The Prime Minister was delivering an apocalyptic warning to his country. Like an ancient Hebrew prophet, Stephen Harper conjured a satanic spectre: “A great evil has been descending over our world, an evil that has been growing more and more powerful.” This ogre is “violent jihadism … one of the most dangerous enemies our world has ever faced.”

Harper was speaking with the conviction that comes from personal experience. After all, he had only recently emerged from the closet where he hid while a “violent jihadist” was gunned down by the parliamentary Sergeant-at-Arms. Out of the closet, he had morphed into the Avenging Angel, and he had a lethal weapon of his own: Bill C-51, The Anti-terrorism Act 2015. But what is this weapon pointed at?

Last year, a mentally disturbed young man in Moncton, Jason Bourque, who had conceived a violent antipathy to police, without provocation shot and killed three RCMP officers. This was terrible, but it was, by common consent, a law enforcement problem resolved by the police who arrested Bourque and the courts that sentenced him to 75 years in prison.

A few months later, another mentally disturbed, sometimes crack-addled young man, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, armed with a 19th-century vintage hunting rifle, shot and killed Nathan Cirillo, a young soldier peacefully standing guard at the National War Memorial in Ottawa, then shot his way into the Centre Block of Parliament before his own violent demise. That too was terrible, and apparently something far worse than a mere law enforcement problem: a “great evil descending over our world.”

Besides frightening the Prime Minister into a closet, how exactly did Bibeau differ from Bourque? Bourque just hated cops, while Bibeau had attached his personal demons to extremist Islamist gibberish and to a trendy brand name, Islamic State, to which this generation of violent wingnuts happens to be attracted. A few years down the road, the next generation of Bibeaus may be invoking the Global Movement to Liberate Chickens from Factory Farms. But today the words Islamic State are a trigger setting off Apocalypse Now.

To be sure, there is a real force calling itself the Islamic State that is armed to the teeth, ruthless, cruel and a genuine threat: to Syria, Iraq and the Middle East. To Canada, not so much. There have been attacks here, including another soldier tragically killed in Quebec, and other plots apprehended and disrupted by good police work. But there is no credible evidence that any of these have been planned, financed and directed from inside the Islamic State high command in Syria, the way that 9/11 was orchestrated from Osama bin Laden’s HQ in Afghanistan. There are deluded young Canadians, along with even larger numbers of deluded young Europeans, who have travelled to the Middle East to fight for the Islamic State, some of whom have died in action. The threat that some might return to Canada as trained Islamic State agents is merely speculative.

Canada is engaged militarily against the Islamic State in Iraq, a mission just extended and expanded into Syria in March. Even for those who favour the Canadian contribution, the frame that the Harper government places around it should give pause. Repeatedly, the government has argued that there is a seamless web connecting Syria and Iraq with Canada. The first clause in the motion that Harper introduced extending the mission states that the Islamic State “has called on its members to target Canada and Canadians at home and abroad.” In his “great evil” speech, Harper asserted that “Canadians are targeted by these terrorists for no other reason than that we are Canadians.” This is as clever as Employment Minister Pierre Poilievre’s inane “the root cause of terrorism is terrorists.”

Of course there is a terrorist problem in Canada. A reasonable case can be made that the Anti-terrorism Act 2001 should be updated in light of the changing nature of the terrorist challenge over the past decade and a half. This case has emphatically not been made by the Harper government, which has failed to define clearly the nature of the threat; failed to indicate how existing laws and police powers are inadequate (or in some cases why powers added in 2001 have never been used); and failed to indicate how the vast and unaccountable expansion of policing powers in C-51 is proportionate to the actual threat.

Make no mistake: C-51 is breathtaking in the scope of its radical redrawing of the boundaries between state and society, between security and liberty. C-51 is the worst and most dangerous piece of national security law this country has ever seen. Among its most objectionable features:

Instead of defining the terrorist threat with greater precision, C-51 expands the definition of what might be considered terrorist activity or threats to the security of Canada to include “interference with the capability of the Government of Canada in relation to … the economic or financial stability of Canada” as well as “interference with critical infrastructure” or “undermining the security” of any other state – among a wide panoply of other potential threats. This is driftnet fishing.

Drawing on this expansive foundation, C-51 envisages better information sharing between government agencies and between governments – with no privacy safeguards in effect and no obvious controls over the extent of the personal information passed on, with whatever consequences for the individuals concerned. This has to be read in the context of the Edward Snowden revelations of epic Five Eyes spying, including the Canadian CSE collecting “metadata” on Canadians. In the face of panoptic surveillance operations, C-51 in effect trumps privacy protection laws.

C-51 scraps a cautious and limited “Passenger Protect” program in favour of a Canadian no-fly list that replicates the discredited U.S. no-fly list – the one that prevents two year-old toddler “terrorists” from boarding aircraft with their moms – and replaces a reasonable appeal process with a convoluted Kafkaesque “appeal” process in which banned individuals are told nothing about the case against them, while the judge considers even hearsay evidence in secret.

Any person who “advocates or promotes the commission of terrorism offences in general” will under C-51 be committing a criminal offence. Starting from a justifiable concern about abusive jihadi websites, ignoring existing laws against hate speech and incitement to violence, C-51 leaps into a direct assault on freedom of expression.

C-51 offers the Canadian Security Intelligence Service a new mandate to take “measures”, “within or outside Canada”, to “reduce” any threats to security. CSIS was created as an intelligence collection agency, in reaction to the scandals in the 1970s when the old RCMP security service was ordered to “counter” violent Quebec separatists like the FLQ and launched the “dirty tricks” era of illegal burglaries and barn burnings. Now CSIS is expected to be a Bond-like swat squad battling terrorists around the globe with muscle. If CSIS thinks it necessary, it may seek a so-called disruption warrant from a federal judge. The application will be heard in secret and, if granted, will authorize CSIS to break Canadian law and violate Charter rights, short only of committing murder, torture, rape or obstruction of justice! This would turn judges from being arbiters of the constitutionality of government actions into enablers of state lawlessness. Moreover, it threatens to reignite pointless RCMP-CSIS turf wars and undermines the viability of criminal prosecutions by contaminating the evidentiary trails required to lead to court proceedings. Subverting the rule of law while making counterterrorism more difficult is quite the trick.

There are no provisions for expanded oversight or accountability to match the greatly expanded powers provided to the agencies. In fact, the Harper government has seriously degraded the already inadequate existing patchwork of accountability.

C-51 is a monstrosity. To their credit, the NDP and Green parties have responded appropriately: it should be killed. To their shame, the Liberals said they would vote for what they admitted is a terrible bill, but would improve it once a Liberal government is elected. In other words: buy the stinking pig today on the promise to apply deodorant later.

The Liberals’ bizarre stance is explicable only as proving Harper’s strategy of using terrorism to terrorize his opposition. This worked on the gutless Liberals, but it has not been working on more and more Canadians, who have reacted with anger the more they have seen of the devil in the C-51 details. Even some conservatives have begun shaking their heads at an allegedly conservative government (slayer of the gun registry and the long-form census) bringing in police state powers reckless of individual privacy and liberty.

Harper has done something none of his predecessors ever did. He has turned national security into a partisan issue with which he hopes to savage his opponents. The economy as a reelection issue has sunk in lockstep with the collapsing price of oil, so peddling fear will take its place. He has even added Islamophobia, with cheap jibes at Muslim women wearing niqabs and hijabs. Apparently his reelection is worth to him whatever cost the country will pay in loss of civility and decency.

Perhaps the election will settle the matter. The result might demonstrate that a ruthless leader can employ irrational fear to perpetuate his rule. Or the Canadian people may instead decide that the “great evil” is not so much terrorism as it is Mr. Harper himself.

In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray is forced to live the same day over and over. He tries to break the loop by changing events; he even tries suicide. Nothing works: his next day is always his previous day.

Canadian foreign policy debates in the year 2014 look very much like Groundhog Day. Two conflicts – Israel-Palestine in Gaza and Russia-Ukraine – have raised much heat, many sharp words, vehement passions, but precious little light. Hanging over the debates is a pervasive sense of déja vu. Trapped in a time warp?

Russia-Ukraine is a good example. Following the coup that drove out the pro-Russian president, Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and barely covert Russian backing for violent pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of the country quickly led to talk of a “new Cold War.” Putin was cast as the dictator Stalin menacing eastern Europe circa 1947–48, with the West being called on to revive the heroic spirit of the Marshall Plan and NATO. We in the West, it seemed, were blameless innocents confronted by Putin’s aggression and lust for domination. The failure of appeasement in the 1930s to stop Hitler had taught the West that dictators must always be confronted.

he problem with the screenplay for Cold War Two begins with its crude interpretation of Cold War One. In the late 1940s, it was seen as a simple case of Soviet Communist aggression and Western response. Stalin bore sole responsibility for starting the Cold War, and early Cold War history echoed this version of reality.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, haunted by the spectre of the Vietnam debacle, revisionist schools began to appear that turned Cold War historiography on its head. Now it was the United States that was the villain, with the Communist world responding to imperialist aggression. Revisionism did point out flaws in the Western façade of innocence, and did cast light on the defensive elements in the Communist posture. But simply inverting the anti-Soviet model into an anti-American one was a misconceived, if not morally suspect, enterprise.

After the collapse of Soviet Communism, Cold War historiography has become more balanced and nuanced. Few would claim any more to find a smoking gun at the starting line. There were deep differences – systems, interests, goals – between the capitalist West and the Communist East that doomed postwar cooperation. There were also grave mistakes made in reading the intentions of the other side: what were primarily defensive moves by the East were misread as offensive actions by the West, and vice versa.

