The Canadian Choice: Fundamental Change or Hard Right Populism

In the era of Brexit and Trump, Canadians face an increasingly clear choice between fundamental change and hard right populism.

Canada is one of the major countries in the West where the political centre has held, much to the benefit of Canadians. But the same forces that have driven the rise of the xenophobic right in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and other countries are at play here.

We have some time to adapt, but time is running out. The temptation to muddle through in the hope that the Trump administration will be satisfied with gouging Mexico and won’t try to take a bite out of us on trade, investment and taxes is foolish. We risk being further marginalized as suppliers of primary products at the same time as our industrial base is ever more hollowed out.

What is driving the collapse of the political centre is the crisis of the global neo-liberal capitalism of our age.

For the past several decades, the majority of men and women in the labour force in Canada and abroad have seen little or no rise in their incomes (adjusted for inflation), at the same time as their security of employment grows increasingly precarious. Meanwhile, those who have presided over the present global division of labour have enriched themselves more lavishly than any class of rulers in the history of the world.

To put it simply, the leverage of those who control capital over those who sell their labour to earn a living has expanded dramatically.

Though the rise of the xenophobic far right, in response to this state of affairs, has received most of the attention in the mainstream media, a wave of radical politics is sweeping across the developed world. Potentially, this wave can provide the effective antidote to the extremism on the right. The young are at the epicentre of this political surge. In response to the socio-economic conditions they face and the dire problems that confront the world, they have evolved a unique political outlook.

The negative consequences of the vast and growing inequality of our age are being concentrated on the young. They are the victims of the uneven ways the widening class divide affects different generations.

Compared with those who came before, most notably the baby boomers, the generation of the millennials, aged twenty to thirty-five, are grappling with the effects of inequality.

As one man in his early twenties wrote to me: “The millennials are acutely aware of the ever worsening material conditions they face.” From their forebears “millennials have come to realize that at one point in the past it was not typical to have to change jobs every two years, or to be completely locked out of the home ownership market due to ridiculously high home prices, and to have to bankrupt oneself to get a post-secondary education.” One apt term being used to describe the young is “Generation Rent.”

For the young, as well, climate change is imbedded in their reality. Stark changes in weather patterns are part of the public conversation in a way that was certainly not true for earlier generations.

To break with a failed system, Canadians need a wholly new outlook on how to make Canada work for the large majority of the population. No less is required than the launching of an economy, constructed around new green industries, and green energy systems, that will transform the way we live and work. Rebuilding cities and transportation systems will be central to this. Twentieth century cities, particularly their suburban and exurban perimeters, were constructed around the automobile. The cities of the twenty-first century will have to be designed around much more effective public transit. Greater urban density and public transit are essential to the green economy of the future.

Building a new economy around the principle of equity for the diverse elements of the Canadian population including first nations peoples, immigrants, and women can create full employment. It can effectively grapple with the plight of those in the working class who have been losing full time jobs.

Canadians have made vast and successful adaptations in the past to their socio-economic system. Today’s change, in which the young are bound to play a leading role, will require making capital work for people rather than the other way around. Among other things that necessitates the rejection of trade deals such as NAFTA that have much more to do with the privileges of corporations than the free exchange of goods and services.

In Europe and even in the United States, effective political voices have taken up the cause of a new politics. So far, in Canada, while the conditions exist for new movements with transformative political programs, no political party has laid claim to this terrain, and that includes the NDP. Politics abhors a vacuum. If existing institutions fail to fill the void, new institutions, as has happened in other countries will take their place.

America: En Route from Republic to Post Democratic Empire

With the election of Donald Trump as President, the United States has taken another major step from a Republic to an Empire ruled by those who would be Caesars.

The American republic was born in a struggle against imperial rule from across the sea. Its leaders—who were soiled by the racism and brutality of slavery—nonetheless counted themselves children of the Enlightenment.

The conquest of a continental domain and the Monroe Doctrine’s proclamation that the Western Hemisphere was an American sphere of influence were followed by the rise of the United States to global power.

The early republic, whose founders shunned a standing army in favour of local militias, now has hundreds of military bases around the world. It is an imperial power on a scale that dwarfs all the previous empires in history. It is the only power on earth ever to have dropped atomic bombs on cities.

Americans have a deep and quasi-religious attachment to their Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787. The connection today, however, is much like the nostalgic attachment of many religious people to their rituals.

For the first time in American history, a very wealthy man has bought and paid for his own campaign for the nation’s highest office. Trump’s campaign was less costly than that of his liberal opponent Hillary Clinton. This does not lessen the point that Donald Trump is a would-be Caesar who financed his personal assault on the presidency. American liberal election campaigns, those of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama before her, were also affairs of vast expenditure. Neither Republicans nor Democrats now acquire public funding for their campaigns. Their campaigns are far too stratospherically expensive for that.

A state that places no limits on campaign finance for its highest office is not a full democracy. In the last days of the Roman Republic, candidates for office, some more liberal than others, financed their own lavish campaigns, famed for their “bread and circuses”. They fed the Roman population and hosted gladiatorial contests in the Coliseum.

