The Liberals: From Natural Governing Party to the Political Wilderness

There is much to be said about the utter failure of Michael Ignatieff’s Liberal Party during the recent election campaign. Here I’m going to look at the demise of the “Natural Governing Party” from a historical perspective.


Since 1984, when Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives won a large majority of federal ridings in Quebec, the federal Liberal Party has failed to win a majority of seats in Quebec in any subsequent election, although they came close in 2000. Contrast the last three decades with the era from 1896 to 1984.

In 1896, Liberal leader Wilfrid Laurier led his party to victory in a large majority of Quebec seats on his way to power. Since 1896, the Conservatives have won a majority of federal seats in Quebec only three times, in 1958, 1984 and 1988. Beginning in 1993 and in every federal election since then until the NDP swept Quebec on May 2, the Bloc Quebecois has won a majority of federal seats in Quebec.

What made the Liberal Party “the natural governing party” of Canada for over eighty years following 1896 was that it could almost always count on winning a majority of seats in Quebec, usually a very substantial majority. (The term “natural governing party” simply means the party that can usually be expected to win elections.) With Quebec almost always safely in its column the day an election was called, the Liberals had only to do reasonably well in the rest of Canada to win power.

Look at it another way. In only seven elections from 1896 through 1988---those of 1911, 1917, 1925, 1930, 1957, 1962 and 1979 (four of the last five of these producing short-lived Conservative minority governments)---did the party winning a majority of seats in Quebec fail to win the election. Throughout this period, the Liberal Party never won power without winning a majority of seats in Quebec.
During the elections from 1993 through 2000, the Liberal Party successfully masked the loss of its ability to win a majority of seats in Quebec for two reasons, both of them not destined to endure for the long-term. The first of these was the Liberal Party’s success in winning an overwhelming majority of seats in vote rich Ontario. The second reason, strongly related to the first, was the division of the political right into two major parties from 1993 to 2003 when the Conservative Party of Canada was founded.

Why did the Liberals lose their grip on Quebec? In 1984 and 1988, after decades of dominating Quebec, the Liberals came up against the phenomenon of Brian Mulroney, a politician from the north shore of the St. Lawrence who was linguistically as much a Francophone as an Anglophone. There had never previously been a Conservative leader like Mulroney. And his timing was ideal. By 1984, the Quebecois were fed up with the great political wars of the preceding two decades between the two giants of the age, Pierre Trudeau and Rene Levesque. Moreover, by 1984, Canadians, including the Quebecois, were tired of the Trudeau government, after several years of sharp recession and the unseemly spectacle of Liberals rewarding their own with plush appointments in the months leading up to the election.

Beyond Mulroney, there was another and more important reason why the Liberals lost Quebec---Quebec nationalism.

Pierre Trudeau’s liberalism had an enormous impact on Canada, but in Quebec it was a highly divisive force. In the 1968 election campaign, Pierre Trudeau sailed to victory, not only because of the attractiveness of his vision of a Just Society, but in English Canada he was that very special politician, a French Canadian who insisted on making no concessions to Quebec nationalism. He opposed any form of special status for Quebec and insisted that bilingualism and fairness toward the country’s two major linguistic communities was the responsibility of Ottawa and all of the provinces. The fate of Francophone Canada, he argued, was not the exclusive problem of Quebec. In English Canada, this was heady stuff. Here was a charismatic Francophone saying that the Quebec nationalists had got it all wrong.

Trudeau’s eventual success in patriating the Constitution and in entrenching the Charter of Rights in 1982 was an unqualified success everywhere but in Quebec. In English Canada, the Charter soon became a pillar of the national identity, making English Canadians much more a “rights based” people than they had been. In Quebec, while the ideas of a written constitution and a Charter of Rights were not anathema, the fact that these were imposed from Ottawa, against the explicit opposition of Rene Levesque’s Quebec government, enormously reduced their legitimacy.

