Worth the Fee to Read It

It’s been a very interesting night, actually, watching the by-election returns come in. If nothing else, tonight’s returns show just how isolated Toronto has become from the rest of the country — and, with it, the ideas of the Toronto élites in the various parties.

Toronto Centre and Willowdale were never, of course, in doubt: a political earthquake of extreme proportions would have been required to shake these loose from not only the grip of the laurels of incumbency being passed on to two new candidates (both of whom had received great quantities of news coverage not that long ago as the Liberal leadership campaign carried on). Indeed, both have (as of the 20:39 PT reading from the Elections Canada website) achieved a 59% true majority from the electors — slightly less than one in four — who turned out today. This puts two more possible alternatives to Dion on the Liberal benches for all to see, each and every day in Question Period: I do wonder why my mind’s eye keeps seeing Gaius Julius surrounded by his friends. Probably clapping as the knife goes in, too.

Desnethé-Missinippi-Churchill River, where Stéphane Dion’s hand-picked candidate, Joan Beatty, was expected to have a tough go of it tonight, but the battle was expected to be close for all of that. Nevertheless, this riding voted consistently, from poll to poll, to elect the Conservative, Rob Clarke. It would, in point of fact, have taken just about every NDP vote to have gone to the Liberal (I do recall more than one news article and blog post in the past few days who thought it would be a Liberal-NDP battle here!) to close the gap. (It may well be that that outcome does eventually come about — a Liberal & NDP merger, not unlike the Canadian Alliance & Progressive Conservative merger that gave us today’s Conservatives. Goodness knows there are enough former New Democrats already on the Liberal benches.)

“DMCR”, as one Maclean’s blogger put it, has another distinction: the highest turnout of the four by-elections. Still only 25%, but solidly so, not under the mark as in the Toronto ridings — or in Vancouver.

Which brings me to Vancouver Quadra, still a battleground at the time of writing (there are still 64 of the 237 polls to report, and although the Liberal Joyce Murray has been ahead often the lead has see-sawed). I am expecting (but not personally happy about) Murray to win it. However, Stephen Owen’s +20% legacy has been dissolved. The next go around in this riding should be more interesting, indeed. The Greens are coming out of Quadra with 15% as well — they and the NDP have traded the also-ran laurels all night long — and I suspect this represents the future general election in BC, at least along the coast: a four way battle.

The Aftermath

If there is a big loser tonight it is Jack Layton and the NDP. Across three of the four ridings (Toronto Centre, Desenthé-Missinippi-Churchill River and Vancouver Quadra) the party is in the 13-17% range, not enough to lead to more seats. True, all four of these ridings were Liberal pre-tonight, but if the NDP’s message — with its anti-war core and NDP opposition exercised in the Commons (no abstentions amongst the abstentious, so to speak) can’t make headway in a by-election, where both the prior incumbents and the current government could be sent a message, then they are unlikely to do so in a general campaign. The party has come to be seen as mostly “against”; it is going to need to be known as being “for” a coherent, integrated programme, or that merger with the Liberals is going to looking more and more appropriate as time goes on.

Our Opposition Leader, Stéphane Dion, also has failed to reinforce his position tonight, and may in fact have weakened it substantially. Four-for-four was — as with those who run websites and data centres — the price of admission. There will be those who link DMCR to Outremont and ask what other losses wait in the wings. The tussle amongst sitting MPs over whether to try and trigger an election or continue to avoid losing by winning a non-confidence measure will continue. No doubt the morrow will bring new analysis — perhaps first and foremost from the recently-installed President of the Central Region of the Liberal Party of Canada (Ontario) — but things are at a point with Dion where his supporters end up being countered not only by those who do not support the Liberal Party, but by those who do (and fear for it). In other words, the storm of sound and fury, signifying little to nothing, we have lived through for weeks will continue.

On the other hand, the Greens can see decent results in Toronto Centre (where they came second) and in Vancouver Quadra (where Dan Grice put on a solid showing). Both these results earn the party funding support for the next battle, having 13-15% of the total vote: this puts them on a part with the NDP. (The other two ridings showed a more standard breakdown of support.)

Finally, the Conservatives. Not only does Stephen Harper come out of tonight with a new MP on the Government benches, but it is clear that none of the attempts to plaster his party with goo — Schreiber, Cadman, etc. — have done any real damage. Neither have any of the decried “self-inflicted wounds”: income trusts, denial of the RESP tax change, etc. Whatever reservations may keep Harper from achieving a majority, he is also not losing ground. This is particularly important when we remember that by-elections give voters a safe place to “spank the government”. We come out of tonight with a government unspanked. Food for thought should the government fall in the near future.

