I am curious on what the perspective is from Canadian Dopers on how far left / right / down the middle each of our parties are, and then to insert the various US parties in on the list. I propose using a scale of 1 to 100 where 1 is as far left Completely Socialist, and 100 is Completely Capitalist. Then, for fun sake, rank yourself on the same scale.
This is probably the closest match, especially these days. There doesn’t seem to be much difference between these parties at all.
Aside from this match, the other parties don’t map well at all, because the ‘left’ in Canada is really split into three parties - the Liberals, the NDP, and the Bloc. The Bloc is a regional party with their own issues, so let’s leave them out. The NDP are the party you would have if you took the liberal/left wing of the Democratic party and dumped all the moderates. They’re basically socialists. The Liberals are hard to pigeonhole, because they are a party completely devoid of principles. I guess you could call them pragmatists, because the only thing you can count on from them is that they will try to stay in power.
They play to the left, but if you look at the core of the Liberal party you will find it is far more ‘corporatist’ than even the Republicans in the U.S. It’s also a highly insular party where most of the leadership come from a tiny segment of Canadian business life. Where both major American parties have good representation across all segments of American society, the Liberal party heirarchy is made up almost exclusively of high-powered corporate types from the big eastern cities. On the one hand, they have a pretty good record at fiscal management and keeping taxes down, so you might want to call them conservative, but then they’ll turn around and do something like give the NDP a five billion dollar goodie package of social spending to buy their votes. They really are all over the map, and you simply can’t predict what they’ll do.
By the way, there is also a Libertarian party in Canada, which probably gets about the same amount of support the Libertarians get in the U.S. (not much) And the Greens in Canada are similar to Greens all over the place - far-left socialists with an environmentalist face, mostlly.
Sorry, but the Canadian Greens are nowhere near “far-left socialists.” In fact, the current leader is a former Tory who believes in market-driven solutions for the environment. I’m proud to say that Greenpeace and the Sierra Club ranked the NDP’s environmental platform better than the Greens’ in the last election.
Yes, I’ve heard the Greens described as “Green Tories”. Which just goes to show that the traditional dirigiste/free-market axis of political philosophy has little to do with the green/grey axis.
“Dirigiste” implies direction of society by a knowledgeable elite for everyone’s good. This would include, for instance, both traditional socialists and religious conservatives.
What I am calling “free-market”, for lack of a better term, imples an assumption that people in general are competent enough to manage their own affairs and do not need direction. This would include Libertarians.
I use the terms “green” and “grey” to correspond roughly to “we are part of the world and must adapt to its limits” and “we are separate from the world and it is here for our exploitation” respectively.
Green forces have included Green parties, “deep ecologises”, a lot of NGOs and social-justice orgs, and Ivan Illyich-type philosophers( our tools must match human dimension, rather than the otehr way around). I have seen mention lately on these boards of some greenish religious folk as well.
Small-g green parties have traditionally been dirigiste (witness the green element in the NDP); if the Canadian Green Party is free-market, this could be interesting. I need to read up on this more.
Grey forces would include those who seek short-term profit without counting the long-term costs. They might include Enron-type pillagers, for example, who don’t care about long-term costs, because those will be externalities and they will not personally be affected. Greys might also include US-style rapturist Christians, who do not believe that there will be a world left to experience the long-term costs.
I’m not sure where extropians, space activists, and the Whole Earth Review types would fit on the green/grey axis; their philosophy is closer to “we are part of the world, but everything is subject to improvement, and the only limits are those the universe gives us”.
I’ll also add that Sam is speaking of the ‘left’ in US terms. In Canada, the Liberals are pretty much in the centre.
Can we pick a different colour for the raping and pillaging corporatists? Say taupe or red?
The liberals present an interesting example of what happens when a limited number of parties (but more than two) struggle for power. The one that can define the centre and execute policy by pulling planks out from the other parties can then out compete them when election time rolls around.
For example the Reform party was able to redefine the fiscal centre, but the Liberals managed to adopt the platform, implement it making voting for Reform less appealing to soft centre right/left voters.
Sorry about that, Grey. While I may have picked up the terminology and run with it (I wrote a whole SF story about greens, greys, and browns for instance–browns being social reactionaries who wanted to return to an earlier time), I don’t think it’s original with me. I seem to remember reading it in the Whole Earth Review about ten or twelve years ago.
