Progressive Talking Point: New Democrats for a New Democracy

I wonder if the budget 'drama' is going to play out the way it looks like it just might... I wonder if the Liberals and the Conservatives really are going to square off on the topic of corporate taxes.

It's a worthy issue - it's the kind of thing elections should be waged over. But if that's how it comes to pass, it might have implications for the long-term voting habits of Canadians. It might shift allegiances. And I'm not sure it'll happen to the betterment of Canadians.

After all, the gambit will only work for the Liberals if it helps them peel off some working-class support from the NDP. Theoretically they could peel off working-class support from the Conservatives, too, but I think they'll have a harder time making that work. The allegiance of corporate interests and apolitical working-class 'common people' that has treated the Republican Party so well is looking like working up here too - and just as that has allowed a corporate-shill party to rebrand a help-the-poor party as 'élitist' down south, the same process is well underway here, helped in no part by the Liberals' long-term willingness to appear élitist and certainly helped by the very existence of Michael Ignatieff. If the Liberals are hoping to get the common man to see the Liberals as their champion, Ignatieff is not going to help at all.

On the other hand, Ignatieff is a more natural ally of a kind of older-money Toronto Liberal, someone well-off who finds the Conservatives' 'heartland' brand of social conservatism a turn-off. Moneyed Ontario Liberals have never been the soul of the party, but they've always been an important element of its success. If an election really is to be drawn on the terms of 'how much should we tax the rich', it's not too much to expect that the rich (and the would-be rich) will also vote on those terms. If the Liberals draw a stark contrast on class lines, it will push them well into the overcrowded left and leave fully one-half of the spectrum the exclusive domain of the Conservatives. That's a hell of a rish to take.

So it's interesting to see how Jack Layton seems to be playing it. For the NDP to stand outside of discussion on wealth and taxes seems absurd: surely this, if anything, is why we have a New Democratic Party, isn't it? And yet if Layton is really playing his cards the way I think he might be, it will if nothing else be an interesting electoral experiment.

It's tough for the NDP to fight a campain on the notion of a Liberal/NDP coalition: it merely invites the question of why anyone should vote NDP if it only means getting Liberals. But if Layton is going to attempt to approach the current budget dialogue as the 'moderate voice of reason', as the party committed to making progress by working with whomever they need to, as the party not stuck in stubborn line-in-the-sand polemics but willing to co-operate, to work within the system... if Layton and the NDP can actually communicate that message, it might give the NDP a valuable place in the minds of voters.

Everyone in Canada is fed up with Canadian politics. Everyone agrees the system is not working, that parties are failing to engage the population and that elections are failing to return parliaments that represent the will of Canadians and have the respect of Canadians. Insomuch as the NDP is just another voice in the din, this reality affects them as much as any other party (moreso, perhaps, in that their typical voter profile largely overlaps with the kinds of people most likely to be disaffected by the current political climate). But if they can be seen as an alternative to simple business-as-usual politicking, well that might see them reaping votes from all over the place and in perhaps unexpected amounts.

The New Democratic Party - the party for a new democratic system. Changing our electoral system and abolishing the senate are already long-standing platforms of the NDP. And they've been associated with the word 'coalition' so long now that, frankly, they might as well run with it - not by saying 'we're in symbiosis with the Liberals' but by saying 'we as a country need to enter an era when coalitions are tolerated and even encouraged: we in the NDP announce our willingness to work with all parties after an election to the extent that we have common ground'. Since it'd be a relatively empty threat, the NDP could avoid the 'coalition of the losers' scenario by stating that as a policy the third-finishing party should attempt to form a coalition with the first-finishing party before the second - knowing that Harper would never consent to a Conservative-NDP coalition anyway. Still, it could make it look like they were trying.

'We do politics differently'. I'm not sure that it's really something that can light Canadians on fire, but little else seems to be: corporate tax cuts, fighter jets, Helena Oda (I mean Bev Guergis), G20, Security Council... it amounts to a big litany of 'blah blah' for a lot of Canadians. What will those Canadians do? At the moment, excluding the 10% or so currently committed to the Green Party in what is to a certain degree a protest vote, it seems like they're snaking towards the Conservatives, based on a notion that at least they're in power and they haven't screwed up too much. These people aren't necessarily by nature complacent. It's just the broken-record-player din of politics-as-usual has lulled them to sleep. There is a chance that standing up and basing a campaign around 'what we're doing is not democracy; let's stop it' might have legs...

