, with frustrating policy gridlock one potential outcome. Given the hard realities of the current political configuration, Liberal leadership of the centre-left toward a socially responsible and more equitable green recovery might seem the best hope. As partisans, the NDP, BQ and Greens will be unhappy about this, but in terms of advancing the interests of their progressive supporters, it may just be the most practical way forward.

In March 2020 Canada and the world, like Alice, stepped through a looking glass and into another dimension, a world so strange and unprecedented that no one could find a historical analogy that did not break down on closer examination. There was the plague that devasted ancient Athens during the Peloponnesian War in 430 BCE; the Black Death of the 1340s that killed perhaps 60 per cent of the European population; and the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918–19 that may have killed 50 million people, more than perished during the preceding First World War. None really resembles the particular challenge of COVID-19 or provides templates for responses.

There were famous chroniclers of such past catastrophes, from Thucydides to Boccaccio to Dafoe to Camus, yet none seemed to speak from their experience to the utterly unique situation of an entire world going into voluntary or involuntary lockdown, deliberately shutting much normal economic activity; nor to a bizarre realm in which from one day to the next governments could transform from near-silent shareholders in a globalized corporate enterprise to Leviathan states instantly funding and taking command of a private sector that, for the most part, had been regulated not by government but by the market.

Like Yeats after the Easter Rising of 1916, pundits sententiously declared, “All changed, changed utterly.” Perhaps; perhaps not. There are, however, some things that should change after this searing experience.

Trump and Brexit populism rode a wave of suspicion of science and expertise. Remember Michael Gove dismissing ironclad arguments of economists about havoc in the wake of Brexit: we “have had enough of experts”? Now life and death literally hang on the expertise of scientists and health professionals. Surely this renewed trust in expertise should carry over into the post-COVID world. Surely climate change deniers will give way to the professional opinion of the scientific community that the world is heading for catastrophe if we do not get to net-zero carbon emissions.

For years we have heard tireless reiterations of the neoliberal theme that government is the problem, not the solution; that private enterprise does everything better than bureaucrats; and that deregulation and marketization are the keys to good public policy. Depredations on the tax base by the rich create a hollowed-out state, which is then pointed to as evidence of public sector incompetence.

And then comes the plague. Suddenly everyone – corporations, unions, big and small business, workers, rich, poor – rush to the comforting arms of the state. And the state, astonishingly to those who believed the antigovernment rhetoric, delivers quickly and effectively. Ottawa rolled out massive relief programs of unprecedented complexity and had money flowing into people’s bank accounts within days. When coverage gaps were pointed out, adjustments were made: the public service could be not only efficient but resilient in the face of overarching crisis, even when bureaucrats had to work from home. Surely the performance of the state, matched against the manifest incapacity of the unassisted private sector to cope, should be a salutary lesson to free market evangelists.

Neoliberalism went hand in hand with unchecked globalization. This COVID crisis has brought home the danger posed by extended global supply chains and “just in time” delivery. Globalization had led to concentration of food production and delivery in a small number of multinational conglomerates with resulting dependence on food imports, and now a crisis in Canadian food security. Surely the post-COVID era should see serious efforts at shortening critical supply chains, ensuring adequate inventories of crucial products and refocusing on local food production.

Neoliberalism had notoriously encouraged greater inequality, with the corporate elites paying themselves multimillion-dollar “earnings” and “performance bonuses” while a state starved of resources cut back and privatized social services, providing derisory wages and employment conditions for those who work in the service sector. The COVID crisis highlighted the crucial and heroically self-sacrificing role of health care workers who put their own lives on the line daily in defence of the public.

In Quebec and Ontario in particular, it also shone a harsh spotlight on the shockingly substandard conditions in long-term care facilities, many run for profit, where COVID raged out of control. Seniors are most at risk from the virus, but the ghastly contagion and death rate could have been prevented had conditions not been as Dickensian. Surely the future should see a redistribution of resources to reflect decent remuneration and working conditions for those whose services truly are essential. Surely we should see proper public funding for essential social services like seniors’ care, decoupling of these services from the for-profit sector and an end to simply warehousing the elderly who cannot afford premium care.

Politics in liberal democracies have increasingly in recent years been characterized by relentless partisanship; by the “permanent campaign”; by the commodification of politics and the reduction of citizens to consumers; by the active fostering by politicians and partisan media of social distrust and incivility and aggression in public debate. The COVID crisis has highlighted in ways not seen since wartime that Margaret Thatcher was never so wrong as when she notoriously declared that “there’s no such thing as society.” Surely this crisis will have brought home that there is a collective good that transcends individual self-interest, that people will rise to the challenge of doing their best to help their fellow citizens in adversity, and that partisan politics as usual must change to reflect a greater sense of common purpose, uniting rather than dividing people.

