Canada's experiment with freedom
January 24, 2006
"Don't overdo it. People are telling me that it was more of a throw-the-bums-out reaction than a turn to the right."
-a friend of Batfink, asked his opinion of the Canadian election result
He's right, of course. The magnificent, and highly improbable, reversal of polarity in the Canadian Parliament, and the subsequent resignation of PM Paul Martin (like he had a choice...) only happened because of the overpowering stench of the financial fraud and corruption scandal surrounding their liberal party. In no way could a prudent analyst regard it as indicating an organic change in the political persuasion of the average Canadian voter. So it would seem at best premature to get all gleeful at the thought of Canada actually seeing the light after all those years of Euro-socialism, and turning rightward. They didn't. Not just yet. They just temporarily became a one-party system due to the impossible-to-deny corruption of the party of Paul Martin, who, until very recently, probably had been Canada's most successful politician ever. Indeed, Martin himself was re-elected in his local district, and will keep his seat. He just won't be PM any more.
His party sure took it on the chin, though. There's no minimizing the depth of the change. In the new parliament, the Conservatives will have 124 seats to the liberals' 103; last time it was 135-99 the other way, so the parties essentially traded places.
So how to add it up? What exactly do they now have across the border? Well, as I see it, it is a golden opportunity to take advantage of conservatism's greatest trump over liberalism in modern politics: it actually works. What I mean is, the Canadian population will get to see, assuming the Tories are able to seize their chance to implement the ideas they have been talking about (lower taxes, a grown-up approach to national defense, some fiscal responsibility with regard to public money, sensible relations with a certain superpower to the south, and so on) that those ideas will actually improve their lives in ways they can measure. There's a reason why liberals are so dead-set against tax cuts, after all -- besides that they want all the money, I mean: It's because, once you start giving people their own money back, they tend to get the idea that it was theirs all along, and it gets exponentially harder to raise taxes on them the next time. The same goes for national defense: give the people the idea that they have something worth defending, and they may actually start feeling proud of their country. And once a thing like that sinks in, it's awfully hard to shake it out of people. Teach the population these lessons, and you may find that a generation has to go by before anyone is chump enough to vote liberals in again.
The liberals have been in charge of the Great White North for a good long time now, and a lot of classical liberal rot and socialist drift has taken place up there in that time. That sort of thing happens gradually, though; and it's easy for people who are just trying to get through the day to start feeling as if it has always been that way, and not bother to try to change it anymore. The tendency of people to go along to get along has always been a key secret weapon of the socialist agenda.
But now fate has thrown the long-since-given-up-for-dead Tories an unexpected break. If they can hit the ground running, and think of this as an opportunity for a proof-of-concept, then next time, there may actually be an ideological sea-change at the polls. Here's wishing them luck.
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Revised: 05/19/08 08:07:05 -0400 .