Today, American presidential campaigns finance travel, communications, and unseemly rallies where thousands cheer for their opponent to be locked up. The Caesars would have envied the lavishness.

A democracy, in which each citizen counts for something greater than the mere formality of equal rights, ceases to exist when meaningful political participation is far beyond the means of the vast majority of the population.

In addition to threatening American democracy, Trump’s election widens the chasm that exists between what can be called Old America and New America. The victories of Barack Obama in two presidential elections came as a horrific shock to much of white America, those who have not adapted to the racial, ethnic and cultural changes in the country. These were the people drawn to the Birther lie, promulgated by Donald Trump for years, that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Let’s call them the forces of Old America.

The demographic shift in the United States is perceived as a threat to those in the population who most consciously derive their identity from the demography of the Thirteen Colonies at the time of the American Revolution. The United States has been transformed into a country in which minorities, taken together, are en route to becoming a majority. A New America, characterized by an acceptance of diversity, is coming into being. New America is inhabited by tens of millions of people of all races, among them a very large section of the millennial generation.

By the middle of this century, non-Hispanic whites — it was non-Hispanic whites who made the Revolution — will become a minority in the United States. By that date, demographers project that Latinos will constitute 25 percent of the population, African Americans 15 percent, and native Americans, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders a total of 10 percent.

White resistance to Hispanic immigration is widespread in the United States, but is especially virulent in certain regions. All along the border with Mexico, there are self-appointed white militias who attempt to stop Mexicans from crossing the border illegally. This is a form of group vigilantism that is closely tied in with the gun culture and the propagation of the freedom to bear arms guaranteed through the Second Amendment.

The leadership of Old America has drawn together a section of the very wealthy classes along with vast numbers of much poorer people. To establish a wide alliance of white Americans, from some of the poorest to the richest, the movement embraces a range of causes that give it its cohesiveness. Antagonism to trade unionism, immigrants, African Americans, as well as to feminism and gay rights are among those causes. The protection of gun ownership is another. So too is evangelical Christianity. The causes and attitudes that animate Old America have not been contrived by a few propagandists. The values of Old America have been nurtured in the soil of the country over decades, even centuries.

Trump’s promises to deport millions of Latinos who are undocumented in the United States, to build a wall along the southern U.S. border, and to block Muslim immigration to the United States were central to his election. His victories in states that have experienced massive industrial decline---Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin—were driven by his promise to bring jobs back to America and to clamp down on immigration.

What Trump succeeded in doing, not for the first time in history, was winning over much of the working class to the “fool’s gold” of racism. In times of deep social crisis, the far right specializes in drawing alienated and marginalized wage earners away from class politics to scapegoating and exclusionism. The failures of crisis prone neo-liberal capitalism, with its enormous divide between the superrich and the rest of the population, are falsely blamed on immigrants. This political strategy triumphed in the drive for Brexit in the UK. Marine Le Pen will utilize it in the presidential election in France in the spring of 2017. Trump’s victory is being touted all over the world by those determined to win power in their own countries through racist and anti-immigrant campaigns.

To conclude, America has been sliding from Republic to a post-democratic Empire for many decades. Not surprisingly, Americans are the last people on the planet to perceive this. The populations of imperial powers are well known for lacking much understanding of the world beyond their borders. That is one of the costs of empire and a major reason that empires, sooner or later, decline and fall.

Plato insisted that a universal state would be a tyranny.

The United States is the closest the world has ever come to a universal state. Its claims to champion democracy and human rights around the globe have long rung hollow. Now with a self-proclaimed racist, misogynist and climate change denier about to take the helm--a billionaire who admires dictators--the United States has become a tyrannical menace to humanity and the planet.

The Liberals: The Natural Governing Party Returns Under Justin Trudeau

Since 1984, when Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives won a large majority of federal ridings in Quebec, the federal Liberal Party failed to win a majority of seats in Quebec in any subsequent election, until 2015.  Contrast those 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, 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 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 could have long-term negative consequences for Canadian federalism. 
 
What was clear was that Trudeau’s conception of Canada and of Quebec’s place in it, as simply one province among ten, was 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 was the long-term erosion of the party’s viability in Western Canada.
 
Once 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, 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 the 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.  (For a detailed discussion of the flip side of the story, the rise of the Conservative Party of Canada, see Week 8, Lecture 15, “The Remaking of Canadian Conservatism 1988 to 2011.)
 
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 (for details, see Week 8, Lecture 15) 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 leading up to the election of 2011, Ignatieff had a difficult time developing 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 posed to Canadian democracy in the months prior to the election.
 
For the Liberal Party, the election campaign of 2011 and its aftermath were no less than catastrophic, leaving as they did the standing of the Liberals as a major party in serious doubt.  Michael Ignatieff, despite his strengths as an intellectual and communicator was effectively targeted and marginalized by negative attack ads before and during the campaign.
 
On May 2, 2011, the Liberals won only 34 seats, the worst result in the party’s history.  Even more dire for the Liberals, the party placed third behind the NDP, leaving them neither the government nor the opposition for the first time ever. 
 