Fast forward: Ukraine 2014. Few lessons of this history have been learned. Spurred by a loud anti-Russian Ukrainian-Canadian community, politicians of all parties in Ottawa could see only Russian aggression. To be sure, Putin was making it easy: annexing Crimea and subverting Ukrainian sovereignty were red flags that demanded countermeasures.The decades-long nuclear standoff – the “balance of terror” – ironically proved a factor for international stability. It prevented East-West rivalry from degenerating into a third world war, for which the Cold War was a safer substitute. The one time when the balance was seriously threatened was the Cuban missile crisis, when the USSR attempted to counter U.S. missiles on its Turkish border with secret emplacement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. The doomsday clock was stopped at one minute to midnight when the Soviets withdrew their missiles and the Americans pulled theirs out of Turkey. Mutual recognition of fundamental interests, without surrendering fundamental values, prevented catastrophe.

But were pro-Western Ukrainians the virtuous democrats depicted by their supporters in Parliament and the media? Not quite. First, they came to power by an uprising against an elected pro-Russian president. Yes, that president was corrupt. But so are virtually all Ukrainian politicians, pro- and anti-Russian. That some of the “democrats” were fascistic ultranationalist extremists was not simply Russian propaganda. Ukraine is divided, as it always has been, between western and eastern regions, Ukrainian and Russian speakers, pro-Western and pro-Russian sentiments. Proclaiming the supremacy of one side over the other is a very dangerous prescription for civil war, especially with thuggish militants on both sides.

Crimea is majority Russian-speaking and strongly pro-Russian, as Putin’s referendum clearly showed. It definitely is not an integral historical part of Ukraine. It was assigned to Ukraine as a gift from the Kremlin in the mid-1950s when everything was run from Moscow. Most importantly, Crimea is the site of Russia’s strategically crucial warm water naval base, one recognized internationally and by the Ukrainian Parliament. An independent Ukraine might well be better off without having to hold down territory that contains a largely hostile population and a major Russian military presence. But Crimea also illustrates a larger context for helping to explain, if not excuse, Russian behaviour.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Soviets were reconciled to German reunification on the understanding that a NATO including a united Germany would represent no threat. What followed was a steady march of NATO eastward to include former Warsaw Pact states, along with the contemptuous, almost offhanded, rejection of a request by post-Soviet Russia itself to join NATO. The West seemed to be saying to Russia: we won the Cold War, so now we set the agenda in your region on our terms.

Tension escalated significantly with the threat of bringing Ukraine not only into the European Union but into NATO as well, thus providing NATO with a presence directly on the Russian border – and, prior to the annexation of Crimea, a presence on territory with a Russian military base. Putin’s Russia is not the weak, stumbling sick man of the Yeltsin era; it is a renascent power, but one highly sensitive to the decline of its position in the world, looking for respect, and serious about restoring its regional security. We in the West see Putin starting a fight and see resisting him as defensive, but Putin can see his actions as resisting provocation by the West. And so the downward spiral of mutual misunderstanding begins anew.

If Ukraine is the touchstone of a new Cold War between Russia and the West, it is well to recall the mistakes of the last war. Trying to see the world through the other side’s eyes is not weakness or disloyalty. It is a realistic way of appraising the other side’s actual intentions, not what our own anxieties and fears might conjure. The hawks who demanded rollback to liberate the captive nations behind the Iron Curtain would have brought on a world war. Patient containment of Communism paid off when the Soviet bloc eventually imploded under the weight of its own contradictions and failures.

The Israeli assault on Gaza offers another example of Parliament as an echo chamber rather than a debating forum. Further consolidating their already growing grip over the Jewish vote, which swings a number of seats in Toronto and Montreal, the Harper Conservatives grabbed the old playbook and automatically blamed Hamas for starting hostilities (as if almost 50 years of Israeli occupation and settlement of Palestinian land were without consequence).

The mantra that “Israel has the right to defend itself” became, in the mouths of ministers, opposition MPs and media commentators, a fiat shutting down debate. Self-defence is a legitimate claim only when exercised with reasonable proportionality, and could hardly be invoked when the civilian casualty ratio is hundreds to one in favour of Israel. One did not have to be “anti-Israeli” to insist that blatantly prejudicial arguments granting Israel a perpetual get-out-of-jail-free card for any of its actions, however disproportionate, should be subjected to critical scrutiny. Yet Foreign Minister John Baird characterized any criticism of Israel as equivalent to support for the heinous terrorism of Hamas, if not evidence of anti-Semitism.

To their discredit, the opposition parties acquiesced in this. Indeed, Tom Mulcair exercised a gag order on the NDP caucus to silence criticism of Israeli policy. The notorious George W. Bush formulation “You’re either with us or with the terrorists” was alive and well in Ottawa. Groundhog Day.

Common factors in both Ukraine and Gaza are: (1) a foreign antagonist who can be easily demonized and dehumanized; (2) a strong domestic political support base for a hard line; (3) a historical template for action readily at hand. If some of these conditions do not hold, the outcome can still be open. The decision to send CF-18s into Iraq in the struggle against the newly discovered threat of the Islamic State did not gain all-party consensus, with the NDP and Liberals both opposed. In this case, even though the Islamic State has been widely characterized as “pure evil,” condition (2) was unclear. As for condition (3), the historical templates of recent interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were less than encouraging. Even if the vote was a foregone conclusion, at least the issues were aired from more than one side.

In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray finally gets it right and breaks the loop. When actual debate breaks out in Parliament on an issue of war and peace, perhaps there is hope in Ottawa too.

Reg Whitaker is a political columnist for Inroads and a member of its editorial board. He lives in Victoria, B.C.

In recent years, a number of journalists have published books on Canadian politics. Some are forgettable, some quite good, but one stands out from all the others. Susan Delacourt’s Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them¹ goes beyond the usual journalistic staple of anecdotes, personalities and prognostications to offer an intriguing explanation of a tectonic shift that has taken place in recent decades in how both politicians and voters see the political process. What she finds is not good news, but she does help us understand why things have taken the turn they have.

Delacourt begins where Stephen Harper, John Baird et al. love to be seen hanging out: Tim Hortons, where doughnuts, double-doubles and the famous “Tim Hortons voters” are to be found. She wants to tell us how we arrived at a place where the interface between democratic citizens and their political representatives is defined by and reduced to identification with a particular brand of fast food.

Aristotle wrote that “what effectively distinguishes the citizen proper from all others is his participation in giving judgement and in holding office.” As the Greek city-state grew into today’s nation-state, the proportion of citizens who actually hold office has necessarily become tiny indeed. At the same time, the opportunity for participation in giving judgement (defined broadly not only in relation to the law but to public policy) has shrunk, not out of necessity but out of choice. This is a great paradox of liberal democratic capitalism.

It is the proud boast of the capitalist economy that its producers have vastly expanded the range of choice for its consumers, just as it was one of the great failures of the communist model that it could not put consumer choices on its shelves. This is a triumph of production but it is crucially the triumph of marketing, the clever ways in which producers bring their goods and services to the attention of consumers and into their hands. Shopping for Votes, as its title implies, is a description of the process whereby capitalist marketing techniques have been applied to how we choose our political representatives and how we think about politics and the public realm. Ironically, the application of the economy of consumer choice to the political sphere has meant the impoverishment of the democratic political imagination.

Most of Delacourt’s book is devoted to how our political parties have fallen under the ascendancy of the ad agencies, pollsters, PR flacks and spin doctors who manage and manipulate the public images of the politicians. This is fascinating stuff for political junkies. A very good journalist, she paints vivid personal portraits of the Keith Daveys, Allan Greggs and Patrick Muttarts who have, over the past few decades, transformed politics. These are not villains; indeed, some are thoughtful observers as well as technicians. Some are even critical of what they have wrought.

But there are larger, structural forces at work. In 1971 a practitioner raised eyebrows when he incautiously blurted out the source of the electoral success of the Ontario Premier of the time: “If you can sell a can of tomatoes, you can sell Bill Davis.” Four decades later, such a claim is just a description of business as usual. Political marketing has shown time and again that it works. It works because the media of communication that politicians must employ to reach voters are at the very heart of contemporary capitalist marketing. Selling Bill Davis (or Christy Clark or whomever) is just a minor sidebar to the big commercial selling campaigns, whose sophisticated techniques set the tone and style of political marketing.

Older traditions of political debate and campaigning have fallen away because they were out of step with the times. But as McLuhan was always reminding us, “The medium is the message.” The intensification of marketing as the medium of political communication has changed what politics is about. Political participation (even at the minimal level of voting) as an act of democratic citizenship has been reduced to just one among a myriad of choices consumers make among competing goods. To use Marxist terminology – which I hasten to assure readers Delacourt does not – we are witnessing the commodification of politics.

People have always, of course, been consumers as well as citizens. But the alchemy of commodification has been hollowing out the meaning of democratic citizenship, of the primary obligation to participate according to one’s means and abilities in the public deliberations and decision-making of the community. Take the matter of taxation. “Consumers” are recognized as “taxpayers,” but in the negative sense that taxes reduce individuals’ capacity to consume as they see fit. Therefore tax cuts or targeted tax breaks become, in themselves, a main object of public policy. “Citizens” see taxes as providing the collective means to finance public benefits that cannot be met through the private sector: paying taxes is paying one’s citizenship dues, fulfilling one’s obligations to the community that provides one with the equal democratic rights of citizenship. “Consumers” see only rights, without corresponding obligations.

An afterthought or echo of innovative advertising thinking, the science of shaping political communication is not without contradictions. Political choice, it appears, lacks much of the sexiness and allure that attaches to the more attractive commercial choices on offer – as witness steadily declining turnout at elections. A shrinking pool of buyers bothering to exercise their democratic franchise is frantically fought over by highly competitive, hyperpartisan political marketers. Fortunately for the politicians and their marketers, contemporary trends in new media mean that this flight from politics, while a tragedy for democratic practice, represents new avenues for market penetration.