Surely and should do not connote certainty, however. There is nothing assured about the way Canada will come out of this crisis.

We need only look south of the border to see how lessons may not be learned. Divisive populism and destructive neoliberalism continue apace in the United States. The Trump response to the downside of globalization has been reversion to 1930s-style nationalist protectionism and issuance of threats against other countries, precluding the kind of globalism that is still needed: international cooperation against the virus. Trump has deliberately promoted disunity over unity, set groups of people against one another and relentlessly sought to extract partisan advantage from the crisis. The result: instead of any coherent national strategy, there is chaos; instead of a common national purpose, there are right-wing thugs carrying assault weapons and even invading state legislatures and threatening elected officials, demanding the end of lockdowns.

Canada sets an admirable contrast to American carnage, not only combating the virus more effectively (with nine times Canada’s population, the United States at the end of April had 30 times the number of reported COVID fatalities) but establishing generally nonpartisan direction with large-scale voluntary compliance with guidelines for appropriate behaviour. But the best contrast with this newfound Canadian unity is not with our neighbours but with ourselves, on the very eve of the onset of the pandemic.

When every television network in the country simultaneously broadcast Canadian musicians, artists and athletes all contributing emotive voices to a collective performance dubbed “Stronger Together” on April 26, it is wrenching to take our minds back just two months, to February 28. On that date the National Post published a poll under the blaring headline “Canada is broken”:

In a time of widespread disagreement and ever-increasing polarization, there remains a bitter solidarity among Canadians in the belief that the government doesn’t know what it’s doing. In the wake of regional discontent from the western provinces and blockades jamming up the country’s rail network, a towering majority of Canadians agree with the statement, “Right now, Canada is broken.”¹

A few days later another National Post piece spelled out that “Canada is broken because Justin Trudeau broke it.”² Columnist Chris Selley followed this up with, “The Fathers of Confederation might well find consensus on the word ‘broken’ to describe Canada, 153 years on. Surely 26 million Canadians can’t be wrong.”³

Apparently they could. Two months later, the “bitter solidarity” of distrust in government had been transformed into an even more “towering majority” who expressed faith that the same government would see them through a crisis that made Alberta discontent and rail blockades seem trivial in comparison.

Briefly revisiting the “Canada is broken” moment may also point to the kind of Canada we might expect when we finally step back through the looking glass into a post-COVID era.

Some of the concern about the state of the country was sparked by the widespread protests, including rail blockades, supporting the opposition of some hereditary Wet’suwet’en chiefs to the Coastal GasLink pipeline crossing their traditional unceded territory. The complexities of the legal issues surrounding Wet’suwet’en territorial and governance claims are examined in detail by Gareth Morley in this issue.⁴

The magnitude and extent of the protests, and the economic damage and inconveniences caused by rail blockades, appear disproportionate to the causes, intensified by the way Indigenous sovereignty claims were conflated with the environmental case against liquefied natural gas, despite being separate issues. The federal and British Columbia governments are continuing to negotiate territorial and governance issues with the Wet’suwet’en while the pipeline proceeds. While reconciliation with Indigenous peoples remains a leading goal of public policy, working out Indigenous consent to megaprojects will be complex and difficult when First Nations are always divided as much as non-Native Canadians on environment-vs.-economy issues. But Canada is hardly “broken” by these difficulties.

The other, larger, problem supposedly threatening to break Canada, the alienation of Alberta (now joined by Saskatchewan) from Ottawa and central Canada, is a very old story.⁵ Most recently it has risen to new heights as the Alberta petrostate has seen the future of its leading staple product, oil sands bitumen, called into question. Under Stephen Harper, a prime minister from Calgary, the oil sands were declared to be the leading driver of Canadian economic development. When global oil prices started falling, oils sands profits stalled. Alberta identified completing pipelines to tidewater and export markets in Asia as the answer.

But when Northern Gateway was shelved and Trans Mountain ran into environmental and Indigenous opposition on the B.C. coast, Alberta pointed the finger at environmentalists and federal and B.C. governments concerned with environmental protection as the enemies of Alberta. B.C. Premier John Horgan and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau became hated figures to many Albertans. Even Trudeau buying Trans Mountain when its Texan developers backed out did nothing to allay Alberta rage.

