Bring on the election
The day of the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Tower is a good day to renind ourselves of the privileges of living in a democracy. So I say, Bring on the election — Canadians should never complain about an opportunity to choose who governs us.
As Rick Salutin rightly observes in The Globe and Mail, frequent elections “keep citizens engaged and parties on their toes.”
Now that Michael Ignatieff has made it clear the Liberals will no longer support Mr. Harper’s government, a fall election is as cerftain as the fall colors that we’ll soon see across the land.
The parliamentary maneauvering now falls to the other parties. The NDP and the Bloc can support the Conservativers or not –either way, the Liberals are freed from the strait jacket they’ve worn for the past two years.
Mr. Harper can shout all he wishes about the danger of a Liberal coaslition with the socialists and separatists. The PM has curried the favor of both those parties in the past. He’s likely to do so again, if it means surviving a Liberal non-confidence vote. The chances are, though, the Bloc and the NDP will have none of it.
The election, when it comes, is likely to mark one of those rare, momentous turning points in Canadian politics.
I wrote about 15 of those occasions in my 2004 book, Turning Points: the Campaigns that Changed Canada.
I included the 2004 election because it marked the breakdown of the virtual one-party rule we’d seen since the collapse of the Mulroney-era Conservatives in 1993. The 2006 election, when Stephen Harper came to office in a minority government, merely completed that process.
Before 2004, the last federal vote I’d designated as a turning point was the 1988 free trade election that gave Brian Mulroney his second majority. It was major because it locked Canada into a closer than ever economic partnership — or subserviance, depending on your point of view — with the United States.
The issue in the coming election — the ballot question, as the pundits call it — is going to be who’s best equipped to manage a fragile economy. The Conservatives think they have an edge here because they see themselves as the more prudent, anti-tax party.
In fact, the biggest tax cuts in Canadian history came from the Chretien Liberals, following years of Chretien-Martin deficit slaying.
Now that finance minister Jim Flaherty has revised yet again his deficit forecast — to $56 billion this year, he can hardly lay claim to much in the way of money management smarts. He’s the guy, after all, who predicted just a year ago that the Tories would bring us five successive years of budget surpluses.
There’s an answer to the current deluge of red ink — and all the parties have it. Assuming the recession is close to an end if we’re not already there, government revenues soon will be rising again. Simply restraining the GROWTH of government spending will bring the deficit under control in half a dozen years. No need to slash and burn.
The ballot question might be fiscal but I suspect Canadians will be voting as much with their hearts as their guts. Which do we want — a Tory regime that grudgingly accepts its responsibilities, or a Liberal government that embraces the idea of common effort for the common good?
We see plenty of examples of how Mr. Harper prefers to leave Canadians on their own — whether they’re Muslim citizens stranded in Kenya or at Guantanamo, or natives trapped in reserves riven by a hopelessness that rivals anything in the Third World.
Bring on the election!
