All posts tagged Conservatives

Rumoured Tory poll showing Alberta NDP surge: Orange Wave, or just orange hair dye?

by David Climenhaga on December 14, 2011 in Uncategorized with 4 Comments
Orange Wave, or just orange dye? Below: Alberta Premier Alison Redford with her Chief of Staff, Stephen Carter (photo borrowed from Calgary Herald); NDP Leader Brian Mason.

What’s with the recent buzz there’s a private Conservative poll that shows NDP support surging in the Capital Region?

Is this a real Orange Wave, or is it just hair dye?

Specifically, is it orange hair dye selectively applied by professional creators of new political realities? Or is it evidence of a verifiable trend finally reaching critical mass? Or a little of both?

Here’s what is known and verifiable: At least eight political polls were conducted in Alberta in 2011, some of better quality than others. Together, they demonstrated the NDP to be on a gradual but steady upward trend in support province-wide. There are said to be a couple more private polls out there that show much the same thing.

The first of the eight, conducted by Trend Research Inc. just after New Year 2011, put NDP support at 8 per cent. The most recent poll, done by Environics Research Group between Nov. 4 and 8, put the New Democrats at 14 per cent. The best poll from the NDP perspective, done by the Citizen Society Research Lab on Oct. 1 and 2, showed the party with province-wide support at 16.3 per cent. The latter is the only one that placed the NDP ahead of the Wildrose Party, which it located at 16.1 per cent.

If it’s true that the NDP and the Wildrose Party are at about the same level of support, this works better for the New Democrats because of the way the votes split in the regions where both parties are strong.

If Calgary-area voters are roughly divided 60-40 in favour of Progressive Conservative Premier Alison Redford’s PCs over Danielle Smith’s Wildrose Party, with the NDP and the Liberals hardly registering in the region, the Conservatives can sweep most ridings thereabouts.

If Edmonton support shows big fissures on the right between the Tories and the Wildrose, the NDP led by Brian Mason can do well in several of the area’s ridings where it has strong support. But NDP success depends on a strong Wildrose showing.

Now, we also know that days before the second Conservative leadership poll in early October, Premier Redford’s campaign effectively used an unexpected Calgary Herald-Environics poll that put her in second-place behind front-runner Gary Mar. This in effect created a new reality that motivated her supporters and gave her sufficient momentum to push her over the top.

The Sept. 13 poll was controversial because it was based on a list of 22,000 card-carrying PC Party members that probably ought not to have been given to the polling company. The next day, Conservative Party President Bill Smith issued a stinging rebuke on the party’s website of whoever allowed the “unauthorized and inappropriate use” of the party membership list. That commentary has since been removed from the Tory website, but may still be viewed here.

No one knows who gave the list to the Calgary Herald to pass on to Environics. Since Ms. Redford became premier, the party’s concern about the leak seems to have evanesced.

We also know that back in the fall 2010, the come-from-behind campaign of Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi gained sudden momentum and credibility from an unexpected September Calgary Herald poll that put Mr. Nenshi in third place.

And for what it’s worth, we know that Stephen Carter, who today is Premier Redford’s chief of staff, played pivotal roles in both campaigns.

Can we conclude from this that the two campaigns created their own futures through polling? Not really. But it would be fair to say that both campaigns made effective use of unexpected poll results to springboard their candidates from behind.

This time, even if New Democrat poll numbers have increased startlingly, it would be pretty difficult for Mr. Carter or anyone else to portray the Alberta NDP as riding the crest of an Orange Wave so big it could threaten to dislodge the mighty Tory behemoth.

Still, good NDP numbers could motivate Conservative campaign workers to take the election effort seriously in the Capital Region without giving credibility to the Wildrose Party, which one suspects the Conservatives still view as their Main Enemy. If so, this might parallel the situation in last May’s federal election in which the federal Conservatives focused on the Liberals and ignored the surging NDP.

I asked Mr. Carter about the private Tory poll rumour, and he chose a Delphic response: “Ahh, polling. Yes. No. Absolutely. Sometimes.” File that under “would neither confirm nor deny.”

