Where do you think milk comes from? Ever see an udder ?
Dread Pirate Jimbo, question for ya, since ya bring it up, but I’d be happy for a thoughtful response from anyone: If the Grits are really all that out of touch, how come they consistently win the vast bulk of seats in Commons? Is it the party, its leaders, or the majority of the Canadian people who want Canada’s military to be what it is? If the latter, is it anything more than complacency and fearful isolationism at fault, and what are you lot doing about it?
This Yank says there’s no need to bomb Canada, or even formally annex it. In any way that matters, Canada has voluntarily made itself a territory of the US already, and seems to like it that way.
But, Sam, if you want to actually campaign and vote for the Republicans, of whom there’s no stronger partisan than you, you’re still going to have to move down here and file citizenship papers. Meanwhile, gotta take care of things in your own home.
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We had a really bad drought last summer, and it’s looking like it may last through next summer,too. The Federal Government doesn’t seem to be concerning itself too much over a bunch of Western farmers and ranchers losing their land and their livestock starving to death. On the other hand, I can’t mention this terrible drought without a heartfelt thank-you to the Eastern farmers who sent their surplus hay west.
And if you want to talk about provinces that aren’t doing well in spite of their resources, let’s talk about Saskatchewan, and how the Federal government dictates where they will sell their grain, and for what price, and jails farmers who go outside of the government controls to sell the wheat they have grown on their own land.
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The squabbling doesn’t seem petty to the people who feel they have no say in their own country’s government.
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The louder voices coming out of the West these days are the result of decades of frustration and alienation. Westerners are not loud, reactionary people; we need to be pushed a long, long way to get this kind of resentment built up. To get an idea of how long this has been brewing, come out West some time and ask the locals for their opinions on Trudeau. That should be eye-opening for you.
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Westerners have never wanted to dictate policy to the rest of Canada. All we have ever wanted is to have an equal voice with regions that have much larger populations and completely different concerns.
ElvisL1ves, it’s partially due to the collapse of the Torys following Mulroney’s departure. Think Democrats after Clinton, only multiplied 10-fold. The current Conservative leader is one that returned after 20 years, which would be as if Jimmy Carter suddenly was the Democratic Presidential candidate for 2004. This gave the Liberals a virtual stranglehold and little focused competition, partially due to their being relatively competant in their first two terms (they did get rid of the deficit after all). As well, the ridiculous ‘first past the post’ system gives them a bigger mandate than warranted. They scored about 41% of the vote in the last election but got 57% of the seats in parliament, which due to our constitution makes Jean Chretien almost an elected King. Combine that with the fact that in the last two elections the Liberals have won 100 seats in Ontario (out of 101 and 103, respectively – there are 301 total seats in parliament) and you can see how it would make a government complacent.
Raygun, thanks for the numbers, but I think it begs the question to say it isn’t that there’s wide support for the Liberals, but rather that there’s little for anyone else. If a strong military, capable of significant independent operations, really were the desire of the bulk of Canadians, wouldn’t that translate into support for the parties espousing it? And are there any, btw?
Complain about Chretien all you like (it’s your right, certainly, and to some degree even your responsibility), but give him credit for adopting policies with broad public support. The other parties don’t seem to me (perhaps unfairly) to even pretend to want to represent the whole country and its broader interests, and I’m not referring only to the BQ.
Excellent questions! Here are some answers (albeit very simplified):
Background: Like the U.S., Canada has a two-house government, however, the House of Commons is eleceted and the Senate is appointed. The Commons has a total of 301 seats, of which Ontario and Québec (the two largest provinces by population) hold 178; The Senate has 105 seats, of which Ontario and Québec hold 48. Thus, there is slightly more room for regional representation in the Senate, but, being appointed, they wield almost as little power as the Queen in our affairs. Moreover, as they are appointed by the ruling government, they are rarely more than puppets of the powers that be in the Commons.
Now to the Liberals: As the most consistently moderate party, they have been able, throughout Canadian history, to draw voters from both ends of the political spectrum. More importantly, they have consistently focussed their attentions on making policies which are friendly to people in Ontario and Québec. As a point of fact, the Liberal Party has not had a non-Québecois leader in my lifetime. The result has been consistent domination of the seats in those two provinces, while their representation elsewhere has been spotty at best: During Prime Minister Trudeau’s last term in office the Grits did not hold a single seat west of Winnipeg; currently, they hold a handful of seats in the Vancouver area, but none in the prairies.
Our current Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, has run and been elected in the last decade, on a platform of being a good friend of Trudeau and not much else, which has somehow managed to keep people voting for him. Meanwhile, his main competition, to the political right, has fragmented itself into two competing parties, one (the Progressive Conservatives) which is being led by a good politician with no leadership qualities, and the other (the Alliance) which has been unfairly labelled a western regionalist party and which is still too new and sloppy to be taken seriously by the east, inspite of mustering enough support in the west to form the last two official oppositions. The result has been a mandate for the Liberals to do whatever they want, so long as Ontario’s interests are not compromised, and several decades of building hostility in the west due to their utter lack of a voice in our national government–after all, how would you feel if you learned, once again, that the party with your interests at heart had lost before you even made it to the polling booth. It has been a classic case of tyranny of the majority for some time up here.
As to the military issue, it has been Liberal policy for some time now to keep Canada in an international peacekeeping mode, since we no longer need to fear the Russkies coming after us over the North Pole. Therefore, it has been very easy for them to strip our military to the bone and make a lot of splashy headlines about how much money their saving in the defence budget, since we are not a country of war. And we have developed a reputation for sending troops overseas to try to keep the peace in places such as Bosnia and Crete. However, when it comes to the task of actually defending ourselves or making a meaningful contribution to a war against terrorism, the Grits have simply cut us back too far, with no real plans on the table to correct the situation.
