Would all of you agree that, no matter how far Canada has swung to the right, its political center-of-gravity is still far to the left of the United States’?
I’m sorry, this is Great Debates. Take your “Is this mindbogglingly obvious fact true?” question to another forum. 
Hell, up here, John Kerry would likely be a “Red Tory” as referenced earlier.
I wish someone would explain this to George Bush. He is probably the only president in American history – in fact, so far as I know, the only national leader in the history of any country – to cut taxes right at the start of a war.
Begging your pardon, but allow me to follow up with an inquiry into something slightly less obvious: Why is Canada further to the left? One theory I’ve heard is that Canada’s political culture was profoundly shaped by the fact that, in the 1780s, it was heavily colonized by Loyalist refugees from the rebellious 13 Colonies. These Loyalists were deeply conservative in their acceptance of traditional authority, but this political attitude was also compatible with the idea of “Tory paternalism,” the idea that the state has an obligation, based on noblesse oblige, to take care of the people. Which made it possible to sell the Canadians on the idea of single-payer health care, etc. Do you think this is on the right track?
Is that just your campaign slogan, or have you actually looked at all the leaders they’ve ever had and compared them to Paul Martin? I think you would be surprised indeed to find how conservative the Liberal Party used to be.
That’s demonstrably false. If they were “chopped to the bone,” then we’d be spending next to nothing when he was done… which was obviously not the case.
By what standard is the Liberal Party “right wing”? They’re not fighting the gay marriage movement. They’re not looking to ban abortion. They’re not looking to reintroduce the death penalty. They’re not sending Canadian boys to die in Iraq for Halliburton’s bottom line. The Liberal government of the last ten years is the most SOCIALLY liberal government in the history of this country, with the possible exception of the early Trudeau administration. Our social services are in decent shape by any objective analysis; you may want to spend more, but you cannot say with a straight face that there isn’t a reasonably functioning social safety net in this country. We still have a decent universal health care system.
You’re engaging in the spewing of partisan bull, not the presentation of facts. Hell, I’m not even a Liberal supporter, but bull’s bull.
No.
Your assessment of the people who made up the “Loyalists” is off, for one thing, and seems at first blush to be coloured by American myth. These were not people who fled the Colonies because they loved the idea of authority; they fled because they were being killed and terrorized for opposing an armed rebellion. After the Revolution it was common for Loyalists to be denied basic civil rights, denied jobs, harassed, even lynched. Probably not coincidentally, they were disproportionately made up of ethnic and linguistic minorities, including a not insubstantial number of freed slaves. Their differences with the revolutionaries had nothing to do with “noblesse oblige” and lots to do with them simply not supporting violent means of resolving differences with Britain and being oppressed and murdered for it. These people naturally carried away with them a profound distrust of anything that smacked of revolution. Evolution, sure; revolution, well, that brought back bad memories.
In any event, it is highly doubtful that this had anything to do with the current differences. Canada has not always been a more liberal state; until after WWII it was, in many regards, more conservative. The divergence really didn’t become significant until the 1960s and 1970s. Why that happened could fill a whole thread, but I would submit the following observations:
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Canada is simply not a large enough population to be as insular and self-sufficient as the United States. We cannot support things like rejecting the metric system or having a huge domestic film industry, or a thousand other things. It is simply the nature of things that a huge population has more inertia than a small one. A powerful nation can do things its own way.
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Canada does not have a strong fundamentalist group of people who want to impose a slate of conservative religious views on others; the USA does. The most powerful conservative religious institution in Canadian history, the Catholic Church in Quebec, is long since emasculated.
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Canada has a population that is relatively less homogenous than that of the USA in terms of its perception of its role in Canada. The Quebec-Rest of Canada split is the obvious example, but the Western provinces and Maritimes see themselves as highly distinct, too. Even within provinces, regionalism is the order of the day. This isn’t just a matter of local pride, the way a Texan or a New Yorkers thinks they’re the cat’s meow; I’m talking about very real differences in terms of how the balance of power in this country should be organized. A population like that, it seems to me, would necessitate a more liberal sort of governance in some respects.