...And otherwise, let's face it, the NDP are largely dead in the water.

Progressive Talking Point: Battleground Ontario

If we do see a federal election in 2011, Canada's largest province will be in the curious position of waging two epic battles almost simultaneously. While that's bound to increase Ontarian cynicism to record levels (and as a result, bring down turnout), it's inevitably going to affect the way the two battles turn out.

Every province in Canada differs on the degree to which that province's local voting trends and federal voting trends overlap. Varying down the years, the Ontario provincial political spectrum has been at times quite unlike the federal one, yet at the moment the two line up remarkably closely. If someone tells you they support the PCs locally, a betting man would put down money that that person supports Harper's party federally. And similarly McGuinty and Ignatieff drink from the same pool.

Yet one gets the sense that neither Hudak nor Harper, both ascendant in Ontario, would see much advantage in helping each other out. To a certain extent they might guess, correctly perhaps, that conservative successes at one level will automatically lend a glow to the other party, while the failures of one could potentially be downplayed as an example of the differences between the two. Ontario Liberals are eager anyway to paint Hudak as the next Harris. Hudak is probably undecided how snugly he'd want to get into bed with Harper seeing how polarising Harper remains in Ontario and seeing how he has a pressing need to present himself as his own man.

Meanwhile, you imagine that Ignatieff and McGuinty will be doing everything possible to avoid excessive association with one another: both struggle to maintain popularity among party loyalists, to say nothing of swing voters.

Both of these elections will be won and lost in Ontario by the conservative parties' abilities to build on strengths and avoid alienating moderates. It's looking good for the parties on the right in Ontario at the moment. Both federally and provincially (especially the latter), each Liberal Party can expect a solid drubbing. It's tough to avoid the sense that it's too late for either party to turn their fortunes around.

So where does this leave the NDP? I word that in the singular, because the NDP is the only one of the three in Ontario with organisationally-codependent federal and provincial association. Effectively, we're discussing five, not three or six, parties. And one of those five parties might well need to step into the ring twice in 2011 in Ontario. Will this help or hinder them?

Well, on the one hand both Jack Layton and Andrea Horwath are charismatic and well-liked figures. Horwath is more of an unknown, but I've seen her taken seriously in local media to a degree that Layton himself rarely is. Horwath also has a clear advantage over Layton in that she has no gun-registry issues to affect her perfomance in the Northern Ontario ridings that are crucial to both branches of the party. The other thing Horwath has that Layton would like is an extra five percent or so, by most polling standards. While the order of (Progressive) Conservative, Libeal, NDP, Green is the same both provincially and federally, the Ontario NDP poll at about 20% while the federal NDP in Ontario trend around 15% - that missing five percent most likely traditional Liberals turned off by Dalton McGuinty. If (a) the provincial election happened before the federal one, and (b) the Ontario NDP performed to, or exceeded, expectations, there might be a rub-off effect. Ontarians at least would get used to seeing the name NDP as a contender again. Alas, it'll happen the other way around, which might possibly even clip Horwath's wings a little.

No matter: what remains is that they are both likeable people, both capable, given the opportunity, of stirring up little-man passion, and both with a vested interest in co-operation and in presenting themselves as co-operative. If we do have a federal election in 2011, I do hope both would commit themselves, in Ontario, to a full year of campaigning: really, Layton can only help Horwath and Horwath can only help Layton. I think the non-right in this country regularly shoots itself in the foot by sniping each other instead of going for the prize of siphoned-off conservative votes, but since both Liberal parties could really see themselves bottoming out this year, both branches of the NDP would be silly not to present themselves as the alternative. Populism, that one and only tried-and-tested way for the left and right in Canada to circumvent the Liberals and steal votes directly from each other, doesn't play as well in Ontario (except perhaps in the north and Oshawa) as it does in much of the rest of the country. So attacking the Liberals it's going to have to be. And while that gnawing sense of anxiety that exists among New Democrats that attacking Liberals elects conservatives will certainly not go away, I have to imagine New Democrats across the province would relish more than a little the chance to take Messrs. McGuinty and Ignatieff down a rung or two.