Quebec governments suffered no serious legitimacy problem when they used the Notwithstanding provision in the Constitution to override the Charter to achieve their cultural, linguistic or educational objectives. As this “social values” conflict evolved between English Canadians and Quebec nationalists after 1982, quite distinct positions developed on questions such as multiculturalism. Although multiculturalism has recently come under fire in many circles in English Canada, it was seen for several decades as a pillar of Canadian society.

Quebec developed its own concept, called Interculturalism, with Quebecois intellectuals and political leaders making the case that while other cultures have a role to play in Quebec, that role had to be measured against a standard of “reasonable accommodation” that spelled out how far Quebec should go in accommodating other cultures.

Two recent examples will suffice. The Quebec National Assembly has passed legislation prohibiting women who wear the niqab or burqa from obtaining services from public and para-governmental institutions, including doctors’ offices and health clinics, as well as government-funded schools, colleges and universities. In addition, the Quebec National Assembly refused admission to a group of Sikh men wearing the Kirpan (ceremonial dagger) to a human rights hearing, on the grounds that this violated security. When asked if such a step was a violation of multiculturalism, a spokesperson for the Parti Quebecois replied that multiculturalism is a Canadian value not a Quebec value.
Shifting the periodic debates between English Canada and Quebec from the ground of pragmatic accommodation between the two linguistic communities to a clash of values can have long-term negative consequences for Canadian federalism.

What is clear is that Trudeau’s conception of Canada and of Quebec’s place in it, as simply one province among ten, has been rejected by a majority of Quebecois. No provincial political party in Quebec, and this includes the Quebec Liberals, has been prepared to live within the confines of the Trudeau vision. During the debate about the Meech Lake Accord in 1990, Pierre Trudeau who was retired from politics delivered a speech in Montreal, declaiming his opposition to the idea of recognizing Quebec as a “distinct society” in the Constitution. He would certainly have opposed the Harper government’s resolution, supported by the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc that Quebec constitutes a nation within Canada---the Bloc naturally did not agree with the final part of the proposition.

Trudeau’s long struggle against Quebec nationalism, while arguably successful, had the consequence of weakening the Liberal Party in Quebec.

When to this were added the political response in Quebec to the Clarity Act of 2000 and to the Sponsorship Scandal, which blew up in 2004, the cumulative resentment against the federal Liberals in Quebec was immense. The Chretien government, with Stephane Dion taking the lead on it, promulgated the Clarity Act to insist that for a Quebec government to use a victory in a sovereignty referendum to take Quebec out of Confederation, the referendum would have to be clear as to its intent and the majority favouring it had to be decisive.

In addition to the deterioration of the Liberal Party’s standing in Quebec, there has been the long-term erosion of the party’s viability in Western Canada.

The Liberals succeeded in winning most of the farmer Progressives into their ranks, during the 1920s and 1930s (with the exception of a brief period in the mid 1920s and 1930-35 when the Conservatives were in power) the federal Liberals depended on the twin pillars of Quebec and the West (especially Saskatchewan) to win power. (In their huge majority victory in 1935, the Liberals won 56 of 82 seats in Ontario, adding to their dominance in Quebec, the West, and the Maritimes in that election.)

By the time of the 1945 election, the Liberals were already slipping in the West, with both the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and the Social Credit performing strongly in the region; even the Ontario centred Progressive Conservatives showed strength there. In their massive electoral victory of 1949---the Liberals won 191 of 262 seats---the Liberals dominated all of the major regions of the country. (The only province they lost was Alberta where they took 5 seats compared to the 10 won by the Social Credit.) Again, in the 1953 election, the Liberals won a large majority, although it was reduced from four years earlier.

In 1957, a very significant shift occurred that pointed the way to a future in which the Liberal Party’s fortunes would decline in the West. After twenty-two years of Liberal majority government, John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives won a minority electoral victory, taking 112 of the 265 seats. While the Liberals held onto a large majority of seats in Quebec, they were demolished in the West where most of the seats were shared among the CCF, the PCs and the Social Credit. In their massive victory the following year---Diefenbaker won 208 of 265 seats---the PCs dominated in every region. The Liberals, winning only 48 seats, did not take a single seat in the four western provinces.