I’ll add a few points to RickJay’s excellent analysis. I think the point about religious fundamentalism is crucial, but it only explains the gap on the social front, and doesn’t explain the differences in fiscal policy.
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Canada never developed the “Better dead than Red” attitude the US did during the Cold War. Socialized health care, etc, wasn’t seen as tantamount to Stalinism as it seems to be in the US even to this day.
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Whereas the Great Depression led to New Deal Democrats in the States, in Canada it gave birth to the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, a bona fide socialist political party the managed to get into the political mainstream. It gained power provincially in Saskatchewan in the 40’s, and established a voice in federal politics that, while never in a position to dictate, has nonetheless been influential at times. That socialist policies like universal health care have had advocates in the mainstream, and not just in the wacko fringe, has an impact on public discourse.
Functioning, certainly. Functioning as it should? That’s another question. Why is student debt so high? Why are our tuitions and our class sizes both increasing? Why is Canada the only G-8 country without national funding for public transit or social housing? Why are people being warned to avoid the emergency rooms of certain hospitals?
Certainly, the system can continue to function under stressors like these. But these things hurt the citizenry, and they’re unnecessary and shortsighted.
Which still begs the question: Why not? Why is evangelical Protestantism so much stronger in the United States than in Canada, which has such a similar cultural history?
Is it, perhaps, because Canada has never known the institution of slavery, nor had to deal with its aftermath? (In the U.S., there is a historical association between evangelical Protestantism and racism, even though some recent evangelical movements, such as the Promise Keepers, have tried to establish a transracial appeal.)
This argument sounds strange to American ears, because in the U.S., in the conflict between centralism and decentralism, the most socially conservative forces have also been the most decentralist.
BrainGlutton, to answer your points first:
Concerning Point 2: That goes back, frankly, to who colonized the two nations. Canada doesn’t have a large group of fundamentalists because we just never have. The dominant Christian sects that founded this country were relatively liberal.
Concerning Point 3: I don’t think you understand what I meant. I’m not talking about centralists versus decentralists; they’re a part of any federally organized state.
What I mean is that different parts of Canada want the fundamental governing system of this country to be different things. There is no American equivalent to this phenomenon, not since 1865. Imagine if, today, the majority of Texans felt that Texas, by itself, should have a Constitutional veto, and that no other state should be allowed to have it because Texas should be special and more powerful, and incidentally this alternate universe Texas is 80% Spanish-speaking and passes laws banning the use of English in public and can get away with it. Imagine also that at the same time New England was economically backwards and felt it had an inherent right to massive tax transfers from California, who by the way have 120 million people, not 40 million, and get 180 seats in the House of Reps, rather than 50, and whose voting bloc has decided the last two elections, and frankly don’t give a hoot what the rest of the country thinks. Meanwhile, most of the Northwest feels emasculated and wants the Senate either abolished or radically changed. Oh, and Pennsylvania, alone amongst all 50 states, is politically closer to Canada than it is to the USA, and due to having big oil reserves, the federal government is taxing them extra and giving the money to New England and Texas. Florida feels it’s even more different and thinks everyone else is full of shit, although they sort of sympathize with the Northwest’s desire to change the Senate. You also have massive regional economic disparities, with tremendous resentment, in California (Where everyone despises LA - okay, so some of this is true) Florida, and Texas. And all these regions have a fair number of people with separatist sympathies. By the way, Spanish is an official language, but 40% of Texans want to separate anyway. That’s Canada.
Now to Matt:
Umm, aren’t those PROVINCIAL responsibilities? Education certainly isn’t a federal responsibility. I mean, if you want a direct answer to your question, it’s because the Constitution says the provinces are responsible for that shit.
My point was not that we don’t have problems, Matt, and you know it because you don’t miss stuff like that. My point was merely that the claim that Martin is the “most right wing leader in Liberal history” and that social services were “cut to the bone” is absurd bullshit.
