On The Eve of Destruction

It looks good people.  I know I should keep my mouth shut until tomorrow evening but from where and when I stand it looks very good.  A consensus figure of about 130 to 140 seats for our boys and girls in blue is forming and all we can do now is go out and vote.  I did so in an advanced poll last Saturday, as did many of my friends.  I'll leave the forecasting about the future of the CPC and Canada for sometime later this week, time allowing.  Today let's just look back a little at where we've been.  My thoughts go back to 1987.  Nineteen years ago the Mulroney government signed the initial Free Trade agreement, pending subsequent ratification by both national legislatures, and put forward the first Meech Lake agreement.  How we got here starts in many ways then. 

It was also the same year that Preston Manning and a small band of mostly young men, including a twenty-eight year old Stephen Harper, formed the Reform Party.  The new party fared poorly in 1988.  Mulroney had calculated well in making his free trade gamble.  However angry the West might be over his appeasement of Quebec, particularly Meech, and his slow movement in scrapping Trudeau's National Energy Program, doing so only in 1986 once world oil prices had collapsed, it would back him over CAFTA.  Free Trade was an old dream for the West and one wrapped up in the complex psychological drama of Western Alienation and Central Canadian dominance.  Laurier had died his political death fighting for it.  King was too shrewd to take the risk, remembering what had happened to his mentor.  Mulroney's genius was in giving the West something it wanted more badly than getting rid of him for being so enthralled to the Canadian Center.  It was, like so much of what Mulroney accomplished, tactically brilliant and strategically foolish.  Micheal Bliss once quipped that Mulroney would have made a good mayor of Boston around 1900.  This may seem a strange comparison but it gets at the core of why Mulroney was so often too clever for his own, and Canada's, good. 

He, unlike Trudeau and Diefenbaker, did not think along national and ideologically lines, but was in many ways was an old fashioned regional coalition builder.  Of course this is a necessity for anyone wishing to become Prime Minister.  If the first job of the President of the United States is to defend the Republic against external and internal dangers, the first job of the Prime Minister of Canada is to ensure he still has a country to lead.  In this we are not unique, only unique among leading developed nations.  Trudeau, Dief and to a certain extent even Pearson tried to bind together Canada with ideas rather than pork barrel politics and ethnic power brokering.  These were necessities of power, certainly, but another element could be added they hoped, something closer to the British and American model, where right and left were more important than East, West and Centre.

Mulroney won the West with Free Trade, and Quebec with Meech.  What he hoped was that no matter how much the West, particularly Alberta, despised Meech and what would today be called asymmetrical federalism, it would go along.  The trick to governing Canada, he believed, was to keep Quebec happy, Ontario satisfied and the West just a few degrees below simmering.  Quebec wanted what it wanted, Ontario wanted to know that the nation's affairs were being looked to, lest crisis disrupt the economic engine of the Golden Horseshoe, and West could be left with crumbs because they had no where else to turn.  This is a strategy inherent in all political coalitions: You betray your base so you can reach out to a swing grouping.  The hope is that your base doesn't walk away.  Mulroney calculated that the West wouldn't walk.  He was wrong. 

The failure of Meech and the Charlottetown Accords (Son of Meech) lost Mulroney the soft nationalists who had been his core support in Quebec.  It is only now, in 2006, that a Conservative Party has become the first choice of federalist Quebecois.  The victories of 1930, 1957-1958, 1984 and 1988 rested on a kind of soft nationalist support (thought it wouldn't have been described as such before the 1960s).  Without it the Progressive Conservatives, with or without Mulroney, could never hold Quebec.  Meech, the gesture it was hoped that would win over these soft nationalists to the Tories and Canada, all in one big blue bow, not only failed in its intended goal, its mere proposal crippled Mulroney's Alberta flank.  Ontario, seeing that Mulroney the daring gambler had become Mulroney the failure simply turned away.  The GST backlash, the corruption (perceived and actual) and everything else we remember about the last three years of the Mulroney regime did not kill him.  The loss of the West and Quebec destroyed him.  Ontario wants a competent regional coalition manager first and foremost.  If you can secure neither of the country's two key flanks then you are worse than useless.

What Preston Manning understood in 1987, and Brian Mulroney didn't, was that the West could no longer be managed.  B.C. and Alberta together had reached a kind of critical mass in the 1970s, both economically and demographically.  The oil boom of the time only sped up the inevitable.  What had once been an axillary of economic and political power became a center unto itself.  It could sustain regional media networks, regional business empires of great wealth and centers of learning rivaling those of the Centre and East.  It was not unusual, even forty years ago, for the West's best and brightest to go East.  Today no one would seriously travel from Calgary to the University of Toronto or McGill in search of a good post-secondary education, or to Bay or St. James Street (now St. Jacques) to climb the corporate ladder.  This is not to say that Toronto isn't supreme in the Canadian economic universe, it is, but count the head offices in Calgary and Burnaby and it looks a lot less supreme than it once did.  The West, Manning understood, could now be a partner and would demand to be so.  That was the tectonic shift of the late 1980s and early 1990s, not the rise of the Bloc Quebecois.

