All posts in Wedge Politics

How far will Prime Minister Stephen Harper go with separatists to hang onto power?

by David Climenhaga on June 26, 2012 in Canadian Constitution, Canadian Politics, Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair, Wedge Politics with 4 Comments

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, left, with Parti Quebecois Leader Pauline Marois … or something very much like that. The politicians pictured above may not be exactly as illustrated in real life. Below: Thomas Mulcair, Jack Layton.

Now that our sullen neo-conservative prime minister is on speaking terms once again with former PM Brian Mulroney – in desperate hopes of staving off an eventual electoral disaster in Quebec at the hands of the federalist NDP leader, Thomas Mulcair – one wonders how long it will be before the Harper Government sits down to sup with separatists.

Sure enough, it was only a few hours after Mr. Harper’s meeting with Mr. Mulroney that Industry Minister Christian Paradis, the PM’s “Quebec lieutenant,” had proclaimed a rapprochement between the Harper Conservatives and the separatist Parti Quebecois. Details, it is reported, will follow.

What a catastrophe from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s perspective that he must eventually face an opponent who is both immensely popular in Quebec and a demonstrably a committed federalist!

Indeed, it can be persuasively argued that Mr. Mulcair is a much better federalist than Mr. Harper. Mr. Mulcair, after all, took a chance on the federal NDP at time when being anything but a sovereignist in Quebec looked like a recipe for electoral suicide. Mr. Harper is well known as a signatory to a sovereignist screed in Alberta that refuses to go peaceably down the Memory Hole, despite the best efforts of the Conservative media establishment here and elsewhere.

So now Mr. Harper, after long rejecting Mr. Mulroney as a political embarrassment over the Airbus Affair, has come hat in hand to his elder for some tips on how to make Quebec behave itself.

And one of the key secrets to Mr. Mulroney’s electoral success, as is well known, was his willingness to welcome Quebec nationalists into the federal Conservative fold.

This is not to suggest that Mr. Mulroney was making common cause with the separatist movement in Quebec for cynical reasons. On the contrary, the Conservative apologist Robert Fulford likely had it right when he stated that Mr. Mulroney “set out to bring permanent internal peace to Canada by dissolving the arguments for separatism.”

This is what drove the genuinely patriotic Mr. Mulroney’s efforts to recognize the reality that Quebec constitutes a “distinct society” within Canada, which culminated in the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords that had failed so irrevocably by 1992.

It was English Canada’s deep discomfort with recognizing that reality – with Mr. Mulroney’s vision of Canada as two nations in one country – that provided the wedge for the Reform Party under Preston Manning not only to defeat Mr. Mulroney’s constitutional proposals in a national referendum, but to set up the takeover by the Reform Party of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada in 2003.

There is no little irony in the reality these were the circumstances that allowed the rise of the American-influenced and ideologically fundamentalist wing of Canada’s conservative movement – eventually led by the steely eyed Mr. Harper after Mr. Manning and Stockwell Day proved insufficiently hard edged – to form the government.

And now the grip on the country by Mr. Harper and his fellow ideologues is weakening, in no small part because their neoconservative nostrums are so unconvincing to the people of Quebec.

But if Mr. Mulroney only welcomed Quebec nationalists to get them to become Canadian nationalists, can we trust Mr. Harper to be motivated by the same thing?

This seems unlikely. Mr. Harper’s (neo) Conservative Party, after all, is the one that has been willing to slap Quebec at every turn and on every issue – whether it’s support for the arts, the long-gun registry or military adventures abroad – the better to drive effective electoral wedges within English Canada.

This was the party that was prepared, for example, to scream that former Liberal leader Stephane Dion and the late NDP leader Jack Layton were “selling out to separatists” when they dared in 2008 to talk of a democratic coalition that would depend on votes from the sovereignist Bloc Quebecois, a story that has now been mostly purged from the Internet.

And this was the party whose MPs shouted down Quebec MP Gilles Duceppe, then the leader of the BQ, by singing O Canada when he tried to speak about the coalition in Parliament – a crude riposte that, quite literally, must have been music to the ears of Quebec’s die-hard separatists.

“This deal that the leader of the Liberal Party has made with the separatists is a betrayal of the voters of this country, a betrayal of the best interests of our economy, a betrayal of the best interests of our country, and we will fight it with every means that we have,” said Mr. Harper at the time. …But that was then.

Do you seriously think that facing a popular national NDP leader from Quebec with impeccable federalist credentials, Mr. Harper won’t take greater risks, drive deeper wedges, make more dangerous promises, make deals with anyone, in his efforts to keep his increasingly unpopular government afloat?

Yesterday’s grainy attack ad on Mr. Mulcair – almost a parody of itself – was one part of Mr. Harper’s strategy. Seeking out strange bedfellows is obviously another.

So will Mr. Harper sup with the separatists? It is said here he is bound to. And don’t count on him using a long spoon!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Wedge politics, not religious freedom, behind Danielle Smith’s refusal to apologize

by David Climenhaga on June 14, 2012 in Alan Hunsperger, Alison Redford, Danielle Smith, Edmonton Pride Festival, Mitt Romney, Rob Anderson, Wedge Politics, Wildrose Party with 4 Comments
Police officers walk in Saturday’s Pride Parade. Below: Danielle Smith, Alan Hunsperger.