In 1962, with Diefenbaker reduced to a minority government, with 116 of the 265 seats, the Liberals took 99 seats. Significantly, while the Liberals came back strongly in Central Canada---they won only 35 seats in Quebec because of the rise of the Creditistes (Social Credit) under Real Caouette who took 26 seats---they managed to win only 6 seats in the West where Diefenbaker held on strongly. The following year, 1963, in another election, Lester Pearson’s Liberals won a minority victory, taking 128 of 265 seats, with Diefenbaker’s PCs winning 95 seats. In this hour of defeat Diefenbaker held onto a large majority of seats in all three prairie provinces, with the newly formed NDP winning 9 seats in B.C. to the Liberals 7, and the PCs 4 in that province. Again two years later, in 1965, the Liberals had to settle for another minority with 131 of 265 seats, while Diefenbaker won 97 seats, clinging stubbornly to his prairie base, while the Liberals managed to take only 8 seats in the West.

A pattern was taking shape. The Liberal Party was becoming the party of Central Canada, and it was on the skids in the West. That was certainly to be the case with the party’s new leader Pierre Trudeau, who was elevated to the party leadership and won a majority electoral victory in 1968. In his first election victory, Trudeau’s Liberals took 154 of 265 seats with Robert Stanfield’s PCs settling for 72 seats. In 1968, Trudeau won 16 seats in B.C.----he was very popular on the West Coast in urban areas, but the PCs beat him handily in the prairies winning 20 seats to his 11. In 1972, the Trudeau Liberals were thrown back on their Quebec base to sustain them as a minority government. They won 109 seats overall out of 264, just two seats more than the Conservatives. Without his 56 seats in Quebec and 36 in Ontario (four fewer than the Tories), Trudeau would have lost power. The Liberals won only 7 seats in the West. In 1974, Trudeau got his majority back, winning 141 seats with the PCs reduced to 95. Between them, Quebec and Ontario provided 115 of the Liberal seats, with the party carrying 8 seats in B.C. and 5 in the prairies. The Liberals had to rely on Central Canada as its political engine.

In 1979, the PCs under Joe Clark won 136 seats out of 282 to win a minority victory, with the Liberals reduced to 114. In the West, the new citadel of the Conservative Party, the Liberals picked up only 3 seats. Trudeau was back the following year, 1980, with his final hurrah, a majority government. His party won 147 seats out of 282 to 103 for Joe Clark’s Conservatives. But the new majority pointed to Trudeau’s dependence on Central Canada where he won 126 seats, and carried only 2 in the four western provinces. In the West, Trudeau meant one thing only---being left out of what looked like an increasingly distant Ottawa.

In 1984, Brian Mulroney’s PCs carried every region in the country, winning 211 seats out of 282, while John Turner’s Liberals scraped together only 40. Quebec was now gone from the Liberal column----in that province, the Liberals won only 17 seats to 58 for the Tories. And the Liberals have not won a majority of seats in Quebec in any federal election since then. The Quebec pillar was gone and so too was the Western pillar, which had been eroding for decades. The Liberals carried only 2 seats in the West in 1984.

In 1993, when Jean Chretien stormed to a majority victory against a divided right, he ended up with 177 seats out of 295, with the PCs reduced to 2 seats, the Bloc Quebecois winning 54 and the Reform Party 52. The Liberals did better in the West than in recent elections, carrying 27 seats, 12 of them in Manitoba. But they were far behind the Reform Party with its 51 western seats. And in Quebec, the party won only 19 seats. The story of Chretien’s victory as it would be the story of his three majorities was Ontario, where the party carried a stunning 98 seats out of 99. In 1997, the Liberals managed 101 of the 103 seats in Ontario out of their total caucus of 155. In Quebec, they took 26 seats, and in the West a total of 15. The fragility of the Liberals was there for all to see. In 2000, it was the same basic story with the Liberals winning 172 of the 301 seats, to the 66 seats taken by the Canadian Alliance. In the West, the Liberals won 14 seats and in Quebec 36, only 2 seats behind the Bloc, but again the story was Ontario with its 100 Liberal seats.