Related articles

• McGuinty's Liberals close in on Tories: poll (nationalpost.com)
• McGuinty won't commit to full term if re-elected (ctv.ca)
• Departure of 9 Liberal MPPs a problem for McGuinty (theglobeandmail.com)
• An election, yes, but much else besides (theglobeandmail.com)
• McGuinty, Hudak held secret talks week before Twitter ruse (thestar.com)
• Union ads attack McGuinty, Hudak (thestar.com)
• Beware of politicians offering HST cut: McGuinty (thestar.com)

Progressive Talking Point: The Game-Changer

There's been a fair amount of talk lately about the 'game-changer', a big event that could alter the Canadian political scene, shake it out of its statis: presumably to the benefit of the non-Conservative parties in Canada.

A lot has revolved in one way or another about co-operation or co-option between the Liberals and the NDP or other non-Conservative parties. Stephen Harper is so acutely aware of this that he takes every opportunity he's presented to sound off on the evils of parties working together.

He knows more than a little about this. If anyone in Canada knows what a threat to the staus quo inter-party co-operation can truly be, it's Stephen Harper (or maybe Paul Martin). It's strange to see Harper, perhaps the most mercurial and divisive politician in Canadian history, as in any way a 'force of unity', but to the political right in Canada, he has been exactly that, both in his involvement in the initial creation of the Conservative Party and, more importantly, in the subsequent years as its leader.

There was a time, not too long ago politically, when the animosity between the Reform Party and the Progressive Conservatives was palpably strong. When initial 'unite the right' debate occurred in the aftermath of the 1993 election, polls showed perhaps unsurprisingly that more PCs would vote for the Liberals than would vote for a united PC/Reform party. yet more surprisingly, polls showed that a majority of Reform supporters said the same thing (perhaps, in their case, ironically).

The nineties tempered that opinion, and the last decade has encouraged Conservatives to sweep that opinion entirely under the carpet. For better or for worse, political power has turned the Conservatives into a party with an amazingly impressive image of solidarity. It's to Stephen Harper's credit that he's managed to keep these disparate threads together.

But Stephen Harper's not going to be around forever. One wonders when Harper will step down as leader of the CPC. It's an unknown: it's not something the party seems to want, and it's not something Harper seems to want. But it's got to happen sooner or later. And just as Mulroney's unstable coalition of disparate interests fell apart so spectacularly... well, I don't think that'll happen, but I do think we'll see a schism reappearing in the party.

I don't want to say west vs. east. I don't want to say Blue Tory vs. Red Tory. I don't want to say Reform vs. PC. But these three really do overlap, in a way it's foolish to deny. I think that to a certain extent both sides feel they've compromised, for the good of the party. Objectively, it feels from the outside as if most of that compromise has been from the Red Tory side, but that's really just appearances: in certain key areas, harper has driven his party far away from the Reform ideals which he once touted.

I think it's a fair bet that any post-Harper leadership convention would see at least one candidate from either camp, and would most probably end up a showdown between the two main forces. One reason Maxime Bernier is so frequently mentioned as a possible successor, apart of course from the fact that he's from Québec, is the fact that he represents in many ways an alternative to this dynamic: he's tough to pin down on the Red-Blue Conservative spectrum and in some ways is a successor to the Créditiste tradition that at one point in time made unlikely allies of Albertans and Québécois. He was a member of neither pre-merger party.

But that may not happen. And if it does happen, one wonders how far the dyed-in-the-wool Reformers that still make up the main organisational body of the party in Western Canada will go in supporting a Québécois.

Atlantic Canada will be interesting to watch. At the moment, Atlantic Canada is the only region in the country where the Liberals are leading. They were also the only region in Canada in 1997 where the PCs led in the election. Both of these stats say the same thing: Blue Toryism does not go far in the Maritimes. It's been a long time since the Atlantic Provinces have mattered at all in Canadian politics, and one doesn't get the feeling Stephen Harper loses too much sleep at night wondering what they think of him in Halifax, but they are important enough to shake up a leadership convention, especially if Peter MacKay chose to run.

