I always thought of Canuck conservatives as being like what we would call “Rockefeller Republicans” here – pro-business, but socially liberal and willing to negotiate on the welfare state – or else state-minimalists like our Libertarians (paging Sam Stone), or else moderately socially conservative. At any rate, nothing like our religious right.
There are, of course, social conservatives in Canada. But it’s not as bad as this article makes it to be. Harper is a social conservative, but a quite moderate one, and if he tried to impose his beliefs on the country, he wouldn’t last long.
Is it going to get anywhere? Well, it’s not going away, but I don’t think you’ll see the religious right gain the power that it has in the US, in Canada.
Calgary has a fairly sizeable population of social conservatives, but it’s one of the only large cities in Canada that does. Social conservatism mostly comes out of rural areas in the west.
The statement that Harper has a “slash and burn attitude toward Canadian social programs” is simply a lie; his government has demonstrated nothing of the sort. If anything, they seem overly happy to spend my money.
Harper runs a minority government in a country with legal, structural and poltical blocks that would prevent any attempt to turn Canada into “an Americanized Christian state.” Even if he planned to do it, which he doesn’t, it can’t be done.
I’m asking about whether vigorous religious-conservative movement is starting to emerge in Canuckistan, not whether it’s about to take over; clearly it’s not. But who took Jerry Falwell seriously back in the '70s?
As I recall, Falwell was quite seriously taken in the 1970s.
To answer your question, likely not. Canada’s always had a strong religious base; this hasn’t been some paradise of atheism all this time. There’s always been plenty of Christian fundamentalism here, it’s not a new phenomenon.
What you don’t see is that being carried into major political arenas. For all “The Nation”'s breathless blather, in fact Harper ISN’T some theocratic bad guy, and has almost completely kept his religious beliefs off the radar. The Conservative Party doesn’t even have an official position on abortion, and Harper is running a vote on reopening the same sex marriage debate that is designed to lose. It’s just not happening.
What issues and directions a country will take is dependent not only on position, but importance. To use same sex marriage as an example, it does not have overwhelming majority support in Canada; a very substantial number of Canadians don’t like it. However, the issue is relatively low in importance; many, many Canadians who don’t like same sex marriage nonetheless voted for parties that openly support it, because the issue is vastly outweighed in public interest and attention by other issues. Many Canadians who support SSM voted Conservative (e.g. me, and probably Sam Stone, though I don’t speak for who he voted for) because, again, other issues outweighed its importance. This is as opposed to the USA, where it’s a fairly strong vote-determining issue; candidates who support SSM will irretrievably lose a lot of votes.
Same with abortion; NO party of any significance in Canada has an anti-abortion platform, even though many Canadians oppose abortion. It’s simply not an issue that has moved the public to action.
For all the Falwell and Ralph Reed bugaboo talk, fact is that the elites can’t move the public; the public selects the elites they want. The U.S. has a strong undercurrent of religious fundamentalism because the people want it.
These “slash and burn cuts” are going to lead to an AIDS epidemic in jail :rolleyes: and to women becoming second class citizens again because, you know, their rights aren’t guaranteed in the Charter or anything…
Oh, goody! Does that mean I can start legally beating my wife and pinching the butts of women in the office? Does it? Gee, I can’t wait. Because, you know, it was those women offices that were keeping me from doing it up until now. Damn them. Wow, it is great that we can turn back the clock and put women in their rightful place - Barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen. :rolleyes:
Well, yes and no. Had you asked most American conservatives about the rise of the Religious Right in the 1960s, they’d have suggested you cut back on the hallucinogens. After the first burst of apparent power in 1976 and 1980, the Religious Right in the U.S. discovered that they had simply been used to get votes and that no one in the Republican Party was all that interested in pushing their agendas. As a result, they changed tactics. Beginning in the very early 1980s, they formed a very specific strategy of getting elected to school boards, as precinct captains, to township boards and city and village councils. There were even jokes aimed at them over people running for dogcatcher on an anti-abortion platform. As a result, they eventually got a lot of people elected to the organizational positions within the Republican Party. Even without big name candidates, they were able to exercise a certain amount of control over the candidates who were running. They still do not really “own” the Republican Party; there are not really that many congresscritters who are fervent members of the Religious Right. However, they very definitely get to control a lot of the political discussion in the country.
