Freedom Socialist • Vol. 27, No. 2 • April-May 2006

Say it ain't so! Or, the story of why the Conservatives won the election in Canada

by Megan Cornish

Conservative winner Stephen Harper (at left), shown here with Royal Mounted Police Commissioner Guiliano Zaccardelli in Ottawa on January 31, promised new law-and-order measures including adult sentencing for juveniles as young as 14 and an increase in police forces.

Canada's parliamentary elections on January 23 put the Conservative Party and its markedly rightwing leader Stephen Harper in power, ending a 12-year stretch by the Liberal Party.

"It's spooky," Toronto activist David Noble, an immigrant from the U.S. 15 years ago, told the FS. "But it doesn't mean this is 'Harper-land.' The Conservatives won not because people wanted them, but because they were fed up with the Liberals."

New Canadian PM — a Bush clone. The Conservative Party is only three years old, a merger of two other parties. According to The Globe and Mail, Harper is "the most conservative figure to be elected prime minister in living memory."

Harper is a Bush-style ultraconservative, who supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq (which 74 percent of Canadians polled believed Canada was right not to join), opposes the Kyoto climate control protocol (which Canada signed), and called for $5 billion in new military spending.

From the corporate media, you wouldn't have known the extent of Harper's rightwing pedigree before the election. The big newspapers endorsed him as a "moderate," while focusing unrelentingly on a Liberal Party scandal known as "AdScam." The Liberals paid supportive ad agencies ridiculously inflated commissions for their services, and then the agencies turned much of the money back to Liberal coffers.

After the election, Harper bragged of a "mandate" from the voters. Actually, his party polled only 36 percent of the vote, as against 30.2 for the Liberals, 17.5 for the New Democratic Party (NDP), and 10.5 for the Bloc Québécois, the Quebec separatist party. The leader of the party that wins the highest number of seats in elections for the lower house of parliament, the House of Commons, usually becomes prime minister. This is true even if the party fails to get more than 50 percent of the vote.

Harper has moved with "shock and awe" speed to implement his conservative program. A national childcare policy the Liberals had planned "was scrapped within a week," says Noble. And the environmental health organization with which he works just had all its funding cut.

Perhaps most ominously, Canadian forces in Afghanistan have moved from UN "peacekeeping" near Kabul to active "counterinsurgency" attacks around Kandahar. Harper echoes Bush with his declarations that "we're not going to cut and run."

If all this sounds familiar, it's because corporate globalization is forcing Canada in the same direction as the U.S., with a similar move to the right by major parties across the spectrum.

This is certainly true of the Liberal Party.

While in charge, the Liberals severely reduced funding to the provinces and refused to reverse the trend of stepped-up support through federal dollars to private healthcare, threatening the public medical system. They also drastically cut unemployment insurance.

The party passed the biggest-ever tax cuts for the rich, hugely increased military spending, and landed Canadian forces in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Haiti. Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin defended the use of "information" obtained through torture and was unwilling to sanction U.S. war resisters finding refuge in Canada.

NDP: running on empty. While most recently in power, the Liberal government had a minority in the House of Commons and only ruled with the support of the NDP, a reformist party that is nominally socialist and the closest thing Canada has to a labor party.

Yet the NDP backed the Liberal pro-war military stance, said little in opposition to Canada's anti-Arab and anti-Muslim "anti-terrorist" act, and was weak on Quebec's right to self-determination.

According to Canadian Dimension, a socialist journal, NDP "arguably ran its most 'mainstream' and neoliberal campaign ever: no tax increases, tough on crime, a mainstream economist running for the party and no mention of social democracy, let alone socialism." Led by Jack Layton, the NDP won only 2 percent more votes than in 2004, not enough to maintain the balance-of-power position it held under the Liberals.

"People are getting passive about elections, because they feel they aren't being represented," Tammy Sadeghi told this reporter. Sadeghi is an Iranian activist who has lived in Canada for 16 years. "When the NDP is in power, they are almost as bad as the Liberals or Conservatives. There are all these cutbacks, everything is being privatized, and the unions are not taking radical action."

Canadian Dimension agrees, saying that this lack of representation of workers and the poor "might explain the precipitous decline in voter turnout over the past three decades." Thirty-six percent of the electorate abstained from voting.

" Lesser evil" politics play into rightward drift. Labor officialdom in English-speaking Canada formally allies with the NDP. Yet Buzz Hargrove, head of the Canadian Auto Workers union, publicly aligned himself with the Liberals, urging workers to vote for the NDP only in "safe" races where a Liberal loss wouldn't mean a seat for the Conservatives. So did some of the Left, including Socialist Project, a group of unaffiliated socialists.

But this "lesser evil" logic helps to move the whole political spectrum to the right.

As the International Socialists of Canada point out, the same logic was used in the 1993 election, after a Conservative government signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. The Liberals pledged to revise the treaty, but after winning the election negotiated a version that was virtually unchanged.

For its part, the Bloc Québécois, while ostensibly social-democratic like the NDP and supported by much of the Quebec labor movement, was originally cobbled together from the Liberals, labor, and the earlier Progressive Conservatives. In practice, its program revolves almost entirely around independence from or autonomy within Canada, although it has taken other progressive positions at times.

In the recent election, the Conservatives won more seats than the Bloc, even in Quebec itself.

Time to build a real alternative! After the vote, the progressive magazine Seven Oaks urged the creation of a strong radical electoral alternative in "An Election Day Call to Action," by stone sculptor and Nehiyaw nation member Stewart Steinhauer. "The current form of Canadian state power, whether Liberal or Conservative, is dedicated to maintaining the system that is destroying Mother Earth. We don't need to change parties. We need to change systems. Starting now."

And a socialist amen to that!