If MacKay did run, and if he faced a Reform-minded candidate from the West (ideally someone complaining that Harper had moved the party too far away from its core values), one really wonders what would happen to the party. Ontario and Québec would be crucial - and particularly in Ontario, Conservatives might be reminded of the fact that they support a party built around two poles one of which they don't support very much (in Ontario, pre-merger, Reform-minded people were distrustful of PCs and vice-versa). The fight in Ontario would be largely urban vs. rural, as it might also be in Québec.

I really don't know who would win. It might be an avowed peacemaker seeking to carry on Harper's successful tightrope-walking act. But if it isn't, and even perhaps if it is, it'll leave suddenly a good number of traditional conservative people newly alienated by 'their party'.

The fray would really shake up the Conservative Party. To a certain extent, this ought to mean nothing to progressives, as a good working definition for 'progressive' could perhaps be 'someone who would never under any circumstances vote Conservative'. But it would certainly make Canadian politics interesting again. The Liberals, as is their nature, would redefine themselves accordingly, shifting to a more Ignatieff-right to sweep up disaffected Red Tories should a Blue Tory win (I can picture Ignatieff on a podium praising Robert Stanfield) or shifting to a more Dion-left should a Red Tory win. Everyone to the left of the Liberals ought to spend a while just sitting back and enjoying the chaos.

Progressive Talking Points: Winnipeg North

I didn't want to label this a "Progressive Talking Point", but I guess it is one. It's a starting point anyway, for the concept of 'vote splitting' is something that comes up again and again on the left. There's a certain madness to the concept that the Left is losing seats to vote-splitting, in that people are usually referring to the combined NDP-Liberal vote when they talk about it.

Gatineau in 2004: The Liberals take the seat with 42% to the Bloc's 40%, but if you combine the Bloc, the NDP and the Greens, you'd get 49% and a win for the Left. That's vote splitting.

The four by-elections held yesterday had absolutely no vote-splitting: they were about as bipartisan as they get. Scarily so, in fact. Some numbers:

• Vaughan: 96% of the vote to the top two candidates (CPC & Libs)
• Winnipeg North: 87% of the vote to the top two candidates (Libs & NDP)
• Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette: 83% of the vote to the top two candidates (CPC & NDP)
• Kamouraska-Témiscouata: 73% of the vote to the top two candidates: (PQ & PLQ)

The provincial by-election is the only exception, with the ADQ putting on a respectable showing as a third-party candidate. The federal elections were shocking. Look at Vaughan: 96%. Even American elections are more multipartisan than that. Interesting that the three ridings all featured two different players in the top-three, though for our purposes what that primarily shows is that the NDP is much more of a factor in Manitoba than in Ontario. The NDP should be deeply worried by Vaughan. Not like they had a chance at winning it, but to be a mere fringe... That hurts.

It hurts, but not as much as losing Winnipeg North. I found myself looking at the history of the riding, and I have to say I'm amazed. Winnipeg North might just be the most left-wing riding in the country. How left-wing is it? Well, if you want to talk 'vote splitting', have a look at these numbers from 1940:

• Liberals: 40.9%
• CCF: 35.3%
• Communists: 16.7%
• National Government (Conservatives): 7.1%

 The CCF (predecessor to the NDP) lost, but (a) because 17% of the vote went to a party to their left, and (b) to the Liberals, not the Tories, who could only muster 7% of the vote, even with their hubris-filled jingoistic wartime rename.

The CCF candidate, A. A. Heaps, was the incumbent. In the previous election, 1935, he won with 42.2%, but the Communist candidate took 25.4%. The Liberals served as the main party of the non-left (relatively speaking), with 29.3% of the vote, and the only actual party of the right, Social Credit, managed a mere 3.2%. the Conservatives didn't even bother to contest the riding.

In 1945, with A. A. Heaps having stood down, the CCF held the seat and the Communists came second. Consider that for a moment, as WWII was ending, Winnipeg North was a battleground between Socialists and Communists. The other parties were mere runners-up.