The Anomaly That is Toronto

I close this piece by returning momentarily to the city of my birth, Toronto. There should now be little question but that Toronto has a political culture that is atypical. It was, as Ontarians well know, Toronto that has thrown up the “Progressive” end of Progressive Conservativism, both provincially and federally. Yes, there are other places that live and breathe a Liberal-NDP axis: Ottawa, West Island Montréal, the City of Vancouver. Toronto, however, exemplifies this. Couple that with the fact that many of the most influential Liberal bloggers are either transplants to Toronto, native Torontonians, or located just outside it in Southern Ontario, and that most of the English-language main stream media in the country is located there, and the disproportionate influence of the Toronto political calculus on national affairs starts to be seen.

But that influence wanes the closer the Liberal Party as elected comes to be the Toronto & District party. Tonight’s results move the Liberals a little closer to that: winning Vancouver Quadra, a seat where, from 1988 to 2006 inclusive, a box painted red with an “L” on it could have been elected with a 10%+ margin (and actual candidates did significantly better), by the less than 4% Joyce Murray is tracking to, suggests that urban Vancouver may be more susceptible to new types of races (against the Conservatives here; against the NDP elsewhere; every riding facing a growing Green challenge). The future, in other words, is changing: eventually, Toronto — even with its gerrymandered riding boundaries that split opposing party strengths to allow Liberals to sneak through (for Toronto is not monolithic) — will come to change, too.

For Toronto worships at the twin troughs of power and money, and eventually goes where these can be found. When they do, the Liberals as we know them are toast.

So here’s the real question from tonight: can the NDP (or the Greens) figure out how to compete successfully enough to tip the balance and make the residual Liberals the supplicants, when the time comes?

On this question the nation’s political future rests.

Update @ 21.41 PT: Vancouver Quadra takes the laurels for largest turnout and the gap between the Liberal Murray and the Conservative Meredith is closing. Nothing like a little “end of the night” (there are only 34 polls still to report) excitement, although I’m not expecting an upset here — just an extremely close result. 

The blogosphere is an interesting space from a political point of view, for it is highly unlikely that anyone would write about matters political who didn’t have some internal drive or passion toward it. What this means is that we are far more likely to find partisans online — both as writers and as readers/commenters — than we are in the broader public.

Writers, of course, write because they want to be read. So they look to join blogrolls and communities. These help bring new readers their way. But they often come with a price: one of converging upon the general view of that community. Add a few overt partisans to that mix, and slowly that community will become almost a reflexive mouthpiece for one party or another.

For those with active or independent minds, such communities can seem a straight-jacket.

Moreover, no community exists in isolation. The community itself will have a site, and feeds, which must be managed. Perhaps this effort is donated as a labour of love, but, more likely, it must be funded, by donations or by advertising. The net effect is that the community has a vested interest in reinforcing itself around its sources of income. How expulsions from the community can then occur isn’t hard to see.

I don’t — and have never — belonged to such a community. The reason for this is that I believe, deeply, that we should decide each issue on its merits. This can lead us into conflict with those who subscribe to the community’s position, “right or wrong”.

As an example of this, take the recent issue of Dan McTeague, MP, and his RESP tax deduction private member’s bill. Perhaps this is a worthy measure (I don’t happen to think so; I prefer simpler tax systems, and this is yet another complexity) but fundamentally my opposition to it stems from the bill’s disregard of Parliamentary tradition. Tradition matters to me: while it does change, it should change by express deliberation and consideration of what is being given up, not backed into in a fit of partisan excitement. I believe the Speaker erred in allowing this bill to proceed: while he might have been able to find no explicit restriction upon which to hang a denial of a bill like this which is all about restriction of revenue planned for in the budget, our tradition is that it is the budget which is voted up or down, and that such a measure should have been an amendment to the budget itself.

Does this then make me a Government supporter (as in last Thursday’s Ways & Means vote, which included an explicit repeal of the previously-passed RESP provision)? Obviously, yes, but as someone who shared an issue, not someone even who is necessarily doing it for the same reasons (the Government’s stated reasoning is that this would threaten the stability of the budget to remain out of deficit, which is also a truth, but only if no move is made to accommodate the new provision as a choice; the Government did not choose to challenge the affront to Parliamentary tradition, as it ought to have done).

Men and women of good will and engaged, active mind can disagree with one another without any sound and fury at all. My fellow writer — and one whom I respect deeply — Werner Patels, the author of Ideas and Issues, supported the RESP provision. Promoting post-secondary education and tax relief are also things I support; we disagree as to the methods to accomplish these (to some extent), and we obviously disagree about the value of hewing to Parliamentary tradition and the Canadian methods of responsible government. But we can share these, even commenting on each other’s writing, and the voice is never raised.