Conclusions? It’s too soon to tell.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The Wildrose Party’s Redford Files: Not nearly as funny as the first time…

by David Climenhaga on November 23, 2011 in Uncategorized with 6 Comments
The Redford Files website: evidence the Wildrose Alliance is on the ropes. Below, an image grabbed from the site.

If “the Redford Files” really are “authorized by the Wildrose Party,” as the blog-style attack website that appeared on the Internet a few days ago indicates, it is the best evidence yet the whole ramshackle far-right project is crumbling in the face of Premier Alison Redford’s Tory juggernaut.

The former Wildrose Alliance was never really the right-wing Prairie fire media made it out to be and its most devoted adherents sincerely believed after reading their own press clippings. But this little exercise in mean-spiritedness is nothing more than a puff of greasy smoke, a whiff of desperation.

The Wildrose Whatever’s game plan started to fall apart the day last January that Conservative premier Ed Stelmach announced he’d had enough and would pull the plug on politics. Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith and her closest advisors were gobsmacked, and the party’s rise in the polls, which was a real phenomenon though one that always came with a certain degree of exaggeration, never recovered or resumed. Nothing has changed since Ms. Redford succeeded Mr. Stelmach last month.

But this pathetic effort at RedfordFiles.ca – like the deceptive push poll the party financed last month – indicates Wildrose insiders now really fear their effort to move Alberta even farther to the right is on the ropes.

Cornered, they must have concluded their situation is so desperate they have no choice but to plumb the depths of the bag of dirty tricks given to right-wing operatives everywhere by such odious Republican strategists as Donald Segretti, Karl Rove and Grover Norquist.

Almost all political parties talk a good line about civility and generosity when things are going their way. It’s when they’re in a corner and feeling desperate that their true character is revealed. So neither the appearance in October of a thoroughly disreputable push poll, followed by the Redford Files website this month, are good indicators of the kind of character that underpins the Wildrose effort.

Indeed, RedfordFiles.ca is a blog-style pastiche of cheap shots stitched up like torn-up documents recovered from a garbage can and scotch-taped together for a scoop in a right-wing newspaper. What’s next, one wonders, a paranoid accusation that the thoroughly right-wing Ms. Redford is a secret Bolshevik? Oh, wait. That’s all but already on the site, whose anonymous author suggests the Conservative premier is “too RED for Alberta.” After that, Swift Boats for sure – or, in the case of the Wildrose Party, perhaps, Swift Bats.

In addition to its rather quaint attempt to red-bait the premier – here’s betting most Wildrose supporters nowadays identify the colour red with their beloved American Republicans – RedfordFiles.ca includes an obviously PhotoShopped image of Ms. Redford sitting with her controversial Chief of Staff Stephen Carter, tries to tie her to the Liberals (quelle horreur!) and (even worse, apparently) the NDP.

“Liberals feel at home in Redford caucus,” is today’s commentary on the return of Lethbridge-East MLA Bridget Pastoor to the party she started out with. “Federal NDP endorses Redford,” is yesterday’s posting, showing an image of a Tweet by Edmonton-Strathcona MP Linda Duncan suggesting Ms. Redford is adopting NDP polices.

Another post yesterday, in the style of a Western Wanted poster, accuses the premier of “total absence on the Keystone XL Pipeline … when her province needed her most.” Now, there are those of us who think the pipeline is not a particularly good idea, but one can hardly deny the premier’s frenetic efforts to sell it to the U.S. Administration of President Barack Obama, even if she was talking to the wrong politicians south of the Medicine Line.

In other words, RedfordFiles.ca is not only mean, it’s lame!

Just as they tried to brazen it out when caught using a push poll, if this should become controversial, count on the Wildrose Party to try to pass it off as just an exercise in good fun – sort of like the progressive blogs these normally tireless property rights advocates steal their best lines from. (Face it people, the “Redford Files” was funnier the first time, if I may say so myself.)

Actually, many of us in the centre and on the left had been hoping for a strong-enough Wildrose showing in the Edmonton area to split the right-wing vote and make a little room for an Orange Wave, or an orange ripple anyway.