The fragmentation and precision targeting of the new media permits the segmentation of the potential market into smaller and smaller niches. Political marketers identify potentially friendly voter niches, target these with carefully crafted policies (Timbits or McNuggets) and then design campaigns around these consumer loyalty nodes. This is not majoritarian, but determinedly minoritarian, politics. What the majority (many of whom will not even vote) think about any issue is irrelevant; what matters is the minority that can be motivated to return the favour to the party that has provided them with the particular policy good they want.

The Harper Conservatives have pushed micromarketing further than any other party in Canada. They particularly excel at skilfully manipulating “wedge” issues that divide people from one another, reinforcing the loyalty of their carefully cultivated voting niches by deliberately rousing the opposition of those groups their own supporters dislike or fear. The same techniques are used effectively with fundraising: when opposition rears its head, whether among other parties, the judiciary or the bureaucracy, it is usually translated into a fundraising appeal targeting those supporters likely to be angered by such opposition. Successful fundraising in turn fuels the professional marketing campaigns that yield voting support.

It is not surprising that the Tories are the party that has perfected the black arts of negative advertising, or that they have enthusiastically adopted the “permanent campaign” (24/7 remorseless partisan warfare), in which public policy is strictly tied to specific electoral advantage. While this style of governing appalls democrats, it also raises questions among small-c conservatives who can discern few indications of any coherent ideological direction in this micromarketing mishmash of policies. But ideological purity, whether of the right or the left, is the old politics, in which politicians are supposed to lay out visions, encourage debate and exercise leadership in achieving goals. The new politics sees leadership as simply identifying and meeting the consumer preferences of enough potential buyers to put together an electorally effective aggregation of voter niches.

The new political marketing lacks partisan preferences. That the Harperites have exploited its possibilities more effectively than their opponents, so far, does not mean that others cannot out-compete them in the future. In fact, both the NDP and the Liberals are driving toward mastery of the same techniques that have yielded successive victories to the Tories. Early in 2014 the NDP carried out a “cross-country day of action on affordability” in which voters were mobilized around issues like “cracking down on price collusion by gas companies”, “widening access to low-interest credit cards” and “capping ATM withdrawal fees.” The appeal was exclusively to citizens as consumers.

But while not biased in a partisan sense, the new marketing techniques are hardly ideologically neutral. There are good reasons why the new marketing has arrived simultaneously with the triumph of neoliberalism throughout the capitalist world. The two trends complement and reinforce one another. By buying into the “citizen = consumer” equation, parties of the centre and left buy into the larger neoliberal paradigm. Tony Blair’s rebranded “New Labour” is a remarkable example. Historically, social democracy helped lay the groundwork for this change when it began to conceptualize its alternative vision as widening the opportunities of the working class for greater consumption rather than sharing collectively in the governance of the economy.

We are all democratic consumers now. Recovery of democratic citizenship will not be easy.

Continue reading “How citizens became democratic consumers” →

After the Parti Québécois under Pauline Marois slipped into office with a minority in the fall of 2012, there was a curiously muted reaction both in Quebec and the rest of Canada – unlike the mingled expectation and dread that followed the first PQ victory in 1976 and the PQ’s second coming in 1994. In their initial instances, Péquiste victories bore the seeds of potential sovereignty and the breakup of Canada. Premier Marois rouses few expectations and even fewer fears. The PQ is no longer the flag bearer of a radical project but just another political party, one that bears the same scars of popular distrust that afflict all parties these days.

Once in office, the Marois government did set about trying to poke the slumbering dragon of English Canada. Presumably this was on the principle that provoking Anglo anti-Quebec sentiments is the best (or only?) way of rousing its own sovereigntist base at a time when the sovereignty option has been sinking in public enthusiasm. But most English Canadians now seemingly care as much about Quebec as most Québécois care about English Canada: the two solitudes have grown even more indifferent to each other. This may be deplorable, but it perversely aids national unity. The PQ’s efforts to pick a quarrel (like removing the Canadian flag from the National Assembly) were met with a shrug from les anglais; instead of rallying, the sovereigntist ranks continued to doze.

All this changed abruptly when the Marois government announced its intention of introducing a “charter of values” that was supposed to express the Quebec identity into which immigrants are to integrate. Chief among these values is laïcité or the secularity of Quebec society after the Quiet Revolution. Once as priest-ridden as de Valera’s Ireland or Franco’s Spain, Quebec is today a society not only thoroughly secular but proud of it. But the PQ’s proposed charter speaks not to that confidence but to the insecurity some feel in the face of newcomers with different cultural values. Such insecurity led to the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on “reasonable accommodation.”

What stands out in the charter are provisions that would forbid public sector workers from wearing religious symbols such as the hijab, the turban or the kippah. The addition of “large” crucifixes to the proscribed apparel list fooled no one. The main point is to target Muslims as the group that most focuses fears of the Other: the steadfast refusal of the PQ to remove the large crucifix that Maurice Duplessis long ago hung above the Speaker’s chair in the Assembly resolves any doubts about the privileged position of Catholicism in Quebec laïcité.

With this, all hell broke loose. As Marois and her minister Bernard Drainville no doubt anticipated, English Canada finally erupted. What they did not expect was the negative reaction in Quebec, not only from the usual suspects in the anglophone and allophone communities but also from within the ranks of the PQ itself and the wider academic and journalistic intelligentsia, the very milieu most friendly to the idea of sovereignty. The Bloc Québécois expelled its only woman and only ethnic-minority MP, Maria Mourani, from its shrunken caucus in Ottawa after the Lebanese-born writer and activist (who often wears a crucifix around her neck) condemned the proposed charter as an insult to religious minorities and a worrying sign that ethnic nationalism was overtaking the sovereignty movement. Then former PQ premiers Jacques Parizeau (he of the infamous “money and the ethnic vote” speech after the 1995 referendum), Lucien Bouchard and Bernard Landry weighed in with stinging criticisms.

Critics suggested that the charter is a solution in search of a problem. Like the town of Hérouxville that barred shari’a law despite having not a single Muslim inhabitant, the PQ was identifying an issue – the imposition on the secular state of minority religious control – for which there was not a tittle of supporting evidence. Any public servant who is unable impartially to fulfill their responsibilities as a result of their religious beliefs can be disciplined or removed. What the charter would do is target public servants not on the basis of what they do, but on suspicion of what they might do. By suggesting that this is not discrimination against minorities so long as minority employees divest themselves of any visible indications of their faith, the PQ denies the obvious. In other words, this is a Quebec equivalent of the old, discredited U.S. policy on gays in the military: don’t ask, don’t tell. That piece of hurtful sophistry doesn’t fly any better in Quebec than in America.

Another argument put forward by some feminist supporters of the charter is equally demeaning. They would have it that Muslim women must be protected by law from submitting to the “patriarchal” imposition of the veil. That non-Muslim feminists would deny Muslim women the choice of what they wear is an unusual twist on “feminism.” If the charter comes into effect in its present form, the clear result would be to deny employment in the public sector to Muslim women who choose the hijab.

English Canadian indignation could be dismissed. After all, was there not a protest a few years ago against Sikh RCMP officers donning turbans instead of traditional Mountie hats? And yet the comparison of Quebec with the rest of Canada on treatment of minorities is one that Quebecers might prudently choose not to pursue. Alone in the Western world, Canada has not produced a racist, anti-immigrant right-wing national political movement. The rise of the Reform Party in the 1990s could have spurred this ugly variant of conservatism, but it notably did not. The Harper government, far from encouraging anti-immigrant sentiments, has actively and successfully wooed immigrant community support.

In Quebec, on the other hand, anxieties over immigration helped fuel the fast-rising, fast-falling and now defunct Action Démocratique du Québec party. The ADQ experience has current echoes in the Coalition Avenir Québec that competes with the PQ for votes in rural and small-town francophone Quebec where there are few immigrants but many fears of those who are not pure laine. These are the ducks that the PQ has set out to hunt.

Contrasting reactions to multicultural immigration are hardly the result of English Canadian moral superiority. It is surely the lack of any clear idea of “Canadian” (as Gertrude Stein remarked of Oakland, California, “there’s no there there”) that contrasts with a much sharper sense of Québécois national identity, especially in the sovereigntist version. “Others” are inherently more threatening when “we” are clearly defined.

Yet this misses a further nuance. One of the most interesting findings of polling on attitudes toward immigrants across the wider Western world is that fear is most pronounced among those who have the least contact with immigrants, while liberality and openness is strongest where the concentration of immigrants is highest. Thus native Britons resident in multiethnic London are more at ease with newcomers than those living in parts of Britain with many fewer immigrants. Familiarity breeds not contempt, but tolerance. In Quebec, the charter controversy has revealed a sharp divide between Montreal and the rest of the province. Opposition to the charter is clear and articulate in Montreal, and tends to cross linguistic and ethnic divides. Outside Montreal, anxieties roused by the appearance of unfamiliar newcomers appear to have more play.

In the 2007 Quebec election, the ADQ captured almost a third of the vote by using the immigrant issue as a wedge driven between Montreal and the hinterland. The PQ is embarked on the same strategy, pointing to Montreal as the seedbed of foreign threats to the Quebec identity. It is not unlike what Duplessis did successfully for many elections in the 1940s and 1950s: mobilize the backwoods against Montreal’s Jehovah’s Witnesses and Communists, said to threaten the integrity of Catholic Quebec. Instead of the Padlock Law there is now the charter to keep Quebec safe. Will it work electorally for the PQ? Perhaps. If enough CAQ votes can be siphoned off, the PQ could even win a majority.