I’m looking at the platform for the Green Party of Canada, and I’m having a hard time seeing them as ‘green Tories’. I think my ‘far-left’ characterization was closer. According to their party platform, the Greens want:
[ul]
[li]Publically funded day care[/li][li]Government-enforced pay equity for women[/li][li]Publically-funded school lunch programs[/li][li]Reinforcing “our publicly run, publicly financed, universal health care system.” I assume they are opposed to any private initiatives in health care at all[/li][li]Increased taxes on tobacco and junk food (!!)[/li][li]Public ‘social housing’ projects to provide secure loans and guarantees to “non-profit housing organizations and cooperatives for the building and restoration of quality, energy-efficient housing for seniors, families and single people with special-needs.”[/li][li]Increase our already-generous parental leave benefits (unemployment insurance pays for up to a year of maternity leave now)[/li][li]Provide student loan forgiveness to working graduates of childhood education programs. (essentially publically funding their educations)[/li][li]Increase funding for women’s crisis centres and shelters, as well as educational programs that build healthy attitudes toward women among young people. [/li][li]Provide free tuition to college and university for retirees (??? Why ???)[/li][li]Restart a national housing program. [/li][/ul]
There are some interesting ideas in their platform as well, including a number of market-oriented incentive programs such as pollution credit trading. They also want to decrease personal and corporate taxes, and replace the revenue by adding new taxes that control behaviour such a taxes on the ‘wrong’ industries, tax credits for the ‘rigtht’ ones.
Unfortunately, they also have a few absolutely idiotic planks in their platform. For instance, they want to heavily tax fertilizer, ban GM crops, and force Canada to move to ‘sustainable agriculture’. They also want to ban reproductive cloning, institute trade tariffs all over the place, and they want the U.N. to have its own standing army under U.N. control (eek). They also want the IMF, the WTO, and the World Bank placed under control of the U.N. general assembly, which is an idiotic idea. They also want to phase out fossil fuel AND nuclear power within 50 years, and move Canada to totally renewable energy sources. This is simply impossible, and an attempt to legislate this could be disastrous.
Anyway, they aren’t quite the monolothic socialist-lefties that constitute green parties in other countries, but they have enough wacky ideas to make me unable to take them seriously.
Personallly, I wish the Rhino party was still around. I remember when one of their election promises was to flatten the Rocky Mountains so that Alberta could get another half-hour of daylight. Hilarious.
I liked their idea of repealing the law of gravity. We need a party like that–one that doesn’t take itself seriously and provides a little humour during election campaigns. I still recall one of their campaign slogans:
As to placing the IMFP, World Bank, and WTO under the control of the UN, the reason it’s an idiotic idea is that there’s no point in doing it. If you understand Canadian politics, you have to understand that saying the words “United Nations” is code for “vague peaceful stuff, and definitely not the United States.” There’s no rhyme or reason behind the “plan” to put the World Bank under UN control, no particular logic there; it’s just something dropped into the platform because it sounds good if you don’t think about it.
Which has nothing to do with a Canadian political party’s platform. There is next to no desire in Canada for a “World Government” least of all one based on the current UN.
A world government is a *terrible idea. Governments function best when they represent a homogenous population. The tyranny of the majority would be a disaster in a world government. And if the government turns tyrannical, there’s no opposing force to stop it.
The reason I object to rule by the U.N., and things like the ICC, is because they are anti-democratic and fly in the face of hundreds of years of evolution towards citizen control of their own lives. Instead of putting power and liberty in the hands of the people and allowing them to choose their representation, we have organizations made up of unelected bureaucrats disconnected from the people they allegedly serve.
It’s funny that those who can be so critical of the U.S. government and see things like the abuses at Abu Ghraib as damning to the system can look the other way at the massive amounts of U.N. graft and corruption that have been discovered. Bllue Helmeted soldiers are raping the people they are supposed to protect, and the left does a collective yawn. Billions of dollars are funneled to a tyrant in the oil for food scandal, and hey, who cares? The U.N. is such a good idea we’re willing to overlook the abuses, the fraud, and the evidence of massive systemic failure and support it anyway. But hell, if the U.S. government so much as sneezes in the wrong direction, we’re all over it.
A one-world government is the worst idea I can possibly imagine.