If the Wildrose Party can’t do better than this, we may have to resign ourselves to another 40 years of Tory government!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

For the divisive, petty Harper Conservatives, no cause is too important for bickering

by David Climenhaga on November 12, 2011 in Uncategorized with 6 Comments
French-speaking troops of the Régiment de la Chaudière push inland from Juno Beach toward Bény-sur-Mer on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Below, Veterans Affairs Minister Steven Blaney, Bloc MP Louis Plamondon.

Why did Stephen Harper’s Conservatives refuse to allow Members of Parliament from the Bloc Quebecois and Green Party to pay tribute to Canada’s war dead in the House of Commons?

On Nov. 2, Veterans Affairs Minister Steven Blaney rose in the House of Commons to mark the start of Veterans Week, leading up to Remembrance Day. The Conservative MP for Lévis-Bellechasse gave a good speech in French and English that remarked on how Canada’s two founding nations were once enemies on the Plains of Abraham and later “united to fight for the common cause of peace and freedom.”

The francophone minister closed by asking his colleagues how they would remember Canada’s war dead, and thanking them for doing so.

Mr. Blaney’s generous remarks were followed in order of Parliamentary precedence by short speeches by Peter Stoffer, the NDP MP for Sackville-Eastern Shore, and Sean Casey, the Liberal MP for Charlottetown.

At this point, the Interim Bloc Leader Louis Plamondon, MP for Bas Richelieu-Nicolet-Becancour, rose and told the Speaker, “on behalf of the Bloc Québécois and all of its members, I would also like to pay tribute to our veterans. …”

Alas, this was the moment that the members of our majority government demonstrated the disgraceful pettiness and inexcusable divisiveness that characterizes Mr. Harper’s so-called Conservative Party.

Unfortunately in this particular circumstance, the Standing Orders of the House do not permit MPs who are not a member of an official party to speak on such occasions without the unanimous consent of all the MPs present. With four seats and just one seat in the House respectively, both the Bloc and Green caucuses are too small to be officially designated parties.

So went the debate, according to Hansard:

The Speaker: Does the House give unanimous consent?
Some hon. members: Agreed.
Some hon. members: No.
The Speaker: There is no consent.

I commend the rest of this short passage from Hansard to you, dear readers, because it illustrates so clearly how our great country is slipping off the tracks now that this small-minded Conservative majority has their hands on the throttle of the locomotive in Ottawa. Have we really come to a place where any Member of Parliament can’t give a heartfelt tribute to the Canadians who gave their lives in the service of their country? With Mr. Harper in charge, the answer is clearly yes.

Reading between the lines, one can hear the genuine shock at this pointless slight in Mr. Plamondon’s subsequent remarks. Yet, given the opportunity to grow up and act with a little decency, the Conservatives refused again.

This is another drip in what is starting to seem like a torrent of petty and not so petty slaps at Quebeckers and their representatives by this government, which loudly asserts a very American style of fake patriotism yet is incapable of putting genuine patriotism ahead of partisan gamesmanship even on the most non-partisan of occasions.

Naturally, our tame and cowardly English Canadian media didn’t bother to report this insult at all.

A couple of days ago, I asked my Conservative MP in writing if he could explain this. I also asked Edmonton-Centre MP Laurie Hawn, who seems to be the party’s main spokesman in this region nowadays. To me, it would have been useful to know even that these elected Alberta representatives disapproved of the calls of their caucus colleagues – after all, there is not much you can do to silence someone in a house of debate, and no one knows who shouted “No” beyond the fact they were “some hon. members.” Alas, neither Conservative MP has responded.

As long as his colleagues hold a majority in the House of Commons, I see little reason to hope that the openness of spirit Mr. Blaney showed in his speech can prevail. If it doesn’t, we should all fear for the future of our country.

I suggested in this space the other day that these Conservatives apparently see Quebec versus the rest of Canada as the biggest and most glorious wedge issue they’ve ever stumbled upon.

It almost seems, as other patriotic Canadians are coming to fear too, that these Tories would be happy to split Canada any which way to gain a partisan advantage.

This is no way to honour the men and women who sacrificed their lives for Canada, whether they spoke to one another in French or English.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Deconstructing the Liberals and other post-election puzzles

by David Climenhaga on May 4, 2011 in Uncategorized with 6 Comments
Whigs and Block-istes: Done like Liberals. Below: Michael Ignatieff, Jack Layton. The future belongs to the NDP.