From there the story of Liberal decline can be quickly told. In 2004, the Liberals under Paul Martin held onto power with 135 seats, a minority of the 308 seats in the House of Commons. The new Conservative Party, led by Stephen Harper, won 99 seats. Martin managed to win 14 seats in the West and 21 in Quebec. His Ontario citadel was under attack. He held onto 75 seats, to the Conservatives 24. In 2006, the party of the united right, the Conservatives, won a minority victory with 124 seats to the Liberals’ 103. This time the Liberals were down to 54 seats in Ontario, 13 in Quebec, and 14 in the West. In 2008, the Conservatives gained seats, but still fell short of a majority, winning 143 seats to 77 for the Liberals. This time, the Conservatives won a majority of seats in Ontario, 51, to the Liberals with 38. In the West, the Conservative Party’s bastion, the Liberals won 7 seats and took 14 in Quebec.

We have looked at why the Liberal Party fell on hard times in Quebec. What caused its long demise in the West? It should be noted that each of the four western provinces has its own political culture, and what moves politics in Alberta as compared to B.C., for instance, can be quite different. Nonetheless, it is helpful to examine the fortunes of the Liberals in the West as a whole.

In part, the Liberal problem in the West was its long association with Quebec and bilingualism. In part, the idea grew in the West that the Liberals cared only about Toronto and Montreal and didn’t concern themselves with “outer Canada.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Trudeau government’s petroleum policies deeply alienated the provincial governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan as well as the powerful petroleum industry. Beginning in the autumn of 1973 and continuing in subsequent years, the Trudeau government fixed the price of domestic petroleum well below the rising world price. Meanwhile the Trudeau government authorized the sale of Canadian petroleum to the United States at the world price and collected the difference between the domestic and export price as an export tax.

In 1980, the Trudeau government introduced the National Energy Policy (NEP), which established the goal of achieving fifty per cent Canadian ownership of the petroleum industry by 1990. This goal was to be achieved by expanding Petro Canada, the publicly owned petroleum that had been established in 1975, and that had grown by buying out the assets of a number of foreign owned petroleum firms. In addition, the goal was to be realized by promoting the expansion of privately owned petroleum firms. These firms were to benefit from a change to tax system that imposed higher taxes on foreign owned than on Canadian owned petroleum companies. This tax differential was to provide capital for Petroleum Incentive Program (PIP) grants to be made to domestically owned petroleum companies to aid them in expanding their operations.

This set of policies, together with the negative effects of a global slowdown of the petroleum industry, opened the Liberals to sustained attacks from the Alberta and Saskatchewan governments and the petroleum industry (not to mention the U.S. government) as hostile of the petroleum sector and responsible for its problems.

Once the unusual Liberal dominance in the elections of 1993, 1997 and 2000---largely attributable to the division on the right, the party faced a much more problematic future. As the details of the Sponsorship Scandal struck home with the public in the winter of 2004 the changed realities that confronted the Liberal Party were plainly visible.

Of course, other factors---changing economic conditions and the quality of leadership---have played their part in influencing the fortunes of the Liberal Party.

If anything, the Liberals got lucky bounces on the economy. The election of 1993---Chretien’s first victory---came at just the right time for the Liberals, allowing them to capitalize on the vast unpopularity of Brian Mulroney (even though the Tories were running under newly anointed leader, Kim Campbell), and the unhappiness generated by the sharp economic downtown of the early 1990s.

Briefly, we turn to the issue of leadership.

Rusty and awkward in public, when he was first elected leader of the Liberal Party and served briefly as prime minister, until defeated by Brian Mulroney’s PCs in 1984, John Turner grew in stature and grace as the years passed. By the time he faced Mulroney for the second time in an election in 1988, Turner had become a formidable campaigner. In the second English language television leaders’ debate of the campaign, his sharp attack on Mulroney on the issue of free trade briefly propelled the Liberals into first place ahead of the Tories.

