rabble.ca Canadian federal election blog

War of positions

by Pierre Beaudet

Stephen Harper has registered an important tactical victory yesterday. While maintaining his positions in most regions, he has made important headways into the urban bastions of the Liberals, notably in Ontario and BC. A few weeks back, when he was saying that he was hoping for another minority government, most people thought he was spinning. But probably he had calculated correctly that a victory for him in the present context meant progressing in the context of a protracted battle, a sort of war of positions. Mission accomplished, he can this morning. For sure, the conservative coalition is stronger, it consolidated itself in the eyes of the Toronto (big finance) – Calgary (big oil) elite who really desire to ‘restructure’ Canada away from Keynesianism, meaning interventionist state and manufactures. Lots of ‘middle classes’ are so angry with the dislocation of their lives over the last decade that they literally ‘hate’ the traditional (Keynesian) elites linked with the Liberals. Reactionary ‘blocks’ are on the rise in western province and central Quebec based on that same deep hate against what they perceived as en ‘enemy’, the public sector, artists, alternative lifestyles, etc. This is what happened in the US when the ‘hard republican right’ succeeded in capturing and organizing the descendant middle classes around ‘moral issues’ and ‘hate issues’.

The dislocation of the Liberals

All of this is possible of course because the historical ruling party is in disarray. Of course, it is easy to blame Stéphane Dion, but is it the only (and main) cause? The ‘grand coalition’ created after the war around Keynesianism is in terminal disease. The liberal elite was itself the main destroyer of this Keynesianism throughout the 1990s when they weakened the safety net, aligned with the US over NAFTA and refused to take meaningful steps to reorganize the economy in an eco friendly perspective. Sot it should not be a surprise to see middle and popular classes drifting away from the Liberals. This party is not going to re emerge rapidly.

The left promise that never came

Liberals could say, with a grain of truth, that they were defeated by the spreading out of the vote in favor of the NDP (which could say the same with the Greens). For sure, this is partially what explains the dominance of Harper, but is it the only reason? Why the NDP was unable to catch the discontent vote in southern Ontario, even in the industrial heartland like Oshawa? Is it not because it hsa inherited the legacy of provincial NDP governments who basically did like the liberals, ‘managing’ neoliberalism, giving it a ‘human face’? How can we explain the enormous number of people who did not vote, most probably from popular classes, if not by the disgust that ordinary folks have of ‘politics’ in general, and of big promises that never materialize in particular? Again it reminds us of the US where poor, blacks and youth have stopped voting because the Democrats have abandoned any pretense of doing differently than the hard right?

The catastrophe was avoided

With all of that depressing stuff, at least Harper has not been able to win the majority. However with his progression, he can rule ‘effectively’ without the fear of being defeated in the House, at least on the short term. We can expect more reactionary policies, more aggressivity, more contempt. In short, more bad news. What can slow down Harper is the forthcoming economic recession, not to say, the depression. Elites have already started to reorganize and ‘socialize’ their losses, dumping on popular and middle classes the legacy of their policies. It will be tough. Will people react? What will they do if Harper continues with the endless war that even Obama has promised to continue?

The Quebec Enigma

Without the anything-but-Harper mobilization, the situation today would be much worse. Let us not forget that. And it happened in Quebec where 75% of the population voted against Stephen. So yes, Gilles Duceppe is right, we did it. On the other hand, the Bloc’s victory was relative. It is a fact that the nationalist electorate is sliding. Like social liberals in the world, the PQ and the Bloc are caught between the rock and the hard place. Their right wing aspires at nothing else than winning the next election and they are convincing that they should turn right to win the ‘center’, which is a big illusion. Turning left is not evident either, because of the legacy of Lucien Bouchard and the discontent of social movements against the PQ. The nationalists are also threatened by a small but significant push from the NDP. One had to see former Liberal Minister Thomas Mulcair who was reelected for the NDP in Outremont celebrating the decline of the Nationalists, more than his own victory against the Conservatives! Federalist first, social democrat second, that’s the NDP in Quebec. It’s pathetic