It is now often said in Alberta that Trudeau’s secret agenda is to destroy the Alberta economy (why any prime minister would harbour such a politically self-defeating agenda beggars the imagination, but apparently not that of conspiracy theorists from the fever swamps of the Alberta far right). When the Liberals committed to the introduction of a carbon tax as the centrepiece of a national climate strategy, suspicion of Ottawa reached paranoid levels. Then the 2019 election saw the return of a Trudeau government with the support of three other parties equally or more committed to the carbon tax and to serious climate action, while Alberta and Saskatchewan returned crushing majorities to a Tory party fully backing Alberta. Canada, it seemed, was breaking apart. “Western” (sic) separatism was bubbling up across the Prairies.

In the real world, even if some environmental activists do seek the closure of the oil sands, majority opinion across the country has clung to the belief that the environment and economic development could be balanced, as reflected in the decision to put Trans Mountain under public ownership. Whether any viable compromise might ever have been found is now a moot point, as the pandemic has thrown all calculations about the future of oil and gas into confusion. Global lockdown has led to a drastic drop in energy consumption and resulting oversupply, while a Saudi-led price war had already driven down North American oil to uncompetitive levels. North American prices briefly went negative, with the surreal result that on one day producers would have had to pay buyers $37 a barrel to take the stuff off their hands.

This situation will not endure and eventually there will be a price rebound. But it is doubtful that it will ever rebound to levels that make the Alberta oil sands a profitable producer. In fact, there were abundant signs pre-COVID that the oil sands’ day was done. All foreign investment, including from some oil giants, had already fled the field, and sovereign funds and other big institutional investors had divested oil sands stocks. Ethical concerns may have played a small part, but the larger reason was hard financial calculation: the world was transitioning away from fossil fuels for reasons of self-preservation. The oil sands, being among the most expensive (and dirty) sources of crude in the world, are roadkill in the global downsizing of the carbon economy. The COVID pandemic has given even more impetus to the move away from the petro-economy: this virus is only a preview of the horrific damage the earth can wreak upon a human species fouling its own nest and upending the delicate balance of nature.

Even if there exists a transitional period when oil is still in demand, consider that the Saudis, with low production costs, can break even at a price in the low $20s a barrel. The break-even point for oil sands bitumen is the mid-$50s. For exports to be reliably profitable, prices would have to be in the $60 range, which is the aspirational forecast for Jason Kenney’s 2020 Alberta budget. Energy analysts are not predicting anything like $60 oil in the foreseeable future. No wonder Kinder Morgan backed out of Trans Mountain and Teck Resources dumped Premier Kenney’s pampered Frontier oil sands development (which posited $80–$90 a barrel over 20 years!).

The bottom line is that the real enemy of the Alberta petro-economy is not found among the Liberals, Greens, socialists, federal bureaucrats and environmentalists of Albertan demonology. The real enemy is the market. There is great irony in this, in light of the Alberta Conservatives’ vociferous free enterprise ideology, not to speak of their constant self-congratulation at their genius at finding oil in the ground. One is tempted to sneer that those who live by free enterprise die by free enterprise, but that would be both ungracious and self-defeating. The collapse of the petro-economy will wreak havoc not only on Albertans but on the entire Canadian economy. This is of course only intensified by the downward spiral induced by the pandemic lockdown. Not surprisingly, Alberta is already coming back to Ottawa, this time not as a threatening creditor but as supplicant, grateful for whatever assistance is offered. Ottawa initially offered the same assistance to laid-off oil and gas workers that it offers all other laid-off workers. It also tied specific aid to the industry to environmental purposes: cleaning up abandoned oil wells, for instance. This has won support from both environmentalists and the Alberta government.

What must be resisted are demands that good federal money be thrown after bad into the pit of existing big oil investment in the oil sands. Instead, there is the major challenge ahead of assisting the transition of the Alberta economy to much greater reliance on alternative non-fossil energy sources (geothermal, wind, sun, etc.), toward a greener economy rather than a petro-economy.

This will certainly not be easy, and may be very disruptive and extremely expensive, especially in the early stages. But the pandemic crisis offers an opportunity along these lines that would otherwise have been more difficult to achieve. The transition of Alberta toward a greener future should be part of the renewed common purpose coming out of the crisis, showing that Canada is in no way broken, but indeed stronger together.

Continue reading “Through the Looking Glass – and Back?” →

For a time, it appeared that Canada had avoided the worst recent experiences of democracy elsewhere, but with the Doug Ford bozo eruption in Ontario, Canadian exceptionalism suddenly seemed less clear. The federal election this fall begins to appear as a gathering storm. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may have begun his tenure in office with high hopes of new ways of doing politics. His term is ending in vituperative partisan squabbling, rancid regional recriminations and a bizarre spectacle in which two of his former ministers, promoted to purported sainthood status by the opposition, carried on a guerrilla war against the Prime Minister from within his Liberal caucus until they were finally expelled.