Jean Chretien, Turner’s successor, was often written off as a light-weight before he won the election of 1993. Having held many cabinet positions under Pierre Trudeau, he was not a stand out in any of them. But he did win three successive majority governments. Luck had a lot to do with this, the luck of being up against a weak and divided opposition. Despite his lack of gravitas at times, Chretien was an effective communicator, especially in English Canada. He had learned the hard lessons of a political pugilist through his decades of experience.

Paul Martin was sworn in as prime minister in December 2003, three years into Chretien’s final mandate. Martin was personable and a good listener---a rarity in politics---who didn’t assume that that he was smarter than everyone around him. He combined a genuine, progressive concern for the well-being of Canadians with a tough, unbending commitment to the neo-liberal ethos. Unlike Chretien, Martin was not lucky. He inherited the Sponsorship Scandal from his predecessor. When it blew up on his watch, he was never able to recover from it.

Stephane Dion, the surprise winner of the 2006 Liberal leadership race, was unpopular in his home province of Quebec, in large measure because he was seen as the author of the Clarity Act, and was completely unsympathetic to Quebec nationalism. As Liberal leader, he never succeeded in winning a large following in English Canada. He was the only Liberal leader who only led his party in one federal election and only the second Liberal leader never to become prime minister.

Michael Ignatieff failed to ignite major affection from the Canadian people. A highly accomplished intellectual, Ignatieff spent decades outside the country in Britain and the United States, a biographical fact that has come home to haunt him in his quest for political success. While in the U.S., he supported the American led invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has since written that he was wrong about that. Ignatieff pulled the plug on the idea of a Liberal-NDP coalition government when he took over from Dion as interim Liberal leader in December 2008. During the two years prior to the election on May 2, Ignatieff failed to develop a consistent line of attack on the Harper government. He settled on the broad issue of the Harper government’s consistent disdain for parliament and the threat this poses to Canadian democracy.

What was missing in the Liberal campaign was a connection with the concerns of Canadians in a society where the tectonic plates have been shifting. In an age of growing inequality, with an ever wider gap between the rich and the rest, the Liberal record and approach could not connect. Ignatieff was right about the Harper threat to democracy. What he could not perceive was the gathering momentum of discontent with the state of Canadian society among those who are not rich or seriously affluent.

The Liberals were already dead in Quebec and in the West. The rest, they say, is history.

Time for Sheriff Stephen to Cull the Herd

Sheriff Stephen can’t skate, but he does know how to cull a herd.

After his big win, the Sheriff sat on a fence post and mused about the future and the past.

“Our people have been waiting for this for a very long time,” he offered. “And I, for one, am not going to disappoint them. Oh, by the way, I got a call from Fredrich Hayek to congratulate me last night.”

I though Hayek was dead, I interjected.

“Spiritual leaders never die,” said the Sheriff. “But back to our people. From the earliest days with Preston, they’ve been waiting for this day. Of course, they’ll get the scrapping of the gun registry on Day One. That’s a given. As for the CBC, I’m still making up my mind. We either bleed that sucker until it falls to its knees, or put it on the auction block right away. You do realize that the second option is more humane, but the death of a thousand cuts will achieve the same result.”

“And that brings me to the cull. Some people actually think that now that I am where I need to be I’ll grow soft. I didn’t come all this way because I am made of sugar candy.”

I cocked my head and looked inquiringly at him.

“Hard is a good word in my lexicon,” he said as though in answer to my wordless question. “Hard is nature’s way. Nature cannot afford to take prisoners. Soft is the way of the wasteful fool.”

“Do you realize,” he continued, shifting uneasily on the post “that one of the fastest growing demographics in our country is families worth more than a million dollars each? There are now well over a million such families in this land. And if we stay the course, there will be more than two million families worth over a million by 2020.”

“Those people are this nation’s beauty rose. And the beauty rose does not flower if runty little plants get in the way.”

“Taxing those families in our rose garden,” he said indignantly “would be a violation. And to what end----to fund the soft, the failed, and the dead-enders, to encourage their progeny. The climb up the mountain of virtue is a hard one.” He shifted uncomfortably again, as though he was making that climb right before my eyes.