Taking the initiative

Let us face it, it’s going to be a long haul. The left who could be happy with the difficulties of the NDP and the Nationalists in Quebec should think twice, because their decline does not bear well for us. The discontent of the popular classes is going right, not left. The elites are on the offensive. The dislocation of the working classes is rapidly progressing, undermining trade unions and social movements in manufacturing and the public sector, our traditional bastions. What to do then? I believe we have to really start thinking outside the box. At a first level, there is a need to go back in a way to the long march of organizing popular classes, especially this growing sector condemned to marginalization and poverty, mostly outside the safety net of Keynesianism and stable employment. These neo proletarians, so to speak, mostly immigrants, mostly women, mostly young, are one of the key for the rebirth of the left. Then I am repeating myself, the gap between Quebec and English Canada has to be challenged with social movements taking the lead. There is however a ‘price’ to pay in Canada for that, which is abandoning the old idea of the centralized and benevolent federal state. The left in Canada needs to make its own internal revolution, leaving behind its  historical incapacity to understand the substance of national struggles and rights. All of this is very difficult but not impossible. To conclude, we have yesterday avoided the total and immediate catastrophe. It’s a sort of a victory. Let us capitalize on it to move further.

Learning from the lowest turnout ever

by Blair Redlin

Turns out low voter turnout helps tell the tale of the 2008 federal. At 59%, the turnout yesterday was the lowest yet.

For all the arcane and complicated discussion about strategic voting, the record low turnout may explain more. Certainly the turnout offers important lessons for next time.

With megabucks in their party coffers and a focused message, the Conservatives were able to hold and grow their base in many parts of the country, particularly suburban and rural Ontario and B.C.

Meanwhile, Liberal support collapsed everywhere after an inept and confused effort by Dion and his campaign planners. Internal power struggles may explain why it seemed at the start of the campaign as if the election had come as a big surprise to Liberal headquarters. After supporting the Conservatives 43 times in votes of the last parliament, Dion lacked credibility from the get go in rallying anti-Conservative support. It remains a mystery why so many on the left still label the Liberals “progressive” despite strong Liberal support for the war in Afghanistan, big corporate tax cuts and the Security and Prosperity Partnership.

Social movements need to reflect seriously about the low turnout. Few issues fired the public imagination or encouraged voters to get to the polls. Critical issues like the war, global warming, homelessness and trade agreements need to somehow be recast so potential electors and politicians feel motivated and pay closer attention. Greater unity and cooperation among civil society organizations and less byzantine “insider baseball” about so-called “vote splitting” will help.

The campaign to protect arts funding was probably the most successful social movement effort of the campaign. Creativity and an ability to generate attention from the mainstream media were key to making culture a vote determining issue, particularly in Quebec.

Those of us in the rest of the country can be grateful for the strong showing in Quebec by the Bloc, which was key to preventing a Conservative majority.

After an energetic and focused campaign N.D.P. support grew, particularly in northern Ontario. Especially encouraging was the N.D.P. victory of environmental lawyer Linda Duncan in Edmonton Strathcona. Duncan will be a strong voice against tar sands expansion from Alberta’s capital city.

The Obama Democrats in the U.S. have made it a big priority this year to try to boost voter registration and turnout. After the hard lessons of the last many years, they understand how important it is to motivate supporters. We need to make turnout a similar priority here. If turnout keeps slipping in Canada, particularly amongst younger voters, only the Conservatives will benefit. As a start, the new stringent voter identification rules need to be eased. Dru Oja Jay of The Dominion is right on in describing how the requirements for picture i.d. disenfranchised many people yesterday.

Democracy Watch calls for Elections Act changes

OTTAWA - Today, Democracy Watch called on the leaders of federal
political parties to work together to make changes to the federal
Elections Act to respect voter rights, increase disturbingly low
voter turnout, ensure election honesty, fairness and ethics, and
ensure a representative Parliament is elected, in future federal
elections.