The large question for the Liberals was whether a centre party such as theirs could regain their former standing as one of the country’s two major parties.  Major centre parties are very much the exception in first world democracies.  In Europe and the United States, the norm is for the political system to be dominated by major parties on the left and the right.  In Europe, with the exception of the UK, varying systems of proportional representation are in place.  On the continent, the norm is to have one major party on the left and one on the right, along with small centrist parties and smaller parties on the further left and right. 
 
In the UK, which has a first-past-the-post electoral system like Canada’s, the centrist Liberal Democrats, partners in a coalition government with the Conservatives from 2010 to 2015, occupy the centre ground between the major parties, the Conservatives and Labour. 
 
The question for the Liberals was: did, they now face a future as a centrist, third party, poised between the Conservatives and the NDP, sometimes able to coalesce with one or the other?  Or, could the Liberals rebound and push the NDP back into third party status in the next election?  

Onto the stage of Liberal politics has come a young man with a famous last name, Justin Trudeau. In the 2008 federal election, the son of the former prime minister won the Montreal riding of Papineau.

Following the disastrous results of the 2011 election for the Liberals, Michael Ignatieff resigned as party leader. Bob Rae, a Liberal convert from the NDP and the former premier of Ontario, took over as interim Liberal leader. Ever more widely in the party, Justin Trudeau was touted as a possible leader. In June 2012, Rae announced that he would not enter the leadership race.

Despite his relative lack of political experience, Justin Trudeau threw his hat in the ring. His main challenger for the leadership was Liberal MP Marc Garneau, the former astronaut. Garneau charged Trudeau with not having released enough substantive policy positions. Polls showed Trudeau as highly popular with the public, with the potential to shift the party from third place to first place. Eventually, Garneau dropped out of the contest, leaving only Joyce Murray and Martha Hall Findlay running against Trudeau. On April 14, 2013, Justin Trudeau won 80.1 per cent of the 30,800 votes cast by party members.

As leader, Trudeau immediately propelled the Liberal Party to first place in the opinion polls, with the Conservatives in second place and the NDP in third. Beginning in the autumn of 2014, the Liberal lead diminished. In April 2015, while the race between the Liberals and the Conservatives had tightened to a virtual tie, some polls put the Conservatives slightly ahead of the Liberals.

When the federal election was called in the summer of 2015, it was Tom Mulcair and the NDP who found themselves in the first place in the polls, while the Liberals were in third place. During the first month of the campaign, Mulcair promised that an NDP government would manage the country’s finances so as to achieve a balanced budget. The message was one of caution and it was framed in television ads around Mulcair as a family man who understood the pressures faced by families. Sane and trustworthy Tom could be trusted to lead the country. Exciting this was not. Providing hope for a transformed Canada, following nine years of Conservative government, this was not.

Instead the message for a new kind of future came from Justin Trudeau and the Liberals. The cornerstone of Trudeau’s campaign was the promise to end austerity by mounting a massive program of infrastructure spending that would result in federal deficits of five to ten billion dollars annually for a period of three years. (As it turned out, when the Liberal Finance Minister, Bill Morneau, brought in his first budget in March 2016, the projected deficit for the first year was just over $28 billion. It was much higher than had been anticipated during the election campaign, both because of what was discovered to be the true state of government finances when the Liberals took office and because of the continuing deterioration of the performance of the economy.)
Whatever the merits of the case, it was Justin Trudeau who came to personify the hunger for change, not Tom Mulcair.
This was partly a matter of personality. But while Mulcair deliberately sought to moderate his party’s image, Trudeau was intent on radicalizing his. In this, he succeeded hugely. He led his party to a majority in the House of Commons, with 183 seats.
The Liberals took every seat in Atlantic Canada. They won a majority of seats in Quebec, 40, for the first time since 1980. And they took every seat in the City of Toronto.
What immediately excited Canadians when Justin Trudeau was sworn into office was the composition of the cabinet. Half of its members were women and prominent among them were members who were drawn from a number of ethnic, racial and first nations backgrounds.

The Liberals: From Natural Governing Party to an Uncertain Future, 1984 to 2012

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, 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.

Once 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, 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 the 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 (for details, see Week 8, Lecture 15) 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 leading up to the election of 2011, Ignatieff had a difficult time developing 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 posed to Canadian democracy in the months prior to the election.

For the Liberal Party, the election campaign of 2011 and its aftermath were no less than catastrophic, leaving as they did the standing of the Liberals as a major party in serious doubt. Michael Ignatieff, despite his strengths as an intellectual and communicator was effectively targeted and marginalized by negative attack ads before and during the campaign.

On May 2, 2011, the Liberals won only 34 seats, the worst result in the party’s history. Even more dire for the Liberals, the party placed third behind the NDP, leaving them neither the government nor the opposition for the first time ever.

The large question for the Liberals and their interim leader Bob Rae, was whether a centre party such as theirs could regain their former standing as one of the country’s two major parties. Major centre parties are very much the exception in first world democracies. In Europe and the United States, the norm is for the political system to be dominated by major parties on the left and the right. In Europe, with the exception of the UK, varying systems of proportional representation are in place. On the continent, the norm is to have one major party on the left and one on the right, along with small centrist parties and smaller parties on the further left and right.

