Maple Leaf Ragged
FRUM, DAVID
Maple Leaf Ragged by David Frum It's 1958, a year awash with liberal self-confidence. In treasury departments across the planet, clever young Keynesians are turning the economic heat up and down...
...But the Liberals have in fact governed it for 70 of the 101 years since 1896, a record unmatched by any democratic political party (and by precious few undemocratic parties for that matter...
...The Conservatives retained 16 percent of the vote, but without a geographic base they kept only two seats...
...On June 2, Prime Minister Chretien will be seeking reelection in Canada...
...And who is governing the United States, Britain, and Canada...
...You don't accumulate that sort of win-loss record by indulging in naive illusions about ideological consistency, or by tolerating backbench dissent when the government senses a shift in the political wind and tacks accordingly...
...It won't help that Prime Minister Chretien is a Quebecker himself: He's very unpopular in his province...
...But the parties are at war with one another, and the resulting split in the center-right vote almost guarantees that the Liberals—who these days can also semi-plausibly claim to be a right-of-center party— will sweep English Canada...
...The small band of right-wingers within the party was kept at bay with occasional symbolic concessions and taunting reminders that it had nowhere else to go...
...The Liberals won only 20 of Quebec's 75 seats, almost all of them in the English-speaking ridings of greater Montreal...
...Canada, like the United States and Britain, has been moving to the political right for most of the past two decades...
...Chretien won election the first time, in 1993, by promising to reverse the legacy of the deeply unpopular Conservative government of Brian Mulroney...
...Reform broke through in 1993, winning 17 percent of the vote and 52 seats in the then-295-member House of Commons...
...He said he would cancel the U.S.-Canada free-trade agreement Mulroney signed in 1988, would repeal the national goods-and-services tax that Mulroney had imposed, and would stop fretting so much about Canada's crushing public debt and instead spend, spend, spend on "infrastructure" jobs...
...But as conservative ideas gained strength in Canada, the ideological Right did find someplace to go: It migrated to the new Reform party, based in Canada's west...
...With another referendum expected in 1999 or 2000, it's beginning to look as if the last Canadian election of the twentieth century may prove to be the last election of a united Canada as well...
...Conservatism is a laughable, discredited political force...
...In office, Chretien has broken every single one of those pledges...
...This astonishing about-face has provoked strangely little resentment in Canada...
...Well, the Liberals are no ordinary political party...
...A federal parliament polarized along linguistic and ethnic lines will only strengthen that resolve...
...All but one of the remainder were taken by the separatist Bloc Quebecois, the federal counterpart of the Parti Quebecois that holds power at the provincial level...
...Klein proceeded to cut public spending by almost 25 percent and balance a desperately indebted province's books without raising taxes...
...Canada's Progressive Conservatives have long been a party of a squishiness that would embarrass even a Lowell Weicker...
...Anybody see a pattern...
...In polls taken since then, almost two-thirds of French-speaking Quebeckers say they will vote "yes" next time...
...He was reelected with an enlarged majority two months ago...
...The Republican Dwight Eisenhower, the Tory Harold Macmillan, and the Conservative John Diefenbaker...
...Thus far he's honored his commitments down to the last comma...
...The goods-and-services tax remains squarely in place...
...Since Canada was formed in 1867, every federal government that has lasted longer than a year has ruled with the support of a majority of Quebec's seats in Parliament...
...The Democrat Bill Clinton, the Laborite Tony Blair, and the Liberal Jean Chretien...
...The Right has continued its rise...
...In October 1995, a referendum proposing the secession of Quebec failed by a mere 40,000 votes...
...Canada is often said to be an impossible country to govern: two languages spread across four and a half time zones, a weak national identity, a ramshackle federal system...
...And who is governing the North Atlantic countries...
...Fast forward to 1997...
...Since 1994, stringent spending cuts and the revenues from Mulroney's taxes have brought Canada to within hailing distance of a balanced budget...
...In treasury departments across the planet, clever young Keynesians are turning the economic heat up and down with the precision of French chefs...
...The last preelection poll put Reform at 12 percent and the Conservatives at 18 percent...
...If the polls are right, the confrontation between English and French Canada will look even starker after June 2. Almost 200 English-speaking Liberals will confront more than 50 French-speaking Bloquistes across the aisle of the House of Commons...
...In 1993, the province of Alberta elected as its premier an amiable guy-on-the-next-barstool named Ralph Klein...
...And the Chretien government has made Canada's debt and deficit an even higher priority than the Mulroney government did...
...Both Reform and the Conservatives have adopted a Harris-style tax cut as the centerpiece of their campaign manifestoes...
...Then the province of Ontario, notorious for its caution and moderation, elected in 1995 an even more radical premier named Mike Harris...
...How is that possible...
...That may sound like a weird diagnosis of a country that in its last federal election squashed its Conservative party, but it's true...
...The Left is as humiliated and discredited as conservatives were 40 years ago...
...Growing economies are kicking in money to be spent on ever more lavish social benefits...
...Barring some astonishing collapse of support, he will get it...
...stranger still, it has provoked not a whisper of dissent or complaint within Chretien's own Liberal party...
...Not only did he maintain the U.S.Canada free-trade agreement, he signed NAFTA...
...His Liberals have coasted along at just under 45 percent in the polls for most of the past four years—more than sufficient to win a parliamentary majority in Canada's new five-party federal political system...
...Harris promised to cut income tax rates by 30 percent while balancing the budget, abolish affirmative action, and remove the pro-union bias from the labor code...
...But the crushing victory the Liberals expect will bring them little joy...
...1993 was the first time that ancient rule was broken...
...David Frum is a contributing editor of The Weekly Standard...
...Governments everywhere are obsessed with cutting public spending, reducing budget deficits, and opening their economies up to foreign trade...
Vol. 2 • May 1997 • No. 34
