Since it has been conclusively established that Canada's long-ruling Liberal Party is riddled with corruption in Quebec, since it has been unmistakably demonstrated that the Liberal government will sell out to the socialists to stay in power, and since it has become wholly evident that the parliamentary traditions that safeguard democracy mean nothing to them, what price for all this conduct can the Liberal party expect to pay in an election?
The answer, according to the first poll made since the party survived a crucial parliamentary division by a single-vote margin nine days ago, is no price at all. Liberal support has not been reduced by a single percentage point, a Leger Marketing poll found. If the election were held tomorrow, 38 percent of Canadians would vote Liberal, only 27 percent Conservative.
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Their reason for shunning the Conservatives, however, was a telling one. Was it Conservative leader Stephen Harper, the pollsters asked? Not at all, came the reply – the electorate think Harper has far greater integrity than Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin. It's the Conservative Party as a whole they don't trust. They suspect and fear its "social" policies.
By this, of course, they meant the Christian influence, something the party's leadership of late has been at great pains to downplay. For instance, though Canada has no legal restriction on abortion whatever, the Conservatives flatly refused to discuss the issue at their last policy convention.
In other "social" matters, however, they have remained stalwartly traditional. They have taken a strong stand against gay marriage. They resist the growing intervention of the state into family life, contending that parents, not the government, should decide what moral principles are taught to their children. They support a parent's right to physically discipline a child, and they believe any federal day-care subsidy should be paid to the parent, not used to run government pre-school programs.
These are the policies that render the party "dangerous" in the eyes 38 percent of Canadians, the poll discovers. However, the poll's findings so mirror the editorial views of the Globe and Mail newspaper, which published it, that its credibility may be widely doubted.
History, however, lends it a certain believability. The late Kenneth Scott Latourette, the Oregon-raised historian of Christianity, in his massive mid-1950s history of the faith discloses two little-known facts about both American and Canadian religious practice. In the year 1800, he writes, slightly less than 7 percent of the U.S. population professed formal membership in a church. By 1910, this figure had risen to 43.5 percent, thanks to a massive campaign of evangelism waged throughout the 19th century to "convert" Americans to the Christian faith, and the proportion has remained in or close to that range ever since.
In Canada, by contrast, 95 percent of the population reported a church connection in 1910-11. This figure dropped to the 40 percent range during the Second World War and, if he had lived, Latourette would have seen it drop to 20 percent at the close of the 20th century. So Canada has been undergoing what Latourette terms "deChristianization" throughout the entire century, creating a widening gap with the U.S. on an integral issue.
Why this has happened to Canada, Latourette does not undertake to explain. One possibility is that Canada has always enjoyed a dependent role – dependent on the British Empire for the first two-thirds of its history, and on the American one for the remaining third. The United States, having had from the beginning no other country to lean on, has had to fend for itself, a necessity that has taught it to pray.
There is one other implication to the Leger poll. The party which 38 percent of Canadians fear and distrust draws about three-quarters of its numerical support from the four western provinces. It is, in other words, a western-based organization. From election results, it's plain that most of the 38 percent are concentrated in Ontario and Quebec. In short, the religious divide is also a geographic divide.
If the Conservatives want to form a government, the Globe and Mail endlessly lectures, they will have to suppress and silence their "socially conservative" wing. That is, the Conservative Party can only be elected if on social issues it becomes identical with the Liberal Party.
A rather large assumption is implicit in this line of argument – the assumption that if people are made to choose between their country and their faith, they will naturally choose their country. The Globe and Mail could be mistaken about that.