A common theme of both opposition and media is “Liberal arrogance,” paging back to the Liberal Party of the Prime Minister’s father. Liberals think they are the “natural governing party.” Out of touch with ordinary Canadians and alienated westerners, tied closely to the Ottawa bureaucracy and the central Canadian corporate elite, the Liberals run roughshod over opposition and even the rule of law to get their way.

Hang on a minute. This is not your parents’ Liberal Party.

The Liberals of the era from Mackenzie King to Pierre Trudeau constituted the Government Party, a big-tent catch-all centrist grouping that won most elections and was embedded deeply within the state and the corporate sector. It had no firm ideological anchor, but tacked to the right or left depending upon the prevailing electoral winds. The Government Party model actually reached its culmination not with the Liberals but with the Brian Mulroney Conservatives, who in 1984 won a commanding majority based on pluralities in all provinces and regions and governed mainly from the centre.

Yet by 1993 the Progressive Conservative Party had imploded, its two main pillars of support, Quebec and the west, kicked away, replaced by two new ideologically driven parties, the Bloc Québécois and Reform. A decade later the remnants of the old PC Party were the subjects of a hostile takeover by Reform, as the harder-line Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) took shape under Stephen Harper. With the breakaway on the far right by Maxime Bernier with his People’s Party and the rightward pressures coming from Ford in Ontario and Jason Kenney in Alberta, Andrew Scheer has bowed to the forces of the right on climate policy, immigration and the whole culture-war framing of political discourse by “alt-right” populism.

This is not your parents’ Conservative Party.

National politics have taken on a more sharply divisive shape, with the CPC firmly occupying the right while the centre-left is shared – or split – by the Liberals, NDP and Greens. Common ground in the centre is rapidly shrinking. How did Trudeau’s promise of “sunny ways” get overtaken so quickly by dark storm clouds of division? Personalities and personal failings are no doubt part of the story, but it is more revealing to look at deeper structural forces at work.

Perhaps the most dramatic changes have been in the transformation of the media by the new information technologies, which in turn have led to dramatic changes in political marketing. As early as the 1990s, parties were gaining access to new tools that could identify and target very specific electoral niches. The old catch-all parties of the past made broad-based appeals to voters who were identified only in wide categories. Parties consequently tended to congregate around the centre of the spectrum where the potential for growth seemed greatest. With more precisely targeted appeals now possible – greatly enhanced in the era of “Big Data” and sophisticated marketing algorithms – strategies to build a winning coalition of niche electorates have become more programmatic than in the past.

In the 1990s, the Mike Harris Ontario Tories were among the first to grasp the potential of identifying niche voters who could be won by a narrowly targeted program. This was branded the “Common Sense Revolution”; once in office, they diligently delivered on their specific promises to targeted voters.

A key point is that the new politics rewards divide-and-rule tactics over appeals to common purpose. The new technologies encourage separate social media echo chambers in which particular groups hear and see only what they want to hear and see, rarely engaging directly with those of differing views. Harris Tories saw the partisan advantages of dividing Ontarians against one another. All the groups alienated by their neoliberal austerity policies – welfare recipients; unionized workers; feminists; gays and lesbians; various other minority communities – were spotlighted as enemies of the pocketbooks of Tory supporters (rebranded “taxpayers”).

The Ford Conservatives are a cartoon version of their predecessors. The programmatic breadth of the Common Sense Revolution has been replaced by “buck a beer” and tailgate parties. What persists is aggressive divisiveness and a drift to the further reaches of the right, mirroring perhaps the same movement among their core base. But for all Ford’s populist bluster of being “For the People,” he was elected premier with only 40 per cent of the vote but a legislative majority thanks to first-past-the-post and a split on the centre-left between the defeated Liberals and the NDP. In a clear warning to the federal parties, an Ontario electorate determined to throw out the Kathleen Wynne Liberals paid little attention to what the alternative really was. When it became apparent that the NDP had moved into place as the only viable competitor to Ford, Wynne conceded defeat and astoundingly urged Liberal voters in key contests to back the Tories rather than their hated competitor on the left. The relatively progressive Liberal agenda was thus sacrificed to a Tory bonfire: Wynne’s cap-and-trade carbon reduction program was immediately scrapped and Ford emerged as a leading opponent of the national climate plan.