“The cull starts now,” he proclaimed. “The new prisons are going up. The jets will soon be on our runways. Those who work for us will be the first to be culled. Frozen salaries, a freeze on hiring. It’s got to be done. Do you really think I’m going to tax those million dollar families one nickel more to pay those who need to be culled?”

He looked at me disgustedly.

“And you don’t seriously think Jack will stop me,” he said. “Jack can quack, quack and quack some more. Quack Jack!”

“The cull will make this a better country. You do realize that Robin Hood was a communist don’t you? All right, a crypto Communist, a little ahead of that guy in Highgate cemetery. The Sheriff of Nottingham has always gotten a bad press from the Liberal media. But who built England? The liberal poseur with the longbow who took money from the hard working rich to give to good-for-nothings, just so he could shag Maid Marion? What people have a hard time realizing is that by taking a little bit from each poor person and giving the sum of all those little bits to the rich we push civilization forward. We leave monuments behind and we set a pathway for those who come after. The Sheriff of Nottingham is the true hero of the human drama. A slightly fatter peasant does not a world make. But set the wealthy up on a hill and the world will beat a path to our door.”

He climbed down from the fence post and jiggled his legs for a minute.

“I better start the cull today,” he said. “Now that Osama’s dead the price of oil is falling. I’ve got to convince the Americans to go on buying our ethical oil. Not a moment to lose.”

“That reminds me, I’ve got to return Rob’s call,” he shouted back, striding off “He wants to talk to me about the Ontario election this fall and Hudak. He said something about ‘Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble.’ A real egg-head that Rob.”

ADVANCE COPY OF GLOBE AND MAIL ENDORSEMENT OF STEPHEN HARPER FALLS OFF LEAKY WIKS TRUCK

(Read it here first. This is an exact copy of the Globe editorial. Only the words have been made up.)

Last week on these pages, we expressed our preference for Michael Ignatieff over Jack Layton. We found Mr. Layton to be living in a past when income gaps between the rich and the rest of the population were narrower than today, and social programs were stronger than now. Mr. Layton’s Canada is gone, replaced by the bracing and refreshing winds of a global capitalism that has taken flight, a flight this country dares not miss. Jack Layton has not boarded that flight.

We discovered in Michael Ignatieff a powerful intellect that has honed a thankfully modest set of proposals for reform. A dollop of hope afloat in a sea of realism is how we would summarize the Canada Mr. Ignatieff would lead.

But that brings us to Stephen Harper the candidate for Prime Minister this paper endorses to lead the country for the next half decade.

Over the past five years of Conservative minority government, Canadians have come to trust Stephen Harper and he has come to trust quite a few of them as well. He no longer fears that most Canadians are welfare sloths, hooked up to the drip, drip, drip of socialist chicanery. The odd young woman in a crowd in Guelph still spooks him, but he’s ever calmer as his crowds howl down reporters’ questions.

The switch to the glasses and the sweaters has helped. And the piano playing has been therapeutic whatever those who cherish the memory of John Lennon might say.

Given the greater relaxation Mr. Harper would experience as leader of a majority government, we feel sure that over the next five years he will complete his book on hockey and even learn to skate.

Mr. Harper has come a long way from his days in the Reform Party, and at the helm of the National Citizens Coalition, when he believed that medicare was sapping the vital bodily fluids of Canadian manhood. Now it is all Canada around which he is throwing up firewalls and not just Alberta. That is to be cheered.

Mr. Harper’s hand on the economic tiller is steady as she goes. It’s a good thing that neither Mr. Harper nor Jim Flaherty anticipated the economic crash of 2008 or understood that it would hurl Ottawa into years of deficits. Better a team of political leaders committed to tax cuts than a Prime Minister and a Finance Minister with a clue about how the economy functions. We prefer sleek headed men who sleep at nights and attend barbecues by day. This country needs leaders who do not terrify investors through excess thought. Such men are dangerous.