At the federal level there has only been one true coalition government: the Unionist government, formed in 1917 to prosecute WWI. When the war broke out in 1914, the Conservatives were in office under Prime Minister Borden, with Laurier leading the Liberals in Opposition. By 1917, to meet its manpower committments for the slaughterhouse of the Western Front, the government felt it had to introduce conscription. Both the Liberals, and to a leser extent the Conservatves, fractured on the issue, with anglophones from outside Quebec largely supporting the idea, and the francophones from Quebec strenuously opposing it. Borden invited a significant number of anglo Liberals to enter into the Cabinet, forming a true coalition government with conscription as its unifying plank. The Union government lasted until about 1920, if I recall correctly, but with the war over, the Liberals drifted out of the coalition and the Liberal party re-formed.
There was also a quasi-coalition immediately after Confederation in 1867 - the Liberals and Conservatives in the old Province of Canada had formed a coalition government in 1863 to try to achieve Confederation with the Maritime colonies. The first government after Confederation was technically called the Liberal-Conservative government, but it was largely under the control of Sir John A., a Conservative, and the Liberal members didn’t stay in the Cabinet for long - the two-party system reasserted itself.
Other than the two examples above, there wasn’t a minority government for the first ~50 years of Confederation: it was a relatively stable two-party system, alternating between Liberals and Conservatives. (There was one exceptional case where Sir John’s government fell over a scandal in 1873, the Grits took office immediately, even though they didn’t have as many seats as the Tories, but called an election right away and won. This was a period where party discipline wasn’t as strong, and some Conservative MPs voted against Sir John’s government, bringing it down.)
With the social upheaval following WWI, and the western provinces gaining a regional identity, third parties started to form. We’ve had several minority governments at the federal level since WWI. As others have commented, the difference between a coalition government and a minority government is whether the Cabinet is composed of representatives of more than one party. If there’s more than one party in the Cabinet, it’s a coalition government. If the Cabinet is all one party, but that party doesn’t have a majority in the Commons, then it’s a minority government, which needs the support of other parties in the Commons to get its legislation and budget passed.
The coalition governments have been as follows:
1921-1925 - Liberals in office, supported by Progressives in the Commons; election called after normal four-year term.
1925-1926 - Liberals in office, supported by Progressives in the Commons; government defeated on confidence motion, and replaced by Conservative minority government.
1926 - Conservatives in office, not supported by anyone; quickly lost non-confidence motion.
1957-1958 - Progressive Conservatives in office, supported by Social Credit/Créditistes.
1962-1963 - Progressive Conservatives in office, supported by Social Credit/Créditistes.
1963-1965 - Liberals in office, supported by CCF/NDP
1963-1965 - Liberals in office, supported by CCF/NDP
1972-1974 - Liberals in office, supported by NDP
1979-1980 - Progressive Conservatives in office; briefly supported by Social Credit
Note that the government rarely seeks support from the main opposition party, except in times of national crisis. Why would a government want to solicit support from its main rival? Minority governments tend to seek support from third parties.
Sure they are provincial responsibilities. But a major source of funding is transfers to the provinces. Social programs are not something for which the federal government can abdicate its responsibility.
Except the Atlantic region doesn’t have enough seats to make up for the anticipated losses in Ontario and Quebec.
At dissolution, the standings in the Atlantic were:
Newfoundland & Labrador: 5 Liberals, 2 PC
Prince Edward Island: 4 Liberals
New Brunswick: 6 Liberals, 3 PC, 1 NDP
Nova Scotia: 4 Liberals, 4 PC, 3 NDP
Let’s assume that the Liberals sweep the Atlantic, winning every single riding. At most, they can have a gain of 13 seats.
Now let’s go to Québec. At dissolution, the Liberals had 36 seats, the PCs had one, and the Bloc had 38. But, the Bloc is polling about 20 points ahead of the Grits, and most of the Grit support is located in Montréal and Gatineau. The Tories and NDP are barely registering in Québec (at least, not in any polls I’ve seen; if I’m wrong, I’m sure matt or Hamish will let us know.) Si le tendance continue… - those numbers and distribution mean that the Grits will lose big-time in Québec - they may be lucky to hold 20 seats, for a net loss of 16. That’s already more than they can possibly pick up in Atlantic Canada.
So the polls close in Québec, and the government has lost seats overall. Can it pick up seats in Ontario? Doubtful - there aren’t that many seats to pick up in any event. Ontario has 103 seats, and at dissolution the Grits held 100 of them. Even if they swept Ontario this time, that would only be a gain of 3 seats, for a net loss of 13 seats to this point.