In the UK, which has a first-past-the-post electoral system like Canada’s, the centrist Liberal Democrats, now partners in a coalition government with the Conservatives, occupy the centre ground between the major parties, the Conservatives and Labour.

The question for the Liberals is: do, they now face a future as a centrist, third party, poised between the Conservatives and the NDP, sometimes able to coalesce with one or the other? Or, can the Liberals rebound and push the NDP back into third party status in a subsequent election? And does the continuing combat between the Liberals and the NDP for a similar electorate bode well for the continuing domination of Canadian politics by the Conservatives?

The NDP: The Road Travelled from 2006 to 2012

On election night in January 2006, Jack Layton declared that Canadians had “voted out of hope for change” and expressed the conviction that the NDP caucus, 29 MPs as compared with 19 in 2004, would help place working people and seniors “at the front of the line” where they belong. Layton was proved stunningly, embarrassingly wrong, however.

The Harper minority government turned out to be more insistently, stubbornly right-wing than anyone predicted. On childcare, Harper did exactly what he said he would do—he scrapped the national program. On the Kelowna Accord, the Conservatives have scuppered a historic deal that had been years in the making, and that would have provided billions of dollars in development capital for Aboriginal peoples. On relations with the U.S. and on foreign policy issues, Harper has overtly aligned himself with the countries making up the Anglo-sphere, principally the United States and the United Kingdom. Harper’s priorities are unswervingly clear: cut taxes; increase military spending; impose no environmental regulations that will inconvenience the petroleum industry; decentralize Canada and win the votes of soft Quebec nationalists in the process.

The NDP’s predecessor the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) held its founding convention in Regina in 1933 and adopted the Regina Manifesto as the new party’s program. The Regina manifesto advocated widespread public ownership of key sectors of the Canadian economy. Its clarion call was that “no CCF Government will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism and put into operation the full program of socialized planning which will lead to the establishment in Canada of the Cooperative Commonwealth.” A cursory glance at the document reveals that the founders of Canada’s social democratic party were prepared to critique capitalism and they advanced a program aimed at making fundamental changes. If none of this seems at all like the mild-mannered NDP of today, there is a reason for that. When the CCF-NDP was founded, there was a creative tension between movement and party. CCFers cared about the long-term struggle to win people to socialism as well as about the short-term effort to elect members to the House of Commons and provincial legislatures. That tension has ceased as a consequence of the total, or near total, victory of the party side of the equation. Socialism, anti-capitalism, and the commitment to a fundamentally altered society have been dropped from the NDP program, and are nowhere to be seen during election campaigns. Socialism is a kind of friendly ghost that haunts a party whose program and whose outlook are no longer socialist.

On one level what makes this odd is that over the past thirty years, society at home and abroad, has grown ever more unequal, and basic inequality was the spur that created a social democratic party in the first place. Globally, the wealth gap between workers in poor countries—many of them women and children, who produce the imports for the first world—and the tiny elite that sits atop the global system, is as wide as was the gap in the pre-capitalist feudal order in Europe. Forget the soft sounding term “neo-colonialism,” often used to depict relations between the developed world and the poor world. The level of exploitation that exists today matches that of colonial times.

Closer to home, a 2007 report for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives concluded that the income disparity between the rich and the rest of the population was rapidly widening. By 2004, the richest 10 percent of families were earning 82 times as much as the poorest 10 percent. By comparison, in 1976, the difference was 31 times. In the United States in 2007, the relative income gap between rich and poor was wider than at any time since 1929, the eve of the Great Depression. Seventy years ago, the remuneration of a top American corporate manager was 68 times that of a typical employee. Now the top manager makes 170 times as much. The American figures may be somewhat more unequal than ours, but we’re moving in exactly the same direction. The social democratic critique of the Liberals and Conservatives has been that they are both business parties, the Bobbsey Twins of Bay Street. The critique is not inaccurate, but is altogether too broad a generalization to be of much use except as a rhetorical vehicle.

The NDP suffered from Liberal envy. NDP leaders have long wanted to replace the Liberals as a major party to make of the Canadian political system what social democrats have always seen as “natural”—a system in which a major party of the left takes on a major party of the right. The model social democrats had in mind was that of Britain, where the long-established Liberal Party had shrunk into minor party status, to be replaced by the Labour Party as the alternative to the Conservatives. Nothing has annoyed Canadian social democrats more over the past 75 years than the failure of the Liberals to give up the ghost, which was the original aspiration of people like Tommy Douglas. In its battle to replace the Liberals as one of the country’s two major parties, the NDP has watered down its socialism almost to the vanishing point.