But the PQ is not merely an electoral machine like Duplessis’s Union Nationale. It is also the electoral manifestation of the sovereignty movement. Is this really the issue on which the PQ wants to wage war with federalism? When the PQ first came into office in 1976 it came with a compelling vision: sovereignty promised a better, more progressive, liberated Quebec. Now it promises to fight Ottawa for the right to be mean, self-centred and exclusionary. Has it really come to this?

The PQ perhaps had hoped to ignite a federalist-sovereignist controversy by invoking the notwithstanding clause to protect its charter or by provoking the federal courts to shoot down an unprotected charter. This strategy imploded when the Quebec Commission on the Rights of the Person reported that the PQ charter was clearly in violation of the Quebec human rights code, not just the federal Charter of Rights.

Until recently, PQ nationalism had been dominantly liberal and territorial, rather than narrow and ethnic. Despite good intentions, liberal nationalism never fully resolved the issue of the place of its anglophone, allophone and Aboriginal minorities. Now it seems that the Marois PQ is abandoning the effort and reverting to an older, more illiberal nationalism. The struggle over the charter of values is not only a struggle for power in Quebec. It is also a struggle for the soul of the sovereignty movement.

Every few decades an issue arises that unexpectedly becomes a defining moment for the country. Such issues can creep up and catch decision-makers unawares. The great free trade election of 1988 was one such: when Brian Mulroney signed the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement he had no idea that it would precipitate an election/plebiscite widely understood as a choice between two very different paths into the future for Canada. It was one of the rare instances of an election in which a great public policy issue overshadowed parties and personalities.

When the federal and Alberta governments, along with Enbridge and the various other corporate players in the Alberta oil sands, came up with the idea of a pipeline megaproject – Northern Gateway – that would pump bitumen from Alberta across northern British Columbia to the Pacific coast, whence supertankers would ship the cargo to refineries in Asia to feed the giant Chinese economy, it seemed a no-brainer. In a world in which nonrenewable energy resources were being rapidly depleted, Alberta’s oil sands were increasingly seen as the export driver not just of the Alberta economy but of the Canadian economy as a whole.

With a Prime Minister and a governing party in Ottawa with their deepest foundations in Alberta, Alberta and Ottawa had apparently come full circle from the bitter federal-provincial battles of the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1950s, a U.S. secretary of defense notoriously declared that “what’s good for General Motors is good for America.” In 2012 it seemed that Ottawa, as well as most of corporate Canada, the business press and academic economics departments, were all singing out of a hymn book that began “What’s good for Alberta is good for Canada.”

But a skunk had sneaked into this elite garden party. When Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair warned that the Alberta-driven petro-economy was pushing up the value of the loonie to unacceptably high levels and threatening an onset of the “Dutch disease” in which Canadian nonresource exports could be squeezed out, the Establishment vented its fury at the impertinence of questioning the new Canadian consensus. Mulcair’s words were “divisive” and “destructive,” pitting region against region and Canadian against Canadian. From the tone of the ripostes, one could be forgiven for thinking that Mulcair had blurted out a racist epithet.

As is so often the case when an elite consensus is challenged, Mulcair’s views were caricatured more than engaged. This is not the place to discuss the economic merits of the “Dutch disease” syndrome beyond noting that petro-economies, if not very carefully managed, do have distorting impacts on other sectors, even if the precise measurement of these distortions remains a matter of legitimate debate. Instead I prefer to focus on another element in the attack on Mulcair: that he was initiating a “war against the west.”

The concept of the “west” has to be deconstructed. For too long Alberta has appropriated the regional voice of the “west” to amplify its provincial interests and its provincial perspectives. Northern Gateway highlights how something that appears manifestly a good thing in Alberta can appear quite the opposite beyond the Rockies. The first fruits of Mulcair’s “war against the west” appeared in Canada’s westernmost province: a boost in NDP poll numbers in British Columbia. War against the west in Alberta could be seen as war for the west in B.C. The negative B.C. reaction to Northern Gateway is one key to this paradox.

There were some one-off economic benefits to B.C. promised in the pipeline construction and port enlargement. However, such benefits were more than overshadowed by the enormity of the environmental risks. The pipeline route takes it across remote, rugged mountainous terrain crisscrossed by close to 800 waterways, including the headwaters of three major watersheds. The severe environmental threat was highlighted when Enbridge was hit with a series of embarrassing spillages, including a major destructive spill in Michigan, where an American regulator slammed Enbridge’s tardy response as worthy of “Keystone Kops.”

Potentially even worse is the threat of some 500 supertankers per year, each carrying up to a million gallons of heavy bitumen, plying the dangerous Pacific coastline (far more challenging to navigation than the Atlantic coast). Since the 1970s there has been an informal ban on tankers in the Queen Charlotte Sound and adjacent areas. The spectre of another Exxon Valdez or BP disaster represents a terrifying prospect of devastation to a very delicate ecosystem. Assurances that the risk is extremely “low” are worthless: a single failure would be catastrophic.

Not surprisingly, First Nations whose lands Northern Gateway would traverse are up in arms (most rejecting the hush money proffered by Enbridge) and plan legal challenges that could tie the approval process up for years in the courts. But British Columbians generally have been appalled and indeed insulted at the idea that their breathtakingly beautiful natural environment should be held hostage for a few local dollars and huge profits for neighbouring Alberta.

It needs saying that there is much more at stake here than a dollars-and-cents calculation. This issue is cultural, touching on the very core of British Columbian identity. Messing with this is decidedly inadvisable for any B.C. politician. Premier Christy Clark learned this lesson at considerable cost. Very late in the game she realized that she could no longer sit on this fence and presented demands to Alberta for environmental guarantees, including a share in oil sands royalties to offset the risks. She was rebuffed by Premier Alison Redford. Clark’s default is threatening to tie up the project by refusing to issue construction permits and throwing other barriers in the way. Voters appear unimpressed by Clark’s unrequited plea for a bribe. According to all polls the NDP, whose wholehearted opposition has given them ownership of the issue, is poised to assume office in the upcoming May 2013 election.

Megaproject proposals like Northern Gateway are normally refracted through a lens that runs economic benefits and environmental impacts together. Typically, decision-makers have to balance economic and environmental issues. When economic concerns weigh more heavily on voters’ and politicians’ minds, as they have since the great crash of 2008, environmental concerns tend to lose out. But here’s the problem: to Alberta, the project overwhelmingly represents economic benefit; to B.C., it overwhelmingly represents environmental risk. This jurisdictional bifurcation is what raises Northern Gateway to a level of significance far beyond the usual run of public policy issues. One of the great conundrums of today, economic growth versus ecological responsibility, is thus dramatically encoded in a jurisdictional conflict between provincial partners in a federation. The question is: will B.C.’s environmentally driven opposition or Alberta’s economically driven support win out in the larger Canadian federal system?

There is no doubt where Harper’s Ottawa stands. The so-called “budget implementation” bill in the last session of Parliament was actually a bloated omnibus that systematically set out to gut various environmental controls that might stand in the way of the project, and to eviscerate the National Energy Board holding hearings to review the plan. No longer will the NEB have final say. Instead its recommendation may be overturned by the cabinet, which is to say the PM.

At the same time, Tory outriders like Resources Minister Joe (McCarthy) Oliver have been intimidating “environmentalists and other radicals” supposedly funded by foreign money, who should be silenced because they are trying to “hijack” the review process. Tom Flanagan has proposed dusting off the disused “declaratory power” in the BNA Act that would permit the federal government to simply override any B.C. objections by declaring Northern Gateway a work in the national interest. A government led by a PM from Calgary ramming through a project to Alberta’s benefit against majority and bipartisan B.C. opposition might be constitutional, but the political fallout would be, shall we say, volatile. For that reason the declaratory option is unlikely, but the general perception of a federal Tory government squarely behind Enbridge and Alberta has already led to an unusual display of cabinet dissent from the senior B.C. minister, James Moore. There are after all 21 Tory MPs from B.C. whose seats are on the line in the next federal election.

Stopping the Gateway would hardly be a fatal blow to Alberta. The Keystone XL carrying oil sands bitumen to the United States, temporarily put on hold by the Obama administration, will almost certainly be given final approval now that the U.S. election is over. The NDP has endorsed a proposal to pipe Alberta oil to eastern Canada, from which it has been excluded for decades. At worst it might mean a more measured and responsible development of the oil sands, as the late Peter Lougheed, Alberta’s greatest premier, wisely advised.

Stopping Northern Gateway would deal a blow to Harper’s economically reckless and environmentally irresponsible resource export–led development strategy. Uncontrolled petro-economies are not only lethal to the environment; in the long run, they are bad for business. That’s why B.C.’s battle against Northern Gateway is a battle for all Canadians.

With time, the federal election of 2011 may be seen as a crucial realignment election, like 1935 or 1993. In realignment elections, the party system undergoes a fundamental structural change. In 1935, two new parties appeared, the social democratic predecessor of the NDP and a right-wing Alberta-based populist predecessor of the Reform Party that in 1993 wrecked and then eventually swallowed the old Progressive Conservatives. 1993 also saw the rise of the Bloc Québécois as a sovereigntist presence in the federal Parliament.

2011 saw the destruction of the BQ by an NDP tsunami in Quebec. That, combined with the collapse of the Liberal Party across Canada, gave the NDP Official Opposition status and the Harper Conservatives their longed-for majority. The Liberal collapse sent a shock wave through the Canadian political system. With deep roots going back to pre-Confederation Canada, the Liberals are the centrist brokerage party that dominated the country from the 1890s through the 1990s and have marked every aspect of Canadian life, from the economy to the constitution to the cultural symbols of the nation. They are the party of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Mackenzie King, Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, icons of Canadian statesmanship.