Since she won’t apologize for remarks made by one of her candidates during the recent election campaign that many Albertans thought were offensive and anti-gay, Wildrose Party Leader Danielle Smith found herself trapped this week between a rock and a hard place.

The leader of Alberta’s Opposition party desperately wants to leave behind the brouhaha created by unsuccessful Edmonton-South West candidate Alan Hunsperger, who imprudently left a blog post lying around the Internet before last April’s election that expressed the view all gays are doomed to spend eternity in the Lake of Fire if they don’t repent.

To do so, Ms. Smith tried Tuesday to “mend fences,” in the words of a local newspaper, with Alberta’s gay community by attending the Edmonton Pride Festival Police Chief’s Reception, a low-key event that involved the kind of imagery the Wildrose Party is comfortable with – squad cars and people in uniform.

But members of the gay community, including some of the police officers at the reception, continue to make it clear they expect her to apologize for the remarks made by Pastor Hunsperger, who is a minister in a conservative Protestant congregation that holds homosexuality to be a violation of God’s law and apparently spends lot of time agonizing about it.

Ms. Smith refuses to say she’s sorry, insisting that to do so would amount to an attack on Pastor Hunsperger’s freedom of speech and religion.

As a result, the issue won’t go away, creaking like a rusty hinge every time Ms. Smith opens the gate in that fence she’s trying to mend – to the absolute delight of the Progressive Conservative Party of Premier Alison Redford, who used the original controversy to derail the Wildrose campaign days before the April 23 election.

So on Tuesday, Ms. Smith tried to sidestep the question of an apology by telling reporters that if anyone wants atonement for Pastor Hunsperger’s remarks, they’ll have to go to Pastor Hunsperger. “I think it’s important for us to have the conversation about religious freedom, freedom of speech and equality rights, because I think that’s really what this comes down to,” she extemporized, according to the Edmonton Journal.

As is often the case when the political right starts letting off steam about our fundamental freedoms, though, this issue isn’t really about freedom of speech or religion at all.

Virtually all Albertans agree with Ms. Smith that Pastor Hunsperger has a fundamental right to believe anything he chooses is sinful. As we know, there enough sins in the Old Testament of the Bible to consign us all to the lake of fire – apparently including wearing a wool suit with a linen collar! (Leviticus 19:19.)

The question is really whether holding those views and talking publicly about them in a casual and hurtful way made Pastor Hunsperger an appropriate candidate for the party, and whether his doing so indicated the party holds homophobic views – which, obviously, is precisely what a lot of Albertans concluded.

Imagine if the bee in Pastor Hunsperger’s theological bonnet had been that members of some other branch of Christianity – say, Catholics, or Baptists – were sinners bound for Hell. Would Ms. Smith be prepared then to apologize to the Catholics, or the Baptists, to save her electoral skin? Of course she would!

As a matter of fact, quite a lot of Christians hold exactly such views. Consider the controversy in the United States among evangelical Christians about the Mormon beliefs of Republican candidate Mitt Romney, which are presumably the same as those held by Wildrose House Leader Rob Anderson. And it’s certainly consistent with Christian theology to believe non-Christians are bound for an unhappy eternal destination.

But you can count on it that supporters of a right-wing party like the Wildrose would never have gotten their knickers in a twist about that they way they have about homosexuality. It’s reasonable of us to ask why.

What’s more, almost all the Christians associated with parties of the right like Ms. Smith’s seem completely disengaged from many of the teachings of the nominal head of their church. For example, “And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24.) If that’s not a clarion call for fair progressive taxation as a social good, in this world and the next, I don’t know what is!

Verily, verily, I say unto thee, the real reason for Ms. Smith’s predicament – and for her reluctance to say she’s sorry – is her party’s practice of wedge politics, not freedom of religion.

The Wildrose Party embarked on a strategy of wedge politics designed to separate groups of voters traditionally associated with Ms. Redford’s PC Party and drive them toward Wildrose candidates. For a time, at least until the discovery of Pastor Hunsperger’s Epistle to the Albertans, it seemed to be working spectacularly.

One of the groups they tried to appeal to was religious fundamentalists with strongly hostile views about sexual minorities.

The problem now faced by Ms. Smith, who I am sure is not personally homophobic, is that she can’t say sorry to the gay community without infuriating a significant portion of her party’s most loyal base, religious fundamentalists so carefully and discreetly cultivated before and during the election campaign.

It is said here Wildrose opposition to public payments for gender reassignment surgery, another sore point with the same community, is mud from the same muddy spring.

That’s the thing about wedge politics. It’s a two-edged sword, and sometimes it cuts on the side its wielder didn’t intend it to!

This must be very frustrating to a market fundamentalist like Ms. Smith who really, one strongly suspects, doesn’t care a fig about fundamental religious issues.

But it’s pretty hard to feel much sympathy for her predicament. She got herself there. Now she’s going to have to get herself out.

It seems like Pastor Hunsperger won’t be much help in that endeavour.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.