Now Dobson and his ilk are up in Canada, with 30+ years of U.S. political organizing experience, and I suspect that they will begin to attempt the same sort of long-term “grass roots” organizing efforts. They are not looking at the 2009-2011 elections or even the elections that follow that one, but perhaps elections as late as 2025. (Mind you, they will take any victory prior to that, of course, but their strategy is likely to focus on control in around 20 years.)
I am not claiming that Canada is doomed to fall under their sway. I am not claiming that they will clearly be successful in their efforts. I am pointing out that they were dismissed as fringe in the mid-1970s, treated as dupes in 1980, and then set out to gain some measure of actual control–a goal for which they have been moderately successful. (Of course, success often sows its own destruction; there are the beginnings of rifts within the Religious Right as a number of people within that organization attempt to introduce more efforts toward social justice, environmental issues, etc. (See the recent pre-inauguration resignation of Joel Hunter from the presidency of the Christian Coalition.)) If the American coalition does not self-destruct in the next few years, I suspect that they will be pumping experience (and funds) into Canada to try to shape more of the Candian political discourse, as well. There will be blunders and missteps as Yanks who fail to understand Canadian politics give some bad advice, but organizing is organizing and that is where they will target their efforts.
Thing is, the Canadian political system is fundamentally unlike the American system in some ways. One of those ways is the absence of the US’s rigid two-party system. In the US, neither of the two major parties has any chance of becoming irrelevant in the foreseeable future so gaining influence within the Republican party itself has a lasting and significant political impact. In Canada, a party can go from successive majority governments to completely wiped out overnight (see: Progressive Conservatives, 1993). If religious conservatives successfully took over the organizational positions in a party and then exercised their power to influence the party’s platform or candidates, that party would immediately become a minor niche party doomed to be competitive in no more than 10% or so of ridings nationally. It would become and remain an inconsequential fourth or fifth party in Parliament that would never have any real political impact except in the possible case of a minority government where the numbers play out just right so they’d have the balance of power, and even then their power would be limited to being able to trigger an election, as the major parties would just vote together against any significantly socially conservative legislation.
I don’t mean to downplay the extent to which some parts of the country are socially conservative. There are quite a few of them. But the really populous parts are not. It’s not an accident that the Reform and Canadian Alliance parties struggled for years to achieve a political breakthrough east of the Great Lakes, and I guarantee you that if Ontarians and Quebeckers feel that western social conservatives have gained undue influence you’ll be looking at Prime Minister Stephane Dion in about 40 days. Hell, even in Alberta social conservatism is polarizing. The Alberta Tories just elected a new leader to replace King Ralph, and the major candidate who most emphasized that side of things lost, at least in part because he was emphasizing that. But Sam could tell you more about that - I don’t know that much about Alberta provincial politics.
Yep. Alberta is no doubt the most conservative province in Canada, and we just picked a new leader of the Conservative party. The most socially conservative candidate lost to a guy who’s claim to fame is that he’s a nice guy who’s a ‘consensus builder’.
To be fair, the most conservative guy lost in part because a lot of Alberta Liberals temporarily joined the Conservative party just so they could vote against him, and because he was also in favor of building a ‘firewall’ in Alberta that would allow us to more easily cut ourselves off from the rest of Canada should we so choose. That scared people.
No, a ‘firewall’ in this context means setting up our own institutions to replace federal ones, so that we have flexibility in decision-making. For example, outside the cities law enforcements is currently handled by the RCMP. Morton wanted to replace them with an Alberta police force. Our retirement system is based on the Canada Pension Plan, a federal program. Morton wanted to create an Alberta Pension Plan and have us opt out of CPP. Quebec has done both those things.
They plan to funnel sour gas from the oil sands through a series of pipes lined along the border (especially those facing Ontario). In the event that the Federal government introduces a plan similar to the NEP those pipe will be lit preventing desperate Newfs and Timmins natives from reaching the Promised Land. It’s like genesis but with cowboy hats.
Alberta was badly scarred by the NEP. It was an almost ideal example of the worst kind of federal meddling in the name of the common good. Ever since then, the province has developed a distinct dislike for centralizing (read Liberal) federal governments. The firewall would be the assertion of actual provincial powers allowed by the Canadian constitution but not currently used by the province. Powers such as withdrawing from the Canada Pension Plan, (like Quebec), establishing a provincial police force (like Ontario and Quebec) and collecting provincial income tax directly (like Quebec).
How did they mean the word “progressive”? (In the U.S. it’s usually used, nowadays, to mean “left-liberal,” but in the early 20th-Century it meant something different.)
An actual physical wall? Some kind of border controls? Or what?