1945 is a long time ago. yet, excepting only four elections in the 26 previous general elections, going all the way back to 1925, Winnipeg North has been reliably CCF/NDP. Before even the CCF existed, they were CCF, electing Heaps as a "Labour Party" candidate. The closest the NDP have in this country to a 'safe riding', and they've lost it to a Liberal. How much does that matter? It's tough to tell. It was the NDP's to lose, but the Battle of the Kevins was pitted between a star Kevin for the Liberals and a relatively unknown Kevin for the NDP. Things could change once again, and remarkably soon perhaps if we're looking at a spring election. So this might be just an occassional blip in the trend. But if the NDP really have lost Winnipeg North, what hope do they truly have?

Related articles

• "Byelections 2010: No trends, just some stuff that happened" and related posts (bcinto.blogspot.com)
• Fantino wins Vaughan byelection in close finish (thestar.com)
• Vaughan chooses new rep in one of three byelections (ctv.ca)
• Politicians take away little from by-elections (theglobeandmail.com)
• Byelection wins endorse Tory agenda, PM says (ctv.ca)
• Vaughan by-election loss adds to Ignatieff's woes (theglobeandmail.com)
• In the by-elections' aftermath, the parties spin (theglobeandmail.com)
• Byelections may fortell full vote (news.nationalpost.com)
• Byelections could set political agenda in Parliament (ctv.ca)
• Tories hold Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette (cbc.ca)
• Leaders spin byelection results in opposite directions (canada.com)

Progressive Talking Point: Saskatchewan

When the Conservative Party was founded in 2002, the House of Commons still reflected the results of it 2000 election. In 2000, the Canadian Alliance, successor to the Western populist Reform Party, had taken 10 of 14 seats in Saskatchewan, leaving the remaining seats equally divided between the Liberals and the NDP at two apiece. In the three elections since the formation of a united right-wing party, the NDP have not been able to take even a single seat in Saskatchewan.

Is this surprising? By now we've conditioned ourselves to think not, to think that the great expanses that lie between Northern Ontario and coastal BC are a socially- and financially-conservative 'heartland' for the Conservatives. This simplification is not only dangerously simple-minded but is also, I wager, a big part of the problem we're facing these days.

In 1945, the first post-war election, the Liberals swept the wartime Conservatives out, with a minority government much more comfortable than our current one. They took 118 of 245 seats, in a dizzyingly complex parliament where elected MPs wore one of eleven different designations. The Progressive Conservatives, humbled at only 66 seats, formed the opposition and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the avowedly socialist party-of-the-left, took 28 seats.

Nothing that radical, when we look at it like this: numbers we might recognise from the Trudeau or Chrétien years really. But we need to look closer. Specifically, we need to zoom in on Saskatchewan, where the CCF had recently won the provincial election, the first democratically-elected socialist government in North America. Where the CCF took fully 18 of 21 seats with 44.4% of the vote. Though it failed to manifest, 1945 was seen as a potential breakthrough for the CCF. It was expected they could take upwards of 100 seats and maybe even form a minority government. 28 seats seems like small potatoes, but they had won only eight last time out, so however you look at it, it was still a victory.

28 seats. And 18, almost two-thirds of them, were from Saskatchewan. In 1945, the voice of socialism in Canada sounded from Saskatchewan.

To understand what's happening to the left in Canada, it's vitally important that we consider Saskatchewan. 65 years is ancient history, but the last time the NDP led Saskatchewan in popular vote and in elected MPs was in 1988, when they took 10 in 14 Saskatchewan seats. Hardly ancient history.

1988. 22 years ago, and an election, with retrospect, filled with 'lasts' for Canadian history. Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives won their second election, built on a brilliant big-tent vision that united alienated Westerners with alienated Québecois, catering to the Conservatives' traditional moneyed power centres in cities and in Eastern Canada while doing a good job attracting the populist vote too. Mulroney's vision for the country might have been skewed, but his vision for his party was without parallel. To the point that four years before that, in Orwell's 1984, his PCs won the popular vote in every single province in Canada. This remarkable mandate came closest to being broken in - where? I bet you can guess by now.

In 1984, the PCs took nine in fourteen Saskatchewan seats. The NDP took the other five, with the Liberals in the middle of a 19-year stretch where they failed to take a single Saskatchewan seat. Yet the PCs did it with 41.7% of the Saskatchewan vote, the lowest number of any of the ten provinces of Canada, and a mere 3.3% above their NDP numbers.

