Politik ist die Kunst des Möglichen - Otto von Bismark - Politics is the art of the possibleThe Conservatives’ promises are ... mostly stupid, while the Liberals’ are ... mostly meaningless. - Andrew Coyne, a small-c conservative commentator, "Bad policy versus no policy — the real difference between Conservatives and Liberals" (25 September 2019)I had a couple of women, constituents, come to my office and say, ‘We fought so hard to get a seat around the table, and you got there and you gave it away.’ It kind of stunned me. My answer to them was, ‘We didn’t fight hard to get a seat at the table so that we [could] do things the way they’ve always been done and let the boys still run things the way the boys have been running things.’- Jane Philpott, independent MP for Markham-Stouffville and former cabinet minister, interview with Jason McBride, "Can Jane Philpott Change Politics?" https://thewalrus.ca/can-jane-philpott-change-politics/
"Politicians, I think, need to figure out how to have those conversations which will allow us to introduce evidence-based policy in a politically palatable way ... Polling can't substitute for good public policy." - Jody Wilson-Raybould, independent MP for Vancouver Granville and former cabinet minister, interview with Canadaland (Oppo podcast #31, 4 June 2019)
If one story encapsulates
the state of the parties in Canada it is the saga of Doug Ford, premier of Ontario. Doug Ford was the quieter of the two Ford brothers: when his brother was city councillor, he was busy with business, when his brother was mayor he was city councillor, when Rob Ford had to step down for health reasons (and after being caught on video smoking crack cocaine with teenagers) Doug ran for mayor and lost. Rob Ford died of cancer in March 2016. In January 2018 the provincial Progressive Conservative leader was accused of sexual assault and stepped down just before an election. Doug then moved into provincial politics, was narrowly elected party leader, and a few months later became premier by default because too many Ontario voters were tired of the 15 year old Liberal government but not enough agreed which other party to support. He got 40.5% of the vote which is 1% more than Stephen Harper ever did. Since election his administration has been less shambolic than Boris Johnson's but not what you could call disciplined. That is a bad outcome from the party's point of view (rather than quietly implementing the planks of their unwritten platform, he announces something shocking then backs down after massive public protest), but they were not able to keep someone without at least one term as MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly ie. the provincial parliament) from becoming leader just before an election they expected to win.
Each of the big three parties seem to be divided between
those who think that the thing to do is to offer more or less the same policies as everyone else and focus on playing the game, and
those who got into politics to DO SOMETHING and suspect that offending the opinion sections of the
Globe and Mail and the
National Post is about as consequential as offending tumblr and that people will like policies they don't tell pollsters they like, and vice versa. I don't like the term 'establishment,' because I think you can find both views everywhere from people interested in running for parliament for the first time to senior advisors and ex-cabinet ministers.
There are also regional differences. BC (which has the ports and the fragile coastal ecosystems) and Alberta (which has the tar sands and the royalties thereof) are never going to see eye to eye about oil pipelines, and many provinces have their own party system: Saskatchewan is governed by the Saskatchewan Party (est. 1997), and in BC until the last election we had a two-party system, with the NDP representing the public sector unions and the Liberals representing capital (the Greens, lead by a distinguished physicist, have now wedged their way in). In this and the last election, federal parties who want to win seats in Quebec are torn what to say about local politicians who want to ban visible religious symbols such as crucifixes or niqabs (
Bill 21, An Act Respecting the Laicity of the State). And keep in mind that some ridings in Canada are already the size of the whole United Kingdom, so some kinds of proportional representation are not practical.
I have trouble using the word ideology for the federal Liberals at all, but they have a few neocons like Michael Ignatieff and greens like Stéphane Dion and a few genially corrupt elders. Broadly speaking, they are for the kinds of things that the
Globe and Mail,
New York Times, or
Economist say are good things, for listening to credentialed experts, and for not rocking the boat. The pressures of keeping their big coalitions together and the small temptations available to people who play along tend to boil any strong political philosophy out of them. That said, the three-party consensus in Canada is heavily shaped by the policies of earlier Liberal governments, bold ideas like our immigration system or free trade, but I just don't see any sign that today's Liberals think hard about principles before making policy. Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott obviously saw that differently than I do.
The NDP are for the postwar welfare state (their great achievement was introducing single-payer healthcare in
1961) and unions, but they have the problem that the only people who talk about "socialism" in Canada are right-wing columnists and maybe the odd student debate society, and that mass unionized workforces are not what they once were. I think they have tension between the "workers' party" and social justice wings, because if you are serious that First Nations who never surrendered their land have rights to it, then you can't just hand that land over to a resource company in exchange for jobs. The remainder of the old-school left, from back when Communism was a thing, hang out in the party but are marginalized: occasionally someone says something nice about FARC (seriously?) or suggests that the Palestinians might not entirely be to blame for troubles in the occupied territories and the press jump on them like starving wolves. The beige wing of the NDP issues ads which sound like they come from an online insurance brokerage ("the NDP can save you money on your phone bill, just call ...") with language around affordability, "hard-working Canadians," and sinister big business which echoes Conservative language about entrepreneurs and ominous foreign threats or Liberal language about the middle class and nameless people who want the country to go back not step forward. They can point out that they have formed provincial governments and are the first party to support something which later becomes Liberal policy, but they have never formed a federal government, and only been the second-largest party in parliament ("official opposition, Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition") once.