Compare that to the partisan! Both the Liblogs (the self-identified Liberal Party supporters) and the Blogging Tories (the self-identified Conservative Party supporters) wrote reams on this whole tale — opposed to each other, naturally — and both echoing the sound and fury occurring in the House. Here there was no cross-engagement, just a closed world encountering another closed world.

Most Canadians, as well, although they might vote for the same party again and again, do not identify themselves with one enough to actually sign up and become a member of a riding association, or be a regular financial supporter. (I have done the second, but for three different parties at various times Federally, and for three different parties Provincially, sometimes for years at a time.) One can share a great deal with a party and its policies — motivations might differ, but the direction is roughly aligned — and thus feel that supplying them with either the mother’s milk of labour or of cash makes sense. Parties, too, do not operate for free: in the words of the old Spanish proverb, “take what you want, and pay for it”.

Still, those of you who have followed my writings here and elsewhere know well that I prize the independent candidate, the person who will stand against both their riding and their party when needed. In other words, I value independent thinking and a willingness to trust that I, the citizen, will engage when we differ rather than simply shout you down unthinkingly, and try to encourage it. This is the legacy of Chuck Cadman’s last term as an Independent MP representing Surrey North; the thought of electing more such is why I support STV as a voting mechanism (there are times to consider changing traditional practice, and this is one of them, as I have argued earlier this month.

In the recent past it has been necessary to support the new Conservative Party. Canada needs more than one party of government. Much of my writing in the past month has criticized the Liberal Party, but not with the intent to say “Conservatives right; Liberals wrong”: it is because it is clear to me that the tearing apart of the old Progressive Conservative coalition during the second Mulroney Government has also deeply crippled and hollowed-out the Liberal Party, to the point where it is adrift. (In other words, the Chrétien years represented a period in which they didn’t need to be competitive and the inter-necine warfare that replaced external competition broke that party, too.) I have chosen to write about the Liberals rather than promote a new alternative in large measure because Canadians are deeply small-c conservative when it comes to parties: refreshing a known name gives that party a leg up, at least for a few decades.

But I have also — via the comments on my piece yesterday about how Toryism (which is not at all the core of the Conservative Party) and Greenism (if I can be permitted this abysmal neologism) are a natural pairing with many congruences over issues — been made to realise (thanks to my readers) that it is time for me to look more closely at whether I ought to be stepping forward more clearly for new alternatives in the Canadian political landscape, and broadening my public support where helpful. This may lead me to eschew the money side of politics for a while — the NDP’s insistence that one is simultaneously a member of both the Federal and Provincial parties simultaneously simply by being a donor drove me from continued support, for instance (although we needed and continue to need an ability to alternate parties in BC — and here the NDP is the Opposition — I ultimately could not stand with Layton’s Federal NDP), and I simply will not, any longer, give blanket support to any party that ties me down in this way. But the pen (or the pixels) still await.

I had said, earlier, that I might not vote in tomorrow’s by-election here in Vancouver-Quadra. On that score I have changed my mind. I shall vote. I believe that at this juncture I have managed to find enough commonality on issues to feel I am voting “for” rather than “against”. To that end, I shall, tomorrow, cast my ballot for Dan Grice, and hope that it is enough to push him past the other candidates to take his place on March 31 in the House, as the Green Party’s Deborah Grey.

Periodically, there comes a point where the Augean Stables of Canadian politics need a good cleaning. We have been there for a long time now. The Bloc and Reform were false starts. May this one turn out to be better.

Many, many commentators lump the Green Party in as part of the Canadian “Left”. They — and the NDP — consider the Greens to be a competitor of the NDP, appealing to the same voters. The left-hand side of the Liberal Party, in turn, worries about both of these other parties siphoning off votes. There have been calls to “unite the left” (just as, a few years ago, there were repeated calls to “unite the right”). But … wait. Is Green policy necessarily leftist?

There’s no question but that there are individual Greens who are clearly on the left-hand side of the Canadian spectrum, including (judging by her many public statements), the current leader, Elizabeth May. But the previous Green leader, Jim Harris, wasn’t: he had previously been a Progressive Conservative. Much of the stated policy platform of the Green party reflects a centre-right bent.

Now, the Green platform also contains a commitment to work within the global Green framework. In other words, here is a party with extra-Canadian links. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the “Kyoto Chant” will be a prominent part of Green politics. Kyoto “the treaty” is — in the Canadian context — a convenient symbol. But that symbol can work two ways: as a symbol that some problems require international co-operation to make action effective there’s nothing wrong with it. After all, preserving fish stocks and fisheries requires the same. How many Canadians, for instance, know that lessened water supplies in the Western United States has the US thinking of banning — entirely — the salmon fishery in the Western states (excepting Alaska)? Should Canada be thinking along the same lines with the BC fishery: intervening at the tenth hour (before the stocks completely collapse) rather than at the eleventh hour (as with the Newfoundland cod fishery)? In other words, a gaze that goes beyond one’s own borders and some international thinking isn’t necessarily amiss — or wrong.