TO SEE the list of key changes, with links to related documents, go to:
http://www.dwatch.ca/camp/RelsOct1508.html

“It is incredible that 141 years after the creation of Canada
our election process is still unfair and undemocratic,” said Duff
Conacher, Coordinator of Democracy Watch.  “All the federal parties
must make it a priority to correct the many flaws so that future
federal elections will actually be fair and democratic.”

Morning After Points

by Dru Oja Jay, the Dominion

CKUT’s Wednesday Morning After invited me to come and talk about the elections bright and early this morning. Voici mes talking points, albeit in more articulate form, not that I got to all of them:

• Proportional representation is on a lot of people’s minds, but it’s not going to happen. If it can’t be passed at a provincial level (so far, BC, PEI and Ontario have voted no) then it won’t happen nationally, as neither the Libs or Cons will be likely to support it (this is an interesting footnote, though).
• If that’s true, the Green Party has to do some thinking at this point. A spot in the debates, more media coverage than ever, no seats.
• No matter who people vote for, indications are that we’re not going to see anything even beginning to address colonial policies in Canada.
• The new, stringent requirements are causing havoc and confusion at the polls, as voters are turned away. The skew toward people with permanent addresses and bills in their name on voting day is undemocratic, and unjustifiable. There’s no significant case of voting fraud to respond to; the only reason to do it is to disenfranchise people—disproportionately, those more marginalized. If voting is democracy (subject to debate!), Elections Canada should have only one mandate: to make voting easier and more accessible, while preventing fraud and manipulation. So far, they’re doing the opposite of what they should be doing.
• In many ridings (Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar, for example), increasingly stringent voting regulations could have had an impact. We’ll never know, though.
• Since the 1980s, most Canadians’ wages have been stagnant or shrinking relative to the cost of goods. That was with almost constant economic growth. If we’re hitting a major recession, then the question is: who is going to take the cut? The uber-rich or the middle to working class? In the US, Barack Obama is talking about increasing taxes on the richest people. It’s a mild measure, to be sure, but no one is even talking like that in Canada, aside from the NDP’s mild proposal to reverse Harper’s corporate tax cuts. (More on this by Nik Barry-Shaw.)
• Parties that promise something other than the same old right wing economic policies always implement them anyway, so in a very skewed way, you can see why people might pick the Cons.
• A Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition may be the only way Dion can stay in his current job. Politics aside, I would receive news of a coalition between Mr. Clarity Bill and Gilles Duceppe with something like glee.
• In all of a sudden talking about the economy, leaving out all but one allusion to the Green Shift, and then saying he would support Harper, Dion shed his dignity, which was the main thing he had going for him.
• Did I hear Harper talk about “working families”?
• Dion’s main mistake was to forget the main tenet of Liberal politics: pitch popular policies during the election, ram through unpopular policies once you’ve got a four year term to play with. Rinse, repeat.

Not what I’d call a breakthrough

by Vicky Smallman

Well, it’s 3:30am and I am finally putting aside my spreadsheet for the night.  I’ve been tracking the numbers of women elected and here’s the scoop:

68 women total - 22%.  A whopping percentage point up from last year.  Not what I’d call a breakthrough, although this is the first time we have moved up from the 21% we’d been stuck at for some time.

Ironically, the Conservatives are the only party to have elected more women in 2008.  They are up to 23 women - an increase of 9.  Nevertheless, at 16% their caucus still has less women than the national average.

The New Democrats held their total of 12 women, but lost two women MPs, Peggy Nash and Catherine Bell.  Since their caucus is larger, they are down to 38% women from the previous high of 41% - still the best representation within a caucus in this Parliament.

Not so much good news for the Liberals.  Despite the fact that they ran more women than the other parties, they only elected 18, down 3 from the last election.

As for the Bloc, they too are down, although their 15 women MPs make up 30% of their new caucus.

Not a rosy picture overall.  More women, but less voices for women’s equality. We have our work cut out for us, sisters.

Media Issues: Where do the parties stand? Where do we stand?

By Steve Anderson

As I wrote earlier, it is clear that Canadians are passionate about communication and cultural issues, and they deserve to know exactly where each party stands.