So, to sum up, yes, the majority are voting the Grits in over and over; no they still don’t have a legitimate threat for the next election; everyone I knows is ashamed of how little we can offer to the current international crisis; and maybe an attack on T.O., launched by the States or Al Qaeda or anyone else who gets a notion, is what it will take to get our leaders to take steps to get us back in the game.
I hope that helps clear it up and not make it even more muddy.
In this post on The Corner, Goldberg says:
Goldberg has posted excerpts from some letters. From a positive letter:
I love it when someone says they’re doing something right and then double-posts. 
Thank you, Dread Pirate Jimbo, for that cogent synopsis.
Although I have a hard time conceptualizing the Liberals as “consistently moderate”, given their apparent slasher ethos, I appreciate your post – most elucidating.
I admit I’m at a total loss about what to do about Saturday’s civic elections. U.S. Dopers may be amused to hear that one of our mayoral candidates represents The Marijuana Party. As sympathetic as I am to those pushing for sensible laws, I can’t imagine voting for Marc Emory – partly because it’s one of the more absurd one-issue platforms out there, and partly because he’s an irritating little prick that gives pot-smokers a bad name. Unfortunately, one of the candidates who may actually have a shot at winning is a Narc with an MBA. I don’t know what to do, apart from hold my nose and vote NPA to keep the other assholes out. There’s no winning.
[/much-too-localized hijack]
I had no idea that Canadian political debates were this…robust. This is absolutely fascinating.
Please continue. I’m learning a ton. Really.
Larry, there’s always the Corrosion of Conformity option… (Oh wait, I forgot, yer a Candadian, nevermind!)
ElvisL1ves, to answer your question, there are two parties strongly in favour of bringing our military back to a reasonable status: the Conservatives and the Alliance. Unfortunately, they comprise the political right of our spectrum and have managed to split the right-wing vote in the last two elections. The result has been that the Liberals have the support of only 41% of voters, as Raygun99 pointed out, but a strong majority in the Commons. If those two parties could ever settle their differences and combine into a single party, they’d actually be able to take a run at the Grits. Of course they’d also have to find themselves a leader who doesn’t put people to sleep with his speeches… and find a way to silence the loudmouth morons who continue to embarass themselves as members of the Alliance (yeah, I’m talking about you Rob Anders)… and they’d have to convince central Canada that their policies are in the interests of all of Canada, not just the lunatic fringe in the prairies…
That would make you 12 years old at most, since the Liberals had a non-Quebecois leader as recently as 1990. You’re a remarkably well-informed young man! 
I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but I’ll be happy to get bombed with Muffin any time she will let me. 
and the maritime provinces. Only the west has any right to feel alienated.
Not true. Liberals have a tradition of alternating leaders from within and without Quebec. Remember John Turner?
I recall a major liberal wipeout in Ontario when Mulroney was first elected Prime Minister. Liberals had abour 40 seats for all of Canada as I recall.
Isn’t Manitoba part of the praires? I thought they picked up 5 seats in the last election there, more than any other party. Lets get the facts right Jimbo
Obvious partisan comment. No mention of turning around the annual deficits and plowing back the hugh national debt with massive unbelievable annual surpluses.
Long before Glasnost, all Canadian governments were content to let Americans make the peace. We are the peacekeepers. :rolleyes:
On preview: abogan I’ll have a drink with Muffin anytime, but its more likely that Muffin is a studmuffin than a lady.
I know it may seem to have been a long time ago but this is one Merican who remembers Juno Beach and the help provided in Iran in '79. So if Canada wants to give the US some constructive advice or even just vent to high heaven, I for one will listen. No sovereign nation must “earn” any rights. However, Canada certainly has earned the right to disagree with our foreign policy (God knows I often do) without the US coming unglued as though
it were unthinkable that our neighbors just might have a mind of their own. I know that if push comes to shove, Canada will be by our side of their own free will. I only hope the US never needs Canadian support for a cause that is not truly right and proper.
grienspace
I just think it would be nice to have a drink with someone from thunder bay.
Not that there is any thing wrong with that.
Having a drink with Muffin that is.
My point was that the government plays to Ontario and Québec and ignores everyone else. It was not my intent to underplay the feelings of maritimers or, for that matter, people in the Territories who have even less voice. I’m making my point from a western perspective because that is the one with which I am most familiar.
Point conceded. The man who broke the record for shortest term in the PM’s office (later bested by Kim Campbell) at least deserves credit for being there.
By consistent domination, I did not mean to suggest that there haven’t been exceptions. I was living in Ontario when Turner got his ass handed to him by Mulroney and I very much recall the shock and horror people around me expressed when they learned that the Grits had been unseated in Ontario.
Yes and no. The Winnipeg area has long been a bit of a Liberal strnghold (if memory serves, Lloyd Axeworthy is from the Winnipeg area). I conceded as much already. But the further away from the Canadian Shield you get (and the last time I checked, Manitoba has a substantial amount of Shield in it), the further from Liberal support you get.
I’m afraid I can’t attribute a strong economy to our government any more than I can credit Ralph Klein with creating a strong oil industry. Cutting the defecit has been done at the expense of our health care system, among other things. Our dollar’s value is stayed at or near all-time lows for most of Mr. Chrétien’s time in office. The federal coffers have been bolstered by double-dipping on taxes from the strong petroleum industry. And all this so-called surplus and balanced budget has done nothing to address the poverty which looms over the western farming industry and the maritime fishing industry.
Chrétien’s government has slashed military spending dramatically during its tenure, regardless of the mandate of our troops. We at least had a defence budget until recently. And although we had an official policy of peacekeeping, our military was still, first and foremost, in the business of defending our turf.