[BRIEF NOTE] Me on Federal Politics
May. 21st, 2005 01:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThere appears to have been some confusion about my earlier post about my hope for an election some time this year. Let me clarify.
Let's be honest: The Liberals are corrupt. We all know that. We also know that, wild rumours aside, it isn't P-2/Vatican Bank-style corruption by any means. Rather, it's more like Prince Edward Island-style corruption: excessively generous, highly personalized, motivated by short-term thinking. I've no doubt whatsoever that the Conservatives wouldn't be equally corrupt if they were elected to form the federal government. Likely they are already, inasmuch as Conservative MPs are situated in patronage networks, just like their Bloc Québécois counterparts, perhaps even like their NDP counterparts.
Patronage is a fact of Canadian politics, and shouldn't be unduly penalized. Parties caught red-handed should be scared, though. What better way to do this than to have a tight-fought election? Yes, people might raise the spectre of Canada's 1993 federal election, when the old Tories' share of the vote dropped by more than half and the Liberal vote rose by a quarter and the Tories got annihilated thanks to Canada's lack of proportional representation. The election occurred after eight years of government by the exceptionally unpopular prime minister Brian Mulroney, though, and in the context of an outraged population wanting to get the Tories good.
That sort of intense anger, broadly distributed, just doesn't exist towards the Liberals. All of the opinion polls suggest that the Liberals haven't suffered nearly as much of a collapse in popularity as the post-Mulroney Tories; in fact, the Liberals seem to have a lead over the new Conservatives. Plenty of things can still happen, but the Conservatives are still weaker than the Liberals, lacking that much of a foothold east of Manitoba and depending on their alliance with the Bloc to threaten the Liberals. A Conservative-Bloc coalition government might manage to do a lot of damage to Canada, but given how the only policies these two parties--the one rather right-wing, the other somewhat left-wing--could agree on would involve radical decentralization, they would only accelerate Canada's shift towards a federation rather less well-integrated than the European Union.
Thoughts?
UPDATE (8:50 PM) :![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
autopope has very interesting thoughts indeed.
Let's be honest: The Liberals are corrupt. We all know that. We also know that, wild rumours aside, it isn't P-2/Vatican Bank-style corruption by any means. Rather, it's more like Prince Edward Island-style corruption: excessively generous, highly personalized, motivated by short-term thinking. I've no doubt whatsoever that the Conservatives wouldn't be equally corrupt if they were elected to form the federal government. Likely they are already, inasmuch as Conservative MPs are situated in patronage networks, just like their Bloc Québécois counterparts, perhaps even like their NDP counterparts.
Patronage is a fact of Canadian politics, and shouldn't be unduly penalized. Parties caught red-handed should be scared, though. What better way to do this than to have a tight-fought election? Yes, people might raise the spectre of Canada's 1993 federal election, when the old Tories' share of the vote dropped by more than half and the Liberal vote rose by a quarter and the Tories got annihilated thanks to Canada's lack of proportional representation. The election occurred after eight years of government by the exceptionally unpopular prime minister Brian Mulroney, though, and in the context of an outraged population wanting to get the Tories good.
That sort of intense anger, broadly distributed, just doesn't exist towards the Liberals. All of the opinion polls suggest that the Liberals haven't suffered nearly as much of a collapse in popularity as the post-Mulroney Tories; in fact, the Liberals seem to have a lead over the new Conservatives. Plenty of things can still happen, but the Conservatives are still weaker than the Liberals, lacking that much of a foothold east of Manitoba and depending on their alliance with the Bloc to threaten the Liberals. A Conservative-Bloc coalition government might manage to do a lot of damage to Canada, but given how the only policies these two parties--the one rather right-wing, the other somewhat left-wing--could agree on would involve radical decentralization, they would only accelerate Canada's shift towards a federation rather less well-integrated than the European Union.
Thoughts?
UPDATE (8:50 PM) :
autopope has very interesting thoughts indeed.
