Canada: Roughly Four More Years Of The Plague

In . . . cheerful . . . news, Canada has just reelected Stephen Harper as Prime Minister and given his Conservative Party a majority in Parliament.

Though I have long left the shores of Canuckia, it was not before Harper appeared on the scene as part of the "reform" conservative movement. It is essentially composed of neoconservatives who have very peculiar ideas of the world allied with a practically impermeable layer of semibenevolent stupidity. Its other exponents include Stockwell Day who, though also young and reasonably picturesque (in politician terms) like Harper, was a less serious figure but left the realm of Canadian political comedy with far greater riches, like the picture of him in a skintight suit on a speedboat. Harper seems, behind his somewhat undistinctive face and slightly protuberant-tipped nose and indolent blue eyes, the most intelligent of the lot.

Behind this meaningless façade the government is as far as I can tell self-seeking and inwardlooking, ignores those social problems which it might prove inconvenient to solve, and casually prone to endorsing rather repellent ideas to the effect that Muslims are generally suspicious, people who are poor are maliciously bent on disturbing the comfort of the rich, immigrants are moochers, and that the starving masses abroad should feel content with Canada's past largesse and accept the now circumscribed crumbs of aid like the princely alms which the wilted soul of an Ottawa parliamentarian considers it to be. This mentality will be familiar far beyond the shores of Canada, for its proponents are a somewhat international burden.

On the other hand the NDP, the New Democratic Party and the party to the left of the Liberal Party, has done exceedingly well. How the Liberal Party, which happily occupied the centre and majority of the Canadian pool of eligible voters for over a decade, managed to lose the vast sections of support may remain a mystery. Certainly Michael Ignatieff is a contentious figure, though whether it is that he mostly dwelled in the US, that he is an Elitist who spent years in the Ivy pinnacle of the Ivory Tower and hobnobbed among the ambient intelligentsia, that he supported the Iraq War (which is the "deal-breaker" for me), that he had tinges of neoconservatism (which was also a problem for me) or that he is simply not very compelling in himself and as a representative of a happy and harmonious Liberal Party, it is impossible for me to determine.

The NDP's Jack Layton seems a slightly abrasive, combative miniature Napoleon, who has the minor opposition party advantage in always being right whenever he criticizes a government policy that turns out to be wrong. And I think he has also profited either by the leftwing belief that now that Canada's economy is in a good state one can afford a little idealism, or by a spillover of the lefty hopefulness of Obama-era America circa 2008, or both. When I was growing up in Victoria the problem was that the Liberal Party was the only left-wingish party capable of gaining a majority, so a vote for the NDP or the Green Party was essentially a vote wasted. Since the opposition to the Conservative government has been a triumvirate for a while, composed of the Liberal Party, the NDP, and the Bloc Québécois — the second and third parties harbouring a relentless undercurrent of needling resentment for the first due to their history of suffering as the more or less impotent naysayers under the Liberal yoke — the argument that the Liberals are the lone hope of the left has evidently become less and less compelling.

Lastly the Green Party triumphed with one parliamentary seat, held by the party's leader Elizabeth May.

Anyway we may well wonder at the degree of stupidity which led people to vote for the Conservatives by such a margin, but evidently the Canadian public has decided that the success of the NDP is a sufficient sign of progressivism, so the mere, trifling fact that the Conservative Party can push its nasty ideas through freely is a side issue . . . except of course for the people who are most affected by the nasty ideas.

If my Facebook friends are an indication, there is no great rejoicing at this electoral outcome, though as one friend astutely pointed out, it isn't quite as embarrassing as the reelection of Bush was for Americans.

What I will do is effectively stuff my ears for the next little while and think very concentratedly back to the glory days of Trudeau and Chrétien.