Let's win over the NDP's accidental MPs
So, which is it going to be? Will our shiny, new two-party system give us refreshingly ideological left-right politics, with the right, such as it is, holding the upper hand for the moment? Or, as Tom Flanagan has argued, will the inevitable grinding of the Median Voter Theorem produce Tweedledum/ Tweedledee choices and a political game played between the 50yard lines? (With only two parties, the theorem says, both target the median voter for fear of being squeezed out of the centre and reduced to their base support.)
Centrist politics or ideological politics, which is it to be?
Not to dodge the issue, but the most likely answer is "Both." At election time, median-voter politics dominates. With the goalposts given, if the right veers too far right, the left takes all left voters and also makes inroads among centre-right voters, thus winning a majority. Just the opposite happens if the left moves too far left: the right wins centre-left votes. Plus: open up too much room at midfield and both left and right have to worry about the resurgence of a centrist Liberal Party of Canada.
Does that mean conservatism -and for that matter, socialism -are dead, victims of the slogging match at the 55-yard-line, replaced by uninspiring three-yard plunges up the middle? Not at all. Though it makes sense in the short run to take the field as given and stake out your position in the middle, in the longer run you try to move the goalposts.
We now have the prospect of four years without an election. Before electoral considerations become overpowering again, there's plenty of time for both sides to try to budge the country's ideological tectonic plates. If you're the government, you have the advantage in such a struggle being able to put little bits of your ideological druthers into budgets and let the country try them out and learn with experience they're nothing to be afraid of.
Since 1993, when Kim Campbell didn't quite say an election isn't the right time to discuss policy details, that has been the conventional wisdom. But the campaign just finished put the lie to that. We had one party back a 15% corporate tax, a second favour 18% and a third propose 19.5%. You can't get more precise than that. Let's insist our politicians keep arguing this way, with details on the table.
Another lesson from that election is that there's ample room for ideological differences even on a relatively narrow question such as exactly what rate of corporate tax we should charge. If we could focus the debate on a relatively narrow range of similar issues, we could have plenty of disagreement yet keep the economy's most important underpinnings out of play.
Much to their surprise, much to the surprise of the people who voted them in, the NDP's Quebec caucus now includes five students from McGill University (though none from my classes, unfortunately). William F. Buckley used to say he'd rather be governed by the first 100 names in the Boston telephone book than by the Harvard faculty. He never said anything about the Harvard student body.
"I never dared to be radical when young," Robert Frost wrote "for fear it would make me conservative when old." These accidental MPs have taken the road Frost didn't, so there's hope for them: being radical now they may grow conservative with age. (Maybe even sooner: I'd love to see their reaction when they notice all the deductions on their first pay stub.) Having been reminded of their lack of experience by every commentator in the country, they may already be open to suggestions.
Here's an idea for them: The best policy for the left is "hard heads, soft hearts." A competitive capitalist economy is not an NGO. It may not be the most caring institution ever visited on humankind. But it is a wonderful institution -the best ever -for producing goods and services people want. Production-wise, the chance government can improve on capitalism is remote. Government therefore shouldn't even try.
Bureaucrats and regulators whose job is to try to devise national strategies for this or that industry should be bought out and retired off. That's the "hard heads" part. Hard-headed socialists and social democrats understand how foolish it is to try to supplant the market or second-guess how it works. (That means you, marketing boards, and other such egregious restraints on competition.)
The "soft hearts" part involves the realization that, like nature, the market is indifferent to the damage it does. Not everybody succeeds. Some do quite badly. Conservatives doubt the government's ability or even desire to repair such damage and have greater confidence in private efforts to help those who would otherwise be left behind. Liberals and others are much more trusting, or at least are willing to accept the evident inefficiencies of government in exchange for what they believe are net gains. But that's the kind of thing we should debate, not which industries the country needs or how to make Canadians more entrepreneurial.
There's more than enough room for disagreement about what our tax rates should be and how much income we should redistribute to the market's victims. The actual running of the economy let's leave to the invisible hand.
A lesson for American conservatives
The following editorial appeared in Wednesday's edition of The Wall Street Journal.
Canadian Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper's landslide victory in Monday's election, capturing the first centre-right majority since 1988, is a tutorial in economics as much as politics. Aspiring Presidential candidates south of the 49th parallel, please take note.
Mr. Harper has been running a minority government since 2006 and this time he won big. Conservatives captured 167 seats of 308. Second place went to the hard-left New Democratic Party, which won 102 seats and is now the official opposition, replacing the more moderate centre-left Liberal Party. Liberals won a scant 34 seats, while the separatist party, Bloc Québécois, took the worst drubbing, winning only four seats against 47 in the last parliament.
Mr. Harper was conciliatory on Monday night but also took appropriate credit. "We got that mandate because of the way we have governed, because of our record," he said in Calgary. That record is worth reviewing, especially as it relates to government spending and taxes.
Despite its reputation for leaning left, Canada has been economically opening and liberalizing since the mid-1990s. Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 and later that decade, as the Canadian dollar swooned, the Liberals were forced to begin cutting federal spending.
Yet Liberals were only willing to go so far in shrinking Ottawa's bureaucracy. Enter the Harper government in 2006. It made tax cuts, a strong national defense and rationalizing government its priorities. And it made good on those promises. On Jan. 1, 2008, Canada's general sales tax fell to 5% from 7%. Mr. Harper has also cut the federal corporate tax rate, which is now 16.5% and is scheduled to fall to 15% in 2012. (Add in provincial corporate rates of about 10%.) The U.S. federal rate alone is 35%.