On the federal scene, after nine years of a CPC government that was in many ways based on the Harris blueprint – although mitigated by many more compromises with the realities of a regionally and culturally disparate country – Justin Trudeau demonstrated his grasp of the new political dynamics in his 2015 victory. He saw no point in seeking votes on the right where the CPC support base is rock-solid. Instead he adroitly outflanked Thomas Mulcair and the NDP on the left by promising deficits, social spending and increased taxes on the highest-bracket earners. In office the Liberals have, by and large, continued to govern from the centre-left. With the national climate plan, they have mounted an ambitious and systematic approach to combating climate change, including a Canada-wide carbon pricing regime.

Yet Liberal prospects in 2019 are clouded. The centre-left vote may be splintered three ways as Liberal support drains off to the NDP and the Greens. There is a very real possibility of a CPC in thrall to the far right coming to power over a fractured centre-left. They do not have to go far beyond their one-in-three core base to do this, so long as the centre-left is deeply split.

If Trudeau has lost leadership of the centre-left, he has himself to blame, at least in part. Among the debit-side entries:

• A bungled electoral reform process that managed to alienate supporters both of proportional representation and of the status quo;
• A tortured argument that climate change could best be combated by promoting pipelines to carry increased production of the world’s dirtiest oil to export, culminating in the commitment of billions of tax dollars to purchase a pipeline that Texas capitalists wanted to unload – this bought Trudeau no credit and created deep animosity among Albertans and disillusionment among environmentalists;
• The SNC-Lavalin affair in which the Prime Minister could be seen to be interfering with the independence of the prosecutorial office and the Attorney General, on behalf of a corporation whose executives had been found guilty of paying millions in bribes to the former dictator of Libya.

SNC has highlighted the core Liberal problem. Former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould appears to represent a principled ethical stand, while Trudeau appears to represent an old and discredited way of doing politics. In an era when there is widespread revulsion against political elites and an appetite for voting in populist “outsiders” to “drain the swamp,” it is any democratic leader’s nightmare to be caught looking like a deer frozen in the searchlights of the social media avengers – especially when the same leader came into office promising a new way of doing politics.

Without in any way questioning Wilson-Raybould’s probity, the juxtaposition of a principled minister vs. an unprincipled prime minister is not in the end very helpful. Despite populist illusions, governing means making choices, which are inevitably compromises among a “people” always divided over public policy. Making laws is still like making sausages: best judge the end result rather than the process. Every populist movement that has arrived in office has had to either compromise with reality or fail.

Trudeau may not have done himself any favours by overselling how different he would be, but as a leader of a fractious democracy he must follow what Max Weber called the “ethic of consequences” that faces anyone holding power over others. This ethic may often be at odds with the “absolute ethic” that those without power can follow. The Prime Minister’s behaviour over SNC may, as Wilson-Raybould herself has acknowledged, be “inappropriate” without being “illegal.” Despite Andrew Scheer’s claim of “corruption,” there is no evidence of bribery or other corrupt relationship with the company in Trudeau’s advocacy of the alternative remediation agreement route for SNC as being in the public interest.

Those disappointed with the Liberals’ performance might remember Maurice Chevalier’s comment on the discomforts of old age: “Consider the alternative.” The CPC alternative in 2019 is a party committed to a demagogic campaign against the carbon tax founded on an outright lie denying the rebates that will more than compensate people for increased energy costs. This in the face of an alarming report that Canada is warming at twice the global average rate. In the face of the enormity of the challenge, the CPC position may not constitute outright climate change denial, but it certainly constitutes solution denial, which is equally reckless. Carbon pricing is not the sole answer but it is a large part of the solution, and a part that works with the market, not against it. If the CPC is successful in conning its way into office with a shamelessly disingenuous appeal to the lowest common denominator of self-interest at the expense of what is at least a recognition of the existential threat to the planet, Canadian democracy will have truly failed in as unambiguous a fashion as American democracy did when it elected a serial liar and conman to the highest office in 2016.

The NDP and the Greens will argue, not without reason, that the Liberals’ environmental record is poor – the now federally owned Trans Mountain pipeline being an own-goal against their national climate plan. But the potential of vote splitting on the centre-left allowing Scheer into office cannot be dismissed. Of course, if Trudeau had actually followed through on his oft-repeated promise to make the 2015 election the last first-past-the-post contest, we might not be having a conversation about vote splitting. Just one more self-inflicted wound.

When Canadians cast their ballots, they will have to ponder a flawed prime ministerial record. And then they will have to consider the alternative. Hobson’s Choice?