George Dangerfield, author of The Strange Death of Liberal England, detailed the collapse of British Liberalism on the eve of the First World War. A century later, it is time to analyze the “strange death of Liberal Canada.” To understand this “strange death,” it is best to focus not on the fate of a political party, but on the deeper meaning of the party’s passage from domination to collapse. Parties are important not in themselves, but for what their success, and failure, can tell us about the politics of the country. Something very important has happened to our politics: the disintegration of the political centre. One need not have any loyalty or emotional attachment to the Liberal Party to conclude that this is not necessarily good news.

We might start with the dimensions of the Liberal collapse. Between 1896 and 2004, there were 30 federal general elections: the Liberals won 21, the Conservatives nine. During these years Liberal governments were in office 72 per cent of the time, the Tories only 28 per cent. This was the long Liberal century. The Liberals were the “Government Party,” the most successful political party in the Western world throughout the 20th century.

That was then. After Jean Chrétien’s third straight majority in 2000, the Liberals under Paul Martin limped to a minority in 2004 while polling 269,811 fewer votes – a loss of 5.1 per cent of their 2000 support. In 2006, Martin’s party lost government, and polled 502,805 fewer votes – a loss of 10.1 per cent. In 2008, under Stéphane Dion, the Liberal losses accelerated: 846,230 fewer Liberal votes than two years earlier, a loss of 18.9 per cent. And finally, in 2011 under Michael Ignatieff, the Liberals fell to third place, in the process polling 850,010 fewer votes, a loss of 23.4 per cent. In four elections in 11 years, the Liberals have lost a staggering total of 2,468,856 votes, close to half those who voted Liberal in 2000. And of these losses, 1,696,240 were recorded in the last two elections, in 2008 and 2011.

This is a profile of a party that is heading downhill, and picking up speed as it goes. It is perhaps conceivable that the Liberals will bounce back to edge ahead of the NDP as official, if distant, opposition to the Conservatives. More likely, they have now become a marginal third party that will linger as a shrunken shadow of its former glory. Perhaps we are actually witnessing the death throes of Canadian Liberalism, just as we witnessed the death throes of the old Progressive Conservative Party from 1993 to 2003. Whatever happens, the Liberals will never again be the Government Party of old. It is not their vertiginous loss of popularity that has led to the demise of the Government Party model, but rather the demise of the model itself that has led to the copious Liberal bleeding.

The first pillar: Quebec

Looking back over the years of Liberal domination, three pillars of a successful Government Party stand out. The first and most obvious is Liberal domination of Quebec, which dates back to the late 19th century and Canada’s first national unity crisis, the hanging of Louis Riel in 1885 by Sir John A. Macdonald. Formerly dominant in Quebec, the Bleus never really recovered. Wilfrid Laurier, the first French Canadian leader of a national party, brought the Liberals to power in 1896 on a Quebec wave.

Laurier finally lost his grip on national office in 1911, when a combination of anti–free trade Tories under Sir Robert Borden and breakaway Quebec nationalists under Henri Bourassa fatally undercut his support. But the Conservatives proved incapable of reabsorbing Quebec into their fold. In the conscription crisis of 1917, a Union government of Conservatives and pro-conscription English Canadian Liberals succeeded in forcing conscription down unwilling Quebec throats – and also succeeded in crushing Tory electoral chances in Quebec for the next 40 years.

Liberal hegemony in Quebec formed the institutional embodiment of the elite accommodation mechanism that glued the binational state together. The Liberals capitalized on the incapacity of their Conservative opponents to sustain a Quebec base. Twice in the 20th century, the Conservatives made major breakthroughs into the francophone Quebec electorate, thereby yielding national majorities. Twice they fumbled their opportunities. In 1958 John Diefenbaker won 50 of 75 Quebec seats. Four years later, in the face of Tory incomprehension of the emerging Quiet Revolution, the foothold was lost. In 1984, under Quebecer Brian Mulroney, the PCs swept Quebec, a feat repeated in 1988. Yet by 1993, the party’s Quebec wing was virtually destroyed by massive defections to the new BQ led by Mulroney’s former Quebec lieutenant, Lucien Bouchard.

In contrast, the Liberals from Laurier to Trudeau more or less competently managed the delicate negotiation of elite accommodation between English Canada and Quebec. Laurier effectively finessed the contentious Manitoba schools question that threatened English-French relations in the 1890s. During the Second World War, Mackenzie King’s studied ambiguity (“Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription”) manoeuvred Canada past the jagged reefs of intercommunity crisis that had shipwrecked Borden in the previous war. Pierre Trudeau faced down the challenge of Quebec secession in the 1980 sovereignty-association referendum with an ambiguous promise of “renewed federalism”; 15 years later, Jean Chrétien faced down a more acute challenge in the second referendum, and left office in 2003 with the sovereigntist threat considerably diminished.

The positive Liberal record on the national unity file in part may represent simply good luck and good timing, but sustained success over the decades cannot be entirely attributed to chance. Facing the one challenge that has always held the potential to tear apart our federalist state, the Liberals knew how to manage Quebec nationalism. This was a particular Liberal skill in governance.

To understand the Liberal knack for managing an always restive Quebec, one must understand what Liberals meant by “national unity.” To the indignation of Quebec nationalists and sovereigntists, and to the bafflement and frustration of critics in English Canada on both right and left, the Liberal sense of national unity deliberately lacked content. It contained no vision of the Good, of the ideal Canada to be counterposed to the vision of a sovereign Quebec. Normally, it meant “more of the same” or, at most, a rejigging here and there of existing arrangements with the end goal of preserving the system intact. But this was the point: any attempt to articulate a “Canadian” countervision would open up a hornet’s nest of competing and sometimes mutually exclusive notions of what kind of Canada and Quebec was desirable. Thus the fiascos of Meech Lake and Charlottetown, when Mulroney unwisely “rolled the dice.” His Liberal successor Chrétien stoutly resisted any so-called “Plan C” for English Canada in the wake of the 1995 near-miss referendum, and he was prudent to do so.

The closest any Liberal government came to erecting a countervision to Quebec sovereignty was Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, his “people’s package” in the patriation debate. But even though the Charter raised controversies over the relative place of First Nations, women, gays and lesbians, etc., in the end it too conformed to the Liberal emphasis on procedural rather than substantive justice.

National unity became a watchword of Liberal politics, indeed a virtual Liberal campaign slogan, one largely successful for decades. This, however, never meant that English Canada and Quebec shared a positive vision of federalism, even in the eloquent and powerful articulation of Trudeau. It finally came down to this: the Liberals represented federalism in a Quebec that was, following the creation of the Parti Québécois in the late 1960s, rent by a sovereignty-vs.-federalism dichotomy that tended to displace all other criteria for political choice. That Liberal federalism was without much social or economic content long appeared to be strength rather than weakness. One could choose to block the sovereigntist project by voting for a party that covered over the issues that otherwise divided federalists.

Over time this conjuring trick fooled fewer and fewer. First the Liberals lost francophone voters to Mulroney’s Tories, then failed to regain them with the emergence of the BQ. Chrétien’s three majorities were built not on a Liberal Quebec but on a Liberal Ontario. The sponsorship scandal discredited Liberal federalism in the eyes of both Québécois and Anglo-Canadians. In 2006 Harper eked out a minority government. When francophone voters finally grew weary of the BQ’s fixation on sovereignty, they did not turn to a party defined by little more than its federalist faith. Instead they decided to shrug off the tired sovereignty-federalism polarization and vote for a party that had a social and economic agenda that accorded with the BQ’s social democratic philosophy, minus its overriding nationalist preoccupation. In other words, Quebec voters tentatively opted to rejoin the larger Canadian political community by choosing a pan-Canadian social democratic alternative to a right-of-centre government. With that decision, the Liberal Party’s ancient Quebec pillar finally collapsed.

The second pillar: executive federalism

The second pillar of the Government Party model was related to the first. As the national unity party, the Liberals were also the party of the federal – the national – government. It was the Liberals who managed, without benefit of coalition, the national war effort from 1939 to 1945. It was the Liberals who managed the transition to peacetime with no Depression-era unemployment and who orchestrated a quasi-Keynesian “Ottawa knows best” era of prosperity into the late 1950s. It was the Pearson Liberals who presided over the biggest increase ever in the welfare state with the introduction of medicare and the Canada Pension Plan. It was Pearson who gave us the maple leaf flag as a distinctive symbol of national pride (craftily linked to the red-and-white Liberal logo).

Despite attemps by the right to label it as such, the Liberals neither intended nor sold their policies to the electorate as dirigisme or socialism. If anything, they defined themselves as ideologically neutral, as managerial and technocratic. In the Liberal telling, the national government was more competent than the provinces in protecting the interests of the Canadian community – including French and English Canada, the western and Atlantic regions, rich and poor, the private and public sectors.

In associating themselves with the national government, the Liberals were always careful to maintain their federalist credentials, which meant dealing with provincial governments in a quasi-diplomatic manner. Under Liberal guidance the distinctive Canadian form of executive federalism emerged: a Liberal Ottawa would deal evenhandedly with provincial governments of all partisan and ideological stripes. From the late 1930s through the late 1950s, Liberal governments in Ottawa faced Maurice Duplessis’s Union Nationale in Quebec, and federal Liberals in Quebec and the UN observed a mutual nonaggression pact in federal and provincial elections. A somewhat similar situation existed de facto in Ontario where the provincial Tories remained in office from the early 1940s to the mid-1980s: Tory Ontario was often the ally of Liberal Ottawa, as in 1981–82 when Tory premiers Bill Davis of Ontario and Richard Hatfield of New Brunswick were Trudeau’s sole provincial allies in the great constitutional patriation battle.