Other than their wounded pride — and, as we all should know by now, pride goeth before destruction — it’s hard to see why so many Canadian Liberals are complaining so vociferously about the Conservative majority that resulted from the May 2 federal election.

After all, notwithstanding the L-Shaped Party’s longstanding habit of campaigning as if it were the NDP, it has long governed as if it were the Tories, and more recently as if it were the so-called Conservatives of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative-Reform-Alliance Party coalition.

So, aside from some charmingly progressive rhetoric at election time and a looser interpretation of the need for its MPs to stick to the party’s official talking points, it’s fair to ask what Liberal supporters are missing under Stephen Harper that wouldn’t have been provided by Paul Martin.

Cuts to social programs? Concentration of wealth? Six of one; half a dozen of the other! Or, more to the point, 167 of one (Harper in 2011); 168 of the other (Martin in 2004).

Yes, ordinary Canadians have cause to be gravely worried about what Prime Minister Harper will likely get up to now that he has a comfortable majority, notwithstanding his gentle-sounding day-after rhetoric. But, really people, is it all that different than what we could have expected from Michael Ignatieff with a similar Liberal majority?

Look, we’re all in agreement here: Dr. Ignatieff seems like a much nicer fellow than Mr. Harper, even if he did suffer from the common Harvard Ph.D.’s delusion that the rest of us were hanging on his every word just because his students used to take notes.

And we can agree that some of his election platform policies sounded pretty progressive – but then, so did Mr. Martin’s promise of a national child care program. And where did that one go? Other than the place all progressive sounding Liberal promises seem to go, that is – Zap! You’re frozen!

But when you get right down to where the rubber hits the road, there is no substantive difference between the policies the Conservatives now offer and those the late lamented Liberals would have been likely to deliver in the same circumstances.

Indeed, it may be the similarities, rather than the differences, that explain the prime minister’s irrational hatred for Dr. Ignatieff and Liberals, and his seemingly warmer feelings for Jack Layton and the NDP.

It is said here that a big part of the explanation for the Orange Wave that saw Canadians choose the New Democratic Party as the Official Opposition is that they wanted an opposition that actually opposes what the Harper government is likely to do. The only puzzling thing about this “shocking” development is that we Canadians took so long to get to it.

As re-elected Conservative Edmonton-Centre MP Laurie Hawn, getting it mostly right for once, put it in the wake of Monday’s election: “Canadians now have a clear choice, something that is right of centre and something clearly the left of centre.”

He exaggerates, of course, how far to the left the NDP under Mr. Layton really is, but we can almost forgive him that hyperbole under the circumstances. Because it is true, arguably for the first time since Confederation, that the Parliament of Canada now has an Opposition party that is in fact to the left of the governing party.

As frustrating as the next four years may be for progressive Canadians, who constitute the majority of citizens, in the long term that can only be a good thing.

The professional media and the political commentariat, steeped in generations of Liberal dominance, can barely come to terms with the notion that in Canada, just like the rest of the post-industrial West, the era of right-wing Liberal parties is almost as far gone as the age of Whiggery.

Come to think of it, the Whigs may have had a good idea or two – Down with the King! – but as a political movement they’re deader than the proverbial mackerel, just as the Liberals are today nothing more than a dead mackerel swimming.

Yet, steeped in the habits and delusions of the past, all the Canadian media can focus on is who the Liberals will choose to replace the hapless Dr. Ignatieff and how the party will reinvent itself.

Well, here’s a bulletin: the Liberals are not going to reinvent themselves, even with someone named Trudeau in the vanguard. They are done like dinner, thanks to Dr. Ignatieff’s incomprehensible campaign and the forces of history. They’ll no more recover from this blow than did the Progressive Conservatives, who notwithstanding the current governing party’s name were finished off by the combined efforts of Brian Mulroney, Preston Manning and Stephen Harper.

Ludicrously, professional pundits keep talking about how the NDP stole the progressive vote from the Liberals, as if the Liberals deserved it, allowing the Conservatives to triumph. In fact, it was the Liberals in their traditional campaign camouflage of mock progressives that did the vote splitting.