In 1945, Saskatchewan was the central point of socialism in the whole of North America. In 1984, Saskatchewan was the one province that came closest to resisting the Conservative wave that flooded Canada from the USA and the UK, where Reagan and Thatcher primed us for our own Mulroney.
In 2008, thirteen of fourteen Saskatchewan seats went Conservative. Saskatchewan was one of only two provinces in the country not to elect a single NDP MP. Polls, which combine Saskatchewan and Manitoba, at times show Conservative support in the Prairies to top even their numbers in 'Fortress Alberta'.

What in the world is going on here? And why aren't we talking about it? It's one thing for Canada's progressives to write off a province (and that's bad enough), but to write off the historical heartland of our entire movement? It's just ridiculous. Why has Saskatchewan abandoned the left? And why has the left abandoned Saskatchewan?

Demographically, it's easy to guess. the CCF and the NDP after them were for years seen as a Western party. It's a bit of a simplification to say Westerners like to vote for Westerners, but there's at least a kernel of truth to it. In their Western Canadian power bases, the CCF/NDP frequently adopted a man-in-the-street approach, at times 'us-against-them' rhetoric, at times an approach characterised as 'folksy'. Western and populist: it made a nice contrast with 'Eastern and élitist', a phrase which pretty much always defines the Liberals and quite frequently defined the rather more fluid Progressive Conservative party. Western and populist: exactly what Harper's party is seen as being today.

This is not to suggest that this is how the NDP should have remained. Obviously success in educated urban circles and success east of Manitoba are of critical importance for any party interested in taking the reins of power, and it would be ridiculous to suggest that in any way NDP successes in, say, Montréal or Nova Scotia are things to be upset about. But in crossing those divides, the NDP might well have created a schism within itself, one pitting Western and/or rural New Democrats against Eastern and/or urban ones. This schism, if indeed it exists, is what makes Conservative strategists' mouths water, as we recently saw with the long-gun registry debacle. For this schism, if it really exists, could spell the end of the NDP as a force in politics and could entrench the Conservatives as the sole party that matters in the western half of the country.

It's obviously more than this, though. I've been speaking quite superficially, and I can't see Saskatchewan being such a socialist mainstay for generations if people were reacting merely to the appearance and ignoring the content. It must be that the people of Saskatchewan so supported the CCF/NDP because they agreed with what they had to say. Is it possible that they do not anymore?

The changeover was not immediate. 1993 will be remembered as perhaps the most important election in Canadian history: the watershed that saw the birth of two new forces in Canadian politics, the Reform Party and the Bloc Québecois, that saw the near destruction of two old forces, the Progressive Conservatives and the New Democrats, and that saw the beginning of a decade-plus reign by the Liberals, Canada's only 'national party'. Our political scene today looks little like it did in 1993, but it is ultimately rooted in 1993. Another difference between then and now? Saskatchewan again.

Reform used the slogan, "The West wants in!" Its present status as Canada's governing party notwithstanding, Reform was born as an explicitly regional party. And they got 52 seats, 51 of those west of Ontario. Yet in Saskatchewan, they got a mere 0.6% more of the vote than the NDP and one seat fewer (the Liberals beat both of them). Reform/Alliance/Conservatives in their most explicitly Western and most explicitly populist failed to move the people of Saskatchewan much.

What has happened has happened since then. And again I'm not going to pretend that the issues don't matter: quite obviously they do. But I think it matters that to a certain extent your average Saskatchewan voter inclined to seeing the world as 'us vs. them' would at one point in time see the NDP as inherently 'one of us' but would perhaps now see the NDP as 'one of them'. For whatever reason, the people of Saskatchewan may no longer feel that the NDP knows them, understands them or represents them in any meaningful way. They may feel that have more in common with the Conservative Party than with the New Democrats. And if this is really true, and if it is a permanent shift, then the repercussions could be dire for the NDP. After all, if a party of the left is not seen as a 'party of the people', then what use are they? What do they contribute to the national political discourse? And how can they ever hope to take the reins of power?