The point here is that Liberal nationalism – if we can call it that – was nonpartisan or at least very low-key partisan. Ottawa Liberals were never eager to put their own party on the line on behalf of provincial Liberals who in office often proved more formidable antagonists than provincial governments of a different colour – witness the warlike relations between Ontario’s Mitch Hepburn and Mackenzie King in the 1930s, or the tough negotiations between Lester Pearson and Quebec’s Jean Lesage in the 1960s.

Starting with John Diefenbaker’s 1958 electoral sweep, the Liberal identification with the national state began to flash warning signs. The west, especially the prairies, grew restive about federal governments that seemed disengaged from western concerns. With the exception of Trudeau’s “just society” 1968 election, the federal Liberal vote in the western provinces never recovered. Rejection of the Liberals in the west reached new highs under Trudeau. In Trudeau’s 1980 return to power, only two Liberal MPs were elected west of Ontario. The Trudeau government then embarked on the National Energy Program that was, and has remained to this day, anathema in Alberta. The rise of the west was imposing a new reality on the Canadian political economy, and the Liberals’ identification with the national state pitted them in a structural conflict with powerful province-building projects across the west. This weakened the national government, and the Liberal Party.

Events beyond Canada also spelled increasing difficulty for both the federal government and the Liberal Party. The decline of economic growth rates in the 1970s led to the rise of Thatcherism in Britain and Reaganism in the United States. Faith in the Keynesian welfare state faltered. Liberal identification with the national government had always been about Liberals as sound economic managers, and the federal bureaucracy as the competent custodian of the national interest. As markets came to be favoured over politics, and government came to be seen as more the problem than the solution, this second pillar of the Government Party model was seriously undermined.

The third pillar: the Liberals as chameleons

The third pillar of the Government Party model was the agility of the Liberal Party over many decades in identifying and capturing for its own electoral benefit the prevailing direction of the ideological winds in the country. Observers who have chosen points at which the Liberals veered left might conclude that the Liberals are “really” socialists in slow motion; observers who chose points at which they veered right might conclude that they are “really” conservative wolves disguised as moderate sheep. The best description of Liberal policy and ideology over the decades is neither of the above. The Liberals were chameleons: lizards able to change colours to match the immediate environment, so as to minimize the risk of exposure to enemies.

At crucial points in the 20th century, the Liberals veered leftward to co-opt a spike in left-wing public sentiment and thus pre-empt the potential rise of a rival party to the Liberals’ left. In the 1945 election, following the rise of the social democratic CCF, the King government promised a “New Social Order”: family allowances, a national housing policy, a strong federal role in maintaining full employment, etc. In the 1960s, after the founding of the NDP on a solid trade union financial base, the Pearson Liberals brought in a national medicare scheme (after its tumultuous introduction in Saskatchewan by the CCF-NDP) and the Canada Pension Plan. From 1972 to 1974, Trudeau managed a minority by working closely with the NDP. In 1980, Trudeau made a startling return from the dead by campaigning against an austerity budget by the short-lived Clark government, and then moved in office to the ill-fated National Energy Program, foreign investment review and other left-of-centre policies. One last gasp of Liberal leftism came in 2008 with the doomed Liberal-NDP coalition bid that was only averted by Harper’s prolonged prorogation of Parliament.

There is another side of the historical ledger. After returning to office in 1935, Mackenzie King led a government that was, in the desperate context of the Great Depression, one of the most conservative in Canadian history. The Louis Saint-Laurent–C.D. Howe Liberal governments of the 1950s were thoroughly rooted in corporate capitalist Canada. In the 1990s, the Chrétien-Martin Liberals slashed spending and eliminated the deficit that had bedevilled the Mulroney governments of the 1980s.

The Liberals were neither left nor right; they were the classic brokerage party, an electoral and governing machine that tries to put together a coalition of voters that can stay ahead of the competition, whatever direction voters move at any given moment. That formula works best when the brokerage party sits astride the political process as the dominant force, and when it is the only credible alternative when in opposition. This latter condition has vanished now that the Liberals have slid to minor party status. Michael Ignatieff appealed to voters in 2011 not so much as a positive left-centre alternative to the Conservatives as with the old refrain that only the Liberals could form a government. Like the cartoon coyote who runs off the edge of the cliff yet continues on thin air until he finally looks down, the Liberals believed their own conjuring trick – until May 2. No longer a credible governing party, nor the only credible alternative, the Liberal Party with its brokerage politics looks much less attractive. It is a party that stands for little, other than the delusion that it is entitled to office.

Mulroney’s failure and what it tells us

Failing Liberal brokerage politics is part of the explanation for the Liberals’ demise. To fully grasp the extent of the changes that have overtaken Canadian politics in the past three decades, we must turn to the Progressive Conservatives’ inability to establish themselves as a governing party. When Brian Mulroney assumed office in 1984, his government seemed to be the fulfilment of the Government Party model. The Tories held a majority or plurality of seats in every province and region. A Quebec leader had stolen that province from the Liberals and added the west, which had abandoned the Liberals since Diefenbaker. Mulroney in office eschewed the harder ideological examples of his fellow conservatives Thatcher and Reagan to follow a more pragmatic brokerage model. No axes were taken to social programs; he introduced a major new tax, the GST, to pay for pensions, UI, transfers to provinces and so on. A confident national government negotiated free trade with the United States. Mulroney also negotiated the Meech Lake agreement that promised to “bring Quebec back into the Constitution” after its isolation over Trudeau’s patriation. Grasping all three pillars of the old model, seemingly with more conviction than his opponents, Mulroney appeared poised to inherit the mantle of the Government Party.

It did not happen. A populist backlash in English Canada defeated the Meech Lake Accord, and disaffection with pragmatic PC policy flared on the right. In Mulroney’s second term, the PCs were riven by massive defections – in Quebec to the BQ and in the west to the Reform Party. After Mulroney abandoned the field to Kim Campbell, she won a derisory two seats in the 1993 election. The PCs never recovered.

The crucial point of this story is that the Mulroney attempt at brokerage failed because of two new parties that were quite different in nature both from each other and from either the PCs or the Liberals. Both Reform and the BQ were resolutely ideological in origin, explicitly rejecting the centrist policies that had characterized the Mulroney years. The BQ’s raison d’être was independence for Quebec, a goal to which all other policy was subordinated. Reform rejected the economic and social policies of the centre, calling instead for strong economic and social conservatism and radical populist innovations in direct democratic control of representatives (free votes, initiatives, referendums, recall).

The PC collapse of 1993 was not just another electoral setback for an old-line brokerage party; it was a signal of how politics would henceforth be played. To be sure, the BQ failed in its raison d’être. Reform underwent one transformation into the Canadian Alliance and then took over the PCs, forming the new Harperite Conservative Party. Superficially, we seem to have returned to the old party system that prevailed prior to 1993. Appearances are deceiving. The BQ took francophone Quebec out of the old game of elite accommodation, with consequences yet to be fully counted. Equally important, the ideological DNA of Reform/Alliance that went into the new Conservative Party has produced a hybrid beast that has branched off from the old Lib/Con Government Party evolutionary tree.

The Conservatives’ wedge politics

When the new Conservative Party was founded, it quickly shucked off the direct democracy component of Reform ideology. The sole surviving remnant was fixed election dates, which Harper enacted – then promptly ignored in 2008. This is no surprise since Harper had long been a critic of the direct democracy element of Reform ideology. While populist democracy was a mainly western enthusiasm, the Calgary-based but Toronto-born Harper drew on Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution in Ontario as inspiration both for the new party’s economic and social ideology and for its political and electoral strategy.

The Harris program for Ontario was largely Thatcherite and Reaganite in content, sharply to the right of the bland Red Toryism of the Frost-Robarts-Davis years. As important as the changing content of policy was the changing shape of the party as a vote- getting enterprise. The Harris party was rebranded for the new political science of micromarketing. It was no longer a party but a virtual party: the Conservative franchise chain sold a product, the Common Sense Revolution, and Mike Harris was its public face. What was new was the marketing concept: the product was not designed for the largest possible number of possible buyers, and thus watered down to the lowest common denominator acceptable to the largest number. That was old-style thinking. New media and polling tools permitted the identification and targeting of niche markets that could be persuaded to vote Tory by specific promises. Political campaigning focused singlemindedly on these microconstituencies. In office the Harrisites were relentless in fulfilling promises to microconstituencies, and were rewarded with a solid vote in their 1999 reelection.

Political micromarketing was an import from the United States. The Clinton Democrats had been adept at identifying target niches (the famous “soccer moms”). The Harris Tories went beyond identifying potential positives by seeking “wedge issues” deliberately designed to be divisive.

All significant public policy creates winners and losers. The Harrisites grasped an important element in the new science of micromarketing: the visible anger of the losers confirms the support of the winners. There was an enormous backlog of resentment built up after years of mildly left-of-centre governance by the David Peterson Liberals and the Bob Rae New Democrats. The Tories tapped into it. “Taxpayers” were pitted against the “special interests.” When these “interests” reacted to attacks on their “entitlements” with strikes and demonstrations, this only deepened the commitment of the “taxpayers” (winners with big provincial tax cuts) by showing that their enemies (unionized workers, students, feminists, gays and lesbians, Aboriginals, etc.) had been made losers. Wedge politics is a zero-sum game, based not so much on class as on ressentiment.