More sensibly, some Liberals – like former Ontario NDP premier Bob Rae – are talking about the need to merge with the NDP. But no one should imagine that such a merger could be on anyone’s terms but the NDP’s.

Indeed, the effects of vote splitting in 2011 notwithstanding, it is hardly necessary, since the Liberals are likely to wither away all on their own without help. Certainly, there will be no need for a hostile reverse takeover by the NDP like that the Reform Party used to permanently hijack the Progressive Conservatives.

So don’t cry for me, Argentina – even if we Canadian have to live like Argentines for a while… The future belongs to the NDP!

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

Surge of NDP tells a tale of commonsense, practical Canadians

by David Climenhaga on April 26, 2011 in Uncategorized with 2 Comments
The Orange Wave. Below: Jack Layton.

Now that professional pollsters are talking about Jack Layton and the New Democratic Party like giddy partisans spinning dreamy victory scenarios, we need to face up to the possibility that something of historic proportions really may be happening here.

Commentary on federal voting intentions in the EKOS-iPolitics.ca survey published by the Edmonton Journal yesterday evening raises for the first time in the mainstream media the hopeful prospect of a person called “Prime Minister Jack Layton.”

EKOS pollster Frank Graves is quoted by iPolitics as saying his firm’s latest polls results suggest the NDP could reach 100 seats on election day, a result he characterized as “breathtaking” and “astonishing.”

The survey of more than 3,000 Canadians shows 28 per cent of decided voters support the NDP, compared with 23.7 per cent who plan to vote Liberal. “The Conservatives hold less than a six-point lead, sitting with 33.7 per cent support with just one week to go before election day,” iPolitics says.

For those of us who have supported the New Democrats through many disappointments and lean times, and who know how formidable and unprincipled this party’s opponents can be, even saying such a thing aloud feels dangerous, especially when our angry, negative, neo-con prime minister is sounding confident.

But perhaps we will have to admit that our commonsensical Canadian neighbours are running well ahead of us this time and doing exactly what we’ve always said they ought – taking a serious look at the party with the hopeful and practical policies most likely to benefit ordinary Canadians, families and individuals, young and old alike.

It’s been observed elsewhere that Canadians have long made it clear to pollsters what they want from their government – fair public health care, respect for human rights, accessible unemployment insurance, access for their children to affordable post-secondary education, respect for the environment – and that these are the very policies the NDP has advocated more consistently and with more passion than any other party.

Instead, of course, we got Brian Mulroney’s “free trade” agreements and Stephen Harper’s cynical vote suppression strategies and Parliamentary prorogations. Instead we got Liberals who promised us the moon, and delivered policies identical to those of the Conservatives.

Still, given this history, it’s easy to understand why you can’t read a commentary on this phenomenon written from an NDP perspective without hearing qualifiers like, “if the NDP surge is real.”

Well, whatever happens on election day (and there’s another such qualifier), we can take it as given now that this surge in support is real enough, and that it is based in the good sense of very large numbers of Canadians in every corner of the country. As a consequence, the best thing we can do is to ensure our family, friends and neighbours get to the polls on May 2.

If nothing else, surely we can set aside the notion that by voting for the NDP instead of the Liberals we are somehow dangerously splitting the progressive vote in Canada.

Au contraire, it appears very clear now that in most places it’s a vote for the Liberals that constitutes a dangerous experiment in strategic voting that is more likely to help Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and their friends in high places than the ordinary Canadians whom the NDP represents.

If you want to defeat Prime Minister Harper, or hold him to a minority, the professional pollsters are telling us that the smart thing to do is to vote for Jack Layton and the NDP.

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

Speaking the unspeakable: Do Canadian voters really care about coalitions?

by David Climenhaga on March 29, 2011 in Uncategorized with 3 Comments
The coalition idea, as now perceived by the Canadian politeratti. Conservative election advertising may not be exactly as illustrated. Oh, wait! That’s Mr. Harper’s 2004 coalition idea!

According to the Canadian chattering classes, it’s the political sin that dares not speak its name! But does anyone else really care about coalitions any more?