The Conservatives ("Tories") tend to learn authoritarian, against regulation of business, and for natural resource development and privatization, but under the skin there are all the different movements within mainstream Anglo right-wing circles today: market-oriented people, policy geeks who want to get rid of the Senate (traditionally a place for the
Liberals government of the day to park elderly supporters) or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (seriously!) or expand rights around firearms, American-style libertarians, religious conservatives, climate-change deniers, people who really don't like LGBTQ+/Moslem/brown people ... the
Freemen on the Land (warning, RationalWiki) and Neo-Nazis get kicked out when they show themselves in public. You sometimes meet the term "red tory" which had a fairly consistent meaning in the 1950s (they were kind of in favour of class distinctions, Anglo, and skeptical of free trade), but is now something vague like "moderate Conservative." They are the most successful at fundraising and get a consistent 29% to 39% of the national vote.
Jason Kenney the premier of Alberta gives a sense of what a fiery speaker within the party says, Ezra Levant and Maxime Bernier can get printed in less respectable places but say things which keep them just outside the bounds (but Maxime Bernier almost became head of the Conservative Party of Canada back when he was presenting himself as an American-style libertarian, and Scheer likes to hint that he has deep socially conservative convictions which he would never, never let the party act on
unless the polls change).
This Kai Nagata article gives an idea of the kinds of people who could conceivably have become leader after Harper stepped down (because he is not a sympathizer, I think he deliberately picked moderate voices).
Federal parties in Canada consist of a leader (who does not have to be a MP), cabinet or shadow cabinet ministers (who do not have to be MPs, but actual serving cabinet ministers are traditionally MPs), a group of MPs ("caucus"), a collection of riding associations, some kind of national council or assembly with the party secretary and so on, and the obligatory youth/student association. The Liberals and Conservatives have national meetings, I don't know if the other parties do. Both of the biggest two parties claim several hundred thousand members, so about 1% of the population each, but that is after Trudeau and the post-Harper leadership contest. The Conservatives in particular have had issues where a riding association wants one candidate, but the party bosses in Ottawa want another,
https://lfpress.com/news/national/election-2019/parachute-candidate-in-london-north-centre-not-the-first and their 2017 leadership election (with ranked ballots ...) had some irregularities
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Conservative_Party_of_Canada_leadership_election The NDP are having trouble finding candidates for all 338 ridings this year. Its not always easy to get a sense of the people running in your riding due to lack of local reporting and strict message control by the parties. A common gambit is to find a candidate or MP who has, or used to have, a controversial opinion on some national issue, get it into the national press, and challenge the party leader to disown them. The problem is that what shocks the national media may or may not shock you (and vice versa), and that this is a crude weapon, it can't dig out things which require local knowledge.
Remember when Steven Harper was held in contempt of Parliament by majority of the members? And the Governor General let him get away with ignoring this and treating it as merely a partisan stunt? ... Our elections seem to have been transformed into something like a plebiscite on who makes the best Prime Minister. ... our 19th century institutions are in a shambles because we don’t remember the 19th century principles that made them effective, and we haven’t replaced them with more recent principles and institutions - Steve Muhlberger, Democracy in Trouble (2013) https://smuhlberger.blogspot.com/2013/07/democracy-in-trouble.htmlFormal democracy, in such places, rides like a floating cork on an ocean of invisible influences, tangled power structures and murky social forces. - Phil Paine, A New International Body (2006) http://www.philpaine.com/?p=425 In my previous post, I described the
broad consensus on policy between the three largest parties. Many areas of policy have been declared beyond debate this year. If you would like to restore diplomatic relations with Iran, reverse the Conservatives' harsh new policies on sex workers, or try economic policies which would give the University of Chicago Economics department an attack of the vapors you have to look to human-rights groups and some parts of the NDP or the Greens, or go into municipal or provincial politics (two provincial governments have experimented with Guaranteed Minimum Income, the previous Ontario legislature considered moving towards a circular economy, and for about 10 years before pot smoking was legalized, several big-city police forces had a policy of ignoring small-scale possession and use). If you are on the right and think abortion is murder, gay marriage is a sin, or public services must be cut soon and drastically you have to lobby within the Conservative party while your MP sticks to the party line (citizen Andrew Scheer probably shares these opinions, but party leader Scheer has decided that they are not in the interests of the party). The people who run the three big parties are not very imaginative, and they are all asking the same pollsters and commentators to show them policies which will win 30-40% of the vote and 90% of the power.
However, the media and party machines which used to enforce this consensus are weak, leaving just the voting system and Canadians' distrust of extreme positions. A day may come when Canadians remember their courage, when they forget they are supposed to be the polite country and break the bonds of dead ideas, but the 21st of October 2019 is not that day. For now, a Strache or Le Pen or Johnson is nowhere near power, but put someone like that in the Prime Minister's Office and the rest of the federal government could not put up much resistance. And nobody expected that Doug Ford would become premier of Ontario, or the NDP would end the 44 year reign of the Progressive Conservatives in Alberta (and yes, I mean forty-four years, Canadian politics are
weird), until a few months before it happened.