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rfmcdonaldI'd like to thank a reader for showing me that David Frum still cares about Canada. Why, he supports Canada's transition to multiparty democracy.
I might be upset about this if I actually cared about his opinion. As things stand, I'm as amused by this as I am by his stated opinion that Canada should develop a nuclear deterrent, and tempted to point out that his view of Canada as a pre-modern polity is firstly wrong and secondly something that he has in common with old-stock Canadian cultural nationalists like Margaret Atwood.
Unlike their supposed analogues, the Democrats in the United States or Great Britain's Labor Party, Canada's Liberals are not a party built around certain policies and principles. They are instead what political scientists call a brokerage party, similar to the old Italian Christian Democrats or India's Congress Party: a political entity without fixed principles or policies that exploits the power of the central state to bribe or bully incompatible constituencies to join together to share the spoils of government.
As countries modernize, they tend to leave brokerage parties behind. Very belatedly, that moment of maturity may now be arriving in Canada. Americans may lose their illusions about my native country; Canadians will gain true multiparty democracy and accountability in government. It's an exchange that is long past due.
I might be upset about this if I actually cared about his opinion. As things stand, I'm as amused by this as I am by his stated opinion that Canada should develop a nuclear deterrent, and tempted to point out that his view of Canada as a pre-modern polity is firstly wrong and secondly something that he has in common with old-stock Canadian cultural nationalists like Margaret Atwood.