The rise of the West didn't change the basic role of the federal government, and of the Prime Minister, it simply changed the nature of how it would go about performing its role as regional coalition builder and manager.  To form a government you still need a majority, or substantial minority, of the seats in either Ontario and Quebec.  But if you cannot win Ontario or Quebec decisively, as Jean Chretien did, then you will need to look elsewhere to form a sustainable government.  The Maritimes, to be blunt, go to the highest bidder and always have.  The highest bidder is usually the party in power or the party likely to get power.  This leaves the West deciding who governs.  The political math has not changed dramatically in the last twenty or thirty years.  This same formula for power could also have been true as far back as the 1960s.  What has changed is the terms the West is willing to demand for its support.  It doesn't want to bargain as it did in the past, or bargain on better terms, it wants to lead.  It wants to lead partly out of revenge, for all the years of being shut out of power and partly out of ideological difference. 

Westerners, to mangle F. Scott Fitzgerald, are different from you and me, they're from out West.  The regional differences, economic, social and demographic between the West and Ontario have made certain kinds of ideologies more attractive, both to the man in the street and the region's elites.  Prairie populism is not in and of itself an ideology, as Stephen Harper realized when he quit the Reform caucus and agreed to lead the National Citizens' Coalition.  Once in power populism disintegrates almost immediately.  Just try and remember who the United Farmers of Alberta or the United Farmers of Ontario were.  Footnotes in our national histories because they brought anger but not the ideas that make policy and institutions, the sort of things that last.  The ideologies that the West brings to the table, really more like different perspectives on ones found else where in Canada, are libertarian and evangelical.

I don't mean libertarian in the sense that the people of West want to destroy the welfare state - if only! - merely that they are more skeptical of government, having felt its ill affects only too acutely in the region's comparatively short history.  I don't, also, mean evangelical in the purely religious sense.  Evangelical in the simpler sense of wanting change and expecting risk - of idealism.  There are Christians in Ontario, they're just very quiet about it, lest they be discovered and soon after interrogated for not conforming.  It's a beat and sound that's different out there.  Nothing wrong with Ontario, Canada needs Ontario and needs what it represents.  It just needs less of it in the years to come.  Enough with the United Empire Loyalists and the never ending permutations on their bloody paternalism.  I'm all for stability, I' m occasionally smug - no really, I am - but the Globe and Mail I do not need. 

Tomorrow Stephen Harper will probably succeed in partially rebuilding the Mulroney Coalition, but with not only an Albertan but a whole team of Albertans in charge.  Alberta is not the West, but it is it's center and Harper's influence and those of his Alberta team will be a good barometer of the West's influence in the new coalition.  Something else may also happen tomorrow tonight, and if it doesn't happen tomorrow it will probably happen in the next election, Quebec will join a Conservative coalition without the soft nationalists holding the balance of power in that province's organization and caucus.  Every previous Conservative majority government has had to make a deal with a soft nationalist devil of some kind.  In 1911 it was Borden and Henri Bourassa, in 1958 it was Dief and Duplessis, in 1984 it was Mulroney and, if only as a proxy, at first, Lucien Bouchard. 

Harper's two best allies in Quebec right now are Jean Charest, if somewhat hesitantly as he is still nominally leading a Liberal party, and Mario Dumont of the ADQ.  It is Dumont who is the great White Hope of Conservatives everywhere, not because of his ideas but because he is post-nationalist or at the very least a nationalist / federalist agnostic.  Our hope is that this approach might sweep the province, and move Canada past the constitutional wrangling that got in the way of real economic and political reform twenty years ago.  That if Francophones in Quebec could not be enthusiastically pro-Canada, or vaguely neutral, they might be exhausted by three decades of constitutional fighting and want to move onto other less vexing matters, like productivity, immigration, urban renewal and the building of a perpetual motion machine.

It looks good people.  We got here in a round about way, as usually, and unfortunately, happens in history.  Maybe this time we can get past the regional bickering, OK maybe not, but a little less this time around.  The West wants in, now it is in, if only at the threshold and by no means comfortable in its new role or with its history in Canada.  One word to our Albertan friends, beware what Talleyrand is suppose to have said about the Bourbons when they were restored after Napoleon's fall, they forget nothing and learned nothing.  If you behave as Ontario behaved in the past this process will merely repeat itself, and trust me ladies and gentlemen, Ontario only looks boring and placid.  We can be quite vicious and they're are still more of us than there are of you.  In the not so distant future Ontario might have half the population of Canada.  Do remember that.  No one here will forget it, be sure.