Canada's new Conservative government, elected on the short-term promise of repairing some of the more grievous deficiencies of its Liberal predecessor, will have to develop a long-term vision for the nation before it can hope to win a majority, says an observant academic writing last week in the National Post. The historical record shows, he says, that only leaders with an inspiring perspective of the future win majorities in Canada.
The writer is Adam Chapnick, and he teaches history to the Canadian Forces College, the equivalent of an Annapolis and a West Point combined. In his prognosis, Chapnick sees what has happened in Canada as evidence of what will happen, an unusual departure for a Canadian academic.
The politicians who won majorities offered sweeping portraits of a possible future. In the 19th Century, for example, John A. Macdonald (Canada's George Washington) promised a "Sea-to-Sea" nation (Atlantic to Pacific). At the century's close, Wilfrid Laurier foresaw Canada's future in a "Great West." In the 1920s, Mackenzie King offered a Canada wholly independent of British control. In the 1950s, John Diefenbaker envisioned enormous development of the far North. In the 1970s, Pierre Trudeau portrayed a New Canada as a "just society."
On the contrary, Lester Pearson in the 1960s and Joe Clark in the late 1970s offered little more than immediate solutions to immediate problems. Both were denied majority governments.
Now Stephen Harper's Conservatives, says Chapnick, are following the Pearson-Clark path. They are providing no sweeping visions of the Canada they intend to create. In fact, he implies, they appear to be looking backwards. Harper refuses to attend the international AIDS conference. His only foreign policy initiative has been to restore Canadian support for the United States and to back Israel. And while "the environment" offers "a longer, big-picture issue," Harper's stance (though Chapnick didn't feel the need to point this out) has been to back off the Kyoto treaty on the mere grounds that fulfilling it is impossible.
Closeted within the Chapnick message, in other words, is the tacit assumption that this indispensable "grand, sweeping vision" must of necessity represent a grand sweeping movement to the left – distancing the country from the Americans, buying into the Kyoto impossibility, leaping onto the AIDS bandwagon, presumably remaining loftily above the anti-terrorist "hysteria," instituting federal control over pre-schooler values via federally-dictated daycare and offering heel-clicking obedience to directives from our lunatic-packed Supreme Court.
No, he didn't say all these things. But that's where his compass points. All true "visionaries" must look leftward. There can be no vision to the right. Thus, he discreetly ignores the awkward example of the Mulroney government, which in the mid-1980s won the numerically biggest majority in Canadian history by promising free trade with the United States, something, by the Chapnick criteria, that would not have been "visionary" at all.
Now if the Chapnick mindset could permit such a (to him) preposterous possibility, he would be able to see that Harper, under his very nose, is gradually piecing together exactly such a rightward vision. Harper sees the family, not the government, as the fundamental building block of society. Therefore he opposes gay marriage and says so. Therefore, also he proposes that any daycare subsidy be paid directly to parents, not into a state system of pre-schools.
He knows that this perception of the family is, in the main, strongly shared by our new immigrants, that their values are, at root, far more conservative than those of the Canadian left and that the government should reinforce, rather than undermine, those values by portraying them as alien to the so-called "New Canada."
Meanwhile, he sees the whole centralizing thrust of the federal government as an obstacle to true democracy, and he seeks to inhibit his own prime ministerial omnipotence through an elected Senate which could use its existing senatorial powers as a check on federal bureaucratic omnipotence.
He sees the United States as the foremost champion of democracy in the world and Israel as the sole champion of it in the Middle East – and that's where he wants to direct Canadian support.
Thus, cautiously, methodically, intelligently, he builds the vision of the right, always aware that painting it too fully or too categorically would only provide a target for attack by the bevy of bent-brains, bubbleheads and bimbos now running for the Liberal leadership. Out of this Liberal chaos, he knows, there can arise no vision at all. So when the election comes, the only vision available will look to the right.