8/7/2019 11-05-03 Post Election Analysis

1/2

Mr Harper finds his whale and the Liberals are lost at sea

By David McLaren

Hard a'starbord Mister Starbuck. Thar she blows!

Well Mr Harper has found his elusive majority and Mr Laytons job just got a whole lot

harder. Now he must to try to keep the captain from taking the ship over the edge of theknown world. If you rememberMoby Dick, youll remember that Ahabs ship was a

multicultural ark America as it was beginning to become in 1850. Nothing Melvillewrote was accidental, and it was no accident he named Ahabs ship the Pequod, after an

aboriginal tribe who rebelled against settlers greed and, in revenge, were nearly massacred

into oblivion by Puritan Christians.

Perhaps the analogy to a Canadian election in 2011 is a bit of a stretch. But consider what

politics in America have come to and that this election (like American elections since the

1980s) was not about choosing from reasonable and well-articulated platforms. Thiselection was about culture.

It was about law and order vs soft on criminals, sports and hockey vs arts and letters, freemarket vs regulated economy, family values vs individual rights, centralized authority vs

parliamentary procedure. On May 2nd 2011, voters picked sides: roughly 40% of the votes

went to the right, 40% to the left and 20% found themselves in no mans land along with

the Liberals.

Mr Harper still won most of the seats (such is the reality of first-past-the-post electoral

systems), so he won the battle. Oh, and thats another way were getting closer to

American politics. We didnt vote for the best candidate in our ridings, we voted for (oragainst) a leader. We lost a lot of good people on May 2nd.

Culture war is a term used to describe the American electoral battles in the 1980s. Starting

with Ronald Reagans election, these saw the right, particularly the religious right, begin to

define issues in terms of ideological differences rather differences of policy.

For example, the religious right went after academics, feminists and artists as elitist,

subversive, blasphemous and corrosive of western civilization and families. And the

secular left replied with charges the right was undemocratic, uncaring and bigoted. Debatecongealed around a candidates character (code for holding to socially conservative

Christian values) rather than his or her capabilities.

Each side still considers the other the devil incarnate (24% of Republicans thinkPresident

Obama is the Antichrist) and political discourse has degenerated into truthy, quasi-

theological debates over right and wrong, good and evil. Were not quite there Jesushasnt been dragged into our politics yet, but according to some observers, principally

Marci McDonald in The Armageddon Factor, hes in the house.

8/7/2019 11-05-03 Post Election Analysis

2/2

So what can Canadians expect from our 41st

Parliament? The Conservatives will do whatthey said they would do: buy jails and jets and cut corporate taxes. And they will continue

to re-shape Canada in their own image both in the House by legislation and outside

Parliament by fiat. The left will snipe and complain and accuse but, stripped of its abilityto defeat a minority government, it will be impotent. Acrimony and the search for sound

bites will continue to pollute the evening news.

This state of affairs will continue until the left unites or until centre-right liberals get war-

weary. That will take at least ten years which is about how long it took for them in the

US to decide to vote for Barak Obama in 2008. And it took ten years for centre-right

Liberals in Ontario to wake up to the fact that Common Sense was perhaps not the bestfoundation for government policy and practice.

My guess, given the times and the trends, is that the Harper Government will be secure forat least that long, probably longer. It took Mr Harper ten years to unite the right. Unifying

the left will be a lot harder and far scrappier, a bit like herding cats. The ginger cats wont

like sitting with the big red toms, and the tabby with green stripes will hiss at them both,everyone forgetting entirely that they are all cats.

So, to get the ball rolling, Elizabeth May should cross the floor of the House to sit with the

NDP as soon as possible. And Bob Rae should knock on Jack Laytons door to talk aboutmerging the Liberals and the NDP.

Or, the left could wait and hope the Liberals who voted Conservative will return to thefold. But the left vote would still split against a united right and that will put us back into

minority Conservative governments. By then the countrys personality will have beenchanged forever.

The political ground shifted on May 2nd in Canada. It wasnt a green shift, or an orangecrush. It was a cultural earthquake.

May 3, 2011 David McLaren

David McLaren is a writer living on Georgian Bay in Ontario. He has worked in

government and in the private sector and with NGOs and First Nations. He can be

reached through http://jdavidmclaren.wordpress.com.