At this paper, we have had our share of concerns about Mr. Harper. While we support the purchase of the next generation of jet fighters---the price of admission to meetings of the truly powerful, where on occasion Peter MacKay has been mistaken for the doorman---we’re less sure about the new prisons. Who exactly is going to inhabit them? Longer prison sentences inexorably lead to the incarceration of men over sixty. Men over sixty---however bad when they were young---lack the hormones for serious nastiness. Providing such men with room, board, free medical care, television and dominoes-for-life is an oddly socialist idea, more a reward for crime than a punishment.

In any case, excess space in the prisons can always serve as hangars for the fighters.

Some of the members of past and present Harper cabinets have worried us and we’re not just talking about Bev Oda, Helena Guergis, and Maxime Bernier. On the whole, it’s better for ministers to be able to distinguish between their positives and their negatives, to avoid attacking the hired help at airports and not to lose classified documents in the lingerie. We’re not sure if Lawrence Cannon knows which wars we’re in and the ones on which we’ve taken a pass. At times Jason Kenney seems to be auditioning for the role of costumes consultant for a Canada Day pageant, complete with dancers from every land whose sons and daughters have graced our shores. They’re citizens, not props, we try to tell him. But you can’t fault his enthusiasm.

Tony Clement can be problematic. During his watch, every Port O Potty in Muskoka was freshened up, recalling the days when local businessmen won contracts to build Post Offices and bridges and to plow Main Street. (Oh, those days are now.) To give Clement his due, he’s so busy Tweeting that he can lose touch with the winking and nudging that goes on between Bala and Severn River.

The cancelling of the mandatory long form census struck as at Canada’s National Newspaper as a little nutty. We worried that Stephen Harper might be spending too much time listening to talk radio from Montana where there is anxiety that the United Nations guys in the Black Helicopters are about to seize power.

Mr. Ignatieff is a man with a big brain and a small program. He has laboured mightily and brought forth a mouse.

We prefer Stephen Harper, a helmsman not easily budged from his convictions, however unfashionable they may seem to some. They called him a colossal fossil in Copenhagen, but he stayed in his hotel room, kept his head down, and took pride in leading a nation where fresh water and clean natural gas are deployed by giant machines to separate bitumen from sand.

Tailings yes, and the odd dead duck, we can agree. Warts acknowledged, and greenhouse gases are warts, Stephen Harper gets it. Canada is, always has been, and will be over the course of the 21st century, a land of stuff. Comparative advantage, this paper embraces. Some peoples create cities, new industries, culture, education, ideas, science and cures for disease. We do stuff.

Stephen Harper is the leader this country needs and this paper endorses.

Stephen Harper: Now He’s The Champion of National Unity

Now we’ve seen everything---Stephen Harper, who only a few years ago counseled Albertans to build “firewalls” around their province to protect it from Canada, has proclaimed himself the indispensable champion of national unity. Without him at the helm of a majority government, this one-time quasi-Alberta separatist would have us believe there will be no one to protect the country from a new round of sovereignist upheaval in Quebec.

In fact, I’d be surprised if Parti Quebecois leader Pauline Marois didn't regard a Harper majority government as one of the essential “winning conditions” for a sovereignty referendum should she succeed in becoming premier of Quebec in the next provincial election. The PQ is well ahead of Jean Charest’s hapless Liberals in the polls, but an election does not need to be called for two and a half years.

A Harper majority government would be the most English Canadian-centred majority government since the Unionist (mostly Conservative) government of 1917 that imposed conscription during the First World War. That government’s remoteness from Quebec inspired the introduction of the first ever resolution---it was never put to a vote---in the Quebec legislative assembly advocating the secession of the province from Canada.

Ever since the federal election of 1993 when the Reform Party and the Bloc Quebecois---heirs to the disintegrating Progressive Conservatives---won large swaths of seats in the House of Commons, a showdown between Alberta regionalism and Quebec nationalism has been in the making.

Reform leader Preston Manning---Harper was a Reform Party MP---saw the collision coming. Absurdly, he was fond of portraying himself as Canada’s Abraham Lincoln standing on guard against the “peculiar institution” of bilingualism.