But why would I say the most natural pairing are those of us who tend toward the “blue” end of the spectrum and those of “green” inclinations?

Part of this is my Toryism. I did not hold with Reform, am not a social conservative, nor am I a neoconservative (all three of these are really neo-liberals of the right). But indigenous Canadian Tories start from the notion that the reason for the state is a bond between past and future generations: to transmit, preserve and protect traditions, and to be good stewards of the country and its bounty so that future generations will prosper. How, may I ask, is that different from such Green notions as sustainability, a clean environment, transforming the economy to waste less, etc.? Aren’t these all acts of stewardship for the future? What about Green notions of including all of Canada’s communities in Canadian life? Isn’t that the preservation of tradition coupled with our tradition of opportunity?

Certainly the Greens stand for things we Tories might not want to stand for. They stand for a more pacifist and less activist approach to world affairs; we value our international commitments, which occasionally require us to fight, perhaps for years, in defence of Western values that are at the core of Canadian tradition going back before Samuel de Champlain ever started building moats and battlements on a cliff-top and beside a river in Québec. Green ideas pay less attention than perhaps Tories would to the Confederal nature of Canada and the essential role of its provinces. But these are points on which to agree to disagree. Much of what we do believe in, however, overlaps greatly — once we get past the rhetoric.

It is the rhetoric that keeps us apart. When the Harper Government introduced its Clean Air Act, for instance, the “Kyoto Chant” shouted it down. True, no Green MPs were involved in this, there being none in the House. But it was certainly heard from outside. Yet Greens stand for cleaning up the environment, requiring both businesses and consumers to stop treating our air, land and water as a free dumping ground, and for developing businesses that turn today’s waste into tomorrow’s goods, creating exports of green technology and good sustainable jobs for Canadians. Simply setting the mantra of “Kyoto or nothing” aside would have shown this remarkable degree of overlap — a degree of overlap not shared by the Opposition MPs (Liberal, NDP or Bloc) all of whom were more concerned with “keeping lumber communities going” or “preserving smokestack jobs” or “handouts for industry” (as well as doing the “Kyoto shuffle”, conga-line fashion, up and down the well of the House) and therefore opposed to the attempt to provide some stewardship for the environment and our children’s children’s future by the Government on multiple counts, not just one.

Unfortunately, such blindness affects the Conservative Party of Canada no less than it does the Green Party of Canada under its current leader, Ms. May, who lets her leftist leanings bind her to the media/pundit meme of being on the left, competing with the Liberals against any Conservative, and engaged, with the Liberals, in replacing the NDP. Meanwhile, the neoliberal elements in the CPC try to deny the Tory ideas of fidelity to the past coupled with stewardship for the future and argue against doing anything on the file, including seeking common cause with anyone.

I look at the Green candidate in Vancouver-Quadra (who, it has been suggested, may actually be polling second heading into Monday’s tilt at the ballot box — although frankly any single riding poll should be taken with a heavy grain of salt). Ms. May didn’t want Dan Grice to be the candidate. He won the nomination against her opposition. He has approached his attempt to win election as a Green MP by stressing areas of common cause and concern, avoiding internecine war “on the left” and emphasising a fair number of Tory values — all within careful fidelity to the platform of his party. He is, in other words, living what I’m talking about. (The local Conservative candidate, Deborah Meredith, on the other hand, equally opposed by the Prime Minister as the nominee [and not helped in any way — Harper even avoiding visiting the riding while in Vancouver during this campaign] nevertheless is toeing the party line, slapping “anti-crime” stickers on her signs. One more neoliberal seeking office. It is to weep.)

The Conservative Party of Canada’s principles are not at all at odds with Green Party principles. The platforms of both point out numerous tensions — but on both sides an appeal to principles would show the high degree of common cause and overlap that is already there, waiting to be put to work. For this is the future of politics: not the stale debate of warmed over leftist/rightist thinking but those who would compel action into pathways that their betters think up — the neo-Marxist musings of Liberal, NDP and Bloc policy — and those who engage in that inter-generational bond and create openings for a free and industrious people to work within limits that preserve, protect and defend the best of Canada for its future citizens for generations to come.

I know where I stand. I welcome any “Green Tory” candidate who knocks on my door, regardless of their party affiliation. I’d like them, of course, to carry a blue sign — Canada needs its deep roots in the Conservative tradition, too. But I don’t do neoliberals and social conservatives. If I need a Green to get a Green Tory, so be it.