There were two ways in which the social democrats failed to understand the Liberals. First of all, the Liberals had their own progressive roots in the failed rebellions of 1837-38 in Lower Canada and Upper Canada. In those struggles, the reformers and would-be revolutionaries could point to the American and French Revolutions and to the radical British Chartists as being among those from whom they drew political and intellectual inspiration. They came by the colour red honestly, to the unhappiness of the social democrats who got stuck with orange, having flirted with green before abandoning the colour (much to their chagrin today). For their part, the Liberals have made strenuous efforts to put their radical history behind them, especially in Quebec, where the rouge heritage put them up against the enormously powerful Roman Catholic church. The other thing the social democrats did not understand about the Liberals was that in the late 19th century, the party managed to reinvent itself as a European-style Catholic Centre party. During the 20th century, the great achievement of the Liberal Party was to make itself the more or less permanent home of Catholic voters, not only of francophones, but of Irish Catholics and later of the post-World War II Catholic immigrants from Europe, notably the Italians. For most of the 20th century, the religion of voters was a much surer indicator of the party they would support than social class, rivalling language and region. In a country that has become nearly 50 percent Roman Catholic (though not necessarily practising Catholics), this correlation gave the Liberals enormous staying power.

Meanwhile, the CCF-NDP suffered from the fact that among the midwives at the party’s birth were Protestant clergymen. Despite the best efforts of social democrats, they could never succeed in removing the scent of Protestantism that Quebec voters found so off-putting. In the end, Pierre Trudeau, who was attracted to social democracy and was an admirer of the CCF-NDP, decided that if he wanted to have a serious political career it would have to be as a Liberal, a party he scorned until the early 1960s, rather than in the marginal NDP. If social democrats have never wanted to take a clear look at the Liberals, because they want to replace them, they also have avoided being realistic about the Conservatives, because they’d rather not acknowledge how right-wing their own party has become. Under the leadership of Brian Mulroney in the 1980s, the Conservatives dropped the nationalism and Red Toryism that had been important elements in the party’s past, and opted instead for neo-conservatism. This meant that the adherents of the Canadian right took on the role of uncritical enthusiasts for the American socio-economic system and for the tightest possible alliance with the U.S. in global affairs. The Conservatives represented the segment of the Canadian population that had little or no fundamental attachment to the idea of Canada as a country separate from the United States, a stance that leads inexorably toward the elimination of basic differences between Canada and the U.S., certainly including the euthanizing of the social democratic tendency in Canada.

The NDP has evolved into a party much like the others. There is little political ferment. Riding association meetings, party conferences and provincial and federal conventions are not occasions for basic debate and education about the state of society and what needs to be done, but rather focus on fundraising, holding raffles and showcasing the leader for the media. The only time when there is genuine democracy in the NDP is during leadership campaigns. At least during these intervals, real debate becomes possible. Once the leader is chosen, however, party policy, decided on at conventions, is ignored. That has been the case for decades. Between leadership campaigns, the leader, surrounded by his or her inner staff and pollsters, determines the political course of the party. The campaigns of the party establishment to replace the Regina Manifesto with the Winnipeg Declaration in 1956 (which effectively replaced socialism with the humanization of capitalism as the party’s objective), to suppress the Waffle in the early 1970s (to eliminate a grassroots movement that sought to move the party to the left) and to contain the New Politics Initiative a number of years ago were episodes in a decades-old effort to make vote winning the paramount, almost exclusive, legitimate activity of the party. The historically successful drive to drain party membership of any real political content and to vest almost all power in the hands of the leader and his or her operatives has had the effect of making the tactics of each election campaign the only thing that really matters. And since the success of leaders is judged almost wholly by how many seats they win, ambitious NDP leaders have reached the not surprising conclusion that the party will tolerate virtually anything as long as it promotes the winning of more votes and more seats.

In the 1930s, social democrats believed that they needed to nurture a political culture and an intellectual climate in which socialist ideas would be embraced. CCF meetings were serious occasions for learning, discussion and debate. Under the aegis of the League for Social Reconstruction, socialist thinkers wrote books on the future course of Canadian social and economic policy. In 1935, the LSR published Social Planning for Canada, a penetrating analysis of what ailed Canadian society during the Depression. Some of those active in the LSR were F.R. Scott, Frank Underhill, King Gordon, Graham Spry and Leonard Marsh. It’s been a long time since anyone looked to the NDP for ideas. The trouble with encouraging thought and creating a culture where ideas can flourish is that ideas come with controversy and searing debates about what the party stands for and what its tactics should be.

While social democrats believed they could dispense with ideas, the right figured out that they could not. The neo-conservatives buttressed the Conservative Party with the help of media conglomerates and the right-wing intelligentsia. For example, Conrad Black, once described by Margaret Thatcher as the most right-wing person she’d ever met—she meant it as a compliment—established the National Post over a decade ago as a journal of combat whose task was to rally the right, feature its most effective voices as columnists and help bring to power a party that would move Canada sharply to the right.

The Aspers stepped in as Black withdrew and now run a media empire that is Canada’s “Fox lite,” committed to shifting the dialogue in the country dramatically to the right. David Frum, Robert Fulford and—until recently—Andrew Coyne at the Post and Tom Flanagan who used to be at Stephen Harper’s elbow actually care about ideas. They don’t merely want to hold office, they want to change the country (something social democrats used to care about). They are not content to become members of a centre-of-the road Canadian government. J.S. Woodsworth, Tommy Douglas and David Lewis were also not interested in merely simply sitting at a cabinet table. They were determined to create a Canada in which the power of the capitalists to exploit workers was sharply reduced and the lives of wage and salary earners were dramatically improved. If they had simply wanted to hold office, they could have signed on with Mackenzie King, St. Laurent or Pearson and they would have been welcomed with open arms.