Related articles

• Potash approval would be wind in NDP sails, pollster says (theglobeandmail.com)
• Price to be paid over potash, Sask. NDP warns (cbc.ca)
• Tories, Liberals stuck in 'trench warfare:' Poll (canada.com)
• Potash rejection a triumph of politics over principle (theglobeandmail.com)
• Ignatieff accuses PM of alienating Western provinces on Potash (theglobeandmail.com)

Progressive Talking Point: Rob Ford's Davenport

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I've been thinking a lot about the left wing in Canada lately. I think I'd like to write a comprehensive 'action plan' for the Left (not that I am vain enough to think it would be considered), but it would be a lengthy work-in-progress, obviously. Something requiring rather more time than I'm able to give. In the meantime, I thought I'd start including some 'talking points' - notes, in effect, for such a grand composition. Bite-size observations or idea relating to the Left and its role in Canada.


I'd like to start with what I believe is a widely-misunderstood phenomenon: Rob Ford's electoral victory in Toronto. I think it's every bit as newsworthy as people make it out to be. I think it says a lot about a paradigmatic shit in Toronto - and perhaps more generally in Canada. But now that the shock has faded, I'm beginning to think that Toronto is still Toronto, and Ford's victory is not the victory for urban conservatism that people would like to make it out to be.

Toronto has been a vitally important line of defence against the encroachment of Harper's Conservatives in recent years. The 2008 election brought a Conservative minority with 143 of 308 seats, but of Toronto's 22 seats, 20 went Liberal and 2 went NDP. A Torontoless Canada would have returned a rather confusing situation where the Conservatives had won exactly 50% of 286 ridings. A majority... er, I think. I don't know how that one would work.

What I want to say is that I don't believe the 416 is ready to jump onto Harper's train any time soon. I think Tim Hudak will win seats in the 416, and I think a seat or two might drift blue federally, but what I mean is that the 47% of Torontonians who voted for Ford are by no means preparing to cast their votes for formalised conservative parties any time soon. What we need to see is that the 'anger' or whatever it was that pushed Ford over the top was based more on frustration with conventional politics and with a sense of 'entitlement' (and, importantly, élitism) than any real interest in American-style small-government politics. I would bet that if Ford made half of the visible service cuts he's talked about making, Torontonians would be up in arms, even in the suburbs.


I found it interesting to consider one of the Old Toronto wards that 'went Ford': Ward 17, the northern half of Davenport. It was hardly a landslide, at 41.7% not even a majority, but clearly a plurality. As one of only a scant few (three if memory serves) Old Toronto wards to give Ford more votes than Smitherman, it seems like a useful focus for the rightward shift in Torontonian politics, right?

Well... inasmuch as you can quantify it, the leftmost candidate for councillor, Jonah Schein, lost - with a healthy percentage of votes, but a loss nevertheless. To whom? To incumbent Cesar Palacio, who supported Pantalone. That's right: the more conservative of the two main candidates supported Pantalone. That's the kind of ward we're talking about here. The third-place finisher, Tony Letra, wasn't even a Ford follower, being roughly a Smithermanesque centrist. So one of the few Old Toronto wards that supported Ford didn't even have a local candidate on the right of the spectrum. There didn't seem to be a need for one.

With its Siamese-twin southern ward, which turfed out the incumbent councillor and went for Smitherman, the federal and provincial Davenport riding is hardly a hotbed for conservatism: federally, the Liberal candidate won and the NDP candidate came second, with a combined total of 77.1% of the vote. The local Conservative candidate managed a mere 11.0%, beating the Green candidate by less than 200 votes. Provincially in 2007 the situation was even more extreme, with the Liberal winner and the NDP second-place finisher tallying a remarkably similar 77.8% of the vote and the PC candidate finishing last in the riding, scraping a mere 9.5% of the vote, and even that was a two-percent increase from the laughable 7.5% the PCs pulled in in 2003.

 This is the new urban conservatism? I mean really... trends change, but could you imagine a riding like this, which federally has been Liberal since 1962, ready to jump into Steven Harper's waiting arms?

Let's be realistic: this is not a conservative part of town. This is not a place where what appealed about Rob Ford was his commitment to laissez-faire economics. If we hope to make any sense at all of Ford's victory and what it means to the Left in Canada, we have to stop pretending that we know why people voted Ford and start trying to learn why they did. And this neighbourhood, where the final two streets on Davenport Road travelling westbound are called, respectively, Miller St. and Ford St., is the place to start.

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