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What Really Happened in Canada (From a Canadian)
I’m a Canadian, a longtime small-government libertarian, and sympathetic to US conservative causes. I was for many years a Canadian Liberal partisan (long story, see my bio). This is my first post, though I’ve been a Ricochetti from the very beginning. I just had to weigh in on the confusion I’ve been hearing on the podcasts about the Canadian election.
I know you all like Stephen Harper, and I agree he looks pretty good from a foreign conservative’s perspective. But Canadians didn’t reject that Harper, or even (intentionally) his policies. They just got caught up in a shiny, pretty new thing. It happens to the best of electorates. (US in 2008, anyone?)
Here are some things you don’t know:
- Harper is our Nixon. He is an introvert: moral, bookish, unsmiling, tactical, uncharismatic except in occasional flashes. He is cold to all but his closest advisors, and dislikes having to explain his policies. His strategy was to make incremental changes, hide from interviews, and hope people would understand their brilliance at election time. Telling moment: When sending his six-year-old kid to school for the cameras, [ed. I incorrectly wrote age 9 at first] he shook the kid’s hand rather than giving him a hug. A cold fish indeed. Women and urban voters can’t stand him, personally, even if they like his policies.
- The Canadian electorate doesn’t reject Harper’s responsible, business-friendly policies. This election was not about policy. They voted for a glamorous, young “change” candidate, generally ignoring his party’s unpleasantly left-wing platform. Trudeau’s surge came so late in the day that the media didn’t have a chance to vet him properly; they spent much more time on the heir-apparent in our system, the (now-decimated) NDP. Tellingly, Trudeau’s platform largely leaves in place some of Harper’s signature policies, such as tax-free savings accounts and tax cuts.
- Trudeau is not his father. I have met him and have no love for him, but I will admit he is his own man. His father was a famous French-Canadian political scientist who nationalized industries and spent much of his time battling separatists (and giving them oxygen — separatism came of age during Pierre’s 17-year time tenure). Justin grew up on the other side of the country; he speaks French with an Anglo accent, and lived a quiet life as a drama teacher, uncurious about policy (and generally uninformed). Most Canadians know this. A majority of voters had no opportunity to vote in Pierre Trudeau’s last election in 1980.
- Trudeau may be our Obama. A few years ago, I told a US Republican friend that “We had our Obama in the 1970s,” meaning Pierre Trudeau. Well, Justin may be a better analogue. Rising quickly from obscurity, with little depth of policy experience but surprising political talent, he runs in a “change” year on a left-wing platform that nobody reads, defeating a competent but uninspiring conservative party. Hmm. Let’s hope it doesn’t go that way.
- Canadian Liberals are not analogous to US liberal Democrats. I always get pushback on this point, but it’s true. In Canada, our far-Left self-segregates itself into the New Democratic Party (NDP). The NPD has never held power at the national level. Our Liberals are more akin to your Clinton Democrats, with a smattering of business Republicans. The Liberals are an urban party with a tradition, as they say here, of “campaigning on the Left and governing from the Right.” It is business-friendly, has a good economic record, and in the 1990s, brought our federal debt-to-GDP ratio from 63 percent to 34 percent through massive spending cuts. (Much of our debt is provincial, so that higher number constituted a debt crisis here in 1994). Both Trudeaus campaigned to the left of this tradition. We’ll see if Justin respects it.
- Foreign affairs weren’t on the ballot. The only issue was whether we would take more Syrian refugees (Canadians had ignored the ISIS/Syrian issue until September). Trudeau will take a few more: 25,000 versus Harper’s 10,000. Sadly, he will also pull out of the international ISIS mission, but Harper’s contribution was pretty small, anyway. Relations with the US, often a flashpoint in our elections, were undiscussed.
The biggest issue in our election was Harper’s personality. After nine years of his quietly refusing to make any case for policy — conservative or otherwise — the Canadian opposition parties managed to paint Harper as an out-of-touch, petty extremist. It isn’t fair, but it isn’t surprising.
Canadian conservatives have to learn to become happy warriors. Now, America, please show us how it’s done.
Published in General
Justin Trudeau’s mom is the same age as Hillary Clinton.
Something to think about.
The Conservatives were defeated by Cancer. The result this week would have been very different if Jack Layton hadn’t died from it.
Can you explain what a free vote is?
It means he won’t force members to vote the party line or else (assuming it works essentially the same way as in the UK). Leadership in a parliamentary system is far more powerful than in the U.S.
Thanks.
Keep’em coming Vorpal
I’m sympathetic to your point, but in this particular instance, it wasn’t that he shook hands with his 6-year-old son, per se. It was that he didn’t have the political instincts to react well in an awkward situation, nor to grasp how it would be perceived and spun. He froze up and gagged the optics, and that would prove to be a recurring problem for him. Here’s a good recap.
Also from that same story, a telling anecdote that I’ve personally seen play out among my Canadian friends:
My concern is that Trudeau will continue the Liberal’s policy of benign neglect of the Canadian military. The RCAF needs new planes, the Navy needs new ships (letting the Mistral get away was simply inexcusable), the Army needs a replacement for LAVIII, and all of this needs to happen yesterday.