Campaign for Democratic Media (CDM) formulated five specific questions that were sent out to the five major parties.  The objective of the questionnaire was to both provide citizens with a clear sense of the party positions on media and cultural issues, as well as asses the parties preparedness for the future of digital communication in Canada. The responses are available at: http://democraticmedia.ca/positions08

All the parties filled out the CDM questionnaire except the Conservatives, who failed to respond despite several attempts by CDM to elicit responses. One thing we do know about the Conservatives is that all the Conservative MPs voted against a motion in the House of Commons on May 30, 2006, calling for the retention of current restrictions on foreign ownership in the cultural sector. As well, the Conservative Party’s 2004 election platform calls for the relaxation or removal of communications sector foreign ownership restrictions.

Conservatives aside, the answers from those parties that did reply indicate that no party has a comprehensive platform on media issues. Nor do they have action plans to deal with the increasing concentration of private media ownership, the decline in local and regional programming — especially news, the general decline in Canadian content on our airwaves, the lack of universal access to an open internet, or the increasing commercialization of our public broadcaster.

While those who care about communication and cultural issues are likely not satisfied with the answers detailed in the CDM “Media and Culture: where do the parties stand?” report, we should be proud of the degree to which communication issues have moved towards the center of public discourse during this election. Arts and culture certainly took a profound role this election, as did new media.  Concerning the later, candidates like Dan Grice from the Green Party blogged about it, and more significantly, NDP leader Jack Layton made a specific video address on net neutrality and other key new media issues.

This change in discourse is no doubt the result of an increasingly active media democracy movement in Canada. Throughout the election: Rabble, TheTyee, and TheRealnews all provided essential independent coverage and analysis; in addition to the CDM survey, the Campaign For Democratic Media published the net neutrality “Fact vs Fiction” report, and encouraged citizens to use it as a tool to get their local candidates on record; Friends of Canadian Broadcasting ran several campaigns including a National Ad Campaign concerning media ownership; and a new group, Department of Culture, was remarkably active and high profile in there work around strategic voting.

As we move past the election, now is the time to start thinking about long-term media and communication battles in Canada. In the next few weeks several Canadian cities will host Media Democracy Day events. It is there that you’ll find a newly rejuvenated, and newly focused media democracy movement.

For more information about Media Democracy Day visit: http://mediademocracyday.org

Steve Anderson is National Coordinator of the Campaign For Democratic Media.

The Kids are All… Where?

by Beisan Zubi

As a member of the oft-ignored youth vote, I see some stirrings on my university campus to get out there and have our voices heard.  Since the 1960s, when the younger generation was a strong force in societal changes taking place across North America, the atmosphere has settled into one of (perceived) apathy and ignorance.

I see this on my university campus, where a vocal and compassionate minority attempt to affect interest in the silent majority. Organizations such the Canadian Federation of Students (the CFS is one of the biggest student-focused lobby groups in Canada) have been organizing debates and information sessions across Canadian campuses, and while I can’t speak for the whole country, a lot of this work goes unnoticed.  Why is this?

At a basic level, the university-level organization does not seem to be there.  At a debate organized by the CFS and the Concordia Student Union on October 1st, only two of the MP candidates (the NDP’s Anne Lagace-Dowson, and the Conservatives’ Guy Dufort) actually bothered showing up, with the Liberals’ hotshot aeronaut Marc Garneau and the Bloq Quebecois’s Patrick Larivee not in attendance (which brings up the irony of the BQ’s slogan, “Present… Pour le Quebec”).

As well, The CFS released a “report card” of the major political parties (http://www.voteeducation.ca/fd/english/files/2008_report_card_en.pdf), that is at once patronizing and patently nonsensical, grading parties on policies such as the environment and student loans, while assigning grades that really don’t have much to do with their comments about the parties’ stances (eg: grading parties differently for what they describe as similar positions and while not mirroring grades to their own evaluations). This makes something designed to simplify the voting process unnecessarily complicated.