And I’m not talking about the one Prime Minister Stephen Harper proposed to build with the Bloc Quebecois and the NDP back in 2004.

That’s mostly been consigned to the official Memory Hole, except at Canada’s only remaining non-neo-con daily newspaper, the Toronto Star. The Star will be punished, presumably, if Mr. Harper gets his majority.

Nor am I talking about Mr. Harper’s minority Parliaments, which from a commonsense perspective are nothing more than a species of coalition for the time they remain afloat.

For that matter, I’m not really talking about the coalition that never was, but which nevertheless looms large now on Canada’s political radar scope. That is to say, the would-be coalition of December 2008 between the Liberals under Stephane Dion and the New Democrats under Jack Layton, with the Bloc Quebecois cast as a flying buttress, supporting the rickety structure from the outside.

That one has relevance to this discussion because of the frenzied reaction to it by some voters drummed up by Mr. Harper’s Conservative Rage Machine in a moment of nearly hysterical fury at the thought that what they viewed as rightfully theirs might be snatched away by a perfectly democratic and Constitutional Parliamentary tactic.

The Canadian Tea Party Moment ginned up by Mr. Harper and tacitly encouraged by a Liberal MP named Michael Ignatieff, who was then eyeing his leader’s job, was what entrenched the idea of a Parliamentary coalition as the C-Word of Canadian politics. That is, the most obscene thing that could be uttered within our borders, something not suitable to be spoken aloud in the presence of small children, clergypeople or the faint-of-heart.

Indeed, the fear the word inspires in political circles is so great that we were able to witness the enjoyable spectacle of both Mr. Ignatieff and Prime Minister Harper uttering sputtering denials that they would ever contemplate such a thing, even if a willing electorate were to beg passionately for a governmental moment of national unity!

I can tell you with certainty that any time one mentions this word, even on a humble blog, the Rage Machine is turned as if with the flick of a switch, and reams of anonymous invective is sure to flow from the zitty-faced Tiny Tories who race to their laptops in the service of their party.

And I can speculate with reasonable confidence that the spooked leaders of any of the Opposition parties will likely be as displeased to see this topic publicly discussed as any of the dyspeptic teenagers employed by Mr. Harper’s campaign to fling ordure and opprobrium at the prime minister’s long list of enemies

But really, people, does the idea of a Parliamentary coalition matter a whit to Martha and Henry (et Martine et Henri) in their kitchens throughout the land, or is this notion that ordinary Canadians just hate coalitions just another peculiar weed that’s sprung up in the unwholesome soil and steamy climate of the Ottawa Valley?

Oh, sure, there’s probably a poll out there somewhere that supports this conclusion. But you can get any answer you want if you craft the appropriate Russian Ballot question – “Do you want a majority government or would you prefer to see demonic forces of anarchy and plague loosed upon the land?”

Is there a body of voters in Canada sufficiently large to sway a national election, but so disengaged by reality as to believe anything they are told in a TV clip that features a Conservative politician? Anything’s possible, I suppose, but you’ve gotta have some faith in your neighbours, not to mention the inability of Conservative provincial governments’ education policies to deliver the level of ignorance they seem to be aiming for!

I mean, really folks, surely by now it has sunk in to most Canadians that even if our American cousins don’t do it, politicians back in our Mother Country do it, upside down politicians in the antipodes do it, Mr. Harper’s Israeli friends do it, and even the Dutch do it … and the Dutch keep everything clean!

We’ve had a few years now to become used to this idea. Doesn’t it seem likely that among ordinary Canadians – if not the chattering classes and the professional politeratti – the whole idea of a coalition, and whether or not you have one, is a total non-issue?

Isn’t it probable that what Canadians really want from their government is that whoever gets elected to run the country simply makes things work?

Isn’t it possible that Mr. Ignatieff did far more harm to himself by getting rattled and denying everything than he would have if he’d just manned up and said, “we’re campaigning to win a majority, but of course we’d consider a coalition if the circumstances call for it and it’s good for the country”?

Well, never mind. The C-Word is completely, totally and utterly off the Canadian political agenda … until the next time Mr. Harper needs to consider one.