But, if anything, the Liberals will go down this time in Ontario, not up.
The last few elections the Liberals won a lot of seats in Ontario because the Alliance and the PCs split the right-wing vote. It’s not clear how the new Conservative party will fare, and if it can heal that rift, but if it can, then the Liberals are looking at losing seats in Ontario, not gaining them.
To make matters worse for the Liberals, the NDP is threatening them on the left for the first time in a long while. Jack Layton may be a walking campaign advert for Jack Layton, but he’s certainly perked up the NDP. And in a three-way race, they don’t have to take a majority of the votes to win a seat - they just have to come in first. As with the PCs/Alliance, the NDP were in contention in some Ontario ridings in the last election, but fell short. It wouldn’t take much of a voter shift in some of those ridings for some NDP candidates to squeak past the Liberals. And, with the heavy-handed tactics Martin’s gang used on the left-leaning Liberals (notably Sheila Copps), while picking up right-wing MPs defecting from the old PC and Alliance parties, there may well be some disgruntled leftie Liberals who will vote NDP - and that may make the difference.
So, let’s suppose that the NDP and Conervatives do moderately well, and pick up 20 seats combined in Ontario - that leaves the Grits at 83 in Ontario, for a loss of 17.
If you take my guestimates and add them up, by the time the polls close in Ontario, the Liberals have a net loss of 20. They only had a majority of 21 in the old House, so they’re looking at a minority, unless they can pick up seats in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, or B.C. (Alberta’s a dead loss for them, and they might even lose the Deputy Premier, “Landslide Annie” from Edmonton.) Saskatchewan and Manitoba haven’t been friendly to the Liberals the past two elections, and not much has changed. B.C. has always been a wild card - we may be staying up late, waiting for the last returns to come in from the Queen Charlotte Islands.
All in all, the electoral numbers don’t favour the Liberals this time out.
(By the way, I know that there’s been a redistribution of seats for this election, but for simplicity’s sake I’ve use the old numbers. Since the redistribution favoured Ontario and Alberta, I’m not sure that it will have very much effect on the overall trends.)
Not necessarily. In a minority situation, the Prime Minister is the person who can command a majority in the Commons, which is not always the same as having the most seats.
It’s happened once in our history that the leader of the second largest party formed the government. Following the election of 1925 the Conservatives had 116 seats, the Liberals 101 seats, and the Progressives had 25. Prime Minister Mackenzie King, the leader of the Liberals, was able to reach an agreement with the Progressives (N.B. - not the same as Progressive Conservatives!) and stayed in office for about half a year, even though the Conservatives had more seats, until eventually losing a non-confidence motion over a procurement/sweat shop scandal.
The same thing could happen this time. Suppose there’s no majority, but the Conservatives come in with more seats than the Liberals, and the Bloc and the NDP both elect members. Who would be more likely to form a government? There’s no junior right wing party that the Conservatives could look to, unlike Joe Clark’s short-lived government, when the Créditistes were still around. The Bloc and the NDP are both to the left of the Liberals on social and economic issues, so even if the Liberals come in second, since they occupy the centre they’re more likely to be able to cut a deal with either the NDP or the Bloc, and stay in office.
There is no legal requirement that the Prime Minister have a seat in either the Commons or the Senate (technically, the office of Prime Minister doesn’t even exist, as a matter of constitutional law).
For example, Prime Minister Turner never had a seat in the Commons while he was Prime Minister. PM Trudeau announced his resignation in February 1984, after a walk in the snow. Turner, who had been Finance Minister in Trudeau’s government (but had been forced out in 1977 - sounds familiar) did not have a seat in the Commons, but announced he was running for the Liberal leadership. At a hastily called party convention, Turner won the leadership over Chrétien. Trudeau formally resigned and Turner was sworn in as Prime Minister on June 30, 1984. He immediately called an election, which he lost. He resigned as Prime Minister on September 16, 1984, before the new Parliament convened, so he never had a seat while he was Prime Minister.
However, by constitutional convention (and practical politics), the Prime Minister must have a seat in the Commons, so a Prime Minister without a seat has to get one pronto.