One crucial caveat: this kind of politics works best when the right is united and the centre-left is divided. Such was the case in Ontario where the Liberals and NDP divided the vote to the left of the Tories. In this scenario, a minority coalition of niche constituencies can command power over a divided majority. A decade after Mike Harris, Stephen Harper and his marketing and PR gurus stepped into this opportunity at the federal level. Flush with cash from phenomenally successful fundraising (much of it based on niche constituencies like evangelicals), the Conservatives have launched what Tom Flanagan, insider party scholar-activist par excellence, has called the “permanent campaign.”1 A 24/7 partisan avalanche of negative advertising designed to frame Tory opponents as unworthy destroyed two successive Liberal leaders, Stéphane Dion (“Not much of a leader”) and Michael Ignatieff (“Just visiting”), in the minds of voters before these leaders could define themselves. The permanent campaign rests on relentless partisanship: every issue is infused with partisan rancour in which the opposition parties are tarred with negative invective. The point is not to present the government’s accomplishments in a positive light, but to frame the opposition in the most negative light.

The practitioners of negativity believe that voters can be conditioned more readily by fear than by hope. This is not a new insight. Machiavelli asked long ago if fear or love was the more valuable asset for the Prince. His answer was unequivocal: men love at their own free will, but fear at the will of the Prince, and the wise Prince relies on what is in his power and not in the power of others. Harper as Prince is a good Machiavellian.

Wedge issues fit well into the negativity of niche marketing. Never mind that on a particular issue more people may be on the other side. The hook in a wedge issue is designed for the target niche, not for others, even when the others are in the majority. In describing the “emerging Conservative coalition,” Flanagan reveals the confrontational, divisive nature of the party’s coalition building. After the 2008 electoral reverse suffered by the party in Quebec, the leadership abandoned its earlier attempt to enlist Quebec as the third pillar of its governing coalition (along with western populists and traditional Tories). Instead they targeted ethnic communities, especially in the then Liberal fortress of Toronto.

The roots of this targeting go back to 2005 when Harper seized on the same-sex marriage bill introduced by the Chrétien government. “Harper,” writes Flanagan, “decided to use it as a wedge issue to approach ethnic voters.” $300,000 was allocated to running ads in ethnic media appealing to the conservative moral values of many religiously oriented ethnic voters, opposed to the “lifestyle obsessions of Liberal elites.”2 This was the platform on which the party fashioned its major breakthrough into the ethnic vote in 2011, sweeping 30 of the 45 seats in the Greater Toronto Area. No matter that a majority of Canadians endorse same-sex marriage: as a Tory wedge issue, it was mission accomplished. It is sound electoral strategy, when the opposition parties split the majority vote between them. That it was bought at the expense of pandering to homophobic prejudice and inflaming distrust and division apparently did not trouble Conservative consciences.

Conjuring the Socialist-Separatist Menace

There are already postelection hints of how this negative niche marketing strategy will be extended now that the Liberals have been displaced by a Quebec-based NDP as the official opposition, especially after the tragic death of Jack Layton has left the NDP with a vacuum at the top. Quebec, downplayed in Tory strategy after 2008, has now been written off altogether. Tory spin on Quebec was test-marketed in the propaganda onslaught against the ill-fated Liberal-NDP coalition, which was duplicitously framed as a Liberal coalition not just with the “socialists” but also with the “separatists” – which it was not. This attack on the legitimacy of the BQ continued with the Conservatives’ self-serving plan to scrap public financing of political parties. Real Canadian taxpayers, it was said, were being made to pay for a disloyal separatist party (Quebec taxpayers who voted for the BQ were not, it would seem, “real” taxpayers).

Now that the orange tsunami has swept the BQ off the Quebec map, the Tory spin machine has quickly regeared to unmask and denounce leading Quebec NDPers, starting with interim leader Nycole Turmel, as former Bloquistes or as having had dalliance with separatists in the past. Ponder the implications for national unity: instead of the conversion of former sovereigntists being welcomed, the NDP is denounced as cryptoseparatist.

Contempt for Quebec was further demonstrated when Harper replaced his communications director from Quebec with Angelo Persichelli, an ethnic press journalist who does not speak French and had authored a notorious column in the Toronto Star complaining that that there are too many francophones around Ottawa: “Many are tired of the annoying lament from a province that keeps yelling at those who pay part of its bills and are concerned by the over-representation of francophones in our bureaucracy, our Parliament and our institutions.”3 Even Tory senators from Quebec complained. Winning Quebec hearts and minds is not at the top of the PMO agenda.

For the Machiavelli of Calgary Southwest, this is only part of the plan. Now consider the government’s postelection lurch toward nostalgic celebration of the British monarchy. There was the lavish attention paid to the visit of the newlyweds Kate and William, the return to the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal Canadian Air Force, the replacement of Quebec artist Alfred Pellan’s mural in the Foreign Affairs building lobby with a portrait of Her Britannic Majesty, orders to hang the royal portrait front and centre in every Canadian embassy throughout the world. Next year a huge bicentennial celebration is planned to commemorate the War of 1812 – patriotism suitably wrapped in the Union Jack. This sudden effusion of British royalist sentiment might appeal to the Colonel Blimp niche in the electorate, which may have been a big constituency in 1940 but is not exactly influential today. The real point is negative: to provoke the Quebec NDP into lashing out at this flaunting of British hegemonic symbolism, thus revealing the disloyal “separatists” in federalist clothes.

When Brian Topp became the first announced candidate for the NDP leadership, the PMO smearmongers were instantly off the mark: “How could Brian Topp speak on behalf of all Canadians, when he is so tied to big union special interests” and was the “NDP leader’s hand-picked negotiator in the coalition talks with the separatist Bloc Québécois.” The next round of Dion-Ignatieff character assassination ads was previewed: “Brian Topp will do anything – including forming a wreckless coalition with separatists – in order to gain power.”4 There you have it: the Socialist-Separatist Menace coming soon to a television screen near you. The cynicism is breathtaking.

But there is yet more political gain for the Tories in this attack. The threat posed by a strong NDP rooted in Quebec is a left-centre alliance that would cross the national divide and bring a social democratic government to national office, the very possibility thwarted by the domination of Quebec by the leftish but sovereigntist BQ and by the Liberal-NDP split in English Canada. Conjuring the Socialist-Separatist Menace thus does double duty.

This marks how far we have come from the old Government Party model, whether Chrétien Liberal or Mulroney Conservative. All three pillars have been repudiated by the Harperites.

National unity has been abandoned for the immediate partisan advantage of undermining the Quebec-based opposition within English Canada. Breaking with the traditional Liberal practice of executive federalism, the Harperites have intervened in the Ontario election of 2011, campaigning for their Tory counterparts against a Liberal premier. Three weeks before an election in Prince Edward Island the Liberal incumbents are hit with a federal government probe of alleged corruption from a few years back, charges enthusiastically supported by the Liberals’ Tory challengers. Partisanship trumps executive federalism.

As for centrist pragmatism in policy, it is a relic of the Liberal past. Division is fostered over consensus as group is pitted against group, and ideology against ideology. Opposition is delegitimized. “Conservative values are Canadian values. Canadian values are Conservative values,” Harper declared at the Calgary Stampede, thus implying that liberal and social democratic values are un-Canadian.5

This is a Canadian equivalent of the contemporary American political system, a system in which a hyperpartisan and ideological Republican party, pushed by the Tea Party and cheered on by Fox News, has bombed out the political centre to interdict compromise with the “left” (i.e., the Democrats). It is in this context that the decline and fall of the über-centrist Liberal Party must be set. It is the strange death of the political centre that is more striking and more demanding of explanation than the strange death of Liberal Canada.

Recreating the centre

There are those in the NDP camp who welcome the vanishing centre as the necessary removal of an unprincipled Liberal Party, clearing the way for what was once hopefully called “creative politics”: a sharp, well-defined right-left division between the Conservatives and the NDP. The complaint of social democrats that the deadening hand of the Liberals smothered the emergence of a Canadian version of the British Labour party was memorably expressed in Frank Scott’s poem on the death of Mackenzie King:

He blunted us.

We had no shape
Because he never took sides,
And no sides
Because he never allowed them to take shape.

There is a problem with this call for right-left class politics. Currently the North American right, not the left, has the ideological wind in its sails; the sharper the division, the worse the fate of the left. And this has always been the case. British Columbia is a Canadian case study for what happens when politics is turned into a binary opposition of ideologies. B.C. politics has been the closest thing to European-style class politics ever since the CCF emerged as a contender for provincial office in the 1930s. The right coalesced in reaction, first behind the B.C. Liberals in the 1930s, then behind a Liberal-Conservative coalition in the 1940s, followed by Social Credit from the 1950s through the 1980s, and finally again the B.C. Liberals in the last decade. Whatever name it has gone under, a business-based right-of-centre party has confronted a labour-dominated, ideologically driven CCF-NDP. The results are stark. In 22 elections since the arrival of the social democrats, the right-wing party has won 19 times, the NDP only three times. Over eight decades, the right has been in office 84 per cent of the time. This is not an impressive track record for “creative politics.”

Here is the prime vulnerability for the post-Layton NDP, and the Tory smear machine will gleefully seize on it. Whoever succeeds Layton will be framed as a scary radical, and the party as a dangerous leftist threat to Canadian values and, of course, to taxpayer wallets. As the centre declines, the resulting political narrative favours the right more than the left. True, the Canadian public idolizes icons of the left like Tommy Douglas and Jack Layton – once they are safely dead. But the same public elects and reelects living, acting politicians of the right. The language of politics reproduced through the media and the corporations embeds the dominant theme of the right: the self-interested demands of taxpayers and consumers are prior to the obligations of citizens toward their community. Politicians of the right go with the flow; those of the left have their faces to the wind.

