Or a reasonable facsimile for modern Canadian politics:
Increasingly, Jason Kenney and Justin Trudeau look like the future of their parties.
That’s not the same as saying they’ll be their parties’ leaders. That’s in the hands of card-holding party members and the fates. But each man carries in him something of the culture of his own political movement. Both will be around for many years yet. Their influence can only grow.
So much of Stephen Harper Conservatism is now run by, through, or on the sufferance of Jason Kenney that he has become his leader’s indispensable man, a C.D. Howe for a new and stranger age.
Heavens. C.D. would have eaten Kenney for breakfast. I suspect the old Grit stalwart would have been impressed by Stephen Harper. A grumpy technocrat's grudging respect for another grumpy technocrat. Howe's background was engineering grain silos, Harper economics and public policy activism. At some level they both believed that smart people with flow charts can run the world. Thing is that Harper should know better.
Where Paul Wells nails it is in the concluding passage:
Quebec’s nationalist elites saw Trudeau as a laughable throwback to outdated values. So far he keeps beating them. Canadian conservatives see him as a laughable throwback to outdated values. His party will sink or swim on its ability to keep those values relevant in a new era. The Liberals’ silver-spoon multiculturalist will sink or swim with it.
This isn't as trite or obvious as it sounds. Trudeau is his father's champion. He assumed that mantle the moment he began that hysterical eulogy more than a decade ago. You might think a defence of Trudeaupian values in modern Canada is as redundant as coal marketing in Newcastle. The hand of the Charter, official multiculturalism, the Canada Health Act and an overly generous welfare state are very much with us. The force that inspired them, however, is dead. Government grows bigger through inertia, not passion.
Take Paul Martin's ill-starred proposal for a national daycare program. It's the sort of 1960s style big government solution to a fashionable problem of the day. It died a sad and lonely death, supplanted by a fairly modest Tory mandated tax credit. When Medicare was introduced its advocates were driven by an almost religious zeal. A zeal not unrelated to the fact that the program's leading advocate was a former Baptist minister. This wasn't just another government program, it was a moral crusade for social justice. Very few felt the same way about national nanny care.
What the younger Trudeau represents is an attempt to re-inject passion into the Trudeaupian project. Whether he succeeds or fails will say much about what Canadians expect from their government. Is it just Santa Claus, dispensing pork and subsidized social services, or should its ambitions be grander? Weaning people off the teat of big government isn't going to be easy because big government is easy. It promises all things to all people. A very pleasing lie.
The welfare state began as a project to alleviate suffering among the poorest of the poor. Its advocates soon realized that so expensive a program, which benefited only a small percentage of the population, would lack proper political support. Public housing, social assistance and food subsidies could be sold to the middle class as part of a package deal. Agree to fund these freebies for the poor, and the government would provide subsidized university tuition, socialized health care and superhighways to the expanding suburbs.
It was a political deal whose economics has been compared to an intergenerational ponzi scheme. Its architects little imagined that the birth rate would begin to dip below replacement level within a generation of its inception. This was mitigated by a reopening of our borders to immigrants. So long as the immigrants who arrived were high-skilled, or willing to acquire economically valuable skills soon after arrival, this new wave of post-war immigrants was a tremendous boon. The cost of their rearing had been borne by their mother countries. They arrived in the prime of life and were by nature people of higher than average ambition.
That was then. Today the ambitious have little reason to come to Canada and finance grandma Mackenzie's nursing care. Our economic and social life seems designed to discourage procreation among the old stock groups accustomed to high living standards. The welfare state is broke. The multicultural project has failed abysmally, its pieties ignored by the ambitious among the post-1968 immigrant groups, and cynically exploited by ethnic and religious grievance mongers. Justin Trudeau has yet to figure that out. The vital question is whether a critical mass of the Canadian electorate understands the new reality.
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