Canada avoided America's housing mania and meltdown, but as our biggest trading partner it shared some of our economic pain. Conservative policy -low taxes and a willingness to allow the exploitation of rich oil and mineral deposits -has been a life saver for a small economy heavily integrated with the U.S. Its GDP grew by 3.3% last year, compared to America's 2.9%, and it now takes $1.05 to buy a Canadian dollar.
Mr. Harper did engage in stimulus spending, but he was also mindful of the risks. Canada's stimulus did not add to the country's entitlement rolls, and he has avoided the debt explosion afflicting the U.S. and much of Europe. He has also promised to balance the budget by fiscal 2014-2015 without raising taxes, which was a clear dividing line in the recent campaign.
All of this has made Mr. Harper's Tories the party of Canada's working and middle classes, including the immigrant communities around Toronto, which has long been a Liberal stronghold. As the Canadian polling company Compas explained on Sunday before the vote: "The historic middle class or bourgeois bastion of the Liberal-Conservative establishment, university-educated voters, have become the fortress of the antiestablishment NDP, while less educated and hence lower status Canadians are set to become the stronghold -the impregnable fortress -of the Conservatives."
The bad news here is that Canada's extreme left is now the opposition party, suggesting a sharper ideological polarization more typical of America. New Democratic leader Jack Layton moderated his populist tone during the campaign but the party's official "constitution," as reported on in the Canadian press, is anything but moderate. It includes references to "the extension of the principle of social ownership" and promises to increase government control of the economy in the interest of social justice and the environment. If the Tories mess up, the NDP would be poised to take the country sharply to the left.
For now the Conservatives will get to showcase their agenda with far more freedom than before. The NDP's constitution isn't well known and its victories, particularly in Quebec, seem largely attributed to a protest vote against the failures of the separatists and Liberals.
On the other hand, a too-cautious Mr. Harper could have trouble with his own party. Tory voters have been waiting for this majority for a long time and their victory means a lease of four years in power. Canadians will expect Mr. Harper to reshape economic policy to make the country more internationally competitive. That would seem to include reform of the national health-care model, which is draining government budgets but which Mr. Harper has been reluctant to talk about. Cuts in personal income tax rates are also on the conservatives' list.
The lesson of Mr. Harper's victory is that well-implemented conservative economic policies can attract and keep a political majority. America's Republicans might want to send a visiting delegation and study up.
Giving Ignatieff his due
Michael Ignatieff told reporters on Tuesday morning that he is stepping down as Liberal leader and would like to return to "teaching young Canadians."
He will have a lot to teach them. Perhaps one of his first topics should be: Mud wrestling or politics, which is the more honourable career?
Even in the context of an otherwise gracious departure from Canadian politics, which followed a tasteful concession speech on Monday night, Mr. Ignatieff couldn't quite bring himself to accept that the Liberals had brought their current state of devastation on themselves. He still feels the Conservatives are abusive and anti-democratic. He still points out that the government was found in contempt of Parliament, ignoring the partisan nature of a campaign by angry opposition parties to gang up on a government lacking the votes to defend itself. He still thinks he was largely ruined by attack ads that defined him as a carpetbagging academic before Canadians got to know him for themselves.
It painted a pretty bleak picture, which makes you wonder why Mr. Ignatieff then went on to express, quite eloquently, his hope that others will follow in his footsteps -preferably young people, and in particular young women -to revivify the party and return it to the heights he failed to achieve. Why would you want to wish that on someone, after portraying politics as a profession peopled by the bad and the worse?
Perhaps because Mr. Ignatieff is still, at heart, an optimist; the guy who, as he says, believes that "public service" (which is what politicians claim they perform) is a worthy career worth pursuing despite its deep crevices of muck and maliciousness. This quality helps explain why Mr. Ignatieff has been a success in his career till now: He can be eloquent, committed, passionate, intelligent and engaging. He must be great in a classroom.
Why was he not able to get that across in his two years as Liberal leader, or before, as an opposition MP? Too often, he appeared to be striving to shape himself into the persona he felt he should be -to act like a "politician," according to some image he had of what a politician should be. Too much of the tough-guy posturing -"Mr. Harper, your time is up," "Any time, any place."
Mr. Ignatieff came on his job at a bad time: The Liberal party was down and close to out, but unwilling to admit it, or to take the time needed to rebuild. It was intent on finding a saviour, the magic candidate who could slay the Tories and return the party to its deserved glory, all without any serious changes to an organization that had been coasting for years on memories of its past. Even Mr. Ignatieff himself, in his concession speech, could not resist revisiting gauzy memories of Laurier and other long-dead Liberal leaders -a party-wide reflex toward nostalgia that goes some way to explain why Liberal elders are so persistently out of touch.
Jack Layton spent a decade reconstructing the NDP; Stephen Harper rebuilt the Conservatives methodically from the ruins of a fractured right. But the Liberals wanted none of that; a couple of years in opposition was plenty for them; all they needed was a bright new face.
They were wrong, and Mr. Ignatieff is paying the price. He wasn't given the time or opportunity to rebuild. Maybe he didn't want to, or see the need himself. He still seems a bit fixated on the fact the Conservatives haven't played by the rules (as if the Liberals ever did). He still seems a bit too academic in outlook, trying to apply reason to an unreasonable business. Pierre Trudeau could do that because he had regular majorities to impose his personal agenda, whether the country liked it or not. It's harder to do when you're in opposition, facing a tougher leader than Mr. Trudeau faced.
It's likely Mr. Ignatieff will get another teaching job soon enough -or perhaps a leadership role in a blue-chip NGO or UN agency. He would make a fine ambassador, certainly. And no doubt a book will follow with his thoughts on his experience in partisan politics. It will undoubtedly be worth reading -especially by the next generation of politicians seeking to lead the party he is leaving.
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