Liberals occasionally got things through, from the left like medicare or from the right like deficit elimination, precisely because they “blunted” debate (in Scott’s lament). Deficit elimination under the Liberals worked because they “never took sides,” refusing to package it as a neoliberal attack on the state. It worked so well that, by the end, all parties (including the NDP and the Greens) were in agreement that Canada’s welfare state, no less than its economy, was in better shape when the books were in balance than when the country was in debt to foreign creditors and the bond rating agencies. Contrast this to the brutal Hobbesian state of nature that characterizes the current war between the Republican Congress and the Obama White House over the U.S. debt problem, where the centre is a no-man’s-land between armies that take no prisoners.

There is a deeper question than the electoral fate of particular political parties. Is the decline of the political centre rooted in the changing social and economic circumstances of our time? Or is it an artificial construct, fostered and manipulated by the right for its own political benefit? Perhaps it is a bit of both. The squeeze on the middle class has in effect narrowed the base for the political centre.6 The fragmentation of the commons and the techniques of micromarketing, both facilitated by the new media, allow wedge politics to deconstruct the “public” into multiple manipulable “publics.”

There is widespread disgust with the negative climate of politics fostered by the deliberate attack on the centre. To the extent that the cultivation of fear and loathing turns many people off politics altogether, especially young people, it may even be a deliberate strategy of the right: shrink the voting population down to a smaller pond dominated by right-wing constituencies. But there is also an enduring yearning for more civility and more common ground on which substantive, as opposed to partisan, debate can take place over public policy.

At this point the continuing partisan divide of the parties to the left of the Conservatives is not only unfortunate but downright irresponsible. The 60 per cent of the electorate that has refused to be drawn into Harper’s coalition of negativity cannot reasonably be described as a “left” alternative; it is a potential centre-left source of effective opposition – if the two or three parties can get their act together and unite to represent this nascent majority. If this happened, the Liberals would probably shed some of their own more conservative elements – the John Manleys et al. – which would bolster the Red Tory minority in the Harper party and be a welcome moderating influence on the Harperites.

Perhaps the centre’s strange death has been, like Mark Twain’s, greatly exaggerated. If Harper has moved the entire spectrum to the right, then it is the centre-left that now occupies the ground formerly contested between the Liberal centre and the NDP left. The three pillars of the old Government Party still remain relevant, albeit in need of renovation:

• national unity redefined as a common progressive front across the two nations;
• a renewed and reinvigorated national government as an instrument for the Canadian community as a whole against the fragmenting forces of globalization and private greed;
• an emphasis on rational public policy as against ideological zealotry.

There is a potential majority around these pillars that needs the encouragement and cooperation of both the Liberals and the NDP. With that cooperation the strange death might then become a not so strange rebirth.

Continue reading “The Liberals: The strange death of the political centre” →

In North America populism is all the rage. In the United States, activists under the banner of the “Tea Party” are storming the Republican Party. Rabid right-wing TV ranter Glenn Beck poses as the tribune of the people.

Canadian politicians and commentators are less inclined to act as hysterical drama queens, but we are not immune to the appeal of populism. This is especially the case in British Columbia, where populist frenzies can suddenly flare like the forest fires that consumed parts of the B.C. interior in the summer of 2010. Just as the fires were fuelled by the prior infestation of the pine beetle that has turned forests into kindling, populist rage feeds on a political system already hollowed out by undemocratic politicians.

Like American populism, the B.C. variety is a taxpayer revolt, in this case opposition to the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST). Economists have been virtually unanimous in arguing that the HST makes economic sense. They could have saved their breath. The public was in no mood to listen to academics. Nobody likes a tax increase, but anti-HST feelings soon went beyond the usual grumbling: they now threaten to overturn not only the HST but also the Liberal government that brought in the HST. They have already claimed the career of three-term Premier Gordon Campbell.

Driving the populist wave was anger at the antidemocratic attitude of the Liberal government, which had campaigned for reelection in 2009 without a hint of an impending HST decision, and then dropped the bombshell in the immediate aftermath of winning another majority. Arrogantly assuming that voters’ attention span fell short of the next election in 2013, they thought they could get away with it. Bad plan.

The HST saga is a tale of two provinces. Ontario made the decision first. There has been taxpayer grumbling in Ontario, but little more. Ontario anger will have to be saved for the next provincial election.

B.C. is a different story. In keeping with its populist political culture, B.C. has a unique Recall and Initiative Act, NDP legislation from the 1990s. An initiative petition to stop the HST was launched by the discredited former Social Credit Premier Bill Vander Zalm and other right-wing antitax crusaders, joined hand in hand by NDP leader Carole James and pro-NDP journalist Bill Tieleman.

Despite, or perhaps because of, such strange bedfellows, the petition easily amassed sufficient names in every constituency. As a result, a provincewide referendum on Vander Zalm’s proposed “HST Extinguishment Act” will be held in September 2011. Premier Campbell quickly announced that his government would accept a simple majority of votes cast as the trigger to dump the tax, thereby hoping to avoid the other, nuclear, option threatened by the anti-HST campaigners: “total recall” of the entire Liberal government (Total Recall is the title of a 1990 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, who 13 years later became Governor of California in a campaign recalling a recently elected governor). B.C. legislation permits petitions to recall sitting members of the legislature, and while no recall attempt has yet succeeded, there is no precedent for the heat of the present populist backlash.

The prospect of an impending vote on the HST represents a public policy disaster for the province. Uncertainty over the fate of a key tax for business can only harm the economic climate, and if, as is likely, the HST is dumped, the ramifications will be worse. Reversing the HST, which is a joint federal-provincial program, would involve negotiations with Ottawa, and B.C. would have to return $1.6 billion the federal government kicked in as a sweetener. It would also have to restore its provincial sales tax and reconstitute the bureaucracy to administer it (which was absorbed into Revenue Canada when the HST replaced the PST). It would be a major-league mess. Campbell desperately announced a 15 per cent cut in provincial income tax, but when that failed to improve his dismal approval ratings (9 per cent!) he abruptly resigned and called for a leadership convention.

Whatever happens, B.C. has shown eagerness to go down the road of California, where public policy may be determined by referenda and initiatives, and elected officials can be recalled by an aroused electorate. The prospect of the “Californication” of B.C. is one that should chill not just British Columbians but all Canadians. It is universally acknowledged that California is a failed state with collapsed finances, disintegrating educational and health institutions and dysfunctional politics.

There is a direct link between California’s dire straits and its extreme populism. Proposition 13, an initiative passed by California voters in 1978 and now embodied in the state constitution, not only lowered property taxes but severely restrained state and local governments from raising taxes in the future. This taxpayer revolt has paralyzed funding for public institutions for more than two decades.

Populism does not, as its proponents like to think, make democracy more democratic. It just makes it more dysfunctional – and therefore less democratic. Populism is incapable of mustering a positive program for reform because the emotions that drive it are fundamentally negative: distrust and resentment of privileged “elites” and the large, complex organizations “they” have turned against “us.” Underlying populist rhetoric is an enduring democratic fallacy: the “will of the people” is perpetually thwarted by self-serving elites.

But what is this “people” that possesses a unified “will”? Margaret Thatcher once infamously said, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” One might with greater accuracy say that there is no such thing as the people. There are individuals and groups, and there are interests. The problem with populism is that it constructs a mythical “people” to provide a false legitimacy to the loudest voices of the moment. But the people are always divided among themselves, with sharply differing interests in conflict. This is why populism is almost always negative. You can unite a large number of people against something – especially a tax – but it is much more difficult to unite people for something. In federal politics, populist backlash vetoed both the Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional accords, but populism has offered no constructive alternatives.

Ex-Socreds, miscellaneous right-wingers and NDPers can all be mobilized against the HST, although there is not a chance they could act together for anything. Hitching itself to a populist wave is a dangerous strategy for the NDP, whatever its immediate electoral appeal. Populism in the 21st century has a distinct right-wing complexion – as witness the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, funded by far-right billionaires like Rupert Murdoch. The people elect the politicians, but they do not elect the capitalists. Politicians are accountable; the capitalists are not. Corporate wealth and power escape populist rage, by and large, while the state, which alone can rein in unrestrained corporate power, bears the brunt and sees its fiscal capacity and its regulatory power weakened: as a result, the people lose. Think of it as populism’s built-in self-destruct mechanism.

The NDP first fought B.C.’s environmentally progressive carbon tax in the provincial election, and now fights the HST. Does a purportedly social democratic party with an agenda for expanding public programs really want to come to office on the back of a tax revolt? Yet the federal NDP has joined its provincial party in vociferously opposing both the carbon tax and the HST. Such is the siren song of populism.

How ironic it is that British Columbia, the worst-case scenario for dysfunctional populism, has also offered a remarkable innovation in democratic governance. In 2003 a B.C. Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform was created (composed of 160 men and women in equal numbers randomly selected from each of B.C.’s electoral districts) to advise on the best voting system for the province. Unlike plebiscitary populism that gives only the power of “no” to a faceless majority, the Citizens’ Assembly was an exercise in deliberative democracy: ordinary people learned about and thoughtfully debated an issue with which the political parties could not be trusted for partisan reasons, and then made a positive recommendation submitted to a provincewide referendum in 2005.

The Citizens’ Assembly plan, for a Single Transferable Vote system (STV), “failed” after gaining 59 per cent in a referendum (the province set the bar at 60 per cent). It was again put to the voters in 2009, but was defeated soundly by a majority of No votes. Ironically, this time it fell victim to populist distrust (fed by political parties which dislike a voting system that undermines their privileges). Prominent among the anti-STV campaigners was Bill Tieleman, the same NDP advocate who has helped spearhead the anti-HST campaign. Call it the populist audacity of nope.

The point is not whether STV is preferable to the existing voting system. The point is that the Citizens’ Assembly offers a procedural model of deliberative democracy that is preferable to populist negativism. British Columbia thus offers the rest of the country the best and the worst faces of political reform.