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

Federal Conservative-NDP détente comes right out of the Ralph Klein Playbook

by David Climenhaga on December 30, 2010 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment
Détente: Jack Layton, left, and Stephen Harper, right (geddit?), work together on their sinister plans. Warning: Canadian politicians may not appear exactly as described by Michael Ignatieff. Below: Ralph Klein.

If you’re wondering where most of Stephen Harper’s big political ideas come from, look no further than Alberta.

And so it is with this holiday season’s Conservative-NDP détente, which is whipping the federal Liberals into a froth of self-righteous frustration. The prime minister has torn this particular page right out of the Ralph Klein Playbook.

As premier of Alberta, Mr. Klein was always careful to ensure that the Alberta NDP, if it didn’t exactly prosper, at least would live long. That way, to the intense frustration of those who imagine social democratic voters in Alberta would all happily vote for a “united alternative” led by the Liberals, the NDP could always bleed off the Liberal vote in the generally more progressive Edmonton region come election time.

Thus after the general elections of 1997 and 2001 under Mr. Klein’s premiership, Alberta’s victorious Conservatives granted the provincial New Democrats official party status and the cash and perks that went with it despite the fact they failed to win the four seats required.

Mr. Klein’s successor, Conservative Premier Ed Stelmach, continued this tradition in 2008 in the same circumstances, for the same reasons and with much the same results.

Politics being the art of the possible, this small Conservative kindness has made plenty of sense from both the Conservative and NDP perspectives. From the Conservative point of view, it minimized any threat that might be presented by the Alberta Liberals from time to time. From the New Democrats’ viewpoint, it helped keep the social democratic option alive in Alberta and the NDP in the game.

So why shouldn’t two political parties in such circumstances help one another? It’s not as if the Alberta Liberals were offering policies identical to the New Democrats’ in most years. On the contrary, historically in Alberta as at the national level, Liberal policies trend closer those of the Conservatives than those of the NDP.

Alberta New Democrats never felt they owed it to the Alberta Liberals to commit suicide just because the Liberals were ever so slightly to the left of the Conservatives, and why should they have?

If someday soon the Conservatives are replaced by the Wildrose Alliance as the government of Alberta, it seems likely that this same dynamic will continue to be played out in the Alberta Legislature for the same sensible reasons.

It’s hard to feel much sympathy with those Alberta Liberal supporters unhappy with this arrangement because it is, after all, politics as usual. Would the Liberals play it any differently in the same circumstances? Of course not!

All the same arguments for this arrangement apply at the national level, except that the policies of federal Liberals and Conservatives are even closer than are those of the two parties’ counterparts here in Alberta. Indeed, if anything, they’ve drifted even closer together from a policy perspective under the leadership of Opposition Leader Michael Ignatieff.

The Liberals will do whatever they can to avoid a national election if it is not to their advantage. Why should they ask NDP Leader Jack Layton and his caucus to do any differently? Certainly – in Ottawa as in Edmonton – the New Democrats are under no moral obligation to destroy themselves politically to suit Mr. Ignatieff’s ambitions.

When the Liberals dismiss the “common ground” between New Democrats and the Conservatives as mere political convenience, they are just whining. It’s always a little unseemly when politicians complain that other politicians are playing politics. That’s the name of the game! This complaint, after all, is being made by the party that foolishly dropped the idea of a democratic coalition with the NDP the instant Mr. Ignatieff saw an opportunity to have it all for himself.

But if the Ignatieff Liberals would prefer this arrangement to be cast as a question of high principle, then that can be done too. That is because, for all the many sins of the minority Conservative government under Mr. Harper, Canada is far better served by continuation of the present minority situation with a strong NDP contingent in Parliament than by either a large Harper Conservative or Ignatieff Liberal majority in Parliament.

If by working with the Conservatives, the NDP can hold the government’s feet to the fire to achieve sensible and fair policies that help low-income seniors and the unemployed, Canadians will be better off.

If by working with the Conservatives, the NDP can establish the credibility needed to become the Opposition in Parliament, or eventually even the government of Canada, then politics as usual will truly have paid dividends for the Canadian people.

