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jsburbidgeThesis, Antithesis, Synthesis, Confusion, Aftermath...
There would seem to be a number of lessons to take away from last night.
1) People were really not enthusiastic about Ignatieff. (losing his own riding to a neophyte sends a message there). A change of leadership might repair the Liberal fortunes next election. Maybe. But...
2) As I noted yesterday, there's a core (small-c) conservative vote there which not only was the foundation but almost all the substance of the Conservative win, and I don't see this as likely to change in the next decade or so, at least. Insofar as the CPC gained votes in Ontario -- it wasn't all vote-splitting on the left -- it was right-of-centre Liberals drifting towards the Conservatives.
3) The Liberals really haven't been a party of the left in any meaningful sense since Trudeau's day. The Chretien Liberals governed as pure centrist "managers" with a small-c-conservative economic bent on their fiscal side. (Ironically, Martin, who was responsible for carrying this out, seems to have had more liberal instincts than Chretien, but he wasn't the one making policy.) Ignatieff had a background which was not terribly helpful: he's a liberal, but appeals to liberal "tradition" -- a sort of Tory liberalism where Liberal affiliation and aims are a heritage: you could see this in his speech last night. (His family background doesn't make him appealing on the left, either, here -- White Russian Counts on one side, George Grant on the other.) And there was the whole thing about his expat, Harvard, pro Iraq War background as well. The Liberals shifted slightly left in this campaign, but they weren't likely to be listened to by the people they needed.
Contrariwise, the NDP is hardly very radical, these days: contrast Layton with John Clarke, for example; or my old classmate Michael Shapcott (who, I note, has in fact run for the NDP, but not in this election).
It's arguable -- and many people are going to argue it in the coming days -- that given the immovability of that conservative vote block it makes sense to counter it with a single (non-Green) party of the left. Even if the fifty-some percent of the electorate who supported the two parties shed some members, it might provide an equivalent counterweight to the conservative vote. I don't think that this will happen soon.
A few days ago a column in the Globe and Mail referenced Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England, but I think it missed the point. Dangerfield's book shows the Liberals as being blindsided by a set of social changes (Labour, Suffragism, Ireland, etc.) which were new and too radical to be absorbed by the Liberal Party, which faded into irrelevance. The only such issue on the horizon now would be the ecological/global warming one, and that would involve a shift towards the Greens, not the NDP/traditional left. It wasn't simply a case of the centre being squeezed out by parties at the wings. (In addition, there's the elephant in the room which Dangerfield passes over lightly -- the slowly growing set of realignments which followed the passage of the Third Reform Bill (on this topic Cannadine's The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy is a better source) -- which has no parallel in out recent history.) It's entirely possible that -- if the CPC governs in a way which is relatively acceptable to many if not most centrist Canadians -- the NDP rather than the Liberals will become, permanently, the main voice of opposition to the CPCs, simply because the Conservatives will have enough of the centrist vote to cripple the Liberals permanently; and it's possible that in that context there will be increasing coordination between the two left-of-centre parties followed by an eventual merger. It is just barely possible that, under Rae (who has connections in both camps) there might be a rapid coalescence of interests against the Conservatives, especially if the Conservatives govern from the right rather than the centre. But parallels with the decline of the English Liberals aren't there. (For another thing, the transition under Ramsey MacDonald occurred when party discipline/affiliation was much laxer and more amorphous that today, and certainly than today in Canada, which allowed a coalition government to form without large-scale permanent decisions by a formal party governing body.)
4) As has actually been the case for some time, a Conservative majority basically means that Parliament is a useful sounding area (not only with added NDP voices, but with some added Green-ness), but to get anything actually done which is not on the CPC agenda will require social action at a non-party level which can demonstrate a broad appeal to a broad spectrum of voters, combined with a strong importance to a minimum core. Grassroots approaches become much more critical.
5) Finally, there's always mutatis mutandis, the reaction of Mike and Mark to BD in 1980 when Reagan started to look electable: "I think I'll shoot myself." "Good choice. Handguns will be cheap and plentiful.". I think we can say goodbye to the long-gun registry, regardless of how many police departments support it.
