How the West won
A review of The Big Shift: The Seismic Change in Canadian Politics, Business, and Culture, and What It Means for Our Future by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson
(Harper Collins, 294 pp, $27.99)
Reviewed By Paul Bunner
Canadian conservatives who chafed for decades under the rule of Liberals fronted by millionaire prime ministers from Quebec still have to pinch themselves occasionally to confirm that a Conservative government led by a middle class westerner is now running things in Ottawa. The 20th century pretty much belonged to the Liberals, and as late as the 2000 federal election when they humiliated the Canadian Alliance under Stockwell Day, it seemed they were destined to rule forever. As it turned out, absolute power had so corrupted the Liberals that they self-destructed when the sponsorship scandal, among others, revealed the depths of their decadence.
Still, even after seven years of Conservative government under Stephen Harper, dread of a Liberal resurgence, or an NDP coup, or a successful unite-the-left movement, haunts the hegemonic dreams of the Canadian right. Happily, there’s a tonic for such nightmares, a new book titled The Big Shift: The Seismic Change in Canadian Politics, Business, and Culture, and What It Means for Our Future, by Globe and Mail Parliament Hill columnist John Ibbitson and Ipsos-Reid pollster Darrell Bricker.
The partial collapse of the Laurentian consensus
The authors contend the centre-left eastern political consensus that kept the Liberals in power for generations has collapsed and been replaced by a new coalition of westerners, rural Canadians, Ontario suburban middle-class voters, and recent immigrants who have all embraced western conservative ideas and values that are going to dominate the Canadian political landscape for a very long time.
The western triumphalism seems a little incongruous coming from a couple of self-identified members of the eastern intellectual elites. Especially from a writer at the Globe, which famously greeted the election of Alberta’s first female premier last year with the condescending headline “Alberta Steps Into the Present.” But Ibbitson has never been a cheerleader for the eastern liberal status quo, and has generally given western conservatives a fair shake. Besides, crowing that the Conservatives are Canada’s new natural governing party would be conduct unbecoming a westerner.
The thesis of The Big Shift is largely constructed from demographic and polling data, including Ipsos-Reid’s exit poll of 40,000 voters in the 2011 election. The numbers offer persuasive evidence that the Canadian narrative constructed by the Liberals and their academic and media thinkalikes in the Toronto-Montreal-Ottawa axis over many decades has been banished to the ash heap of history. It has been replaced, according to the authors, by a new consensus, largely rooted in rural, western, “Old Canada” values of hard work, thrift and self-reliance.
The main nostrums of the old “Laurentian Consensus” held that Canada was a fragile, insecure country, held together only by appeasement of Quebec nationalism, equalization payments, economic protectionism, official multiculturalism and national social programs. Our history was largely a colonialist embarrassment, rooted in exploitation and oppression of women, aboriginals and miscellaneous minorities. The church-ridden Canadian Dark Ages gave way to a secular Enlightenment, beginning with the election of Pierre Trudeau in 1968 and climaxing with his Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. On the world stage, Canada was a pioneer of the United Nations and peacekeeping, morally superior in every way to our selfish violence-prone imperialist neighbours south of the 49th parallel.
The Laurentian Consensus fostered a durable electoral coalition for the Liberals that included transfer-dependent Maritimers, fretful Quebec federalists, urban liberal elites, ethnic minorities and Ontario’s suburban middle class. Although the authors don’t say as much, it seems obvious that The Consensus started to come unglued in the 1980s, beginning with the 1984 landslide victory of Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives. The 1988 free trade election was even more telling: the repudiation of a century of Canadian nationalist economic policy, and the fundamental insecurity that sustained it. That election surely marked the awakening of a more confident, outward-looking, pragmatic people.
Reform delayed: Brian Mulroney and the appeasement of Quebec
But the Mulroney regime was wedded to the first principle of Laurentianism, appeasement of Quebec. Inevitably it alienated the western faction of the Conservative coalition, resulting in the historic schism that destroyed the PCs in Quebec and the West and handed Ottawa back to the Liberals. In retrospect the break-up was both cathartic and necessary. It left western conservatives, who were far better attuned to declining public faith in big, activist government, with the upper hand in rebuilding the Canadian conservative movement.
Bricker and Ibbitson portray the Big Shift as primarily driven by demographics and culture. Key to it are the roughly quarter million immigrants who have arrived each year for the last twenty years, most of them Asians with economic and often socially conservative values and prodigious ambition to achieve middle-class or better lives for themselves and their children. By and large they come from places where big government is a menace, so they are less susceptible to the blandishments and bribes of official multiculturalism. They have no skin in Quebec’s existential game, and see little reason to live in a province that insists they pay exorbitant taxes to educate their children in the native language of barely one percent of the global population.
The Laurentian demographic decline
Meanwhile, pur laine Quebeckers aren’t reproducing in anything like sustainable numbers, despite federal transfer-funded subsidies for babies, day care and post-secondary education, so their demographic weight in Quebec and Canada is declining along with their economic and political clout. The Conservative rise to power in 2006 included a charm offensive aimed at Quebec that produced a clutch of seats around Quebec City. But the French kiss turned out to be no more than a peck on the cheek and the Tories went elsewhere to build their 2011 majority. With the addition of 30 new ridings before the next election, virtually all of them in Conservative-friendly regions of Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, it appears the Biggest Shift of all is that the days of the Quebec tail wagging the Canadian dog are well and truly over.
Less certain is sustained support for the Conservatives by Ontario suburbanites and immigrants. If it’s true, as the authors believe, that the former were won over primarily by the Tories’ handling of fiscal and economic policy, what happens if the government’s big bet on resource development and increased energy exports is defeated by some combination of Greens, Idlers, and Occupiers? What happens if this is coupled with a surge in energy production elsewhere, leaving the budget unbalanced, growth stalled and unemployment rising in election year 2015? That would leave cracking down on ever-declining crime rates, re-arming the post-Afghanistan military with exorbitantly priced aircraft, and some boutique tariff and tax cuts and credits that add up to pocket change for most voters as the main planks in a very shaky campaign platform. The Conservatives could have done more in their post-majority, post-recession budgets to consolidate their ownership of fiscal and economic credibility. The decision to continue with deficit-financed stimulus spending leaves them more vulnerable to external economic and political variables than they needed to be.
As for the ethnic vote, just ask the Liberals how fickle it is. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has done a masterful job turning immigration reform, including the crackdown on bogus refugees and boosting of economic class immigrants, into an ethno-political winner. But if the Potemkin Office of Religious Freedom is the best the Conservatives can do to consolidate their gains among newcomers, those gains may prove ephemeral.
All in all, The Big Shift makes a strong case for sustained Conservative political hegemony in the 21st century. It’s easy to imagine the Tory attack machine dismembering Justin Trudeau and putting the final nail in his father’s coffin so he’ll haunt us no more. It’s also easy to imagine NDP leader Thomas Mulcair getting crushed between the rock of his Quebec soft nationalists and the hard place of his Canadian resource industry union members. But in politics, luck and timing count for at least as much as good policy and clever communications. As the Americans painfully learned after their Cold War triumph, there is no such thing as the end of history. Ditto, probably, for the end of Canadian liberalism.
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Paul Bunner is a former editor of Alberta Report and a former speechwriter for Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