And there is an important difference between those on the right and those on the left who seek fundamental change. The right can achieve crucial changes that are exceptionally difficult to reverse because they speak for the leading elements of the business class. When the members of the Mulroney government, with the overwhelming support of business, signed a trade deal with the United States, they locked measures into it that meant that no future Canadian government could reintroduce the elements of the National Energy Program without seeking the repeal of the FTA and NAFTA. When the left is in office and seeks to legislate basic change, it does so in opposition to the power of the business class. The classic example was the implementation of medicare by the Saskatchewan CCF government in the summer of 1962. Tommy Douglas, who had led the CCF to its fifth consecutive electoral victory in 1960, had pledged that he would regard re-election as a mandate from the people to introduce a universal, comprehensive medical care program to cover every person in the province. After passing the required legislation, the government announced that medicare would come into force on July 1, 1962. (By then, Douglas, who was elected leader of the newly founded federal NDP the previous summer, had been replaced as premier by Woodrow Lloyd.)

On July 1, a large majority of the province’s doctors went on strike to combat medicare. The strike, watched closely across North America, had the full support of the Canadian and American Medical Associations, the continental insurance industry and most of the wider business community plus the backing of the editorial pages of almost all of the continent’s daily newspapers. Three weeks later the strike ended and the doctors returned to work, and within a few years, the federal Liberals had offered funding to any provincial government that agreed to sign onto the principles of medicare. All of them did. Medicare changed Canada. Even though right-wing governments have tried to undermine the public health care system by opening the door to private hospitals and clinics, they have not been able to challenge medicare head on.

With this campaign, Canadian social democrats achieved what American liberals during the Clinton administration and the Obama administration never could. They had presided over a profound change in the political culture, and they did it because the Saskatchewan CCF was a genuine people’s party. Few members were business executives, and not many were direct owners of small businesses, with the exception of family farmers (and these were a small minority of the Saskatchewan party membership by 1960). While the business community could put external pressure on the CCF government in the province, as it could on any government, the party itself was quite impervious to its coersion and that made the CCF very different from the Democrats in the United States and the Canadian Liberals.

Not accidentally, the medicare breakthrough came in at the high point of the progressive era of the postwar decades. In Canada, the United States and in Western Europe, this was a time when trade union membership was on the rise, social programs were being established and access to higher education was widening. Europe was the most advanced in this process, followed by Canada, but these were also the great years of the American Civil Rights movement, as well as the Great Society programs. In today’s neo-conservative environment, it is dauntingly difficult to achieve social policy breakthroughs—for instance the establishment of a universal, comprehensive early childhood education system beginning at age two, along the lines of the system that has existed for many decades in France. There is a strong movement in Canada that has struggled for many years for such a program and the NDP supports this aim, but the NDP and the forces that seek such a basic reform have never really worked together in a major campaign to see their goal to fruition. The NDP is a becalmed political party that has lost the combative edge of the social democrats of earlier decades. For tactical reasons, the NDP prefers to see the Conservatives and Liberals as parties that share common values. The NDP leadership fears that if it critiques the Harper Conservatives as significantly to the right of the Liberals this will drive social democratic voters into the arms of the Liberals. Indeed, one is more likely to get a sweeping assessment of the implications of neo-conservatism from the Liberals than from the NDP.

The consequence of the NDP’s tactical stance is that the party ends up as just another liberal party, operating from a somewhat more left-wing vantage point. The lack of a compelling vision has left the NDP looking much like the other parties, which is why so many people who are searching for something genuinely different are opting for the Green Party.

There have been moments in the history of the NDP when the party has stood on principle, leaving shabby tactics to the side. One came during the October Crisis of 1970. After cells from the Front de Liberation du Quebec kidnapped James Cross, the British Trade Commissioner in Montreal, and a few days later kidnapped Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte, the Trudeau government proclaimed the War Measures Act and dispatched soldiers to the streets of Montreal. The next day, the body of the murdered Laporte was discovered in the trunk of a car. The draconian powers of the act allowed the government to arrest people and hold them for weeks without charging them. The night the Act was proclaimed, the Montreal began rounding people up. Never charged, several hundred people were arrested and held. The Act also allowed the government to censor the media. In the course of a few days, the government acquired dictatorial powers and public opinion polls showed that about ninety per cent of Canadians approved.

When David Lewis and Tommy Douglas decided in the autumn of 1970 to oppose Pierre Trudeau’s blatant disregard for civil liberties when he proclaimed the War Measures Act, in Quebec these NDP leaders were not thinking about votes. Polls showed that 90 percent of Canadians were on Trudeau’s side. In the short run, what Lewis and Douglas did bled support away from their party. In the long run, however, the NDP not only took a stand for civil liberties when it was crucial that someone do so, but the party gained respect and reinforced the view of the NDP as an institution to which Canadians looked for leadership. During the 2006 election campaign, many trade unionists and social activists were furious with Jack Layton and the NDP for failing to critique the consequences of a Conservative victory in the election. They were angry that the NDP chose the late fall of 2005 to join the Conservatives and the Bloc in bringing down the Martin government and precipitating an election.

