Pros and Cons

It sounds like Prime Minister Harper plans to call an election, breaking his previous promise to wait until October 2009. Rumour has it that he fears an Obama victory in the US will weaken Conservative support here. So I'll give my current impressions of the major national parties, starting with the incumbent Conservatives.

The new Conservative party is essentially the Canadian branch of the US establishment. They favour direct military and economic integration with the US, eg. the "Security and Prosperity Partnership." Before he was PM, Stephen Harper was president of the National Citizens Coalition, which campaigns for private Medicare and CBC, widespread deregulation, privately-funded elections, more military spending, etc. Their religious wing is anti-abortion, pro-death penalty, and generally draconian. Thankfully, they haven't had a majority government, so they haven't been able to fully implement those policies.

My major concern is to have robust national food, water, transportation, and energy systems which can withstand the disruptions of climate change, financial speculation, and peak oil. For some reason, that is considered part of the Ministry of Environment. How do the Conservatives fare in that respect?

Allow me to introduce Canada's environment minister, John Baird. His approach is to attack political opponents and to ignore all inconvenient facts. Canada's greenhouse gas emissions are still rising exponentially, and sustainable infrastructure is a patchwork of local initiatives. Baird is the poster boy of business-as-usual government.

Aside from their ideology and general nastiness, I dislike the Conservatives because they are self-serving, secretive, and short-sighted. A poor man's Republican Party, if you will.

I call them self-serving because they ignore any rules that don't suit them. The party was created in 2003 when Progressive Conservative leader Peter MacKay broke a written promise not to merge with the Reform party. Since they were elected in 2006, they broke many rules and traditions such as appointing an unelected businessman to Cabinet (Michael Fortier). Harper's comment was "If you look carefully at what I said in the election campaign, I did leave open that possibility." With that attitude, how can I trust anything they say?

Which leads to the next problem... they don't say much! In the last election, their platform was released only a few days before the election, and it consisted of vague promises on Accountability, Opportunity, Security, Families, Communities, and Canada. Even so, they've largely ignored that document. They rarely announce their plans, and we know little about the operation of government because of their policy of secrecy; they routinely deny access-to-information requests. For instance, by law military spending needs to be published every year, but it hasn't been published since 2003. (Notice the continuity with Liberal policy; I'll address them in the next post.) I suspect that our military is heavily funding the war in Iraq, but at this point there is no way to know.

Finally, I say that they are short-sighted because they ignore pressing issues such as climate change, endemic poverty, and the collapsing US economy. In fact, they make things worse by expanding the tar sands, cutting social programs, and increasing trade with the US. The Kyoto Protocol, which is already woefully inadequate, has been ignored: when the Conservatives were elected in 2006, we were 24% above the emissions limit, and now we are about 35% above it. In contrast, Norway's emissions are 25% below the Kyoto target. We are a rich nation, so in the short term we are insulated from our mistakes, but as a sparse northern country we are also very vulnerable to climate change and economic dislocation.


According to this poll, party support nationwide is currently 38% Conservative, 28% Liberal, 19% NDP, 8% Bloc Quebecois, and 7% Green. Because of the electoral system, that would mean about 60% Conservative, 20% Liberal, 10% NDP, and 10% Bloc in Parliament. We progressives have our work cut out for us.