All of this is contributing to the lack of a strong youth vote, but there must be more. Is it because there is no social pull to care, such as civil rights and anti-war movements of the past? Or is the lifestyle led by my contemporaries one that leaves no impulse for a proactive move such as voting— the combination of school stress, getting drunk, eating unhealthily and relying on a computer to keep your life in order does not really breed independent thought.

Perhaps it’s due to the lack of a galvanizing and inspiring leader, like Barack Obama, electrifying college campuses. Canadian politics has been in a personality vacuum since Trudeau. There aren’t really any inspirational leaders out there. I wish it was more of a popularity contest, because that would entail at least some personality. This is like going to the grocery store and them only having cottage cheese and beans. I’m not feeling hungry anymore. Neither will kill me, but where is the flavour?

All of these factors are slowing down the activity of what, if properly motivated and mobilized, could be an extremely strong force of change, especially for the left wing. University students alone account for a huge Canadian demographic, as well as Canada’s future.

Hopefully, this election will show more of a presence from the youth, and not the silence that politicians have come to expect, resulting in a demographic politics has come to ignore.

Harper’s economics, at home and abroad

by rabble staff

On the eve of the election, Nikolas Barry-Shaw has an excellent piece on Znet summing up the convergence of economic and foreign policy issues in this campaign. First, he summarizes the bi-partisan (Liberal/Conservative) implementation of neo-liberalism:

While those fortunate enough to own stock in the banks and the oil companies have certainly enjoyed the fruits of “solid” economic fundamentals, ordinary Canadians have most certainly not, according to a recent study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.  It wasn’t always so. “Between the Second World War and 1980, the economic pie was growing at all points in the distribution, even if income shares in Canada didn’t change much” observes Lars Osberg, author of “A Quarter Century of Economic Inequality in Canada: 1981-2006”.

With the exhaustion of the post-war boom, however, class warfare was reborn under the moniker of neoliberalism.  Employers’ hardened stance and an open assault on trade union freedoms - pursued by Tory and Liberal governments alike - would usher in a “new norm” of lowered expectations and “stagnant or declining real wages, despite unprecedented improvements in education and skills,” for Canadian workers. The “fear of falling” for workers was also enhanced, with the poor facing “a much nastier reality now than twenty years ago, since cuts to social assistance have substantially increased the poverty gap - even in Canada’s richest provinces.”

(Stephane Dion’s claim to represent both social justice and the economic legacy of the Chretien/Martin years is unproblematic only to those with a serious case of historical amnesia.  It was precisely the deep cuts to social spending made by the Liberals during those years - after beating the Tories in 1993 on the promise of “Jobs, jobs, jobs” - that helped established this “new norm”.)

Then, the connection is made to foreign policy, mentioning a country that - despite suffering from a devastating food crisis while under Canadian supported UN occupation - has been totally off the election discussion radar:

it was Canada, in concert with the U.S. and France, who put Haitians in such a hopeless situation.  Canada helped plan and execute the overthrow Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s democratically-elected reformist government, in whom Haiti’s poor had invested so much hope.  After the coup d’État, Naomi Klein writes, there was “a wave of Falluja-like collective punishment inflicted on neighborhoods known for supporting Aristide,” unleashed by the Canada-backed interim government and the UN “peacekeeping” mission.

The repression imposed a “peace of the graveyards” on these restive neighborhoods, so that Harper and other foreign dignitaries could visit like conquering heroes.  During his July 20, 2007, visit to Cité Soleil, one of the hardest hit neighborhoods of Haiti’s capital, Harper stated that Canada’s presence in Haiti was “giving [Haitians] some hope and some opportunity,” and that “Canadians should be very proud that they are offering to help, that our help is making a difference in terms in safety of people’s lives.”  The sullen looks on the faces of the mothers present for Harper’s awkward photo-op, however, told another story.

The savage violence of the occupation was necessary to impose a tremedously unpopular neoliberal economic plan on Haiti.  The opposition was so great that Haitians began referring to IMF and World Bank strictures as the “plan lanmo”, literally “the death plan”.

It should go without saying that like the Kandahar mission, the 2004 coup in Haiti was initiated by the Liberals and then supported by the Conservatives.