There can be all sorts of reasons why the Prime Minister might be defeated in his or her own seat. For example, if the government is being swept out, the PM might be one of the many government MPs who lose their seats (e.g. Prime Minister Campbell in 1993). However, even if the government is returned to office, the PM potentially could lose his/her seat. The voters in the PM’s riding might think that he’s not doing enough for the riding, or he might be espousing a policy that has general support in the country at large, but ticks off the voters in his own riding.
There have been at least three occasions when the the leader of the party has personally lost his seat, even though his party won enough seats to form the government. It happened to Macdonald in 1878, and to Mackenzie King twice, in 1925 and again in 1945.
In 1878, Macdonald was the Leader of the Opposition going into the general election. He lost his seat in Kingston, Ontario, but his Conservative Party elected a majority. If I recall correctly, the mood in Kingston was that Macdonald was campaigning on building a trans-continental railway, which was going to be expensive - it was the issue that Macdonald lost office over in 1873. When it was clear that the Conservatives could form a government, two Conservative Party MPs resigned, one in Manitoba and one in Victoria. Macdonald ran in both of the ridings in the bye-elections, won election in both seats, and chose to sit as the member for Victoria. The same issue that cost him his Kingston set won him election in the western seats, since Manitoba and B.C. both wanted the transcontinental railway, regardless of cost.
Prime Minister King lost his seat in York, Ontario, in the general election of 1925. Since the Liberals only had a minority government, that put King on very shaky ground within the party, but he managed to hang on. The Liberal MP for Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, resigned and King ran there. In those days, Saskatchewan was a bastion of Liberal strength - sort of like the “yellow dog Democrats”, whoever got the Liberal nomination was likely to win the general election. He stayed on as MP for Prince Albert until 1945, when he lost his seat there, even though the Liberals won the genral election overall. Again, a Liberal MP resigned, this time in Ontario, and King ran in that bye-election and got in.
Note that King stayed on as Prime Minister in both cases, even though he did not have a seat in the House between his loss in the general election and his victory in the bye-elections. Membership in the House is not a legal requirement.
This isn’t quite accurate, on a couple of points.
First, the GovGen is above partisan politics, so she would not be privy to the negotiations, except in the most general way. She might ask the Prime Minister for progress updates, when she can expect to have a Cabinet proposed to her, and so on. Her constitutional responsibility is to keep the machinery of government turning over, and to ensure that there is a Cabinet, but she would stay out of the nuts & bolts of the negotiations.
Second, while the appointment of the PM is one of the Governor General’s reserve powers, constitutional conventions still apply. One of those conventions is that if it is unclear if the government still has a majority after a general election, the Prime Minister has two choices. He can resign and suggest the GovGen call on one of the other leaders. Alternatively, he can also insist on his right to meet the new House, even if it’s doubtful that he will still have a majority.
For example, following the Ontario election of 1985, Premier Miller’s PCs had the single largest number of seats, but not a majority. The Liberals came in second, and the NDP third. The leaders of the Liberals and the NDP announced that they had reached an agreement for the Liberals to take office, with NDP support in exchange for a commitment from the Liberals on certain policies. Even though that agreement was public knowledge, the Lieutenant Governor didn’t call on the leader of the Liberals to form a government. Premier Miller insisted on his right to face the House. The PCs recalled the House and the Liberals promptly moved non-confidence in the PC government. The motion of non-confidence passed with NDP support. Only at that point did Premier Miller resign and the Lt. Gov. send for the leader of the Liberals.
A hijack and a nitpick, but to be fair it should be kept in mind that evangelical Protestantism propelled much of the abolitionist movement in the U.S. - both the Great Awakening and much more particularly the Second Great Awakening were a major impetus to anti-slavery agitation. Remember the explosive center of the Second Great Awakening was the “Burned-Over District” of western New York - a state that had banned slavery decades earlier and a part of the state that was settled in significant part by transplanted New Englanders, a region that had largely banned slavery even earlier than New York.
- Tamerlane
I really shouldn’t post so late at night. That was supposed to read:
None of these were coalition governments, as the Cabinet was composed solely of one party, which stayed in office by informal arrangements with one of the smaller parties in the Commons.