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

Brits do it, Aussies do it … Let’s do it!

by David Climenhaga on August 22, 2010 in Uncategorized with No comments
David Cameron and Nick Clegg on a commemorative coalition teacup. Yikes! All around the world, coalition uninterruptus! Below: Stephen Harper, would-be loner; Ella Fitzgerald, “…even educated fleas do it!”


Brits do it, Aussies do it,
Even the Japanese do it,
Let’s do it, let’s … form a coalition!

We can fall in love, too. But the first order of business really ought to be getting rid of Stephen Harper and his odious so-called Conservatives.

And the best way to do that, as we (almost) discovered in 2008, is to form a coalition, or, failing that, some kind of co-operative modus operandi in Parliament between Liberals and New Democrats, including, if necessary, the Bloc Quebecois.

But wait, you say, Canadians hated the idea of a coalition. They were bludgeoned by Prime Minister Harper’s Conservative Rage Machine into believing the proposed 2008 coalition, a profound expression of our Westminster-style democracy, was somehow undemocratic. What’s more, they were persuaded that proroguing a new Parliament that had done no business, which is about as undemocratic as you can get short of mass street arrests, was somehow an example of democracy!

Yeah, yeah. All true. But things are different today. You see, that was then and this is now!

This is because Canadian voters aren’t stupid – even though some of us may feel they are when, for their own good reasons, they don’t vote the way we wish they would.

Plus, a lot of things have happened since Canada’s moment of coalition interruptus in 2008.

People who may have been persuaded by the first blast of the Tory Rage Machine’s hysterical response to the coalition idea have now had a little time to think about how our Parliamentary democracy really works, and how they’ve observed it working elsewhere. Moreover, they’ve also had nearly two additional years to see Mr. Harper in action.

It’s been – and continues to be – an educational experience.

As a result, going into the next federal general election, Canadians have had their consciousness raised about Parliamentary coalitions.

Sure, lots of folks will still be opposed. And the Rage Machine will still scream at us that coalitions are an outrage. But Canadians have had a couple of years to ponder what really happened 2008, and what could have. It seems likely, in these circumstances alone, that many more voters than not will have moved from the anti-coalition camp to the group that is at least prepared to consider the idea.

What’s more, going into an election that could result in a coalition from the get-go is different from being surprised by the idea a few days after what you’d thought was a foregone conclusion.

Then there’s the matter of what other people are doing, some of them in the English-Speaking World, as we used to call it back in the day when a U.K. passport carried the right to vote in a Canadian election.

The Brits did it – and while you may not agree with the fiscal policies that resulted, the world didn’t end. Leastways, Her Majesty is still on the throne, notwithstanding the fact Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron is governing in coalition with the Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg. There are five Lib Dems in his cabinet.

And now the Aussies are talking about doing it – even if, like the clams Ella Fitzgerald was singing about, it’s partly ’gainst their wish.

In a general election, Australia’s Labour Party and its opposition (called, interestingly, The Coalition) both fell short Saturday night of winning the 76 seats they needed to form a majority government. As a result, both sides are now wooing the Aussie House of Representatives’ four independents and one Green to form … a coalition.

If the Coalition forms the coalition, one supposes, it’ll be a coalition squared – but the important thing is that whatever happens in Australia, it will be another example of a coalition government working out just fine in a country with a Westminster-style Parliament, thanks very much, mate.

So Australia’s election result is just one more nail in the coffin of the peculiar Canadian notion that Parliamentary coalitions are “undemocratic.”

When the dust settles Down Under, Canadian voters will certainly take note that no one in either the U.K. or Australia is hyperventilating about how undemocratic their Parliamentary coalitions are.

Finally, there is the matter of our sourpuss prime minister’s own conduct. Canadians have had almost two more years to watch the guy in action – fighting tooth and nail against honest statistics that might run counter to his Tea Party ideology, rounding up free Canadian citizens in the streets of Toronto for the crime of wearing clothing that was too dark, and spending our taxes like a drunken sailor on “security,” including that notorious fake lake.

All these factors will make drumming up hysteria against the notion of a coalition considerably more difficult going into the next federal election.

“The Dutch in old Amsterdam do it, not to mention the Finns; folks in Siam do it – think of Siamese twins!” Let’s do it!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.