The tradition of the Alberta right flows from the Social Credit through the Reform Party and the Canadian Alliance to Harper’s Conservative Party of Canada---not to be confused with John A. Macdonald’s Conservative Party, formally the Liberal Conservative Party. No political tradition is as alien from the social values and culture of Quebec as the political steam of which Harper is a part. Just as the old Reformers knew that they could not abide bilingualism and Quebec---this sentiment was one of the main reasons the Reformers broke away from the PCs---Quebec nationalists know that they have nothing in common with the current federal manifestation of the Alberta right.

Nothing would fire up the engines of the aging Quebec sovereignists more than a Harper majority. They would make the case that Harper’s Canada is remote from Quebec and everything the Quebecois aspire to.

That Harper took the lead in recognizing Quebec as a nation within Canada would make little difference to the Quebecois. Everyone knows that Harper’s motive was to head off Michael Ignatieff who promoted the idea during his failed bid for the Liberal Party leadership in 2006.

In the winter of 1980, when Parti Quebecois Premier Rene Levesque was launching the first Quebec sovereignty referendum, nothing upset his plans more that the resurrection of Pierre Trudeau through his electoral victory over Joe Clark’s short-lived PC minority government. Instead of facing Clark during the referendum campaign, Levesque had to do battle with Pierre Trudeau, a much more daunting proposition.

The truly hopeful development in Quebec during this election campaign has been the stunning rise in Jack Layton’s standing in the province.

For six federal election campaigns in a row, the Bloc Quebecois has been dominant in Quebec. Now the Quebecois are turning in huge numbers to the NDP, embracing a progressive federalist party that could give them a voice in governing the country. Layton’s breakthrough in Quebec has the potential to change the landscape of Canadian politics.

Harper’s boast that he alone can keep the country together is merely the latest demagogic claim he has made in his desperate bid for a majority.

STEPHEN HARPER: SANS MOI LE DELUGE

As the Prime Minister of a long-established, if complacent, democracy, Stephen Harper is supposed to say that for him the will of the people is paramount. He is supposed to declare that whatever House of Commons Canadians establish through their votes, he will accept it and work with it. He is supposed to say that he is the servant of the people.

Remarkably, Harper says none of these things. He insists that the only House of Commons he can work with after the election is one in which his party has a majority of seats. Should his party end up with the largest number of seats in a minority Parliament, he has declared that he cannot work with the other parties.

He will not alter a single jot or tittle in the budget he presented in March in a bid to win the support of one or more of the opposition parties. Quite simply, he does not recognize the legitimacy of the members of the other parties in the House of Commons, even though their presence in the House is the result of the expression of the will of the people. He is not required, he is saying, to heed the voices, the wisdom or the ideas of other Parliamentarians.

As a politician in a democracy, even if you secretly have nothing but loathing for the views of others, you are not supposed to make that contempt obvious. You are supposed to claim that you recognize the legitimacy of others.

That is the conventional thing to do.

The conventional is often dull, pretentious and ceremonial. But it is also an essential form of shorthand. It lets us know whether we can trust someone at first glance. We recoil, for instance, when a man bites a dog.

Not only does Stephen Harper refuse to acknowledge the will of the people and the legitimacy of parties that are not his own, he calls into question the essential principle of the Westminster system of parliamentary government. The principle is that a ministry must enjoy the confidence of the majority of the members of the House of Commons. Furthermore, if one ministry does not enjoy the confidence of the House, it is appropriate for the Governor General to seek to form an alternative ministry that does enjoy the confidence of the House.

I can’t help wondering if Stephen Harper doesn’t know what happened to the Stuarts, missed the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or spent so much time at Reform Party gatherings that he had no time to read Locke.

Canada is one of the few democracies in which there is no formal sharing of power among political parties in the governing of the country. Even in the United States, the country Harper wishes he led, the President of the United States has to share power with the Congress. Consider the plight of Barack Obama having to deal with John Boehner in the House of Representatives. No one imagines that he loves it. But it does it. He does not call into question the constitutional authority of the House to pass money bills.

When one party controls the Presidency while another party controls the legislature or national assembly, the French call it co-habitation, something with which they are familiar.

In the democratic world, Stephen Harper alone wraps himself in the cloak of: “Sans moi, le deluge.”