To understand how the Liberals got to the depths they're in now, one should understand how they reached the heights they enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century. Unsurprisingly, I've found Peter C. Newman's When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada a remarkable resource in this regard. Newman is also the author of one of my all-time favorite hate-screeds, The Secret Mulroney Tapes: The Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister. I'm seriously considering having all of my future lovers read The Secret Mulroney Tapes before I embed myself within them, so beautifully angry is that book. It's almost as balls-out pissed off as Mulroney's own memoirs, but only a quarter the length!
Anyhow, without actually coming right and saying so, Newman makes the case that the Liberals became the "Natural Government Party" through good timing and breath-taking corruption. Fantastically, I was unaware of this theorem before reading When the Gods Changed because no Liberal actually contested it. There was no shortage of material in Newman's book that various and sundry Grits protested, but that wasn't among them.
The LPoC had the good fortune of governing during the Second World War, when Canada finally became a fully industrialized society. As was true in the United States later, Ottawa was besieged with "dollar a year men," business leaders who worked for the government to further the war effort. In Canada, they answered to Prime Minister King's "Minister of Everything," C.D Howe.
Besides being mostly responsible for the war effort, Howe was also the Liberal party's chief fundraiser. However, he never bothered building any kind of a wall being his two functions. When a business wanted a lucrative "cost-plus" war contract, Howe's functionaries reminded them that a political donation would grease the wheels somewhat. That this also essentially froze money from going to the Conservatives or the CCF (which is now the NDP) was likely something that didn't escape ol' C.D's notice.
Often times, a company would overbid for a contract and then kick back as much as 10% of it to the party. Most modern observers believe that Jean Chretien's sponsorship scandal came out of nowhere, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Peter Newman spends the better part of three chapters describing how corruption is part of the Liberal DNA, again, without actually saying so. But it is impossible to read the history in When the Gods Changed without coming to that conclusion.
The Grits also mightily relied on the federal civil service to build it's infrastructure and as a training ground for their candidates, particularly during the King, St. Laurent and Pearson years. What was created was an unstoppable marriage between politics, business and the public service that was unparalleled in most of the democratic world. Indeed, it was a phenomenon more more common to totalitarian societies.
But the Liberals were often brought down by their own unparalleled arrogance. At various points(specifically, 1957, '84 and 2006) the public would grow disgusted with their hubris and throw them out, giving the Conservatives the odd chance at government, which they would promptly fuck up.
But after '57 - with the very notable exception of Pierre Trudeau's win in 1968 - the Liberals only won because the Conservatives were so bad at politics. Trudeau never won back-to-back majority governments and Jean Chretien only won at all because the Conservative party fractured three ways during the latter Mulroney years.
When the Tories reunified in 2003, the Grits were first reduced to a bare minority, then thrown out of government altogether, probably never to return. In the 2006, '08 and '11 elections, the Liberal seats from Paul Martn's last government have been cut by more than two-thirds. Only three Liberal leaders since 1867 have never been prime minister. Two of them were leader in the last six years.
Of course the Liberals should have reached some accommodation with the NDP. In fact, even Jean Chretien now recognizes that he should have done it years ago, when he was prime minister. The Dippers were almost as thoroughly wiped out as the Conservatives were in 1993. Had Chretien absorbed the New Democratic Party under the most generous terms possible back then, I believe that they'd still be in power today. There would have been an almost unstoppable left-wing party in a centre-left-leaning country, which even the unified Conservatives probably wouldn't have defeated.
But the Liberals couldn't stop being Liberals for 20 minutes and think about their electoral future. They had their strength in Quebec cut in half after 1984 and spent the better part of the 70s guaranteeing that they'd never again win significant numbers of seats in Western Canada. They thought that the Tory fracture was forever and that they could continue to win majorities with all of the seats in Ontario, slightly less than half of Quebec's and a plurality in Atlantic Canada until they end of time.
The only problem was that they didn't see the end of time coming until it was too late to stop it, which was in 2010, if you believe some commentators. It was only then that some Grit functionaries - very probably without telling their leader, Micheal Ignatieff - started "negotiating" a merger with the NDP under Jack Layton.
Even at that incredibly late date, the overwhelming hubris of the Liberals was on full display. The "deal" was essentially this: "Stop being the NDP and we'll let you become Liberals. But before you get too excited, we're not going to give you commie assholes any Cabinet seats that have anything to do with money. How's that grab you?"
Within a year, the Grits would have fewer seats than the Dippers did when those "negotiations" were ongoing.
Now comes the new book by Paul Adams, an associate professor of journalism at Ottawa’s Carleton University, Power Trap: How fear and loathing between New Democrats and Liberals keep Stephen Harper in power--and what can be done about it.
I haven't yet read Power Trap, but Professor Adams' thesis is, to put it lightly, silly.
A new book that advocates a Liberal-NDP merger blames partisan pettiness and personal rivalries for the two parties’ refusal to play footsie.
“New Democrats and Liberals are caught in a power trap in which they seek to reach government, not by defeating the Conservatives, but by destroying their progressive rival,” writes Paul Adams, an associate professor of journalism at Ottawa’s Carleton University.
In Power Trap: How Fear and Loathing Between the Liberals and NDP Keep Harper in Power, he predicts the two parties will keep duelling for at least another three elections before one or the other establishes supremacy.
In other words, opposition stubbornness will enable Stephen Harper to join the five-member club of Canadian prime ministers who’ve each ruled for a decade or more.
This, argues the veteran journalist, will be disastrous for Canada.
(...)
He believes a victory by co-operating progressives would be fairly certain, noting the three parties won 53 per cent of the vote in 2011.