Meanwhile, the Canadian military has a procurement process that makes the US military look like a model of efficiency and thrift.
All the needs I mentioned before are holdovers from the last time the Liberals were in power. Back then, the Grit MPs saw the desperate need of armed forces, steeled their courage, and boldly purchased…
… new VIP jets so they could fly around the country in-style.
Not really seeing any hope for the Canadian military for the next few years.
Wow! Linked by Instapundit on your first post.
Yes, he’s just a basic decent guy, isn’t he? It’s the press that is indecent and pathetic.
This is again the doing of the unprofessional press of both our countries.
The parliamentary tradition of tightly whipped votes is because if a money bill goes to a vote and fails, there is an almost automatic general election. The prospect of a hanging does much to concentrate the mind: a parliamentary caucus decides internally what it wants, then presents an united front.
That means parties only field candidates who will toe the line – the party leader personally signs their nomination papers (and often refuses, for less loyal candidates) – a few stray votes is not an embarrassment, but a catastrophe.
Kevin, I fear you are right. The military is not a priority amongst Canadian voters – we won the geographic lottery, and the world’s problems seem awfully far away. Harper made a halfhearted defence of Defence, but spectacularly screwed up a couple of high-profile plane and ship procurements – now Canada’s voters roll their eyes when they think of the military.
We’re getting some new ships, but the RCAF looks like it’ll be on F18s for at least another decade and a half.
Still, Canada is usually a contributor to multinational forces, so hopefully our ships will be useful, if unflashy.
Any person who would change his vote because a candidate shook his son’s hand instead of hugging him does not deserve the right to vote. It is because of people like this that we get the kind of governance that we do.
A handshake is the better way to go when delivering a child to school for the first time. It shows him that you respect him as a person in his own right, not just as “your child.” He is going through one of life’s passages, and the handshake shows that the father understands this.
Hug your daughters if you must. A boy needs a good handshake from his dad.
You ignore the concept of “pretext”.
This is a bit of my projection based on US politics.
Largely, it did not matter whether Harper was actually stiff, etc. What mattered was that the media told people that: (1) Harper was stiff; (2) that’s a bad thing; and (3) they can feel good about themselves for voting against Harper on grounds of stiffness. You can repeat that for every other asserted attribute. The grounds are purely pretextual.
The media/left can come up with one or more narratives (even if inconsistent, witness the simultaneous narratives of Obama as Spock and as cool), bend the facts (if necessary) to fit the narrative(s), and run with it.
This is
basicadvanced use of mob psychology. The John Oliver piece was a good example. The mocking of Harper’s band was characteristic. Had Harper been a liberal, Harper’s musical skill (which likely exceeds Clinton’s sax skill and Obama’s vocal skill) would have shown his coolness and the band name would have shown his wit and cultural sensitivity.Canada is going to get new jets. That was a campaign promise from Trudeau. They’re just not going to be F-35’s. And that would at least be a silver lining.
The same in the UK too.
That’s utterly foreign to Americans. Leadership does whip some votes pretty strongly and crossing them can potentially affect your career (committee assignments, for one thing), but if a Senator wants to do his own thing — and they often do — there’s little that can really be done to stop them.
To me that is a huge deal. But nobody but Mark Steyn talks about it.
Really? I am American who likes America but Americans are generally inefficient when it comes to government stuff. Even important government stuff like the military. Is there any solid evidence that Canada is pound per pound more wasteful than American excess?
The American model tries to do something ours does not: your procurement pays for new technology. Sometimes you even pay two companies to develop the same thing, because you have to have it. That is expensive, but not necessarily wasteful.
We generally buy stuff with proven technology, and while I don’t know if we do it worse than you, consider:
This editorial says it’s getting worse since Harper was in power (left-wing paper, grain of salt, but the analysis matches the facts). There is a major shipbuilding contract that seems to have gone okay, but it might be too early to tell.
The Canadian government is actually quite competent in many types of service delivery (for a national-level government, that is) – but on this one, they are pretty bad.
I have never seen a contrast specifically with the US, probably because our goals are different as a lower-tier power.
You’re right, they do some pretty scary things, and only Steyn watches it.
No one in the West does military procurement well, save perhaps the Swedes. In all the major industrial nations… the US, France, the UK, Germany, etc… military procurement is seen as just another opportunity to rip off taxpayers. It’s especially bad in the US. The F-35 survives because Lockheed made sure to spread out production all over the country (and the world), to keep pressure on as many politicians as possible to keep supporting, despite the horrendous price tag and never ending flaws of the jet. This of course, drives up the cost even more. Other examples abound. The price from the last Nimitz carrier to the first Ford carrier doubled. Military procurement may be the biggest example of graft in the federal budget now. The only people doing a truly most-bang-for-the-buck military program these days are the Swedes with the Gripen.
What’s with the Gripen obsession?
It could only exist because the US developed the engines.
As for performance, it’s a really good Viet Nam war multirole. I would not fly it against a modern air superiority fighter.
How much of an advance is it over the original Lavi?