They believed that this decision put in peril a number of reforms to which the Martin Liberals had agreed, including a national childcare program. The 2006 federal election “badly tested the relationship” between social movements and the NDP, wrote Canadian Auto Workers economist Jim Stanford in the Globe and Mail a few days after Harper’s election victory. “NDP strategists precipitated the election, sensing a moment of opportunity to win more seats. But their decision was made over the explicit objection of many progressive movements. They had used the Liberals’ fragile minority position to extract impressive, important gains (child care, new legal protections for workers, the aboriginal deal, and others); they wanted to solidify those victories, and win new ones.” Leaders from these progressive constituencies “all wanted the election later, not sooner.” The most visible sign of division was Canadian Auto Workers’ president Buzz Hargrove’s campaign to stop the Conservatives by supporting New Democrats in ridings where they were likely to win and Liberals elsewhere. Three weeks after the election, the Ontario NDP executive suspended Hargrove from the party; its president, Sandra Clifford, explaining that the sum of the union leader’s actions led to the suspension. “It was appearing with the prime minister….hugging him. Saying that he wanted a Liberal minority government,” Clifford said. In effect, the party had decided that it was an expellable offence for members to advocate strategic voting. While many insiders wanted Hargrove to “Buzz off,” others were just as concerned about the decision to bring down the government; still others, viewing the entire NDP campaign as strategic, thought Hargrove’s dismissal deeply ironic.

Still smarting over Martin’s successful 2004 last-ditch appeal to NDP supporters to vote Liberal to stop Harper, Layton’s campaign team was determined not to let history repeat itself. Polls indicated that NDP supporters were the most worried about a Conservative government and, the thinking went, many again would vote strategically (for the Liberals) in the event of a successful campaign to demonize Harper. So, as revealed by NDP press releases, campaign literature, and Layton’s speeches, to prevent erosion of NDP support, the party concentrated its fire on the Liberals, barely mentioning the Conservatives in their attacks. The most memorable NDP television advertisement depicted Canadians giving the corrupt Liberals the boot. This kind of messaging set the tone, and Maude Barlow, Chairperson of the Council of Canadians, for one, said she felt pressure “not to critique Harper,” and that the top priority was “to win more seats for the NDP.” During the election, the Council was involved in the Think Twice coalition, made up of groups that came together to warn Canadians about Stephen Harper’s record.” Barlow said: “if the NDP was not going to talk about Harper’s record, we felt we had to.” In the eyes of many social activists, in the 2004 election, and much more overtly in 2006, exhibiting a penchant for short-term fixes over long-term party-building, Jack Layton became a servant to the proposition that what was good for working people and for the left was more seats for the NDP, no more, no less.

In the 2006 election, Layton helped frame the central issue as Liberal scandals. The Canadian Election Study (CES), published just after the election, suggests this issue was responsible for the Conservative victory. It showed that outside Quebec, the proportion of people rating Liberal scandals as salient jumped from 19.7 percent at the conclusion of the 2004 campaign to 30.4 percent at the end of the 2006 election. The proportion of people rating Harper positively actually declined slightly from 48.8 percent to 46.7 percent, over the same interval. The share of people who believed that Harper “is just too extreme” barely budged, down from 49.1 percent to 48.3 percent of those interviewed. But this did not matter. While the NDP’s prospects improved, its strategy clearly helped install the Conservative minority government.

Analysts agree that the major turning point in the campaign came in late December with the RCMP’s letter to NDP MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis informing her that a criminal probe was being launched about possible leaks in Ralph Goodale’s finance department on Income Trusts. Wasylycia-Leis had written to the RCMP to request an investigation and when the Mounties, in a questionable move during an election campaign, wrote her back, she released the letter to the media. The Liberals never recovered. In the last week of the campaign, Layton advocated strategic voting, urging traditional Liberals to “lend” the NDP their vote, while the Liberals went into the “repair shop” for refitting. To cap it off, in what was billed as his last statement as an MP, Ed Broadbent thundered that power “should be taken away” from the Liberals, that the party “no longer has the moral authority to deserve people’s votes.”

In the advanced world, Canada is that rare case where a centrist party was dominant for many decades, borrowing ideas from the left and the right, whichever was opportune. Rarely innovative, always adaptive, the federal Liberals have been the bane of their opponents, detested by NDP and Conservative insiders for their lack of principle. Under Layton, NDP strategists have resumed the search for the Holy Grail: the realignment of Canadian politics around the centre-left pillar of the NDP through the marginalization of the Liberals. For the dream to become reality, the NDP will have to move even further to the centre, and to abandon its half-remembered social democratic aspirations.

Here’s a way to measure just how far the NDP has journeyed from the left to the centre in the aftermath of the implementation of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement in 1989. When it held the balance of power from 1972 to 1974, led by David Lewis the party pushed for the creation of a national oil company. Having won back its majority, Trudeau’s Liberal government completed the launch of Petro Canada as a publicly owned petroleum company in 1975. Though no longer under effective NDP pressure, the Liberals aggressively built Petrocan, which acquired the assets of foreign owned oil companies in Canada in the process. Within a few years, Petrocan grew into a vertically integrated company that operated in all aspects of the oil business, from exploration and production to retailing. Petrocan’s purpose was clear: to establish a public window on an industry controlled by global oil giants that regularly altered estimates of Canadian oil and natural gas reserves to suit their purposes.