There would seem to be a number of lessons to take away from last night.
1) People were really not enthusiastic about Ignatieff. (losing his own riding to a neophyte sends a message there). A change of leadership might repair the Liberal fortunes next election. Maybe. But...
2) As I noted yesterday, there's a core (small-c) conservative vote there which not only was the foundation but almost all the substance of the Conservative win, and I don't see this as likely to change in the next decade or so, at least. Insofar as the CPC gained votes in Ontario -- it wasn't all vote-splitting on the left -- it was right-of-centre Liberals drifting towards the Conservatives.
3) The Liberals really haven't been a party of the left in any meaningful sense since Trudeau's day. The Chretien Liberals governed as pure centrist "managers" with a small-c-conservative economic bent on their fiscal side. (Ironically, Martin, who was responsible for carrying this out, seems to have had more liberal instincts than Chretien, but he wasn't the one making policy.) Ignatieff had a background which was not terribly helpful: he's a liberal, but appeals to liberal "tradition" -- a sort of Tory liberalism where Liberal affiliation and aims are a heritage: you could see this in his speech last night. (His family background doesn't make him appealing on the left, either, here -- White Russian Counts on one side, George Grant on the other.) And there was the whole thing about his expat, Harvard, pro Iraq War background as well. The Liberals shifted slightly left in this campaign, but they weren't likely to be listened to by the people they needed.
Contrariwise, the NDP is hardly very radical, these days: contrast Layton with John Clarke, for example; or my old classmate Michael Shapcott (who, I note, has in fact run for the NDP, but not in this election).
It's arguable -- and many people are going to argue it in the coming days -- that given the immovability of that conservative vote block it makes sense to counter it with a single (non-Green) party of the left. Even if the fifty-some percent of the electorate who supported the two parties shed some members, it might provide an equivalent counterweight to the conservative vote. I don't think that this will happen soon.
A few days ago a column in the Globe and Mail referenced Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England, but I think it missed the point. Dangerfield's book shows the Liberals as being blindsided by a set of social changes (Labour, Suffragism, Ireland, etc.) which were new and too radical to be absorbed by the Liberal Party, which faded into irrelevance. The only such issue on the horizon now would be the ecological/global warming one, and that would involve a shift towards the Greens, not the NDP/traditional left. It wasn't simply a case of the centre being squeezed out by parties at the wings. (In addition, there's the elephant in the room which Dangerfield passes over lightly -- the slowly growing set of realignments which followed the passage of the Third Reform Bill (on this topic Cannadine's The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy is a better source) -- which has no parallel in out recent history.) It's entirely possible that -- if the CPC governs in a way which is relatively acceptable to many if not most centrist Canadians -- the NDP rather than the Liberals will become, permanently, the main voice of opposition to the CPCs, simply because the Conservatives will have enough of the centrist vote to cripple the Liberals permanently; and it's possible that in that context there will be increasing coordination between the two left-of-centre parties followed by an eventual merger. It is just barely possible that, under Rae (who has connections in both camps) there might be a rapid coalescence of interests against the Conservatives, especially if the Conservatives govern from the right rather than the centre. But parallels with the decline of the English Liberals aren't there. (For another thing, the transition under Ramsey MacDonald occurred when party discipline/affiliation was much laxer and more amorphous that today, and certainly than today in Canada, which allowed a coalition government to form without large-scale permanent decisions by a formal party governing body.)
4) As has actually been the case for some time, a Conservative majority basically means that Parliament is a useful sounding area (not only with added NDP voices, but with some added Green-ness), but to get anything actually done which is not on the CPC agenda will require social action at a non-party level which can demonstrate a broad appeal to a broad spectrum of voters, combined with a strong importance to a minimum core. Grassroots approaches become much more critical.
5) Finally, there's always mutatis mutandis, the reaction of Mike and Mark to BD in 1980 when Reagan started to look electable: "I think I'll shoot myself." "Good choice. Handguns will be cheap and plentiful.". I think we can say goodbye to the long-gun registry, regardless of how many police departments support it.