And that was with a no-show from a large chunk of a voting constituency — youth — that the progressive parties potentially are best positioned to win over. If the three parties were to undertake a campaign of outreach, using social media as Barack Obama did in his 2008 “Yes We Can” presidential campaign, young people who previously haven’t voted could help put a merged Opposition force over the top in a vote expected in 2015.
While it’s true some right-leaning Liberals likely go over to the Conservatives in such a scenario, “blue Liberals” probably already have left the party, Adams writes.
At the moment, however, so-called progressives have “no agreed-upon platform or unifying vision, no leader who can claim undisputed primacy in the fight to dislodge the Conservatives.”There's absolutely no evidence to support Adams' assertions.
The Liberals have already spent the better part of four decades narrowing their geographic and political appeal to the point that it barely exists at all. If the Conservatives were even halfway smart, John Turner would have been the Last Liberal Prime Minister instead of Paul Martin.
The NDP has already established "supremacy" over the Liberals, as any fair reading of the last twenty years of elections results amply demonstrates.
In 1993, the Dippers were reduced to 9 seats from 44, losing party status along with the Progressive Conservatives. The Liberals went from 88 to 177, and Chretien likely wouldn't have won half that many were it not for vote-splitting in Ontario and Quebec, where over half of Parliament's seats are.
But in four of the five subsequent elections, 1997, 2004, '06 and '08, the New Democrats slowly gained seats as the Liberals lost them. The Grits started the 2004 election with 168 seats and ended it with 135. In 2008, they dropped to 77. Between '93 and '08, the Dippers more than quadrupled their seat count to 37.
2011 was the terminal point. The Liberals were reduced to an all-time low of 34 seats, while the NDP exploded to 103, over half of which was in Quebec.
Simply put, the Liberals have had the floor drop out of their vote in the last two elections, losing 50% of their seats in each of them. Meanwhile, the Dippers have been increasingly expanding the scope and reach of their vote in ways that no one could have anticipated.
Unless the Grits can magically start doubling and tripling their seats counts overnight, reversing a trend two decades in the making, they're done. And given the narrowing of the geographic reach of the vote that started under Trudeau, that ain't at all likely. At this point, they barely hold the majority of seats in their former stronghold of Toronto.
Liberal fortunes are further complicated by their continued reliance on fucking gimmicks. Their coming leadership race seems to be a contest for who their next "guru" is going to be; Teenage Jesus, who hasn't done anything in government, or a retired astronaut who hasn't done anything in government. Both are about as notable for their governing vision of Canada as the former goalie who previously ran for the leadership was. The Liberals haven't thought of having a serious parliamentarian as their leader since Martin.
Say what you will about Jack Layton and Thomas Muclair, but they had spent decades in municipal and provincial government between them. They both knew how the game of politics is played and how the machinery worked, as well as having a vision as to how broaden the chessboard of the electorate. The Liberals are still relying on stunts that they think will make the country fall to their knees before them. I could be very wrong about this, but I think they're insulting the public with that nonsense. I haven't hidden the fact that I think that the voting public is stupid, but I don't think we're that stupid.
Professor Adams also makes much too much about how "right-wing" the Harper Conservatives are. They responded to the 2008 financial panic by spending even more in stimulus money than Barack Obama did. Every single proposal they've ever made since 2004 has been poll-tested to the tits and is utterly bereft of anything that is recognizable as "conservative principle." let alone being "right-wing." In his six years in power, Harper has come close to surpassing even Trudeau's insane spending.
When a left-wing party finally beats the Tories, it won't be because that party is so made of awesome. It'll be because conservatives have abandoned the Conservatives.
Can we also quit comparing anything in Canadian politics to President Obama's 2008 victory? More than anything else, doing that demonstrates that people like Paul Adams don't know anything about Canadian or American politics.
There are two reasons that Barack Obama is president today, their names are George W. Bush and John McCain.
Bush had poisoned the well on all the issues that Republicans had previously been strong on, most importantly, national security and the economy. It's important to remember that the financial panic began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008 but the recession started in the spring of 2007. Iraq was a huge mess and Afghanistan was even worse without anyone noticing. Also, McCain ran a spectacularly bad campaign and thought that a semi-literate piece of ass would save him. He thought wrong.
I probably shouldn't overlook the fact that Obama wasn't even the favourite to win the Democratic nomination: Hillary Clinton was, but her campaign was overwhelmed by stupidity, hubris and infighting, making her the ideal frontrunner to run the Liberal Party of Canada.
You can actually look at the Obama presidency and adorably say that "He didn't build that!" The GOP did it for him, and are continuing to. But there is, as yet, no evidence at all that Stephen Harper is creating similar conditions for a future
Finally, I have seen no indication at all that the Liberals have gotten over themselves enough to even think about reconsidering their previously stated terms of a merger, specifically that the NDP stop being the NDP. Even though they have well under half of the seats that the Dippers do, the Grits are still delusional enough to think that they can dictate the terms of a merger.
The Liberal Party of Canada is basically the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. They've had a limb cut off in each of the last four elections, but they insist that "it's just a flesh wound" and that they remain strong enough to dictate the terms under which the New Democrats cross the bridge.
It would be hilarious if it wasn't so pathetic. Okay, that's not true, It's still hilarious.
I'll probably still read Power Trap, but that's only because I like feeling smarter than my supposed intellectual betters. Whether you buy it or not, I'll leave to you, but I can't imagine that Tories or Dippers will find a single useful thing in it.
I could go into some depth about Quebec and how the dynamics there are likely to play into the coming power shift, but I'm bored and this post is already long enough. If you want to argue, let's go to the comments. In all probability, somebody's going to bring up the Clarity Act and that'll necessitate a part two to this post.
Let's get it on.
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