Along with Petrocan, Ottawa froze the price of domestic oil well below the world level while exporting to the US at the world price. The policy sheltered Canadian consumers from the full impact of the quadrupling of world oil prices between December 1973 and the summer of 1974. Ottawa collected the difference between the domestic price and export price as an export tax. This under a Liberal government. If this all sounds terribly radical – and to oil companies, horrifying – it’s simply a sign of just how far Canadian economic policy has shifted since the free trade election of 1988. Today, Layton’s NDP wouldn’t dare advocate such policies, and not just because a two-price system would violate NAFTA rules. It would represent too much interference with the operations of the market.

During the 2008 federal election campaign, the NDP adopted a stance that was similar to the one it took in the campaign of 2006. Nothing in the campaign pointed toward the dramatic events that followed it when the NDP and the Liberals proposed to defeat the Conservatives in the House of Commons and to install a Liberal-NDP coalition, with the support of the Bloc. That initiative collapsed when Michael Ignatieff, installed as interim Liberal leader in December 2008 decided to support the Conservative government’s budget in January 2009. In March 2011, the NDP joined the Liberals and the Bloc to vote No Confidence in the Harper government. For the NDP, the federal election of May 2, 2011 was the break-out party insiders had been hoping for since the party was founded fifty years earlier in the summer of 1961. For NDP supporters, the 2011 election will always be remembered with a mixture of joy and sadness: joy because the party won 103 seats, 59 of them in Quebec (later reduced to 58 when one of the members left the NDP to join the Liberal caucus in the House of Commons) and formed the Official Opposition for the first time ever, and sadness because the architect of the break through, leader Jack Layton, died less than four months after voting day. Both the breakthrough in Quebec and the vault to Official Opposition status were transformative.

In Quebec, the NDP’s triumph marked the first time since 1988 that a federalist party had won a majority of seats in the province. Throughout the nearly eight decades since the CCF had been created, social democrats had longed for the day when their party would replace the Liberals as one of the country’s two major political formations. With the death of Jack Layton, the NDP was unexpectedly cast into a leadership campaign that consumed much of the first year of the party’s position as the Official Opposition.

While other candidates ran effective campaigns, two of them dominated the race, which culminated in the selection of the new leader on March 24, 2012. Without a seat in the House of Commons, Brian Topp, who had occupied top bureaucratic positions in the NDP in Saskatchewan and at the federal level and had served as federal party president, threw his hat in the ring. Appearing at his side at the press conference in Ottawa where Topp launched his campaign in September 2011 was Ed Broadbent who had led the party from 1975 to 1989. With the backing of Broadbent and other major party figures such as Roy Romanow, the former premier of Saskatchewan, Topp was the closest thing in the race to an establishment candidate. He presented himself as a social democrat who would preserve and act on the traditional and historic values of the NDP.

This stance grew in importance as a counterpoint to the campaign of Thomas Mulcair, the MP for Outremont (in Montreal), the eventual winner. Mulcair, who had previously served as Minister of Sustainable Development, and Environment and Parks from 2003 to 2006 in the Quebec cabinet of Liberal Jean Charest, left the Quebec Liberals and contested a federal by-election in the riding of Outremont in 2007 as the NDP candidate. In the leadership campaign, Mulcair ran as the most prominent member of the NDP’s newly minted caucus from Quebec. Mulcair presented himself as a potential leader who would bring the centre of the Canadian political spectrum to the NDP. In other words, he planned to woo Canadians to the left, not push the NDP to the right.

In the latter weeks of the campaign, prior to the NDP convention in Toronto, with Mulcair seen as the front runner, Ed Broadbent publicly called into question the Quebec MP’s commitment to NDP values. In an effort to reinvigorate the campaign of Brian Topp, in a newspaper and a television interview, Broadbent praised Topp’s dependability as a social democrat while stating that he was not really sure where Mulcair stood. Broadbent’s foray dominated the final days of the leadership race. In the mainstream media and on activist blogs, those who agreed with Broadbent reinforced the case that Mulcair would lead to the NDP away from its traditional stance to the centre. They charged that he was personally abrasive and unable to work effectively with other people. Prominent social activist Judy Rebick, although not a member of the NDP, took up the cudgels against Mulcair, charging that he was authoritarian in his leadership style, that he was patriarchal and that he was particularly unable to maintain effective working relationships with women.

Others (myself included) rejected the attacks against Mulcair, and supported his candidacy. On March 24, 2012, in an election in which all NDP members could participate, mostly through online voting prior to the convention, Thomas Mulcair was elected federal NDP on the third ballot, winning 57 per cent of the vote. Runner up Brian Topp won 43 per cent of the vote. For the first time in the history of the party, the NDP had a leader who had emerged from the furnace of Quebec politics. It remained to be seen where he would lead the party.